Subnautica

Subnautica is a survival game that puts you in the place of a stranded space traveler on an ocean planet. Survival is a somewhat controversial genre that a whole lot of people despise or just don't give a damn about, so you may have just knee jerked into closing this review. I'd love to tell you: "Hey wait a minute and listen to me, Subnautica is barely the kind of survival game you're thinking of!". I desperately want to tell you: "What if you had Metroid's level of atmosphere, but underwater?". I would actually say it's almost closer to a walking (swimming?) simulator with survival chores tacked onto it more than anything (which is not an insult, walking simulators are really cool). It certainly wants to be that kind of minimal survival game. But I'd be a damned liar if I said that.

The Game

 The survival elements are rather light on the surface, and it features minimal combat (beautifully excused by your corporate overlords disabling weapon production on all 3d printers after a massacre in a similar survival situation). Gaining resources is primarily a matter of picking things up (as opposed to more elaborate mining systems or combat challenges the genre trends towards), getting new technology is a matter of finding or scanning things you find in the environment. A few other survival elements also exist (needing to eat/drink, repairing equipment after use with batteries, powering your base to operate equipment, etc) but most of them quickly fade away into minor chores after upgrades. 

 The real core loop of Subnautica is just about going to new places, finding upgrades in them, creating those upgrades with gathering you did along the way, and then using those upgrades to go to even more new places (your traversal mechanics getting shook up slightly along the way). The only real omnipresent survival element is that the places you explore will almost always be on a time limit of your oxygen supply, but it's really more of a flavor timer than anything since resupplying at a safe point is rather trivial.

 The terrible, terrible problem of Subnautica is just that it didn't cut down the survival genre enough. In particular, the dreaded scourge of the genre is in full force: inventory management. If you're unfamiliar with it, Minecraft basically established that inventories have to be terrible chores where you have to move items into chests between runs. Lots and lots of chests. It's a genre staple that has stuck around for good reason because it gives purpose to player's bases (if you can carry everything then why have a base, other than for crafting stations). Even more importantly, the need to organize things (ie, put the gold and silver in their own chest) is a facsimile of how people organize their actual homes in real life, creating a sense of place. While annoying, plenty of games have done a good job minimizing the annoyance while maximizing the flavor it creates.

 Subnautica does the opposite and maximizes the annoyance instead. Specifically, it defies genre standards by not letting you stack items of any kind. While it's very generous with the number of slots in your inventory and chests to compensate for it, it makes transferring items between chests an enormous chore. The first problem this creates is just that the game will ask you to transfer your main storage multiple times: first because you built your base in a really stupid shallow spot where your vehicles can't easily get into. Then because you only start out with being able to build small tubes, so when you finally find the recipe to make a big room you end up with a big chore of hauling things around. Then the game will do this again when it introduces a mobile base where you can store everything if you choose to do so (of course said mobile base has a number of limitations where you will occasionally still need a normal base to do certain things anyway). I didn't actually exercise most these options, opting to store my crap in the tiny annoying tube base rather than moving it over and over again (and using the mobile base as a secondary base instead of a primary). So that's a real hassle.

The second problem not having stacking creates is just that it makes it hard to stockpile things (until very late in the game where you get said mobile base, then it just becomes a nightmare to transfer your stockpile without taking multiple trips). Unless you go back to base every single time you hit your inventory limit, you will constantly be leaving resources behind. Sometimes I left things behind just because my chest for that thing was full and I didn't have a great place to put another chest of those things in my tiny tube base. This limitation was almost certainly a design choice, because the result is that you will constantly be be running out of things and going "ugh I'm out of this, time to go back to that biome that has them". And sometimes this design choice worked out really well with me discovering something I missed the last time, or a new area along the way. But mostly it created a certain chafing annoyance every time I thought about starting the game up again. The apex of this is the final thing you have to build in the game: it only tells you the resources you need for each stage of building it, so it's impossible to create a shopping list ahead of time. The end result is that I had to go back and forth (a several minute trip of just heading forward) to the endgame area like 5 or 6 times to build the final thing since I would inevitably have not brought enough for the next stage of building. While some of this can be mitigated with smart base positioning (or just obsessive gathering even if you don't think you'll need something again), it's easy to screw it up without foreknowledge.

And let me be clear here. I think Wind Waker's sailing (the thing everyone complains about as being too slow) has the best sense of adventure a game has ever accomplished. I thought the treasure map quest in Wind Waker was a good time and I hated that subsequent re-releases cut it down (I almost tried playing the Japanese version to see the longer version of it!). I think Death Stranding, a game about walking back and forth to places delivering packages, was the best game released in 2019. So when I say that Subnautica is filled with way too much tedious back and forth travel caused by a crummy inventory system, I really mean it. 

The World

The actual appeal of the game is the world. Underwater settings are woefully underrepresented (likely due to early 3d attempts at swimming controls ending in tragedy), but Subnautica completely nails the feeling of exploring an alien ocean in isolation. It's not even that the art design dazzles you with exotic glowing plants and alien one-eyed fish, contrasted by the player's sleek futuristic vessels. It's that in the same way that Red Dead Redemption had exactly the right "wood creaking under cowboy boots" sounds that movies have trained us to expect, Subnautica has all the right creaks and groans of an underwater base, and the creepy moans of giant things we definitely don't want to encounter. The deeply atmospheric soundtrack that kicks in sparingly takes you the rest of the way to traveling to this alien planet.

The story has a pretty minimal approach, primarily driven by distress signals you get on your radio, and cliche voice logs of the other survivors you find scattered about. What makes it work is that it twists and goes past your expectations just enough to excite your imagination. Looking back on it after finishing it, it isn't that impressive from a distance, but in the moment it's exciting. Scanning the fauna and learning about the planet's ecosystem is also delightful, though I wish the game paused your oxygen counter while reading.

Topping it off is the game's brilliant way of handling exploration. Rather than uncovering a map, you get beacons you can place that the game will point you towards at all times. This is a perfect balance of letting you find your way back to important places while still making it easy to get lost in the world. It's also sized tastefully enough that every point of interest in the game is generally at least a little unique, and traversing the entire map isn't too exhausting. The only real mark against it is that the game uses distress signals too heavily, directing you to most of the important locations in the game ahead of time, which can rob you of a sense of discovery. It's also a minor technical mess with tons of world pop-in, fish flying into rocks and clipping through things, getting warped into a rock by an attacker, etc. These things are understandable given the scope of the game relative to the team's size, but it does hurt the game's strongest assets.

As much as I spent most of this review complaining about the survival mechanics, they also add a certain something to the pacing of discovering the world. A certain something to the sense of danger to the world. Excitement when you finally find what you need to go deeper, but also irritation when you feel like you're looking for a needle in a haystack. So would I recommend that you play Subnautica? Yes, especially if you're into atmospheric games about exploring things. But with a very heavy caveat that you need a stomach for terrible inventory systems and other such nuisances. I generally like survival games and backtracking, but this game was too much for me several times (so much so that I quit playing it the first time and only came back to it later. And frankly, I'm not sure it was worth going back to finish it.). It's a world worth exploring, even if you don't see all of it.

Final Fantasy II

There's one phenomenon of the NES era that I find most interesting: the black sheep sequel. For whatever reason the second game in a lot of series tended to be radically different. Castlevania II turned a straightforward action platformer into an open world adventure (albeit inspired by Castlevania's parallel MSX version- so II might have been seen as letting the NES "catch up" in complexity), Zelda 2 turned an overhead action adventure into a side scrolling action adventure with an RPG overworld, etc. Upon release, the drastic genre shifts generally weren't received well by their fans and the next sequel tended to be a return to form (though opinions have shifted over the years).

Final Fantasy II, at least from a western perspective, falls firmly into this category even though it didn't change genres. Going into it for the first time (ignoring previous 5 minute dismissals), all I really knew was "it's that game where you hit your own party members to increase their HP instead of getting experience to level up". Which is true, but what I didn't expect was a shocking emphasis on story for the time (most discussions I've read about the game usually write it off as, "I guess it establishes taking down evil empires in Final Fantasy"). I would probably go so far as to say that if Dragon Quest is the grandmother of Japanese RPGs, then Final Fantasy II is the mother- and it honestly establishes more of the formula as we think of it today than Dragon Quest does.

This guy is my favorite NPC in the game. He blames you for every bad event in the game.

The Story

It starts you off as a group of now-orphaned teens trying to run away as the Empire conquers their home town. The escape fails, but they end up rescued by the rebellion. After proving themselves capable, they end up recruited by them and the rest of the plot revolves entirely around overthrowing the empire. While the means of taking the Empire down technically boils down to fetch quests, the first half actually does a very good job of feeling like you're taking part in a conflict. Finding the mythril for new weapons actually spawns new NPCs that sell those weapons to you, you have to go back to the central castle to receive new orders each step of the way, and plans often go awry resulting in towns getting partially destroyed in the crossfire (albeit in very limited fashion of just having some NPCs disappear). There's even a part late in the game where liberating your conquered home town actually turns a dungeon into a new town (plausibly the inspiration for Suikoden). It's all incredibly cool for 1988 on a Famicom, and I really didn't expect to see this kind of stuff until Dragon Quest IV in the 90's.

 

A lot of people die in this game. It's pretty rad.

 

Unfortunately for as directed as the plot is for the first half, the second half turns into more of a literal fetch quest for a spell to defeat the Empire with. The plot loses all of its momentum for the sake of turning into a more typical free roam RPG, where you basically just have to conquer several dungeons in a row. This section probably wouldn't stick out as much if the game part of the game were actually good, but we'll get to that later. On the plus side, the plot focus of the first half of the game does eventually make its return, and it features some of the best moments as well which makes the slog to get to it somewhat worthwhile.

The sex scene was probably too hot for the game to come to America.

 

What makes the plot stand out for the time isn't just that the world changes in response to it (or that it exists at all), but its execution is surprisingly good. Partially because the game actually features cutscenes of NPCs moving around, heroically sacrificing themselves on boulders for you- even going so far as to have a sad piece of music for the numerous deaths in the game (maybe the first usage of matching music to emotional tone?). But more importantly, it's relatively intricate: At the start of the game you'll meet an optional NPC in town, a cowardly prince who refuses to take the throne to wage war against the Empire, leaving his sister to do it in his stead. You'll meet his brother on his death bed, but he still he won't fight. Several hours later he'll end up joining your party for a time. Even later on, he ends up leaving your party, finally inspired by the protagonists to fight. From then on he becomes a major player in the story, even though he started out as an NPC you could easily walk past. The same structure applies throughout the game: NPCs you rescue at the start of the game later become guiding party members or daring rescuers near the end of the game. It's all really cool, even if not everything works (a late game character reveal doesn't have the emotional weight nor the surprise to work, the late game plot dissolves into just killing the bad guy, the protagonists themselves have virtually no characterization, and completely sidelining the princess who does all the actual work in running the rebellion is pretty lame).

Even the world map features cutscenes, like this airship chase.

The Manual

Try as I might, I cannot actually find an English translation of the original Final Fantasy II manual (remakes that received translations aren't really substitutes since they generally omit detail that has been added to the game itself). This makes evaluating the game somewhat difficult. There's a good chance things like arcane progression systems, or different armors having different spell casting penalties may have been cleanly stated instead of aggravatingly obscure. There's just as good of a chance that the manual didn't explain anything. For my own play through, I ended up referring to an online database that included a lot of opinions about spell/item utility and warnings about numerous bugged elements (the manual definitely wouldn't have included bugs). It made for a much smoother play than I would have had totally blind, but just how different from the intended experience is impossible to say (I suspect the manual would include spell penalties at least). Just something to keep in mind, a lot of complaints against the game could either be very minor if the manual explained them or game destroying flaws if it didn't and I have no idea which it is- I only have my own distorted experience.

Not every world transforming event is handled very well, probably due to cart limitations.

The Game

Let's get the easy part out of the way first: Final Fantasy I had pretty great dungeons. Most of them had distinct themes (sometimes with the layout, sometimes with the battles themselves having a theme, sometimes with minor puzzles or damage tiles, etc), and they were tightly sized so their pacing generally wasn't too exhausting. Combined with a  more-full-of-stuff battle system (featuring elemental damage, tons of spells to buy, and unique equipment to find), Final Fantasy I was basically a really good dungeon crawler to Dragon Quest I practically being an adventure game with its reliance on dialog clues (something Final Fantasy merely dabbled with for variety). Dragon Quest II had more stuff, but was still ultimately outclassed as a dungeon crawler. Which then makes it utterly baffling that Final Fantasy II pretty much jettisons everything its predecessor did with dungeons.

Get used to seeing this room.

Almost every dungeon in Final Fantasy II has only one main gimmick: doors that mostly lead to the same empty room, so you have to figure out which one is the way forward. Things like fake walls you can walk through and damage tiles technically exist, but are used sparingly, and are largely irrelevant or impossible to find. Even though the new spell system lets the game reward the player with new spells now, treasure chests are heavily slanted towards only giving you garbage (yet still contain unique items just often enough that you're forced to check them anyway). Battles aren't particularly themed around each dungeon either, as you'll fight similar monster patterns with different palettes throughout most of the game, and most don't have very distinct gimmicks outside of basic elemental weaknesses or status effects. Gold basically becomes irrelevant 1/4th into the game outside of healing items, making finding it completely unsatisfying. Topping it all off, pretty much every boss is a cakewalk compared to the difficulty of reaching them (outside of the occasional trapped treasure chest)- though this complaint is perhaps a blessing.

A rare dungeon secret. Savor it, for there are few.

 

Now having bland dungeons isn't necessarily a show stopper for an RPG. Sometimes a dungeon just needs to be about pacing out the story and being a place for battles. If anything, bland can often be better than when a game tries too hard with unique gimmicks such that they just end up becoming annoying (hello Persona 5). The real problem with Final Fantasy II's dungeons is just that they're ridiculously long to get to the end of. Not just a few dungeons, but almost every dungeon in the game is just too damn long. The final dungeon's whopping 15 floors being the worst example of it (though at that point you at least have the tools to easily manage your MP. Earlier dungeons often require warping out early, not because the battles are too hard, but because you ran out of MP are actually far worse). In short, the dungeons are awful. 

It turns out Final Fantasy recycles a lot of ideas.

That said, I should give the dungeon design some credit. While horribly bland, their shapes are actually distinct enough that when you do your second or third run, they'll be dramatically faster since it's fairly easy to remember the "correct" path. Maze dungeons that you have to write down, these are not. I got through them just fine without writing anything down or looking up any maps.

Although the protagonists are undeveloped, they do talk throughout the game. A big step up from Dragon Quest II, at least.

If you haven't noticed, I've been avoiding getting to the battle system. The basic idea of it is pretty simple: if you hit things with a sword, you get better at using a sword and gain more strength (but lose intelligence). Cast a spell, you get better at that spell and gain intelligence (but lose strength). Get hurt a lot, gain more HP. It's a system that pops up in various games, but rarely sticks around because it tends to promote boring, grinding behavior. In the case of Final Fantasy II, the flaws are so many and so varied that the only way I can describe them is by giving up and writing a list:

I tried to keep Maria's HP low all game so I could use the swap hp spell on the final boss, but it ended up being unnecessary.

• The way MP gain is triggered requires unnatural behavior. Most magic spells can destroy monsters in 1-2 turns, but gaining MP requires using 25-50% of your MP pool in a single battle. This means that you'll basically never gain MP by playing naturally, which results in brutal situations where you'll never have enough MP to survive a dungeon. You have to grind it, and grinding requires sitting in one battle spamming spells without killing monsters- which is something you can't really do while progressing through a dungeon, where the goal is to conserve MP. This is assuming you read a guide that tells you how leveling MP works, a completely blind player is in for a miserable experience until they figure out the trick. (Similarly, using spells in a menu doesn't count so your white mage ends up in the awkward position of being better off healing in battle)
  
• Leveling spells is also unintuitive. While you might expect casting the same spell over and over in the same battle to be ideal, what you actually want to do is cast it once per battle (as there is a first time cast bonus each battle). Once you realize this, it's technically a somewhat interesting system that forces you to use a variety of spells every battle if you want to avoid a more direct grind later on. But I had no clue until I absolutely had to level up a critical spell and ended up looking it up in desperation.
• This one is as much of a positive as it is a negative: There are a ton of spells in the game, leveling them up takes forever. The end result is that it's impossible (without an absurd amount of grinding) to try everything. This is positive in that it means everyone will likely end up with a somewhat unique party, but it's also a negative in that it's also very easy to lose the spell lottery and end up having wasted your time on junk. I have to imagine discussing the best spells was popular on Japanese playgrounds.

(Not Pictured) One of the cool things the game does is have the first guest character have all the white magic spells in the game, so you get to mess with them ages before you get them for yourself. None of the other guests are that cool.

• In the case of curing status effects, it also meant I had to stop in my tracks and grind Esuna for like an hour in order for it to heal the petrification that a dungeon was full of (buying items wasn't an option because you can't stack items in this game even though the first game let you, and key items and unique equipment will end up clogging your inventory). Grinding isn't unexpected for a NES game, but having to grind a status effect cure sure is something.

It doesn't take long before Gil has no meaning.

• Progression just feels mushy and ambiguous. A traditional leveling system combined with purchasable equipment throughout a game makes it relatively easy to feel "on target" for a dungeon- once you have bought/found the nearby gear and random encounters are easy enough, you know it's time to reach the boss. Final Fantasy II barely having purchased equipment, MP being the main hindrance for clearing a dungeon, and random encounters often not feeling much easier even on my third dungeon run due to not having leveled the right spell or whatever made it very hard for me to tell if I was "ready" to tackle a dungeon boss (until several dungeons into the game where it became very clear that all the bosses were easy. Whether that's because I overleveled by accident or they're just easy... I'm still not sure)
• The game features a rotating cast of guest characters that join your party. While this is great for the plot, it goes entirely against the battle system wanting you to grind spells for hours on end (as only one guest comes with their own spells). Guest characters end up as a rotating kind-of-crappy physical character. It makes the game feel like it's at odds with itself.
  

In a regression from the first game, you can't stack items and key items take up inventory space such that you get less inventory space the longer the game goes on. It is a nightmare of constantly tossing unique elemental equipment in the trash because you can't carry it.

There's probably more I could complain about or point out (despite the main power of the system being that anyone can learn any spell, numerous systems work against letting you do this, you can hit yourself to reach 9999 hp if you want and people call this a "flaw" but I got to merely 3000 hp naturally and it wasn't a problem anyway and I suspect the healing MP drain wouldn't be worth it anyway, etc). If you squint really hard, it's easy to imagine that the designer's intent was to create a "self-balancing" RPG given the way HP/MP gains operate off percent lost in a single battle- that is, if a player is having a hard time and losing too much HP then the system swoops in and gives them more HP until they're ready. But in practice it works about the same as a normal leveling system, just with convoluted methods to level.

One of the few nods to the first game (aside from recycled art) is a tasteful village of black mages.

Still, while people mainly complain about the oddball battle system, I don't think it's actually what makes Final Fantasy II miserable to play so much as it is the dungeons and other fringe design choices. The sometimes rewarding party customization likely would have made up for the jagged edges of the system if everything around it wasn't so bad. 

One of the coolest areas in the game is a town inside a sea monster, because everyone keeps falling for the same trapped "rare" quest item that causes it to eat their ships. This review has way too many screenshots because I'd rather gush about the cool story stuff than talk about the game.

So should you play Final Fantasy II? No. Almost certainly not. The story is really cool, but only if you're so into video games (or the series) that you can appreciate it from a historical perspective. But everything else just completely overshadows it by so much that I can't really recommend it to anyone. I half regret playing it myself (but the other half of me is like: holy crap so many characters died in this, dang multiple towns got blown up, wow I didn't know dragoons were introduced this early in the series, wondering how many story bits in Final Fantasy XIV were actually nods to this game all along, etc)

Yakuza 7

Yakuza 7 is probably the ballsiest genre shift I have ever heard of. The previous games in the series were largely beat 'em up action RPGs. 7 is a turn based RPG. I'm not sure any franchise has done that with a mainline entry. Certainly not in recent memory, where the majority of RPG franchises have been steadily either dying off or turning into Action RPGs (even Final Fantasy starting with XV, and Dragon Quest nearly did so with IX were it not for fan backlash). The pressure to sell more copies to the largest possible audience has pushed developers into turning every game into an action game. So it's absolutely bonkers Yakuza would go the opposite direction, even considering its target audience in Japan being more receptive to it. To top it off is the actual premise of why it's turn based: the protagonist is so obsessed with Dragon Quest that he sees real life like an RPG. I couldn't not play this game. I didn't have time to play the rest of the series (of which I've only seen/played like 2.5 games prior), but I still had to play this game.

The Battle System

So how does a game from genre newcomers (who allegedly slammed the new battle system into the game in like a year, which is absurd and I'm not sure I believe) actually play? The fundamentals are really strong. The main gimmick here is that while actions are turn based, enemies and players move around on the battlefield in real time while you decide your turn. It's a simple enough twist, but it has a lot of really cool elements that fall out from it: objects in the world get turned into extra damage attacks if a character touches them on their way to an enemy, area of effect attacks are a constantly shifting factor so you need to be fast before enemies scatter, allies will throw in free bonus attacks if they're nearby a knocked down enemy, and most interestingly enemies tend to attack the character nearest to them- so if you used a ranged ability, you'll tend to get attacked less while using a melee attack will put you in harms way. To play into the real time element there are also cases where some moves knock enemies down, giving you a few seconds to decide whether to follow it up with a souped-up regular attack or not. Rounding out the action elements, they include Super Mario RPG-esque attack and guard boosts with good timing (albeit presented as button prompts, rather than the more natural animation timing). What I dig about the system conceptually is that it allows the battle system to have the depth of positional choices, without slowing it down with full movement that turns tactics RPGs into slogs.

I only said that the fundamentals are strong. In practice, most battles involve you spending the first two turns using area of effect attacks and then focus firing remaining enemies because the previous attacks will have hopelessly spread out the enemies such that you will never get them in an area again. Things like knockdown attacks are OK for conserving MP on trash battles, but against bosses you will pretty much just spend every turn spamming whatever your highest damage attack is. Clever ideas like knocking an enemy down near your mage so they do a follow-up attack to regain MP without spending a turn don't actually matter in practice, since MP costs are sky high. About the only positional element that gets much play is keeping damaged allies away from bosses with ranged attacks, but healing is prolific enough that even that doesn't get much play. Basically, all the neat ideas don't actually matter that much.

Even so, I would still say the first half of the game is a perfectly good chill out RPG. It's a game about hanging out and talking with your party members in a bar, and helping naked strangers replace their lost clothing by clearing a path- battles don't need to be everything. They're smooth and fast paced enough with just enough action timing flavor and basic depth. Except the second half of the game makes it a lot harder to say they're fine. The short description is just that the game's approach to increasing difficulty is to just give more and more HP to every boss enemy. Actually, I'm not sure it's necessarily their HP so much as giving near-blanket elemental resistances while also having a very restrictive class system that makes it really hard/impossible to have elemental coverage on every party member while still having so much HP that having just one party member exploiting a weakness generally still takes forever? Even attack/defense buffs/debuffs didn't seem to help much. It's kind of odd, honestly. It mostly makes me feel like I was playing it wrong (particularly with odd cases where an enemy was weak to magic lightning attacks, but not my lightning-element weapon- and the game being inconsistent at displaying whether something is weak before using an ability) despite doing every side quest, beating the arena, experimenting with several jobs, and doing a significant amount of weapon upgrading. But I think just...maybe that's how the game is? Trying to create long-boss fight RPG tension, but failing because the enemies only have very basic gimmicks and only really change patterns once per fight, and often just to deal a little more damage. I wouldn't say it ruins the game, but it's kind of a bummer that I almost started to miss the old beat em up style by the end.

The Story

I played Yakuza 1 to completion somewhere around when Yakuza 4 came out and people were starting to praise the series as coming into its own (previously just dismissing it as a bad Shenmue clone). I only barely finished it after taking several months to beat a rather short game. The primary problem was just random encounters combined with PlayStation 2 load times, but I also found the story pretty unremarkable (made more interesting by the sequels always being direct, and involving characters aging over time- but I didn't get that far). The attempt at crime drama/mystery was admirable, but I wasn't that into it. I mention all this just to say: god damn did they get way better at writing stories since then. It's still a deathly serious crime drama with soap opera level absurd coincidences (side quests meanwhile completely contrasting it with silly comedy and sudden heartwarming endings), but a lot of the drama actually lands and it's usually compelling. It's one of those games with a 4 hour opening story setup where you barely play it, but you're OK with it because it's good. And also one of those games with hour long exposition that gives you 3 breaks to save. You're uh. You're less OK with that.

Game stories have progressively gotten more and more streamlined. Partially because games have gotten really expensive, which cuts down on the number of characters and locations you can have at full quality (consider how many original Final Fantasy VII scenes were probably done in under a week by a couple dudes, while the remake had to have full teams to create the equivalent scene). Partially because direction has shifted towards streamlined movie-like narratives over traditional RPG narratives that gravitate more towards a sprawling series of short stories connected by a main thread. It's in this regard that I kind of really appreciate Yakuza 7's frankly meandering plot. 

It basically spends 4 hours setting up the main Yakuza family story, before taking a hard turn into spending a significant chunk of the run time on the trials and tribulations of the 40-something protagonists working their way out of homelessness. It just keeps going from there with numerous subplots along the way, and by the end of it I felt like I had played through 3 games worth of plot. Somehow, it even manages to connect most of it together into a cohesive theme. Kind of- your party members are probably the weakest link, with a few of them not making that much sense to be hanging with you for the entire game and hardly even showing up in scenes. Likely the result of radical shifts mid-development, but it doesn't hurt much. Still, I really appreciated how they managed to pull off such a sprawling plot these days (admittedly mostly achieved by having such a limited setting of "the city" and "some office buildings", while something like Dragon Quest XI's globe trotting ambitions are more obviously cramped by budget).

What Is a Yakuza Game Anyway

Yakuza 7 basically just takes the existing formula and replaces the battle system. Structurally the games are kind of an odd duck to begin with. You might be tempted to call them open world: run around a city that unlocks over time, do side quests, shop, run into random encounters, do minigames for rewards in the rest of the game, etc. But the city is tiny. You don't have a car. The battles are siloed off from the world, so it isn't really an open world game. There's one single linear main plot. I don't know what to call it, and it's even weirder when you slap a traditional RPG battle system into it- effectively stripping the globe trotting formula out and replacing it with a sequence of events and a tiny overworld. 

I will say that 7 (and probably other recent incarnations) is a big step over 1's version of the formula (and not just because the load times aren't terrible). The sidequests are entertaining, and create a vague sense of a living city if you let yourself bump into them between tasks rather than beelining to them. The business minigame is great until you learn it, then the only joy is watching numbers go up. The can collecting one would be a legitimately great arcade game if it was played purely overhead. Picking up itemsin the world is baseline satisfying. So it's not necessarily terrible.

Yet I still don't know what to make of the structure when I let my brain ponder over it. I actually felt similarly "huh" about the beat em up version of it. I kind of hate it. The random encounters don't really add anything in a world where a restaraunt to heal at is always just down the street? Really it may be the main thing that makes me dread playing the rest of the series, even though it sometimes works.

Conclusion

I should probably take the time to mention that the personality of this game is actually really great. The reason I haven't is because by the end of a 60hr game, that kind of thing ends up forgotten. But it's great. Summoning works by using an app on your phone, and they all have delightfully lengthy animations. You get everything from a lobster pinching the enemy's nose to calling down an orbital laser. The game explains that a party member is resistant to cold because they're homeless. There is a tasteful amount of the protagonist comparing everything to Dragon Quest. A side quest tasks you with distinguishing a public urinator from a line up of suspects such as a really energetic fisherman. Mimics are just dudes jumping out of safes. This list is but a sample. 

Even outside of the quirky comedic elements, it also nails a comfy atmosphere with quietly chatting with your party members at your bar in between karaoke rhythm minigame sessions. The only real downside of it all is that the goofy combat animations diminish the serious "two shirtless men fighting about serious drama" boss battles that the previous games pulled off so well. I honestly think they might need to separate them into a different battle system in the sequels? But it doesn't hurt the game too much as-is.

So should you play Yakuza 7? If you can stomach occasional damage sponge RPG boss battles, possibly being forced to do side activities to power up, relatively bland battles, and slow paced storytelling then absolutely. I came close to quitting during my four month long play through, but I always came back. And I'm glad I did. (Even though I grew to loathe the battles, I still prefer them to the even worse beat em up style. It certainly took a lot longer for me to hate fighting.)

Bonus

I wanted to make a slick comment that Yakuza was smart enough to avoid doing a party-based game until going turn based, contrasting it with how Final Fantasy XV's action focus actually hurts its attempted themes of friendship because having dopey AI team mates running into walls is far worse at presenting comradery than a turn based game where working as a team is baked into the systems. But Yakuza 7 is still full of AI path finding running into things in the field and in battle so I can't honestly make that statement. And I haven't actually played enough Yakuza games to be certain there isn't a party based one (but I am under the impression they expanded by having multiple protagonists rather than parties, outside of temporary battle allies).

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

 The Minish Cap is a subtle case of flash over substance. Subtle, since just looking at it you wouldn't necessarily think it's particularly flashy. But as you start to pick apart why elements aren't as interesting as they sound, it starts to make sense. The front-of-the-box selling point of being able explore the world as both regular sized Link, and shrunk-down fairy sized Link is probably the best example of this. The game essentially executes it in two modes: exploring the same map with a tiny sprite (thus being able to fit in places you couldn't before, but also making things like roads and steps into obstructions) and zoomed-in maps that play the same as normal. The latter allows for cool aesthetics of seeing the world from a different angle, but doesn't actually contribute much as a mechanic. You can see this as they have to go out of their way with screen-obscuring giant grass leaves and the like to even be able to sell the concept.

There are more ways to spend money than most Zeldas of this vintage, but you're still going to be wasting hundreds of rupees.

The cases where you explore the same map with a different size are slightly more successful at being a mechanic, particular in town where you slowly unlock the capacity to reach areas while small that you've had access to the entire time as big Link. It's a slightly neat feeling of "oh that's what was in here". But it pretty much exists solely as a traversal mechanic, and only allows changing size at specific points (and doesn't even let you use any items other than your sword). The end result is that really cool ideas like stunning a boss as big Link, shrinking down to little Link, and going inside the boss to beat up its brain is purely spectacle- there's no puzzle since the size switcher makes it a foregone conclusion, and there's no mechanical riff since both sizes play the same. It's entirely reliant on flashy aesthetics selling the shrinking, rather than the mechanics. Even the developers kind of knew as much, as it basically disappears for the last two dungeons of the game.

Cucco abuser not so tough since being shrunk.

One of the other things that exhibits this is the Kinstone sidequest system. Essentially: collect stones through various means (treasure, drops, buying them, etc), match them up with NPCs, and then see something new appear in the overworld. On paper this is a really slick idea of creating a constantly-evolving overworld to explore. In reality, it's a heck of a lot of backtracking to unlock typical minor Zelda treasure caves, and cursing that it turns out an NPC requires checking them multiple times to exhaust their stones, or having to triple check that some jerk doesn't suddenly have a new stone. In the system's defense, it also harbors a larger quantity of major upgrades than most side Zelda activities: turn your bombs into remote detonators, numerous bomb/arrow capacity upgrades that you don't really need, new sword techniques that you don't really need, shield and boomerang upgrades that you don't really need, etc. You can definitely see the groundwork for Skyward Sword's upgrade system (and thus Breath of the Wild's actual upgrade system) getting laid here with Capcom's staff bothering to consider putting real rewards in a Zelda game, even though it's buried in so many rupee rewards and backtracking that you don't really appreciate it. In other words, progressing by changing the overworld is flashily exciting with regrowing trees and restoring houses to get major optional upgrades, but doesn't actually come together in the end.

This boss battle where you jump between two flying monsters is also flashy, but legit cool. Also note that I was maxed out on rupees again.

 Putting that aside, the brass tacks Zelda of it isn't half bad. It doesn't fall into the Twilight Princess hole of kind of just using one item everywhere in a dungeon, it's generally decent at giving every item some love, or giving you 3 new items for a single dungeon and having you use all of them. While some dungeons are pretty rote, other ones do clever things like just shoving the dungeon item behind a wall or having you use an old item in a new way you hadn't considered several dungeons later. It does sometimes fall into the trap of having you use an item in the one extremely obvious way you use that item everywhere just to make you use it, but it isn't too bad with it. I'm not as big a fan of the overworld since it falls into mostly being used as dungeons-between-dungeons (in order to give you multiple items per dungeon) rather than a place to explore. Focusing on a single constantly-evolving town throughout the plot worked well, though they don't really do anything novel with the tiny Minish living hidden in people's houses or even have them evolve with the main townspeople. Thumbs up to the gambling minigame owner who constantly warns you about the dangers of gambling.

The Four Swords-derived Link clone mechanic was probably my favorite new "item", though they don't come up with enough ways to use it.

 So all that griping aside, Minish Cap is perfectly OK. Yeah, it feels borderline like a fan game with the heavy reuse of series items (albeit with some fun twists here and there), 90% of the characters coming from other games, 90% of the music coming from other games, etc. Yeah, it's definitely from this vintage of Zelda where the dungeons are in a linear story order, the story doesn't actually go anywhere despite the time spent on it, items are primarily for puzzle solving instead of combat, and you can spam the heck out of the attack button rather than actually fighting (though some end game enemies do require waiting for openings or exploiting them with upgraded items, so it's at least a step above Link Between World's spammy mess. Kind of a weird attempt to mesh Link to the Past with 3d Zeldas by having gigantic enemy sprites that rely on openings rather than vulnerable points, but it doesn't work that well). But at the end of the day some of the dungeons are pretty good, some of the puzzles are slightly clever, some of the flash actually works, the fangame nature is sometimes cute (they crammed Zelda 2's downward thrust into an overhead Zelda! I never used it, but it sure was neat), and it's just good enough to scratch that Zelda itch if you've got it. So go ahead and play it, if you've got the itch and already played the rest. But uh. Don't make it your first.

Spelunky 2

 There are two kinds of sequels you can make: you can try to completely reinvent the original game while preserving some element of it (how it makes players feel, the theming, etc), or you can just refine the original game. Spelunky 2 is the latter kind of sequel. Considering no one else even came close to the original in 12 years, that still makes it a pretty incredible game. Doubly so since the vast majority of changes they made make it a far better game. It also makes it weird to review because it's kind of just more Spelunky. So let's break down the changes instead.

1. Sublevels

One of the big new features is that every level is now two levels that you can go between by finding secret (or not so secret) doorways. Prior to release this was the feature I was worried about the most, since it seemed likely to bloat the game's pacing. Evidently so were the developers, as most of the randomized sublevels in the game are just empty passageways that occasionally hide treasure or can operate as shortcuts. While it does use these for incredible effect for some of the static discoveries, I'm not sure these add much to the game. They can also be really frustrating when you notice something hidden in them, but the entrances often have few reliable clues which makes them cost a lot of precious bombs early in a run.

2. Branching Paths

Spelunky is pretty heavily built on the concept of avoiding discrete modes. Getting to the hard ending of it still uses the same locations as the normal ending, it just puts different requirements on the player (and then rewards them by extending the game). In a game built around 30-60 minute permadeath runs, this makes expanding for a sequel without extending the length of a run tricky. They opted for having the game branch off into different biomes depending on where players decide to go. It's a slick solution to the problem, and early on I found myself making a lot of tough choices on where to go based on what equipment I had gained so far and whether I wanted "harder but more rewarding" or "faster but more prone to bad luck". That said, in the long term the game doesn't do a great job making every branch feel like a viable choice for a lot of esoteric late game reasons (on the other hand: I haven't looked much up, so maybe I'm full of crap and have just missed compelling reasons for each branch).

3. Level Design

This is the part where Spelunky 2 really blows the original out of the water. The most obvious example is just looking at a single piece of equipment: the jump boots. They let you jump a few tiles higher. In the original, they were occasionally useful. In the sequel, they are amazing. And that's because the level design is smart enough to have numerous patterns where important treasure is hanging out on a ledge that you can only get to by using a rope or an equipment upgrade like the jump boots. This thoughtful design extends to making ropes useful for more things than just backtracking as well, which then makes the resource management at the heart of Spelunky more compelling than the original.

I won't list every subtle difference (and there are a lot of them- not all of them positive, requiring bomb cooking for key items is a bit much), but the biggest one is how radically different the starting area is. Spelunky 1's was very much designed as a tutorial: most enemies died in 1 hit, and they had easy to predict trigger behavior (spider drops when you're under it). Spelunky 2 by contrast loads its starting area with three types of multi-hit enemies, demands that players understand that enemies use sight lines, and throws in more traps just in case you weren't dead enough. The end result is that the sequel is way harder (especially up front), but it also avoids having the most played area in the game also being the most boring. As a tutorial, it also imparts more lessons to the player than the original (ie, I learned things I never knew about 1 by playing 2 because they become vital techniques).

Needing the first area to be a tutorial, yet not boring to expert players having to replay it constantly is a pretty classic arcade game problem that I think about a lot. Making it harder for the sequel is probably the right choice, but it's also a problem that kind of turns me against the underlying design philosophy of avoiding modes and difficulty settings. Splitting the game into a newbie dungeon that unlocks the real dungeon would probably be a much better option (yeah I know don't write suggestions in a review, bite me).

It also feels weird to review this game right now because patches keep changing it radically. On release, the game would generate "dead end" parts of levels that, once entered, required using bombs or ropes to get out of (or just die if you don't have any). I found this pretty interesting, but as of right now they've been completely removed from the game. I don't exactly miss the dead ends, but it does make 2 feel more similar to 1.

4. Speed

You may recall me referring to the original as "a bit like a way too fast slippery janky freeware platformer". Apparently the developers had the same thought, so Spelunky 2 slows everything down ever just so slightly. It's really subtle, at first you only notice it with the drastically slowed down shopkeepers (who had comical "someone turned the entity speed to the max the engine allows" speed). But it actually applies to everything, and opens up new techniques like jumping over arrows. It's a huge improvement, and makes 2 feel like the professionally made version of the game.

5. More viable play styles

In the original, it was phenomenally boring to get the hard ending without stealing from shopkeepers (though plenty viable for the normal ending, which means this was likely intentional to force harder play styles). The sequel thankfully walks this back with small but important changes to make it a viable play style no matter what ending you're going for: 

• There are fewer rooms that are just "all dirt blocks", meaning that getting money doesn't require using as many bombs- something that made buying early items very luck dependent in the original (it also means you spend a lot more time navigating levels, so it's just generally better across the board)
  
• There's a new fragile item that can consistently get you a big chunk of money in every level (it also enables even riskier money strategies for high score runs, but those aren't usually necessary for buying things now).
• Stealing in general has been heavily re-balanced such that it's riskier, but is also much deeper with different choices and strategies if you choose to do it.

The end result is that going for harder endings is no longer as suffocating about how you can play it. I cannot overstate how big of an improvement this is. It's one of my biggest pet peeves: games that create difficulty by removing options from the game. Sure you made it harder, but you also made it narrower. And those choices were what made playing it interesting to begin with. This is probably the biggest reason why I ended up playing Spelunky 2 for 2 months straight, while the original would get stale after a week or two.

6. Quests

The original game featured a sort of puzzle where the player needed to obtain certain items and do certain things in order to unlock the final world and see the true final ending: the hard ending chain. It's a really clever way of giving players a puzzle to chew on while trying to build up their skill and experience necessary to get the regular ending. Naturally, the sequel doubles down on this by changing up the chain itself (subverting and acknowledging the original's along the way), and the presence of multiple branches complicates it. On top of that, it adds little sub-chains involving NPC characters in the world (the simplest is rescuing all 3 NPCs in the jungle netting you rewards later in the run). The end result is that playing the early/mid game is a pretty overwhelming but rewarding experience of having a pile of puzzle pieces on a table and no idea what to do with them. I had an incredible time sharing new discoveries and theories with a couple friends as we cracked the case. We also sounded like lunatics. Even though most of it is just standard adventure game "take the thing to the place", putting it in the context of a roguelike platformer made it something special to figure out.

Maybe more interesting is that the same design philosophy that allowed for multiple valid play styles, applies to the quest chain too. While 1 provided few opportunities to veer from the its chain, 2 allows alternative (but way harder) options for almost every step. Miss an item? Don't quit the game yet, there's still a razor thin chance that you can do something crazy to get there without it. It's mostly just there for stupid good players to exploit, but it also gives a certain degree of hope and late game discovery for normal players as well. 

7. New Items

Most of them are pretty mediocre additions, actually. Their presence is nonetheless appreciated for more variety. The way numerous old items are made far better just by changing how you get them and the levels around them is maybe the bigger deal.

8. Continuity

Spelunky 2 stars the child of the original game's protagonist on a quest to find her missing parents. The world of the original game was a bunch of nonsense that the creator almost certainly pulled out of his butt as needed for the level/enemy design. So it's kind of incredible that 2 takes that hodgepodge and made me care about its lore just a tiny bit. Time has advanced since the original, characters have aged, different characters take up the role of old characters, etc. Even the enemies have evolved since the original game, getting new gadgets or moving to new areas because you ruined their life in the first game. You'll finally get to see some of the places those enemies came from. In short, it's loaded with completely unnecessary references to the original game. With so much time passed since the original, it all hits surprisingly hard if you're familiar.

I'm more Spelunky than man after sinking hundreds of hours into the game so I don't really appreciate this part of it anymore. But those first few dozen hours? This stuff was really cool.

9. The Town

It also introduces a sort of lobby area where all of the player characters you rescue show up and build little rooms to live in. There are some nice touches to it, like characters having different things to say depending on who you're playing as. But it falls completely short of matching something like Azure Dreams at creating a relaxing home to come back to between runs. Partially because only reaching new areas/endings unlocks things in it (rather than giving smaller goals like spending gold), partially because you get no choice in where or what to build in it, and partially because there's nothing to actually do in it since there's very little dialog variation.

I'm not that dissappointed with it, since it's really hard for a pure roguelike to pull off town building when the town cannot give anything back to the main game without breaking the purity (and the main game cannot create incentives to play it poorly for the sake of town rewards). At the same time, man it would have been pretty cool to buy a sweet couch with the money I earned from my previous runs? The fact that they did it poorly is almost worse than not doing it at all.

Conclusion

I still haven't tried the co-op mode (because the online is still disabled months after release). I still haven't beaten Spelunky 2. I got the normal ending, the hard ending, and I know how to enter the special ending. I'll probably never see the special ending, but I'll definitely enter it one of these days. I'm writing this review now because I'm going to forget my early thoughts if I wait any longer.

Should you play it? Yes, absolutely. Unless you hated the first one. In which case, the sequel will do nothing for you. Probably play the original first if you haven't because it's easier and the references are cool (it's also sufficiently different that 2 doesn't really replace it). If you didn't beat the original and don't want to, that's fine. The sequel is still a game worth playing even if you never beat it (quite literally since it features a true ending that is probably impossible for most people).

Spelunky HD

Spelunky was originally released in 2008, so early in the indie boom that it was released as freeware since being able to sell a game on the internet had yet to really explode. Spelunky HD was a remake that wouldn't be released until 2012 in an effort to actually make a profit off it, and included quite a few refinements, additional secrets/areas, etc. It's probably one of the most influential games of all time since it was the first platformer roguelike (that is, randomly generated levels in a platformer)- a genre you can't walk in a digital store without tripping over these days. Even more than that, it sparked the imagination of what other genres you could apply random generation to. Diablo technically predates applying random generation to an action game by many years, but it also lost the feel of a roguelike in favor of loot gambling.

What makes Spelunky particularly incredible is that I would honestly say that it is still, 12 years and countless similar games later, hands down the best of the genre in terms of actually translating a roguelike into an action game. See, the thing about randomly generating a level is that it actually kind of sucks. If you just drop in a few rooms at random and plop down a few enemies from a pool, it will only be as entertaining as fighting those enemies is. If you hand design the room layouts, and make terrain relevant to the gameplay, then you have only created a few permutations of fighting those enemies. Add in some power ups / money, and you have only made it as interesting as how big an impact those powerups make. You might go "ah, but what if we add lock/key progression where the generator is smart enough to only put the red key before its locked door and etc!". And you will quickly find that the only reason that lock/key gameplay is interesting is because the level designer put things in interesting positions. The reality is that most games don't have mechanics that can be interesting through simple random permutations. At best you get a modern version of an arcade game where randomization makes harsh death penalties more palatable (which is frankly what the majority of action roguelikes, or roguelites, or whatever you want to call them actually are- souped up arcade games).

The thing that makes roguelike random generation work above all else is that they rely on chain reactions. Imagine a fictional game where a monster can explode and destroy terrain around it. Shopkeepers will attack you for destroying their store. As a result, this monster and shopkeepers both become more interesting when together. Now a trap that pushes things, pushing the monster into a shop, where it explodes. That's three things interacting together. Suddenly, random permutations start to have enough different combinations to become interesting. This is the foundation of roguelikes (though plenty of non-random games use it as well).

Spelunky's choice of genre being platformer allows for an incredibly natural action adaptation of these systems, since it comes with the most intuitive system there is: physics. Darts can push you and enemies into other things. Falling onto spikes can kill you- and monsters. A poorly thrown rock into an explosion can come flying back to your face. Specks of blood can cause explosives to go off. It's an incredibly smart choice, and it also highlights why attempts at other genres of roguelike are so difficult. It also just makes dying funny. Which is important in its own way. Because you'll be doing it a lot.

These types of chain reactions weren't unheard of in action games, with things like Doom allowing demons to attack each other and traps to damage them. But the necessity of players being able to read a situation in real time somewhat limits the allowed chain depth compared to a turn based game like a traditional roguelike. Spelunky works around this in a really clever way: almost every monster and trap in the game is stationary or in a set pattern until the player gets near it. It shakes it up in various ways (spiders fall from the ceiling, snakes pace, humans use their weapons only when facing you, etc), but the rule is only broken with great care. This prevents the chain system from spiraling out of control, or out of sight. In a way it even makes it a turn based game in a sense, as you usually have time to process a situation before reacting to it.

Even outside being one of the few to successfully translate chain reactions, I find it surprising that the progenitor of the genre also does a lot of things better than its own spawn. In particular, the thing I absolutely detest about most action roguelikes is that they tend to fall into a pattern where the early areas become trivial (due to the need for a skill difficulty curve), but it's still in your best interest to loot everything in them. This makes the start of every game a choice between tedium or a disadvantage. Spelunky sidesteps this in a slew of ways: levels are relatively small, runs are relatively short (30-40 minutes), early areas have intense resource costs that often require skipping parts of them, a timer spawns an invincible killer ghost if you take too long, and even when you're experienced at the game it requires a lot of focus such that it's easy to trip up even on the early areas. It's certainly not perfect about it, with some high score tactics requiring wasting a lot of time. But relative to its progeny, it does a remarkably good job of keeping the early run tedium down.

Would I recommend Spelunky HD? Uh, absolutely. Pretty much everyone should play it. The years have only made me appreciate it more after watching other games fail to emulate it. I could nitpick a bit in terms of the game perhaps feeling a bit like a way too fast slippery janky freeware platformer at times. But that speed is also pretty important for reducing the repetition and allowing risky play. I could nitpick that occasionally the randomization will screw you over in impossible ways (admittedly pretty rare, though). But that's it, just nitpicks. 

Bonus: Stages of Beating It

With Spelunky 2 coming out soon, I finally decided to actually beat the original. While I always considered it the pretty much definitive action roguelike, I also don't really play roguelikes to win. They're more like slot machines I spin now and then to see all the possibilities. So actually setting out with the specific goal of beating it was weird, but I'm glad I did it. In this bonus section, I'm going to describe how I felt about the game at each stage of beating it.

Messing Around

What a cool game. I killed a bunch of spiders with a lady! Oh no, she fell on spikes and died.

Warping Around

The game lets you unlock shortcuts to each biome. Being some roguelike purist weirdo, I refused to use them until now because I considered them cheating. Since the goal was now to beat it, I swallowed my pride and tried them. I'm glad I did? This is still an action game, which means it requires some practice and learning of patterns. The warps make that possible, which makes my gut think that the action and roguelike marriage is maybe inherently wrong in some sense (it feels like a really hacky solution to a problem). Maybe more interestingly, the warps show off how every biome in the game is designed to be winnable no matter how poor your equipment luck is (the final area via warp is practically a different, harder game than a full run). The fact that the game doesn't feel broken even with good equipment is remarkable, since the equipment also manages to feel incredibly useful.

Beating It

Doing a full run was mostly a matter of learning one important lesson: the longer you spend in the world, the more likely you are to screw up. So it was mostly a matter of resisting greed and moving on. Not the easiest lesson to learn.

Actually Beating It

Naturally, the process required to unlock the true final area requires throwing away that lesson by forcing you to thoroughly explore certain areas to unlock it. I have some mixed feelings about this ending since it limits available strategies pretty severely, but at the same time I have to really appreciate that I was constantly honing my strategies for it throughout? When I reached the final boss for the first time, raw addiction set in and I was losing track of time- the temptation for just one more run was the strongest it has ever been.

I'd outline the progression of my strategies like this (don't read if you haven't beaten it, honestly):

• Is it even possible to make enough money for this?
• It is! I learned and honed several different methods for earning money.
• But ultimately it's really boring and slow to grind money (which means fewer total run chances), so I switched to robbing every shopkeeper I saw to get practice.
• Eventually I realized it's even more consistent to buy things and only steal when reaching the black market (excepting for important stuff).
• I made it to the final boss, and realized it's one of the few areas that isn't littered with one-shot kills. Which means doing sacrifices to get more HP would be incredibly useful for learning the boss. Suddenly, altars and the haunted castle got me INCREDIBLY excited to find while I previously didn't care.
• Victory
  

Trials of Mana

The Original

Seiken Densetsu 3 was kind of a bad game. At least, relative to its predecessor Secret of Mana. The duo exist in a weird forgotten niche of Action RPGs where, after attacking, you have to wait a few seconds before you can attack again. The closest modern comparison is something like Demon's Souls or Monster Hunter where each attack drains a constantly-recharging stamina bar, with some negative consequence for fully depleting it (the far more prevalent modern system for Action RPGs just being simplified combo attack systems that lets you button mash to your heart's content to various degrees). But since the Mana games only allowed a single attack, it gave them a very distinct rhythmic feel.

Where Seiken Densetsu 3 went wrong was in trying streamline the format of its predecessor: it removed the option of 0-damage semi-stunlock enemies by mashing the attack button, it removed charge attacks (which took time to charge up, and also slowed your movement while doing so and were pretty fundamental) in favor of simply giving you charge for each successful hit and then unleashing a special attack with a single button press, and probably worst of all it stripped Secret of Mana's robust armory of 8 weapons down to 6 extremely similar-feeling characters (of which you only get 3 in a single play through).

It tried to make up for the gutting of the action part with deeper RPG systems featuring a customizable party (complete with partially different storylines and antagonists), a branching class change system, and more customizable characters by letting players allocate stats on level up. But in the end, the RPG systems don't make that big of a difference and Seiken Densetsu 3 mostly just comes off as an extremely repetitive button masher (albeit a very pretty one).

And yes. To be clear, this is a pretty fragile argument because in reality magic is incredibly overpowered in both of these games and a lot of encounters just boil down to spamming things to death with magic that pauses the game entirely (probably even more so in Secret of Mana that featured a tedious system of leveling up magic by using it). But when and if you chose to engage with the action systems of these games, Secret of Mana comes out way ahead.

The Remake

The fact that Seiken Densetsu 3 was kind of a bad game actually made the prospect of a remake far more interesting. Remakes generally only happen for games that were popular, and most popular games were at least pretty good for their time, if not outright timeless classics. This makes most remakes a boring proposition of just upgrading the visuals/audio, cleaning up a broken translation, easing a few bad elements, and then just calling it a day. Do it for a bad game, and suddenly you get to give good ideas a second chance. It's an exciting prospect.

The actual end result in the case of Trials of Mana is... hard to say. It throws away the original rhymic combat in favor of a modern light combo action game with light/heavy attacks, the number of light attacks in sequence changing the properties of the ending heavy attack (with a few different options like pushing an enemy back vs. locking in place with multiple heavy attacks). Considering Seiken Densetu 3 was already creeping into being a button masher, I can't really hate the remake for turning it into a decent button masher. The aforementioned system of every 4 attacks charging you up to do a fancier heavy attack has been replaced with a much flashier special attack system that you use less often for more screen-clearing effects. There are a few other tweaks like back attacks doing extra damage, and dodge rolls replacing the rhythm of the older system. The changes line up to making random encounters a more pleasant brainless button masher than the original game.

If that were all, I would probably still be just as bored of the remake as the original. The bosses are where it salvages the combat by essentially ripping off Final Fantasy XIV's system of indicating future area attacks with big ol' red circles, cones, and lines as well as gimmicks like "hey kill this thing real fast or you're going to regret it". Using a fairly deep well of variation on these fundamental elements they actually juiced pretty distinct boss fights out of what was "eh it bounces around a bit and casts some spells occasionally" for a ton of bosses in the original game. It would be genuinely impressive if they didn't also make your now-mandatory AI companions incapable of dodging these things like 75% of the time. It's particularly nasty on hard mode where a lot of these attacks will one shot or nearly one shot characters. It doesn't make the game unplayable, and arguably makes the RPG elements come to the forefront since you will chew through healing items like crazy on Hard, but mostly it just made me wish my party members didn't exist so I could just focus on the fun boss fight instead of constantly pausing to heal? (beating more than a few bosses with my party members dead and all revival items gone was admittedly satisfying in its own way, though).

The other element of the remake that shines is, oddly enough, treasure hunting. Most of the time when a remake transitions from 2d to 3d it doesn't make much use of the extra dimension. And looking at Trials of Mana's extremely literal re-creations of most of the maps you'd think that would be the case here. But in reality, this feels more like an early 3d game in terms of "LOOK AT WHAT WE CAN DO WITH 3D!". There are chests behind trees, under cliffs, behind stacks of boxes, on roofs that were never accessible in the original because now there's a jump button, etc. It's honestly some of the most satisfying looking around the world for treasure that I have experienced in a game in ages. My only complaint is that a late game upgrade marks chests on your map ,which kind of destroys it, but you get it fairly late in the game so it didn't ruin much (and if nothing else revealed that I actually missed quite a few chests despite my best efforts of poking around).

While we're heaping praise on the remake, it also makes the RPG elements work a lot better too. Stat allocations no longer just upgrade the stat, but also unlock new abilities. The passive ones are new to the remake and add a satisfying RPG system of having to make the best use of limited slots for them. It's just the right amount of extra RPG complexity that was missing from the original without bogging the game in it.

Somewhat less successful is the upgrade to cutscenes and voice acting. The cutscene direction is actually surprisingly better than most midbudget JRPGs that have fallen into "I give up let's just tell our story as a visual novel" or "rotate in place on-map cutscenes because turning animations are hard". There's actually some camera work and custom animations here and there, and the angles chosen wisely avoid showing the character's feet when they turn. They even have NPCs that look like the belong to the same game thanks to the lower budget. The problem is more that they went with what seems like an extremely direct copy of the original game's dialog, and it's often (especially exposition parts), way too wordy for voice acting. Thankfully the game also lets you skip cutscenes on a per-subtitle level, so it doesn't actually damage the pacing as much as it could have. (There's also plenty of questionable voice direction going on, like Riesz having extremely stiff delivery which was probably an attempt to translate extremely formal Japanese because she's royalty, but in English it just comes off as more like she's speaking a second language or something).

So that's a lot of praise for the remake. By all means, they drastically improved a kind of bad game. But I still can't quite bring myself to say they juiced a great game out of it. The random encounters are still incredibly boring (I very nearly quit, but the later parts of the game start throwing tons of bosses at you which turned it into the best part of the game). The much improved boss fights are still held back by poor AI. It doesn't replicate that rhythmic combat I fell in love with, but that is as much a fault of the original game as the remake. The storytelling is honestly probably made worse by the upgrades (compare the classy silent cutscene of the fairy's companions, visible only as orbs, dying by slowly drifting off screen, too tired to fly... to the remake's explicit, cartoon voices telling us what's happening with awkward close-ups that kind of sap all the sadness out of it). The remake is merely... pretty good.

Would I recommend playing it? Yeah, if you're in the mood for a light mostly brainless Action RPG. It's probably not the best one of those you could play, though. A stronger recommendation if you played the original, because it is genuinely fascinating to see how closely they adapted it while still adding things like jumping.

(There's also a new post-game added to the remake. The brief epilogues it adds for each of the characters to unlock their fourth classes are decent. The main post-game dungeon itself is horrible because it consists almost entirely of random battles on recycled maps, and those battles are the worst part of the game.)

Bonus: The Adaptation

Maybe the most interesting thing about this remake is just the weird aesthetic clash that is created by bringing it into the modern day. For instance, the new 3d character models are extremely modern anime game (which is true to their original concept art). But rather than changing the intro to some anime opening with a Japanese vocal song, it has a very faithful reproduction of the original including the classy 90's Squaresoft music. It's weird! That clash of expectations exists to some degree across the entire game (though offset by the very anime dub acting).

But maybe more interesting is coming to terms with how different pixel art versions of characters are from their original concept art. By which I mean you might look at the 3d version of Riesz here:

And go "dang, was that skirt always that short?!" (particularly in a free 3d camera game with rolls and constant cutscenes from certain angles). So you look at the original sprite:

And go "eh no not really.. though maybe if you interpret it just right.. but everything else was definitely made sexier". So then you refer to the original concept art:

And go "ok yeah that 3d model is actually pretty spot-on aside from the dramatically enlarged chest."

This general principle applies throughout the remake. In some cases it's just a matter of things like short skirt lady witch soldiers working fine in 2d, but very much not working in 3d when you have their dead bodies lying all over the place with no effort being made to deal with it. Mana is just a sexy anime game franchise now, I guess (which wasn't false for the original Seiken Densetsu 3 either, but was also mostly using it as part of Angela's character. Secret of Mana had a completely different art style too, so it's kind of just SD3's fault.).

I don't have a lot to say about this, but it is an interesting facet of remaking old games: do you go with the more detailed concept art, or are you faithful to the sprites that players spent most of their time looking at? Were these sprites different due to the practical limits of pixel art, or because the sprite artists thought they just looked cooler? We'll probably never know.

The Last of Us

The Last of Us might be the clearest example of something I like to call a "role playing game". No, I don't mean the RPG genre. It's a pattern I've started to notice about high budget video games, but has been around for a very long time. It's when a game presents itself as having a mechanic/element, but streamlines it down so much that it no longer resembles the original idea- merely the flavor (maybe I should be calling these Vapor games or something). A clear example of this is how most open world games present themselves as having exploration/navigation, but in reality streamline it down into having on-screen quest pointers that guide you directly to everything (often including radars for nearby treasure to remove even nearby exploration, minimaps for detailed navigation, or just straight up drawing a line to show the full path). The result is a game where the player can role play that they're an explorer, but exploration isn't actually present as a mechanic (an effect I first noticed while playing an Assassin's Creed without having slept in over 35 hours: "hey this game is kind of fun when you're sleep deprived").

The Last of Us does this for survival horror. The game goes out of its way to present the idea that every bullet matters, and that you should aim carefully and make every shot count. That you should use stealth to kill or avoid opponents as much as possible to conserve ammo. Resource management, in other words. In reality this is mostly an illusion: the game is rigged so that when your total ammo count is below a threshold, enemies will start dropping random ammo. Skillfully stealth murdering an entire room of guys with guns will yield no further ammo if you're above the threshold (but ancient civilian zombies will drop them in abundance if you're low on ammo). This results in a weird meta game where, if the game has mostly given you ammo for guns you don't like, the strategically best option is to just start shooting things with it in hopes of forcing the game so start spawning ammo for the guns you do like. It all just comes off as one of the most blatantly artificial systems for producing scarcity I've ever seen. I also kind of get it, since these kinds of systems often turn into jokes when players play carefully (since developers have to balance around the dumbest possible player not getting into an impossible situation). But this attempt at solving the problem just comes off as insulting (even as someone who doesn't give a crap about realism in games, and will always prefer good systems over flavorful systems)

What really tips it over the edge is the game's aggressive checkpointing system, though. It does it even in the middle of encounters. This resulted in several situations where I found myself invested in figuring out the optimal situation, only for the game to just put me back half-way through it. So when I was excited to thoroughly explore a space, exploit the enemy's AI, and just figure out a level the game would just slap it out of my hands and tell me it was okay to sloppily bungle my way through it. This also lowers the value of the resource management on health kits quite a bit- why burn one when the penalty for failure is so low anyway? The end result is a game that is thematically survival horror if you choose to "role play" that you're playing it like that, but in reality is just another cinematic third person shooting game (with a mild "don't miss too much" mechanic).

Now you might be saying "Hold on just a second, Hawk- this game has multiple difficulty settings, just crank it up to the highest!". Which I did. And the highest one does, in fact, remove some of my gripes with checkpointing. But it mostly just made the artificial nature of the resource management even more obvious. And it also made it such that my total inability to actually aim with a gamepad became a severe detriment since head shots are pretty crucial to getting any use out of guns with so few bullets. I actually quit the game the first time I played it in 2015 when I tried to do the highest difficulty. I gave the game a second chance with merely Hard mode, and all I found was the same issues being expressed in different ways. I would not say the game is too easy, just that it isn't what it presents itself as.

So is it actually a problem that big budget games keep watering mechanics and ideas down so hard that they effectively cease to exist outside of the player's imagination? No, not really. There's room for expressing ideas with a range of complexities, including the very bottom of the scale. I'm even glad they experimented with this extreme of a simplification of resource management. It just didn't work for me.

And finally there's the story. I guess. It mostly seems to be a response to how there was a criticism of Uncharted for presenting its protagonist as a fun loving likable dude while also having him shoot, like, a thousand men to death in every game (a body count vastly exceeding its cinematic inspiration of Indiana Jones, but ultimately the problem of celebrating killers is just part of the Action genre). The Last of Us tries to correct this by making the protagonist a Sad Dad who did a lot of Bad Things to Survive In The Apocalypse, with his companion being a girl losing her innocence by learning from the violent world around her how to Kill. It's kind of just miserable and bleak, and feels excessively long compared to the average Cinematic Game, mostly so it can spend more time developing the two protagonist's relationship. Most of it was kind of flat for me, but I did love the penultimate chapter where the game stops to go all in with the best antagonist in the game who goes through several predictable but enjoyable twists. As a whole it's alright, but I also didn't feel like the bleakness had that much purpose to it.

So would I recommend playing The Last of Us? No. Not really. It literally came for free with my PS4 and I still kind of half-regret the time investment (yet I am also half-curious where  the sequel goes- but it sounds like they didn't change the game formula so I probably won't try it). I also don't really get why people found Uncharted 2 so incredible, so take that into consideration with my advice. (From what I gather half the people were floored by the setpieces like a physicsing building mid-firefight, and the other half were floored that a game finally achieved the storytelling quality of a Hollywood movie. I found the setpieces unimpressive because they didn't actually impact the gameplay that much, and achieving Hollywood quality meant nothing to me because I love trash.)