Every now and then while perusing a list of new game releases, I come across a game with a concept so strong that I pretty much immediately sit up and know I have to play it. Hero Must Die Again is precisely that kind of a game: after overexerting himself by killing Satan, the protagonist only has 5 days left to live- during which he levels down and has to rely on party members to get anything done in battle. While most time limit games tend to just tell you to find an optimal way to kill the final boss, the only overarching goal here is to find your missing true love that no one else seems to remember (with a slice of cleaning up the aftermath of the war- kind of a statement on what happens when you ignore all the side quests in an RPG I suppose). At the end of every cycle, you get a funeral that changes depending on how well you did (amusingly with a high score of how many people attended, and how many cried).
That only half describes the process of first finding this game, though. The other half is looking at the very horny box art of a bunch of anime girls (some with belts for bras) weeping over said protagonist's dead body. Combined with the fact I had never heard of this thing prior to release (odd for someone who tries to keep up with niche Japanese games), I went into it pretty skeptical. Deepening the mystery was the fact that this is a PS4/Switch/PC port of a 2016 Vita remake of a 2007 Japan-only mobile game. Having a remake that many years later certainly implied some level of being a fan favorite, but the pretty much non-existent footprint for the English release still gave me little hope of this thing living up to its concept. I was almost afraid to play it since the idea in my head was cooler.
The game actually leans all the way into the premise. You just beat this RPG, so naturally you start with the max 99,999 gold- making purchasing decisions quite different from other RPGs. As you level down you need to equip weaker gear from earlier in the original game, too. As you meet your old party members, you'll even start to piece together what the plot leading up to beating the final boss was. The first time you start forgetting vital spells like fast travel genuinely hurts, even more so when trivial enemies start becoming impossible. It's this combination of game mechanics with theme that makes this anime titty game a way more poignant depiction of aging/disease/death than what you find in minimalist art games like Passage. The end of my first run where I was selling my now-useless legendary equipment to try to get the money to finish a quest is a moment I won't soon forget.
Beyond the premise, it's actually a pretty interesting twist on the time management genre as well. Most games tend to have extremely static loops to allow the player to master and then exploit them, but Hero Must Die turns that on its head by injecting random elements into the loop. You'll get used to an NPC offering two rewards only for the game to slap you in the face by having another character get there first and take one of them- forcing you to scramble to find an alternate method. Other times, the goal for a quest will change entirely. Sometimes two bosses will show up instead of one. It compounds on that with a Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter system where quest progress from previous runs will carry over into future ones. I didn't like the idea of it at first, but it actually ends up just adding harder additional goals while making the initial goals easier (but often only at random). True mastery involves figuring out the various permutations, and the multiple methods of achieving the common goals. The end result is it feels a lot more like a game you react to, rather than devolving into a rote adventure game where you robotically do the goals.
Coming from a mobile game, the execution of all this is pretty simple. NPCs don't move (but don't always show up in the same place), there's no night time because God paused it (yes, they actually write around having night visuals), the battle system is a mix of Dragon Quest buffs with an elemental damage system (simple but sufficient), exploration is side scrolling with no jumping, etc. Most NPCs don't move based on the day it is, so the time management is mostly about the timer ticking down in real time while exploring, and traveling/sleeping/fishing taking up longer chunks of it instantly. The world is tightly designed with only a few towns/dungeons, but care is taken to make most of them slightly unique to traverse (and to solve for efficient completion): one dungeon's boss moves around and has to be followed, another has locks/keys, etc. The simplicity is a boon for the time management, since a complete run only takes about 2 hours- long enough that you get invested in not messing up, but short enough that doing a new run feels really compelling since you can see another ending in a single session.
That's a lot of effusive praise, but it's also kind of hard to recommend to anyone who isn't way into time management games (especially at $40). While it features an Earthbound style too-easy-battle skip, it doesn't actually trigger very often so you'll be spending a fair amount of time fighting rote RPG battles (that unfortunately don't let you skip spell animations, though on the whole the speed is quick- just not quick enough for a game with this much repetition). At the same time, it's really cool when you end up having to improvise a new way to do an old battle when forced to fight with a crippled hero. The aforementioned randomization in the loop also means it can be really confusing when you can't trigger a certain event- is it random, or do you not understand the conditions? To the game's credit there was only one event I got stuck on, but it really sucks to waste 2-3 runs on a single quest when runs can take hours. Some of the mechanics also operate in a way that isn't intuitive to casual observation, but become easy to exploit if you look up a guide (one optional quest is basically impossible to intuit in a logical in-world way, though you could figure it out if you think in purely game terms).
And then there's the story. It's mostly light, and dialogue is delightfully brief. Mostly consists of a lot of piecing together background story (both of the protagonist's original quest, and the world). But there's also an undercurrent of darkness. That maybe you can't fix everything. One of my favorite quests involves training the next hero. She's just a terrible person. Training her is basically just giving her more power to be terrible with. There's some incredibly potent anxiety about raising future generations here. As far as I can tell, there's nothing you can do to make her a good person either. The "best" you can do is just not enable her, or possibly kill her (which the game still doesn't portray as a positive). Even in the True Ending, the kingdom doesn't last forever.
In short, there are some really good moments, but as a whole it still feels vaguely like it's missing something. Maybe because there are far more vapid moments. Maybe because all the background story doesn't add up to anything too interesting (don't get me wrong, the True Ending is pretty cool, but little of the background story you learn leading up to it makes it that much more impactful). Can't put my finger on it.
Epilogue
Oh right, the horniness. The character designs are exactly what they look like, but in practice the game doesn't actually lean into it much at all (outside of a couple raunchy lines of dialogue). You can have a kid with any of them, but the sex scenes just fade to pink. It literally feels like someone inserted boobs after the fact as a desperate measure to try to sell a Vita game in 2016 (or to sell a mobile game in 2007- I checked the original mobile game. They're not as extreme, but I wouldn't say the remake is adding something that wasn't there). It's kind of unfortunate, the romance is an important aspect of the theme of death, but the designs undercut it- especially some moments in the true ending.
I got pretty curious that the time system was so well designed for a game from out of nowhere, and discovered the lead writer/designer is one Shoji Masuda. Two of his other big games seem to be Oreshika (about humans that only live for 1-2 years and you have to breed to achieve a goal- the sequel I've wanted for years but is also literally the only game on the Vita I'm interested in) and Linda Cubed (about a meteor destroying a planet and needing to gather as many Pokemon as possible on your space ark before the time limit expires- also apparently all the humans are dicks during the end of the world?). So suddenly it made sense that Hero Must Die is so adept at time management since it's coming from a founding father. Hope that a fan translation happens some day, I guess?
Friday, March 6, 2020
Thursday, December 5, 2019
Chrono Cross
(This review has heavy story spoilers in it if you care about that kind of thing)
When Chrono Cross came out I mostly recall pretty severe reactions to it, mostly focusing on how it only let you level up from designated fights (mostly on the main path). There were probably other complaints like the spell system turning every character into barely distinguishable mush, but it was the adverse reaction to finite levels that I remember the most. Much later Paper Mario: Sticker Star and a few other RPGs that dared to excise experience points would meet a similar fate of universal outcry: random encounters that don't offer experience were a cardinal sin for an RPG (yet, oddly, RPGs that mask this under the guise of level scaling get far less flak- almost as though it's more about perception of growth than reality). This is the main reason I finally got around to playing it 20 years later. I thought perhaps this might be another Metal Gear Solid 2, where I skipped an amazing game based on misplaced outrage. Instead, I discovered that fixed level ups basically don't even register as a problem next to everything else.
When Chrono Cross came out I mostly recall pretty severe reactions to it, mostly focusing on how it only let you level up from designated fights (mostly on the main path). There were probably other complaints like the spell system turning every character into barely distinguishable mush, but it was the adverse reaction to finite levels that I remember the most. Much later Paper Mario: Sticker Star and a few other RPGs that dared to excise experience points would meet a similar fate of universal outcry: random encounters that don't offer experience were a cardinal sin for an RPG (yet, oddly, RPGs that mask this under the guise of level scaling get far less flak- almost as though it's more about perception of growth than reality). This is the main reason I finally got around to playing it 20 years later. I thought perhaps this might be another Metal Gear Solid 2, where I skipped an amazing game based on misplaced outrage. Instead, I discovered that fixed level ups basically don't even register as a problem next to everything else.
The battle system is, put simply, an unfinished mess. There are basically two primary crippling factors: spell animations are ludicrously long (even for a PS1 RPG), and they didn't bother to actually balance the battles. For the vast majority of the game, random encounters pretty much did 10-20 damage to my 100-400 HP characters. There were occasional spikes, but stupid long attack animations followed by comedic low damage were the standard. This right here is the actual reason people felt slighted by the leveling system: the hard to avoid battles are quite literally time wasters with middling rewards.
You might say, "the bosses are where all the real challenge is in an RPG anyway!". But this actually reveals a deeper flaw with the game's element system, which basically lets you put almost any ability on any character (with some caveats). This results in every character feeling the same, but it also makes the (VERY FEW) difficult battles in the game a bummer because you'll realize how to beat a boss during the battle, but be completely incapable of adapting to it without running away or dying. Then you get to enjoy the chore of rearranging all of your abilities to deal with it, followed by putting them back afterwards. So even if the game had been tightly balanced with its fixed level system, it would also have been a real chore to play (I almost wonder if they realized this themselves, and lowered the difficulty as a hot fix). Even as someone who enjoys messing around in RPG menus to prepare for a hard battle, it just wouldn't work here.
On the flip side of this, Chrono Cross is a profoundly chill game. With the level scaling and low difficulty it's pretty easy to get through it while only occasionally adjusting your equipment/abilities, while skipping as many battles as the game lets you get away with (not as many as you want- enemies are hard to dodge on tight pre-rendered corridors). I played a non-trivial amount of it with a hot drink by my side, and it was sometimes a good time. The game also tries to integrate a small amount of adventure game into it by having the player use key items or bring specific characters to certain place. Sometimes this is satisfying, but it gets annoyingly obscure too. The final boss is probably the greatest example of this: it throws numerous clues at you for how to beat it- but only in the final dungeon that gets sealed off after the game even informs you that those clues were critically important. It's not hard for me to imagine getting cruelly stonewalled for months by this in a pre-internet world. Still, every dungeon tries to have its own little gimmick, and while they don't make them fun to traverse they do keep the repetition at bay.
The story is a lot harder to critique. A simple explanation is: there are a lot of great moments, but the game doesn't build off any of them. The first one is where you realize you've been warped to an alternate world based off all the villagers having subtle to radical changes in their life. This part is a great use of the RPG format, allowing the situation to sink in as players discovers it on their own before triggering a more explicit cutscene. The subtle changes approach is really effective in the village, but the rest of the game doesn't do that much interesting with it. You'll have a monster extinct in one world but not the other, one version of a city celebrating while the other prepares for war, or an entire village transplanted into being slave labor on a luxury boat. Some of these might be interesting on paper, but none of them are as haunting as the first reveal in execution. It's also really hard to pinpoint the exact reasons because the game inconsistently gets pieces of it right: sometimes the characters involved just don't have meaningfully different personalities despite radically different circumstances (which is what makes the concept haunting to begin with: having the face the reality that your circumstances shape you), often the visual differences between the worlds don't exist, and it often just doesn't feel like there's an interesting story to the differences. They're just slightly different because... they needed to put something different there, and it made sense within the setting.
The next great moment that everyone talks about is where you end up body swapping with the antagonist, Lynx. The reveal execution is perfect, where the game just stops and waits for you to move with the dpad- only for you to realize to your horror that you're moving Lynx now. Shortly after that you return to your home village once again, only to realize everyone you know and love are secretly horrible racists. It's executed much like the previous moment, letting you just explore around town at your own pace and soak up how different people are around your new body. It's another great use of the RPG format. And like the last one, the game just doesn't use it in any meaningful way after the initial reveal. The story quickly gets tired of explaining the situation to everyone, and doesn't do much meaningful with your new identity (not even trying to use his army against him or anything). Maybe the biggest waste of the concept comes at the end of the game, where it's revealed that Lynx was never a real person- just the protagonist's father mutated into his greatest fear and with no free will of his own. So rather than having any epiphany about the villain's motivations after walking a day in his shoes, it actually becomes a meaningless twist because Lynx was never a character to begin with. You can certainly argue that it still ties into the broader themes of the game (and that it titillated many English Majors that you literally turn into your father), but it just feels kind of wasted to me.
On the flip side of this, Chrono Cross is a profoundly chill game. With the level scaling and low difficulty it's pretty easy to get through it while only occasionally adjusting your equipment/abilities, while skipping as many battles as the game lets you get away with (not as many as you want- enemies are hard to dodge on tight pre-rendered corridors). I played a non-trivial amount of it with a hot drink by my side, and it was sometimes a good time. The game also tries to integrate a small amount of adventure game into it by having the player use key items or bring specific characters to certain place. Sometimes this is satisfying, but it gets annoyingly obscure too. The final boss is probably the greatest example of this: it throws numerous clues at you for how to beat it- but only in the final dungeon that gets sealed off after the game even informs you that those clues were critically important. It's not hard for me to imagine getting cruelly stonewalled for months by this in a pre-internet world. Still, every dungeon tries to have its own little gimmick, and while they don't make them fun to traverse they do keep the repetition at bay.
The story is a lot harder to critique. A simple explanation is: there are a lot of great moments, but the game doesn't build off any of them. The first one is where you realize you've been warped to an alternate world based off all the villagers having subtle to radical changes in their life. This part is a great use of the RPG format, allowing the situation to sink in as players discovers it on their own before triggering a more explicit cutscene. The subtle changes approach is really effective in the village, but the rest of the game doesn't do that much interesting with it. You'll have a monster extinct in one world but not the other, one version of a city celebrating while the other prepares for war, or an entire village transplanted into being slave labor on a luxury boat. Some of these might be interesting on paper, but none of them are as haunting as the first reveal in execution. It's also really hard to pinpoint the exact reasons because the game inconsistently gets pieces of it right: sometimes the characters involved just don't have meaningfully different personalities despite radically different circumstances (which is what makes the concept haunting to begin with: having the face the reality that your circumstances shape you), often the visual differences between the worlds don't exist, and it often just doesn't feel like there's an interesting story to the differences. They're just slightly different because... they needed to put something different there, and it made sense within the setting.
The next great moment that everyone talks about is where you end up body swapping with the antagonist, Lynx. The reveal execution is perfect, where the game just stops and waits for you to move with the dpad- only for you to realize to your horror that you're moving Lynx now. Shortly after that you return to your home village once again, only to realize everyone you know and love are secretly horrible racists. It's executed much like the previous moment, letting you just explore around town at your own pace and soak up how different people are around your new body. It's another great use of the RPG format. And like the last one, the game just doesn't use it in any meaningful way after the initial reveal. The story quickly gets tired of explaining the situation to everyone, and doesn't do much meaningful with your new identity (not even trying to use his army against him or anything). Maybe the biggest waste of the concept comes at the end of the game, where it's revealed that Lynx was never a real person- just the protagonist's father mutated into his greatest fear and with no free will of his own. So rather than having any epiphany about the villain's motivations after walking a day in his shoes, it actually becomes a meaningless twist because Lynx was never a character to begin with. You can certainly argue that it still ties into the broader themes of the game (and that it titillated many English Majors that you literally turn into your father), but it just feels kind of wasted to me.
And finally you have the ending of the game. It's pretty much two dungeons filled to the brim with nonstop plot twists, betrayals the characters were never privy to, reveals the true nature of the world, and much more while your characters contemplate the meaning of life. Even when you think it's done revealing things, it just keeps going by re-contextualizing things a couple more times just for good measure. When the game runs out of dungeon material to reveal things with, it says screw it and reveals a few more things by just having ghosts deliver text box after text box of exposition before finally letting you tackle the final boss (this is a game that features a lady trapped in infinite time being slowly merged into a monster for all eternity, and the game doesn't really stop to reflect on the emotional cosmic horror of that whatsoever because it doesn't have time for it with all the trans-dimensional time wars going on). It's a spectacularly convoluted mess with some fun scifi concepts, and I had a smile on my face the whole time. I don't know that it's necessarily good, but I loved how far it would go to top itself. An element of that is just that Chrono Cross is more interesting in 2019 than it was in 1999. This is a game with themes and it's going to scream them at you as loud and emotionally as possible. It's a game where an NPC will summarize how humans have been razing the planet and this swamp is fucked because of it in a single text box. It's the kind of game where the ending is going to have metaphors about sperm and eggs. It's that kind of game. I miss that kind of game.
That all sounds pretty great but here's the catch: these are almost all of the good moments in the game. There's four times more plot in the final 4 hours of the game than the rest of the game put together. Despite all the cool concepts I just listed above, the game actually spends most of its time on oddly dry world building? Yes this is a world where a super AI is controlling humanity for all eternity, but let's talk about the Acacia dragoons and how one of them died recently and that turned their leader Command Viper cruel and bitter along with his wife's death, and... actually I have no idea why any of these people or their problems are important to the main plot even after beating it. I'm sure many of them have detailed side stories I missed from not doing an obscure side quest or choosing the wrong branch. It's just a really boring world that has excessive detail in some places, but is also extremely vague in others ("I guess this part of the world just has 6 dragon nature gods watching over it but no other part of the world for some reason"). And while it feels lovingly made in a way where you can probably look at it and say "boy it's super obvious how that super AI was controlling this person", it makes for a really uncohesive whole with bumpy pacing (made worse by having forty-five characters to split their attention between, and a silent protagonist being the sole omnipresent character which isn't enough to give the game a constant to thread to work with). This all comes to a head in one part in particular where you just need to beat 6 bosses across the world while the plot slows to a standstill entirely. While this kind of free roam quest might be joyful in an RPG where the systems are good, it just magnifies the problems to the forefront in this case. I only barely got through it.
Chrono Cross has a sort of predecessor called Radical Dreamers, a short text adventure that answers the same hanging plot thread of Chrono Trigger, but in a very different way. While playing through Cross I had a pet theory that the reason the game felt like it had an absolute boatload of filler was because it just took key moments from Radical Dreamers and stretched them out to a full RPG. After actually reading a plot summary I realized I actually had it kind of backwards: many of the pointless characters of Chrono Cross were actually the entire setting of Radical Dreamers. This game feels so weirdly disconnected because it has an entire other game's characters crammed into it for no reason. Of course there are also many other pointless characters that don't originate from Radical Dreamers, so it isn't a perfect explanation of this inexplicable mess. But it's all I've got.
So is it a good game? No, not really. The visual design is a wonderful blend of blue sky ocean mixed with distressingly alien locales. The soundtrack is incredible. It plays really poorly (somewhat better with an emulator to fast forward the animations). The story has great moments in an ocean of bland. Everything good is just completely drug down by the bad. The best thing I can say is that it kept me hooked, but often just out of how many fascinatingly poor design choices it has. It's hard not to respect how hard it tries to be different despite being a sequel to a big game, but it just doesn't work out in the end.
That all sounds pretty great but here's the catch: these are almost all of the good moments in the game. There's four times more plot in the final 4 hours of the game than the rest of the game put together. Despite all the cool concepts I just listed above, the game actually spends most of its time on oddly dry world building? Yes this is a world where a super AI is controlling humanity for all eternity, but let's talk about the Acacia dragoons and how one of them died recently and that turned their leader Command Viper cruel and bitter along with his wife's death, and... actually I have no idea why any of these people or their problems are important to the main plot even after beating it. I'm sure many of them have detailed side stories I missed from not doing an obscure side quest or choosing the wrong branch. It's just a really boring world that has excessive detail in some places, but is also extremely vague in others ("I guess this part of the world just has 6 dragon nature gods watching over it but no other part of the world for some reason"). And while it feels lovingly made in a way where you can probably look at it and say "boy it's super obvious how that super AI was controlling this person", it makes for a really uncohesive whole with bumpy pacing (made worse by having forty-five characters to split their attention between, and a silent protagonist being the sole omnipresent character which isn't enough to give the game a constant to thread to work with). This all comes to a head in one part in particular where you just need to beat 6 bosses across the world while the plot slows to a standstill entirely. While this kind of free roam quest might be joyful in an RPG where the systems are good, it just magnifies the problems to the forefront in this case. I only barely got through it.
Chrono Cross has a sort of predecessor called Radical Dreamers, a short text adventure that answers the same hanging plot thread of Chrono Trigger, but in a very different way. While playing through Cross I had a pet theory that the reason the game felt like it had an absolute boatload of filler was because it just took key moments from Radical Dreamers and stretched them out to a full RPG. After actually reading a plot summary I realized I actually had it kind of backwards: many of the pointless characters of Chrono Cross were actually the entire setting of Radical Dreamers. This game feels so weirdly disconnected because it has an entire other game's characters crammed into it for no reason. Of course there are also many other pointless characters that don't originate from Radical Dreamers, so it isn't a perfect explanation of this inexplicable mess. But it's all I've got.
So is it a good game? No, not really. The visual design is a wonderful blend of blue sky ocean mixed with distressingly alien locales. The soundtrack is incredible. It plays really poorly (somewhat better with an emulator to fast forward the animations). The story has great moments in an ocean of bland. Everything good is just completely drug down by the bad. The best thing I can say is that it kept me hooked, but often just out of how many fascinatingly poor design choices it has. It's hard not to respect how hard it tries to be different despite being a sequel to a big game, but it just doesn't work out in the end.
Friday, May 17, 2019
Axiom Verge
The thing I always complain about with the modern indie metroidvania is that they're largely scared to death of backtracking. I'll grant Axiom Verge that it doesn't exactly fall into that mold. The first half of the game is pretty dang linear and takes you through maybe 60% of the world, but the second half turns into a more traditional peck and hunt through the world trying to find the next major upgrade.
And yet it still failed to hit that sense of a world. Part of it is that the backtracking tended to fall into a simple pattern of finding small branching areas that were locked off by abilities, clearing them out, then moving back on to the "main track" of the area. Eventually you'd find the main path of the game which would be longer and slightly more branching, but still ultimately felt more like a level than anything. It just never feels like a place due to how shallow the branching is, rarely looping in on itself.
It makes me feel sort of crazy since I haven't played Super Metroid in over a decade, so I'm uncertain if it actually nailed this aspect, or I just didn't pay as much attention back then. Am I being unfair to all these games by comparing them to a game that maybe doesn't actually exist?
That's compounded by how much I like everything else about Axiom Verge. I am a total sucker for the organic/mechanical aesthetic of the world. Despite visually being Metroid as heck, the actual upgrades you get deviate from it in a pleasing way instead of just repainting the classics. I got way into the story that starts off by making you think the nature of the world is one thing, then shifts to something else, and by the end I'm not even sure anymore- but in a way that I found to be satisfying ambiguity that answers just enough questions to not feel like a rip off (truth be told the narrative ended up being the main thing that kept me going through it). I wouldn't necessarily recommend the game to everyone on it, it just hits a lot of types of scifi that I personally love.
When looking at basic design decisions I also found myself nodding in agreement that smart choices were made. Instead of resorting to immersion-breaking teleporters for convenience, it uses part of the world as a shortcut (although frankly considering the plot, an actual teleporter would have made sense anyway). It condenses all the "key" abilities into various mobility options and secondary attacks, allowing you to instead find dozens of possible weapons for your primary fire. The end result, in theory, makes finding stuff in the world far more rewarding since there are tons of unique optional mechanics to find. Not all of them end up being useful, but plenty of them made various boss fights in my play through much easier.
In theory. In reality, even though the rewards were great, I didn't find exploring that satisfying. Because, again, it doesn't feel like exploring a world so much as cleaning the gutters. On a more fundamental level I didn't find the basics of fighting enemies that engaging either. There's plenty of variety, I had to come up with strategies over time for several enemies, and the rooms rarely devolve into Symphony of the Night's copy/paste hallways, but it just never.. felt good?
It's an alright game. It mostly leaves me questioning my own sense of taste, that I'm comparing an entire genre to a game that might only exist in my head. I could just replay Super Metroid and find out, but psh.
And yet it still failed to hit that sense of a world. Part of it is that the backtracking tended to fall into a simple pattern of finding small branching areas that were locked off by abilities, clearing them out, then moving back on to the "main track" of the area. Eventually you'd find the main path of the game which would be longer and slightly more branching, but still ultimately felt more like a level than anything. It just never feels like a place due to how shallow the branching is, rarely looping in on itself.
It makes me feel sort of crazy since I haven't played Super Metroid in over a decade, so I'm uncertain if it actually nailed this aspect, or I just didn't pay as much attention back then. Am I being unfair to all these games by comparing them to a game that maybe doesn't actually exist?
That's compounded by how much I like everything else about Axiom Verge. I am a total sucker for the organic/mechanical aesthetic of the world. Despite visually being Metroid as heck, the actual upgrades you get deviate from it in a pleasing way instead of just repainting the classics. I got way into the story that starts off by making you think the nature of the world is one thing, then shifts to something else, and by the end I'm not even sure anymore- but in a way that I found to be satisfying ambiguity that answers just enough questions to not feel like a rip off (truth be told the narrative ended up being the main thing that kept me going through it). I wouldn't necessarily recommend the game to everyone on it, it just hits a lot of types of scifi that I personally love.
When looking at basic design decisions I also found myself nodding in agreement that smart choices were made. Instead of resorting to immersion-breaking teleporters for convenience, it uses part of the world as a shortcut (although frankly considering the plot, an actual teleporter would have made sense anyway). It condenses all the "key" abilities into various mobility options and secondary attacks, allowing you to instead find dozens of possible weapons for your primary fire. The end result, in theory, makes finding stuff in the world far more rewarding since there are tons of unique optional mechanics to find. Not all of them end up being useful, but plenty of them made various boss fights in my play through much easier.
In theory. In reality, even though the rewards were great, I didn't find exploring that satisfying. Because, again, it doesn't feel like exploring a world so much as cleaning the gutters. On a more fundamental level I didn't find the basics of fighting enemies that engaging either. There's plenty of variety, I had to come up with strategies over time for several enemies, and the rooms rarely devolve into Symphony of the Night's copy/paste hallways, but it just never.. felt good?
It's an alright game. It mostly leaves me questioning my own sense of taste, that I'm comparing an entire genre to a game that might only exist in my head. I could just replay Super Metroid and find out, but psh.
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