Banjo-Tooie Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 7/31/2023)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Banjo-Tooie

Developer: Rare

Publisher: Nintendo

Genre(s): 3D Platformer

Platforms: N64

Release Date: November 19, 2000

Banjo-Tooie is a perfect sequel to the innovative, influential 3D platformer Banjo-Kazooie…in theory. On paper, Banjo-Tooie completes more than the necessary criteria for an exemplary sequel. The factors I’ve always attributed to when it comes to crafting a substantial followup to a celebrated title is expanding upon its world and characters along with using the element of hindsight to oil the hinges that perhaps started squeaking once the game was released, much to the embarrassment of the developers. If you’ll notice the cheeky instance of play-on-words in the title, Banjo-Tooie is a game that revels in its inherent role as a sequel. The game was always in a comfortable position, after all, succeeding its predecessor after only two years and on the same, familiar hardware. Banjo-Kazooie constructed the concrete architecture of the Banjo mansion, and all Banjo-Tooie was tasked with was sprucing up the glorious estate with some voguish furniture or state-of-the-art HDTV complete with surround sound speakers. The question still remains: does Rare’s magnum opus really need these additional luxuries? Banjo-Kazooie made such a monumental splash for the prevailing 3D platformer trend that it stole the proverbial torch away from Mario to guide every subsequent release in the genre with its light. Any game that usurps the throne from Nintendo’s golden boy ain't no slouch, so one can infer the extent of Banjo-Kazooie’s quality merely through this fact alone. Because of Banjo-Kazooie’s high mark of 3D platforming excellence, Banjo-Tooie is another example of a sequel needing to prove the rationale of its existence. In some aspects, Banjo-Tooie knew which of Banjo-Kazooie’s loose bolts to tighten up, but there are some screws that it never should’ve tinkered with.

Even though Banjo-Tooie is screaming its sequel status from the stormy peak of Gruntilda’s Lair, it’ll be damned to be content with being eclipsed in the shadow of Banjo-Kazooie’s glory. Since Gruntilda fell from her tower upon her defeat and was entombed under the crushing weight of a massive boulder, the moral characters from the first game can now relax and play a rousing game of poker at Banjo’s house. During their relatively carefree evening of playing cards, Gruntilda’s two equally unsightly sisters of contrasting body proportions align with her old scientific servant Klungo to tunnel to Gruntilda’s resting place with a military-grade drill. Somehow, Gruntilda defies the laws of biology and still remains alive and well despite her stationary status beneath the earth for who knows how long. The glaring effect being buried has had on Gruntilda is the total removal of her sickly-green skin, reducing her to a skeleton with the same witch garb and squawking voice (personally, I think the new look is an improvement). Before Gruntilda begins her major quest to procure a new epidermis, she can’t help but act on a petty impulse to blast Banjo’s house with a comically-enhanced laser cannon. Bottles the mole is the sole victim of Gruntilda’s vengeance, leaving his wispy soul to roam around Banjo’s front yard until the end of times. That’s right: the game begins with Bottles fucking dying. As the unceremonious onslaught signals a new adventure, the events of the previous night leave the old stomping grounds of Spiral Mountain in ruin, with the overhead entrance of Gruntilda’s lair blocked off by the wreckage. The first cutscene and its aftermath convey a message that the comfort of nostalgia that comes with a sequel has been blown to smithereens, even if the game is still strictly confined to familiarity as a direct sequel developed on the same console.

That cynical attitude seems to persist throughout Banjo-Tooie. Banjo-Tooie behaves the same way as a displeased, ill-natured child does being dragged along on a chore by a parent, committing minor acts of obnoxious debauchery to both alleviate their boredom and spite their parental figure. Banjo-Tooie does its damndest to dump on its predecessor at every waking moment possible. Namely, corrupting Banjo-Kazooie’s guileless presentation and tone as fervently as it can while admittedly being tethered down by the same aesthetic. More cases of murder pop up after Bottles is dispatched among the various NPCs, and the fact that Tooty is missing once again (with a credible search ad on a milk carton to boot) but no one seems to care disturbs me a smidge. Really, the trick that Banjo-Tooie pulls out of its hat in an attempt to ruin its predecessor’s legacy is constantly breaking the fourth wall. Seemingly every line of dialogue references Banjo-Kazooie in some capacity, noting some familiar characters, events, and other nostalgic nuggets to further hammer in its sequel status. The emotional impact of Bottles being fried to a crisp is tainted by Kazooie’s offhand comment that “he wasn’t the most popular character in the last game.” In fact, the snarky bird spits so much verbal venom at the NPCs in Banjo-Tooie that I’m almost offended on their behalf. On top of referencing the previous title, the game features posters with characters from Jet Force Gemini and a jiggie quest involving unfreezing a Rare relic named Sabreman. The second title is too soon to start being meta, guys! The game gives off the impression that a sequel to Banjo-Kazooie was greenlit, but Rare shared the same weary sentiment about sequels that I tend to express. I’m not sure if this flippant direction is an attempt to sabotage the player’s immersion or if Rare genuinely thought it made the game more discernible from Banjo-Kazooie. Still, it indicates that something was stirring at the Rare offices during this game’s development.

However, just because Banjo-Tooie makes a fuss out of having to exist, it doesn’t mean that the game didn’t ultimately make an effort. As I stated before, the quality of life enhancements that usually come with a sequel is certainly apparent. For example, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with Banjo’s combat moves. Here, Banjo’s roll maneuver to mow down enemies is far less stilted, as he can now shift the direction slightly. When in an idle position, Banjo has thankfully stopped trying to attack with his pitiful arm slaps and the game leaves the short-range offense entirely to Kazooie. One glaring issue found in Banjo-Kazooie that encompassed most players' gripes and grievances was the traversal of the hub world. Having to make the trek all the way up Gruntilda’s Lair in the later portions of the game from its entrance at the bottom was a tedious excursion unfitting for the accessible feeling of a hub world, and the teleportation cauldrons were too sparsely placed to amend this issue. Banjo-Tooie’s hub and its levels are divided into distinct districts that all come with a teleportation mechanism. Simply place Banjo into the dome fit for a mole and a menu will appear to select where to arrive at, provided Banjo has already visited that area already. The levels also feature something similar in the vein of a warp pad which transports Banjo across the map, but I’ll touch on that in further detail later on. The developers have corrected every last one of Banjo-Kazooie's minor sniggles and while the amount of these is marginal, at least the developers paid attention and acted accordingly for the little effort required.

Isle O’ Hags is the name of the new nucleus between all of Banjo-Tooie’s levels. Technically, it encompasses the entire eclectic island nation that Banjo, his friends, and the Gruntilda sisters who are apparently a native species. Every area from Banjo-Kazooie also shares the same dominion but for now, let’s focus on the district revealed behind the dirt wall of Spiral Mountain. Isle O’ Hags essentially copies the same design philosophy as Gruntilda’s Lair; a steep ascent where the peak of the climb is the climactic point of the game, with frequent inhibitors in the shape of arbitrarily-assigned jiggy quantities to implore the player to visit the levels and to stretch out the pacing to elevate the scope of the journey. While both hubs share the same overall design and collectathon direction, they differ in the atmosphere. Ironically, for a place named after the pejorative term for Gruntilda, the looming presence of Gruntilda and her sisters is practically absent, never throwing her voice from her chamber to cackle discouraging limericks in Banjo’s ears. That, and the oppressiveness that Gruntilda’s Lair exuded was contributed by the enclosed cavern setting, something that winding seaside cliffs of the isle certainly don’t. Still, I actually prefer Isle O’ Hags as a hub world, and not only because the fast travel domes make climbing it much breezier. The developers have also streamlined the level-unlocking process. Once Banjo collects a certain amount of jiggies, he’ll revisit a jiggy spiritual temple near the base of the hub where solving a jigsaw puzzle will reward him with the monk-like Master Jiggywiggy beaming a ray of light that rivals Gruntilda’s laser beam to the unlocked area. I thought exploring to look for the painting with the missing jigsaw pieces made for an unnecessary additional venture, so I’m content with returning to the same sacred jiggy domain once in a while to further the game.

Banjo-Tooie’s branching areas were an especially exciting prospect because the previous game exhausted all of the typical level tropes seen across 3D platformers of the same ilk. This doesn’t inherently mean that the developers have hit a wall with nowhere to run; rather, scratching off all the boxes on the 3D platformer cheat sheet forces the developers to amplify their creative juices. Overall, the level tropes on display in Banjo-Tooie are a little less conventional. Mayahem Temple’s core inspiration stems from the ancient civilizations from Central America, while the humid, terraform dinosaur biome Terrydactyland takes Banjo further back in time far before the dawn of human civilization. Jolly Roger’s Lagoon separates the sea creatures from the land lubbers when Banjo dives into the basin of the port town and discovers an immaculate underwater world beneath the surface. Hailfire Peaks presents the most classic of contrasts with a fire and ice world coexisting on opposite sides of one another. Glitter Gulch Mine reminds me of one of those hokey prospector attractions where families get their pictures taken at, complete with a train station and shiny piles of counterfeit gold. Speaking of attractions, my favorite area in Banjo-Tooie from a conceptual standpoint is the amusement park of Witchyworld run by Gruntilda, a despondent carnival that makes every Six Flags location look safe and professional by comparison. In fact, the churlish atmosphere found in Witchyworld sort of extends to every other level to some extent as well. None of these levels capture that cheery, captivating vibe that oozed from levels like Freezeezy Peak or Click Clock Wood and instead borrow the same filthy dirge found in an area like Clanker's Cavern. Grunty Industries certainly exemplifies a glum, morale-free factory and if I didn’t know any better, I’d think Hailfire was a censored misprint of the damned afterlife of a certain religious denomination because of all of its scorching fire and brimstone. Still, the variety on display rivals the level selection of the previous game marvelously.

In lieu of Bottles pushing up daisies, who will teach Banjo and the bird new techniques to survive these harsher worlds? Bottles' brother, the army drill sergeant Jamjars, will pop out of his various underground hatches to whip Banjo and Kazooie into shape, promising them that they’ll learn some military-grade shit after Bottles simply taught them the basics. He doesn’t teach Banjo how to sneak up behind a man and snap his neck like Solid Snake, but I’m sure some of these moves are still illegal in at least seven different countries. The developers found a better use of the golden musical notes in Banjo-Tooie as they can be used as an accumulated currency to unlock a new move from Jamjars. Some of these new feats of dexterity come in the form of quality-of-life enhancements, with ledge grabbing and the Breegull Blast seeming like necessary afterthoughts after the first game was released. Kazooie gains a smattering of other egg types alongside the standard ones, including fire, ice, grenades, and birthing a walking cuckoo bomb with a timed or manual detonator. The Beak Bomb is now enhanced with the Bill Drill to crack open large boulders and unscrew bolts. Temporary power-ups that involve the Talon Trot add some moon shoes to bounce high and shoes that can climb up inclines with footprints on them. The most interesting of these new moves are the ones the pair learn for their individual merit. “Split pads” with both characters' faces on them separate both of them until they regroup on the same spot, proving that Kazooie isn’t fused to Banjo like an abominable conjoined twin. Banjo’s individual moves involve his backpack in some capacity, whether it be hopping inside it to mitigate damage or carrying someone else in it for a change like a taxi service. Kazooie mostly performs enhanced versions of her innate abilities without Banjo’s weight to contend with, on top of hatching other creatures' eggs for them. Banjo-Tooie doubles the number of learnable techniques while keeping the old ones intact, and playing as the dynamic duo separately doesn’t feel too much like a handicap.

Beloved character Mumbo Jumbo was present at the card game and did not perish at the scaly hand of Grundtilda, so he doesn’t have an excuse to sit this adventure out like Bottles. Fortunately, Banjo-Tooie had big plans for the pygmy shaman. Visiting Mumbo in his now two-story skull house with the new and easily obtained Glowbo collectible will grant the player the ability to play as Mumbo on the field. His range of movement is fairly limited, and the taser staff he brings to defend himself is more humorous to use than practical. Bringing Mumbo to pads with his face on them triggers him to use supernatural magic to levitate colossally-sized objects, perform a rain dance to create a rainbow bridge, resurrect the dead, etc. A new magical companion Banjo-Tooie introduces is the beautiful native girl Wumba, whose character is probably a more overtly racist depiction than Mumbo. She fulfills the transformation mechanic introduced in Banjo Kazooie, changing Banjo’s shape into an animal or object when he enters her wigwam and takes a dip in the pink, Glowbo-powered pool in its center. Some of the new transformations include a dynamite plunger, a submarine, and even a full-sized fucking T-Rex that bulldozes all in its path. Even the washing machine easter egg from the last game actually becomes a useful mechanic in Grunty Industries. As much as playing as Mumbo and the returning transformations serve as nice additional layers to the gameplay, what interests me more is the strained relationship between Mumbo and Wumba. Considering their feuding attitudes toward each other, these two obviously have some intimate history together, right?

Judging by all of Banjo-Tooie’s exciting new features that are all fun and fluid, it would seem like it’s a sequel that renders Banjo-Kazooie obsolete. However, the way in which Banjo-Tooie utilizes all of these new features in the quasi-open world environment is the source of its downfall. If Banjo-Kazooie's single-world summation of its design is conspicuous, then Banjo-Tooie’s is circuitous. In Banjo-Tooie, exploration is still required to progress the game, but it is rarely rewarded. Oftentimes, excavating the area and finding a jiggy comes with several unnecessary extra steps. As much as I enjoy the lark of being able to play as Mumbo, retrieving him from his perch just to trigger a cutscene in a specific place and then trailing back to his skull house grated on my nerves one too many times. Grunty Industries, the area that exemplifies the worst of Banjo-Tooie’s bloated design, is a languid climb up the five floors of the industrial cesspit with finding the stairs for each following floor as the central progression gimmick. At the apex point of the factory lies a jiggy on a wooden crate, which should’ve been the reward for making it this far. However, this point is still littered with unnecessary obstacles to pad out the levels. Banjo-Kazooie was consistently more engaging because the quicker satisfaction of simply finding a jiggy tickled the player’s sense of accomplishment more frequently. It can take longer to find half of the jiggies in Banjo-Tooie than all of them in any of the Banjo-Kazooie areas. It seems like the new features like the split pads and the alternate characters only enable this circuity even more, as they are often implemented as the extra and not-so-obvious steps to obtaining a jiggy. This level of augmented length also extends to the other collectibles, as the jingos in plain sight will most likely be their evil, bizarro counterparts the minjos who will dupe Banjo and harm him. Most of the jiggies in the game feel as if they’re annoyingly out of reach as if the game is dangling them over the player as a cruel tease. Coupling this with the swollen breadth of each area, I thank the lord for the warp pads because, without them, I’d go as far as to say the game would be unplayable.

Another factor of Banjo-Tooie’s bloatedness is due to the developers attempting to intertwine each area and craft an interconnected world. Considering the game is modeled the same as the sectioned-off playgrounds in the first game, it’s no surprise its execution didn’t work. The adjacent paths between areas require a heavy suspension of disbelief and only seem to be applicable in select situations to make collecting a jiggy more drudgery than anything like delivering food from Witchyland to the struggling cavemen in Terrydactyland. Chuffy, the train that should ideally facilitate the rationale for an interconnected world, only rolls through six of the nine areas. If that doesn’t indicate that the idea was unfeasible, I don’t know what does. What irritates me the most about their decision is that it is the biggest contributor to the fleeting jiggy hunt quandary in Banjo-Tooie as most of the jiggies can’t be obtained until Banjo or Kazooie requires a move at a later level. Approximately half of a level’s jiggies will be kept out of reach initially and in a game with levels that are supposed to foster exploration, being limited to only a few jiggies needed to progress the game is a big kick in the balls from developers. One might raise an eyebrow at my criticism of this direction considering it mirrors the design philosophy of the Metroidvania genre, one of my niche video game favorites that I constantly tout. For one, Metroidvania worlds never have slapdashed interconnectivity when its world doesn’t warrant it. Secondly, finding an upgrade in a Metroidvania game will always put the player on a direct path and make the once-inhibited passage a cakewalk to traverse, something Banjo-Tooie still goes out of its way to reject even when the move and or upgrade is learned.

It seems like most of the jiggies not obstructed by the developer's ill-planned directives come in the form of minigames. As pleased as I was to stumble upon these to finally earn a jiggy in a somewhat fair and natural way, it’s a shame that many of them boiled down to the same task of shooting or collecting objects of three different colors with different point totals. I’ll be seeing objects of red, green, and blue hopping around in my sleep at this point. I greatly missed the variety from Banjo-Kazooie, even if those minigames were easier than grade school arithmetic. While it does seem like I’m complaining, I’ll easily engage with these minigames as opposed to the other option. In a select few areas, entering certain sections will make Banjo cock Kazooie like a gun and the perspective will shift to the first-person view. As amused as I initially was to witness “Banjo-KaDOOMie,” these minigames were more hellish than anything from the pioneering FPS franchise. Kazooie’s targeting is as responsive as a lazy eye and trying to skewer enemies with her beak like a bayonet made me feel like a drunk civil war reenactor.

The jiggy tasks I did enjoy and sought out over the rest were the boss battles. They were few and far between in Banjo-Kazooie, and I’d be lying if I said that the wooden box or Nipper the hermit crab were herculean foes that were hard to conquer. Each level in Banjo-Tooie features a mighty foe worthy of the boss battle title, and they are a varied and challenging bunch. The fights between the twin dragons of the opposite representative of Hailfire Peaks were in some pretty taut arenas, and Weldar featured enough simultaneous offensive tactics to overwhelm me. Popping the monstrous boils off of the angler fish Fak Fak and the stitched patches of the giant inflatable beast in the circus tent by soaring and swimming over them made the bosses seem formidable, and the Targitzan duel managed to make that particular FPS section palatable. Klungo even cements his role as a recurring supporting character through frequent encounters. To my surprise, I ended up enjoying the final boss fight against Gruntilda and her drill tank more than her final fight from the first game because of how involved it is. Those final increments of her health bar had me sweating bullets. Or, perhaps I enjoy it because the developers made the bizarrely-implemented quiz show portion of the finale tolerable this time around, and it's hilariously morbid to boot.

Banjo-Tooie isn’t quite an example of a sophomore slump. However, the game seems to have tacked on a sophomore seventeen pounds due to the developers having ambitions bigger than their stomachs, and it’s enough weight to make the game feel comparatively fatigued and sluggish throughout. Either this was a faulty wish, or Rare took the piss out of the natural evolution of the franchise and this is their idea of a joke, judging from the game’s more negative tone. Behind all that excess fat, Banjo-Tooie feels like the same game as its trend-setting predecessor, and it even makes the Banjo experience more inviting because of the effort of the minor improvements. Banjo-Tooie made me exhausted at simply performing the bare minimum to complete the game, which is certainly not a feeling I got after finishing Banjo-Kazooie.

Kid Icarus Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 7/22/2023)

[Image from wikipedia.org]

Kid Icarus

Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo

Genre(s): 2D Platformer

Platforms: NES

Release Date: December 19, 1986

Nintendo front loads their most popular franchises with a new slab of entries so frequently that one can forget about the other selections they offer. Japan’s richest company could probably still subsist from Mario and Zelda (and maybe Kirby) alone, which is why we mainly see fresh releases from these franchises as opposed to offering a smorgasbord of their properties per release schedule. As impressive as this is, I think the true testament to Nintendo’s monolithic presence in the gaming world is its vast catalog of IPs. Just use the success of Super Smash Bros. as a point of reference: every single character from Nintendo’s roster, no matter how old or how popular, elicits at least a respectable amount of excitement from most of their fans. Nintendo’s fans still remember their failures and burnt-out relics even if the company tries its best to sweep them up in a dustpan and dispose of them in the refuse of time. Nintendo kicked this process into overdrive in recent generations with several of their properties, but they’ve been doing this since their heyday on the NES. Kid Icarus used to be the poster boy of forsaken Nintendo franchises, debuting on the company’s first console with one title before being abandoned completely. Given that the game was released alongside generation-defining titans like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, it seemed like Kid Icarus was destined for success. However, upon playing Kid Icarus, it’s not hard to imagine why Kid Icarus didn’t catch on like its contemporaries.

But why was Kid Icarus reduced to a one-hit wonder when it was propped up amongst the architects of Nintendo’s legacy? Certainly, Kid Icarus is more inspired and offers more content to extrapolate on compared to its fellow NES stalemates like Ice Climber and Clu Clu Land. If one’s high school education needs dusting off, the game’s title alludes to the Greek myth of Icarus, the young man who infamously flew too close to the sun and fatally dipped into the ocean from the sky and drowned. Whether or not one sees this story from ancient times as a sympathetic tragedy or a fable poking at the hubris of man, Icarus has ostensibly resonated in popular culture from centuries onward. However, Kid Icarus is not an 8-bit rendering of the morality tale. Hell, the winged, cherublike protagonist of the game isn’t even named Icarus–but the blunt-sounding nickname of Pit. No matter, for the game can still borrow plenty from the gilded Greek mythos to sculpt something of substance. Kid Icarus presents itself as the same respectable tribute to the entirety of Greek mythology that Castlevania does with the golden age of horror films.

Then again, refusing to commit to a single source of inspiration might be the root cause of Kid Icarus’s downfall (no pun intended). Kid Icarus’s gameplay is cemented in the 2D platformer genre, but the game insists on warping the perspective for every level. The game begins as a vertical platformer, hopping upward on a series of clouds and Corinthian architecture to eventually reach the goal at the zenith point of the climb. The NES was no stranger to these sections spliced into the action of other 2D platformers, and their inclusion was a tense, thrilling mixup of the standard side-scrolling action. In Kid Icarus, however, prolonging these sections to the length of an entire level makes the ascent a hefty endurance test. Slipping down the cavernous pratfalls created by the scrolling screen devouring the level will obviously kill Pit instantly, which makes him channel his inner Daniel Plainview and scream “I’m finished!” as he is transported back to the beginning of the level. A one-life penalty seems harsh, but at least a password system is implemented instead of sending the player back to the start of the game upon dying. Still, these vertical levels feature far too many hazards, especially at the beginning of the game. The levels in the second act of the game adopt a more traditional trek to the right side of the screen, and the difference in difficulty between the opposing level axes is clear as day. Technically, Kid Icarus only offers 3 levels, but they are divided into four sections that extend those levels significantly. The sublevels are already lengthy enough as is, so the player has to endure an onslaught of hazards before they are victorious. The fourth sublevel will always remain constant: a labyrinth stage where the player must navigate through a series of rooms and find the correct path to the boss. These sublevels are intended to ape the dungeons in Zelda, but not even the hidden bomb passage in the first Zelda is as cryptic and circuitous as these befuddling excursions. Also, finding the dungeon map in Zelda would uncover the entire layout as opposed to putting a blank board on the screen shaped like a waffle with one glowing dot to indicate Pit’s location. Why do these levels punish the player so swiftly without them warranting it?

If the inflexible level design doesn’t crush the player’s spirit, the droves of mythical enemies definitely will. They complement each level’s challenge effectively, but more like an axis of evil and torment than anything. Snakes with wings will fall from the ceiling without little notice, and the piles of sludge that form from the ground are short enough to only scrape their heads with Pit’s arrows and piss me off. A particularly irksome enemy type is the reapers. These scythe-wielding phantoms go apeshit when they are aware of Pit’s presence, signaling four minions to swoop down on Pit and distract him from his trajectory. They also tend to be situated on the slimmest of platforms along the path, making them especially difficult to avoid. Really, the one enemy from Kid Icarus that is so notoriously vexing is the Eggplant Wizards. Where in the Greco-Roman texts do these robed cyclopses stem from? Probably none of them, but they’ve earned their spot in the Kid Icarus canon. They’ll lob their namesake fruit at Pit and if he comes in contact with one, their black magic will reduce him to nothing but an eggplant with legs. Being that eggplants are soft and squishy, Pit cannot fight in this handicapped state. The only solution is to visit a sectioned-off block of any fourth level dedicated to a doctor who’ll cure Pit’s ailment. Considering all the player has to reference is a rectangular pastry to find this specific area, pray to the Gods of Olympus if you stumble upon these purple bastards. Surprisingly, each boss at the end of every fourth level is relatively undemanding, even if Pit doesn’t free the petrified soldiers with the hammer items.

Only having the poor excuse for a map the game offers isn’t entirely accurate, I must admit. The player can purchase a pencil from one of the merchants, but the player would be better off saving their heart currency for other items. The saving grace of Kid Icarus is that the game becomes far less stressful once the player acquires all of the upgrades, permanently boosting their maximum health and damage output for the duration of the game. Other nifty tools to purchase are fire arrows, magic rods, and a glass of wine that restores a fair bit of health. How bohemian. While all of these upgrades seem like a practical solution to beating this game, none of them come cheap. I mean this quite literally as buying any of these items will break the bank, so the player will have to make an entrepreneurial decision on which item will be the best for them. If the game still proves to be excruciating with this frugal system, the other option is to farm hearts with a maximum quantity of ten. The player is forced to engage in several forced grinding sessions to make the game tolerable, and that aspect is absolutely unforgivable.

Also, the amount of items the player has on hand coincides with the ending the player receives. Kid Icarus already flirts around with different interpretations of the 2D platformer, so why not add a space shooter section as the final one for good measure? At the end of this overlong flight, Pit will take down Medusa, the prime mythical Greek figure who serves as the game’s main antagonist, by shooting the eye of the monstrous vegetation she’s hiding beneath. Paulutena, the damsel in distress, rewards Pit the same way a boss would. Depending on the player's diligence, Pit’s future will range from a lowly farmer to a prestigious role as a knight in her army. As far as I’m concerned, she can demote Pit to a shoe shiner because the qualifications needed to put Pit in a more lucrative position isn’t worth meeting. Sorry, Pit.

The main issue with Kid Icarus is that its gameplay identity wasn’t worth giving further attention to. The game isn’t any more cruel and cryptic than its peers at Nintendo, frustrating the player to no end and leaving them as lost as a gerbil in a test chamber. However, The Legend of Zelda and Metroid pioneered a fresh outlook on game design that the world would’ve been bereft of if Nintendo decided not to expand upon, despite their myriad of gameplay flaws. Pit throws every conceivable method of platforming in a 2D space at the wall and executes them all very poorly. I’m forgiving its rudimentary foundation to some extent like every NES game, but Kid Icarus simply doesn’t offer any visionary concepts. No wonder why Nintendo left Kid Icarus at the front steps of the gaming orphanage. Nintendo was only producing game changers at the time, and Kid Icarus didn’t quite cut it.

Kirby & the Amazing Mirror Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 7/21/2023)

[Image from ign.com]

Kirby & the Amazing Mirror

Developer: Flagship, Hal Laboratory, Dimps

Publisher: Nintendo

Genre(s): Metroidvania

Platforms: GBA

Release Date: April  15, 2004

Kirby games hardly ever pique my interest but suddenly, add the Metroidvania tag to one entry and I’m all ears. The Metroidvania genre inherently intrigues me because I adore its design philosophy with the loose parameters that fracture the foundation of linearity. Kirby and the Amazing Mirror is the pink puffball’s first and only foray in the intricate 2D platformer subgenre, an experiment on the GBA handheld that would ideally expand the parameters of the typical Kirby level design and let its layers blossom. One question still remains: does Kirby’s world actually warrant a Metroidvania treatment? His primary ventures in 2D platforming would suggest so, considering the Metroidvania is a more fleshed-out offshoot of the genre. What I’m wondering is if sculpting any standard 2D platformer franchise in the Metroidvania form would inherently make for a more engaging and substantial experience. For example, would Bubsy no longer prove to be disparagingly derivative only if his games featured more locked doors and power-ups? Would that be enough for Bubsy to get into my good graces? The same hypothetical question could pertain to Kirby, albeit much less drastically than in the situation for the defamed bobcat. Kirby’s tried and true 2D platformer design simply never captured my attention like his fellow 2D platformer mates at Nintendo because the lack of restrictions to Kirby’s innate physicality made his games a bit too breezy for my liking. By forcing Kirby to accumulate to his full potential as par for the Metroidvania course, will it result in an experience that finally resonates strongly with me? After playing through Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, this question somehow remains unanswered.

The mirror that the title alludes to is actually as mystically grandiose as it sounds. The angel-winged glass frame is currently being corrupted by an ambiguously evil presence, which puts the general welfare of Dreamland at great risk of succumbing to a dark demise. Kirby and his friends follow what looks to be Meta Knight into the mirror to cease the formidable force possessing the sacred artifact. Notice how this Meta Knight’s complexion looks more depleted than usual? It’s indicative of the game’s prominent theme of a mirror presenting a shadowy reflection of thyself. However, the prevalence of this theme does not mean the world inside the mirror is a spooky bizarro Dreamland. The GBA’s pixels render something just as colorful and charming as the 16-bit aesthetic last seen in Super Star, even if they display a better refinement to the point where the overall aesthetic no longer reminds me of Laffy Taffy and chocolate cake. The mirror world is a diverse environment consisting of nine unique districts, and their distinctiveness is reliant on competent graphical prowess for discernibility. The theming presented here recalls how every sequential level in linear games like Kirby’s Adventure and Kirby 64 comprises a loose motif, only now sprawled out to the wider parameters of a labyrinthian playground. Some districts of the mirror world include the dry canyon of “Mustard Mountain” with flaming hot lava belching from the earth, the frozen grounds of a sparkling ice estate called “Peppermint Palace,” and the Halloweeny haunted house of “Moonlight Mansion,” etc. The stringy, purple foliage of “Cabbage Cavern” is especially eye-catching. Whether or not the world seems like super-gluing nine individual Kirby worlds together and calling it cohesion is a bothersome nitpick of the overall design, at least the wide level variety will at least ensure that the foregrounds will never become stale.

The main objective of Kirby and the Amazing Mirror is to collect the misplaced nine pieces of the mighty reflector, restoring its power and central symmetry across the realm. Each of the nine pieces is scattered across nine areas on the map, all branching from the radius of the first area if not close to its base with the mirror frame. Do you know what else is neat and convenient? These areas can be visited at any point in the game regardless of how far the player has progressed. The player’s progression on their mission to collect all nine mirror shards is as loose as an incontinent bulldog, scrambling around the map willy-nilly as if the boundaries that comprise the core of the Metroidvania design philosophy cease to exist. This lack of definition is the core issue of Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, as I’d be hard-pressed to call a game with this extent of liberal progression barriers a Metroidvania game. The root of the game’s difficulty stems from navigating around these boundless parameters to reach that area’s boss and collect the mirror shard. Finding the correct path to the penultimate foe can be tricky, for the game merely offers a substandard rendering of the area’s outline until Kirby uncovers its map sealed in a large treasure chest. The beta version is at least practical as one can still make out the general layout through the microscopic yellow clusters. Still, it’s far more efficient to use the full map as a reference to see where the door portals lead and the intended trajectory to the goal. Otherwise, the player will likely stumble upon the handful of dead-end areas on the map. Kirby will be trapped into using a warp star to ascend above the clouds, teleporting him back to the main room with the mirror at the end of the flight. Marking these points of no return as “goals” on the map just beams with irony considering they lock you out of the previous room and force the player to trek all the way back to square one and lose their footing to the real objective. The player can collect extra goodies that stream down from the sky as compensation, but the player will never truly need them because the game upholds that typical brisk Kirby difficulty curve. For a game that tries to make the Metroidvania genre as flimsy as humanly possible, unknowingly encountering one of these rooms feels like the game unfairly punishes the player for exploring at their own free will.

If the player finds the map and uses it to direct themselves to the actual goal, they’ll be greeted by a boss holding a mirror shard. Their encounters are the true means of finalizing an area, as retreating to the central room after beating them makes sense unlike meeting one of the “goal areas.” Like the domains that they occupy, the strength of the bosses is not on their individual merits, but as an eclectic coalition. Some Kirby mainstays like the thunderous, one-eyed Kracko, and Whispy has adopted a rocky skin coating with a walrus mustache chiseled in, dubbing himself the regal King Golem. Apparently, Nintendo noticed that Kirby fans were growing tired of fighting the tree for the first boss in every game and swapped him out with this titan, but who are they trying to fool? Really, the bosses that will tickle the player with their familiarity is the opposable duo of Master Hand and Crazy Hand. I was certainly titillated by this lark being a lifelong Smash Bros. fan who has fought them countless number of times as Kirby beforehand, and intrigued at the reminder that both Kirby and Smash Bros. are both the brainchildren of Mr. Masahiro Sakurai. Playing a glorified game of whac-a-mole with Moley is unpredictable, and bumping the Mega Titan into the electric current includes some neat physics. The real challenge revolving around the bosses is simply finding the way to them, which somehow makes their encounters marginally more gratifying than they would be in a typical 2D platformer.

Other notable bosses the player might recognize like Bonkers the Gorilla and the pudgy, overall-wearing snowman Mr. Frosty have been relegated to the position of minibosses. These subsidiary foes that Kirby still fights in an empty arena have their own special use, for sucking them up upon defeat will naturally grant Kirby their distinctive powers. Kirby’s extraordinary ability to absorb the genetic properties of Dreamland’s denizens is exactly why the Metroidvania translation should be ideal. One of the hallmarks of the Metroidvania genre is gaining new abilities to unlock more of the map, and progressively adding the swiss-army knife roulette of physical properties Kirby can emulate to his arsenal offers the opportunity to craft something really engaging. The full potential of this is ultimately sullied by the game’s total abandonment of boundaries, but the developers still attempted to incorporate some Metroidvania-esque properties throughout the levels. At times, lines of concrete blocks are broken to unveil passageways, a grounded pole must be stomped, and cutting the thin strings that support a few specific platforms. The developers have even reimagined the classic bonus task of igniting the fuse to a cannon and racing to climb inside its interior before it blows to launch Kirby to uncharted territory. These few instances of using Kirby’s powers for further excavation are unfortunately the full extent of the game’s Metroidvania properties, and their utilization is only needed a piddly number of times. However, for those brief instances, the game makes sure to inconvenience the player as much as possible. Like the traditional Kirby games of yore, the floating ball of bubble gum can only hold one power-up ability at a time, and this power is removed any time he receives damage. The power-ups required to break through the hurdles are very specific, making the player trudge through the map to find the enemy who possesses it. All the while, the player must also be cautious, lest an enemy bumps off the power up and lose it on impact. The tedium I endured through this cumbersome process did not evoke the confident feeling one gets from accumulating power in a Metroidvania game.

Helpful aid in Kirby and the Amazing Mirror comes in other aspects, I suppose. When Kirby whips out a pink flip phone (the fashionable model at the time), this Chatty Cathy calls up the rainbow coalition of other Kirbys to stand on switches, fight valiantly alongside him, and take turns frenching him to restore his health. What you might consider gay, the Kirbys would consider the behavior to make them better friends. The mirror must be attached to a radio tower because Kirby’s flip phone gets more efficient cell service than my modern iPhone 12. The only drawback of receiving around-the-clock assistance is that the phone’s battery power is a scant three bars of usage. Fortunately, batteries are a plentiful item on the field. While I certainly appreciate the efforts of Kirby’s friends, I’m not certain that they are needed because Kirby games never really require extra assistance on account of how easy they tend to be, this one included. I tended to use the phone’s other function on the opposite trigger which acts as a cab service to take Kirby to the center of the mirror world because the game features more dead ends than hedge maze.

For how simple Kirby and the Amazing Mirror is from a design standpoint, there is still plenty to uncover. Treasure chests that don’t feature the area’s maps can be found on practically every block of the map, which could include extra skins and music tracks to name a few. I wish the game incorporated the explored percentage of the map into some sort of true ending like in the previous Kirby games since the map is fairly accessible for exploration due to the lack of impediments. As it is, restoring the mirror with all nine pieces results in Kirby facing the shadow version of Meta Knight, which should’ve been the final boss of the game for the less inclined players. Then, Kirby faces off against the true culprit of corruption, an intimidating arcane being called Dark Mind. The fight against the menacing deity comes in four phases, but Kirby can slash at him with the immense power of Meta Knight’s sword and make quick work of him as his core progressively starts to manifest with every phase. That, and the other Kirbys can still bushwhack him with just one phone call. For those who yearn to lick the game’s plate clean, or so to speak, Dark Mind should’ve been locked behind a completionist bonus like O2 in Kirby 64, making for a better incentive to explore the mirror world to its full extent. Blasting the last phase of Dark Mind’s center as the credits roll mid-flight might indicate a slapdash effort on the developers' part, implying that even the final fight was never intended to be all that substantial anyways.

Kirby’s journey through the looking glass could’ve been outstanding. Kirby’s inherent role as a 2D platformer protagonist already made him a prime candidate for a Metroidvania entry, and his copy ability could’ve worked wonderfully for the smattering of Metroidvania upgrades to unveil more of the area. All this wasted potential on display is tragic. What Kirby and the Amazing Mirror is at the end of the day is a tumefied rendition of The Great Cave Offensive, only less offensive because the design isn’t as staggeringly claustrophobic (pun actually intended). I hate having to tell Sakurai how to do his job, but this isn’t what a Metroidvania game is, either by its foundation or progression. The Great Cave Offensive was my least favorite chapter in Kirby Super Star, so the inclusion of a map and varied area themes could only do so much in Sakurai’s attempts to sway my negative opinion of it with a full game. Does he think it’s his crowning achievement? If so, Sakurai needs to lay off the sauce.

Dig Dug Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 7/14/2023)

[Image from giantbomb.com]

Dig Dug

Developer: Namco

Publisher: Namco

Genre(s): Action

Platforms: Arcade, Atari-2600

Release Date: April 19, 1982

An arcade classic whose legacy has always been undermined compared to Pac-Man and its other Namco brethren. It’s amusing to me that this is how history has played out because I always preferred it to the game with the gluttonous glob of sliced cheese that ranks among the highest echelons of video game icons. Why? I’m not entirely sure, since all of the second-generation arcade games could only hold my attention for so long until I nodded off into space, Dig Dug included (I know, I’m spoiled). Maybe it’s because injecting a pump into your enemies and inflating them to the point where they burst is the most gangster shit I’ve ever seen.

Take that, Tommy Vercetti, Carl Johnson, and every other Grand Theft Auto protagonist. Don’t fuck with Dig Dug.

Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 7/8/2023)

[Image from igdb.com]

Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time 

Developer: AlphaDream

Publisher: Nintendo

Genre(s): JRPG

Platforms: DS

Release Date: November 28, 2005

Nintendo is never too keen on trying out new ideas for their poster boy Mario. Mario is their #1 asset that maintains their accessible marketability, the buoy that has kept Nintendo afloat for so long in the gaming landscape. Because of this, Nintendo feels adamant about taking risks with Mario in fear that deviation from the norm risks sinking the multi-million dollar vessel that they’ve built over decades of time. This is why multi-genre spin-offs of Mario are essential entries in the overall Mario series, offering intriguing ideas revolving around Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom increasing the ubiquity of his brand and keeping it from stagnating. I’m partial to the few Mario JRPG spinoff series because the genre’s broader narrative scope allows the developers to swell Mario’s properties to something more substantial. It forces Nintendo to make Mario step out of his comfort zone and dive into the deep end for a while after mastering all kinds of swimming techniques in the shallow end. Suddenly, the most recognizable video game character to ever exist in the medium feels fresh and interesting after generations of soaking itself in a bath of its own familiarities and pruning up as a result. However, there is a possibility that the JRPG series could also languish in their own idiosyncrasies eventually. Both the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi series have multiple entries themselves, and there has to be some sort of cohesiveness between each entry to make them identifiable from one another. What happens when the series intended to break the cycle of tired tropes and ends up falling victim to the same fate? Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, the second entry in the Mario JRPG series mentioned in the latter, is another JRPG game with Mario and his green brother Luigi sharing equal billing. The game has the same dynamic mechanics and humorous presentation that made Superstar Saga an excellent Mario adventure. However, perhaps the game is too close to its predecessor for comfort.

Initially, Partners in Time seemingly strays away from Superstar Saga’s identity with its plot. I never pegged Princess Peach as the eccentric type of royal figure that comes with the territory of having more fame and fortune than one knows what to do with and little sparks of boredom-inspired creativity, yet she decides to embrace her inner H.G. Wells and travels back in time using a rocket-shaped time machine manufactured by Professor E. Gadd (I guess he’s a Mario & Luigi mainstay at this point). However, her enterprising journey isn’t for recreation, The princess calculated a course to a period of the Mushroom Kingdom’s history where a race of sentient purple mushrooms called “Shroobs” enact a full-scale invasion of the Mushroom Kingdom. Upon anticipating Peach’s arrival, Mario and Luigi are instead greeted with the hostility of a rogue, hulking green Shroob, indicating that something has gone horribly wrong. Through another time portal that has conveniently materialized on the castle grounds, the plumber brothers plunge into the past and rendezvous with their youthful counterparts who are taking refuge from the Shroob invaders. Mario’s vocational duty of rescuing Princess Peach this time around involves crossing the plane of the fourth dimension, simultaneously saving the past and the present on an adventure with such huge stakes that the pairing with his brother needs to be doubled. Despite how many plot holes are seeped into the premise of many time travel stories, this one included, the topsy-turvy nature of time travel is a perfect new narrative device in the kooky and whacky Mario & Luigi series.

Beneath the excitingly intricate notion of time travel, Partners in Time fails to use its premise to its full potential. For one, all it amounts to is the same collectathon quest from Superstar Saga. The Cobalt Star is the power source for E. Gadd’s time machine, and it has been ruptured into five separate pieces. Retrieving these pieces is of utmost importance for the Marios and Luigis, for it is the only way to restore balance to the space-time continuum that all of this interdimensional galloping has caused and sever the unnatural connection between the two periods of the Mushroom Kingdom. This type of fetch quest should ring familiar to those who played the previous game, as the Beanstar was the former all-powerful plot Macguffin that spurred story progression. In saying that, obtaining the pieces of the Beanstar only became significant to the plot for the last third of Superstar Saga, while picking up the pieces of the Cobalt Star is an objective that spans the entirety of Partners in Time. I wasn’t all that enthused when Superstar Saga’s manic pacing came to a screeching halt when it introduced this scavenger hunt, so you can imagine my disappointment with Partners in Time inflating this typical task for the whole duration of the game. One could argue that committing to a single overarching mission gives Partners in Time a better sense of narrative organization, and splitting each individual trek for a piece of the Cobalt Star should recall the chapter-based pacing of the Paper Mario games which I professed to appreciate. Still, the Mario & Luigi games should exude a different tone from its thinner Mario RPG associate to establish its own tonal identity as the first game did. In terms of visuals and presentation, Partners in Time upholds the expressive, animated pixels that made Superstar Saga so charming. Yet, Partners in Time feels bogged down by its more stringent arc, as if the game is submitting to order by some bureaucratic gaming force that demands order and neatness. Superstar Saga’s wilder pacing that only acceded to plot regulations made the game more interesting because the wonky direction the game would dart through was unpredictable.

Toning down Superstar Saga’s erratic pacing with more construction is one thing, but streamlining the way in which the game goes about dividing its disciplined plot adds another worrisome layer of accessibility. The time rifts are endemic to the present-day Peach’s Castle, as her royal domain was ground zero where the dilemma occurred. Because the dissonance is confined to the castle, it's the only entry point to the past. While this makes sense, the developers use their realm of logic to dilute the overworld to a standard level hub. Portals to the past are located in each room of Peach’s palace, signified by a psychedelic swirl encompassing the diameter of a crater caused by the shaking up of time and space. The transport on the other side resides in a unique district of the Mushroom Kingdom in its glory days, and returning to the castle is a two-way backpedal through the same hole. Normally, I wouldn’t chide a hub so emphatically, especially considering that Peach’s Castle here meets the same exemplary qualifications as its other iterations. Still, I can’t ignore that Partners in Time presents a stark regression in this regard. The BeanBean Kingdom’s overworld that took a liberal helping from A Link to the Past’s Hyrule wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of an open-world environment, but it was the optimal inspiration point for a 16-bit adventure with a top-down perspective. Implementing an open landscape like the BeanBean Kingdom was a mark of excellent effort on the part of the developers, to integrate something with more spatial depth in a franchise that is usually content with simpler, more conventional hub areas (even if Mario popularized their widespread pervasiveness). In Partner in Time, we’ve reverted back to traveling to levels via a shrouded warping process that makes the player put the pieces together for the geographical rationale of the trip themselves. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using Peach’s castle as a middle ground between all of the game’s areas again, but it's rather disappointing when the developers have proved that they can offer something more interesting.

At least the individual areas that stem from these portals still uphold the quality standard issued by Superstar Saga. Each area encompasses the journey to collecting one shard of the Cobalt Star, circling around the district back to the entry point either from a natural occurrence or comedic mishap once the task is complete. The Mushroom Kingdom’s areas that are under siege by the Shroob forces are a varied bunch, which signifies that the purple buggers have already seized large swathes of Peach’s monarchy in the short time since the initial invasion. The areas here solidify my comparative observations between the Mushroom Kingdom and their BeanBean neighbors, for we now witness the developers rendering the Mushroom Kingdom in its first Mario & Luigi outing. Toadwood Forest is another shaded wooded area that vaguely resembles that of Chucklehuck, minus the thirsty tree golem blocking the path to the objective. Gritzy Desert is another sand dune with some ancient mysticism sprinkled in, and Bowser’s Castle is a tutorial-level inverse of the climactic final area it served as in Superstar Saga. Besides areas that reuse level themes at a dissimilar angle, a few of the Mushroom Kingdom’s places of interest are fresh-faced destinations that share fewer similarities with BeanBean’s. Yoshi’s Island is newly rendered in the Mario & Luigi format, a particularly inspired choice considering this tropical offshore dinosaur villa is where the babies originated from. I don’t recall seeing the monstrous Yoob casting a shadow over the island with its drooping gut in Super Mario World 2, and I’m thankful for not encountering this abomination back then. Here, the core of his gaseous stomach also makes for an area with a riveting foreground. Navigating through the inner sanctum of the Thwomp Volcano is more involved than the other areas due to zipping and hopping around its floors to reach the exit point instead of a straightaway descent. Star Shrine sort of reminds me of Magicant from Earthbound with its otherworldly splendor and mandated tasks to get to its center. Overall, the Mario & Luigi level design still thrives with the abundance of puzzles and enemy variety whether or not the area motifs look suspiciously familiar.

The process of solving the puzzles in question is now divided between the paradoxical pairing of Mario and Luigi and their infant forms. The division of work is a collaboration between the teams of the adult brother and the baby brothers instead of swapping Mario and Luigi in Superstar Saga. The grown-ups will throw the babies off their backs to allow them to journey off on their own as their own tethered duo, using their underdeveloped sizes to squeeze through crevices in an alternating sequence with the older brothers. When separated, the two teams regroup by hitting a block with a warp pipe symbol, summoning the duo not being controlled by the player. As useful as this seems, the baby's utility simply amounts to gaining hand-me-downs that their older counterparts used in Superstar Saga. Only the babies are granted hammers to drill themselves into the earth, which also means that Baby Luigi is the sole volunteer to whack an engorged Baby Mario when he gulps down too much water as well. Grown-up Mario and Luigi roll into a ball to flatten the babies like pancakes instead of using the hammers, but all this change does is highlight how team-intensive the moves on the field tend to be here. All of the moves are recycled from the previous game, only with Mario and Luigi violating child labor laws by making their younger selves perform half of the work. Really, the appeal of cutting the quartet in half by age brackets some of the time is to flaunt the two screens and doubled controller buttons of the DS. The flippable handheld was still in its infancy, and swapping between the screens when the babies are on their lonesome with their own button commands was something Nintendo thought everyone would marvel at back then. Personally, I’d rather have the characters perform some fresh, new abilities instead of reusing stale ones.

The double-screen gimmick is also highlighted in the combat. With comparisons to a 3D movie, the developers have implemented some cheap minute effects like a Piranha Plant enemy’s neck stretching out and shooting projectiles upward to fall on the brothers from above. Other than these neat little peripheral tricks, base combat is essentially the same as it was in Superstar Saga. Mario and Luigi still hop on enemies for offensive and hop over their projectiles and bodily rammings for defense. Mario and Luigi carry their respective younger selves on their back, and this isn’t a weighted burden as one would expect. In fact, Mario and Luigi should always come into battle with the babies strapped on their backs. While together, the babies use their hammers to counter damage by pressing their respective buttons, and the window of time holding the hammers before they strain themselves is much more lenient than it was in Superstar Saga. The babies can fight in battles involving Mario and Luigi but ideally, they shouldn’t have to. The babies only take matters into their own hands when their older self has fainted, which might give the impression that their life force is hanging by a thread and it's time to wave the white flag. Not only can the babies pull their own weight in combat, but their turns can be used to fully revive Mario or Luigi to get their feet back into battle. Evidently, the Mushroom Kingdom’s resources seem to be as bountiful as BeanBean’s, so the babies should always have a 1-Up in their inventory to stave off defending themselves from potential harm. Ultimately, this outcome upon defeat in battle acts as an unintentional safety net, an Aku-Aku-like shield that has the potential to never diminish. It never did for me. Because the enemy health pools also aren’t upscaled for this augmentation, Partners in Time manages to be breezier than an autumn afternoon.

But isn’t the lack of difficulty only an issue during the standard battles from the Shroob grunts and the kingdom’s various wildlife? Surely, the boss battles offer something more substantial and wouldn’t allow the brothers to slide by them so smoothly? On paper, the bosses in Partners in Time are more complex than the average Shroob underling because they require exploiting a weak spot to deal a sizable dent in their defenses. I especially enjoy making the Wiggler boss sickly and pale after slipping him a poison shroom Mickey into his healing beverage, or saving the Yoshi’s in Yoob’s stomach for them to drop a Chain Chomp boulder on the head of a ghastly Yoshi egg. However, the more engaging boss battles can revert back to a guerilla beatdown with a new feature: the “Bros. items.” These nifty tools in the item menu replace the convoluted Bros attacks and require an honed accuracy to use them effectively. Shells of the red and green variety are batted back and forth as they bounce off the enemy, and the same goes for volleying an egg that can make the enemy dizzy. The most powerful Bros. items are the cannonballs and trampolines, which incorporate both DS screens as the brothers flatten the enemy with the force of four swift landings. Needless to say, each of these Bros. items deals whopping amounts of damage, making quick work of each boss after their weak spot is exposed. I suppose this is what I asked for considering I griped that the bosses in Superstar Saga tended to overstay their welcome, but now I almost feel remorseful for doing these bosses so dirty like this. Also, the Bros. items are just as plentiful as the healing ones, so the game is practically incentivizing their use with their high stock.

Upon my reflection of what the Baby Mario brothers add to the Mario & Luigi gameplay mechanics, a record scratch sound interrupts my thought process as I begin to ask myself one important question: does anyone really like the baby versions of the Mario brothers to begin with? The last time that I checked, all Baby Mario accomplished was being an effective advocacy for abstinence for everyone who played Super Mario World 2 as he wailed in his helpless panic as Yoshi scrambled to retrieve him. Any offshoot of Mario Kart and sports venture that includes the babies dials back on their infantile proclivities to cry and whine at every waking moment, but their inclusion in the fray of competition always seemed like filler to me. Mario’s universe consists of a plethora of creatively designed creatures, and Nintendo thinks they can pull a fast one on us and pad the roster with the same characters portrayed at different ages and masses. The fetal forms of Mario and Luigi have never inspired feelings of true joy in Mario fans, and this is not only due to acting as glorified skins of the mustachioed men in overalls. I’ve said this a thousand times already, but Mario’s appeal is his wide accessibility. Games that fall under the “E for everyone” rating from the ESRB actually exhibit content that accommodates a wide audience instead of exclusively children. Still, there are games that are specifically catered to very young children. Including the babies as a focal point in any Mario game teeters on that accessibility threshold, for some adults might be put off by the babies doing the puerile things that babies usually do. The character dynamic between Mario and Luigi in Superstar Saga is compromised because they both have to act as solid rocks to balance the babies. Mario and Luigi playfully interacting with the babies are fairly cute until the realization that they’re both playing with themselves creeps in and things feel weird *ahem*. So much of the humor their dynamic facilitated in Superstar Saga is lost because they’ve both been relegated to the roles of babysitters.

To make matters worse, Partners in Time decides that every familiar character needs to interact with a younger version of themselves to bloat the list of secondary characters. A relatively youthful Toadsworth spends his time with his present self trying new ways to entertain a Baby Peach with amusing contortions that count as the brother’s team moves on the field. He also proves that Peach’s “protector” was still a total oaf before he became a senile old man, for they often fail to entertain the princess which results in her uttering a baby cry so excruciating that I put my DS volume on mute. Please cancel all Yoshi sequels that could potentially feature this character, please. Baby Bowser exhibits more personality as a spoiled little twerp, but all he does is confuse me because his design and voice mirror his son, Bowser. Jr. Padding the game with even more childish characters is grating enough, but the character that irks me the most bears no resemblance to any preexisting one. For some reason, the developers found it appropriate to give the suitcase in the item menu sentience with googly eyes and feet to boot and call him Stuffwell. He lugs around the pieces of the Cobalt Star, and I wish that was all he did. He also insists on popping up frequently to offer unsolicited guidance to the player on their objective, which is entirely unnecessary considering every objective is still clear as crystal. I would say that Stuffwell has the personality of a cardboard box, but that packaging apparatus would actually be far more interesting. The fact that the developers implemented Stuffwell to keep on the player’s side at all times in a desperate attempt to maintain his presence as a character is laughable, and his constant condescending input exemplifies the worst trope of children’s media. Fuck off, Stuffwell. Go help Dora the Explorer or something. Meanwhile, Fawful is making his presence remote in the underground sewers as a black market badge dealer that only the babies can access. Oftentimes, I’d visit him just to hear the sweet sounds of his grammatical errors. I’d let Fawful off the hook!

The Shroob forces aren’t all that colorful either. These demented, dwarfish mushrooms that look like someone forgot to add a pinch of chlorine to the Toad gene pool to clean the gunk out of it do not deviate very far from the standard model. The developers could’ve used the X-Naut army from The Thousand-Year Door as inspiration. Perhaps the Shroobs work more efficiently with a stronger sense of unity. By the end of the game, they’ve taken total control over the past version of Peach’s castle. The climactic build-up to the finale of Partners in Time is storming the palace and sending the Shroobs and their dinky Plan 9 from Outer Space saucers back to their polluted home planet. As seen in the first game, the difficulty curve completely ratchets up here, which made me fearful of the final boss at the end of it. The Shroob Princess is by and large the most challenging fight in the game with her forcefield phase and spider walker, but she’s not the final boss. The last piece that fully reforms the Cobalt Star actually houses the true heir to the Shroob throne, and she’s more sinister than her spare of a sister. The beastly Elder Shroob Princess is as daunting as Cackletta was in Superstar Saga, with her multiple phases progressively becoming more durable and unpredictable. An even bigger slight against the player is that if they die on the Elder Princess, they’ll have to tackle the grueling battle with her sister AGAIN as well. Thank God for the Bros. items for both of these fights, for I was sweating bullets the entire time. The developers learned from the fight against Cackletta. Apparently, saline would’ve saved me the trouble, for Baby Luigi’s tears are the substance that eradicates the Shroob presence from the Mushroom Kingdom. Interesting.

Given everything I’ve said, it should be apparent that Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time is rather underwhelming. It’s a by-the-numbers sequel that does very little to innovate on its predecessor except for doubling the playable characters, the items, and the screens the player can use as reference. It all amounts to practically nothing of substance. However, I wouldn’t go as far as to declare Partners in Time as another unfortunate example of a “sophomore slump.” It’s more like a student finishing a semester with a 3.0 GPA after sweeping the dean’s list their freshman year, a hard act to follow indeed. Still, achieving that average is a respectable accomplishment. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with Partners in Time because the Mario & Luigi foundation is so solid, and they’d have to botch it pretty badly to make me forsake it entirely.

Grand Theft Auto III Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 7/4/2023)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Grand Theft Auto III

Developer: DMA Design

Publisher: Rockstar

Genre(s): Open-World

Platforms: PS2, Xbox, PC

Release Date: October 22, 2001

Since the dawn of humanity, our society has always needed a scapegoat as a source of blame for the corruption of our young. Television on the whole was claimed to rot the minds of children since its inception in the mid-20th century, and the rebellious spirit of rock-and-roll soon after proved to be another nightmare for the halcyon post-war America that we desperately attempted to uphold. However, these ridiculous moral panics were but historical footnotes of the early information age by the time I was born, so I obviously didn’t experience them firsthand. However, the video games I played as a child were always a point of concern for my general welfare as an impressionable youth. Even then, I still wasn’t privy to the genesis point of the video game controversy when hundreds of soccer moms fainted at Little Timmy performing button combinations to unsheathe one’s spinal cord from their bodies in Mortal Kombat. No, my initial exposure to the anti-video game pandemonium was early in the sixth generation of gaming in the early 2000s when this little game hit the shelves: Grand Theft Auto III. Not since sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll has a three-word combination struck fear in the hearts of the perennially bored housewives and prudish, geriatric politicians of America. Considering how vocal the outcry was against this game, it seemed as if these authoritative figures would rather their children be influenced to become a degenerate hedonists rather than mirror the realm of murder and chaos found in Grand Theft Auto. Ever since the media conveniently discovered that the Columbine shooters were fans of games like Doom and Quake, attributing the exposure of video game violence to the foibles of adolescence became second nature to the stodgy older generations. Releasing Grand Theft Auto III two years later felt as if an encore of that horrific event was directly on the horizon. My own mother grounded me for two weeks in the fourth grade for watching a friend of mine drive around in this game for five minutes before school one day, as if simply being exposed to the game for such a short time would affect my ethical fiber like radiation poisoning. (I swear, that’s all I watched him do). The Grand Theft Auto epidemic was an irritating reality for gamers such as me, but I’m sure the then-small-fry game developer Rockstar Studios were eternally grateful for all of the inadvertent press.

But everyone would be remiss if they didn’t experience Grand Theft Auto III back then, for the franchise's third entry during the PS2’s infancy was a groundbreaking milestone in gaming history. Grand Theft Auto III’s titanic splash didn’t just provoke the wrath of parents and politicians: it ignited a revolutionary new wave of game design by popularizing the open-world genre and indelibly laying out the rules and regulations for all other developers to follow. Realistic polygons were only a surface-level aspect of the transition to the third dimension in the former generation that started it. After the initial period of setting the foundation, game developers were seriously expanding the possibilities of a 3D environment to radical proportions. The non-linear sandbox design popularized in the levels of fellow 3D trendsetter Super Mario 64 was enlarged to proportions that they could be reminiscent of environments from the real world, eliminating the problem of empty, ethereal graphical space found in the levels of the game from the previous generation. In fact, GTA III coalesced its areas so seamlessly that using the term levels out of the beginner’s book of the gaming lexicon now seemed inappropriate to assign. A staggering evolution in game design was taking place, and GTA III's contributions to this growth and change served as the substance behind the game’s bloodshed and mayhem. However, one would have had to experience GTA III in the short window of time of its initial release to appreciate what it did. Not only did the series sprout two sequels on the PS2 soon after that eclipsed its impact, but hundreds of imitators naturally emerged after seeing the tangibility of its content and design that translated to great success. In a way, GTA III is the Super Mario 64 of the sixth generation of gaming: an early innovator that skates by in retrospect because of its influence despite its myriad of glaring flaws.

A portion of GTA III’s appeal can be attributed to its cinematic flair. The franchise's influences stem directly from tons of crime fiction from other entertainment mediums, ranging from HBO’s television staple The Sopranos, heist films such as Heat and Reservoir Dogs, to the acclaimed filmography of Martin Scorsese. GTA III’s opening cutscene displays a bank robbery unfolding, with three culprits making their quick getaway. The female criminal at the scene of the crime, Catalina, leaves her boyfriend and fellow bank job accomplice Claude to die by shooting him point-blank while escaping the scene. Claude miraculously survives, but is the sole perpetrator apprehended and taken to justice. After being sentenced to ten years in prison, the Colombian Cartel seizes the armored van he’s being transported in, and the hostage takeover gives him and another prisoner “8 Ball” an opportune moment to escape custody. While the cinematic splendor on display here doesn’t rival the arthouse ambitions of, say, Hideo Kojima, the exhilaration of the bank robbery to introduce the game is an effective enough hook to intrigue the player immediately and set a precedent for the game’s chaotic tone.

Claude Speed, a name that is totally on his birth certificate and not the fabricated persona of a criminal/D-list porn star, is GTA III’s protagonist and the vehicle for the player committing a bloody holocaust in the city streets. Interestingly enough, Claude is another example of a silent protagonist seen so many times in a game that presents its story cinematically. Rockstar would learn their lesson soon after but here on GTA’s open-world debut, interacting with anything and anyone with a character that doesn’t make a peep feels completely unnatural. The silent protagonist trope should be reserved for platforming characters who only focus on tight gameplay and customizable avatars in RPGs. Through a particular perspective, Claude maybe works as a silent protagonist to immerse the player in the biblical chaos they can commit without any injected personability getting in the way. This was the developer's intention, right? No, they severely fucked this up.

The core of GTA III’s heightened non-linearity is to facilitate a sense of freedom, to unbound the shackles of video game discipline and order, allowing the player to run wild and let their hair down, or so to speak. One realization that dons over the player is that once Claude arrives at his safe house is that the rate of gameplay doesn’t halt when the player isn’t engaging in tasks that the game assigns them. The brilliance of GTA III’s design philosophy is that the player could potentially spend hours playing the game without even progressing the story with one mission, and it’s also likely that the player wouldn’t grow weary of their deregulated merriment. Playing a game with rules on the playground as a kid is all fine and dandy, but the free reign of using everything at your disposal on the slightest impulse tends to feel more joyous, no? The player is given the opportunity to perform acts of the game’s namesake and ride their stolen property around with a sense of recklessness like they’re in The Italian Job. Claude can engage in spontaneous fisticuffs with the unassuming pedestrians that roam the streets, or take the morbid route of ending their insignificant lives with the blast of his roulette of firearms. As one can expect, all this debauchery will alert the attention of the Liberty City Police Force, who will proceed to hunt you down like a pack of wild dogs. The alert level coincides with how tenacious their efforts will be in ousting your malignant presence from the streets, escalating to them sicing an attack helicopter and an army-grade tank on you if you refuse to comply. One may argue that the police penalty is a buzzkill to the adrenaline-fueled fun that the game fosters, but where would the thrill of committing crimes be without the looming consequence of legal blowback? Then again, the player is never forced to enact anything that would warrant this heavy rate of firepower unless they choose to.

Whether or not the player wishes to lay waste to Liberty City on their own time, I implore the player to at least frolic around to learn the layout of the game’s map. The most egregious aspect of GTA III’s rudimentary open-world design is the lack of a map. I don’t care if the game exemplifies the fetal stage of the open-world genre: no amount of reflective hindsight excuses omitting this essential feature from the game. The circular radar located in the bottom left corner of the screen only indicates the safe house and mission icons, but not the locations of the Pay-N-Spray garages or the Ammu-Nation stores. The reason why both of these stores are as imperative to find is that if Claude gets arrested or gunned down, he respawns outside of either a hospital or the police station with only the clothes on his back. The cause for both of these unfortunate outcomes is usually attributed to the police horde raining their fury down upon Claude or being unequipped to deal with the various gang factions infecting Liberty City. Not to mention, the player will constantly be subject to lethal carbeques because every vehicle in the game is as durable as paper mache. Eluding the police by changing the color of the car and stacking one’s arsenal to rival the gangbangers is the only possible way to survive the harsh streets of Liberty City, and obscuring these destinations from view on the radar makes the game unnecessarily more irritating. All the player has as a reference to where anything could be is a northern mark like a compass, but who do I look like? Magellan?

Learning the layout of GTA III’s map is an especially grueling escapade because the urban jungle the player is forced to commit to memory is rather drab. Liberty City is obviously a fictional American city because it doesn’t share a name with one from the real world. However, its similarities with The Big Apple almost veer into the uncanny valley. Like real-world New York City, Liberty City is divided into three islands that act as distinct Burroughs that the player has access to as the story progresses. One may argue that imposing barriers between the Burroughs negates a true open-world environment, but each individual island can stand on its own merits with its breadth. The starting island of Portland vaguely resembles both the New York Burroughs of Brooklyn and Queens due to its hilly elevation and the persistent presence of the metro station. Staunton Island is a comparatively more flashy, bourgeois metropolitan area like Manhattan. Shoreside Island ostensibly depicts the suburban sprawl of Newark, New Jersey. While the three islands are certainly inspired, they all lack a kind of urban pomp. Unique geographical features such as Portland’s Chinatown district, Staunton’s central park, and Shoreside’s dam give them enough distinction, but none of these sites pop and sparkle with that city magic. Many of these features feel slapdashed onto the map, obligations of what usually composes the city streets of America without any of the grand allure that makes spots like these enticing in real life. Around all these underwhelming “landmarks” are the typical tall buildings and cluttered streets that simply trace the bare minimum of urbanity. If New York was as generic as it is depicted here, I highly doubt it would be the most populated city in the country.

Eventually, the player’s pension for senseless, unmitigated destruction will conflict with the fact that crime costs money. Maximizing the scope of a mindless murdering spree requires at least a fair amount of cash to purchase weapons, and the arcade-style method of ebbing away vehicles to the point of exploding and gaining a sum of money isn’t enough to finance all of the manic fun the player could be having. Naturally, the only way of earning a substantial income in GTA III is by putting Claude to work. Claude could steal a taxi and siphon the fare money from the poor Indian guy he’s co-opting the business from but really, the more organic way of earning income in the game is completing the story missions. Essentially, GTA III’s story missions are odd jobs assigned by Liberty City’s finest: the higher-ups of the city’s crime syndicate. Claude becomes everyone’s glorified errand boy in his mission to get to Catalina, maintaining his pure chaotic neutral position between the Italian mafia, the Yakuza, and the Jamaican Yardies strictly for his own benefit. These tasks range from escort missions via car, assassinations, property damage, etc. By completing these various missions, the player will be more than compensated for their troubles so they can make bigger bloodbaths on the streets.

Being that these jobs are assigned by the disgusting criminal toe scum beneath the feet of the city, almost every mission given to Claude is dangerous, deplorable, and highly illegal. Because of this thrilling combination of circumstances, GTA III’s missions tend to be quite challenging. The tasks are relatively short and straightforward, but the game goes the extra mile to grief the player with additional circumstances. If you’re too afraid to cause any sizable conflict on the streets for fear of facing the lashing of the law, get used to it. A pattern anyone who plays the game will notice is that the harder missions involve Liberty City’s boys in blue strong-arming Claude with everything they’ve got while the mission is still underway. Some notably bothersome moments involving the police abruptly exercising their authority during missions are running over a man in a seemingly impervious body cast in “Plaster Blaster” or bumping a car over and over to drop paraphernalia in “Evidence Dash.” The only way to elude the rampaging police force is to visit a Pay-N-Spray to throw off your scent, which is why obscuring their view on the map is cruel and unusual. Actually, I’ll kindly accept any vehicular mission over any that involve weapon combat with gang members. Getting up close and personal with a posse of armed malcontents in missions like “Arms Shortage” and “Grand Theft Aero” assures that their barrage of whizzing bullets will tear through Claude like tissue paper. Preparing beforehand by acquiring body armor will only make a marginal difference in defense, for its material is evidently made of bubble wrap and the targeting system for the guns is not exactly smooth or accurate. The sniper rifle is your best friend in this game and not only during the often maligned “Bomb Da Base: Act II” mission. Time is of the essence when committing a criminal offense, so many of the missions are given a strict time limit to complete. I’m convinced the developers meticulously formulated the perfect time to keep the player on edge during these missions and scrape out of that time by the skin of their teeth. Even if you outsmart the constraints of the city-spanning mission “Espresso 2 Go!,” you’ll still only ram into all nine espresso stands across Liberty City with under a minute left. The Asuka mission acronym “S.A.M.” is arguably the most frustrating mission in the game because it combines every excruciating element listed above. To top everything off, the missions in GTA III must be completed without any mistakes, for there are no checkpoints to bail the player out when they make a mistake or die. GTA III is a ruthless test of trial and error, and whether or not the game offers a fair, reasonable challenge is up to contention.

Performing the missions and furthering the story is also the only way to meet GTA III’s number of supporting characters. GTA III cast exemplifies the film noir tenet in that there are no good, moral characters to attach to and hope for their happiness and prosperity: only bad characters that fall on a spectrum of amoral behavior. The problem with every character in GTA III is not their scumbaggery, but that they’re all caricatures. The Leone crime family seems like a parody of every Italian mob ever depicted with their ritzy attire, restaurant place of operation, and overbearing mother figure yelling at a made man from a distance. Kenji is the classic Yakuza member, justifying the ultraviolence he commits with ancient Japanese spiritualism. At least it’s amusing and disturbing how aroused his sister Asuka becomes around Clyde the more death and destruction he causes. These characters might only seem as one-dimensional as they are because their relationship with Claude never surpasses a formal employer-client dynamic. I’m sure corrupt cop Ray and sleazy yuppie Donald Love lead interesting lives, but it’s difficult to peer into their characters in a deeper manner when it's all strictly business.

The business of all of these criminal figures at least begins to wrap around to something interesting around the second half of the game. After Claude’s relationship with the Italians is soured due to the Don’s wife Maria and her philandering, Claude enters the center of a drug trafficking ring involving all of the gang factions, shoveling SPANK around the city and attempting to occupy control. Things get rather contentious between the Colombians and the Yakuza when Claude whacks Kenji using a cartel car to set them up and take the blame. This escalated gang war only allows Claude to get closer to Catalina, which he eventually does at the cost of her murdering a scorned, grieving Asuka. The final mission involves following Catalina’s helicopter to a cartel base. Fitting for a final mission of a challenging game, the caveat to the climax of Claude’s revenge plot must be done without any purchased weapons or ammunition, as Claude must rely on cartel pickups. Why not just make Claude also do this mission stark naked while they’re at it? Catalina finally earns her comeuppance via a bazooka shell, but GTA III’s ending is not happy. A part of the mission was to rescue a captured Maria, who Claude decides to shoot as the screen goes black. Jesus, Rockstar. Maria was a trifling skank, but that’s just ice cold. Ike treated Tina with more dignity than that.

I could easily write off GTA III for being completely undercooked in every feasible department. The world is empty and bland, the controls are austere, and every mission is padded with unfair bullshit. All of the characters have the charisma of a gaggle of cockroaches, including the protagonist we’re intended to root for. However, I’ve come to a realization that maybe most of these discrepancies were intentional. It’s possible that all of GTA III’s attributes ranging from its world to its characters seem raw and generic because of the bluntness the developers want to convey. Through the game’s fabric, a sort of satire is subtly interwoven through the game’s active ethos. Perhaps the reason why Liberty City is an unflinching depiction of New York City without the superficial glitz and glamor associated with a bustling American metropolis. Claude as a silent protagonist isn’t a mistake made by sticking to traditional video game tropes despite the cinematic evolution of the medium, but only a stoic, unwavering sociopath could survive on the brutal city streets run by people who have no human warmth. The harsh ending indicates there are no happy endings here, only the next step in a cycle of violence and greed. It’s a bit of a stretch in divulging some sort of substance, and I don’t think any concerned parent would care in making their decision to keep it away from their children. Overall, GTA III’s substance is defined by its innovations, which were certainly awe-striking at the time. No other game tested a gamer’s subconscious ID that thirsted for animalistic impulses, nor was there one that facilitated it. GTA III belongs in a museum where we can give it all the respect it deserves but from an impersonal distance.

Mega Man 4 Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 6/27/2023)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Mega Man 4

Developer: Capcom

Publisher: Capcom 

Genre(s): 2D Platformer

Platforms: NES

Release Date: December 6, 1991

From an artistic standpoint, I am of the belief that a franchise shouldn’t surpass the number of entries fitting for a trilogy. Brevity is not only the soul of wit but also a necessity to retain the magic and integrity of a series of entertainment properties. However, my passionate sentiments would cause serious humiliation at the Capcom offices, as they would laugh like hyenas as I ran out of the room in a crying frenzy like a girl who just bombed her school’s talent show. As thankful as I am for Capcom and all of the other video game conglomerates, their ultimate goal at the end of the day is to turn a profit with their creative properties. Since Capcom now found a winning formula with their Mega Man franchise, they milked that udder dry until it shriveled up and could only produce dust. I suppose Mega Man 4 was the first entry that overstayed Mega Man’s welcome on the NES considering it surpasses the number of titles that make up a solid trilogy of games, so we can attribute this game to commencing Mega Man’s downfall further into the future. However, the strange revelation that I’ve come to is that Mega Man 4 might arguably be the best game in the original series. Come to think of it, Mega Man 3 would’ve been an askew note to leave the series on, what with its unreached ambitions that fell apart in execution. Maybe a proper (and hypothetical) series send-off should signal a true return to form, and that’s certainly what Mega Man 4 offers.

Alert the presses, everyone, for Capcom decided to place another mad scientist on the pedestal of Mega Man bad guys that isn’t Dr. Wily! Approximately a year after the events of the last game, a Russian scientist named Dr. Cossack constructs eight new Robot Masters with the intention of seizing total sovereignty. I’m surprised it took Capcom this long to create a Russian villain at the helm of a megalomaniacal power surge, considering the franchise debuted in the 80s when their association with scum and villainy was at its peak. I suppose Capcom thought it would be wise to wait until the Soviet Union crumbled to feature one of their citizens in an antagonistic role so as to not sour the foreign affairs between them and Japan. Their country is only a submarine ride over from the Pacific coast of Russia, after all. Nevertheless, the fact that Capcom retired their standard bald, mustachioed bad guy here makes me beam with pride. Cossack may be committing a copycat crime here, but the slight deviation his presence represents makes a world of difference. NES franchises have been known to acquiesce to feelings of separation anxiety regarding their main villains, so I realize how hard it was for Capcom to let Wily go.

By this point in the early 90s, developers had honed the rudimentary 8-bit aesthetic into an art form. After the humble, fuzzy entry point in the first Mega Man title, Mega Man 2 made strides in elevating the visual capabilities of the NES console, just to have Mega Man 3 vomit on its contributions. One vital aspect of Mega Man 4’s return to form is the pixelated splendor displayed throughout, starting from the opening sequence. Somehow, Capcom felt that an introduction detailing the genesis point of Mega Man’s creation needed to surpass all other 8-bit cutscenes on the system by illustrating an origin story for Mega Man. A tranquil cityscape is shown from the cycle of day to dusk, with chaotic blasts of malevolent fire disrupting the peaceful atmosphere and calling Mega Man to action out of a valiant sense of justice. We also learn that his Japanese moniker “Rock” is merely the robot’s birth name and that Mega Man is his crime-fighting pseudonym. We also learn from this introduction that Mega Man’s hair was intended to be blue, thus making the initial reveal under his helmet in Mega Man 2 to be a graphical blip. As one could probably infer from the outstanding presentation here, all of the erroneous smudges in the pixels have been wiped out. The cityscape scene is gorgeous, and the following sequence where Mega Man is riding on top of a moving vehicle is spellbinding to watch.

Of course, the effort of high graphical fidelity extends to what is present during the gameplay. A pleasing color pallet was needed in the Mega Man series after Mega Man 3’s muted, flat textures that made the game look depleted. Mega Man 4’s return to form also saw the revival of the visual vibrancy seen in Mega Man 2, and thank the Lords for this. Every level in Mega Man 4 looks uniquely dazzling, meeting the standard established in Mega Man 2. Ring Man’s stage has candy neon evaporating platforms juxtaposed with some crystalline chrome architecture. Pharoah Man’s tomb is built with a tan-colored brick that looks appropriately weathered enough for an ancient construction, and the flow of the sinking sand is borderline hypnotizing. The showering rain effect in Toad Man’s stage is only distracting on a mechanical level, and Dive Man’s teal foreground compliments the water splendidly. The lavender color of Skull Man’s stage probably doesn’t make sense from a thematic standpoint, but I can’t deny that its contrast with the bleached skeletal platforms is striking.

I suppose what is more important about the new crop of levels is their level design. Mega Man 4 doesn’t do too much to deviate from the series' tried and true 2D platforming from point A to B where the Robot Master’s domain lies except for one true stride in ingenuity. Just because Mega Man’s trajectory is fairly straightforward doesn’t mean that each level should offer nothing but a straight line with enemies to halt progression. For the first time in series history, the levels will offer alternate paths for the player to take, usually signified by both ascending and descending ladders. Once Mega Man climbs one of these ladders in either direction on the Y-axis, surviving enemy fire and the various pratfalls will eventually lead Mega Man to the same result as the standard pathway. Sometimes, these alternate passages lead Mega Man to dead ends and the extra challenges before he hits a brick wall often lead to goodies like E-Tanks and health upgrades, rewarding the players for their troubles. God only knows we can’t rely on Dr. Light’s new, little support bot Eddie to supply Mega Man with what he needs because the little guy seems to have difficulties discerning whether or not Mega Man’s health or energy is low. He’s too adorably pathetic to chastise, really. Speaking of difficulties, Mega Man 4 still retains that classic NES challenge that was absent in Mega Man 2 compared to the two games that border it in the main series timeline. The game presents a smattering of dangerous sections like riding on robot enemies over pits of spikes like the bouncy grasshoppers in Bright Man’s stage and the floating platforms in Pharaoh Man’s stage. It’s best to shoot first between a chasm because a cap enemy will fly upward and knock Mega Man out of his airborne velocity to his untimely demise. The midway miniboss robots resembling animals often proved to be formidable obstacles to my goal, such as the hulking whales in Dive Man’s stage and the hippos in Ring Man’s stage that spit missiles comfortably from their high perches. Because of all of these impediments prove to cause a small amount of grief to the player, Mega Man 2’s one big criticism of being too easy cannot be applied here.

Good luck trying to find the correct order to defeat Mega Man 4’s Robot Masters, for this lineup is when the lineup started becoming abstract. Like Mega Man 3, all of these Robot Masters were submitted by Japanese children via a contest and the best of the bunch were granted life by the developers. I don’t know how some kid living in Japan in the early 90s knew what a Pharaoh was, but maybe that's how advanced their education system is. Drill Man is an inspired ground-type Robot Master in the same vein as Gutsman and Hard Man, and his drill bomb weapon is like a more manageable version of the Crash Bomb. Skull Man is the coolest one here from a design standpoint, but I’m not enthused by his weapon being a recycled version of Wood Man’s leaf shield. What makes the weapon worse is that it’s Dive Man’s weakness, and his apt dive maneuver makes sure that plenty of contact damage will occur while fighting him. Bright Man copies Flash Man’s time freeze move, and Dust Man’s mound of vacuumed trash is an effective cluster bomb. God bless Toad Man, for the developers inadvertently made him into a spongy whelp of a Robot Master AND his acid rain weapon clears the screen. Guess which Robot Master I recommend tackling first? Overall, I can’t find too much fault with Cossack’s coalition of Robot Masters. They all have interesting designs and none of their weapons fall under the category of useless junk (points directly at Top Man from Mega Man 3).

Fortunately, if the player isn’t content with using any of these weapons, maybe because they feel the Robot Master weapons peaked with the Metal Blade as I do, Mega Man 4 provides a suitable alternative. This game’s innovative stride in updating Mega Man’s battle prowess is the new addition of the charge shot. By holding down the shoot button on the controller, the collective energy needed for a regular shot of Mega Man’s base beam builds up inside his being and radiates all over him. Releasing Mega Man’s edged shot will unleash a single burst of energy much bigger and much more lethal than the piddly lemon drops it normally sputters out. I probably use the standard blaster more often than most people who have played a Mega Man game, so this addition is a godsend. I’ve always appreciated the variety in store with Mega Man sucking up his enemy's abilities, but I have to admit that pausing the game to cycle through the options can be a tad irksome. Revving up the blaster to blow through enemies that have stronger defenses is incredibly convenient and satisfying, and is just as crucial to Mega Man’s evolution as the slide move (which also returns from Mega Man 3). If it could shoot in the same number of directions as the Metal Blade, I’d never use any of the alternate weapons.

Whether or not using the enhanced blaster or figuring out a Robot Masters's specific weakness works for you, it still culminates in climbing the castle of a wicked scientific genius. This time, it’s the blonde, bearded Cossack instead of Wily’s wild eyebrows. When storming through Cossack’s castle, each level seems deceptively easier than the last. The castle offers some substantial sections involving Rush’s mechanical aid, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief that the Yellow Devil doesn’t make his return to pummel me to oblivion. Still, roaming through the fortress of a madman as the climax of a video game on the NES. My suspicions unraveled with the appalling revelation that Cossack is a red-herring and that Dr. Wily has been using him as a scapegoat the entire time. Naturally, it’s when Wily reveals himself that the apropos difficulty curve reveals itself too, as Wily’s final fight in Mega Man 4 is the most irritating one so far. The weak spot on Wily’s new death machine is high enough that Mega Man must strain himself trying to reach it, and finding Wily in complete darkness while being confined to using Pharaoh Man’s weapon conjures up unpleasant memories of having to use Crash Man’s weapon in the conclusive fight in Mega Man 2, showing that the developers didn’t learn from their mistake.

God dammit. So much for subversion. The old saying that old dogs never learn new tricks is just as applicable to video game franchises, which is why they tend to struggle with innovation past the third entry. Yet, Mega Man 4 seemed like it could’ve at least gone against the grain with the opportunity to do the bare minimum of putting another antagonist in the front seat. Alas, it seems like Dr. Wily will always be the nagging force of oppression like his NES contemporaries Bowser and Ganondorf. Up until this point, I was enjoying Mega Man 4 vastly more than Mega Man 3. Mega Man 4’s back to basics after Mega Man 3 shot to the moon and missed by a mile making for the most balanced of Mega Man titles so far. It’s as smooth as Mega Man 2 was without the few discrepancies that sullied its near-perfect status. If reusing the same villain in a bait-and-switch routine is the only sniggle the game has in a series filled with unfair, broken bullshit, Capcom has more than legitimized Mega Man 4’s existence. Quit while you're ahead, guys.