[Game Review] Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Note: This review contains spoilers.


If Dragon Quest V is anything to go by, I think I will sincerely enjoy the Dragon Quest series.  Dragon Quest V is my first of the series, and as such this review is more than likely going to be a bit different.  My easiest comparison is going to be Final Fantasy and Pokemon, the two JRPG series' with turn-based mechanics I have the greatest amount of time in.  As such, forgive me if I sound incredibly ignorant to things like deeper mechanics or series trends, but I've attempted to do my research, and at the very least should be in the ballpark of all things.

All of that said, the reason I picked Dragon Quest V as my first game in the series when I had made the decision to play one (other games considered were Dragon Quest XI, Dragon Quest VIII, and Dragon Quest III) was the gimmick with its story.  Dragon Quest V takes place over three generations, starting when you are a child following your father on his quest to find the legendary hero in order to save his wife, then moving into your adulthood where you continue your father's quest and get married, and finally becoming a father yourself to two kids that become your party members in the latter third, finally finishing your father's quest and defeating the big baddie attempting to take over the world.  The story itself underneath this generational structure is your basic hero's journey stuff, of which you will predict every last step as you play, but the execution of the story was generally quick and fun, a swashbuckling adventure story that feels as epic as the 18 years that makes up its timeline.  So long as you aren't expecting the philosophical toying that, say, Final Fantasy generally plays with, you are bound to enjoy this game's story the way you would a fun adventure novel.

What surprised me was that the story wasn't really what kept me around as I played.  Despite the interesting premise, the family-as-party dynamic was severely underused (props where props are due though for a pre-Chrono Trigger JRPG on the SNES: it is incredibly unique plot-wise), and the aspect I was least thrilled about became what sucked me in, despite some of its less appealing aspects.  You see, Dragon Quest games are well known for not changing up the formula of the JRPG turn-based combat system, as opposed to its peers in Final Fantasy.  You cannot see your party in combat, you can't pick enemies to attack (instead picking groups of enemies, which sometimes feels arbitrary in how it groups them), and you have a basic party of four (in the re-release versions of Dragon Quest V).  What Dragon Quest does well, however, is it keeps these basic mechanics incredibly tight.  Dragon Quest as a series has quite the reputation of being grindy in parts, and Dragon Quest V is no exception.  The last 15% of the game took just as long for me to get through as the first 85%, and that could turn a lot of people off the game.  I generally made it through the game somewhat underleveled (as I like to do, because it gives a stronger focus on mechanics rather than leveled power), so this is partially my own fault.  Likewise, one of the coolest mechanics (which we will get to soon) was something I had somehow breezed past without much experimentation.  If you have a good sense of JRPG mechanics (not just experience with these systems, but a relatively tight understanding of buffs, debuffs, and party dynamics) then you will do much better than I did.  The game averages out at around 30-35 hours, and it took me a little over 40 to complete, largely because of my approach.  That said, no matter your skill level, there is still quite a few parts of the game where at least some grinding will become mandatory.  These grindy bits, however, end up playing an interesting tight rope that I've never felt was well executed until Dragon Quest V.  Generally speaking, grinding in an RPG should be a dis-incentivizing mechanic.  It should be a red flag that there are some mechanics you aren't quite up to snuff on.  The issue here is that sometimes you are underleveled, and figuring out which is which can often be a crapshoot.  For the most part, Dragon Quest V does a fantastic job of upping the difficulty - particularly with boss battles - to force you into exploring its mechanics.  Buffing, debuffing, and balancing out item usage for healing, MP regeneration, etc. is absolutely required in the latter part of the game.  Bosses quickly start using buff and debuff spells, screaming at you that you should be doing the same.   Likewise, later bosses use the Bounce spell heavily, which means any spells thrown their way will bounce back to the caster, requiring you to be aware of just what type of attack you are using and when, and to tailor your party accordingly.  I've always felt that turn-based combat was a bit of a means to an end rather than an outright fun in and of itself (despite valiant efforts from Final Fantasy VII's materia system, or Chrono Trigger's group attacks), but Dragon Quest V squeezes out the most strategy it can from the base mechanics, and I found myself re-strategizing constantly as newer and more difficult bosses reared their wonderfully cartoony heads.  (As an aside: the iOS and Android port, which is what I played, is one of the best mobile ports I've ever played, and I strongly recommend it if you are on a budget and don't want to splurge for the DS version, which is identical).

Of all of Dragon Quest V's tight-if-trite mechanical design, they innovated in one spectacular way: they included recruitable monsters.  One of the Dragon Quest mechanical staples started its life here, and it is this game that heavily influenced the creation of the Pokemon games.  Recruiting monsters takes quite a bit of trial and error, but it becomes one of the most fun and unique aspects of the game.  Monsters can be added just like party members, and the best healers (and some of the best tanks) in the game are monsters, thus investing time into capturing and training monsters can give you a serious leg up, as well as opening up the customizable options for your party.  As well, when you are in the overworld map (or facing certain endgame bosses), you have a bench of four party members that can be switched out at the beginning of a turn, giving you even more customization and strategic options.  At the final boss, just before I beat him, I had lost my entire first lineup and was relying on my severely underleveled 2nd string, of which I had virtually no healers, only one who could buff and debuff, and one who was virtually useless in attack and defense.  I won by the skin of my teeth because of them, and it was one of the most exciting moments I had in a game in recent memory.

Dragon Quest V is by-the-numbers in so many ways, but it is tight in how it utilizes the usual.  It challenges subtly, rarely to the point of being hard (unless you made some serious error along the way, of which you only have about an hour of grinding or re-structuring before you're caught up again), and feels about the correct length for its content.  Understandably, it doesn't innovate the way many other SNES RPGs did (one of the most competitive categories for a JRPG), but it is so incredibly solid I have to recommend it to anyone who loves the genre.  Your mileage will certainly vary, but never so much as to regret playing it.  All future Dragon Quest games have some serious heights to live up to, but I'm excited to check out them all.



9.0

[Game Review] The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

Note: This review contains spoilers.


When I was a teen, I played Link's Awakening by accident.  Having grown up playing A Link to the Past years before, I got the itch to replay the game and relive my youth in a bout of early nostalgia.  At some point I confused myself, and thought my friend's copy of Link's Awakening was the game from my youth.  At the time it was a somewhat surreal experience, something very fitting for what Link's Awakening is.  I'd played through A Link to the Past very young, so most of my memory was of specific bosses and an overall art style more than any sense of place (outside of the castle and Link's home early in the game - a section a six year old me was stuck on for days until my cousin pointed me towards the bush leading to the castle dungeons).  So when I picked up Link's Awakening, it wasn't immediately apparent I had started the wrong game.  After all, the game looked relatively right, if a little simplified which I credited to it being ported to the Gameboy Color (making this the DX version of the game).  I wasn't one for text boxes when I was younger, preferring instead to jump into the action, so I missed several key exchanges with Marin, this game's analogue to Zelda.  I was pretty sure something was off while I played, but every once in awhile pieces of A Link to the Past would filter through, such as some of the enemies, or the worm boss that you have to hit the tail to defeat.  It was mostly due to remembering so little about the SNES classic that it took until I got the jump feather (the same dungeon as the tailed boss) that I decided to look the game up and realized my error.

This first play through Link's Awakening is something I cherish because of how the accident played so well into what the game is trying to do.  Very early on, it is easy to notice some things are off.  There is a chain-chomp, for one, sitting outside of a house.  The dotting of Mario enemies (and Kirby) throughout give a very bendy sense of reality that only enhanced my confusion as a teen.  Link's Awakening was said to be influenced by Twin Peaks, which isn't particularly strange given the game's dream-centric plot.  In the Zelda canon, it is Link's Awakening that started the pattern of surreal side-games outside of Hyrule that Majora's Mask would eventually follow.  Started as a straight port of  A Link to the Past for the Gameboy by some bored Nintendo employees, the game eventually found a life of its own as the programmers became more and more invested in programming Zelda for the little handheld.  The somewhat relaxed atmosphere of playing with a game's construction rather than the serious, impassioned work of a traditional "product" games certainly played into the game's surrealism.  It's aloof.  Link's Awakening to date feels the breeziest of all the Zelda games (unless we are searching for a Wind Waker pun), relaxed mostly in pace and whimsical in tone.  The game doesn't have a serious villain, only an abstract: a nightmare is terrorizing the Wind Fish, a giant whale slumbering in an egg on top of a mountain.  Your task is to travel the eight dungeons (as you do), collect the eight instruments, and play the song of awakening to wake the Wind Fish from his nightmare and free him.  The whole island you are on, however, is within the dream of the Wind Fish, and doing so will destroy the entire island as well as all of its charismatic, and downright adorable inhabitants.  There is a tragedy in this, and somewhat of an irony in that the villains of the game are the ones trying to keep this world alive.  Granted, these nightmares want to rule this world, but the sense of preservation over that world is something kind of unique to a Zelda game, and most games in the RPG genre (funnily enough, the only other game I can think of is the awful Fable III, but there it is a gimmick and here it seems to be more of a tonal theme).

Link's conflict of needing to save the Wind Fish but lose all of his newfound friends is one of the more unique and somewhat postmodern themes in a Zelda game.  While postmodernism is lauded in later games like Bioshock or Braid, many of the similar themes there are echoed here, nearly a decade earlier.  In particular, the central conflict is a reflection on the game's own game-ness.  During the final boss battle, the boss takes the form of Agahnim, the wizard from A Link to the Past, and he must be defeated the same way as in that game.  The game is very aware that this is most likely not your first Zelda game, and that, if you are interested in a handheld port, you must have played the previous, larger-selling entry in the series.  This boss phase plays exactly like that of the SNES classic, and though it doesn't directly require your knowledge of another game in order to beat, it is enhanced by it.  More so than these little additions of mechanics and characters, however, is in how the game wants you to beat it while self consciously knowing that to do so means you can no longer live in this world.  It reminds me of how in Dark Souls your ultimate goal is the right to die and not come back.  It is the game recognizing that its win condition is something happy, but also in ending itself.  It wants you to stop playing, but it wants you to earn that ability to stop playing, it wants you to feel a conclusion.  Here they don't mince words about this, and call the game a dream.  David Lean, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Stanley Kubrick all explained in one interview or another that a film was like a day dream, that it allowed you to live through a world and characters without that explicit feeling of consciousness, that you didn't have to feel personally morally at odds, but could live through or with a character that was without the guilt or ethical burden.  It allowed us to explore concepts, people, and situations we otherwise couldn't in real life, and that this ability could be used for escapism or for confrontation on what we were too worried or closed off from to confront.  Likewise, games are like that, as are books if we really want to get into it.  Link's Awakening takes this seriously, telling you to enjoy the dream as it goes, to miss it when it's gone, but to never forget it.  All games are daydreams, and there is a beauty in acknowledging them as so.

The Switch remake has done a near perfect job recreating this experience, even if the game isn't so perfect.  The new toy-like style perfectly realizes this sense of unreality in a twee package that never ceases to be cute.  Though it may feel like a glossy coating on a rather old game (the layout still uses an archaeic tile based system for an open world RPG), I think Link's Awakening holds up incredibly well on its own merits to not warrant an overhaul, as interesting as that prospect may be.  On a technical side, frame dropping is incredibly annoying and far more frequent than in Breath of the Wild, a much more intensely technical game.  Some of this may be because the game largely discards the "scene" like loading of areas outside of dungeons as is usual in 2D Zelda games in favor of a free moving world, without requiring the camera to swing to the next scene when you reached the previous scene's edge.  This change makes the map feel much more open, but wouldn't have been a hindrance if the game ran smoother the original way.  The base Link's Awakening can at times be opaque in what it wants you to do, partially because of a game-spanning trade quest that can sometimes be downright senseless, but usually has some sense of consistent logic to it.  Being gated out of areas of the map without a required tool is something I hadn't realized was out of Zelda for so long until confronted with it here, and it has its pluses and minuses.  Mostly pluses, as it makes gaining a new item exciting on an exploratory level, but occasionally it can feel like you are out of places to go without a new item when in reality it just takes some experimentation.  Overlap such as the Hookshot and the combination of Roc's Feather and Pegasus Boots in getting over gaps was particularly annoying, as sometimes I would either pass up areas I could access or try at areas I couldn't.  The game also loses steam item-wise by the end of the game, giving you the flame rod and mirror shield towards the end, neither of which change the game except in virtually arbitrary ways.  Luckily, there is a built in hint system to help you through if you are sick of wandering around.  Going into one of the phone huts allows you to call one of the in game characters and ask for a hint, which is usually not overly spelled out and can generally relieve some frustration when the game's world seems to not be giving you any sense of where to go next.

As far as Zelda games go, Link's Awakening is still one of my favorites, even if it falls at the bottom of the list of Zelda greats.  It is an entry in the series that could have easily been overlooked, but instead it has been lovingly rendered again with a distinct artistic style that compliments the themes of the game.  Here's hoping Nintendo is excited by this game's reception, because there is nothing I would love more than a similar port of the Capcom Zelda's as soon as possible.



8.5

[Game Review] ICO and Untitled Goose Game

There is always a baseline of joy in video games.  Interacting with our avatar, learning the controls and the rules, reading the level to know where to go and what to try -- playing video games is fun.  But a baseline of fun can be found anywhere.  It isn't to video games specifically that we go for fun, we want something more that only that medium can provide.  Granted, a lot of times this comes to a feeling of accomplishment, of overcoming odds and besting a system you've learned inside and out.  Some of the most lingering experiences in the medium, however, are those that give you a sense of existing in their world.  I don't just mean like how Red Dead Redemption 2 makes you exist in its world by swamping you with chores and minor, inconvenient manners of "play" that do little to actually make the game more fun or engaging.  Rather, it's the minor aspects of play, it's the the desperate gripping on the back of a colossi in Shadow of the Colossus, or holding princess Yorda's hand in Ico, or . . . untying a boy's shoes as the most annoying goose to ever exist.

You've seen the title, so you know I'm attempting to co-review Team Ico's influential classic Ico, predecessor to one of the most classic games in the video game canon Shadow of the Colossus, and the more recent Untitled Goose Game, the Switch's weird, pseudo-stealth puzzler.  This may seem incredibly strange (or even blasphemy, if you haven't played Goose Game), but I think that these two games have one particular core part that collects them in a particular design perspective: gameplay as something akin to avatar manipulation.  Specifically, Ico's button to hold Yorda's hand so you can guide her through levels, and Untitled Goose Game's buttons to duck your head, quack, grab with your mouth, or spread your wings.  There is the feeling while playing these games that you are a physical character, which in turn impresses on you a feeling of role playing.  Games like Grand Theft Auto, great as they are, give you a very loose sense of character allowing you to essentially break the fourth wall by engaging with it as a game rather than as a story with characters.  There isn't anything wrong with this, but that lingering feeling of place and person that Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Untitled Goose Game give you is something I find more and more attractive as a play more and more games.

Part of the reason I want to harp on about this is because of how it creates a unique engagement with the game in question.  Untitled Goose Game has a physicality and a whimsical art style that envelops you in its experience.  The waddle of your goose feels rather realistic, as well as the rest of the goose's detailed and expressive animations.  Whether it is spreading your wings as you run away from a broom wielding shopkeeper or the way you strain your neck in order to try and steal that rake from the gardener, the physicality of the animation feels very much like a convincing performance by an actor, something keyed in on subtly but so consistently it becomes a convincing conduit toward a more full and fulfilling engagement.  You don't feel like you are playing a game, you feel like you are a goose.  The game itself plays out like a stealth game, where your job is to sneak around a complete a to-do list of annoyances to the townspeople of this small, English village.  There is little in the way of fail states outside of having to set up your plan again in order to complete a particular entry in your to-do list.  The puzzle elements I mentioned before are in how you go about planning this.  At one point in the game, you find a little road with a shop with all of its wares out on tables and shelves, with an attentive shopkeeper wielding a broom to shoo you away if you come to close.  One of your to-do list tasks, however, is to collect a series of items and put it into a basket.  There are multiple ways of completing this, including taking items out of trash cans rather than the store itself, but one of the more effective ways I found was to grab a near by walky-talky and use it to lure the shopkeeper away.  Other methods include stealing or messing up displays to distract her while I made off with what I wanted.  The game's freeform allows you to express your inner goosey-ness to your hearts content.  Feeling so much like a goose, I would often find myself acting like a goose just to entertain myself or for a quick laugh, totally distracting myself from any of the game's tasks.  I did things like hid in a bush, give a little quack, and ducked my head out of sight when an alarmed gardener turned to see where the sound came from.  I cannot recall a game that made me so consistently giggle at my own absurdity while keeping that self conscious feeling of playing a game so far from my mind.  I've used the word engagement probably far too many times in this review as is, but it is the perfect descriptor for what I'm trying to talk about here.  It is a sense that the distance between you, the actions in the game, and the character you play as is so small it is nigh unnoticeable.  In this way, Untitled Goose Game is a master of form, even if, artistically speaking, it has virtually null to say.  And it doesn't need to say anything.

On the other hand, Ico feels as though it is saying quite a bit, even if it is far more impressionistic.  In Ico, you play as the titular character, a boy who was born with horns on his head, considered an omen by his tribesmen.  Ico is taken to a remote castle where he is placed in a jar, presumably to be tortured or to otherwise die and relieve the tribe or village he was born in from whatever misfortune he could cause them.  There is an impression of tradition here, partially in how this is mentioned to have been done before, and in that the jar you are imprisoned in is in a room lined with others.  There is a fault in your jar, however, and you are able to escape.  Knocking your head on the ground after crashing your jar, you have a quick vision of a cage dripping in dark shadow, giving you your first indication of what to look for next.  This cage turns out to be in the next room, risen high in a hollowed tower by a thick chain, containing not a darkness but a young girl.  This is Yorda, who seems older than you but not by much.  You release her from her cage and find she does not speak a language you can understand.  shadow creatures rise out of the ground and attempt to take her away from you, but you fight them off with a stick and begin the game proper.  The game, in summation, has you venturing through the castle, solving puzzles and using the games physics to climb and explore.  Your ultimate goal is to get Yorda out of this castle prison, as well as yourself.  Every area is essentially two puzzles: how do you get from point A to point B, and then how do you get Yorda from Point A to Point B, given her limited traversal skills.  What sounds like a glorified, full length escort mission is much closer to a combination of Myst and the original Tomb Raider.  Exploration, puzzle solving, and platforming are the core gameplay loops, but cinching these together into something cohesively meaningful is the affect of Yorda.  A button is dedicated to calling her over to you, and when she is close enough this button holds her hand.  Having this physicality between yourself and a virtual character is a unique connection that gives Yorda a kind of compassionate weight many other escort characters do not have.  Early on, it becomes obvious that Yorda cannot make it far without your help to boost her up a ledge, or catch her hand during a long jump and pull her up the other side.  The fact you cannot die outside of great falls also makes you far more gun-ho about jumping into coded danger in order to save her, the truly vulnerable one.  All of these little affects cause an emotional resonance between you and Yorda.  Likewise, little details throughout make her more personable.  Things like save points being glowing couches you two can relax on together add a fourth wall breaking surrealism that feeds into something rather nostalgic and vulnerable.  With all of its mystery and mythological implications, Ico feels primarily about a boy and girl slightly older than him, about how the boy tries to pull this girl through an adventure she isn't equipped to handle, and how the two build a connection.  The imagery of these two sitting on a couch together immediately made me think of myself sitting on a couch, and doing that then made me feel something very personal toward Yorda, not like I was literally sitting on the couch with her, but that there was a time and place, sometime younger where perhaps I fancied someone and wanted to share some piece of media with them, and while we were on this grand adventure together in reality we were simply sitting on a couch, sharing a moment.  These touches don't build towards any concise meaning, but I don't think that that matters much.  Art does not have to be hammering down some specific political or moral point in order to be meaningful, sometimes it can impress the nonverbal minutia between moments, the subtle, ephemeral connections that exists in slivers of timelessness and the echoing affect those can have on the subconscious.  In the end, Yorda saves Ico, and experiencing that predictable switch in dynamics isn't so much expected because it was basic, but because it was an echo of something felt.  We don't feel Yorda to be so helpless as to have no autonomy, but as someone we want to see express that autonomy, and she does when we are in trouble.  It is the punctuation on a series of impressions on connection, on companionship, and the importance therein.

There is a valley between the artistic significance between these two games, but the feeling of connection between player and avatar are incredibly similar, even if they are applied to divergent effects.  While it is easy to set Ico on a pedestal for its emotional impact and artful execution, Untitled Goose Game utilizes similar theory towards its design in order to elevate something small and simple into something fun and memorable.  In the search for greater and more useful theories on game design and their affect on the player, my money is largely on this sense of interaction, that it is one aspect of game design form that has the most impact, and the most versatility, because it is part most game-like, most impressionistic, most lingering, and the aspect most likely to affect those well traveled in artistic abstracts and those equally just looking for a game to play.  Stanley Kubrick talked of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove that there were only a few people who directly identified with abstracts in such a way that they would have an effect on them, that what truly affected most people was their emotional reaction or impression of a film or work of art.  He said that the truck driver and the Cambridge student were vastly different in education and intellectual integrity, but that emotionally they were far more alike, and that it was here he wanted to strike.  He wanted people who never thought of science, the evolution of man, the possibilities of the cosmos, and the concept of God to consider these concepts and their interplay through 2001, and he wanted people to think of the true horror of what people being in charge of nuclear weapons really consisted of with Dr. Strangelove, and he wanted to do it in a way that was understood by everyone on an immediate, emotional level.  So too could games be expressed, and while film used primarily shot composition, mise en scène, and music to create these impressions, games can utilize control and avatar-player relationships (although I cannot stress that framing, music, and mise en scène are also incredibly important to games)  to create impressions, one that affects the intellectuals and hobbyists alike.


Untitled Goose Game
 8.5


ICO
9.5   

[Game Review] Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid

Note: This review may contain spoilers.


If you ever wondered why the genre was called Metroidvania, look no further.  Neither of these games are the first in their respective series, but both would become the icons from which all subsequent entries would be compared to, not to speak of the genre at large.  Super Metroid in particular casts such a shadow on the entire genre and Nintendo in general that it has entered the upper echelon of the gaming canon.  The genre reached most of its defining characteristics with these two games, with Super Metroid setting the standard for "show don't tell" in teaching game mechanics and mechanics as exploration keys, and Symphony of the Night integrating Action-RPG mechanics and tight combat that, if you were me, should give you distinct Dark Souls vibes.  It is important to note that these games were released in separate console generations, but most of their comparisons and differences are generational independent.  Their attempts toward the genre take different philosophies of fun and challenge, which is interesting to recognize given their relationship to one another.  Despite being the cornerstones and the namesake of an entire genre, there is a lot that differentiates these two games.



Both games are incredibly strong in what is often considered one of the primary tenants of the genre: exploration.  Metroidvania games can be described as sidescrolling exploration games, where areas are blocked off by requiring powerups in order to reach them.  This relationship between exploration and powerup collection is the loop that Metroidvanias are built upon.  Tall ledges requiring double jump, or closely paralleled walls for wall jumping usually populate every game in the genre, from these games to the more recent Hollow Knight.  However, while Super Metroid is entirely dependent on this relationship, Symphony of the Night uses it sparingly.  From the outset, most of the castle in Castlevania is explorable.  Powerup based exploration is often relegated to nooks and crannies hiding gear or minor health and heart upgrades (which are, counter intuitively, different things), things which can sincerely help you in your run through the final stretches of the game, but otherwise can feel a bit of a let down.  One of the most bizzarre aspects of Castlevania is in how much of the collectibles are either incredibly minor, unnecessary, or strange.  Super Metroid felt methodical in its secrets and powerup distribution, having only as much as it needed and paced out in a very consistent way.  Finding a secret wall to bomb in Metroid either led to you upgrading your energy or missiles, or otherwise gave you some kind of powerup that would significantly change the game, such as the x-ray power.  In Castlevania, you can often find yourself finding powerups (called "relics" here) without having a clue how it could ever come in handy.  Several of these relics can have some secret uses later on for the experimental (such as the Soul of a Wolf, that lets you change into a short, low-damage and slow wolf which grants some access to some secret I never managed to find), but for the average player these are going to be unnecessary.  Castlevania's philosophy to much of its loot is "here is something strange, play around with it", and it can be incredibly fun.  Experimenting with different combinations of stuff could yield interesting and bizarre results (pro tip: towards the end of the game, equip the Alucard shield and the shield rod, attack twice with the shield rod quickly and watch what happens -- but it may make the game far too easy), making exploration rewarding in a somewhat odd way.  Likewise, spells can be bought from the store but technically their moveset required to cast them (often some combo-type sequence of D-pad inputs and the attack button, much like a fighting game) can be accessed immediately so long as you know the inputs required to cast them.  It's an interesting mechanic to have moves that the game gates information on, but rewards those replaying the game.  Super Metroid does something similar with its wall jumps, which are always accessible to the player but somewhat difficult to pull off, and are taught to the player roughly mid-way through the game by watching some docile creatures repeatedly pull them off.  Knowing this moveset can allow you to sequence break the game on subsequent playthroughs.  Super Metroid's sense of exploration is much more direct, always coding certain locked areas to power ups found later.  Backtracking becomes something fun as you slowly find how Super Metroid's surprisingly intricate and large maps interconnect with one another as you gain more and more powerups.   Every new area opened up is also another opportunity to find more powerups.  Since powerups in Metroid are tied to exploration (and thus platforming), exploration also makes platforming and movement more fun.  Double jump, high jump, boost-run, ball form, and ball bomb are all powerups that allow for you to find more secrets, add more options for combat, and generally expand your verbiage and therefore engagement with the game.

Combat feels incredibly different between the two games, and is the notable dimension where Castlevania has the upper hand on Metroid.  Metroid has more than serviceable combat, allowing you several missiles or charge shots and shooting to take out enemies as you platform your way around the eerie alien world, but it often feels at odds with the controls.  Switching between weapons requires hitting the SELECT button, which is incredibly awkward for split-second decision making during combat.  Not only this, but weapons are cycled through, which means if you want the first weapon but you are on the second, you could have to cycle through around five other weapons before selecting the one you want.  Castlevania's combat is one of the ways in which it reminds me of Dark Souls.  The game feels built around your ability to engage enemies, down to making most exploration rewarding in combat directly through weapons and armor finds rather than with further exploration.  You have a dodge back button mapped to triangle that allows you to duck away from enemy swings.  There are weapons with different damage outputs but also different attack speeds, requiring experimentation to truly discover the contextual use of everything.  All of this feeds back into the combat loop.  One of the best feelings throughout Castlevania is when you discover a new boss, of which it has many.  There are some 32 bosses in Castlevania (for comparison, Dark Souls has 22), and they only get wonderfully more strange as you go (looking at you, floating ball of corpses).  Bosses provide the greatest reward for tightening up your combat skills, and act as locks to different wings of the castle.

As great and fun as Castlevania's combat is, the true masterclass of not only the genre, but of game design, comes from Super Metroid.  Super Metroid is incredibly designed to put you in a position to learn its mechanics yourself.  This is evident early on in the game, where you are dropped down a pit you cannot get out of.  The pit is relatively small, and there is a very shortlist of verbs you can try to get out of it, one of which is wall jumping which you haven't learned how to do yet (but benefits you on a second run -- another great facet of its design).  The verb the game wants you to do is drop a bomb on the ground.  There is no indication that the ground is breakable, yet it breaks away and opens you up to the new area, teaching you a new exploration technique that you will use for the rest of the game.  After every single new power up acquired through the game, Metroid will do this, trapping you in an area that requires a complete understanding of the power up in order to get out of.  When receiving the space jump, which allows for higher jumps, you'll immediately think that now you can jump up that long fall you took to get to the power up.  What you'll find, however, is that the ledge is just out of reach.  In order to reach it, you must double jump, one of the less obvious space jump mechanics.  Rarely is anything ever spelled out for you in the game, and when it does so it is by showing docile creatures enacting the mechanics of the power up, and to my memory only happens twice and with particularly obtuse mechanics.  

If Super Metroid set the groundwork for tutorializing and power ups as keys to exploration, Castlevania did the same for the genre's combat and opened the door for RPG elements.  While different games of the genre take different pieces from these games, the best of them take from both (Hollow Knight being a prime example of exploration, power ups, and tight combat with lots of boss battles).  Rare is it that a game creates a genre, and even rarer for two games simultaneously to create and influence one's creation.  Both games hold up incredibly well today, with little to no calibration needed for your modern gaming brain to 90s gaming brain in order to play.  Not only that, but both games are easily accessible now, with Castlevania Symphony of the Night being on PS4 and Super Metroid available on the Switch's SNES app.  So your excuses for not experiencing two classics are next to nil at this point, and I couldn't recommend them more.



Castlevania Symphony of the Night
9.5

Super Metroid
10  

[Game Review] Bloodborne

Note: spoilers below.


Bloodborne plays a neat trick in its opening areas: it plays into your memory of classic horror stories.  The game opens with you undergoing a blood transfusion, the operation that converts you into a Hunter.  Hunters have a mysterious past at this point in the game, and all you know is that the blood in your veins will heal you of your unnamed affliction, and that now your duties are to participate in the Hunt.  The Hunt has happened before, although you won't learn about its history until much later, and you are sent out into the world to kill as many monsters as you can.  Some monsters, the game tells you, don't look like monsters.  They look like people, poisoned by "The Blood", damned to become werewolf-like monsters if given enough time.  Killing them can drop blood vials, the same blood coursing through your veins and the veins of these monsters you are killing, and using them will quickly heal you.  It's werewolf/vampire iconography, enhanced by being framed by Victorian style and architecture.  It feels so by the numbers, in fact, that you could be forgiven for thinking that this game was initially disappointing story-wise when compared to the lore-heavy existentialism of Dark Souls.  At about the halfway point, you realize the ruse:  this isn't a story about monsters or beasts, about campy werewolves and vampires, but rather that of Gods, of Lovecraftian horrors and Zarathustra-type pursuits, all of which have gone horribly wrong and led to the current state of affairs.  The Hunt is an attempt at clean up from years of experimenting with these Gods.  These experiments were meant to progress man to a higher state, but it resulted in a horrible scourge on the Yharnam public.

The story (as far as I can understand it) starts with a group of people discovering the Chalice Dungeons, ancient rogue-like dungeons that alluded to ancient cosmological beings called The Great Ones.  Most of these Great Ones long since ascended from earth, but one remained.  It was kept alive and its blood was taken and experimented on and used as a healing remedy as well as being thought as the key to human evolution.  Experimentation led to dark results, people going mad or turning into beasts, and a schism ripped apart the "scientific" community.  One half believed that it was through blood experimentation that they could find the future evolution of man, while the other believed in the power of insight.  Insight, in this case, is somewhat vague.  How does one find insight in the Great Ones?  Each Great One born had a Great One umbilical chord, and using them was thought to give insight (you can imagine how that works; spoiler: poorly).  The blood-activists created a hierarchy in the Church of Healing.  It seemed to virtually rule the city of Yharnam, being the source of the healing blood.  When a sickness ripped through Old Yharnam (a sickness heavily hinted as having come from the blood), the Healing Church swooped in to save the day, placing themselves as an invaluable power in this society (this being the first Hunt).  The fact the blood was turning people into beasts was a well kept secret for a long time, helped by developing a secret police force called the Hunters to wipe out those in danger of turning to beasts.  The Healing Church created several other organizations, each of which would carry out their own experiments and slowly separate from the Church's control, always in favor of looking for their own ideas about human progress -- or, their own striving for Godhood.

Bloodborne takes a different perspective of Dark Souls' existential exploration.  Rather than considering life and death and usurping the Gods, Bloodborne wants to confront the horrors of the Gods, the horror of striving for incredible power and the detriment that desire has on a person and on society.  If Dark Souls was introspective and considering Gods as a concept and its blanketing of human flaws, Bloodborne wants to think what religion and the striving for God-like status does.  It feels like a perfect thematic companion to Dark Souls rather than covering the same ground.

That said, I'm not sure Bloodborne's grouping with the Soulsborne series is totally fair.  Most notably in Bloodborne's take on combat.  Initially, the game feels like a faster version of other Souls games, but once the first mandatory boss is encountered, it is quickly shown that there are some key differences in gameplay.  Father Gascoigne is a tough first boss, roughly like the Taurus Demon in Dark Souls, but with the quit rate in new players closer to the Gargoyles.  Father Gascoigne acts as a check to make sure you have been paying attention to the new mechanics in Bloodborne, punishing new players and Souls veterans alike for not keeping up.  Dodging will get you far in this fight, but his ability to counter you with his gun means that your better option is to learn how to parry him, one of the most important moves in Bloodborne.  Father Gascoigne, like the player, is a Hunter, and thus has mostly the same moveset, so being punished by him is also teaching you how to punish, a smart design decision so early in the game (as frustrating as it is on your first few attempts).  After Father Gascoigne, you should have learned several of the major differences between Bloodborne and the other Souls games.  Bloodborne is insanely fast, allowing quick dodges around enemies and quick attacks.  Staggering is more important here than in Souls games (until Dark Souls III), meaning hitting hard and fast is more beneficial than the cautious play of Dark Souls.  Parrying was overpowered in the original Dark Souls, and with Bloodborne's emphasis on parrying, the same is true here.  Parrying can often times neuter bosses if they have slow enough attacks, especially the last two bosses.  Bloodborne's biggest difference outside of the speed of it is that the gear is no longer that different.  There are three or so main weapons, with some variants outside of that, but generally replaying the game with different weapons is only going to net one or two different playthroughs, rather than the dozen or so possible with Dark Souls' options.  Likewise, gear is virtually unimportant, with only minor defensive bonuses netted to you for experimenting with them.  I didn't change my armor (which is really just coats and hats, so not "armor" per se) except in the first area, where I found a set that was never statistically outclassed for the next 20-or-so hours of the game.

Without much to look forward to gear-wise, exploration had a bit of a mixed presentation.  Usually in a Souls game exploration had the chance of netting a game-changing weapon, piece of armor, or some other upgrade element that increased Estus Flask charges or healing capabilities.  Healing is no longer through Estus Flask type mechanics, but rather blood vials, which are looted from corpses or bought at a store.  Certain areas are scant for enemies that drop blood vials, requiring backtracking in order to properly tackle the boss (side note: rather than do this, I would often try bosses multiple times without any possibility of healing, which turned into a very fun challenge, even when it ended with me giving in to backtracking only to kill the boss on my first subsequent try).  The blood vial system does something smart in its design despite its obvious weakness by allowing you to maintain your single run longer than in most Souls games without needing to go back to a bonfire (or, in this case, a Hunter's Lamp).  Exploration, then, becomes this increasing intensity as your blood echos (this game's souls) collect to dangerously high levels.  Areas are often sprawling in many directions with nooks and crannys to look for levers, elevators, or wholly new and large side areas.  Exploration's biggest reward is in finding side areas and the rising tension of not wanting to return to the Hunter's Dream to cash in your echos.  Re-exploring areas also becomes more adventurous as the game goes given you are likely to have more Insight by the time you return, which is Bloodborne's Humanity.  It can be spent at a particular store or for summoning help at boss doors, but if you let it collect, it will slowly begin to spawn new and unique enemies, or modifying previous enemies to make them more difficult.  Likewise, it changes the presentation of enemies, giving them grotesque clusters of eyes or other Lovecraftian traits.  It is incredibly fun, but it may be more person-to-person on whether you will enjoy it or not, given it seems to be exploration for exploration's sake (which, disclaimer: I absolutely love).

The thing about all of the above is that it is easy to overlook any issues because Bloodborne just feels so damn good.  Playing it is smooth and quick and you always feel as though you are making very sudden decisions with combat because many mistakes can be made up for by either staggering an enemy with a heavy attack, or by reclaiming health with Bloodborne's unique system of allowing you to hit quickly for health before your health bar shrinks after being hit.  The Chalice Dungeons, rogue-like dungeons that, while feeling very samey, allow you to play with Bloodborne's combat and ended up being very fun for me, although I've read enough to know that these dungeons are easily one of the most polarizing part of the game.  Bloodborne, because of how fun it is to control, is one of the best entry points into the Souls series.  Despite not having much in the way of replayability through different builds, I can't help but toy with the idea of doing a second run.  The world is so immersive and beautifully rendered, and the controls so tight that I look forward to returning to the horrors of Yharnam.



9.5