Epic Yarn is Epic Fun

OK, I know I'm taking a while on Zelda II, got a little involved in quite a few other games. It's coming along though, I'm about 75% done with it right now. However, I did pick up Epic Yarn a couple days ago and really want to share my thoughts on it.

I am in absolute love with this game. It's easy, it's short, but god damn is it fun. While you can't die it is reasonably challenging to get gold rankings in a few of the stages.

Why is this game so good? There's quite a few reasons so let's just run down them in no particular order:

The Yarn effects are amazing. Seriously, praising graphics on a Wii game? Heck yes, this game is gorgeous, plain and simple. Watching the yarn water line fly up as you jump out of the water, or watching the yarn clouds get blown around by a gust of wind is just incredibly impressive, and the developers were very clever with their yarn effects, such as yarn getting yanked out to create shifting sand. This is the prettiest game I've seen stylistically since Okami.

The controls are incredibly smooth. They're great, the only downside is that you can't aim your whip down, but even that isn't a big deal. Kirby has a nice sized pool of moves to draw from. He can dash, slow fall, whip, throw, and ground pound, and all of these moves are utilized well to get through the game. Kirby also has plenty of transformations that are all very fun to use.

The levels are just fun. You aren't really playing to win, your playing to see what the developers thought of next. It's surprisingly fun though, and you'll constantly be thinking "Oh, that's so cool!" as you go through the game.

The two player option is well implemented. This game is two player in the same way NSMBW is four player. The levels are identical, it just adds the extra players in. What's great about this though is that you can switch at the beginning of every level either to multi or single player, and unlike NSMBW everything still counts in two player. The game never says "Oh you can't do this since your not playing alone".

Prince Fluff is just cool. 'nuff said.

The bad guy is a yarn Mexican with a magical sock necklace. That's just crazy enough to be awesome. Also his name is an awesomely lame pun.

The picture at the top of this post is actually in the game. No really, that's in the opening cutscene.

American Kirby is finally secure with himself and doesn't feel the need to act hardcore.

The game is just the right length for what it tries to be. Like I said, the game is all about seeing what the developers did, so it's only about 10 hours to do absolutely everything. Which means there's enough to see all whole lot of ideas, but the game isn't so long it stagnates. Some people may find it short, but I don't think it would have been half as good if it got dragged out. Maybe just one more world would have been nice, but I'm glad it's not too long.

So there you have it. Is the game perfect? No, I really do wish is was a fair bit more challenging, but it's still a damn fun game where the good far, far outweighs the bad. But if you think 10 hours is a little short, then go ahead and give it a rent. If you do really love it though, go ahead and pick it up, Good Feel needs your support to make more gems like this.

A few thoughts on a few games.

Well then, there's a couple games that I got recently that I feel I should give my thoughts on.

Ys Seven: Holy Shit! Yes, Yes, Yes!

Dear god I love the Ys games, and usually I have to go through some kind of fancy import and patch ritual to get them running in my goddamn language. I still hold the belief that if you combined VI's story, weapon system, and super attacks with Oath in Felghana's battle, magic, and power-up gem systems you'd have a hack-n-slash that would probably make it into my top 10, maybe even top 5.

As it stands I think Ys VII may be my new favorite game in the series. It's not the combination I was hoping for, but it's pretty damn awesome. It may make my top 10 but we'll have to wait and see because it is a pretty tough list to contend with. It's not without it's problems of course, but the good generally outweighs the bad.

Let's start with the bad first though for kicks. You can't jump, which doesn't seem like it would be a big issue, but after being able to jump in the last few games it's a bit awkward for them just to remove it, luckily the Dodge maneuver works well and after a bit of gameplay you won't have a problem with not being able to jump anymore. This game also marks the first time Adol's in a party. 3 members strong at any given time, it's quite strange to have AI partners following you around, but it's nice to see Dogi in action, and their different strengths are taken far more advantage of than Ys VI's tragically underutilized elemental system.

A spot where this game falters without a counter argument though is the opening. It quite honestly sucks. They give you a tutorial on every little damn thing and they take their sweet time setting up a story while you're stuck wandering around town with nothing to do. Now I know I'm going to be called a hypocrite later since Majora's Mask is one of my favorite openings, but the difference is that the entire game world exists around Clock Town. It is the single most important place in the game, and the game is built around side quests to reach the same length as OoT and many of them stem from Clock Town. The game requires and wants you (the player) to form attachments to all the people of the town. By contrast Ys is a damn hack-n-slash RPG, let me get to the action, Ys stories are cool and all, but it's the game and the music that everyone is there for. Don't just dangle it out of our reach for 20 minutes.

The final issue I have with the game is the graphics. They suck. Really really bad. Now everything is a low-poly model. This is as opposed to the fantastic sprites and backgrounds of the previous games with passable polygonal backgrounds and boss models for the time in VI and OiF. Also the whole art direction of the previous games was fantastic, where as it seems a little less so in Ys Seven. The bosses are a little lackluster, the enemies are a little generic, and the weapons aren't anything  fancy. It's kind of disappointing really. I haven't played Ys Origin though, but I've heard that the sprite work is still nice even if the art direction is a little lackluster.

Now onto the good. The gameplay is fantastic. It's fantastically paced with your characters moving quick but not so much that you can't keep track, the combo system works well since you can chain regular attacks into skills and cancel into dodges, the skill system is good too forcing you to balance which skills to use and when to charge up for a focus attack without being too restricting, and the bosses are fun to fight and challenging as always. You also have to go out collecting herbs, metals, other plant parts and enemy body parts in order to improve your weapons and armor. So yeah, this game is kind of like Monster Hunter... only it isn't boring as shit. The only real issue I have with the game is that the Super Attacks you get take waaaaaaay too long to charge up. I wouldn't mind them being a bit weaker if I could use them more than once a boss fight, maybe twice if I have a full charge going in.

So for those of you still wondering: It's Monster Hunter meets, oh I don't know, Lunar Knights, and it is freaking glorious.

Second game: Ultimate Knight Windom XP

Sure does look exciting now doesn't it? Well it is, but it's not worth the $20. Why? Just go get the prequely prototypey thing Bootfighter Windom XP SP2. Trust me, you're not missing out on much. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with Ultimate Knight, but I'm a giant robot whore. It only adds three new mechs, the ability to power up specific categories of your mechs, the ability to change their colors, and an arcade mode. Oh and a new soundtracks, but that's actually pretty good. Problems? Well the power-up thing screws with the balance, the Arcade mode kind of sucks but you have to do it to unlock all the mechs, and the game hasn't fixed any of it's problems. The sound is still kind of glitchy, Blitz Tactics mode is still coded like a monkey took a wrench to it and lags like crap, and the gameplay hasn't improved one bit, all it did was replace the bars with some shiny new ones. Bootfighter's gameplay is fun, but it's still incredibly unpolished. The knockdown system is broken, the mechs could stand to give you a little more control over their movement, and it's way too easy to get stun-locked. 

They really need to fix these issues if they want the game to be worth buying over just downloading Bootfighter. You're selling the game for money now, the quality has to match.

The Legend Begins

Felt like doing something simple

OK, sorry this took so long, been playing other games, moving, going to school, going to work. You know, life. I actually finished Zelda one about a week and a half ago and already started on Zelda two a bit, though I've also gotten really into the Banjo games again, maybe I'll do a review of those too.

So, The Legend of Zelda, what can I say? It's fun, really fun, and no matter how much criticism I give it that's what's important. Even when I was dying, even when I was astounded by the crazy prices of some things, even when my Big Shield was getting eaten and Wizzrobes were shredding me like a cheese grater I was still having fun.

Released in 1986 as the big launch title for the Famicom Disc System, and in 1988 in the US as the first game to have a battery backup allowing players to perform the task now taken for granted, saving your game. The quakes sent out by this game had to have been huge, and I only wish I was alive at the time, I know how I felt about saving your game when I first played this one since it was my first game that allowed saving, but it probably wasn't nearly the same.

First file select screen ever. For the record, in my file my name was Zilla (my Zelda 2's is Gamera), and my death count was around 30.

So anyways, this game is a classic, and an important milestone in modern gaming history, but how does it stack up? Seeing as it was my first time playing it in about 14 years my memory of it was fuzzy at best. Well, when I first turned it on, I picked up the sword, and then proceeded to get totally lost.

Yep, it's one of those games.

I eventually found two pieces of heart and then stumbled my way into Level 3, which I quickly exited and then remembered where Level 1 was.

Before dungeons though, let's talk about the overall game itself. If you're going to play Zelda 1 and you're only experience with the 2-D games is A Link to the Past or any of the Gameboy ones you need to immediately throw out everything you know. For starters, Zelda 1 moves on a psuedo-grid, meaning only four directions, and Link only stabs, he doesn't slash across a quarter of the screen. You have no idea how difficult that makes the game in comparison to the others. On top of that, Link moves relatively slowly, there are a lot of enemies on most screens, you can only block attacks while standing still, gathering rupees takes incredibly long amounts of time unless you get lucky or know the trick to Money Making Game, things are expensive, you can only carry two full heal potions at once and they're expensive to buy, Arrows drain from your rupee supply, you can only carry 8 bombs (though you can get up to 16 if you, you guessed it, pay a high amount), bombable things have no indication you can bomb them, and bosses are usually the easiest part of a dungeon, to the point where you fight three of the level 2 boss in level 3.

And yet you're surprisingly not screwed. Turns out all Dodongos dislike smoke.

And despite, or perhaps because of all that, the game is amazingly fun and charming. Unlike later Zelda games cash is never really useless, the challenge is real, but it doesn't feel like an issue, and combat is the main focus of the game.

The reason the challenge never becomes overwhelming in this game, is the same reason the lack of challenge can become rather tedious in the later games, and it comes from one brilliant design choice. No matter how many times you die every life gains you progress. Any doors you opened stay open, any items you got you keep, any keys you got you keep, any rupees are kept. If you die in a dungeon a few times you can just leave, go grab the blue ring or Magical Sword, or a potion and then run back in and try again. Everything will be there just the way you left it. This means no matter how challenging it gets, you never lose, you just need to dust yourself off and keep going, and with saving you can take a break and come back to it later.

So I keep talking about the challenge, and I talked about the restricted movement and limited potions, but why else is it challenging? Simply put, the regular enemies. Some of them are tough, really tough, and rooms are swamped with them. Examples:

This is a Blue Darknut. It can appear in groups of up to I believe eight. It takes several hits to kill, it can only be hit from the side or back, it likes to chase you, it moves faster than you, it does multiple hearts of damage, and it is often fought in claustrophobic obstacle heavy rooms where you NEED to kill all of the Darknuts to progress. If you don't have your sword beams then these guys, while not impossible, or freaking tough. Good luck with that

These are Wizzrobes. They teleport or move invincibly, they shoot attacks that do lots of damage and they come in fairly large groups. Their attacks require you to either move quickly or stand still to not die, and they can only be blocked with a big shield. They are often paired with:

Like Likes. These guys eat your big shield if you didn't know. It's never a good idea to stand still OR  move haphazardly around a Like Like. Good luck with that.

This is Ganon. He's a boss, not a regular enemy though I'm sure you knew that. I'm just mentioning him because in this game Ganon is invisible while you fight him. Good luck with that.

So yeah, Zelda is hard (although Zelda 2 is so far tougher than I remember it), and it's some of the most fun I've had with a game in the past few months. I've been playing plenty of great games so it's strange isn't it? I wasn't playing easy games at all so the challenge isn't the reason, but it was just so unexpectedly difficult due to an unfamiliarity with the controls. I was having an easier time with Ninja Gaiden. The reason I had fun with it though, is the simplicity. The game starts right away, and kicks you into the adventure. No opening cutscene, just some text scroll if you wait. No bullshit training level, no stupid scenes when you enter an area, no loading screens, nothing bogging it down, and the game comes out all the better for it in a gaming world populated with overemphasis on garnish.

So I'm going to have to give Zelda one a Play. You don't have to play it all the way through, but if you haven't played it yet you do need to get off your butt and see what gaming is like without all the fancy stuff over top. Don't get me wrong, that stuff has its place, definitely, and in the later games I'm definitely going to start going over the strength of the intro and story, but every once in a while you just need to embrace the simplicity.

For the record:
1) I didn't beat Second Quest. Darknut's in the second dungeon? Guys that take away your heart containers? No thanks.
2) I was playing this old school with my Top Loader, and trust me, I tried it on an emulator but the NES controller really does make a difference.

So, see you next time.

The Great Zelda Retrospective: Intro

I'll probably end up making a logo using this.

Yeah, it might seem strange talking about Zelda multiple posts in a row, but hey, I got it on the mind for some reason.

Anyways, The Legend of Zelda is one of the most influential series in history, and the waves it's caused can be felt in many games today. So, I'm going to play through and give a rundown of every game in the series (which will obviously take a really long time) except for Four Swords (due to not having someone to play it with), Four Swords Adventure (because my friend sold his copy, maybe if I get my hands on another copy when the time comes), and the CDI games (they're really expensive, and I don't feel like paying for a CDI and them. They ain't worth it).

I won't be giving them any sort of numbered rating system (because numbered ratings are pointless, rant for another time), but I will give them a rating of Play or Don't Play if you're new to the series and haven't played them already. Let's face it, a couple games in the series, while still playable and fun, are really showing their age and won't appeal to a new gamer.

Anyways, expect the first game's review to pop up sometime in the next several weeks (I'm really busy right now, but hopefully it'll ease up).

At least I won't be going into this painful experience.

Ocarina of Time is one of the best games ever, but it also sucks.

Yes, This game right here.

First and foremost I'll get this out of the way: Ocarina of Time is a fantastic game both taken along with and without it's place in history. In this article I'm merely trying to explain how both sides of the spectrum look at this game and how they both need to change. This argument could easily be applied to any other "Best game ever" so apply as need be, especially to Final Fantasy VII and Super Mario 64 because they have the exact same problem as OoT.

Now then, I'm going to tell you something that seems rather tangential at first, but really isn't. When gaming started designers were still trying a whole bunch of new things that had never been tested before and games themselves were still constantly evolving and improving. You'll rarely find a platformer fan who will claim the old arcade Donkey Kong is the best platformer ever made, and likewise you won't find people claiming Galaga  or Space Invaders is the best shooter, Akalabeth is the best RPG, or Karate Champ is the best fighting game. Those people are out there, but you understand what I'm saying. Anyways, by the time the NES, SNES, Genesis, and computers of the Apple II and beyond came around developers had been working with games for many years and had a lot of development experience under their belts. That's why many games that can pop up on a "best of all time list" and many of the most recognizable and enduring series came about in that decade. Series such as Super Mario Bros., Zelda, Ultima, Prince of Persia, Ninja Gaiden, Megaman, Metroid, Kirby, Castlevania, and so on and so forth all came from that period of time.

But then something happened. Technology evolved in such away that wireframe graphics, Mode-7/ Super Scaler, and first-person turn based dungeon crawlers weren't the only way to make 3-D games. Textured polygons started showing up and being used in 2-D games before eventually making their way to games that were fully able to render things along the Z-axis. This was a huge change for gaming as a whole, and it's hard to imagine not having 3-D games at this point. There's no denying that the ability to make 3-D games has improved gaming tremendously, even if your favorite games are still 2-D or 2.5-D (many of mine are). On the other hand, nearly everything can be a double-edged sword, and 3-D was no exception.

Gone were those years of experience. Sure everything still applied to 3-D gaming, but there are so many more variables and problems at work that it was like starting from scratch. Allowing people to move in three dimensions meant everything had just become exponentially more complex. A few genres got off easy, RPG's still played the same so they merely had to focus on how they wanted to do the visuals, and forced scrolling shooters only had to change the forced scroll, from right or up, to into the screen. However, other genres had to figure everything out the hard way.

This is one of Ocarina of Time's greatest strengths, but also the place of a flaw. Because 3-D gaming was so new OoT was the first game I can think of to give a semi-free floating camera with a button to recenter it behind the character, and if it wasn't the first, is the the one that popularized it. Earlier games had either had the camera locked behind the character (ala, Megaman Legends and third person shooters in general), locked in a specific direction (Crash Bandicoot), or left to it's own free form devices with limited player control (Super Mario 64). Ocarina of Time was also the first game to have a lock-on combat system allowing you two very distinct ways to fight, a mechanism that is still copied with virtually no change to this very day.

Yes I took these images from Wikipedia. I can't capture it myself, and open source means no chance of copyright infringeme- Er I mean, Z-Targeting was crazy innovative!

Ocarina of Time also used the flexibility of three dimensions and polygons too their fullest giving you a large list of sword attacks and dodge moves to spruce up combat a whole lot from the previous 2-D outings and give you a whole new meaning to the word "control".

Yet look at it now, without taking any of those "firsts" into mind. The camera, while still generally good, acts up occasionally, notably while climbing on vines or in very enclosed environments like one of the block puzzles in the forest temple that immediately comes to mind. It's not bad, but it definitely shows that the camera still needed a little tweaking that only could have come with more experience. Likewise, for all those movements and sword attacks there's almost nothing in the way of combos, and the differences between the vertical slash, horizontal slash, and stab really hardly matter since no enemy really takes advantage of them. Sub-weapons and the sword are only ever used in relaxed succession (one to open them up, one to attack), never in combination or requiring precise timing of a switch. The puzzles are also relatively easy and generally only ever frustrating because they're time consuming not difficult (I'm looking at you, Water Temple) Take all that into account and the game tends to be pitifully easy compared to other Zelda games which, with the exception of the first, aren't known to be particularly difficult anyways.

Once again, I still think it's a fantastic game, and I'm not disputing it's place in history. However, what I am saying is both the lovers and the haters need to shut the hell up. Two paragraphs up gives reasons to the haters, and the one after that is for the lovers. Look, there's no denying it's a good game, but there's also no denying it doesn't have flaws. If you still think it's the best game ever, or it's your favorite game of all time that's OK. I was born too late so I didn't get the same nostalgia bomb others did, but I understand the message Ocarina of Time gives. The fact that Link goes into the future and then looks back at the places from his past seeing how much they changed for the worse shows a fear about growing up and a reflection on childhood that most gamers who grew up with the NES got touched by. At the same time, the fact that Link got to grow up and fulfill his duties while still retaining his childhood innocence reached out to many younger gamers who were just starting the hobby. I was in the middle of those two groups, the age of the latter, but I had started gaming at 3 with and NES, and was introduced to the SNES and Genesis one year later with the Saturn, PS1, and N64 a year and half after that. I already had experience with games and Link's story wasn't really all that new to me from the child perspective, but I hadn't grown up and needed to reflect yet either.

What I'm trying to say is that games that really have an emotional connection with people are the games that deserve to be considered great, whether it's an emotional connection through life experience, or just a game that is sheer fun enough to cause everything else to drop away while playing it. The games that can do both, like the following two for me or OoT for many people are why many people call them the "Best game ever". I personally think the greatest game of all time is Shadow of the Colossus, a story of a man choosing his own path in life and tackling the impossible for purely selfish reasons, to someone like me who was always being pushed into advanced classes, pushed into sports, and pushed into just about everything it was a powerful message.

Tackling the impossible indeed.

It got me to go into Competitive Marching Band as opposed to a sport, a decision I will never regret (no matter how much of a geek it makes me), and it also eventually led to me choosing to major in English despite my parents pushing for me to go into a bunch of high money making careers that I simply have no interest in. Likewise NiGHTS Into Dreams hits second place on my list for giving us a view on escapism. The story of NiGHTS is one of shy kids who realize that their escape from the world can only and should only ever be temporary but can help give them confidence to succeed in the real world. To someone like me who was incredibly shy and hesitant as well as an avid daydreamer NiGHTS Into Dreams really gave me a much needed push to live in the moment.

I bought  this and a Saturn off eBay a few years back to undo a huge mistake in my life: Selling it in the first place.

So, now comes the other end of the spectrum. To those of you who do think Ocarina of Time (or any game) is the best game ever and has absolutely no flaws, Not the regular fans, just the ones who avidly defend it as the best thing ever, YOU'RE RUINING IT FOR EVERYONE ELSE! That's right, you set the bar so high for people who are going off to play the game, and flame out anyone who thinks it isn't super special awesomely spectacular that you ruin the game for all of them. I honestly hated OoT, SM64, and FF7 for a while, downright despised them, but not the games. I hated everything about the games except for the raw games themselves, if anyone said anything good about the games I had to counter with something bad because the taste was just so bad in my mouth from fanboys being utter assholes about them.

Look, the haters of the games don't actually hate the games. Well they might, but if they do it's not just that particular game it's that entire branch of the genre. They hate the games because you all refuse to. You refuse to see any flaws in the games at all. Look, a flaw doesn't make the game worse. OoT in terms of technical execution, design, and difficulty has been one upped by other games, but when everything is taken into context it's unarguably one of the strongest ever. However, refusing any possible flaw or anyone that doesn't think it's the best game makes you a horrible person. Not everyone had the same experience you did, and therefore the flaws were more apparent to them. Either the message didn't strike the same chord with them or they're too young and they played other, better technically executed games, with the years of experience that OoT paved the way for, first so it didn't have any real impact on them. My personal favorite Zelda game is Majora's Mask, and has been since the day it came out when I got it, but I'll explain the reasons for that another time. Let's just say it's another game that had an emotional impact on me. However, I'll be the first to admit the game does have some flaws, and several love it or hate it elements (which in a way are flaws, but necessary ones). Refusing to acknowledge such flaws in your favorite game simply because it's the more commonly liked choice is why the haters of it are so steadfast and ever growing.

Also haters, sit back and figure out if you really like the game or not as the raw game itself, and if you do: Shut the hell up because you're part of the problem too. Nit picking is only making the lovers defend it harder.