Game Reviews: Metroid Prime 2 and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (2004, GameCube)

“Wait for it to start doing its spin attack. Switch to Morph Ball. Boost Ball into it while it's spinning to stun it. While it's stunned, roll between its legs, and lay a bomb on its flashing weak point. When the body is destroyed, the head flies off and starts attacking. The head will have a light or dark shield; switch to the opposite colored beam to dispel it. Then you can use a Super Missile to destroy the head.”

This is me describing how to kill a Normal Non-Miniboss Enemy in one of the late game areas of Metroid Prime 2. I swear to god every fucking enemy is like this. God forbid you design an FPS enemy where the optimal strategy is “shoot it until it dies”; it always has to be some five step process to make then enemy vulnerable, then you have a half second window to shoot them (from just the right angle, of course) and finally deal Real Actual Damage.

Of course, even with all that, many enemies take three or four Super Missiles to kill. So now every encounter takes a full minute to finish, and often they’ll put three or four of these fuckers in the same room. So of course I run past every single enemy I can, because combat is a miserable ordeal with no reward, and I’ve already been through this room seven times anyway, god fucking dammit.

Don't you dare use anything besides Super Missiles or maybe the occasional charged light/dark/annihilator beam. I can't think of an FPS with a more pathetic default gun. There's almost never a good reason to use any of the non-charged shots against enemies. I counted the number of regular beam shots an extremely piddily enemy took later on — 26 hits! What's even the point of having a beam at that point? Where are the popcorn enemies? Why is everything a painfully involved miniboss? Why do the beam combos cost so many resources when I never found a single practical use case for any of them?!

While I don’t think the combat works at all for the regular enemies, I think there’s a perverse rom hack joy to the bosses. They have all the same problems and jank as the enemies, but multiplied several times over. Every major boss is a 10+ minute encounter, and because the timing to dodge enemy attacks is much stricter here than in Prime 1, they often come down to the wire. The thing is, once you’ve beaten a boss, it’s over. And you’re generally rewarded with a cool power-up! The regular enemies are miserable because the game expects you fight them over and over for no reason. The bosses don’t have that problem.

All my most memorable moments in Prime 2 were barely scraping by at the end of the painfully long boss fights. I beat the Spider Guardian on my first try with 10 total energy to spare. If I'd taken a single additional hit, I would've died and had to start the whole grueling trial over again. The release I felt nailing each of those super-strict bomb jumps and defeating the boss was orgasmic.

The finale is epic. The Ing Emperor’s second phase is the scariest fight in the game outside maybe the Boost Guardian, and after barely scraping by that fight you still have another timed boss fight to deal with, one that’s exceptionally confusing and opaque in its execution even by this game's standards. All without any checkpoints of course. No notes, pristine conclusion.

The best thing you can say about Metroid Prime 2 is that it’s a weird, obnoxiously strict, rom hack-y sequel to Metroid Prime 1. Prime 1 was polished, streamlined, and generally pretty easy. It’s a good game that definitely called for a sequel that’s annoying in the ways Prime 2 is annoying.

Prime 2 is far too long, and the story is contrived videogame bullshit in contrast to Prime 1’s gracefully unfolding mystery. Calling it an FPS feels unfair because it invites comparisons to games where the combat is actually fun. But it has some good tunes, and in spite of (and sometimes because of) its myriad failings, it still takes you on a journey that feels substantial. There’s a catharsis to reaching its hard-won conclusion.

I definitely don’t think Retro is the best to ever do it, and I’m in no rush to revisit Prime 3. But they make games that feel like real adventures, and that’s something I’ll always appreciate.

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky (2009, DS)

Cleared the main game, special episodes, and post-game story.

This was my first Mystery Dungeon game, and it honestly kicked my ass early on. I finished the Groudon fight having exhausted every resource I’d been stockpiling, and I banged my head against the Bidoof’s Wish special episode endboss for over an hour.

After a while though, I figured out what moves worked really well, what items to stockpile for bosses (reviver, totter, and x-eye seeds), and played more tactically. My goals stopped being “get through the dungeon and beat the boss” and started being “try to win without using any reviver seeds.” Nothing gave me real trouble after the first ten hours. This is ultimately still “Baby’s First Mystery Dungeon,” which was great for me, because I’m still very inexperienced with roguelikes, and I was in the mood for a light and breezy number-go-up game.

That said, the Zero Island South dungeon is very intimidating. It’s a 99-floor dungeon that starts you at level 1, with no items, money, or teammates. It basically turns the game into a real capital R Rogue-type dungeon crawl. If I hadn’t been playing for 40 hours already, I’d probably throw myself into learning it. But after a few attempts, I’ve decided I need a break. I suspect for MD veterans, the post-game super-dungeons are the main appeal here, and the rest of the game is essentially an extended tutorial. I hope to get there someday!

Ultimately, the story and presentation were the main draw for me. It’s not hard to explain why the story is as good as it is. It’s just written like a real JRPG or VN. The story is free to do what it needs to do, instead of being incestuously beholden to series tradition like the mainline Pokémon games. It functions like a good YA novel, so the big moments can have a huge emotional impact. (The amazing soundtrack, perfectly deployed and directed, also helps.)  

It’s not just the big moments though. All the incidental character writing too worked great for me too. The game is just cute. I love all the characters, I love living in this tiny adorable world.

The main game lands great, but it doesn’t feel quite complete on its own. I think Special Episode 5 is absolutely required for the story to land the way it needs to. The main game and the last special episode are two halves of one climax, and without either one the story doesn’t feel quite finished. After having played both, I was deeply satisfied. I cried my eyes out through both finales, of course.

The special episodes are only in the Explorers of Sky version of the game, so I strongly recommend playing this version, and not Explorers of Time or Darkness. They’re maybe the most story-essential post-release content I’ve ever seen, even more than Dana’s solo dungeon in Ys VIII, and I’m a little aghast they weren’t in the original game.

The post-game story doesn’t land as well, unfortunately. I think I would’ve ultimately been just as satisfied if I’d stopped after the main game and Ep. 5. There are enough good moments for it not feel like a waste of time, but ultimately introducing three entirely new characters for the eleventh hour climax was a bad call. I just don’t care about them the way I do the established cast, and their story resolves too quickly to have any real impact. That their story comes after slogging through that awful Unown dungeon added insult to injury.

I wanted to voice that criticism, but I still can't overstate how much the main story and special eps resonated with me. I honestly feel a stronger connection to Sky than I can really put into words or justify. There’s a certain spirit to the simple, lovely story and gorgeous presentation that’s hard to pin down, something that makes me feel warm in my heart. I think that essence is why it still has such devoted fans over a decade later.

Sky was a fantastic introduction to Pokémon Mystery Dungeon and Mystery Dungeon in general. I’m excited to play Shiren and other roguelike-adjacent retro games, and for the first time in ten years I’m excited about Pokémon. I can’t wait to play the other PMD games.

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: SeaBed and Anthology of the Killer

SeaBed (2017, PC) (Itch.io, Steam)

In terms of the intensity and depth of the emotional response it engendered in me, SeaBed compares neatly with The House in Fata Morgana. It takes a completely different, much quieter and subtler path to get there, obviously. Fata Morgana gets there with the most hard hitting melodrama possible. SeaBed gets there through countless quiet moments, all working in concert to slowly weave a spell over you without you even realizing.

As a text game dev, I deeply appreciate the presentation. The whole story is told through VA-less NVL-mode walls of text, borrowed royalty-free music, as few VN presentation tricks as humanly possible, and a combo of blurred photo and cheap blender backgrounds. The only major points of aesthetic interest are the beautiful character illustrations by hide38 (who also wrote the script).

And the story still hits like a truck. When you make your characters and their longings feel this real in the reader's heart, you don't need voice acting or a bunch of expensive one-off assets. SeaBed does exactly what it needs to with the presentation to support the writing, then gets out of the way and lets the story speak for itself. I think that's really admirable, and speaks to a confidence that a lot of devs would benefit from.

If all this sounds back-handed, it shouldn't. Some of the most well-loved VNs in history are doujin games like Higurashi or Tsukihime, which used similar aesthetic shortcuts. I cherish many VNs with super-loved-on presentation. But my favorites will always be the ones that make me believe in their stories, and you get there first and foremost with strong writing.

SeaBed is as affecting a story as any visual novel I've read. I don't have much to say beyond that that wouldn't spoil the shape of the story (hence why I spent three paragraphs soapboxing about VN direction). If you're up for the slowest of slow burns, and you appreciate VNs with grown-up theming that don't talk down to you, give this one a read. 

Anthology of the Killer (2020-2024, PC) (Itch.io)

Extremely extremely delightful. I've been savoring these over the last few months, and I finally ran through the epic finale last night. I've been playing thecatamites's games for over a decade, so it's really awesome to see so much of his style synthesized into such a dense hilarious vision.

It's cathartic because I've actually often struggled to connect with his games. thecatamites's work is focused more than anything on strong texture, loved-on spaces, and funny lyrical writing. That's all great — but I like games with strong emotional arcs, stories that take me on dramatically pointed and specific journeys. thecatamites's games (and his criticism for that matter) don't generally seem interested in drama at all. Anything resembling a dramatic moment in his games tends to feel playful and ironically detached. In many respects our critical lenses are almost exact opposites.

I had a really negative reaction to Magic Wand when it came out for this reason; I kept expecting it to have some kind of real rpg story, and it just doesn't. Space Funeral has a neat little meta theme at the end that really resonated with me, but it's more of a cute final note than a big climax. The games of his I've enjoyed the most with are the short comic ones like Murder Dog IV, where I can focus on enjoying the texture and jokes, and they're over before I can build any lofty narrative expectations in my head.

Anthology of the Killer meets me half-way. The grand joke of these games is that thecatamites is as good as literally anyone on itch at making Eerie Haunting Dream spaces in 3D, at setting up scares, at panicky chase sequences. He speaks the language of "Unity horror game" extremely fluently — which makes it VERY funny when BB cracks a perfectly timed hilarious joke that sucks all the tension out of the scene. (Drool of the Killer's ending sticks out to me as a particularly great moment.)

The writing is SO funny, constantly, and pairing that sense of humor with the great horror language never stops being delightful. It's also possible he was always this funny, and I was just finally disarmed and willing to fully accept his sense of humor because he fit it into a game with the most perfect cast of blorbos imaginable (I cherish ZZ).

I haven't played all of thecatamites' ouevre, in part because I've sometimes come out of his games frustrated. I feel bad about never getting around to 50 Short Games or 10 Beautiful Postcards in particular; I really want to play those. Part of me wants to end this on something like "Anthology of the Killer is thecatamites at the height of his powers," but that doesn't feel quite right. It's more like, I'm thankful that he channeled his myriad artistic strengths into a package I could personally connect to, even as someone that doesn't share all his values as a creator and player. 

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: Trails to Azure and Carrion

The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure (2011/2013, PC)

Cleared on Hard, finished all side-quests. Finished it a while ago, but it's still stuck in my craw, so I feel like writing a review. I'm not going to spoil anything directly, but I'm definitely giving impressions of the whole game, so if you're particularly sensitive to spoilers maybe dip now.

This was obviously lovely in a lot of ways, but I think this is where I get off the Trails train for a while. Trails has never been big on stakes, but the lack of lethality to anything in Zero and Azure is just devastating. There's no weight to this anymore. The big scary villains aren't scary because I know no one's ever going to die.

It's especially weird because Zero gets most of its resonance from paying off an extremely dark character thread set up in 3rd. You'd think they'd realize it's good to have some edge every now and then in a massive fantasy epic. But if there was any edge left in Zero then it's completely gone in Azure; this is one of the most bloodless stories ostensibly about revolution I've ever seen. The new emphasis on light dating sim mechanics means we also don't get a strong core romance like in Sky. I didn't get to see any of the meager sparks between Elie and Lloyd pay off because I didn't buy her enough stuffed animals to put in her room, whoops.

It's a shame because the character writing is as lovely as ever. I finally upped the difficulty to Hard for this one and I should've done it sooner, it feels amazing and the bosses are super-chunky and fun to unravel. The music and art and setting texture are as gorgeous as always. But at this point Trails is a romance where nobody fucks and a war epic where nobody dies. I've lost my patience for that for the moment. 

Carrion (2020, PC) (Steam)

Carrion does One Thing and does it really really well. I was worried at first it would get tedious as the game went on, but it introduces just enough little movement and puzzle mechanics to keep things fresh. I really appreciate the game's restraint; less confident games would have three times as many upgrades, ten times as many optional collectibles. But Carrion only does exactly what it needs to communicate its story. It knows it doesn't need to dangle keys in front of your face to keep you interested.

It was clearly play-tested to hell and back too. It takes a ton of work to make a game that feels this smooth and frictionless without also feeling patronizing. It reminded me of Valve games at their best honestly. The choice to not have an in-game map was inspired, and I'm sure it created a lot of extra work making sure players can stay on track without one, but it fit the tone perfectly.

I appreciate the inclusion of the containment units since it gave me an excuse to run around the game world at the end, see how things fit together. It took maybe an hour to find them all, which felt like exactly the right amount of time I wanted to be backtracking before going back and watching the perfect ending play out. The extra puzzle rooms were fun too, and I appreciate that none of the setpieces ever got hard enough that I got frustrated with the innate imprecision of the movement.

Making a commercial-scale game that's this quietly Rock Solid is a huge accomplishment. There isn't a single thing about it I'd want to add or take out. I can't remember the last game of this scope I could say that about. 

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean: First Departure R

Tales of Phantasia (1995/1998, PSX)

Loved this to bits — it's solid and excellent, in a subtle way. I have some thoughts!

This isn't Final Fantasy VII — dungeons are numerous, mazey, long, and chock-full of random encounters. Multiple times the main story pauses until you go to two or three dungeons (in any order) to get the required plot tokens. This is bad if you see rpg dungeons as an unpleasant obstacle in the way of progressing the rpg story. But I loved the combat system, and I was in the mood for a classic, dungeon-y, meat-and-potatoes jrpg, so I had a really fun time.

Small cast sizes are good! There are only six playable characters, and they all get plenty of time to shine throughout the story. I semi-recently played FF9 and Xenogears for the first time; both those games have much bigger casts, and both drop the ball with many of their characters. There are no Ricos or Freyas here, characters with a couple good scenes early on that have nothing to do otherwise. The skits, added in the PSX remake, obviously go a long way in helping me further connect with the characters. Their ending resolutions, and the extended pre-final dungeon scene in Early, cemented them in my heart as an all-time favorite rpg cast. (The excellent, playful writing in the Phantasian Productions patch also definitely helped.)

The main villain is introduced in the first seconds of the game, and he stays the main villain for the entire story. There's no bait-and-switch, no big twist. There are two main act break setpieces, one about three hours in and one about twenty hours in, that each further establish the villain and develop your relationship with him. When I got to the finale and the full arc of his story was revealed to me, I was really moved. A big part of that is that they didn't pull a new villain out of their ass for the final boss — this is Dhaos's story from start to finish as much as it is Cress and co.'s, and that's a rare feat for an RPG story.

The only other Tales game I've played is Vesperia, and it frustrated me because of its extremely long, sloppy story full of dropped threads and its very easy fighting. Phantasia was the perfect antidote — it's more tightly focused, and the dramatic fights kicked my ass. I have a lot of friends that adore Tales; I'm really happy I found the right game to invite me into the series.

Star Ocean: First Departure R (1996/2019, Switch)

I had measured but fairly high hopes going into this one. I'd just played Tales of Phantasia and absolutely adored it, and this game shares a lot of the same core creative team. It's actually a great meta-story — after chafing under Namco's direction during Tales of Phantasia's development, the creatives left Wolfteam to form their own studio, Tri-Ace. So, Star Ocean was Tri-Ace's first game after its founders escaped from under the thumb of big daddy Namco. It's a great narrative about creatives thumbing their nose at big publishers and making the games -they- want to make.

So it's a shame Star Ocean sucks ass!!! I haven't played an rpg this devoid of charm and joy since Suikoden. It's easy to focus on the nakedly incompetent parts. A popular target is how the game essentially begins with a ninety minute cutscene dropping gallons of lore and exposition about its big sci-fi multi-planetary universe, only to drop you on a single generic fantasy planet for 90% of the game. I'd also mention how the last three hours come out of nowhere and feel totally weak and unearned, and how we only meet each of the two main antagonists minutes before they're killed and exit the story. But there's so little here to latch onto that I don't think fixing the glaring unforced errors would help much, honestly. At least the big mistakes are funny.

I can't speak much to how the remake compares with the original. My partner and I compared scenes from the intro cutscenes with the remake, and the original seemed a little better directed. The remake will smash cut between scenes or music tracks in ways that feel amateurish and ridiculous, and the original at least seems to avoid that. The original's aesthetics feel a little nicer to me too. But I like the fighting in the remake (apparently borrowed from Star Ocean 2) a lot more, so it's all kind of a wash.

Ultimately the foundation here is so rotted through that I don't think it can matter much which version you play. Maybe the SNES version has stronger texture, but I don't think there's any iteration of Star Ocean that compares with the straightforward competence and resonance of Tales of Phantasia. Maybe some creatives benefit from a producer looking over their shoulder after all.

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Writers' Club, NaNoWriMo, General Updates

I want to share a cool thing I’ve been doing for the past year or so.

About once a month, I get together with my partner and a few like-minded friends. We’ve met in the park and at each other’s homes. We bring snacks (fruit, cheese, and cured meats are always a safe bet) and drinks (tea, seltzer water). We chat for a while and catch up.

Then, we go to this site and generate ten random words. Any similar site will do fine. We all look over the list, and pick two words that jointly make for an inspiring theme. We set an hour timer, and we all hunker down on our laptops or phones and write a short story based (often loosely) on that theme.

When we’re done (we usually extend the timer 5-10 minutes so everyone can wrap up), we take turns reading our stories aloud to everyone. They’re usually between 800 and 1500 words. Everyone is very sweet and affirming to each other’s stories. This definitely isn't a hardcore writers’ workshop where we’re criticizing each other’s off-the-cuff pieces; it’s a purely nice, positive thing.

I’ve really enjoyed this process. I don’t love all the stories I’ve come up with, but I always have fun writing and sharing them. It’s nice to do something creative without worrying about whether the end product will be worth making a whole itch page, posting it on social media.

I’ve really liked a few of the stories. I’ve thought about making a little PDF collection and posting them on itch. But then I started overthinking things. How many stories should I include? Are any of them really worth sharing?

I decided to table the collection idea for now. I’ll just keep writing little stories, enjoying the process, and maybe sharing the ones I really like in smaller circles.

I want to keep working like this, both socially and on my own. It’s helping me grow as a writer. When I improvise and slam out small stories based on ideas I just came up with, it’s easier to see my creative patterns. I see the parts of my prose voice I’m proud of, and I see what story structures and clichés I reach for more than I should.

This isn’t the only way I’ve been experimenting as a writer. At the behest of my partner, I attempted NaNoWriMo last November. (She’s won eight times, incredibly.) We successfully roped in a bunch of friends and family. Everyone had a blast. I successfully won — I wrote 55,000 words and completed a first draft!

I haven’t returned to that draft yet, although I want to once I’m done with a few other mega-projects. Right now, I’m finishing up a large interactive fiction story. I’ve had the seed of it in a google doc for a couple of years now. Over the last three or four months, I’ve gone from barely anything drafted, to a complete, mostly edited 43,000 word twine.

Between flash fiction, my twine, and the NaNoWriMo, I’ve slammed out over 100,000 words of fiction in the last year. I’ve never written at this pace in my life before. I’m not planning to post any of it here (the flash fiction is very casual and loose, and the long-form works *cough* don't really fit the Far Away Times brand). But I’m confident the learning and growing I’m doing with these projects will only make my future stories stronger.

My itch and my blog are going to be a little quiet this year. I made a huge amount of progress early in the year on my big RPGMaker explore-y game. I stalled out because mega-projects are exhausting. But the map is fully built out and polished — I "just" need to do the NPC dialogue, a couple of cutscenes, and the interior locations. I want to get it in playtesters’ hands in the winter, then release it early next year.

I’m still making a Vextro jam entry, so the itch won’t be completely dead in 2024. My hope is that I’ll finish my current mega-projects, then channel more of this flash fiction/writers’ club energy into my game dev. Some of the game designers I most admire have shared over a hundred games over the years. They’re good at giving themselves permission to sketch out small ideas and not overthink them to death. As a result, they’re able to put out a ton of cool, creatively vibrant works.

Next year, I’d like to make more complete games in one or two sittings. I think the way to get better at a creative discipline is to work at it consistently over a long time, to start and finish many, many projects. Learning to work in a looser, sketchier mode sometimes would be good for me.

It’s funny that it’s translating into so little publicly shareable work, but this has maybe been the most creatively productive year of my life. I’m even writing videogame criticism again, over on Backloggd! Even with something as low stakes as games crit, it helps to find a space where you can casually make things without worrying about whether the end result is “good enough.” I intend to repost some of my favorite reviews on here over the next few weeks.