Now, it’s not a bad game. It controls nice, the dungeons are fun and well designed, and it brings some new mechanics to the table. It has some good things going for it. The problem is that there’s just so many bad things that decide to get in your way every time you start enjoying it. It already takes five hours for the game to become remotely fun, cramming in stuff to get in the way of the fun is just not a good idea.

You heard me right, it takes five hours for this game to get fun. The entirety of Twilight Princess is paced horribly. It just goes on and on and on. I’d beaten the game a few years back, and decided to play a ways in again and refresh my memory. I am fifteen hours into the game. I have just completed the third dungeon. I’m not even getting stuck or anything. That’s the sort of pacing you can expect from Twilight Princess. I beat Ocarina of Time faster than this.

Twilight Princess continues a really bad trend I’ve started to notice in Zelda games. It’s not a new trend, just more noticeable lately. Every console iteration has more bullshit before you can actually play the game than the last. Zelda NES starts you off right outside the cave with the sword, and then you get to go do shit. Link to the Past has you sneak into a dungeon and make it to a plot point before getting your sword. You get free reign to do shit after you get out of the dungeon. Ocarina of Time makes you find a sword, buy a shield, and do a dungeon before it lets you go out and explore Hyrule. Wind Waker makes you dick around on an island for an hour, dick around on a ship for fifteen minutes, do a dungeon, and then get a sail before you can explore and whatnot.

Twilight Princess takes the fucking cake in terms of wasting your time. Before you get any freedom whatsoever, you have to round up goats into a barn… twice. You have to travel through the same forest area three times. (Twice as a human, and once as a wolf) You have to do a slingshot tutorial, a swordfighting tutorial, and random, tedious chores for the townsfolk. You have to watch many a cutscene. You have to do two dungeons, though the first one is less dungeon and more a linear tutorial in how to be a wolf. Of all these things, the only one that is actually a worthwhile is the second dungeon.

I know it seems like I’m making too much of a big deal about the freedom in Zelda games, but that’s always been one of the selling points. The games have always been about exploring Hyrule, finding shit, and doing dungeons. It always restricted you in some way by what tools you didn’t have yet, but you were still free to explore. That’s the Zelda formula. I don’t think that formula is stale. This game puts too much between you and that part of the game, and even when you get to that part, it uses the Twilight World to keep railroading you to where it wants you to go next. This wouldn’t be a problem if the stuff in the way was fun, but very little of it actually is. It’s all just filler.

Herding goats is just a matter of running around in circles pressing A over and over again, and trying to decide if “GOAT IN” is the best or worst phrase to ever grace a Zelda game. Another has you flying through a canyon while monsters shoot arrows at you and parts of the canyon fall down. This one I can at least concede is a good idea. What makes it not good in practice is that you fly very slowly, steer by aiming the Wiimote which is just unnecessary Wiimote fellatio. It’s not challenging, but if you do fly into a wall due to the awful controls you have to start the whole mess all over again. They couldn’t just make it play like a straight up Starfox level?

The absolute WORST is when the game gives you an escort mission. I’d go into a long overwrought spiel about how escort missions are terrible and people need to stop putting them in games, but do I really need to? I don’t thing anyone in the history of gaming has ever thought an escort mission was a positive addition to a game, other than the developers who do it. Nobody likes them, and everyone knows why they’re bad. Developers just have their heads in the sand. The worst thing about this isn’t that it’s challenging, because Zelda games aren’t. There are some birds that drop bombs, and if the wagon you’re escorting gets hit with a bomb, they’ll run all the way back to the beginning of that section of the escort mission. You have to defend them on their way back, and try that section again, hoping you take out the bird in time this try. It’s stupid and irritating and makes something awful even moreso.

There are a couple good ones. I remember the shoot shit while river rafting game being fairly enjoyable, and it does reward you for doing it. There’s a fairly painless one where you collect orbs of light for Tingle, which is cake with the hookshot. The thing is, all these good ones are optional and reward you for doing them. All the awful ones are required, like the game creator is just rubbing your face in how bad they are. Ocarina of Time had some meh minigames, mostly meh simply due to the controls, but I honestly can’t recall it forcing you to do any.

As did Ocarina of Time, Twilight Princess has collectables. Ocarina of Time’s collectables had ways of detecting when they were near and gave you frequent rewards for collecting them. Twilight Princess’ collectables are golden bugs. They make no noise so you have no way of finding them unless you stumble across them. There are only twenty-four in the entire game so finding one is based largely on luck or using the internet. You get a bigger wallet when you get the first bug, and an even bigger one for collecting all of them. All rewards in between are money.

FUCK money in Twilight Princess. Never before have I played a game that I have literally hated for it giving me money. Other than a shield and bombs, there is nothing worth spending money on. Hell, having to buy bombs as the primary means of getting bombs was pretty much done just to justify having a money system at all. Blowing up rocks nets fifteen rupees minimum. Treasure chests at least twenty. Pretend that you actually give a shit about having this much money and congratulations your wallet is full.

Ocarina of Time had a similar problem, but it used the money well for the most part. You used it to do the mask sidequests. If you didn’t want to do the quests to get the blue and red tunics, you could just buy them. If you didn’t want to wait till you found it in a chest, you could buy the Hyrule Shield. You could buy The Biggest Sword. Ocarina of Time’s economy is still broken as hell, but it feels less broken.

The main reason I’m pissed off about the money in Twilight Princess is the chests. Your wallet will be filled pretty quickly, which means that any treasure chest that has money in it is a waste of your time. Dungeons happen to be FULL of money chests. In fact, the vast majority of treasure chests are filled with money. What makes this all the worse is that there is literally no way to tell a money chest from a key chest, or a heart piece chest, or any other chest really. The game will put silver keys in small and large chests alike, and will put money in these as well. Every time you see a large chest, it might be a heart piece, or something useful like a map, or it might be twenty rupees because FUCK YOU.

Wow, that’s pretty awful. No way that can get worse! First rule of game reviewing: Don’t talk about Fight Cl It can always get worse. If your wallet does not have room for the money in the chest, it will put the money back in the chest and close it. Leaving it for you to come back to. This is ultimately pointless because there’s nothing to spend your money on so you will never have any room for the money in that chest. Let’s suppose that you walk into a dungeon with a full wallet, because you probably will. Once you get the compass, you can see every treasure in that dungeon. Almost none of those treasures are worth getting, because you don’t need any money. You have no room for the money, so you can’t take the money, meaning those chests will stay on your map no matter what. All those treasures cluttering your map are worthless at best, but more likely than not a nuisance. Especially if you’re trying to find a heart piece or a silver key. There’s generally at least one of the former in every dungeon.

This all came together Voltron style to form a giant middle finger in the water temple. There’s a treasure chest you see at one point of the dungeon that you can’t get without the hookshot, but you don’t have the hookshot quite yet. It’s a big chest. So, you get the hookshot and go back to get it. To get back up you have to walk up the world’s longest waterslide with the iron boots on. It isn’t challenging, but it’s slow and tedious as hell. Not remotely fun. Anyways, you make it to the top of the slide, hookshot to the treasure chest and buh-duh-duh-duuuuuuh twenty rupees. My six hundred rupee wallet was full at the time, of course, adding insult to injury.

Except for the asinine nature of treasure chests, the dungeons are pretty good. The fire dungeon is more industrial in design, visually differentiating it from Ocarina’s fire temple. The water temple has you opening up water flows and directing them down a staircase to advance, so that’s pretty cool, too. There are some new items, like a top you can ride, and you get a second hookshot so you can George of the Jungle your way from one hookshot spot to another. It brings new stuff, like the wolf transformation, but, like the MGS games, there’s also not a whole lot in terms of gameplay to differentiate it from previous Zeldas.

One of the game’s gimmicks is that you can turn into a wolf. My pet theory is that Nintendo noticed how much better Okami was than their own Zelda games and got penis envy. Twilight Princess’ wolf sections are another example of good ideas that failed in practice. The wolf section combat doesn’t play out much different than regular combat, except you have fewer moves and none of your special equipment available to you. The one difference is that by holding B you can target every enemy within a certain radius and insta-kill them. The problem with that is they put in fights where you have to do that to proceed, and then make it a nuisance to do so. Wolf Link would occasionally run into the wall for no reason, and the enemies would come back to life, or it’d put a wall between a couple of the enemies, meaning I’d have to kill one or two normally before insta-killing the remaining two. It’s not fun and serves no point.

While a wolf, there are some areas where Midna, this game’s Navi, will fly up and you’ll do a targeted jump at her. This allows you to reach areas you couldn’t under normal circumstances. The problem with this is obvious. You can only use this in the very specific instances the game says that you can, with no reason given for why you can’t use it in other places. They do a good job of keeping you from noticing areas you’d like to go but can’t CUZ THEY SAY SO, but that didn’t keep me from getting annoyed the few instances where I did see a treasure chest I wanted. There’s not even an explanation for why it works in the first place. Just more CUZ THEY SAY SO nonsense game design.

The biggest problem is that there’s no reason for the wolf segments. There’s no real plot reason for Link turning into a wolf, and there’s very little in terms of gameplay that justifies it, since the actual uses of the insta-kill and Midna jump are very limited. The main thing it makes you do as a wolf is retread areas you’ve already been to and kill sixteen mean bugs to advance the plot. It’s more stupid, pointless filler, and as a result I come to think that’s the only real point of the wolf transformation. As a game reviewer, I hate having my time wasted. I hate these sections of the game.

It’s the same formula you’ve seen before. Go into dungeon, get map, compass, and item. Use item gimmick to solve the dungeon, and then use it to defeat the boss. Wash, rinse, repeat eight or nine times over. There are no surprises to be had here. Except for the wolf sections and generally terrible pacing, there are no real gameplay changes to be had here. The only thing being on the Wii brings to the table is some nice aiming controls for the bow and hookshot, and some pointless waggle for the sword. I can’t really bring myself to dislike the waggle, since it’s really no different from mashing B repeatedly, but I am disappointed that that’s all it is. Consider this an argument in favor of Motion+.

I don’t think the Zelda formula is stale, but I do think that following it so closely has its problems. Namely, there’s no particular reason to play Twilight Princess. If it improved upon the formula, or got rid of the problems with previous games, there would be a reason, but it doesn’t. In fact, almost everything new it brings detracts from the experience. You could play Ocarina of Time, Windwaker, Link to the Past. Any of these would be a much better use of your time, even if you’re replaying them.

The story had potential. It honestly could have been the best story to grace the franchise, but both hero and villain ruined that chance. I get that there are a lot of people who don’t want Link to talk. I understand that. They grew up with a silent Link, and hearing him talk will sound awkward. I don’t think I have to remind anyone that Link can’t wait to bomb some dodongos. However, neither nostalgia nor the fuckups of others are good reasons to avoid doing what should have been done ages ago.

Legend of Zelda is Nintendo’s story based franchise. We are expected to care about the characters, and the events that unfold around them. Twilight Princess has Link’s love interest suffer amnesia and forget about him. That they put this in the game to begin with means they expected us to care that she forgot about Link. However, Link is a silent protagonist. He has no voice, no personality, and no memorable traits. Other than visual style, there is nothing to differentiate him from any previous Link. He’s wholly forgettable, and if I find his character forgettable I am not going to care that a character forgot him.

Another scene in the game hints that the dark power of the Fused Shadows, this game’s plot macguffin, might turn Link to the dark side. It uses some fantastic nightmare imagery to convey this idea, and the execution of this scene was perfect. Except Link is a silent protagonist. He’s The Hero. He will do heroic things and save the day and all that jazz, because that is what silent protagonists do. There is no risk of him turning to the dark side or that he’ll even being tempted to. Because of that, this perfectly executed scene falls flat on it’s face.

It’s generally more acceptable in the older Zelda games because it was the norm at the time or because the visual style just kept you from thinking about it. Windwaker was mostly lighthearted silliness. Link not talking was fine because the game didn’t expect me to care about him. It just wanted me to have fun. That’s not the case in Twilight Princess. They’ve done great things in how expressive they make Link without having him talk. I am honestly impressed, but it makes it all the more weird to have him just staring down everyone who talks to him. They made an extremely expressive character who has no personality. That’s almost a feat in and of itself.

This game’s villain is problematic, too, simply because it’s Ganondorf. (Oops! Spoilers!) There was a lot of potential for villains in this game. Midna, just off the top of my head, says a lot of things that make her sounds somewhat villainous, and you’re really only helping her because you have no choice. For her to turn around at the end and try to cover the world in Twilight herself would have made sense given her early characterization, and been a nice change of pace from what you normally expect in a Zelda game. It’d be like Navi being the final boss of Ocarina of Time, except if Navi was a likable character.

The actual villain early on is Zant. Zant infuriates me, because he starts off as such a fantastic villain. He’s Magnificent Bastard at its very best. He walks into the castle, takes out all the soldiers guarding Zelda, and gives her an ultimatum. Either she can surrender the kingdom to him, or he’ll kill everyone in it. That’s badass. When you encounter him again, he tosses the ultimate weapon you’ve obtained to the side like a child’s toy, curses you into your wolf form permanently, beats the crap out of Midna, and then forces her into the world of light. Being forced into the world of light will KILL Midna. He shows off how much more powerful he is than you, and then tries to murder your teammate in a very malevolent douchebag kind of way. The best part about it all is that he does all this without any real effort on his part. It’s easy.

Visually, he’s very striking, combining heavy, yet elegant looking, armor with long robes. When you see him remove part of his mask, his lips look like they’re loosely threaded together. It’s quite a while before his appearance is revealed in full, much like how I said Ocarina of Time should have done Ganondorf. It’s so much better than you expect of the Zelda franchise, and every time he gets a scene your response is pretty much “Holy shit yes!”

…And then they fucked it all up.

Oh, sorry, I meant to link this. Same thing really. Every excellent moment Zant has had is now irrelevant because Nintendo just threw everything good about him under a bus, set the remains on fire, and tossed the ashes off Ayers Rock for good measure. That time he nearly murdered Midna doesn’t matter anymore because now he yells “reeeeeeoooowww” like a pissed off cat. Back when he murdered all of Zelda’s guards might as well have not happened because he’s a wacky, whiny, contortionist now. His awesome power means nothing now because it isn’t even his. It’s Ganondorf’s. Of course, it had to be Ganondorf’s because this is a Zelda game and Ganondorf is the bad guy cuz Ganondorf Ganondorf Ganonblorf… Zant just became the biggest disappointment in Nintendo history since the Virtual Boy, and they managed it in a single cutscene. There are no words in the tongues of man for the sort of frustration seeing this happen inflicts upon me. I want to punch Miyamoto in the face for this.

The music in this game is hit or miss. Some of the tracks are really good. When Wolf Link is carrying a dying Midna on his back, an excellently depressing tune kicks in. The music can be really good. Then you have the twilight tracks. The twilight battle music is midi garbage. It sounds like an NES after it’s been kicked in the stomach fifty times. It is the music of an era being strangled to death by a drunk composer, and it is awful. It doesn’t show up too often, but that it shows up at all is bad. Another problem is that it feels like they just cheaped out on it. Koji Kondo supposedly wanted a fifty piece orchestra for the soundtrack, but then went with digital in the end because it was more “interactive.” All the sense that doesn’t make aside, why go with digital for the Zelda game, then orchestral for both Super Mario Galaxy games? I are confused.

As with the music, the visuals are hit and miss. The level of detail is nice. Link’s outfit has never looked so pretty. I mean it. The twilight monsters look cool and have a nice sense of otherness to their appearance. The Zoras look better here than they ever have. There are some great designs. There are some absolutely shit designs in here, too. The Ooocoo are a Lovecraftian nightmare made real, and some of the clothing designs, like Link’s starting outfit, would put Nomura to shame. Several character faces are hideous on so many levels.

Now, weird and bizarre designs aren’t anything new. Just look at Tingle. Ocarina of Time had bad graphics to make any bad designs bearable, and limit the amount of bad they could put in a single character. Windwaker had a cartoony style to make them feel more natural. The more realistic look Twilight Princess went for makes all the ugly designs stand out, and it takes some getting used to.

Like I said early on, Twilight Princess isn’t a bad game. The dungeons are enjoyable, despite the rupee overdose, and exploring Hyrule is fun once the game lets you. Some of the minigames are fun, too. There’s just so much faffing about and bad ideas crammed in between the good parts that it’s hard to see through it all. When compared against a lot of the other console Zeldas, it just doesn’t stand out as anything special. It’s slow and disappointing, despite having some ideas that could have given it an edge over others.

Twilight Princess gets two out of five unnecessary Ganons.

Kane and Lynch is not the game featuring Kanye West and David Lynch, where they go about approving of ladies’ asses and creating befuddling nightmare-fuel movies, but instead features a pair of gangsters. They worked alongside each other in the prior game, and are reunited for a brief arms deal in Shanghai, China.

Of course inevitably shit goes down, people freak inevitably out, and the entirety of China including police, gangsters, and basically everyone are out to kill the duo. The two plot threads involve Lynch’s arms deal needing to be resolved and Kane’s Shanghai girlfriend keep the plot going before they flee the city.

It’s a third person shooter with a cover system and regenerating health. So, moving on.

Now this is no Uncharted, relying on some pretty graphics and Nolan North to drive it into selling more copies than Twilight: Pantsless Cold Hard Edward Edition. IO Entertainment figured out with their last game that they needed some cold hard gimmicks to get it to not be grilled by the reviewers with more than two brain cells (phew, they sure dodged a bullet there!). And this one has some that actually almost redeem it.

For one, this game has a Mature rating, and it earns it. Every other “Mature” game netted the title by being about violent things and featuring blood. Dog Days is grittier and vicious, and completely fucking morbid. I won’t spoil too much about it but there’s sequences later on that honestly made me feel almost nauseous, partly through the graphical style, partly through the hauntingly visceral atmosphere, partly through the sheer subject matter itself. This game is to be congratulated for being mature, dark, and gritty, most especially without resorting to silly, over-the-top Goddamn Batman-ing. It does nuke the fridge at one point, but it’s depressing and bleak and not a happy game. Probably for the best.

The real thing that makes it so immersive is the graphical style and camera. Normally the camera is a passing comment, barely more than a brief mention maybe if it’s operated by a limbless drunken man who turns it by smacking it with his face. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows had this mark especially. When I first noticed Kane and Lynch 2′s boxart I couldn’t help but notice that it looked blocky and pixelated, especially on the lighting and some odd garbage data (purple blocky squares) screwed up on the picture. I kept looking for better ones but no, it stayed put. Strange, I thought, why was this intentional?

Because the entirety of Dog Days is handled like a snuff film/handicam operated Cops episode. Frequently garbage data screws up the visual feed with blocky purple-pink discoloration, and the lights wash out the color in a big line over the entire screen. It looks and feels like a real handicam. When you sprint the camera gets shaky and jumps around, Cloverfield style, making it both difficult to see and really immersive. Best of all there’s even an option to disable the camera bouncing just in case it makes you even more nauseous than the obscene violence does.

There’s sequences later on where you throw gas containers or fire extinguishers (This game’s version of grenades) into large groups of cars and oxygen tanks, causing chain explosions. Nothing new. But what I dig is the fact that the game lags on purpose, screwing up the camera and adding static, more discoloration, and blocky segments. The game could most definitely process this, but it does not, and it pulls it off more artfully than any game thus far. There’s even the Cops style face- and nudity-blur for certain areas, especially when you get headshots and they don’t want to show you the mutilated skull, or during many scenarios where private parts would be otherwise exposed.

The game is also very harsh, which fits with the theme of ultra-realism. Popping out of cover makes a good sixty bullets fly at you simultaneously, and taking damage muddles up the screen with blood and sometimes rain. Only by hiding in cover and carefully taking shots are you able to pass from region to region. The screaming Shanghai citizens and police, as well as the chaotic and muffled noise of sirens and traffic in the background, only amplify everything I’ve told you about here.

So the graphics and camera lead to a pretty immersive experience, but the rest of the game doesn’t fit cohesively with this concept. It’s pretty engaging to sprint to cover and see the cameraman bounce and stumble, but it breaks the illusion once you’re in cover and you have to make about six shots to someone’s chest to get them to kill over, watching them flinch with a robotic ‘ow’ each time. The locational damage is completely wonky, with a headshot as an insta-kill, while shots to the feet or arms barely register on the enemy’s radar, even with revolvers or shotguns.

As far as decent gaming is concerned, it’s not a huge issue that kills the game, but if we’re talking about this ultra-realism that IO seems to be trying to push they’ve effectively shot it in the foot. Which is a real shame; the game is aping up to being realistic as fuck, protagonist and his invincible super-psycho buddy notwithstanding, so it’d be nice if we got a few more animations of people with shot arms or legs, and having most all shots be a one hit kill.

The odds are still overwhelming due to the sheer number of bad guys after you, and it does fit well with the story that could be named Kane and Lynch Versus the World, but if they made enemies more vulnerable – and more of them – it would be a vast improvement. And most importantly it wouldn’t make it feel like such a cheap shot when a Chinese cop runs up to me with an SMG sprayed in my face, ignorant to her own safety. Making the odds overwhelming along with a viciously cruel health system would feel much more cohesive for the experience K+L2 is trying to convey.

So yeah, AI is pretty shoddy too. On the bright side you can take them hostage, Gears of War 2 style, if they get close enough. This is pretty useful in theory but for some reason I found that it never worked, often I’d have a hostage, but I’d just get shot up anyway. Instead of actually bothering to use them in combat I’d just take them hostage, throw them aside, and return to cover. With the AI this means that many encounters started with throwing a Shanghai gangster five feet away, with a cop and a military soldier standing next to you, going, “Me next, me next!”

Guns needed more tweaking, too. The SMG is a close-range weapon, which is fine, but the damage is insanely wimpy, and pales in comparison to every other weapon either in close or long range. It’s also worth noting that the shotgun is quite simply the best weapon in the game, hands down. It’s not enough that you can make the shells fire accurately enough to just make one or two hits on their torso for a clean kill, but I’ve fired in the general direction of enemy heads while behind cover and gotten outright headshots. I thought I was very specific about after Counterstrike and Raven Squad? The damage dropoff of shotguns should put the damage at zero eventually. Even TF2 knew this! Using this Anti-Sonofa-Bitch-Stick made the game remarkably easy, even when 500-round drum machine guns and AR-33s were dropping every encounter.

It’s worth mentioning that it’s got the Alpha Protocol problem too, with assault rifles and pistols – the precision weapons, mind – being unable to get decent headshots, so the locational damage I mentioned earlier compounds and makes it bitchass hard to get a solid kill. The only one good at headshots was the sniper rifles, go figure, but they’re rare enough as is. To put it more succinctly, the shooting is acceptable at absolute best, but always lacquered with frustration and tedium.

There is one thing I like – high damage attacks knock you over, such as a shotgun or a revolver or many assault rifles. When you’re knocked over you can crawl away, stand right back up, stand up in cover if you’re close enough, or shoot at your enemies. What I love is that you autoaim towards the one who attacked you and, though you can’t see very well, shots fired in rapid succession have a good chance of hitting. It really capitalizes on the desperation and instinct to fire blindly and hope you hit, and with how punishing the health system can be, it’s always your first instinct. And the game is far better for it.

I notice now I haven’t talked about the story. Well, really, the summary I gave earlier is about it. There’s some lingering questions as to what exactly transpires before and after the game, especially since Lynch is meant to be utterly psychotic yet he manages to have a Chinese girlfriend he’s pretty committed to and who’s very committed to him. But the game feels like it’s intended to be a snapshot in these men’s time. Sounds fair, but why not carry forth with them after the game wraps up? It’s a pretty good climax, but once they climb onto the plane it feels like the game claps its hands and goes, “Right then, that’s it! Go on, story over, shoo shoo!” Reminds me of when my mom would show me Highlander, then remember its violent finale and quickly turn it off and usher me out of the room.

There’s some nifty multiplayer options, such as the return of Fragile Alliance, but it won’t do much more than provide momentary distractions. It is kind of cool, I’ll admit, to work with a partner to rob a bank against a horde of police, constantly at worry that any of your teammates could murder you, take the profits, and let you die (so you can spawn as a cop and hunt for revenge), or better yet that you could do the same thing. A new mode I like quite a bit is Undercover Cop, letting you slowly assassinate enemy players without breaking your cover as one of them, and it is pretty awesome to rely on a kind of stealth that isn’t some kind of hiding or magical Stealth Boy power. But as cool as they are, the gunplay is still kinda clunky. Other, better games have much more fun multilayer, and like the single player, it doesn’t do enough right to make it worthwhile.

Other bad games shouldn’t lower my perception of another game, but it’s worth mentioning that despite all these things Kane and Lynch 2 is a decent game, especially compared to Dead Men. I normally abhor the generic, safe, Nickelback-clones of the gaming industry, but this one has enough that stands out that I was willing to finish it, though that might be just because it’s criminally short. There’s some decent writing moments throughout the campaign, and the sheer visceral gore moments are almost worth the price of admission, but honestly so many of these things could have made a great game fantastic; as it is now it just makes a bad game merely marginally interesting. Just not interesting enough for anything more than a rental.

2/5 Happy Pills

The answer: A Dojo reviewer! If you look at the rather large roster of games under the belt of developer and publisher formerly known as Eidos Interactive, you can almost cut a line down the center and form two categories. The first category would probably be called the Wicked List, because most of the games on it are awesome. They may not have reached critical acclaim with everybody, but they were solid titles. Games on the Wicked List would include Timesplitters, a couple Thief games, Batman Arkham Asylum, amongst quite a few others. The other category would probably be called something like Shit Stained Undergarments.

Thus, Kane and Lynch: Dead Men.

Kane and Lynch is yet another fantastic example of an intellectual property that could have been great, except the developer forgot a few little tidbits here or there around the edges, such as making a fucking enjoyable game. Instead what’s delivered is a half-assed third person shooter that goes downhill the further you get in the game. Level by level, you can actually see the programmers and texture artists slowly give way to their insanity, or apathy. That, or the title was rushed out. Only they could know. What I do know is Kane and Lynch has sluggish controls, no aiming auto-assist (an absolute must for all console shooters), a camera that’s too twitchy in a bad way, and generally bland gunfights where enemies have too much health and guns have way too much recoil. On top of the mediocrity, Kane and Lynch is really hard. I played through the co-op with a friend, and we’re both experienced gamers with more than enough shooting prowess. We died, and we died a lot, and on Normal difficulty to boot! Admittedly, this difficulty would have been a positive point for the game, had the game been more fun and less slog for the sake of reviewing Kane and Lynch 2.

Co-operative experience is another good talking point for the two games, because they are supposed to be built on them. In a way, you can imagine Kane and Lynch as a shitty, gritty version of Army of Two. Co-op experience is a big plus for me, as I’m a huge fan of any jumble of binaries willing to let me play through with my friends. In this vein, I found Kane and Lynch: Dead Men to be pretty disappointing. No co-op door opening or climbing a la Resident Evil or Army of Two. No co-op shoot-outs a la Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. The game only toyed with a few very brief segments of levels where Kane and Lynch are split up. The developers at this point must have forgotten that those segments are by far the second most annoying things ever in co-op games. The most annoying, of course, being escort missions. Oh yeah, Kane and Lynch has those, too. Luckily, the game sucks just enough that escorting your vault-breaking AI buddy or damaged escape van through firefights doesn’t seem so bad compared to the cheap enemy AI or shitty cover system. Say what we will about Gears of War and its issues, it delivered a competent cover system, however cliché it has become. A third of the time you move to take cover in Kane and Lynch, it’s not even eligible for cover. The rest of the time, enemies seem to get an angle on you and shoot you anyway.

My Kingdom for some chest-high walls.

Kane and Lynch exist to export three main gimmicks to the gamer population. One, it’s a more graphic experience than your average title coming out of the North Americas, or Europe. Both Kane and Lynch are sociopaths under any definition of the term, and even the box art advertises Lynch as a full-blown psychotic. The sheer grim of it all, combined with its setting in the modern day, actually rings true for me. It’s refreshing to get some gore and vulgarity that isn’t watered down and neutered by Microsoft Games Studios standards or T for Teen ratings. There are way too many Mature games out there that avoid ample use of Fuck. Seriously, just say it. Fuck. Given most games pit you in dire circumstances, like war, fuck is probably the most common word and phrase, perhaps tied with “oh shit.” So I’d like to thank Kane and Lynch for edging North American games a little closer to earning their M for Mature rating. One last credit to the true grittiness of the game is that one way or the other, by the end of the game, you get screwed. There’s literally no happy ending. I liked that.

The game’s second gimmick is the interplay between Kane, an asshole, and Lynch, a dickhole. Honestly, they have every reason to hate each other, and after playing both games, I’m pretty sure they do. Jokes were even made during play about the multiplayer being 1v1 Deathmatch, wherein either Kane or Lynch finally snap and try to strangle one another. Having the two main characters hate each other was actually a refreshing change from the “haw haw buddy, let’s go slay another battalion of Locusts/Covenant/Germans/Communists! [slap shoulder, manly grunting, BroFist™]”

The third and final gimmick is Lynch’s honest-to-goodness insanity. The first instance occurs during a bank robbery, where Lynch is left to guard the hostages on the main floor. Suddenly, there are police everywhere. Since police are notoriously hard to kill, the instinct is to mow them down. At the same time, Kane fights his way from the vault back up to the main floor, only to find all of the hostages massacred. It was a neat gimmick, and my only regret is they didn’t take it far enough. There is another point during a run-and-gun battle in the street where Lynch imagines fleeing hostages as oncoming S.W.A.T. teams. That was pretty much it, though. Why didn’t they flesh this part out? It could have been fantastic, and instead it got boiled down to a sparse “Huh” moment here or “That was cool” there.

I could delve into the intricacies of Kane and Lynch more, if I really wanted to. I could explain why the vehicle segments are either so easy they’re boring or so hard they’re teeth shattering. I could go on about the fact that the game seems to be missing a couple levels, because in one stage you rob a bank and assassinate a guy, and in another stage you’re just smack-dab in the middle of a war zone, with almost zero exposition. But really, the game hardly deserves much more analysis. We here at the Dojo complain about how generic most shooters are, and indeed they are. I could probably write an essay on how bland I think Halo is. But at the end of the day, Halo is a competent shooter, and Kane and Lynch is Shit Stained Undergarments.

To Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, I award one bottle of morphine out of five, and I suggest you use it while playing the game. (1/5)

Thus, Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days.

There are some stark changes in Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days that separate it from its three-year-old predecessor. For one, I have to extend some props to Io-Interactive, because clearly they took the verbal and visual harassment they received from gamers and critics alike in Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, and put it to some decent use. Whereas Kane and Lynch: Dead Men was a total fight for me to even complete (and not in the difficulty sense), Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days manages to pull a 180 degree spin, and I found the game totally playable, albeit not without an hour of adjustment.

The sequel pulls off a fantastic atmosphere. Everything from the art style, to the streets of virtual Shanghai, to the new-fangled camera, is a shout-out to cheesy action slaughter-fests. My best analogy for the camera is Gears of War sprinting on crack. Playing the game is like playing Cloverfield, without the giant monster. I realize that comparison doesn’t make too much sense on: A shaky-cam sounds awful, and without a doubt some people will find it so. However, my current theory is that I’ve simply been a spoiled gamer child. I’ve been spoiled by years of static cameras that are perfectly aligned all the time. The camera in Kane and Lynch is an asshole, just like the protagonists, and it decides to flip the table on all that static jazz and follow Kane or Lynch around attached by only a Slinky. I’ve already gotten carried away with the metaphors, but I need to reiterate that I didn’t find the camera poorly implemented at all. In fact, if there’s one really positive thing to say about Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, it’s that many of the gunfights are truly chaotic and frenetic, and the camera only adds to the experience. Pinned down by S.W.A.T members for the fiftieth time, I couldn’t help but admire the camera flipping and flopping about uneasily as Lynch took a few hits, fell to the floor, and clumsily returned fire one-handed with his assault rifle. It bred some awesome moments. Blanking out incredibly gory scenes and dead bodies added a nice touch, and made you feel like you were playing some kind of horribly twisted spawn of Cops (as if Cops isn’t twisted enough already). And at the end of the day, if you still really hate the camera recorded a la America’s Bloodiest Home Videos, there are options to steady the camera from the main menu.

Kane and Lynch: Dead Men was a crappy shooter with a few little admirable gimmicks. Io-Interactive clearly realized this, since somebody at the company must have played the game themselves and compared it to other games. Now, the sequel boasts rather competent features across the board as far as shooters go. The cover system has been patched up nicely, and works about as well as the cover in Mass Effect 2. The aiming no longer feels like you’re playing the game in cooking molasses, and rudimentary auto-assist now exists! Although it still varies from gun to gun and punishes accordingly, the recoil of the weapons is also much more reasonable. The wonky and unreliable melee attack from the first was replaced with a “human shield” option in the second, where you can either throw the captive enemy at his companions and start shooting, or execute said captive, and then continue shooting. The health of enemies is still wonky, but you know what, Lynch goes through most of the game in a wife beater. Who am I to complain about enemy hit points when both Kane and Lynch should be nothing more than bloodied scraps of spaghetti-stained undershirt after a few of the gun battles you’ll end up having over the course of the game. The stubborn, death-resistant enemies are also more forgiving just because the rest of the game is just, well, better. The difficulty of the game is still intact. Out of Easy, Normal, Hard, and Extreme, we played through on Normal. We still died, and as with the first game, we died a-plenty. However, more often than not, the constant deaths no longer brewed frustration. This subtle change occurred for the above stated not-so-subtle reasons: we weren’t dying because the game sucked, we were dying because we sucked.

In the sequel, Kane and Lynch still hate each other, but that’s nothing difficult to pull off. Io decided that the best way to move the story forward and fix a rather bland and uninteresting plot was to remove it entirely, and that’s what Kane and Lynch 2 does. Okay, so some events occur in a sequence, but honestly, they could have reversed the sequence and it probably wouldn’t have impacted the game experience. From five minutes in to the final five seconds, you are going to be running from one piece of cover to another, slaughtering pretty much every armed individual (and many unarmed) in Shanghai. There is so much unchecked and unending murder in this game, it’s a wonder the Armed Forces aren’t called in to put Kane and Lynch down. Oh wait, never mind, you end up killing a lot of dudes in fatigues in the latter half of the game.

If anybody out there was interested in invading Shanghai anytime soon, they’re about as weakened and demoralized as they’re ever going to be.

If Kane and Lynch 2 were a medium or even long game for a shooter title, I would now launch into a series of complaints about how bland the variety of enemies in gunfights can be. I understand it’s hard to find frigates and tanks and giant alien bosses for Kane and Lynch to kill in Shanghai, but the game is pretty much the same handful of skirmishes each time, and the only thing that changes is the scenery. Even the heavy duty machine gunners and snipers that populated the first game with frequency only make sparse appearances here. That being said, the scenery is gorgeous. I mentioned the art style in reference to the cheesy shaky camera, but it’s been implemented beautifully in Kane and Lynch 2, and there’s no decline in quality as you progress through the game. Levels you fight through on the streets of Shanghai are by far my favourite. They’re usually jam packed with little cars, or throngs of people that quickly cower and disperse as the gunfire opens up. And the sirens; the sirens are never far away. Everything around you seems so dense, including the endless apartment buildings. My favourite line in the whole game has to be a brief conversation after a long chain of gun battles, in which a bloodied Kane and Lynch are walking out of an alley back into the crowded streets of Shanghai. Lynch turns his head to speak back at Kane and, clutching an assault rifle with an assault shotgun strapped to his back remarks, “Okay, try to be discreet.”

Without too much warning, the campaign ends. I won’t even spoil the specifics of it to you, because I found the final scene truly exhilarating. It was fast-paced and bloody and everything Kane and Lynch seems to get off on, and this time the game worked with me instead of against me. The grit factor was even increased, because there are even a few shock factor moments. I won’t spoil them for you, save for a hint: it’ll involve razor blades. Kane and Lynch 2 is M for Mature because it would probably make most 10-year-olds cry. Now that’s what I’m talking about! I’ve still got my urge for a game that’s mature in the other sense of the word, with deep characters, multi-layered plots, and various other complexities of adult life. For now, however, I’m actually looking forward to Kane and Lynch 3. Yeah, there’s probably going to be a Kane and Lynch 3, if Square-Enix is nice enough to dole out the funding for it. If Io and Eidos keep it up and return to their drawing board, perhaps their third attempt will craft something truly awesome in scope.

It’s awfully hard to get good screenshots of Kane and Lynch too. That’s just how shaky and brilliant the camera is.

A hypothetical Kane and Lynch 3: Holy Shit won’t have the usual rising action and climax of most games, it will begin with the climax and just climax harder. That’s exactly what intense action games need to do, and they’ve proven they can pull it off in Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days. Now Io just needs to pull it off again, and harder, and more often. This is starting to sound inappropriate. My final comment is an important one: Lynch’s psychosis. Where did it go? That was one of the brighter moments in Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, and it is literally nowhere to be found in the sequel. Nowhere. This was a decent let-down. Given that everything else about the game had improved drastically, I had high hopes for some psycho rampaging. Granted, Lynch is still a little loopy, but I want hallucinations! There’s a big, wide open niche market for hallucinations in co-op games, and this is the franchise that should be milking it.

For this review I have awarded two scores, since I technically reviewed two games. Keep in mind that Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days isn’t the best shooter on the block. In fact, I don’t even recommend buying it. But it’s a four or five hour experience that you won’t regret, assuming you can find a buddy to plop down on the couch with you to play through. Saying this, though, is infinitely more praise then I could give to Kane and Lynch: Dead Men. That game is shit. Fuck that game.

To Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, I award three awful mullets out of five. (3/5)

Now that I’m done justifying my horrible [strikethrough]cocaine[/strikethrough] SMT addiction, let’s talk about Devil Survivor. Being a game reviewer, I’m noticing I’ve become skeptical even towards franchises I like. DQIX sits inside my DS as we speak, unplayed by anyone but my younger brother. I really can’t explain why, except that I worry it won’t be as good as the others and don’t want to be disappointed. Similarly, I heard that Devil Survivor was an SRPG, and I started to worry. I don’t know if Atlus has even attempted an SRPG before Devil Survivor, and it took them until the PS2 era to get their normal jRPG games right. I wouldn’t have been remotely surprised to find out the game was mediocre, redeemed only by its story.

Surprising no one but me, the game turned out to be awesome. Atlus doesn’t half-ass their games. Even better, it’s good while being noticeably different from every other SRPG I’ve played. Most SRPGs are simply jRPG combined with chess. Occasionally, you’ll get games like Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn adding a sort of rock-paper-scissors mechanic with weapons or classes. There’s the occasion interesting gimmick, but you more or less know what to expect from SRPGs. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. This is not a complaint. It’s merely an observation.

The same applies to Devil Survivor. If you’ve played an SRPG, you mostly know how it works. There are enemies spread across a map, and you run over and beat the shit out of them. Everybody is really polite, so they all take turns moving and attacking. Turn order is based mostly on how fast they are, though engaging an enemy can sometimes delay their turn.

Devil Survivor does have its own brand of interesting gimmicks, though. First is that every character is actually a party of three, one human and two demons. You can get demons by buying them on eBay, or fusing them from other demons. Buying demons instead of getting them automatically at the end of battle or by recruiting them seems like it’d be an annoying waste of money, but it avoids that problem in the most brilliant of ways. It’s the only thing to spend money on. There is no equipment for you to buy, nor anything like Nocturne’s magatamas for learning skills. All of your character’s stats are dependent on level.

There’s nothing wrong with this. It certainly cuts out a lot of money grinding, but they also cut out something from the other games that I miss. Pretty much all of the recent SMT games, so far as I can remember, have included the demon compendium in some form, allowing you to pay to summon ones you once had. Not including this makes you wholly at the whims of whatever is available for sale. Say you fused a certain demon with awesome skills, and want to use it to fuse another demon with some of those skills. If you’ve already used it in another fusion, you’re shit out of luck, unless the auction system says otherwise. Granted, having two separate systems for buying demons would have been a bit odd, but I am horrible addicted to the demon compendium.

So, if you don’t have magatamas or equipment, this leaves a big empty space for what normally decides your character’s skills. This space is filled with skill cracking. Before every battle starts, you can scroll through what skills the enemies know, and which enemy that has it you want to go after. If the character you told to crack the skill kills that specific enemy that has the skill being cracked, you get said skill, and can even use the skill in the same battle if your stats are high enough for it. Once a skill is cracked, it’s cracked for everyone, with the restriction that a skill is limited to one human character at a time. You can change what skills a character has between any battle through the menu. They are limited to three skills they actively use, three that have constant passive effects, and one that they auto-use at the start of battle.

Each skill being limited to one person at a time, while allowing the player to change skills at almost any time, encourages making characters fill specific roles without being limited by them. This is a very good thing. FFX and XII allowed the player complete freedom in how they built there characters, after a certain point. Both were ultimately flawed in that every character became everything. By limiting what skills a character can use by how high their stats are, and having only one character per skill, Devil Survivor surpasses both. Can more games do this? Please?

When you approach an enemy and attack them, it initiates a standard turn-based battle straight out of Nocturne, with one key difference. Since this is an SRPG, where movement and non-combat actions play an important role, during the small turn-based battles everyone only gets one turn, and then it goes back to the map. By hitting the enemy with their weakness, you can get a second turn, but they can do the same to you. Hitting them with something they’re strong against can also give them an extra turn. The opposite also applies.

Outside these battles, every character in a group can use one skill during their turn. Most of the skills allowed are just healing, but there are a couple that increase your movement or strengthen your magic spells for you next fight. This works beautifully, and, since the enemies can do the same, it doesn’t kill the difficulty. It is a bit frustrating to do a lot of damage to an enemy group but not have them dead yet, only for them to use a full heal spell and practically negate everything you’ve just done, but even that plays into how you strategize.

In Persona 3, Nocturne, and Strange Journey, the main character’s death meant game over. This is carried over into Devil Survivor in a really interesting way. Every human character is the leader of their particular party. If they die, their party disappears. You can have other parties resurrect them though, and if you do, the rest of their party is as it was when the leader died. This is a really cool way of using the leader death mechanic from the other games.

Even better is that this also applies to enemies. If you kill the leader of an enemy group, the whole group is gone. However, whether human or demon, a group’s leader has higher defense so long as the rest of his/her party is still alive. It makes it harder for enemies to just go after your leader, and, with most mechanics in this game, the opposite applies. However, it’s still possible. The only downside to going after the leader in every encounter is that you don’t get quite as much experience as you normally would from the battle. It’s a fair trade, and makes the player frequently assess their priorities during battle.

The biggest complaint I can lodge against the battles is that there are some rescue mission. These are the SRPG equivalent of escort missions, where you have to keep specific characters alive while killing all the others. There are a surprising amount of them, and while the keeping people alive part is fairly easy, it still detracts from the otherwise great gameplay. If I’m going to get abilities to move my characters across the field of play more quickly, I want to do it so my characters can support each other better, not because I have to protect some stupid pop idol.

Now, there is grinding in this game, but it’s not too bad. Coming to it after Phantom Brave, I want to say the grinding is negligible, but I’m not sure how true that is. There’s some very tedious grinding near the very beginning, but after it I went quite some time before needing to grind again. The only other time I needed to grind that much was before fighting the final boss. Had I built my final party better, I might not have needed to do it as much then, too.

The grinding stays fairly fresh by changing up the areas of Tokyo you can grind in as you progress, and having Easy and Hard battles spread throughout specifically so you can do some leveling. Since this is an SMT game, anything you can have in your party can also be something you fight. This keeps you from running into endless monster recolors, as I’m fairly certain I did in Phantom Brave.

Outside of battle, you have a list of Tokyo districts you can go to. You can talk to people there, or look around, all with a single button press. It’s a tad disappointing that there’s not full-on world exploring, or a world map, but that’s really not designed to be a part of the game, so the lack thereof hurts the experience very little. The game is kind enough to list plot relevant battles and characters you can talk to in these areas alongside the district names. Doing something plot relevant advances the clock a half hour forward.

The game’s plot is spread out along seven days, with a number of plot events happening during specific times on these days. You can avoid some plot relevant things, at the risk of having a plot path locked off, but others are required to do. Knowing that there’s going to be a super huge boss fight at 5:30 is nice. It lets you prepare, and while you can’t really do anything about the boss fight, knowing when to expect it is kind of cool, especially when there’s a plot reason you know.

At the beginning of the game, your cousin Naoya gives you and your two friends DS’s that he hacked. (Subtle advertising!) After cracking the protection on them, you receive an email letting you know that someone will be murdered by an animal, there’ll be an explosion, and the power will go out. It lists the time these things will happen. They do happen, and you also end up fighting demons that come out of your DS’s. When you beat them, they join you, and that’s how you get your first demons. You end up spending the night in that area of Tokyo, and find out that everywhere around that area is locked off when you wake up. The Japanese Special Defense Force has sealed it off with the excuse of gas leaks in the Yamanote subway tunnels.

Time passes, and it becomes more than obvious that this is just the governments way of keeping demons and people who can use them from getting out. There are rumors the government is working with angels, there is a cult saying this is a trial brought by God to test man, and more and more people are getting ahold of these hacked, demon summoning DS’s. The protagonist, because he’s the group leader, is able to see numbers over everyone’s head. These numbers let him know how long everyone has to live. Nobody inside the Yamanote circle has more than seven days to live, except the JSDF. The reasons are obvious when you look at the facts. Knowing this, it’s your goal to either escape the circle, or prevent the tragedy, and you only have seven days to do it, all the while protecting yourself and others from demons.

Depending on who you talk to, and when, there are a lot of endings. Possibly more than Nocturne has. I won’t spoil them, except to say that one such ending available is the one Nocturne is most famous for. This isn’t really a surprise, since it seems to make an appearance in most every SMT game I’ve played that isn’t Persona. The endings in this game, with two exceptions, are all based around how you deal with the demon threat to prevent the tragedy, or whether you run away from the problem completely. It’s a nice change of pace from the more alignment based paths I saw in Nocturne and Strange Journey. Not that there’s anything wrong with them. They’re awesome. It’s just nice to see some change.

Presentation is solid all around. The character designs are very reminiscent of Persona 3, with it’s own versions of Junpei and Yukari. Graphics are nice and largely sprite based, making me happy. The visual novel look to the story scenes is done well, and doesn’t feel remotely out of place. There’s no voice acting, but it’s the DS. What did you expect? The songs, as with most SMT games, are fantastic, and my only complaint is that being on the DS means that Demon of Darkness (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11PcvLcwAa4) doesn’t live up to it’s musical potential.

It’s a solid game. There’s almost zero bullshit, and my biggest complaint is the lack of a demon compendium. After playing Phantom Brave, it was especially refreshing. It offers a challenge without pissing me off, and there’s enough interesting twists to the gameplay and plot that make it worth playing over many other SRPGs. I can only hope we get a Devil Survivor 2 for the 3DS or something, because being on the DS is the only thing that hurts its presentation.

Four Out of Five Black Frosts

I can understand them certainly. The idea of using all sorts of resources to gain power, produce more awesome soldiers, and send them steamrolling over your enemy has definite appeal, but I just hate micromanaging. The idea that I have to send a handful of totally fucking worthless units to go build shit, make shit, or repair shit is annoying. I want to fight guys – not balance a resource checkbook. This is the same reason I ragequit Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker early in. It wasn’t a bad game, but I want games to test skill, not my patience.

I prefer my games to be about one person fighting one other person, be it fighting or shooter. Stretching your control over multiple facets just gets complex and frustrating, especially when the game is fairly tight-lipped about how to overcome obstacles. This is one of the reasons Street Fighter IV pissed me off, too, by introducing attacks or abilities that reacted in ways that didn’t make sense to me and offering no explanation for them. It does not count as a challenge if I can’t understand what I did wrong.

Basically RTSes just aren’t my thing. So I naturally picked up the Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II demo out of sheer curiosity, and found myself actually interested. So when it came out I picked up the retail game, and now, because gaming releases have slowed to the level of a snail crawling through molasses, I’m reviewing it!

Yeah, you heard. Mirai reviewing an RTS. Pick up your oversized red phones directly to the president, cause the world’s coming to an end! And this time it really wasn’t global warming’s fault!

I played the original Dawn of War years ago and didn’t feel much for it. It was an RTS. Another RTS, one in the million different factory-line productions of them that come out every year. Battle Realms, Dawn of War, Starcraft, Warcraft III, Star Wars: Empire at War, Rome: Total War, Supreme Commander, all of which are just more games about mining vespine gas, building farms, and producing enough units to overwhelm over your opponent, Battle for Azure City style. So why is Dawn of War II so great in my eyes?

Now, the main reason I like this game is because, especially for the campaign, it feels much much less like an RTS, note the emphasis. It is still most definitely an RTS, just a huge departure from what is considered traditional. This isn’t like Brutal Legend where the game covered pretentiousness of strategy (strategy of ‘run at the enemy’) under a third-person action game. You move a hero around, control squads to different areas, and combat with foot soldiers. But the focus on capturing resource points rather than ferrying gold to HQ and entirely removing building production cuts much of the bullshit out of a genre I’ve all but hated for years. This has actually pulled me back in!

There’s a fun World of Warcraftian loot and equipment system, gathered after each battle, and you can keep changing the loadout for each squad to fit your needs. If you need a shotgun or a sniper for your Scout group, you can swap it out before the mission. Better and newer swords, guns, and armor come and go giving you abilities and powerups. The items aren’t strictly better in the +1 versus +2, giving you lots of benefits depending on what you prefer more in your Hot Vorpal Flaming Heavy Bolter while still keeping all the choices balanced. Have I mentioned how much of a giant hard-on I have for balanced gameplay?

All these changes make the campaign feel much more like a squad-based tactical action game, which I appreciate, since the monstrosity that is the RTS monster doesn’t appeal to me at all. Sure it’s a total departure from the series, but fuck that, who cares about the rest of the world? Certainly not me! I was born in the US, it comes natural.

So you get a couple of squads and are in charge of going onto one of many planets, wandering around until you find your objective, usually someone or something that needs killing, sometimes laced with points you need to capture. There’s multiple smaller missions that increase your experience, wargear, and options in combat.

I like it because it means you have to learn what each squad does, so the regular rifle soldiers and Devastator squads are better at distance fighting with their overcompensatory weapons, assault marines are better at close combat, and so on. It works really well as a tutorial to educate you with what each team does, especially for multiplay, and there’s fun abilities like satchel charges, bombs, and powerups that continue to push that tactical action game. Most importantly I don’t have to spend a fucking ten minute wait producing and upgrading buildings, only to die at the end and have to do all the stupid bullshit all over again.

The campaign, then, is rockin’ in gameplay alone. I wish I could say the same for the plot. You take control of a nameless Force Commander named, uh, The Commander, but he never even says anything, and meanwhile faces like Cyrus the Scout Seargeant or Tactical Squad Sargeant Thaddius yell at you to do things while everyone with a voice talks among themselves. Why does every RTS have to make you control The Voiceless One while the big boys talk? Makes me feel like I’m the little kid while mom and dad yell at each other, except they occasionally turn and ask me if I’d send the troops to Iraq.

Not only that but every character is just a growly generic space marine. I understand the Emperor is a facist and more than likely pretty sexist, but even with that in mind all that happens is that the grizzled manly warriors brood and grit at each other, occasionally stopping to squash bugs or murder Orks. There’s not even any females that aren’t on the other side of The Good Guys, namely Eldar sorceresses.

That might not be a good example of the story, but…it’s kind of hard to define what the story even is. You’re a voiceless faceless newcomer who’s much prettier than anyone in the 40k universe should be, and you go alongside the other Space Marines to…fight any threat that comes before you. The situation only gets dire when the Tyranids descend and try to take the planet Calderis and, in turn, other nearby planets, and you spend the rest of the game trying to finish three separate objectives; gathering bio-toxins to make a Tyranid-destroying poison, reclaiming an Astronomic Array, and defending a Marine post called Angel Forge. Pick them in any order, they each give you a new power. There’s also several side-missions of varying enemies, objectives, and difficulty.

But…that’s pretty much it. Like, I’m not even exaggerating, that’s about all that happens. From what I remember from Starcraft’s story while I typed in ‘there is no cow level‘ to make those pesky battles go away, there was at least central characters, psychological conflicts, betrayals, and lest we forget Sarah Kerrigan becoming the smokin’ rad Queen Bitch of Blades of the Zerg.

With DOWII, you have commanders of your squads, maybe six or seven, and they all growl and brood about the next objective. And then put you, with no voice, in control. The brooding and gritting in question is well acted, but there’s just no plot to speak of. Nothing happens. I guess that works in the 40k universe?

Despite all the brainwork you have to do, this is still a game for big manly men who don’t have time to have emotions – instead let’s just slap the player into the shoes of a spacemarine and send them to wreck shit. Bleh.

If you know nothing about the Warhammer 40k universe, imagine taking Starcraft and making it less goofy and more Grimdark, and you pretty much have the right idea. When Starcraft first was created Tyranids became Zerg, Eldar became Protoss, and Space Marines became…space marines. Lots of liberties and alterations were made of course, such as turning Eldar from space elves to Jedi, but the bone structure is the same. Did that save me from explaining details? Good, let’s move on.

The story is a minor nitpick on an otherwise terrific campaign, featuring a pretty wide spectrum of environments on which to wage some warfare. When the Tyranids take over they often end up shitting on the planet heartily, giving it this clash of the natural environment of a desert or forest while all this grey/purple organic alien ooze creeps along the whole floor. This isn’t even on all of the planets, either, such as the Eldar controlled ones. So all in all, environments are a solid knockout.

But you generally don’t get an RTS for single-play, and even though this one charmed me with being so abnormal from the standard affair, the multiplay carries that same attitude. In multiplay squads don’t have commander units to revive, or equipment, or any of the stuff you learn through the game. Instead it’s a very heavily resource-downplayed version of most strategy games. You have a base that you use to produce units, but there’s little to no producing of buildings or defending the base. Instead it hands you your commander, the one revivable hero unit you get, and lets you out to play.

The focus of the game is capturing points that give you more requisition, as requisition is the currency to buying more dudes, and power nodes which are much stingier with their resource but let you get fancier units. There’s also a third resource, named colorfully depending on your chosen race, that allows you to do cool shit like orbital strikes or suddenly spawn soldiers upon command. I like it because it means the gameplay is always shifting in controllable, understandable ways.

You and your opponent send grunt troops at each other, quick scout squads that usually just clash over control points before Big Daddy Commander comes in and breaks it up. After a while of capturing nodes, you’ve built up some better units to clash with, and now the earlier scouts are only good at running and providing backup or capturing points while the heavier units wage war. All the while you have backup powers, abilities, and Orbital Drops/WAAAUGH/Tyranid Colonizing/Eldar Warp that can give you backup at any point provided you’ve wrecked enough shit.

I also love the ability to Fall Back – most units (this is an advantage, so the exceptions often are weaker) have this option where, if things go bad, they can break away and flee at any moment back to base. Provided the entire squad didn’t die, you can reinforce at a cheaper cost than a whole new unit. The individual units also become veterans and gain bonuses to health, damage, and defense. Individual units can even be upgraded with fancy abilities and weapons, changing their roles as you see fit, IE close combat, ranged, suppression, and so forth.

There’s also a really strong emphasis on cover and real warfare tactics. Strange combination, but I can call it Dawn of Modern Warfare II and you get the kind of idea; your squads suffer higher damage from firearms if they aren’t in cover, and if bullets are being sprayed in all direction it slows down their movement as they need to keep their heads down. This means good squad composition is important, as you need tough guys in the front, suppression fire in the back, careful use of grenades, and big stompin’ dudes for when the Hive Tyrant/Force Commander/etc start rolling out. Eventually you’re producing units so powerful that you have to win, because if you have a bipedal walker with more guns than appendages and haven’t won yet, there’s seriously something wrong with you.

The AI never becomes a problem, and I can’t help but heap praise upon that. If you order marines into cover, they go into cover. You tell them to start shooting, they start shooting. Unit placement is the key factor here, so you can grab your Tactical Marines, pull them back, get the Assault Marines in there, and keep the pressure on your foe. Not once does it ever feel like some stupid pathing problem made you lose, as it would frequently.

Dawn of War II is a game where you abandon all pretenses of typical RTSes and focus on the fighting. Warfare should be about war – Starcraft spent so long making buildings to get up to the bigger, better units, suffering a defeat felt like losing all your hard work and not getting any real progress in the actual combat. Loss of buildings puts you so far behind it’s just drawing out the inevitable loss anyway. Why can’t we cut out the Barracks and turret placement entirely and just focus on you fighting the enemy?

I’ll tell you what this game reminds me of, the one other RTS that I kind of liked – Total Annihilation, one of those games so old they just had a mishmash of polygons rather than any real art style. But I liked it because it does the same thing this does – focus on back-seating resource management and instead lets you just crank out enough fighter jets to embarrass Tom Cruise and make bombing runs on everything near where your enemy’s base is.

However it still had the building construction/placement I hated. All building construction does is slow down advancement of the Big Boys, and feels like unnecessary padding on the combat itself. Why can’t we gut all that bullshit and get to the fistycuffs?

Supreme Commander obviously was the sequel, and it continued this trend of building production. That is why Dawn of War II is so rockin’ – it abandons all priori pillars upon which RTSes sit, and the game is better for it. Breaking through standardized material is the kind of thing that produces games like Vagrant Story and BlazBlue and Resident Evil 4! This is a good thing! Instead of just repeating the same crap Warcraft: Orcs Vs Humans made twenty years ago, break some boundaries!

The races are as varied as they are similar – space elves Eldar have some of the most vicious ranged weapons in the game, but melee isn’t their strongest attribute and often push run-and-gun tactics, especially with their commanders that have abilities to teleport or cast crazy powerful spells. Orks are, well, they’re Orks. If you know anything about fantasy or 40k, you know that Orks become more powerful the more of them there are. Individually they don’t amount to much, but in mass numbers they can overrun you easily.

Space Marines are the opposite – each group is very self-sufficient and can handle themselves in a fight, but are equally expensive and each loss is a cripple to your resources. Dig in and keep fighting and pull back if things start going sour. Tyranid bugs, meanwhile, are fast and vicious in close-quarters and can easily wreck your shit if they close the gap. They pale at ranged damage like other races, even with barbed stranglers able to suppress enemy units, and can’t dig in.

That’s not even getting involved with many of the balance changes added since Dawn of War II’s release. Since I started playing many of the costs and strengths of squads for each army has gone up and down, rebalancing slowly while even adding in new units, like the fantastic Genestealers, a sorely missed unit from the Tyranid forces, or new heroes like the Librarian. You don’t even need to buy the game to get these new units – they came with the update you get automatically.

Since the game came out I was even going online to play it, fighting in multiplayer, something I don’t think I’ve done for hardly any RTS games ever. I could get better but there’s too much frustrating crap involved. Dawn of War II said, yeah that is some frustrating crap, so let’s just not even do it. They unleash your chain and tell you to go fight. Have fun, and may the Emperor bless you.

Now as much praise as I throw onto this game, there’s a couple things I flat out just don’t get. For one thing, there’s a mode called Last Stand, undoubtedly a spiritual knockoff of the multiplay heroes modes that are in Warcraft III. But…it feels so pointless. Waves of enemies come out into a circular arena, and you and two friends kill them. Gutting squad control from a tactical strategy game so you can control a single person is utterly ridiculous. It’s not satisfying, and since you’re not doing micromanaging all it ends up being is a bad Diablo knockoff where every action is delayed by an entire second. Why even include it? There isn’t even any crazy mods like WCIII had where you get actually decent mods like Defense of the Ancients or Paintball, so what’s the point?

During release the big bitching point was the lack of maps, but Relic has rolled out more and more maps with each patch, increasing the count to over fifteen if I remember right. For free. That’s pretty Goddamn impressive if you ask me.

I’m also not quite a big fan of the central game mechanic of Victory Control Points. Aside from the regular requisition points, there’s also three points you need to capture that increase a point count. The more you control, the faster the points go up. What it often means is that victory is not centralizing around utterly ruining your opponent by destroying his base, it’s by conflicting over a single point that both armies want. This does wrap games up much faster, I’ll admit, especially since all bases have two to three Fuck You Turrets posted next to them therefore making total annihilation impossible, but it always feels a bit weird to be losing a war because an imaginary, arbitrary meter is filling up against your favor. This is a small complaint, of course.

Dawn of War II is the one RTS that I love even to keep playing it. I suck in multiplay, but that’s nothing new, and it’s the one RTS that warmed my heart this long later. When this love letter was written, I hadn’t even heard of the second expansion coming up. Redemption is giving me wood and I haven’t even heard if there’s going to be a new race yet.

5/5 Zerg

Now, the real question is, can a game be held up by very basic platformer/puzzle mechanics and some insanely ratcheted up atmosphere and immersion? Limbo says, “Hell yes it can.”

Limbo is an Xbox Live Arcade game created by independent game developers Playdead, and it won two Independent Games Festivals awards before finding its place on Microsoft’s online service. I initially didn’t think much about it, but then I saw it getting some really good reviews and so many of them called it an ‘art game.’ Oooooh, this mystery intrigues me. So I bought the game, and from the moment I started it I was utterly hooked.

Let me throw in this screenshot here to save you from thinking I’m talking about walking vertically under low-hanging bars.

Limbo is, in raw gameplay mechanics alone, an extremely basic platformer with two buttons – one jumps, one grabs. Everything about the gameplay is adequate and very minimalistic, reducing big fancy Super Mario Galaxy 3d environments into the most simplistic yet challenging linear ‘Move Right’ series of events.

It reminds me of Little Big Planet in many ways – physics based puzzles featuring linear platforming and really well designed levels. The big difference is that Little Big Planet has charm oozing out of every bit of its sack. Limbo, by contrast (and contrast is a very good keyword), secrets depression and bleakness.

Have you ever gone through Photoshop with a picture, selected big sections with the Magic Wand tool, and then just colored them black? That’s kind of what this game looks like, then run through several filters, most notably Greyscale, Film Noir, and some pretty atmospheric lighting. The music track only is the ambient sounds of dripping water or a lonely forest; the kind of terse quietness grips you by the neck and drags you in. I can’t imagine it any other way, as music would distract from the experience. Music, I feel, usually does in horror games, unless it’s very tastefully executed. Dead Space suffered from this, for example, making it feel like every Slasher had an iPod with shrieking violins hooked to their belts.

I don’t normally play up on graphics, but I feel it has to be mentioned that with two colors – white, black, and the spectrum between – they did amazing stuff. The film noir lighting in the background pulses and flickers like there’s nothing but 1950s horror movie light bulbs lighting your path. The audio track of ambient eerie quietness skips and crackles like a black and white movie. Everything around you is so faceless, even the humans, in such dark and drab ways it gives the complete feel of otherworldliness. And this Another World wants really badly to kill you.

When I reviewed Silent Hill 2 I gave praise to the immersion and sense of the entire world around you trying to passive-aggressively kill you. This is what that feels like – a big, scary world in which you are the lowest rung of the ladder, but even more so than SH2. You are tiny. You are insignificant. Everything around can offhandedly kill you, and it will. This is totally reinforced by the game’s punishing trial-and-error difficulty. Your quest to rescue your lost sister is one laced with defeat and loss, death and punishment, and it’s a depressing, bleak road. And I love the game all the more for it. The sheer production values pushes this game from great to brilliant.

The checkpoints are frequent, but the game often surprises you with deaths to compliment the ‘error’ part of the trial-and-error equation. For example, you’ll walk into one area and see a few jagged spikes sticking out of the ground. By stepping on them you find out they are in fact, bear traps. You were not supposed to have known that, and it lends it to the feeling of utter vulnerability and desperation. The world – whatever world this is – is cold, uncaring, and cruel. It’s also strangely gory, with the aforementioned bear trap lopping your head off like pruning shears to a troublesome branch, with unmistakable blood dripping from the neckflap.

I don’t want to spoil it, but early on there’s these repeated encounters with this spider the size of a house. Now, here I am, minding my own business playing a video game, and suddenly an arachnid makes a guest appearance in my chosen video game and reminds me why I’m a pretty little thirteen year old girl at heart the moment anything eight-legged and hairy appears in the room. If the encounters with this creature don’t make you freak the fuck out, even if you think spiders are the most fuzzy wuzzy adorable little abominations, something other than human blood animates you. Maybe dark elf blood.

Feel free to skip this paragraph to avoid insectoid spoilers, but the spider deserves special mention. It is a great example of everything that’s wonderful about this game, with the high attention to detail in the way the spider walks that makes it feel all the more real, to the perplexing way it becomes a difficult puzzle element and a boss fight simultaneously, to the tight controls that give no margin of error that is not your fault. The boy controls beautifully; if you die, it is your own fault, and you must overcome this hostile dimension to succeed.

The platforming and physics puzzles are great throughout and get really really complex as the game goes on. There’s segments later on that rely on anti-gravity, the roof being a ceiling, and pushing around a series of blocks with those tools. Sure it mostly falls to block-moving eventually, but they keep introducing elements like magnetism, water, and gravity to keep it constantly becoming fresh. At one point I was collecting boxes on the ceiling, floor, and out of a tree. It’s incredibly inventive.

It is a little bit of a letdown that there’s no more boss like encounters. In fact after that one you think there’s going to be new horrible monsters to kill you every few markers, but it never seems to pop up. The game still feels deadly and thickly atmospheric, but it lessens, instead trading hostile enemies for more puzzles. Good puzzles, mind, but it lost what I treasured so much about it. If this was the demo it’s about the point where it’d swipe it away from you and stick you through a crummy God of War clone, Sonic Unleashed style.

So let me be clear and say that this game is downright terrific in terms of atmosphere, design, and creative direction. It’s artistically beautiful in just about every sense of the term, and all the gameplay is fantastic minimal realizations of platforming and puzzles. But I’ve got some very big complaints about this game, big ones I’ve been saving up.

The game is frequently touted as too short. It really isn’t – I far prefer a short game that feels complete rather than one that sits and pads out its length. But Limbo isn’t complete. After solving a very difficult timed gravity-shifting puzzle, the boy goes into a strange glass barrier, breaks through it in extremely slow motion, and the game promptly wraps up. There was no final boss fight, no all-important puzzle cog that affects the world permanently, no final barrier crossed to the former out-of-reach ending, nothing. It just ends, hands you the achievement, and quickly ushers you off like a mother shooing away naughty kids.

This anticlimactic moment is probably compounded by the story, of which there isn’t one. Through gaming news, the short summary that Xbox Live offers you, and word of mouth you learn that the boy is searching for his lost sister. After about two hours of playing I realized that there was no story and – groan – it’s all left up for interpretation, especially when the final cutscene and discovery of the lost sister cuts to black before anything is resolved, Sopranos style.

The idea is to leave it up for interpretation, but no, fuck that. Leaving it up to interpretation is something you do with specifics or minor details. The idea is to at least tell me a story. Limbo does not do this. It folds its arms, shows you a boy looking for a girl, and lets you figure the rest out.

See Shadow of the Colossus did something like this, but that was different. You still had people with characters doing things, and some level of plot. So much of it, however, was left to interpretation, such as the relationship between Wander (the main character) and Mono (the girl), neither of which were specifically named. Are they related? Are they married? How did she even die? By the time the game wraps up, things have happened, and even though so much of it is left up to interpretation you still got a satisfying experience out of it, while leaving much room for debates with your date. Hell, even the film Inception told you a story, it just didn’t tell you everything.

With Limbo, the entire story is up for debate. Are they related or romantically involved? Are they dead, trying to find each other? Are they actually children or is that just their avatars? It is never answered, never explained. I appreciate the lack of dialogue, as it adds to the loneliness and anxiety, but in exchange there’s absolutely no plot. I think that Braid’s plotdump books are an improvement! That’s a pretty fucking low rung of the ladder.

So here’s my idea, because I never ever don’t think I’m better than other people – finish the ending. If you see the girl react somewhat to the boy, it would give much insight to their relationship or even how it is they were separated. Even if it’s just a hug, or maybe a shocked stare, something. As it is, there’s nothing. All it really needs is more of the beautiful animations I’ve seen time and time again through the spider or the hostile enemies. The place can be ambiguous, but something has to be specific otherwise it’s just dicking you about.

Hell, maybe even specify where this all takes place! If we know it’s the afterlife but the game never specifies the relationship between the boy and girl, the story would still feel more cohesive and, well, told. Entire stories can’t be carried by ambiguity. They just flat out can’t.

See, I mentioned Another World a while ago, also known as Out Of This World, it wasn’t on accident. Another World told a story that made perfect sense without a single spoken word. The presentation is top notch, but it still falls short of the brilliance that a DOS game from over twenty years ago achieved. The story was there, you could understand it, and it was told. Limbo doesn’t even have that.

Let me make it clear when I say, this game is terrific. I can do nothing other than insist you play it just for the sheer uniqueness and production values of it all. Sudden ending and lack of story in any context at all are minor nitpicks compared to the sheer achievement this game is. And that’s what it is – a triumph. It is art layered on top of art, not quite to the level of Shadow of the Colossus but goddamn is it close. Even when I whine about story, this is a game you just have to play. And once again, like Shadow Complex, the price point pushes it right up to a full Dojo score. Feel glad, Playdead, you deserve the hell out of it.

5/5 brainslugs

Chain of Memories was brought to mind during a recent argument Mirai and I had about whether or not it counted as a sequel. He said no because Sora forgets the game happened, I said yes because major KH2 plot points revolved around events in CoM. The argument ended in a draw partially because Mirai and I get bored with arguing rather quickly, and because my memory of the game was fuzzy. After the argument, I started to wonder if replaying it would change my mind. I hadn’t played it in years, and I’d gotten very picky in the meanwhile.

(Note: There’s a Riku game mode, unlocked after beating the game, but for this review I’ll be focusing on Sora’s story mode. This is similar to how I only reviewed The Journey when I reviewed Persona 3 FES.)

The game starts with Sora searching for Riku, instead of trying to get back to Kairi, bringing my fanfics ever closer to becoming canon. It is during this quest that he encounters Castle Oblivion, which looks like it was designed by a drunk MC Escher. One look and the group knows that Riku and Mickey Mouse are waiting for them in there. How? They just do.

Here we get into spoilers. If you’re a Kingdom Hearts fan, you’ve probably already played it. If you aren’t, you weren’t going to play it.

Sora meets Organization XIII in this castle, and, before KH2 came out and ruined everything (forever!!!), they were badass. They tell Sora that someone is waiting for him at the top of the tower, and that as he proceeds he will forget things he once knew, but remember things he had forgotten. This is why Sora has to relearn his skills. Yeah, having to relearn shit is kinda lame, but it’s a necessity from a gameplay perspective, and giving a good story reason is better than it just happening. Sora decides to climb to the top of the tower, despite the risks. After all, there’s no way he could ever forget his friends. He remembered them when he turned into a heartless, so there’s no way he’d forget them now. Besides, Riku might be at the top. Love will prevail!

As he climbs the tower, he meets more members of Organization XIII. (Axel, Larxen, and Vexen) Axel is at his best in this game. He only says “Got it memorized?” once, and it makes sense. After all, the core theme of this game is memory, and the story revolves around Sora forgetting things. Axel manipulates every character in the game, whether they’re working for Organization XIII or not, and kills Vexen mid-sentence just to get someone to trust him. He tends to speak in overly flowery language, but I’m willing to forgive it since it does bring us a couple solid lines.

Sora begins to remember Namine, another girl who lived on the island with Riku, Kairi, and him. She loved to draw, and Riku and Sora were always fighting for her attention. Sora even has a star amulet that she gave him when they were little. Sora forgot her because she left the islands when he was very little, and he can’t even remember why she left. The obvious response from any intelligent fan would be, “Wait. What the fuck?! Bringing in a brand new character that Sora just forgot conveniently is stupid bullshit.”

It is! That’s why it’s so brilliant. As a player, we blindly go along with whatever the story tells us. The story says that Sora has a secret forgotten best friend that he was totally in love with, and we’ll think it’s dumb, but we’ll still assume the game is telling the truth. When the villain tells us that Sora’s just remembering his true memories, we believe it. It is so dumb, but we believe it, and we don’t even question that Sora is doing the same. Logically, Sora should be skeptical and distrust everything the villains tell him. Since we don’t, it seems normal to us that Sora doesn’t either.

It should come as no surprise, then, that they have been manipulating the fuck out of him all along. Namine’s not his friend. He never knew anyone named Namine to begin with. She’s a witch with power of his heart, and has been erasing his old memories, like Kairi, and replacing them with fake memories of her. Marluxia has her doing this so he can eventually make Sora his puppet, and take over Organization XIII for himself. Organization XIII knew this, and sent Axel to take out Marluxia and Larxene once he had proof of their treason. It’s the sort of backstabbing treachery and deceit that I expect from a group like this. Hell, it’s what I love about them.

The flowery dialogue could have gone through the wringer, and the plot gets a tad wonky near the end, but these are hardly the biggest detractors from the game. The biggest problem with Chain of Memories is Kingdom Hearts 2. When Chain of Memories originally came out, everything revealed in Kingdom Hearts 2 was a mystery. There were big question marks everywhere. These contributed to the atmosphere, and made the player excited to learn the answers to these questions in the sequel.

Unfortunately, the plot to Kingdom Hearts 2 is a complete disappointment in almost every way. Aside from being mopey and whiny, it sets up a lot of interesting ideas that it refuses to execute properly. A Nobody, a being without a heart, could have worked. It was clear that they did have feelings. They showed them all the time, and you can’t really have goals or motives if you don’t have feelings to drive them. “Fuck that!” Nomura says. No, they really don’t have feelings cuz it’s SADDER that way. They just want to get hearts, so you should feel bad for them.

Honestly, I’d feel worse for a group of people who have hearts being needlessly persecuted because of the preconceptions Mickey and Yensid hold. From this, we see that good and evil isn’t so black and white in the Kingdom Hearts universe, giving it depth. Organization XIII’s goal of getting hearts could then be seen as an attempt to fit in and be accepted, meaning they have an understandable goal that they chase after through the wrong means. DiZ could be the true villain, as he did appear most of the time. Instead, KH2 had him be a Good Guy all along because he’s fighting the Bad Guys, and so his motives, goals, and means are not to be questioned whatsoever. Sora and gang go along with him mindlessly because of this.

Even Sora’s blind trust and obedience could be treated as a flaw, as it was in Chain of Memories. Having him suddenly realize that the good guys weren’t as good as he thought, nor the bad guys as bad, would be an interesting moral conundrum for Sora to face. Instead, his biggest problem is “Who is this Roxas guy and why is he fighting me?” A fear of death and loss of self could really be made a much bigger deal out of in the case of both Roxas and Namine.

So, when the answers to these questions end up being terrible, the game that sets them up suffers for it. The plot of Chain of Memories is still, for the most part, able to stand on its own, but KH2 retroactively taints it. CoM’s plot could have been better, but it’s still better than I expect a KH plot to be.

One problem that Chain of Memories has is that the Disney worlds seem irrelevant the overall plot. The original Kingdom Hearts was simultaneously a vehicle for exploring Disney worlds in a game that wasn’t terrible, with an overarching story that tied it together and was decent in its own right. Visiting these worlds mattered. The Disney worlds just feel like they’re getting in the way in CoM. Yes, they reinforce the themes of memory and friends, but this could have easily been done without them. You’re revisiting Sora’s memories of these worlds, but it’s all about Sora, not the worlds.

The result is it feeling like it doesn’t need to be a Kingdom Hearts game. Visiting these worlds feels like a waste of time, has no relevance the plot except its role in the villains’ schemes, and is boring. I’m a huge Nightmare Before Christmas fan. It’s one of my favorite musicals of all time. Since I played KH Numbery Days I don’t think I’ve watched the movie once. I’ve gotten sick of these worlds. I’ve slowly gotten sick of Nightmare Before Christmas, Beauty and the Beast, and pretty much every Disney movie I used to love. The only thing I’m looking forward to Birth by Sleep for is that we’ll hopefully see fewer recycled worlds.

Think about this with me, if you will. Let’s say Chain of Memories wasn’t a Kingdom Hearts game. Let’s say it was an original, stand-alone game. We have a character we don’t know, but by traveling through his memories to get through this tower, we do get to know him. These worlds don’t feel stale or boring, because we haven’t seen them before and they serve a purpose beyond reinforcing the theme. We climb this tower, and as he slowly forgets some things, we revisit worlds we saw at the beginning. The worlds themselves are much smaller, because he’s forgetting them, but he sees Namine where he didn’t before. This confuses the player and and brings the plot more into how the game is presented. That the worlds are smaller for a plot reason not only makes sense, but keeps the fact that you came back from them from feeling boring or tedious, especially since we’re getting new plot information as we do. I guess that would require Squeenix to hire writers though.

I’m sure it sounds like I’m being too forgiving of CoM’s plot in some ways. Try to understand where I’m coming from, though. I played through KHII, which was mediocre, Numbery Days, which was awful, and already know the major plot spoilers for Birth by Sleep and Coded. I even have a pretty solid idea about what KH3 is going to be about. The plot is getting worse every game, and the fact that new games keep coming out make the franchise as a whole complete shit. It’s a horrible goddamn mess that could have been something better. I’ll take what I can get.

Gameplay is… interesting, to say the least. I mean, back when I first played it, I hadn’t played anything else like it. I still don’t think I have. Everything is built around cards. You use cards to open doors, and you use them for battle. Hell, since you use cards to open the doors to the Disney worlds, you advance the plot with cards, too!

Combat is active time, meaning no ATB gauges or turns. Every action requires a card to perform it, except jumping and dodge-rolling. (Thank God!) To swing your keyblade, you use a keyblade card. To cast blizzard you use a blizzard card. Healing requires a cure card. You cycle through you deck with the shoulder buttons, and whenever you use up all your cards, or just need a specific card back, you charge up a special meter. First time you use it, it takes one charge-up to get your cards back, the second it takes two, and the third takes three. All times after the third still only take three. During regular battles, this encourages you to finish the fight with as few card refreshes needed as possible. During boss battles, it makes you strategize and look for safe moments when you can recharge it some, and just wait until you’ve used up your deck before charging that meter the rest of the way.

It sounds like it just gets in the way, but I feel it brings something necessary to Kingdom Hearts’ gameplay. Specifically, depth. Kingdom Hearts has quite possibly the least depth I’ve seen in a jRPG. It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with a game where the gameplay devolves into Mash X Till Dead. It’s more that I’ve just plain seen it done better. God Hand was pretty much that, but it was so ball-crushingly unforgiving in that you had to dodge every single attack while mashing square, and it had depth in that you could design your character’s fighting style. Kingdom Hearts has neither of those things, and the combat ends up really unimpressive.

The cards all have numbers on them ranging from zero to nine. If your enemy uses a card, and you simultaneously play a card with a higher number, you perform a card break, which results in them temporarily stunned. The opposite also applies, meaning you want as many high number cards in your deck as possible. Zeros are special in that they can break any card or group of cards (more on that later), but any card can break them, too. This makes them pretty much useless for attacking, but boss battles will hinge on whether or not you have a zero to card break them with.

Combat improves even further through the addition of sleights. By pressing triangle when you have a card highlighted, you put it into a sleight. Push triangle after putting three cards into that sleight and you’ll perform one. Sleights are basically the special moves of the game. Depending on the card types used, and the total number of the cards combined, you’ll perform different sleights. Combining spell cards does stronger versions of the spells, whereas combining keyblade cards might make you boomerang it.

There are a lot of them to unlock, either by finding them in treasure chests or getting them as a perk when you level up. For the most part, you’ll find a couple you like and focus on them, but it’s nice having the other available. Another great thing about sleights is that, generally speaking, only the bosses are capable of breaking yours, and bosses are the only ones that have sleights of their own. Brings an element to the boss fights that keeps them from feeling just like hard versions of normal battles. The one downside to sleights, which is an upside from a gameplay balance perspective, is that using one gets rid of the first card in the sleight for the rest of the battle, unless you have a special card that can bring them back.

CoM is a really deep RPG, and it really surprises me after playing the other games in the franchise. It’s not what I expect, but it’s good. The biggest complain I have against the combat is that I think the normal encounters take a bit too long, but that’s not a big deal. Not only is the game deep, but it’s hard… This sentence didn’t sound as dirty in my mind. Moving on, I really love the challenge. I was playing on normal, and the game was hard as hell. I had to repeat many of the boss fights a lot, and it wasn’t because they were cheap or anything. It used the standard game mechanics to kill me, but there were always definite things I could have done to survive. I could have used a zero card, a sleight, or healed, and if I tried to do one of these things and failed, it was because I didn’t look for an opportunity to do so relative the cards they were using. It’s better to only heal when you know the action will card break them, stunning them so that they can’t card break your healing action, for instance. Hell, even the camera was rarely a concern. Kingdom Hearts with good gameplay? What kind of terrifying alter-world have I fallen into?!

Of course, every rose has its thorn, and it wouldn’t be Kingdom Hearts if grabbing said rose didn’t cause you to bleed to death. As previously mentioned, you get into rooms through the use of cards. Every time you win a battle, you are rewarded with a room card. Room cards all have varying effects and change the nature of the room they open. There’ll be more enemies, fewer enemies, save points, moogle shops, or treasure chests.

Red rum room cards affect the enemies in the room. Green effects your skills. Blue creates treasure, moogle shops, or save points. The cards all have numbers on them, too. The problem is that all the doors have different requirements. Some will require a card with a number under three. Another might require a seven. Yet another might require multiple green cards that add up to thirty or more. Because of this, there will inevitably be times where you can’t open a door because you don’t have any cards that qualify, and you’ll end up grinding, not to get stronger, but to just make it further into the game. It’s a stupid waste of time, and not remotely fun. I was lucky enough to rarely encounter this problem, but how often you do is left entirely up to chance. Regardless, encountering it once is one too many times.

For presentation, you have two options. There’s a Gameboy Advance version, and a Playstation 2 version. The PS2 one is graphically and musically superior, and includes some voice acting. The camera is much more Kingdom Hearts 2, as well, whereas the GBA version used fixed, isometric camera angles. PS2 has the same graphics engine as KH2. GBA version has GBA era sprites. The PS2 version is the superior version in most respects. However, I do have two issues with it. First is that this game takes place when Sora is still fairly young. His voice actor, however, is no longer that young. The voice sounds a bit too old for the face and feels out of place. The acting is still good, though.

The other problem I have is that you only get voice acting in Castle Oblivion. There is none in the Disney worlds. I’m guessing they decided to cheap out, since this was a remake coming out near the end of the PS2′s effective life. You spend very little time in Castle Oblivion, and much more in the Disney worlds. This results in short bursts of voice acting followed by very long segments without, and it’s just really jarring. The GBA has no voice acting, so far as I can recall, and doesn’t suffer this problem, because you don’t expect any voice acting. Still, the PS2 CoM is still the superior version.

So we return to our question: Is Chain of Memories a legitimate sequel? I’m going to say no. It’s a good game. Probably one of the best Kingdom Hearts games, if not the best, despite its flaws. You can’t really play and get Kingdom Hearts 2 without playing it. It’s a sequel in that it is both a good addition to the franchise and necessary for further participation in that franchise. However, I say it is ultimately not a legitimate sequel because the franchise that it’s a part of really isn’t worth getting involved in, and Chain of Memories would have been a far superior game had it not been a Kingdom Hearts game. It’s not a sequel because being such detracts from the game.

Chain of Memories gets three out of five Axels, because this was back when he was still cool.

Basically the whole thing perplexed me – I saw it getting full scores all over the place. I mean I even like the entire Halo series but I acknowledge that the campaign kind of sucks and multiplay promotes acting like a total cocknut. Now we’re reaching Red Dead Redemption, and it’s pretty much getting nothing but perfect scores.

What is it about Rockstar games that makes reviewers heap praise upon it by the gallons? I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption for a while now and while I do like the game, a perfect score seems hardly valid. Granted Gamepad Dojo has perfect scores too, but ours is only a system out of five, and many of the ranking systems you’d otherwise read are based on out of ten, or one hundred, or even the A/B/C/D/F grading system, giving perfect scores out of systems with eight or more notches on the scale. The perplexing thing is this is the same websites that you’d see give imperfect scores for games like Bioshock or Portal. Why are we so happy with well-done sandboxes that they deserve flawless marks?

But okay okay, axe is grinded, typical review can start now. Red Dead Redemption is an open-world sandbox game featuring vehicles and minigames. So it’s pretty much the same skeletal structure Rockstar’s been making for the last fifteen years, but set back over seventy years to in the closing chapter of the old Wild West. The main character, John Marston, is a tough guy with a dark past that hides his heart of gold. Mysterious unexplained circumstances bring him back to the Wild West on the border of Mexico and America, to bring in an outlaw and his former teammate Bill Williams.

Sounds like I’m trying to make it sound more boring than it is, but that’s just the spoiler-free synopsis I can offer you without ruining much of the game. The story and cutscenes are written beautifully, with lots of my precious minimalistic dialog and a great supporting cast of strong characters, half of whom are good men and women and the other half are crooks and psychos.

As far as writing is concerned, the game is a full hand of aces – Marston is forced to work with the people who can help him out, which results in finding some of the worst people in the world to become his new Bestest Best Friend. The one that stands out the most is a grave robber with an (ahem) ‘special friendship’ with the dead, and has been driven so crazy by his obsession with buried treasure he’s got a total of three teeth and about four muscles in his whole body. And that’s only the story campaign – there’s interesting strangers scattered all over the place that continue to add more life, sub-missions, and sometimes just some more beautiful cutscenes to the world in the West.

I’m a little iffy about John himself, though. As I said before his character seems to be built as a straight-talking tough badass with a heart of gold, as indicated by the story mission good deeds he does here and there, but if you steal a horse or go on a shooting rampage there’s repercussions of the law trying to bring you in. It doesn’t really fit, especially when you work with the local marshal to shoot up Fort Mercer, fortress for outlaws. On top of that, he claims he’s married with kids! How can I be so heartless yet have a family I care about?

Hell, most of the time the game punishes these repercussions severely, especially with the ‘Honor’ system that does little more than give you a quantified sliding scale with which to judge how good or evil you are, almost like an…alignment system?

The entire idea doesn’t really add up to much, though, because the game doesn’t have that same element of chaotic freedom GTA usually does, where you get bored and decide to turn around and mow down anything and everything within a close proximity, especially not since doing so puts a bounty on your head provided you don’t die instantly and are forced to reload. Plus, Mustang chases with gunfire are a bit more intense than revolvers and mustangs with four feet instead of wheels.

The story is nice but the pacing is a bit wonky, as each time you wrap up a segment of the story it goes through what is unmistakably a climax before the carpet is yanked out from under you and you’re sent off to a new destination. This leads to the frustrating moments of believing you’re going to finally get some answers to questions that have been haunting you since the beginning of the game, then the game kicks you in the shins and laughs at you. “What, you thought this game was over already?! It’s Rockstar, baby, our games are labrynthine and epic; we gotta get those perfect scores somehow!”

Gunplay is a standard third-person cover based shooter you’d see otherwise in GTAs, but you’re far more vulnerable this time around, and cover is the only way to avoid getting turned into a bullet-riddled corpse. Once again the auto-lock by tapping the ironsights button is your savior as it locks onto enemies just enough to let you kill them. The shooting works and is flawless but feels lackluster by itself, missing some spice, but it gets redeemed with the bullet-time like mechanic, Dead Eye.

Dead Eye is actually one of my favorite things about this game. Ordinarily bullet time slows you and everything down so you can dodge enemy attacks and make precise shots. This time it slows time down so that it’s almost impossible to get shot at, and instead asks you to either make one really good shot, whereupon Dead Eye ends, or mark your targets and pull the trigger, putting a bullet in each mark you’ve made.

I like this because if the enemy was just ducking behind cover when you start firing, you might not hit them. Hell, when you start shooting time resumes and your shots have to be made in order, so that last guy you marked might not be there anymore, or he might be behind cover. And, of course, Dead Eye is the most awesome when you pop from cover with a revolver, mark six heads, and blow them all off in one sweep of the room. It isn’t intensely satisfying like Splinter Cell: Conviction could be at times, but it is a lot harder and therefore I like it a bit more. And it most definitely fits with the theme.

My problem is it feels so stock and standard. You shoot things on horseback, you shoot things in cities while taking cover, and whenever the plot can spare it you go on a turret rampage. I like the shooting but it seems to leave as quickly as it comes, making them feel like the gunplay isn’t the central part of the game. With auto-lock and bullet time the game feels incredibly easy – hide behind cover using your amazing ability to have a third-person camera, wait for someone to pop out, blow their head off. Occasionally you do it slowly. It just didn’t endear itself to me; no real challenge, no real change in sets, nothing.

The open world isn’t nearly as densely packed as New York, Miami, or Los Angeles. In fact, coupled with the seemingly dropped ability to wreck shit at a moment’s boredom, it feels a lot less like GTA than you’d expect. The open world reminds me of Fallout 3 in many ways – one big open world full of sparse vegetation, murderous wildlife, and thick atmosphere you could just get lost in. There’s a fast-travel system you can use almost anywhere, but I found myself not wanting to, preferring to drink more in the scenery. It takes many hours to truly get bored as the pacing is spread pretty carefully, with long, beautiful gallops through the countryside and calm moments of dialog, right before rushing to a gunfight.

Well, if you can get to it. Sandboxes are forgiven for being a touch glitchy, but this game is all kinds of ‘fucking up’ wrapped into a single package. There were multiple times where I’d gallop forward and fall through the road, floating quietly in empty negative space, wondering if the game would fix itself anytime soon. That’s not even including the times when my horse would get its leg stuck in a nearby building, or hump the building sideways due to collision errors with the stable, or one time when I ran into a cart that bounced up and down like it had fucking hydraulics. Eventually the physics shit itself and flung the cart, horse, and passenger hundreds of feet into the air, and thus was the first NASA project successful.

One of the problems I found with the open world and multiple missions is that before long I fell into the GTA Pattern. You know, where you start off hunting bounties, searching about for strangers, picking wildlife, skinning animals…basically trying to do everything that comes along. Doing this for two hours gets really tedious and drags the game out to an obscene length and pace. I eventually just blew off the rest and just resorted to running through the main campaign missions back-to-back, hoping to get to more shootouts.

There’s lots of minigames put together to distract you and fill the gaps when it’s night and there’s no story missions available. Now this was GTA4′s real selling point – at any time in the campaign you could go on a date with a friend or lady, and you could play darts, pool, bowl, go on helicopter rides, visit comedy clubs that were bizarrely featuring real-life comedians like Katt Williams, and so on. The problem is, as I said, it all becomes moot after a certain point, especially redundant that half the minigames are just sitting on your ass watching. Red Dead Redemption feels like it’s middle road on the concept; not as bad, but not great either.

The minigames just aren’t original enough to really warrant my interest. It is kind of cool that you can sit and play poker at any time, and it really fits well with the whole Wild West theme, but I already know how to play poker and I’ve done it plenty of times before. There’s the bar game Bullshit, tastefully called Liar’s Dice, poker as I said before, blackjack, arm wrestling, and horseshoes, but Goddamn it I’ve already played these games before. All they really do is kind of fit the theme – they aren’t even really that interesting, and none of them have a reason to exist beyond wasting your time and gambling away equally pointless money.

The only minigames I really liked was Five-Fingered Fillet, a tapping rhythm game that was as easy to pick up as it was deceptively difficult, and Dueling, a first-to-the-draw western duel that was usually a result of my cheating at Poker. The showdowns aren’t hard at all and usually it becomes either if I want to humiliate them and shoot the gun from their hand, or see how many times I can give them a tracheotomy. I liked them both because they were games I hadn’t seen before that felt new and different. Arm Wrestling is practically “Tap X: The Game” that occasionally requires strategic use of not tapping X.

One of the few incentives to do much of anything that I kind of liked was the outfits. You start off with Marston’s cowboy outfit and the variants such as the one with a pancho or a long duster coat, and by jumping through certain hoops, IE, discovering locations, helping specific strangers, completing certain missions, taking certain bounties, etc., you can get the pieces to give yourself a new getup. Each of the outfits isn’t revealed to you until certain points in the game, and each individual challenge scales in terms of both discovery and difficulty. This, I like, as it allows the people who want to obsess over collection sheerly to find out what the costume is a chance to get ahead while not interrupting the game with phone calls from Seth the Gravedigger going, “John, my partner, welcome to America! Let’s go bowling!”

Saint’s Row 2, once again that magical romp of wonder that is pure sandbox crime at near perfection, had the right idea. The minigames were action-packed and became things you usually wanted to do anyway or at least had never seen before. If you weren’t giving some reporter an inside scoop by blowing everything up in a square mile radius, you were taking off all your clothes and flashing old women or getting hit by a semi-truck on a freeway and flung hundreds of feet into the air to rack up a high score. The minigames were a total blast and, as I said, frequently you’d stumble across them on accident when hopping onto a car to car surf, already planning on defying the game’s request to play the campaign only to have it keep score of something you were going to do anyway. It did refuse you entry to the campaign, but usually once you started a minigame you really wanted to finish all six levels just for how hilarious it was.

Basically Saint’s Row 2 took advantage of your instinct to defy the rules and blow shit up. RDR, meanwhile, is trying to make you fuck around, but only in certain ways that fit with an experience it wants you to have. It’s halfway good at the attempt, but there’s no coherent reason to play the minigames other than for their own sake. There’s breaking-the-rules things you can do here and there, but never as fully realized.

Yes it is kind of fun that, when a random encounter creates a bank robber who’s making his escape, you can lasso him off his horse and drag him behind you all the way back to the town, turning him into a screamy pile of rocks and guts in a sack. Yes it is pretty fun to repeatedly cheat at poker and duel all the contestants one by one until you win by default. Yes it is fun to stop a horse thief, receive payment for returning the horse, then shoot the civilian and steal his horse again. But again it’s the fleeting, empty kind of fun that runs out, especially if the game punishes you for it.

Health regenerates, which I approve of, but so does bullet time and a horse’s stamina. If you ever take someone else’s horse or ride a wagon, your horse can be called with a tap of the up button. I get that it fits the theme to have a Loyal Steed, and a horse’s trust in you expands their health meter, but to me it almost feels like cheating to have my tele-horse Agro pop up whenever I press the button that makes John Wander yell, “Taxi!”

All these things regenerate, but they try and sell you items that restore them. Only once did I ever use an item to restore health, and it was because the turret mission left me extremely exposed and I got sick of dying and restarting, probably because I can’t use bullet time or go to cover then.

You can use money to buy guns and ammunition, but after getting to Mexico they sell you an ‘Improved Campfire’, which restores all your ammo whenever you make camp, and from that point on they might as well have just hung a “CLOSED” sign on the gun shop door, maybe with a second, smaller one beneath that said “FOREVER”. All I ever stepped in to get after that was the newest pistol or rifle, making the shops practically worthless. You can even buy horses at different speeds! Why the hell would you buy something that dies so easily that you can get for free in the wilderness, something the game tells you repeatedly is a good idea, as wild mustangs live there?

To me it feels like the game needs to be harsher, more unforgiving. So let me try something else then, I’m going to steal a half-baked idea from a game over fifteen years old – EverQuest. You had to always carry food and drink with you, else your stamina went down, and inventory space was limited. In the end all this turned into was making sure you bought one or two twenty-tall stacks of food and drink whenever you logged in, but it was a novel idea. Let’s use this.

Instead of food regenerating health, make it and water necessary for survival, but with limited inventory space along with bullets, maybe even Resident Evil 4 ‘Attache Case’ style. If the player has to balance food and water along with medkits, weapons, horse pills, and tobacco/alcohol for Dead Eye, it’d make them more careful to balance what they take before heading out into the wilds. After a while of not eating, health stops regenerating, and after longer it starts draining very slowly. Being stuck in the wilds with no food or water would make you pretty desperate for returning to civilization, even so desperate that you’d steal a horse or cart if you had to.

Restricting the amount of money would work pretty well at making the game feel more cohesive; you’d have a reason to bounty hunt to keep up your funds instead of grinding through the main campaign. Instead of playing poker cause you like poker, maybe it’s cause you were eyeing that new Remington rifle but are short on cash. Then, partway through, the game goes sour and you start to lose money. Without that you can’t buy things you need to survive, and cheating sounds a little more tempting doesn’t it? I mean, you’re just doing what you gotta do to get by, if that guy dies cause he dueled you, well, sorry, but I can’t always be a good guy.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Too much of the game feels disconnected and GTA-like, without any of the wanton destruction. You can wreck shit, but not to the degree that you feel rewarded, and instead we’re left with Rockstar building an experience for us to have instead.

Not a bad experience, it’s tall and proud a better game than GTA4 just for being more story-driven and with less Roman Bellic, but it just ends up feeling scattered. I feel as though if it were more System Shock 2/Bioshockish, with more unforgiving difficulty with which you need edges to get by. It’s like a shelf of action figures – you can pose them and make them fight and fire missiles at each other, but in the end none of them have anything other than you binding them together. You certainly can make The Boss fight Superman while Optimus Prime offers backup, but if you stopped it’d just be three figurines for your dad to step on and break.

Picture a long, lonely, atmospheric road, a nice path that lets you collect your thoughts while you soak in the sunset, and along the road are Tiger Electronic keychain games. They can distract you and it’s nice to savor the sights, but after a while you’re running full-pelt down the road hoping there’s a destination in sight. And that’s Red Dead Redemption; a big sandbox filled with party favors and a Louis Llamor novel, sold together as a kit.

3/5 howdys

I regret this decision.

It’s a visual novel, and for those of you who haven’t played a visual novel, let me try and explain what they’re like. I’m sure many of you have checked out a “choose your own adventure” book at least once in your youth. Take that, and add pictures for every single scene. Then add voice acting. Last, but not least, make 90% of them porn. Disgaea Infinite has neither titties nor cute boys. As such, I can’t help but wonder what my motivation for playing it is.

The problem with something like this is that it gets you into a more gamer/movie watcher mindset, and without any real gameplay the whole experience hinges on how good the story is and whether or not the delivery was well executed. The plot and characters have to be excellent for me to finish a visual novel, and even then I’ll probably only play through it once.

So perhaps I’m not the right person to be reviewing a visual novel type game. I’m not even sure if it qualifies as a game. It’s a thing that you do on your PSP. If you are a visual novel fan, you’ll probably like the game more than I did. This does not mean you’ll like it very much, though.

In terms of actual presentation, this game does a decent enough job. It’s more or less exclusively limited to character portraits, with a few sprite based events spread throughout. The character portraits are nice and expressive, though I’m certain they’re all just shameless recycles from other Disgaea games. The sprites, though rarely used, seem to still be the PSX quality ugliness I’ve come to expect. I will give them the benefit of the doubt, as undeserving as they might be of it, and say that the sprites are probably there for fanservice rather than laziness.

…Actually, rather than just laziness.

The voice acting is really cheesy, but at this point it’s pretty much part of the appeal of NIS games. It just wouldn’t be the same without Laharl’s ridiculous laugh. That said, if you’re a pickier person than I about voice acting, though, I can see getting annoyed by a few of the voices. As for the music, while I’m sure there is music, I don’t remember any of it. Assuming that there’s a soundtrack at all, it’s one of the most forgettable ones NIS has put out because goddamn there’s always at lease one song that I remember. Of course, maybe I was just so busy being underwhelmed by everything else I just didn’t notice the music.

The entire game hinges on the story, so it’d better be a pretty good one. It’s… decent. You play a prinny, a peg-legged penguin who ends every sentence with “dood.” After a rough day of being beaten up by demon girl Etna, and being threatened by fallen angel Flonne, your day gets worse when Laharl is, to use his own words, “assassinated.” He blames the prinnies, and threatens to dock their pay. However, the prinny you’re controlling found a magical watch that lets his spirit travel back in time, where he can possess people and influence their actions. His goal is to keep Laharl from being “assassinated,” so their pay doesn’t get cut. There’s some nonsense with Etna’s pudding (surprisingly not an innuendo) and a Prism Ranger DVD Flonne ordered, but none of it matters. It’s really just a thinly veiled excuse to watch the cast involved in wacky hijinks, and the actual plot, such that it is, does that well enough.

It’s not a bad plot, but the only time I ever thought the prinnies were good was during their starring chapter in the first Disgaea, and it was more on account of Laharl’s mother than the rest of the prinnies. About the fiftieth time I’ve heard “dood” I end up torn between killing myself or partying with some bros and watching football. Both are grim prospects. Aside from all that, I just didn’t feel motivated to complete the story. There are fourteen endings, and while most of them are hilarious, the humor can only carry the game so far. The whole experience feels like a filler arc. It feels like a really damn funny one, but it’s still a filler arc.

And we finally get to the gameplay, though I’m hesitant to call it gameplay. There are only two gameplay mechanics: possession and mind control. Possession is simply a matter of who you follow through the story. Any time two or more characters are interacting, pressing a shoulder button will allow you to possess one of the present characters. You can only start possessing characters when they’re present. This proves important when you know you need to possess a certain character, but don’t know who to follow to encounter them.

Mind control is exactly what it implies. Occasionally, characters will be in the middle of a decision, and, should you be possessing them when this happens, you can influence what they choose to do or say. Sometimes this will result in hilarity, like Laharl cuddling your unconscious body, and other times it will change events, which can give you more opportunities to change events, changing the end result even further.

The game is split into two halves, which, for convenience sake, I will call Act 1 and Act 2. Act 1 has a single ending that you must get to advance the plot. However, it is literally impossible to get your first time through, simply because you don’t have all the information necessary to prevent Laharl’s assassination. So, you have to play through multiple times, following almost every possible plot path. Every time one concludes, it rewinds time back to the beginning so you can follow a different one. Think if Megaman made getting game overs play a role in the gameplay beyond just restarting the level… And then I recall that X4 did that, and it was just as awful as it sounds.

There are two problems with this, and they’re quite big. First off, it forces you to replay the game a lot of times before you can complete it. Now, I’m not exactly into replaying games to begin with. Forcing me to halfway through a five hour game isn’t going to win me over. When I say it’s a five hour game, it’s five hours because of the constant replaying of scenes. The second problem is that you’ll be replaying scenes from multiple perspectives for no other reason than to try and find out who has a mind control option in one, or just to try out different options. Yeah, you can fast-forward through a lot of them, but even then it’s more redundant and frustrating than reading one of my reviews.

So, you play Act 1 fifty times and you earn yourself Act 2. Finally you’re free of the repetition! Oh, wait, no, because now you’re repeating this act fifty times to get every ending. Only about half of the thirteen endings feel remotely fulfilling, many of them are barely different from others, and the special ending you get for getting all the others is really only mildly fun. Even then, it’s only really funny if you’re in the know about NIS in-jokes.

If you’re going to make a game only story, it shouldn’t be a chore to work through. Repetition does not make for puzzle solving. It’s just trial-and-error, and when you actually have to follow multiple failing paths before it’ll let following the right one actually work, you end up trying ones you’ve already done multiple times without effect because you haven’t a fucking clue what to do next. Decent visual novels that have multiple endings have deep enough stories and interesting enough characters to make replaying worth it. Additionally, every ending and path to that ending is a complete, enjoyable story on its own. This game has neither of those things going for it.

There’s not even anything here that validates it being a visual novel. It would be improved in every way by either being an anime episode, or a single chapter in one of the Disgaea SRPGs. There is nothing here that could not be included in a regular Disgaea game in some way shape or form. If there is no reason for your game to exist, you have a problem.

Alternatively, put in real puzzle solving, like from the Phoenix Wright games. Hell, that’s actually what I thought it was like when I read the description online. I thought I’d find evidence and use it to solve the mystery. That actually could have worked in the game, and, like pretty much any other change you could make to it, would have improved the game into something mildly worthwhile. Hell, steal the whole quicktime event bullshit from Indigo Prophecy or Heavy Rain. You guys don’t know how to make a visual novel so please just rip someone off. I’m begging you.

There’s really nothing left for me to say. It’s a repetitive, mediocre, piece of shit, even by visual novel standards. If you absolutely have to play a visual novel, you could pretty much pick one at random and do better. This has some great humor, but repetition will kill any joke, no matter how good, and is rarely able to carry a game on its own. It’s a waste of time, a waste of money, and a waste of space. Don’t play it.



Never played Sin and Punishment #1, so much of the story of this game befuddles me, though I suspect it isn’t anything even fans of the original rail shooter released via Virtual Console will get either. Throughout the game it tells of cutscenes here and there that involve our heroes running from some bad guys. Apparently Isa, the blonde-haired dude with a laser gun/laser sword combo, used to work for the people that are hunting down Kachi, the blonde-haired girl with a laser SMG. This is pretty much all they ever tell us in the entire seven-level length as they run around from area to area, evading the bad guys. There’s some talk of Isa’s father being a demon of some sort and by Kachi and he merging they can control his power, but none of it makes any sense or has any real coherent narrative it’s trying to tell. You could speed up the game by a factor of three and put on Yakety Sax and it’d be about as worthwhile as a story.

I asked Noncon about Isa’s father being a demon, and he had this to say.

“When the game says Isa is the son of a demon or whatever, his father was one of the main characters of the first Sin and Punishment, and he turned into a giant robot monster thing to protect Earth from a fake version of Earth that was shooting asteroids and meteors at it and shit.”

So, there you go.

After defeating the final boss I put the controller in my lap and saw the game playing the credits at me. I blinked in disbelief – was this game really going to end that nonsensically? A quick jaunt to YouTube confirmed that I accidentally hit the continue button to skip the cutscene.

“Oh good,” I thought, “Maybe this will explain things.”

And thus, the final cutscene played. For – no joke – twenty seconds wherein the villain called Kachi a monster that will destroy the universe and Isa, in essence, replied with, “No U!” Then the credits rolled.

That’s downright impressive. I browsed Wikipedia to try and get a grasp on something of what’s going on, only for it to tell me some gibberish about five Earths, with two dimensions of Inner and Outer Space, and the Outer Space people sending Kachi to do…something, I dunno, by the time the game starts Kachi and Isa are on the ship together so there’s no prologue. Was the entire plot left behind in translation? I think this might be worse writing than Bayonetta!

It might just be me talking here but the way it’s set up Kachi and Isa fall in love – I think? – and fight alongside one another against the freakshow. So it’s a little unnerving that, after gunning and dicing up giant monsters and enemy space-samurai and a dude who can apparently control darkness itself, to look like a pair of twelve year olds with matching voices. It’s all the more odd when you get into a fistfight with Commander Deko and he says, “Prepare to bleed.” The whole thing looks so colorful and flashy and young it doesn’t quite fit the theme when the villain begins monologing. So do yourself a favor, turn on subtitles and Japanese voice overs and it makes the whole thing much more engaging.

To be fair, however, the plot doesn’t make any sense nor does it even need to. Bayonetta’s story and execution were both embarrassing and ridiculous – Sin and Punishment’s comparatively short cutscenes leaves you blankly wondering, “wait, what?” And the game’s response is, “Shut up and play.” And I can at least respect that. After all it’s one thing to try and make you care about stories or plot; it’s another to basically say, “Yeah, there’s a plot, but let’s just move past it, okay?”

So meager and confusing story aside, Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is a rail shooter. Now, you might scoff and roll your eyes at yet another rail shooter on the Wii, and I certainly wouldn’t be one to disagree. I mean, we’ve got two of them from Resident Evil, one excellent one from House of the Dead, and that’s not even to talk about some of the other no-names. The most obvious comparison is Star Fox 64, because as far as rail shooters go that’s pretty much the bar the whole genre can aspire to. And it fits, too.

There’s a reason the Wii has a fuck ton of rail shooters on it – the motion-sensitive bullshit they pumped through press before the console came out was just a load of crap to disguise the fact that it can barely detect any kind of movement other than “Flailing” or “Not.” The pointing at the screen works great, however, and with a lack of a second thumbstick that’s all games turns into. Occasional great games like Resident Evil 4 also fit but clearly nobody gives a shit enough to put any more than twenty bucks into development time on the Wii but Nintendo themselves.

This is a Treasure game, best known for their last game McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure for the NES. Okay, no, they’re best known for their other shooter games, Gunstar Heroes, Gradius, and Ikaruga. You’ll notice all these games are blisteringly fucking hard. Now that we’ve properly set the context for this adventure, we can get started.

The best thing I can do is call it Star Fox 64 filtered through Japan, then filtered through Japan fifty more times. Everything’s so ridiculous and nonsensical and anime’d out, like the disco ball Isa carries on his back that lets him defy gravity with no control panel of any kind. Or the guns that require no ammo or battery and fires lightning-fast and can also become a beamsword. Or the surfboard that Kachi rides on that always hovers onto her belt for no reason. Or the falcon and tiger that serve as mid-level boss fights before merging, Megazord style, into a level boss. Or the giant underwater air tunnel that has you get into fights with giant eels. Don’t get me wrong, Star Fox 64 was pretty silly too, and I understand it’s basically an anime, but this dials the knob to ten, and then all the way up to eleven.

I’m hesitant to call the gameplay changes ‘an improvement’ over Star Fox; after all they’re both very different things. In Star Fox you had one thumbstick that moved your cursor and ship, and in Sin and Punishment the Wiimote moves the cursor while the thumbstick moves your character around. This means that your character acts independently from where you’re aiming – I like that for this game. In Star Fox you were controlling the cursor and the Arwing followed it, making it more about the ship than the gunning. It works for its own game.

Instead of doing a Barrel Roll – yes, haha – instead of that you have a dodgeroll that makes you temporarily invincible, and a sword-slash three-hit combo that deflects rockets and bullets. Another cool aspect is how in Star Fox, you charge up to lock on or mash to manual fire. Sin and Punishment 2 goes a different route, with charge shots requiring manual aim, and standard shooting allows a lock-on. This is great because it cuts out Star Fox 64′s laser button-mashing whenever you got to bosses or enemies you can’t lock on to.

But what’s really cool is that merges well with the bullet-dodging because lock-on reduces the damage you do. You can free-fire while dodging but your attention is split making sure you’re aiming correctly. If it isn’t worth it, activate lock-on and start dodging. I love this split up between your avatar and the shooting as it gives you multiple options and breathes new life into more precision high-score runs.

In essence, Treasure reduced button presses. There’s no more mashing A to fire because you’re always firing, and why wouldn’t you? It’s a rail-shooter! There’s no ammo involved, just hold B and never let go. Instead, they give you the A button (lock on, charge up) and let you press that once or twice when you need to, and the rest of the game is purely dodging bullets with the nunchuk.

Another awesome aspect is the character select – Isa is your standard gunner, with high-concentration of damage in a single stream. Holding A charges up a circular blast, Star Fox style, but they don’t lock on. Fairly standard.

The cool one is Kachi, the girl, who’s gun is more like an SMG with a wide spray. Her charge-up blast locks on when targeted, but charges up to ten times and can be lock multiple targets. She also auto-targets anything you look at first, and you can only manually direct her. It’s a nice way to create balance of characters as one auto- and multi-targets but the other has higher, more precise damage. Beating the game with both characters results in a double-play mode where you can swap between them. Very slick.

Since your character is on screen, the game feels like it needs to live up to the Punishment aspect of the title and starts bombarding you with lasers and rockets. This game pulls absolutely no Goddamn punches – by the time you get to level three it’s unloading everything it has at you with no reservations.

Sounds like it’d be a nightmare, but by pressing a button you can lock-on to one target you’re pointing at, freeing up your attention to let you dodge like crazy from the spray of bullets. This lowers the damage you do, meaning that manual fire is preferred if possible, but with how much your attention is on the things that can hurt you it becomes a nice gamble to keep doing damage while you evade. It only gets more fucking difficult as the game goes on, and man if I don’t love this game for it.

Star Fox 64 is a terrific game, don’t get me wrong, but the game’s just too easy. The only real challenge (that doesn’t involve whittling you down to be OHKO’d by the boss) involves traversing the insanely difficult Hard mode, where one single impact blows your wings off. The rest is just score attacking the regular difficulty and seeing how much of a bill you can get General Pepper to pay for by the ending. It likes to cuddle you and tell you how big you are, make you feel manly for racking up a large kill spread while it softly rubs your arm.

Sin and Punishment 2 is not so gentle. Star Successor likes to tie you up and tell you how naughty you’ve been, slapping your ass with a steak tenderizer, and the whole time you thank her for it. This is precisely the kind of difficult game I like – a tough game involving lots of action and some cleverly hidden solution, usually revolving around hitting missiles and rocks back with your lightsaber (As I said, Japanese). Bullets fill the entire screen at times, and you’re spending so much effort mashing buttons to get a kill and dodge bullets you can’t even stop to think, and you end up operating on instinct. It’s the same kind of thing with Ikaruga, where you fall into an automated no-mind groove of shooting, flipping, and super-attacking.

It also finds a way to keep all shooter crowds happy, as there’s plenty of long, enemy-ridden segments for you to spray fire at. The boss fights, however, are the real meat of this game, and some levels are pretty much just one boss fought over and over in varying patterns. Thankfully they had two brain cells with which to stimulate some electricity and gave you checkpoints after each phase and frequently throughout each level.

Sin and Punishment 2 is the same kind of difficulty that I love about Devil May Cry 3 – you’re punished severely for getting hit, so much so the most obvious path is to not do it. Spend the entire game getting gradually better and better at the gameplay until you get to a boss who has sixteen lasers that fire out of his nipples and twelve life bars, and only look back and go, holy shit, am I seriously doing this? Few games give you that Ninja Gaiden 2004 feel of being able to absolutely spank the fights that were giving you trouble not even yesterday.

The difficulty is so great that, at the final boss, I spent so long trying to dodge and weave through the sheer bullet storm he was launching at me, while simultaneously keeping manual fire on him, that I died over twenty times. I was so defeated and frustrated that I wrote half the review before my psychic powers kicked me in the ass and reminded me that I had a charge-up move that does around four hundred damage. Once I started actually using this mystical power given to me at the beginning of the game I beat him my first try.

The bullet-hell segments are assuredly hard and can shoe in some cheap hits, but never stop being just hard enough to test you, just difficult enough to kill you before you learn what you’re doing and are able to overcome it. Even when you wrap it all up, there’s an entire harder difficulty (like you would even need it) and score-attacking or no-hit runs on levels are always available, with leaderboards to track your friend’s (as well as global) high scores. Since it’s fairly short and emphasizes dying-and-restarting, playing over-and-over again is primarily the focus, and the game is built with this in mind. And, of course, when you’re done you unlock an even harder difficulty, as though it was needed.

As is typical any rail-shooter could get pretty tedious after a while, and Star Successor manages to keep the formula changed up. The early levels are simple running through your crashed spaceship, then later ones have you high-flying or highway-running through a ruined city, then it’s changed to a night-based spirit-shaman fight sequence. The erratic change of scenario does feel extremely disconnected, but I mentioned in the beginning that it was so ridiculous I couldn’t blame it, so it gets a free by for just being Sin and Punishment.

Call me spoiled but the game doesn’t look quite good enough. There’s the occasional problem with perspective – when things are flying toward the camera it can be quite difficulty to see where they are in relation to your character, though they usually help you with that – but I find myself really let down by the visuals. They’re bright and colorful and very action-packed, but as Isa’s flying toward the screen you could almost cut yourself on the jagged pixels that are his shirt sleeve. I suppose I’m getting spoiled, but as graphics get bigger resolutions the Wii is still behind on the times. Having Sin and Punishment released the same week as War for Cybertron only makes it worse.

Sorry to become formulaic, but the music deserves mention for being pretty fantastic. Fitting along with the action that’s so fast-paced and super futuristic sci-fi is some slick techno. I can’t think of anything funny for this paragraph, so here’s a link to a YooTube of my favorite song.

The pros are pretty much as obvious as the cons. Sin and Punishment looks alright and plays great, but nothing about the plot makes any kind of sense or even attempts to explain anything. It’s much, much better than any rail shooter out there, stuffed with action and really really tough, but once again we find ourselves with a strangely great game for the Wii. I recommend it highly if you have a Wii because you’re gonna do fuck-all else with it, so you might as well play one of four good third-party games for the console.

4/5 Isas