Check out the first entry in this series for additional context on what these are and what the nuances of my Game Clearing is~
Game 1: Donkey Kong Land - Beat
I was feeling pretty down on myself with regards to game clearing for much of April. The Fire Emblem playthrough ate up much of my time and, due to various circumstances surrounding it, I was having a pretty poor time playing Fire Emblem. And due to how I was game clearing at that time, Fire Emblem's progress stalling meant I was stalling on the whole project. Now I am trying out this thing where I alternate the games I want to write about with shorter, lighter fair on alternating days so a game's progress stalling doesn't get to me as much, but I only decided to do that AFTER I had been stuck on Fire Emblem for like a month with little progress. I needed a light, breezy distraction in the midst of this. And in came Donkey Kong Land.
Donkey Kong Land is part of a longstanding tradition of creating lesser versions of console titles for handheld systems, typically either a demake or a side game. It's hard to even conceptualize this after almost ten years of the Switch, but once upon a time the handheld system(s) of each generation were considered so technologically inferior to their console counterparts that they often had to be entirely different games or series. Donkey Kong Land is, as you might imagine, this for the Donkey Kong Country series. A companion title to the DKC series which is roughly approximate to a DKC experience on handheld. The story is even a fourth-wall breaking narrative where Cranky Kong, DK's elder of uncertain relation, challenges the DK Crew to replicate the success of DKC on a handheld system, enlisting K Rool's assistance in creating a new game by stealing the Kongs' banana hoard.
In my mind, they succeed fairly well. Like it's obviously an inferior title, it does not reach the highs of the Donkey Kong games on Super Nintendo, but it does actually do a good job of replicating the DKC feel on a Game Boy. I found this title incredibly impressive, it replicates the physics, the level design, the core gameplay, and even the graphics of the DKC games despite being a Game Boy game. There are honestly times where I like it a bit more than DKC2, my personal least favorite of the SNES trilogy, I know, hot take. I also find it very charming how Donkey Kong Land escalates into a city setting, with the final levels being on a construction site. It can become easy to believe that the arcade Donkey Kong and DKC are two distinctive eras, literally separated by a generational gap, it's interesting to see a game from when DKC was contemporary try to blend these ideas. It's a fun little Game Boy platformer, I think it has been overlooked in the discussion of the Game Boy library. 6.7/10
Game 2: Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind - Beat
I try not to let curiosity get the better of me when I do game clearing. There are plenty of famously bad games in my library, a leftover from my game collecting phase, games that have been rated among the worst of all time. And in almost every case, I have marked those games to either sell or just hid them from my digital libraries. Unfortunately, I will not be doing the Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 gaming diary. This is primarily because I want to enter each game I play with at least the notion that I will like it. I tend to stay away from games that I know I'm unlikely to enjoy, and I want to generally not play famously awful games. I don't believe in poisoning the well, I want to bring a level of earnestness to the games I play. But, fittingly, curiosity did finally get to me on Bubsy. And to say it killed the cat would be an understatement.
Bubsy in: Claws Encounter of the Furred Kind is a traditional 2D mascot platformer in the vein of Sonic the Hedgehog. In it you play as Bubsy the Bobcat, a cartoony mascot who must race through a series of incredibly complex levels to overcome the invasive threat of the Woolies, a group of alien invaders who are attempting to rule the galaxy. The plot to Bubsy is pretty irrelevant, something that many people have noted about the series, especially in later entries where the Woolies are a more active threat. It's a bit like finding out that the Goombas are the actual big bads of Mario and it wasn't until Super Mario 64 that we met their boss, the Big Goomba, and had to do battle with him. Along the way, Bubsy will encounter very traditional level themes like a grass/water level, a desert level, a forest level, before taking the fight to the Woolies and having a maze-like outer space level where you fight through their numerous ships. All the while, Bubsy cracks jokes and makes pop culture references.
I do want to say that, while I am obviously very negative on Bubsy overall, I am a person with a pulse, the game's sense of humor is fine. Bubsy annoys me but most "comedic" characters annoy me, I literally wrote a whole section about how Rareware's iconic sense of humor made the process of playing Banjo-Kazooie a whole lot worse for me. But I do think that Bubsy does a decent job of translating that Saturday morning cartoon vibe into a video game. It feels like you're watching a Hanna Barbera cartoon that you caught one time at like 6AM before school when Cartoon Network would play classic cartoons after the Toonami block ended and you never saw it again and you thought you made it up until you started watching all the B tier HB cartoons and suddenly this character was everywhere. That is the exact place Bubsy is sitting in.
That being said, Bubsy is the worst platformer I've ever played in my life. With the new game, which does admittedly look good, and Bubsy's overwhelmingly negative reputation that is likely overblown we are likely to see a renaissance for Bubsy. A lot of Bubsy apologists coming out of the woodwork. But, in my opinion, the common take on Bubsy is correct. It has the incredibly complex, multi-path level design of something like Sonic but it is more unintuitive than any other game in its genre. There appears to be, perhaps intentionally, very little care to making the levels have any cohesion or logic to them. It feels like the most important thing to the Bubsy team was to make the levels a gauntlet of bad and obtuse decisions so that players could experience the numerous cartoony death animations present in Bubsy.
As well, the game just has a lot of bad ideas in it. Bubsy uses yarn balls like coins or rings, a collectible currency of sorts that you can exchange for an additional life if you collect enough of them, but it places such absurd numbers of the balls around AND requires you to collect 500 of the yarn balls to accomplish their goal, making them both unsatisfying to collect and too punishing to even bother. Bubsy takes up so much central screen real estate that it exacerbates the Sonic the Hedgehog problem of the main character's fast momentum and lack of screen space relative to them causing most of the difficulty in the game. Bubsy LOVES vertical level design, with many levels requiring you to find your way higher up on the level before you can even hope to start looking for the exit, a process that quickly becomes an exercise in "hoping that whatever's above you doesn't kill you when you jump up there". And Bubsy takes fall damage. In a fast paced traditional 2D mascot platformer. Bubsy has more than earned its reputation as one of the worst series of all time, and the fact that the original title is supposed to be the "good game" among them is harrowing, frankly. 1.5/10
Game 3: Stray Gods: The Role-Playing Musical - Beat
It's time to reveal something I've been keeping from all of you: I love musical theater. I grew up on it, actually, my mom was a long time subscriber to our local Broadway Across America chapter since I was very young and she would take me to any plays she believed were suitable for my young brain. I've seen so many shows, both good and bad, and while I've been out of the theatre game for a while now, I miss musicals so much. This appreciation of the genre extends far outside of the theatre though, I love musical movies, musical television, concept albums. Musical narrative fiction is one of my favorite things. Disappointingly, though, musicals have only just started breaking through the medium of gaming. We've had loads of music games over the years, but not really musical games. But we are starting to see something of a renaissance of musical games, and one of the earliest adopters of the genre was this, Stray Gods: The Role-Playing Musical.
Stray Gods takes place in a modern day America where the gods of mythology live among humans in secret. Unlike most takes on this mythology, the gods in question are actually immortal souls with mortal bodies, and instead of simply living on indefinitely, they must pass their soul onto another host after so many years. You play as Grace, an aimless young woman and lead singer in her best friend's rock band, who one fateful day unknowingly runs into the Muse Calliope at her band's tryouts. Later that same evening, Calliope arrives at Grace's door bleeding out and dying. She quickly transfers her soul into Grace, making Grace the next Calliope, and passes on in her arms. Immediately, Grace is summoned by a council of gods calling themselves "the chorus", the leadership of the hidden society of gods, comprising of Aphrodite, Persephone, Apollo, and their boss, Athena. The group welcomes Grace into their family, before immediately telling her that she is the lead suspect in Calliope's murder and that she must be immediately put to execution. Grace argues that this is unfair, that she is innocent and that, even if she were guilty, she is owed due process. The gods contemplate this and begrudgingly agree, giving Grace exactly one week to amass the necessary evidence to prove herself innocent before she is to be put on trial. This sets Grace on a new path, forcing her to investigate this crime on her own and clear her name.
But how is she going to gain this evidence from a group of potential suspects who have spent centuries keeping secrets? Well, that's where her status as a muse comes in. The muse's ability is to make people open up their hearts. By initiating musical numbers, Grace has the power to make people enter a state where they are emotionally vulnerable, a state where they might be open to confessing the secrets they are keeping close to their chest. She cannot force them to do anything, mind, she cannot initiate a love song to force people to fall in love or initiate a big villain number to make them confess. But her powers allow her to put people into a state where they are more likely to tell her what they know, as the songs within their hearts are set free. And by navigating these numbers effectively, Grace can learn what she needs to know a long the way, as well as potentially fix the relationships present in the complicated web of the gods' histories.
While Stray Gods states it is a RPG, I think that this is mostly because "Role-Playing Musical" is just a catchier title overall. It certainly has some RPG elements, it was designed by members of the Mass Effect team and has a lot of the Mass Effect style of dialog choices, both outside and inside of the musical numbers. But it is primarily a mystery visual novel, in the vein of something like Ace Attorney. Much of the gameplay outside of the musical numbers consists of investigating locations for clues and interviewing potential suspects, witnesses, and allies. All the while using the Mass Effect style dialogue wheel to either outwit, antagonize, or empathize with the people you meet. It's a tried and tested formula that Stray Gods uses to great effect.
The worldbuilding is also super interesting in Stray Gods. It's difficult for this urban fantasy setting, you know, the gods living among us in the modern day, to really feel fresh. There have been numerous takes on it already, from American Gods to Percy Jackson to The Wicked + The Divine. But I think Stray Gods does a very good job of creating its own take on it. A point I really love is that the gods seem to function on belief, that people paying them tribute is integral to their existence, and so there is a massive blank spot in their memory from the fall of Rome to the Italian Renaissance. Persephone puts it best, she remembers the Goths breaking into Rome in the fifth century and Zeus saying that the gods need to prepare for war, and then the next memory she has is Athena arriving at the nunnery a thousand years later and telling her to come with her. There are other really neat things too, but I don't want to give spoilers because I do really like this game and I want people to play it.
If I had to level any criticism at Stray Gods, it is that the musical numbers are not always great. I get it, having to develop a musical number that can fit a variety of different tones and melodies as the player shapes the song and have it sound really fantastic is obviously pretty difficult. And there are definitely times where a musical number is meant to be off-tune, either to naturally lead the player into a better option for progress or to depict a character who is less confident in their song. But some of these do just sound pretty mediocre. A couple have stuck with me but overall I find the game's music somewhat lacking. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed this and I highly recommend it. If you have a Prime subscription and you've been redeeming the free games they give you in that, you probably already own it, and I think it's well worth a play. I really did like this game a whole lot. 8.2/10
Game 4: Fire Emblem (The Blazing Blade) - DNF (For Now)
I'm so sad this one didn't pan out. Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade was actually a game I was really looking forward to beating. It seemed like such a slam dunk, it's a game in a series I like, it's one that I've already played partially and know I like, it's been a hanging thread for some time for me. Due to the permadeath system, it could be very interesting to write about as I write about lost units and why my decisions made them lost to me. I was so excited about playing Fire Emblem. And then the WiiU conspired against me. Someday, in the not-too-distant future I will never have to play a WiiU game again and when that day comes I will be happy. There are certainly some truly great games on the WiiU, but man is this console terrible. If you want to read about my unsuccessful playthrough of Blazing Blade, the link is here.
Game 5: Sonic Adventure - Beat (Sonic's Story)
I want to start this section by correcting a mistake I have made in the past when reviewing other 3D Sonic games for game clearing. A long time ago, before I started this blog, I played Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Lost World. It was in a year where I cleared like four Sonic games because my backloggery really like rolling Sonic games back then. I rated Sonic Adventure 2 decently highly, I believe at the time I rated it a 6.3/10, and then because at the time I kind of liked Lost World a little bit more than Adventure 2, I rated it a 6.4/10. Both of these are inaccurate. I deeply dislike Sonic Adventure 2 and I rated it highly specifically because I wanted to give it its flowers as one of the most important games of all time to so many people, and I do not care about Sonic Lost World and do think it is just worse than Adventure 2 in hindsight. I think this is an important thing to establish at the start of me Sonic Adventure 1 section because I like Sonic Adventure 1 considerably more than both of them, but also, spoilers, don't think it's that good.
Sonic Adventure is the first attempt by the iconic platforming franchise to properly transition the blue hedgehog into 3D. Sonic had other 3D games in the past, but this is the first attempt to actually take the Sonic formula and translate to 3D, sort of Sonic's answer to games like Mario 64. In it you play as, obviously, Sonic the Hedgehog, along with a cast of other Sonic characters both pre-established and entirely new. In a divergence from the traditional Sonic formula, which took place in natural environments being corrupted by the mad scientist Dr. Robotnik, Sonic Adventure sees the cast in a metropolis named Station Square. A mysterious monster made entirely of water has appeared suddenly and Sonic and crew have arrived in the big city to help stop it. This monster is named Chaos, and it has been awakened by Dr. Robotnik, now given the nickname "Dr. Eggman", to help him achieve his goals of destroying Station Square so he can rebuild it as his own city/theme park hybrid. Sonic and friends must race to find the Chaos Emeralds before Eggman can, as feeding the Chaos Emeralds to Chaos is what awakens its ancient destructive power.
Something I really appreciate about Adventure over other 3D Sonic games is how it makes a genuine attempt to translate traditional Sonic level design into 3D. I don't necessarily think that this ends up being the correct decision, but it's the one I admire the most of the 3D Sonic games. It's a very experimental kind of level design, trying to make the multi-path open ended level design work in a 3D context, and while I don't think it always works out, it is the 3D Sonic game that I believe has the most interesting level design. Other Sonic games might technically be better, especially as we get into the Boost era which is where I personally believe Sonic finally found a formula for 3D level design that works for the character, but this one is certainly the most interesting one to play in my opinion.
It also, I think, does the "Sonic fights a god" plot the best of any of the games in the series. I don't like this plot on principle, I think in general Sonic has become overly ambitious in its plots, to the detriment of the character, his world, and his fanbase, and that the series would benefit way more from really returning to the core setup of environmentalism vs. industrialization. But I think Sonic Adventure does the best job of incorporating these ideas into the established Sonic dynamic without going too ridiculous with it. Chaos is a corrupted guardian of the land that is being used by Eggman to destroy the natural world so he can rebuild it into his mechanized utopia, the focus is almost always on Eggman and his plans and the stuff with Chaos is a thing he arrogantly believes he can control only for it to go wild and start accomplishing his goals too well. Again, if it were up to me I would never do a plot where Sonic has to fight an ancient god, much less how many the series has done. But this one works.
People probably read the byline of this and went "hey, wait a minute, you didn't beat Sonic Adventure if you just did Sonic's story, what the heck" and like. Look. I don't dislike Sonic Adventure. I would be open to the idea of playing the other stories in the future. That being said, I also know the kinds of gameplay the other stories have and like. I don't necessarily think I would love them. The worst parts of Adventure 2 to me where the Tails/Eggman shooting stages, so having to do an entire story of that seems non-ideal. But it's also just like, overall I'm kind of indifferent on Adventure? Like I enjoyed it fine enough, but at the same time I am just pretty neutral on it. I mostly played it because of the Sonic games I owned, it felt like the last one I NEEDED to play, with it I feel like I have played through all of the Sonic games of some importance to gaming history outside of Frontiers, a game I likely will play eventually. Sonic Adventure is fine, but the thing I enjoy most is knowing that, for right now, the Sonic series is something I can mark as over and done with, and I like having a series checked off my to-play list. 5.8/10
Game 6: Mario's Picross - Beat
I love Picross. This is an unsurprising statement if you know me, I talk about Picross very often. I have started at least one friend's addiction to it, I highlight a lot of games that are built off of Picross, I am Murder by Numbers' strongest soldier. Tetris is my first love in puzzle games, but Picross is the one I've returned to the most. If you saw a very old version of my favorite games of all time list, actually, Picross S5, the city pop one, was literally listed as like a top 50 game of all time for me. I have, unfortunately, been out of the Picross game for a while however. Lack of funds means I can't really justify buying these little puzzle games annually at the moment and I also tend to focus on games that have more concrete objectives. But, this month, I finally decided to play the OG Picross game, Mario's Picross for the original Game Boy, as kind of a "before bed/during meals" kind of game. It's certainly Picross.
Mario's Picross is not a game with a narrative that drives the gameplay, there is no given reason why Mario is doing nonograms. It can be broadly assumed, due to the game's theming, that Mario's Picross takes place in the midst of an archaeological dig, Mario playing the role of an archaeologist. But mostly it is just a Picross game with loose Mario theming. As such, I'm just going to describe what Picross is. Picross is the most popular variation on a type of Japanese puzzle broadly known as "nonograms". Nonograms are played on a grid, typically 10 squares by 10 squares or 15x15, with numbers at the left and top edges of the grid correlating to each row/column. You must then use a combination of math and logic to figure out where to fill in squares on the grid, with numbers listed in order of their appearance from top to bottom or left to right. The clues also tell you where there are breaks between the numbers, i.e. if you're doing a 10x10 and one of the columns tells you that the number of squares in a row are "4 5", you know that that the top four squares and the bottom five squares must be filled in with a break in between. While the broader category of Nonograms does not require the ending image to be a picture, Picross, as well as other Nonogram games, usually do require the final puzzle to be some sort legible image. It's even where the name "Picross" comes from, it's a Picture Crossword, ergo, it is Picross.
And Mario's Picross is just a solid little Picross game. That's it. It has a wide variety of puzzles, some of which are even Mario-themed, it has the very traditional progression of going from 5x5s to 10x10s to 15x15s, it's pleasant enough to look at, outside of one track it's fine enough to listen to. It's basic, don't get me wrong, it is after all the first of the Picross games and it definitely feels like it. It has an autocorrect functionality that you cannot turn off and only disappears after you have completed the first 192 puzzles and reach the finale. Which for a pretty serious Picross player, games with non-optional autocorrects are just kind of disappointing. But for a first attempt, it's shockingly competent.
I think the only real issue I ultimately have with Mario's Picross is that it kind of feels near the ending of the Star Course, the third puzzle set in this game, that there are just a disappointing number of puzzles where after you do all the stuff you can prove, you kind of have to rely too much on intuition to progress in the puzzle. Instead of being able to use the math to make progress, you kind of get to a point where you've filled in a lot of the puzzle and then have to intuit how to fill in more squares based not on the clues in the puzzle, but on your knowledge of how Picross puzzles are solved and the methods they typically use. But overall it's a fine Picross game, definitely a great one for beginners too. I've often said that Mario's Super Picross on the Super Famicom, a game I absolutely love and have 100%-ed twice, is kind of the best "beginner's Picross", but this one might take the cake. 7.4/10
Game 7: Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure
I've mentioned in the past that I was a pretty hardcore Nintendo fanboy at one point of my life, specifically during the Wii era. For that entire console generation, my personality was basically the Nintendo Wii, and most of the gaming news that I would receive would come from people who were very Wii-centric. Literally, one of the only reviewers whose opinion I cared about was a guy called "the Wiiviewer", who I believe is still doing content though I haven't seen anything from him since like 2013. For the most part, I cringe at what I was about in that era, I believe some truly awful things because of my Wii/Nintendo fanboyism, but there were some positives. Because I was so inundated with the Wii culture, I knew about genuinely fantastic games that were consistently overlooked by more mainstream gaming circles. Which leads us to our final topic for this post, Zack & Wiki.
Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure is a LucasArts style point-and-click adventure/puzzle hybrid developed and published by legendary game company Capcom. In it, you play as the young pirate Zack, a boy who dreams of being the greatest pirate ever, alongside his pal Wiki, a magical monkey who can transform into an enchanted bell to alter the world around you. On a simple treasure finding mission, the duo uncovers the skull of the legendary pirate Barbaros, which immediately comes to life. Barbaros' skeleton has been scattered across the land in a number of treasure chests, and being unable to reassemble it himself as a disembodied skull, he strikes a deal with the duo. Zack & Wiki will travel across the land, finding the treasure chests that contain the pieces of Barbaros and reassembling the undead pirate to, eventually, restore him to life; and in exchange, Barbaros will grant Zack his old ship and a part of his treasure hoard. Along the way, Zack & Wiki must battle monsters, solve puzzles, and outsmart the rival pirate crew of Captain Rose, a beautiful but greedy female air pirate who is trying to race Zack to the treasure.
To accomplish this goal, Zack & Wiki are granted assistance in the form of various animals that they meet along the journey. This animals are not actually there to help, they mostly serve as obstacles that Zack & Wiki must work their way around, but thankfully, they are helping us whether they want to or not. When Zack rings Wiki near various animals and enemies, they magically transform into tools for the duo to use to progress towards their goal. A centipede may seek to crush Zack between its jaws normally, but those jaws become a handy saw after Wiki works their magic. Not every puzzle contains these tools, mind, but a good majority of them do require the usage of a clever tool made out of an unsuspecting enemy.
Zack & Wiki also is famous for its wide and intuitive usage of motion controls. You can tell Zack & Wiki is a very early Wii game because they really go all out with how you can use the Wii remote. The entire game is controlled via the Wii Remote's pointer, being a point and click adventure game, but most puzzles require you to hold the Wii Remote in specific ways and perform specific actions to progress. To pull switches you have to hold the Wii Remote like a lever and pull down, to adjust cranks you need to hold it sideways and rotate it, stuff like that. It is the kind of control scheme that, if handled poorly, could be seen as overly gimmicky and like. I'm not going to say it's not overly gimmicky, its commitment to utilizing the Wii Remote in a number of unique ways definitely can get annoying, especially as you redo a puzzle multiple times. But it's kind of charming as well, a truly unique game that really can only work as intended on the Wii.
The style and humor of this game in particular is top notch. I don't know if this was an inspiration for Zack & Wiki, but the whole game feels so distinctly French to me. And not in the same way that I talked about Gravity Rush being French, no, Zack & Wiki is like a french cartoon. It's very slapstick-y and has a good sense of movement to it, the main character has kind of a devil may care attitude, always munching on a chocolate bar when things are getting serious. When I was playing it, I clocked it as "what if One Piece has been French instead of Japanese" and I think that's a pretty good description. It even has a ranking system which takes the form of Wanted Posters of increasing value, showing Zack's evolution from a no-name pirate to a true menace. And as it goes on the drawings go from crude to detailed to photographs to lovingly created artistic renderings. It's just so charming.
Zack & Wiki does, unfortunately, lose steam in the endgame though. It starts introducing more puzzles where any mistake in the order of operations requires a reset, you can't reliably work your way out of a point where you're stuck even if you wanted to. The puzzles get a bit too clever for their own good, leading to a lot of "wow, this was really cool" moments mind but also leading to a lot of frustration. The final levels introduce arbitrary time limits where the game was kind of lacking in those before, forcing you to learn the puzzles perfectly. The motion controls for the last two ideas they add, the sword and the anchor, don't really work. It doesn't sink the game, but the end game is pretty frustrating. Still, Zack & Wiki is a very good, very fun puzzle game. From those who have played it, it has a reputation as one of the best Wii games of all time and is famously an underrated gem on the system, and I am likely to agree. It's real good. I hope Capcom finds the want to port it to, like, the Switch. 8.5/10
