I watched Hunter Prey on Monday. I wasn't really sure if I wanted to do a review of it. I mean, yeah, it was a good movie, but it seemed to be getting a decent amount of praise and it was on Netflix Instant so what was the point nobody likes me anyway.
Then I watched a fourth of Terminator: Salvation and I was all HOLY SHIIIIIIT NO WE GOTTA DO THIS REVIEW
Hunter Prey is by that guy that did Batman: Dead End, which was that fan film where Batman fought the Alien, then the Predator and everyone on Internet 1.0 had no idea what was happening ROMS WHAT ARE DOSE. Dead End wasn't great by any means, but it was a dorky derivative concept done about as well as you could hope for, and that's exactly the game behind Hunter Prey. It's hardly doing anything new or interesting, but it's somehow nerd food of the highest order. If you're the target audience you're probably going to like it just for the fact that it's exactly the sort of crappy movie you thought about with friends, except look it was actually completed. On thinking about this, it's sort of brilliant that the film avoided anything resembling innovation: it would have destroyed the illusion that we're seeing our subconscious nerd scenarios come forth and play on the computer screen.
This might sound like damning praise, but consider the state of modern science fiction films. While there's occasionally gems like Moon, generally we get either brainless action films that think they have something to say, or hifalutin REALLY MAKES YOU THINK DONTIT shit done by people who read Ender's Game and think that plot movement is a luxury. Hunter Prey just aims to tell a story, and fuck it, that's what it does (pretty well).
The plot, in keeping with the nerdishment (get it bros), is basically a collection of sci-fi conventions just different enough that your mind feels clever for recognizing what the director is ripping off without being totally put off by the concepts. We start off with three space ranger dudes dressed in "totally not clone troopers" gear chasing after a prisoner who crashed their ship and they have to get back by the time rescue arrives because he has the ability to blow up their world! Yeah. Thankfully, in keeping with how Dead End went, this plotline resolves itself in about 30 minutes with a twist that you'll probably see coming if you watched a given minute of the film beforehand.
Again, let's give some credit. The director clearly saw that the target audience would figure out what was going on almost immediately, so he just shrugs his shoulders, gives some action shots, then proceeds to the twist. Let's compare this to fucking Salvation, which despite having a perhaps even more obvious twist, keeps going and going under the presumption that no one is going to figure out that the convict guy who signed his body to Cyberdyne and then wakes up fifteen years into the machine wars without knowing what is happening is actually a cyborg. And when it's finally revealed, all the characters are like NO WAY and we get like twenty more minutes of Christian Bale altering the script and argggh this fucking movie. Hunter Prey gives the surprise, and then just moves onto the rest of the film. What a nice movie!
Everything about the film, visually wise, is pretty much fun. You know the movie was filmed in Mexico or something like that, but the scenery is still great, and while there is cgi twin suns and dumb shit like that, it's not obnoxious HAY LOOK ITS AN ALIEN WORLD OOOOO type of thing. You probably know what I mean, right? Props are silly (behold the alien computer that is connected by a headphone jack), but the film doesn't spend much time with obnoxious technobabble. Which is probably for the best, as the aforementioned computer is one of the two bad things about the film. You see, the computer was pretty clearly ripped off of Cortana, the purple AI lady from Halo that got progressively sluttier as the series progressed. While there's no sexy holograms here, there's the same weird romantic tension between one of the space rangers and the computer, and it's really hard to tell if we're supposed to just be laughing at a guy being attached to his Vista OS or if it's really intended to be some sort of clever flirting but really just some awkward PUA disaster.
What's the other bad thing? ENDING. Without spoiling, after the initial twist, we get roughly 40 minutes of really fun interplay between the two opposing sides, some nice action sequences, conversations that aren't embarrassing, just a nice little sci-fi romp. Then we get to the final scenes, lots of twists, and while straining credibility, one is still willing to play along. But then we get to the final pivotal action. Initially, you think it makes sense, but thinking back, you realize it runs completely contrary to everything forever.
IN SPOILER: For those that have scene the film, you probably get that I'm talking about the fact that Blue Guy didn't shoot the human, and then just lets the human get the coordinates of the alien planet because uh. I can sort of get the second thing, as it leaves a sequel open and while it seems kind of insane to give the coordinates, there's probably yet another twist in the wings. But the first? No, man. The human asked why he didn't shoot, and he says "because you didn't" or something like that. But the problem with that is that it's clearly established that the human didn't shoot the last guy because he needed some way to get the computer or otherwise he wouldn't find the coordinates. Blue Guy clearly knew this from his talks with Not Cortana, and yet just lets him go. What.
Ultimately, in a world where there are people defending Terminator Salavation, there's a real need for good, fun science fiction that isn't taking itself hell of seriously. Hunter Prey, as mentioned above, is a good movie, fanservice for nerds without making one feel like a total creep.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Monster Tale (DS, 2011)
I wouldn't normally have felt arsed to review this game, despite finishing it, as the whole experience was vaguely unsatisfying, like eating a non-molecular fortune cookie requiring several hours of assembly for a few seconds of bland sweetness. But looking up reviews of this game, there's alot of people who are calling this some sort of Metroidvania remix or something. These people are literally idiots!
I mean, I could understand how a touched individual could compare the two. Both Monster Tale and the newer Castlevanias take place in a non-linear, 2-D area comprised of several interconnected areas usually requiring you to find new abilities to enter them. I mean, that has never happened in any game series other than these two oh wait yes it has. There's also the fact that
wait
uh
surprise there is LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE connecting the titles.
I'm not really sure there's such a unanimous consensus that Monster Tale is like a "Castlevania with bright colors!" Okay, actually I do, in that game reviewers are like everyone in The Stand and the first shitheel that got this game was Captain Campion. The only other possibility was that everyone was just to embarrassed to stand up and say "hey this is basically Henry Hatsworth with a terrible monster raising gimmick instead of a sort of fun puzzle gimmick." This is kind of weird, as the game doesn't even try to hide the fact that pretty much everything that isn't a floating moody monster was basically ripped from the developer's previous game. I think the point that I knew that this probably wasn't the game for me was when I ran into the weird turret camera gun things from Henry Hatsworth, except they suddenly had an identity and gotten weird lizard costumes. I feel bad for getting hung up on this, since I just blogged about my love for a game that takes enemy cloning to the highest realms. But then again, there's nothing about Monster Tale that implies that we're getting the exact same engine from Henry Hatsworth.
Not that its a bad engine, mind you. Combat in Monster Tale is probably what kept me going. Like Henry, your character (a young girl thrust into a fantasy world and that's all I'm going to say about the plot because holy shit is it embarrassing) is capable of doing real damage to the bads. Unfortunately, "doing real damage" usually always translates into "start your five-combo hit, launch into air, juggle into oblivion." Granted, this is still deeper and more fulfilling than anything in the Metroidvanias. OMG IS MONSTER TALE RIPPING OFF DEVIL MAY CRY????? It's just pretty fun to kick around bads, just as it was in Henry Hatsworth. Also like that game, difficulty suddenly spikes from wacky kid's game simple to a pretty obnoxious trek between save points near the end, especially with my favorite holdover: random monster ambush rooms!
So, combat is good. Thus, it's kind of a pity that Monster Tale does its god-damnedest to kill the vibe with its bottom screen gimmick. See, in addition to you being able to kill bads, you also get a computer controlled monster that help spread the pain. The gimmick of the game is that while the monster cannot per se "die," as long as it is in the top screen fighting with you, it will steadily lose energy, forcing you to send it back into the bottom screen MONSTARR DIMENSION where it will quickly refill energy. The monster also can learn various abilities, which cost a certain percentage of life but are infinitely better than just letting it float around being just as retarded as the Sword Familiar from Symphony of the Night. The monster gains experience different ways: if it hits an enemy, it gains experience when it dies. However, killing certain enemies will lead to dropping various items that fall into the bottom screen. When you send the monster to the bottom screen, it will play with the items, gaining a sizeable EXP bonus and minute stat points. Levelling the monster will allow it to unlock certain skills and stat boosts. This sounds fairly decent, right?
Well, here's the thing. There's a literal shitload of different monster evolutions. How do you gain these evolutions? No, not just by levelling up your monster, that would be simple and not utterly ruin the flow of the game. Instead, you also need to give the monster items that the next form would "like." Do this enough, eventually it will evolve into a whole new form! And if you want the skills and stat boosts to carry over from one monster to another, you will have to level that little shit up all over again.
This isn't really a problem when you only have a few monster forms available to work on. But as you progress, unless you really want to stagnate in the world of monsters, you're going to have to carefully make sure that you maximize those items drops for each monster form it would most boost the evolution towards. This means constantly stopping the game so you can fumble through the evolution tree and changing the monster so it can play with a soccer ball than changing it to another so it can eat a cookie. Henry Hatsworth had the same game-stopping issue, but at least I felt like I was just switching to another game rather than suddenly remembering why I stopped playing Pokemon every 15 seconds, like some awful gamer's version of Jacob's Ladder. I wouldn't even mind this much, but (GET READY FOR HUGE SALTY TEARS) apparently in copying Castlevania, there was some Brazil-esque error in mapping the buttons for options and maps, because Monster Tale suddenly turned convention on its head and put map access on "start," and options on "select." This meant that literally every time I wanted to switch my monster so the pizza-loving monster would finally appear so I could learn another useless skill, my Castlevania trained fingers would punch the start button, only to get a map screen, and then I would just fumble on buttons until I got sent back. Sometimes, I would hit the start button again, which was probably the most depressing thing in my life.
It doesn't really help that monsters are amazingly unbalanced. PROTIP for anyone reading this after buying the game: go to the teen monster evolution tree, and go leftward until you unlock the Petdozer, and never look back. This form has the skill that is a hyper-powerful, multi-hitting drill attack. The power is nice, but the truly game breaking aspect is that enemies drop more money and items as you execute higher combos on them. The drill essentially allows you to infinitely chain bads until the game gets pissed at you and just removes them from play. As a result, I was literally awash in cash by the end of the game, which allowed me to roll the final boss more convincingly than Simon did at the end of Castlevania II.
I feel pretty shitty about knocking this game. After all, it's probably the last decent side-scroller to ever be released on the DS (and judging by the 3DS's lineup, possibly all Gameboys forever), and done by an indie game development group which probably still deserves more support than all of EA's horrible nightmare shit combined. On the other hand, when your game can barely manage eight hours of play despite a literal third of that playtime being backtracking, and IGN is saying "This is a game that has clearly been crafted with love and respect for what video gaming is," maybe I'm the only one left to make other people feel shitty.
Not that its a bad engine, mind you. Combat in Monster Tale is probably what kept me going. Like Henry, your character (a young girl thrust into a fantasy world and that's all I'm going to say about the plot because holy shit is it embarrassing) is capable of doing real damage to the bads. Unfortunately, "doing real damage" usually always translates into "start your five-combo hit, launch into air, juggle into oblivion." Granted, this is still deeper and more fulfilling than anything in the Metroidvanias. OMG IS MONSTER TALE RIPPING OFF DEVIL MAY CRY????? It's just pretty fun to kick around bads, just as it was in Henry Hatsworth. Also like that game, difficulty suddenly spikes from wacky kid's game simple to a pretty obnoxious trek between save points near the end, especially with my favorite holdover: random monster ambush rooms!
So, combat is good. Thus, it's kind of a pity that Monster Tale does its god-damnedest to kill the vibe with its bottom screen gimmick. See, in addition to you being able to kill bads, you also get a computer controlled monster that help spread the pain. The gimmick of the game is that while the monster cannot per se "die," as long as it is in the top screen fighting with you, it will steadily lose energy, forcing you to send it back into the bottom screen MONSTARR DIMENSION where it will quickly refill energy. The monster also can learn various abilities, which cost a certain percentage of life but are infinitely better than just letting it float around being just as retarded as the Sword Familiar from Symphony of the Night. The monster gains experience different ways: if it hits an enemy, it gains experience when it dies. However, killing certain enemies will lead to dropping various items that fall into the bottom screen. When you send the monster to the bottom screen, it will play with the items, gaining a sizeable EXP bonus and minute stat points. Levelling the monster will allow it to unlock certain skills and stat boosts. This sounds fairly decent, right?
Well, here's the thing. There's a literal shitload of different monster evolutions. How do you gain these evolutions? No, not just by levelling up your monster, that would be simple and not utterly ruin the flow of the game. Instead, you also need to give the monster items that the next form would "like." Do this enough, eventually it will evolve into a whole new form! And if you want the skills and stat boosts to carry over from one monster to another, you will have to level that little shit up all over again.
This isn't really a problem when you only have a few monster forms available to work on. But as you progress, unless you really want to stagnate in the world of monsters, you're going to have to carefully make sure that you maximize those items drops for each monster form it would most boost the evolution towards. This means constantly stopping the game so you can fumble through the evolution tree and changing the monster so it can play with a soccer ball than changing it to another so it can eat a cookie. Henry Hatsworth had the same game-stopping issue, but at least I felt like I was just switching to another game rather than suddenly remembering why I stopped playing Pokemon every 15 seconds, like some awful gamer's version of Jacob's Ladder. I wouldn't even mind this much, but (GET READY FOR HUGE SALTY TEARS) apparently in copying Castlevania, there was some Brazil-esque error in mapping the buttons for options and maps, because Monster Tale suddenly turned convention on its head and put map access on "start," and options on "select." This meant that literally every time I wanted to switch my monster so the pizza-loving monster would finally appear so I could learn another useless skill, my Castlevania trained fingers would punch the start button, only to get a map screen, and then I would just fumble on buttons until I got sent back. Sometimes, I would hit the start button again, which was probably the most depressing thing in my life.
It doesn't really help that monsters are amazingly unbalanced. PROTIP for anyone reading this after buying the game: go to the teen monster evolution tree, and go leftward until you unlock the Petdozer, and never look back. This form has the skill that is a hyper-powerful, multi-hitting drill attack. The power is nice, but the truly game breaking aspect is that enemies drop more money and items as you execute higher combos on them. The drill essentially allows you to infinitely chain bads until the game gets pissed at you and just removes them from play. As a result, I was literally awash in cash by the end of the game, which allowed me to roll the final boss more convincingly than Simon did at the end of Castlevania II.
I feel pretty shitty about knocking this game. After all, it's probably the last decent side-scroller to ever be released on the DS (and judging by the 3DS's lineup, possibly all Gameboys forever), and done by an indie game development group which probably still deserves more support than all of EA's horrible nightmare shit combined. On the other hand, when your game can barely manage eight hours of play despite a literal third of that playtime being backtracking, and IGN is saying "This is a game that has clearly been crafted with love and respect for what video gaming is," maybe I'm the only one left to make other people feel shitty.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Okamiden
I'm probably done for the Zelda series forever.
I've known this for awhile, probably starting when I stopped playing Twilight Princess after some Moblin kidnapped a girl and I literally felt nothing during some overwrought bridge chase sequence, holding the Wiimote and trying to summon some kind of reaction to the shit on the screen. But it didn't really strike me until I was just about done with Okamiden that I haven't enjoyed a single Zelda game since 2001's Oracle duo. It's depressing, considering the massive nostalgia boner I still have for everything up to Zelda 64. My dad and I were ridiculous fans of the series, getting the SNES largely because Link to the Past haunted my goddamned dreams.
The reason for my lack of interest is pretty simple: Every Zelda game is the same fucking bullshit. I'm not saying that repetition of game mechanics and story are a bad thing. I'm sure I'd play the fuck out of Mario Sunshine if I had a Wii, and Metal Slug would probably be improved if they dropped the ridiculous attempts to add on to the core gameplay (or maybe at least give Tarma something better than the stupidest goddamned character ability in the game). But everything feels so fucking familiar in Zelda, and its always so boring. Nothing has changed plot wise, aside from a creepy slide towards appealing to the fanbase that thought Midna was an acceptable target of amour, and gameplay is still the same horrible progression of dungeons with the only changes being an increasing amount of bloated chores you're compelled to accomplish before you can just kick another dungeon's ass.
The worst example of this is probably the DS Zeldas. In those, the gimmick essentially exists to shoehorn you in a series of poorly controlled, overly long, and brain-numbing transit sections. I stopped HORRIBLE BOAT ZELDA around halfway through when I realized the game was going to throw even more stupid obstacles at me every time I charted another sobriety test-failing path through endless water and probably have to visit FORCED STEALTH SECTION WITH A GODDAMNED TIME LIMIT another three times or something. I think I got right to the end of Spirit Tracks, but got distracted with something and never bothered to finish it, because everything about it was just so generically dumbexcept for the concept of a ghost princess being able to possess my dong.
Okamiden is depressingly superior to the DS Zeldas, to the point that I'd occasionally have Jacob's Ladder-esque flashbacks to me tapping the stylus on the SS THIS IS GAY to make it hop over another thorn fence in the middle of the ocean for the 20th time in a single voyage.
The single best thing I can say about Okamiden is that it ends right about where it is starting to wear its welcome. This was probably the worst part about Okami where after spending roughly 30 hours to kill the boss that everyone has talked about for the entire game, TWICE, suddenly the game decides that no there's actually a super hidden boss and now you have to spend like 10 more hours in some fucking ice stage battling obnoxious enemies that take five minutes to kill and a maze forest and aggggh. God help me, I soldiered through the pain, and to add insult to injury, we get the worst final boss relative to the quality of the rest of the game. Seriously, if I have to spend 40 hours on some massive adventure, it would be nice to get something better than "evil fish fetus in giant claw ball." Okamiden get a little long in the puppy tooth, but the story actually did some vaguely surprising things and without spoiling anything, the final boss actually felt like a satisfying culmination to all the shit I had been doing.
The game even managed to break up the typical Zelda 'tween dungeon doldrums by instituting the concept of having multiple people riding on your main character's back throughout the story. Some characters are worse than others (YES YOU'RE SCARED OF THE MONSTER BUT YOU CAN'T RUN I GET IT), though they're all generally more tolerable in the amount of time you have them than Okami's Issun, who sure as hell didn't make the Ice Stage Screwjob any easier to bear. The story itself is pretty serviceable, a standard fairy-tale story of growing up that manages not to take itself too seriously, which makes it a little easier to deal with the fact that alot of the plot twists, at best, are a little inconsistent. If anything really hurts the pace it's that the game often employs cutscenes with text that you cannot scroll through. This wouldn't be so bad if Okamiden didn't employ the "repeat every plot point 20 times per conversation" element. Granted, this gave me plenty of time catch up glorious lisa foiles videos OH MAN TOP FIVE ROBOTS THIS IS GREAT, and there's also a nice little option that fills you in on what happened and what you need to do if you miss something or just decide to skip the conversation entirely.
Dungeons are at an absolutely perfect length for the platform, giving you some forced encounters, some standard puzzles, and some hee-larious "guide your companion through enemy minefield sections." The only new paint skill (which would be annoying if using the stylus wasn't absolutely wonderful for the purpose of fucking up bads, as opposed to the PS2 version recognizing I wanted to draw a bomb under the enemy roughly 5% of the time) is that you can draw unseat your ally, and paint him a path to follow. God knows that I got extremely nervous when this was revealed, but it's merely overused (which after years of DS playing I've learned is the best you can hope for with stylus gimmicks), and while time-consuming, it usually goes as planned.
The only real failing of Okamiden is in its combat system. Okami didn't have lots of slutty friction and gaping anus combos, but it was serviceable and all three weapons felt appropriate at certain times. In Okamiden, you actually have a fairly realistic simulation of what happens if a puppy tried to fight! Trying to combo anything is a waste of time, as Chibiterasu will randomly fly into the air to attack his floating sense of self-loathing, or just get bamboozled by the camera. It is an unholy mess, especially since your partner will also attack, which usually serves just to knock enemies away from a combo you just started and no you cannot cancel out of them. The only weapon of any worth is the sword, which can be charged into a short, powerful combo that made me feel like a Sears catalog. The "battle report" screens from Okami are back, but now joining "time" and "damage" is "partner help." I honestly have no idea what partner help refers to even after spending twenty-five hours in the game. Sometimes I'd have my partner absolutely wrecking the enemy and get a dead twig rating, and other times I'd kill everything without my partner lifting a hand and I'd get a pink cherry blossom rating. Not that it really mattered, as the only thing that battle ratings affect is how much bonus money you get, and there was never a point in the game I was wanting for cash with just story fights and the occasional random attack.
On the other hand, the bosses are generally pretty well done, of course requiring whatever new brush skill(s) you required since the last king evil to exterminate them, but also actually requiring some genuine combat skills too, which is a modifier that hasn't applied to a Zelda boss fight for years. They're not exactly hard if just for that fact that you will be drowning in health and ink restorative items by the second boss, but they're actually really fun to battle against, to the point that you won't even mind dealing with them in the boss rush whoooops did I say that.
Graphics and Music, whatever. You probably know what to expect from Okamiden graphics wise, that being lower resolution cel shading and less extraneous pretty stuff floating around GLORIOUS NIPPON. Music is basically the same as Okami, traditional japanese music as a horrible nerd would expect it to sound, which is fun at first but got progressively more grating, especially with the WACKY COMEDY THEME.
I liked Okamiden. Fuck Zelda forever. Long live the New Wolf Flesh arrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooo BANG
I've known this for awhile, probably starting when I stopped playing Twilight Princess after some Moblin kidnapped a girl and I literally felt nothing during some overwrought bridge chase sequence, holding the Wiimote and trying to summon some kind of reaction to the shit on the screen. But it didn't really strike me until I was just about done with Okamiden that I haven't enjoyed a single Zelda game since 2001's Oracle duo. It's depressing, considering the massive nostalgia boner I still have for everything up to Zelda 64. My dad and I were ridiculous fans of the series, getting the SNES largely because Link to the Past haunted my goddamned dreams.
The reason for my lack of interest is pretty simple: Every Zelda game is the same fucking bullshit. I'm not saying that repetition of game mechanics and story are a bad thing. I'm sure I'd play the fuck out of Mario Sunshine if I had a Wii, and Metal Slug would probably be improved if they dropped the ridiculous attempts to add on to the core gameplay (or maybe at least give Tarma something better than the stupidest goddamned character ability in the game). But everything feels so fucking familiar in Zelda, and its always so boring. Nothing has changed plot wise, aside from a creepy slide towards appealing to the fanbase that thought Midna was an acceptable target of amour, and gameplay is still the same horrible progression of dungeons with the only changes being an increasing amount of bloated chores you're compelled to accomplish before you can just kick another dungeon's ass.
The worst example of this is probably the DS Zeldas. In those, the gimmick essentially exists to shoehorn you in a series of poorly controlled, overly long, and brain-numbing transit sections. I stopped HORRIBLE BOAT ZELDA around halfway through when I realized the game was going to throw even more stupid obstacles at me every time I charted another sobriety test-failing path through endless water and probably have to visit FORCED STEALTH SECTION WITH A GODDAMNED TIME LIMIT another three times or something. I think I got right to the end of Spirit Tracks, but got distracted with something and never bothered to finish it, because everything about it was just so generically dumb
Okamiden is depressingly superior to the DS Zeldas, to the point that I'd occasionally have Jacob's Ladder-esque flashbacks to me tapping the stylus on the SS THIS IS GAY to make it hop over another thorn fence in the middle of the ocean for the 20th time in a single voyage.
The single best thing I can say about Okamiden is that it ends right about where it is starting to wear its welcome. This was probably the worst part about Okami where after spending roughly 30 hours to kill the boss that everyone has talked about for the entire game, TWICE, suddenly the game decides that no there's actually a super hidden boss and now you have to spend like 10 more hours in some fucking ice stage battling obnoxious enemies that take five minutes to kill and a maze forest and aggggh. God help me, I soldiered through the pain, and to add insult to injury, we get the worst final boss relative to the quality of the rest of the game. Seriously, if I have to spend 40 hours on some massive adventure, it would be nice to get something better than "evil fish fetus in giant claw ball." Okamiden get a little long in the puppy tooth, but the story actually did some vaguely surprising things and without spoiling anything, the final boss actually felt like a satisfying culmination to all the shit I had been doing.
The game even managed to break up the typical Zelda 'tween dungeon doldrums by instituting the concept of having multiple people riding on your main character's back throughout the story. Some characters are worse than others (YES YOU'RE SCARED OF THE MONSTER BUT YOU CAN'T RUN I GET IT), though they're all generally more tolerable in the amount of time you have them than Okami's Issun, who sure as hell didn't make the Ice Stage Screwjob any easier to bear. The story itself is pretty serviceable, a standard fairy-tale story of growing up that manages not to take itself too seriously, which makes it a little easier to deal with the fact that alot of the plot twists, at best, are a little inconsistent. If anything really hurts the pace it's that the game often employs cutscenes with text that you cannot scroll through. This wouldn't be so bad if Okamiden didn't employ the "repeat every plot point 20 times per conversation" element. Granted, this gave me plenty of time catch up glorious lisa foiles videos OH MAN TOP FIVE ROBOTS THIS IS GREAT, and there's also a nice little option that fills you in on what happened and what you need to do if you miss something or just decide to skip the conversation entirely.
Dungeons are at an absolutely perfect length for the platform, giving you some forced encounters, some standard puzzles, and some hee-larious "guide your companion through enemy minefield sections." The only new paint skill (which would be annoying if using the stylus wasn't absolutely wonderful for the purpose of fucking up bads, as opposed to the PS2 version recognizing I wanted to draw a bomb under the enemy roughly 5% of the time) is that you can draw unseat your ally, and paint him a path to follow. God knows that I got extremely nervous when this was revealed, but it's merely overused (which after years of DS playing I've learned is the best you can hope for with stylus gimmicks), and while time-consuming, it usually goes as planned.
The only real failing of Okamiden is in its combat system. Okami didn't have lots of slutty friction and gaping anus combos, but it was serviceable and all three weapons felt appropriate at certain times. In Okamiden, you actually have a fairly realistic simulation of what happens if a puppy tried to fight! Trying to combo anything is a waste of time, as Chibiterasu will randomly fly into the air to attack his floating sense of self-loathing, or just get bamboozled by the camera. It is an unholy mess, especially since your partner will also attack, which usually serves just to knock enemies away from a combo you just started and no you cannot cancel out of them. The only weapon of any worth is the sword, which can be charged into a short, powerful combo that made me feel like a Sears catalog. The "battle report" screens from Okami are back, but now joining "time" and "damage" is "partner help." I honestly have no idea what partner help refers to even after spending twenty-five hours in the game. Sometimes I'd have my partner absolutely wrecking the enemy and get a dead twig rating, and other times I'd kill everything without my partner lifting a hand and I'd get a pink cherry blossom rating. Not that it really mattered, as the only thing that battle ratings affect is how much bonus money you get, and there was never a point in the game I was wanting for cash with just story fights and the occasional random attack.
On the other hand, the bosses are generally pretty well done, of course requiring whatever new brush skill(s) you required since the last king evil to exterminate them, but also actually requiring some genuine combat skills too, which is a modifier that hasn't applied to a Zelda boss fight for years. They're not exactly hard if just for that fact that you will be drowning in health and ink restorative items by the second boss, but they're actually really fun to battle against, to the point that you won't even mind dealing with them in the boss rush whoooops did I say that.
Graphics and Music, whatever. You probably know what to expect from Okamiden graphics wise, that being lower resolution cel shading and less extraneous pretty stuff floating around GLORIOUS NIPPON. Music is basically the same as Okami, traditional japanese music as a horrible nerd would expect it to sound, which is fun at first but got progressively more grating, especially with the WACKY COMEDY THEME.
I liked Okamiden. Fuck Zelda forever. Long live the New Wolf Flesh arrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooo BANG
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