The Arcade: INSERT COIN

A while ago, I actually beat Bravely Default II.

I don't have a lot of thigns to say about the game that I didn't already. Pretty much everything I said before still holds true, though I have to say that the issues I had with the game's balancing just got worse and worse the longer the game went on.

In the game's first half, almost every boss was quite challenging (if not frustrating), but they all still felt beatable, and I did beat them all, without going on extended grinding sessions. However, that all changed drastically in the game's second half, where every boss suddenly started to feel like an unbeatable iron wall. It took me literal days to beat some of them. Bosses like or outright felt like jokes to me. Like the developers intentionally put some unbeatable bosses into the game to mock the player.

I did beat all of them, mind you, and I didn't have to reduce the difficulty, but it still wasn't exactly funny, and sometimes it felt more like like. During that portion of the game, the story pacing slowed down to a halt, simply because every boss took me an eternity to beat. My main issue here is that there wasn't really a way around this. Finding strategies that worked on bosses was difficult and sometimes even outright impossible, yet gridning also did very little to help, because it was just sooo slow. I'm not kidding you, I had to grind for an hour to get like one level-up, and that was despite gaining bonus EXP. And then a single level-up barely even does anything.

I think I've learned to quite dislike Job Points as a concept. On one hand, they encourage me to switch jobs and try every single one, but on the other hand, the make me always use jobs that aren't fully leveled up yet, rather than jobs that are actually useful, so I end up using really stupid jobs on certain bosses, just because I want those Job Points from the battle (which don't even end up really being that much). I think bosses not giving any EXP or JP would outright be better. It would also make beating bosses with dead party members less frustrating (though that's an entirely different problem - if you ask me, dead party members should just receive EXP like everyone else).

Anyways, the fun thing is that the game's balancing issues actually swing both ways. They make the game frustratingly difficult in its second half, but also make it laughably easy and trivial towards the end, which actually made the final boss the most laughable one in the game for me. Once you reach a certain point in the game, you can unlock new abilities for all jobs, and using a certain unlockable ability in combination with a certain job's over-powered stats and a couple of other abilities made one of my characters so strong that he could win every boss battle in the entire game in one to three turns single-handedly. So at that point, every battle just boiled down to surviving for a couple of turns. Not only that, but even leveling up got way easier with the unlocked abilities. Whereas previously, I might have gotten a single level-up in an hour of play time, at that point, I could get ten level-ups int he same amount of times, which of course further trivialized the game.

Ironically, despite all this, some boss battles still managed to be somewhat tricky, because the devs sure as hell tried the best they could to make absolutely every boss battle in the game as difficult and frustrating as possible. Almost every boss at that point (especially the optional ones) had some way of killing my entire party in one or two turns, so surviving for that long was still a challenge. However, the general point still stands. These bosses would have probably been absolutely unbeatable otherwise, and with this combination of abilities, they became trivial at best and mildly challenging at worst.

You know, the way the entire game played out, I'm almost convinced it was made by developing all the battles first and then building a world around it. I mean, think about it. This absurd difficulty and the high amount of battles really would make a lot of sense if the game started out as just a battle simulator and if the battles were the game's only content. Once you build a world and a story around that, it immediately starts becoming a drag, though. I just don't play RPGs for their battles. I play RPGs for their story and exploration, and battles are usually just a necessary evil I bear to get that. If you make an RPG, chances are I won't like your battle systems, so the more battles the game throws my way, the more annoyed I'll get. Now mind you, there do still exist RPGs with battle systems I like, but even if those I wouldn't want them to be the core focus of the respective games and take away too much play time. For example, I do like the battle system in Xenoblade Chronicles, but I specifically like it because the battles tend to be quick, smooth and, for the largest part, optional. The battles in the game don't interrupt your exploration flow very much, and that's why I like them. I still rarely do more battles than what I need to. Only as many as are needed to complete side quests and advance the main story, which despite the game's large scale might still be fewer battles than Bravely Default II apparently expects you to do.

Well, all things considered, I have to say I still do like Bravely Default II more than the predecessor. The general gameplay is just more fun for me and I actually even prefer over the first game's. However, I don't think I'll ever complete the game regularly again. If I ever do decide to pick it back up (which probably won't be for years), I'll either play on easy mode or, preferably, do a New Game+ and just blast through the game.

So a couple of weeks ago, I started noticing that GBA game prices have sky-rocketed. I've always loved the GBA, but I got it at a time where the Nintendo DS was nearly released in Europe already and also at a time when I couldn't afford a lot of games. For this reason, my entire GBA collection only ever consisted of like 10-ish games (the majority of which being different Mega Man Battle Network games). Anyways, since I only expect GBA games to get harder and harder to obtain in the future, I've bitten into the bitter pill and started to buy some of the games I really like from the second-hand market. It isn't funny. A boxed version of Metroid Fusion in a meh condition cost me 60€, not even including the manual - and this is actually one of the cheaper games still. To get a used copy of Metroid Zero Mission without box or manual, you'll have to pay at least 100€. An actual boxed copy will easily cost you multiple hundreds. The entire situation is monkey butts, but right now, there's also hardly any (legal) alternatives. The Wii U is the only console with a GBA Virtual Console, but no way in hell am I gonna hook that thing up again just to play them. The whole point of handheld games is their convenience, and absolutely nothing about the Wii U is convenient.

So anyways, to make a long story short, I recently acquired Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World and completed it 100%.

I think people go unreasonably harsh on this port. I personally think it's an amazing one, and it's easily my favorite version of the game. From what I understand, people usually have two specific complaints when it comes to the GBA version: the soundtrack and the palettes. While I do understand both of these, I have to say that neither really bothers me at all.

The soundtrack sounds slightly worse on GBA, sure, but I don't think it's as bad as people claim it to be. The GBA soundtrack is still perfectly fine. I find every single song to still sound perfectly nice, especially for handheld versions of an SNES soundtrack. Every song still works and is instantly recognizable. If anything, I'd even say the GBA soundtrack has a unique charm to it. The hand full of new songs in the OST that are played during certain cutscenes are also a nice addition.

As for the palettes, honestly, if I hadn't known about them already, I probably wouldn't even have noticed. I feel like people greatly overplay how bad these new palettes really are, probably because comparison screenshots on the net make them appear way brighter. I personally think the game's GBA palettes are absolutely fine, and I'm saying this as someone who played the game on a modded GBA with a bright-ass backlit screen - so something similar to what you would find in a newer GBA SP or Nintendo DS. The palettes still didn't bother me in the slightest, and I only noticed them after going back to the SNES version afterwards.

Anyways, I feel like discussions around the game's soundtrack and palettes constantly overshadow all the good things this port brings to the table - which are actually a lot of things. Not only is the GBA version full of QoL changes, but it also contains a little bit of entirely new content.

I already mentioned the new cutscenes added to the game, like the new intro cutscene, or the cutscenes for 100%ing the game. All of these have a lot of charm and really make for a nice reward. Talking about rewards, I really like how the game now rewards collecting all Yoshi Coins with more than just 1-UPs and how it actually added Yoshi Coins to a bunch of levels that previously didn't have any. One issue that I have with the game's SNES version in particular is that I barely even play some of the levels. I always just take the shortest route to the goal, skipping large portions of a few levels where it's doable. For example, Ghost Houses are traditionally short affairs, because once you know the rout to the goal, there's no reason to go anywhere else. Some levels also have Yoshi Wings or shortcuts to the goal very early in the level, giving very little reason to play the later parts of them. The GBA version alleviates this problem to a large degree by rewarding Yoshi Coin collection. This actually makes me play the levels in way more of an exploratoray way, which makes me see sections of levels that I barely even knew from the SNES version. This alone improves the game so much. The SNES version can be quite a snooze fest sometimes, and the GBA version makes a couple of levels legitimately challenging, just thanks to the Yoshi Coins.

However, aside from that, there's also the many, many QoL changes unique to the GBA version. I love how once you've unlocked a Yoshi color, it can appear in every level rather than just on Star Road. That actually made me encounter each of them regularly throughout the game, rather than just in a few specific levels. I also like how when you jump off Yoshi in a level and complete it, you will actually keep it after that level, which really makes some of those levels that aren't completable on Yoshi less annoying. I like the fact that you can now save your game everywhere. That's especially useful for a handheld game. Not to mention various glitch fixes and minor touches throughout the entire game. Like the fact that Yoshi can now eat the dolphins (hands-down the single most important feature in all of gaming history ever), or that bonus room in Donut Plains 1, where they added a little coin counter and a special animation if you collect all the coins, or that little bomb animation that now plays when you delete a save file on the title screen.

The game is just full of these little touches and I love all of them. You can really feel how much love went into the port. That's why it really bothers me when people frown upon it just on the basis of soundtrack and palettes being slightly worse. There's just so much to this port!

Alright, so after completing Bravely Default II, I started playing New Pokemon Snap. Well, would you be surprised if I told you that this game is what I consider to be the best Pokemon game in at least a decade? You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm dead serious. I didn't even play the original Pokemon Snap, so I went into this with zero expectations. In fact, if anything, I expected not being into this game very much, but here we are.

Now to make this perfectly clear, I don't really hate any main-line Pokemon game. I like all of them to a large degree, and in terms of raw playability, I'd even go so far as to call Sword and Shield some of my favorite versions. However, that isn't to say that the series hasn't felt stale for a very long time, if not to say that it has even stagnated in some areas. Pokemon, for a really long time now, has been a series with too little development time, and as a result, a series that just don't feel like it's advancing anymore - and now New Pokemon Snap, of all games, actually brings me a tone of the improvements that I would have hoped to see in the main series for a long, long time (and that, in fact, I don't expect to see in the main series for quite a while still).

So before I talk about what these improvements are, I should probably start by explaining what it is I love about Pokemon games, since this will probably be something different for every player. I'm the kind of player how likes exploration. My favorite aspect of Pokemon games is exploring the world, catching Pokemon and seeing the story unfold. On the other hand, battles are something that I don't care too much for. I don't mind them, and I do think they're generally fun, but they're certainly not why I play Pokemon, and I feel they in particular have felt stale for decades now and are probably the one aspect of the main series that feels the most stale to me. I will certainly get annoyed from having too battle to much, and if I do battle, I prefer battles that revolve around catching a Pokemon (especially Legandaries) over trainer battles.

So with that out of the way, what are the things that I've been missing in the main line series for a really long time now? Well, pretty much just that. A bigger focus on exploration, and more importantly, "better" exploration. The wild areas in Sword and Shield felt like they attempted to give me just, but missed their mark so badly that it isn't even funny. For me, the thing that I like about Pokemon is that every single Pokemon feels unique, every single one has personality and is very recognizable. I have memories involving just about any of the 1000-ish Pokemon that exist so far, and I'd say I can easily recall the names of at least half of them. So when I play a Pokemon game, then the one thing I want to see more than anything else is Pokemon being themselves.

So did Sword and Shield deliver that? Hell no. Is Legends Arceus going to deliever that? Probably not, judging by the one trailer so far. What really bothered me about Sword and Shield's wild area was that every single Pokemon was just exactly the same. Just models playing their one animation, running over the world in the exact same way, showing the exact same behavior, often not even spawning in meaningful places, but just randomly spawning in a location with roughly fitting weather. It was so lame. Wild Pokemon in the game had absolutely no personality whatsoever. To me, it hardly mattered that 400 different Pokemon were catchable in Sword (600 with the DLCs), because all of them felt exactly identical. I'd much rather take a game with just 100 obtainable Pokemon, but all of them feeling unique. I feel like even the older generations of games did this better.

So anyways, with my rant on Sword and Shield out of the way, this is exactly the one key area where New Pokemon Snap takes a huge, HUGE leap forward. Every single Pokemon in this game actually feels unique. They all act naturally. Pokemon act in ways that you would expect them to based on their PokeDex entries. They interact with the player, they interact with the world around them, and they interact with one another. Pokemon have preferences, Pokemon have rivalries, Pokemon have habitats, Pokemon play with one another or bully one another, and they do it all in ways fitting their respective personalities. To give just one random example: Things like these really make the persoanilities of Pokemon come to life, and it's just one of many, many such examples. New Pokemon Snap brings Pokemon to live in a way that no main line title has even remotely managed to do so far, period.

It's not even just the personalities of Pokemon that amaze me. The developers of this game really went far and beyond. For example, one detail I really, really love is how Pokemon in this game actually got realistic screams, and multiple of them. In the main line games, Pokemon all just have their one unique scream, and at best, it's pitched slightly higher or lower, depending on what move is used, but it's always just this one scream and always sounds the exact same. New Pokemon Snap ditches this. Here, every Pokemon has entirely new screams that sound like they're actually coming form the respective Pokemon, and Pokemon even have multiple screams for different animations. Best of all, these screams now sound quite realistic. That is, these screams roughly resemble whatever sound the respective real-life animal a Pokemon is based on would make. Birds sounds like birds, a bull sounds like a bull, a rat sounds like a rat etc. Yet desptie all this, these new screams are acutally based on the existing ones each Pokemon already has. So for example, if you listen to Pidgeot's scream, you will hear the scream of the bird, but if you pay close attention, you will notice that this bird scream actually kind of resembles its original 8-bit scream. Discovering this little detail truely blew me away.

Now all of this is already really great, but even a Pokemon world as realistic as this could fall apart if there wasn't gameplay to support it. Luckily, New Pokemon Snap has us covered here. The main line Pokemon games are all about catching Pokemon, and to some degree, the same is true for New Pokemon Snap. Except the way you "catch" Pokemon here is by shooting photos of them. This, I feel, is absolutely brilliant, because it really ties perfectly into the world the game provides. So as I said, each Pokemon has unique and realistic behaviors, and this gameplay of taking photos fits it perfectly, because it actually requires you to study the unique behaviors of each Pokemon, experiment with it and exploit it to make the Pokemon do certain poses. As I mentioned, catching Pokemon has always been my favorite aspect of main-line Pokemon games, and in my opinion, taking pictures is a really, really fun way of "catching" Pokemon - to a point where I think I even prefer it over regular Pokemon catching in some ways.

Btw., did I manage that New Pokemon Snap runs at butter-smooth 60 FPS and looks gorgeous? This really caught me so off-guard, because by now, I'm just used to Pokemon games running like shit and barely managing 20 FPS. And sure, the game is on-rails and very linear in design, which makes it a lot easier to optimize the levels for good performance, as it's always known exactly what is being visible on the screen. But... come one! New Pokemon Snap is occasionally rendering like 20 or 30 Pokemon on screen at the same time, in addition to the level background, at stable 60 FPS, whereas the main line games can't even manage four in battle (with hardly any scenery) without the performance immediately taking a nose-dive. It's not even like the Pokemon in this game looked any worse than in the main line games. If aynthing, I'd argue they look even better due to their many new and unique animations. So really, there's no excuse for the main line games running as horribly as they do.

Alright, now with all this praise out of the way, it's time to also give a little bit of criticism, because yeah, as much I really ended up loving this game, there are some things I really dislike about it. Above all else, what I really don't like is the way progression is handled in the game. So the main objective in this game is to complete your PhotoDex, which is basically like a PokeDex, except filled with pictures taken of Pokemon. The PhotoDex can hold four entries for each Pokemon, labeled with one to four stars, and these entries represent unique poses of the respective Pokemon, with one star being common poses and four stars being rare poses. This means to 100% complete the game, you need to take at least four unique photos of each Pokemon.

Now this is where we run into our first issue, because as it turns out, the game only allows you to actually get one picture rated per Pokemon per level playthrough. This means in order to 100% the game, you already have to play each and every level at least four times, just to get four different pictures of each Pokemon. However, in practice, you can't actually 100% the game with just four runs, because each level also has different tiers. You unlock these tiers by playing a level high enough and taking a specific amount of high-scoring photos. Each tier unlocks new Pokemon behaviors and, more importantly, entirely new Pokemon. Sometimes, you may find rare poses of a Pokemon only on a higher tier, and sometimes, even a Pokemon itself might only appear on higher tier.

Now in general, I don't mind this unlocking of new tears. It gives each level a bit replayability, and it also has a decent enough story explanation in-game (it's that Pokemon start getting used to you, so more Pokemon start showing up). However, it means you will have to play each level a lot more times. This is not even to mention that some levels actually contain multiple paths, and you might encounter certain Pokemon only on or the other. This means that in practice, you will actually have to play each level way more often than four times to achieve 100% completion. I'm estimating the bare minimum to be around 15 to 20 plays per level, and this is only assuming you can actually manage to snap all required poses in that amount of attempts, which I kinda doubt.

Just imagine watching a 100% speedrun of this game. It would be super, super boring because you would just see players playing the same level 20 times or more. Sure, not every game is or should be developped with speedrunability in mind, but this is clearly just artificial padding. It's also super frustrating, too, when you manage to take a bunch of great pictures of a Pokemon on a single run, but have discard all but one of them. It's like... why? There isn't even a lore explanation for this, and it certainly doesn't make sense in-universe, so it's clearly just a way to pad out play time.

My next issue somewhat ties into this, but I really kinda dislike that New Pokemon Snaps plays out on-rails. I get why they did it this way, and I understand that certain cool Pokemon behaviors might only work the way they do because on-rails gameplay makes it predictable for the game where the player is going to be a which point in time... but man, ultimately this kind of gameplay really feels like a hindrance to the game. Sometimes, you just want to take your time taking the perfect picture of a Pokemon or exploring the area, but you can't, because you're constantly moving forward. This doesn't even really fit the theme of photography. Isn't photography all about taking your time and waiting for the perfect moment? When real photographers take pictures in the wild, they don't do it by flying a helicotper through a forest and trying to catch a quick glimpse of an animal. No, they do it by patiently lying down and waiting for animals to appear. New Pokemon Snap doesn't capture this feeling at all. Even more importantly, I feel like this on-rails gameplay just ties really badly into the game's completion aspect, because if you fail to capture the right moment of a Pokemon on photo, you have no option but to replay the level, and if it's a Pokemon that appears rather later into the level, you have to basically replay all of it. This frankly gets annoying. I can't even count the amount of times I had to replay a certain level because I just happened to miss a very specific object towards its end every single time.

In conclusion, I think New Pokemon Snap is an amazing game and an absolute must-play for Pokemon fans who care about the exploration aspect more so than the battle aspect. Above all else, it features easily the best and most realistic Pokemon world we've experienced in any Pokemon game so far ever. However, it also kinda makes me sad. Sad that we probably won't ever see this kind of world in a main-line Pokemon game (or hack, really any Pokemon game of the foreseeable future). I really, REALLY want to play a Pokemon game with the world of Snap, but non-linear and more exploratory gameplay. For starters, just giving mew New Pokemon Snap without on-rails gameplay would already be great, but ideally, I'd want to see this kind of game world in an open-world main-line Pokemon game. I know that's probably impossible to do, but even just remotely approaching this would already be a great start for me.

Completed another run of Metroid Fusion today. I don't know, but I'm guessing in total, this might be like my sixth or seventh run through the game so far. It's still amazing and I still love it. One of my favorite games of all time. Subjectively, I might still slightly prefer Super Metroid over it, but I'd say objectively, it's clearly the better game because it guides the player a bit better and also manages to tell a coherent story throughout its play-time, which hardly any other Metroid game does tot his degree. Absolutely must-play for any Metroidvania fan.