What Game is Mio Bitter About Today?

[UltraViolet64]

I decided to make a spot for the collection of my thoughts on various video games here so people don't have to wade through a mountain of text on the Discord server. I can probably be more clear and concise in giant text posts than messages I type in five seconds, anyways. 

So, now the answer to the question - What game is Mio bitter about today? Why, it's none other than ARMS for the Nintendo Switch.


I wish to preface this by making it entirely clear that I was very excited for this game. Around April or so, my initial skepticism had worn off and I began to eagerly anticipate this game's release. I played all the Test Punches and enjoyed the living hell out of them. When June 16th rolled around, I was practically foaming at the mouth to get my hands on the game. It seemed like it had plenty of content to keep me consistently entertained for ages, and more free DLC was on the way only a month later. I played some rounds with friends, did a Grand Prix, and played a few matches on Ranked. It seemed fun at first, but as the days carried on, there was almost nothing to draw me back.

The fundamental problem with ARMS is its insistence on being as monotonous as possible. Usually, when it comes to fighting games, they run the risk of becoming repetitive quickly (at least that's been my experience), but ARMS wants to make sure that feeling sinks in as swiftly as it possibly can. After just a few rounds of online sparring, playing Grand Prix once, or trying to unlock new Arms for your fighters, you'll discover that most of the gameplay is simply going through the motions, rinsing and repeating ad infinitum. 

The general mentality that one must have to be a reasonable player of fighting games is "if it works, it works." But what if the thing that works just isn't very fun to play? That much is where ARMS really falls flat. The game is designed in a way that makes stalling to time out not only an easily affordable strategy, but a far too effective one. A lot of Arms are just too slow to catch certain fighters (namely Ribbon Girl), and Twintelle's ability to slow down punches makes her capable of playing hyper-evasive to the point where it can be near-impossible to land a single punch. After a while, the game begins to boil down to a monotonous trench warfare of poking and stalling. I have no issue with defensive play, but ARMS takes almost all the life out of the fight. There is very little you can do to allow for more offensive fights, because the Arms themselves don't give you enough variety to work with, and the speed of a character like Ninjara or Min Min is better spent trying to be as evasive as you can. Even if I personally take the opportunity when I can, there's nothing fun about every match being stalled into time-out. It turns every fight into a slog, and it's not something I would want to spend hours upon hours playing. This is without even bringing up the three "mini-game" options, Hoops, Skillshot, and V-Ball. V-Ball is meagerly entertaining, but there is very little strategy to it - just try to set up spikes until it works. As for Hoops - you like getting chain-grabbed? Me either. Too bad that's pretty much all there is to do here. Skillshot is a pretty simple premise, just breaking targets. Spam spread weapons like the Revolver or Triblast as soon as they appear and you'll win by a landslide.

The single-player options are also pathetically shallow. Clearly nobody likes fighting CPUs very much, so naturally one would probably be drawn to Grand Prix, the most you're going to get out of playing alone. It's your standard fighting game fare - select your character, fight every other character, and then a two-phase boss at the end. It's pretty typical stuff, but this game loads on the arcade difficulty like no one else can. Even at level 4, the CPUs will read inputs and put up a hell of a fight. Max Brass, the penultimate fight no matter who you play as, is already a very difficult fight, and then Hedlok, who comes immediately after, will generally take at least three tries to defeat. Hedlok is also the only fight in which the timer never runs out, so the previously mentioned stalling strategy is completely unviable here. It's a struggle in every sense of the word, but there is effectively no bonus for clearing this mode, other than coins - which you can already earn by just playing matches locally or online, anyways. 

Even the system for unlocking new Arms really blows. You pay coins to play a variation of Skillshot where you break targets and sometimes a box appears in the background for you to hit, containing a random pair of new Arms. You play until the timer runs out, and sometimes clocks will appear in the back which you can punch for extra time. It sounds relatively painless, but there is no guarantee you'll unlock what you're looking for, and you wind up getting a lot of Arms for different characters you don't want to play as. It will more often than not end up as a total waste of your time and earned coins. But this is the only way to unlock new Arms at all. You can't directly purchase the ones you want for a specific fighter - it has to be by pure chance in this monotonous minigame. 

Overall, I just can't help but feel disappointed with how the game came out. The monotony hits hard and fast, and there's ultimately nothing that's making me want to come back to it. Maybe this will be like Splatoon and the steady stream of updates will make it eventually worth a purchase, but as it stands, this game is not worth sixty dollars by any stretch of the imagination. It's barely worth twenty.

[Dashe]

That brings me back to that one Japanese fan's reaction to Rockman Xover: "I was an idiot for having expectations." That quote is applicable to so much in the gaming universe.

[Fatman X. Jones]

Wait. Legends Station has a Discord?

Anyway, glad to see that someone's giving an unfiltered viewpoint about ARMS. I was afraid it was going to be bland from the get-go, and yet I was happy to see Nintendo try a new IP. It sounds as if they squandered their potential here. Shouldn't be surprising, considering Nintendo is deathly afraid of hardcore gamers these days; you can see what I mean in my own LP thread, but it seems to be the air around most games by them these days, no matter their franchise series.

[UltraViolet64]

I'm just really sick of the way games are released half-baked and then months later the developer starts adding patches to make the game actually worth playing. Maybe it's my fault for buying games when they launch, but it's a practice that's gotten way out of control.

[Mikéy]

Jul 4, 2017 15:27:19 GMT -5 Fatman X. Jones said:

Wait. Legends Station has a Discord?

Yep, there's a thread for that. Seems my experiments with the news banner have proven that it's too small to make an impact anymore.

Jul 4, 2017 16:23:12 GMT -5 UltraViolet64 said:

I'm just really sick of the way games are released half-baked and then months later the developer starts adding patches to make the game actually worth playing. Maybe it's my fault for buying games when they launch, but it's a practice that's gotten way out of control.

Agreed. Back in the early days of consoles, what you bought is what you got. Now there's so much room for laziness on completion of a game that it's kinda sad. It's around this point where PC gaming really starts to shine as a result, although lazy development happened to be invented by the PC. So perhaps there's not much to be said on that subject of comparison.

[UltraViolet64]

So before I write my next review (which, if what I'm currently playing through keeps going the way it has been, will be in a few days) I think I'm gonna make a scoring system.

0 - Utterly irredeemable.
1 - Barely functional.
2 - Unfun.
3 - Just below mediocre.
4 - Competent...and that's it.
5 - Uninspired, forgettable, middle of the road.
6 - Just above mediocre.
7 - Massively missed potential/Acquired taste.
8 - A good, solid game.
9 - Very good game. Negligible issues.
10 - Near-perfect, if not perfect.

ARMS sits at a solid 6 at the time of writing this. And that's being generous.

[UltraViolet64]

What game is Mio bitter about today? Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, for PC, PS4, Xbox One, Wii U, Switch, and Vita. 



WayForward is my arch-enemy. They have been ever since I purchased Mighty Switch Force expecting a half-decent platformer in the vein of Mega Man, but I instead received a mediocre puzzle-platformer with a pitiful total of 16 levels. I confess I haven't played all of their games, but I've played enough to be consistently disappointed in them as a developer. (No exception goes to the very first Shantae - which I consider one of the worst games I've ever played. Nothing about that game is remotely fun, and it suffers the strongest screen crunch I have ever experienced in any game.) There is a consistent pattern to what makes WayForward disappointing, I've come to discover. Generally speaking, their games are full of great music (usually delivered by the legendary Jake Kaufman) and gorgeous visuals, but are pathetically shallow when it comes to the gameplay end of it. Using Mighty Switch Force as an example again: the game has excellent sprite animation, a kick-ass techno soundtrack, and a fun main protagonist...but only 16 levels that can be solved in roughly three minutes or less, and only the abilities to run, jump, shoot, and flip platforms. This lack of polish happens almost every single time without fail, with the lone exception of a singular game in the Shantae series. This year, I played Shantae and the Pirate's Curse to see if the series had managed to improve at least somewhat, and much to my surprise, Pirate's Curse was a very enjoyable experience. The game felt like it was at a perfectly appropriate length, had some interesting and challenging platforming puzzles, and a pleasant mixture of Metroidvania and Zelda II elements, on top of the excellent sprite art and music. I was genuinely shocked to find that there was a WayForward title that felt...complete? I wondered if the studio had turned a new leaf and boldly ventured on to the newest game in the Shantae series, Half-Genie Hero. Would the series use Pirate's Curse as a building block to finally achieve its potential of being something great? I was quite excited to find out.

And shortly after starting, I was disappointed to see that WayForward was back to their dirty tricks yet again. 

Half-Genie Hero was funded on Kickstarter around the same time that Shovel Knight and Mighty No. 9 were, in 2013. Those two games are the token examples of how to make a great Kickstarter game and how to do it perfectly wrong, respectively. So which side did Half-Genie Hero land on? Somewhere inbetween. It's certainly not as unpolished and badly designed as Mighty No. 9, but it lacks the brilliant level design and soul of Shovel Knight. It's a melting pot of half-baked or poorly executed ideas mixed in with the signature WayForward visuals and music. It feels as though WayForward learned absolutely nothing from past experiences and used crowd-funding to just make the same type of experience they always funnel out. Everything in this game completely pales in comparison to Pirate's Curse and other platformers. What exactly is wrong with it, though?

I hope you weren't expecting a good story coming into this, because it certainly will not deliver on that front. There is virtually no real plot to speak of. The game consists of a half-decent opening stage setting up the plot, which is then swiftly abandoned for a series of five completely unrelated subplots for each area you explore. Even the introduction of a replacement Genie for Shantae is a plot point totally abandoned by the time you face the game's third boss. It seems the game was trying to set up Risky Boots's plot to be more devious and vile than before, but she disappears after the opening stage and doesn't reappear until the very end of the game. The dialogue towards the end is trying to insist that the stakes are high, but there is no real tension felt when your main villain has absolutely nothing to do with 85% of the events that transpire in-game. The humorous, witty overall nature of the game's dialogue may lead one to believe that the story is supposed to be farce, but the game's true ending is trying and failing desperately to be heart-warming even though there is no such feeling to be found upon completion. A platformer doesn't need a good story to be a good game, but it bothers me to see this game try to be something it isn't. If it's going to be farce, embrace it. If you want an ending that feels touching, you have to structure it and set up a tone that allows it to be so. You can't just mix and match elements of both and expect both to pay off. The game's issues with narrative are definitely noticeable, but they're quite frankly the least of my actual complaints. 

Where Half-Genie truly falls flat on its face is the gameplay. What stuck out to me immediately was how much more stiff the movement felt compared to Pirate's Curse, which I had just completed before playing this. Shantae is back to only being able to run, jump, and whip, and can't get any upgrades or new movement options (except for upgrades to make her whip faster and stronger), so there's already less to play with, but for some reason her movement just feels more rigid in general. Running is a lot slower and jumps feel heavier and more difficult to land. It was a detriment to me personally, having expected something looser, but it's the bare minimum required to be "functional". It feels very clunky, awkward, and tedious to move from point A to B. Not to the extent of something like the original Castlevania, mind you, but it's damn close.

The lack of movement options and upgrades are compensated for somewhat by the reintroduction of transformations from the first Shantae and Risky's Revenge, but these have massive issues in implementation and usage. The major, glaring issue with all of them is how situational and disruptive they are. Very often you will find yourself having to halt your progress just to switch to the Monkey to make a single jump that is just barely out of reach, or use the Elephant to break a singular block, or waste your time in a stupid maze as the Mouse, or other things to that effect. They don't enhance the game, they simply interrupt it. You spend an excessive amount of time transforming and using the one or two powers the transformation comes with, but they're generally used simply for padding or the sheer hell of it. Very little of the game requires you to transform for longer than 20 seconds, so you'll end up constantly having to change and then change back. The abilities of the transformations also have serious issues with overlap. There are two separate transformations for both the ability to fly and go underwater. Your flight options are the Harpy and the Bat. The Harpy is not unlocked until very late in the game, but is able to fly freely and attack enemies (if you actually take the time to unlock the ability to do so), but carries momentum to the extent of Luigi in Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels. The Bat, however, is stuck on the vertical plane you transform into it on, so it can only fly in straight horizontal lines and lacks the ability to hit enemies at all. Instead, it can fit through small places (which is just a method of padding this game loves to abuse) and has a sonar ability that lights dark areas - an ability you use a grand total of one time in the entire game, which is only if you go for 100%. As for underwater travelling, your two options are the Crab and the Mermaid. The Crab once again can fit through smaller spaces, but is limited to jumping on the ground underwater. It also can cut seaweed blocks, which you only have to do maybe three times in a 100% run. The Mermaid blatantly outclasses it in underwater movement, having totally free movement, but can also break giant stone blocks (if you're underwater, that is) but can't break seaweed or fit in small spaces. Are you noticing a pattern here? Two separate things that could have easily been just a singular transformation with all the same abilities. It's a massive pace breaker having to constantly switch between two extremely similar options only to find out that the one you wanted to use in the first place lacks one extremely specific function you need, yet it happens so often. It absolutely kills the flow of the game, and is by far the biggest problem overall. The fact that almost every single one lacks an ability to attack because you need to unlock it also seriously does not help their cases.

The game absolutely adores fetchquests. There are so many of them in this game that it's almost entirely what the game's content consists of. Inbetween playing the five main levels for the first time, you'll spend almost all of your time running back and forth to retrieve items for NPCs to get other items to give to other NPCs. It's a very redundant game of back-and-forth, and the small amount of levels means the monotony will hit warp speed over time. I swear to god, the game sends you back to Mermaid Falls, the first level, at least 15 different times. It must have been the only level they were proud of, because the other levels only get revisited once or twice. The fact that you even have to revisit the levels just to advance the game instead of them just having completely optional bonuses for revisits is a true sign of how poorly-thought-out this game is. Part of the frustration could be mitigated if there was just a sub-screen map like all the previous Shantae installments so you could at least see where you haven't covered, but a map functionality is conspicuously and frustratingly absent this time around. I collected all 10 Sunken Souls thinking there would be a bonus for it, but instead they're actually required to get the game's true ending - and that's it. The same thing happened with the Scrap Metal pieces. The only optional completion bonuses the game has are the extra health gained from Heart Holders, and the ability to use magic infinitely from the Magic Tiara, which sucks away any possible difficulty the end of the game could have. As a matter of fact, the game has very little difficulty, even though you'll end up constantly frustrated if you're anything like me.

The alternate weapons you use in the game are powered by Magic, which acts as their effective time limit. They will remain constantly active until you either run out of Magic or switch weapons. The weapons are also upgradeable at the shop in Scuttle Town, which is where you purchase them in the first place. You can end up with a lingering fire attack, a shield consisting of scimitars, or even full-on invincibility. They will drain Magic harshly when fully upgraded, but you can purchase an item in the shop which cuts Magic consumption in half, and the previously mentioned Magic Tiara makes them use no Magic at all. Now, imagine, if you will, the ability to just remain invincible forever. Needless to say this turns boss fights into a complete and utter joke, boiling them down to simply wailing on them when you can reach them. The Heart Holders, should you choose to find them, already make the game pathetically easy in the first place. You lose quarter hearts most of the time you get hit, and every time you fall down a pit, get crushed, or touch insta-kill spikes. You essentially start with a default of eight hits before a game over, but with twelve Heart Holders, you can upgrade yourself to taking a whopping fifty-six hits before you even die once. In fact, I think this is the first time I've completed a game without game-overing at least once.

So if the platforming sucks, the gameplay is boring and far too easy, and the plot is laughable at best, is there anything salvageable? Well, the visuals are very nice. Not quite up to the standards of Rayman Origins or other recent platformers, but very easy on the eyes nonetheless. The music is once again kick-ass thanks to Jake Kaufman (even if Pirate's Curse still has the better overall soundtrack). But at the end of the day, neither of those two elements make up for how pathetically terrible the gameplay is. This game is a complete waste of twenty dollars when you can buy so many others that are far better for a lower price. Words cannot even begin to describe my disappointment with this game as a follow up to Pirate's Curse. Supposedly the upcoming Pirate Queen's Quest DLC is going to play more like Pirate's Curse, but it's not out at the time of this review's writing and does not necessarily make up for how flawed this game is. The absolute highest score I'm willing to give this game is a 4/10. Do yourself a favor and avoid this one, especially if you like good platformers.

[UltraViolet64]

Today is a surprise for me. I fully expected this to be a catalyst for bitterness, but I couldn't be happier with this game. What game is Mio (not) bitter about today?
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions for the Nintendo 3DS.




I was fully anticipating Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga DX to be a repeat of how I felt about the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy - a good attempt at reviving the heart of its respective series, but misguided in the visuals and audio (and even a handful of gameplay elements). I could not be more pleasantly surprised to say that this is not the case.
Superstar Saga DX is such an incredibly faithful recreation of the GBA original that I'm almost shocked. I seem to be in the minority of people who think that the Mario & Luigi series almost immediately started going south starting with Partners in Time, and it hit a breaking point with Dream Team. The later installments removed almost everything I loved about Superstar Saga, namely the extremely weird environment, quirky, unique and lovable NPCs, and the fast-paced combat. The latter was the first to go, and by Dream Team all three of these elements were gone. The prospect of Superstar Saga getting remade to be more in line with these titles made me extremely uneasy. I hold that game very close to my heart, being as it was one of the first games I had ever played, and I really did not want to see it get violated. However, I was delighted to see that AlphaDream had done the original classic justice.


Admittedly, I was unsure about how I felt about the visual changes at the start of the game, but by Hoohoo Mountain, I fell in love with them. The level of detail in the backgrounds and animations is incredible, and the colors are wonderful. Everything looks lively and rich, without being visually obnoxious like many other graphically updated games. I'm especially glad that there was little to no use of bloom lighting, which is one of my absolute largest pet peeves in video game remakes. The lighting, for once, is actually appropriate (except in a small handful of specific rooms which were arbitrarily made darker). A small handful of specific characters, such as Troopeas, the Toads in Little Fungitown, and the Koopa Cruiser staff look a lot less distinct and more generic, but almost every major character was translated near flawlessly. (Psycho Kamek was replaced with Dr. Toadley from Bowser's Inside Story, which I was also slightly let down by, even if it's a change that does make sense.) Hell, I would even argue that characters such as Tolstar and Bowletta look even BETTER in the remake. Despite a pinch of missteps, the change was executed wonderfully. It couldn't have done much better if they had tried.


The audio was admittedly one of the game's lower points to me. Does it stand on its own? Absolutely. But it more often than not sounds a great deal less distinct than the GBA original, at least to me. Mario and Luigi were given a lot more voice lines so the player isn't forced to listen to the same two mock-Italian sentences over and over anymore, but the original voice clips scarcely make an appearance, which was a letdown to me. New sound effects for the Thunderhand and Thunder Bros fail to leave the same impact. Those are admittedly pretty specific examples, but they're forgivable in the grand scheme of things. The music, however, I would argue is an overall downgrade. I respect Yoko Shimomura very strongly, and they are her songs. She's completely free to rearrange them however she deems appropriate. I feel like songs such as Final Cackletta and Popple the Shadow Thief feel extremely off. The instrumentation is bizarrely inappropriate for the latter, and the guitar section is completely excised from the former, removing its backbone. All I can really say is that it's not the way I would have done it. The original compositions are still strong enough to work, despite the hiccups. A handful of tracks, like Hoohoo Mountain and Bowletta Battle actually sound even better, too. Overall, the audio is a mixed bag, but not so much so that it gets outright distracting. This stuff would probably only bother someone as passionate about the original as I am, anyways.

What I was REALLY worried about was the combat. I was almost positive that if they were going to screw anything up, it was going to be this. I anticipated Bros Attacks being slowed way the hell down to be more flashy and showy, enemies moving at a snail's pace, and for every encounter to be easy as piss, like in Paper Jam. Thank god they found the right balance. Admittedly, the combat was slowed down a little bit, but not so much that it actively pissed me off. Surprisingly, it was actually made consistently more difficult than the original, giving much tighter windows for action command timing as well as counter-attack timing. I will say that they did make the normal versions of the Bros Attacks more or less irrelevant by making the Advanced versions their own separate options, though. It's only accentuated by the fact that the Advanced versions are now much easier to unlock this time around. A handful of them, namely Knockback Bros Advance and Chopper Bros, feel noticeably nerfed - but in the context of difficulty, this is a good change, since battles can't be cheesed as hard. The Mush Badge, which busted the original wide open, is no longer available outside of a secret found in the waters around Gwarhar Lagoon, which eliminated what was effectively easy mode. Considering the recent trend of Nintendo making their games more and more casualized, it's astonishing to see this remake amp up the difficulty. Cackletta's Soul no longer attacks first, but her attacks are so powerful and hard to dodge that the fight is, ironically enough, a brutal endurance round. It's the ultimate test of your timing skills and ability to manage items. I absolutely loved it.


This is one of those rare remakes that completely stands eye to eye with the original. If you have no means of playing the original GBA version of Superstar Saga, this is an absolutely wonderful alternative. I wholeheartedly recommend it to people who love the original and to people who have never played it before. I take absolutely no issue in giving this remake a 9/10. 

(I did not actually get around to playing Bowser's Minions yet. It's not what I wanted the game for, but it's additional content for an already solid game.)

[Bean]

Now this makes me happy to read. I've kind of put this one off for a bit because of playing a long fan game this month, so to know it's pretty much right there with the original and having some new content to boot is nice.