Here I go!
Oh boy, where do I start with this one? I know these games have A LOT of supporters and fans, so I'm ready to have my head chopped off for my comments, but I legitimately think that Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald just absolutely suck. Here's the thing: Blue, Red, and Yellow were the originals and I love them for what they are. They're dated by today's standards, but back then they were pretty incredible. I enjoyed Silver, Gold, and Crystal the most out of the whole series because I felt they had immense upgrades over the original: a day and night system with different Pokemon for each time (I guess you could say that the hours I spent secretly staying up to catch a Hoothoot were quite...a hoot! YEEEAAAAAAHHHHH!), the ability to breed Pokemon, the introduction of two new types (including my absolute favorite: steel), shiny Pokemon, the PokeGear, berries, and a lot more. To this day, Silver, Gold, and Crystal remain my absolute favorites (that includes the highly superior SoulSilver and HeartGold remakes).
Fast forward to a few years later and you'll find me with a Gameboy Advanced just eagerly awaiting to get my hands on the new Pokemon games. I finally managed to snag a copy of Sapphire after waiting for quite some time, and while I felt it wasn't the worst game on the planet, I found it terribly boring. Here's the thing about these games that bother me: Silver, Gold, and Crystal were great evolutions to the series, changing it more than I felt it ever had until the recent release of Black and White. Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum introduced 3D(ish) to the series, and though I didn't love them as much, they did try new things. Black and White are both pretty amazing. On the other hand, Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald have always felt like they were just there...the middle of the road, and though I had obviously not played the sequels yet, it was only reinforced when I did.
I found that the overall world was boring. I don't care for Hoenn nearly as much as I care for Kanto or Johto. I certainly don't care for it as much as I do for Unova, and though I barely like Sinnoh, I still think it's the better of the two worlds. The graphics were an improvement over the last games in the series, but I wasn't blown away by what Gamefreak was offering in R/S/E. I also thought that the large majority of the Pokemon designs that generation were lame, and the "legendaries" all sucked for me, especially the mascots for each. Don't even get me started on those God awful starters (Treecko and its evolutionary line being the only truly awesome ones). The new evil teams just served to annoy me and the story tried too hard while completely sucking (just keep to a light story, Gamefreak!). I also hated all the gyms and gym leaders. Honestly, I found almost everything about these games a fuckin' chore of some sort.
This one suffers from trying to do way too much and being too ambitious, without there really being a need for it. The fact of the matter is that Banjo-Kazooie was pretty much perfect the way it was originally conceived, and unlike Perfect Dark, it didn't need to be completely changed to be competitive in today's market. For whatever illogical reason, Rare felt that Perfect Dark Zero could get away with being a less interesting version of the original game while Banjo-Kazooie had to be completely remade into something it never really needed to be. Yes, the idea of building vehicles is cool, and with a creative mind you can create some pretty amazing stuff (I've literally seen people create the mother-fuckin'-Terminator with those blocks; the engine is that deep), and sure the graphics are possibly the best the Xbox 360 has ever seen. But the problem is that doesn't stop the game from being boring. Depth does not automatically equate to fun and this is something developers at times have an issue grasping. Sure, I can make myself a Death Star with legs and attack everything in sight, but what's the point? The vehicles that L.O.G. provides me are all adequate enough to get the job done, and what gets me is the poor choices Rare made about the game design. If you really want me to explore the vehicle design system, then why in the world am I required to complete mundane tasks just to get new pieces of equipment? It should all be available from the moment the game starts. If you're going to allow me to create cool vehicles, then why in the world are you limiting my "challenges" to carrying objects and racing? For all the attention payed to the vehicle building system, it seems like the missions system was just an afterthought. If you're going to make your vehicles control through a physics engine, then why in the world do only some of the rules of physics actually apply? If I place the engine in the wrong spot of an airplane, it'll nosedive faster than SEGA did with the Saturn, but if I place it just right and then add three more engines, the plane will fly faster while completely ignoring the obvious issue of weight vs. the wingspan of my vehicle. The fuck is that about? The physics are unforgiving in this game...until they're suddenly not! The game has a strange habit of mixing real world physics with cartoon physics, and it's not until you've spent a good hour building a vehicle and then test it that you figure out what the game wants you to do in order to make the vehicle function properly. It's all so inconsistent.
You know what sucks the most? The level design of Nuts & Bolts is fuckin' spectacular, with a special nod to the Terrairum of Terror. I can't begin to count the times I entered one of the levels and thought: "Gee, this would fun...if I could platform through it instead of driving these awful vehicles!" or "Gee, this would be fun if my helicopter didn't move like an enormous cow attached to a parachute, lazily drifting to the ground." The one series that Rare didn't really need to evolve is the one they decided to screw around with. It makes no sense and I was sorely disappointed with this game.
Here's my issue with this one: it doesn't just commit the cardinal sin of not evolving or not polishing the series, but it actually takes several steps back. Dead or Alive was an interesting game for its time...a fun knock-off of Virtua Fighter that wasn't very deep but at least playable and entertaining. Dead or Alive 2 was broken in the balance department, but it was spectacular and Team Ninja actually took the time to evolve their ideas (with special care used in development of the multi-tiered stages). Dead or Alive 3 didn't do much different, but at least it polished the series some more, especially by changing the damage of counter-holds which were painfully overpowered in DoA 2. Dead or Alive 4 is just a stagnant game that fell really, really far behind the competition. But Dead or Alive 2: Ultimate? It recreates the system of Dead or Alive 2 and the problem with that is that as fun as DoA 2 was for its time, it was rendered obsolete really, really quickly. The Ultimate remake basically devolved into a showcase of costumes and unlockable characters, with no attention to the balance of the system, with no thought of evolving the series at all, and with the removal of things that made DoA 3 superior to DoA 2. Why oh why did Team Ninja completely botch the side-stepping system in 2: Ultimate? In DoA 3 you can...you know, actually dodge attacks by side-stepping? Not so in DoA 2: U. If you don't block or counter-hold you can't escape any hit, no matter how blatantly obvious it is (like Jan Lee's running-jump kick). This is also pretty shit-tastic in the fact that it made it harder to move around stages, kind of defeating the purpose of having multi-tiered stages to begin with. You would think it would end there, but no, it doesn't. To further render the multi-tiered stages useless, Team Ninja decided for some illogical reason that you could no longer knock opponents out by making them fall out of a widow or off a ledge. If I have enough skill to lure or push an opponent toward a ledge and then enough skill to toss him or her off while his or her health is low, I see no reason why I shouldn't deserve to knock him or her out. That's the whole point of interactive environments.
See, you may think that interactive environments are not really that important to fighting games, and you'd be right. This is completely true in games like Virtua Fighter and Tekken where the battle systems are so beautifully designed that the series can just rely on them (as they should). But for a fighting series like DoA that still had a lot of catching up to do and a lot of polishing to be truly good, the one thing that made it stand out was the ability to use the environments to your advantage. Somehow, Team Ninja felt that this was no longer important and decided to pretty much render environments useless.
There is of course the other thing that makes DoA different from other 3D fighters, which is the counter-hold system. Love or hate it, the counter-hold system is an interesting idea, but there was always one major problem with counter-holds: the disproportionate amount of damage counter-holds did to the level of skill it took to pull them off. Dead or Alive 3 purposefully reduced the damage of counter-holds by about 33% and for some illogical reason that I can't figure out, DoA 2: Ultimate goes back to the old system of immense damage. What really gets me is that Team Ninja added the different kick counter-holds to make the game more difficult, but it sort of defeats the purpose if the damage is still disproportionate. They should have kept the damage of Dead or Alive 3 and the new difficulty of 2: Ultimate. But no.
Don't even get me started on how difficult TN made it to escape a throw. The timing for it is about ten times more difficult than the timing for a counter-hold, and when you have grappling characters that can do brutal damage like Bass, it kind of sucks. Even in multiple-part throws the ability to escape becomes almost impossible at times. It's frustrating. The game was also short on characters with the excuse that Dead or Alive 2 didn't have the characters in the story...meanwhile, they decide to add Hitomi for no other reason than to please the fanboys. Yeah, that totally makes sense Team Ninja. And you now what? I could forgive the lack of characters, I really, really could, if only you had bothered to balance them. Hayabusa is the single most overpowered character in the series and his counter-holds are so over-the-top that I don't understand how you let him slip by. Lest we forget the removal of charge moves (i.e. The ability to hold a move and charge it), which kind of botched Hitomi and Gen Fu.
So what did Dead or Alive 2: Ultimate bring to the fray? Slopes? It's just another fancy animation for falls. Online gameplay? Yes, it did, and I'm glad it did. If it wasn't for DoA 2: Ultimate then SEGA probably would have never felt pressured to bring Virtua Fighter 5 online, and DoA 2: Ultimate proved that it could be done, which led to other developers putting their fighters online in an age where arcades are pretty much dead in any place other than Japan. So yes, it's the forerunner to competitive online fighting on the home console front, but it could have just easily been done with a better fighting engine. The issues of Dead or Alive 2: Ultimate are all, and I do mean all, unrelated to its online component. It's the core gameplay in DoA 2: U which is the ultimate problem (i c wut u did thar! HAR! HAR!).
Needless to say that I was severely disappointed. The Dead or Alive series has immense potential, but it'll probably never be reached because Team Ninja said: "fuck balance and a refined engine with numerous options! We want bouncy tits!" So fuck you, Team Ninja!
This game is not necessarily bad, but it's average across the board. I understand why it turned out to be a semi-decent product considering the events leading up to its release: Rare's fate was in limbo, Nintendo was forcing them to shoehorn a license of theirs into a game where it didn't belong, and then basically told the company to fuck off half way through development. There's a part of me that legitimately feels like Rare made this game the way it is as a big "fuck you" to Nintendo for what they were doing, but the problem I have with that is that the ones who suffer are the gamers. Honestly, this game is absolutely soulless. It doesn't do anything out of the ordinary, the combat system is limited, the puzzles were bland, and the story and characters were just grating. It feels like the game was made by-the-numbers, with no creativity whatsoever. The lack of spaceship missions also sucks, and hurts twice as much when you get to do the transition missions in the Arwing and realize just how good that tiny portion of that game is. If Rare had just made it into a typical Star Fox game, it would have been spectacular.
Don't get me started on that "dinosaur language" where the words are just a jumbled mess with random intersecting English names ("Garbble, garbble, garbble, DINOSAUR PLANET, garbble, garbble, gabble, GENERAL SCALES!"). If you're going to invent a language for a game, you should probably play a few Panzer Dragoon games first just so you can see how it can be done properly. Just sayin'.
Oh man, where to start with this one? Perfect Dark is one of my all time favorite games, and even though it's still a joy to play, there is no excuse for the lack of evolution in this prequel. The game got pretty solid review scores and sold surprisingly well (which I blame on it being a launch title with little to no competition), but it's just plain bad. On the surface it still has a lot of the "Perfect Dark" feel and the weapons all handle beautifully (which is more than I can say for a series like Halo where it feels like every gun is made of paper-mâché), but not even that was enough to save this game from being my biggest disappointment of all time. The enemy A.I. is atrocious, and most of the battles come down to enemies running at you in a straight line while you pick them off like wooden ducks in a shooting gallery: you might think this is okay since the original Perfect Dark pretty much did the same thing, but no. The original Perfect Dark had the excuse of being on limited hardware, while Perfect Dark Zero is on the Xbox 360. It's not acceptable. The game also has awful level design...so much so, in fact, that Rare felt the need to provide the player with ENORMOUS neon arrows on the floor which pointed them to the next direction.
Ultimately though, this game is perfect example of why Rare has gone downhill. Truth is that Rare is an ambitious and incredibly talented game developer, but they're not without fault. The biggest problem with Rare is lack of focus and poor handling of development time. Under Nintendo, Rare outperformed almost every single developer of each respective generation, and the reason is obvious: Nintendo knew how to keep Rare focused on a single path. Microsoft has no idea how to handle the company, and what's worse is that Rare doesn't seem to know what to do with itself now. It feels like Rare is that really pretty girl who gets dumped, then finds a new boyfriend and is all insecure about herself. She's so insecure that she doesn't believe that she has enough qualities to please the new guy and has to do stupid bullshit like dieting to lose an unnecessary amount of pounds.
The problem with PDZ in specific is that it doesn't know what kind of game it wants to be, and the fact that for some ridiculous reason Rareware doesn't believe in its own ability to make great games...or maybe it's Microsoft that doesn't believe they can. There are some mind-boggling choices here that make no sense whatsoever, like making Jo an American and giving her an American accent, as well as turning her into a fifteen year old with nail polish (I'm not even kidding). Why? I mean, honestly, why? Joanna Dark wasn't exactly the most three dimensional character but at least she didn't suck so much as she did in Zero.
Definitely my biggest disappointment.
- Kharlo -
I actually enjoyed Dinosaur Planet. </3 :(
ReplyDeletePerfect Dark Zero should have never been released. It is as if they were only given two weeks to develop this game... Just plain awful... And sadly enough, I remember being extremely excited for its release.
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