Mother 3, The World Ends with You, Super Smash Brothers Brawl
This is turning into a "Jack blogs about video games and nobody cares" blog, isn't it? Ah well. I like to talk about games, even if no one wants to hear it.
Mother 3 ended up surprising me. Kudos to the fan translation team for putting together that functional ROM, because I'm glad I decided to play it. I wasn't sure what to expect from the game, since even though it's supposedly considered to be "better" than Earthbound, the internet as a whole doesn't have much to say about it (the fact that it was a Japan-only release probably has something to do with that).
Honestly, the game didn't really have me until 2/3rds through. I liked the game alright, but it wasn't as... compelling as Earthbound was. I was generally interested in Ness and Paula and Jeff (wasn't really that interested in Poo but he comes into the game really late) and I wanted to see them succeed. I liked Lucas well enough, he's a very sympathetic protagonist.... But you don't get to PLAY him until you're a 3rd through the game! You play his dad, Flint, and Duster the thief, and a Monkey named Salsa (or Chico if you're me) before Lucas is even SEEN again. And even then, once you get control of Lucas it took me a little bit to warm up to him.
The game is oddly paced for reasons that I can't really explain without talking about the ending. Basically all the weird choices in story and game set up are explained in the last 4th of the game. A lot of the things I was scratching my head about ended up being justified in the end... but it was odd because there were a few times where I would have put the game down only because I didn't understand what was going on. It's okay for a game to be confusing, and I get why the game was set up the way it was, but there felt like there was probably a better way of handling it that didn't involve being confused for the majority of the story as to why we were doing things or why they were important.
Spoilers start here.
Earthbound got me to cry simply because I cared about the characters. Mother 3 made me cry not because of any latent concern for the characters, but because I was sympathetic to their general situation. There's a lot of sadness and death surrounding the story, and all of it is tragic and immediate. But I wasn't really upset about any of the character deaths because they happen within the first 30 minutes of gameplay. The whole feel of the game is built around the feeling of being lost and abandoned when you lose a loved one (in addition to it's other messages). Earthbound's feels were rooted in the game play. I cried because I was afraid for the character's immediate safety. Mother 3 had more of an... outside reactionary feel to it. I wasn't attached to the characters who die. I was familiar with the feeling of losing someone you care about. I wasn't crying for Hinawa and Claus. I was crying for Eric and my Grandmother.
The end of the game tied it up in a neat little bow, though. At the very end the feels were more about the story then my own personal experiences. I almost lost it a few times during the final boss "fight"... it's one of the more powerful boss scenarios I've experienced. It blows in the face of everything you've been programmed to do as a gamer, which really works for the situation. You want to attack. You're conditioned to associate attacking with winning. But you can't win. Lucas can't attack, it's too painful for him to strike his brother. So you struggle with this idea that you're truly limited by your emotions, that you can't just blindly plow through. And as the battle drags on and you start to feel like it's never going to end, like you're going to give out before he gives in, you realize that's exactly how things would play out if you were in that situation.
And then the final lines of dialogue made me bawl endlessly.
Spoilers end here.
At any rate, I don't know if Earthbound or Mother 3 is the better game. I liked Earthbound more, but I feel like Mother 3 has the better story. Earthbound brought it together better, but Mother 3 was going for something more complex. I don't know if I can fault it for that.
So I've been replaying The World Ends With You for some research on "media about people playing games to the death" (or "to the life" in the case of TWEWY) I legitimately adore this game, and I sing it's praises to anyone who will listen long enough. I have put an INSANE amount of hours into it, just replaying it over and over again. It's one of the best impulse buys I've ever had. But by all accounts it should be a terrible game.
The interface is confusing, even after you've played the game as long as I have. The way things are laid out is cramped and there is a lot of wasted space. The battle mechanics are really hard to master, and there are so many customization options that you can spend forever trying to find a combination of weapons that "work" for you. The story is clunky at times, and some of the characters are oddly characterized or poorly fleshed out. Also the reveal at the VERY end is kind of forced, and it remains my least favorite part of the game.
But the game is somehow still good.
I don't know if it's the combination of the art style, the fast paced nature of battles, the way that Shibuya actually FEELS like a crowded city, the music, or the personalities of the developed characters that pull it through. But something about that game manages to work. The more that I play it the more I enjoy it. But I don't think it's the kind of game that could work twice. I hear that TWEWY characters are going to be in Kingdom Hearts 3, which means that this game will probably eventually get a sequel... and it doesn't need one. It really can't work again, it's a miracle it works at all. I guess in the end everything about this game ultimately results in a game that is fun to play for inexplicable reasons. Which I am okay with.
Dan and I spent some time revisiting Super Smash Brothers Brawl after I finished Earthbound, since Brawl was the reason we were interested in looking into Earthbound and Mother 3. I'm not actually all that fond of fighting games, and I really disliked Brawl when it came out. Melee is a great game, but Brawl is so... cluttered. There are SO many characters and SO many stages and SO much content and unlockables and items and extra content... it's a very busy game. Sometimes it felt like a chore to play. And that doesn't even get into my problems with the Smash Ball item (deus ex machina for people who are bad at the game... and that's coming from someone who IS bad at the game).
Looking back on it, I think I was a little hard on this game. Melee is still the superior game in terms of being more balanced for multiplayer and more... manageable in terms of content. Brawl is fun, it's just a different kind of fun. Dan and I had a blast playing the Subspace Emissary story mode, even though we were being terrible all over the place and stumbling through trying to remember how to play the damn game. The story is crap, but they did their best trying to tie together all the characters into a single storyline. That's admirable, even if it's an unforgivable sin to put fighting game controls into a side-scrolling platformer style game.
At any rate, I've always found it funny how people can get attached to characters in that game for different reasons. For me, I used to only pick characters I was familiar with, so I played a lot of Link and Pikachu. Then I played pretty guys with swords Marth and Roy in Melee since they matched my fight style (close combat). In Brawl I mostly played Ike, but in this playthrough of the Subspace Emissary I was able to be more... open minded about the character choices. I tried out everyone, just to try it because I was going to be equally bad at everyone.
And wouldn't you know it, turns out I'm pretty good as Ness and Lucas.
That's all I guess. I've been playing a lot of video games lately XD
Mother 3 ended up surprising me. Kudos to the fan translation team for putting together that functional ROM, because I'm glad I decided to play it. I wasn't sure what to expect from the game, since even though it's supposedly considered to be "better" than Earthbound, the internet as a whole doesn't have much to say about it (the fact that it was a Japan-only release probably has something to do with that).
Honestly, the game didn't really have me until 2/3rds through. I liked the game alright, but it wasn't as... compelling as Earthbound was. I was generally interested in Ness and Paula and Jeff (wasn't really that interested in Poo but he comes into the game really late) and I wanted to see them succeed. I liked Lucas well enough, he's a very sympathetic protagonist.... But you don't get to PLAY him until you're a 3rd through the game! You play his dad, Flint, and Duster the thief, and a Monkey named Salsa (or Chico if you're me) before Lucas is even SEEN again. And even then, once you get control of Lucas it took me a little bit to warm up to him.
The game is oddly paced for reasons that I can't really explain without talking about the ending. Basically all the weird choices in story and game set up are explained in the last 4th of the game. A lot of the things I was scratching my head about ended up being justified in the end... but it was odd because there were a few times where I would have put the game down only because I didn't understand what was going on. It's okay for a game to be confusing, and I get why the game was set up the way it was, but there felt like there was probably a better way of handling it that didn't involve being confused for the majority of the story as to why we were doing things or why they were important.
Spoilers start here.
Earthbound got me to cry simply because I cared about the characters. Mother 3 made me cry not because of any latent concern for the characters, but because I was sympathetic to their general situation. There's a lot of sadness and death surrounding the story, and all of it is tragic and immediate. But I wasn't really upset about any of the character deaths because they happen within the first 30 minutes of gameplay. The whole feel of the game is built around the feeling of being lost and abandoned when you lose a loved one (in addition to it's other messages). Earthbound's feels were rooted in the game play. I cried because I was afraid for the character's immediate safety. Mother 3 had more of an... outside reactionary feel to it. I wasn't attached to the characters who die. I was familiar with the feeling of losing someone you care about. I wasn't crying for Hinawa and Claus. I was crying for Eric and my Grandmother.
The end of the game tied it up in a neat little bow, though. At the very end the feels were more about the story then my own personal experiences. I almost lost it a few times during the final boss "fight"... it's one of the more powerful boss scenarios I've experienced. It blows in the face of everything you've been programmed to do as a gamer, which really works for the situation. You want to attack. You're conditioned to associate attacking with winning. But you can't win. Lucas can't attack, it's too painful for him to strike his brother. So you struggle with this idea that you're truly limited by your emotions, that you can't just blindly plow through. And as the battle drags on and you start to feel like it's never going to end, like you're going to give out before he gives in, you realize that's exactly how things would play out if you were in that situation.
And then the final lines of dialogue made me bawl endlessly.
Spoilers end here.
At any rate, I don't know if Earthbound or Mother 3 is the better game. I liked Earthbound more, but I feel like Mother 3 has the better story. Earthbound brought it together better, but Mother 3 was going for something more complex. I don't know if I can fault it for that.
So I've been replaying The World Ends With You for some research on "media about people playing games to the death" (or "to the life" in the case of TWEWY) I legitimately adore this game, and I sing it's praises to anyone who will listen long enough. I have put an INSANE amount of hours into it, just replaying it over and over again. It's one of the best impulse buys I've ever had. But by all accounts it should be a terrible game.
The interface is confusing, even after you've played the game as long as I have. The way things are laid out is cramped and there is a lot of wasted space. The battle mechanics are really hard to master, and there are so many customization options that you can spend forever trying to find a combination of weapons that "work" for you. The story is clunky at times, and some of the characters are oddly characterized or poorly fleshed out. Also the reveal at the VERY end is kind of forced, and it remains my least favorite part of the game.
But the game is somehow still good.
I don't know if it's the combination of the art style, the fast paced nature of battles, the way that Shibuya actually FEELS like a crowded city, the music, or the personalities of the developed characters that pull it through. But something about that game manages to work. The more that I play it the more I enjoy it. But I don't think it's the kind of game that could work twice. I hear that TWEWY characters are going to be in Kingdom Hearts 3, which means that this game will probably eventually get a sequel... and it doesn't need one. It really can't work again, it's a miracle it works at all. I guess in the end everything about this game ultimately results in a game that is fun to play for inexplicable reasons. Which I am okay with.
Dan and I spent some time revisiting Super Smash Brothers Brawl after I finished Earthbound, since Brawl was the reason we were interested in looking into Earthbound and Mother 3. I'm not actually all that fond of fighting games, and I really disliked Brawl when it came out. Melee is a great game, but Brawl is so... cluttered. There are SO many characters and SO many stages and SO much content and unlockables and items and extra content... it's a very busy game. Sometimes it felt like a chore to play. And that doesn't even get into my problems with the Smash Ball item (deus ex machina for people who are bad at the game... and that's coming from someone who IS bad at the game).
Looking back on it, I think I was a little hard on this game. Melee is still the superior game in terms of being more balanced for multiplayer and more... manageable in terms of content. Brawl is fun, it's just a different kind of fun. Dan and I had a blast playing the Subspace Emissary story mode, even though we were being terrible all over the place and stumbling through trying to remember how to play the damn game. The story is crap, but they did their best trying to tie together all the characters into a single storyline. That's admirable, even if it's an unforgivable sin to put fighting game controls into a side-scrolling platformer style game.
At any rate, I've always found it funny how people can get attached to characters in that game for different reasons. For me, I used to only pick characters I was familiar with, so I played a lot of Link and Pikachu. Then I played pretty guys with swords Marth and Roy in Melee since they matched my fight style (close combat). In Brawl I mostly played Ike, but in this playthrough of the Subspace Emissary I was able to be more... open minded about the character choices. I tried out everyone, just to try it because I was going to be equally bad at everyone.
And wouldn't you know it, turns out I'm pretty good as Ness and Lucas.
That's all I guess. I've been playing a lot of video games lately XD