What I'm Playing (Volume 105): Wario Land 3

Wario Land 3 is a Metroidvania game for the Game Boy Color, the most dull of all of Nintendo's handhelds (sorry). I picked it up on an eShop sale on the 3DS a year or so ago, and decided to break it out, as I'd beaten Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright in the morning at work, and needed something to play in the afternoon. Unlike the Metroid games, which have the controls of an run and gun shooter, or the Castlevania games, which have the controls of an action platformer, Wario Land resembles a more pure platformer in control, while still maintaining the gradualist approach of a Metroidvania game, in which you must unlock new abilities to complete your adventure.

The big difference between this game and other platformers, or Metroidvania games, is the lack of dying in the game. Rather than being killed by getting hit by enemies, Wario's pudgy body will either be knocked back, or changed in some way. For example, if you get hit by an enemy with a flamethrower, you'll light on fire, sending Wario running at top speed and out of control, until he finally starts smoldering and goes out, returning to completely back to normal. The genius thing about this is that you'll use these status changes to unlock new parts of the level. So if Wario gets lit on fire, he can run into blocks that only break upon being touched by fire, and which are impassible without suffering this dastardly damage. The status changes, however, will also frequently send you all the way back to the beginning of a challenge, making it imperative for you to think carefully about the status changes you'll need, those you won't need, and acting accordingly.

There are dozens of status changes and new abilities for Wario to unlock in the game, making it so that each level gradually unpeels as Wario attains more and more capabilities. While the game only has 25 levels, each level contains 4 unique treasures, only one of which is typically available upon your first visit to a level. Each treasure chest is opened by the correspondingly colored key, and you can bet the far that they're going to be teasing you with the sight of these out of reach chests and keys early and often. As such, you'll end up revisiting each level several times throughout your adventure, experiencing new and creative parts of each level.

The graphical treatment of the game still looks wonderful today, with that typical Game Boy Color look, and lovely sprite work throughout. Wario is completely gross, as you'd expect, farting on his way up and down ladders, ballooning to embarrassing size upon eating donuts, and falling asleep with his mouth wide open when you have the audacity to not move him for a few seconds. There's a large cast of enemies that clearly communicate to you their effects through their visual design, and the stages themselves are huge, detailed, and lovingly animated.

The music is actually very good, and I spent more time than usual listening to it as I actually played it at home quite a bit. There are a bunch of nice tracks here, and you get plenty of musical bang for your buck.

The level designs are simply fantastic, and are the primary reason for playing the game. The teasing nature with which the developers allow you to glimpse treasures and keys that are out of reach will reinforce the core Metroidvania concept you know and (hopefully) love), allowing you the surpassing joy of finally bypassing those stupid solid blocks, bombs, or raging rivers that have been taunting you for hours. There was the occasional time that I felt that the path forward was unclear to me and the puzzles were slightly unfair, but more often than not the game did a pretty good job of displaying where to go next and what to do, without forcing you to pick any particular level up next. Usually I could figure out everything with some careful thought and further exploration, but I'll admit I did resort to using a guide a handful of times to bypass a particularly tricky situation.

*SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT BELOW*

My experience with this game was almost universally positive, save for getting occasionally frustrated by a puzzle I couldn't solve. But the end boss battle really irked me. The bosses, in general, were very creative and well-thought out, using the status effects to make it so that your invincibility didn't make the battle too simple, while also reinforcing the core concept that Wario can't die. But in the final boss battle, one of the boss' attacks can trigger a game over, and is the only thing in the game which can, which seems totally contrary to the messaging and theme the game had been ingeniously trying to develop since minute one. Additionally, the boss fight was exceedingly simple and seemed far to similar to the boss fight at the end of Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3.

*SPOILER ALERT CONCLUDED*

Wario Land 3 is an all-time classic, and an absolute joy to play, minus a few small warts here and there. Despite being more or less forced into playing it due to my lack of foresight to bring another game with me to work the day I finished my previous quest, I found myself totally sucked into Wario's third adventure, and would absolutely recommend it to anyone. It's a must-buy, particularly with its availability on the Virtual Console, and the fact that an actual cartridge isn't too much more expensive. I'll give it a 9.6/10.

-TRO

Top Ten GBA Games

Since I'm winding down my completions a bit, I'm going to try to keep my writing fresh with a few different topics other than the usual What I'm Playing. Since I did an homage to my favorite home console, the SNES, I decided I'd also do a list for my favorite handheld, the Game Boy Advance (note, I still refer to my 3DS as my Game Boy, sometimes-I'm like your mom). I adore lists, and love getting upset that my favorites aren't included, or are too low, so feel free to take umbrage with my selections! My rules were that the game must have originated on the GBA to qualify for the list, which rules out any number of super ports on the system, and that I wouldn't exclude multiple games from the same series, unless there was a game from another series that was pretty close, and would have been excluded due to the presence of two from the same series. This was WAY harder than doing the SNES for some reason, which means that every single one of these games is a must-buy. I've linked any full reviews I've done for these games for your reference.

Honorable Mentions:

Mega Man Zero & Mega Man Zero 2-really wonderful games on a very deep system
Mario Tennis: Power Tour-ditto
Dragon Ball Z Collectible Card Game-it's not good, and I really love it
The Final Fantasy Ports (Origins, IV, V, and VI)
The Mario Ports (Super Mario Bros. 3 & Super Mario World)
The Link to the Past Port
Pokemon FireRed
Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones-just quite as good as it's predecessor, and a hair worse than Advance Wars 

Anyway, on with the true list!

 10/9. Advance Wars & Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising

I feel so stupid putting these at number 10 and number 9, but then I look at the games above them and realize that 1) this is no insult and 2) this is exactly where they belong, with the second game being slightly better than the first due to the new Neotanks and more playable commanders.

8. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

 

When I reviewed this game, I gave it a 9.5 and yet I still feel the need to put it at number 8. It's fantastic, and only has a few tiny flaws that drop it down this far.

7. Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga

I have to confess that I can't think of anything wrong with this delightful gem. It's extremely well polished and hilarious, with a wonderful concept for a game mixing puzzling, action elements, and RPG elements, and yet it didn't quite blow my mind or stick with me in quite the same way other games ahead of it in this list did.

6/5. Golden Sun: The Lost Age & Golden Sun

These two are more or less interchangeable to me, but if I had to pick one, I think I'd pick the first. Having fewer characters, and more likeable characters, made this one slightly better, but they're both titanic technical and gameplay achievements, despite some of the rambly dialogue.

4. Mario Golf: Advance Tour

It's just a flat out incredible golf game on a handheld. I'm probably biased by my love of golf games and sports RPGs here, but this is my list, and this is one of my all-time favorites. Don't knock it unless you've tried it!

3. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

This is where making this list got really, really, really hard. This is a flat out unbelievable game, and is probably in my top 3 Final Fantasy games list. It's a perfect 10, along with the other two, but I feel slightly less need to revisit this game than I do with the other two.

2. Fire Emblem

The permadeath feature in this game made very dive into every mission stressful, and made the payoff from victory all the sweeter. Throw in the fact that it has my favorite Fire Emblem story, and my two favorite Fire Emblem characters (Lyn #1, Hector #2), and combine it with the flawless mechanics of Fire Emblem, and you have a perfect handheld experience.

1. Pokemon Emerald

As I've gotten older, I've come to accept that the greatest RPG franchise of all-time is not Final Fantasy. It's Pokemon. And this is my favorite Pokemon game, and also probably the game I've beaten the most times, out of any game. I used to run through the game from beginning to end, wipe it, and start anew with a new gimmick, or try to beat it as fast as possible. The existence of Emerald makes it unnecessary to play Ruby or Sapphire again, so despite those games being every bit as good as Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, they appear here quasi-spiritually.

Anyway, that's my top ten list of my favorite GBA games! I'll probably do my top ten NES games next, or maybe I'll do the DS next. Tough choices! In actuality, I'm close to wrapping up the game I'm currently playing on handheld, and also have another fun new idea to do, so one of those will probably be next before a top ten.

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 104): Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright

Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright a strategy RPG for the Nintendo 3DS. Having adored it's predecessor, Fire Emblem Awakening, and hankering for the some Fire Emblem action, I bought this one as the next title to be crossed off my list.

This game is actually one of three in the Fates universe, and while this is often compared to the approach typically seen in Pokemon, I think it's much more ambitious than that. Rather than multiple games with the same quest and slightly different selections of characters, Fates actually has three separate stories to experience. The first few chapters of the game will be the same regardless of your version (Birthright, Conquest, and Revelation), but a big choice will be presented to you after the completion of an early chapter, determining your journey from that point on. Each version gives you access to over twenty additional missions, a divergent cast of characters, and a completely different storyline. What's more, if you have the physical version of one of the games, you can purchase the other two as DLC for the admittedly steep price of $19.99, each. But I think the base game was worth the 39.99 at launch, so to get another similarly sized two games for the same price as the base game is probably worth it, particularly if you love Fire Emblem like I do. With that being said, I won't be purchasing the other two campaigns now, and haven't played them, so I can't speak to their quality, but reviews of all of them have generally been good.

So what's new here, compared to Fire Emblem Awakening? The system is very similar, with an identical graphical style and typical Fire Emblem action, but there are actually some huge changes lying beneath the surface. In each Fire Emblem game, you play as the tactician (avatar) for the army, making the decisions for all of the units, but starting with Fire Emblem Awakening, the avatar was now an actually playable unit, and had a serious part to play in the story. That trend was taken to the extreme in Fates, as your avatar is now not just a character, but is actually the main character of the game, overthrowing a lot of Fire Emblem tradition. I frankly didn't care for this. Due to the customization of gender, voice, name, and appearance, your avatar can never really appear in pre-rendered cutscenes, which is no fun. I also really liked the traditional approach of watching and managing the story as a fly on the wall, but this may just be a personal preference.

They also significantly changed the system by which you can pair up units and support others. Now, if you want to have a more offensively focused pairing, you just sit your units next to each other while one attacks, but pairing up your units to share a space on the map will result in a more defensively oriented team-up. When paired up, your stats are significantly boosted, but your pair-up partner cannot attack, meaning that there are real pros and cons to pairing up. I actually liked this decision, and thought it added an additional level of strategy to the gameplay.

The weapon triangle is a significant part of Fire Emblem history, and even the simplest acolytes will know that swords beat axes, axes beat lances, and lances beat swords. The weapon triangle in this game has been significantly overhauled, with attack types that were traditionally outside of the triangle, like bows and magic, now being included. This was quite confusing to me, as there are now a ton of different types of weapons (swords, axes, lances, daggers/shurikens, magic, and bows), and remembering where on this bizarre six-sided triangle each weapon sat was confusing. They also did away with the magical hierarchy in which certain elements beat other elements, which was a good decision.

Perhaps most crushingly, the good folks at Intelligent Systems did away with my favorite item, the Second Seal. This item would allow you to reset at level 1 in another class, while keeping all of your stat growths from your previous leveling. This allowed you to explore numerous class chains to customize each character, which was tons of fun. In this game, your access to other classes is determined by your level of support with other units, which will allow you to alter a characters class to become the same class as their spouse or close friends. This is an intriguing system, but I really wish that I had still had access to the Second Seals, as it felt like you had a significantly increased amount of control over your characters, and more opportunities to level and gain stats. They did introduce a nice new item, the Eternal Seal, that allows you increase the maximum level of any character by 5, but these are very expensive and don't quite give the same bang for your buck that Fire Emblem Awakening did.

The music is fine, and the visuals are still disappointing. They could literally just add new characters and story to the old GBA architecture and I'd be beyond thrilled. Don't fix what ain't broke! But the CG cutscenes look better than ever, and I guess I'm more used to it now, so it doesn't bother me as much as it did in Fire Emblem Awakening.

It's just so perfect! Lyn for Smash!

The story and writing are just not in the same class as its predecessor, however. There were precious few characters that I really adored in this game, and the building of relationships between the characters was dull and lifeless. The story also felt bizarre, and with so many predictable tropes thrown in, I had little interest.

The music was very good throughout, and builds on a Chinese martial style that fits well with the group to which you're attached in this iteration of the game. There's also an absolute banger of a track that has a significant tie-in to the story that I find myself humming all the time, so the music was really a big highlight for me.

Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright is a very good game. But it doesn't quite capture the joys of the character building system in Fire Emblem Awakening, nor the witty interactions between the characters in that game, and those two things were the best things to happen to Fire Emblem in a very long time. I'll definitely get Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest, but I'm not going to rush out to do so. It's definitely worth your time and attention, particularly if you enjoy strategy RPGs. I'll give it an 8.5/10.

I'm really not sure what's up next on handhelds, to be honest. I've got a few ideas, but nothing firmly set in stone, so check back in soon to find out. I may kick around a few old favorites, as my 4 completed games through mid-February puts me way ahead of my curve.

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 103): Golf Story

Golf Story is a sports game with RPG elements for the Nintendo Switch. It's among the first indie games I heard about for the Switch, and immediately added it to my list. It's a golf game in the spirit of the handheld Mario Golf games for the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance, and seeing as I loved the GBA game so much, I was very eager to try out its spiritual successor.

You control an up and coming golfer in this game, trying your best to become a pro golfer. It's a trope seen frequently in games of this sort, and is perfectly great. Along the way you'll meet a colorful cast of characters who will either impede or aid in your quest to golf greatness. You have to finish numerous little challenges on each course to unlock one final challenge, which will typically unlock the next course. There are several courses to play (I didn't count them, but I think it's at least 6), and each has its own little environmental hazards to deal with. As you complete challenges, you'll not only proceed through the story, but also be rewarded with cash and experience that you can use to buy better gear and improve your golfer to your liking.

The mechanics of the game are the typical three-click system, which is also great. I'd hate for them to break up something so perfect, and am very glad that they didn't. You get the usual options in addition to the basic three clicks, including striking the ball at certain locations to increase/decrease spin and loft, drawing back your club power a bit to lay up for shots, and the use of a variety of power/specialty shots.

The golf physics themselves are very good. You'll rarely be hit with a surprise-how you hit it is typically how it flies.  The putting mechanics are very good, and are the best 2D golf putting mechanics to date. Every green just has a simple slope denoted by an arrow and a word, showing how it slopes and how severely, making aiming very simple.

The graphics are ok, I guess. I feel like they could have done something much prettier with them, to be honest, but they're basically a 16 bit approximation, which feels like the right stylistic choice.

The music is so bad that I turned it off. I mean, it's really, really bad. I never do this with games, but I simply couldn't take it anymore. What's worse, they don't even give you an option to turn off the music inside of the campaign mode, forcing you to back up to the main menu to turn it off.

I rarely found the writing in this game compelling or interesting. There were a few times I would laugh at some of the antics of the characters, but it was mostly very dry, and I was frankly tired of it by the end. It also felt that the story was filled with challenges that had precious little to do with golfing, or was just filler to waste time. If I have to shoot 6 out of 9 balls into a circle again...and that's nothing compared to the bizarre half hour I spent solving a murder mystery. Your opportunities for match play and tournament play are few and far between, and skirt around the actual fun golf physics that this team put together.

If you really like golf games, this is a perfectly fine choice. I got it on sale for 9.99, which felt just about right. But I can't help but feel that with better music, better writing, and a more diverse set of golf related activities along the way, this would have been a game to which I would have returned again and again. Instead, I'll cross it off the list, and probably never return. I'll give it a 7.0/10.

I still haven't decided which console game to clear next, as I'm currently having a tremendous amount of fun sticking to my New Years' resolution by replaying some old favorites, so keep an eye out for a new handheld review in the next few days, in all likelihood, and a console review next month or so, if I had to guess.

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 102): New Super Mario Bros. 2

New Super Mario Bros. 2 is a 2D platformer for the Nintendo 3DS. It's astonishingly similar to the original New Super Mario Bros., with a few tiny twists.

First, the Tanooki tail makes a triumphant return, which is always great. Other than that, the only sizeable change is a general alteration in theme, with a huge emphasis in this game being on collecting the staggering amount of coins in the game.

In previous Mario games, finding a room filled with more than 20 coins was a joyous anomaly. Now, coins are simply everywhere, with gradual rewards being unlocked based on the number of coins you've collected across your journey. It's a bit reminiscent of Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, albeit it doesn't quite fit the theme of your character nearly as well.

The controls are as good as ever, the levels are fine, the bosses are fine and the graphics are perfectly acceptable. I frankly didn't listen to the music at all, because I mostly play handhelds on my lunch break, and no one wants to hear music drifting from another cubicle. The game was also far too short, and way too easy. I finished it in about 4 hours, and finished the game while popping back and forth between 96-99 lives.

This is a Mario game, which means it's better than average, but it just left me wanting more. It changed almost nothing in the formula, and feels more like a DLC for the underwhelming New Super Mario Bros. Almost everyone will enjoy this game, but it won't be particularly memorable, and you probably won't return to it. I feel like this is my shortest review in a long time, and I have absolutely nothing else to say. I'll give it an 8.0/10.

Up next on the handheld edition of What I'm Playing is a game I recently acquired after an urge to dive back into a beloved series. See below for a little teaser...

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 101): Super Punch-Out!!

I'm finally back to my beloved SNES, after not having finished a new SNES game for the entire year of 2018! When I got my SNES Classic Edition, I really enjoyed playing Super Punch-Out!!, but found that playing it on an emulator was nearly as difficult as playing Punch-Out!! The SNES sequel features a far larger emphasis on memorization, and less of a focus on fast twitch reflexes compared to its ancestor, but the input lag you get from playing through an emulator is sufficient enough to make the experience less than ideal. So I tacked the cartridge back onto my list, and my parents got me the game for Christmas, giving me an excellent opportunity to get back to my SNES, and enjoy a game from what is becoming one of my favorite series. I was also inspired by the Gaming Historian's recent excellent video on the history of Punch-Out.

Super-Punch Out!! jumps over where the NES left off, and really is far closer to the experience from the original arcade games. You have a view from behind the boxer, similar to the arcade games, and the huge sprites and colorful palate looks far more like the arcade experience than does the more humble NES game, with its more muted tones and hilariously tiny boxer. It also adds a significant amount of complexity to the control scheme. In Punch-Out!!, you could block, dodge left, dodge right, jab left, jab right, body blow left, body blow right, and uppercut. In Super Punch Out!!, you have a dizzying (for this series) array of options added, including a flurry of uppercuts, a power punch to the body, and flurry of power punches to the body, blocking high, blocking low, and ducking. Unlike the NES game, in which you got uppercuts by attacking an opponent at a particularly weak time, in Super Punch-Out!! you now have a meter that builds up as you land any successful strike at any time, and the meter goes down when you are hit with a punch from your opponent. This lends it a more authentic boxing feel, as you need to wear down your opponent with consistent pressure, unlocking the opening to strike with powerful punches for the knockdown.

Super Punch-Out!!, despite these differences, still feels very much like a Punch-Out game, however. You'll still be facing comical opponents from a variety of racial stereotypes, although these are significantly toned down from the NES game, needing to memorize their patterns, and wear them down for three knockdowns. Certain punches will work at certain parts of their patterns, it's just that exploiting them is a bit more complicated now with the addition of a new arsenal of strikes and avoidance techniques at your disposal. There's definitely a big focus on ensuring that you feel that your opponents are filthy cheaters in this game, as you'll face off with a clown who tries to hit you with juggling balls, a Chinese martial artist who will launch flying kicks at you off the turnbuckle, and a Mexican Lucha Libre who will spit in your eyes, reducing your vision. But for the most part, the game tries using these new cheaters to reinforce the age old story of Punch-Out-fighting against impossible odds to become the champ.

There are a lot of things I really love about this iteration of Punch-Out. The time attack mode is a godsend that was long overdue, allowing you to both practice against an individual boxer for the purposes of getting higher scores in the world circuit, and also challenging yourself to knock down your opponents in a much faster manner. I wish, however, that they would have made this option available as soon as you had faced an opponent, as it would have made grinding out their tactics a much simpler proposition. Instead, you'll spend a lot of time chewing through old opponents again and again, which does get old at times. It also uses some of the advancements in cartridge technology to good use, including saving your place in the world circuit, as well as keeping track of all of your fastest knockdowns and highest scores. The bright colors and excellent designs of the boxers were also excellent.

I felt that other things didn't translate quite as well. I thought the updated view of the boxer was technically impressive, but undersold some of the implicit David vs. Goliath storytelling. In this game, Little Mac just isn't that little! The music was, frankly, dreadful. A large chunk of the soundtrack seemed too reminiscent to Star Fox in tone and style, and the rest was pretty boring. The more complex controls also seemed a bit too complex, and added little to the gameplay. The magic of Punch-Out!! is how intuitive everything seems, while also being incredibly difficult to master. It was tough to get used to all of the varied controls from this one, and found myself stumbling over whether or not block was neutral, or up, or down, just to name one example.

These are really small quibbles, however, as Super Punch-Out!! is just a tremendous game. It's not normally mentioned in the pantheon of great SNES games, and I get that. When I did my top ten list of SNES games, it didn't make it. Part of that was that I'd never really played it at the point I wrote that list. But looking back on it now, I can't think of any of the 10 I'd bump for it. It's not better than Street Fighter II, or Donkey Kong Country 2, or Final Fantasy IV, although it's probably close to the first two titles at least. And there's no way it can touch the top 7, which are all incredibly innovative and polished. The SNES is known well for its high flyers like the top ten list, but there are just a ton of high quality games in the next tier that just give it new life for me, all the time. This is in that class with games like F-Zero, Star Fox, Super Mario Kart, and Secret of Mana-all games that have significant flaws, but are ultimately just a tremendous amount of fun, and are essential additions to any retro game enthusiast's library. I'll give Super Punch-Out!! a 9/10.

Up next on the home console version of What I'm Playing is a little game I've been looking forward to for a while now, and which I've already completed! Check back in in the next few days for a few more reviews...

-TRO