innegativeion

Playing Final Fantasy I, II, and III For The First Time

I try to play a lot of games. I find exposing oneself to a wide variety of ideas and precedent helps one form a better understanding of the craft. I especially am fond of tracing the development of certain ideas and precedents over long stretches of time. In a moment of hubris that could be perhaps, generously, described as “insane”, some friends and I decided to undergo the herculean task of playing through the entirety of the Final Fantasy canon. The Roman numeral numbered ones, anyway. There are scant few games with such a distinct and traceable lineage. This is but the first leg of a long journey. Perhaps by the end you dear reader, and I, will have learned… something.

A man in red and black armor wielding a black sword with a red crack in it in one hand. His other hand is spiky and demonic with an orange glow over black armor.

He stands before an ashy gray castle in the background. A fiery phoenix and wolflike beast growl at each other from the corners of the screen.

Promotional image of the game Final Fantasy XVI

…We’ll get there.

As this is a retrospective, expect at least some spoilers for these games.

Final Fantasy I – Setting a Precedent

This is not going to be a narrative retrospective, at least not primarily, but story is an important part of this franchise’s identity, so I will touch on it briefly where I have something to comment about. Final Fantasy I‘s initial setup is about as simple as it gets. Four Warriors of Light set out on a quest to save a princess from an evil knight, then quickly discover they are heroes foretold in legend, destined to defeat Four Fiends, collect four magic crystals, and restore the balance of light and dark in the world. Still, even from humble beginnings, someone somewhere wanted to make this tale stand out a bit, with inspirations likely from Japanese mythology, manga, and anime, all of which tend to deal with rather esoteric concepts. The evil knight from the beginning of the game, Garland, reveals that he has enacted a complex time loop by sending the Four Fiends back in time. The result of this is that Garland becomes the immortal demon Chaos. Once defeated, all of our heroes’ adventures are undone, along with the evil of Chaos, though the memory of those adventures remains etched in the Warrior’s hearts. There are elements of Final Fantasy‘s heart here already. The esoterica, the high-minded fantasy concepts, the slight twinge of melancholy at the end of a long journey, all feelings that pervade the Final Fantasy games and their derivatives that I have played.

A man in full platemail, helmet decorated with bull-like horns and glowing yellow eyes. He wields a giant greatsword, and has a woman in a dress slung over his shoulder. A castle looms very small in the background. An image of the evil knight Garland.

Yeah man, this guy…

At the outset, the player chooses a lineup of four heroes from a roster of possible character classes with different abilities. Notably, you can loadout your team any way you like. Use four white mages, aka healers if you so like. Use four glass cannon black mages. This level of customization sets a nice precedent going forward for what the gameplay of Final Fantasy is, I think. The game followed the release of Dragon Quest about a year earlier, and follows similar conventions of its contemporaries. Turn-based combat with simple rules, spells, attacks, and the ability to run from battle.

Often I judge my enjoyment of turn-based gameplay by how much leeway I am given for strategic thinking. There’s… not a whole lot of that in Final Fantasy I. Boss and enemy designs tend to be straightforward. One throws fire at you. One throws ice at you. Sometimes enemies are stronger than you, though, and figuring out how to maximize your heroes’ damage while keeping them alive can be a bit of an entertaining problem.

A skeletal mage labeled 'Lich' fights against a mage in a blue robe with a face shrouded in shadow, all on a plain black background. The menus surrounding the fight are labeled 'Lich' 'Fight' 'Magic' 'Drink' 'Item' 'Run' 'BkM 'Fhtr' 'Thef' 'RedM'

The game’s visuals are simplistic, but refreshingly uncluttered.

My friends and I did arrive at a rather interesting strategy. It’s pretty apparent that it wasn’t the primary method of play, that it was a strategy unique to us, so that’s pretty cool. We had a part of one strong physical attacker, the warrior, one potent offensive mage, the black mage, one healing support, the white mage, and one jack-of-all-trades red mage. Our go-to method is thus: The white mage casts a strength-enhancing spell on our warrior, and the red mage casts a speed-enhancing speed spell on our warrior. Our black mage continues to blast offensive spells away, not needed enhancements to do decent damage, especially against several enemies at once. Meanwhile, our warriors becomes a lawnmower, shredding through bosses and other monsters like dry grass.

So while our decision making process never really changed, we did make some interesting decisions that allowed us to clear the game, so that’s good. On the other hand, the presence of a certain mechanic I dread really accentuates the repetitiveness – that being random encounter system. In the overworld, the player character moves across terrain divided into tiles on a grid. Each time they pass a tile, there is a chance they will be forced into a monster encounter. I think I’ve decided by now I pretty much detest random encounters, for a number of reasons. They introduce a level of abstraction that is irritating to me, bringing me out of the fantasy of the world. Where are all these monsters coming from? Where are they hiding? Why are they not dangerous until they are on top of me? Worse than that it bring an unjustified level of agency away from the player. The use of random encounters in early RPGs almost certainly was partially a tech consideration. The NES can only render so many items on screen, and a consistent supply of enemies to fight was needed. Still, from a purely ludic standpoint it’s annoying as hell. Crossing a continent in this game could take two minutes, or two hours, depending on your real-world luck stat. Mine is very very low.

I always find myself comparing old RPGs with random encounters to one of my favorite RPG – Chrono Trigger which, contrary to many of its contemporaries, had no random encounters. Enemies were consistently visible in the overworld. Sure, there were surprise encounters, and required encounters. Enemies often leap out of bushes to ambush the heroes. The added context and predictability of these encounters make them far more tolerable, especially when backtracking through areas, as is often required in RPGs. When one can mentally prepare for exactly how long a task it’s going to take, it’s a lot more pleasant than getting surprised with a lot of meaningless activity that does little but waste time. Any advantages you could gain by having random encounters can be achieved with more bespoke, designed encounters, with none of the frustration. But, this is Final Fantasy I of 16, so I’d better get used to them. Just wanted to throw out the random encounters rant early on here.

There’s one more thing I’ve got to say about this first game. Final Fantasy I sprang forth about a year after the release of watershed title Dragon Quest, itself inspired by similar role-playing-type games like Ultima. Ultima, in turn was inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, itself inspired by other tabletop war games and major fantasy works like The Lord of The Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium, which includes The Lord of The Rings, represents a sort of fictive mythologized history of the real world – a legend for the modern age. My point is, Final Fantasy represents a lineage of people exploring the nature of the world as they understand it through imagination. There’s something poetic, I think, about how the heroes of the story embark on a journey that brings them across the world, and to the edge of history, only to rid the world of evil, at the cost of forever leaving those fantastical events behind, as nothing more than a fantasy. They don’t get to stay in that world, but the memory of it stays forever with them. Final Fantasy I is a humble game, with systems, gameplay, and storytelling that are primitive by today’s standards, but it’s also impossible to divorce it from all this context of its creation. There’s a lot of beauty, in this humble little adventure.

A message saying; 'The Warrior who broke the 2000 year Time-Loop is truly a LIGHT WARRIOR.... That warrior was YOU!' is imposed over a backdrop of peaceful waters and forests of pine trees under a blue sky.

Final Fantasy II – Experiments Are Educational, But Not Always Fun

The early Final Fantasy series was notoriously mislabeled in the west under its English releases, with Final Fantasy IV being erroneously christened Final Fantasy II to English speakers because the actual second and third entries to the franchise were simply not released outside of Japan. You know, I believe in the dissemination and availability of media across cultural boundaries. Translations and localization with easy availability are not only good, but necessary for a thriving and robust culture. That said… I think I could see how The Powers That Be found that, in the project of bringing Final Fantasy to the western market… I understand why they decided, “eh, think we can skip this one” (this is a joke). I mean… It’s bad, guys. I did not thoroughly enjoy my time playing Final Fantasy II.

The story of this game is alarmingly Star Wars. I know that’s an easy criticism to levy at a lot of fantasy media, but it’s really true in this case, I think. Everything from a rebellion lead by a princess fighting an evil empire, to a secretive emperor with a flying super weapon that razes civilizations, accompanied by a right-hand man dressed in black who is a secret lost family member that eventually turns good again at the last minute. The biggest major departure is the journey’s terminus taking place in a bright technicolor version of hell, which was a pretty delightful surprise, though somewhat harsh on my eyeballs.

A portrait of a man in an armored hat next to a text box reading "Guy: Guy speak beaver."

Below the text, four people stand near a beaver in the snow.

Okay, never mind this story is Kino.

Once upon a time, the coolest, hypest, most exciting RPG on the horizon was the as yet unreleased Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. We were dazzled with its cutting edge graphics in one-thousand-and-eighty-whole-p, 1080p! We were told about many of its new, innovative, never-before-seen gameplay systems that would upend what we thought an RPG could be! For example, the traditional RPG character level system? Out the window! Replaced, with this shiny novel skill system where your hero would improve specifically at the tasks they performed the most. How fresh! How new! Except, of course, this system predates Skyrim by more than two decades. It exists, in near identical fashion, in Final Fantasy II, which also forgoes its predecessor’s level system in favor of an adaptive skill system. Suffice to say, it leads to many of the same problems that plagued Skyrim in its day, though in some cases to a far greater degree.

Against a black background, four cerulean blue knights on horseback fight against a four heroic warriors. The menu at the bottom of the screen reads hp and mp, as well as the heroes' names in Japanese.

Oh featureless black void in which all fights take place, we’re really in it now…

Your heroes’ efficacy with a sword, with a shield, even with their ability to sustain damage is all determined by individual numeric values that only increase when engaged in their associated property. For your Warriors of Light to have a decent health pool, they have to be smacked in the face, repeatedly, and at length. Because you are able to target allies with offensive commands in battle, the best way to train hp is to have your heroes smack each other. The adaptive skill system introduces all kinds of bizarre and irritating behaviors like this. Whenever you get a new spell, you are not enthralled by the exciting new possibilities, but debilitated by the crushing knowledge that you’ll have to spend hours mindlessly blasting weaker monsters to get this new spell to even reach the point of being partially usable.

You will consistently feel pigeon-holed by the choices in character building presented in this game. Make no mistake, Final Fantasy II offers a bevy of options when building your heroes for battle. There are lots of different swords with different properties, from swords, to axes, to polearms. You can even dual wield! You can carry a shield. You can practice black magic and white magic as you please! You can customize your spell loadout. And yet. It takes so much time, and so much effort, to get any of those aforementioned options up to a level of usefulness with the adaptive skill system, that if you don’t choose your course for each hero early on, and stick with it, you’ll find your jacks-of-all-trades to be rather useless in combat by the end. In this way, Final Fantasy II rather lacks the adaptability in hero roster customization that even Final Fantasy I had.

This is not to say that such a level of adaptability is necessary to even complete this slog of a game. And I don’t use that word lightly. A lot of RPGs are very long, and very repetitive, but engaging with II‘s content is so consistently irritating, with more random encounters than ever before, that I eventually found myself engaging in… the Teleport spam. You see, Teleport is one of those spells – the kind that remove enemies entirely from battle. Usually, the tradeoff for that in most RPGs is that enemies will not drop loot, or provide experience points to level up. However, my hero’s skill at successfully casting Teleport did improve every time they used it, making this spell an infinite feedback loop of instantly killing everything, and becoming more likely to instantly kill everything. Including bosses! Including the last boss, save for his… very very super last, final form. Even then, we moved on to employing some other similarly cheesy strategy to dispatch him. ‘Cheesy’ in the case meaning, that it does not feel as though the strategy meaningfully engages with the mechanics of the game. The win against the boss at the end rang kind of hollow for me.

So Final Fantasy II was extremely experimental. It tried a totally new way to conceptualize character building. Even its Star Wars-ass story feels like a test bed for what these games could be capable of narratively. I mean certainly a lot of things happen in this game. It’s turn of event after turn of event, even if they all feel very familiar. Gameplay seems to have become even more simplified since the first game, but that may also be a byproduct of experimentation, with new spells and skills and whatnot. Experimentation isn’t a bad thing though, even if it seems to have thoroughly ruined this particular outing. Based on what I know of Final Fantasy now, it’s almost certain that the developers learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t while making this game, and that’ll serve them well in future titles.

Final Fantasy III – Why This Game And Not Any Other?

Final Fantasy III starts introducing more of those bizarre, esoteric concepts that require some serious thinking to really keep straight it your head. There’s no time travel, as far as I can tell, but there are larger than life mythological wizards, with special gifts of immortality, or dream walking, etc. There is global time stoppage, though. There’s a giant floating continent that the heroes were born on, not knowing it was a small part of the larger world. To the game’s credit, I also experienced that same emotional journey – and I’m sure that was the intent, a surprise reveal for players of the smaller Final Fantasy games that came before. Surprise! The game’s world is actually way larger than you thought. Pretty cool. The Warriors of (The) Light are still mostly hollow player-inserts, the quest is still to collect a bunch of magic rocks, and most characters present are not terribly deep or engrossing. The villain is once again preoccupied with immortality, and entangles themselves with dark forces beyond them for their hubris. The series is establishing its pattern of repeating narrative motifs – which is not necessarily a bad thing!

Final Fantasy III introduces the Jobs system. The seeds of this system will germ and survive long into Final Fantasy‘s future, up to present day. It is, in essence, the ability to swap your Warrior of Light’s class and associated abilities or on the fly, or under certain circumstances. In III, this circumstance is any time outside of battle. Your choice of jobs to pick from expands as you progress through the game, with more powerful ones coming later. This is pretty exciting, and does enhance the possibilities of team building from the first game. You don’t have to commit to a team right away. There are a couple problems with this first run at the system, though. For some reason, swapping jobs makes the swapped hero weakened for several battles. I say ‘for some reason’, but it’s likely to make committing to specific jobs per hero attractive, so heroes build more of a gameplay identity, rather than faceless fighters who can do all things at all times. I suspect this, because future such jobs systems will be designed toward that end, but usually in a more clever and less frictional way.

A grid view of the same drawing of a girl five times, with the girl in a different outfit for each drawing, and then again in those respective outfits seen from behind.

All that said though, yeah, the jobs system is cool.

Boss and enemy design of Final Fantasy III is once again fairly simplistic, but there was a moment that came late in the game. I think what I saw in Final Fantasy III was a spark, a flicker, a momentary glimmer in the night that reminds me of the reason that I actively seek out games with turn-based combat. I’m not talking about why I play JRPGS, a vague collection of aesthetic and ludic conventions that form a genre. I’m talking about why I enjoy the play of commanding a team and managing resources in a turn-oriented fashion the way Final Fantasy does it, divorced from all aesthetic and narrative trappings. Within the optional dungeon of Eureka, I saw the essence of what makes turn-based RPGs worth the effort.

The bosses of Eureka are tough. They threaten the Warriors of The Light with devastating attacks and powerful spells. Instant death for individual heroes is a very real possibility. To defeat these bosses, my own team of heroes – us nerds playing the game, had to put our heads together and reason out a strategy. A lot of games require this kind of creative thinking – where your initial approach is brick-walled by an impassible obstacle, and a different approach is required to progress. However, given the strictly governed rules of a turn-based game, the player’s ability to think laterally and solve abstract problems is something unique to this kind of play. It’s the same sort of thing that’s made activities like Chess and Go among the most enduring of all designed games. In hundreds of hours across three games of mowing down group of monsters, after group of monsters, boss after boss, villain after villain, mostly just by spamming our most powerful moves over and over again or… gods save me… spamming the Teleport spell, Final Fantasy III, in it’s final hours, at last forced us to think. It wasn’t just that we could think creatively to solve a problem, but that the game responded to this, and rewarded this. When creative application of game mechanics leads to interesting and rewarding, designed scenarios, that, to me, is strategic liberty, the very reason turn-based games are compelling to me.

Four purple wasps on a black background fight against four heroic warriors. The warriors names, as well as the options for combat are listed in Japanese on blue menus.

You kill an awful lot of wildlife in RPGs, I’m realizing…

It’s so important for a game to recognize its own worth. Why play this game, and not any other? I play action games to feel a sense of dexterity in my hands and tension in my heart that isn’t possible or quite the same in other formats. I play rhythm games because my sense of music aligns with my sense of play, and the two complement each other. I play platform games because the ease of traversal they entail appeals to a sense of exploration and adventure. I think often games will replicate certain mechanics or conventions based on precedent, without stopping to recognize why those things are precedent in the first place. This is the kind of thing I was hoping to see, playing Final Fantasy as a retrospective – these important core principles to the turn-based RPG and JRPG traditions develop before my eyes in real-time.

It occurred to me that the strategic liberty I so value in turn-based RPGs is much like the solving of a very elaborate and very particular kind of puzzle. It isn’t just that we had to think creatively with the tools we were given, but that the tools we were given operated in tandem to produce new possibilities. For example, the Warrior of Light Refia was our dragoon hero, or spearman. She was also our greatest damage dealer. We were fighting a boss whose physical attacks devastated the heroes. We could counter this with the Protect spell, but that Protect spell could only target one hero per turn, and only two of our heroes were capable of casting it. Moreover, each of our four heroes served an essential role in the party. Refia brought the damage, the dark knight Ingus was the only one who could take a hit, the red mage Luneth was our go-to spell caster, including caster of Protect, and the white mage Arc was needed for healing duty. Losing even one would debilitate us for the rest of the fight.

While our mages were busy casting Protect on people and not healing, one or more of our heroes might straight up die, so raising a full defense was just too slow a prospect. It occurred to us, after some experimentation, that Refia’s Jump ability – in which she jumps off screen and becomes immune to damage for one turn, then crashes back down to deal bonus damage – was maxing out the damage count at ‘9999’. Five of those jumps alone would bring the enemy down. So instead of insuring every hero could survive incoming damage, one of my friend’s suggested, let’s ensure Refia can, so she can constantly jump to safety, while busting the enemy down over the course of ten turns. Instead of Protecting the party, our mages would Protect themselves, while Refia used the guard action to survive. Then, we would buff her with Haste to ensure she’d always Jump before the enemy could act. If ever she was caught with some damage as she landed, we would repeat the process of setup, then sent her on her way to continue the attack. After a couple of tries, it worked! The enemy was defeated, and all of us players cheered.

The sense of satisfaction that washed over us was fantastic. Our friend expressed that they felt like a genius – a familiar sensation for anyone who’s played a particularly challenging RPG. It’s just a shame that this sort of thing had to take several dozens of hours of gameplay to get to. That’s a bit unfair, though, there was some strategizing that took place in the earlier levels of Final Fantasy III. However, it never reached near this level of depth. Knowledge of the game’s rules or how its various mechanics interacted was never really necessary. It was more a continuous process of experimentation – seeing what the various hero jobs did, though a feeling of utilizing them to some greater end was disappointingly infrequent.

That said, the presence of this strategic liberty, even at the eleventh hour, kind of redeemed Final Fantasy III a bit in my eyes. Like Final Fantasy I, I think it’s very commendable for its time, and it’s scratching at the surface of some of the things that I think makes this kind of game great, which is a good sign! I’m optimistic going into Final Fantasy IV, another game I’ve never played! Final Fantasy will be entering a transitional period, I predict, as it undergoes a transformation from its simple NES days to the robust cutting edge graphical and storytelling experiences of the SNES and PS1 eras, and beyond, that the series is famous for.

A man in blue dragon-like armor with glowing yellow eyes repeatedly pumps his fist in the air on a grassy background.

With the memory of their struggle buried deep in their hearts…

Taking Off March For GDC

Hello, I’m taking a break this month for GDC, the hustle and bustle of which has kicked my ass. Hope you’re all having a lovely March, see you again soon.

Door Key Mechanics

It’s been a short, busy month, so this time I wanted to talk about something that might be of particular concern to me, specifically. One of my pet peeves. A real bee-in-my-bonnet moment. I’m going to get into why this particular design pattern bothers me so much in a moment, but first what am I talking about?

You ever find yourself at the heart of a deadly dungeon, having just slain a cursed demon dragon of darkness? Of course you have. You open up the chest he was guarding, and viola! A super cool, exciting, new weapon, spell, or other tool. You’re so hyped to get back out in the field and use this thing, but first you’ve got to figure out how to use it to make your way out of here. You start playing around with it, but pretty quickly you find that its use cases are rather… limited. Maybe it’s a whip that doesn’t really damage enemies – but it’s sure useful for hitting distant switches to open doors! Maybe it’s a freeze gun. It’s cool – I mean it can’t freeze enemies or bodies of water, but it can freeze waterfalls, to unblock doors. Maybe it’s a grappling hook! You can’t control the grapple or decide where to use it – it just pulls you to fixed targets so that you can reach previously inaccessible… doors.

You have just encountered, what I like to call the Door Key Mechanic. It’s a game feature masquerading as a fancy new play mechanic, but it’s not really. When you zoom out, and take a high-level top-down look at what all these mechanics actually do in the context of the play space… they just open doors. Maybe they pull specialized switches that then open doors. Maybe they disable electric fences so you can get to the doors behind them. Maybe they transport you to doors you couldn’t get to before in a predefined way, but that’s it. Above all it is interactivity that makes game mechanics compelling to me, and these are interactive in the most rudimentary way possible – do the thing, and a door opens.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having features in your game that specifically exist to remove some gate to the player’s progress. These sorts of items are all over the place. I mean, literal keys, for one. It’s an important purpose to fill. The presence of an inaccessible door is inherently tantalizing to the player, and finding an appropriate key gives a sense of puzzle-solving or excitement. The trouble comes in when it’s something a lot more complicated than a key or a special inventory item pretending to be more important than it is. Need some examples? Let’s do some examples.

I think the most egregious example I can think of is the last game produced by Sonic The Hedgehog creator and indicted insider trader Yuji Naka, Balan Wonderworld. It’s a great instance of what I’m talking about, because it also highlights the crux of the problem. You see, this game had several marketing angles, such as Naka’s involvement, the visual and stylistic echoes of cult classic games like NiGHTS Into Dreams, and most relevantly here, the fact that the game would feature EIGHTY different costumes! Each with unique abilities! Or in other words, game mechanics. Ignoring that several of the costumes are just variations or upgrades of others, we have to interrogate how meaningful and interactive these costume mechanics actually are.

A child in a pig costume runs over to a silver piston in a grassy field and slams the ground with its bottom, forcing one piston down and causing a different piston to shoot up. The child jumps onto it and grabs a gem.

Well, we have a ground slam for a start, the Pounding Pig, which doesn’t do anything except hammer posts and break blocks – basically just opening specific doors. There are jellyfish and dolphin costumes, which do little else but allow access to water terrain that otherwise gates you. There’s a spider costume that allows you to climb webs, which are also just simple obstacles – doors in other words. The Itsy-Bitsy Elf costume “Allows the wearer to pass through tiny doors” and nothing else. Lickshot Lizard sounds like a grappling hook, but it only works on stationary targets that are trivial to target – it’s just opening a door with extra steps. Happy Horn activates an event when stepping onto a pre-placed stage. Functionally the same as a key item. Gear King allows you to use specific gear switches, to open doors. Hothead lets you light torches to open doors.

A child in a rock star costume runs over to a stage in a grass field and plays a short concert to some monsters, and they turn into gems.

Riveting Stuff.

Important to note that ‘door’ here proverbially means any simple gate preventing player progress, but a gate of minimal player interactions. Flipping a switch causing a bridge to appear. Destroying a block to reveal a staircase. That’s all the same as opening a door. Like, there’s Balan‘s Laser Launcher costume…

“A robot costume that shoots a laser from its chest. Use the laser to break blocks and flip switches.” -Official Website Description

I can use the robot to open doors, OR open doors you say!? Okay granted, a lot of these very simplistic costumes in Balan can also be used for combat, but that is such a bare minimum. Doorkey Mechanics make one wonder ‘why is this even here?’ Like, why do you need a spider costume to climb webs? Most game characters can just do that, like on their own.

A small armored alien, Ratchet from Ratchet and Clank, traverses a small gap in a broken bridge amidst a futuristic sci fi metropolis. He does so using an energy tether thrown into a rift portal.

“Does it do anything?”

“It allows you traverse this door bridging a very small gap.”

“Yeah but does it do anything??”

It’s easy to criticize Balan. Door Key mechanics pop up in some of my favorite games too, though.

I adore A Hat In Time. It’s a delightful, fully-featured, cute, and compelling indie game in the style of classic 3D platform games. It feels great to control, it’s pretty to look at, and it’s just an overall fun time. We need more games like A Hat In Time. That said, of the six hats available in the game, which each provide unique abilities, I couldn’t help but wish the Ice Hat and Brewing Hat were more generally useful. The sprint hat makes you dash at breakneck pace, allowing you to bound over great distances – it’s super fun and super useful. The Kid’s Hat helpfully guides you where to go if you ever lose your way. The Time Stop Hat does what it says. However, the Ice and Brewing Hats flip switches and break barriers, respectively, only in hyper-specific scenarios. They can technically be used in combat, but I never once felt it was prudent to do so next to just, say, smacking enemies with my umbrella.

The Door Key Mechanic is a sliding scale, too. Game mechanics can be more or less door key-like. Hi-Fi Rush, a game I should really talk more about sometime, has mechanics that are Door Key-adjacent in the form of your party’s assist moves. Macaron’s punch assist breaks down hyper-specific walls and Peppermint’s gun assist shoots switches, but they can both be used in combat. The difference between Hi-Fi and say Balan, is that Hi-Fi Rush has very robust combat mechanics where that addition is not a footnote. Assists can be woven into combos and used in a variety of ways, defensively or offensively, to uniquely color each player’s experience. That’s interactivity, and that’s what makes a Door Key Mechanic less noticeable. The Legend of Zelda series has been occasionally guilty of making legacy items more door keyish. For instance, take the hookshot / claw shot item.

When first introduced in A Link To The Past, the hookshot was a metal spike on a spring loaded chain that could latch onto blocks, chests, rocks, and pots to pull Link rapidly to the target location. Not only that, but it can grab distant items and pull them to link, hit switches, stun some enemies, and outright defeat others. It’s used for unlocking doors, sure, but also for combat and traversal in interesting ways. Its uses are fairly prescribed, but not so much that it doesn’t feel generally useful.

In the sequel, Ocarina of Time, the hookshot was brought into 3D and it became even more generally useful. It still activates switches, pulls in items, stuns some enemies at a distance, and defeats others, but now in three dimensions. In addition, the list of things it can latch onto has been expanded to include most wooden or soft surfaces, like climbing vines, tree branches, rooftops, and rafters. The hookshot doesn’t just latch onto specific predefined targets, it also lets you grapple to anything it can stick into around the world! And there’s a logic and consistency to this general use that makes it feel like an organic part of that world. That kind of flavoring and context can also help alleviate the sense of artificiality that Door Key Mechanics invoke.

Later Zelda games would not be so magnanimous with the use of their hookshot analogues. The hookshot in The Wind Waker feels noticeably more limited, with fewer viable targets. Where in Ocarina of Time there were a lot more organic environmental targets to hit, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess lean somewhat heavily into literal bullseye targets, and floating targets, obviously specifically placed for Link’s benefit. The difference is stark in Skyward Sword, where the clawshot is used for little else other than clearing gaps to reach brightly colored, artificial bullseyes that exist in the world without context. The interactivity of the clawshot in Skyward Sword is severely limited.

My point is not that the more limited hookshots make these games bad – but rather that it makes specifically the hookshot item in those games a lot less compelling. Compare it to the Shieka Slate spells in Breath of The Wild, which can be employed almost anywhere, and used for almost anything – crossing gaps, attacking, blocking projectiles, climbing cliffs, retrieving items, escaping… flying, if you use them just right. That’s interactivity.

Here’s another Zelda example. In Majora’s Mask for the N64, the ice arrows allow you to shoot projectiles encased in freezing magic. Shooting the arrow at any body of water. *Any* body of water, an icy platform is produced, that Link can walk on. I’m sure you can already imagine the applications of that. This is in addition to the arrows being useful for stopping waterfalls, freezing enemies to use as platforms, or freezing them just to more easily defeat them.

In a dark interior pipeworks chamber flooded with water, Link from The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask. Link shoots two magic ice arrows into the water, creating two ice platforms, which he hops across.

In the remake, the developers opted to instead restrict how these arrows can be used. There are shiny blue sparkles on the surfaces of water where the ice arrows were intended to be used. Shooting them there creates the usual ice platforms, however… they also opted to prevent the platforms from ever being created elsewhere, severely limiting the interactivity of this item, and risking the player engagement. Originally, the ice arrows were a tool – a new avenue of possibilities that gets the player thinking and invested in what they’re doing. The latter version makes them a prescribed door key to access only a very specific planned path, with no engagement required on the player’s part. I find game mechanics most exciting when they expand possibilities, not limit them.

In an interior pipeworks chamber flooded with water, there are some conspicuous sparkles on the water. Link from The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask, shoots magic ice arrows at each sparkle, although misses his target once, and the ice arrow fizzles on the water.

Heaven forbid anybody be required to do some lateral thinking while playing a video game.

When developing a new mechanic or feature for your game that might be a significant undertaking, ask yourself some questions; does this feature open up interesting interactions or decisions? Does it expand the play space? What are its use cases? How does the player interact with it? What does it accomplish? If the conclusion is that the feature accomplishes a similar level of interaction to simply unlocking a door with a key – if its use is no greater than removing a proverbial gate to the player’s progress, consider whether the feature is even worth developing, especially early on. Some of these features, such as the Balan Wonderworld costumes offer very little interactivity or engagement, but would have cost a huge amount of development resources for character models, bespoke animations, sound effects, and program implementation. The decision to add a feature is not one that should be done without forethought. Think about what each of your new features actually adds to the experience.

Link from The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time runs up to an ornate golden chest in a dank dungeon. Light pours forth from it, and slowly, dramatically, Link holds aloft a golden key inset with a red skull jewel.

A key opens doors…

Video Games Vs. Ladders

Welcome to ‘Video Games Vs.’, what I hope to be a series of pieces written about the many little inexplicable hangups that video games, historically, seem to struggle with for some reason. I’ll go over some interesting examples of implementations, problem areas, and interrogate why these weird little oddities are so difficult to get right, and how to possibly address that. You could call this series my personal crusade against extremely petty irritants. For example, we’re going to start out discussing ladders!

They help you ascend. They help you descend. They are an almost mystical force in video games, capable of violating all of the regular rules of a game world, turning preconceptions of movement and space on their head, and tearing through the very fabric of reality itself. Yes, ladders.

Zelda

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time was one of the earliest truly 3D adventure games, and set the standard for a lot of things we take for granted in that space. For one, Zelda had ladders. Lots of them. There’s a ladder in the first dungeon, in fact, by why? The very same dungeon contains a lot of ivy Link can climb in similar fashion, with the added bonus of being able to move laterally one it. Why was a ladder also included? I don’t know for certain, but if I had to guess, a ladder was placed alongside the ivy to prime the player for the though that they can ascend the wall they were facing. A ladder is an excellent visual shorthand for ‘the above area is indeed accessible’. It would lead a curious player to investigate the ivy that notable also runs up the wall, suggesting they can climb it. So ladders are just good visual language. Long before the ambiguities of 3D space were introduced, the ladder acted as a near-universal icon that meant ‘your player is going to enter a space above or below to this, relative to their current position.’

So how did they work? Pretty well, but I’d like to break that down in exacting detail. For all intents and purposes the protagonist, Link, exists in one of two states at all times – on a ladder, or not on a ladder. Art reflects life. While not on a ladder, Link can run, roll, backflip, attack, block, use items, all that good stuff. While on a ladder, Link suddenly loses all control of his arms and becomes incapable of wielding a sword, boomerang, shield, or anything else. Link’s verbs become severely limited on a ladder, reduced to only ascend, descend, and let go – in which case Link’s body goes limp as he falls to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

Here is set a precedent that will follow the course of game design, probably until the end of time – ladders exist primarily as a method to bridge point A to point B at different elevations. They are not, themselves, play spaces for a game’s usual mechanics. There are of course exceptions to this, and games that break the mold, but in nearly every case of a 3D space featuring a ladder, your game character will be restricted in what they are allowed to do. There are a number of reasons for this. For example, a truly robust play space on a ladder would require such an upscaled set of art and animation assets that it might balloon out of scope, in proportion to how much ladder-climbing actually takes place in your game.

If the player can dismount a ladder anywhere along its length, you need an animation for that. In the case of Zelda, it’s just falling. If the player can be harmed or die on a ladder, you need a contextual animation for that. If the player normally reacts to damage based on the angle of attack, you need animations for each angle an attack can come from on a ladder. Attacking from a ladder. Defending from a ladder. Using a special item on a ladder. Etc.

Link is, however, still in a vulnerable state whilst climbing a ladder. Enemy attacks and other hazards can still deal damage to him. If Link is damaged by an attack of significant force, he will be knocked from the ladder and fall to the ground, screaming, like a very loud sack of potatoes. However, grounded enemies, such as terrestrial monsters, the walking dead, fire-breathing dinosaurs and the like, are incapable of climbing ladders.

This sets another precedent that will be common in video games’s long and storied campaign against the concept of ladders – ladders represent a space that, conceptually, has a different relationship to the environment around it than normal play space. By this I mean, usually, when Link is threatened by, say, the bloodthirsty undead stalfos, he has the option of attacking it with his sword, or subduing it from a distance with one of his many ranged items. If the creature is too far from Link in the vertical axis whilst he is on a ladder, though, although he has no way to fight them, they also have literally zero recourse and are incapable of harming him. The ever-present risk-and-reward factors of game enemies are often negated by ladders. Rare is the enemy, especially in earlier games like Ocarina of Time that themselves commands the awesome power to utilize a ladder.

Link from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time climbs a wooden ladder up a wall to reach a door.

One last note here – for a kid, Link can ascend and descend ladders at a pretty reasonable clip. However, as climbing ladders is often an extremely uneventful prospect, for the aforementioned reason of their existing outside of the usual risk-reward rules of their world, a player’s awareness of how slow or fast a ladder is being navigated is heightened, as compared to other contexts. So, developers will often include the optional ability to clear large sections of ladder in some extreme, exaggerated manner. Link can’t do this in the ascending direction, but his ability to fall enables this in the descending direction. Overall the transition period between walking and ladder-ing is very snappy and quick for Link, something Zelda has always been pretty good at for contextual animations.

Fromsoft

Fromsoft games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne have a rich history with ladders that embody some of the most bizarre aspects of their implementation in games. For instance, these games, well known for their intricate, complex and deep combat systems, become awkward slap-fights if a player ever occupies the same ladder as an enemy. For these games, ladders are simple transportation and any interaction they have with the game’s infamously difficult enemies are kind of an afterthought. Ladder climbing is implicitly tied to the player’s stamina resource, normally spent on dodging and attack. If they take damage whilst on a ladder, they’ll plummet to the ground with a bespoke animation. I suppose the rationale was that even if the ladder is only somewhat tied to regular gameplay systems, it would be better than existing completely apart.

Another example of ladder weirdness in Fromsoft’s games is the ladder interact button. Unlike Zelda, which activated the ‘ladder-climb’ state automatically based on the player’s proximity to the ladder and their movement vector, Fromsoft ladders are generally mounted via dedicated button press when the player gets close to one. There is a reason one might vie for this method. Aside from the complicated contingencies involved in Zelda‘s proximity-based ladders, tying the action to a button press removes ambiguity. A player is less likely to accidentally press a button than accidentally wandering into a ladder climbing animation by walking, especially in a game with a lot of movement.

Still, the button-press method is not without its drawbacks. Once the button is pressed, control must be taken from the player so that their character can be placed upon the ladder. Any situation where player control has to be shifted away is liable to be fertile ground for bugs. In Dark Souls II in particular, player characters attempting to mount a ladder enter a sort of sidling animation where they inch towards the specific spot where they can mount. If some object blocks the way during this transition, they can be stuck in a lengthy loop of trying to sidle toward the ladder, with no way to stop them. The game contains a band-aide solution for this, in that characters will cancel their attempt at a ladder climb if they are blocked for too long, and control is returned. If this solution were not in play, a player could theoretically enter a perpetual loop of approaching, but no mounting, the ladder, leaving the game in a soft-locked state.

In a gothic-Victorian city, a man in a black cowl slides down a metal ladder until he is stopped by an invisible object. He kicks at it, producing blood, rapidly several times, until both he and the object fall to the ground limp. They get up, and the invisible object is revealed to be a second cowled man with knives. He tries to attack the first man, who scampers back up the ladder.

AI is also always prone to bugs in special contexts like ladder-climbing. Enemies mounting ladders in Fromsoft games enter a sort of fugue state, in which all semblance of an anchor to reality is lost. For them, there is only themselves and the ladder. No world exists outside this dichotomy, and their powers of object permanence dissolve completely, until they dismount the ladder, and after a moment of gathering themselves, are brought back down to earth both literally and figuratively. The simplicity of ladder AI is likely to avoid bugs, as well as them often being an afterthought, as mentioned.

Because of the nature of ladders as a sort of perpendicular space to the regular game space, both literally and figuratively, AI often has these sorts of issues in navigating them. Common problems for game ladders include two AI entities trying to traverse the ladder in two different directions, causing a blockage. This can be circumvented by removing collision for AIs on ladders, but that has the knock on effect of looking cheap and awful. These are just some of the issues you will face by employing ladder-capable AI, and why games often forgo this feature altogether. Negatives aside, there is still something satisfying about luring a hapless zombie up a tall tower then kicking them into oblivion, though.

Mass Effect

A little discussed feature of Mass Effect is how its ladders are gateways to an askew plane of existence in which the player has no control of their character. Once a ladder is engaged with, the character will execute an elaborate pre-baked ladder climbing animation, complete with directed camera action! It’s quite the spectacle. Problem is, enemies are still more than capable of shooting at you while trapped in this ladder dimension with, y’know, their guns. In the original Mass Effect 3‘s multiplayer mode, this became infamous as a way to very efficiently drop dead. So much so, that is was lampshaded as an in-joke in Mass Effect 3‘s lighthearted Citadel DLC.

Sometimes this problem, when it crops up in other games, is circumvented by making ladders into closed tunnels. Or in other words, disallowing any form of interaction at all between mount a ladder at its bottom and dismounting it at its apex. During the pre-baked ladder climbing animation in such games, the player will be immune to enemy attack. It might as well be a Super Mario warp pipe. Which is all well and good, but what is the point of using a ladder as opposed to, like, a teleporter again? One would think it allows for a bit more organic interactivity with the world, a bit more realism and verisimilitude. That’s one angle. As previously mentioned, though, ladders are also just good visual shorthand for ‘this intractable brings you up and down.’

The Source Engine

Unstoppable engines of destruction, the source of ultimate power, or perhaps the manifestations of capricious gods sent to spite those of us that bought The Orange Box on Xbox and not steam. Whatever the case, ladders in Valve’s Source Engine and its derivatives are rightly feared far and wide.

Source Engine games, being largely games of a first-person perspective came up with a very odd solution to the implementation of ladders. They work more like… vertically oriented pathways that realign the player’s sense of gravity. By hugging one with your face, the player character will stick to the ladder, essentially. From there, the camera can be pointed up or down to cause the player to move in that direction as if they can fly, but only so long as they continue touching the ladder. The system is infamous for being rather finicky. It’s proximity based like Zelda, but even more ambiguous. Whereas in Zelda once a ladder climb was initiated, Link was in a clearly illustrated ‘ladder’ state, there’s no real state transition in, say, Half-Life, and the ladders in that game are a lot more finicky. The ambiguity might lead a player to go running off a great height to their death.

The grimy metal rusted ladder of a Half Life 2 map is shown from a first person perspective. The player is holding a crowbar.

While climbing, Link can only go up or down. In Half-Life, the full range of 3D motion remains open. Ladders are not ‘on rails’ in the same way they are in other games. This means you can easily dismount the ladder anywhere along its length, but it also means you can accidentally slip and fall pretty easily. These games being in a first-person perspective also means it’s not always clear where the player is standing, relative to the ladder.

Rather hilariously, Half Life: Alyx has some of the most realistically-executed ladders in video games, should you choose to engage with them. This is on account of, as a VR game, your hands are free! These ladders can be climbed manually with your actual grip, or teleported across as is standard for VR locomotion.

Death Stranding

Death Stranding is an interesting case because movement is such a central and overriding aspect of its gameplay. Near all of the game’s verbs are nuanced aspects of movement and traversal. It’s also an interesting case because ladders form a core part of the early game’s relationship to these verbs. For example, the ladder item can be placed nearly anywhere to enhance the player’s traversal.

Interestingly, since ladders in this game are a physics object which can settle in near any location, they might often be deployed horizontally or in a ramp configuration. There is a certain inflection point for Death Stranding‘s ladders where if they are not arranged steeply enough, they operate more like bridges than like ladders.

I just wanted to bring up that Death Stranding, despite the rather central importance of ladders to its gameplay, utilizes the same ‘press button’ method as the Fromsoft games. I think the reason for this is likely due to the game’s movement mechanics. In Death Stranding, careful movement is essential. One false step, and you can trip over a rock, tumble down a cliff, and lose half your cargo. So it was likely decided that the reduced ambiguity of button activation would be important so players know exactly when and how they will transition to climbing the ladder.

Nier: Automata

Alright I’m just going to come out and say it. Nier: Automata is my Holy Grail of video game ladders. I mean just look at this:

Beauty. Grace. Poetry in motion. A ladder that serves as an extension of the play space rather than a partition of it. A ladder that doesn’t involve a weeks-advanced scheduled commitment. A ladder whose animations and state changes blend seamlessly with regular gameplay’s animations and state changes. 2B can just jump at it and grab the thing. Not just from the top, not just from the bottom, but at any point on the ladder. You can still attack, and defend yourself while on ladders.

The way ladders feels so seamless and effortless in this game really highlights how inexplicable and irritating they can be in others, although there are of course reasons this isn’t always easy to do as we mentioned.

Here is a list of things that the Nier: Automata ladder doesn’t do:

It does not required a button press to interact with. Unlike so many other examples of video game ladders, the ‘climb’ state that the player can access in Nier: Automata is not separated in this way. Often, the button that causes a character to begin climbing is a general-purpose interact button, or otherwise double-loaded for other actions, meaning that the prospect of interacting with a ladder can be ambiguous. If the interaction button also causes the player to pick up items, for example, they might accidentally pick up an item where they meant to scamper up a ladder to avoid a foe that is chasing them.
The ladder does not feel like a separate play space, and is integrated into the world. The player character is readily capable of attacking, being attacked, sprinting, and shooting while climbing a ladder. Precious few of the game’s usual verbs are restricted, making ladders feel like an extension of the play space, not adjunct to it.
The ladder is not treated as a closed tunnel which can only be accessed from the top or bottom. The ladder is a ladder. The player character is capable of mounting it, and dismounting it, from any point along its length. A lot of the artificiality of other ladder executions is done away with.
The transition animations between ‘ladder’ and regular gameplay are extremely quick and simple.

A woman in a black dress with two massive katanas on her back, 2B from Nier: Automata, leaps through the air across a rusted metal scaffold to grab a ladder. She hops up the rungs with great speed, then jumps another scaffold to another ladder.

All this is made possible through some borderline excessive attention to detail and eye for contingencies. A lot of very robust and adaptable animations had to be made to ensure it would always look seamless and natural whenever the player character in Nier: Automota interacts with a ladder. The animation tree is equipped to convey interacting with the ladder in every way and from every angle. Nier ladders are heavily proximity based – if the player moves toward a ladder’s collision box, they will grab it automatically. This introduces ambiguity yet, but it’s a lot less intrusive than it might be otherwise because the developers went out of their way to ensure that the player remains fully capable on the ladder, and that dismounting it represents no real time investment. As such, accidentally climbing a ladder in Nier is no big deal anyway. As I’ve noted elsewhere, I really appreciate immediacy in games, especially action games, so the effortless way you can interact with objects like ladders in this game really stands out to me.

It’s not as though this was easy, however. As we’ve been over, though a seemingly simple and pedestrian intractable on the surface, ladders in video games have a lot of pain points and ways to introduce gameplay bugs. A great amount of consideration has to be made for how they interplay with your gameplay systems, how much scope will be required to make that interplay happen. Ultimately it’s a question of relevance – how important is it that ladders function non-intrusively? If your ladders are a bit clunky, are they common enough to be an issue? It seems like a effortless of locomotion was a major priority for Nier: Automata, as evidenced by the many small ways movement is smoothed out in this game across a multitude of terrains, so an extra investment in making alternate methods of movement, like ladders, feel fine tuned to the gameplay.

So the next time you consider adding a ladder to the game, remember to ask yourselves some pertinent questions about how they should be implemented, and how they’ll relate to the gameplay which contextualizes them. We so often marvel at the big ideas and broad strokes of game design that we overlook the mundane building blocks that go into constructing a space. Forget ladders, what about stairs? Or doors!? Perhaps another day. Video games are held together with duct tape and a dream, so at the very least try to use sturdy duct tape. Okay the end card is Nier again, I just really wanted to keep looking at those beautiful perfect Nier ladders.

Do you think games are silly little things?

Happy New Year, and See You There

Taking a break for the holidays this month. Hope you all had a good holiday and wishing you a happy New Year!

A Heartfelt Review of Sonic Frontiers

So this is not a review blog. Reviewing things is not my usual thing. I’m making an exception for this, a very particular game. My relationship to the Sonic franchise is difficult for me to put words to. It is a property I am so profoundly invested in, I will watch all marketing and critical material for each new entry in this monolithic franchise like a hawk, and yet I can’t always bring myself to participate in new Sonic content. Lots of breath has been spent on the bizarre nature of Sonic as a media franchise, but for my part, the simple version is as follows. Sonic The Hedgehog is a franchise with identities as numerous as the stars. It is many things to many people, as it’s consistently accrued new young fans over the years with movies, comics, TV shows, and even games that are each often wildly different in tone, texture, and creative vision. Sonic seems to constantly be in a state of wanting to reinvent itself, and I’ve long been wary of this leading to games that are sometimes of questionable quality, and thus an a deep interest in critical and fan reception, despite my own desperate love of the franchise. I’ve just been disappointed by Sonic a number of times, but I desperately want to love each new game.

I’m pleased to say, Sonic Frontiers was not a disappointment to me. I love much about it, but I can’t say it’s exactly exemplary. Well, that’s for the conclusion. Like I said I don’t normally write reviews, but I don’t really care for letter or number grades on media. Art is just so much more than that could ever convey. So, I’m going to do my best, to give voice to my thoughts on the latest Sonic game.

Sonic Frontiers is the first ‘Open Zone’ Sonic game. What they mean by this is simply that the game is divided into several open-world style maps, with objectives, collectibles, points of interest, and characters to meet in each. These maps are not connected to one another as they might be in a full open world game, thus the distinction. This isn’t really an issue to me – I find I have a fondness for the unique strengths of linear game design anyway, so this is a bit of the best of both worlds for me. You can explore the zones as you wish up to a point, when the story kicks in, unlocking the next area.

You’ll find you need to collect a bevy of different objects to progress the story and proceed to the next map, by ultimately assembling the seven chaos emeralds to fight a big climactic area boss. In the mean time, these objects can be collected by exploring the many, many, small platforming challenges scattered about each island, by playing through the more robust ‘Cyberspace Stage’ platforming/speed challenges, by talking to NPCs in narrative sequences, or by simply interacting with various objects to find collectibles.

The Movement

The beating heart of any Sonic game, where speed is king, how does the movement system feel? This is something I always get caught up on. It’s also something that nobody can really seem to agree on, including the developers at Sonic Team! Sonic’s movement and gamefeel has changed so many times fans categorize the different systems like its a wildlife taxonomy, and there are categories within categories! To give you an idea of where I’m coming from, I think the best character controller in Sonic is Sonic Adventure 2, and I don’t think the games have felt quite as good since! Either too slippery, or too stiff, or some other oddity always throws me off. And of course the boost games which followed some years after the Adventure games had completely different design goals, and as such the character controllers departed drastically from what I had been attached to.

Before I get into, there is one strange thing. There are movement sliders. They feature the ability to adjust and customize things like turn rate, initial speed, boost acceleration, and even top speed! That’s a little wild to me. This may sound appealing to some, but me, I’m not fond. In a game about movement, like a platformer, the character controls and capabilities need to be fine-tuned to the environment to really excel at showcasing what a movement system is capable of. Design is decision-making, and a truly great movement system has to be deliberated on to a certain level of specificity such that it is as suitable to its place in the game as possible – you know, you need to design it. To me this is not of the same substance as, say, camera control options. It’s not even really a set of control options. It’s doesn’t affect the interface, it affects what Sonic is literally capable of as a game-entity. It’s strange. It strikes me as a lack of confidence, to have left your game’s de-bugging variable sliders in the options menu. Thankfully, there was at least some confidence here – the default ‘high speed’ style gives you, in my opinion, the optimal experience by default.

Sonic the blue hedgehog runs around a grassy plateau at twilight, sprinting in circles at high speeds with great grace and agility. — Left: The most responsive Sonic ever, Right: The same but… slower?

A slider labeled "top speed" is brought to its lowest setting, then the blue hedgehog Sonic runs across a grassy filed in midday at a very moderate speed. — Left: The most responsive Sonic ever, Right: The same but… slower?

The game opens with a prompt to choose your preferred control style – ‘High Speed’ style or ‘Action’ style, with the game noting that ‘Action’ is good for beginners. As far as I can tell, all this does is change where the default of the ‘top speed’ slider rests. All the other sliders remain the same! Action, uh, sets your top speed to the minimum setting. That’s all! High speed does the opposite, starting it at the max setting. I highly highly recommend choosing high speed, even for beginners. Maybe I’m off base here and as a long-time pro gamer sonic master, but I feel as though even someone relatively new to games is going to pick up a Sonic game… expecting to go fast? It’s kind of the main pitch of the character. I don’t really understand the inclination to undermine that for the sake of making the game allegedly easier. Although one would think nerfing the movement speed could also make the game harder. I just feel as though there were better ways to construct a ‘beginner-friendly’ mode.

Okay on to the actual movement. Sonic controls excellently, smoothly, without hitch. Sonic responsively turns nearly one-to-one with control stick input. He can very quickly achieve impressive speeds, while ducking and weaving around obstacles with an engrossing gracefulness. Sonic never slips and slides around, stopping pretty promptly when bid to stop. Sonic is very adaptable, capable of transferring from one activity to the next in short order, like hopping on a grind rail, hopping off midway to bounce off a balloon, then boost toward a cliff side in the distance. The fantasy of seeing a large landscape ahead of sonic and just dashing off into the distance is realized here, with a responsive and blazingly fast hedgehog.

He feels like Adventure Sonic to me. Which is to say I feel in direct control of Sonic. I don’t feel like I’m guiding him with a carrot on a stick, or wrestling against strict movement constraints. When I want Sonic to get to a particular spot, I can get him there, when I want to running around enemies with flourish and style, I can do that. This movement system really accels to me in its ability to directly translate the player’s self-expression through play onto the canvas of the game. The friction between player and Sonic is very low.

From a birdseye view, SOnic the blue hedgehog runs leaving light blue energy trail behind him, in a field of red flowers. Sonic writes the name "Ian" in cursive, using this trail.

Sonic grips the ground satisfyingly as you run. The homing attack is long-ranged and fast, although I feel it has a bit too much hit-pause, making it more disruptive to flow than it should be. Sonic has more options than ever, being able to slide, bounce, dash to the ground from the air, boost, and double jump! The latter really helps with making precision platform jumps, even at high speed.

To get into the specifics, Sonic’s boost ability has been given an overhaul. It is now a regenerating resource, rather that a purely expendable one, more in line with the stamina meter in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild. I’m in favor of this change, as it makes the boost more of a strategic tool, a decision to make, rather than just a binary state of ‘holding boost down indefinitely’ and ‘not having enough boost power and walking awkwardly slow’. The boost can also be used as an air-dash to reach distant areas, which is great, because the game does not carry Sonic’s momentum much at all in midair.

It’s something you get used to, but it feels awkwardly wrong to jump out of a full sprint only to watch all of your speed evaporate. Obviously, the maps and levels are not built to accommodate a movement system that heavily transfers speed from one state to another. Every time you light-dash, homing-attack, or bounce, Sonic’s speed is totally reset, and you have to rely on the boost to pick it up again. Luckily, the boost is no longer a one-size-fits-all solution to every obstacle. It doesn’t damage enemies, for one thing, so it is possible to send oneself careening into danger at high speeds. This is the fun part though! Sonic has always been all about know when and how to leverage your speed, and Frontiers captures this through the versatility, though not omnipotence, of the boost function.

The new boost, like the old, effectively replaces Sonic’s spindash move, something I still sorely miss. I really feel as though it would fit quite well in Frontiers especially, given how much its movement seems to be inspired by the Adventure games which featured the spindash prominently. Its advantage over the boost is fine aiming, although there’s no reason the two mechanics could not coexist. Indeed, this is proven by the baffling inclusion of the dropdash, inspired by Sonic Mania. Sonic can spin up, but only in midair, and otherwise it functions exactly like a spindash, perhaps a bit more unwieldy than the one in Adventure and Adventure 2. You can’t use it for fine aiming since you need to jump into it, but the dropdash feels great to use once you get the hang of it, and although it’s by no means necessary to use in the game, it’s cool to have- and I feel the same about Sonic’s most iconic move! Please bring back the spindash. Anyway. The spindash feels like a glaring omission, if only for the sake of completeness, but most of its functionality has been distributed to other moves.

Sonic jumps into a blue spinning ball, and lands on the grassy hill as such, rolling down across the landscape at high speed, before unrolling into a jog.

Sonic plays mostly the same in the Cyberspace Stages, except his turn rate is more strictly throttled, as the stages are more racetrack-like. Interestingly, it seems as though the movement sliders don’t affect Sonic in these stages, at all. It seems there was confidence in how he moved in this context. And well-earned too! I honestly think Sonic handles better in Cyberspace than in any other ‘boost’ game that came before. Sonic still feels like a person, rather than a runaway car. Stopping, turning, readjusting for fine precision, is all intuitive and not a roadblock to some of the more platform-heavy stages. I do have one quibble, which is that Sonic has far less air control than in the Frontiers overworld, even while stationary. This is not ultimately very important to the core gameplay of Cyberspace, which wants you to go fast. The lack of air control while jumping at high speed is meant to be evocative of momentum, ironically, since the game doesn’t really express momentum in many other ways, and that makes sense. At low speed it doesn’t really make sense and feels awkward. It wasn’t a common issue for me, but occasionally, whether I wanted to look in every nook and cranny of a level, or was backtracking to grab a missed collectible, sometimes I’d miss a platform entirely because Sonic can barely move in the air in these stages.

Although this game lacks momentum, the way one can string Sonic’s various moves together to achieve a similar effect can be very satisfying. You might backflip off of a grindrail to air-boost right across an enemy that would’ve slowed you down, and you get through the level a couple seconds faster. It’s amazing how well the systems can interact like this in subtle ways, and leaves a lot of essential room for mastery. Though I wish there was some measure of greater momentum, which would go a long way had the levels also been designed to accommodate it, I still think this is going to be a very repayable game. It’s one of the most immediate, smooth, and frankly playable Sonic movement systems we’ve had in a long time. I’d love to replay all of the old Sonic boost stages with this new movement system.

The Combat

It’s fluff. It’s style over substance that involves a lot of stopping and starting that feels quite at odds with the otherwise very free-flowing and fluid movement gameplay. Eh. I’m not happy to say that. I didn’t want the combat to bounce off of me. I don’t think an added focus on combat is totally incompatible to a Sonic game. I just think to make it work, the systems would’ve had to better play to its strengths. What we got, feels oddly disconnected from the movement systems whereas I had hoped for a pair of systems that interlinked in some way. What we got is rife with simplistic dominant strategies, and an apparent lack of depth. Suffice to say, for a Sonic combat system, I’d hope for an intricate dance of momentum, all about constant movement, situational awareness, and yeah, speed. This is not that.

I want to be clear; the combat is not a chore. It’s not egregious, or irritating, or even too frequent. It mostly just confuses me as to why it had to be there. It’s never challenging nor interesting to me in the way that combat depth usually is. Its best qualities are the spectacle, which seems to be the primary motivator behind the design of this combat. It is indeed very,, cool,, when Sonic kicks the air so hard it shoots laser crescents at his enemies. It is very,, neat,, when Sonic zigs and zags around in a finishing flourish to dispatch an enemy. It’s pleasant enough to watch enemy robots explode, and the combat never lingers long enough to feel like too much of a disruption.

Sonic’s combat options essentially include your standard series of punches chained together, and, in the style of other genres like fighting games and beat-em-ups, the option to string in alternate button inputs in the middle or end of a combo to extend the assault an deal more damage. The wrinkle is that Sonic can chain his homing attack into the beginning of one of these combos. The homing attack is ubiquitous in 3D Sonic and allows the hedgehog to zoom to a nearby enemy’s location whilst damaging it. It’s snappy, smart, and fits in perfectly with a game all about moving. Now though, with enemies gaining larger health pools to accommodate a larger-scoped combat system, Sonic can’t just zip by his defeated foes anymore. There’s a lot of stopping, wailing on a guy with lots of health, rinse and repeat. I found myself just bypassing a lot of enemies actually, because I always felt like that’s what I wanted to be doing as Sonic. The prospect of taking two minutes to button mash some randos to death never appealed to me here. Credit where it’s due though, the decision to change the homing attack from an air-only maneuver to one Sonic can perform from any state, including running on the ground, assigned to the same button as his punchy combo attack, was pretty clever. It essentially means Sonic will always zoom to an appropriate target when starting a combo. I just wish the act of building those combos was more fun.

Sonic repeatedly punches, kicks, and spins at a red light affixed to the back of a giant robot beetle.

Enemies caught in one of your combos will be mostly stunned until you finish. Other enemies can intervene, but all the AI in the game seems placid enough that I never really found it too much of a problem. Really I found Sonic’s defensive options- a dodge and a parry – nearly unnecessary. I say parry, but it’s more like a block with a reprisal attack. There’s no timing window. By holding the block input, Sonic stops in place (ugh), and prepares for an enemy’s blow. Once he takes the hit, the offender is stunned, and Sonic can follow up with his own attack. To block another hit, you must re-input the block, but after that it can be once again held indefinitely. It’s a little wild to me, that this system gives me no sense of speed, seeing as I’m playing as Sonic The Hedgehog. The parry and it’s stationary, time-agnostic nature is a prime example.

Not that you’ll need to be very defensive to begin with. As is expected by this point, Sonic’s life meter is his ring count. Rings being the common collectible in this game, the equivalent of coins. When you get hit, you drop some. If you’re hit with zero rings, you die. Same problems as always apply. There’s not much tension if I know I can always just pick up the rings I dropped, except in very specific situations. This knowledge makes a savvy player basically invincible, and draws into question the necessity of Sonic’s upgradeable defense level, which only reduces how many rings vanish from Sonic’s inventory when hit, as opposed to how many hit the ground. No matter your defense level some always do drop, and you can just pick them up.

Sonic is cut by a robot with blade-arms, and knocked onto the grassy ground at night. He drops some rings behind him as he falls on the ground, but quickly picks them up and beats up the robot.

Sonic has a good amount of brilliant blue eye-popping moves to use, and it’s all very impressive looking, but for me, to feel invested in a game’s combat I have to feel present in the shoes of the player character. I have to feel like I’m making decisions as though there are enemies attacking me. I think the primary problem here is that I don’t feel any of that. I feel like watching some pretty nice, but altogether non-interactive animations. Even then, some of the camera choices are pretty questionable. One camera animation in particular, during one of Sonic’s moves, I could easily see giving someone motion sickness. The whole framing feels off, too. Often you’ll see a reverse shot of Sonic, as if your perspective is meant to be from the target of the attack. But that is so incongruent. I’m meant to be playing Sonic, shouldn’t the camera frame me as Sonic, not a third-party observer?

The combo system seems to be catered specifically to stringing together Sonic’s various new tricks to maximize damage in one combo, with very little emphasis on ducking and dodging enemies, which are, in the majority, woefully unequipped to pose a threat to Sonic. Though I always enjoyed the nice crunchy audio-visual feedback of smashing robots, that was all underlined by my misgivings. I rarely found myself making interesting decisions when dispatching enemies. With the exception of one new mechanic.

I did mention that the combat mechanics and movement mechanics do not interlink in a way I find satisfactory. Well, that’s mostly true. Besides Sonic’s punches and kicks and dodges, there’s also the new cyloop. The cyloop is allows Sonic to leave behind a trail of energy as the player holds the cyloop button. If the player navigates Sonic into drawing a closed shape with this energy trail, he whips up a damaging whirlwind to lift and harm foes. This is fantastic. This is a combat mechanic, which is also a movement mechanic. This synergizes with what Sonic is about, and this tiny little thing has such great room for mastery and interactivity. You can run Sonic as fast or as erratically as you please while doing it – you can even combine the cyloop with Sonic’s new boost, for some insanely agile and stylish loops.

Sonic runs a ring around a group of robots so quickly, he whips up a whirlwind that knocks them into the air. He then dashes from one robot to the next in a series of homing attacks, bashing them to pieces.

One maneuver, that never got old for me was rounding up groups of enemies as they spawned. The most basic enemies usually teleport in, in groups of three or four. If you’re quick, Sonic can boost into a full sprint, cyloop around them, launching the enemies into the air, where they are helpless to stop Sonic from using his homing attacking to blast through each of them in turn. It’s great, and feels like a real execution of skill and strategy – it requires an understanding of how two disparate mechanics (cyloop and homing attack) interact, as well as the execution of a cyloop at a high, unwieldy speed. As enemies got stronger, it became apparent that I could no longer defeat them with just a cyloop and a single homing attack. It was kind of disappointment, to be honest, to use the rest of Sonic’s sluggish arsenal. Having to repeatedly wail on a robot to defeat it feels so much less smooth and flowing than a one-two punch of cyloop to homing attack. The enemies still rarely put up any opposition to me doing this, which I would’ve liked to see, but I enjoyed the cyloop so much more than every one of Sonic’s other offensive options that I’d use it whenever I could. This is a mechanic I hope to see return in the future, and expanded on.

Honestly, even the bosses I feel could’ve been designed largely the same way just without the combo system at all. All of them boil down to -do some Sonic related activity like run fast or jump over something, until my weakpoint is exposed, then wail on it-. Why the wailing though? Why not just expose the weakpoint and hit it, then we get on with doing Sonic related things. The following would work basically the same without a combos system. Run up his arm, sure, avoid the red rings, got it, then just homing attack the weakpoint. Why stop in place for all the extra punching?

A giant three-armed robot slams the ground in front of Sonic with its hand. Sonic boosts and dashes up the arm, before slimming into the hinge that connects the arm to the top of the robot, and punching it until it explodes.

For all of my complaining I want to reemphasize that the combat is a minor enough part of regular gameplay, or otherwise inoffensive enough, that I never felt like it was really disrupting my good time. It helps that so many of the encounters are so easy. I obviously care a lot about combat design, and I tend to have a lot more to say about a subject when I do really like it, the subject being Frontiers in this case, but it has just a few niggling problems that I can’t quite ignore. So if you’re wondering how I went on at such length about a supposedly ‘not that bad’ subject, that’s how.

The Levels and Spaces

One of the collectibles Sonic needs to complete the game are obtained by doing Cyberspace levels, which are bite-sized chunks of intense gameplay reminiscent of “boost” games like Sonic Generations and Sonic Forces. In these stages, Sonic’s movement is more restricted, and there’s a focus on completing them fast. In fact, there are several objectives in each, and you receive more of the required collectible the more challenges you complete. One such challenge is to beat the level in a minimum required time.

Most of these times are pretty generous, but some of them really push the movement system to its limit, demanding the player squeeze every last second they can out of Sonic’s ability to cut corners, boost over obstacles, and bounce off baddies. It’s really quite exciting, and the smaller levels had me a lot more invested in trying to get good times than more open-concept levels in past Sonic games might have. I still miss Sonic Adventure style stages, but the refocus on speed running is a good fit for these narrower experiences.

The Cyberspace levels lack the spectacle and narrative context of boost games from previous games, using only a short list of visual elements, recycled across many stages likely for the sake of development scope. That aside, this may be the most I’ve enjoyed boost-style long-corridor Sonic levels in a long time. With the updates to Sonic’s movement, I find them a lot more approachable, and my playstyle a lot more freeform.

The reduction of level themes to a rather sparse and measly handful certainly there’s a lot less visual variety than I might be used to in a Sonic game. For what it’s worth, I can’t honestly say that I got tired of the repeated patterns by the end of the game, as the levels themselves are engrossing enough as bits of challenge and play. They’re pretty sizeable, too. They’re not primarily what you’ll be doing in the game, but nor are they purely optional side-content. You do indeed have to play at least some of them, but they are fun, and I found it pretty breezy to complete every single one. The levels are fun to play, but that’s all. I will never have the same sort of visceral, emotional connection, or immersive sense of place to these nearly context-free spaces as I do to some of Sonic‘s classic locations. Speak of which…

For many of these cyberspace levels, the physical platform layout, obstacle placements, and overall design is borrowed largely or in-part from existing Sonic levels from previous games in the franchise. While this may seem off-putting to some, it’s actually kind of refreshing, to retread familiar ground with Sonic Frontiers‘ new and frankly quite competently put together movement system. Some of these stages haven’t been in the spotlight for literal decades. While you do need to do at least some minimum number of cyberspace stages, you do not need to do even nearly all of them, so the presence of reused content doesn’t feel like much of an imposition to me. Their presence is largely explained away by cyberspace being ‘constructed of Sonic’s memories’ or somesuch, even though certain stages that are present such as Radical Highway are not levels that Sonic himself ever ran through. It’s neither here nor there.

Ultimately, a curated list of tried and proven stage designs alongside a handful of originals and remixes makes the Cyberspace level design quality feel quite consistent overall. The stages also being bite-sized allows the designers to explore gimmicks for the levels that might be tiresome otherwise, like a series of suspended boost rings you have to jump between, for example.

When it comes to the overworld, we have a repeating pattern of context-free grind rails, bounce pads, and booster pads littering a mostly naturalistic environment dotted with high-tech ruins. The ‘context’ to these is that they are bits and pieces of these ruins, but they don’t really read as that. Their presence faded into the background for me as I simply began seeing them as gameplay items, though I wish they could be that and a more natural part of the world. The open zones themselves to me feel pretty uninspired. Grass place, volcano place, desert place, etc. I’ll remember the Starfall Islands well for a number of reasons- the events that took place here, the fun I had running around with Sonic, the conversations I had with his friends – but I won’t remember them because of my sense of place while visiting them. They feel honestly, kind of generic.

The Music

I probably don’t need to tell you this, but Sonic Frontiers‘ soundtrack is out of control. It’s bursting with levels of palpable passion and energy such to be bordering on unreasonable. The way I feel when listening to some of these songs is how I should be expecting to feel listening to a sold-out rock concert in a stadium. To experience the same sitting in my living room playing a video game for children about a cartoon hedgehog feels almost surreal, but this has always been the case. The consummate strangeness of this franchise is a feature, not a bug. You can’t quite replicate this exact experience elsewhere. This is the kind of energy that got me invested in the hedgehog in the first place.

The high-energy stuff is kept close to the chest, for a bit though. The overworld is rather ambient, chill music just capturing the vibes of nature. It seemed in marketing to me like it would be an ill-fit for sonic, but the overworld really is more about vibes than action and adventure. The heart-pumping electronic stuff starts to kick in with the Cyberspace levels, which utilizes some short-looping but very catchy and cool tracks.

It’s pretty much tradition at this point, Sonic’s got good music. No matter what you think of any given Sonic game, there is a weird, infectious bug at Sega that convinces each and every person on their audio staff that they need to compose and perform music like they’re going to die tomorrow. The energy flows, and every Sonic soundtrack inexplicably has a song powerful enough to crack a mountain in half. Lesser game soundtracks would settle for a profoundly powerful endgame boss theme that rolls with a thunderous buildup of swelling instrumentals before awashing you in a tidal wave of heartfelt lyrics which tie together the themes and the game and steps along the way the characters had to complete this journey together with you. Sonic Frontiers has at least four. Four lavishly produced lyrical tracks that put most of what I hear in other games to shame. The Metal Gear Rising: Reveangence comparison early was foreshadowing. There was clearly some inspiration here, these songs kick ass, and in similar fashion, blast you in the face with some of the most earnest lyricism you’ve heard since you first discovered what music was when you turned fourteen, just as each boss enters their climactic final stage. Blaring guitars accompany dual vocalists utterly convinced they’re creating the coolest thing of all time – and they’re right. I feel like I could crack a mountain in half with my fist listening to these.

Weird side-note: The main credits theme for this song, Vandalize, which is also very good, has an original edit not featured in the game. This original edit pretty heavily features the F**K word, in the context of its traditionally 1st definition. Kind of funny, having that officially closely associated with a Sonic The Hedgehog game. Y’know I’m not a prude for that sort of stuff, not at all. Just crossed my mind that actual children will probably be googling this song once they finish the game. It’s nothing that’s gonna ruin anybody’s life or anything, just. Funny? Strange? I dunno. Side-noteworthy, I guess.

Sonic is sliding across a grindrail, offset from a cliff overlooking the sea. He jumps off the rail to reach the cliff, but in midair, the camera shifts perspective to focus on a distant menacing robot labeled "Tower". This shift in perspective has killed Sonic's momentum, and he falls into the ocean like a sack of bricks.

The Narrative

Sonic fans made a big deal about the new head writer for this game, Ian Flynn. He’s been heading up the new run of Sonic comics lately, and apparently is much beloved for that. I don’t read the comics, and video games are a very different medium, even aside from the fact that game development is often messy and solid writing can get mangled for any number of unforeseen reasons. I was cautious going into the story of Frontiers.

Narrative for Sonic has been as divisive and chaotic as his gameplay, for much the same reasons. Seems like no one can decide what Sonic really should be, or if he should even be anything. Maybe Sonic can occupy any tone or style at any time. Who’s to say? Before Frontiers Sonic’s games have given up on much of the melodrama and outlandish plotlines that defined him for some years, focusing more on child-skewing comedy and such silliness.

Frontiers sticks more to the old dramatic model. Sonic’s friends are in real trouble, trapped in Cyberspace, and he’s got to rescue them. A new antagonistic force in the form of the mysterious AI-hologram girl Sage has appeared. I have to say, the plot of this one is rather thin. It feels as though Flynn was brought on quite a ways into development, to post-hoc fill out the narrative beats to fit in with Sonic’s adventure across a series of islands. Not much happens other than Sonic getting beat up by big monsters repeatedly as he slowly gets closer to his friends’ release. Then you fight a bigger monster at the end.

That said… though the plot didn’t do much for me, there’s a lot more dialogue and character writing going on here than Sonic has had in a long time. You know, there’s like, some real growth and personal introspection on the part of these cartoons between some of their conversations. It seems Ian Flynn has a real talent for character voice, as Sonic, Knuckles, Tails, and Amy haven’t felt so much like fully fleshed out characters for a long, long time. They have opinions of each other, senses of humor, dreams, and desires. They aren’t caricatures. Where the plot feels thin, the story is consistently carried by these character interactions, and I constantly felt compelled to find the next story cutscene, because I just wanted to see these bozos interact with each other more. There’s a lot of one-on-one dialogues between Sonic and one other character, and I would’ve liked to see more group interactions, or interactions sans Sonic, and perhaps a more robust plot would have been able to accomodate that.

Another highlight is the subplot of series archenemy Dr. Eggman, which happens mostly off-screen, but is recorded in a series of obtainable voice recordings from him. Eggman as an example here, we really see some new takes on these characters, sides that logically work, but have never really been explored before. How does Eggman feel about the, like, by all accounts, actually alive machines that he’s created with his own hands? Maybe Tails, though he values Sonic as a best friend, has feelings a bit more complicated than that. What does Amy think of Sonic, having chased his affections for so long, but been rebuffed at every turn? There’s a lot here.

That’s to say nothing of the new character, Sage. She’s adorable, entertaining, and even packs a bit of a pathos punch. I wouldn’t say she’s terribly deep, or anything, but she’s obviously got some emotional complexity to her, and her relationships to the other characters are super interesting. Her visual design is really cool too. I really, really, hope we get to see more of her in the future.

Another fun quirk of the writing is that is seems almost religiously committed to reaffirming the canon of Sonic The Hedgehog as a series. Nearly every game is referenced in some way, its story being incorporated into Sonic’s personal history, no matter how absurd or bizarre the events would seem to be in retrospect. I honestly have to respect the hustle. For a long-time fan like me, I found it amusing, and even somewhat compelling, the persistent callbacks and connections.

The storytelling technique and presentation, as far as games go, is nothing you haven’t seen, for the most part. You go from game objective to game objective and occasionally trigger a cutscene conversation between Sonic and an NPC. As I’ve mentioned, it did keep me continuously motivated to find the next one though, it’s certainly not bad! In terms of presentation, when the game wants to build excitement, it delivers, with that insane music and some absolutely gorgeously boarded animated action scenes.

The plot, like it begins, ends somewhat underwritten, with a dearth of real context or answers for what’s happening. There are bits and pieces that suggest a grander narrative that may follow, but I could see this leaving people cold in some respects. And yes, I got the real ending. Still, the character writing remains strong-throughout and I’d be excited to see what this new writing team can do with perhaps more leeway.

Conclusion

Sonic The Hedgehog once felt like every creative involved through they were creating the coolest thing in the goddamn world. For a long time I didn’t quite feel that anymore. Maybe it was a sign of growing up, or maybe something was lost. It’s hard to say. From the music, to the visuals, the ambition and scope of the story, the style you’re capable of in gameplay. It was all just so cool. And you know what? Sonic Frontiers is far from a perfect game, it’s full of baffling decisions and strange inconsistencies that feel as though someone should’ve been on top of, stuff that feels obvious to me in hindsight. And yet, I feel shades of that same feeling again for the first time in maybe a decade. Sonic is cool. Sonic has always been cool but this is different. This is like, advanced cool. This feels like every creative involved is convinced that they are creating the coolest thing in the goddamn world. The passion is palpable. And it’s fun! I breezed through the game 100% with basically no desire to stop. The gameplay may not have as much ‘momentum’ as I hoped, but there’s momentum in the energy of this game. Like it’s the first step of a mountainous surge of creativity. Sonic Frontiers is good. Go play it.

The blue hedgehog Sonic runs at high speed through a field of red and white flowers, wind whipping past him as he goes. He hops over a rail, and ducks to slide beneath another one.

They’ll Know Your Name, Burned Into Their Memory…

Bayonetta’s Witch Time is Better Than Most of Its Derivatives

Man it’s been an absolute hurricane of a month for me, and I am freaking exhausted. It’s Halloween night, so I’m going to indulge myself and ramble about what else? A parry mechanic. Ramble about a parry mechanic whilst complaining and making perhaps uncharitable comparisons between vastly different games. Like I said, I’ve chosen to indulge myself. Nothing scarier than unfiltered opinions. It’ll be a good time. Let’s go.

Bayonetta is an action game from 2009 that grew to a franchise that is apparently worth $450 million. No, do I not have a source for that number. In seriousness, while the niche-ness of Bayonetta may have placed her more in the financial category of a God of War (2005) as opposed to a God of War (2018), she seems to have made a much heavier mark upon combat design, particularly in regards to action games heavy on the spectacle. ‘Spectacle Fighter’ or ‘Character Action’ were a couple of vague and unhelpful terms spun up around the time of Bayonetta‘s release to try and encompass the really different way that certain games started doing things following Bayonetta. Of course there were plenty of games that slotted into the category of ‘spectacle fighter’ before, Bayonetta herself owing much of her DNA to games like Devil May Cry which came long before. And as I said, Bayo was plenty niche, but among the melee-action hardcores, both players and designers, it seems as though she’s had a very last impact.

One of the most noteworthy features of Bayonetta, which set it apart, was the ‘witch time’ mechanic, essentially the game’s parry mechanic. In Bayonetta, if you dodge at the last possible moment, the entire game’s time scale will slow to crawl, except for the titular player character Bayonetta herself, who can the walk about as she pleases, and unleash a flurry of attacks against her hapless foes. Games like Max Payne and even some of Bayonetta‘s own predecessors like Viewtiful Joe made use of a slow-motion effect to allow players to more tactically navigate chaotic and fast-paced situations. Bayonetta‘s wrinkle of hyper-specificity, in that witch time can only be brought forth in response to player performance and situational awareness is what really made this particular mechanic special, I think.

The black catsuit-wearing witch Bayonetta fights two angelic lizard monsters in a quaint yet abandoned European town. She dodges nimbly out of the way of an axe strike, as time slows around her in a purple haze. She leaps into the air and beats one of the lizards to death while he can hardly move.

Bayonetta, primarily inspired by Devil May Cry, features a robust combo and score system by which the player is expected to not just mow down hordes of monsters, but to do it in style. While other games were killing framerates, making characters run like tanks, and restricting camera controls to make games feel more cinematic, Bayonetta opted to pull its camera back and give the player the tools of an editor; the ability to slow time and navigate a mid-massacre diorama like it were an art exhibit, for snippets at a time. If spectacle was the goal, if spectacle is a design pillar of this series, then witch time gives the player the space to think through their masterwork, their fireworks show. Action games like these have big and complicated combo systems for juggling enemies in the air and performing outrageous feats of acrobatics. They can be hard enough to master on their own, let alone while bloodthirsty monsters are swarming about. Bayonetta really seems interested in on-boarding newbies despite its niche appeal, and witch time reinforces this by giving the player a pause with which to set up or practice their big combos stress-free, like a batter swinging at a teed up ball. The Bayonetta loading screens, which opt for a playable void in which you’re free to practice combos at your leisure, makes me quite confident this was one of the goals. With very little practice, witch time allows players to come to grips with the combo system in a more controlled environment, as well as looking cool as heck.

What’s more is what it does for the interest curve of a given battle. Parries in action games typically embody a kind of crescendo, where the intensity of the battle reaches its peak because the player is at the greatest risk – they’ve put themselves in harm’s way to deflect an oncoming attack. Bayonetta takes this further with an invigorating lull in the action to follow, a denouement so to speak. This creates a great rhythm of rising and falling action that allows one to navigate the battlefield in a way that’s a bit more planned and elegant, less improvisational and chaotic than in many other games, which certainly fits the bill of Bayonetta‘s atmosphere. It’s a game about an incredibly stylish witch who always seems to be one step ahead, and just a tad more confident than is warranted by any given situation.

The black catsuit-wearing witch Bayonetta fights an angelic lizard creature with a horn instrument in a gothic temple courtyard. She dodges a strike from it, causing time to slow around her in a purple haze. She then strikes the enemy so hard he is catapulted into the air, where Bayonetta juggles him about with a series of gunshots and rapid melee strikes.

I say that Bayonetta seems to have had a big impact despite it’s somewhat limited first splash because it really seems like tons of games took after it. Bayonetta‘s developer Platinum Games ran with the ‘character action’ style of game, with a slew of them to follow, including Bayonetta‘s own sequels, as well as collaborations like Nier:Automata, a game which shares a huge amount of DNA with Bayonetta including witch time as an option mechanic. As a brief aside, what I’m going to complain about with Automata is that the witch time equivalent in that game is so instantly satisfying to use, that it makes me wish it was a baseline feature of the game as with Bayonetta! Ah well.

Interestingly, I see Bayonetta inspirations in even heavier hitters like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild. I think one of the magical parts of game design is that like, even more so than in many other art forms, the practices and learned lessons of design can be studied and adopted in direct ways freely. It’s magical to see wildly different games borrowing great ideas from one another, putting their own spin on it, and creating some truly great experiences. Breath of The Wild did not do that with witch time. Oh yeah, complaining about botw let’s DO THIS. So, in BotW you can induce a slow-motion of sorts by dodging out of the way of enemy’s attack at the last moment, just like in Bayonetta. After this, you are.. permitted to spawn the attack button and unleash a pre-baked, non-interactive series of attacks. Or, you can do nothing, and the slow-mo promptly just ends. It’s, um, well it’s got the spirit anyway.

The key problem with implementations of parries like this lies in the lack of interactivity, I think. The problem starts with the dodge that initiates it. Dodging in Botw is so digital and rigid, as opposed to games like Bayonetta which have more of an analogue omni-directional approach. Then, the result of the dodge is non-interactive. The only player input is continue, or don’t. Not really much of a choice, meaningful for otherwise. Witch time allows the player to do anything they’d otherwise be able to do, but against an army of nearly paralyzed vulnerable opponents, and has so many options to bear against them at that. Imagine if Link from Breath of The Wild was able to, say, use one of his Shieka Slate gadgets during the slow-mo time, planting a bomb, bashing a foe with a big piece of metal, or even just shooting a bunch of them with arrows. To be clear, BotW does have a lot of weird glitches involving its slow-mo effect that make some strange interactions possible, but these are clearly not intended as every perfect does is accompanies with a big flashing “PRESS BUTTON NOW TO FLURRY RUSH DO IT NOW”, and these glitches are not likely to be noticed by casual players.

A blonde young man with a sword and shield side-step dodges a jumping attack from a pig-demon as time slows to a crawl atop a brick stone pathway overgrown with grass. The young man veeeery sloowlly does a combination attack on the pig demon.

Parries are fun, but mostly as tools of personal expression through play, and signs of mastery to enhance performance during play. In the former case, BotW is functional as a basic parry mechanic – you can choose, meaningfully whether to go for flurries or not depending on the combat situation, but it lacks the follow-through of witch time’s setting up for complex combos in a way that feels satisfying. The pre-baked combo of the flurry rush is also really long and time consuming. I said earlier that a parry should mark a big crescendo, a spark of heightened action, but the flurry rush just takes so damn long to resolve, and since enemies in BotW can often be damage sponges, it doesn’t really have the oomph I’d want. The thing could resolve in a fifth of the time and be much more effective in terms of feel, I think. Kirby and The Forgotten land does just this with its own witch time mechanic, and I feel it works much better there. Feels looser and more free-form, too.

The round pink creature Kirby dodges a charging fox in an open grassy field, as time slows to a crawl. Time resumes as kirby goes in to inhale and swallow the fox whole.

In the latter case, where parries accentuate mastery, this only really matters, in my opinion, if it can be significantly felt, most often by making fights shorter. If you can parry a lot, then you can counter a lot, then you can dispatch enemies quickly, in most games that have that feature. Flurry rushes take so long that even if they technically shave time off of beating baddies, it rarely feels like it. I often feel, in BotW that I’d save more time by just wailing on dudes. The game lacks the same goals of defeating enemies stylishly, in an explicit capacity anyway, so I personally feel more compelled to dispatch efficiently, and flurry rush has friction with that.

The round pink creature Kirby dodges a charging fox in an open grassy field, as time slows to a crawl. Time resumes as kirby goes in for a switch strike with his sword.

So what’d we learn from all this? Witch Time is great. It synthetically manipulates the interest curve to have natural highs and lows, but explains it away with a clever and intuitive mechanic that ties in with the style of Bayonetta the game and Bayonetta the character. Witch Time eases players in to high-intensity action games and sets up those really cool combos that everyone wants to pull off. Parry mechanics should have a material impact on gameplay so that their role as a barometer of mastery can be felt. Parry mechanics ideally can also serve as a vector of player creativity and agency during combat. I got to complain about Breath of The Wild. It’s all good here.

I hope you enjoyed this slightly indulgent Halloween special. Stay spooky and be good to each other.

A demonic dragon head made of black hair appears from a purple portal in quaint yet abandoned European town, and violently bites into a strange reptilian creature, spraying blood every as the dragon jostles the limp creature about, before biting down hard, reducing it to spatters.

You’ve been naughty…

Splatoon’s Salmon Run: Fine-Tuned Machine of Industry

Got Splatoon on the brain, so that’s what I’m gonna talk about today. The game’s preeminent horde mode, added in Splatoon 2, and expanded in Splatoon 3, to be specific, Salmon Run. So essentially I adore Salmon Run, it’s some of the most fun I’ve had with a horde mode in a game, that is, a mode in which waves of enemies hound a team of players in hordes, as the players are tasked with holding them off. In Salmon Run, four plucky young squidkids and octoteens are on the clock to collect golden salmon eggs for their employer. Each run is divided into three waves of increasing difficulty, which can take a number of different forms at random. During each wave, hordes of minor salmonids of a small, medium, and large variety will hound the players, and occasionally larger ‘boss salmonids’ will appear. They are more dangerous and harder to take down, but each drop a number of golden salmon eggs, which then must be carried, one at a time per player, back to a centrally located basket to meet each wave’s quota of golden eggs. Fulfill that goal, and you progress to the next wave. I’m going to go over my perspective on the various elements that make Salmon Run work so damn well. It starts with the maps the game mode takes place on.

A Space Where Moments Happen

Salmon Run maps seem pretty simple on the surface. Smaller than Splatoon‘s versus maps, and usually approximately circle or square shaped. They all hold a few interesting features in common, though. For one, they all feature a large amount of elevation variation. This is important, as most salmonid cannot directly climb walls like players can, and thus will have to path around and through the level’s various ground passages. That’s important too, those passages. The heavily varied elevations create a lot of corridors and enclosed spaces. These enclosed spaces can lead to players getting trapped with enemies, in dangerous situations. That’s the point, Salmon Run maps tend to be less open to facilitate this up-close encounters, to really engage the players with how their enemies move and operate. Strategy becomes essential to keep yourself from being cornered. All this creates exciting ‘Moments’ of high action, that keep Salmon Run interesting.

Speaking of being cornered. Ever notice how all the Salmon Run maps are similarly shaped? Specifically I mean, if we are to assume they are basically the shape of a square, then three of their ‘sides’ are always exposed to the water, where salmonid always spawn from. The fourth side, is not.

This will cause salmonid, again always approaching from the beachheads, to surround players as they navigate, but never directly from behind, as that would feel unfair. So the minor salmonids; tiny small fry, player-sized chums, and larger imposing cohawks, all walk toward players at a moderate speed, usually in lines and clumps, then try to melee attack. The damage dealt by each, and the damage each can incur before being dispatched is proportional to their size. It might be one’s inclination to largely ignore the unruly masses and focus solely on bosses, but this would be a mistake, especially as that aforementioned difficulty scale begins to skyrocket. There is one wall for players to back up against in the face of the coming forces, but they also must keep an eye out for flankers, constantly. peripheral attention becomes essential. Reacting for flanks is another of these exciting ‘Moments’. Waves of high danger follow waves of control, forming Salmon Run’s interest curve.

Game is Hard

So one thing that a cooperative experience like Salmon Run needs is longevity – something for players to latch onto so they keep coming back. One way Salmon Run achieves this is through an adaptive difficulty system. Based on how frequently a player is winning at Salmon Run, an invisible difficulty scale will begin to go up for them. Higher difficulty scales mean more frequent salmon spawns, and higher egg quotas. The higher scales demand more and more efficiency of the players.

So, cleverly, Salmon Run starts out very forgiving, allowing players of any skill level to begin to succeed and claim their rewards for the game mode. What I find commendable is how unrestrained the upper echelons of this scale is. A lot of the fun of horde mode comes from the horde- tons and tons of enemies coming at you all at once. Through grit and determination, you can overcome.

An octopus girl is surrounded by fireflies as she picks up a golden egg with a net. She swims through blue ink to escape a frenzied mosh pit of enraged salmon, who flail at her with frying pans. She swims frantically away. — More like Salmon RUUUUUUUUUUN

Salmon Run also includes a lot of wrinkles and surprises, such as the special event waves, where the rules of the game are tweaked slightly. For example, high tide might shrink the play area, making the next round very claustrophobic. What is all this for, then? Well, like the level design which emphasizes situation awareness, every aspect of Salmon Run from its maps, to its enemies and bosses reinforces specific fundamental skills in the Splatoon player’s toolkit. Players are randomly assigned weapons they are forced to use, reinforcing general adaptability and understanding of the game’s mechanics. The maps are laid out to reinforce situational awareness and navigation skills. Specific bosses reinforce specific weapon-handing skills. As the game’s difficulty ramps up, so does the speed of the game, and the skills needed for mastery are further and more rapidly drilled into the player.

Entity Cramming

“Entity Cramming” is a term originating from Minecraft, a game which allows a very large number of entities like players, enemies, and animals to coexist in a very small space. Salmon Runs can get very cramped, very fast. Especially at higher difficulties with very high spawn rates, or during high tide, at which the viable play space shrinks. There is a need to combat the problem of overpopulation in a small space, to keep the game running smoothly and feeling fair. A lot of salmonid bosses possess some way to impede player movements or player attacks, or both. Even beyond that, with too many enemies present, it would become unfeasible for four meager squids to fight back, which would create an overwhelming and unfair disadvantage for the minor mistake of acting just a little too slow or inefficiently. There’s also the random chance that bosses might occupy the same relative space.

To combat this, salmonid bosses represent an inherent risk-reward factor. With many of them bunched up, there is great risk to approach them, but many slamonid bosses represent an opportunity to clear wide swathes of salmon all at once. There are bomb salmonid, for example, which explode and deal damage to their allies when defeated. When enemies are bunched up, players with wide-reaching area-affecting weapons can take out multiple of them at once. All bosses explode into friendly ink, which is toxic to some salmonid. The new Slammin’ Lid boss, added in Splatoon 3, will utterly crush any salmonid beneath it, bosses included, if it is goaded to use its slam attack.

An octopus-girl in a slopsuit approaches a green UFO piloted by a fish. The UFO hangs over two giant fish with bombs strapped to their heads. The UFO flashes, them falls directly onto the giant fish like a rapid hydraulic press, crushing them utterly into an explosion of orange ink. — Good Cod that is satisfying

So with this built-in risk-reward for salmonid bosses, it’s never too daunting when they team up. With a clever and careful approach, bosses can be used as weapons to take out other bosses! So while difficulty scaling leads to huge hordes of enemies, it also creates this rubber-banding effect where huge hordes of enemies can actual mean an increase in overall efficiency, where you’re dispatching two or three bosses at once, along with their smaller minions, rather than just one. At high levels of play, golden egg collection can skyrocket to huge profits.

Teamwork Teamwork Teamwork!

The real key to excelling at Salmon Run is efficiency, and efficiency is teamwork. It is virtually impossible to accomplish some of this game mode’s higher-end challenges without utter mastery and knowledge of your role on the team. The randomly assigned weapons ensure each player accels and struggles with some specific task. Long ranged precision weapons can take out unshield bosses from a distance with ease. Heavier wide-area weapons can dispatch crowds of small salmonid *much* faster that snipers can. Some weapons can defeat salmon from safety whereas others have to get up close and personal.

Later on efficiency becomes to important, that if you are ever swimming around with a full tank of ink ammunition, you are kind of a liability. My advice to ace Salmon Run? Always be doing something, whether its clearing small enemies or ferrying eggs. Rescue teammates as quickly as possible – four sets of hands outperform two or three. Everyone has a role to fill, even if that role is just moving eggs around, because you’re weapon is ill-suited to the current event wave. In Splatoon 3, a new event wave called the Tornado was implemented to highlight this. Large quantities of eggs spawn far away from the basket, so the four players must form an assembly line of sorts to taxi them across enemy territory. Kind of reflects the rough work environments that the game uses as its horde mode backdrop, huh? In fact, there’s a lot of parallels to game development in general..

An octopus girl in a slopsuit swims back and forth across blue ink, each time grabbing a golden salmon egg in a net, and hurling it up a ledge to a friendly squid kid, to whom it is handed off. — Pictured: The Production Pipeline

The Main Event: The Bosses

The bosses in Salmon Run are fun, inventive, visually creative, goofy, funny, and irresistibly compelling. They all fill specialized niches in the gameplay, and each reinforce a skill for the player. They all have specific rules for how best to deal with them. There’s a lot, so I’m going to rapid-fire-style review them in a series of mini boss breakdowns and see how they fit into this scheme, with a little more detail given on the new bosses added to Splatoon 3‘s Salmon Run.

Steelheads are giant salmon with bombs in their heads. They arm the bombs for a moment, then throw them as a player approaches. They teach precision aiming, as their weak point bobs about while it’s vulnerable. They also reinforce reactiveness to bombs and ground hazards – a common danger in Splatoon.

Steel Eels demand the skill of tracking moving targets, their weak point constantly on the move, and occasionally blocked by their own shield-like bodies. Terrain navigation is crucial here too, as getting sandwiched by one against another enemy or wall means death.

Scrappers, or Jalopies, as I like to call them, teach the skill of flanking. They always turn to face attacking players, and they are shielded from the front. Using teamwork, one player can distract or stun from the front as they other takes them out. This is one of the ‘kiteable’ bosses, which can be lured by the player to be very close to the basket when they die, leaving eggs right there. Retrieving golden eggs past salmonid enemy lines

Stingers are of a class of salmonid bosses I call ‘globals’, as they can damage players from anywhere on the map. Stingers use a long-range beam unimpeded by terrain. Stingers teach players a hierarchy of needs for the game. It’s near-impossible to kill every enemy as they spawn. Just reaching your egg quota and surviving is paramount. You have to triage your attention to what’s most important. Stingers are important. You’re excelling when you put out fires before they happen, and addressing Stingers quickly is a good example.

Maws can also be kited to the basket for easy eggs. They teach how to swim away while placing a bomb, which generally kills them. A surprisingly practical skill, as bombs cost a lot of ink, but swimming replenishes it. Efficient!

Drizzlers are a global salmon which create damaging rain that also ruins friendly turf. They teach lining up shots, and maintaining relative positions between player and enemy, as they are most easily dispatched by deflecting their projectile back at them. Lining this up is strict, to aim well!

Flyfish. Ooooh Flyfish. Perhaps most infamous of all salmonid. They are hovering mobile missile vehicles which periodically fire squid-seeking missiles at players who must be moving to avoid them. This is global. They are easily one of the most dangerous bosses to keep alive, so a great marker of Salmon Run mastery has become one’s ability to safely and efficiently take them out. Taking them out quick is a true marker of friendship between allies. They teach precision use of the grenade sub-weapon, as you must land a grenade in its open missile launchers after it fires. Twice. Once for each launcher. It also teaches patience, and the truth of your own mortality.

An octopus girl in a slopsuit swims through green ink to throw a grenade into the open missile launcher of a hovercraft being piloted by a salmon, just as its second missile launcher as been destroyed in a similar way by a friendly squid kid nearby. — Any man who can one-cycle a flyfish with me, I would trust with the life of my child.

The Slammin’ Lids (god I love that name) are one of two new Salmonid that seem to be purposed to teach one of the two new movement options in Splatoon 3. The lids are easiest to kill by baiting out their slam attack, then mounting them while they’re on the ground, to kill the pilot. The easiest way to do that, is by using the new Squid Roll, which allows rapid turning while swimming through ink. They are also one of the best example of the entity cramming solutions in Salmon Run, as I’d shown earlier. Their main threat is the impenetrable shield they produce beneath themselves, which can obscure lines of fire while they pump out small salmonid to shore up the enemy forces. They aren’t high-priority targets, but can become dangerous if they take up advantageous positions.

The Fish Stick is a toward carries by a rotating contingent of salmon. The stick is easily dispatched using the new Squid Surge, which allows one to rapidly ascend a vertical surface. The Fish Stick fills a new niche in the game mode, which is the use of the player’s wall-scaling abilities, and introduces an enemy that is itself terrain that can be inked. What’s really interesting is that the Fish Stick’s terrain remains in play even after it’s defeated and its eggs are retrieved, opening new strategic options for players. This can be a double edges stick though, as while the extreme vantage is usually safe, some salmon like the maws or dreaded fly fish can use its small surface area to trap players.

The Flip Flapper is a salmon dressed like a dolphin which drops rings of enemy ink where it is about to dive. Filling in this ink with friendly colors before it lands, stuns it and renders it vulnerable. I love this thing because it teaches the teamwork of efficient ink coverage. Nothing worse than teammates who waste time inking something you’ve already inked. Working together, these dolphin wannabes are no challenge, but they also serve Entity Cramming well, as they are very weak to the splatter from other enemies nearby being killed.

Big Shots are tough guys with lots of health that stay on the sidelines. I think what these guys are meant to teach is how the AI operates and reacts to player movement. You see, the Big Shot is a global who uses a machine at the beach to launch wave-generating projectiles toward the basket. Very inconvenient. What is, convenient, though is that the player can use the same device to launch golden eggs toward the basket. Toward, not in, mind you. Another player still has to be there to cash the eggs. If they don’t, salmonid will come in and snatch them up, making the players’ efforts a waste of time. What’s more, is that spending too much time on the beach, which I might remind you is where salmonid come from, can mean quickly becoming overrun by enemies, and trapping you in a place which is very dangerous and inconvenient to reach. Teaches teamwork and restraint.

And octopus girl holding a bathtub uses it to throw green bubbles at a giant salmon on the beach below who is fiddling with a wood-chipper like machine, and is then exploded into green ink. An allied squidkid below loads a golden egg into the machine, which is then launched across the field of view. — Couldn’t have gotten better footage of that egg being thrown by the Big Shot if I’d planned it

There are a few more event-specific bosses, but that was a lot, I think, so we’ll leave it at that.

EMERGENCY!

JUST KIDDING! They couldn’t have a sequel without upping the ante a little, right. At (slight) random, after winning a few Salmon Runs, the new King Salmonid Cohozuna will appear. You have a mere 100 seconds to send him back to the briny deep in order to secure the special fish scale rewards he provides. Really, there isn’t much to him or his AI beyond standing as a suitable final challenge to really test the player’s mastery over all these bosses and systems. His implementation is pretty clever, though.

He has a LOT of health, so normal weapons will simply not do enough damage to vanquish him on their own, not in the time allotted. To beat him, you’ll have to leverage golden eggs, which can, in this bonus boss round, be thrown with zero ammunition cost. They deal massive damage to him, and the only way to get them remains the same: defeat the boss salmonid that accompany him. You’ve only got 100 seconds, your team, one special weapon, and the ink your back, so I hope you’ve been practicing your aim and reaction time.

He seems to prefer to follow the last player who damaged him, so he can be tanked somewhat. He’s not that dangerous on his own. He’s slow, and only has two real attacks. One where he belly flops right in front of him – so keep somewhat at a distance. His other is a jump, which does heavy damage where he lands. Be ready to move. Other than that, it’s his health and his bulk that is the challenge. The team needs to work together to get enough eggs to bring him down, while positioning him such that he is not a threat to the team, and such that he is not covering vital resources with his body. It’s a stiff challenge, but if you really push your self and put a full understanding of all the little things Salmon Run has been teaching you, it’s very doable. A suitable finale to any work day.

A giant 30-foot-tall salmon flops toward an octopus girl wielding a an automatic ink-gun. He is being pelted from the sides by golden projectiles. He turns around, then bursts into green ink in a fantastic explosion. A squidkid declares "Booyah!" as the four cephalopod teammates, now friends, celebrate. — That’s teamwork!

The Cohonclusion

Where. That felt like a gauntlet. We all get through okay? Yeah so I love Salmon Run, to reiterate. It’s got so many little clever design considerations to acutely tune the experience and promote active thinking while playing. Sure, it’s great fun to goof around in with friends, but even at a casual level, enough exposure to the game mode will gradually train certain behaviors that make you better at it. I think that’s a sign of some absolutely excellent game design, that deep consideration of incentives and how minor tweaks to Splatoon‘s gameplay setup will reinforce certain behaviors. Salmon Run is also just where some of Splatoon‘s considerable creativity comes to the fore. I mean “Slammin’ Lid”? An eel made of shower heads that forms an impenetrable wall of showering ink? A mothership that is a warehouse container full of smaller crates that deploy salmon? Come on. This stuff is gold.

An octopus girl swims across orange and green into into a torrent of orange produced by allied weapons. She is showered with golden eggs as salmon burst around her. She grabs one and throws it into a large basket.

DO YOUR JOB!

The Ink Must Flow: How Splatoon Gets You In a Rhythm

Splatoon is my favorite multiplayer shooter series right now. There’s a lot of reasons for that, from the inimitable youthful aesthetic, to the novelty of its premise, to the breadth of self-expression available to players. I think what most draws me back to this game again and again is just how effortlessly it induces the Flow State. The Flow State is a psychological concept that you may have come across by many names in different fields. It is being fully immersed and cognitively absorbed with a task. It is being ‘in the zone’, so to speak. It is associated with a certain energy, a joy, in the act of doing. As applied to games, it’s what happens when you become so involved in with the game, so in sync with its rules and systems that you feel time slip away, when effort becomes so natural it feels like no effort at all. It’s the kind of thing I make games for, as opposed to any other medium, and Splatoon pulls it off beautifully in the way its most basic gameplay is structured.

In a peaceful urban sidewalk patio, a purple octopus repeatedly bounces around in a circle on the pavement, before transforming into the purple silhouette of a young girl. — This is how I express myself

You’re a Kid Now You’re a Squid Now

Like many great games Splatoon is a system built on mobility and positioning. However, its breakout idea is that the players have agency not only in how they move, but in what areas of the game space are available to them to move. Most shooters’ main actions are move and shoot. Splatoon adds move, shoot, and claim turf. Your team claims turf on any playable surface they shoot with their ink-based weaponry. At any time, players may shift from their ‘kid’ form, in which they can shoot to claim turf or defeat opponents (‘splat’ them) to their ‘squid’ or ‘swim’ form. In the swim form, shooting is not available as an action, but mobility options are greatly expanded. While swimming, a player is significantly faster on the ground, while also gaining the ability to scale sheer walls that have been claimed by allied ink.

Splatoon has a created an inherent meaningful decisions layered on top of the typical scenario in a competitive shooter. Like in other games, players have the option to take cover, spray suppressive fire, focus down single targets, and the rest, but they also have the omnipresent option to forego offense entirely for the swim form, making them more mobile, and harder to see. The last essential wrinkle is that ammo (ink) is limited, the player can only load so much at one time. To reload, the player needs to swim through allied ink that has already been laid down. This also quickly heals any damage you’ve taken, acting as a catch-all resource renewal action.

Your two modes now create a feedback loop. Shooting can accomplish two things. One: splatting players which gives you and your teammates safe space to advance the game’s main objective, which is usually to claim turf. And two: claiming turf, which is the metric by which the winning team is judged, but also provides a tactical advantage in allied ink’s utility to evasive maneuvers, ambushes, and advantageous positioning. The more angles you have on your opponent, the more limited their options as opposed to yours. Swimming accomplishes two things as well. One: The increased swim speed, decreased visibility, and healing of the swim form makes a swimming player a much less vulnerable target than a shooting one. Two: A swimming player is restoring ammunition, which must be done to continue shooting.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt runs across a shipping dock, drenching the ground with purple ink from a giant paintbrush she carries as she goes. Every few seconds, an ink tank on her back becomes visibly emptied, and she turns into a small octopus that sinks beneath the ink on the ground. When she emerges, the ink tank is full. She continues this pattern rhythmically. — It’s rhythmic, comfortable, almost, therapeutic. Yeah! Ink that turf!

Here Splatoon has through incentives solidified its gameplay loop to where shooting gives you more space for swimming, and swimming enables you to continue shooting. After getting used to the unconventional systems, it quickly becomes intuitive how they relate to each other, and thus players will naturally begin to fall into a pattern, which typically looks like this:

Lay down plentiful amounts of ink to claim turf, including a path to your next desired, probably tactically chosen, location. Then, swim to that location to reload your ink. Engage the enemy team either though frontal assault or ambush tactics, utilizing your own turf for advantage. Whether the enemy is splatted, or you or pushed back, you’ll relocated using your own turf, renewing your resources at the same time, and repeat. Ink and swim, ink and swim.

The Simple Pleasure of Splatter

Splatoon is a crunchy, colorful, game with lush audio-visual feedback. A lot of care was clearly taken to making the act of laying down ink very satisfying. There’s a simple joy in seeing color overtake the environment, permanent marks of your activity. The wild shapes and pathways carved across the terrain, as seen from above in the final score tally screen of each match, leaves evidence of every assault, flank, retreat, and regroup each team took part in.

A bird's eye view of a symmetrical office complex. The upper left section and most of the center is covered in bright purple ink. The lower right is covered in neon green. The two ink colors meet at an uneven border, indicative of splashes, splats, and drips, the purple intruding on the green and vice versa. Two cats appear on either side of a meter indicating the ratio of purple to green. The cats dance and determine that the purple is more abundant than green, as the meter reflects this. The word "Victory" appears. — Sometimes these end screens can look pretty wild, a cathartic sendoff to an intense match.

It is intrinsically motivating to want to just cover stuff in pretty colors. With that desire in place, and the necessity of the swim form for continuing to do that, players are naturally encouraged to tactically engage with the game, and consider their surroundings. No matter what, when you run out of ink, you have to swim for a bit to restore it, so players are given a mandatory bit of space and pause in the action to acknowledge their context. Splatoon trains players to always be considering their next move. You know you have to restore ink, so you know you have to relocate eventually as some ground is ceded to your opponents.

This space to consider is a permanent and mandatory part of the game loop, but is also fun in and of itself. Movement in Splatoon while in kid form isn’t horribly slow, not nearly slow enough to be frustrating, but it is pointedly slower than swimming. The contrast makes swimming through ink exhilarating and liberating. It also makes one feel powerful compared to those not swimming at that exact moment, as a swimming squid has the advantage of wall-scaling and stealth through their reduced visibility. At any moment you can jump out to ambushed an unsuspecting opponent. So while Splatoon is essentially forcing an idealized interested curve through the interplay of its mechanics (moments of high intensity shooting to moments of less intense swimming, reloading, and repositioning), it remains intrinsically motivating throughout.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt summons a fountain of ink beside a bridge soaked in pink and yellow ink. A yellow squidkid, threatened by the pink geyser, retreats beneath the bridge, and uses an inflatable wall there as cover. The octo-girl runs back and forth a bit behind the wall to mix him up, but as she goes in for the kill, the yellow squidkid backs off of a safety girder and falls to his doom. — Tricking this squidkid off a cliff is tangentially related… but mostly I though it was funny

Through this enforced rhythm and tactical engagement, the endless looping of shoot, swim, ink, shoot, swim becomes natural. Before long, it will feel second-nature to veteran players, like skiing veterans effortlessly gliding back and forth across a slope. Ink, shoot, swim, reposition, shoot, ink, swim, retreat, ink, swim, etc.

I really think its the rhythmic nature of this extreme tight gameplay loop that makes Splatoon so engrossing. In some ways it feels almost like a ritual, meant to teach you the inherent interrelations of Splatoon‘s various modes of interaction. For example, knowing that swimming is the best, fastest way to move, and that it restores your ammo, one might realize that swimming with a full tank of ink is a bit of a waste. That’s ink which could be better spent elsewhere. If you know you’re going to be swimming for a bit to get to your next location, it would be ideal if you could spend a great deal of your ink all at once at something productive. And… wouldn’t you know it, there is such a tool, a secondary weapon all players have access to that consume a large amount of ink, but can claim turf at a great distance, create threatened space to keep enemies away, or even outright splat enemies instantly. Indeed, throwing a splat-bomb secondary weapon into the distance before swimming a ways to restore the sunk cost is a powerful strategy.

Push Buttons and You’re Contributing

One thing I want to briefly touch on is how Splatoon goes out of its way to maintain this rhythm no matter what. After all, the point of Flow is its uninterrupted and focused nature. You know, a flow. Splatoon clearly values this flow state greatly, with all of the contingencies it deploys for possible interruptions. There’s a couple of techniques it uses to do this.

First, death and death timers. Sorry, splatting and respawn timers. When getting splatted, you’re put out of commission for some time. There has to be some reward for getting a splat where shooting the other guy is a primary goal, so some space and time is awarded to the successful splatter-er. However, this game wants as little (boring) downtime as possible, and will thrust a defeated player back into the action as soon as possible. Respawn timers never last more than 10 seconds. Lots of shooters have similar respawn timers, but Splatoon‘s super jump mechanic, which lets players immediately jump to an ally’s location makes getting back into the action incredibly quick and breezy. To counteract this, so that every match doesn’t devolve into an immovable, non-dynamic stalemate, the average TTK or time to kill in Splatoon is very low, meaning just a little bit of forethought or even luck can unseat a skilled opponent who’s caught unawares. If ambushed, a squid kid can be taken down in a fraction of a second.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt jumps across a shipping dock drenched in yellow and purple ink. Yellow cephalopod-kids spray yellow ink at her, partially covering her. She sprays purple ink at her feet and turns into an octopus to submerge in it, before retreating. As she does, she spies a yellow opponent spraying ink on her purple turf, sneaks up behind them, and splats them into a burst of purple ink in less than a second. — Here demonstrates the utility of Splatoon’s ink-swim-ink rhythm. I only lived here because I repeatedly swam in my own ink to restore heatlh. It also shows how attainable a good ambush is.

The inherent risk in attacking in Splatoon is reduced in this way. If you can outmaneuver an opponent you might be able to defeat them before they have a chance to hit you with any reprisal. There’s a synthesis of strategy and instinct here that’s very friendly to newer players. If beating someone in a competition is so demanding that a new player can never get one over on their opponent, the game runs a high risk of bouncing off of them. We want those new players to experience that engrossing flow state uninterrupted, so beating even veteran players in shootouts is made a very attainable goal.

Of course, even if you’re not extremely predisposed to shooting opponents in general, Splatoon‘s got your flow state covered. Simply shooting the unmoving ground beneath your feet creates a tactical advantage for your team. Inking turf is how you build up your special weapon, which itself is quite powerful for creating space, inking turf, and splatting opponents. A note on those special weapons, by the by. If a player is splatted, they lose progress towards charging their special weapon, even if it’s already fully charged! I love this design decision, as it encourages liberal use of the special weapons, which is exciting for both sides of the match. Use them with some strategy, sure, but if you don’t use it for too long, you will most certainly lose it. Why is this good? Well it prevents that boring downtime, where players might be encouraged to play passively, waiting for the perfect moment to throw out a bunch of specials rather than just using them so they can charge up the next one.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt sprays purple ink on a moving bit of drawbridge as it goes vertical. She turns into an octopus and swims up the surface, then leaps down to ambush a fleeing yellow opponent. Finally, she doubles back, and inks some more wall to create an escape route. — Play long enough, and everything from using your specials, to nabbing kills, to laying out turf becomes second nature, a continuous stream of consciousness

Anyway, inking turf is the main goal of most gameplay modes, and it contributes directly to your team’s likelihood of success. It also increases your more violently-minded teammate’s options for splatting opponents. If the enemy team’s hard-hitters are simply hitting too hard for your comfort zone, any player can contribute with minimal risk of interruption if they avoid the front lines, and just focus on getting into that flow of laying ink, swimming, laying ink.

Masahiro Sakurai, creator of the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series, recently shared his theory that there is a relationship between the level of a game’s ‘Game Essence’ or ‘Risk and Reward’ and the broadness of its appeal to a wider audience. I think there’s some merit to this line of thinking, and the runaway success of Splatoon, which has implemented so many clever ways to diminish inherent risk so as to maintain the integrity of its gameplay loop for all players, winning or losing, while also allowing greater levels of risk for high-skill strategy and gameplay execution, supports it. One of the many reasons for Smash Bros. success, I think, is a philosophy of risk vs. reward similar to Splatoon‘s. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the former were an inspiration to the latter.

Swimming In Splatoon’s Energy

If there’s three words I’d use to describe Splatoon‘s vibe they’d be ‘youthful’, ‘vibrant’ and ‘expressive’. It’s a game that gives so many unique avenues to accomplish it’s primary goals, but all through a highly tuned gameplay loop that encourages situational awareness and engagement to create an engine for inducing the flow state. Splatoon‘s greater context of youth-dominated urban spaces playing host to the world’s coolest city-wide paintball matches encourages an inviting environment of constant partying, and playing the game feels like that too; a nonstop party, three minutes at a time. It’s a lot of little hidden motivators working in tandem behind the scenes that create this overall vibe. It’s amazing the sense of freedom I get from such a precisely controlled set of parameters. When I really get into a match of Splatoon, I hardly feel as though the space between myself and the world of the game exists at all. It’s like swimming in that exciting space. If I could master one aspect of Splatoon‘s design it would be that.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt runs through an office complex with floors and walls drenched with green and purple ink. With a giant paintbrush she leaves behind purple ink as she goes. Several ink-bombs go off around her before a countdown timer reaches zero, as a barrier of caution tape with the word "Game!" written on each piece covers the screen.

Stay Fresh…

Thoughts on Multiversus: Sticking Out In Well-Explored Territory

I’ve spent a few hours playing Warner Brothers’ answer to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. this week. Yeah, Warner Brothers. Seemingly also an answer to, uh, I guess Viacom’s Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl. (MultiVersus developed by Player First Games and Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl developed by Fair Play Labs and Ludosity). It’s funny video games’ premiere crossover game has met its competition lately from the television and film industry. Or maybe not quite competition. I’ve had a lot of fun playing MultiVersus, and it definitely gives me some of the same chaotic, good vibes of a good Smash Bros. session, but it also feels distinct in some key ways. MultiVersus has been pulling some impressive concurrent player numbers and seems to have drawn a great deal of positive attention. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here, so these are more or less my first impressions and initial thoughts on the matter.

Finn and Superman team up to fight Batman and Harley Quinn on a concert stage from the show Rick and Morty — Ah yes, the classic matchup. Superman, Batman… Harley Quinn… and Finn The Human from Adventure Time

Drawing People In

I think of lot of MultiVersus‘s initial success can be attributed to some very savvy distribution and marketing decisions on their part. The game dropped with an absolutely delightful fully animated short featuring some of the more surprising inclusions to the game. Fighting games are complicated beasts, and as crucial as their nuances may seem to the enthusiast and designer, it’s often the case that an audience is found by virtue of aesthetics or indeed, character roster. Smash Bros. has earned its reputation as mechanically deep and irrepressibly fun to play, but lots of games are like that – Smash is so huge because it has a singularly unmatched roster of characters. The absurdity of Arya Stark defending Bugs Bunny from a batarang may be matched only by the absurdity of the Iron Giant rolling up alongside actual Superman. MultiVersus starts strong with a trailer that features a great deal of the character roster, including surprising editions with devoted pre-baked fanbases, in out-there abnormal team-ups and head-to-heads.

The aesthetic of this game is just appealing too. Not too fancy on graphical fidelity, but the game has a soft, round, inviting look to it and all of its characters. The models are animated well and look quite appealing from the middle-distance a player is going to seem them in the heat of battle. The inclusion of not just voice acting, but the legitimate, genuine article original voices for much of the cast is a huge appeal for me personally. As much passion as Nickelodeon All Star Brawl clearly had, I struggled to maintain an interest in the game when it was eerily silent, without the iconic voices that helped make its cartoon fighting cast stars in the first place. Their post-launched inclusion in an update was much appreciated, but the production values of that game, likely on the basis of budget, simply don’t compare to the push Warner Bros. has clearly given to the development of MultiVersus, financially speaking.

Maybe it’s not that surprising that TV and film companies see opportunity in the crossover fighter space. Original characters, regrettably, just don’t have the kind of draw that legacy characters do for a genre like platform fighter, that has traditionally only maintained a few active games. Even then, Smash is arguably the only one that’s achieved mainstream appeal. When Sony last challenged the throne with PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale in 2012, they struggled to populate the game’s roster with characters that are as instantly marketable as Superman, Batman, Bugs, Adventure Time‘s Jake The Dog, Tom and Jerry, and, uh, Lebron James. Warner Bros., obviously, owns a lot of properties, so they’ve got an inherent edge in that marketability by way of character roster. Selling on the merits of your character roster is essentially selling on the merits of your game’s possibility for play. When someone sees the Iron Giant – it primes their imagination for what is possible in your game, because even if you don’t know the Iron Giant, he’s a big terrifying metal man with jet boosters. It gets a potential audience excited in a way the presence of something more abstract like a “wave dash” never could. Not that mechanics are unimportant to retaining your audience, but more on that later.

The Iron Giant, a massive robot, picks up and throws Shaggy from Scoobie Doo, before jumping on him in a grid-lined empty arena. — I always knew shaggy could totally take The Iron Giant in a fight. Now I can prove it.

Next to consider, the game is free. Now I have a lot of personal issues with some of the particulars of the game’s monetization strategy, but it cannot be denied that playing the game, at bare minimum, costs not a penny. That’s something MultiVersus has over its contemporaries and seems a natural fit for fighting games. Free-to-play gained a lot of notoriety among business types for its wild success on behalf of games like League of Legends, games about battling between champions chosen from a huge roster of distinct characters sporting unique abilities. A high-skill-ceiling game that rewards intimate knowledge of the game’s intricacies, experimentation with multiple characters, and an understanding of how all the different characters interact. Yeah, a fighting game also seems a good fit.

Finally, with modern netcode and full cross-platform play support, MultiVersus has a refreshingly smooth online experience. For all of its popularity and quality in other areas, Smash Bros. has never been able to say that for itself. I cannot understate how delightful it is to be able to install a game on multiple platforms, pick it up where and when I choose, carrying all of my game progress between machines, and play with any of my friends who are all using their preferred devices. It really makes online games without this feature feel… a little archaic. Honestly, this is the form online gaming always should’ve taken since its inception.

“Platform Fighting Games”

With all that tertiary stuff going for it, it’s no wonder MutiVersus has retained such a player base and media presence in the last few days. People are loving it. A game can’t be carried by media presence alone though and I can confirm that the game is, indeed, fun to play. MultiVersus is a “platform fighting game” like Smash Bros. before it. Smash is certainly the most famous and successful of these, but there have been more platform fighting games than you might think. In addition to the recent Nickelodeon, there’s been a number of indie games following the formula like Brawlhala and Rivals of Aether, and also weird stuff you might’ve never heard of like DreamMix TV World Fighters, developed by Bitstep and published by Hudson, a crossover fighting game featuring the likes of Bomberman and Optimus Prime. Really.

I think one reason platform fighting games haven’t had the same presence as traditional fighters like Street Fighter or Dragon Ball FighterZ, despite one of the genre’s advantages being its beginner-friendly nature, is the ever-present shadow of Super Smash Bros. No other platform fighter has been near as successful as of now, to the point that “platform fighters” were once “smash clones” much as first-person shooters started their history as “doom clones”. But, as with Doom I think there’s been a period of experimentation with with these Smash Bros. off-shoots that have tested the water of what can be done to distinguish oneself from Smash while remaining familiar enough to draw in the players looking for platform fighting games. How much do you change? How much do you keep? Player First Games’ answer? Not too much, but just enough.

Platform fighting games are by nature more beginner friendly than the traditional variety of fighting game, with a greater degree of freedom of movement baked-in, and less reliance on complex minimally-visible mechanics. Multiversus well leans into this strength, even in some ways better than Smash. For example there are much more robust control customization features, allowing you to do things like separating combo moves and charged moves to two different buttons, or swapping what moves are mapped to neutral button presses and directional button presses, among others. Movesets are somewhat limited, even, which could potentially be a mark against it for some, but really does make the game simple to pickup and play. I’d go as far to call it somewhat button-mashy. You may find success just throwing attacks out there. I think there’s some depth to be found here though, the game seems much more naturally suited combo strings that Smash, allowing plays to intuitively juggle their opponents and give chase. And although things can get a little chaotic and hard to read, the action does remain readable if you concentrate, I’ve found, and just a little getting used to if you’re coming from Smash.

There’s a lot familiar here to platform fighter veterans. Characters have their standard attacks, which change depending on directional input, as well as four special attacks likewise influenced by direction. Taking damage makes you more vulnerable to being launched by enemy attacks, and getting launched past the game’s boundaries results in a KO. The ringout KO with ramping knockback from damage is one of Smash’s most elegant inventions, I think. It’s such a natural fit for a fighting game with platforming because it makes one thinking about their standing position within space. Most fighting games exist on an abstract flat plane, with implied impenetrable barriers on either side. The terrain is not a concern there. In platform fighters, where the player’s relationship to the terrain is as important as their relationship to their opponent, a win condition involving the ejection of your opponent from the terrain is brilliant. Some other platform fighters like PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale have had win conditions that just did not work for me, because they de-emphasized this player relationship to the battle arena in a way that made the platforming capabilities of the characters feel somewhat redundant. MultiVersus knows what to crib from its contemporaries.

Finn the human teams up with Superman to fight Batman and Harley Quinn on a floating concert stage from the show Rick and Morty. Finn digs BMO the living calculator from his backpack, then holds BMO up as he karate chops Batman and Harley Quinn into the distance. — Finn’s down-special operates like a simpler version of Hero’s from Smash

It’s also a little different though. Weird and unique decisions like giving Finn the Human from Adventure Time the ability to charge his attacks while moving keep the game fresh. Most characters have such small interesting unique mechanics, in addition to bigger and noticeable ones. On a broader scale, this game has some intense aerial mobility. Every character practically plays like Sora from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, flowing nimbly through the air at high speeds. In Smash, players are allowed two jumps and a recovery attack to stop themselves from falling off the arena. In MutliVersus, you can use a recovery twice, air-dodge twice, then climb up an vertical surface. They really didn’t want people falling off the stage by accident. In free-for-all mode, the edges of the play area draw in, making the safe ground smaller when the round’s timer nears its end. It’s a pretty elegant way to prevent camping, an often reviled somewhat bad-faith way of playing, which I think is quite clever, especially in a ‘just for fun’ party mode like free-for-all. I always appreciate fighting games that encourage engaging the enemy and utilizing the fighting mechanics, rather than just turtling up or running away.

Another unique and rather clever angle the game has is that it’s 2v2 focused. Now this is a mechanic that I think does come across somewhat in building your initial audience, because it has such an overriding effect on the game’s design and, like the character roster, is something that can spark a general audience’s imagination. Some people play games for the experience of being a support role for their friends. These people, I’d say, are less likely to play traditional fighting games, but the presence of characters with a support-specific focus like Wonder Woman or Reindog might be appealing to them. You can really feel the way the game wants to encourage team-play too. The presence of cooldowns, a rarity in Smash Bros., encourages teams coordinating their available resources and the timing of their most valuable moves. Having support roles in a fighting games allows MultiVersus to do things that Smash simply doesn’t, carving its own niche.

Superman and Finn The Human from Adventure Time team up to fight with Wonder Woman and Steven Universe. Superman's ice breath slows so Finn can followup, and Stephen creates a barrier with his shield for Wonder Woman. — Superman’s ice breath slows so Finn can followup, and Stephen creates a barrier with his shield for Wonder Woman

The game also just makes some design decisions for their fighters that just seems very… not Smash, not necessarily in a bad way. Smash is far from creatively stifled but it does have a little bit of a brand, and that’s fine. It’s nice to see its contemporaries establish their own brand though! Some of the wacky stuff characters can do feel like things Smash didn’t really start doing until the later downloadable characters of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. When I see the Iron Giant enormously stomping around the battlefield in MultiVersus I can’t help but think of the years hand-wringing online discourse had about the inclusion of “too big” space dragon Ridley from the Metroid series as a fighter in Smash. He got in anyway (and I will go to my grave being smug about that), but at quite a modest relative size. I love the depiction of Ridley in Smash, he’s practically perfect. Iron Giant though, I think is going to be a very memorable fighter in his own right, because the developers of MultiVersus feel so unrestrained by tradition, while respecting the foundations that were the inception of the genre they’re iterating on.

There’s a lot more to see and learn about MultiVersus. I’m sure there’s an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge yet to be discovered about combo strings, frame data, tier lists, and other such silliness, but on first blush the game is a blast and is doing a commendable job of setting itself apart from obvious comparisons. It’s production values are exceptional, its roster is absolutely wild and it’s free… more or less. My issues with monetization are the biggest sticking point for me. I don’t know if I want to talk about that here, though. At any rate, I’ve had platform fighters on the brain and wanted to get my thoughts out there.

Two Finn(s) The Human, Batman, and Wonder Woman duke it out in a 2D bat-cave themed arena. The Finns slash their swords, Batman throws punches, and Wonder Woman bashes with her shield as gouts of steam erupt from the ground.

Mathematical!