Xator Nova

Note: I played on the hardest difficulty setting. I can see where Capcom was going with this. Play through the levels, and buy items in Dr. Light's shop with your hard earned bolts to help you prepare for each journey. There's a reason why Mega Man 11 features the longest levels in the franchise. The idea is to carefully consider what to invest on and what is more necessary for your journey, which should invite to a mental involvement with the game. It should be a huge cost to pay and you could lose it all in a game over. The problem is that Capcom somehow didn't consider how this would repercute on the player's behavior. Because enemies respawn, and there's always a chance to find bolts after destroying any enemy, it's very easy for any player to just start farming for them, and the result is that the tension of what should a player invest in disappears, since they can just buy everything at the shop after some sessions of collecting materials. Nothing in the g...

This is better than I remembered. Everything is right in its place. Disregarding the obvious inherited aspects of the original (lack of a map, black backgrounds, floating jump mechanics, only having one type of weapon at a time) that work just as well here, the changes reshape the meaning of the experience. The close camera to represent a dark cavern where watching ahead is difficult, the repeated tiles to simulate the feeling of getting lost the more one enters into labyrinthine places, and the black-and-white coloration that strengthens the limited vision. In a sense, you can interpret these elements as the developer's way to put the player in Samus's perspective, and they help as well to give thrill to the anticipation of an encounter. Even if the game is linear, it's easy to stop having track on where to go if you don't pay attention, and even if the game has some modern conventions such as save points and healing spots, it's not nearly as bad as modern works b...

In this game you grab falling blocks and throw them upwards. You can grab more than one, albeit of the same colour. Matching three same-coloured blocks in a column destroys them, alongside adjacent ones of the same colour. Two design decisions contribute to the success of Data East's Magical Drop III: - The quota of destroyed blocks that the player can fulfill to win the duel, which prevents stalling. - Multiple groups of matching blocks affecting the speed of which the opponent's blocks start falling down. These two factors encourage the player to concatenate matching blocks in as few actions as possible. The key word here: Efficiency. However, blocks falling down threaten the player with a defeat, thus creating urgency to destroy blocks near the bottom. Urgency and efficiency clash with each other. It's a choice, except it's not just once, but multiple times per second, many steps ahead, while you desperately move your avatar to grab and throw blocks, and possibly mes...

In spite of the advertising claims from developers, Three Houses doesn't really resemble Genealogy of the Holy War. The drama between the protagonists in Three Houses, Edelgard, Dimitri and Claude, is different than Sigurd's, Quan's and Eldigan's in Genealogy. In Three Houses, the student representatives are barely friends. They're rather rivals, while in Genealogy, the trio is perceived from the moment they're introduced that they're very close friends. It isn't about moral or political dilemmas or perceiving different perspectives either. The game becomes actually worse being interpreted this way, since one isn't conscious of the implications of each faction when you're choosing a team, and it avoids having a political position to suggest opposite options as equally positive to the social conditions of its world, which is a coward measure to dress a story with vagueness to fake depth while avoiding alienating the audience. A purely commerci...

I have already published my opinion on Pokémon , and everything said there, good and bad, especially regarding the seventh generation, applies broadly to Pokémon Let's Go. However, the game differentiates itself from previous entries due to the capture system. Pokémon Let's Go abandons random combats and instead makes its wild creatures visible on the field, while removing combat in favor of allowing the player to face the creature and capture it directly. To give complexity to this mechanic, the game takes the capture system from Pokémon Go, where a precise throw becomes decisive. Moreover, the more precise is the throw, or better streak you have, the more experience you get, which is the game's incentive to master this system. Beyond trying to catch the attention of players that entered the series through Pokémon Go, the developers offer a different perspective to the essence of the franchise: To simulate the search and capture of creatures. Pokémon Let's Go i...

Note: This was originally posted in Twitlonger in April 6th 2018. I'm reposting this as a commemoration of the anniversary of Isao Takahata's departure. When I was a child, probably around four-years old, there was a TV show that most children of my generation used to watch, which was called "Marco - From the Apennines to the Andes" . It was the story of a little poor boy who travelled across the ocean to find his sick mother. I didn't know why at the time, but there was something very unusual about this series compared to other children shows I used to watch. Maybe because it was the very first Japanese animation I had seen, with the roughness that comes with it in comparison to children's entertainment in the West but even with more series under my belt, I realized that I was watching something more akin to real life, to more normal sentiments like loving your family, and wanting to do everything for them, regardless of your age. This was my first...

Gris is the worst game of 2018. Gris fails as an architectonic construct because as much as its imagery suggests beauty, the interaction with the world is empty. The details that are visually presented don't exist to the gameplay, creating a sensorial dissonance. Travelling through the landscape suggests going through stairs or small bumps of road, but the real input is pressing left and right, like if everything was flat. Gris fails as a platformer because there's no grace to the gravitational movement, no punishment for jumping wrong, no enrichment to use platforming for exploration. If you miss, you'll simply fall over and try again until you get it. Its only purpose is to trick the player that they're doing something while advancing and clearing puzzles and collectibles in order to justify that it's a game. It's so simple-minded that one wonders why it's there. It is inept as a statement about overcoming depression because of its vagueness: Instead...