Mega Man Zero 2

Another day, another Mega Man Zero game checked off. This time around, I'll touch on gameplay.

All of the basics from Mega Man and Mega Man X are back. You've got your basic run-and-gun platforming, you've got hidden power-ups, and you've got that "choose your own adventure" style freedom to select which stages you play in almost any order. However, there are some key differences between this series (so far) and the two that preceded it.

Stage Selection:

In the Mega Man X games, the order in which you chose to beat levels had an affect on the levels themselves. In the first game, for instance, once you beat Storm Eagle, his ship crashes into Spark Mandrill's power plant stage, which makes it much easier to handle. There's a heart power-up in Flame Mammoth's level that you can't get to unless you've already beaten Chill Penguin; likewise, there's a heart in Chill Penguin's level that you can't uncover until you've beaten Flame Mammoth and have his flamethrower weapon. So any 100% run in Mega Man X involves visiting levels after you've already beaten them. And furthermore, there are eight stages in these games, traditionally, that you can beat in any order. You don't have that same freedom so far through two Mega Man Zero games. In the first one, there were three missions available at once, and you could select any of them, but that still made things progress in a very specific and mostly predetermined order. Part of the charm of Mega Man was that freelancing ability to play things in any order. It's a minor change, but it's one I'm noticing.

Boss Weapons and Weaknesses:

Here, almost every boss has some sort of elemental weakness. Fire seems to damage water and ice-based enemies, paradoxically; ice hurts wind and lightning-based enemies, and it's lightning that hurts fire-based enemies. But that's all! Back in Mega Man and Mega Man X, every time you beat a boss you acquired a new weapon. Furthermore, every boss was weak against another boss's weapon - and often in creative ways. Here, that's just less so the case.

Weapons:

On the bright side, Zero has way more basic weapons at his disposal than Mega Man or X ever did. In addition to the buster (gun, basically), Zero has a saber and a boomerang and a grappling hook. The saber, in particular, just dishes out all kinds of punishment. You could play as Zero in Mega Man X3 and X4, and all he could use there was the saber, so it's nothing new. Still, having both a saber and a buster brings a whole new element to this type of gameplay.

Power-Ups and Cyber Elves:

The classic Mega Man series didn't really have these, but Mega Man X made all kinds of hay out of hidden power-ups that made you stronger and more powerful, or that gave you new abilities. Chief among these were the heart tanks - one per stage - that increased your life bar. In Mega Man Zero, these are sort of still around. The heart tanks are gone, but you can still increase your maximum HP by finding specific cyber-elves. Cyber-elves are a new gimmick in the Mega Man Zero series, and I'm not a huge fan so far. There are tons of them to find in each stage. To use them, you need to level them up by collecting energy that occasionally falls from defeated enemies. And they do just about everything. Some will increase your life bar, others will turn into sub tanks, and several more become these one-time-use instant-cures. Why not just spread heart tanks and sub tanks throughout the stages instead, like in the good old days?

Leveling Up:

This is the worst. There was no reason for Mega Man Zero to do this, but, neither your buster nor your saber is capable of charging up early on in the game. In order to unlock charged shots - and to strengthen the weapons in general - you need to use them. Like, a lot. The only real effect of this is that players just farm enemies for half an hour upon starting the game, grinding their way to having charged shots and stronger saber attacks. Why bother with this? Mega Man games have never needed grinding before.

Difficulty:

I lied - this is the worst. These games are brutally hard. Most of the difficulty is fine - just well-designed and challenging gameplay, really - but occasionally these games will give you a really cheap death due to an off-screen trap or an unseen pitfall. There's nothing wrong with trial-and-error learning curves, but they work a lot better in something like Super Meat Boy, where levels are ridiculously brief and precision timing is everything. Here in the Mega Man Zero games, a silly and unpreventable death might set you back two full minutes. Where's the fun in that?

Now, one last caveat - I'm playing through the Mega Man Zero Collection on a mode called "Easy Scenario." It's almost an unreasonably cheap way to get through the game - some have dismissed it as a god mode of sorts - but what it does is give you all kinds of hidden power-ups from the get-go. So in both games so far, for instance, I've played with a maximum health bar the whole way. And my saber and buster start out fully charged, and I've already got at least a few of the sub tanks. I'm torn about this. On the one hand, it's making these games much shorter and easier and allowing me to appreciate the story, the art, the design, and everything else without really worrying about the insanely hard gameplay. That's not to say I haven't died - I've died a lot, particularly from the aforementioned pitfalls - but I can't pretend I've "earned" any sort of completion status on either of these games so far. But, yeah, on the other hand, I'm robbing myself of the experience of finding all the cyber-elves and power-ups. A ton of the monotony is gone, but so is the rewarding feeling you get as you build up your character's strength throughout the game. It all kind of feels like starting a "New Game+" in an RPG. Look, as always, I appreciate every opportunity to make a game shorter or easier than it needs to be; I'll spend extra time on the ones that merit it, but I've still got more than 60 games in my backlog, and I just can't devote as much time to exploring them as fully as I'd like to.

In conclusion, the Zero series so far doesn't have quite the same feel as the X games did, and that's too bad. But it's also entirely understandable, and these games have been plenty enjoyable - probably more so than later X games, actually.

Mega Man Zero

Long-time readers know I've got a love-hate relationship with the Mega Man franchise. I mean, I love it, and in particular I love Mega Man X, but for two weeks or so I hated the sheer volume of Mega Man I was playing as I ripped through two separate compilations (the Mega Man Anniversary Collection and the Mega Man X Collection) of admittedly repetitive run-and-gun platforming. Alas, I just don't know when to quit, because a few months ago I purchased the Mega Man Zero Collection, another Mega Man compilation. Yikes!

This one covers the entirety of a third subseries: the Mega Man Zero games. There are four of them, all released on the Game Boy Advance between 2002 and 2005. In these games, you play as Zero, the badass from the Mega Man X series who serves as a mentor and role model to X. Now, right off the bat, Zero's charisma and unflappable cool are gone, since you're the one controlling Zero and making mistakes, but whatever - that's still cool!

The first game in the series took me two and a half hours to beat on easy mode and I expect more of the same going forward, so I'll keep this post brief and try to touch on some gameplay comments and criticisms in an upcoming post.

The World Ends with You

I bought this game not out of the blue, but specifically after holding off for several years after its release in 2008. Any RPG from Square merits at least a strong consideration on my part, but there was always something a little bit off about this game. What finally got me to buy in was a recommendation from somewhere on the Internet, based on how much I had enjoyed both Zero Escape games on the DS. Each of those games had a pretty mind-bending mystery at its core, and if I could play an RPG with a similar set of twists, why wouldn't I?

Now, it's often been said that there are three key design elements of all Japanese role-playing games: plot, exploration, and combat. "Plot" is more or less the story the game tells as you push your way through it. Who are these characters? What are their goals? What stands in their way? That sort of stuff. "Exploration" is everything you do in the game that doesn't directly relate to advancing the plot, like walking around town talking to random people, taking on a side quest, going places you don't need to go, watching scenes that you don't need to watch, and so on. There's often some overlap between plot and exploration, but it usually isn't hard to categorize chunks of different games as one or the other when push comes to shove. Lastly, combat consists, obviously, of all the fights and battles in a game, and more broadly of the entire battle system the game has set up, from move sets to character stats.

The best RPGs excel at all three of these elements, and different types of RPGs add emphasis to different aspects. An MMORPG is, by nature, going to be light on plot but extremely heavy on exploration. A strategy RPG will make its hay in the intricacies of its combat. And then there are RPGs with epic, sprawling stories where the scope and emotional impact of the story is the selling point itself. Let me take a minute now to go over The World Ends with You and see if that's the best way to explain my own reaction to it.

• Plot: The story really was the hook this game had going for it. You play as Neku, a boy who wakes up one day to find himself an unwilling participant in a game where losing means dying. The game takes place on an alternate plane of reality, and the participants can see everything in the real world, but cannot interact with anyone; they're essentially ghosts. Neku partners up with three different people over the course of the game, trying to survive and also to figure out why he's here at all. It's not the best or deepest story in the world, but the constant twists keep it entertaining and interesting enough to grant it a solid B.
• Exploration: Here's where the game starts to suffer. The entire story takes place in a subsection of Tokyo, which means that all the environments end up looking the same. Furthermore, since there aren't a lot of people to interact with from the ghost world, there really isn't much optional dialogue. The game also employs all kinds of roadblocks that don't allow you to progress on much more than a linear track. It's about as straightforward as a rail shooter, unfortunately.
• Combat: In a nutshell, a total mess. First of all, you have to use the stylus to swipe and tap on enemies on the screen moving in real time. Complicating things, your partner battles on the top screen and is controlled by the directional pad. The partner will enter auto-battle mode by default - which is something I learned not to mess with, very quickly - but that just means I spent lots of battles tapping and swiping enemies that were already getting hit by my partner. There was also a "pin" concept that replaced the standard weapon equipment aspect of gameplay, and these pins stood in for attacks and healing spells, and I'm not sure I ever understood it or made much sense of it. The combat here was bold and innovative, but it was kind of a disaster in implementation - at least for me.

So at the end of the day, this was a game that felt broken even if it wasn't, and one that didn't allow you to do much of anything beyond pushing through the end-to-end story. That story wasn't bad, but it also wasn't amazing, and a decent story alone doesn't make any game worth spending twenty hours playing. I wanted to like The World Ends with You, and I want to give it acclaim for being so unique and unusual, but ultimately I found it to be little more than a twenty-hour slog with frustrating combat. Oh well!

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

One gift. Forty dollars. Thirty-three games. A year and a half. One Keith. Two more games. Thirty-five total games. And now, finally, at long last, I bid adieu to the Genesis Project. Oh, happy day!

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is a game I've played before, on a PC, back at some point in the '90s. It's also a show I watched a decent amount when I was a kid. The premise is pretty simple, for anyone who isn't familiar. Carmen Sandiego is a world-traveling criminal mastermind who steals precious artifacts and national treasures from cities all over the world. Your job in these games is to track her and her henchmen down by figuring out where to travel next and what your suspect looks like. The basic pattern is that you start out in one city, and ask people questions. Some will give you information on what your suspect looks like ("she was trying to conceal a tattoo on her shoulder") or where your suspect was heading next ("he exchanged all of his money for francs"). I've always been a bit of a map nerd - geography, history, countries and capitals, etc. - and so I've always had a soft spot for these games. They're baldly educational in nature, and entirely boring if you don't like piecing clues together. That's okay though, since the menu-based gameplay made for one of the least broken Sega Genesis games I've ever played.

One interesting aspect of this game was that, since it was made in 1992, it contained all kinds of dated references. I mentioned francs above, and often the biggest clues for where to head next were based on 2015-extinct currencies. Another big one was flags. "He headed somewhere with a green and white flag," someone would say, but when I looked at my available options for where to head next, none of them had a green and white flag. Yeah, I used my cell phone to look up some cities and regions and flags and such, and I can't imagine what it was like for a kid playing this game in 1992. "Let's go to the library, Mom. I need to look up where Patagonia is in the World Book Encyclopedia!"

Anyway, this was a fitting way for me to end the Genesis Project. I can't rule out that I'll ever buy another Sega Genesis game - I do have a working Sega Genesis now, after all, and who knows what old obscurity may tickle my fancy one night? - but for now that thing is heading back to the closet in order to free up the A/V slots on my guest room TV. I've got a long overdue date with some PS2 titles...

Ecco: The Tides of Time

Ecco the Dolphin

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

Arrow Flash

Golden Axe

Alien Storm

Virtua Fighter 2

Fatal Labyrinth

Ecco Jr.

Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master

Streets of Rage 3

Gain Ground

Streets of Rage 2

Golden Axe II

Kid Chameleon

DecapAttack

Comix Zone

Vectorman 2

Vectorman

ESWAT: City Under Siege

Streets of Rage

Chakan: The Forever Man

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle

Eternal Champions

Risky Woods

The Ooze

Jewel Master

Shadow Dancer

Columns III

Columns

Crack Down

Golden Axe III

Altered Beast

Bonanza Brothers

Sword of Sodan

And the Mountains Echoed

Here's the third book from Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-born doctor-turned-writer responsible for The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. Those two books focused, broadly, on father-son relationships and mother-daughter relationships, respectively. Here in And the Mountains Echoed, Hosseini has taken a stab at exploring the ties that bind siblings to one another.

This 400-page book is nominally a novel, but in truth it's a collection of nine different short stories that intertwine in different places. It takes place not just in Afghanistan, but also in France and America, across seventy years. Each of the book's nine chapters was told from a different point of view. The result, at least for me, was a book that ended up being less than the sum of its parts. The scope and breadth here were impressive, but no character or story was given any real prominence here. That doesn't mean the stories weren't all impressive on an individual level - sad, tragic, uplifting, cynical, enlightening, you name it - but just that they didn't combine thematically or plot-wise into something more for me. Which is fine!

Honestly, Hosseini's writing has gotten a bit formulaic for me by now - which is also fine! Beyond taking place in Afghanistan, all of his work seems to feature elements like wealth gaps, codependent relationships, life-altering accidents, redemption arcs, and adoption. Most of the time, when his characters start out with some kind of advantage - wealth, beauty, power, intelligence, for instance - they'll have the tables turned on them and have to learn to cope with new circumstances. The man is still an effective storyteller - I'm just familiar with his tricks now.

The nine chapters really varied, not so much in quality but in tone and message. None were particularly bad or boring, but some stayed with me in ways others didn't. My favorite involved two cousins who had emigrated to America, visiting Afghanistan after the war. One cousin loved to throw his money around and show off his generosity, while the other quietly judged him for it and preferred making deeper connections with individual people. The conclusion was a real gut punch, but it was so satisfyingly realistic. Another story that stuck with me involved a man who fell in love with his master's young and beautiful wife. He had an opportunity to follow her when she left her husband one night and fled the country, but instead he stayed behind, ultimately becoming the man's caretaker for several ensuing decades. Lastly, the book's final chapter picked up on the thread left behind by the first chapter, and gave a very bittersweet conclusion to two separated siblings after close to seventy years.

These stories and all the rest were touching and enjoyable, but collectively they didn't really compliment one another. There was no impeccably woven tapestry by the end of this book as much as there were several different strands only loosely tied together. The stories all work - truly, there isn't a dud in the bunch - but collectively they make for a shallower novel than Hosseini's previous two efforts. I'm still glad that I read it, and I'd likely be back for more if he decided to write a fourth book one day.

It's Our Sixth Anniversary

Or at least it was, a few days ago. Just for the sake of documenting where I stand:

Hey, look at that. I may be the only one left here, but I just had my second-best year of backlog progress, and best since the very first one! Long live the blog!

Good night, everyone.