Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie
( Christ, that's gotta be one of the longest titles I've seen for a video game!) In fact...no, several games kick its ass in the Long Title Department. But still, that's one long title, and not a lot of it makes sense in the context of the game. OK, so there's a big space fortress and you invade it as an anime robot, but what the hell is Scrambled Valkyrie supposed to mean? I can't even come up with a joke for that phrase, that's how randomly insane it is! In fact, if I were asked to describe this game, I'd point somebody to this very blog and call it a day. But if they were lazy or had some attention deficit problem, I'd use the phrase "randomly insane." My first example should be incredibly obvious by now: the story. Yes, I know, story in a shooter matters as much as it did in Avatar, but in Scrambled Valkyrie, things get weird in every way when you examine the story. The first thing you'll notice is an English message which alludes to a previous games. Two things wrong with that: this game was only released in Japan, and there was no previous game. This is the first one. There's not even an anime or manga or potato chip it's based on, this game was made completely on its own. Anyway, after a poor translation telling you about a game that doesn't exist, you find out that you're supposed to rescue a pop-star who was captured by space aliens to....wait, what the hell is this?
What am I doing? Again, absolutely none of that makes any form of sense. And it doesn't stop there; it stops at the section immediately after this one. This section concerns the bosses, who often reside in the realm of the crazy. At any given time, they can fill about 90% of the screen with glowing death balls, leading to a quick death. The rest of the game isn't like this, so it comes off as cheap that the bosses can make areas ridiculously hard to navigate without losing 3 inches off your life bar and two levels of your 3-level-powered-up weapon. The only exception to this rule seems to be the almost-final boss, who can easily be beaten by staying in one corner and shooting him betwixt his paintball barrages.
Oh, what's that? You're confused about my mentioning the life bar? Yes, this is one of those rare shmups where you actually have a life bar, so rather than losing all progress at the hands of a renegade bullet, you lose health before losing all your progress at the hands of a renegade bullet. Then again, there's not much room for progression in this game; you only have three weapons, and, as I said before, you can only get them up to a third level of screen death. While that may make them sound weak at their best, their third level is actually enough to blow up a black hole, somehow. And while that may make the game sound like a piss-easy excuse for a shooter where you just glue down the shoot button and wait an hour or two, again, that's not the case. There's actually some strategy in using your weapons, since one weapon can kill things above/below you and another can make things blow up in about half a second. It all makes for that rare type of shmup that's satisfying without constantly asking your for quarters you don't have.
However, there's one weapon....hold on *checks wiki for this* Winky Soft....ew....forgot to include: one that shoots backwards. I say "forgot" instead of "not included" because a lot of the enemies tend to come from behind, presumably because you get extra points if you shoot the good guy straight in his butthole. Sure, it's creative, something Scrambled Valkyrie is really good at, but creativity means nothing if it screws with the game in a significant way. Coincidentally, creativity amounts to nothing if you don't make the gamer know that you're being creative. I bring this up because there actually is a way to shoot backwards; it's just that you'll never figure it out. What you have to do is not shoot, wait for your ship to short circuit, and then RAM YOURSELF INTO THE ENEMY. Depending on the enemy, they'll either lose enough intelligence to shoot their former allies, or they'll do nothing and you'll lose health. The prospect of recruiting different enemies does sound like an interesting idea, but given that and the small number of usable enemies, it feels like an underdeveloped f...wait, what am I doing again? I like this game, why did I spend an entire blog doing nothing but criticizing it? Let me give it the Assault on Dark Athena Award for Good Shooters with Long Ass Titles, hoping that it makes up for all the nasty things I've said so far.
Review Synopsis
- It does quite a few creative things, like weapon swapping and enemy control, but with varied success.
- Everything about the story confuses me. Seriously, everything.
- Oh, I forgot to mention that the final boss is a snow-summoning fetus. Try to sleep tonight.
These have to be the least competent criminals ever, and this has to be the most confusing commercial ever. Seriously, who the hell uses a blowtorch to light dynamite!?
Mega Man Zero
( Very rarely am I able to give a game an award before I've played it.) Rarer still am I able to give a game an award within the first paragraph. However, with Mega Man Zero, I don't have much of a choice. I know it, you know it, this game's getting the Most Misleading Game Title Award until I forget that I gave it to this game. I'm pretty sure few of you have played it (confusing the hell out of me *points to above line*), so let me explain: Mega Man Zero isn't a prequel where we find out what Mega Man did before Dr. Light turned him into a less pedo-baiting version of Astro Boy; no, this game is about the character Zero in a desolate future that isn't the exact same one from X. In fact, Mega Man X is the reason the futurer future is so shit: feeling the need to reinvent himself AGAIN, X decided to become a Reploid killing villain, completely forgetting everything from the X games ever. Because of this, some resistance movement has to revive Zero and make him beat up X alone. You might call them the laziest bastards in the world, but given the fact that several of the missions have you rescuing them from locations within walking distance (you literally walk there) from the base, I'm betting that they're somehow less competent than those two criminals from before. "What does any of this have to do with Mega Man", you ask me completely aware that I've made this joke about 30 times before. "Aren't most Mega Man stories the exact same thing?" Yes, they are, but two things wrong with that here: Zero is a bit more subtle about the repetitive parts, and there's a greater focus on the story than before. Instead of levels, you get to choose from a list of missions.
And what reward do you get for following the rules? Some cyber-elves (imagine Pokemon you can eat) and a new weapon...element. This is where Zero tries to draw attention away from the the words "Mega Man" plastered on the box, as the weapon system in this game is incredibly removed from Mega Man. Of course, those last four words could be summed up as "under-developed"; you only get three elements to assign to three weapons, making for a total of nine weapons. Sure, you can level up the weapons to widen their capabilities, but the pissant number of killing tools you get makes the game very limiting. Trust me, it's very limiting when all the weapons behave the same except for when you occasionally find out a boss's weakness. Again, unlike every other Mega Man game ever, not only is it possible to beat a boss without exploiting their arbitrary weakness, but actually using the death weapon won't knock off about 1200% of their health.
Wait a minute, I just realized something: this game is actually....creative? I know it isn't truly creative (ripping off GTA, keeping some of MM's flaws), but still, this is MEGA MAN doing something that's CREATIVE! And sure, some of it sucks (see a directional weapon....that isn't a gun), but still, this is Capcom doing something creative with some degree of success. What the hell is going on!? You....you're not the Mega Man I know! You're better than the Mega Man I know, in about 80% of the way. (The extra 20% I took off for a crap ending and mythology vomiting on the boss selection.)
Review Synopsis
- Wait, the story is something MORE than "kill eight weirdos, then kill them again before killing their leader"?
- OK, change accepted, but how do you fuck up the one defining feature of the games?
- The slight open world concept may feel gimmicky
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