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Video_Game_King

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Somehow, ninjas, legends, and Final Fantasy manage to disappoint.


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Mega Man Legends

( OK, this is going to be weird, kinda.) Remember how I said that I'd only blog about games I've already beaten? Go browse around my list of beaten games, if you want to destroy your computer. If your computer somehow survives exploding, you'll notice that Mega Man Legends isn't on there. So why'd I beat it? Look again, since I hate your computer and wish nothing but explosions upon it. If you're somehow invincible to shrapnel, you'll see that I've also beaten Mega Man 64, and they're the same thing. And they're not that good.
 
This becomes painfully obvious with the story, and this time, it actually means something. It's the future in Mega Man World (which I guess makes it the futurefuture), and the entire planet is covered in water. Civilization barely survives on the many scattered islands, and your only means of income is digging up the remnants of a civilization long dead. So it's like Waterworld, only much more boring, which is quite a feat, given that Waterworld's story spends a lot of time trying to crack a secret code that ends up being Chinese. How do you get duller and infinitely stupider than that? First, by changing the unreadable language to English; second, by populating the game with insignificant administrative and local politics bullshit. I am not kidding. The first major conflict in the game is Mega Man getting his state ID. It's like Capcom realized that they were releasing the same four games repeatedly and they decided to do something original, for a change....before realizing that they ran out of ideas ten years prior, at which point, they made a game about whatever they looked at in the brainstorming room. Hell, even when it looks like a genuinely interesting plot point comes up, they still manage to fuck up. For example, the villain ex machina intends to destroy all the humans o-sorry, I meant he wants to "purge" all the "carbons" present on the island. I didn't know you could eliminate global warming in one tiny area, let alone do it with a giant rod with an eye in the middle, an idea I'm sure you ripped from some porn somewhere, but whatever you say, Al Gore.
 
  Predictably, the answer is far more insulting than the question.
 Predictably, the answer is far more insulting than the question.
Moving onto the complete opposite of Al Gore: romance. I might as well mention that the game tries to establish a romance thing between the annoying as hell Tron Bonne and Mega Man, but, like everything else the game offers, falls flat on its ass. They just leave it at "Tron Bonne kinda likes her enemy" while Mega Man, for the most part, ignores the whole thing. He doesn't have time for romance; he's already spending his time making weird facial expressions and looking oddly 2D. Look at those graphics; there's something off about them. I know that they're 3D, but there's some oddly clean 2D quality to them that weirds me out. I don't know if it's some obscure cel-shading technique or a result of it trying to be a Mega Manime, only somewhat respectable (unlike the actual anime (let's get this out of the way right now so I never have to mention it again: there was a time in my life when I watched a ton of bad anime)), but nothing looks as 3D as it should. I'd say that the graphics actually one of the few strong points of the game, but the clipping issues eliminate any chance of that ever happening.
 
I know that you find it weird that I didn't mention the gameplay as the strongest point of the game, and I have a good reason for that: the gameplay eliminates any chance of that ever happening. Hell, I can't even figure out what this game is supposed to be. The obvious guess is a shooter, and if that's the case, it's not a good one. OK, so the controls allow you to run and jump well, but when it comes time to shoot something, you'll understand why that monkey was such a turd in the above picture. Without locking on, you can only shoot directly away from the camera, leaving you completely defenseless if you're running away or trying to shoot something to the side. I realize that there's a lock-on feature, but that just makes things worse, since you can't cycle between targets or even move. I'm guessing that's because the movement controls become your aiming controls during lock-on mode, but you can only aim when there aren't any enemies within the game's draw distance. But let's pretend that Capcom allowed you to aim at enemies that aren't close enough to deepthroat your head; this is when you find out that your futuristic energy gun has the range of a modern laser pointer. That's not very far, people who don't have cats.
 
  
 "I'm just going to look the other way and pretend that this is a good game."
Of course, you could always upgrade your gun. Turns out there are RPG aspects to the game, too; there's a lot of emphasis on exploring dungeons for treasure, and you have stats you can upgrade with crap you find in said dungeons. Nothing wrong with the dungeon parts, at least. Sure, they're not too memorable, and they're a bit hard to navigate, but they serve their function well enough. Unfortunately, that upgrading part isn't as good. I'm fine with upgrading my weapons so that they're more powerful; I just want my most basic weapons to shoot shit a mile away. You know, like how guns works. Wait, I said something about weapons exactly one line ago, didn't I? Oh, right, there are other weapons you can equip, too. They're OK, but I never found much of a reason to use them over my handy Mega Buster, since it has infinite ammo, unlike the other weapons, and you have it right from the beginning, unlike the other weapons. So where do you get the other weapons? Side quests that I suspect were only put in the game to make it longer, since, having skipped the damn things (I'm here to beat them, not get every last thing in them), I finished the game in about four hours. So on those merits, it sucks as an RPG, too.
 
The story's not helping things, either. Wait, I already did that. Just pretend that I said voices, OK? They suck, too. Like the story, they're duller than a sphere; unlike the story, however, they never seem to align well. I saw this in the N64 version, so I know that it's not some weird emulation issue; instead, I think Capcom, like Square, was just too lazy to change the damn mouth animations when they localized the game, the only difference being that Square wasn't as lazy as Capcom. I submit as proof the still-Japanese signs in some parts of the game. Do I need to say it? What I do need to say is that the voice acting fucks up beyond Godzilla levels of misalignment, reaching navgtr levels of just dying off. (That joke's not too soon, since you probably didn't even know that he's dead.) It's not present at the beginning of the game, but come second half of the Legends, cutscenes will start losing sound in the middle of them for no reason. Interestingly, though, you can still get the general gist of what's going on in the story without the bad voice acting, so I'm guessing what they're saying wasn't important.
 
Actually, now that I think about it, a lot of the game could be described as "not very important." I don't know where to start, but since I knocked out almost everything else, how about the open world stuff? Or, at least what little open world aspects there are; you can jump around the city, crash into invisible walls for no reason, play some OKish mini-games, and watch Mega "Not Quite Squeaky Classic, Not Quite Rebellious Teen X" Man get his ass deservedly run over. That's my favorite part of the game. It's probably the only time it doesn't fall flat on its ass trying to introduce variety. Take, for example, the boss battles. Wait, they're "missions." "Missions" that give you extremely condescending hints as to how to beat them. Fuck you for insulting my intelligence twice, Mega Man Legends. And fuck you for taking the Captain Novolin route of putting me on a boat without changing the gameplay in any significant manner. Do you even know what you want to be, Mega Man Legends? You have about nine trillion things going on at once, and none of them are really that good. I think you know what award this game is getting: Least Significant Use of Wily Award. I know that this sounds weird and extremely abrupt, but hear me out: remember how Wily had a major role in the preceding games (villain of the first, guy who created Zero/Sigma/both/whatever in X)? Forget all that, as he's nothing more than a random bit character you see for all of two minutes. Still, there's something...off about him. He's just as generic as everything else in the game, but that doesn't stop this odd fee-wait a minute.
 

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AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!! Dr Wily is Satan Claus! He's only a minor character because it's the perfect disguise. Excuse me for a second; I need to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. * turns on some Christmas music*
 

Review Synopsis

  • Wow, this game is really boring.
  • And broken.
  • And confused.
 
 
 
 
You bastards....WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!? I know that this is no accident. You disabled ratings and comments; you know what you've done, you monsters.
  
  

Joe & Mac: Cavemen Ninjas

( Let's get this out of the way right now: I'm just going to skip over FF12's portion of the "only use Final Fantasy music for the final countdown" part of Renegade Ego.) Wow, that's gotta be the longest musical intro line I've ever put in a blog. Anyway, there are several reasons why I'm not doing that. First, ever since SilvaGunner was banned on YouTube, it's been somewhat more difficult to find all the Final Fantasy music I use in this blog. Second, I don't like Final Fantasy XII. Man, was that a disappointing piece of crap. You know, like Joe & Mac: Cavemen Ninjas.
 
OK, so Joe & Mac isn't a piece of crap, but it sure as hell is disappointing, to some extent. Notice how the game is specifically called "Cavemen Ninjas?" Turns out that crap never comes up. Neither Joe nor Mac ever do anything close to ninja-y, so why are they called ninjas? You can't juts call yourself a ninja without qualifications, damn it! However, despite bastardizing the ninja name, Joe & Mac still manage to do pretty cool things. For example, the game begins with a bunch of rival cavemen stealing all your women. Given that you're rivals, I think, this inevitably begins your quest to rescue the women of the world. You know what that means, right? Yea, exactly: Joe & Mac are on a quest for poon. Oh god, yes. This entirely makes up for their heinous abuse of the word "ninjas." Oh, and I'm not the only one who thinks this, either; the game rewards such greatness by ending almost every level with a hot lady kissing you back to health.
 
  That girl on the right looks WAY to into it.
 That girl on the right looks WAY to into it.
Yes, this is one of those platformers that has a health system, like Noah's Ark and Ninja Gaiden, and like them, it's not at all necessary. Not in the Ninja Gaiden way, where you'll be bombarded with enough projectiles to make health completely worthless; it's more like Noah's Ark, where even the tiniest pebble is laced with poison cancer, meaning you can only survive a few hits before death. Granted, you can heal by stuffing your fat face with veggies and meat, but that's way too close for comfort. Combine this with the fact that cavemen move as slow as their own minds, and you're going to take a lot of hits. Combine that with the fact that you don't get extra lives (at least I didn't see any extra lives), and you can see how this game can become stupidly easily frustrating. So what the hell does it offer in return for all this? Well, not a helluva lot.
 
In fact, like half the games I blog about, it's nothing more than your average platformer. You jump through levels that feel like they were ripped from other games, on enemies that just don't stop coming, and towards hot women who will heal you with their sexy kisses. There's not a lot to separate it from other games, and what features it tries to use to separate it from other games AREN'T THAT CREATIVE, COMPARED TO OTHER GAMES. Wait, can you yell something and still have a comma in it? Why do I feel like caps lock and commas are incompatible? Anyway, one such feature is weapons. You know, because no other game has done that. To be fair, there's a decent variety of them, and it does do at least one thing creatively: charging weapons. Although the game doesn't ever tell you that this is actually possible, you can hold down the shoot button to charge up your shot into something that will destroy bosses. Oh, and you, if you have the temerity to hold down the shoot button for too long. Why? Why did they balance it like that? Why not just give me a limited amount of charges? Why am I being punished for holding down a button? Other than that, though, it's just your typical platformer. That's why I give it the SNES Version is Still Better Award. Why? I'm a fan of the Super Mario World-esque overworld that's lacking in the Genesis port. Branching paths simply won't cut it. Oh, right, there are branching paths. You get different levels, but only the ones at the "the same for all paths" end count for any type of different ending. There are only two endings, but three paths at the end. What?
 

Review Synopsis

  • You know what's awesome? Cave pussy.
  • You know what's not awesome? The health system.
  • You know what's middling? Everything else about the game.
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