The Legend of Zelda -16/52

     If you were to ask me what my first love in gaming was, it's Pokemon.  I hope at this point I've made that fact abundantly clear.  But if you were to ask me my second love, it's Kingdom Hearts.  But we’ll get back to that later.  But if you were to ask me my third love, that would be the Legend of Zelda.  I got into the Zelda series way later in life than I imagine most other fans did.  I was already probably 11 or 12 when I received my first Zelda game, Wind Waker, and while it would take me a few more years to really appreciate how great Wind Waker was, I was pretty instantly hooked on the Zelda formula.  Later that same year I would receive a promo disc from a close friend that allowed me to play Zelda 1, Zelda 2, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, and this disc cemented my lifelong love of the Zelda series.  But my biggest regret from that point was never beating the original, a game that I found incredibly fascinating yet incredibly confusing at the same time.  And now, over a decade later, my little blog series has finally given me an excuse to fulfill my biggest gaming regret.  This is the Legend of Zelda.

     Let's start with a disclaimer.  I was initially fully on board with playing this game like I would've as a kid in the 80s before I could just look up everything on the internet.  I even sat down and tried it for a few hours, figuring out my own way through the primitive Future Past Hyrule.  But as I was pretty slowly finding various things around the map, it dawned on me that I have 36 other games to beat this year and I really would like to get to them too.  So I opted for a guide, but only to show me dungeon locations and sword upgrades.  Everything else in the run was all me.  With that out of the way, let's get to it.

     It almost seems ludicrous to discuss the story of the Legend of Zelda.  It's one of the most important and iconic video games of all time.  But for those unaware, the Legend of Zelda puts you in the boots of a young adventurer named Link, exploring the largely abandoned, monster-infested land of Hyrule.  Your goal is to discover all eight of the dungeons, collecting various weapons, equipment, and tools to aid you along the way, as well we finding all eight shards of the all-powerful Triforce of Courage.  After doing so, you must find your way into the massive labyrinth of Death Mountain, battling your way through the evil monster army of the dark wizard Ganon until finally, you come face-to-face with Ganon himself.  Slay the beast, grab his Triforce of Power, rescue the princess, just all the classic fantasy tropes we know and love.  Simple, effective and a ton of fun.

     It was incredibly interesting to see the origins of one of my favorite game series.  I had previously played the first Zelda, of course, but young me got easily confused and frustrated by it and got into a cycle of playing it for ten minutes, dying a couple times, not finding anything and then just turning it off and playing Scooby-Doo: Night of 100 Frights for the thousandth time.  Really, it kind of reignited my love for Zelda, or at least my passion.  The last Zelda game I played was Ocarina of Time 3D and I don’t like Ocarina of Time, at all, so I was feeling pretty off with Zelda.  So really, playing through the original was exactly what I needed.  As well, it came at a point where Breath of the Wild was still a fresh point in my mind, being a game for months after I had actually beat it that I would return to just to wind down with some exploration.  Seeing the obvious thematic parallels between the original Zelda and Breath of the Wild only heightened my experience of the original.

     So, let’s talk about dungeons.  Dungeons are the staple of pretty much every Zelda game that isn’t Breath of the Wild and are more often the favorite part for a lot of Zelda players.  Dungeon design has been one of the most important parts of the series overall.  And you know what, they didn’t get it from this game.  None of the dungeons are necessarily bad, far from it.  The original Zelda has some really fun dungeons with a lot of cool secrets and shortcuts lying around.  And honestly, Death Mountain is probably one of my favorite dungeons in the series overall.  It’s just, for a series that would grow to pride itself on puzzle-solving, it’s off to see it missing in any capacity.  They feel more akin to a Coliseum rather than a massive underground temple, with room after room of the only notable obstacle being 5-7 of Ganon’s minions trying to kill you.  It creates for fun, combat-heavy challenges, but it just feels off considering everything Zelda has become.  Though, I will say that seeing the origins of a lot of the classic Zelda enemies and their functions in this game did put a smile on my face.  One enemy in particular, which has very recently grown a reputation for being exceptionally challenging and rewarding in future installments, is present in this game as an exceptionally easy overworld fight and that amuses me to no end.

     I don’t actually have anything super negative to say about the Legend of Zelda.  It’s almost boringly perfect when you get down to it.  So, instead, I’m just going to list off a couple nitpicks I had throughout the game.  One, I feel like it should’ve been made clearer that the whistle warps you between dungeons on the overworld.  There’s a lot of very unhelpful old men scattered throughout Hyrule and I kind of feel like one of them should tell you ‘hey, you can warp around the world with the power of song’.  Two, I feel like this game suffers more from the overstocked inventory problem than any other Zelda game.  So many of the game’s various items and weapons are just completely and totally useless except for this one area in the game where they are necessary.  The Spinner from Twilight Princess has nothing on the Raft is all I’m saying.  And finally, the final boss kind of sucks.  It’s kind of cool how Ganon goes invisible and teleports around, but I personally feel like the only thing that stops it from becoming a complete and total random number generation nightmare is the sheer size of Ganon’s sprite.  If he didn’t have such a huge hitbox, I could easily see that fight taking forever just from you getting a bad warp spot set.  These are really all minor things in the grand scheme of things and didn’t really hurt my playthrough, they’re just all little issues I had with it.

     I wasn't actually sure if I would like the original Zelda very much when I say down to play it.  Part of that was definitely skill.  Despite the fact that a large portion of my free time is devoted to video games, I'm not good at them, and the normal level of difficulty in older video games has been super off-putting to me previously.   More than that, though, I’ve pretty routinely been let down by games everyone loves.  For some reason, me and the popular opinion don’t tend to mesh and I think it’s that I usually let myself join the hype train which is just a setup for disappointment all around.  But all of these doubts were quickly silenced, to my relief, and filled with a sense of wonder about this beautifully, masterfully designed game that was way ahead of its time.  I hope you enjoyed this look at the original Legend of Zelda, it is absolutely a superb game that I highly recommend for pretty much anyone.  We’ll be back next time with another retro adventure game, though this one has a new, pretty coat of paint on it, Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap.

All gameplay screens and official art credit of https://www.zeldadungeon.net/ and Nintendo.  Map image credit of http://www.ign.com/.

Ethan's backlog: https://www.backloggery.com/edzoologist

Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut - 15/52

  I don’t think there’s a subject gamers love more than the subject of underrated video games.  With so many video games out there, it’s inevitable that some great games fly the under the radar in favor of something more popular or more advanced, only to resurface later with a massive community that’s basically been hiding underground this entire time.  Some of these games can even swing back around and go from a hidden gem to one of the most universally loved games of all time, like EarthBound.  Today’s subject is kind of a little bit hidden gem and a little universally loved.  It’s a series I’ve been following for years now and is very likely one of my favorite video game series of all time.  So please let us welcome back WayForward (seen here, for reference), as we talk about Shantae: Risky’s Revenge.

  

     Shantae: Risky’s Revenge puts you in the sandals of the titular heroine as she deals with her chosen profession, superheroing.  Shantae, you see, is half-genie, granting her a plethora of magic powers as well as the apparent responsibility that all genies have in this world, being the protectors of the various cities and towns.  Shantae, unfortunately, has the awful luck of protecting the one town that is attacked on basically a daily basis by pirates, zombies, and armies of sentient scarecrows.  In particular, Shantae is frequently antagonized by her arch-enemy, the villainous pirate Risky Boots, who in this particular adventure has decided to steal an ancient oil lamp from Shantae’s uncle and now Shantae must travel the world to stop Risky from unleashing the oil lamp’s hidden powers.  Along the way, she will meet a variety of colorful characters, go to a wide variety of interesting and appealing locales and fight weird and wacky bosses with her various magical genie powers.  So basically it’s Aladdin if Princess Jasmine was the protagonist and wore her slave outfit the entire time and was also Robin Williams.

    
At first glance, Shantae is very traditional platformer fare, with some vague Metroidvania elements thrown in for good measure.  You'll be doing the standard running, jumping and attacking you've grown to expect from the genre at this point and while Shantae doesn't offer anything especially new in these aspects, it's one of the best examples of the genre in my opinion.  Shantae has really well-defined movements that are easy to learn and master, and before long you'll be charging your way through all the game's various locales with relative ease.  What does make Shantae unique among her platforming colleagues is her belly dancing.  She's a very rhythmic person, constantly bopping and shaking to the beat, and through this innate sense of rhythm, she concentrates her magical genie powers to allow her to transform.  In other Shantae games there's a wider variety of transformations to utilize, but in Risky’s Revenge they narrow it down to the three best and most iconic.  There's the monkey, a smaller, more nimble form that allows you to run faster, jump higher, cling to walls and, by extension, wall kick.  The elephant, Shantae’s second transformation, limits your mobility greatly but in exchange greatly increases your power and gives you both a charge attack and a stomp attack.  And finally, there's the mermaid, which gives you worse mobility on land than even the elephant in exchange for flawless mobility underwater.  All these transformations are very fun to play and keeping it at three was a wise decision as at no point do any of them feel redundant, an issue we might dive into in future Shantae games.

     Shantae: Risky’s Revenge is a sequel.  Normally I try not to do sequels if I can help it, preferring to start a series at it’s beginning and work my way through the rest of it, either at later points of the year or in future 52s.  There are two exceptions to this rule, those being either I have already completed the previous game or games in the series in the past or the game I’m talking about can be talked about without knowledge of the previous game being a requirement.  And for Shantae’s second journey, all you need to know is that there is a crime-fighting, belly dancing half-djinn named Shantae who has has a previous encounter with a pirate named Risky Boots.  Risky’s Revenge also marks a major tonal and thematic shift between the obscure Gameboy Color original.  Namely, Shantae is now unabashedly a comedy because that’s basically where all platformer series go when they live long enough.

     Comedy is, indeed, one of the main selling points of the Shantae series.  It's gotten a reputation among its player base for being one of the funniest game series to ever exist and I cannot dispute this claim.  I was laughing throughout my playthrough of Risky’s Revenge.  The writing in this game is top-notch and never misses a beat, helped in large part by the fact that Shantae’s world is full of eccentric and larger than life characters.  If you're going to be playing this game for any reason, I'd say definitely do it for the humor.

     The pixel art in Risky’s Revenge is spectacular, which is very fitting given it’s Gameboy Color roots.  I'll admit, after the stream of games I've been playing recently, I've been hankering for some great pixel art and boy does Shantae deliver.  I've briefly talked about what kind of gamer I used to be in my post on Frederic: Resurrection of Music and I guess to expand on that, I also used to be the kind of gamer who asserted that retro games were just better than whatever I was seeing in the present.  Don't exactly know where that came from as by the time I was old enough to comprehend what was going on in a video game, it was the late 90s and the era of 3D gaming had long since arrived.  But that period of being elitist and nostalgic for games that came out before I was born left me with a deep love of sprite art and pixel art.  In particular, I love the environmental art in this game.  All the locales you adventure through are just so gorgeous and so lively and just makes the entire game pop.

     In a game where the protagonist’s main power is dancing, you would not be wrong in expecting the game to have a killer soundtrack.  And, much like everything else about this game I've discussed so far because this game is great and I love it, the soundtrack is fantastic.  Shantae utilizes its Arabian-mythology base to great effect in its soundtrack, combining the low strings and high brass of Arabic folk music with some great techno beats and it's just so good.  As with all game soundtracks I feel are important enough to specifically talk about, the link will be down below so you can check it out yourself.

     So at this point, you may be wondering, is there anything I don't like about this one?  Well, if I had to nitpick, the boss fights are pretty terrible.  The bosses in this game come in two flavors and both of them are pretty bad.  The first, less common type of boss is a boss with a very noticeable pattern, making for a very easy boss fight, but these fights tend to have a lot of invincibility periods involved causing what should be a very short boss to be unnecessarily long and tedious.  But that's nothing compared to the more common type of boss fight, the boss that has no consistency at all and just kind of expects you to tank damage.  I understand boss fights are pretty hard to balance, as it's very easy to lean into one or the other, but it's very unfortunate when an otherwise great game just has really bad boss fights.

     As well, the Director’s Cut version of the game is, in my opinion, the inferior version.  There's not a ton different between the original DSiWare release and the Director’s Cut version, and I'd honestly say you're better off with the Director’s Cut as it's way more available if you're going to play the game.  But the Director's Cut doesn't especially add anything to the game other than these weird HD portraits during character interactions that only serve to cover the gorgeous pixel art in the game and just don't mesh with the rest of the game at all.  The Director's Cut also locks certain things behind progression walls that weren't there in the original release and, while it's better for structuring, it still feels like you’re getting less game.  If you are able to snag the original, I'd recommend that over the Director’s Cut, though these are really minor nitpicks in the grand scheme of things and the game is still great in either version.

     Shantae: Risky’s Revenge is the best experience I've had with a traditional side-scrolling platformer since the first time I played through Mario World.  It's an incredibly charming and incredibly fun game that I would recommend to pretty much everyone.  I absolutely can't wait to get back to Shantae in the future, I love both the character and the world so much.  I hope you enjoyed this look at Shantae, and I'll be back next time with a game I probably should've beaten long before now, the Legend of Zelda.

Shantae: Risky's Revenge OST: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy7z_XfPei9plHNc5VURedoi7NtUie3vS

Ethan's Backlog: https://www.backloggery.com/edzoologist

Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions - 14/52

There’s a certain beauty to Mario games when you really think about it.  Virtually every gamer from every walk of life has at least some connection to the jolly little red plumber and his world of mushrooms.  A huge part of that is that Mario is such a simple character that he has virtually no limit to what he can do. He’s more like a classic cartoon character than the main character of any one franchise.  Mario could do opera in one game (Mario 3) and then shift to messing around with his supporting cast by creating their hazards and obstacles (Mario Maker) and then finish it all off by battling an evil witch equipped with little more than his wit and a few things he has in his pockets (Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door).  Those are all actual plots to Looney Tunes shorts, by the way, namely ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’, ‘Duck Amok’ and ‘Bewitched Bunny’. I digress. My point is that Mario isn’t limited by preexisting notions of who Mario is. And the varied nature of Mario brings us to today’s subject, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions.

    The Mario & Luigi series is probably the largest facet of the Mario series that I’ve completely missed.  I wasn’t yet into a vast majority of games when I had my Gameboy Advance and by the time I discovered Mario with Super Mario Sunshine, Superstar Saga had been buried under the Advance series, which was my first introduction to both Super Mario World and my hidden talent of being surprisingly good at the original Mario Bros. arcade game.  I did play through the majority of Partners in Time back in the day, but I never beat it and I really don’t remember any of it. And the rest of the series I just missed out on because between Galaxy and Odyssey, I was just kind of done with Mario. I mention all of this because I want you to know I had no idea what to expect from playing the Superstar Saga remake.  Being a Paper Mario fan, at least before Sticker Star ruined it, I expected something akin to Thousand Year Door, except your only party member was Luigi. What I got was something that made me rethink which series in the Mario franchise was my favorite off of just a single game. But, first, the story.

    Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga opens with representatives of the Mushroom Kingdom’s neighbors, the Beanbean Kingdom, visiting Princess Peach at her castle/art gallery.  Quick tangent, it always amuses me how worldbuilding in the Mario universe is just a constant stream of ‘well this exists now’. If there’s a comprehensive map of the world of Mario, I’d absolutely love to see it, it has to be utter nonsense.  Anyways, as is the case with any time that someone other than Mario visits Princess Peach in her castle, something absolutely horrible happens to her. But this time, instead of simply a kidnapping, these representatives of the Beanbean Kingdom instead opt to steal Peach’s voice.  And then immediately shed their disguises, meaning that the point of posing as official representatives of Beanbean was pointless in the long term, but whatever. I guess their plan was never to perpetuate a war between the two kingdoms anyways. I’m thinking way too hard about a Mario game, aren’t I?  Anyways, Mario, Luigi and even Bowser get involved shortly after this point and decide that their goal is clear, they must team up to rescue Peach’s voice. And something about a mystical Beanstar. That part isn’t readily important.

    I’m going to level with you, from the framing alone I was already out of this story.  I’m personally not a fan of introducing new villains just to have them do the same thing as the old villain but just a little different, and the Mario universe is full of this specific setup.  But what ends up setting Superstar Saga apart is how the payoff to the framing works out. The narrative is tight without being overbearing. At no point does this story ever drag and, while the game never exactly kept me guessing, I was so invested that I didn’t especially care.  Not to mention how wonderful the writing to this game is, making this simple and kind of tired Mario story really come alive.

    I poke fun at the off worldbuilding in the Mario world, but I honestly feel like the decision not to set this game in the Mushroom Kingdom was overall a wise one.  The Gamecube/GBA era of Mario games in general were the starting point of a push to move Mario away from the Mushroom Kingdom and, while Sunshine does do the new, vastly different environment well, it doesn’t do it half as well as Superstar Saga.  The Beanbean Kingdom almost feels like a different world, while still being uncannily familiar to what you know. It starts you off thinking that this world, unlike the Mushroom Kingdom, is dreary, full of purples and greys instead of the vibrant reds and greens of your home.  But immediately this changes and gives way to a lush environment that is brimming with charm and personality. It’s a wonderful blend of new and familiar that makes it stand out even amongst the plethora of wonderful places in the Mario world, and I would love another game set in the Beanbean Kingdom.

    Superstar Saga is not what one would call a traditional Mario game.  Instead of running through levels, clearing obstacles and jumping on enemies, Superstar Saga plays more akin to an early Final Fantasy game.  Mario, Luigi and their enemies take turns in battle, determined by their individual speed stats. Mario and Luigi can perform a variety of options in combat as well, starting with a basic ‘jump on enemy to deal damage’ and evolving to several different normal and special attacks that the brothers can perform, with more unique and powerful attacks using a system known as Bro. Points, this game’s version of the Magic Points system from Final Fantasy.  As well, you can power up your attacks even more by the Action Command system, where timed button presses allow you to increase your damage significantly, up to double what it normally would be. These action commands aren’t just for offense, either, there are defensive action commands that allow players to null, dodge or even counter the enemies’ attacks with correct timing. It’s a surprising amount of complexity and I could see this turning off a lot of newer players, but if you feel overwhelmed, don’t worry.  Mario & Luigi have an easy combat mode, making the button timing way easier and the guarding near automatic. It all creates an incredibly fun and rewarding battle system that, while pretty typical for a Mario RPG, is arguably at its best in Superstar Saga.

    It’s pretty apt that I compared Mario games to classic Looney Tunes cartoons, as recent Mario games have made a push to include more genuinely good comedy in their games.  And, as you may expect, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga is no exception. So much of this game is full of genuinely funny jokes, super clever wordplay and very good physical comedy that just make every conversation so much fun to sit through.  This comedy is even a theme in the game, with an early area being almost completely devoted to good slapstick, writing and even the fun that can be had with very obviously bad jokes. It creates a very different feel from its contemporaries in terms of Mario games and could be seen as the originator of so much of the excellent writing in Mario games, especially the RPGs, to this day.  The only issue with this is the lack of voice acting and the presence of a player-controlled text box progression sometimes makes the timing miss. But that’s a minor problem in a game full of great jokes.

    The character work in this game is purposefully weak, but in a good way.  Obviously, unlike many RPGs, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga isn’t opting for an especially deep story with complex themes and interesting themes.  It’s a comedy first and foremost, and the characters reflect this by being largely one note. But if it isn’t a great note to be on. There are so many big personalities in this game and seeing their interactions just makes it all the sweeter.  A few standouts are the Beanbean Kingdom’s queen, who is just brimming with enthusiasm and optimism, Prince Peasley, a handsome, charming, chivalrous, competitive and all around fabulous warrior, and Popple, the commanding bean bandit who frequently bosses around people several times his size without showing an ounce of fear.  Even the Mario Bros. who spend most of this game silent and when they aren’t, opt to speak probably fake Italian still manage to be two of the most fun, charming and funny characters in the game.

    And that’s not even mentioning how great our villains are.  The main villain, Cackletta, is almost like the Mario universe’s very own Maleficent. She’s the most conniving and diabolical Mario villain I think we’ve ever had, being just as funny as everyone else but not any less intimidating than she needs to be.  I mentioned how her plan is very similar to Bowser’s, but it’s made clear she isn’t going to make the same mistakes as the Koopa King. She opts to take only what she needs rather than deal with any unnecessary baggage, and is way better at forcing people to do her bidding than Bowser ever was.  And then there’s Fawful. If I were to adequately explain how amazing Fawful is, the rest of this one would devolve into a series of quotes. I highly encourage you to play the game solely for Fawful, he’s a fan favorite character for excellent reasons.

    So, with all this praise I’ve been heaping on Superstar Saga, you might be thinking ‘is there anything he doesn’t like about Superstar Saga’.  And the answer is, speaking only for the core game, not really. I have my problems with the minigames, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want this to devolve into me just having to list how a minigame is played and then saying ‘I just don’t find this especially fun’.  Superstar Saga is a great game overall and I highly recommend you find a way to play it if you haven’t played it already. Unfortunately, Superstar Saga isn’t the only game on this cart and... oh boy… Bowser’s Minions.

    I’m going to knock a few good things out of the way in regards to Bowser’s Minions to start off.  Conceptually, this game is exactly what I’ve been wanting from a Mario spin-off for years now. Taking control of Bowser’s army and using the various talents of the individual troops to ram through your opponents has always been a kind of dream game of mine.  Admittedly, I wanted it in the form of a Tower Defense game, but going on the offense works too. I love the characters of this game as well. Captain Goomba is the exact kind of lovable, enthusiastic idiot that you would expect from a Goomba leader and seeing him grow over the course of the game is actually really touching and endearing.  Captains Shy Guy, Boo and Koopa Troopa play off Captain Goomba really well, one opting to go along with his idiocy, one opting to constantly call out his idiocy and the last being potentially a bigger idiot than Goomba could ever be. I really dig how they captured the personalities of the Koopalings as well, each being essentially the character I always expected them to be from their first appearance in Mario 3.  And, of course, Fawful is the main antagonist of this particular story so that’s just a roaring endorsement of this mode right there.

    And now the bad.  Bowser’s Minions is unplayable.  Not because it’s, like, broken or not fun, though it is definitely both of those.  No, it’s unplayable because it literally cannot be played. Bowser’s Minions is a game where you choose your squad of a mere eight members and then the game auto-plays the fight and basically just decides whether you win or lose at random.  And it is definitely at random. I’ve done the same fight over and over again and gotten radically different results each and every time. Now, there are some very minor things you can do to help the turn of battle. You get something called ‘Captain Commands’ which are things you can do to stop enemy special attacks, get minor stat buffs and do specific special attacks dependant on the squad leader.  But, really, it’s almost not worth doing any of them, as it costs part of your extremely limited pool of CP and, in my experience, it oftentimes doesn’t affect the way battle ends up in any significant way. It feels more like something I should be playing on my phone, but in a really bad way. It’s more built for the free-to-play, microtransaction field than anything, and if I discovered this was a test for a new mobile game Nintendo’s thinking about releasing, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

    Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions is one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played, easily.  While I may hate the Bowser’s Minions mode, it never was so much to kill my enjoyment of the overall product.  It’s engrossing, funny, charming and just all around a great time, and I highly recommend everyone play through it.  I imagine that, should I do a top ten at the end of this, Mario & Luigi is going to rank pretty high on it. I more than recommend it if you haven’t played it, and even if you have played it before and are just wondering if you should replay it.  I hope you enjoyed this look at Superstar Saga, and we’ll be back next time for another really funny game, Shantae: Risky’s Revenge.