I haven’t tried this, so can’t really compare it myself, but if we are comparing this to Splatoon (which seems reasonable in terms of appeal if not completely in terms of gameplay), I can already see a difference, and in my opinion a huge problem.
Microtransactions. Very bad case of them according to lots of reviews.
Motion Twin is an interesting studio. They have a completely horizontal structure, they keep their studio small (10 people at most) on purpose and they’re more like a partnership of independent developers agreeing on common projects.
Most of them also seem to prefer switching to completely something else once they consider a game is done. Dead Cells is a special case because after a year part of MT wanted to keep working on it, so they created their own, more traditional studio Evil Empire and hired people just for that.
But then, things at MT apparently didn’t go too well. They spent months vetoing everything because no game concept seemed good enough for everyone to agree on it. The lead dev on Dead Cells tried to push them to at least try something, it didn’t go well and they pushed him out instead.
Looks like there has been quite a bit of turnover on the studio since Dead Cells, and very little news, and since we’re talking about a studio of 8-10 people, it’s a bit worrying.
There have been 4 paid DLCs, Castlevania is just the latest.
However, I agree it’s been all worth it until now. Every new area feels like a new experience with cool new gimmicks, gameplay has been refined with stuff like the backpack, we got cool free indie crossover stuff…
And Return to Castlevania has more love for the series in it than anything Konami has done in the last 15 years (which is not saying much, fuck Konami).
I’m okay with the next DLC being the last. The game has had a fantastic life, and I wouldn’t want it to go past the creators’ motivation and start becoming bland. Excited to see what Motion Twin and Evil Empire have in store now (though Motion Twin’s situation seems a bit complex).
So, a long time ago I got Little Big Adventure 2 a.k.a. Twinsen’s Odyssey.
This game has a “behaviour” feature that lets you switch between 4 modes : normal, stealthy, athletic and agressive. This has an impact on how the main character Twinsen moves and acts : normal walks and interacts, stealthy sneaks around, athletic runs and jumps, aggressive lets you punch stuff.
Note that all of those except athletic are unbearably slow, and the game requires quite a bit of jumping, so I quickly considered athletic the default one, only switching for something else briefly when I needed to do something specific.
In this game you get your second and last weapon, a sword, quite far into the game. It does a lot of damage, and it’s required to beat some enemies. But every time I’d try to use it, Twinsen would do a ridiculous backflip first, then do a jumping attack forward. It was very hard to hit a moving enemy that way, it required a lot of space and since I could barely control that move (tank controls by the way), there was a huge risk I’d get hit in the process.
I lost many times against a huge boss that was only vulnerable to the sword, eventually beat him with great difficulty and after that went through the rest of the game still trying to get the most out of that ridiculous weapon.
It took me another playthrough to understand that the way Twinsen used the sword depended on his behaviour. Only athletic did that double jump first, agressive in particular just let you hack stuff up immediately.
Probably something on the Amstrad CPC computer, and I couldn’t tell which game specifically.
I had the Donkey Kong arcade port on it, ironically better than the NES one because it had the full 4 levels instead of just 3.
Other game of note was Jet Set Willy. Despite the simplistic style that game was creepy as hell to me. The intro music was a pretty good 8-bit rendition of the Moonlight Sonata. Not sure how much of this is due to the game, but that music still kind of gives me the creeps.
Then on that computers I had lots of forgettable games, often in compilations. And a few bad ports (Salamander a.k.a Life Force), okay ones (Contra) and a very late addition of Lemmings, probably the best game I had on it yet not the best version of the game by far.
I got a NES as a secondary gaming platform at some point. Super Mario Bros 1 and 3 were not the first games I played, but after playing so many crappy platform games on the CPC they definitely had a huge impact on what I still consider good game design now.
Maya is a genius compared to Pearl. Poor girl was introduced as a little kid and they decided she’d stay a toddler in a grown-up body for the rest her life.
I suspect Metroid Prime works for you because movement is quite slow. Samus feels like a tank compared to Gordon Freeman.
I love the Prime trilogy, but when I returned to it while doing a Metroid binge of sort, and I was kind of trying to do decent times, I was surprised how much slower-paced they feel compared to the 2D games. Even jumps feel floaty (probably for the better, it’s hard to judge jumps correctly in first person).
And that’s weird, I really love the series as a whole. OoT feels way too bland to me and… I don’t know, I can’t stand its characters, its boring empty environments (plain, ranch and lake for example), its overwhelmingly grey colour palette.
Majora’s Mask’s one of my favourites though. But yeah, I’d rather replay a Link to the Past or any of the other 3D games over OoT.
I happen to like both, but they’re very different. Like a lot of fans of the rest of the series, while playing BotW I missed the classic dungeon experience. A whole divine beast and a dozen shrines stitched together would be maybe like one dungeon in the main series, and it’d have a new item, it would rely on it a lot with clever riddles and it’d have a unique boss, not just another flavour of Ganon.
Of course, a classic Zelda game is also a lot more linear in structure, with a world you can only explore bit by bit, and in a set order (mostly, there is a couple of exceptions).
Really not convinced that you can’t call something a genre because it wouldn’t describe different games in a series.
I’d argue the Wario Land series has mostly changed genres between 1 and 2. First one is a straight platformer that’s basically Super Mario Bros with different abilities, following games are exploration puzzle game things that have a platforming element, but in which platforming is not the main point IMO.
Resident Evil really forgot it was survival horror for a while.
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are almost nothing like the classic Zelda formula. Free-form puzzle solving, free-er movement, almost zero dungeon structures, consumable weapons…
Those are significant, because when it happens it’s very likely some people would be more invested in either the old or new games, which incidentally explains why it doesn’t happen that much in established series.
I know I was initially very disappointed with new Wario, because all I wanted back then was more Mario-style platforming and the intentionally frustrating design of Wario Land 2-3-4 wasn’t for me.
The reason 2048 took over was probably because Threes was only on iOS for a while, and because 2048 was available as a free, ad-supported game while Threes was only available as a paid game.
I got Threes back around Android release, and 2048 was already huge.
Being stuck for a while on iOS was its initial problem.
The Android port took quite a bit of time to happen which means 2048 had time to eclipse it for many people. And when it finally was on Android, It probably struggled more there for being a paid game when 2048 was free with ads what’s wrong with you people, it costs as much as 2 coffees and ads are fucking annoying.
It’s been available on both iOS and Android for years before Arcade was a thing.
I think Castlevania : Lords of Shadow’s IP kind of worked against it. It’s useless to non- fans of the series, and it’s jarring to those who are.
It’s like it is constantly wondering if it’s a new take on the universe, or just a whole new one with useless, random references thrown in. There are lots of people completely displaced from their original time and background, and I am not talking about the game’s big spoilery reveal, but completely random ones with no point.
One example among many : in the main series there is a character who is a 20th century German artist who tragically turned mad because he lost his family during WW2. He is “reimagined” into a random bat-faced vampire general in the 11th century. His name is just mentioned in narration before a short fight and he’s never seen again.
Despite all of that, the game is great. Mostly linear, definitely has some pacing issues, but it’s pretty good at telling its story, it’s a decent spectacle fighter, and the environments are great.
Sequels… Yeah, not so much. But I really liked the first one. I just feel the Castlevania name only set it for something it wasn’t though.
Nintendo started doing that a lot around the Wii. New Super Mario Bros series, Donkey Kong Country Returns, etc… also on other games regular messages to let you know that you could lower the difficulty. And Skyward Sword’s Fi being unable to let you play more than 2 seconds without trying to “help”.
Honestly I did not like it much. I didn’t mind that it was an option, but I did mind that it was a shiny, blinking thing making shrieking sounds at you as soon as you’d start facing a bit of challenge.
Super Mario Bros Wonder’s way of doing this is way better IMO, with the beginner characters and some of the badges that you can activate to make the game easier when you need it.