LogFAQs > #932366452

<b>#14: The End is Nigh
Released on 7/12/2017
Steam</b>
(written in 2019)

These next three games are basically ties and theyre all flawed differently in ways thats hard to really rank them against each other, but eff that -- we like definitive rankings here, so #3 is The End is Nigh.

I love love loooooved Super Meat Boy when it first came out, and when you look at TEiN it's really easy to see this is a similar game from the same developer. Even if you play TEiN after not playing SMB in years, you'll feel like this is very familiar territory.

However, take some time to play them side-by-side and you'll be caught off-guard by the differences you'll feel. SMB is floatier and more momentum-based while TEiN is more precisely as you command and incorporates a few little powers you always have but don't know about until later when the game teaches you. SMB deals with wall-jumps while TEiN deals with jumps from ledges. We also see SMB is stage-based while TEiN connects a world together. Point is, SMB and TEiN feel almost exactly the same until you load them up side-by-side with a controller in your hand.

The crowning achievement is the music. They not only made rock-orchestra versions of classical music for its soundtrack, they then made chiptune-versions of those songs too. I'm not sure there's a better song on this whole list than two variations of the same song -- The Future and The Tower:

https://youtu.be/NEZ3x317jvE

https://youtu.be/nh9uFAxsGQs

Okay though, it has a legitimate flaw in ethical difficulty and I say this as somebody who 100%'d both this and SMB. I'm making eye-contact with +Acceptance for this rant.

TEiN is varied and interesting in how it used its lives system. You have infinite lives in the main world and the hardest carts, you have as many lives in the dark world as you have tumors saved from the main world, most carts give you ten lives, and four carts give you one life.

+Acceptance combines all four of those difficult one-life carts together, then adds a brand new cart at the very end and still expects you to do it all in one life...and that crosses a line for me. That is BS difficulty to waste players times in a major way, not being able to even practice that last cart until you ACE all the rest in a row and then only get one shot at it.

I mean, I did it, butcome on, that's BS.

Also, their cutscenes after the intro were bad and hopping on those flying creatures while you're in that cliff-world was malarkey.

All and all though, SMB fans don't have an excuse not to play TEiN. I'll probably lean SMB > TEiN, but what a great pair of games.

NOW IN 2020: I maintain +Acceptance was unethical. I also wouldn't want to beat any retro cart without dying (which isn't necessary anyway, but, you know...achievements). Otherwise though, it felt good beating the heck out of this game and any fans of Super Meat Boy need to give it a shot.

Since we had a do-save-states-mean-you-beat-it conversation from another topic here, I'll share this: I beat the game fair and square, plus I got the achievements of dying less than 20(?) times and beating the game in under 2(?) hours with a little cheesing. I took a save file and started thrashing a world until I could ace it consistently, then I went to a second save file to beat it cleanly with that practice. I then went back to my practice file and destroyed the next world before switching to my clean file for a single clean run. Rinse and repeat. I beat the crap of that game and still had to cheese it a bit for those achievements...but I stand by it counting. If it's throwing +Acceptance at me, I'm throwing practice between save files at it.

---

O P E R A T I O N O U S T : Nominate SHEIK!
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/ssb/images/0/0d/Sheik-Victory3-SSB4.png