Board 8 > Exdeath Plays Every Game in the GotD 2020 Contest

(+) Yeah! (+)

Oh cool. Long term tag.

Best of luck!

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BetrayedTangy posted...

Did a big update today as well, I cleared Great Bay Temple and got caught up on the masks as well as a couple of heart pieces.

Yeah 100% sucks. I did it last year and it's just not fun at a certain point, but I think that might kinda be the point? Like we were saying earlier with doing side quests early/buffing Link up. There's so many different ways to do quests and gain items that each playthrough ends up being different and that's not even touching on the Easter eggs. Like take the Circus Leader's Mask for example it's only use is irrelevant, but it has constant tears streaming down its face. I never knew that until this playthrough!

Also it's funny that you mention EarthBound's monkey cave as when I reached that part during my playthrough I remember saying great it's like the well in Majora's Mask. Also I think you can clear it without leaving technically? Maybe not access every room, but I think you can get to the end.

I think almost all games stop being fun a little bit before 100%, at least for someone like me. With Majora's Mask, I think I'd probably go to around 18 hearts and a full inventory before stopping, if I weren't feeling the need to move onto the next game for this project. I will say that's a pretty good ratio of fun sidequests to annoying ones.

One small detail that I noticed playing today is how many different reactions the NPCs have to different masks. I would have expected them to mostly have a single generic reaction for all masks, but just out of curiosity I tried different ones on the kid who guards the bomber's hideout and he has unique reactions for the majority of the masks in the game. That impressed me a lot and inspired me to run around town trying my masks on other characters. The Happy Mask salesman has different ones for every single mask. I did know about that before.

With the Monkey Cave, you only need to bring the items to trade with the 2 monkeys in the first room from outside. I remember every time I've played I would talk to them, find out what they wanted, and then go buy those two things from the shop nearby. I've played EB enough times that I can remember one of them is a wet towel, but not the other. It is possible to do the whole well in one go, but you have to know exactly what you need beforehand. I had to go in three times. Once to find out what the guys in the first room wanted, like the monkey gave, a second time that lasted until I learned I needed milk, and then I completed it on the third visit.

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I really wanted to at least finish the game today, but I wound up spending so long on the Stone Tower Temple that I'm worried I would get partway through the final section of the game before having to leave for work. As of now, the plan is to finish MM when I wake up tomorrow afternoon and then start on the second game (Bayonetta) immediately afterward.

The Stone Tower Temple was no joke. Getting the stray fairies was especially arduous. You have to enter and exit the dungeon repeatedly to flip it up and down. One fairy in particular, which requires you to quickly roll through a set of narrow hallways as a goron, took me a ton of tries to get. The reward for all that effort was the Great Fairy Sword, which is used with the c-buttons rather than replacing your other sword. As powerful as it is, I don't expect to get much mileage out of it given that by the time it's available the game is all but over. I think I would skip it on a repeat playthrough.

The boss reminded me a lot of another game I've played repeatedly: Shadow of the Colossus. As a giant flying sandworm, it's very reminiscent of Phalanx, the 14th colossus, which is almost universally considered to be one of the best fights in that game. We use the newly-acquired Giant's Mask to super-size Link and take it down, which while cool doesn't quite have the heart-racing feeling that leaping from horseback onto Phalanx's wings did. Since the Giant's Mask drains magic, a green potion really comes in handy for this fight.

Now all four dungeons are cleared and we're finally ready to confront the Skull Kid again. It's just a matter of speeding along to the night of the third day and returning to the clock tower.

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Good stuff :)

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What do you think of the giants mask

I always thought it was so lame how limited it was

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ZenOfThunder posted...

What do you think of the giants mask

I always thought it was so lame how limited it was

It's a cool concept. I agree it's a let down how you can't use it outside the boss. I imagine it would be broken in most areas, not in the sense of being overpowered but in the sense of not working. I also wish being giant changed the gameplay a little more than just increasing the size of Link's model. A power to freely become normal-sized or colossal at will might be a cool idea for a small indie game. It seems like an idea that would do better if the whole game were based around it. You could have more wide-open areas where it was handy and program in the results of expanding in smaller places. Maybe there could be puzzles where you have stand in the right place when you expand so that your arm can reach a high narrow corridor to press a switch, or something like that.

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there should have been a sidequest where Link needs to get something off a high shelf and he puts on the giants mask to get it

literally just a second use for it, even a gag

but yeah to your point there would need to be like an entire game based around a mechanic of getting THAT big whenever you want

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One of the only changes in MM3D that I actually liked was the complete rework of the Twinmold fight, including giving the Giant's Mask a unique barehanded moveset including a spinning toss.

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ZenOfThunder posted...

there should have been a sidequest where Link needs to get something off a high shelf and he puts on the giants mask to get it

literally just a second use for it, even a gag

Yeah, that's a good idea. The same goes for the Circus Leader's Mask I would say. I think I read that the 3DS version adds a quest where you can get a bottle from that one.

Keltiq posted...

One of the only changes in MM3D that I actually liked was the complete rework of the Twinmold fight, including giving the Giant's Mask a unique barehanded moveset including a spinning toss.

That sounds pretty cool. I do think the original game has some things that need expansion or refinement, so the remake was a good chance for that. It sounds like most people think they messed that up though, which is a shame.

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The final section of the game is pretty quick for a competent player. We finally play the Oath to Order and summon the four giants, who hold up the moon and knock out the Skull Kid. Majora's Mask itself comes to life and gets swallowed by the moon, and we chase it for the final, somewhat surreal sequence of the game, where we play with some moon children who ask downbeat questions about the nature of existence. We trade in all our masks for The Fierce Diety's Mask, which turns Link into a grown-up with a mighty two-handed sword. We make extremely short work of Majora with this powerup. I liked the "Dawn of a New Day" title card indicating that we're finally free of this time loop. The ending being so upbeat conflicts a little with the morbidity and darkness I found so appealing in the game, but that's forgivable I would say.

I got stuck for a while trying to beat the Goron section of the moon. It's basically organized as a test of all the skills you've learned so far, as is typical for the last stretch of a game. The Deku and Zora sections I breezed through, and the combat section was naturally easy enough, but the Goron one was a huge difficulty spike and felt poorly designed. It's mostly based around bouncing off of treasure chests to complete turns that are otherwise too wide, which is a hitherto unused possibility of the Goron form. It was really precise - at many angles I would come to a complete stop when I hit the chest or bounce off into a chasm. You have to maintain full acceleration for a long time to jump off ramps onto narrow bridges, with even tiny mistakes in the angle of launch sending you falling into oblivion. I kind of hated the existence of the Goron form by the time I finally beat it.

Final thoughts on MM coming shortly.

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Yeah the Goron section sucks here. I actually skipped Fierce Deity this playthrough for that very reason. Plus I hadn't actually beaten Majora without it prior to this. It was still incredibly easy with 1/2 damage and the Gilded Sword, but it's a cool fight nonetheless.

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The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

What I thought of Majora's Mask: A great game to start with.
Would I play Majora's Mask again? Definitely
Did it deserve to win Game of the Decade? Yes, even if it wouldn't have been my first pick.

I respect Nintendo for making a game like Majora's Mask. It's easy for huge AAA developers to repeat themselves for the sake of financial safety and broad appeal. There's no denying that Nintendo have done this in the past. I find the New Super Mario Bros. series of games to be unbearably dull for essentially this reason. MM might be the furthest they have come from those games aesthetically. New Mario is cute and bubbly to the point of being sacchirine, while Majora's Mask is brooding, somber, and creepy.

I think what I admire most about the game is the art direction. It has a very consistent visual theme of morbidity. The animations when Link transforms with his masks are painful and disturbing, his new power-set includes thing like making souless copies of himself and disguising himself as a monster, and even tools like the Mirror Shield have been redesigned, in that case to resemble a tormented human face. The four deities you call upon are ugly long-legged elder gods, and instead of collecting sacred artifacts or rescuing maidens or sages you collect the corpses of your enemies. It's all framed by the ever-present threat of the apocalyptic moon, which is deliberately placed within the player's vision at important moments. Seeing it hanging over the peaceful Romani Ranch and nearly coming face-to-face with it at the peak of Snowhead mountain made for some of the game's most memorable moments.

All those visual motifs serve to reinforce the game's themes, perhaps the most significant of which is futility. It makes an interesting contrast against most video games as well as most other stories based around a time-loop, such as Groundhog Day or Edge of Tomorrow. While a character like Phil Connors learns from each successive cycle of his personal time loop, and a satisfying part of most adventure games or RPGs is visiting new places and leaving them better than you found them, the time loop in Majora's Mask is used specifically to undermine your achievements. Although you can run around Termina righting wrongs and preventing disaster, it will all be rendered meaningless when the moon strikes and you're forced to start again. You have to ignore the villany around you for the sake of simple pragmatism: you know that an old woman will be robbed on the first night of every cycle, but you can't practically help her every single time.

What's even better is the way those things are conveyed. Link's silent protagonist status serves this game well: cutscenes of him lamenting how his heroic achievements are undone would be much less impactful than allowing the player to experience that feeling himself through the gameplay. We can hold up Majora's Mask as a valuable example of how to use video games, in particular, to tell a story. Exploring this young medium in that way has always excited me.

I find that most really good games have either a great story (Mother 3, Silent Hill 2, Xenogears) or great gameplay (Star Fox 64, Symphony of the Night,) but the combination of the two (Final Fantasy Tactics, Dark Souls) is much rarer. Majora's Mask is one game I would say is great at both. The gameplay is where MM more closely resembles its Zelda brethren: some aspects of the formula started by Link to the Past are visible here. While that was a generally potent gameplay format (I remember absolutely loving the dungeons in Twilight Princess,) it eventually became repetitive enough that I was glad to see Breath of the Wild tear it down.

Majora might be the second-most unusual post-LttP Zelda game (we will have to revisit this claim when it comes time to play A Link Between Worlds.) You find items like the hookshot outside dungeons and the boss fights are open-ended brawls rather than repeating puzzle battles. I like this approach to boss fights! I think my favorite was the first one, where there's a surprising variety of mechanics at play: you have to dodge and block against his attacks, change targets (or spin attack) against his minions and throw bombs against the swarms of gnats he summons. As I mentioned earlier, the surprising highlight was playing as a Zora. The room for skill and elegance just in swimming around made the aquatic sections satisfying and fun.

I definitely have some complaints. I wish most of the masks were more useful. Mechanics like the Elegy of Emptiness weren't much fun to play around with. A common annoyance in Zelda games is how often you have to pause the game to change items. Masks can exacerbate this issue, especially for players who understandably dedicate a slot to the bunny hood at all times. There were tons of times when I talked to a shopkeeper with a mask on and had to go through their mask dialog, remove my mask, and talk to them again. Likewise, I wish I could swap a mask for another item while wearing it. Those are essentially nitpicks. I think most of my issues with the game are ultimately no big deal.

It's heartening for a game like this to be so powerful in our popularity contests. I've talked to a lot of people who were turned off by the time loop mechanic or the sense of helplessness it evokes, which I consider to be its important artistic decisions. Of course, there's a cynical part of me that thinks its strength is mostly attributable to GameFAQs' obsession with Nintendo and Zelda in particular - but the fact that it won where Twilight Princess failed at least says something.

Likewise, I don't know how long it might have taken me to revist Majora's Mask without this project, but I'm glad I did, and that makes me feel optimistic for the rest of it.

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The Goron section of the moon would be my favourite... if it weren't for the fact that I only own the GCN Zelda Collector's Edition port, which is notable for having a chance to crash every time the Goron Roll bounces off something.

I'm glad you enjoyed MM so much! It's definitely my favourite Zelda, and was probably my favourite game period until I played Undertale... But that's for much, much later, I suppose.

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Alright, now that the bonus poll's contest is done with, we can move into the bracket proper:

2010 - The Hold-Over Year

Decades are an illusion of human categorization. The trends of the last several years don't obligingly end when the calendar turns over to a year divisible by 10. If we indulge that illusion, we can point out that most of the 2010 games I have before me are in some way hanging onto the 2000s. First of all, we have two games from 2009 that snuck into the bracket: Bayonetta and Pokemon HGSS (the latter of which is a remake of a game from 2000.) We also have a set of games in the same engine as their predecessors from 2007 or 2008:

Super Mario Galaxy 2
Fallout: New Vegas
Halo: Reach

Even more notable is Mass Effect 2, the direct continuation of a single narrative that started in 2007, which loads save data from its previous iteration.

This project is so long that by the time I'm done with it, I might be shocked to see the progress made by a then-modern game of 2025. I'll have been stuck in the 2010s for years after their conclusion. If we run with that, and imagine me transplanting myself into the year 2010, then I'm looking to the future by first going over the past.

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Bayonetta
Release Date: January 5, 2010
I Will be Playing On: PLaystation 4
Previous Experience With Bayonetta: None
What I Expect From Bayonetta: Long legs and long combos

Bayonetta is a game I would never play outside this topic. In fact, it will be my first "spectacle fighter." I've never played any Platinum game or any entry in the Devil May Cry franchise. I bought Metal Gear Rising: Revengence for around $5 because the senator at the end is funny to me, but never got around to playing it. It just doesn't seem interesting to me. I'm not entirely sure why. Most games I love have combat, but it's only one aspect out of many. I don't really like fighting games either, so maybe it's the major emphasis of combat that repels my interest.

And like her game itself, there's something about the character of Bayonetta that just doesn't compel me, though I only know her from Smash and by reputation. I can appreciate the sense of fun she has, but I haven't seen her show much emotional range beyond that, so maybe that's what it is. That's not to say she doesn't have such an emotional range, to be clear. I won't know that until I play the game.

Still, this isn't intended as a total dismissal of Bayonetta. It's totally possible that I'll love her game once I give it a shot. That would be a great affirmation of the value of this project.


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I played Bayonetta for like a half hour and gave up, not my type of game, but I love Bayonetta

have fun!

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Keltiq posted...

The Goron section of the moon would be my favourite... if it weren't for the fact that I only own the GCN Zelda Collector's Edition port, which is notable for having a chance to crash every time the Goron Roll bounces off something.

I'm glad you enjoyed MM so much! It's definitely my favourite Zelda, and was probably my favourite game period until I played Undertale... But that's for much, much later, I suppose.

Man, that would've been a killer for me given how many times I had to try it. The Goron Roll is like the Zora swimming in that it's a movement option that has a lot of room for skill and elegance, so I can see why you'd like it. I think for me the heavy punishment for failure in that moon section was the biggest turn-off. I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes more enjoyable when you get better at it.

I think I would say MM is one of my top 3 Zelda games, along with Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild. OoT is up there too, of course.

Undertale is one of the relatively few games I've completed all the way from the GotD 2020 bracket. I have some plans for it that I hope you'll find interesting, but yeah, that's a long way down the road.

ZenOfThunder posted...

I played Bayonetta for like a half hour and gave up, not my type of game, but I love Bayonetta

have fun!

One thing I will say is that I expect to be really, really bad at it. Hopefully I'll figure it out a little more with two games worth of practice.

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Yeah it's really not my type of game either, but after I did beat it last year I can say it's definitely a good game, with a fun story.

However I really don't have a desire to play it again, so I'll be sitting this one out. Definitely enjoy your playthrough though, looking forward to your thoughts.

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Between floundering on the Moon in Majora's Mask and writing all those posts I cut it a little close on not being able to play Bayonetta at all tonight. I essentially only had time to see in intro. Bayonetta opens on a shot of a full moon, which makes a cute parallel with our last game. I like how stylized the presentation is, with many of the cutscenes looking as if we're examining them directly on a film reel, and I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly the actual gameplay begins, where I was expecting a long intro cutscene. Instead we have an impossible-to-fail combat sequence over narration, which is a nice way to kill two birds with one stone and give the player a chance to get introduced to the controls.

After that, though, there is a cutscene of Bayonetta praying while a fat man rudely shouts into her ears for quite a while followed by Bayonetta and a second man fighting angels in cutscene for really quite a while. It's about 10 minutes in total, and while it was amusing, I think I would've preferred if that fighting took place in gameplay. Anyway, I'll get into it more substantially tomorrow afternoon.

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Looking forward to it. 1 down 128 to go

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Hey, the NSMB games are solid platformers. There are far worse Nintendo series when it comes to being dull and unchanging.

How much did you like the 4 main dungeons in Majora's Mask compared to other Zeldas? Personally I think they're some of the best. I love how long and complex they are and how they don't just rely on the 'get item, use item, kill boss with item' formula. I also like the bonus objective of finding all the stray fairies which really makes you closely investigate every room for hidden stuff - I think I also liked the skulltula houses for the same reason, did you do those?

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pyresword posted...

So the Trails in the Sky game that made it into the contest is a direct sequel (the "SC" stands for Second Chapter) and shouldn't be played in isolation, because it starts right in the middle of things, doesn't really re-introduce characters that I can remember, and it would likely just leave you confused.

If you get that far in the project to begin with, you should probably play the first Trails in the Sky (Subtitled either just "Trails in the Sky" or sometimes "Trails in the Sky FC") available here https://store.steampowered.com/app/251150/The_Legend_of_Heroes_Trails_in_the_Sky/. These were originally intended to be one game anyways but ended up being released separately due to the length.

Anyways good luck with the project. I probably won't follow along closely just because I've only played 10% of the games myself, but it sounds exciting.

Come on pyre. We could've finally fulfilled the chest's prophecy of "There's probably somebody out there who played SC before FC. I bet they're really confused right now"

//if you're counting both games as one, FC came out in 2011...

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pezzicle posted...

Looking forward to it. 1 down 128 to go

Thanks for the support!

Gall posted...

Hey, the NSMB games are solid platformers. There are far worse Nintendo series when it comes to being dull and unchanging.

How much did you like the 4 main dungeons in Majora's Mask compared to other Zeldas? Personally I think they're some of the best. I love how long and complex they are and how they don't just rely on the 'get item, use item, kill boss with item' formula. I also like the bonus objective of finding all the stray fairies which really makes you closely investigate every room for hidden stuff - I think I also liked the skulltula houses for the same reason, did you do those?

I agree the NSMB games are well designed, they just feel a bit generic, you know? You're probably right that some of Nintendo's other properties are worse in that regard, though.

Yeah, I think MM's dungeons are among the best too, mostly for the same reasons you mention. I did do the Skulltula houses. I think they're among the best sidequests in the game, along with the Anju and Kafei quest line. They're like miniaturized Zelda dungeons. I will say that hearing the sound from so many skulltulas at once got on my nerves after a while though.

NFUN posted...

Come on pyre. We could've finally fulfilled the chest's prophecy of "There's probably somebody out there who played SC before FC. I bet they're really confused right now"

//if you're counting both games as one, FC came out in 2011...

Admittedly this is somewhat arbitrary, but my plan was to count them as one game with SC's release date, just because that's the game of the two that was in the contest. Since they're that far apart I might play them separately under their own release dates, though. I'll have to think about it more.

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Prologue:
Rank: Gold

Yesterday I played the interactive intro to this game. This level is the proper tutorial, explaining Bayonetta's light and heavy attacks, basic combos, dodge, and Witch Time, which slows down enemies if you dodge at the last possible second for some safe follow-up attacks. It might be described as a more involved version of the parry mechanic from Dark Souls. Unlike that, the amount of damage you get out of Witch Time varies, to an extent, based on your individual skill.

After a large brawl in a graveyard, there's a second sequence on an exploding plane that tutorializes the magic meter, which lets you perform pre-animated instant-kills on certain enemies. I failed this part the first time by going over the time limit, but got the "pure platinum" rating on my second attempt. Go figure.

Chapter 1
Rank: Silver

The first time we see the gameplay involve anything except combat. There are exploration sections and some obstacles to get around. I would hesitate to call them "puzzles." They're extensions of the combat mechanics, actually. There are walls you have to execute combos to get through and sections where you use enchanted statues to call lightning strikes upon yourself, so you can dodge them to activate Witch Time. For such a combat-centric game, it does make sense to use the battle mechanics in the other sections.

I made it partway through Chapter 2 before realizing how late it was and putting the PS4 into sleep mode so I could get ready for work. I guess that's a good sign!

The story is extremely frenetic in its pacing so far, to the point of being a little disorienting. We're introduced to Bayonetta's past, the roles of witches and sages which are neutral parties in a conflict between Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, and arcs involving Bayonetta's lost partner-turned-enemy and what I think is her daughter, as well as a chap who is ineptly hunting Bayonetta after she killed his father. Actually, a lot of the cutscenes do put a smile on my face, and I think the ultra-fast pacing helps keep things light-hearted and fun.

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Played through chapters 2 through 5 of Bayonetta today, with Stone rankings on all the proper levels and bronze on the Chapter 4 boss fight. At least I can take solace in the idea that I correctly predicted how bad I would be at this game.

I can tell it was designed to be played multiple times through, both for the unlockable difficulties and improving your rankings. There's a dizzying amount of stuff to keep track of in the gameplay, between all the different combos, unlockable skills, temporary weapons dropped by enemies, and permanent weapon options that change all your light attacks. So far I've unlocked a sword and a pair of gauntlets, and have mostly been using the sword. It seems to make certain enemies much easier to stagger with the faster attacks.

The boss fight in chapter 4 was super long and elaborate. There are checkpoints mid-battle, which was a saving grace for me, because I think I would've really struggled to complete it without them.

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I think Bayonetta's biggest strength is that replayability factor you mentioned. I like how it really encourages you to hone your skills to get those higher ranks on higher difficulties.

It's less about them trying to make a game for anyone to enjoy and more about working for that sense of reward. Which in turn led to the upswing of stuff like Soulsborne and tough indie games like Super Meat Boy, Cuphead and Celeste

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I think the best point of comparison for Hideki Kamiya's and Platinum's games are 1-on-1 fighting games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. Like how Bayonetta is meant to be played again and again to improve the player's skills, fighting games have almost no content in the traditional sense but can still be fun for an insanely long time as you improve at them to almost infinite levels. Arcade-style games can be like that too. I remember someone talking about clearing Ikaruga for the first time on infinite lives mode with hundreds of deaths, and then going back again and again to reduce that number. I feel a little bit tempted to do the same with Bayonetta, and play the game again on normal mode to try and get some half-decent rankings.

It does expose a potential flaw with this project, where I'll have to move onto the next game and therefore games like this one may not leave the same impression on me that they could, but I'll always have the option to revisit Bayonetta once I'm done.

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Hey now fighting games have plenty of content

It's that kind of talk that got us into this mess with Street Fighter V

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Leonhart4 posted...

Hey now fighting games have plenty of content

It's that kind of talk that got us into this mess with Street Fighter V

I admit that statement came from the perspective of someone who doesn't play many fighting games and is generally ignorant about them. I was mostly going by the old Street Fighter games where there was arcade mode and vs. mode and not much else.

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Chapter 6
Rank: Stone

For a lot of this level we're accompanied by Cereza, who calls Bayonetta her mummy. While I'm mostly on board with Bayonetta as a character by this point, I will say that her aloof attitude toward the kid wasn't too endearing to me. In gameplay terms we have to protect Cereza in the combat sections, but she's protected by a high-health magic barrier that regenerates, so I never failed because of the escort quest.

We fight a shape-shifting angel who transforms to look like Bayonetta, and they have a dance-off, which was hilarious and one of the game's highlights for me so far. Eventually Bayonetta dumps Cereza off on Luka, the guy whose dad she killed 20 years ago, which comes as kind of a relief.

Chapter 7
Rank: Bronze

Our second boss fight. I actually found this guy easier than the first boss. He has three distinct phases: one where we're jumping around on floating platforms while he flies past us, a second that reminded me a bit of Super Mario Galaxy where we run on his massive body and break red glowing spheres, and a third against his head. In the first phase you can actually stop many of his attacks just by hitting him enough during the wind-up, and I found the second pretty easy to get through without taking much damage once I learned that you can easily avoid its attacks in your panther form. The third one I struggled with a little more, because it has some quick-to-start attacks that I consistently failed to dodge.

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here's a question now that youve been playing it for a bit:

does Bayonetta truly feel like a great, worthy first game of the decade?

(i like it a lot and i think it definitely does)

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ZenOfThunder posted...

here's a question now that youve been playing it for a bit:

does Bayonetta truly feel like a great, worthy first game of the decade?

(i like it a lot and i think it definitely does)

Well the pedantic part of me wants to say no: it came out in 2009, damn it!

But to answer more seriously, I think it makes a good "first" game for this project because I'm gaining an appreciation for it and I wouldn't have tried it out otherwise. I definitely think it's a well-made game and can see how most of the design choices serve what the devs were going for. So yes!

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It's probably safe to assume I'll get the stone rank on every single level from now on.

Chapter 8

Short motorcycle level. The chapter title is "Route 666," which made me wonder if the Pokemon series has featured that same location by now. Sometimes these kind of single-appearance vehicle sections in games can be really badly made and obnoxious, but this one went by quickly and painlessly enough.

Chapters 9 & 10

A sort of narrative diversion into Bayonetta's past, set in Paradiso. Most of her amnesia is gone by this point. A lot of pretty visuals in this area. The enemy variety is apparently starting to run out as we start facing golden powered-up versions of previously encountered baddies, including miniaturized versions of the first two bosses.

Chapter 11

Third boss. Even though I got a lower rating than I did for the previous two, I think this guy is actually the easiest boss yet. Many of his attacks are aimed so far outward that you can just stand close to him and keep attacking, and he goes down a lot faster than either of the previous two. His final phase has a long animation when it begins, during which you can deal a lot of damage while he isn't attacking. You can exploit this even more by jumping off the platform you're standing on, which will make Bayonetta jump onto a new one, and the boss will go through that animation again afterward.

Chapter 12

Another short one, this time on a plane. It took me a while to figure out where I was going at one point, where you have to break open a pair of doors and go outside. This is also our third fight against Jeanne, who has a very similar power-set to Bayonetta. I find these mirror matches to be pretty satisfying from a gameplay standpoint, because it's interesting to match up against someone else who will use the dodge and break out of combos more like another player might. You have to change up your tactics accordingly.

By now Bayonetta has built up relationships with Cereza and to a lesser extent Luka, and is actively protective of them both. I think this is definitely a positive thing for the story that helps give it some more immediate stakes and makes Bayonetta a more sympathetic character.

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Chapter 13 (Boss)
Rank: Gold

First level I beat with 0 deaths. This is partially because of the health upgrades I've gathered throughout the game. This boss is definitely straight-foward but also drawn-out. He has a diving attack that is really easy to avoid but prevents you from attacking him for a while, and he uses it frequently. I even saw him do it twice in a row at one point. It started to give me trauma flashbacks of the fight against Ansem in the first Kingdom Hearts, where he had a spammable attack that surrounded him in a damage-proof aura for the duration, but at least it wasn't nearly that bad.

Chapter 14
Rank: Stone

A shoot-em-up section combined with the last fight against Jeanne. I remember when I started this game I was worried that I would think less of it for having very little apart from the combat. It's turned out to be the opposite, where the alternate gameplay styles feel much less interesting or well-developed than the combat and I almost resent the game for pulling me away from fighting to indulge them. What's interesting about this shmup section is that it still includes the evasion and Witch Time mechanics, which turn out to be pretty overpowered in this context. The section is quite long, and far less generous with its checkpoints, so after two deaths I was tired of it before it ended.

I would say it was a design error to include that section and the last Jeanne fight in the same chapter, because I can see myself wanting to replay the Jeanne fight but would rather not go back through the shoot-em-up section beforehand. It's quite an intensive and challenging battle - I died an absurd number of times trying to get through it. Jeanne only has a few attacks that let you activate Witch Time, and it's nigh impossible to get off your longer combos on her without it. I found the best option without Witch Time was the grounded Punch -> Punch -> Kick -> Kick combo. Jeanne's AI seemed to have trouble avoiding the final downward "wicked weave" hit from that option, which made it the most reliable such attack to try and hit her with. Not that I know what I'm talking about.

Chapter 15
Rank: Stone

The only 'standard' level I completed today. Unless I'm mistaken, the end of the game is in sight now, and this level did have the feeling of a final challenge to test what you've learned throughout the game, including more miniaturized versions of the earlier bosses. It was definitely nice to have a late level focused on the standard combat, though there was also a turret section that annoyed me a little.

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Chapter 16 (Boss)
Rank: Bronze

This entire chapter is dedicated to the boss fight against Balder, Bayonetta's dad. The guy is kind of a smug, foppish sort of villain, but I thought he was fun enough now that we finally got to meet him. As a boss he's more akin to Jeanne than one of the giant multi-stage battles against the Cardinal Virtues, and I think I prefer this model of boss fights for this game on the whole. Balder seems a bit more vulnerable to long combos than did Jeanne, but his attack speed becomes absolutely relentless later in the fight. It was cool seeing someone resist Bayonetta's "climax" attacks for the first time, and the way she finishes him off in the end was amusing. "Don't fuck with a witch."

Epilogue
Rank: Stone

After a short but hysterical section of riding up a rocket on a motorbike as it exits Earth's atmosphere, playing as Jeanne, we fight the final boss in Jubileus, who I was surprised to learn (though I shouldn't have been,) was a sexy woman-shaped diety. I'd say the first phase of the boss is the trickiest, where he has a variety of attacks that can come out all at once, with these Bullet-bill things that hound you even as you try to dodge attacks from the boss herself. After a little while she transitions into this more environmental boss fight with fire, ice, and lightning stages which are all pretty easy to get around. In some stages, she has a crazy instant kill attack that turns half the arena into a black hole, which was responsible for all my deaths.

Just before you finish her off, the music changes from her boss theme to Bayonetta's cover of Fly Me to the Moon, which I thought was a nice touch. I also liked the degree of absurdity that the fight manages, with things like the player maneuvering the boss' flailing body around every planet in the solar system to dunk her in the sun.

There are a couple little fights during the credits as a kind of relaxing way to wind down, which I thought was a great idea.

I would say I was satisfied with how the story ended. It's suitably light-hearted and silly as a conclusion, and I like how the whole cast of characters we've gotten to know throughout the game was together kicking ass in the end. Bayonetta's final goodbye to Cereza was cute too.

Final thoughts on Bayonetta coming soon. Possibly tomorrow.

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Final Analysis: Bayonetta
What I thought of Bayonetta: Amusingly absurd and impressively polished.
Would I play Bayonetta again? Yes, if only to satisfy my perfectionist instincts
Did it deserve to lose in round 1? No, it's probably in the top half of the bracket in terms of quality.

Restraint is generally an important concept in art. A lot of audiences might argue, for example, that the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky could've been more restrained in his use of overly long takes of people sitting around looking sad. A lot of anime gets criticized for lacking restraint in its sexualization. Bayonetta takes the concept of restraint, throws it out the window, then leaps forward in slow motion to riddle it with bullet holes as it descends into a swirling vortex that leads directly to the pits of Hell.

This is ironic for a game whose protagonist is a dominatrix, but at this level of consistency and exaggeration, it works. Most of the game's best moments come from its dizzy heights of high-octane exaggeration: fighting a rival on a flying missile, having dance-competitions with a clone of yourself, or flinging a newly awakened God across the entire solar system and into the sun. It manages a balance where it can have all this absurdity but its few more poignant scenes still have an impact, and that's in part because we become invested in the characters as we share in their fun. Bayonetta herself is endearingly self-assured: one of her sidekicks complains about her battling angels in a nun's habit, and she cooly responds "I can't help it if I like the little outfits."

The game's greatest sin is its tendency to use cutscenes for things it could show in gameplay. There are loads of long scenes where Bayonetta acrobatically annihilates mooks, and they are well-choreographed and often funny, but they can leave the player uselessly clutching his controller and feeling a little left out. Perhaps some restraint would have been useful after all, in this particular area. The cutscenes are so prevalent throughout the levels that they can disrupt the flow of replays, where the player will skip them and suddenly find Bayonetta in a completely different area. The elaborate intro scenes for every single enemy type, in particular, are one thing I could've done without.

Hideki Kamiya is a veteran of the hack and slash genre, and Platinum Games have become its most prominent developer. It's no surprise, then, that Bayonetta's combat mechanics are exceptionally well-done. There are a staggering number of options between the lengthy combo list, multiple weapons that can be attached to both hands and feet for different results, temporary weapons, and additional mechanics like the magic meter and witch time. All that complexity serves exhilarating fast-paced brawling that's especially rewarding to gradually master. Even after finishing the game, I feel like I've only scratched its surface in this regard: I'd like to go back through on normal difficulty for higher rankings, try out the harder modes, and experiment more with weapon options and unlockable skills.

But almost everything else about the gameplay is kind of shallow. The adventure game segments are mostly a series of boring puzzles based around the same two mechanics, and the more unusual motorbike and shoot-em-up sections lack the same polish and made me long to go back to the combat.

When I started playing this game, a few of you guys mentioned that it's not really your type of game. I've said a lot of nice things about it, so it might surprise you to know that it's not entirely my cup of tea either. To explain why, I'll use a contrast. Bayonetta is a Japanese story about fighting angels that extensively re-uses a cover of Bart Howard's Fly me to the Moon, and I happen to be a huge fan of something else that fits that same curiously specific description: Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Apart from the similarities I just mentioned, Bayonetta and Evangelion are about as different as can be. Their protagonists in particular are near polar opposites. While I enjoyed my time with the cocksure, unshakeable, and joyously energetic Bayonetta, I can't see her occupying a position among my favorite fictional characters like Evangelion's akward, self-doubting, frequently reprehensible Shinji Ikari does. Bayonetta can face down angels or even gods without batting an eye, constantly revealing new superpowers to counter them, and that's hilarious, but it deprives these entities of their conceptual force, by which I mean the angels in Bayonetta are as interesting and impressive as orcs in a standard fantasy story, or uncharacterized human mooks in something like Call of Duty. In contrast, Shinji's battles with his angels are traumatic, brooding, and usually narrowly won. He often sees his friends beaten down and in mortal danger, and some of Evangelion's most powerful moments are when his heroic efforts amount to nothing and he's helpless to do anything except wait for death.

In general, at least for me, the more flawed a character is, the better. This hurts the case of a character like Bayonetta, but it's great news for someone like Shinji. I'm not entirely sure why it is, but part of it comes from those previously-raised concepts of subtlety and restraint. At one point in Evangelion, Shinji claims that his primary motive is to win his father's approval, but that's not what we see in his actions. He refuses to take the first step forward on his journey (piloting a giant robot, in this case,) when his dad commands him to. What convinces him to do it is that when he refuses, he sees an injured girl being brought in to do that job in his place. My contention is that while Bayonetta would be a more enjoyable person to spend time with, Shinji is the more interesting character to observe in a work of fiction, and I guess that's part of it - Bayonetta makes her motives perfectly plain, but guessing at his gives us something to think about.

Like its main character, I had fun with Bayonetta, but I wonder if it's something I'll still think about a long time from now. I consider that the test it has to pass if it's a truly great game.

Next Game: VVVVVV

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Love your pace and write-ups so far! I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to say about VVVVVV.

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One of only three games in the entire bracket I've beaten, the others being Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Portal 2.

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Yeah that pretty much sums up my thoughts on Bayo as well. It was a fun time, but I'd be hard pressed to say it left an impact on me.

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So I figured I'd play along for VVVVVV....

And let's just say I'm looking forward to your reaction on some of this stuff

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MetalmindStats posted...

Love your pace and write-ups so far! I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to say about VVVVVV.

Thanks! That's very kind. I imagine most people skim heavily over the write-ups, so maybe I could make them a little more succinct. I'd also like to go even faster.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

One of only three games in the entire bracket I've beaten, the others being Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Portal 2.

All from 2010 or 11, interestingly. That implies that you're either a really retro gamer or that you stopped playing games very much around 2012.

BetrayedTangy posted...

Yeah that pretty much sums up my thoughts on Bayo as well. It was a fun time, but I'd be hard pressed to say it left an impact on me.

I imagine it's that way for a lot of people, unless they get really into the gameplay. Still, it's good enough for me. I think it's really hard to make a real impact on someone with a tone like Bayonetta's. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann managed that for me to a certain extent, but I think it helped that I was a 16 when I first saw it.

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VVVVVV
Release Date: January 11, 2010
I Will Be Playing On: Nintendo 3DS

Previous Experience With VVVVVV: None
My Expectations for VVVVVV: High difficulty + backtracking = frustration

If the contest had been "Best-Named Game of the Decade," VVVVVV would deserve last place in the X-Stats. You can tell it's an indie game, because that titling choice would never be approved by anyone trained in marketing. At least it's fun to come up with mocking variations, like "VVVVVV's Company." The best one I've thought of so far is "VVVVVV for Vendetta Vendetta Vendetta Vendetta Vendetta Vendetta."

Indie platformers are my favorite "Buy, but don't play" genre. Meat Boy, Shovel Knight, and Celeste are among the games I won't have to buy to complete this project, and I've never touched any of them. I only played about 2 hours of Hollow Knight. I have high expectations for all of them, don't get me wrong, I just never sat down and actually started them.

VVVVVV I did have to buy for this project. I'd say I'm looking forward to it but with a certain degree of trepidation. The game is apparently really hard and has a lot of back-tracking, which I think could become a potent rage-quit inducing combination.

When I initially sorted all the games by release date, using Wikipedia, I also took the time to glance at which platforms the games are available on, and I realized this project would help me finally get some extensive use out of my PS4. My goal, however, is to play as many games as possible on the 3DS, if only so I can take them with me on the bus. With its 8-bit graphics and fast-paced gameplay, VVVVVV seemed like an ideal place to start.

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very happy you enjoyed Bayo and stuck thru it, i am so awful at character action games, dont know if i ever finished one

can't believe VVVVVV was in freaking 2010 thats nuts

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Okay guys, I have a confession to make: I started VVVVVV last Friday. Thanks to COVID-19, my bus ride is especially long on Saturday mornings, so I brought it with me as a way to make use of the time. I delayed posting about it because I thought doing one game at a time would make the thread easier to follow.

So here's where we're picking up:

Play time: 1:21:26
Crewmates Rescued 5/6
Trinkets Found: 9/20
Deaths: 530 (It's that kind of game.)

VVVVVV is about 6 astronauts whose names all start with V. That's the reasoning behind the title, but I still don't call it a sufficient justification. Their spaceship crashes due to some kind of interference with its systems and they find themselves separated, and it's up to Captain Viridian, our intrepid player character, to reunite the crew and find out what went wrong.

Visually, the crew-mates make me think of the Teletubbies. They're a group of vaguely-humanoid ever-grinning creatures only differentiated by colour. The story and characterization are almost equally light, but I did think it was cute when I rescued Vermilion then the teleporter malfunctioned, throwing Viridian and Vermillion into a strange and dangerous dimension, and their response was a cheery "let's go exploring!" Their happy-go-lucky attitudes make a funny contrast against how dangerous the gameplay makes their situation look. Both characters died an embarrassing number of times on that happy little journey.

'Vicious' is the best word to describe the gameplay. It takes after games like I Wanna be the Guy where you need to position very carefully to avoid damage, and absolutely everything kills you in one hit, but it lacks the deceitful nature of that game. The things that can kill you are clearly sign-posted. The game is well-optimized to reduce the frustration factor of its difficulty, since checkpoints are extremely frequent and there's no downtime between death and respawn. The unusual 'gimmick' is that you can't jump but can reverse gravity if you're on the ground. One interesting effect of this is that you can freely explore the vertical limits of the game's overworld right from the start, while in any other game you would be heavily restricted in that way.

Very often there are sudden difficulty spikes. I think around 10% of the rooms have been responsible for like 90% of my deaths - the so-called Pareto distribution of video game deaths. For example, there's an area in the first level where you need to drop down multiple screens into a narrow chute full of spikes, bounce back up, travel the same screens again with the hazards on the opposite side, and emerge about ten pixels to the right of where you were when you began. There's a similar one shortly afterward where you have to cross multiple screens horizontally as they bounce you up and down, until you reach a very narrow spike-covered gap at the top of the whole structure. A lot of the time I would have the feeling of "I'll never manage this," and then try a little longer and manage it. The backtracking I was afraid of hasn't manifested too much. There's one 'auto-scroller' area where you can accidentally hit checkpoints and prevent yourself from going back for trinkets. I did that and thus had to go back through the whole level (which spans the entire vertical length of the map) to pick them back up.

Vermilion, the little bastard, caused a terrible number of deaths. He doesn't reverse gravity with you, but follows along whenever you're on the ground, just behind you. It can be hard to judge the distance away from you that he'll stop at, and the spacing is so precise that this led to a number of deaths. His section features by far the hardest screen so far, where you have to carefully and quickly navigate three platforms upside down, before they lower you into spikes, make it to a crevice, time your drops to lead Vermilion across, and then make your way back across the level twice to meet him. The length of time you have to go without making a mistake there made losing near the end really discouraging, but after a ton of tries I made it through.

Verily, the game is fast-paced fun so far, and I feel encouraged to keep going.


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Just beat it, and yeah that screen was by far the hardest one for me as well.

Also nice touch starting each of the six paragraphs with a V-word.

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Both of those are true for me. I do indeed play mostly older games, and I've found it hard to fully commit to a game since like 2015 or so. I typically get stuck somewhere and then never return out of disinterest.

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BetrayedTangy posted...

Just beat it, and yeah that screen was by far the hardest one for me as well.

Also nice touch starting each of the six paragraphs with a V-word.

Thanks. I wish I could've done it using better words than "very" and "verily," but by the time I finished that post I had to bolt out the door, practically carrying a slice of toast in my mouth like a high school anime girl.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Both of those are true for me. I do indeed play mostly older games, and I've found it hard to fully commit to a game since like 2015 or so. I typically get stuck somewhere and then never return out of disinterest.

I'm kind of the same way. Before I started this project, I had played almost 50 of these games, but only finished 11: Mass Effect 2 & 3, Dark Souls, Telltale's Walking Dead, Fire Emblem Awakening, Stick of Truth, Life is Strange, Undertale, Persona 5, Cuphead, and Three Houses. Also played a lot of Civ V, but you don't really complete that game.

One of my hopes for the project is that it will help me learn to finish the things I start.

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Yesterday was the closest I've come to going a day without actually playing any games for this project. A 10-minute session with VVVVVV on the bus was my only saving grace. After playing both ways and on my lunch break:

Play Time: 1:55:50
Crewmates Rescued: 5/6
Trinkets Found 12/20
Deaths: 659

I found some trinkets outside the levels proper, including one where you go around the outside of a previous level and find it past a giant glowing elephant. I'm not sure what significance the elephant has, if any, but walking around nearby it made Viridian look sad for a while.

Past a maze of teleporters I found what I assume is the last full-fledged level, where all the screens loop into each other, like in Pac-Man. Most of the level is based around the disorientation that comes from quickly falling off the level and re-appearing at the top. It's not as hard as my death count seems to imply, really. I think most of my lives were spent trying to get a trinket in a room full of killer fish, which I eventually gave up on.

We successfully rescue Verdigris, but Veridian gets stuck in an alternate dimension from the rest of the crew, so that our only missing person now is the captain himself. That's where I stopped for now. I think this is the very last section of the game, so I should get up in the afternoon and quickly finish it off.

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Oh yeah I have finished two games of Civ5.

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Since it's so close now, I'd like to solicit opinions on what I should do with Mass Effect. My inclination is to play the first one for this topic as well as the other two. I think it will be best if people can follow my Shepard through the whole trilogy instead of just reading a quick summary of the "comic book" DLC when I start 2. So if any of you are really against the idea of me playing a game that wasn't in any way in the bracket, speak up now.

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Nope. At the very least, take the "it's my topic and I'll do whatever I want" route.

But yeah, it would be like doing an '80s movie marathon that only included Empire and Jedi without A New Hope. So go ahead.

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LinkMarioSamus posted...

VVVVVV is actually the last game I beat, in early 2017, and while I liked the game I wasn't super crazy about it and it wasn't exactly a standout memory for me. Last year I tried playing Final Fantasy VII, got stuck on this boss you fight right outside Midgar on Disc 2, and then never came back. Haven't felt particularly keen on Final Fantasy since then either. I guess part of the problem is that I was hoping for my FFVII playthrough to be momentous, and instead it just felt like business as usual.

That's kind of similar to how I feel about VVVVVV. FFVII is a game where you "had to be there" to a certain extent. The story and gameplay hold up pretty well I would say, but there's no denying that a big part of its cultural impact came from how impressive the technology behind it was at the time.

Oh yeah, I remember you posting in another topic that you struggled with Diamond Weapon and being really surprised by that, because last time I played it with a friend both of our responses to him were "wow, what an under-powered boss!" I guess it's an example of how much easier a game can get once you know the tricks. Diamond Weapon goes down really quickly to Bolt3 and has no area-of-effect attacks, so even if he's one-shotting your guys you can get through by using a phoenix down after each of his attacks.

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Final stats for VVVVVV

Play Time: 2:17:43
Crewmates Rescued: 6/6
Trinkets Found: 14/20
Deaths: 843

Appropriately for a final section, the last area of the game brings back all the mechanics we learned in the previous sections. The tripwires that make you reverse direction mid-air, the screens looping into themselves, even the auto-scrolling sections come back for a final visit. After a non-linear game with a consequently 'flat' difficulty curve, this last area is a bit of a step up, though nothing came close to my previously-mentioned hardest room. There are a lot of pixel-perfect narrow gaps in this section, which is where the difficulty finally started to really annoy me, and before it was over I found myself hoping that each screen would be the last.

The ending was short and kind of cute. I admit I like the optimism that the characters have about them. They see the universe collapsing around them and say "We'll find a way to save our dimension!" We're also treated to some artwork of the 6 crewmates as a rock band, which makes them look like mutli-coloured versions of Isaac (BOI) rather than teletubbies - though this game was actually first!

You're still allowed back into the overworld after the game is done, and I took the time to find one last trinket on the map. I didn't feel dedicated enough to get the ones that would require me to go back into the levels themselves.

Final Thoughts on VVVVVV coming soon.

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Final Analysis: VVVVVV

What I thought of VVVVVV: Short and sweet, if a little frustrating
Would I play VVVVVV again? Maybe, if only because it's so short.
Did it deserve to lose in Round 1? I'm okay with this.

The release of Cave Story in 2004 makes a decent marker for when indie games started to become legit. That game had a full-scale main quest, powerups, unlockable content, a secret ending, and a story with flawed characters and dramatic events. I didn't play Cave Story until 2017, but even then I found it attention-grabbing enough to quickly play to completion.

Six years later, VVVVVV feels almost retrograde in comparison to Cave Story. It doesn't really match the depth or scope of that game. Though there is something to be said for its succinct method of storytelling, given that gaming is a visual medium, it doesn't use it to go anywhere terribly interesting, and the gameplay is mostly limited to a few simple mechanics.

But that's a strength too: the immediacy and simplicity are what make VVVVVV. Despite a couple of difficulty spikes, it really is a well designed game. It's one of the pioneering titles in how to manage high difficulty without causing rage-quits: there's no delay between death and restarts and it ditches most of the dick moves that defined its predecessor I Wanna be the Guy, a game that would have spikes shoot from the floor just before a checkpoint, with no visual warning, and then laugh as you fought the urge to hurl your keyboard against the wall.

It wasn't the game's capriciousness that made me quit IWbtG, though. I gave up during the Castlevania section, when I had to navigate a narrow passageway through rapidly-shifting spikes. At times, VVVVVV indulges this same tendency to overdo its difficulty and becomes obnoxious.

2010 was close to the time when indie games really started to shift into the relative mainstream. I don't think our first two games contests had a single indie game, or if it did they didn't last long. For one of them to go toe-to-toe with a mainline Final Fantasy game, on this of all sites, says a lot about their success in this decade, after that history.

VVVVVV is a relic of a more innocent age for indies, before The Binding of Isaac popularized procedural level generation. Its carefully tuned challenges and deliberately laid-out non-linear overworld are far more satisfying than the randomized levels - and prizes - of a game like Eagle Island. I wasn't blown away by the game by any means, but I respect it. This is a good format for a one-man project to follow. A small scale and iteration upon a simple idea and a handful of mechanics keeps the scope manageable. A lot more would-be indie developers would actually finish their games if they took lessons from VVVVVV. Just don't copy the naming system.

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I actually like what I've played of FFVII a lot though, albeit mostly in the sense of the game feeling wonderfully cinematic while still having reasonably good gameplay.

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Ff7 is definitely still playable today

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