[Jigsaw]

Played/watched this for an hour or two with a co-worker Friday night, and being a lifelong Strider Hiryu nut (the original arcade game is definitely up there in my all-time favourites) I was really curious to see how this game'd end up. Immediately upon its announcement, I thought it looked like shit. I eventually warmed up to (or at least begrudgingly accepted) the idea of making it a Metroidy exploration game but there were still plenty of things I was apprehensive about. Having played it a little, I'd definitely say I'm not quite as enthused as some seem to be.



To its credit, I think some things aren't nearly as bad as I dreaded. Combat is actually reasonably fun, and the bullet sponge factor isn't quite as bad as early footage made it look - getting shot DOES hurt, and with Hiryu's surprisingly tiny hitbox you can actually dodge bullets somewhat; and managing to slip through a barrage of incoming projectiles unscathed does feel genuinely awesome. You can/will get quite a lot of health upgrades pretty quickly though, so I dunno how it works out in the long haul. Maybe the game is better played on higher difficulty, IDK.


But overall I'm certainly not in love with it. Random impressions:

-Hiryu looks and feels like Hiryu, for the most part, and he handles reasonably well. His new design is dumb, but at least he's usually zoomed out and moving fast enough for you to not really notice. His animations look great and that's really what makes it work. There's a few things about the controls/movement that felt super weird to me though. First off, the jumping - the air control you have was really jarring to me; you can switch direction mid-air at any point, even back and forth, but you can't really control the horizontal speed of the jump very well. This felt very awkward to me, being used to the arcade game where you commit to the jump but are then free to aim your mid-air attacks in any direction. In this game you can't jump forward and attack backwards, trying to do so will just make you land where you started. It doesn't slow you down or anything either, nope, just instantaneously reverses the direction of your jump.
Oh yeah, and you can't cancel your slide with a jump either, that's just bullshit.

-Climbing on ceilings is a bit awkward too. Letting you use the jump button to go faster while climbing walls is great, but as soon as you reach a ceiling or even an angled surface, that stops working. Instead pressing the jump button will make Hiryu just kinda, er, stop in his place and do a weird jerking motion? Sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what the outlines of the wall/ceiling you're climbing are, and it's easy to end up boosting into a sloped surface without realising, pressing jump again, and just have Hiryu stop dead in his tracks instead of ascending smoothly. I would have preferred being able to boost with the jump button regardless of what surface you're climbing, but barring that at least not having the same button suddely make you STOP instead of going faster.

-Speaking of sloped surfaces, I don't much like how they work on the ground either. What immediately stood out to me is how Hiryu doesn't even have unique idle or walking animations for slopes! He did in the 1989 game, where it would have to have been considered if not a technical achievement, at least some degree of extravagance - but here, nope. His regular idle animation just gets tilted up to 45 degrees, and it looks fucking ridiculous. On a related note Hiryu does not pick up speed by running down slopes, which is a huge missed opportunity. Not only did it simply feel pretty sweet in the original, it could be used to interesting effect in navigation puzzles and the like.

-The character design is just fucking dreadful. Hiryu's design isn't offensively bad (he doesn't look like this or anything), but it certainly doesn't improve on his Strider 2/MVC design. It's brought more in line with the overall aesthetic of this game I guess (which ultimately is kind of the issue since the game looks so agonizingly dull), but I don't really know if I have that much to say about his design either way. Well except the smokey laser scarf, that's just fucking stupid. Caveat number two is that I actually really like Grandmaster Meio's design! I think it's a nice refinement that keeps the character recognisable while making him less of a blatant copy of the Emperor from Star Wars.

I don't have as nice things to say about anyone else though. The enemy grunts have the blandest, most forgettable designs imaginable, and it's certainly not helped by having to face the same 2 or 3 kinds of enemies over and over and over again in every single area. The original arcade game had more enemy variety (and memorable designs) in its first five minutes than this game has in an hour!

The robot enemies/bosses are just boring. Solo looks.. kind of OK I guess? I don't like his cape, but he's at least more recognizable/memorable than just about anyone else in the game so far. Contrarily the Kuniang Martial Arts team aren't the least bit recognisable, neither in design or fighting style. They're still girls with colour coded outfits I guess?? Looking at the artwork for the new game, they do look pretty decent (and visibly Chinese), but none of that seemed to survive the transition to the actual game.


-My biggest gripe by far though is just how massively dull and uninteresting the game's world is. The original arcade game has five relatively short stages, but in that manages to squeeze in futuristic cityscapes, Siberian wilderness, flying fortresses, the fucking Amazon, a MOON BASE and more - all in amazing technicolor and all without even any one of those areas ever feeling repetitive or samey on its own. Meanwhile in 2014, we get a sprawling city(?) where everything is completely grey and largely looks the same. The music has that same droning, indistinct and forgettable quality, doing absolutely nothing to tell you where you are.

Games like Super Metroid and SOTN takes place in one location, but still manages to make it varied and interesting by using tons of variation in tilesets/colour schemes, enemies, architecture, while also tying each area to memorable landmarks and music. Incidentally the original Strider did this, but the new game - which would actually need it - just doesn't seem to bother. Everything looks the same, none of it interesting. It's not UGLY - but it's absolutely devoid of any colour or personality. Just look at any screenshot of this game and compare it to how Kazakh was depicted in, say, Marvel vs. Capcom. Both the original arcade game and its sequel were amazingly vibrant and colourful, and they've basically just sucked that right out of the new game.

On a related note, I found it really shocking that this game apparently makes ZERO attempts at explaining the world, any of its characters (including the protagonist), the main mission/conflict, or really any of what's going on. Far be it from me to complain about a game not stopping enough to dole out exposition, but in this game I found it borderline absurd. Even the arcade game spent more time on its story than this! Even something as simple as showing Grandmaster Meio holding the Earth in his hands while cackling away sets the stage immediately - OK, this dude is obviously evil and we're supposed to stop him. The new game doesn't even have that! It shows Hiryu flying in somewhere and... the game begins. Neither Hiryu nor Meio (nor anyone else) gets any kind of introduction, there's just explicit instructions popping up on the map screen telling you how to advance to the next room, that's it. Whether these are meant to be Hiryu's orders (from whom?) or instructions to the player is left up to the imagination, I guess. We eventually see cutscenes of some guy with a fake Russian accent having some kind of conversation with Solo, the Kuniang sisters just kinda show up, and... well, again, none of them are introduced and there aren't really any explanations as to who any of them are or why they want to kill Hiryu (or rather the other way around I suppose, I don't even know).

This is really weird for a game like this! I would be absolutely happy for the game to speak for itself, but for the gameplay itself to carry the burden of narrative, as it were, it needs some degree of actual setup. Super Metroid front loads its storytelling to great effect, and while SOTN does stop to advance the narrative at multiple points, it too makes great efforts to set the stage properly before the game actually begins. I would be fine with the new Strider not focusing much on cutscene/dialogue-fueled 'narrative', but it's not like it's deliberately taking that approach either. The environment, enemy placement, music etc is as mentioned far too dull and forgettable to do that work, and the game DOES have cutscenes, talking heads, and whatnot which implies that they want to tell a story that way, but then they don't even bother with that. They didn't eat the cake but then they didn't keep it either. I don't get it.






It's not an awful game, in many ways it's better than I dreaded it would be. Moving around and fighting feels pretty good and is reasonably fun, and I could absolutely see myself playing it through, maybe multiple times even. I'm stoked to see what a speedrun of this will look like. But it is certainly no all-time classic, and it undoubtedly falls short of what it could have been, let alone the pedigree set by the original game.

[Jigsaw]

[Jigsaw]

Bought the game for myself a few days ago, and finally got around to playing it today. Finished it in 4:43 (game time).

Most of my complaints still stand; nothing the game did ever really made me feel different about the stuff that bothered me initially, other than enemy variety I guess. That DOES get a lot better once more enemy types are introduced, eventually the game's combat even evolves into something rather mechanically fun and interesting.

That kind of ties into a bigger issue though - the game for whatever reason elects to wait a rather long time before bothering to even introduce the elements that make the combat in the second half of the game actually interesting - the different ways of attacking, and the different plasma types. Once you unlock the kunai, Plasma Catapult and start getting access to the different plasma types, both combat and navigation become like 100x more fun and engaging than before. The game starts throwing enemies at you that actually pose kind of a threat, and you have to switch back and forth between different ways of attacking in order to succeed - at this point the game turns into something I'd call a legitimately fun and cool action game... but it takes like 2 hours to get there. That's kinda weird!

The different uses of options to interact with and traverse the world are pretty cool too. Kinda sucks that it's never particularly clear where the panther or eagle actually will take you, but whatever. It's not a huge part of the game so I'm willing to look past it I suppose.


The confusion wrt world traversing is a very real problem in the bigger picture though. My original complaint that the world feels incredibly dull and samey unfortunately holds just as true after finishing the game as it did on first impression. With the exception of the way-too-brief Balrog section and the Ouroboros fight in the very beginning, almost every part of the game looks and feels more or less the same. There are a few minor details that stand out, a room or two here and there that had a cool feature, but the fact that every major area of the game feels so similar to the next makes it all but impossible to actually remember where any of those places are. In fact I don't think I could name let alone describe any of the game's areas if asked. There was, like... a prison? I think? I'd probably enjoy exploring a lot more if the game actually had memorable and unique locations.



Bluh yeah I'm kinda conflicted still but all in all I kinda like the game? I'm not quite as enthused about it as some people seem to have been, but there's definitely fun to be had with the game. I wouldn't feel too bad about recommending it to fans of the series and/or the genre.

[Jigsaw]

Good to hear, also not terribly surprising. Definitely started wondering more about that stuff once I started unlocking more abilities and whatnot. Between Plasma Catapult management and different weapon types I imagine there'll be quite a bit to actually speedrunning this thing.

Do you happen to have any hot tips on runners to keep an eye on?