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Nintendo, Square - Embarrassing?
Thanks to EvilAvatar for pointing to a recent update at the sadly semi-retired ToastyFrog site, in which Nintendo and Square are added to the list of The 20 Most Embarrassing Game Companies. A gentle roasting is applied to Nintendo for being "..called the gaming equivalent of Walt Disney. Partly because their work is innovative, polished and marketable, but also because a pervasive stench of evil hovers over the company", and a similar treatment is applied to Square, of which ToastyFrog posits: "Which is worse, the company, its fanboys or its ex-fanboys? The world may never know." However, this tongue-in-cheek cynicism produces plenty of good points, most notably Square's Tom Sawyer RPG as a "terrible cultural hiccup."
The article referred to Kingdom Hearts as "flawed at best" and implied that it was due to the FF characters that just show up and 'act pretty". It's true, in KH the FF characters don't do *much* but they do point you in the right direction and provide some good opposition in the arena. However, I haven't played any FF games in any depth at all, so I'm not attached to (or familiar with) the characters. I recognized some of the names, but didn't have any emotional connection or sense of how the should be used in the story.
However I do take exception to characterizing Kingdom Hearts as "flawed at best" on every other point. The game looks good, controls well, provides a lot of challenges and side missions. The real star is how well they tie in the Disney properties. The worlds and characters all *work*. I didn't expect that adventuring with Donald and, of all people, Goofy would be cool. But they are. In marvelous level design they squeezed Wonderland into four levels, and kept rotating one room to create different situations and open up different paths. Visiting familiar places and meeting characters was also cool. It all helped drive the urgency of the plotline, since you're charged with protecting all of this familiar territory.
Even without the licensed properties the game would still be worth playing for its enormous bosses and flagrantly beutiful scenery. The Tarzan world has several stunning vistas - go up to the very top of Tarzan's house and you can see for miles, and the fight up the waterfall is just gorgeous. All of the art direction and level design is stellar.
The real-time combat system does an excellent job of combining 3d fighting action (some basic combos to chain up) with platforming intensity and RPG decision making. The sidekicks (Donald, Goofy and/or Tarzan, the Beast, Jack Skellington, Ariel etc) actually help in combat. The game alternates between swarms of small fry, mixed up with smaller numbers of big monsters. Sometimes you have to just button mash and pound your way clear before you're overrun with bad guys, other times you have the opportunity to set up combos and plan your attacks. It keeps the intensity up. And the aerial battle against Captain Hook rocks.
Bosses are big. Sometimes really big. Uggy Wuggy or whatever is name is from Halloweentown turns into a veritable mountain of a monster. You have to climb and jump over him to attack weak points. And he's at least 100 yeards high. Fighting Cerberus in the arena requires jumping on his back to escape the jaws, and fireballs and dark magic and... The human-scaled bosses are still dangerous for all the fact that you can cross blades with them.
KH is also a 3d platformer. Jumping puzzles abound, some of them intricate and requiring precision to pull off. And sometimes you're faced with a jump you just can't make yet and will have to come back to. But they're rarely game killers. I did have to take breaks and come back to execute some sequences, but I felt *good* after the accomplishment. Even the tricky ones rarely felt 'cheap'. At least you never take falling damage, so you usually just have to retrace your steps if you miss a jump (there are a couple of bottomless pits to get lost in though). And you have some chocie in which world to tackle next.
The story is good, deliberately cheesy in places but not overly so. It has lighthearted moments and some very dark ones. The inevitable setup for a sequel is tastefully done. The wholly original world design (the final levels) was very well executed. As a real bonus there iare remarkably few graphical glitches. I found a rendering error under Tarzan's house, and you get slowdowns during big fights in the hold of the pirate ship because there's an environmental fog effect that competes with spell efefcts for rendering time. Other than that, and one or two jumps that we're trickier than they had to be, the game was just about pefect.
"Flawed at beast" my hat. This would have been great without a single licensed property. And they used at least t
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Hardly a niche Player when the GameCube is #2 worldwide, and of top 100 games in Japan, Nintendo published more than anyone else.
I'd recommend you look at some of Parish's other work to get an idea of when to take him seriously and when not to. This would be an instance of sarcasm, a concept you may have run into in other comments here at Slashdot. For instance, he doesn't actually think that Pac-Man is jingoist, xenophobic anti-Christian propaganda (at least, it's never come up in conversation...). And if you really think Xenogears' protagonist was originally named Fei Ben Jesus, you're beyond help.
The articles for Ninetendo and Sqare-Enix may be toungue and cheek, but I think its more important to look at the entire section as a whole. Too put Capcom, Nintendo and Square-Enix in the same context as 3DO and Acclaim...now that's just wrong. I find 3DO and Acclaim seriously embarassing as a gameplayer. They put out some real steaming piles, and lets not talk about tombstones. I just think its bad journalism in a way, to put those companies in the same context.
He deffinately has a pair for critcizing Capcom, Nintendo and Spuare-Enix in this way, though. I just think he might have had a blood flow problem at the time.
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