Super FamiComplete # 122: Yuuyu no Quiz de Go! Go!

 

Title: Yuuyu no Quiz de Go! Go!

Release: July 10th, 1992

Developer: Taito

Publisher: Taito

Weirdly I've seen this game before on Game Center CX and through a blog that recaps that show in English. It is a quiz game, it is! I am thinking this is going to be a very short entry on this blog. 

Background and Developer

A genre of video game that never really translated to American culture was the Quiz Game. Sure there have been and will always be shovelware ports of game shows and the like (I always think of the NES Jeopardy or the Wii Are you Smarter than a 5th grader?), but the big examples of Quiz Games have been left to digital board games. The latest examples that even come to mind are You Don't Know Jack and *shudder* The Guy Game (gross). I imagine the demand for trivia and quiz games, which age quickly and poorly, have cheaper and easier mediums to be designed for rather than video games, so they really died, in my experience, around the PS2 generation. If you do still see them, they really are considered shovelware. 

Is this game shovelware? Yes. This is some kusoge weirdness. The title translates to "Quiz with Yuuyu! Go! Go!" Who is Yuuyu you may ask? Yuuyu is the nickname of Yukiko Iwai, a Japanese idol from the 80s and early 90s. 

For the uninitiated, idols are all purpose entertainers in that they are singers, models, and dancers that adopt a persona to interact with their fans. Their appearance and persona are heavily monitored and scripted by their agencies, similar to how Disney has stringent contracts that regulate and set an expected behavior for their actors. While idol culture had its heyday in the 80s and 90s,  and is still very popular now, it has notoriously become much more cutthroat and competitive due to the influence of K-pop and the general fracturing of the music industry into more niche genres. Yukiko herself belonged to a girl group called Onyako Club, and was considered the breakout star of that group. 

Onyako Club

Here is some of her singles from her heyday...

Yukiko Iwai left the industry in 1997, and really has not been seen in public since 2002 when her group had a reunion concert. Hilariously, one tabloid said that the reason she retired was because she hated children, though I am assuming this meant as fans as she had a couple of children herself. 

The game itself was developed and published by Taito who, on top of making a bunch of big games, also made niche products like this. 

Gameplay

The game is a series of several rounds of general knowledge questions and some more esoteric Japanese pop culture questions. Yuyu serves as the host and emcee of the quiz, usually in some fanciful or, in some cases, cultural appropriated outfits (I mean look at the front cover where she is wearing a sari). The presentation is colorful, but certainly of its period in terms of the compressed pictures of Yuyu, cartoony sprite art, and a very cutesy/childish aesthetic. This seems like it would have some FMV in it, but instead you get still pictures of Yuyu. It seems a very strange choice to develop a game focused on a the image of a real life figure without the hardware to back it up. This feels like it should be a PC Engine or DOS game from this era rather than a Super Famicom game. 

The one thing it does have a lot of is compressed voice clips of Yukiko Iwai, who will introduce new segments and, my favorite, do a delightful "bing bong" when you get a question wrong. The sound design is also pretty fun and well crafted for a quiz game.

The game play does seem to be slowed a good bit by using a text parser in order to enter certain answers. Not really fun to do that on a D-Pad without a keyboard available. 

Overall

This seems like a fun relic of its time, but not really something that someone should seek out to play. I don't know how much a modern Japanese collector would get out of this, because quiz games, especially ones endorsed by a celebrity that hasn't been active for 25 years, tend to age like milk. A neat little time capsule of an era in Japanese pop culture, but nothing really there for the general collector. 

The Legend of 9 Black Unicorn Sols in a UFO of Wisdom: Wukong Overlord 50 (Part 2)

Hello again! Between the first post of this kind and this one, I have made some good ol' progress on a few of the titles hinted at in the title, and even beaten one of them! In this post, I am going to give some updated thoughts on Black Myth: Wukong as well as my first thoughts on the newest Legend of Zelda AND my first and final thoughts on 9 Sols. 

Let's start with some more monkey madness! 

Black Myth: Wukong

I have made pretty good progress! I just finished Chapter 3, which I have heard is the longest chapter in the game. It really is like six smaller chapters all in one, and feels by far the most sweeping and threatening locale yet. In this chapter, you traverse this games take on the Tower of Latria from Demon's Souls; a temple and prison complex that spans a snowy mountain range where a set of malevolent demons masquerading as monks have made their base of power. The combat has become really challenging to match the ever expanding toolset of your monkey man. I now have a ring of fire that can allow me to regenerate health/stamina as long as I can defend it, a parry (it's on a cooldown) in the form of turning to stone right before a hit lands and will stagger your foes for a second, and a new and improved hub that collects all the NPCs that can give you permanent upgrades in one place. 

The bosses, as well, are becoming much more wild in design and abilities: a gigantic scarab with the head of a buddha lodged in his back, a really hard tiger demon that you fight in a pool of blood and offal, and, weirdly my favorite boss so far, a mad monk who starts with his hands bound behind his back, and then a second phase where he unbinds himself and becomes a dervish of kicks and punches. 

The chapter concludes with a grandiose final dungeon: a temple complex just filled with enemies, including these stories tall towering giants who are modeled after Bishamonten, the War Buddha. It is really challenging (and at times kind of annoying) and the boss of this chapter was easily the most rage inducing due to his ability to turn your spells against you. The false Buddha "Yellowbrow" is a towering fat monk who you engage in a 3 phase boss fight with that is quite the spectacle. You start fighting just him, who wields a spiked mace that can extend along a chain, and casts powerful lightning spells at you. His second phase is actually a fight against the toughest version of another boss you fight throughout the chapter, a Macaque demon, whom you fight inside Yellowbrows magic seed sack. Finally, you are shrunk to the size of a miniature, and placed inside a giant shrine amidst a bunch of animated clay figurines. After you tear through the altar, you finally fight Yellowbrow again, who is able to use a golden version of your parry, as well as turn your monkey duplicates against you if you try to summon them. It is really damn hard, but super rewarding when I finally beat him by the skin of my teeth. 

The game has also become less of a corridor and more of actual levels with some choices in exploration. Each area has little secrets to find and some really well hidden bosses and challenges. I am excited by the fact that I still have three more areas to fully explore! Really good stuff and the game continues to delight.

Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

The newest in the storied Nintendo series, and the first official Zelda game where you play primarily as Zelda, Echoes of Wisdom is a bit of a sour note when I was hoping it to be a revolutionary entry in the series. Perhaps those expectations were a bit too lofty, but even at a base level the game is a bit of a disappointment for the series, and it makes some key missteps that would have made this a much more engaging experience.

So far, I have completed two of the regional dungeons and the big halfway dungeon, so these impressions will be based off of that. The game so far, focuses on a Hyrule where rifts into a void dimension have opened over the kingdom and absorbed the land and its inhabitants. Worse, these voids start spitting out shadow monsters and doppelgangers that replace those who have been swallowed, and are working to push the kingdom over the edge into chaos. On paper, this sounds cool, especially with these void dimensions taking the place of the "dark world" that has become a fun part of many Zelda games. I was expecting one of two things (and maybe expectations are part of the issue): either a "dark dimension" or the rifts to be dungeons dotted around the map to slowly and piecemeal put the map back together, sharing a similar role to the shrines serve in Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. This is sadly not the case. 

This sense of putting the world back together piece by piece, and having the freedom to choose an arsenal of tools with which to do so, was really appealing. This was bolstered by the main gameplay conceit of the game: a wand with which you can record the "echoes" of monsters and objects, and then repopulate the world with these objects to do your bidding. Maybe you summon a swordsman or land shark to defeat your enemies, or stack a trampoline on top of a bed to reach a tall ledge. This promise of using the toys and the toy box itself to solve your problems and potentially sequence break the game sounded really appealing and refreshing. It was like refining the freedom of the modern 3D Zelda's into the nostalgic mold of the 2D Zeldas. Again, at least so far, this is not the case. 

This game is one of the most handholdy and constrained of any of the Zelda's so far. It is like they were intimidated by the scale of the idea they were building towards, and were afraid that someone could get easily overwhelmed or lost. After the intro of the game, you are given a "choice" of the Gerudo or Zora area of the map to start hunting for dungeons. In reality, you pretty much have to do the Zora dungeon, as you get the ability to summon echoes further away from you, without which you cannot complete the Gerudo dungeon. You then do the Gerudo dungeon, and finally return to Hyrule castle as the halfway dungeon. There really aren't optional rifts to explore, a small handful of sidequests, and no real Echoes that "break" the game (we will talk more on this in a bit). Granted, the game has opened up a bit since the halfway point, and started offering some optional challenges, but it took a good bit too long to get to this point. 

It also doesn't help that there are some other sloppy issues that present a lot of friction to the player. First off, the style is very cute and harkens to the Link's Awakening remake, but nothing about the game really reflects this style other than providing a contextual reason for having 2D platforming on top of the Link to the Past style 2D exploration, a gimmick present in Awakening that is present here. The UI is more reminiscent of Breath of the Wild and feels like a tonal mismatch with the cute "playhouse" miniatures aesthetic. As well, Links Awakening benefited from the slightly off dreamland aesthetic with some bizarre environments and characters. At least so far, Echoes really doesn't have that. You have all the Zelda staple races: two types of Zora, the Gerudo, the Gorons, the Hylians, and the Sheikah, but there is nothing unique about these iterations or implementations. They just are there in another Zelda adventure. Especially with the promise of a Zelda led title, it really feels like they gave her the dullest adventure possible. 

Second, this game is way too chatty for a story so slight. All the characters trip over themselves to over explain the goals and the mechanics of the game, sometimes beating a certain plot points in three times before letting you move on. This is further exacerbated by the lack of a meaningful skip button to dialogue or cutscenes. The writing is utilitarian and not really charming in the least; they don't add onto the Zelda lore in any neat way, there is no sense of humor really, and the characters are all just kind of milquetoast. I was really hoping that they would, instead, just kind of emote or do little speech bubbles with icons/emojis in them, with maybe one character (like the little orb who follows you around, Tri), who acts as interpreter for the player. They had to do something, because right now the game is severely devoid of charm.

Finally the "freedom" offered by the echoes really isn't offering the dynamism I was hoping. Most of the echoes boil down to monsters to fight for you, objects that act as throwable objects, or objects to act as platforms. There are a handful of really useful echoes that are clearly the "dungeon items" traditional to Zelda, such as the water block that makes a bridge or a ladder you can swim across or up, a spider who leaves a rope to climb, and a flying tile that allows you to fly across gaps. This leaves most of the echoes feeling like cruft next to the few handful, and you only really use those small handful instead of exploring and playing through all of them.

Compounding this frustration is a really piss poor UI for the echoes. It is similar to the Tears of the Kingdom menus, where you have to scroll through options in a horizontally scrolling menu. While Tears of the Kingdom provides you with specialized menus for swords, shields, items, etc, Echoes has all of your echoes in one big menu, one which, already just halfway through the game, takes about 10 seconds to scroll from one side to the other. It is incredibly cumbersome and makes it a pain to want to find and try new echoes. This is exceptionally frustrating considering they could have fixed this with a different UI option, like a favorites menu or a weapons wheel, or segment the echoes further by utility. It just comes off as inept from a company that is usually known for its slick UI. 

Overall, this game really is quite the bland stew, and one that I keep putting off going back to when it's time to play video games. 

9 Sols

9 Sols, by Taiwanese studio Red Candle Games, is a 2D metroidvania souls like ala Hollow Knight that drinks more from the Sekiro well than the Dark Souls well. With an aesthetic affectionately coined as "Tao Punk," 9 Sols takes place in a ruined world where a race of cat beings, known as Solarians, have purloined a group of humans from Earth and taken them to a Shambala styled "paradise" to serve as fodder for their technologies that corrupt the natural and spiritual order. The story, which is told in a similar piecemeal and contextual style as Souls, is regardless much more rich in lore and character focused. There is a lot of dialogue, many diary entries, and other bits of lore to help flesh out the world and characters; the player still has to do the leg work to piece the story together, but the pieces are readily available and much less left to interpretation. 

While this is a story of rebellion against the order of this world, you do not play as a human rebelling against their captors, but instead one of the leaders of the Solarians, known as a Sol who was betrayed by the other nine Sols (*gasp* the title!) and is now on a quest for vengeance. The player has the ability to choose, through dialogue and actions, to choose whether this quest is one of bloodlust fueled revenge: killing the other Sols out of pride without caring for the plight of the humans/victims of this regime, or one of redemption, where you character reconciles with his own misdeeds in creating this system of oppression and overthrows the other Sols to fix these mistakes. 

The tale and world is a really rich one too. Basically the Solarians, a technocratic regime who views their Taoist heritage as a curious relics at best or dangerous distractions to progress at worst, are all stricken with a disease that eventually will turn them into husks from which white flowers grow. Instead of choosing to accept this fate, as a growing number of traditionalist Taoists are proclaiming, instead the technocrats create the "soulscape," a suspended animation that leaves the bodies of the Solarians in stasis while their brain enters a digital paradise. While they are in this digital dream, the Sols are working frantically on a cure for the affliction with the hopes to reawaken their population in the future. It sounds like a good plan if not for a couple things: 1) the Soulscape can only be sustained by a network of human brains, which the Solarians have made a pseudo-religion in order to keep the humans compliant and ready to sacrifice themselves for brain harvesting, and 2) the people awakened from their stasis are often driven mad at being plucked from heaven, and go violently berserk when awakened. Throw on top of this the corruption, apathy, and misconduct, and sick experiments of some of the other Sols, you have a system that is built on cruelty and is completely perverted from its original purpose. 

It's pretty gripping, and how your character's relationships with the other Sols, the Sols motivations for their actions, and the plight of the humans throughout the story is told in a very relatable and charming way. You can find gifts for the human child you take in, and poisonous dishes that are deadly to anyone but one NPC who can only eat deadly toxins, or help a sentient warbot who has become a serene poet locate his still very much a warbot brother. Each of the other Sols has their own backstory and motivations, and they try to do their best to endear you to your rogues gallery, and add a bit of depth to their villainy. Admittedly, some of these are still a little moustache twirly, and I actually found the main villain/final boss to have the least impactful story, instead trading compelling reasoning for her actions to "oops she's just been driven crazy now."

While I really enjoyed the story and world of 9 Sols, I found the game to be tuned a little too high in terms of difficulty. Enemies are really rather relentless in their attacks, and the timings between your parries, your charge parries (necessary to deflect the powerful "red" attacks), and your jump counters (similar to the Mikiri counters in Sekiro which you use to counter thrust attacks), is quite short. As well, your character is a bit of a squishy little kitty, and he dies very quickly even with a healthy supply of healing items. Luckily, the game let's you tune the difficulty to your liking with a great deal of flexibility, and you can basically make the game a cakewalk if you want, but judging the game as-is means that this is really one mean game. I decided to up my damage so that I hit a good bit harder, so that it made the game more of a DPS race; I still had to learn enemy movesets, but I never became hard stuck, aside from a very few sticking points like the final boss. Eigong, who is already making waves as a particularly nasty final boss, is a standout for being two phases of just relentless screen filling attacks that you have to counter near perfectly, as well as an ability to freeze you in place while she wails on you. If you want the true ending, in fact, you have to do another third phase that is somehow even more difficult. 

The game is also a fan of the arena gauntlet of enemies, demanding that you master the movesets of each enemy type, as at some point you will hit a "quiz" that demands you face several different types at once and balance their moves. There is one, in particular, that is a long scrolling hallway that just continually fills with enemies that took me quite some time to overcome. I imagine if you really gelled with the combat, which I am sure a great many players did seeing how this topped a lot of peoples' "best of 2024" lists, but for me it was a bit of a deterrent to calling this game an unqualified win. 

I suppose this does work in terms of the story: redemption should not be easily earned, and if you little duder wants to atone for his past mistakes, he must suffer first. This means you must suffer and overcome, to a degree. 

In the end, I would recommend giving this game a try. The story is quite good, and I am sure that others will enjoy the gameplay much more than I did. 

Okey dokey, next time we will talk about UFO 50 and Unicorn Overlord. See you then!

Super FamiComplete #121: Hokuto no Ken 5: Tenma Ryuuseiden Ai Zesshou

 

Title: Hokuto no Ken 5: Tenma Ryuuseiden: Ai Zesshou

(Trans. Fist of the North Star 5: Legend of the Demonic Shooting Star: A Chapter Beyond Sorrow)

Developer: Shouei 

Publisher: Toei Animation

Release Date: 07/10/1992 (Japan only)

WARNING: SOME VIOLENT AND GORY IMAGES DUE TO SOURCE MATERIAL

Sometimes you just need to clear the blogging pipes to get restarted on a project. Hokuto no Ken 5 is a Japanese only turn based RPG, and honestly this is going to be more of a research dump than actually playing through the game. I played about a half hour and hit the "I get it" button, and did a further watch of a let's play on Youtube (shout out to Batista_Harpu's let's play series SNES Super Side Quest), and of course researched this pretty obscure game as thoroughly as I could. 

Background

Fist of the North Star is a particular favorite anime and manga for me. I have distinct memories of finding its ridiculous hyper violence and post-apocalyptic "Road Warrior" style setting quite enjoyable as a teenager scrolling through Showtime after dark. It was just so unlike other cartoons and anime of the early aughts, only learning that the anime was way older than I initially thought. I remember back when Netflix was first a company that would send you DVDs, and one of the first things on my queue when I signed up for the service in college was the dvd of the "first volume" of the anime; in reality it was the first main saga a chunk of the next arc with an unceremonious ending. They never did release the next part of the classic dub, which is a shame because the dub is one of those "so bad it's good" releases. 

For the uninitiated, Hokuto no Shinken or Fist of the North Star takes place in a world that has been ravaged by nuclear war, and the rulers of this world are warlords who command roving bands of mutated muscle bound biker thugs. Each warlord generally represents a different fictional martial art or fighting style, such as an army of Green Berets or a roving band of beast men led by the giant Father Fang. The protagonist, Kenshiro, is the heir to the titular Fist of the North Star, a martial art that targets the vital chakras of the body and cause the victim's body to distort, twist, and eventually explode in a shower of gore. Kenshiro is on a quest for vengeance against his former friend, Shin, who stole his beloved, Yulia, and left Kenshiro in the desert to die. The gnarly scar left on his chest from this encounter is shaped like the Big Dipper constellation, giving him the nom de guerre of the Man with the Seven Scars. After he defeats Shin and his entire army, the first major saga of the anime, Kenshiro then has to deal with the other heirs to the Fist of the North Star, who have generally all become warlords themselves. 

Kenshiro is hilariously dead pan as a protagonist, with nothing really seeming to phase him. Until about 10 volumes into the manga and about 50 episodes into the anime, no antagonist really seems to be able to threaten him. He is just too darn competent and powerful, and no one can seemingly withstand the destructive force of his body popping martial art. There are some other standout characters, such as Rei, who can  slice people into ribbons with his hands, or the giant prison warden Uighur, who shoulder rams people so hard that they pop, or the aforementioned Father Fang who famously head butts a man so hard that it causes a man's eyes to bulge out the sides of his head. All in all a lot of campy, gory fun. 

Now this game is the fifth in the series of RPGs and platformers made for the the Nintendo systems, and this itself is also an RPG. There will be two more games in this lineage for the Super Famicom, but those will both be in the far off future and also fighting games instead of JRPGS. 

This game was developed by Shouei, which mainly developed video games in the Hokuto no Shinken series with Toei Animation, the production company behind the anime, as the producers for the entirety of the series. This was a relatively short-lived development house, with only working on some Pachinko games and a Puss in Boots series of games developed handheld consoles (no relation to the character from Shrek). 

Toei Animation, the publisher in this case, is one of the most famous anime production houses, working on juggernauts such as Dragon Ball Z, One Piece, and of course Fist of the North Star. They actually produced, and still produce, a great many of video game projects surrounding their many anime intellectual properties. 

In a bizarre choice, this game is more of an "alternate universe" fan-fiction than a retelling of the canon events of the story, with all the main cast of the Hokuto Shinken universe appearing as cameo party members than really acting as the...well main cast. In this version, the main events of Hokuto no Shinken have not occurred exactly, so characters who would have died by the time other characters are introduced are still alive...it is a jumbled mess honestly. 

Perhaps even stranger, Kenshiro is not the main character, but instead you play as two generations of heroes who must rally the various martial arts factions from the main story against a common foe. You play as the "Hero" who is the descendant of the Tentei Ken school of martial arts, whose beloved has been stolen by a rival gang of warlords known as the Makotei Ken. The Tentei Ken school, through ancient accords with Hokuto, Nanto (the Southern Star Fist), and other martial arts, call upon these schools to help the hero regain his lost love. Eventually, this conflict is carried on by your Hero's children, who are technically the heir of both the Tentei and the Makotei schools, and you play as these characters for the second half of the game. 

The story was written by a pretty well known anime screenwriter, Hiroshi Toda, who worked a lot in translating manga to anime in the 80s and 90s, and was overseen, as far as generic plot, by Buronson, the original author and artist behind Fist of the North Star. I imagine it is hard to write scenarios for video games due to constraints from the manga and anime publisher: you can't wildly change characters, plot beats, or otherwise, or introduce anything that would mess with the overall canon of the source material. It is games as a marketing service to promote, but not surpass, the original material. You can either just retell the story, or create something wholly new but tangential to the main plot. 

Buronson

 

Gameplay and Presentation

This game is about 25-30 hours long of good old fashioned turn based RPG goodness, with your party of adventurers traveling from town to town, righting small-scale wrongs along the way towards the overarching and climactic showdown with the main villains. The combat is traditional turn based, with you choosing between "hard strikes" to deal damage, "soft strikes" which are your debuffs, and vital point strikes to heal yourself and comrades. There are no real gimmicks beyond this which is sad to say: you have an HP and MP meter you manage, with items to buff as well, but other than the setting there is really nothing unique about this combat. 

I think the big letdown, in this case, is the presentation. While I love the tall, detailed full body battle sprites, which is reminiscent of the style of the manga and anime, the presentation of the world and combat is really bland. The world is all grays, browns, and mud colored, and the world sprites are really low detailed. As well, the animation during combat and in the world is really poor at capturing the action from the series. While the original anime could definitely be accused of some cheap and shoddy animation, it made up for it with the bombastic violence and over the top action. This on the other hand, is just poorly translated to video game form. The battle sprites do not have much animation, which makes everything look choppy and without much impact; attack animations also look really silly, especially when defeated enemies "pop" like an over inflated balloon (it looks more goofy than violent). This is made much worse on the overworld map. For example, at one point some enemies, in a cutscene, are trying to attack this grandmaster character, who sends them all "flying back" with his attacks, and instead they just screensaver slowly off the side of the screen. 

The game also seems very grindy: all the best equipment comes from enemy drops, and so much of the playthrough that I watched was just spent milling about a dungeon fighting random battles. Leveling up also seems to take quite some time. What a slog!

The music I found to be pretty annoying: it is going for a stereotypical "Chinese" sound font, and it is really tinny and obnoxious. One thing I will give it credit for is the voice samples, which is rare for a console game of this vintage; granted, you will mainly hear the same ones over and over again, so take that with a grain of salt. 

Final Verdict

What a mess! From playing this game to watching the let's play, this game just seems like a chore rather than fun. I respect myself and my time too much to fully engage with this game, and honestly, you should too. Please skip this title if you are doing a revisit of Super Famicom JRPGS. It is boring, and doesn't even come close to the fun and energy of the source material. 

The Legend of 9 Black Unicorn Sols in a UFO of Wisdom: Wukong Overlord 50 (Part 1)

Hello all and happy 2025. Let's eat our veggies first and get the blog business out of the way. For those reading I decided to start the 16 bit Chronicles up officially again with two posts that were half complete and sitting on an incredibly cold back burner. I had an absolute blast playing through Prince of Persia and even Super Bowling for its novelty, and was super stoked to continue the project...until realizing that the next four games in the project were a text heavy Japanese only RPG based on Fist of the North Star side story (you don't even play as Kenshiro initially!!!), a Japanese only quiz game, a soccer game based on Captain Tsubasa, and a racing game (you can also add the American made Clue adaptation as another possible choice) and my burgeoning fire to blog about Super Nintendo/Famicom games was back to chilled. 

One thing that I have learned from doing a blog for over ten years off and on, and starting an equally ill fated podcast that I ran for a couple years is that gaming makes a very rough translation from recreation to structured hobby (and I don't even want to imagine as a career). While this is a personal preference, feeling forced to do something, even a fun activity, really kills my motivation. I prefer to follow my fun with gaming; so that is what I am going to do with this project! I am going to follow my fun and write about what I want to write about, with updating the core project as the mood strikes me. I may also skip ahead to talk about other Super Famicom and Super Nintendo games that I have been dying to talk about for years, but were trying to work through the hordes of baseball, licensed, and American/Eurotrash games that litter the early SNES library. Who knows! The world is my video game blogging oyster. For those who keep checking here periodically; thank you so much! I can't promise frequent updates, but I can promise that blogging, writing, and video games are never far from my thoughts. 

Okay, veggies consumed...

So today's post is going to be a mix of what I've been playing recently, my thoughts on each title, but also specifically about how each game tackles the interaction between gameplay and narrative. This will probably be a multi-part post. 

A little about how I've been playing video games over the past few years. I am a person who struggles with intense choice paralysis and opportunity cost struggles with gaming. If I am playing one thing, then I can't complete the playthrough of the Mega Man X series I've been dreaming about doing, or playing weird old MAME hidden gems, or not keeping up with the new indie hit that every tuber has been on and on about (there's always one), or generally just not chipping away at my Dead God achievement in Isaac. To help cope with this anxiety, instead of playing one game, I instead chip away at about five games at a time, usually one on each of the consoles that I mainly play. If I find a game that really strikes my interests, then I focus on that instead (Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth for example, was basically my December). So far, this has worked for me, though it does bump up against my feelings of compulsory gaming, so it certainly isn't perfect. 

Recently, I have been playing The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom on the Switch, UFO 50 on my Steam Deck, Unicorn Overlord and Black Myth: Wukong on my PS5, and 9 Sols on my game pass. Each one of these games, aside from being incredibly different in genre, style, and tone, also handles the interaction of narrative and gameplay, specifically as to how integral the story is to the experience, how the game gatekeeps gameplay behind story, and how the gameplay accentuates the story and vice versa. 

It should be noted, before I begin, that I haven't finished any of these games. I'll go into more details with each game, but these are definitely ongoing impressions that will eventually be "final thoughts" style posts for each individual game when finished. Let's start with...

Black Myth: Wukong

"Monkey, Monkey, Monkey" ~ What I say every time the game is loading

Impressions

Black Myth: Wukong was quite the surprise last year; I don't think anyone after the earliest alpha demo trailer expected this game to be as polished and put together as the final product. The earliest trailer looked too good to be true. Granted, I am only on chapter 2 of 6, so this game's quality could dip in the last two thirds of the game, but I am also saying this after 18 hours with the game for a chapter and a half of progress. 

The game is an interesting beast in almost every metric: the game isn't quite a Souls game despite the heavy pre-release hype building it up as one, though it does have a focus on the large, grandiose, and difficult boss fights similar to that series. I would say that it is more a hybrid of a character action game ala Devil May Cry, mixed some environmental exploration (no real platforming though as yet) and secret hunting, and a continuing string of boss fights that almost qualify this game as a boss rush game. Each chapter of the game is set in a distinct environment pulled from the source material (more on that when we dig into the narrative), and generally sets you on a winding path with boss fights, both optional and mandatory, dotting each part of the path. 

In fact, this game has over 100 boss fights, most of which are distinct and not iterated upon, though of course there are some repeats of boss fights; they are altered in some distinct way either through lore, look, or unique wrinkle added to the fight). I have to say, compared to a similar giant like Elden Ring, which has a similar number of boss fights and enemy designs, but had to use many many repeats in order to also prioritize unique dungeons and a really vivid world, the sheer amount of quality boss fights is very impressive. You have two-phase boss fights, bosses that change form, hidden boss fights that are locked behind environmental puzzles, gimmick boss fights, duo bosses that change future boss fights if you kill one boss before the other, and a player vs. boss vs. boss fight, and this is just what I have played thus far in one and a half chapters. It makes me incredibly excited for what the later chapters will bring. 

The enemy and monster design, as well, is really quite fun and detailed. So far I've fought a giant wolf man with flowing white hair, who every time he gets a solid slash with his claws, tenderly licks your blood clean off of his paw. I've fought a really tense fight against a spear wielding demon "king" who can turn himself into black wind and zip behind you at a moments notice; even better you then fight this king again in his true form, which is a large black bear whose fur erupts into flames during his second phase. Even the normal enemies show some lovingly crafted little weirdos: living ginseng mandragoras that look so unfortunately human  that erupt from the ground and whip their roots at you, skeletonized snake humanoids that attack in small packs, and rock golems that have fleshy little Buddha heads imbedded in them that are just screaming in malice and anger. The designs are just very uniform in vision and well realized. 

The combat and difficulty also cherry picks from the Souls genre as well while eschewing some of the other conventions. First, there is no penalty for death aside from restarting at the nearest checkpoint; you lose no progression, experience, or currency from what I can tell. This means that if an area or boss is particularly challenging, you can go grind to upgrade a very robust and varied skill tree, or craft new medicinal buffs, armor, or upgrade your bo staff, which is your only weapon ala Sekiro and its protagonist, Wolf's, sword. The game balances this by making the game's bosses quite difficult. You have to analyze their fighting style and pick it apart; you are a devotee of the famous monkey king, Sun Wukong, who is an avatar of transformation, deception, and trickery. You really only, at least thus far, have two pieces of defensive tools to use: dodging and a spell that temporarily freezes the enemy that starts on a very miserly cooldown. Battles are usually tense affairs with enemies who are larger, stronger, and can shred your health bar fairly quickly, so you have to use every trick in your arsenal to survive. It also opens up those challenge runs where you can do low upgrade, no spells, dodge only boss runs, where one or two hits will put your little monkey man in the ground. 

The presentation of the game is also stellar. The graphics, developed in Unreal Engine 5, are really quite breathtaking. The style leans to a really detailed realism, which is quite striking when the subject matter is primarily Chinese mythology. Every environment is lush and detailed, though I will say the game hints at heavy exploration but has a large number of invisible walls used to guide the player down the boss rush path. There have been some really well designed areas I have encountered so far: a crumbling temple compound that snakes from a bamboo forest up a mountain path, culminating with a five tiered pagoda that has been lit ablaze by the corrupt abbot of the monastery that ruled the mountain; a really well realized desert canyon that is revealed to be a community destroyed by a perpetual sandstorm, with hints at a lost civilization peeking out from beneath the sands. The prologue of the game especially, is one of the most epic scenes I have seen in a video game, with your avatar squaring off against a god amongst the clouds while four horizon filling "heavenly kings" and their armies watch on waiting to square off themselves. Each chapter, as well, is capped with an animation that goes into the motivations of the main antagonist of each chapter, and from what I have heard the animation style is different for each of these vignettes.

 As far as music, I haven't listened to enough to speak to it as yet, though the game's second chapter features a headless musician who is quite fun, and his music is earwormy. 

The interaction of story and gameplay so far...

So let's talk about the narrative and how that meshes with the gameplay; the game, in marketing, was presented as a gritty re-telling of parts of the classic Chinese epic Journey to the West. This novel details the pilgrimage of a Buddhist monk who is on the path to become a Bodhisattva (a Buddhist sage who forsakes Nirvana to help others on their path to enlightenment). The monk travels across the "New West" provinces of China in order to reach India to meet with the Buddha, and the deities of Chinese folk religion send a few avatars/minor deities, like Sun Wukong the Monkey King, to help him reach his goal. The book, which sadly I've only read excerpts, captures the way that Buddhism didn't supplant local religions in China, Korea, and Japan, but instead fused with them to create something unique, allowing Chinese mythological figures and monsters to exist alongside (and also become part of) Buddhist belief.  

Black Myth: Wukong, though, is not a retelling of Journey to the West but instead a pseudo-sequel that takes place after the main story, and follows an unnamed monkey who is retracing the steps of the book's pilgrimage in order to gather six holy relics that will allow him to resurrect Sun Wukong from a stone prison which he has been kept in for 500 years. Now do all the antagonists in the game so far also appear in the book? Yes. Do they pull the exact same type of villainy that they did in the book almost beat for beat? Also yes. It plays more like a gritty "this is how the story really happened" kind of tale; like you are viewing the events of Journey to the West as unfiltered by time and legend. You are seeing these mythical figures as they really are, warts and all. 

What is interesting, though, is that they present this coupled with an elaborate codex filled with traditional art, poetry, and stories for each of the games enemies, bosses, and NPCS. You get the legend for each of these creatures alongside how you encounter and defeat them in the reality of the game. What I really love is that these entries aren't just summaries of whom these individuals are, but instead stories featuring these creatures where the player/reader has to discern the character of these creatures based on their actions within the tale. In a way, it feels very similar to the the Souls games' item and boss souls descriptions, where you only get hints of the motivations of the characters in those games. 

This also ties story to the exploration and development of your character. Your character's goal is to resurrect Sun Wukong from his stone prison by following his path, and by becoming more and more like Sun Wukong. Dotted around the map are places to meditate, and in doing so you get a free upgrade or "spark" of inspiration into the psyche of Sun Wukong. Each time you are leveling up, you are showing that you are just one minute step closer to becoming the Monkey god; it also helps that the prologue lets you play as a full powered Sun Wukong to create this point of comparison. In a fun twist, every NPC you encounter cannot seem to decide whether or not you are Sun Wukong, an imitator, or someone else completely, further developing this theme. A boss who kills you will say "I knew you couldn't be him," or another NPC will scramble away from you in fear screaming "I thought you were dead, it's been 500 years!" 

As well, these codeces are locked behind defeating the bosses and various enemy types, many of which only exist squirreled away in the corners of each map. The codeces for each chapter help flesh out the story of the chapter,  how it is tied to the original Journey to the West, and give the motivations for the main chapter antagonist. Much like Souls, the story is not directly given to you, but instead the onus is on the player to create their understanding of the narrative. 

Is the game successful in this style of storytelling? Overall I would say yes with an if, or no with a but. Being set after the book, the game is written and presented with not just the expectation that you are familiar with Journey to the West and its core cast, but also pretty well versed with the events from what is a very long saga. With setting most of the lore in the codeces in parables and legends, this also means that, if you are not the type of player who reads through game lore, you will really have no context for what is going on or character motivations. Honestly, even if you do know the original story, the game really doesn't explain why the characters from the original story are cyclically reliving the events from the main story. The problem is I can't see a workable middle ground to fix this without altering what is special and good about the story; the game expects you to do your homework, and there just doesn't seem to be a way around it. Having done some homework, the story is really hitting well, especially when paired with the great presentation. The first chapter tells the story of an honorable bear demon and a mountain monastery slowly falling to corruption, greed, and eventually a fiery destruction. The second chapter is all about a desert kingdom that slowly ceded power with a rat demon, venerating the demon as a Buddha until the denizens of the kingdom were turned into malformed rat demons, and the buildings all sank into the sand. It is really fun to start to piece together how the different characters, monsters, and bosses all fit into the patchwork of the setting as the lore is drip fed to you. 

This means that while decoding the narrative isn't necessary to participate in the gameplay, it does feel like a vestigial hanger-on to the main gameplay. To the uninitiated to classic Chinese literature, this game will feel like a surreal parade of fantastic creatures with strange motivations. Why are you getting this boar demon rice wine from a local village? Not sure. Why are you ringing the three bells on this mountain, which will whisk you away to fight a giant monk demon who is surrounded by zombie thralls? *shrug* Generally, I will say that some glimpse of understanding starts to emerge by the end of each chapter, as by then your codex has been mostly filled, you've seen every story scene, and you can then study. Even so, I had to check out a lore channel on youtube (shout out to BanditGames, who makes some really good explainers for each chapter) to fill in a lot of the blanks. 

In the end, while the gameplay does provide the puzzle pieces for the story, it certainly doesn't put the puzzle together for you. While I do love, to a degree, that the story is one to be deciphered and left to impression, I think the work is just a little too onerous to the point it will actively be a detractor to some players. 

I do love this game so far though, and am very hooked. I will do a follow up post probably about 2/3 of the way through, and again when finished the game, but for next time I will be talking about one of the other games that I am playing currently (probably Zelda as I have some bones to pick). Happy New Years everyone!