Recent reviews by DouBLe

Specifically,
the Kino

I'll be the one person to be honest with you: don't play this game. This game is a very good sokoban style game until it stops being a good sokoban game and starts being a meta puzzle piece of garbage stuck up its own posterior. Metapuzzles aren't inherently bad--and I would struggle to truly call what this game does as metapuzzles proper like, say, Baba Is You does: there's really only a handful and they're not very involved, just a bit hard to link together clue + solution area + solution--but this game locks every single bit of player convenience behind a (meta)puzzle. My frustrations:

• You want to fast travel through tons of stuff you've already done? No level select, have a metapuzzle/shortcut system to skip floors or manipulate what floor you're on. Basically the entire reason this works this way is to serve a handful of not particularly interesting metapuzzles. Wasting potentially several hours of player time so you can do something that makes them say "neat" once is not what I would call a good idea. Everyone in the reviews with 40 hours has 40 hours not because there is 40 hours of actual game, but because important information is scattered far and wide and going in totally blind you would have to do several playthroughs and resets to find everything and experiment with the information you're given. There is an incredible amount of filler.
  
• You unlocked some cool progression items/gameplay alterations to start a new playthrough with (multiple playthroughs required to see everything, by the way)? Well, the method to activate them is super tedious because the devs allowed you to unlock them if you know the "password" even if the game hasn't told you (cool!), but instead of making it easy once you've actually found the "password", it's exactly as tedious as if you didn't find it (not cool!). You know, instead of just letting you toggle them on. Waste five minutes of your time at the start of every playthrough!
  
• Why are basic options like, I dunno, resetting the game to the start not available in the menu? I get it, you have deepest lore on why certain gameplay actions are used to do that, but it and everything else with the same excuse end up being very inconvenient in practice. This is also very relevant because without resetting to "title", you can end up in a state where you are in an extremely difficult section of the game without any upgrades, and the places where you would obtain the upgrades are empty.
  
• Repeated really crap gameplay switchups. Why do we enter an annoyingly slow turn-based battle system with zero depth multiple times? Why is the final boss a crappy bullet hell shmup that is visually impossible to parse? Switching up the gameplay feels like a really terrible attempt at being artsy or something, and it doesn't work.
  
• The second-to-last boss fight is really dumb mechanically for various reasons--once again, making a terrible gameplay experience for lore reasons.
  
  

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  Please understand that the sokoban core is good, and many floors are well thought out and well designed little puzzlers, especially in the game's equivalent of hard mode. From what I've read, you can even ignore the progression items and still beat hard mode somehow (minus the bonus area which requires all items), which is mindbogglingly cool to me after seeing some of the puzzles. I was in several rooms where I have no idea whatsoever how they would be possible without any upgrades. But a significant other portion of the game heavily sours the basic sequence of levels for little practical reason.
  
  I would love to see a game from these devs where their worse impulses are tempered, because there are a lot of good things in here, but I cannot recommend this game as it is to anyone.

A series which has aged poorly into adulthood.

When I was a kid I played these games through dozens of times. I probably have like 50 completions of MMZ3, beating it on all difficulties and unlocking everything. As GBA games that I played while my parents ran errands, they're pretty suited to this: nice and short and difficult. As a collection played as an adult, the experience is somewhat poorer, and much of it is due to game design.

Every mission in these games is ranked, and the ranking system can be boiled down to four main objectives: go fast, kill lots of enemies, take no damage, and accomplish the mission goal if there is one beyond "just kill the boss at the end". Ranking is also averaged over every mission in a playthrough, so doing well in general makes a bad mission not tank your overall ranking much, while doing poorly makes a standout mission not amount to much.

The cramped view as a result of the original handheld console together with the game's sprite/camera design makes it very easy to accidentally run into enemies, attacks, and traps. Being able to get good rank is mostly a matter of memorization of the stages; it's very hard to react to things as they come when moving fast. You can't help but feel that if they had decreased the size of the sprites or adjusted the camera so the player isn't centered, allowing you to see more of the stage ahead of you at once, the game would feel much more fair.

So why does rank matter? Well, in nearly every game in the series it's tied to additional stuff. Whether it's additional bosses or additional combat techniques, you get more stuff to do if you consistently do well. Or, to reverse it, you get punished for doing badly by getting fewer toys to play with and fewer bosses to challenge yourself against.

If you're willing to stick with it and grind out the games, there's a lot of enjoyment to be found, the same as any other MegaMan game. As a fan of basically all MegaMan subfranchises, the satisfaction of doing well remains, and is perhaps even enhanced by the especially challenging boss fights compared to much of the rest of the franchise. But as a...studio experience, would you call it, this collection? Just playing through each individual game once or twice, I would expect most people to be frustrated.

Perhaps you'll love them despite the flaws and enjoy grinding out each one half a dozen times.

Sprawling metroidvania with many a complicated puzzle, like its predecessor. Often requires thinking outside the box. Mostly free of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ puzzles, although there are a few that probably aren't reasonable for even this series' demographic to figure out in a reasonable period of time. Learn to laugh at instant deathtraps, because you'll run into a lot (but mostly within only a couple of minutes of the last quicksave).

Hot tip: build a map of Eg-Lana as you go, taking copious notes, writing down every tablet, etc. I built a nearly-complete map of the game out of tiled screenshots, complete with the names of all the rooms, and it definitely makes solving a lot of the puzzles waaaay easier.