Wario Land 4 (Game Boy Advance, 2001) - The Impression

 A bad platformer turns you off with cheap deaths, unresponsive controls, and poor level design. Your time is wasted on relentless obstacles, minimal progress, and general aimlessness. Fortunately for all of us, Wario Land 4 features none of those things. Instead, it takes the idea of the collectathon that was so prevalent in the 3D platformers of the 1990s and retools and weaponizes it in 2D using the full capabilities of the Game Boy Advance platform. It drops many of the conventions of the 2D platformers that preceded it such as lives, linear level design, punishing precision platforming, instead focusing on exploration, puzzle solving, and building tension. That last point - the building of tension might just be what makes Wario Land 4 such a rewarding experience.

The premise of the game is simple: Wario enters a golden pyramid, tempted by the idea of uncovering a whole bunch of loot, and is presented with a series of 18 levels to rip to shreds in the pursuit of a higher tax bracket come the new year. The main levels of the game, 16 in all, are sorted into 4 groups by color. Each one of those levels is a large 2D maze that you must scour in order to find 4 quarters of a gemstone of sorts, a key to the next level, and if you are feeling ambitious, a bonus CD that contains an isolated copy of each of the level’s tracks that are playable in a separate mode. Each of the 4 groups are similarly themed, and a boss awaits you after you find each of the 4 quarters in each of the four levels. A simple enough premise, right?

Each of the game’s 18 levels are laid out in ways that encourage experimentation with your base set of moves such as a power dash, charge, and ground pound, as well as a set of different gimmicks that allow you to break down barriers or access different parts of the level. The essential items are cleverly hidden in ways that, on normal difficulty, reward players for their willingness to explore the depths of each level. On hard mode, the difficulty that I played to completion, some of these objects are hidden in such obscurities that one must push the game’s controls to their absolute limit in order to walk away with even the bare minimum items required to progress. It is however, not a precision platformer; Wario Land 4’s levels are designed to be accessible by the masses, and provide ample room for you to try again, resulting in eventual satisfaction by all levels of players. The gimmicks, such as turning into a shooting ball of flames, or becoming a raging snowball, are never used in ways that become stale. 

The highlight of the game arrives in each level where you find a room where it's just Wario and the purple plunger. You must smash the plunger, leading to the reveal of a second game buried within the first one, set to a timer. Activating this timer adds a tasteful amount of tension to the otherwise casual experience of digging through its levels and forces you to race back to the very beginning of each level in order to keep the items you have found within. Hitting the plunger also changes the design of the level: previously accessible areas are sealed off, and other areas are opened up for the first time. It forces you to think on your feet as you adjust to the alternate version of the level, which often contains required collectibles in later levels. The game’s music, which is typically very excellent, turns into this sour, tense rhythmic noise that just propels you to get out as fast as possible.

The only part of the game that I did not actively look forward to was the boss fights. Playing on hard, I found them to be the only element of the game that I found mundane. Beating them did not feel like a triumph, but merely like being forced to overcome an obstacle setup between the fun parts of the game. Being that there are only a handful of them, I did not think it sullied my opinion of the game too much. Wario Land 4 basically rules.

Note: this impression was written in one shot without revision or editing. Deal with it.

Xenogears: The Twenty Hour Impression

    Xenogears rolls into town like a new kid who just moved from the big city into your small suburban neighborhood. It wears an intense leather jacket, has all of the cool toys that your parents couldn’t or wouldn’t purchase you, and drops mysterious one liners that make you go, “woah man, that’s heavy.” It oozes cool in ways you already knew the JRPG could, but with just enough edge to make you want to lean in and listen whenever it wants to say something. Its opening hours are filled to the brim with drama, tragedy, anime cutscenes, sci-fi concepts, and a 2 pronged battle system that allows you to do martial arts and martial arts in a giant robot suit. It hits hard and it hits fast. It introduces interesting characters with mysterious backstories, lets you spend enough time with them for you to almost care about them, and then ramps the momentum up to keep your eyes away from any of the flaws that might be simmering just under the surface.

    But like so many of the cool kids of our lives, once you spend enough time to get to know that kid, the cool factor melts away to reveal exactly what that kid brings to the table. And once things begin to slow down and you begin to spend some more time with Xenogears’ characters and environments, it becomes clear that maybe this kid doesn’t quite have what it takes to back up some of the cool things he read in all those books it assumes you probably haven’t read. If the first five hours of the game are a rush of cool kid adrenaline, the next fifteen hours ebb and flow with the kind of stammering that is produced when you ask that kid what it actually meant. In its first five hours Xenogears presents us with a moderately novel concept for a role playing game in 1998: a protagonist that doesn’t really know what he believes in, and doesn’t want to just fight whatever is in front of him. He lashes out at his peers, who are in turn believably complex in expressing their motivations, wants, and needs, and they lash out at him in return. It speaks to a level of depth that I would argue most games wouldn’t attempt to achieve for at least another ten or so years in terms of the emotional crisis that lingers at the core of many of its characters.

    Unfortunately, rather than fully explore these feelings and ideas, the story structure just continues to toss layers of obscurity on top of the interesting ideas at its core. It adds extra factions, brooding mysteries, melodramatic conflicts, and contrived plot devices that are perhaps more interesting to us as players than it is to the characters whose role we are playing. At the twenty hour mark, I’m not thinking about the characters I am currently playing and what they’re actually doing, but rather the questions that Xenogears forces me to keep asking. Mostly, this is because what they’re actually doing isn’t all that interesting; much of the game’s actual content is running around mildly confusing town maps talking to characters and being directed to do things just because. Many of the game’s dungeons, as well as its combat encounters just seem to be designed in order to take up time between moments where the game feels comfortable drip feeding me more information about the incredibly complex world the game takes place in.

    That’s not to say that I’m not enjoying Xenogears though; it just talks big game and then seems to not have the actual depth to support such bigness. The combat, while fun to watch play out, is usually solved by pressing the same combos over and over again with little variety, and the game is full of fun visual touches that generally make exploring its environments unique, if not entirely interesting. Its first twenty hours ring a bit hollow, but I am 100% willing to give it another twenty if it can answer some of my big questions in a satisfying way. Here’s to the next twenty…...

Note: this impression was written in one shot without revision or editing. I do, after all, have another twenty hours of Xenogears to play.