Video Game Review: Venus Vacation Prism – Dead or Alive Xtreme (400th Blog Post Celebration!)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Man, when I started this blog thirteen years ago, I never would have expected that I’d manage to reach four hundred posts! I had started a couple blogs prior to this one and those struggled to continue after the first couple posts, so having this monument to my writing, thoughts, and their evolution over time is just… well, it’s difficult to quantify, really.

Knowing that I was approaching this milestone, I knew that I had to do something special to celebrate. Given that my two hundredth post was about Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, and my three hundredth post was about the DOA movie, I obviously had to find a way to dive back into the Dead or Alive well once more! And, wouldn’t you know it, the timing for this milestone would be reached in fairly close proximity with Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme, a brand new spin-off entry in the franchise. Given my previous commentary about this game during preview season, I also knew that there was the potential for some really spicy opinions, and those kinds of articles are always the most fun to write. Suffice to say, I knew that I was going to need to write a review of it for the occasion. So strap in for my thoughts on Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme!

While the Dead or Alive Xtreme games had some very basic dating sim elements stapled on, Venus Vacation is a full-on dating sim, presented through a visual novel format. The game has a robust photography system, and much of the game’s “content” revolves around watching the girls and waiting to take the perfect shot. Much like Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 and Venus Vacation, you play as the “Owner”, hired by Zack to oversee the Venus Islands and manage the upcoming Venus Festival. In order to prepare for the festival, you go around recruiting alluring women you meet to be a “Venus” to do promos for the festival. The game doesn’t really elaborate on what being a “Venus” entails, but I understood it to mean “a supermodel who embodies the essence of ‘beauty'”. Each of the Venuses is vying for your affection, so you have to decide who to show preference to. Most of the game involves you watching the Venuses interact and making occasional dialogue choices. You also can take photos throughout each level to increase the pictured Venus’ interest in you and earn them more fans. On rare occasions, you may be asked to do a QTE sequence. If that sounds dull to you… well, I don’t think you’re cut out for visual novels, sorry.

So Who Are Our Cast of Venuses?

Venus Vacation Prism has brought over six of the girls from Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation for you to photograph and woo:

Misaki is the first girl you meet in the game. She’s the stereotypical Japanese “trad-GF” archetype: constantly working, polite, sweet, modest, and innocent. She takes a long time to get out of her shell and feel comfortable with herself. She is far too insecure to make the first move, so you need to do it for her. Romancing Misaki is all about making her feel comfortable enough to show off her voluptuous body to you… which just gives me the ick. As a grown man experiencing this game, trying to romance this shy and innocent girl makes me feel like I’m grooming her, ugh! I was legitimately uncomfortable pursuing her romance, so I just romanced the other characters instead. This left Misaki visibly disappointed and saddened throughout the entire game, but since she didn’t make the first move, I just roleplayed that I didn’t even notice this as I cucked her with the rest of the cast.

Disappointingly, the only girl from the mainline Dead or Alive series in this game is Honoka… but, like, she’s Honoka. She feels out of place in the mainline Dead or Alive games, but she’s right at home in Dead or Alive Xtreme.

Honoka’s the second girl you meet in Venus Vacation Prism. True to her portrayal in Dead or Alive 6, she’s a simple sort: not particularly smart, but sweet and fun-loving. She doesn’t have much of a personality to speak of… which is why I’d say that Honoka is literally just this game’s “teenage boy’s fantasy” archetype: she’s got ridiculously massive tits, and a personality so dull that it couldn’t possibly intimidate the lowest common denominator (y’know, those sorts of cowards who get angry if the object of their affection has any sort of self agency). Romancing her is all about having fun and staring at boobs as much as possible. That’s… fine, really, but so shallow that it couldn’t hold my interest.

The third Venus you’ll meet is Tamaki. She is very open, has few boundaries, and greatly appreciates honesty and forthrightness. She’s heavily bi-coded, fawning over the Venuses just as much as she flirts with you. She’s also a bit of a goblin, flirting with you to see how you’ll react, teasing people, groping the other Venuses, and she’s a borderline alcoholic. She immediately begins flirting with you the moment she lays eyes on you, and is not shy about trying to seduce you.

And I love this.

I’m just going to say this up-front: Tamaki was my ride-or-die in this game. I’ve complained in the past about how Dead or Alive girls are almost all portrayed as innocent, untouchable angels, which makes the voyeuristic aspects of these games more uncomfortable. However, here we have a character who is aware of, and in control of, her sexuality, and she expresses her interest in you outright. That is a thousand times more arousing than preying on someone’s inexperience! The franchise legitimately needs more characters like this. Suffice to say, I prioritized Tamaki every chance I got. Romancing Tamaki is all about being honest with your feelings, and having a (relatively) realistic, adult relationship with someone.

Fiona is fucking insane. She’s a yandere, a character who is extremely obsessed with you. That would be weird enough on its own, but Fiona is also a literal princess who has spent her entire life in a castle. Like a week or two before you meet her, Fiona saw an advertisement for the Venus Festival with Misaki, Honoka, Tamaki, and yourself in it and she decided that she needed to throw her entire life away to be with you. Why is she so devoted to you? Well, she liked the way that you looked at the other Venuses and wanted you to look at her that way…

Fucking what???

Personality-wise, Fiona is clearly has social anxiety. She’s soft-spoken and sweet, but her obsession with you makes every interaction awkward. She was also clearly only educated in etiquette and politics, so she needs help from others to understand the ways of the world… ugh, here comes that uncomfortable groomer feeling again…

Quite frankly, I did not like Fiona. I can’t really tell you what romancing her entails, because I didn’t fuel her delusions. She seems fairly sweet, but I’m not into these yandere types, other than Monika.

Just Monika.

Nanami is uncanny. She seems to be intended to be a relatively normal, modern city girl: she’s soft-spoken, sociable, interested in photography, gets bored, and she’s uncertain what her future holds. I actually found this concept moderately interesting, but the more time you spend with Nanami, the less “normal” she feels. She’s excessively soft-spoken and chill, to the point where you become sharply aware that it defines her entire personality. I can’t even imagine her being angry, losing her cool, or even expressing excitement. As a result, she ends up being kind of a bland dating sim character, lacking much of a personality to latch on to. Maybe she has a more engaging personality as you get to know her, but I didn’t have much interest in getting to that point when there were much more compelling choices available. Romancing her is equally chill – just don’t be an asshole, real-life rules apply here too.

But hey, at least she doesn’t give me the ick, so that put her above a couple other characters in my books.

M-mommy!?! Elise is the harsh teacher/boss archetype: she’s stern, strict, and disappointed in you. You need to earn her approval, which makes it feel all the more satisfying when you do. She’s a workaholic and needs someone to show her how to loosen up and have fun. She doesn’t even become a Venus until after several chapters with her, so you get a lot of time to get to know her compared to some of the other girls.

Hoo boy, Elise was waking something in me and, at times, even managed to take some of my attention from Tamaki. Elise may be intimidating and cold to some people, but she’s totally my type, looks very cute, has a great storyline, and feels particularly suited for a dating sim narrative! That said, going for Elise is playing this game on hard mode, because she is particularly difficult to impress and, as the last Venus recruited, you get less opportunities to prioritize her.

“Gameplay”

Given that the dating sim elements of Dead or Alive Xtreme are my least-favourite part about those games, I was not expecting much from a Team Ninja dating sim game. However, this really is a case where going all-in on a concept made for a better end product, because I actually rather enjoyed the dating sim elements in Venus Vacation Prism. Instead of having to memorize the specific colours of wrapping paper that each girl likes to get them to arbitrarily accept a gift from you, Venus Vacation Prism‘s dating sim elements revolve entirely around getting to know the girls’ personalities through your interactions with them and then making dialogue choices which correspond to their interests. You’ll also often be forced to choose which girls to spend your time with, so you can’t just woo them all at once – someone has to end up disappointed. Granted, this is just bog-standard modern dating sim gameplay, but it’s certainly a step up from Dead or Alive Xtreme‘s half-assed approach.

The other big gameplay system in Venus Vacation Prism is the photography suite. You can choose to just take a quick screenshot with a press of a button, but those who really want to indulge can get full 360 degree control of the scene so you can line up that perfect shot, in addition to being able to control the lighting, add filters, etc. The game requires you to get at least six photos by the end of a chapter, but you will likely take several dozen instead, because taking pictures is fun! To make that point clear, every screenshot in this review was taken by me, because I had no shortage of photos to choose from during my playthrough!

In addition, you are graded one-to-three stars per photo at the end of each chapter. This certainly incentivizes you to take more photos, but the game is really unclear about the criteria to get a higher score. As a result, it can be a bit frustrating when one of your favourite photos gets a one star rating, while some random shot gets two or even three stars.

Lastly in the gameplay department, Venus Vacation Prism will occasionally ask you to partake in a micro-game to earn some affection from a chosen Venus. There are a handful of these, but they are generally just a QTE sequence that’s over faster than your mom. As you’d expect, they kind of suck.

But how else are Team Ninja going to get you a face-full of Honoka’s sweaty cleavage while she does sit-ups?

“Story”

Venus Vacation Prism is a visual novel, so that means that there’s more of an emphasis on story compared to other Dead or Alive games, right? Well, about that…

The narrative of Venus Vacation Prism is very shallow and low-stakes. I was not skimping on details earlier when I described what this game’s premise is: you really are just recruiting Venuses and preparing for the festival for this entire game’s runtime. Sure, there are a couple developments (you get caught on a date by the person who you rejected, the head office is threatening to fire you if your performance doesn’t improve, etc), but the whole thing is lacking in any real stakes, twists, or tension. For the most part, you’re just having normal conversations with the girls and hanging out.

That said, I’m not sure that this lack of narrative tension is actually a problem. The Xtreme games carved a niche due to being relaxing vacation simulators, and Venus Vacation Prism‘s breezy “story” achieves the same sort of feel. This game does, at times, really feel like being away a tropical vacation. Like, sure, you’re technically working throughout the game, but your job is so ridiculously easy that it doesn’t get in the way. Despite the extremely mundane narrative, I was still interested to see where things would go. It also helps that I am hopelessly obsessed with seeing new corners of the world of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, so there’s that too…

Despite the very laid-back narrative, there is some thrust which keeps things from getting boring. In the first half of the game, a new Venus will get introduced every couple chapters. This provides some novelty as you get to meet them, learn about their personality, and then recruit them. While this approach keeps things fresh, it takes a long time to introduce all the girls, which can really suck if you don’t care for the early Venuses. Elise in particular is really difficult to romance, due to her strict personality and having much less time to try to blitz her approval rating high enough before the game ends. The game also heavily foreshadows the Venus Festival that corresponds with a romantic prismatic meteor shower as the grand finale, so you’ve always got it in the back of your mind that you’re working towards that final goal. It’s simple stuff, as I’ve said, but it works well enough.

As for the chapters themselves, most will only have a couple of the girls available to be interacted with at any one time, so you can often go multiple chapters without seeing your preferred Venus. Furthermore, there are plenty of mandatory interactions which are not particularly balanced between the girls: Misaki and Elise get lots of one-on-one time with the Owner in which to make an impression on you, but fans of Honoka and Nanami are going to be absolutely starved if they don’t specifically pursue those characters every chance they get (which, combined with their boring personalities, didn’t help my perception of either character any). Each chapter has some branching paths that you can take (usually picking between one of two girls, but late-game chapters will allow you to choose between any of the Venuses). These choices are shown in a handy flowchart in the between-chapter menu, so you can see all the scenes you found and the ones still available. This is much appreciated for those looking to experience everything the game has to provide, but it also shows that your choices, and their consequences, are pretty limited outside of affecting your overall relationship score with the girls.

Much of this lack of consequence is down to the Venuses all immediately falling in love with you as soon as you meet them (other than Elise, who takes a few chapters to get to that point). Even if you consistently reject their advances, they’ll still pine after you as if nothing happened. This was displayed most egregiously for me during Fiona’s introduction. As I stated, I did not like her character’s obsession with me, so I gave her the cold shoulder and immediately stood her up for Tamaki. However, at the end of her introductory chapter, the game railroads you into going on a date to recruit her as a Venus, and acts like it’s a romantic occasion no matter what you’ve said up to that point. While this is the most egregious example I found, you can feel it elsewhere as well. For example, I wasn’t kidding about Misaki when I said I was cucking her at every opportunity: the poor girl was consistently dropping hints that she liked me and hoped that I would reciprocate, but then I’d go and spend my time off with literally anyone else, to her constant disappointment. Like, girl, at this point you’re delusional if you think that I’m going to pick you to be my date to the prismatic meteor shower!

That said, this is a dating sim, so most of the game’s consequence boils down to romancing your chosen Venus. There are certain scenes and dialogue options which are only unlocked if you have a high (or low!) enough interest score with a particular girl. The thresholds to unlock these scenes are pretty high, so these are typically only going to be available if you’re actively wooing one or two of the girls above all else. Again, this is pretty standard dating sim stuff, but it would have been nice if you actually had to work a bit to get the girls to like you in the first place.

The game also has a smartphone where the girls will send you texts to chat and flirt. On the one hand, this is a very easy way to get in more interactions and choices without having to go to the effort of animating and voicing an entire scene. It also offers an different feel to conversations, especially with the shyer girls who are clearly more comfortable speaking to you via text. On the other hand, these text conversations feel disconnected from the rest of the game. For example, you’ll get a text and agree to go on a date with your chosen Venus, but then you don’t get a new scene or anything, the game just gives your affection score a bump and moves on. You’ll also be in the middle of a scene with another character when the smartphone will pop up and you’ll start texting one of the other girls randomly before going back to the scene at hand. Hell, you can be in the middle of the scene and then get texts from the girl who is in the scene right in front of you and go off on an entirely unrelated conversation before going back to the scene at hand. I love the concept of the smartphone in this game, but the implementation is immersion-breaking far too often.

Looks That Could Kill

As is usual for a Team Ninja game, Venus Vacation Prism looks fantastic. When this game was originally previewed, the character models felt a bit too realistic and uncanny, but having played the actual game now, this was not a problem at all. Like Dead or Alive 5/6/Xtreme 3, the characters are more realistic-looking, but still stylized enough to avoid the uncanny valley (especially Elise, who I feel deserves special shout-out for her ridiculously gorgeous character design).

Visual novels and dating sims aren’t usually my thing, but from my understanding, Venus Vacation Prism has insane production values for the genre. Most of these sorts of games are low-budget indie affairs with 2D sprites and little to no animation, just due to the economics of such a niche genre. In comparison, Venus Vacation Prism, with its AAA-level graphics, animation, full voice acting, and photography suite is a technological behemoth (to the point where I am legitimately curious if it has sold well enough to be worthwhile for Koei-Tecmo). This certainly helps the game stand out, even if its mechanics are pretty bog-standard otherwise.

Like the Xtreme games, Venus Vacation Prism allows you to dress your Venuses in various outfits and swimsuits and also change their hair style. I like that most of the outfits have additional customization options (for example, the you can choose whether or not you want to wear a zip-up hoodie over a particular style of bikini). However, there are a couple issues with the dress-up system which are hard to ignore. First of all, the number of available outfits per Venus is tied to their number of fans (which is influenced by the star rating of photos of the Venus submitted at the end of each chapter). It takes quite a while to unlock new outfits for each Venus because of this system. Despite giving Tamaki most of my attention during my playthrough, I hadn’t even unlocked half of her outfits by the time I reached the finale, so several playthroughs are going to be necessary if you want to unlock everything (I’ll leave that up to you to decide whether that’s good or bad).

I think that the bigger issue with the dress-up system though is that there just are not enough options available. The game has about thirty-seven outfits per girl, which doesn’t sound too bad, until you realize that the vast majority of these are reskins. Most outfits have three-to-five recoloured variants (some have even more), so these recolours are padding the total massively: discounting all the recolours, there’s only seven outfits available to dress up your Venuses, plus their one unique outfit and two pre-order bonus ones that you may not even have access to. That’s extremely limited, especially since you won’t unlock most of them in a single playthrough, so expect to have a bunch of Venuses all wearing the same outfit around the mid-point of the game…

Core Values

This is a Dead or Alive Xtreme game, so naturally that begs the question: just how lewd does this game get? Well, to put it simply…

…the game’s weirdly kind of chaste and restrained (at least by Dead or Alive‘s standards)?

Like, don’t get me wrong, the game’s still horny – the camera will linger on the girls’ boobs, most of said boobs are massive, and there are plenty of revealing bikinis to dress them up in. Compared to the Dead or Alive Xtreme games though (and especially Venus Vacation, which this game is directly spun-off of), the game’s downright modest. Sure, the bikinis are revealing, but they’re just fairly normal bikinis, as opposed to, say, the downright insane Venus swimsuit from Dead or Alive Xtreme. And sure, this game will occasionally have scenes which are egregiously fetish bait (most notably involving Misaki: in one scene, she nervously tries on a bikini in front of you, and in a later scene she’s bent over for no real reason and you’re clearly being invited to upskirt her), but that’s nothing compared to the literal pole dance sequences in the Xtreme games. And don’t even get me started on the ability to sexually harass the girls whenever you want to in Venus Vacation…

Conversely, Venus Vacation Prism takes the opposite approach, where acting like a creep and fixating on the girls’ assets above all else will leave them unimpressed, unless they actively invite that kind of attention from you. As I’ve said in the past, a big reason why the Xtreme games feel creepy is because the girls don’t seem to have any agency and are completely innocent angels, so all the voyeurism you engage in explicitly happens without their consent (as their reactions to you poking and peeking on them make clear). Venus Vacation Prism, on the other hand, wants you to form a connection with your chosen Venuses, make them want to open up to you, and will straight-up punish you for disrespecting the girls’ boundaries. Again, having Tamaki openly flirting with you and taking notes about the things that turn you on is orders of magnitude more sexy than the ham-fisted sexuality we get in the Xtreme games.

That said, this is still an Xtreme game: you’ll have plenty of opportunities to ogle the girls, but I really cannot understate how relatively restrained this game is. You can dress the girls in the most revealing outfits you can unlock, you can take their shoes off to get the best look at their toes (you know that someone on Team Ninja was begging them to implement this feature), and you can make all your photos zoomed on their girls’ cleavage, but that’s entirely up to you and the game doesn’t really incentivize it one way or another. Hell, despite having the series’ vaunted boob physics and ass physics (they move like gelatin this time!), you will almost never notice any jiggling outside of the costume selection screen.

It also really needs to be said, that Venus Vacation Prism feels restrained, not only in comparison to the Xtreme games, but to visual novels in general at this point. We’re living in an era where pornographic visual novels appear on the front page of Steam. Mobile app stores and Youtube ads are infested with a plethora of generic, anime, gooner gacha games. While the ending I got with Tamaki slyly implied that sex was had off-screen, a lot of this game’s contemporaries would be revolving entirely around showing the act rather than implying it. Dead or Alive Xtreme was salacious in the 2000s, but in 2025, a game like Venus Vacation Prism is downright modest compared to the competition. Am I suggesting that they should go all the way and release a Dead or Alive game with full nudity and sex? No, I think that would stray too far from the series’ identity, but it’s just something worth thinking about when putting this series’ sexual themes into a wider context.

Further to that point, there’s absolutely no reason why this game could not get a Western release, aside from Koei-Tecmo being a bunch of cowards. The biggest criticism you could level at the game is that it might give you unrealistic expectations regarding dating, but a) it’s a fantasy, and b) that’s something you could say about any dating sim; it’s just inherent to the genre. Sorry, butthurt culture warrior Dead or Alive fans, but there’s nothing particularly objectionable about this game that would draw any protest or negative attention (other than, y’know, some fucksticks loudly gooning over the game on social media and drawing derision over that; aka the Stellar Blade effect). This Asia-exclusive release strategy is honestly just Koei-Tecmo being idiots, with the absolute most charitable reading being that they want to preserve the Dead or Alive series’ reputation as a fighting game in the West and not dilute that with spin-offs that historically have sold poorly here. It sucks, but at least it’s easy to use a VPN or import the game if you really want to try it.

Bottom-Line

I enjoyed Venus Vacation Prism a lot more than I was expecting to. While I would have certainly preferred a new, mainline Dead or Alive entry, I think it’s extremely unfair to judge this game based on what it isn’t rather than what it is. For what it is, it’s a pretty bog-standard, low-stakes visual novel with some well-integrated dating sim and photography systems. As a result, it’s definitely a pretty niche experience, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy my time with it. Frankly, it’s a considerably more engaging and enjoyable game than any of the Xtreme spin-offs, so I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to getting more spin-offs of this nature in future… just a long as we get Dead or Alive 7 sooner or later!

5/10

(5/10 means the game is pretty average and has some niche appeal – that doesn’t mean it sucks, gamers!)

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden (Master System) (1992)

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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden for the Sega Master System! Once again, this is an entirely new entry in the franchise, despite sharing a name with (by this point) three other games released in a four year timespan. I was not too keen on the previous Sega-exclusive Ninja Gaiden game, would this attempt on the Master System fair any better? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Graphics – Ninja Gaiden on the Master System is, hands-down, the best-looking classic Ninja Gaiden game. In fact, the graphics are so crisp here that I was legitimately shocked when I found out that the Master System was an 8-bit console like the NES. The graphics here are so much better than any other Ninja Gaiden game of the era that I legitimately thought that this game was designed for a 16-bit console! I adore the art style of 16-bit consoles, so this game is all the more impressive to me for looking this good on such aged hardware! This praise for the graphics and pixel art also carries over to the cutscenes, which are easily the most detailed of the classic era of Ninja Gaiden.

Mixed

  • Control Complexity – One of the most notable new additions in Ninja Gaiden on Master System is that you now have a bit more control over when you grab onto platforms and walls. This is actually kind of nice: in Ninja Gaiden III and Shadow, you would occasionally jump and unintentionally grab onto a platform above you, which could cause you to get hit by an enemy in the process. With that in mind, having some control over whether you want to grab onto a platform is a good idea and it allows the developers to design levels in more interesting ways. However, this decision lays bare the hardware limitations these games are operating under, and how they struggle to deal with additional complexity.
    • Like the NES games, you’ve got a d-pad and two buttons to work with, and the game controls pretty similarly, but now you have to hold the up button while jumping to grab onto a platform. This is a problem for two reasons: 1) It’s annoying to have to hold a button to do something that used to be automatic, even if I can understand why they’ve added this. But, more importantly, 2) It makes it way easier to accidentally activate your ninja arts if you need to attack an enemy mid-jump, which wastes your energy and can leave you without any later if you need it.
    • Similarly, jumping onto a wall has gotten more complicated, for better or worse. You used to just grab onto the wall automatically. Now you need to jump into the wall and continue holding the d-pad in the direction of the wall. This will cause Ryu to turn around, and then you need to press jump quickly while still holding the d-pad in the direction of the wall to jump in the opposite direction. In essence, you’re pressing the d-pad in the opposite direction you want to go in, which gets really confusing. On the plus side, this can allow you to leap back and forth off of walls, opening up new platforming opportunities, but my God is it confusing in execution. I honestly think that this game would have been better off on an actual 16-bit console with more buttons – having a dedicated “grab” button would have made this all so much simpler and with no drawbacks.
  • Difficulty – The people who designed this game are fucking bastards. The NES games are brutal, but their difficulty feels reasonably fair most of the time and the spikes come when they want to test your limits. Meanwhile, the Master System Ninja Gaiden wants to kill you, full-stop. Many enemies move so quickly that you barely have a chance to react to them. The fucking birds are back, and this time they’re even faster and more erratic than ever before! WHY??? And that’s not even getting to the level designs. In the very first level, you complete one area and the next one immediately puts you on a tiny platform over a pit of spikes, so if you were still moving forward absent-mindedly, you would die instantly. It was at that point I went “oh, so that’s the kind of game you’re playing”. What sadistic bastard thought it would be a good idea to have four bird spawn in mid-jump over an instant-death pit? What idiot thought that what an ice level needed was platforms that send you careening forward if you move even a single pixel AND these icy platforms are covered with spikes? Oh, and then they spice things up even more by adding lightning-fast jumping ninjas and piranhas as an extra “fuck you”. Ninja Gaiden on the Master System is a bastard of a game, but I… kind of enjoyed it? Admittedly, most of this comes down to the modern conveniences of emulation mitigating a ton of frustration, but it was to a point where I was starting to predict the next dickheaded move the game would make, prepared myself for it ahead of time, and would have a laugh after each new development. On top of that, the game is pretty generous with its checkpoints and continues (no “oh, you lost to the final boss? Back to the start of the level” bullshit from the previous games). I actually managed to beat this game, which is more than I can say about any of the NES titles with their “fairer” levels of challenge!
    • Oh, and as a bonus regarding the difficulty, there’s a game-breaking bug that makes it significantly easier. If you can get your ninja arts stockpiled up to 999, then you will actually have unlimited uses of your art. Suffice to say, being able to create unlimited rings of fire to intercept every enemy and projectile (not to mention being able to walk on spikes without getting hurt!) was overpowered as fuck and is a pretty big reason why I was able to reach the end of the game in spite of all the bullshit it threw at me.
  • The Story – I kind of view the Master System Ninja Gaiden as the apex of the classic era: sure, it’s got some design flaws that mar the experience, but it’s the flashiest and most refined version of the classic era’s gameplay. However, one notable area in which it falls short compared to the NES games is that its story is significantly less effective. It retains the cutscenes that made the trilogy so famous, but the actual narrative here is disappointing. The NES trilogy were simple, but a lot of effort was put into its characters and wringing drama out of their reactions to the games’ events. Here, they’ve taken a step back – it’s now just about Ryu doing cool shit until the bad guys are defeated. It’s too bad, you can see how this franchise’s emphasis on narrative just dropped off until Ninja Gaiden stories became… well, what we’d new expect out of a modern Ninja Gaiden game.
    • Also, the game has some questionable localization, so you’ll occasionally get a chuckle out of some badly translated line of dialogue.

Hate

  • Multi-hit Enemies – This game introduces lots of basic enemies who require multiple hits in order to kill. Call me old-fashioned, but this feels like it goes against the fundamental design ethos of these games. Why does some mafioso in a suit take two hits to kill, while a nearly-identical one dies in one? I don’t get it, I don’t really like it, and it just feels like an unnecessary extra step to kill an enemy who is almost-certainly dead anyway when you landed that first hit; the second hit just feels like an unnecessary formality at that point.

In spite of itself, I actually quite enjoyed Ninja Gaiden on the Master System. I don’t think it’s quite as good as the first couple games on the NES, but it’s very close, and gives us a glimpse into a potential future where these games continued into the 16-bit era. As a close to the classic era of Ninja Gaiden, it’s a pretty great time and well worth checking out!

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden (Game Gear) (1991)

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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden for the Sega Game Gear! Despite what its title would suggest, this is not a port of the NES Ninja Gaiden, nor is it a port of the arcade game, but an entirely new game that just happens to have the same name as the others (get used to this, this isn’t even the last game called Ninja Gaiden that we’re going to be covering in this series). To make matters even more confusing, it’s unclear if this game is even considered canon, having an entirely self-contained narrative that sees Ryu Hayabusa having to save the world once again. How would this portable entry on superior hardware hold up in comparison to Ninja Gaiden Shadow? Read on to find out…

Love

…nothing. For the second time in Love/Hate history, there’s nothing particular about this game that I liked, let alone would consider worth mentioning. If I had to say anything even tangentially positive: it’s got Ryu Hayabusa in it, it’s portable, and it’s on the Game Gear, I guess?

Mixed

  • The Graphics – The graphics in this game look like ass. Yes, they are technically more detailed than they were on the NES, but the art style looks so much worse in comparison. That said, I’d be kind of an asshole if I did not put this into perspective: this was a handheld game released in 1991 on the Game Gear. In that context, Ninja Gaiden would have looked pretty damn impressive for its time (especially compared to the Game Boy, whose significantly more limited hardware was still being used into the 2000s). Still… in a modern context where the totality of gaming history is available to us, Ninja Gaiden on the Game Gear looks very unappealing.

Hate

  • Game Feel – The moment you start playing Ninja Gaiden, you get the sense that something is off. Gone is the quick, precise action of the NES trilogy, replaced with a jump which goes very high and is unbelievably floaty. As a result, you’re going to overshoot nearly anything you try to jump to, and then have to wait for Ryu to float down to the enemy or orb to slash it. The pickup orbs, by the way, are tiny in this game, so you’d better hope you don’t miss your slash, or you’ll have to waste a couple more seconds trying again. It sounds really nitpicky when I describe it, but my God does this game feel terrible to play, and it largely stems from the way they’ve designed the jumping/falling mechanics.
  • Enemy Placements are BULLSHIT – Ninja Gaiden on Game Gear is not a particularly difficult game, especially compared to its NES counterparts. However, in an effort to make the game “difficult”, the developers have made most enemy encounters utter fucking bullshit. You will have enemies spawn in, immediately attack you, and you have a fraction of a second to register this new information and respond or you will take unavoidable damage. This happens the moment the game starts and goes on throughout the entire playthrough, it’s utter dogshit design. To get through a level unscathed, you end up needing to have the reaction time of an athlete, or you memorize the entire level and trivialize the entire thing (or, y’know, enjoy the benefits of modern emulation and get through the game stupid-easily).
  • The Skyscraper Level – Whoever designed the skyscraper level needs to be tried in the Hauge for crimes against humanity. What a fucking bullshit level: you’re climbing up the side of a skyscraper while it auto-scrolls upward and have to jump between two buildings to avoid falling objects and kamikaze martial artists. Not only does this mean that you have to react instantly to every incoming object, but if you get hit, you also have to immediately grab back onto the building, or you will fall to an instant death. It’s a cool concept for a level, but the execution here makes for one of the most unenjoyable sequences in the entire franchise.

Ninja Gaiden on Game Gear isn’t the worst game I’ve ever played, but it’s certainly not enjoyable either. I really was not expecting Ninja Gaiden Shadow to be the superior 8-bit handheld experience, but at least I got some fun out of that game in spite of its shortcomings. Perhaps it’s a mercy then that Ninja Gaiden is so short, clocking in at barely over thirty minutes of runtime (hence why this list is also short… there’s only so much you can say about a game that I beat in less time than it took me to write this article).

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden Shadow (1991)

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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden Shadow, a prequel to the NES trilogy released for the Game Boy! I’m always super leery about Game Boy spin-offs of console games: the handheld was extremely under-powered, so the idea of playing an ultra-precise and difficult Ninja Gaiden game on one sounds like a nightmare. That said, how does Ninja Gaiden Shadow actually play in practice? Read on to find out…

Love

  • New Platforming Tricks – You’d think that Ninja Gaiden Shadow would be content to just coast of the gimmick of being a handheld Ninja Gaiden game, but it actually has a couple fantastic additions to the 2D side-scrolling formula. First of all, you can now press down + jump to hang and/or drop from the platform you’re standing on, which is super useful and opens up new platforming options. The flashiest new addition though is the grappling hook, which has a surprisingly long range that allows you to reach platforms above you that are out of your reach. I love this thing, not only is it useful for the platforming, but it’s so cool being able to dodge an enemy attack by throwing the hook and climbing to safety in the nick of time!
  • Reasonable Level of Difficulty – It’s no secret that I haven’t really enjoyed the extreme difficulty of these old-school Ninja Gaiden games, but I feel like Ninja Gaiden Shadow strikes a pretty reasonable level of challenge. For the most part, it’s not too bad, and there’s enough health pickups that mistakes don’t feel excessively punishing. The last couple bosses are tough, so it’s not like the game is excessively easy either!
  • The Wrestler Boss – Most of the 2D Ninja Gaiden bosses have been pretty forgettable, but Ninja Gaiden Shadow has a boss who is, hands-down, the best boss in the series thus far. It’s a pretty simple fight against a wrestler, which plays out like any other boss in the series… except that this guy has a little minion who you cannot damage. This little bastard will flip around the arena and grab onto you, slowing your movement and making it so you can’t get away from the boss. The resulting fight is still not particularly difficult, but it’s hilarious trying to dodge this gremlin and shake him off before the main boss beats you down!

Mixed

  • Strips Out Most of What Makes Ninja Gaiden Good – Ninja Gaiden Shadow has had to make some heavy compromises in order to function on Game Boy. The platforming is much less precise than on NES, you only get one ninja art that you can use, the narrative is practically non-existent, and the game’s performance is quite poor. That said… I can’t put this in “Hate”, because I got some enjoyment out of my time with Shadow, so there must be some fundamental strength here that they’ve retained which is keeping things fun.

Hate

  • Boss Health Feels Excessive – While Ninja Gaiden Shadow is a pretty easy experience, it does have one particularly frustrating flaw. Due to the hardware limitations, there’s no display showing how much HP a boss has remaining. This would be fine, but I swear that the bosses feel like they take more hits to kill than they did on NES. This gets particularly annoying on the last couple bosses, who require precise maneuvers to avoid getting hit, and you won’t be able to do enough damage to them without dying if you do not perfect your jumps and dodge timing. This is particularly relevant for the goddamn genie boss, who flies around out of reach for 80% of the fight. You might only manage to get in one or two hits at a time before he becomes invulnerable again, making the entire fight an absolute slog.

Ninja Gaiden Shadow makes me question how much I can take hardware limitations into account when judging a game. Taking into account the Game Boy’s limitations, this is a pretty good game. However, by the standards of the Ninja Gaiden franchise, this is a pretty lackluster experience. And, judged entirely on its own merits, Shadow is an incredibly short and mediocre curiosity. It’s a bit of a weird situation overall. I got enough fun out of Shadow that I’d at least recommend checking it out if you’re into 2D side-scrolling action-platformers, but it’s far from a must-play experience.

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden III – The Ancient Ship of Doom (1991)

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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at the final entry in the NES trilogy, Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom! With the NES era coming to a close, Tecmo wanted to get one last Ninja Gaiden game out. This game would have a different creative team who wanted to make changes to the formula and attempt to tell a different sort of story than its predecessors. Would these changes improve the overall experience, or would it cap off the original trilogy on a down note? Read on to find out…

For this article, I played the NES Ninja Gaiden III, as well as the re-released version of the game in Ninja Gaiden Trilogy (the reasons for this will become clear later). Having played both versions, I can confirm that the Trilogy release’s altered graphics, bizarrely, have desaturated a lot of the brighter colours for God knows what reason. This is actively detrimental to the experience: for one example, streams of molten metal in the NES version end up looking like fountains of literal shit in Trilogy. In addition, the soundtrack has been downgraded significantly, reminding me of the hack job they did on Resident Evil Director’s Cut: it’s that level of crap.

Love

  • Further Refines the Ninja Gaiden Formula – You’d be surprised that they could find more ways to refine Ninja Gaiden on NES hardware after the second game, but they sure managed it here. The flashiest new feature would have to be the ability to grab onto overhanging bars and then move forward while hanging, or jump up onto the platform above. This adds an entire new dimension of strategic platforming whenever it is implemented. However, I think my favourite refinement is that you can now see what power-up is inside of each orb before you smash it. This makes it a lot easier to manage your ninja art of choice and know whether it’s worth it to go out of your way for an orb in a dangerous area.
  • Sword Power-up – Ninja Gaiden III adds a new upgrade which extends the range of your sword swing. It should go without saying that this is extremely handy for a game of this sort, but I also like the way that they’ve executed the idea. The upgrade only lasts until you die or reach the end of the current act, whichever comes first. This seems very fair to me, whereas Ninja Gaiden II‘s shadow ninjas were a bit too good and made the game feel so much worse when you died and lost them. Plus, with the aforementioned ability to see what’s inside each orb, you really get excited when you spot one up for grabs!
  • Enemies Don’t Respawn! – OH MY GOD, FINALLY! No more cheesing the game by manipulating enemy spawns, and no more frustration caused by endless respawns, if an enemy is pissing you off, just swing your sword at them. This “Love” is really self-evidently great, need I say more?

Mixed

  • Level Gimmicks – For the most part, Ninja Gaiden III jettisons the level gimmicks which plagued Ninja Gaiden II‘s runtime, and it’s a much less frustrating experience for it. However, they do come back all at once in act six: you suddenly have slippery platforms, foreground obstructions, and quicksand. On the one hand, thank you Ninja Gaiden III for confining this to a single act. On the other hand, the execution of these level gimmicks is at its absolute worst here, with excessively-slippery platforms, foreground obstructions making it impossible to see where the platform ends, and areas where the entire ground is quicksand, forcing you to jump constantly (including after defeating a boss, you still have to remember to jump or you’ll die and get forced to replay the entire boss fight and the run-up to it)!

Hate

  • ABSURD Difficulty – Look, I’m sure that I’ve made it abundantly clear by this point that I do not enjoy old-school difficulty and don’t have the patience to see these games through to the end. I don’t hold that against the games too much though, because they seem like they’re reasonably achievable with patience and practice. However, Ninja Gaiden III takes this to an even more absurd level, where I feel that it’s actively detrimental to the experience. For the first two games, I was able to struggle through to the last act before the challenge just got to be too much. With Ninja Gaiden III, I made it to the start of act three before I rage-quit. This game is, without a doubt, the hardest of the trilogy for one reason: even basic enemies do an idiotic amount of damage. You need to be damn-near perfect to survive this game, because it is incredibly punishing. Making a mistake and taking a couple hits will leave you with a sliver of health, so even tanking a hit to land a jump is an incredibly costly move. Oh, and the game only gives you a limited number of lives with which to complete the game. Perhaps the biggest piss-off though? The game wasn’t even designed this way: Tecmo decided, for the North American release, to just make the game harder, so they increased the damage of enemy attacks, gave you a life limit, and removed a password system to be able to “save” your progress…
    • …which brings us to Ninja Gaiden Trilogy. The version of Ninja Gaiden III in this compilation is based on the original Japanese release, which features the game’s originally-intended difficulty. The differences are like night and day: I could barely get to act three in the NES version, but in Trilogy I actually reached the final boss (the only NES Ninja Gaiden game I could do that for)! So, for all its faults, at least Trilogy makes Ninja Gaiden III reasonably playable!
  • Narrative – Compared to the previous two games, Ninja Gaiden III‘s narrative feels like a step down in quality. While its predecessors had b-movie narratives, Ninja Gaiden III‘s story is intensely bizarre. So, for some reason, the game is an interquel between the first and second games, but it doesn’t bother to tell you this until the very end of the game… There’s a rogue US Agent, Foster, who has created these clone-mutants (called bio-noids, lol) using lingering power from the demon Ryu defeated in the first game. The bio-noids were used to kill Irene, but it turns out that she’s not actually dead, because she knew what Foster was up to and was working with the US army against him. Anyway, the bad guys have cloned Ryu, so he now has to stop this imposter and figure out who killed Irene (but actually didn’t). Got all that? Good, because I haven’t even gotten to the titular Ancient Ship of Doom, which one of the bio-noids has claimed possession of, is going to use it to destroy the world and then replace it with a new one sculpted in his image. Suffice to say, it’s utter nonsense. Worst of all though? Even with the weird things going on, the narrative is not even particularly interesting. The first couple games were pretty simple, but the characters kept things interesting and the abundance of drama made things feel like there were some actual stakes.

Ninja Gaiden III is a weird case. When I was doing well, I found the game to be pretty enjoyable. However, if I made any mistake, I was punished so hard that it made the next mistake I made near-certain death. That just… isn’t fun. I’d be remiss if I did not mention that the version of Ninja Gaiden III in Trilogy is at a level of challenge that feels reasonable, even to a modern audience, so it might be worth a look. When you can actually enjoy playing the game, Ninja Gaiden III is a pretty good time!

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden II – The Dark Sword of Chaos (1990)

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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos, the direct sequel to the NES Ninja Gaiden! With the revolutionary success of the NES Ninja Gaiden, Tecmo set about making a grander and even more ambitious follow-up to try to eclipse it. Could they achieve this lofty goal, or would familiarity and aging hardware result in diminishing returns? Read on to find out…

Love

  • More Ninja Gaiden, But Refined – For the most part, Ninja Gaiden II is more of the good stuff that we got in the original: precise controls, satisfying platforming, and fast combat. The platforming abilities especially have been improved for the better. Being able to to climb up and down any wall you grab onto is super helpful. In addition, jumps feel a tad floatier than the first game. A floaty jump can be annoying, but they’ve tuned it well here. This makes it easier to jump off of a wall and then immediately turn around to get “up” onto a platform, and can make it a easier to land a strike at the peak of your jump. If anything, combat has become even more precise. You need to time your sword strikes just right to land a hit: even a fraction of a second too early can result in you getting hit instead.
  • More Emphasis on Story – While the actual narrative of Ninja Gaiden II is very simple (the secret bad guy behind the first game has kidnapped Irene, go take him out), the emphasis on cinematic storytelling is even greater than it was in the first game. Cutscenes are interspersed a bit more frequently to tell the game’s story, and really do a good job of making you feel like you’re part of an epic quest. As far as NES narratives go, this is about the best you could look for outside of a JRPG.
  • Graphics – Ninja Gaiden was already a pretty good looking game for the NES, but the 8-bit pixel art in Ninja Gaiden II is downright gorgeous at times. In particular, the sun-soaked approach to the demon altar is jaw-dropping stuff and really gets you in the mood for an epic showdown!
  • Difficulty – The difficulty in the first Ninja Gaiden felt downright unfair towards the end, throwing so much at you that you had to either memorize the entire level, or manipulate the game’s hardware limitations to make it through with enough health to survive the boss encounter. Ninja Gaiden II seems to strike a somewhat fairer balance: most enemies move slower and more predictably, giving just enough time to figure out how to deal with them without feeling like you’re going to be overwhelmed. I also found that health items drop more frequently than they did in the first game (to the point where I didn’t know that the first game even had health drops at all!). Sure, this is still an old-school hard game with its own levels of bullshit, but it feels significantly more manageable than the first game or Ninja Gaiden (arcade) did… That said, I did end up giving up in the last level again, but I got a lot further and felt a hell of a lot more motivated to get better than I did playing the first game, so that’s a plus.

Mixed

  • Shadow Ninjas – A new feature of this game is that you can get up to two “ghosts” of Ryu which will follow you and attack whenever you do (including using your sub-weapons!), potentially killing nearby enemies or dealing bonus damage to a boss. On the one hand, I’ll welcome anything that makes these games’ difficulty a bit more manageable for me, and lining these shadow ninjas up to damage an enemy while you’re safely off to the side can be pretty satisfying. On the other hand, they feel borderline overpowered, especially since they can clone your ninja arts and just wipe the screen clean of enemies. This also results in a general sense of screen clutter. I’ve had several enemies rushing at me that I never noticed because of all the crap my shadow ninjas were doing at the same time. Finally, when you die, your shadow ninjas go away until you find more item pickups for them. This, frankly, just makes you feel like crap when it happens, leaving you significantly depowered and invariably making the run back to whatever killed you even harder than it was the first time. As cool as they can be, I’d honestly just prefer a game balanced around the player character taking on everything themselves.

Hate

  • Stage Gimmicks – By far the worst addition in Ninja Gaiden II is this game’s obsession with filling most of the levels with some sort of new gimmick… and they all suck.
    • First of all, there’s the gusts of wind that blow you around uncontrollably. You have to actively push against them, or they’ll blow you right off of platforms. This would be fine, but the main issue is that you simply cannot make a jump if the wind is against you. Winds change direction after a few seconds, so this can get you hit and/or killed if it happens at an inopportune time.
    • Then there’s the level where it’s pitch-black night and you can only see the path forward during the occasional lightning flash. Honestly, this gimmick was my least-hated one, despite being potentially lethal to have to make a jump while blind. I think that this frustration was mitigated by the sheer fact that Ninja Gaiden II‘s platforming controls are stellar, and this stage has been mercifully designed in a way that you aren’t dealing with this while simultaneously being overwhelmed by multiple enemies (also, y’know, emulation conveniences help too).
    • Then there’s the icy platforms. Is there a single person out there who loves ice levels in platformers? As you’d expect, these ice platforms cause you to slide, and standing still on one will take a couple seconds to build up momentum to be able to move again. This sort of imprecise platforming goes against the entire reason I enjoy these NES Ninja Gaiden games in the first place, why would you ruin a level like this?
    • Then there’s the level where large ruins in the foreground block your view of Ryu, platforms and enemies throughout the level. What idiot thought that it would be a good idea to have an action platformer level where you can see neither the action, nor the platforming!? I don’t think I even took a hit because of this, but it’s the principle that counts!

Overall, I found Ninja Gaiden II to be a more fun experience than its predecessor. Tuning down the old-school difficulty just a smidgen makes its challenges something that I actually feel motivated to try to overcome. It’s basically just a more refined version of its predecessor, but that’s all it really needs to be!

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden (1988)

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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be going back to the “true” beginning of this franchise: the other 1988 Ninja Gaiden game released on the NES! Despite sharing a name, publisher, and a release year, the two games share nothing in common. While the arcade game was a side-scrolling beat ’em up in the vein of Double Dragon, this NES game was a side-scrolling action-platformer in the vein of the original Castlevania. That said, the arcade Ninja Gaiden didn’t exactly hold up to the test of time, would this console attempt fare any better? Read on to find out…

For this playthrough, I used the original NES Ninja Gaiden. There is also a SNES re-release of the first three games in the trilogy, fittingly-titled Ninja Gaiden Trilogy, which slightly improves/alters the graphics. However, this re-release is generally considered inferior for how it fails to translate some aspects of the original experience (eg, missing parallax scrolling, altered graphics affecting the tone of certain scenes, much worse music, etc), and the controls are noticeably less-precise, which makes it a more frustrating experience. In general, it’s considered a rushed, low-quality re-release, so most fans recommend playing the originals instead. For this Love/Hate series, I played the NES originals unless otherwise noted.

Love

  • Precision – If there’s one word you could use to describe Ninja Gaiden on NES, it’s “precise”. The game’s controls are immaculate, giving you very fine control over your jumps and near-immediate feedback when you attack with your weapon. This core strength just makes the rest of the gameplay feel very satisfying as you learn to expertly line up your jumps and time your attacks.
  • Combat – Compared to Ninja Gaiden (arcade)’s extremely sluggish combat system, Ninja Gaiden on NES is incredibly snappy. Sword strikes are fast, one-shotting all regular enemies and destroying most projectiles. Despite having only two buttons and a d-pad to work with, the game also features several special weapons and techniques that you find and equip in the overworld (again, which operate like Castlevania‘s sub-weapons). They’re mapped to up + attack, which is good enough to pull off when you need it, while not accidentally using them when you weren’t intending to.
  • Platforming – Ninja Gaiden is as much a platformer as it is an action game, and those precise controls really help in this regard. Jumping feels very intuitive and landing where you want to rarely presents a problem. Any deaths from falls will almost always be down to enemy attacks or your own errors rather than the game’s controls. The game’s platforming also is enhanced due to Ryu’s ability to grab onto walls, which allows him to cling to them and then jump off. This ability provides some really creative and fun platforming opportunities that you wouldn’t expect from a game this old.
  • Narrative Presentation – Ninja Gaiden was revolutionary at the time of its release for featuring fully-fledged, animated cutscenes. Some games had experimented with this concept, but Ninja Gaiden was one of the first on NES to showcase it and to make story presentation a core part of the experience. These animated cutscenes are actually pretty lengthy too, totaling around twenty minutes of runtime! While the story itself is still just b-movie level stuff (the bad guy steals the demon statues to summon a slumbering demon and Ryu needs to get them back), it takes this plot more seriously than its arcade contemporary and lacks that campy tone as a result. I dare say that the ambition on display here arguably makes this game’s narrative a bit more compelling than some of its 3D-era successors.

Hate

  • NES Difficulty – NES-era games are notorious for their ridiculous and downright unfair levels of difficulty, and Ninja Gaiden is known for being one of the toughest of the bunch. While the game’s great controls and combat mitigate the frustration, surviving in this game often comes down to a matter of luck, or memorization of enemy placements through trial and error. It gets so bad that you end up having to manipulate the game’s spawn system, moving back and forth in specific ways to de-spawning enemies to clear a path forward. Beating the game is certainly doable with practice and skill, so it is somewhat satisfying to get to grips with, but it’s asking for a lot of commitment up-front to deal with that frustration. Thankfully, modern conveniences, such as save states and rewinds, also help to mitigate this frustration, but by the time you face off with Bloody Malth and then move into act six, the game’s difficulty goes into overdrive. You’ll have to navigate an overwhelming number of enemies, make near-frame-perfect jumps to avoid certain attacks, and you don’t even have a way to heal any damage you may end up taking. As the ultimate piss-off, the game ends with a triple boss gauntlet, where you get thrown all the way back to the start of act six if you fail. It’s just punishingly difficult and merciless, demanding perfection if you want to see the end credits. Even with save states as a fallback, the frustration wasn’t worth it for me: I gave up in act six and just Youtubed the finale.
  • FUCKING BIIIIIIIRDS!!! – This ties into the previous section, but fuck birds. These flapping bastards will spawn in as you go to jump, nailing you mid-air when you cannot react and sending you to a cheap death. Even if you know they’re coming, they move erratically, potentially landing a hit on you that you simply cannot stop with an attack of your own. I am not exaggerating when I say that these dickheads are the most annoying basic enemy in the entire franchise.

In spite of its ridiculous level of difficulty, Ninja Gaiden is well-worth trying out, even today. Given that the NES was the most popular console of its day, Ninja Gaiden‘s narrative presentation was nothing short of revolutionary, influencing all future games that would adopt more involved and cinematic narratives. The gameplay is quite fun too, although the signature old-school difficulty means that this is a game that you’ll go in to with the understanding that you probably will not see the end.

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden (Arcade) (1988)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

It’s time for the long-awaited Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series here on IC2S! This series has been a long time coming, largely down to me being an obsessive psycho: it wasn’t enough to play nearly every version of the modern Ninja Gaiden games, I had to go back to play the originals for the first time too! As a result, we’re kicking this series off with the 1988 arcade game, Ninja Gaiden (which is going to get confusing fast, because this is not even the only game named “Ninja Gaiden” which released in 1988)! As a rural child of the 90s, the arcade boom completely passed me by, so I was completely unfamiliar with this game going in. How does it hold up, both as a game and as a part of the Ninja Gaiden franchise? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Old-School Charm – Ninja Gaiden feels like a relic of the 80s, which gives it a lot of sincere charm that cannot be replicated. The game’s setup is pure 80s ninjasploitation B-movie cheese, with Ryu coming to America to beat up an assortment of weirdos dressed like Jason Voorhees and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The graphics are pretty rudimentary, but they would have looked pretty good in the arcades in 1988. While I didn’t experience that era myself, they still illicit some nostalgia from me, reminding me of the style and palette of MS-DOS games from the 90s. The end-level screens where you get an image of Ryu doing some comedic activity (ordering sushi in an extremely serious manner, gambling in a suit while still wearing his mask and flanked by a couple bunny girls, etc). Best of all though are some of its hilarious and memorable sequences, such as the infamous “CONTINUE?” screen which sees Ryu tied to a table as a buzzsaw lowers towards him (better put in those coins quickly!). For all its shortcomings, I can at least see how someone can enjoy the little hit of nostalgia this game brings with it.
  • Homoeroticism – This is the most 80s-gay game I’ve ever played. The game’s opening cutscene has a lingering shot of Ryu Hayabusa’s lusciously-rendered pixel art ass. You’ve got a bunch of shirtless muscle-bound men, leather daddies, and bears beating you down for the entire game. There are muscle men sea serpents… which would be weird enough, but the fact that you encounter them in the fucking Grand Canyon makes it all so much more bizarre. The final boss has a painted mural showing off his goddamn ass in his boss room! I’m not gay myself, but I found it very funny once I noticed how unusually homoerotic this game was. Honestly, it’s kind of refreshing: this is the kind of representation that the video game industry took away from us in the 90s when it began catering only to teenage boys!
SEE? I’M NOT KIDDING!!!

Mixed

  • The Sword – When you have a sword, this game’s combat is actually fun. You can kill all enemies in 1-2 hits and you knock them back, which gives you some crowd control options. Unfortunately, this is short-lived, because the sword is a random weapon pickup that only lasts for ten hits before it breaks, what the actual hell!? Why would you develop fun gameplay and then intentionally limit it to a matter of seconds? It makes it feel worse than if it was not there at all!
    • Side-note: this is the one game outside of the Dead or Alive series where Ryu Hayabusa is using his martial arts primarily. Dude is literally choosing to save the world with a handicap.
  • The Jump Throw – By jumping and then pressing the X button when landing near an enemy, Ryu will grab them and throw them across the screen. Not only does this damage them, but it also knocks them down and stops them from doing anything for a couple seconds. This kind of breathing room is crucial in this game’s combat, so you end up spamming the hell out of it for the entire game. By the way, I do mean the entire game, as every single boss can be jump-thrown as if they were a regular enemy. It’s to the point where it actively feels overpowered in a way that’s detrimental to the combat gameplay, since you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage unnecessarily by not using it.
    • Also: they literally recreated this move in the 3D games with the guillotine throw! I love those kinds of callbacks to the classics!

Hate

  • Arcade Game Design – Arcade games are inherently flawed due to their business model requiring them to be frustrating and unfair. Ninja Gaiden is no exception. Sure, emulation and modern re-releases have given us unlimited credits and save states, but their design is still infected to the core to be bullshit. Ninja Gaiden will throw you into fights with so many enemies that you can get stun-locked to death. You end up surviving, not by skill, but by exploiting the enemy AI to get cheap kills (ie, standing in a corner and spamming the X button to hit them the second they step into your reach, jumping to a lower level and then attacking them while they’re stuck in their climb animation). This bullshit got to its absolute worst in the last level, where most of the enemies you encounter will take off 66% of your health in a single hit! How are you expected to beat this, even with unlimited credits!? I got to the last level, but it was such a piss-off that I said “fuck it” and quit.
  • Hardware Limitations – Some of Ninja Gaiden‘s issues seem to stem from the very hardware it was forced to use:
    • There’s only three buttons and a d-pad for them to design the gameplay around, and one of those buttons ends up getting wasted on a “hold” move to grab onto platforms. It rarely gets used, and the cynic in me believes that it’s only here to make players forget about it and get some cheap deaths on the few occasions where it’s needed.
    • The 2.5D layout makes it hard to tell whether you will be able to hit an enemy who is right beside you or not. Judge wrong, and you will inevitably get hit instead.
    • There is very little variety to the enemies, and all the bosses are recycled wholesale multiple times (remember, this is a ~45 minute game with only six stages, so you’re going to notice how repetitive this is).
  • The Combat – Combat in this game somehow manages to be slow and tedious, despite simultaneously swarming you with enemies. This is largely because landing a “hit” is done with a three-strike combo animation (this goes for your attacks and your enemies’). As a result, every single fight is taking three times longer to complete than it needed to. It also makes taking a hit feel even more punishing and demoralizing as you sit there for a couple seconds waiting for the animation to play out.
  • FUCKING CLAW TRIO MOTHERFUCKERS – I WAS ABSOLUTELY RAGING WHILE FIGHTING THESE SONS OF BITCHES. This boss is what it sounds like: a trio of guys with claws. What makes them truly rage-inducing is that, when you hit them, they’ll usually dodge and then perform a counter-attack. The only way you can avoid damage is if you side-step immediately. This was bad enough the first time we fought them, but they show up again in the final stage and they now will one-shot you!!! It’s so overly-punishing and spiteful, I hate these bastards with the core of my being.

Ninja Gaiden arcade is a relic of its time. As far as side-scroller beat ’em ups go, it’s very basic and would be quickly eclipsed by much faster and more complex contemporaries. As a result, it just feels so slow, tedious, and repetitive. On its own merits, it does not hold up today at all and any enjoyment you’ll get out of the game will be more down to nostalgia and curiosity rather than any actual compelling design. That said, it only takes about an hour to beat and modern emulation stymies its most egregious design choices, so at least it’s a curiosity that won’t take up too much of your time.

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Gaming Has Changed

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

The Switch 2 was recently shown off… and all the news we’ve been getting about it is making me more and more secure in my decision to use the money I was saving to get a Steam Deck instead. The discourse surrounding this has been interesting to see and take part in, but there was one sentiment I keep seeing that resonated with me: “I miss the days when gaming was an affordable hobby”. This really strikes me as true, as much as it hurts me to admit it. This got me thinking though: this is a pattern we’ve seen happen before, so maybe we can see how this pattern plays out to get an idea of where gaming is headed.

So what sort of pattern do I mean? Well, it’s simple: it’s the cycle we see all the time with companies and capitalism. When there’s growth, the company will do anything it can to foster more growth, because growth correlates to profit. However, when growth stagnates, they then turn to squeezing ever-increasing profits out of their remaining customers. After a massive, temporary spike in growth during COVID, the gaming industry is in a period of stagnation. After decades of wringing out efficiencies and monetizing games as far as they can go, publishers are running out of other ways to maximize profits. We’re now at the point where Sony and Nintendo’s pricing has sent the message that they no longer care if some of their fans get shut out from enjoying their systems going forward.

How did we get to this point? As much as we might want to blame capitalism and greedy publishers, the gaming industry has always had a profit-motive, and publishers have been involved the entire time, so it’s not necessarily that simple. However, I do believe this road we’re on really started in the early 2010s when microtransactions become normalized in gaming. We’d already had DLC before it, but at least DLC was adding additional content to your game and there was a finite amount of it. Microtransactions, on the other hand, were infinite and, if designed “correctly”, were necessary to enjoy the game. As a result, nearly every AAA video game was designed as 1) a storefront, and then 2) a game designed from the ground-up to funnel you to that storefront. With microtransactions providing a steady stream of profit growth, along with game companies creating efficiencies to reduce their overhead (such as the adoption of digital game distribution), the price of games and consoles was able to stay relatively low in order to sell to the widest possible audience. This then hit its peak in 2020 when COVID lockdowns caused more people to spend more time gaming than ever before, and profits hit new heights as a result.

However, this peak was short-lived. The contraction the industry has been in since has caused companies to begin cannibalizing themselves as they desperately try to continue making more than they did last quarter, to the detriment of the industry’s long-term health. For these huge companies, if you have less money coming in, then the first way to make it look like you’re still growing is to cut overhead. The most visible method that these companies have employed to this end was the elimination of over 25,000 gaming industry jobs in the past couple years. However, they’re getting to the limits of what they can currently sustain through cutting overhead, so they have to look to the next thing if they want to report profit growth: squeezing the customer. Between “microtransactions” ballooning in price to the point where we now have $500 cosmetics, to $70 USD and now $80 USD games, the squeeze is well-and-truly on. Never overlook the fact that the existence of this squeeze means that these companies have actively decided that they do not care that people who love games will be priced out of their products.

Of course, profits will need to continue to rise, even after the squeeze. If gaming continues to stagnate, which it probably will, then they’ll look to the next squeeze: inevitably more expensive “micro”transactions, or a new monetization scheme, or yet another price increase, or not adjusting the price of games when the tariffs on them inevitably go away. If you can still afford to buy the newest console and accessories, how long can they squeeze until you get priced out of it next? While the price of games has largely just matched inflation, wages have not matched inflation and, as a result, the cost of a game console and accessories is a lot harder to stomach, even if it’s the “same” price.

In the meantime, there are a couple other sources of cost cutting that the industry is looking at which may keep them from squeezing the life out of the industry for a little bit longer:

  1. Outsourcing. AAA games are extremely expensive, and most of that comes from the cost of maintaining teams of hundreds (or even one thousand-plus) team members for years before completing a shippable product. It really pushes the margins that a game needs to achieve in order to be considered a success. As a result, publishers have been outsourcing work to support studios in nations with lower cost of living. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does present the scary prospect of all but the biggest Western game studios being priced out of the market, since supplemental outsourcing is still going to end up costing more than a development studio in a country with a low cost of living.
  2. AI. Obviously publishers are going to try to cut costs with the latest tech fad as much as possible. Even if it doesn’t save them any money, being able to say that they’re utilizing AI is enough to draw attention from idiot investors. That said, we are starting to see AI being used to cut cost in games, most notably Activision and Call of Duty, which has been using AI art assets in-game and is accused of using AI voice “actors” too. And this is Call of fucking Duty, the most profitable game series nearly every year: they can afford to pay artists and still make a profit, but they’ve calculated that having garish, cheap slop put into their game is not going to devalue it enough to offset the amount of money they can pocket instead.

Now, I will admit that the issues faced by the gaming industry do, to some degree, go beyond “just greed”. The AI tech fad that we’re in has driven up the price of computer components, meaning that acquiring the resources to make consoles has gotten a lot more expensive (and basically guarantees that the base price of a console will never go down, even if components eventually drop in price). I imagine that this is a big reason why the Switch 2 costs as much as it does. Tariffs are also certainly going to play a factor in making gaming even more unaffordable (for Americans at least, although it remains to be seen if other nations will be spared or penalized to offset lost profits). And, boy, it sure will suck when China inevitably invades Taiwan and throws the global semi-conductor industry into turmoil.

Here’s the thing though… I fear that this is just the new normal. Enough people will continue to buy these expensive consoles and games that it will be worthwhile. Meanwhile, those who cannot afford it will just fall through the cracks. Maybe they’ll find ways to game on a budget. Maybe they’ll find new hobbies. Or… they’ll spend beyond their means. I honestly think that this is a calculation these companies make since credit cards were introduced: how much debt will people be willing to go into to get this thing they want? In my opinion, the advent of “buy now, pay later” services just accelerates this: you can charge more, because people will willingly put themselves into debt to buy something that they otherwise would not be able to afford.

So… what can you do if you’re priced out of gaming in this environment. Well, I’ve got a couple ideas:

  1. PC gaming is fairly economical, all things considered. Obviously, a gaming PC (even a low-end one) will cost a fair bit up-front, but the cost from there is exponentially lower than on console. Online play is free, there’s more competition so you get huge discounts on games, accessories are less expensive since they are not proprietary, etc. Oh, and that’s not even mentioning that you can get a used Steam Deck for under $300 USD, which is a pretty compelling value proposition compared to buying a console.
  2. Take advantage of companies seeking growth. My go-to example for this is fast food restaurants trying to entice you to use their apps with reward points, discounts, and free food. This is clearly just them trying to get you into their ecosystem and, when they’ve gotten enough people on their app, they’ll start cutting back on these perks. However, to that I say: “exploit it while you can”. Bringing this back to the games industry, Game Pass is often touted as the best value proposition in all of gaming, but I’m incredibly leery of it for exactly this reason. Subscription services are always one quarter of stagnation away from enshittification. Game Pass is trying to maximize its subscriber numbers, and they’re giving out all sorts of incentives to make that happen: months of Game Pass for free, AAA games launching on the service on day one, low price, etc. However, Game Pass’ subscription numbers might be starting to plateau already, and we’ve already seen Microsoft raise prices and cut features to put on the squeeze. Enjoy Game Pass while you can, but understand that, at the end of it, you’ll come out with no games that you can enjoy years later… and that’s how they’re going to try to keep you in their ecosystem.
  3. Stop playing new games. You don’t need to keep up with the new AAA hotness. Buy used systems and games, or dabble in emulation and play the stuff you never got a chance to as a kid. In the past year, I got a Retroid Pocket 4 Pro to play any retro game I could dream of, and it has been an absolute blast. I snapped up a used Xbox One and a stack of games for it, all for barely over $100 CAD. If the new hotness isn’t still enticing in a couple years, how excited were you for it, really?

That’s how I see the current state of the industry. Honestly, I hope that my analysis is wrong here, or a major shake-up occurs that makes the industry more affordable (shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less could be a start), but I’m pessimistic. Activision have demonstrated that, even when they have the highest-grossing game every year, they will continue to squeeze until there is no life left, and you can be sure that the other publishers will follow suit. We may not see the AAA market make an attempt to be affordable again until we get a real industry crash. At that point, some company may realize that they can capture market share by growing their audience, and then we can relive the cycle again…

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Bioshock 2’s Weird Take on Collectivism

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

I recently replayed Bioshock and, having now familiarized myself with Ayn Rand and her ideology, it made for a much richer experience as I was now able to appreciate its critique of objectivism. It takes Atlas Shrugged‘s premise (John Galt goes off and creates his own secret utopia of the world’s greatest minds unshackled from the rules and regulations of society), and says “okay, this is what would happen next”. I love how the game opens with Andrew Ryan explaining his ideology and then reveals the grandeur of Rapture in such a awe-inspiring way. It’s the same sort of one-sided fantasy artifice that Rand constructs in her own novels, to the point where you could go “wow, this guy might be on to something”… and then, the second you arrive in Rapture, you find that the entire thing has turned into a hellscape due to the inherent flaws of unrestrained selfishness. It is an unusually bold and politically-charged stance for a AAA video game to take, especially for one released in 2007, and it’s part of the reason why Bioshock remains an all-time classic to this day.

However, this got me really curious about Bioshock 2: I had only played a little bit of it around the time it released, but I was aware that its story revolved around taking the opposite route and critiquing collectivism. As a left-leaning individual, I was fascinated to see how they could criticize collectivism as effectively as they took down objectivism. Obviously I’m biased on the topic, but I was legitimately curious to see what they would come up with.

…well, turns out that they kind of fumbled the ball, because Bioshock 2‘s take on collectivism is really strange and nowhere near as effective as its predecessor was.

In all fairness to Bioshock 2, a little context is necessary to explain how this game came about. Irrational Games developed the first Bioshock, with Ken Levine acting as the creative lead. However, for Bioshock 2, the project was given to 2K Marin. Parent company 2K Games wanted a sequel to be developed in a timely manner while Ken Levine and Irrational Games took some time to destress and develop their own Bioshock sequel at their own pace. 2K Marin was made up of some former Irrational Games staff, but it was created with the express purpose of delivering a Bioshock sequel while the iron was still hot. So, while the game does share some DNA with its predecessor, its creative team were largely newcomers to the series, which would explain some of the differences in its writing and feel.

Also, I’m not sure if I really need to clarify this, but obviously:

Bioshock 2‘s narrative and collectivist critique revolves around the antagonist, Sophia Lamb. She is a renowned psychiatrist who was invited by Andrew Ryan to join the population of Rapture. However, he somehow missed the fact that she was a dedicated altruist and she soon tried to spread her beliefs throughout the citizenry of the city. Lamb viewed the human race as inherently selfish and tried to raise her daughter, Eleanor, in strict isolation to try to spread her ideology to her.

When Ryan realized that Lamb was undermining the ideology his city was built upon (selfishness is a virtue in objectivism), he began seeking ways to crush her movement. When other methods failed, he had her arrested and imprisoned in a secret facility where all of Ryan’s undesirables were exiled from the rest of the city. She would eventually unite the prisoners and escape, but discovered that, in her absence, Eleanor had been abducted and turned into a Little Sister. She would eventually locate Eleanor, kill her Big Daddy protector, codenamed Subject Delta (your player character), and did her best to reverse the physical and mental conditioning that Eleanor had undergone as a Little Sister. They did manage to restore Eleanor’s memories, but they were unable to remove the ADAM slug which had been implanted in her and Eleanor still harboured an intense bond with Subject Delta, who she held dearer than her own mother.

Soon thereafter, the events of Bioshock would play out and, with the deaths of Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine, Sophia Lamb would make moves to become the de facto leader of the populace of Rapture, uniting most of the city under the banner of her movement, which she dubbed “The Family”.

This brings us to my first criticism of Bioshock 2‘s critique of collectivism: The Family resembles a traditional cult far more than it does any political collectivist movement. Like, sure, the game will have all sorts of graffiti scrawled saying “We before I” and Sophia Lamb might talk about how she will redistribute wealth by intentionally losing at poker, but we don’t actually see this altruism play out or how it has made Rapture any different than it was under Ryan and/or Fontaine’s selfishness-above-all-else rule. The place is still an unlivable hellhole after nearly ten years of Lamb’s rule of the city, inhabited by a bunch of murderous, ADAM-addled psychos. Sure, they follow Lamb’s orders, but they also followed Ryan and Fontaine, so this isn’t a new development, it just seems to be how Splicers operate: they follow whoever controls the ADAM. From what we can see in-game, The Family is a cult of personality with little ideology beyond “do what Lamb says”.

This is just unfortunate – if they actually wanted to critique collectivism, one of the most effective ways to do that would be to give us some sort of contrast between how the city operates under Ryan and Lamb, but we just don’t get that. Having a bunch of raving, drug-addicted psychos roaming the streets made perfect sense for Bioshock‘s critique of extreme selfishness. But a city united under collectivism, which is all about trying to build communities for mutual benefit, why are they still a bunch of murderers and psychos? What the hell has Lamb been doing the past ten years? You’d think that she’d try to get the city back in order at some point, right?

Now, I will admit that this could be because the writers were taking a centrist position, that “extreme selfishness and extreme altruism are just two side of the same coin!” which is why their results are so similar. This is entirely possible, but even if it was the intent, I still think that their critique of collectivism was extremely weak in comparison to their critique of objectivism. Ultimately, I think we really know why Rapture isn’t much different than it was in the first game: 2K Games wanted the game to play like its predecessor, so they just kept things the same and didn’t really worry about how that might undermine their game’s themes.

Ok, so Rapture isn’t any different than it was in the original game. But how about Sophia Lamb herself, can we glean any social commentary from her philosophy?

…not really? Or, at the very least, it’s nowhere near the same level as Andrew Ryan.

Like I said before, Sophia Lamb’s core belief is that humanity is inherently selfish. She learns that Jack (the player character of Bioshock) was subjected to mind-conditioning that took away his free will and she becomes obsessed with the idea of removing a person’s sense of self. This conditioning, combined with ADAM’s ability to retain the genetic memories of the person(s) it was harvested from, could allow you to splice a person of strong moral fortitude who has the memories of hundreds (or thousands) of individuals, losing their sense of self in the process. Lamb aspires to create this figure to become a selfless Ubermensch that will inspire everyone to give up their self-interest for good.

So, like, you can kind of see why this isn’t landing for me the same way the original Bioshock did, right? Bioshock 2‘s take on collectivism is a pure fantasy that literally no one in real-life is advocating for. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a decent video game narrative in its own right, but it’s not saying things about real-world political concepts and philosophy the way that its predecessor did. It reminds me of what I have said about the whole Inception vs The Matrix debate: one’s saying things about real-world topics in an insightful manner that demands that you engage with it on a deeper level, and the other’s just a fun action romp. You can enjoy either, but don’t try to tell me that the fun action romp’s got as many layers as the other.

Now, to be fair, there is a classic, collectivist philosophical dilemma at the core of this game’s narrative. By coincidence, the procedure that turned Eleanor Lamb into a Little Sister has left her uniquely suited to absorb the amount of ADAM necessary to create Sophia’s Ubermensch. As a result, Sophia decides that Eleanor’s wants and needs have to be sacrificed for the “greater good” of inspiring others to embrace altruism. This is pretty basic philosophy and it does give the game some depth, but it doesn’t have nearly the same kind of bite as the first game’s more pointed commentary. Like, okay, a collectivist movement built around a cult is probably going to justify doing bad things to achieve dubious ends.

Furthermore, if we’re being honest, Sophia Lamb’s beliefs seem to hinge more on humans being inherently selfish than they do on collectivism. Throughout the game, she taunts your character for being a mindless drone, but if you choose to do good actions (rescuing Little Sisters and sparing some NPCs’ lives), she gets angry that you’re defying her beliefs in humanity. This also ties into the game’s endings, where your choices either result in you proving Lamb right by acting selfishly (the bad endings), or wrong by being merciful to others (the good endings).

I guess this is just me complaining about spoiled expectations: Bioshock had interesting things to say about real-world politics and philosophy, so I assumed that Bioshock 2 would as well. Now, this is entirely speculation, but I believe that this decision to make Bioshock 2 revolve around the opposite political extreme than its predecessor dictated how much more shallow the real-world political critique in this game ended up. Like, criticizing objectivism is super easy, even I can do it. Criticizing collectivism, literally “doing the best for the common man”, though? Yeah… uh, I guess we’ll make up a whole new, tangentially-related collectivist offshoot philosophy for this game. Is that bad? No, it’s a different approach, but it does not resonate with me anywhere near as deeply as Bioshock‘s approach did.

And that’s just a shame.

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Franchises With the Most Games in One Console Generation

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

While writing my recent Love/Hate posts about the Halo franchise, I was stunned when I realized the amount of effort that had to be put in for the developers to release four mainline Halo games during the Xbox 360 era. Like… these are Halo games, even a smaller title like ODST would have take a ton of work and creativity to complete. This achievement was even more impressive to me compared to today, where most AAA video game developers struggle to release even two games this generation. It got me wondering what other game franchises had a ton of releases over the span of a single console’s lifecycle. Well, it turns out that Halo‘s Xbox 360 run barely even warrants mention next to the titans we’re about to look at.

Some quick notes though about how we’re going to determine our criteria for what counts for this top eight list:

  • The games here will include the original game (if applicable), and any sequels which are treated as a direct follow-up to its predecessor. So, for example, Super Mario Bros 2 would be a sequel to Super Mario Bros, but Mario Tennis or Mario Party would not (they would, instead, be considered their own separate series). This would include some side-games and spin-offs if they were intended to be a major release (for example, Dead Island: Riptide is a sequel, even though it is not a numbered entry like Dead Island 2). This does not apply to follow-ups which are expansions or DLC (such as Half Life: Blue Shift). This also doesn’t include clear, direct spin-off series within a wider franchise (such as Resident Evil: Survivor). It ultimately comes down to a judgment call from me, but I will mention my reasoning as needed.
  • If a game received an official release on the console, then it will be eligible to be counted. However, I am not counting re-releases and remasters which are then released on a later console generation (so, for example, Halo: Combat Evolved would count towards the Xbox’s total, but I would not count Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary towards the Xbox 360’s total since it was a re-release. I will count ports, but only if they are within the same console generation and a short timeframe of the original release (such as Twisted Metal: Head-On, which I would count towards both PSP and PS2).
  • I am not including sports video game franchises. Seeing the entire list clogged up with decades of annualized sports games is just boring – we know that they will dominate the list if we let them compete… the bastards. That said, I did look at all of the major sports games franchises and FIFA comes out on top with a whopping fourteen games releasing on both the PS2 and the Xbox 360!!! (NBA 2K was the second most-prolific, and then Madden.)
  • Also, for simplicity’s sake, if a game has a different number of releases on different consoles across one console generation, I’m only going to count the console with the most releases. This is actually pretty relevant for the Xbox 360, which was getting exclusives and annualized games released on PS2 and Game Cube for a whole year before the PS3 and Wii released, which inflates its numbers somewhat.
  • As I specifically mentioned “console generation” here, it should not surprise you that the PC and mobile are not in consideration for this list, and by extension, PC and mobile-exclusive games do not count.
  • Finally, I have researched as best as I could for this topic, but it’s definitely possible that some obscure series exists with a ton of entries on a single console that I missed. I also don’t doubt that some shovelware publisher has released a threadbare game and several “sequels” in quick succession, but I don’t even think it’s worth anyone’s while for me to even mention those kinds of games anyway.

Honourable Mentions

  • Dynasty Warriors had an impressive five mainline games release on the PS2. However, if I had chosen to include the Xtreme Legends and Empires expansions, then it would have been at ten games released on PS2 instead! It technically doesn’t count under my own rules, but I thought it was notable enough to mention!
  • The Tony Hawk was notorious for pumping out a ton of sequels, but surprisingly, the franchise capped out at five games released on both the PS2 and the Xbox 360. I mean… that’s a lot of games, but it’s barely a blip on the radar for this list.
  • Similarly, the other two franchises I always associated with a flurry of sequels during the PS1 era were Tomb Raider and Twisted Metal. However, these franchises both capped at a total of five games, which just goes to show how many games you had to pump out to even warrant a mention on this list.

Mega Man: 6 Games (Nintendo Entertainment System)

Games: Mega Man (1987), Mega Man 2 (1988), Mega Man 3 (1990), Mega Man 4 (1991), Mega Man 5 (1992), Mega Man 6 (1993)

The Mega Man games were well-known for how many of them were pumped out in the 80s and early 90s, so it was not too surprising to see them make the list. I have never played any of them myself, but even I knew that there were just loads and loads of these games released before I ever held a controller in my hands. They released nearly-annually, which is pretty impressive, but it does explain why the franchise didn’t innovate much at the time.

Rock Band: 6 Games (PlayStation 3/Xbox 360)

Games: Rock Band (2007), Rock Band 2 (2008), The Beatles: Rock Band (2009), Lego Rock Band (2009), Green Day: Rock Band (2010), Rock Band 3 (2010)

Oh my God, the over-saturation of the rhythm game market was absolutely bonkers in the late 2000s. Multiple entries on this list released within a couple months of each other! How could you sustain your audience’s interest with that many releases!

Note: I did not include Rock Band Blitz into this list, because it is meant to be a spiritual successor to Amplitude and Frequency, and therefore is a spin-off. However, I did include Lego Rock Band, because it is a full-on Rock Band game with a Lego skin applied.

Ratchet & Clank: 6 Games (PlayStation 2)

Games: Ratchet & Clank (2002), Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando (2003), Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal (2004), Ratchet: Deadlocked (2005), Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters (2007), Secret Agent Clank (2008)

Wow, I had no idea that the Ratchet & Clank games were so prolific during the PS2 era! They were creative and innovative games, so it never really felt like we were getting over-saturated with Ratchet & Clank games.

Perhaps controversially, I’m counting Secret Agent Clank on this list. I considered cutting it, but it’s meant to be the narrative follow-up to Size Matters and plays similarly to all the other games… I mean, I can’t really justify it as anything but a proper sequel.

Need For Speed: 7 Games (Playstation 2)

Games: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 (2002), Need For Speed: Underground (2003), Need For Speed: Underground 2 (2004), Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005), Need For Speed: Carbon (2006), Need For Speed: ProStreet (2007), Need For Speed: Undercover (2008)

It’s wild how Need For Speed was a full-on annualized series on PS2, whereas today the “serious”, AAA racing market is a desert of variety. I appreciated how they would try out different designs in each year’s installment, it always kept the series fresh and exciting.

Assassin’s Creed: 7 Games (Playstation 4/Xbox One)

Games: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013), Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014), Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (2015), Assassin’s Creed Origins (2017), Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (2018), Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020), Assassin’s Creed Mirage (2023)

Assassin’s Creed just does not stop, even when it definitely should have. These are such difficult games to pump out annually, with such detailed environments and animations, I do not know how they manage it. That said, when we get seven games on one console, is it any wonder that audiences have gotten burnt out on this franchise on multiple occasions?

Note, I did not count Assassin’s Creed Freedom Cry, since it was intended to be a standalone DLC for Assassin’s Creed IV.

Assassin’s Creed: 8 Games (PlayStation 3/Xbox 360)

Games: Assassin’s Creed (2007), Assassin’s Creed II (2009), Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (2010), Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (2011), Assassin’s Creed III (2012), Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013), Assassin’s Creed Liberation (2014), Assassin’s Creed Rogue (2014)

You got that right, Assassin’s Creed has had so many games release that it managed to beat itself on this list! I did not expect the PS3/Xbox 360 era of Assassin’s Creed to be its most prolific, but I suppose it managed to avoid any of the fatigue-related cooling of the brakes for the release cadence.

Note, I chose to count Assassin’s Creed Liberation‘s port to PS3/Xbox 360 for this list since it released about a year and a half after the PS Vita version and retains the series’ traditional gameplay, so it’s more-or-less a proper sequel in its own right.

Armored Core: 8 Games (PlayStation 2)

Games: Armored Core 2 (2000), Armored Core 2: Another Age (2001), Armored Core 3 (2002), Silent Line: Armored Core (2003), Armored Core: Nexus (2004), Armored Core: Nine Breaker (2004), Armored Core: Formula Front (2004), Armored Core: Last Raven (2005)

Good God, I had no idea there were so many Armored Core games on PS2! FromSoftware were working their asses off in the 2000s, and all for a fairly niche market! I mean, we have three games released in 2004, that should tell you the rate at which this series was being cranked out.

The series’ naming conventions were so weird to parse through, but it seems like the non-numbered entries are not expansions or spin-offs, but full-on games in most cases. I agonized about whether to count Armored Core: Nine Breaker since it was meant to be a stand-alone multiplayer game, back before multiplayer was included as an optional mode in a primarily single-player game. I decided I would count it since it’s technically its own entry in the series, but it’s pushing the limits of what I’d accept…

Traveller’s Tales Lego Franchise: 9 Games (PS4)

Games: Lego Marvel Super Heroes (2013), Lego The Hobbit (2014), Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham (2014), Lego Dimensions (2015), Lego Marvel’s Avengers (2016), Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 (2017), Lego DC Super-Villains (2018), The Lego Movie 2 Video Game (2019), Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (2022)

This might be a controversial inclusion here, since I’m counting all the various “franchises” of Lego games under the banner of Traveller’s Tales’ overall Lego game brand, but I don’t think it’s unwarranted. These games all play virtually identically, with some minor changes made to fit the theme of the franchise it’s riffing on. There’s actually been less of them released in the past decade than I realized, with a pretty long wait between 2019 and 2022 for a new release. Hopefully the slower release cadence is a sign of better games to come!

Some notes on what I would consider to qualify for this lst. I would not consider, say, Lego Racers or Lego Rock Band part of this franchise – just being a Lego game does not qualify, the game has to be following the Traveller’s Tales formula for me to consider it here. By that token, I did not include Lego Worlds, which is more like a Lego take on the Minecraft formula. However, I did include Lego Dimensions, since it’s basically just a toys-to-life take on the traditional formula, and The Lego Movie 2 Video Game is basically a Lego game with the Lego IP as its theme, which is kind of funny to think about.

Guitar Hero: 10 Games (Xbox 360)

Games: Guitar Hero II (2006), Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (2007), Guitar Hero: Aerosmith (2008), Guitar Hero World Tour (2008), Guitar Hero: Metallica (2009), Guitar Hero Smash Hits (2009), Guitar Hero 5 (2009), Band Hero (2009), Guitar Hero: Van Halen (2009), Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock (2009)

The rhythm game genre would have been oversaturated by Rock Band‘s releases alone, but Guitar Hero absolutely took the piss with ten games released on the Xbox 360! They released five fucking games in 2009!!! Seriously, the rhythm genre did not die due to disinterest, Activision actively killed the damn thing.

Note, I waffled on whether to include Guitar Hero Smash Hits on this list. Like, I would not consider a band’s greatest hits album to be a proper entry in their discography, right? But ultimately I did decide to include it, because it includes new recordings of many of the older songs, adds in support for other instruments, has new venues, etc, meaning that more-or-less has new content which justifies its existence. I also chose to include Band Hero, since it is identical to Guitar Hero, but with slightly different branding due to being full of pop songs rather than rock/metal.

Need For Speed: 10 Games (Xbox 360)

Games: Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005), Need For Speed: Carbon (2006), Need For Speed: ProStreet (2007), Need For Speed: Undercover (2008), Need For Speed: Shift (2009), Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010), Shift 2: Unleashed (2011), Need For Speed: The Run (2011), Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2012), Need For Speed: Rivals (2013)

As impressed as I was with the release cadence for Need For Speed on PS2, it is wild how many of these games released on Xbox 360. However, you can really see how much flailing EA were doing during this console generation, as they went from arcade action with Most Wanted, to failed attempts at more serious games with ProStreet and Shift, and then back to a Most Wanted reboot to try to recapture what previously worked. Despite that, the series still put out a new game every single year (and two of them in 2011!), which is pretty wild for a franchise which was struggling with an identity crisis, and I imagine the breakneck release schedule didn’t help any with that.

Call of Duty: 11 Games (Xbox 360)

Games: Call of Duty 2 (2005), Call of Duty 3 (2006), Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007), Call of Duty: World at War (2008), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011), Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012), Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013), Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014), Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015)

We all knew that Call of Duty was going to make this list. A new Call of Duty game each year is one of the universe’s constants; we are all truly fucked when Activision finally decides to take a year off. Looking back, this series was absolute fire during this era, as the run from Modern Warfare to Black Ops II gave us some of the best first person shooters of all-time.

Note, the Xbox 360 port of the original Call of Duty does not count for this list, as it was ported six years after it originally released.

Call of Duty: 12 Games (PlayStation 4)

Games: Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013), Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014), Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015), Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016), Call of Duty: WWII (2017), Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (2018), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020), Call of Duty: Vanguard (2021), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023), Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (2024)

Yeah, that’s right, like Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty is so prolific that it manages to smash its own, absolutely insane records, despite multiple revolts from their hardcore fans during this console generation. The craziest part is that there very well could be more games releasing on PS4 in future, so this number may end up getting higher in the next couple years!

Note, I am not counting Call of Duty: Warzone as a separate game, as it is a stand-alone multiplayer mode that is included in the mainline releases.

Traveller’s Tales Lego Franchise: 15 Games (Xbox 360)

Games: Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (2006), Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (2008), Lego Batman: The Video Game (2008), Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues (2009), Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 (2010), Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (2011), Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game (2011), Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (2011), Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (2012), Lego The Lord of the Rings (2012), Lego Marvel Super Heroes (2013), Lego The Hobbit (2014), Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham (2014), Lego Dimensions (2015), Lego Marvel’s Avengers (2016)

Okay, I knew that the number of Lego games on PS4 felt kind of low, but fifteen games on Xbox 360 is absolutely nuts. The different franchises helped to break things up and allow you to engage with the properties you cared about, but it’s no wonder this game formula became so over-saturated when we had this many games in eight years!

Note, Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga does not count for this list, since it is a re-release of the first two Lego Star Wars games. Bionicle Heroes also does not count, since it is not following the “Traveller’s Tales Lego game formula” that binds this disparate franchise together.

Just Dance: 18 Games (Wii)

Games: Just Dance (2009), Just Dance 2 (2010), Just Dance Kids (2010), Just Dance 3 (2011), Just Dance Wii (2011), Just Dance Kids 2 (2011), Just Dance Wii 2 (2012), Just Dance 4 (2012), Just Dance: Disney Party (2012), Just Dance 2014 (2013), Just Dance Kids 2014 (2013), Just Dance 2015 (2014), Just Dance 2016 (2015), Just Dance: Disney Party 2 (2015), Just Dance 2017 (2016), Just Dance 2018 (2017), Just Dance 2019 (2018), Just Dance 2020 (2019)

GOOD GOD, eighteen games in a ten year period!?!! Some of these games literally released within less than a week of the previous entry! I knew that the Just Dance games had a bunch of releases, but I never would have imagined that it was that prolific. To me, the wildest part about this is that Just Dance didn’t start releasing games until three years into the Wii’s lifecycle… can you imagine how many more games there would have been if we had gotten three more years of releases?

Note, I am not including Just Dance Summer Party, as it is basically a re-release of Just Dance 2. Likewise, Just Dance: Best Of is straight-up a greatest hits compilation with minimal changes made to the formula. I chose to include the Kids and Disney Party games on this list, as they are fundamentally identical to a mainline entry, just with kid-centric soundtracks. Also, Just Dance Wii and Wii 2 were Japan-exclusive, but that counts as far as I’m concerned!

Singstar: At Least 39 Games (PS2)

Games: SingStar (2004), SingStar Party (2004), SingStar Anthems (2006), SingStar Rocks! (2006), SingStar Norske Hits (2007), SingStar Pop (2007), SingStar Popworld (2007), SingStar Pop Hits (2007), SingStar: Die Toten Hosen (2007), SingStar Svenska Hits (2007), SingStar Svenska Hits Schlager (2007), SingStar ’80s (2007), SingStar Amped (2007), SingStar Rock Ballads (2007), SingStar Deutsch Rock-Pop Vol. 2 (2007), SingStar Bollywood (2007), SingStar R&B (2007), SingStar: Morangos com Açúcar (2008), SingStar ’90s (2008), SingStar Summer Party (2008), SingStar Pop Vol. 2 (2008), SingStar Hottest Hits (2008), SingStar Boy Bands vs Girl Bands (2008), SingStar Country (2008), SingStar Legends (2008), SingStar Singalong With Disney (2008), SingStar ABBA (2008), SingStar Queen (2009), SingStar Motown (2009), SingStar Take That (2009), SingStar Vasco (2009), SingStar Latino (2009), SingStar Kent (2010), SingStar The Wiggles (2010), SingStar: Fussballhits (2010), SingStar Portugal Hits (2010), SingStar SuomiHitit (2010), SingStar Studio 100 (2010), SingStar Chart Hits (2010)

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!?!?!!! I knew that there were a bunch of SingStar games, but I had no idea the franchise was this fucking unhinged. By the way: 39 games is an estimate based on what I could find, there very well could be nearly double that number!

It’s worth mentioning that this particular list was a massive pain in the ass to collate. No one can seem to agree which SingStar game was released when, or how many of these games there even are. Some games were region-exclusive, and even international releases will often have different tracks in different territories. Wikipedia doesn’t even have a complete list, and everywhere I looked for lists of what games had been released, I would find new entries I’d never heard of, while others were missing from their lists… what the fuck is going on here???

Honestly, I throw my hands up to this one, SingStar has defeated me. Backloggd says that there were 61 games released on PS2 in a six year period, and I’m just going to take their word for it. God help us if there is a video game franchise with even more entries in one console generation…

Halo: Final Thoughts (BONUS)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

And with that, we have completed another Love/Hate series here on IC2S! I’m so glad that I managed to finally get through the Halo games – like I said at the start, I’ve had a lot of enthusiasm for this series, long before I got a chance to play them for myself. As you can see with my Top 100 Video Games of All-Time list, Halo 3 was such a well-crafted shooter that it made the list, and Halo 2 even cracked my top 25, which is pretty wild for a game I played for the first time only a few months prior! Funnily enough, my son has somehow found himself interested in Halo after getting some of the Mega Bloks figures. During the course of these playthroughs, we had a few magical evenings where he would sneak down past his bedtime and excitedly watch me play some Halo for a little bit, delighting in seeing Master Chief kick some ass before being sent back to bed. Hopefully I’m instilling in him some of that same wonder that first made me fall in love with this franchise.

As a bonus, I started 2025 with a throw-back session of Halo 3 multiplayer with friends. It was absolutely glorious, we all had a blast fragging each other. I honestly think that these games’ multiplayer modes might be even better today than they were on release – it’s so refreshing to play a multiplayer shooter that doesn’t have any battle passes, live service bullshit, paid cosmetics, daily/weekly challenges, etc. It’s just pure, unadulterated fun, tuned just the way you like it, thanks to Halo‘s fantastic custom game options!

Halo Games Ranked

Here is how I would rank the mainline Halo games’ campaigns:

If you read all of my Love/Hate articles, then I feel like these rankings should be pretty self-explanatory. However, these rankings would be a bit controversial in the Halo fandom, so…

  • S-tier: Halo 2
    • Halo 2 is simultaneously the most unabashedly fun game in the franchise, and expands the narrative scope to a far grander and cinematic degree. Is it more linear? Sure, but I do not particularly mind when we get linear games like this (also, I think people overstate how open the original Halo was). Halo 2 is a fantastically-curated injection of fun.
  • A-tier: Halo 3
    • Gameplay-wise, Halo 3 is probably the tightest, most well-balanced, and best-developed campaign in the franchise. However, its narrative is pretty weak for a trilogy-closer, especially in comparison to its predecessor, which makes me less-enthusiastic about it. I love a satisfying ending, so Halo 3‘s weaker narrative is a legitimate mark against it for me.
  • B-tier: Halo Infinite, Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo: Reach
    • Halo Infinite at the top of B-tier and ahead of Combat Evolved is probably my most controversial opinion on this list, but I loved its gunplay that much. If not for the open world hurting the game’s level design, this could have had a serious shot of hitting A-tier, that’s how much fun I had with it.
    • For a lot of Halo fans, Combat Evolved is their favourite game in the franchise, so seeing it rank below Infinite is probably infuriating them right now. I’ll reiterate what I said before: the level design is just not fun to play. Between confusing levels with reused assets making it difficult to tell where you’re supposed to go, and repetitive encounter design, I spend way too much time in Combat Evolved not enjoying myself to truly love it. That said, it laid a rock-solid foundation and I really have to give it credit for how revolutionary it was on release.
    • Halo: Reach was somewhat disappointing to me. Its narrative and characters just didn’t resonate with me, and the fairly substantial changes to the series’ gameplay makes it less fun to play than Halo 3 was for me. It just kind of plodded along and then, suddenly, it was over. It definitely gets better as it goes, but I didn’t like it anywhere near as much as I wanted to.
  • C-tier: Halo 4, Halo 3: ODST
    • Halo 4 operates kind of like fridge logic: you enjoy yourself when you’re playing it, but when it’s all over and then you think back on it, you decide that you enjoyed it less and less. It’s decent, but definitely a step down after one of the greatest game trilogies of all-time.
    • Halo 3: ODST down this low is probably the second-most controversial opinion on this list. Some people will say that this is their favourite campaign in the franchise, and claim it’s so deep and emotional: what game are you people playing that I missed out on? I cannot stand the characters’ dialogue, the semi-open world sections are dull, and the combat encounters are poorly-balanced.
  • D-tier: Halo 5: Guardians
    • Halo 5 was obviously going to be at the bottom of this list, to the point where I almost considered putting a tier between C and D and calling it “comically empty space to emphasize how much Halo 5 sucks”. It’s a bad Halo game in particular, but it’s not even a good co-op shooter either.

Halo Weapons Ranked

There are a lot of weapons over the course of this series, so naturally I wanted to rank them. Note that I am not ranking each individual weapon for each time it appeared in a game; rather, I am only using the best version of each weapon, which will be noted on the image. Some weapons are technically “different” weapons in subsequent entries, but if it’s just “_____ with a different name”, I’m just going to cover the peak version of that gun. Some weapons don’t really have a “peak” version, so I’ll go with the game that introduced them instead (eg, the sniper rifle is great and basically the same in every Halo game, so I’ve assigned it to Combat Evolved). Finally, Halo 5 and Infinite have “upgraded” versions of each weapon, which I’m ignoring entirely, since they would throw off the entire list.

Okay, got it? Here’s my ranking of the weapons:

There’s no way in hell that I’m explaining all these individually, so I’ll let this list speak for itself. However, I will break these down by game to see which one has the best weapons! There are 60 weapons on this list, but I’m going to exclude the 7 grenades since they can’t really be associated with one particular game, for a total of 53 weapons across 8 games to look at. Points will be awarded with the first place (M90 Shotgun) getting 53 points, the second place (Beamrifle) getting 52 points, and so on.

So, with that said, here’s how the points broke down:

  • Halo: Combat Evolved: 169 points (42.25 average)
  • Halo 2: 253 points (36.14 average)
  • Halo 3: 255 points (23.18 average)
  • Halo 3: ODST: Literally fucking zero, lol.
  • Halo: Reach: 151 points (16.78 average)
  • Halo 4: 249 points (27.69 average)
  • Halo 5: Guardians: 67 points (33.5 average)
  • Halo Infinite: 287 points (26.09 average)

Some observations from this data:

  • Halo: Combat Evolved has only a few weapons that have stood the test of time compared to its sequels, hence its fairly low point total. However, those weapons that have continued to stand out are top-tier (literally, that game’s shotgun is insane and topped this list without question).
  • Perhaps unsurprisingly, Halo 2‘s weapons have also really stood out for being great, with the second highest overall average and a very high point total. I would say that, arguably, this would make it the strongest overall roster (if not for the completely outclassed Brute Plasma Rifle, this game’s overall average would be nearly identical to Combat Evolved).
  • Halo 3 is, unfortunately, brought down by its glut of very mediocre weapons, which tank its overall average. It’s probably got the best-balanced weapons of the entire franchise, but it doesn’t really reflect well on this list, because many of its weapons end up getting poached by other entries in the franchise where they performed better.
  • Halo 3: ODST getting zero points doesn’t surprise me much. No weapon in that game really stood out to me, and it plays worse than Halo 3, so this was kind of inevitable.
  • Halo: Reach has a lot of unique weapons, so it was inevitably going to get some points here, but having the lowest overall average and a very low point total shows just how “good” these additions were. If not for a series-best Needler, things would be pretty dire.
  • Halo 4 also introduced a lot of new weapons, four of which ended up being personal favourites, which give it a solid overall average. The guns here are pretty good, what else can I say? Oh, one thing to note though: if I was counting grenades, then Halo 4‘s average would get tanked, because Splinter and Pulse grenades SUCK.
  • Halo 5: Guardians only had two entries on this list: the most overpowered Plasma Pistol in the franchise, and the Splinter Turret. All of the other Promethean weapons were more interesting and fun in Halo 4, so this game gets absolutely screwed as a result… which is good, because it’s what it deserves.
  • Like 4, Halo Infinite introduces a glut of new weapons to the franchise, but most of these are incredibly fun to use, hence its highest overall point total. However, it has a fairly low overall average due to the really generic UNSC rifles and the awful Disruptor pistol.

Halo Enemies Ranked

Like the previous category, I’m taking into account only the “best” version of any particular enemy type across the series. I’m also not differentiating the sub-classes of enemies (Elite Zealots, Brute Chieftains, etc), each ranking has taken them all as a whole. The main exception to this are Jackals, which have a few very distinct variants, which I have given their own entries:

And, just for fun, we’ll do the same scoring system as last time (out of 21 total entries):

  • Halo: Combat Evolved: 96 points (10.66 average)
  • Halo 2: 27 points (9 average)
  • Halo 3: 0 points… ouch.
  • Halo 3: ODST: 9 points, both total and average.
  • Halo: Reach: 15 points… again, both total, and average.
  • Halo 4: 18 points (9 average)
  • Halo 5: Guardians: 18 points (9 average… I’m noticing a pattern here)
  • Halo Infinite: 27 points (13.5 average)

I definitely need to give some observations from this data since, now that I have it call collated, it’s skewed pretty badly by the small sample size:

  • It should really go without saying that Halo: Combat Evolved skews these numbers significantly, claiming 9 out of the 20 enemy types on this list. This game established how the core enemy types play (Grunts < Jackals < Elites). In nearly every subsequent game, they’ve either functioned identically, or they’ve been notably worse. It’s amazing how well they captured the fundamental essence of these enemy types right out of the gate, and the game deserves all the accolades for it. However, the Flood enemies drag the total down somewhat – they’re decent as a way to shake-up the core gameplay, but they are very repetitive to fight and you quickly tire of dealing with pod infectors and bursters, not to mention all the ones firing rocket launchers at you. The Sentinels are also really dull and ineffective enemies.
  • Halo 2 mostly continues the formula established by its predecessor, but it does introduce a couple new enemy types. Most notably are the notorious Jackal snipers. They are potentially lethal, but they’re handled fairly in my opinion and are a pretty ingenious addition to the formula. The Drones are also a fairly unique and underutilized enemy type, but they’re at their best here in this game. Unfortunately, this game also has the Sentinel Enforcers, those annoying-ass, large, shielded sentinels that you have to blow apart piece by piece to defeat. Every time I had to fight these things, it was a total slog. The only thing keeping them from the bottom of the list is that they’re at least an uncommon enemy type.
  • Halo 3 had zero enemies make the list… which, I guess, isn’t too odd, since it’s basically a trilogy-closer and isn’t introducing anything completely new. In my opinion, its enemies aren’t doing anything particularly new or notable compared to its predecessors or successors.
  • Halo 3: ODST, on the other hand, actually gets some points this time, for the Engineers. These guys have been very under-utilized through the series, mainly because they aren’t impactful by themselves and have the potential to be annoying when they buff all nearby enemies with an overshield. I didn’t find them that annoying in my playthroughs, hence their fairly middling placement.
  • Halo: Reach is another game that basically just has the same enemies as before, although it does introduce one new enemy type: the Jackal Skirmishers. These guys aren’t as fun as regular Jackals, but they do shake-up their playstyle substantially – instead of being slow with a big shield, they’re fast with a could small shields. A solid, late-game introduction to the series.
  • Halo 4 introduced the Prometheans… which doesn’t help it too much, because there were only a couple different types of Prometheans, and they aren’t as fun to fight as the Covenant are. In particular, the Watchers are known for being really annoying, due to running away and resurrecting Knights. I did not have much issue with them in my playthroughs, but I could see them being lower in some peoples’ estimation.
  • Halo 5: Guardians, we actually have a couple interesting notes here. The Knights are significantly more fun to fight than they were in Halo 4, hence their fairly high placement in B-tier. However, I really disliked the Armiger Soldiers, which are kind of like mini-version of the Halo 4 Knights, which dragged the game’s overall score down.
  • Finally, we have Halo Infinite, which pulls off a coup by finally perfecting the Brutes. These guys have been a questionable enemy type for so long in the franchise, and have seen so many re-designs to try to get them to work, but I actually really enjoy fighting them in this game. Infinite also features the Skimmers, which show up on occasion and sort of act like the Drones. They don’t make a huge impact, but the Brutes were so good that, funnily enough, they manage to give Infinite the second highest average. Obviously, this is due to the tiny sample sizes, and due to Combat Evolved hogging most of the best enemy types, but funny to note nonetheless.

What Does the Future Hold For Halo?

The future is pretty uncertain for Halo. Halo Infinite‘s launch went well, but it very quickly bled players due to monetization and content issues, and the game has underperformed as a result. 343 Industries has also suffered mass layoffs on both the management and developer level, the studio itself has been rebranded as “Halo Studios”, and they will be using Unreal Engine for any future games rather than Halo‘s traditional, proprietary engine. So… honestly, no one really knows what will happen, but at this point, Microsoft has mismanaged the franchise so badly that there’s no sense in getting too excited for the future.

Personally, what would I like to see for a future Halo game? Well, as much as I enjoyed Infinite, I don’t think it’s the blueprint for the franchise’s future. You can’t just keep making Master Chief fight the Covenant on a Halo ring over and over again. You can get away with a throw-back once in a while, but when that’s done, you’re stuck in the same place you were at before.

I’d also prefer a more curated, linear level design again, but I am fine with the games remaining open world if they can refine the formula and make it more interesting to avoid modern-day open world fatigue. If we can keep the gunplay as good as it is in Infinite, then they’ll already be a long way towards success.

Aaaaaand that’s it for another Love/Hate series! I already have my next one in mind and will begin playing/writing it soon. Writing this one took me a couple months, so don’t expect the next one any time sooner than that. In the meantime, I’ll continue writing and posting here whenever the mood strikes me. (Also, I will continue/finish the Resident Evil Love/Hate series at some point in the future. I have not forgotten it or shelved it for good! I’m just having fun enjoying other things right now!)

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Love/Hate: Halo Infinite

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the most recent game in the franchise Halo Infinite. After all the shit 343 Industries had put the fanbase through, expectations were really low for this game, and then got even worse when people saw the reveal trailer, which necessitated a delay to polish the game up for launch. Since then, I’m aware that the game has been through some major highs and lows, so I wasn’t really expecting a whole lot going in. Could 343 finally right the ship and deliver a worthy follow-up to Bungie’s trilogy? Read on to find out…

Love

  • The Gunplay – As far as I’m concerned, Halo Infinite has the best gunplay of the franchise since Halo 3. Shooting enemies just feels so good. This is largely because your shots feel like they have real impact when they land and there’s some really satisfying feedback that goes along with it. This is best exemplified with the big power weapons, which impact with a massive explosion of fire and colour and a satisfyingly loud bang. Even smaller, standard weapons like the Mauler pack a punch and are really satisfying to blast away your foes with. It feels like they took a cue from Doom (2016) and put a ton of effort into making sure that combat makes you feel like a total badass.
  • Enemies Have Personality Again! – The Covenant in the first couple Halo games had so much personality, making them into some of the most fun video game enemies to fight. Grunts screaming and running when you started killing their comrades, contrasted with the tactical, honourable combat of the Elites made the game feel like it wasn’t just a simple shooting gallery. This was eroded away over the course of the series, with them eventually just feeling like regular video game bad guys that you need to shoot to win the game. In Halo Infinite though, the Covenant soldiers have so much personality again. This is largely due to them being extremely chatty – you’ll hear Grunts acting arrogant, only to immediately start squealing and freaking out when they see you, Jackals obsessing over collecting your bounty, Brutes yelling taunts, and Elites steeling themselves for battle, etc. All this chatter almost makes me feel sorry as I mow them down by the dozen.
    • Also, on a somewhat related note, the enemy variety in this game is fantastic. There have been different tiers of each Covenant troop in all previous games, but they’ve been expanded here and are more notably differentiated in my opinion. For example, let’s look at just the Brutes: we’ve got the standard Brutes, multiple variants in heavy armour, guys with jet packs and heavy weapons, chieftains with various weapon configurations, and even melee-only berserkers who rush head-long at you. Oh, and any one of these can have shields and various weapon combinations, making the variety of combat scenarios even among one enemy type truly vast. Good God, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I actually really enjoy fighting Brutes in this game!
    • On another related note, I love the UNSC banter in this game. They spout all sorts of cheesy one-liners which perfectly capture the feel of early 2000s video game writing.
  • New Weapons – As usual, Halo Infinite introduces a bunch of new and remixed weapons and, due to this game’s emphasis on fun gameplay, there are some truly awesome additions. My personal favourites are the Skewer (which fires a massive, impaling spear which one-shots most enemies), the Hydra (which is kind of like a Halo version of the 40k boltgun, with an alt-fire mode that homes in on enemies!), and the Heatwave (a shotgun that allows you to set its spread to go horizontal or vertical, making it much more accurate at longer ranges). Making things even better, most guns have special upgraded versions which you can get, which make them even more devastating to use. Legitimately, the only weapon I don’t like is the Disruptor Pistol, but everything else I will gleefully pickup and mow down the enemy with.
  • Grappling Hook – Ever since Halo 3 introduced equipment pickups, these games have really struggled to introduce an equipment ability which really sticks with you. The Grappling Hook is easily the best addition to the core formula, bar none. I (perhaps notoriously) hate open world games with dull traversal, but the grappling hook makes swinging about this world quicker and more entertaining, while also opening up space for creative mobility during combat. Making things better, the grappling hook has offensive abilities too, allowing to you grab distant weapons and items, and you can also hook an enemy to swing in for a melee strike. It can also be upgraded to stun enemies, which can be really helpful when you’re getting beat down by a particular guy with a power weapon and need to close the distance to them quickly.
  • The Story – Halo Infinite‘s narrative is definitely an improvement on the previous two 343 Industries games. While Halo 4 was bogged down by lore and Halo 5 was vapid and rushed, Infinite takes a more cinematic, character-driven approach that makes it feel more akin to Metal Gear Solid 5 than its two predecessors. The overall story here is basically a throwback: you’re on a Halo ring and the Covenant Banished are trying to activate it, so you have to stop them. The villains also have a fairly large role in the narrative and often show up to taunt you directly. So, while they are fairly generic and melodramatic, at least they leave more of an impression than, say, the Didact or Eternal Warden did. It takes a while to get there, but this story does end up being fairly entertaining by the end.

Mixed

  • Scan Pulse – Halo Infinite introduces a “scan” button, which will send out a pulse which briefly points highlights all weapons, enemies, and interactable objects in the vicinity, and will display where your objectives are. It’s definitely handy, but it also just feels like a crutch: I constantly want to press this button to make sure that I’m not missing anything. The only reason I don’t do it is because that’s really fucking annoying to keep up, so I just resign myself to missing things. That said, there are times where you actually do need it, because you can’t find some random panel where you need to press a button to advance the mission, and it won’t make that clear to you. Maybe it’s just like this because modern games have gotten so big and detailed that it’s way too easy to miss anything important, but it feels like an inelegant solution to the problem.
  • The Characters – A character-driven story needs its characters, and while they are a bit of a mixed bag, what we get here is an improvement on the last couple games overall. First of all, Master Chief is back to being the effortless badass he was in Halo 2, and those Doom (2016) influences have helped make his dry humour even more awesome. Where things get a bit more mixed is in the supporting cast:
    • The Pilot is a coward trying to flee, but gets caught up with Master Chief and becomes exasperated as he gets dragged into danger again and again. He can be somewhat annoying as a result, but he does grow on you as the game goes, and at least I can understand and sympathize with him.
    • The Weapon, on the other hand… I’m really mixed on her. She’s our new AI companion, who is an incomplete copy of Cortana that was supposed to find Cortana, destroy her, and then delete herself. However, upon Cortana’s deletion, the Weapon finds herself still operational, much to her confusion. Her personality is noticeably different compared to Cortana; the Weapon is much more childlike and inquisitive. While she is fairly well fleshed out as a character and I’m glad they’ve gone to the effort to differentiate her from Cortana, she just ends up being kind of annoying to me. Some of this is down to her dialogue, which can be fairly cringey. She’s also our objective-giver, so after every single objective you complete, she’ll say something along the lines of “oh hey we need to go find ____ to advance the story, lets go do it!” This bothers me, because I can just feel the developers prodding me every time she says something like this (which is a lot). Like… it’s an open world, I’ve got camps to capture and soldiers to rescue, I can see my objective markers, just let me do what I want to.
  • Open World Structure – I am fairly burnt out on open world games, so I was pretty concerned about how Halo Infinite would fare as a result. Luckily, it works out fairly well I’d say, although there are some pretty big caveats to that. One of the most revolutionary aspects of the early Halo games were their massive, open sandboxes, so going fully open-world just feels like an evolution of that concept. I think it’s best summed up this way: playing Halo Infinite is like playing Combat Evolved the way you imagined it in 2001. That said…
    • Big caveat #1: Halo Infinite is basically a carbon copy of the Far Cry open world structure which has become very tired in the past decade. For most of this game’s runtime, you’re just capturing bandit camps and dealing with a bunch of filler side quests which provide very little incentive to complete them, other than checking off some boxes on your mini-map and allowing you to spawn more powerful weapons and vehicles at captured bandit camps. Surprisingly, this didn’t wear thin for me (perhaps because the game has a fairly reasonable playtime), but if you’ve been playing more open world games than I have, then this may be a bigger issue for you.
    • Big caveat #2: Halo Infinite has the worst level design of the entire franchise, bar none. Since 343 Industries cannot curate encounters or force you to complete missions in a certain order, objectives are absolutely swarming with enemies, and your missions are extremely generic: press X buttons to expose power cores that you need to blow up, kill all bad guys in the area, blow up X objectives, etc. This would be unacceptable in any previous Halo game, but for some reason, being open world makes this less of an issue for me, even though in the back of my mind I know I prefer a more curated, creative, and diversified approach. The gunplay in this game is just so good that it props up issues like this which would have sunk a weaker game. I think this is why, as much fun as I was having playing the game, I just didn’t find myself wanting to play it as much as some of the other games in the franchise, and my play sessions end up being shorter and more spread out than for, say, Halo 2 and 3.

Hate

  • Skipping Over the End of Halo 5 is Cowardly – As much as I enjoy this game’s throw-back to classic Halo and its fantastic gunplay, I just cannot get over the fact that it skips over the end of Halo 5 and basically soft-reboots the entire franchise to not have to bother dealing with the consequences of it. For all my problems with Halo 5, the ending was downright bold. Only a handful of humans managed to escape Cortana before she fires EMP bombs at all worlds resisting the AI takeover, blasting them into the stone age. This hinted at a future game that’s scrappier and lower-tech, where we have to scavenge for better weapons and armour, akin to The Terminator. Plus, Halo 5 barely even started to deal with Cortana as our new main villain, so having her die off-screen before Halo Infinite begins is borderline insane and makes this entire extended universe of continuity feel like a joke. Instead, it’s back to the ol’ status quo: Chief fighting the Covenant on a Halo ring. Is that all this franchise will ever be? Because that’s a depressing future if it is…
    • Granted, Infinite does touch on this storyline in its final hours, but it’s done in such a way where it feels like we skipped over an entire game’s worth of plot and consequences… like, imagine if Star Wars went from Attack of the Clones to A New Hope. It would feel kind of weird and disjointed, right? That’s kind of what playing Infinite is like.
  • Load Times – Halo Infinite has some of the longest load times that I’ve seen in a game since the PS3 era. The first time I loaded up the game, it legitimately took at least a minute just to get to the main menu. Thankfully, it loads quicker from there on, but if you’re like me and are playing this game for the campaign, there’s an extra “fuck you” in store: the game always loads into the multiplayer menu, so you have to then select “Campaign” and then go through another lengthy loading screen to play that. Thankfully, once you get in-game, there are basically no more loading screens, but it’s still enough friction up-front that I sometimes didn’t even want to bother starting the game up.
  • The Other Equipment Choices Suck – If there’s one big issue with the grappling hook, it’s that it’s arguably too good… which is actually kind of a problem, because you have other equipment you can use. However, they are so inferior in comparison that they aren’t worth using at all. Like, the first equipment you can switch to is the Threat Sensor, which… highlights nearby enemies. Big fucking whoop. The only time you might want to use this is when an Elite pulls out an energy sword and uses its active camouflage. However, I would literally rather blindly fight an invisible enemy that can one-shot me than go through the convoluted sequence of button presses to switch from the grappling hook to the threat sensor… so that’s exactly what I did. I legitimately never used any piece of equipment other than the grappling hook the entire game, and never felt like I missed out for this.
  • Rough Around the Edges – Halo Infinite is a game that ended up needing to be delayed for a full year in order to get it into a shippable state… and thank God they did, because the game we got is still pretty rough at times, so I can only imagine what it would have been like if it released in 2020! I’m talking some pretty stiff animations, questionable optimization (substantial frame drops are not an uncommon occurrence), random bugs, weird ragdolling (especially when you die), guns turning into unintelligible blobs that stretch infinitely across the game world, etc. Oh, and there’s one mission where you will be told that you need to visit four beacons, which will be marked on your map and everything. However, these beacons do not allow you to progress until after you’re told about the mission, at which point you are expected to walk forward a little bit to actually trigger it. On two separate occasions, I fast travelled away before the mission triggered without even realizing it, and was then left completely confused about why I couldn’t do anything at these beacons. This could be a minor annoyance, but the area you need to go to to trigger the mission is far away from any fast travel point you will have unlocked up to this point, which turns it into a giant, confusing headache which is far too easy to find yourself mired in.
  • Overpowered Weapon/Vehicle Spawns – As you complete objectives in Halo Infinite, you will get “Valor” points which allow you to spawn a chosen weapon or vehicle if your Valor is above a specific threshold. Initially this will allow you to call for an assault rifle or a mongoose ATV, but you quickly start getting the ability to call in upgraded versions of the game’s strongest weapons, or even goddamn Scorpion tanks! It’s cool that they give you the choice, I guess…? But, at a certain point, you have to actively choose not to trivialize the game if you want to have fun. It also robs that feeling of excitement in the tank sections in previous games, as it was no longer this surprise awaiting you, and I just kept finding myself starting every mission with the exact same overpowered guns.
  • Worst Vehicle Physics in the Franchise – You can spawn in any vehicle you want at forward operating bases (FOBs) that you capture. This sounds great, especially since it can take a few minutes to get where you’re going in this open world… however, I usually just hoof it on foot, because the vehicle physics in this game suck, particularly for the warthog and mongoose. Like, they control about as well as ever, but they crash, flip over, and get stuck on the terrain constantly, which I can only assume is due to the open world structure and a lack of polish.

Halo Infinite really surprised me. I had heard that its campaign was decent, but I’m so sick of open world games that I was not expecting much at all. Its gunplay was so immediately fun though that it sucked me in. It may look like there’s a lot of things I hated about this game, but honestly, these are all nitpicks. For literally every single one of these complaints, you can add onto the end “…the gunplay sure is fucking great though”. I had an absolute blast with Halo Inifinite, to the point where open world bullshit and a cowardly plot reset couldn’t even dampen my enthusiasm for the game.

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Love/Hate: Halo 5 – Guardians

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over Halo 5: Guardians. I’ve been well aware of this game’s reputation long before I played it: stories about the marketing being deceptive, the game being full of repetitive boss fights, being downed constantly in co-op, and a despised story. Honestly though, I didn’t dislike Halo 4 as much as some people, so I’m going into this with an open mind. Maybe it can shake-up the series formula in some interesting ways? Maybe all the shit people sling at 343 Industries is unwarranted? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Meridian – Halo games haven’t really bothered to explore the wider cultures of humanity. That sort of thing is generally relegated to the EU novels. As a result, it was fascinating when the game heads to the human frontier world, Meridian, and we get to see the tension between the UNSC and the colonists. In the Halo universe, the SPARTAN program was developed to crush dissent from separatist colonists. The animosity that the people of Meridian hold towards the SPARTANs is palpable, and the way that the SPARTANs have to be extra polite to avoid pissing them off makes for some legitimate tension. Perhaps the most interesting thing here though is that Meridian’s governor, Sloan, is an AI. This took me by surprise, but it’s kind of brilliant: of course humanity would have AI politicians, it makes so much sense to implement. Making this even more interesting, Sloan is in the early onset of rampancy, making his actions somewhat erratic and making the whole situation even more tense, since he could go off the deep end at any moment.
  • Quality of Life Improvements – In its efforts to modernize the franchise, Halo 5 has some nice quality of life improvements. One that I particularly liked was that you can now swap seats in a vehicle by pressing A instead of having to go through an animation to leave the vehicle and then manually move to find the seat you want. The game also allows you to give simple commands to your squadmates, which they will follow fairly reliably.
  • More Movement Options – In line with Halo 5‘s QoL improvements and modernizations, movement has been overhauled to be much faster and more in-line with the FPS games of the day. You can now grab ledges while jumping, do a charging attack or a ground pound, do a quick rocket thruster dodge, aim in mid-air to float momentarily… oh, and you can just sprint endlessly now too. As you would expect, this shakes-up the series’ core game feel and pace substantially.

Mixed

  • Modernized Controls – When I was playing through Combat Evolved, I kept getting tripped up by its old-school control scheme (R1 to reload and pickup items? L3 to crouch? B to melee? L2 to throw grenade?). FPS control schemes have become so standardized that it’s weird going back to an older game and trying to get acclimated. However… I just played through six Halo games that all retained that control scheme. Going into Halo 5, I was used to that traditional scheme and was completely thrown off when it played exactly like a modern shooter (B to reload/pickup items, L2 to aim down sights, L1 to throw grenade, etc). I didn’t like this at first… but, honestly, this is just me complaining about the game being different. Changing the controls to be more familiar to modern gamers is fine and does not take away from anything. It’s not even like Resident Evil‘s tank controls, where you’re being nostalgic for a fundamentally different way to experience those games: you could remap the controls if you wanted to and it would play the exact same.

Hate

  • Fucking Loot Boxes – This game has paid loot boxes in it. Do I even need to say more than that? That, by itself, should give you an idea of the sort of bullshit you’re going to be subjected to in this game. Strap in, we’re just getting started here…
  • It’s a COD Clone – The back half of the PS3/Xbox 360 era was a graveyard for FPS games trying to emulate the success of Call of Duty. Every franchise was bending over backwards to change or dilute its core tone and gameplay systems in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator COD fan. Here’s the thing though: every one of those games that went all-in on mass appeal failed. By the time that the new console generation was rolling around, this was pretty well known and we were getting far less COD clones. Hell, with the dawn of the PS4 and Xbox One, even COD had outstayed its welcome and was facing some pretty heavy backlash. So, I can only imagine that 343 Industries looked at all these failed COD clones and said “We can do worse”. I could feel the influence of Call of Duty on this franchise since at least Reach, but in Halo 5 it is blatant (even down to the aforementioned modernized controls, which basically just bring the franchise into parity with Call of Duty). Nearly every bit of gameplay that was distinctly “Halo” has been stripped away in favour of appealing to the Call of Duty crowd.
    • The biggest impact of this approach is that the combined arms, open sandbox structure that most Halo games employ (to varying degrees) has been largely eliminated in favour of much more linear shooting galleries. In their place, 343 Industries have instead inserted several bombastic, scripted set-piece action moments that Call of Duty campaigns are famous for. These moments just feel vapid, the sort of noisy light shows that we had largely tired of years earlier. Meanwhile, the linear levels are painfully mediocre, with every level being a series of “kill all enemies in this room to unlock the door, then move onto the next room and do the same, etc”. These moments were always the weak, filler portions of the previous Halo games, so seeing that be the core gameplay loop here is pretty dire. That said, if this was the only problem, then Halo 5 would just be mediocre. However…
  • Co-op Focus Screws the Game Design – Halo games are famous for their campaigns which can be played through entirely in co-op. I actually was unaware that you could play up to four-player co-op in these games as early as Halo 3, but you honestly would never realize it: the campaign was clearly designed for single-player and is balanced as such. Halo 5, on the other hand, is designed from the ground up with four players in mind, which means that things have changed quite a bit…
    • Pity Halo 5‘s level design: not only is it getting fucked for being a COD clone, but then the four player co-op comes in to fuck it from an entirely different angle. To accommodate entertaining four people at once, combat encounters are far less focused. Each area feels like a miniature multiplayer arena, where you start the encounter by picking a lane and then clear out all the enemies there until everyone has cleared out their zone. You end up getting swarmed by enemy forces from all angles, including occasions where you have enemies spawning behind you. The game ended up reminding me way too much of Operation Raccoon City, although the core gunplay was good enough that it’s not quite that bad at least.
    • Since you can be revived now, Halo 5 is simultaneously more forgiving and more punishing than other Halo games. Sure, you can get revived by your partners if you play sloppily, but you also get a lot more overpowered enemy attacks that will either one-shot you (such as the Eternal Warden’s melee attack), or which have splash damage which is difficult to negate (such as incineration cannons, the Hunter fuel rod cannon, etc). Naturally, you are going to hear “I’m down, need assistance!” a lot.
  • The Story – Halo 4‘s story was a mess, but at least it had a solid emotional core that you could latch onto. Halo 5 ditches much of the sci-fi gobbledygook that plagued its predecessor, but it’s no less confusing for it…
    • First of all, the narrative is poorly conveyed. The actual plot here is pretty simple: Cortana is back and evil now, Master Chief goes AWOL to try to find her, SPARTAN Locke is tasked with apprehending Master Chief, and they all get caught up in Cortana’s plot to resurrect the Guardians – giant Forerunner robots which were used to enforce order in the galaxy. Good luck keeping track of what’s going on though, because Halo 5 just assumes you already know what’s happening at any given time. Like… to give you an idea of how bad the storytelling in this game is, the game just suddenly assumes that Cortana is evil before we actually have any reason to believe that to be the case. You’re just expected to go along with it, but that’s a massive change that needs some time to breathe. Or how about the Guardians: they’re supposed to be the big threat that the game revolves around, but we never really get a sense of what they do or why they’re so scary. Again, the game just assumes that you already know what’s going on.
    • Then there’s the inciting incident which puts this entire plot into motion: Master Chief gets knocked out, hallucinates about Cortana, who gives him some mysterious directives, and then he just decides to do what she told him to (to the point of disobeying his superiors to do so). Like… what the fuck? I get that Halo 3 and 4 had weird hallucinations with Cortana, but they never really came across like they were “real”. This here in Halo 5? It’s full-on space magic, I don’t know how else they can really justify it.
    • Maybe the worst part about this story though is what it does to the Master Chief. He spends this entire game chasing after Cortana instead of dealing with the existential threat of the Guardians… in fact, by chasing after Cortana, he’s actually kind of complicit in everything that happens. You could argue that he was pursuing Cortana, because she was the source of the threat and he needed to eliminate her to stop the Guardians… but that never happens. He encounters her and then they have a chat instead of trying to eliminate the problem. It’s also not like this is the Cortana we knew before; she is clearly an entirely different person now, so it should be easier for him to do what’s needed. Is… is this what 343 Industries were trying to convey from the whole “you’re not a machine” theme in Halo 4? Are they saying that he needed to be way more selfish and damn the rest of humanity for his own interests? Guys… are these tech bros a bunch of libertarians…? Fucking insanity.
  • The Characters – Related to all the previous issues we’ve already discussed, the characters in Halo 5 suck. Theoretically, it’s kind of cool that 343 Industries brought Master Chief’s squad mates from the Halo novels into the games. Having ODST‘s Buck become a SPARTAN is also a pretty cool move. However, none of this ends up mattering, because none of them have any development, interactions, or characterization beyond “is a soldier”. Even Arbiter’s return isn’t particularly interesting, because he basically does nothing (although I do find it hilarious that they make a point of telling us that he’s a feminist, because he breaks Elite tradition and allows females into his ranks, LOL).
    • The Eternal Warden is, apparently, supposed to be this game’s main “bad guy”. He’s a Promethean construct who occasionally shows up to oppose you. You end up having to kill the guy like seven or eight times across the course of the game and it becomes tiring very quickly. I also don’t get his part in the story at all. He’s like a rival to Cortana, but she slaps him around like a bitch at every turn. When she vanquishes him at the end, you’d think it would be a big “oh shit, she just killed the powerful bad guy!” moment, but I didn’t feel anything. Dude sucks.
    • Also, probably goes without saying, but having multiple SPARTANs in your story is lame. Master Chief’s cool, largely because he’s the only man capable of saving the day. When you have an entire squad of SPARTANs, it dilutes that importance and your squad doesn’t feel exponentially more powerful than you did when you were solo.
  • Technical Issues – Okay, we’ve gotten through the big problems, now onto some smaller fish… This game has some really weird technical issues, the most obvious of which is that enemies will render at a lower frame rate if they’re more than a few meters away and you’re not looking directly at them. I can only assume that this was implemented to keep the game running smoothly and to deal with optimization issues (it reminds me of similar issues in Pokémon Violet). However, this game doesn’t look that good, so I assume that it’s probably a combination of having to accommodate four players and general development incompetence. Oh, and speaking of incompetence, the NPC AI is worthless. You can give commands, sure, but your squad mates will struggle to kill anything, and their pathfinding makes having AI operate vehicles an exercise in frustration. I saw my squad mates get themselves killed constantly, including one particularly funny moment where we had to escape a massive Covenant vehicle. I escaped in a Banshee, only to turn around and see that my squad was still fucking around inside before the whole thing blew up and took them all with it.
  • Interactive Cutscene “Missions” – Halo 5 has three “missions” which can only really be described as interactive cutscenes. In these sequences, you and your companions are tasked with finding an NPC, talking to them, and then finding another NPC and talking to them. These sequences legitimately last anywhere from thirty seconds to two minutes at most, and make absolutely no sense to me. They even count as full-on missions for the achievements! I’d get it if all cutscenes in the game were done this way, but no, the game has plenty of cinematics, so I honestly do not understand what the hell they were doing with these things.

Halo 5: Guardians was a fucking experience. Moments after the game started, I just sat there and went “Oh. Oh no.” Taken on its own, Halo 5 is a mediocre-at-best co-op shooter with a weak narrative. In the context of this franchise though, Halo 5 is straight-up insulting. As you can see from all the “Hates” listed here, the game was fundamentally compromised on a design level and these issues cascaded to make by far the worst game in the entire franchise. Halo 5 gleefully packs so much of the stuff I hate about the past decade of gaming into its runtime, shedding everything you might have liked about Halo in the process. Oh, and making matters even more annoying for me, in particular: I just made a list of my 25 Worst Video Games of All-Time, and it’s already outdated. Halo 5: Guardians definitely deserves a spot on that list. Is this a bad time to announce that I’m intending to update my best/worst-of lists in about five years time to see how much they’ve changed in that time? Because, unless I play a lot of shit games between then and now, Halo 5: Guardians is sure as hell gonna be on there.

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