RiME (Switch)

Go all the way to the tower!

Find all the secrets behind!

I've had my eyes on RiME back in 2017 when it was released, but a lot of games together with a bit of negative reviews on the games, especially the switch version, kept me from it. Until now when it was relatively cheap. What caught my eye was that it gave me some Mysterious Cities of Gold vibes, and maybe the clothes of the boy since it looked like Estabans clothes. It took me 5 hours to play through it once, and I gotta say. I really enjoyed it. It's basically an adventure with platforming elements. Story is that this boy have washed up on some island with ruins of a lost civilisation with some technological marvels together with some mystical magic around the island. There is no dialog so what you see and observe with your own senses is what you get out the story. First of you awaken some kind of magical fox that was trapped in some statue and leads you across the adventure. You will see a man in a red cloak similar to your own scrap of cape, meeting some kind of machine eyes on bipedal legs that will help you on your journey. Beyond these friendly characters you have some shadow creatures that seems afraid of you in one chapter, then attacks you and tries to drain your life and then ends just looking at you. And then we have the monstrous pterodactyl that hunts you if you go out in the open until you fry it with summoning a cloud of lightning from several windmills scattered across a plain. 

So you gotta solve puzzles like moving boxes into place to reach higher places, align shadows to touch or not touch light sensitive buttons to open doors, and all you gotta get with context cues. It's nice to feel smart some times, didn't use a guide (like that would be an achievement am I right?). So if it's this good, why wasn't it recieved better? Well, the switch port was apparently at launch a disaster since the frame-rate was horrendous, the game would chug at crucial times and apparently felt unplayable. They fixed a lot of those, but when I notice, at the very first screen part of the background blinks in and out, then I can see some people finding it really bad. Still chugs at times and I got stuck on a branch in the first 15 minutes of the game so I needed to restart to the nearest check-point. But I liked it.

Spoilers for those who cares about that, or want to experience it for themselves. In between what I would classify as chapters you get some flashbacks it turns out. First you are on a ship that looks stranded in snow, but as you follow your red cloth to it and as you climb the ship it disappears and your are on the open sea and storm clouds comes upon you. The next vision is you looking through the ship at sea. Next vision is doing it again, but this time trying to reach the man clad in the red mantle you've seen across the island as the storm rocks the boat and he falls of and while the boy tries to drag him up you will see that it's just a shadow with the mantle draped over him. The mantle rips and leaves the boy with his scarf or whatever you would call it. And then the final vision hits. The roles are switched, it's the man trying to reach the boy as he falls off in his raincoat, and the raincoat rips as the boy disappear in the ocean. The game gets really surreal at this point. Right before the vision it went from bright to darkness with constant rain. The machines you resurrected sacrificed themselves one by one to open the doors so you could reach a statue with a crying child that looks like the boy where the fox disappears, and the boy is turned to some sand statue, and after breaking free is also a shadow with white glowing eyes as he climbs a lighthouse and lights it. He ends up in a room, walks through a corridor and sees the man from the boat, sitting as a sand statue and touching destroys it, transporting the child to a whirlpool that the shadows jumps into, and then he follows. Which changes the story to the man, as he looks through his sons toys and seeing a vision of his dead son.

Fantastic. Apparently the games chapters is based on the five stages of grief and the twist over who was going through the stages are fantastic. Also that I empathised so much with the machines that helped you and then died was also rather heavy on the heart. Would I compare the game it probably has taken inspiration from Ico (which I've never played, I got stuck on Shadow of the Colossus while playing through the Ico Collection on PS3). As said, it took me 5 hours, but I wasn't that thorough since I missed a lot of collectibles, like the keyholes that I assume tells the story of the boys family. I checked if there was an alternate ending and there is. If you find 4 white shades you get a bit more, I found one. Being 5 hours it's not impossible that I run through it again. I can understand locking progress between chapters, but making it impossible to walk back through a door or jumping down from a plateau  in the same chapter feels rather irritating. Still, well worth a play, but maybe not the switch version due to the still lingering graphics hiccups. 

Mega Man 3 (Mega Man Legacy Collection) (Switch)

Loved the box art

The best game in the series... as far as I know since I haven't played 7, 8, 9, 10 or 11 (or any of the X-series). Probably something we shall see when I get there. Borrowed it from my neighbour as a kid and pretty much my only Mega Man experience until I got the games on the Wii virtual console so my glasses might be tinted a bit out of nostalgia. Did beat it a couple of times as a kid... by using a password I got from a Nintendo Magazine I had. So not really.

Story is that Dr. Wily have reformed and together with Dr. Light tries to build the peacekeeping robot Gamma. They send out the 8 robot masters Top Man, Shadow Man, Spark Man, Magnet Man, Hard Man, Snake Man, Gemini Man and Needle Man to mine for crystals to power Gamma, but they go rouge. During the battles he faces of against Beak Man and afterwards have to fight the doc robots that contains the attack moves off the robot masters from Mega Man 2. After this Dr. Wily steals the crystals the robot masters where mining and takes Gamma with him. Battling through Mega Man defeats Gamma and Dr. Wily, but the lair collapses over them, but Beak Man shows up and rescue Mega Man. Turns out Beak Man is Proto Man, Mega Man's brother. Well, at least according to the wikipedia article that summarises the plot. The game itself is rather bad in explaining why you do that you do. 

But since when was story important for Mega Man? Here gameplay reigns supreme. And they definitely upgraded how you play Mega Man, first off you get the slide enabling the player to avoid damage and get past certain allowing different routes. Then, Rush is introduced that first only allows reaching higher ground from the get go and then can turn into a submarine and lastly a jet. Pretty much replacing the item's from the 2nd game. You get some cutscenes in game and the music is overall better. Sure, 2 had the Wily theme and the start up theme, 3 has Top Man Stage, Hard Man stage, the Intro theme, Spark Man, Snake Man... I mean most songs are killers. And I think the people behind the collection does as well since several tracks appear all over the menus and such. A sad part is that the best tracks are on the stages that doesn't get revisited while fighting the doc robots. Still find the game enjoyable and replayable... although it has a Yellow Devil so just the robot stages are enough, especially with that soundtrack.

Mega Man 2 (Mega Man Legacy Collection) (Switch)

Mega Mega Mega Man

So finished the second game, plot excuse is just one year later Dr. Wily builds his own 8 robot masters to fight Mega Man, Metal Man, Wood Man, Air Man, Bubble Man, Heat Man, Crash Man, Flash Man and Quick Man. Mega Man sets out and during the fight Dr. Light will send you sone upgrades, Item-1. Item-2 and Item-3... clever naming there. Praised as maybe the best Mega Man game. It has better graphics, not as hard and you can choose difficulty so that's nice. Music is definitely better and memorable. They also improved the fact that you can use the robot masters weapon to aid you during the stages and not just killing monsters easily. Well, technically Guts mans weapon and Ice Mans weapon had secondary functions... so I don't where my mind went since it just Crash Man and Flash Man that have secondary functions here. Of course, the item's are better since it's just not find it on a stage with the right weapon, but they are given out after certain stages. 

Overall more fun to play through since I believe they tweaked the item drops since it doesn't take almost a minute to farm energy and life if you find a decent spot. And they also looks like they do in the rest of the series so this is definitely a finer tuned game than the first game... and no damn Yellow Devil.

Mega Man (Mega Man Legacy Collection) (Switch)

Still find the European Box Art rather fantastic.

As my Micro Sd Card of 400 GB is being completely full I decided to migrate all Capcom games to secondary memory card since it's pretty obvious they take the most space, looking at you Resident Evil games that doesn't get a physical release at launch and when they do it's only one out of 2 or 3 games and always the smallest one on the cartridge while the others need to be downloaded. So using the internal storage of the Switch I moved most games, except Resident Evil Revelations 2 that on around 23 GB was too big so I had to download it again, which take ca 4 hours for some reason. So I'm stuck with my Capcom memory card, time for some Mega Man.

Played it before on Wii (didn't finish), Wii U and 3DS (which I finished) and I even got it on my Sega Mega Drive Mini (which I haven't played). Never played it as a kid. As you might see, I only finished it on consoles where you could potentially save scum and such and that's the case, without it I wouldn't get very far cause this game is punishing at certain points. Not the main 6 areas with the robot masters, but the damn Wily stages. Story is that in the year 200X Dr. Wily takes control of the robots created by Dr. Light in a bid to take over the world, Dr. Light takes a household robot and turns it into Mega Man, the last hope of humanity.

So Mega Man jumps and shoots his way through 6 stages to fight of the 6 robot masters, Ice Man, Fire Man, Bomb Man, Guts Man , Cut Man and Elec Man. Pretty straight forward levels where the goal is pretty much survive to reach the boss room, get killed, start from there and just win against the master and get his weapon to use on another robot. Elec Man is recommended to take sometime after Guts Man since you also get a secret weapon called the Magnet Beam that you need to get past certain platform areas. The Wily stages you need to get through on limited resources in what is pretty much 3 stages fighting the bosses all again with some new ones. Lucky Elec Man's weapon have the pause glitch where you press the pause button again and again and the hit registers several times. For bosses like the Yellow Devil there is no other option if you don't learn the pattern that is very specific. I hate that, I'm not a kid with unlimited time anymore. Also, the platforming is rather suspicious since Mega Man feels very slippery and not always as responsive when I try to jump so many times I've fallen to my death for something that feels like me slipping past a platform or the jump not register so I just walk of the platform.

So how do the Legacy Collection add to the game? You can save state like before, but you also got a rewind option by holding down L you can try to avoid mistakes and such. Don't know if there is some max time, but at the boss rush with Bomb, Fire, Ice and Guts Man I stopped going back in time and it could be that I was waiting there a long time and didn't bother rewinding long enough or that I reached a max time it is able to do that. You also get a database with the enemies and what weapons to use and an ability to fight the bosses to try them. There is also some challenges for the collections, but I might not be that inclined to 100 % them.