Forza Horizon - Thoughts

After careening through six Mario Karts straight in a row, I wanted to take a break and play something more on the simulation side. I gave franchises like Gran Turismo and Forza some serious consideration (and purchased a good number of them), but what really captured my curiosity was the Forza Horizon series. Forza Horizon 5 was soon to release so talk of the game was bubbling up everywhere—and as someone that's only dabbled in arcade and kart racers, I figured there was no better time to strike than now. But anyone that knows me can attest to the fact that I have a bit of a chronological obsession, a problem that would undoubtedly nip while vacationing in sunny Mexico. So instead I stayed in the states, booting up my Xbox 360 to return to where it all began: scenic Colorado.

I'll be frank: the first Forza Horizon is a great game. But its greatness takes on a different form compared to the fiery excellence of other titles like Spelunky and Doom. Horizon offers a subtle and warm enjoyment, radiating contentment like lounging outside on a breezy Spring afternoon. It rejuvenates not with spikes of energy but gentle massaging, applying just enough pressure to exfoliate your worries away. Horizon grips your attention tighter than other laudable diversions like Bejeweled, Hexcells, or Wordle, but it's similarly prone to meditative trances, where minutes just drift away. "Pleasant" is perhaps the best word I'd use to describe Horizon—it carefully soothes like a much-needed phone call from one of your parents.

I'm hammering on this point because honestly, there's not really a lot I can do to describe what gives Forza Horizon its ineffable magic. The game looks great despite being a decade old, the soundtrack is loaded with bangers, and there's enough content to keep you sated for forty hours—or more! But at the core of the experience is a simple promise: you can drive around to your heart's content. Naturally, there's a lot more to Horizon than that—collecting cars and dominating races are also huge draws—but the game excels most from the freedom it hands you. One moment you can be cruising around looking for collectibles, and then the next you can be slamming headfirst into a guard rail during a haphazard street race. Horizon doesn't bring anything new to the open world formula (especially since Burnout Paradise came out four years prior), but somehow manages to feel fresh and rejuvenating, even if "open world driving" isn't your cup of tea. A big part of is the aforementioned indescribable magic, emanating a tinge of... authentic homeliness, I suppose. Though that could just be my rural New York roots coloring the experience more fondly.

Another reason for my fondness is Forza Horizon's ingenious approach to custom difficulty. Rather than throwing the nebulous "easy/medium/hard" metrics at you, Horizon lets you manually tailor how realistic you want your racing to be, rewarding you with additional credits for each handicap removed. This is an absolutely brilliant approach that keeps the ball in the player's court, letting them customize their experience beyond cranking up the CPU's cheatometer. Of course you can still do that—expect the AI to maintain impossible leads on Hard and above—but modifying your own controls to increase the difficulty helps to keep races interesting, and more importantly: RNG-free.

While driving around Colorado is an exquisite experience, I have some gripes with the systems that surround and unfortunately pinch the game. Forza Horizon's biggest issue is its menus—more specifically, how obtuse they can be at times. Obviously the "pay real money to fast travel anywhere" feature is a terrible inclusion, but it's the game's needlessly restrictive behavior that's worse. For instance, once you start a race you won't be able to tweak AI difficulty, modify driver aids, change cars, or purchase new upgrades/vehicles without first backing out. And then you'll have to load the world map, start the race again, load the race data, and then you can change what you need to. Several times I wanted to test out a handful of cars for a particular track (or at least nudge the AI difficulty up/down) but each instance required a multi-minute load time, even with the game installed on my hard drive. Therefore I settled on a handful of vehicles as my dependable go-tos, ironically betraying the collectible mentality of the Forza series.

Another problem I routinely ran into was trying to figure out what cars were viable for which events. Some of the descriptions are self-explanatory (it's not hard to guess what's required for a "Toyota only" event) but there were a bunch I had no clue for, like decade-specific events, price-specific events, and drivetrain-specific events to name a few. Horizon will notify you whether or not you need to buy a new vehicle, but you won't be able to see an eligibility list—that is, unless you personally drive to the event to start it (which incurs yet another load time.) And while the game is nice enough to let you purchase directly from the eligibility list, you can't manually tweak the cars or even take them for a test drive!

Note that all these grievances have a commonality: they burden you with load times that keep you from playing the game. Forza Horizon would undoubtedly be improved if these problems were fixed, but at worst they render your experience inconvenient—not insufferable. Plus I imagine the more one knows about cars and racing, the more these issues would come across as speedbumps rather than roadblocks. The core of Horizon itself—the controls, the engine, the visuals, the music, the atmosphere—are all encased in solid gold, not only standing the test of time but managing to frequently impress a full decade later. Forza Horizon is a stunning, priceless package; I feel as though I've missed out on nothing by jumping into the first entry instead of the fifth.

I would have never expected Forza Horizon to be the ideal dessert to my painfully fickle Mario Kart entrée, but here we are. Horizon showed me the perks of serious racing without including too much simulation to drag down my integrity, keeping my cruise light, breezy, and blissful. Plus I got to learn a little more of the automotive world, realizing which manufacturers and models I prefer (Audi R8 GT baby!), as well as which types of vehicles and events I detest (hatchbacks and rally racing—it's not fun sliding around everywhere.) I enjoyed my time with the game so much that I went out of my way to complete every racing event, as well as drive across every road. Even after exhausting the non-repeatable content, I didn't feel like the game dragged on too long or lacked enough to do—Forza Horizon was genuinely the perfect drive.

---------------------

Images obtained from: amazon.com, forzamotorsport.net

Mortal Shell - Thoughts

Whereas some games wear their Dark Souls inspiration on their sleeve, Mortal Shell fashions its entire suit out of From Software's fabric. Most of the series' staples are here: a grim fantasy world, trigger-focused control scheme, laborious combat, corpse runs, bosses with esoteric names, experience that doubles as currency, lore through item descriptions, et cetera, et cetera. But to Mortal Shell's credit, it applies some creative twists to the well-worn genre, generating new mechanics in the process. It's a neat and ambitious game... that unfortunately feels like an unbalanced tech demo in the end.

Surprisingly, Mortal Shell offers that rare introductory Souls experience that few games nowadays provide, where the opening hours feel like bullshit. You're given no direction, no estus flasks, and a forest littered with nasties that want you dead. As if that wasn't bad enough, Mortal Shell doesn't even offer a class, weapon, or item selection at its start—nor are you able to level your stats! It's like being dumped naked into 1-1 of Demon's Souls armed with only a longsword, and the best moon grass you can find is half as effective as the crescent variety. But you better learn to love that eighth moon grass because it's the best healing you'll find for the entire game.

You're not left entirely defenseless however, as Mortal Shell provides an new way to shield: hardening. By holding LT you can innately block any type of attack, transforming your flesh into an impenetrable statue à la the tanooki suit. This ability is also on an extremely generous cool down, allowing you to counter every other combo made by your opponent. It's a bit tricky learning to rely on it as a Souls vet, since it's best used in the middle of an attack animation to avoid interruption. Plus your impulse will likely be to mash roll or parry—both of which can be done here in addition to hardening. It's a cool mechanic though, and is super gratifying to pull off in the nick of time.

Another unique aspect about Mortal Shell I liked were the titular shells. While you can't choose what build you start as, there are three inhabitable bodies you can stumble upon out in the wild: one with high health, one with high stamina, and one that offers a compromise between the two. You may not be able to level these husks in a tradition sense but you can still dump your souls tar into their individualized skill trees wheels. Though I found the wheels to be underwhelming (a 5% resistance buff upon taking damage... hooray...), it was an interesting way to portray character growth beyond the trite "watch number go up."

The way Mortal Shell handles items is ingenious too—on paper. Every item you stumble across will have an unknown use until you consume it, incentivizing you to experiment with everything you pick up. The more you use an item the more familiar with it you'll become, eventually upgrading its potency to a second tier. I thought this was brilliant when I stumbled upon the tarspore—consuming the fungus can transform it from a poison edible to a poison-immunity treat once it hits familiarity. But every other item in the game is mundane by comparison; their effects become a tiny bit better once you cross the familiarity threshold. Considering how low-impact most of the items are already (I get health back for a single parry?), their evolved forms didn't do much to convince me they were even worth using in the midst of combat.

Early on, when your ass is being repeatedly handed to you, you'll probably stumble upon a mighty realization: dying is kind of... good? Not that being sent back to a checkpoint feels rewarding—it's frustrating as hell—but dying creates a statue of your shell you can reclaim for full health upon return. As you can already survive one ejection per life, your stone corpse serves as a second full heal waiting out on the field. Factor that together with the Eredrim shell's massive health pool (seriously, the dude's a tank), and you won't need consumables to win battles—as long as a copy of your corpse is nearby, any fight can be won through endurance alone. (Well except the last boss... you have to learn to roll for that obnoxious hopping dingbat.)

Combat is fun for the most part, as enemies run the gamut from slaughter-fodder to competent swordsman to "oh no not this guy!" But the problem with Mortal Shell's bestiary is that there's just not enough variety. The three arcs of your journey each feature a different—but small—set of enemies to clash swords with, but they're reused so many times that combat becomes stale and repetitive, your blade worn down to a nub. Given how sluggish and costly parrying can be, skipping encounters is often the safer option later on, especially during a gland run. Plus I didn't find much of a reason to fight foes once Eredrim was fully upgraded. Sure, I could funnel his tar into the other shells and try them out, but as soon as the going got tough I would revert back to the ol' dependable-Venerable. 

Amongst Mortal Shell's (many) shortcomings, the worst has to be its scarcity of locales. There are only four major zones in the game, each split up into three similar-looking subregions. The Seat of Infinity is the only zone of the four I'd readily call awe-inspiring: it's an expanse of pitch black stones carved into looming, brutalist architecture, bending even gravity to its will as you venture deeper inside the ominous Dim Gate. Unfortunately area drags on for forever, emulating the charred remains of Lost Izalith. Yet compared to the other areas it's the crowning jewel of Mortal Shell; the three remaining zones are a gigantic swamp, featureless cave, and some chilly catacombs. Each are comprised of muted, featureless corridors that often blend into one another, with the swamp being worst labyrinth of the lot—which is an egregious sin for a hub world to have! Toss in a washed out color palette, dearth of shortcuts, and the aforementioned enemy problem, and you'll be happy when the adventure is finally over.

While Nioh still retains the top spot as the premier 3D soulslike, Mortal Shell is a confident runner-up that's not without its flaws. Its merciless start offers no options other than "gitting gud", but as long as you can endure the initial beating you're bound to find something you enjoy. The combat has its foibles but is solid for the most part, and while its reuse of enemies was tiresome the placement of them was often devious, if not clever. I maintain that it's worth a playthrough for die-hard fans of the genre, as it's the closest a game has gotten to loyally copying Dark Souls. And hey, if that doesn't tickle your fancy—at least Mortal Shell can reveal all the things From Software does right by occasionally showing you what could go wrong.

Paper Mario: Color Splash - Thoughts

Never have I played a game so irresistibly charming that tries its damnedest to be mediocre. Paper Mario: Color Splash may be a better game than Sticker Star but it fails to learn nearly half of the lessons it should have. Every step forwards is proceeded by a baffling stumble backwards, punishing you every time you start to have fun. I don't fault anyone for being lured in by Color Splash's gorgeous visuals and toe-tappingly phenomenal music, but player beware: beneath the captivating aesthetic is the same exact crummy design document that sunk Sticker Star like a stone lobbed into a lake.

Or rather—a rock, eh? Eh?!!! Get it?!!!!!! 

Lord almighty do I loathe Paper Mario: Color Splash's obsession with rock paper scissors. Anyone that's played the game knows what I'm talking about—and likely feels the same. The best way to earn coins in Color Splash is to enter into one of the eight (!!!) rock paper scissors tournaments that pop up on the world map. Blatant hints are provided to assist you in the first two battles, but you're on your own for the third—and as the game progresses, the hints grow vaguer, culminating in a tournament that's entirely dependent on chance. Gone is any semblance of strategy; you either know the outcome of a match before it starts, or are helplessly beholden to a random roll. Does that sound fun?

Because it's not. The first tournament is entertaining in a kitschy way (given how seriously it's presented), but the novelty wears off quickly. I avoided the Roshambo temples after conquering the first two, but restocking my arsenal later on got so expensive that I'd be a fool not to do them—a single tournament can shower you in thousands of coins. Plus, seeing as a goddamn minigame quiz show was mandatory for progression, I assumed the Roshambo temples were as well. Only at the gates of final level did I say "screw it", ready to incur the wrath of an impossible boss fight as long as it meant I could maybe skip playing rock paper scissors for the 50th time.

For those familiar with Sticker Star, you're likely to notice two big red flags from that last paragraph: the need to restock and being unaware of what's mandatory for progression. Color Splash thankfully improves on its predecessor in both categories... but I wouldn't call either of those problems "fixed." Attacks continue to be consumable resources but they're cards now instead of stickers, meaning you won't have to deal with gigantic adhesives clogging up your inventory space. And in the main hub is a handy toad that'll clue you into what Thing you need next, avoiding the urge to keep a walkthrough open at all times. Buuut you'll continue to fiddle with deck management more than you should (largely from wanting to retain stronger cards for boss fights), as well as repeatedly backtracking to Port Prisma to check if you have the right Thing or not. Intelligent Systems keenly demonstrates that acknowledging a problem is not quite the same as addressing it.

In regard to boss fights, Color Splash likewise makes a minor improvement. What were once one-note fights (er, one-sticker fights) have transformed into actual battles that require proper healing and paint management. That is, until a specific event happens and you're forced to use the Thing that beats the boss—or face annihilation. Again the root problem is sidestepped, transforming "fights where a Thing trivializes a battle" into "fights where a Thing is mandatory for victory." And I mean mandatory—bosses are literally impossible to beat without their weakness! I would've readily taken reduced damage, or a penalizing status effect, or a difficult-to-dodge mega-attack over the brick wall that is invulnerability. It's a shame too because besides that prickly point, most of the boss fights are clever and fun (Wendy, Roy); the final boss in particular is a great duel, solely because no one particular card is required to beat it.

Another aspect Color Splash aims to improve but eventually bungles is its world map. Zones in Sticker Star were quarantined off like blobs of paint on a palette, locking you into exploring them one at a time. Color Splash mixes this up, adding multiple exits to every stage so that paths encircle the entire island. It starts off promising enough, feeling like a nonlinear adventure where you can solve things out of order, but the freedom is fleeting—you'll soon noticed that zones are still quarantined off, blocking you from making progress unless you tackle stages in the right order. This is especially apparently halfway through the game, where you're yet again traversing through stages in a boring linear fashion, with any secret exits tacked on in the most half-assed, shiftless way (Mossrock Theater).

Yet another problem Color Splash kicks further down the road is its random encounters—more specifically, making them meaningful. In Sticker Star, there's really no reason to fight enemies when you're armed with full health and stickers. However in Color Splash, battling will occasionally increase the maximum amount of paint you can hold, which is (sadly) as close to the concept of "levelling up" as the game gets. But after the first handful of expansions, upgrading your paint bucket hardly provides a benefit—the last few increases I got were a paltry 3% each. While paint is valuable early on, helping transform blank cards into better cards, powerful attacks eventually require so much paint that a single turn can deplete most of your chromatic stock. Therefore it's often better to stock up on paint-refilling green mushrooms and simply avoid battles—rendering the fights as superfluous as they were in Sticker Star.

But hey—at least Sticker Star gave numerical feedback for its battles!

Whoever thought it was a good idea to nix the damage numbers in Color Splash is a categorical fool. Depriving an RPG of such key information sends the player spiraling into an abyss of increasing uncertainty: does a hammer do as much damage as a jump? Does a fully painted jump do as much damage as an unpainted big jump? What about three half-painted hammers compared to a quarter-painted huge hurlhammer? A fire flower to an ice flower? A fire extinguisher to a lemon? Even when you manage to grasp one card's strength relative to another, you're still holding on to a formless adjudication that can never be tallied. Without a baseline of data to help determine the proper card for the situation, you'll just choose whatever card feels right.

But it's not like Color Splash requires a serious level of planning anyway. The gameplay here doesn't fare any better or worse than Sticker Star, as both suffer deeply from a simplified and recycled bestiary. Most of the fights boil down to "what attacks don't I want to waste," given that most of the enemies are a droll variation of one another. Maybe the shy guy will have a straw sticking out of his gob, or a crease across his middle, or a cardboard shield—all you really have to pay attention to is whether you should jump or hammer them. If that doesn't sound all that exciting, it's because it's not; the enemy gimmicks are mildly entertaining for the first encounter, but fail to distract from the fact that you're fighting the same overused archetypes over and over, attacks and health pools all vaguely blending together.

Color Splash's pathetic bestiary unfortunately extends over to its NPCs as well, seeing how Prism Island is home to a cabal of low-effort NFT Toads. Occasionally they'll wear a little hat, or a different colored vest, or maybe even some sunglasses—but they're all the same, bland, neutered creature in the end. Ironically a good chunk of them possess distinct personalities (the captain, the foreman, the bridge-loving toads), showing that Intelligent Systems (or at least the translation team) still yearn to tell stories. It's just a shame that the game has sterilized of any sort of visual whimsy—a problem which similarly plagued Sticker Star. But hey, at least the Koopa Kids are back this time!... again! A first for a Mario RPG Paper Mario game!

I do apologize for the unending comparisons to Sticker Star, but it's honestly hard to analyze Color Splash independent of the flawed ancestor it shares so much DNA with. I honestly feel that Color Splash is the better of the two, largely thanks to its crisp visuals, witty writing, and alarming creativity. Jokes land successfully more often than they don't, and there's a lot of fantastic paper-craft gags that reveal a stunning attention to detail. Plus I could gush about the music all day, about how it majestically evokes the chromatic tone of each colored star's episode perfectly, culminating in an energized boss theme which utilizes each episode's motif. I'd even go as far as to say that Color Splash is an aesthetic masterpiece, blowing the first three Paper Mario games out of the water...

... It's just that when it comes to the gameplay, everything comes tumbling down like a house of cards.

Just like Sticker Star.

Diehard Wii U fans may rightfully gush over Paper Mario: Color Splash's vibrant art style and charming script—but I'm unable to call it a good game, given the encyclopedic tome of annoyances and missteps. Every controllable aspect of the game is glaringly flawed—and I didn't even touch on how pointless the shy bandit is, or how annoying Kamek is, or the unforgivably stupid decision to make ally cards flee in boss fights! Those are the encounters where you need allies the most! If this blog post comes off as more negative than the one I wrote for Sticker Star, chalk it up to growing older, writing more honestly, or just a bur in my boot; the important takeaway is that neither game holds a candle to the Paper Marios of old. I mean, is there anyone that even prefers the rudderless direction the series is taking?

Worst of all is that Color Splash isn't just bad—it's bad in spite of its good parts, smothering whatever redeeming qualities it had in boneheaded decisions. It's a meticulously-crafted still life caked in dirt, a twinkling star strangled by needless smog.

---------------------

Images obtained from: nintendo.com, geekdad.com, theyoungfolks.com, expertreviews.co.uk, mariowiki.com