ゲームを楽しもう!

when i started getting back into anime one of the titles that caught my interest first was this, platinum end. i saw it's manga covers any time i went into any of the local manga stores and they always stood out as having some of the best art on the shelves. volume 12 especially always caught my eye. i had debated for a while on getting the manga or committing to the anime but once i learned that the anime was complete and only 2 volumes i ended up going that route just for the sake of space and convenience, good though that manga art was. i snagged both volumes for next to nothing brand new and watched them over the course of 2 weeks and i was honestly very impressed, i loved this show! i was shocked to see though that this wasn't the consensus around it at all and while i can see why some people would dislike it, i don't agree with that sentiment at all. i think this show is great and the original manga is too, it might be even better.

now before i get into why i love this and why i recommend it, i need to give a disclaimer. this is a very edgy show. it's dark and violent and it can be a lot to handle for some people. if extreme violence, suicide or sexual assault are too much for you to handle then i would advise skipping this one. the show isn't shy on any of these things, though the sexual violence is only limited to one scene and it's never directly shown. just know what you're getting into here and know that i will get into spoilers at some points here. with platinum eend one of my favourite things about it is just the basic premise. it's a battle royale anime but it's one done very differently. it has a pacifist MC at the heart of it and a ruleset that actually works well with a protagonist like that. god is dying and 13 suicidal humans are given powers and told to come to a decision on who among them should be the next god. they don't have to kill each other or be the last standing, they just have to agree on a new god. things don't go that simply but i think that premise, of a battle royale that's not really a battle is just so interesting and the angelic and religious themes do a ton for me. there's complications thrown in there along the way. each candidate is given powers which can range from wings, a red arrow that acts similarly to cupids arrow and a white arrow that kills anything it touches instantly and each is given a combination of these. it's a complicated setup but i think the show goes in some interesting directions with it and i think it's a really strong foundation. it's themes with suicide and finding happiness are also really solid, it has a lot to say about both topics and i think what it has to say is worth hearing. the show is surprisingly mature and nuanced with those topics especially considering how edgy the rest of the show can be, it's a strange contrast but the tonal whiplash really works for me..

it's set into a few big arcs over its runtime and there will be some spoilers here especially regarding the ending. the setup and the first confrontation with metropoliman. the final fight with metropoliman and a third act with the candidates coming together and coming into conflict with the last remaining undecided candidate. i think two of these are excellent and the other is just good. i think the early episodes when the show still has a lot of tension and mystery are some of the strongest and i think the mysteries and character introductions are all at their most interesting. you also get the mimimi episode which i love and the first two metropoliman fights which are probably the shows action at its strongest. there's a lot of tension in them since this early on it really does feel like anyone could die considering how the show is very willing to kill of characters you wouldn't expect it to. i think the middle portion which is the final confrontation with metropoliman is a little more mixed though. i love some characters like fuyuko and i think the fight with metropoliman is resolved really well with some of the shows best moments and arguably the manga's best panel but the hajime stuff is a total miss and takes up too much screentime here and the other villain, while fun, doesn't add a ton to the fight.

the final episodes do pick up a lot though since you get introduced to temari, the best character, and the other god candidates as well as being given one of the best episodes when they have to help temari escape the government. yoneda is a great villain for the arc and i think he's the show's writing at its best. he's really interesting and i think the ideas the show uses him to talk about are some of the most interesting elements and i like how he doesn't really have a fight at all. his final battle is basically just a debate of ideals which is the best kind of way i think the battle royale could have ended. then there's that ending. i did not see it coming and i think it's the kind of thing that will make or break the show for a lot of people. for me it's a total hit and i think it's one of the best things about it. it's ambitious and risky and different and i think it took a lot of guts to pull off. it's the kind of thing i could see being a hard sell for editors but you really have to respect them for pushing through and getting it out there. having god kill himself and end the world is the coolest thing it could have possibly done and i think the tone of that final episode is really sweet and tragic in a way i liked a lot.

i think another area it shines is in the character writing. metropoliman is one of my favourite villains in any anime. he's so fun to watch, has unique views and motivations and he's also really cute to boot. a hot yandere brocon will always find his way into my heart and he is no exception to that rule. beyond having a good villain the show also has a solid cast of other characters. Temari is pretty easily my other favourite character, she's just a phone addict who very openly just does not want to be there. she spends most of her time in the show in another country chilling on a beach and even when she has to get involved with the game she just tries to sit out and side with whoever will give her the most money and let her live a life of luxury. she's easily the most relatable character in the cast and if i was in her position i would be doing the exact same thing. she has one of my favourite designs too, she looks so cool in one chapter of the manga where she gets to wear a suit. it's also really interesting to me that she's there as explicit commentary on things like social media driving suicides, something I've been speaking out about for a long time and it's nice to see it acknowledged in something like this. there's also mukaido, a military contractor with cancer that just wants to ensure his families safety, there's some fun side villains with mimmimi, a kawaii serial killer that's invited into the game seemingly just to have fun and fuyuko, a viral weapons expert with a killer design and the show's best fight under her belt. mimimi feels like wasted potential though since she really doesn't get much time or even a real fight. even the angels can be pretty interesting.

i liked meyza, belta and beret to be the most interesting, though i liked the roles that revel and nesse had. they're just not as interesting as the rest though. this also goes for their users. mirai and saki are more or less the show's main characters and while i think they're interesting enough, they are two of the casts less interesting characters and i do think mirai can be super annoying at times even though i think that annoyance suits the story well. i had a moment midway in where i really had to sit and think of the fact that i was getting annoyed by his pacifism, which is kind of a weird thing to get mad at. that he wasn't bloodthirsty and willing to kill enough and that's kind of an unsettling realization, to want to root for him to kill. the fact he was written in a way that got me to even sit back and ask that to myself is worth commending. i like saki's arc a lot too, finding happiness in a way that i find kind of mirrored my own views on life which i don't always see represented in media. i love the cool armour designs both get though, saki especially looks so cool. the two cops that come in later are fun too and i like uryu's former friend that becomes a simp for mirai, that was a fun few episodes.

the people involved with the BR are flawed and interesting and messy. it's not the best cast for a BR but i think it's one of the more interesting conceptually. it's a battle royale where none of the options are good, humanity basically can't win here. while a few are glossed over, like the otaku and the girl that appears in stadium fight. tonma is a disgusting rapist, mirai and saki are well meaning but ineffective and don't really want the role, Hajime is a psycho, yoneda wants to end the world just to prove that he's right, Susumu is a reckless kid that wants to give everyone dangerous weapons, mukaido doesn't want the position and is dying anyway, yuri just wants money and shuji wants to normalize suicide. it's very telling how the core cast all but decide the suicidal child is the best option for humanity because of how flawed the whole system is, it's left them with no other option. that's so cool, it's a great premise for a story and i think it's handled well. like who do you root for when all of the options are bad and i like that they come to that conclusion without any real casualties. the art of the series is pretty fantastic too. the designs are all by Takeshi obata and his art for the manga is some of his best work. it's seriously good and the covers especially showcase it well. the anime doesn't look quite as good and i think it does a worse job of translating his designs than either bakuman or death note, but it still looks good. the anime also doesn't handle some other things as well, like how in the manga the angels have a weird effect put over them that kind of makes them blend into the background more. it gives them a more ethereal look and the anime is missing that. the anime also cuts some stuff like a fairly controversial scene with temari that i actually kind of like. it's easy to say removing a characters homophobia is a universal good thing but i think it does remove depth from her. the characters are all flawed and mostly kind of bad people and i think by removing an element like that you kind of miss the point, i feel the same way about them removing the trait from Yosuke from persona 4 in the new remake. i think that kind of sanitization for the sake of likability is a little anti art and i think it's okay for characters to have flaws the viewer might disagree with. they aren't perfect just like how people aren't perfect and i think the story is lesser for its removal, small though it might be.

the OST is by Masahiro tokuda, known for his work on sengoku basara: judge end, one piece fan letter, kimi wa meido sama and both seasons of ishura. not much I've seen beyond sengoku basara but the shows seem well liked. standout OST tracks for me would be "platinum end" , "Ikiru kibou" which is probably the best track on the OST, "jiyu no tsubasa" which is a close second, "shiwase ni narutameni", "shiwase na kioku" and "utsukushi sekai". "heion na hibi" is an amazing piano and violin track and another favourite. "mazushiku minikui mono" is good and "fukai kanashimi" is even better. "tenshi no sumu sekai" is the prettiest track here, it captures the angelic energy better than anything else on the list. "tsunoru omoi", "hanten", "hidamari", "ugokidasu jitai", "fuon na kuki", "utsukushi omoide and three more personal favourites with "odayakana hizashi", "anata ni tote no shiawase" and "nagoyakana kaze" round out the rest of the standout OST tracks. the OP is pretty great too! they chose "sense" by band maid and it's excellent, the kind of angelic opening and the harder guitars fit the series' energy perfectly and the visuals are great! the ED's don't quite match up to the OP but "kudafukuron" by yuu miyashita is pretty great and i like the focus it has on metropoliman. makes for a cool contrast against the OP and it's a really solid song especially in the second half when it starts to pick up with the drums. ED2 comes in at the end of the first volume and it's my least favourite of the three. the song is "last straw" by Kuuhaku Gokko and it's still very good but i just think the other two have stronger songs and animation to go alongside them. still made its way into my playlists though, it's catchy and i think once it gets going it's really good.

the show also had some very talented creatives involved with it. the main of note are Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. the former known mainly for his work on death note, ship Yamada kun and bakuman. the latter mostly known for, again, death note and bakuman, but also his work on things like hikaru no go, ral grad, all you need is kill, school judgment and show-ha shoten. they're a talented duo and while i haven't gotten around to watching bakuman yet, though i do absolutely want to. i adored death note and it was actually my first real anime, so it means a lot to me. i think it's still one of my favourites and i own tons of merch for it, down to even the books and the new blu ray release. so i like their work a lot and i think platinum end does well to honor that, even if it can't quite stack up to their peak. the animated version was done by signalMD, also known for the recent hanakimi adaptation, recovery of an MMO junkie, FLCL progressive, nina the starry bride, napping princess, yuuna and the haunted hot springs and a personal favourite kusoani, Kizuna no aelle AKA the Kizuna AI NFT anime. if you want to get into the show you have a few options. the blu ray for the anime is super common and it's not difficult to find the two volumes for under £10 each sealed. i paid around £6 a piece for them and there's only two to grab. the manga will be more expensive at 13 volumes but they're very easy to find and odds are your local manga store will have a few. mine always has a near full set on sale at any given time. I'd say which version to go for is kind of up to you. i would say the manga is better overall with the writing and the art but the show has a killer OST going for it and some solid animation in the fight scenes. if anything I've said about it has sold you i would recommend you to give it a try in some form. it's short enough that you could easily finish it in a week or two of casual viewing and it's paced well enough that outside of that middle fight dragging, you'll never really get bored of it.

city on fire was my first foree into hong kong cinema and the one that started an obsession I've had with it this year. I was always a little interested in it since one of the first games i ever played was the PS3 action shooter "stranglehold" which was a sequel to a john woo HK action movie but actually sitting down and seeing these movies just always slipped me by. when a local theatre decided to have a late night showing of this movie I decided to give it a try and go for it and what I found was a new favourite movie. being there in the theatre with a nice Sakura peach tea and seeing this movie with its jazzy smokey atmosphere, it's beautiful neon lit hong kong locale and that absolutely amazing jazz OST was one of the best experiences I've had in a theatre in my life. i almost never stopped smiling the whole time through. the movie has so much style, every scene was so pretty and i just enjoyed watching this setting. there's a chase scene around halfway in with ko chow is being chased through a city and it's so beautiful, though the movies best looking scene's have to be the one in the really fancy looking bar and the final city gunfight. that final heist really is something else though, the main theme playing and the Christmas night market setting with the Christmas music eventually kicking in. it's flawless. as pretty as the movie is, i think the characters and the story almost outpace it. ko is super fun to follow and chow yun fat is cool as hell, really cute and funny throughout, he got so many laughs from me with his one liners and the gun deal where he does this goofy little dance before he meets the dealers. he steals almost every scene and his friendship with Danny lee's Fu is reason alone to watch the movie, they have much better chemistry than the actual romance the movie has. they both kill it and watching more movies with the duo in it have cemented them as two of my favourite actors and the best duo in cinema.

the story is also just really damn good, i won't spoil too much but i was in tears at the end and i think it's probably the best "undercover cop" movie I've ever seen and it's up there with the likes of sonatina and hanabi as being one of the best crime movies ever made. you're constantly worried for ko since he's just such a likable character and by the end you really start to feel conflicted about the whole "seeing the heisters go down" thing when you start to get to know them. i wanted everyone to get out of it okay. the one flaw though is the romance subplot, it's still good but it feels very weak compared to the rest. it does give the movie some of its prettiest scenes though, like the cafe meetup and that bar scene. it's also one of those rare movies that i immediately ended up buying the blu ray for as soon as i left the theatre. arrow video put one out super recently and if you want to watch the movie, and you really should, i would highly recommend this version. it's a really well made package and i think it's worth the £18 price tag. I'd also recommend checking out "the killer" which has the duo back at it and "Hard boiled" which only has chow but it's a fantastic action movie. i watched both very recently and plan to write about them at some point so keep an eye out for that and i also plan to go and see "bullet in the head" and "a better tomorrow" which are showing in my local theatre pretty soon. it was directed by "ringo lam" who i haven't seen anything else from just yet but i do plan to seek out the rest of his filmography soon, he also worked on things like "school on fire", "prison on fire", "sky on fire", "twin dragons" and even some American movies like "maximum risk" and "simon sez" which both look like a fun time. I'm not so into American action movies but if they're anywhere close to being as good as this was then I'm sure I'll enjoy them.

GOTG is easily one of the years biggest surprises for me and it's a game i originally never even intended to play. any time it came up in a square enix showcase i would just brush it off as being boring, that it was taking up way too much time and that it was a complete waste of the talents of crystal dynamics. a team i would have work on a new tomb raider instead. this wasn't fair to it. i was just super put off by marvel stuff at the time. it shouldn't shock anyone to know that i do not care for the MCU and what it's done to the media landscape, I've never even seen a marvel movie but what i knew of them was enough for me to write them off and in turn write this game off. that was how i felt at the time and it hasn't changed beyond me just not caring enough to get mad at it anymore, they're not for me and that's fine. i shouldn't have pushed that mindset onto this game though. not only is it completely unrelated to those movies or even the other square enix marvel game (which i actually did play and enjoy), it's also just a fantastic game and one of the better action games I've played this generation. i really liked this one, though my recommendation for it does come with some small asterisks.

the story is i think the big reason to play. while the rest of the game is very solid, the story is the big draw to make you stick with it. the core dynamic between the team is so well written and well handled that it's something i could easily recommend the game on based on just that. it's the kind of thing that just makes these characters enjoyable to be around and their dynamic feels natural and dynamic. it doesn't feel forced. it's shocking too, i didn't expect it from a licenced marvel game, i expected it to be like spiderman and be kind of blandly written, quippy and nothingy but i found myself loving this core cast and getting super invested in their stories. i loved this cast. they trash talk each other a lot but it's fun to see them grow to care about each other as the game goes on and i really wanted to seek out the little trinkets you can find in order to hear more about the cast's backstories. all the little interactions they have in levels are almost all funny and i always sought them out, there's so many variations too for if you make different story choices, say different things in dialogue or even in what order you do things like finding hidden side paths or if you do puzzle solutions in the wrong order or even how well you do in some parts can change dialogue, like if you lose the shooting minigame to rocket or if you manage to get certain characters on your side when the game tallies up certain choices. there's a really seriously impressive amount of dialogue here and very little of it is wasted or poorly written. the story they're involved in is also very good and it has a really impressive sense of scale to it with just how much of the galaxy you end up seeing. the place feels so well realized for its runtime. it gets super personal and emotional too. it's not just a funny game, it actually managed to make me cry a few times near the end in some of those flashback dream sequences or the sections on earth with starlord as a teen. the psychic space cult is a cool idea for a villain and there's tons of fun side characters you get to meet along the way, highlights for me were the psychic dog that runs a smuggler city, mantis who is probably the games funniest character with her knowing of all of these really funny alternate timelines and confusing the rest of the cast with them or a cool warrior queen you spend most of the game on the run from after a really funny heist gone wrong. even the family drama with the main character ended up working for me when i really didn't expect it to, the game manages to handle its dramatic scenes impressively well for a game with this much humour and i think the contrast between that humour and those dark moments really makes both parts stand out so much better.

the gameplay reminds me a lot of something like dirge of Cerberus, EX troopers or megaman legends. it's a third person shooter with less of a focus on precise aim and more of a focus on dodging and resource management. you get a super generous auto-aim lock on, some cooldowns with things like a machinegun shot or a burst or flight and you have teammates with their own cooldowns that you have to work into combos along with your own. you dodge and fly around the battlefield away from enemy attacks and keep an eye on your active reload thingy that can end combos with an explosion. your teammates can bind enemies, juggle them in the air or just do massive damage. these cooldowns can also be shortened with this games version of a burst mode. here you do a huddle with your party and have to pick the correct dialogue option, if you do this you get almost instant cooldowns for a while and the games licenced OST kicks in for a while. it's really cool and it's where the combat felt at its most fun. it works perfectly with the team focused energy of the story and it ends with you very quickly developing a bond with them mechanically. it's just fun too, it's not as deep or fast as something like max payne or stranglehold but it's got depth and i like how different it feels from other shooters these days, though with the games length and the inability to directly control other teammates it does get boring after a while. i had my character maxxed around 3/4 of the way into the game and the tactics i used didn't really change much with the harder enemies to stop the combat from getting really stale by the end. i think letting you control those other characters would have done a lot to give the game the variety it needs.

that does bring me to the big thing about this game that may dissuade some people. this game is long, even by cinematic action games. it's a good 15-17 hours and it feels it. it drags on pretty badly with slow walking segments and levels that feel at least half an hour too long each, the places you go always have amazing variety and are really pretty and the story is consistently good and funny throughout but the combat more or less wraps up in complexity halfway in and by the 2/3rds point i just wanted the game to end already. it can be a total slog for the sake of being long and i do think it drags down what is an otherwise amazing experience. the game is at least not very difficult. it's beatable for most people at most skill levels and it's very accessible in terms of how it plays, so even if you're an action game novice i think you would have a good time here, since stuff like aiming is taken care of for you with that lock on. there's not much gameplay vareity beyond this though, a lot of walking and talking segments and some hub towns are basically all you get. those towns are fun to explore though and you can even spend money and see some side areas if you explore enough.

the game is very pretty, it might even be one of the best looking games of the gen so far. the characters all look good and are super well designed. i thought rocket, groot and gamora were the standouts but the rest of the crew look good too and you have a ton of cool costumes you can pick up for the characters if you don't like those base designs. best part is that none of those costumes are DLC, they're all just unlockable throughout the story mode! the NPC's don't look to bad either. i loved how the space cops looked and the cool dog and there's tons of cool monsters and alien species dotted around to admire too. the levels are the standout though. there's a cool hub ship you can talk to teammates and listen to music on, huge cyberpunk cities, snow planets, rainy mushroom worlds, a cool quarantined spaceship covered in pink stuff, megachurches, cool crystally desert planets and even a chunk that takes place in the skull of a dead god(?) thingy. though sadly not all of the game is as good looking as that, there are a lot of fairly bland, if pretty, spaceships in here too. those tend to drag a little and blend together after a while.

now the music is one of the best parts of the game, though sadly not the games original score. which is disappointing! since this game is scored by the legendary Richard Jacques. you might not know his name but you know his work. games like sonic R, 3D blast and generations, the club, metropolis street racer, jet set radio, headhunter and Daytona USA. it's a very cinematic score though, closer to his work on something like battle stations midway or conflict denied ops. it works for the game and it's not a bad score but it just doesn't give me much to work with personally. there's some original tracks here from the band "star lord" which were fully original to the game and they're mostly pretty good, though i find the licenced 80's music more my speed. there's a ton of amazing stuff there. A-HA, blondie, blue oyster cult, rick Astley, tears for fears and a bunch more. they only play on your ship and during your ultimate mode outside of some very specific scripted segments but it's a really good selection and it did a lot for me.

if you want to play the game it's very common and not very expensive. a physical copy will run you anywhere from £10-20 and if you're lucky you can get it even cheaper than that. it's also on almost every platform currently out, it's only missing the switch and switch 2. i played it on PS5 and it worked fantastically. the game was made by a former favourite studio of mine, crystal dynamics! back when i played and finished this i would have told you that they were easily one of the best western studios out there. their output was consistently great and i was super excited for their future. sadly now they're out there shilling AI tech in the new tomb raider game and wasting all good will i had for them. makes me almost glad we aren't getting a sequel to this. as a studio they're known for games like soul reaver, blood omen, the tomb raider series post-core designs leaving, gex, mad dash racing and the square enix avengers game. they have talent and i liked all of those games, even avengers, which i will one day cover. this is the better of their marvel titles though. the characters from the game also showed up in another PS4 game but this one was by telltale and was based more on the movies, where this was more of an original take. that gams has long since been delisted and isn't easy to play anymore, though i have seen some people online say the games disc version works fine these days. it's connection to the movies makes me mostly uninterested in it though, I'm just not into that. you can play as a few members of the cast in MVC3 and infinite though as well as the upcoming tokon and that i do care about. this version is probably dead in the water, i can't see it getting any future sequels, which is a huge shame since i enjoyed the game a lot. though never say never, the game is getting an upcoming switch 2 port seemingly so if that does well then, well, we can only hope. i do hope so, because this was a real surprise and it's something that i think would work with a sequel that shows off more of the galaxy and gives the game a tighter pace and better gameplay variety. there's a ton of potential here.

nirvana the band the show the movie. i wasn't originally planning on covering this since it's pretty far out from what i would usually cover but something about it just made me excited to go and see it. it looked really funny and i liked the original web series, though i hadn't watched the actual show the movie is based on until very recently in the run up to this. i liked that show a lot, but i think the movie might be the best part of it! it's really funny and it's the kind of movie that i would really urge you to get out and see in a theatre if you can. i haven't seen an audience this excited and into a movie in a long time, we even had cosplayers at my screening! the movie itself was also just really good. it's one of the funniest comedies I've seen in a long time and while i don't usually enjoy english language comedy at all, i thought this was hilarious and i laughed out loud a lot here. the time travel stuff, the cinema scene, the wii shop cameo, *the gun*, the alphabet song, all of the stunts and the whole copyright scene. all got me so bad. i loved this. it's well acted, it's charming and it's weirdly sweet. if you've seen the show i think it's easily with going to see, but even if you haven't i still think you would have an amazing time here. there's some references you might not get like the wii shop theme or the full version of army playing but the jokes are pretty universal and jay and matt both play the characters so well that even without the knowledge of the series it's still easy to enjoy their work. it's a movie that deeply cares about movies and art as a whole and it's made for people who also really care about that. i really think it's worth making the effort to get out and see it if anywhere local to you is playing it. it deserves to do well and i think seeing this with a group of people just as into it as you are is the perfect experience, especially if you do it like me and bring bubble tea and melon pan to your screening. i love to see some hometown heroes do well. oh! and my local theatre even gave out posters so yours may too, i put it up next to the ones i got from exit 8 and chainsaw man.

i set up my xbox one again for the first time in a few years recently. i just wanted to go back and finish a bunch of the games I've bought for it and never played since it's one of the few consoles i own that has a library small enough for me to reasonably finish everything i want to play on it in a short enough timespan. it seems like it would be a fun project for me, to outright be finished with a consoles library. it helps that it's a library that's super accessable and fairly interesting for the most part, almost all of it's titles are dirt cheap and easy to find and most of the first party stuff can be played on gamepass for the few digital only games it has laying around. i had a free month so i decided to do just that and start with some of those digital only titles. the first of these was battletoads. a game people wanted for years with memes of it being on the wii and prank calls that just made me feel a little bad for the staff that had to put up with it, though it did get a few laughs out of me. when the game came out though it just felt like not many people actually genuinely cared beyond those memes, which made me feel bad for it too. it came and went with very little hype or fanfair even from rare fans or the wider internet. the truth though is that it's easy to see why the game got so forgotten. while it's a fun time and i like it, it's also not very memorable and in a twist it's actually a game that, as it turns out, I'd actually finished before in its entirety and only just remembered midway into playing it. that's very likely not the best sign.

despite all of this it plays fairly well. the beatemup segments are varied and interesting with some super creative movesets because of how the toads can transform into stuff, helped by some genuinely amazing animation work. each of the 3 toads all play fairly differently too. one is fast, one is strong and the other is a wild card, it's pretty simple and each have bespoke transformations too. you can swap between them and each acts like an extra life when you die which makes the game feel fairly forgiving. it's not that tough of a game and can be finished in a few play sessions. it took me about 4 hours but i imagine you could do it in less with no real issue. it still has the gameplay variety from the older titles too though so it's more than just a beatemup. you have those cool bike segments which are a lot more forgiving now, 2D platforming levels, puzzle platformer segments, twinstick shooters, QTE segments and there's a really cool 2D bike segment that reminded me of olioli which was a highlight for me. it's one of the games strong suits and it helps the game keep from getting too repetitive i feel, even if some parts like the puzzle's go on far too long.

it helps that the games visual style is really pretty, it's got some very good 2D animation that looks really fluid and well done. it really consistently impressed me with how good the 2D art and backgrounds all looked and even now i think it's still one of the prettiest 2D games of it's generation. the levels within those tend to be pretty cool looking too, like an abandoned theme park and some really nice looking alien planets. it even has animated cutscenes! though those cutscenes do bring the game to one of it's major issues. the tone is really not what i imagine a lot of people wanted out of a battletoads game. it doesn't have that outdated 90's grossout humour of the old games, which i am really glad of since i can't handle that kind of thing. instead though it has a very "Modern adult animation" style of humour to it, similar to an adult swim show or rick and morty. I'm not very familiar with these kinds of shows but I've seen it compared to those a lot so i assume it's true. it's edgy and abrasive and very irony poisoned. i think at times it can work out like in the dream sequence at the start that shows a what if of if the toads where these cultural icons or i like almost all of the dark queens dialogue but a lot of the time it's just mean spirited and it can be a lot to deal with. it's something that can really make or break the game, for me it didn't break it but it really didn't endear me all that much to it. if you like this kind of humour though i think the game will give you a lot to work with. the music is similar. it works for what the game is going for but there wasn't a whole lot that stood out to me beyond a few cool remixes from the original. like the pause theme coming back. that's really all there is to say though. it never got any follow-ups or a physical release or any kind and it's not likely to do so, especially not under the current Microsoft. rare only ended up being supervisors this time around as opposed to the lead devs and the game was made by dlala studios who also went on to make 2023's Disney illusion island which has been on my list to grab for some time now. they seem like a talented studio. this one is hard to recommend though, i enjoyed my time with it but it's one that i feel won't resonate with a ton of people. if you like the original then it's an easy recommend, same for anyone super into beatemups or edgy comedy, but for everyone else it's just not one i can really say to seek out.