Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

I've been a fan of the Castlevania series in almost every one of its incarnations. While I think the high points of the series were Super Castlevania IV and Rondo of Blood / Dracula X, I also thoroughly enjoyed the "Metroidvania" entries, especially the first one, Symphony of the Night. Just about every entry, even from the beginning with the first NES game, has been what I think a higher class of action/adventure game, with superior, moodier soundtracks, much more detailed and atmospheric graphics, uncompromising in its difficulty and challenge, and larger in its scope.

The exceptions, I always thought, were the 3D entries. They always seemed to fall short of the Castlevania standard, and seemed to slip into mediocrity as soon as it made the transition. This latest game, Lords of Shadow, I think is an exception to that rule and tries very, very hard to reach for the grand sweeping design of classic Castlevania games, and mostly achieves it, I think.

The game has been billed as a "reboot" of the Castlevania franchise and appears to take the path of an origin story, which I'm typically not a huge fan of, and I feel is often a necessary inconvenience. So as is typical of an origin story, I enjoyed the characters of this game: Gabriel Belmont (presumably the first of the clan) is a troubled hero, bent on revenging his wife's death and hopes to bring her back to life with a mystical artifact called the God Mask. This story isn't typical Castlevania lore, but you can excuse it as part of an origin story. We do deal with lots of typical Castlevania bestiary like werewolves, zombies, vampires, goblins, trolls, animated skeletons, and suits of armor, but the setting is what throws it off for me most of the time. There's a tour through a vampire castle, for example, but it is just a short stop along the path of a much longer journey that includes swamps, mountain cliffsides, enchanted forests, deep caverns, deserted wastelands, and ancient city ruins. While the Castle levels are mostly great and well realized (albeit a little non traditional, because it provides the game's obligatory ice and snow level), it's over quickly and there's easily a third more of the game left to get through.

While the gameplay mechanics of a castlevania game aren't what you would call unique or original, Lords of Shadow definitely flies in the face of any kind of originality and borrows HEAVILY from just about every popular action genre on the market. The core of the game is a combo-heavy beat-em-up with fixed camera angles, straight out of God of War/Dante's Inferno, complete with contextual quicktimer events and finishing moves. You also use experience points to purchase new combos and moves, which is typical fare for this genre. One little changeup is the magic system, which is pretty simple: activate light magic to regain health during battle, and activate dark magic to increase attack power. Both are surprisingly effective in battle, considering the ubiquitous health fountains are scattered pretty sparingly throughout the game, and some of the larger beasts require quit a bit of flailing to kill unless you turn on the dark magic to increase your hit power. Your health and magic levels are all, of course, upgradeable by collecting colored gems. Again, straight of of GoW.

Then there are puzzles, which are also very similar to God of War. It usually involves manipulating some kind of ancient mechanism to unlock a door or open a new path. Some are ingenious (including a neat little memorization puzzle that takes place in, of all things, a music box), while others are just plain tedious and based on little more than trial and error. There's even a minigame that's like a scaled-down version of chess but more frustrating to play due to some confusing magic rules. The worst is the second to last level, which contains two of the more tedious mechanism puzzles, followed by an entire level full of Lost Woods - style portals and enemies that can kill you in two hits. If you die, you have to start over from the beginning. It's a cheap, tiresome note on which to end the game.

If that's not enough variety for you, there are also three titan battles that are straight out of Shadow of the Colossus. These fight scenes come out of nowhere and seem to have little bearing on the story other than being yet another obstacle to overcome. While they're mostly enjoyable to play, they feel nothing like a Castlevania game and feel very tacked-on, like the developers thought they needed one more feature in this game.

Finally there's the ever-present platforming puzzles, which are a lift right out of the Uncharted games. While the mechanic feels mostly good and predictable, they're much less inventive than Uncharted ever was, and end up mostly being tedious. One highlight, though, is the inclusing of rapelling and swinging with your primary whip/chain weapon, which is a nice nod to Castlevania IV. Then there's the obligatory Clocktower level in the vampire castle, which ends up being a rather genious level-long platforming puzzle consisting of turning gears and levers that feels right at home in the Castlevania universe.

The game's saving grace, and the one that pushes it from being just a middling, derivative action game, is the graphics and sound design. This is easily one of the best looking games of the current generation, with incredibly detailed graphics, beautiful lighting effects, rich textures, fluid motion-captured animation, and intricate character designs. The soundtrack, which has little touches of the Castlevania IV themes here and there, is beautiful and dramatic, and at times addicting. They're nowhere near as infectious as the original Castlevania themes like Vampire Killer, Bloody Tears, or Wicked Child, but they're remarkable in their own way.

In the end, Lords of Shadow is the definitive mixed bag. Audiovisually it's a great game, with amazing graphics and sound. The origin story isn't much like a typical Castlevania story, but it is enjoyable on its own merits and, to avoid spoilers, we get back on track with Vampire hunting when the end game epilogue rolls around. The level designs are impressive and nuanced, but again they don't mesh with the Castlevania universe very much. The gameplay mechanics are derivative at best, but they're still mostly fun, aside from a few tedious mechanism and platforming puzzles. I had fun with this game, and I'm excited about more Castlevania games in this format. The developers are obviously very talented, and with perhaps a little more focus, they can bring the true Castlevania "feel" back home in this latest incarnation. For now though, this game may not feel a lot like Castlevania but it's still a fun playthrough with enough unlockables and replay value to warrant a buy.

Metroid: Other M.

Because there's so much that Metroid: Other M gets right, it disappoints more than it should in the areas that it fumbles.

Let's start with what it gets right. You get a strong sense that this game was made by big fans of the Metroid series, especially Super Metroid: the green text recaps of your progress when you load a saved game; the return of several creatures from the classic Metroid bestiary like geemers, skrees, and wavers; the revisit of numerous musical cues, sound effects, and generally nostalgic audio texture; the reuse of familiar level designs (Sector 1 is the spitting image of Brinstar from Super Metroid, and Sector 3 is a more industrial take on Norfair, with its more mechanical sections reminding me of the Phazon Mines of Metroid Prime); and the return to a more "linear" level design that (usually) makes backtracking a little less confusing.

Obviously, the third person perspective gameplay is a return to the series' roots and away from the first-person reimaging of Metroid exploration that we saw in the Prime trilogy. The nostalgic change is further emphasized by the way you control Samus... you hold the Wiimote sideways like an old NES controller and use the plus button to move her around, button 1 for firing, button 2 for jumping, etc. It doesn't completely shrug off the 1st person innovations though, because the game rather sublimely blends the best parts of the first person gameplay from Prime into this game, and allows you to shift to first person perspective on demand for more precise targeting. The method of switching to first person mode, accomplished by shifting the remote in your hands to point at the screen like a traditional Wii game, is intuitive and genius in its simplicity. Also, the morph ball sequences and puzzles, while nowhere near on par with the virtuoso morph ball puzzles from Prime, definitely pay homage to them and make for some satisfyingly quirky gameplay that never ceases to amuse. By doing this, the game creators simultaneously acknowledge the greatness of the Metroid Prime contributions, and give chance for us to see Samus herself in action while you play (probably the part I missed the most when I was playing the Prime games).

While the levels definitely look and sound the part of a Metroid map, they're all a bit on the short side and a little disappointing in scope and creativity. It's hard to top Retro Studios's work in designing the levels in Prime, but even in comparison to the levels in Super Metroid these seem to fizzle. It seems like each level has maybe one or two interesting sequences and gameplay mechanics but the rest is a samey corridor crawl that doesn't quite cut it by today's standards. In context with the story I guess it makes sense... the premise is the whole game takes place on a giant spaceship with three artificial habitats created, a la Metroid Fusion, so each one isn't vast and sprawling like the Prime levels, or even the levels in Super Metroid. But nonetheless it still gives you more of a sense of playing a GameBoy or DS game instead of a full-sized Wii game. The labyrinthian levels of the previous metroid games were a halmark of the series, but in this game they feel pint-sized, like you're playing "Metroid Lite". The boss battles are also a little disappointing.. they used to be huge, set-piece type events in previous games that required skill, precision, imagination, and preseverence to finish. Here they're simplistic and very few and far between. The Ridley fight, especially, is disappointing in both difficulty and design, which is unfortunate because it was one of the many highlights of Metroid Prime.

So if it looks like Metroid and sounds like Metroid, and even plays like Metroid, what's not to like? Basically, everything that Team Ninja took liberties with. Front and center is the story, which is woefully bad and poorly written. It's chock full of schmaltzy flashbacks to Samus's early days and tiresome soliloquies about Samus's relationship to Adam Malkovich, her former superior officer, with whom she has a curious and disturbing father-daughter type relationship. There's also a lot of business with the Galactic Federation developing bio-weapons, creating artificial intelligence to control them, and a massive coverup when things go haywire.. it's stuff that would have made more sense in a Metal Gear Solid game but is just perplexing and needlessly complex here.

The disappointing story and plot filler gets presented in a series of protracted cutscenes, which are very nicely animated and tastefully directed, but the voice acting is so poor that it ruins them. Samus's voice acting is especially stilted and awkward; the first time we get to hear Samus speak is a huge disappointment. Adam's voice acting isn't much better, and is mostly void of any emotion or emphasis. It's the same problem that the Star Wars prequels had, in which the story is taken too reverentially and seriously, and it's hard for the player to empathize with any character in the game.

Samus's strange subservient relationship to Adam leads into probably the dumbest mechanic in the game, that of "approving" Samus's various weapons and abilities. The story goes that Samus is following Adam's orders and he has to authorize the use of various weapons in interest of preserving the ship's systems. But it stops making any sort of sense very quickly, when Samus has to quickly run through a lava-filled cavern without the Varia suit enabled (a sequence that resulted in several of deaths as I played through), only to have Adam tell me I could have my Varia suit back while I was fighting a couple firebats. To think that he would have allowed Samus to die in the lava cavern simply because he didn't approve of her using any kind of heat protection is preposterous. There are numerous other examples of this throughout the game, where having a particular upgrade would have had little or no impact on the environment, but it serves as an artificial barrier that requires you to backtrack later in the game to advance the story or pick up items. The game takes one of the great touchstones of the series, searching for items and using them to explore deeper areas of the game, and turns it into a demeaning obstacle course while your superior sits and watches, approving bite-sized upgrades if you do well.

It all leads up to a confusing and lackluster finale (including a frustrating final boss fight that doesn't tell you when you are allowed to use a power bomb to finish the enemy off) that leaves you a little empty-feeling by the time the credits start rolling. Thankfully, once the game is finished, you are allowed to return to the ship to retrieve "one last thing that was left behind", and this is where the game slips back into very familiar territory, and feels like a sweet little bit of fanservice. You are allowed to go back into every part of the ship and retrieve any missile and energy tank upgrades that you might have missed before (indeed, even some of the upgrades were not even reachable without power bombs, which you don't receive till the last boss fight). One particular upgrade is an eye-wink to diehard fans... the last possible pickup you can get before you leave is a missle tank, which takes you up to a full count of 80, but you receive it after you fight the last enemy of the game. Plus, the last sequence in the game even gives you a percentage count per area on your item collection rate, so purists can keep track of how much left there is to go before you get the full 100%. This, combined with one last, terrific boss fight from a surprise returning enemy in a previous game, gives Metroid fans a nice warm fuzzy feeling before you set the game down.

That last post-game wrapup section is a relief, because a lot of what comes before it is jarring, disappointing, and just lame in general. Great game mechanics, beautiful art direction and sound design, and solid but stunted level design round out the good parts of Metroid: Other M. Campy and groan-inducing dialog, silly plot developments, and that darned weapon approval system unfortunately drags the whole lot down a few notches. Then, the game rebounds with a brilliant post-credit curtain call that left me mostly satisfied with this latest Metroid outing, but more than anything I want to go back and replay the universally superior Metroid Prime games. And wait to see what, if anything, Team Ninja might do in the next game to make up for all their mistakes here. In the end, you really need to play this game if you're a Metroid die-hard, but just about everyone else can probably give it a pass.