Mysterious GBA Games

[Music] this is not a youtube poop video or a fan game it is in fact official licensed nintendo contraband found on the gba the game boy advance was home to many bonafide classics like game you couldn't see really lame tribal tattoos and of course also tons of other actually really really good games like golden sun the mario rpgs pokemon rubenstaff tic-tacs the dbz games super circuit aria of sorrow the sonic advances advanced wars wariowares weird [ __ ] and many other cool little classics however those don't really represent what most of the library was like was it see the gba was kind of a weird bit of tech and i'm not just talking about the display that functioned more like a darkened mirror straight into the soul than actual screen neither ah more so that the gba was like a mixture of a good three whole generations of video games in one small package take the sound chip for instance it had a legacy channel i.e thinks that can produce 8-bit waves much like the og gameboy but also a type of sampler that allowed composers to drag in sounds from wherever to use for their midi compositions but of course space would be limited and so you ended up with music that has like strings sampled from a fancy roland synth but bass lines produced by a bumping and dumping 8-bit boot then there was also the speaker the shitty tinny noisy almost high frequency speaker for which the music had to be mixed in rather strange ways to be made optimally audible and then alongside that its sample capabilities also weren't very high unlike say the nes was before resulting in music that sounded both like whatever the modern trends were at the time 8-bit chip tunes sample pack drag-and-drops and dumpy super nintendo music [Music] now as you can see here as well a similar mixed gen vive was applied to the visuals as gba graphics would mostly be 2d being that it wasn't the most powerful system but pixel art is hard to do and expensive and we did just have that whole pre-render phase a few years ago on the ps1 so sure let's do that let's use really compressed bitmaps and tilesets based off of quickly made janky renders but also let's [ __ ] up the coloring and contrasts because of the darkened screen and also the game is multiplat so we don't have to make cg from scratch neither let's just like take screenshots of the models that we made for the pc and ps2 games and uh yeah this'll look just fine and it did mostly like how tekken advance is just a bunch of compressed images from tekken tag but it's certainly a vibe all its own which can be said about how many of the games played as well isometric angles that jive better with the renders technically made for 3d environments but would make games control funky and also two face buttons and the stubby d-pad so yeah why not have a double up as a menu button or like put all the combos under just one button it's fine and of course due to the nature of it being a portable system there'd also be tons more old-school arcadey experiences lots of platformers simple little racers shooters and otherwise side-scrolling games but then again we are also in the thick of the ambitious ps2 era and we do kind of like that we do want to abolish lives and include long tutorials and write epic big stories that uh well we'll just use the same images technique that we did for the graphics in general and just put some text under it and we'll figure out later if this meshes well with the arcadey stuff or not oh remember when pirates of the caribbean came out based on a ride called spirit of the caribbean and it was good uh you did it didn't he a good job you made a good [ __ ] movie for once but then uh because capitalism they went like they're like yo what other rights we got haunted mansion haunted mansion sure that's the movie put eddie eddie murphy donkey shrek he's popular put him in it and then it came out and it was bad and then someone made a gba game yeah so this is that exact [ __ ] you got sprites that aren't drawn but just really grossly compressed pngs of trees in a 3d ish world which seems sorta high effort uh until you realize that the actual story presentation is just [ __ ] text [Music] yeah so in summary in short to round it off to lead in two the gba essentially ended up being a host for some weird stanky-ass homunculi games combining aesthetics sounds and design standards from across about three different generations of gaming that were never meant to be mixed together all done with varying levels of budget time and technical competence is a product of either thus resulting in this but also this [Music] so tonally visually and musically this game is nothing like the ps1 or even later release spyro games no pastels cool gradient sky boxes no funky as [ __ ] prog influence breakbeats by way of stu copeland and no crazy temple-like structures dotting the horizon mainly because there is no horizon but considering that this game is about spyro being violently teleported to another realm all of this actually fits big bold colors slightly off-kilter music everything looking like it's been built out of a scrape together toy box and a slightly claustrophobic camera cause gba it all goes towards making a game that feels appropriately alien and gameplay-wise they do actually translate the spyro formula pretty well as this moveset enemies return because we might as well just scan in those models as pngs you collect gems get butterfly and just sort of satisfyingly plow about the place flaming and headbutting everything in sight with the same great sound effects and the same exploratory levels with the odd friendly folks dotted around to liven up the place does control a bit wonk due to the perspective going in a straight line and always is easy especially with how stubby the gba's d-pad was and also the camera rocks back and forth a lot to compensate for the zoom-in speed and well the spyro ps1 games had no shortage of motion sickness triggering camera whipping so it's not not faithful but it's definitely a bit more extreme here and i can see this game being straight up unplayable to some still it is a cute little adventure rather than portals everywhere the worlds are interconnected with you going on little boat rides and traveling what seemed to be like long distances and eating items for certain areas like a way to light up the caves i i do quite like this game for what it is [Music] oh my god it's cooler world from the hit game glove but on the other end of the spectrum we have crash bandicoot also a ps1 mascot who unlike spyro played more like a 2d platformer in 3d than a 3d platformer and so they just made a 2d platform copy pasted all of the assets added some much needed tricky depth perception by slightly slanting all the level geometry making certain edges hard to define which is [ __ ] great and otherwise pretty much one to winning this [ __ ] even aping the music pretty faithfully by also just reusing all of the instruments and whole mini bits like it ain't [ __ ] it's really stunningly blatant but i can't say that it don't work plays a lot like a smorgasbord of highlights from crash one two and three a sort of best off that's better off being called that we tried our best off to be a best off and we're off to just being pretty okay good does have like the laziest cutscenes ever though even by gba standards as they just straight up took screenshots from crashtree's opening cutscene and put text under it pretending like [ __ ] was happening that wasn't but even with all of the reuse otherwise i do totes have to comment the game feel and general level design [ __ ] just flows well and feels good just as the games it's crimping from did and that ain't as easy to recreate as simply scanning in some models so good job of course now that both of these [ __ ] were under the same roof a pretty big dick move would be to do an epic crossover taking the best off of the best off and the best off of the offshoot to make a best off of the best off of both worlds you could have big exploratory levels as spyro and cool dkc-esque platforming challenges as crash and have epic funny moments as the casts of both games interact with each other and fun [ __ ] [ __ ] like i'll have the goat right the boar and see crash trying to feed butterflies to akuaku or some [ __ ] they got all the possibilities and instead they made a really iffy minigame collection yeah so at its core it uses the same controls as crash but only for the overworld this goes for spyro 2 only because i guess they couldn't just copy paste [ __ ] from his game even though they totally could have had they just made it isometric his overworlds are more noticeably dumpy and he also controls like [ __ ] with every stage you enter you get a mini game these range from really slow stiff and tedious shmups and shitty breakouts to rocket blasting sheep which is actually pretty fun or that one helicopter flash game what's interesting though is that while spyro had skateboard and those hoop levels they clearly had infinitely less to draw from for his stuff as crashy's minigames are at least things he once did or would do and almost automatically fare better as a result crash would drive a tiny jeep spyro nah spyro just wants to put on his shades and chill which is why his mini games feel like they never end and suck this also resonates further as in that crash's levels and vibes and music fit and are consistent with the huge adventure but spyros are just off and this time not in a cool way but in a way that felt like they didn't quite know how to recreate things or simply didn't have enough time or [ __ ] to give not that these were made by just one team both the gba crash team and the gba spyro team mapped out the whole thing together but i also know that both prior mentioned games got some sequels and spin-offs and there's the crash cart racing games and yeah honestly they were probably just like mass producing these at this point for store otherwise even if the crash one is mostly okay though there's still an undeniable cynicism to be felt there as this is clearly not the epic crossover that could have been defoe almost tries to be from a story pov i suppose there are some neat little needed ease like seeing money bags and the racially insensitive islander attire and uh oh spyro has that bumper cart from crash bash you know the one right yeah however this is also where the gba stank really comes in like something about these two renders clearly made for very different promotional purposes back in the day just being put together is incredibly [ __ ] funny these are textbook gba cutscenes right here even crash nitro card's intro ain't got [ __ ] on this it's great especially spyro's side looks [ __ ] cursed the goddamn cunter over here has seen some [ __ ] [ __ ] and the title screen spyro's soulless gaze is something to behold too honestly all of this makes me wonder what type of other exciting skunk game adventures the remaining platformer mascots that were left out of this epic team up were up to [Music] [Music] well there's the sonic 1 port it's sonic but zoomed in and with rampant speed ups and slow downs and then i'm not just talking about the fps neither and not just speeding up to the speed it should be no just the whole physics of it the game's constantly pushing and pulling at you and it ramps up and crumbles seemingly wholly randomly at any point making it almost playable very cool sega then of course there's the goddamn motherheckin dagnabbin fuckbabin skirt dab in sonic advance games which are legit pretty great level design can have a few too many death drops but overall these shits work really well as slightly edgier faster paced action-packed or sequels to the og sonics baby straight up naruto running and sliding and corkscrewing and the music is all pumped up and [ __ ] the whole level designs too are built solely for speed with really well placed ramps and slides and bouncies being easier but also not as troll-like as the other 2d knicks it's fast as [ __ ] and super accelerating to play because it's zeitgeist sonic sonic adventure 2 energy but in 2d i quite dig it obviously though that sonic adventure 2 did have a subtitle that i never quite knew why it was there but i wager someone at sega figured that the adventure and 2 needed to be dropped from that title which resulted in sonic battle not the first sonic fighting game and probably not the last either but definitely a sonic fighting game that unlike the advanced titles is chock full of that spicy creamy gooey sonic the hedgehog [Music] storytelling so uh eggman is out here uh beating up his robot child i guess once sonic up and befriends the dude and then the guy with the guns and the booby bat show up to unleash some fetishes within whatever unsuspecting souls who played this growing up if this is your plan to get a date you'll you'll still need to wait in line well there's quite a line shadow dr x oh no and even my boss are interested in wait wait eggman isn't her bot no wait who she works for the present from which many hijinks and battles commence also people being called daddy uh because yeah this game is weirdly horny and i don't quite know why not super sure on these guitar shred samples either there just that smidge not in tune but in that i also sort of respect it i think anyway battle battle battle it's pretty much all the game is interspersed with a bucket load of cut scenes it's essentially your arena fighter little 3d areas that are quite impressive for what they are on the gba various sonic sprites duking it out somewhat awkwardly as perspectives go [ __ ] and aligning oneself properly with flat people in a non-flat space can really suck but it's got cool move for days just the one and a decently beefy feel to it it's just fun to juggle [ __ ] or slam right into them and the chaos of it all when there's enough folks on screen is entertaining too much like sonic advance 2 it is very much 100 at all times [Music] like this is the goddamn town song okay it's not a bad track like don't get me wrong but when you're in that town for over an hour while you're also hearing this [Music] cutting through your ears it goes to like it goes from like okay the dmc orb emoji when the only breaks from it you get are this [Music] again uh you know it's not awful i kind of like how stanky it is in fact but when it's there constantly it's it's just too much so the holy summit song comes [Music] but yeah the game has this weird unrelentineness to it that makes it feel as if events are over before you know it while also feeling as if nothing ever ends it's a very simple game at its core as i've said dialogue battle dialogue battle but when you do do that in quick enough succession while reusing a lot of songs and backdrops and blasting through plot points like they ain't [ __ ] with the music and tech sound effects just skunking at full force and face it simply becomes too hard to bear stuff are not a terrible game though i [ __ ] with many of the individual parts they just don't come together very well because i mean that 100 approach works for something like sonic advance 2 or sonic adventure 2 due to them largely being very fun games so when sonic goes wow you go wow but when only the game goes wow anyway really feeling it and it's just like awkwardly staring at you and disbelief will need to go wow again then the wow stops being an invitation to good times and instead just becomes a facade pretending that things are cooler than they really are again there's dope [ __ ] in here for sure especially from a story point of view but tried as i might it i could not get into it for the game began to give me a migraine see you later mama rouge and finally there's rayman uh trust me i made sure to check if there was any geck to be found in gba land but sadly this video can't be quite that blessed i fear i'll find a reason to talk about gex at some point though don't you doubt me anyway ray child dude has quite a lot of gba games actually there's a rayman xi jinping crossover game that has some strong dendi energy reminds me of this equally cursed sonic and garfield package which just why but there's a rabbit's game a port of rayman one because of course there's a port of rayman 1 a port of rayman 3 and a port of rayman 3 has a similar subtitle and actually jokes on you [ __ ] none of these games is what they seem see a rapid game is a legit platformer yeah take that crash in spyro it's pretty okay and plays and looks more or less the same as the rayman 3 port which is actually just rayman 2 in 2d with bits of rayman 1 and has nothing to do with rayman 3 outside of its menu and rayman hoodlums revenge is actually more like 3 aesthetically but is otherwise its own whole game plays a lot like the spyro games funnily enough and has similar issues like the camera sway in the occasionally [ __ ] depth perception but it is pretty good the collectibles have super satisfying sounds when picked up which makes it insta rewarding the music is really crisp for a gba game and has this progy jazzy fusiony take on the typical rayman soundscape that has a good driving pace to the game as a whole that's keeping up with its fast paced movement and kinetic jumpy combat thing is as well rayman platformers are often a bit slow more methodical or puzzle focused or combat heavy or just really precise and difficult but this one is just jaunty murphy pulls up like yo [ __ ] it's a new adventure how exciting and then you simply bolt off to the nearest shiny thing and just go from there it does do this annoying thing where it tilts the camera up when you jump this moving rayman to the bottom of the screen and obfuscating a shadow of depth perception as a result which makes that a bigger issue than it ever was for spyro and sometimes also the levels are really busy which doesn't help with the former [ __ ] [ __ ] though for what it is it's definitely pretty cool i think if we can take away anything from all of this though is that when even the big major mascot franchises can come out with some hardcore unadulterated uncensored experimental crusts and some legit good stuff too in the form of some very mysterious jogos then [ __ ] knows what else we'll find on our gba journey [ __ ] i'm compressed got a low bitrate but i'm not depressed [ __ ] on your [ __ ] i don't need no backlight when she turn around i see that back right yeah hey crash your bearing scarf from the backseat [ __ ] cause i'm a baby yeah hey she wants to blow on the slot of the cartridge and i said maybe yeah hey keep that [ __ ] purp the moment is bro the car goes skirt and i go raw back in the pieces of gun dashing gold just like the sun i'm brilliant get told on cause you a [ __ ] that's the truth there it is tiny little minish nothing but a devil kid but hey i got rubies in my mouth that's a whole lot of red and some gold like me off yeah yeah cause [ __ ] i'm depressed got a little bit right but i'm not depressed dang damn [ __ ] i'm compressed got a little bit rate but i'm not depressed oh god damn baby i am compressed baby i'm a tiny little man in a tiny little cartridge baby um yeah i guess that's a song persona 5 the greatest rpg ever made japanese jazz music more like persona 5 music surely the gba could produce nothing better oh [ __ ] wait they got turf rpg dang no one ever told me about turf rpg yeah that's right they made a harry potter rpg a jrpg i guess like it's not japanese but it's clearly inspired by by what it's inspired by they were on the gameboy color too i remember playing those and enjoying them for the most part but this one looks nice but otherwise is a bit lame doesn't feel too well balanced with enemies up the ass and [ __ ] let's be real harry potter's borderline late millennial cringe course so [ __ ] jk and [ __ ] hp we got bigger fish to fry as the gba had many jrpgs tons of square stuff you know i dig that square stuff like i'm not gonna talk about it here much but i was tearing up at tic tacs because the goddamn music swells hard and the pixel art is beautiful and the you know chain of memories exists but really it's probably everyone else repping that's way cooler as you don't really get that much of anywhere else jack into your pet like yeah sure you got the mario rpg and that paper but what about superstar saga it's the only one of those that spawn a consistent series and for a pretty good [ __ ] reason cause it it basically does everything else that those game did about as well sometimes worse some things better but miyamoto didn't have a vendetta against it so burr it goes there are many other objects that you can jacket also metabot's rpg this shit's cute and neat and cute and fun and cute and colorful and i like it just look at this little dude if you've seen this show it's basically the show but game so tiny town with tiny folk fighting their tiny mix has a cool battle system that's like this surprisingly intricate combo of front mission and atb atp in a way where it's visualized by way of literal wayward walking whoever gets to be on their spot first gets to attack or pick menu first and set distances also play into damages and whatnot and then you get the body parts a la front mission that work the same way with their own stats and attacks and other characteristics and then of course you can have multiple bots and it's not a fast battle system by any means but it's really clever and good and great for a gba game this cute wholesome and comfy and hey you know it even has an auto battle option long before that became in vogue a lot of its depth though comes from attacks all having their own walk speeds if you will you can pick your literal glass cannon back at base only to have it get dunked on on your way there and reach the attack point not being able to do [ __ ] but also you can fire your big attack successfully but get booted on your way back because you built up so much walkages but also two you can only use many attacks so many times anyway so you don't want to waste them accidentally without having your fill fully potential it's [ __ ] like that taken across multiple bots that adds a lot of thinking and engagement that just sort of makes it really really fun to [ __ ] with without it being too overwhelming too which i'd say goes for the game as a whole it's surprisingly deep for what it is while also at the same time being a pretty standard jrpg it maximizes its spaces a lot not burning through locales characters and areas like they don't mean nothing while still having plenty to potentially burn through in the first place and while you can customize your bot boys and get really in depth with it you also don't get swamped with parts and overly complicated stat screens i just really like its general structure being that it's based and based like an anime so every hour or so is like a new episode one minute you're solving a mystery at school and the next you're ghost hunting in the mountains it's really cute what does sadly drag the whole thing down quite significantly even is as always the random encounters that can be very unwelcome given that battles can range anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 [ __ ] minutes or more due to the front mission limbs and the fact that parts can permanently break when you lose a fight meaning that you can essentially [ __ ] yourself over ending up at a spot where winning becomes next to impossible which is a bit rough and not really fun at all shame because it has many cool systems as i've said but i'm not sure this really holds up that well aside from playing it in its intended setting i.e in the back of a car when you're 9. we'll say though that it is a great showcase of how the gba's tech really worked in rpg's favor in general not just to help along the grind but also because jrpgs are very big games always lots of characters characters models or sprites and animations to work through not to mention all of the headwork needed to balance the math in the background so you can see how now with modern jrpgs they either don't even try to beat aaa or do and mostly fail ending up unfinished or chopped up into bits as a result of all of you but buckley on a system such as the gba where tile sets is tiny and text boxes are the norm it's a [ __ ] a whole lot easier to squeeze out a ton of content to make a small looking game that still feels big all these tiny little interiors and one-off vignettes and events and tons of different battle animations and characters and things that you'd otherwise never see in what is essentially a licensed jrpg like it is by no means an expensive game but it sure as [ __ ] doesn't look cheap or low effort in any capacity you know what i mean so hey thanks gba a security system designed to look like a doghouse it will alert you of any intruders in the house looks like you can jack in here and of course there's also the jacktastic battle network games which so far aren't the only megan mans i have any experience with but pretty good ones they are unlike metabots this is the rare type of jrpg that knows it's on a handheld and thus never wastes a minute keeping [ __ ] brief and speedy never deadlocking you into hour-long commitments and dialogue sequences while still having plenty of personality to boot though a lot of these are cool and neat i feel like if there's one game people think of when you say gba rpg or even just gba in general it's probably isaac got nut yeah so this game is a [ __ ] classic camelot leading up to this was already making pretty well regarded jrpgs for consoles nobody owned and therefore nobody bought but if you look at their earlier titles you can kind of begin to see how they were already on this tip the art the text the music the speedy quick gameplay golden sun defo feels like an amalgamation of what they have been doing ambitious as [ __ ] too as pre-rendered graphics but not of the stanky kind at all actually going for a more stylized chunky super deformed look mixing it with simple but really cute pixel art and clever use of used transparencies and gradients to make lighting and during combat there's even goddamn particle effects which i i don't even know what type of black magic they had to draw from to pull that off the soundtrack by moytoy sakuraba also pushes the sound chip to its limits producing big massive sounding prog that blast through any and all downsides that the speaker may have had and it keeps its menus and systems pretty simple and easy to read because of the small screen which makes the game pretty smooth and [ __ ] even goddamn spanned two whole cartridges technically as they just had so much that they wanted to do and did sadly the pacing is a bit off as a result certainly on the proverbial disc too but you got variety in towns dungeons oh my god it's just like dark soul and other areas for days and the map that while pretty easy to get lost in is also very fun to simply explore not to mention that much like a dragon quest game each little town tells its own little story with its own little gimmicks in terms of gameplay via its cool magic system that also gives way to puzzles and adventure gaming [ __ ] and yeah it is just really really goddamn [ __ ] good built to work with the gba's limitations whilst also shattering them quite literally as it poured out to multiple cartridges i could honestly talk about this game for hours and maybe one day i will however would you believe it that while this is camelot's best game it is not certainly on the gba their most interesting one as a yeah they also did this [Music] uh [Music] is me [ __ ] so for some reason despite being exclusively known for jrpgs nintendo contracted camelot to make the mario tennis games like all of them too except for the virtual boy one that was a gun pay you koi joins which means that they could be responsible for the existence of waluigi which then also means that golden sun is retroactively garbage as waluigi isn't in it as a cameo come time come game boy they come blasted a cometastic come story on in there though cause secretly they can't not come jrpg and shit's come loud a2 mainly cause it is just golden sun but with tennis yeah because like i mean golden sun be like and mario tennis be like same game you got some childs at a really fun and comfy looking tennis academy anyway having a good time admiring the warp pipes and having a dance to the music when suddenly it is revealed that there is a masked mystery person going about doing masked mystery person things and so you have to work your way through their colorful cast of characters and beat them all at tennessee to become the best there ever denneth and not gonna lie i was not expecting the story to actually be anything but it's basically a tennis anime all the tropes are here the hot heads the girly girls the dynamic duos and the mystery peoples and the goofy but kind adults it's all there for a jrpg as well that takes place in one town it's default a very cool one too there's a lot more going on than what it really needed and just indulges in fun explorable buildings and heaps of npcs to chat to no less lore to gain by way of mario pictures in the headmaster's office and the history of this academy that you can peel away at through awards and trophies and [ __ ] i had like a whole 30 minutes of chat and story in and [ __ ] around before i even came close to swinging a racket though when i did [ __ ] sure [ __ ] owned just as well [Music] it's pretty simple because jrpg but it does a lot with what it has purely through how it handles as it has a type of floatiness to the movement with a bit of momentum to it and grind that makes lining oneself up for ball hits just that smidge not fully in controlly enough to make even the minorist of ball flicks feel rewarding naturally timing stuff i.e hitting a button when ball is almost inherently satisfying but it's when combined with the above and pretty decent sound effects that makes things gucci then there's also rpg stats of the ass and big wins with every round and they really just nailed the sensation of climbing the ranks no less through how your exploits make the initially happy go [ __ ] academy folks become saltier and saltier as time goes on not that there's any epic drama that results from all of this the game keeps things lighthearted and i do think that there's some untapped potential here cause well the way that shit's set up makes the battles in general more personable you ain't fighting against throwaway enemies over and over you're fighting against characters with portraits and personalities and stories and motivations besides just the idea of a tennis rpg is really cool i have a bit of a fetish for games that ditch combat in favor of other cool stuff as that instantly opens up the door to not only gameplay innovations but also tons of stories you otherwise couldn't really tell quite as well many publishers obviously wouldn't take that risk sas violence is simply what sells most and probably always will but on the gba with low ass production costs and the golden sun engine and assets that they could reuse this becomes more justifiable so hey again thanks gba as mario tennis's is as cute as is as fun and as experimental as it is expertly crafted though more could have definitely been done with this type of story idea and i'm very sad that far as i know camelot never really got to they made more tennis and golf games sure but those remained largely storyless there's the indie game golf story which might do what i'm looking for but i haven't played it yet and as far as other cool castle games go the gba also has shining soul which is based on a long-running camelot series only this one is not made by them but instead by [ __ ] grasshopper spearheaded by akira ueda aka the contact man aka mr x love the lick and [ __ ] masafumi takara on the ost [Music] also check this [ __ ] presentation [Applause] [Music] it really looks a lot like contact too it's definitely more of a grasshopper game because like the text sounds and just the general casual vibe being really strange and different from what a game that looks like this would normally have though it plays like quite a standard action rpg slice sword kill slime get point it is what it is but it is pretty fun you can like get hit while you're in menus it's just like two anyway i compared mario tennis power tour tour anime and that's really because it's basically one giant tournament arc it has the epic team ups and rivalries people all along the sidelines discussing [ __ ] little mysteries and drama [ __ ] talks around and in between the matches and you know what's also almost always like one giant tournament arc even when it's not literally one clever segway question mark dragon ball z that's a series that also has a ton of rpgs in it some very particularly good ones on the gb of a y'all know it i know it goku know it it's legacy of goku two and legacy of goku won the latter being quite a good example of gba's skunkitude as the whole game could essentially be described as combat's kind of shitty because attack ranges are iffy and walk speech is stiffy and the ai is dumb as [ __ ] and everyone sort of walks about and stun locks each other and it's all just wee one-off punches as well like this does not capture the intensity of the show at all but it does lay down a chill vibe and also some really solid foundations top down action exploration of dragon balls adorable world a fair bit of hangout ability just chilling with the cast cool little rpg stats that don't just involve combat but also [ __ ] aroundy bits like the first level that you gain you gain from collecting porn and there are some cute side quests if this game would have been better combat and pacing wise and was less grindy easily coulda woulda and had done been something really great bye goku and luckily legacy goku 2 was i mean don't get me wrong [Applause] [Music] i do like how skunky the first game was but right away this just looks and feels so much better the ui design isn't as babby's first text box anymore there's no weird perspective [ __ ] like whatever the [ __ ] this [ __ ] is and it has more of a legit presentation with music scoring and nice pixel arty bits rather than crusty ass screen shots of the show and hey it even plays pretty well as less dumpy animations walk speeds is boosted considerably the sound effects for moves are good like key blasts actually connect now and you don't have a range as stubby as your tiny little chippy hands would imply as basic attacks have a slight lunging property to them now and of course it also just has much more exploration [Music] right away you get to dick around in goku's little house and be like whoa goku has an alarm clock you got this whole little mote 7 world map with tons of places to go optional or otherwise and entire cities and [ __ ] with bunch of enterable buildings and folks to talk to it's like such a whole game ass game now and exactly the type of stuff that i want out of a dragon ball z rpg honestly like in one you awkwardly fight raditz yelling help piccolo help he just sort of like does brain dead pathfinding and here you get with the whole gang and their scripted events there's real last cut scenes real ass storytelling real less atmosphere and real ass gameplay and all that from what was more or less a bargain bin shovelware studio [ __ ] webfoot technologies is and was and are as their name and logo which suggests not exactly the coolest studio making pinball games and mlp games and hello kitty games and fans and nancy tea party time so the fact that they were able to squeeze out a game this good is really quite something and of course they followed it up later that same year with the even better dragon ball z taikatsu upon its release dragon ball z taikatsu was met with generally unfavorable reviews from critics and you know what i really wonder why cause dang online this is great just look at it it's beautiful it is dare i say peak gba we got the pre-renders that don't scale or compress well or belong together because i think they were supposed to be used for a 3d game that never got made we got the skunkiest sound effects [Music] like what and somehow it's running in the legacy goku engine as i guess that's just what they had and i doubt they had much time or money to make this but it certainly explains why it is the stiffiest jankiest garboist feeling fighter this side of battle arena so shinden or final boat granite to be fair it is on the gba which wasn't exactly a fighting game beast but then it also has tekken advance which is really got them good and feels and sounds great i think just making a fighting game in an rpg engine is simply a case of ramming a round peg into a square hole as said square hole proved the inverse with tobal's rpg mode in a fighter's engine just as well still a for a though as i'm glad that it exists either way i feel like this is a pretty good place to wrap up our rpg segment as i think now might be a good time to put some focus on that there sound chip [Music] bruh whoa look at this it's a tape many tapes of positive yellow that one album i did that y'all like so much mainly because it's pretty good i like it but yeah me and the homie hazel and her label pop spirit teamed up to drop spirit there's like 100 or so of them right now you can buy them with money they're yellow they're positive there's a car whoa look look at it go animated by nail gun it was good it's all pretty great really positive yellow dx with four bonus tracks buy it now on the pop spirit band cam boom he's finally back to suck your dick crash your car and then steal yo [ __ ] donkey kong is here [ __ ] it's time to admit it you wanna [ __ ] funky get him hard and then nuttin that monkey okay [Music] yeah so donk has had some pretty iconic tunes for real for real this is one of them then there's also the station as [ __ ] soundtrack for the country series and of course the gba game all the atmosphere the lush sounds the tension [ __ ] destroyed by a harsh midi pan flute in a similar vein there's the rayman 1 music which replaces most of the really well picked smooth nice sounding instruments with also the skunkiest harshest flute sound however while these examples exist due to the devs either not knowing how to work with the quirks and limitations of the sound chip or simply didn't have the time to figure things out these exact limitations also made for some really interesting sounding stuff for example check out this barbie game bro believe it or not aphex twin did not compose this and who did wasn't credited they did credit the five-year-old who qa tested this though so that's cool but i couldn't really find out much else online either which sucks says i want to know how this happened if i had to hazard a guess i guess i guess they probably just didn't give much of a [ __ ] and simply let the composer do whatever which normally results in lazy sample pack usage or very standard template melodies but they clearly got creative with it to the benefit of me who likes this very much the whole game feels like a dream this song plays during the menus gameplay the credits it's just there [Music] meanwhile the title screen with its freakishly realistic horse contrasted to the fast-moving clouds skunk trees and music that's all [Music] is also quite something this game's music got some real clever compression usage with the atmospheric hazes in the background barely being identifiable as any instrument just adding a nice texture all the bells and round sign waves cut through the haze at their peak echoing out in the malaise of compression as they fade [Music] everything comes together to sound like something that has reverb on it and is really clear and roomy but is in actuality just a bunch of noisy high-pitched sounds a lot of great texture going on here for real [Music] [Applause] [Music] something similar was also done for silent hill play novel where an equally uncredited composer used different bell chimes but spaced out to [ __ ] letting their cold compressed crunchiness bellow out through the town with its slowly breathing pulsating fog [Music] layers but if you simply want an example of the sound chip being used to its fullest by big pros peep this [ __ ] [Music] using samples and midi sparingly that's allowing for slightly less crust and vocal sung and high pitch with simple little sound canvas plucks thus also vibing very well with the speaker's output it's [ __ ] genius as is this game overall really wario land 4 owns it as style for days cut scenes of plenty and gameplay that's super satisfying with everything being so weighty and thick and collectible as being shiny and fun together but yeah sound chip a lot of music made for it including wario land 4 uses this wheel old thing that i just mentioned called the roland sound canvas a machine that has a library a very punchy no frills almost sort of basic but nonetheless recognizable set of instruments it sounds like video games and the prime reason for that is that because of its simple soundiness it's very good for heavily compressed audio as video games certainly on the gba would often have due to bitrates anything more complex would go on to sound too muddy or shitty when overly bitted but the rsc survives that transition gracefully i mean just listen to the song you've been hearing how nice these basic [ __ ] guitar plucks sound when compressed as [ __ ] that is some good texture right there it's used very heavily anyway in anything from smash bros melee twilight princess yoshi island to live alive phoenix wright and [ __ ] sonico6 even seeing frequent use to this very day a few notables for the gba though would include mario kart and its fat bass lapse [Music] advance wars and it's donkey timpani's golden sun and it's crazy proxims and of course pokemon gen 3. [Music] people sometimes make fun of the rubenstaff music for being too horny but those blasty powerful cheerful little trumpets were also chosen to accommodate the speaker meanwhile the bass and percussion contain a lot of timpani 2 which not only fits with the epic orchestrated soundscapes but is also a lower frequency instrument that's still audible when heavily compressed and rung through a [ __ ] tin can and the same goes for the 8-bit dude bass and marching drums and hi-hats made from white noise and waves gen by the chiptune chip besides it's a unique soundscape that gives the games their own identity even without the limitations [Music] pikachu i swear if it wasn't for the 8-bit bass and not actually using any drum break samples i would have picked this as a ps1 game song as aside from the snare and the hoover synth pad none of this is samples and so those samples like the hoover pad could sound super clear and airy and not muddy at all as the rest of the little bleeps and twinkles and hi-hats are generated by the chiptune chip [Music] it's super clever sounds great legit not even by gba compression standards and also fits very well with battle network as it's all about techno pc [ __ ] and you know when [ __ ] goes techno pc [ __ ] you gotta have them bleeps even sonic battles migrate inducing ass knew that in any case many of these tracks were made with compression in mind or simply benefited from it either way as even the shitty donk midi music has its charms about it not gonna lie however as i was writing this i've been seeing a lot of restoration thingies going around the aka folks doing more or less what i just did with the canvas but much better and deeper for various snes and gpa games and it's super neat as you get a sort of view of how these songs would have sounded to the composers while making them before being midi then sampled the sound chip and you can also get a better understanding of how texture works and what kind of instruments sound backs and sample cds people would use back then i did sadly also see some fun policing country going on about it too to which i must say don't gatekeep ain't done wrong about folks having fun with some sound sources and learning about their favorite games especially when your whole work depends on the work of others that maybe don't go after the kids with the roland sound sample cds jesus because that's a cop move and don't be a cop but yeah it's cool to see sounds like warped by hardware and then artists using that to make those sounds sound cooler bat sound chips and speakers records and tapes various types of recording equipment it can all be vibes and i do like vibes vibes are not cop [ __ ] [Music] forever stranded always impressed that's right [ __ ] secret retrospective episode [ __ ] you as konami's output on the gba was actually pretty great there's the excellent silent hill play novel the cool castlevanias [ __ ] tony yu-gi-ohs and the amazingly fun konami crazy racers konami man though didn't just send out a letter to the racers but also to hideo and his gulag goon gang emphasis on the latter as well bdo often gets all the credit for boktai he really only produced it as it was actually designed directed and written by ikuya nakamura as far as i can tell dude got his start assigning one controller rumble in ngs1 and doing 3d modeling and design but soon went on to take up even more roles during ghost babel and mgs2's development doing many things on many mental gears all the way up to survive and wholesale directing the surprisingly really fun metal gear touch so a bit of a jack of all trades pretty much doing everything from directing and writing to doing sprite work 3d modeling and even concept art and so much like the other hideo jack underlings such as shinta nojiri and noriaki okumura nakamura too got to have his own pet project overseen by kojima and sort of the studio but really that could mean as much as that he simply walked into the room a few times smiled and gave a thumbs up in this case though i think it extends to coming up with the base idea for the game's main gimmick which is the sun [Applause] not that we'll be seeing that here as i'm emulating and it's currently not summer and also a pandemic so what we're left with is a pretty neat little stealth game the idea was that vampires and [ __ ] don't like the sun and so you'd have to like play in the sun to charge your gun with sun to take him down or either get shaded and knighted on and sneak around as you can tell from my footage i deffo got knighted on a bit and it's really neat to see that reflected in the game seeing it actually spitting the legit time until sunrise right back at me and giving me a little bit of [ __ ] for it as there was loads i couldn't do but of course you can change the time and so i did and hey now i can charge my code it's really neat though the whole like mode of gameplay sort of changes depending on when you play it's more shooty during the day and easier as an effect but more low-key quiet and tense as nice two games in one day times has difficulties it's super unique you can also store sunlight either by using it conservatively or dumping it into stations you can plan out your night sessions and there's even cool little mgs like wall leads and [ __ ] and the types of enemies differ very wildly depending on the time of day too it's defoe taken both styles into consideration more than i figured it would either way though in both cases it's a weirdly simplistic sort of game as a shooty game you get different gun frames i.e shot types but you're still just mostly running gunning or stunning dudes and dashing past them and as a stealth game it uses snake man's guard mans on the level of like say about metal gear 2 rather basic patterns clearly defined hiding spot square geometry it's a bit slow maybe even too slow at times but the presentation definitely makes it work regardless as it has really great sneaky snooping around music and rather satisfying sound effects and animations even if the navigation can feel a bit awkward at times due to the gba as [ __ ] isometric perspective [Music] you play as jango the son of a cool vampire hunter guy who was also a cool vampire hunter guy tasked with going into vampire dungeon castle mansions to hunt vampires and retrieve goodies and vampires it has a lot of cool lore and ideas and terms that i'm sure get explored more bigly over the course of the series but here it really just boils down to navigate stealth slash shoot maze and drag back the coffin to the circle place outside it's a really fun game loop that gives the simple bass mechanics a lot more depth as a coffin get mad and will drag itself back if you leave it behind for too long and b it makes you see the level you just blasted on through in a wholly different sunlight certain enemy patterns easy to deal with when moving forward might very much come back to bite you in the ass on your tread back not to mention that you can't exactly move very fast while dragging it's a really basic concept again but similar to metal gear games i guess that simplicity gets used in many different situations and exhausted as much as it can be i mean while it lacks mgs's grand set pieces it instead focuses on scope big maze-like dungeons underground with tactically placed recharge points aka cracks where the sun bleeds through provided that you're catching any at all and metroidvania asked progressions with keys and stuff kinda like if the mgs vr missions were one big continuous gauntlet of things affected by all of the many variables listed above and being more interconnected than really any of the guard mandy mgs games due to the coffin backtracks it is generally a really cool game that while clearly being made by metal gear veterans isn't quite as uh you know tainted by the many kojima isn'ts and don't get me wrong i loves me some kojima-isms and this game does have whole voice acting and [ __ ] in a place not too far from here and now but it's never sleazy or icky nor does it have huge story aspirations and remains just a very gba ass game simple arcady addictive makes great use of it being a handheld and somehow doesn't even look or sound too skunky so good job gulags solar nut now there's a lot to be said about kojima's influence on zone of the enders one or two but i'll do that when i'll eventually get back to those games again for now though it's good to know that konami man also requested a rare unknown third zoe game made for the gba and with this one kojima doesn't even have a producing rule no it don't even have the potential actual brains behind the zoe series noriaki okamura behind it as its development was outsourced primarily to winky soft i'm gonna be real that name does not inspire confidence so they've made a lot of those robot wars games so it can't be too bad right i mean just looking at zone in the end there's the fist of mars god what a title alone it certainly looks pretty strong as a cool green ui a pounding techno soundtrack really cool robo animations and hours of vn cutscenes for days with some really nice cg pre-renders that give off some powerful front mission 3 vibes and gameplay of the super robot wars variety i think that's what wikipedia says it has though i wouldn't really know i don't think i can understate how much this game's story presentation [ __ ] it's like a mix between again front mission 3 and police knots chill bits school frames nice text boxes very nicely but slowly paced talking and cool establishing shots and sound effects all coinciding to make these vn scenes flourish with cinematic flair inside of your head and they tell a story not of leo or egyptian stuff but instead of some kid called cage midwell a cleaner bust boy [ __ ] on a spaceship that suddenly explodes as he escapes in a mech with some mystery chick and then crazy international conflict starts happening with them in the middle of all of it and [ __ ] [ __ ] let me tell ya it has some gbass writing to go along with all of that bucktai had it too mario tennis had it final fantasy tactics advance has it the legacy of goku games do too it's some [ __ ] i've only hinted at prior up until now but it's good to point out here now given that this has very much the aesthetics of its slower paced peers but still cuts through the [ __ ] to not waste your time for handheld purposes information is conveyed very quickly like hey what's going on ellipses oh you can't remember can you yeah okay it conveys the jrpg information but much faster than most jrpgs would it can feel sort of clunky for sure but it has some purpose to it too as to keep up an action game like pace giving it the comfy benefits of police knots without any of the super waffly kojima downsides it's the other sides of bok tai's coin in that sense i suppose that do considerably lower the stakes best friend is like lol i'm your best friend and then two minutes later he dies and then five minutes later he's back and it's all too quick to really feel anything for anything but it does not work neither in that dumb action game anime plot way which is mostly what it is too boasting a big old colorful cast of comic reliefs cockies and dum-dums where events might not be as weighty but they are very plenty it's just fun really good exciting fun which i'll say about the gameplay just as well battle system is standard tic tac spare in many senses if it wasn't for the interactive attacks where you need to aim or dodge stats it sort of simplifies tactics combat in the same way that the ps2 game simplified action combat those games were very basic but looked cool and felt good and also had a lot else going on and so it worked out here it lacks a lot of the typical tactical tropicals there's no [ __ ] with sides and complicated turns and speed stats no elements no rock papers or scissors and not a whole lot of number crunching going on either nor jobs it's just cool robots with guns and [ __ ] but because of the fast little mini game that is each attack and the general fast-pacedness of the game in general generally it also all checks out as the ability to aim good adds a nice sensation of skill and makes things more engaging and hands-on plus the fact that you're in charge of when you hit and miss negates the randomness that can often make these types of games feel very unfair and it has a nice cursor feel with physics and a bit of heft while also being blazingly quick much like how the zoe mex was when action game i'd be we're missing out on dope stuff though if i didn't also mention how legit excellent the soundtrack is uses the general sparse yet texture rich punchiness of jungle and breakbeat to which advantage to make well jungle and break me drum breaks is often muddy to begin with so the little snippets of those sound great when sampled up through the sound chip and alongside it we got buckets of 8-bit percussion for the rattling hi-hats cutting above the mix and the melodies are all jazzy and rosy and paddy so those also play very nicely with the compression and the hazing to know if the deep basses will come through on the speaker but my emulating ass sure should appreciate those either way it does a great job of maximizing the action tension and glorifying its cool green menus while at the same time it does what many gba games do and lets those warm fuzzy strings swell amplifying the chill friend homie pre-render vibes thus surrounding this comfy little game off perfectly it is so good that imma just let it [Music] so this is a thing that happened gta on the gba or rather it is its own game a mostly okay one even runs at like 12 fps but the graphics is nice the gameplay of the 2d gta has translated pretty well though i mean you know those games weren't always the greatest certainly on a combat front and that's all here too but the name logo and general stylistic choices made do make it look like a port in screenshots and articles which was surprisingly very common on the gba it had many ports on there especially snes games which i would play this way it's not like i'm all enough to have grown up with one of those things so burr luigi go [Music] but on the other hand most console and pc games at the time simply couldn't be ported and as dong showed even old games could be tricky as even more powerful hardware is still different hardware so i can get why many ports that weren't really ports existed it's just that one also really is a question the choice to port medal of honor underground to the gba because uh that is some crust right there some real stank it looks like oatmeal the music is what's trying to do something but it ain't doing it and staggeringly it's even slightly less playable than gta advance was so good job ea seeing full 3d games on the gba was always pretty awful wasn't it because they barely look good asterix and obelix manages it sure but that's far too euro for my majority anglo-ass audience to handle that is also uncle derek's territory but for something so seemingly ambitious and tricky to do 3d was surprisingly common among the bottom barrel bargain bin port type games however what wasn't very common were the few games with straight up fmvs as stated prior gba games rely a lot on cd pre-renders and static text boxes which ain't that far off from fmv games per se but obviously these cartridges weren't meant to hold [ __ ] like that they were meant to hold pokemon naraya don't uh don't tell nintendo i own this it's uh it's illegal contraband [ __ ] but big money square managed it with chain of memories the legacy of goku games have the skunkiest version of the dragon ball z intro silent hill play novel has what looks to be the opening fmv wholly intact only for it to then quite hilariously give up after five seconds but you know it's cool fmv was possible which i guess ain't too surprising given that those gba video things existed but it's still something you rarely ever saw and for good reason and so of course we had to port a game that's entirely made up out of highly detailed hand-drawn fmv animation look at it oh my god look at it it looks great yeah broken sword the shadow of the temple ours is pretty much entirely crust not as crushed as metal of honor was but definitely quite high on crust as the crust hair even extends to the box art which is really the only reason why i brought it up see while the gba has no shortage of great box arts it being a shabby port and licensed game dump garbo station also meant that we saw some dandy ass [ __ ] like super duper sumos disney's extreme skate adventure board game classics sims bust a nut turf the quidditch snitch and of course the one you've all been waiting for carnage rally yeah that's right we got the face we got the blurry car we got the carnage and we got the yo the game actually just looks like this yeah this whole time the art was just an accurate depiction of what you were buying and actually pretty fun top down razor nothing special unassuming pure adult baby with dreadlocks which is probably a good enough place to end things i think cause when even carnage is honestly pretty good i think we can all agree that the gba in general was honestly pretty good yes we got the skunk we got the crust then we got a whole bunch of mysterious games but god damn it if that wasn't ever part of its charm neither not to mention all of the bonafide classics that i played for this i ran through a good 51 games for this [ __ ] and had many much fun doing just that sure maybe the ds would be better sure maybe the og is more iconic but [ __ ] it man neither of those have shark tail so i rest my case and pressed my gba although uh nintendo did do this to my ears so [ __ ] the gba

Channel: ThorHighHeels

Views: 129,133

Rating: 4.9040351 out of 5

Keywords: Game Review, ThorHighHeels, Thor High Heels, So I've Been Playing, So ive been playing, review, retrospective, hidden gem

Id: jpOiuJkJTz8

Length: 71min 39sec (4299 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/M8753]

I like how he talks about the music. I love that old video game music sound and it's cool to learn more about it.

[u/heretobotheryou]

An hour+ thorhighheels video is such a treat, his videos are very often interesting, well researched and show off some of the weirder games out there. Would never have given Moon Remix RPG a fair shake if not for his video on it and it was one the best games I played last year!

[u/Tarpaulinator]

This is my first Thorhigheels video.

Interesting topic but I really hate the way he talks. His cadence is all over the place, then he shouts, then he whispers.

Does he talk like this in his other vids?

[u/[deleted]]

I haven't finished the video yet, but it made me realize that -probably unpopular opinion- oh boy do I miss when handhelds had their own weird versions of bigger games or exclusive titles created specifically for them. I appreciate the Switch for what it's trying to accomplish, but at the end of the day, I end up playing its exclusives and an indie game/visual novel here and there instead of playing a poor man's version of a game that I already or could own on PC/console.