Super Meat Boy Forever - A Rotten Sequel

Indie Games I think it's safe to say that everyone loves them regardless of what genre they could be platformer RPG metroidvania horror it really doesn't matter honestly they're a super important part of the gaming industry as a whole and are many people's passion projects they pour a ton of time and effort into so it goes without saying that they can either succeed heavily and carry a generation or fall flat on their faces as a matter of fact some of my favorite games of all timer Indie Games The Binding of Isaac repentance cuphead I had in time though there's one game that's always stuck out to me and that game is Super Meat Boy dude this [ __ ] rocks with its tight controls clever level design and wide array of play styles with different unlockable characters and levels Super Meat Boy took over the indie game scene in the early 2010s when indie games were just starting to pick up steam hell it's got Steve from Minecraft so that's how you know it's a pretty big deal for Indie Games even though Minecraft's not an indie game it doesn't matter it doesn't matter so it would only make sense to make a sequel to such a beloved game and a big piece of History right right right [Music] first let's talk about what exactly is Super Meat Boy well Super Meat Boy is a game made by Edmund McMillan and Tommy rafinas it started off as a small prototype Flash game made for Newgrounds just titled Meat Boy and focused around the same exact premise as Super Meat Boy hard platforming to save your girlfriend bandage girl from the evil Dr fetus this would spawn the basic idea of what Edmund and Tommy would want to do for an upcoming project and to No Surprise it was a huge hit though how exactly does the Prototype hold up now well it certainly holds up as a prototype that's for sure it's definitely very janky compared to what would come but it was still serviceable and did its job with making sure you understand what kind of game they want to make especially with early flash yeesh after the success of the Prototype Nintendo and Xbox both requested a game for their upcoming Services we wear an Xbox Live arcade which was a huge step for them thus team meet was born with Edmund as the artist Nella designer and Tommy as the programmer for their upcoming project Super Meat Boy despite living on separate sides of the US they managed to actually make the game together and have their families play test it the game started development in 2009 and eventually released on October 20th 2010 for the Xbox Live arcade and later PC even though Nintendo requested the game from Edmund for their weeware software it actually never came out and this was due to the fact that the Wii could not handle this game the file size was way too big it actually went beyond their expectations with how much content they were adding it was pretty cool however despite releasing on the Xbox Live arcade at first Xbox had no hope in this game at all and by Xbox I mean Microsoft though despite their low expectations with the lack of advertising it was a massive hit selling over 1 million copies by 2012 a huge milestone for an indie game and it's no surprise that people loved it the dark and Mindless in-game art style paired with a smooth and tight controls benefits the game heavily in setting out as one of the best Platformers ever made at least in my opinion even though the controls are super simple having a run and jump button and nothing else the game does nothing but their idea after idea ear with new level mechanics being introduced in every single World paired with its hard difficulty for YouTubers to scream their heads off at for that sweet sweet Revenue I think if it was released today you would hear game journalists call it the Dark Souls of Platformers because game journalists only think that Dark Souls is hard no other game is hard apparently it's safe to say that overall Super Meat Boy was a huge success and that would mean people would want to see more of this fleshy friend I mean come on it's me boy wait where'd he go yeah so even though Meat Boy was really successful team meet would go on to be silent for some time up to four years in fact with Edmund McMillan shifting his Focus onto his new projects The Binding of his rebirth and Eugenics a game you tied in with Team meet at the time actually fun fact if you watch the original mugenics trailer you can see he censored out the team meet logo that's kind of funny both Edmund and Tommy were pretty dead set on the idea that meat boy should remain a one-off title considering how the main game is pretty complete itself and how it doesn't really need more despite that though people are practically begging to see something new from teammate especially when it came to a potential Meat Boy Sequel and we were left with nothing but silence just as all hope was starting to lose steam team meet came forward and said that Super Meat Boy 2 is a possibility with Super Meat Boy forever finally being mentioned as a new adventure with Meat Boy however forever was meant to be a game designed for mobile with it being an auto scroller using tap controls and having an online leaderboard system with Edmund stating a goal with Super Meat Boy forever is to design a new full-length platformer or touch devices from the ground up to avoid attacking bad controls on an existing design we want something that embodies the original Meat Boy but is designed around a simple yet intuitive control scheme allowing for pinpoint accuracy and surprisingly deep controls without the use of multiple buttons slash analog sticks I think it's safe to say that we know how well this aged um we were also given screen the game would look like and appearing to have Edmond's kind of thick line style however seeming to retain the background style of the original Meat Boy okay kind of a weird style but I kind of get it it's clearly just the Prototype and plus it's a mobile game not necessarily a sequel it's definitely a spin-off I'm sure they're cooking up something for a true Meat Boy sequel while they work on a fun little spin-off that's great and hey it was set to release in 2015 that's so soon so uh where's the game two years pass after the initial targeted release of Super Meat Boy forever and we've heard nothing of it only getting ports of the first game to the newest consoles Within an interesting choice or some reason they changed all of the music from the original in 2015 with new tracks and oh my God they sound 10 times worse I mean just listen to the huge downgrade here in some of these themes [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] ly this was due to Denny Baranowski the legendary composer that did the music for the original Meat Boy did not want to pay for the game's music license with every port so the music was done by ridiculon the composers of The Binding of Isaac rebirth's music we'll get back to them anyways besides these ports we got nothing regarding the sequel that was until August 30th 2017 when we would finally get our announcement trailer for Super Meat Boy forever finally the spin-off we've been waiting for we can finally see what it what it but but wait this is announced as a sequel wait what yeah so it turned out the game was changed from a fun little spin-off on mobile to experiment with one button touch controls to the Super Meat Boy sequel we've all been waiting for and it looks off the game clearly had a different style and none of that old Edmund charm that the first game had both with the designs and the animation what gives well to everyone's surprised in the same year Edmund McMillan revealed that he had left team meet to shift his focus on The Binding of Isaac rebirth and future DLCs for the game leaving Tommy all alone on teammate to focus on Meat Boy content this wasn't exactly promising as Tommy was only the coder not exactly the level designer that was Edmund's job but the game seems to be coming out a year after the trailer release 2018 so we'd have to wait until then 2018 comes and the game is delayed again a trailer did come out that year though with mixed reception in the comments but also a release date of April 2019. well all right cool just one more year should do it hopefully they follow through and we're able to see what this game is finally like the game is delayed again until 2020 this time so what was going on why was the game getting delayed so much well as it turns out Edmonds playing from teammeet had a heavy toll on the game's development everything being scrapped from that point and built from the ground up on top of having a lot of animated cutscenes by 2019 everything felt complete however Tommy felt the game needed a dark World well that's great news the game is getting delayed for more content and by 2020 we finally got a release date December 23 2020 as an exclusive for epic games in the Nintendo switch it was really a shame to hear the game would be releasing on those two platforms only at the initial release especially on Epic Games however after all this agonizing time we can finally see how much this game has improved since its Rocky trailer [Music] oh no Superman boy forever is genuinely really really bad so much so that I'd go as far as calling it one of my least favorite games of all time there's just so much wrong with this game man is bizarre it feels like it wants to be like the original while also falling flat on its face while proceeding a dragon in the mud the game was about five hours long but those five hours were just agonizing you could say I'm over exaggerating yeah sure I could be for the views but I swear this game is just that bad so what exactly is wrong with the game well let's go over some of the main elements God help us all [Music] the story is about as simple as you can get with the Meat Boy game until it isn't just like the first one Meat Boy and bandage girl are minding their own business with their new child nugget when all of a sudden the evil Dr fetus is back to kidnap nugget as part of his plan for Revenge Dr fetus you cruel cruel man you can't kidnap a little baby child so it's up to Meat Boy and bandage girl to save her oh yeah and the game does the Side Story thing as the game goes on about this squirrel who hates Dr fetus for destroying the forest remember that one-off joke about the squirrel being said about all of his dead friends in the original you know the ending of chapter one imagine that but just stretched out for the entire game's story yep it's a very nothing addition to the story and it would remain the same without it what confuses me the most though is the game randomly becomes about time travel or something near the end with Meat Boy and Benadryl becoming old and Dr B's becoming a cosmic being okay they try to play it off as this really cool sequence and like oh my God this is a huge Galactic Monster but it is just nothing not to mention the fight for it is absolutely Dreadful but we'll get to that the original kept it simple with it just being about how nobody loved Dr fetus hence the reason why he stole Vantage girl to begin with he was jealous of Meat Boy and hated him because of that it is literally set in the intro they don't even need to explain the final boss either it's just Dr fetus he's just shooting rockets at Meat Boy realizing that he won't die and continues to try and kill him but the narrator at the end needs a quirky and cool reason to say that's awesome it's just so stupid don't get me wrong I'd be fine with this if the plans were elaborated but it is not explained the entire game it just sort of happens after the squirrel falls on a button it's just so stupid also a lot of the story cutscenes contain wacky baby humor look at this baby being silly isn't it great she's so silly oh my God she's just a little baby she has no idea what's going on look at her being so silly and nice it's so cute I have to buy merch of her now so yeah the story is just nothing it's not even worth getting into anymore so now let's get down to [Music] talking about music for this part but I do have to say that the sound effects for when you punch an enemy are very underwhelming just thought I'd point that out considering it's the main goddamn gimmick anyways the music is very Bland and repetitive and is not memorable at all the original Meat Boy prevented this by having tracks be a decent length and its entire score is unique enough to enjoy it and not get tired of it but with this soundtrack it just feels like you're on a Merry-Go-Round that doesn't stop and plays the same looping soundtrack over and over for example the song for the final world has this one part of the song that plays about five times in the span of a minute [Music] foreign [Music] I was really tempted to just mute the game but then I'd be missing out on the other tracks that appear curiosity so I just ended up not doing that and suffered for the entire game ridiculon is not bad at composing far from it actually they made some amazing tracks for The Binding of Isaac repentance but man what the hell happened here these just do not live up to the original soundtrack though I'd be lying if I said this is the worst aspect of the game so now let's move on to [Music] when I first saw the game's initial trailer I honestly did not mind the art style at all it seemed like it wanted to replicate Edmund's style even with the weird inconsistent Line work on many different enemies and obstacles but they clearly had a vision for this style so how does it hold up well it's very Bland and inconsistent don't get me wrong I'm not talking about the animations in the cutscenes because those are very well animated as they were done by all these people definitely talented artists hey they even got Paul tervort and Tammy Chang both very prominent animators and artists but the style really doesn't fit Meat Boy especially compared to the first one the best way I can describe the art style is a more sterilized and corporate version of it like look at all the backgrounds as pretty as they are they just do not fit the same game they should have just had one style and stuck with it alright that's all the side stuff out of the way so now we can finally get into the dreaded topic of so imagine you start up your first copy of Super Meat Boy super excited to see what you've been missing out on wanting to play a really fun and challenging platformer while also being fair you start the first level and it's the me column fight from the hell chapter you slog through it but you managed to do it only to find out the entire game is the meat Golem fight that's Super Meat Boy forever's gameplay this is probably the most shameful gameplay for a sequel to A platformer I've ever had the displeasure of playing and I'm not even kidding I absolutely hate this gameplay it is so precise and unsatisfying with its Mobility options that it left me frustrated for the wrong reasons so let me go over the gameplay and then dive into the different aspects of content the game has to offer as you know by now Super Meat Boy forever is an auto Runner mixed with the elements of the first Meat Boy game kind of use still have the ability to wall jump but instead of the ability to move you have two different attack options as you run to boost your movement the punch and the kick the punch is used to hit enemies or break obstacles and boosts you in the air slightly leaving more potential for level design the kick is basically the same thing except when you're in the air and use it you drop down super fast I will admit it's an interesting idea to give more moves to meat boy's disposal makes him feel more like he has control in what he's doing except for the fact he can't stop running yeah a huge flaw that plays into this is the auto Runner aspect I know I keep comparing this game to the first one but how can I not when this is labeled as a sequel in the original the freedom of the movement gave you time to process the level design and reactor stuff in a more free way however in this game you're constantly moving so there's no chance to breathe it's all a matter of memorizing what Punch or kick you're going to do and it's just so much more boring compared to actually learning the level design on top of that you could just spend tons of time on a section just because it takes so long to get a grip of what the level design for a certain section of a level is if this sounds weird there's a reason for that so basically in the entire game there's six worlds chipper Grove the clinic tetanusville the lab the other side and Ox dead beef and instead of having 20 levels like the first game this game has six levels per World pretty big downgrade right well there's apparently a big reason for this this game has procedurally generated levels what yeah so each level is much longer due to the fact that they're segmented into different parts this is best explained in the meat questions section on the Super Meat Boy website which by the way has some of the worst answers I've ever seen super challenging but fair my ass I solved some of these basic level designs through sheer guessing anyways one of them States each level consists of 100 carefully designed chunks that are placed together to create a level chunks are like little meepoy levels that are designed decorated and given a difficulty rating each time you beat a level an increase difficulty criteria is used to generate the harder version of that level also levels need to have a certain Cadence to them so they don't feel like just random stuff thrown at you we've worked on a system that allows us to give a criteria of difficulty and pacing that makes the levels randomly but still Within the confines of what we want the levels to be presented as so to put it short they made it more complicated than it needs to be for the sake of having a higher number because of each level being designed around this complicated ad system the game puts in checkpoints on each chunk you die on in my opinion this is a huge problem and really takes away from what made the first game so great the original game had short and sweet levels it was really challenging but also Fair however when you die at a level here you respawn at the checkpoint of the chunk that you loaded in but why would they even change such a simple formula well there's an easy answer for this the game had a tendency to brag about the fact it has thousands of levels meaning that there was clearly more care about quantity over quality not even to mention that some of the levels suck to begin with I spent way more time on certain chunks than I needed to causing me to get stuck and it's not like I could search for a walk through because everyone's playthrough is entirely different by the time I had figured out what to do I didn't even feel like I did the chunk correctly I genuinely had the idea that I solved it by accident not a good thing it just feels like with these procedurally generated levels the charm of the original isn't there because they're just striving for a big number the game gives you you a seed before you start the game to indicate yeah it's all random but I really hate that that works in games that are designed around being random Meat Boy the original was not a random game also I want to point out that they have a speedrunner timer in the settings in a procedurally generated Auto Runner just pathetic man what else is there to look at though well there's the warp zones as well just like the first game warp zones are portals that take you to a secret level in which you only have a limited amount of lives to do a special challenge to unlock I honestly never figured it out I found about two to three of the warp zones in the game and I can tell you right now they are nothing like the first and are not as good these warp zones are centered around referencing the first game and also other games mixing them together instead of being fun challenging levels some of them could be fun but that's only because they're all copying other games like punch out which I enjoy really heavily I didn't even unlock anything from doing these and I spent a bit of time trying to get the perfect run on the test of your meat challenge the first one had three different War zones usually two normal and one where you could get a special character from another game it was great and it offered new ways to approach the game with each character offering a new play style I'm a huge fan of how the game celebrated Indies at the time this time around though after I searched it up online you get skins that you unlock by doing very specific tasks mostly revolving around collecting pacifiers by the way pacifiers are the replacement for bandages and I just ended up ignoring them the entire game because my attention is focused on the fact that I'm constantly running and can't stop to think about how to get them so I ended up with zero of them yep it really sucks because with the warp zones in the original you did three challenging platforming levels to be rewarded with either bandages or a new character it was a great incentive to actually do them however locking the Skins behind both specific amount of pacifiers and the warp zones combined just ruins the point of their existence on top of that going from unique playstyles to just primarily skins due to the limiting gameplay is such a disappointment great two gameplay editions done perfectly fine on the first left feeling empty in the sequel surely they couldn't mess up the bosses though right [Music] oh good God they messed up the bosses the bosses are by far my least favorite part of the entire game they were just so Dreadful to play the first boss is a little Slugger clone except you constantly wall jump and punch out the weak points how exhilarating not hard at all the second boss is this weird brain slug creature that's less memorable than Chad just another boring boss fight that gets really repetitive after a few minutes then there's a security wall boss fight which is absolutely terrible the fight is enclosed in this tight space and you're just wall jumping from left to right to right to left while you smack slugs into a weak point so you can beat up the head it took me so long and the lasers of the fight reset rotation when you hit his weak points are him sometimes it's completely random and sometimes the Slugs just don't even reach the weak points it was awful and tedious but believe me the fights get worse the next fight is a doctor fetus fight which is just a barrage of clones and yeah it's not interesting I had no idea what to do for the first 10 minutes and I could just not figure it out I had to use a guide a lot in this playthrough by the way even though that the levels didn't have a playthrough because everything's random it was very tea yes you have to keep punching and jumping the waves of fetuses feed eye while grabbing the jump up power-up to punch the real Doctor fetus down eventually it's just so boring and lastly there's the final boss it's a gigantic Galactic Dr fetus and the entire fight is just a super linear and Precise Auto running level it is the worst boss fight in the game and it took me like an hour to do especially when the mechanics it uses are super janky it doesn't utilize the mechanics of the game builds up on just two mechanics that show up in the final world it doesn't even feel like a final boss and which is super frustrating for the wrong reasons these are all such terrible boss fights and do not work on the game's favor especially when most of the time you'll spend on this game is the last three bosses the first meat boy had you utilize what you knew from the world in its boss fights while it also introduced fun mechanics and challenged your platforming skills except the meat Golem granted they're not perfect boss fights but they get the job done in testing your skills especially the final boss the best way I can summarize the gameplay of Super Meat Boy forever is a sequel that tries to be something that I just can't be the auto running genre it just it really does not fit Super Meat Boy in the slightest a game that is based on precise movement and level design having a format that already worked in its favor in the past it tries to have the same feeling and preciseness but Falls hard by incorporating the auto running element it just does not mix well together I hope they managed to return to the original format if they ever end up doing their third game but based on their super dickish responses towards the two buttons criticism on the same meat question segment it feels very unlikely I think it's fair to say based on everything I've said about this game that it's so crushingly bad in my eyes this is far from what I expect the Meat Boy game to be as a matter of fact it's a soulless husk wearing a meat boy skin to Target a new audience and forget everything about what made the original so special though I think I should specify if you enjoy this game then good on you I'm glad you're able to enjoy something I just can't it's just such a shame to see this game go through hell and back just to come out starting as a mobile game for fun to becoming a sequel it feels like it was almost doomed from the start it sucks that it feels like we'll never see a true Meat Boy sequel again I suppose although that may not be true in 2017 Evan McMillan and Tyler glale teamed up to make a game called the end of night a difficult platformer with almost the same exact control as a Super Meat Boy so with different movement options to make it feel fresh it does a much better job at capturing the first Meat Boy spirit and Edmund has said that it's what he would have wanted the Meat Boy sequel to be like I highly recommend you go check it out if you're craving more meat boy it's a very fun game and even more difficult and do yourself a favor and just skip out on Super Meat Boy forever unless you like Auto Runners I guess so that's it I'm meatball and you just watch me get mad about a cube of meat let's hope this never happens again playing this game was actually agonizing foreign [Music]

Channel: Meatball

Views: 322,022

Keywords: supermeatboy, meatboy, edmund, games, gaming, indiegames, videogames, reviews, videogamereview

Id: krGoC6x8bsQ

Length: 24min 44sec (1484 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022