Sengoku Strider wrote:But I also don't think this criticism is relevant. Nobody expects a baseball historian to be a home run champ. A film historian doesn't need an Oscar-filled IMDB page. And thankfully military historians aren't required to conquer nearby countries to prove their bonafides. Because these aren't equivalent skill-sets. Being willing and able to dig through game credits, track subcontracted developers even when uncredited, go through archives, exhaustively trace the origins of individual gameplay elements and their coalescence into genres and subgenres, and produce disciplined professional work around this on a weekly basis for years is no small feat.
I most definitely expect competence from anyone who'd write about a videogame's quality, its playability. These aren't historic matches or battles viewed in hindsight, nor are they even passive viewing or listening experiences ala film / music. If it becomes apparent someone's threshold for engagement with a game -
or a kind of game - is especially low, their credibility will suffer in any enthusiast's eyes.
In fact, if their incompetence is severe enough, it may serve as a kind of endorsement - for example, "too hard!" has long since become personal code for "substantial," and "too short!" for "no filler."
Anyway, because your original response was to me - a reassurance that far from cocking an eyebrow at Parrish's credibility. I should trust in his journalistic bonafides - I decided to look up the video Bryan mentioned. As is Bryan's wont, I figured he had playfully exaggerated. "I'd better not be walking into an HG101-grade shitfest full of geriatric casual gamer cliches!" I half-jokingly thought.
(I walked into an HG101-grade shitfest full of geriatric casual gamer cliches)
Thus spake Jerry, AC Rygar is "agonisingly long" (~30mins a credit), "pretty mundane," full of "cheap hits," and designed to "gobble quarters" - a curious charge for a game that boots the player off after their third credit. Once you've cleared three stages, you've seen "all it has to offer." (I actually cracked a smile at that last one - it's so barefacedly dishonest, with even the most generous interpretation)
The NES verison, meanwhile, is "totally fair," we're informed to footage of Jerry eating spreadshot after spreadshot while damage-sponging through a miniboss to narrow victory. He later calls the AC game a "mindless melee arcade platformer," opposite the NES's "fully-fledged ARPG" - another improbably letter-perfect bit of farce I couldn't help smiling at, our intrepid reviewer's ever-growing lifebar soaking yet more damage, as he scampered up a rope to that next sweet dopamine hit.
NES Rygar, as played by Jerry, looks almost tactile in its damage sponging - I'm imagining mopping up a hot, saucy plate with a thick slice of crusty white bread after a satisfying meal at the local Italian place. I know this feeling from certain Compile STGs, with their signature "body ram" burst invincibility, but never did I suspect it was hiding in such plain sight here!
The AC's signature stomp n' bounce, a vital source of invincible frames - a novel element many journos infamously fail to grasp to this day, cf
Souls "PREPARE 2 DIE" hysteria - barely gets a look in, via a very late comment on its far less integral NES equivalent, which we are told is "weird," with no further comment. One faintly hopes the "weirdness" or
distinctiveness might be followed up on - perhaps with a note that the onslaughts it facilitates attack/evasion of, in the Arcade game, are AWOL here? But no.
Similarly nil mention goes to the AC's powerups and their massive expansion of the player's offensive suite. What kind of loser bothers surviving a whole agonising three minutes to see powerups? Indeed, no detail beyond "run/jump/hit" is ever given of the AC game, I'm guessing because Parrish played it for five minutes, looked up a FAQ to clock the number of stages, then called it quits. Instead, we're given a similarly oilslick-deep comparison to fellow landmark
Rastan, because the player sprites look similar, and that's about it.
He concludes with another generous serving of fried air - NES Rygar may have less stages, but they are "more interesting" (ie they don't kill Jerry when he blunders into things), and they reward players' "sense of spatial awareness." By this, he does not mean the level designs themselves do interesting things, spatially; rather, he is referring to the various logs and chasms you pass by early on, which you should return to once you are equipped to traverse them. Backtracking, an arcade action fan's delight.
We end on resounding applause for the NES game's evolving beyond its "shallow" arcade predecessor, offering instead a "large virtual world" for the player to explore at their leisure. "Leisure" and "Shallow" are key words here, as we're informed AC Rygar "sucks," and its appeal lay exclusively with narcissists desperate enough to weather its herculean (30min) runtime for local bragging rights. Jerry does not do bragging, maaan! Talk about toxic masculinity. He's all about exploring those "large virtual worlds," brah, while getting shot in the face repeatedly.
What about those who couldn't care less about braggadocio, who simply find this intense, no-frills mode of action game enjoyable in its own right? Daft question - they're not watching or reading Jerry's work, unless that rascal Bryan tricked them into it first. Up this page, I half-jokingly wondered
"Why would anyone trash AC Rygar?" I should've appended:
"...assuming they're not a generic nostalgia casual about as compatible with the notion of recreational challenge as a bucket of bacon grease is with a flamethrower?"
Hard scrolling action games are my passion (he typed with a granite murderface - you like what you like! and I'll be doing this stuff until I fall off my chair). I've not seen another sidescrolling action/platformer from the 80s or 90s, period, with Rygar's particular balance of intensity and generosity. It's an uncommonly fair game, not just by arcade but even console standards. I genuinely don't know what cheap hits he's talking about; there's certainly nothing here as monstrously unfair as the sixth stage of Castlevania, a game he appears to lionise.
When I detect cheapness in a title I dig,
I don't pretend it's not there. I single it out, warn others who might be considering a purchase, then seek to neutralise it as much as possible via practiced technique. See, again, Castlevania's sixth stage (and most definitely its second loop catacombs). Sometimes, it's just too much, and I have to concede the product is busted - caveat emptor. I always expect at least a
little; designing compellingly tough games for an enthusiast niche without ever overstepping the line isn't easy. Learning to survive Rygar required absolutely nil, I was genuinely surprised - particularly as a latecomer (2019).
It's also a marvelously finessed action game, again by standards far beyond its own time. The GIFs seen above make Jerry's footage look like shit, true, but they are no choice promo cuts, only utterly mundane snapshots of typical runs. AC Rygar, by its nature, demands you marshal the character's superhuman mobility merely to survive, in not just aggressive but frequently creative, multi-tasking ways. Mindless? Get your eyes examined.
It's natural that Jerry would have nothing to say about any of this - why would anyone devote more than the most banal, interchangeable observation to a game so cruel as to lock you away from its "virtual world," condemning you to thirty whole minutes of "mindless melee?"
"Maybe if you engaged your mind, you'd notice the melee isn't so mindless at all" is my usual thought, and typically I leave it at that. Don't track dogshit in to the house is my personal policy for this thread. What passes for valuable, debatable insight in casual spaces will barely tread water in niche, enthusiast ones, and what will typically ensue - as here - is a painstaking analysis of utter vacuous shit.
We also get an unsourced claim of FC Ninja Ryukenden being a separate project from its AC counterpart - not because they were in development simultaneously by differing divisions at Tecmo, as has been confirmed via staff interviews, but because Nintendo demanded this. No source is given, only a caveat from Parrish himself that he might be talking nonsense - it's just a theory he likes. Great history!
Similarly flubbed is the nature of FC/NES Rygar itself. "Almost an original sequel?" It has its own subtitle, in Japan. "Hachamecha Daishingeki / Legendary Great Charge." I'm unsure if Jerry's going for a Burgercentric "Didn't happen in Burgerland? DUN CARE LOL" approach - which would still suck balls, mind - or not.
I'm not sure anybody was writing about Wings of Madoola and its place in the legacy of Metroid, but once he picked up the gauntlet suddenly multiple retrospectives appeared. Or picking apart how much the Legend of Zelda was cobbling together elements of Tower of Druaga and Hydlide, or even acknowledging how huge and influential Druaga was in the first place.
You're leaving me freezing cold here. When were these writings published? Everything you just mentioned was boilerplate discourse on this forum, SelectButton and HG101's ca.2005, to name a few places. It makes me wonder if Jerry was trawling the same places around then, or maybe a bit later on, once the website went tits up?
As an aside, I noticed a lot of "for its time" and "better things to come" speech in that video - the usual nostalgist stink I get from these quarters. They don't discuss games as they are, in the present, but as they were, in the past - a past leading to the glorious future of even bigger, more EXPLAWESOME virtual worlds for Jerry and his lik to explore! Rockin'!
Zzzzzz.