It’s all a matter of timing. When Capcom’s pushed Third Strike into arcades in 1999, every member of its development team believed that this was the final, flawless evolution of Street Fighter. It was, as the name suggests, the third iteration of Street Fighter III. Many disgruntled consumers consider Capcom’s tradition of releasing three revisions to each of its prizefighters little more than a money-grabbing exercise. Perhaps for the shareholders this is true. But for the design team on the frontline it’s a stepladder towards perfection, each iteration amplifying the successes of the preceding game, while diminishing its shortfalls. And they know that three strikes and you’re out. Better make sure the final swing counts.
It’s all a matter of timing. While Third Strike was a game that refined all that had gone before, thanks to the state of the 2D fighting genre, few were really paying attention at the turn of the millennium. The previous decade had seen Capcom flood the market with Street Fighter-themed product, attempt after attempt to, at best, recapture the Street Fighter II heyday, at worst, work the series’ icons like wizened salesmen. By 1999 ennui had set in, not only amongst the general gaming public, but also within the core fighting fan base. Indeed, following Third Strike’s release, it would be nearly a decade before we saw another mainline entry to the series.
So while Third Strike’s team believed they had perfected the 2D fighter with its game, what should have landed as a sucker-punch provided just a glancing blow. Critics awarded the game lacklustre praise. Sales of the subsequent Dreamcast release were modest.
Nevertheless, it was a blow with repercussions. Each year more and more players registered their interest to compete at Third Strike at fighting game tournaments around the globe. There was something at the heart of this game that was building community and then sustaining it. While the game looked like orthodox Street Fighter – albeit with a more diverse cast – some twist in the DNA set it apart in competitive play. But what?
It’s all a matter of timing. Street Fighter III’s evolutionary change to the Street Fighter template is disarmingly simple. Press forward on the joystick at the exact moment of any opponent’s hit and your character will bat it away with the back of their hand. The parry is different to a block in that, when blocking, your character sustains chip damage. By contrast, there is no penalty to a successful parry. The temptation must have been there for the development team to include moves which could not be parried. But they stuck to the vision. Every attack from every character, including the multi hit ‘Super Arts’ can be parried by a player with expert timing. It is theoretically possible to parry every single hit in a game of Third Strike. The designers hard coded invincibility into the game, albeit only for somebody with the reaction times of a god. Somebody like Daigo Umehara.
Despite it’s simplicity, the parry mechanic needed a defining Rocky-esque moment to show the world what it really meant to the fighting game genre. Japan’s Umehara provided just that in the Evolution 2004 loser’s bracket final, where he executed a full parry of Chun Li’s Houyokusen super art, batting away 14 consecutive parry strikes, followed up by a Super Art of his own to take the round. The crowd went wild. Google bought YouTube. Third Strike suddenly made sense to the world.
But there’s a reason more people watched the internet clip of Daigo’s super parry than bought copies of Third Strike across its three console releases combined. For all the wonder of the parry, it’s a move that requires astonishing reaction times, well beyond the physical means of most players. So Third Strike became a spectator sport, something for mortals to gawp at.
But it’s all a matter of timing. And with the success of Street Fighter IV and the clutch of other fighting titles tethered to its rocketing bandwagon, the fighting game is back in fashion, with a swollen audience full of wannabe contenders. So what better time to re-introduce Third Strike to the world in a bid to land the punch that, in 1999, failed to make much of a third impact.
You can read the rest of this review at Eurogamer here.
It’s not clear precisely when the Japanese role-playing game crumbled from one of gaming’s core pillars to a battered monument to outmoded design. In the wake of Final Fantasy VII’s global popularity, this weave of grandiose storytelling, menu-based battling and lavish production values seemed set to dominate the future of interactive entertainment. But as budgets strained ever harder to fill the widening technological boundaries of each new wave of console hardware, publishers took fewer and fewer risks with their money. Creative repetition led to stagnation led to decline.
Today, the release schedules are peppered with remakes and re-releases of seminal ‘JRPGs’ from the Super Nintendo’s golden era and fans are routinely made to look backwards, rarely forwards. On the few occasions that we are treated to a strong fresh release, such as last year’s outstanding Dragon Quest IX, that success leans more heavily on familiarity than novelty.
Xenoblade Chronicles is a rare exception. Here is an endlessly lavish, detailed production based in a newborn universe that is not only filled with unfamiliar faces but also brims with daring ideas and mechanics. Indisputably, this Wii game – released in the twilight months of its host console – is the strongest JRPG to emerge in years. Its vision is so bold and assured that it’s difficult to imagine how such a creature could have risen from this brackish swamp of a genre.
It helps, of course, that its breeding is impeccable. Director Tetsuya Takahashi’s past credits include formative classics such as Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger. But Takahashi’s work hasn’t been without its problems. His most famous self-originated project was Xenogears, a game whose aspiration soundly outstripped its budget, while his similarly ambitious Xenosaga limped to a conclusion just three games into an intended series of six. Both alienated as many players as they made fans with their winding, indulgent cut-scenes and overreaching plots.
But with Xenoblade Chronicles, Takahashi demonstrates creative humility as he brings ambition in line with achievability and moves away from that reliance on cut-scene storytelling, which he recently described as a “creative dead-end”. Make no mistake, Xenoblade Chronicles carries a grand narrative, played out by a cast of scores; but that plot is expressed as much in the game’s mechanics and environment as it is cinematically.
Its world is shaped like a giant colossus. Imagine one of Team Ico’s giants had been blown up to a hundred times its original size and frozen in time, before reeds, trees and lakes were allowed to settle on its features. The Bionis, as it is known, is the world upon which you adventure, its 10-mile limbs the walkways and bridges you clamber across. Exploration off the beaten track is encouraged with experience point rewards for every landmark charted – but this is a world that invites wide-eyed surveying. The joy of discovery is reward enough.
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is an unfamiliar pairing of familiar components.
The style is silhouette indie chic — a more colourful Limbo, a less intricate Pixel Junk Eden, a more serious World of Goo — each frame rendered in pin-sharp black vector ink that’s only just beginning to fade from fashion. It’s a whisper world of foreground shadows and background soft focus shapes, of proto-life forms with feelers and pincers but no words. Craggy ceilings and underground lakes are the sights here. You may play as a flying saucer from the future, but everything around you has the feel of the primordial, an embryo domain of clicks and ominous keyboard swells.
Meanwhile, the structure is pure Super Metroid, depositing your diminutive spaceship into a 2D labyrinth. Your task is simple: chart the world by visiting every nook and cranny, your progress in this aim hampered by a series of convoluted locks, which require the correct key to be in your possession before they will let you though.
As such, in contrast to the try-hard zany name, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is essentially a game about tools and choosing the right one for the right job. There’s the circular saw, which you must use to cut your way through the brittle rock. And, once you’ve mastered this by applying it in a variety of situations, there’s the grappling claw that must be used to clear boulders and so on. The drip feed of new tools continues across the game’s five hours. Puzzles scale with a mathematical elegance as the problems set before you require ever more elaborate combinations of tools before they’ll yield.
These are, of course, the foundation principles of all good game design: press a single tool into the player’s hands, provide opportunity for them to master it, before presenting another. But these principles rendered in the Metroidvania style have a pure clarity that is timelessly compelling, and Shadow Planet benefits greatly from the tried and tested formula.
Control of the ship is tight and satisfying. The game controls like a twin stick shooter, the left analogue stick controlling your movements, the right angling whichever of the nine bolt-on tools you have active at any give point. These are switched between via a radial menu, with shortcuts to your favourite four manually mapped to the d-pad. Your ship has an unseen health meter, sprouting red fungus on its hull to show you how close it is to death, a sign that is washed away every time you pass through one of the regular checkpoint spheres that punctuate the world.
While its name implies oodles of charisma, in reality Shadow Planet suffers from a unwavering lack of character. The alien ship is a cold, near-silent avatar, and the world it seeks to penetrate is unforgiving and without warmth or solace. The decision to eradicate all text from the game adds to the style, but the lack of narrative and premise makes this an icy, clinical game that relies entirely upon the strength of its mechanics to provide motivation to its player. In this regard, while the game benefits from the Metroidvania template, it falls short of its inspirations in the details. There’s a lack of excitement every time you unlock a new weapon, derived from the fact it’s not always immediately clear what each one does.
