The Monkey King: The Legend Beings (Wii) Review

 

The Monkey King: The Legend Begins (Wii) Review

Date Released: 30 May 2008

Date Played: 7 February 2022

Introduction:

The Monkey King: The Legend Begins is a horizontally scrolling shmup that retells the Journey to the West story that has been used countless times since its inception over 500 years ago.  It's a sort of sequel to Taito's Cloud Master and was developed by StarFish and published by UFO.  While it is certainly buried in the hallowed halls of mediocrity among the massive troves of other Wii shovelware games, it isn't such a blatant crash grab as many of them and you can detect just the slightest hint of care by the developers. The same can't be said for the game they created shortly after this. StarFish created a cash-in game called Saint that tells the exact same story, uses the same engine, many of the same graphics, and is basically just a reskin of this game.  It's also one of the worst games I've ever played and I am hard pressed to even remember any other game that was as terrible as it was.  Luckily, The Monkey King, while very simple and budget oriented, isn't nearly as bad as that one and feels more like "baby's first shmup" rather than an attempt to defraud the consumer of their hard earned cash. Don't get me wrong, it's bad.  It's just more of a failure on part of its creator's shortcomings rather than them trying to cheat you.  It's like scoring a 30% on a test when you hadn't studied but actually tried a little on test day versus not studying, not trying, but telling everyone that you were going to ace the exam.

Gameplay:

You play as either Wukong, the titular adolescent monkey king or his female friend, Mai Mai.  Both are training to become martial arts masters and have to shoot their way through 6 levels to gain the approval of their teacher. They play almost identically (other than their access to specific spells) and are really nothing more than a cosmetic choice. As mentioned earlier, the game is a horizontal shmup just like we're all quite familiar with.  You have access to a standard shot that is little more than a pea shooter but can be leveled up 6 times by collecting powerups.  This will turn your pea shooter into a much wider and more powerful spread of bullets the will ravage the enemies coming your way.  In addition to this, you can collect the standard speed upgrades as well as occasionally enter a door to grab a magic spell.  You are able to bank two of these spells simultaneously and switch between them at will by using the A button.  They range from simple bombs that you drop, fire shields to protect you, dragon fireballs, and even almost full screen laser beams. There are slight variances between which spell each of the two characters can collect, but they are mostly identical and only a couple of spells are unique to whomever you chose.  These spells are very powerful and oddly have unlimited uses.  You can just spam the magic button constantly and feel almost impossible to kill. There is also a pretty generous life bar that allows you to take several hits before dying. The enemy placement in the game isn't well thought out and seems almost random at best and your character's sprite is very large and there will be blankets of bullets fired at you with no way to avoid them.  This forces you to have to take the damage since there's nothing you can do about it. This makes the health bar a requirement for a game this poorly thought out and is a hallmark of a poorly designed game.  As I've sarcastically stated many times, why make tight and well designed game that will allow you to learn to rout the stages while avoiding even a single hit when you can just throw a bunch of random junk at the player to increase the difficulty and let the health bar take up the slack? If you see a health bar in a shmup, be forewarned; the developers probably didn't know how to design good bullet patterns or enemy placement.  Then, when they played the game, found it to be almost impossible, so they just slapped a life bar on there and pushed the game out of the door. This is almost certainly what happened with this game as well, and if that weren't enough, you can replenish your health by collecting the commonly occurring health potions from fallen enemies or by finishing a stage. You're given so much health, lives, and healing items that you don't even have to bother to dodge most of the time. If you do die, you respawn right where you were without having to worry about going back to a checkpoint. Making things even easier, there are plenty of extra lives that drop from enemies as well.  Too many, in fact.  I actually had 16 extra lives by the end of my first playthrough and never died once. 

However, on the hardest difficulty, I did die a couple of times and discovered the game suffers from some pretty serious Gradius syndrome where if you die, you lose your powerups and the game can be extremely difficult to make any progress with.  The Monkey King is no different, but since powerups are so abundant, you really only need to survive long enough to grab a magic spell and you'll be all set to return to your normal boring method of just holding down the fire button and spamming magic. The few seconds I had to spend surviving with none of my powerups was quite difficult and practically impossible to sustain for more than a short period.  This leaves the game in a situation where if you're not fully powered up, you have no chance... and if you are fully powered up, the game has no chance.  By the middle of stage 2, you'll be fully powered up and can mostly just sit in the middle of the back portion of the screen while holding the fire button and spamming your magic attacks. Even on the hardest difficulty, you'll pretty much just shred through the levels by doing this and it won't take long for boredom to set in.  To make matters worse, the boss fights are the easiest I've ever seen in a game.  Almost all of them will be eliminated in just a matter of seconds and they won't even have the opportunity to fire off a single shot.  This is a big disappointment since the boring levels could have used something to break up the monotony. The bosses look cool and I found myself not attacking them in an attempt to see them do something. They have very limited attack patterns that usually consist of either a telegraphed laser beam or a rain of bullets from the sky.  If you decide to not bother firing on them, they won't do much and seem to be copied and pasted from one to the next.  It really makes all of these fights feel like an afterthought rather than a feature of the game.

The gimmick of this shmup, as with almost all games on the Wii, is the addition of motion controls (sigh....). In this game, you can tilt the controller to the right to speed up the scrolling of the stage (and I guess add a little more difficulty) or tilt it to the left to slow down the scrolling and make the already insanely easy game even more so.  It doesn't really serve any true purpose in the game and feels completely shoehorned into the whole experience.  I did find myself using it to try to get through the boring stages a little more quickly, but outside of using it like a fast forward button, it doesn't do much to add to the enjoyment you're trying to find.  

You'll play through 6 stages as you progress through the game.  You'll start at Mt. Gogyu before traveling over a river, the Great Wall, another mountain, the sky, and finally Hell.  These all have the same basic enemies of pigs, foxes, clouds, chickens, etc. that are reused over and over during each of the stages with only a handful of unique enemies seen elsewhere in the game.  Most enemies die in a single hit and serve as nothing more than cannon fodder.  After you play through the boss rush of the final stage and dispatch the last boss, you're rewarded by having to play all the way through the game again.... in reverse.   Apparently, it isn't enough to have to journey all the way to hell to slay the great evil, you also need to make your way back by killing each boss for a third time in a single playthrough (on the way there, boss rush, and on the way back).  You get to play by facing left this time around, but other than that, the game is exactly the same and poses no more of a challenge than before.  This does nothing but waste your time and make the game feel even more padded.  

Once you finish the game on normal difficulty (I'm not sure if you need to do it on 1 credit because I never died) you'll unlock Race mode.  This is where you just fly through all 6 levels of the game without shooting.  There are tons of speed upgrades and health potions around as you dodge through tons of enemies in an attempt to reach the finish line before the stage's mid-boss.  You will need to make use of the tilt motion controls to fly through the levels as fast as possible as you attempt to dodge enemies while grabbing those essential healing items.  While I do like this idea, it's very poorly implemented and requires almost no skill.  When you die, you have a recovery period where you're invulnerable.  During this time, you can just slam on gas at full speed and fly straight through all of the enemies and pass the boss with little to no effort.  I beat the whole game in race mode on the hardest difficulty in 3 minutes and 8 seconds only dying 2 times on my very first try.

Presentation:

The Monkey King definitely falls into the cute 'em up category as all of the character models and enemies are adorable and colorful.  They are all interesting to look at and I feel like the artists on the game did a pretty good job.  The backgrounds of the various stages as very muted in their color pallet, but it's very clear that they were aiming for the subtle stylings of east Asian artwork from that period.  It's simple and well done, and while it won't dazzle you, it does help the cute sprites on the screen pop out a little more.  

The music is fine and goes for a traditional Eastern style that is really the only fitting genre for a game like this.  It does have some anachronistic pumping percussion parts that attempt to add a little intensity to the game, but it's well done and I feel that it adds a nice component to the soundtrack.  As for the sound effects, they are extremely terrible.  The sound of your powered up shot is shrill, ear piercing, and constant.  It's so distracting that I had to turn off all of the sound effects in the options menu to try to escape it. Once gone, the whole experience became much less painful. There aren't too many other memorable sound effects in the game and they are mostly benign, so I'll take that as a positive.

The game does have that trademark blurriness and washed out color pallet that was so characteristic of the Wii.  To me, it hasn't really reached the nostalgically charming level yet and just appears to be a little outdated.  However, it isn't a terrible looking game for what it is.  There are some nice animations that give the characters life like Mai Mai's flowing dress, but it does have bit of that early 2000s Flash based browser game look to it.  Perhaps in 10 years, we'll all look back on this style fondly, but I don't think we're quite there yet.

Conclusion:

The Monkey King is a budget title that certainly does feel cheap.  They recycle assets, pad out the stages, and even make you retrace your steps all the way back through the game. There's even a typo on the back of the game's case where, "Fight Larger Then Life Bosses" is proudly displayed. I would be more forgiving if there was at least some engaging gameplay. But it is completely lacking in difficulty that you could probably beat the entire game just by spamming the shot and magic button with your eyes closed.  I played through the game 4 times in a row; first on easy and normal where I never died a single time.  Then, on hard, where I only died 2 times and it was little more than a slight nuisance to recover.  Finally, I plowed through the race mode in about 3 minutes.  This doesn't leave a lot of content or enjoyment to be found for your average gamer and makes the game nothing more than a mindless time killer.

It does have some cute characters but they aren't enough to make up for the severely lacking gameplay.  That being said, this game doesn't feel like a malicious cash grab to me and has more of a game for young children sort of vibe to it.  It's kind of like if an adult played a Sesame Street game about spelling simple words or something.  You can recognize the basics of of a genre that you like, but there really isn't much gameplay there for an adult.  I wouldn't hesitate to let a 3 year old play this game, and they might actually have a good time with it.  However, if you're older than 3, there really isn't much here for you.

Final Status: Completed (did everything the game had to offer in a couple of hours)

Final Score: 3/10 (barely any gameplay... far too easy)

Sol Divide (PS1) Review

Sol Divide (PS1) Review

Date Released: 11 March 2003

Date Played: 27 January 2022

Introduction:

Sol Divide is one of the most painfully terrible games I've ever played and I'm absolutely shocked that it has received as many ports as it has.  It was developed by Psikyo for arcades back in 1997 before being ported to several home consoles. It's a departure from their normal types of games and tries to blend a horizontal shmup with an RPG while throwing in some fighting game elements into the mix  I have played this game three different times on three different consoles, and each time I play it I feel like it only gets worse. I Originally played this game on the PS2 in 2006 where I felt like it was just a boring arcade game. Then, I played it again on the Nintendo Switch in 2018 where it was a boring arcade game with so much input delay that it was practically impossible.  Now, I've decided to try to redeem Sol Divide by playing what is considered to be the absolute best port of the game, the Playstation 1 version.  

You may have noticed that this version was released in 2003. Two whole years after the PS2 was released and almost halfway through the cycle leading up to the following console generation. This is such a bizarre choice for releasing their game that I had all of these theories brewing in my head trying to rationalize a reason why they would have done this.  The best thing I could come up with was that the publisher was contractually obligated to release it on a home console in the United States, but knew the game was so bad that they decided to bury it by putting it on the previous generation Playstation to save face and money. Sadly, we know this isn't the case, because they released the game on the PS2 just a few years later (and once again right as the PS3 was coming out). So, there as to be some other reason for doing this.  Why would you release your game time and time again on a console that's one it's way out?  You know the game isn't good and isn't going to sell well, why even bother?  At least on the PS2 version it's bundled with the much better Dragon Blaze. I'm at a complete loss for what actually happened and the mystery of why this all came to be is, by far, the most interesting aspect of the game to me.

Despite all of the terrible choices centered around this miserable game, there are still people out there who consider the game underrated or as "hidden gem."  Don't listen to what they have to say, because they're wrong.  Sol Divide is an objectively bad game with almost no redeeming qualities.  It's a broken mess, and is not only extremely boring while being maddeningly frustrating, it's also barely playable.

Story:

There is some nonsensical story about the armies of Satan invading some fantasy kingdom and you have to stop them.  It's all very convoluted and hard to discern because there's very little information about it out there.  Even the Wikipedia page for this game is mostly blank and only has basic information about it's release date and critical reception. Most of the information about the narrative has to be gleaned from the manual because there is practically no story given to you while you play the game.  

You're greeted by a terrible CGI cutscene that shows the skeleton of a fallen warrior lying in the sand near some ruins.  Then, you see a dragon fly by overhead... and that's it.  There's no exposition, dialog, or anything else to let you know what's going on and this cutscene could honestly be from any sort of fantasy game.  As you play the game, you're shown a map of a fantasy world in between the stages.  Obviously, you're traveling to these places, but you aren't given any idea of what these locations are or what is happening there.  Then, when you finish the game, you're greeted by one of the laziest things I've ever seen any developer do. The final cut-scene is completely in Japanese.  Let me remind you that this is the U.S. release of a game; and the final cut-scene is all Japanese text with no audio or English translation.  I'm not sure if the publisher just didn't care, didn't have the money, or didn't think anyone would ever make it this far because the game is so terrible, but it's an absolute slap in the face to have this cutscene play out after suffering through this game.

Gameplay:  

The Playstation 1 version of the game is considered to be the best not only because of it's port of the Arcade version of the game, but also because of the included Normal mode which is supposed to be more like a story-based campaign.

In Arcade mode, you being by selecting from the usual 7 difficulty settings found in most Psikyo games. These range from the insultingly titled, "Monkey" for the easiest setting, up through "Child" and on to "Very Hard" for the highest difficulty.  If you've ever played a Psikyo game, you'll be fully aware that the games pack quite a punch even on the "Monkey" setting and will not be a walk in the park.  As for this game, I've never been able to 1 credit clear it on anything harder than the easiest setting in all my attempts with it.  This isn't from a lack of skill but rather from the poorly implemented gameplay mechanics and god awful design. So, if you do make the misguided decision to play this game, don't let Psikyo's direct insult of playing on a difficulty designed for a monkey force you to play on a higher difficulty setting.  You won't have more fun that way... you'll have way less.  Believe me, I didn't even think that was possible until playing through the game on the practically impossible Normal difficulty.

You select from 1 of 3 characters to use in combat. Kashon, the hawkman (or bird person as I like to call him) who is the largest character and is evenly balanced, Vorg, the fighter who has stronger melee attacks but weak magic, and Tyora, the sexy wizard, who has strong magic but weak melee abilities.  Personally, I always go with the wizard because she seems to be the best for cheesing the game, which is really the only way I've been able to make any progress with it.  After that, you're dumped out into the first stage.

The gimmick of Sol Divide is that it's more melee focused instead of being based around shooting like most shmups.  Each character has the ability to shoot bullets, do melee attacks at close range, and cast an overly large and complex series of magic spells that are essential to make any progress.  In addition to this, you're given only one life but have a health bar to make up for it.  You also have a mana meter for casting spells that is refilled by damaging enemies with your shot or melee attacks. As you kill enemies, they drop power upgrades, additional spells, and health and mana recovery items.  It's actually pretty sound idea that seems like it would be a lot of fun.  Unfortunately, the game is executed so poorly that almost none of its systems actually works.

Here is how the game actually plays.  Each of the stages is broken up into several smaller encounters with enemies that range from bats, eyeballs, wizards, skeleton warriors, mushroom monsters, and all other manner of fantasy creatures.  These happen more like an arena battle where you move on after you clear everything rather than the game continually scrolling as you would expect in a shmup.  These arenas are broken up by mid-bosses and final bosses just like you will expect and they mostly play out exactly the same way as the other encounters.  Your ranged shot is pretty much useless and is only good for taking out the smallest and weakest of enemies.  Usually, these just sit in one place at the beginning of each encounter and let you blast them away and really only serve to waste more of your time. After that, a handful of other enemies will appear and start bobbing and weaving around the screen as they bum-rush you one at a time.  They get right up in your face and you have to use your melee attack to dispatch them before the next one rushes in.  This seems fine, except that even your melee attack is rather weak and will take several complete combos just to take down an enemy.  To help with this, each character has a dedicated special move that they can do during their combo to help take down the enemies faster but pulling it off is easier said than done.  If you are able to do it, it will make they incredibly tanky enemies much easier to deal with because using your normal combo attack seems to take forever. This makes each combat encounter much longer than it needs to be and this can be especially true for the boss fights. It's annoying, but not a deal breaker.  The real issue in clearing the arenas lies in the enemy behavior.  They are all much faster than you are and will dash in and hit you before you're able to move out of the way.  If you decide to go on the offensive, and move forward to kill them before they have a chance to come to you, they will often bob, weave, and dart out of your attack range so you end up chasing them all over the screen trying to land a hit on them.  The hit detection is very poor and it often feels like a lot of your hits just aren't making contact when they should be.  To make matters worse, your character is immobile when they are in the middle of a combo.  So, you'll be in the middle of attacking an enemy, just for it to dodge away and you'll be stuck swinging at empty air.  It's usually at this time that the other enemies on the screen decide to shoot you when there's nothing you can do about it.  This leads me to my other point, which is that your character is huge and takes up about a quarter of the vertical portion of the screen.  Enemies will send out a barrage of bullets and attacks that there's no way to avoid and you'll take damage constantly.  If that weren't enough, you basically have no invulnerability time after getting hit and you'll have enemies stun lock you constantly as you're getting hit from all sides only to watch your health bar rapidly get drained.  It's rage inducing, and the combat never feels like it's working the way it's supposed to do. 

You know how in martial arts movies the hero will be surrounded by bad guys and they will all attack him one at a time and he seems super powered and untouchable?  Well, this game is the opposite of that.  The bad guys all attack you one at a time, but it's them that are super powered and untouchable.  It won't be long until you're trying to deal with several enemies all at once as they move all around the screen while avoiding your attacks and popping off cheap shots at you.  

To help with this, you're given magic spells to use.  As you kill enemies, they will drop magic scrolls that you can collect.  These are added to your spell book shown under your life bar.  Several of these spells are permanent and you can use them whenever you have the mana, while some are single use items.  Every character can have up to 9 of them at any given time and they can be cycled through by pressing the X button.  Personally, I feel like 9 spells is WAY too many to try to deal with.  All enemies and bosses have spell weaknesses, defenses, and invulnerabilities and it's up to you to learn which one works best in most situations.  But, with 9 spells, it can be a challenge to figure out what works... especially after you blow a single use spell on a boss that has an invulnerability to it.  The permanent spells are the main ones you'll be using and they range from a flame thrower, to lighting that strikes the whole screen, and finally the most useful skill in the entire game, the freeze attack.  This spell freezes all of the enemies on the screen and actually gives you a chance to attack something without it dodging and moving all around and will also prevent the other enemies on the screen from sucker punching you while you're trying to focus on one specific guy.  Since you're mana refills by attacking, most of the game just consists of you freezing everyone on screen, attacking something until your mana is full enough to cast another freeze spell, and rinse and repeat.  You basically have to chain freeze the entire game to cheese your way through it.  The other spells like meteor and death may only appear one time in the game and are single use and can be very devastating. You typically have to save them for a boss as many of their attack patterns are practically un-dodgeable and you need to kill them as quickly as you can before losing all your health.  Luckily, the freeze trick works on most of the bosses as well.  

If you don't want to suffer alone, there's 2-player simultaneous cooperative play.  Good luck finding someone to see it through with you to the end.

In addition to the Arcade mode, this port also has a Normal mode which serves as a story based RPG.  While it is a nice feature, it is executed as lazily and poorly as everything else in the game.  What you're supposed to do is make your way through 16 floors of a dungeon.  Each floor is broken up into little combat arenas just like the main game where you'll have to kill enemies.  Doing this will level up your character which does nothing more than give you more health.  To increase your other stats, find healing items, spells, and everything else, you'll need to collect floating chests from fallen enemies.  These chests have rarity levels like copper, silver, and gold. To utilize them, you'll have to constantly be returning to the menu to open them and have a chance at a precious upgrade.  Sadly, most of the chests require a key to open; and these keys can only be found in other chests.  You'll have to grind for these keys because you really need the items found inside the locked chests.  As you progress, you'll be given the option of repeating the floor you just did before moving on.  Sadly, you'll need to do this several times in order to level up and get the items you need to survive the next floor.  Grind, grind, grind.

Occasionally, you'll have a spell drop from one of the chests and you can finally cast something.  This time around, the spells all have limited uses and you'll really need to horde them for use on the later floors.  It's a real misstep by the designers, because the magic is the most fun part of the game and removing it as a main attack feature in this mode turns the game into a really boring hack and slash game. Albeit one where neither the hacking and/or slacking are any fun.

But, just like the Arcade mode, there are some other insanely stupid design choices here as well.  Firstly, you don't even seem to get that much stronger when you manage to get items to increase your attack power and defense.  Maybe each one is like a 2% increase to your stats.  So, you need to grind a lot to make any difference.  Also, many of the floors of the dungeon are just copied and pasted from previous floors.  You'll fight the exact same enemies, mid-bosses, and final bosses in a row with only pallet swaps to differentiate them.  But, the most grievous sin of the whole game is that when you die in this mode, it takes all of your upgrades and items that you've collected and sends you ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE GAME. Yes, you are a higher level now, but all that does is slightly increase your health.  You'll still need to redo all of the grinding you did before to upgrade your attacks and defense and collect all the keys and healing items you'll need.  If you're far enough along, the game may not take all of your attack and defense upgrades, but just like 80% of the them. But, even then, it can erase hours of progress. It's, all highly boring and grindy, and the fact that the game makes you redo it again and again is just so painful.

Presentation:

Sol Divide has prerendered 3D graphics similar to Donkey Kong Country on the SNES.  Only, in this case instead of being charming and impressive they are chunky, ugly, and muddled with an art style that is very lackluster. Everything in this game is a murky mess and you can barely make out any features of the characters as they fly over uninspired and repetitive backgrounds that are mostly stone structures. The boss design is all over the place but seems to focus on various dragons, lizards, mummies and statues.  I guess it's supposed to be like a pseudo-Egyptian theme, but it's all so haphazard and poorly thrown together that it's difficult to even tell what the theme is going for. Maybe if the developers had actually taken the time to tell me what's going on, I would be able to piece it together. The stages are all so similar with their muted color scheme and repetitive environments, that I can't even really tell them apart other than some are above ground and some are below. Not only that, you're given a really boring and sparse orchestral score to accompany your time with the game.  I've never personally been much of a fan of the Psikyo shmup soundtracks, and this one is no exception. There are no memorable points in the music and nothing I could find to grab onto. I know that this is a game from 1997, but it looked bad even for that time period and really doesn't hold up well now.  Everything about the aesthetic choices in this game are ugly and off-putting. When compared to Psikyo's other games, they don't even look like they're made by the same company.

Conclusion:

I've given this game 3 tries to prove itself over the course of 16 years and it has never been able to give me a single moment of enjoyment.  It's not in the "so bad it's good category" and it's not even in the mediocre one either.  It's just completely terrible across the board.  I want to commend Psikyo on trying something new and a little out of their comfort zone, but they just failed so spectacularly in every conceivable way that I would be remiss to give them even the slightest acknowledgement of any worthwhile effort put into this game.  It's an ugly and clunky mess that is barely playable.  The game wants you to ignore the shooting aspect of a shoot 'em up and asks you to get right up in the enemy's face and melee attack them while the other enemies get to pretend like they're in a real shmup and blast you with unavoidable bullets from across the screen. Psikyo wants you to play the game by their very specific and not fun at all rules, while they ignore those rules themselves and proceed to make the whole experience feel unfair.  The only way around this, is to basically cheese the game by freezing all of the enemies constantly which totally defeats the whole point of playing a shmup. 

I don't recommend this game to anyone and would advise everyone to steer clear.  I'm angry with myself for having purchased this game 3 separate times just trying to eek out a little enjoyment from something I feel should be good... but just isn't.  

Final Status: Beaten (at least 9 times over 3 console generations... and 1 credit cleared on Monkey)

Final Score: 2/10 (about as bad as you can get)