Wii's Rygar port is full of things games should never do ever again

By OMG Nintendo
January 26, 2009 06:58 AM PST
Print
Email this!
Share
- Digg
- Yahoo Buzz!
- FaceBook
- StumbleUpon
- del.icio.us

Just how bad is the Rygar: The Battle of Argus port for the Wii? So bad that it had OMG Nintendo thinking up terrible game ideas that should be retired forever.

By Alicia Ashby

I just finished playing Rygar: The Battle of Argus. It is a near-direct port of a six-year-old PS2 game that has been plopped onto Wii with minimal changes to... well, anything. Everything about the game is dated: the graphics, the localization, and especially the gameplay. It's not dated in a fun retro way, either, but in that sort of depressive creepy way you run across when you're digging through a GameStop bargain bin.

Being forced to run this gauntlet of turn-of-the-century B.S. made me realize that there are certain things that games just shouldn't be allowed to do anymore. If someone submits a game containing one or more of these elements for certification, someone at Nintendo should have the duty of screaming at the developers in question until they feel very bad about themselves.

7. No Save Points For You

This is such a fundamental piece of stupidity, I can't believe it somehow survived past the introduction of data saving as a general game feature. Okay, the point of saving your game progress is to make playing through a game less tedious, right? Because you don't have to replay every section constantly, you can load up from your last file and pick up exactly where you left off. This means, ideally, that you should get a chance to save at the end of every major benchmark in the game.

Hah hah, wrong! In Rygar, save points are placed pretty much at random. You generally get to save before a major boss fight or before entering a new level, and any locations beyond that will be complete surprises. Sometimes there's upwards of forty minutes of platforming between saves. Sometimes you have to actually navigate through additional enemy encounters after defeating a boss to save. More than once, you aren't allowed to save between two consecutive boss fights.

There's no good reason for save points to be located like this, unless you want to force players to have to replay major benchmark sections of the game over and over again. If your game is actually fun, though, you don't have to beat gamers upside the head to make them want to replay things! They'll choose to replay games at higher levels of difficulty or choose to do crazy single segment runs with no saving. Forcing people to replay boss battles until they can come out of them with enough health to survive the next round of fights is how a jerkwad developer tries to make a short game feel longer.

6. No Full Heals For You

In most games that make sensible use of a health point system, there's some infinitely renewable way to replenish your HP to full. Most games choose to let you full heal at save points or other designated spot. If it's a game with multiple lives, then you restart at full health when you lose a life.

The important thing here is that in a game that bothers to give you health points, they serve no useful function unless they can be replenished to full at given points in the game. Even Castlevania bosses drop an orb to grab after the battle's end, so Simon or whoever can tackle the next level with a fair fresh start. Rygar, of course, uses a Zelda-style health system where you start with a little life bar and find doodads that boost the length of your lifebar... but there is no stable way, throughout the game, to get a full health restore.

There are consumable items that offer a full health restore, but they are painfully rare (to the tune of "less than ten in the game"). Once you realize this, the game turns into an exercise in hoarding items and replaying early boss fights endlessly, trying to get through them with at least more than 50% health. So... why bother even health points? Why not just have you automatically die after taking more than X number of hits and give players multiple lives instead? As it is, the lack of a sustainable full heal system in the game just means you either make the beginning of the game tedious or get screwed at the end. Either way, it's not fun.

5. No Camera Control for You

It is possible to make an auto-camera system work if you give players the ability to adjust angles a little bit to try and set up better jumps. That's how Super Mario Galaxy did it, right? Super Mario Galaxy also had a gently drifting camera that slid organically into position behind you. No abruptly re-mapped controls that made you suddenly start walking back out a doorway you just entered, or sent you spiraling to your doom in the cruel vacuum of space.

Rygar doesn't do any of these things. It has the sort of camera that turned me off of the Devil May Cry games in their early incarnations-- one that jumps angles very abruptly, automatically remapping your controls as it goes. Only where Devil May Cry was a good game with levels designed so that you never really got boned by the abrupt control changes, Rygar is a lousy game where control re-mappings make you blunder into enemies, down pits, or into pits of life-sapping lava. Not even boss fights are entirely exempt from the horrors of abrupt camera angle changes.

Porting a six-year-old game to a new system with only minor cosmetic changes is pretty bad to begin with, but there is absolutely no excuse for any game to still be using the kind of camera that Rygar does. The abruptly changing angles aren't quite as player-hostile as Castlevania Judgment's or Spray's, but that's the definition of damning with faint praise.

4. No Auto-Targeting For You

It was around the middle of the PS2 era of game design that auto-targeting started showing up more and more in games that had any kind of big emphasis on melee combat. And why not? In a 2D game, you can furiously spam attacks and there's no need to worry about your punches flying besides the enemy. In a 3D game with no FPS-style targeting reticule, landing melee-range attacks without the benefit of auto-targeting can rapidly degenerate into a frustrating whiff-fest where your most deadly enemy is the camera.

Of course, Rygar doesn't even give you camera control. Instead you have to make sure you don't accidentally walk into an area that abruptly changes the camera angle, or get caught in one of Rygar's many slightly different long, slow animations. With common enemies this is easy enough (Rygar does feature effective guarding), but when you're fighting bosses you will begin weeping and gnashing your teeth.

Imagine playing Kingdom Hearts without the ability to immediately home in on a boss's weaknesses with your magic or what-have-you. Imagine attack after attack, including summons, going just a few pixels wide of the target so the boss gets free damage while you're trapped in the attack animation. Basically imagine something that's not any fun at all.

3. No Coherent Story For You

I'm pretty hard on video game stories most of the time, and maybe harder than a should be. They do tend to be cheesy and formulaic, but for the most part, video game stories now make sense. Garland will not knock us all down, we don't have to get silk bags from the graveyard duck, and very rarely does anyone feel asleep. Rygar seems to exist to remind us of what a luxury simple straightforward comprehensibility is in a video game plot.

I don't think I've ever seen a video game story conveyed as poorly as Rygar's, which of course insists on cramming in tons of cutscenes you can't save directly after to let you know the insipid goings-on in detail. The dialogue is monstrously, unimaginably bad. Did all video games sound this bad in 2002? Actual dialogue includes the line, "Before I died, I ate the flesh of a Titan. I became an evil one and dedicated myself to bringing the Titans' earth to this world!"

"I became an evil one"? Seriously? And it just gets better from there, as Rygar turns out to be Cleopatra's son Caesarion, Icarus ends up being Aristotle, Icarus becomes a good guy literally one cutscene or so after trying very hard to kill you, Rygar is going to... kill Chronos to avenge him? But Chronos was working with him, to get Diskarmers to... something... arrgh. Story this dumb actually makes gameplay less fun.

2. No Forward Momentum For You

As I've mentioned before: Rygar is really fixated on the idea of getting players to replay sections of a game. This is now by itself a bad thing-- how many games are loaded with New Game+ or other features just designed to make you play it again? Things like multi-path levels, Achievements, or unlockables are just there, really, to make it more likely you'll pick the game up at some point.

But, here's the thing-- a successful game gets you to replay the game generally after letting you finish all the story in whatever way you like, and entices you to come back later. It doesn't, say, force you to replay individual segments until you're playing them perfectly before you get to move on.

Rygar forces you to do this if you want to actually play the game well. If you don't repeat early fights so you can get through them without using items, you will be stuck having to replay later fights to an absolutely annoying degree (the final boss fight is actually two bosses consecutively, with no chance to save). NES games could get away with this, but even Mega Man 9 lets you save after milestones-- because forced replays aren't any fun at all, just boring repetition.

1. No Sensible Shirt For You

I said Rygar came to the Wii mostly unchanged, and that's true. Aside from improvements to background textures, there appears to be only one major visual change from the PS2 version of the game: they redesigned the protagonist. To the best of my ability to find images of this, here's the old PS2 protagonist:

Not a fantastic design, but he looks like he's from basically the same pseudo-historical universe as everyone else in the game. Remember that. Now, here's the "updated" protagonist design they slapped into the Wii version:

Yes, dude is really wearing a haltar top made out of metal rings and approximately six layers of skirt over his pants. I don't want to know how long it takes him to get dressed in the morning.

Now, look-- I understand people want video game characters to look flamboyant and interesting, but Rygar has a pseudo-historical plot. This guy looks pretty damned stupid by himself, but if you put him next to just about anyone else in the cutscenes, he looks like he got lost on the way to a bottom-tier Square-Enix title. Remake a game, or don't-- only redesigning one thing makes everything else look stupider!

This article originally appeared (with pictures and videos!) over at OMG Nintendo.