PC Genjin 2 (PS3)
SESSION 4 Final
I don’t want to play a Mario game because Mario post-NES has always felt creepy to me and I just don’t want to get into the whole thing. [For the sake of completeness I went back and tried SMB 1 through 3 again and yeah I don’t need to do more coin and mushroom collecting. The jump is nice though.] But the boss rush end of Bonk 2 had me wishing I was playing a Mario game because at least Mario games have a good jump. Bonk is horrible at jumping and his laggy jump kept getting me punished in these little dungeon tunnels with alternating conveyor belts and fireballs that teleport in right next to you and other nonsense.
There’s a point where the game gives you some health (in some of the branches there is no health at all), makes you take a hit–getting stuck between alternate direction conveyor belts, and it’s of course unclear how to get out really as you desperately mash buttons for a while–and then gives you a little health back, like okay now everything’s okay, right?
Why? Why do any of that?
Oh, right–it’s because they might have squished you into a crab, and the only way to revert back, as far as I could find, is to take damage. It isn’t clear that being a crab is particularly advantageous or necessary, and it is used only in a few very limited brief areas very late in the game; it feels like they made it to impress viewers with a character transformation–but nobody seeing it in the death horror house of the late game is likely to care all that much.
Two of the bosses in the boss rush, I have no idea how to hit without also taking a hit. It’s completely unclear. With a third one, I did figure it out after abusing save states for quite some time; it’s a fairly ridiculous, rather unintuitive, extremely unforgiving sequence and as usual the hurt boxes are punishing and not possible to understand until they’ve hit you a lot. And it’s entirely possible to hit something and immediately get hit for being there hitting it because why would they like build in a grace period or anything thoughtful to make the action feel less horrible.
It’s bad design and the dungeons connecting the bosses feel like either they weren’t really play tested, or they just didn’t care. Because of his delay between moves, Bonk can’t really handle more than one enemy at a time unless they’re intentionally spaced so that he can chain-dive-bonk them, which is rare after the early stages. He cannot run, and if he tries to move past enemies, they will catch up to him and gun him down from behind.
There is no time limit, and Bonk must stop, carefully trigger a single enemy at a time, and defeat them–and sometimes then carefully headbutt their tracking bullet spray swarm piece by piece–before continuing to the next. His sluggish jumping is abused repeatedly to make you take hits until you’ve memorized the layout and can execute the correct sequence in anticipation of what you remember he will need to do next.
With the basic mechanics a muddled mess, the game’s developers still didn’t seem to know how to make the game hard without resorting to cheap tactics. A lot of enemies are made just tall enough that your jump has to be almost perfect in order to dive-bonk them without hurting yourself. Random bullet sprays become common.
In one of the buss rush connecting dungeon tunnels–oh, yes, it is a water level–they hide a crab behind a pillar.
The crabs shoot at you, in any direction and through any obstacle.
It’s the opposite of what I recall from the NES Mario games where they show you very clearly what you need to do, aren’t designed in such a way as to feel punishing–possibly excepting those darned Mario 3 airships–and the controls for executing what you need to do are crisp and clean. Bonk is muddled and vindictive. By the end I felt like I couldn’t trust the game’s physics at all, and every time I had to do anything I felt queasy, and surprised if it somehow ended without me taking a hit. I didn’t trust the designers to distribute danger or healing items in any sort of sane way, so I reloaded nearly every time I took a hit. Which was a lot. But I was sick of the game and did not want to have continue and replay any stage from the beginning again, ever.
The first hit I took from the final boss was while I was jumping happily through the air after having beaten the prior boss: the final boss suddenly teleported in right there, on top of me, without warning, probably unhittable, hurt box immediately in effect.
Other than that, he’s actually kind of a pushover. The game feels severely lacking in gameplay balancing.
Nobody should play this game, the ship level isn’t worth it. At least, quit when you reach the ship stage’s boss. Not a whole lot that’s good happens after that point.
After you beat the final boss and see the little ending which is cute but involves a character I hadn’t even really seen to this point so didn’t care much about, you’re stuck in a credits loop.
“To be continued… Maybe…” it says.
