Pungry for Laughs

Early March, Game Freak announced little more than the name of the next mainline Pokemon game via a cryptic trailer. The 1:57 movie displayed Lumiose City from Pokemon X & Y before ending with the words “Urban Redevelopment Plan”. Now, nothing gets this journalist more excited for a video game than the promise of bureaucracy, but Pungry Industries’ specialist Nintendo leaker… Pungry… has figured it out. Pokemon Legends: Z-A (great name by the way) is actually a Parisian Street Cleaner simulator.

Don’t just take my word for it. The source, white hat hacker Nurse Joi, was the first to figure out Pokemon Trozei’s top-secret existence as “the boring Pokemon Puzzle League pseudo-sequel” and the one to determine that Pokemon Master sEX was not going to live up to its name. Nurse Joi provided their input to our prestigious paper through covert DMs on Discord, stating (all typos are [SIC]) “Lumiose City is based on Paris, the game is about an Urban Redevelopment Plan if your ead the text, but just look at waht that Pikachu is doing… it’s running through very clean streets… Paris has very dirty streets… Pokemon must’ve been enlisted to clean up those streets in the truest meaning of the word”

Presumably, the player will be riding on Koraidon or whatever stupid vehicular-looking legendary from Gen 6 there was (I didn’t play that crap! Pokemon is for kids!!) as they take out bags of Trubbish, wash down the Grimer, and, uh, do whatever they can to get Guzzlord to leave the city. In addition, NPCs around the city will be wearing berets while eating baguettes and saying “hohn hohn hohn” as they cheer on the player’s efforts.

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I’m sorry, this suuuuucks. I have been too busy this month to write anything funny so I have thrown this together in 20 minutes. I wanted to finish the Spyro Tim Rogers thing but it is so hard to sit down and write these days. And the rest of the year doesn’t get less busy! Especially with one YouTuber claiming that Spyro 4 has been in development since January. How am I supposed to focus on Reignited when I have that in the back of my mind from now on?

If anyone has any funny ideas for something to actually write instead of this, please leave a comment. There’s been more views than usual this year (compared to the dismal past 3 years anyway) which means my longform video game writing must be bringing in the viewers! Right! Right? Well, whatever.

Most video games are outdoors. Despite being decried as the reason children lack imagination and the reason adults need to “touch grass”, video games have always promoted the outdoors. Ever since Super Mario Bros. had Mario jump out of the black background of the construction site in Donkey Kong and into the wild blue of the Mushroom Kingdom, Nintendo games especially have been obsessed with the outdoors. Prior to the original Luigi’s Mansion, the only Nintendo series that attempted complex interior design was The Legend of Zelda, and I gotta say that I wouldn’t want to live in any of those literal “dungeons” prior to Luigi’s Mansion. I’d happily live in the Yeti’s Snowcabin in Twilight Princess, though.

I open my review about Luigi’s Mansion 3 in this manor because the indoors was truly Nintendo’s final frontier. Peach’s Castle in Super Maio 64 was Nintendo’s first hallway into developing a believable 3D interior, and the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask were their second storeys on this practice. The console was not powerful enough to do very detailed textures of the many houses that Link could enter and break pots within, but an introspection of these house inspections shows that interior design was being thought about by those at Nintendo. When it came time to develop games for the GameCube, I can only assume that a combination of Resident Evil and Big Boo’s Haunt gave the impetus to creating Luigi’s Mansion.

Luigi’s Mansion 1, as all first games in a series seem to be posthumously given a trailing 1 to avoid any confusion, focused on creating one lived in space. The titular haunted mansion that Luigi is tricked into buying is the only location in the title that the player explores. In said game, the main quest of rescuing Mario forces Luigi to explore the entire house. Each room has its own small story that fits in with the rest of the mansion. The boss baby ghost is found in a nursing room with a horse rocking chair. The shivering butler ghost is found in a spartan minimalist room that wouldn’t be out of place in r/malelivingspaces. The clockwork ghosts boss goes a step further by being found within a toybox room within another room. In short, every ghost in Luigi’s Mansion is given context from their surrounding environment which gives further context to the mansion as a holistic, believable interior.

Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon takes a much different approach. Instead of creating one believable interior like the first mansion of Luigi, Dark Moon creates four different mansions that each have their own otherworldly interiors. For instance, the third mansion isn’t even a mansion–it’s a factory. With the focus on creating a game for handheld players that can be set down and picked up at a moment’s notice, Dark Moon maximizes the design of every individual room in these four mansions as if they were all mansions themselves owned by completely different insane interior designers from one another. Luigi’s Mansion 3 further evolves this sentiment of maximizing individual rooms over creating a single holistic interior.

The setting for Luigi’s Mansion 3 is the Last Resort Hotel. Despite the name befitting the worst tourist trap motel with dozens of clearly-bought five star reviews on Yelp, Princess Peach, Mario, Luigi, and some unnamed Toads all book a stay because owner Hellen Gravely, another extremely trustworthy name, sent Luigi a letter to come. This hotel turns out to be both a luxury hotel, and a literal deathtrap, unlike most tourist trap hotels which will at worst poison you with poorly cooked roomservice cheeseburgers. Furthermore, it is a hotel that built up rather than out, so the game is divided into a series of floors.

Each floor of The Last Resort has its own distinct theme. The first few themes are normal affairs for a luxury hotel. Floor 1 is the lobby, floor 2 is the mezzanine, floor 3 is the shops, floor 4 is a concert hall which doesn’t make that much sense until you remember that this is a kid’s game and the hotel bar that would pair with the hall is not mentioned, and floor 5 is the suites. Each of these floors contain normal items and inconspicuous rooms given their purpose. The main lobby has the classic “too large” chandelier, a front desk, and a waiting area with lovely couches that Luigi is never allowed to sit on. There’s a ton of comfy looking chairs, sofas, beds, and couches that Luigi comes across on his journey and yet he only chooses to sit down upon the bus seat in the introduction and ending of the game, by far the least comfortable option he had.

Now, after the player finishes floor 5 and thinks to themselves “I don’t really know how they’re going to fill another 8 or 9 floors if they’re all going to be similar to this one for the suites”, Luigi’s Mansion 3 starts going crazy with their idea of interior design. Floor 6 is themed after a medieval castle. No luxury hotel would ever theme a section based off a castle–we invented hotels because they were more comfortable than castles. There are multiple interiors that directly reference death. Now, I’m no marketer, but making your resort’s motto “memento mori” is not my idea of a good idea.

The castle level of the hotel takes everything memorable about living in a castle, excises a few things such as the chamberpots, and then spits out a concentrated highlight of being a king, right down to having a king ghost force you to fight in a joust at the end of the floor. Every level from then on is all about showing only the good side of a particular interior, except for the sewers in the second level of the basement. A player may not even realize how much sense this makes in-universe to have the game’s setting of a first-class hotel make every accommodation possible because most gamers live in an r/malelivingspace sensory deprivation chamber that has zero interior decoration. The designers of Luigi’s Mansion 3 have been in at least one Hilton, on the other hand.

The game gets into a groove of making the player explore a sharply designed interior until all the good ideas are gone before moving them up another floor. It’s an extremely linear game, which may upset the fans of Luigi’s Mansion 1 (always have to append the “1” to a game series that gets numbered posthumously) and its open floor concept of a video game. However, by funneling the player through this linear progression, Luigi’s Mansion 3 is able to polish the individual rooms and bring out the inherent joy of exploring a small space. It’s quite similar to the majesty of the tight, polished obstacle course nature of a Super Mario Galaxy level compared to the open playpen of a Super Mario 64 level. There’s reasons to prefer either, but I played Super Mario Galaxy at a more formative time in my life than Super Mario 64, so it is obviously much better and so is Luigi’s Mansion 3. Though longtime readers will remember I played Luigi’s Mansion 1 at a formative time of my life as well–but we don’t have to talk about it.

If I had to complain about Luigi’s Mansion 3, and I am legally obligated to do so by my FDA (Full Disclosure Agreement), the game is at its worst when it is trying to be most like a video game. The combat requires relatively quick reflexes and movement in a game that is otherwise a walking simulator. Most combat encounters with generic ghosts are fine, and I do enjoy most of the puzzle parts of boss fights, but actually executing a plan with a character that runs at the speed of Mario’s tiptoe walk is not what the game was for. The fight versus the pool ghost is the perfect example. It has a very clever idea at its core by forcing you to send your co-op goo clone to drain the pool while having Luigi distract him. However, judging the amount of time it takes and finding the cover for your goo clone are extremely difficult things to do with the camera zoomed out as far as it does which leads to your goo clone getting wiped out before completing the task and forcing you to start over again.

The second biggest complaint I have with the game is that Luigi forgets he has hands. There are numerous times when I am attempting to interact with some object in a room with one of the 6 different features the Poltergust 3000 comes with that would very easily be operated by someone with, say, a pair of hands and protective gloves. Just pull the rope. Please. Do not make me have to guess the proper angle for sucking the rope into Luigi’s vacuum. It’s annoying.

Finally, the act of collecting gems and money provides the game’s most creative challenges. Unlike in Luigi’s Mansion 1 or even 2, the rewards for finding a dragon’s hoard of treasure is extremely underwhelming. There are only 3 endgame grades you can get for your final level of money, with the highest grade being a mere 70k money. The gems themselves don’t even factor into this judgment and, again, these puzzles for gems are really cool that should’ve been rewarded except by the phrase “a good deed is its own reward”. That sort of thinking is for NARCs, as Tim Rogers would say.

To close this review out, consider this. Big-budget, big-audience triple-A games that involve the indoors all do something to unsettle it. P.T. for instance is a timeloop game about walking down the same hallway over and over as something chases you and other spooky things occur. But step outside the realm of the big boys games for boys only and look at games for women and even younger children than the juveniles that purchase Dead Rising. Games like Style Savvy make the indoors feel welcoming. In Western culture at large, the indoors has been associated with the feminine. Luigi’s Mansion represents the intergender synthesis of the masculine and feminine by making its core premise that of a man (masculine) using a vacuum (feminine) to defeat ghosts (masculine) and clean up (feminine). Think about that.

I hope no one took that last paragraph seriously.

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I am continuing work on the Spyro the Dragon Tim Rogers podcast script! It is hard to write multiple things at a time! I had forgotten everything I wanted to say about Luigi’s Mansion 3 while playing Outer Wilds which is a game I will not be reviewing on this channel. Hoping to write something funny next month.

I know I told all you wonderful patrons supporting me on patreon.com/PungryFTW that I was working on a Tim Rogers-esque podcast essay on Spyro: Reignited Trilogy, but that’s hard work to actually write! Tim Rogers spends full 8 hour (at a minimum) workdays just on editing a 2 minute segment of a video of his. I can’t even spend 8 hours over a week playing video games!

Alright, I confess. I was halfway through Spyro 2 on the Reignited Trilogy when my friends gifted me two games on Steam, VVVVVV and Tape to Tape. I had wishlisted Tape to Tape after trying its demo last year and feeling it was the courteous thing to do for a game in Early Early Access that I enjoyed–kind of like holding the door open after exiting a restaurant’s grand opening after only trying their free samples. VVVVVV was a game 100% off my radar, much like the game’s plot. Nothing other than coincidental timing links these two games together in any way… or is that true????

Well, here’s one link between VVVVVV and Tape to Tape: they can both be played on PC. And here’s another: they both represent the “indie trend” of their time.

VVVVVV is a game released in 2010, developed by Terry Cavanagh with a soundtrack composed by Magnus Palsson and additional support given by Bennett Foddy, of QWOP fame. Put simply, it is a fake retro 2D sidescroller indie game which was all the rage during the time of development. Games such as Braid (2008) and I Wanna Be the Guy (2007) were megahits that revitalized interest in 2D sidescrolling platformers. VVVVVV released during that indie zeitgeist, and was its own moderate success itself due to it.

I want to be clear that VVVVVV is likely to have been made by Terry Cavanagh regardless of the popularity of such new age retro games, but that it is unlikely it would have been as well received. Right now, the game has a 10/10 Steam user review score across 5,769 reviews. It has an 83 on Metacritic from critic reviews. People enjoy this game! And now that I’ve actually played it, it’s pretty clear why: the music is really good.

That’s a bit of a joke. Palsson’s tracks add a lot to the game, but VVVVVV has immense charm and easy-to-recognize gameplay charisma. You control the pixelated version of the stickman I draw as a “human” whenever I am forced to hand-draw something. You can move left or right. When you press the action button (shoutout Tim Rogers), instead of jumping like in a normal platformer, you invert gravity. You can only invert gravity with your feet firmly on the ground. You are required to invert, and subvert, and revert gravity all through a vast dimension to search for your crew of spacemen in order to escape this void your spaceship accidentally teleported into. You will have great difficulty as you quickly learn that the game is a puzzle game with timing elements rather than an action game. The game’s beauty shines through on repeated playthroughs as you learn how to more efficiently clear rooms that gave you extreme trouble your first few times playing them. I personally died on the screen below around 15 times the first time I played the game:

I really lived up to the room’s name, huh? What keeps VVVVVV from being extremely frustrating is the numerous amount of checkpoints that respawn your character should you meet an untimely demise. The game is split into 20 second chunks via these frequent save spots that fall into the simple pattern of observe, plan, execute, repeat. As the game progresses, you are required to do more inventive things with your simple abilities of moving left/right and flipping gravity, such as escorting another character, surviving in a tunnel with an endless amount of trash thrown at you, and planes that flip your gravity when you touch them, but the core loop of observe, plan, execute, repeat remains the same. It’s genius stuff, truly.

That said, I personally did not grow up playing Mega Man 2 or Super Mario Bros: Lost Levels, and thus have zero nostalgia for VVVVVV’s rose colored glasses gameplay. This game had to win me over on its own merits. And I will say, that music went a very long ways towards winning me over. In the same way that someone who has only seen Boss Baby will be reminded of the film whenever they watch another movie, VVVVVV reminded me of the only difficult 2D sidescrolling game I’ve ever played, Metroid Dread. That game too has frequent checkpoints and turns navigation into a major puzzle. Of course, that game came out 10+ years after VVVVVV and has a whole lot more interaction than simply moving left/right and flipping gravity. But it does explain to me why I really enjoyed VVVVVV but had no desire going back to master it. I still haven’t replayed Metroid Dread even though that game also begs you to redo the script faster and better. I think I don’t enjoy full mastery of games. Unless it’s Super Mario Strikers.

See, VVVVVV did get me mad. The Final Challenge killed me 41 times because there’s zero time to observe what to do. It’s one of the two times in the game you are put on a deliberate clock and have to observe while dying in order to not die the next time. These two segments are incongruous with the rest of the game. And I say that as someone who tried to clear most rooms off of instinct alone rather than thought. There is a certain level of genius behind Cavanagh’s design here, though. Playing a platformer is similar to running in real life, you feel best when in a flow state. VVVVVV generally encourages the flow state by setting up rooms in a way that allow a player “in the groove” to clear without thought and with constant action. Now, the whole game isn’t designed for this flow state–lord knows I died to a number of obstacles when transitioning between screens that I couldn’t have possibly prepared for without seeing them first–but enough of the game is made in a way to keep the player moving and grooving to the beat of Palsson’s tunes to make a nice little rhythm game.

VVVVVV shows its Braid influences with a deceptively abstract minimalist story. Your character finds missives on TVs in the abandoned dimension that seem like nonsense individually but tell a tragic tale of how some people before your crew found themselves in the same dimension due to a number of scientific anomalies and presumably passed away. Your character in the present moment is only concerned with getting his crewmates rescued, and never acknowledges these missives, nor does he acknowledge his ability to flip gravity. It just is for the character. Us players with our understanding of dramatic irony start to worry that maybe saving the crew won’t get the team out of the abandoned dimension, and that they’re just a thinly veiled metaphor for the loss of minimalist, pixelated 2D sidescrollers in the first place. No crew of game developers can fully revive the abandoned dimension of the 2D sidescroller–they can only teleport in with their own twist, and teleport out to something else once complete. Which is why Terry Cavanagh went on to make Dicey Dungeons.

All of these words are for me to say that I recognize how VVVVVV came out of the retro 2D sidescrolling zeitgeist and that I can appreciate how well Terry Cavanagh executed his take on the genre, but I simply do not have the same love affair with those games. I enjoyed VVVVVV but was not inspired to replay it for any of its low death achievements. I played both Mega Man 9 AND 10 on the Wii out of a weird feeling of obligation that I had to play them for modern historical purposes, and stopped playing both before I even cleared a stage in either game. Heck, the only truly old pixel game I’ve played was the GBA remake of Super Mario Bros 3, not even the original. I haven’t even played a real NES! So VVVVVV fell on deaf hands. Still liked it.

Time passed, and indie games started getting made by more and more people. Soon enough, the hardcore gamers that learned how to code their own Kaizo Mario romhacks were replaced by people who wanted to feel things other than anger while playing games. Undertale (2015) ushered in the next indie game zeitgeist by making all indie devs decide to make their own spin on Earthbound, which led to some beautiful gems like Omori and, well, Undertale (Poser alert: never played Undertale or Deltarune, no plans to do so).

Following Undertale, indie gaming continued to flourish. More and more people got into developing games as game making tools became easier to access and use. The game Celeste (2018) proved that indie 2D platformers still had room to grow. Pizza Tower (2023) was the most recent 2D platforming indie hit and it has inspired its own suite of imitators to come over the next few years to keep sidescrolling platformers relevant. But the roguelike card game Slay the Spire (2019) became the defining indie game once it was released, and the path it paved for roguelikes is the mold the other game I titled this blog post for (Tape to Tape) is within.

Slay the Spire wasn’t the first indie roguelike to be popular. Heck, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (2006) even pre-dates Braid. A roguelike used to mean a game like Rogue, hence the name. And not like Rouge the Bat. Spelunky (2008), Binding of Isaac (2011) and FTL (2012) were some of the first popular indie games that took elements from roguelikes and placed them in more comprehensible game styles. In general, a roguelike has permadeath (you have to restart the entire game should you reach a losing state once), randomized level design, randomized access to items or abilities (or their equivalents), emphasis on player learning and memorization of skills or tricks, and no actual relation to the game Rogue. What makes a roguelike interesting is that you have to make tough decisions on what the best course of action is based on incomplete information. Compared to a game like VVVVVV where you can memorize the entire game and execute a script like a robot, a roguelike that is well designed forces players to constantly make sub-optimal decisions to adapt to the situation in front of them.

Again, Slay the Spire was not the first roguelike that did this well, but it certainly became the Earthbound of Roguelikes in how it influenced the genre. Tape to Tape especially took notes. Tape to Tape is a roguelike arcade hockey game. You play as Angus McShaggy, a golfer-turned-hockey-player that seeks the cup at the center of The Promised Land in order to reverse the defrosting of the world. It’s a silly story with silly dialogue that you only have to see once should you win. You have to win 9 games in order to win a run of Tape to Tape. At the start of a run, you choose another “superstar” with their own special ability to join your team and get three benchwarmers to fill out your squad. Between required games, the player can choose between taking their team to a practice game for the chance to earn a random new ability to equip to a player, to training in order to boost every player’s stats directly, or to an event where a bunch of random things can happen, some good, some bad.

Slay the Spire has 3 distinct acts, Tape to Tape has 3 distinct acts. Slay the Spire has artifacts that boost your character’s abilities, Tape to Tape has artefacts that boost your team’s abilities. Slay the Spire has random events, Tape to Tape has random events. Slay the Spire has a map screen that gives players some amount of choice over what they wish to do on a given floor, Tape to Tape has a map screen. Slay the Spire has an Ascension system where the player can gradually increase the difficulty of the game as they win runs, Tape to Tape is almost certainly developing an Ascension-esque system to do the same thing. Or at the very least, the devs are working on an equivalent act 4 like in Slay the Spire.

That isn’t to say everything is the same. For one, Slay the Spire is a player-vs-enemy card game, Tape to Tape is an arcade hockey game. In Slay the Spire, you will lose a fight if you fail to build a good deck. In Tape to Tape, you can win any game even if you fail to meaningfully improve your team just because it’s an arcade hockey game; you have much more control over winning and losing since there’s never a time you’ll be dogged by a bad draw like in Slay the Spire. Another key difference between the games is in meta-progression. In Slay the Spire, you unlock 15 character-specific cards and artifacts after a few runs with each character and these don’t actually increase or decrease your chance to win necessarily. In Tape to Tape, as the player wins games, they earn Rubber which can be used to buy unlocked superstars, skills, or increase Angus’ stats; the player will be able to brute force their way to winning a run after playing long enough by simply having a super-powerful Angus and a super-powerful superstar unlike Slay the Spire which always requires real thought.

I think that’s enough of a compare/contrast essay. Let’s get to my actual thoughts about Tape to Tape. I think the game’s fun! I never played NHL 94 which is what the game is most inspired by, but I did play a ton of Mario Sports Mix’s hockey which is basically the same thing. I think adding the roguelike elements into NHL 94 and ripping off Slay the Spire’s structure gives a great excuse to play a bunch of arcade hockey. Season modes just aren’t as compelling as the Slay the Spire random 3 act structure. I also feel the game nails the speed, fun, and chaotic energy of an arcade sports game like NBA Jam. There’s something primally satisfying about speeding down the wing and setting up a slapshot one-timer for a goal. The game is also quite funny and flavorful. The first boss team you play against is a team of referees that will once-per-game negate one of your goals and once-per-game grant themselves a goal arbitrarily. That’s hilariously infuriating! All the other enemy teams are equally well-flavored and make it as entertaining as possible to lose to them.

Now the cons I have with the game. First and foremost, I do not find the map screen compelling. The events are so random that it feels like it’s never worth going for them except to save time. Compared to giving your team straight stat boosts, they’re too much a headache. Also, the individual talents you get from winning practice games are all pretty uncompelling. I’m not sure what playstyle a talent like Berserk (+30 checking, play without a stick) is for, but it ain’t for me. Those I think are pretty universal complaints. My complaint as an individual is that enemy goalies get too good too fast in act 2 at the moment. I lost to the Princess team the first 9 times I played them and only scored 2 goals in those 9 games despite outshooting them by 10+ shots every game. I still don’t fully understand how I ended up beating them eventually in that 9th game. I also have this bizarre issue with the game’s performance during the final boss where there’s input lag while the framerate somehow increases to 60 FPS after being at 30 FPS the rest of the game. Very strange.

As I finish writing this, I’m halfway through Spyro 3 on the Reignited Trilogy and the proud player and completer of VVVVVV and Tape to Tape. I’ve really grown throughout this month of January as you might be able to tell. I’ll probably play Tape to Tape down the road as the game gets closer to full release and then is fully released, but I find it unlikely I’ll play VVVVVV again. They should’ve made it a roguelike.

I’ve directly resold two games back to GameStop in my life. The first was Luigi’s Mansion, because it was too scary. The second was Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth. Also because it was too scary, but specifically because the second case is a murder case on an airplane, and I was about to spend a large portion of my upcoming life on long airplane trips. Why am I saying this? No real reason.

Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, henceforth referred to as AAI1, turned out to be a great game to be scared of. Case 3 has a terrifying image in its intro cutscene that really spooked me (screenshot from this video by MegamanNG, yeah I watched that 4 hour video about how bad plagiarism on YouTube is, what of it?)

I watched someone else play cases 3, 4, and 5 a few weeks after reselling the game because I love Ace Attorney and needed to know what happened, then proceeded to immediately forget just about everything that happened in these cases. And I found out eventually that was the community consensus around AAI1. Aside from case 4 setting up a really intriguing hook, nothing else in the game resonated the same way other Ace Attorney games do. Edgeworth and Gumshoe alone could not save a game that only had 2 of the characters on the cover show up in exactly 2 cases in prominent roles. It was a strangely boring game in a series that consistently makes engaging soap opera dramas.

AAI1 came out in 2009 in Japan and ended up selling poorly enough in America that the sequel, Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Path (AAI2), never got translated out of the Japanese language. Officially, that is. But Ace Attorney has a large enough fanbase that someone was going to take it upon themselves to get it translated. Well, not just some*one* stepped up, a huge amount of fans got together on the Court-Records Ace Attorney forum and other online locations, and localized the game over the course of 3 years. I’m hesitant to link the actual forum post in case a bot scrapes this blog no one’s heard of and puts it in a big enough spotlight that forces Capcom to send a C&D letter or DMCA claim that gets the whole thing taken down, but it’s pretty easy to find if you search for Ace Attorney Investigations 2 English patch. Everyone who put the patch together is a great person and they all deserve the credit they’re given in the long forum post.

I personally played AAI2 some 3 years or so after it was “released”. Despite being a die-hard Ace Attorney fan since watching ZSlyzer’s playthroughs of the DS games (which was also how I experienced AAI1 originally), I was only mildly aware of AAI2 as a game at all, let alone its sterling reputation as Ace Attorney Investigations But Good.

I want to take a brief detour here to say that most people these days get into Ace Attorney by watching other people playing the games. I’m still a weirdo because ZSlyzer uploaded commentary-free playthroughs of the games whereas current day fans likely got into the games because one of their favorite streamers played Ace Attorney with a webcam on them as they yelled and reacted bombastically to the twists and turns. There are plenty of fans of the series who have not even played the games, and that’s totally okay. I’m saying this to give myself a very small amount of defense from my own imagined haters who would take me to task for falsely pretending to be any sort of Ace Attorney fanboy if I didn’t voice act one of the new characters put into AAI2.

Back to my previous topic. I have one friend in my life that I personally have met who has played and enjoyed Ace Attorney. I was on the couch with him when he first heard The Storyteller’s testimony at the end of Professor Layton x Ace Attorney some 6 years ago. He and I called each other every day to discuss Great Ace Attorney Chronicles as we each progressed through the game. So I have a great amount of trust and rapport with him as an Ace Attorney-head, as we fans of Ace Attorney call ourselves. He had played AAI2’s English translation at some point well before me and said “AAI2 is the best game in the series”. He’s since put Great Ace Attorney Chronicles above it, but understand that such a lofty rating at that time by a man whose opinion I trust a great deal made me quite interested in actually playing this game.

If you know me, you know I’m a bit of a contrarian. So because I went into AAI2 expecting greatness, I was really expecting it to be meh. A large reason for this is my aforementioned distaste of AAI1 which I think is the only game in the Ace Attorney series I think qualifies as a bad game. I didn’t really believe in Ace Attorney Investigations as a format that could be a quality game, and I think I will take time in this extremely long review of AAI2 to flesh out the problems I have with AAI1. I apologize, but I’ve been watching more than just the one 4 hour YouTube essay lately.

From a macro level, Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth is a game that doesn’t really know what it’s trying to do. Rather, it knows what it is not allowed to do. The game takes place over the course of two weeks and comes directly after the ending of Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations but before any major incidents that lead to the events of Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice. AAI1 is a very tightly-written video game due to these limitations, and while “tightly-written” is almost always a compliment for a video game, it is a negative here. I would argue that the writers were so focused on what they couldn’t write that they ended up not writing much of anything. My mother advised me when I was young to draw the negative space around a figure in order to improve my art. I continued to draw the world’s worst rectangle figures but in a slightly different style. AAI1 is writing the negative space around Miles Edgeworth.

Miles Edgeworth has multiple character arcs in the original trilogy prior to AAI1. He starts as the snooty rival in AA1 (not AAI1 which is not AA Eleven using the Roman numeral I next to a 1 like it’s Danganronpa V3) that stops at nothing to get a guilty verdict in case 2, progresses to helping Phoenix find the truth at risk of losing in case 3, then finds himself sympathetic to the very criminals he prosecuted in case 4. He disappears for AA2 only to reappear at the end to again assist Phoenix pursue the truth rather than victory. And in AA3, he even turns in his prosecutor’s badge temporarily to be a defense attorney to assist Phoenix after he has literally fallen ill which actually sets up AAI2 far better than AAI1 now that I think on it but we’ll get there. My point is that he already has had a major character arc from start to end. AAI1 is not allowed to simply retell this arc by making him regress, nor is it allowed to progress his arc in a radically different way. But I figure that the writers of AAI1 weren’t yet confident in progressing Miles’ character in small steps when AAI1 was getting written, and so they instead opted for an easier path: case 4 of AAI1 is set some ten years ago when Miles is the brainwashed pawn of Manfred Von Karma and you, the player, get to fill in the gaps of what happened to Edgeworth between then and now with your own understanding of his arc and essentially imagine a much better written game than what is on display here.

All other characters in the game follow a similar story. Franziska Von Karma is a bratty nine year old trying to earn daddy’s favor in case 4, and you have to reconcile that immature image of her with the current-day reality of her as a prodigy prosecutor for Interpol. I’d say Gumshoe has the same thing happen to him, but he is an arc-less man who will never be anything but a beloved goofball.

Three new characters that the game tricks you into thinking are prominent characters for AAI1’s story all get the same treatment, even though they are new characters and you cannot actually fill the gaps between case 4 and present day to understand how the grow. I mean, you kind of can fill in those gaps with Kay Faraday, the Maya Fey of Edgeworth, who was also 8 or 9 years old during case 4. Not that she even has a real arc to her story. Her father gets murdered in case 4 where you find out he was a member of the legendary Great Thief group Yatagarasu and her “arc” is that she will carry on that legacy by being a thief of truth… but that’s not really an arc at all. Also, another time where the father in Ace Attorney is either dead or a bad guy. You do not hear about many mothers at all, and the amount of deadbeat or dead or beat dads there are in this series will make you think the writers have extreme dad issues. Regardless, Kay has almost zero arc to her character in part because she is in 3 of 5 cases, and in one of those cases she is 8 or 9 years old. Despite being a cover character, Kay is less developed than Ini Miney from AA2-2.

Shi-Long Lang and his partner-in-law (not in that way (probably)) Shih-na are the two other “important” characters the game goes out of its way to highlight. Lang is the primary rival of this game, meant to be Edgeworth’s Edgeworth, but he only shows up in two cases! There isn’t enough back-and-forth with this guy for him to be an interesting character. He is purely an obstacle until, like in every Ace Attorney game when the rival helps you out in the final case, Lang helps you out in the final case. Shih-na ends up having the most extreme arc out of any character, and I don’t think she says more than 3 lines as Shih-na. Spoiler alert, Shih-na is Calisto Yew. Spoiler alert, Calisto Yew is the mole in the Yatagarasu group that got Kay’s dad killed and also covered up the tracks of the real villains of the story, a smuggling ring. Spoiler alert, this game that’s about solving 5 murders is actually about a smuggling ring. Spoiler alert, who on earth could care about a smuggling ring. You play as literal narcs in the Ace Attorney series, but I don’t think any of the good characters in the games with good moral compasses would give one iota of a care about a smuggling ring. Machi Tobaye is a member of one such smuggling ring in Apollo Justice and you still defend the man.

I’m getting off topic. The point of this is that Shih-na being Calisto Yew, who you do actually have a bit of a confrontation with in case 4 when she’s her triple agent self as a defense attorney, member of Yatagarasu, and lapdog of the smuggling ring. Oh, another side note. There isn’t even a cool name of the smuggling ring. It’s always called the “smuggling ring”. Come on. But while you talk to Calisto Yew 10 years before the game starts, you hear, again, 3 lines from Shih-na before you figure out she was the mole. Probably because the instant you see Shih-na laugh, you know she’s Calisto Yew. Check out my favorite animation from the game:

All of this leads me back to my original point: despite a lot happening in two weeks in AAI1, nothing actually happens because nothing *can* happen. At least, not to main character Miles Edgeworth. The side characters and new guys are where things *could’ve* happened, but no. Instead, cases 1 and 2 are filler, with case 2 scarring me for life. Case 3 is a boring slog that serves as a way to finally introduce the other important people in the plot but also features an extended Mike Meekins cameo that no one asked for in addition to a stupid resolution to a stupid kidnapping that was stupidly faked for stupid money. A good amount of people consider it to be the worst case in the series, and they may not be that off.

Case 4 is the only interesting case in the game. Both because it is the only time in the game where you see characters in altered states, but because the hook is genuinely interesting. A witness who is about to provide evidence of the “smuggling ring” (come on, name it something like “karasu” which is raven in Japanese because it is the enemy of the “yatagarasu” which is a crow) is murdered at the trial she would’ve appeared at. Young Edgeworth does some good investigating to uncover that the witness’ sister, Calisto, the defense attorney, was the one who committed said murder and further foul play to hide the smuggling ring’s existence. But when you confront her having figured this out, she vanishes, and that is the hook that sets up case 5.

Case 5 is a really long and boring anti-climax. Well, most people think it’s really long. I found it to be of an okay enough length that has poor pacing at the end when every new revelation takes place in the same location with random witness after random witness being the ones to keep the final confrontation going until Larry Butz delivers the final blow (like I said, I’ve been watching a lot of video essays where a sentence like that is allowed). There’s some legitimate creativity in how the murder at the center of the case was carried out and covered up over country lines at the embassy it takes place in, but it was obvious from the moment you saw Quercus Alba that he was behind everything. What a stupid name. Who names their kid “White Oak” in Latin. You blast his nose off his face, the game ends with you wrapping up the smuggling ring, and restoring some small peace between Allebahst and Babahl, two nations that used to be Cohdopia. In all honesty, I have no idea why this sort of tension between countries that used to be one country even made its way into the game, but the nation of Cohdopia received far more character development than any of the characters. Maybe global politics was really the story behind AAI1.

Boy that would really suck!

Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Path (which prosecutor? guess you’ll have to play to find out) or AAI2 is really what AAI1 should’ve been. It is again working in the limitations of being set between Trials and Tribulations and Apollo Justice which means that nothing that happens in the game can really matter unless it matters to the side characters that will never be seen again in the main series. I feel like the writers behind AAI2 decided to be nicer than the writers behind the MCU since you are not expected to have played any of the spinoffs of Ace Attorney to understand every Ace Attorney game in the main series, you are only expected to have played the main series.

However, AAI2 does have a small and important character arc for Edgeworth. See, I mentioned that he takes the role of a defense attorney in Trials and Tribulations when Phoenix literally fell ill, a joke I wanted to make again because I think it is very clever. I framed it then as he “turns in his prosecutor’s badge” to do this in that case, but it is not until AAI2 when he actually does turn in his badge in pursuit of the truth. Heck, Edgeworth breaks multiple laws in order to bring down a much greater evil than a simple smuggling ring run by high officials with governmental power. He brings down an auction ring run by high officials with governmental power. Well, more so power over the justice system than power over the entire government, but still.

In the end, because this is a game about a prosecutor on his path rather than a defense attorney, the narrative around Edgeworth and his indecision between choosing to be a prosecutor or a defense attorney climaxes into case 5 where the “defendant” of case 2 turns out to be a criminal that deserved prosecution. That culprit simply deserved prosecution for a different crime than the one they were originally pegged for. Phoenix doesn’t get the chance to ever re-defend a person guilty for one crime yet innocent for one later. The closest you get to that is in 2-4 where you’re allowed to call your client not guilty as effectively judge, jury, and executioner but doing so gives you one of the series’ two bad endings when him being not guilty causes an assassin to stalk him forever. The narrative has to make Edgeworth’s choice back to the prosecution easy because it is necessary to set up future games, so AAI2 pulls a reverse double jeopardy to make sure players don’t get confused by cases 2-4 featuring Edgeworth act as an actual defense attorney in role and spirit.

I could talk about Edgeworth’s arc all day, but I just want to reiterate that AAI2 expertly threads the needle in depicting his internal struggle between his badge and his morals. It is very unlike AAI1 when Edgeworth spends the whole game being a smug son of a gun that only barely bends the law to capture Querces Alba but is never personally challenged. Edgeworth remains an extremely smug son of a gun in AAI2 where he envisions entire conversations as chess battles.

Logic chess is one of a few different minigames that AAI2 brings out to break up the rudimentary investigations that have always boiled down in AA games as “click on everything, talk to everyone, present everything to everyone”. Logic chess is a timed dialogue tree where you have to select the right dialogue options before time runs out. It is extremely simple because Miles Edgeworth plays logic chess and all his opponents play logic checkers. I find it thematically interesting as it fits Edgeworth’s character while not fitting any other character’s MO, especially not the ones that he beats in logic chess.

The final logic chess duel is against my favorite new character, Sebastian Debeste, where Edgeworth comes in with the intention of asking Debeste why he was tied up in his father’s house and ends with Edgeworth reaffirming Sebastian’s sense of self-worth and sending him on the correct prosecutor’s path. Edgeworth barely gets one line of actual worth from Debeste and imparts him with much more important words instead. It’s a remarkable show-don’t-tell of Edgeworth’s growth compared to where he was even at the start of the game where he used logic chess to expressly go against a journalist’s moral code of not revealing her scoops to anyone. If Edgeworth from case 5 used logic chess on Nicole Swift in case 1, he would’ve actually assisted Nicole in writing her article or giving usable real-life advice about the fleeting fame of pursuing The Next Big Thing. Conversely, case 1 Edgeworth logic chessing case 5 Debeste would lead in Sebastian voluntarily tying himself back up and putting the gag back in his mouth.

To bring it back to logic chess as a whole, I want to talk about AAI’s rhythm. AAI1 was written poorly in part because it didn’t know a good rhythm yet. Ace Attorney has the greatest structure in gaming history: the wild back and forth courtroom days are given time to breathe with more methodical, introspective investigations. AAI1 had to figure out how to deliver the drama of the courtroom while only taking place during the plodding investigations. It couldn’t really do that, so it broke up investigations with the same cross-examination gameplay of a standard Ace Attorney trial that would come up after an investigation scene as a bit of a pop quiz. These are when those big dramatic confrontations happen and are fine but feel like a crutch in the AAI games overall as they aren’t taking advantage of the hook. AAI1 and 2 both lean heavily on the cross-examination gameplay.

The other two things used to break things up are the common gameplay system of Logic and the very uncommon gameplay in Little Thief mode. Little Thief mode is investigating the past with a tool that simulates a location at a given time and using the evidence and knowledge of the present to determine the veracity of that simulation. This means that Edgeworth presents evidence to literal objects and yells “Eureka” as if a puddle of grape juice by the evidence would understand that the broken grape juice bottle in your inventory contradicted the scene. Very funny mental image. Little Thief comes up maybe 5 times across both games and is just really strange. I do not think the writers fully figured out what was going on with it, but Kay Faraday needed something so this is what she got. Also, the music is godawful.

Logic is not logic chess. It is logic solitaire. As you investigate things, Edgeworth remembers pertinent information that you then have to connect. This adds a fourth step to the usual “click on everything, talk to everyone, present everything to everyone” investigations where you now “think about everything”. I think this is useful for players out there expecting a kinetic novel from Ace Attorney where they never personally have to think as the action unfolds, but it ends up feeling like a bit of a timewaster. I know that math teachers want you to show your work, but I never want to understand Professor Layton’s logic as he deduces that the girl he was traveling with for 2 days was actually a man twice as tall as the girl he was impersonating. Do not make me be the one to explain how counterfeit money using Babahlese ink wound up in Allebahastian. Or at least make me explain something more interesting. God! AAI1. Uh, anyway, it’s in AAI2 that is only slightly interesting in case 5 when you can’t actually clear out every thought bubble between each segment.

Now that I’ve broken up my part of the review about the characters in AAI2 with the gameplay mechanics in AAI2, it’s time to go back. I’ll be brief this time. Kay Faraday continues to be the girl without an arc. She gets amnesia in case 4, and regains her memories at the end. Her arc is exactly the same as the first game–a book of promises turns Kay from a child into an adult, with no viewing of the internal mechanisms that govern her maturity. Awful sentence there, christ.

Sebastian Debeste, as I said, is the best character. Joke character the entire game until his dad tells him he’s an extreme idiot and accidentally kidnaps him. This, like I said, prompts a logic chess battle where Edgeworth tells him that, even though Sebastian sucks, he did make it far enough to be a prosecutor. And he might as well try to be a good one. The writers of AA Dual Destinies liked this idea so much they made a way worse version in Hugh O’Conner for case 3. What an absolute goofball Debeste is. Look at this.

Beautiful. His partner-in-law, Justine Courtney, is actually the game’s real rival. Unlike Shi-Long Lang, she shows up from case 2 and is constantly in your way. She’s quite mean in cases 2 and 3. Many people disliked Nahyuta Sadmahdi from Spirit of Justice, and Justine Courtney is quite similar in how she uses her spirituality as a moral cudgel. Constantly citing the “Goddess of Law” as this mythical, religious icon that can do no wrong, she does everything she can in cases 2 and 3 to push the narrative set by the far more powerful.

What makes Justine quite interesting as a figure more so than her writing (she can be overbearing in her constant rudeness) is who she is as a character. She is a mother. Ace Attorney is a series overwhelmingly about dads and bad dads, including AAI2. There are some moms in the series. There is very very rarely interaction between a mom and their child where both parties are aware of their relationship. For instance, case 3-5 has Maya and her mother meeting, but Maya is unaware. In that same case, Pearls says she talked extensively with her mother about preparing for what happened in case 3-5, but the player does not see them directly interact. Case 4-3 has Apollo and Trucy talking to their mother but neither party realizes they are related. Case 5-5 has Athena Cykes discuss her past trauma involving her mom and quotes her mom, but we do not see them interact. Case 6-5 has Rayfa interacting a ton with her mom… who was in disguise the whole time without her knowing.

AAI2 is not so different from this pattern of motherly weirdness. Justine is not *actually* the mother of John Marsh, she is his adoptive mother after a series of a bunch of crazy events I won’t get into. But all the same, she embodies the role of a mother. You *never* see a character in Ace Attorney actually act like a mother. Justine does a lot in the name of her son, and does even more in order to protect his life when the Goddess of Law decides to kidnap her son and make her pass judgments as a ransom. It’s a little sad that AAI2’s writers finally wrote a mom character and then made her ultra-dependent on her son–just a bit too cliche an arc.

I will say that Justine in case 4 is a very good character. After spending cases 2 and 3 completely on the side of the Goddess of Law and against Edgeworth’s side, she uses her moral self-superiority as a gavel against Blaise Debeste, the actual-but-corrupt god of law. It is always fun when the rival Ace Attorney character makes that turn at the end of the game to join your side and take down the real bad guy, and Justine plays that part perfectly.

I would like to quickly say that Ace Attorney games on the DS have by far the best graphics of any Ace Attorney game, and they always will. Look at how perfect this animation combined with her character design and clothing sums up Judge Justine Courtney’s character as a pious follower of the Goddess of Law. Beautiful.

The last important new character is Ray Shields. If you’ve ever played an Ace Attorney game, you can tell by his last name that he is a defense attorney. Specifically, he was Gregory Edgeworth’s final apprentice and proceeded to take over the Edgeworth Law Offices once Gregory passed away. Gregory is, of course, Miles’ father. You’d think someone like this guy would’ve come up at some point in the mainline games, especially during case 1-4, but Ray held deep disdain for Miles when he saw Miles go down the Von Karma path. Which is explained in AAI2-3 quite well.

Ray goes through his character arc pretty quickly. He hates Miles for abandoning his father, is forced by circumstance in case 2 to take Miles as an “assistant”, forgives Miles by the end of case 2 as Miles does act as a defense attorney in that case, and fully forgives Miles at the end of case 3 when Miles helps exorcise the demonic case 18 years prior that saw Gregory pass away. Ray is a real nice guy that’s only slightly a creep around women as he asks for them to hug him at any opportunity he gets. Not much else to say about him other than he is there to help Miles reconnect with Gregory in spirit and in reality while also being a helpful guy. It is nice to see him insofar as it is nice to see Ace Attorney put together a tightly-written (positive) arc for a side character because that really doesn’t happen so much over the course of the games. Have Trucy Wright or Pearls Fey developed as people at all?

And with all the characters done for, I can go over the case-by-case thoughts I have and end this extremely long post.

Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Path Case 1 tries to bridge the gap between games 1 and 2 immediately. It opens with the President of Zheng Fa making a visit to Japanifornia, the home country of Ace Attorney as fans lovingly call it, where the president declares his thanks for the squashing of the smuggling ring that had plagued his nation. While it wasn’t the headquarters of the smuggling ring, players of AAI1 will barely remember Zheng Fa as the home country of Shi-Long Lang, who himself is barely remembered in this game at the very end.

Anyway, the president makes his declaration that the war on drugs isn’t over when a gunshot rings out and everyone goes into scramble mode. Immediately, someone unnamed on the scene decides that someone needs to contact the High Prosecutor’s Office in order to get “that man” on the case. That man being, of course, Miles Edgeworth. Now, this framing of the game is strange. The character who makes the call to Edgeworth is the Chief Prosecutor. You see the back of the head of the Chief Prosecutor later on in the case. You are never given his name–it’s just some gray-haired guy that presumably took the role after AA1-5 (not AAI1-5) saw Lana Skye, the then-Chief, go to jail. I do not understand why the game never gives you this guy’s face or name. It’d have been refreshing to have a higher up in an Ace Attorney game be a nice guy for once. It gets especially confusing later when a different former Chief Prosecutor decides to make Edgeworth’s life miserable starting in case 2, making the player wonder why the guy who called in Edgeworth is doing this to him. This is all a nitpick but it’s really strange that the writers couldn’t figure out a more natural way to get Edgeworth to this case. Just have him already be in the crowd because it was tangentially connected to AAI1-5 (not AA1-5) when he led the charge against the smuggling ring. The most logical reason is that the president of Zheng Fa would’ve set this publicity stunt up in order to thank Edgeworth on stage, but that was thrown out because it would ruin the mystery.

The first mystery is what actually happened after the gunshot. Edgeworth shows up, gets accosted by a wannabe reporter, and is informed that Zheng Fa’s plane carries extraterritorial judiciary rights. Which is a concept that AAI1-5 players know well. So even before getting to solve a mystery, Edgeworth has to prove to the staff that the incident took place outside by solving a different mystery. Ace Attorney’s cases are sometimes akin to a Zelda dungeon where progress through the dungeon requires solving a seemingly-unrelated puzzle for a small key to get through. At any rate, Edgeworth gathers enough incidental info to find out that the assassination attempt got a bodyguard killed rather than the president.

The first suspect for the murder is found by following the trail of a bloody red rain jacket. It leads you to Shelly de Killer, a memorable character from AA2-4 that, as his name spells out, is a professional assassin. Some people profess frustration that Ace Attorney’s world gives a veneer of realism while also having literal spirit channeling. All I gotta say is that the assassins in Ace Attorney are way more unrealistic than spirit channelers. The whole reason why AA1-4 happens is because a spirit channeler channels a human who realistically tells a lie in order to save his nine-year old son from thinking he killed someone. Shelly de Killer’s escapades on screen are way crazier than that, let alone getting into the jobs he’s said to have completed. There’s a second assassin in this game who feels like a joke character from the writers who thought “how can we make an even larger than life assassin than Shelly de Killer”, but I’ll get into that later. For now, people who dislike spirit channeling in the “realistic” world of Ace Attorney, get over yourselves!

You grill Shelly who says he *was* hired to assassinate the president, but that he didn’t and wouldn’t kill the bodyguard that died because Shelly de Killer is an assassin with honor. Again, how ridiculous is that?! So then Edgeworth and Gumshoe (oh yeah Gumshoe is here) are led to ask the reporter, Nicole Swift, her involvement with the incident. I gotta say, Nicole Swift is my second-favorite new character in the game. That may just be because I wanted to be a journalist and she is a journalist who says “I forgot rule one of journalism… always tell the truth” at one point during this case. Also, look at her design.

It just looks awesome! I don’t even care that a journalist randomly has a bear trap. Edgeworth bullies Swift with logic chess to get her to go against her morals and force her to reveal that she affixed a laser pointer on the president. This causes everyone to suspect her of the assassination attempt and I am very thankful that Nicole Swift was not the murderer. It’d be too cruel. No, instead you spend more time investigating and get the approval to take a look at the president’s airplane despite the extraterritorial rights. An airplane AND extraterritorial rights? All of my favorite parts of AAI1 remixed in one case!

Further investigation of the plane leads you to conclude that the assassination attempt was staged all along and that one of the bodyguards was the one behind the staging. You push a little further and it turns out that this same bodyguard also shot the other bodyguard in a fit of jealous rage. All in all, it’s a longer case 1 than you might expect that has a few interesting turns for a case 1. The Great Ace Attorneys and Apollo Justice are the only other case 1s that are as complex, not that complexity is necessarily good. Case 1 may have a really tenuous reason for Edgeworth’s involvement, but case 2 uses the momentum to put Edgeworth further down a path that will overlap many times with the events set in motion by case 1. A prosecutor’s path! Hmm, that joke’s timing got missed as bad as a Yu-Gi-Oh card.

Case 2 opens with Edgeworth and Gumshoe visiting the detention center to meet with the now-accused murderer from case 1, Horace Knightley. You see, Horace Knightley likes chess and looks like a horse. He is a reference to the game of checkers. While there, Ray Shields shows up to talk to Knightley as well, as a defense attorney. This sort of coincidence makes so much more sense than the coincidence that had the Chief Prosecutor call Miles Edgeworth from the scene at case 1. Basically everything other than the very first thing that happens in this game makes logical sense. I don’t think I will ever get over the weirdness of the Chief Prosecutor in case 1 who is never seen again. What is he doing the rest of this game? I feel the game says without directly saying it what happens considering the main antagonist, but I’ll get to him later.

Edgeworth and Shields have a terse meeting where Shields is not over Miles’ betrayal of his father in that Gregory Edgeworth was a defense attorney and Miles went under Manfred Von Karma’s tutelage as a prosecutor instead. Case 3 is all about exorcising that demon, so I won’t get into that here. After some time of waiting, a guard tells those gathered waiting to speak to Horace Knightley that he has been found dead in the prison. Si Monkeyes (Simon Keyes), is pinned with the crime, and defense attorney Ray Shields nominates himself as the defense attorney for Si Monkeyes. Edgeworth decides that he’s already too connected to whatever’s going on and demands to be a part of the case. Shields reluctantly lets Miles act as his assistant. Here, we see Miles give up a cornerstone of his identity for the past 18 years of his life in order to accomplish something even more important to him. It’s more abstract in case 2 than it is later in the game, but still shows his resolve. Also, Miles thinks to himself how “that man” changed him that time, referring of course to the influence of Larry Butz on him mellowing out.

I’m not going to get to into the details of case 2 because I find it rather laborious and lengthy. The murder happened in a… special prison where every inmate is assigned an animal buddy for rehabilitation purposes. Jael Bird has a polar bear cub, for instance. You want to talk about spirit channeling being unrealistic again? At some point in this case, Justine Courtney and Sebastian Debeste make their presence known where they declare themselves emissaries of the P.I.C. (yeah you know me).

The P.I.C. or Prosecutorial Investigation Committee is a satire of those “do nothing” committees that theoretically supervise the actions of some governing group and keep them honest. What makes the P.I.C. effective satire of those groups is that the P.I.C. actually does stuff, namely boot out any potential rogue prosecutors that actually believe in good morals over corruptly manhandling the criminal system for personal profit and maximum public pain. Hmm, maybe it isn’t a satire after all.

The P.I.C.’s existence makes a ton of sense for the world of Ace Attorney. The prosecutor’s office is a complete mess after Phoenix Wright starts. In case 1-4, Wright reveals Manfred Von Karma’s extreme corruption to the public by getting him indicted both for a murder that happened some 15 years ago and for coming up with the plot for murdering another person in the present day. At the time, Von Karma was the most respected and feared prosecutor who had gone 40 years as a prosecutor without losing a case.

Then, the very next case Wright takes on in case 1-5, he implicates the chief of police, Damon Gant, as a man who used blackmail and other dark tactics to get his current position. Moreover, Gant murdered a man and created fake evidence to make the Chief Prosecutor, Lana Skye, a pawn of his to get whatever results he wanted in trial.

Justice for All doesn’t reckon with these monumental changes, but the absolute disarray of the prosecutor’s office is seen in Trials and Tribulations where the current best prosecutor 2 years after Von Karma, Skye, and Gant’s expulsions is Godot, a man who had not prosecuted a single case in his life prior to case 3-2, nor did anyone else at the prosecutor’s office even know who he was.

In short, if you take Ace Attorney as simply a satire, these circumstances surrounding the prosecutor’s office are heightened exaggerations that make for more dramatic outcomes and soap opera reactions. If you want to take the world of Ace Attorney as an actual setting for something more than a satire, these shakeups need to be acknowledged in a meaningful way.

Apollo Justice and Dual Destinies grapple with this from an abstract perspective where the concept of the “dark age of the law” is constantly discussed in reference to the public’s complete lack of faith in the court system. However, it’s a lot of telling rather than showing this unease. Apollo Justice shows the start of the dark age with Phoenix’s disbarment, and a theoretical hopeful ending of the dark age with its pro-jury system final case (which was ripped from the headlines in Japan–the jury system was trialed as Apollo Justice was being written and was found to be a failure). Dual Destinies kind of shows the corruption in case 5-3 where the head professor of the #1 law school is shown to be absolutely corrupt and teaching those corrupt practices to the next generation, but you don’t see any of the already-tainted lawyers dealing damage to the legal system because the game is a character-centric soap opera.

Coming back to AAI2 and its P.I.C. finally. The P.I.C. is a realistic group for a government to form in order to restore some semblance of faith in its legal system. “See? We’ve got a committee making sure the people are on the up and up!” the government pleas. All the while, the people on the committee are there to line their pockets and make sure they only oversee what they want to oversee instead. In a series that began as a cynical satire of the Japanese legal system, the P.I.C. is the most cynical satire in Ace Attorney, and, as an American where we love committees, the most biting. The biggest disappointment of there being no AAI3 is that the logical next step after the P.I.C. is shown to be corrupt in AAI2 is for a Prosecutorial Investigative Committee Committee to form and investigate the P.I.C. Alas, no AAI3, no P.I.C.C.

The two people representing the P.I.C. and its noble goal are a literal priestess of law and the biggest moron you’ll ever meet. It’s beautiful satire. Justine Courtney and Sebastian Debeste state they are keeping tabs on Edgeworth as a potential dangerous prosecutor that might do harm. This is almost correct. Edgeworth is a potentially dangerous prosecutor that might do harm… to the corrupt people hiding behind the P.I.C. and other places of power outside the normal reach of law. Courtney and Debeste get in Edgeworth’s way as they abuse their own authority to lock as much of the truth away from Edgeworth as they legally can, which is a trap that a good amount of Ace Attorney villains fall into. They’re immoral and doing illegal stuff, but they can’t just deny someone legally attempting to take them down–that’d be wrong.

As you investigate different possibilities that led to the murder of Horace Knightley, you end up meeting another assassin. This is the guy I mentioned earlier as being an even sillier parody of the perfect professional assassin. Sirhan Dogen is a blind assassin that kills with the help of a large dog and many men. Let me reiterate: he is a blind man. I’m not trying to be ableist here, if you’re blind and want to be a professional assassin, go for it. I just don’t think you could emulate the insanity of Sirhan Dogen.

Eventually, after a very long time and some cameos from Frank Sawhit (case 1-1) and Regina Berry (case 2-3), you pin the crime on the jail’s warden. She hated Sirhan Dogen and attempted to pin the crime on him since Dogen made her afraid for her life. If she had murdered Dogen instead of Knightley (who she murdered because she thought he was a member of Dogen’s group), it might’ve been more justifiable as self-ish defense as Dogen had made threats to her life. But she didn’t. So she instead gives her selfish defense in the final third of the case where Edgeworth uses Facts And Logic to outdebate Debeste, Courtney, and the warden.

I have two comments about the side characters in AAI2-2. First of all, Frank Sawhit is back from case 1-1 as an inmate. The man was invented as a joke character based on shady door-to-door salesmen in Japan and never intended to be anything but the first throwaway villain in the series. AAI2 once again decides to treat the satirical as real and gives Sawhit a relatively pivotal role as the mole for the warden in the prison. It feels very strange seeing a man who showed zero capacity as being anything more than a superficial two-faced toupee-wearer thrust into a serious spot as a narc. It’s like if Police Academy 7 featured the guy who did the silly noises became chief of police and did silly noises while also seriously discussing how to crack down on crime.

The other comment I have is again about Sirhan Dogen. I’m sorry. When Edgeworth and the gang first find out Sirhan is in the prison and meet him, Miles and Sirhan chat about their past where Miles managed to track down some piece of evidence that finally put Sirhan behind bars. AAI2 does not show how this happened, nor does any other game in the series. I find this unexplored reference to the past very odd when the rest of AAI2, and the entire Ace Attorney series for that matter, is obsessed with illuminating the past. AAI2-3 especially shows pastmania. So it is very odd that Sirhan Dogen’s prosecution is not shown in AAI2. Maybe it was another sequel hook where the punchline of the case is that Dogen was the head of the P.I.C.C.

AAI2-2 put Edgeworth into circumstances where he had to say he would give up his prosecutor’s badge in pursuit of a greater good. It is unclear if Edgeworth truly believed in the morality of what he was doing then or if he simply believed in his gut that he could untangle the case without actually risking his position. AAI2-3 makes Edgeworth come to Jesus, who is named Gregory in the Ace Attorney series. Although Gregory is Miles’ dad so I suppose Miles is actually Jesus coming to God in this case. Much like my biblical fanfiction.

AAI2-3 is where Ace Attorney is at its most tender and most bizarre. The intro video has nothing to do with whatever actual crime is at the heart of the case as a normal intro video to a case is–it is instead a lovingly rendered clip of the introduction to an in-universe TV show that is a musical cooking show aimed at children. Somehow, this musical cooking show is inextricably tied to the core of the events of Ace Attorney 1. Specifically, it is tied to case 1-4, the heart of the series, as AAI2-3 is mainly about Miles finally coming to terms with what happened to his father and clearing his father’s name while also choosing a different but equally valid path on Miles’ own terms… while also finding out what happened during the series finale of a Great British Bake-Off rip-off.

Let me try to give the most concise summary of AAI2-3. It begins with that intro video of the musical cooking show “Piece of Cake” that Ray Shields was watching on TV. He talks to a picture of him and Gregory Edgeworth that he is about to go to “that” place from 18 years ago with Gregory’s son, Miles. The scene transitions to Miles walking into an art gallery. This isn’t a very concise summary, is it?

Let’s continue, but speed it up. Miles and Ray are going to the opening of the Zodiac Art Gallery because Ray wants to explain to Miles what happened during Gregory’s final case, and why Ray has such a hatred for Von Karma. Jeffrey Master, star of “Piece of Cake”, is still imprisoned 18 years after the events that took place that day, and Ray believes in Gregory’s belief that Jeffrey was innocent. The game immediately flashes back to 18 years prior with the player controlling Gregory Edgeworth as he begins his defense for Jeffrey with Gregory’s new assistant, Ray Shields.

Master is accused of the murder of one of the finalists in his cooking contest during the show’s finale. Gregory proves why he is named after Gregory Peck, aka Atticus Finch, and quickly builds a trusting relationship with Jeffrey. You then head to the scene of the crime, which is the art gallery that Miles and Ray are visiting in the current day, and do preliminary investigations. This puts you into contact with both prosecutor Manfred Von Karma and AAI1 beloved character Detective Tyrell Badd. It took until this playthrough that I figured out that all the ellipses and pauses in Badd’s dialogue are intended to make him sound like an action movie star.

I chose to go in detail about Tyrell Badd instead of the investigation because the investigation is incredibly silly the instant you think about it. The context of this murder is the finale of a dessert baking show. The body was discovered in a treasure chest made of chocolate after the ship made of chocolate placed above it crashed into the chest. Details only get more ludicrous as things are discovered, such as that one of the finalists had zero cooking ability and was simply covering real plaster or construction material with fresh cream and calling it a sculpture. It’s not worth getting bogged down in the insanity of it all when there’s the extreme narrative weight of questions like “what was Gregory’s father like” and “what led to Gregory’s early passing after the IS-7 trials were over?” hanging over a murder over a cooking competition.

Soon enough, the scene switches back to present day where Miles and Ray do whatever investigations they can do into a case that occurred 18 years ago. Ray had a hunch that something big would happen on opening day of the art gallery since it was the first time the location of the murder had been open to the public since the events 18 years ago–the case was never officially solved, so anything that the true culprit didn’t want to be found still in the museum would be attempted to be retrieved on this first day. This premonition comes to fruition when a patron of the arts is found unconscious in a locked room in the gallery. Turns out it was one of the characters there 18 years ago. He’s been found poisoned by the deadly mixture of Normallium and Fatallium and I apologize again that I’ve gotten too in depth on the details to the point of distraction. Some people might initially think “oh the fan localizers did a hack Ted Woolsey-ism on that” and, buddy, I gotta tell you that the fan localizers could more accurately localize your own thoughts to yourself than you can. Those names are 100% accurate. And stupid.

In a case that’s already exceedingly implausible, AAI2-3 manages to one-up itself by having the unconscious person be unconscious exactly as long as it takes for Ray to finish telling the story of what happened during the final part of the investigation and first day of trial for the IS-7 case. Gregory and Ray figure out that the body of the victim was never actually recovered by the police after it was first found, though the official documentation of the case signed by the Chief Prosecutor himself says otherwise. Furthermore, the IS-7 case took place in the “before times” prior to AA1’s satirical premise of “there’s too much crime to prosecute, ergo all trials from now on will only be three days in length max, AND all defendants are guilty until proven innocent”, so the IS-7 trial dragged for an entire year.

Eventually, Von Karma got Master to plead guilty as an accomplice to the murder but not before Gregory managed to get the judge to slap Von Karma with the only penalty he ever received in 40 years of service. Players of AA1 know that, upon the conclusion of the IS-7 trial, Manfred murdered Gregory which led to the events of Ace Attorney as we know it. I’ll be honest: Manfred does not come across as a very smart man in AAI2-3. In AA1-4, he puts together the conspiracy to deliver the coup de grace to Miles due to that petty grudge stemming from Gregory giving him a penalty. In AAI2-3, he has a line where he says anything his wife cooks is the best tasting food out there. He also is quite slow on the uptake and never seems to understand exactly what information he’s trying to conceal from Gregory during the IS-7 investigation, let alone understand why said information is important. AA1’s villains are perfectly crafted jerks in the times you interact with them. Damon Gant and Manfred Von Karma actually act as they would deserve their incredibly high-up positions with pristine reputations. AAI2-3’s Von Karma blows as much hot air as Winston Payne (who does make a small cameo in AAI2-1!).

I’m losing focus. This case is insanely long. It or case 5 are the longest cases and this one feels longer with its narrative gimmick of timehopping. Once you see the end of the events 18 years ago, you are back in current day with Miles and Ray trying to solve the still-unsolved IS-7 incident. Turns out that the body that was lost 18 years ago was still on the premises of the art gallery. The culprit hid the body as part of the final’s entry put together by the victim–said entry was a collection of sorbet sculptures, and the culprit made the body look like one. The man rendered unconscious by normallium plus fatallium wakes up and confesses after a bit of grilling that he was trying to retrieve the frozen body from the sculptures displayed in the art gallery because he knew that was the victim’s body. Miles is able to find dumb loopholes in the law that bring the culprit to justice for the murder despite the statute of limitations running out. Ray gets his catharsis seeing his mentor’s trust in both his client and his son rewarded in the end. Katherine Hall, essentially the adopted daughter of Jeffrey, gets her catharsis seeing Jeffrey declared innocent. It’s a very sweet ending for a case centered around a pastry competition.

I glazed over a number of details because the emotional core of AAI2-3 is Ace Attorney at its peak as a soap opera. If you are able to suspend your disbelief long enough to accept that the culprit decided to resort to murder and other underhanded tricks to win a cooking competition in order to get the recipe for a medicine that would cure his inability to taste any food, you can love any Ace Attorney game and case. Except for maybe Investigations’ 1 where there’s so little soap opera and personally understandable catharsis to get.

Case 4 of AAI2 is really the final important case of the game. Almost every question that’s been raised in the two weeks that AAI2 takes place over is resolved in case 5. If you’re playing Ace Attorney for the “whodunnit” aspect of it rather than the soap opera, the long denouement with its many twists and turns within case 5 is your reward for sitting through the amount of text explicitly about what it means to be a good person and especially the amount of subtext about what it means to be a good parent. The last truly emotional part of AAI2 is the end of the beginning segment where Miles gets into logic chess with Sebastian Debeste and Sebastian turns up again in a few minutes to finally take a stand against his father.

Who is Sebastian’s father? Why, it’s Debeste former chief prosecutor that signed off on the shoddy investigation of IS-7 and current day leader of the P.I.C. attempting to strip Miles of his prosecutor’s badge. AAI2-4 is when he finally shows up on screen to snuff out Miles’ flame, mostly by crying on him. I spent a while harping on how bizarre the way Miles enters case 1 via a telephone call by the chief prosecutor. The way he winds up in case 4 is even weirder. Kay Faraday is wheeled in on a wheelchair into his office a few days after case 3 wrapped up. Kay has amnesia and doesn’t remember where she was or who Edgeworth is. Edgeworth wants to know what happened to his adoptive daughter (there is at least one parallel relationship to every set of characters in AAI2, one of the most genius parts of its writing; Edgeworth and Kay have a relationship similar to Gregory and Ray but also to Jeffrey and Katherine’s relationship, for instance; I could’ve written an entire paragraph on this but it isn’t all that insightful).

A search of Kay’s belongings takes the group to Grand Tower. Some light questioning of Kay while at the scene brings back a traumatic memory of being pushed off the building. A police officer interrupts to state that a murder occurred in the Grand Tower itself and that Kay is the lead suspect due to circumstantial evidence. The murder occurred in the P.I.C.’s meeting room, and a letter signed by Kay was found in the victim’s pocket. Justine Courtney and Sebastian Debeste, who did get in Miles’ way during case 3 but really didn’t do much of anything, show up to get Kay convicted immediately. Blaise Debeste, chairman of the P.I.C., pokes his beard in as well to get in on the action.

After a short day of investigation, Miles’ own trial takes place the next day where his badge is on the line. Miles shows that he’s taken all the lessons from the rest of the game and decides to use his own prosecutor’s badge as leverage to get a real chance to defend Kay before true prosecution goes after her. This move shows Miles’ full maturity as a man who puts the truth and being a good person above basically anything else. Something that characters in power directly over him, namely Chief Gant, or Manfred Von Karma, or Blaise Debeste, all refused in the name of grabbing said power. Ace Attorney never shows how exactly Miles was able to move up the corporate ladder after going “woke”. Instead, we hear snippets of the fallout of this rise, like when Miles talks about the lack of morally good prosecutors in the offices is what is causing him to prosecute the DLC case of Spirit of Justice.

I have more to say about AAI2 but I think anyone that’s gotten this far should instead experience the rest of the game for themselves if they are interested. The “what” part behind AAI2’s events is an insane set of circumstances and events that makes for some great entertainment. There are so many ridiculous details left out in my rundown of case 3, and a boatload of insane details I’ve not even alluded to in case 5. The bottom line is that I hope Ace Attorney 7 comes out soon enough, or that AAI3 is about Sirhan Dogen and Miles’ cleaning up of the prosecutor’s office.

Hot on their recent string of success of remaking and remastering classic games such as the Super Mario RPG remake and the announced remake of Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door, Nintendo has announced that they are now remaking beloved SNES Golden Era RPG “Your Life” for release next year on the Switch 3.

That’s right, the game every indie dev has cited as being their inspiration for their own games is finally getting its modern release. “Your Life was really the first game to capture the feeling of living in the suburbs, where you would go to middle school, get picked on by bullies during kickball, and fail algebra 1. It’s something that happened to us all, but it wasn’t until Your Life that we got to truly experience your life,” said Undertale developer Toby Fox.

Though the graphics may be updated from initial release for higher quality and fidelity, players still have the option to turn back the clock and use the original blurry-but-charming graphics from the original release. “The older graphics provide a more realistic recreation of the time you failed to ask Stacy out to the middle school dance than the newer graphics as the motion blur you experienced was due to you needing glasses but not knowing it at the time,” said director Shigeru Miyamoto.

One of the most fondly remembered parts of Your Life was the soundtrack comprised of MIDI versions of Blink-182’s Enema of the State and Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory albums, and Nintendo has confirmed that the old soundtrack can be played at anytime in-game, along with the ability to download other contemporary MIDI classic rock songs from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, and Green Day as DLC. The new soundtrack is comprised of the 8 hour white noise YouTube video you listen to while at work, whether it be actual white noise, an 8 hour documentary on the history of the FastPass, or Lofi Hip Hop Radio – Beats To Relax Study To.

While the main story of Your Life will conclude with its ambiguous and open ended ending where you ponder whether to pursue a college degree or do anything else but school, extra content has been added in the form of postgame bosses. These include fights against The Grind, Your Boss, Your Boss’ Boss, Your Boss’ Boss’ Boss, Capitalism, and Depression. Dataminers claim that there may be another scenario added that gives Your Life meaning, but it is unlikely. Though the gameplay of Your Life is almost completely unchanged other than these fights and could easily be played on the SNES9x emulator right now, Nintendo has announced it will ship with a $60 pricetag.

I’ve referenced this game on this blog three times, and, each time, I have invoked the game’s name in a positive manner. So it is time to talk about it. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective was originally released in 2010 on the Nintendo DS. 13 years later, an HD remake for it came out on most consoles for $30. It is currently on sale at $20 as I write this. If anything I say in this review makes it sound interesting, please purchase the game. It was buried as a very late DS launch just before the poor Nintendo 3DS launch and never got the attention it deserved. Though the author, Shu Takumi, has no intentions of writing a sequel, I would absolutely love to support any side endeavor of his if they’re all up to this quality.

Shu Takumi is a name you might know from his more popular works as the head writer of the Ace Attorney series, where he wrote and directed the original Trilogy as well as the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. They are masterpiece games in their own wright. I can’t read Mr. Takumi’s thoughts so I can’t tell you why he wasn’t a director or writer on any game after Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations in 2004. But my speculation is that he was done with the Ace Attorney series and wanted to write something else, like Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective.

Ghost Trick is a Rube Goldberg Machine puzzle game mixed with a visual novel. The central hook is that you play as the ghost of a man named Sissel who has lost his memory and is trying to get it back. You do this by using “ghost tricks”, sprite-like actions that lightly manipulate inanimate objects such as folding an umbrella or turning a lever. Additionally, you have the power to go back 4 minutes prior to a person’s death if you find their corpse. Heck of an “additionally”, I know. You are usually tasked with saving this person’s life during those 4 minutes by using your ghost tricks.

That is the vague, spoiler-free hook of the game. If it sounds interesting, please buy it.

Now, what sets Ghost Trick apart from other visual novels are a couple of things. The first is the focus on action puzzle-solving. Those 4 minutes are a bit of a blurry time limit that varies from chapter to chapter, but the time limit keeps the tension extremely high as you try and find a way to get your spirit in a position to save the victim as the countdown flashes on the screen.

The second is how incredibly tight the narrative is–there is zero filler in all 18 chapters. As such, the game is around 8-12 hours for an average first-time completion because the game does everything it wants in that short time frame. Every character has an important role to play. The stakes continually get raised as new information is revealed. It even does a perfect job leaving on a cliffhanger every chapter to get you to keep playing–I know my friend played the final 8 chapters in a row until 3 AM because of how gripping the game was.

Lastly, the plot and gameplay are a perfect fit. The game is a series of, like I said, Rube Goldberg Machine puzzles. The story perfectly embodies that with every action having an equal and opposite reaction that pushes things forward. Oh, and the scenarios that such a “simple” idea of reviving corpses and doing ghost tricks on inanimate objects are incredibly creative. The Ace Attorney series does a good job of making the gameplay fit the story, but Ghost Trick makes you really feel like YOU are driving the story as you spin a table to make sure the turkey without a radio transmitter is served to a table so that 2 people don’t die. I also feel that the time limit does a lot for upping the intensity compared to most other visual novels that give you infinite time to sift through dialogue options.

I don’t want to talk much at all about the story because almost everything I write after that initial summary is a spoiler. And that’s because everything in Ghost Trick is relevant. Well, except for two early villains. Eh, one. And even then, they’re at least remembered. But you must know that the story is incredible. There is some amount of suspension of disbelief you need to go along with the ride, but, hey, it’s a freaking video game. Why expect realism?

Without being able to say much about the story or gameplay because of how interconnected they are, I can only talk about the presentation. Regardless about how people may feel about the story or gameplay, Ghost Trick has always been beloved for two things: its animations and music.

I will have to stop here. But I think you get my point. Keep in mind that this is originally a Nintendo DS game, which was a pretty low-spec system. And they got every inch of graphical prowess put into the animations. These low-poly, low frame rate animations have more soul in them than all 2010 contemporary FPSes. And the best part is that the remake keeps all the animations but makes them way less blurry and with more frames for a smoother look. It’s incredibly well done.

Like I said, the other thing is the music. I will post a YouTube video with the entire OST below, but you only need the first song really. I think the music speaks for itself.

To wind down this really unhelpful, uninformative review of an obscure game, I’ll quickly go over the other things the remake added. There’s a set of extra puzzles to do once you beat the game, there’s some cool concept art, and there’s an in-game way to listen to the soundtrack. Also, if you, like me, only experienced the game by watching someone else play it, you’ll finally be able to see the interesting extra dialogue in the Phone Book as well as in areas you aren’t supposed to be in because ZSlyzer only showed the critical path. That stuff isn’t new, but it might as well be.

I just wanted to get something out there as I continue to think about how to write about Tears of the Kingdom. I surprisingly have little I want to say about it personally and have found myself far more interested on the game’s legacy. But I’d like to, at some point, plant my flag and state which side of history I’m on, even if it turns out to be wrong. And, if it is wrong, Sissel will take me back 4 minutes prior to my online death, and save it.

Please buy Ghost Trick.

The Nintendo Direct in early September ended by revealing a remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door was to be released on the Nintendo Switch in 2024. For many long-suffering Paper Mario fans who fell in love with the games on the Nintendo 64 and GameCube and spurned the franchise’s move away from those games, this announcement brought back their faith in Intelligent Systems and Shigeru Miyamoto. For instance, local user ThunderousBirdo rejoined the Discord server of friends he made 15 years ago posting about The Thousand Year Door, showing just how much this announcement did to mend communities.

Still, others, like marioman1155, who had been calling for the series to return to its roots this entire time, was not pleased. “Oh, just another lame coin grab from Shigeru Miyamoney and UNintelligent Systems. $60 for a remake of a 20 year old game? Erm, what the h? The ‘h’ stands for ‘heck’,” marioman1155 posted his first impressions on the PAPER MARIO RETVRN OR DIE Discord server, which uses a Paper-Mario-in-the-style-of-a-Roman-statue as its server icon. “NintenDOH is so against creating new original characters for Mario games that they only greenlight remakes of prior games with them. Take a look at this epic fail over here, yikes,” marioman1155 continued.

As the day wore on, other Discord members started losing patience with marioman1155’s negativity. “Man, why can’t you enjoy the moment? You literally made a long-lasting forum game based on The Thousand Year Door. Why are you even complaining?” asked fellow Discord member Weegee. “Um, because I expect UNintelligent Systems to improve instead of stay stagnant and get more money for it? If the Seattle Mariners remade the 1995 season in 2023, would you pay $170 for playoff tickets when they cost $75 a year prior? Same principle,” said marioman1155. “That is a very specific analogy,” said Newtro.

Mods started weighing in. “I would like some updates to the game for sure. Like get rid of some unnecessary backtracking, maybe buff the steal rate for getting badges from enemies not listed to have badges, but I must concur with Weegee. Enjoy this. It means Nintendo is listening. We’re more likely than ever to see a true sequel to The Thousand Year Door if this sells well,” said JPSava. “Yeah, like when UNintelligent Systems listened to that fan poll sent out to ten people in Japan that they thought the story in Super Paper Mario was boring and they took that info to mean that no future Paper Mario game should have a real story? Yeah, I’m sure buying this game will send the message that all Paper Mario games should have gallows in their main hubs,” said marioman1155. “I’m not going to make the easy response. But know that I could’ve done so,” said Lefbra.

marioman1155 just couldn’t let it go. “Remember when they showed screenshots of the early Paper Mario 3DS game that included a Chain Chomp partner and Miyadummy shot it down due to it being too similar to The Thousand Year Door? What makes us so confident they’ll let literally The Thousand Year Door Again get released? I bet they’ll make a last minute change where all the Crystal Stars are replaced by Things and Kammy Koopa is replaced with Kamek,” said marioman1155. “You could look at literally every Switch remake of any previous game where they are extremely faithful to the original but add some content, like Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury,” said Tea Necromancer. “Erm, but look at the Super Mario RPG remake that’s randomly changing crap like timed hits now hitting all enemies! They’re going to ruin this remake by making the game run at 10 FPS and making it impossible to nail action commands!” said marioman1155.

Eventually, the admins had to step in. “marioman1155, this is a server that waited many years for a sequel to The Thousand Year Door. I hear your frustration that this isn’t one. But it is even better than that. It’s the exact game we already know and love with no surprises. It’s like finding your ex-wife after 15 years, remarrying them, and going back to that blissful honeymoon phase before she cheated on you with some squares from Flipside,” said Pungy. “That is a very specific analogy,” said Newtro. “I’m giving you a temporary timeout. Come back when you are about to rawk (we salute you),” said Pungy.

In the end, marioman1155 did not come back. He left the server after stating that he’d find another friend who would buy the game, divorce their spouse, and give him the game in the wake of the divorce and never open it.

I’m a big Seattle Mariners fan. The team has seen recent success after 20+ years of missing the playoffs, primarily via drafting and trading for players rather than adding through free agency. As such, the team has just the 18th-highest payroll at $134 million but it has outperformed big spenders like the New York Mets ($344 million) and New York Yankees ($279 million) that acquires pricy free agents in the offseason (Source: https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/payroll/).

I and other Mariner fans have been frustrated with the team not spending more on free agents, so I decided to do data analysis to see if this is the right move. My study is fairly simple. The scope is the production of each of the top 10 free agents from 2010 to 2021 by bWAR production over the past three seasons in the season directly prior to signing a new contract and the production of the same players in the season directly after signing a new contract.

Let’s break down what this all means. First: bWAR is a catch-all baseball statistic that roughly sums up how good a given MLB player is compared to a replacement level player. The higher the bWAR, the better the player. It has some flaws but is useful here to summarize a player’s worth.

Second: I limited the scope of players to be simply the top 10 players by bWAR produced over the past three years because it is a simple way to illustrate the best players available in a given free agent class. This is not to say the free agents available with lower bWAR over the past three years aren’t important–I wanted to look at the best available by bWAR because they tend to be the priciest to acquire and thus least likeliest for the Mariners to sign.

Third: I limited the year range to be between 2010 and 2021 because 2010 is about when all baseball front offices completely adopted SABRmetrics and new-school baseball data analytics such as bWAR. I ended it with the 2021 free agent class because the 2023 season has not concluded and I did not feel confident in projecting the production of the free agent class of 2022.

Fourth: for the 2020 season shortened by Covid-19, I did project the production of players for a full 162 game season based on the numbers they put up in the 60 game season. I want to be open about this since the 2020 numbers used in this study are not necessarily reflective of reality.

With all that out of the way, let’s start by comparing the bWAR of the best free agents in the season prior to signing a new contract to the bWAR of the best free agents in the season after signing a new contract.

Just at a quick glance, you can see that the best free agents produce less the year after they sign a big contract. There’s only one player who put up a negative bWAR before becoming a free agent (Ervin Santana in 2018) while eight players put up negative bWAR after signing a new contract. For context, that means teams who signed a player worth negative bWAR would’ve been better off setting the money spent on fire rather than signing that player. The 110 free agents in this study put up a combined 396 bWAR in seasons prior to signing a new contract, then put up a combined 282.8 bWAR in seasons after. An average post-contract player would be expected to lose just over 1 bWAR in value in the season after signing their contract–talk about depreciation!

Of course, not all ballplayers are equal, and you can’t expect consistent year-to-year production from most players. But surely the players signed to the largest contracts are able to replicate or even surpass the production they accrued in the years prior, right? Let’s look at performance for value next.

For the most part, the more money spent on a player, the better they do perform. AAV is short for “Average Annual Value” and is a player’s yearly salary based on their contract. For instance, the best production-for-money-spent contract on here is Hyun Jin Ryu’s 2020 season where he put up 7.7 bWAR for just $20 million. On the other hand, Madison Bumgarner’s 2020 was the worst value as he delivered a gruesome -1.3 bWAR for $17 million. Ouch!

All told, $1.8663 billions of dollars was spent for 282.8 bWAR. That means that 1 bWAR costs around $6.6 million, but that number will continue to rise as salaries for players continue to increase.

In conclusion, while a big name free agent is expected to depreciate in production after signing a new contract, it is still worth signing big name free agents to improve your baseball team. A league average MLB starter puts up between 1 to 2 bWAR a year. Based on this sample size, a big name free agent puts up 2.96 bWAR on average. That is most likely an improvement. That said, adding a big name free agent comes with an average annual salary of $17 million, and, again, that price will only continue to go up. So while winning as many games as possible is theoretically the goal of every baseball team, it is still a business, and paying top dollar for low production is always a risk that’ll scare off low-budget teams.

I am happy that this case study reaffirmed my belief that the Seattle Mariners should pursue more big name free agents like when they got Robbie Ray, Robinson Cano, and Nelson Cruz since this exact moment is when they could add a great player to get them a championship. Please sign the checks, John Stanton.

Appendix:

Baseball Reference was used for the free agent tracker and player statistical data.

Spotrac was used for contract data.

R Studio Desktop was used to generate the visualizations in this case study.

Batter data is in this spreadsheet.

Pitcher data is in this spreadsheet.

Some three years ago I was inspired by Brian David Gilbert and Jon Bois videos and decided to write about my true passion in life, Mario Sports games. Well, soon after, the two of them stopped making as many videos, and I lost that cadence of theirs where they just spent 20 minutes talking about random banal things in the most fascinating styles. But I’ve found myself rewatching their videos again, and I’m finding it’s time to Unravel yet another Dorktown.

If you missed the sneaky hyperlink or the 10,000 words scared you off of that previous blog post, well, you’ll probably be scared by the length of this one too. But regardless I’d like to talk about some more stadiums in Mario Sports games with the main goal being answering the questions “how much did this cost?”, and “where in the Mushroom Kingdom is this?”

For price, Brian David Gilbert equated 8 coins to 1 USD but I will stick with the 1 coin to 1 USD ratio I determined. Also, I will probably forget about that dimension of my analysis halfway through, and I apologize.

For location, I’m always much more interested in figuring that out. The idea that there’s some actual map that could be made showing the general locations of Mario Circuits 1-5 from the SNES compared to the general location of Mario Circuit from Mario Kart 8 is such a fun idea, but Mario games that aren’t RPGs don’t tend to have a grounding location. For instance, The Dump from Mario Strikers Charged is a literal dump full of nothing but mud and a single drain in the center, which seems like a pretty bad dump. I would’ve figured there’d be some litter or something. Regardless, it is a soccer stadium and must be a “real” location somewhere in the Mushroom Kingdom that would make sense for a dump, so I said it was close to the Kero Sewers from Super Mario RPG.

In that previous post, I went through and sussed out the locations of Mario sports stadiums from Super Mario Strikers, Mario Strikers Charged, Mario Superstar Baseball, Mario Super Sluggers (kinda), and Mario Sports Mix. They’re my five favorite Mario sports games and the ones I have the most passion for. Which means that this post will cover Mario Power Tennis, Mario Golf Toadstool Tour, Mario Golf World Tour, and Mario Sports Superstars, four games I’m nowhere near as passionate about. They say “write what you love”, but I think “write what you lukewarm” is just as good.

Mario Power Tennis was a game I rented often from Blockbuster, and was the final game my Gamecube played before it stopped reading discs. So I have fond memories of this one.

The Peach Dome is actually home to three distinct courts. You got the Hard Court, the Grass Court, and the Clay Court in the Peach Dome. I’d love to riff on it, but it is an extremely boring stage that you will see half your time playing since it is the court set used for the “non-gimmick” cups in Mario Power Tennis. Peach is no stranger to vanity sports projects. 4 years after opening the Peach Dome, she’d open the insanity of Baseball Island for Mario Super Sluggers which is far more interesting than Peach’s equivalent to Wimbledon. The Peach Dome could be literally anywhere but we’ll just place it about a mile away from the castle in a stadium district with Peach Gardens from Mario Superstar Baseball and Peach’s Castle from Mario Sports Mix. It probably cost the most of the three to build, to be honest. And with renovations of Wimbledon being >100 million Euros, well, let’s just say the Toads aren’t pleased at how many Piantas and Nokis are in the crowd instead of them.

Bowser’s Castle Court is a lot like Bowser’s Castle from Mario Sports Mix. You got a tilting platform suspended over lava that tips against the team in front, a fire source randomly coming out to burn competitors, and literally nothing else visible from the playfield. How does Bowser ferry people to these fields? And why do people agree to play there? There’s no amenities! Not even a locker room, let alone stands for fans to sit in. Again, Bowser spared all expense on this stadium and passed the savings to his military to hire another 1000 Goombas from poor families to perpetuate the war. Thanks sportswashing! Oh. And it’s in Bowser’s Castle. Did I have to clarify that?

Delfino Plaza Court is another easy to locate court in the Mushroom Kingdom. It is in the plaza… of Isle Delfino… While setting up the court just required some paint and the shoddiest fence I’ve seen, there is a rather expensive gimmick that they installed. See, hitting one of those circles on the court causes a goop piranha plant to spit goop onto the court, slowing down competitors. And it is insane that the politicians of Isle Delfino signed off on this when this was literally what Bowser Jr. did to the island in order to ruin the beautiful vacation destination. But, just as Super Mario Sunshine also showed, the politicians and justice system in Isle Delfino is easily circumnavigated when convicted criminals are just asked to promise that they’ll do community service after destroying half the country. I still don’t think this cost much to make. Let’s say 3 million coins mainly for goop piranha plant food.

DK Jungle Court is another court that put all its money into its gimmicks. This looks like it’s just upstream from the DK Jungle baseball stadium in Mario Superstar Baseball. And, obviously, it is just a piece of wood suspended over a river. I can’t imagine it cost anything but paint to make this. And it is a major safety hazard just for existing. The gimmick here is that the cannons near the net will shoot klaptraps onto the court which will then bite players’ legs. This is slightly more safe than Bowser’s Castle court but only slightly. Otherwise, it’s a tennis court painted onto a hunk of wood in DK Jungle which I’ll say is in the Forest Maze of Super Mario RPG. You can’t stop me. No cost estimate, we don’t have a real-world equivalent to a cannon that shoots piranhas.

Gooper Blooper Court is another very easy to locate court. It is in Ricco Harbor in Isle Delfino. My real question here is how close the Isle Delfino is to Rogueport. This is a tennis court on a weird set of catwalks up in Ricco Harbor’s shipyard. They filled in a major hole with a tennis court instead of putting fences around the thing catwalks or anything else that would’ve made sense for improving safety. I’m noticing a pattern with this game where, similar to Mario Sports Mix, all the stadiums were done on the cheapest budget possible. I would bet the Isle Delfino government gave Ricco Harbor funds to fix their catwalks and they stretched that money to put in a gimmick court where balls hitting platforms with arrows on it will cause those platforms to move that way and make the area under where they were to be out of bounds. And all I can say is “why?” Those poor Piantas and Nokis working there…

Luigi’s Mansion Court is obviously just outside of Luigi’s Mansion. There have been three Luigi’s Mansion games and yet none of them have actually answered where Luigi’s Mansion is relative to the rest of the Mushroom Kingdom. Other than that it is close to Professor E. Gadd’s laboratory. Which is revealed to be on Thwomp Mountain in Mario & Luigi Partners in Time. So, we don’t see the mansion in that game, just the lab, but I think that’s a sufficient answer for the relative where of Luigi’s Mansion. And, once again, this court cost nothing to make. I mean, you can see it. The spooky interior design candles from Pier 1 Imports and the court paint job was all it took to bring this to life. Or should I sa… death?!?!

Mario Classic Court is a fun court idea. Between the time that Mario Power Tennis and the original Mario Bros. arcade game the court is based on, 21 years had passed. It has been 19 years since Mario Power Tennis was released. Will we get a Mario Power Tennis Power Classic Court in Mario Tennis Aces 2 when that comes around in 2 years? The court itself is underground in the sewers, but a very clean part of the sewers. Official Mario Bros. Arcade Game Lore states that the sewers are New York, under the Mario household. I think the game proved that the water in New York is truly different. I gotta hand it to Mario on this one. He cleaned his house’s sewers so well that he could put in a tennis court. This one couldn’t have been cheap to build. Simply replacing a sewer line is somewhere between $1250-$25000, but replacing a sewer line with a tennis court? That’s probably got to be at leaest $25001.

Finally, the Wario Factory Court. It is very strange to me how Wario became synonymous with factories in the Mario Sports universe. There’s three different games with a Wario Factory stadium, and it is the most consistent thing the side games have given Wario. In Mario Sports Mix, it’s revealed he’s making treasure chests filled with coins or Bob-ombs. In Mario Hoops 3 on 3, there are only Bob-ombs. And, here, Wario is only making… arrow signs? The stadium is relatively high-cost compared to the other stadiums here because cutting out pieces of conveyer belts and interlocking them into a tennis court must’ve taken some ingenuity and labor. 10′ of a 10″ wide conveyor belt is around $1570, and a tennis court is 78′ long by 36′ wide so, uh, you do the math. Not cheap! I continue to maintain Wario’s factory was Smithy’s old factory from Super Mario RPG.

And, with that, we come to Mario Golf games. Now, golf in the real world costs so much between the opportunity cost of some 160 acres of usable land as well as the actual cost of grooming the land and watering the grass that it is frankly ludicrous that anyone allows them to get made. But video game golf is perfect. You can just invent 160 acres out of electronic thin air unless some weirdo decides to look into the logistics of the courses. So, “here we go” – Luigi. I’ll be skipping Mario Golf 64 for now because all those courses were canonically torn down, and I do not care about the Mario Golf game on the GBA (nor the Mario Tennis one either). If you disagree, you can make your own analysis about the costs of building those courses and clubs. But I’ll stick with the first good one I played, the Gamecube’s Toadstool Tour.

Lakitu Valley is the first locale on the Toadstool Tour. Full of lush green hills and simple water and bunker traps, it is as close as you’ll get to a generic golf course in the game. Heck, there aren’t even any Lakitus in here despite the name. This could be in basically any grass world from a Mario game, so we’ll say it’s in Grass Land from Super Mario Bros. 3. Which means that the guy who put this golf course into legislature looks like this:

I’m not surprised to see he was already carrying a golf club.

Cheep Cheep Falls is like Lakitu Valley but in the Pacific Northwest. You can tell because there’s actual elevation gains and drops, and because there are the beautiful Cascades in the background. Which is why I’m proud to say this golf course was chiseled around the dinosaur fossils found in the Cascade Kingdom. It’s got the lush greens, the clear water, and, most importantly, the tall mountains that cause players to completely miss their approach shots and clang their balls off stone. What’s that? The Cascade Kingdom is independent from the Mushroom Kingdom? Well, my interpretation of the ending of Super Mario Odyssey is that Peach owns every Kingdom that she sightsees at during the postgame, so, yes, the Cascade Kingdom is hers. Also, just like how Lakitu Valley has no Lakitus, there are no Cheep Cheeps in Cheep Cheep Falls or in Cascade Kingdom. So boom. Prices for both are the standard $25 million it costs to build a golf course on average (according to Golf Span) since there’s not much terraforming to do, just landscaping.

Shifting Sands is the first course in Toadstool Tour that uses a prior place of reference, though it might be by accident. Shifting Sand Land is a Super Mario 64 level that is nothing but sand, cement, and brick, so turning it into a golf course would require unthinkable amounts of resources to play in a 120 degree Fahrenheit pit of torture. I do not want to think about the costs and Kleptos displaced from this endeavor. I can’t imagine Eyerok signing off on this, and yet…

Blooper Bay is a return to the slightly-off locales in Toadstool Tour. Whereas every other Mario sports game on the GameCube made sure to reference Isle Delfino, “Blooper Bay” is instead chosen as the tropical beach course. This one just feels so strange. Every accessory in this park screams Isle Delfino and yet we’re at non-copyright infringing Jolly Roger Bay instead. It could be any beach anywhere in the Mushroom Kingdom, even one without Bloopers considering the past courses being named after creatures that don’t appear there. I’ll just pick one at random. Plack Beach from Bowser’s Inside Story is the home of the Blooper Open and Blooper Bay. The course was funded by Kuzzle, rich off making YouTube videos where he solves jigsaw puzzles while regaling folks with ASMR stories about his youth. It cost $20 million. YouTubers make bank.

Peach’s Castle Grounds are a fun thought exercise because the course is incompatible with the rest of the depiction of said castle grounds in other Mario spinoffs. Royal Raceway from Mario Kart 64 doesn’t look anything like this. Peach Garden from Mario Superstar Baseball doesn’t have warp pipes. Peach Castle from Mario Sports Mix is the only one that might be compatible since it just needs grass and a fountain. But this game’s claim on the front of Peach’s Castle is as valid as the rest, so I’ll just have to assume there’s random parts in front of Peach’s Castle where there’s over 300 feet between solid ground with a bottomless hole between them as well as a Mt. Rushmore of Mario figures with “Princess Peach in place of George Washington, Mario in place of Thomas Jefferson, Luigi in place of Theodore Roosevelt, and Yoshi in place of Abraham Lincoln.” That’s right. Yoshi freed the Goomba slaves.

Bowser Badlands is set in the Valley of Bowser from Super Mario World. Bowser granted the location license to use his name for advertising purposes but didn’t actually fund any of this, it was all Larry’s idea. Turning a lava-filled area into a golf course isn’t that hard. Life sprang from molten rock, grass grows easily on new land. They just saw the random landscapes that sprung up and said “that’ll be fine”. That’s why Larry was Bowser’s right hand man, for making cost-effective business decisions. Sadly, Bowser Jr. replaced Larry when Bowser found that Larry had used his actual Clown Car for hole 11, and he wasn’t allowed back into the family until New Super Mario Bros Wii 6 years later.

The last stop of the tour is Congo Canopy which doesn’t have a single good picture on the internet. But I think you can tell from that green stop sign that the golf course takes place on massive tree branches and some treehouses. It’s a cute interlocking golf course that overlaps on itself as you get to hole 18, probably the most thought-about layout in the game. It’s a small par 3 only course but the insurance needed to get this built made it cost around 30 million coins because anyone falling from this height will die. Some brain geniuses on the Super Mario Wiki think this is located in Kongo Jungle because of the name and the DK theme. But those people are morons because this is Congo Canopy, not Kongo Canopy. No, you don’t need to sound off in the comments and tell me that Kongo Jungle from Smash Bros 64 was incorrectly localized as Congo Jungle initially thus meaning Congo Canopy befell to the same fate because this is actually located in the Bafflewood of Paper Mario Sticker Star.

Phew, thank goodness we’re done with the rinkydink Toadstool Tour. It’s time for the Mario Golf: World Tour on the 3DS. I spent 3 and a half months in London and I spent probably 3 full days of that time playing this game. It was very good. Part of those 3 days was spent doing the Castle Club campaign mode where you raise your Mii to become the best golfer the Mushroom Kingdom has ever seen. Below is the Castle Club.

Now, at first glance, this looks like it’s just Peach’s Castle. But the flora will reveal that it’s just a golf club built to look like Peach’s Castle but in some more tropical area. Like, maybe in Mario Florida, which I think is world 2 of New Super Mario Bros Wii. This place is as bougie as it gets but I can’t find any figures for how much a high-end golf club would cost, only figures for how much high-end golf clubs cost. Onto the courses!

Sky Island is a misnomer because it’s actually an archipelago of islands in the sky. Thank you Tears of the Kingdom for reminding the world of that term. Sky Worlds are in a bunch of Mario games, but the music for this course is a remix of a Super Mario Bros. 3 song. Which means that it is canonically set on a series of random islands in World 5 of that game. The cost for this is incalculable because we literally do not have the technology to transport terraforming equipment into the stratosphere where this golf course lives. But rest assured, the cost is sky high.

Peach Gardens is another Peach area that is just straight up incompatible with other spinoffs. I can only assume that Peach just goes through phases and changes her gardens from being a baseball field, to a go kart track, one golf course with warp pipes in Toadstool Tour and to a different golf course in World Tour whenever she feels like it. Freaking royals, huh? And don’t get me started on the impossible pink grass. That amount of dye cannot be healthy for the plants nor the players–a blade of grass will tear up even Wario’s intestines. The dye and landscaping that makes sure every bunker is in the shape of a heart turn what really could’ve been a cheap operation into an insane overbudget project. Freaking royals, huh?

Yoshi Lake is the Blooper Bay of World Tour in that something about this golf course feels very off. As you can see from the screenshot, basically all terrain in the level is Yoshi-themed. The terrain is shaped either like an egg, a cookie from Yoshi’s Cookie, or his disgusting stomach that turns everything he eats into an egg. And that’s cute, sure, but, this may just be me, I don’t think of “Lake” when I think of “Yoshi”. Yoshi can’t swim. He does the dog paddle in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Why is there a lake claiming to be Yoshi Lake with a bunch of Yoshi-themed land when Yoshi hates the water? It’s because Bert the Bashful is getting his revenge as he turns the Lake Shore Paradise on Yoshi’s Island into a Yoshi Lake golf course in order to deviously trap the green dinosaur. It cost little because Bert got Kamek to do it with magic, but so far the trap has not sprung on Yoshi. So far…

Wiggler Park is a straight ripoff of Mario Party DS’s Wiggler’s Garden, even though the music is a cover of a Super Mario Galaxy song. In that game, Bowser used his Minimizer to shrink everyone in order to steal the Sky Crystals. By the way, the ending of Mario Party DS’s story is that the Sky Crystals make up a Nintendo DS that the cast then play Triangle Twisters on which the game hypes up as this perfect, super fun minigame, but it’s just bad Bejeweled. Of course, everyone who played Mario Party DS would know that it should’ve ended with everyone playing Shorty Scorers, the best Mario Party minigame ever created. All of this is to say that Bowser’s Minimizer is brought back to roam Wiggler Park as a golf course for Koopa knows what. Shrink the players, shrink the cost? I don’t know man. I feel like the power costs on using the Minimizer would drive up the price. But it definitely cut down on the fees making the course–the entire acreage for Wiggler Park fits inside the dress-up closet in the Castle Club. Also, I guess they gave the Minimizer to Wiggler since why else would anyone make a golf course themed around Wiggler? Woah, don’t get mad at me!

Cheep Cheep Lagoon is the same location as the Cheep Cheep Lagoon from Mario Kart 7. The golf course is just a few blocks away from the racecourse but they share a large submarine parking lot. “Zuh? A golf course underwater? Boy, I bet their budget is underwater!” is what you may be thinking. And you’re definitely right. The Cheep Cheep Lagoon brand cratered extremely hard after their initial VC money dried up as they failed to establish themselves as an attractive resort. No games since MK7 or World Tour have gone back to the Lagoon. This giant waste of money off the shores of Pi’Illo Island was founded by “Sleepy” Prince Dreambert as the island writ large gambled and lost all its money when Alphadream closed. Bring Mario and Luigi games back!

DK Jungle is actually on DK Island from DKC Returns. I can’t really say there’s another spot in the Mushroom Kingdom it could be with all the obvious iconography from the game. Donkey Kong is a philanthropist (as you would know if you played Mario Party games) so he isn’t behind it other than giving his name away to the project. No, this is a cynical endeavor by Lanky Kong who keeps trying to get back into the spotlight, but knows no one wants him specifically. This course cost a lot more than what one might expect because Lanky eliminated anything superfluous to the course itself, meaning huge swathes of the DK Jungle got cut down and then had the ground completely removed for this thing. Just like regular golf courses!

Bowser’s Castle is a misnomer. You don’t actually get into the castle at any point, nor do you really see it. My impression is that Bowser’s Badlands didn’t draw the fans so he switched the course around and then changed the name to bring the crowds. Bowser already owned all this property and the labor to make the course happen, so it didn’t cost anything according to the books. But if you were to ask the families of the brave Paratroopas who perished due to lack of PPE, this golf course cost everything. And you too can visit the Bowser Castle Resort and Theme Park for only 300 coins a night!

Toad Highlands is next door to Lakitu Valley. Grass Land has tons of space, and very little else to do with it. There is just about nothing to say about the Toad Highlands. It’s too normal. Why would anyone in the Mushroom or Beanbean Kingdom come here on vacation? Go hike the Highlands/Valley instead of going to the golf courses there. Yeesh. Oh, I should probably mention that the final 6 courses covered here are the 6 courses from Mario Golf 64, remade as DLC for World Tour. This is why I didn’t go over them earlier.

The fact that these are remade N64 courses helps explain why Koopa Park is just as boring as Toad Highlands. It has some giant Koopa balloons distracting golfers, and nothing but sand, trees, and greens otherwise. But that’s alright, it’s near Koopa Cape, a nice little Mario Kart Wii track. The cape would be a lovely spot to vacation. Too bad beaches aren’t real. Koopa Koot founded the whole Koopa Cape thing before retiring to Koopa Village back when normal people could afford to do something like that, so it was a modest 1 coin to build. Back in Koopa Koot’s day, you could eat for 3 years with just one coin, so don’t be mad when that’s the reward for fetching his “tape”.

Layer-Cake Desert was actually called “Shy Guy Desert” in Mario Golf 64. Layer-Cake Desert is a world in New Super Mario Bros U. You can understand why there were no more New Super Mario Bros games after that one when all the developers can mustard for level designs is a food pun. Chef Torte got a group of investors behind the food-themed golf idea to fund this golf course’s development. Sad thing is that the investors were Tutankoopa and Tower Power Pokey who demanded the course be built in a desert. The property was cheap. The water was not. Just like Shifting Sands, this place cost over 40 million coins to make. And, this time, it was in a desert even further away from civilization. Awful awful idea from the man who made Bundt.

Sparkling Waters is another level from New Super Mario Bros U., but U may remember it as Blooper Bay. That’s right, the resort behind Blooper Bay knew that people were turned off by it trying to connect to a nostalgic state of the Mushroom Kingdom even though said resort had only been around for 3 years, and it switched to jumping on the hot newness of Sparkling Waters. The only problem is that Sparkling Waters is as soulless as the megacorp and this rebranding of Yoshi Island from Mario Golf 64 flopped on its face completely. Why did they not just stick with Yoshi Island? That is a recognizable brand you stupid morons!

Rock-Candy Mines was Boo’s Valley in Mario Golf 64. You tell me if the theming makes any more sense. On one hand, you have a golf course in an area named after a ghost (?) that apparently owns a valley (???). And on the other, you have a golf course in a mine (?) full of rock-candy (???) that doesn’t actually go underground (???). Roy Koopa owns the Rock-Candy Mines and must be the one to blame for this weird venture. It doesn’t look like it cost much to terraform, just to plant the grass. Probably the cheapest 18 hole golf course we’ve seen yet. Only 5-10 million coins.

And, finally, Mario’s Star. Rosalina was so grateful to Mario (and Luigi) for stopping Bowser twice from destroying the universe that she made an 18 hole golf course in space with every hole themed and shaped in the form of him or one of his friends using uninhabited planets. You know, normal gifts from friends who are the literal Queen of the Universe. There is no actual location nor an actual price for something like this. It shouldn’t even be in the “World” Tour since it’s in freaking space!

I know I just said “finally” but there are actually three more golf courses in World Tour. The problem is that they are even more generic than Lakitu Valley or Cheep Cheep Falls. They are called the “Forest Course”, the “Seaside Course”, and the “Mountain Course”. And this generic rot ties into the final game I wanted to discuss, which is Mario Sports Superstars.

See, after the Wii, Nintendo decided that Mario spinoff games needed less interesting things. You might remember an infamous Paper Mario Sticker Star interview where Miyamoto said he hated originality and barred anyone from ever putting a hat on a Koopa again. But that extended past Paper Mario games and into Mario sports spinoffs. Mario Golf: World Tour has some fun theming with Peach’s Gardens for instance, but also has this painfully generic trio of courses that don’t even attempt to fit in with the Mushroom Kingdom. Somehow, by trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, the cookie-cutter theming of “Grass Course” sticks out like a sore ? block.

Mario Sports Superstars is where genericism has fully taken over the Mario spinoff ethos. It has five different sports available to play: Soccer, Baseball, Tennis, Golf, and Horse Racing. I’ve already covered how much fun previous games had building stadiums that tied into the Mushroom Kingdom, like Wario’s Palace, or at least they built stadiums that tried to do something even if their existence in the Mushroom Kingdom is bizarre, like the Underground. But the stadiums in Superstars? Well, let’s just list the names of the soccer stadiums:

Village Stadium

City Stadium

Kingdom Stadium

Grand Stadium

Wow. Don’t you really feel like you’re in the Mushroom Kingdom with a name like “City Stadium”? Let’s check out just how grand Grand Stadium is. Ooh, I bet you can see Peach’s Castle from inside!

Absolutely nothing to make it feel like it is part of the Mushroom Kingdom. This is horrible! Surely, the baseball fields must be better! Here’s a list of them again:

Country Field

Town Park

Big Field

Harbor Park

Okay! We got exactly one stadium that might convincingly be a part of the vibrant world of the Mushroom Kingdom! Show me Harbor Park!

Alright! If you squint, you can see a lighthouse beyond the left field wall! That’s, like, almost making a claim that Harbor Park is somewhere! Maybe it’s at Ricco Harbor! Maybe it’s in Seaside Kingdom! Or maybe, as Mario Wiki says, it is based on Oracle Park from real-life MLB team San Francisco Giants and isn’t part of the Mushroom Kingdom at all. Well, at least it’s more of a place than “Big Field” is.

None of the tennis courts are themed in any remotely interesting way, and the golf courses are extremely genericly themed with “Emerald Woods”, “Gold Links”, and “Crystal Beach” which I’m pretty sure are all retirement homes instead of golf courses. Horse Racing invents its own ranch and 5 themed courses that would fit in literally any other horse racing game that didn’t come from a pre-existing IP with plenty of fun ideas for places for horses to race. Instead of going through “Wild Valley”, “Green Farm”, “Cobalt Lake”, “Yellow Leaves Hill”, or “Sky Peak”, the horses could’ve raced literally any Mario Kart track and had it fit in more than this crap.

I think that’s enough proselytizing in my fun jokey article. Thankfully, after the Wii U and 3DS games were done with, Mario spinoffs have returned to more interesting theming. Mario Tennis Aces has a court in “Mirage Mansion” instead of Luigi’s Mansion for some reason, but at least it’s interesting to know that there’s another haunted mansion out there. I’m still annoyed that Mario Strikers Battle League doesn’t give me any lore about how the stadium works in that game, or where exactly it is in the Mushroom Kingdom, but, again, it is interesting. And that’s all I want.

Captain Pungry looks to exterminate the Rat Frenzy plaguing Imp Zone by scoring himself a Rat Trick. Tune in this Sunday night, 6/18, at 8 PM EST, 5 PM PST only on https://www.twitch.tv/ritoru_demon.