Sayonara Likes and Dislikes

[Princess Rescuer]

Sayonara Umihara Kawase is brilliant. It's a great sendoff to a great series and it shows other games and developers how you modernize a series while keeping what's good about it. It also attempted to change the series in a lot of ways, which I'll be discussing. Here is what was good and bad about it.

Like: The modernization. The physics, the music, the graphics, the level design, the field progression structure, the fact that each path only has one boss and only at the end, all of those are amazing. Unfortunately...

Dislike: The game also adds a "wins/failures" to each field. I don't like it when any video game counts your failures. It's annoying. What if you were trying risky strategies? What if you let someone else play? In wishing to represent a player's skill, this element actually misrepresents such things.

Like: The bosses. You know have to actually fight them instead of just waiting them out most of the time. As mentioned before, the bosses are all at the end, so there's only one per path. That's AWESOME. The bosses are easily the worst part of Umihara Kawase and they feel like they're just there because video games need bosses.

Dislike: Fighting the bosses can be kind of obtuse, though. The first time you fight the Tadpole, you might not know that you're supposed to make it run into a wall 3 times unless you've watched the 3DS version's trailer. And if you're a veteran, you might assume you're just supposed to wait it out, like previous games.

Like: In order to get extra lives, you have to collect them and you won't have them until you've finished the stage. This incentivizes getting out of any situation you get yourself into, and it also means Sayonara is a modern game that doesn't hand out extra lives like candy. If you want to have 20 lives by the end of a path, pick a longer path. Speaking of which, the time trial aspect of Survival runs interferes with you going out of your way to collect lots of lives, creating an interesting risk/reward dynamic.

Dislike: Unfortunately, one thing that nerfs the game is the new characters, Nokko and Emiko. Nokko's time-slowing power is useful and good for practice, but Emiko's checkpoints are ridiculously overpowered. Not only do you get checkpoints in the game's already short levels if you play as her, but you also don't even lose a life if you make it to one and die! And on levels with more than one checkpoint, you can keep going to the other one and reuse them infinitely. Only Umihara's records are supposed to count, but there is one option in the options menu you can simply change in order to make everyone's best times count, and due to the aforementioned checkpoint thing, there are certain times and bosses Emiko can get faster times in that are flat-out impossible for Umihara. Couldn't Umihara and the other characters have separate best times or something?

Like: You can assign any button to any function. You can have X and C be jump, S and T be hook, and L and R be stop/slow down time. I love it when games let me assign buttons to functions, and not the other way around so you can have multiple buttons be the same function.

Dislike: The tutorials. What happened to the short, helpful, and most of all SKIPPABLE tutorials from the first two games? Instead we get intrusive text boxes. Can be turned off in the options menu, but you might not know that. Also, my favorite character, Original Umihara, needs to be unlocked with 15 backpacks.

So, those are my thoughts. Ups and downs of an otherwise excellent game!

[sol-alpha]

Dislike: The game also adds a "wins/failures" to each field. I don't like it when any video game counts your failures. It's annoying. What if you were trying risky strategies? What if you let someone else play? In wishing to represent a player's skill, this element actually misrepresents such things.

I don't mind it. I've posted on my youtube videos in the description how many failures I've had and I don't care if it says I cleared something 3 times and failed 300+ times which is definitely in one of the videos.

I got tired of perfectionism long ago when online gaming came around. It's not going to matter to me much if I lose hundreds of times in fighting games if I end up winning a tournament eventually. (Preferably EVO or any equivalent)

Dislike: Unfortunately, one thing that nerfs the game is the new characters, Nokko and Emiko. Nokko's time-slowing power is useful and good for practice, but Emiko's checkpoints are ridiculously overpowered. Not only do you get checkpoints in the game's already short levels if you play as her, but you also don't even lose a life if you make it to one and die! And on levels with more than one checkpoint, you can keep going to the other one and reuse them infinitely. Only Umihara's records are supposed to count, but there is one option in the options menu you can simply change in order to make everyone's best times count, and due to the aforementioned checkpoint thing, there are certain times and bosses Emiko can get faster times in that are flat-out impossible for Umihara. Couldn't Umihara and the other characters have separate best times or something?

This is clearly a design decision to help newcomers to be able to use characters that can help them clear stages more easily.

I can't comment on the "Emiko clears bosses and stages faster" since I never really use the other characters for online rankings. Although it may explain some online rankings that have Emiko filling the top 10 for a stage? I don't know I could be wrong.

Dislike: The tutorials. What happened to the short, helpful, and most of all SKIPPABLE tutorials from the first two games? Instead we get intrusive text boxes. Can be turned off in the options menu, but you might not know that. Also, my favorite character, Original Umihara, needs to be unlocked with 15 backpacks.

Well, as you said. It is skippable so I don't really see it as a big deal. However, I never found the tutorial for Umihara Kawase Shun Steam Edition, still haven't. I saw the tutorial in the DS version of the game and I checked options but I still can't find the tutorial for Shun Steam edition.

[Princess Rescuer]

Well, okay, the excitement of beating a tough level (such as 33, 46, 54, 59) is mitigated by the fact that you have 1 success and like 56 failures. It makes you feel incompetent.

And I don't care about online rankings anyway. It's mostly just a bunch of similar runs that are nanoseconds apart. I never submitted one.

And I don't mean to bash the game at all. Its positives far outweigh its negatives (in the 2015 version) and it's still one of the modern games I've gotten the most replay value out of. These petty gripes don't really bother me at all really.