video game sanctuary

Ore no Ryouri works like this: customers' orders pop up on a list and their patience drains over time, always visible at the side of the screen. different dishes are broken down into different steps, and each step is a different gesture with the sticks. how fast and accurate you are on each step in a dish determines your final score when you finally serve it, so you want to work fast and well -- many steps let you perform literally as fast as you can move the joysticks, which makes it as intense as you want it to be. sometimes you have to wait for something to boil or fry, and you can work on different orders during those waiting steps, though you have to be sure to take it off the stove at the right time. and occasionally there are "problem tasks" that show up and take a little more time to do, like washing dishes or chasing a runaway customer. if you let the time on one of these run out, all your customers instantly leave, which is almost a guaranteed loss. when your score is high enough, you win. that's basically it.

it's also got a really quirky story that I can't read because I don't know Japanese and a bright, fun art style indicative of a Japanese PS1 game. there's an awesome competitive mode where two players can go head to head in an intense culinary tug-of-war, which I've mostly only played against computers because that's the story mode and no one else has ever played this. but still. by the way, the disc looks like this!

what I love about Ore no Ryouri is that it's ultra-responsive: it lets you go as fast as your hands and mind can take you. sometimes you have to wait for things to cook, but that's the time between, and even those few seconds of pause are important. if you take a long task at the wrong time, you might let burgers cook too long or let a customer get impatient and leave. balancing this just right and cooking as fast as you can with its odd immersive controls feels like nothing else. Cooking Mama is actually a great counter-example of responsiveness, since the minigames have lots of fanfare and tutorials between them and a simple dish can take a couple minutes start to finish, while Ore no Ryouri's long dishes take maybe 30 seconds. (Ore no Ryouri's tutorials are found during the "restaurant phase" of the sotry mode, where they show you the gestures you're supposed to do in the corner of the screen. the number of different gestures is also fairly limited, which is either for technical reasons or by design because it's hard to remember too many. either way, it feels great for its short runtime, though I wish there was more!)

there's one small thing that's absolutely essential to the flipping mechanic: there's a short time between switching colors that you can get hit by both. it's important to every level of using this mechanic. I love this kind of design where you can tell the time between is thoughtful and absolutely necessary. it's the same thing that makes the Dark Souls roll so satisfying to use well -- just enough so you have to think before you do it. that's the pause, and I'll mention it a lot.

flipping is really useful on a beginner level because if a bullet of your own polarity touches you, you absorb it and take no damage. for the first stage, you basically get to pick which bullets you want to worry about, so it gives you a good reason to use it and makes you feel smart for using it in the simplest way. but of course the pause I mentioned makes it so you can't turn your brain off. that's great to get people to play the game in an arcade and interesting design on its own, right?

the next simplest thing Ikaruga does to make you want to take risks is that being the opposite color of an enemy makes you do much more damage. since enemies usually fire shots of their own color, you'll have to think a lot more about dodging if you want to take advantage. also, enemies of your own color spray bullets on death, and combined with the pause, you can't shoot and flip recklessly, even at a beginner level.

instead of a standard Touhou-like bomb mechanic, Ikaruga has a powerful homing attack that charges as you absorb bullets, so it's actually a good thing to try to get as many as possible. sometimes that means putting yourself in danger to eat as much as you can for a bigger homing attack against a boss. when you get to this level, you have to start thinking about both colors at the same time, not just to dodge, but to figure out what would be the best way to charge the most energy as you move. against bosses, this makes it best to flip constantly to eat as many bullets as you can and bombard them with homing attacks of the opposite color, and thanks to the pause, that involves tons of risky situations and conscious thought about every bullet on the screen. quick kills on bosses give tons of extra points, so this is important for high ranks.

there's one more mechanic in the game that isn't strictly related to the polarity flipping, but combined with everything flipping is good for, you have to be a lunatic to take full advantage of it. Ikaruga has a chain system where destroying three of the same color enemies in a row increases your score multiplier, but doing it in groups other than three resets it to one. you can destroy black-black-black then white-white-white and get the bonus, but black-white-black or white-white-black would break it. this sounds hard to take advantage of, and it totally is, but with thoughtful play (most enemies come in groups of three to help with your chain) it's possible to keep this chain for the whole stage through the boss for incredible score that's necessary for high ranks.

Sakurai's usual achievement system like in Kid Icarus: Uprising and Kirby Air Ride is so effective because it allows the designer to give the player both experiences at once: the achievements are arranged in a grid, and every goal on this grid starts off hidden when you unlock an achievement, sometimes you'll get a new ride or other gameplay feature, and it reveals the conditions for all its immediate neighbors this way, the designer can offer lots of surprise unlocks while also putting more rewards in sight of the player! the uncertainty about whether an achievement will give a reward can also offer some surprise, but an achievement always reveals its neighbors, which is a reward in itself

the location of most objectives on the grid is also randomized for each game save to give different players different surprising experiences with the system, and its nonlinear grid shape allows players to pursue their own path and get an even more varied experience

there's also the "free space" mechanic, where you're given a certain number of achievements of your choice to unlock without actually completing them these can be used to unlock objectives that are too hard, or can be used in unexplored sections of the grid to give the player an idea of what else they should do to unlock the achievements there

traditional achievement and leveling systems have grown more popular in recent indie games to give the player both a sense of progression and a goal to work toward, but in many games it feels "tacked on" in a way: detached from the game's other systems and only present to give a sense of progression where there otherwise wouldn't be any, which is fine, but designers should aim for better than fine if possible

another strong example of a reward system is the mission system in Luftrausers, a score attack shmup where you can customize your plane each part you unlock has a number of associated missions that must be completed in order these missions give the player a goal in a game where the only other goal is a high score, and encourage them to try different play styles or aim to complete a difficult feat, and then reward the player with surprising new ways to play (more plane parts) and more missions to complete each plane part has several missions to complete, which allows players that don't like a certain plane part can use other parts instead and still unlock more it's a very smart piece of design for a very smart score attack game, a genre where design has to be highly focused to keep the player with it for more than a few minutes

essentially, the absolute best progression systems in games offer the player a goal to work for with the promise of some kind of reward, but keeping that reward vague (or even the goals themselves vague) allows the designer to surprise and delight the player with something unexpected!

there's a story mode with a basic plot where you unlock characters, a training mode, four player free-for-all, and a bunch of characters to unlock. they each have some unique moves and at least one Super Smiley Attack by picking up a Super Smiley Ball, which gets charged by being thrown around. pretty much like a Smash ball. most of the time, though, you'll be throwing items in each stage at your enemies, which include missiles, black holes and boulders. for ease of use, many items are either very large or have homing, and there's a convenient homing jump toward the nearest item so you don't have to walk. as I'm writing I notice this post has a way different mood than most of my others, but it's Rakugaki Showtime. it deserves it.

two of my favorite characters on the roster are this knock-off Cloud Strife looking guy called Ex Calibur, who can't hold items because his sword is too heavy (and so has a range of sword attacks), and Marina Liteyears, a cameo character from Mischief Makers who has the completely broken ability to instantly charge a Smiley Ball by shaking it. she can shake other items to make them bigger and stronger. all the characters are fun in their own way, these are just my favorites.

strange how little I have to say about one of the most fun games I've ever written about. there's just not much to it. (tangent incoming.) it takes a lot behind the scenes to make a party game like this where there's "not much to it" so much fun, which makes me think of Nintendo's recent development philosophy where they put play first. in a certain video by Ceave Gaming he points out some faults to this philosophy — often, the visual design of levels and other non-gameplay considerations will suffer from Nintendo laser focus on gameplay. that explains why Breath of the Wild, for example, controlled so well and had so many interesting systems, but shrines and the divine beasts were aesthetically samey. Treasure, meanwhile (or at least when they made video games), aimed to make technically and visually impressive games on any console they developed for while making no sacrifices in gameplay. Rakugaki Showtime especially has loads of personality in all its characters.

unlike Nintendo, Treasure never aimed to be mainstream, only developing the games they wanted to play and licensed games to make money in between. Nintendo made some great games while Treasure was active that arguably had more charm than their modern library, and that decline in personality may be from their need to appeal to as many people as possible — a much broader audience than the 90s or early 2000s and a need to keep profits up. I can only wonder what Treasure would do for a 2022 release since their last game was Gaist Crusher God, a 3DS game made with Capcom nearly 10 years ago. they are still "active," at least, and release a new Ikaruga figure and post on Twitter every now and then.