It may not be much by today's standards, but when this game came out so long ago I was young and didn't comprehend just how much this game changed everything we knew about games. Games on the previous generation of Nintendo hardware like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Metroid were already starting the paradigm shift away from having the main game consist of clearing goalposts and getting the top score towards having a cohesive world for us to adventure through, but when this game dropped and literally added a new dimension to the mix, it blew our minds with just how deep games could take us into new worlds. Mario was the perfect avatar for us to blaze that trail, with a set of acrobatic moves that were just right for traversing the vast (at the time) and intriguing playgrounds we were dropped into and given free reign to explore, and a plucky personality that won our hearts and kept us going through this brave new world. Games have had plenty of time since then to do all of this and much more, expanding and twisting the formula in their own ways, and telling their own stories, but playing Super Mario 64 feels like going back home to the good times, when the world wasn't as big and scary. Super Mario 64 was the spark that ignited my passion for games.
To me, this game represents 3D action gaming perfected. I could go on and on about how great I think this game is but I will try to keep things short. Hideki Kamiya takes the formula he created with the Devil May Cry series and elevates it to whole new levels of brilliance and finesse. Bayonetta's moves and arsenal are highly inventive, able to equip weapons on both her hands and feet in order to mix up the strategy involved in the game's two-button attack system in unique ways. The combat itself is truely sublime, offering pixel-perfect precision of control and a massive yet easily accessible moveset, while at the same time offering tons of depth in how the player approaches battling enemies -- mastering the game's combo system is one of the most satisfying experiences I've had in a game. Whereas screwing up and performing the wrong technique is a common pitfall of 3D hack-n'-slash and beat-'em-up games, in Bayonetta, when the player fails and gets taken down, it is almost always their own fault and not the game's. Kamiya and his team of former Capcom employees are masters of their craft.
The "Automatic" mode included in the easier difficulties lets players not skilled in action games use repeated button presses to pull off complicated combo sequences, but you're really robbing yourself of the true satisfaction that comes with the challenge of clearing the game's normal mode. On top of that it has tons of replay value, jam-packed with brutally hard secret missions and extra difficulty levels, along with a treasure trove of extra content -- and
none of it is attempted to be sold as DLC!
I couldn't decide whether I wanted to write about Super Mario 64 or this game -- Mario won out in the end but I felt like I had to give this game a mention anyways. It's a memorable, landmark FPS game that in my opinion, still holds up a decade later. The level design, art design, sound design, and the seamless transitions through the single-player campaign's engrossing story all come together wonderfully, and for one of the first games to use the Havok physics engine like it did, it's still one of the most fun. Using your brains and and a gravity gun instead of tons of bullets to overcome enemies (the game intentionally doesn't give much ammo for this purpose) still makes me feel like both a genius and a badass of a mute physicist.
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