Semblance is a game that relies on your enjoyment of the satisfying feeling that comes with the act of reshaping objects and environments. The game's world and its unnamed blobby protagonist are as malleable as playdough, and it's up to you to restore this world after it is infected by another harder, sharper race of blob. It's thin on plot justification, but that's fine--Semblance is a solid puzzle-platformer with a great hook and well-designed levels.
The game has you solve level-manipulation puzzles to collect numerous scattered orbs floating just outside of your reach. When you come across an orb, the camera will zoom out so that every piece of the landscape you need to solve the puzzle fits within a single screen, and it's up to you to figure out which platforms and walls to bend and shape to reach the orb. Levels are decorated using limited color palettes, but if a platform or wall has one consistent color tone, you can squish and deform it with your body.
Your character, a small indistinct blob, can move, jump, dash, and "reset" shifted pieces of the environment. Dashing allows you to shift or reshape platforms and dig crevices into larger parts of the level. You might need to dash into a suspended platform from below to push it up, creating a hump you can use to reach a higher ledge; alternatively, you might need to dash into the ground to create a hole so that a dangerous object moving on a set path through the level will pass over the top of you. At several points you can wall-jump by dashing into the platforms around you, creating little crevices to move between. It's all about finding ways to bend the environment into the shape you need it, with some mild platforming elements thrown in.
The puzzles in the game get much more complex over time with the addition of new obstacles and mechanics. In later levels, you're able to squash yourself flat, horizontally or vertically, which allows you to jump higher or further (like you're a frisbee being thrown around) and fit through narrow gaps, which leads to some great puzzle designs but also highlights the game's slightly fiddly controls. The blob's inertia is hard to come to grips with, and it's a little harder to move sideways in the air than it is in most platformers. It's easy to dash in the wrong direction during a jump, and on a few occasions, a platforming section seemingly became more difficult than necessary, because during a dash I'd deformed the platform I was meant to land on. Thankfully there's an option to reset the screen, but this can mean repeating a lot of steps during the more complicated puzzles.
Semblance is often frustrating, but solving a puzzle, and figuring out which step you've been missing in your process, can be very rewarding. Mid-way through the game you'll start to encounter lights that can snap objects back to their original form if they touch them. These lights are used for several clever puzzles; for example, you might need to press a platform down so that it touches a light below you, causing you to shoot into the air when the platform springs back into its original shape like you've just jumped on a trampoline. The game finds lots of inventive ways to deploy this trick throughout the game. There are a few moments where puzzle solutions are immediately obvious, or ideas get reused, but most screens require lateral thinking from the player. Insta-kill laser beams and fields that block your dash ability are also used to clever effect throughout.
Semblance is a charming experience, with a cute protagonist and nice sense of visual style, even if it never quite tips over into being properly beautiful. The art and sound design are both perfectly fine, but also quite repetitive over the course of the game. The game also tries to deliver story through vague cave paintings scrawled throughout the world, but there's not enough sense of place to make them worth paying close attention to. I also encountered a few glitches--I once got stuck inside a wall, and on another occasion I fell through the floor, hurtling through an endless void. A quick reset fixed these issues and I did not lose much progress, but there's a general pervasive stickiness to some of the game's surfaces that feels inconsistent, and this can be frustrating.
Semblance is a short game--you'll likely be finished within two or three hours, with the final area feeling particularly brief. This is a length that works perfectly well for some games, but Semblance feels like it should have more to offer--the ending arrives much faster than you'd expect after some build-up in the final level, and while the puzzles are clever and fun it feels like more could have been done to diversify the experience. Upon finishing the game it felt like something was missing.
Because it's so short, and the puzzles never get particularly fiendish, Semblance is an enjoyable but light experience. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--it's a relaxed game, a good one to clear over a few sessions in bed or on the train if you're playing on Switch--but it also means that it doesn't feel like the game realizes its full conceptual potential. But the fact that I desperately wanted more, and that I was disappointed when Semblance abruptly ended, says more about the game's strengths than its weaknesses. This is a good idea realized and executed well, even though you're likely to come away from it wishing for just a bit more.
Mega Man and Mega Man X are related, but only just. Whereas Mega Man is plucky and wholesome, Mega Man X is often melodramatic and grim. The two series are joined by some loose themes and for being peak action-platforming in the '90s when competition was fierce, but Mega Man X has always been a little more complex and experimental, for better and worse. The Mega Man X Legacy Collection pays homage to the series in its near-entirety, with only a few shortcomings to detract from the overall quality of the compilation.
True to its name, this set captures the legacy of MMX--from the original Super NES classics, to their natural progression onto 32-bit systems, to the somewhat disastrous journey into 3D on the PlayStation 2. Only missing are a handful of Mega Man X curios: the pair of Xtreme Gameboy titles, the Maverick Hunter X remake for the PSP, and the strangely endearing spin-off RPG Command Mission. Three of those four were remakes or retellings in one way or another, so their absence is understandable.
With such a wide variety of emulation represented, technical proficiency becomes the key to a successful collection. The Switch version, where I spent most of my playtime, performed on-par with expectations, with no more slowdown on the Super NES titles than I remembered, and consistently smooth quality on the more technically demanding PlayStation- and PlayStation 2-era games.
The original Mega Man X is still a blast 25 years after its debut, with its combination of classic Mega Man gameplay with increased speed and agility feeding off of a soundtrack that pops and fizzes with the energy of a synth-heavy 80s rock band. Collections like this give a chance to appreciate just how unique its ideas were: Stages that shift based on which bosses have already been defeated build the world in subtle ways; Optional power-ups that center around proper mastery of the dash-jump combo, and give a special sense of accomplishment that favors especially skilled play; Special secondary functions for charged boss weapons that add another layer of strategy. It all holds up spectacularly, and still feels enjoyable from start to finish.
Mega Man X2 built on the original concepts and took those high-level skills for granted. This makes it both a natural progression and, sometimes, too clever for its own good. The upgrades require more backtracking, and the punishment for missing a power-up is often instant death. The addition of optional super-bosses, the X-Hunters, was a concept that would continue across several games, but the genesis here may be the best implementation of it. Mega Man X3, by comparison, suffers sequel fatigue with a few too many collectible doodads and boss animations that are noticeably less detailed and flowing than their other SNES counterparts. Fortunately, it's one of the rarest Mega Man games, and one of the easiest to have missed back in its day, so having access to it again at all is a small prize.
In a way, the entire collection itself is the museum--an entire series, with all its beauty and its blemishes, on display for its audience to judge and assess years later.
Mega Man X4 is where the series transitioned to PlayStation, and serves as a refresh. The new platform gave an opportunity for reimagined sprites, introduced the ability to play through the entire game as the popular character Zero, and somehow, miraculously, didn't lose a step for the transition. It serves as a rare example of a platform-crossing sequel that didn't shed any of the original magic.
Mega Man X5 builds upon that firm foundation with some novel ideas like two collectible sets of armors. The classic guesswork of sussing out boss weaknesses is diminished somewhat by splitting the sets of bosses in two, thereby halving the possibilities. But it features multiple endings, and adds the ability to duck for new wrinkles of platforming complexity. It's also the most narratively coherent, intended as a farewell to the character Zero. Obviously, that didn't last. Mega Man X6, like X3 before it, is the third game on a platform and starts to diminish in some ways that are hard to ignore--namely weaker animations and a lack of English voiceover in cutscenes. In fact, all of the PS1-era cutscenes look worse for the wear on an HD screen.
And while Legacy Collection also includes Mega Man X7 and Mega Man X8, these are the lowlights for a series that unfortunately stumbled its way across the finish line. The less said about X7, the better. It was a clumsy experiment in taking the franchise to 3D, at the cost of all the exacting control for which the series had deservedly earned its reputation. It also famously introduced Axl, a young new Hunter who is as over-designed as he is obnoxiously voiced. Axl's weapon is more suited to 3D than X or Zero, which is itself a concession to the impracticality of it all. Mega Man X8 finishes the series by learning hard lessons and going back to the side-scroller genre, albeit in 2.5D. Despite the half-baked attempt, it's just not the same. It's as if X, Zero, and Axl are wearing lead boots. It fails to capture the seamless speed and agility that made the older games so special, so it's a sour note to end on.
In sum, then, the first half of the collection is significantly stronger than the second. That serves to emphasize how strange it is that the collection as a whole is bifurcated. The split gives some flexibility for purchasing, but it would have been nice to have an option in which all eight games are housed under a single roof. As it is, the collection is split into two distinct pieces of software, and jumping back and forth between them to sample the various games is inelegant.
The "X Challenge" mode is the most substantial new feature in the Legacy Collection, challenging you to take on a gauntlet of bosses, two at a time. These are curated fights, and at the beginning of each set you can choose a set of three special weapons to bring along. Since it's mixing and matching bosses from across separate games, it takes some experimentation to find weapons that are effective against the widest range of enemies, and which ones will have to be taken down with the simple X-Buster. The challenges in each half of the collection are similar to each other, but include a slightly different boss line-up and separate leaderboards.
The other features added are to be expected from a retro compilation. A smoothing filter actually bucks the trend of muddy processing effects and looks crisp on the handheld Nintendo Switch screen--though for big-screen play, classic pixel-perfect is still the way to go. A Rookie Hunter toggle reduces the difficulty for a more relaxed experience. A set of Hunter Medals track and reward the full breadth of Mega Man X challenges, from completing armor sets or finishing games to more obscure ones like receiving Zero's Arm Part in the original MMX. Some are even devilishly difficult, offering challenges that seasoned veterans may not have realized were even possible. It grants some extra longevity to a set of games that are, ordinarily, known for going by quickly.
A separate Museum feature details a treasure trove of artwork, music tracks, merchandise, and marketing from throughout the series' history. It could stand to be more complete, but the material that is present archives the series' history well.
In a way, the entire collection itself is the museum--an entire series, with all its beauty and its blemishes, on display for its audience to judge and assess years later. Parts of this legacy have aged horribly, but they're still undeniably a piece of Mega Man X history. We've been told that the upcoming Mega Man 11 was greenlit thanks in part to fan interest in the original Mega Man Legacy Collection. If Capcom follows with a proper sequel to Mega Man X, this compilation provides valuable lessons on what the series is, what it isn't, and what it can be when given the chance.
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