Kid Icarus Uprising Review | Video Game Thoughts.

First and foremost I should address one thing. This game has a lot of referential humor, but I'm a person who's super picky, so I don't necessarily like every game referenced within this game. Not that I'm attacking any franchises, just like everyone else I have franchises I like and franchises I dislike.

Everyone's free to enjoy what they enjoy, and everyone is free to say, "I don't like this," so long as we all respect each other. This game was actually one of my first great memories with the 3DS. I had owned a DS throughout highschool and really enjoyed that system.

Up until college though I was always the person who browsed Gamestop and video game sections at stores, but I usually didn't spend time looking up video game news and stuff like that. If I saw it in the store, I'd buy it. I started and would continue to try to keep up to date on video game news starting with the 3DS.

In the beginning I was just actively looking up news on the system to decide if I wanted to buy it. I'd had great experiences with every Nintendo handheld since the Gameboy Pocket, so there wasn't much doubt. But with the price tag of the system , I did want to be really sure.

People talk a lot about the 3DS being underpowered, and all due respect to the Vita because that's a great system too, but before the 3DS's release and even today, I thought that these graphics were exactly what I had wanted on a handheld for so long.

Comparing it to the DS and Gameboy line, the games used to advertise the 3DS just looked so pretty. I'd owned a PSP, which was also really good, and maybe this speaks more to my inability to research games for it than anything else, but I had a hard time finding games for it that I wanted.

With the 3DS, I was finally guaranteed a handheld system that would have both the graphical power I'd always wanted in a handheld and that was certain to be home to a lot of my favorite franchises. So I bought the 3DS about a month after launch. And we all know what happened then.

The 3DS had such a drought early in its life. I'm so happy things picked up for the system, and the fact that Nintendo did turn around the 3DS was even a big part of my decision to get a Wii U because I trusted them to do the same for that system .

People were always saying phones would take it out, when the Vita was released people attacked the 3DS a lot, eesh it was just bad. And then like a ray of light from video gaming heavens, Kid Icarus Uprising arrived! Well, okay, too dramatic. Overall I got the impression back then that the reaction to this game was, "Good effort, Nintendo, but bad controls." I even held back on buying it precisely because everyone mentioned how difficult its controls were, and I figured someone like me who isn't great at video games would probably struggle too much with it.

Ultimately I saw the game in the store and, I decided to go for it. I remember not having enough time to play the game the first day I had it, so I just looked through the menus and I stumbled across the tutorial videos. Kid Icarus Uprising has a series of tutorial videos to teach you the basics of the game, but the videos aren't just some dry, hit such button to do this, hit that other button to do that, sort of thing.

Both Pit and Palutena narrate what you can do, and they're fully in character as they do so, so there's a lot of very sincere joking around. Personality. I think that was my take away from the game. Even though Nintendo hasn't returned to this world in over 20 years, the Kid Icarus world is so full of personality.

Characters are unique. The plot is slightly unhinged, going from point A to B to Z to Pi and back to C. The weapons that you pick up are so varied The enemy characters range from giant eyeballs to a pair of moustache glasses with a sneeze attack. Boss encounters are both expected and totally unexpected.

I mean, in buying a video game based on ancient Greek mythology, no matter how loosely based, did you expect to fight a phoenix and mind control aliens? Can I take a minute to talk about characters? The character development in this game, which you might find odd considering that this game is known to be more of a comedy and folks often don't expect deep characterization from a Nintendo comedy.

But just take a look at the juxtaposition of Pit and Dark Pit. With Pit, we have a cheery, optimistic, loyal, goofy but brave hero. With Dark Pit, introduced as Pit's polar opposite, we have a serious, independent anti-hero. In fact, in-game everyone assumes Dark Pit is evil soon after he's introduced, er, born.

He's born out of a mirror that creates copies of people by revealing their true selves, but since Dark Pit is born as Pit is breaking that mirror, everyone assumes Dark Pit is some sort of defective clone. What Dark Pit is, is the mirror image of Pit, different in certain respects but still similar enough that we can recognize the hero inside of Dark Pit.

Having this contrast helps to show that Pit himself is a flawed hero. Dark Pit is very independent, and putting that next to Pit lets us see that he can be too loyal, to the point of blinding himself. He can be serious, but next to Pit and his ridiculous jokes and bad puns, does a bit of seriousness seem all that bad? And at the end of the game, he repeatedly helps Pit save the world, showing that while he won't be allying himself with someone like Palutena, who spends so much of her time making fun of allies like Pit, he won't just stand by when things really are that dire.

He's still heroic, just not the same type of heroic as Pit. And just like Dark Pit, there's a whole cast of characters who were, given what I considered to be the limited length of the game, decently developed. Though, it isn't like there aren't problems with the characterization.

Viridi seems to get away too easily with, let's call this what it is: attempting to commit genocide on humanity because of pollution. This in a world where human technology hasn't gotten anywhere near to the levels of environmental corruption we have in our world.

Taking issue with pollution in the world of Kid Icarus just seemed so anachronistic, when at that time in that world, the whole humans versus nature conflict had nature winning handily and humans still struggling to survive in a pretty harsh environment.

Ultimately, Viridi helped save the world, and did quite a lot for Pit. But that doesn't make up for what I thought to be a huge oversight in her character introduction. So good but not perfect characterization. Another thing that's good but not perfect is the controls.

Everyone mentioned this about the game, and I am too, but towards the end of my analysis because I just didn't think the controls were that big of an issue. See you hold the 3DS with one hand and control the camera with the stylus in the other hand. If that sounds awkward, it is.

My hands cramped up plenty of times as I played and I would have to wait for the numbness to go away. But that's only an issue for really long play sessions. I got used to the control scheme pretty early on and ultimately had fun with the game as-is.

Could it have been more intuitive? Definitely. Does the control scheme create a barrier entry when controls should facilitate the player interacting with the game world? Yes. But does the rest of the game still hold up? I think it does. I honestly think that this game does so many things so well, and the control scheme, while unwieldy, is something I could get used to and ignore.

The control wasn't perfect, but it wasn't that bad either, certainly not bad enough to tarnish what is an amazing game otherwise. The graphics are just beautiful on the 3DS and the sound design is amazing. The gameplay could be better but is still fun, and mechanics like the Fiend's Cauldron allow you to find just the right balance with regards to difficulty.

What's special about Kid Icarus is the voice acting. Every character comes alive not just through actions but also through their voices. It makes the game into a sort of living Saturday morning cartoon, silly and goofy. This in an age where video games are trying so hard to be taken serious as a medium! It reminds me that shouldn't let the fact that some people are so willing to dismiss video games as an irrelevant medium interfere with making great games, whether those games are serious adventures or comedies.