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by positive about it, retrospectively. 02/20/2018, 5:49am PST |
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I want to talk about the best combat encounter in the game, the Autobot boss fight against Soundwave. I'm going to run down the list of reasons why I liked it.
1) You're fighting an actual Transformer! This happens precisely five times throughout both campaigns - the other battles are with Zeta Prime (who?) and Omega Supreme as the Decepticons, and Starscream and Trypticon as the Autobots. The remaining few hundred combat encounters pit you against nameless, voiceless autoboring decepticlone protoforms or, in some particularly regrettable instances, giant robot housecat-sized giant robot spiders.
2) Soundwave is awesome! He was my favourite in the cartoon, and he's my favourite here. He has a unique voice that, unlike Megatron, is so heavily processed that I can't even tell it's not Frank Welker doing it anymore. He also has a unique speech pattern that happens to translate really fucking well to videogame barks ("FRENZY, DEPLOY. OPERATION: ANNIHILATION.")
3) He brings his Mini-Cassette friends with him! The three invulnerable stages of Soundwave's boss fight have you fighting first the piledriving Frenzy, then Frenzy's (cartoon-accurate blue) palette swap Rumble, and finally frickin' Laserbeak. Inbetween you get to damage Soundwave himself when he runs out to retrieve their shattered cassette corpses. There is no point in the fight when you're not doing damage to SOMEONE'S health bar. It puts the player in a very proactive position, which I appreciate.
3.1) You know the devs probably wanted to get Ravage in there, but I suppose he would've required not only another model but a whole new set of quadruped animations, which would be frankly ridiculous for one phase of one boss fight. It's enough we got Laserbeak. Still, how great would it have been if all those campaign fights against swarms of purple spiders were actually against packs of Ravages? Now I'm just dreaming.
3.2) The Transformers wiki is the best Transformers-related thing since the cartoon. How do they maintain such a consistent voice? Is it one guy's life's work to touch up every article? God bless that guy.
4. This is the big one. Soundwave is either the hardest or second-hardest boss fight in the game, at least on maximum difficulty. How many beloved NES games of our childhood are testament to the idea that ANYTHING can eventually become fun, provided it's challenging enough? How entwined with our memories of the Transformers cartoon are our memories of inappropriately difficult licensed kids games? In the same way that Braid's physics deliberately evoke nostalgia for the original Super Mario Bros., I think this difficulty spike accidentally evokes nostalgia for that first shitty TMNT platformer, the one with the underwater bomb defusal mission that my soft adult brain still wants to argue wasn't so bad. Beyond that, my soft adult brain actually had to come up with a strategy to beat Soundwave that used all the tools at my disposal, including vehicle mode and melee attacks to minimize reloading during his window of vulnerability. What's the point of including sweet mechanics like those if the game never makes you make use of them?
5. Here are some ideas for combat encounters I had while I was literally falling asleep massacring my one millionth purpleshirt:
- fighting Megatron as the Autobots
- fighting Optimus Prime as the Decepticons
- tearing out Bumblebee's voicebox in a quick time event or, even better, NOT in a quick time event
- fighting Soundwave again, that was pretty fun.
Maybe these are already in the sequel? I heard that one's better. |
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