1. I somehow missed this remaster of 1989's DuckTales when it came out. I discovered it only five years after release despite the fact it's a remake of a game I loved as a kid that was made by a developer I love an adult. I honestly kinda wish I had missed it altogether. It is really not that great.
2. I was going to try to criticize DuckTales: Remastered as if the original didn't exit but, really, it's so impacted by nostalgia that you simply can't ignore it. You get the feeling at least someone wanted to push the gameplay from the original game to a new places but the whole process was held up, seemingly out of fear to leave anything from the original game out.
3. The soft-chewy center of this is, in fact, the original game. All five levels are here. They vary a little bit in layout and structure but, you know, lose enough. Some fan people will pick nits but who has time for that?
4. The graphics look great, detailed 2D sprites on bright, beautiful 3D rendered graphics. There is a WayForward
touch to it but all the Disney characters are rendered true to the show.
The general vibe I get is that this is what the NES game would have
looked like if they could have made a game that looked like this on the
NES.
5. I will confess to missing the original music much more than the original graphics. The songs are all there but those old chip sounds play my heart like an eight bit fiddle. For what it's worth, what they did was pretty excellent. It's got a great synthesized sound and they've utilized the additional sonic space modern technology allows to develop themes and motifs between the different songs. It's great stuff and I like it a lot but I still fear change. Shoot me.
6. If that was it for the game, it'd be great. Call it a lazy up-port if
you want but I think this is what most people actually want out
of a remaster.
7. The only issue that comes from not changing anything is that all of the levels are pretty long and, on higher difficulties, don't have any checkpoints. No individual section is all that hard, you just have to get through w/o making mistakes. It's exhilarating the moment you finally manage to finish a long level followed by a reasonably tough pattern-based boss but there is a lot of tedious replay to get to that one moment.
8. Oh, that and because you can play the levels in any order, there's no way to really have a difficulty curve. Every other problem stems from all the crap they added.
9. The most egregious issue is the endless cut scenes. I didn't really feel like I needed an explanation of why Scrooge McDuck was going off collecting treasures when the original came out and I definitely don't need it now. They are mostly voiced by the original actors from the series and so could have been a great asset to the game but they are just so long and so unnecessary that I found myself skipping them even on my first playthrough. The fact that the characters aren't animated at all when they speak doesn't help either.
10. As part of the set-up, they added a tutorial level. I guess this okay but, you know, this is a game that still uses two buttons and the d-pad. Just give some prompts on the first level people chose to play and I think that's about good.
11. They also added a final boss level, complete w/ a Metroid-style escape scene. This was actually cool so no complaints here. The original sort of lacked a satisfying finish to it so this is a welcome addition.
12. This Metroid bit really got me thinking to what they might have done w/ the franchise rather than just slapping the old game between a couple new levels. Capcom's DuckTales was clearly built on Mega Man DNA, which they adapted to fit the license and for a younger audience. In the same vein, I wish WayForward would have taken their Metroid-vania franchise, Shantae, and fit DuckTails into that framework. Keep the updated graphics and music. Keep the level themes but rework them into something new. That would have been a fun game to play.
13. Really, just generally, I feel like something is holding DuckTales: Remastered back. It keeps the original levels and adds the original voice actors from the show, all seemingly out service to the fans, but the whole thing never really congeals into anything special. It just feels like a bunch of old stuff mashed together. The voice-work shows this did at least have some kind of money behind it. The new levels indicate a willingness to try something new but it wasn't taken far enough and the end result is a game stuck between being a straight remaster and a full reboot and seems unable to deliver what you'd want out of either.
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