11th March 2021, 8:33 PM
Yes I saw what's in the early prototype, and while some things are better story-wise, all in all it's still got a lot of elements missing.
Here's why the final boss fakeout failed so badly. You've been working on one combat system, the staff, for the entire game and that final battle against Scales was the culmination of all your practice. Then he just dies and it's an Arwing fight. Would the final fight against an evil dragon have used your staff, or would you have been on teradactyl back? If the former, well that could redeem itself, if it's the latter, it's really no different from what we got.
Thing is, Fox being in the game isn't much of a stretch at all, but Andross most certainly is. Fox was responding to a distress call and he ended up caught up in a long adventure to save the world. That worked perfectly fine for me as far as a setup goes. It even goes a long way towards differentiating Krystal from Fox. They're from very different cultures and it shows. Too bad they didn't actually get to capitalize on it by working in that character switching component. Still, even if they had worked it in, from what I can tell it would have basically just split up what we did get across two characters rather than actually add more content.
A complete reimagining of the game for me would take the arwing and make it a method of fully controllable travel in an open world environment, Jak and Daxter mixed with Fury 3. No need to be ready to warp when you can fly in real time to the various locales in the game. It could have been "all range mode" all the time. The arwing is a single seater, but there's room to work another seat in there for the purposes of using that as the relay point to switch characters. Prince Tricky? Gone! Just... get rid of him.
Here's why the final boss fakeout failed so badly. You've been working on one combat system, the staff, for the entire game and that final battle against Scales was the culmination of all your practice. Then he just dies and it's an Arwing fight. Would the final fight against an evil dragon have used your staff, or would you have been on teradactyl back? If the former, well that could redeem itself, if it's the latter, it's really no different from what we got.
Thing is, Fox being in the game isn't much of a stretch at all, but Andross most certainly is. Fox was responding to a distress call and he ended up caught up in a long adventure to save the world. That worked perfectly fine for me as far as a setup goes. It even goes a long way towards differentiating Krystal from Fox. They're from very different cultures and it shows. Too bad they didn't actually get to capitalize on it by working in that character switching component. Still, even if they had worked it in, from what I can tell it would have basically just split up what we did get across two characters rather than actually add more content.
A complete reimagining of the game for me would take the arwing and make it a method of fully controllable travel in an open world environment, Jak and Daxter mixed with Fury 3. No need to be ready to warp when you can fly in real time to the various locales in the game. It could have been "all range mode" all the time. The arwing is a single seater, but there's room to work another seat in there for the purposes of using that as the relay point to switch characters. Prince Tricky? Gone! Just... get rid of him.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)