Gimmick! 2

 I played Gimmick! 2

Gimmick! 2 was released in 2024. It is a sequel to Gimmick! from 1992

Okay, so I've always said the original Gimmick! for Famicom was my favourite 8-bit game. It's cute, difficult, it has a lot of attention to detail and the main gameplay mechanic of throwing the star to bounce around has a lot of depth, for traversing the levels, attacking enemies, skipping sections of levels, it's just so good. 

The main thing that makes Gimmick unique is the star throw - you create a star above Yumetaro's head, and then throw it. It bounces around the environment with relatively realsitic bouncing physics, and if you land on top of your own star, you can let it take you around the level, which lets you reach high places if you're skilled at bouncing it in just the right spot. It's really cool. 

So I played Gimmick! 2, and.... hmm.

So the game gives a good first impression. The physics of the star bounce are spot on. They added a bit more momentum to your jumps if you jump off a moving star, which is a nice change. It feels perfect for returning fans, and it is just such a clever emergent physics kind of movement option for a platformer. I love it.

the game is definitely more of a puzzle-platformer compared to Gimmick 1. It feels a bit Celeste-like in that the focus is on completing a series of rooms using your star-bounce mechanic, with frequent checkpointing and infinite immediate retries. It's not like Gimmick 1's 8-bit style of difficult platforming with lives and game overs and all that.

The levels in Gimmick 2 are pretty long, but there are only six level in total. So the game has a bit of a lopsided balance, where it feels like things are dragging on a bit too much, yet it also feels like you're over and done with it a bit too quickly. I dunno. I don't think it's an actual problem because the checkpoints let you travel between them, Shadow the Hedgehog style, and the game permanently saves the fact that you have access to a new checkpoint the moment you unlock it. So the game does give you plenty of natural stopping points if you do start feeling fatigued. ...It's fine tbh. But maybe it could have been better paced anyway.

The game has a ton of secret items hidden everywhere that unlock customisation for the main character Yumetaro. You can change his colour palatte, star colour, or give him a hat. I never really felt like using any of these, but these items are really just a way for them to put hidden little secrets in the game, the actual prize isn't what's important.

I do enjoy how the secret areas are subtly conveyed by way of slightly off-looking level design. You see a ledge that goes nowhere, and it feels enticing to try and reach it anyway. And then you get rewarded for managing it. it's good stuff. But there were a few hidden areas that were a bit too obscure. I did not feel bad about looking up a guide for the few things I didn't find myself.

The main difference in level design philosophy between Gimmick 1 and Gimmick 2 is the fact that Gimmick 2 is designed primarily around doing trickshots with the star bounce. In Gimmick 1, you really didn't need to know how to bounce the star in order to complete the game for the most part. It was a hard game due to the enemy behaviour and platforming jumps primarily. The star bounce system was mostly there for repeat playthroughs, for more experienced players to play the game over and over, getting more efficient and practiced at bouncing the star, and being able to skip once-tricky sections with a well-placed bounce. It was super cool and it really rewarded becoming familiar with the game over repeated playthroughs.

Gimmick 2 on the other hand, demands that you master the star bounce just to get through the game. Very often there are platforming challenges that expect you to figure out exactly where to bounce the star in order to get past them.

This is what makes the game feel more like a puzzle-platformer than a pure platformer. And this extends to the enemy design as well - the enemies are placed in order to support each screen's challenge. Like a Deku Scrub-like enemy that shoots seeds at you from afar, but hides when you're close. The puzzle is figuring out how to bounce the star so it can defeat the enemy from afar. Things like this make the game feel much more puzzle focused than before. 

There is also one other, kind of esoteric aspect of Gimmick 1 that absolutely did not carry on over to Gimmick 2.

And that is the "Realistic Another World" aspect.

So basically, Gimmick 1 says on the title screen "Authentic Entertainment Realistic Another World" which is kinda a poorly-translated Japanese English tagline to make the game sound cool... but what it was trying to convey was the fact that Gimmick 1's world feels alive and "lived in".

 Enemies have distinct behaviours that don't really serve a gameplay purpose, but instead are just fun little details. The ferret looking enemy that appears at the start of the castle level chases your star like a dog playing catch. The hardhat guy who shoots homing missiles in the factory level runs away defeated once he runs out of missiles. The tooth-looking guys are normally peaceful, but get angry if you hurt one of the little birdies. The ship captain boss starts the level asleep, which you can only see if you reach the boss fast enough. The bees in the cave level actually fly into a hole in the wall, rather than just flying offscreen like a normal videogame enemy.

These are the little touches that make Gimmick 1 feel like "Realistic Another World". The world doesn't revolve around Yumetaro. It feels like it's its own little world with its own logic and procedures, and the player just gets a little taste of it during their playthrough of Gimmick. This concept would be taken to the extreme in Trip World for the GB, which I would say even goes as far to forgo having actual gameplay entirely, and just focuses on this weird naturalistic aspect. (Trip World is a super weird game btw).

Gimmick 2 doesn't seem to care about any of this that made the original Gimmick so unique. Gimmick 2's level design and enemy design exists purely for the gameplay. They took the most interesting aspect of the original Gimmick, which was the star physics system, and designed a new game entirely around making as much use as possible out of it.

And with this design goal in mind, they did a great job. Some of those bounces they expect you to do are pretty challenging, and feel great to pull off. ...But it feels like they completely ignored the other aspects of Gimmick 1 that made it feel so unique just to zero-in on this one part. Which is a bit sad to see.

Overall.. good game, good puzzle-platformer game, but I felt fatigued after playing it, and I'm nowhere near as enamored with it as I was am the original Gimmick, sad to say.