The Story :
The story starts off, and stays, kind of bland. At the beginning of the game our characters are shown in a cutscene arriving at a planet in their spaceship, the Nubis (pretty sure it's the Nubis). They are boarded by human sized blue ants and forced to evacuate to a nearby planet, where you find out some evil dude Mizar is using his blue aunt army to take over the universe and inslave the adorable - yet soon to be hated by anyone who plays this game - Tribals, little white balls of fuzz who literally lose their heads if you shoot them. So, I guess, you have to take down Mizar and his army, saving the Tribals.
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| We're here to kick ass and...do whatever you tell us. |
Graphics, Sound, Atmosphere and the Likes :
As with Zelda, JFG has pretty good graphics for it's time. They are clunky and imperfect, but doable. At times, though, the game gets skippy. If at any point there are too many enemies on the screen, or you unleash a hellstorm of rockets at a boss, the game slows down and seems like it has problems keeping up with what is on screen. It doesn't happen enough to ruin the game, but it can get annoying.
The sound of the game is 50/50. The sound effects are actually really good and effective. Enemy blood sounds squishy, gunfire matches the amount of bullets that you shoot and all that. The music itself is actually very good. It sounds professional and really helps players get into the game. When it is supposed to sound epic and adventurous, it does. When you are playing through a planet plagued with hot lava pits and dark caves, the music gets erie and dramatic. The only problem I had with the music was there was no actual soundtrack. Instead, all of the music was made up of short sound clips that loop continuously as you play. The longer you play, you actually start to hate the music, because it is the same thing over and over and over again. This gets especially annoying when you are spending a lot of time on one planet, trying to complete late-game objectives.
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| The music is a lot like this roller coaster. It loops, and it will make you puke. |
As far as atmosphere goes, it didn't really grow on me. At the beginning of the game it seemed alright, but it never achieved what it really wanted to, that feeling of an "Interstellar Adventure". Nothing about this game feels "interstellar". Sure, you play on different planets, and a spaceship, but it never actually felt like that. Each planet just felt like a different level on the same planet. The spaceships could have been anything industrial, like a factory, or janitor's closet. The lack of originality and creativity that went into the games atmosphere left it feeling dry, and limited how much I enjoyed playing. The game border line failed on feeling like an actual adventure.
Controls and Gameplay :
The controls in JFG are a little different then most games. Instead of using the A / B buttons to jump and perform different actions, you use them to cycle through the weapons. Instead the "C" pad, the yellow arrows on the N64 controller, allow you to jump, strafe, crawl and occasionally hover. The joystick goes with the basic joystick N64 operations, you use it to walk, turn and aim. The controls were good, but the camera was not. This game is played in the third person, so you see your character in front of you as you control him / her. At times, your character would get ahead of the camera and you couldnt' see them if you were turning a corner. This causes a lot of run ins with enemies that could be prevented. It can also make it difficult to navigate some levels that require a lot of platform manuevering.
JFG seems to be lacking a lot more than other games, but the gameplay is solid and unique. One thing that worked well for it was the design of the game. It felt like Rare intended to make JFG as a 2D platform game, then turned it into a 3D semi-shooter at the last second, which turned out good. It was cool to navigate multiple platforms to get through levels, especially when you earn the jetpack attachment. Aside from its platform-esque gameplay, JFG also had the elements of a railshooter. When the time came for a boss battle, your character was limited to left and right movement (and jumping). There was a crosshair in the middle of the screen, and you could fire away. This actually worked really well, as during regular gameplay you usually auto-aimed and rarely used the manual targeting feature. It also made boss battles a little more difficult, but kept the difficulty on a reasonable level. The diverse gameplay helps keep JFG alive.
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| Dodge left, dodge right, shoot, repeat! |
Another thing that helps JFG a lot is the multiplayer. There are tons of multiplayer modes that players unlock as they play, and they seem pretty fun. In the days before online gaming, I could see JFG thriving because of its multiplayer alone.
Another fun bonus is a robot named Floyd. You save Floyd in one of the earlier levels and he spends the duration of the game flying around whatever character you are playing as. This is cool for two reasons. One, there are hidden points through the game that act as many games for Floyd. Players get to fly him through tunnels and the likes to beat mini games that earn them unlockables. Second, Floyd turns the game into a sort of co-op video game. A person playing on a second controller can aid the first player by using Floyds gun. His guns are pretty powerful, they have unlimited ammo and Floyd can't be killed. The only downside is he never leaves the main characters side, so you are limited on movement.
Now comes the huge, fun killing, made me hate JFG part of the review. Throughout the game, you think that you simply have to fight through planets, reunite the JFG team and take down Mizar. So you do just that, except the fight with Mizar is ridiculously easy. Why? Because Rare didn't think the game was long enough. Instead of killing Mizar, he escapes and send an asteroid hurtling towards Earth. The only way to save it is to use an ancient spaceship, which is missing a bunch of parts. You are told you have to go back through all the planets you already beat to find these missing parts and oh yea, save every single tribal in the fucking game. Are you kidding me? There were times when just getting through a planet was tedious, and now I have to find every single hidden tribal in the game? After learning all this, you are given new armor with jetpacks, and you find out you can now use any character on any planet. Seems good right?....right.
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| Across the level, you will lose all will to live as this game slowly kills your soul. |
Truth is, using any character on any planet is a curse. Each character has a different ability, like the ability to swim (you can all save the universe, but not all of you can swim?) or hover across mediocre distances. This allows you to access new areas of planets hiding more Tribals, and spaceship parts. This seems cool at first, but is actually extremely annoying. Let's say one planet has two hidden areas, one that can be found by swimming, the other hovering, and each one is about halfway through the regular play area of the planet. Since the game starts you off at the beginning of a planet everytime you change characters, you have to go through some planets two or three times to find all the Tribals it is hiding. This gets so tedious it completely kills everything that is good about the game. To make it worse, you can't just charge through areas to get where you want. Most of the time, each area is blocked by a "life force door" that can only be unlocked by killing all the enemies in that area. This makes the game so long and drawn out. Everything gets dulled out because you do it so much, that by the time you finish you wish you rescued all the Tribals just to see them get dumped into a giant paper shredder.
Maps (Planets) :
They are fun, but I don't think much time went into them. Some are woodsy, some have hot lava, and some look like giant pyramids. They weren't bad, but they weren't amazing.
Characters :
The JFG team is made up of three heros, Juno, Vela, and Lupus the dog. Lupus was fun, just because he's a dog who can hover. Oh, he also turns into a tank halfway through the game. Aside from the heros, you have Mizar who looks like a cross between a spider and a butterfly (who turns out to be neither, but that's a big spoiler.) There's King Jeff, the Tribal who guides you through the game and walks really slow. JFG also has a pretty big cast of small role characters, such as a turtle whose pants you have to retrieve from a tree. These characters kept the game fun and fresh, but they didn't do so enough.
As far as enemies go, they are all giant bugs or flying UFO's (which made little sense). Most of the time you are fighting big blue ants, or big purple.....upright purple guys, with rocket launchers. You also take on hovering UFO looking enemies, who tend to fly into an area and hover in one spot making for some fun machine gun rampages. The enemies to toss it up every once in a while with things like riot shields and sniper rifles, but they all mostly look the same and have one of two actions, shooting and running.
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| If I had to play this game again, I'd run away too. |
Summary :
JFG simply left a bad taste in my mouth. I got the feeling that Rare thought the game wasn't long enough, so they added a lot of mind numbing objectives that killed the mood. JFG started off as a fun, save the world shooter and turned into an I want this shit to be done so I can get on with my life game. Playing through the same planet again and again simply got annoying and, truthfully, boring. By the time I was done I felt like Rare didn't actually finish JFG in the way they wanted, but they were forced to release it anyway.
Favorite Planet - None in particular. I guess I'm leaning towards Mizar's palace, because it looked pretty.
Most Epic Moment - Beating the boss for Lupus the dog. You have to fight two Praying Mantis' at the same time. It's hard to conserve ammo and took me quite a few tries, but those guys fell hard.
Biggest Annoyance : The second half of the game. Period.
Favorite Weapon : Tri Rockets. They always saved the day.
Favorite Character : Lupus. He's a tank dog!
Final Say :
If you play it, just pretend you killed Mizar and won the game after the first fight. Nothing else is worth it.
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