Right, so, this is about all we get for an intro. The Main Menu is actually on board Fox's capital ship, the Great Fox, with all the characters you know and love, so suddenly being behind the reins of some bitch named Krystal is, well...whiplash inducing.
"It said something about a mountain hidden in a storm. Whoever they are, they sound in great danger!"
Oh right. Shitty design choice number 1: The characters, at least for the first part of the game, speak in "Dinosaur Language", a stupid letter replacement language that makes about as much sense as the Al Bhed language in FFX did. And I hate FFX, so anything that reminds me of that pile of trash gets immediate negative points.
Oh yeah, while I'm lamenting the stupid language, Krystal gets shot with a fireball and drops her staff. This is only so Fox can pick it up later after being given a stupid excuse for not being able to bring his fucking blaster rifle to the game.
And here come the glitches. You can't tell, but what's next to us is a massive airship that seems to be alive-or at least, have living dinosaur heads worked into it. These glitches are mercifully rare after this point so I can't even say it's "extreme weather" that does it, the rest of this level and a level later on has a rain storm and a blizzard throughout it, respectively, and this glitch never comes up again. So...I dunno.
Man this game does not look good in screen caps. Your objective here is to use your pterodactyl's magical light balls to blow up several parts of the ship, starting with the two cannons behind it shooting fireballs, then the propeller below it, and then finally, the dinosaur figurehead in the front. Problem is, you don't have any sort of indication of where your shots will land. Your movement affects the trajectory of your shots, so trying to hit anything is like trying to piss into a cup from 10 feet away. Luckily, you cannot die in this segment, no matter how many hits you take.
Once you blow everything up, Krystal will land on the ship for some reason. There's no need to do so and in fact we just end up going to the "Mountain in the Storm" as soon as this segment is over, so really, she only lands so the game can introduce the badguy.
And another shitty design choice, but then again, there's a million Gamecube games guilty of treating players like absolute retards. Just, game designers, please pretend I have some idea of what I'm doing, or at least leave the control tutorials to NPCs I can talk to and skip by if I don't give a shit.
Anyway, we follow a squeaky voice to a caged pterodactyl, and after talking to it, a door opens to go down below. Going down below, we find a key.
So, you know how Zelda had that charming little "Item Get" thing, and it was reserved for treasure chests and rupees that actually meant something? Well, imagine that, but it's twice as long and done for EVERY SINGLE NEW FUCKING ITEM YOU FIND. Every key, every Scarab (the game's currency), even the fucking food items that restore health. No really, imagine if Link jumped in excitement and the game gave you a 20 second long text based explanation about how hearts restore your health and you have about how this game handles new items. It would be one thing if it was just "oh, this egg restores your health", but no, they have to explain what it is, asure you it's not a dinosaur egg, and annoy you to no end. Though thankfully, the explanation only pops up the first time you collect a thing.
If your first instinct after getting the key is to run back to the cage with the little flying dino and try to save it, you are right and wrong. Right in that you have to go back to that location, wrong in thinking you can save him. It disappears after this prologue sequence, never to be seen again. Who IS seen again is...
Ruler, tyrant, and dictator of Dinosaur Planet.
And, for some reason, I enjoy describing myself in villainous terms, despite how tyrant and dictator are usually reserved for the heroes to call the villain. I'm just kinda removing the moral ambiguity up front for your convenience.
What brings you to my world?
I'm not here to fight you. I'm here because of a distress call?
A distress call? The whole planet is in distress!
The CloudRunner told me about you, the evil General.
Though this conversation will not be shown in game and it's kind of up to the player that "CloudRunner" means "Flying dinosaurs".
My girl, I am not evil. I rule over the many dinosaur tribes. You see, I must control this planet with fear. Otherwise, the tribes always try to fight against me.
Hmm, you know, ruling through fear might be a bit evil and totally undermine my point, since they wouldn't be fighting me if I was doing a good job of ruling the planet...maybe I should stop talking. Maybe I should throw you off my ship!
General Scales then attempts to do just that.
Well, at least the game established that the flying dude was there instead of Deus Ex Machina'ing it. A worse game would just have her land on Krazoa Palace unharmed-which is where we're heading as General Scales promises, in that classic bad villain way, that this isn't over!
Seriously, this story has all the depth of a Saturday Morning Cartoon.
We land at Krazoa Palace, and the pterodactyl we've been riding tells us this is the dinosaurs' most sacred place. Yes, the flier talks. All the dinos talk, in fact, and for now they talk in the stupid Dino Language. This will not change for some time. Kill me.
And here's some more bad design. Instead of just using keys when they're appropriate, like Zelda does, you have to cycle your inventory to get to them. All of your items are in this red bar, and you use the C-Stick (the Gamecube's worse version of a Right Analog stick) to go through your inventory, rather than having a pause menu full of items, it's all on the C-Stick. Imagine if, in Ocarina of Time, instead of being able to map three of your items to the C buttons (or how, even in Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, you were able to slot items to X Y and Z), you had to use the C-buttons to cycle your inventory in real time, select the item you needed, and then you pressed A to use it.
There is a single Quick Select button: You can map an item to the Y button. That's it. X is roll and Z is looking around, so obviously we can't use those for mapping items, right? It's not bad right now, but later on you'll end up scrolling past a pile of crap you've collected just to get to your fucking bomb spores or blue grubtubs or whatever. Did I mention that Key Items are also part of this Red Menu? Cause they are. Things end up so cluttered that you'll be begging to have a pause menu like OoT's instead.
The entire palace is also a pseudo stealth section, at least for this visit. You can use explosive barrels left behind by Scales and his SharpClaw army to blow up the weird brain things you meet, but throwing is a delicate art-if you got used to how far Link can throw in any Zelda game, prepare to be disappointed when your tosses come up shorter. Also, if you get hit while carrying a barrel, it explodes and you take a lot of damage. Luckily, you have a lot of health, and you'll take out the brain thing with you.
You have effectively 12 hearts in Zelda terms, and each brain attack that hits takes off one. The barrels will take out 4 hearts, but you'll find a lot of healing items in the wooden boxes (that you can destroy with the barrels) that restore 2 or even 4 'hearts'. Unlike Zelda, you don't get pieces of heart to extend your life meter, only heart containers after completing certain plot important areas. But, when you DO get one, you get a full 4 hearts instead of just one. Kinda nice.
Anyway, you need to use the explosive barrels to blow up the wooden crates blocking your path, as well as destroying a crack in the wall. The barrels explode as soon as they hit something, so if you're too close to the wall, the barrel will hit the wall above the crack and not actually destroy the wall. It's annoying.
Eventually you'll reach a room with flame jets and a crack at the end. You'll need to carry a fuel barrel from earlier all the way up to here, dodging the flame jets with good timing. Throw the barrel from behind the final jet-otherwise, it'll hit the top of the wall and not blow up the crack.
The next room has a weighted switch that needs something heavy on it to keep it pressed down. Luckily, there is a fuel barrel here. However, you need to walk onto the switch and let the A button change to being 'Set Down' instead of throw before you can put it down and keep the door open so you can pass. You can only place fuel barrels in certain areas, like these switches, otherwise, you always chuck them and they explode.
Past the door, Krystal finds a wounded dinosaur and speaks with him.
The Krazoa Spirits are basically a group of six super powerful magic spirits that can save Dinosaur Planet, or something. But their power can also be used for evil, and with Scales nearly victorious, the spirits have been sealed away and it's up to you to collect them. And with that, I basically just explained everything this guy will explain in two sentences. Damn I'm good!
The Dino opens the entrance to the first shrine. Go in, grab the spirit, bring it back. Easy.
Inside the shrine, we're introduced to these doors. They're called "Life Force Doors". All it means is you can't proceed until you kill all the enemies nearby. The only enemy we need to kill for this one is a brain-thing that is taken out by the fuel barrels we've been using up til now.
From there, this shrine is just a couple more rooms until we reach the Krazoa Spirit and take the TEST OF OBSERVATION! Every Shrine has a little test associated with it. This one is bone fucking simple.
The spirit will hide in one of the urns, then the urns will shuffle around. Once they're done and the ticking sound begins, you simply move up to the one it's hiding in. Do this three times and the Spirit is yours. The urns move slowly, but will damage you if you try to 'cheat' by hugging the urn the spirit is in. Just watch the one he hides in and you'll be fine.
The spirit then slams itself into Krystal, so as far as I care, it's possessing her. Side effects include: Glowing purple aura, hovering into the air, purple eye color (including the whites of your eyes becoming purple), and the spirit's 'face' appearing at the top of your HUD. Ask your doctor if Krazoa Spirit is right for you.
We're instantly warped out of the shrine and returned to the palace. There's an elevator thingy near the dying dino we have to ride up to where we can release the first spirit.
All is not well, as we are looking through the eyes of an enemy. The spirit releases itself from Krystal, and shoots a laser beam out of it. The unknown enemy emerges from behind a pillar and knocks Krystal into the laser, which shoots her into a crystal prison.
And to make matters worse, she's awake in there.
Welp, that's it it seems! Our main character is stuck in a crystal prison and won't be getting out. The End! Short game it seems...
