Why there are better things to do on the bus than play Kid Icarus: Uprising
Kid Icarus: Uprising (2012)
Kid Icarus: Uprising (2012)
I want you to throw away any good mood you may have had, and try to think about the people who annoy you most in your day-to-day life. To give you my own example, I am frequently aggravated, to the point of gnashing and grinding of teeth, by one particular commuter who gets the bus with me.
When I share a deck with this guy, I always know about it - because he decides to spend his journey phoning other people all the time, and I do mean all the time. I'm serious, this clown must go through his entire contacts list, those people idiotic enough to give their number to him anyway. Then he calls them up and wants to knwo how they’re doing. Can you believe that?
I could almost handle it if the conversations had any juice in them at all - I love to eavesdrop on those recently released criminals who I also share a bus with, because when they're talking about prison riots, dirty protests and people getting filled in with hacksaws, you cannot help but take notice.
But this telephonic bête noire of mine just talks about the most mundane rubbish about his day to anybody who would listen. It's not like he's some doddery old fool either, he can't be that much older than me - and before you laugh, I ain't doddery. Not yet, anyway. What was the question again?
No sooner has the most tedious chatterbox in the world finished one conversation, then he’s straight onto the next pigeon. The people on the other side, even they’re sick of him - they start pretending their phone network is dying. I know this because I’ll be listening to our man saying "hello?", "are you still there?" and "what's your favourite humming noise?" a dozen times.
And do you know what he does then? By God, you've got it in one - he calls them back and he actually says, "sorry, I think I lost you there." He's got no shame, this lad. Well, his type never do, do they?
There are remedies to situations like this, of course. Don’t get the bus, that’s probably the easiest solution, but needs must. Noise-cancelling headphones, they’re an absolute necessity. They’ve got to be the best invention since sliced bread. But what you can’t beat is a good portable game to sink your teeth into, any attempt to drown out the banal noise around you.
Things on my commute don’t get much better for me, though, because I’m having to deal with a different annoyer - my old friend Pit, start of the latest and hopefully last Kid Icarus game, Uprising for the Nintendo 3DS.
One thing you may already know about me is that I have what you'd call a hate-hate relationship with the Kid Icarus series. The first game on NES was absolute cack and then they spat out a Game Boy version which was even worse, but possibly found favour with tedious types - like my friend on the bus.
Obviously I wasn’t counting down the days to Kid Icarus: Uprising’s release, then. But when I witnessed more than one online imbecile saying that it was one of the best games ever, a great update to the series, a very funny piece of work, it will make your private parts tingle et cetera et cetera, well, even an ignorant swine like me sits up and takes notice. After all, the game’s development and production was spearheaded by that man Sakurai, creator of the Smash Bros. series - and that’s a pedigree worth calling someone about.
You're always worried that an extremely hard-working man like Sakurai is only a few bad days away from going completely over the top, Falling Down style. And I reckon Kid Icarus was the straw that broke the man's back here. Firstly, you would not believe the control scheme in this game. Retailers probably couldn't believe it either, when the game came to them, contained in a larger cardboard box which included an entire dedicated plastic stand to put your 3DS on, for God's sake.
Not much room on the bus to get a plastic podium installed, so I’d have to do without. I don’t think it even works well with lefties like myself, but anyway. Without the stand, you’ll need one hand to hold the 3DS, one hand to hold the stylus, and one hand to use the buttons, and… ah. We’ve got a problem.
You were born with the regulation two human hands, I assume? The good news is, this would mean you’ve got more hands than the global average. The “bad” news is that KI:U is not the game for you - anyone with less than three paws simply need not apply. So maybe your dog could get some wear out of Uprising, although I suspect he'd whine at the prospect, or growl at it and bury both the game and the ridiculous hunk of plastic out your back garden instead.
When you do actually play the game, I’ll give Sakurai and the team some credit, it’s not quite like any game you’ve played before. It’s not a moribund side-scroller like the previous two Kid Icarus games, which is positive. It’s got two different playstyles - some of the levels sees Pit flying through the clouds, shooting enemies flying-rail shooter style, though not even half as fun as Star Fox.
Other levels see you on the ground, where you move around the world, not quite freely but not quite on rails, smashing foes and finding items with all kinds of different weapons, the design of which are often unappealing.
In similar fashion to the Smash Bros. games, you can choose your own difficulty, kind of like a gambling system - change the difficulty from between 0.0 to 9.0 intensity, and the more you push things to the edge and make it harder for yourself, the better loot and swag you can obtain.
I do like that system, though it’s a pain to bring up the difficulty and nearly make it to the end, only to get clobbered. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the way I play or I was trying to take too much out of the Intensity system, but it seemed like I had just one hit-point left for 90% of my time in this game.
The graphics are fairly nice for 3DS standards, and the highlight of the game may be the fully voice-acted dialogue between Pit and the Goddess of Light, Palutena, who gives these missions to Pit. There’s also the wise-cracking Goddess of Nature, Viridi, who takes Pit down a peg or twelve every time she can.
She’d probably be the bet character, with the worst character being the silly attempt at an evil doppelganger character, Dark Pit, who was inexplicably added to Smash Bros. Between them all, there’s lots and lots of conversations. You know I’m sensitive to excessive phone calls, and there’s probably too much tedious yapping in this game as well, but some of it will make you laugh.
Well, this one is a lot better than the other Kid Icarus games, that much is certain. But if fans of this game thought the 3DS title would jump-start a whole new subseries of Kid Icarus games and establish it as one of Nintendo’s strongest franchises, I’m afraid they were sorely mistaken. Uprising, for its part, isn’t too bad, not very annoying - just highly, highly forgettable. In that sense, it’s a funner use of your time than listening to someone’s monotonous phone conversations on the bus - but only just.
24 July 2026