Ranking the top 101 Nintendo games: No. 64, Kid Icarus: Uprising
Once you figure out the controls — and it'll take you a minute — this game rewards you for your patience, and then some.
I’m ranking the top 101 Nintendo developed/published games of all-time, and you can read about the thought process behind game eligibility and list construction here. You can keep up with the rankings so far through this link.
I have to admit that I was immensely disappointed in Kid Icarus: Uprising for years. For most of its existence since it released back in 2012 for the Nintendo 3DS, even. I wanted so very much to like the game, given it handled not just one but two genres that I love playing — on-rails shooter and hack-and-slash adventure — but it just didn’t happen at first. The controls went beyond unfriendly to the point of being nearly impossible to handle, and what made it worse for me is that this wasn’t necessarily a universal problem. It’s because I’m left-handed, and the game’s default, most intuitive settings were very much built for a right-handed world.
This wasn’t the case when it came to the on-rails portion of the game: you control Pit, the protagonist whose name is not Kid Icarus, with the 3DS’ circle pad (the handheld’s analog stick equivalent). He flies automatically, so you’re just controlling where on the screen he is, and then aim/fire from your bow using the stylus. Easy enough! It’s on the ground where things would get dicey, as figuring out how to move around the world and attack the enemies without falling to my doom or failing to dodge incoming attacks and so on and so on became impossible. So, I put the game down, for years, after hitting a real frustration point.
Things have obviously changed since then, but it required a bit of patience and figuring out how to rewire my brain to make sense of the game’s controls, rather than try to tailor the controls to me. What ended up working was making Kid Icarus: Uprising play like a Nintendo 64 game, the kind that would feel like precursor to a dual analog world. The Y, X, B, A cross now became like the 64’s directional C buttons, which stood in for a second analog stick on titles like Rare’s first-person N64 shooter, Perfect Dark. So, I’d move Pit using those buttons like they were a directional pad on the right side of a controller, and I’d move the on-screen reticule with the circle pad. The camera could be aligned with the left shoulder button, while attacking was performed with the right. I could easily shift from controlling the reticule with my left hand to selecting or using a power with the D-pad, and there I was. Finally with a comfortable way to play both game modes, despite my possession of the devil’s hand.
Maybe your journey to enjoying the first entry in the Kid Icarus franchise in over 20 years wasn’t nearly as harrowing, but we both got to what I hope is the same place in the end: in recognizing that this game is loads of fun, exactly as challenging as you want it to be, and like the best on-rails shooters, stuffed with replay value. Kid Icarus: Uprising, is nothing like the two games in the series that came before it. Quality titles in their own right — though, not top 101 Nintendo games of all-time levels of quality — the first two Kid Icarus titles were punishing, old-school platformers. In the original NES game, Pit climbed and climbed and climbed a series of platforms, and falling off of them would mean his death. Enemies were aggressive, health was limited, and while power-ups existed to help you through a lot of that, the game was meant to be a real challenge in a way that was different from the challenge of its similarly inventive cousin which had released just a few months earlier, Metroid.
Its sequel, the Game Boy title Of Myths and Monsters, is the better game. You no longer died when falling from a platform, but instead just had to climb again, and that did much to ease some of the unnecessary frustrations of the original. That game released in 1991 — and not at all in Japan — and then everything fell silent on the Kid Icarus front for nearly two decades. Pit joined the roster of Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the Wii in 2008, with a brand-new look that took him from his pixelated roots into the polygonal present, and that planted the seeds for a new Kid Icarus title. Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of Smash Bros. and lead of Sora Ltd., was tasked with making a game for the upcoming 3DS, and decided to make a third-person shooter featuring a character who Nintendo hadn’t utilized in some time. A look through the roster of Smash Bros. showed that Pit was at the top of that suggestion pile, and so Uprising was born.
What we ended up getting was completely unlike the first two Kid Icarus titles in gameplay, but the sense of humor — the weird enemy designs, the silliness around dying — was retained, and expanded upon thanks to full voice acting and a script Sakurai wrote himself so that it “jibed” with the gameplay, according to the man himself:
"I did it so I could write a story that jibed with the game, one that took advantage of the game's advantages," he explained. "Every character, including the bosses, had their personalities shaped by their roles in the game, or the structure of the game itself. That let me develop the dialogue to firmly match the developments you encounter in the game. If I had had someone else write the story, I'd either have to keep explaining things to the writer whenever anything changed in-game, or I'd have to partition it away from the game and lose on that consistency. Especially with a game like Kid Icarus, which features air battles where the gameplay, dialogue, and music needed to fully mesh with each other, it was vital that the story and game were one and the same and could easily be fine-tuned."
To Sakurai, stories in games could seriously benefit from designers taking the time to think about how the story relates to the game, and vice versa. "A game's story absolutely needs to match the content and the gameplay," he concluded. "In an ideal world, we could take advantage of this to provide new story developments that you'll never be able to see in other media."
Sakurai is correct in a general sense, but for Uprising, it was vital that this all came together in this specific way in this specific instance. The game features plenty of exposition and dialogue that explains characters and their motivations, but it’s all delivered while you’re doing something else. Pit and Palutena, their allies, the enemies they face: they are all in constant conversation with each other, for one story-based reason or another, but those conversations happen while you’re flying around the on-rails portions, or in the middle of a battle with enemies on the ground. There are few interruptions to your gameplay throughout Uprising, which really helps with the pacing, injects humor into your more standard gameplay, and allows story progression to happen without hampering your actual progress. It’s all intricately balanced and works in sync, a truly impressive achievement for any game, never mind one where half of it is on rails.
One thing Uprising had going for it is that the mythology, pun only sort of intended, of Kid Icarus was so bare bones compared to Nintendo’s more active franchises. This was the series’ shift to 3D, well after Mario and Zelda and Metroid and Donkey Kong and basically everyone else had already made the shift there and then some. There were more Metroid Prime games than Kid Icarus games, total, and Metroid isn’t exactly releasing at Mario or Zelda levels of consistency, either. Uprising was released 16 years after Super Mario 64 and Mario’s transition to a three-dimensional space, which occurred just five years after Of Myths and Monsters.
So, Project Sora and Sakurai had essentially free rein to shape the world and its characters as they saw fit. There was a lot of filling in the blanks to do to create a world as rich as what Nintendo’s premier franchises had built up to that point, and since this was just one game, it ended up giving the developers a chance to cast off subtlety and just go all-in, all at once. Story concepts that could have been rolled out into entire games or at least major pieces of them were introduced and then resolved and discarded over the course of single levels, because whatever, there were over 20 years of blank space on Pit’s résumé, and it needed to be filled.
Spoilers, I guess, for an eight-year-old story: Things start with a pretty simple “oh no, Medusa is back, we have to do Kid Icarus again but this time as an on-rails shooter and hack-and-slash in both kinds of 3D!” setup, but that quickly evolves into “actually, there’s an even bigger bad controlling Medusa,” which also becomes “hey this nature goddess who isn’t normally considered bad has decided humanity can’t be saved and needs to be nuked from orbit or else the planet will never flourish, so Big Bad needs to wait a second even though all of the available evidence suggests she kind of has a point about those humans but is just going about it the wrong way” then moves to “what, now there’s a mirror version of Pit who isn’t evil but just isn’t a kiss-ass goody two-shoes like Standard Pit, is he with us or against us OR IS IT BOTH" to “OK I know we’re all fighting each other and having a good time doing it, but some hive mind aliens just showed up and are threatening all of our collective existences so we need to work together for a minute to handle that” to “oh no, mind control and time jumps and transmogrification in one arc?!” to “nooooo the protagonist is down for the count, how will we ever possibly tie up all of these story arcs and work toward a satisfying conclusion without him?”
It is, admittedly, a lot. A lot. But that all works to the game’s benefit, as the frenetic pacing of the story beats with the gameplay and the dialogue just fits together so well that you can’t help but laugh and enjoy yourself as the stakes clutter and climb at the same time. They shoved 20 years of narrative into one game, and somehow you’re playing just nodding along with it going “this makes sense.”
I mentioned earlier that Kid Icarus: Uprising can be “exactly as challenging as you want it to be,” so let’s unpack that. Difficulty is a sliding scale that can be changed from stage to stage. It goes from an intensity of 0.0 dubbed “Effortless” to “Nothing Harder!” and 9.0. You bet hearts, which you earn from defeating enemies and completing stages to earn the payout from that bet, to either play at a lower or higher intensity than the standard 2.0. If you die in a stage, the intensity goes down, and so too does your potential reward for completing it. You can play the entire game on the higher-end of the standard intensity (2.9) and build up a pretty healthy collection of hearts without the game’s 25 chapters lacking for challenge, then try on progressively tougher difficulties on the scale as you feel like it.
What’s good, though, is that you probably won’t play through the entire game on the same difficulty, anyway. The game recommends what you should be playing/betting on a given stage based on your own performances, so if you feel confident in the game’s confidence in you, go along with it. If you want things to be easier than that, then do that. If you think the game isn’t throwing enough challenge at you yet and you have the hearts to ramp things up, then go with your Greek god of choice, my friend.
Like any game with loot, you’ll also be able to unlock more powerful weapons on more challenging difficulties, and you’ll be in a better position to pay for the upgrades to those weapons thanks to pulling in more hearts, too. This whole system makes a single playthrough exactly what you need it to be at any given moment, but it also creates a game with extreme replay value, tailored to your exact level of expertise on any stage.
The game is legitimately funny, the absurd way the story progresses is both meta and to Uprising’s credit, and the gameplay itself — once you figure out controls that work for you — is really stellar. There are times where I wish the whole game was exclusively an on-rails shooter, but those moments have more to do with the excellence of those portions of the game and less to do with any failings of the hack-and-slash third-person stuff on the ground. Part of what makes Uprising work so well is that there was this massive gap between Kid Icarus titles, and it could be exploited by someone who knew how to do that very thing for narrative and enjoyment purposes, but even given that, a sequel to Uprising would be welcome. Even if it takes another 20 years to get one. With that being said, who needs a sequel when Uprising is already here and remains unplayed by so many? Port it to the Switch, let it find a new audience, because it deserves to be enjoyed by the masses.
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