It’s over. I completed Catherine, and I got the “true lover” ending. The last stage was looooong though. Six floors! Crazy! I kind of wonder if the game is shorter if you go for other endings though, because the last two stages were brought on as direct consequences to the decisions I’d made during the course of the game. I kinda wouldn’t mind if it ended at Stage 7 if you’re headed toward the opposite ending (my current goal).
Also, this game makes use of the word “radii.” I think that’s just swell.
Completing the game seems to have unlocked a two-player mode. It’s local mulitplayer too, which is fantastic. Too many Xbox games force you to play multiplayer online, and therefore I cannot enjoy some games with others, like Crackdown, Castlevania: Harmony of Despair. It’s especially egregious in Castlevania HD, in which there really is no reason not to have local multiplayer. But I’ll leave that rant for another day.
In Catherine, on the other hand, I don’t see cooperative multiplayer working really well. Sure, most of the time it should be okay, but even in single-player there were more than a handful of instances where I fell from a height and couldn’t get back up because in creating a path to go up I had managed to destroy or otherwise block the path below me (follow?). So you’d have to not only work your way to the top, but make sure that the path persists for your buddy. That or one person sticks right behind the other, which would be missing the point completely. Or make separate paths. Where’s the teamwork in that though?
In one stage of the main game, you have an NPC that has to get to the top with you, and it took me many, many tries to finish it. Sometimes it was because -like I said before- I accidentally removed the path below me in continuing my ascent, and the slower AI player got stuck below. Other times it was because the AI is completely retarded and would not climb around to the other side of a block. Its pathfinding isn’t even that bad, it just refuses to shimmy around a block to get to a place where it can ascend. Fortunately the stage was only medium-length and a single floor, but it’s still the main reason why I’m not convinced that cooperative multiplayer is a good idea.
There’s also a competitive mode, which makes a lot more sense. Haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like a race where the players climb parallel towers. It seems like fun, and if you can cross over to your opponent’s tower and mess them up, all the better. I just wonder if it emphasizes speed over puzzles.
Looking back, I could/should probably have waited and complied all my thoughts on Catherine into an article. Maybe I still will. There’s plenty more I can add in there. It just feels like a missed opportunity.