Thor! Again! But not really!

One of my original blog posts was a look at the movie Thor, which I liked but felt was not as good as it could have been.  Recently, however, I managed to pick up a copy of the Thor video game for the Nintendo DS and decided to see how its story manages to interact with the movie's story, and find out where it ranks on the list of "mostly terrible video game/movie collaborations."

Seriously, a way for me to know that I shouldn't pick up a video game is to hear the words "based on the movie" anywhere in the synopsis.  The only ones that really got it right for a long time were some of the Disney-based video games (Aladdin and The Lion King come readily to mind), a single James Bond-based game (Goldeneye), and one of the most underrated games of all time for the PC (Blade Runner).

...man, Blade Runner.  I've gotta dig that game out and do a post on it, because not enough people know about how awesome it is.

Where was I?  Oh, right.  In recent years this trend of most games based on movies being terrible has changed, no longer simply being a cheap way to slap a character likeness on a standard "jump the platforms" game or first person shooter.  The world certainly doesn't need more of some of the worst games ever.  Now a game might still be a rip-off of another popular game, but they'll at least design the world and controls around what you have...for the most part.

So how does Thor for the Nintendo DS do?  ...to be honest, despite the fact that it has the actor on the cover of the case, I can't really tell it's supposed to be connected to the movie world at all.  The game takes place before the events of the movie, but the ending seems to wrap things up too neatly for there to be any chance of the movie events ever happening.

Here's the set-up:  Loki, Thor's mischievous brother, sets a few plans in motion that completely backfire and wind up releasing Mangog, a character described by Wikipedia as powered by "the hate of a billion billion beings that Odin killed."

Comics, everybody!

Thor then needs to fight his way through hordes of enemies, face off against Ymir the frost giant, the demon Surtur, and even Hela the Goddess of Death to get back to Asgard and defeat Mangog.

The end, though...well, spoiler alert, but Loki and Thor have to team up to defeat Mangog.  Loki apologizes to Thor, Thor forgives Loki, Loki learns he loves his family, and Thor learns he needs to support his brother more...and then the movie begins, wait, what?

Now, there is one thing I want to get out right away, and that's that the boss fights are great.  It's hard to do huge battles on a tiny screen, but the people making the game for the Nintendo DS figured out how to do it right.

That's the battle Thor has against Surtur (wielding the Twilight Sword, nice touch), and you'll note Thor's size down there in the lower left.  And there's several boss fights that are on that scale.  It's great, and to be completely honest, I got more of an impression of size from that than I did from, say, God of War.

Combat in the game left me feeling mixed, because while it's quite easy to figure out combos and ways to take out swaths of enemies at once, the fact that Thor wields a tiny hammer while every other enemy has a long sword does mean you can't fight defensively at all.  You have to dive into combat, which is probably how a Norse god should fight, and it can be easy to get tagged by long distance weapons and ranged weapons while you're trying to leap into battle.

There were a few instances where I swore at the game repeatedly, but that was while I was trying to figure out a way past some of the "sub-bosses" who were pretty tough.  However, I did find that there are some times that you're fighting a big enemy that it'll pause, stand there, and then never move again while you wail on it.

Some of the bosses are cheap, and the stages can also hurt you when they strip you of the ability to jump high or move around freely.  There's also one stage where it rains poison and you have to run around holding a giant rock over you to shield you while simultaneously smacking enemies with it.

Now, this game will be a keeper for me, but not really for the main game.  The best part of the game is the fact that, when you defeat it, it unlocks modes where you can play as secondary characters, such as Loki, Sif, and the Warriors Three.

That's right, they made a video game where you can smack around trolls as Volstagg.

Bless this game.

Everyone should play it, it's just downright fun.