Rating Curve

A prime example as to why megacollabs need not just color consistency, but also need style consistency. Axe everything from G4lva onwards and you have a pretty decent megacollab on your hands.

Faithful to Cataclysm but nowhere near as good. Woogi's gameplay carries.

One of Darwin's better levels. This desperately needs to just be cut down to like a minute or two tops, the layout style wears thin after a while and there's too much reliance on size portals for the sync rather than using the decoration or color work to sync with the music, which gets annoying quickly too.

Not to mention how senseless the whole theming is. Not too knowledgeable about CICADA3301 but I'm assuming most of the text relates to it... it's not particularly appropriate for this level. Just saying some shit for the love of the game.

Yatagarasu starts off pretty good for a hell themed extreme. The intro is really mystifying, and it feels like the player is starting off in a disoriented manner. Viprin and Anubis really cook here in a way I don’t think I’ve seen in a hell megacollab ever before. It has contrast and interesting concepts, and it plays with the iconography in unique ways, helping to establish this hell theme on a larger, more ambitious scale, a scale no other teams have been able to accomplish before.

Sadly, it falls off back into old habits around meromelon's part, and the pretty great efforts from weo, Vermillion, and Hinds aren't enough to fully satisfy the other 3 minutes of mid decoration.

It's quite a shame that this is definitively considered the "Freedom Dive" level because I feel like this could've been so much more if it just wasn't as messy and didn't overstay its welcome, but you can't really do much about it now. The gameplay looks hype as hell tho, especially that second drop.

I flip flop on this level a lot- sometimes I hate it, sometimes I like it, but I never really see myself thinking of this as anything above a 4 or a 5. This level occupies a space between an in-joke with friends and a personal struggle, and when it comes to art I just do not like when people make art from of their in-jokes and put them out on the center stage, partly because I'm projecting my own personal sentiments and history about these sorts of things, but mostly because I'm simply not going to care for them the same way the author is- it's not made for me. This level is much more of a victim of circumstance though and there's a level of intimacy and struggle that KrmaL went through to verify- had it been easier and verified quickly I don't think this level would have been as memorable or impactful, but the determination to put this out, to confront this level and just get it done with is very admirable.

So it eventually leads me to the question: Do I care about the historical context enough or not? I would probably say no, although this is not an attack on the accomplishment or KrmaL's character or anything- it's just that I do not know him like that. And it's what made the parasocial relationship from the wider community with KrmaL and wanting this level verified so baffling in retrospect. I get that if you have your own tight-knit GD friend group or if you're even friends with KrmaL you'll view this level more favorably- and you have full right to do that- but I find it so odd as someone who has never interacted with him before, to really get it the same way someone who might've been a part of GeoStorm or g will. I respect him a lot as an artist, not a friend, and when I view this level from the perspective as KrmaL the artist, it's just a level that he made when he was starting out creating. I don't know, I just don't really see what makes this special. I'm glad to see how it exudes the fun he had making it, and I do find it really interesting how much that fun started to become a burden, but like I said, it's not a level for me.