There's a version of this game that exists between its admirers, one with too solid a body of discourse built up around it to be called imaginary. This Fallout is the centerpiece of a secular religion of CRPG design, attended by Deus Ex and Planescape Torment, though perhaps finally consigned to the status of Old Testament anticipation by Disco Elysium. Hbomberguy is this faith's high priest.

I'm fond of the Fallout of conversation, in which the skills are consistently useful, there are multiple, organic solutions to problems and the writing is thoughtful and nuanced. The kind of guy whose praise perpetuates belief in this game is often the least racist kind of PC gamer. I'm also fond, however, of the playable piece of software released in 1997 bearing the same name, and feel its merits should be articulated as well.

The structure of Fallout's world is less reminiscent of anything else called an RPG than it is of the evidence-gathering phase of a Phoenix Wright case. There's a manageable number of locations presented through a menu, and in each of them one pokes and prods around, with novel bits of optional content with little long-term bearing but which serve as their own reward, until something moves the world state forward. Fallout's chief innovation wasn't so much opening up the CRPG as subjecting it to the same rigorous structure as the adventure game. While there are filler enemies and random encounters, each of the game's major combats provides the player with the tools necessary to manage the next: Vault 15's SMG, for example, allows the player to deal with the Khans, whose armor makes the upcoming chain of large group firefights survivable.

That progression is driven by new gear and information rather than leveling keeps any of the game's areas from feeling extraneous. Nothing in Fallout ever overstays its welcome, which is enormously beneficial: ideas and characters which would be insufferable in a game a few hours longer are instead presented straightforwardly and immediately moved on from. It's this brevity, and the recognition that a thinly-sketched character is almost always preferable to an overwrought one, that Fallout inherits from tabletop, rather than anything like freedom of choice. It's perhaps the best example of pacing in a western CRPG.

Aside from a few points at which the player's given multiple, equidistant leads to follow up on at once, the progression is incredibly taut and, because its only gating mechanisms are information and ability, feels more essential and less arbitrary than equivalents in the genre. Most of the choices of approach are back-loaded into the last two areas of the game, where the character skills which have been largely useless for the previous two-thirds of the game now function as keys. That these areas can be so easily circumvented by simply wearing a disguise undercuts their significance, but ultimately a high Speech or Science or Big Guns is treated like an item in an adventure game. This is made possible by and supports Fallout's limited scale and general restraint: it's a game where a skill or a tool used two or three times is worth going out of one's way for.

It's probably the first Western RPG to have really good art direction, and I'd suggest resisting the urge to play the game at a modern resolution in order to really appreciate the spritework. The voice work is shockingly solid, and with the exception of some of the better New Vegas characters I don't think the series has ever quite matched the talking heads in this game for memorability. It is so sad to watch the cinematics in this first entry present what would become the series aesthetic as succinctly and stylishly as they do, and to know this would be milked dry in later years as these games got more and more saturated with 50s-dystopian broad satire.

jesus christ activision sure knows how to make tense games for the 2600. On average, this game is like 6-7 seconds long, which sounds pathetic on paper but dear lord getting that time down is an absolute struggle.

So here's why this game is kinda nuts: there's a tachometer at the bottom of your screen. If it goes past 3/4ths of your screen at any time, you blow up and die instantaneously. Pushing the button on the controller is your gas and your gas moves the meter up. Pushing down the left direction on the joystick puts you in a clutch state where the tachometer is so sensitive to gas that pretty much holding both the button and left at the same time at any point is a death sentence. Releasing left after pressing it down brings you up a gear, where you go faster with a slower tachometer. Basically you need to do as close to frame-perfect button presses and joystick inputs/releases as you feasibly can, and if you do it right, you get a good time, and if you do it even slightly wrong you either die in a horrific car explosion or get a shit time that brings great dishonor to your drag racing career. The manual's challenge of getting under 6 seconds to join the World Class Dragster Club is no simple task either. Considering the frame-perfect theoretical perfect time is 5.57, there's a shockingly small margin of error to join that prestigious, 40-years-defunct club (and if you say you've gotten a 5.51 before, you are a liar!). It took me dozens upon dozens of attempts to be able to just barely squeeze out a 5.94 that I swear to god felt like luck as I did the same thing I usually did for a good run, I just must have happened to have pressed the buttons at a more optimal time. Though I guess since the game is only 6 seconds long on a good run those dozens of attempts was still only like 20-30 minutes of grind. I felt like I spent more time waiting for the starting countdown to finish (or prematurely exploding by failing to properly feather the gas during the countdown as a way to get a good start) than actually racing, which is kinda eh but it is what it is.

It's certainly a deep and thought-out game that has a high skill ceiling to work up towards for sure. With how much frame-perfection is emphasized here, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a game to sew the seeds of speedrunning or just general high-level gamer tech to the still-blossoming Atari gamer crowd. But it does mean that this game is definitely geared towards that certain type of player, so if you aren't into personal time attack grinds there's pretty much less game time for you in this game than the time it took you to read this whole ramble in the first place. Fascinating!

Maybe I'm being overly critical. I'm not sure. Am I just salty after being so enthused by Donkey Kong 94? Or is this game genuinely a disappointing successor to that game? Well, to be honest, I don't even think Mario vs Donkey Kong succeeds at being a very interesting puzzle platformer in its own rights.

The game feels so sluggish; not just control wise but also in terms of level design. Plenty of puzzles; primarily later on required me to wait around so much without anything interesting to keep me entranced.

I wouldn't even mind the puzzles being slower paced if they weren't so piss easy. There were very few instances where I felt like I had to think to solve these puzzles. The colored switches are certainly interesting but manage to streamline the puzzles even further. It doesn't help that solutions feel so railroaded and straightforward.

I could have written an entire essay all about how this game is the antithesis to Donkey Kong 94's bitesized and fast paced yet challenging puzzle platforming, but I don't even need to compare the two games to find Mario vs Donkey Kong painfully average. To be fair, I enjoyed it when I was much younger (although I never made it past world 2). I think both my perception with its predecessor and puzzle platformers in general has spoiled me from enjoying this game nowadays, though.

(Oh, and what the hell is going on with the art direction? The backgrounds, enemies, and set pieces are, like, all completely different styles that constantly clash with each other. It's yucky.)

Played as part of Atari 50.

Fuck this game.

Seriously--I think out of all the games I've played so far in this collection this is hands down the worst one. I finally see the origin point of literally everything that can make an adventure game bad (ok, well, maybe this and The Colossal Cave Adventure, which I hope for my own sanity that I never play). Which is bizarre considering it's, like, maybe the only 2600 game in the overall VG canon outside of E.T. (for very different reasons) and mayyyybe Pitfall. But I just cannot get past the fact that literally every design decision made here makes my blood boil and my eyes go red.

Difficulty 1 is fine. It takes like 3 minutes to beat and it's fine. I am assuming most people are playing on difficulty 1, which is the default and (according to the manual) the easy difficulty. Difficulty 2 is the normal difficulty, and is seemingly the full game, but when you get to see all of it designed as intended, everything falls apart.

The literal nadir of "Adventure Game bullshit". You know how lots of adventure games have "that part that sucks" in them? Maybe it's a really long and frustrating maze with lots of warp points, maybe it's just an area with a lot of annoying enemies and the only save point you have is one where you've lost your sword. Well, if you're expecting anything other than those two things here you're in the wrong place. I cannot fathom anyone designing that fucking bat that steals your shit and thinking it was a worthwhile addition. And even when you are allowed to carry your single item to the spot it needs to go, have fun running through maze, after maze, after maze. That's literally the entire game.

Which doesn't even begin to mention how ill-fitted for the Atari this game is. I think a lot of the above elements would be annoying but bearable through gritted teeth on, say, an NES game of the same length, but the constant headache-inducing flashing of the 2600, the slowdown when too many things show up on screen, and items constantly glitching into walls makes this terrible in a way I have scarcely seen from any other game. It's very innovative for the time, yes, but in the end it's attempting to fit a big grand quest down on a console which was made to play Pong and other simple infinitely looping single-screen arcade games.

It doesn't work in the slightest and I'm baffled that the general consensus seems to be that it's even remotely good. Influential, yes, but good??? Even for the time, every single other 2600 game I have played in this collection is more fun to play, which includes games that are nothing more than button mashers. It takes like 30 minutes to beat this legit without savestates and it is one of the toughest slogs I have ever gotten through with any video game. Just completely mentally stunlocked here

Donkey Kong could have been so good had it been born on NES. As it stands it comes off as an awkwardly ambitious arcade game that really wants to be something more. Compared to Namco’s early 80s classics Pac-Man and Galaga, which are as fun now as they were when they came out, Donkey Kong is a neat novelty that wears off quickly. It’s all Shigeru Miyamoto’s fault, visionary and genius that he is.

Miyamoto’s name these days is associated with a strict dedication to formula and emphasizing gameplay over story, and I find that ironic: Miyamoto is essentially the man behind contextualizing and integrating story into gameplay in the first place! Miyamoto developed Donkey Kong from the perspective of an artist, not a programmer.

And it’s pretty obvious that game mechanics were based on the story concept, not the other way around. For a 1981 arcade game, the characters and the construction site setting are coherent and identifiable. To this day I don’t know who Pac-Man is or what he’s supposed to be doing, but DK himself sure is a big scary gorilla who wants to kill you. Jumpman is virtually identical to the Mario we know and love today.

It’s not as though the concept is wholly original: King Kong is obviously a massive influence, and originally the game was going to star Popeye, Bluto, and Olive Oyl. That said, Donkey Kong at least as far as I know is the first game with a fully realized story. The context of Donkey Kong dragging Lady to the top of the construction site is animated and even the level design layout is contextualized when he stomps his feet and sets the girders to a slant. The gameplay mechanics are intuitive too: climb the ladders, jump over the barrels that are rolling down on the now slanted girders, save cute girlfriend. The fourth stage involves removing the (nails? stakes?) that support the platform, and bring Donkey Kong crashing down.

Miyamoto wanted his players to focus their goal on completing the story instead of chasing a high score, a philosophy that he used to guide development on Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda a few years later, on the NES.

Maybe you can see the problem. Donkey Kong’s levels do loop, but the same four stages made more challenging just does not make for the addicting formula other arcade games have mastered by this point. Donkey Kong was of course obviously a massive hit, it pulled Nintendo out financial troubles after all, but I suspect this was for the ambition and gravitas of the project: judging by the four-man team of programmers who gave a lot of blowback for Miyamoto’s design ideas, it was a technical marvel.

To give credit where credit is due, Donkey Kong is more than playable, and as I said earlier, intuitive and easy to pick up. As someone who’s introducing to platformers was New Super Mario Bros for the DS, however, I have completely different expectations for how Mario should move and control. To me Jumpman feels too slow, the response to my input a little laggy, and much too prone to dying when I fall any vertical distance. From a modern perspective, these aren’t exactly nuanced criticisms to make, however. And it’s not as though it isn’t easy to adapt: play Donkey Kong for longer than five minutes and you’ll get used to it.

My one major criticism is the hammer, which in my opinion badly disrupts the flow of the game. The ability to destroy obstacles is nice in concept, but when it robs you of the ability to climb ladders and locks you in the same animation for the duration you’re holding on to it. Also, at least for me, it created a Mandela effect where I made a leap in logic and assumed the way you defeat Donkey Kong is beating him up with a hammer. I think this was one of those “cool cinematic” concepts that just didn’t synergize well to the gameplay mechanics.

Donkey Kong falls awkwardly between the couch cushions of too cinematic and ambitious to be an arcade game and too short and simple for an NES game, while games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Frogger and Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda sit comfortably on either side. It’s loved as a novelty and a stepping stone, at best a distraction for a few minutes before playing a more enduring game.

Some are content to leave it there but I’m really disappointed that Donkey Kong has been pigeonholed like this. I think of future entries of other NES games that modernize their original concepts and fully realize them: Super Mario Bros 3, A Link to The Past, Super Metroid, Castlevania IV, Mega Man X… the list goes on. These games are to this day called some of the best ever made and even later entries tend to have trouble escaping their shadow.

Donkey Kong had two arcade sequels, but Donkey Kong Jr changes quite a bit about the core gameplay, and 3 is barely recognizable. I’ve heard Super Mario Bros called a spiritual sequel to this game, and it is to an extent, but I’ve always seen them as two sides of the same coin: vertical vs horizontal. I love Donkey Kong Country, but let’s be real: Rare used Donkey Kong’s name and virtually nothing else from the game they’re using to market their new series. Donkey Kong himself is redesigned and declared their original character, before being shoved aside in favor of Diddy, the real main protagonist.

Donkey Kong never got to grow up with all those other crusty old Nintendo games, and I’m pretty disappointed with all the ports and rereleases it got, no effort was made to improve or modernize it. All I can do is recommend Donkey Kong ‘94 for the gift of god it is, and lament what could have been.

Over these past few years, Bethesda has managed to make "rip and tear" synonymous with Doom, but even that slogan's misleading at this point. The original (uh, original reboot, not original original) Doom embraced this mantra more faithfully- while it did suffer from some seriously misplaced modernization, most of it was pretty ignorable and the action, propped up by the smart new glory kill mechanic, more than made up for it. It also had our hero in a Gordon Freeman-esque scenario, in the midst of a world-altering catastrophe with his only goal survival and escape by any means necessary. Now we're galaxy trotting, forgoing the natural sense of progression that comes with just moving from place to place in favor of teleporting in from a hub world with the help of an omniscient AI as we retrieve MacGuffin after MacGuffin. There's an expanded codex filled with fresh word salad if you want to learn the significance of any of what you're doing, there's also a flamethrower now, there's an ice bomb, there's monkey bars, there's a huge glowing sword, there's about two dozen new upgrade systems. The big question is, do any of these additions make it a better action game than its predecessor? My answer is no.

I've come to realize that what I liked most about Doom 2016's encounters is that they felt like endurance tests. They were long and drawn out but truly felt like they forced you to use all of your resources to come out successfully. Eternal's feel shorter by comparison, and a lot of the time I found myself finishing one only having used a few of my weapons. 2016 had me constantly creating new strategies- I remember always saving my rockets for Cacodemons and plasma for Revenants- but I didn't really find myself choosing my weapon based on which demon I was fighting in Eternal. It also feels too easy to make a clean getaway. You'll never catch me calling additional movement options a flaw, but the demons don't really have any way to deal with the fact that you have two dashes and consistent ways to get tons of airtime. What's probably my biggest gripe is that the newly added abilities never ended up flowing. Throughout my playthrough the only time I'd ever use the Flame Belch or the Blood Punch was when I mentally reminded myself to. It never felt natural or instinctual, and on top of this I could never remember which of my abilities were on a cooldown or which recharged with glory kills. At first I just chalked this up to me being pretty lousy at shooters but the copious amount of tips the game throws at you began to make me think otherwise. It feels like you're reminded to check the automap, to use a specific weapon on a specific enemy, or to spend your upgrade tokens at such a constant rate that at some point you have to wonder if this increased complexity is really worth it. I'd still rather replay Doom 1993 than any of its sequels or reboots, and its simplicity is largely to thank for that. But then again, are you truly ripping and tearing if you're not logged into your Bethesda.net account?

Less of a Donkey Kong Eighty-One remake and more of a Mario Sixty-Four premake. The arcade classic entirely revolves around precise platforming under an extremely restrictive moveset, and while some familiar physics quirks remain, DK '94 instead opts for a loose, flexible approach. The one major feature that survived the porting process is the scale of each level, but while the original saw its single-screen stages as linear paths for Jumpman to run through as an ape hurls the kitchen sink at him, the Game Boy edition treats them more like open-ended jungle gyms. The Super Mario 64 comparison is half literal and half figurative: the game features primitive versions of both the side and triple jumps, but these moves are representative of a design philosophy that allows skilled players to cruise through each exit on their own terms. Theoretically, this should clash with the fact that DK '94 is, indeed, a puzzle platformer, but the puzzles in question generally lack a single, strict solution and mostly serve to add variable state to otherwise simple level layouts. This means that they hardly ever slow Mario down, and instead just create another set of tools for players to improvise with while routing through each stage. The microscopic scale justifies itself here- not only because of the pick-up-and-play nature of handheld gaming, but because being able to see most, if not all, of the course at once lets you immediately plan out which parts of it you're going to attempt to skip, bolstered by the return of Lady's lost items as sub-objectives. And of course, this was Nintendo during its apex years, so it's a forgone conclusion that every individual level mechanic in here is introduced and combined with every other one flawlessly. Interestingly, observant Marioheads might notice that this game also features some experimentation with non-failstate punishments that would later define the Wario Land series. Most notably, if Mario falls from a high drop, but not one large to kill him, he'll enter a roll when he lands. This not only leaves him exposed to enemies, but also drops the item he's holding and denies the player control for a few seconds. In a game where quick, stylish traversal is the greatest reward, awkward, time-wasting mistakes may actually be worse than death. Just a fraction of the ingenuity that makes up, in my opinion, the very best OG Game Boy title.

I wasn’t always a Final Fantasy II defender, but upon revisiting the title a couple years ago for the first time since I was a young teen I was shocked by how smooth that game actually goes down. Like most games the internet latches onto as eternal targets, it’s not actually that obtuse, not actually that difficult, doesn’t actually require an outrageous amount of planning and self-flagellation to excel at. Sure you COULD min max your party by hitting your own characters for hours or whatever, but there’s no real incentive to do that, ESPECIALLY since all of the remakes of the game significantly sand down the rough edges of the NES original. When I look at Final Fantasy II on its own merits today, I see a game that tried a lot of interesting stuff and succeeded at a lot, with beautiful presentation and ambitious, successful storytelling…but I also see a game that was already constrained by the fledgling expectations imparted by its nascent brand. I’m convinced that that game is as rejected as it is in large part because it’s just, y’know, it’s not what Final Fantasy feels like, even in a day and age where what Final Fantasy feels like is entirely ephemeral, and even though it did much more to define the look and sound of the series than its predecessor by far. So what does Final Fantasy II look like if it gets to be the game that it truly wants to be? If we give battle designer Akitoshi Kawazu the keys to the kingdom and put him in the chairs of director and designer and (co-)writer, really just let this guy who is clearly ambitious and hungry and ready to do it, just go nuts?

It looks like The Final Fantasy Legend, or Makai Toushi SaGa, one of the most enchanting and definitive debuts I’ve ever played. This game, it must be said, whips ass. Everything about Final Fantasy II is here and much more intense. The famous and hated stat increase system is back, but now siloed to one of three character classes and seemingly much more random in its effectiveness and distribution. These guys, the Mutants, can only equip half as much stuff as a normal human, but the tradeoff is they can do magic and innately learn special abilities, which appear randomly after battles based on the character’s unseen level, and disappear just as randomly and just as often. It created a great push and pull where I had to make the choice between armoring up my initially quite fragile Mutant party member more or sacrificing a couple of those equipment slots to give her some equippable offensive magic, because for about the first half of the game that’s by far the most effective combat shit you have, and you never know when their flame ability might just disappear and be replaced by a counterspell, or a useless poison ability, or even an elemental weakness instead.

These choices make up all of the game, a constant push and pull of resource management that is at its most dire in the early goings when money is tightest but never completely fades away. Human characters don’t level up at all – they only increase stats by purchasing a small variety of potions from shops that will upgrade strength, agility (all weapons scale off of one or both of these stats in various ways, occasionally weirdly), or HP. They have double the equipment slots of a mutant, but they need that stuff because they never get abilities, can’t use magic, and their defense stat is entirely dependent on their gear. The third class is Monsters, who are simultaneously the simplest and most complex class to manage. They only have their innate skills to work with and can’t learn new ones or equip anything, but when you kill guys in fights, sometimes they leave behind MEAT, and if you have a monster character EAT THAT SHIT, they’ll turn into a DIFFERENT monster. The game doesn’t ever explain any of this system or how it works to you and I didn’t look up the mechanics of it, so as far as I can tell it seems to be based on your monster’s hidden level and a pokemon-esque intersection of monster types interacting with each other in various complex ways behind the scenes (there is actually a LOT of obvious pokemon DNA in this game, it’s very clearly a huge influence on those). Not knowing how this works, my monster was probably the worst guy in my party for most of the game but by the end I had lucked into some combinations that were getting him some sick forms and abilities, it’s really just fun to see what you’ll get next. I highly recommend playing a monster blind.

Compounding all of this is how much the loop of this game revolves around the grind for caaaashola. Everything has a numerical durability, everything. From your swords to your spells to your psychic powers to your monster’s tail swipes, every possible action in the game will have, at absolute most, fifty uses, and frequently as few as ten or twenty, often even lower than that. For natural abilities topping off is as simple as resting at an inn or, for monsters, devouring a fallen foe and/or transforming, but for equipment there is no recourse but to simply Buy More Shit, and, hopefully, Better Shit. Couple this with the way human characters’ developments revolve entirely around buying them increasingly expensive potions and the economy becomes a much more important part of this game than most. This does mean there’s a lot of grinding in FFL, especially in the early game, but there’s also an emphasis on precise resource management that’s not so severe in most JRPGs. It’s a vibe akin to my perennial fave Dragon Quest 1, where you really have to be certain that you’re ready to strike out again before you leave the vicinity of your current safe zone, because getting caught with your pants down far from a town is the only situation where the game will REALLY punish you. And the stakes ARE high – each character comes with only three lives, and aside from the leader of your party who you select at the very onset of the game, if they die three times they’re dead for good. You CAN buy more hearts for characters but these items are the most expensive thing you can purchase for the majority of the game, and it’s obviously better to just not put yourself in a situation where you need them. That means not only keeping on top of your resources but also your stats, as much as is possible and it’s within your control. There’s a lot to juggle in FFL, so even though the combat is pretty simple and often unchallenging, I never felt disengaged from the experience.

It helps that, although I do think that all of these systems and the ways they interconnect are a ton of fun, they are supported by an incredible world, presented beautifully. A mysterious world constructed around a gigantic tower, one that houses myriad other worlds, all menaced by the same demiurge. These civilizations are all strange and beautiful, as notable for their mundanity as they are for their weirdness. This is a world of species parity, where cannibal monsters share towns with human characters, feeding you the same canned NPC dialogue. An early quest has you hooking a small-time king up with a slime villager (who reciprocates his feelings but is being threatened by a local bandit leader, who maybe you kill with your GUN that it's not unsusual for you to have in your medieval fantasy town) and later you find that they’re happily married and expecting a kid. This is just part of the fabric of life here, entirely unremarkable, and when you later find a plane within the tower where a race of gargoyle men has enslaved everyone else it’s bizarre and terrible and everyone is really fucked up about it.

And they ARE fucked up about it! Something that separates this game from many others on its platform and even in its time generally is how talkative your party is. Not just your main guy but everyone in the party has spoken dialogue in story scenes. The simple decision to just flag different characters to speak the dialogue rather than just one general voice or your lead person lends them a lot of character. There’s an implication that Party Member 3 is the subject of one of the three kingdoms in the starting world the tower springs from based on their familiarity in dialogue with the king there. Party Member 2 is noticeably more downtrodden and pessimistic than the others but no to a degree that they will dissent to action, just enough to vocally not want to give a shit about the philosophical underpinnings that begin to become obviously important to the quest the longer it goes. ALL of your guys have a fierce sense of justice but in a funny hotheaded way. In more than one encounter they cold-bloodedly execute defeated villains who are begging for their lives, or start bar fights for no reason, because he man, you shouldn’t have been a shitty bad guy if you didn’t want to get beheaded by us, or you shouldn’t have acted like a tough shit if you didn’t want to start shit. It’s funny and charming and just MORE character than I was expecting from such an early Gameboy game, something that’s been true of practically every element of it, from the depth of the mechanics to the verve of the characters to the color of the world itself.

The tower itself is eldritch in the true sense of the word: uncanny, impossible, vaguely sinister, and moreso these things the higher you climb. The worlds contained within become stranger and more foreign with every step, from sunlit islands hiding undersea kingdoms to a world in the clouds terrorized by a sky-demon and his gang in their flying castle to literally just post-apocalyptic Tokyo with all of the strange implications that implies. This nuclear wasteland and its inescapable, invincible, wrathful fire demon that stalks you across the world map until you can gather the tools and sacrifice the friends necessary to neutralize its defenses is not the ultimate revelation of the game, only one more step up the staircase. Each of these main scenarios is unique with a thoughtfully constructed narrative device and a creative main quest objective that goes beyond just following a the right pathways until you reach the boss and being strong enough to kill it. That Tokyo section even ends with what I can only describe as a Gameboy-tier setpiece climax on a bullet train, it fucking rules! There is SO much ambition packed into these ten hours.

Even the standard Kawazu shit that people hate works here, imo. Stuff like the healing pools you come to rely on in between towns in the transitional floors in the tower being frequently fake as you get higher, or hitting a room where all of the floor tiles have been replaced with stair tiles and not knowing which of them will actually end up being stairs lends itself to the uncanny wrongness of the location. The classic Wizardry-ass, AD&D-esque traps and puzzles do a good job of adding color to the world but they don’t meaningfully harm you if you’re adequately prepared for exploration; they’re more like fun pranks between you and the designer than cruel gotchas. It’s all tuned very well imo, and I feel like I can say this with some authority because I DID beat this game in under ten hours without a manual or looking anything up on the internet. It’s just not that demanding if you’re willing to meet it halfway.

That’s all you really need to do with Kawazu, is something I’m learning. This game has a lot to it, and it IS, on purpose, more challenging to get a handle on than most of its contemporaries. But it balances that high barrier to entry with a deep and varied playground, and it balances the complexity of the mechanics with combat encounters that don’t really pick up in difficulty until well into the back half of the game, even as it’s fairly hard to get to far ahead of power curve. If you can stick it out there’s a truly magical world waiting for you here. I didn’t even mention the music holy shit! One of Uematsu’s early greats. Guy was knocking it out of the park for this weird little Gameboy game. That’s how much I loved this, I FORGOT about the absolutely SLAM DUNK-ASS music. This game rips ass, WHAT an opening statement for a series. The bar is SO high.