Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is a sequel to the first Metroid Prime, developed on its engine in the span of a bit less than two years, though it apparently had to be rushed in a few areas to make that deadline (This caused it to release right after Halo 2 and right before Half-Life 2 which... ouch). Following up on the first game's success, the studio took inspiration from Metroid Fusion, wanting to make a more challenging and narratively-focused experience. The overall plot is still simple, though: Samus Aran follows an emergency message sent by a Federation ship to a planet named Aether, where she discovers the remainders of a war between the peaceful Luminoth and the Ing, a horde of aliens born from another dimension, Dark Aether. That's not to say that intended focus on storytelling doesn't come across, though. The first few hours of the game see you trying to piece together what happened to this Federation group, and the Luminoth's lore is discovered piece by piece through scanning the environment. This may be a wild guess but I feel Half-Life was an inspiration here, and it worked quite well. The Scan Visor (my beloved) returns in full force, firing on all cylinders to flesh out every part of the world, from the wildlife, to the Aether/Dark Aether war, to the fates of humans and space pirates who set foot on it.

Speaking of the worldbuilding, it's a pretty good improvement. The Luminoth are sort of akin to the Chozo, but them not being a franchise stable makes them feel a lot more fresh, and their struggle against the Ing is well fleshed out and detailed, with some interesting turns. That said, the Ing themselves are kind of boring. By this point in the franchise we already had Phazon and the X as all-devouring unknowable horror villains for the franchise, and a third one really feels a bit redundant. They also are just not that interesting compared to the more Lovecraftian Phazon and the more TheThingian X. The return of Space Pirates feels so token that it's kind of out of place, also. I love those goobers but they just don't really matter here. Same for the Metroid. Something that does matter is the art design- Aether is beautifully alien and every corner of it is a delight to look at, and much more interesting than Prime's lush but kind of standard elemental biomes. It does come at the cost, however, of a more generally drab color palette which fits the style super well but does make rooms feel just a bit more samey. As intriguing as the areas are, the fact that they're all yellowy makes entering a new one much less awe-inspiring than it was in MP1. The soundtrack, while still good, is also nowhere near the perfection of the previous game's. At least, Samus' two new suits both look fucking awesome.

Every time I begin to play a new Metroid(vania), there's one big question in my mind: What kind of world design are we dealing with? Metroidvanias come in all shapes and sizes. Some hold your hand pretty firmly (Zero Mission, Ori and the Blind Forest), some cleverly dump you right where you're going to be going next (Dread) and some just rely on you to figure things out (Super Metroid, Hollow Knight). In this case... none of those, sort of? Echoes is divided in three big areas (with a fourth, transitional one in-between), rather than several smaller ones, and instead of asking you to travel between them regularly to get more upgrades, they essentially act as massive Zelda dungeons, containing all the items you need to beat them. In paper, this is actually quite smart. It keeps the spirit of slowly unfolding a massive puzzle box, while limiting the slog of backtracking. In execution this system works really well when in place, but it is broken twice through the game (once in the second area, once in the third), and that is half of MP2's biggest mistake, in my opinion. If a player is conditioned to think all they need is in the area they're in, they will hesitate to look outside of it, wasting a lot of their time. Once they do, this conditioning will be flipped, and they will mistakenly begin to believe that they need to search the entire world for the next piece of the puzzle, despite the fact that all the ones they need are all in the same place. It happened to me, and I wasted some hours in complete confusion.

The central gimmick of Echoes' level design is the ability to travel to Dark Aether's version of the world. These areas are incredibly hostile, damaging you overtime and siccing very powerful enemies on you on the regular. It's used fairly well, getting some good mileage out of the levels while blocking off parts of them that would be unnecessary to this dark version. However this system compounds the issue I've mentioned already, because throughout the world there are several portals to Dark Aether that will be opened to the player as they gain more power-ups. Logically one would expect them to contain either a progression item or at worst some nice side thing, but in truth they contain invisible keys necessary to access the final boss. Metroid Prime's fetch quest was my least favorite aspect of it, but you could at least collect its Artifacts at any point, as long as they were accessible to you. In this game, they're invisible (Revealed only by a mid/late game item), and you have no reason to ever guess they're there before the fetch quest officially starts. What this means is that if you ever get the idea to backtrack, whether because you think finding the next plot item will require it or just because you want to check out a place you just gained access to, these apparent dead ends are likely going to be wasting a lot of your time. It's kind of baffling, honestly, making the keys not invisible would completely remedy this issue. Still, when the time for the fetch quest came around, I did at least have fun this time. The problem of incredibly annoying and tanky enemies jumping you during backtracking remains, but you do get a lot of traversal items in the late game and they let you breeze through early areas fairly swiftly. Another thing I want to praise is how almost every optional item has some very cool puzzle tied to it, rather than just being given to you.

The general discourse around Echoes is that it's much harder than its predecessor. I admittedly can't fully testify to that- I'm playing using PrimeHack, which gives the game modern PC controls. It's very fun and feels amazing, but I would assume it breaks the difficulty design just a bit (though so would the Wii's control scheme, I think). So take this all with a grain of salt, but I didn't find Echoes much harder than MP1, most of the time. Dark Aether's damage over time is punishing at the beginning but eventually becomes more of an annoyance, and almost all of my game overs were to a certain few infamous bosses. The first, the Boost Guardian, I actually thought was a really fun challenge, very frantic and tense, with no way to avoid damage over time and needing to quickly pile damage onto him after making him vulnerable. The second, the Spider Guardian, is truly awful. Essentially just a really hard Pac-Man boss, it takes a lot of time to get to and a lot of time to beat, and forces you to deal with Morph Ball physics at their absolute worst. There's a lot of Morph Ball fights in this game, actually, three bosses are fought entirely with it and about as many feature it prominently. I don't mind, it's kinda cool, just a shame that the worst one is so challenging. Some other bosses are also quite great, and while a lot of the mini-boss fights end up feeling like filler, others are actually very elaborate and on par with "main" bosses, which is always a pleasure to see (here's my tier list of the bosses btw). Well, when they don't kill you. MP2 is very stingy with save rooms.

As you can see, I had a lot to say about this game. There were very high highs and low lows in my playthrough, but I'm happy to say I did really enjoy it by the end. Definitely going to check out Metroid Prime 3 sooner than later, I've heard a few things about it that I'm quite interested to verify, both good and bad.

Cosmology of Kyoto is, in essence, an edutainment game that chooses a very particular formula to teach the player about Heian-era Kyoto- that is, to allow them to explore a fictional version of it, one designed not for 1:1 historical accuracy, but for the purpose of letting them witness various events found in its history, religion and folklore in the form of brief vignettes they will inevitably run into as they aimlessly wander through its empty streets at night.

Kyoto's presentation is incredible. While the animation is limited, the pixel art is outstanding, painting humans and demons alike with a grotesque style that brings traditional Japanese artwork to life in an extremely striking way. Voice acting and sound design are also very effective. There's not much to the gameplay, being a very basic version of a point and click, but just the sheer intrigue of seeing more of this world is enough to keep one going. There is an end state, however hard it might be to find, and I thought the ending was actually pretty cool.

Crusader of Centy is, at surface value, a fairly competent Zelda clone for the Genesis. Movement is smoother and it leans more towards action, with a sword throw and a pretty freeform sense of momentum. It lacks proper dungeons and puzzle-solving, but it does feature a nice variety of animal buddies that each have their own ability. It's a bit light on content, with most of the levels and bosses feeling rather underdesigned, but it's hard to accuse it of a lack of ambition because its story is, to be frank, completely fucking insane.

The game, set in a fantasy world where monsters used to rule the land, but were then banished by a mysterious light, starts with the protagonist (default name Corona)'s 14th birthday, where he is given, as ordained by the laws of the land, a sword and shield by his worried mother, and sent to adventure in the wild. He then loses the ability to speak with men, causing an actually pretty effective sense of alienation, even though he can now speak with animals. He goes on with his journey with no stated goal, eventually finding out that the reason he can't speak with humans is that the Tower of Babel finished construction, and God did the whole thing preventing all men from understanding one another. There's an episode where you are unwittingly transformed into a monster and get to see how your kind terrifies theirs (this lasts about 2 minutes of playtime), which later sets up the reveal that the monsters are just innocent creatures that humans murder for no reason (no idea why they keep trying to kill you. Self defense?). Eventually you decide to climb up the Tower of Babel, where you throw hands with an alien, then you meet a giant ancient dragon who summons your mom into the fight and starts beating the shit out of her, only to reveal that this was a test of your mettle and that she was just an illusion. Then, you grow a plant on top of the Tower of Babel so you can climb into heaven (which is, obviously, the most unhingedly designed area in the game, made purely to troll players I think) and ask God to cut that whole language thing out. He does, but says humanity sucks and will all go to Hell. Anyways, a magic tornado has appeared, and you can use to travel in time by jumping into it, which lets you witness a few (I think unrelated?) vignettes of the world's past, before letting you travel to the final dungeon, which is where the monsters lived before spilling into the human world again so you can destroy... some divine creature? To reboot the entire universe and stop fantasy racism (by sealing the oppressed monsters into another dimension).

It's easy to make any game sound crazy by just listing plot beats, but I want you to understand that there is very little that I omitted. Centy just goes between a plot beat and another without actually bothering to explain why things are happening. This game doesn't even have a villain or a proper overarching goal, as far as I understand it. Where did the tornado, which plays a key role in the late game, come from, and why does it have these powers? Who knows! It's barely acknowledged, let alone explained. Why do monsters flip-flop between completely reasonable creatures and random encounters? Dunno! I only guessed what the final dungeon was based off one off-hand line, the game doesn't tell you. I think at least some of the blame for this rests on the bad translation (Apparently the EU one is different, might be better to go with that) but the game is very clearly rushed. A lot of the animal buddies see use only once or twice throughout the game, and the whole time travel stuff is clearly a way to reuse stages and enemies they already made. If I had to guess, the devs were trying to make a proper epic of a game, spanning tens of hours and exploring the breadth of themes that Crusader of Centy as is uneasily touches upon, and had to drastically resize the scope of what they were working with. It's a dang shame because as it is, the game feels extremely confused and muddled. I think it's worth a shot if you're interested, it feels ok to play especially when you get the sword throw (the basic slash is a little janky), there's a lot of cool ideas and moments and even if they struggle to come together they can at least be appreciated for what they are.

Normally I do not replay games, and never ones this long, but for whatever reason, the idea of replaying the infamously punishing Darkest Dungeon struck my fancy, a week and a half ago, after a streamer I follow started a new playthrough of it. And yeah, I had a great time. The essential structure of it is that using a roster of characters, susceptible to permadeath and a great degree of conditions both positive and negative, you must slowly acquire power until you are ready to challenge the titular Darkest Dungeon, a cove of eldritch powers that threaten to swallow the entire world.

And before going on- damn, if those characters aren't cool! They're more "classes" than "characters", I suppose, you can have as many Crusaders and Plague Doctors as you like, but still, each of them has a really strong concept and design that's extremely memorable and interesting while still fitting the dark, low fantasy feeling (Except for the Arbalest, sorry. You've got a poet fallen king wielding a broken executioner's sword and a terse, faceless bounty hunter who pulls you in with a hook, marks you and then scores a crit for 50 damage, "woman with a crossbow" doesn't really do it). All of them also boast a great level of mechanical depth and opportunity for expression.

Take the Crusader, for example, one of your two starting heroes. At first, you'll look at him and deduce that he's a fairly standard tank- hits hard with his sword, takes hits well in return. And that seems to be true, until you unlock characters like the Leper or the Hellion, who can deal way more damage, completely obsoleting good old Reynauld in that field. And yet, it is at that point that you may realize that he packs healing magic, however weak. He's not going to keep up with the Vestal, the designated white mage, but he doesn't need to. Healing when a fight is nearly over helps you last a lot longer throughout a long dungeon, and doing so to take a character off Death's Door (characters can only die at 0 hp) is invaluable. He can also heal off stress, which no other character can do both of. He can also stun enemies, so perhaps he is to be more of a support tank of sorts? Sure, but he doesn't even need to be in the frontline! He has an attack, Holy Lance, that only works in the back but is as powerful as his main one and can target squishier enemies in the back ranks. So what looked like a big bag of HP and damage turns out to be able to fill just about any role in any spot of the party, from tank to control to support to sniper, to the point that once I actually ran a Crusader / Crusader / Crusader / Leper formation against a certain boss, and it worked! All (well, most) of the characters boast this level of complexity, and it allows the gameplay to hold up tremendously well throughout DD's significant runtime.

If Darkest Dungeon has flaws, they do lie in its pacing. Not only are there few interesting things that can happen outside of the dungeon crawling, nothing you can achieve outside of the Darkest Dungeon itself (which you will likely never be setting foot in until near the end of the game) really advances things besides granting you more gold, resources and hero levels, which makes every expedition feel like it matters less than it actually does. Of note are the various bosses, which are a group of very mechanically varied and mostly very well thought-out fights, but unlock very little for you besides the ability to fight harder versions of them, eventually for the prize of a unique trinket at the hardest versions. The game gets much harder at high levels (In this playthrough I had 3 deaths before getting into the highest level dungeons, and then 5 in the much shorter period afterwards, disregarding DD expeditions which meted out something like 7 deaths on their own) and losing a high level hero is very scary, so taking those on doesn't really feel worth it, which is a shame because taking them down is very fun. The game is a lot more merciful than people realize- there's no permanent lose state outside of the hard mode, survivors of the Darkest Dungeon grant exp bonuses to heroes they venture together with and you can unlock the ability to recruit mid level heroes from the get go- but it does still feel like playing things very very safe is the best way to do it, and that takes some of the fun away.

All of this is good and all but Darkest Dungeon also excels in presentation, which I haven't really mentioned up until now. The artstyle is clearly a bit budget but it works damn well, with a sort of comic-booky vibe that manages to feel serious and effective despite the chibi proportions, extremely punchy attacks sprites and some of the best sound design I've ever heard. Everything sounds great, from enemy attacks to UI sounds to lighting a torch to the ambiance in the background of every stage. That, in particular, is very impressive, sounding muted and restrained when the light is bright, but breaking into complete madness if it ever goes too down. All of this is tied together by the Ancestor, the gloomy, uncaring narrator who always has so much to say in regards to both your victories and failures. He's well written and splendidly voiced, to the point that it's a pleasure to hear even his most common lines, no matter the repetition.

So yeah, Darkest Dungeon, excellent game in my opinion. Hurts just a bit to see mostly negative top reviews, but it is what it is. Before ending this I wanna quickly say a few things. First off, I had no DLCs on in this playthrough. Secondly, I think the idea of this game being RNG-driven is entirely wrong, I can recount exactly one instance in my entire playthrough where a character death felt truly bullshit (in the longest and hardest mission in the game, admittedly), which did suck but once in 50 hours does not ruin a game. The game hinges on RNG in the same way that many other tactical games do, there's plenty of systems in place to always give you a chance if you play well, and a failure to prepare for (reasonable levels of) it is a failure to match the game's expectations. Lastly, the game's storyline is something I have mixed feelings on. The atmosphere and sheer writing are great, but Darkest Dungeon is very light on overarching plot, and the big reveals at the end fall more in the "oh, cool" spectrum for me, than the "oh my god" one, though I think it does manage to fit the game's themes without feeling like a kick in the nuts. To quote the man himself, a trifling victory, but a victory, nonetheless.

Shadow Tower Abyss starts off on the right foot. After an enigmatic intro, you're dropped in a forest cave, armed only with a handgun and little ammo. You've just fallen down a pit, and the torch you were carrying goes out in seconds. Then, total darkness, until your eyes slowly get used to their environment. A statue falls right by your side as you inch your way into the dark corridor, nearly crushing you. Lizards crawl on the walls. Finally, you see a fellow human, but he is badly wounded, clearly breathing his last. Before speaking to him, you glance to the side, and see the probable cause of his demise: a red humanoid, staring back at you with fiery eyes. You speak to the man. Slumping over, he hands you a knife, and makes you the recipient of his last words: kill them, kill them all.

While I haven't played the King's Field games, I have watched a four-hour retrospective on them, which means I am practically an erudite. All jokes aside, I don't think it's unfair to assert that Abyss is clearly trying to dig out its own style, while following in their footsteps. The most obvious of these is the focus on combat. King's Field is an attack button, a magic button, and a whole lot of strafing, STA has a whole lot more than that. You can swing your weapon four different ways, which seems to impact their effectiveness (more on the stats later) and more interestingly lets you target enemy body parts, destroying heads and removing limbs rather than just chipping away at a health bar. It's quite the interesting system, and it's coupled with a few other ones. First off, guns! There's not much to say about how they work, standard FPS fare though with quite the limited ammo supply, but there's a nice bit of resource management with them- with everything, in fact. Every piece of equipment decays when used, from armor to weapons to guns to magic rings, but you can destroy items to heal at certain stations, or repair items using your own HP.

This is all clearly intended to cause a tense gameplay loop along the lines of survival horror games, but as for whether it succeeds... eeh? It's tense, for a bit, but none of these systems ever forced me to make uncomfortable choices. I could always use fairly strong weapons and the best armor without needing to actually use lesser backups, and I kept a reasonable supply of ammo, money and healing potions all the way to the endgame. It's a shame because there's some neat stuff here, but while I did enjoy interfacing with these systems I don't think I actually ever had to. Also, the limb cut system kinds of runs out of ideas for most of the game, chopping off an enemy's head and seeing them stand back up is a memorable moment in the first stage, but it's also the most interesting thing you'll ever do with a limb cut throughout all of Abyss, save for maybe that one level where you have to chop off certain parts to land a lethal blow.

The structure of Shadow Tower Abyss is simple enough. You have a tower you must climb, and to do so you must venture through dangerous zones to unlock its elevators and make it to higher floors. Once you get past the game's esoteric bits, that's all it really boils down to. These levels are... a mixed bag? I really like some of them, like the bug stage where you can get a bit of a glimpse at how their colony works, or the poison swamp area (lol) that you have to purify room by room with pickups you find strewn about it, but most are a lot weaker. Not necessarily frustrating, just mechanically lackluster. They're surprisingly linear and most of their gimmicks don't really amount to much. The waterfall area really just sees you moving slower underwater, the cliffs area has airborne enemies, that kind of stuff. It's weird how it gets simpler as you go, and less engaging as a result.

Shadow Tower Abyss' art direction is possibly its most interesting bit, and what I think earned it a bit of interest in modern times (that and the inherent humor of facing high fantasy enemies with modern day firearms), and yeah, it is quite pretty. It does a lot of interesting stuff with lighting and palette, and even though areas look sort of samey from room to room there is a very memorable visual identity to each of them, especially the hub world, inhabited by odd hunched-over ferrymen who tend to bioluminescent runic technology in massive bone structures that rise up from a black void. I mean, that's just cool. However while I would love to say I was smitten with Abyss' atmosphere (that's really why i played it. Well, that, and guns funny), its lack of soundtrack kinda flattened the whole thing for me. There's some ambiance, but not really an immersive or interesting sort, and I think its great visual presentation is held back as a result.

That's the sum of my thoughts but I wanna touch on just how bizarre this game is, the story is nearly incomprehensible, I think mostly thanks to the fan translation being extremely rough, often to the point of broken english (though I don't think it'd make much more sense without... the ending, in particular, is kind of very lame. I thought it might change depending on your actions but it does not, which is weird because there's several optional areas you get some story content out of), the art as mentioned is often very esoteric and even the mechanics are hard to parse. I mean, just look at the stats. Stamina, ok, Vitality, sure, Strength and Dexterity, I know what those do... Slash, Break and Pierce I can guess... (but are they defense, offense, or both? and does slash boost your horizontal swings and break vertical, or the other way around?) Concentration? Mentality? Mind? Element, Solvent and Spirit? I beat the game and I still couldn't quite tell you how all of this works. All of this summed up together gives STA a very unique feel, like the mechanical equivalent of a liminal space. You know it's leading somewhere, but you have no idea what that somewhere could possibly be. And I dunno, it's interesting. Shadow Tower Abyss isn't a masterpiece, in my opinion, but it is very interesting to think about.

I replayed Portal, today. Hadn't in quite a few years, and it's a short game, so I thought why not. Short story short, it's a good game, and I like it. Here are some random thoughts.

- It feels underbaked on a replay, almost half of the game is a tutorial and while that's understandable it only truly gets fun in the second half. This isn't a hot take but I'm sure it'd get more interesting if it was even just an hour longer.
- I can't really tell if it feels like the game's trying to force memes at times, or it's just that since they became memes, it retroactively feels like it. Regardless the writing's usually just good enough to get away with it, but there are some moments of cringe.
- I like the few more atmospheric moments, Glados is great but there's something to say about how her always having some dialogue often prevents that vibe from becoming apparent. She's great and I'd never remove her from the game, but it's food for thought.
- The OST is really good. It's not something I remembered at all but Valve is really good at subtly underlining cool moments with their soundtrack.
- I bet that if Portal came out today, we'd be getting a whole wave of yellow paint discourse around it, it's not very subtle with its signposting.
- Suffers slightly from hand-holdy Valve level design, but not nearly as much as the Half-Life 2 games. I only had a few real "ha-ha!" moments, but they were pretty good ones.

I find that some of the games I enjoy the most are those that I know very little of, by the time I check them out. Panzer Dragoon Saga is one of them. All I had seen of it, which was enough to spark my interest, was this bit of cutscene, devoid of context. There's something already pretty unique, in there. Most games back then- hell, a lot of JRPGs today, don't have that kind of animation. In just about every scene (and these aren't the "big" ones- those are FMVs) characters act and interact with each other, move around, they don't just stand there and stare at each other while they talk. Today this isn't groundbreaking, but I genuinely cannot think of a single game in Saga's era that did anything like this. Only Vagrant Story, maybe, and that one's a few years newer. It's fully voice acted, too, down to every single unimportant NPC line (Only in Japanese, though. This is probably better nowadays, but it does feel like they just didn't care to dub it, it would certainly have turned people off at the time. Given how few copies were even sold overseas, this isn't surprising. It's nice that the translation itself is pretty alright, though, minus some oddities). This is all already very admirable in a vacuum, but I think that when Panzer Dragoon Saga is looked at as a sequel to its rail shooter predecessors, it all makes even more sense. In my thoughts on the original Panzer Dragoon, I noted that the game felt extremely cinematic in a grandiose way, and Saga is a natural evolution of that. It's impressive just how much it achieves in terms of presentation, and while the story is simpler than the genre's usual fare, that very much does not harm it, in the long run.

Speaking of adapting Panzer Dragoon to the RPG canon, the gameplay is an even clearer and more brilliant example of that, which is no small feat. How do you even adapt a rail shooter into turn-based combat? Simple, you put all of the focus on the positioning of the player and enemies in regards to one another, and turn every fight into a super cinematic little puzzle. It's not the deepest thing out there, though more than satisfying enough: You can move around the foes, ducking in and out of danger and safe zones, positioning yourself so you can hit weak points, but the ability to act recharges in real time, and moving halts it briefly, so you have to be tactical. This is all capped off quite cleverly by a simple ratings system at the end of every fight. Beat it quickly and without taking many hits, and you'll be awarded with more exp and a chance for an item. The game is quite easy, and you'll never really need to play strategically, so it's nice to always have something to push you towards optimal play. Outside of battle, levels are explored entirely on dragonback, flying through caves, ruins, forests and the like, which is a nice spectacle and quite cooler than the usual on-foot dungeon crawling, though ultimately not too mechanically different. Again, Team Andromeda's penchant for the cinematic shines- style over substance is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when there's more than enough of the latter. Speaking of that, you can transform your dragon, and the way it freely warps between any combination of its forms is quite the technological marvel.

When you will be walking on foot, it will be because you're exploring the game's few towns and such. They're small, but populated with fairly memorable NPCs. I think all of them have unique models, and plenty have side-quests associated with them, sometimes small, sometimes not. Good stuff. I don't think you'll be missing out by going in fully blind, but I actually did enjoy checking the wiki's list of "secrets" and poking around at various side stories as I went through the game. As for the main story, I've mentioned already that it's fairly simple, but that doesn't mean it's bad, just more understated than expected. Mercenary Edge's group gets slaughtered by rebel Craymen, who is following some mysterious goals, and he sets out to get his revenge on him, with the help of a dragon that mysteriously bonded with him. Character development is very organic, sometimes subtle and usually not lampshaded, and PDS doesn't mind hitting you with some nasty gut punches, or hiding some pretty vital information from you entirely. It can feel slightly underwhelming at times, but it does fit the setting and tone, and I do appreciate the commitment to the original games' surreal aura.

I do have some genuine criticisms, though. While the game is mostly pretty fun, a few of the dungeons are pretty unbearable. The worst offender is the Ruins of Uru, a massive labyrinth you can only explore with a shitty little landspeeder, populated with pathetically weak encounters that offer no challenge and a lot of wasted time. I actually quite like what it does story-wise but man is it a slog to go through. Generally, the last disc of the game tends to have some of its worst dungeons, with reskinned enemies and lots of flying about with little to do. The final dungeon is a stealth one, and it completely fails as a climactic conclusion of the story and gameplay. Your offensive "berserk" powers, aka your spells, look cool but feel kind of useless a lot of the time, because they require twice as many actions as your attacks and rarely do even just twice as much damage, at least in the late game. They're useful to break past defenses but usually there's some way around them that lets you strike a weak point for great damage, which you can only do with your standard attacks.

It's a damn shame that this game was relegated to the last throes of a console doomed to fail from day one. It is absolutely one of the finest JRPGs I've played and just bursts at the seams with love for its world and for pushing the envelope on what games could be. I absolutely recommend playing it, it's quite tighter and lighter in length than your usual JRPG, has some really awesome things I haven't even mentioned, like the OST, and while Saturn emulation isn't great it is worth dealing with. Do keep in mind that it is highly recommended to be familiar with Panzer Dragoon II: Zwei before playing this- knowing the original PD is nice, knowing Zwei is quite important. So, with that, I guess that's it for Panzer Dragoon and me. I want to play Orta, but I don't know if I want to enough to figure out Xbox emulation, and I'm sure as hell not playing the Game Gear one. All I've said about this game applies to the whole series, these are some really evocative, artful games that did some extremely interesting stuff with the medium, and it's really a shame that they were stuck on a console nobody bought, because if they were on the PS1 or N64 I guarantee to you that Panzer Dragoon would be a household name today.

Zwei is a massive upgrade from the original Panzer Dragoon in just about every way. On a mechanical level it's not even close, everything feels snappier and more effective, the addition of a rechargeable screen nuke grants a little bit of leeway and while the split routes are esoteric enough to require some real experimentation to figure out, they're at least a neat idea in theory. What I must presume was Zwei's big selling point was the ability to evolve your dragon between stages, and I have to say I love how it was handled. He starts as a flightless creature you just ride on the ground, and the first stage and a half are played that way... until you reach a chasm, and fall down it, only for him to take flight and carry you into the first sky stage, as triumphant music swells up. Super cool way to introduce the concept. After that, the evolution has quite a bit less fanfare: if you play well, your guy digivolves and gets a bit stronger, with the only real difference besides statistics being that you'll get the best ending (read: somehow the most cryptic one) if you evolve him to his full power. Still, if nothing it's neat to see the various designs.

There's a bit more focus on storytelling in Zwei compared to the first Panzer Dragoon, which was extremely grandiose in its atmosphere, but devoid of dialogue. While it's nice to have just a little bit more insight into the world, Jean only really speaks in the first half of the game, and usually doesn't have too much to say. Still, it doesn't do any harm, the levels themselves are just as majestic as the original's, and quite a bit more elaborate in appearance. Special mention goes to some of the bosses, which manage to feel impressively dynamic, and are overall fairly effective setpieces, and to the soundtrack, which goes for a more esoteric and less orchestral feel compared to the original, and lands just as well.

Panzer Dragoon captures some pretty memorable imagery in its intro cutscene. Between the orchestral soundtrack, the large landscapes and the backdrop of a sort of post-apocalyptic world where dragons are actually mutants I couldn't help but feel like I was watching some forgotten 80s sci-fi movie, some big budget production with rough spots but a unique identity that never quite got the chance it deserved and eventually fell into obscurity. I'm not sure why exactly that comparison jumped to me but it's one that remained in my mind through much of my playthrough. I was somewhat fond of movies like The Neverending Story and Labyrinth growing up (especially the former, though nowadays I'm very much more into the latter), and the limited 3D painted an obscure but extremely evocative picture of this world I was getting a glimpse at somehow reminded me of that sort of fantasy. Something else I was reminded of was progressive rock, and once again I'm not exactly sure why, but if Panzer Dragoon is a playable album cover, it's In The Land of Grey and Pink, or Fragile, or Foxtrot.

Enough reminiscing. Panzer Dragoon is commonly considered to be a "style over substance" game, and I would generally be led to agree, though I find nothing wrong with that concept myself. At its basic level, you aim and you shoot, with the greatest mechanics being the ability to look around yourself to face foes surrounding you (which must have been pretty mindblowing back in '95), and the capacity for a charged homing shot, which I think this game introduced? I'm far from an expert on the genre. My main issue in regards to the gameplay is that your drago(o?)n is quite sluggish to move. It's clear that this isn't meant to be a super snappy game, but even then avoiding some attacks feels pretty impossible at times. Full disclosure, while I am marking this game as beaten, I actually could not reach the end without usage of the level select cheat code, mostly due to level 5 being quite a lot more challenging than the ones before and after. This might speak less about the game's difficulty and more my lack of patience or skill, and I have no doubt that others will find no issue with the level of challenge, but it is something that held the experience back just a hint for me. After all, levels are autoscrollers, and needing to restart one means you just wasted quite a bit of time.

With that said, I think I'll check out the later PD games- Initially I planned to just play Saga, and only checked out PD as an appetizer, but I am quite curious what Zwei is like now.

Typically I seek out bizarre games, it's something I actively enjoy, to the point that if a game feels too measured and adherent to established canons that's almost a downside for me. This is all to contextualize the fact that I think that Screaming Mad George's ParanoiaScape might be the first game that is just way too much for me in that regard. It's a constant deluge of surreal horror imagery ("anti-realistic", George calls it) that just gets to me in a way I can't explain. It feels like I just got cursed by playing it, like it's an infohazard. It's not just lolrandom shit thrown at the wall, I can clearly tell that there is a successful artistic intent behind it but I cannot for the life of me even begin to guess what it might be other than the fact that it makes me feel very uncomfortable.

No score. I don't know how to rate this.

I'm not really sure why I played this game- I think literally just because of the cool boxart and title + the fact that Kenichi Nishi worked on the story. I find said "story" credit quite silly because the game itself has absolutely none, I must assume that the summaries I've found online come from the manual. You're diving inside some VR simulation to save a girl who has gotten stuck inside it, and that's all the context you get. It's got some neat bits, though, most of the levels have a bit of Akira-esque horror and I quite like that, it's a lot more atmospheric than your average one-hour action platformer from the era.

You play as either Ryo or Maria, who take what I presume must be superpowered avatars in the VR simulation, he's a knight guy with a lightsaber, she's a dominatrix lady with a whip, because of course. Movement feels slow until you realize holding L or R lets you dash, and then it feels alright, but there is some serious jankiness to the hitboxes which is especially noticeable as the game gets harder. The neat gimmick is that enemies drop crystals that upgrade your attack: Ryo gets spinning blades to replace his first sword and eventually turns into a cyborg that shoots beams everywhere, and Maria whips out metal claws to then turn into a fairy with super busted homing attacks. It's sort of the SHMUP issue of the difficulty being very reliant on how well you perform, stay on top and it's a cakewalk, die and you're fending off swarms of enemies with an un-upgraded dude.

Overall I'd say Psycho Dream's alright? Far from the best game on the system but if you play on Easy it's not the worst mindless romp, and can actually be quite fun. I recommend not bothering with the last level, though, it's the outlier in terms of art design quality and ends with a very frustrating final boss. Besides that, you could definitely do a lot worse when it comes to this genre and console, and I'd very much recommend fans of more surreal atmospheres to at least try out a little bit of it.