5244 reviews liked by BlazingWaters


Look, I don't care if it's juvenile. Monster trucks are fuckin' cool. The sheer concept of a colossal vehicle built to literally crush other cars underneath it's gargantuan wheels fills me with delight, and not only can you play as one in this, but there's also a mechanic where if you run into another car from behind you'll drive over them and get a speed boost. This effectively makes the monster trucks in Off-Road Challenge the racing game equivalent of a grappler, and that's the sickest crap ever.

If that doesn't convince you, then how about watching an AI car drive into a passing by train and have the train be the loser in the exchange and explode into pieces? That sight left more of a mark on me than any racing sim this past decade I tells ya, and every time you set a record you're given a compliment and told "you're hot". Thank you Ms. Challenge! Midway arcade racers always got my back.

IGN: "oh oooh! the frame rate!"

gives IGN a swirly and steals their underpants

This replay has re-confirmed I still love this linear adventure through Not Hawaii quite a lot. This game's characters, art/colour direction, location design, and music owns. I don't have any major complaints with the gameplay too. Good encounter variety, no need to grind, boss fights are challenging enough on Set mode.

This is still comfortably one of my favourite mainlines behind BW/2 and RSE. I love Alola.

When I bring up the 2000s nostalgia of JRPGs, there's a good chance I'm referencing this game at some point or another. In preparation for making this list I usually read some literature, listen to some music, or more simply, just play the game to get caught up to speed. The Last Story was a game I remember very fondly, but I couldn't remember for the life of me why. 2012-2013 were some of my most turbulent years of my life, so a lot of gaming done around that time ended up in the memory hole, never to be seen or heard from again.

Fast-forward to 2024, and I've hooked my Wii back up to my HDTV. It took a converter to do so, but I have a lot of Wii games I want to play, especially for this list. The Last Story I bought the collector's edition for when it had a pricing error of 8 dollars on Amazon. It was a part of the Operation Rainfall trilogy of games--one with arguably the largest pedigree--and was developed by Mistwalker under Hironobu Sakaguchi's guiding light, with Noduo Uematsu's beautiful music accompanying it. The game has a compelling art style that, while looking like somebody smeared vaseline on my TV, still looks compelling and gorgeous to this day.

The Last Story had a rather subdued release. It's not particularly remembered among the Operation Rainfall games considering the massive shadow Xenoblade Chronicles cast, but at least it's not Pandora's Tower, lost somewhere to obscurity. And given that, I've met so many people who don't know what the Hell this game is or anything of note other than who made it.

The Last Story is a love story meets political struggle. Let's not mince words here; the story is generic. But its strength lies in the fantastic characterization, banter, and investment in its characters. Even booting the game up for the first time in over a decade, they immediately throw you into the action with all these characters charmingly shooting the shit and working with each other. The romance feels organic and developed. The world and aesthetic they created is very much a fantasy setting you'd expect from Sakaguchi.

So how does it play? Well, it's an Action RPG with a lot of tactics work behind it. The game utilizes a cover and stealth system, and you can aim your crossbow at enemies to signal your party to do various tactics like dumping magic in a chosen spot. There's also an aggro system. The combat is Ys-styled where it consists of running aggressively at enemies until they die, while blocking and dodging. Frankly there's a lot going on with the battle system. It's a fascinating take on a battle system that feels like it could've laid the groundwork for a lot more tactical ARPGs to come in the future.

But honestly, we are here for Sakaguchi and Uematsu. The story has a classic JRPG feel to it, accompanied by gorgeous music. The game has an immaculate vibe to it that just makes the worldbuilding and storytelling compelling, even if it covers a lot of ground both have covered before. It's just a very back-to-basics strong JRPG with some unique spins on the gameplay (ONLINE MULTIPLAYER).

"Final Fantasy" has sort of become a word salad as time has gone on, two terms that just signal an ongoing JRPG franchise, unaware of the irony that it's neither a singular fantasy nor the last one. The Last Story was Mistwalker's last game on console platforms before jumping ship to mobile and iOS. It's a very self-contained, succinct, complete story with a happy ending. And coming out in the twilight years of the Wii in the early 2010s as the gaming industry moved towards the AAA singularity, The Last Story really does sort of feel like the last of its kind, a very faithful-to-tradition, honest JRPG.

Strongly recommend. It's a hard game to play nowadays, but worth it for some forgotten nostalgia.

One of my favorite games ever. I first played this in 2020, but for whatever reason I didn't finish it until 2021. I think it was because of the framerate issues that made the game a powerpoint presentation and the fact that I hadn't played a Wii game with the nunchuk control scheme in well over a decade.

This game has so much charm. I think the character development of Zael and his friends is what made me love this game so much. In the beginning, Zael's mercenary group gave off the vibes of "We're only together for the job, we're not really friends", but by the end of the game it's clear that they truly care for each other. I thought it was really sweet.

This game isn't very hard, in fact I learned that one of the jokes people made about this game was that it was so easy it practically played itself. It's also only 25 hours long, so if you want an RPG but don't want a 100 hour game then this is perfect. The only times I struggled was during the Kraken fight because of the wallrun move's wonky detection and the Zangurak fight because of the sword-stealing mechanic. Fortunately by the climax of the story, the game dumps experience points on you, so I was able to get leveled up from lvl 35 to 60(?) in the last stretch. I never tried out the multiplayer because it obviously requires homebrew and I didn't feel like doing that.
Not a day goes by where I don't think about this game. Mistwalker loves developing games for systems that nobody has or for systems that are on life support. Please play it.

These bitches gay, good for them

I think there is this general thought floating around that when a company does something so well for so long it must be easy to create. In this particular example I am thinking of one of my favourite series Monster Hunter. Several other companies have put their hands into the hunter genre to various success but none have come close to the original's appeal and quality. Wild Hearts however gives a pretty good try and brings some really neat ideas to the table with it.

The most unique thing about Wild Hearts is it's Karakuri system. This allows the player to quick build wooden structures for use in combat as well as other functions. You can equip up to 4 basic ones that can also be used in fusion combinations to make different results. For example you can use a torch which on it's own will give a flame effect on your weapon but combine it with a celestial anchor which helps zip you around the map and it creates an extremely powerful cannon. These abilities create all sorts of effects like fireworks for knocking enemies out of the sky, walls for defence and to knock enemies over, hammers, traps, springboards, healing mist machines etc. The loadout you bring will depend on the weapon you use and enemy you face but are easy enough to switch out as and when is needed.

It is a brilliant system to be honest, they are quick to fire out, mostly nearly always useful and different players with different load outs can work well together. For example there is an enemy called the Kingtusk which is essentially a wild boar the size of a building who likes to charge attack. My friend's load out has a very quick release wall with a spring that only lasts a couple of seconds but will knock the boar on it's back when timed right allowing me to set up my above mentioned celestial cannon which takes some time to make and fire. The usage of these aren't infinite as they use a resource called thread you have a stock of. Depending what Karakuri you summon will effect the amount depleted. You build it back up through armour skills, environmental objects, attacking or jumping on wounded enemies and sucking it out of their wounds in a climbing exercise like shadow of the Colossus. Knowing how much thread you need to make things, how much you have and where to get more are the key loops to beating your enemies.

The Karakuri aren't limited to just combat though as you have another type called Dragon Karakuri which allow you to build permanent structures on each map. These structures are limited by elemental resources for each location you can expand as you play through the game to constantly work on what is available and as you unlock more Karakuri through upgrades. You can build your own camps for fast traveling, zip lines, updraft wind tunnels, giant wheel bikes, armour forges, search towers etc etc. Each player builds their own maps differently so joining online and seeing how they have theirs set up is really interesting. I tend to just have zip lines everywhere from camps to key areas like the worlds coolest assault course. Using a line from a cliff face, dropping off it half way to create a glider mid air to fly to your target before dropping down to attack will always be fun.

Alongside Karakuri you have your own weapon in which there are 8 to choose from; Katana, Nodachi, bow, maul, bladed wagasa, canon, claw blade and karakuri staff. Each weapon handles very differently with some being more simple than others but each having unique abilities. For example the Katana changing into a whip sword, or grappling in the air like an acrobat with the claw blade etc. I really like the weapons selections and some of them do some really interesting things like the Canon and Karakuri staff feeling more technical with a lot of steps to unlock their full potential. Their design is really interesting but honestly I feel they would be better utilised in a different game.

The issue is that the monsters you fight in most cases are so constantly aggressive it makes the Tigrex in Monster hunter look pretty laid back in comparison. They attack, non stop to the point at times it's actually ridiculous. Building up timed combo weapon changes in different rhythm multiple times to unlock the big hit with the Karakuri staff is more than often a laughable prospect. Their art designs are all really gorgeous at least. They are based mostly on fantasy looking corrupt animals like rats with flowers growing out of them, ice wolves, moss crocodiles etc. However there also just isn't enough of them, the game really lacks enemy variety. It plays over 5 chapters and just has the same half a dozen or so enemies over and over but the armour and weapon upgrades just aren't varied or interesting enough to not stop it feeling monotonous before you are even half way through.

I think if the story and characters could hold their own like the developers last attempt in the genre Toukiden then I could forgive that repetition along with the excellent combat system but sadly despite such a surprisingly large focus on characters and story it feels so dry and uninteresting with a terribly vague ending of nothing. It feels like the game needed more time in the oven to fully sculpt it's ideas. There is a lack of armour, weapon skills and build depth, a lack of enemy variety and a pretty uninteresting plot to boot and it's a real shame because some of the mechanics are really fantastic and I loved how it plays with it's gorgeous art design and music wrapping it all together. (I mean check out just the main menu theme.

It's a really good game, but it could have been an amazing one.

+ Karakuri system is utterly brilliant mechanic in and out of combat.
+ Beautiful art design and music.
+ Some seriously cool weapons...

-...some of which aren't worth using because the enemy AI is based around "relentless assault".
- Extremely limited enemy variety.
- Story and characters are uninteresting.
- Playing online due to EA's servers was a nightmare. Wouldn't let us play at all without telling why. Had to sign in with EA account on a PC to register it for this. It took us two days to figure this out. Why are they so terrible at everything they do? why?

A complete shallow mess of an action game with a myriad of conflicting design choices.

>enemy and boss interactions are neutered compared to previous entries (artes have less distinct features among them, the amount of hit states you can potentially inflict on an enemy has been lessened, with even shit like downing enemies locking them down to the ground, unable to be comboed, bosses will flat out ignore hitstun entirely, even humanoid ones)
>you only get a max of 12 artes (6 for ground and 6 for air) when most modernish games allowed for at least 16
>artes are now separated into two categories, ground and aerial, vastly limiting your combo potential and leading to more repetition
>if you want to keep an enemy in its break state, you’ll find yourself forced into doing aerial combos even if you probably won’t want to, making the aerial and ground play feel even more homogenized
>Boost Artes/Strikes all have a singular answer and don’t particularly open up for interesting combo routes and gameplay applications

In most action games (the big ones at least, not counting the shoveleware stuff) you can change the status of a normal enemy pretty easily. There are multiple types of hitstun, stun, aerial status, downed status, pinned on a wall etc. These go a long way in making combat against normal mooks enjoyable, since they open up a lot of possibilities. Hitting an enemy and having it suffer just damage and hitstun is the most basic interaction and it's fine, but if it's almost all you ever do, then it starts to become a problem.

Tales games usually do a pretty good job with this, giving you a ton of artes with unique properties (pushback, launchers, downing, picking enemies up from a downed state, spinning, dizzying, relocating player characters behind the enemies, inflicting varying amounts of hitstun, comboing into themselves for multiple hits, and more) that not only had useful functions when it came to engaging enemies but made it satisfying as a result due to the amount of different hit reactions you can inflict. In Arise, however, there’s just not as many outside of knockdown with Boost Attacks, in which you can’t even pick up enemies from since it locks them to the ground, launchers, and some status effects here and there, which makes the combat feel less dynamic as a result.

There's not really any room for real creativity or interesting situations arising from what you choose to do, there's a very limited number of possible game states in Arise with very limited answers. When an enemy actually is responding to being hit they only have a single type of standing hitstun since things like basic OTG mechanics are no longer present, and a stun/stagger state where all you can do is wail on them while they sit in place. Of course that's when they're not just plowing through attacks with super armor. There's no room for actual variety in combat since everything you do will lead to the exact same outcome. I can't consider swapping out animations to do the same thing to be actual depth or variety.

As for the conflicting design choices, Arise wants to have you doing fast, flashy combos (which are really brainless to perform since you'll never create an interesting situation that you have to adapt to and you'll never have to think about what artes will go well together. Even something as simple as accounting for your arte choices causing knockdown is out the window.) yet it's also unresponsive with unnecessarily lengthy animations that can't be canceled, and spams super armor on every enemy. Generally having most of your moves be long animation locks is for games with slow, methodical combat (e.g. Monster Hunter, Souls) but Arise tries to have its cake and eat it too, unable to decide between being a poor copy of stuff like DMC or a poor copy of stuff like MonHun.

Then you get to the boss encounters which invalidate half of the game mechanics. It's like you're playing a whole different game when you fight these guys. Their super armor is permanent meaning the pierce system doesn't matter, you can't do the combos they clearly tried to design game systems around, and to top it all off since you can't get them into hitstun you can't knock them into the air, which makes half of your assigned moveset useless on most of them.

I like having options in action games. I like having a lot of different ways I can approach the same thing from the core systems. I like being able to find a lot of creative applications for a given tool. That's depth. None of this is present in these encounters where there is a single optimal way to approach them. If it's a big monster boss you dodge very highly telegraphed attacks and hit the flashing glowing weak point until it dies. For humanoid bosses, it's just dodge into attack, use your limited selection artes that come out fast enough, to reset and do it again. I tried the highest difficulty available and it was still so fucking boring and mindless.

Then there’s the fact that they removed co-op, a standard feature across the series, just so they could make it like every other generic ARPG Bamco already puts out. It doesn't have the LMBS, fighting game influence, or fleshed out combat you used to be able to expect of a Tales game. It's a "Tales" game with none of the defining features of Tales. And while it threw out a lot of established, unique features of the series the ones it does retain suffered dramatic regressions. The strategy menu only affects healing behavior now and Overlimit is back to the way it was in GameCube Symphonia where you don't have control over it activating and can't see how close you are to entering OVL state either. Outside of the combat I thought it was still pretty mediocre. It's very frontloaded to give you a strong first impression but the world and dungeon design drop off rapidly. It's full of recycling, you'll never stop fighting recolors of the same handful of enemies from the first couple areas, and dungeons are full of copypasted rooms.

The characters aren’t anything to write home about either. Alphen was just the standard heroic main protag with amnesia. Yeah, he has a bit of a dorky side and is a weapons nerd but that’s just about it. He doesn’t really have any major flaws he has to overcome since the mystery and set-ups around him are external rather than internal. Now, I would be fine with this if they actually made him funny or entertaining to follow, like, Lloyd or Yuri but he has nothing about him.
Shionne was the standard, prickly tsundere love interest. While she has her understandable reasons for doing so, it doesn’t make her any more compelling to watch, even when she does eventually defrost and that’s not even getting into how on-the-nose her relationship with Alphen is.
Law is the dumbass of the group and isn’t even particularly endearing with it and just comes across as obnoxious more than anything. Plus the whole “if you kill her, you’ll be just like her” thing that pops up at one point during the story annoyed the hell out of me.

>party is on a quest to kill all the lords and have already killed 2
>Introduce a new lord who just killed over 100 civilians in front of the party
>party member who already wanted her dead due to her past crimes tries to kill her
>another party member literally runs to block the spell from hitting the villain
>NOOOOO YOU CAN'T KILL THE PERSON THAT KILLED YOUR PARENTS AND WIPED OUT YOUR ENTIRE CLAN IN THE PAST YOU'LL BE JUST LIKE HER
>villain does nothing while all of this is happening and escapes
>OK NOW LETS GO FIND HER AND KILL HER
>find her after slaughtering her henchmen
>previous party member has a change of heart
>IF I KILL YOU I'LL BE JUST LIKE YOU
>party lets her go AGAIN
>bigger and badder villain immediately appears to kill her anyway
Just a complete mess overall.

Rinwell is pretty normal besides the racist mage thing but there’s not much to her outside of her flirting/bickering with Law.
Kisara has nothing to her beyond being the team mom, fishing, her ass, and "muh dead brother."
Dohalim felt like he did have nice development throughout the game though, especially with how he learns to see how his rule has affected the people under him. I like him.
Hootle is the team pet but he’s adorable so I’ll give him a pass.
The villains are also all lackluster as well, being comprised of little more than different flavors of mustache-twirling assholes, though at least the Sephiroth wannabe is the most entertaining with how much he yearns for his salty runback. And don’t even get me fucking started with the "it was aliens all along" twist. And the godawful skits, where the game has you stop every 10 steps to have a cutscene where everyone just slightly rephrases the conversation they just had for the sixth time.

>Law: Golly fellas, I’m starting to think racism is bad.
>Alphen: Interesting idea…
>Rinwell: But I love racism. Also, I hate you (please love me)
>Shionne: I don’t need any of you.
>Dohalim: Culture sure is interesting.
>Kisara: Which one of you can I nurse?
>-Walk outside and trigger another cutscene-
>Alphen: Guys, maybe racism isn’t the way?
>Law: Hmm, maybe you are right.
>Rinwell: I HATE RENANS, YOU IDIOT (Oh god I love you)
>Shionne: You are all wasting my time.
>Dohalim: Mmm, culture.
>Kisara: Seriously you guys are making me want to mom so hard.
>-Walk a little way down the road-
>Law: I just had this weird idea like maybe different races shouldn’t hate each other
And let us not forget how this absolute gem of a game really tried to show you a bunch of slave owners who horrifically torture and kill the people underneath them and go "you know, they weren't all that bad, they were just trying to do what they think was right."
Overall, Tales of Arise is the epitome of style-over-substance and I legitimately do not understand the amount of praise it has received. Yes, the game looks extremely pretty and some of the animations are quite nice to look at, but the actual game is a slog, both mechanically and narratively.

A couple of years ago, they announced a rerelease of Hebereke/Ufouria and I played the original on an emulator to prepare for the official release and to promote it saying it would come out soon. Turns out it took way longer than expected. It’s weird as the Gimmick one came out a long while ago and we also got Trip World DX. It then just randomly got announced right as Hebereke 2 was going to release. What made this rerelease interesting was we were even getting the Japanese version and not the PAL version that was shown years ago. Now that it’s finally out, should you get this Enjoy Edition? It’s hard to say really.

Let’s get this out of the way now, this is a pretty similar release to the one Gimmick got so any opinions you had on that rerelease will probably be true here. Not much was added outside of the usual borders, scans of the boxes and cartridges and manuals, achievements, and a speedrun mode that you can post to the leaderboards. There’s no challenges, no hard achievements to earn, no interviews, no scans of just the artwork, not even a sound test. I think the reason it lacks a sound test is because you can pay additional money for the OST to listen to on Steam which is kind of stupid if you ask me. I’m not really sure about input lag or the sorts as I’m not one to notice that stuff, I heard Gimmick had some little issues with that so it might be the same here? Though this is a much easier and more relaxed game, you’ll never really cry foul for any input lag shenanigans.

Actually I guess there is one important feature that is the Special Snaps. You see, the original has always been Japan only, you needed a fan translation to ever read the dialogue in English. This release sort of adds English support but it’s kind of weird. Once you see a dialogue box, the game will let you view it there and translate the scene in English. You can even compare it to the PAL version called Ufouria the Saga. While these are cool, it might hurt the experience for some as you have to go to the menu and then look at the Special Snap to even read what the dialogue said. The translation can feel a bit iffy at times but it's not unreadable. There’s also a before and after scene that’s incorrectly placed for the Ufouria images. How this got past testing is beyond me and hopefully a patch can fix it. They also hilariously made an error where pressing the A button does “ChengeTitle” according to the bottom of the screen. Speaking of Ufouria, I wanna talk about something related to it.

Look, I don’t like Ufouria at all. I always hated the replacement sprites, especially Bop Louie. The dialogue has also lost a lot of the charm it once had and it’s why I always recommend the Japanese original. That said, I can understand why someone would prefer Ufouria even if I don't agree. Which is why I find it very disappointing that you just can’t play it here at all. It makes no sense to not have it here as it has scans, the comparisons in Special Snaps, and even a border. It’s even more of a shame as every release of Ufouria that was on Virtual Console in the past has been delisted meaning there’s still no easy way to play it outside of emulation. I don’t get why there’s no toggle to play that version. This makes me even more confused why they even bothered localizing the sequel under the PAL name if they were just not gonna do that here for this rerelease. It’s something I hope they can patch in but I don’t expect it to happen.

Should you buy Hebereke Enjoy Edition? Honestly, it’s hard to say. It doesn’t add too much to warrant playing it over emulation unless you just don’t feel morally okay with doing something like that and the release just isn’t perfect in general. They did make this one cheaper than the Gimmick rerelease with this being $9.99 and it’s a dollar off currently but this still could have been better. Hebereke is an expensive Famicom game unfortunately and the rerelease on PS1 has poor sound emulation so this is your best bet for an official release. It also might be a nice buy if you wanna compare it to Hebereke 2. Hebereke is still a wonderful game and I enjoyed my time replaying it here and got every achievement as well (even though it’s super easy to do). Stick with emulation if you think the price isn’t worth it but this is still a playable release of one of Sunsoft’s greatest games.

This score is for the JP version. The Working Designs version gets, like, a 3?

Psycho World (not Psychic like the ports) is a pretty impressive MSX2 game for 1988. If you’re familiar with the Game Gear or Master System ports then you’ll know what you’re in store for in this adventure. It has more worlds than the other versions. I can’t tell if the GG and SMS versions just combined the last few levels into one. There’s also a jungle level I don’t even remember from the other versions.

I always really loved how by the end of this game you feel so strong that nothing can stop you. Psycho World is a pretty easy game though there’s no checkpoints for levels. I think there’s a lot about the game that just feels interesting for a computer game. I love all of the platforming you have to do and all the cool abilities you have. Getting to upgrade all of your attacks is also cool, again adding to the strong factor of it. Even the music and graphics are nice and this probably has the best cutscenes of the three versions.

It’s a must play if you’re looking for MSX2 games to play and it even has a fan translation for the few cutscenes it has though it sadly doesn’t translate the text for two moments. If the awesome cover art didn’t convince you to try it then I hope my review will at least convince you to give it a go. I’m still not sure if this is my favorite version but I still really enjoy it regardless.