Pepper Grinder is a solid game where movement is the main focus, in particular mainly involving the player use a drill that can then go through dirt and whatnot and charge out of them. This makes for a very quick and smooth rush through most of the levels, and it often coupled with additional gimmicks such as material that breaks as you drill through it.

The game is pretty short which might disappoint some, but I found it to be nice regardless. There's a few parts that can be frustrating, particularly an elevator segment in the next to last stags, but besides these everything else feels great to play. There are also bosses to fight, one at the end of each world, they're cool as well and rely on you charging out of dirt beneath them to attack. Lastly, I'll of course mention that the artwork and music are great and solidly match the gameplay.

The Heroes of Light gather as Square begins its maiden voyage into the ever popular Final Fantasy series, and this certainly makes sure it won't be the last fantasy either. Setting the stage for all the games to come this honestly holds up mostly well and I would definitely recommend trying it if you want to experience the series origins, or just want a solid RPG to play.

There is honestly a decent amount of stuff going on the in-game, such as 3 different vehicles you can obtain, weapons that can also have spell effects, different classes that can use different magic or equipment, it's pretty fun to see how much depth there was in just the first game. Of course it does lack something pretty crucial compared to modern ones, and that's the lack of descriptions for items and equipments. This can make building your characters a bit hard if you don't look at a chart explaining stats on stuff, which I'd probably recommend doing. Aside from this, there isn't really any complaints I have. The difficulty felt very fair and aside from one enemy attack having a chance to instakill characters it was easier than I expected from a game of this time.

Now that I've finally played this, I look forward to trying all the other Final Fantasies I've yet to. There's quite a lot, and I would recommend considering trying this one out amongst them.

Gradius is among the first shmups I've played and the first horizontal one as well, and for the most part it was pretty fun. The ability to choose different upgrades for your ship is pretty neat, though admittedly after a while you're just sticking to the same strategy for picking them. I think this system sadly also causes a big issue with the game, whenever you die you lose all your upgrades, and past the first stage it really just feels insanely difficult to build them back up. To this end, I basically played until I lost my first life and then considered the run over there.

The levels themselves are mostly susceptible to learning, but a few can be quite troublesome especially without a fully upgraded ship. Stage Three with the Easter Island heads feels pretty unreasonable without an option or two to help deal with the projectiles they shoot, and the final stage to this day I cannot beat. Everything else I think makes for a good starting point for Shmup beginners since it certainly was suitable for myself.

Unfortunately since I don't think I have the skill or will to beat every stage in one go yet, I'll mark this as completed for now. I can definitely see myself coming back to it with more experience in the future though, because it was pretty fun. If interested, my hi score is 262100.