Man, I have some feelings about Phantasy Star Universe, a lot of them nebulous and uncomfortable. Everybody has that one video game where they in retrospect realize is really bad, but it doesn't stop you from pouring dozens if not hundreds of hours into it just because it evokes a certain pathos from you.

I got drafted into playing PSU because of a psychotic friend who has thousands of hours in the X360 version. I ended up putting a few hundred in myself. Then we watched the world end together as the servers came to a solemn close. Cue several years and one privately-run server later, PSU is back! But I'm well past the age of thinking this game is good, so I'm happy the private server exists. ...Alright fine, so I started playing it again.

And I don't know why I have, because again, this isn't a good game! It's not bad, but it's very very old. The combat is mindless button-mashing and corralling enemies into groups to slaughter them with. There's no dodge or block or dash button. Guns have an arbitrary ammo system that just makes them straight-up suck to use. Techniques and photon arts only leveled up the more you used them which lead to shitloads of grinding and "buff parties". The weapon-leveling system could fail and destroy your weapon permanently. There's just a lot of needlessly obtuse and mean-spirited systems present in the game. So why play it?

Phantasy Star Online remains one of my favorite games of all time, and this game feels like a step sideways for a Dreamcast-to-X360 game. Honestly I couldn't tell you which game plays better, which is either a testament to how well PSO's aged or a testament to how terrible PSU is. But the vibe remains similar. There is a cool dystopian future vibe to the entire game, with locales overrun with monsters and enemies, and bastions of civilization seeming sparse and empty due to it being relative to how many real-world players occupy each area. The music is still pretty solid (but still incapable of touching PSO) and the general art direction is still pretty evocative.

Phantasy Star Universe was meant to be a follow-up to Phantasy Star Online's enormous legacy, but it's a game that does pretty much everything just as well or worse than a game that came out 6 years ago. It's a sidegrade to a game that precedes it by a whole generation. With the Portable games improving on PSU's formula and PSO2 going in a separate direction that felt faithful to PSO, Phantasy Star Universe is just going to occupy an awkward part of Sega's history.

Anyways, I'll be on it if anybody needs me.

Pikmin 2 is a bit divisive among Pikmin games. The first Pikmin was a beautifully elegant experience about time and workload management. Pikmin 2 ditches the time management aspect of the game for dungeons and significantly more challenge. Pikmin in Pikmin 2 feel infinitely more disposable, which is good because a lot of your Pikmin are going to get mowed down, incinerated, eaten, drowned, electrocuted, and even good-ol'-fashioned shot by guns.

Pikmin 2 almost feels like a roguelike with procedurally-generated dungeons. It's packed to the brim with loot and hazards to micro-manage your Pikmin through. With infinite time to complete the game and a portion of the challenge that came with that in Pikmin 1 being eliminated, Pikmin 2 is just hard. Monster types are brutal with lots of them, and with more Pikmin, you have significantly more bandwidth to kill enemies with them--either by crushing them with Purples or just straight-up sacrificing White Pikmin for the glorious cause. The slew of monster types keeps the gameplay interesting and occasionally terrifying. And the coolest feature is the Piklopedia, a journal of sorts for every enemy and every piece of loot you grab in the game.

Pikmin 1 felt like an honest arcade experience, where a lot of it became about minmaxing your work days maneuvering through levels and harvesting loot to fix your ship; it wasn't a particularly long game for it, but it was replayable. Pikmin 2 feels more like a complete game. It's a harder game with arguably a major hook fans of the first game liked gone, but it's still a beautifully designed game.

Farming sims have come a long way since Friends of Mineral Town. But this (and by extension Back To Nature and Harvest Moon 64) was where The Good Shit started. It was never strictly about farming, but about participating in festivals, making friends, even settling down and getting married. FoMT even has a rivals system, where if you take too long to get married, every bachelorette will eventually marry someone else, in which case your only option is to wed God (joking not joking).

Friends of Mineral Town walked so other games in the series, let alone the genre, could run. It lacks a lot of the bells and whistles modern Harvest Moon games have, while other titles like Rune Factory or Stardew Valley augment the experience to a satisfying degree. But for some folks, they just want the good ol' back-to-basics of a solid portable Harvest Moon to see where things started to get good for the series.

All wives are perfect. Rick is an asshole.