watching every scene between Gabriel Knight and von Glower more like gaybriel knight am I right folks
Cool game! I like how this series works in real-world history (with heaping helpings of total nonsense, of course). It reminds me of playing games as a kid and finding out some obscure historical fact that's stuck with me for life and will come up when watching The Chase or something. How do I know who invented the Kongming Lantern, mum? Heh...let me tell you about a little game called Dynasty Warriors...

Geppy-X is not a particularly good shmup. For most of the game it's too easy, and when it's not too easy it's just throwing unforeseeable gotchas at you - I guess the devs considered this fair game since you don't die in one hit, but it doesn't make for particularly engaging design. There's never really any point where you come out of a level feeling like the Lord of the Gamers for conquering a 100mph slice of hell, because that level simply doesn't exist in this game.
The good thing is that all this mediocre gameplay is couched in the most earnest We Love Goofy Giant Robots presentation you could ever want. You want an animated OP and ED every level? You got 'em. Eyecatch after the midboss? Done. Live-action ads for big chunky Geppy toys between those eyecatches? They're right there, go look. You want Zakus to shoot at? They're in there. You want one red Zaku that moves faster? Present and accounted for. Okay, logical conclusion, you just want a Char clone? You got one. You want him voiced by Char? Fine! Take it!
Sure, this is all just "hey, that's thing! I recognise thing!" stuff. Well, sometimes I like recognising thing, especially when thing is cool. Are there a million better PS1 shmups you could play instead? Undoubtedly. Do any of those have four discs worth of Obari-animated cutscenes and vocal tracks from the likes of Isao Sasaki, Akira Kushida and MIO? Fuck no they don't! put_geppy_in_srw!

Hard to view this as anything but a Granfalloon-sized downgrade from Symphony of the Night. The somewhat rigid controls and fixed camera makes for real bad platforming, and Konami presumably recognised this because there's barely any actually necessary platforming sections - in a Castlevania! A small mercy I guess, but it also has the effect of compounding the seriously boring level design - with little vertical movement around the map you end up just running through a bunch of flat, samey corridors. And you're going to be running through them all multiple times, too, because this game has backtracking up the wazoo. Even the runup to the final boss is all backtracking!
It's a real shame, because I think the combat isn't bad at all once you've unlocked some more moves like the sidestep dodging. Could have used a manual lock-on but it still feels pretty snappy. You pretty much never have to fight a non-boss enemy unless they're blocking a door, though, so yeah. Dull, dull game. Waste of great box art. I do think it's very funny that they make Michael McConnohie say "it's a whip...made with Alchemy...", though.

Run around on top of a bunch of Onimusha transitional backgrounds, the weird boundaries and the camera angle combining to make it impossible to tell if you're actually standing next to an enemy until you visibly connect with a swing. The Simple Series, baby!!
I picked the character that was very obviously supposed to be Tetsuya Watari (good) and discovered that Square, Square, X, X will kill pretty much everything in the game no fuss. You can also use this to meaty every boss to death, including the final one, who did not hit me once. The Simple Series, baby!!!

Pretty fun Ninja Gaiden-alike (though nowhere near as challenging/infuriating) in the first half and then things switch up to a substandard Metroidvania for what's going to feel like the majority of the game. Total slog. It's cool how it switches over to a 16-bit tribute, it looks great, obviously a lot of work went in, but if it had done that and remained a platformer I'd have liked it a whole lot more. Shame!
The music is decent but I feel like with a lot of this throwback stuff it never manages to match the energy of the games it's trying to ape. There's nothing in here that's as driving and gets you pumped up as NG1's 4-2 theme, for instance. I don't know why it is - music composed without console limitations sounding inherently different? Beats me. I blame the Scott Pilgrim game, personally. Anyway the first half of The Messenger is pretty good!

Probably has the blandest level design out of the games in the series that I've played so far - which is really saying something - but if you're playing "properly" and constantly pinballing off enemies and making the bare minimum acquaintance with the floor you'll probably be having too much fun to really notice. Movement feels great!
Glad that they streamlined what they did - the crafting system in the previous games felt pretty superfluous, and this game having you simply buy upgrades works a lot better. Also mid-play dialogue boxes no longer obscure half the screen and what EX weapon is what is clearly labelled in the menu, so well done Inti!
It's short and sweet. The idea of a spinoff from a previous game's Bad Ending is an interesting one even if I couldn't give much of a toss for the actual story in these. Also I feel like I'm risking prison any time I look at 99% of the female characters in the series - wish they'd rein that in a bit, maybe stop it entirely. But yeah it's pretty fun!

I like this game a whole lot - got the platinum in the first week of release, have gone back to it pretty regularly, and I'm having a lot of fun trying to nail all the goals they added with their most recent update. Reminds me of God Hand in the sense that when you're doing everything right and operating on the power of Ultra Instinct it's extremely hard to imagine anything more satisfying. However all of this is ruined because one of the trophies is called "The 36th Chamber of Kung Fu", and is awarded for performing every type of takedown in the game, which to me implies a level of mastery. The 36th Chamber was not for masters, it was for complete laypeople not part of the temple to begin their training. Watch the movie!!