Eleventh GOTW finished for 2022. Started out thinking I was going to hate this game. The controls and attacks were a bit confusing, and it just didn't click. Came back to it after a bit, and burned through the whole game in a tidy 1.5 hours. You play as a sorceress who shoots lightning, and you have a small selection of beast companions with different abilities that accompany you. The game is pretty hard, but the upgrades to both you and your beasties help it feel a little more fair. The platforming sometimes felt a bit clunky, but it's an older Genesis game. Didn't hate it by the end.

Oh yeah, and Yoshimi Kanda of Gainax fame was the Game Designer.

Oh boy, this game. While this has been the shortest SMT I've played to date - less than half the length of SMT and SMT II - it's also been the most frustrating. The guardian system isn't necessary for your primary character (I made it through to the final boss without one at all) and VITAL to your partner since they have no magic without one. The difficulty spikes come fast and hard, and in a game that bases your stats and skills on how long you go without dying to get a more powerful guardian that can be a brutal death spiral. It had some neat ideas, but paired them with some of the most purposefully frustrating dungeon design (looking at you, Sloth Domain...) and a mouth-frothingly annoying final boss. Might potentially come back to this one for the Akira route, but not for a long, long time.

Third GOTM finished for July 2022. Mixed emotions on this one. The PS4 remaster looks gorgeous, but it still feels like a PS1 game in a lot of the controls. The PS4 version is more difficult across the board (which I didn't know until after I looked up why I kept getting my ass handed to me), and the game felt like a beautiful, frustrating mess at the beginning. Once I got the broadsword the game opened up quite a bit, but it was a little frustrating again at the end. Ultimately glad to have it off the backlog, but coming in with no nostalgia for this game made the flaws stand out that much more.

Twelfth GOTW finished for 2022. Really had a good time with this game! Only took about an hour or so, but was quite challenging at the later levels. You need to make rows of animals, monsters, and icons horizontally, diagonally, or vertically in order to clear a constantly filing space on the screen. If the space completely fills, it's game over. After a set amount of time, a timer countdown starts and you have that amount of time to clear as many on-screen items as you can for points, and then you're on to the next level. It can feel a little dull, as you're basically just sorting with no background music or anything playing. However, the further along you get the more frantically you are trying to clear these icons before they fill the space, so you don't really have the time to notice since you're constantly moving to clear these kreatures.

What a great game! Maybe it was coming from the previous SNES SMTs that made this feel like a breath of fresh air, but I had a blast playing this game. I played the PSP version with PS1 music overlay, and the soundtrack on this game is absolutely killer. The gameplay was enjoyable, the story was decent, and the art style aged pretty well. Some of the level spikes can be a surprise at the beginning of new dungeons, but so many welcome new changes made the gameplay feel good most of the time. The last two dungeons are quite long, and the encounter rate is pretty high throughout, but still enjoyed my time with this one.