A fantastic continuation of the first 2 Dragon Quest games with how it not only expands into new ideas, but refines the pre-existing ones into something far more compelling, culminating in an experience that feels far more grandiose and finely tuned. The sense of player hostility that the first 2 games revelled in remains a constant here but is shifted in such a way to make it fit the narrative of DQ3 more cleanly. Structural changes with how the player progresses further contribute to the game feeling far bigger and more richly detailed, demonstrating more than just escalating difficulty as a means of engaging the player. Rather than a world wrought with hopelessness that has already accepted its fate, Dragon Quest 3 revolves around the birth of a legend and their rise to this status, with a level of power fitting of being perceived as such.

The game still remains quite challenging, but the player is also provided with enough tools to comfortably overcome all opposition with relative ease, as long as they know what they’re doing, both due to the mechanics feeling more evenly balanced to make turns where the enemy is capable of party wiping far more infrequent, but also by making your entire party actually have the capabilities of effectively helping out in a fight. Dragon Quest 2’s party was comprised entirely of characters that would rigidly conform to their roles without any flexibility to accommodate to situations that deviated from their main skillset, which led to a dynamic that often would only allow one character at a time to meaningfully contribute to a situation, and this rigidity was the most transformative element of the game that was altered to make Dragon Quest 3 feel more balanced in the player’s favour. The way that the increased party flexibility is limited is what makes the game especially intriguing however, as hitting the point where this all becomes relevant takes time and careful planning. At their base level, classes still largely fit into specific niches, but have been given tools to allow them to contribute to a wider variety of obstacles, with healers having enough physical attack to let them still deal serviceable damage in the early game, and wizards having access to certain buffing spells, so even if you’re up against something that resists magic, they can make your attackers stronger instead of being dead weight.

This alone is already enough to make the moment-to-moment decision making feel more dynamic, but it’s the ability to change classes later on that really elevates this decision making process by giving the player a lot of agency in how they want to approach immediate situations while also planning for the future. The system essentially lets you change character classes while allowing that character to retain traits of what they previously were, leading to situations such as warriors that are able to cast spells, or healers that have more bulk to them than average. This mainly is used to bring more versatility to a team while still allowing them to be total powerhouses in other areas, and while not strictly necessary, it makes the 2nd half of the game considerably easier when you’ve got your army of physical attackers also blasting your enemies with huge group magic damage or keeping everyone topped up on HP, feeling like you’ve become a truly formidable party by the end, rather than perpetually feeling on the brink of death. I don’t really prefer one approach over the other in this case, since both are handled so well, but it’s an interesting difference to note.

The ability to become so much more inherently powerful also does wonders for the game’s pacing, as while there is still some degree of grinding (it’s an NES RPG, so of course there would be), it’s infrequent enough that it won’t completely halt the pacing outside of a few key moments that warranted things being more challenging to truly feel climactic enough. The other aspect of the game that makes everything feel as if it’s moving along at a more typical pace is how the storytelling no longer solely revolves around the heroes trying to track down a single antagonist with everything else being there to propel this one goal forward. A lot of towns have their own plotlines that you have to become involved in now, and while most of them result in you gaining another key item to continue pursuing Baramos, the main villain of the game, the plotlines themselves often have little to do with him beyond the towns potentially feeling threatened about the prospect of being destroyed. The world feels far more richly detailed as a result of this decision, being more akin to actual towns in a world rather than just a tool for the player to use and pass through in their singular quest. The game does a far better job of properly orienting the player in the world as well, not just with Zoom now actually letting you to choose where you warp, cutting down on a lot of tedious backtracking, but more regularly pointing you in directions you could potentially go, dodging the aimlessness of DQ2 by giving you a lot of direction. The aforementioned changes in how different locations have been written also make the orb hunt a far more enjoyable process than it could’ve been, especially since most of them are either tied to their own little narratives, or feel climactic to grab in their own right, making them feel more rewarding to pick up instead of just thinking “yeah that was just on the ground, ok next one.”

I can see why Dragon Quest 3 is often considered to be the first great game in the series, as for as much as I appreciate the charming simplicity of the first game, this takes a lot of the same framework and expands upon it in ways that make it feel utterly massive for the system. The entire final act is also fantastic in how it’s able to recontextualise a lot of pre-existing elements in ways that make it feel entirely new, yet familiar. Playing the NES of this is what truly got me to appreciate just how cool this game was for its time, even though I already thoroughly enjoyed it beforehand, and while the SNES version is definitely still the one I’d return to if I decided to play this again in the future, there’s something incredibly cool about seeing this game in its roughest, most unforgiving form as well.

The unflinching hostility of this game became a more prominent aspect of the experience on this 2nd playthrough that I did on the NES version instead of the SNES one. Dragon Quest 2 is already somewhat notorious for being the most unforgiving game in the series, but the way that this is handled is interesting to give some deeper consideration to. The original Dragon Quest game presented a harsh world that could coldly kill you in mere seconds if you were unprepared, forcing you to carefully make your way through, with each new area being a risk that you could only overcome if you had sufficiently powered up enough. While Dragon Quest 2 is similar to this, it has the one key difference of often feeling as if it doesn’t even want the player to succeed, instead being content with repeatedly beating you to death no matter what you’re doing.

The game leans into this difficulty to effectively reinforce its tone, with its sense of hopelessness pervading each town you visit. The threat against the world feels so much scarier without the underlying optimism and belief that the legendary hero will be able to save the world, everyone is despondent, there are Kings that have hidden themselves away from the shame of being unable to do anything to stand up to Hargon, and any attempt at stopping the evil priest’s reign seem so out of reach. I don’t blame everyone for feeling so hopeless in the face of these threats either, because there’s very little working in favour of the player. While the combat system evolving to give the player a party and have battles move away from pure 1 on 1 encounters would seemingly make things easier, giving way to a wider range of strategies to employ and giving the enemies multiple targets to make it harder for the stunlocking nonsense of DQ1 to happen, the encounters are just, so much scarier for the most part. While your party caps out at 3 members, there can be up to 5 dangerous enemies that jump you at once, usually having spells that will damage your entire party, forcing you to divert a lot of your attack power into healing everyone back up before you can strike again. Adding to the problem is that your other party members completely suck, being extremely frail and mostly specialising in magic in a game that makes most spells entirely obsolete by the endgame. It hits a point where the other 2 members do such little damage that the optimal strategy is genuinely to just attack with your main character, and make the other 2 people block every turn unless they outright are required to cast a spell.

This reaches its peak in the last stretch of the game, where every fibre of the experience’s existence is pushing back against you, containing multiple excruciating dungeons in conjunction with enemies that genuinely just feel unfair, having capabilities that can decide to completely wipe you out even when you’re of extremely high levels, doing things such as putting your entire party to sleep, or having constant critical hits that bypass any defence that you have. This is also my favourite portion of the game however, and the one that works best for the game’s atmosphere, because of course the entire world is feeling hopeless to stop Hargon when this is the resistance he presents when you’re trying to reach him, it’s complete justification for why everyone is so terrified here, because it’s brutal in a way that nothing else in the game even comes close to touching. Everything from the Cave to Rhone to the end is a constant uphill battle that keeps escalating even when you swear that it surely has reached its peak by now, every fight is a close one where death is just one unlucky turn away, and your only safehaven leaves you entirely isolated at the top of a snowy mountain with your only quick way back down being one-way, effectively stranding you in this inhospitable wasteland unless you’re willing to brave the horrors of the cave once again, all culminating in a constant feeling of tension as you’re trying to get to the final castle time and time again, only to be met with a string of 5 bosses that each feel insurmountable on their own.

While the game’s final act spectacularly hits its target to make all the buildup worth it in some weird, twisted way, a large swathe of the rest makes the game as a whole feel pretty insufferable. While the escalating enemy difficulty that constantly pulls out some pretty cheap tricks plays nicely into the world being a more hostile place than ever, it completely kills the pacing of the game when you’re more often grinding than actually exploring in any serious capacity. The world is so big, but there’s no way to properly orient yourself most of the time, leading to situations where sometimes the next step you need to take is locating another town that you’ve barely heard anything about, and this is where the line between interesting player hostility and hostility that negatively impacts the experience comes in. While it’s true that the spirit of adventure can be found in aimless exploration of an unknown land, it feels a bit too obtuse here, there are clear places which you need to go, but you’re expected to get there just by wandering the open seas which feel too big and landmasses which feel hard to fully distinguish, combined with the middle portion of the game flatlining difficulty to the point where almost nothing feels like it can get in your way, further contributing to the confusing boredom. The talisman hunting isn’t great partially because of this, but also because of how most of them are hidden in extremely uninteresting locations that makes collecting them all feel like a huge anticlimax.

Dragon Quest 2 has some interesting ideas and is sometimes able to craft a very compelling atmosphere, but it’s also unfortunately a slog to get through that didn’t quite grasp how to effectively utilise its far greater scope in a way that didn’t feel cumbersome. It’s an ambitious title, but not one that works for me a lot of the time due to how much of it felt as aimless as it did. The NES version especially has these issues due to how you get much fewer resources to work with, along with no map or a way to warp to anywhere other than your last save point, making everything feel that much slower. Nonetheless was still happy to replay this and gain a deeper appreciation for it even if I still don’t really like playing it though, especially since I now have a greater point of reference to what it originally was like.

A genuinely magical game that’s kept me thinking about it and will continue having this grip on me for quite some time. Games that utilise the medium to such an extent that their identity hinges on the interactive element being present are some of the most fun ones to let sit with you, and this is one of my favourite instances of it. Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the greatest mystery games I’ve played and a lot of this is owed to the structure of the game, forgoing crafting a mystery specifically designed to surprise the player with its various twists and instead laying it all out bare and forcing you to pick everything apart to fully grasp the finer details of things. The mystery and story themselves are not the important aspects here, it’s just trying to immerse you into the role of a detective without any handholding beyond the bare essentials, and it does so perfectly.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery/puzzle game that revolves around incomplete information and assumption, often leaving little to no definitive evidence and forcing you to jump all around to place with increasingly tenuous lines of logic as you feel yourself going insane. It was quite funny taking a step back after combing through a few scenes in excruciating detail and just thinking “wow, this is deranged” but that’s just how the game is. The player is likely to find all of the story beats of the game rather early on without knowing the fates of the vast majority of the cast, and then the rest of the game boils down to going between the relevant scenes in the game to try and figure out how to deduce some of them, which would seem like an experience that would feel stagnant very quickly, but is saved due to the sense of progression that will take place despite it all just looking like cleanup at first. The progression gates in this game are entirely dependent on and driven by the player, hinging on multiple big realisations on how they need to approach their investigations. This culminates in a deeply rewarding loop of thinking that you’ve hit the logical endpoint of what you achieve on your own, before realising a new detail that leads you down a new line of logic to discover someone, and then applying this newfound understanding of how to figure something out to other characters. A contributing factor to how this is so successful is due to the plethora of approaches that you’re expected to work out, sometimes really being as simple but uncertain feeling as “this guy hangs around this other guy a lot, they’re probably in the same field”.

The way that your answers are confirmed is a clever way of limiting the ability to brute force a lot of puzzle answers as well, since you’ve only got confirmation on whether you’re correct or not once you have 3 correct answers simultaneously written down. While some amount of guesswork was an expected element of this game’s design, by structuring it like this, players are still forced to confidently deduce 2 other people before they can start taking real shots in the dark with incomplete assumptions, solving a problem I’ve seen time and time again in deduction games where people will often resort to total guesswork the moment they’re met with some confusion and uncertainty. The presentation goes a long way in tying everything together as well, being visually striking while having the effect of being simple enough to make the important details easier to pinpoint while simultaneously obscuring everything just enough to invite uncertainty into every observation. I adore whenever a game can keep me thinking for so long after I’m done with it, and I love it even more when it does so through something as esoteric as it is here. Total masterpiece, something new to add to my list of favourites.

Knack is a bit of a weird game to me. On paper it’s something that genuinely feels like it attempts to accomplish nothing noteworthy in the slightest, with so many ideas present here being staggeringly mediocre and seemingly trying to culminate in the most average game ever, acting as a pseudo-tech demo that manages to not even accomplish that much to any effective degree. What truly gets me about Knack is how all of these ideas that were already as insignificant as they were, are consistently botched and made to feel bad across the board, transforming mediocrity into something that feels actively bad to play.

The content within this game feels skeletal, largely lacking in any memorable setpieces in favour of guiding the player through repetitive corridors of enemies, with the progression between each level feeling inconsequential and stagnant, and functionality rarely shifting beyond occasional types of Knack that make some small attempt at shaking things up. Unfortunately, even the most gimmicky parts of the game still feel near functionally identical and mostly boil down to different ways of taking damage over time, rather than anything that would potentially invite a playstyle that differs in any major way. Knack is also a 3D brawler/platformer that strives to dumb down both sides of its gameplay loop to painfully simple levels. Platforming is almost a non-entity, with most platforming that you’re doing being more akin to traversing battle arenas with an element a slight verticality as opposed to full fledged platforming challenges, but the combat is so basic that these slightly varied arenas aren’t enough to meaningfully change much. Knack’s moveset being as basic as it is makes it so encounters cannot have much variety to them due to how limited the player’s capabilities are, leading to a lot of visually distinct, but mechanically samey enemies that are sent at you.

Playing Knack feels like white noise that abruptly throws a high-pitched, ear-piercing noise at you from time to time, with its monotony only being broken up by cheap shots that you often can’t even see because big Knack takes up a third of the screen. Almost everything killing you in one hit doesn’t play nicely into how sluggish you’ll often feel, with a lot of situations that feel impossible to react to without dying a lot to memorise the exact route you need to take to avoid getting hit, which is an element of friction that I’d find compelling if the systems in play weren’t quite so braindead. The fact that something as simple as an actual combo meter is relegated to an unlockable as opposed to just being there is a testament to how shoehorned in the collectibles feel in general as well. For the most part, all that these will unlock for you are features that feel like they should have been part of your base kit from the beginning instead of a reward for finding secrets, especially since you’ll likely not get more than a couple of full gadget sets to begin with since the collectibles you get from hidden areas are randomised. The more you think about Knack, the worse it gets. A tech demo that was meant to showcase the power of the PS4, yet only takes any advantage of this with Knack himself, as every other character model looks somewhat uncanny and ugly, and cutscenes making me think of a Clash of Clans ad more than an actual game, being one of many bad elements to be found in a game that barely feels like it’s trying to do anything most of the time. Worse than I expected it to be, don’t play Knack.

Made a potentially ill-conceived choice that I’d go and play through all the Kingdom Hearts games, this time including the ones that I previously skipped out on for one reason or another, and while KH1 ended up being a game that became a masterpiece in my mind, playing Re:Chain of Memories did not leave me with similar feelings. To put it simply, this game is deranged, and also a total mess, taking the framework of a GBA game with more similarities to a beat ‘em up than anything else, and trying to implement the core card-based mechanics of the game into KH1’s combat engine. This leads to the game in a constant state of feeling entirely at odds with itself, trying to mash two systems that had vastly different dynamics associated with them into one package at the cost of both sides of this coin being severely hampered. Fortunately, despite how awkward everything is, there are some interesting ideas to go alongside all the quirks, both narratively and in the combat itself, that serve to occasionally make this a weird, but interesting game, rather than consistently being a bore.

At its core, I’m very much not a fan of the card system and its implementation in either of the campaigns here. To have an attack be successful, you need to use a card with a higher number than your enemy, and then they need to not respond with a higher number than yours, otherwise your attack will be rendered ineffective. While the deckbuilding element is meant to encourage a more strategic approach to combat, due to the way most enemies function, this ultimately contributes to a system that makes standard KH1 combat feel worse and more annoying in most cases. Encountering wave after wave of heartless as you make your way through the labyrinths quickly becomes tedious, with the constant chance of enemies breaking your attack and wasting your time as a result being a slight, but increasingly frustrating thing to encounter with each fight. Triangle spamming to use sleights will resolve some of this issue, by almost always leaving you with a number high enough that enemies can never break through since it’s a combination of 3 card values and basic enemies don’t have the 0 cards that guarantee a card break. However, this doesn’t get around the fact that aerial combat is awful regardless, with a lot of special attacks being unable to hit airborne enemies. This causes Re:Chain of memories to have the worst aerial combat in the series bar none due to how drastically your options get reduced, further contributing to the fodder heartless fights being a slog to get through.

The boss fights fix certain problems with this setup but introduce and highlight their own set of issues. The vast majority of the bosses have access to 0 cards, letting them break through your attack regardless of how strong it is, which forces the player to more carefully pick and choose their moments so they don’t waster their strongest attacks. Any humanoid boss also has access to their own set of sleights, further increasing the chance of your attacks being interrupted, along with introducing some extremely devastating attacks. The issues with this framework surface in 2 main ways, both being equally annoying. Since the player is able to nullify enemy attacks with the right cards, a lot of attacks in the game straight up are not designed with the idea of being able to dodge them in mind. This detracts from the sense of variety that a lot of bosses could have, since learning patterns and dodging is not something that ever happens really, it’s just that you need to nullify the attack to stop it from happening in the first place, leading to most bosses being dealt with in the exact same way. This issue is compounded with the extremely binary outcome of most of these fights, either you steamroll them and don’t let them ever hit you, or you get demolished without the slightest modicum of hope. If you build your deck to just have a bunch of powerful sleights, it’s extremely easy to stunlock the bosses despite the mechanics that were put in place specifically to try preventing this, and it’s mainly caused by there being no revenge values of any sort, so there’s no way for them to retaliate if you keep spamming them with attacks that momentarily stun them. The one exception to this that I found is the final boss, which is honestly really good and is one of the only times that I felt like the card system was being used to its full potential.

The one positive about this is that it’s honestly pretty fun to break the game with an overpowered deck, and there are a lot of way to do this, whether it’s with sonic blade, lethal frame, ars arcanum, or even level 3 magic spells, there’ll never be a shortage of different ways to obliterate the game balance to suit any given situation, and it’s satisfying to build around facilitating such situations, just an unfortunate fact that it comes at the cost of doing almost anything else throughout the game. Riku’s story tackles a lot of my complaints by making the player use prebuilt decks and not giving them access to a bunch of overpowered abilities that are easy to trigger, but then it goes and introduces its own flaws instead. Bosses can no longer be utterly steamrolled in the same braindead manner, but the duel mechanics which let you use a strong attack if you use the same value card as an enemy gives you an almost equally easy and dominant strategy. The fights still end up being a bit trickier and more even, but the core issue of things being built around nullifying attacks instead of learning how to properly deal with them is still present, and the regular heartless fights are made even more tedious by not being given options to destroy everything on screen within a couple of seconds, making the journey a massive grind.

Overall, Chain of Memories is just an utter mess of a game that will either be deeply frustrating, or comically easy without anything in between, which I think is a shame, since in theory, a lot of these mechanics could be really interesting, bizarre, but interesting, it’s just unfortunate that the game almost never utilises them in a manner to bring anything interesting out of it. I still don’t really dislike the game either though, the narrative is cool enough and I got enough enjoyment out of figuring out a bunch of different ways to break stuff, but it just goes on forever with so much padding in between the cool stuff. A fascinating experiment, but not much more for me, I don’t see myself wanting to return to this one again.

This was one of THE games of my childhood so I was excited to get back around to it and see if I still felt like it held up to an extent when returning to it, and I was pretty amazed with how much of this game feels almost as if it was tailor made to feel like the biggest, most exciting thing ever to a kid. Looking at it now, there’s definitely quite a bit that doesn’t really work too well, and it feels more like a typical 5th gen platformer than something that is uniquely Spyro, but even so, I can see why I was obsessed with this game when I was younger, and it was still quite fun to me this time, especially since I realised that I remembered almost nothing about it whatsoever.

The way that this game mainly stands out to me is with how it utilises negative space in its stages, often having these large, open unreachable spaces that stretch over the horizon, not really having much in them, but providing a sense of scale and sparseness to each world. This trait is consistently one of the most enchanting things to me in a 3D platformer when handled correctly, and it’s done marvellously here, with a lot of the biggest points of spectacle in the stages being these moments where walking through the claustrophobic corridors and gauntlets leads you to a big, open area, often with level boundaries that don’t do much to visually cover up the emptiness behind them, which in turn evokes a similar atmosphere to Stone Hill from Spyro 1, just in far more locations. What really sells the game’s visuals to me is how it does all this while maintaining a sense of lushness and vibrancy to even the most hostile of locations, making places like the swamp still look strangely warm and inviting.

Switching up the structure of the game from self-contained levels to larger, interconnected zones is another way that the game felt so massive to me as a kid, with the relatively seamless transitions making those sudden changes in scenery feel all the more impactful. A more open approach to level design felt like the natural progression of the series as a whole as well thanks to how Spyro’s mobility options have always differed to a typical 3D platformer, and it’s handled rather well here purely in terms of how each areas feels to exist in. Unfortunately, it becomes clear very quickly that outside of the atmosphere, A Hero’s Tail doesn’t really know how to fully utilise the tools at its disposal and dumbs things down a lot in places that could have been where the game shone the brightest. The way collectibles are hidden is the biggest way this becomes so apparent, with the majority of them being more or less directly in sight of the player and just requiring very short, easy platforming challenges to reach them. It rarely feels as if you’re actively exploring the levels as a result, instead doing something more akin to being led down a bunch of paths that are very clearly signposted for your convenience, feeling closer to a theme park attraction than a proper platforming stage in places. This makes the actual exploration of the stages feel very barebones, something that is only saved due to how beautiful they all are and the fact that the occasional instances of genuinely well-hidden stuff feel like fantastic curveballs, regardless of how few and far between they may be.

Unfortunately, I also don’t quite love how certain aspects of Spyro’s controls feel in this game, especially with how jumping works. You have a double jump in this, but it’ll only trigger before and at the exact moment where you hit the peak in your jump, and afterwards will be a glide instead. This feels really rough in the more technical platforming sections, since the typical strategy of waiting a bit longer before jumping again so you can extend the distance will just kill you here instead, setting things up in such a way that you always feel like you’re jumping a bit too early, even if you still get to where you need to. None of Spyro’s moves flow into one another smoothly enough to make the moment to moment experience feel quite annoying because of it. Hitboxes also come across as very iffy sometimes, particularly whenever there’s something you need to pole spin across, as it’s a common occurrence for you to phase through these if you didn’t hit the exact trigger point, often leading to death. Boss fights are consistently a low point of the game as well, consisting of a lot of waiting in between attack cycles for the one moment where you can hit them, often with attacks worked in that don’t feel designed with consistent dodging in mind, leading to some real cheap shots that are irritating every time, even if they rarely lead to an outright death.

While the Spyro gameplay is largely a very pleasant ride, despite its simplicity and problems (it’s a kids game and a good one at that, it’s allowed to be simple), my praise for almost everything outside of Spyro’s portion of the game runs far thinner. Rather than taking the approach of Spyro 2, 3 and even Enter the Dragonfly to a lesser extent, where there was a constant bombardment of weird game modes that would only appear once or twice and make each place stand out simply due to how many different ideas could be packed into each twist and turn, a Hero’s Tail opts to largely contain it to 5 different additional game modes that all make an appearance in each world instead. To give some credit to this concept, a lot of this adds a greater sense of liveliness to the world, with Sgt Byrd’s speedways, Sparx’s shooter sections and Blink’s underground expeditions showcasing different facets of the world, making the skies, the underground and even small gaps within the walls feel populated. Unfortunately, most of these additional gameplay sections play very poorly and break up the pacing in a truly horrible way.

The Sgt Byrd sections are the best parts of the game’s side content, acting as the speedway sections from the previous games, just with a couple of key twists that switch things up, both for better and for worse. The jetpack controls feels a bit different to how Spyro would fly in the past games, but ends up working out nicely, making things feel quick and weighty, with the ability to use fuel to boost further contributing to this. The ability to fire off your homing rocket launchers and have them come into contact with something as long as they’re vaguely on screen is an aspect I’m less appreciative of, as it leads to the player having to think less about routing and how to efficiently grab everything. None of these speedways took more than one or two attempts each and they’d always feel like a bit of a blur, where I’d just fly around and hit stuff aimlessly until I’d eventually win. The most difficult parts of each of these was just finding those last one or two objectives that had been tucked away somewhere, rather than having to understand the stage as a whole. Despite my issues, these end up being quite fun regardless, it’s just that they miss out on a lot of smaller details that made these always feel so exciting in the original trilogy.

In contrast to this, the other 4 main modes all kinda suck for the most part. The turret sections of each world just scream “this was a 5th gen platformer so we needed a few of these”, and feel like a mindless distraction, they feel gimmicky, and unlike the skateboard sections in Year of the Dragon, do not have enough time put into them to feel like a fun distraction, just an obligation and a hollow attempt at spicing up gameplay. The Sparx sections similarly feel utterly skeletal in how little is going on here, just being a bland rail shooter, with the caveat being that he takes up so much of the screen that properly navigating between threats is an obnoxious endeavour. The ball sections start off well enough, with the introductory one being a fun obstacle course with a bit of exploration and moments where the level design gets a bit playful with the physics, but the other 2 appearances of this in the game are far more on rails, either being a janky marble run section that has a tendency to throw you into bottomless pits constantly, or a minecart section with obstacles that come out of nowhere. The Blink the mole sections are where the game is at its worst however. These sections are entirely built around being stealthy, and cycle-based platforming, with each cycle being agonisingly slow to the point where each of these 4 stages will make you spend at least half of the time either waiting for an obvious opportunity to proceed, or slowly traversing via walls, ceilings or by standing on glacial moving platforms. Adding insult to injury is the way that all of these minigames require you to go through them twice if you want all of the collectibles, and while they’re technically harder than they were the first time, the changes are always so minimal that you might as well just be doing the same thing a 2nd time.

This is a game with a lot of issues for sure, but it’s a lovely time nonetheless. No amount of frustrating, tedious minigame nonsense will take away from the fact that the atmosphere and scenery of A Hero’s Tail is downright breathtaking (and trust me, the game really seems to want to see how much dumb garbage it can get away with packing into this). A very cute, pleasant experience that I would recommend to those who enjoyed the original trilogy, it’s not quite as good in my opinion, but it’s got its own appeal all the same, just maybe don’t try going for all collectibles, you’ll enjoy it more that way.

If there was one typically maligned game that I had expected to get more out of than the average person, it would’ve been this one, after all, it’s a colourful 3D platformer with a lot of weird ideas thrown into the mix. The amount of discussion surrounding such games to make them purely out as these punching bags to point and laugh at in bad faith is a tiresome thing to witness time and time again and my hatred for such a mindset is ultimately one of the many reasons why I strive to approach art with optimism. Unfortunately, while I definitely think I have a bit more appreciation for this than I often see, there’s a bit too much about Balan Wonderworld that is downright baffling to me, which when combined with how utterly milquetoast other elements of the game are, makes for a very stilted experience that never fully achieves the grander heights that it’s going for.

I think that the one button control scheme that the game goes for is one of the biggest missed opportunities here, as a lot of the groundwork for something really cool is in place, but the level design simply isn’t strong enough to accommodate for the weird ideas in play. There are over 60 costumes in the game, and due to the simplistic controls, each of these will only have one function, with an occasional 2nd one that will be activated in a less conventional way, and unfortunately, jumping counts as a function, so in this platformer game, you’ll be in situations at times where you’re unable to jump. This isn’t as inherently bad as it may seem, but the level design doesn’t seem to be thoughtfully designed around the potential limitations that the player will face. Another aspect that doesn’t help is that even though there are so many costumes with a lot of different effects, a solid chunk of these exist to interact in a very lock and key way with the environment, having only one specific use that’s blatantly stated, with no way of utilising it in any other ways. This results in a lot of costumes feeling extremely underwhelming to unlock, as you know that the only thing it’ll be good for is to open the paths in specifically designated areas, making it feel functionally worthless and boring in any other scenario.

Adding to the frustration is that getting hit a single time will make you entirely lose the costume you’re wearing, forcing you to go and recollect it if you want to use it again. This doesn’t really do anything beyond add a layer of tedium to it all, since it’s not like it even returns to an inventory or anything, it’s just gone. This feeds back into the frustration with not being able to consistently jump, depending on your costume loadout, since taking a hit can straight up leave you in a situation where you need to backtrack and grab another costume since you can’t progress otherwise. Despite my issues however, there’s definitely something here with the idea in its current form, it’s offbeat for sure, but not a totally lost cause either. Rather than crafting each stage to feel like the most barebones, basic 3D platformer stuff out there, the game would work a whole lot better if there were a bunch of different, branching paths within the stages that took advantage of specific abilities, or at least multiple ways to reach the same location so as to not completely lock you out of progression by getting hit once and still contribute to a sense of exploration, as a collectathon should feature in some capacity. This would lead to a more varied set of obstacles to tackle and would also be a great way of more deftly incorporating some hidden collectibles, having multiple ways to approach a situation, with each of them rewarding you for doing so.

This would also tie into the boss fights of the game much more smoothly to create a more cohesive experience on the whole, due to how they function and reward the player. While these fights are very simple for the most part, they’re also conceptually my favourite element of the game for how they’re able to work both as something very easy and approachable for the kids that are going to play the game, while still requiring a bit of thought for those who want to collect everything. Each boss has 3 different opportunities to hit it in its attack patterns, often requiring different costumes to hit its weak points, and for each way you utilise in the battle, you’re awarded one additional Balan statue, the collectible of the game. This shifts each encounter into a bit of a puzzle, since some of the methods of hurting the boss are pretty tricky to work out, and it adds a lot of nuance and intrigue to what usually are the blandest, or at least most simplistic elements of a platformer in this vein.

Despite the stages also not utilising it super well in a lot of cases, I also quite like the game’s artstyle, it’s very colourful and cute and absolutely shines in the boss fights especially, along with the character designs of Balan and Lance, further making me wish that a lot of other elements of the game were more fleshed out and vibrant. The one exception to my distaste over the fact that everything looks very “gamey” in the stages, for lack of a better term, is that it contributes to a certain vibe whenever you have the snow fairy costume that lets you completely break levels and skip large chunks of them, evoking a very similar feeling of exploring the boundaries of a game in the way that a lot of my favourite platformers hone in on. Hiding more stuff like this in especially out of reach and unconventional locations is another way that I think I’d have enjoyed the game more, it’s a very specific brand of weirdness that appeals to me greatly, and this game has all the tools to be able to accomplish such things with a few tweaks.

The one element of this game that I cannot really defend or appreciate in any major capacity is the Balan Bout however, these things SUCK in a way that very few game mechanics ever have to me. Having to do a QTE whenever you grab one of the Balan hats is tedious beyond belief, with a lot of the sequences that play out being over 2 minutes long and just, repeating sequences you’ve seen many times before, without any way to speed up or skip at all. The fact that you need to do these perfectly in order to get the Balan statue from them is a pain and a half as well, especially with certain telegraphs feeling borderline impossible to hit, and the fact that if you don’t get a perfect, the hat disappears and makes you beat the boss of the world if you want to respawn it, making each attempt at it an ordeal to get to. These made me genuinely mad and never stopped completely baffling me each time I had to think about them.

Overall, I liked Balan Wonderworld a bit less than I was hoping, the stages were dull and felt almost entirely lacking in progression, making the game feel stagnant, the weird mechanics were kinda just thrown into an otherwise extremely standard game, and the Balan Bouts are atrocious. With that said, I think the thing that disappoints me most is that there are elements of intrigue to be found here with how off kilter so many ideas truly are, even within the bits that I don’t really like in their current state. I love when a game is packed to the brim with idiosyncrasies, it just so happens that in this case, those idiosyncrasies do not gel well with the exceptionally standard foundation that the game is built around, it tries to feel dreamlike, but just ends up being either frustrating or pedestrian.

Tech demos like this are usually something of passing interest for me at best, but Astro's Playroom really understood how to hook me by making it a tech demo that is also a 3D platformer. Delightful game that feels extremely celebratory of the legacy of the Playstation and has a lot of fun with things along the way. I was especially impressed with how nuanced the controller vibration was, simulating different surfaces that Astro walks across with more accuracy and variety than I'd anticipated, which made walking across each stage a fun little spectacle in its own right. Endlessly cute, and above all else, something that understands the virtues of being able to play as just a little guy :)

The idea of making a CD-i inspired pseudo-parody game like this is the kind of thing that I could've seen being pretty insufferable in the wrong hands. The legacy of these games largely boils down to its cutscenes and its "so bad its good" nature, but basing an entire game around this not only would've made for something that was barely a game, but also something profoundly annoying and submerged in tedious ironic humour. Arzette being developed by the same person who made the PC remasters of those games puts the game in a much more favourable position however, with a very clear understanding on the intricacies of the game as a whole being put on display, as well as coming across as a far more earnest tribute as opposed to pointing and laughing.

Arzette understands the incongruencies of its inspirations well, but also digs further down to see the good that game had as well, expanding upon them to create versions of these concepts that are more palatable, rather than getting rid of them. In this regard, saying that this game is just "CD-i but good" misses out on analysing the way that the positive qualities here are largely lifted from them, with the positive aspects simply highlighted and some of the elements obscuring these qualities being lessened, wanting to craft a similar sense of identity. One of the biggest ways I see this working is how boss fights are handled in this, with all of them functioning in very similar ways to the CD-i titles, but tweaked to still feel more like actual boss fights. The strategies for all of these is extremely simple, with them all either being countered either by being in certain locations where they cannot reach you, or countering all of their attacks with a single item, but these fights still go on for a bit, requiring multiple hits and the like, even though it's always entirely trivial. This riffs nicely off of the idea of "the bosses in these games get hit with an item once and go poof", by keeping the spirit of this alive while making it feel just a tad less anticlimactic, still feeling like an actual confrontation to some degree.

The other enjoyable aspects of the original games are also here in full force, with the gorgeous backgrounds and awesome, energetic music making the game an absolute treat presentation wise. It's also interesting to note that despite the backgrounds going for such a similar style, that there aren't any instances of it being hard to tell what is a platform and what isn't outside of a couple of instances that very clearly felt intentionally funny to me. The platforms themselves aren't highlighted or made overly visible or anything like that, it's just that the scenery is composed in such a way to make it feel immediately intuitive, making you feel fully immersed in traversing these painted landscapes.

The cutscenes are also delightful as well of course, as while they're not quite as wild with the constant character distortions and expressiveness of the smallest of details, the vibe is close enough and falls quite comfortably into its own style that runs very closely parallel, rather than entirely mimicking everything. The writing contains a bit of meta-humour but also largely feels like a nice bit of camp that's elevated by the cutscene style rather than focusing solely on making everything seem intentionally awkward and "bad". Even the animation itself tends to go for slightly different quirks to focus on, the biggest of which being that Arzette herself never seems to look quite the same in any 2 cutscenes, always shifting between a variety of incredibly similar, yet nonetheless different styles.

Really, really love what this game sets out to do and I think that it culminates in something that feels special in how earnest it is. I can't see many cases where this idea would've come to life in a satisfying way to me if basically anyone else had handled this project, but here it is, and it's an absolute blast :)

Insane game, one that succeeds so strongly at expanding upon Remake that it makes that game feel more akin to a prototype than anything else. Rebirth is an absurd, maximalist experience that seems deadset on taking even the smallest details of the original game and stretching it into a massive undertaking, feeling like a game that entirely reveres its original version while constantly poking fun at it throughout. Nothing here feels like an attempt to replace, nothing here wants to undercut what the original game did, it all just feels like a massive, 100 hours love letter to one of the most beloved games out there, but one that’s not afraid to make so many decisions and alterations that would piss people off in theory, only for them to be handled with such grace (or sometimes lack thereof) that it becomes a joyous sight to watch unfold. Cannot quite remember the last time I was as engrossed in a game as I was here either, just nonstop grinning from me, despite the fact that it’s as long as it is.

One thing that I feel definitely flew by me a bit in Remake that now makes a lot of sense is the fact that a lot of the systems in that game were handled in a somewhat clumsy thanks to the structure of Midgar necessitating a the majority of the game taking place in setpieces with no way to return to, often being a linear foray into one way roads, being an especially notable issue with the Moogle Medals an how long it took to be able to spend them, only to then need to wait for a ton of time before having another opportunity. Everything feels as if it was designed with Rebirth at least somewhat in mind from the start, and Remake simply ended up suffering a tad out of necessity, but it results in this game feeling far more cohesive and tightly designed.

The combat is the biggest glow up of them all however, playing similarly, but with enough key differences to more strongly encourage players to fully engage with all of its intricacies instead of default to a couple of strong moves. This is most notable in the way that it feels as if there is a lot more incentive to be swapping between characters, both thanks to the increased complexity of a lot of encounters, and due to the synergy abilities that have been added in, leading to a moment to moment gameplay experience that punishes you more harshly for refusing to properly engage, but rewarding you so much more when you do. The synergy abilities also play hand in hand with this game allowing you to use 3 party members almost all the time, with different ones being available depending on your party composition, making it far more interesting to mix and match, experimenting with different playstyles while also getting to see so many goofy attack animations that epitomises the game’s heightened flashiness. Each character’s moveset has been tweaked to feel more situational, but infinitely more powerful in said situation as well, making them feel more distinct from one another and a lot more fun to mess around with, knowing how strong everyone can be as long as you know what you’re doing.

A lot of other details contribute to this as well, with the core moveset shared between all characters, such as a more effective rolling animation and the ability to negate damage entirely by blocking at the right time, facilitating a faster pace to the combat without making it feel frustrating in most cases. There’s a good balance of blockable and avoidable attacks and instances of it being inevitable that you’ll get hit as well, making these real time action elements just one component of how the game plays without completely ditching the feel of a more traditional JRPG.

I’m very fond of the changes this game chose to make when compared to the original as well, less so because I didn’t like it there, because I very much did love how sparse and lonely everything felt in it, but because of how this walks the fine line between keeping things faithful while knowing when to go entirely off the rails. This perfectly understands the nature of the original FF7’s contrast between seriousness and comedic nonsense, but dials everything up a lot, with more indulgent sequences being met with comedy that reaches levels of purely unhinged nonsense at every turn. There are very few stretches where this game can refrain from being hilarious and often downright nonsensical in the grand scheme of things and I’m all for it, given the sheer variety of ways which this is accomplished. Sometimes you’ll get a full-length scene based off something that was little more than a one off joke in the original, at other points, you’re admiring how Red XIII looks entirely out of place in any situation he’s in while he’s just there, trying to act like a regular human while falling horribly short because he’s just a cute little puppy, and you’re constantly being subjected to minigames as well.

These minigames are my favourite part of how the game handles tone thanks to how hard they commit to the bit. There are so many different gameplay styles to be found here, each of them fleshed out just enough to be engaging, often having fun little twists to them that really appeal to me. The Queens Blood card game implemented here is my favourite of these, being a card game with a surprising amount of depth that makes deckbuilding a wonderful time, while also including a wild side story that runs alongside the entire game. There was almost never a moment where I felt as if I could predict what I’d have thrown my way next in this regard as well, with there being a nonstop onslaught of curveballs that had me genuinely exclaim “oh, surely not” aloud more than once, grinning at the same time.

The greatest benefit of increasing the scope of the middle portion of FF7 like this however, lies in the wonders it’s done for the already great character writing that the original had. A lot of the core plot points revolving around each character’s dedicated section are kept largely similar, but the swathes of dungeon crawling and dead air in between core narrative beats are now also peppered with cute interactions that manage to almost always serve to further reinforce the writing surrounding the main cast, with even the most inconsequential of details effectively characterising without getting repetitive. This effect is most felt in Red XIII and Cait Sith, the latter of which going from someone I wanted to kill with rocks into possibly my favourite character here. While the rougher edges of a lot of the cast have been sanded down a tad to make them all feel more approachable, I’d say it works well in this instance due to how much has been put into making the party feel like a unified cast who all care deeply for one another, which in turn makes the road trip vibes that a lot of the game gives off feel utterly immaculate. The pacing here is very, very slow in a lot of cases, but in a way that works well due to this, very rarely feeling as if there’s any serious momentum as much as it being a fun adventure with a group of friends who want to explore the world.

I finished this game a few days ago and still find that the majority of my brain space is taken up with warm thoughts about it, sure, the narrative towards the end gets pretty messy due to the sudden increase in intensity that makes the final few hours feel like a bit of a poorly built up blur, and Sephiroth is unfortunately a bit less engaging to me in the remakes than I’d have hoped (still cool nonetheless, also he’s hot so he can get a bit of a pass), but even so, my adoration for this is extraordinary. A remake with nothing but earnest love for the source material that fires on all cylinders all the time, even if it sometimes misses, an absolute sight to behold from start to finish.

This is a game that for some reason is completely eluding me when I try writing up something more structured on it, but I will say that I really liked a lot about this and wanted to say SOMETHING in regards to it, so here:

This is the one kind of remake that I won't be an annoying hater about, it really sets itself apart from the original game in a ton of ways and feels like its own experience that just uses the same foundation as another game, rather than trying to just be a smoother rehash that removes a lot of the weirdness of said game.

Making Midgar an entire game was a choice that I feel didn't fully work out in all aspects because there is just a bit too much time in between the big story beats, slowing the pacing to an absolute crawl at times.

The "filler" chapters are cool for the way that they try expanding upon the insignificant aspects of the city to reinforce the player's connection with the location as a whole.

The sheer amount of gay energy exuded every time Cloud and Sephiroth exist on screen together is insane.

35 hours of Midgar unfortunately means around 30 hours of seeing very similar rundown urban environments or factories, and that gets super tiring.

I love how good basically every attack feels to use, and the ATB system here is a great way to try encouraging switching between characters constantly.

Unfortunately combat is also easy to the point where I never really felt the need to properly strategise outside of a couple specific encounters, which ended up being my favourite as a result of making me properly interact with the game's systems. It doesn't help that Cloud just feels by far the strongest in a lot of cases.

More of the game should've involved Cloud wearing a dress

I love the way NPC flavour text is handled here, it adds a ton of life to the world when you just hear snippets of these random conversations as you're running through a crowd.

The side quests suck for the most part, especially in chapter 14 where there's a downright egregious amount of backtracking to be done.

I adore the main cast and do think it's the one aspect of this game that I like considerably more than in the original, even though I liked them all a lot there too.

I wish Cloud was real and that I could make out with him.

I am so glad that they kept in the Shinra Building emergency stairs and made the ascent EVEN LONGER, all while letting you listen to Barret complain the entire time you ran up.

The last stretch of the game had so many batshit plot revelations one after the other and it makes me really interested to see the direction that Rebirth will take.

I've played a lot of FF7 related stuff in preparation for Rebirth and I think it's driven me a bit insane, almost feels like purgatory, still looking forward to it though!!!

Getting the normal 1CC on this was the moment that truly had me sold on bullet hells I think, since I can't really remember the last time I felt such a strong emotional response to succeeding at something in a game, or such nervousness when things began to look bleak. This game also really amps up how cool a lot of these bullet patterns look, with some especially interesting mechanics that offer a variety of challenges both purely reflex based and ones that focus more on pattern recognition. An absolute blast, only got mad occasionally :)

Incredible vibe game, and one that manages to create this feeling through the bits of imprecision and loss of control, rather than being a seamless, effortless experience to get anything done. You'll frequently find yourself drifting off course regardless of how well you do, with progress often backsliding thanks to the ever changing winds, but this works in the game's favour once you allow yourself to just, abandon the concept of actually trying to win in favour of taking in the atmosphere. Kaze no Notam makes slight setbacks inevitable, and it gives a sense of your movements being dictated by the whims of nature, which rapidly dissolves from a point of irritation into reinforcing the that you need to just accept where the game takes you and take in your surroundings instead, you can't do anything to fix the situation currently, so you might as well make the best of it. The objectives the game gives you just exist to facilitate some very loose sense of direction, but aren't really something that feel like anything more than a secondary element to go alongside the main appeal of getting players to chill out in a balloon, peacefully being separated from the world below. Utterly gorgeous game that encapsulates my favourite elements of the PSX aesthetic better than almost anything else.

For a game that was comprised almost entirely of misery for me for the first 6 hours, I'm surprised about how complicated my thoughts towards Sonic 06 became by the end, and how playing through the game had directly led me to better articulate the reasoning behind a lot of my opinions on experiencing art. In a lot of ways, Sonic 06 is a bad game, a terrible one even, one that will barely function in a lot of instances and is so rife with issues both in design and polish that it becomes a sight to behold, and yet, I had a weirdly good time with it, albeit not quite for the same reasons as a lot of people typically state. The insistence on the game's ambition being its big selling point doesn't really land for me all too well since I don't really think that the sense of scale here is much greater than what the 2 Sonic Adventure games had to show, and even if it did, everything was handled so messily here that I'd still find it hard to fully work for me regardless. This is a rare case where a game executes upon its ideas so poorly most of the time that I can't even appreciate them much from a conceptual standpoint because I'm just SO distracted by the way they never work, but it's a lot of this failure at being a formally good game at all that is the biggest draw of Sonic 06 to me, and not in a boring, ironic "so bad it's good" way either.

Being able to earnestly engage with "bad" art is a skill that more people should learn and become familiar with, they don't have to end up liking all of the things they end up checking out as a result, but the attempt at understanding such experiences is a worthwhile endeavour in itself, especially when you've already seen a lot in a particular medium and are beginning the generally understand the language and flow in how things are constructed. While this applies to art in general, I feel like this is especially the case for games due to the interactive component of them which not only forces the audience to more closely and actively engage with what's in front of them, but also brings about a stronger need to construct games with certain rules in mind. This links back to Sonic 06, a game that disregards some rules entirely, and attempts to follow others but flounders in doing so, a game that constantly defies expectations while trying to reach a point where it can meet them. One of the most prominent words I'd use to describe my time with Sonic 06 would be "refreshing" for this exact reason, as I was constantly having my preconceived notions on how a game "should" function be challenged, throwing me into a state of having to engage in thorough experimentation in places to make my way through, never quite knowing if I was missing something obvious, or if the game was wanting me to do something a bit nonsensical.

This isn't a game that I found some interest in despite its flaws, but rather because of them, creating a weird push and pull where each idiosyncratic interaction or decision was simultaneously the most infuriating thing ever while also being by far the most interesting constant. The game barely even works most of the time, trying to move during fast sections will get you killed, random bits of geometry will sometimes get you killed, things that are meant to be scary can break in such a way that makes them feel utterly benign, and most notably, the automatic sections meant to be pseudo cutscenes just don't properly work a lot of the time. Any time there was a part in the level that was clearly set up to make you automatically bounce from location to location, or run around a huge loop, everything immediately became scarier thanks to how unreliable these would be, with the game basically requiring you to plan out the angle you went into them to minimise chances of being entirely screwed over. The game being so ready to kill you for no reason contributed to one of its most infuriating elements as a whole though, that being the fact that if you lose all your lives, you need to start the stage over again, and since a lot of deaths could hardly be classified as your fault, it was an arduous process that made me more genuinely mad at a game than I have been in years probably.

This game is rough to say the least, but the brand of roughness it has going on is the kind of thing that I think people should experience from time to time, especially if they've played a ton of other games. It's different to games that intentionally break rules to play something that just, fails to follow them, seeing so many anomalous elements that try so hard to be something and just can't muster that up. This is a rare game that I feel is one that's justly disliked while I can still say that I found playing it more fun and interesting than the average person, and I completely get how someone could play this and immediately hate it, it's not an easy one to like. Silver's campaign sucks and throws in some of the most baffling bits of level design I've seen, Shadow's story is very up and down with both the game at its best and almost worst, and Sonic has mach speed sections which straight up didn't feel designed with this game in mind, it's just a constant battle against the game in order to hit a point where you can overcome its janky nonsense, but it's a pretty unique time even so. Other bits and pieces, such as the music and how cool the stages themselves tend to look are genuinely great elements as well, White Acropolis and Crisis City are big highlights especially, so it's not even all bad either. This game is weird, I don't really know how much I actually like it, but I also think that it's 100% a game worth playing to some degree at least, I've never been so conflicted about my thoughts on a game, but that's cool in its own way as well :)

This one has a few too many points of frustration for me to consider wanting to 1CC it at any point, along with the fact that Mystic Square in general is the hardest of the PC-98 games by a decent margin even when ignoring its specific irritating qualities. Bullet visibility is particularly rough here, with more than a couple of instances of bullets blending into the background and forcing you to be a bit overly attentive to be able to even see some of them, and certain attack also feel really janky to deal with, particularly the big yellow lasers that folow you. Even so, the game is still neat, there are a lot of fun bullet patterns to dodge, the music just keeps getting better from game to game, and the pacing here is a bit smoother thanks to the stages in between bosses feeling more substantial overall. A bit too annoying in certain respects for it to be my favourite Touhou I've played so far, but it marks a fantastic end to the PC-98 games nonetheless.