Whatever slightly less positive things I could say about Rhythm Heaven Fever are completely overshadowed by the fact that this is one of the greatest games ever. Sure, I'm not enamoured with the idea of creating a more consistent artstyle instead of just throwing a lot of disparate ideas at the wall, but when everything looks as cute as it does here, I can't complain at all really. Everything that appears to be that tiny bit less interesting to me compared to previous entries ends up not mattering when it feels like so much else has been taken further. The outlandish concepts for the minigames have somehow become even more ridiculous and charming, the way a player's sense of rhythm is messed with feels both more intuitive than ever before while also throwing some really interesting curveballs your way that are sure to catch you off guard even after having played the games before it, and the music is once again fantastic. Basically an ideal game, I need another 17 entries in this series and I need them immediately.

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.

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.

For the first hour or so of playing Jet Set Radio, I was fully considering dropping the game soon after. Fortunately I ended up sticking with it, because with a bit more time I finally started to see this as an absolutely fantastic little experience. At its core, JSR is also a game that felt as if it allowed me to better understand certain dichotomies between the game design approach between Nintendo and Sega and how they were able to cultivate a lot of experiences that felt remarkably distinct, each with their own pros and cons to them. While Nintendo tended to approach games largely from the perspective of having a player understand the majority of the game's systems immediately and intuitively to make for something inviting and accessible, Sega consistently seemed to more go for the approach of "Hey, the first few hours of this are going to suck but once it clicks it's the best stuff ever". This feels especially true for this game however, as getting into it proves to be a bit rough due to the control scheme feeling incredibly loose and difficult to handle, with a wide turn radius and a constant sense of momentum that means you can't immediately slow down making it really difficult to start off with as even the most simple obstacles feel like fighting against the game. However, with a bit of time, once you get used to it all, it becomes increasingly clear how so many of the mobility quirks that you have lend themselves perfectly to the level design.

For a movement system that practically requires the player to be getting a bit of a running start to properly gain momentum and actually reach a lot of higher locations, not to mention maintaining this speed for a pretty long time whether you want to or not since rollerskates just tend to do that, it needs to be complemented by level design that supports this, and here's where Jet Set Radio largely shines. Grind rails, secret areas and just your general avenues of traversal tend to be spaced out in such a way where you can flow naturally from one location to another as long as you have a general idea of where everything is. Jumps are spaced in such a way that you'll be finding yourself effortlessly perfectly positioning yourself to barely slow down after a while, it goes from something that feels like it's fighting against the player to something that feels incredibly intuitive, but then also satisfying due to the player knowing how much they had struggled at first to make even the most basic of manoeuvres. It all contributes to a feeling that the game is less interested in seeing you merely beat the stages, and instead wants you to absolutely master them.

This idea of mastery continues to be represented through the way that the enemies within the game are handled, initially seeming like pointless distractions that serve to frustrate and slow you down, but actually being utilised as a clever way to further force the player to understand the levels and plan their routes carefully from the start. Because the intensification of enemy waves is based exclusively off of how many spots you've tagged without the time taken having any bearing, planning is a far more important step to the game than it first lets on, to the point where once you figure out how to approach getting around a stage, the pacing can often feel rather leisurely, with even the most intense waves still being easily managed due to the remaining targets being simple to reach nonetheless. So many elements that initially seem like a hindrance to the Jet Set Radio's experience ultimately prove to contribute to the core gameplay loop in an incredibly organic way to the point where you'll often feel as if you're just being let loose without any real sense of overbearing guidance, even though the game is really nudging you in the right direction for the entire duration.

This reaches its peak with the rival battles thrown throughout the game, that either make you race against someone or just follow what they do, which doesn't only often lead to you being taught about certain tricks to make getting around easier, one example being sliding across walls for extra height, but you'll often be taught about little shortcuts as well. These end up feeling exciting not only because you're being taught about so many things that were always there that you probably just didn't know about, but it all links back into making replaying those stages later all the more satisfying as you once again get to entirely redefine your route with these new tricks and passages in mind, feeding into the remarkable replayability that the game has. Of course, despite all of this, it's still hard to deny that the best aspect of the game for me is just how much insane style it has to it, with the colourful, cel - shaded art making every area be filled to the seams with so much charm, bringing life to what could've potentially been a dreary urban sprawl. The art is further complemented by Hideki Naganuma's amazing soundtrack that takes a lot of cues from instrumental hip hop and the big beat scene to make for one of the coolest OSTs to a game out there, with even the occasional lulls in quality still carrying such a strong vibe to carry the game's aesthetic up into the stratosphere.

On the whole, while I cannot fault anyone who plays this game and hates it for the way you control your character, it not only is a system that progressively feels better the more you play, but the design of the levels and encounters themselves is absolutely incredible in how it perfectly balances between knocking the player around and silently guiding them into feeling like they're pulling off some absolutely insane stunts. While I already love the game, it's also another case where it almost feels built to be replayed a bunch, and those small annoying moments that appear from time to time are nowhere near enough to tank the experience by very much. Definitely worth a shot especially if you love its aesthetic, and even if you've played it and didn't like it very much, honestly give it another small shot, you might be pleasantly surprised.

The first Castlevania is basically as cool as people say, it's an awesome melting pot of horror imagery, it's one of the most atmospheric games on the NES, the music is deservedly iconic, it's just a great time overall. One especially interesting thing however, is the way that it utilises its feelings of clunkiness to enhance the experience and force the player to use more of their tools, with those subweapons feeling just as integral to being able to overcome obstacles as your whip. So many instances have an air of uncertainty because of the rigid and slow way that Simon controls, you can't really just react on the fly and expect things to work out for you, you need that moment of planning and anticipation, which serves to make every threat feel even more formidable.

The way limited lives are handled here is actually pretty interesting as well, since it ties quite cleanly into the way that each set of 3 levels can allow the player to build up a sense of momentum and power, with certain subweapons early on in each section often being very useful later. Rather than losing your lives and having to go back to the start of the last set of 3 levels being a purely negative thing, the fact that this can give the player another opportunity at taking the subweapons they want and even making them stronger, softens the blow a bit. This is accentuated by the whip mechanic basically forcing the player to master certain sections due to their considerably worse weapon if they lose a life. This results in the next time you have to go through being far, far smoother due to now likely being at full whip strength and range, making many challenges more digestible in the process. My only real complaints with this one is that the final set of levels drops the ball a bit, especially with the clock tower being a bit of an ugly mess that can be hard to discern where you're actually meant to go, the enemy spam doesn't help either. Great game nonetheless, one of the best on the system

An incredibly stressful time thanks to the way Iron Lung basically laughs in your face and whacks you over the head any time the feeling of complacency begins to kick in. The setting itself is already a really strong one, basically being shipped off in a death-submarine that's explicitly not designed for what you're trying to do, being surrounded by all sides by murky water and mysterious creatures who probably want you dead, it all immediately makes the situation feel profoundly hopeless. The way this is then taken and maintained throughout is what really sells the game for me though, as there are constant one-off problems that come your way that are never really hard to deal with whatsoever, but really disrupt whatever sense of flow you were starting to find yourself in. More than anything else, I really appreciate how this ends up making navigation that bit less certain than is comfortable, where often, trains of thought on how to proceed forward will just get lost thanks to some unforeseen problem arising, distracting you just long enough to make you start desperately scrambling to get your bearings again. The game certainly does a lot for something confined to such a claustrophobic environment and it makes for an awesome little horror experience.

An absolutely wretched experience through and through, and not just for the bland nature of the courses for the most part. Super Mario Kart is honestly a game that I feel fails in practically every way to the point where starting off with its positive attributes is easy enough to fit into a single paragraph. The reason I'm not giving this a lower score can be traced to a few different elements, the biggest being that even in its simplest form, Mario Kart is wonderfully charming and I heavily appreciate certain elements of this game's presentation. I also think that from a technical standpoint this is really, really cool, being able to somewhat craft a 3D effect on a 2D console and then apply it to basically everything, must've been a bit mind blowing for the time, or at least I imagine it would have been.

Unfortunately, while technically very impressive, the game is also downright nauseating to the point where playing this for around an hour is enough to make me feel genuinely ill. Every individual facet of the track ahead of the player feels as if it moves and pulsates constantly, often flickering between textures before the camera itself moves in unpleasant ways. This is an issue present throughout the game and makes the base experience of driving, even when separating it from literally everything else the game has to offer, feel horrible. This is especially notable on Rainbow Road, which combines the issues of the flickering, constantly moving textures with a rapidfire onslaught of colour that changes very quickly if you're driving at an even slightly reasonable pace, sickening stuff. The way the player controls while driving also feels very off, and I think it's both due to the controls themselves but also with the way the game attempts to establish a fully 3D space. I feel that it's extremely difficult to gain a full grasp of the speed of the character and the way they handle turns, often feeling as if you're either too slippery, as your character moves like they're on ice, or they turn at such sharp angles that you're almost guaranteed to overturn and bump into something else, made especially egregious by this issue with depth perception that plagues everything.

While the core gameplay loop itself is utterly broken it feels, it's made all the worse by how unashamedly the AI just cheats all over the place. The rubber banding is absolutely insane here, to the point where it feels as if the items you use on your opponents are practically useless as they'll speed up to catch up with their expected position extremely quickly, giving the player only about 10 - 15 seconds before it all looks the same. The idea of giving each character a "rival" that sticks close behind you is a pretty cool idea on paper, but it just makes it worse when the game feels as jankily conceived as it is, with them seemingly having unlimited access to a particular powerup, determined by what character they are. While this is already annoying with something like an unlimited supply of green shells on hand, the fact that Mario and Luigi are able to activate a star like this is absurd and makes it practically impossible to win if they're what the game considers your rival.

The way the AI acts makes it feel as if the game outright hates the player, and not in the usual, upbeat and funny way that this series already does, where it feels as if it's just sitting there grinning while it throws more nonsense at your way, but actual, genuine hatred and aggressive refusal to let the player gain any distance. The courses almost all have a couple of turns that feel way too janky, the depth perception makes it hard to properly judge how to move to avoid obstacles, the AI is specifically tailored to never give the player a hint of reprieve, and the visuals are physically sickening. While I'm sure that some people would say that the multiplayer experience is more engaging and fun as it does away with a lot of the AI nonsense, I'd say that while it's true that basically any game is more fun with friends, that I would literally rather play almost any other game with them than this nightmare.

One of THE games and also one of the few cases where I genuinely think that it's near impossible for me to say anything especially new about it, but god, this game is so good. The atmosphere that this has is particularly interesting, with locations that often feel like sparse game constructs that are only just beginning to take shape as actual locations, but are still forming all the finer details to truly take it to that point. It sits in this middle ground between having naturalistic worlds and abstract, geometrical artifice populating the landscapes, with even the most well-established aesthetics being coupled with strange floating boxes or blatantly mismatching elements, ultimately embodying a lot about what I love about this era of 3D platformers.

Another bit of magic that this game has to me is how its movement plays into its level design. Super Mario 64's character control feels sublime with how cleanly it flows into itself while never making the process of traversing the environment an unintrusive exercise when you're first playing. Mario feels heavy, he's got a lot of jumps that require a semblance of commitment once you begin, there's some precision to be found in stringing everything together as well, but once you begin understanding how to control him, you truly understand just how powerful you are. The level design plays into this fantastically for the most part, with this constant feeling of "if I was just a bit better and more confident at this game, I'm sure there would be a ton of ways to get up here" in most stages, making them feel so mechanically dense, with the potential to learn a lot of basic, tiny skips just through experimenting and messing around with bits of geometry that look vaguely scalable, because there's so much room for this everywhere that you're bound to find a few if you're at all adventurous.

I might not enjoy every stage here, since some do end up being a bit too skeletal for my liking (not too fond of Dire Dire Docks and Snowman's Land mainly), but this game is magical, it's foundational to so much of what I adore and still somehow also has some of the best movement in any game I've played despite also being the blueprint of a lot of it. Also, the experience of playing as a little guy who makes silly noises after literally anything you do is so powerful once you've actually played it yourself, seeing gameplay videos does not convey how funny it is for this to happen for an entire game.

I feel like I've given this one a pretty good try, doing a few of the chapter 2 stories before wanting to fully put this down, but yeah, I'm just really not a fan of Octopath Traveler unfortunately. When you look at it broadly, it seemingly has a lot of ideas that could make for a really engaging RPG, but unfortunately, I feel like the skeletons of most of these ideas are all that's present. You have 8 characters, but none of them feel interesting and barely even talk to each other, you've got unique ways of interacting with a lot of NPCs, but the interactions themselves feel hollow, you have a ton of plot threads going on at once, but never any sense of actual stakes nor an instance of them intersecting, and this issue pervades the whole experience. This isn't even a case of just disliking this for being an RPG either, because RPGs are cool, this one just doesn't do it for me despite the amount of promise and how genuinely great certain aspects of the experience were, it's all just disappointing really.

Everything surrounding the writing is where a lot of my biggest complaints stem from, not just from one particular aspect either, it's just all rather bad to me. The premises of each of the 8 plotlines is where I especially take issue with, as none of the set ups really do anything especially interesting on their own, but due to the way everything is structured due to the fact that there are 8 of these, none of the individual plotlines feels as if they really have any ground to fully take off, instead feeling like truncated ideas that aren't allowed to actually expand in interesting directions. This causes the narrative to feel like a consistent drag without an end in sight, further hindered by the pacing being rough thanks to having to jump between each of these narratives regularly, causing everything to feel stagnant with how long it takes to see anything progress in any meaningful way.
Doesn't help that the characters don't really have much going for them, similarly largely feeling like skeletal concepts and tropes without much to really differentiate them. The choice to write all of this in such a self-contained manner as if each adventurer has entirely set off on their own does no favours either, completely hindering a lot of potential interactions and making everyone feel like even more of a blank slate. I personally feel that structuring the game in a way where after the intros for each character, it was possible for a player to fully complete each storyline in full would've done a lot to help with the pacing issue, because as it stands here, it really just feels like an endless sea of nothingness.

The world itself similarly doesn't really do anything for me, neither to towns nor the overworld. I'll say that the game mostly looks very pretty, including these environments, but that's really where it ends for me. I didn't really feel any sense of cohesion in it especially, with generic biomes bleeding into one another without much that felt like it was connected in an especially interesting way, just, "ok and now the scenery is suddenly a desert, and now it's a beautiful, grassy area with absolutely beautiful water, and now it's a giant, mysterious forest" and it just, doesn't feel interesting, there's no real intrigue to any of these places, and as such I end up feeling absolutely nothing when exploring them. Doesn't help that the NPCs don't really add anything to the experience either, having a tendency to just not really say anything of note, at most occasionally providing a single line tidbit of information that I never really found myself caring about given that it never really did anything to make the setting feel any more interesting. The side quests also suck and reveal how empty the whole path action mechanic feels in its implementation, not to mention having other issues to go along with it. So many of them feel vague to the point of being ridiculous while simultaneously almost always just being solved by spamming certain path actions towards surrounding NPCs. It makes for a dynamic that simultaneously feels obtuse while being totally braindead, almost never really knowing the exact thing you need to do, but being able to brute force your way through a lot of them anyway.

Despite all of these complaints, there's one area that the game absolutely excels at (mostly), and that's the combat. Even some of the earliest fights feel pretty engaging due to the combination of the break and boost system being tools that are able to contribute both to long term strategic play while also giving the player a lot of tools to make a lot of nuanced spur of the moment decisions. It adds a lot to the battling experience in a few different ways, as not only does it lead to a more dynamic experience as a whole, but it also feels awesome when you've planned everything out and then enact it all to deal an utterly absurd amount of damage, and can also make each individual fight feel a bit more involved. This last point is a bit of a double edged sword however, as while making it that even a lot of common enemy fights require a bit of thought at times is cool for giving a bit more gravity to each encounter, it also has the effect of making grinding feel agonisingly tedious when you can't really have anywhere to fall back on to only half pay attention while mashing the attack button to gain those extra couple of levels you might need. If the game didn't feel grindy that'd be one thing, but the jump from the chapter 1 areas to the chapter 2 ones felt pretty steep to me with how tanky some of the enemies ended up getting, and it doesn't help that only your 4 active party members even gain any exp, basically forcing you to either grind, or to kneecap yourself by having certain party members be slacking in a combat scenario. Doesn't help that actually exploring a lot of the dungeons was just lame, nothing really going on in them.

Octopath Traveler is a game that has some serious promise in some areas and is outright amazing in others, but the whole package doesn't connect in a way that I feel is particularly interesting, especially since so many of the promising ideas never really deliver on anything more concrete. So many times I was thinking "this could be awesome" only to repeatedly see it exclusively utilised in the more barebones way possible, doesn't matter if this was to do with the world, the characters, or the narrative, basically anything that wasn't the core combat felt lacking, and combat alone really just isn't enough to make for a game I want to play to completion, especially when it's this long. Basically a game that I could only recommend to someone who just reaaalllly loves JRPGs and enjoys this sort of very stylistically basic experience, but even in that case I would probably just recommend playing through a Dragon Quest game instead.

I wish that this era of licenced titles never ended, too many games like this are just endlessly fun and charming and a part of the reason to me does stem from the fact that there's that sense of inherent charm from seeing characters that I already feel familiar with being put through an interactive medium like this. Sheep Raider takes this further by doing basically everything in its power to feel as close to an og Looney Tunes cartoon as possible without interrupting the actual gameplay that takes place, making for a very stylistically unique game on the system that's an absolute joy to play through. A big way this is done is through the fact that so many of the puzzle setpieces here aren't just set up as gameplay obstacles to overcome, but often doubling as setups to slapstick gags in the process. This leads to a lot of situations where not only are the victory conditions ones that lead you to a funny little joke along with being able to accomplish your goal, but the loss conditions will also act in a similar way, just with a joke that has you as the punchline.

This does a lot to serve the moment to moment gameplay, filling the sometimes long winded puzzle sections with these silly moments to keep the vibe consistently very strong regardless of how big a level might be. I also love the way the items are utilised in the game, often not really telling you their use and instead forcing the player to start using outlandish cartoon logic to try the most seemingly stupid ideas possible, only to find out that that was the intended solution. While this more vague way of conveying this leads to a few situations where things end up getting a bit too obtuse for their own good, it largely feels very intuitive while still having some insanely creative puzzle solutions with how many fun ways to mess about with your toolkit. My favourite aspect however, is the way that the game will strategically break the rules when it feels like it, both to further lend itself to having to deal with mountains of cartoon logic in a game that you're playing as the antagonist of, but also to basically never let you feel complacent in your approach. One of my favourite examples of this is when Sam the Sheepdog learns from your strategy in a previous level, where he puts countermeasures up to stop the player from being able to play a hypnotic flute nearby him after that was the main solution that had to be implemented in the previous level.

Other aspects such as the artstyle and music help further make Sheep Raider a wonderful game to play and just, experience the vibes. It's not really perfect either to me though, especially since the camera has a tendency to be super finicky and uncooperative, which led to a few failures specifically because of not being able to see where I wanted to. Fortunately this didn't happen often enough to be a dealbreaker, but it was pretty annoying. Also, while it's a more personal preference thing, big puzzle game like this when it's just nonstop puzzle solving in such a manner as here can get a bit exhausting for me, so towards the end I was beginning to get a bit burnt out, though I'm sure for those who are way more into that stuff than me, they'd have an even better time. That said, I still love this for the fact that it's probably the closest game one could get to playing out episodes of a cartoon while still feeling like a conventional game, and that's an aesthetic that's incredibly cool to me.

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 :)

A game basically just as bad as everyone said it was going to be unfortunately, but not even in a way that I could really appreciate because it's not even a failure in any big, bombastic ways or anything, it's just a few hours of pure nothingness. The roughness of this game feels almost entirely opposite to the roughness of the first DMC game, rather than going out of its way to have a bunch of wild ideas that felt thrown in with a bit of reckless abandon, all tied together with some truly glorious cutscenes and atmosphere, DMC 2 just feels like it took almost all the safest routes but also was incapable of executing even these ideas with a modicum of grace. It's not a total trainwreck, but it's just an absolute slog through and through that feels hopelessly misguided, or just, barely guided at all.

Nothing here functions properly, but nothing feels entirely broken either, just a collection of half baked ideas that simply don't seem to properly work. I actually like the changes to the controls in theory, making things feel generally far more intuitive and fluid to use (being able to roll in 4 directions is especially nice), but even so, I just feel like you control horribly in the game. Everything feels off and clunky, especially with the endlag on all of your attacks essentially meaning that you have to prepare to dodge a full second or two earlier than feels natural completely kills any sense of momentum it could have. The enemy AI technically works but is utterly worthless most of the time, enemies often only having one or two attacks at most and being dealt with in the exact same way. This isn't even taking into account the fact that guns are just broken here, with almost the entire cast having no proper countermeasures to the player just standing back and mashing square for a few minutes until they win, being able to take down even the spongiest of enemies with ease.

In that regard though, this worthless AI provides one shred of mercy in the game, as it's a very easy time for the most part, making things a tedious and mindless slog, but not really forcing the player to actually have to get to grips with the various awful systems. Being able to breeze through most situations allows things to at least go by pretty quickly and see a wide variety of ideas packed into a very short amount of time. Can't say much good about the level design either unfortunately, since everything looks so drab and devoid of colour, with it pulling off the miraculous feat of even making a huge ruined city feel totally uninteresting. Probably doesn't help that the story is largely a scattershot mess that doesn't really attempt to contextualise anything that's happening most of the time, making your travels through these different locations feel less interesting because they just feel like game constructs instead of a part of some sort of world, stringing you along from bland location to bland location without a care in the world.

Despite basically everything going wrong with this, I still do like bits and pieces of what's present here however. The aforementioned control changes are a genuinely cool thing even if they feel horribly implemented here, as It really does just flow a bit smoother in those rare instances where everything works. I also appreciate the changes to the combo system here compared to DMC 1, with keeping up your streak by interspersing gunshots in with your main attacks being far more engaging to me than the guns essentially resulting in the end of it in the first game. It's all a bit mindless in that regard here, but it's definitely the one thing that made a lot of the combat in this almost bearable, seeing if I could properly chain together these useless punching bags. The 2nd phase of the final boss was also cool I guess, came out of nowhere, but was a fun time, unlike all the rest of them which were once again either useless punching bags that would take a million years to kill thanks to being only really hittable consistently with guns, or just absolute nonsense with a tendency to hit you with some pretty silly, out of nowhere attacks. It's just a lame and extremely drab game that feels horribly barebones and barely functional at the end of the day, has some cool things going for it and is both mercifully very short and easy, but I'm happy that I won't have to be touching this one again anytime soon.

Might be a bit early to call this before I've even really started going for the high level rankings, but this might just be my favourite 2D platformer already. It just feels like an absolute perfect storm of some of the greatest character control I've experienced in a game combined with level design that perfectly supports this, but it tops all of this off with such an absurd amount of personality baked into even the smallest of details. It's a pretty huge accomplishment for a game that looks like this to be able to surpass any expectations I had, but Pizza Tower just did it in every single regard. The aesthetic is absolutely on point, being this neat combination of embodying the spirit of really feral, crusty looking 90s cartoons all put through the filter of MS Paint, but then it ends up being further elevated by how chaotic the actual gameplay is. I expected things to look really bizarre and charmingly gross, but the sheer amount of expressive animation for everything takes it to a whole other level, something particularly notable with the increasingly depraved facial expressions of Peppino as you build speed from a sprint.

This kind of vibe works equally as well for the enemies, with each of them feeling as if they have so much charm even when you only sometimes see them on screen for a second or two before running past. The brand of appealing ugliness that the game takes on is something I heavily appreciate in general and I would love more things to lean into such a style, especially if done to this level of quality. I also think it's really cool how this game just, has some of the greatest character control in a platformer to me, with so many moves perfectly flowing into one another while also facilitating frankly ludicrous speeds. Everything has a great sense of weight to it as well, you might be fast, but more in the way of being a bizarrely mobile freight train than what the archetypal fast character might look and behave in gameplay. The level design and sense of difficulty the game has also play into this really well, with the levels being built around being able to maintain a sense of momentum, and the lack of ability to die making it that you never feel truly punished for going too fast, with the worst that can happen almost always just being losing this pace momentarily and also potentially losing your combo.

While initially, the decision to focus so heavily around building these levels with getting high rankings and combos in mind didn't really do a whole lot for me, I ultimately think that it was a great choice for the way the game plays as a whole. Rather than focusing on a more traditional, hazardous obstacle course to get through and encouraging a more careful playstyle, by placing the vast majority of the difficulty here on perfecting the levels rather than purely beating them, it allows for this much more confident and often reckless playstyle to feel not just feasible, but the ideal way to play, especially on the first runs before you start caring about such rankings. There were so few times where I really ended up taking my finger of the sprint button throughout my playtime because even when it felt a bit ill-advised, the simple action of being fast felt awesome nonetheless. There's a nice variety of stuff thrown your way too, with most levels having some cool, unique mechanics in them that almost never felt fully transformative and pace breaking (though I'll admit that I don't really like playing as Gustavo anywhere near as much as Peppino), but they were still significant enough to always add some kind of unique dimension to the experience that would make it stand out from the crowd.

I cannot think of the last time where I so feverishly wanted to just, keep playing a game and never put it down as I did with this one, I cannot think of the last time I played a game that I genuinely felt had absolutely no glaringly weak elements or moments along with making everything feel this varied and special, I just, cannot think of another game that surpassed my expectations to the extent that Pizza Tower did. Maybe my opinion will shift to an extent after attempting to P rank some of the levels here, but for the time being, I consider this as nothing short of a masterpiece.

Edit: After P ranking a decent chunk of levels I'll lower this slightly, still a fantastic game but some of these levels really weren't built too well with keeping your combo feeling especially good thanks to some of the more inconvenient detours you need to make.

Fell in love with a lot of what this did, both mechanically and narratively. The way this manages to feel like such a neat take on a Souls inspired combat system while weaving through this incredibly hard hitting, personal narrative relating to fractured identity and forcible conformity that runs counter to that is an absolutely mystifying thing to see when done to this extent. The story itself doesn't make a ton of sense when looking at it conventionally, more taking the approach of being a scattershot, abstract explosion of rough emotions scrawled down and screamed out. It makes the artstyle (which was already some of the coolest stuff I'd seen in gaming) feel even more special with the way it reflects this, with so few elements of any scene feeling at all fully formed and more just a messy sketch of them that keeps this amorphous quality that stops it from being truly 100% discernible. The game just piles on this absolute mountain of queer frustration towards the suppression of our identities that so many other forces desire to impose and then keeps driving this feeling of despondence deeper and deeper, with your own survival ultimately being all that you're able to worry about by the end, but everything in the game telling you that at the very least, you need to do all you can to fight and not lose who you truly are.

The whole corruption mechanic ties into this super fluidly, making self-preservation feel as if it towers above all other elements of the game, with each death contributing to a slowly filling timer that leads to a true lose of the game. It evokes this sense of anxiety that never truly goes away, you always feel one step away from making some earth shattering mistake that completely ruins all the progress you've made. This only really works because of the way the game utilises so many other interesting, forgiving mechanics to ensure that while challenging, a mistake or two in any given section is far from a be all end all in the grand scheme of things, especially the rewind feature. Providing a limited supply of opportunities to undo the last section of combat if you feel like you tremendously messed up is a wonderful little risk-reward system, basically forcing the player to carefully consider when a mistake was too bad or whether it would be beneficial to just let it slide and save it for a bit later.

This sort of balancing act is further elevated by the core combat dynamic focusing so strongly on chaining attacks together to deal devastating damage at once rather than dragging fights on, where each encounter can feel agonisingly long or comically short just because of a couple of carefully placed attacks and a thoughtfully crafted loadout. It increases the chance to an extent of completely messing up just due to not properly planning out your approach (and then being able to actually execute that), but it then feels totally fair because of the fact that you're given so many ways out. The level of customisation here is also really awesome, being able to mix and match different light and heavy attacks in whatever way you want leads to a lot of potential for experimentation that feels very tangible, where each decision can wildly change up how you approach your enemies but if it's a bad choice, you can just go back and fix it up after you've seen it in action.

In the end this is a devastating experience that plays around with a lot of concepts of identity and queer repression under theocracy in some very raw, messy ways that contribute to an experience that feels more like a bunch of emotions and feelings strung together as opposed to something that always tries to tell a more conventionally cohesive story, and it works wonders in this case. Combine that with some seriously great gameplay and some of the best art direction I've experienced in the medium and you've got something that I think is truly magical, with even minor gripes like a somewhat repetitive gameplay loop towards the end and the like not detracting from it all too much. A game that I'll be thinking about for quite a while past this point I feel.

This is just, the ideal game, one of the best ones out there to me. It's so simple and breezy, but full of little incongruencies that add a ton of life to the moment to moment gameplay, all wrapped up with being one of the best looking games out there. Playing this for the billionth time after having played the reignited version also did wonders for getting me to appreciate how many little moments of friction in this game keep it feeling so engaging and interesting to me. The level design is mostly breezy but with these occasional difficult jumps that require a lot of precision to be able to make, never being unreasonable, but often coming a bit out of left field and adding a bit of tension to an otherwise very calm experience. Even the way Spyro moves feels a bit odd at first, with the player not being able to turn as snappily as in many other 3d platformers, since you're playing as a 4 legged creature. It never feels unintuitive or even weird, but it's different enough to be noticeable, and plays wonderfully into both the more open spaces and those tighter, winding corridors you'll occasionally find yourself in, with the charge ability never leaving navigations feeling at all sluggish.

Since the game is a pure collectathon with very little else focused on, having no minigames or strong combat focus, I like how much has been put into making the act of collecting itself a reasonably varied feeling task without leaning into outright distractions or big pace breakers, with things like the different kinds of boxes adding that tiny bit extra and also keeping things slightly more visually diverse as well. Of course, the bigger way that collecting things is made so fun is just in how cleverly a lot of gems are hidden, with the game making many more attempts to completely obfuscate potential hiding spots, being unafraid to even hide some gems completely out of sight and require borderline blind jumps to find some of them, with the only hint directing you in such a way being "I've looked in a lot of other places and it looks like I could maybe get to that platform over there. These hiding spots never feel outright unfair, but they do force the player to approach exploration in a way that will sometimes need to disregard basic expecations, approaching exploration in a far more open minded way where every unseen location could maybe be another hiding place, even if it seems ridiculous at first. This makes even the smallest of stages feel so much larger, just knowing that what seem like boundaries have the potential of leading to a reward, and it helps that the game is as pretty as it is.

The level design plays perfectly with Spyro's glide ability, which in turn contributes a lot to its aesthetic being so perfect. This is one of the best games for the appeal of "existing in a place and just wandering around" that I can think of. The levels feel sparse and empty, populated solely by enemies and dragons that have been turned to crystal, with each stage feeling very expansive due to Spyro's gliding and charging allowing him to travel long distances relatively quickly, with elements of verticality largely being utilised as a means of being able to travel further distances across long gaps, rather than just for the appeal of reaching higher places. The constant haze in the distance, the varied skyboxes, the untextured blobs in the distance that resemble random structures, all of it crafts a world that feels desolate, but dreamlike and inviting too, and this appeal is further reinforced with the game's use of colour. There are very few moments in Spyro The Dragon that feel content with only utilising a couple of flatter colours, with the ice cavern being the epitome of this, taking what in many other games would often be a largely white location, and adding a lot of greens, blues and purples to the world, with warm oranges weakly beaming out of the buildings, and it's absolutely beautiful. On the other hand, the moments that utilise more consistent, flat colouring are also really interesting, with the two biggest examples being the seemingly endless fields of Stone Hill or the flat desert of Cliff Town, both of which are open to the point of feeling slightly disconnected from the rest of the game, almost as if you've discovered a way to make it out of bounds and now can run around these endlessly expansive places of nothingness.

Everything about Spyro the Dragon feels set out to make the basic act of existing in a 3D environment as engaging as possible, with gems and dragons feeling like a means of getting the player to explore these gorgeous environments, rather than the levels feeling like vessels for collectables, and that difference is one of the biggest contributing factors in what makes Spyro 1 such a uniquely enjoyable game. It's just telling me to enjoy myself while combing through each stage, never letting me get comfortable to the point where I can switch my brain off and stop fully paying attention, but also not challenging me in a way that would majorly impede the act of exploration either. Tree Tops is also one of the best stages in any game and further reinforces my total adoration for everything this does.