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.

Consistently similar, yet ever so slightly different across the board when compared to Faces of Evil. It's definitely the game that feels as if it had a bit more time to be developed for one, lacking the blatant reuse that Faces of Evil demonstrated towards the end, as well as having a throughline that feels a bit more complete and interesting to be led through. The world as a whole feels far more interconnected in this game in particular, with far more instances of moving back and forth between locations while the NPCs unlock things for you, rather than awkwardly disappearing upon interaction. I love the way that the focus in general is more placed in its puzzle solving and exploration rather than the heavier focus on combat in Faces of Evil as well, with the first half of the game throwing so many different objectives you need to keep track of before slowly unravelling them to you, which consequently made each individual puzzle more difficult and interesting to figure out due to how many different possibilities the utility of each item could potentially have. It does have all the same drawbacks and points of intrigue as Faces of Evil, but this just feels a bit more tightly wound and appealing to my own sensibilities, so it has the slight edge for me and results in another breezy time that I could maybe even see myself returning to again to check out its hard mode.

A rather enjoyable time, feeling more like a condensed Zelda experience in a lot of respects as opposed to the shoddy knockoff it's always touted as. Link: The Faces of Evil certainly is quite rough around the edges, with a couple of odd puzzles and controls that regularly work against you being the most prominent issues, but I feel like this is far from enough to entirely detract from the game's good qualities. Despite the infamous nature of the cutscenes here, I'm quite fond of the two sides of the art direction for this game overall, albeit for different reasons. The background art is frequently really pretty in particular, often being very colourful and packed with detail, and while it makes actual platform visibility less intuitive than it should be, you'll naturally hit a point while playing where the visual language clicks and makes this a small inconvenience at worst. To build on this, the game covers a wide range of location themes within its tiny runtime as well, further contributing to providing the world with a sense of scale and stopping things from ever feeling too repetitive, since you'll always be thrown into something new within a couple of minutes, with the quest structure feeding into this sense of loose interconnectivity thanks to the backtracking. The cutscenes are really funny as well to me with the way that there's this constant need to make the smallest thing be expressed in the most exaggerated manner possible, with everyone strangely distorting with each word accompanied by voice acting equally ridiculous. People already harp on the cutscenes being incredibly funny, but as someone who'd never seen any of the YTPs that so heavily used these, it was all new and surprising to me and felt like a reward in itself whenever I was able to see a new one. A bite-sized, largely painless game that made me smile whenever it played a cutscene or made me feel smart when I was able to figure out the vaguely obtusely presented puzzle hints, looking forward to playing Wand of Gamelon soon.

I went into Enter the Dragonfly with hopes and mild expectations that I could go into the game and come out of it saying that the haters were wrong and that the game is pretty good actually, a reality which unfortunately was not the case, since the game really does suck. On a base level, it's an experience plagued with too many issues to be able to fully enjoy, problems that irritate more than create intrigue, and the game being very structurally similar to Year of the Dragon puts it in a position where it feels like a very boring and broken retread rather than an ambitious or otherwise interesting game that could lead to a more unique experience despite the issues. While the game feels very fundamentally similar to Year of the Dragon, a lot of the finer details have been changed for the worse to lead to everything being miserable to play through. The movement of Spyro himself is far floatier and imprecise than before, with wider turning angles and a weird sense of inertia that feels as if you need to prepare to stop and slow down far earlier than before, with tighter platforming sections feeling frustrating due to this unreliability. He also feels slower now, and this is for a few reasons. Not only is Spyro's charge speed purely slower than it was before, but the less precise controls mean that it becomes far harder to actually maintain your charge while traversing each stage, especially when combined with the fact that charge jumping is straight up broken and will often put you into a falling animation when you try gliding out of it.

The level design itself also contributes to the game feeling slower overall with the amount of big empty spaces that populate each area in the game. There's still more or less the same amount of content in each of these zones as a Year of the Dragon world, but everything is made slower, so it feels like you're spending more time in each zone. Stages feel as if someone got the scale tool and just used it on all of them, leading to a lot of dead air with some gems randomly scattered about sometimes, which makes everything feel way too spacious and tedious to get around in. The side objectives are unfortunately no better, with clunky controls and mechanics that often feel very unfinished, especially in the flying vehicle levels with the enemy projectiles being almost impossible to see. The game almost always is rough in ways that make it slower to play however, and this further contributes to each stage feeling as long as it is despite only containing slightly more content than your average YOTD world, with everything else in the game also feeling slower than it ought to. The breath mechanic is also woefully underutilised, with each type only having one or two specific use-cases and otherwise functioning as a different looking flame breath, which made acquiring all of them feel very pointless, being more akin to an attempt at creating a unique selling point in the game to justify its inclusion in the series, but not really having the time to properly implement actual instances of utility to them, leading to it being one of many elements of the game that feels underbaked to the point of it still being raw.

Everything in this game screams that it was unfinished and does not stop reminding you of this fact in every facet of its existence. Not only is the framerate constantly tanking for just playing the game normally, but everything has some glitch or example of lack of polish plastered all over it. Some of the worst examples of this are to do with sound effects and how they'll often be very delayed or just not play at all, same with animations being mistimed, making any action you perform lose a lot of its impact, or how the gems have such little draw distance. The latter issue is one of the most egregious issues with the game in general, since the stages are so much more spread out, making a core collectible something that doesn't render in until you're rather close to it ends up encouraging the player to run across every surface in the game just in case they just didn't see something because they weren't close enough to do that. The game doesn't handle this in a way that rewards exploration however, as there are very few hidden areas for extra gems and the like, it just has you running across empty spaces while hoping that you find something shiny within those wastelands. Despite not trying to break the game, there were also a lot of glitches that took me out of things in the moment a bit as well, sometimes majorly so as swathes of the level would not load in, or enemies would not attack and instead lifelessly rotate in place.

Even ignoring the polish side of things, the unfinished state of the game is impossible to miss regardless. One of the most immediately noticeable ways this popped up for me was with how cutscenes were used, with there being only 3 in total, with one at the start, one halfway through that felt like it was initially meant to be the 2nd half of the opening cutscene, and one at the very end of the game. It's made even stranger by the fact that the final cutscene only happens if you beat the game with 100% game completion, which I did, and it was not worth it (surprising absolutely nobody). There isn't even a cutscene to signify when the final boss portal opens up, or any signifier that it has at all unless you go past it and see that it's no longer closed, which further contributes to an already lacklustre experience somehow feel disappointing in how anticlimactic it is. Most characters will only appear once before never showing up again, most confusingly with Moneybags being in the first area and then disappearing forever without even providing a way to get those gems back by the end of the game, kinda defeating the whole purpose of having a character that exists to provide gems with a more tangible value and purpose.

Overall, despite the fact that this is so fundamentally similar to Year of the Dragon, the execution of it is subpar to the point where it feels awful to play, exuding a constant aura of mild irritation and lacking in anything especially notable outside of the way that it can barely hold itself together. I can't even find myself enjoying being able to take in the sights, because most of them are awful, with the shoddy fog effects over the washed out, muddy colouration making it a dreary slog to have to be there at all. The character models don't help either, genuinely horrible animations that feel the need to be uncannily moving all around with each word spoken. Even if you ignored the glitches and lack of polish, this is a very boring game to me, but when including all the other stuff, it just makes me disappointed. The OST is cool and the Monkey Monastery level is an exception to a lot of this for me, but it's not enough to culminate in something that I found even remotely enjoyable beyond moments of being utterly baffled at something I'd just seen,

A game that goes absolutely off the rails in the best kind of way. While Spyro 1 was a very simple game that focused on one thing, and Spyro 2 was a more well-rounded, filled out experience, Year of the Dragon throws as many ideas as it can think of into the game, stuffing it with a wild amount of content with reckless abandon, sacrificing cohesion in favour of an unpredictable game that always has a curveball waiting for you. While undoubtedly less consistent than the first 2 entries, feeling less finished than them as well, I can't help but appreciate this kitchen sink approach a lot for how many weird and wonderful moments it leads to, and it makes the game as a whole an absolute joy to play.

The style of side objectives that the player experiences is the biggest point of deviation from the 2nd game, and results in the most divisive element of it as well. The 2nd game largely utilised Spyro's basic movement options and had the surrounding elements contribute to the individual tasks that you needed to do, with the behaviour of the enemies and environment being the main factor that provided variety, with the couple of exceptions such as the trolley of Breeze Harbour being very rare moments that stood out a lot. In contrast, Year of the Dragon messes about with gameplay styles a lot, not only having 5 other playable characters that control differently, but adding some vehicle sections in for good measure, with further gameplay styles often found within that. The Agent 9 missions especially feel emblematic of this approach, being a 3rd person shooter in his own level, but then having every other instance of him in the game take on a different control scheme, with one being top-down, one being a rail shooter, and other one being a Doom inspired FPS. His missions are also emblematic of the fact that Year of the Dragon is not afraid to put the player through some janky nonsense, as most of those missions are very rough to control, regardless of how neat it is that they exist in any capacity. This is echoed through the entire game, as while there are some places where it works well enough for what it needs to do, for every cool skateboarding or submarine section, there's a barely functional boxing or slide section close by.

This focus on minigames and similar side objectives ends up being a cause for a lot of the core approach to individual level design to be changed as well, taking one step further away from cohesion since in all fairness, it would probably be extremely hard to naturally incorporate most of these additional setpieces into the one stage without leaving huge chunks emptiness all over the place, but still being compelling despite this. Now a lot of the extra objectives are separated by portals, with the main stage being made more linear and straightforward, with most deviations being additional, longer paths rather than small aspects of the level that sneakily hide a few extra gems or the like. While this isn't my preferred approach to these games, it has its own unique properties that make it appealing in its own regard, especially with how it ties into the game as a whole having a far more surreal, dreamlike quality to them, rather than the unbridled whimsy of Ripto's Rage. Little thought has been put into how these stages within the world itself, the inhabitants just exist in these themed locations and it's treated as normal, you're told how certain areas function and events that happen even when it's clearly playing out differently to how it's been described and it all feels very disconnected in a way that ends up wrapping around to being a very similar atmosphere to Spyro 1 in places, only this time the world feels more populated. While the stages don't invite a similar sense of needing to explore the boundaries of the space you exist in, many stages are still able to feel extremely expansive, as if you're only able to see a small slice of something far greater, but this time there are a few more instances of something completely different jumping out at you as well.

Everything about Buzz's fight especially stands out to me in this regard, with landscape being hellish, further supported by the music and the strange, grotesque design of Buzz himself. It's intimidating and lacks a lot of the usual lighter feel that the game has, but is also the first boss and nothing in the game comes close to this again, with even later boss fights being in more mysterious arenas as opposed to surrounding you with mountains and lava, not to mention that the boss designs themselves are far more "normal" despite being imposing nonetheless. I also love what they did with Moneybags in this game, transforming him from a greedy roadblock into someone who's downright malicious in his attempts to squeeze every last gem out of Spyro, no longer just being content with blocking doors, but actively imprisoning animals and even trying to peddle a dragon egg, being far more smug about the whole ordeal as well, blatantly mentioning that he's being paid off by the sorceress as well. His presence also contributes to the Sorceress being a far more insidious force in the story as a whole, providing many more tangible examples of awful stuff she's doing, and while she still isn't as fun or interesting a Ripto, it's appreciated and continues adding that slightly darker edge to what's otherwise a really bright and charming game.

While this game is far less cohesive and is packed with a few sections and ideas that are genuinely insufferable, Spyro Year of the Dragon makes up for it by using its disparate elements in a way to craft its own unique feel, one based on its own incongruencies and constant need to expand outwards, rather than refine which ultimately leads to an experience that works so well because of its inconsistencies, rather than despite them. The worlds are so bright and charming, there's more weird stuff to spice things up than ever before, so much about the game embodies the PSX jank that I'm so fond of, I just adore it even if it doesn't lean into the same collectathon appeal that makes me so enamoured with the first game.

Considering the fact that Spyro 1 was such a laser-focused experience that was extremely successful at accomplishing what it was attempting to do, it makes sense that the sequel would expand outwards to such a degree, rather than going down the route of refining what was already there. While the first game was almost purely a collectathon with everything else existing simply to elevate the act of collecting, Spyro 2 focuses more on being an more well-rounded gaming experience, filling in a lot of the spaces that the first game had left, resulting in something that feels a more formally "complete". You've now got NPCs that exist in the world beyond being utilised as collectibles, cutscenes beyond the opening and closing one, boss fights, side objective, just a ton of new stuff to sink your teeth into. I don't really love it as much as the first game for that exact reason, with all of these other objectives detracting a bit from the raw experience of "existing in a place", but the game manages to feel magical despite this.


The level design in general feels far less sparsely populated than before, not only adding more overall detail to each stage to make them feel more lived in, but also ensuring that there are other friendly entities in each of them, making the stages always feel more inviting even when hostility is never too far away. Rather than dropping the player in more non-descript areas that feel entirely taken over by the enemies, feeling otherwise devoid of life, the atmosphere here is more akin to walking somewhere that's in the middle of some kind of inconvenient, chaotic problem that you can still solve, with robot bugs eating crops or rock golems interrupting a party, rather than just throwing you into the aftermath of a bad situation. This gives the game its own charm and sense of whimsy that gives each stage a greater sense of variety, with the narrative elements of each stage bolstering the visual theming, making the act of getting to the end of each stage feel like a completely different undertaking, even when they're fundamentally the same with minor differences. While the pure collecting aspect of the game is less prominent, not really having as many stages with especially tricky to grab gems as long as you do a basic sweep of any given stage, the level design stands out by the way it connects its side objectives into the world.

There are a ton of orb minigames throughout the game, but the vast majority of these are built into the stage in such a way that they'll take place within some regular part of the stage that's completely accessible even if you've decided not to undertake these side objectives. It causes the vast majority of the minigames to feel very naturally implemented into the world, rarely feeling as if an area was designed purely as a vessel for a minigame, even if realistically, it 100% was. Most of them are fun as well, finding a lot of clever ways to utilise Spyro's core moveset, with there only being a couple of instances of completely altering the gameplay style. This gives everything a real sense of cohesion, especially when factoring in the fact that there are less areas in this game, but all of them are of relatively even quality as well.

The bosses in this game are also the best in the series from what I've seen, with there being only 3 main ones, but each of them being fantastically designed to feel threatening, varied and relatively involved fights, at least by the standards of your average 3D platformer boss. Gulp especially succeeds in this, both in how the player is meant to damage him, but also in how you're meant to avoid certain attacks, requiring quick thinking and careful positioning, since the weapons you need to use to hurt him can also be utilised by him to hurt you instead. It gives the battle a frantic energy, where you're having to carefully line yourself up to hit him, but can't be too slow about it since that will just lead to it being used against you instead. Moments like this that utilise Spyro's movement in a more active way are a lot of fun and extremely welcome in a game that focuses more strongly on the capabilities of Spyro, rather than purely about the surrounding world.

The game is also really funny, both in more overt ways with the dialogue and some characters looking incredibly goofy (Hunter's design is perfect and it makes him merely existing something really funny), but also some more subtle ways. The biggest example of this is how Ripto is presented as such a non-threatening villain through most of the the game, not just with how all the cutscenes show him as a bumbling idiot, but also with how this is the one game in the original trilogy that doesn't have a type of enemy directly associated with the main villain. Each world here just has its own separate issue completely disconnected from Ripto, nobody mentions him outside of the hub worlds, and his influence is nowhere to be seen at any point. His presence is still felt to an extent due to the focus on him in the hub worlds, but it's always funny to see that he has such little reach that no other world even knows of his existence. Moneybags is another favourite of mine, introducing a way to give gems a greater sense of value and also being another constant source of humour. I love how he just seems to have his hands in everything going on across the realms and always figures out a way to charge Spyro for it, he's just this omnipresent figure who'll exist in 7 different places in one location just because he sees a potential way to take more treasure from you.

Overall this is an incredibly good game that adds a ton to the Spyro experience. There are occasional issues with the game, with some of the orb challenges being on the more obnoxious side of things (the headbash mission in Fracture Hills being placed directly after the alchemist is a rough misstep in particular), but this is an incredible time nonetheless, even if I still prefer the approach the first game took. While the game may add a lot of additional distractions from the core idea of wandering around absolutely beautiful looking worlds, that appeal is still present to a great enough extent that I end up adoring almost every second of my time with this game regardless, and it'll probably be a more enjoyable game to you if you thought that the first game's loop wasn't engaging enough on its own to carry you through an entire game of it.

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.

A game comprised of cool moments surrounded by a sea of things that get worse the more I think about them, with constant attempts to expand upon the world of Final Fantasy VII only serving to lessen the sense of wonder felt from it all. There were definitely elements that kept me hooked from start to finish, but it was often a bit of an uphill battle, as if I was being dragged along by the promise of something amazing waiting for me at the end, and while I cannot deny the fact that I did end up getting that with the ending, I struggle to say that the journey to that point was an especially fulfilling one. Everything this game does just feels a bit weird in general, with ideas that don't mesh together especially well, but don't carry enough charming incongruency to define the experience as anything other than stilted and unsatisfying.

The writing is where I feel especially conflicted, because while I love Zack's character, and will inherently appreciate the game on some level whenever Sephiroth is on screen, things come apart at the seams in most other areas. Crisis Core's narrative falls into the pretty common prequel trappings of attempting to explain and contextualise a lot of concepts from the original in ways that ultimately remove some of the magic that was present. Most unique elements from the original are now presented as something that there are actually multiple of instead, things that have totally existed before this one shown example. The best parts of this game's story are also just the parts that were already established as events in the original Final Fantasy VII, with most of the purely new ideas in this being a bit insufferable, even when taking into account that I normally love the sense of earnest campiness that this game embodies. The game's brevity unfortunately makes its pacing feel rather strange in particular, as it feels as if the game is attempting to reach a sense of scope and spectacle far greater than its short runtime properly allows, making the majority of the plot points feel very shallow and rushed through, never being given enough time to fully breathe and develop, being left feeling more like sketches of interesting ideas that never fully see fruition.

Of course, there are some bits that I just wholeheartedly dislike as well. Aerith's writing feels especially egregious in this game, removing all personality she had and boiling her existence down to someone who spends the entire game fawning over Zack and generally feeling strangely dumb and childish, not even in a way that a child would typically act though, she's just written so flatly that everything surrounding her also becomes less compelling. Genesis also sucks, he's fun at first but by the end of the game, his routine of reading out another passage from LOVELESS and tying it back into the events that are currently occurring is just tiresome. With all that said though, the ending of the game definitely is as good as people say, it feels like the rest of the game was built around that final sequence and the payoff was powerful enough to emotionally hit me even when I was becoming thoroughly disinterested with almost everything that was happening beforehand.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is where Crisis Core fumbles the most, being painfully tedious while also carrying a lot of prominent flaws that were exacerbated the longer the game went on. In theory, I think that the way the gameplay of this is kinda neat, bringing a more prominent real-time aspect into the Final Fantasy combat system, being halfway between an action rpg and a turn-based one, but the way it's handled left a lot to be desired. Everything that Zack does feels sluggish, with attacks being slow, blocking only being an option if you're not midway into another animation, and rolling being a very hit-or-miss mechanic. A lot of enemies have attacks that feel as if the intent was for the player to time a roll to dodge them, but the animations just don't line up in a way that will allow you to escape taking damage regardless, with the bigger, flashy combos always just being better to walk away from and not engage with the patterns in any way beyond knowing when a combo starts and when it ends. This puts the game in a position where each encounter will either feel fun to fight but look pretty boring, or vice versa, either sacrificing spectacle or enjoyment with interacting with the game mechanics.

The DMW system also really doesn't do it for me either, with the constant slot machine in the top left of the UI being a really unsatisfying way of handling level-ups and temporary buffs during combat. While it's clear that the DMW is not entirely random in the way it functions, anything provided to the player through this still doesn't quite feel as engaging or exciting as it should, due to the presentation of these upgrades still making it feel like luck. While it's clear that a big part of the game is to capitalise on the moments that you're powered up by this system to use your tools to their fullest potential, having such a pivotal element of the game be entirely out of your control feels pretty bad. I hate the way that the limits will also make the game halt its momentum and make you watch the DMW coming to a stop every time as well, it got tiring very early on and by the end could only be described as maddening. Bonuses being handed up via luck feels bad regardless of which difficulty the game is played on, since it either feels so easy that the DMW just feels as if it's handing you the win, or so tedious and frustrating that a lot of your victories will feel more due to luck than anything to do with you actually playing well. The side quests definitely contribute to the fact that the difficulty balancing is extremely off, since doing even a small portion of them will still be enough to put you in a position where you feel practically unstoppable in the main story. Unfortunately, the rewards you get from a lot of these is pretty essential to make full use of the combat system, since this is how the player can ultimately be given a lot of additional items and materia to give them the more interesting combat tools, making these side quests in an awkward position where they simultaneously provide the player with the means of more deeply experimenting with the game's systems, while also leaving them in a position where doing so it practically pointless since you'll be destroying everything anyway.

This game just didn't hit the way I was expecting it to, despite having so much that by all rights, normally would be up my alley. Crisis Core made me understand why Zack is such a beloved character, and gave me more Sephiroth, but beyond that, this just felt empty. Interacting with the game's systems was consistently unsatisfying, combat felt limp, half of the cast was a bore at best, and its focus on painfully repetitive side quests affected the main game's experience to such an extent that I'd say to just skip the vast majority of them if not that this is also the way to unlock more stuff to actually add a bit more complexity to the moment to moment gameplay. On the positive side of things, I at least now feel like I almost know enough FF7 stuff to get the most out of the remake.

Strange game, but definitely a very cool one still. The way the narrative and gameplay feel entirely disparate from one another is at first a bit strange, but these two sides end up being individually compelling enough to make it work well nonetheless. The narrative is easily the biggest draw of this to me though, with it being pretty simple for the most part, but conveyed in a way that strongly elevated the experience of getting to see another scene after each round of the game. It's especially strong in the way the main plot of the random disappearances is complemented by these mysterious notes that are undoubtedly linked to the events that are transpiring while simultaneously feeling very detached from the world of the game thanks to the way they're implemented.

The actual gameplay was surprisngly engaging to me as well, following a similar baseline to falling block puzzle games, but the method of controlling all the pieces in this one made it pretty cool as well. Since the movement of pieces is done via launching blocks at them as they slowly fall, it provides a certain sense of erratic control, with your plans often going a bit awry due to accidentally hitting a piece at the wrong angle, sending it flying in a direction you didn't quite intend. It leads to a dynamic where getting better at the game is not just a case of better understanding where pieces should be positioned, but also getting better at the mechanical skill of actually being able to get them into that planned position, and improvising when things go off the rails. Surprisingly ended up putting a few hours into this as a result, especially since the music is fantastic, being deeply melancholic, yet hypnotic. Overall this is just a cool game that incorporates its meta elements in a neat way, I wish that I could have unlocked metsu mode without having to have gotten such a high score on regular mode, since that's really where the game gets especially good on both fronts to me, but even so, I liked this one.

If Final Fantasy VI was basically just a group of wizards pushing a game system to its absolute limit in terms of capabilities, Final Fantasy VII is more akin to a ramshackle amalgamation of jankily implemented ideas, held together with old bits of duct tape. Despite how the latter option sounds though, it also fits the kind of gameplay experience that I have a certain fondness of, never being short of ideas whatsoever, just throwing more weird stuff at the wall and watching it lightly come apart at the seams, all tied together with the rest of the game going all out in making setpieces that feel utterly massive in scope. The game in general feels really big in a way that led to it having this effect where I'd often feel the need take big breaks in between play sessions and almost dread returning, but then I'd pick it up again and become enthralled all over again, and by the end I felt pretty confident in this being something that's almost as amazing as people have said for quite some time.

The game strikes this great balance of being incredibly goofy for a lot of its runtime while still maintaining just enough elements of self-seriousness to keep you engaged in the actual narrative going on. Time and time again, the stakes of what's broadly going on around the player is contrasted by a lot of funny character interactions, especially from Cloud, who continues trying to appear very solemn but ends up just being really awkward and a bit in over his head, especially with some of the dialogue options you get in the first half of the game. I really like the way that the game being so consistently off the wall in the first half also works at making the big turning point of the game hit so much harder once all of this is torn away, leaving some moments of levity, but having them be very few and far between.

In terms of the core gameplay, I felt that this took some interesting steps forward to the systems found in FF6, especially with how Materia feels like an evolution of espers in a lot of regards, and one that I like a lot more. One of my biggest problems with the mechanics of FF6 was the way that the espers essentially meant that all of your characters could do anything as long as you put a bit of time in to grind those abilities, limiting the sense of mechanical individuality each character would have outside of their core special ability. While at a glance, the ability to assign any materia to anyone seems to have the same effect, the limited materia slots each character can have will leave each party member in a certain role of your choosing anyway, since there aren't really enough slots to be able to let everyone do everything. This is further bolstered by the stat changes that the materia gives when equipping it, often lowering a couple of stats while raising others, giving a nice layer of strategy to team composition. I like this as a way to make each piece of new equipment feel a bit more interesting and exciting as well, as the more powerful pieces of gear will often come with more materia slots as well. This makes getting better gear not just feel like a statistical bonus, but an opportunity to further expand upon your battle strategy and team complexity.

The combat itself is rather easy for the most part, but provides sufficient enough roadblocks for players who try completely turning their brains off and mashing through everything, it feels comfortable, yet rewards a bit of thought as well. This leads to there being nothing in the main game that requires any grinding as long as you're smart about things, which is especially nice, given that for the first time in the FF series, the random encounters feel sparse enough to almost never be intrusive, which makes the exploration feel more fun. I also love the limit break system, not only for the spectacle of it all, but also with how it manages to make enemies using powerful attacks feel exciting, as while you're obviously damaged and now likely in a rough position, you're a lot closer to being able to unleash something big of your own, making for a wonderful bit of give and take.

This isn't to say that the combat is flawless however, as there are definitely some issues that became increasingly annoying as the game went on. I feel like with each passing game, the ATB system has felt more intrusive and annoying, with this being the peak of that for a few reasons. The reason why I thought this was a neat system in FF4 mainly was because of the little quirks in the character loadouts that specifically played out in ways that wouldn't translate quite as well in pure turn based gameplay, such as making twincast feel cooler because of its slowly charging bar, but by FF7, an instance of this stuff is almost nowhere to be seen, making it feel superfluous at best. These issues are exacerbated by the UI, as while it's visually appealing, it's so big that it barely shows any actual information either. This is most egregious when you need to scroll your inventory for an item and only 3 of them can be shown on screen at once, leading to a lot of scrolling while the enemies are still able to keep attacking, it just feels awful all around, and while the other abilities you can use aren't quite as egregious as this, it's a common problem that becomes especially frustrating once you're far enough in the game that this can become very costly. Other elements of the UI that felt bothersome were the way that targeting had a tendency to be quite finicky due to the shifting camera angles and fact that there aren't really any strong bits of feedback to let you know what you're targeting unless you press a separate button to bring up another element that clutters the screen more.

The game is still very fun despite these issues though. The constant minigames were always a highlight to me, especially with the way that no matter how simple something seemed, it was actually horribly broken in one way or another. While I get that not everyone's sentiment would quite be the same as mine here, I couldn't help but smile whenever one of these appeared and brought forth a new frontier of barely functioning nonsense. After all, how can you not at least find a bit of comedy in your ascent up to one of the most significant moments in the narrative having a random snowboarding section that controls horrifically? It's not just the jank that I find endearing in the game though, as the game can pull off some absolutely fantastic bits of spectacle when it wants to, with the fearsome power of the Weapons being especially notable, easily standing out as one of the coolest things in any of the Final Fantasy games up to this point. Thanks to them, along with a few other specific points in the story, disc 2 ends up being this constant thrill, overcoming the one other big issue I had with FF6, that being its largely uninteresting 2nd half.

This game is just awesome, everything feels so big and flashy, with the summons especially benefitting from this. The experience is undoubtedly a bit of a mess, with the seams being very visible all over the place, along with there clearly being some ideas that were added very late into development and ended up being visibly half-baked as a result, but what we got here is still a phenomenal achievement.

I feel like I could sustain myself off of old 3D collectathons that largely just boil down to "look around this sparse stage for a while" without much hassle, and Jumping Flash is especially appealing in this regard due to the ways it deviates from its contemporaries. The first person perspective is the big point of difference here, which when combined with the player character's mobility, leads to a very different dynamic to what I'm used to in these sorts of games. Jumping Flash is one of the more interesting examples of the player character fundamentally feeling more powerful than the world surrounding them can cater towards as well, notably with Robbit's insane jump height.

With the triple jump you have access to, it's incredibly easy to clear most gaps and entirely bypass a lot of the little challenges presented to you, leading to the stages feeling extremely open, especially when taking into account how the art direction makes each stage feel quite sparse and expansive, with the short render distance and perpetual fogginess contributing to this atmosphere most of all. While on its own, this idea could just lead to a game with no real sense of friction, certain other limitations imposed upon you cause everything to fall into place. The tank controls prevent you from being able to easily avoid most things the enemy throws at you, along with making you unable to effectively aim your guns in an efficient manner. This shifts the dynamic of the experience to one that feels far more invested in getting the player to pick and choose when to interact with the game in a more traditional way and when to just fly over everything or avoid danger altogether in some other way.

This focus loops back to the individual stages feeling far more engaging due to those occasional moments where the player will need to interact with the environment conventionally feeling far more impactful due to their relative infrequency. The camera also gives extra weight to the verticality of each level, as you need to actively tilt it up to actually see what's above, allowing the pickups to be more easily hidden above the player. The game's sense of scale is also bolstered thanks to this, doubly so due to the way that the camera will pan down whenever you become airborne, forcing you to regularly see just how high up you are at any given time. Overall just a really cute game that does a lot of cool weird stuff with its fundamentals and culminates in a very unique, very charming experience.

This game rules, while the Castlevania series in general is essentially a celebratory mishmash of classic horror iconography, Rondo of Blood feels like a celebratory mishmash of Castlevania iconography while also being one of the coolest games out there. This is also the point where everything starts leaning harder into an aesthetic that's more anime and a bit more upbeat. It's made even better by the fact that said anime influence bears far more resemblance to the style of shoujo during that era, with the way that Maria straight up looks like a magical girl being especially fun.

Everything in this feels like an escalation of what was established in previous games, locations being far more chaotic than ever before, each enemy on its own being considerably more aggressive, returning music being waaay funkier, it just hits you all at once, sustains that intensity for the entire game, and brings along some of the tightest level design in the series at the same time. One of my favourite examples of this is the difference in how the player is expected to handle the axe armour enemies. In previous entries these would be handled by a mix of dodging and deflecting if the moment called for it, but here, dodging or anything else similarly defensive will ultimately overwhelm the player due to how quickly these enemies attack now, instead requiring the player to successfully deflect every projectile thrown at them. Instances like this appear all over the game, and make each encounter feel like 2 extremely strong forces being put up against one another, rather than the more oppressive nature of the situations that previous Belmonts found themselves in.

Obviously this is a matter of taste, but I do prefer this feel a bit more in this instance, even though both are good and have their place, it's just that Castlevania in general is so, so good at this specifically that I can't help love it wholeheartedly. I'm also very fond of the way the level design is handled here, feeling like a middle point between Castlevania 1 and Super Castlevania IV, being both a faster paced gauntlet, but carrying on for that bit longer than is comfortable to test your endurance as well. This works well as a way to balance out the item crashes being absurdly powerful, preventing them from being an instant win, but not making it overly tough to succeed if you eschew the use of them either. The alternate paths also go a long way in adding a bit of neat exploration to the experience, never really being a dominant enough force to take you out of that core loop, but providing more depth to the stages and making the game feel fun and varied on subsequent playthroughs as well.

Honestly just one of the coolest games ever while also being one of the most finely crafted in the series as well. In a series of games that I could gladly play through countless times and just continue soaking in everything about how it looks, sounds and feels, this is one of the ones I feel most inclined to play constantly, it's just peak gaming right here.

The big favourite of this era of the series and for good reason, I still prefer FFV but it's not difficult to see why this one is put up on such a pedestal either. FFVI essentially takes the more maximalist elements of the previous entries in the series and takes them to even greater heights to make for one of the coolest games on the system. It's not strictly the ambition present here that makes me adore this game, as much as it is the fact that this specific brand of ambition is so off-kilter. There are a ton of ideas here that are just downright strange or at the very least, feel like a vaguely absurd undertaking, and seeing all of those converge in this ultimately results in something far greater than the sum of its parts.

The presentation is easily the element of this game that feels like it's taken the biggest jump from previous entries with the way that it's as if it took advantage of basically every capability that the SNES had in order to craft something that felt truly cinematic for its era. This most clearly show up in the way that there even the smaller plot points will often really pile on the extravagance in one way or another, with the first half of the game especially feeling like a string of extremely memorable setpieces where even the smallest of moments can feel exciting and memorable. It never really gets old either in this regard, both because of the fact that the most significant parts of the game are still greatly elevated compared to everything else here, and that it seems somewhat uninterested in the idea of it all perfectly fitting together.

So many instances across this experience where there will just be a random, neat idea thrown into the mix that doesn't quite pan out in an especially polished way, especially with a couple of chase sequences that make use of mode-7, but end up feeling like an indistinguishable mass of dark pixels that make you barely able to decipher what's going on at the best of times. While I definitely could see this being a negative for some people, it all adds to the experience to me to see how many different directions these conceptually cool ideas go in. A similar thing can be seen with the combat mechanics of the characters being all over the place, with the blitz commands especially standing out as being a bit of a baffling choice to just throw in, not to mention everything about how Gau works. It's all a bit unbalanced and weird, but I can't really find much fault in it when that gets balanced out by being able to mess about with that weirdness.

One thing that I do find fault in however, is how a lot of the combat and party composition tends to flow thanks to the way magic and espers work here. The customisation that this provides is interesting to an extent, essentially allowing any character to do whatever magic stuff they want, but it ultimately homogenises the party a fair bit, especially since magic is undoubtedly the dominant force in the game. While FFV also allowed the player to change each character into whatever they felt like, the limit on how many job abilities could be carried over ended up leaving the player in a situation where they'd almost always have some sort of blind spot in their party that you'd have to compensate for in some way, or even change jobs around to suit particular situations. In comparison, this FFVI just lets any character do everything at once with magic if you put in a bit of time into grinding those spells out, and it's the type of choice that makes me just, stop caring much about the dynamics of combat when I can give everyone level 3 spells and a couple of characters Ultima without needing to do any additional grinding or strategising, they can just get it as long as you remember to swap out espers regularly enough.

While the game is more focused on the narrative and spectacle of everything, this doesn't even bother me too much, as it acts more as a backdrop to the elements of the game that I connected with far more, but with the shift in priority that these two elements are in the 2nd half, where dungeon crawling etc. is far more prevalent, it starts to fall apart a bit. Without much effort, you can hit the point where almost everything in your path entirely crumbles as you're getting multiple characters up to the point where they'll be hitting the damage cap every turn without having to have put in any real effort to hit that point. It's a bit dull in itself, but when it's the vast majority of what you'll be doing in that 2nd half, it just drags, and is one case where I'd also say that the game suffers a bit from the massive cast of party members you can amass, since it does lead to there being sooo many places you need to explore without anything really progressing.

Another way that the big cast ends up having its issues is the way that it hits a point where a lot of the backstories end up feeling the same with how it feels like half of them have a dead loved one of some sort that has led them to internalise certain things in the rather similar ways to one another, and while the first couple of these instances work exceptionally well, especially with everything surrounding the phantom train, by the time you've hit the 2nd half and there are still more people revealing similar backstories, it gets tiresome. I also think it's a bit strange how Cyan's big moments of character development in the 2nd half occur while he's not even fully present, along with the fact that he ends up serving a pretty minor role despite having such a strong introduction that gives him some incredible motivation to have been far more actively involved in the plot. Kefka is cool though, he bears a lot of similarities to some past villains with how he's just, absolutely evil and will not hesitate to ruin everything surrounding him on a whim, but he is my favourite of the FF villains so far because of how unhinged he is about it all, replacing the more stoic disposition that the previous ones had with one that's unsettlingly gleeful and volatile without losing that threatening aura.

Despite my complaining, I also can't deny that this game rules, especially in terms of how everything is presented. It's unafraid to throw weird shit at the player just because it could potentially be cool, and I appreciate that borderline reckless maximalism, especially when it's varied enough in those ideas to keep you on your toes throughout, and all of this is further enhanced by the masterful soundtrack, with Dancing Mad especially being as good as everyone says.