A man dressed in black holds a young woman at gunpoint. He's a hitman, hired to erase all those who possess knowledge about something our unlucky gal has stumbled upon. Between her and the barrel of the shotgun is a man, who realizes what's going on and wants to do something to help. Except... he's already dead, his body lying face down in the ground, and his disembodied spirit just watching helplessly.

Not all is lost: with the help of another ghost nearby, he learns of a spirit's ability to possess and manipulate various objects, as well as, when faced with a corpse, the unbelievable power turn back time to just before that person died. After a bit of trying, he is able to prevent the girl from being assassinated. All is well! Only, he's still dead. Even worse... he has no idea who he is, or why he died. With the girl he saved being the only person who might have a clue about what transpired, he elects to follow her, and the night that follows is a sequence of ever more unbelievable events.

Coming out of several years in a row working on the Ace Attorney series, director Shu Takumi wanted to try something different, creating a new IP that pushed the beloved style character-focused stories of his previous works even further. To achieve that, he planned on using a disembodied spirit as a protagonist as a means to explore multiple locations and connect more intimately with more characters, in a way a person with a physical body wouldn't be able to. This opus took years to come into fruition, and how cruel it was that, in the saturated and piracy-ravaged market of the Nintendo DS's later years, it earned the label "cult classic" instead of the shorter and more deserved "classic".

Ghost Trick is an adventure game unlike any other ever made. Its unique style of puzzle gameplay puts the player in control of Sissel, the amnesiac spirit, whose most basic ability is to hop between highlighted objects in a scene and use them in some way, like moving a cart or turning on a light. In the most basic stages of Ghost Trick, that's just his goal: traverse a certain location to cause something to happen, or to eavesdrop on a conversation and obtain a piece of information.

Everything changes once he finds a dead body and travels back in time to exactly four minutes before that person's passed away. We're presented with the sequence of events that led to that death, and are then set loose in the scene with the goal of altering it and preventing that terrible outcome. Naturally, Sissel cannot talk or otherwise directly interact with anyone in the past, so in case he needs to change someone's behaviour, he must use his powers over objects to induce them into the desired course of action.

These sections are superb puzzles. They force the player to go through the scene several times, understanding what are the pivotal moments in the scene and what tools they have to work with. Sometimes, it's a simple matter of finding the right timing to perform a certain action, or finding a way to gain more time. In other occasions, the paths Sissel can take in a certain location must be thoroughly explored in order to gain more information and act appropriately. There's even cases where more elaborate chains of object manipulations must be enacted -- if the thought of preventing crimes by building Rube Goldberg machines sounds appealing in any way, this is the game you need to play.

More than the puzzles themselves, however, what's most intriguing is their execution. A pitfall games centered around puzzles often fall in is that those get in the way of the narrative, especially towards the end of the campaign where the difficulty is at its highest. Ghost Trick, on the other hand, follows in the footsteps of Ace Attorney, interleaving them with action and character moments. In addition, as the story progresses, the game focuses on offering a larger variety of puzzles through exploring different locations and featuring new characters instead of scaling the difficulty. Both of these decisions confer a flawless pacing to the narrative. The final section of the game, in particular, is so extraordinarily well paced that it doesn't feel like playing a game, but being part of a story yourself.

A story which is in itself, exceptional, and alone worth the price of admission. Shu Takumi was cooking he put forth the idea of a ghost used to explore a large cast: there are many, many characters in Ghost Trick, all of them worthy of being someone's favorite, and the game has the time and means to move between scenes, giving each person time on the spotlight and exploring their personality and motivations. Of note is that Ghost Trick is home to the single best dog in all of gaming: Missile, the Pomeranian, based on Shu Takumi's real life dog at the time, is a standout character whose energy and charm wins over just about anyone who plays the game for a bit. The uncontested best boy.

Each scene in Ghost Trick is rendered in a sidescrolling 2D view, which is in itself pretty rare for a narrative game, but the way the story is presented is what really makes the game shine: the scene direction treats each sideways view of a location as a stage, making heavy use of theater language to convey thoughts, emotions and information to the spectator. This is reinforced by the team's rejection of motion capture, which led them to hand-animate the flashiest, most unique and detailed animations for each character, sometimes establishing a character's entire personality simply from the way they walk into the stage. The game's flat colors and strong shapes may make every frame of it a painting, but seeing it in motion is the truly breathtaking part.

Ghost Trick's only debatable flaw is that the story being told here is so extensive and so complex that it makes the experience into one the player has to give credence to, and has to be willing to stick with to the end. The script very slowly unveils its hand, and it might feel, at times, like certain arcs were forgotten or huge plot holes are being opened. And that's not true: the plot is masterfully paced and paints a complete and concise picture by the time the credits roll, but because that process takes time, it demands a certain openness from the player, a willingness to engage with the narrative and let it unfold on its own time.

Which is to say, its only flaw is being too good for its own sake, a demerit that can no doubt be worn as a badge of honor. Ghost Trick is an exhilarating experience, and it is a blessing that it survived its weak sales performance on the DS and went on to be ported and remade for other platforms. Sissel's supernatural adventure between the worlds of the living and the dead deserves to be seen and enjoyed by more people.

A while ago, I was talking to a friend about RPGs we liked, and Dragon Age: Origins came up as one of mine. They replied that they tried playing it once and found it too dated. I had just started a new playthrough then, and thought that that absolutely couldn't be the case, as it had felt groundbreaking back when it was released. However, as I continued that playthrough in the days that followed, with each main quest I completed, with each DLC I played, I felt myself eating my words.

DA:O's unevenness definitely shows in this decade. Its visuals, which already weren't great for the PS3 at the time, feel dated and are sometimes hard to make out, and they accompany numerous bugs and performance issues, especially on the console version. The gameplay systems also feature a myriad odd design choices that, among other things, make it shockingly hostile to a new player more in tune with modern gaming experiences, or even to one coming from BioWare's other flagship series at the time, Mass Effect.

In the realm of character development alone, we can see a few of those: between hard to understand equipment mechanics, missable items and upgrades, limited supplies of money and consumables and the inability to respec builds, there are multiple ways one can permanently screw themselves. And then there comes the balance (or lack thereof), with multiple, severe difficulty spikes, confusingly priced shop items and the presence of bugged and/or useless abilities and traits in the skill tree. Add all of that together, and simply saving at a bad time can brick an entire playthrough.

So yes, as of 2024, DA:O is huge pile of jank. My pile of jank, which I absolutely adore, regardless of its age. Having played it so many times way back in 2010, somehow, when playing it again now, I still found new outcomes to explore: the fact that the writers were able to weave such a complex narrative, with so many moving parts and possibilities, and still walk out with something coherent is a real achievement. All those years back, I had also never truly appreciated the nuances of some of the moral choices, like the crowning of a Dwarf King.

The large cast of characters shines, being packed with some truly detestable antagonists: Arl Howe is a despicable human being who, if playing as Human Noble (which, let's face it, you probably are), provides a personal motivation for the Warden character to chase him down. Loghain, on the other hand, is such a layered and complicated character, a foul man who truly, deeply believes to be doing the right thing, and facing him down in the Landsmeet brings chills to my spine every time.

The lovable sidekicks don't leave anything to be desired, either: the canon party of Leliana, Alistair and Morrigan is my favorite, with there being so much chemistry (often of the explosive kind) between the three, but the rest of the cast delivers as well. This was my first exposure to Bioware's writing, its intricate character personalities and settings, and even though, having seen more of their games since, the formula for those interactions is now evident, it does not dim their brilliance, and I still get lost in the dialogue just as much.

"That was uncharacteristically wise of you."
"Yeah, yeah, don't let that get around, I have a reputation."

Having bought the original game near its release, I had never had access to most of the (outrageously expensive) DLC packs, all of which were bundled into the Ultimate Edition. Surprisingly, all of them ranged from mid to bad: I suppose it's hard to make DLC campaigns for a game with such massive scale, where the big picture matters so much, but it's still shocking how short, rushed and uninvolving most of these extra adventures were. The BioWare touch is almost completely lost on them.

Speaking of which, as of 2024, BioWare has been repeatedly gutted by the dreaded publisher, and the future of the Dragon Age series is uncertain, with much of BioWare's original staff gone and Dreadwolf having been stuck in development hell for a while. Without the talent that made the original Dragon Age great, it's hard to see BioWare pushing the envelope again, so maybe, just maybe, they'd be willing to give Origins a Legendary Edition treatment, and polish up some bits in the process? One can only hope.

A fun side effect of writing about games, even on an amateur level, is that one ends up reflecting and researching on games a bit deeper and thus getting to know more about them than if they just hop from game to game. I originally planned to open this review by talking about the early days of the DS and PSP, how despite the DS being the best selling (and arguably best) portable in history, the two portables being presented in 2004 left audiences puzzled as to what Nintendo was thinking, and why anyone would want that quirky thing instead of the much slicker PSP. That's because I believed that to be the cause for Konami opting to play it safe and make the first DS Castlevania a sequel -- an assumption which proved incorrect.

No, Iga was pretty much sold on the DS from the start, and Aria of Sorrow's great sales on a Nintendo platform sealed the deal on the DS as the host for the next portable entry in the Castlevania series. As for why make a direct sequel, in particular, that is owed to Iga knowing that he and his team had accomplished something special with Aria, both in terms of storyline and gameplay. Iga truly loves the soul system from that game, and that would become even more evident years later, with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, but I digress.

As a direct sequel to Aria, Dawn of Sorrow might get criticised for being a rethreading of known ground, but the fact of the matter is, it's rethreading some damn solid ground. Most of what I mention in my Aria of Sorrow review applies to its sequel as well, from the robust gameplay systems to the beautiful sprite art. There are some areas in which Dawn attempts to stand out from its prequel, some of which are successful, some of which, not so much.

Immediately apparent from the cover of the game is that the art style for character art was changed, moving away from Ayami Kojima's (gorgeous) character portraits to... somewhat generic anime art. This change is said to be a result of demographics, with portable gamers being mainly children and, as such, it making sense to use character art that appealed more to that age group. Unfortunately, none of us happened to be in the room when that decision was taken to loudly point out that Aria was a success among that very demographic and that aging down the brand identity so suddenly might be a bad idea, so this is what we got stuck with.

It's not that the character art is terrible -- it reminds me of Rondo, which also used anime art and is still widely beloved by the fanbase -- but Dawn is trying to tell a story from a handicapped position and nailing the gothic horror vibes right from the cover would have helped its case by a lot. See, the position of a sequel to a work that was never written in a way to have one is a difficult one: the big twists have already happened and characters have experienced their respective growths, so what do we work with to make a new story?

(Incidentally, Dawn opens by spoiling the big twist in Aria, so absolutely play Aria first if you can.)

What immediately springs to mind are those Disney direct-to-VHS sequels that were mostly pretty forgettable, when not antithetical to the original work, as that's absolutely the vibe one gets when one mischievous gang of troublemakers shows up in the opening in Dawn to oppose Soma and his crew. The generic cartoon aesthetic makes for a poor first impression even though the storyline is actually quite competent and, for a game ostensibly marketed at children, it shows some rather dark imagery.

The idea is that, with Dracula being forever gone, a cult forms from people that desire a new Dark Lord, and a few of its head figures step forward as candidates to fill the power vacuula. They decide to have a go at Soma, attacking him and his girlfriend when the two are hanging out in town, and our boy doesn't take too kindly to that, setting out in pursuit of the group, pulling the whole crew from Aria in with him. What follows is a metroidvania romp just like Aria, which has Soma claiming monsters' souls as he brings down the Dark Lord wannabes.

Where Dawn successfully improves on Aria is in quality of life features as well as better tuning. On the former front, Soma can now use two different equipment sets that can be swapped at the press of the X button, a very welcome feature as it switching souls without entering the menu, thus letting the player adapt to each situation faster. The game also makes good use of the DS's top screen, displaying either the castle map or a screen with Soma's and enemy's stats. While having the map always visible is a godsend in this genre, having enemy info readily available is great when farming souls, as it does exactly the same thing the gadget from the Advance Collection does in Aria.

As for tuning, weapons have been rebalanced, emphasizing their variety. There's even a system through which, by imbuing weapons with certain souls, they can be upgraded, a nice addition that unfortunately ends up underutilized due to the rarity of some of the souls it requires. Having a use for excess souls, however, is a nice thought, and again I point to Bloodstained as the unofficial successor to Dawn, with Iga further refining this idea in that game.

Incidentally, while Aria already had souls that powered up with their count, Dawn brings this feature to the forefront explicitly calling it the Soul Level -- this is also a key feature in Bloodstained, where it exists for all souls-- uh, all shards. Souls have also been retooled in Dawn: while a lot of them are reskins from those from Aria, there are a handful of interesting new additions to the roster, and the player can expect to work with different toolsets than the ones the prequel gives. Of note is that late game souls are absolutely stacked, making them really gratifying to use.

And they have to be, because the best part of Dawn is its extremely challenging bosses. Aria's were great, but Dawn takes it to a new level: every boss is a unique enemy with a carefully crafted moveset, and their hits are extremely punishing. Even when spamming items, playing sloppily ultimately ends up in Soma getting overwhelmed, so instead, the player is expected to learn each tell and carefully avoid each attack. The magic seal mechanic is the cherry on top, forcing the player to remain vigilant for the prompt while adding flavor to finishing off the boss.

(Admittedly, if playing on an emulator, magic seals are an absolutely cursed mechanic, practically serving as an accidental form of anti-piracy . In that case, use the mod that removes them from the game.)

But is it better than Aria? Probably not: it will never be able to count on the simplicity and novelty factor that that game presented. However, even if it doesn't surpass its predecessor, it is a thoroughly enjoyable game that proudly stands at its prequel's side. Fans of Aria willing to look past a horrid first impression will find themselves a fiercely challenging game that brings back many of the original's boons.

It takes real effort to publish a truly dysfunctional AAA game. Mediocre, unsatisfying, rushed, those labels are common, but pouring millions of dollars and hiring industry top talent to work on a project and still managing to come up with something that's not just underwhelming, but broken, that's an achievement. And one which Blizzard decided to chase after, apparently: Diablo IV is the latest in Blizzard's long running series of ARPGs, a series said to be "the king of ARPGs" by some. It's a game I have played for longer than I like to think about, desperately trying to find something good about it, and one that failed to deliver even then.

ARPGs are not particularly known for good stories, but since the first excuse the few people who still defend Diablo IV make for it is that the campaign is worth the $70 price of admission, it makes for a good starting point. D4 takes place in the world of Sanctuary, a vast expanse of land between Heaven and Hell occupied by humanity. The opening shows a group of treasure hunters delving into an ancient temple that are manipulated into performing a dark ritual and summoning an ancient demon called Lilith into Sanctuary, who then proceeds to try to take it over. The story plays out as the player's character, the Wanderer, along with a few allies met along the way, chases after her in an attempt to stop her plans of domination.

There are a couple of genuinely exciting moments during the game's prologue: Lilith seems like a fascinating antagonist at first, what with her gentle, motherly demeanor paradoxically bringing out the worst in her followers. Also, Lorath, one of the main characters, makes an impressive entrance into the story during this first hour. That's all we get, however, with the story devolving into a generic fantasy narrative not long after it gets going. Worse, a generic Blizzard narrative: a funny quirk of Blizzard's writing is that they really like using "prophecy" and/or "hot woman turned evil due to a traumatic past" as plot devices, and it worked until Warcraft III or so, but after that, it got silly. And unfortunately, Diablo IV ticks both of those boxes.

Far from that being only problem with the campaign, of course. Its six acts are abysmally paced, some rushing over their plot points blink-and-you'll-miss it style, while others feature roundabout questlines that could have been trimmed down to a third of their length at no loss for the storytelling. They're also cheapened by uneven and incoherent stakes: most notably, at one point in the story, a potential event is determined to be world-ending should it come to pass, and it eventually does... resulting in an unremarkable boss battle and in everyone forgetting all about it by the next quest. It's hard to take any other threat seriously after that point.

The initially exciting cast also consistently underdelivers: just about every character ends up being paper-thin and spouting wonky writing. The illusion of good story beats comes up every now and then, but that's mostly the pre-rendered cutscenes and/or the actors wringing blood from the stone that is the material given to them, moments that soon peter out. One could say Diablo IV's main story is comparable a Marvel movie in that it features incredibly gorgeous CG scenes, great actors and expensive tech to bring to life complete drivel. The similarity also holds in that it ends in a cliffhanger, because please be excited about the expansions to this garbage that we plan to churn out in the next few years.

Finishing the campaign is but the first in a long list of things that are done "to get to the fun part of the game", a list that only grows for the entirety of the game's runtime. The problems begin with how the world of Sanctuary is structured, or rather, how it's not: it's an open world, and a character can go anywhere in it as soon as the prologue is done. The campaign will take the Wanderer through the five regions in a more or less set order, and as superficial as that trip might be, one might as well follow along, because despite all that freedom, there's little reason to care about any of those places: Sanctuary as large as it is barren, with vestiges of civilization -- where locals sit eager to hand out fetch quests -- lost amidst deserts, swamps, snow-covered mountains and other similarly dead places. It's hard to even remember most of the map beyond the prologue areas.

Enemies feel similarly same-y: there's little variety in their mechanics, and the entire game world uses level scaling to match them to the player level. Level scaling is an often-touted but very ugly design solution for open world RPGs, and Diablo IV serves as a perfect example of why: the mechanic fails in its purpose to match content to player as, more often than not, the difficulty is not simply in enemy stats. More pressingly, however, without a natural progression of easy to hard content, the thrill of being able to do quests and kill bosses one couldn't stand against before is lost, and thus, the emotional connection to those things is also lost. Worse, since there's a lot of grind to be done in D4, players outright ignore most areas and gravitate to repeating the most efficient content over, and over, and over again.

One might as well also skip the bossing in the game, because most of the bosses are terrible. The design railroaded itself from the moment character movement was decided to be so stiff: characters have low base movement speed, some classes entirely lack movement skills and the evade button meant to replace those is almost always on cooldown. Thus, bosses forgo mechanics that encourage movement and quick-thinking and instead are designed so to be facetanked. There's a few exceptions to that, but even those have very few fight mechanics to engage with. Boss variety in itself is also extremely low: players will tire of seeing the words "Khazra Abomination" on the screen from all the dungeoning, and the game's only (egregious) pinnacle boss is Uber Lilith, recycled from the campaign and given one shot moves to create an illusion of difficulty.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves: we're still early in our leveling journey, dipping our toes into Sanctuary. Assuming the campaign is done, the next step is to farm renown, which is a measurement of how well-known the Wanderer is across Sanctuary. Renown is increased by doing optional side content and rewards the player with more potion charges and skill points -- i.e. it's a mandatory kind of optional. Farming renown is the most fun part of the game, the only part that offers a modicum of variety and comes close to fleshing out the world. It's also near-universally reviled, mainly because every new character is made to do it again, as it's one of the few things low level characters can do if the campaign is skipped.

By the time we're done farming, it's likely we'll have most of our skill points and a complete build. In fact, it will be complete much before that, as there's not much flexibility in how to build a character. Diablo IV's skill tree can barely be called a tree: it's a linear track with skills that have clearly tagged purposes and synergies so obvious, it's more of an exercise in basic pattern recognition than real decision making. One node will have a choice of core skills, then the next one, a set of passives each designed to go with one of those core skills... there's zero room for player choice and creativity, and unfortunately, that statement is also true for every other character development system.

Once level 50 is reached, the Wanderer stops earning skill points and earns paragon points, which are used to traverse a large, modular board of tiles that yield stats and multipliers. Never mind the failure of easing the player into this complete paradigm shift for leveling -- stats had next to zero importance up to this point -- the biggest issue is that, once again, there's an opportunity for diversifying builds; once again, the designed synergies are few and blatant, telegraphed from a mile away. This is made worse from the fact that most of the character's power is gotten from the Paragon board, so by deviating from the optimal path, the player is sealing their own doom. This also has the side effect of making level 100 practically mandatory, as the whopping forty Paragon points obtained in those gruesome final levels matter. That's in stark contrast to something like PoE, where a level 90ish character is often more concerned with fighting endgame bosses and refining their gear.

Speaking of which, it's truly baffling how badly botched the itemization is for a game in a genre that largely revolves around loot. There are five types of items in Diablo IV: Common, Magic, Rare, Legendary and Unique. There is no crafting system in Diablo IV (no, making cute potions in town whose only real effect is +5% exp gain does not count) so those lower rank items are trash that is going to suck forever. Thus, there are three types of items, but wait: most of the uniques that matter are those are insanely rare. In any other game, one would just trade for them, but Diablo IV doesn't just lack an economy, it outright impedes the trading of Uniques and Legendaries, making it so players are highly unlikely to have a unique they desperately need. Incidentally, the only viable way to play a Necromancer Minion build is through one of those ultra-rare, late game Uniques.

We're down to two item types, Rares and Legendaries, which really are one and the same: a Legendary item is a Rare with an Aspect applied to it, that is, a modifier that enhances a skill or group of skills -- sort of an unique one can create themselves. Yet again, a system with potential for diversity further railroads the design of builds: any viable build has Aspects clearly made for it, which sometimes are the one thing that makes it playable, and one would be silly not to include them. Far more concerning than the Aspects that makes builds work, however, are the ones that don't.

While it should be pretty clear that Diablo IV's systems are shallow, the truly offensive part, the part that makes it likely that no amount of patches will ever fix this mess is that most of the game doesn't work. Among item affixes, Aspects, Uniques, and even the nodes on the skill tree, there's so much absolute garbage beyond any level of consideration that's scattered around to create the illusion of complexity. There's even a running gag amongst the community about item affixes that's along the lines of "I found an item with '+10% more damage to stunned enemies while vulnerable on the second Tuesday of the month'", referring to the multiple, bizarrely situational affixes that exist only to flood the affix pool and make the itemization seem deeper than it really is.

Furthermore, while it is true that every build in the game was designed by Blizzard, with very little room to deviate, theirs was an extremely hands-off design: in theory, the synergies are there, so say, this build is meant to bank on Vulnerable, while that build relies on Overpower... In practice, there are clear winners and utter losers that should have been clear not only from any sort of playtesting, but from the systems' design in itself. In that example, Vulnerable multiplies the damage, while Overpower adds damage, meaning the former scales much, much more steeply than the latter -- they are not equivalent, even though the designers seemed to think that they are.

The game is riddled with these fundamental mistakes: defensive options not called "Armor" are useless, with resistances to elements being especially pathetic; critical and vulnerable modifiers, along with cooldown reduction/resource generation to counter the absurdly high downtime suffered by most builds, are the only things most respectable builds will care for in any piece of gear; a couple of classes, namely the Barbarian and the Sorcerer, are completely unplayable compared to the rest, and notably both good Barb builds so far have been the result of now fixed bugs that caused damage to scale in a way that it shouldn't have.

It's a thoroughly incompetent game, and that has to be emphasized: in this breakneck industry, many games end up being rushed, but come out with specks of brilliance and a clear vision of what the production was aiming for. Diablo IV, however, wasn't simply released before it was ready (although it must be said that it was absolutely rushed out to save face after Diablo Immortal and to make Kotick and his goons a quick buck while the ActiBlizz sale closes). Diablo IV is a game without a vision: an ARPG made from the most generic of parts, by people without a single clue about what makes an ARPG work, or even how the game they made works. For proof, look no further than the dreaded patch 1.1.0.

Patch 1.1.0 was the canary in the mine for anyone still holding out hope that the 70 dollars spent in this garbage were going to pay off in any way. Blizzard saw the state the game was in: everyone was stacking armor and CDR, Barbs and Sorcs were in the dumpster, and builds with multiplicative mods dominated the meta. Exp was also a point of contention, leveling was slow, and people straight up paid others to boost them through the endgame grind. Seeing all this, what did Blizzard do? Nerfed everything in the game.

It's hard to fully illustrate just how inept, if not outright malicious, this patch was. To call it a balance patch is a stretch and a half: the patch created the illusion of sweeping changes through numerous small, irrelevant power shifts like "+0.04 base" or "-5%" to stuff that needed reworking from the ground up or that was too powerful to even feel the difference. Among the largest changes, multiplicative damage sources were reduced by a percentage, then additive ones were buffed by a similar amount, all in the name of "shifting power" -- ignoring that the problem was the underlying maths of damage calculation and not the tuning, and that no power was shifted, it was instead reduced.

The already shaky baseline power for characters was devastated by these nonsensical changes, and it was the off-meta builds, that were already hinging on unviable, that suffered the most, further narrowing the set of reasonably playable builds. Meanwhile, the exp changes made a game that was already some 50 hours too long even slower in the name of stopping boosting, and then failed to stop boosting anyway -- in fact, relative to normal leveling, it was made even more effective. Furthermore, changes to monster levels further intensified the funneling towards optimal content since, now, grinding a small set of Nightmare Dungeons was the only activity in the game that still gave decent returns.

This makes Nightmare Dungeons the final step in the list of "things before the fun part", and what a dumpster fire they are. For all the big talk about Sanctuary being large and open and how the player gets to walk around it on a stupid horse that moves at a glacial pace and gets stuck behind ankle-high obstacles... for all that talk, most of the player's time in D4 is going to be spent indoor in dungeons. They could have been just mazes with monsters to kill, but instead, they're that plus some inane task for the player to perform: best case scenario, it's clear the dungeon of monsters or of a certain type of monster; worst case, it's get one thing from one end of the dungeon, backtrack all the way to another part of the dungeon and open a door with it. Regardless, there's an incredible amount of downtime on the thing players have to do hundreds, thousands of times.

And then you grind your life away and kill Uber Lilith, and what do you do next? The fight is awful; she doesn't drop anything special, and even if she did, there's no economy in the game for you to become rich. There's no crafting either to allow for creating neat gear, and since 99% of the loot found is for your character's own class, you probably only have gear for them anyway. So if you do reroll, which is supposed to be one of the pillars of the genre, you're going to be restarting from almost scratch. Wanna stay and collect uniques, then? Even if there were consistent ways to get them, there's not enough stash tabs to keep them in. To have stash tabs, we'd have to load every one of your fancy uniques for every other player because... you know, I'd pay to hear an explanation of why stashes are coded how they are. Whatever that explanation is, though, four minuscule stash tabs is a tasteless joke.

The stash, with its few tabs and no tools to organize or filter them is but one of the ways in which there's no quality of life whatsoever in the game: basic ARPG features like loot filters and map overlays are also absent, and if you're playing on PC, hoo boy, prepare for some clunky UI and for having to aim absolutely everything manually, as only console players get targeting help (to be fair, the UI is also bad on console). Also, despite it being a premium game and there being heavy restrictions on trade between players, there is no way to play offline by yourself, and the game is plagued by lag spikes and rubber banding even when soloing dungeons.

Do you know what the game does have, though? An in-game store filled with outrageously expensive microtransactions, like a $28 set of cosmetic armor or $13 for a horse skin. What else? A paid seasonal battle pass, with more cosmetics and a barrage of annoying in-game messages trying to create FOMO. Seasons which, by the way, aren't good, as one might have expected: Season 1 further complicated itemization for little benefit to the players, and had people not loudly complained online about the loss of armor from replacing socketed skulls, every single Malignant Heart would have been ignored by the player base in favor of survivability, because apparently no one in the dev team plays the game at a reasonably high level.

The maths behind damage calculation is also being worked on in Season 2, after months of complaints. One might think this is the team taking feedback from the community, but don't be mistaken: they have come out multiple times to call complainers a "vocal minority" and who would ban people who said words like "endgame" in their campfire stream's chat. The fact is, high-profile players have been pointing out most of what I mentioned in this review, including the basic math issues, since early on in the Beta, and no one cared. The change of stance now is presumably only because, after the predictably poor reception of Season 1, this live service game of theirs has been dying a slow death, and someone will have to fix it if those expensive MTX are to be sold.

And even then, even if they listen, there's points even the community gets wrong. It's important to understand the idea I've been hammering about there being an ever growing list of things to do before the fun part of the game: a lot of players have negative feelings on D4, but clamour for more content as a solution: "we need Primal Ancestrals and World Tier V!". In reality, Diablo IV already has a lot of content -- god knows this is the best game to give to a person that puts a dollar value on games based on playtime -- but that content is terrible: it's slow, it's easy, it's shallow, it's broken. Adding World Tier V and one more level-gated tier of Rare item would only serve to make the experience worse, turning WT4 into yet another of those intermediate steps that must be taken in order to play the real game. D4 would, in fact, have been better had levels been capped at 70 and the "Content" ended at WT3.

Alas, play time KPIs had to be met at all costs, and this was what we got instead: a glorified skinner box that desperately wants you to put more hours into it and that magnifies every weakness of its genre. The king of ARPGs, you say? I was never one for monarchy in the first place. Diablo IV is a mix of malice and incompetence, and Blizzard having the gall to ship the game in this state and sell it for seventy dollars is a testament to not only how much of their talent they've lost, but also to how much Kotick and his goons are willing to drain the company while on the way out. Don't waste money on this: just go back and play Diablo 2, or Path of Exile, or Torchlight, or literally anything else.

I remember downloading the demo for Dragon Age II on PS3, coming out of several Origins playthroughs and being hungry for more RPG action. And oh boy, did I get action, with the new game gearing much towards that than the quiet, strategic gameplay of its predecessor. Units zoomed across the field and dished out attacks at impossible speeds, mages flung out spells like confetti, and enemies flooded the battlefields. As jarring as all of that felt, what really stood out was how unpolished the game looked and felt. "Surely this isn't coming out for at least a year or so, right?".

"...What? What do you mean 'it's coming out next week'?!"

Following hot on the success of DA:Origins, the geniuses at EA thought Bioware could pull a Majora's Mask and make a sequel to that game in a year or so. The result was not only massive crunch within the studio, but a final product that lost them much of the hype DA:O had garnered. While not exactly critically panned, it didn't come close to the acclaim of its predecessor, and its uneven quality set the fanbase ablaze -- to this day, some wince at the title's mere mention.

Myself, I was merely disappointed by the game's demo and completely forgot about it up until I was met with a very cheap copy on a retro game store a couple of months back. Somewhat reeling from the shock of realizing that its age was closer in years to the Pokémon Snap cartridge I picked up on the same trip than to the present year, I decided to dive in and see just how bad Dragon Age II was. By the end, I was positively surprised: the sequel to DA:O might not have reached the same heights as the original, but it hardly warrants the hatred it gets.

Dragon Age II opens rather unusually: a dwarf by the name of Varric, under arrest, is being interrogated by Cassandra, a Seeker of the Chantry. It's suggested that a great crisis struck the city of Kirkwall and then spread throughout the rest of the world; at the epicenter of said crisis, there was a key figure referred to by the Seeker as the Champion of Kirkwall, who has disappeared amidst the chaos and is wanted by the Chantry. Cassandra barely knows who they were, however, so she has Varric tell her the story of what transpired in Kirkwall. The entire game is told as a tale within a tale, with Varric recounting the Champion's ascension to the Seeker as he remembers it... with a few creative liberties, of course.

That story begins in Ferelden, still during the events of the first game, right after the fall of Ostagar. With Lothering soon to be overrun by the Blight, the Hawke family, led by the playable character, who's their eldest daughter, attempts to flee. Stuff happens on the way, but the group makes it more or less safe out of Ferelden, reaching the port of the city of Kirkwall, in the Free Marches. There, Hawke's rise to power, beginning all the way at the bottom of the ladder, begins.

As with many high-profile titles that were rushed -- Pokémon Scarlet and Violet being the most recent ones that come to mind -- that fact is immediately apparent by the wildly disparate levels of polish applied to different parts of the game. For instance, DA2 features much more impacting character designs than the original: the new designs for the Qunari and Flemeth stand out, as do the iconic designs for the main character and most of the main and supporting cast. Everyone feels more like characters from a fantasy setting instead of someone straight out of the character creator.

But then you look elsewhere, like the environment design, and that spark is gone. The opening segment areas look hideous; the city of Kirkwall is so little like a city and so underdesigned for the amount of quests that take place in it; most famously, for every other type of area in the city and its vicinity -- caves, dungeons, warehouses and so on -- there is one map for that type of place. Every grotto, every maze, every temple has the exact same layout flipped around and with new enemy placements, and sometimes having a couple of paths cordoned off. More than repetitive, this becomes extremely confusing not too many hours in.

Systems also have their own ups and downs: instead of the janky morality systems of other RPGs, DA2 has a personality system which keeps track of the style of dialogue options that gets picked the most and performs subtle changes in dialogues, like adding or taking away certain choices in conversations, or having NPCs take Hawke's threats more seriously if she's been consistently aggressive. It's a fantastic idea that, unfortunately, ends up very underused in the final game, and may even confuse those who don't know about it. Its subtlety should also not imply that the dialogue wheel is as smooth as it could be, as this is the easiest of all Bioware games with it to get jumpscared by a dialogue option that causes Hawke to say something completely different from what was expected.

My biggest dislike in terms of systems, though, has to be the combat. I specifically want to say that "I disliked it" instead of saying it's bad because what happened with Dragon Age's combat was a bit tricky. One would think, by the way DA2 seems like much more of an action game, that Bioware had created a more streamlined experience, but it was actually quite the opposite: skills are a lot more diverse and splashable in DA2, opening up far more possibilities of builds. Characters also end up with a ton of active abilities, so if playing a mage, for instance, players will be unleashing a constant barrage of spells, which means having to stop time to aim all the time.

All of that, combined with a more dynamic and faster paced game, in which the party is constantly getting ambushed and flanked, make for a far more tinkery experience, one that can't be survived without elaborate tactics setups and plenty of micromanagement on top. It's perfectly functional, and there are people who like it and have gone to great lengths theorycrafting around it, but I, myself, despite usually playing DA:O on Hard or Nightmare, grew less and less willing to put up with combat in DA2, lowering the difficulty to Normal by Act 2, then Casual by Act 3.

So... all those downsides in mind, why is Dragon Age II so great even then? Simply put, the writers and actors hard-carry it. As flawed as the main plot might be at times, there's a legitimate warmth to Hawke's story that is hard to ignore: Hawke loses almost everything to the Blight and has to start from scratch elsewhere, rising to the top from the lowly status of refugee -- it's an underdog story, and everybody loves an underdog. Plus, that rise is enhanced by a sociological aspect to the storytelling that greatly enhances it, owed to the brilliant choice of setting.

Kirkwall is a fantastic place to set DA2 in: being only a city-state, a place of a much smaller scale than the kingdom featured in Origins, it allows the writers to tell more personal stories, focusing on developing the characters close to the protagonist, as well as the dynamics between the different castes of people living in the city. The latter is important because, as one soon realizes, Kirkwall is a disaster waiting to happen, with serious tensions building within it from way before the moment Hawke and company set foot on its shores. These tensions feed into one another, and are ultimately going to reach a breaking point she interferes or not.

Dragon Age II resembles, in that sense, the first Mass Effect, by featuring a character who's but a tiny piece of the story, and also in how it always leaves that feeling of disgusting inevitability when looking back at the chains of events that shaped that world of the game. The three act structure, with a time skip between each act, also echoes the satisfying feeling of continuity from that series as the consequences of events in previous acts snowball into the next. Since DA2 is a self contained game instead of a trilogy, however, it enjoys a more consistent vision -- unfortunately, that does not save it from having a haphazard conclusion, but I guess that can also be considered a shared feature between the two series.

The more personal focus of the writing means that even with the main story removed, however, The Daily Adventures of Ms. Hawke & Pals would have been worth the ride for the phenomenal character writing alone: Hawke is an amazing protagonist and delivers on great lines regardless of whether she's being played as diplomatic, humorous or aggressive. Her responses, and sometimes, unhinged monologuing, would have easily earned her the #1 spot in fans' favorite companion lists in any other game, but the fact we have direct control of her makes it even more special. And that's not to say that the companions in DA2 leave anything to be desired.

Almost immediately upon booting the game, Varric wins over everyone's hearts. He is the ideal sidekick to Hawke, and the two play off each other spectacularly, with the game presenting a legitimate, wholesome development to their relationship over the years. The same happens with Aveline, an honorable warrior met still while on the run from the Blight who, despite a rocky start, becomes almost like family to Hawke, a friendly face with whom a bond of complete mutual trust is shared. Speaking of family, though, we have that too! Hawke is accompanied by her mother, Leandra, as well as her siblings Bethany and Carver. It's so rare to see a good sibling dynamic in fiction, some good old butting heads but with a lot of love sprinkled in, and Dragon Age II nails it perfectly.

And there's more! Do you like weird, asocial mages? Anders is back from Awakening! Do you enjoy a pirate lady with killer gear and even more killer looks? Isabela, once a minor character in Origins, has gotten a makeover and is now a stand-out member of Hawke's group! Do you like unhinged elves with dangerous magical powers? We've got two of them! DA2's cast is almost as large as its prequel's, and the seemingly unending stream of character interactions are bound to get chuckles out of the player for the whole ride.

Like the rise of the champion of Kirkwall, Dragon Age II is a glorious mess: a game rushed out the window that, despite the odds, still managed to come out with an incredible amount of heart. It's definitely a terrible starting point to Dragon Age for new fans, but fans of the series really ought to give it a fair shot.

Before being retconned out of the series chronology, Castlevania: Legends used to be the very first game in the series' timeline. It features the first incarnation of Count Dracula as well as the first Belmont, Sonia Belmont, to rise against him. For what would be a pivotal game in the series chronology, it's... definitely one of the Castlevania games ever made.

The Game Boy and Game Boy Color were filled with boneless, unambitious platformers, be them licensed games or attempts to bring home console franchises to the portable, and Castlevania: Legends is one more game in that latter pile, featuring uninspired level and enemy design, a janky, barebones implementation of traditional series mechanics and encounters that are an exercise in frustration. It has a very short runtime, but even so, it's better off being skipped.

It's a shame, too, because it features a female protagonist, whose appearance on the cover of the game was what drove me to try it in the first place. Sonia is pretty cool, it's just that her game is... not. I do enjoy the implication in the best ending that she had a son, Victor Belmont, with Alucard, thus forever tying the Belmont bloodline to Dracula. My gal literally doomed her entire bloodline to get a piece of that gorgeous dhampir, which... based and goals? Mad respect for her.

Besides, just think about it: had Legends stayed canon (which in my heart, it did), it would recontextualize every one of Alucard's appearances as him looking out for his great great great great grandchildren. "Richter, get down from that throne, you're going to hurt yourself". "Trevor, take an adult with you to fight grandpa's dad, okay?". I can only assume Iga struck the game out of the continuity because he was too afraid of how powerful such a narrative would be.

When I was younger and more prone to spending time online playing free MMOs, the ones that fascinated me the most were the ones that allowed me to do something other than fighting monsters. It's not that I didn't like the fighting, nor that I didn’t know any games without combat, it’s just that being in a fantasy world as something other than a warrior felt so special. It wasn't until 2013's Fantasy Life, however, that someone made a game to cater specifically to that taste.

Fantasy Life is an action RPG, and its premise is simple: You're a citizen of Castele, a kingdom in the magical land of Reveria, and time has come for you to choose your Life -- that is, your job. There are twelve Lifes to choose from, four of which are fighters (Paladin, Mercenary, Hunter and Magician) and eight of which are not (Miner, Angler, Woodcutter, Carpenter, Blacksmith, Alchemist, Cook and Tailor).

While Lives might sound like a fixed character class, it is but a transitory state: once you've gotten your license for your first Life -- essentially a tutorial -- and progressed a bit through the game, you're free to go back and get a license for another Life and swap between them whenever. And that's the beauty of the world of Fantasy Life: it's filled with quests and opportunities for every Life, and your approach to locations changes depending on which class you are currently.

More than that, while you can, theoretically, pick a Life and play through the entire game on it, the game actively discourages that sort of approach, instead making it so the work of a class is crucial for the success of another. A Blacksmith needs raw ore and wooden beams, the latter of which a Carpenter has to create from logs, but they, in turn, need fabric to fashion some of their furniture, which a Tailor can provide. Fighter classes can provide rare materials they collect from monsters, and benefit from improved gear that crafters can create.

Each Life has a rank, starting from Novice and moving all the way up to Legend. To increase one's rank, class-specific quests must be completed: Craft said item, kill said monsters, recover the wood from a special tree, find a specific mineral, and so on. These lists of quests are refreshed every time you move up a rank, and have you adventuring all over Reveria to get them done.

Reveria is an excellently realized game world. Some players call Fantasy Life "a single player MMO", which in some ways, it is, but crucially, it avoids the common trap amongst games with that tagline where the world is made large, sparse, and boring. Reveria is instead densely packed, filled with interesting places to visit, loot to collect and boons to find. The game rewards exploring on your own, as there's many locations the story alone will not show you through but that will benefit specific Lives.

Speaking of which, I love the story in Fantasy Life. It starts off a bit clichéd, as an unassuming adventurer fresh from obtaining their first Life license -- that's you -- gets dragged into an adventure which will have them meeting god and preventing the destruction of the world. However, it's that stellar kind of E-rated writing that makes you feel like the main character in a saturday morning cartoon, going on a grand adventure where you make friends and help people in need.

The game features a wide cast of lovable characters, each of which has a distinct personality and their own twists. This then feeds into the stakes of the narrative: it's easy, in games with grimdark and moody settings, to lose sight of your goals, of what your character is meant to be fighting for. Fantasy Life makes sure to show you how much good there is in Reveria before it shows the threat looming above it: it looks childish and is often very playful, but it's also really good at creating drama and tension when needed.

The quality of the main story was a nice surprise: I wasn't expecting that when I first started playing, but once it got going, it was one of the rare instances where I temporarily put aside all the side content in a game until I finished the main story, just to see how it would end. Another surprise was the excellent soundtrack, which was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, and it shows. The background music is phenomenal, and there are some vocal songs that play on special occasions that are a treat.

Fantasy Life is a truly remarkable experience: it stands as my favorite 3DS game, and it's criminal that, nearly ten years later, the closest thing we got for a sequel was a lousy mobile game. Should you choose to visit Reveria, be it brandishing a sword versus a giant dragon, swinging your hammer against the anvil, reeling in a fish or making a delicious omelet, your time is sure to be exciting.

In case you didn’t notice it from my username, I love Chrono Trigger. It’s one of the most memorable games from my childhood, a standout RPG that left such a powerful impression on me that playing it nowadays still brings me chills.

This review contains spoilers for the first few hours of the game.

Originally released for the SNES in 1995, Chrono Trigger is an RPG developed by Squaresoft, way before its merger with Enix created Square-Enix. The game’s production was kickstarted by a trio dubbed the “Dream Team”, consisting of Final Fantasy’s Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii and Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama.

That’s just for starters, as many people who had or would make a name for themselves within Square were also designated to work on the game, including legendary composers Nobuo Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda. This team was able to create an RPG that was considered revolutionary for its time, and to this day is still widely considered one of the best of its genre. It’s hard not to see why. Anywhere you look in Chrono Trigger, there’s something to behold.

Take its storytelling, for example: one could look at the story superficially and state that this is a game about time-travelling teenagers saving the world, and in a sense, they’d be right, but it understates how brilliantly the story is told. For the first few hours, you won’t even realize there is an antagonist, as the characters are pretty much going about their own business. There’s a fair going on, which childhood friends Crono and Lucca are attending. On the way, Crono meets a new girl called Marle, and as the trio test Lucca’s new technological invention, they get thrown four hundred years into the past and have to work their way back home.

There’s a dramatic shift in mood whenever time travel happens, with each era having a defined sound and visual identity that tells part of its story. The Present is expressed in bright tones and a peaceful melody, while the past is somewhat darker and eerier – stepping into it for the first time evokes feelings of mystery, isolation; of being away from home, thrown in the unknown. The Prehistory uses palettes of mostly warm colors, accompanied by simple percussion music; the Antiquity uses sound to contrast between the harmony of the sky cities and the misery on the Earth’s surface; the End of Time looks disjointed and out of place… but no time period hits as hard as in the Future, when the game finally shows its hand and reveals the antagonist.

About two entire quest lines after the fair, both of which are memorable in their own right, the trio stumbles upon the Future. It's terrifying -- the atmosphere is filled with a silent dread, and no matter where you go, it feels desolate and miserable. The ruins of what were once great buildings are filled with bizarre monsters, and whatever’s left of any human settlement has everyone starving. This motivates the heroes to try and find out where – or rather, when – they are and why it looks that way, and sure enough, they find their answer: in an abandoned dome, they learn of the events of the year 1999 A.D. and first hear the name Lavos. The stage is now set for the rest of the adventure.

Lavos is, in itself, a fascinating antagonist. Unlike many other games, where we’re chasing a Bad Guy around as he does Evil Things, the heroes of Chrono Trigger are out to prevent something that has already happened in its entirety, but they don’t know how, thus making the game into more of a quest for knowledge, of understanding a foe before one can even stand up to it. As such, Lavos doesn’t need to make appearances to keep itself relevant: the horrifying suggestion that, if they fail, everyone dies, is always there, hanging over the party's heads.

Chrono Trigger’s plot is masterfully paced. The game presents a series of intertwined storylines taking place in different eras, and whenever the player completes a quest in a certain time period, they get moved to another one where there’s new things to do. This back and forth travelling is not only exciting, but it also paints a fascinating picture of the world’s history in the player’s mind: it's impossible to call any of the game’s historical events pointless or contrived, as everything that happens throughout the eras is not only relevant, it’s a natural consequence of some other event that preceded it.

There’s little in the sense of filler, which explains the game's shorter (and sweeter) runtime compared to its genre peers: even if it's not immediately apparent, each section of the game either inches the player ever forward to its conclusion, or advances a character’s arc. On the latter case, CT further explores the character-driven approach that Final Fantasy VI tried before it: each party member in Chrono Trigger has a defined arc, a journey of their own, that ties seamlessly to the game’s quests, developing and resolving over the course of the game. All of these arcs conclude in the end game with quests entirely dedicated to each character, all of which pack a punch.

Speaking of Final Fantasy, though, Chrono Trigger features an important twist from the typical Final Fantasy battle system: there is no battle screen. As you stumble upon a monster, the party draws their weapons, moves into formation, and begins the fight on the field itself. This means, depending on the enemies and the space available, the positioning of each actor will vary. Naturally, the design of the game took this into account: several battles in the game might look daunting at first, but can be made easy if the player understands the skills in their arsenal and how they work against different groups of foes.

More than that, Chrono Trigger wants you to understand its enemies as well. Many enemies have reactions to your attacks, like counterattacks, stat drops, or even interactions with other foes that the player must take into consideration. When you get to bosses, they feature even more quirks, like multiple parts, defensive stances, temporary vulnerabilities that need to be triggered by specific attacks and even more elaborate counterattacks.

This is not endgame mechanics, mind you: the very first enemy in the game, Gato, has a twist to his patterns: his strongest attack is, by far, his counterattack. After getting hammered in the face a couple of times, you’ll notice that this attack is only performed if Gato is close to a character when he’s hit, thus, if you let him walk away before attacking, the battle is then made much easier. From that moment, the game shows the player how they’ll need to learn these quirks and exploit them: just mashing A will quickly get you killed.

Another beloved element of CT’s combat is the skills performed by multiple party members, which the game calls Dual Techs and Triple Techs. Battles run on ATB gauges, and whenever you have two or more characters ready to act, with specific techs learned, combination techs might become available. Mind you, that’s a lot of extra abilities for you to consider: three for each combination of two characters, plus a bunch of others for each possible party combination. It’s no wonder not many games do this.

It certainly paid off here, however, as it added an extra dimension to party building and battle strategies. They’re also extremely satisfying to use, as the sprite design and animation in Chrono Trigger are works of art: every time a character swings a sword or uses a tech, it feels like they’re truly putting their strength into that attack. When they jump in for a critical, from the animation and the sound, you feel the impact of the blow as well.

But of course, you can’t expect that magic to last forever, and indeed, the game is over before it gets stale. Just like the story has no filler, neither do the dungeons. There are no random battles, and neither are there pointless long treks through a bunch of identical rooms. And if you do happen to get stuck, just talk to Gaspar at The End of Time, and he’ll give you a hint as to where to go next. This design decision is known to have been done for the sake of not having the player wander around aimlessly, like it would often happen in other RPGs at the time.

Chrono Trigger was truly ahead of its time, a masterpiece that’s easy to understand why it is so well remembered. I adore it to bits. There’s so many RPGs from that time that I once held dear but feel underwhelming to play nowadays, but Chrono Trigger stands strong as the one game that I can always look back on, twenty years after first trying it, and never be disappointed.

So, 2024, That's practically 2014, right? I'm still in time to check out A Link Between Worlds? Yes, of course.

Despite it having been sitting in my shelf for some ten years by now, I knew almost nothing coming into A Link Between Worlds bar its central gimmick and connection to A Link to the Past, and even in the latter there was a bit of a surprise: in Japanese, the game is outright called 神々のトライフォース２, which would be equivalent to naming it A Link to the Past 2. It's good that they changed it in the West, not only because sequels tend to intimidate people who don't know the original, but because A Link Between Worlds has its own, unique game feel to it, almost like a reimagining, which naming it "Thing 2" betrays.

It is a direct sequel, though, that is not up for debate: it takes place in the same Hyrule as A Link to the Past, decades, maybe centuries after the events of that game. You play as, as one would guess, Link, who's the apprentice to a smith in Kakariko Village. Link's day starts out just like any other, that is, with him oversleeping and being late to work yet again. During a delivery of a commissioned sword, however, he is met with the eccentric Yuga, a man possessing magical powers who attacks the local church. Sword in hand, the descendant of the legendary hero sets out to find a solution to this new threat.

It pays not to know much about the narrative of A Link Between Worlds because, surprisingly for a Zelda title, there's a lot of depth to it: it expands upon the lore of the original game, building its story on top of established elements and motifs, while at the same time, providing us with fascinating new characters and settings. The cast is wider than that of the prequel, and the slowly unfolding narrative has a lot of twists and turns to its plot, which wraps up to a beautiful ending.

It's one of the ways in which ALBW incorporates the sensibilies of more modern Zelda design, and it goes even further than that: despite the world map being mostly unchanged from the original, the game brings a completely new twist to its dungeons, abandoning the grid-based design of the original in favor of more varied rooms. A few dungeons retaining the feel of the original while others explore other concepts, like more vertical and/or more open layouts. On the surface, some of them even resemble the DS Zelda games more than A Link to the Past.

But then comes another twist: equipment is no longer found within dungeons, being instead required to enter them in the first place. A mysterious merchant named Ravio sets up shop in Hyrule and helpfully offers to sell or lend Link helpful items, like a bow or a hammer. The economics of Ravio's shop are a bit confusing -- Ittle Dew presented a more elegant implementation of the same concept -- but it does serve a purpose in that it rewards thorough exploration while at the same time not requiring it. Plus, it's one of the game's many rupee sinks, which help solve the problem of rupees being useless that's often seen in the series. In A Link Between Worlds, it's unlikely, unless the player intentionally grinds, that they'll finish the game with maxed out rupees.

The potential problem with this setup is that each dungeon assumes the player has one specific item and only that item, and simplistic puzzles can arise from having a single answer to any problem. "Oh no! I'm stuck in a puzzle in the Bow® Dungeon™! Whatever shall I do? I guess I will use my Bow®!" Fortunately, A Link Between Worlds's level designers were aware of this issue, making full use of the game's 3D nature to create complex rooms, and also incorporating a variety of stage elements to support the creation of each dungeon, preventing the one-answer problem and making each one feel unique. The result was some of the best dungeons in the series.

One mechanic shared by every dungeon is the wall traversal: it's the one thing that drew the most skepticism on my part coming into the game, and I cannot believe how wrong I was. The wall mechanic is, at the same time, mind-bending and intuitive, creating a complete paradigm shift on how dungeons are traversed while still feeling perfectly natural to the game. There are a myriad different ways in which A Link Between Worlds uses its central gimmick in its many environments, exploring verticality, connections between rooms and so on.

It's the cherry on top that makes the game, more than excellent, feel irreplicable. A Link Between Worlds is a fantastic reimagining of a classic game that's so dear to my heart, blending its iconic motifs and clever design philosophies with more modern aspects of Zelda games' design. Don't be like me: don't wait for a full decade to play it. It's a treat that deserves to be enjoyed.

Unlike the other pieces of Dragon Age DLC, which present linear storylines in self-contained levels, Awakening attempts to replicate the structure of the main game, bringing a larger campaign made up of different questlines that the player can choose to tackle in whichever order they wish. Also unlike the other DLC, it was priced at a whopping forty dollars on release, which was almost as much as the main game, so it might as well have had something special going to justify it. Fourteen years ago, my gut told me it wasn't going to. It turns out those suspicions were not entirely unfounded.

The expansion is a direct sequel to the events of the main game. The Warden, now promoted to Warden-Commander, arrives in the fortress of Vigil's Keep within the arling of Amaranthine, which was granted to the Grey Wardens during the epilogue. What should be mere routine quickly spirals into chaos as the fortress is attacked by an army of darkspawn whose commander is somehow capable of human speech. The Warden-Commander now shuffles to repair Vigil's Keep as well as recruit new Grey Wardens to fight this new threat.

From a playtime standpoint alone, the expansion already compares disfavorably, clocking in at a quarter of the playtime of the main game, which should be a sign of how light on content it is. While one might (fairly) object to hours-per-dollar being used to evaluate a game, it's important to note that runtime, in a dense RPG such as Dragon Age, allows the writers to flesh out their characters and worlds much better, and it turns out they desperately needed that, because Awakening lacks both the setups and the cast of the original and struggles to get its main quest going.

The mystery of intelligent darkspawn is an enticing one, and it does present us with two fascinating characters from that faction, but the campaign rushes through the moments where they might have been developed, and it is only near the very end of the campaign that we're presented with their true purposes and with the nature and scale of the threat they represent: until then, we're mostly tasked with the administration of the arling and recruitment of new Grey Wardens, doing quests that, while fun, at least at first, seem unrelated to the darkspawn.

Even though the work as arlessa is far from the dramatic race against the clock we had before, it's possible to tell fascinating character-driven stories against a bureaucratic backdrop, but not only does it require a wealth of in-game events -- which again, the short runtime does not allow for -- strong characters with good chemistry are needed, and Awakening is lacking in the latter, and arguably the former as well.

Apart from Oghren, who has somehow become even more vile since Origins, the party is composed of entirely new characters, and it's a real mixed bag. Justice is the one standout, a spirit from the Fade trapped in the body of a Grey Warden against this will who's then forced to experience the world of mortals through the eyes of one. His points of view on the events of the game are fascinating and fresh, and his lack of knowledge about the real world organically creates conflicts of ideas with the rest of the party without him having to be a dick to them. Justice also experiences consistent growth throughout the game.

The rest are just... eh. Velanna and Sigurh are forgettable: there could have been something going for them, but at the breakneck pace of Awakening, there just wasn't enough time to flesh out their characters and they just end up as More Grey Wardens™. Likewise, Nathaniel is an interesting proposition for a character that needed more time to work out his conflicts with the Human Noble without seeming whiny -- my first impulse, which I had to reload a save to fix, was to execute him on the first meeting when he asked to be killed instead of conscripted.

Finally, Anders: his DA2 incarnation may not garner all the love in the world, but at least there, there's a better balance between the multiple facets of his character, and he displays a wider range of emotions. In Awakening, he spends most of his time playing the smartass, to a point where leaving him in the party for too long may drive one insane. It's interesting to see the inversion that will happen in DA2, where Justice will be the one that reads as shallow and single-minded, while Anders is more complex.

Either way, another point of the setting that gets lost due to the rushed storyline is the weight to the order of the Grey Wardens and their practices. The Right of Conscription gets waved around like it's nothing, and the Joining ritual loses both its mystery and seriousness, becoming as casual as inviting someone out for a darkspawn-flavored milkshake. The pacing also ruins points that Awakening itself tries to bring up, with lots of quests petering out before reaching a fulfilling conclusion. A few sidequests, like the Blight Orfans (sic) questline, make for great examples of this, but nothing can top the abysmal conclusion to the campaign, which sees the party turn their back to the charred corpse of the final boss immediately as it dies and... cuts straight to the ending slideshow.

The cherry on top are the bugs. Origins is far from a clean gaming experience and a trip down the wiki will quickly demonstrate that, but Awakening is on a whole other level: multiple pieces of equipment can be lost upon entering the DLC and entire questlines can just fall apart or be missed if the player dares do missions in certain orders or remove companions from the party when the game doesn't expect them to. By the end of my playthrough, three entire questlines were uncompletable, including Sigurh's character missions and the Vigil's Keep upgrades. And supposedly, even with the game done, its bugs are still with me, as the imported save can have other issues and misrepresent the playthrough.

There's a semblance of something good going on in Awakening, but engaging with it mostly brings disappointment over disappointment. In the end, it feels like a tacked-on, overpriced expansion to Dragon Age: Origins, lacking both the scale and weight of that game. Owners of the Ultimate Edition will enjoy one more silly adventure to take their Grey Warden on if they can tolerate the hurdles, but will probably forget about it shortly after. As for the people who paid full-price back in the day... Oof.

I didn't expect to be saying this about a Konami product from the 2020s, but Castlevania: Advance Collection is a gold-standard for what a collection of retro games should be.

This collection features all three GBA Castlevania games, those being Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow, all of which can be played in their American, European or Japanese versions. There is little to no input lag, at least on the PS4 version, and the emulator comes with all sorts of convenient functionality, like save states, a clip function, a rewind function and remappable controls, a checklist that not all retro game collections manage to fill.

It goes a step further than that, however, adding an encyclopedia with information on all enemies and items, as well as what it calls "gadgets". Those gadgets are helpful UI elements that aid in the completion of each game: in Circle of the Moon, they show which enemies carry an unobtained DSS card; in Harmony of Dissonance, they show key items and furniture pieces present in an area; finally, in Aria of Sorrow, they show whether Soma has picked up the soul of an enemy he's fighting at that moment. All three gadgets are very welcome additions to their respective games.

The collection also comes with the SNES port of Rondo of Blood, Dracula X... but we try not to talk about that one.

I'm sure it must get better after 20 or 30 hours, but after several hours in a row of just grinding metal scraps, I think I'm done waiting.

...is how I would have originally opened my review if I had really stopped playing when uninstalling the game out of frustration after nine hours of play. However, I'm not too eager to hate on games, especially ones like Loop Hero that, armed with a zero dollars marketing budget, became so beloved: if so many people came to like it, I wanted to know how it worked and what made it click. Sure enough, my insistence led to an answer, but one that made me more confused rather than less. Strap in, and let's examine why this game has been living in my head rent-free for a while now.

What is Loop Hero, anyway? Its premise is that the world is being erased by a supernatural entity and its remnants are slowly forgetting all that used to exist. You play as a young hero who attempts to resist the destruction, going on expeditions to gather materials and build a village along with other survivors. These expeditions have them looping around a set path on the world map, passing by their camp after every lap. The twist is, although the path through the map might be set, its contents are not: with every battle, the hero earns cards that can be used to place landmarks around the map, like groves, meadows, ruins, etcetera -- as if remembering what the world used to be like before.

These cards, when placed, give boons to the hero, but also cause enemies to appear in their path that could bring an end to their adventure. The goal is to survive long enough to place enough tiles and spawn a boss, whose defeat unlocks the next act of the story. Between expeditions, resources can be used to build new facilities around the village and upgrade the existing ones. In true roguelite fashion, doing so unlocks permanent bonuses for your character, like stat increases, new classes, extra lives and so on, and also unlocks more cards containing different landmarks to assemble a deck with and use in the expedition map.

The game's poetic setting quickly gives way to frustration, as the player is left to reason about Loop Hero's incredibly cryptic mechanics on their own. It’s hard to understand what makes a deck good; the in-game texts explaining cards and stats are vague, when not misleading; and there are hidden interactions that the game does not explain whatsoever. This extends into the expeditions, which make for lengthy gameplay sessions even at max game speed, and should they come to an end through the hero’s death – a highly likely outcome, as enemies also have opaque rules and interactions to them – the player is punished by losing most of the resources gathered.

That’s where the grinding kicks in, as players turn to the one thing they see some progress happening in: the village. By slowly gathering resources over the course of their expeditions, one figures they might accrue enough bonuses to power through the seemingly impossible hordes of enemies. That's where I originally stopped: completely stumped by Act II, at the end of a long grind for Metal Shards that was leading into an even larger grind of Orbs of Evolution. My conclusion was that the game was a grindfest and not worth my time. But was it, really? I eventually started thinking that if the game was truly a grindfest, then speedruns of it must also take hours. A quick search yielded this, which I watched intently.

Later that day, I reinstalled the game and beat it within an hour and a half, finishing the three remaining acts in almost back-to-back runs.

There is no grinding in Loop Hero. There isn't a single point in the game where you have to stop and grind, and doing so it's a consequence of playing the game wrong. Mystery solved! It's a case of, as the kids say, git gud, amirite? Except, nobody plays the game wrong intentionally, they do it because the correct answer is unclear and/or something leads them down the wrong path. What is going on? What is it about Loop Hero that guides people towards ruining their own experiences?

The first factor is the general haziness surrounding the mechanics I previously went over. The second is in the risk-reward ratio heavily skewing towards "risk". A simple example can be found in choosing to end the expedition after finishing a loop: loops grow increasingly dangerous the higher their number, and staying for one more loop and dying would lose you 70% of your total resources. Surviving one more loop would yield 10%, maybe 20% more? Better to play conservatively and do short expeditions. And what about increasing the spawn of enemies? A definite no-no, as it could easily result in death! The game even helpfully gives you the Road Lantern card to prevent spawns from getting out of control!

Which leads me into the third factor that pushes people into “playing wrong”: there are very few ways to play correctly, as Loop Hero offers a very narrow set of viable builds. I'd risk saying two thirds of the game's cards are unusable, which, for a deck builder, where you generally expect most cards to be viable so long as the rest of the deck synergizes with them, is disastrous. Classes, too, seem like they can be built around different stats, but in reality, there are definitive answers to what must be prioritized, if for no other reason that each boss is a specific mechanics check. To say nothing of traits: picking any boss trait whatsoever is making the game harder on yourself as all of them suck, and their presence reduces the chance of rolling the few good ones. In short, if you don’t build everything exactly as the game wants you to, you’ll die, over and over and over again.

Combine these three things and it’s almost inevitable to come to the conclusion that the only way out of this loop (no pun intended) is to grind the difficulty away, playing each expedition super carefully and slowly amassing materials. Never mind that aggressively placing cards and maximizing encounters is the key to success, both in terms of obtaining more cards and equipment that can further the current expedition and in terms of maximizing the materials you bring back to the village: to give a concrete example, before doing research on the game, I was painstakingly obtaining 1~3 Orbs of Evolution per expedition. After fixing my builds, I easily raked 20~40, along with loads of most other resources. This is why I say there’s no grinding: the material yields are far higher than one might expect.

Anyway, mystery solved²! I figured that was how Loop Hero operated. People who like the game are the ones who figure out which builds to use, play aggressively and finish it quickly, and people who dislike the game are the ones who get stuck in the grind. As we can see from the looking at the game's reviews:

- Steam user StaticSpine recommends it, saying “...it overstays its welcome and becomes way too grindy starting from Act III. But the first ~20 hours I had a blast.”
- Steam user technocosm does not recommend it, ”...the progression is slower than most microtransaction-ridden mobile games.”
- Steam user mercenaryai recommends it, ”...quickly becomes a time-wasting grind.”

Ah.

In the end, it’s not so simple: most reviews mention grinding as a defining aspect of the experience, even the positive ones – in fact, to some people, the punishing grind is the enjoyable part of the game. So where does that leave me? With the game still living rent-free in my mind, I suppose. Maybe my assumption that there is a correct, developer-intended way to play the game is wrong, as much as it irks me to think that the grind is an intentional design choice instead of accident. Some people also mention that they enjoy the game because it’s very hands-free, and they use it to keep their minds busy while multitasking, which I guess I understand, though I would definitely pick a less punishing game.

In the end, would I recommend the game myself? The game design field trip was certainly intriguing, but I would have to say “no”. Aside from the very real risk that anyone that plays this will end up farming for hours on end, a deck builder that provides so few viable options is not a very good one. But it is a fascinating game, and there is legitimate untapped potential in the concept: the ideas behind the game are unlike anything I’ve seen before. Maybe a Loop Hero 2 will eventually come up, with better balance and more in-game information, and deliver on all that potential.

Confession: I didn't actually buy the Advance Collection for a history trip with the Castlevania series. Instead, I just wanted an excuse to play Aria of Sorrow again, with some other games as a bonus. Aria was my first contact with the Castlevania series, something that was both a blessing and a curse, because from then on, playing other Castlevanias always gave a feeling of "this is not quite it". Of course, in revisiting an old favorite, there's always the risk of one's memory not holding up and just not remembering the game's flaws.

One thing I definitely didn't remember was that the protagonist, Soma Cruz, is actually an eighteen year-old high-schooler, to which my immediate reaction was "no he's not". Just look at his portrait, beautifully rendered by Ayami Kojima. That piercing gaze? Shining white hair? That black turtleneck with the sleek fur-lined coat? This man is the definition of too cool for school. If he's a high schooler, he probably takes love letters out of his locker on a wheelbarrow. And he ignores them all, because that's how cool he is.

Erm-ahem. Fan fiction aside, the game takes place in Japan in the year of 2035. A solar eclipse is happening on that day, and Soma is headed to Hakuba Shrine to meet his childhood friend Mina and watch the event from there. Upon arriving at the shrine, however, Soma loses consciousness, and the two are transported to a mysterious castle, where they meet the enigmatic Genya Arikado. At first, he doesn't know what to do about the two teenagers, but as the trio are jumped by monsters, something unexpected happens: Soma absorbs the essence of a monster he defeats, obtaining its power. Having witnessed this, Arikado then ushers Soma to reach the top of the castle so the group can escape from it.

Aria was the last Castlevania game made for the Game Boy Advance, and it shows. The mastery over the limited hardware and small screen is displayed in some of the most beautiful spritework on the system. Soma himself is a shining example: the fluidity of his walk cycle, the turning of his body as he puts his strength into a swing, the way his coat gently sways with the wind... the amount of detail crammed into this not even 40 pixels tall character is impressive.

One might say that putting a lot of work into the main character is standard, as that will be the focus of the player's attention most of the time. The idea with such an approach would be to put a lot of work in the main character, and then not push enemies and other characters too far. Which is fine, except that no sprite artist at Konami got that memo, because they flexed all over the place. Enemies look positively gorgeous in Aria, from the first disgustingly goopy zombie met in the Eternal Corridor all the way to Dracula's final form, all of them are carefully designed, colored, shaded and animated.

To say nothing of the environments, which are a further step up from Harmony of Dissonance and look especially smooth. Parallax and Mode 7-like effects are a given by this point, but Aria takes it further by incorporating animated tilesets for lighting effects. The save room in this game is the most beautiful in the series, with the flickering of the flame on display through the walls and the statue in the center.

And the sound design? There are a surprising amount of voice clips for a GBA game, and enemies make all sorts of noises that give them more personality -- I especially like the intense death screams. It should also be said that the game's original soundtrack is one banger after another. Konami is really bad at this memo thing, because the composer also didn't get the one that said "these are the first and second areas of the game, no need to go all out". To say nothing of the moments where it actually made sense go hard, which... Incredible stuff.

Everything in Aria feels just right, like after a couple of games of trying to iterate on Symphony of the Night, something just clicked. The castle is a perfect mix of maze and proper castle, with the areas that branch and connect unpredictably, but without losing the feeling of distinct zones, which happened in HoD to some extent. Aria even went back to having transition rooms like SotN did, which despite being technically unnecessary in a GBA game, feel extremely natural from a design standpoint, creating some breathing room between areas that emphasize the difference between them.

In addition, the game maintains a consistent level of challenge from beginning to end, with enemies and bosses that are varied and engaging. Plus, with Soma not being a vampire hunter, the player is not locked into a whip for the entirety of the game, and he instead gets access to an arsenal of swords, lances, axes and blunt weapons. The choice between them is not simply about aesthetics: each individual weapon has a different range and hitbox shape, as well as distinct swing and recovery times. It's often advantageous to swap between weapon types for specific encounters, which speaks to how well designed equipment is.

Aria's greatest asset, however, is the Soul System and its monster abilities, through which you-- yes, you -- can now be the little asshat throwing bones from higher ground, living the ultimate Castlevania power fantasy. As established in the opening segment, when defeating enemies, Soma might obtain a soul, which when equipped, enable either a passive, sustained or instant ability related in some way to that monster. Souls are both a means of progression, with key souls obtained in specific rooms allowing access to new areas of the castle, and for combat purposes, replacing the series' traditional subweapons.

At first, this might seem similar to the DSS in that abilities are obtained as random drops from monsters, but it's far superior. For one, there's a direct connection between the monster and what its dropped soul does, which gives the system more personality. Moreover, unlike cards, every monster has a soul. In the face of the low drop rate, while it's unlikely the player will obtain every soul as they travel through the castle (unless your name is TASBot), the law of averages results in them obtaining some set of souls that they can work with. The result is that every playthrough feels slightly different as the player works with a set of tools. Also, completionists have their work cut out for them, hunting exotic monsters with the aid of late game mechanics that boost drop rates.

Souls are also an important metanarrative element that lends credence to Soma's growth. Unlike Juste before him, Soma is a student with no formal combat training, and this is reflected on his initial abilities, which are restricted to jumping and a weak attack. As he explores deeper into the castle, however, he grows stronger and faster, becoming a real powerhouse by the end of the game, and souls make that growth over the course of the story, down to the completely artificial video game notion of levels, seem justified.

Incidentally, Aria of Sorrow features an outstanding central narrative. This is largely owed to its mysterious and layered characters who make frequent appearances throughout the castle, and also to the unusual circumstances surrounding Dracula's castle in the year of 2035 itself. Similarly to HoD, ol' Vlad is nowhere to be found, this time because Aria takes place in an age in which Dracula was permanently destroyed by the Belmonts, and the characters, from church officials to government agents to soldiers to our unlucky duo of teenagers, have different ideas on why the castle reappeared.

There's no feeling quite as refreshing as returning to a childhood classic and realizing it's just as outstanding as it was all those years ago. Aria of Sorrow is the result of years of iteration and passion, and stands amongst the best Castlevanias and the best metroidvanias ever made. It alone justifies buying the Advance Collection.

Frog Detective 3 sees the conclusion (for now?) to the story of the eponymous amphibian, taking them to the sands of Cowboy County to solve the mystery of the missing hats. New gameplay elements include a scooter, which also allowed for a larger environment... and that's it. The rest is the same point-n'-click, item trade chain type of game.

Anyone who's made it to game three in the trilogy already knows what it's like, and whether or not it's for them, but nevertheless: Frog Detective is a great pick for young kids, who will probably adore the cute visuals, witty writing and the scooter. As for the adults, it's a bit more hit-or-miss. There's very little complexity to the investigation, so it's up to how much the jokes land.

On a side note, it's such a bummer that none of the games in the trilogy used the magnifying glass for something.

The original Resident Evil 4, on the Gamecube, has a bit of a historical significance to me, being the first (and for many years, the only) survival horror game I beat by myself. I first saw it at a friend's house, thought it looked incredibly cool, and hey, sure, it's a horror game, but I'm old enough, I can handle it now! I was, of course, wrong, a lesson the Regenerator would soon enough burn into my mind. I was also terrible at the game and died a ton, as I'm pretty sure this was also my first shooter on console. Regardless, I pushed through, and the game earned a nostalgia-filled place in my heart.

So when the remake was announced, I was a bit apprehensive. RE4 was a product of its time, both in the sense that it could never be replicated and that it would never fly in today's industry, as it features mechanics and a storytelling style that major franchises, and especially, the Resident Evil series, have moved on from. How would they even go about remaking the game? Would a remake follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, focusing on delivering on an intense and satisfying action gameplay experience, or would it attempt to pull the series further back towards survival horror? And would it keep the cheesiness of the Gamecube game, the quips and trash talk, or would it play things more seriously and focus on the Resident Evil melodrama? Would it seek to replicate the highs of the original release, or would it feel like its own, separate thing?

The answer to all of those questions is yes.

It's unenviable how many disparate things RE4R attempts to balance, and even more shocking is how it manages to. Take, for example, the character of Leon S. Kennedy, the protagonist in this story. Leon is remembered by RE4 players as being this pretty cool guy who kills ganados and doesnt afraid of anything, but that representation, as fitting as it is for the pulp action ride that is that game, is at odds with his character in basically every other Resident Evil piece of media, especially Resident Evil 2. In all other places, he's a rookie cop turned US agent who's deeply traumatized by the incident in Raccoon City, which left him filled with survivor's guilt. How do you bring that element into RE4?

RE4R kicks off by presenting a slightly altered version of the opening in which, instead of Leon neutrally narrating the events that happened in 1998, focusing on Umbrella's downfall, he is more emotional and focuses, instead, on himself: the death of the policeman in the disaster caused by the T-Virus leading, almost unwillingly, to the birth of one of the US's top secret agents. This then cuts to him in the car with the two Spanish policemen, and the three exchange quips. It's an incredible decision, because it changes nothing from the structure of the original, but takes the opportunity to present both sides of Leon's personality, immediately establishing him as a much more layered version of the character he was in the original game. Which is to say, he still is that character from an external observer's point of view -- I have never been happier to hear the word "Bingo" in my life.

That opening also shows us glimpses of other characters, like Krauser and Ada, which gives more, much needed context to their appearances later in the story. Which is to say, pretty much everyone in the cast has gained from being remade in RE4R: Ashley now has more of a partner dynamic with Leon, through which we get to see more of her inner thoughts, and also his. Ada feels less out of place, being presented in ways that make her less of a surreal addiction to the story. Saddler and Mendez are now more cult-ish and intimidating, but there's also a human side shown to the latter; Krauser's relationship with Leon, as well as his motivations, are more clearly established, making the confrontations against him more satisfying...

The greatest winner, though, has to be Luis, who, like Leon, has had his backstory emphasized and got a more layered personality. Crucially, though, he now gets more time on-screen, time which is used to deliver on a more nuanced and satisfying character arc built upon his interactions with Leon, Ashley and Ada. Without going into spoilers, he is, at first, made more mysterious (not to say sleazy), which in turn causes Leon to not trust him, and the two have a much more rocky and thus more interesting relationship. There's a parallel made between him and Don Quixote, the overwhelming outward confidence of a man who wants to be a hero, not realizing the world isn't as simple as he thinks and that he is actually in way over his head -- it's fitting for the tragic heroism to this new Luis that greatly enhances the narrative of the remake. Incidentally, for those who like digging into the lore of the game's Files, he is now more integrated into the Resident Evil canon than his predecessor, which is also a plus.

People can change, right?

The way characters are treated is but a part of how RE4R understands what was great about the original and seeks to enhance those moments whenever possible. Another area in which RE4 was incredibly successful was the creation of horror through anxiety, the feeling of being trapped, undersupplied and soon to be overwhelmed, and iconic setpieces that played to those emotions are still here: take the village fight, for instance, which retains all the qualities of the original, but adds a couple more events that enhance the feeling of being cornered. It remains, in my opinion, the most brutal part of the game, though it is closely rivaled by the cabin fight, just a bit further into the village, which now has a new mechanic involving the windows that keeps the fight moving and the anxiety piling up. It also features much better scene direction and, even more importantly, sound design, both which drive home the point of how dire the situation our heroes find themselves in really is.

It bears saying, however, that although RE4 is notorious for that type of setpiece, it's not the only way in which it created horror: though less frequent, horror through dread also played an important part in the game. Here, I would avoid detailing specific sequences to avoid spoilers, but I will say that RE4R makes excellent use of the different types of plaga, and that old friends will be showing up again, like Verdugo and the Regenerators. Oh god, the goddamn Regenerators. I hate them so much. You know, when Leon said "What the fuck?!", I really felt it. Anyway.

And it's worth not going into spoilers, because as much as RE4R takes to enhancing beloved sequences, it's also willing to scrap ones that don't make a lot of sense. The original RE4 had a linear design in which some parts were unevenly paced (the Island, in particular, being notorious for this), and multiple sections felt like video game levels that were inconsequential in the long run. This may have worked in 2005, when we were all too eager to engage in more of the flashy combat of this new game, but is a way harder sell in 2023, when the bar is set so much higher. RE4R repositions, repurposes and even entirely replaces locations from the original game, and as such, it feels like a new game, with new surprises.

And does it hit that extremely high bar it sets to match? Yes. The remake retains the qualities of the original, but with modern enhancements that make all the difference. Most, if not all the original's guns are here, balanced further so that all of them feel like they have a niche, that they are exceptional at something. It's actually shocking how you can use anything if it fits your playstyle: even weapons I thought were memes, like the CQBR Rifle, have someone, somewhere, that swears by them and can use them to great effect. Central to all this is that one can now move while aiming, which improves their options during combat. Weapon shortcuts also exist, letting Leon switch weapons without entering the inventory screen.

The overall game balance, as well as the management of difficulty, was something the original RE4 was well known for. Similar systems are still, as far as I understand, being employed in all RE remakes, including this one, and as such, the game excels at making its player feel challenged, but never cheated; constantly running out of options, but never completely out. It also features a crafting system -- yes, I know, I too wince at the sight of those on modern games, but I promise, this one is actually good. The player is handed out crafting resources just like any every other resource -- it's not something that has or can be grinded for -- and at the cost of the inventory space they take, they give the player more flexibility in regards to the items they get. Is the RNG not playing along? You can offset that by using some of your resources. Would having more bullets help you out of this mess, or would popping a flash and booking it be more effective? Your choice. It's a simple and effective system that empowers the player without ever getting in their way.

And on that note, I have to mention the knife parries. The remake turns the knife into a resource which can be used to get yourself out of attacks that would deal high damage. Relying on that too much, however, will break it until the next visit to the merchant a time during which one misses out on the truly effective uses of the knife, which are stealth kills and knife parries. Through those, you can entirely avoid dealing with an enemy, or parry the attack and stun your target in the process. Parrying is an extremely rewarding mechanic with a high skill ceiling, and it's the final piece in making RE4's combat feel more fluid than ever.

What an incredible ride RE4R is. Its critics will of course say that it is not as revolutionary as its predecessor, but that was never the point: RE4 sought to create a new identity for a series that feared being forgotten, while RE4R seeks to rescue and reinforce that old identity, and reconcile it with the 2005 game. And on that goal, it succeeded, delivering an incredibly well-written and designed game, and highly polished to boot. I played it for almost 100 hours already, finishing it six times, each credits roll making me hungry for the next, and just writing about it makes me want to go for a seventh. In the end, that's what matters most.