Phantom Hourglass was a long awaited coming of the Zelda series into the Nintendo DS. I remember downloading the trailer from some gaming website and watching it over and over in anticipation. When the game finally came out.... it was... ehh...?

To its credit, it has interesting, if shallow, characters, and a couple of areas, like the Temple of the Ocean King and the Ruins Island are excellent level designs. I think the former gets a lot of undeserved hate because of the timer and of having to revisit it, but I like how the dungeon and its enemies feel genuinely intimidating, and how floors transform as you get more items.

The goodwill the game garners, though, is quickly demolished by its abysmal touch controls, baffling storytelling, and pacing so sluggish you will often check you phone while you play.

The story opens with Tetra getting randomly kidnapped before the five minute mark, because that's the only way the writers know how to establish stakes for a hero. I hope you developed some attachment to her in Wind Waker, because if you didn't, it's not gonna happen here either.

What follows is a script hellbent on repeating itself over and over, as well as lots of handholding and linear gameplay. At least TWW let you explore the entire map from the get go, but here, you can't travel into uncharted waters unless you get a specific chart beforehand. And the sailing is as sluggish as in the predecessor, except some chores in the form of enemies were added in the way to make it seem like you're doing something.

It's not a horrible game, nor is it the worst in the series, but it's a great example of Nintendo dragging the Zelda franchise through the mud: not investing enough on the product and shoving too many gimmicks into it to showcase the new console, even if it hurts gameplay.

With Pokémon Let's Go Eevee/Pikachu being released before the eighth generation, there were high expectations upon Sword and Shield, as players hoped it would harness the new platform’s strengths to evolve upon aspects of the previous games and push the series forward once more. Expectations which, to me, were betrayed. It’s not that terrible a game, but it's still one that left me bitter with disappointment, as it took many steps back and saw TPC and Game Freak making some unsavory decisions for the franchise.

Pokemon SWSH takes place in Galar, a new region based on the UK. You play as a fledgling Pokemon Trainer that heads out on an adventure together with your first Pokémon and your friend Hop. Hop’s brother is none other than the Pokemon League champion, Leon, which means there are a lot of eyes on the two of you, with audiences expecting you to accomplish great things as you take on the region's Gym Challenge.

I will never understand why there was such a vocal portion of the fanbase who complained about Alola having trials instead of Gyms. It's bizarre how many will simultaneously demand sweeping changes, yet backlash about any deviation from the formula. Nevertheless, those folks got what they wanted: we’re back to having a pretty standard Pokemon League with eight badges to collect from eight gym leaders in eight different cities.

The quest for badges coming back isn’t inherently an issue, but it just so happens that its absence in Alola mitigated a long-standing issue in the series, that of the supporting cast quickly being forgotten. As much as I like, say, Kalos, it’s hard to remember anything about the characters in that game: every one of them was one dimensional, confined to one specific role in the story, from rivals, to Gym Leaders, to antagonists.

Alola, on the other hand, was brimming with personality, and neatly tied its characters together by means of either the trials in the Island Challenge, the foundation of the Pokémon League or the Aether Foundation plot. There were more defined character arcs, too, with everyone undergoing some kind of growth over the course of your journey. To me, this is what makes Sun and Moon so memorable, even if I had other issues with those games.

With Sword and Shield back to the standard formula, the ball is in their court to find a way to pull its characters into the spotlight more. And I think, to some extent, its designers got that. Galar has plenty of mysteries waiting to be untangled, as well as some of the best character designs in the series. In fact, most of the supporting cast of the game has something of a character arc waiting to happen.

Additionally, because of the League Championship around which the story is built, more screen time is given to the Gym leaders and the Champion, which means you’ll see plenty of them throughout the game, instead of beating them and forgetting about it. Even better, there's a suggestion of a greater plot involving the ancient history of Galar, relating to the region's Dynamax phenomenon as well as its ancient sites of Geoglyphs. All the while, the shadow of Macro Cosmos, Chairman Rose's energy company, looms over the region.

And... none of that ever goes anywhere. When it does, it does so in a muted and visibly cut back way.

Galar's ancient history disappears after the first few cities, being never mentioned again. Chairman Rose, a frightening antagonist whose benign façade hides a man capable of doing dangerous things, heel turns in a way so rushed it’s almost comical: he doesn't even get a proper hideout, or grunts, or anything. Oh, he gets an immensely menacing theme along with a battle intro animation that shows his conflicting feelings that an earlier version of the plot might have developed more. But that's it.

And it's not just Rose, there's several other characters whose development arcs appear incomplete in the final version of the game. Hop and Bede are other outrageous cases, two rivals with conflicting personalities whose fascinating developments... happen mostly off-screen. They leave the plot for a while, come back in, and now they're different. To say nothing about Leon's original rivals, who I learned more about playing Masters EX than their own game.

What's worse is that those cuts really didn't reflect in other areas of the game being necessarily better, as the only thing SWSH really has going for it is the anemic Wild Area. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how the Wild Area represented the first experiment towards the open world format that PLA and SV would iterate on and realize, but back when I first played the game, the Wild Area all but convinced me an open world Pokemon game would never work. And it is the only post game you get, as the only battle facility you get is extremely basic, and raid battles get old rather fast.

If anything, SWSH shone in the competitive scene. Dynamax, the new in-battle mechanic, replaced Megas and Z-Moves, and although the first impression made it seem like it would be busted and create a tedious, centralizing the metagame, I was wrong about it: Dynamax added an element of risk-assessment and flexibility that previous mechanics lacked, and contributed to decentralizing Pokémon picks. SwSh actually proved to have some of the most fascinating VGC metas in the history of the franchise, so I'll give it at least that: Dynamax is an improvement.

Oh, and the game has Galarian Ponyta. Galarian Ponyta is great. In fact, Galar really knocks it out of the park with the mon designs, and the Pokédex offers a great mix of old, new, and Galar form Pokémon. Of course, the fanbase didn't react well at all to the region’s available Pokémon, culminating in the Dexit "controversy", if you can call it that, where the fanbase proved once and for all that it's a toxic cesspool, filled with people prone to overreacting to pre-release information and who don't understand game development at all.

Now, Dexit was incredibly mismanaged by Game Freak's PR, I have to admit. GF initially claimed that it would be impossible to add old Pokémon via updates and/or DLC... and then turned around and did exactly that. A lot of headaches would have been avoided if they’d just said “DLC is coming, please be excited” from the start. Regardless, they'd announce the Armor Island and Crown Tundra showing only concept art, which was incredibly shady, and when it was revealed that these expansions were mostly new legendaries and more Wild Area... If you dig that, more power to you, but I was done expecting anything else from the games.

I lie, what really burned me out was the announcement for Pokémon HOME. The service was unveiled during a Nintendo investors meeting, which said a lot about who it's meant to benefit, and it turned out to be a replacement to Pokémon Bank that costed triple the price of its predecessor offering little more. It was a classic case of creating the problem and selling the solution: box count has remained the same since the 5th or 6th Gen, even though the variety of Pokémon and Forms has increased dramatically since then, and with Raids being a thing in this new game, and incentive to hunt and collect shinies, players started running out of box space.

The Pokémon Company helpfully sweeps in to create a way they can hold your Pokémon hostage for years to come -- well played! Not to mention that the whole thing was horrifically mismanaged, with delayed updates, as well as multiple technical issues which betrayed a lack of planning from TPC and its partners. If you're going to make a service that links multiple games, the first thing to do is to establish a few standards and ground rules. The multiple delayed updates to the application as well as bugs stemming from GO and BDSP integrations suggest to me they did anything but.

It’s so tiresome to talk about SWSH. I'm so glad PLA eventually came out, because Pokémon Sword and Shield made me very pessimistic for the future of the franchise. The game was more expensive, but not more ambitious, and in fact felt like a step back in many regards. Again, not terrible, perfectly possible to have fun with, especially for competitive or returning players, but not my thing.

Years ago, if someone had told me 999 was a name I’d be hearing again over the years, I’d have my doubts about it. The game seemed as niche as can be: It was a visual novel heavy on text and grim undertones that I only ever saw discussed in Japanese games circles. Yet, here we are, with The Nonary Games and Zero Time Dilemma available across a variety of platforms.

I’m unsure how I even came to buy 999. I remember trying it out and having a not so good first impression, then not looking at the game again. I must have seen it on a sale one day and, maybe thinking of giving it a second chance, I brought it home. It remained on my backlog until the day I was looking for a more slow-paced game to play. The day finally came, and gosh, am I ever glad I gave a game a second try.

9 Persons, 9 Hours, 9 Doors, or 999, for short, tells the story of nine people who are kidnapped and trapped on a ship. Their fate is to play the Nonary Game, a perverse and elaborate game that gives them nine hours to go around the ship gathering keys and finding numbered doors in search of an exit, all while their life is on the line.

The first impression is truly bad, mainly because the protagonist, Junpei, is a complete dumbass. he’s one of those dull, “just a normal guy until […]” main characters who are meant to be projected upon and are completely unlikeable as characters. And unlikeable he is, as we spend a bunch of time stuck with him drooling over a female friend who’s also on the ship. Basically, he's male gaze given a name and dialogue box.

Unfortunately, male gaze is a big part of the game. Expect to see impossible boobs and immature jokes, as well as a teenager's idea of romance coming up a lot. There's a Q&A with the author online, and you can tell from that he's not even ashamed of it. Were I to judge the game from the first half an hour, I’d say it was going to be insufferable due to these issues.

Fortunately, however, once we get past the intro, we get less exposed to Junpei’s thoughts and more to the rest of the cast, all of which are much more interesting people than him. Also much more fascinating is the plot of the game, which immediately establishes how high the stakes are, and how horribly everyone will die if they fail the game.

The writing is fantastic. It feels truly novel-like, complete with a very descriptive narrator. This is especially important because of how the game is mostly made up of text and static images. It leaves much more to your imagination, greatly enhancing many of its scenes, especially the more sinister ones. This is an advantage intrinsic to books that visual novels can also make use of.

Unlike their paper counterparts, however, VNs can also make use of sound, and the sound design in 999 reinforces its writing very well. The sound of stepping on metal floors, threading on grimy floors, doors opening, the ship creaking… To say nothing of the excellent soundtrack, which not only appears during cutscenes, but is played during puzzle sections as well.

The gameplay sections in 999 take place in escape rooms. As the game goes on, you’ll be asked to choose doors to go through, and each time you do, Junpei and the characters that accompanied him get trapped into a room and have to find and combine various items to solve puzzles and exit the room.

I like how the difficulty of these sections sits in a nice, comfortable place. The game rewards thoroughness instead of jumping to crazy conclusions, so it’s unlikely you’ll end up in the same situations as in, say, Phoenix Wright, where a very specific item must be used on a specific person because that can incite a reaction you couldn’t possibly know about. In 999, so long as you’re a careful observer, the solution will always be in your grasp.

The escape rooms are half the fun of the game, and it’s great how, the way the endings are laid out, you’ll explore most of the rooms to get them all (only one is technically skippable). This proves to be a double-edged sword when it comes to the endings, however, since they’re mostly decided by your choice of doors.

Picking a door is essentially a blind choice, and even in hindsight it’s hard to figure out by yourself why the game ends in certain ways if you take certain paths. I was lucky to find the true ending path by accident, but a friend missed it by a room and was met with a seemingly inevitable fate, which frustrated him. To me, it was pretty logical why that happened, but I happened to know something he couldn’t have.

This is, of course, a moot point in The Nonary Games, which fixed this issue by having a flowchart and adding the ability to skip back and forth in the game. In the DS version, you kinda need a guide to make sure you don’t waste a bunch of time getting repeat endings.

Regardless of the version you play on, the twist that leads to the true ending, and the fact that you cannot get that ending on your first try, is some of the most amazing video game storytelling I’ve seen. 999 is the kind of narrative that you can only create in a videogame, nowhere else.

I might have my gripes with 999, but it stands that it was a fantastic experience, both story and gameplay-wise. The original DS version, which is what I played, might be hard to locate nowadays, but fortunately, the game is available on the Nonary Games collection, which I recommend picking up wholeheartedly. Always nice to see these games preserved somehow.

(Back to the Q&A with the author, it caught me by surprise how the author justified Lotus’s outfit with “she likes it” (Q8) and insisted her breasts are not implants, they’re “all natural” (Q70). Sheesh. Could he really not have made up a better excuse? The game establishes she’s out of a job, so why didn’t he say “she’s working part-time as a dancer” instead of digging an even bigger hole? The woman has two daughters to feed, has bills to pay, I would have bought it. And what’s so important about a character’s breasts being implants or not?

This juvenile attitude coming from an otherwise very capable writer is so emblematic of the boys’ club mentality pervasive in the gaming industry, it’s sickening.)

The fact that this is probably one of the best uses of the IP nowadays is worrisome, to say the least. It's not the worst gacha in existence, but it is a gacha, and an expensive one at that. Every day playing it is a test of resilience against exploitation of FOMO.

However, not only does it tell genuinely good stories with the characters from the franchise -- within the boundaries of what is acceptable for a kids' game, of course -- but it offers one of the most exciting and challenging single player experiences in the history of the franchise. And of course, it has banger remixes of tracks from the games, as well as stellar character designs.

I keep playing it, hoping it will never piss me off enough that I have to quit.

I played this game for over a year before putting it down to play the then newly released 4th generation of Pokémon. Compared to new entries in the series, especially New Horizons, it does feel a little barebones, but at the time, it felt incredibly ambitious and fresh.

Back then, I also relied a lot on the game to help me with the loneliness and depression that plagued my teenage years. That gap that would also eventually be filled by Pokémon, which helped me make new friends, some of which are with me to this day. Before that happened, though, it was caring for my isolated city and talking to Apollo, Marina, and others, that gave me joy.

So it's a complicated relationship I have with this game. Even though it's aged, and even though I would never recommend playing it and I will never do so again, it will always have this warm place in my heart to itself.

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. I had never done all the endings on the SNES version, however, and the DS remake provided me with a chance to correct that.

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

Originally released for the SNES in 1995, then re-released for the Playstation in 1999 and Nintendo DS in 2008, 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.

(On the subject of the DS remake, apart from the font being a bit tiny, it’s the better version, featuring everything from the SNES, plus a revised English translation that slightly improves the script, and an extra boss that leads to a 14th ending and ties into Chrono Cross. There’s also the Arena of the Ages for training monsters, but that’s mostly good for duping capsules and making a perfect save file instead.)

(It’s just too bad this version is so hard to find nowadays)

I remember having a hard time getting into this game at first, I think because Normal difficulty felt way too easy. Then I tried it on Hard, and played over two hundred hours, only stopping when everything in the game was maxed out.

As far as portable RPGs go, this is one of the best. It's easy to put 15 minutes into it, if you feel like it, and it's easy to put 150 hours as well. It's almost perfect. If I could change one simple thing, I would change the speed mechanics. But that's it. I really wish a new entry in this series would show up one day.

I hope you like Sea Salt Ice Cream.

358/2 Days runs parallel to Chain of Memories, and is the story of Sora's Nobody, Roxas. Having showed up in Twilight Town, Xemnas recruited him into the Organization and gave him his name. Roxas would then spend 358 days as a member of the Organization – Days tells us what happened during that time.

I remember being very surprised when this game was announced. It was when Nomura started showing off his talent of giving his games ludicrous names. I can’t remember if the reveal happened in a magazine or press release, but regardless, we, the fans, only knew how the name was written, not how it was pronounced, and we ended up spending a while simply trying to figure that bit out. “Three-hundred-and-fifty-eight-slash-two-days”? "divided by two days"? The forum discussions on the topic were endless.

Square eventually had to issue another press release saying that the correct pronunciation was “three-five-eight-days-over-two”, meaning not a single fan was correct in their theory. More pre-release material came out over time, as well, showing that this was not going to be another Chain of Memories, but a full-fledged KH game, with the front-facing camera and command menu and such. Could the DS really handle such a game?

The answer was, surprisingly, yes. Sure, the physics are a bit slippery and environments are simpler so to not be visually taxing, but overall, this came much closer to delivering a traditional KH experience than the previous spin-off, Chain of Memories.

That’s not to say Days is entirely without quirks – far from it, actually. Instead of the more free-form world exploration we see in the two mainline KH games, Days has a mission-based structure: on each in-game day, you’ll be given a task to complete in one of the game’s worlds. This bite-sized gameplay was probably considered fitting for the portable setting, but that means there is no free-roam.

Another big difference from the mainline games is that, when you level up or learn new abilities, you don’t simply get those bonuses automatically, they need to be physically fit into your panels, which are a grid where the skills you want to use must be placed. There's a puzzle element to it: it’s very much possible to fit every end-game ability within the grid if you put your mind to it. It's fun to fiddle with.

The only problem, for me, is magic, or rather, how there's a hard limit on the number of casts your spells have determined by how many copies of that spell are in your panels. The game is sorely lacking in burst damage, which magic could have provided if it used KH or KHII's MP systems, but instead, there's this cap which also caps your DPS.

If that sounds like a weird criticism, it’s because it relates to one of the biggest problems with 358/2 Days: enemies take too long to kill. The balancing in the game is utterly skewed towards making fights harder by giving more HP to foes. No kidding, right after the tutorial, you’re faced with an (admittedly optional) enemy that has seven bars of health that have to be chipped down.

When you start doing challenges and mission mode, this tendency becomes the norm, as so many missions devolve into chipping away the massive health of bosses. It’s kind of why I recommend not touching Proud Mode, not because it’s a hard game, but because dying during those chip sections and starting them all over again can take a hard toll on your sanity.

The second huge issue with Days, and this is arguably the biggest one since it cannot be avoided at all, is that a lot of the game is pure filler. There are 90 something missions to do, and there just isn’t enough plot to support all that. The result is useless tasks like “Collect Organization Emblems”, “Destroy the Shadow Globs” (whatever that is) or “Kill a particular brand of Heartless” that likes to run away and hide and burn the mission timer.

Pointless time-wasters such as that bog down a story that is already pretty slow to begin with. It’s ironic, because Days’ story is not bad at all, but it’s perceived as such because of the sluggish pacing. The things that it tries to do, it does well: it shows the story from the point of view of the antagonists, it creates a mystery, it establishes how the friendship between the main characters, Xion, Roxas and Axel, came to be and how it fell apart, and it ties into KHII without breaking anything major. Which is a lot more than you can say for BbS, for instance.

It's the padding that I think ultimately destroy the game. Had it been 20~30 hours shorter, it would be an easy recommendation to make. As it is, though, I think all but the most hardcore of fans should just settle for watching the cutscenes on the remix versions.

Pokémon is probably one of the franchises with the most spin-offs ever. Conquest is Pokémon’s attempt at the strategy RPG genre, and while I like it, I fear that may be for the wrong reasons.

Visually, it’s pleasant. It’s a DS game, so you know there won’t be any mindblowing effects, but it uses more detailed sprites than the 4th gen games. Stages are functional, with miniature, 2D sprites in a 3D scene, as is somewhat standard for SRPGs, and while the soundtrack isn't outstanding, there's some pretty good tracks in there, like Nixtorm and Aurora themes.

The game’s setting is loosely based on Japan from the Edo Period, when the country went through the process of unification influenced by Nobunaga Oda. In fact, Nobunaga is the main antagonist, and every single character in the game is named after someone connected to him in some way. Bulbapedia keeps a list of those, if you're interested.

The game, or at least the first campaign, goes something like this: Your character is the ruler of one of seventeen kingdoms, and you must conquer all of them before Nobunaga does, while befriending both pokémon and warriors. It’s kind of like what you do in Pokémon Masters, if you played that: beat the Gym leader and they join you.

The dialogues are hilarious, what you should expect from taking a dark plot about the bloody conquest of nations by a fierce warlord and rewrite it to be suitable for children. Right after your first major battle, a character casually says something along the lines of “Greenleaf and Fontaine are peaceful nations, they’re not planning to go to war with anyone. You should invade them!”. Just like that. So if you’re looking for deep plots and nuanced characters, you’re in the wrong place.

Which then takes us to the gameplay. How does Conquest fare as an SRPG? Not that well, I'm afraid. As far as strategy games go, it’s entry level at best, having a relatively low difficulty level and being based on simple, rather shallow mechanics.

You bring into battle a team of six warriors, each of which can only optimally use one Pokémon family and whose placement in the field is outside of your control. Each Pokémon has only one move, of either of its types, and also a set of traits, which are almost always luck-based effects.

There are some mechanics, like Warrior Skills, that attempt to bring some depth to battles, but apart from one grossly overpowered case (Sweet Song), those will hardly make a difference. Several stages also have environmental twists, but again, unit starting positions are random, so you won't get to plan around those.

Ultimately, Conquest is about overpowering enemies with brute force, which makes for a pretty poor strategy game experience. Which is why, a couple dozen hours in, I realized Conquest was a much better game if I thought of it as a turn-based RPG instead, because of how the Pokémon license lends itself to the gameplay.

That’s pretty much why I spent so much time playing it. It’s fun to recruit warriors, match them to their perfect link, evolve their pokémon, then do the same in the next of the many campaigns (since they carry over). It's as if the game was just a run-of-the-mill mainline release.

Of course, even then, there are some issues. The game overstays its welcome by a lot -- yes, the multiple campaigns have fun twists, but there's also so much padding, so much grinding, and so much of the enemy AI wasting your time. Not to mention, there is so much missable or hard to find crap. By the time I completed the game, it was more about the sunken cost fallacy and the feeling of obligation to see it to the end than actual engagement.

And that's Pokémon Conquest. It's a mediocre strategy game that has no reason to be relevant other than its license, but it does make good use of that license. It's worth checking out for those who are deep into the Pokémon series and are looking for something a little bit different.

In the time be the fourth generation came around, Nintendo and TPC made sure to milk the franchise as they could with as many spin-offs possible. It was during that content drought that shovelware such as Pokémon Dash were released as if they were full-featured products, but it was also during that time that one of the longest-running series spin-offs first came around: Pokémon Mystery Dungeon.

A double spin-off, at that, as Mystery Dungeon is an entire series of games that was very popular in Japan. The series had your character exploring procedurally generated dungeons full of treasures and hostile creatures, and the format was deemed suitable for a Pokémon crossover.

The first game, Blue Rescue Team, came around during the transitional period between DS and GBA and had a sister game available for the latter platform, Red Rescue Team. Since then, the series has seen several entries of varying quality, but mostly with the same formula as the first.

To me, the first game is always what comes to mind when I think of Mystery Dungeon, not only because it was the one to introduce the series and its mechanics, but also, the plot clicked with me a lot more. Later entries would focus on big bad Pokémon as antagonists, which felt underwhelming in comparison to the quest for knowledge and the natural calamities the first game presented.

That, and it feels like it played the whole "human reincarnated as a Pokémon" schtick in a more interesting fashion than in any other game, in the sense that that fact carries a lot of emotional weight in multiple parts of the story. Later on in the series, it just felt like a gratuitous isekai setup.

All of that said, the game does become very same-y after a short while, and then devolves into plain grinding for dozens and dozens of hours over. The game could do with lots of balancing on exp gain and recruit rates, as well as features to keep the game fresh over time. As it is, there's no incentive to building an actual Rescue Team for the end game.

All in all, it's a game I hold close to my heart, but at the same time, I don't feel like ever touching it again. Who knows. Maybe one day I'll check out the Switch remake, see if they fixed anything.

Pokémon Diamond and Pearl exist in an incredibly awkward spot in the franchise's history. It's a generation that brought some incredibly important mechanical improvements, but also that was completely overshadowed by, well, every other Pokémon game surrounding it.

Compared to Emerald, DP were games clearly confused about how to build on the previous generation's legacy. You can see that in stuff like contests, berries, secret bases... mechanics that attempt to replicate what the predecessor did, but in a way that either didn't fit the new game, or featured additions that actually made them worse. Also, why were there so many evolutions?

Compared to BW, they feature an underwhelming story and world design -- in fact, BW makes the art direction in DP more awkward in retrospect. Compared to HGSS, they look ugly and content light, and obviously don't have any nostalgia to them.

And when faced with Platinum, their third version counterpart, which I would still rank very low within the franchise, it is evident how barebones and unfinished parts of the original games were, especially their main plots.

The only reason these games still have a place in my heart is that they were the ones to introduce online play, which elevated Pokémon communities to a whole new level. And that was a massive boon to lonely kids all around.

At the time, I was a very depressed teenager, going through an identity crisis and having a hard time making friends. Playing Pokémon Pearl led me to people who are still my friends and I still treasure to this day. It's actually kind of scary to imagine what course my life would have taken if my teenage self had somehow grown out of Pokémon -- I would be a completely different person.

But yeah, even with all that, I would be hard-pressed to replay Diamond or Pearl nowadays. These are by far the most poorly-aged Pokémon games, and they are in dire need of a remake. Thank god there is one for the Switch, which...

....oh. Oh no. Oh god no. Why?

For a game released during the content drought between the release of the DS and the release of the actual 4th generation of Pokémon, Pokémon Ranger was actually a pretty nifty idea.

The game has you controlling an eponymous Pokémon Ranger in Fiore, a land without trainers. Here, Rangers use tools called capture stylers to temporarily recruit wild Pokémon to help them in tasks, such as putting out fires and unblocking roads. The capture styler is a beyblade of sorts controlled by your stylus, and the main mechanic in the game is drawing circles around Pokémon in sequence to add them to your team.

I, for one, am very favorable to experimentation with the world of Pokémon, and this idea was pretty fun. It's too bad the actual execution was sort of barebones. Once the sequels came around, this would become even more apparent, as their mechanics are fleshed out and they're superior games as a result.

The way the game is, where you have to catch Pokémon without lifting the stylus, is asking for an RSI and a ruined touch screen. I played through it a few times as a kid, but I probably wouldn't do so again as an adult. Grab the sequels instead, they're much better.

The second generation is considered by many to be the best generation, even among people who continued to play all of them. I'm not one to pick favorites, as I find that each generation brought with it important changes... but there is a magic to GSC that makes me think those people might have a point.

The journey through Johto and Kanto really felt like such an adventure. It’s when the series really started to hit its stride, gameplay-wise, but it was also when they were still these very simple Game Boy games, and that simplicity added to the design.

Diamond and Pearl were particularly frustrating in this regard, as they tended to have these massive, uninteresting areas just for show, as well as mechanics that sought to expand upon the existing ones just for the sake of expanding. Among other issues.

I could rant about those games for a while, and in fact, I was so burned out after a while that I would only play Soul Silver years later, right before XY came out. I simply had no faith these remakes would turn out right.

I was wrong. HGSS are pure, unabated, loving fanservice, targeted directly at those nostalgic memories I keep. HGSS would set the bar for remakes so high that no other game since would be able to match it.

Johto is remade in a way that feels like it is renewed, but at the same time, like it never really changed. GSC's cartridge space limitations are the stuff of legend, and this meant tilesets were very restricted. HGSS is free of such issues, and it shows. So many areas in the game are given gorgeous visual makeovers, it's pure joy.

GSC also had very memorable music. The problem is that remastering those great chiptunes carries the risk of ruining them. I didn’t doubt Game Freak after their work on FRLG, though, and HGSS definitely didn’t disappoint. The music is well preserved and feels just the same as the originals.

As for the gameplay… Well, it's true that updating the games to Gen IV means incorporating much of those changes-for-changes-sake I mentioned I didn't like. But HGSS were not designed with those changes in place, which leaves us with core changes such as physical/special split and new moves, whi

Speaking of restrictions, I mentioned the memory limitations that made areas less pretty, but in addition to that, there were areas that were outright cut from the original game, either because of time, space, or nothing to put there in the first place. So imagine my surprise when I walk into a cave and wind up in a Safari Zone. Or when I went to Seafoam Islands as a joke and they were there. Or when Viridian Forest wasn't cut down.

None of that was in the originals, and their absence was noticeable. In the Seafoam Islands, specifically, you can even capture Articuno. Zapdos and Moltres are also present elsewhere. And in Cerulean Cave, there’s a Mewtwo. Their presence makes the game feel so much more like a sequel, so much more complete. Heck, in modern games, they'd make a point not to give you so much stuff, to make you buy multiple versions or go to stupid events.

And that's not all. Even existing areas, like some of the less interesting Gyms, see new elements that would not have been possible on the GBC. Areas that were good already are mostly unchanged.

Other additions include the Battle Frontier, but I'll be honest, as much as I like it, I don't like it enough to bother with pre-Gen VI breeding mechanics. Breeding and IV mechanics in this gen took copious amounts of time and luck to get anywhere, which goes against the idea of experimenting with different teams in different facilities.

There's also this crazy bit of postgame content, the so-called Pokéathlon, which is a bunch of minigames played with your Pokémon. Touch minigames usually have the potential to go horribly, but most of them are actually pretty fun, and add to the game a lot.

...anyway. I'm sure there's more, but I'm going to stop here and just say you should totally play HGSS if you haven't. Yes, even though, by now, it's older than the source games were on its release. Everything in Soul Silver is so carefully redone, improved with so much love, it’s almost a manual on how to remake a classic game. Unlike some modern cough-cough-bdsp-cough games, they remind me of why I love this series so much.