very endearing. none of the minigames are very good and the gardening loop is really barebones but that hardly matters in a world this charming and effortlessly cute.

the leveling up for the time you can spend outside of your home and there being a time restriction in the first place can be read as a nuisance but it also encourages you to actually become familiar with its world and be excited by how new pieces of it unlock and how new shortcuts pop up, also adding a bit of tension to its small mazes and a touch of planning wrt where you'll go. also recreates the feeling of becoming more confident with yourself and your surroundings as a child upon learning more about them and what makes each person tick, even if in silly ways like "this guy really loves skiing". while having the pop quiz first happen on day 3 is a strange choice it also highlights how much you absorb of this world through just playing more of the game, with the quiz becoming really easy later on. i love this feeling of actually getting to know a game's world, small as this one's is it's still very rewarding to do the sidequests and fill the photo book up and chip away at making the world's flowers bloom again.

the translation patch is really good translation wise, pretty professional script, but i had some technical hiccups which i don't know what caused them: the frying pan sidequest would just Not turn in, my first attempt at playing this got killed really late into it because i couldn't access the seed/drop combination screen anymore and that etched into the save somehow? then i replayed the game with speedups, not doing as much side content, to try to get to the ending, and that menu didn't break but one optional minigame did for reasons also unknown. maybe it's mgba (though i played it on different instances each time, first through the standalone vita app then the retroarch core), maybe it's the patch, i don't know. but that i had the motivation to spend a couple hours farming just to get to a short ending cutscene speaks volumes to how immediately attached i got to this small, colorful 8 bit world with really nice music. the evangelion shito ikusei of sylvanian families, except with gardening that's more barebones than the angel raising and a more developed world. lol these comparisons are stupid

There's two ways to look at Donkey Kong Country 3: A decent yet underrated send off to DKC that released too late and whose reputation was tarnished by the boom of 3D gaming, or a piece of crap garbage game that replaces Donkey Kong with a baby. A baby!!

Me? I like to think the truth is uh, somewhere in the middle.

While this is wild speculation, the impression I get from Double Trouble is that much of the talent from the last two games vacated before this project began to get to work on titles for the Nintendo 64. The formula is intact, this feels like a proper Donkey Kong Country on its surface, but the level design is so much more flat, gimmicks don't land nearly as well and are often irritating, and outside of a mostly unnecessary but kinda cool overworld, there's not a whole lot that feels like it's pushing these games forward in a positive way. It would not surprise me if this was a Mega Man 5 situation where everyone shrugged and asked "well, what the hell do you do after Diddy's Kong Quest?"

You put a hideous baby in the game, apparently. I don't like babies! I think they're gross! I gag when I see baby-related paraphernalia, I don't want to play as one. Every time I see a baby I think "Ugh. Baby." Babies vomit and crap all over themselves, they cannot forge for food, their skulls are soft, they are not the protagonists of video games! You might protect a baby in a game, but they aren't the stars of their own adventure, you don't put them on the front of a box!!

It's also a little weird that there's three Donkey Kong Country games for the SNES and you only play as DK in the first one, right?

Even the presentation is off. There's this uncanny quality to a lot of the sprites, the music feels very uninspired, and the setting lacks a lot of the charm and uniqueness of the previous games. Yet despite all my misgivings, I don't think Double Trouble is a bad game, so much as it's just mediocre. Diddy's Kong Quest was a tough act to follow, especially for a game coming out on the very tail end of the SNES' lifecycle and during a holiday season where it had to compete with games like Mario 64. I've heard people talk about this game in extremely negative ways, and like, if they played Mario 64 before this - or worse, were expecting Mario 64 for Christmas and got fucking Dixie Kong's Double Trouble instead - I honestly can't say I'd blame them for harboring some long-standing resentment for it. I'd be pretty disappointed, too.

Crusader of Centy is, at surface value, a fairly competent Zelda clone for the Genesis. Movement is smoother and it leans more towards action, with a sword throw and a pretty freeform sense of momentum. It lacks proper dungeons and puzzle-solving, but it does feature a nice variety of animal buddies that each have their own ability. It's a bit light on content, with most of the levels and bosses feeling rather underdesigned, but it's hard to accuse it of a lack of ambition because its story is, to be frank, completely fucking insane.

The game, set in a fantasy world where monsters used to rule the land, but were then banished by a mysterious light, starts with the protagonist (default name Corona)'s 14th birthday, where he is given, as ordained by the laws of the land, a sword and shield by his worried mother, and sent to adventure in the wild. He then loses the ability to speak with men, causing an actually pretty effective sense of alienation, even though he can now speak with animals. He goes on with his journey with no stated goal, eventually finding out that the reason he can't speak with humans is that the Tower of Babel finished construction, and God did the whole thing preventing all men from understanding one another. There's an episode where you are unwittingly transformed into a monster and get to see how your kind terrifies theirs (this lasts about 2 minutes of playtime), which later sets up the reveal that the monsters are just innocent creatures that humans murder for no reason (no idea why they keep trying to kill you. Self defense?). Eventually you decide to climb up the Tower of Babel, where you throw hands with an alien, then you meet a giant ancient dragon who summons your mom into the fight and starts beating the shit out of her, only to reveal that this was a test of your mettle and that she was just an illusion. Then, you grow a plant on top of the Tower of Babel so you can climb into heaven (which is, obviously, the most unhingedly designed area in the game, made purely to troll players I think) and ask God to cut that whole language thing out. He does, but says humanity sucks and will all go to Hell. Anyways, a magic tornado has appeared, and you can use to travel in time by jumping into it, which lets you witness a few (I think unrelated?) vignettes of the world's past, before letting you travel to the final dungeon, which is where the monsters lived before spilling into the human world again so you can destroy... some divine creature? To reboot the entire universe and stop fantasy racism (by sealing the oppressed monsters into another dimension).

It's easy to make any game sound crazy by just listing plot beats, but I want you to understand that there is very little that I omitted. Centy just goes between a plot beat and another without actually bothering to explain why things are happening. This game doesn't even have a villain or a proper overarching goal, as far as I understand it. Where did the tornado, which plays a key role in the late game, come from, and why does it have these powers? Who knows! It's barely acknowledged, let alone explained. Why do monsters flip-flop between completely reasonable creatures and random encounters? Dunno! I only guessed what the final dungeon was based off one off-hand line, the game doesn't tell you. I think at least some of the blame for this rests on the bad translation (Apparently the EU one is different, might be better to go with that) but the game is very clearly rushed. A lot of the animal buddies see use only once or twice throughout the game, and the whole time travel stuff is clearly a way to reuse stages and enemies they already made. If I had to guess, the devs were trying to make a proper epic of a game, spanning tens of hours and exploring the breadth of themes that Crusader of Centy as is uneasily touches upon, and had to drastically resize the scope of what they were working with. It's a dang shame because as it is, the game feels extremely confused and muddled. I think it's worth a shot if you're interested, it feels ok to play especially when you get the sword throw (the basic slash is a little janky), there's a lot of cool ideas and moments and even if they struggle to come together they can at least be appreciated for what they are.

January 2022 I played Dark Souls 2 : Scholar of the first sin for the first time, it took a while to click but eventually I fell in love with it and the series as a whole.

April 2024 It is with a heavy heart that I must face facts : I cannot play these games anymore. A similar thing has happened to me before, in 2022 I had the same realization about the total war games, but I have since been able to replay them a few years later. So I'd like to say its not "goodbye souls" but "see you later souls". I've simply grown too used to them, as replayable as they are, there is just nothing to excite me anymore. I will note however, that demons' souls was the last holdout.

Admittedly, this is probably less due to Demons' Souls' qualities than it is to the fact that I have done fewer runs of it than DS1 and 2 which I have played to death, by virtue of having to get my ps3 out of storage to play it, but nevertheless I find myself thinking about IT in particular lately.

Spoilers for Demons Souls I guess

The last time I played it I felt like the protagonist of Shadows over Insmouth or even 1984 when the cosmic horror hit as I made my way through the swamp of sorrows and thought to myself "oh god, I'm actually enjoying this". Miyazaki's psy-op finally got to me, whichever pheromone infused miasma the swamps emanate has made it into my head. Are these thoughts my own anymore? Am I but a vessel for the sacrifice to the great god of toxic swamp water that From Software has built an altar to?

Before any of the Demon Souls superfans get too pleased with their new convert, I think my overall enjoyment of DeS has stayed about the same; case in point I think I fucking hate 1-3 and 1-4. I think DeS strengths lie in atmosphere, in novel challenge revolving around environmental traversal, elemental match-ups, slow, methodical exploration and puzzle bossfights. In terms of straight up combat gauntlets its been utterly left in the dust by later entries, and its my least favourite aspect of the game. My ass also got killed because I accidentally climbed over a railing my rubbing too close to it and jumped into a 3 enemy gank, which felt less like punishing poor awareness and more getting fucked by weird controls. How hard is it to add a button press for mantling over obstacles? Either way, FromSoft abandoned that shit almost inmediately so its nice to know they agree with me.

The Blue dragon fucking sucks. The red dragon as an obstacle in 1-1 and 1-2 works perfectly, thematically and mechanically it serves its role of pseudoboss/setpiece wonderfully. The blue dragon sucks, whether or not you get past his second phase seems more luck to me than anything else given the disconnect between the visual outline and hitbox of his fire breath (especially if you rescue the knight dude) and given he guards the false king, as a player you're going to be seeing him a lot, leaving you to either absolutely master his bullshit timing or do the slow, tedious process of killing him with arrows. I have only ever fought King Allant "honourably" like 2 times maybe, because by the time I get to 1-4 my enthusiasm for DeS has grown thin and the tedium of the dragon and runback occupy such a space in my mind, that I usually just pull out the thief ring + poison cloud cheese combo, and I admit that with 0 shame. Its unfortunate, because the first time I fought King Allant I was legitimately sweating by the end of it, it was an incredible rush of adrenaline, but that fucking dumbass dragon had to fuck it up.

That's kind of DeS' double edged sword. It fucks with you, and dares you to fuck with it back, which is great when you max out health regen items so you can tank the poison and absolutely breeze through the swamp, but less great when you realize the optimum interaction with the world tendency system is to act in such a way that you dont have to engage with it at all i.e kill yourself in the nexus and always go in soul form. I get the logic in body form having the supposed risk/reward of extra health vs the chance to make the entire area harder if you die with it, but the usual obtuseness added to the fact that 25% extra health isn't particularly helpful compared to potentially getting into black world tendency, there isn't much of a choice. The added mechanic of item drop rates going up with black world tendency is also kind of pointless because pure white levels with sub-optimally upgraded weapons are infinitely easier than pure black with maxed out weapons. There's just not much of a choice here. You could argue that maybe there wasnt intended to BE a choice, given that the NPC which explained this mechanic was removed during development, but even as an opaque mechanic it cannot help but incentivise not bothering with it at all. Especially given the focus on cooperation I think they had to have realized people would crack the code on it eventually.

The poise system is weird, in that its an example of a system that is both too punishing and way too forgiving for the player, which is weird. Compared to the later souls games (though admittedly DS1 maybe went a bit too far in making poise OP) it fucks with the usual dynamic of the combat wherein you commit to every attack, both yours and the enemies' being slow and interruptable leading to tense back and forths. In DeS though, there is no poise, just hyper armor given by attacks. This leads to some weirdness. Take the scale miners in world 2. They are extremely tough skinned mindless workers in the mines of boletaria, they are very resistant to slashing damage but vulnerable to magic and pierce (and maybe blunt I think). So you'd think then that they would be able to shrug off any attacks from you and attack uninterrupted. This isnt really the case though, because hyper armor only kicks in during certain frames of attacks, hence if they start their pickaxe attack they are absolutely impossible to interrupt by quick thinking, as the attack has basically 0 windup before it enters the hyper armor phase, but if you hit em before they attack you can absolutely stunlock em into oblivion. The same is true of the blue and red-eyed knights who are way easier than they were likely intended to be because they don't have poise. This is what I mean, its both too punishing (doesnt seem to follow the dynamic of the rest of the combat) and too easy to abuse. The red eye knights in 1-3 are absolute dickheads for this, their charging spear attack can get spammed ad infinitum, with basically 0 cooldown and grants hyper armor. Thankfully I have a bow, but the amount of enemies in 1-3 is one reason why I hate it so much.

But nowhere is this poise problem demonstrated more than with Garl Vinland. Poor garl, serving a corrupt demon without poise. For some reason, of the heavy weapons which get hyper armor in DeS, seemingly the ultra greatswords and his fuck off hammer were excluded, and even if it wasnt easy as hell to parry him / get his hammer to smack the wall harmlessly, his dumbass heavy armor grants him 0 resistance to being stunlocked into oblivion. Compare him to Havel, who can also be cheesed, but at least he shrugs off attacks with a toothpick and hits you with his fuck off hammer regardless.

All that said, I love worlds 2,3 and to a lesser extent 4 and 5. 1-1 and 1-2 are great. Atmosphere and visual design wise they are great treats. I read an article I'll link here which brought up an interesting point I've been thinking about lately, which speaks to DeS' longstanding cult status. In the article they compare the flamelurker design in DeS and its remake, and how the latter looks like "artstation fire demon", which is harsh but kind of true. Its what you make when a director asks you for a fire demon, and if there is something that defines DeS I think, its that it embodies the opposite, for good and for ill. The vanguard demon, the storm king, maiden astraea, phalanx even, these all subvert usual genre expectations and give something rather unique without feeling try-hard. Everything else about its design from its mechanics to the art all seem to follow the rule of not just doing the obvious, the easy, the straightforward.

Think about the tutorial, where after maybe defeating the vanguard demon (which again, is not the type of enemy one would usually put as a beginner boss, both in its lethality and slight goofiness of the design) you are taken to an area with some loot and then are put in front of a giant humanoid dragon, who kills you not by breathing fire and melting you (i.e what you would expect) but by hitting you with a big old punch.

So all my complaints aside, I have to respect Demons' Souls, and if I manage to get back into souls at some point in the future, I hope I get to enjoy being brainwashed into liking 5-2 again. And despising that fucking dragon asshole.

Imagineer coined a uniquely minimal (level-less, item-limited, currency-less and party-less) form of JRPG with Quest 64, whose light storytelling, vast 3D areas and day/night cycles brought them closer to computer-RPGs than to its console-born siblings. What is undoubtedly CRPG-like - however, is their flexible upgrade system. Stat-leveling in the vein of FFII (i.e. earned from various parts of combat) is joined by collectible skill points distributed between 4 elements (which unlock new spells of that type and increase their power). Their combinations - from balanced spreads to a dual-type hyperfocus, governs the player's build with their own merits and limits. That sense of freedom well-complements their turn-based battles; seamless, responsive on-map gameplay with confined movement/dodging that's heavy on the spellcasting, reined in a little by elemental weaknesses and resistance. These two features rescue a work that otherwise would be dull and clumsy, as its lengthy overworld & dungeons plus a general dearth of content (other than a handful of pickups) make for some patience-testing trips. As a result, gameplay oscillates between moments of snappy, entertaining semi-action and sheer torture.

This brief project is many things at once, and - depending on taste, some conclusions are more prominent than others: A few great ideas placed on weak foundations. A half-baked mess. An interesting compromise between action & tactical gameplay. A novel fusion of Western/J-RPG languages, or even a grim omen of their genre's future; of the overscaled, empty worlds that progressively defined the next generation onwards. At the very least - though, a fascinating artifact of its era.

Six years and a switch in directors, platform and setting led to their slowest but also their most intense and atmospheric work. Morrowind - however, is actually two games in one: The deliberate explorer and the moon-jumping alteration mage. The former is where the trademark 'haunting' component of dungeon-crawlers takes over the world, turning it into an agonizing wasteland in which the mood, weather, wildlife and natives are all hostile in their own way. It's also a classic example of exploration, first by dropping the tutorial dungeons, reducing fast travel to a paid service and - after a few minutes of walking and character creation, begins by wishing the player "good luck!". What comes next is perhaps the most 'involved' form of navigation ever. Via signposts, checking for directions (using a quest menu that takes after a messy journal) and frequent use of the map, players basically perform the gameplay loop of towns in prior TES games outwards. A similar process also affects its structure, as Daggerfall's dungeon verticality translates into complex world geometry (hills, mountains, valleys, even floating areas). The addition of random encounters (not only while resting, and whose rate becomes comical lategame) lends a new layer of tension to traversal, and in-between - their talent for strange-but-memorable moments shows in its roadside quests.

Alteration spells define the other side of their program, a hyper-busted strategy where magic becomes as freely explorable as its world. Movement-related ones such as levitate, jump and slowfall take on higher parameters - with access to more extreme effects via spellmaking, and the result is a progressively wild game of 'fast travel' in which players cross incredible distances with a single leap. Levitation - in particular, revolutionizes dungeon progression the way that Jump does to the overworld, while other spell types, whether new (conjuration) or expanded (illusion & mysticism), also benefit from the bugs/oversights of such a wonderfully broken spellcrafting system. Essentially, users must choose between slow-burn wandering and a superhero sim. What these two playstyles have in common is that the overworld is now the centerpiece.

Not every change is a huge plus (e.g. verbose topic-based dialogue system, combat that relies heavily on stamina) but the rest marks a major step forward in quality, variety and personality.

The trajectory of The Elder Scrolls - from rough freeform complexity to polished, restrictive 'streamlining', reached a magical balance with Morrowind. But the release of Oblivion began their descent towards the latter end, of guided storytelling, less complex RPG mechanics, fully-action combat and lush environments, i.e. towards greater mass appeal. Like its predecessor, much of the intrigue is owed to its playstyles. This time it's the leveling system that influences gameplay, and in particular their major/minor skills, of which only the former awards level EXP. When played normally (as in: selecting the right major skills for one's intended build), the experience suffers from oppressive level-scaling and chronically weak combat. When played in reverse (as in: by assigning seldom-used talents as major skills), the player is faced with an oddly accommodating RPG. Morrowind had balanced this by way of dice rolls, which made building low-level misc skills (here known as minor skills) especially difficult without a trainer. Their absence this time around allows one to easily hone talents regardless of the character's class, and even stay at level 1 for hundreds of hours (although exempted from major quests and stuck with lesser treasure). It's yet another exploit-prone system, but the exploit's effect on gameplay is unusual: Players level up with complete agency and ideally when prepared to increase the difficulty & loot. As skills improve, the attribute bonuses of old lead to carefully-sculpted builds reminiscent of Pokemon's EV-training.

Acrobatics (or regular jumping in general) replaced jump spells as the alternative means of world traversal, now equipped with much better air control that - at high levels, turns areas into quasi-platformer stages (with potential to sequence-break dungeons). The rest is a mixed bag that's heavier on the negatives: Features such as spellmaking and enchanting are tidied up and locked behind quests. Weapons lack feedback despite removing skill-based hit chance. The icon compass and a return to fast-travel-from-anywhere detract from the sense of discovery. And finally the inclusion of voiced dialogue (more than a line or two) indirectly reduces the quality of writing, but that does little to hurt their scenario-building.

I think it's time for me to give up on this one. I've tried it numerous times through the years and even got decently far into it once... but it's just not super compelling to me. For being a 3D game with 2D sprites it just doesn't look that great and all around it feels very... almost but not quite. Besides the OST, which may be my most listened to OST after Chrono Cross. It's like this inbetween of CT and CC (probably because it literally was made between them).

I've heard this was originally a FFVII pitch, and then a possible Chrono Trigger 2 at some point as well, and it does have a lot in common with CT, not just the the soundtrack composer.

Anyway, I think I'm going to abandon this as a game and watch a playthrough instead. Considering how inspired by Gnosticism I am in my own projects it seems like a necessity to at least know the whole plot.

Edit: Just collecting my thoughts here while I watch a play-through, but this very much feels like a game completely led by its narrative and everything about it is in support of that narrative. Basically, there are no overly frivolous gameplay aspects, they're all there for the story. This could very much just have been a novel. Not sure how I feel about that, but it is an interesting way to approach a game.

The pacing is also pretty slow and there's a lot of dialogue to not say so much. That feels like a pretty common Japanese poetic choice. A lot of battle scenes feel like 61 episodes of DBZ.

What is most striking to me about the game is that it accurately captures the interesting theoretical aspects of the original SaGa games.

As in the original SaGa series, in Varonis, we find ourselves in a sort of post-scientific episteme. Science exists, of course, and there are scientists and researchers, but truth value itself has moved beyond science into the realm of the interpersonal and the political. Scientific knowledge production is provincialized to the realm of hobbies and specialized tasks for specialized individuals. The actual products of scientific production (guns, missiles, etc) are just as usable as other weapons (like swords or bows) which are themselves products of more traditional knowledge structures. Often scientifically-inflected technology is even simply decorative (see the various character portraits and their use of radio headsets as cosmetic/aesthetic etc). This is obviously quite distinct from the contemporary world, but that is precisely what makes it interesting - it is a way of imagining the world beyond science, but not the world mourning the loss of it (as in so many post-apocalyptic stories).

Another somewhat obvious thematic tie is the posthuman/decentering turn the text takes. Like the original SaGa games, it somewhat fails at true posthumanism (which is to say, decentering human perspectives - the robots etc think and act just like humans after all), but, also like the original games, it succeeds at the gesture towards decentering/destabilization. You get this wonderful taste of so many different worlds and cultures, many of which (all the various non-story-important side-worlds) are honestly kind of uninterested in whatever it is you're doing in the tower. They are happy to have guests of course, but they are very much doing their own thing and you are not really part of it and that is just great. None of these are fully fleshed out as distinct cultures, but, with the briefness of your contact, I wonder if the text is conscious of the shallowness and actively deploying it. What I mean by this is that, as with a week trip to Vietnam or something, you can only get a taste of a foreign culture with a shallow contact and you do not move to understanding or appreciating it as you might if you lived there. You of course come away changed, maybe even wrongly feeling like an expert in whatever country you just visited and desiring to tell all your friends about what you learned, but you have only truly dipped the toe in. The similarity of the cultures in the text, with small variation, and their focus on the protagonist's overarching interests (especially in the 'story worlds') does not, to me anyway, feel like lazy writing, but functions more as a recognition of perspective and the shallow 'toe dipping' that the protagonists do in each new world they encounter. The reason for this are the various side-worlds which do have pretty distinct local flavors and are not engaged in your interests or desires.

Mechanically, the game is just great and I wish more games had the Fixed Encounter system that Varonis does. Basically, this has enemies walking around the world map and once you kill them, they are gone forever. Many RPGs are fundamentally about strategizing the next anticipated moment (in a sense, it is kind of regressive as a genre, since this strategizing is only ever in the sake of optimization, but that is neither here nor there). In this way, they are always future-focused, looking forward to what will come and thinking about how best to deal with that. This normally manifests in turn-based combat that encourages thoughtful action, distributing stats for various characters, and buying weapons and armor. However, Varonis expands this (unlike the SaGa games) to the encounters themselves: there are only a fixed number of them, meaning there is only a fixed amount of money in the game (and healing generally costs money). Who do you fight and under what condition? How do you anticipate the next fight will go? You get a preview based on the enemy icon walking around the map, after all. Do you spring for a heal and potentially waste the finite resource of money or try your luck? Lots of little moments of strategy to be found in the actual encounters themselves and it makes purchases (especially the gear-up before the next big boss) so much more interesting. I'm genuinely shocked more games have not done this format, as it amplifies the experience greatly.

Now I can say the things everyone else will say about this game - it is simply SaGa 4 in the way Bloodstained was a new Castlevania game. It understood what made the source material work and thus transcends simply being a fan game or a carbon copy. Put another way: it is not a SaGa-like or a SaGa-clone or a SaGa-fan game: it is SaGa 4. Additionally, the mechanical spins it adds to the series are just wonderful, ranging from the aforementioned fixed encounter system to (excellent) overhauls to how the races/species work. It is an easy recommendation from me and what a joy it was to play.

I find that some of the games I enjoy the most are those that I know very little of, by the time I check them out. Panzer Dragoon Saga is one of them. All I had seen of it, which was enough to spark my interest, was this bit of cutscene, devoid of context. There's something already pretty unique, in there. Most games back then- hell, a lot of JRPGs today, don't have that kind of animation. In just about every scene (and these aren't the "big" ones- those are FMVs) characters act and interact with each other, move around, they don't just stand there and stare at each other while they talk. Today this isn't groundbreaking, but I genuinely cannot think of a single game in Saga's era that did anything like this. Only Vagrant Story, maybe, and that one's a few years newer. It's fully voice acted, too, down to every single unimportant NPC line (Only in Japanese, though. This is probably better nowadays, but it does feel like they just didn't care to dub it, it would certainly have turned people off at the time. Given how few copies were even sold overseas, this isn't surprising. It's nice that the translation itself is pretty alright, though, minus some oddities). This is all already very admirable in a vacuum, but I think that when Panzer Dragoon Saga is looked at as a sequel to its rail shooter predecessors, it all makes even more sense. In my thoughts on the original Panzer Dragoon, I noted that the game felt extremely cinematic in a grandiose way, and Saga is a natural evolution of that. It's impressive just how much it achieves in terms of presentation, and while the story is simpler than the genre's usual fare, that very much does not harm it, in the long run.

Speaking of adapting Panzer Dragoon to the RPG canon, the gameplay is an even clearer and more brilliant example of that, which is no small feat. How do you even adapt a rail shooter into turn-based combat? Simple, you put all of the focus on the positioning of the player and enemies in regards to one another, and turn every fight into a super cinematic little puzzle. It's not the deepest thing out there, though more than satisfying enough: You can move around the foes, ducking in and out of danger and safe zones, positioning yourself so you can hit weak points, but the ability to act recharges in real time, and moving halts it briefly, so you have to be tactical. This is all capped off quite cleverly by a simple ratings system at the end of every fight. Beat it quickly and without taking many hits, and you'll be awarded with more exp and a chance for an item. The game is quite easy, and you'll never really need to play strategically, so it's nice to always have something to push you towards optimal play. Outside of battle, levels are explored entirely on dragonback, flying through caves, ruins, forests and the like, which is a nice spectacle and quite cooler than the usual on-foot dungeon crawling, though ultimately not too mechanically different. Again, Team Andromeda's penchant for the cinematic shines- style over substance is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when there's more than enough of the latter. Speaking of that, you can transform your dragon, and the way it freely warps between any combination of its forms is quite the technological marvel.

When you will be walking on foot, it will be because you're exploring the game's few towns and such. They're small, but populated with fairly memorable NPCs. I think all of them have unique models, and plenty have side-quests associated with them, sometimes small, sometimes not. Good stuff. I don't think you'll be missing out by going in fully blind, but I actually did enjoy checking the wiki's list of "secrets" and poking around at various side stories as I went through the game. As for the main story, I've mentioned already that it's fairly simple, but that doesn't mean it's bad, just more understated than expected. Mercenary Edge's group gets slaughtered by rebel Craymen, who is following some mysterious goals, and he sets out to get his revenge on him, with the help of a dragon that mysteriously bonded with him. Character development is very organic, sometimes subtle and usually not lampshaded, and PDS doesn't mind hitting you with some nasty gut punches, or hiding some pretty vital information from you entirely. It can feel slightly underwhelming at times, but it does fit the setting and tone, and I do appreciate the commitment to the original games' surreal aura.

I do have some genuine criticisms, though. While the game is mostly pretty fun, a few of the dungeons are pretty unbearable. The worst offender is the Ruins of Uru, a massive labyrinth you can only explore with a shitty little landspeeder, populated with pathetically weak encounters that offer no challenge and a lot of wasted time. I actually quite like what it does story-wise but man is it a slog to go through. Generally, the last disc of the game tends to have some of its worst dungeons, with reskinned enemies and lots of flying about with little to do. The final dungeon is a stealth one, and it completely fails as a climactic conclusion of the story and gameplay. Your offensive "berserk" powers, aka your spells, look cool but feel kind of useless a lot of the time, because they require twice as many actions as your attacks and rarely do even just twice as much damage, at least in the late game. They're useful to break past defenses but usually there's some way around them that lets you strike a weak point for great damage, which you can only do with your standard attacks.

It's a damn shame that this game was relegated to the last throes of a console doomed to fail from day one. It is absolutely one of the finest JRPGs I've played and just bursts at the seams with love for its world and for pushing the envelope on what games could be. I absolutely recommend playing it, it's quite tighter and lighter in length than your usual JRPG, has some really awesome things I haven't even mentioned, like the OST, and while Saturn emulation isn't great it is worth dealing with. Do keep in mind that it is highly recommended to be familiar with Panzer Dragoon II: Zwei before playing this- knowing the original PD is nice, knowing Zwei is quite important. So, with that, I guess that's it for Panzer Dragoon and me. I want to play Orta, but I don't know if I want to enough to figure out Xbox emulation, and I'm sure as hell not playing the Game Gear one. All I've said about this game applies to the whole series, these are some really evocative, artful games that did some extremely interesting stuff with the medium, and it's really a shame that they were stuck on a console nobody bought, because if they were on the PS1 or N64 I guarantee to you that Panzer Dragoon would be a household name today.

Whats funny about this game is that presentation aside, its fairly straightforward mechanically. Its a level based 3d platformer based on alternating forms with different traversal powers to reach the next objective or set of upgrades to your max stamina(or mana or genes or whatever).

I found it to be quite engrossing, even getting some of that "tetris effect" after finishing it, lying in bed with an image of a toy ball rolling up a series of 'oil slick as seen through a kaleidoscope'-ass platforms. If I were to coin a stupid genre name for it it would be a "cheese-em-up" because it hits that primal urge in every attempt to go out of bounds or exploit a physics bug to cheese an annoying puzzle in a more conventional action game. Not all the levels or powers are winners of course, but finally getting up a big tower by some stupid scheme or walking along a line of pixels to reach a nee power through what feels like an "unintended" route; well it feels great. Thankfully I was home alone so no one could hear me cackling maniacally like a supervillain after my victory.

With all that being said, its a hard game to recommend, given that I think that the art direction will kill you if you have any sort of photosensitivity or history of epilepsy, but also that the game's appeal is quite specific.

But you know, thats kinda why its good. More games should be made to cater to a specific idea or urge rather than try to please everyone with the broadest possible sensibilities. Extreme Evolution kind of starts to lose steam after a certain point towards the climax cause you end up unlocking a few OP powers that just invalidate everything else and make the climax more of a formality, but thankfully the weirdness of the story had me interested enough to make it to the end? (I havent gotten all of the endings, but I think I got the "important ones"). Its one of those games where thematically and mechanically it feels like any kind of detail feels like a spoiler, given its intention seems to be to piece something for yourself in both cases, so I wont go too much into it. I will say however, that I was sold on the game when the first level of all was called "birth" and involved you as an "egg" rolling down a big tube to essentially be born.

As for the story, its like that scene at the end of 2001 : a space odyssey but for an entire game, idk what the fuck is going on beyond some vague ideas and interpretations about what it means, Id probably need to replay through the whole thing with a team or archaeologists to make heads or tails of it, but then I am kinda dumb so idk.

A pleasant surprise to be sure, a nice change of pace that has some interesting ideas in design

Edit : Got all the endings, including the canon ending, pretty cool