The charm and charisma of this game hold the rest of it up like how Altus holds the weight of the world on his back.

I really like Mega Man Legends. It has a passive peacefulness that could trick you into thinking you’re playing an island life simulator. You run errands for the townspeople of Kattlelox island, you play game shows on tv, you become a local legend for donating money to get better medical equipment at the hospital. Cutely designed characters have funny dialogue, you can tell the lady who runs the junk shop that your name is Hippopotamus. Hippopotamus can look at a magazine rack full of dirty magazines and contemplates reading one. The music that plays while you avoid oncoming traffic downtown sounds like the happiest trip to the mall you’ve ever had. Mega Man Legends is so pleasant.

But then, deep underground beneath the town, lies the Ruins. Eerie mines full of mindless Reaverbots, ready to kill anything they see. Under the silent cover of low draw distance, they wait for you. Some of these robots can drain your health in an instant, while you’re several loading screens away from salvation (and your latest save file). Mega Man Legends can be a little tense. (The hamburger-lookin ass crab Reaverbot, called Kuruguru, was particularly frightening to me and my younger brother when we played this game together.)

The tonal whiplash between the happy town and the harrowing ruins is only further compounded by the hysterical (and I mean that in both that they’re funny and that they’re constantly in hysterics) Bonne family. Between Tron Bonne’s violent and confused feelings towards Mega Man and Tiesel Bonne’s maniacal laughter after he plots a doomed scheme, any time they show up you’re in for a fun time.

That is, when the cutscenes are playing.

Early on, you gradually ease into the combat after a good amount of time hanging out in the town. But then BAM you’re hit with two back to back missions with their own boss fights. I guess the game wanted you to grind in the ruins for a lot longer than I did before starting those missions, because Defending City Hall is a huge difficulty spike.

And that difficulty, of course, comes from the controls.

Everyone hates tank controls. I won’t spend time reiterating what we all know, tank controls aren’t great for 3rd person action adventure games. This game is early enough in the genre’s existence that it was all they could conceive at the time. It’s really hard making two dimensional games as it is, and now you have to make a 3D game work and not completely copy Mario 64.

And besides, it’s not like Mario had a gun he could aim in Mario 64. They had to figure that out with what they had.

It’s a tough job, and I think they did OK with it. Decent enough to play, but not fun enough to where I get excited that a saving issue brought up the possibility of replaying 8 hours worth of the game. I didn’t have to replay those 8 hours, thankfully.

The main problem with Mega Man Legends’ turgid tank controls is half of the game’s loop is long term money grinding for obscenely expensive purchases. If you want to keep up with the dangerous enemies that threaten your life, you’re going to have spend a sickening amount of time grinding for zenny, all while moving around in that awkward and uncomfortable way. You get used to it, but it doesn’t make the grinding fun.

I genuinely recommend looking into cheat codes or something for this game to just give yourself a huge amount of money to mitigate the grinding. I played it “pure” and spent days running around the same spot in the ruins making chump change. Just cheat. Cheat because that half of the game is so lackluster compared to the side quests.

The side quests is what makes this game shine. There’s not enough of them to feel like a substantial Zelda-like adventure, but the amount we get is still satisfying. When you’re not raising money to rebuild the island from collateral damage you could have prevented, you’re helping the citizens with their simple problems. In return, you get an item that goes towards improving Mega Man (which you might need that grinding money to make use of), but more importantly, a fleshed out Kattelox Island. It makes it feel like a real place, and I love it.

However, these side quests have a dark side to them. A problem that could leave a “pure” playthrough completely in the dark.

A lot of these side quests/things to do are not blatantly advertised enough.

Much like the hidden treasures in the ruins beneath Kattlelox Island, Mega Man Legends hides it’s delightful and rewarding supplementary content behind obscurity. While some games with a racing minigame have some kind of eye catching indicator of its existence, or even a cutscene to let you know about it, Mega Man Legends has a nondescript npc in the corner of a building you might not think to go in anymore because you cleared the other two minigames it offered.

There are important npcs who have things for you to do who look like any other npc. Sometimes you have to talk to an obvious quest npc multiple times after you finish their quest to get a second or third quest. And I don’t mean just talk to them again I mean again and again and again. Some of these quests are built around the in-game timer, but it’s never specified exactly how much time it’s built around.

If your Saiyan Pride doesn’t let you cheat or use a guide, I respect that, but understand just how much of your precious time will be spent grinding zenny and talking to every npc multiple times. It is not weakness to save yourself an hour because you know where you have to go.

At the very least, I recommend having a guide handy while you play this game, just so you can give yourself everything it can offer. My first full playthrough was without a guide and I missed half the game and it really felt like it.

That full playthrough completely missed all the quests that went into the most powerful weapon in the game, maybe the entire Mega Man Series: the Shining Laser. The incredibly expensive culmination of several quests and mountains of money, the Shining Laser turns the already easy final boss into a seconds long joke.

Normally I’d be upset at the prospect of being robbed of a good fight, but I think it thematically works. The Shining Laser is everyone you helped on Kattelox returning the favor. It’s the final episode of the anime where everyone opens their hearts to send their energy to the hero. I like it. It’s a reward for players who aren’t good at combat but love the side quests, and it’s a reward for people like me who put too much thought into it.

But anyways,

I’ve played this game three times and rolled credits twice. I got every item on the second full playthrough, but I didn’t upgrade the weapons all the way because I didn’t cheat this time lmao. I fully upgraded the Shining Laser though, which is more than enough for me.

I recommend Mega Man Legends to anyone willing to put up with the few drawbacks it has. They are certainly drawbacks, (though I think the controls are much less of an issue) but the characters and world this game creates are vibrant and endearing and maybe the strongest in the entire Mega Man franchise.

There’s a reason why Tron Bonne shows up in more games as a cameo appearance than Mega Man Volnutt. It’s because she’s the best character in the game.

From the makers of the best tasting apples, comes the best tasting orange. Lucky for me, I like oranges too.

There are a lot of ways to go on an adventure. You can loosely follow the trail laid before you, you can do everything the helicopter parent of a tour guide tells you to, or, like in 1986’s The Legend of Zelda, you can go wherever you want, however you want, consequences for getting lost be damned.

2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild aims to be like that original Zelda that started it all.

This is one of my favorite Zelda games of all time. It has so much going for it.

Its Hyrule is enormous and exploring its massive expanse is an adventure all its own. It is SO much fun to go from one place to another. The ability to climb and glide is truly what makes exploration so satisfying, if you can climb high enough, you can go anywhere.

And the beautifully rendered places you can go are pocked with civilization. Hylians, Sheikah, Gorons, Gerudo, Koroks, Zoras, and (to the bafflement of people who care about the lore of the series) Rito, all continue to live after the apocalypse that Hyrule suffered a hundred years ago. And these beautifully designed people are as charming and interesting as ever. You can spend an in game day walking around any of the villages and watch a single person’s daily routine. Every creature, every plant, every item is so thoroughly considered that the game has a paragraph of lore for each of them in the Hyrule Compendium. But you only get that lore by taking a picture first, so you’re asked to employ a fair level of scrutiny to all these lush locations you explore. You will be rewarded with people to talk to, plants to learn about, and even plant people to do minor puzzles for. So, so many plant people…

Some of those villages sell armor and clothing to help you traverse Hyrule. There’s clothing for hot weather, cold weather, really hot weather, armor for fights, armor for avoiding fights, it’s great. There’s even a crossdressing outfit, which I feel was a cultural touchstone, if only because it awakened something in so many people. I love customizability and Breath of the Wild gives us that in spades. Everyone’s Link will now look different from each other because it’s YOUR Link wearing your favorite clothes.

You can even take the plants you’ve foraged and used them to dye your armor, further adding to the customizability of your Link. And despite being unable to name your Link, it is more Your Link than ever before.

There is truly so much to see and so much to do.

Exploration is the most important thing in the game, maybe to the detriment of other aspects of it.

It’s entirely possible that my love for this game would not diminish in the slightest if there wasn’t any combat. But, for better or worse, I think the controversial combat system is thematically, a crucial part of it.

Breath of the Wild is a game about how nothing lasts forever. Great kingdoms will fall. Valiant heroes will die. Your weapons will break. You must accept this fact of the world and press on to save it nonetheless, because the here and now is worth saving. Breath of the Wild is a game about letting go.

The weapon degradation is the most poisonous aspect of the goal of letting go. It goes against everything the Zelda series has done before. Every cool elemental weapon you find has an expiration date, which makes some players prefer not to use them, so that they last longer. But the game wants you to learn to let go. Use it and lose it and move on. You’ll find another fire sword, there’s dozens of them and they always come back.

Now personally, I don’t hate the weapon degradation of Breath of the Wild. Every early fight is tense, and the act of throwing an almost-broken weapon at an enemy to deal double damage when the weapon breaks is very satisfying. And since most enemies have a weapon already, you’re always close to a replacement.

My problems with the weapon degradation comes in at the endgame. By this point, enemies have gotten stronger and become serious damage sponges. Even the most minor enemy, the lowly Bokoblin, has a silver variant with enough health to cost you at least one weapon. At the very least, this forces the player to get creative and start killing monsters in more…thrifty ways. Back stabs deal more damage so be sneaky. Enemies that end in “blin” can’t swim, so get them into deep water. Shocking an enemy makes them drop their weapon so you can snatch it and run. You can also just wear a disguise and avoid combat altogether if you want.

Eventually, you’ll start marking down where good weapons are and returning to them whenever there’s a Blood Moon that resets Hyrule to its base state, and you can pick those weapons up again. So now you don’t have to be thrifty, but then you have a steady enough flow of weapons that you might as well just have unbreakable weapons.

The degradation system is fine, but it really only shines in the early game. And Breath of the Wild knows this, because the Eventide Island shrine challenge takes all your weapons and armor away. You’re back to square one, and it’s great. I remember a lot of people rightfully hyping up Eventide Island, but it’s kind of just the Great Plateau again. The system needed something to justify itself in the endgame.

My real problem with the weapon degradation system, the actual beef I have, is something I will not waver on, and it is that the Master Sword degrades too. You have to work hard for the most iconic sword in video games and it still breaks on you? Sure it comes back after a bit but I have to wait? Really? Would making the Master Sword an unbreakable but average damage weapon be such a game changer? Maybe. But I would have liked it more.

But there is so much more to Zelda games than the combat so I will move on.

Unfortunately, the Zelda-ness of Breath of the Wild is perhaps a bit estranged. Four visually indistinct main dungeons and 120 micro-dungeon Shrines make up the main trials of the game and I have no real qualms outside of everything looking samey for the main dungeons, the Divine Beasts. The bite sized shrines peppering the massive world is a pretty genius way to have a Zelda game this big. It’s a great way to get players exploring more of the map, and I respect that. 120 is a little excessive though.

Those shrines test not just combat, but your knowledge of a part the game I haven’t brought up yet, the Runes. Essentially half of the dungeon item equivalents of Breath of the Wild, the Runes are very interesting in how they let you manipulate the world. Magnesis is a particular favorite of mine, but upgrading Stasis to make it freeze enemies turns it into a vital ability. The Cryonis rune is a little less flashy than the others, but the ability to cross rivers with it makes it no less important.

To fill out the arsenal of tools, you get an ability from beating each of the Divine Beasts, and they’re all useful but Revali’s Gale, which can help you get higher faster, is by far the best of them. Revali isn’t my favorite champion but you gotta hand it to him.

I can imagine the complaints that these abilities and runes replace the dungeon item toys from previous Zeldas, and I am absolutely hurting for a hookshot here, but all of these tools are useful in many situations. There is no Spinner equivalent here. There’s no Gust Bellows. Maybe it makes me a bad Zelda fan but I think that’s a fair trade.

I would be an even worse Zelda fan if I said I didn’t like this game’s Princess Zelda. I like just about every character from this game, but Zelda is the mvp. This pouty bookworm with the big eyebrows joins the ranks of all the top tier Princess Zeldas, right up there with the one from Ocarina of Time and the one from Wind Waker and yeah I’ll say it, the one from Spirit Tracks.

I think I like this one best though.

The memory cutscenes in this game flesh Zelda out so much more than we’ve ever gotten before. This game even makes us think of Zelda when we see a certain flower in the wild, a simple collectible item, because we’re told it’s her favorite. It’s a little thing but it goes a long long way. Trust me.

Before I wrap this up, I want to talk about the DLC, which adds a few extra story beats, an upgrade to the Master Sword (but not an unlimited durability), a motorcycle (lmao) and a more classic-style Zelda dungeon (which I ultimately forgot about). It also adds Master Mode, which makes every regular enemy one level stronger than they normally are, as well as adding a new Gold level for the strongest of enemies, and then gives every enemy regenerating health.

On the one hand, I welcome Master Mode’s added challenge and additional replay value to a very long game. On the other hand, Master Mode shows us how ironically fragile the durability system can be. It becomes mathematically unviable to fight large groups of enemies. This is where I learned that campfires are actually your best weapon. Trapping an enemy into standing on a campfire will make them slowly die, saving your weapons for more important fights. I think that’s a cool thing that this game allows, but avoiding combat at all costs is a bit of a problem. Of course, this is Master Mode, and not the base game, where this isn’t quite as necessary. I still would have liked the ability to increase durability at a fairy fountain or blacksmith for a sum of rupees. You CAN do this with a particular Octorok, but it requires a lot of time and luck so I just don’t bother.

I have beaten The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild three times. Once on regular mode and twice in Master Mode, one of which I only used spears as my weapon (it wound up being a lot easier than I was expecting it to be). I never 100%-ed any of those playthroughs because when I found out what the reward for helping all the koroks was, I lost interest. But I can proudly say that first playthrough was a 99% completion playthrough. I played this game so much it ruined my first set of joycons.

I love Breath of the Wild.

And I recommend it to anyone, just learn to let go.

A tasty buffet of games to play with your favorite evil scientist girl and her band of little Lego mans.

I never played The Misadventures of Tron Bonne as a kid. And honestly, for a good while I thought it was a Japan exlusive. Just the name alone is estranged enough from “Mega Man Legends” to evoke feelings of a limited, regional release. As a Mega Man Freak, The Misadventures of Tron Bonne always felt like a holy grail, “the one that got away”, the one that I’ll eventually get to. Meanwhile there’s a good chance I could have gotten it at any time during my childhood.

Today, with the power of technology, I have gotten my hands on The Misadventures of Tron Bonne during my adulthood, it’s no longer the one that got away.

And brother let me tell you, this game is Strange.

Now don’t get it twisted, there are stranger games out there. The Katamari series alone is both conceptually and mechanically weirder that this. But The Misadventures of Tron Bonne being a game in the Mega Man Legends series, and being such a variety of different things at once, and doing them all decently well, is bizarre.

You start the game and you think it’s going to play like Legends, but you’re a mech instead of a Mega Man. But then you can command your Servbots to attack or interact with something you target, almost like Pikmin would more cleanly do a few years later. But then you’re talking with each Servbot and puzzling out ways to manage their stats to inspire their secret abilities to manifest, like some kind of light visual novel. But then you’re robbing a bank, and using your Servbots to steal from random houses, because the main drive of the game is to make a lot of money. But then you’re going on an underground dig in a first person dungeon crawler, from the point of view of a small pig-shaped drone, commanding your small team of Servbots to disarm traps and open treasure. But then you’re doing intricately planned block puzzles to steal shipping containers. But then you’re stealing livestock from a heavily defended farm belonging to a crime boss. But then you’re playing bingo at a casino that you can only get to after a series of specific decisions that tie back to the group management simulator/visual novel aspect of the game. You also have a few training minigames to play to boost your Servbots’ stats, as well as a Torture Minigame to cure them of their laziness.

It’s dizzying.

The Misadventures of Tron Bonne is definitely at its best when you’re running and gunning in the Gustaff mech, but it doesn’t slouch in the other modes. The crate-moving puzzle levels are a personal favorite of mine. There’s some pretty tricky stuff going on there. While I don’t think I could stomach an entire game built around the first person dungeon crawler (which is called the “rpg” mission for some reason), I would easily play a couple hundred container puzzle levels.

Regardless, the mech gets the most screen time, and rightfully so. It plays like a weightier Mega Man Volnutt, so fans of the series will feel comfortable with it. And I doubt you’ll be playing The Misadventures or Tron Bonne without being a fan of the series.

You’re not going to customize Tron’s Gustaff the same elaborate way you do Mega Man Volnutt’s equipment, but it does have a smattering of upgrades. This leads me to my biggest gripe with The Misadventures of Tron Bonne. It’s a gripe that I probably only have because the game offers so much to begin with. A gripe I have because it spoils me.

The plot of the game focuses on Tron collecting an exorbitant sum of ransom money through her various dubious missions. Sometimes these missions get too dangerous, and you need to upgrade the Gustaff to keep up with the obstacles. The thought of having to manage money on top of everything else in this game had me eagerly anticipating the zenny-pinching decisions I’d have to make. My mind wandered to imaginary scenarios where I’d have to decide whether to spend the money on an upgrade for a Servbot, or save up for a new arm cannon for the Gustaff.

Imagine my shock when the only thing you’re spending your hard earned zenny on is Gustaff upgrades. There’s so many moving parts to this game and it’s all in the service of making money but you can only spend that money on a tiny cog for half of that machine. It feels like a missed opportunity to have a more interesting money system, but at the same time, The Misadventures of Tron Bonne came out at such an early stage of the history of games, that to expect more than what we got would be greedy. And yet, on the other hand, despite the circumstances of its development, The Misadventures of Tron Bonne is so many things at once that a more interesting economy wouldn’t be off the table. The game spoils you to such a degree that it’s most mild shortcomings are more noticeable.

Thankfully, there’s not that many more shortcomings. There’s minor things of course, the torture minigame is annoying, the dungeon crawling missions are a little boring, the ruins mission doesn’t have checkpoints, that kind of thing. Stuff that annoys but doesn’t disturb. There is however, something that I find pretty disappointing about The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, that could probably be solved by that improved economy I was talking about earlier.

In this game, you have to make money. And you make money by going on missions. And you’re helped on your missions by any number of the 40 Servbots. Combat missions have you taking six of them, puzzle missions have you just taking one. When you complete a mission, their Brains stat goes up. The have other stats, Attack and Speed, but the Brains is the most important because for most Servbots, a higher Brains rating unlocks their Ability, which can drastically change how they help you out. Some of them throw grenades or use a rocket launcher in combat. Some of them can make things to improve the Gustaff’s attack and defense, which you will capital N Need for the late game. Even if a Servbot isn’t immediately helpful to you, it’s still nice to see them all maxed out when you 100% the game, a thing I did not do.

Why didn’t I 100% the game? Because I wrongfully assumed you could replay missions to grind your Servbots Brains up. Aside from level completions, the only way to increase the Brains stat is a consumable item, which will take a very long time to grind out scouting missions to get enough of them.

The lack of opportunities to level up your Servbots really hurts the game for me, it turns a completed file from an act of enjoyment to obsession. And I like The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, but I’m not obsessed.

It’s a good time though. Maybe even a great time. It’s certainly interesting.

I recommend The Misadventures of Tron Bonne to anyone interested in game history, because I feel like this one really bit off more than it could chew for the time and nevertheless, it still chewed. If that doesn’t do it for you, the characters absolutely will. I was a passive Servbot Appreciator but now I am an avid Servbot Enthusiast.

Sometimes it takes a pebble to start an avalanche, and this is quite a pebble.

I wish I could have played Metal Gear when it was first released, in a world where every other major video game release was focused on combat. I wish I could have played Metal Gear when it was something other than the quaint beginnings of a mega franchise that you play for historical purposes.

Playing Metal Gear in a post-Metal Gear Solid world is kind of rough. I’m a certified Metal Gear Solid Freak so on my first playthrough, I went through it with reverent awe, taking in the humble beginnings of my favorite tactical espionage hero, Solid Snake. And having beaten it that one time, I’m good. There's some really obtuse things in this game, particularly towards the end. Sometimes it's purposeful, but when it isn't, it's rough. Really rough. I trudged through it for the academic history of the series i love, as well as the lore.

And if you’re considering getting into the Metal Gear series, you absolutely need to play this game. The MSX one. It’s required reading.

The fact that you can sneak around and get spotted in this game, and you’re encouraged to not get spotted, is so great. This game’s peers were mindless arcade shooters, it really stands out. Mechanically, at least. You’re still a soldier guy and the enemies are also still soldier guys. The slick, iconic, beautiful Shinkawa designs wouldn’t be around for a bit longer.

The charm of the clever ideas on display pale in comparison to its legendary progeny. And this is why I wish I could have played it when it first came out.

I recommend this game to Metal Gear fans, Kojima fans, and people who are interested in what you can do with the simple systems of an old console.

I wish the intro to the Theme of Tara was longer, it's the best part of the song.