Well, we are at the end of my little Character Action Game marathon. At the same time this is also my 350th review on the site, so what better game to cap both of these off with than the underappreciated Capcom cult classic, God Hand.

I have known about this game for, I wanna say the past 2 to 3 years thanks to my buddy Simon who showed me of course, the SsethTzeentach Review of the game. What I saw looked like some of the most comical shit ever made in a video game, and made it all the more surprising to me that this was the last game created by its developer, Clover Studios.

My friends have all gassed this game up to me for years now, and so I finally decided that 2022 would be the year I would play God Hand.

So now allow me to make a huge disclaimer: I fucking suck at this game. I doubt that's a huge surprise, God Hand is known to be a very challenging game and it will kick your ass, as it brutally did mine.

So do not take my opinions here as fact, but just as my personal views for my first playthrough, as God Hand is meant to be played many many times.

Right from the offset, God Hand comes at you in full force with its vibes, showing the "Graphic Violence, Discretion is Advised" statement that had been put in both Devil May Cry and Resident Evil games at the time. The image of course showing a screen of our protagonist Gene kicking an enemy in the testicles until his face turns blue.

Then there's the menu theme.

I sat there for a solid 2 and a half minutes just, absorbing the absolute bop that is the menu theme. All of the music in this game is fucking excellent, from the theme of Fat Elvis, this absolute bop filled with Elvis Presley sounding noises and a sensual backing track, to the intense rocking theme of your rival Azel, quaintly named Devil May Sly. It's all fucking phenomenal and gets you in the mood.

Of course, what follows after the music is also one of the funniest games ever made. Usually I find weird voice acting to be laughable for the wrong reasons but here I'd honestly argue that the weirdness is 100% both intentional and what makes the game work. Elvis being the most stereotypical version of a Hispanic male, which I also am (Hispanic, not stereotypical lol), gave me a good amount of laughs as he cracks Spanish curse words calling Gene all sorts of things from "pendejo" to "puta" and all that in between.

There's just so many funny moments, like when you encounter these Super Sentai looking mofos and they have these weird Stich like voices, doing weird poses and then you kick them into the ground like a nail and proceed to stomp their heads into the dirt. Or the scene with Gene kicking the thugs out of the window, and the last thug agreeing to get kicked out midscene with a tiny head nod.

And that humor stays in the gameplay as well. You have various ridiculous moves that you can and will use on your opponents, like your Roulette Moves. These can vary from beam like attacks, a flurry of punches, getting a Home Run with a Baseball Bat you summon, or my personal favorite: Kicking people in the balls.

The attention to detail is great too, because that kicking in the balls move only applies to male characters, and will not effect female or robotic enemies, and a specific boss who lost their testicles in the war.

Going more into the combat, my friend referred to it as a "spiritual sequel to Resident Evil 4", which makes sense given that both are Shinji Mikami titles. Both games work with an adaptive difficulty that changes depending on the skill of the player. It's a lot more subtle in RE4, but in God Hand it is the game.

The better you perform at the game, the higher the Tension Gauge goes up. It grows from Level 1, to Level 2, Level 3 and finally Level Die. Full transparency, the highest I ever got was to Level 2 because even on the lowest levels this game absolutely dominated me with its Alexander the Great obsessed cast of characters.

Combat works as follows: You use the Square Button to use the combo chain, which you can customize, the Triangle Button is your combo cancel move, and the X button is your spacer move, with Circle being your Reaction Command button.

All of the moves, for all buttons except Circle can be customized to whatever you wish. You want your Square Combo Chain to be an assortment of kicks, or a near infinite juggle combo, you can do that. You want your combo cancel to be a Pimp Smack, you can do that. The level of customization is endless, and even outside of that you have direction based moves that can also help you.

Let's say you do a spot dodge, you can press Triangle during it to do a slide kick which can easily knock down crowds of opponents and works great as crowd control option. If you're particularly skilled, you can knock an enemy high up in the air and press Back and Triangle to do a Shoryuken, and chain it multiple times until you do a forward triangle to kick the enemy in front of you, using them as a projectile to knock down other opponents.

All of these can help to take down the hordes of enemies you face, alongside the power of the God Hand. When you raise your God Hand Meter high enough, you can press R2 to activate the awesome powers of a God, and absolutely decimate your foes. They cannot block the attacks, and you are invulnerable while using it. Truly, an awesome ability.

This does bring up though certain other aspects of your playthrough, resource management. In your first playthrough of God Hand, unless you are some supernaturally gifted God of Video Games, you are going to suck ass. You will often find yourself breaking open various containers be it boxes or jars to get health, Roulette Wheel meter, God Hand meter, and cash. These drops are entirely random, as the game doesn't want you to rely too much on them.

This creates a system I call the "Gamble". Where you have to base your current battle situation around the resources available to you. Do you get a fresh fruit that restores your health while you're topped off and let it sit for later on in the fight, or do you get a Roulette Wheel card. You gotta take the risks and see if you'll survive.

Gambling honestly is a central mechanic to this game even outside combat, your hub for God Hand's sake is a fucking Casino on a remote island. You can play Slots, Blackjack, Poker, or even bet on racing these Poisonous Chihuahuas. (Always bet on Lucky Clover, should be obvious enough). Gambling is a major way of winning money both in combat and out of it, so to say that this game is very much about gambling is correct.

Of course a skilled enough player can work well without luck, but that was not me and it will not be you either on your first go.

In another refreshing sense, God Hand also lets you avoid entire encounters if you have what you need. If you just feel like you want to proceed through a level and aren't locked behind keys or the like, you can easily avoid combat in general. I wouldn't recommend avoiding all combat obviously, but if you're in a risky situation it is a completely valid option for progression. You aren't given a grade at the end of the level, the only thing decided is the bonus money you receive, and when you die you keep any money you gained from before hand. It results in the game not actively demoralizing new players unlike in other CAGs, which I find gives it more of an appeal than most. It also helps that the individual levels are themselves, very short. With there being 9 stages, with various small levels within each. It makes you feel like you aren't losing much progress when you die.

It's shit like this that makes me question how this game flopped. Everything here is incredibly appealing to a casual player, and there's all sorts of tech that more advanced players can learn and master. So why is it that this game got a 3 out of 10 on fucking IGN. You want my guess? The reviewer got to the first boss, thought it was unfair, and dropped the fucking game.

God Hand is a game that instantly brought a smile to my face, and even when I would get frustrated due to the many challenges, there was always a funny moment or a goofy encounter that would soon follow.

You can kick men in the balls, suplex a man in a Gorilla suit, fight Elvis, spank dominatrix women, get your ass beat by actual clowns, and save the world. What here is not at least somewhat entertaining?

Also this game had a ending dance sequence before Bayonetta did, so Bayonetta is easily the inferior copy of God Hand.

I implore you to play God Hand, or else I'll dragon kick your ass into the milky way. I'm Alexander the Great, and this has been God Hand.

P.S.

COME ON, HOW WAS THIS CLOVER'S LAST GAME?!?!?!? YOU KICK MEN IN THE BALLS! YOU KICK MEN IN THE BALLS!!!!!!!!!!

Remember those fucking terrible Simpsons games on NES? Well, Imagineering were pumping out that shit so hard that they even had it's engine infest other IPs.

Swamp Thing plays pretty much exactly like Bart Meets Radioactive Man, which came out literally around the same time as this apparently. Same abominable control scheme where run and jump are the same button, same exact sound effects and same ruthless checkpoint system/or lack thereof. This game though is worse than Radioactive Man, because despite the fact you're playing as a superhero, you're apparently less competent than Bart pretending to be one. Swamp Thing can punch and shoot shit after he picks up the ammo for that particular attack, but is deathly allergic to doing so while crouching and it feels like enemies easily lumber into you on accident when you attempt to hit them due to shitty hitboxes.

The most amount of hilarity I got out of this game was the visual of probably the most shy enemy in the history of video games; some guy hiding in his house tossing slow-moving knives out his front door. At least I assume someone's throwing them, I don't think the knives are sentient, but the obvious shoot reason was that they didn't have enough time to animate someone throwing them.

I love that the image for this game on here is just some person's ebay listing (I think), it goes really well with how low effort this game was in general. By the way, no this is not worth the hundreds it's going for on ebay. It's complete highway robbery, this game ain't even worth one tenths of a didgeridoo let alone a complete one.

a weird one to try and rate over 20 years later. is it a timeless video game? ...maybe? being completely honest, there was a solid decade or so where i felt this had aged poorly, and that other games were becoming more refined with their controls, had greater scope, better ideas, etc. none of that really matters to me now—it no longer needs to be all the things that i feel were eventually surpassed by other games—and in a full circle kinda way i love this one now almost as much as i did in 1998. almost.

Played as part of Rare Replay.


In the hands of a more sophisticated writer and more than two voice actors, this could have been something special. The Rare Replay documentary about the game explains that it was essentially Rareware’s Rage Against the Dying Light moment - power players within the company were sick of gluing googly eyes onto broomsticks and bedknobs and wanted to deconstruct their own irreverent image by gluing googly eyes onto pints of beer and making them say FUCK instead. 

It's an exciting concept, and one that's appealed to me for some 20 years - as someone who religiously purchased Nintendo Official Magazine in the late 90s (even when there were no Nintendo games to read about), Conker's Bad Fur Day has always occupied a special place in my mind - during some of Nintendo’s worst droughts, this game was repeatedly trotted out as a “COMING SOON!” attraction to stop people trading in for the PlayStation - and it did work, to some extent. I (thought I) was far too young for it and that my parents would cast me out for even suggesting that we buy it, but was nonetheless inextricably drawn to the idea of a Banjo-Kazooie game where I could see boobs and drink pints. I'd 100%'d Kazooie, Tooie, and Kong 64, and really wanted to try on my big boy pants with this game - as someone who only owned an N64 for most of the fifth generation of consoles, I was emotionally starved of pseudo-mature gaming content. In the end, I forgot about it in the same way most people did - by watching it be crushed under the arrival of the GameCube only a few months later. It's only because Rare Replay pretty much handed this game to me on a plate that I've even bothered to give it a try.

Bad Fur Day does manage to achieve its "NOT FOR KIDZ" destructive-deconstructive goals to some extent - the first few hours are genuinely eye-popping in the way they very unsubtly put Banjo-Kazooie in the crosshairs. Even the game’s strict adherence to a “no collectibles at any time” policy (aside from an admittedly funny cutscene that tries to explain why these games have floating pieces of honeycomb everywhere) feels like a self-inflicted attack on the house Rare had built by the turn of the century. Bribing scouser beetles (who are all voiced by one guy who can barely stifle his own giggles on the production track) with wads of shrieking sentient cash is an initially novel experience that I genuinely can't compare to any other game I've played, but by the third time you’ve done a fetch-quest for yet another a drunken inanimate object with big tits, it kinda becomes apparent that Chris Seavor and his surprisingly small team were more or less just thrashing around a playground with very little direction. There wasn't all that much of an image for them to deconstruct.

The Conker team's admission in the Rare Replay documentary that Bad Fur Day was more or less a directionless mess of sandboxes until someone on the team decided to incorporate a series of movie parodies is an altogether unsurprising admission. It was the year 2000, and this is the video game equivalent of Scary Movie. I was there! I remember! Referencing pop-films by just straight-up recreating them with your own characters was peak comedy at the time! After a certain point, though, the game is essentially just chaining parody cutscenes of varying humour and quality together using stiff player movement that makes Banjo's mobility look like Mirror's Edge or Metroid Dread in comparison. You can probably imagine how poorly a bullet-time parody handles on 64-bit hardware, even with the power of the mighty Expansion Pak behind it.

The final cutscene (I watched it on YouTube after becoming all too tired of carrying around slices of cheese with Yorkshire accents) - where Conker fruitlessly negotiates with God/The Programmer to get his girlfriend back - is a rare bit of introspective deviation from a game that is otherwise all too content to lean on 6-vertice polygonal gore and a fart soundboard for its content, and I wish the game had done more things like it instead of what we got. If the game leaned more into questioning its own existence and the value of Rare's house-style in general, I think Bad Fur Day could really have struck a chord with those of us who grew up snatching jiggies in Tik Tok Woods or whatever those Banjo levels were called. The "no collectibles" rule is a striking statement of intent at first, but ultimately Rare prove themselves wrong by demonstrating that grabbing bananas and musical notes are an intrinsic part of what made their mascot platformers so satisfying - without those cute little distractions, all you really have here is a drunk-walking simulator set in a muddy 3D world that's been stripped back to its threadbare essentials in order to make room on the cartridge for as many crude voice lines as Robin Beanland could scavenge from the cutting room floor of an early-2000s South Park recording room.

As a developer who’s also made a game that heavily leaned on “British” “humour” at the arguable expense of gameplay, I should probably be more charitable to this game than I’m being right now - but there’s only so many times you can hear Conker call a female-coded pile of faeces a huge bitch before reaching for the Home button. While I admire Chris Seavor for having the audacity to make Yamauchi-era Nintendo publish a video game as deeply offensive and provocative as this (the Rare Replay documentary mentions that Nintendo financed a recreation of a tacky British pub at Spaceworld to promote the game, and even Miyamoto checked it out!), I think provocative art should have a sense of purpose (I am kinda repeating my Twelve Minutes review here, sorry), and it's clear that Rare's C-team were kinda scrambling haplessly to turn their pet "what if a squirrel said CNT" concept into something that players could spend a couple dozen hours with.

With Bad Fur Day*, I feel Rare squandered a perfect opportunity to rudely set the sun on their goofy Saturday-morning SNES and N64 era and move ahead to something new. This could have been their Kill the Past moment, but instead it's more of a Vague, Lengthy Gesture Towards the FUCKING Past moment. As I'm always saying on Backloggd, it kinda pisses me off when developers try to send-up or tear-down genres by making stodgy, broken or tedious imitations of said genre. What's the point? Maybe I'm asking too much of an N64 mascot platformer, but I can see the same potential my child-self imagined in there somewhere. Sadly, another of my Rareware white whales has been slain.

Far and away the worst game Capcom have ever made, a uniquely fascinating and objectively awful experience from a company whose lesser games are typically let down by near-imperceptible balance flaws for hardcore gameplay enthusiasts; a “bad” Capcom game is normally undone by subpar netcode or an overpowered character, but here we must suffer through actors falling through floors, textures upside-down on walls and enemies who forget to wake up and fight you, perhaps protesting at the unsanitary working conditions they’ve been asked to perform in. Rotten to the core in ways big-developer games are never allowed to be any more, Spanish bootleg-ass Devil May Cry game, fuckin El Diablo Puede llorar: Dos on a cigarette-burned DVD you got at the market this morning, buried deep in a spindle with Animal Soccer World. Hooooly shit dude, it’s funny like a bad movie for the first hour or two, rinsing bosses in minutes without taking damage by just standing still and shooting your guns and cackling maniacally about how little brain you used, but the novelty of a mute Dante’s hexagonal eyes clipping through their pentagonal sockets soon gives way to a depressive despair when you’re begged by a nervous stutter to pull off a series of chaotic wall-runs in order to beat a battle that I’m pretty sure was compiled and saved moments before Hideaki Itsuno had to load copies of this shitpile onto the back of a busted dumptruck headed straight to the cemetery. I persevered past the attack chopper’s infamy in hope of more epic-fail frivolity but was only rewarded with more mechanical misery; being able to activate Devil Trigger amidst what appears to be a knockdown state and have it expire before you can even jank yourself to your feet is a fun five minute feat, but my remaining shreds of self-respect prevented me from subjecting myself to ten more hours of bosses you can beat by simply walking behind them. Huge admiration for Capcom putting this in the HD Collection, presumably as a cautionary tale for generations to come about what happens when you release a CAG without combos, care or competence. Drakengard, eat your dragonheart out.

Not a legitimate review (because I just played the first world of both games), but I want to throw my hat into this ring of fire I see brewing here.

I'm willing to admit that the graphics can look a bit cheap, asset-wise. I personally think that the original Klonoa 1 looks much better than the Wii version (which this game's remake is clearly based off of). I do think that there's an argument to be made against Klonoa 2, dropping that game's cel-shaded characters for more consistent models between the two games. I think the one thing I can unanimously agree on is that the game feels a bit too bright, lighting-wise. Some of that visual atmosphere has definitely been lost in the transition.

But on the other hand, there's an attention to detail that I think would be shameful to ignore. Everything is colorful, whimsical, and animated. For crying out loud, they kept the title screen easter eggs in Klonoa 2. The level design remains untouched as far as I can tell, and that's ok in my eyes because it never needed fixing.

There's still definitely some modern gaming scum dripping off this title though. Extra outfits are cute, holding them as $20 DLC for a $40 game is not. The game assaults you with EULAs once you hit the title screen (no Bamco, you don't get my personal information). I don't know why every cutscene needs the "skip" and "speed up" buttons present at all times. It's not the most distracting thing, but like, shoo, shoo, I'm trying to enjoy the story!

Lastly, I understand the plea for the preservation of the original titles, but I see it from this perspective:

If you want to play the original Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, you have three choices. Buy it digitally for PS3/PSP/Vita (this choice will likely disappear in the near future), sell a kidney so you can afford an official copy, or emulate it. If you want to play the Wii version of Klonoa, you either sell your other kidney, or you emulate it. If you want to play the original Klonoa 2, you either sell your secret third kidney, or you emulate it.

It might hurt for some people to hear this, but most consumers tend to take the most convenient option. I don't swear allegiance to companies, but I'm personally just glad that these games are being preserved in ANY capacity. I consider the quality high enough to warrant my recommendation. If you haven't played these games and want to know what all the chatter is about, I believe that you're doing yourself a disservice by not picking this up.

EDIT: Finished both titles. I personally found Klonoa 2's remaster more enjoyable. Just make sure to turn off bloom in the settings, it helps combat the extreme brightness. Door to Phantomile was fairly enjoyable, but as a retooling of the Wiimake, I have to say that I still prefer the PS1 original overall. Something felt...off about how Klonoa controlled in that remaster. Nothing unplayable though, I still beat the Extra Vision in just under 5 minutes. I'm an old pro.

Cing's DS output are the type of games you encounter once in a lifetime. Never again will you get a game with a faux-noir narrative with marvelously animated characters presented in the style of a notebook. Nevermore will you get a Nintendo published game that handles people struggling to keep up this facade of them living this average, normal life while they're still aimlessly wandering through life in hopes of maybe finding a way to put their baggage to rest, all to the tone of a nice, jazzy soundtrack. Even if you do manage to find a mystical game that also happens to excel on all these fronts, this imaginary game will never grapple with the same level of pure ingenuity and confidence that is practically bursting out of the seams in some of Cing's works. Cing, and Hotel Dusk especially, does not deserve to be lost to the annals of time. Hotel Dusk, in all its innocent tenaciousness, is an experience that will forever be etched into my memory.

Cing's works tend to blend in with the rest of the DS' absurdly good third-party titles; and while this isn't necessarily a fault, the historic context behind the game sheds some light on how this seemly out-of-nowhere game sticks the landing with flying colors. Hotel Dusk's scenario writer Rika Suzuki is a lady that has had her hand in a lotta pies throughout the decades. From assisting on the production of Dragon Quest I through IV, to pioneering the adventure game genre with the successful J.B. Harold series, Suzuki has always been an influential force within the industry. This is why, from the perspective of Japanese audiences, Cing's foray into the DS represented a new beginning for an established game designer.

With the advent of the DS, Suzuki saw an opportunity to capitalize on her stock of experience and wisdom. With the unconventional nature of Nintendo's brand new handheld and the low-production costs of designing for said platform, Suzuki saw a chance to experiment with the adventure game genre from an unexplored angle. Thankfully Nintendo would see eye to eye with Suzuki's ambitions to an extent. They too saw the implications of the dual-screen setup of their latest handheld, and they more than willing to publish the game so Cing's ideas could come to fruition. This is how Hotel Dusk came to captivate so many unsuspecting DS owners, it's a game, unlike anything else Nintendo has published in the west, not only founded on top of a well of iteration and refinement but a game that's more than enthusiastic about taking full advantage of its unique platform.

However, it'd be disingenuous to solely put the spotlight on Suzuki when Hotel Dusk's director and character animator supervisor Taisuke Kanasaki's phenomenal art direction that really sold audiences on the world of Hotel Dusk. The stylistic boldness of Hotel Dusk's character portraits are not to go unnoticed. Kanasaki's rotoscoped, sketchy character portraits have an awing level of veracity to them. The subtle, small shift in facial annotation and posture establishes this living quality throughout the cast, and it's these same portraits that wordlessly communicate a melting pot of complex emotions these characters have to battle with as the truth and their insecurities claws its way into the light.

In a game as exceptional as Hotel Dusk though, where there's style there's substance, and Cing's down-to-earth, intimate universe has more than enough substance. Hotel Dusk has the foundations of your standard noir work, but this presentation acts an inventive illusion to a deeply interpersonal game. Hell, the game intentionally plays with this with its main character, a former detective turned door-to-door salesman, deceiving noir-esque jacket. The real meat of Hotel Dusk lies in the residents of the shabby, rattletrap Hotel Dusk. Over the course of your exhaustive, one night stay at Hotel Dusk, you will be deconstructing these characters' lives bit by bit, not to expose and critique the core of these characters' baggage, not to get to the bottom of some grand conspiracy, but in order to make amends with your own troubling past.

While you do eventually get to the bottom of a grand conspiracy, this happens more as a result of the cast collectively striving to find a resolution to their shattered past. In defiance to their seemly normal outward demeanor, all these characters are suffering; desperately yet aimlessly pursuing the truth of the days gone by so they can finally break free of their shackles. Hotel Dusk is brimming with people holding regrets, insecurities, trauma, and guilt and they're all brewing to be stirred before the dawn of the new decade.

Where would Hotel Dusk be though, without the constant hum of its understated soundtrack? Composer Satoshi Okubo produced a score oozing with variety and his memorable melodies enrich every moment it decorates. The music never quite oversteps what's happening on screen, instead it comfortably settles into the mood constructed by the script and art direction. The cast's off-beat banter is coated in a layer of swingy electric, the subdued investigation segments are laced in this soothing bossa nova sound, and with each moment of tension, the game sings its heart out and boasters the emotions of the prevailing scene.

With all this in mind though, I can assuredly say Hotel Dusk wouldn't be remembered as the brilliant gem it is today if it was propped by its ingenious presentation that exploits every avenue a dual, touch screen handheld mounts. Hotel Dusk challenges you to discard all petty preconceptions of what video games can do and forces you to hold your DS in the same vein as a notebook, packaged with a handy left-handed and right-handed mode of course. As with your usual adventure game affair, the player is constantly confronted with an assortment of puzzles, halting your progression until you sit down and solve them.

Except with Hotel Dusk, solving puzzles and investigating isn't a conventionally fair of solving riddles, cracking number codes, or deciphering messages. No, instead you will be whittling down notes in your notebook, locksmithing your suitcase with a wire, and revolving a cardboard box around to find a secret letter. While these puzzles aren't brainteasers, their novelty is exceptionally striking and a good portion of them never overstay their welcome. Unfortunately, as with many physically unconventional games, this comes at the consequence of the experience being diluted on anything but original hardware. Many of the game's head-scratchers lose all of their intuitiveness once you drop them out of the context playing on original hardware confides them in. It's a damn shame, but it just goes to show how Hotel Dusk is, bar none, one of the most distinctive experiences you can get your hands on.

Yet, while Cing's confidence is deserving of great praise and respect, it sometimes comes at the cost of breaking the game's cohesion. When you're working with an unconventional gameplay device, you have to offer some leeway to the player. There has to be enough information to invoke an intuition within their head, leading to them cracking the mystery. Some puzzles in Hotel Dusk break that code of law unfortunately. Every so often, the game contests you with a puzzle that are at least ten degrees more out there compared to the game's usual roadblocks. I would welcome these riddles with a warm embrace if it the game attempted to offer enough contextual information to trigger an intuitive, finally leading you to crack the secret. More often than not, I would solve these puzzles by sheer accident rather than me wrecking my brain, and puzzles of that nature are less satisfying and more anticlimactic. These moments break the established pace of the game, and by extension tragically fractures an otherwise smooth-sailing, immersive experience.

It dismays me that these rare few puzzles aren't the only blemishes on Hotel Dusk's journey and that sometimes the investigating itself turns the game into a monotonous, disconnected experience. At times will find yourself directionlessly roaming around the hotel, entering each and every room and interacting with every little nook and cranny in hopes of finally triggering an event flag. Kyle has something to say about little detail in the you choose to engage with, which quickly transitions from charming to annoying when compounded by Hotel Dusk's painfully slow default text crawl.

It's even more heartbreaking how the game's already numerous pacing issues are exaggerated even further by the forced game's absurdly out-of-place end-of-chapter summary quizzes. These quizzes aren't as aggravating as the other flaws presented, especially given that you have to try to fail at them at times, but their very existence is profoundly baffling. These quizzes often pertain to information that doesn't have any real significance to the game on a thematic level, sometimes even on a plot level, and they feel noticeably out of place in a game where the overarching conflict isn't even the focus. Conjoined by the fact that there are already chapter summaries right in the main character's notebook, the decision to include the segments is just utterly dumbfounding.

Now, with all my aforementioned frustrations, do I still recommend Hotel Dusk? Yes, in fact, I cannot recommend it enough. My grievances with some of its game design decisions does not change how remarkably well every facet of Hotel Dusk comes together to form such a cohesive, unique experience. I fell in love with so many aspects of this game, and it has made me break down and cry and feel for these characters. It's truly a one-of-a-kind game and I am begging you, even if you only have a passing interest in the game, to at least give it a chance before the game becomes inaccessible. No amount of words will be able to articulate how much Hotel Dusk has changed my perspective on the power of handheld games, and the possibilities of video games that are yet to be seen.

Save Klonoa #KlonoaSweep buy the games legitimately to support the series and prevent it from another painful death. We could get Klonoa 3.

You know, not to diss the backer who’s review was absolutely damning, but 1) I personally found no issue with the framerate throughout my experience with the game so far, 2) while I do agree that the PS1 version is the best way to play Klonoa 1, I would argue that for newcomers, this is certainly a great introduction to the franchise. Being a port of the Wii version means no skidding on platforms that lead to unfair deaths, and that’s really good stuff. And 3) frankly I don’t care about the DLC costumes because they’re not really the main focus of the game, don’t really provide much enhancement to the gameplay and I prefer regular Klonoa anyways.

The remasters have surprised me with how well they present themselves so far: the graphics are vibrant and colourful, bearing more similarity to the PS1 version; Klonoa’s model is also reverted back to the original design and the cutscene dialogue uses the original PS1 audio (although I would’ve gladly appreciated the quality be upscaled as well). Sure, Klonoa isn’t as expressive as his PS1 sprite counterpart due to the limitations of in-game models, and he no longer says Manyah when he gets hit (a downside of porting the Wii version); the Skip Scene button could’ve been hidden as well, but I don’t think those small nitpicks are worth completely trashing this game for. It still controls fine, plays fine, looks amazing for a Unity Engine port, soundtrack still delivers and Klonoa even has idle animations now! Again, I’m not saying this version is better because the PS1 version is clearly superior, I’m just saying that this is still a perfectly acceptable port of one of the greatest games ever made!

I’ll come back to the game as a whole when I’m done, but I’m labelling this game as my favourite game of all time because I consider both Klonoa games to be that as a collective, and putting the Phantasy Reverie Series as a placeholder works for me.