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danbo's review is excellent, check it out too.

Partners-in-crime Ribbiks and Grain of Salt take a break from their usual challenge mapping antics to put out a platforming-only WAD that's, shockingly, one of the best platformers I've ever played.

I think the problem with most platformers that I've tried (though I don't play many) is that the movement has to be pretty damn engaging to warrant focusing the whole game around it. I found Celeste just okay (high heresy, I know) but I can attempt stupid pointless jumps in Super Metroid for hours because the movement feels so alien and interesting.

It turns out Doom's bizarro physics (Absolutely no air control + lots of momentum + straferunning) work pretty well for this too! On top of this, Ribbiks and GoS hack together a weird Archvile-jump-on-command whose explosive flinging properties heavily depend on your speed and direction. It's all very analog, and the whole thing takes a while to get used to, but that's the point: it's about the tactile feel of play, almost like Katamari Damacy.

Levels are very lenient with the difficulty and only require a fraction of the gems in each level to be collected before you can move on to the next one, so you can try different challenges if you get stuck, though I would have liked to see a few more freeform areas where you can just jump around. I would be remiss not to mention these two's fearsomely honed ability to create atmosphere in the Doom engine, especially the last 3 maps. It's clear that after a decade in the scene, they know how to use color, lighting, architecture, and MIDIs (Ribbiks composes here too!) in ways that work with the engine's strengths.

While I was writing this I loaded the WAD up to check some things, but got sucked in again without thinking. Honestly feels like SM64 more than any other platformer I've played. Recommended to basically everyone. An absolute joy!

To love Musou games is to love the mythological and silly nature it injects into its subject matter. It's lovely.

I don't think there's anyone in the world who loves these games for the way they feel or the gameplay systems or anything like that. It's about The Romance of Three Kingdoms being taken to an absurd and camp-y conclusion. It's in the retelling of a massive historical event in such a fun and loving way. It sparked my interest in ROT3K and I've loved this game for all of my life. It's got tens of characters with their own individual sets of "campaigns", with later levels wildly varying from other characters, because they delve into hypothetical rather than following the actual historical outcome. It has a (relatively) extensive section dedicated to a timeline of the era and reasonably descriptive biographies for every character in the game, even secondary general/lieutenants/etc. It just wants you to laugh and have fun with it, and maybe learn something if you find anything in it interesting.
<3

Ambitious, missed potential, confused, anti-nationalist. Yeah. Emotionally aware, dramatic, pays attention to its individual characters while tripping over itself for what it actually stands for.

They had a great opportunity with the anti-war stuff, not that it's terrible, but it's like... well, it eventually resolves itself into nationalism being bad, which is true, but to get there it also felt like it had to give up another thing it got close to: something along the lines of "war is manufactured by the ones who don't have to experience it." but that gets dashed aside for couple of twists that I won't detail because I don't want to give this a full spoiler tag.

Lovely cast of characters, albeit somewhat scatter-brained usage of them. The method of feeding you cutscenes that are mostly from a non-military non-player perspective is always something I liked, and the aesthetic of shooting it through a camera for journalism that also exists in some places is nice... There's a lot going on in this, it gets very direct with shit like the military silencing journalists (temporarily, in this case) so they don't report on things that should be known, the citizens of your originating country don't fucking care about the war and think it's pointless... It has ambition, like I said before.

It plays nice. It has horrid team-AI, with a caveat: they are decent at damaging enemy planes, they are godawful at finishing them off. It's very scripted, which okay, fine, it's way more focused on making you engage with the narrative and the spectacle (stuff like the ICBM lighting up the entire sky), I don't think it's a huge issue. It's not very difficult outside of a couple of obtuse occasions. It has lots of hectic radio chatter, for me it helps prop up some of the border-line snoozefest levels, but if you think it isn't convincing enough, yeah, there's nothing helping some of these missions. Lots of infinitely respawning pairs of jets and whatnot to keep you occupied. It's whatever.

It's not bad, but it's very... fantastical. It doesn't have the balls to commit to the grand vision that it felt like it was capable of, it hit some really weird twists and story beats in the later bits, and is generally kind of strange.

Emulated via PCSX2 on Linux.

This review contains spoilers

I have no idea what I just played.

Equal parts oddly relaxing, confusing, and frustrating, Flower Sun and Rain really tries to confuse the player above all else. Most of the time, it's a funny confusion, but sometimes it flies way over my head.

I have to let this game sink in for a bit before I really understand what it's about. (Time for a music metaphor) It's kind of like atonal music - where they are throwing dissonant, unresolved chords at you all the time, without a real center or tonic, but still you have a sense of things progressing. It is literally maybe one of the only plots I can think of from a videogame that only works because it's confusing, because it's nonsensical. It works exactly because there is no stability - or just enough to make the nonsense appealing. Interesting too that this game references a lot of composers, mostly for the pleasant (but odd) familiarity of some of the remixed classical tunes. Still I see some parallels of the tone of this game and the works of Debussy, Ravel and the like. Using odd, yet dreamy and majestic harmonies. I would describe the tone of FSR as precisely an odd daydream.

Of course, the game itself is like if you melded Professor Layton with an odd (vaguely) Polynesian and Sinatra-age America vibe. The biggest comparison might be to a show like Hawaii 5-O, only much more postmodern and tongue in cheek. Now the puzzles can be bad. In particular, there are some puzzles that assume that you just take something for granted - in the latter of the game in particular, there is a series of puzzles about a radio. You have to look for a "memory radio station". So the guidebook (where you will look to solve most of the puzzles in this game) has a listing of a station where callers request the songs they want to be played - songs they have memories of. It didn't say anything of memories in the description of the station, so (my probably dumb) self couldn't make that leap of logic.

Yeah, the game also has a lot of walking back and forth, lots and lots of it.

Flower, Sun and Rain can be confusing and sometimes poorly designed. It operates purely on a seeming lack of ground, and is held up only by shocking the player at every turn.

Yet, I'll be damned if I didn't like my time with it. I love the DS version in particular, something so interesting about the grainy, DS-rendered graphics that complements the style of this game. While I think the game was a bit too tongue-in-cheek at points, I also was supremely relaxed by it, and found myself laughing a lot. Mondo is a very witty guy.

I loved this game for the time I spent with it, and I'm looking forward to replaying it! There is a loooot of walking though. It brings me to a good point: the way this game flaunts its faults. I've heard the Grasshopper crew wasn't exactly operating on a million dollar budget during this game. Still, bringing attention to the games faults with Fourth Wall breaks didn't exactly make them less obvious - for example "I can guess you have a lot of walking to do this chapter", or "why don't our 3D character models look like our 2D illustrations?". The game easily could have done without these fourth wall breaks, and it really kind of broke the immersion.

Still, I'm impressed at what the developers were able to do with what they had - I feel like this game could've been an interesting art film (in the best way possible). While it was silly most of the time, I had a hint of some serious themes of derealization, the ways people take advantage of each other, and questioning of ones self and identity. SPOILERS: (see the movie "The Truman Show" or "Synecdoche, New York")

Very lovely, and I usually don't play much of Suda 51's projects because the hyperviolence isn't my thing. I loved this one though. Give it a shot if you want something equally mind-destroying and relaxing.

Probably my favorite post-Square, post Love-de-lic Akira Ueda involved project. Keeps the charming visual style of Contact while opting for a simpler adventure game with occasional boss fights and imho is all the better for it.

It matches up to be, along with "Houkago Shounen", the DS's version of Japanese summer vacation simulator type games (like Attack of the Friday Monsters for 3DS or Boku Natsu for Playstation)

Only issue is that the game is surprisingly short, when I got to the ending, I was surprised. I might have exclaimed "already?" Yeah, this game has 4 chapters and is only around about 5 hours if you only do the main story, I'd say. Still, there are sidequests in each chapter that add up to a replayable experience. You also unlock scenes by collecting people's tears each chapter (the gimmick the game centers around), and you get little scenes based on "pets", animals around town that you also unlock via tear collecting.

Really awesome third person pre-rendered graphics, odd but great music, and a weighty yet sentimental and nostalgic story of childhood. I honestly had no clue what was being said in the dialogue while playing it, and curbing my usually obsessive google translate attempts I just played through it without translating a bit of the dialogue. I did get a sense of the emotional weight of what was happening. It's a story of kids, their parents, and the sometimes misguided childhood desire for escape.

Really recommend this one.

One thing I'll admit: I included this game on a list of introductory adventure games without having completed it myself. That's my confession, and I really do feel like I should've got to this earlier.

We start the game with snapshots of the big city, but soon we are off to a tiny hotel in the desert of Nevada. A blank slate, a desert, or so it seems. Can we start over? Only after discovering our past once again.

I was so awe struck by this game. I ate it up, which is surprising because I'm in a slump with games right now. I admit, the puzzles did get tedious, one or two in particular (finding a tiny piece of chalk that I needed to make a pen legible). There's one other particularly annoying one that I forgot.

This is one of the most visually striking games on the DS. The book "1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die" (a mouthful) describes it as being like the video to A-ha's "Take on Me", a comparison I cannot un-see. Yet it really works in the games favor. It's interesting, it's symbolic almost, to see the characters in monochrome, as if they are all stuck in the dark, toiling away until the end, but with hope of color.

Kyle is an interesting protagonist. He starts the game off as kind of a gruff a-hole. Yet, his dialogue is really well written, and he ends up being a very lovable protag. He "softens" up a little as the game goes on, and we get to love him in his cynicism yet real kindness when he is put to the test by peoples desperation. It's like watching someone grow empathy.

The music is amazing, also some T's Music people worked on this game (another game to add to the Reel Fishing legacy, if you know you know.)

The dialogue can be funny as hell, I'll leave you to experience it if you haven't already. Very witty and well written.
Also, I feel like they really captured the vibe of 70s America.

Sorry for this kind of skimmed review, I promise I will eventually play this again and say my thoughts in more detail.
Trust this tired reviewer, this game made me cry, and it's intensely real and personal. Give it a shot.

(My time with this game was about 11 hours 50 minutes, but since I admittedly used a walkthrough at parts, the realistic time would be around 13 hours I think.)


At this point in time, Bubble Bobble had already made a name for itself as a simple, yet addictive and consistently great series of arcade platformers, ones that you and a buddy could easily pick up and enjoy for a good couple of hours, even if it can get repetitive at times. Of course though, like with any major video game franchise, the series would have plenty of spin-off and side games that would be released over the years, with some of these games, like the Rainbow Islands series, continuing the same platforming gimmicks that Bubble Bobble would introduce, while also shaking them up in new, interesting ways. But of course, the series wouldn’t be limited to just platformers, as there would be another game made right alongside the mainline games that would take on the puzzle genre, spawning its own successful series that would get plenty of sequels for years to come, and that game in question would be Puzzle Bobble………………. no, I am not calling it Bust-A-Move, I REFUSE to call it that.

While I am somewhat familiar with the mainline Bubble Bobble games, I had never played any of the Puzzle Bobble games before now, primarily just because I wasn’t interested. Like with most puzzle games out there, if it wasn’t something like Bejewled or Dr. Mario, it just didn’t interest me as a kid, and I figured that Puzzle Bobble would just fall right alongside those other games as just being another series of generic puzzle games. But hey, since I have been trying out more puzzle games recently, I figured I would go ahead and give the first game a shot, and I am glad that I did, because it’s actually really goddamn good! It is pretty simple, all things considered, and it probably doesn’t offer as much as later games in the series, but for what we got here, it’s still fun, addicting, and pleasant enough to make me wanna check out the sequels at some point.

The graphics are great, having that cute-sy feel that a Bubble Bobble game should have, while also having simple, yet engaging enough visuals for the main puzzle element that keeps your eyes glued to the screen, the music is good, being cheerful and energetic enough to where you will remember it after playing the game, but as is tradition with these games, it is pretty much the only track that plays for the entire game, and it can get pretty repetitive after a while, and the control/gameplay is pretty basic once you figure it all out (which won’t take long for you to do at all), but it manages to keep you hooked long enough to where you wanna see just how far you can get before your sanity won’t let you anymore.

The game is a typical arcade puzzle game, where you take control of Bub, go through a set of 32 very similar levels filled with plenty of multi-colored bubble, shoot your own set of multi-colored bubbles at them to link them together in plenty of places, match three or more to have them pop to give yourself more points and clear them all out, and panic frequently when the bubbles are pushed towards the bottom of the screen, making it easier for you to fuck up and lose. It is a very simple game, and upon going into it, you can easily assess what you are meant to do and how to do it, but not only does the game switch up the bubble formations to trick you up as you keep going, it also makes this simple concept that much more fun to take on and try to get a high score in.

Back when I reviewed Puyo Puyo, I mentioned how, when it comes to any successful puzzle game series, having a formula that works right from the get-go with the first entry is essential, otherwise you are just going to have a bunch of mediocre, or just plain bad, games that I don’t wanna play or even look at. Thankfully though, when it comes to Puzzle Bobble, this just may be my favorite set-up for a traditional puzzle game that I have seen yet. It isn’t perfect by any means, but it does provide that sense of satisfaction a puzzle game should give off, it isn’t too challenging to where you feel like you can’t properly succeed, and unlike with Puyo Puyo, I am smart enough to actually figure this one out! And let me tell ya, the feeling that you get whenever you manage to shoot a bubble at a series of bubbles along the top of the column that manages to drop them all down to where you instantly win………… it may actually feel better than sex, it is so great. Not to mention, there is a 2-player vs. mode, so if you have been looking for a simple enough puzzle game to play with your friends, then look no further than this.

Now, with all that being said, I can’t say that this game is perfect by any means, as it does have several issues that hold it back in certain different ways. In terms of the game itself, there isn’t really much I can say that I don’t like about it, except for the fact that it does have a certain luck factor to it that can make it frustrating at points. There were plenty of times where the bubbles would be close to reaching the bottom of the screen, and I couldn’t clear them out in time simply due to the fact that the game wouldn’t give me the right color of bubble that I needed at that time, and I would have to keep building up on the column I had until it ultimately crashed and burned. Of course, that is to be expected from a game like this, but it still worth pointing out regardless. Outside of the game though, the only real other complaint I could have about it is that, most likely, it is just outdated at this point. There have been plenty of sequels to this game, each one I imagine expanding upon the gameplay and visuals in ways that make it much better to play and enjoy, so there isn’t much this game has going for it in comparison to its sequels, other then that it is the first one. That doesn’t make the game bad, mind you, but it just makes it less desirable over the other games.

Overall, despite some luck that could screw you over and being outdated in comparison to other games, the original Puzzle Bobble was a really fun time, being one of the best old-school puzzle games that I have ever played, and I am now really looking forward to trying out some of the other games in the series at some point in the future. I would recommend it for those who are big fans of old-school puzzle games in general, as well as those who enjoy some of the later titles in the series, because while this may not be as good as those other titles, it still manages to stand on its own and be enjoyable to this very day. And people were saying that Tetris was the biggest, baddest puzzle game out there, but does that game have tiny, adorable dragons shooting bubbles from their mouths? I don’t think so!

Game #516

This review contains spoilers

(I played this on the CD-ROM version of the game!)

As we see the logo for Cyberdreams, as they are "developing new ways to amaze", we see some sort of strange alien ship reaching somewhere in a alien world, and then the name Dark Seed appears and the alien world is replaced by the image of a mansion, and then we see Mike Dawson getting impregnated by a alien embryo...

After a horrying nightmare, Mike Dawson awakens to the first day on his new house...

And now its up for Mike Dawson to find out about all the strange events happening in Woodland Hills.

HR Giger is one of the most well known artists in history, particularly when it comes to horror, alongside Junji Ito and Zdzislaw Beksinski. He was responsible for many things throughout his career, whether that thing is, of course, Ridley Scott's Alien, ELP (Emerson, Lake & Palmer)'s Brain Salad Surgery and much more. Giger has a very iconic style for his paintings, in this case his beatifully grotesque industrial hellscapes of flesh and steel, where man and machine were combined while tackling other mature themes like death, suicide, sex and more.

Obviously, other people would be inspired by Giger's paintings to create something equally as "RAD" (insert Darkwood here), but then we have Dark Seed, developed by Cyberdreams, a studio which would go on to develop the cult classic I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, based on the short story of the same name by Harlan Ellison, before that though they made this, and unlike I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, this game has kind of fallen into obscurity over the years, and after playing it, I can perfectly see why...

Because it's BAD, I could even say AWFUL!!!

Before I start tearing through it however, I want to start with the positives (which there aren't a lot to be honest):

First of all, visually it looks really good for its time. Initially the game was going to run on the standard 320x200 resolution that most games adopted, but Giger felt like it wasn't enough to handle his art, so he demanded Cyberdreams to increase the resolution to a higher standard (while reducing the amount of colors to 16 instead of the standard 256 at the time), and it shows. The Normal World and the spritework present in there makes Woodland Hills feel like a truly desolate town, separate from the rest of the world, with all the clashing between different kinds of architecture further contributing to it, and then we have the Dark World, coming directly from the mind of HR Giger, and most of his artwork is integrated astoundingly well, giving this genuinely creepy contrast to the Normal World's sterile but at the same time human town. Although it isn't perfect, the Keeper of the Scrolls is just a poor man's copy of Li 2, and the human spritework is somewhat dated, with Mike Dawson sticking out kind of badly in comparison to the otherwise fantastic background artwork, but in general these are rather minor complaints (especially in comparison to the other awful shit this game does). Like, when you look at a lot of the earlier LucasArts point and click adventure games from the 90s specifically they can kind of blend together, but this game's artwork make it unmistakably Dark Seed (and HR Giger), which is one of the reasons why I love games like Westwood's Blade Runner and Machinarium so much.

The only thing I like about the story of the game is the genuine mystery surrounding the Dark World, where even after beating it we still don't know a lot about it aside from the things we met there, but rather than hindering it, further makes the Dark World all the more ominous and otherworldly than it already is when combined with its art direction.

And speaking of art direction, I will say this: The HR Giger stuff is what truly make this game have even a single bit of ACTUAL ATMOSPHERE (since it would otherwise have probably fallen into obscurity even harder), because almost everything else besides these two things (and a few others) range from mediocre to HILARIOUSLY AWFUL!

First of all, the gameplay is abysmal. While functionally it is pretty simple, you have three different actions you can do with the mouse (walk, interact and examine), the real problem comes from everything else surrounding it, which is the embodiment of everything wrong with point and click adventure games: Pixel hunting? CHECK (out that bobby pin)! Moon logic (or should I say, Dark World logic)? CHECK! Dead ends (at jail)? CHECK! Timed events? Well guess what? CHECK! It's just unbearable, and as I mentioned, there are so many ways to get softlocked for commiting a mistake, whether that is not picking a item beforehand, not using a item at the correct time, or for fuck sake, even PICKING a item earlier will punish you. It's truly the "Dumb Ways To Die!" of point and click adventure games!

But if there is one point in the game which is like the EPITOME of bad in this game, what is it then? Well, there is one point in the game where you are sent into jail (because the aliens from the Dark World are controlling the police force in the Normal World, somehow), let me count all the times you can get softlocked just because of all the sections involving the jail (both the Normal World and Dark World ones):

1 - Not getting Delbert's business card (because you didn't buy the Scotch at the shop using the money that you probably forgot even existed).
2 - Getting the gun before getting sent into jail (straight up punishing players for doing certain steps earlier, wowie).
3 - Not putting atleast one of the three items under the pillow (one of those items aren't even twenty pixels large).
4 - Not putting the rope in the gargoyle statue at the Balcony (remember that chest and that crowbar).
5 - Using the invisibility headband at the wrong time (if you use the invisibility headband and reach the entrance to the alien jail, you're toasted).

The first three examples can happen just at that ONE moment you visit the jail in the Normal World ALONE. And a lot of those are plagued by the other problems like pixel hunting or moon logic.

I think that the way the game was designed is that you would ALWAYS lose the game atleast once when trying to beat this game (if you don't use a walkthrough or didn't get spoiled on the """""puzzles""""" beforehand), and you would need to bash your skull against the biomechanical walls of the Dark World over and over and over again until finally beating it, combine this with the slow movement and the atrocious comments Mike Dawson says when entering certain screens for the first time, restarting the game to get back at where you lost is made all the more agonizing by them. Though if I were to praise one thing about the gameplay, is that conceptually the idea of doing certain things in one dimension affecting the other is really creative, even if one of the few puzzles involving this idea present in this game is completely ridiculous and riddled with moon logic and dead ends, but other games such as.... UUUUUUUHHH... I guess The Messenger? (I know that's an nonsensical game to use as example in comparison to Dark Seed, but its one of those games that used a similar concept in much better ways).

Well, finally moving on, while the mystery and intrigue about Dark Seed's setting is certainly interesting, it could have been further enhanced if every single character wasn't thinner than an ant. While I can give the Dark World inhabitants somewhat of a pass since the Dark World does have the benefit of being an inherently mysterious setting (even if they are still shallow) plus their cool as hell designs (barring Keeper of the Scrolls), the characters from the Normal World unfortunately don't get that same treatment, but the worst offender for all of the characters is the unholy Mike Dawson.

Who the fuck is HR Giger?! Mike Dawson is the REAL draw to this game! His character is so asinine it makes the game almost hilarious to watch (NOT PLAY, JUST WATCH), his comments on almost everything is like the most obvious shit imaginable drawn out to multiple lines of nonsense, like, NO SHIT DAWSON, of course that is the inside of a police station!!! And who would have known that books manage to be scarier than a baby doll turning into a biomechanical monster? Well, I guess Mike Dawson is the one! Mike Dawson is somehow more otherworldly than the actually otherworldly creatures from HR Giger's paintings, and the voice of Mike doesn't help at all, even when he is facing those monstrous amalgamations of flesh and steel in the Dark World, he acts like nothing interesting is happening, he is just that much of a dorky chad!

I am almost reaching the end of this review I swear, I just want to talk about the music and voice acting, music is a mixed bag, sometimes ear damaging songs that feel like they came out of a baby show but make even System Shock 1 sound like exploring relaxing soundscapes in a Frutiger Aero world, sometimes they do manage to integrate pretty well into the game, the Dark World ones are thankfully not the Baby Shock (a mix of baby shows from the real TLC and System Shock 1) nonsense of the Normal World bar the cemetery (even that is ear bleeding though), but that's all par from the course at this point. The voice acting is mediocre (aside from the Dark World ones, which may not have good voice ACTING, but they do sound ominous for once, except the cop one, he sounds like a 65 year old man), but so was most voice acting from most games in the early 90s so I can give it a pass, Mike Dawson is GOD though!

I do acknowledge I was perhaps a tad too harsh on this game (heck even my rating is rather harsh), I had just beaten Blade Runner again the day prior to beating this, but one thing I can say for sure, I do not recommend playing this game, even if you want to play it for the HR Giger artwork or the ironic enjoyment of hearing Mike Dawson babbling about stuff, its not enough to redeem the infuriating gameplay this game generally suffers from, and in fact when I think more about this game, this reeks of a case where they had the cheese and knife at their hands, but they threw the cheese in the trash and put their knife in the ass, it may have been great at its time despite all the issues, but nowadays is just a spoiled relic of its time.

Truly a rough start to the studio that went on to make I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream!

A while ago I tried to play Marchen Veil I on the PC 88 and wasn’t able to finish it. I just found the game too slow to want me to see the end, so I stopped at around stage 5. I thought this version would be different but this was surprisingly a port with changes obviously but this one really improved the experience for me.

There are eight stages where you must do objectives, collect items and make it to the end while getting stronger. There are parts that may seem a little cryptic but the big story might help a little. It’s best to experiment like hitting rocks or trees to uncover items or defeat every enemy. You’ll even need to backtrack a couple of times. Your weapon is a sword and similar to Valis, it’s more of a projectile weapon that shoots projectiles. You can also jump but make sure your health is above 5 hearts or more. Just be careful as instant death is still a thing including pits you have to mash the attack button to get out of.

This port is a lot faster than the PC 88 version and doesn’t even do screen by screen. The game still can get pretty hard around the last quarter so be careful. Some items are gone and so are the descriptions and safe zones. The game even makes you load back into the game every time you are done looking at it. You can shoot diagonally which I’m not sure was in the original to be honest. Saving also doesn’t require a floppy disk but be warned that you’ll need to press up and A with the 2nd controller to actually save. There are no continues outside of a book item you can get and there’s only one revive potion which only heals five hearts so if you are emulating and lack a 2nd controller, use save states.

The story is a big component of the game and the visuals are now done with the in game graphics and even animate a little. A GameFAQs guide will translate the story if you wanna read it though I don’t know how accurate the translation is. The story seems pretty interesting though I just feel really bad for the Prince. Even by the end the game ends on a real downer and unfortunately still ends on a cliffhanger. This is pretty weird as a sequel doesn’t exist on the FDS.

The game graphically looks alright but it does have some choppy scrolling when moving around but for 1987 it could be worse I guess. Like I said before, the cutscenes look different and kind of lose some of the mood and scariness I felt from those originals though maybe I’m just weird. There’s also some loading here and there but nothing unbearable. The music sadly isn’t that good and can sound pretty ear grating at times. There are at least more tracks here which is nice but I just don’t like the sound some of these songs make.

This was a nice game that I’m glad I could say I finished and enjoyed. If there is one version people should play here, it’s probably this one. The speed is a lot more bearable and there’s an easy guide to read if you need help with anything. This is what I was hoping to enjoy when playing that PC 88 version but sadly I guess sometimes experiences don’t go how you want to. If you’re looking for a nice top down action adventure game, this isn’t a bad one to give a go. Just remember it can get hard so don’t get discouraged, hope you enjoy it if you ever give this one a try.

A fascinating "rail shooter-meets-ATB" combat system, a brisk and well-paced story that trims the JRPG fat, a rich and mysterious sci-fi world that doesn't over-explain itself, organic and adaptable customization systems... A miraculous game, especially pre-OoT.