Deliberately painted spots of light and shadow as cover combined with an all-encompassing soundscape make this perhaps the closest a simulated world has ever gotten to transcending toy status, as opposed to the same year's Pac-Man with extra steps. This is why 天照大神 had to smite their vision by only making them realize this by the time they had already made half of the game some dogshit survival horror dungeon waddler. Fuck this. I am confined to the bounds of the emergent systemic design sandbox forever. This is why I only fuck with Blue Archive.

Novelty and simplicity are Crypt of the NecroDancer’s greatest strengths. All you need to play is the arrow keys and yet this is one of the hardest roguelikes you will ever play, particularly if you dive into the unlockable characters. I’m nowhere near good enough to beat the game with Aria, but I still enjoyed trying to stay in the groove with Cadence and Melody. It should go without saying the music is wonderful. The singing shopkeeper is a delight, to the point where I wish he was playable. In any case, definitely check this out if you like rhythm games or want a new take on a roguelike.

Also, check out the crossover follow-up Cadence of Hyrule. Its lower difficulty and reduced roguelike elements make it a perfect entry point for the rhythm gameplay. Even if that’s not your cup of tea, the exploration is great and there’s an option to disable the rhythm if you struggle with that. Brace Yourself Games has earned my respect and I look forward to playing Rift of the Necrodancer after it releases!

Felt like updating my review, as the Synchrony DLC has since come out of early access.
In my original review, I complained about the new 4.0 engine's quirks and nuances. I picked up the game in 2017, just after Amplified came out, and I got really familiar with the game. It has the second highest playtime on my steam page (and I put over 200 hours into the switch version too.) So, when the new engine came around, the small changes really bothered me.

Certain exploits, glitches, or even basic interactions were changed as the game was essentially rebuilt. Most of them have been addressed and reinstated since early access, and I am not as frustrated as I was originally with the changes. Plus, there is a new legacy option to play with the old engine, something I had wished for in my old review. It's the best of both worlds! The online cross-play that Synchrony offers is genuinely really cool.

Necrodancer was such a unique take on the rogue like formula at the time, and it took hold of my life. I have many memories with it and it changed the way I look at both rhythm games and rogue likes. In hindsight, it seems obvious that old turn based rogue likes could be adapted into a rhythm game: your hand is forced to make a move before you are ready, your strategy always shifting and changing just like the enemies around you. It's such a thrilling grind, pulsing with the tunes of legendary indie composer Danny Baranowsky. It's hard to describe how Necrodancer makes me feel.

The learning curve is steep. VERY steep. There is an excellent video essay describing why Necrodancer has one of the hardest PS4 platinums. Not to mention that both Amplified and Synchrony have their own achievements too! However, I would argue that it is simple to pick up and learn. Anyone can beat Cadence with a little practice and patience!

The mechanics are brilliant. The music is top notch. I'll never be able to get all the achievements, but the grind is extremely addicting!

only took two and a half years, but through my innovative technique of playing a handful of missions every four months I have finally taken down this beast. absurd how structurally lazy this game is: 89 single-player missions, all back-to-back with no side quests or key quest system or any sort of progression/organization beyond "play a mission and then unlock the next one." it should be obvious that most of these missions bear more than a small resemblance to one another due to the comparative dearth of maps and enemy types, so throwing the player into this many mandatory missions just exacerbates the repetition. sure, this is a game oriented around an endless grind for weapon and armor drops, but evidently the game's bounty of missions vastly exceed the bounds of the game's weapon pools given that identical pools appear in many of the missions on a given difficulty and rarely give new items. the weapon level drop curve is such that even running the first couple of missions on inferno, the highest difficulty, primarily gave me weapons I already had from midgame on normal, three difficulties below it. this would be more bearable if at least the weapon pools between all four classes were shared... but they aren't, so good luck if you played through the campaign with one class and would like to switch on the next difficulty up, because you won't have shit to work with. the developers recognized these unforced errors because edf5 rectified a fair number of them (primarily shared weapon pools and an upgrade system when you pick up a dupe), but it stings a bit that this entry completely fumbles these elements here.

I'm dedicated to fencer (the armored suit class) through and through, and in this particular entry fencer gets an essential (if perhaps not intended) dash cancel that lifts the weight of the rest of the game on its back. by firing the otherwise mediocre javelin catapult directly after executing a side dash, the ending lag of the dash will get overwritten with extremely fast javelin recovery frames, enabling quick dash spam across the battlefield. a couple weapon types possess the side dash as an auxillary ability, with perhaps no one more busted than the blasthole spear lineage, which provide rapid-fire, high-DPS shots at close range. the synergy is quickly clear: hit-and-run tactics with the spears and the dash cancel can easily depose even spongier enemies as long as one manages their cooldowns. of course, if this was the whole gameplan, the game would stale over such a long campaign, but luckily the fencer uniquely possesses switchable item sets. I kept a mid-range cannon and long-range mortars on deck in the other set for most of the ride as heavy artillery to deal the majority of my long-range damage, and since these remove the incredible mobility of the javelin/spear combo, you have a comfortable role trade-off to deal with in each fight. switching sets can't be done willy-nilly, and outside of wakeup animations most recovery lag will keep you from swapping, preserving the commitment of the most truly heinous fencer weaponry. the sluggish movement of the fencer normally would not necessarily be fun to use, as it would submerge the game into wading through enemies and tanking shot after shot, but this particular dash-cancel wrinkle helps sell a hot-and-cold playstyle that one rarely finds in a third-person shooter.

scenario-wise, probably one of the best examples I can think of where simply mass-spawning identical enemies makes for very solid encounters. although my brain would like to call it a TPS musou, it really hews closer to a wave shooter or arena shooter due to the centralization of the battle around the player character. you may enter with allies to assist you, but they rarely last past the first wave, and thus the game devolves into controlling the mass of enemies following you and you alone around the map. at its worst, it's a lot of kiting, either soothed by the need to stop to unleash your best weapons or agitated by the need to build up a healthy distance from the enemies before you unleash your best weapons, depending on how you look at it. only the cheap fodder succumb to pure tracking tactics, however, and with enough alternate opponents that lockdown certain parts of the map, roam, or patrol, you can find yourself properly flanked in a way the fodder can't do alone. of these the most fundamental are the hectors: large bipedal robots with an assortment of heavy weaponry and shields. getting in one's sights can subject the player to anything from full-map range plasma shots to short-range sheets of sparks, the latter of which portends poorly for any fencer player clamped to the ground by it. the variety of these and the use of different AI routines for each make hectors an essential flavor for any environment, especially maps with lots of enemy spawn points. other large enemies are equally fascinating (the segmented quadruped deroys and their long-range leg melee are rather fierce), yet the bosses tend to make clear how much of the game relies on hundreds of adds running around the screen at once due to their gigantic hurtboxes and rudimentary behavior. perhaps this is why the final boss opts for a much smarter strategy of smothering the earth with artificial ceiling of weaponry, with the top hurtbox only accessible when openings in the ceiling plates have been cracked open.

Don’t know if I’m quite as taken with this as the fanbase at large is, but it’s easy to see why it’s such a favorite; for all the fine-tuning around the progression system and the changes to the weapon lineup, it’s the big narrative moments that make this such a strong experience. With some hindsight, a real strength of the Zero sub-series is that they flow pretty naturally together when played back-to-back, meaning that all the unresolved tension of 1 and 2 are given a game’s worth of space to play out here. It can be hard to think of a portable game as ever really being “AAA,” but Inti Creates plays out these moments with such conviction that the betrayals and revelations about the characters land with some real weight, despite the tinny bombast that it’s been presented with.

Nowhere near good enough to comment on some of its deeper changes, (like, I assume the recoil rod is something you can get a huge amount of value out of if you’re a fiend- I am not that person) but structurally, it’s a massive improvement over the other titles, mainly for the fact that it bolsters the midgame by having you rematch against three bosses from the prior games, and cuts down the finale to two levels, giving the action some real momentum at a time when things would normally start to drag down into their most familiar. Combined with the strong narrative elements, and it's the entry that's the most exciting to just casually play through- compelling even as your letter grade starts to nosedive.

Despite the months-long break between playing the first two games and now this, there’s still a bit of series fatigue that’s no doubt cooled my impressions on this, but it’s undeniably satisfying seeing an entry smartly build on and improve its predecessor's foundations.

I didn't think they could one-up themselves after Planet Robobot, especially on their first (real) attempt at a 3D game, but I couldn't be more wrong. The exploration, the minigames, the boss fights—everything translates so well to the third dimension that you are left wondering how they didn't attempt this before. The soundtrack is also top-tier and the level design is just as you would expect from the series: it's a breeze to just move forward and finish the stages, but if you go for the secrets, challenges, and post-game content then you are in for a more refined and engaging experience that makes the transformations mechanics truly shine. 
Highly recommended; it's a modern classic already.

(Single player campaign review) Absolutely essential video game, maybe the best American AAA game ever made. The details of the mechanics and level design seem forgotten by time. Paradoxically wildly underrated. On my short list of “mandatory reading” for videogames. A significant number of linear games would be a lot better if the developer learned any of the lessons from mw — there’s a huge and multidisciplinary game-wide commitment to spending money on simulationist systems in service of the linear scripted levels — very dynamic second to second ai, flavor dialogue that responds to dynamic details of fights , setpieces where you get saved by a tank or helicopter using real AI, and so on. Generational achievement. Don’t play the HD re-release, which messed up some of the fx.

For my entire life, i've never fully gave Ninja Gaiden a try. One time, I got up to Act 4, said "nah" and stopped playing. Just a few months ago, I tried the Special edition on NSO, got destroyed by the masked devil, then tried 6-1 and ALSO got destroyed (for some reason, my dumbass was trying to outrun the enemies, so no shit I couldn't do it) then said "nah" and once again quit. Recently, i've been playing some games people would label 'NES hard' like Castlevania, Mega Man 1, Ghosts n Goblins etc. I always saw Ninja Gaiden mentioned when people talked about hard games, so I thought, why not just put an effort in? If it gets too hard and I lose motivation, I could just use save states (which I didn't end up needing to use).
Now, after finishing it a few minutes ago, I want to beat the shit out of my old self.

I ADORE this game. The controls, the music, the special weapons, the level design, its all nearly flawless. Alot of peoples main problem however, was the difficultly.

Now, i'm not gonna try to say this game isn't hard, since I would be disrespecting my 7 hours of playtime, but what I can say is that 5 of those hours were in Act 6, which is really where the complaints of difficulty come from.

The game does start showing signs of bullshit at Act 5, but really shows its insides at Act 6, which is ridiculously hard, on your first few tries atleast. If you don't know, dying on any of the last 3 bosses sends you back to the start of 6-1, and makes you do the whole act over. Its one of the most infamous fuck you's in all of gaming.

However, I don't hate that feature as much as others. The first time, it was soul crushing, but over time, I practiced Act 6, every-time i would note something new to do on a boss or enemy. Using that special weapon there, or jumping over an enemy instead of attacking, it became like nirvana.

Obviously, there are still bullshit like Jaquio, which is one of the hardest bosses on the entire system, but he can be by-passed with spin-slash, one more thing, if you killed one of the last three bosses, but die to the next, you don't have to re-fight it.

The game is extremely generous overall, when you game over, you're sent back to the start of the stage instead of the act, plus spin-slash can kill nearly all bosses with one use.

I just love this game, I even love the flaws.
One of the games that shows that the NES isn't just an outdated machine.

just a note, while searching up how to kill jaquio, i found a post on a forum saying "how do i kill myself painlessly?" and honestly bro? until i got the spin-slash, same.

The open world was super overwhelming to me at first, and I still think the game's structure, specifically the side content, makes literally no sense with the "muhuhaha you will die by tonight batman, tick tick it's almost time, you will die soon lil bro, maybe find a cure if you can trololol" plot, but I really liked this!

Like, I think the overwhelming feeling was intentional, since Arkham City's one massive fucked up prison, but its pretty weird that we've got him trying to track down Deadshot on a side quest while he's a few hours away from fucking dying, especially when the story keeps pointing out how little time he has left. Makes for really weird pacing, which is funny when that's one of the things Asylum nailed.

I'm okay with that though because the actual gameplay is really solid. Gliding as Batman across the city is EXTREMELY satisfying, especially after you've gotten the grapple boost upgrade, and the stealth/combat is still fun like it was in Asylum. I found the bosses interesting here too (Mr. Freeze's was neat especially). Catwoman's traversal is awful though, and that final mission with her was really annoying.. I find it really funny how the game presents a choice with her, and upon choosing the wrong one the game just rolls the credits. I thought that was neat lol

Everyone who adores this game always points out how good the story is, and while I think the ending is really well done (love that thing with the credits), everything preceding the final hour or so of story was just alright? The story is great in the sense that it finds a good way to weave in as many batman villains as possible without it feeling too game-y, but besides that it's just an alright go-here, find-this-villain, go-there, find-this-villain, though I do question opening the game with the big "HUGO KNOWS WHO BRUCE IS" when literally nothing happens with it. I did like the Talia and Ras part but they feel out of place for whatever reason, just comes out of nowhere I guess? There's this air of stuff being a little contrived, but that's like a really stupid nitpick to make honestly considering this is both a superhero story and a videogame. Also, I have no idea how (un)popular this opinion is, but Arkham Batman/Bruce is pretty meh to me. I understand that he's stoic, and you do see little bits of emotion (he's sarcastic with Oracle sometimes), but he's about as interesting as a plank of wood, and it also sucks that the game's lead people to think Batman's always a dick and smashes random robbers' ribcages on the daily.

As a complete experience, it was pretty good, and ended right as I was starting to get tired of it. I can see why it was so beloved; way bigger scale and more grandiose than Asylum, would've blown 8 year old me's mind. I'll admit the Batman fanboy in me gave an extra half star just because you could play as Nightwing and Robin in the challenge maps (TIM HAS THE RED ROBIN SUIT AAAAAAA) (they have their own animations and gadgets!!)

Speaking of gadgets, I can't help but think of how much better this game handles them and breaking up the flow of the superhero gameplay than Insomniac did with Spider-Man (2018).

neat game !

The online discourse for this game is baffling. If I'd listened to the current consensus, then I would have avoided all but a handful of NES games, because they're apparently unfun, dated junk.

I decided to give the original Metroid a shot anyway, and I'm floored. This game is spectacular. Some of the music tracks are among the best I've ever heard. The atmosphere is as thick as butter. The world is enormous and labyrinthian. I felt a sense of vertigo uncovering side passage after side passage in areas I'd previously explored, realizing the map was at least double the size than I'd previously thought.

People are playing this game wrong. Don't use a guide, just read the manual. Be frustrated, and learn the game. This isn't a walk in the park. This is an expedition to a hostile alien fortress.