Synchronise
2001
Both this game and Gargoyle's Quest I played on recommendation from Transparency. I had heard of this game before but had never had occasion to play it due to it not being released in North America.
Much like the game itself, I'll keep this short and sweet. I had a lot of fun "solving" each stage, though I wasn't terribly concerned with "perfect" runs or getting the fastest time. I could see myself going back to this now and again.
Much like the game itself, I'll keep this short and sweet. I had a lot of fun "solving" each stage, though I wasn't terribly concerned with "perfect" runs or getting the fastest time. I could see myself going back to this now and again.
2000
This review contains spoilers
Late in 2022 I decided that for January 2023, I wanted to play Boku no Natsuyasumi one day at a time. January and August are the same length--31 days each--and escaping into the Japanese summer countryside while in the grip of the Swedish winter (a cold, dark experience where the sun is more a suggestion than a guarantee) seemed enticing.
So every day this month, usually after a long day at work and a short dinner, I sat down with my partner as spectator and I booted up a new summer day, taking on the role of Boku. Neither of us are fluent in Japanese, so we made liberal use of translation options, but much of the time I was more keen to just let the speech wash over me and try to catch what I could in meaning. I've been privileged to always have games playable in my native language, so this experience felt a lot like my partner's childhood gaming reality--playing games in a language you don't understand, doing your best to beat it anyway--and also never detracted from the overall experience.
I tried to play this game less as a game and more as a simulator. I did not reset (excluding that one time when the game froze) and I avoided looking things up as much as possible. This was, maybe, a chance for me to get back one summer of my childhood that I thought was lost forever.
I didn't actually get an ending. I still don't really understand why. But getting a specific ending wasn't really the point. The ending I really earned was a month of memories with my partner, a month of evenings (and a couple mornings) running through forests and fields, shouting "BIG!" whenever we caught a big bug, cheering when the kite cleared 120m, and dreaming about the many meals Boku tasted during his summer break.
I can never go back to my childhood, can never replace those memories, even as more of those memories slip from my grasp. But I can make new ones, and I made fantastic ones with this game. Play it if you can.
So every day this month, usually after a long day at work and a short dinner, I sat down with my partner as spectator and I booted up a new summer day, taking on the role of Boku. Neither of us are fluent in Japanese, so we made liberal use of translation options, but much of the time I was more keen to just let the speech wash over me and try to catch what I could in meaning. I've been privileged to always have games playable in my native language, so this experience felt a lot like my partner's childhood gaming reality--playing games in a language you don't understand, doing your best to beat it anyway--and also never detracted from the overall experience.
I tried to play this game less as a game and more as a simulator. I did not reset (excluding that one time when the game froze) and I avoided looking things up as much as possible. This was, maybe, a chance for me to get back one summer of my childhood that I thought was lost forever.
I didn't actually get an ending. I still don't really understand why. But getting a specific ending wasn't really the point. The ending I really earned was a month of memories with my partner, a month of evenings (and a couple mornings) running through forests and fields, shouting "BIG!" whenever we caught a big bug, cheering when the kite cleared 120m, and dreaming about the many meals Boku tasted during his summer break.
I can never go back to my childhood, can never replace those memories, even as more of those memories slip from my grasp. But I can make new ones, and I made fantastic ones with this game. Play it if you can.
Klonoa was deceptively cute. The platforming in this game gave me an absolute fit, with a good portion of that being due to just how slippery Klonoa is on platforms. My dude, please get some better shoes if you're going to save the world.
I played this in Japanese (a language I barely understand) so I have no comments on the story, but I can tell you that I frequently recalled watching my friend play the Wii version of this game--my own copy, in fact, which he played and I never did before selling it for some unknowable reason--and so this reminded me of a much simpler time in my life, before I moved to a new continent and started, then stopped, dyeing my hair.
A great game worth playing, but probably not worth playing past the final boss unless you're much better at platformers than me. (And you probably are.)
I played this in Japanese (a language I barely understand) so I have no comments on the story, but I can tell you that I frequently recalled watching my friend play the Wii version of this game--my own copy, in fact, which he played and I never did before selling it for some unknowable reason--and so this reminded me of a much simpler time in my life, before I moved to a new continent and started, then stopped, dyeing my hair.
A great game worth playing, but probably not worth playing past the final boss unless you're much better at platformers than me. (And you probably are.)