Nancy Drew Sea of Darkness was released in May 2015. The 32nd game in this quiet little franchise, publishing two games a year to a niche crowd, not making much in profits. There’s a whole mystery to untangle about how this company even survived for twenty years. Anonymous reports from people who left Her company reported that they received funding from an outside investor who just felt it was the right thing to do to support “educational games for young girls.” Future attempts to gain investors or gimmicks to boost sales failed handily. Even so, there was no reason to suspect anything about the company’s structure would change.

At the end of 2014, just before the release of Sea of Darkness, former Disney marketing director Penny Milliken was installed as the new CEO of HerInteractive. Under Millikin, the entire structure of the company changed. Half of the staff was fired. Several quit in frustration. The remaining crew was given the job of making a new Nancy Drew game in Unity, compared to the previous engine the franchise used. Communication from the company died down. Lani Minelli was replaced with a new Nancy Drew voice. There was a weird announcement that MIdnight in Salem would be a “VR game,” which went nowhere. The game released in 2019, to poor reviews. It's unlikely another Nancy game is on the horizon. Sea of Darkness is sort of the last hurrah of the franchise.

As much as it's tempting for me to lay all the blame on Milikin, I will reluctantly grant that her decision to port all the games to Steam was the correct move. Previously, the games could only be bought in-stores or on HerInteractive’s website. The website is… bad. Games you bought can just up and vanish. Wanna play it again? Better pay up a second time. And the fact of the matter was, HerInteractive was unmistakably in the red. These games do not turn a profit. It gained a diehard (but tiny) fanbase that was basically content to accept anything, myself obviously included. But these are not “exciting” games. They’re goofy. They’re silly. Comfortable Bs. If the company wanted to really thrive, I can understand to an extent why shaking things up seemed necessary.

On the other hand, she also signed a big petition a bunch of rich fucks in California wrote to protest a potential bill that would taxing big companies more. The structure of the bill probably would have resulted in mass firings so companies could pay less taxes, but the threat towards the workforce clearly wasn’t the motives of the business people protesting that “this is hurting the poor innocent companies that are helping California thrive :( :( :( how could they bully us like this :( :( :(“ So with all that in mind, I don’t feel too bad about calling her a corporate monster.

I’ve put off playing this game for a long time. The Nancy Drew games are a huge part of my childhood and saying goodbye always feels… weird. I still haven’t even touched Midnight in Salem yet, even as it sits in my Steam library taunting me. Maybe it's actually good. Who could say. But all the things that defined the franchise as Nancy Drew are in THIS game, not Midnight in Salem. Yeah, the system’s clunky and Minelli’s acting is always a little stiff. But that’s kind of part of the charm, you know? And I think the devs knew that. People like to pretend the point and click genre “died”, but I think it mostly just started marketing to girls more than men, and gaming culture hated that. So for newer generations this was one of the best ways to get into the genre. I’m sure the newest gen have enough great indie point and clicks that I’m not too worried about the genre vanishing. But its still hard to see.

Maybe part of what’s so devastating is the sense that Nancy Drew’s legacy and cultural importance has been virtually abandoned. I’m not going to claim the franchise didn’t have problems from the onset. It's always been about a rich white teen who inspired people like Hilary Clinton. The original versions of the texts had major problems depicting race, and then the revisions of those books chose to whitewash all the characters and erased much of Nancy’s sassiness in favor of a girl with devotional loyalty to cops and authority. Both versions of those books are, as hard as it is for me to admit, bad! But I truly believe there’s something in this universe that hasn’t been fully utilized yet. Nancy had to answer the 1930s question of a "proper" female heroes by basically being loose enough to fill any ideal. But this results in something interesting. Because her character is written to be so thin, Nancy Drew can represent anything. Her potential is infinite. She can fly planes. She can solve murder by Tesla electrocution. There can be a jetpack homeless woman. She can do anything, BE anything.

But no one’s willing to give Nancy that chance. Simon and Schuster never advertised these games, leaving HerInteractive to foot the marketing bill. The 2008 movie is 90% great, but also shows embarrassment over the franchise’s supporting cast and spends too much time focusing on Ned’s romantic drama. The tv show is an attempt to rip off Riverdale without having any of the things that make Riverdale or Nancy Drew work. (“work”). Shit like Ready Player One take jabs a villain for liking Nancy Drew, because that’s the only kind of nerd franchise that’s not “important” I suppose. The last really great Nancy Drew work was a 2018 comic by Kelly Thompson. It took a noir approach to the character, wringing out some edgy character drama out of Nancy’s relationship with her friends and how her snooping has helped or hindered them in life. It's genuinely amazing. Ended on a cliffhanger that hasn’t been followed up on.

For Nancy’s 90th Anniversary, they announced a sequel to a Hardy Boys comic instead. The Hardy Boys in “The Death of Nancy Drew.”

How appropriate.

Anyway, now that I’m done having an existential crisis about my childhood hero for eight paragraphs, this game’s pretty alright.

The franchise’s formula has often tried to write some kind of tragedy set in the past and I’ve generally tuned it out. I’ve seen it before, you know? But at some point, I genuinely think the writing became something special. They nailed down giving characters unique voices and personality. The suspects particularly charming this time around. Gunnar, the boisterous drunkard who can’t tell a lie. The grumpy Lisabet who seems to teleport around town trying to keep some measure of peace in the town’s chaos. The girlboss lesbian Dagny, who’s such the stand-out of an already great cast. Her lines are constantly peppered with mean-spirited jabs so over the top that you can’t help but adore her. At one point, Nancy catches Dagny doing something shady and Dagny starts crafting a cover story. When Nancy acts like she buys it, Dagny immediately drops the lie on her own accord to lecture Nancy on being too trusting, before revealing the truth of the situation just for kicks. She’s a bitch and I love her.

But the writing also gives these characters a real tragedy to their lives. Dagny’s recently divorced and she still has her ex-wife’s last name in a lot of her paperwork, even years after the separation. Lisabet is grappling with a messy break-up and a messier financial struggle. Gunnar is irritable towards outsiders and over-the-top in his antics, but he keeps talking to someone as nosy as Nancy just because she looks like his lost daughter. Everyone’s struggling through these messy parts of their lives and the care to give them that depth highlights just how far the series has changed since the plot beat about the Trauma Therapy Robot back in the Haunted Carousel.

The game also takes a genuine swing at dealing with some more Nancy/Ned relationship drama, with the usual oddly paced writing decisions that entails. I've never been a Ned fan, but there's an attempt at tenderness here that truly feels warm and fresh in ways it hasn't been before.

Of course, it's still got the usual Drew problems. Some motivations and plots go nowhere, there’s a lot of red herrings that don’t quite line up, puzzles that barely make sense within the world’s setting, and this is probably the thirtieth treasure hunt plot these games have had. But those aren’t bugs per se. Those are features. That’s what you’re here to see.

Among the staff on Sea of Darkness were three notable writers. Nik Blahunka, Cathy Roiter, and Katie Chironis. The former two became the main Her writers for a good eight years and I think churned out some of its strongest swings of the franchise. Nik Blahunka is currently one of the staff on Fortnite while Cathy Roiter I couldn’t track down.

But I want to give special attention to Katie Chironis, a new hire at Her at the time.In between this game and being overworked for MiS and the dozens of other projects in between, Chironis spent 2013 to 2019 writing Elsinore, one of my favorite games of all time. I didn’t know about this connection until I was browsing the Elsinore website on a whim. It's one of the most touching, beautiful stories on narrative and the terror of an inevitable tragedy. Even while under the nightmare conditions of Midnight in Salem, she was making something truly personal and well-crafted.

And I think that’s where I really come down to with Nancy Drew. It's goofy, it's contrived, the writing isn’t always good, and you can really wander around for hours without a clue of what’s going on. There’s some copaganda aspects that come up here and there. But goddamn, you can feel the heart. There’s a genuine desire to just look around a new locale, teach some history, and maybe have some fun along the way. It was a franchise so comfortably in its groove, it kept finding new ways to expand and experiment, even within its formula. You got to see the team grow and change over the course of the years and make something really, truly sincere. Even 32 games in, I still wanted to see them do more.

But at the end of the day, I have no right to complain. 32 games in any franchise is a miracle. It was there for as long as it could be. And it really did make something wonderful in the process.

I love this game’s visual design. It’s tragically rather undercut by how the lighting is wayyyyyyyyy oversaturated — and washes out everything it touches — but there are so many cool things here otherwise. The abandoned apartments feel so grotty: all the litter everywhere, the layers of graffiti covering the walls, the layers of dust and mold and mess that lends so much character to the world around you. The design of the monster is so evocative — how it seems like the cherry blossoms are trying to burst through its skin — and I’m a fan of how, by design, you’re never quite able to see its full image, at least not for more than a glimpse's worth. I love how the flashback cutscenes showing Maya so effortlessly segue between graphics and what looks so convincingly like FMV, really helping to contribute to the idiosyncratic, off-kilter vibe the game takes whenever we go to the past. I’m not quite sure how much of this is meant to be a tech demo — or whether this really is just meant to stand on its own — but if the aim was to show off its engine it certainly succeeded on that front, even if it’s more the artstyle itself that stands out over its graphical fidelity. And even if it really could have used an option to lower the brightness.

It’s a bit sad, in that case, that I’m rather less into most everything else. Particularly the writing. There’s promise in the premise: I could certainly see a world where I really vibe with what the game has to offer, but I think where this game is let down most is by its dialogue. There’s no subtlety. The game will spell out everything a particular moment is trying to communicate just in case you might not get it. It kinda suffers from a lack of patience, too. There’s this one segment that earnestly does the PT-style looping hallway in a way that gels super well with what’s going on thematically, setting the stage to perfectly represent the downward spiral you know is coming... then the game proceeds to throw you straight down to the bottom, having things immediately go wrong and having the whole thing only end after, like, three loops. Things and themes are brought up and then never quite mentioned again, and while one of those is the kind of painful portrayal of social media and The Gen Z Quest For Likes which I was happy to see go, there’s some stuff that really felt like it needed to be addressed or expanded on which… wasn’t. You’d think that if there’s a scene where (I think) the main character grabs a razor to cut her wrists, with the scars on their arm indicating that this is a rather routine thing, that that might… come up later, but if you thought that, you thought wrong. It just kind of happens. And unless there was something I missed… it never gets brought up again. Feels like a bit of an oversight.

(also: the game is set in Germany and yet… the characters are going to college? but can’t actually go to college because they… have to pay tuition fees? the americans might not realize that other countries don’t work the same way the US does, but trust me, we’ll notice your cultural assumptions :V)

The script never feels particularly naturalistic, either. Characters go through stuff and talk about the stuff they go through like it’s some sort of cyberbullying PSA, and… as somebody who went through some of the sort of stuff some of the characters here did, it never really felt like my experience. I know that it’s loosely going for heightened reality — I don’t think the game was literally suggesting that our character walked down her school hallways every day while random jocks yelled “Go away!” and “Slut!” and shoved her towards the lockers — but if the game is really trying to sell this as a real thing people go through, I feel like maybe there could’ve been an ear towards having the bullies say things bullys actually say. If you’re going to talk about how The Gen Z Quest For Likes makes people feel alienated and inferior from their peers, maybe don’t make it seem like you’re making fun of it instead. If you’re trying to treat the complicated and nuanced topic of suicide and mental health with the care and respect that’s required… Look, I wouldn’t necessarily say this game is as triggering on the subject of mental health and suicide as others made me think it might be (it never goes as far about it as, say, something like 13 Reasons Why or Doki Doki Literature Club ever did) but also it was insanely funny just how many times they throw the content warning disclaimer at you. Like, I read through it when I started the game. You don’t have to show it again every time you portray something that could be a representation fucky-wucky. It just kinda makes your case worse.

There’s other things, as well: the chase sequences were kind of annoying to play. They’re like this weird looping maze you have to brute force until you find the arbitrarily correct way through and also the monster will just suddenly appear from in front of you and immediately kill you if you can’t react in time and I haaaaaated having to do them. Overall, though, I’m… rather mixed on this. In a way where it really could’ve been something I liked, as well. Because while visually the game is rather adept, below the surface… god the writing really betrays it, especially the slipshot way it handles its delicate, complicated thematic material. If this is a teaser of the future of the Silent Hill franchise, it’s… certainly indicative of what’s to come. In more ways than one.

Initially felt inclined to rate The Lost Crown slightly lower due to some minor annoyances brought about by glitches, but by the end, I realised it represents too much of what I want out of this industry to lowball it. This game’s not just a welcome franchise revival or a showcase of a big publisher’s willingness to get experimental, it’s equally a reminder that not enough people are aware of what consistently great developers Ubisoft Montpellier are, an exercise in hardcore Indo-Persian frisbeeing, a vindication of Warrior Within enjoyers and – if you ask me – the single best search-‘em-up outside of actual Metroid games.

There’s a few indicators that Warrior Within was a point of study here – Sargon dual wields swords, it’s bloodier and more combat-oriented than most other entries, creatures from Persian folklore play a bigger role compared to original monsters and the Prince’s outfit from it was a preorder bonus – but the main one is that Warrior Within was Prince of Persia’s precedent for experimenting with a Metroid-y overworld. That more exploratory angle was always why I liked it best, so it’s just as well that The Last Crown expands on this like a duck to water. Mount Qaf’s dishing out surprises so regularly that the game never once feels stale despite how much longer it is than most of this genre, which is thanks not just to the conceptual creativity and sheer number of its biomes but also how those concepts inform their mechanics. To mention just one, my favourite’s the labyrinthine library whose master’s hunger for knowledge ended up turning him into Mr. X, in which you have to juggle that looming threat with puzzles where realising the solution is only part of the equation; showing you how I did this particular one isn’t even really a spoiler, because the onus is still as much on your dexterity and forward-planning as on figuring out what to do. Comparatively straightforward, linear areas aren’t without some kind of distinctive pull or spectacle either, one major highlight being pressing the resume button on a naval battle which had been frozen in time centuries ago.

That sort of moment-to-moment variety goes a big way towards helping avoid the staleness or tedium that could’ve been invited by its length, but the biggest asset in that regard is what a joy it is to gradually unravel Mount Qaf. I love the powers in this to the point that I’m hoping future metroidbraniacs rip them off wholesale. Nearly every individual one of them opens up several means of approach in both platforming and combat by itself; teleporting to an afterimage with Shadow of the Simurgh to slip through obstacles or set up multiple charged attacks quicker than you normally could, phasing between realities like in Soul Reaver to control when certain enemies or platforms become tangible, stuffing an explosive in your pocket to unveil a hidden respite in a precision platforming segment or even an entire enemy to even the odds in a particularly tough encounter… Every time I unlocked a new one, my mind was racing at the possibilities. Combine just a few with a little out-of-the-box thinking and it feels like you can reach just about anywhere – I’ve no idea how you’re “supposed” to get past the bit in that clip normally, and that’s beautiful.

Its combat designers similarly outdo themselves. Experimentation’s the name of the game, in part thanks to the impressive amount of hit reactions on its enemies’ part. They and bosses can be varyingly be tripped, launched, juggled, wallsplatted and more, but these differ heavily according to their weight class, which contributes to them being as varied functionally as visually in addition to making target prioritisation pretty frantic whenever big bois are mixed in with little ones. Coupled with the aforementioned powers, your means of approach are spruced up by the extent to which you can alter Sargon’s attributes through an equivalent to Hollow Knight’s charm system. I personally set him up with a ranged shockwave on melee attacks and another letting you turn the chakram into a lingering hazard, with an additional one that heals you on successful parries in case I ran out of potions during the increasingly tough later levels and their gleefully Shonen boss fights, but the customisation on offer’s such that your combat comfort zone’ll likely be pretty different. The feedback on attacks also deserves credit, seemingly taking pointers from Dreadtroid in that respect (love the slight screenshake on each hit in particular). As I said to a friend of mine, himself a French weeb, I’d loosely compare The Lost Crown to Streets of Rage 4 in that it represents what happens when a bunch of French weebs get together and stuff as much of whatever they think is coolest into a game as possible: an exhibition of action gameplay so well-studied and thoroughly understood you’d swear it was made by the Japanese genre figureheads they so clearly admire.

Same goes for its visual artists and the carvers of ancient rock reliefs they palpably draw inspiration from. It’s a delight to see this series dig deeper into the historical iconography of its namesake, ornate Faravahars and esoteric cuneiform and all, tempered by the hand of Rayman Legends’ art director to drape it all in this lovely cartoony, stylised edge. I imagine part of why it runs so well both handheld and docked’s due in part to some clever tricks the artists use with the backgrounds and certain characters too, rendering them with painted 2D images as opposed to fully textured 3D models; really lends figures like the Simurgh and places like the Crossroads of Time an otherworldly feel.

I’ve always been iffy on how “Ubisoft” is used as a descriptor, partially because it often crops up regardless of how similar the game it’s used in reference to actually is to any of their games, but also because there are so many Ubisofts that you can’t really talk about them like they’re a singular entity. I mentioned in my Chaos Theory review that I find it hard not to retain some goodwill towards them so long as at least some of their oldheads remain, and while that holds true, The Lost Crown’s also a compelling case for their newcomers. It’s clear evidence that there’s a swathe of latent talent amongst the group’s bloated headcount primed and ready for the chance to be let off the mobile game hamster wheel and deliver some genre-best efforts, with such avalanches of great ideas that I haven’t even mentioned Memory Shards or that this has a Persian Vergil who uses the 3D games’ time powers against you. Severely hoping Ahriman decides to lay off for a bit so that this game and the people behind it can see the success they deserve, and so we can get more of those in turn.

Dead dove, do not eat.

I’d like to believe that I’ve been living in my own personal Silent Hill the last few years. It would explain a lot, really. Konami has done a wonderful job of threading puppet strings through the arteries of Silent Hill and making the corpse dance, turning it into all manner of pachislot machines and skateboard decks, but they seem like they’re really trying to bring the franchise back this time. No more minor entries. We’re handing out the license and making some real goddamned Games this time. We’ve got a Ryukishi07 Silent Hill on the way, something we don't know much about called Townfall, and Bloober Team are even sticking their dirty, dirty fingers in the pie with a Silent Hill 2 remake. Silent Hill is finally back. But those are all coming later. We’re getting the first taste of the revitalized Silent Hill now, and it’s here in the form of Silent Hill: Ascension. Get hyped. This is the first marker being driven into fresh, virginal earth. This is Silent Hill from here on out.

This is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.

Genuinely, I mean that. I want to be funnier about it, but I can’t. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played. I wish I could say that I’ve played anything worse than this, but I haven’t. It is the worst fucking thing I have ever played in my stupid goddamned life. Sorry. Every time I try typing something else, my brain just shuts itself off and my fingers move on the keyboard of their own volition to produce the phrase “this is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life”. This is the first cognitohazard ever put to market.

IGDB was trying to protect me from writing about this any further. I appreciate them doing that, now. When I first made a page for Silent Hill: Ascension, they rejected it on the grounds of this “not being a game”. Naturally, I kicked my feet and made a fuss about it in the email appeals — we’ve got RPG Maker and Polybius and Spell Checker and Calculator on here, and I know those definitely fucking aren’t games — and the admin staff eventually relented. But they were only trying to help, I think. I should have just accepted their ruling and let this slip into the ether. Now we’ve got a Backloggd page for it, which means that now I have to think about this again, and it’s still the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.

This is the kind of bad that’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself. It’s like childbirth, or the smell of rotting meat. You don’t want anyone else to have to deal with it, but how could they know what it’s like without going through it? You can show them the season pass being sold for $22.99, you can show them the “It’s Trauma!” sticker, you can show them the wholly unmoderated chat bar where you can’t say “Playboy Carti” but you can say the n-word, but none of that is the same as experiencing it. They’re visible symptoms of the disease running through Silent Hill: Ascension’s blood, but the pain of another doesn’t exist unless you feel it yourself. It’s ethereal. I’ve got a sore on my lip right now, but you don’t feel it, do you? You understand that it hurts, and you can empathize with that, but it doesn’t actually exist to you. If I stopped talking about it, you’d assume I was fine, and nothing would change for you. Meanwhile, I’m still over here suffering through this shit, and it’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.

The game is streamed live every night at 9 PM EST, and you can show up to vote on what’s going to happen to the characters. The choices themselves are very clearly labelled with the outcomes; you’ve got Salvation, Suffering, and Damnation choices, helpfully color-coded as blue, white, and red respectively, just so you can still know which one is the “good” choice and which one is “bad” in the event that you forgot how to read. Mass Effect's Paragon, Neutral, and Renegade system lives on, strong and proud. This, of course, means that every single fucking choice made thus far has been heavily in favor of Salvation, because it’s clearly the good option. If you don’t like that, you can vote for something else. In an especially impressive bit of social commentary, however, the only votes that matter come from those rich and stupid enough to buy them.

To vote, you need to wager a set amount of Influence Points, or IP. I haven’t found a way to cast a vote for anything less than 200 IP, so either that’s the minimum spend needed to vote, or the UI is just so badly designed that I can’t fucking find the free vote option. You can buy IP in one of three differently-priced bundles, each one more expensive than the last; one of the IP packs is about twenty-five bucks for 26,400 IP, and the second decision of the game is currently for "Salvation" by roughly twenty-five million points. If you really want a choice to go a certain way, then you had better get to spending. By my math, you’ll be out a little over $23,650 if you decide that you’re going to stick it to those Salvation voters. Of course, with the audience shrinking every night after they see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, it’ll only get easier and easier to sway the vote with less money invested. If you’re as much of a moron as I am and you decide to stick around past your first watch just to see where this goes, then you’ll have a decent opportunity to roleplay as a real government lobbyist soon enough.

But buying IP for real money isn’t the only way to get it. Lucky enough for the impoverished, filthy masses, you can earn IP at a massively reduced rate simply by playing minigames. You don’t get much — maybe a thousand or two per day, resetting every twenty-four hours — but it’s enough to cast a couple votes. Doing your daily and weekly quests certainly helps to boost your IP gains, and if you just felt something cold run down your back after you read the phrase “daily and weekly quests” in a Silent Hill game, don’t worry. That just means you’re still alive. Unfortunately, though, the minigames are on a set rotation; you get one puzzle and one “mindfulness” game per day, each awarding a small pittance of IP if you manage to successfully complete them.

By the way, I’m glad you’re curious about what the minigames actually are. I’m really excited to talk about them, so knowing that you’re enthusiastic to hear more really encourages me to do my best in explaining them to you. They’re the worst fucking things I’ve ever played in my stupid fucking life. Most egregious of the lot is the rhythm minigame, which doesn't require you to have any rhythm nor timing whatsoever. There's no penalty for hitting wrong notes (the game even encourages you to "just jam along" should you feel like it), every note needs to be individually clicked, and every click produces a sound from what I think is a literal Garageband guitar VST. Since there's no warning for when the notes are going to show up or leave, you have to click them all as fast as possible, resulting in a complete cacophony of instruments playing over each other if you want to guarantee a good score. Worst of all is the fact that the selection of songs is exclusively limited to Akira Yamaoka's more famous works, meaning you get to listen to some of the greatest video game music ever composed get completely butchered in one of the worst minigames you've ever played, in service of gaining points to vote on what happens next in the dumbest narrative ever written. I think if you're a killer or kidnapper or whatever in life, this is what you have to do forever after you die as punishment.

Here's a video of me getting the highest rank possible on the theme of Silent Hill. I want to stress that this is optimal play.

Anyway, this is all in service of giving you votes for the completely fucking incomprehensible story. It's hard to call it a narrative. There's some old lady who sucks, and then she dies, and her family kind of cares about it, but not really. There's a girl who gets initiated into some cult called The Foundation that seems to worship the Otherworld monsters, and she dies, and a couple people seem a little bothered by it. There's some drunk guy who really hates that the girl is dead and she's also haunting him and calling him a fuckup. The grandson of the old lady who sucked and died speaks entirely in the spooky child language that only exists in bad horror movies where he talks about how he plays pretend with "the man in the fog". I've long said that stories should strive to be more than events happening in sequence. This is more like events. They're not really happening in any given order, they're just kind of shown to the player and then quietly shuffled off so another event can happen.

At the end of the show proper is a canned animation of a character getting lost in the Otherworld, and the live viewers do QTEs that don't actually do anything. If they collectively fail, you get the message that the character "failed to endure" and they lose hope, but I don't know what losing hope actually entails. If you collectively pass, which happened for the first time during tonight's November 2nd show, the game bugs out and assumes that you failed anyway. The CEO of the company has gone out of his way to specify that the QTE sequences are for live viewers only and, as such, don't actually do anything because it wouldn't be fair to people who watch the VODs. Imagine a Jerma Dollhouse stream where the commands didn't work because it wouldn't have been fair to people who watched the whole thing on YouTube later. You're the one insisting on a livestream and you're not going to fucking use it? Why? Seriously, why? What reason does this have to be live at all?

And speaking of the CEO, Weatherby is absolutely correct that the best part of all of this is the aftershow. For whatever fucking reason, Jacob Navok feels an incredible need to come out on his shitty laptop camera (you can tell it's a laptop camera because it keeps shaking while he passionately swings his arms around) and rant about how they're definitely not scamming people. You can tell you've got a good product when the actual episode is about eight minutes long and the CEO takes half an hour in the post-show to complain about how unfair everyone is being towards one of the shittiest fucking things ever made. It's bordering on performance art.

I cannot fucking wait to watch more of this. It's the most excited I've been for a recent release in years.

Free superchats on sign up means you can blast "wearing my james sunderland c o c k ring" on screen and change the canon of Silent Hill.

Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.

Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.

Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...

Sonic Mania released in 2017, and felt like an absolute breath of fresh air for the Sonic franchise after both the misguided attempt of recapturing classic Sonic magic in Sonic 4, and the 3D titles back in a downward slump after the series regained momentum with Sonic Colours and Sonic Generations. So, you'd think the natural course of action would be to get the dev team to work on a sequel with entirely original zone aesthetics, to give fans the next 2D entry to make the Sonic 2 to Sonic Mania's Sonic 1.

But you forget Sega are a stupid, dumb company, so they brought the stellar Sonic 1, 2 and CD mobile ports to consoles and PC, complete with Sonic 3&K, fucked them up, barely patched them, rereleased the compilation for more money and effectively swindled those who bought the terribly contrived Digital Deluxe Edition at launch, and left the devs to go make their own original title, Penny's Big Breakaway.

Instead, Sega found themselves partnering with Arzest, the company helmed by original Sonic designer, and director of Sonic CD, Nights Into Dreams, Burning Rangers and Blinx The Time Sweeper, Naoto Oshima. In a partnership started over Zoom calls with Takashi Iizuka during lockdown, I like to imagine the guy was venting about the nightmare hellscape of Balan Wonderworld and one thing lead to another. Oshima being back on board was a nice surprise, but Arzest have an incredibly spotty background history. Their back catalogue is a mixture of mobile games, minigame collections, 3DS 2D platformer shovelware in the form of Yoshi's New Island and Hey! Pikmin, and the aforementioned chocolate steamer of Balan Wonderworld. What a damn shame Yuji "Arrested For Insider Trading" Naka couldn't direct this one, and then get kicked off of his position as director as voted by EVERYONE ON THE TEAM.

I bring all this up to say a few things. One, that Sonic Superstars had huge shoes to live up to, and two, that it was dealt an unfortunate hand from the jump. While its easy to point fingers at Naka for being a total shitheel in regards to Balan Wonderworld (especially if you know his track record at Sonic Team), Hey! Pikmin and Yoshi's New Island are still prime examples of 2D platformers that shouldn't inspire confidence. With its weird focus on 4-player, simultaneous co-op akin to New Super Mario Bros Wii and U, a generic visual style that touted incredibly flat lighting and only made people miss the stellar pixel art of the classics, the inclusion of new mechanics within collection of individual Chaos Emeralds, and an almost full price of admission that was especially eyebrow raising given a huge part of Mania's success can definitely be attributed to its £20 price tag, there was debate from day one. The end result was always going to have to be compared to Sonic Mania.

But, let's start from the top, because we've got some pretty solid physics! After Sonic 4 and Forces, I wouldn't blame anybody for thinking Christian Whitehead and Simon Thomley were the only people capable of making Classic Sonic feel god to play, but Arzest, of all fucking people, made sure the feel of Mania was pulled wholesale. So, you know what that means; momentum's fully here, and rolling feels great! I was able to jump into Superstars and felt right at home from minute 1, especially given the amount of time I've put into the classic Sonic titles though my life. We've also got fully original zones after all, which is an absolute fucking delight after over a decade of Green Hill, Chemical Plant and the like being forced upon us.

But level aesthetics and game feel are every bit as important to Sonic as the rest of the game around it, from level design, platforming, exploration and pacing, to the visuals and music. It's hard to really give a concrete opinion on Sonic Superstars' level design right now; partially because we don't have the years of stockpiled knowledge of the best and fastest routes, but for the most part, it's... fine? Not many of the level designs really stuck out in my mind or kept me thumping to go back to replay them, but I can say the first few zones get the game off to a generally good start.

But that just makes the levels that annoyed me stick out even more. There's smaller things, like the ever annoying darkness gimmick in Speed Jungle Act 2, the painfully slow fans in Sky Temple, but those are just small irks. Then comes the constant platforming above bottomless pits in Pinball Carnival Act 2, which is challenging enough but made me feel a little cheated every now and then. Then the game drags its feet, and suddenly hits you with things like the absolute dogshit instant kill gimmick of Press Factory Act 2, and the laziest level in the form of the final zone's second act making you replay the first one in reverse. So when it isn't being frustrating, most of the level design just felt like it went in one side of my brain and out the other without much worth remembering. Cyber Station was the only one that really stuck with me, mostly for its visual style.

The highly marketed emerald powers are also insanely situational at best in most cases, which is exactly what I feared. The ability to storm the screen with clones was occasionally handy in boss fights for one free hit, and the bullet which acts as the Burst Wisp from Sonic Colours was really handy as well. But then there's the Vision ability, which lets you see very specific hidden platforms, basically as functionally worthless as Knuckles' Sunglasses from SA2, and the Water power that lets you climb up waterfalls, also highly situational. I remember playing some Sonic 1 rom hack back in the day that let you get additional abilities from the emeralds individually (I think you got the spin dash, super peel out, instashield etc, finally culminating in Super Sonic when you got all 7. Does anyone else remember this insanely specific rom hack?), and it's a damn shame that kind of approach wasn't taken here because it could've been great. Instead, all you get is the spin dash, drop dash and these incredibly hit or miss abilities. No super peel out, and not even any elemental shields. The emerald powers are kneecapped even more by the fact you get to use them exactly once before needing to hit another checkpoint to recharge them. I hate cooldown timers, but I'd have taken them over something this limiting, even if I understand the intention of making the players need to really pick and choose when to pop them.

The game also throws in this weird restriction of only letting you get one Chaos Emerald per zone, which feels like a really bad way of hindering people like me, who generally frontload a playthrough of Sonic 2, 3&K or Mania by securing the emeralds for the sake of the good ending. With giant rings so limited now, the only reason to explore is to find medals which can only be used to buy things exclusively used in the multiplayer I don't want to play because it isn't what I buy a Sonic game for. Thanks, Sega. The special stages also jump from legitimately braindead easy to "What the fuck do they even want me to do?" by the time you get to the 5th one, so I couldn't see all the emerald powers or seen the true ending at the time of writing. For all I know, doing that could be the absolutely universal gamechangers that'll make this game feel like I'm playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles 2: & Knuckles, but I doubt it!

And then there's the game's pacing! For the most part, the game's pretty alright with it as levels strike a good enough balance between speed and platforming, setting aside any bad gimmicks... until you get to the boss fights, which are some of the worst slogs in 2D Sonic history, right down there with Rush and both episodes of Sonic 4 and only barely above those because they take less hits on average. Lengthy periods of downtime between being able to hit them one single time before playing the waiting game again, and they're not even all that fun to cheese with the emerald powers. Classic Sonic bosses were never some holy grail of boss design or anything, but at least you were, more often than not, fully in control of how long they took. Here, though, it's all at a glacial pace, with long, drawn out, and unfun being the names of the game. The last boss in particular gets incredibly obnoxious with instant kill bullshit and a lack of checkpoints to go along with its agonisingly slow pacing, really making me feel like I'm right at home in the cold, hateful arms of Dimps' worst Sonic design traits.

The presentation definitely feels really flat and cheap, which I think does a real number to the charm of Classic Sonic, a character designed to be so expressive and cutting edge. The colours are plenty vibrant, and we aren't dealing with Sonic 4 Episode 1 or anything, but it just feels really generic, without anything to set it apart aside from maybe Cyber Station. Definitely wish we'd gotten a pixel art style instead, but Iizuka says it's not going to be viable in 10 or 20 years, despite the the amount of charm and care put into Mania's spritework meaning it'll inherently age far better than something like Superstars, so I guess we're stuck with this.

And in a shocking twist, the music is a really mixed bag. Every now and then, there's a banger track by Tee Lopes, but there's also a lot of tracks like just go in one ear and out the other, and ones that just sound actively bad. The track that backs the Sonic 1 bonus stage that just sounds like depressed fairground music was the first track that stuck out to me in regards to its lower quality, and any time Jun Senoue tries in vein to make something with that Mega Drive synth is absolute ear poison to what could be a decent composition. On the whole, the entire OST failed to stick with me after playing, with Speed Jungle Act 1 being the only track that really sat in my head for a while after turning it off and writing this review. A damn shame, but it is what it is.

So at the end of the day, Sonic Superstars isn't worth its price tag. It's honestly barely even worth half it, especially when Sonic Mania is not only cheaper, but better in terms of level design, visuals, music, the whole shabang. Superstars, conversely, is has decent highs, but the middling and low points win out at the end of the day. A boring, frustrating, disappointing slog.

But it's still Arzest's best game!

I initially had a 3/5 score logged for this game and complimented it for its expressive spritework, character designs and creative gameplay. I think I badly wanted to hold onto my nostalgia with this one, and it never sat right with me. I've periodically gone back, looked at that review, and chewed on it until it felt soggy... I know I should say something different and have a better discussion about what this game is and who its creators are, but I never could find the right words to articulate it.

Between Doug Tennepal's full-throated transphobia and Tommy Tallarico's outing as a hack fraud and pathological liar, there is nothing any childhood nostalgia can do to get me to go back to this, and I feel bad even talking about it positively in the first place. Even then, all the positively I showered on this thing was met with asterisks. "Yeah some of the levels suck," "Pete's sake is terrible," wow great, so it's an uneven Sega Genesis game and it is (seemingly) the only real claim to fame either of these losers have to their name. Doug is still getting into petty Internet slap fights over the relevancy of Jim, that is when he's not getting irrationally upset about lifestyles that have zero effect on him and slinging dogshit NFTs. Tommy has essentially been dark since April of last year, which uh, good.

The game itself is largely carried by its animation in the same way Ren & Stimpy is. God, why are animation industry dudes such pathetic freaks? I know Doug habitually Googles himself, so: you sure did draw that worm good, so cherish it as the only nice thing you'll be remembered for. There are some interesting level ideas here, and while I think the second game executes on higher concepts with better consistency, there's some real lousy stuff in each. And Earthworm Jim was never really known or appreciated for any of that anyway, so much as it was impressive that it looked the way it did on the hardware it was on. You can say that about a lot of other, better Genesis games.

I feel like there's more I want to dig into here; how there's always going to be bad people making good art, and about how we sometimes give tacit acceptance of the bad in exchange for entertainment. And I do think that's a subject worth exploring, I just don't know if I can contain that within a review about freaking Earthworm Jim and have it not spill into some "meta" thing. At the very least, it's something I'm trying to think about more on a personal level, and by the end of the day I realized I was far too uncomfortable with what I previously wrote about this game.

Adam Sessler voice: I give Earthworm Jim a one... out of five.

Oh no I just looked up the stuff Adam Sessler said, oh GOD DAMNIT!!

You know, despite being considered the worst of the Mega Man games on Game Boy, I did actually find myself having a pretty good time with Mega Man II, but I can still see how many wouldn’t like it as much. It keeps all the basic fundamentals in tact when it comes to the gameplay and visual style, but not only was the game much easier then your typical Mega Man game (which I didn’t mind, but still), but there were some pretty dumb elements to be found in the game, such as with genuinely terrible story, as well as with Quint and the weapon that you get from him. Needless to say, it isn’t quite what people were used to when it came to these games, and due to this, as well as a bad experience with Thinking Rabbit, Capcom decided to go back to the original Mega Man GB developers, Minakuchi Engineering, for the remaining titles in this series, which was definitely for the best in my opinion. So, despite changing development studios yet again, just one year later, we would then get Mega Man III on Game Boy.

As one would expect, this game changes practically nothing in terms of the main gameplay and formula of the series, but it does revert back to some of the same design choices from the original Game Boy game. So, of course, for those who didn’t really get into the other two Mega Man Game Boy games before this, then they most likely won’t have their minds changed by this game. Naturally though, you see the name, you see the profile picture: if it’s Mega Man, I’m probably gonna really like it, and that is no different here. While it may not change that much, this is still a pretty good entry in the series for the Game Boy, and one that I did have fun revisiting after what feels like a decade, even if it hasn’t been that long.

The story is, you guessed it, Dr. Wily being a dick, but this time he is using a machine to suck energy out of the Earth’s core, which admittedly is a much better plot then getting Future Mega Man to battle Past Mega Man (seriously, what was that), the graphics are Game Boy graphics, and they remain practically unchanged from the previous two games, which is to be expected, but it still looks good for what it is, the music is great, primarily being conversions of tracks from the NES games, but they still sound good on this system, the control is the exact same from the other games, so nothing to comment on there, and the gameplay is your typical classic Mega Man action, so if you were expecting anything more at this point, sorry to disappoint.

The game is a 2D platformer, where you take control of Mega Man once again, take on plenty of stages consisting of familiar locations and familiar faces to take down, defeat plenty of robotic enemies that will halt your progress through every waking moment, gather plenty of ammo, health, lives, and E-Tanks to aid you in your mission along the way, defeat the plenty of Robot Masters and other bosses that stand in your way, and gain access to their powers to use to your advantage. But of course, that is all stuff that you all have heard plenty of times before, so is there anything new about this game at all in comparison to the others? Well, yes, there is: the new Mega Man Killer, Punk, who has a pretty great design, and his weapon is pretty useful as well. And… that is it. So yeah, thanks for reading the revi-

Ignoring the lack of that much substantial new content in this entry, since this is being developed by the original team behind Dr. Wily’s Revenge instead of Thinking Rabbit, do they still know how to craft an enjoyable handheld romp for the blue bomber? Well, yeah, I’d say so. Like with Dr. Wily’s Revenge, and really most of the other Mega Man games, this game goes back to being pretty difficult, but based on what I had played, I didn’t find myself having too much of a hard time with it, with less instances of bullshit to be found… aside from one or two instances (fuck Dust Man’s stage), and they didn’t make the next Mega Man Killer stupid as hell, so that is also an improvement in my book. All around, it is clear that these guys are still very familiar with this character, this franchise, and how to make these games, so it is no wonder why they brought them back, and kept them around for several more installments to come after this.

But, with all that being said, we are now 8 entries into this franchise (9-10 if you count the MS-DOS games, which I don’t, and neither should you), and there has still been no substantial changes to the gameplay, and no major additions that will make any non-Mega Man fans turn their heads, which can be seen as the game’s biggest issue: it is kinda just there. Of course, for me and all the other big-time fans of this series out there, I don’t really mind this all too much, but again, for those who are not that big on Mega Man, then there is no reason to check out this title whatsoever, especially since it once again reuses Robot Masters and their stage themes, this time being from Mega Man 3 and 4. There are some other minor elements that did kind of bug me, such as the final stage being a little too long for my liking, as well as, again, the entirety of Dust Man’s stage, but ignoring those things, the repetition may be the thing that drags this game straight down into mediocrity for some people, even if it doesn’t bother me so much.

Overall, despite being yet another average Mega Man game in the classic series, I of course still had a really good time with this title, and I am glad that finally replayed after a long time since I originally beat it. I would recommend it for those who are fans of the Game Boy Mega Man games, or those who are big fans of Mega Man in general, but for everyone else, once again, there isn’t really that much that this game has going for it that you would wanna check out immediately. But anyway, since I have no joke to end this review with, I am just gonna go figure out how to achieve immortality now. See ya next time!

Game #346

My first thought was that Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was just going to be a straight spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future (which would have been a letdown considering my three weeks of original Jet Set Radio prep), but I'm pleasantly surprised by the blend of mechanics presented! In reality, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk takes the overall structure and aesthetic from Future while borrowing more heavily from original Jet Set Radio's tight level design and intricate scoring mechanics, and dare I say, actually improves upon certain aspects. It does have a few underdeveloped features as a result of its experimentation, but overall, not a bad first attempt by Team Reptile!

One issue that apparently escaped my notice the first time around (I replayed Future recently just to confirm this) was that Future's extremely linear and stretched-out levels resulted in tons of backtracking upon missing objectives/falling off the stage, and led to fairly rigid approaches that really tried my patience upon additional loops. This is fortunately not the case with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: levels are generally a lot more open with many more shortcuts and are spaced apart carefully to where traversal feels much more free-form. It more closely resembles original Jet Set Radio, especially when you consider how its momentum mechanics complement this design. Future made the speed fairly easy to obtain: jump onto a rail regardless of your momentum, then keep mashing trick to accelerate and never slow down. On the other hand, original Jet Set Radio became well-known for how slow your character would move about unless you actively utilized rails and grindable walls to speed up, and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk takes a modern twist: you need to maintain momentum by either rail grinding and leaning into corners for speed boosts, or by using grounded manuals combined with boost (refreshed from performing tricks) to retain speed.

The momentum mechanics go hand-in-hand with the game's combo system. After thoroughly exploring levels to spray graffiti spots for "rep" and completing subsequent score and movement-tech challenges from opposing crew members, your crew must finally confront opposing crews in a crew battle, outscoring them with trick combos in their own territory. The scoring and trick system improvises upon both original Jet Set Radio and Future: in both games, the safest way to score trick points was abusing infinite grind loops and repeating the same tricks/movement over and over. However, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk turns this on its head: you don't get tons of points for doing the same tricks ad-nauseam (since trick value decreases and eventually levels off when used more and more). Instead, the main key to getting points is increasing the multiplier by utilizing unique features of the stage: that is, leaning into tight corners on grindable rails, wall-riding billboards, and going up half-pipe ramps (which are improved over the original game since you can manual up ramps and then air boost off into manuals/rail and wall-grinds, so they can function as part of a combo). The key word is "unique," since utilizing the same set-piece in a held combo will not give additional multipliers, and the same goes for graffiti spots that can now also be resprayed as one-time trick bonuses during continuous combos. As a result, the trick and multiplier staling incentivizes players to fully explore and utilize every set-piece present upon the open stages to create massive combos, made easier thanks to the mid-air dash (which also lets you alter airborne momentum once) and the manual. The only downside here is that the game's circumstances never become difficult enough to necessitate this trick optimization; the story crew battles are pretty easy and I was leapfrogging them using the above strategy (i.e. while other crews were floundering around several hundred thousand, I was well beyond a couple million in score), so unless players are trying to crack the tougher post-game score barriers for optional characters/achievements, they may never need to lean on these strategies at all.

The lack of difficulty serves as a microcosm of this game's unfortunate trend: Bomb Rush Cyberfunk certainly innovates upon many features from the Jet Set Radio games, but I find a few to be undercooked or lacking in execution. The combat's one example: it's not a bad idea in theory (using tricks to both deal damage and maintain score/momentum) and in fact has been proposed before, but its implementation leaves something to be desired. Attacking enemies feels like it has little impact because of the muffled sound-effects, akin to slapping a wet sock on a table. Also, most enemies can be defeated with a single grounded attack into an immediate "corkscrew" jump and then spray-painted in the air. While this graffiti coup de grâce never gets old, it does feel quite difficult in practice comboing in and out of this linearizing technique (since you need to be standing and off your skates to execute, breaking any combo potential), so combat never really flows and the mandatory combat sections in-story feel somewhat superfluous.

Adjacent to this is the heat system, a spin on original Jet Set Radio's enemy escalation during story stages. As your character goes about spraying graffiti, police forces begin to spawn in tougher waves: for example, wave one consists of simple grounded officers with batons and pistols, wave two activates turrets that home-in on the player with chains and slow their movement, and wave three brings in armored forces that can block attacks. I found most of these enemies to be mere nuisances: you can easily skate around and dodge most attacks (except for the turrets, which can be easily disabled with a single attack + spray), and since enemies can't be easily comboed for points and will respawn continuously upon defeat anyways, it's best to just ignore them as is. Again, this is fairly similar to original Jet Set Radio's strategy of outmanuevering enemies since foes there were active time sinks, so this doesn't bother me greatly. Unfortunately, this creates friction with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk's exploration, and not just in the sense that enemies will impede progress. The game requires you to swap between the three different types of movestyle for their different abilities: skateboards can ride on extendable fire hydrants to extend them vertically and reach heights, inline skates can skid on glass to shatter specific ceilings, and bikes can open special garage doors. The only way to switch between characters/movestyles is to go to checkerboard tiles and dance, but the game prohibits switching when there's "too much heat." Thus, you have to de-escalate the heat gauge by entering orange porta-potties (unmarked on the map, so hopefully you remember their locations!). However, they also lock up after a single use, so players have to either outright leave the stages or find a different porta-potty elsewhere to reopen old porta-potties for enemy despawning. I think this could have easily been improved if the heat gauge slowly decreased over time from successful enemy evasion.

Even with my criticisms, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was definitely worth the three year wait. The story isn't anything mindblowing, but it's got some nice twists that are conveyed via these surreal platforming sequences that are a cross between the time rifts from A Hat in Time and a Psychonauts fever dream. I'm pleasantly surprised by a good chunk of the soundtrack too: Hideki Naganuma's three contributions are the obvious highlights, but other tracks like 2Mello's I Wanna Kno and Sebastian Knight's Feel the Funk more than hold their own weight. It's a good mix of upbeat sampledelia hip-hop and chill ambient tunes, with my only real complaint being the lack of guitar-heavy rock tracks like Magical Girl or Statement of Intent... RIP Guitar Vader. Finally, I more than got my playtime's worth out of 100%ing the game, considering all the hidden areas and collectibles to find and just how much fun I had figuring out new ways to string together ridiculous combos. Despite the game's various areas of improvement, I find Bomb Rush Cyberfunk to be a fantastic fresh take upon a beloved franchise that isn't just a homage to Jet Set Radio, but a love letter to classic Y2K counter-culture and skating games as a whole. If you're not a prior fan of the franchise, this might not be the game to change your mind, but if you are, then I see no reason why you wouldn't find some enjoyment out of it. It's no surprise that fans absolutely ate this up, with excitement for the franchise reaching a new fever pitch. Your move, SEGA. Let's see if you guys still understand the concept of love.

(This is the 63rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

The 'SaGa' series started in 1989 with 'The Final Fantasy Legend', as it is known by in the West, and was a Game Boy series for its first three titles until Romancing SaGa brought it to the SNES on January 28, 1992. Well, at least in Japan it did, as the game did not get a release in the West. The SNES actually never did, in fact, but a PS2 remake called 'Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song' did release in North America in 2005, though the 'Mistrel Song' subtitle would only be included in Japanese versions.

'Romancing SaGa' did pretty well, with over a million sales recorded for its SNES version. The game was developed by Square, who had released their first SNES game in 1991 called 'Final Fantasy IV', you may know it. The alliance of both games with Square is immediately notable, but Romancing SaGa , and SaGa games overall, are different in many ways from their Final Fantasy counterpart that makes the SaGa games stand out as their own, distinctive series.

Personally, I think it differs positively in many ways, but negatively in at least just as many. I go over everything in my review for 'Romancing SaGa'.

(I was able to play the SNES version with fan translations. If you are interested in this game, I would recommend the PS2 version for both its official translation and the many QoL and overall graphical improvements you will find with it.)

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 7/10

You play Albert, heir to a noble lord in Rosalia. No wait, you play Sif, a warrior from Valhalland. Or do you play Jamil, a thief in Estamir? Wait, what?

Off the bat, you will find out why the SaGa series is very different from your run-of-the-mill JRPG in terms of its story set-up. You have eight unique characters to choose from. Not eight different classes (though they do all differ in class), but eight (!) unique (!) characters, each with their own name and background and, most importantly, their own journey. Their journey all lead to the same destination, but you'll be surprised with the amount of freedom in play here. This is not Cyberpunk 2077, where a few intros play out differently and all culminate in the same outcome an hour into the game.

For example, I chose Albert. In his introduction, he and his sister clear a cave near the castle that is their home. Upon return, the castle is attacked by monsters, and they are to flee and report the incident to a nearby kingdom. Diana, his sister, pushes Albert off a cliff to save him from strong enemies that have surrounded them (why she doesn't jump after him, I don't know). She dies trying to fend off the attackers, while Albert wakes up later in the home of a caretaker. From here, Albert finds himself in Loban. From there, he is to take a ship to Yeoville that runs into a storm and washes up near Valhalland, where he meets Sif.

Sif's story starts in Valhalland and she finds Albert knocked out on the ship wreck, so there is some crossover at times.

Then there is Claudia's story, who is an orphan raised by the witch of the forest in Mazewood. She goes to clear a cave from monsters as well, finds a Knight called Gian getting attacked, helps him and then proceeds to leave the Mazewood later on in her introduction. She takes a totally different route, explore different areas and meets other potential companions than Albert or Sif, either meeting them much earlier or doing so at all, such as a bear and a wolf-like creature that lived with her in Mazewood.

The locations you explore are not only relevant in the companions you can fight for battles, of which there are dozens, but also in the quests you find and can pursue. These quests often don't go beyond simple set-ups to explore nearby caves and exterminate the monsters within, but it adds to the replayability and the unique structure of each character's playthrough.

So overall, it's not just eight different intros, but many different journeys altogether. This unfortunately does come with its many concessions and makes tying things together for the main story, which does exist, much more difficult. The execution in the end is lackluster, both from experience and, mainly, from reading up on it, as I couldn't justify playing the game more than I did (a little over 5 hours), which I will mainly explain in the 'Gameplay' section.

Let's start with the main story. The game is set in Mardias, where three gods called 'Death', 'Saruin' and 'Schirach' waged war against the lord of all gods, 'Elore'. At the end, Death and Schirach lost and were stripped of their powers. Saruin, who was not willing to accept defeat and the same punishment, was instead imprisoned within ten fatestones by a hero who would perish in that battle and be turned into a god by Elore as thanks. Now, a millennium later, all Fatestones are scattered throughout Mardias and evil powers festered bent on releasing Saruin, with eight heroes fighting back to make sure that this doesn't happen.

It's an OK setup for a main story of its time. How does it happen that the Fatestones are scattered? If Saruin is imprisoned in them, how can you not take care of even one of the stones? Well, we shouldn't try to look for too much logic here. The game treats the main story as an afterthought, which is OK for what it is going for, but so should we in that case.

Unfortunately, 'afterthought' is an understatement, because the main story doesn't really get any mention apart from certain main story quests that trigger for mid-game and end-game portions. I found two conflicting notes on this online, one saying that the amount of quests you finish trigger these 'jumps' and another saying that the amount of encounters you had does the trick. I'm finding number of quests to be likelier, but either way, you're not going through a linear path of quests to unlock those main quests. And only in those main quests do you learn more about the main story, which, overall, is very little for an RPG. Is that a bad thing? That's for you to decide. The non-linearity is a positive for some, a negative for others. Personally, I'd be more of a fan if the execution wasn't like this.

Because here is the issue for me. The game will take you 30-40 hours to beat just once. You can complete it with all eight characters (and get a secret ending), but those 30-40 hours are brutal in terms of the content that fills them. A good 90% of your time is spent in caves fighting near endless waves of enemies in, 90% of the time, battles that can be described as cakewalks. Of the remaining 10%, I'd guesstimate that 8% is walking around in same-looking towns to collect gear and quests, and 2% is actual story dialogue.

The combat does not have nearly the amount of depth necessary to pull the majority of players through, at least not in a fun way. In my opinion, there needs to be plenty of balance between lengthy 'dungeon-crawling' and story bits in RPGs. Final Fantasy IV did a good job in achieving this a year earlier. With Romancing SaGa, that is not the case, and I couldn't put myself through the monotony for dozens of hours, both because I don't consider it to be fun (maybe I would have if I was 8 again and didn't have many other games to choose from) and because I can put the time into the other games in this challenge which have more varied and, most importantly, rewarding experiences.

Overall, the game employs a "Free Scenario System" that shows a lot of potential. Spiritual successors such as The Octopath Traveler exist. Sequels in the SaGa series exist. This challenge will be exploring those sequels, but in Romancing SaGa, there is not enough in the side-quests and pretty much nothing in the main storyline to push one through the brutally repetitive combat system. The SNES cartridge space will not have done the developers any favors, so future generations should help out there, but I also think that improved balance in the next SNES iterations could help the potential be reached sooner than later. We shall see.

GAMEPLAY | 8/20

Gameplay is not as unique as the "Free Scenario System" we went over at length above, but there are certain elements to Romancing SaGa that make it stand out over other JRPGs of the time as well. Let's start with the similarities.

Just like Final Fantasy, you explore many different locations as you visit their towns and dungeons. You go into many battle encounters with turn-based combat. You purchase healing items, magic items, weapons and armor to equip your party members.

There are many differences though. First, let's go over exploration. Instead of traveling the overworld to find the towns and their nearby dungeons, you select a location from the map and fast-travel there. There is no exploration to be done in between.

Towns have their shops and inns positioned slightly differently, but inherently are all the same. You got an inn, a weapons store, a magic store and a pub to look at quest notices and find companions. There are few, if any, other houses that specific characters own. There are nearly no characters roaming in these towns in general, perhaps 3 or 4 apart from the shopkeepers. Nearby, there is emptiness that fills the space between a town and the dungeon you're supposed to enter once you get the quest. There also is going to be a path that allows you to open up the map and travel elsewhere.

There are barely any, if any, secret paths to take. Nearly all chests, if not all, simply contain gold. I haven't found anything else in 5 hours. Items to buy with the gold usually seem overpriced, though perhaps later locations give you a lot more to make up for that.

The biggest difference you will find however is encounters. Instead of walking around and randomly being thrown into a battle, you find all enemies running around in the overworld. There are a lot, and I mean A LOT, of them running around in the same area and you can defeat them one by one to reduce their number to zero, at least until you leave the area and re-enter it, which makes them respawn. It makes encounters more predictable, but my god does it not help you avoid them whatsoever. These enemies will rush after you once they spot you, and most of them are faster than you, so they will catch up. They also mirror your path, so if you try to walk left, they will walk left as well until they catch up to you and engage. If they engage you from the side, it throws your party formation into disarray and leaves you in a tougher spot, though I'll go over that in a little bit. The worst part though is when you try to flee from a battle.

In Final Fantasy, when you escape, the encounter is simply over and you keep moving. In Romancing SaGa, GET THIS: The enemy remains right where they were when they engaged you. So guess what? You are immediately thrown into battle against them again. WTF? You have a split second to react and try to run away, but by the time you process which way to go (usually at least two directions are blocked off by enemies), the enemy re-engages and you enter the battle again. Hilariously terrible and makes escapes pretty much useless.

OK, so let's go over the battle system. It is a turn-based system (doesn't have a 'real-time' component like FFIV, which I don't mind) and uses a 3x3 grid, meaning you can choose to line up 3 party members on three rows. The front row is most susceptible to be attacked, but can use melee weapons. The second and third rows are less likely to be attacked, but can't reach with melee weapons. Spears, bows, magic skills and special limited-use attacks for melee weapons (a slash on swords for example) do reach first, second and possibly third rows of the enemies. I did not get the impression that the row has a damage output penalty like in Final Fantasy games.

Unlike many other RPGs, you don't have a 'level' that you increase. Instead, you have a number of stats that get increased after each encounter, like Speed, Vitality and Charisma, which increase hit points and damage output for specific attacks. That's the game's specific oddity but not a bad one. Here is an oddity that IS bad however. As you use weapons more and more, you get upgrades to those weapons, like a slashing attack for a melee weapon that lets you hit the second row. This experience needs to be gained for every weapon that is in the game. If you don't like a weapon and decide to switch back, guess what? All your experience for the weapon has reset. Why? Who knows, maybe a developmental oversight.

The UI for combat also makes matters worse. In Final Fantasy, you select whether you want to attack, guard or use an item on one screen. In this game, you need to cycle from left to right to find the screen you are looking for, and there is a screen for each weapon and skill you have equipped. With the thousands of encounters you will have in this game, all the cycling can become really tiresome. The game saves the screen you were on last time, which means you can spam A to do quick attacks when the cycle is pre-selected. But as mentioned, side-engagements by the enemy throws your formation into disarray, so the same characters will find themselves in the second and third row all of a sudden, unable to attack. You can either let them "defend" (which doesn't really do anything like 'Guard' does) or have them move forward/backward a row, but this means cycling through the menus. Next time, you need to cycle back when you had a frontal engagement. So you're not spared all the cycling. I didn't sign up for Tour de France, man. So all the grindy fights where you simply would just spam a basic attack, you have all these extra steps involved, and things move at a snails pace. Before the screen pops up, you first need to press a key. Why? Who knows. But this means instead of two key-presses (attack, enemy select), you do three (empty press, attack, enemy select).

To conclude, it's an interesting system but slowed down to a horrible degree. There is a fast-forward feature on the emulator I am using, and I did an experiment through a dungeon to show you how horrible it is. Even if you fast-forward, the in-game counter doesn't know it, so it updates as if you did everything in regular time. In real-time, I went through a dungeon in five minutes using the fast-forward key. In game time, and in would-be real time without the fast forward, it took 40 (!) minutes. And none of the fights required a drop of strategy, so you literally are spending 35 of 40 minutes pressing the same button and waiting for it to play out the same way. Yeesh. That's literally 30-34 of 40 hours it takes to beat the game. I understand that most gameplay in RPGs is spent like this, but it's not nearly this much and it's also not in a game where there is no strategy involved for the majority of battles.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10

No voice acting. The sound design is average, but the one thing I noticed was how your strikes in combat didn't have the satisfying ferocity that they had in Final Fantasy. The soundtrack has good and bad parts. The main theme sounds like your prototypical Square NES/SNES main theme to the point that it is indistinguishable. The unique part about the soundrack, which isn't overly long, is that each character has their own unique theme. The bad part about it is that it plays endlessly in a loop, unless you are in a story set piece or in a dungeon. After 5 hours, Albert's theme makes a shiver run down my spine. The battle theme is the same as well, but that's typical for most RPGs and this one actually sounds pretty good, even after 5 hours. Overall, it's a soundtrack that sounds solidly average, one that you will remember fondly, if nostalgia is involved and one that is mostly forgettable, apart from the battle and character themes that you end up listening to for 30-40 hours.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10

Graphically this gives the impression of mid-budget early SNES game. That's to say that it certainly makes use of the jump to 16-bit, especially for a game that was Game Boy exclusive up to this point, but there is a lot of potential left to reach still. One thing I like the most about the game graphically is the sprite work and design for the companions, which look pretty good and distinct. Battles play out in terrain that you engaged the enemy in, which is a nice touch that will become more common on the SNES. Enemy sprites look OK but the lower resolution look compared to the characters is slighty off-putting. Sprites are also not animated as they await their turn, similarly to FFIV, which would have been nice but is not the norm yet.

One note worth making is on the menu UI, both in battle (which I commented on in 'Gameplay' -> sucks) and in your inventory, which is worse than in Final Fantasy. Stacking items isn't possible, so I was stuck having two slots occupied by 'Balm' from the start for some reason and equipping stuff requires you to go through many more clicks.

Overall, the game looks like a small upgrade to 8-bit RPGs. The first sentence in this section above pretty much describes it simply.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 6/10

I really like how you can choose one character and then meet the other starting characters in the areas where you would be had you chosen them. This gives the game world a sort of realistic feel that you simply visit from the perspective of one of the available options. Enemies being visible in the overworld is also a nice touch, at least atmospherically, as it doesn't necessarily equate to a more enjoyable experience based on execution. I also like the world map that covers a number of different kingdoms, and these points are pretty much the most notable things as it pertains to immersion. The game doesn't accomplish anything else specifically, but it isn't as good a look to have all towns be pretty much copies of each other and be mostly barren of life.

CONTENT | 5/10

There are plenty of dungeons to fight enemies in, thousands of encounters to go through, dozens of companions to recruit, lots of locations to travel and quests to find, but one of those points proves why quantity is never better than quality, especially if you don't have much quality in that department to begin with. Thousands of encounters that play out the same way to bloat the play time way beyond where it needs to be. Final Fantasy IV isn't this long, and it includes a ton of story elements as well. This game barely has story and lasts 30-40 hours. It's just way too much.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 4/10

I do like the amount of freedom on offer here, from choosing the character to play, to being let go in the world, but I definitely expected more from what I heard. "Open world" and "non-linear" are attached to this series a lot, but for those 5 hours I played, the path was certainly as linear as it gets, it simply was a unique path to Albert (and presumably Sif). Going from one location to the next also necessitates fast travel, with no way to organically go there, which eliminates open world as well, especially since each individual location usually comes with the same few features like towns and dungeons, with basically no motivation to explore in between. Then you look at it more closely and you're expected to go through dungeons with a solid 50-100 encounters per dungeon, the majority of which require next to no strategy, and I can't say I'm too positive on the design here for the most part.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10

The "Free Scenario System" certainly is unique. The 3x3 grid used for the combat is not bad as well, nor is the fact that you can see the enemies in the overworld instead of being thrown in random encounters. Unfortunately, innovation comes with growing pains, and that's certainly the case here, as all of these features have more negatives than positives attached to them in this particular game in my opinion.

REPLAYABILITY | 4/5

There is genuine replayability here. The only reason I'm not giving it a perfect score here is because replaying it means another few thousand encounters to go through, which will not be a lot of fun unless you're a massive sucker for turn-based combat that doesn't have much depth. But to be able to go through eight charaters and have most of them go through pretty different journeys is definitely a very nice feature, if we don't consider the concessions that were made to make it happen. There is no character development and very little personality in characters to make these unique routes stand out as much as they should as well, but for its time, having this much 'freedom' was unheard of, at least when it comes to Japanese RPGs.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 57/100

I'd like to summarize the game as follows: Romancing SaGa introduces many unique ideas to the JRPG genre, but its innovation comes with very apparent growing pains. Had this been as clean as it gets for a first iteration of a formula (A Link To The Past), you would have definitely heard of it by now and would have had this game release in the West way before its 2005 PS2 port, so my opinion isn't a unique one. Future games in the series will definitely do a better job to appeal to more players, and I'm excited to find out, but as it stands, I'd recommend to skip to those for newcomers or to play a spiritual successor like "The Octopath Traveler".

Oh my god, finally, another Gradius game other then the first one that ACTUALLY uses the name Gradius!......... except for outside of Japan, where they called it Vulcan Venture, because calling it Gradius II would’ve only made things easier to follow, and Konami clearly weren’t going for that. But anyways, we now have the first proper sequel to the original Gradius, that isn’t some kind of spin-off-except-it-may-as-well-not-be, or any kind of other separate MSX sequel that makes things unnecessarily confusing. Also, this time around, for a change of pace, instead of playing the NES version of this game, I decided to play the arcade version, because I thought that would make things much more entertaining. And thank god I did decide to do that, because I found myself having a blast with this installment, much more then I did with the previous three games in the series. Does it do too much in comparison to the previous Gradius games? No, not much is changed, but I have a feeling that that is going to be a recurring theme for the games in this series. But what it does do is take what worked about the previous games, mixes them all together, and makes a solid, albeit not perfect, experience.

The graphics are pretty similar to that of the other games in the series, but at least now that I am playing the arcade version of this game, I can enjoy the original look of the games rather then what the NES gave us, the music is pretty damn solid, with several of the tracks being standout new favorites of mine, the control is the same as before, so nothing more to say there, and the gameplay, as I mentioned before, takes what was established and introduced with previous games in the series, and brings it together to fine-tune the experience.

The gameplay is almost identical to the previous Gradius games, where you take control of the Vic Viper, go through plenty of side-scrolling shooter levels, destroy the many different enemies and obstacles that you will run into, gather items to give you plenty of options to powerup your arsenal, and take down alien threats that stand in your way. However, in comparison to the last three games that I have played in this series, something about this installment just feels the most right to me, in terms of the gameplay. Something about the way movement is handled, the amount of upgrades you can give yourself, and the amount that you can take on and overcome, while being insane, and practically impossible without some sort of help, it does feel incredibly satisfying to get the hang of and conquer. Not to mention, I appreciate some of the changes to the gameplay, specifically the challenges that don’t just require you to shoot down whatever you see, such as with one level where you are going INSANELY fast, and you have to be quick as hell in order to make it through, while also being careful of all your surroundings.

And speaking of new additions, there are several of them that do change up the experience in an admirable way. Before you start up the game, you are given the option of four different configurations of upgrades that you can get throughout the game, each one containing either completely unique upgrades, or different variations of regular ones. This, in my opinion, is a great addition to the series, because not only does it force the player to get used to what they are given straight from the get go (even though that’s not always a bad thing), but it also adds a good amount of replay value, choosing different upgrade configurations and testing them out to see which one best suits you, and seeing what different effects they have on the enemies. Not to mention, they also have a boss rush in this game that DOESN’T SUCK! Instead of making you refight previous bosses, they use this boss rush to bring in either bosses from previous games in the series, or new bosses to take on as well, and not only is it somewhat nice, seeing these familiar faces again, but also it gives you yet another way to fully show what you can do with your spacecraft, taking down these foes that you are already familiar with.

Of course though, the game isn’t perfect, and also of course, the problems start with the difficulty. Yes, the game is hard once again, but honestly, I think this is probably the hardest the games have ever been at this point. From the beginning, there is already a lot to manage and take on, but when you reach the final stages of the game, JESUS CHRIST, it takes some of the most precise and insane movements and shots to get through some of these obstacles. At this point though, I have already beaten three of these games (technically, because Nemesis 2 can fuck right off with its repeat playthrough bullshit), so it didn’t really take me by surprise, and I was able to keep calm and blast through these challenges with enough time, patience, and save states. Aside from that though, the only real problem I could see with the game would be that, while the addition of multiple upgrade configurations and a good boss rush are great to see, it doesn’t really differentiate itself tooooooo much from the other games, so if you aren’t that much of a fan of the series, you would find little reason to play this entry when compared to others. That being said, if those are my only real complaints, then that means we got a winner here.

Overall, while it will still make you cry and beg for mercy with its difficulty, and while it keeps things relatively similar with previous titles, Gradius II is an improvement from the previous titles in just about every way, and is without a doubt my favorite entry in the series so far. I would definitely recommend it for those who are fans of the Gradius series, as well as anyone who enjoyed the previous games, assuming you played those first. Now, let’s just hope they keep up the same naming convention for the next title in the series. So tell me, what’s the next game called?............ Nemesis 3? sigh......... old habits die hard, it seems.

Game #288

This has to be one of the most stylish, rich and tight-controlling Mega Man-inspired games out there. The grappling hook, while mostly optional, adds a lot of depth to your movement and the combat alike, as do the many unlockable burst moves you can customize your character with.

The melee-based combat can feel awkward at first, but you get used to it, and that one passive skill that furthers your attacks' reach certainly helps. Game is basically martial arts Mega Man Zero.

The levels are all winners too, which is super rare for this kind of game (even actual Mega Man ones). I think the only dud is the short, missile-dodging sections in the highway stage that mimic MM8's slide/jump ones, but that's about it. The level design is perfectly suited for fast gameplay and all levels are a joy to traverse, making you want to replay them to try and get through them faster right away.

Music is incredible too. Dominic Ninmark never disappoints.

But yeah, can't recommend this enough. I hope it does well so we can see a followup someday.

Gylt, a Stadia (RIP) exclusive upon release, is a stealth game in a similar vein to Alan Wake. You play as a little girl trying to save her cousin Emily from monsters in a strange town, and you don't know where you are on top of all this. You slowly get introduced to new gameplay mechanics and fight a couple of bosses.

Gylt's short length means there's pretty much no story or character to capture your interest or care about. In the four hours it takes to complete the game, there is zero world-building. There's even a creepy old guy that we never find out what his purpose is or why he's even present. We don't know anything about the main character or Emily. It's like starting 1/4th through a book and ending at the halfway point. I felt like there was a lot missing. There is no context, exposition, or anything like that. You can go around collecting journals, birds, and whatnot, but what's the point? I won't collect things in a game if I don't feel connected to the world in some way. There's no motivation to push me to want to find out the small details. Gylt has pretty much none of that.

When it comes to gameplay, Gylt is a run-of-the mill stealth action game. The puzzles are elementary, giving no challenge to the players at all. You have two tools at your disposal. A flashlight and a fire extinguisher. The flashpoint can not just light your way, but a focused beam can remove objects, bust pustules on enemies to kill them, and the extinguisher can freeze enemies, freeze water, and put out fires. This is all fine and dandy, but there's nothing challenging to go along with these tools. You will be plopped into a room with a single moveable ladder. It's obvious from one glance around the room that it goes against the wall with the vent. However, you must destroy three eyes with your light to unstick the ladder. It's pointless filler gameplay. Even the light-switching puzzles are dull and simple.

Unlike Alan Wake, the focused flashlight to kill enemies just doesn't feel as fluid, and I understand combat isn't the main focus of Gylt. You are supposed to use it as a last resort—if you get caught at all. Most of the enemy patrols are easy to bypass as there are a ton of objects to hide around, and the game pretty much points a finger at your most direct path. There is a central hub with buildings that connect, and these are your main levels. Each level usually requires some sort of master key to get to its boss, and this is the only time the game was challenging or changed the pace. There are two bosses, and one focuses on combat and the other on stealth. I wanted more of this, but as the game dragged on, it never got more challenging.

The voice acting is good, the cut scenes are hand drawn, and overall, the visuals are nice. Pick any 3D animation studio in the last 20 years, and that's how your game looks. It's dark and moody, but never scary. A few monster designs are a little interesting and different, but nothing crazy. Also, don't expect the game to push your systems to their limits. This game may look nice artistically, but technically it's nothing special, and that's also okay.

Overall, by the end of the game, I had no reason to care for anything I came across. The characters aren't fleshed out, there's no back story to any single thing in the game, and I'm left just moving on from this game and will most likely forget about it in an hour. I love indie games that are short and sweet, but many are forgettable with passable gameplay and mostly decent visuals. This is becoming a trend lately, and it's kind of scary. I can't really recommend Gylt unless you want a short, spooky evening, but don't expect anything but average gameplay.

Replaying it for nostalgia and it really is an absolute banger of a season. It adds such a complexity to this solid but uncomplicated series. It ditches what didn't work about previous seasons and highlights what does.

What really works is just the thesis of the very story. The series has always been good at sticking with gags that you'd think would be one-offs. Season 3 escalates by just keeping the camera on these two goofballs as the jokes melt away and the real consequences they promised you start to set in. And when the jokes vanish you're just left with the real heart of it all: the two best friends who want to go adventuring together and how that bond refuses to break in spite of all the ways its bent. A perfect ending without an equal.