You know it's good when every guide recommends beating a different game before this one, importing overpowered parts from it for even the earliest missions, and also get the bonuses from going bankrupt that make the game easier, which aren't normally available in this game without the save import. Great!

I somehow did it. After months of beating my head against a wall trying to find a way to beat this game on my own terms, I simply caved in and took a mech from a guide. It worked. Woohoo. Just like with Armored Core 2, I do not like missions that are near impossible for any but one specific build. Here, they ramped it up by making it ACTUALLY impossible. Some missions cannot be beat if your boosters aren't strong enough and your mech doesn't have high enough output. Some enemies, like the final boss of AC2, are also infuriating unless you go at them with missiles and only missiles. But you don't know that until you go in.

I guess there's less punishment to be found here at least, you lose, you simply go back in whenever you want. You don't lose any money unless you spend more during the mission than you're paid. There's also zero stakes related to the story. In all the other Armored Core games, you get to choose your contracts, your missions, meaning you can skip any that you don't vibe with. Not here, you need to do them ALL here. All 90, just to reach the credits.

So many of them are so boring. There's no fun in having to stand and shoot at incoming enemies for a bit, or boosting through canyons and shooting stationary targets. It's just testing whether you have enough ammo or good enough boosters. I can do that in the testing arena, not in a mission.

This is particularly egregious early on, there's so many missions of this type. After caving in and eventually building a "well-rounded" mech, rather than the one I've been using for the entirety of AC2 and chose to import here, I did start to enjoy it more, but that's only because I got past the worst missions. The later missions are more varied and pretty, there's enemies hidden in snowstorms, there's jumping between planes and destroying them, there's seeing the progressive demise of a water base we previously defended, but which broke the mega-corporation commity rules and we now have to eliminate.

Like I mentioned previously, there's no story to speak of, this is the purest mercenary experience Armored Core ever got. You just pick missions from whoever, no matter how evil their requests are. You could try to avoid this in other Armored Core titles, it was a key part of this series' interaction with the player and what made these games work the best. Not here, you're a mindless merc, you can't progress until you literally just commit acts of terrorism by blowing up a train.

I think this is an absolute failure, there's gotta be a cool story that could be attached to these random vignettes that could only enrich them. You fight these cool, random ACs, and they're good fights mind you, but they're so much less memorable than something like the Human Plus escapee from Armored Core 1, Nineball, even the final boss of the last game is awesome. I appreciate the megarobot fight, that shit was cool as fuck, but how is something this awesome wasted on it being as important as a random encounter in a jrpg.

What a piss ending too. Nooo, skilled pilots are interfering with the government again, how could it beee. This time, it is some total rando who you hear about only one time. That's the final boss. Whatever. Beat them. No ending cutscene. Awesome, great. There's some superbosses after all is done, they're AC bosses from previous games. Kinda cool I suppose, but they're more fun in their respective games for me anyway. Extra parts that you can only use in the test chamber now I suppose. I never want to go through all this again.

My first Zelda replay is not necessarily a very successful one. With the jump to 3D, I finally begin to wonder and examine the core mechanics of a Zelda title, and realize how weird of a relationships they have with each other.

Health system that is continually upgraded throughout the game, but is combined with puzzle-based dungeons, with occasional death pits and combat (which has a shitton of inconsistencies in its own right). If you die you get sent back to the beginning of the dungeon, but you unlock shortcuts to get back to your point faster... but you respawn with three filled hearts every time, no matter how much health you collected throughout the game. This has been a thing since Zelda 1, and it continues to be a thing during the jump to 3D. Why? Isn't being sent back the punishment? I guess it's not as big of a punishment as the originals, because here all the doors that required you to kill enemies in them stay unlocked at least, but... I just don't get it.

In general, I begin to wonder exactly what does stuff like the amount of health, arrows, bombs etc. add to the game. I am struggling to find a reason to not just have the player be able to use abilities without a limit. Not like you ever really lack them in any important moments in this game, but what if you did? Theoretically the system is there to prevent spamming them in combat, but what if you do and you just don't have the tool required to progress? What if a puzzle doesn't click with you fast enough? You're supposed to run out of the dungeon, go buy bombs or gather magic and come back?

In a lot of ways, I think these contrasting mechanics sort of add to the world of the games at large, because the game ends up placing shops in towns to make the game feel more human, and even secrets may contain additional items. And, in theory, you really do want those extra hearts for late-game dungeons, so at least on the first run you can unlock as much as possible, so secret-hunting is well incentivized.

As for specific 2D to 3D transition stuff, a lot of the snappiness is gone, replaced by more deliberate movement and combat. Oh man, do I miss the Pegasus shoes. But you do get Epona... once you become an adult at least. There's a lot gained obviously, no reason for me to get into it, you boot up the game and you hear the music, you see Hyrule Fields with your very eyes. No matter how populated it actually is, what it's populated with, or how that stuff interacts with any other systems, I don't know a person who doesn't see how certain elements of Ocarina are a grand success. Really just depends how much clicks with you and how much you're willing to look past because of it.

Myself, I end up looking past quite a bit, but I do wish I approached this replay differently. Maybe engage more with stuff I haven't before, maybe go for a 100%. Going through it casually when you remember so much, without any added challenge or anything, doesn't do it for me. Too slow for my brain which has been steadily developing more and more zoomy receptors. I could also try a randomizer next time. Nevertheless, I think the next replay some time down the line will help me fully realize my thoughts. Right now it's complicated, and the zoomy receptors wish not to wait for me to write more.

It's weird to me that this game would get overlooked for such a long time when discussing the evolution of Zelda. A sequel from the same team as Link to the Past, bearing so many new ideas, both mechanically and story-wise.

So much of Link's Awakening is up my alley. A large chunk of the items are focused on upgrading the movement: the jump, the pegasus boots improving the jump further while also making you faster, the returning hookshot stretches through the entire screen. All these items find use in exploration and in combat.

Exploration is so smooth thanks to the map being once more split into squares, with hints being saved on it, but there are also the hint houses, working much, much, much better than the ones in LttP. The game relies a bit too much on recognizing stuff from previous games: puzzle types, ways in which items are used or even enemy names play a part in this adventure.

But this amalgamation of the three previous Zelda games with, uh, Mario, is a product of a beautiful, timeless story. Another reason why this title feels tailor made for me is how strange encountering this mish-mash is. The main path has you fight the coolest designed enemies in the series so far, no doubt. The bosses look phenomenal and super unique, and they tend to utilize the upgrades you get in their dungeon extremely well, showcasing the possible depths of combat. None of them ever really require you to combine two, which would be pretty fun I think, but maybe switching between items too much during a fight would be annoying.

The game is generally very easy, but I wouldn't say it's much harder than Link to the Past, playing which I died a LOT. I would simply say this game doesn't have any major flaw, there are no hitboxes that are off, and controlling is as snappy as it was back on the NES.

But perhaps the key to my enjoyment was the art and animations. So many phenomenal sprites and so many clever ways of utilizing the minimalistic beeps and bops of the Gameboy's soundtrack possibilities. So many secrets are elevated by, for example, finding a big, funny fish inside a cave who does a little dance, and the perspective switches between side-scrolling and top-down add so much to the world design. I adore the variety of not just the actual ways of hiding things, but, for the first time in the series, their contents. There are some caves that just have a heart piece of course, but those are usually the most fun when it comes to the process of discovering them, while most of the simpler secrets have very fun contents.

Also just the humor of the game. Zelda was always pretty funny, Link to the Past leaned into it, but this is so lighthearted, it uses sound, animations, everything it has to add to it. Oh, and the pictures are a phenomenal addition. They are so pretty that they make me question how pretty could the Gameboy Color truly be at its best.

Love this game, love that it got its second wind in the form of a remake, love the direction it took the series in, love the weirdness, love every emotional and tonal whiplash, love the story so much, love the ending, love the dungeons, love the items, love the mechanics, love the art, love the humor, love the Mario, love the Link, love the little moments of peace and quiet, the ones of joy and laughter as well as the melancholy sinking in as you move along. Gameboy's masterpiece.