I'm not very big into Star Wars nowadays, but after having a blast with Battlefront II and seeing how hype the trailers for Survivor have been I decided it was the perfect time to replay this as I've been meaning to get to it for a while. I also made sure to play it over a month before the sequel comes out to avoid burnout and as I'm sitting here writing this while watching the credits scroll I think that was definitely a smart decision.

That is not to insult this game as I did actually even enjoy it a little more this time around, but there are some pretty big issues I have with it that hold it back for me. For one, the gameplay isn't always the most satisfying. When I first played this game I had virtually no experience with Soulslikes but now I consider them a genre I really enjoy (even if I rarely find the time to play them) and I was able to pick up on more of the similarities this time around. But really its more of a Soulslite and I don't find the implementation of many staples the genre is known for to really compliment this game in meaningful ways. The lightsaber combat is pretty good - the lack of dismemberment disappointing but understandable - but it doesn't really feel as tight or as in depth as I'd expect other games like this to be. Also quite frankly while there is a good amount of enemy types, I found virtually every single one that wasnt a stormtrooper variation to be a huge pain in the ass to fight. Thats not to say that its not fun still and pushing enemies off cliffs will never not be fun, but by the time i reached the final boss I was just pretty over the system in general and ended up dropping it to story mode just to get done with it. Skill issue? perhaps but I know if FromSoft added an easy mode update to all of their games right this moment I would still never go for it. Basically the combat is good but the challenge feels more reliant on being annoying than actually honing skill.

My only other big issue with this is that the PS5 version at the very least is quite buggy. I don't remember if it was this noticeable for my first playthrough on ps4 but there were a whole lot of little things that just kinda got in the way. Once or twice Cal just randomly died for no reason during platforming sections, sometimes in fights where you get swarmed and stunlocked the camera fucked off and made it really hard to see and there were multiple cutscenes with out of sync audio that had to be fixed by closing the game. Another thing thats not really a glitch but a bit bothersome is the huge amount of clipping. The ponchos are stylish (but severely lacking in color options like cmon) and optional but its a pretty big distraction to see Cal's hands and legs phase through them in every cutscene and I wish they put a little more care into that. And this is the game that has multiple different lightsaber holstering animations that have a lot of personality so I really doubt its from a lack of love.

Story wise I think the game is pretty solid. I like the whole cast and it has some pretty good arcs and emotional moments. But it does really suffer from feeling like the first in a series. I am very curious to see where the story goes with Survivor but the story definitely feels a little underwhelming where Fallen Order ends off. Its kinda at a point where the main goal is complete but theres no real setup for how the story will continue and it just doesnt entirely work. Cal is a likeable protagonist and I am looking forward to see what they do with his character, I especially want to see more of Merrin as well. The gameplay loop mostly has you traveling back and forth between planets and there is maybe a bit too much backtracking but there are always new areas opened up so its not like you're replaying the same exact thing again and again. I also found the puzzles to be a lot more enjoyable on this playthrough where I remember them being kinda annoying to begin with. I don't generally like puzzles but the ones in this are pretty well thought out and done so I dont have any complaints about them. Overall despite having some technical issues and some complaints about the story and combat as a standalone this is a really great single player Star Wars game that I'm glad is as successful as it is.

Seeing as its been said that this story is planned as a trilogy I am more than okay with that. I definitely am a little unsure on what the story of Survivor will end up being. My biggest hopes after completing this was for a bigger cast and more of them beyond mostly just staying back at the Mantis but It seems like Survivor is going in a different direction. There is apparently a prequel graphic novel meant to explain what happens inbetween the two games but I ain't paying 15 dollars to read it and so I really just hope they have some good ideas and that they don't give the game an ending that super suffers from middle child syndrome. Beyond that I just hope its a little more polished and honestly it's looking like a big step up in a lot of ways. I'll get back to you in May for my review on that one as well :p

Thanks for reading y'all. Still working on a couple other reviews but can't say when they'll be out. I really appreciate you if you've made it this far. See you next time <3

Nancymeter - 81/100 (oh wow a 2 point increase!!)
Time Played: 14 hours for this playthrough
Trophy Completion - 100%
Game Completion #4 of March
Game Completion #54 of 2023

One of those Doom WADs where I guess it's not entirely great (was a partial conversation, very wildly unbalanced and just throws some speculative ideas into the mix) but god, there's something about playing this which is just so weird and strange. Seemed like an early example of trying to add things like proper cutscenes and reloading mechanics into Doom, and also is kind of original in the sense that it plagiarises everything so much that it paradoxically becomes something entirely original. Also has two different endings, one of which is a secret, and it's one of those things where it's hard to tell how much of it is parody and how much of it was sincere.

Oh, also the soundtrack in this is great. Purple Motion's Shadowrun really stands out in particular, and was used in Morgan Vogel's Lesbian Bart: Escape from Cyberworld video. Honestly is how I found out about this Doom WAD, lol.

Super Metroid represents some of the peaks and most of the valleys Metroidvania's as a whole can have. While in the endgame you will feel like an unstoppable tank barreling at super speeds uninhibited by the mortal plain. In the early and mid-game, you will be a traveler that is lost because a vendor sold you a faulty map then kicks you in the shins and runs off just to occasionally kick you again when you thought you found a path forward (but really it was just another missile tank or dead end).
A quality I think is especially worthy of praise though is the Screw Attack and Freeze Beam represent exactly what makes a good Metroidvania upgrade. Something that not only increases the power of the player but also expands their freedom of movement and ability to progress. Unfortunately in this game they only appear after such an unpleasant experience.

I was able to get my hands on a WIP machine-translated copy of the original Slime Mori-Mori thanks to Nick, check out his work!

This is honestly a very solid foundation for the Dragon Quest Heroes spinoff series. You play as the iconic blue slime, living out their quiet rural life amongst other friendly slimes when suddenly, the Plob show up and kidnap everyone from your village and it's up to you, the hapless and adorable squishy hero, to rescue everyone and repair your village while beating the Plob at their own game of discovering the world's many secrets. If you've played the DS sequel to this (Rocket Slime), then this basically controls the same; you can stretch out your slime's body and let go to perform an Elasto Blast, which propels you into enemies, obstacles, and other objects and will often shoot them into the air, where you can then catch, carry, and throw these objects and enemies to your delight. The Elasto Blast is both your main form of attack as well as a movement and object interaction tool in this sense.

The original Japan exclusive Slime Mori Mori focuses on dungeon traversal; your Slime buddies have all been boxed up within the various ecosystems scattered across the giant island, and it's your duty to break open these boxes and send them home by either carrying them back to the entrance, or throwing them onto balloon lifts and train cars headed back. The backbone is solid enough strictly speaking, but as someone coming from many hours spent in Rocket Slime, this is where the lack of quality of life starts to show a bit. All of the balloon lifts and many of the train cars/cargo floats have a capacity of one, which means you can only chuck one passenger/object/monster on at a time and have to wait around a little for the next transport to come about. In the case of balloon lifts, this wait is exacerbated since it respawns off screen and you have to meander about in a separate area of the dungeon before it comes back. Dungeon exploration in general has some great ideas, but again, when comparing to its successors, becomes a bit rote. A lot of the exploration boils down to carrying over Bomb Rocks from other rooms to blow up barriers, or collecting an assortment of other objects elsewhere and bringing them over to statues to imitate their object order and unlock doors. The actual puzzle combinations outside of these two interactions are quite interesting though; there's a lava area where you have to drop loose tiles from an above floor to create platforms for traversal, there's a beach area with water spouts and sand where you can bury yourself to flip enemies and travel under tunnels, and so on so forth. It does suck a little that some progress isn't saved, such as the poppable Plob balloons that block progress in the mountain zone, but this is generally a trifle once you figure out the dungeon layout as is.

The real breadwinner of the original game however, has to be the over-the-top boss fights. Some of my favorites here include a fight against two twin Plobs (one with a fire gauntlet and the other with an ice sword) who attempt to take you down simultaneously but are susceptible to team damage (so it's more fun dodging their attacks and watching them actively interfere with one another), and a turtle monster who, upon realizing that you're using the sand to flip and damage it, floods the room with water to prevent burying and forces an old rival of yours to appear to help you out with fireballs and aerial dodging, transforming the fight into almost a pseudo shmup. Some of the fights do phone it in a bit (i.e. the 2nd golem fight in the secret forest is more or less a juiced up version of the 1st golem fight with slightly tougher attacks), but in general, these boss fights are exemplary of the cartoony and vibrant charm of the series. They're absolutely ridiculous and don't try to take themselves seriously whatsoever, and are a great diversion from the often repetitive dungeon crawling.

Again, my main reservation here is less that the game sucks, and more that it's just quite overshadowed at this point by its successors. I don't find the dungeon exploration very externally rewarding unfortunately; you can send some monsters and materials back to help repair the town or sell materials for money, but outside of some permanent health bar capacity/wallet upgrades and a few unlockable minigames, there's not a huge incentive to keep grinding out materials unless you really do care that much about fixing up your town as a good citizen. Dungeon exploration is also held back a bit by the arbitrary time limit (which will end your run if you're there past nightfall), so it does become necessary to keep an eye out on the day-night cycle gauge if you don't want to spend another 100G buying time sand as a fail safe. Having said that, the tank/ship battles in the later installments are a welcome improvement in tying all the different adventure game elements together, and definitely add more meat to the bone on what is already a pretty promising beginning to the series. It doesn't take too long to run through the whole game (maybe about 10 hours or so for my first playthrough), and while I admit that I can't comment too heavily on the dialogue due to the limits of the machine translation, the classic happy-go-lucky appeal of Rocket Slime is all still there with surprisingly well animated and colorful visuals. If you're a fan of Rocket Slime looking for more content, then I'd recommend giving this a shot just to check out its humble beginnings, and definitely don't be afraid to ask for help if you get stymied by the translated hints.

Notes:
Ending Acquired: Good Ending
- Played only as Alucard
- Around 185% completion


After unintentionally abandoning the game the first time around, my first complete trip through Castlevania: Symphony of the Night leaves me struggling to encapsulate my feelings on this game into words. While I loved the atmosphere, overall presentation, and map, playing Symphony of the Night today can make the game feel both dated and, in certain moments, poorly designed.

The first half of this game is honestly great. The pacing is excellent, the bosses are fun, the difficulty is perfect, and exploring Castlevania's dimly-light, creepy halls is terrific. This was the part of the game I enjoyed the most.

Then, comes the second half of the game. I'm going to try to remain light on spoilers here, but you basically have to explore the Castle again. I honestly didn't have any issues with this at first, but this is where the game's faults truly begin to show.

Going through this castle again led me to realize how many goddamn long hallways full of nothing but enemies there are in this game. This normally wouldn't be an issue if the enemies weren't the most annoying pieces creatures I have ever had the displeasure of fighting. They stun-lock you, do the same annoying attacks over and over, and in general, are a nuisance. The worst part is, the game actually gets easier during this section! It's just that fighting the enemies feels so boring and slow that I just never wanted to do it. The bosses also greatly drop in quality by this point. Although they are still well designed, they become so easy that it's not even enjoyable fighting them. Normal enemies become harder to fight than the bosses.

I also want to mention this game's "rpg" style of combat system. You get tons of weapons, shields, and armour in this game, but so many of them feel completely useless. There is absolutely 0 balancing in regard to the weapons. Not only that, but almost every sword feels the exact same, and it just feels like a way to pad up the inventory.

Now, I know this review sounds quite negative. But, I truly did enjoy this game. Even during the second half, when my grips become increasingly apparent, I was still having fun. However, I was just...expecting more from a game held so highly by others.

Casltevania: Symphony of the Night has my sheer and total respect for being one of the founders of my favourite genre. I loved the atmosphere, score, and overall feel of Dracula's Castle, and loved exploring it the first time around. However, the game's few, yet apparent issues bog-down the pacing and leave a sour taste. Both my feelings on this game and my opinion of its design can be described with one word; inconsistent.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is perhaps the most consistent and polished 2D Zelda of them all. Every aspect of this game is a massive improvement over its predecessor, A Link to the Past, and in-terms of the pure dungeon and level design, could be considered one of the best in the entire franchise.

The game's dungeons are practically perfect. Every single one is designed with such great care to where this game may be the only Zelda with 0 sub-par dungeons. I mean, even Ocarina of Time has the Water Temple. The game doesn't handhold you at all, yet its puzzles are designed in such a way solving them is genuinely fun, extremely satisfying, and just the right amount of challenging. Nearly every puzzle I solved, I found myself saying "God, that's so clever!". This is even more impressive when you realize that all 7 of the game's main dungeons can be completed in any order.

The overworld remains largely the same in terms of design from A Link to the Past, however, seeing it in 3d for the first time is wonderful. There are also enough changes made to where it feels familiar, yet new. There are a decent amount of hidden items to find, and the game's fast pace (greatly attributed to the extremely fast walking speed and quick travel) prevents finding them from feeling like a chore.

In terms of design, this game is almost perfect. Almost. The ONLY gripe I had with this game was its newly introduced "Weapon Loaning" system. Renting the items feels completely pointless as you die so rarely in this game. Even when you do die, the items only cost 50 rupees to rent, which considering how many rupees you get in this game, is next to nothing. All death means is a quick trip to the shop, and then back to exploring. Not finding any key items inside the dungeons removes the fun and surprise of acquiring the next major item, and makes the dungeons feel just slightly less satisfying to complete. By mid-way through my playthrough, I had permanently bought all the items and the "loan" system...just kind of vanished.

However, in the grand scheme of things, this nitpick is extremely small. A Link Between Worlds is otherwise a flawless game, and makes me yearn for another 2d Zelda.

Nintendo, just come on. It's been nearly 10 years.


Please.

Lots of reviews on this simultaneously praise the story and writing as a step forward for video games while acknowledging that that same story and writing may be exposed as somewhat weak by the TV adaptation via HBO. And that seems revealing to me, it seems to speak volumes. The quality of the game that is universally agreed to be the most enduring pales in comparison when held up to like, anything else remotely decent. And shit no one is even saying it might seem weak compared to The Wire or The Sopranos; no, people are seemingly worried about comparisons to fucking Game of Thrones or some shit. Because even next to GoT, maybe, the weaknesses of TLOU stand out.

I have not played more than two hours of this game. I enjoyed the walking sim more than the stealth combat, and while I don't know that I observed enough of the story and writing to weigh in, it seemed fine enough. But I think any game where the "story and writing" operate in the cinematic mode will necessarily fall short when compared to actual cinematic things. Better to focus on the whole, video game part, imo.

Iji is one of the most ambitious games of this size that I've seen, especially for coming out back in 2008. Made almost entirely by one person, this is basically an action platformer/immersive sim, which is a combination I don't know that I've seen before. There are different approaches to combat and exploration depending on how you spec out your character's stats, from handling different types of weaponry, to strength based melee builds, hacking (which is actually a pretty cool stealth-ish playstyle where you can hack enemy weapons), or just becoming a tank so you can run through everything. I did a mostly strength focused build (though I got enough levels to try out a bit of everything by the end) and went full lethal, although pacifist runs seem to have been considered as at least a mostly viable option, and there are parts in the story that seem to reflect that choice.

All of that stuff is cool and very ambitious, and it more or less works, but it does come with some downsides. The controls are very stiff, particularly only being able to attack while standing. You often want to crouch behind cover or jump over attacks and are helpless while doing that. The enemy attack patterns, although not that interesting overall, are at least decent about this though so once you get used to it it's not so bad. It just all feels very weird and like a modern game or a remake of this would do things differently. It's also not a great looking game. You're going to be looking at some low res programmer art characters against very basic and repetitive backgrounds for nearly the entire game, and some people aren't going to be into it because of that.

The balancing is also strange. Playing on the normal difficulty early on I was expecting it to get kind of tedious (though it hadn't yet) with the awkward controls and sprawling levels, but it never really did. I think part of this is because you get really, really overpowered by the end if you're collecting the maximum amount of XP per level. You're limited to leveling up 5 times in each zone, and while I get the reason for the cap with you already being able to become overpowered even with that, it feels like it should have just been balanced better without an artificial cap in place. That being said, being overpowered was pretty fun and the awkwardness of the game might have gotten more in the way if it was more difficult. I haven't tried the other difficulties so I can't really speak to those, but they seem like pretty straightforward numerical changes.

The writing is equally ambitious as the gameplay design, but less successful at achieving its goals. There's an absolute ton of lore and background info in text logs you find throughout the game, but there's also some pretty important info in these, which led to me skimming a whole lot. It could definitely use some editing down. The dialogue and narrative feel amateur at a lot of points but at least they're trying for something interesting and make an effort to tie into your choices throughout the game.

It's a weird game with a lot of drawbacks, and I wouldn't blame someone for not being able to get into it, but it's also just so ambitious and cool for what it is, and I haven't seen anything else quite like it.

This is a perfectly fine game. The first person platforming is simple but fun enough, it introduces all of the mechanics fairly quickly and I guess they're used decently, though it never gets very challenging. The story is just... there. It didn't evoke much emotion or interest, but wasn't actively bad. It's held back some by the voice acting and character animations feeling very stiff. I can admire going for what they did on a lower budget, many games just wouldn't show you the characters directly or communicate only through text as a way around this. I dunno, this is okay but also isn't very well done here. The highlight of the game is definitely the environmental design and art. The areas were really nice looking, pretty diverse for a short game, and fun to move through. It's hard to think of who I'd recommend this to, because it doesn't really excel at much, but if it seems interesting to you it's not bad and it's fairly short to play through.

As a fan of roguelikes, roguelites, and Rogue, I find my standards for the quality of a roguelike are as follows: if the game can provide significant mechanical novelty across playthroughs such that each new run feels like a new character embarking on a new adventure with new perils to face, then I consider it a success - and the level of its success is amplified by both amount of content (which multiplies the sense of novelty), and consistency of mechanics, which allows the player both feel themselves in a world governed by consistent rules, and to create more and more successful attempts at the given goal of, say, going to hell (or, as in the current example, escaping from it). Narrative and design soundness are also useful aspects for game makers to focus on, and can elevate a title massively, but when I consider the most significant aspects of the roguelike genre, the ability to produce consistent mechanical novelty within a mechanically consistent world is paramount.

Hades, then, is concerned with the things which to me are the exact opposite of the point, and does very little to push this mechanics-focused genre forward. While the combat is punchy and fun, it's essentially just action gameplay ported from Supergiant's previous titles Bastion and Transistor - "work smarter, not harder" ostensibly being the aphorism in the office after releasing a significantly more unique game, Pyre, to much less vibrant fanfare - and while the story is lively, there is for me a feeling of disappointment after the first, the third, the fifth successful fight with Hades, which springs from the grim question not ever to be evoked by such a life-sucking medium as this: what's the point?

I'm all for well-constructed works which adhere to the mores of a given artistic movement, and to its credit, perhaps that is simply what this is (which is to say, a game consistent with the times, and guided by superficial forces which garner positive attention, such as: general polish, strong VA, a coherent aesthetic, lovely music, fascinating attention to detail, a rags-to-riches developer story, bright readable visuals, a transparent development process, a charming cast of characters and an absolutely absurd amount of dialogue lines) - but nonetheless, I find it all kind of boring.

lacking in sufficient secrets or novelty, yet polished to a mirror's sheen, Hades is a roguelike himbo with daddy issues, perceiving the multigenerational success of its forefathers, and projecting outwardly that it can be a big boy too, just as long as its prettier than pops. What himbo fails to realize, unfortunately, is that brooding daddy was actually sort of deep.

Pretty fun megawad, with a really unique visual style for the 2nd and 3rd episodes. Makes very smart use of low monster counts most of the time, which leads to a different type of difficulty than most modern wads. Also enjoyed the unorthodox use of weapons, like allowing the basic shotgun some time to shine in the first episode, and heavy use of the rocket launcher. My main complaint is some of the later maps are easy to get lost, particularly the guest maps which I felt didn't do as good of a job with signposting keys/doors. The ending was also a bit anticlimactic. Favorite map was 16, Cidadela I.