"I just moved here, but Aoba sure is a great place." (Young Man)

Before starting this review, I need to say this kind of works as my combined thoughts on Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment. My score is indicative of just this game, but I never felt like I wanted to make a review for both since the gameplay is practically identical and I'd just be repeating myself a lot.

Eternal Punishment has some seriously missed potential. There are some great ideas here that are tough to appreciate from the gameplay that is present.

Being that Eternal Punishment is a direct sequel to Innocent Sin, it reuses a ton of assets from the original game, with the major culprits being the dungeons and music. Logically, the reused dungeons make sense as they pertain to the story's happenings, but I think there comes a point where, in development, the creators should have asked themselves if that was truly an ideal way to entertain the player. I would have liked to see how the settings have changed atmospherically in the sequel, but all we got were map layout updates. I was also disappointed by the game's soundtrack this time around. Most songs are either remixed or just reused entirely. There's some new songs though, one of which is the Aoba Park theme which is a beautiful track, and this remix of the Mountain Trail theme, but I enjoyed Innocent Sin’s OST more since all the music was brand new.

It's clear the developers drew some inspiration from Phantasy Star when making this combat system. Combat revolving around auto-battling, a 5-character party, and most notably, fusion spells. Differing from PSIV, you're able to switch around turn orders mid-battle, which is a great addition for fusion spells considering PSIV had you making your characters defend to link the turns for people with varying speed stats. I honestly never really ended up using these in Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment, as a lot just seemed worse than their non-chainable counterparts. An instance being when you use spells that target groups of enemies that share the same element, you can be prompted to turn it into a fusion spell that only attacks one enemy instead, which was inconvenient in standard battles with enemy groups. You can opt out of using the fusion spell before it happens in battle, which is another great addition, so it's not really an issue. The only time I ended up really using them was when combining two elements to do a bit more damage in boss fights. A major oversight, or intended mechanic, depending on who you ask, is the defend trick, where you cancel auto-battle and make everyone defend after their action. It's tedious to use in standard battles but proves extremely effective in boss battles due to you taking close to no damage. It really does make me believe it's an oversight, unless the developers thought it would be too useless to waste an extra turn defending. A cool aspect of the combat was the ability to have characters be able to switch their personae without wasting a turn, which led me to use it quite frequently. Turning anyone into a healer out of the blue was very helpful.

EP is known to be one of the harder entries in the SMT franchise, and I was well aware of this from friends. I know it sounds condescending, but I thought it was going to be a case of Persona 5 fans playing an older RPG, but Eternal Punishment is one of the harder RPG titles in the PS1 library, in my opinion. The difficulty was kind of mixed in its tedious structure along with its slow combat and frustrating encounter rate. By tedious structure, I am referring to demon fusion, which is done by gathering spell cards through demon negotiation. When fusing demons, there are different arcanas of cards they will give you pertaining to their arcana. Later on, demons will give you more and more per negotiation as the card requirements for fusions rise for higher-leveled personae. It's pretty easy to find a way to entertain them for cards, as there's multiple character combinations that work, but the strategy you want to go for is to form a contract with them, which usually has a very small amount or 1 specific character combo that raises their joy stat. The reason you want to do this is because after contract formation, when you entertain them for cards, they'll give you wild cards, which you can give to someone in the velvet room to change into any arcana you want. Considering there's over 20 card types in the game, this is the most convenient method of fusing personae. There’s different personae to fuse in each arcana of cards, which explains why you’d want the wild cards for complete freedom of your team's builds. It’s frustrating to find the joy-raising action to initiate these contracts, part of it being that they’re integral to the gameplay. There’s an art to demon negotiation; you’ll be able to tell what works sometimes from your characters' personalities meshing well with the demons, but it is by no means consistent. It’s something that’s fun at first but quickly becomes tedious when you're tasked with doing it more than a few times. It felt like I was just aimlessly trying anything that might work, which most times resulted in the demon getting mad and you having to enter a new encounter to try again. The salt on the wound is that making them mad will have them break your contract… Persona 2 is best played with a notebook nearby to write down the correct prompts for these demons. Even though the end result is a team with some killer personae, it's a goal that’s hard to work towards with all the tedium associated with it. 

Now, the slow combat. Not only is the game some of the slowest combat on the system, but it is also grindy as all hell. Throughout the game, you’ll need to fuse new personae a lot to stay on top of the game's difficulty. To unlock the moves on each persona, you’ll have to use any of their moves to get them to slowly rank up to their max level of 8 and get each move associated with them. Why would you want to rank them up all the way? Because sometimes the personae will have an integral move like healing everyone, or attack moves which you'll need for them to be useful. This was by far the most annoying part of the game's combat. When I’d get to a skill-check boss fight, I’d have to back out and grind up new personas, which got really irritating. I honestly wouldn’t mind the idea of it if they’d rank up quicker, because later on it started to tread on multiple hours of grinding. You can get them to skip 2 ranks from finishing battles with fusion attacks from a lucky mutation, but I could never get this to happen, so take that as you will. Even though I have a lot of complaints about this game's systems, it’s still fun to make builds for your characters with persona fusion. You can add a stat boost card and a card to add a certain move during the fusion, which adds a good layer of customizability. There’s also a level-up bonus for each persona to add a point to a particular stat, which is something you need to think about so you can boost your character's strengths. It’s as fun as the rest of the series in that regard; there’s still a bunch of pondering time spent in the velvet room, but it’s hard to look past the requirements of doing so.

I will say, though, that Eternal Punishment has great boss fights; almost every boss in the game will make you switch up your strategy and punish you if you don't. For instance, there's one fight later on where the boss heals a set amount of HP passively every turn, so you'll need to utilize fusion spells to maximize damage while balancing out support for your party. They were always a challenge to look forward to, and I was always preemptively aware that there would be a challenge that I'd have to face when outside boss doors in dungeons, no matter how high level or good my personae were.

By far the most endearing aspect of Eternal Punishment is its cast of characters. It's really nice to see a game tackle aspects of adulthood in such a blunt way in a real-life setting. These characters are people that most can truly relate to. By the time they started revealing a lot about them near the end through flashbacks, I got a bit emotional. These characters have realistic internal conflicts, not some shit out of Persona 5. I do wish there was more of it throughout the game. It may be the absurd amount of time spent in dungeons, but it really feels like there were barely any cutscenes for these characters to develop. Of course, the ones we have are great, but I wanted more.

I'm being told I should have played the PSP releases of these games, but I always like playing original releases because I like to admire what games did at the time of their original release. Part of the reason P1 is so interesting to me is that it is an early 5th generation title, and it was up in the air what to make next since there wasn’t really a blueprint yet. I feel more in tune with the innovations associated with games when I play their original releases, since a lot feels lost to me when I look at HD re-releases. Just looking at the UI in these titles and how they tried to make P1 overly accessible with the fast movement and out-of-place soundtrack, which completely alters the heavy atmosphere the Revelations version has, it was evident enough that these were not the definitive ways for me to play these titles. For the P2 games, though, the redone soundtracks actually sound really nice, but the battle UI looks and plays awful. So, that's just in case anyone was wondering why I played these versions instead.

What can I take away from these games? I will never complain about lengthy combat animations again. Kidding, but not really... These games definitely got me more interested in trying out the classic SMT games, and newer SMT games, for that matter, and I liked P2’s structure as opposed to the later entries in the Persona series. If you like this game and feel like I’m missing something, feel free to let me know in the comments. I’m curious to know aspects of why people enjoy this game.

Side Note: Whenever I play SMT games, something befalls me every single time. When I was playing Nocturne, I was incapable of sleeping for a week for some reason? During Revelations, I got hacked on every single account I own from what I think to be my cookies getting logged, and yes, even my Backloggd was hacked. Can you believe the nerve of someone to hack a Backloggd account? Someone must really hate me. During this game, I got sick for the first time in like 2 years and feel like shit. I fear for my life next time I go back to this series. I'll end off this review by reminding everyone to use 2 Factor sign in for your accounts. Stay safe out there, fellas...

I’ve known about this game for a minute and just avoided it because of the cover art. It didn't really look like my kind of game. What reminded me of this game's existence was seeing a tweet around a week ago that Wild Woody was added to an NSFW kart racing game. I had to do a double take, but it was actually real. I shouldn’t be surprised considering the name of the game, but, like, wow. I consider myself to be a fan of the Sega CD, so I did want to give this game a try.

The controls are some of the worst I’ve seen in the medium. When jumping, Woody stutters when rising and falling, so it ends up feeling like you’re rubber banding in an online game. Woody’s main form of attacking is jumping on enemies, which will play out an animation where he sinks into the enemy while erasing them from the level. There’s been times where I would try jumping on enemies upwards of 5 times in a row and it would still not register! He’s also got this sketch ability where you’ll have to press the pause button, flip through the sketch book to find the ability you want to use, and activate it, which plays out an animation. Admittedly, a cool idea, but badly integrated since you can only use 2 of these before having to get a powerup later in the level. For the most part, these are useless in the sense that they obstruct the flow of the game and are never good enough to where you’d even think of using them instead of just damage boosting through whatever enemy is in front of you. Abilities are mostly some awkward projectile or something that transforms you into something for more jump height and movement speed, all controlling as bad if not worse than your standard form. For example, there’s ones that turn you into a kangaroo and hobby horse.

This game is not good in the level design department either. Wild Woody has the design philosophies of Sonic CD with these large, incoherent mazes I’ve gotten lost in for some embarrassingly long times. Also cluttered with enemy placements that, at times, make taking damage feel unavoidable. It’s so bad you’re better off just damage boosting through everything since you’ll probably take more damage trying to avoid them. The enemies also really like throwing unfair projectiles, which you can’t even avoid at times. It’s evident this game was a rush job, and the stage design really makes that show. I get the vibe that they made the levels and didn’t even try playing through the game because a ton of stages have platforming segments that are way too awkward to perform consistently. In the Mount Olympus stage, there is a part where you literally have to take a leap of faith and hope you land on a small platform instead of falling below the area and having to climb back up again. I haven’t mentioned yet that Woody has an ability where he can erase areas of the map to find secrets and progress through the stage. That’s fine; at the start of the game, they highlight these areas to let you know you can erase them, but past level 1, they never mark them again. So, there are areas I’ve gotten trapped in where you just have to waste time guessing where the erasable floor or wall is. Funnily enough, they also increase the time to do so in later stages if it wasn’t already cryptic enough, because then you’ll have to wait longer to erase things with no prior indication.

First impressions of the music from stage 1 sound bad initially, but make more sense since Ron Thal who did the music, said that he made the soundtrack start off silly and progressively get more intense throughout. So even though the first song sounds like a prog rock cover of a nursery rhyme, it does start to pick up the pace with the later stages. My favorite songs are the space stage theme and this song that went unused due to a presumed programming bug. It's a bit goofy, but the high-tempo drums and the piano make for a pretty kickass boss theme, so it’s sad this song didn’t make it in.

How was this released?! Ristar literally came out earlier in the year, and this was supposed to be the swan-song for the Sega CD? How unfortunate… It’s a shame because I think this game had the potential to be pretty cool. I also think it's hilarious that the platforming mascot shit got so out of hand that they made one for a fucking pencil… At least the soundtrack is good.

Front Mission seemed kind of daunting at first to me, as I’ve never really played anything like it with the customizable mechs. What really intrigued me about playing Front Mission was the talent of Amano and Shimomura behind it. There’s digitized portraits of Amano’s character designs in-game, and his timeless art is the kind of stuff I’ll never get sick of looking at. It started to make more sense as I played it, and honestly, it wasn't as confusing as I had thought.

Front Mission is a strategy RPG where you customize mecha for your units to use in battle. When changing the equipment for your mechs though, they didn’t take the easy route with spritework. There are different battle sprites, field sprites, and giant sprites in the setup menu that all change depending on the pieces of equipment you pick. There’s a ton of equipment too, with there being body armor, legs, guns, and even backpacks too, so to see this much work put into something like this is astounding. It really helps sell the game's whole gimmick of building mechs and really makes some builds feel unique. Might I add that you can even paint the mechs different colors for free? This actually helped a ton because I usually have a hard time differentiating troops in these games, so I knew who was who with the allocated colors.

Much of the time will be spent sitting in the menu and customizing your mechs. Admittedly, buying parts is slow, but it’s fun thinking about which builds to go for. There’s a weight limit for mechs, so you kind of need to balance out your builds and not have too much stuff on them as you mix and match a variety of parts from shops, which all raise certain stats. Another aspect of the builds is your character stats. There’s some sort of hidden leveling system for weapon proficiency, so you’ll usually want to stick to one type of weapon for each character. You have the “Fight” stat, which is for gauntlets; the “Short” stat for 1 tile range weaponry; and “Long” for missiles and other long range guns. Certain equipment will work better for short-range or long-range people, so that’s why there’s a lot to think about in the parts shop.

The combat revolves around this body part system, where each mech has separate health bars for their leg parts, both individual hands and the body. Destroying the legs will lower their tile movement; destroying either hand will make whatever weapon the mech is equipped with unusable; and destroying their body will immobilize them completely. You also can’t control what parts you shoot unless someone has a skill that lets them, so it kind of makes a lot of battles very RNG-reliant. I also really like the combat animations. It’s pretty satisfying seeing your mech fire off a multi-hit machine gun as the game lags with the debris flying everywhere…

Front Mission has some awkward balancing as well. The start of the game provides you with some pretty unremarkable equipment, and leveling up units is tricky since they don’t do very much damage. This made the game very hard at the beginning, and I was getting my ass kicked at a certain skill check. At around a third through the game, the characters start to get stronger, unlock their skills, and eventually become some of the most broken units in RPG history (probably). This means you don’t even have to be strategizing anymore. There is benefit at the start of the game from having a balanced team, but in the latter half, the short-range units are so busted that it doesn’t even matter if you have any other differently classed units. Hell, I’m sure you could solo most maps with just one of them!

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Front Mission. The story is very ahead of its time and probably my favorite aspect of the game, which is rare for me since I’m more of a gameplay-oriented person. It’s a pretty easy game and not that hard to get into, despite how complicated it may seem. If all still goes south, there’s an arena you can grind at in case you get stuck too.