Soul Blazer really surprised me. It’s an early game, but does a lot of interesting things that I didn’t expect and don't recall ever seeing followed up on by anything else bar the…direct followups by the same folks. The structure of the game is clever, and the way you "build” a city over time by defeating monsters in the underworld is satisfying. You’re constantly getting a nice jolt of gratification as you progress through a dungeon, which kept me really engaged. I also liked the magic system — just complex enough to not be boring, and the way it adds an additional level of strategy to the basic movement works really well. And, of course, the music rules.

Like Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia also surprised me — but in a bad way! Conventional wisdom seems to be that this is one of the SNES greats, and a big improvement over Soul Blazer. I did not feel this way. It lost the simplicity and focused vision of Soul Blazer, and took a bunch of the things that game did well and did them worse. Combat is made worse by introducing some learned techniques that are pretty clumsy and not as fun as the magic in Soul Blazer, and the experience-based leveling and compelling “clear an area and unlock a part of the town” progression has been dropped in favor of tying leveling directly to area clears instead. Plus, the localization is simply atrocious — the translator didn’t seem to understand the story, as it’s presented incomprehensibly and filled with errors. It’s an action RPG with unrewarding combat and a bad story, so, why are we here? While it’s technically superior in terms of graphics and sound to Soul Blazer, I kept wishing I was playing that instead.

Mega Man X2 is...fine! Ok, it's good. Maybe even great! It's just not as great as the first game. Yes, it's bigger, with an even more cinematic presentation, more interesting set piece-style stages, more impressive upgrades, and optional hidden bosses. On paper, it should be even better than the first game, but it just...isn't. It's more complicated, but it's messier. Getting all the upgrades and defeating the mavericks and the X-Hunters means you're jumping around stages a lot more than in the first game, and while those stages have some interesting hooks (moving dinosaur tank! jet biking through the desert!) I don't think the level design is all that great. Still, absolutely worth playing, and definitely not the worst X game by a long shot, but I don't return to it very often when compared to the first one.

Really wanted to like this more than I did. I like Tokyo, and I like ghosts, and this game definitely delivers on both of those things. There's just not a lot of variation in the moment-to-moment gameplay, and while I'm happy to do the same thing a lot (I do love beat 'em ups), those things need to feel satisfying. Unfortunately, nothing here is quuuuuite compelling enough to make you want to keep doing it for many hours. Dig the vibes and dig the little story moments you get from the side quests, but after a while seeing the map expand and fill with icons represented things that were 90% similar to stuff I'd been doing for the last few hours really got to me. A bummer!

Now we're cooking. X3's stages have neat set-pieces in them, without devoting whole stages to a gimmicks that hamper replayability. There's a ton of stuff to find, hidden bosses, a lot of secrets to uncover, and I like the player choice present in the enhancement system. I also really like how even minor enemies pose a challenge, with increased offensive and defensive options present beyond "has shield." It's just so much more fun and interesting to play vs X2.

X3 might not be as sharp and focused as X1, but I think it the best example of the ambitions for the X series. It's not the best, but it never gets better after this. The music is a real bummer, though, as it's pretty unremarkable compared to the prior two games.

In my memory, X4 is absolutely excellent. Returning to it, it's...not that, but it's not bad. It's something of a return to the series' roots in terms of gameplay scope, with pretty simple, straightforward levels and a lot less stuff to track down. The cutscenes certainly impressed at the time, but coming off of X3 I was really missing a deeper experience, and the levels, while straightforward, are often kind of boring. Playing as Zero is pretty neat, though. It's a very playable game, and it looks nice, but I'm not sure trading a longer, more interesting game was worth the tradeoff for the CD-era presentation.

If you'd asked me what my most-desired compilation title was, a collection of the iOS Sonic remasters + a new S3K remaster would've been high up there. And this is it! Mostly. But when you consider all the little things like the lack of CRT filter (which looked great in Sonic Mania), the inability to disable the drop dash, replacing lives with a coin economy that quickly loses relevance...it all adds up to a lackluster package. It just isn't the treatment these games deserve. And yeah, I get and understand why the music for S3 had to change, but it just doesn't feel right, you know? These are fine versions of the game, but this won't ever be my favorite way to play them. That's a real bummer, because it could've (and should've) been.

Yikes. What a dreadful game. Its core mechanics are X4's, so shooting and jumping still feels good, which is a trick because everything else in this game is awful. Some great music, but mostly because it's reused and remixed from prior titles. The enemy and upgrade loop is totally broken, forcing you to revisit one stage (the worst one!) three totally separate times. The time limit is pointless given the randomness that determines success with the colony, and the part system is obtuse. Real bad localization, too. Wild to consider the sharp drop in quality of pretty much everything between X4 and this. There are little brief moments that remind you of better games, but this is the start of a real downward spiral for the series.

The game you think you remember playing as a kid. It's just fun, and it plays every hit you'd want from it. I wish it were a little more ambitious and a liiiiittle less anchored to nostalgia for the original games, but I'm a sucker so I still love it. Can't imagine it converts anyone who isn't already into this sort of thing, but I am, so give me the slop.

Minus one star for the cartoon Slash design over the vastly superior toy/Turtles in Time one and because it doesn't have the perfect, deep wallop sound from that game. I realize I said I wished it was less nostalgic and then dinged it for arguably not being enough like an older thing, and I promise to do my penance for that.