caleb
1996
He's always be the one true Super Star in my eyes.
2008
I know it wasn’t even close to the first, but I remember this as the game that launched the mainstream indie revolution.
1993
To sleep: perchance to dream.
This game ate my homework and my life.
1998
I don't believe anyone who claims they finished this game in under 50 hours without consulting a guide. Most of the puzzles rely either on extreme trial and error or intuiting leaps of ludicrous moon logic. The boss fights range from kind of silly and gimmicky yet entertaining to infuriating garbage.
Otherwise it's still a pretty swell little stealth game with some great 80s B-movie vibes and a highly memorable intro sequence.
Otherwise it's still a pretty swell little stealth game with some great 80s B-movie vibes and a highly memorable intro sequence.
2011
One of those games that’s too good, just so good it kinda ruins other games in the genre for you.
The Zelda That Makes You Feel Something™
The only way this game could possibly be better is if it were in color.
THEY DID IT. They ACTUALLY did it. Those maniacs at Nintendo put Link’s Awakening in full, glorious color!
Oh it’s OVER for all you fools now.
Oh it’s OVER for all you fools now.
Not much of a story or sense of place or memorable characters to speak of, but A Link to the Past was a very solid trial run before the series really got going with Link’s Awakening.
Ocarina of Time felt like pure magic, once upon a time. If you squint your eyes real hard and play just the first three or four dungeons, it still kinda does.
(Definitely don’t play on an actual N64 though. The game runs like ass. Treat yourself with some good emulation hardware instead.)
(Definitely don’t play on an actual N64 though. The game runs like ass. Treat yourself with some good emulation hardware instead.)
I’m still in the middle of this, but I can confidently say the 3DS version kicks the shit out of the N64 one.
Rad music and sound design, nifty combat and item systems, and overall one of the most successful utilizations I've seen of the DS's unique hardware. It's a shame the protagonist is such a damp rag of nothing for such a long time. The game expects you to put up with its least likable character and his grating dialogue for hours and hours before he starts to grow the hell up.
Dragon Quest XI is an aggressively uninteresting game. Like I realize this series is all about nostalgia, and that DQ1 practically defined the genre, but good lord — this might be the most generic JRPG I’ve ever seen. It’s a NES game with voice acting (though it is cool they happened to include an 8-bit mode I’ll never use, I guess). The story is an almost parodically vanilla Prophesied Chosen One Must Fight the Dark Lord After His Home Village Is Destroyed, yet after two hours they still haven’t destroyed the village or even introduced the Dark Lord beyond references to his inevitable return (which seems to bother no one much at all) (and yes they actually flat-out call him The Dark Lord).
The combat is cosmically bad; it’s DQ1-style "mash A through the menus" to grind and win. Luckily they added this cool new feature where the combat can play itself! At 3x speed! Wonders never cease.
There’s a “free move” combat mode that lets you move your party characters around the battlefield. You would think this would let you setup backstabs and blocks and stuff like a Tales Of game — and you would be wrong! It does nothing. Purely cosmetic timewasting.
Which is more or less what this game amounts to: the most stultifying, time-wasting take on the JRPG formula you can think of. You can literally auto-run from point A to B, take your hands off the controller, and let the game play itss bland-ass self for you. Why isn’t it just a visual novel at that point? Why have combat at all? Who knows. This series has millions of fans somewhere, apparently. Ask them.
So the combat is bad. The dialogue is drivel. But the music is truly awful. They added full orchestration for the Switch version and it’s still possibly the worst RPG score I can remember, all blaring obnoxious fanfares devoid of the emotion of the most forgettable Final Fantasy theme. Words can’t describe how much worse the MIDI versions are.
This game’s only saving grace so far are the Akira Toriyama character designs, yet the characters themselves have none of the life or animation or humor that makes the Dragon Ball and Chrono Trigger casts so memorable. They’re cardboard cut-out stand-ins for RPG types so stock they might as well just be named Fighter, Thief, and Village Maiden in Distress. The protagonist, ofc, is silent — not because you have any real control over the dialogue, mind you.
I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve played a less inspired RPG since early childhood. Dragon Quest XI makes The Outer Worlds look like an astonishing masterpiece of depth and innovation.
The combat is cosmically bad; it’s DQ1-style "mash A through the menus" to grind and win. Luckily they added this cool new feature where the combat can play itself! At 3x speed! Wonders never cease.
There’s a “free move” combat mode that lets you move your party characters around the battlefield. You would think this would let you setup backstabs and blocks and stuff like a Tales Of game — and you would be wrong! It does nothing. Purely cosmetic timewasting.
Which is more or less what this game amounts to: the most stultifying, time-wasting take on the JRPG formula you can think of. You can literally auto-run from point A to B, take your hands off the controller, and let the game play itss bland-ass self for you. Why isn’t it just a visual novel at that point? Why have combat at all? Who knows. This series has millions of fans somewhere, apparently. Ask them.
So the combat is bad. The dialogue is drivel. But the music is truly awful. They added full orchestration for the Switch version and it’s still possibly the worst RPG score I can remember, all blaring obnoxious fanfares devoid of the emotion of the most forgettable Final Fantasy theme. Words can’t describe how much worse the MIDI versions are.
This game’s only saving grace so far are the Akira Toriyama character designs, yet the characters themselves have none of the life or animation or humor that makes the Dragon Ball and Chrono Trigger casts so memorable. They’re cardboard cut-out stand-ins for RPG types so stock they might as well just be named Fighter, Thief, and Village Maiden in Distress. The protagonist, ofc, is silent — not because you have any real control over the dialogue, mind you.
I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve played a less inspired RPG since early childhood. Dragon Quest XI makes The Outer Worlds look like an astonishing masterpiece of depth and innovation.