For as much as I love this game, I can't help but wish they had gone even harder on making a game that completely throws action-packed missions to the wayside in favor of making a cowboy slice-of-life. If I had spent 33% less time mowing down dudes and 33% more time with Mary Linton, 33% more time breaking into a slave catcher's foreclosed house, 33% more time learning about the cholera outbreak affecting one of the game's towns, I'd be even more in love with it. The guns are fun, I like them, but I think their presence could be significantly reduced without feeling like the violence has lost its thematic weight.

Not every game should be like this, of course, but Rockstar proved that they can make something interesting with all the money they pumped into this product, so I can only wonder what would've happened if they tried a little harder to break with convention.

Despite my many issues with Metroidvanias as a genre, I've always been curious about Symphony of the Night in particular not just because it's often held up as the best of its series, but also because it came out the year I was born! Idk, there's something interesting about that! Where were video games when you were born?

And when I first booted it up, I thought to myself; "yup! this sure is a video game from 1997!", it didn't explain shit, dialogue may as well have been written by ChatGPT and to call inventory management "clunky" would be an understatement on the level of my tax returns. (I am committing fraud)

Soon I saw that the game had actually aged way better than I was giving it credit for. I often hold up Ocarina Of Time as the benchmark for how well a game has aged. If a game can be 20+ years old and still fun to play now? Then it's aged very well. And Symphony of the Night might not quite be on OOT's level, but it is still fun in all the ways that matter. It definitely does throw you into the deep end with little to no explanation on how a variety of mechanics and special moves work, and it unsurprisingly has all the same fundamental issues I take with pretty much every Metroidvania (see my Dawn of Sorrow review where I suggest that every Metroidvania should steal - ironically, Ocarina Of Time 3D's Sheikah Stone hint system) but I'm still able to put myself back into the non-existent shoes of a version of me that is still a fetus and say "that's a frickin' good game!!" (Though let me just say - "hearts" representing your magic meter and not your HEALTH is an absolutely fucking asinine design decision, even for 1997. Apparently this is the case in other Castlevania games too?? What were these dudes doing??)

Symphony of the Night's visuals for the time are astonishing. Not just in its pixel art but in the many times it implements 3D stuff too like the floating books in the Long Library and so many boss models and attacks. Its soundtrack also absolutely slaps (for 66% of the game) and its fundamental gameplay and exploration is just fun. Yes, I did frequently have to consult a walkthrough (which I think is basically a necessity for any Metroidvania to be fun - especially one from 1997) because how tf was I supposed to know what to do with the Merman Statue? How tf was I supposed to know that one of the statues opens up a pathway in the Marble Gallery clock room every other minute?? BUUUT just jumping around, slashing dudes, unfurling the map of the castle and getting stronger all the while just feels great. This game gave me more of a power fantasy than any other of the genre I've played, it allowed me to feel truly busted and absolutely fucking melt some bosses (sorry Karasuman) (sorry Akmodan II) (sorry Cerberos) in the most satisfying ways. Alucard felt truly overpowered at some points, and it was great fun. Also, a particular shout-out to the SFX. Just super memorable and fun, (with the exception of basically any skeleton enemy bc wtf was up with some of those sounds, lmao) I love the louds yells that the Green Knights make when they die, the fuckin' cacophony that comes out of a Blood Zombie, I love that Alucard spends this whole game fighting off some of the most disturbing, incomprehensible horrors imaginable and the one time he screams is when he goes down on an elevator

Of course, the game has a bit of a weird difficulty curve. Because after what you think is the game's ending, the castle goes full xD random and flips up on its frickin' head!! Whoaa!! She's so crazy!! Love herr x

And this is where Symphony of the Night goes from being clearly one of the best games of all time to a "good enough" Metroidvania with an actively shit soundtrack. Spend long enough in the Reverse Colosseum or Catacombs and those 10-second loops are enough to drive any man crazy. The inverted castle is fine! But it's not great, and is a clear step down in quality from the game's first 6-or-so-hours. Story stuff just stops happening until you barrel through to the end of the game, the music becomes actively grating to listen to and man - I wish Symphony of the Night would flash up the name of the area you're in every time you re-enter because it was hard enough to keep track of all the different areas when you were the fuckin' right side-up! Now that I'm all upside-down and shit the castle just feels pretty unintuitive to explore and it's hard to ever really orient yourself! It also represents some weirdness in the difficulty curve as I just mentioned because both portions of the game start out pretty hard, and then get significantly easier as you travel around and get super overpowered. But then the inverted section throws another spanner in the works with fucking Galamoth. Holy shit. I thought this was a joke. I used 2 Elixirs, tons of other healing items, Strength AND Defence potions with over 600 health on this cunt and he just wouldn't go down! Eventually I had to just cheese him with a Shield Rod + Alucard Shield strat I learned about from a walkthrough and when I saw how much health had to melt away before me for him to fuckin' die I couldn't believe my eyes. How is this mfer in the same game as crusty ass "walk in a straight line for 5 seconds and fuckin' die" Akmodan II, pahahaha

Anyway, good ass game that holds up well. It's just that the inverted castle is a gimmick that bogs it down. Super cool concept and very impressive technically! But not actually fun to play, at least comparatively. I think most would agree that if the game just flipped the castle for like, one big last run-up to the final boss without having to travel around and explore the whole thing and get 5 key items and whatnot, it'd be better, because those first 6 hours are just goated.

Aw man, this is gonna be my longest review and hottest take in a while. When I was a kid I played the first few missions of the original Advance Wars on emulator and remember thinking it was really cool! Well, either I didn't get far enough in to see the flaws or I was just too young to have developed my critical thinking skills because damn - Advance Wars kinda sucks!

Let me be upfront here; nothing that WayForward have done with this as a remake is even remotely a problem - in fact it's about the only stuff I like about the game. The UI and menus are gorgeous, character models and animations are full of personality and the remixed music is great too. No - I don't love the vomit-green colour of the grass and in-game textures, but I find that people who complain about a remake's visuals are often among the most insufferable people in the world and I don't wanna be lumped in with them, I'll get over it, we've got bigger fish to fry.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp is a very faithful remake of the original Advance Wars 1&2 and that might be the problem because what I've realised upon revisiting these games is that they are - in my opinion very fundamentally flawed! I'm about halfway through Advance Wars 2 right now and it's just starting to feel like a total slog that I'm not sure I'll finish.

Advance Wars' AI is dumb as a box of rocks. I'm playing on "Classic" (the more difficult) mode and find that the AI never reacts to you having a unit nearing the objective. You can have an infantry unit on literally the space next to the HQ you need to capture to win the match, and they still send their units off to fight your other guys halfway across the map. Only when you begin the active process of capturing an objective does that unit become a target, which is very exploitable because you can just send infantry/mech units in to capture an objective as a decoy, knowing they'll die and then send all your tanks and other guys round the ensuing chaos to win the game. The enemy AI will also frequently attack your units with sub-optimal units. Case in point: I've just had the enemy attack my battle copter with 2 separate tanks (which are highly ineffective against battle copters), get completely destroyed on the counter-attack and THEN after letting their tanks take completely unnecessary damage, send in their anti-air unit which was IN RANGE THE WHOLE TIME to one-shot my battle copter after the fact???

Advance Wars hones in on the strategy elements moreso than its Intelligent Systems-counterpart Fire Emblem - yet you rarely ever feel like you won a match through genuine strategy, instead you feel like you won because the AI kept being fucking stupid. And yet - despite the AI being so dumb, battles - especially ones later in the game take AGES. Fire Emblem I'd say never lets its chapters take upwards of an hour or so on average, it has a pretty clean curve. Battles in Advance Wars start off at a pretty fair Fire Emblem-length, and yet they snowball like you would not believe to the point that the final battle of Advance Wars 1 took me 5 hours. This shit goes from feeling like Fire Emblem to Civilization real quick, it's astonishing how quickly the average battle length spirals out of control, and this didn't take me 5 hours because I had to keep resetting or anything! I don't know if I was doing something hugely wrong but I was only playing the game in the way that made sense and yeah, I did win! But it took me 5 HOURS!

(The battle just before that also took about 3, so.)

Advance Wars is like rock, paper, scissors if there were 8 choices and 5 of those choices only interacted specifically with 4 of those other choices and the remaining choices had extremely niche and specific interactions with everything else and also there were terrain bonuses and special powers and over 50% of the game's maps threw this annoying ass fucking fog of war at you that further slowed the game's pace to a halt and also felt like it eliminated a lot of the strategy in the game and instead just had you fuckin firing blindly in the dark for half an hour trying to find the bastard-ass rocket unit that's been firing on you from 6 spaces away the whole time

It does not tell you what the opponent's CO power does when they use them on you, you only find out what they do once you play as them yourselves late into AW1 or 2 (when that knowledge has long stopped being useful) and it poorly communicates which unit is attacking you by frequently leaving the camera on the unit which has just moved while another unit is attacking you - frequently leaving me in moments of utter confusion where I could swear an artillery unit had just moved and attacked me in the same turn. It is a very complex game that never feels particularly deep. It never justifies just how many different units and niche interactions there are, partially because so many mechanics are exactly that - niche and forgettable and partially because you win almost every match by exploiting the dumbass AI!

Late in Advance Wars 1, when former enemy officer Eagle and literal child protagonist Andy are celebrating a victory, Eagle tells Andy they should "spar" again sometime.

...Spar...?

...What the fuck do you mean...Spar? When a helicopter bursts into flames and explodes with screaming men inside it, is he aware of what's happening? He does realise what war is and what it entails, right? Why is he suggesting "sparring" with the game's child protagonist as if sending men to their deaths in large-scale armed combat is a fucking anime training montage? Why does every Japanese game lately seem to have dialogue like this? Those are people, with guns and explosives, Eagle! You fucking freak! Why has everything gotta be so fucking anime all the time?? It's POISON!!! IT'S BRAINROT I TELL YOU!!! BRAINROT!!!!!!!!!

The world of Advance Wars is canonically called "Wars World". Clearly, the biggest loser in this review is me, who has written up this entirely-too-lengthy diatribe about a videogame where anime teens wage literal war against eachother in a place called "Wars World." Fucking Wars World. Genuinely, I can not stop thinking about the ramifications of a place called "Wars World" that seems to exist for the sole purpose of being a place where wars happen.

By the way - what's the deal with the voice acting? Like, it's fine don't get me wrong but why are characters only ever saying 30-40% of what's on-screen at most? I understand having a budget or time constraints but like, none of the VOs who got into their studios or whatever had the time at any point to just read all of the dialogue in any given textbox? This isn't like a Fire Emblem situation where they're using grunts or noises to actively convey the characters' emotions consistently because every character has like, 2 noises max and the lines/words that they do choose to read out I just find really weird! I don't know how else to describe it, you'd have to see it for yourself! It's just really weird what they did and did not record! The plot fucking sucks by the way! I played through the entire first game and still genuinely have no idea what happened! It's a mess and it feels like they barely even tried!

I'm really disappointed to return to Advance Wars and think it's actually pretty bad. I wanna reiterate that I don't think much of the fault lies with WayForward - who inject a lot of personality and charm into this thing, and just faithfully recreated what I think is a deeply flawed pair of games. I wanted to like it a lot more because I love its vibe and aesthetic but damn, I only have so much time on this beautiful green planet, bro. I can only spend so much of it exploiting AI and mashing through mid-map stalemates in fuckin Wars World for hours on end. I'm gonna go outside and see if I can get my ass ate

An extremely cool and original game that is also just not my thing at all, I really don't have the patience for more narrative-driven, "explore and point and click at stuff to get plot details" kinda games, I'm one of those freaks who plays games for the gameplay. With this in mind, it's impressive how much Outer Wilds kept pulling me back in! I kept putting the game down saying to myself "eh, not for me" and yet still getting the itch to come back and try exploring somewhere new.

I couldn't quite finish it, but I appreciate it and get how it's so beloved. I do think the game does a pretty bad job of tutorialising space flight - which is far more complicated and hard to get to grips with than it first presents, and the game can be quite sluggish and a bit meandering with how much time you spend travelling between planets or combing back over areas you've already explored to see if there's anything you've missed - but this game has an undeniable mystique that makes exploring it really tantalising. Even without finishing, I came across tons of fascinating things that made me wanna discover more - just in a slightly snappier, less text-heavy version of this game that won't ever, and frankly probably shouldn't ever exist.

For the first hour or so of gameplay, I was really charmed by this game and was ready to give it the "10/10 Game Freak better take some notes, Capcom is running laps around you" rating, but then the honeymoon period started to wear off and I was left with a JRPG that does some things better than Pokemon while doing other things worse than Pokemon. This is less of a "this is Legends Arceus but good" situation and more of a "this is a 7/10 but hey at least the graphics look nice" thing.

This game does do a lot of good things! The catching gameplay loop is really satisfying and I loved hunting for eggs like it was Easter Sunday just so I could hatch and finagle several overpowered dragons using the Rite of Channeling system. Unlike Legends Arceus, the graphics don't look like shit and there's a lot of varied locations to run around in. The battle system has a lot of little things and mechanics that make it feel like you're playing a turn-based Monster Hunter game rather than a Pokemon ROM hack with Monster Hunter characters awkwardly placed in there, with each random encounter feeling like a boss battle as you're gradually wearing these monsters down. Equipment progression is always fun and requires a lot of monster part harvesting and satisfies the portion of my brain that likes swinging giant swords at things and material crafting more giant swords out of the things I swung my giant sword at.

Alas, all is not well in Monstie paradise. Once you endure the frankly terrible English voice acting for long enough before finally relenting and switching to the Japanese track, that's when you start to notice that, in handheld mode, this game is devouring your battery faster than Breath of the Wild, so check "not very optimized for the system it's on" off the list.

You're like "yeah, okay I can live with that" but as the hours wear on, you start to notice that all of the level layouts are starting to blend into each other and you're starting to memorize the layouts of all the so-called randomized monster dens. You want to hunt for more eggs and genes, but then you're starting to blaze through these dens as fast as you can, because not only are the dungeon layouts monotonous, but the random encounters are too.

Ah yes, the battle system. Fighting monsters in this game is equal parts a breath of fresh air for someone who's well acquainted with the Pokemon game mechanics and, miraculously, also very tedious. While there is an elemental attack system in place (one that will screw you over when you get to the snow level and your assigned partner has an Ice-type monster doing piss-poor damage against other Ice-types thanks for nothing Anivia), the main focus is the Rock-Paper-Scissors format where you try to gauge how your opponent will attack and try to choose the stronger attack pattern for the best parries and counterattacks. Here's hoping you have a good memory or a helpful guide open because the game will penalize you if you forget which monsters use what and they'll often change what types of attacks they use based on certain battle conditions.

On top of all of this, your average random encounter takes about 20 turns to beat (it IS a Monster Hunter game after all) with each monster feeling like a damage sponge as they just wait for you to make one little mistake in type input. I do like that they tried something new and it does feel unique, but there were also quite a few moments where I was spamming a Monstie with Roar because I just did not want to be bothered with the random spawns in front of me. I didn't hate the battle system but I had to be in the mood for it, y'know?

As for the story, it's neither here nor there. You are a blank slate protagonist that sometimes changes facial expressions while your bootleg Jibanyan is narrating everything and as you make your way through the world completely mute save for screaming battle grunts, you befriend a bunch of battle companions who range from Fun to Kyle. Soon you hatch and bond with a cursed/blessed/blursed Rathalos and, even if you barely use this guy in battle, the game will treat him as your Toothless in every cutscene as you protect him from persecution just because he sometimes goes Hulk Mode and nearly kills people a couple times.

At first you think the game's core messages are "don't kill a newborn monster just because an ancient tablet says that they're the harbringer of destruction and they're born with powerful energies that they have to learn to control when they're creatures with thoughts and feelings like you" and "don't go seeking revenge on a creature that was just acting like an animal even if they killed one of your loved ones" as you hang out with your bro Ratha and a character that went through this arc in the first Stories game, but then this lesson gets kinda thrown out the window when the final boss is also a newborn monster that an ancient tablet says is a harbringer of destruction and one that was responsible for the death of a loved one. Whoops?

There's also a plot twist and an apocalypse death cult, but they're barely in the game and are just there to have a stoic guy go all anime crazy eyed and start screaming about forging a new world while a monster starts turning the landscape into the pages of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

It's all worth it in the end - silly writing and the destruction of plot themes aside - because the final boss battle in this game is spectacular. It's brutal, it took me a couple of tries to beat, and requires constant vigilance of what your entire party is doing at all times and it rules. Everything in this game got payoff in this one moment and made the whole journey worth it, even if after the credits rolled, I was like "yeah I really don't like Kyle".

Ah well, once you get past the lukewarm story, the lukewarm cast, the lukewarm battle system, and the lukewarm dungeon designs, this game still satisfied that itch to catch them all in a game that doesn't have the Pokemon mechanics. Even if this game's core mechanic also has the shittiest little mascot saying "Mmm, pretty stinky don't you thinky?" after he sniffs something that was recently under a dragon's ass.

Aside from Nintendo Land and possibly Super Mario Maker, Star Fox Guard is the first Wii U game I’ve played that actually feels designed for the gamepad. I'm not usually a fan of the 'Tower Defense' genre but the second screen creates a level of engagement and tension to it here beyond just setting up turrets. With how quick and bulky the enemies can be, both strategy and reflexes come in to play with placing and switching the cameras. The unusual control scheme makes it nearly impossible to port to other systems but hopefully it gets recognition some day as a unique take on the RTS format.

How close can you toe the line of homage without falling completely into plagiarism? While hard to ignore the obvious influences that Kojima and his crew take inspiration from, the gorgeous and colorful 16-bit pixel art of Snatcher is able to create a path of its own into the cyberpunk genre by offering a tonal deviation from the gritty dystopic movies it aesthetically steals from into vibrant comic book territory filled with police procedural twists and turns and injected with just enough japanese melodrama.

Many indie games try their best to recreate the look of those old japanese PC-98 and MSX games, but playing Snatcher nowadays it becomes clear that achieving such an identity extended past just replicating its 16-bit sprite work and was instead a byproduct of the videogame technology and anime cultural zeitgeist that permeated so much of the 80s/90s Japan and filled Snatcher with its color, sound and style, a magnum opus of what can only be now considered a lost art. Despite how static Snatcher can be at points, the power of the Sega CD turns every screen a joy to look at and listen to, making the case for why VNs are a venue to take in the realm of videogames.

Thankfully, at this point in time a not so confident as he is now Kojima was at the helm of the project, managing to restrain his obssessive nerdisms into the background and instead utilizing the premise of his cinema aspirations to create a much more subdued and logically competent thriller that gamifies Blade Runner and takes advantage of the medium of interactivity to immerse the player in clever detective work and satisfying plot point progression in ways film never could. The simple choice of being able to call your wife on the phone and talk about your day and feelings does more for the universe of Snatcher than whatever post 90s Kojima lore dump ever could.

It isn't without it's problems. Much of its "deductive puzzle solving" solely consists of exhausting every combination of "look" and "investigate" commands until the characters decide it's time to advance, the rushed and campy ending would have actually greatly benefited from Kojima's tendency to tie in world socioeconomical politics with his characters personal struggles which would have more strongly cemented Snatcher's themes of human connection and distrust, and the constant forceful "flirt" with every single woman (and child) that shows up on the screen quickly goes from being mildly amusing to straight up creepy. Still, the self awareness and sense of humor keeps things light and fun, and Snatcher's addition to the canon of japanese art that has its finger on the pulse of modern technology makes this a must for Kojima fans. Snatcher 2 would be a joy to witness, though I doubt they could ever manage to recreate the 90s in such a fashion.