The first Final Fantasy blew my mind. Maybe it’s because it’s the first Final Fantasy game I’ve ever played, maybe it’s because it’s the first RPG I’ve played on the NES that physically shows your characters fighting the enemy rather than using the classic 1st-person view, maybe it’s because of that stupid flying boat I’m now obsessed with. Who knows. But what I do know, is that Final Fantasy I is a fucking AWESOME game that has withstood the sands of time beautifully. Throughout this review, I will be comparing Final Fantasy with other NES RPGs I have played, which is just Dragon Warrior (1986/1989) and MOTHER (1989).

I played the game on my NES and had absolutely no issues with lack of save points, enemy/boss difficulty, and getting around to figure out what to do next. The manual for Final Fantasy 1 is insanely kind, going above and beyond what the already jampacked manuals for the time usually had. Again, the manual, not the guidebook, gives the player information for where to go until you discover the airship. That’s pretty much the end game, with help knowing the best weapons and places to go until that point. The manual of course also includes all the information for enemy, weapon, and armor stats, and a map of the whole area to boot. Final Fantasy gameplay wise is also just very, very player-friendly, with little need to ever grind if you focus on destroying every group you run into. In fact, I would argue you will quickly become OVERpowered if you focus on eliminating everyone you run into. With Dragon Warrior and MOTHER, I definitely had to put aside time just to level up between bosses, while Final Fantasy seemed to always lead me to be just the right level at just the right time, even when running away from a lot of the bigger groups.

Final Fantasy is a gorgeous game on the NES, even including cutscenes and a credit roll, something I don’t think I’ve ever seen on a 3rd-generation game (though I still have lots to check-out!). The music is really impressive too, with a very large variety that I can think back on fondly (though my wife eventually had me mute the TV because she couldn’t stand it lmao). I loved all the effort put into both the visuals and music in this game, and appreciated even the little things we might not think much about today, such as being able to change weapons and visibly see your change (I love the Coral Sword for being a bright hot pink hehe), the cute little dance after beating an enemy, large and varied groups of monsters to fight against, and the awesome and varied transportation you unlock throughout that only helps you move faster and faster! That’s what’s great about the original Final Fantasy, it really feels like a great video game conversion of DND. You pick who you want in your party, get to name them, create little stories in your head, and play them through a fairly open story that you can adjust to fit in a way you may prefer. My party had two fighters, a thief, and a red mage. I drew my own interpretations of them which you can see here!

My biggest complaint with Final Fantasy is that a bunch of the spells and magic are just plain broken in the game, so stuff like mages not being able to raise their intelligence and certain spells simply not working was a bit frustrating, but I heard they fixed that in later adaptations, so that’s good! Sadly, it did affect my playthrough, so I gotta dock some points towards the game for that as it was a bit annoying, and had me restart from my original team of fighter, thief, white mage, and black mage.

I feel there’s so much more I could say about Final Fantasy I, but I feel I’ve already rambled enough. It’s truly a wonderful experience and has so many fun visual elements that I felt were missing in Dragon Warrior and MOTHER. MOTHER came out after Final Fantasy I, and I’ve never played Dragon Quest/Warrior II though which is a NES/Famicom RPG with a party system that came out a year or so before Final Fantasy I, so that might be a more fair comparison, but oh well! This is the experience I have so my review is going to play off of that! If you’re looking for a 3rd-gen RPG to get started with, Final Fantasy I has to be the most player friendly I’ve ever played, and I can’t recommend it enough!


4.5/5

A game that gets progressively better with each chapter imo. At first I wasn't quite sold out on it, modifying the car was intimidating, the random encounters on the map seemed annoying and loading time even more. But then you start to get it and look forward for more chances of getting better parts. Even the loading times sometimes work in favor of the game as it pulls some of the most stylish loading screens of the ps1.

And then there's the writing... It's hard to explain, it takes its racing aesthetic very seriously and is even poetic at times, but can be also very funny, its the kind of thing you could only see in a game of this era I guess. By the end I really feel in love with its characters and unique style. And the surreality of its main plot also works in its favor in my opinion.

jump to the bottom of this review for the optimal physics settings. game is ass without them. thank me later

frustratingly close to being the best sonic game ever. with proper momentum there would be little contest, but thankfully the freeflowing open world promotes speed and precision above all else. if you're playing the game as it's intended you won't really ever be standing still, and thanks to sonic's, well... speed - frontiers may be the only open world game in the past ten or more years to actually justify its own vastness

regardless, the lack of momentum is still a problem during the few sections that are strictly 2d. i have no idea why there are levels that depend on inertia in a game where your character literally grinds himself to a halt every time you're not holding forward. all of this could be fixed if sonic only stopped after gradually losing speed or when holding a braking button or something, but because nothing like that is in place there's a few especially jarring sequences here and there

momentum aside, my only other complaint is the deceptive progression and noticeable lack of budget. i was really eager to see all five islands and what kinds of biomes they'd cover or what other characters may pop up. unfortunately the last two are pretty disingenuously labeled. think of the actual zone count as 3.5 and you wont be too underwhelmed - the first three are pretty massive areas anyway. i just wanted more. it's been a while since i've played a 30+ hour game that i didn't want to end

i'm incredibly eager to see what comes next. i hope sonic team picks up on frontiers' slack and puts out the actual best game in the franchise next time

optimal settings:

starting speed: 60
initial boost speed: 90
turning speed: 100
boost turning speed: 20
top speed: 100
steering sensitivity: 100
acceleration: 50
bounce height: 100

the most important things here are the third, fourth, and sixth options. sonic steers like a fucking tank otherwise. i'd recommend dropping the camera distance to 40 and upping its speed to 70ish but that's up to preference

edit: with the update this all stays the same. you'll just want to also turn deceleration completely off and keep the deceleration rate somewhere around 90 to 100 depending on what you prefer. i'm not a fan of stopping completely on a dime, but anything below 90 gets real stupid real fast

The technical minutes of a remaster like this, primarily the addition of 60 fps, provides an oddly significant reinforcement of the original gameplay mechanisms that many other remasters of this level don't often contribute (righteously in most cases given the precariousness of preserving original elements) for other games. Although the possibilities of the movement system are also found in the Nintendo 64 version, 60 fps, perhaps in some ways placebo, comes off as a a direct request to the player to take risks in and embrace enemy or platform encounters via side flips or triple jumps. It, then, further contrasts the structure of the original against the modern class of 3D platformers which often limit its movement possibilities to a double jump (or, in some cases, double jump and hover) model. Although this should not necessarily be considered a "regression" given the necessities of, say, Psychonauts 1/2 to express its themes in a more guided and linear fashion, what is found here exemplifies a profoundly complex relationship between movement and level design which, even today, is rarely matched. Each level pathway, even though carefully designed and meant to explicitly signal in certain cases the necessity of using advanced movement, comes across as shortcuts found out of personal experimentation which feel like secrets not meant to be shared.

The level redesigns promised in marketing materials ask a bigger question of what a blend of classic and modern visuals should appear in the generation of ray tracing, which I can't answer with personal experience since I preferred to go with the original level textures (as the new textures are, for now, unfinished). Yet, passively observing the new environments still finds a bucking of re-release traditions in either remaking games from scratch or remastering assets without providing a major visual overhaul. In the case of render96, environments adhere to the look of Super Mario 64 render materials provided in 90s gaming magazines, primarily a plastic, yet "realistic" apperance with ray tracing adding reflections and detailed shadows. An analogy for this classic-modern visual blend may be "retro HD" JRPGs such as Octopath Traveler. However, whereas the framing of Octopath's graphics perhaps comes from a desire to refresh JRPGs for a new generation unaccostomed to their antecedents, with god rays and shadows that dominate appearance over 16 bit sprites, render96 desires to visit rose-tinted memories of game and gameplay, memories which often blended the stark amount of suspension of disbelief within childhood and marketing materials which promised revolutions in digital realities, and "realize" such memories. The polygonal and low-res textures of some environments aren't forgone even when placed alongside pinpoint shadow and lighting texture, almost as if going an inch forward in fidelity would dissolve the realistic-plastic world that, to the mind, is the closest to engaging in a simulacra of childhood daydreams. What's seen creates a sense of wonder regarding if future remasters, including those that will be made after numerous fan decompilations are completed, should, instead of "updating" their visual appearance, look at the implicit desire to find Gestalt in polygonal textures and leave such Gestalt in place even as the gap feels almost inches away from being closed.

https://i.imgur.com/AbGZYCb.png
Game's heavier than a honey baked ham!!!
For every moment in Yakuza 5 that lead me into thinking I was playing an untamed vortex of passion and uncompromised vision, there were two-to-five other uncomplimentary moments that felt like spinning plates and taking the meandering narrative for walkies. Spreads its roots far & wide across so many ideas and gameplay concepts that, on paper, scans as a maximalist daydream I'd love to lose myself in, but all of it feels so perfunctory and checklisty. Fifty different minigames to micromanage and level up in individually to access Harder Levels of said minigames - - - Vidcon Gospel since time immemoria but my patience has limits :(

Haruka's chapter was probably my personal standout, if only with thanks to how vastly different her story played to any character to come before. The rhythm battles were so fun albeit with the game's slim tracklist, and her substories took on a refreshing dynamic too. The combat in these games has never impressed me but I'd much rather play an unimpressive rhythm game than a brawler I've lost heart in. From a narrative perspective, it is infuriatingly complacent with the practices Japanese idol industry in a way I find legitimately toothless in a series that tends to dedicate fisticuffs to rooting out corruption and it makes Haruka's characterisation weaker as a result.
When came the Shinada chapter I was desperately hoping the end credits would finally begin to roll, which is a shame because he and Koichi's dynamic is probably my favourite spark of character chemistry in the entire series.

I in complete honesty couldn't tell you a single thing that happened in the final hours. This was a game I had started months ago and it rather hilariously demanded for me to recall with perfect clarity a cloak and dagger conspiracy that happened in the initial chapters. The overarching story was a wash for me but I much preferred when the leading cast were locked in their own little bubbles, & exploring their own vignettes about dreams lost & worth aspiring 4. Truly believe that in another world, this would have been a younger me's One Playstation 3 Game For The Month and I'd have completely melted into it - but sadly, I had to play this in incredibly granular sessions that largely felt like clocking in for community service.

GeoGuessr is the greatest feat achieved in games for reasons entirely external to the game itself. I think that's something realised by all its players on a (sub)subconscious level, but is rarely mentioned in discourse about the game, or even its constituent parts. It exists only because of an incomprehensible amount of photographic data being readily available for almost anyone on Earth to use. And this access is borderline mundane to us, alongside so much borne of the Internet age.

That I can get live information on traffic and see the outside of a restaurant across town in seconds is already dumbfounding on its own. However, I could do that for anyplace, anywhere on the globe. We have this asset which lets us see anywhere on the entire planet in crystal clarity, and instead of exploring the sheer boundlessness of our world, we use it for our local sphere the vast, vast majority of the time. I can see a dirt road in the middle of the Australian outback with the same amount of effort I consistently put towards checking for street parking near my doctor's office.

Where GeoGuessr excels is in showing you an elsewhere without requiring input. The sheer near-infinity of possibilities in global exploration vis-à-vis Google Street View can instill a decision paralysis, even when actually committing to a choice. The local sphere pulls even here not as a magnet to your present place, but to one starkly similar or dissimilar. And in seeking, however inadvertently, a (perhaps misguided and miscalculated) maximal boon of knowledge and culture and worldliness, there is that gravitation to the noteworthy. Similarly, there is a repulsion from the non-place, defined by Marc Augé as an anthropological space of transience and anonymity. This dissection of the world into places and non-places is perhaps semantically valueless, but it is a truth as, in being dropped into a non-place, there is a feeling of disappointment because one's perceived worldliness does not expand. The non-place thus remains necessarily transient and anonymising as this information of the non-place remains bounded to the non-place; there will not be talk around of the globe of a random Albanian fence post, or the interior of a suburban shopping centre in a town of 50,000. This is, in part, due to perceived worldliness being denoted by visitation to places of supposed import. In contradistinction and in theory, one's worldly knowledge should be the sum of familiarity with non-places distant from actualised places, as non-places are most void of knowledge. Through memetics and mimesis, places of import can already be, in essence, visited without physical travel, but a non-place cannot. Yet with GeoGuessr, they can be.

As mentioned above, GeoGuessr shows its players an elsewhere determined at random from an enormity of data (unless one plays a fixed map). I am equally as likely to land in Jardin des Tuileries or Ngorongoro Crater as I am to be placed on a barren strip of highway in Uruguay. In the case of the latter, perceived worldliness approaches uselessness compared to an understanding of non-places. This is due, in large part, to the identifying features of a space meant for anonymity. In the absence of signifiers we might know through cultural osmosis, the mundane becomes an invaluable asset. This is multiplied exponentially by how transient the non-place is. A highway, as a non-place, is identified with ease should it be near a roadsign indicating distance and relation to real places. Increasing obfuscation of the relation to actual places renders the non-place more anonymous and unknowable. Consider an approximated heirarchy of identifiers in GeoGuessr: place label, landmark, flag, TLD, language, country telephone code, architecture, license plate, street sign, flora, cars, utility pole, bollard, resolution, relation to sun, road composition. Some of these are considered of greater value than others in determining (and establishing) a place due to their applicability to a specific place (or non-place).

By being thrown into a non-place, that hyper-specific knowledge of no real value (for the vast, vast majority of the population) becomes essential in achieving a high score. And even without it, locating a place or non-place, however approximated, remains fun as one learns deliberately of subconsciously those signifiers. Consider and compare the play of an amateur entertainer, a speedrunner, and the high-scoring player. They play the game with vastly different knowledge and technique, and indeed for very different purposes. But they're all having fun and honing their skill while doing so. They are all analysing the properties of the non-place to render it into a place.

What I am long-windedly trying to convey is that GeoGuessr, as an extension of Street View, demonstrates the (un)knowability of the world in a way allowed only by our attempts to make it known. In a cynical sense, corporations try to make the world knowable for its exploitation. Optimistically, in quantifying what is or can be known, we are made aware of how much we do not know, and how much there is left to know. In its random presentation and in asking the player to locate themselves, GeoGuessr implores us to consider the non-places of the world as places unto themselves.

Minus one star for increasing feature bloat and the effective need to subscribe. If the reduction of value for something so miraculous by something so petty doesn't show you how underappreciated our contemporary miracles are, nothing will.

Underwurlde received lots of glowing reviews when it came out. Sometimes even if you dislike an older game, you can still see why it was great at the time. With Underwurlde, I just can’t see it at all.

This is another maze-like game. There are 600 squares so without a guide there is little hope. You need to find three guardians and kill them, but each one needs a different weapon to defeat it, so you’ll need to find them first. Then you have to reach one of the exits at the top of the map (or you can always head down to kill more enemies for points.

The biggest issue with Underwurlde are the controls. The jumping in this game is not a controlled jump. You’re turned into some kind of frog-like thing and you leap in a massic arc across half the screen. As the screen doesn’t scroll, this means some jumps are completely blind, and any large fall will kill you. In the castle area of the map, you need to jump upwards, so you’ll often try to position yourself for a precise jump, however if you go too close to the edge, Sabreman will jump downwards. Moving around is incredibly frustrating.

There are also a ton of enemies flying about. Before you get your first weapon, you can’t defeat them. At first it seems lucky that enemies don’t damage you, however they instead knock you around, causing you to fall and die. There are sections where you’re riding a bubble upwards, being hounded by loads of respawning enemies and one touch will knock you down. To make matters worse, your weapon fires in random directions (they roughly go the way you’re facing, but will go upwards and downward on their own). There’s a good reason why there is an option for “no enemies” in the cheats.

In the cavern area, Sabreman will latch himself to a rope. You can shimmy downwards and move left and right a bit. If an enemy hits you, or you bash into the side of a platform, you’ll fall and die. Sometimes a stalactite will fall down so you’ll have to swing sideways to dodge. Sometimes this happens the moment you latch to the ceiling, so it’s an instant unavoidable death.

Underwurlde is a game filled with cheap deaths, terrible controls, platforming into areas blindly and all while trying to navigate an overly large maze. A truly terrible game.

For completion, I killed the three guardians, escaped the maze and completed the snapshots. The one where you have to descend quickly while invulnerability gems last much longer is great fun as you get to throw yourself down giant holes.

Our flames are our own, and they burn as one.

Where to begin here… Well, I’ve been a Final Fantasy fan for most of my life. I used to stare into the Wal-Mart display case wishing we could afford a copy of FFVII. My brother and I rented FFVIII from Blockbuster, and we would restart our PS1 to watch the opening movie over and over—so much so that we had to buy our rented copy from Blockbuster. My dad wasn’t too happy with that. I’d watch in awe as my brother played FFX… I bought Dragon Quest VIII for the FFXII demo… anyway, you get it. It’s no secret that, with the exception of VII Remake, many think Final Fantasy has lost its way during the post-PS2 years. In my eyes, FFXVI would be the game to change that. A dream team of Square Enix veterans, a strong concept, a new platform… All of the cards were on the table, and I absolutely could not wait to play this. Does FFXVI live up to its namesake?

Well… if I had to describe this game in a single word, it would be “troubled.” It’s like someone at Square Enix tried to serve you the most delicious meal they’ve ever made, but your server dropped your food on the floor, slipped in it, and served it to you anyway. If you don’t stop and think about it too much, your food tastes really good—I mean, really good—but something is missing. I just wish it hadn’t been dropped in the first place. I would’ve really liked to eat my food without compromise. That’s what playing FFXVI is like. A series of half-measures more disparate than they should be. When they work in tandem to form a whole, the game is capable of some of the most awe-inspiring and emotionally resonant sequences this franchise has ever known. When they don’t, well…

Let’s get this out of the way right here: this was billed as FF’s first action title, but it’s neither an action game or an RPG. It’s somewhere in the middle and isn’t fully accomplished at capturing either genre. Combat feels extremely fluid and competently captures the spectacle that director Naoki Yoshida is known for. As for the RPG elements, there are “stats,” but you get the feeling that your level is more of a story progress bar than anything else. In fact, I left the game feeling like the only Eikon ability sets that aren’t phoned in are Titan and Odin. The Odin toolkit did a lot to win me back over, but Odin is also the only Eikon with abilities working in tandem—it feels like a classic Final Fantasy job change. There are numerous Eikon pairings that work well together and, I expect, numerous others that I hadn’t even considered. But again, it’s a half-measure. With only 6 equippable Eikon abilities at a time, a low variety of basic abilities, and the baffling absence of a buff/debuff/elemental weakness system, your options will be kind of limited regardless of how competent you are at Eikon synergy. You’d better enjoy doing the same things over, and over, and over if you’re going to get through this 70 hour juggernaut. Oh, and don’t expect anything from the game’s completely underbaked crafting system.

I’ve played games for 29 years, and FFXVI has the worst pacing I’ve ever encountered. Maybe that’s my fault, since I always try to 100% every game I commit to finishing, but no Final Fantasy game should punish the player for trying to see it to its fullest extent. This series is known the world over for its imaginative, thrilling storytelling, its striking characterizations, and its attention to detail. You’d never know that if FFXVI was your first Final Fantasy game. The game is constantly bookending its most powerful setpieces (which, in a vacuum, represent some of the highest highs in franchise history) with MMO quest design and low-energy NPC writing that, quite simply, don’t belong in this game. Like most of this thing, the concept here was a strong one—world-shaking battles between gods that leave smaller-scale everyday struggles in their wake. In practice, much of the game’s optional content brushes against its more skillfully executed components. You get the sense that Creative Business Unit III was just as bored by implementing these quests as we are playing them. I’m suspecting that the team wanted to make FFXVI a tightly executed 20 hours, but Square Enix’s top brass wouldn’t let them. “You can’t have a 20-hour mainline FF game!” This might be the only game in existence that had too much in the oven.

To put all of this another way, an old friend once recommended I read the Thomas Ligotti short story collection, Teatro Grottesco. It was terrifying, but not for the reasons you’d generally expect. Each of those stories felt like I was watching them unfold through a filthy glass window, like I could still see what was happening but there was a degree of separation preventing me from fully stepping inside Ligotti’s world. It’s the same case here. You might be thrilled by FFXVI’s spectacular Eikon battles or taken with its patient, meticulous portrayal of key players like Clive, Joshua, Jill, and Dion. Even with that in mind, I felt like I was outside of that dirty glass window at almost every turn. The game simply won’t let you inside unless you take every last one of its undeveloped elements as it is, never asking for more from one of the most storied franchises in gaming.

Who knows? Maybe I just need some distance from FFXVI. I enjoyed this plenty, but returning to it someday with a clearer picture of what it is might be to my benefit. For now, I’m happily locking this one up.

i was like 5 years old when i first heard Californication. it made me bug my parents for years to get guitar lessons just to learn how to play it. i kinda did! i recorded a scuffed version of the Can't Stop video with my brother (and a camcorder). the Californication video, at least nowadays, represents to me an idealization of video game aesthetics in a musical dreamscape. music videos of this era tend to be very surreal; the fake game the band was in was just an expression of that trend, but it still easily captured my mind.

the video does not represent a videogame that makes sense. at all. it breaks free from any mechanics and the sense of player input because it's CGI, and it was made with that in mind - not with the intent to create a simulacrum of a videogame. it made me, as a child, go insane about how this music video would work as a real game. even when i was a little kid, it didn't make any sense at all! but it was one of the main things that made me think about how i see games.

yunno, i thought about how those very contextually sensitive animations playing while Flea dodges and jumps around LA people wouldn't make sense in a game played with a controller. "not even GTA can do this!", i thought. that's what made it so dreamlike - the MV emulates videogame aesthetic and UI with graphics that didn't make sense in any console at the time and completely incoherent "gameplay". it's how it feels to dream that you're inside a game.

transforming this into even a slightly playable game, as neat as it is, can't evoke the same feelings that the MV does. the detailed minimap, slightly freeform sections, and the lack of the LA cityscape and iconography make this game too "real". it can't exist. it's based on something that is remarkable specifically because it doesn't exist.

but like, this is still good though. cool effort! just made me think a bit.

Spark is cute: Endlessly huge and impressive in scope for a mostly 1-person project developed in such a short time. And it perfectly synthesizes Sonic's speed and platforming into a barrage of other 16-bit action flavors in a way that flows and pleases without a bump in the road. It has a ton of charming homemade anime cut-ins, loads of recognizeable setpeices from SEGA/Treasure/HAL projects, and a solid, well-fitting soundtrack.

It's also too long and - to be blunt, - braindead.

Spark gets speed and action feel right, and it's always shooting new things at you, but the game loop gets way too easy and repetitive too quick. Even though stage hazards and enemies change up constantly, the way you have to engage with them hardly matters. 10 minutes runtime per stage in a 16+ stage game is fucking obscene. Bosses don't dish enough heat to feel meaningfully fun. It's like if you maxed out all the things that make Sonic with good with all the things that make... Kirby bad, of all things?

Pacing is critical to these Sonic-style platformers - hell, even the best 2D Sonic games sometimes overstay their welcome. I love 3K, but it's got a few too many Zones that go on for ages while testing your patience. The trade-off is that each level is such a distinctly-experienced world, with land curvature and stage gimmicks that make you feel Sonic's gravity and presence in totally unique ways: The sound, sights, challenges and automation give even the weakest moments a strong identity and high memorability.

But Spark? I honestly couldn't tell you what makes one level different than another. It all blends together. I remember a lot of city, snow, factory and sewer stages, but couldn't give you a good timeline of how they connected, how they tethered from a 'symphonic' point of view, etc. A repetitive game loop can still be fun, but these high-energy games take a lot of wind out of me, and I need a good return on mental investment. It's different in Kirby when you're mostly shutting your brain off and moving around at a brisk jog, doing a few things here and there. But I can't watch this clown bounce around like a pinball for more than 15 minutes without feeling like I need some fat to chew, get my drift?

I guess what I'm trying to say is, too much candy will destroy your fucking gums

I just find it amusing that the classic Sonic game with the time travel gimmick is so chronologically confusing. Due to being developed at the same time, Sonic CD was released after Sonic 2 but takes place before it, and seems a lot closer in graphical style to the original game!

Anyway, this makes a really interesting foil to Sonic 2 because it tries a lot of different ideas both for better and worse, the most obvious one being the time-travel mechanic. Being able to travel backwards and forwards in time means lots of additional content (four different variations of each stage!), and the optional goal of destroying machines in the past that will change the future for the better adds some replay value to what is actually a pretty easy base game. Through this format, Sonic CD casts itself as a time/score attack game, where each individual stage is short and relatively easy but you're encouraged to try them again and again, and rewarded with different content and a slightly different ending once you get good enough.

However, the execution is slightly off here: playing simply to get through the game is a pretty bland and frictionless experience, while trying to get the good ending requires tedious combing through levels trying to find the right machine to destroy, and there is very little middle ground between these two experiences of the game. By contrast, Sonic 2 lacks any such overarching gimmick but has much tighter level design, more interesting zones, and offers an experience with just the right amount of difficulty (except for Metropolis Zone, screw that).

Sonic CD does have one aspect that it excels in though, and that's the bosses. They're far more creative than anything in previous Sonic games, and almost none of them fall into the category of "figure out attack pattern, hit boss X number of times, profit". The two highlights for me are a pinball-themed boss (Sonic Spinball without the fluff and with better physics!), and a thematically-appropriate straight-up footrace against Metal Sonic which you simply win by getting to the end of the stage first!

I'd personally rank this slightly below Sonic 2 but it's still firmly in the "very good" category. However, the fact that Sonic CD was by far the best-received and best-selling game on the Sega CD was perhaps a warning sign that foreshadowed Sega losing more and more ground in the console wars with each successive generation. Oh, to find the right machine to break in the past to save this franchise from the bad future...

Sonic's story independently might be the best game in the whole series - near-perfect pacing, back-to-back fantastic level concepts, a thrilling sense of adrenaline, so much joy to be had in the vocal deliveries and iconic lines, and the best video game soundtrack ever performed.

Sonic's friend's stories could be better - not primarily because of the gameplay, but because of the overworld/story padding. They each only get about 15 minutes of gameplay between them, but they all took over an hour each because you're re-watching all these scenes you've already seen. It was really fatiguing fighting Chaos 4 a total of three times (all while Redream fucked up the floor textures and triggered my acrophobia, ewww). But believe me, I do like playing as all of them, one way or another.

I'm not a remake-obsessed guy but if Adventure ever did get revisited, I'd want them to go the extra mile with these other character's stories - change up the dialogue, do more to reflect how they're experiencing these events from their POV, maybe add in more inner-monologue, definitely make the gameplay sections a little meatier and difficult too.

Sonic >>>>>> Amy > Knuckles = E-102 Gamma > Tails >>>>>> Big

The Brainworms Got Me And I Will Absolutely Be Playing Sonic Adventure 2 Again Soon :)