Despite having never finished a Disaster Report game, I love this franchise a lot. It’s the exact kind of niche, jank nonsense I’m a complete sucker for. Ridiculous melodrama, goofy acting, poorly animated visuals… it’s got it all! After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, however, it seemed likely that the franchise was dead. Studio Irem shut down and it’s devs left to make studio Granzilla. The PS2 era was over and these kinds of goofy C-tier games didn’t have a space to exist anymore.

Which is why it’s kind of stunning this game exists at all, much less is as compelling as it is.

The ThorHighHeels video review covers the topic in much more detail and I’ll hit a lot of the same points here, but I need to convey my thoughts down anyway or I’ll melt. Even so, I highly recommend checking his analysis out.

Like all Disaster Report games, the set-up is straightforward. There’s a disaster. You need to survive it. Gather resources, make ethical decisions, press a button to brace for earthquakes. Previous entries often involved a vast conspiracy, with some villain creating an artificial flood or earthquake for their own evil ends.

Disaster Report 4 sheds that angle though and goes for a quiet character drama. The disaster is natural. There’s no mastermind. It’s just you and thousands of others trying to survive an awful situation. You can tell that the 2011 disaster actually impacted how the team was approaching these stories. Rather than a lot of high-octane chases, a lot of the game is about traveling around and visiting different tragedies or morality plays. You find people price gouging on emergency supplies or using the chaos to support their own vices. You can also find communities binding together and cutting down old barriers in favor of overcoming these tremendous odds.

I think the most striking, and probably controversial, sequence of the game is the Miracle Water subplot on Day 4. You’ve reached an elementary school that’s been turned into a shelter. But the community is distrustful of outsiders, particularly foreigners. Immigrants from outside the country are forced to sleep in the parking lot and the playground rather than indoors with the others. After grabbing some water and helping some of these children, rumors start to spread about the “Miracle Water.” Before long, before you can stop it, you’re being hailed as a messiah by those same racist community members. The game never lets you correct them but it’s hard not to see an advantage in keeping up the con. They’re giving you food to give to the children. They’re letting outsiders sleep indoors. If you’re playing an immoral play through, you can even get a sailboat out of it to escape from the city. And people are happy. Is it that bad a lie?

Things break bad eventually and the chaos that emerges is genuinely upsetting. You’re chased out of the shelter and one of the immigrants is brutally assaulted by the angry mob. It’s horrifying and sickening and it left an awful pit in my stomach that AAA games haven’t ever done to me. Until the epilogue section, I was actually pretty sure he was murdered. While not being able to stop the lie could be annoying, the lack of control makes it more effective as an extreme action somewhat might take in upsetting circumstances. It’s a genuinely engaging story about how desperate people buy into cults and myths, a story of racism, and about the stress of disaster. When an actual villain does emerge in the climax, their motives and beliefs seem more believable because of plots like that. The villain commits some horrible crimes, and justifies it to themselves by pointing to angry mobs of normal people like we’ve just seen. “These people seem civilized, but it’s no different from the war zones I grew up in. Distrust of outsiders, selfish behavior, falling for cons out of desperation… it’s all the same”

But even with how bleak that sounds, this is a light game in the end. While you can do horrible things, the game actually gives you plenty of ways to turn those bad actions into good deeds. In fact, that’s encouraged for a player that wants to see everything. Steal thousands of dollars from a cult? Pay off people’s loans, save the orphanage, support communities. It’s also still a VERY silly game. You can run around in a chef or superhero or whatever costume through all these scenes. You can convince a con artist that you’re Mary Crawford. You can blackmail the mayor to change the game’s title, which permanently changes the loading screens to “Disaster Report 5?” The optional epilogue becomes a fighting game in the climax and the protag finishes it up saying “oh the ending song is playing.” Even with its shift to a character drama, the game hasn’t left its roots.

There’s a couple narrative threads that don’t ultimately go anywhere as part of the game’s chaotic nature. A subplot about a shady business only wraps up in the epilogue. The epilogue is packaged with the main switch copies, but it looks like the PC and PS4 version has the epilogue as paid dlc. Truly bizarre choice.

A brief confession. If a Switch game wasn’t made by an indie studio, I probably pirated it. I won’t explain how. 13 Sentinels, Kirby, and Animal Crossing I bought legally, the latter mainly for online services. Otherwise, I really try to avoid paying $60 for a game.

But… I might go legally buy this? I don’t know if or when I’d play this again, but this game just stuck with me in such a way that I feel like I want it on my shelf in a permanent way. It’s such a fascinating experience.

Played on N64 Switch Online.

I'll never understand why given all the potential things you could do with the premise of a golf game set in the Super Mario universe, they chose to not do anything interesting and just make this bland thing. Even the mini golf courses are just courses in the shapes of numbers and letters. I can't even give this the excuse of being an early golf game because Kirby's Dream Course came out on the SNES and utilizes the Kirby universe perfectly, and it's probably the single best golf game because of it! 1 star because I can make Peach call my opponent a whore.

I probably didn’t need to add a full hour of playtime to this one hour game just grinding at the arena, but listen, what was I supposed to do? LET Doose hurt small businesses through his monster summoning, in some pathetic hunt for tourism? If Star Hollow falls, Lorelai would have to move back in with Emily and that be trapped in that abusive house all over again! Besides, getting Rory leveled up enough to use the game’s only master seal is the experience she needs if she’s gonna get to Harvard.

I’ve never watched Gilmore Girls. This was fun.

vastly more confident and polished than its predecessor in every conceivable way.

+the UI has been touched up significantly, both in the highly stylized menus as will as with the significantly clearer HUD.
+better animated mission briefings, and cutscenes overall
+more rugged and varied landscapes with higher-quality texture work. the cities look really amazing here, as do the ravine levels, which far exceed the chunky rock formations of the original.
+mission objectives vary far beyond the mindless target-hunting of the original. twists to the way you approach your targets are now at the forefront: the one that requires you squeeze the throttle and fly far above cloud level in order to trail surveillance planes, the one where you must divebomb radar hubs tucked away in craggy ocean-side cliffs with solely machine-gun fire, and the one that requires you to approach silo targets head-on at frighteningly low altitude all illustrate a desire to realize depth from otherwise simple gameplay mechanics. there's even rather competant escort missions thanks to the relative autonomy and combat prowess of your allies.
+destroying the plane now results in a small fine that acts more like a slap on the wrist than losing your plane entirely as in the first game. given that save scumming still exists here, it was smart of them to make this concession.
+special high-profile targets exist that will bestow decals onto you if you manage to destroy them. the best dogfights in the game lie in these optional objectives, and I only wish they were more prominently exhibited rather than being so subtlely placed.
+wingman system was pared down in all the right ways. you get two choices per mission with sophisticated tactical options compared to that of the original. your wingman is transparent about their self-chosen objectives and thankfully pretty useful, even though you'll likely rarely need them on normal.
+wider selection of genres with the music here. ac1 got a little too caught up in the butt-rock, but here they transition into more fascinating textures, with breakbeats, saxophones, and lovely synth breaking through. definitely more groove-focused and less riff-focused, which is exactly what I want.
+as far as I'm aware ac1 only had one path towards the ending, meaning that pursuing certain quest paths could lead to a dead-end. the branching storylines here do a much better job both encouraging replayability and keeping the game rolling along.

there really isn't much I can knock ace combat 2 for either, but at the same time it's held back in terms of ambition. the missions are not that long, and there aren't really side objectives to speak of for the most part. why eliminate optional opponents when the only thing they reward you with is money to go towards planes? this is especially evident in the ending missions, which at the end of the day are not that different from what came before (other than the brief but compelling submarine mission right before the true ending). a large boss like the original probably would not have been the best move, but they could have elevated the finale beyond what was given. the criteria to get into the true ending is also not communicated either, though I can excuse this a tad given the game's age.

still, the quality on display here portends great things to come. I would like to rerun this game with the beta operation on hard with expert controls (and not with my roommate's broken xbox controller... btw duckstation on xbox one sort of rules). above all though I'm really excited to dive into electrosphere and its evolution from the series's arcade roots.

Kirby Forgotten Land is my favorite Kirby game of all time, and I'm not even done with the post-game content. This game has so much charm and a lot of love put into it by HAL. The only thing I didn't really like about this game was the lack of copy abilities (12 of them) and the amount of moves removed from them. I was surprised at the amount of abilities that were in the game, even some staples like Stone, Fighter, and Beam were removed.

Other than that I didn't have any problems with this game because it only goes up, there are no down moments in the game at all. Like when I found out that with the d-pad you could get Kirby to say hi to you or the Waddles Dee's, and the Waddle Dee's I love them. There are over 250+ Dee's in the game but you only need 1/16th of that to actually beat the game, BUT. If you miss out on any Waddle Dee's out in the open or are so obvious to collect, you are a monster and no matter how hard you pray you will find yourself in hell when you die.

Waddle Dee Town is one of my favorite areas in the game. You can say hello to Waddle Dee's and they'll say hi back, you can knock one down and they'll get back up looking sad, it's such a neat detail and I love it. The more Dee's you collect the bigger the town grows and you unlock more buildings that will and can help you in the game. How HAL worked the Star Coins and Waddle Dee's is so good because it gives players an incentive to look around the area for hidden rooms rather than just speed blitzing through levels.

I don't have much to say about the level design rather than I enjoyed just about all of them and I like how detailed each level is, they all have their own story to tell.

Kirby had a stellar transition into 3D and I can't wait for more games like this one.

A game that I can't believe was made by Nintendo.
I don't know if that's the right analogy, but if I were to say "Nintendo released a game like Fallout or Mortal Kombat" you'd get the idea?

Was Nintendo also concerned about its brand image?
It has become a fantastic game that has not even been sold in ROM. ...In Japan.

It's a top quality tactical game. It's a fun tactical game that I can still fire up my NDS and play.
It's a perfect game, except for the joke about one of the characters, the doctor, and the limited sales channels and apart from the cruelty of the story, I can't think of any faults. It's a masterpiece.

「お　の　れ　邪　鬼　王　！」

A game that makes me hate birds.
In fact, I've been unable to eat fried chicken for a long time.
It's a conspiracy by Tecmo to make KFC's business worse by artificially making me allergic to birds.

Ha ha ha,
You've read the Player's review who most likes Mother3 of this site,
the second Player who likes Mother3 of this site,
the fourth Player who likes Mother3 of this site,
and the Player who most hates Mother3 of this site!
I'm truly the third Player who likes Mother3 of this site.
Now you see the true advantage of being third!
And, In my review of Mother2/EarthBound I'll write the third most detailed review of the MOTHER series on this site!

...It may be next year before I can up a review.
This is also the third strongest! Ha ha ha!

This is an anti-Dragon Quest game.
In fact, the catchphrase was "I'm tired of slaying dragons!”.
But Dragon Quest doesn't often slay dragons, and the producer was a key staff member up to Dragon Quest 3, so there was an episode of panic when this ad was released. It's a bit of an outburst by the advertising manager (laughs).

A simple description of the content would be "Fallout" with tanks and armoured vehicles.
I'm embarrassed to say, the only Fallout I've played through to the end is Fallout 3. (1 and 2 were not translated for a long time. The Japanese translation we have now is also done by volunteers)
When I first played Fallout 3, my first thought was.
"It's like MetalMax in 3D! I love it!" That was it.
It's still an interesting concept game to play today.
I've been waiting for a remake of the original MM for a long time, but no matter how long I wait, it never comes, so for now it's best to play the SNES version.

The philosophy of MetalMax
The creator of the series, Mr Miyaoka, said in an interview.
"We do things that DQ doesn't do.
In terms of direction, I wanted to leave the DQ-like things to DQ. In short, I thought, "The fun of RPGs should not be limited to the fun of DQ. There must be something else that's fun. That's why I decided to go in the direction that DQ was not going.
So I decided to go in a direction that DQ didn't go. I said, "If you want to tell a good story about a brave man who is guided by God and saves a princess and makes the world peaceful, go with DQ. I said, "I'll do a story that's not like that.”
So I decided to make a story in which the hero is not a hero, but a useless son of a local factory, and he saves the world without any intention of doing so.
[omitted].
The protagonist of Metal Max is not a hero who is guided by fate. The story of a young man of noble blood wandering the lowly world and becoming a hero is one of the patterns that have been told in various stories since ancient times, but I've always had a problem with the "noble" part of the story.
[omitted].
Metal Max is an RPG, but you don't have to role-play. Because you are the hero of this game."