One of the best ubisoft open-world games ever made, funnily enough. And yet.

Unicorn Overlord starts strong--it doesn't waste your time jumping into the meat of the game, putting you in the world and basically telling you "go ham" on liberating the nations from the Evil Empire. This ends up playing out like those Ubisoft games I mentioned--the various towns you liberate are 30 second long puzzle fights that are actually quite endearing, which act as towers that mostly unlock the surrounding area. You have a set of pretty tedious things to collect in each region just like that, it ends up being very checklist gaming.

And this works for a while, but the difficulty tuning is just way off. I played on the hardest difficulty before NG+ and it was trivial to do content 20+ levels above me because the power scaling goes crazy if you actually try even a little to do content.

This is also hampered by an actually atrocious story. It's somehow both overwritten and underwritten at the same time, using a thousand words to say something that has the content of ten. I was actually shocked by how literally every plot and subplot is like, the lamest most overly-played out trope of whatever that plot is. There is not a shred of intrigue to be found in the moment to moment writing nor the grand narrative at play, and yet the cutscenes just take it so seriously and feel like they want you to.

It honestly made me hate it all the more. I'm serious, if this game completely removed the narrative and made it play out more like Total War or X-Com or something where you have a vague objective, it'd be significantly better.

The saving grace is of course, the actual game. It's an interesting mix of Super Auto Pets-style trigger setting to create a doom machine with Fire Emblem as an RTS that has infinite amounts of space for clever players to work with. Of course, the issue as I mentioned before is the game doesn't really utilize it. I am by no means a "clever player", I'm a fucking ape in these sorts of games, but even my monkey brain "well if i put three of the cavalry guys who get a 'all cavalry get +50% strength' skill in a party surely its good" was able to literally blitz through the game.

It's good enough that I played through the rest of the game just to see what it was doing. What I'd really like to see is a Unicorn Overlord 2 where they actually push the battle system harder, make you think a little. And maybe actually try and write a story, its not like we don't know Vanillaware can't--13 Sentinels was literally their last game!

While Nintendo was never afraid of experimenting with Mario's identity, providing numerous detours in aesthetic and thematic imagery just by jumping from SMB1 to SMB3, Super Mario Land definitely earns its distinction of being "the weird one".

It interprets the plumber's magical landscape as one filled with ancient history and sci-fi cultural artifacts from our own planet that somehow feel more alien than what the Mushroom World has accustomed us to. There is definitely something very otherwordly and dreamlike about starting a level with the implication that Mario arrived on a UFO and that the enemies you will be facing are Easter Island face fellas, and the changes made to accomodate the limitations of the hardware, such as the exploding turtles and the bouncing ball power up, further elevate Super Mario Land's odd quirky vibe.

What I love the most about it though is its brevity. Low of difficulty and brisk paced, Super Mario Land is beatable under 30 minutes with little chance for game overs and with enough variety sprinkled inbetween that makes picking it up for a high score attempt highly leasurable and absolve it of the settling monotony that plagues the repeating assets and levels from SMB1. Add to that the beautifuly simplistic monochrome sprite line work and eternal earworm tunes that will never leave your head for all of your life and I'm very tempted to call it a perfect game, despite its lackluster platforming physics. A priveledged Mario that preceeds its own brand, that's pretty neat.

Try not to feel joy while listening to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f1I1i_t94E&ab_channel=GilvaSunner%3AArchive

Like visiting your Grandpa and finding out exactly why your family is fucked up in the ways they are. For its slight imperfections and occasional frustrations, this is the ooze I crawled out of, the reflection staring back at me when I look in the mirror. The incoherent but indelible monsters, that soul-pounding Reznor score, the gorgeous industrial-gothic landscapes, the goofball chapter-ending paragraphs, these are the neurons that intertwine to create my mind. Quake is too definitional to what I love. It barely registers as a game. This is a divine manuscript by which the heavens bestowed onto us mortals a most holy of artefacts, the rocket jump. John Romero may be chained to a boulder, destined to have his spleen devoured by an Emu every day for the rest of time, but it is a small price to pay for such enlightenment.

I initially overlooked this game seeing it as an Etrian Odyssey game with worse gameplay. However, after learning how to like mystery dungeon games, I came back to this title and really enjoyed playing it. Etrian Odyssey games have a fundemental amount of chill baked into them, and the mystery dungeon formula complements this well.

Then, a good ways into one of the game's dungeons, my party died. I did the only natural thing to do and restarted the game to load my previous save. I then learned how cruel/punishing the game is with its autosaves. Upon loading my game, I found that the game had removed all my items, money, and equipment that I had worked so hard to obtain. It was at this point that I realized the game's chill was a mere facade.

This was actually a terrifyingly, threateningly cruel game that I should be afraid of playing. The difficulty crept as optimized movement and party awareness became a requirement. Previous dungeons were farmed and re-farmed to replenish my supply of consumables that can only be obtained in dungeons which I desperately needed to survive wave upon wave of monster houses, large explosion traps, teleport traps, cursed items, and ailment after ailment.

...Then I learned how to break the game and it became chill again.

A potential masterpiece riddled with flawed systems. Trick weapons are genius, and FromSoftware should definitely revisit the concept in future games, but all of the ones I tried had a form I preferred to use almost exclusively in any given fight. The rally mechanic is a really good idea, but I still often felt it was optimal to back off and heal instead, given how much less health I regained from rallying than blood vials. Blood vials are a great healing system mechanically, ruined only by being a finite consumable for some reason (of all the things to bring back from Demon's Souls, why this). Lamps are easily the coolest looking variation of the Bonfire, but are also easily the worst implemented. A limb-break system sounds cool on paper, but basing it on damage dealt rather than implementing a posture system meant I wasn't able to play around stance-breaking enemies like I would in Elden Ring despite using the heaviest weapon available (first the Kirkhammer and later Ludwig's Holy Blade) and focusing on charged heavy attacks.

For me, one of the most important parts of a FromSoftware game is the boss roster. Having started with Dark Souls 3, which I personally feel has some of the worst regular enemy encounters and many of the best bosses, I expected Bloodborne to be similar. In some ways, it was. Many of the standard encounters in Bloodborne are frustrating to me in the same ways they are in DS3. Too many fast, aggressive enemies all bunched together in small rooms or wide open spaces with no good way to split them up. Call it a skill issue, but I just don't like playing through most of the levels in these two games. In DS3, the bosses counterbalance the frustrating levels by being pretty consistently excellent. I even like the Curse-Rotted Greatwood somehow, DS3 just understands what makes bosses fun. Bloodborne simply doesn't have a comparable boss lineup. The best of them are pretty good, but still not amazing. Father Gascoigne and Martyr Logarius were the only bosses I actually liked before playing the Old Hunters DLC. A lot of Bloodborne's bosses were just forgettable or annoying, but none came close to being as bad as Micolash, who sits solidly at the bottom of my FromSoft boss tierlist with only Bed of Chaos for company. I waited until after finishing the Old Hunters to fight the final three bosses, and that might be part of why I found them so lacking. Mergo's Wet Nurse looked very cool, but wasn't mechanically engaging. Gehrman I expect to enjoy more in future playthroughs, but his fight didn't click with me this time. The Moon Presence was a disappointing final boss, mechanically just another beast boss with a few spell attacks that I barely had to try to dodge and one arena-wide "you have 1 health now" spell that didn't really add anything to the fight.

Some of my problems with the game might have been less grating if its performance wasn't a hunter's nightmare. On PS4, where I played most of the base game, this was one of the worst performing games I've ever experienced. Load times were agonizingly long, so needing to sit through two loading screens to fast travel was very annoying. The framerate and smoothness of my PS4 experience can't all be blamed on the game, as I had it hooked up to a cheap TV that definitely hurt performance, but even on my PS5 and 165hz monitor, it's still noticeably choppy. Load times do seem much better on PS5 at least.

Despite how much I complain about this game, I do still think it's good. I don't think it's the masterpiece a lot of people say it is, but the bones that make the Old Hunters DLC so incredible are built here in the base game.

TLDR: I can't get gay married to Eileen the Crow, 0/10 fuck this game.

The Grim Fandango that nobody played. Nobody played it back when it came out and nobody's playing it now, because it's abandonware and not easily accessible for the public at large. Which is a dang shame, because much like GF, Discworld Noir is a detective game steeped in thick atmosphere and boasting a witty script, a colourful cast of characters and an intriguing story that alternates between being broadly comic and deadly serious. It deserves not to be forgotten about and I hope one day it'll receive the same treatment that many of Lucas Arts' classics of the genre have gotten.

By the way, take my advice and avoid the PS1 version at all costs. It is a dreadful port. Get the PC version operational or don't bother at all.

used to be self-conscious about liking this one so much, but we're all adults now. so earnest and breezy that it can do the absolute most stupid shit and i'll still give it a hell yeah as opposed to an eyeroll. insanely fun boss fights that weave between cinematic and playing a video game with the seamless and innovative 'press triangle' feature. probably also the story at its series best, as it does a good job of raising emotional stakes and mostly refrains from delving into the overwrought attempts at surprise the later entries bring. willing to briefly mess with the formula of what a shlocky action game is for the purpose of telling that story, too. definitely the most fun kh to replay