kragor
2014
I've gone through a lot of the emotions one could have regarding this game. I once thought it was Fine, I once hated it and I once loved it. It is awful, it spits in the face of any form of Good Game Design put forward by Demon's Souls and Dark Souls in service of pushing the idea of "dark souls is hard, right? let's just make it really hard they'll love that shit" without putting any thought into making the game Good in service to That. If Dark Souls is a Game For Freaks, Dark Souls 2 is a game for the Freaks that the Freaks can't handle. People love to hate this game and people love to be contrarians about Not Hating this game, and people love to hate this game to be contrarian towards the people who are being contrarians about liking this game (It often comes off as pointlessly cyclical discourse in which people are either liking or hating the game for cred through discrediting the people who feel the opposite way and I don't care to engage in it. These are my Raw Feelings. Like or Dislike Dark Souls 2 at Your Own Discretion). Dark Souls 2 is a Deep Pit of Depression from which I cannot escape. It is a shadowy enigma of undelivered-upon-vaguepromises and experimentally-safe-yet-horrid game design within an already experimental series of Video Games. Dark Souls 2 is a zero-sum game. Without Dark Souls 2 we don't have the massive over-correction of a Greatest Stinkers Album that Dark Souls 3 is. Dark Souls 2 is Two.
2021
pretty nice step up from World in a lot of ways, although it carries forwards a lot of it's issues like the butchering of some weapon identities and the far worse armour skill system which encourages ridiculous levels of power creep in it's design. On the plus, mantles, the slinger, and the clutch claw are gone in favor of the wirebug, a game element that works like a toned-down version of hunter arts from XX/Generations while also expanding mobility to better navigate the persistent maps which also carries over from world. What doesn't carry over from world in the maps, thankfully are that game's accursed tech-demo-tier layouts. No more Ancient Forest! Yay! While there's still a good deal of verticality the individual zones in the maps are generally much flatter, making them far better suited as arenas for Hunting Monsters In and the overall layouts feel far more functional rather than World's environments which felt focused more on Looking Good but not Feeling Good to play in. We're also back to having separate village and hub quests which means, at least compared to world there's actually a relatively decent amount of content in this one for the high-rank version... I think the new mounting system is mostly pretty good, and in how it works definitely feels like an evolution of the mechanic from it's inception in 4, although it's a little too easy as is to get mounts, which is kind of a minus depending on what you value in terms if the game's difficulty. If you're the boomer who's more into the older games Rise is probably still far from the perfect MH for you, and it is for me too; but it's overall still a very enjoyable experience with mostly solid gameplay and a nice story.
Horse
2002
kino strategy game visual novel
2003
this is like the only gen urobuchi thing I've put to my eyeballs so far that I don't Completely Hate For Reasons. It's a short horror VN with some absolutely messed up gruesome subject matter. It's definitely very edgy and not for everyone. The soundtrack is pretty great.
beastmode
2022
It's Elden Mid #packwatch #ripbozo FROMSOFT is washed, worst game ever
(it's good, they actually managed to take the feeling of exploring Dark Souls 1's world and blow it up to ridiculous big scale, with all sorts of Really Good, Intertwining, explorable world bits and Secret side-paths that lead to secret side-paths that lead to secret side-paths. I only really wish they would go back to going hard on making the types of claustrophobic murder-dungeons that made Demon's Souls and Dark Souls The First so good for me.
I went in with very tempered expectations as someone who Tragically Preordered Dark Souls 2 and I gotta say as someone who felt incredibly let down by that for what I hope to you, the reader are obvious reasons if you've played that game, and Dark Souls 3, for being essentially a Biggest Stinkers Album, I was pleasantly surprised by Elden Ring and for the first time since 2011 truly felt the joy of exploring the world of a new fromsoft rpg for the first time again; I'll be honest I was kinda tearing up when the end credits hit because I've genuinely felt deprived of Good Gaming Food from fromsoft ever since I first played Dark Souls 2 and slowly felt a sense of True Dread setting in as I got further and further in. I suppose Bloodborne and Sekiro were a brief reprieve in a way from this feeling for me but even then THEY AREN'T SOULS GAMES. While not perfect ER very much feels like the first fromsoft RPG since Dark Souls The First that I genuinely found myself enjoying; in some ways I find it better and in others I find it worse. There aren't really any of the concessions one might expect if they were told FROM SOFTWARE is making an open-world Dark Souls. It's not Far Cry or Assassin's Creed, nor Grand Theft Auto or The Elder Scrolls. It's Big Dark Souls. With a Dedicated Jump Button. And that reflects for better and worse, with both the highs and lows of The First Dark Souls Game very much being magnified the same as the world-scale.
It has some low lows in the form of some mild gameplay baggage from Dark Souls 3 (they really gotta ditch that combat engine, the faster paced combat is really awful for Games That Aren't Bloodborne and it really shows, especially in some of the boss encounters), but mostly very high highs for me. Only other thing I want to mention is that they frontloaded the enemy stat-scaling in the game HARD; once you hit a point on a fresh new game everything just starts casually doing NG+ levels of damage and never stops. Pretty much every boss towards the end of the game will 1-2-shot you regardless of your vit which can make learning some of the harder encounters pretty gruelling.)
Now, I can finally get back to playing games that don't suck.
(it's good, they actually managed to take the feeling of exploring Dark Souls 1's world and blow it up to ridiculous big scale, with all sorts of Really Good, Intertwining, explorable world bits and Secret side-paths that lead to secret side-paths that lead to secret side-paths. I only really wish they would go back to going hard on making the types of claustrophobic murder-dungeons that made Demon's Souls and Dark Souls The First so good for me.
I went in with very tempered expectations as someone who Tragically Preordered Dark Souls 2 and I gotta say as someone who felt incredibly let down by that for what I hope to you, the reader are obvious reasons if you've played that game, and Dark Souls 3, for being essentially a Biggest Stinkers Album, I was pleasantly surprised by Elden Ring and for the first time since 2011 truly felt the joy of exploring the world of a new fromsoft rpg for the first time again; I'll be honest I was kinda tearing up when the end credits hit because I've genuinely felt deprived of Good Gaming Food from fromsoft ever since I first played Dark Souls 2 and slowly felt a sense of True Dread setting in as I got further and further in. I suppose Bloodborne and Sekiro were a brief reprieve in a way from this feeling for me but even then THEY AREN'T SOULS GAMES. While not perfect ER very much feels like the first fromsoft RPG since Dark Souls The First that I genuinely found myself enjoying; in some ways I find it better and in others I find it worse. There aren't really any of the concessions one might expect if they were told FROM SOFTWARE is making an open-world Dark Souls. It's not Far Cry or Assassin's Creed, nor Grand Theft Auto or The Elder Scrolls. It's Big Dark Souls. With a Dedicated Jump Button. And that reflects for better and worse, with both the highs and lows of The First Dark Souls Game very much being magnified the same as the world-scale.
It has some low lows in the form of some mild gameplay baggage from Dark Souls 3 (they really gotta ditch that combat engine, the faster paced combat is really awful for Games That Aren't Bloodborne and it really shows, especially in some of the boss encounters), but mostly very high highs for me. Only other thing I want to mention is that they frontloaded the enemy stat-scaling in the game HARD; once you hit a point on a fresh new game everything just starts casually doing NG+ levels of damage and never stops. Pretty much every boss towards the end of the game will 1-2-shot you regardless of your vit which can make learning some of the harder encounters pretty gruelling.)
Now, I can finally get back to playing games that don't suck.
1995
Wow!
2016
this game's dookie water
It's time for atlus to move on from trying to make a better relationship-driven-narrative jrpg than persona 3. I can feel the ghosts of the characters that nearly every P5 main character is based on, and these are some of the shallowest ghosts they've made yet! I hate it! I've heard that Royal fixes some of this game's issues but really, I spent nearly all of the game thinking to myself "I wonder when this will get good?" while I was enjoying hanging out with the few good side-characters, and by the time I was pretty much at the end I had my answer! They would have had to of changed a lot to fix this one!
It's time for atlus to move on from trying to make a better relationship-driven-narrative jrpg than persona 3. I can feel the ghosts of the characters that nearly every P5 main character is based on, and these are some of the shallowest ghosts they've made yet! I hate it! I've heard that Royal fixes some of this game's issues but really, I spent nearly all of the game thinking to myself "I wonder when this will get good?" while I was enjoying hanging out with the few good side-characters, and by the time I was pretty much at the end I had my answer! They would have had to of changed a lot to fix this one!
1997
This review contains spoilers
Incredibly powerful game. It has the nicest continue button of the X games so far. Also you can play as Zero.
The final boss feels pretty dang good to learn and fight as X. As Zero it feels a lot harder but I still found it to be a really fun fight to play around without X's buster.
The final boss feels pretty dang good to learn and fight as X. As Zero it feels a lot harder but I still found it to be a really fun fight to play around without X's buster.
1995
This review contains spoilers
I wasn't really having fun with this one so I'm leaving it unfinished. Got to the final boss and had to close the game before I could clear it, the negative progress from having to redo those stages + get the gold armour again was kind of the nail in the coffin. I would like to come back to this one at a later time but I just don't want to sweat it, especially when I've been marathon-ing through these games pretty quickly and having to redo the final stages of this one again would be a real pace-killer.
As for the overall game itself, it's pretty hard. Everything shaves off chunks from your life and the body armour is tough to get. Most of the common enemies don't just fall over, and pickups feel a lot more sparse, so even if you grab a bunch of health upgrades you're just getting destroyed by everything - it very much encourages going for a more cautious, no-hit playstyle. I don't really take issue with games being hard and I feel like the difficulty of this one would almost give it more replay value than the other SNES X games for the people looking for a more considerable challenge, but it definitely feels much more mean spirited in its difficulty.
I certainly wouldn't say that it's bad, but maybe just not quite my style? Like with the previous X games, I didn't worry about going for boss weaknesses and used the Buster's charge shot for nearly everyone - while I didn't have much issues with this approach in X and X2, I feel like this is a mistake in X3; most of these bosses have mean attack patterns, many of which are locked out or trivialized if you use the boss' weakness. It's very NES Megaman in that you're meant to exploit their weaknesses to succeed. If you aren't privy to said weaknesses and aren't going through a proper boss chain, the bosses feel significantly harder. Thankfully, the health upgrades and sub-tanks are far easier to come by in this game, although the scarce health and ammo drops kind of make having full sub-tanks a reward for doing well in a stage rather than something you may feel the need to go out of your way to grind up.
I really don't know how to feel about this one. I'll probably do a full replay revenge run when I come back to it rather than jumping right back to the final stages.
As for the overall game itself, it's pretty hard. Everything shaves off chunks from your life and the body armour is tough to get. Most of the common enemies don't just fall over, and pickups feel a lot more sparse, so even if you grab a bunch of health upgrades you're just getting destroyed by everything - it very much encourages going for a more cautious, no-hit playstyle. I don't really take issue with games being hard and I feel like the difficulty of this one would almost give it more replay value than the other SNES X games for the people looking for a more considerable challenge, but it definitely feels much more mean spirited in its difficulty.
I certainly wouldn't say that it's bad, but maybe just not quite my style? Like with the previous X games, I didn't worry about going for boss weaknesses and used the Buster's charge shot for nearly everyone - while I didn't have much issues with this approach in X and X2, I feel like this is a mistake in X3; most of these bosses have mean attack patterns, many of which are locked out or trivialized if you use the boss' weakness. It's very NES Megaman in that you're meant to exploit their weaknesses to succeed. If you aren't privy to said weaknesses and aren't going through a proper boss chain, the bosses feel significantly harder. Thankfully, the health upgrades and sub-tanks are far easier to come by in this game, although the scarce health and ammo drops kind of make having full sub-tanks a reward for doing well in a stage rather than something you may feel the need to go out of your way to grind up.
I really don't know how to feel about this one. I'll probably do a full replay revenge run when I come back to it rather than jumping right back to the final stages.
1994
This review contains spoilers
I'd say this one's a strong sequel, although the final boss isn't as much of a nail-biter compared to X.... I didn't even feel the need to grab the last energy tank.
I liked how if you want to get Zero's parts; even if you knew every boss weakness ahead of time it can mix up the route you take through the initial stages which is juxtaposed pretty well over X's original loop of backtracking to earlier stages to grab things once you have more beam types and armour upgrades.
I liked how if you want to get Zero's parts; even if you knew every boss weakness ahead of time it can mix up the route you take through the initial stages which is juxtaposed pretty well over X's original loop of backtracking to earlier stages to grab things once you have more beam types and armour upgrades.
1993
This review contains spoilers
They nailed it.
I think that maybe you should start with the dash. It's not really a big deal once you know that the ice stage just gives it to you, in fact, it's perfectly fine that you don't start with the dash, the dash is awesome; if you started with the dash, you probably wouldn't have as much of an appreciation for the dash if you didn't have to find it. I take back my statement about wanting to start with the dash. This game rules.
I think that maybe you should start with the dash. It's not really a big deal once you know that the ice stage just gives it to you, in fact, it's perfectly fine that you don't start with the dash, the dash is awesome; if you started with the dash, you probably wouldn't have as much of an appreciation for the dash if you didn't have to find it. I take back my statement about wanting to start with the dash. This game rules.
1988
This review contains spoilers
Tried to give this one the benefit of the doubt but it really just has nothing going on for me. I don't even particularly take issue with it being "grindy", I barely grinded anything up to the point where I decided to drop the game, which according to the guide I checked afterwards ended up being only 2 or so dungeons out from the final boss, and ran into pretty much no issues with my characters aside from deciding to grind a little after running into some tough creeps in the later parts of the game's overworld that were giving me some trouble. Needless to say, I played enough of the game to gain a pretty good grasp of the scope of it's combat systems, and as someone who usually plays these games for the battle systems, and wasn't getting much out of the story either it seemed like a pretty straightforward conclusion that the game wasn't my style and to just drop the game and maybe come back if ever there came a world where I had literally no other JRPGs left to play. I really don't even want the "vindication" that may or may not come from having actually finished the game; had it maybe been a short, 4-6 hour affair that I could have burned through in a day l may have given the end credits a go, but as it is it's really just not up my alley
2021
This review contains spoilers
Insane. Very possibly GOTY 2021. 99% item completion on the first run. There's literally only one item to grab in normal mode + doing hard more before I would consider myself having "mastered" this game according to backloggd's criteria.
I won't go too far into the story even though I've marked this review as spoilers; I would consider the gameplay elements and upgrades you find in games like this to be as worthy of considering to be spoilers as the story itself, though I would not suggest that the importance of avoiding information on these parts of the game to undermine the importance of also avoiding story spoilers. All I will say on the story is that I really like it quite a lot and that some of the developments and revelations in this game may actually explain to some degree why Prime 4 had to start over development if they plan on connecting that game's story in any way at all with the ongoing narrative of the 2D metroid games up to this point.
Game feels pretty linear in terms of the progression of finding items to move forward in specific ways, however despite this linearity, it doesn't really attempt to railroad the player's path as aggressively as Fusion did aside from forcing you to talk to Adam when he has something to say (thankfully he doesn't mark EXACTLY on the map where you need to go this time). I already really like Fusion despite that game's considerably-more-straightforward-than-most-other-metroid-games' path, so the fact that this goes in a similar direction in terms of the flow of exploration while not feeling quite as overbearing, with the game only really opening up towards the very end, this isn't an issue to me; so I'll just say that it being linear doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad.
(edit: as of the unspecified time that I'm making this edit, people have been discovering some interesting sequence breaks now)
The actual feel of playing the game is great: Dread has what may remain to be some of the most memorable and exciting-to-battle bosses in this genre and it's absolutely due in credit to the various ways in which the combat systems of Metroid are expanded upon in this title. I love the parry, I love the flash step, and I love the slide. The fact that so many of the Dread original upgrades double as both exploration and combat (or evasion, in the case of the cloaking ability), is really cool; even as a non-first party metroid title, it demonstrates a passion for the 2D-Action-Exploration genre from the people that worked on this game that I've not felt from many other games I've attempted to play in recent memory that claim to be trying to break into this genre, and while I didn't really like the Aeion abilities at all when they were introduced in Samus Returns, it really feels like they hit the nail on the head with the return of the Aeion system in Dread: every ability in Samus' arsenal feels like it has a place.... even when the presence of some abilities is rather quickly overwritten by stronger ones, you can feel the merit of gaining every upgrade; something I would consider a key "feeling" to many of the good games of the 2D-Action-Exploration genre. Also I love how much the later E.M.M.I just cheat; games with forgiving continues shouldn't be afraid to ramp up to being "fuck you" hard when you can just start over and try again so quickly.
In short: this game is really, really good. I hope to see more new 2D Metroid games in the near, not-19-years-later future. It maybe doesn't quite reach the level of Super Metroid or Zero Mission, but it's still going strong in the top 3 for now.
I won't go too far into the story even though I've marked this review as spoilers; I would consider the gameplay elements and upgrades you find in games like this to be as worthy of considering to be spoilers as the story itself, though I would not suggest that the importance of avoiding information on these parts of the game to undermine the importance of also avoiding story spoilers. All I will say on the story is that I really like it quite a lot and that some of the developments and revelations in this game may actually explain to some degree why Prime 4 had to start over development if they plan on connecting that game's story in any way at all with the ongoing narrative of the 2D metroid games up to this point.
Game feels pretty linear in terms of the progression of finding items to move forward in specific ways, however despite this linearity, it doesn't really attempt to railroad the player's path as aggressively as Fusion did aside from forcing you to talk to Adam when he has something to say (thankfully he doesn't mark EXACTLY on the map where you need to go this time). I already really like Fusion despite that game's considerably-more-straightforward-than-most-other-metroid-games' path, so the fact that this goes in a similar direction in terms of the flow of exploration while not feeling quite as overbearing, with the game only really opening up towards the very end, this isn't an issue to me; so I'll just say that it being linear doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad.
(edit: as of the unspecified time that I'm making this edit, people have been discovering some interesting sequence breaks now)
The actual feel of playing the game is great: Dread has what may remain to be some of the most memorable and exciting-to-battle bosses in this genre and it's absolutely due in credit to the various ways in which the combat systems of Metroid are expanded upon in this title. I love the parry, I love the flash step, and I love the slide. The fact that so many of the Dread original upgrades double as both exploration and combat (or evasion, in the case of the cloaking ability), is really cool; even as a non-first party metroid title, it demonstrates a passion for the 2D-Action-Exploration genre from the people that worked on this game that I've not felt from many other games I've attempted to play in recent memory that claim to be trying to break into this genre, and while I didn't really like the Aeion abilities at all when they were introduced in Samus Returns, it really feels like they hit the nail on the head with the return of the Aeion system in Dread: every ability in Samus' arsenal feels like it has a place.... even when the presence of some abilities is rather quickly overwritten by stronger ones, you can feel the merit of gaining every upgrade; something I would consider a key "feeling" to many of the good games of the 2D-Action-Exploration genre. Also I love how much the later E.M.M.I just cheat; games with forgiving continues shouldn't be afraid to ramp up to being "fuck you" hard when you can just start over and try again so quickly.
In short: this game is really, really good. I hope to see more new 2D Metroid games in the near, not-19-years-later future. It maybe doesn't quite reach the level of Super Metroid or Zero Mission, but it's still going strong in the top 3 for now.