This was my introduction to the the great and holy video game genre that is the Metroidvania. It was truly an eye-opening experience; how could I have not known about a genre so divine for so long? I shall now make my formal apology to the Metroidvania genre for my years of ignorance of its qualities, such as its maps, its abilities, and its secrets. From now on, my heart is truly devoted to the Metroidvania genre and all the amazing games it has given us.

(im joking but this is an amazing game and it did introduce me to metroidvanias)

I played FE5 almost as a joke so my friends could watch it kill me in real life. I don't even like FE4. I wasn't prepared for this game to own. I wasn't prepared for it to unironically be series Top 3 material. What the fuck.

With a lot of beloved hard games, the refrain is that they're Hard But Fair. (I think it started with God Hand commercials?) Thracia's difficulty probably lives up to the hype, and the game is amazing, but I cannot overstate how much it's not fair. One of the great things is that it's hard to sum up why it's so difficult, because it's not any one main reason; the game is inventively sadistic. Every other chapter it pulls some shit that warrants brand new amendments to the Fantasy Geneva Conventions. In one map you may have to outrun an entire squadron of wyvern riders with Killer Lances who spawn closer to what you're trying to protect than you do and you're on slow ass mountain terrain. In another, you want to turn a bunch of powerful enemies into friendly green units by allowing them to talk to specific other green units, with no ability to steer either party toward each other, and also the enemies who are still red will immediately start butchering the turncoats. The game is an endless bag of absurd, dirty tricks being played on you personally, and it's honestly both hilarious to fail and immensely satisfying to finally solve the puzzle.

There are also a ton of little mechanical quirks, some of them infamous and none of which would be back-breaking on their own, but the cumulative effect requires your entire strategic mentality to be completely different from in any other game in the series. For example, most stats cap at 20 for every class, and a lot of your units honestly have pretty great growth rates, so that drastically changes the value of something as basic as EXP. The game actually has a Konami Code-style cheat you can use on the main menu to literally double everyone's EXP gains, but there's debate over whether it actually makes the game any easier. You gain items over the course of the game that increase a unit's growths, so everyone ballooning two thirds of the way to level cap before you get most of them can actually kind of fuck you. Love it or hate it, I think it takes an incredibly interesting game to make a unilateral gigantic level boost potentially disadvantageous to the player. Also, you've probably heard that healing can miss; that's not actually one of your bigger problems (though it can really come in clutch to ruin an entire plan sometimes), but it is an extremely funny indicator of the game's overall attitude towards the player. There are a lot of other innovations you don't hear about as oddities because they simply stuck around; weird and brutal as it is, the game feels shockingly modern (or I suppose I should say "like a 2000s-era Fire Emblem") compared to the other Shouzou Kaga games.

But the most important feature, and another one you've probably heard of, is the capture mechanic--you can actually nonlethally disable enemies (and steal all their shit)! But something you might not pick up on until you're playing the game is that it's basically your only source of income. You get a pretty typical number of items from treasure chests and villages, sure, but enemies never drop anything when killed, shop prices are fucking exorbitant and you NEVER, at any point in the game, get any money in any way other than selling items. There aren't even gems or anything that exist only to sell for a lot, everything you can sell is potentially useful in its own right and you get peanuts compared to how much it would cost to buy the same thing. It's not a minor or optional mechanic; if you like it when your army has weapons, you need to be capturing on an extremely regular basis. It makes for a really crunchy, interesting in-game economy where you're basically always tense about your equipment.

Luckily, the other really important thing about capturing is that it's really fucking hard and dangerous. You have to defeat the enemy anyway to capture them; you can't do it on enemy phase so it often requires some tricky baiting; some units can almost never do it at all because you need higher constitution than the enemy; doing it with other enemies around will definitely get someone killed because you have severe stat penalties while holding a captive; and worst of all, using the Capture command instead of Attack also gives you stat penalties. It turns out fighting with edged weapons is harder when you're trying not to kill the fucker, what's up with that?

This also means the better the loot, the harder it is to get, since rare and valuable items tend to be carried by stronger enemies who are deeper behind enemy lines. You're basically running a cost-benefit analysis every time you see something you really want; you may have to stick your entire head in a blender to get it, but can you afford to pass it up? The game is hard right now, but it's not gonna get any easier later on, especially if you're not building a stockpile of exactly this kind of resource. That extra Warp staff will be a huge lifeline. Did I mention that the guy is using it every turn, so by the time you get to him and take it, having run fucking pell-mell through an obstacle course of siege weaponry and cavalry that overextended you for the rest of the map, it has one cast left? The game is littered with honey pots like this, where it dangles something you DESPERATELY want in front of you, then makes it so difficult and costly to get that you don't realize it's not worth it until you're already hard committed. I hear you laughing at me, Kaga, you weird chauvinist fuck! This still doesn't make you cool!

So obviously I'm an idiot masochist, but there is more than pain here. Counterintuitively, for how much you're suffering, you get to fuck around with some of the strongest units in the series. (Relative to the game around them. Their stats cap at 20 they should not fight FE10 units--) You form the kind of attachment to characters like Mareeta and Asbel, to name just a couple of the more extreme examples, that you can normally only get with people you've ACTUALLY been to war with. They're your fucking rock. A fixed point you can rely on when you need them most.

It also helps that, in moderation, you get to be just as sadistic as the game. I know I just spent a small novel hyping up the scarcity of resources, but the thing about the game making you fight like hell to get anything is that it can make a lot more crazy stuff technically available. You won't get out of this map with a Brave Sword, a Sleep staff, a promotion item and two Silver weapons--but with some elbow grease you can probably get a couple of them, and that actually gives you a lot of freedom. Your toolkit is both limited and potentially really potent, and sometimes you realize you have the right combination of staves or something to completely ratfuck a challenge that looked impossible at first glance, as a reward for having worked hard earlier in the game. That's a rare, amazing feeling.

Okay, this is a stupid sentence but it's my review and it can be stupid if I want: I haven't played Pathologic, but FE5 kind of makes me feel the way people describe Pathologic. I mean, I wouldn't call them similar games, the narrative here is not exactly high art, but it's a story about being a scrappy underdog rebel faction fighting a huge empire and the gameplay genuinely commits to that feeling. It is impossible to forget while playing this game that everything is working against you, you have nothing but what you can desperately claw out of somebody else's hands, and you cannot win by fighting fair. Thracia really is a harrowing game, but inside the infamous struggle is something that sticks with you; something bold, fascinating, and incredibly rewarding.

although Saias being arbitrarily immune to Sleep and Silence in chapter 22 is fucking--

Thracia is a beautiful video game and a bit of a standout in the Fire Emblem series. In FE you often play as a prince or princess with the support of the crown, yours or another, at your back. Knights, resources, loyal retainers, and the like. You go forth and fight for your kingdom, your friends, and what have you.

Thracia is a bit different. Leif is a minor prince in exile, and your brigade is the local militia. So much of the game is spent struggling against overwhelming odds; running away from a superior force. You have very little gold, so you need to capture enemies and steal their equipment. Every victory feels desperate and well-earned.

The game is full of bullshit. It is a bullshit game. Don't have enough keys at this very late chapter in the game? Sorry, buddy, you're softlocked. Oh, you're in the bandit gaiden? Get ready for the girl with the Thief staff to steal your equipment from across the map. Deal with it. Got a powerful unit in the middle of your army? Sorry, she got hit by the berserk staff and just killed your best healer. Walk out into the dark forest? That's a shame, this random bandit just hit you with a sleep staff, captured you, and stole all your equipment. Oh, and the boss hit you with a long range sleep staff, too. Don't even get me started on the long range siege tomes through fog of war.

The game hates you. The game spits on your face. You think you're having a continent-spanning adventure as the Hero-Prince Marth? Who the fuck do you think you are? You think you're having a geopolitical Shakespearean drama, an ancient epic with larger-than-life heroes blessed by the blood of ancient warriors, of the very gods themselves like in FE4? Get real, twerp. You're a two-bit prince with a bunch of militia troops, freedom fighters, and mountain noble knights (later), and you've got to run the fuck away before you can reclaim your kingdom. Every battle is desperate. Every victory is hard-won.

The beauty of the bullshit is that you also have bullshit. Staffs are busted. Warp across the map, who cares. Make the enemy berserk, whatever. Thief staff the boss's weapon away, what's he gonna do about it? When you're this desperate, who the fuck cares about 'fighting fair'? This game was meant to be cheesed, because it's cheesing you. It feels like the director Kaga is challenging you, personally, to a battle of wits - a contest you're going to rise to the challenge of.

One part that stands out to me is a mission later in the game, a tense defense mission where you have to hold out for reinforcements. When it is finally done, the protagonist of FE4 appears with a host of troops to bail you out and give you the thumbs up before going back to doing incredibly significant, world-saving epic shit. You, as Leif, and all of your struggles, have just been a footnote in the greater narrative of FE4. Your 16+ chapters of blood, sweat, tears and loss are just a single map to the other guy.

It's beautiful.

Most significant to me is the penultimate map, right before the finale. I won't give details of the reward, but it is the height of the game's bullshit, of its player-hostile design. Seemingly-random tiles teleport your units to a room in the bottom where they are beaten to death by enemy reinforcements coming out of stairways from which there is no escape. Fog of war concealing Berserkers with extremely high crit and damage, all but guaranteeing a one hit kill on any of your unfortunate allies. Constantly dark mages warping towards you from across the map. It is perverse. It is disgusting. It feels like something out of like a cruel romhack, like a particularly rough Kaizou Mario.

Yet it has great purpose. If you go through it, even though your best units will likely be fatigued and thus unusable in the final map, where you will need them most to actually beat the game - even though you will gain no new items, no new weapons, not even a powerful party member - you are instead rewarded with the best cutscene in the game and incredible emotional catharsis.

It is completely optional. It is in your best tactical interest to not do it. The requirements to unlock it are slightly difficult in the previous map. Yet, the game looks you in the eye, narrows its own, and asks you how much you want your happy ending. Because if you do, you'd better come and get it, motherfucker.

I love Thracia 776. I don't think we'll ever get a game in the Fire Emblem series like it again, but I deeply cherish my time with it and hope anyone else interested in Fire Emblem gives it a try, ideally after getting a few femblems under their belt.

For my first Bomberman game, I was thinking of trying the NES one, but decided on this for 2 reasons, firstly because the NES Bomberman has 50 FUCKING LEVELS, and also because i liked the footstep sound effects in this one, idk why, they just itch my brain in the right way.

Anyway, this was a great time, and one of the best ways to start with the BM franchise. It's pretty easy for a SNES game, since you have unlimited continues which start you off in the exact level you were in. The stage 4 boss can go smd tho.

the ost also bangs, stage 4 and the boss themes are both top 10 snes music tracks

primeiro jogo indie feito inteiramente em Cuba! toda a solidariedade aos nossos irmãos latinos na resistência contra as aves de rapina.

esse jogo (assim como meio que qualquer plataforma de puzzle) possui coletáveis, mas a maneira que são abordados é bem interessante. tudo baseado no detalhe de que não podemos conhecer nosso desfecho se não soubermos a nossa própria história. isso é reiterado pelo personagem Cronista sempre que o encontramos. o único coletável são pedaços de papel que, juntos, viram um item para relembrar o protagonista de seu passado. uma maneira bem interessante de lidar com essa característica super comum nesse gênero e, que fica mais interessante ainda quando se tem uma ideia da história do povo cubano. espero que saiam mais jogos feitos lá. consumir arte de outros países é sempre muito revigorante.

pra terminar gostaria de adaptar uma das minhas frases históricas favoritas. frase essa de Porfírio Diaz:
"Pobre Cuba. Tão longe de Deus mas tão perto dos Estados Unidos."
(na original é pobre México)

So all the DLC is out now, adding up to a total of 52 songs (counting full versions of certain songs separately), which is a considerable improvement from the initial number. I S+ ranked, full combo'd all songs on Easy and Normal, and did the same for S rank and full combo on Hard. So I think I'm finished with the game for good now.

The song selection here is very strong, but I don't think I can improve my rating beyond 3 stars still, because some of this game's charting and general difficulty scaling is weird. Some songs on Hard difficulty are super simple while others feel more like they'd fit Expert difficulty more. Easy mode should be, you know, easy, but it ended up being more challenging than Normal to S+ rank because there are less notes overall (if you screw up, it reduces your score considerably more). Expert mode felt way way too hard for me as someone who doesn't play rhythm games, but that's not that big of a deal. Overall I'm happy that Gunvolt Records Cychronicle exists, but I think I'm even happier that I can now move on from the game.

Also according to the steam charts I'm like the only person who plays this game LOL

Wario Land 4 é a melhor aventura de Wario até o momento -- é a primeira trama da série em que as coisas acontecem a partir das ações de Wario e é engraçado pensar nisso porque é também a jornada mais "simples" -- Wario invade um templo, pega os tesouros, tudo desmorona, ele foge, fim.

em todo jogo da série até agora o Wario sai ganhando no final com uma conclusão positiva mas de alguma forma nem todas as suas jornadas se contextualizavam em circunstâncias positivas. no primeiro jogo ele passa por diversos desafios até conseguir sua primeira riqueza (o castelo), no segundo ele passa o jogo inteiro indo atrás do que já era dele, no terceiro todo o game design é moldado ao redor da justificativa de que ele não tem os poderes no mundo da caixa de música e precisa recuperá-los

e aí no 4, ele tem tudo, e o jogo só existe porque ele tava afim de dar um rolê de carro. as animações idle do Wario é literalmente ele fazendo algum exercício físico. as músicas são todas animadas e memoráveis, as fases são extremamente criativas e sei lá, parece que tá tudo de acordo com os movimentos do Wario -- não no mesmo ritmo, mas sim na mesma melodia.

é o primeiro jogo da série que não tenta ser completamente diferente do anterior (o 1 sendo um platformer padrão, o 2 mudando a forma em que os desafios são compostos, o 3 mudando toda a estrutura pra transformar num metroidvania) e aí o 4 chega e muda as coisas com base numa introspecção de "o que deu certo e o que deu errado até agora na franquia" -- voltaram com os pontos de vida do Wario mas mantiveram os inimigos de transformação, voltaram com a importância do dinheiro, voltaram com o timer mas implementaram ele como padrão de todo final de fase (pra forçar o backtracking e liberar trechos novos de exploração) e mudaram a estrutura de progressão do jogo -- agora são 4 mundos, 4 fases cada um, e a ordem é completamente livre (mesmo que exista certa escala de dificuldade)

o jogo trouxe de volta muitas ideias da franquia enquanto abandonou outras, mas o que mais me cativou foi o quão bem misturaram e masterizaram o conceito de 'exploração espacial' com a progressão restrita (mesmo que pouco burocrática) de collectathon do jogo -- eu me senti desafiado em bons momentos num jogo em que o apelo pra mim era sair andando e interagindo com coisas. enquanto no 2 eu tive que me adaptar com os controles novos junto com o Wario que tinha acabado de acordar, e no 3 eu precisava me acomodar à limitações com a progressão metroidvania dele (baseada na necessidade de poderes pra poder desbloquear diferentes caminhos e fases), o 4 já me deixa TUDO disposto -- e eu penso no Wario como esse veículo, essa figura controlável que me dá todas as habilidades pra explorar os ambientes e interagir com eles, e coloco tudo isso na idealização que eu tenho do level design de Wario Land 4 como o mais inventivo da série: todos os mundos tem temáticas bem definidas com mecânicas super diferentes e criativas umas das outras, e pra mim, esse artifício só tá ali pra reforçar o quão Capaz o Wario é de superar aqueles desafios enquanto se diverte e se sente bem consigo mesmo.

Wario Land 4 é um jogo que move corpos de uma forma diferente que reitera seu funcionamento como um jogo novo da franquia -- e mesmo assim, conseguiu ser o mais único até agora.

Tempo é dinheiro, e você tá em dívida com o Wario.