[post-25th ward face] haha ummmm yea!

first thing to get out of the way: the presentation here is a beast, even by grasshopper's standards. if it weren't for killer7's audio design i'd call 25w their aesthetic peak, so it follows then that this is some of the coldest atmosphere in games ever. you'd think the original silver case was the mobile game.

i mentioned in my flower sun and rain review that i expected 25th ward to be a "return to the grime" after the vacation away, but it turns out that's not entirely the case. 25 coming after 24 implies sequentiality, certain concepts and people do make a return, but the 25th ward--both the game and the setting--won't provide as much continuity as you might assume. in fact it will at many points try to shatter that continuity, and then dare you to look for it anyway. the 25th is influenced by the 24th, its a more rigidly enforced and even more claustrophobic city box, but its acceleration and sterility also makes for a keener sense of meditation on itself from so many angles, honing on in not just the city-net idea but also on the dynamics of surveillance, identity within gender/work/metafiction, exorcising the past, anachronistic reflection on the work from the authors, and games and the player-character.

this is best felt in the interactive space of the game, hugely improved and more considered than its direct predecessor. tsc tries to connect urbanization with cold unfeeling logic by having you solve codes to unlock doors and shit, but they are too infrequent and don't have much behind them beyond the numbers and ciphers themselves. 25w by comparison utilizes wizardry-esque navigation thru indoor hallway mazes, sex chat as repetitive dialogue trees, and constant password/pin entering (i don't make a lot of comparisons to fsr but this element feels the most like that game) to hone in on tsc's original thesis, expressing it more starkly and confidently. one really vivid example for me being when you are dropped into an apartment complex of four 7 floor buildings with 10 rooms per floor, in order to find a man hiding out in one of those 280 rooms. the "city" has been crunched down to "the apartment building" as a database, dehumanized yet also video gamey, onto itself; your partner is a "searcher" who can feel out where he is, so you search by building/disk, then by floor/folder, in order to target a piece of data that is a person.

that said i really had to think over this one, i practically immediately replayed it to sort feelings on it. tsc has the clearest sense of "character development"--how i took it anyway--guiding it and concludes on a more directly emotional note, and the interplay between its two scenarios feels the most effective compared to 25w's further and further divergences between its scenarios. BUT 25w is much tighter its in thematic construction, managing to be ballsier and THE most weapons-grade cryptic shit without completely toppling its jenga tower, and its more fun to think about after the fact in some ways. your preferral of tsc or 25w may depend on, at the risk of oversimplifying what its doing, how willing you are to accept characters that are more seemingly static in their personality, or at least foggier (the big exception being in matchmaker, imo the weakest scenario that feels unfinished by its end but is enjoyable on its own terms for having the most bluntly dynamic arc for its characters) for the sake of interrogating their role in the world. in many cases the players perception of them changing with their understanding of the story is what matters, and that is admittedly used to great effect with further readings. but its difficult to say how i mean this kind of thing exactly

i was ready to call it my least favorite of the trilogy after first finishing it but now it may be slightly better than tsc? im still not 100% sure where to place this, other than that i know fsr was basically predetermined to be my favorite so i can say its not at that level for me, but ultimately all three games are bangers so yeah. did my best to make a review that wouldn't need a spoiler-tag but my god at this point i am just constipated to get into this more

no schmovement + linear + cringe + ratio

Prime takes its series to new heights in atmosphere, environmental storytelling and polish, but also sacrifices a little too much of Super Metroid's sweaty energy and genius level design structure for my tastes. Morphballing over bumpy terrain, side-stepping around Space Pirates and double jumping between platforms is fun, but is it as fun as it could be when every room is a tiny self-contained box? It sucks ass how you can get the Ice Beam, see eight Ice Beam doors on your map and then realize that seven of them are dead ends.

The wide-eyed little gamer in me hopes Retro will take inspiration from more loosey-goosey schmovement sandbox FPS games like Quake, Titanfall 2 or Halo Infinite for Prime 4. As it stands though, I can appreciate this more rigid Ocarina of Time-style take on Metroid for what it is!

(recommended by clownswords on this list. i remembered!)
reigning champ and apotheosis of the ridge racer formula, type 4 finds namco on much more confident ground when compared to the shaky foundation rage racer built. a lot of rage racer's aesthetic musings - the idealization and veneration of wheelmen, the sleekness of these machines, the grunge and beauty of asphalt and cobblestone - have all essentially been given a facelift, no longer resembling a gloomy concrete jungle but instead coming across as suggestive, painterly, and sometimes ghostly. like many games of its kind, its romantic, but instead of invoking the arcade palette of saturated hues or gleaming vistas, this game is adorned with earthier tones that really strongly compliment its otherwise exuberant and kinetic approach to racing ('out of blue' is a particular fave of mine - cruising through a picturesque port town during a misty morning). personally i sensed a lot of overlap with ace combat 3 - obviously both works' existence as namco projects goes without saying but relating to their fidelity, they both have similarly moody approaches to lighting that really become apparent as you speed down highways at night that are pockmarked by pale green lights and transition into tunnels that explode with hazy amber. to say little of that incredible soundtrack shared between both titles! electrosphere with its comparatively cold electronic soundtrack has its antithesis in type 4, with polished evocative tracks that go down like smooth scotch (although 'motor species' is actually just a dead fucking ringer for some ace combat 3 tracks, which makes sense given that three composers are common to both games). it's not the furious rave techno of prior ridge racer entries, but it's mellow and heartthumping and just so goddamn arresting, my favourite soundtrack in a long while. drifting in sync has never felt better. so much of the reason this game is adored is largely for its aesthetic which is, to be sure, excellent, but this belies that it's every bit as strong mechanically as prior entries. rage racer's experimentalism is done away with for a more conservative experience, so hills are no longer sisyphean trials and drift/grip type vehicles see further segregation, but it's hard to complain when the end result is a game with some legitimately wicked track design that packs intelligent re-use of assets. the campaign, which has four levels of 'tuning' difficulties that all offer simplistic but reactive stories that depend on your performance as a racer, was a really nice touch - didn't need to be there but thoroughly enjoyed that element nonetheless. all their discussion about willpower and unattainable ideals is a fun way to motivate the player but also to underscore that these games are time trials in disguise, with your rival opponents being obstacles to surmount and benchmarks to ascendancy rather than acting as traditional opponents. about the only complaint i have in that regard is that it's strange that the peak of the game's difficulty is at the midway point; it's really disappointing that the final stage can be overcome without any of the predilection for appropriate technique that the game demonstrated prior to this (again, somewhat excusable, movin' in circles is one of the best tracks on the OST). even so, this is still a game that's firing on all cylinders - i had cynically expected some resistance to that idea heading in but it really is the peak of the franchise so far while carving out its own spot as a giant in arcade racing.

this is a game for the fellas who have It. if you dont know what that might be, you gotta do some soulsearching on these streets

In my short time on this platform I've noticed that a not-insignificant portion of FromSoft fans tend to look back on Demon's Souls as nothing but a stepping stone to Dark Souls, and while DeS certainly laid the groundwork for a new sub-genre of adventure games that future titles would learn from, I don't think it's fair to sweep it under the rug as nothing but a prototype.

Something we tend to hear about in games criticism is the idea of conventional design. For example, a platformer that teaches a concept in a safe environment and tests your knowledge on the concept incrementally will likely be heralded as an example of good game design. It doesn't have to be a platformer, every genre under the sun tends to have games that follow what's expected, and more often than not those games see success over those that break the mold. This makes sense to a certain degree, something comfortable to the consumer is clearly a safe investment, odds are they'll be more satisfied with their purchase in the short term, etc. The fallacy here, of course, is the implication that the best games only stem from those that don't take risks, but looking at the most successful games of all time night trick you into believing this. Market trends continue to worm their way into every corner of the medium, allowing for higher profits for the higher ups at big companies leading to more disposable experiences (quick aside, but this is a big reason why i tend to be more cynical towards remakes these days. it's more profitable to take a classic title and reshape it to better fit in with modern standards rather than just preserve the art as it once was).

This is why a game like Demon's Souls slipping through the cracks is all the more fascinating to me. Back in an era where most devs fell into formulaic trappings that some would follow for the next decade, DeS not only made it to shelves in the tangled abrasive state it was in, but actually managed to resonate with it's playerbase. What other game was cool with you missing massive pieces of lore right before the final boss? What do you mean other players can join my world and punish me for successfully regaining my humanity? Even today, Demon's Souls was able to capture my attention in how it was somehow able to tie all these disparate gameplay elements together cohesively.

Now, it'd be foolish of me to write any piece on a Miyazaki-directed title without bringing up the difficulty, but to those of us who've played DeS, the way the game expects mastery from the player is more thoughtful than you might be led to believe. If there's one slice of the game that exemplifies this well, it's gotta be the cycle between soul form and human form. Starting the game with half your health slashed might be devastating to a first-time player, but it will surely teach them one thing: patience. After the player has carefully navigated the first level and taken down their first boss, they're rewarded with their humanity, but only for a fleeting moment. Since they know that this only lasts as long as they can handle, it will make them more cautious of traps and upcoming dangers, as the punishment for death will be severe. But even though they may lose their humanity in the moment, the reward for pushing through can't be understated. It's a brilliant little loop of design that not only keeps the player engaged throughout, but expertly threads the game's depressing mood and theming into the core gameplay. It's gameplay ideas like this that are so insane when stacked up against the larger gaming landscape, but the team behind the project had faith and passion in what they were creating, any potential accolades were secondary to the game itself.

Suffficed to say, it's very cathartic to see a game like Demon's Souls make an impact despite not even the publishers and higher ups at Sony believing in it. Even though Dark Souls was the game that changed the world in a more significant way, it wouldn't have turned out the way it did had Demon's Souls been adjusted to better fit in with the industry. Is it a game that can stumble over its own ideas occasionally? Sure. Are there clearly rough edges that slipped past QA that wouldn't have existed if the team had more experience? Absolutely. But we need more games that are willing to bend conventions and see what they can get away with. We need more rule breakers like Hidetaka Miyazaki that care about creating meaningful experiences above all else. Though even if all creativity was drained from humanity tomorrow and we only got slop for the rest of our existence, at least that wouldn't wash away the diamond in the rough that came to life against all odds.

Simply put, few games have managed to capture my soul quite as much as this, and that's probably the highest praise I can give.

Alien Soldier is the very definition of Sink Or Swim. It doesn't care who you are or where you came from, you're not going ANYWHERE until you blast this massive, writhing, cybernetic worm thing all the way to Hell. If Shadow of the Colossus can be called a “Boss Rush,” then Alien Soldier is a “Boss Stampede.” A “Boss Bullet Train.” A “Hyper Boss Fighter II Turbo: Fight for the Future.“ Why nobody’s been hollering loudly about Alien Soldier’s greatness for the last two decades is seriously beyond me, though it’s probably because they’re all too busy evangelizing Gunstar Heroes (or — checks notes — Minecraft). Then again, as of my writing this, Alien Soldier already has a higher average rating than Gunstar Heroes on Backloggd.com, though, let’s pretend I’m not preaching to the choir for just a moment.

Somewhere between Treasure’s previous run-and-gun ventures and Sin and Punishment, Alien Soldier achieves actual, No-Really relentlessness. Barreling through setpiece after setpiece, packed with wild battles so frantic that your real-world cool-headedness becomes an active game mechanic, its manufactured setting takes on an air of genuine ferocity. It’s so videogame-y that, in the heat of the moment, its game-y-ness folds back on itself and becomes believability. The drama that emerges from its extreme white-knuckle “VISUALSHOCK!!” action grinds the nonsense story on the title screen down to powder. Rather than getting kicked back to a level select, you progress until you win or die. And “winning” puts every twitch action reflex bone in your body to the test.

Remember how, right at the start, Gunstar Heroes made you choose whether or not you’d be able to move while shooting for the whole game? Alien Soldier laughs directly into the camera, says “THAT was dumb,” reels back, and hurls the car keys your way at mach five. It’s your responsibility to work out When to do What. Select any four of six possible weapons to cycle between. Press the jump button in mid-air to hover in place. You can walk on the ceiling. Parry bullets to turn them into health blobs. Reach max health, and your invulnerable dash becomes a Fiery Death Charge. Because this is a certifiably Great Videogame, this damages you slightly. Here, the rhythm of Alien Soldier’s dance comes into focus. Swap modes, cycle weapons, fire, dodge, cycle again, hover, parry bullets, dash, and you might just live to fight the next unholy abomination. You can breathe when it’s over.

It’s a dollar on Steam.

this is a title that feels downright oppressive at first. your protagonist takes up an absolutely absurd amount of screen real estate; you have a wealth of complex techniques to master mapped to only three different buttons; there's six different weapons, not all of which are applicable in every scenario, and there are upwards of twenty different ways of representing your status and resources; the only available difficulties are SUPEREASY and SUPERHARD. this is unruly, frantic, and demanding, and you'll likely spend a fair amount of time dying repeatedly just to make heads or tails of the game because it shoves you right into the crossfire, before you might even be aware that the entire game is tantamount to a boss rush.

stick with it. conquer the game on SUPERHARD, no matter how arduous. it's the rare game that makes the most of every single mechanic on offer, where each design implementation is representative of an uncanny degree of fine-tuning and polish. i can point to any one detail in this game, no matter how consequential or intangible, and give you a sensible, informative, and well-articulated answer for why it was designed this way. doubtless the masters at treasure can, too. it's tooth-and-nail adrenaline-inducing frenzy condensed into an hour's run time

DISCLAIMER: this review will spoil both the original game and official remake for Metroid II. If you're unfamiliar with how either play out, I'd strongly recommend playing the original first, and then the remake.

It's pretty easy to separate remakes into two distinct categories: those that are supplementary to the original (Final Fantasy VII Remake, Twin Snakes) and those that are replacements to the original (Demon's Souls, Shadow of the Colossus). I tend to be more apprehensive towards the latter, but that's not to say it can't be done well. With the right team at the helm (usually including the original designers) it's possible to create something truly special that polishes the original's shortcomings and reinvents what it represented without the constraints of it's era. I haven't played the Resident Evil Remake, but from what I'm told it's the best example of a game that repaints the original while still capturing the spirit and soul present in the PlayStation version.

Having said that, most replacement remakes tend to stumble over themselves and create a product that doesn't really do justice to the source material in any way. Samus Returns is no different.

Looking at it in a vaccum, it's a standard Metroid adventure. Many areas tend to blend into one another and the stop-and-start nature of combat got old quickly, but a lot of it is pretty familiar and comfortable if you're familiar with the series. Looking at it in the context of the source material is where it really starts to fall apart in my eyes.

Much of the charm of Return of Samus was how cramped and stressful the whole journey was. The first game presented a complete mirror of the Zelda series that felt both swashbuckling and mysterious with it's alien world while still feeling like an adventure. It's sequel, by comparison, wasn't nearly as pleasant and leaned more into a psudo-horror atmosphere. You were tasked with exterminating an entire alien race, and the game quite fittingly was upsetting to trek through. Traversing the caves of SR388 always felt tense, the limited visibility meant you never knew what was around every corner, and the Metroid encounters were a mad scramble to stay alive more than anything. Nothing about it felt triumphant. While repetitive towards the end, each subsequent Metroid encounter would eventually feel as if you're just filling a quota, like you're just clocking in for a drab job only to slog through the day and clock out. It was interesting to see Samus not only get tasked with commiting genocide on an alien planet, but for it to be presented without any of the energy you might expect. And yet, in one final subversive gesture, it doesn't end on a sour note. Samus comes across a Metroid hatchling, and instead of greeting it with hostility, she changes her tone and takes it back to the federation. One would expect a game like this to end in bombast, yet the player gets a moment of quiet relief. The mission was over, there was no need for any more violence or conflict. The galaxy was at peace.

Presumably in an effort to modernize the game and have it fall more in line with other popular titles, the official Metroid II remake manages to sand down nearly all distinct elements of the GameBoy classic and create a game that hardly resembles that which it's trying to replicate. It seems as though every change made in Samus Returns was made to make everything bigger, better, and louder. In place of pitch black dour caves you have brightly lit neon crystal formations, enemies are more aggressive promoting the use of your new parry action to make combat feel more "engaging", the list of changes is pretty massive and it'd be boring to just list them all. Instead, I think it'd be valuable to mention how these changes all fit together. In other words, each step in the remake progress was logical.

Newer games are expected to be bigger so they made the map bigger, and by extension added an actual map to track your progress. The lack of any map in the original is a big sticking point for many, but what makes it work is how you only needed to keep a small chunk of the map in your mind at any time, once you finish an area you can move on and never look back. It created a dizzying feeling while exploring, but the excellent layout and sprite designs guaranteed the player should never be lost for too long. Now that the world is massive, it'd be ridiculous to force the player to track it all in their brain, so the map makes some amount of sense. It just comes at a cost of the rewarding feeling players got by picking apart the world completely on their own.

More pressingly, the huge world greatly effects the thrill of hunting Metroids. In the original, not only could they spring up at any moment, but encounters never felt gamey for lack of a better term. Fights could take place in sand pits, cramped caves, or anywhere for that matter. They never felt like video game combat arenas, so the whole journey felt natural. The heart sinking feeling of finding a Metroid never lost it's spark since you never knew when they'd appear. Naturally, SR opts into a dedicated radar that beeps like a metal detector as you approach a Metroid removing the thrill of discovery, and every fight takes place in one of a handful of deliberately designed sterile arenas.

None of these elements stand up to the scrappy yet elegant design of the original, but the biggest blunder has got to be the overall tone and feel of the game. As I mentioned earlier, hunting Metroids in the original rarely felt fun. It was a nerve-wracking crawl through claustrophobic caves and generally just felt miserable. The remake instead wants the player to feel as cool as posible while shredding this world to pieces. Samus's parry is the most immediate example of this cheap pop of energy, but the series first of Cutscenes That Wrestle Control From The Player to Show You Something Sick Nasty From Samus is the most obnoxious. Walking into an unknown area and having control taken from me is the quickest way to let me know I'm in absolutely no danger, and anything that happens is bound to be awesome. Because nothing screams genocide like Samus backflipping off of an alien as she shoots it to death.

Not even the beautiful ending leaves unscathed, what used to be a calm reflective escape to your ship is now an action packed sprint through every basic enemy in the game's roster followed by the most embarrassing form of fanservice in the game, a brand new final boss against the most iconic villain of the series, Ridley. Of course the game with the most subversive ending had to end with bombast, that's what they always intended for with the classic violence free ending right?

The cherry on top is the baby Metroid itself, once a symbol of hope to strategically shift the tone before the end is now relegated to a key for item collection right after the Queen Metroid encounter, but before the final boss, leading to the most frustrating item cleanup in the series.

I recognize most of this write up has been me whining about why the remake fails when stacked up against the original, and while that may seem sloppy and unfair, it's only natural given the fact that they share a title. Samus Returns was meant to be a cozy return to form for the series, and in many ways it accomplished that goal. It's nice to see a series come back in a familiar setting after lying dormant for a decade, but that's never what the original was meant to be. It was a brand new adventure that didn't have to follow an arbitrary ruleset laid in place by the series legacy, it was an interesting sequel to a groundbreaking title and nothing else. These days people don't look fondly on Return of Samus, so this could have been a perfect opportunity for Mercury Steam to show the world what made the original so special in their own Resident Evil Remake moment. Instead what we got was a safe installment that proudly wears the series on its sleeve, but holds no reverence for the game that bore the title of Metroid II.

mascotizing, de-eroticized, de-humanizing wooby doo-doo that started out as a low key homophobic ~sooo randim~ joke about how funny gay cultural nomenclature is to its straight creators but then got agonizingly retconned into game grumps' (ugh) flailing attempt at a self-serious inclusivity project. Too ignorant and afraid of offending anyone to portray anything resembling adult human intimacy or eroticism, and reeks with the no homo!!!! creator's fears of depicting anything messy, hot, or specific about icky degenerate gay sexuality. Never overtly cruel and clearly interested in playacting safeness and inclusivity, but the placid smoothness of everything feels like its own form of erasure--and it's a smug, self congratulatory one. This is clearly not really trying to provide anything meaningful or substantive for gay audiences: it's for obnoxious straight "allies" to play and have fuzzy wuzzies about how great they are for wubbing the cutesy wootsie daddy poos--they're smol pastel beans just like us!!! Heinous. I dont want to yuck anyones yum too hard or whatever but if you're a queer adult and love this game I kind of think you're a fucking idiot

the discrepancy between top banana's advertised aesthetic, signified by its cover art, and the manifestly psychedelic artwork reflected within is ferociously disorienting. ive never felt such abrasive whiplash, anticipating a rote and teed-up but hamfistedly executed platformer and getting instead what can only be described as environmental rave horror.

im pretty happy to walk into games knowing next to nothing these days, people love inadvertently ruining the joy of discovery online nowadays. i sat there for half an hour, adjusting the settings of my amiga emulator, trying to get this damn thing to work with no knowledge of the games mechanics or stylings. for a time i was accompanied only by the lovingly recreated whirring and chugging of the amiga emulator reading my floppy disk files, presumably orchestrated so as to reflect the sounds an actual amiga might make. we're segued into the game with a loop of a music video entitled 'Global Chaos' featuring protagonist KT, and then momentarily halted by copy-protection as the game asks us to use a specific word from the game's manual as passcode. following this, the player is unceremoniously thrust into the game proper and finds they must contend with an arcane control scheme. z moves left, x moves right, the enter key fires hearts, the quote key jumps, and the / key will stop jump momentum at any interval, bringing you down to a platform.

according to the manual, top banana's world is facing calamity: "not from slimy aliens or evil wizards but from direct consequences of our own greed and stupidity." in plainer terms, corresponding to the systems of the game itself, the manual lets us know the goal is simple: reach the top of the stage, prove your skill and courage in the material world, and become the top banana after seeking ultimate wisdom in the Mind-Scape. along the way you navigate perilous floods and you vanquish foes, among them bulldozers and emaciated individuals, with the power of love, akin to an off-kilter love-de-lic experience. it would be a straightforward endeavour were it not for some frankly eerie sound design, evocative of silent hill and siren, setting the tone for the experience. note that i wouldnt make that comparison lightly. this is compounded further by some genuinely eye-straining and cluttered visuals.

and this is where my interests in top banana as an ineffectual and rudimentary, but otherwise somewhat functional platformer end and my interest in top banana as an aesthetic experience begin, something of a vulgar, perverse mother 3. because it's clearly not up to snuff as an arcade platformer - controls are slippery, the ruleset is abundantly unclear, visuals are sometimes indecipherable, the effects of powerups are very rarely beneficial - despite being obsequious to the general rule of thumbs for a variety of very difficult arcade platformers, ie directing the player to adhere to a strict choreography in order to progress effectively. but it is, in many ways, something of a forward-thinking experience that could only have been constructed by a multimedia collective, not fully dedicated to games but instead interested in their form, structure, and conveyance. a lot of the spritework and textures in top banana wouldn't feel too out of place in something from jack king-spooner's body of work (like a boss that's a cross between a police helmet and a spider), with the claustrophobia of its platforming feeling not dissimilar from itch.io works, or something like problem attic. and obviously the sound design is very much worth mentioning too, with its rainforest stages all sounding like a turbulent mix of either raging fires in the distance or generic jungle ambience; the mind can't quite decide initially. all told, the game's environmentalist journey has you traverse hollowed-out industrial cities, crumbling religious temples, and a "psychedelic hip-house", the haze and splendor of a mind flayed, as you fight against your "fears, dreams, and illusions". kind of earnestly bleak stuff, kicking you back to the starting point ghosts n goblins style, without any felt impact on the world or its inhabitants but instead jeering and laughing from the game itself. love, self-actualization and self-prioritization, and spiritual enlightenment aren't enough in the face of the world's evils, it seems.

i also think it's noteworthy that it takes its environmentalist bent to the furthest extent it can, releasing with environmentally friendly packaging and even allowing for a supposed large breadth of freedom with regards to editing sprites and sound, kind of riffing on that sustainability. put your money where your mouth is and all that, serves as a nice implicit acknowledgment this medium is a nightmare wrt exploitation of environment

it's really quite fascinating playing something that feels modern in sensibilities and tone with relation to the medium, despite releasing into a media zeitgeist already dominated by themes of environmental preservation as it relates to encroaching technological advancement (with even dinosaurs ending with its cast confronting corporate-engineered apocalypse). no doubt in my mind rainbow islands is the better game but there's something about this games tailored spitefulness im enamored with. it's cynical and cruel, i kind of love it. KICK IT TO EM.

Playing this really drove home that I was right about Dark Souls being the almost note-perfect translation of the search action template into 3D that people wanted from the 3D Castlevanias, only it refuses to compromise or accommodate in certain areas (save and warp point placement most obviously, but also enemy mob rooms that are never as lacking in any actual strategic options for dealing with them nor as frustrating by just knocking the player around, albeit with negligible damage) where SOTN practically bends over backward to such an extent that it terminally borks the game's difficulty curve after the first few hours and renders the entire inverted castle as effectively just busywork, especially with its weapon damage scaling (e.g. some of SOTN's game-breakingly OP special weapon abilities such as Shield Rod + Alucard Shield). From an aesthetic and production design standpoint it absolutely deserves its reputation as a masterpiece, and Alucard feels luxuriously satisfying to play (ridiculous knockback when damaged aside) but as a game it feels - whilst highly enjoyable - surprisingly three quarters baked and at once a bit too eager to avoid alienating anyone for its own good while simultaneously demanding a level of bullshit pixel-hunting obssessiveness to actually fully complete the map that I cannot conceive how people did it without guides. I'm glad I finally gave this a fair shake but I can see how the slavish devotion to the formula established here would go on to frustrate people down the line. Still, looking forward to jamming Aria of Sorrow next to see how they refined it further.