Dungeon crawling in a new style

Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan was a first-person dungeon crawler JRPG released for the 3DS in 2012 in Japan and 2013 in the US. It was the first 3DS Etrian Odyssey title released for the system and considered a good "starting point" for fans interested in the series. After a 58 hour long playthrough on normal, I can safely say that this is a very solid JRPG with good amounts of customization to your party, gameplay and incredibly well composed and performed music.

I'll start off by saying this game really nails the first-person dungeon gameplay well to an extent. The main mazes were interesting in design and each had very unique puzzles that made each maze different from the rest and designed well down to the specific interactions you can have in each dungeon. This is also helped by the incredible soundtrack this game has, I was honestly surprised how excellent the soundtrack for a game like this. The game nails each maze's theme with a specific ethereal and calming feel and manages to ramp up the seriousness in the final 2 mazes including a battle theme that might be in my top 10 favorite JRPG battle themes. The bread and butter of this game alongside the dungeons are the classes and the synergy you can have with the subclass system here. Each class here feels really unique in what they bring to your party included some very far out ideas that you really don't see in any other JRPG. There is a lot you can customize here with abilities and passives down to the specific dungeon skills each class has that you'll definitely need trekking through the long mazes. This game is also surprisingly difficult for it being considered "one of the easiest" in the series so really know what you're getting into here but the challenge was really satisfying to get through.

As much as I dug this game, there were some rough edges to the gameplay here in general. The general consensus for the fans of EO games have been "creating the map" by yourself and at first it was a bit tedious. I almost considered dropping the game because I found out the automap feature here only does the floor and not the walls so this is also something to keep in mind if you want to get into this game. Obtaining money was also a big problem when getting gear upgrades was getting costly for the amount of money you got in an hour of gameplay not being able to cover one piece of equipment so you really have to make each upgrade worth it. The final maze was also sorta a disappointment in the way it was structured to make the overall finale a bit more tedious than it had to be.

Despite how tedious it got, I still really enjoyed this game a lot. It had a great class/subclass system with the way you can customize your characters along with stellar soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro. If you can dig making your own map and this game kicking your ass, you'll enjoy Etrian Odyssey IV.

"If you've got some real tight friends somewhere nearby, then you know it'll all work out."

i've been a huge fan of the animal crossing series almost my entire childhood, starting with me first seeing tom nook and totakeke as trophies in super smash bros. melee, getting animal crossing new leaf the day it came out and dedicating thousands of hours to it, and culminating in me spending almost the entirety of not just one, but two vacations obsessing over the footage we had been shown from animal crossing: new horizons just to get that game on day one too. it means a lot to me in a way that a lot of series just don't. it's been there with me through some of the most important times in my life, nights where i felt desperately alone or trapped in my own thoughts of self realization, and my first true experience with this franchise came with animal crossing: population growing for the nintendo gamecube.

animal crossing for the nintendo gamecube is a game that means so much to me due in part to how utterly stupid and sheltered i was when i had played it and when i was growing up in general. obviously this isn't at all to say that people who prefer old animal crossing or like animal crossing at all are inherently stupid at all, it's easily one of my favorite franchises of all time. growing up, i didn't love that the villagers were mean. to this a lot of people would probably say
"oh, well that seems pretty normal. i don't think a lot of people liked the mean villagers as kids,"
which i would respond to with a firm
"i did not know they were supposed to be mean."
most of it i thought was the villagers being silly animals who would say mean things just to be silly, kind of like a squidward situation. obviously after growing up and learning more about socialization i grew out of those notions, and while i appreciate it more knowing they are just kind of jerks for the sake of it, there's kind of an inherent charm to the dialog that i feel like most people don't have. it's near impossible for me to read the dialog in animal crossing as deliberate meanspirited insults as much as it feels like two friends being assholes to each other in that way where you can both tell none of it is serious.
if "i didnt think the villagers were supposed to be mean" is shocking to anyone, i hope it does not come as a surprise that 70% of the time when i played this game, i just didn't save. i had weird notions about how video games worked growing up (i thought if i peeled the sticker off of my cartridge for dragon ball z: buu's fury i would get back the save i deleted off of my uncle's cartridge with the sticker missing) and trying to remember i think it had something to do with wanting the skull shirt and mistaking me forgetting to save the game as it being a day one only shirt, but i genuinely couldn't tell you. needless to say, my experience with animal crossing is probably one that a lot of people didn't have.
when i played animal crossing, it was less about getting used to a small town where nobody knew me and everyone thought i was kind of a poser jerk. it was a game about meeting new people, and i think that shaped a specific vibe for me that i wasn't ever able to capture again since it stemmed purely from childhood naiveté.

but that wasn't all i felt couldn't be captured again.

at its core animal crossing for the gamecube is a much slower, much more spread out experience than its follow ups. everything is slow paced to the point where unless you really wanna work at something or decide to time travel, you won't be doing much when you play each day. it's a nice laid back experience accented by your snobby neighbors and one of the best, off-kilter aesthetics any game has ever had (it's a genuine shame how much they tone it down for later entries). every inch of the game is oozing with character and just the vibes of letting you live your life at your pace. fast forward to animal crossing new leaf, and the series has a lot of quality of life improvements and small new things with your villagers at this point, but it also has a lot more to do. your check in for the day can take anywhere from an hour to five depending on your plans for the town or how many bells you need for your next project, and animal crossing has suddenly become more than just a daily investment. it's a daily investment that lasts over an hour a day if you interact with your mayoral duties and it's expanded on even more with the wonderful welcome amiibo expansion. more things to do is always good! but when i'm in the mood for a game to put myself at ease, i can't say i go back to new leaf that often.
then there's new horizons, which gives you even more to do while also cutting out a majority of the soul and content that made up previous games. the entire game is now busy work, only slightly offset by the fact that checking in daily genuinely does not matter at all which certainly isn't winning it any points.
i just wanted a game i could engage with that captured that slow, my own pace feeling without having to sacrifice the new features from the later games, especially with how new horizons is so easy to get burnt out by.

and that's finally where doubutsu no mori e+ comes in.

doubutsu no mori e+ is an in-depth expansion of the original animal crossing. not only does it add more bugs, fish, villagers, music, minigames, and even a more restricted prototype of the public works project system from new leaf, but it also adds more character. if you have business with nook but his shop is closed, you can bang on his shop with a shovel until you wake him up. he will do business with you, but because you woke him up while he was sleeping, everything is 40% more and he'll take what you give him for 20% less. the reset surveillance center makes its debut in this game, which lets you meet mr. resetti and his brother, don, outside of the context of being yelled at for resetting your game, and that's just the special npcs.
the villagers in your town become a lot more fleshed out in a way that's reminiscent of later titles. you can become best friends with them, you can eavesdrop and listen in on a conversation two of your animals are having, and they even comment on the goings on around town, like your house and nook's store being upgraded. that's just the surface, but a lot of these new features are aspects that were completely absent from the original until wild world came out in the west.

but that's the kicker. "until wild world came out in the west." as of my writing this, the only way to play this game is in an unfinished fan translation and holding google translate up to your screen every time you see something you can't read yourself. it isn't the worst way you could play it, if you can decipher the context and intention behind what's being said instead of just taking google translate at its word you can make it work as a hold over, but most people aren't going to want to play it like this. for the most part, people are going to pass this entry by in favor of wild world or city folk, or in a lot of cases new leaf and new horizons, and that just bums me out in a way. there's a lot of character in this game that shines dimmer and dimmer as the series goes on, and the only way to experience that character and laid back nature in english is a version that's missing a lot of things that, to me, give animal crossing its charm.

i implore anyone who's a fan of animal crossing to try this one out or at the very least keep an eye on the fan translation. there's no ETA and the newest public build is over 2 years old, but a lot of work is being done and it'll be worth the wait once it releases. it's one of the most vibrant and interesting games nintendo has ever published, and i hope one day this is what people think of when they think of the definitive animal crossing experience.

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is a really excellent RPG with some awesome and unique ideas that make up for its few narrative missteps and mechanical opacity. This is the best and most interesting Breath of Fire game.

The visuals and music in Dragon Quarter are great. The character models are well done and expressive and the environments are varied and look good.
The music is definitely a high point, a lot of it is reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story (same composer) and it sounds fantastic throughout the game.

The narrative here is very cool to begin with but runs out of steam towards the end. You play as a 'Ranger' in an underground, post apocalyptic society that seems to have formed after a disaster on the surface of the world, making it unlivable in some way. Over the course of the game you meet Nina, a girl who is a lab experiment of some kind, and Lin, a member of a resistance organization. These three main characters are cool spins on the Breath of Fire main cast (Dragon Boy, Flying Girl, and Cat Person), and it makes this game feel like a weird, far-future version of a Breath of Fire game.
The story itself is contained and drives forward effectively. The world and factions are all interesting and the game generally doesn't try to do too much. There are a lot of really good character moments and the graphical style and animations convey feelings really effectively. There are more than a few very striking character reactions of sadness and horror that are among the most effective I have seen in games.
Near the end the game throws in what is basically a boss gauntlet of a bunch of barely foreshadowed members of some organization that vaguely controls the Rangers and isn't really involved in the story up to that point. It all feels very disconnected and low stakes, even though they hint at some sort of metaphysical connection between these characters. It didn't work for me and just distracted from the main through-line of Nina trying to get to the surface with Ryu and Lin's help (plus interference and rivalry with the Rangers).

Exploration is fun, with distinctive, not-overly confusing dungeons and the ability to start combat by attacking enemies on the field. The environments look cool, in that classic PS2 sort of way, and even though most of it is underground and dark, there is a lot of variety to the areas you travel through.
There is also a fairy cave mini-game where you recruit ants to do various jobs. shrug Breath of Fire.
Combat in Dragon Quarter is tactical. Characters have action points they can spend on movement and attacks in a fairly straight-forward way. There is a twist that works pretty well, where you can build combos from abilities you have 'threaded' onto your weapons. Abilities have different costs and how they are set up in the weapon and how you string them together brings a lot of depth to the system. Each of the three characters also has things they are better at and each feels distinct to play, in terms of their actual abilities and how they combo them together.
Additionally, the main character can use a special dragon mode that gives him new abilities and can kill literally every enemy in the game in one turn. You have a percentage counter and if it hits 100% at any point, it is game over! This seems insane, but manipulating this counter is an integral part of the game that feeds elegantly into...

The real innovation in Dragon Quarter comes, strangely, from the save system which is, unfortunately, very opaque and weird. Getting your head around (and even remembering) how it works is definitely a challenge.
It comes down to basically one menu option (SOL Restore) that you can do whenever you want (and it triggers automatically if you die, which shouldn't ever happen). Using this overwrites certain aspects of your save file and boots you back to the main menu, letting you load your newly altered save. When you load, you are back at the location from the save file, at the level you were when you made it with a minimal set of items and (Importantly!) your dragon percentage at whatever it was when you saved. From the SOL Restore, you get your weapon inventory, item bank, any new skills you found, and your cash and freely assignable party experience points. This is all very complicated and seems arbitrary, but the bottom line is that the game wants you to save before a new area, then run through the upcoming dungeon using your dragon abilities to trivialize it (gaining massive amounts of party exp because of efficiency bonuses) while you pick up new weapons, learn new skills, and loot a bunch of stat bonus items. Then you SOL Restore (which resets your levels and dragon counter) distribute your party experience and use your stat bonus items, save, and do it again until you can easily make it through the dungeon without needing dragon form at all. Basically, a unique, interesting form of grinding is built fundamentally into the mechanics of the game that make it almost feel like a roguelike.

The SOL Restore system makes the dragon form work! You can use this massively powerful, fun form as much as you want to learn the level and defeat hard, optional side enemies then reset your counter and keep most of your rewards!
The level design exploits the SOL Restore system! The main path through a level is almost always short and straight, so once you learn the level and have gotten every item and skill out of it, you can just run right through to the next part of the game!
The system lets you bring weapons from the future back to help you in the past! You can run up to the boss of the level, steal their sword, SOL Restore, then use it to kill them!
New narrative events happen the second and third times through an area, so SOL Restore has some additional reward for effectively using it!

There are a few missteps with this system, unfortunately.
There is an additional SOL Restart feature, which does the same thing as SOL Restore, but sends you back to the beginning of the game. I think you would never want to do this, and it seems like it is included so that there can be a newgame+?
Saving is unnecessarily annoying, with a dependency on sparse save terminals and a pseudo-rare item (that is part of your basic SOL Restore inventory). The game would just be better if it let you save at every terminal for free.
A couple of things don't carry over but should, which just makes things fiddly. If SOL Restore saved new backpack slots, used stat items, and applied party experience the whole thing would just work more smoothly without losing anything.

All that aside, it is hard to express how awesome and unique the SOL system is and how much it truly impacts the game. It is really a triumph of game design that brings Dragon Quarter from 4 stars up to 5 for me, despite its other minor shortcomings. This game is worth checking out... just give it a chance to teach you how to play it and you will have a good time with its unique take on RPG advancement, interesting world, and solid, turn-based combat.

Kinda charming but idk I didn't vibe with this as much as I wished I did. I like Balloon Fight's trip mode, but not like, 40-minute autoscroller like it. Feels really slow for the first half - it did get a lot cooler in the second half when they have you inflate and release your balloons to navigate these hybrid platforming sections, but those same levels get really trigger-happy with spikes and 1-hit-kill hazards. Also felt like my inputs were being dropped a lot - maybe an emulation issue or the controller I was using, but I didn't notice it with anything else in my GB binge so far.

One of the shittier HD collections of the 7th gen, breaking a lot of audio cues, ruining the linework effect (implying it's just shittily emulating these games anyways as that's an age-old emulation error that was fixed over the last couple years in PCSX2, even when up-resing), and bafflingly changing the music from its iconic B-grade-yet-unique font and composition to this weirdly generic, less dynamic orchestral spin on them that ruins much of the atmosphere.

Kind of bewildering this collection sits at a cool 4.1 average, which I can only assume is just hyperfans propping it up. I hate "ports" like these, it makes something relatively unique in much of its presentation for its time feel so cheap. I guess the "mediocre 3D platformer" Youtube fandom would get a kick out of it that way.