I had to let this one go. There's something in here, but it really fizzles out with some very obnoxious design decisions. This review will be long, and I will be breaking it down into eight parts, for each game, and then one longer post about the game as an aggregate sum.

1) Cosmic Gate - basically the walkthrough game for the metagame you're playing. The four challenges you have to do are all super easy and the things it asks are explained via the magazines that you unlock during this part. It's basically a reskin of Galaxian, with not much more to it other than warps. It's the first game, and for what the game asks you to do at the point you unlock it, it's inoffensive.

2) Robot Ninja Haggle Man - There seems to be no clear indication of whether the title is Haggleman or Haggle Man. Anyway, I actually liked this game a lot which is what got me to start really getting into Retro Game Challenge. It has a bit of NES funk to it (which is nontrivially The Point) but for what it is Haggle Man is actually fun? If this was a full game I would play it. It's a simple yet effective platformer.

3) Rally King - If this game's goal was to achieve accurate simulation of early racing games, it achieved it, I guess. Rally King sucks. The drifting mechanic is super awkward and hard to get used to, the courses are confusing with no map so you can't plan too far ahead short of memorizing the courses, and it's easy to spin out and lose all of your momentum. One of Retro Game Challenge's concepts in the metagame is that you do have access to in-game "cheat codes", which I admittedly used here (they're part of the game), but they basically completely remove the difficulty and make you the ONLY character on the track and completely invincible. A slog. Challenge 3 is very difficult if you don't use cheats.

4) Star Prince - It's another space shooter, but far more complicated than Cosmic Gate/Galaxian this time. Not much to say about this one. It seems well designed, even it it's crazy difficult, I did have fun with it.

5) Rally King SP - this is the first time where the game gets outright offensive. Rally King SP is a complete clone of Rally King. The courses, the controls, the cheat codes, everything is identical other than the colors and a couple of graphics. I get it's supposed to be some sort of snide commentary on special editions being not different, but the fact that this game also has four challenges, with one of them being an insanely difficult time trial, is just offensive as hell. Rally King already sucked, we didn't have to do it again.

6) Robot Ninja Haggle Man 2 - I really liked Haggle Man 1, Haggle Man 2 is that but better. You can pull out the bosses early, the stages are wider, you can now use your special power (once you get it) on command rather than automatically when you pick up your third scroll. Much like the first one, I would unironically play this game in standalone.

7) Guadia Quest - I know that RPGs are a classic staple of the era that Retro Game Challenge is meant to embody. The problem is it doesn't really adapt to the meta-challenge format that the game asks you to play. So you get this RPG which is really short and content-devoid from an RPG perspective, but really long and drawn out from Retro Game Challenge's perspective, which just leads to it being a huge slog and not being fun. Which sucks! I like RPGs! The Guadia concept is barely used, it's basically a bonus party member you can pick up who sometimes attacks if you're in a pinch but largely just Vibes. The first dungeon is an enormous sprawling 4 level dungeon, with very dangerous enemies, no reliable healing items (there's a full heal tile bear the start), and worst: no in-game map at all. And sure, it's the 80's, they wouldn't have one, but part of Retro Game Challenge is that you can pause and look at game magazines/guides any time - and there's no map there either! And once you get to the end of the dungeon the boss there is super hard too - grinding is completely non-optional in this game and it drags Retro Game Challenge to a grinding halt with no payoff because the actual RPG content isn't good enough to warrant playing outside of this scope. This one is just offensively bad. The music is banger, at least, but I got very sick of the dungeon theme after spending hours in there.

8) Robot Ninja Haggle Man 3 - To end things off after Guadia Quest, you get Robot Ninja Haggle Man 3, which has gotten a complete facelift and is nothing like 1 or 2. It's fine. Not as fun as the first 2, but I didn't hate it. It was a little annoying though that the game force turned off after completing challenge 1 and 2, and challenge 4 is just "kill 100 enemies in zone 2" which is more grinding (which is brutal after Gaudia Quest, frankly).

If the game ended here I'd be a bit happier, but then after completing the 4 challenges for each, you get a "final challenge", which is to complete all 8 games all the way through. I liked Haggle Man 1 & 2 (and 3 is fine I guess), Cosmic Gate has a "skip the game" shortcut, and I could use invincibility for Star Prince, but playing Rally King twice (even with invincibility), and finishing Gaudia Quest sounds like absolute torture and I cannot bring myself to finish this game.

It's frustrating, this game squanders its creativity because it seems to be so wrapped up in the challenges and the idea of "play all these retro-inspired hits" that it failed to make some of them good, because it both had to fit the challenges and the idea that they had to be retro. If this was just a collection of retro-inspired games I think it would've been way better (if they fine-tuned Guadia Quest and removed Rally King SP entirely), but what we have just burns its goodwill away and misses the mark by the end. Still Haggle Man 1 & 2 are a hell of a lot of fun by themselves at least.

FE16 is a strange one. There’s an interesting parallel between the granularity of the story and the granularity of the gameplay where they’re both great on surface and intricate levels but have difficulty bridging the gap.

In the story, FE16 is among the series’ best in character writing. Even the characters who are tropey have depth to them and of the entire roster maybe only two characters are truly “one note”. The support conversations are good, easy to get, and timed well. The paired endings are plentiful and feel deserved. The game is also great on delivering its themes and premise, without taking any cheap shots. But if you analyze it from a time perspective, a few things just don’t make sense. Why do we dally a whole month when Flayn and Manuela go missing? That’s just one (admittedly particularly egregious) example, but this game was designed around a calendar and by God does it feel forced sometimes.

The gameplay is similar. You can kind of zone out and ignore most skills and combat arts on Normal and have a good time, or if you’re into what the game has to offer you can truly optimize your team with skills and weapons and quite a lot. Or just make everyone a flier, since wyverns are OP (not the first time in the FE series for this one). But the sheer bloat in skills and what they do can be overwhelming in this game. There’s also the matter of again, the calendar. Near the end of the game you still have to stick to it unless you choose to skip everything. I really found myself getting to the “okay let’s wrap it up” point in the last 3 chapters of the game.

There’s also a bit of a puzzler around this game having four routes yet the replayabiloty being difficult with having to do the monastery each time from the beginning. New Game+ alleviates that a bit, but having to explore, and do basically mandatory quests to unlock basic features of the run is obnoxious as hell for someone trying to replay just to get a different route.

All that though for 3.5 stars. It’s a good Fire Emblem game - I’ll definitely come back to it again some day, probably just not any time soon since I can’t imagine doing Part 1 again in the near future.

TOTK is wonderful. It does a great job filling the big boots that BOTW had before it and manages to hit many of the same vibes with stellar gameplay, a big open and immersive world, and hours and hours of content that doesn’t particularly feel stale. There are a number of quality of life improvements from BOTW: Lookout towers replacing Sheikah Towers, Geoglyphs clearly demarking where the cutscene unlocks are, and your partners being more directly controllable (which is a lot of fun!). Another obvious improvement that isn’t QoL per se is that the temples all have a unique point of view compared to the divine beasts.

So why 4.5 stars? Well, TOTK is a great game and I had a fantastic time playing it, but occasionally the game would throw something that’s utterly baffling and stands out for not good reasons my way. There are a number of nitpicks I have about this game which make the experience fall just short of “there’s nothing I would improve”. And each of them is small, but they add up. Some of it feels a bit more mixed and that it was by design, such as weapon fusing as a main mechanic (I wasn’t too fond of that, but I got used to it. There’s no explanation as to why bows didn’t decay though which is odd.) and how you can easily cheese some things with the toolkit you have available. It was much easier to just use Hylian Pinecones and campfires to get around rather than use Zonai devices and solve the traversal puzzles the intended way.

Other bits feel like they’re a bit hollow. The depths is meant to add a whole other layer to the games map, but in practice it mostly feels sparse and empty, being literally just the Hyrule Map inverted but with very few and far between interesting landmarks or things to interact with. Most of the abandoned mines are the same and just unlock autobuild schematics. Speaking of autobuild, it’s.. not particularly useful by the time you get it. It’s fun to screw around with, but the only practical use I got out of it was building dirigibles to cross large vertical gaps. The fire temple is in the depths, which is cool, but the spirit temple feels very anticlimactic for the final temple and isn’t particularly good on its own. I have a feeling that Mineru was supposed to be a little more important than she ended up actually being in the story, but they ended up keeping her temple where it was in the intended progression and it felt a bit hollow.

The story is also all over the place. The vibes are immaculate. Don’t get me wrong. But there are a few beats which just seem. Bad. It’s actually quite bothersome that Absolutely Everyone believes that the imposter Zelda is the real one despite her actions being out of character, and we have to follow her to Hyrule Castle for progression even though it’s so painfully obvious that she’s a fake, or at the very least acting nothing like herself. I feel like they could’ve framed imposter Zelda so much better, and they just didn’t.

There’s also the issue of the game repeating Virtually The Same Cutscene after the first 4 temples; the second/third/fourth ancient sages give no additional exposition beyond the first one’s cutscene you watch. And that the calamity is barely mentioned at all. After having living through a major historical event with Covid, I don’t particularly feel like people would just Never Talk About It Again the way this game seems to imply. I know it’s that so the developers didn’t want to make people feel like they had to play BOTW first, but it rings just a bit off to have it completely shied away from.

The difficulty is largely good, with an enormous spike at the end. The final boss (stage 2 & 2.5 anyway) is VERY HARD and the game does not telegraph well that you should be highly highly stacking up on food made with the Sunny effect to mitigate all the hearts you lose. Having Ganondorf be able to flurry rush you is comically rude. There’s also weirdness with upgrading armor, with it being an enormous spike in resources needed compared to BOTW. 60 defense from maxing out the base set is fine, but if you want more, the max upgrade of the soldier’s set requires 15 Lynel guts which is just insane (and they aren’t even a drop from red lynels anymore).

But ultimately most of these nitpicks don’t matter. I’ve always been better at pointing out things I don’t like rather than things I do, and the fact of the matter is that TOTK was able to fully grip me for pretty much an entire month. I had a fantastic time playing this game even if there are some refinements I would personally make. I really hope the Legend of Zelda series keeps making games in this direction because BOTW and TOTK both were smashing successes.

I swear to god this game is trying to give me carpal tunnel.

Look, it's good in theory. Aside from the massive dose of nostalgia I got when I booted the game up and did tank 1, reminiscent of when this game was a flash game on MSN Games (a simpler time..), the first tank and most of the second tank is straightforward and fun. Use the types of fish available to collect money and buy the egg. The prices stay low early on, and your tank doesn't overcrowd easily unless you're grinding.

Then Tank 3 and Tank 4 introduce aliens with a lot more health, more esoteric fish types (the beetlemuncher is.. a lot, and the breeders make things difficult), and crank up the egg prices to insane degrees. You better have the fastest clicking speed in the world to finish.. or use a script to turn your mouse into the equivalent of a turbo controller. And then every level becomes the same: set up your tank while defending against the initial waves, get to a semi-stable population where an alien attack won't game over you, max out food, max out your gun, then let the population explode. Buy all three egg pieces. It becomes very formulaic where the only thing each new level adds at a certain point is more time, which is a damn shame because the early game is fun but this game doesn't handle extrapolation well and the challenge isn't really there - it's fake difficulty.

And then the final boss is more or less trivial unless you somehow got there without using a turbo clicker - a genuinely impressive feat, but anyone who can handle 4-5 can handle 5-1, there's less clicking and less to take care of. I understand the final boss is ceremonial more than anything, but honestly it would've been better as a joke-cutsene or if they just capped it off at 4-5.

The first two tanks still rule, but honestly this game is probably more fun in its flash version if you can find it archived on the internet anywhere.