The last of the (non-remake) Super Famicom Shin Megami Tensei games, if... (hereto referred to as "IF" because typing "if..." is annoying to type and difficult to parse) was released a scant SEVEN months after SMT 2. That said, it nonetheless manages to both stand apart from its predecessors as well as pave a brave new direction for the series that would end up defining SMT for the next five big games Atlus made (all the way until SMT 3, basically). It took me 32 or so hours to play through Reiko's route (the longest and most complete of the three available at the start) in Japanese on the Switch Online SFC service using copious save states, rewinds, and online maps (because hoooo boy, is this game a doozy).
Taking a huge step back from the larger philosophical dissections and discussions that SMT 1 and 2 partake in, IF has a much smaller story set in a high school. You're a Japanese high schooler whose school suddenly gets sucked into the Makai (where all the demons live). You soon find out that your classmate Ideo Hazuma is behind it all (he even brags to you that he did it before the game starts), and you can choose to buddy up with one of three of your classmates (Charlie, Yumi, or Reiko) as you brave the perils of the Makai to save your imperiled classmates and get everyone (or not) out of the Makai and back to safety. This is a game with a much more different story structure and tone from the previous games. It opens with a very silly personality quiz it uses to determine what sort of character you are (but we'll talk about that more later), and you can even pick your gender (which makes this one of the first and only SMT games to do that). Your classmate companions (Charlie, Yumi, and Reiko) all offer respectively longer and longer paths to the end of the story, but with very different outcomes, and in fact alignment doesn't dictate your story path at all. Once you pick a partner at the start (Charlie's being the shortest and easiest, Reiko's being the best and most complete, and an extra & very different fourth, Akira, being available after you beat the game once), that's the story path you're on. It's a much lighter and sillier story in the smaller beats of it (your continuously self-augmenting and very eccentric science teacher as a recurring boss being one of my favorite parts of it), but it also does actually get serious in a way I really liked. It doesn't dwell on it a ton, and it's only in Reiko's route, but the way they go about humanizing but not excusing the antagonist's behavior was something that was surprisingly well done given the quality of Atlus's character writing up to this point. The high school setting and more character driven story became the impetus for the Persona series (and the female protagonist of this game actually appears in Persona 2~), and with character writing like this, it's not hard to see the connective tissue, even if it's relatively quite simple and brief here. As far as mechanics go, this thing is HEAVILY built onto the skeleton of SMT 2, so a lot of features from that are effectively identical here. The general way that combat and navigation is the same, but there's a lot that's polished up and new despite how similar things are. For starters, the UI has been even further polished up and made faster, amking for a generally nicer and more quick play experience. Demon negotiation has been improved significantly from SMT 2. It's still not nearly as delightfully simple and rewarding as in SMT1, but it's nowhere near as frustrating as SMT 2 can be. Another good thing is that SMT 2's horrid mangnetite (the secondary money-like resource you need to keep demons summoned and in your party) has been solved too, and I basically never felt like I was running out. Instead of slowly getting upgrades for your arm computer, it comes fully featured right off the bat (so you can befriend 12 demons and analyze items right from the start). But there's also a LOT here that's very significantly different from how SMT 2 is constructed. First of all, you have the significantly changed way alignment works. Choices you make in the narrative now don't make any change to your alignment, and your alignment doesn't affect the narrative's path at all. Now, your alignment is something that changes dynamically depending on what demons you have summoned. Have too many Chaos-leaning demons summoned and you can't recruit or summon Law demons, and vice versa. It's nice to not have to worry about messing up your path through the story just because you picked the wrong dialogue option at a story part, but it's also a bit of a pain to need to constantly worry about having a team you can actually have summoned all the time. It's not an awful thing, but it's not all around good either. Then you just have the general design of the game. Whether on one of the initial three routes or the extra fourth route (which is completely different and basically a whole new adventure, albeit one that leans very hard, even compared to the main game), there is no overworld at all. The main game has a hub from which you go to different towers based on different deadly sins, and the bosses and encounters you experience there are based off that particular sin in some fashion. Some of these places aren't the best designed (particularly the one that has no boss and you just need to wait an age to finish it), but no genuine fast travel nodes and no overworld is a huge change to get used to. But that unfortunately relates to just how much of what's new may be novel, but is just also not very well polished or designed. For starters, they just imported the weapon list from SMT 2 has more or less just been imported as it was. Now this isn't a problem on its face, but you need to consider that you can actually choose your gender in this version, and SMT 2 is balanced for a male main character and a female NPC partner. If you chose a female main character and a female partner like I did, you will not be able to use ANY of the scads of male-exclusive equipment, particularly the loads of really good weapons that only guys get to use. It's really cool that you can choose to play as a girl in this, but I just wish they'd made more of an effort to balance the game around that. This is also a big reason beyond Charlie's route being significantly shorter (he doesn't even fight the final boss) that Yumi and Reiko's routes are so much harder, because they can't use a lot of the best weapons in the early, mid, or late game. The game is generally really good at giving you player information and being very candid about upcoming traps or trials, and just how poorly it communicates what is effectively its difficulty modes (choice of gender and choice of partner) is really unfortunate in how it can sour the experience. But the biggest bugbear in the room is also one of the most significant parts of the game: The Guardian Spirit System. This game is actually super forgiving compared to most SMT games in that it has no hard game overs. When you die, you just get kicked back to the start of the tower you're in, which sucks, but at least you don't lose all your progress with EXP and money. You're also given a new Guardian Spirit, and they're actually REALLY important. As you kill enemies, you rack up points for a new Guardian Spirit, which is just a particular demon from the game. When you die, depending on which of the four character types you are (as determined by the quiz at the start), what gender you are, your level, and your number of Guardian Points, you get a particular new Guardian Spirit. This spirit gives stat boosts or nerfs to the character player depending on how the demon's stat's compare to yours. When your partner dies, they come back immediately after the battle with a new Guardian Spirit of their own, but their Guardian Spirit impacts what spells they get/have, making it super important to whether or not your one party member who can learn spells (your main character still can't. They have the demon summoning computer after all) will or can actually have the spells they need. And therein lies the critical and immensely frustrating flaw with the Guardian Spirit system: The player has heck-all control over it. Dying can be an absolutely debilitating penalty despite not having hard game overs because your new Guardian Spirit may take away a really good spell your partner had or give you WAY worse stats because the demon's stat comparisons really penalize the kind of min/max-ing that you're encouraged to have for the main character (the level up system where you just put a point into one of your six main stats from SMT 1 and 2 is back again all the same here). There were tons of times I'd dread dying and coming back because I'd be given yet more nigh useless INT and Magic stats and my super valuable Speed stat would be dropped even lower. You also can't see a numerical representation of your Guardian Points, as it's just a bar that fills up, so trying to get a specific demon by dying at a certain point is nigh impossible. While it was the inspiration for the eventually much better designed titular system of the Persona series, just how uncontrollable the Guardian Spirit system is makes it worse than nothing, and makes an already hard game even harder. That's another sort of problem with this game. While SMT 1 and 2 are hardly easy games, IF cranks things up significantly. Dungeon design is way meaner, with far more teleporter mazes, labyrinths of total darkness, pit fall traps, and no-map or computer areas to give you an absolutely nightmarish time. There are also far less demons to recruit in this game. While there are a surprising number of brand new demons, in general the demons you run into will be from demon families that can never be recruited, so taking advantage of the ones you can actually recruit is a must do. The early game is also really hard even for an early SMT game, with the Zombie-chan school girls in particular being a really nasty enemy. Most of these awful enemies can't be recruited or even fused into, so you're forced to just have to fight them or try (and likely fail) to run from them. They also make shops and towns much more spread apart and difficult to get to due to the lack of a world map, and that problem is amplified even more by two more really mean new changes. First of all is that this is the first game to make melee attacking from the back row completely impossible. In SMT 1 and 2, you got a significant damage penalty for melee attacking from the back row, but you could still do it. Now you need to either be casting magic or firing guns or you have to just sit on your hands in the back row. This is compounded by an even more evil new change: Guns now have limited bullets. Before, bullets just acted as a damage type modifier for your guns. Now, you need to keep your inventory stocked full of stacks of 99 bullets of the most advantageous (sleep and charm bullets are still your best friends) bullets you can get your hands on. This is made EVEN worse by the fact you can't just buy a whole stack at once. You've gotta tap right on the D-pad 99 damn times to buy a stack, and you've gotta do that one at a time. Hand cramps from buying bullets were a very constant element of my time with SMT IF. While in some segments the enhanced difficulty made for some more fun and challenging boss fights, by and large the added difficulty in IF is achieved by doubling down on the worst and most frustrating parts of earlier SMT games, and I am absolutely not a fan of it. The presentation is one of the things that makes it most clear that this is based so heavily on the bones of SMT 2. There's very little new music, for one, as most of it is reused from SMT 2. Now it's still the same nice atmospheric music that worked well in SMT 2, but it's reused nonetheless. There are also a TON of reused demon sprites and attack effects. Now this isn't a huge issue as far as playing the game goes, as all the bosses are still new and there are a really surprising amount of new demons on top of the old ones, but there's still a lot reused here. At the very least basically all of the environments have been redone and look very nicely detailed and scary. They add great flair to each of the different parts of the Makai they grace. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Although I did ultimately enjoy my time with SMT if... more than I did SMT 2, the sheer length of this review should speak pretty clearly to how conflicted my feelings on it are. This is a game that would be absolutely miserable to play without save states or even online maps, as it's just way too in love with being mean and punishing you very hard for just getting unlucky. It's a game of lower lows but higher highs, and while I wouldn't say it's a better all around product than SMT 1, I'd still say it's worth trying if you're a fan of the series and don't mind either using save states like I did, or don't mind a LOT of punishment and trial and error ^^;
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My appetite for SMT not nearly satiated with just the first game, I quickly went on to the sequel, which is also on the Switch Online Super Famicom service. Unfortunately, my appendix issues sprang up in the middle of my playing it, so I had to take a week off near the end of the game, but I got back and spent another couple of days finishing up my adventure. It took me around 35 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game using many rewinds and save states just like I had for the first game.
SMT2 came out a couple years after the first SMT and takes a pretty different approach to the narrative compared to the first game. This is a direct sequel to the first game, taking place some time after the neutral ending of SMT when Law has managed to take nominal control over society again. The followers of Law have built a massive pyramid-like city high above the ruins of old Tokyo called MILLENNIUM TOKYO, and that's where you, Hawk, live. You're a prize fighter about to engage in the championship bout to meet the heads of state at the Center as your prize. From there, you end up going on missions for the Center, even going as far as being claimed the Messiah after defeating the anti-Messiah in a huge staged fight, but that's when things really start to go off the rails and its revealed that (of course) things are not even close to the way they seem. I'm of a split mind about SMT 2's story. On one hand, it's a bold step forward for character writing and a character-driven plot compared to the first game. On the other hand, the story is much less open and much more directed the first game's, but this game also keeps the same alignment system that the first game has. It results in a game where trying to get the ending you want is a lot more frustrating mechanically and a fair bit less appropriate narratively because of how the story is constructed. It isn't quite Megami Tensei 2 in how structured the story is, but it reminds me more of that game than it does of Shin Megami Tensei 1. There are some other smaller things I'm not a fan of, like how this game has significantly more homophobia in it than the other SMT games I've played (though that isn't exactly unique for Atlus games these days), but I'd still rank this game below its predecessor in terms of narrative. It's a good step in the right direction for making a more complicated and relatable version of the kinds of themes that SMT 1 is trying to talk about, but it still definitely needs polishing up in making the player feel like it's a world with more equally valid arguments to agree or disagree with. The gameplay is a very similar to the first game in that it's first-person dungeon crawling with turn-based battles where you can fight or recruit the demons you run into, but like with the writing, this is another mixed bag of new improvements but setbacks to previous features. On the good side of things, you have now L is now a shortcut to your auto-mapper and R a shortcut to your demon analyzer, as well as the very significant ability to actually see what items and spells do in-game rather than needing to look them up like you had to for SMT 1. The most significantly appreciated step forward is in regards to demons and how they're no longer all completely identical. They're all still mostly identical, sure, but now if you make a demon via fusion of two other demons, they can inherit some spells from what they were fused from. It's not a massive change, but it's another very good step in the right direction that future games would follow. The list of negative changes is unfortunately much larger. While the concept of alignment is still around, and it's still decided by story-important decisions you make (both optional and non-optional) and determines if you can equip certain items and recruit certain demons, you can now no longer check your alignment by which way your cursor spins on the world map. Now the only way you have to check it is by trying to summon demons of the presumed opposite alignment (law can't summon chaos demons and vice versa) or trying to equip some of the very small number of alignment-locked equipment. The signposting is also much worse, with it generally being much harder than in the first game to know where to go or what to do (particularly around collecting the very well hidden 7 pillars). Random encounters have been lowered, sure, but they also give magnetite less frequently and they give less of it. You need magnetite to keep demons summoned, so a shortage of magnetite is a really bad thing to have, and there were several points where I had to spend large parts of the game either with no demons summoned or just grinding for magnetite because running out of it is such a huge problem. This is compounded by the fact that the way demon negotiations (to recruit them) have been significantly altered. They're more dynamic and conversational, sure, but it's also much harder to get anything out of them that isn't friendship. In the first game, you could very easily ask them for money, magnetite, or items too, but that isn't the case in this game. You can almost never explicitly ask them for things, and when they do give you money or magnetite, it's very small amounts. They thankfully also only ask for super small amounts of money/magnetite if they're demanding it in negotiations, but that really doesn't help much when you're already so short on magnetite. Game balance is also similarly bad to the first game, with a typically brutal early game and a more easy mid-/late-game, but the final bosses are thankfully nowhere near as much of a cakewalk as they were in the first SMT. Like in SMT, guns and bullets that either sleep or charm enemies are going to be your biggest friends. Sword fusion is also much harder to do in this game, so it's much harder to rely on that for an easy super weapon like you could in the first game. I myself really lucked out by finding Fargus's Sword in the mid game, one of the game's best weapons that's a rare random drop, but without that I would've had a MUCH more difficult time. Leveling up still works the same, with putting one stat point into a stat (strength, intelligence, magic, vitality, speed, or luck) per level, so leveling up is still an exercise in very gradual power growth, so getting stronger demons or finding better equipment are still going to be your best options for dealing with encounters you simply can't beat. However, the biggest reason for this difficulty spike isn't any of that, or even the dungeon design (which is still pretty damn mean in terms of invisible pitfalls, floor traps, one-way doors, and even more difficult to see in darkness). The biggest issue with SMT2 is the way the allied AI has been ruined. In SMT 1 and SMT 2, the way random encounters work is that you run into one or two demons at a time who each have several members of their group (from 1 to 8). However, although you can pick which demon group to attack, you can't specify which of the 1 to 8 you wanna hit. In SMT 1, your AI are pretty damn good at focusing down weakened members and avoiding trying to bash enemies who are slept or stunned. In SMT 2, that intelligence is robbed from them entirely, and they seem to attack things almost at random. This makes the game much MUCH harder in its random encounters compared to the first game, and that's an issue that persists the entire game (especially as you get more and more enemies who are totally immune to guns, which are your main and most effective way of dealing status effects in a game where MP is still such a valuable and difficult to recover resource). The presentation is one area where it's a universal step up from the first game. Dungeon tile sets are much prettier, and although there are a lot of returning demons, virtually all of them have been touched up or altered in some way. There's a lot of new, good music too, but it's still in the much more low-key and atmospheric style of the first game. Good music, but not really my jam. You can REALLY feel just how much Atlus had gotten more comfortable with the Super Famicom's hardware in the two years between the first game and this one. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a much more hesitant recommendation than the first SMT. It's virtually impossible to recommend not playing it with rewinds and save states like I did, but it's such a step down from the first game in so many frustrating ways that you're much better off playing that instead. Now if you really like SMT 1 and want more of that, then SMT 2 is a pretty good way to get it. Just don't expect this to be quite as polished or refined an experience as that. When I got out of the hospital, I wanted something a bit more short and sweet to break back into being home again. Coincidentally, I happened to be showing a friend my PCE Mini, and then I remembered that this game was not only on there, but that it also fit great into September's TR theme of inferior ports~ (this being a port of the arcade version). I used save states pretty extensively to get retries at the last few stages and bosses, but overall I think I got familiar enough with their patterns that I could do it legit if I gave it a few more tries. It took me about 45 minutes to finish the Japanese version of the game.
Splatterhouse was originally an arcade game and it has the sort of simple story you'd expect from that. Rick & girlfriend are visiting the house of a paranormal researcher, Dr. West, when his girlfriend is suddenly kidnapped by monsters who also badly injure Rick. Rick is surely doomed when suddenly the terror mask appears, promising him great strength to help defeat Dr. West and his creatures if he'll just put it on. Rick obliges and gets all hulked out with his new mask friend and embarks on a journey through the game's ten or so stages to show these monsters what for. It's all pretty unimportant to the action at hand (that being punching and kicking monsters), but it certainly sets up for a very interesting aesthetic for an action game. And a pretty solid action game it is. Splatterhouse is a 2D sidescrolling beat 'em up of sorts. While there is some platforming to jump over pits, this is more so an action game than anything else. You walk along the one-plane (no depth to walk back and forth between) punching and kicking all that dare stand in your path. It's a pretty tough game, with Rick only getting five hits before he's lost a life (of which you get 3 per continue) and have to go back to the start of the current room, but at least they give you a pretty sizable number of continues. Apparently the jump kick makes the game much easier, but I never quite figured out how to do it ^^;. The difficulty doesn't always feel entirely fair, though, lending to the arcade roots of the game. Enemy spawn locations are sometimes fixed, but also sometimes procedural, so there are times where you simply can't avoid taking a hit because of how relatively big and slow you are. The bosses trend towards being much more manageable and follow more set patterns, and are definitely some of the game's biggest highlights. The game has stage and enemy inspirations from all sorts of horror films (from Rick's own obvious Friday the 13th design cues to the boss that's straight up the Poltergeist), and it makes for a lot of very cool and spooky set pieces and stages to punch your way through~. That spooky presentation is definitely ones of the game's biggest strong points. The horror themes don't shy away from the gore, and although the PC Engine can't show them quite as pretty as the arcade version, the graphics and the music still sound great on a HuCard. The graphics are honestly one of the biggest "inferior port" things about the game. While it still plays just fine, the sprite limit is definitely something the game struggles with, and playing as a nearly invisible Rick trying to kill enough nearly invisible enemies to just make everything look normal again. It isn't exactly game breaking, but it's definitely an aspect that makes the arcade version something more desirable to play than this one. Verdict: Recommended. The sometimes random nature of enemy spawns and relatively high difficulty can make this a bit of a frustrating action title, but it's also got enough charm and extra lives that I think it pulls through just fine. If you're into action games and want something quite aesthetically unique among retro games, this is a great one to check out (or perhaps the arcade version instead, if you're looking for something that runs a little better). This was another game I completed during my stay in the hospital on the Switch Online services, but this time on the Super Famicom side of things. This was a game I'd never heard of (likely because it was localized as Ka-Blooey, and that's the version on the SNES Switch service despite the cover art there saying Bombuzal as well), but was very curious about. When it was unveiled in the most recent Nintendo announcement of new games coming to the Switch Online services, it seemed like just some puzzle game ported from European computers (which it is, originally being a Commodore 64 and Amiga game taking the honor of being the first piece of third-party software released for the Super Famicom). The most recent slate of games on the service seemed really underwhelming, and easily the most "why'd they even bother?" addition to those services yet, but I was determined to give this weird puzzle game a try. It ended up getting the good-puzzle parts of my brain working in happier ways than I'd originally intended, and I spent a bit over 10 hours beating it over several sittings, and I only had to look up three or four solutions~.
Bombuzal was made as just some puzzle game on the C64, and it has a story to match. Or rather, it has a total lack of story that's fitting for when it was made. You play as a weird blue thing (whom I just call "Bombuzal", but who in actuality seems to have never been given a name) whose only goal in life is to blow up bombs and not get blown up. The game really doesn't need a story, and I think it'd be silly to criticize it for not having one. This is a game about solving puzzles, and that's what it delivers! The game has 130 levels where you play as your weird blue thing (from now on known as Bombuzal) trying to blow up all the red bombs on the stage while not getting blown up yourself. You move on a grid that can be viewed in a third-person isometric view, or in a direct top-down view. The latter is much easier to actually see and control with, so that's the one I basically always played with. You move on a grid of square tiles, and you can only move one tile off the bomb you're detonating when you decide it's time to blow. Bombs also detonate if hit by adjacent explosions, so you better make darn sure that you're not gonna get caught in the crossfire when you decide it's time to let things go to hell. There are all sorts of bombs that make up the game's stages (three sizes of normal bombs, two sizes of landmine (which don't blow up adjacent bombs and can't be manually detonated), as well as bombs that all explode at once and bombs that change size over time) as well as different tiles (breakable ones, switches, indestructible ones, and more), and while there are a good handful of levels that are more gag levels than anything (won in an obvious single move), for the most part each puzzle is a good challenge and the game does a good job of weaving shorter puzzles in between the longer and more complicated ones. The game isn't free of problems though. On the more minor side, you have the difficulty and how the game has a life system. Now if you're playing on the Switch Online like I did, that isn't a problem, since save states and rewinds do a great job of making this game feel far more fair and fun, so you don't need to waste a bunch of time redoing everything you just did just because you accidentally walked off a ledge into death. Even if you aren't doing that, this version of the game gives you a four letter passcode every level, so the life system really barely matters other than affecting your high score. Now this game also unintentionally makes a great entry for this month's TR theme of inferior ports, since this is a pretty significant port job from the C64 roots of Bombuzal. Now some elements of the port are good. In the original, you only got a password every four levels, and in this version they give you one every level. This version also has more and better music in addition to having prettier graphics (as one would hope for a game on the Super Famicom compared to a simple Commodore 64). However, beyond that, things get a bit more sour for the Super Famicom's first third party game. On a very objectively bad note, there's a bug in this version (a bomb bigger than it should be) that makes level 80 virtually impossible (you need to basically cheat and get lucky via the anti-idle system to beat it). On a wider design issue, the prettier graphics are to blame. More difficult and later levels get HUGE, and you can't see the whole thing even when you use the start button to zoom out the map a bunch. This makes those levels that have switches that cause one thing (or even multiple things) to happen far away far far harder because you just can't see what you're doing, and it's like very difficult or impossible to move over to the portion of the map you can't see. You also can't move your actual controllable view screen until you're one tile away from the edge of the camera, making it very easy to die to the quick moving enemies if they're coming towards you. Basically every puzzle that I looked up the solution to was the result of me just not being able to see what the heck one or more of the level's many switches had actually affected. The C64 version's normal camera is zoomed out WAY further, and basically avoids all of these problems. Now this doesn't have nearly the degree of issues that the North American port of this has, as while Ka-Blooey may have much more music, it ONLY has the awful isometric camera view, which makes that version pretty hard to stomach even if level 80's bug is fixed. This version of the game is still totally enjoyable, but there are some not insignificant obstacles between you and your Bombuzaling. The presentation is a solidly acceptable experience. The look of the game is basically a more colorful version of the previous Amiga port, and it has a vibe I'd best describe as simple environments (very simple, really) alongside creepy characters (especially Bombuzal himself). It works pretty well, and it more than does the job. The soundtrack is a bit harder to excuse, as while the music there is pretty good, there is a total of ONE stage track, so I hope you like that song, because it's the only one you'll be hearing through all 130 stages Xp. I kinda like the song, and I like the ending theme even more, but the sheer lack of music is difficult to excuse, even for a game SO early in the SFC's lifespan. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you like puzzle games, then this is a pretty darn solid and fun one on the SFC. I think it's most easily recommendable if you play it via a format that has save states and rewinds, but even without those, I think there's a fair amount of fun to be had here. I didn't really know what to expect from this game going in, but now that I've finished it, I'm pretty confident in saying that it's the shining star (or at least the shining-est star) of the most recent addition to the Switch Online retro services~. This was a game added to the SNES Switch Online service ages ago, and one I remember a friend being quite excited for and recommending highly. I was recently in the hospital for a week getting my appendix taken out, and with only my Switch for company, my attention drifted to the SNES and SFC libraries on the Online service, and in particular, this game. I really had no idea what to expect, other than a game a friend recommended, but I was really pleasantly surprised and hooked! At a time when a lot of other stuff on there had failed to keep my pain-addled attention, Operation Logic Bomb had me forget all about that and really get into something other than a hospital ward. It took me about 2 hours to finish the game, only using save states to kill the last boss.
Operation Logic Bomb is an action game on the SNES and has about as much story as most of the games of the era. Honestly, that much isn't even true, as in the game all you really get is a faint understanding of the actual events, as things are never really spelled out for you in any sense. Scientists researching something or other involving other dimensions have turned their facility into some kind of monster-infested hell pit, and it's your job as a special forces agent to save them and set things right! Just as some people need no introduction, OLB really doesn't need any more story than the stuff it presents. Little recordings you find that show off how to use your new weapons as well as previews of upcoming bosses (as they attack other special forces members or scientists) do more than enough to establish the urgent and isolated mood the game needs, and I found it an intriguing mix of cool aesthetics and fun mystery. The gameplay is something of a linear top-down run'n'gun. The closest thing that comes to mind to compare it to would be Smash TV, but that's really only for the perspective. The actual gameplay is much more slow paced than that, as this is most certainly a game built and balanced for consoles instead of arcades. The sprites are also much bigger than Smash TV's were, so the slower pace of things works well with that in mind. That tangent out of the way, it's a really solid run'n'gun game. Healing spots are very limited, so you need to manage your plans of attack accordingly whenever possible, and this is helped by all sorts of new guns and tools you get on your mission. You start with a fast line shot and a spread tool you can swap between, and you slowly upgrade your arsenal to include a powerful flame thrower, a laser that reflects off of walls, and tools like a decoy hologram and a very powerful claymore. They're all fun and well executed for their specific parts they're given in, though I preferred to use my tried and tested spread shot most of the time. You use the shoulder buttons to strafe, so you have to press other face buttons to cycle between weapons, and that can be pretty awkward in a pinch, but it works pretty well for the most part. The levels and bosses are designed really well for the most part. My only significant complaint would be with the bosses than can only be hurt with the claymore. Those bosses don't stay still very long, and they move very randomly, so using your time-detonated claymore to hurt them makes for some frustrating boss encounters. Other than that, the game is polished really well, and I'm pretty darn sure that even with those frustrating bosses, I could beat it without save states if I gave it another try. The presentation is really nice. Environments are split between digital-hell-like dimensional rifts and big, chunky early 90's sci-fi laboratories, and it works great for the mood (and as a bit of a throwback to that era of sci-fi). The music is also fun and pumping, and it fits the action really well. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you have SNES Online and you passed this up (as I did) because of the ugly cover art and the fact that it's an action game from the ever unreliable Jaleco, this is a game absolutely deserving of a second glance. It's not super long, but for any retro action game fan, this will be a delightful afternoon with or without save states, and it's easily one of the best games exclusive to the SNES Online service (that meaning a game that the Super Famicom service doesn't have). I don't really remember what exactly prompted me to pick up and play Maximo, but 300 yen was too low a price to turn my nose up at at the time. The result of an effort to bring Ghouls 'n' Ghosts into the 3rd dimension, Maximo began life as an N64 game before being converted into a Dreamcast game and then FINALLY being turned into a PS2 game once the Dreamcast was deemed too dead to release it for. This strange life cycle leaves its marks all over Maximo, but this weird freak of a game still manages to be good fun regardless. It took me about 10 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game.
Maximo, a brave king, gets back from the war to find an evil wizard has kidnapped his queen. He's struck down at once, but the friendly grim reaper saves him, telling him that the evil wizard is stealing dead from the underworld and putting him out of a job. The two team up and get to work freeing the four sorceresses and saving the queen from the wizard's evil clutches. It's a pretty simple story, but it's just Ghouls 'n' Ghosts. It doesn't have to be complicated, and it does just what it needs to while succeeding to be entertaining in its brief, silly cutscenes. Maximo is a 3D action platformer of five worlds of five levels a piece with a boss at the end of each. The bosses and stages are quite fun and well designed, if pretty brutal in their difficulty at times. Instead of the "two hits and you're dead" thing of its retro inspiration, Maximo takes a more generous and clever approach to updating that old health system. Now you still have armor, and you can even get a third piece of armor, but these each have a health bar. If you find a potion, the health bar of your currently weakened armor will be refilled, but if that armor breaks, it's gone and you'll need to find more armor. There is also a system of powerups to make your weapons swings and shield more powerful, ranging from a sword range extension to being able to throw your mighty shield (just don't use to it too much, or it'll break!). As nice as these things are, you just need to be weary of dying, as take too much damage or fall down a pit and you'll lose nearly all of your powerups and gotta start collecting them fresh, although they thankfully drop fairly frequently. There's also a money system where you can buy more health, armor, or even collectible underwear (changing the type you have when you lose your armor) when you find the little single-use kiosks in the stages. You could also horde that money for saving (it costs 100 gold per save!), or try to collect fairies from glowing fountains in each stage, as 50 fairies gets you another continue. If you're feeling really up to a challenge, there's even a special reward for collecting 100% of the treasure in every stage. I wasn't unhinged enough to try that, but honestly the game was so fun to go through once, I haven't totally dismissed the concept of going through again and trying for 100% completion someday XD. All in all, it's a really nice upgrade of the old 2D games, keeping the difficulty and iconic elements while upgrading it to make more sense in both 3D and in the world of game design in 2001. The biggest control and design issue is a relic of this game being a Dreamcast game: the right stick does nothing. Maximo must've been basically finished on the Dreamcast before they decided to make it a PS2 game, because the right stick doesn't control anything, let alone the camera, so the only way you have to redirect the camera is by holding R1 to slowly realign it behind you. It isn't a game breaker, and the game generally does a good job at keeping the camera behind you, but getting used to realigning the camera is a must for conquering this game and its oodles of platforming. Other issues the game has are some bosses that have pretty poorly signposted weaknesses, and the difficulty curve is good but starts pretty darn high as you get used to the controls. It's a game you really need to get into the spirit of trying to beat, as it's not gonna hold your hand through things as you learn the ropes of how best to approach platforming and combat with the somewhat particular way Maximo controls. The presentation is really nice. Enemies and allies alike have very distinct designs to them, and the homages in especially Maximo's design to original Ghouls 'n' Ghosts aesthetics are really fun. The music is also excellent, with tons of new takes on old Ghouls 'n' Ghosts tracks populating each world. Verdict: Recommended. The awkward way that the game controls, particularly its camera, will likely turn off a fair few people, but if you're a 3D action platformer fan, there's a lot to enjoy with Maximo. It may have its fair share of problems, but its very deliberate design makes it work well within the confines of its own game, and it's well worth checking out~. I'm always a sucker for Bomberman games, and I've been on the lookout for these later 3D adventures of his ever since playing through most of the N64 games last year. I finally found this for a price that was way above just being right (beautiful condition, even came with the sealed trading cards, for only like 700 yen), and that made it a perfect addition to my pile of games to play for GameCube month. It took me about 10 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game and also beat the secret final boss.
Bomberman Jetters is a game based on an anime of the same name. That said, the plot is still really simple. The bad guys are tired of Bomberman ruining their plans constantly, so they make a giant meteor to smash into Planet Bomberman. Bomberman and MAX set out in their spaceships to stop this clearly bad thing from happening. It's a really thread bare and unimportant story, ultimately, although it apparently doesn't really follow characterizations in the anime, which is very odd. It has lots of voice acting which is well done and help bring the quite flat characters to life in a fun way, so that's nice at least. The game itself is a 3D action game (kind of a platformer?) divided between 5 worlds of 6 levels each. Four levels in each world are proper stages, while two of the stages are just boss battles. The mini-bosses (stage 3) of each stage can even be beaten or weakened in certain ways (sometimes requiring re-fights using tools you didn't have yet) to fight an extra, secret final boss at the end. You can also find and unlock animal companions to join you, who give you certain passives and can be leveled up to give you better passives. You can even unlock new and particular elemental bomb types to give you an edge against each world boss. The game plays somewhat like the Baku Bomberman (aka Bomberman 64, in English) games on the N64, but like a marked step backwards. Jetters's biggest problem is that it really just doesn't play very well and the level design is generally quite weak. They give you much more 360-degree freedom than they did on the N64, but this amounts to making throwing and kicking bombs into enemies a far more difficult task than it already was. I can't even count the number of times I missed a bomb or blew myself up instead of an enemy. Bosses also range from trivially easy (which is most of them, to be honest) to nightmarish and frustrating due to how exact you need your bomb throws to be (like the secret final boss who is in no way shape or form worth fighting). The animal companions and elemental bombs also feel very half-baked, as they all range from totally useless to absolutely essential and grinding up the level of the more essential animal companions gets to be a real pain. The presentation of the game is fine, but very uninspired. For a mid-life GameCube game, Jetters doesn't exactly look ugly, but it's very uninspired. The music is also generally okay if a bit surreal and weird. The whole game is just a huge, flat "OK", and the presentation is no exception. Verdict: Not Recommended. This game is actually okay, but that's all it is. It is one of the most aggressively mediocre games I've ever played, and it's just really hard to care about either way because of that. You probably won't hate your time with it, but it'll likely be hard to prompt yourself to actually finish the game unless you're very dedicated to beat it because you can. Your time is better spent playing other, better 3D Bomberman games than this. I love the heck out of Metroidvanias, but the Metroid Prime games have never been something that interested me terribly much. I've never been comfortable with first person games on console, so I just always wrote the series off as something I'd never be able to enjoy. After enjoying Retro Studios's Recore so much last year, I definitely knew it'd be worth my while to eventually check out the Prime series, and August's theme of GameCube games finally pushed me into checking it out. I ended up being a lot more comfortable with it than I thought I ever would. It ended up taking me about 12.5 hours to finish the Japanese version of the game.
Taking place between Metroid 1 and 2, when there were still many Metroids to fight, Metroid Prime has more of a story in it than many prior Metroid games had, but still a fairly light story ultimately. Samus comes across a space pirate station in distress from the biological experiments they've been conducting, and after confronting the monsters hidden there (and losing all her upgrades due to a huge hit to her suit), she goes down to the planet it crashed on to investigate further. The story is mostly told through scanning logs of both the Chozo ruins as well as the space pirates' logs, and these logs were apparently changed significantly from the American release for the Japanese release. Regardless of the changes, the story is generally a very hands-off and atmosphere-heavy experience without a ton of focus on direct storytelling. It makes for a great, isolated atmosphere as you explore Tallon IV. The gameplay is not so much a first-person shooter so much as a first-person Metroidvania. You explore around one large 3D environment, finding new powerups, fighting enemies, defeating bosses, and solving puzzles to progress. This isn't a more normal first-person game, however, as it uses only the analog stick to move. This works surprisingly well as a control method due to the way you can lock onto enemies with the shoulder buttons. The C-stick and D-pad are used for changing your beam type and visor type respectively, so they couldn't be used for camera controls. The world and boss design is generally really solid, but there's a few bumps here and there. The first part of the game is really well signposted and put together, but then once you hit around the halfway point, the game suddenly expects you to know to go halfway across the world just to unlock one upgrade just to go back to where you were to keep progressing just slightly further. Given the hellish development cycle this game had, it's nothing short of incredible that it's even as good as it is, but even then, the marks of that troubled development cycle through that bad signposting. There are some other polish issues, such as certain areas (especially the mines) being weirdly devoid of save points despite how long and difficult they are, but the game is more often given a good difficulty curve. The presentation is really excellent, as one would expect from one of Nintendo's big franchises. You have music that sets the isolated atmosphere really well, and graphics that really impress. The field of view is a bit too narrow at times, and sometimes the lighting strays towards being so dark that it's really difficult to see (in a way that isn't intentional), but it all makes up a really solid package. The Japanese version of the game tightens some things up compared to the original American release aside from the previously mentioned somewhat altered story. The biggest things are rebalances to make the game just a bit harder. You die a lot faster in poison water (my first and one of my only deaths), and they also made the final boss fight significantly harder. It's nothing that makes this version better or worse than other versions, so far as I can tell, but they're interesting tweaks worth mentioning nonetheless. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Metroid Prime shows some marks of its troubled development, no question, but it still manages to be a really excellent game regardless. It holds up great all these years later, and is definitely worth checking out for any Metroid or Metroidvania fan. A special shoutout to my friend Fii, who loves this game and did a lot to help me love it too~. This is a favorite series of a few friends of mine that I've always been too intimidated to touch. The SMT series has always seemed super hard and unforgiving in ways that have made me too scared to engage with it, but I finally decided to take the plunge and see just why my friend likes them so much. With lots of pointers from my friends DogStrong and Fii, I was able to make it through to the end of the Japanese version of the game. It took me about 40 hours to beat the game with the neutral ending. I played it on the Switch Online Super Famicom service with liberal usage of rewinds and save states, because heckin' damn does this game hate you sometimes XD
SMT is the third game in the series but it's the first in the series (as I understand it) to take the concept and tell its own story rather than be beholden to the original books in a meaningful way. You start out as just a normal teenager in Tokyo who wakes up one day to see a message on your computer from Steven [Hawking], who has discovered demons living in the internet and has made a program to allow people to befriend and summon them. From there, a whirlwind of things happen (you're falsely arrested for murder, the Japanese Self Defense Force initiates a coup, the American military initiates a counter attack, America launches ICMBs and ends the world) that lead you eventually to walking through a ruined Tokyo trying to make sense of exactly what these forces of Law and Chaos are doing and how you can affect it. While I could spend all day explaining the details of the story itself, the broad strokes of the story are a combat between the forces of Law and Chaos for control of a world gone to ruin. You can alter your alignment via certain story actions, and where you ultimately end up decides which fate the world will take. Law, Chaos, or a neutral route siding with neither. SMT 1 does have characters other than yourself who have important roles, but none of them really have arcs or meaningful character writing. The bigger narrative in SMT is the philosophical discussion at hand between the forces of Law and Chaos, and how your actions determine which side of that equation you fall on. It's a really interesting and deep game for 1992, and I found it very engaging, even if character writing is much more usually my thing. The gameplay of SMT is that of Megami Tensei but more refined, that system being that which originated monster catching and fighting. You have your main character (whom I named SMTCHAMP) who can summon demons but not use magic, and then you have several other NPCs who join and leave your party throughout the story who learn a bit of magic instead of having your computer powers of summoning demons. It has a simple armor and weapons system, melee weapons for single targets and guns (and different types of often status-inflicting ammo) for groups, and a leveling system where instead of gradual stat increases, you pick one of your six stats (strength, intelligence, magic, vitality, agility, and luck) to put a point into to raise your stats a certain way. This leads to level ups not really being that important in and of themselves, but ultimately having a lot of influence on your power level. Your level is also very important because it affects which demons you can summon and fuse, as that's a lot of the bread and butter of the game. Most demons you encounter can be engaged with in conversation instead of fighting them. Once you talk them down, you get to a negotiating menu where you can ask for all sorts of things (money, friendship, magnetite (which we will get to later)), and they generally want some kind of currency or amount of healing items to join your party. Once they join you, they are in a stagnent position. This isn't Pokemon. A demon is exactly as powerful when they join you as they will ever be. You get level ups; they don't. What you do when you want stronger demons but don't want to befriend new ones (or abandon old friends) is go to the demon summoning Dark Church, where you can fuse demons into new and more powerful ones. SMT overall isn't a super hard game compared to a lot of the later (and earlier) games in its series, but making sure you have the right demons for the fight at hand is key to victory in many fights, especially in the early game. The fights themselves play out surprisingly well for a game this old. Enemies generally only appear one type at a time but with several members of that group of demons (one to eight members). You can't specify which of these you want your party to attack, but the allied AI is often very good at focusing down wounded enemies, avoiding enemies who are stunned or have a status making fighting otherwise impossible for them, and there's even feedback on the screen to show you which of the enemy mob in particular are being damaged. It's a really well done battle system that I was routinely surprised by the robustness of. There's even an auto-battle system to help you through the game's absolutely nuts encounter rate (which is often pretty brutal), and the auto battle even remembers if you last used melee or guns to keep fighting like that! The main meat of the gameplay outside of combat is first-person dungeon crawling. Now I know that sounds like somewhat of a nightmare, especially given that virtually all areas in a particular dungeon don't look terribly memorable or distinct from one another, but the game does the best it can to mitigate that. As you go through an area, you fill out an automatic map in your arm-terminal computer that you use to summon demons. You can check this map whenever you want, and it helps a lot with getting lost. Checking it is a bit cumbersome, but it's certainly better than having no map at all. The game, however, has a fair few issues that make it pretty difficult to go back to if you aren't using rewinds and save states. Demons can only be summoned and befriended if you're the right alignment. Law can't summon Chaos and vice versa, but neutral can summon anybody. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so hard to change your alignment or check what actually influences it (alignment management is one of the most important reasons to have a reference guide open for the game, imo), so you can suddenly be Chaos and not even realize it because you did one thing wrong, and there are only so many scripted opportunities to shift your alignment again before you're just out of options and stuck on the route you're on. Thankfully, you can check your alignment on the overworld whenever you want by checking which way your little marker is spinning (or wobbling in place, if you're neutral), but alignment management and the way it affects gameplay is a bit of a pain. Another BIG problem is player information. Spells have effects, weapons have complicated stats (how many times they hit, what statuses they do or don't inflict, whom they can be wielded by), and items have effects to. There is not a single mechanism in-game for you to learn what ANY of these things are. Giving the player the information they need to even make basic choices outside of sheer trial and error is a remnant of design philosophy from when this game came out that I am SO happy has died out of popular usage. Another big issues is that the game can just be very mean when it comes to punishing you for mistakes you couldn't have seen coming. The start of the game in particular (basically until the ICBMs drop) is a really rough time where getting ambushed by a group of tough enemies that happen to hang around Shinjuku means you're just dead unless you run (if you even CAN run). The dungeons in the game can also be really mean in how they put floor traps, invisible pit falls, and invisible teleports around. The dungeon design can be very mean in how they mostly just seem put together to waste both your time and resources before you can get to the big boss at the end. These points of meanness don't exactly make it unique among JRPGs at the time, not even close, but it's one more thing that makes this a pain to go back to in 2021. The presentation of the game is very nice, if a bit simple at times. The game doesn't have many musical tracks, but what's there fits the dreary, desolate tone well. The graphics are very nice in some places, and more boring in others. Environments are generally very dull and repetitive, while monster designs are often very cool and distinct, especially when it comes to bosses. You can tell Atlus is still getting its sea legs in regards to the Super Famicom, but they're already more than halfway there to a winning formula. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a mean game that is also super cool and fun when it isn't making you curse at the pitfall you just fell down or the paralysis trapped you just stepped on for the third time. The philosophy in the story is engaging and the monster fights and capturing are unique and fun, and if you can get past just how much of a bully the game can be at times, there's a lot to enjoy here. These days, I think the most easy way to enjoy the game is to be able to save state or rewind to brute force your way through those pit falls and traps whenever you want, but to each their own on that point. SMT is a series I was scared to ever try, but after how much fun I had with it, but I'm really glad I gave it a shot, and you just might be too~ Still not off either my 3D Zelda or my GameCube kick, I decided to start playing this game right after I finished with Pikmin 2. Wind Waker is a game I played a bunch when I was little, but it's been SO long since I last played it I genuinely can't remember. At any rate, it was definitely when I payed less attention to game design, so it was high time that I gave it a replay to see just how well it held up. It took me around 25 or 30 hours (rough guess, as the game doesn't count playtime) to finish the Japanese version of the game on original hardware.
Wind Waker starts out in a world flooded with oceans with only a few islands poking above. You, our hero Link, live on one of these islands with your little sister and grandmother. You peacefully live until one day a giant bird carrying girl comes to the island. Long story short, you end up saving her, a pirate captain, and your sister gets kidnapped instead. You join up with the pirates to save her, eventually finding yourself on a larger and much more treacherous journey to save all of this ocean called Hyrule. Wind Waker's writing is well remembered for a reason. Characters and their expressions are super well animated in a great art style, allowing Link to have more character than ever despite still basically being non-verbal. The characters and islands you visit and help out all follow a larger theme of succession and looking towards the future. It's a very hopeful and remarkably topical game in how it so often shows an older generation, despondent in how they've allowed the world to decay, giving the world to the younger generation with the wish they might still be able to make something despite the failings of the past. That said, Wind Waker's story and design really do show the pock marks of its troubled design. It's known that Wind Waker had to have two whole dungeons scrapped in order to fit the release schedule of a holiday release, and it's my opinion that this is likely the cause of the game's wild pacing problems. You have a really tightly choreographed first half, an SUPER strong ending sequence, but a really meandering and poorly signposted second half that does a lot to sour that. It isn't experience ruining, but it definitely left me with a lot of ideas of what could've been had they gone for a March release date instead of a holiday one. The gameplay design of Wind Waker is similarly hit or miss. The dungeon design is really as solid as ever, with the games dungeons and mini-dungeons providing that 3d action and puzzle solving the series is so good at just as good as it ever has. The swordplay has been spiced up a bit from the tried and true Z-targeting of the N64 era. Now in addition to that, you also have special counterattacks you can do by pressing the A button when you hear a sound cue. The way your sword strikes make musical emphasis when you land blows add a ton of cool atmosphere and flavor to the game that really make even normal combat stand out in a way I really appreciated. The "miss" part of that hit or miss is generally in the form of the overworld and the bits in between dungeons. Infamously, a lot of your time in Wind Waker is spent sailing on that ocean whose wind you're waking with your magic baton (this game's ocarina playing, which is incidentally the Japanese title of the game "The Baton of Wind"). The sailing itself isn't *that* bad, but it IS that bad when combined with what you're actually finding on these islands you're going to. What you're finding is, generally, things you can't interact with because you don't have the dungeon item for it yet. It means that your time is best left totally ignoring exploring until the big Triforce shard hunt at the end. I don't mind the Triforce chart hunt, but even that has its own bad reflections on the design of the game. Coming off of Majora's Mask, a game brimming with interesting and character-important side quests, Wind Waker has virtually none, and really not much meaningful side content at all other than treasure charts. Treasure charts are things you'll need to get lots of rupees (which you'll need A LOT of at end game to get your Triforce treasure charts deciphered), and it's just following to X-marks-the-spot somewhere in the ocean. It's not awful, sure, but it's painfully dull. A lot of this really just comes down to the whole ocean as a concept feeling very poorly executed. I don't really think this would've been solved has the game gotten its originally intended development cycle, but adding the ability to speed up the sailing in the Wii U port is definitely a huge upgrade to the overall flow of the game. Presentation-wise, it's a heckin' Zelda game, so of course it's great. Music is absolutely fantastic, the graphics and character designs are (as already mentioned) very good as well. The cartoony design everything has makes it so memorable compared to just about any Zelda game before and after, as nothing quite looks like Wind Waker (other than the 2D Zeldas its art style inspired, of course). Nintendo always swings for the fences with the presentation of their main line Zelda games, and Wind Waker is no exception. Verdict: Recommended. This game has too many negative and grating aspects for me to give it a highly recommended verdict in good conscience, but it has WAY too much good stuff for me to give it anything lower than this. It's a mixed bag, but the good manages to outweigh the bad to the point that it still manages to be great. Its quirks will likely turn off some people, but there's a great adventure and story waiting to be found here if you can manage to get over the ocean to get there X3 |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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