A close friend of mine recently came across her old GameBoy stuff in a closet while visiting her parents. Super super kindly of her, she actually sent me the whole bundle as a gift! (She said she was more than happy knowing that they were going to someone who’d enjoy them ^w^). Among that pile of GameBoy goodies was this game~! I’d heard of this game’s NES sibling before, so I knew I was in for a pretty decent if quite challenging time, but I was very surprised to learn that this game is actually completely different from its console big brother! I was super sleep deprived one morning, and a bit lost on what to play next after finishing the last Pokemon Stadium game, so I just popped this in and decided to give it my best shot. Despite how sleepy I was, I managed to beat its 9 stages and 2 boss fight stages in a little over an hour playing the UK version of the game via my Super GameBoy.
This game loosely, VERY loosely, follows the plot of the 80’s Batman movie. Batman overhears there’s a break in at a chemical factory, he goes there and inadvertently creates the Joker, he goes to the museum, he flies the Batwing for a while, and then it’s off to the church for the final battle. This is a 1990 GameBoy game, so there’s virtually no story here in the first place, but the little cutscene shots do look very nice at least, and its an entertaining enough adaptation of the film’s plot, even if it’s not a terribly close one XD While this game’s NES big brother is more of a Ninja Gaiden-type game, the GameBoy iteration of Batman is much closer to a Mega Man game! You have four worlds with two or three stages in each, and you run from left to right platforming over pits and shooting bad guys with your big bat gun. It’s very clearly a gun and not batarangs, which is pretty weird for a Batman game, admittedly, but it’s just a video game, so I don’t think it matters terribly much XD. The one exception is the Batwing section, where the game briefly becomes a shmup for two stages, where you can mercifully hold (instead of mash) B to shoot backwards and A to shoot forwards. It’s a pretty damn hard game, as is to be expected from a Sunsoft game of this era. Batman’s jump physics take a little while to get used to, though he does have a good deal of play control to help you out, and you’ll be seeing tricky jumps that can easily lead to your death as early as the first level or so. That said, it’s still put together really well. You can collect powerups to increase the amount of bullets you can have on screen at a time, and there are a pretty good handful of different gun types you can pick up (though they do replace the gun you’re currently using, Contra-style), and different ones have their respective advantages and disadvantages in regards to range and power. It’s also a remarkably forgiving game, as not only do you keep your powerups after dying, you even keep them after *continuing* (though I didn’t get a chance to test how many continues you get). Batman even has four hits between him and death as opposed to just one! While this is a pretty tough game (especially in the boss fights), it’s more than forgiving enough to still keep it fun and not punish you too much for failure, and I really appreciated it for that. The aesthetics are absolutely fantastic. The graphics are pretty good, having very pretty cutscene frames as well as very well done little Batman and enemy sprites. The game also thankfully runs great, and I never experienced any issues with chugging frame rates due to things being too busy, even in the auto-scroller levels. The music is the real star of the show here, though. The whole sound track kicks mad amounts of ass, even for a Sunsoft game of the era (for whom awesome soundtracks were nothing rare). The music is so good that I wanted to keep playing more if only to hear successive stages’ music tracks XD. While I’m hardly a walking encyclopedia of GameBoy music, this has easily gotta be one of the best sound tracks on the system, which is doubly impressive for a game that came out barely a year into the system’s life span. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While it’s a bit short, this is still an awesome little action game for the platform. The hard difficulty may be a turn off for some, but the forgiving death mechanics go a long way towards making that a lot more easy to deal with. If you’re a big Mega Man fan like me, this is totally a must-play. While there are no enemy powers to steal, the overall fun of the gameplay scratched that classic Mega Man itch in a way I really appreciated, and I imagine it will for you as well~.
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While going through the effort to finish the two sequels to this game, I naturally thought of this game as well. It’s a game that never came out in English, as it only has 40 Pokemon out of the original 151, and is otherwise *very* content light beyond just free battling. For many years I’d known about this game, but I’d actually always been under the impression that it had no single-player content to speak of at all. Imagine my surprise when, in my researching the other two Pokemon Stadium games, I found that this game does indeed have SOME content to it, and credits to reach! Given that this is a really easily found game for 100 yen, it was a pretty simple choice to run out and grab this so I could get to playing it once I was done with the other two (and it also gave me an extra good excuse to play through Yellow version to get the last few TMs I needed to create my super team for this game’s league~). I played through all four divisions of the the level 1~30 league, and I did it on real hardware. As with the other two Pokemon Stadium games, I can’t really say how long it took me to beat this. Sure, I made it through those four cups in only 3 or 4 hours, but I also used Pokemon from my copies of Green, Gold, and Yellow to win it, and that’s not counting all the time acquiring and training up those Pokemon. This is another one I just can’t really confidently give a “time to beat” for at all, unfortunately.
As with the two sequels to this game, there is no story to speak of with this game. It’s an even more simple version of its successor (the one that DID come out in English), lacking 111 Pokemon or even mini-games to speak of. What it *does* have are some neat tools for looking at your Pokemon if you insert your GameBoy Pokemon game via a Transfer Pak, a way to play those GB Pokemon games via an internal emulator, a free battle mode, and a *small* handful of single-player content. There are two tournaments, one with one division, and one with four, and actually beating either will get you the credits. The former is a level 50~55 league with the Nintendo Cup ’97 ruleset, but the trainers you’re facing in that are entirely teams based on the ’97 championship finalists, so I chose to do the other tournament instead. The other tournament being a cup that uses the Nintendo Cup ’98 rule set (only 33 Pokemon allowed and a level limit of 30). That choice was made partly because I’m getting a little burned out on Pokemon stuff and partly because I’d yet to make a level 30s team, and that seemed like a neat challenge. But frankly, a more major reason I picked to do only this one was because this game has NO continues, unlike its sequels, so if you lose a match, you need to restart the WHOLE cup over again. Now, by a small miracle of luck (on top of all the effort I put into making my level 30s Alakazam, Jolteon, Tauros, Dugtrio, Starmie, and Exeggutor team as burly and mean as I could), I actually managed to go all four cups completely undefeated. This game *does* have rental Pokemon I could’ve used, but given the penalty for failure (and the small amount of actual content at play), it seemed more reasonable and fun to just make as mean a team as I could for this instead. I had always written this game off as just an inferior version made totally obsolete by its immediate sequel, but I was very happy to have been proven wrong in that regard. Part of that is due to the later Pokemon Stadium lacking a four cup tournament that uses the ’98 Cup rule set, which makes this game an interesting oddity for that alone. However, the much bigger point of interest that I discovered is that, unlike the second Pokemon Stadium game, this game *actually* plays just like the Red & Green era GameBoy games do. Pokemon Stadium 2 starts making a lot of changes to Pokemon fix up bugs in the original GB games, and that ends up making it a weird sort of half-step between the first and second generation Pokemon games. This game, however, is JUST like the GameBoy games, warts and all. The biggest ones I noticed are that psychic types are immune to ghost moves and hyper beam doesn’t need a turn of recharge if it gets a kill or misses. They’re ultimately very small changes, but they’re things I encountered a *lot* in the second game and I was always second guessing whether or not the rules were actually like the games I trained these Pokemon up in in the first place. While it’s hardly a top-tier selling point, the rule set for this game’s battle system so closely mirroring the games you’d use to play it does make it a worthwhile addition to any Pokemaniac’s shelf alongside its two sequels. Aesthetically, the game is really just a more simple Pokemon Stadium 2. The models are basically all the same, as are the animations, and there is only one battle field ever used for tournaments and such. The coolest part that I found that’s actually unique to this game is how the tournaments themselves are displayed. After winning a match and “getting a badge”, it actually affixes to an in-game hat your generic player model wears for the duration of that tournament! Not only that, but in the preview shot between you and the person you’re about to fight, it even still has the badges on your profile picture! It’s a very small thing, but it’s something I thought was cool enough to mention here x3 Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a game I really easily could just not recommend at all, but it’s both so cheap and such a unique little game in its rule set that I think it’s still something cool for big Pokemon fans to check out. Mind you, this still has a lot less content to enjoy than its sequels, as we don’t even have all the Pokemon to play around in in free battle, let alone mini-games at all to play with friends. However, if you’re into competitive Pokemon battling and want a very unique single-player challenge, then this is something you might get a good deal of fun out of (if you’re willing to use a menu translation guide to navigate it, at least ^^;). In the big string of old Pokemon I’ve been playing lately, I had a real hankering to play through the first gen of Pokemon again. It’s also been a *very* long time since I’ve played Yellow in particular, and last time I didn’t even use Pikachu in my party! It so happened that I also needed more TMs to complete a team of Pokemon for more Pokemon Stadium nonsense, so this all made for the perfect excuse to track down a cheap copy of Yellow and give it a proper playthrough this time~. It took me around 21 hours to beat the Champion, and I played through the Japanese version on real hardware (with a team of Pikachu, Blastoise, Hitmonlee, Mr Mime, Fearow, and Rhydon). A note before I begin is that I have already reviewd gen 1 Pokemon very recently, so I’m not going to be quite as exhaustive here, and I’m mainly going to be comparing it to that review or referring back to descriptions/statements made there previously (as I see little reason to just type out all the same stuff all over again for the heck of it).
The story of Yellow is more or less the same as the original story in Red & Green, but with some interesting new twists. The whole gimmick of Yellow (or as it’s known here, “Pocket Monsters: Pikachu”) is that it’s the first Pokemon game but remade to be a bit more like the anime, and it achieves that about as well as it reasonably can, for better or worse. You don’t get a choice of starter, and instead you just get a Pikachu at the start. You not only can’t evolve this Pikachu, but he’ll also follow you around on the map, just like Pikachu does with Ash in the anime. You also have a few new touches, like Jessie & James (with their anime appropriate team) fighting you here and there, and a few characters like Brock and Misty having a more anime-appropriate outfit, but overall it’s still the same game, just with a few new touches. Gameplay wise, Pokemon Yellow still has all of the fundamental issues with balancing that the original Pokemon Red & Green have, so I’m not going to go over them again here. The important thing that *is* different, however, is that the game has been rebalanced in ways big and small to make it overall significantly harder. Some of these are the result of the base premise. You have only a Pikachu, so the first gym that has only rock/ground type Pokemon are REALLY good against your starter. If you don’t know that there’s a rare chance to get a fighting type Mankey in a side route on your way there, you’re gonna have a HECK of a difficult time beating the very first gym (as I did) because you’re fighting with a type disadvantage and a Pokemon that can’t evolve. Then there are changes in making certain gym leaders and such have teams more accurate to how they are in the anime, so Lt. Surge is actually made quite a bit easier due to the fact that his whole team now only consists of one quite burly Raichu. The other changes are more present in the later half of the game, with basically every gym from the fifth one onward having VERY significant power increases compared to the original Red & Green. Up through the Elite Four and even the champion, everyone has Pokemon roughly ten to fifteen levels higher than they usually do, and many of them have better put together teams as well. It makes for an interesting change to the normal Pokemon formula, sure, but I’m not sure I’d really call it “better” per se. Pokemon, especially with the very limited tool set of first gen stuff, isn’t something that often benefits significantly from being much harder games in this fashion, as all it really amounts to is making the player grind more as well as forcing them down choosing more optimal teams (rather than teams of interesting makeups or weird gimmicks). It’s not an impossibly hard game, sure, as I still beat this in the same amount of time that it took me to beat Green, even with my weirdo team full of sub-optimal move sets, but it’s still definitely more frustrating and less fun as a result of just how sudden a jump in difficulty so many of those late game gym leaders are (especially compared to the relatively unchanged levels of the Pokemon leading up to them). Aesthetically, this game is pretty much still just what Red & Green were with a few changes here and there. On the smaller side, we have some slight adjustments to environments. As mentioned earlier, we also have some new character sprites here and there to get them more up to form with the anime, and there’s even a new song or two put in to accommodate new characters like Jessie & James (who have their own theme when they confront you for a battle). On the more drastic end, EVERY Pokemon has been given a new front-facing sprite, though their back sprites (the ones you see when you use them) are still unchanged. This has the upshot of making everything look a lot more like what it looked like in the increasingly codified key art of the time, but it also does take away a lot of the janky charm that original Pokemon had with all of the weird, disparate art that it had. It also has the unintended side effect of a fair few of the back sprites looking VERY odd compared to the front sprites, because some of these changes are so drastic that the old back sprites just don’t look very cohesive anymore compared to their front views. Overall, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but I don’t think I’d call much any of it outright good or bad. It’ll really depend on what you like in particular about aesthetics of Pokemon of this era on if you like or dislike these changes. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While this certainly isn’t a bad game and it isn’t even a bad version of gen 1 Pokemon to play, I’d still very strongly hesitate recommending it, especially to a first-time player of this generation. While a lot of the balancing changes are going to likely be interesting to an experienced player, they’re just going to make the experience more frustrating and grindy to someone unfamiliar with the first Pokemon games. Aesthetic changes aside, this just isn’t a very great way to experience how the original Pokemon games were, and while this is still a neat and fun time in places, I found it to be a simply inferior experience compared to just playing the original Red & Green (which, over here at least, are just as common and just as cheap to get your hands on). Unlike with the third Pokemon Stadium game I beat last week, there’s really just no way to not put this game’s title in a way where it’s not very confusing on what I’m talking about XD. This is the game we know in English as just “Pokemon Stadium”, but in Japan, it’s the second of these games (and far more feature complete than its predecessor). Just as with the third game that I beat last week, this was another one I had as a kid and played the mini-games in a ton, but had really given up all hope of ever seeing the end of its quite hard single-player content. However, in the midst of my most recent N64 and Pokemon madness, I decided that, just like with its sequel, I’d sit down and finally see the credits of this game as well. I have no idea how to really say how long it took me to beat this game (given that it doesn’t record playtime and it’s also hard to say how much I should factor in the playtime of my Pokemon Gold and Pokemon Green ‘mons that I used for beating this in the first place), but it took me about a week of playing and grinding up Pokemon to finish it, at least. I played through the Japanese version and I did it on real hardware.
As with the other two Pokemon Stadium games, this game really has no narrative to speak of. It has a few mini-games (which are super fun to play, and I by and large prefer the ones in this game to the ones in the sequel) and a free battle mode to play with friends, and it also has a pile of single-player tournaments and challenges you can try your hand at if you’d like to see the credits. Just like its sequel, it has two rounds of this stuff: an easier first one, which I did, and a FAR harder second one which I have no interest in slamming my head against XD. That said, this game is definitely FAR easier to complete the first round in than it is for the sequel. That’s not to say it’s “easy”, per se, so much as it is to say that the second game’s balancing and AI teams are brutal, whereas this game’s tournament design as well as overall balance of AI teams is far more forgiving, and I found it a lot more easy to actually have fun even when using rental teams of Pokemon rather than my own trained up Pokemon. Speaking of the tournaments, that is a very important difference this game has with its English language counterpart. Both versions have the gym leader tower where you fight the Kanto gym leaders and then the Elite Four + Champion in little mini gauntlets with no continues. That’s all the same between both versions (and a very fun time!). Where the English port of this game has four tournaments (two with one division and two with four), the original Japanese version here has six (four with one division and two with four). While two of the single-division tournaments and one of the four-division tournaments are the same in each version, the English version’s “Poke Cup” is entirely exclusive to itself. The Japanese version, meanwhile, has three tournaments based off of official Nintendo tournaments actually held in Japan, and even the Pokemon present in several of those tournaments are based on teams actually used by finalists in those tournaments. My personal favorite of them was the Nintendo Cup ’99 one, which is the four-division tournament unique to the Japanese version. All 25 Pokemon used by the Nintendo Cup ’97 finalists are banned, so you’re left to make a powerful team out of the generally “Just OK” power levels of the remaining 125 or so. It’s a really fun challenge, and I had a blast putting together a team to tackle it with the weird and oddball restrictions it had. The other big point of difference between the English and Japanese versions is that a lot of the rental Pokemon (ones the game already has that you can build a team out of if you don’t want to build your own team in one of the GameBoy games and transfer it over) are actually *worse* in this version. A lot of them have a lot more sub-optimal and weak move sets than their counterparts in the international versions of this game. It doesn’t make the game *that* much harder, at least for the first round, but it certainly made beating the harder tournaments I needed to use rental Pokemon for that much more difficult to do XP The aesthetics of this game are pretty darn similar to the stuff its sequel uses, so I won’t dwell on them too much as to not repeat the same points again. The Pokemon are the main event, and they all look awesome! Once again, it’s no surprise that 50%+ of the credits for this game are the 3D modelling team, since they did a downright fantastic job bringing the original 151 Pokemon to life. The music is also really fun, with a bunch of really great versions of songs from the GameBoy games recreated here with the power of the N64. My main complaint about the aesthetics in this version specifically, is that the localization has better sound design, particularly in the mini-games. The localization went really hard in getting sound clips and voice talent from the anime adaptation to use in that version, and it has a very distinct point of nostalgia for me as a result. The Pokemon in the mini-games in the Japanese version, by contrast, just use normal little sound effects that are much more boring. It’s not a problem in the more holistic sense, but it’s something that *does* make me value having an English version to play via the Switch Online either way~. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I’d certainly recommend this game much more highly than the sequel due to the better difficulty balancing, this is still a very particular kind of game for a very particular kind of Pokemon fan. I learned a lot about how to play competitive Pokemon with the gen 1 rule set during my time with Pokemon Stadium 2, but if you’re not really caught by the idea of training up your own Pokemon team or trudging through the RNG of a rental Pokemon team, then actually trying to beat this game is likely going to be far more frustration than fun for even a big fan of Pokemon. That said, if that stuff *does* sound fun for you, then this is a game really worth checking out! Even if you don’t end up beating all of the single-player content to see the credits like I did, the mini-games and free battle stuff on their own make for a really fun time with friends, and they’re well worth checking this game out for, particularly if you have access to it via the Switch Online N64 Service~. This is a game I’ve owned for quite some time but just never got around to playing. The most recent game from the team who brought us the excellent Wandersong, I snagged it on sale a while back but just never found myself sitting down to play it. However, when my partner recently mentioned she was going to play through it, this was the perfect opportunity to both finally get to playing this as well as play something alongside her~. It took me around 9.5 hours to beat the game, and around 14 hours to 100% it. I played the English version on real hardware (and the hardware in question is important, in this case!).
Chicory is the story of the titular character…’s janitor. You play as Pizza, a little dog person who is the janitor for the brush wielder Chicory. It’s the wielder’s job to fill the world with color! With the power of the brush they wield, they and only they can turn the world from a black & white bore fest into a colorful world full of inspiration. There have been many wielders over the centuries, and Chicory is the current one. She’s the greatest! So talented and inspiring, it’s Pizza’s dream to be able to work so close with her. However, in the middle of your cleaning, suddenly the room you’re in and the WHOLE world lose color! Trying to go to Chicory for an answer, you find the brush lying outside her room. You pick it up, just to try it out, before going to her for help, but she’s almost completely unresponsive about it. It’s up to Pizza to go out into the world of Picnic and see just what’s the matter here, and just what is causing the color to go away! Given that this was from the folks behind Wandersong, I had some sort of idea of what I was in for here. It wasn’t any surprise that, like the main character of Wandersong, Pizza is never actually given any gendered terms, making them an ideal (and much more gender-neutral presenting than Wandersong’s Bard) main character for anyone of any gender. It was also no surprise how naturally and quietly queer the land of Picnic is, as that’s something else I’ve come to expect that this team is very good at (and they do it excellently here too). Also like Wandersong, this is very much a game about being a grown up in the adult world, but I think they hit the thematic beats they’re going for much better here than they did in that game (as well as just pacing the narrative better as a whole). Chicory is very much a game about how your problems don’t just go away once you’re an adult. Toxic/bad support systems & cycles of abuse, feelings of self-doubt and imposter syndrome, and even being bothered by the simple existentialism of it all are main thrusts of Chicory’s narrative and it executes on them excellently. The focal point of all of this is in the creation of art, unsurprisingly, but it goes far beyond that to self-expression as a whole. Chicory is a wonderfully written game and easily one of my favorites I’ve played this year for it. While it’s a game that kids could certainly enjoy and gain a good bit from (especially if they’re more teenage than under-10), I think adults are going to be the ones for whom the narrative of Chicory hits hardest and for all the best reasons. Mechanically, Chicory is an adventure game not totally unlike a Zelda-type game. You go throughout the world talking to people, solving their problems, exploring new areas, and solving puzzles with the aid of your brush. By either using the right analog stick, the touch screen, or even the right joycon’s gyro (which was the best way to play for me at least), you can guide your brush along the screen to paint the world and everything in it in all sorts of colors. The main difference between something like Zelda and Chicory, however, is that Chicory has almost no combat at all. Whether it’s on the overworld of Picnic or one of it’s many (effective) dungeon areas, there are no normal enemies to speak of. What there ARE are surprisingly difficult boss fights waiting for you at the end of each chapter, and beating a boss gives you and your brush a new power for environmental traversal (such as jumping). I’m a big Binding of Isaac fan, so I really enjoyed the boss fights and all of the attacks you need to dodge. They’re really well put together fights, but I gotta say, they stick out like a sore thumb in a game with otherwise no action element to speak of, and it really does make me question why they’re here at all. All that said, the game seems to actually understand that already. Not only are the death mechanics very forgiving (I seemed to “die” several times but never was actually sent back? I just instantly revived), you can also tweak the difficulty of boss fights quite granularly in the options menu, and you can even just set them to be skipped outright if you so desire. The overly hard boss fights are really the only negative point I can think of for Chicory’s entire design, and even then, given that you can just turn them off completely as soon as you load up the game for the first time, it’s really hard to call it *that* negative a point in the first place. The aesthetics of Chicory are also fantastic. It’s a super cute and wonderfully designed world, with many characters even having unique (or close to it) fonts for how they speak, helping differentiate their un-voice acted dialogue just that much more from other NPCs in the world. The music is also fantastic, with each track complementing its related scene excellently, and especially the boss fights having some really fun and pumping tracks. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you didn’t get it from what I’ve written already, Chicory is an absolutely outstanding game. It’s narrative is one of the best and most poignant I’ve seen in a game, and that’s coming from me the same year I played through Disco Elysium, and the gameplay and aesthetics are tons of fun too. Watch a video or a trailer of Chicory, and you’ll probably know immediately if it’s for you or not, but if you even *think* you’ll like it at all, you’ll probably absolutely love it, just like I did~. |
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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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