Known as "Soul Blader" here in Japan, I've been meaning to get to this game and its two sequels for quite some time now, and a simple sort of Zelda-like was just what I was in the mood for after all of that N64 playing earlier in the month. I honestly had virtually no idea what this game was even like, but its reputation was good enough that I was willing to take the chance regardless. It took me a bit under 8 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states or using a guide.
Soul Blazer tells the story of a heavenly guardian come down to the world to set things right. The great demon lord Deathtoll was summoned by humanity, so the souls of just about every living thing have been sealed away by his dark minions. It's your mission to head down there and set things right again. While the story's presentation is quite of its time (that being quite simple and without much use of scene-setting music), it's actually a surprisingly well written story dealing with how there can always be hope in the world despite how eager humanity can be to march towards its own demise for personal enrichment. It's not exactly the best story on the Super Famicom or anything, but it was one I enjoyed nonetheless, and it's nice to see a more well considered story in a Zelda-like like this. While I do call this game a Zelda-like, it's honestly much more like Ys 1&2 and Gauntlet had a baby that was then raised by Actraiser XD (which makes some degree of sense, given that this was made by the guys who made both Ys 1&2 and Actraiser). It's a top down action game much like Gauntlet or Dungeon Explorers, and you go through dungeons killing all the monsters in an area. Upon killing all of the monsters out of a certain spawner, the spawner will explode all on its own, and walking over it will destroy it and free the soul of the being trapped in it. Upon returning to the town of that particular area (of which the game has seven), you can talk to these beings (be they people, animal, or plant) and receive information, goodies, or just a simple thank you. This game has no money, so your goodies you find generally fall into being either new equipment (armor, swords, or spells), or just the power gems that you collect to power your spells. It's a pretty simple gameplay loop overall, but it's one that works really well regardless. It'll probably be a bit of an easy game for some (though the English version is a little bit harder), but I found its challenge to be juuuust right for me as a veteran of the genre. Even if you are having a hard time, you gain experience points from killing monsters, and there are always monsters that aren't connected to spawners that simply respawn when you enter and leave the screen, so simple EXP grinding to power up more is always an option if you're having trouble~. The presentation of the game is really stand-out excellent. As mentioned earlier, we're taking a LOT of stuff from Actraiser, as almost all of the sound effects and even significant bits of the UI seem to just be copied directly over from Actraiser. Heck, even the way enemies get stunned slightly after hitting them is right out of Actraiser XD. Thankfully, not only is the Actraiser stuff very good and functional, so reusing it here is hardly a problem, but we also got a banging soundtrack too! This game's soundtrack was awesome, and there was barely a new area I got to where I didn't say out loud "oh hell yeah, this song rocks!". The graphics are also very pretty, though they're certainly of the time for a '92 SFC game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. With a nice little story and really fun and balanced gameplay, this is a super easy recommendation. If you like 2D Zelda-type stuff at all, then this will likely be a game you quite enjoy, and you don't even need to be super good at these sorts of games to beat it. An awesome action/adventure game to spend a weekend with, if there ever was one~.
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In a bit of an early Christmas present to myself, I recently picked up a big pile of cheap N64 games that I’d been meaning to nab from a local used games shop. This was one of those games that I ended up picking up, as it’s always one I’ve been meaning to pick up and play all the way through. Or at least it *was* one of those XD. During the course of playing it, there were just too many things that seemed far too familiar, and while I’d originally assumed that I’d only briefly played Pokemon Snap but never ultimately finished it, I now think that I actually have played and beaten this game before at some time in the past XD. Regardless, that was so long ago I could barely begin to guess when it was, and I also had a great time (re)playing through it now! It took me around 4 or so hours to beat the game while snapping pictures of 58 out of 63 Pokemon, and I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The story of Pokemon Snap is one of main character Todd Snap (yes, really) who is a photographer in the Pokemon world. During one expedition of his, he manages to snap what he thinks are photos of the mirage Pokemon Mew, and it’s his mission to take a proper photo of it someday. Here is where Professor Oak enters our story, as he leads our main character to the ever so creatively named Pokemon Island. Using the auto-progressing vehicle, the Zero One, he wants you to photograph all sorts of Pokemon to help complete his Pokemon Report on what lives on the island. It’s a fairly threadbare story, but it more than adequately sets up the premise for your photo snapping adventure. The actual gameplay of Pokemon Snap is, as the name suggests, “snapping” photos of Pokemon to submit them to Professor Oak. However, there’s a big difference between a good photo and a bad photo, so it’s up to you to aim for as high a score as you can for each shot you’re going to submit (as only one photo per Pokemon can be submitted at the end of one of the game’s seven stages). You’re judged on how big the Pokemon is in frame, how they’re posed (are they doing a special action or at least facing the camera?), whether they’re centered or not, and how many other Pokemon of their same species are in the frame with them (if possible). It’s something that doesn’t sound that ultimately great for a video game, admittedly, but it’s a much more addicting score attack kind of game than it first seems. The rules are simple and intuitive enough that they’re easy to grasp even for someone like me who’s far from the biggest score attack or photography fan <w>. The Zero One also always follows a track in each level, and the same Pokemon appear at the same times, so there’s always an opportunity to try again if you mess up a particular trick or shot you’re trying to do. You even get more tools like Pokemon food or a Poke Flute as you progress, so there’s also a lot of value in revisiting old stages to find new secrets too~. It’s remarkably simple and as fun as it is novel, and it’s a gameplay loop that ends up working really well~. The aesthetics would need to be pretty darn good in a game all about looking around and taking photos, and they thankfully achieve that really well! Despite the first (two) Pokemon Stadium games predating this, I’d wager almost none (if any) of those models were reused for this. You need to be so much more up close and personal with the Pokemon, and you also need the Pokemon themselves to be much more expressive (not to mention do things like ambulate around, which they never do in the Stadium games). The end result is a bunch of Pokemon that move great and look awesome, and the polygonal look of the N64 gives the whole thing a very fun retro charm on top of it all. The soundtrack is also great, with a lot of new very Pokemon-y feeling tracks to help make your adventure that much more fun~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really great, super clever little game! It’s not too long, and it’s not too deep, but you can go really nuts with trying to improve your scores and find extra Pokemon if you got really into it. A bit like Pilotwings 64, while this certainly wasn’t my favorite game ever, I can absolutely see how this could be someone’s favorite game ever if it hit for them the right way. But even then, this game is so unique and fun that it’s well worth trying out, especially if you’re a Pokemon fan (and especially if you have the Switch Online N64 service, which this is also on~). 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~. 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~. Literally translating to “My Summer Vacation”, this is a game I’ve had some greater or lesser interest in for well over a year now, but it took me this long to actually find a copy for sale in Book Off XD. Before playing it, I honestly didn’t have much idea of what it was about at all. I knew it was some kind of life sim taking place over a young boy’s summer vacation, and I knew it was lauded very highly for its writing, but that was really it. Sure, the later releases were easier to find, but I wanted to see where the series started! X3. It ended up taking me around 13 or so hours to play through it on real hardware.
Boku No Natsuyasumi is the story of the titular character, Boku (which can be a first-person pronoun for a boy/man and is sometimes used as a cutesy nickname for a young boy, but in this case it’s just used as the character’s name) and his summer vacation the year he was nine years old. His mother was about to have a baby, so his parents arranged for him to stay with his aunt’s family as to give his parents some breathing room during that period. His aunt’s family, the Sorano family, are composed of his aunt and uncle as well as his older cousin Moe and his cousin of similar age Shirabe. The opening narration says simply that this was a summer whose events he has never forgotten, and that actually brings me to an interesting point in and of itself. Our opening narration is done by an older man speaking from Boku’s perspective. The narrative is specifically framed as an older man (likely in his 40’s, much like the game’s creator was at the time this was made) reflecting upon his childhood. This framing device makes clear what otherwise might be a little more buried in the subtext: this is first and foremost a nostalgia piece, and a reflective one at that. Though the topics in this game aren’t anything M-rated that a kid couldn’t or shouldn’t see, the audience for this game is absolutely an adult one. Boku No Natsuyasumi is a game about looking back at your adolescence, about a time when you had no responsibilities of the harsh adult world, and not just getting to go through them again, but being able to reflect on what it means to do so. That’s not to say that Boku’s summer break is entirely devoid of interesting or impactful happenings, quite far from it, but I hesitate to say much more about the actual events (or possible events) of the story because this is a game I think it makes much more sense to simply experience yourself. The actual gameplay of BNNY is relatively simple as such things go. Though this game is most easily described as a life sim, I think it fits the mold of an adventure game much more easily. There are no stats or survival elements to worry about, being that you’re just a grade-schooler staying up in the mountains with your extended family, but you do have various chores you can be responsible for and other activities you can do. You can explore the mountains, talk to your family, fish in the ponds and streams, or catch bugs (to either preserve in your bug catching kit or use to battle other kids in beetle fights), though there honestly isn’t a ton more than that. Granted I had a lot of fun exploring, trying my best to partake in story events, and also catching as many bugs as I could, but this *is* just a rural Japanese home in the 70’s. There’s not a massive amount to do, but making the best of your month off from school is what this game is all about. You don’t really *have* to do anything: It’s your summer vacation, so make the best of it the way you see best~. The presentation is very simple but also homey in a way that fits the game very well. People are relatively simple looking 3D models that almost resemble a child’s drawings of people, but I found that to be both charming as well as come off as very intentional. You have a picture-diary that you write in every day to save the game, and Boku draws people just as they appear in the game. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to assume that, because we’re going down his memory lane, we see the people in his life as he remembers them through his drawings. Aside from that, the game is basically all those good old 2D pre-rendered backdrops that PS1 rpgs and adventure games love so much, and being a quite late-life PS1 game, they all look very nice. The sound design is also very well done in this game, having overall very little music save to underscore very important scenes/events, and most of the soundscape is just the background sounds of living in the Japanese countryside. The game is also fully voice acted, with all spoken dialogue (and even a fair bit of the narration) being voiced very well. The aesthetics work together with the writing beautifully, and I couldn’t possibly imagine the game not having all the VA to help bring the story to life the way it does. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a truly excellent game and easily one of the best games on the PS1, to my reckoning. This is one of the earliest examples in games history of a game where I can point to and say “this is a game that is making art in a way that only a video game can.” This is sadly also a game that’s unlikely to get a translation anytime soon (largely because of all of the oh-so-common in the PS1 era videos with voiced dialogue but no text over it), and it’d honestly be a very hard game to translate at the best of times, in my opinion. There’s a lot here both culturally and historically that you’d need to be quite familiar with Japan in the first place to really take in in the way you probably should, so any would be localizer would have an extremely daunting task on their hands. Regardless, for those who can understand the language and enjoy story based games, this is an all time great of the generation that is absolutely not one to miss out on. After playing through the Shadow Hearts series earlier this year, this game was an absolute must-play on my list. Being effectively Shadow Hearts 0, there was just no way I could go through all the effort of playing through the PS2 Shadow Hearts games and just ignore where the whole series started. I’ve had this game for a few weeks now, and this last weekend was the first time since I bought it where I haven’t been otherwise occupied with another longer game, so I felt it was high time I finally got to seeing the last Shadow Hearts game I hadn’t yet seen~. It took me around 14 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game and get the best ending, and I did it all on real hardware.
Koudelka takes place in a tiny Welsh town of Aberystwyth, our titular character breaks into a mysterious old monastery and comes across a near dying thief, Edward. After a rocky meet and greet between the two of them as they fight off the monster that nearly took Edward’s life, they explore further into the monastery and come across the suspiciously nice caretakers of the place and eventually a third companion, a Bishop named James. The three of them must brave the horrors of the monastery and put the things haunting there to rest, or die trying. It’s honestly a bit hard to give much of a summary, or even an intro, to Koudelka’s story without feeling like I’m either going far too into detail or skipping over far too much. Though an RPG, Koudelka’s story almost feels more like a stage play in how the characters interact with one another, and the VA just adds *so* much to an already stellar script. As you venture further and further into the mansion, the larger narrative of what took place there slowly unfurls, and what you’re left with is an excellently told story of identity, tragedy, trauma, and discovery. The VA is actually as excellent as it is because, in an extremely strange move for the time, Sacnoth actually got the voice actors together on a stage and had them read their lines to one another almost as if it were an actual play. That’s why Koudelka has such long, meaty, and well-acted cutscenes that feel like they’ve been taken out of a stage play: They almost literally have been xD. It all adds up to something really excellent, and even though I had already had this game introduced to me as one with an excellent narrative, I found it absolutely lived up to the hype. Though it’s a short game as far as PS1 RPGs go (especially for a 4-disc PS1 RPG), it’s easily one of the best written games on the system, as far as I’m concerned. Mechanically is where Koudelka is a bit more of a mess ^^;. Now I’d heard that Koudelka was something like a mechanical disaster, and I found that to be quite far from the truth. The actual systems at play here really have very little wrong with them, but there’s just so much chaff here that it can be very overwhelming at times. Koudelka is part turn-based RPG and part survival horror. On the latter, we have a game that feels a *lot* like we’re going through Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion or some equivalent thereof, with the whole game taking place inside one building and tons of fixed camera angles to navigate it through. It honestly is presented so much like a survival horror game that it threw me off when the game didn’t have tank controls XD. Though even while the game has no actual action combat (not even quick time events) to speak of, the puzzle solving and inventory management you’ll be doing is going to feel very familiar to anyone who’s played any of the PS1 Resident Evil games, though the puzzles themselves are very rarely all that difficult, thankfully. On the RPG side of things, we have something that doesn’t have any great analogue, because it’s got mechanical aspects of games from Seiken Densetsu (which the director/composer/writer previously worked on) to even things like the first Persona game and SMT stuff. There’s a lot to cover, but lets start with your characters themselves. All three of your characters are actually functionally identical. They all have access to the same items, equipment, and even spells. The only differences between them come down to how you choose to level up their stats. Koudelka’s stats start her out as a good spell caster and Edward’s make him an obvious melee user, but there’s nothing saying you can’t stick it out and make Koudelka your brawler and Edward your caster. Is it sub-optimal in the early game? Absolutely. But it’s not actually mechanically going to be any better or worse, so you have a lot of wiggle room there. All of that is down to how leveling up works. In a fashion very much like how Atlus loved designing their progression systems back in the 90’s, you get no base stat upgrades upon leveling up. Instead, you get four points to plop into any of your 8 stats that you want. Strength, vitality, and dexterity are your melee-focused stats (being physical-based power, defense/HP, and accuracy), with intelligence, piety, and mental being their magic and MP-focused counterparts. Agility is how fast you are (and more speed is more turns, very much like something like FFX would later do stuff, just with no visible progress bar), and luck is just sorta “makes you a lil’ better at everything”. It’s certainly intimidating at first, but it’s all explained in a very straightforward fashion, and the level curve is also very quick once you make it off of disc 1, so even changing your mind and grinding out a few levels to take on a boss you’re struggling with isn’t actually that big of an ask either. But then we get to the clutter, you see. First we have the battle system, which is this weird grid-based thing that plays like an easier/better designed version of Persona 1’s awful grid stuff. Then we have the spells themselves, which you get more of as you beat more bosses. You also start with a buff spell for each of the 8 stats, and MP is going to be something of an issue regardless, at least in the early game. On top of all that, you also have your spells being able to upgrade, and they do so in a very Seiken Densetsu fashion (use them enough and they level up), and you need to use them a LOT of times to level them up. You also have no money or shops in this game, so all weapons, accessories, and armor need to be found either in the environment or as drops off of enemies, and a very unlucky run can leave you really hurting for that stuff *especially* in the early game. Did I mention your weapons can break? Sure, your guns will run out of ammo, that makes sense, but *all* melee weapons will eventually break, so even if you’re building proficiency levels (again, very Seiken Densetsu) in one weapon, if you can’t find any more of them, you’re going to need to swap to something else. At least you’ll always have your fists, if nothing else, but the fickleness of weapons is a very big worry, particularly in the early game, with how difficult they are to acquire. However, ALL that said, the big thing I realized is that almost none of it actually matters. Koudelka is one of *many* RPGs I’ve played that have a lot of systems that just ultimately don’t matter nearly as much as you might think they do at first. Heck, it isn’t even the only Shadow Hearts game to struggle with that XD. Spells leveling up? Sure, it takes a while, but all it gets you is better AOE on them, and that AOE is almost never actually useful. The only real change gained from spells leveling up is that they’re going to cost more from there on out, which is a pain, but very manageable. It’s especially manageable with just how quickly you level up most of the time, with everyone getting a level every 3 or 4 battles in most cases, and every level up comes with a free full heal. Even save points give full heals too, meaning that grinding and combat are pretty easy after the first hour or so because magic is your main source of damage, and MP is a resource very easily acquired. The position system? It’s ultimately pretty inconsequential beyond using one of your melee people to body block the enemy from getting too close to your back line, but even then, magic and guns (things many enemies have too) have no range limit, so it just makes sense to have everyone have good magic and physical defense all the time anyhow. The buffing spells are also very numerous, sure, but the game is ultimately just not balanced in a way that encourages you to use them at all. I finished the entire game never using them once, and I reckon you’d only really have to if you were trying to kill the optional super boss the hard way. Koudelka overall is just a quite easy RPG after the first hour or so (making it a little SMT-like, in that way), and so a lot of the systems that could be game breaking or experience ruining with their reliance on RNG or grinding are just actually not problems, at the end of the day. Honestly, the biggest criticism I can give of Koudelka’s RPG systems are that they’re quite so easy that they feel a little boring at times, and loading times also take long enough (though far from the longest on the system) that grinding can take a while should you choose to do any. Well, all that as well as the final boss itself being quite a step up in challenge from most other fights in the game (in another very SMT-like move), so it may be worth looking up how to snag secret weapons like the Gargoyle Killer like I did if you wanna make your time with it a bit easier x3 The aesthetics and presentation of the game are absolutely phenomenal, at least for the time. As mentioned earlier, the voice acting is all excellent as well as being all in English even in the Japanese version I played. I got one little bug with audio cutting out during one of them (sadly TwT), but that is thankfully something that does not appear to be present in the international releases at all. The music is very groovy and great too, and it really makes battles and exploration feel just as intense and fun as they should do. The visual design is also very good, with our main characters being very distinct and well designed (if a bit weirdly overly horny in the case of Koudelka herself ^^;), and the monster design is very diverse and delightfully creepy (as Shadow Hearts 1 would continue to be after it). There are many in-game cutscenes but also a handful of pre-rendered CGI cutscenes too, and I imagine those combined are the reason for why such a short game manages to take up four discs of space XD. Regardless of their data size, however, they still look very good, with the monsters that show up in them being particularly good looking and wonderfully uncanny in their designs. Verdict: Highly Recommended. I do want to open this summary by saying that if you’re someone who really loves mechanically deep RPGs first and foremost and story is very secondary to you, you’ll probably have a rougher time with Koudelka than I did. That said, the mechanics themselves may be messy, but they still made a game that felt just challenging enough as I went through it to still be something I enjoyed doing. The writing is also something I cannot praise enough, which is something you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of if you’ve read this far XD. Koudelka may be an odd ball of a game, but it’s regardless an absolutely exceptional one. If you’re a fan of games with strong themes and good character writing, then Koudelka is absolutely not one to miss out on. It’s got a little bit of retro clunkiness to it here and there, but it is more than worth looking past to reach the rest of just how well put together this adventure is. As far as I’m concerned, Koudelka is easily one of the best RPGs, if not one of the best games full stop, on the PS1. Bringing my time with the original Ace Attorney trilogy to a close, I finally finished up with the last of the GBA games. I certainly remembered enjoying this one significantly more than the second game when I was younger, but with how much I’d clearly forgotten about the second game, I didn’t want to assume that I’d remembered this game anything close to accurately either XD. That said, I ended up really enjoying my time with it. It took me about 25-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware via my GameBoy Player.
This is the third game focusing on the adventures of our titular Ace Attorney, Phoenix Wright. Introducing yet another new mysterious prosecutor, Godot, this entry brings the trilogy to a close by wrapping up the major plot threads left by the previous two games. Those who read my review of Ace Attorney 2 will be no stranger to just how much I disliked the writing in that game, and I was very much prepared for this game to ultimately be just as much of a failure as that one. No matter how positively I remembered this one, there was no telling how much bad stuff I’d missed in my last playthrough eight years ago. Thankfully, my memory was by and large quite accurate! While this game’s writing certainly isn’t perfect (with the homophobic stereotype character and some more than slightly problematic age-gap relationship stuff being stand out examples to that point), this game seems to really go out of its way to improve on basically everything the second game suffered so badly with. Returning characters are lessened down significantly, and those who do return do so for reasons that feel important and relevant to their characters. Women overall are written WAY better in particular, and they feel much better represented with a much better depth and variety of character than they had had in the previous two games. The sense of humor has been tuned far better in this game as well. While we’re not completely free of comedy through cruelty for the sake of cruelty by any means, it is *far* less prevalent as a source of comedy than it was in the last game and it lets the better written humor shine that much brighter. The fundamentals of writing are also thankfully back to a familiar strength from the first game as well. This game has a much stronger and more deliberate meta-narrative running throughout it, and it leads to a much stronger conclusion as a result. With major themes of what it means to trust someone and what who we fight for says about who we are, you can really tell that this game had a lot more time and effort put into it than the last game managed to. While it’s certainly an unfortunately flawed game in the places that shine less well, it was still a narrative I enjoyed a lot and feel was really well done. While it may have lower lows than the first game did, those lows are not only quite infrequent, but they’re easily outweighed by just how frequent and high the highs of the narrative are. The mechanics and puzzle design have also thankfully been polished up very significantly since the last game as well. There really aren’t any new mechanics, with the health bar and psycho-lock systems and such returning just as they were in the second game, but what is here has been polished up VERY significantly since the last game, and they’re far more fun as a result. The signposting and overall logic have been improved to the point that I never even needed to look up the solutions to any puzzles to make it to the end of the game~! (Something I was at least a little proud of myself for). A big reason why the puzzles in this game are *so* much better, though, is that we have finally gotten a reasonable save and penalty system. Where the second game only had temporary saves mid-chapter and hard checkpoints only between chapters (so if you died, it was back to the last checkpoint, which could be more than half an hour before where you’re at), this game finally makes those temporary saves become their own hard checkpoints, effectively giving you the ability to save and load at will. This means you have much more leeway to trial-and-error your way past a difficult puzzle you’re stuck on, and it’s far less frustrating to hit a puzzle you just can’t quite solve. Another feature that makes the whole game just better is that we *finally* have a speed-up button for the dialogue. While it isn’t an outright skip button, holding the B button to make text fly by was SUCH a badly needed feature, it’s kinda amazing that it took them three games to add it ^^;. Be that as it may, it’s still better late than never, and this game is far better for its presence. The presentation is still very much the GBA, but this is the GBA of 2004, not the GBA of 2001 and 2002 as the first two games had to deal with. As a result, not only do we have some of the best looking and strongest designed character sprites we’ve ever had (and a lot of my favorite character designs in the trilogy at that), but we also have SUCH better music as a result. The earlier games didn’t have bad music by any means, but you can really tell that the guys at Capcom have gotten a *lot* more comfortable with this hardware over the past couple of years with just how much more technical these tracks are. Songs like Tigre’s theme and Mask Demasque’s theme are easily two of my favorite tracks in the whole trilogy, but they’re standing atop a mountain of other great songs on top of that. My only real complaint about the aesthetics are that we’re reusing *quite* so many things from game to game that older music and especially sprites can kinda stand out and look less than nice compared to the nicer newer stuff (Mia’s original sprite in particular is one I’ve never been a huge fan of, and it looks even more rough next to just how nice everything else looks here). Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a sequel to a quality that the original Ace Attorney really deserved. With as wonderful a presentation as ever and writing to a quality either at or better than what they’d ever done before, this completely blows Ace Attorney 2 out of the water, and that’s absolutely not just because of the mechanical touch-ups for quality of life features. Had I played a version that had the extra fifth case added to the first game, perhaps I’d feel differently, but with the versions I played and the language I played them in, this is definitely my favorite of the original trilogy on GBA. It might go without saying at this point in the review, but this is absolutely not a game to miss out on if you like logical deduction puzzles or are just a visual novel fan in general~. I last played through the original Ace Attorney trilogy (plus a handful of the other ones) back in 2015, a bit before I started writing reviews or properly cataloguing what I played in any respect. My partner, however, has never played them before. She loves visual novels, and she’s really wanted to play more of them together, so we decided to play through the original Ace Attorney trilogy together~. However, while she’s playing the trilogy via her 3DS, I opted to take the weirder route and play the GBA originals, and this is the first of those~. There are some meaningful differences between this original version and its DS counterpart, so I opted to title it with the Japanese title here rather than the English port’s title for the sake of clarity. I really have to just guess at how long it took me to beat it, as this game doesn’t keep track of playtime at all, but I reckon it took me about 15 or so hours to play through all four cases. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware, but via my GameCube’s GameBoy Player rather than a normal GameBoy Advance.
Gyakuten Saiban is the first story of the now famous video game lawyer, Phoenix Wright (or, as he’s known in Japanese, Naruhodo Ryuuichi). This game follows him through his first six months or so as a lawyer along with his assistant Ayasato Mayoi (aka Maya Fey) and his rival Mitsurugi Reiji (aka Miles Edgeworth), and the trials and tribulations (pun intended :b) that ensue as a result. As far as its greater themes go, the ones more delivered in the game’s text revolve around never giving up and believing in yourself regardless of how desperate your situation is. Then there’s also the overriding theme of the setting, which is one very heavily inspired by the real life realities of the justice system in Japan, that being that the justice system is one nigh explicitly constructed as a system of performative punishment and cruelty rather than one concerned with finding any modicum of “truth” or “justice”. Even beyond more narrative analysis-type stuff like that, it’s a really exceptionally written game! This is a series rightfully famous for the excellent quality of its English localization, and the original Japanese works fantastically too. Fun and funny characters carrying out genuinely touching and dramatic stories. It’s kinda nuts to even think that this is the main writer’s first go at game writing simply because it’s *such* a well put together and paced story. It’s a very cold take to say that the Ace Attorney series is really well written, of course, but it’s something that’s absolutely worth repeating due to the sheer quality of the text at hand. Ace Attorney is a really well written series, and this first entry really knocks it out of the park as a great story-focused adventure game. As far as the mechanics go, there are likely few people who’d be reading this who would be unfamiliar with them, but such assumptions are never how I try to write these little essays. The gameplay of the game’s four cases (five cases in later releases) is roughly divided into two sections. First, you have the investigation sections. These are somewhat adventure game puzzle-type sections where you go around crime scenes and talk to characters to gather information and evidence. Sometimes you’ll need to use the cursor to investigate bits of the background or present evidence to characters to get them to comment on them, but these are sections that are ultimately linear in their design. There’s a right way to do them, and all doing things the “wrong” way will accomplish is getting you stuck until you find the right way forward. The other half of the game are the courtroom trials, where you’ll cross examine witnesses and present evidence to try and catch the contradictions in their statements to help prove your client innocent. This is where you could say the real “gameplay” of the series comes in. Keeping everything that’s happened in the case, or at least that which relates to the testimony at hand, will be invaluable in these sections, as the game isn’t terribly hard overall, but getting good at seeing the logical connections between the evidence and testimony is a skill that you’ll develop over time nonetheless. It’s great fun if you’re a fan of logic puzzles, and they’re very fun stories even if you just look up all the solutions online. Presenting evidence that doesn’t actually prove anything will earn you a penalty, and it’s five strikes and you’re out. A really nasty feature of this GBA original is that, should you run out of penalties and game over, you don’t return back to the start of the current trial as you do in later versions of the game. If your client is found guilty, you start the WHOLE case over from the start. These are not very short trials, with the later two being quite long even if you know exactly what to do, so that’s a pretty brutal penalty, and I’m glad this game is the only one in the series to do it. These games have really fun pacing and well written stories, and needing to button mash your way through potentially literally hours of prior investigations and trials just to get back to the third day’s trial you game over’d on REALLY sours that experience. Presentation-wise, this is another factor that the game absolutely gets a slam dunk on. This is a quite early GBA game, coming out roughly half a year after the console itself did, so the music, while good in this original iteration (especially the Tonosaman (aka the Steel Samurai) theme~), is clearly limited by the GBA’s own hardware as well as the industry’s general unfamiliarity with it at this early stage in the GBA’s life. The graphics, on the other hand, kick absolute butt. Being a visual novel, the presentation is kind half the game here, and it’s a factor that this game does not neglect the slightest bit. From main characters to minor characters, from the investigation field to the court room, everyone you meet is brought to life with larger than life expressions that make the whole cast a really memorable one. The way the game delivers text is also very clever, utilizing text size, scroll speed, occasional auto-progression, and even screen shaking to compensate just about as well as you possibly could for a lack of voice acting. If anyone would ever need evidence of how visual novels can be meaningfully different from just reading a book or watching an anime, this is a very stellar example of just how well you can deliver a narrative like only a VN (i.e. an interactive experience) can. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While I might not necessarily recommend *this* particular version quite as highly as other versions (due to just how nasty that aforementioned game over mechanic is), this is a really stellar visual novel/adventure game. While Capcom certainly does love porting games simply for the sake of it, this is a game that has absolutely deserved to have been ported to death and back. It’s as stellar now as it was when it came out over 20 years ago, and it’ still a load of fun to play even if you’re like me and you aren’t generally a huge fan of visual novels. This is another N64 game I bought a fair while ago but just never got around to playing. It’s one I could never beat growing up, and it’s also one of the favorite games of a close friend of mine, so I thought it’d be a load of fun to show them the Japanese version of a game they know really well in English. Having the N64 hooked up again seemed like as great a time as any to finally play through this, so I did! It took me about 6.5 hour to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware, and I got 27 of 52 yellow crystals doing it (to see as much of the ending as you’d normally want to).
Mischief Makers (or as the Japanese title calls it, Trouble Makers) is a very oddball story about Marina, a powerful, happy, ditzy maid robot for Professor Cambell. However, on their visit to Planet Nendoro, the professor just can’t seem to stop getting kidnapped, and it’s up to Marina to save him again and again xD. The game is very silly with tons of horrible disaster weirdos everywhere (on both the heroes and villains sides), so the dialogue is always a joy to read. It’s not trying to do anything particularly daring with its narrative, but it’s written in a very fun way and also does have some genuinely sweet moments here and there. It does a more than serviceable job of setting up the action at hand, and it augments it significantly with just how much more fun and memorable it makes the adventure you’re playing through~. The adventure in question is very much what you’d expect of a Treasure game. Almost playing like a spiritual successor to Gunstar Heroes, Mischief Makers is a 2.5D (but mostly 2D) side scrolling action game, but instead of guns like Gunstar Heroes has, you have a very expanded throwing ability. Marina can pick up, shake, and throw (or at least deflect) damn near anything enemies can throw at her. She can also dash in any cardinal direction by double-tapping the D-pad or pressing one of the corresponding C-buttons (though the C-buttons are a little bit slower than using the D-pad). All of that certainly has a not insignificant learning curve attached to it (especially when it comes to platforming), it still makes for a very satisfying and fun experience. Particularly great and Treasure-ful are the boss fights, some of which are (unsurprisingly) balanced a bit too hard, I’d argue, especially with bosses closer to the start of the game actually being a fair bit harder than most bosses in the back half of the game, but they still make for intense and enjoyable fights regardless that have some wicked cool set pieces and just feel awesome to play through. There are some problems here and there with level design in that some levels have puzzles that are just very needlessly plodding or mean, and some bosses just aren’t quite clear enough on how they’re actually fought, but those aren’t issues nearly big enough to dampen the overall experience. There are also the yellow crystals I mentioned earlier. Crystals (other than red ones) are generally your health pick ups. Red crystals, on the other hand, are more like money, as they can buy hints from certain NPCs as well as revive you when you die. Pay more red crystals and you come back with more health bars (or just quit the game from the game over screen and it’ll bump you back to before you even started that level, meaning you never actually lose any money at all from up until that point scrapped attempts, which is a very odd development oversight). Yellow crystals, on the other hand, aren’t just huge health pick ups, they’re also special. There is one in every stage, and they can be hidden anywhere from at the end of a difficult platforming challenge or locked behind defeating a boss without taking a single hit, but collecting them is what gets you the game’s ending. Every one you grab will unlock a few more seconds of the game’s ending, with about 24 or 26 of them being needed to see the “normal” ending, and anything after that unlocking extra gags or silly moments after that. While the overall game is probably one of the easier 2D platformers Treasure has put out over the years, getting all of those crystals is absolutely what makes this game Treasure-levels of hard, and it really isn’t for the faint of heart. Thankfully, getting 20 or so is a relatively manageable thing (especially with a guide pointing you towards their hiding places), so seeing the normal amount of narrative conclusion is far from an insurmountable task. Aesthetically, this game is absolutely gorgeous. Unsurprisingly for a Treasure game, the levels and particularly characters are absolutely oozing with style, and it’s hard not to love them. While both the English and Japanese versions both have character portraits and dialogue in addition to little bits of voice work here and there, something only the Japanese version has is little mid-battle speech bubbles that will appear from enemies, particularly bosses. It gives the overall game just that much more vibe of a gag manga, and it adds a ton of fun character silliness to an already delightfully put together experience that had me laughing a ton. The music is also absolutely excellent, which talking about a Treasure game from the 90’s should also come as no surprise. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While there are a few bosses that are a bit tougher than they should probably be and a couple levels that just kinda suck, this is regardless an all-time classic on the N64. Though a relatively early game on the system (and one that uses the D-pad rather than the joy stick), it still succeeds at being an excellent 2D action game well worth playing. If you’re a fan of 2D action platformers, and especially if you’re a fan of Treasure’s other work, this is yet another Treasure master-work that is well worth your time despite the generally 3D-focused console it happens to find itself on. I watched this movie a few months back with a close friend of mine, and it got me thinking about this GameBoy game of it. I’d always heard that this was quite a good GameBoy game, especially for a licensed game, and this seemed like a great excuse to check it out, but finding a Japanese copy proved difficult enough that I was ready to give up on it and focus on other things. But my friend is such a sweetie that she actually found a copy local to her and bought it for me! I played it on Twitch via my Super GameBoy, and it took me just about 2 hours to get to the end of the English (British, technically ;b) version of the game.
While the story of this does ostensibly mirror the film’s (even down to recreating the introduction of the film quite charmingly), in grand 8-bit fashion, they add a LOT more action and combat to things XD. The only story really in the game is that title crawl at the start, and the submarine kinda sorta following the path from Russia to America that the sub takes in the film over the course of its 8 stages, but it hardly matters. Given that it’s a 1991 GameBoy action game, licensed or not, a good or compelling story really isn’t what you’d expect here, and the game is perfectly fine even with such a threadbare story x3 The gameplay is you, as the titular submarine “The Red October”, dodging all manner of (Soviet, I would presume?) enemy submarines, destroyers, aircraft carriers, jets, helicopters, and giant crazy undersea fortresses and robo sea mines in your quest to reach the end of each stage and make it to America! In your arsenal, you have equipped unlimited front shooting, weak missiles, a limited number of very powerful heat seeking torpedoes (which can even heat seak out of the water and into the air! XD), and the ever valuable EMP to slip by distant enemies while mostly avoiding their AI (as well as making their heat seeking missiles inactive). It takes a bit of getting used to how the Red October controls, as stuff like tapping left or right twice to change direction and only once to just move that direction without turning has a real learning curve to it, but thankfully you have a big radar of enemy movement at the bottom of the screen to help you avoid ambushes (and it even points out power ups too~). Stages are well designed, and even though the difficulty is a bit front loaded, it’s got a pretty darn good (certainly for the time) difficulty curve as well. I was honestly shocked I was able to beat it over just 3 tries (one of which was game over-ing basically instantly XD) over two hours, but I was certainly happy that I did it, and I had a fun time too! X3 The presentation is pretty much what you’d expect for a quite early life GameBoy game, but even still it does the job very well. Enemies and bosses as well as their projectiles are easily distinguishable (at least via a Super GameBoy screen), and your little sub marine is never confusedly stuck against terrain or anything. The music is also quite impressively good, with some stages having some really surprisingly good tracks. Though nothing can, of course, top the incredible 8-bit rendition of the Soviet National anthem on the title screen xD Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you’re in the market for some 8-bit GameBoy action, this is a great place to find it! It’s not too difficult and not too long, but it’s also unique enough and well balanced enough to be a good time well worth trying out (and you don’t even need to have seen the movie to enjoy it either, even if it is a movie really worth watching 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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