liked
A recommendation, with some caveats. Still a yes — there's just a thing or two you should know going in.
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The original and a fantastic game. The blueprint for something greater.
Bounced off this pretty hard, just haven’t been into these kinds of games lately. It’s fine.
A worthy successor to Aria but the story isn't quite as interesting.
This game has so many good ideas but I just didn't love the execution of it overall. The early levels are just too flat and linear and there's just not enough actual castle (although this could be mitigated by making it a castle by committee). I also wish there was a radial menu to be able to switch between more loadouts (obviously not doable on original hardware). The idea to have a weaknesses system is good, I just spent too much time switching in menus.
The best Diablo yet. Fun, mindless grinding.
This is a fun and very sweet game that is good but not quite very good. A few things keep it from being as high as it could be, but really I think it's just overambitious for what it could have done. Some of it feels a little half baked.
An all time classic. The time pressure is kind of the best and worst thing about this game. You kind of wish you had a more relaxed time to explore and take it all in, but it also drives the game forward and provides urgency.
I fell off this I want to say about 75% of the way through and I'm not totally sure why. I really want to come back to it though at some point. I remember the rings system being really inventive and a nice mechanical hook after Three Houses was pretty thin.
Possibly the best mechanics and maps of any Fire Emblem while also having possibly The. Worst. Plot. EVER. God it's so bad.
I really wanted to like this but it's kind of boring to play. The maps are too big and too easy and it feels like I just spend half the time moving units without doing anything just so everyone can catch up.
I played a lot of this and it was so good for a long time. Ultimately I think a lot of changes in the direction of the game drove me away from it.
There are so many good ideas here, the combat is better than ever and the move away from Paragon/Renegade to the four axis system is just a better idea. The problem is the game just has too much samey filler. I don’t feel like my time is being respected.
I feel like I love the idea of Mega Man more than I like slamming my head into it? Yes I’m outing my own lack of skill.
I think this might be my least favorite 2D Metroid (I'm only counting the most recent remakes of 1 and 2 in this) but it's still a really good game. The Aeion Pulse and frustrating, gotcha puzzle design were the low parts of this.
Bounced off this. It’s beautiful and a wonderful homage but it doesn’t feel like there’s enough there. I might come back to this, it’s really not that long.
Played one session to get through a good chunk of it. Not sure how percentage-wise complete. It felt like a giant sampler platter. It didn't go too deep on the mechanics of anything. It's just like a dabbling. It felt like he was really relying on the multiplayer to make the fun and I think that's a little bit understandable because I assume a lot of people are going to try and play this with their partner who is less into video gaming. It was fine.
Attempted but bounced off a few times. Just wasn't able to really get in the mood/mindset.
I don't think I gave this game enough time but I was slightly discouraged by bugs that caused my progress to get eaten up. It felt a little thin, but maybe it gets a bit more complex later. Something to bookmark and revisit a bit later.
I’ve played this campaign so much. My original love affair with the genre.
My feelings on this are conflicted. It’s a fun game, but I mostly have memories of being frustrated in co-op with my daughter. The latest update should smooth over a lot of my issues with that, but I haven’t put more time into it yet.
Cool experience with a lot of love put into it. I think that it's just a little too wacky but maybe I'll keep chipping away at it.
A classic, but not my favorite just due to the floatiness of jumping and how much of a pain in the ass the wall jumps are.
A cute little game, a bit shallow though. Presentation is really off the charts though.
Really wanted to like this a lot and I do like it a good amount. I think I put about 30 hours in. It's just too in love with its own story, which is fine. It's just not so good and I feel like the combat mechanics didn't keep evolving in a way that made me want to go through 30 minutes of cutscenes for another battle.
WoW was something that I was truly obsessed with for a long time out of high school and a few years thereafter. Playerbots is a nice stroll down memory lane with no pressure, even if it's impossible to capture those old highs.
Really fun 2D Zelda with some interesting gimmicks to it (the buying items, the entering the walls). It's not my favorite but it's fun and it doesn't take too long, and there's a lot of charm here.
An incredibly clever little game that's very cute. Just kind of petered out on this one but I want to finish it.
This is actually too much game. I didn’t like the addition of the underworld or sky and I don’t like having to build machines! Too much shit here. Just let me play Zelda!
This game is…good? I played it back in the day, I have renewed interest due to the Dusk decomp (recomp? I can never remember which or what the difference is).
Okay, so I started THIS to contrast with Symphony of the Night, since I think these two are the two ur-classics of the genre and well, I kind of immediately found it more fun. So much more fun that I might just immediately retire SOTN. I think a HUGE thing is that you can actually get more health while you're adventuring in Super Metroid so it doesn't feel like a really awful, attrition-y experience.
Another benefit is that exploration feels more rewarding and I feel like I grok the design language better. For whatever reason I just understand both where things are likely to be hidden, but what is likely. With SOTN, sometimes you find things and you expect it to be this huge upgrade and then it's a sword that I have better versions of. You don't get that really with Metroid, and when you do find tiny things they're always useful. I'll take a missile pack upgrade.
Neither game is so long so I might power through SOTN anyways, a little more, but I'm not about really forcing the fun here.
Of note, I am playing the Project Base version of the game.
Well I got to the blood trail and was like "I have maybe 30 minutes I don't want to start anything what's something short I could do." I played like two hours of this and it's been something that I've continually felt I should go back, and an Into the Aether podcast I listened to liked it a lot, so that was the thing I needed to actually put it on The Official Backlog. And I figured why not.
It was fun for 30 minutes! It's stupid to start something, I probably should have played Super Metroid but I didn't want to reach over and grab the Thor.
I played about another 30 minutes of this, died to a big monster a couple times. The block button being the opposite bumper from FFVII Remake is a huge pain in the ass.
I saw a thing about being able to run wow for free with bots and I was like...that sounds fun. And then it was very quickly set up and hey, it is fun!
My kingdom for a time machine to know exactly what my old keybinds were. I have this like half muscle memory half regular memory where I kind of know where things are and then I realize I don't when I try to press it.
The overwhelming nostalgia from the sounds is so crazy. I picked a draenei mage, I mostly played horde so I wanted to do something new. It's nice to be able to do stuff like give yourself gold and tweak the exp ratios.
I really like this game except the controls suck so bad. First, I hate the select to switch between weapons thing it's so annoying. Second, Samus is so floaty and her platforming is so weird in general. Thirdly, there are occasional platforming sections that make me want to die.
So after banging my head against a specific platforming section I just...went a different way. I think this game is so much better overall than SotN, I could do with slightly more signposting though because you know, I'm an adult. If I recall, this is something fusion did better, giving you a general heading. It also doesn't discuss the tools well enough. It took me this long to realize you could lengthen the grapple.
This game is also frustrating because it will make you feel like so many things are possible and maybe they are, maybe they aren't, and maybe you could but you shouldn't. There's no good indication of "no, you actually cannot make this jump I know it's really close but you're not like two pixels off you just can't."
Okay this game is really good (hot take), because as frustrating as it is sometimes (how the shit was I supposed to know to grapple beam the electricity on this boss to kill it) God damn does it feel so good and make you feel so smart sometimes.
I have beaten this now and I've said it before but man, it's really good! I got like just over 2/3rds completion which I'm saying is probably pretty decent. I have no metrics for this, that's just what I'm saying. There are a few frustrating parts where I think there could be more hand holding overall but you can really see why this thing is what set the standard and spawned a genre.
I'm definitely very interested in further exploring the genre, especially since these games are just so quick. I think Metroid Zero Mission is likely next, and then Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow on the other end.
I'm pretty interested to see how Zero Mission goes and I cannot for the life of me remember how Fusion worked, but like, I already felt like Super Metroid had too few buttons and the Advance has two fewer.
It's so fucking annoying to play this game after Zero Mission because the A and B buttons now do different things.
Aside from that this is pretty fun. I'm not totally sure how I feel about it in terms of ranking overall among the 2d Metroids. This Metroid fighting stuff is getting a bit repetitive.
Got stuck in one spot, had to look it up, felt like a total idiot for missing the thing. It was just so subtle. The thing where the Metroid DNA machine points you in the right direction is so misleading sometimes too. Like I don't think where it was pointing me was the next one, it was the one I ended up doing last.
Save states aren't working for whatever reason on Azahar either. Real pain in the ass for being able to stop and pick up wherever. Was stressing out trying to find a save spot when I was in a new area.
Super stuck on this one fight, I don't want to backtrack because I'm apparently far away from everything but fighting a gamma Metroid low on missiles and energy. Fuckers deal so much energy.
I think this one is my least favorite of the ones I've played recently. It feels like they dole out new function upgrades really slowly. It also just feels very samey as a result and I feel like there could be many fewer Metroids to have to kill on each level or at the very least they could be more different.
Totally lost, just backtracking now, seeing if I missed an upgrade I can now go get.
I think this is pretty easily my least favorite one. My backtracking has not yielded much. The game feels very stingy with upgrades and the path seems very fixed. Like I feel stuck and there are lots of things I can see I CAN'T do and I can't really tell which way to go from here without a new thing.
Yep. So I figured it out and got farther. I'm just very over the bog standard Metroid fights here. I did it once. Do I have to really keep doing it? This chasing me down the hallway thing also sucks and is infuriating.
There are other issues here. The Aeion Pulse thing has made the game worse. I thought this would be an “I’m stuck” button but they’ve used it to make the environments unreadable. Gone is the ability to check the environments with your eyes for vulnerable blocks. You just have to spam the pulse button. You can’t even opt to not use it. Some of the blocks just aren’t differentiable without it.
Additionally this grinder thingy chase through the tunnels sequence made me want to throw the game in the dumpster.
Got the gravity suit. Another annoyance about this game: it has a high number of puzzles that seemed designed to waste my time. "Haha there was no way for you to know that this was a floor that gave away try again idiot."
Defeated the Diggernaut. Good fight!
I really thought I was so done with this game but then I beat this last big-ass Metroid and I got this little baby Metroid and I love it. Insert Brooklyn Nine-Nine meme of "I just met this but if anything happened to it I would kill everyone."
I went around and started gathering up a bunch of the old power-ups I missed just because now the Metroid unlocks, getting rid of all these crystal things that I never knew how to get past before.
It's been mostly fun, except for the fact that I got fed up by these long rows of spikes and I was like, "I have basically everything and I have to assume I am adjacent to the end of the game." How do I get past these long long rows of spikes? The answer is they don't tell you how but you're supposed to use the power bombs and use those to rocket you past it. I got so frustrated that, like, why would you gate this? What a stupid thing to do. The power bombs are like, you don't get so many of them to the point where it feels like you can just burn them on experimentation. Maybe that's just me
Beat this tonight. About 12 hours? Would have been shorter but I unlocked baby metroid and was like well, you can't give me this baby and then expect me to just end the game instantly. So I went back and got a bunch more upgrades which made the final boss significantly easier to boot! 92% completion.
On to Dread next.
All right the game is very fun. Some issues though, mostly technical. It does run so bad and toning down the quality did not meaningfully improve my frame rates. I don't know if it's just poorly optimized or maybe it is just that good but I have a 4070 Ti super. I feel like I should get pretty good frames on 1440p
More critically I ran into a bug where, at some point during the enemy turn after it went, it just sat there forever. I waited for multiple minutes and it just never went and kept going. It wasn't frozen or anything like that. I could access the menus and stuff like that but it was just stuck.
Other than that I don't know how I feel about the option for faceless rando crew members since there are fully voiced real characters who are important to the plot. Why would I use the randos especially when you can free respec anyone at any time? Just keep it to those people.
Played another hour or so of this. It remains fun. A little frustrating technically. Like it just runs so poorly and I don't think it looks that good.
Also needed to continue our Metroidvania series! Soma moves like fuckin MOLASSES. Beat one boss.
Played some of this tonight with Nate since D&D was off and we had the free time anyways.
My opinion of this game is roughly the same. It's cute. It's fun. It doesn't have a ton of mechanical depth, it's really getting by on being something you do with friends and by keeping it really varied, ideally before you get bored. It's honestly kind of like a co-op Mario Party in that regard. It just keeps changing what you're doing and being chaotic.
Killed like four bosses now? It's pretty fun. Soma still moves sooooo slowwwwww.
I'm liking this a lot more. I'm not totally sure what's so different yet.
I cheated myself the soul getting ring because you know, fuck farming. I know it's more reliable now but dang there's still some farming!
Got through a massive chunk here, "beat" the game with the wrong ending, so had to go back and track down Paranoia and then I went around jumping into all the mirrors for a while before actually beating Dario.
Okay, stayed up a bit later than I should have to beat this, which I suppose is a good sign. I do like how fast it is to chunk through these.
This felt fine though overall. I think the evidence increasingly mounts that I need to replay Aria and Fusion to see how I still feel about both, although I'm pretty certain I beat Aria a few years ago. But I think Order of Ecclesia is next.
Playing these games now has really just shot up my love for Metroidvanias. I have some ideas for why I forgot about this but I think this is fodder for a Deep Thought so I don't want to give too much away right now.
Levels are really horizontal here at the start and I don't care for that. The glyph system is interesting, soul adjacent for Soma.
Game looks really good though, I love the flair in Shanoa's animations.
Also fuck these weird floating tentacle monsters.
This game is so cute and cozy with this art style, this might be the correct way for these games to be.
I also thought the first person perspective for fights was weird, but now I kind of dig it. It's very cute.
I don't know why I like this more than FFIV but I do. It seems basically similar to it, with a similar shallow depth of combat.
It's probably because it's actually challenging?
The progression curve on this feels weird. I don't feel like my weapons are strong enough currently.
Alright, we made it out of the childhood act. God damn this game gets dark as hell. They are not pulling any punches with the "boy it must suck to be a child slave for ten years." It's so random and feels out of place with the brightness of the look.
We got to the monster recruiting part and it’s still fun. My biggest issue so far is just the aimlessness of it. Just point me at things better. I feel like I just need the outline of a walkthrough. Go here, talk to this dude next. The game is just willing to let you flounder for a while until you get to the right spot. I ain’t got time for that!
I'm not a giant fan of how I have to do these little quests to then get the upgrade. I am not really feeling this one currently.
I really don't know how I feel about this one. It's different and it's trying things. I feel like it's hard to get into a good flow with the glyph weapons and I'm not sure I like this early on distributed structure of the locations. I guess I do like having a hub it's relatively easy to zip back to.
I found a slime knight! And now we're investigating the happenings at Harry's old house.
Okay, so the type matching and resistances thing is a cool idea but if you're going to do that I feel like I need more slots for glyph loadouts. I gotta switch between slashing and smashing and poking and then I want something that's a bit more ranged and then I want a magic one.
It's just very annoying and breaks flow to have to be like "fuck it's a skeleton let me switch my sword glyphs for hammers."
How on earth was I supposed to know to go get Maria to get in the tower? It's also very annoying that the monsters don't listen to you. I get that they eventually will but it sucks. Also this old ass man wouldn't let me take the portal back to Coburg at night for no apparent reason?
Extremely frustrating fifteen minutes of gameplay.
I finished the prince's quest extremely glad I never wasted any seeds on this mofo and then got my cat back.
Also got through picking my wife. After consulting THE INTERNET I went with Debora. Kind of crazy that the ds exclusive wife is considered the best written and the best mechanically? If I replay again I'll pick Bianca.
Picked this up for the first time in a while. It's still fine. It's kind of uninteresting. I'm hoping if you push through you get some cooler units or upgrades or SOMETHING.
Rescued all the villagers baby. Still having a moderate amount of fun here. I think I'd say this slots in under Dawn of Sorrow but maybe only just?
Debora kind of sucks right now but Mr. Briscoletti is awesome as hell. So much love from that dude.
Enjoying this overall. I don't think it's as good as DQXIS but how could it be? It's just missing a ton of QOL stuff and improvements learned over the decades since. I also miss the big skill tree in XIS a lot. The progression is definitely lacking in this game and yet it still remains fun.
I think the choice to have basically no party members just monsters for long stretches is highly questionable. It's also a little frustrating that the recruit rate is so random. I feel like this game would be so much easier with one of those cureslimes and I spent a good hot minute trying to get one.
Also thank the lord I'm playing this emulated, the ability to fast forward is so nice.
God damn some dramatic stuff happens in this game. Got the kids though.
We have made it to Dracula's castle. Every time I kill a boss and it doesn't have a cool new ability drop it makes me angry.
I'm really uncertain I'm going to finish this. I think I've seen enough to make a real judgment on it and it's "cool ideas kind of okay execution." What might get me to push through it is that I'm so very close to the end and Fortune's Weave is around the corner so am I going to start something NEW? Probably not. Although I'm so close to the end of this and DQV I'll probably have some left over time before Weave.
The kids after being weak, ineffective, and an overall drain on resources are now coming into their own and pulling their own weight.
I almost quit this game tonight. I finished up the Zenithian thing, needed to leave to find the gold orb and had to go back through Diggery Pokery. Like come on man, let me evac, is that not what this spell is for? I did not want to walk back through this mine cart nonsense. Legit almost decided I've seen enough!
Alright, I had to grind to get both parts of this dragon eye. I did turn on a cheat to do 4x exp gain because I find grinding offensive to my valuable time. We're close to the end here and well, I'm ready to be over it.
DQXIS was definitely more captivating. The mechanics here are a little thin. I thought the monster recruitment might be more interesting but it just isn't because you ride with Slime Knight so long and the rest are just okay, and then the kids come in and they're better than everyone else.
I also think this game is pretty good story wise but like it's gated through optional party talk. Sometimes I'll be playing and then I realize I should just be checking in with the kids or the wife or whatever.
Which is another weird strength/issue with this game! There are stretches (pretty long) where there's nobody to talk to and check in. That chat is awesome but they just don't let you do it.
I think I'm going to just officially put this on pause right now. I'm not going to have time to finish before Fortune's Weave and I don't have a ton of desire to anyways.
Beat it today. I did use a cheat to just help me over the hump. I just wanted to see it through.
I think this game is fine. The Castlevania series is much weaker for me overall compared to Metroid. I think the backtracking is possibly weaker because the verb gaining is much weaker. In this game for example, you get paries and wings so late and there aren't many other traversal powers beyond the double jump.
Also getting weapon upgrades is pretty underwhelming. Once you have all the variety it's mostly just getting the slightly more powerful versions. And for me at least, not much got better than rapiers. They deal so much damage so quickly.
Two more bosses down, we're pretty close to the end here. Found my wife statue, not entirely sure why she can't just be unrocked like me. Overall I'd say I'm pretty disappointed in how long it takes to get the wife back especially because it was billed as such a huge, monumental choice.
The monsters that change your party tactics need to be removed from the game. It's a cute thing the first time but it's purely a time waster.
We beat this too. Okay, so meeting your mom and then losing her didn't land as well for me. I think there is an issue where the story isn't as resonant due to lack of voice over and real cinematics. The wife also has shockingly little to say.
Speaking of, I consistently feel like this game could/should run twice as fast most of the time. The sage's stone is essentially broken.
The victory lap here is much too manual.
I think this is primarily a let down of expectations and in hindsight it never could have capitalized. The ds is just not going to be able to execute on it. There are great ideas here but the end result falls short.
Alright, needed something short and sweet to fill the void between now and Fire Emblem.
This game IS very addictive and fun.
Every Zelda apparently needs a water temple. They love those puzzles.
Ravio, you can't credit me the amount I put down to rent for my own? COME ON DOG. This game does do a really good job of making money feel worthwhile though. I feel like in a lot of Zelda games it's whatever.
I really like collecting the Maiamais. I'm not going to find all of them but it's such a nice treat and its a little reward you get every once in a while.
We are three sages down. Man that ice dungeon is annoying.
Another sage freed. One fun thing about this game is that you tackle it from a normal 2d top down Zelda perspective and then sometimes you remember to think with portals and you solve something you were stuck on. Oh yeah, I can cross that gap.
And it feels really good when you remember off the bat and you don't get stuck at all.
Another good design thing about this game is the Maiamais. I was a little disappointed earlier thinking I may actually want to try to grab them all, but it would be so challenging to look up which ones you were missing if you were stuck since you'd grabbed them all out of order. This is a common issue where you have to go back and say well dang, I don't remember which ones I got and you spend a lot of time backtracking to realize you did actually get that one.
But then I remembered the game divides them into zones, so worst case scenario I'm sure something exists that tells you where they are, divided by zone, and it's easy to check that way.
I also thought I got some of the Master Ore in the Lorule Lost Woods dungeon but I didn't. Maybe I got it but died and never re-got it.
Lava turtle khezu dungeon also done. One to go.
I kind of dislike the item system in this game a bit. On one hand, yes, it lets you have a lot of freedom. On the other, I feel like the boomerang is so totally gapped in usefulness by the bow? The bow is just better boomerang 99% of the time.
Final dungeon complete, Master sword upgraded. Yes I have played a lot of this. It's very good.
We beat this! It was very fun. I didn't go back and get all the maiamai or the heart pieces because I just didn't need to and it sounded boring.
I would say the difficulty on this is a touch too low and the game as a while suffers from optionality. The game can't punish you very hard because maybe you're a kid and you're bad at the game and you keep dying and losing your items and you can never afford to buy them outright so the poor stay poorer (perhaps this game is a scathing take on capitalism).
But in the last dungeon, very few items are mandatory, much less their upgrades because they can't know that you definitely have all of them, or that requiring all of them would put the player in this unfun loop where they have to rent it, then they die, then they have to go back and buy it, run back to the dungeon and try again, then die, repeat. A rent to own would have fixed this.
But instead they just make it not that hard.
There is the hero mode but my gut is that it won't actually reward what I want, it'll just ask you to be better at the base skills of the game (dodging, blocking, swording) instead of making it so enemies have weaknesses and you NEED to use the boomerang or something.
The game gestures at this some, there are definitely some enemies where the hook shot is really useful to rip shields away but that kind of cleverness isn't really necessary.