Marcomix

Tank control RE is something of an acquired taste. Over the years, I've tried several times to get into Resident Evil 1's gorgeous remake, but I would keep bouncing off of its unorthodox controls and frustrating pitfalls. It was time to try another angle.

Resident Evil 2 [1998] has a rough start, especially if you're not used to tank controls. Whether you choose Leon or Claire for your A route, it throws you right into a ravaged inferno of a street in Raccoon City, as zombies shuffle toward you. Better learn that Up on the dpad is always Leon/Claire's forward direction quick! It took me several tries to even get to the first typewriter to save, having to learn what kinds of movement will let you dodge zombies and how risky you can play. Huge bit of advice: turn on auto-aim in the control settings. The game was designed around it, and it's off by default in North American copies. It seems Capcom USA did that and other things like tweaking some damage values to be higher to try to make the game too hard to complete in a game rental, but the feature is thankfully still accessible, just hidden away.

But once you get past this tricky intro section and find your way into the RPD, the Raccoon Police Department, the game's difficulty chills out considerably. RE2 is a pretty easy game overall, with some nice quality-of-life such as your map colour coding which key goes with which door. Getting to the station is a great little boot camp, and you should be ready to handle anything else the game throws at you. You might know about Mr. X, the massive hulking man who stalks you wherever you go in RE2 Remake, but here he only shows up a handful of times on the B routes and he isn't much of a threat overall. If you play the routes in the order I did, Leon A - Claire B - Claire A - Leon B, it feels like each run adds a couple more details to the story that flesh out its characters and their motivations. It's a short game too with my fastest clocking in at around 3 hours, so hitting the credits that many times isn't much of a task!

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis [1999] turns the stalker angle up quite a bit. Nemesis is another hulking brute out to kill you, but he shows up way more frequently and this guy can MOVE! It feels like he's slightly faster than Jill, so expect to get clotheslined from behind as you scramble to get away from him. Most of RE3 takes place in the winding roads of Raccoon City which I found more disorienting than the RPD. I'd say that in any of these classic REs, the first playthrough is going to be the roughest, as you'll get bogged down by inventory items and not know where certain key items are or what they're used for. Nemesis is great at ambushing you when you're bumbling around, so keep your wits about you.

There's this flexible gunpowder system where you can mix different types of powders to make the ammo you want, letting you decide which kinds of resources you want. It can impact the combat flow quite a bit! Do you make those shotgun shells you're running low on now, or tough it out and make powerful magnum rounds later? How about dabbling in the various grenade types for the launcher? RE3 also features some minor decisions you can make in cutscenes, so even on a repeat playthrough you can enjoy a few new or altered scenes while also knowing where to go next! It's a nice if leaner approach to RE2. It is also a shorter game overall, for an important reason...

Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X [2001] originally started development as the actual RE3, and the non-X version released on the Dreamcast in 2000. This is a very long game by RE standards and it has the distinction of being the first game in the classic style to have fully 3D environments. This has some advantages with how freely the camera is used in gameplay and cutscenes, but it definitely has drawbacks. The environments are incredibly plain so as to run well on the Dreamcast, especially compared to the detail of the messy rooms and streets made possible by earlier games' prerendered visuals. The lighting is dark and incredibly flat, leading to items like green herbs often blending into the scene. It wouldn't be until the next game where many items would get sparkles or glows to make them stand out, but Code: Veronica could really have used it. Remember people making fun of RE4's bright glowing item barrels that are impossible to miss when you walk into an area? Code: Veronica might be responsible for that.

If you've heard of this game, you might have also heard about an infamous softlock-type situation that led people to not have enough ammo for the final boss. Code: Veronica features a couple little "gotcha" moments you need to look out for.
First: early on in the game Claire needs a fire extinguisher to get a key item. Once you use the extinguisher it remains empty in your inventory, and later you'll be glad to dump it in a metal detector's security box to proceed. Remember to return for this and store it in the actual item box you find later! You'll need it again near the end of the game for the magnum (seriously) and there's a point of no return partway through which will prevent you from going to get it once you realize you need it again. Rude.
Second: There's a brief moment during Chris's route where you regain control of Claire. You can't save but you have access to an item box. Make sure you don't take anything with you that you'll want to have on Chris for the rest of the game! Claire and Chris have access to the same item box inventory, but they can't take each other's gear. I stuck to Claire having her pistol and grenade launcher and that gave Chris plenty to work with for the finale. Oh, and make sure she's fully healed, with another full heal on her. You'll know why I say that when you play that section.
There are other more minor gotchas, like remembering to bring Rodrigo some hemostatic medicine and saving him again as Chris to gain access to submachine guns, and these little traps, along with a couple of truly ridiculous gimmick boss fights make many consider Code: Veronica to be one of the toughest games in the series. Which meant it was the perfect game to prepare me for conquering my white whale.

Resident Evil Remake [2002] is a tricky game. To old-school fans, it provided a beautiful reimagining of the Spencer Mansion, turning many of its dull and confusingly empty rooms into rooms that actually feel lived in and blend in with the characters' 3D models perfectly. Along with that reimagining though came some traps for old players, messing with their expectations to keep the experience fresh. These traps, for a new player, are very overwhelming. There's a very convenient door whose doorknob will fall off rendering it unusable if you use it too much. The musical score for Moonlight Sonata, used to open a secret room, is missing a page that you'll now need to go find. But of course these are trivial compared to the Crimson Heads.

In Remake, if you don't get a headshot or burn bodies, most zombies you've killed will eventually rise again, but this time faster and angrier as Crimson Heads. To a new player who will fight to survive, this will turn the mansion into a total death trap! It makes Remake really oppressive and for that reason I really don't recommend it as someone's first classic RE. Do RE2 like I did! By the time I reached this game, I was more than prepared. I dodged zombies and used my shotgun wisely to blast heads off (by the way, aim the shotgun up in point blank range and fire to almost guarantee blasting zombies' heads off. this works even back in RE2 and it's an incredibly thrifty use of the shotgun). I didn't even need to burn any bodies. Knowing how these games tick makes dealing with the Crimson Heads so much more manageable. So finally, I cleared a thorn in my side. There are still the RE: Outbreak games to play but those were designed with multiplayer and I might look into whether that's still possible somehow in current year...but wait. Aside from those, there's one more classic RE to do.

Resident Evil Zero [2002] is...an attempt at shaking up the formula. I actually did enjoy the game quite a bit, though. It's once again taking advantage of beautiful pre-rendered visuals which makes the game not look its age at all. The train in the intro is a particular highlight, as the high speed makes all the foreground and background objects roll and rattle around. It also features two playable characters that you can swap between at any moment, and it uses this format well with puzzles that either split them up or require them to work together. Billy is a better shot with a gun but Rebecca is the only one who can mix healing herbs. It's a good time. It's just...the item box situation.

In all the games so far, the item box is the focal point of all your investigation and preparation. If you've found a save room with a box in it, that can be your base of operations for the area as all item boxes are connected. Does it make sense physically? No. But these are games where sometimes you can only carry six items on you, so some abstract magical inventory boxes to return to reduces how tedious things could get.
Resident Evil Zero doesn't have item boxes.
Instead, you get to just place your items on the floor. This means of course if you left something on the ground that you need later, you'll need to run all the way back for it instead of just checking the local item box that doesn't exist. Rebecca and Billy only have six inventory slots each, and frustratingly, long guns like the shotgun and grenade launcher take up two slots apiece. Even the hookshot, a very important tool you need to use several times across most of the game but NOT a weapon, takes up two slots. Without item boxes, whenever you get to a new save room that seems like a good place to set up as your new base of operations, you'll need to run back and do possibly multiple trips to bring your items from your previous base. Watch out though, because the game will actually prevent you from placing too many items on the floor in a room for the sake of Gamecube framerate probably. Something like 10 items per room is the limit, and it just makes the item shuffle you need to do so much more tedious, especially as your selection of supplies slowly rises.

I can kind of understand what they were going for. From a survival horror perspective, RE0 has a great balance for supplies. Since having more supplies means a more tedious item hauling session to later areas, the game is quietly encouraging you to actually use your resources. Take out those zombies! Use that first aid spray you don't really need! Abandon the knife! And you better not be trying to use that hunting rifle once you get the shotgun! Throw it out! The lack of an item box also means Rebecca and Billy need to either physically be next to each other or use things like dumbwaiters to pass each other items, which many of the puzzles rely on. It's just ultimately too tedious, and it drags down what would otherwise be an excellently paced adventure.

So with that I feel I'm finally pretty ok at survival horror and tank controls. RE0 even defaults controls to alternate which makes analog direction move your character relative to the camera and I changed it back to tank controls. I found it more reliable. What is wrong with me?!
I loved my playthroughs and I can say that the series "becoming an action movie" or "too campy" is criticism that doesn't hold up. Even by the end of RE2, my version of Leon is sprinting down hallways mowing down enemies with a shotgun. There's a part in Code: Veronica where Wesker performs a corner wallrun to avoid an attack. And of course, the Spencer Mansion is filled to the brim with goofy traps, secret passages, and ridiculous mutant experiments. Even a release as late as RE0's has its moments of so-bad-it's-good voice acting.
It's also a series that is frequently described as cozy despite the frequent violence and gore, and I think I know why now. Most classic RE titles are short and tend to play better on repeat playthroughs, as you won't spend as much time being lost. That familiarity with the space, knowing that what's ahead is manageable despite appearances... It's comforting! The many calming save room themes as you swap out your items and plan your next move reinforce the coziness too. What's out there might be dangerous, but in here you're perfectly safe for now.
I'm glad I picked RE2 as my jumping in point and I give that approach a solid recommendation. The game being just a little easy is the perfect way to get yourself hooked in. So what do you like about classic Resident Evil? Or have you never tried them before?

Kathy and Emma, high schoolers in a small snowy town, go out into the woods on the 24th of December. Kathy, injured by a bear attack, dies of shock in the hospital the morning after. Emma is nowhere to be found, and time is ticking as Matthew tries to pick up the pieces and learn just what happened that night, in hopes of finding his classmate before it’s too late.

Mizzurna Falls is a mystery adventure game by Human Entertainment, most notable for their work on the Clock Tower series. It’s a surprising game for 1998 on the PlayStation; an impressively detailed American town you can roam freely on foot or in your car, NPCs with daily schedules you can follow from work to home if you wanted to, and a day/night cycle that will ruthlessly steal the truth from you if you miss crucial scenes. Despite featuring an American setting, it was never released outside of Japan until fan translators picked up the mantle decades later. I used the translation by owl for my playthroughs: https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=32523.0

Consistently, I was impressed with how far above its weight Mizzurna Falls punches. Aside from the typical adventure gameplay, there are a few 2D battles and special scenarios, like fleeing from an angry dog or a car chase. There are even a couple of on-rails “shooting” sections? None of these moments control particularly well, including the really stiff tank control movement and a camera that will freely clip through every wall it comes across. It’s a game that didn’t really have a blueprint. You need to see beyond the implementation of everything to appreciate how ahead of its time it is. The closest game I could compare it to is Shenmue, and that came out a whole year later!

Unfortunately, that ambition is also a big hindrance to completing it as an actual game and solving the mystery. The game has a constantly running clock from 10 AM on Christmas Day to the end of New Year’s Eve during which you need to see certain crucial scenes to avoid a bad ending. This means being proactive with calling places on your phone to see if the person you want to talk to is there before wasting time driving there, being curious and driving to places you have no immediate need to go to, and honestly just a lot of trial and error. Being good at driving the car and not careening into snowbanks will help too. In fact, it is possible to get your car very stuck via poor driving. There’s a garage you can call to reposition your car, but if you don’t take the flyer out of your mailbox you wouldn’t know that.

And the game loves not giving you your basic tools. The in-game map is something you have to find on the floor in the police station, and your notebook that automatically fills in character profiles and phone numbers is tucked away in a drawer at Matthew’s place. He won’t let you pick it up when you start the game, so you’d better remember to go back for it later! Although personally, I wrote down every number I came across on a notepad instead of relying on Matthew’s. I feel like these seemingly minor hindrances are really unforgiving in a game where wasting time will lead to a bad ending hours and hours later.

So I did two runs of Mizzurna Falls. In my first run, I took notes. I wrote down tasks to meet at later times like a quest log, added thoughts on certain possible actions that might be worth investigating, and I staggered save states like crazy, trying to fit as much investigating as I could in each day. For the most part, this approach was incredibly rewarding. Following up on clues and seeing scenes that are easily missable thanks to paying attention and good intuition feels like a mystery game done RIGHT.

The problem comes from when crucial scenes are missed irreparably, and sometimes these are scenes you wouldn’t really stumble across naturally. Crucial scenes are the type where, if you miss them, you’ve officially lost the opportunity to see the good ending of the game. An early example of a crucial scene would be finding a way to join in on the bear hunt on the second day. There’s so much resistance from other characters against letting a high school kid in on such a dangerous operation that I originally assumed that you’re not supposed to join the hunt. From that point on, I was locked out of the truth and had no idea. The game continues on, and scenes will play out as normal. I was simply missing a piece of evidence you find during the hunt that would lead to crucial scenes later on, and there was no way I could correct course or even know that I’d made such a big mistake.

In my second run, I very closely followed this guide by residenteevee: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/574993-mizzurna-falls/faqs/71515/introduction

This guide really opened my eyes to how strict the timing of events can be. There are a healthy amount of optional scenes mixed in with the crucial ones, so if you really want to see them all, you need to focus! The guide is rather front-loaded for the first five days, leaving little to nothing to do on the final days, but I don’t know if that’s the game’s design at fault or a little of both that and the guide. In several cases, it’s possible to encounter a nasty bug known as “event layering” where two scenes want to take place at the same time and overlap in a way that may end your chance at uncovering the truth. You could be horrendously unlucky! I always think about this one line from the guide which spells out how unassumingly easy it can be to miss a crucial scene:

“12:55, Anywhere but the hospital
Samuel will phone Matthew and tell him that the results of the drug testing are in. Don't miss the call, and stay away from the hospital or the game will bug out and Samuel won't phone you at all.”

I also had an annoying situation where a call I was supposed to make to progress the story simply wouldn’t connect. Had to redo an in-game day’s progress over that one.
So the progression clearly has issues, but I believe there are solutions out there that could have made this game better. I’ve been brainstorming on how it would be possible to make a game as open-ended as Mizzurna Falls have enough structure to not lock you into a bad ending several days before the end actually happens. The first method would be to outright tell you that you’ve lost track of the truth, like what happens when you miss a case deadline in Dead Rising. That method is rather heavy-handed though, and it could lead to having to redo days over and over like I did. It would mean however that if you’ve made it to Wednesday for example, you have all the information and tools you’re supposed to have by that point. Many of the scenes in Mizzurna Falls don’t actually rely on a specific day, just the time of day. A player could have any degree of crucial completion going into a day, and that is a recipe for schedule-based disaster.

The second method would be to allow the player to find clues in a secondary non-missable way after the more interesting way has expired. This one would be kind of messy I think…but I have a good example of a way this game stumbles without design like this: The first day starts you at the police station at 10 AM. If you hustle and make it to Emma’s house by 10:50 AM, you meet a mutual classmate there, Winona. During the following scene, Winona tells you that Emma was reading a philosophy book from the school library. Armed with that information, you can learn where the philosophy section is from the librarian (Matthew never steps foot in this place so he has no idea) and eventually find the book. With that, you have a missable piece of evidence that isn’t crucial, but opens up a conversation with another character later. It’s also food for thought! Is this book important? Why was Emma reading up on it? Who is Emma, really?

The problem with this scene is that even if you don’t immediately get to Emma’s by 10:50 (something the game doesn’t nudge you into doing at all) you will still frequently find Winona wandering the library in later mornings in your playthrough. She will mention a book that Emma was reading that she’s looking for, but you can’t ask her about it, and the librarian is no use either. Actually finding the book yourself won’t let Matthew examine it, so you get this distinct feeling that something in the game’s logic is broken. You see what needs to be done, you know how to do it, and yet nothing works. In this scenario, the secondary method of gathering the clue could be from talking to Winona at the library and actually asking what book she’s looking for. It would take more effort to design the game around these secondary methods being viable but I believe it would be best in the spirit of Mizzurna Falls. Let the player’s curiosity and reasoning reward them!

It’s an impressive game to me, but also quite frustrating. The attention to detail with this town genuinely surprised me at many points. Mizzurna Falls even has a movie theatre, a steakhouse, a computer shop and a bank you never go to, but they’re in town to make the place feel complete! It’s just that the critical path of the game is so easy to lose sight of. I don’t regret doing my own playthrough first but I believe it’s impossible to see the game through on your own without any guidance because of how strict and unclear it can be at times. It’s a flawed gem, and I love it. I guess you could say it was like a stained glass window… Beautiful, but fragile.

I can't say I've ever played a game like this. The Last Remnant is an RPG that feels somewhat a part of the design trends of Final Fantasy XII and XIII, experimenting with ways to abstract battle into looser systems aided by AI tweaked by the player. In this case, some of it works, but some of it really, really does not.

Evoking a sense of larger-scale battles than your typical party RPG, the number of your fielded characters in battle will eventually reach 18. You split them off into groups called Unions, where all the party members will pick what they think is the best option when you give them a blanket order such as attacking or healing allies. Depending on the formation you place them in while out of battle, their stats can change drastically. You unlock more formations and upgrades to them too along the way, so trying out new strategies is recommended.

There's also a morale bar that moves back and forth based on things like who has strategic advantage, such as flanking Unions, and whose Unions are falling in battle. Keeping this bar maxed out in your favour leads to big damage and defense boosts, so it's especially important in boss battles where low morale will likely lead to a death spiral. The music will change based on how the battle's going, and there are some pretty great tracks that suit the mood very well. My favourite track is probably The Gates of Hell. That part where it goes back and forth between the bells and electric guitar is so unusual, but it always gets me pumped! But honestly, the soundtrack has a lot to love here. It's worth giving a playlist a listen. But anyway, back to battle mechanics...

There are timed hits called Critical Trigger that sometimes occur during your attacks. I never figured out if these have multiple uses, because they don't actually lead to critical hits I don't think, but a successful one will allow characters in your Union to act before the enemy can have their turn. It's actually possible to turn these off and have the game just do them for you with occasional failures, which tells me there wasn't exactly much confidence in the idea's relevance.

The final big piece of the combat puzzle involves Remnant moves and these are a mess in their own way. These are sort of Limit Break-esque attacks that, as long as the leader has the ability to use one, tend to become usable once their individual morale gauge is full. I say "tend to" because it really feels totally up to RNG. The individual morale bars are the orange vertical ones to the left of the Union HP. Notice how Unions 3 and 4 are also full? For some unknown reason, they cannot use the Remnant moves that they know on this turn. If they could, there'd be a flame effect behind their menu window like for Union 1.

What is normally a cool system in most RPGs, an ace in the hole in case things get dire or simply when it's time to turn up the heat, becomes this arbitrary thing that sometimes comes out right as you need it. This system will let you down time and time again, I promise you. The Last Remnant is not a game where grinding your stats will let you force your way past roadblocks, either. Learning the ins and outs of how to find power in this game is unlike any other game I've played, but that isn't exactly praise in this case.

The problem is, as you might have started to realize...this game is obtuse, in almost all aspects. It simply does not explain its systems in any way, and by trying to understand them by looking to external sources, you might end up sabotaging your endgame like I did. That sounds dramatic, but I'll explain that later. For now, check this out:

This party member is asking for a material, either dropped by a monster or mined from a rock someplace. Why is Maddox asking for Necrotic Metal? Where do you find it? Does the yes/no answer here mean anything? None of this is explained, and honestly none of it really matters, it turns out. This is part of a system where your party members, as you level up, will seek upgrade materials for their weapons. It seems like, if they don't have the materials, they will use their own money to buy them. I have no idea where their money even can be seen, and I don't think it's taken from the player's cash pile.

Every time you boot the game up, you'll get accosted by around five or six of your party members asking you for this stuff. You can't even find the materials at a shop and give it to them! You can only ever give them new weapons or accessories you have on hand if they happen to ask for it later. It's so hands-off, it becomes frustrating. Should I give them this thing? What if it makes them worse? I can't see the stat comparison. Should I buy this weapon I can't wield, hoping someone else will want it? It's not a fun system by any means.

"Considering the amount of work to make graphics that deserve HD, it is hard to make towns in the conventional style" is a quote from Motomu Toriyama, director of Final Fantasy XIII, which came out in 2009, a year after The Last Remnant. I think the answer to towns was right here alongside Final Fantasy XIII's development as it struggled to find its footing. They really succeeded at making these towns feel grand and impressive, while still heavily restricting where the player can go. The relatively small play spaces here are great: with our protagonist Rush's movement speed being ironically capped at a light jog, all the important buildings and NPCs are within arm's reach, often all accessible from one or two maps. This also helps with looking around for quest markers, since there's less space to look. But uhh...the quests...

A lot of these are bad. Like, pop open a guide instead of even bothering to figure it out. Go find this guy in this place without even being told which place or where. Wander a massive maze tower with no end in sight. Solve a mystery in a desert while still having to contend with a light jog to get from place to place. At the very least, you'll often actually get recruitable party members to hire from doing the quests, and they often take you to locations you either can't even visit yet, or side passages that weren't there before. You can easily fill your party with characters you actually helped out through various side activities, and that's genuinely a really appealing part of this game. It's just that so many of them are permanently missable, or really confusingly laid out. The bounty monster missions are especially terrible.

Let's say we want to take out Sledgehammer, a monster found in the Catacombs. First thing we'd do is look up where exactly it is online, because the game just expects you to wander aimlessly I guess. It says on the wiki that it's in the Eastern Area in a certain room. We go there and...

Those giant beetles are not the Sledgehammer. Monsters, even bounty monsters, are subject to a spawn table. This means that the intended experience is to wander around in a dungeon you've already cleared, getting hounded by enemies you don't care about looking for something that might not even be there. Thankfully, I'm playing on PC (and that's a little weird, so we'll come back to this later)! There's a handy unofficial tool that connects automatically to your game's save file, which feels invaluable for anyone playing The Last Remnant, called TLRPlanner: http://enceler.github.io/tlrplanner/

You can see here that currently, the rare monster that's here is the Artaxa. That's not what I'm looking for, and if I'd already slain the Artaxa there might not even be any rare monster in the area at all. With this tool in hand, I can leave and re-enter the Catacombs until Sledgehammer shows up in that list in the bottom right. Tedious, but the console players would have it so so much worse.

And that's kind of a big problem when you find out that this game used to have a PC version available on storefronts, but once Square-Enix released the remaster on consoles in 2018/2019, they must have taken down the original game from PC...and never bothered to release the remaster to replace it. The best way to play this game, with access to information that makes so much of the game's flawed design less painful, cannot be purchased. Either you already had a copy purchased, you buy a key of dubious origin from a key reseller (please don't do that) or you find an archived copy by other means. Playing the game without TLRPlanner is just not something I even considered the moment I first tried it out. This game has very easily missable quests! Doesn't a tool like that just fire you up to clear them all in spite of it?!

Quests, which have no easy way to be found in the world other than by obsessively checking every pub in every town after every plot beat, can expire through plot progression without any warning. It's incredibly frustrating considering you'd be missing out on potential party members and more, but from the perspective of someone who has cleared all of them (well, one of them was a superboss that I decided to cheat through), I'm starting to think it was an intentional flaw baked into the game.

I finally made it to the final boss, only to be met with a foe who could wipe my entire party in a turn or two. There's simply no chance whatsoever. I don't understand the battle system well enough to win, and none of the bosses, aside from the one superboss, could possibly have prepared me for this level of brutality. As I mentioned before, grinding is not the solution to strength in this game. Often, raising your Battle Rank higher actually works against you, as the game has formulas that assume higher player BR means they can handle bigger challenges, unlocking stronger enemy moves and higher max HP. So I looked the boss up online.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. They made so many of these quests such a pain to find and complete. A big reason that you do side content in RPGs is to prepare your characters for big boss fights and the endgame, right? This game will take you down for doing that. By being so convoluted, pushing me to outside sources, and eventually finding my way around their insane internal game logic, I found myself face to face with a fight I knew I was never going to beat. I sabotaged my own endgame.

There's really nothing more to be said on my strategy for this fight. I knew for a fact, looking up ancient gamefaqs pages for advice on the superboss from before, that the ways you make your Unions stronger was way beyond the effort I was willing to put in. Meticulous focus on setting very specific formations, rifling through every unit's list of abilities and turning off anything but the exact ones wanted...a battle system all about macro management very suddenly became about extremely micro management, and I was neither prepared nor willing to learn. The vast majority of the game can be cleared by just trying to experiment with what you think will be a good set up. This gulf in difficulty, without anything in-game to guide you towards better strategies, is demoralizing. I don't think the battle system holds up well enough to even want that level of mastery, either.

I felt compelled to see The Last Remnant through, not because of its story or any particular attachment to its characters or mechanics. More than anything, I was intrigued by the massive battles. Some of the high points of the game have your relatively small band of heroes take on 40+ opponents, trying to figure out who to prioritize, whether you should try flanking when you know it'll leave you open... I wanted to see how far they could take a battle system so unique. It turns out it doesn't really matter how many party members you have or what skills they can use if a single move can wipe them all out instantly.

1983's graphic adventure murder mystery for the PC-6001 is influential in countless ways, but relatively unheard of outside of Japan. After all, it never got an official localization, and despite its Famicom port having a very solid English patch in 2006 by DvD Translations, I'm not sure there was enough of a scene to really spread the word online like there is today.

Like many people, my first real interaction with Portopia was its first ever official English localization: the AI Tech Preview remake that Square-Enix released early 2023. Long story short--it's a mess of a text parser that almost never understands very basic commands, and in my opinion unplayable without spending a long time butting your head against unreasonable constraints. Supposedly they actually removed the Natural Language Processing tech from the public demo for fear of users submitting "unethical replies" which reduced the parser to the disappointment we can play today. Yes, that means they released and branded it as an AI Tech Preview without the tech it's supposed to be previewing. I don't get it either.

So let's just ignore all that. What was the original game like? The original 1983 version actually had a text parser like a text adventure game, but I don't think there's an English version of that. The Famicom port, released in 1985, replaced the parser with a list of commands and sub-commands that you can choose from a menu, but kept Portopia's signature investigation style: cracking a case with very little guidance by directing your subordinate Yasu with a wide variety of commands including inspecting, taking into evidence, questioning people, even hitting uncooperative suspects. There are so many commands that it's easy to forget to do some important ones here and there like ordering Yasu to fact-check an alibi, but that freedom does attempt to ensure that you're thinking about the case rather than trying every option blindly in a menu. That is, until that alibi fact-check you forgot to do before comes back to bite you!

If you play Portopia, you will almost certainly need a guide. In the AI Tech version's case, it's to know what verbs you even have access to (Did you know you can take photos of your suspects in the interrogation room? The game sure won't tell you.) but in the Famicom version, there are pixel hunts hiding crucial evidence. Progression happens secretly as you do seemingly unrelated actions, prompting events like receiving a phone call after returning to the police station only because you found a hidden space in the mansion. Maybe it could feel immersive, but if you get stuck, you'll really be stuck since the path forward won't necessarily be logical beyond doing meaningful actions to "pass time" in the story. There aren't many guides online about this game, but the one I recommend is here as it breaks down what actions you need to do, and what they trigger when you do them: https://retrogamesuperhyper.com/2020/04/12/solving-the-portopia-serial-murder-case/

There's also a disaster of a first-person maze with a really unfair secret towards the end of the game. You're given half a map and the solution involves picking a specific unmarked section of wall in the maze and walking into it until the wall collapses into a secret room. I still don't know if it's even possible to know the solution to this through in-game clues.

So obviously I have a lot of issues with the game's design. Aspects of either version have friction where there shouldn't be. In the Famicom version I shouldn't have to inspect an unmarked corner of a front door to find a ring. In the AI Tech version I shouldn't have to guess what words will make Yasu do what I'm trying to ask him to do.

And yet...I admire Famicom Portopia for what it is, and I can forgive its more unfair aspects that haven't aged well. I think this style of detective game still has a ton of untapped potential despite its already wide influence. The simplification of interactions in most mystery games often leads to the game doing the heavy lifting when it comes to making connections and interrogating people. With a more clear evidence gathering system and progress more tied to player discovery leading to further discoveries instead of time passing, this style could really shine.