I've put off writing one of these for a while, it's a doozy! Sorta!
Some games praised! Some classic games, youtuber voice eviscerated! Who will survive, and what will be left of them?!
There are too many games here! Eight of them! I'm sorry!!
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)
No, Grandpa! You wrote about this last time! And posted the same picture!
I barely wrote about it last time! It was mostly a joke post! And now I'm writing about it this time! With the same picture!
Anyway - I enjoyed it.
But no! Really. I did enjoy it. I eventually, as I did with Breath of the Wild, hit a point where I felt like I had Had Enough, and decided to fight Ganon (a cakewalk, though there's a visual joke during the second part of the fight that is incredibly funny), and call it a day. And to TotK's credit, that moment came many, many, many more hours later than when I threw in the towel with BotW.
When it was announced, I think my hopes for a direct sequel to BotW were pretty simple - gimme some real dungeons, and a better story. Did I get those? Kinda!
The temples...y'know, I guess they're alright. They feel like they make use of Link's abilities in more fun ways than the Divine Beasts did. Ascending to the Rito Temple and the Zora Temples are phenomenal moments, the mood and atmosphere of the Gerudo Temple is creepy and foreboding, and the Fire Temple, uh.
Story-wise, without spoiling too much (or anything, preferably) - the big twist, and how you reveal it, is...fascinating, though Link cavorting about in silence as his cohorts wonder aloud about things he has knowledge of...man, what a dick.
I think the whole post-Temple dialogue being more or less exactly the same each time veers hard into being annoying and then veers again into being comical. I guess you gotta account for people being able to play this in any order, but, c'mon.
What else is there to say? The fusion mechanic, at least as weapons go, becomes kind of rote after a while, though the ability to make contraptions will give this thing legs for years. The Depths are sadly kind of a slog - they go from being intimidating, to interesting, to boring as you get more acquainted and prepared to deal with them. And silver enemies being damage sponges/Things You Ruin Your Good Weapons On...not fun! A bad time!
Really, I think the first time I launched out of a tower, through a sea of storm clouds, and broke into the sunset sky above...that's $70 right there, baby. If only for moments like that, they manage to capture that wonder of the last game all over again, so, y'know. Good job.
Storyteller (Switch)
It's cute.
I think maybe I had it in my head that you could tell any dang story with these little tools, but really, the game boils down to some pretty clever little puzzles. You're given a story prompt (and occasionally some bonus ones), and need to place characters and locations accordingly to fulfill that prompt. The game is sometimes too rigid for its own good in expecting you to know exactly the scenario the developers planned (there's not much wiggle room), but...it's fine. It's pretty fun.
Hopefully the freebie DLC next month is good!
Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster (Switch)
Aw yeah, here we go. Baby's first Final Fantasy (forget my making it to the second disc of FFVII or the hours I spent playing FFV - I know I did!).
I...really, really enjoyed this one! A lot!
I think I came into it with sort of a bad attitude (I really liked Dragon Quest II, how dare this series court more popularity?!) and a lot of misconceptions (FFVII and VIII were probably the most familiar to me growing up, and FFVI to a lesser extent, so that whole sorta tech-ish world set expectations). Finding out that Final Fantasy I is like, outright regular old fantasy, dwarves and elves and all that, was kinda refreshing?
I didn't mess with the news bells and whistles this port has to offer much (I flipped between the arranged and classic OSTs once or twice, ultimately stuck with arranged, but never touched the gold or XP multipliers) and found the game to be pretty easy....right up til the end. Oof. Rough time to learn that debuffs don't work on bosses, and that I sorta boned up what spells I had given my crew. Didn't take long to remedy it, but it sure took my beating my head against the game for a while before I gave in and looked it up.
But! Yeah! It was surprisingly engaging. A fun little story, though heartbreaking when all my cute little dudes got turned into weird jocks by the big dragon guy. They don't warn you ahead of time! Greater power, but the cost...!!!
Excited to play the black sheep of the series here soon enough! Though I hear you don't have to beat the shit out of your own team to level them up in these new ones. Ah, well.
Oh wait! I lied! I did enable the "click stick to disable encounters" a few times, usually after an hour or two into a dungeon, or more often upon going back in for items once I got the key that unlocks everything. That was pretty nice!
Undertale (Switch)
OK, so, I did beat this on Switch (Pacifist and True Pacifist routes, at least), but I think the thing that still wows me the most is when I first played this on PC. I did something early on that I deeply regretted (you know!), restarted the game...and got called out on it. Goddamn that's such a good moment.
Anyway, I think I'm too old for this game. This isn't me being weird or stodgy about it, I just found combat to be incredibly hard. I even broke down and bought the Temmie Armor. I'm just no good at bullet hells! It's why my Genocide Run got abandoned at Undyne :(
Glad I finally got around to it, though. Also glad I stewed on writing this for a while, and didn't get a tattoo of that dog (I was never going to, but the idea crept to mind for a minute there...)
Final Fantasy Adventure (Switch)
Oh hell yeah, this one!
I only halfheartedly fired this up as a sort of joke (???), along with Mystic Quest (which I will get back to...that game is weird), delaying my playing Final Fantasy II. But the joke was on me! This was great!
It's such a weird, early Game Boy game (predating Link's Awakening by about a year, I think), but it does so, so much within those limitations that I'm honestly kinda astonished. Yeah, it's clunky and cumbersome that you gotta constantly juggle items, weapons, and spells, the dungeon tile sets are pretty repetitive and go on forever. It's a mess! But god, what a mess!
The story, poorly translated and probably heavily limited by the characters on screen, is such a huge downer. You meet so many characters, often for maybe a dungeon or two at most, only for them to meet a grisly end or bitter fate. It just swings wildly from being weird and goofy to absolutely melancholy.
Even the music drove me nuts, but I found myself listening to it regularly on Spotify via the Adventures of Mana OST. All-star example of "great compositions trapped on limited hardware."
After beating the game I decided to dabble a bit, with the aforementioned Adventures of Mana and Sword of Mana. Here's some quick hits on those!
- Adventures of Mana: Pretty much a straight port, gameplay-wise, into 3D, with some nice, simple graphics and stellar music. Feel like this might be the one to play if the Game Boy original doesn't appeal.
- Sword of Mana: urrghgk blecchhhh cough cough No thank you! Gorgeous graphics from Brownie Brown, as to be expected, but what the fuck did they do to my precious simple baby? What's all this unneeded exposition? Why do these characters never shut the fuck up? Crafting?!?!?! No!!! Bad!
Anyway, Final Fantasy Adventure! Up there in my Games of the Year! That I played anyway! That's what matters! My damn blog!!
Secret of Mana (Switch)
Nope, didn't care for it.
Look, it's fine. I get this game had troubled development (Nasir, bud, you did your best!), a rushed translation, a lotta stuff left on the cutting room floor. I get that a lot of folks who revere it have fond memories of playing it two-player (or three, for those multitap-owning Rockefellers out there) with family and friends. That's cool!
It's just...ehhhhhhhh, I dunno.
There's stuff I liked about it. Like FFA, the story here is kind of a weird downer. There's that animation whenever you use the cannon to travel, and how you sometimes will hit a big bee upon landing at Gaia's Navel. The little village of mushroom people is cool. They bring back the dancing shop owner from FFA, but now in glorious 16 bits.
But goddamn if combat isn't a slog. You learn pretty quick that combat is ineffective unless you only attack when the meter is at 100%. That's easy enough to grasp, but even so, it feels like your attacks miss far more often than they hit. There's a weird, unexplained damage multiplier that goes on when you knock down an enemy and hit them while their down, but seems to also be able to be canceled out for less damage? Add to that the game is brutally difficult until you beat the first boss - then you get magic, and if you play it right (I did not! I should have looked this up!!), you can abuse the hell out of magic til the end of the game, limited only by needing Faerie Nuts or whatever to get you through a dungeon. Even so, I found myself more often than not just booking it past enemies in dungeons, rather than spend minutes at a time trying to hit them or wasting MP attacking them. Was I under-leveled? Possibly! Not using the sprite's MP suck attack? Oh yeah!
Ultimately, this play style brought me to the final boss, grossly under-leveled in magic and unable to beat it. I had to roll back to an earlier save, grind the shit out of magic for the girl in a temple where an old man will restore your MP, grind the shit out of low level magic for the sprite on masses of enemies, then redo the whole last dungeon.
I dunno! It had its moments, but I wouldn't say it was a great time.
The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe (Switch)
Oh this was great! I had gotten the original game on PC years ago, when I was trying to game on my laptop, using the keyboard and track pad. Naturally, I didn't play it! Awful way to play games!
I initially didn't want to write about Tears of the Kingdom because it was new, fresh out of the oven, with a lot of stuff and experiences that I didn't want to spoil. I...kinda feel this way about The Stanley Parable, too. It's short enough, and the scenarios you find yourself in good enough, that saying too much about any of them feels criminal.
I hit a point where I felt satisfied with the endings I had found, content to leave the rest behind, then dipped back in for more and...no! They're all so good!
Some day I will come back and "catch them all," but for now, I'm extremely satisfied with what I've played of this.
Ghost Trick (Switch)
Okay, last one for now! I bought this game...lemme look at my Amazon history here...12 years ago, and only now have finished it, on a whole 'nother system. Whoops!
Had I realized back then that this was from the Phoenix Wright team, I probably would have jumped on it sooner, but honestly I'm kinda glad I left it to now, because goddamn what a treat of a game. Between Shu Takumi's constantly twisting, revelatory story (that, like the Ace Attorney games, manages to tie a bunch of disparate details and characters together by the end) and the sort of Rube Goldberg puzzle design...I dunno, y'all! It's great! I feel stupid just writing "it's so good" but...it's so good! Delightful in every way.
And that's it for now! Next up for me I guess is, uhh, I've got Atelier Marie in the Switch, ready to go. Some day I will play something on my PC or my PS4 again...