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August update: 41/52
Baldur's Gate 3 (great game, but really not sure how I feel about the combat) consuming my life, but I guess I have time to remember a few games in-between rolls.
36. August 3rd | Gimmick! Special Edition | Nintendo Switch | 7h 50m | ☆☆☆☆(/5)
Originally released in 1992 for the NES, and for some reason only in Scandinavia (though as far as I can tell, actually just Sweden, which means I potentially should have been able to play it on actual hardware) under the name Mr. Gimmick, because Gimmick! was too nonsensical of a title, I guess. This port is basically just that game, but with the original title restored and, I would assume, the more technically advanced Famicom soundtrack. It also has a speedrun mode and a mode where you can rewind and use save states, so as far as Special Editions go, this is pretty bare bones. I guess being able to play the game without paying a pretty large fortune (or via emulation, obviously) is special enough, though.
As for the actual game, Gimmick! is honestly pretty great. It's extremely daunting at first, with how slippery the player character, Yumetaro, is and the physics of his star attack (also a traversal method since Yumetaro can jump onto it with some good timing. I'm not very good at it, though) can take a bit to learn as well as the fact that only one star can be on screen at a time, so missing a shot can leave you extremely defenseless for a few seconds. Enemies can also be quite aggressive, and I'd say most stages have at least one pretty BS trial and error section to suffer through. Quite surprising considering how cute the game looks.
It gets even harder when going for the true ending (which I, of course, did, and that's why my playtime is almost 8 hours. My actual final playthrough was just 38 minutes long, and that was honestly pretty slow) where you have to get the secret treasure on every stage, and get through the first six stages without using a single continue, but through that challenge I got a real appreciation of all the systems at work, and the very smart level design that both gives you the feeling that this is an actual, breathing world that you're going through and not just something designed for a video game, with enemies very carefully placed and unique to their stages, and some not even being hostile to you.
The game also very clearly wants you to always move forward, either by spawning enemies behind you, having the ground collapse beneath your feet or just very clearly showing that standing in one spot for too long is extremely unwise. It reminds me a bit of something like the first Ninja Gaiden game, where you barely stay still for a second of the entire playthrough, and I really enjoy that kind of 2D platformer. It's very difficult when you start out, but with some practice, and a whole lot of frustration, it becomes sort of like a dance, and just supremely satisfying to get through what previously seemed impossible without much issue, and look cool while doing it.
Since it's a Sunsoft game made in the 90's, you can also expect Gimmick! to sound and look fantastic. I wouldn't say the levels themselves look all that impressive (not bad at all, but there are certainly NES games with better looking backdrops), but the fact that it has these really impressive physics (slopes!) at play at all times, the enemy AI actually seems sort of dynamic (they at least have very clear line of sight), the amount of things often on screen at the same time, and everything being extremely well animated, it's super impressive how rock solid the frame rate is. Especially when thinking of other technically impressive NES games like Kirby's Adventure where it feels like the game's about to explode at any moment. The fact that this game was made by, like, three people makes this an even more impressive feat, and it doesn't hurt that the soundtrack isn't just among the best on the entire NES, but also feels like wizardry and something that simply shouldn't be technically possible on an 8-bit console, and yet it is.
So yeah, I definitely recommend everyone with a love for NES platformers to play this. It's very difficult and not for the impatient type, but give it a little time and it will click eventually.
Soundtrack highlight:
Good Weather
37. August 4th | Mega Man 2 | Playstation 4 | 39m | Replay | ☆☆☆☆☆
It's Mega Man 2. I don't really have anything to say about the game itself that hasn't already been said a million times. It's a bit like the original RE4 where you sort of wonder if there's any more water to squeeze out of that rock, but I can say that Mega Man 2 is a very important game to me. We didn't have any consoles in our household until the PS2 in 2003, but my uncle had an NES, and we often borrowed it from him, and with it came his games; Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, Super Mario Bros. 3, TMNT 1, TMNT: The Arcade Game, Snake Rattle 'n Roll, Simpsons: Bart Vs. the Space Mutants, and Mega Man 2.
These games of very varying quality sort of became my introduction to video games (and lead me down this dark path that I'm sadly now walking for all eternity), so they all hold a whole lot of sentimental value to me, and especially Mega Man 2 (and to an extent SMB3) since I'm still regularly playing it, still loving the entire playthrough. There's something really cool about having this thing that I've loved for probably around 25 years by now, and how it somehow still never grows stale to me. It's a link between child and adult me in some way, and it's sort of nice to know that I still have that, and that it's built upon a game just being extremely solid and not simply me being stuck in some nostalgic haze whenever I boot it up.
I'm not really sure what I wanted to say with this, other than outing myself as having been a Bart vs. the Space Mutants enjoyer long ago (though I never even beat the first stage. Should probably remedy that some day...), but, you know, video games can be good, or something.
Soundtrack highlight:
Quick Man Stage
38. August 9th | Final Fantasy XVI | Playstation 5 | 65h | ☆☆☆½
FFXVI always felt a bit strange to me. A new Final Fantasy should be the most hyped thing to me, but even though I was really impressed by what was shown pre-release, I wasn't really looking forward to it that much or feel any need to get it day 1. Maybe there are too many great games releasing these days so even something like a new Final Fantasy is treated like an everyday occurrence, or maybe it's because FF7R2 is actually the Final Fantasy I need in my life, but whatever the case, it just felt like a game among many, and that's not how I want a new Final Fantasy to feel like.
Playing the game, I sort of get that same feeling. I don't hate FFXVI, and I don't love it either. I do like it, but it has very clear flaws and if I were to suddenly rank the entire mainline series, it'd be on the lower half. To its defense, I do get a lot of the decisions made with XVI, and it at least feels like a complete game unlike XV, but it feels a lot like the developers focused so much on having it feel complete that they sort of just created a, still good, skeleton of something that could have been great.
Thing is, Final Fantasy XVI is one of the most inconsistent games I've played in a very long while. Every time it does something well, you can almost expect it to do almost the exact same thing later on, and it'll suddenly be done in a much worse or unpolished way. The plot flips between actually some really good scenes with extremely high production values and great writing, and some that look like they were from a budget PS4 game, with characters acting like idiots or the game suddenly forgetting the wider lore, or that Clive actually can't teleport within the logic of the story and it just being a gameplay convenience. It's also insane that this multi-million game made by people with so much experience working in this genre, and probably also having played a lot of games in it, almost entirely rips off a plot point from FFIV and does it so much worse than that very simple RPG from 1991.
The pacing as well, where it sometimes knows exactly when to rush through a sequence and when to take it slow, and other times being in way too much of a hurry or crawling the entire game to a halt for no apparent reason. Everyone's been complaining about the mandatory fetch quests between main missions, and I have to agree with those complaints. They're fine early on, but become a bit egregious as the game goes, especially since Clive, seems to get a new seal or pin or whatever to put on every time in order for townspeople to trust him, so it's just the exact same structure over and over again, which is kind of a disappointment and not only becomes pretty boring, but also makes the world feel really artificial and video game-y.
The pacing is also sort of hurt by the fact that almost no character other than Clive really matters to the story, so it's hard to really care about a lot of what's going on for them since the game doesn't really seem to care either, and just use them as instruments for Clive's journey onward, and it's super annoying since it sort of gives interesting outlines to so many different characters, and then just don't let them really do much. Jill is obviously the biggest offender here, being around the entire game and barely getting anything to do herself and mainly just existing for Clive to either rescue her or her failing to help Clive. Misogyny or just plain bad writing? I'm not really the right person to judge that, but I do know that she's certainly not the only character with unfulfilled potential in the game.
I mean, I love Dion of course, and Gav is a good guy, I guess, but they don't really matter much in the grand scheme of things, and I wish I just got to know them a bit better, have them actually be with Clive on the adventure in more active roles, so that a lot of the game's more emotional scenes would land better, and make me care more about Valisthea as a realm where actual people live and not just tools to move the plot along sometimes. I like Clive, don't get me wrong, but it's not like the game is built upon foundations where it only could have only one good character, or just one main party member for the entire game for that matter. Not to be obnoxious and compare with [popular game], but playing Baldur's Gate 3 has really lead me to believe that just being able to pick a party, having some dynamism in the dialogue and some spontaneous conversations during missions (both main and some side quests that would resonate with different characters), would go a long way to make these characters so much better, without even needing to give them more screen time in the main story.
This pacing issue sadly goes for battles as well. I do want to stress that despite the game being maybe a bit too easy, I actually do enjoy the combat and how you can string different abilities together in a satisfying way, and it always looks great no matter what, but battles can certainly drag at times. Most of the time it's just enough as long as you know what you're doing and how to drain stagger bars quickly, but other times (
Titan) the game just doesn't know when it's time to wrap a fight up. Like, the production values on some of the boss fights are out of this world, like "this is the most expensive thing I've ever seen" levels, so it's extremely sad that these legitimately fun and visually interesting fights sometimes instead of making me feel like "this is the coolest shit I've ever seen" (though I did definitely think that during the entire
Bahamut fight), and instead "this was the coolest thing I've ever seen ten minutes ago, but why is it still going on?"
It doesn't feel great to do nothing but complain about a game that, at the end of the day, I really did like and think was an above average experience, but FFXVI has such glaring issues that it's hard to overlook them. The highs, that I can't really talk about, are extremely high, though, and outside of those main story cool-downs with the fetch quests, I wasn't ever really bored during my 65 hours of playtime where I did 100% of the side content without ever growing tired of the game. The game is 90% combat and running through beautiful but pretty empty landscapes, but I'm honestly fine with that because 1) I really did enjoy the combat, and 2) I don't think every video game world has to exist as some sort of toy box for the player. Sometimes it's nice to just have one that feels sort of like a very unremarkable place that you just have to traverse through to get from point A to point B, taking in the sights and not much else. Doesn't really sound very enticing now that I'm reading it, but I guess there was something zen-like about it that I really enjoyed?
The soundtrack is great, of course, maybe the best of 2023, though honestly also one of the weaker Final Fantasy soundtracks? I don't know, just like with the rest of the game, the highs are extremely high, but I feel like a lot of the music outside of boss battles aren't particularly memorable. Not bad, but I can't really remember any of it off the top of my head, which is sort of disappointing. Still, can't wait for that FFXVI DLC for Theatrhythm later this year!
So Final Fantasy XVI is a complete game, but you can certainly see cracks in the foundation in a lot of places, and that's extra frustrating since every issue can so clearly be fixed with some more or less minor tweaks that would have made it great, but I honestly think the game is the victim of rushed development rather than some incompetence from the developers. Square got all the fundamentals in there, but there's no meat on the bone in a lot of places, and it really feels like they just didn't have the time to just do some tweaking on things, so in the end we got a good first draft, but not what the game could have been with a bit more time in the oven.
Oh, and the game also seems to think that five years is actually a very short period of time where nothing happens, and that mothers don't age, but I digress.
Soundtrack highlight:
Ascension
39. August 21st | Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic | Nintendo Switch | 34h | ☆☆☆☆½
Honestly ashamed it took me 20 years to play this fantastic game, and I remember how extremely well received KotOR was back in the day, but I wasn't an Xbox kid (and don't think I even knew it came out for PC), so never got around to it. I have now, though, and to get in the spirit of 2003, I also played as what I assume would be an acceptably cringy OC from around that era – Tifa Strife, who wields a green and red lightsaber to show that she's a Jedi, but with a dark side to her. Extremely embarrassing, but that's too essential a part of the early 2000's experience to ignore.
As for the game itself it does have its issues, like Bioware at that time having zero cutscene direction, and especially Kashyyyk and Unknown World feeling as if about half of their maps and content must have been cut during development because they're so much shorter than the others. I also don't super vibe with this sort of DnD type of combat and I feel like the game is pretty bad at teaching the player its more intricate mechanics, and am still not 100% sure what some of the stats mean, or why charisma and persuasion are two different things. I also think it's sort of dumb that this game is set hundreds (or thousands?) of years before the Star Wars movies, but the style of fashion and architecture looks basically exactly the same as in those. Iconography is very strict in a galaxy far, far away, I guess.
Despite all this, though, I absolutely loved the game, and it might honestly be my favourite Bioware game of the ones I've played (which are, to be fair, only the Mass Effect games.) I've heard KotOR II has more interesting, more subversive writing and I'm looking forward to that experience, but what I really appreciated about this first game is how extremely well it executes on a fairly traditional Star Wars story, and within it manages to be simulation of the struggles of following the Jedi path, and completely through gameplay really shows why it's so easy to stray to the dark side. I sadly can't play evil in video games for some reason, so I obviously followed that path, and so I really got a taste of how tempting it is to sometimes just say fuck it and either ignore someone's plea for help, or instead of solving something peacefully just hacking down whatever stood in my path, and I absolutely loved how tedious it really could be to do the "right" thing in a lot of instances, and how there's rarely any decent reward for actually being nice over choosing evil. I also really liked that most dialogue, as far as I can tell, doesn't actually change your alignment, or at least not by much, so even though I played as a Jedi the entire playthrough, my character was still kind of an ass in some situations, and her social incompetence did not mean that she suddenly was seen as a villain by everyone around her.
I was also super impressed by how different each planet feels, and how what you do to get to each map piece also differs, from graduating from the Sith Academy on Manaan, to hunting for a Krayt Dragon on Tatooine, or exploring underwater on Manaan (which lead to me being banned from the planet afterwards, but that's the fun of RPGs like this; some poorly chosen dialogue or actions come with a high price and you just have to live with that.) All of them obviously have the galaxy's hottest card game, Pazaak, and some have swoop racing (surprisingly fun!), but they all have their own identity and people inhabiting them, with their own issues and side missions you can help them with, with tangible consequences if you do or don't do them. Not always beneficial or even that noticeable, but still actual consequence and a feeling that you actually made a change for this person or this place. I don't know, I just love games where the current state of things is a bit dynamic in that way, and where you get some say in where things go and actually feel a change happening, even if the main story's broad strokes are set in stone. I always had that issue with especially Mass Effect 2 (a game I love dearly) and 3 (a game I... appreciate), where there's certainly dialogue options here and there, but it doesn't really feel like anything changes other than Shepard moving more towards either paragon or renegade. That was certainly not the case here, and I enjoyed that aspect so, so much.
What else? Good characters outside of that one droid you get before on stealth mission and then never use again, fun interactions within the party. Every piece of headgear makes characters look like idiots when equipped. Darth Malak is a pretty weak villain, but he at least gets some good lines in his final moments, and the fight against him is fittingly challenging if you don't have the right force powers. The soundtrack captures the feel of Star Wars perfectly. I think that's it? I thought the twist was great, despite knowing about it beforehand, and my only reload to, uh, reroll, I guess, something instead of living with the consequences was in order to save Bastila at the end.
I wouldn't really recommend the Switch port, by the way. I don't know how KotOR is on PC these days, but I had two major issues with this port: some cutscenes the game would just skip NPC dialogue completely and jump to whenever the player character got to choose an answer, and that did not only rob me of a lot of context for certain things, but also some of the game's fantastic dialogue. It also just crashes whenever it feels like it, more than any other Switch game I can remember playing. Especially in the final area (which has some corridors with endlessly respawning enemies that are just hell to get through, by the way) I felt like I had to save on every new screen just to be safe, because it crashed at least three or four times just in that area alone.
Soundtrack highlight:
Bastila Shan Theme
40. August 23rd | Yakuza | Playstation 2 | 17h | ☆☆☆
Okay, so, uh, I recently bought a new laptop, and I am obviously not openly going to admit to illegal emulation on a public forum, but let's pretend like I tried out Yakuza on a PS2 emulator and maybe I could get it to play at 1080p without any slowdown. This is obviously just a fantasy, but I still played Yakuza (how? No one knows...) to 100% completion, as I always do with these games, and it was both surprisingly pleasant, and pretty painful at times.
If I were to describe Yakuza with one word, it'd probably be "clunky." The fixed camera angles can be a real nightmare and even I who's spent so many games in Kamurocho could get lost whenever it suddenly swung around and Kiryu was running the opposite direction, and it gets even worse in combat when it just suddenly shifts to an angle where I can't see the enemy anymore. The combat itself is also generally just pretty terrible, with Kiryu often feeling like he's trying to attack in the wrong direction and the R1 lock-on sort of working, but also not at all whenever it feels like it. Seriously, almost every fight against multiple enemies is a nightmare because Kiryu's just confused about where to look, and it doesn't help that the dodge is honestly pretty bad, or at least has way fewer i-frames. Also annoying how there's a loading screen before every fight, but it's not too bad since combat outside of missions is surprisingly rare for a large part of the game. Unsurprisingly, the Jo Amon fight in this game doesn't exactly feel great and super fair, though I did somehow beat him eventually.
At the same time, this is still very much a Yakuza game, just on a smaller scale. Sure, it doesn't play very well, but the DNA is there, and I'm pretty sure I saw some animations here that are used in the games even to this day. You still run around Kamurocho, still do a lot of substories (pretty bad in this game, admittedly, but at least most of them are very short), do some mini-games, and live the Kamurocho life which is sort of better than in most other games. I mean, there's less to do and what's there is worse than usual, but I love Kamurocho's atmosphere in this game. It's almost always night or rain, and the streets are all lit up by hazy lights, and you're getting jumped by people trying to sell you on hostess clubs or whatever on most streets.
There's a seediness to this PS2 Kamurocho that really sells it as this pretty bad place to be, especially certain streets, and it feels like every future game talks about it as this hive of scum and villainy, but it never really feels like it. Here, you can really tell that, while yes, ordinary citizens can walk around there, you can never feel quite safe or know what lurks around the corner, and that adds a lot to give Yakuza a very unique identity in this series (though maybe 2 feels the same? I actually do own that on PS2, but I haven't played it) that I can appreciate.
Storywise I've never been a big fan of this one when I've played Kiwami, and it's not like it's any different here. It does become a bit better by not having the Majima Everywhere system, but it's still a fairly boring story where things start happening pretty much out of nowhere by the end and there's not much focus to the whole thing, despite the plot being really simple and straightforward by this franchise's standards. It's not on the same level of bad as 4, but... I don't know. It starts out well, but somewhere just loses me completely, and that's a shame. I always did like the ending, though, and the game does have a good final boss at least. Maybe a bit too easy compared to the Kiwami fight, but still good.
The terrible voice acting and localization are mostly a plus for me, by the way. Kiryu can sometimes be a bit too flat, and this Goofy-voiced Date seems to be the only one who can at least sometimes pronounce Japanese words correctly, but it is a lot of fun. I mean, who could ever forget classics like "GO! Killthisarrogant Mo ther fu cker", or "Step the fuck up, it's time to die?" God, I get a tiny bit happier just thinking about these lines.
Soundtrack highlight:
Funk Goes On
41. August 29th | Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time | Playstation 3 | 8h 42m | Replay | ☆☆☆½
This neverending marathon of Ratchet games continues, and this time on one of the best games in the franchise! Also one of the games I bought with my PS3 (the other was FFXIII) when I got that in 2011, and one where I lost my original save file that was almost at the end of the game because of that fun Sony hacking incident, where I got a new PSN account for some reason, and then the save corrupted when I tried to transfer it over to it. Oh well, at least I got Pursuit Force and Wipeout from it.
A Crack in Time is a lot of fun, unsurprisingly. I genuinely think the script is maybe the worst it's been in a mainline Ratchet game, and the humor almost never lands at all (though it's also just inoffensive at worse), but playing it is great, I mean. Also sort of feels like a sequel to a game that doesn't exist, because I feel like it introduces things that I'm supposed to know about and have been in the series before, but somehow haven't, but maybe I'm just being pedantic.
Playing it, I mean, is what's so much fun. Also seeing a PS3 game that both looks good and runs great is a surprise (unpopular opinion maybe, but I really think no other generation's graphics have aged worse overall). It is mainly just a continuation of what every previous R&C game has been, meaning a lot of running 'n gunning, and some occasional platforming, but also more platforming than in, say, Tools of Destruction since there are several optional, smaller planets that exist just as platforming challenges and are a lot of fun. The weapon arsenal is maybe not the best in the series, but it gets the job done, and outside of the cryo-mine glove I did get use all of them enough to get them upgraded. They also do more damage (or enemies have less health, I guess), than in ToD, so we're back to combat feeling satisfying and not just tedious and dragged out, while Ratchet also can take a bit more of a beating, even on Hard Mode (which honestly isn't really ever hard). Always annoying that enemies have a tendency to shoot at you from off-screen, but it's not a huge deal.
This game also does what no game has done before: making good Clank sections. I mean, I like his Lemmings mini-game in Size Matters, but actually controlling and doing things as Clank is finally fun this time, and also sort of gratifying to play today as I remember having a pretty tough time with some of his temporal puzzles, but not really having any issues at all this time. I would normally say low difficulty on puzzles kind of defeats the purpose, but I actually really enjoy how clever they are, and how novel it feels to have to record Clank and time different recordings' movements to do things in the right order. It also looks like you're some insane 4D genius when everything clicks and the recordings sync perfectly, which is always s fun feeling. Clank's weird planet lasering to destroy time vortexes or whatever are kind of boring, though, but there aren't too many of these sections, and they can be completed pretty quickly.
Soundtrack highlight:
House of Synth
Currently playing
Baldur's Gate 3 (PS5)
Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii)
