A Flood Of Quickie Game Reviews

It's been a long time since I last posted any opinions of video games I've played on this blog. Funnily enough, I stopped not long before Jumpropeman launched The Game Hoard and became the de facto game reviewer of the community. He does a fantastic job at it and I couldn't compare... but after four years, I've decided to dig through the games I've beaten since the beginning of 2017 and share my thoughts on them. As a caveat, some of these memories are quite old, and I also skipped some games I just don't have much to say about. Let's get right to it.

Zaccaria Pinball
Platform: Steam
Genre: Pinball

I spent a shockingly long time on this game! Zaccaria was an Italian pinball manufacturer that existed in the 70s and 80s and was responsible for dozens of games. The majority of their titles are collected here. Don't expect the sort of pinball action Bally and Williams made famous in the late 80s into the 90s, though - Zaccaria was simpler, more low-rent, with few major gimmicks. Their tables are pretty "normal", mostly lacking in music or multiball or anything fancy like that. These tables are also quite high in difficulty, with it generally being pretty easy to lose the ball. Developers Magic Pixel do the best they can with what they're given, though - multitudes of options and settings, a full suite of leaderboards, alternate game modes like Lamp Hunter (roll the ball over every light on the table using three balls at once) and Target Eliminator (hit as many spot targets and drop targets as possible with a single ball) and most impressively a massive selection of remake tables that take the themes of the original games and move them forward or backward in time to mimic 60s and 90s pinball tables. Magic Pixel has continued to get weirder with this game as they run out of stuff to do with the Zaccaria license, throwing in everything from a zombie survival pinball table to a selection of simple arcade-style games featuring vehicles traversing levels in a manner similar to the Trials series of motorbike games.

One problem many have when getting into this game is the fact that it's sold piecemeal in the form of gobs of DLC - you get one table for free and then have to buy everything else separately or in bundles, even the options menu. A small investment can get you a pretty significant amount of pinball, though - this is one of the best bargains on Steam in terms of price per table, and Magic Pixel has been very good about responding to bug reports and getting problems fixed. Strongly recommended for pinball enthusiasts, but if the idea of playing old obscure pinball tables without familiar licenses doesn't excite you, you can safely ignore this quality but very niche game.

The Pinball Arcade/Stern Pinball Arcade
Platform: Steam/Switch
Genre: Pinball

In direct contrast, this game had the classic tables people passingly familiar with pinball may remember from their arcade-visiting days. Funhouse, The Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Attack From Mars, Black Knight 2000... the GOOD stuff! But the developers, Farsight, were not that great at optimizing their pinball games, and bugs found by players went unfixed months and even years after discovery. Fed up with the poor effort, Bally/Williams pulled their support and let the licenses for their tables expire, and now classic games are slowly appearing on Pinball FX3 instead. Now The Pinball Arcade is dormant and never updated, but in its' time it was one of the better ways to play pinball in virtual form if only because they had the big money licenses people wanted to see.

Stern Pinball Arcade is an oddity. A separate game from the same developer with the same gameplay, except with an emphasis on tables from the Stern Pinball company, most of which had already appeared in The Pinball Arcade. It got a handful of tables and then ceased to get any further content despite dozens of Stern tables out there needing a legal digitizing. Farsight had, unfortunately, blown it again. The Switch version collects every table made for SPA into one convenient offering and is a decent purchase, while its' unfortunate predecessor TPA has been largely hollowed out and only offers a fraction of the tables it once had.

Sonic Mania
Platform: Switch
Genre: 2D Platform

All it took for Sonic to be good again was to let the fans make it. You can tell the passion, love, and respect the developers of Sonic Mania have for the franchise, particularly its' early years. Sonic Mania's levels feel right at home with the rest of the classic Sonic series: 1, 2, CD, and 3K. The physics are perfect, the level designs are smooth, the gimmicks are clever, everything just feels right. The lack of a Sonic Mania 2 announcement is confusing and upsetting considering what a guaranteed slam dunk such a venture would be. If you've played the Genesis era Sonics and want more of that, I can't recommend this title strongly enough, because here it is.

Ever Oasis
Platform: 3DS
Genre: Action RPG

Released towards the end of the 3DS' life, Ever Oasis is a criminally overlooked gem. One of my first full-fledged Action RPG games, I was initially skeptical of an RPG without turn-based battles, especially since I've often struggled with 3D movement on this system due to the little slidy disc you have to use to move instead of a proper stick. Ever Oasis won me over, though, sucking me into its' world with puzzle-filled dungeons, simple but engaging combat, and a strong musical score. The story is pretty simplistic but functional, and the AI is pretty good about not being suicidal when controlling your party members for you (you take three-person parties into dungeons but can only control one character at a time, with the AI handling the others). Aside from minor annoyances like characters in town asking you for items you can't easily acquire when they first ask and a few moments in the adventure where it's not clear where you're supposed to go next, there's a lot to like here and I thoroughly enjoyed exploring this desert. 

Costume Quest/Costume Quest 2
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG

I was absolutely stunned at how well this game captured the magic of a childhood Halloween. It both looks and feels like a 90s Nickelodeon Halloween special, from graphics to dialogue to character design. I completely bought into it, soaking in the atmosphere every time I reached a new area and delighting in the game's sharp sense of humor. I was captivated from start to finish even though the gameplay isn't the best - serviceable, surely, but nothing special. Extremely simplistic battles with action commands and few special abilities on offer combined with the brief (by RPG standards) length make Costume Quest a good "Kid's First RPG". Only the final battle at the end of the bonus quest gave me any real trouble, and even that is easily surpassed once you know what you're doing and bring the right tools to the fight. Still though, that atmosphere. A magical game that took me back to my childhood Halloweens and got me all emotional. I also played and enjoyed the second game, which is more ambitious and has more engaging gameplay, though it exchanges a bit of the simple childhood magic so that it can go in harder on the cartoony elements.

 

Kirby: Planet Robobot
Platform: 3DS
Genre: 2D Platform

Probably the best Kirby game story-wise, and one of the best gameplay-wise too. Robobot has some crazy stuff up its' sleeve for longtime Kirby fans, and the final boss is one of the best final bosses I've fought in any game, period. If you're familiar with the Kirby formula, you know what to expect here - except add in the chance to pilot mecha suits that lend a new dimension to platforming! A strong recommendation for Kirby fans who have missed it before now.

Metroid: Samus Returns
Platform: 3DS
Genre: Metroidvania

It felt good to be playing a new Metroid game again after so long. In contrast to Super Metroid, which I unfortunately didn't enjoy very much despite its' legendary reputation, I had a great time with Samus Returns. Unlike Super, I was rarely confused about what to do or where to go, and while a couple of the bosses proved tricky opponents that handed me a Game Over here and there (particularly the show-stealing newcomer Diggernaut), none were total brick walls like Ridley was for me in the SNES game. I've played the original Metroid II and this felt like a completely different game. There are "remakes" that basically only bump up the graphics and then act like they did something amazing, and then there are games like this that actually remake the old game as if it's a modern game. The Metroid franchise has sadly once again fallen dormant thanks to Prime 4's continued radio silence, but this is a far better note to end things on than the character-assassinating Other M or the barely-Metroid Federation Force would have been.

Shoot Shoot Nitori The Golden
Platform: PC
Genre: Shmup

My first Touhou game! While I love Touhou characters, I've largely stayed away from the actual games for two reasons: their infamously-punishing difficulty, and the characterization and humor style of Touhou not often matching up with my preferences. This game, however, was perfect for me. The difficulty is very reasonable especially on the lowest level, and the plot is barely there and therefore has no chance to wear out its' welcome. Not to mention Nitori is one of my favorite Touhou characters and my number one special favorite, Sumireko Usami, is not only present but also an unlockable character!

Another thing that drew me to this game was the gameplay, which is a Touhou-ified version of Tumiki Fighters. This is a fun shmup design where defeated enemies can be grabbed by your ship and used as additional armor and firepower. Making every enemy a potential power-up that sticks to your character has the expected hilarious result, and it results in Shoot Shoot Nitori being not very challenging but plenty entertaining. I had previous experience with Tumiki Fighters due to another game - Blast Works for the Wii, an obscure create-your-own shmup engine that used Tumiki Fighters' mechanics as a base and even included the actual game as one of the modes of play. I had NOT been expecting to run into an old familiar face from the late 2000s when I first heard about this game, and as soon as I heard it was Touhou Blast Works I simply had to play it. It was good! Main downside is the limited content on offer - you can unlock a bunch of stuff, but the only way to do so is to grind the main game over and over to get cash to buy the unlocks with. There's no other modes you can play to make money, though you can at least change your character to freshen it up a bit.

Lego Jurassic World
Platform: 3DS
Genre: 3D Platform

The Lego Star Wars games came out in the mid-2000s and surprised everyone with their simple appeal. Despite rarely playing with Lego and never touching Star Wars, I found myself happily playing through Lego Star Wars II with my brother and then going back and picking up the first game to play that too. Developer Traveler's Tales knew they were onto something and made some more licensed Lego adventures. A lot more.

Despite coming out a full decade after the original Lego Star Wars and me not having played a single Lego game since then, I didn't feel lost or need any kind of catch-up time, because Lego Jurassic World is basically the same game. Featuring levels that tell goofy, G-rated versions of the first four Jurassic films' plots, Lego Jurassic World is inoffensive and occasionally funny but not very exciting. Most of the adventure consists of danger-free platforming and puzzling, and only the Lost World and JP3 levels offer actual enemies to worry about for some reason. As usual for a Lego licensed game, there are a zillion characters to play as and secrets to unlock, and some of these are deviously hidden or surprisingly tricky to get, but even a kid should be able to coast through the adventure proper.

Kamiko
Platform: Switch
Genre: Action-Adventure

Kamiko comes to us from the people who made Fairune on the 3DS, and if you've played that game, you can immediately tell. The look, sound design, and setting of Kamiko are all nigh-identical, and even some of the enemy mooks are directly lifted from Fairune. Fairune's "combat" was excitement-free bumping into enemies, though, whereas Kamiko is a proper Zelda-esque game with swordplay and action. The main focus is still on puzzles, as your goal is to navigate the land, trip switches, and find secret passages in order to activate a series of shrines to open the way to the boss of the stage, and the bosses themselves are also pretty puzzle-y. As an expansion on the slower-paced Fairune, it's a pretty good game. Very short and can be finished in under an hour, but the three playable characters all fight differently to encourage a few return visits.

Awareness Rooms
Platform: Steam
Genre: Adventure

Awareness Rooms has a cute premise. You are a little girl who doesn't recognize her surroundings, but by interacting with things and experimenting with them, you gradually learn what the world around you is like (this vague steel box can be opened, and it's cold inside... it must be a fridge!) in order to fill up an awareness meter. Once the meter is filled, the vague shapes around you become fully detailed and you can usually move onto the next room shortly after. Awareness Rooms is extremely brief if you know what you're doing, though a few puzzles stymied me and I had to look up a walkthrough. The ending explains basically nothing about what you were doing or what the point of any of this was and I found it very unsatisfying. It was interesting at first, but I liked Awareness Rooms less and less the more I played it, and the ending ruined it entirely.

VA-11 Hall-A
Platform: Steam
Genre: Visual Novel

Now this was enjoyable. Set in a cyberpunk city decades in the future, the people of Glitch City are surrounded by many of the genre's classic foes, like oppressive corporations and a declining environment, but little attention is paid to the big picture. The real story of VA-11 Hall-A, also known as "Valhalla", is focused on the simple fact that life goes on and that we're all human, having small human struggles regardless of the big problems affecting the world at large. Valhalla tells the tale of Jill Stingray, a 27-year-old bartender who serves drinks to customers and listens to their stories. Numerous plot threads pop up here and there concerning the customers and their own issues, but halfway through the game Jill herself gets a plot point when an old romance from her past resurfaces, and the second half of Valhalla largely deals with Jill struggling with the fallout of her old relationship. Despite the sci-fi setting with advanced technology including talking dogs and brains in jars, Valhalla is an incredibly down-to-earth game that makes Jill's personal problems feel very real and very genuine.

Actual gameplay is limited in Valhalla. You have to mix drinks for your customers and you may make a few mistakes early on as you're feeling out how it works (particularly how long you need to mix a drink once the ingredients are assembled), but once you've got the mechanics down, it's effortless. A few wrinkles do pop up, though, such as a couple customers who won't directly tell you what they want, resulting in a bit of a puzzle as Jill tries to determine what they would like by browsing the recipe book for clues. Another wrinkle comes in the form of the money system. You're paid for your bartending, and you get paid more if you do a better job, or if you make more expensive drinks (and some customers will accept numerous possible drinks and you can make bonus money here by choosing to make them the most expensive option that still matches their request). At the end of each work day, though, Jill will want to buy something at the store. If you do not buy her what she wants, her mind will drift at work and the reminder of what the customer wants that appears when you're in drink-making mode won't be displayed. You also have to pay your bills every week, and if you don't do this Jill will struggle to think of anything else, again removing the reminders and also putting you on track for a bad ending as Jill fails to make ends meet and gets evicted from her apartment. It's nigh-impossible to buy Jill everything she wants AND pay your bills in a single playthrough, which is a very realistic outcome to be sure, but a New Game Plus is on offer to help you out by carrying over everything you've already bought for Jill into a replay, freeing you up to stockpile cash and easily pay your bills. Since you get an achievement for finding the bad ending, the "optimal" way to play Valhalla is to go through it twice - once blind to experience the story fresh, and then a second time to find secrets, clean out the store, and get the good ending (and meet the requirements for all the optional extra scenes that can appear alongside the good ending).

Light puzzle and money management elements aside (not to mention a hidden shoot-em-up game that I was unable to beat), the main attraction here is the plot and dialogue. A few of your customers are (intentional) jerks, but most of them are fun and interesting characters. Jill is an immensely likable and relatable person, one of the best protagonists I've ever seen in a video game. She's multifaceted, she's clever, she's smart, she's flawed, she's human. Not getting a "Valhalla 2" to continue her story is a damn shame, as although there will be a sequel to this game (eventually - no sign of a release any time soon), it takes place in a different bar with a different bartender, merely sharing the same universe. Valhalla is a real treat with passion, heart, and soul, and comes highly recommended.

Pokemon Shield
Platform: Switch
Genre: RPG

Instantly reviled by the fanbase the moment it was revealed Game Freak couldn't be bothered to include every Pokemon species, Pokemon Shield (along with counterpart game Pokemon Sword) is the poster child for game series that made the leap from 3DS to Switch and refused to improve themselves to scale with the 50% price increase. Sword and Shield, or as I like to call them, Swoosh, are not bad games at all, but they aren't particularly exciting ones either. The massive open wilderness areas are very cool especially on a first visit, but are also pretty empty and come at the expense of almost everything else, with only a tiny handful of dungeons and one of the worst storylines in the series starring a criminally stupid villain with a godawful explanation for why they're doing bad things. The gameplay remains the same elemental rock-paper-scissors that fans are familiar with and that feels very evergreen to me, though Megas and Z-Moves have both been stripped out in favor of Dynamax, a three-turn power boost that makes your Pokemon really big and is explicitly stated to only work in Swoosh's region of Galar, no doubt so that they can ditch this too for the next gen's gimmick. Also, while the online is a slight improvement over Gen 7's atrocious Festival Plaza, Gen 6 keeps the crown for best online functionality of the series. The included DLC helps fill out a barebones adventure to an acceptable size at the expense of now making this game cost TWICE as much as a 3DS Pokemon game, and even with DLC you still can't catch them all. Also, after fixing TMs by making them infinite-use in Gen 5, Swoosh has broken them again by introducing single-use "TRs", putting all the good attacks on them, and putting weaker, less useful moves on TMs. Great attacks like Ice Beam and Thunderbolt are now single-use TRs, and the TMs are left with weak alternatives like Icy Wind and Thunder Fang that do less damage and are less accurate.

It's not all bad, of course. The music remains on point, the character designs are largely great especially the humans (though some of the Pokemon, like Falinks, are real standouts) and the story finally manages to get kinda good right at the end when you face the main story bosses. You can now see Pokemon roaming about so you know what you'll fight before you start the encounter, which is a GREAT idea... but they also kept in "surprise" encounters in the form of fishing spots and rustling grass, dulling the potential this had in making it easier to find new Pokemon by locking some species to the random encounters and only having certain Pokemon show up on the map. Raid Battles, featuring four normal-size Pokemon teaming up on a single perpetually-Dynamaxed Pokemon, are an interesting idea, though the terrible AI partners put a damper on the fun and you only get one chance to catch the Pokemon when it's over. And the fresh new emphasis on the importance of the gym challenge is actually really nice - in most Pokemon games, the gyms are just plot devices, but here they're placed front and center and every gym fight feels like a real sporting event thanks to the huge stadiums and cheering crowds. Swoosh has some interesting and exciting high points, but they unfortunately come at the heavy expense of many series standbys longtime fans took for granted.

It's been suggested that Game Freak wasn't really prepared for the next-gen leap and needs time to get used to developing for an HD system after two decades of Pokemon being a handheld series. As the biggest franchise in the world, though, they can and should do better than this, especially since this was the SECOND Pokemon RPG for Switch and Let's Go should have been enough to work the kinks out. Swoosh is an enjoyable enough run-through if you're jonesing for more Pokemon, and I liked it well enough, but this series could be so much more if it bothered to try.

Superdimension Neptune vs Sega Hard Girls
Platform: Steam
Genre: RPG

The Neptunia series can basically be summed up as "budget RPGs featuring cute anime girls". Corners aplenty are cut to make Neptunia games as cheaply as possible, particularly by reusing assets from previous Neptunia games. But hey, they charge a budget price to match, at least!

Most of the characters are comical, and despite the serious stakes of the plotline featuring a memory-eating monster that can destroy worlds through its' consuming, most of the dialogue consists of the various cute girls memeing at each other. Aside from one character who thinks torture and sadism is funny and sexy and repeatedly abuses and threatens to abuse other characters as a result, it's a pretty good cast. The Sega Hard Girls are of course the main interest here even though the Neptunia characters threaten to overshadow them. Iffy is a great protagonist and I like her a lot. Segami I'm not as fond of due to her annoying amnesia gimmick where she conveniently never remembers anything helpful until the appointed plot time has rolled around, though she has Edea Lee's voice and that's always a plus. And Neptune is a near-constant delight, as I knew she would be.

I like the battle system here! Every action you perform eats into a meter, and the less of that meter you leave remaining before ending your turn, the longer you must wait before that character can act again. It's a cool idea that's vaguely adjacent to the Brave/Default system used in the Bravely series, and I'd like to see other RPGs try this mechanic out.

The gameplay loop can be satisfying but is very generic, with almost all the quests boiling down to Twenty Bear Asses. Boss fights mostly stink - to win, you use the time-stopping Fever Mode to try and overwhelm the boss with as many attacks as possible. If you don't KO them shortly after that, they will likely overwhelm you and take you down. I almost never got to have a good, satisfying, back-and-forth fight with a boss thanks to their high difficulty without using Fever. Difficulty in general swings all over the place, with mooks swapping between "effortlessly steamrolled" and "capable of a party wipe" from location to location without any rhyme or reason. Even with some cheaty DLC installed that gave me double EXP and guaranteed item drops among other perks, enemies still often threatened to kick my butt. And the final boss' final form is defeated offscreen in a cutscene without player input, which screams cheap. Not a bad game, but the cute girls and "numbers go up" RPG mentality are what carry it.

The Great Ace Attorney
Platform: 3DS
Genre: Visual Novel/Adventure

Capcom's oafish refusal to release this game outside of Japan led to a fan translation effort, and the team did a great job with a professional-quality English translation. The classic Ace Attorney formula of investigating and fighting in court to find The Truth (tm) is in full force once again, this time in a game set in the past, around 1900 or so. This game is at its' best when it embraces the vintage time period to provide clues, angles, and locales that wouldn't work as well in a world that has modern technology at its' disposal, since that makes the setting more than window dressing and lends some uniqueness to this installment when compared to the other games in the series. Some less desirable elements of the past pop up as well, though - there's no shortage of racism against the Japanese in this game, for instance. Racism is just the start of our protagonist's problems, though. Ryunosuke Naruhodo, an ancestor of Phoenix Wright, manages to snatch the crown from Apollo Justice for most trod-upon player character in the Ace Attorney series. While these games have always been happy to push around the protagonist and keep them on the backfoot, with every game in the series featuring the running gag of a bunch of characters trying to screw over the hero so that he can yell OBJECTION as they cut to the credits, TGAA forgets to include the part where Ryunosuke is rewarded for all his blood, sweat, and tears. Precious few moments exist where you feel satisfied for a job well done, only managing to just barely win each case in the nick of time, only for the following case to sometimes smack Ryunosuke a bit for having the audacity to win by showing him people who are personally inconvenienced by his victory. Your assistant has a running gag where she hurls Ryunosuke over her shoulder for the slightest of offenses, more than once managing to knock him unconscious with this attack, and it's played for laughs. Constantly insulted, belittled, abused, chained up, discriminated against, attacked... it's a wonder Ryunosuke bothers to help any of these horrible people he's working with, honestly. You do meet a single character halfway through who is always unfailingly friendly and helpful and likes Ryunosuke a lot and appreciates his efforts, and she's the best character in the whole game as a result.

Fortunately, the AA formula helps keep this game good despite the bizarre frothing interest it has in abusing its' main character. The cases themselves are as engaging as usual, and it can be quite fun trying to piece together what happened. The new Deduction and Closing Argument mechanics are both excellent additions to the series, and provide some of the highlights of the experience.

Ultimately, TGAA's biggest weakness is that it is only one half of a game. There is a sequel game, and this one was very much made with that sequel in mind. Mysteries are set up but not answered, characters appear briefly solely to tease the next installment before vanishing, and while the most important bits get resolution, the ending points out all the loose ends and all but screams "BUY THE SEQUEL". But we can't buy the sequel, because Capcom didn't feel like letting us do so. One of the weakest Ace Attorney games, but not without its' charms, and the game mechanics are among the best the series has ever had.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Platform: Switch
Genre: Life Sim

After ignoring the series for a decade and a half (I loved the GameCube original but never bothered with any other installments), the intense Internet-wide fascination with New Horizons coupled with my brother buying a copy led to me giving AC another chance. And it was pretty great! The core gameplay loop is shockingly addictive, and for about a month I completely slipped into a rhythm of gathering resources for an hour by taking a lengthy route all over my island before moving on to other activities and finally finishing up for the day to do it all again the next day. The museum is absolutely gorgeous, especially once you've filled it with animals and fossils. New Horizons is not without sin, though, and most of its' issues are extremely simple mistakes it had no business making in the first place. Terraforming is handicapped by its' awful slowness, as is crafting, which really needed to offer a bulk option. Breakable tools contribute absolutely nothing to your enjoyment, presenting a pointless inconvenience, and even golden tools can break, making them worthless. Visiting other peoples' islands takes forever, and loading on startup is agonizingly slow. You still get unwanted spam reviews from the Happy Room Academy you can't turn off, criticizing your personal choices in a game all about personal choice. Extremely useful visitors to your town may go weeks without appearing while ones you don't need come back again and again, like Sahara, who sells you rugs for your home but is rendered near-pointless because she won't let you see what they are until after you buy them. And that big, tempting shadow in the water that makes you pull out your fishing pole, 99 times out of 100, is a damn Sea Bass.

Much like Pokemon, Animal Crossing has been around long enough that it really should have figured out Quality Of Life by now. The fact that it hasn't leaves the series hobbled somewhat, but it's still good enough to be addicting and enjoyable, if only for a while.

Nostalgia
Platform: DS
Genre: RPG

You got your Skies of Arcadia in my The Great Ace Attorney!

Nostalgia has a great setting. It's set around the close of the 19th century, much like TGAA, and also like TGAA it's based on the real world and your adventure takes you to multiple real-life locations like New York City, London, St. Petersburg, and Tokyo. However, it's also dipped heavily in a fantasy coat of paint. Magic and monsters are real, and many legendary myths are true (and you even get to visit some of those mythical places).

Nostalgia takes very heavy influence from one of my favorite games of all time, Skies Of Arcadia. The main character is an optimistic, determined young man with an adventurous streak and an earnest desire to change the world, and he has two female companions - a spunky redheaded one who uses fire attacks and a quiet, mysterious one wearing white and specializing in healing the party, complete with a secretive backstory that doesn't surface until lategame. The last main character, a street tough punk with a gun, doesn't really match any SOA playable characters, but fits right in anyway. Just like in SOA, you have an airship that's used to traverse the world map, and you go up against an evil organization of baddies that want your mystery waif for their own dark purposes.

SOA is a great game to take inspiration from, especially since it's never gotten a proper sequel, but Nostalgia copied some of SOA's flaws, too. The encounter rate is high, and although you eventually get an item about halfway through that can lower the rate a bit, you can't turn off or avoid encounters entirely, making exploration a pain. A few things are missable if you want 100%, though it's not much - just a few enemy types and maps, mainly. The sidequests are mostly a bore, constantly making you return to places you've already been and traverse the same old dungeon again to find an item or fight a miniboss, and I quickly lost interest in completing them. SOA's fun idea of "Discoveries", special landmarks you can find on the world map while sailing around, is reused here as "World Treasures", but it's much harder to find World Treasures than Discoveries, and I only came across a handful in my entire playthrough. A solid but flawed RPG, Nostalgia is recommended to anyone desperate to play more Skies Of Arcadia. Just make sure your copy of it doesn't have the infamous Albion Glitch that prevents progress 2/3rds of the way through, and you're good.

Pokemon Gaia
Platform: GBA
Genre: RPG

This is a seriously impressive mod/hack of Pokemon FireRed, which leaves precious little of the original game intact. You can tell from occasional bits and bobs lying around like the Pokedex's layout that this used to be FRLG, but this is a legitimate new full-length Pokemon adventure that expands on the lore of the legendary golems - Regigigas, Regirock, Regice, and Registeel. The game mechanics have been updated to Gen 6, with Pokemon from gens 1 through 6 available as well as mega evolutions and the Fairy type. There's precious little original music, unfortunately, with the soundtrack consisting mostly of Gen 3 Pokemon tracks from both RSE and FRLG. They did cleverly focus on lesser-heard themes, though, like the GSC remixes used on FRLG's Sevii Islands.

It's a sad commentary on the state of Game Freak's approach to the series when one of the things that makes it most obvious this is a hack is the number of QOL issues that are solved. Pokemon that evolve by trading now evolve via alternate methods, since people can't trade on an emulator. You can find various NPCs who will change your Pokemon's Pokeballs so you can give them different aesthetics. You're told the nature of gift Pokemon as you receive them to make soft-resetting for a preferred nature take less time. And that's not even counting the benefits of an emulator like a speed-up toggle to get through boring battles faster and grind your team in a flash. Not only that, but the plot is much more involved than the average Pokemon game, with plenty of dialogue-filled scenes that give the characters a little more depth than the average Pokemon character (though, unfortunately, your player trainer remains a blank slate that never speaks. They at least lampshade this, but a real character would have been nice.) There are a few rough spots here and there, but overall this mod shows a remarkable amount of polish and I sometimes forgot I was playing an unofficial game until a meme reference or minor visual glitch jolted me back to reality. In the state I played it, there is no postgame, and since my emulator wouldn't save in-game (forcing me to use exclusively savestates), I couldn't continue after the credits anyway. A future update is promised that will add more original music and a postgame (and hopefully fix the issue I described), but even as is it's a very complete experience.

Bug Fables
Platform: Switch
Genre: RPG

For quite a few years now, there's been a trend of indie companies making spiritual successors of excellent games that the original creators either have butchered or else refuse to revisit. Capcom's abandonment of Mega Man led to Mighty No. 9. Banjo-Kazooie's abandonment led to Yooka-Laylee. And while neither of those games was able to live up to their originals, Bug Fables stands proudly alongside the games it is a love letter to: Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. With the Paper Mario series retooled into a different series with the same name but few of the same ideas, no one was making games like that any more, so Moonsprout Games stepped up to give it a try.

Bug Fables is not an exact Paper Mario clone, and that's probably to its' benefit. While all the series trademarks are here - recipes, badges, star pieces, field puzzles, tattles, action commands, the Trouble Center, the graphical style, etc - Bug Fables goes bolder in some respects. The difficulty level is a few notches higher - few battles in the first two Paper Mario games are likely to pose a prepared player any trouble, but Bug Fables ups the ante with tricky bosses that can wipe a party that can't get the action commands down lickety-split. Puzzles are harder too, with a few frustrating ones I needed to consult walkthroughs to figure out, and the last leg of the game is seriously tough on both fronts. While it's arguable if being harder is necessarily a good thing, one change BF makes that's definitely for the better is disposing of PM's more tedious indulgences like the General White quest in TTYD or the overly-long block-hitting puzzle in Super Paper Mario. Characterization is also excellent here, with many characters having brilliant personalities and your merry band of three heroes getting many good moments together with lots of quality banter.

Bug Fables made me wonder just how much of my Paper Mario love is childhood nostalgia and if I would be as deeply connected to them if I'd played them later in life. While I liked BF a lot, it didn't manage to grip me the same way the Paper Marios did when I was a kid, and I had no trouble taking a lengthy break from it halfway through to focus on ZFRP before coming back and finishing it up after the season ended. I'm not sure what it could have been doing wrong or what it was missing, but even if I never once considered it to be a top contender for my Best Game Ever, it is absolutely a high quality game and comes recommended for anyone who loves what Paper Mario used to be.

Bravely Default II
Platform: Switch
Genre: RPG

Bravely Default II is a pretty worthy addition to the Bravely series, even if the actual progression of the series is pretty much one step forward and one step back. The series' usual standards of great music, engaging RPG combat, a deep job system that's fun to customize and form combos with, and cute characters going through hell to save the day are all here. It's a long game, too, especially if you do the sidequests and optional dungeons. The environments are gorgeous and as always the characters and their voice acting are a major strength, though voice quality does vary from character to character and some of your foes are not fleshed out enough before they're disposed of. The story beats are pretty basic fare but the interactions between the characters are what make it worth paying attention to. The backstory of the main character, Seth, is lacking in substance and he ends up a pretty bland and generic hero, and crystal-hunting princess Gloria is pretty much just the first game's Agnes with a British accent, but your other two party members Elvis the easygoing hard-drinking scholar of magic and Adelle the mercenary in search of her lost sister are much more interesting and fun characters and help make up for it, and all four party members get their own moments to shine as the adventure carries on, with even Seth eventually becoming a more interesting character by the end.

There are a number of tweaks over Bravely Second. The ability to freeze time and get in extra attacks with SP has been removed, though that means the silly microtransaction system that let you buy extra SP if you didn't want to earn it by leaving your 3DS in sleep mode is gone as well and that's a good thing. Enemies are now encountered on the world map instead of being random encounters, and they'll charge you to fight unless you level up enough to scare them away. Character turns come up one at a time instead of each side alternating. An equipment weight system has been added to prevent squishy jobs like mages from carrying bulky armor by setting a different weight rating to each piece of equipment and then setting weight limits for each job (that slowly increase over time as you level up). Enemies and bosses can react with counters when you attack them, and the triggers and effects vary from opponent to opponent. When done well, it makes you change your strategy - a boss that's weak to fire but that attacks you for free whenever you hit it with fire gives you the choice of avoiding using the weakness or else going for it and dealing with the extra pain. Unfortunately, sometimes strategy goes out the window and the boss counters whenever they take damage from ANYTHING and you just have to sit there and deal with it. You can eventually unlock an ability that lets you auto-dodge most counterattacks, which helps a lot, but some enemies gain extra turns as their counter and there's precious little you can do against that until the adventure's nearly over.

I do have some issues with BD2. Difficulty is a problem, as there are some serious difficulty spikes at a few different points, even on the laughably-named "Casual" difficulty that is hardly what I'd call a cakewalk. The second-to-last boss is harder than the final boss, though this may be intentional. There's also some ending fatigue with multiple "are we done yet" moments, as the adventure transitions to what feels like a climax when you're only halfway through. Overall, while I wouldn't rate it as a top tier experience, BDII was a good solid RPG and really helped satiate my hunger for another installment in this series after waiting nearly six long years since Bravely Second hit the 3DS in early 2016.

Brave Dungeon
Platform: 3DS
Genre: RPG

This is a simple dungeon-crawling RPG from the Legend Of Dark Witch franchise, which is normally a 2D platform series with run-and-gun elements, similar to the original Mega Man series. I played the first two games in that series and they were fine, and this is a fitting companion to them.

Brave Dungeon is a game about building up your stats while controlling a squad of cute girls. Your main hero is Ai, a treasure hunter determined to prove herself (and make a lot of money). There's a strong Touhou influence here, as Ai is quite similar to Komachi, down to carrying a scythe as her main weapon. The gameplay consists of going into one of several dungeons and wandering around inside to collect treasure, fight monsters, and level up. If you find the boss and defeat them, you open the gate to the next floor. Items are reusable - you can only activate them once when in a dungeon, but returning to town refreshes them, and you can buy increasingly-expensive duplicates when shopping in order to use the items multiple times in one trip. Your party of three is customizable from the beginning with five possible characters to play with, but the characters you don't take with you won't get any experience and Ai can't be taken out of the party, so you have to choose between either staying with a single team for the whole game or else ending up with an overleveled Ai and underleveled allies.

I found Brave Dungeon's rhythm to be extremely addicting. Diving into a dungeon, grabbing loot and money and leveling up, then returning to town and spending money on stat boosts and new items proved to be an intoxicating case of "ehehe numbers go up". It's a simple game, but with an effective formula, and it's cheap and not particularly long so it makes for a good bite-sized RPG. The main downside is that the story is practically nonexistent. Most RPGs rely heavily on story to draw the player in, but after a short opening cutscene, Brave Dungeon stops explaining what's happening, who the bosses are, or why anyone is doing anything up until the very end of the game when you face the final boss and there's a bit of an exposition dump.

Brave Dungeon has tons of unlockables and bonus content, but the actual game on offer is stretched too thin if you play it repeatedly to do all that, and only certain enthusiast types will want to bother. No need, though - for an inexpensive 3DS eShop game, it lasts plenty long enough if all you do is play through every dungeon until the credits roll. Interestingly, this spinoff performed well enough that a sequel is being made for the Switch, though it's been delayed several times and still isn't out yet.

Disgaea 5
Platform: Switch
Genre: Tactical RPG

The Disgaea series has a very specific niche and it's very good at fulfilling that niche. This series appeals to people who love to play their games to death, endlessly grinding and watching numbers increase to comical levels. The main quest of any Disgaea game is over before you reach level 200, but the level cap is 9999. That should give you an idea. To further pump up your characters, every item in the game has an Item World, a randomly-generated dungeon that will boost the item's stats as you clear floors. So not only can you grind your characters, you can also grind their equipment!

As for the main game, it's a tactical RPG in the same vein as Final Fantasy Tactics. Characters move about a grid and take turns attacking units on the opposing team. You can use items, cast magic, all that good stuff - but if a character is KOed in combat, they are gone until you return to base post-mission to heal up, so revival mid-combat using an item or magic spell is out of the question, and you're limited to ten characters on the field at once to further add difficulty. You'll also encounter Geo Panels, colored squares that have special rules applied to characters standing on them. These can occasionally be useful (such as awarding you extra experience if the opponent you defeat is standing on the marked panel) but most of the time they're a complication to make things harder, boosting enemy stats, banning certain techniques, and in the case of the "No Entry" panels, blocking your way. Many maps boil down to trying to survive the Geo Panel effects until you can reach the Geo Symbol that's causing the effect and destroy it, whereupon you can finally turn the tables on your now-weaker foes.

Meanwhile, Disgaea 5's story is pretty good, but suffers from an issue where the enemy bad guy team is very small in size, with the big bad only having two major generals to oppose you. This results in a long stretch halfway through where you feel like you're not making any real progress against the enemy forces because the generals continuously survive their encounters with you and flee to fight you again later, producing a continuous stalemate. I eventually grew a bit frustrated that none of my opponents were being taken off the table. Fortunately, things pick up big-time late in the adventure once you're finally allowed to start overcoming your foes, and the finale was very satisfying and worth all the struggling it took to get there.

Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator
Platform: PC
Genre: Strategy

This one is just stupid dumb fun. In this game, you customize two or more armies of various character classes (archers, WWII soldiers, romans, chickens, ogres, etc), then arrange their formations on a map and watch them fight to the death. The AI is quite dumb, only barely able to pathfind around the environments and lacking in strategy beyond "attack the opponent when in range", but the stupidity is part of the fun. UEBS supports tens and even hundreds of thousands of units onscreen at once, but my computer could barely handle 10,000 units total even on the lowest possible settings (amusingly labeled "Potato" in the options menu). While I would have liked to do some truly ridiculous fights, I still got plenty of entertainment from smaller-scale bouts of a few thousand per side.

You can also play as any unit by right-clicking them during combat. My favorite application of this was picking a ranged unit and trying to hold off a horde of melee units as they tried to close in. You're free to edit the units to your heart's content to make them have oodles of HP, one-shot opponents, or attack or move faster. You can also download additional units from the Steam Workshop, where you can get obvious choices for units (like dragons and demons) and rather more unconventional ones too (like Marisa from Touhou, or a Piranha Plant from Mario).

This game was briefly given out for free to raise awareness of the announcement of a sequel that can handle MILLIONS of characters at once, and for a freebie it's stellar. It would benefit from some sort of campaign where you're given certain amounts of resources to create a squad and make a victory happen against an enemy army, but as is it's a great little casual sandbox to mess around with.

Jenny LeClue: Detectivu
Platform: Switch
Genre: Adventure

Wow.

I barely even know where to begin with this one. While idly browsing the Switch eShop in search of interesting new releases, I was immediately struck by this title and the cute main character prominently shown on the logo. The trailer was deeply intriguing, promising a murder mystery and imploring the player to "save their family", and a couple weeks later I owned Jenny LeClue after a deep-discount eShop sale combined with the generosity of Jumpropeman.

Jenny LeClue has one of the strongest first impressions of any game I've ever played. The mood is immediately set with a dark, mysterious scene taking place in the pouring rain in which you take control of a tall, trenchcoat-wearing figure traveling to a mysterious destination out in the middle of a lake. From that moment on I was absolutely hooked, and I cannot praise this game's aesthetic enough. In many older reviews I've spoken of that magical quality of immersion, the feeling of getting sucked into the universe of the media I'm experiencing. Jenny LeClue is one of the most immersive experiences I've ever had. It's crafted brilliantly, with breathtaking setpieces that feel like they came out of a storybook. The setting is vaguely nostalgic - it's implied that Jenny's having her adventures in the 1950s or 1960s - but it's a bit more complicated than that.

Jenny LeClue actually has a framing device that asserts itself after the prologue finishes punching you in the face with its' intensity. Within the game, it's shown that Jenny is actually a fictional character in a series of books, a child detective not unlike Nancy Drew or Encyclopedia Brown, and her author is in trouble because the series is declining in popularity. With his publisher breathing down his neck and demanding something with bite after 38 books of Jenny solving mild, kid-friendly cases like "who stole a jar of mayonnaise" and "where are my glasses", Arthur K. Finklestein is faced with the choice of either giving up on his beloved creation or subjecting her to trauma to make something dark enough to catch his publisher's eye, a decision he's clearly struggling with as we come back to the framing device every so often throughout the adventure. Poor Arthur doesn't want to hurt his characters, but if he doesn't, their time will come to an end anyway. What we play is the manuscript of the story he is writing to try and keep the Jenny LeClue book series alive.

This is already an intensely personal connection. As a writer myself in the form of ZFRP, I sympathized greatly with Arthur and his love of his own characters and passion for the world he has created. You want to make your characters exciting and entertaining, but to do it they have to face conflicts and trials, and a story has to get worse before it gets better. As an additional twist on top of this formula, Jenny herself is bored with her milquetoast mysteries and also wants something more exciting to happen, even arguing with the narration of her story (which is, of course, Arthur) sometimes - though she changes her tune as Arthur is eventually forced by his publisher to make his story so dangerous that Jenny starts to realize she's in over her head...

Gameplay-wise, this is an adventure game. You control Jenny as she moves around various locations, gathers clues, talks to people, and solves puzzles. You usually only have a few options at your disposal at any one time, so puzzles are generally easy to figure out, and you're not likely to get lost as most of the adventure is extremely linear. Jenny LeClue is not particularly challenging, but that's not the point - this game is about the story and the atmosphere. You're always able to take your time doing things, and there are no enemies or battles to worry about. I deliberately walked slowly whenever I was in a new area to soak in Jenny's surroundings. Everything is gorgeous - this game is set around Halloween, and the autumn theming is perfect for the story being told here. The unique soundtrack is another highlight, moody and mysterious and sometimes unsettling.

If Costume Quest felt like a 90s Nickelodeon Halloween special, this game feels like, appropriately enough, a young adult mystery novel of the sort I would have checked out of the local library as a kid, something that won't get gory, but is perfectly happy getting creepy. Jenny LeClue balances plenty of lighthearted comedy with much more serious and ominous segments, starting with a peaceful fall afternoon on a school campus and gradually slipping into darker and more puzzling locations as things escalate higher and higher (and afternoon turns to dusk, and then night). A major asset to the effectiveness of the immersion is the incredibly well-done voice acting. When Jenny LeClue first released in 2019, it only had Ace Attorney-style beeps for text noises, and I can barely even imagine playing it like that after my first playthrough featured the full voice treatment of the "Spoken Secrets" update. Jenny's voice is absolutely perfect for the character - smart and clever, witty and sarcastic. Jenny is as sharp as a tack and a very intelligent girl for her age, though she's still a kid and it shows in some of her more vulnerable moments, like when she thinks about her current family situation. Other characters are also incredibly memorable thanks to their brilliant voice actors, with Jenny's wealthy cousin Suzie and the conspiracy theorist CJ being standouts.

Unfortunately, Jenny LeClue does bear one significant flaw, and it has proven to be one so severe that every single person I've told about this game has considered it a deal-breaker that's keeping them from trying it themselves. And that flaw is that Jenny LeClue, like The Great Ace Attorney, is not a complete game on its' own. While the main mystery that kicks off the plot IS solved, another mystery is set up towards the end that is left for a second installment to unravel, and the adventure ends on a cliffhanger with a few other plot threads unresolved. Without a properly satisfying resolution, and with the second installment still nowhere to be seen a year and a half later (though it is, supposedly, quietly being worked on alongside further updates for the first game), Jenny LeClue makes a mistake at the final hurdle by leaving the player eager for answers but unable to play any more to find them. If the second half of this adventure manages to release and can wrap things up without leaving people hanging, I am confident the two games together will become one of my favorite games ever made. As is, it's hard to recommend since we don't have that second installment to play yet... but I still utterly cherished the time I spent with this title, and I would buy another Jenny LeClue game on day 1 for full price, no questions asked. The developer, Mografi, firmly has my attention.

Oh, and if you're wondering what "Detectivu" is supposed to mean, as far as I can tell it doesn't mean anything and is simply a nonsense spin on "detective" to make the full title rhyme with itself. :V

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I was going to wrap up by ranking the games, but I can't do it. Never been great at ranking stuff! I liked almost all of these games a good deal, warts and all, and in most cases if I didn't enjoy a game I didn't bother finishing it and therefore it didn't qualify for a review.

I did play some other games in addition to the ones discussed here, but I didn't have much of anything interesting to say about them. Super Smash Brothers Ultimate is a game everyone knows already, and it's the definitive Smash Bros. Kirby Star Allies is a pretty good game that's a slight step down from Robobot, but costs more. Super Mario 3D World is a fun game that's better with a friend. Streets Of Rage 4 is a worthy return to form for a beloved series and also benefits from a second player. The Capcom Beat-Em-Up Bundle is likewise best enjoyed with a Player 2, and steamedhams.exe steamed a good ham.

It felt kinda nice writing about games after so long. Maybe in another three years I'll play catchup again.