I'm tired.

Let's play armchair game designer, because lord knows we don't have enough of them on here.

Before you can run, you must walk, and boy does Nathan Graves enjoy walking. Nathan just adores going on a stroll in Camilla's castle while his master's getting his toenails ripped off in preparation for being slaughtered in a satanic ritual. Mr. Graves wouldn't know how to run even if I slapped his dump truck ass with the world's most painful block of wood. It's a godsend that Camilla's basement houses the very shoes he needs to be able to find the joys of exercise again after he forgot how to sprint when Count Dankula played his Trap Hole card in the introduction scene. One must wonder how long it would've taken if Drac's minions didn't make such a fuck up as to leave shoes for Mr. Graves to wear for his aching strolling feet. Even with these shoes Nathan only knows how to barrel forward with wanton disregard for his own being. Alucard had it figured out already, just run with care. That's all you gotta do. For Nathan though? Only two speeds exist. Tortoise, and drunken hare riding on a Kawasaki Ninja.

The input for running in this game is bad enough with requiring me to dash dance on the dpad and kill my thumbs, but Nathan's whip attack is noticeably sluggish compared to past Classicvania outings. It may not be noticeable at first, but try ducking and whipping and go back to playing as Simon in any of the past games and you'll definitely feel it. Nathan can jump like a stiff pong paddle and can even wall jump, and trust me I'm proud of him for being able to do so, but he should stick to his day job. Wall jumping in this is automated for at least two seconds as Nathan pauses on the wall and propels himself into the direction of enemy fire that sends him careening back down the pit that he was trying to make his way up from. You will encounter this scenario a lot, I assure you, especially with Circle of the Moon's obsession with slap dashing Armor enemies everywhere with annoying attacks that can bop you from the other side of the screen. No joke, I had a moment where I thought I was hitting an Ice Armor enemy in the underground waterway safely, only to get a very pleasant surprise in the form of another spear flying from off screen and stabbing me through the adam's apple thanks to the second Ice Armor that was behind him.

The primary system is collecting some shitty Yu-Gi-Oh cards and playing Blackjack with yourself to combine two of them and give yourself some form of power up, which could range from boring effects like your whip getting an elemental bonus, or actual cool shit like turning into a bone-throwing skeleton that dies in one hit. Unfortunately, the card for turning into a glass jawed skeleton is about 95% into the game and requires killing a very specific candle enemy that requires backtracking to a who-gives-a-shit area, and kindly asking it to drop the damn card sometime this week. This is where I get to bitch about the worst part of Circle of the Moon besides Nathan's completely useless movement, and it's the outrageous drop rates. That card that I'd need for the aforementioned skeleton transformation? The drop rate is zero point four fuckin' percent. That doesn't just effect the cards either. Health items? What are those?!

Seriously, I went for hours playing this game and didn't think healing was even a thing in Circle of the Moon besides the absurdly paltry potions that give a measly 20 hit points back, or getting to one of the sparse save points that fully heals you. Hell, you don't even get healed after boss fights. I beat probably six bosses before a piece of meat suddenly dropped from an enemy, where I double-taked and went back just to stare at it for a while. There is not a shop to speak of either, shopkeepers aren't welcome in Circle of the Moon. No buyable health items for you to help with the horrendous onslaught of tedium, but you can go ahead and enjoy all those completely useless armors you get to lug around on your person. Sure is a hard game we got here, would be nice if I could have some items, but Dracula is against formal goods trading.

Circle of the Moon is about inconvenience. It inconveniences you with movement that isn't convenient for the challenge that is set up for you as it would be for past entries. The only way to make your pathetic movement less inconvenient is to find cards inconveniently hidden away in an unknown enemy's back pocket that could potentially make certain encounters flat out trivial, like the normally problematic ice element in the underground waterway, or Dracula's nigh-impossible to dodge meteor attack in the final battle. It's all an inconvenient excuse to grind if you lack information, which this game inconveniently gives you none assuming you're not playing the Advance Collection version, which was the only convenient bit from my experience. Thanks M2.

It took me about three months to finish the save file I started on the Advance Collection a ways back after I completed Harmony of Dissonance and it's toilet noises, and it's mindbogglingly to me to realize that it was around last Christmas that I replayed and finished Aria of Sorrow again on the same collection. It wasn't necessarily a skill issue, it was a thumb issue from the horrendous dash input, and my complete apathy to this game's entire philosophy of wanting to train me on it's solitaire system only for the battle arena to give me the middle finger, and take that same system away in the ultimate show of disrespectful inconvenience. It was optional, sure, but it's existence is more than enough to make me want to transition into a volcanic state. It was even more aggravating to find out that Konami apparently bumped the experience requirements up for the western releases, thus demanding me to update the list for all the times they fucked us in the ass. I needed a lot of Picross breaks, and apparently a detour to that Peach game I didn't care about.

It kinda goes without saying, but the thought of replaying this on original hardware with the bad GBA screen, no suspend save, or in-game overlay hints of what enemies are carrying cards is less appealing to me than taking an epilator to my ballsack. I'll give it a pity star for Dracula's final boss design, I guess. I guess.

Thus concludes armchair game designer session, if you enjoyed what you've read, please like, comment, subscribe, ring the dingaling, and maybe sing me a nice song.

I'm going to bed now. Goodnight.

hoooooonkmimimimimi.

+Nathan Graves dump truck ass
+Rakugakids reference
+Yo Camilla call me
+Proof of Blood

-Nathan Graves dump truck ass
-Sinking Old Sanctuary?! More like Stinking Old Sanctuary!
-Why is my hair not as nice as Hugh's
-Where's my burrito

My first instinct was to regard this as a “flawed, but promising” take on the game-night horror boom - but as the experience sat with me, Ive started to realize: I dont think this game has a soul. I dont believe that the game itself' believes in its concept. Much like its subject matter, this feels like a stunt. A toothy-grinning facade hoping to capture nothing but attention, like a decoy predator. A skinwalker, a doppelganger. A veneer. It almost tricked me, almost got in.

Which isnt to say the game is nefarious. What Im saying is, I dont think its… well-meant. Theres an obscured hollowness to it. A fakeness. Plastic, dressed to look warm but when you touch it all you feel is cold - and there is a low-level deceptiveness to that. Your nerves sense it, they fill you with distrust. I withhold my trust from it.

There is little I can write about Skies of Arcadia that doesn't make it sound like a generic JRPG. Yet its excellence of execution makes it a quintessential RPG, and one of the best games of all time.

It took me around 35 hours to finish this game. Not for a single minute of that time was I bored, or in need of a break, or lacking enjoyment. Skies of Arcadia Legends has enough content in it for five games; I'm amazed they managed to fit it all on a single GameCube disc.

This game captures the joy of exploration in a way that many games attempt, but few succeed. The simple act of sailing through the skies, or climbing a ladder - seeing the beautiful JPEG skybox stretched out before you - or visiting a new town and seeing the designs and mannerisms of the characters there... it instilled me with such happiness. Skies of Arcadia owes a lot to its lovingly crafted world.

The characters and their motivations are hardly original, but they are so absorbing that it doesn't matter. The game also captures all that was good about anime in the 90s - there is humour, there is friendship, there is personal growth, there is love. The story takes inspiration from classic literature to imbue its characters with pathos and its environments with intrigue. We have a Captain Ahab parallel in Drachma, whose tale ends on possibly a more profound note than Moby Dick itself did; we have the mystique of the 'dark continent' portrayed in Ixa'taka; even Robinson Crusoe shows up at one point.

It's not exactly flawless: the random encounter rate is very high, and the battle animations drag on a bit. The ship battle animations are outright overlong. Some boss fights will take 40 minutes to an hour. But I didn't mind very much. Some games just have 'it' - maybe it's because the battle theme doesn't suck, but even when Skies of Arcadia shows its age and flaunts its dated aspects, it's fun to play.

Yet if I told you this was a turn-based JRPG where you explore the world to find six crystals to stop an evil empire, you'd think it's all been done before. Trust me, it's never been done this well. Skies of Arcadia feels fresh at every turn, and is a fulfilling adventure that should've already been remastered by now. All this game needs is a fast-forward button for the battle animations and widescreen support, and it'll be perfect for a new generation to discover its appeal. Go pester Sega about it.