Real ones
Games I adore.
109 Games
holy fuck
Hand on heart love hate relationship with this game for being so good it ruined the entire metroidvania genre for me. Struggling with all my life to go from this to any other, where the rooms all look the fucking same and there's next to no vertical character progression.
hommina hommina burr-do doo
It truly is Marvelous. Instantly my new favourite Zelda game. Forgoes dungeons & combat, and instead focuses on exploration, puzzles and Warioware adjacent minigames. Manages to be wholly unrepetitive through a focus on introducing new scenarios and rewarding experimentation. Boggles the absolute fucking mind that this wasn't localised officially, immoral of Nintendo to keep such a secret. Grab the fan translation!
(Played on an emulator with a rewind feature, so I could quickly go back and re-do a battle that I lost. Genuinely don't think I'd enjoy this as much as I did without such a great time-saving feature)
Instantly one of my all-time favourite JRPGs. Absolutely incredible spritework that brings the expressive characters and gorgeous environments to life. The soundtrack is a pandora's box of unforgettable melodies. The combat system evolves as you progress and eventually becomes one of the most captivating styles of combat I've ever seen in a JRPG, with its genius obfuscation of an ATB/stamina system. The story is a goofy hodge-podge of every trope imaginable, but the characters are so fun it all strings together perfectly.
Instantly one of my all-time favourite JRPGs. Absolutely incredible spritework that brings the expressive characters and gorgeous environments to life. The soundtrack is a pandora's box of unforgettable melodies. The combat system evolves as you progress and eventually becomes one of the most captivating styles of combat I've ever seen in a JRPG, with its genius obfuscation of an ATB/stamina system. The story is a goofy hodge-podge of every trope imaginable, but the characters are so fun it all strings together perfectly.
DK on the Gameboy features the best movelist Mario has ever had. It may be a tad overlong, but I don't mind it in so much as the levels can be cleared shockingly quickly with a deft understanding of how to maneuver through them.
(Also needs a replay but I remember loving it)
I was never really one for point-and-click adventure puzzlers - more due to lack of trying than anything else. Maybe I should get into them in a bigger way - there are certainly some banger entries that have flown under my radar, but the ones I've earnestly attempted have been clangers, and I don't want to dedicate too much of this review to throwing namedrops under a bus (besides Deponia, that one deserves being nailed to the autobahn). Even as much as The Neverhood was a stylistically formative pillar of my life in my developing years and one that I swear by even now, I can never entirely escape the little conceit in my head that I know the game itself banks off of that style hard enough to leave actual design and writing by the wayside.
It's great, but is it Monkey Island 2 good? God no.
MI2 is a wonderfully transformative twist on the first game that understandably leaves many people behind. I personally adored its shift into a creepier, sadder atmosphere - where the first game's player experience is akin to a child discovering a new favourite theme park ride, excitedly exploring the sets in doe-eyed awe at the light and magic of it all. 2 is like finally stepping out of the funhouse and catching glimpses into the employee backrooms, seeing mascot characters take their mask off and putting out a cigarette on an animatronic. Everything here seems to just work in the game's favour; the puzzles are somewhat more streamlined and give me the impression of ride designers running out of ideas and budget. The palette's increase from 16 to 256 on screen colours at a time afforded the illustrators more licence to breathe some character into the environments, which funnily enough is the exact opposite of what they did - Monkey Island 2 feels downright dead to look at at times, even the vibrant front-end stages the amusement park designers want you to see have a sickly dingy grotty energy to them. The writing is just as funny as the first game but comes across far less comedic because of the dryness to the character delivery. These employees are here to pay their rent and go home, dead-eyed hucksters here to exploit the dream factory. Love it so much it all just works, and creates a uniquely textured feel to so many of the interactions in the game that for all intents and purposes should be childhood idyll. Which is what makes the ending so good to me, one of the few times I've seen "it was all a dream" handled so well because it recontextualises not only everything that happened earlier in the game, but the first entry too where the signs become strikingly obvious when pointed out. Without explicitly giving away too much, it's clear that Guybrush is an unhappy child coming to learn that his fantasy happy place is giving diminishing returns. The problem with dreams is that you have to wake up eventually.
It's great, but is it Monkey Island 2 good? God no.
MI2 is a wonderfully transformative twist on the first game that understandably leaves many people behind. I personally adored its shift into a creepier, sadder atmosphere - where the first game's player experience is akin to a child discovering a new favourite theme park ride, excitedly exploring the sets in doe-eyed awe at the light and magic of it all. 2 is like finally stepping out of the funhouse and catching glimpses into the employee backrooms, seeing mascot characters take their mask off and putting out a cigarette on an animatronic. Everything here seems to just work in the game's favour; the puzzles are somewhat more streamlined and give me the impression of ride designers running out of ideas and budget. The palette's increase from 16 to 256 on screen colours at a time afforded the illustrators more licence to breathe some character into the environments, which funnily enough is the exact opposite of what they did - Monkey Island 2 feels downright dead to look at at times, even the vibrant front-end stages the amusement park designers want you to see have a sickly dingy grotty energy to them. The writing is just as funny as the first game but comes across far less comedic because of the dryness to the character delivery. These employees are here to pay their rent and go home, dead-eyed hucksters here to exploit the dream factory. Love it so much it all just works, and creates a uniquely textured feel to so many of the interactions in the game that for all intents and purposes should be childhood idyll. Which is what makes the ending so good to me, one of the few times I've seen "it was all a dream" handled so well because it recontextualises not only everything that happened earlier in the game, but the first entry too where the signs become strikingly obvious when pointed out. Without explicitly giving away too much, it's clear that Guybrush is an unhappy child coming to learn that his fantasy happy place is giving diminishing returns. The problem with dreams is that you have to wake up eventually.
pure, crisp & warm. lingers long after the final chord has sounded.
3 Comments
I'm u
Thanks for writing detailed reasons for the entries in this list. Always appreciate it when people do that in their "my fav games" lists.
Fernabo
7 months ago