DeviousJinjo
The poster child of an era of open-world GTA clones.
[COMING SOON]
2003
I'm pretty sure I hallucinated this whole thing. Trying to get all the endings scarred me for life.
2003
If you've only played one Tales game, it's Symphonia, and that's okay. Symphonia is long as hell and every time you think you've hit "the big twist" in the plot, the game throws another one at you. Excellent game.
Clearly made for multiplayer, but playing that multiplayer in current year is a logistical nightmare. Cool little game if you can actually find a way to play it to its fullest.
2003
Since F-Zero GX, Nintendo has made time to produce three mainline Pikmin games in-house, and zero non-GBA F-Zeros. Every mainline Pikmin game has sold worse than every mainline F-Zero game.
Now don't get me wrong, I like Pikmin. I like Pikmin a lot... but all of those games are highly similar, so the usual Nintendo reasoning that there needs to be some exciting new gameplay justification for a new entry rings pretty damned hollow here, when a Tetris/Mario/Whatever 99 style online multiplayer high speed high fidelity F-Zero seems like the biggest no-brainer technology-enabled gameplay reason for a new F-Zero game one could possibly imagine, but lets assume for a moment that current online infrastructure, even with rollback netcode, simply could not handle such a thing.
Listen. If the world can't handle the online yet, then just let Sega make an F-Zero Yakuza where Falcon pummels alien freaks and has drinks with Samurai Goroh. I don't even care if there's racing it. Please. Just please... somebody do something. PLEASE.
Now don't get me wrong, I like Pikmin. I like Pikmin a lot... but all of those games are highly similar, so the usual Nintendo reasoning that there needs to be some exciting new gameplay justification for a new entry rings pretty damned hollow here, when a Tetris/Mario/Whatever 99 style online multiplayer high speed high fidelity F-Zero seems like the biggest no-brainer technology-enabled gameplay reason for a new F-Zero game one could possibly imagine, but lets assume for a moment that current online infrastructure, even with rollback netcode, simply could not handle such a thing.
Listen. If the world can't handle the online yet, then just let Sega make an F-Zero Yakuza where Falcon pummels alien freaks and has drinks with Samurai Goroh. I don't even care if there's racing it. Please. Just please... somebody do something. PLEASE.
2003
This was one of the first Megaman games I ever played. It's still bad.
For the first several months of its life, my xbox was almost exclusively a KotOR machine. This is one of the landmark games that catapulted Bioware into the big leagues, and with good reason. The only thing holding it back from a perfect score from me is how underwhelming the combat is, particularly by modern standards.
Legacy of Goku 2 is a massive, MASSIVE improvement over LoG1. It's a night and day difference. Combat still isn't exactly deep, but at least it doesn't feel like garbage anymore. The game is much longer and more satisfying. There's still some jank here and there, and keeping up in levels for all of the playable characters can lead to grinding. Cell saga is best saga.
America's first Fire Emblem is a very solid one. The story is pretty average by series standards, but the protagonists stand out as beloved and memorable. Gameplay is pretty standard by Fire Emblem standards, but average Fire Emblem is pretty hecking great.
Finally, Battle Network perfects its cool-ass battle system. There is an absurd amount of post-game content, and even the regular story content is more present and in higher quality than most of the Battle Network games.
2003
Much of the early writing can be very difficult to stomach for a western audience, with an English dub that is even more questionable and FAR more abrasive than the one for FFX. The story does have a heart to it and despite what many might tell you it DOES follow up logically and intelligently on themes and character arcs from the first game. The villain's role in the plot feels hopelessly botched, but Yuna and Spira itself develop in ways that are both interesting and satisfying.
Gameplay is a mixed bag. This is the best implementation that ATB has ever had in 3D, but that isn't as high of a bar as you might think and whether or not that makes up for truly tedious scenario design is up to the player. If there's one recommendation I must make it's this: For the love of god, do not bother trying to do everything in the international versions. 100% completion in FFX is a pretty intense grind, but it's an interesting and satisfying one that I think is at least worth considering once in one's life. Trying to do everything in X-2 AND its Creature Creator (which feels like an entire other game in itself) is a living nightmare. I'm the kind of freak who enjoys going for platinum trophies in these games, and I even had a good time with FF9's infamously stupid trophies. In this one case I loudly declare that it is not worth it. It will only convince you to hate a game you used to like.
Gameplay is a mixed bag. This is the best implementation that ATB has ever had in 3D, but that isn't as high of a bar as you might think and whether or not that makes up for truly tedious scenario design is up to the player. If there's one recommendation I must make it's this: For the love of god, do not bother trying to do everything in the international versions. 100% completion in FFX is a pretty intense grind, but it's an interesting and satisfying one that I think is at least worth considering once in one's life. Trying to do everything in X-2 AND its Creature Creator (which feels like an entire other game in itself) is a living nightmare. I'm the kind of freak who enjoys going for platinum trophies in these games, and I even had a good time with FF9's infamously stupid trophies. In this one case I loudly declare that it is not worth it. It will only convince you to hate a game you used to like.
So I'll admit to some bias here. When I got this game as a kid, I had never played a Star Ocean game and I was under the impression that this game would take place across a bunch of different planets, similar to KotOR. Instead the game takes place almost entirely on a generic medieval fantasy planet. I was not pleased. The gameplay is nothing particularly memorable, and the end of the game features the dumbest twist in video game history.
A cozy, heartfelt timewaster for long car rides when you were a kid. A slow, plodding timewaster for you to quit less than halfway through now that you're an adult.
I have many vaguely positive memories of FFTA because frankly, it's cute, it's cozy, and its story is trying really hard to be something that it doesn't quite know how to be. What is intended as a parable about fantasy and escapism instead comes across as the regurgitated self-righteousness of a child. Marche wants to go home because his life is fine, and there's nothing wrong with that. There IS, however, something MASSIVELY wrong with unilaterally deciding whether or not a world deserves to exist. FFTA is so caught up in preaching about confronting reality that it forgets to confront any reality that disagrees. It clouds its message with so many looming ethical nightmares that the story's intended hero-child comes across as a self-righteousness brat who is, almost without hesitation, willing to delete a whole universe of conscious beings just to get what he wants: for his brother to shut up and happily sit back down in his wheelchair. Yes, this fantasy is an unhealthy one for princeling who spawned it, but there are more characters in this story, and they are inadequately considered.
I could argue that the gameplay is similarly ill considered. Battles are morbidly, HORRIFICALLY slow, and much of the balance is madness. The difficulty of FFTA will hugely depend on how long it took you to find something overpowered and how eager you were to abuse it. I don't usually gives such issues too much weight in games criticism, and I don't much hold ot against FFTA either, but it does speak to a lack of care. I really probably should not be able to cheese my way through half the game with Charm Shot on my gunner. The miniature-pony-sized elephant in the room here is that I don't like FFT combat in the first place. That's a topic for somewhere else.
100% completion of FFTA has been a long-held goal from my childhood days... but there are a lot of reasons why I've never been able to see it through until now.
I have many vaguely positive memories of FFTA because frankly, it's cute, it's cozy, and its story is trying really hard to be something that it doesn't quite know how to be. What is intended as a parable about fantasy and escapism instead comes across as the regurgitated self-righteousness of a child. Marche wants to go home because his life is fine, and there's nothing wrong with that. There IS, however, something MASSIVELY wrong with unilaterally deciding whether or not a world deserves to exist. FFTA is so caught up in preaching about confronting reality that it forgets to confront any reality that disagrees. It clouds its message with so many looming ethical nightmares that the story's intended hero-child comes across as a self-righteousness brat who is, almost without hesitation, willing to delete a whole universe of conscious beings just to get what he wants: for his brother to shut up and happily sit back down in his wheelchair. Yes, this fantasy is an unhealthy one for princeling who spawned it, but there are more characters in this story, and they are inadequately considered.
I could argue that the gameplay is similarly ill considered. Battles are morbidly, HORRIFICALLY slow, and much of the balance is madness. The difficulty of FFTA will hugely depend on how long it took you to find something overpowered and how eager you were to abuse it. I don't usually gives such issues too much weight in games criticism, and I don't much hold ot against FFTA either, but it does speak to a lack of care. I really probably should not be able to cheese my way through half the game with Charm Shot on my gunner. The miniature-pony-sized elephant in the room here is that I don't like FFT combat in the first place. That's a topic for somewhere else.
100% completion of FFTA has been a long-held goal from my childhood days... but there are a lot of reasons why I've never been able to see it through until now.
2001
Your Animal Crossing town genuinely feels like home. It's unfortunate that there's so little to do in the first game.