Just wanna put this out here real quick ever since +R got rollback I think this has become my favorite Guilty Gear period and I have no idea why nobody ever talks about this game as one of the genre's best. Actually one of the coolest games ever made, this and like UMVC3 and MBAACC are one of the few fighting games where I discover something new about it every time I play it. Still has the dopest Sol Badguy to date and I think other characters here are at their most fun, even if I think Xrd utilizes their tools better in their combo game. I will forever be depressed that force breaks never returned after this entry, which I feel like it should be a series staple given how quickly you've always been able to build meter in these games.

I feel like when Xrd's rollback drops it'll be the more requested game to play among my peers since it's a lot more approachable and its balance is way more sensible (minus Johnny and Elphelt) but I have yet to play another FG where every match feel so free-flowing and chaotic like this, where you are given so many ways to execute your characters unique gameplan, and I think how completely open ended it is works the best for Gear where everyone is trying to play a one-player game on the opponent anyways. If you're gonna design your game to be unhinged, you may as well embrace its insanity and bullshit with open arms.

Can’t believe Dunkey really tricked nine million gamers into thinking The Last Guardian was this broken dumpster fire devoid of any fun or joy. Shaking my head. The gaming community really let me down with this one, maybe some other content creator a decade later will realize it was actually good when it’ll be +120$ on retro game store shelves.

Okay, being more rational here, I’ve always found the mixed reception of The Last Guardian to be rather puzzling. You’d think the third game from industry legend Fumito Ueda, the man behind ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, arguably two of the most influential PS2 games ever, would come out with more enthusiasm behind it after its infamously long nine-year development time, spanning a whole console generation. But quite literally the opposite happened. The game was so divisive on its release by critics and audiences it’s no surprise nobody wanted to be the guinea pig that invested their time and money into it. Many of its detractors claimed this was because Trico, the big animal companion and the main mechanic of the game, was unresponsive and unreliable too frequently, giving the player more lack of control than necessary and making playing the game more frustrating than it needed to be. Which I’ve always found that odd because I feel lack of control has always been a major theme in Ueda’s games?

In ICO, you play as a little boy trying to escape a big castle with a girl named Yorda who doesn’t speak the same language and can’t make the same jumps or climbs as you, yet is relied upon to open certain doors to progress your escape. You cannot progress without Yorda, you have to work around her limitations to solve puzzles and protect her from the occasional fight with these shadowy figures. If you go too many rooms too far away from her, you risk her getting captured which kills you. So you have to escort her a lot of the time by hand or yell for her to get her to come to you, which her AI has never really been the best to be honest? It was to the point where Team Ico moved development of the game from the PS1 to the PS2 so they can have more processing power to get her to work and it can still be a bit bumbly and finicky at times. In Shadow of the Colossus, you were this warrior who wandered into a forbidden land to make a deal with a deity to resurrect a girl named Mono from the dead by riding to and killing 16 Colossi, these impossibly towering creatures made of stone and fur. You had to climb on these things and find their weak spots to stab as you wrestle with the overwhelming forces of gravity of these massive creatures trying to shake you off, which oftentimes means you have to hang on for dear life for what seems minutes on end before you can keep climbing as you watch your stamina bar get lower and lower, creating more dread of falling off and having to get back on again. It’s not as if oppression by removing control from the player has never been in Ueda’s previous work before, and these are often aspects I’ve seen praised in these two games, myself included. However, I think these are often overlooked when talking about The Last Guardian because there’s always a sense that you have more kinds of control over your own actions in those games at the end of the day. That you are the one who can hold Yorda’s hand and take her where she needs to be most of the time, that you are the one who made the decision to climb upwards on the Colossi at the most inopportune time. Ueda’s games have always had this near-perfect balance of making the grand scenario more and more learnable while still grounding the player in the reality they’re really in.

This is why I feel The Last Guardian was a harder sell for many people. While I argue the journey itself is more tonally lighthearted than his previous work, The Last Guardian is by far Ueda’s most oppressive feeling game. The boy is not The Wanderer, he’s not even Ico, he’s just about as small and frail as Yorda and can only make the smallest of jumps, hang on the tiniest of ledges, and can push only certain objects around in terrain that scales from tower to tower in a journey that asks you to go higher and higher up the clouds. You more than ever have to rely on your partner Trico, this massive impossible mix of a cat and a bird probably the size of a small house. Only she can make you reach heights you otherwise can’t and make those impossible jumps from tower to tower. Trico is probably the most convincing animal in a video game I’ve ever played, but to some, that’s a burden they can’t deal with. Trico will get hungry so you have to look for barrels sometimes to feed her, Trico will get flustered when she attacks these strange inanimate stone guards so you have to pet her to calm her down, Trico gets scared of these glass windows with eye-shaped designs on them so you have to find a way to destroy them even if you have to do some insane parkour to get to them, Trico will sometimes just flat out ignore your yelling commands by design taking longer to do what the player may see as the simplest of jumps. While Trico is the most relied-on partner character ever in an Ueda game, the boy still has to escort and command this man-eating beast from place to place to solve puzzles or to platform around large jumps. In other words, it’s ICO again, but this time the roles are reversed.

Of course the pitch of “you move an animal around that will act like an animal” was only going to appeal to the most committed to its premise, and it being Ueda’s longest game meant more people were going to fall off of it before they got a chance to see its conclusion. But I feel that aspect also overshadowed discussion of other issues the game has to be honest. You can practically feel its nine years of ambitious development time when the game starts to barely contain its targeted 30fps threshold. The environmental flourishes and details around Ueda’s legendarily creative architecture are jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and as you get higher and higher up the clouds you see more and more of what you maneuvered around down below, but sometimes I feel this hyper fixation on its details mixed with its advanced lighting system can obfuscate puzzle information more often than it needed to, and I feel Team Ico knew this, which is why the game relies on its tip systems too much. There are not only button prompts that appear frequently on the top right of the screen to give clues on what you can interact with, but narration from the boy's perspective will appear similar to Shadow of the Colossus if the game detects the player being on a puzzle for too long. It’s kind of a shame that Ueda’s games still feature these immersion-breaking UI elements present and criticized in Shadow of the Colossus for years with no real way of turning them off, but I feel the game would’ve only been more frustrating on a first time playthrough if they weren’t there. Then there are the occasional physics engine issues that the game will stumble upon, while I found the physics complied with me more than most Havok engine games do to be honest, I did have a moment in my playthrough where when Trico jumped the boy was suddenly teleported upwards which made me fall towards my impending doom, so it’s by no means perfect even if I had a better time with it. The camera is by far my biggest issue with the game. It’s this fickle mistress that only focuses on what it wants to. Sometimes it’ll autofocus on Trico, or the ledge you need to jump on, and sometimes you have to adjust it yourself. Sometimes the camera will get stuck in tight environments with you and Trico which will reset itself with this awkward cut to black which can repeat over and over again rather than just clipping out of bounds to give the player a better view from behind similar to God Hand. The Last Guardian's technical ambitions from its AI to its environments can be seen from a distance as impressive, but its lack of gracefullness at times can also be seen as its downfall, and it’s no wonder why the game had the hardest time sticking with players the most.

It… might be my favorite Ueda game?

It might be too early to tell as I’m writing this, but it just feels right to say. This game just did it all for me. While ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are up there as some of my personal favorite games, I feel The Last Guardian is the most successful in what it sets out to do: to bond the player with its partner character. I never really particularly cared for Yorda or Mono or even Agro as much as I wish I could despite those characters being the central emotional core of the story. While I appreciate the former for its wordless communication between Yorda and Ico along their journey, I can understand the criticisms against the latter. It’s hard to place the corpse of a woman you’ve never interacted with in front of the player and expect them to care, which is why I feel players connected with Agro the horse a lot more since it’s someone you used to venture around the place even if all you did was ride on it and commanded where to go. Trico is that but taken a step further. Yes, Trico acts like a big dumb animal, but somehow managing to get her around these dark tight corridors with traps or these sky-bound vistas feels like accomplishing little miracles one at a time. The game features Ueda’s most creative puzzle design yet, asking the player to constantly think with Trico in mind, and it’s where the rooms where you are alone without Trico are the most pulse-pounding anxiety-inducing. Without that protection from Trico, you are more in danger from other threats like the stone guards or extreme heights you can’t fall on Trico as a failsafe. About halfway through I looked at Trico less like an obstacle and started to look at Trico as the guardian she really is. And you know what I think?

It’s rad as hell! And it’s fun! Seriously! Every time you get Trico to do her earth-shattering cat pounce from one stone pillar to the next it feels like this major accomplishment that the two of you managed to pull off. Every moment you have to climb around Trico when she sees an eye-shaped glass window hung by a stone tower and then get there by doing some mind-bending platforming as you look down at the stomach-churning distance between you and the ground (no seriously, jesus christ lol) and having to jump all the way down on her back is so immensely intense but pulling it off to progress just works. Every time Trico saves you from an army of mysterious stone guards is the ultimate “sick ‘em fido” of video games, yet the game always reminds you to comfort Trico after with a few pets, and maybe pull out a few spears thrown at her body. It’s this dedication the game has with these moment-to-moment connections between you and Trico as you two help each other out closer and closer to the end that makes the later moments where she starts to break design conventions all the more convincing and powerful. The Last Guardian to me is a game of little accomplishments up to the grand finale.

The Last Guardian is not a perfect game, and it’s hardly one I can see the casual player really sticking with very long. Even I had moments where I wished Trico would comply with me more and wished the game’s framerate didn’t give me a headache, but the last three hours of this game to me are borderline perfect, climaxing to Ueda’s strongest story beats yet, somehow managing to top himself with his best ending yet (a man already known for crafting the best endings ever). All the coincidental frustration I had with The Last Guardian seemed fleeting and diminutive. By the end of it, I was more frustrated at being reminded of its dismissive reputation that caused me to hold it off this long. The Last Guardian should be a testament to Team Ico’s mastery of storytelling through game design, rather than be left in the shadows of its predecessor's legacies, but even if it stays within those shadows of obscurity forever, I’m happy to have stuck with the journey through The Nest, atop Trico’s feathery back.

The Last Guardian is a game of accomplishments, and much like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, stands just as tall as those games do, as the achievement it undoubtedly is.

Okay,

I've dabbled into a lot of Character Action games for the past three years and was excited to finally give this one a swing since the 3D Ninja Gaiden games are the only few CAGs I have yet to explore, but after finishing this one I can't help but find myself having very mixed feelings on it. I feel like an insane person for not liking this as much as I should, considering how much praise this game gets around the CAG community, and while there are aspects of NGB I like a lot, I couldn't help but be a little dissatisfied with this one.

That disappointment stings more for me considering I took a full week trying to get the game physically and pulling out my old Xbox only to find out my Xbox's disc drive stopped working when I was testing it, an issue notorious with old Xboxes. The Xbox is kind of a worthless console, like if this thing didn't have Halo I'd probably prefer owning a Dreamcast. Couldn't emulate this game either because Xbox emulation is still very far behind and unstable. But luckily I still had my 360 laying around (until I realized I had no controllers for it so I had to spend another 30$ on one) so I could finally play it. Thanks Microsoft for at least having decent backwards compatibility on your platforms. This'll be the one credit I'll give you, you evil bastards.

Tangent aside, finally booting up this game after all the trouble I went through had me on the edge of my seat. The game makes a strong first impression. This is hands down one of the best looking Xbox games and it still holds up fairly well to this day with the exception of overly shiny, plasticy looking character models common in the 6th gen era of consoles, but even they have a higher polygon count not seen before from that era. The most notably impressive aspect is the animation. Ryu’s movement and attacks have a perfect amount of weight and impact to them. Whether you’re running on walls, doing the Izuna drop, or doing a fully charged Ultimate Technique, the game never stops selling you on the idea that Ryu is this badass skilled ninja. His weapons also have some of the most visceral sound effects in any CAG I’ve played. The swords have this loud comical slicing sound upon every hit while the flail’s whipping sounds always made it fun to, well, flail around. The presentation of this game cannot be understated and the fact the game always runs at 60FPS (arguably the most necessary inclusion for these types of games) is beyond impressive. On a technical level, Ninja Gaiden Black is still a mind-boggling marvel.

The game also makes it apparent how different it’s combat is almost immediately from it’s competition. You notice right away Ryu’s moves have quick start up frames but a ton of end lag to them, necessitating every attack to be a commitment and inviting enemies to punish Ryu upon missing, and enemies don’t let up, they’re dynamically aggressive and hit like bulldozers. Ninja Gaiden Black enemies see you from a country mile and will make an immediate B-line towards Ryu upon smelling him. They’ll charge in numbers, dodge/jump over your attacks, grab you if you’re blocking for too long, throw projectiles or shoot guns at you etc. This makes every encounter an immediate threat to be dealt with, but upon successfully killing them you get rewarded with Essence, a multi-purpose item that either gives you currency, health, or Ki charges (a limited use special move Ryu can use), but what’s interesting is charging a strong attack near these will absorb them and decreases the time needed for an Ultimate Technique, a super powerful move that does devastating damage and makes Ryu fully invincible during the animation, but normally requires a long charge up time to activate them. Normally these Essences are picked up automatically near Ryu, but if Ryu is blocking they won’t be collected, allowing the player to choose whether to take them for their bonuses or absorb them with a strong attack for a quick UT. This turns the combat encounters into a gigantic split-second decision making balancing act where the player upon every kill has to decide whether to collect their earnings, heal, refill their Ki, or sacrifice all of that for a more aggressive option in combat. All of this makes Ninja Gaiden Black’s combat stand out from other CAGs I’ve played, and on paper this makes for a really engaging combat system. Here’s the thing though, as I got more comfortable with how NGB works, I found I liked these ideas more in isolation.

The reality is because a lot of Ryu’s normal combos aren’t rewarding enough to justify them in normal use, it railroads a lot of the combat into doing the more obviously viable options. A lot of Ryu’s combos surprisingly don’t do a ton of damage, can’t deal crowd control very well, and carry a lot of end lag baggage with them, making them feel flimsy and weak to throw out. Except for one: The Izuna Drop. For the low cost of 100 Essence at the shop, Ryu gets a combo from a light > strong attack launcher that puts him in the air to execute it more safely, instantly kills whatever is in it, and does a small AoE when he lands on the ground to deal damage around Ryu which makes him more safe upon landing. This works for every human-sized enemy in the game, and while the Izuna Drop is indeed the sickest move in video game history, I begrudgingly became rather tired of looking at the same animation for the 200th time to set up essences around me for UTs with every Ninja/Soldier/Human-sized fiend demon thing that approached me. To compensate for this, you sometimes have to fight larger sized enemies with super armor moves or weak flying enemies that ask you to think more outside the box, but even they have a samey feeling strategy attached to dealing with them. Because UTs reward is so massively safe and strong, this makes fighting the larger enemies like the dinosaur fiends or zombies with full UTs the more sane option and the same can be said after killing a few smaller enemies and waiting for the rest of them to charge into a UT. I see a lot of praise go towards the humanoid enemies in this game like the Spider Ninjas, but not these enemies and because none of them are fun or interesting, and don’t get me started on the command grabbing Ghost Fishes that spawn in front of you in swarms and can pin you down and loop you if you don’t mash fast enough. For about 90% of the encounters in this game I found myself rolling back and holding Y near essences to watch the same five second animation over and over again or positioning myself to do an Izuna Drop on a human enemy over and over again, and after a while I couldn’t help but find the combat surprisingly dull and stale, no matter how cathartic that Izuna Drop animation is.

But if I wasn’t straight up bored by the lack of options in combat, I was frustrated with the design decisions that the game was built around. The most obvious complaint being that Ryu has a 3rd person manual camera throughout but lacks a hard Lock-On mechanic similar to games that predates NGB like Kingdom Hearts or Devil May Cry and the game’s soft Lock-On is not really intelligent, making it a real hassle to reposition the camera in the middle of combat to see the enemy only for a move to miss because Ryu wasn’t targeting the correct person, or if he was targeting anything at all. I’ve grown more and more disdain for manual cameras in CAGs that aren’t Bayonetta or God Hand (But even Platinum Games had to compensate for Bayo’s camera by making it so enemies don’t attack you unless they’re on screen, despite that game both having a soft and hard lock-on. This is why the isometric camera in The Wonderful 101 was good, people! Because you didn’t have to manually adjust the camera to see what you’re fighting! It just simply displayed everything on screen! It was just too “different” for you guys to appreciate!) so this is like a CAG nightmare for me. It also doesn’t help that the game doesn’t really care where these enemies are placed. A lot of praise is given to this game for it’s Resident Evil-esque level design, but the cramp hallways mixed with the aggressive enemies makes it so you will get side-swiped by enemies running at you with an attack near a corner or shot at by a bullet across the level on a first playthrough. It’s like they designed the map first and made the decision for the game to have hyper-aggressive AI after. The most funny example I found highlighting this haphazard enemy placement was at a save point in chapter 6 I walked out and was immediately surrounded and hit by three Spider Ninjas that were spawned just a little off-screen from the save point. This was the only example of this happening near a save point to be granted and may have been intentional for this one save point, but stuff like this happens in normal play nearly all the time, especially in the city missions.

Speaking of the city, let me bring back that Resident Evil-esque exploration into the spotlight again. A lot of praise is given to it’s lock and key design similar to those games, but here I don’t like it. Because this game is chapter based, when a chapter ends there are a lot of times the game doesn’t give you good direction on where to go next unless you’re in a linear set piece chapter. You kind of just have to stumble around the city to look for a key item that just might be relevant to the current chapter you’re on. (Some of these items you grab don’t even get used till the end game like the stone tablets.) and some methods of getting them are clumsy. Like in chapter 5 you’re supposed to go into this bar and the guy tells you that you need a ticket to get in. I’ve walked around the plaza for a while fighting the same enemies respawning over and over again only to figure out I was supposed to go into Muramasa’s shop and buy something to trigger a cutscene of him giving me the ticket, even though before I triggered the “need ticket” cutscene I actually visited Muramasa’s shop beforehand. I have no idea why he couldn’t just give me the ticket when I visited his shop for the first time, but it made the realization all the more frustrating when unintuitive flags like this show up in the game’s progression. The level design also makes the chapters long dude, like I was clocking in about 30 minutes to an hour each chapter, ballooning the runtime to about 17 hours on my first playthrough (HowLongToBeat reports around 16 ½ hours.) making this the longest CAG I’ve played so far. Even The Wonderful 101 which I always hear criticized as being too long is only 14 hours, and that kind of pacing for an action game like this is grueling and tiresome! Chapter 11 is all about fucking swimming in water for half an hour and then the boss fight shows up and it’s Doku, your rival fight the game built up to! In a level where you barely have combat encounters for the entirety of it! Why!? This is like Jeanne 4 being after the 40 minute After Burner level in Bayonetta levels of bad here and nobody talks about it! At least let me dry off my boots a little.

The boss fights in Ninja Gaiden Black is kind of what kills this game the most for me personally. One of the things I love the most about CAGs is how many of them come up with very unique and interesting boss fight concepts to test your mastery of the game’s mechanics. They’re usually my favorite parts in each of these games, especially rival fights that pit you against an opponent that mirror the strength of your character like Vergil from Devil May Cry, Jeanne from Bayonetta, Azel from God Hand etc. Good boss fights alone is what gets me coming back to replay these games, and I think here in NGB they’re all kinda bad! Don’t think I can name a single one I liked except for maybe Alma, because she dodges around your attacks dynamically which forces you to deal with her attack animations and punish them quickly, which can lead to her getting knocked down for more attacks on her deleting mass chunks of her health bar. Everything else though are either kind of boring like the boss in Chapter 4, or the bone dinosaur, or the dragon, or the rehash fights of the tentacle monster or the elemental worms (You hit a big thing that doesn’t flinch and dodge it’s slow super armor attacks at the right time.) or boss fights in the military base chapter where you fight two tanks and a helicopter where all you do is shoot arrows at it with your bow and roll away to go refill them. (Boy I hope that's not a trend in the sequel!!!) and then there's just fights that don’t make a lot of sense even after beating them? Doku was easily the biggest disappointment for me because he not only highlights how limited your combat options really are in this game with his arbitrary windows to deal damage to him without him blocking. (Speaking of which, you get this jumping dive attack with your Dragon Sword called “Flying Swallow” that kinda breaks the game, and Team Ninja knew this so they made the bosses simply not take damage from it, rather than just rebalancing the move better. Lol.). It was incredibly frustrating to go after him with a laggy attack while he was throwing his sword only for the sword to magically appear back into his hands, blocking the attack and punishing me before I got a chance to dodge roll. Very unsatisfying rival fight, and then you get to fight him again in his spirit form with a worse arena and camera! Aw yeah now this is gaming!

Look, I get it, I get that there's a lot of people who are really into this game. Whether I watch videos of it, scroll through reviews, or talk about it in Discord servers, there's a lot of people who herald this game as "THE GOAT" or "ONE OF THE BEST XBOX GAMES" or "ONE OF THE BEST CAGS" and yeah I get it, there's still a lot to like about this one. It's presentation is slick and sharp like a katana blade, the game does it's best to give Ryu all the grace of a badass ninja whether he's running on wall to wall or elegantly finishing off crowds of enemies in rapid succession. Putting all my grudges with the combat aside, there's a genuine satisfaction in stumbling into a room with seemingly infinitely spawning enemies and after clearing it being rewarded with a health upgrade, it triggers all the dopamine receptors in my brain most of these dumbass games give me. But like any other blade you use for too long, I found it to dull out on me after a while. Annoyances I've had with the combat and level design kept rearing their ugly heads over and over again and I just kept wanting the game to be over 4 hours ago and yet Team Ninja kept insisting to throw more gimmicky sections for another half hour chapter at me. I know this review is probably my longest and rambly yet, but as I said, this is what the game did to me: it made me feel like an insane person bro! So many times this game made me turn over my shoulder and look at my library of CAGs I could be replaying that arguably does a lot of the things this game does but better. I thought about replaying this game on Hard mode before writing this down, but then I thought about fighting those fucking Ghost Fishes again and figured I'd take my internally planted advice and go replay Bayonetta instead.

Sorry guys. :/

The one thing I love about this website is how its community spreads word of mouth very niche games I've overlooked that ended up becoming some personal favorites of mine. I discovered The Silver Case trilogy, Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, ZeroRanger, Yume Nikki, God Hand among other games all because people here share their passion for these games. Got a very good track record of games that were indirectly recommended to me, so I decided it'd be fun to hop on a trend going around by making a recommendation list to help get some more ideas. What was one of those games I got? Fuckin' Taz-Mania baby! LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOooOooOoOoOoOoOoO!!!!!!!

Recommended by user @letshugbro I immediately skimmed through the Backloggd page to see an abundance of negative reviews, but more specifically towards the Sega Game Gear version, I knew I was in for the sewer dive of a lifetime. I couldn't turn this one down. I just had to see why this game specifically is a "meme" and I had to join in. So I downloaded not just the ROM for the Game Gear version, but the ROMs for every other version. So here are my bite-sized reviews for every version of this nightmare shovelware franchise. Thanks @letshugbro and I hope you enjoy, because I sure didn't!

Game Gear: "Holy fuck" was the first sentence I murmured to myself upon booting this version up. I was immediately assaulted by ear-piercing sounds regurgitated by the Texas Instruments SN76489 sound chip packaged in the Game Gear to create this title screen """music""". I'm sure parents upon hearing these screeching sounds coming from their Looney Toon-loving little kid's device was the memo that they got ripped off, but this, unfortunately, is not the exception. You as the Tazmanian Devil will hear a variety of these awful sounds for the whole 15 minute 1CC and the gameplay matches with the pain of your ears. You get thrown in and immediately have to run away from a boulder as you pick up items to keep your stamina up because apparently every time Taz does his little spin tornado maneuver he loses years off his miserable life span. Then after that, you realize you don't even get to move Taz for like half the game. He's always in a minecart, snowboarding without his consent, slipping on ice, attempting to fly, etc. The only thing the player really does in this game is press A to avoid an oncoming obstacle as you watch the game try to process your input in a glorious 10 frames per second because this is the cutting edge hardware of the Game Gear, baby! We need all the processing power we can get for those beautiful 4096 colors! All so we can display Taz's miserable existence for the player to experience! It's absolutely fascinating just how much sheer wrath this software produced in me that I was about to go feral just hearing the high-pitched morse codes of the developers call for help while attempting to slog myself through tar-feeling lag. I think the funniest thing this playthrough produced was discovering that Retroarch's Game Gear emulator on stage 8 crashes attempting to load the thing, and the save-state that I created proved the crash was consistent too. I have a gaming PC I bought like 5 years ago, The Game Gear was such a useless footnote in Sega's long history of useless hardware nobody bothered to optimize a half-decent emulator for it to preserve rancid works like this, but I also took it as a message from God telling me to stop and move on with my life because I was hurting myself. So this was my first (and probably last) Game Gear experience. Great start!

Master System: This was the only version of the game that I actually stomached to finish. Don't get me wrong, it's still a boring Sonic the Hedgehog Master System clone where Taz's acceleration and deceleration is so inconsistent from one leap of faith to the next you're bound to suffer a cheap death or two, but everything else is kinda inoffensive. You barely get scratched by the enemies because of your Taz Spin, so the only trouble you will face are the bombs littered about the place that Taz will eat upon contact like a dog attempting to eat whatever non-edible thing you dropped on the floor mistaking it for food. The secret speedrunning gamer trick here is to Taz Spin from one hill to the next and pray you don't fall off and within 10 minutes you will beat Taz-Mania for the Master System and your Dominos pizza will be delivered at your doorstep. Much like the Game Gear version, this was my first Master System game. A boring platformer made by like 5 people to mimic the success of another game made for more successful hardware but with a fucking one-off Looney Toon character. Cool!

Genesis: Unironically as bad as the Game Gear version. This game has the worst collision detection and camera I've ever played in a 2D platformer. Taz's sprite is a large lad meaning the camera is zoomed up into his ugly mug at all times meaning every jump gives you about 5 pixels to react to whatever is next on the screen, and somehow every platform's hitbox is just off in every way. The only novel thing about this game is hearing the little cartoony sound effects everything makes in this game whenever Taz or an enemy interacts with something, but what starts off as slightly endearing became annoying real fast hearing the game mock you with wiggling tongue sounds and other nonsense as you fail another jump with no fault of your own. I turned this one off real fast. Awesome!

SNES: After three failed attempts at making a half-decent platformer for the Tazmanian Devil, the devs at Sunsoft gave up and decided to make this one OutRun but instead of racing, you as the Tazmanian Devil chase birds on the side of the road while dodging incoming traffic like a deer. Actually attempting to grab birds in a camera perspective made for race cars sounds just as janky as you'd think it is, and it's the only gameplay loop Sunsoft offers here. Just a worthless, ill-considered game probably made out of a mixture of obligation and spite. Fuck yeah!!!

After finishing all of these games in a discord call with my friends I realized something. Despite all of these games having different gameplay styles, level design, and even developers, they all shared one common thing: they brought out some kind of anger, malice, or rage within me. If you know the Tazmanian Devil, he is the embodiment of the chaos that ensues with overwhelming anger, so much so that his very well-being is reduced to being nothing more than a feral creature. Any pain he ensues to himself causes him to create one dusty whirlwind to inflict that same pain to others, not by accident, but out of sheer will from the wrath within him. Playing Taz-Mania was like being caught within Taz's pain, and what was left was 4 ROM files I will never touch again and 2 hours of my life wasted. If that isn't conveying the emotions of a character through game design, I dunno what is! Yeah, that's right, fuck you Drakengard! Taz-Mania was made miserable on purpose years before you, where's its 3-hour analysis videos on YouTube!?

I don't even like Looney Toons all that much lol.

My knowledge of the whole danmaku shmup genre is about as limited as my interest in them. The only two I really got into was during when I was exploring Treasure's catalog of games with Radiant Silvergun and Ikargua, two games I very much enjoy but only on a baseline level. Never had the thought of wanting to 1CC them personally. In fact, the thought of sitting down to attempt 1ccing something like Radiant Silvergun would admittedly be a nightmare even if I do like that game very much casually lol.

Everything else though? I either never played or don't have much of an interest to. I don't know much about your Touhous or your DoDonPachis, I don't know what the hell a Ketsui or a Battle Garegga or even a Gradius is. You show me something that resembles a spaceship, an anime girl, or an anime girl in a spaceship maneuvering and shooting around a plethora of pixelated color vomit representing as "bullets" in a claustrophobic 240x320 vertical space I would probably respond to it as "Neat", but that's as far as I would go.

I think my disinterest in the genre stems from not wanting to invest time into learning an arcade game I don't necessarily care about, like most of these games kinda look the same to me. There needs to be more substance to a game for me than just learning about how to dodge this and that bullet pattern at this and that time at X Y and Z coordinates to really invest my interest in wanting to spend time to master a game that's all about skill mastery, y'know?

But even despite my lack of knowledge, interest, or even care of the whole shoot-em-up genre, after finally sitting down with all of ZeroRangers 8 stages and its batshit insane finale sequence, I can say that I do know this: ZeroRanger is a damn good game.

This may be one of the most overlooked indie darlings of the late 2010s and it's a damn shame. This game had a long arduous development spanning 10 years by two dudes, with some help from other outside sources, and you can feel just how much passion illuminates from this game right at the very first stage of gameplay. This game was practically built on a bromance.

And I think that passion is shown by just how much ZeroRanger just wants you to keep playing it. When you start a new save file, you are thrusted into a grim unwinnable situation: playing the game that you know nothing about. It expects you to lose on your first go, but then shows to the player (after their mind has been blown out of their skull) the continue system, showing that the points they've accumulated on each run will go into getting more continues, encouraging the player right then and there that despite the challenge ahead, the game will throw bones to you as long as you keep trying. It tells you on the game over screen "Never give up!" and then a real opening cutscene plays with these gorgeous visuals following with a triumphant tune, turning what was a dark moment into an adventurous one. This is ZeroRanger's true intent: this is a game about overcoming what seems impossible.

What makes ZeroRanger's challenge so approachable is its accessibility. The game's bullet patterns aren't as immediately wild as what you would find in a Touhou or a HellSinker until the later half, and the game gives stages frequent checkpoints and will let you return to a stage you haven't completed upon a failed run, as well as giving you those aforementioned continues the more points you gathered. But what's interesting is despite this, ZeroRanger still doesn't hold back any punches. The game is still relentlessly challenging but it understands the player won't learn its ins and outs by slamming their faces into a wall. These little guidances don't take away any of the tension and challenge found in these stages and will still punish the player accordingly if they fail to keep up. It's still a game that wants you to one day do it all on one run, but it's also a game that teaches the player on each and every stage with each and every boss, or for a player that just wants to enjoy it casually. It's one of the few exceptions of a game that is accessible without compromising its challenge, which I have to commend because developers still to this day haven't found a way to really balance the two without one feeling too handholdy or the other feeling too punishing.

It also helps that ZeroRangers presentation here is just on point. It's got gorgeous detailed sprite work and the whole game sticks to this bold dark green and bright orange color palette that not also looks striking but also makes it impossible for bullets to blend in with the background. You know you gotta shoot the green thing and it spits out contrasting bright orange bullets that are easy to track your eyes with even if you aren't looking at the whole screen. Now granted, late at night the orange can strain my eyes a bit, but it also helps that the game has a plethora of visual settings that you can adjust. Using scanlines helped, I personally like the Hori ones!

Every stage also just impresses me not only visually but auditory. The game has this crunchy sound design when either pelting something with bullets or blowing shit up. It may not be as visceral sounding as every shot from Ikaruga, but it still does its job by making it satisfying to just blow the spaceships up. The soundtrack though? Nothing short of fantastic here. Apparently, the devs were inspired by Undertale's soundtrack to create bangers of their own, and despite it being comprised of MIDI's, the layering and melodies are just incredible here. Every stage I kept saying to myself "Ah this is the best track... actually this is the best track... actually this is the best track... actually this is the-" and so on. (My personal favorite is The Sea Has Returned. Those fucking saxophones give me goosebumps every time man.)

The game's passion doesn't just stop with its challenging gameplay or its gorgeous visuals and head-banging music though, one thing that gripped me was just how effortlessly cool it becomes. It starts out innocently enough on its first two stages, but then you hit stage 3 and the game goes total apeshit mode. If the references to other shmups or games flew over your head, then maybe the 1,000 on-the-nose references to every influential mecha anime ever won't. You'd think it'd be obnoxious to be asked by the devs over and over again "Hey do you like Gurren Lagann!?" or "Hey do you like Neon Genesis Evangelion!?" but they're presented with such a bold earnestness to them that I can't help but feel their inclusions are just warm smiles from the devs every time I see them. It also doesn't take away from the game's own story. By the halfway mark of this 4-hour game, I was completely engrossed by what it was going to throw at me next and was rewarded with a brand new insane set-piece and set of challenges to overcome, climaxing with a finale that was harrowing but beautiful and personal. People weren't kidding when they said this is a game that you don't want to spoil yourself on, so if you haven't gotten around to it, now's your chance to experience this if I've enticed you enough. (If the game feels a bit basic in its first two stages, don't worry, the game introduces a new mechanic that helps you tackle enemies and bullets that rivals Ikaruga's acclaimed polarity system.)

So, despite me beating ZeroRanger, I'm going to be playing it again very soon. Probably numerous times until I can actually 1CC it. I haven't really imposed this challenge on me since wanting to 1CC Super Monkey Ball Expert-Extra, but I feel the need to because like Super Monkey Ball I just found ZeroRanger to be just so damn charming man. This is clearly a passion project through and through and it's so rare to see a game come out with this much love and care put into every minute of gameplay that I can't help but fall in love with it. System Erasure did the impossible by making a game to attract people who aren't normally into shmups while still being a celebration of the genre, so now it's time for me to see the invisible and keep playing this game until I can checkmark that "Mastered" tab because this game just welcomes me with open arms every time I boot it up.

Row row fight the power.

Look I can commend the devs for trying to create a "simple" fighting game but you can also practically hear them going

"Oh wittle baby, no no no you can't have optwin Swewects and wearn combos they'll hurt your wittle head poor baby, you don't need to go into training mode. Awwww poor baby you need your bottle of milk wittle scrub???"

Straight up most condescending fighting game of all time and plays like garbo, I promise anyone who is interested in fighting games that you can pick up anything else instead if you put your mind into it. Don't do this to yourself, please.