I bounced off this version hard, but eventually clicked with a fan translation of the original NES game after playing 1 & 2. To me the this version turns an incredibly slick NES game into an incredibly clunky DS game, burying the charm of the original. It feels slow in ways the original does not.

Bizarre balance changes are made that undermine the game - instead of storing up capacity to switch jobs, your characters just become pathetically ill and weak when you change jobs, making new jobs seem uniformly awful and punishing you for trying to experiment. I can only imagine how bad this is in the game's many forced job switch sequences I didn't reach on the DS.

Jobs have been rebalanced; Onion Knight, the iconic starter job is removed and gated behind an online connectivity feature and functionally inaccessible for anyone playing now; Ninja & Sage the capstone jobs of the original game have been nerfed to preserve the endgame viability of other jobs, spoiling their function as super jobs.

My personal recommendation is to avoid this and try the original, unless you absolutely cannot stand pixel art.

Absolutely delightful little mobile game that's fast, fun and fluid. Easy to fit in a quick session waiting for the subway or while you're waiting for a match. I found it a bit grating at first- a lot of scope to just get unlucky and die for reasons beyond your control, but as you get more jumps you become more and more able to string together long combos and have fun. It feels super good to line up a jump that grabs three fruit, bounces off a wall, bonks an enemy and then pops you into a cannon.

If you have Netflix, a phone, and time to kill, definitely check this out.

The ending is also very cute and funny!

I was looking for a very straight forward JRPG to play, and this game was that exactly. Really very little twist on the genre, just playing everything straight, a little fantasy adventure where you level up your stats and progress through a linear story. I think even within the Dragon Quest franchise this is one of the more conservative titles - the story doesn't span generations or shift focus between multiple protagonists. If that's what you're looking for, this is a cute game with a fun cast and it isn't too long in the tooth. That said, I do have some issues.

The pacing isn't the best, both narratively and mechanically. At the start of the game you're quickly moving between short vignettes, basically a new episodic story for every location you visit, and filling out your party as you go. However, once you get the main four party members you won't see another for 20-30 hours (never, in the PS2 version), and it takes a very long time for the thread connecting the different adventures to become clear. The individual stories are fun, but it's frustrating just how long you spend one step behind Dhoulmagus.

I was surprised too by the lack of depth to the game's mechanics. This is my first Dragon Quest, I'm used to Final Fantasies, or other games that present you with complex systems to master, which reward engagement with vast power. In this game you just level up higher and slap on better gear for marginal stat increases. You can stack buffs for powerful attacks, but most of the late game bosses can simply undo buffs on a whim. Advancement is linear, not geometric, so the difference between overlevelling and overgearing for the lategame bosses is not going to make a huge difference, you will most likely have a prolonged battle with the final boss no matter what. Personally, I like having deeper systems to engage with and the ability to overshoot the difficulty sometimes, but if that complexity is offputting to you then this game might be for you.

It does make me sad when silent protagonist games like this only allow for a male protagonist, and then force you into a straight relationship. This wouldn't bug me if the Hero were a character with a voice and a personality, but clearly you're supposed to pour yourself into the protagonist and if you're not a straight man you're out of luck. I know Dragon Quest IV back in 1990 allowed you to choose between a male & female protagonist, so I don't know why it's so uncommon in subsequent entries, other than, I guess, the terrible risk of putting some lesbians in your game. Personally I could live with it.

A short simple game about stacking cards to generate cards to sell to buy more cards. If you like skinner-boxy reward loops this game is a nice short diversion, and I enjoyed the initial phase of experimenting, exploring and expanding. I find these games without distinct phases bring out a compulsive tendency in me where I'll just play on and on getting more and more tired, pushing towards an end that isn't coming. I think I'd have enjoyed Stacklands a lot more if there were clearer points to stop a session and come back later.

The game dragged toward the end, especially when I got onto the island content. Apparently the island is an update, sort of Free-LC, and I think it might be more fun for returning players. Without a break it just felt like an additional chunk of time wasting before reaching a similar climax. By that point everything had become incredibly messy, the screen flooded with cards that bounced about and disorganised themselves, pipelines of farm > stove > messhall that nevertheless required manual input at every step, and a large, unsearchable menu of recipes. Some QoL upgrades could go a long way.

If you don't spend too long stuck at the end it's a nice short game, but the last couple of hours soured me on the experience.

Pokemon continues a real breakneck release schedule with another title little over a year after the last DLC for Sword & Shield and apparently the same year as the next generation. I wish Game Freak would take their foot off the pedal for a slower, more considered game.

Legends Arceus is at the same time a successful expansion of the mechanics in Sword & Shield while showing off painful limitations in those mechanics- at least with GameFreak's vision and resources. I found it fantastic fun for the first few hours to run out into the wild and pelt pokeballs at all around me, catching Starlies and Shinx with wild abandon. But as the game went on I found myself becoming disinterested in pokemon. All pokemon were just something to chuck balls at. The unique qualities of the pokemon faded into the background, especially with infrequent and unchallenging combat. In previous generations I spent hours searching for a rare Gible, and prized the one I found. In this game I saw a wild Garchomp and passed over it immediately; it wasnt' Alpha.

The new Hisuian Forms and the brand new evolutions for old pokemon are all good, I'm a big fan. Maybe a little less-so for the starter evolutions. They all have fun typings, but none of them really do it for me. I have more mixed feelings on Alphas- extra-large versions of any given pokemon. They look cool, but they're sufficiently common that they server to make non-Alphas feel lame.

There are some other new ideas on show- a series of boss fight pokemon where you run around a large arena clumsily dodging and chucking little stinky bags at them (this calms their raging aramitama, for some reason). It's a solid idea and the first couple of fights are fine, but the flimsiness of the system shows through. The camera is a mess, you need to see the ground underneath you to dodge, but you can't while you're throwing things. There's no way to recover health while in combat, and the game isn't shy about just lamping you across the back of the head while you're in the recovery animation for another move. It becomes truly unbearable in the postgame when you have to fight four fast moving legendary pokemon who shoot out untelegraphed tornado attacks at random positions, in areas populated with dozens of regular pokemon. Some more time and care might have saved these mechanics but they didn't get any.

The story, however, never had any potential. Pokemon's absolute nosedive into interminable cutscenes with unlikeable jerks continues unabaited. I'd say this is the absolute nadir but I've learned not to underestimate these games. In PLA you're tasked with singlehandedly supporting an entire colony of workshy cowards, catching hundreds upon hundreds of pokemon for these idle twits who are too thick to catch their own bloody Buizels. I absolutely dreaded going back to town, knowing that the absolute worst of them, Professor Laventon, was going to spend 5 minutes force feeding me potato mochi before allowing me to proceed to the next area. I was only ever interested in getting new ride pokemon and accessing new areas, but these guys talk endlessly about the paper thin plot- there are 5 very angry pokemon, punch them until they stop being angry, and then punch even more pokemon into submission after that.

One element of the story I feel a little reticent to comment on is the colonial theme and the representation of the Ainu people. The game is set in Hisui/Sinnoh, an analogue for Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four main islands. The Ainu are an indiginous ethnic group native to Hokkaido. In the game, the Galaxy Team are colonising Hisui which is currently inhabitted by the Diamond & Pearl clans. I haven't been able to find any Ainu commentary on the game so I don't have a strong feel for if the portrayal in the game is good or not. I'm personally not nuts about the depiction of the Japanese establishment as peacefully and happily agglomerating the native peoples into their society (by the "present day" of Diamond/Pearl, there isn't much identifiable heritage left). There's also a very weird implication, buried deep in the game's lore, that there is another even-more native group of blonds who predate even the Diamond & Pearl clans. I'd love to hear a more informed reading of the plot, I have anxiety that there might be dog whistles going off that I can't hear.

The game was sweet at first, but left a bad taste in my mouth by the end. It feels rushed, half baked, in the same way that Sword & Shield felt underdeveloped. I wish the Pokemon Company weren't committed to this pace of releases. I would rather wait a Zelda length of time, or a Mario length of time for a new pokemon if it meant getting titles as good as Black & White, but instead year after year I see new titles that dillute my love for the series. For the love of Arceus, slow down.

There's a Dara O'Briain sketch where he says "you never read a book that stops after 3 chapters, asks you what the major themes are, and then stops when you can't answer". Well, they've done it. Shijima Story is more-or-less a TV show that pauses at the end of every episode to give you a bit of a quiz. I knew this was an FMV game, and was interested to see how they'd handled it, but for the most part it's by placing all the gameplay in big blocks after 15 minutes of FMV footage where you make 'deductions' to try and puzzle out the mystery. I don't think that's fundamentally a terrible approach to take, but combined with other decisions the game makes, I'm just left puzzled, and probably not in the way the designers intended.

Every element is just a little less quality than I'd hoped. The story spans 100 years and 3 time periods, but the actors spend most of that shuffling around the same slightly cheap sets. Nothing looks dramatically different in Taisho period to the Reiwa period. The performances are just a little hokey. The mysteries are underwritten, and focused on bizarre nonsensical twists, and withholding key deductions from the player for a dramatic reveal. The majority of the puzzle solving is actually focused on matching visual patterns completely unrelated to the crime, like a Poirot case where the solution is written on the back of an Eiffel Tower jigsaw puzzle.

I quite like some of the performances and particularly enjoyed seeing Gaku Sano, star of Kamen Rider Gaim, playing various parts. I'm a big fan.

Worth picking up if it goes on sale for under a tenner, but wouldn't recommend it for more unless you're the specific sort of Agatha Christie fan who doesn't care about motives or alibis but just elaborate Jonathan Creek style Tricks.

A very easy game to slip into, whether it's a quick run at lunch time or a longer session with some TV on in the background. Minute to minute, it's fun, dashing and dodging and exploring the castle. Compared to the original, the new classes do a lot to shake it up, and I'm personally a big fan of the Boxer and the Astromancer. However, there are a lot of nagging issues, none of them big enough to be deal breakers, but in aggregate make the game just, underwhelming.

Take upgrades, for instance. Like the first game, the rogue-lite loop is that you do a run through the castle, looting and pillaging, and when you inevitably die, you get to spend all the money you earned upgrading your castle to give permanent bonuses to your future runs. The castle is a gigantic, bloated mess, with THREE seperate upgrade rooms, each with their own independent level for every stat. And you can unlock additional levels. For all of them! It seems aimed at a hardcore crowd ready to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours leveling up their hitpoints over and over again, but for the casual player it means you can finish a run with a respectable 5000 gold and find all you can buy is an imperceptible +1% chance to crit, or change your HP from 502 to 503.

The story, or rather the tone, is likewise a bit of a mess. Most of the story is told through journals left all over the castle. You can stop to read them and absolutely kill the pace of your run. If you do, you'll find a sombre tail of frustrated revolution and uncaring aristocrats. One area tells the story of dredging the bodies of the dead from a lake, but being unable to bury them because the living are too few in number. The sombre tone is completely at odds with the rest of the game- the resolution to that story is a boss fight with two gigantic cartoon skeleton pirates, apparently created from everyone who died in the lake.

The battle between these two tones isn't that dissimilar to the first game. They both feature IBS and twist reveals of tragic villains, but the massively increased budget of the sequel has left more time and space for jokes. It's not just IBS for fart jokes, there's super IBS, and pizza, endless, endless pizza jokes. I think they should have axed the more serious elements completely and just focused on the lighthearted content.

Overall, middling.

I've heard this game compared to Valheim, and to me that comparison rings false. It's a topdown game like Diablo, focused on skill trees of different bolts and blasts to shoot at your enemies, buried beneath layers of deeply misguided crafting, survival and base building. Fun boss fights kiting mobs around as you sling spells and dodge, spread out between hours and hours of punching rocks and trees to upgrade your trousers to the next tier.

Notably, there's no element of procedural generation. The map is always the same. While you are pushing deeper into the world as you play, it's not exactly explorative as you always have the map laid out before you. There are base building elements but they're more akin to Dungeon Keeper than Minecraft, you can decide which squares your single-story Castle Dracula will occupy, but there isn't the kind of creativity you might find in other crafty survival games. This is what makes the Valheim comparison odd to me, since creative architecture and sailing out into the unknown were pivotal elements of that game that are more or less completely absent here.

For me, the skinner box elements were simply unbearable. My heart sank when, in the first five minutes, the game compelled me to seperately make trousers, gloves, a shirt and shoes out of bones. I played with five friends, and we got as far as building a servant coffin (after crafting a sawmill to make a forge, to make a crafting table, to make a tanning table, to make a grinder, to make a research table, to make a blood altar) and then had to wait 90 real-world minutes to progress. Someone asked what we're supposed to do now, what we're actually moving towards, and nobody could answer.

I played in early access (May 2022) so possibly the game will change and improve over time.

Really beautiful hand drawn art and animations, looks absolutely fantastic. The visuals and soundtrack are top notch and give it a very artistic feel, but the other elements knock it down.

On the one hand, the game is very minimalist and understated to try and better sell this artistic side, but you still have a lot of just very video gamey platforming puzzles to solve. Walk though this barren land of sadness watching the winds sweep across the dunes, then use your Kirby power to turn into a big rock to protect from the gusts.

On the other hand, for the quality of the presentation, it feels like looking at a massive, intricately crafted stained glass window that says nothing more complicated than "I'M SAD" in 60 ft tall letters. I fell off midway through the game so maybe there's more nuance and detail in the end.

The biggest problem is you just move very slowly. This feels deliberate, the levels have a strong sense of pacing, but if you flub a puzzle and have to run back to the start, or worse, want to go for the optional collectibles it just takes absolutely forever. The first time, it's atmospheric. The third time it's a chore.

Love the concept but kiiiinda felt like the execution didn't quite come together. Every Character in the game has a limited amount of Time before they die, you find more time and you can dish it out to help people, but you also have a limited amount of time too. I wanted this to be about making poignant decisions, about trying to save everyone and failing, but that really only happened to me once.

That one time was great. I had collected enough resources to boost an NPC before she died, but I was in the middle of a dungeon. I wanted to collect more so I didn't waste time travelling to and from the dungeon. I thought I had enough time. But halfway back to the village, the message popped up. She had died, I was too late. I thought I had enough time. I felt awful.

BUT unfortunately, that was about the only time I felt like that. There are a LOT of characters and I didn't get to know almost any of them. Part of this is that time passes even in the hub area where the NPCs are, so I didn't want to spend time talking to them, that would just make them closer to death. As a result I didn't get to know them very much, and wasn't bothered when a dozen peripheral characters died. Even the characters I did keep around and talk to the most felt a little shallow, without a ton of dialogue. Some just didn't react when someone in the same room dropped dead. Combined with a New Game + option I got the feeling that I was "supposed" to just do a perfect run and keep everyone alive, and that everything else was a failure, which undermined the experience.

Still tho'. Decent fun, it's cool to be a gay robot.

I've mixed feelings on this one. It's a gorgeous, nostalgic game with plenty of big improvements over the original, or even contemporaries in its generation. It's the first game to have icons for the items, for instance. On the other hand, both the shoulder buttons are permanently mapped to a help menu I never used, the endgame pacing goes completely out the window, and awful mechanics like the Game Corner are presented with misplaced pride. It's a flawed gem, but still my favourite version of Generation 1.

Replaying as an adult, what I most appreciated was how the original pokemon games broke up the RPG random encounter formula by splitting the game into fixed trainer battles with much higher EXP yields and random encounters- the only place you can actually catch new pokemon. It’s a much smarter split than I ever realised. Beyond that, I still love exploring Gen I, getting Surf and Fly and getting across the map. While there are still some meddlesome NPCs in the way early on, the midgame actually lets you take several gyms in whichever order you like, something just completely gone from the modern more scripted games.

I have to complain about the pacing of the endgame. There are about 80 hours on my playthrough, and I’d estimate 20-30 of them are fighting Crush Kin Mik & Kia on 1 Island for EXP. The level jump on the Elite 4 for the rematches is absolutely brutal. Even playing through the Sevii Islands will leave you 20 levels short of the Elite 4. If you could get clever and work around their teams it’d be one thing, but pokemon like Gengar and Alikazam have next to no exploitable weakness in this game. It really soured what was otherwise a fun playthrough to just plough dozens of hours into grinding levels in the middle of nowhere.

Stray points:
-Game Corner is pure misery
-Safari Zone is a fun concept but not fun at all in execution.
-Vs. Seeker is great addition

Lastly, replaying this 20 years later, it really sucks to need to trade to complete the pokedex. There isn’t exactly a thriving local community of Leaf Green players for me to hit up. If the game had some sort of acknowledgement of “you’ve done everything you can without trading” it’d be nice (126 Kanto Dex, BTW), but as-is, you’re just left with a gap that can never be filled. The situation is even worse in the National Dex where there’s really no indication of how far you can get without copies of Ruby, Colosseum etc.