This feels a bit weird to say about a JRPG, but I think this game was absolutely carried by it's gameplay. I just couldn't bring myself to care about the story. You don't even meet the main villains until you're over halfway done with the game. And then they don't even reappear until the final dungeon. Aside from Rena and Claude, no party member ever felt relevant to the plot past their introduction, even though most of them had a lot of potential.
But, with all that been said, the gameplay was great enough to make up for it. The amount of options you have to absolutely break the game into pieces at every turn, was truly incredible. Every option felt overpowered in it's own way, and yet the game still felt really well balanced.
One other praise-worthy aspect of the game is just how wonderful of a remake it is. It includes all the quality of life features you could dream of, and graphics that bring the most out of the HD2D style.
Overall, I think I would recommend this game, as long as you don't go into it expecting some grand, incredible narrative.

Talk about growing pains.

Dragon Quest 1's simplicity is what makes that game a timeless classic, but it goes without saying you have to iterate eventually. 2 makes great innovations by introducing parties and telling the story through dedicated event beats and cutscenes, but the core problem is that this game's a dreadful bore. Half of the '''story''' is spent on running errands between the same non-descript towns, and the combat went from 'grindy for the sake of measurable self-growth' to 'grindy for the sake of inflating game length'. What you're left with is a game that's doing 'more things' for the sake of it instead of enriching anything already there. A necessary evil in hindsight, in the same way SMB2 JP had to be a villainous trainwreck for Nintendo to wise up on how game difficulty affects playability.

Long-running franchises having a lackluster 2nd game that is still considered the "black sheep", name a more iconic duo.

At first, I was thinking this'd be a bit better than DQ1, but as I kept playing, I realized that DQ2 really does kinda suck. The entire design philosophy was very clearly "let's just make Dragon Quest but bigger!".

The original game was nothing but a grindfest but it was over in about 5 hours (at least in these modern ports) - DQ2, with very liberal use of a guide, took me about 10 hours. And speaking of guides, this game requires one, it's nearly unplayable without it.

DQ1, if you talked to every NPC, was a very straightforward adventure that always gave you a direction (with one or two exceptions). DQ2 starts out that way, but as soon as you get the boat you are thrown into a massive overworld with zero direction to speak of - I think the devs expected players to just explore every portion of the map which I guess made sense in that particular time frame? NPCs give you only hints about where to find the plot MacGuffins, many of which are just... lying on the ground in an arbitrary piece of the land.

Even the dungeons are "the same, but bigger", they are absolute mazes, with very high encounter ratios. After a while, I got tired of getting into a lot of dead ends, and resorted to guides for the dungeons as well.

Even as a piece of history this game is not interesting. "oh it introduced parties", then you realize that: 1, this game's party is merely the DQ1's Hero split into three characters and 2, Final Fantasy came out the very same year, and featured a 4-character party, where each could be one of six different classes.

And narratively, Phantasy Star also came out in 1987, and was arguably the very first JRPG to take a step forward in the stoytelling. So Dragon Quest II is nothing but a side step or, at most, half step forward - just a footnote in JRPG history, especially since Dragon Quest III came out a mere year later.

I only finished this because I played it on my phone during any downtimes I had. Credit where credit is due, I never actively stopped to grind in this game, I just went with the flow and that made me strong enough to defeat the final boss - a rather intense battle. I was several levels below what the guide I followed recommended me, so it is perfectly doable to just not grind in this game.

But yikes. If it was 5 hours like the first game, I'd probably have enjoyed it more.

If you are curious about DQ2 though, don't even consider playing any other version other than the mobile/Switch port

In this version, Zoom just gives you a list of every town you ever visited so you can teleport there

In every other version, Zoom merely teleports you to the last town you saved at. That sounds like a fucking nightmare.

There is something so special about Dragon Quest aside from it being the origin of JRPGs. I've played so many inventive, unique, creative and strange JRPGs before I played Dragon Quest, yet this game managed to capture my heart. It accomplished this by being so incredibly simple, and while that is a really cliche thing to say about the game, I think there's so much more merit to the "simple" description than meets the eye. That is to say, by being so simple, the game takes advantage of what I consider the most important thing to any RPG, imagination.

From the days of Dungeons & Dragons, imagination played a key role in making an RPG fun. And when the genre made their jump to computers and consoles, this remained true for some of the earliest iterations. Games like Wizardry, Ultima and Akalabeth had such rudimentary graphics and stories that it left room for the player to fill in the blanks and make these worlds feel alive. And sometimes, the player's imagination can do some real heavy lifting.

I can attest. I was the kind of kid that grew up as a fan of Earthbound and would strike poses, holding my hands out at the TV screen acting like I was Ness casting PK Rockin at the opponent. This was in 2008, when console graphics were progressively getting better and better. While the visual fidelity of the PS3 and Xbox 360 were capable of telling stories with amazing graphics, for some reason I always preferred that dusty, old obscure SNES game before anything else simply because my imagination, with the game being the foundation, took me on an adventure I still hold onto so dearly as a core memory.

I had played Dragon Quest around that time as well, but I was so Earthbound-crazy that it didn't really capture my attention for too long. I decided to return to the game with a fresh mind recently. Going into it, I was no longer that kid excited for Earthbound. I was an adult, who had gone through so many things. I didn't become cynical or anything, I just wasn't so easily excitable about games like back then.

Yet, when I played Dragon Quest, something happened. The game had various moments that activated my imagination and began to reel me in. The first one happens the moment you leave the first town. When you set foot into the overworld you are able see the final area of the game. It's far out of your reach but well in sight. That suddenly made the world feel big to me. I was some shlump with basic equipment, struggling to fight slimes, but with the final castle in my view, I knew a greater potential for me was possible. It was just a matter of how to achieve it; maybe I could grind enemies, chart out the world, get better equipment, go into a cave that was beyond my level but get a lucky critical hit to conquer it. These all are simple things in RPGs now but in DQ, it made the world feel open and it all started with the game dropping you into the world, showing you your final objective and just let's you go from there.

The second moment was as I was exploring the overworld, I came across a town that was completely destroyed. There was no inhabitants left to explain anything, hardly anything to interact with. Yet because there was very little information, I was left wondering "What happened here? Why is this town the only one destroyed?" It's such a simple thing, with an obvious explanation but I think the reason it caught me by surprise was because the game gets you in a loop of exploring, conquering a challenge and then resting in a new town for bit, repeat. This destroyed town was probably a choice to break up the pace. But it goes a long way to suddenly making you feel uncomfortable, in danger and curious.

The final moment was when you defeat the Green Dragon to save the princess. She asks if you can take her back to her castle and you agree. I was expecting her sprite to follow you, or something simple but no. The game displays an entirely new set of sprites of you carrying the princess. THIS IS THE MOST CLICHE FANTASY RPG TROPE EVER! And yet when I saw that they made this moment, they went through the trouble of making a whole new sprite set for this scene, it gave me this feeling of "Hell yeah! I SAVED THE PRINCESS."

Writing all of this out makes me sound like a bit of a man-child getting hyped about such a silly generic RPG such as Dragon Quest, but you know what, having that kind of imagination and excitement for a game is fun. Having that kind of excitement tells me that there's still so much more to life. That even in the smallest things, something amazing can be found. And I just gotta go out there with an open mind to find it.

Dragon Quest would go on to refine the formula they established here and would consistently up the quality with each new game. Every DQ game is so wonderful and it all began with the very deliberate design choices the developers made here. They clearly wanted the player to feel like they're on an adventure and for someone like me, they passed with flying colors.

This is why, in spite of being a 37 year old game, with so many other games having done the JRPG formula better, Dragon Quest being simple shows why and how RPGs are fun, even in their most pure, fundamental form. And that is why I am going to love this series for the rest of my life.

I suppose if you're at a point where your main gripe is "I wish there was more game" that means you must have had a good time with it. That being said though, I remember distinctly imagining this game having a much larger scope when I saw the trailers, and the prologue and world building early on seemingly confirmed that assumption.

It wasn't until late that I realized my time with Season would end with just one doomed little valley to record, which in itself is not a bad thing, but even in the short amount of time the game has I feel like I could have seen more.

In a way I think the medium of a video games is working against the story, compared to say a novel, both in terms of the constraints that expensive video game production but also how literal the interpretations of events are and narrowing to our ability to imagine the wider fictitious world.

I couldn't get very far with this game before getting absolutely fatigued with it but I think it utterly fails at capturing the aspect of ff7 I really like the most.

Other than the fact that the original is one of the most earnestly introspective games, had commentaries on nearly every archetype presented in the game, is chock full of content and plot with perfect pace, and manages to utterly demasculate and break down the shounen jrpg hero figure, the original final fantasy VII bucked the tone of the action hero fantasy by both playing up the heroism and swashbuckling with a thick, palpable layer of melancholic and innocent irony.

Irony is often something cynical, something too adult or hardened. A way of coping with the world. But the irony in ff7 was pure, a kind of return to the true nature of what people are. It's not judgmental, it doesn't have expectations, and it's not cynical or bitter. It's simply a sense of peace, with life, oneself, loss, defeat, heroics, struggle, hardship, passion, all the products of friction between a human being and the world around them.

The remake simply lacks that tonally. For the best possible example I can think, watch the moment in the original game near the beginning after the first bombing mission, where every exit of the screen Cloud tries to exit through, he gets cut off by troops and the player is presented with the choice of running or fighting at each turn. It's a straight swashbuckling scene, the hero is cornered at every turn and the choices are weighed against him over and over, and like some of those great heroic stories and films, the hero's not really in any danger; we've seen cloud oneshot those goons earlier with ease, it's purely an aesthetic situation. Yet, the music is utterly at conflict with the scene. It's somber, it's innocent, it's complicated, and very, very subtle. There's something amiss. The scene begs the player to expect a deconstruction, a demasculation, and the undoing of what people know and expect from the game without overtly stating it. It acts as the prelude for the game later changing its own writing and having the player reevaluate what it stands for.

I don't care about nomura ghosts, action combat, new scenes, or any other changes as long as the game gets that one aspect right. That one tone that only the original ever had. I couldn't detect it, so I gave up. I could be wrong, and maybe find that core spirit somewhere else in the game if I come back to it. Or maybe the remake just plain goes for something else, and maybe that's worth it in the end. Still, I feel something's missing.

Also a few other notes, the sidequests Suck ass. Going from ff14 ARR to 7r felt like I was moonlighting one job for an even shittier one. Not recommended!

All else said, that combat system is like the complete evolution of what kingdom hearts started on the ps2. I'm happy it's gotten this far. Mechanically this game plays like everything I wanted when I was 12.

Final fantasy has always been a game about putting all your ideas and the sum total of everything you have to say about a theme and design into one game. Every game in the series is both the first and final game in its own franchise. Those designs and ideas could have anything, any kinds of gameplay systems or plot ideas as long as it grandly tells a story with roleplaying and mechanics. I welcome the real time combat, as it's the series trying to understand and remix what else is out there and put its own spin on things by creating a newly aestheticized experience of combat. Final fantasy 20 might have no combat it in at all. Be ready for it!

Yeah, that's right, I played this on the Sega Genesis Classics emulator on steam, I nabbed it when they gave it away for free some years ago. Sega thought it was being clever when it removed the Sonic games so we would buy Origins, well, who is laughing now, SEGA?!... Now please let me buy Rocket Knight Adventure pleasepleasepleaseplease pretty please.

Ah, Sonic, the one and only! I really liked him when I was younger, and I mean, look at the guy: it's blue, has legs, what's there not to love? I remember being really fixated over this guy for a while, even more than Mario... and then I played the games. I honestly couldn't even tell you if they were even bad, mainly 'cause I never got far 'cause man do I SUCK at those games. No matter if it's 3D or 2D, then or now, I'm extremely bad at them and I really couldn't tell you why, guess it's one of my two curses, the other one being bad grammar. To this day the only Sonic games I've played till the end are Generations and Mania, but even tho I really liked the latter it didn't really made me better at them at all; after beating it I tried time and time again getting into the classic ones, but I just kept dropping them 'cause, again, I just felt I wasn't good enough, that something wasn't clicking. Finally beating Sonic 2 so long after my first attempt was an eye-opener, 'cause while I still consider myself really bad at this games, I also noticed the core design issues that make this experience sometimes a chore to go through.

And it's a shame, because Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has so many good elements that the first impression it leaves is always good! The game is beautiful from start to finish, everything looks incredibly well and far more interesting and stylized than many other 16-bit games. The colors pop out, the enemy and zone design are extremely creative and iconic, and the music... is a bit mixed actually, there are some themes here and there that are noticeable worse than others and don't sound that good, but believe me, when Sonic 2's music is good, IT'S FUCKING FANTASTIC. When it comes to presentation, the game doesn't shy away from going all out, even if that does mean that sometimes there can be a bit of slow-down when you have a lot of rings a get hit, but aside from that, and some graphical glitches that I don't know if they are a problem with the emulator or the game itself, in what respects looks, Sonic 2 absolutely shines.

And at a first contact, it looks like it shines in the gameplay department too! The first zone, Emerald Hill is amazing, it teaches you everything you need to know about the game's dependance on momentum and going as fast as possible, the multiple secrets and ways you can traverse the level, introducing some basic enemies from which future ones will expand upon and be more aggressive, etc. And all of this is... fun! It's really fun! I found myself really enjoying both of the acts of the first zone, and when arriving at Chemical Plant Zone, the first act was even more fun, introducing brand new elements that made the level far more interesting and most importantly: helped you go fast and overcome challenges in a far more agile and interesting way... and then Act 2 happened.


I... what the hell happened here? Don't get me wrong, it's far from being horrible, but many of the design decisions I simply don't understand that the game will carry onwards are present here: It simply won't let you go fast ... WHICH IS THE MECHANICN THE ENTIRE GAME IS SUPOSSED TO BE BASED AROUND. From here onwards, there are a ton of sections where the games into a precision-oriented platformer and... it just doesn't work. Sonic feels slippery, as it should! The idea is that he is supposed to go fast, and what slipperiness and imprecision when it goes slow, becomes a crucial key when it achieves incredible speed. So, when the game start to ask to take things more calmly and jump in a more precise way I say: ''OK! No problem, I get it, you got to break up the fast-paced levels with some down time. At least you will compensate the fact that Sonic wasn't designed for this kind of platforming with not so punishing level design, right?... right...?''

The game not only loves to keep slowing you down, but it also FUCKING ADORES to throw random shit at your direction that you just cannot react or recover from. Endless pits, random enemies or spikes, water from which you have no idea where to get out of, you name it! And this makes me specially mad because the game does have some extremely cool ideas and mechanics, and it’s not like it becomes unbearable from this point onwards, zones like the casino , Hill Top or Mystic Cave do have some fun moments and ideas throwed into them, but it just keeps tripping time and time again, not letting you do what's actually fun and unique about thus game and it seems hellbent on it. I don't want to see the final three zones of this game in my life, Metropolis Zone was boring and repetitive and drown out, Wing Fortress Zone was atrocious, and Death Egg Zone are just two bosses that aren’t that fun, and they don't give you any rings...You have to beat both battles without getting hit... YOU CAN'T EVEN USE SUPER SONIC IF YOU GET ALL THE EMERALDS IN THE FUCKING FINAL BOSS UNLESS YOU USE THE DEBUG MODE!

...ok... things got a bit heated there...

Listen, this game, as a sequel, is incredible: it's a huge upgrade in most regards, it introduces Tails and multiplayer, it introduced an incredible reward for getting the emeralds (tho getting them is absolute hell), it had actual little cinematics and it was all and all far more original and creative. And again, I did have fun, even if doesn't seem like it, but really, this game has some really good meat over its bones... but it's also full of rot. I cannot bring myself to really dislike it 'cause it isn't ''bad'' by any means, but I also didn't find myself actively enjoying it.

If you love or like this one, I'm so, so fucking happy for you and I'm so sorry I couldn't see what makes this game so special. I might be bad at Sonic, but sometimes Sonic is bad at design, and I can't look past that...

Tho I'll say I still really want to play Sonic 3, I might take a little break from Sonic before trying it, but I'll get there...

I'll get that hedgehog!

2022 was a great year for nerds who love to take notes.

2022 was also the year that I discovered I am a huge nerd who loves to take notes.

Really hoping that this is one of many "Obra Dinn Likes" to come. The comparison is really unavoidable, yet there are so few games that scratch the same itch that I really don't even care. Plus there are a lot of unique mechanics in this that I adore! The level based structure makes the game come off as a bite sized collection of individual cases, but it gradually transforms in to an overwhelmingly detailed tome that I found myself flipping through for more clues as the mystery expanded. The unique thinking panels are a fun way to lead players into the right direction without giving away much at all. It's easy to sit down and burn through case after case because the types of information you are looking for varies as the cases go on.

Ultimately, while not as brain bustin as Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol is filled with little moments that had me feeling like a big brained turbo genius. Would recommend to anyone that wants to feel like a big brained turbo genius.