In the span of a week or so, I went from an apathetic “I should try that out sometime” stance on Star Ocean into a giddy little man grinning ear to ear with love because I took that plunge after all this time and was rewarded handsomely. Star Ocean Second Story is such a wonderful video game and I couldn’t be happier.

It’s been a while since I have played a game with a story that feels so vividly “golden age of JRPG”. The main plot kicks off and is so endearing and exciting, in large part due to the outstanding and incredibly lovable dual protagonists. I love the story setup, and even just in my first play session was fully on board with everything being presented, but that momentum just continues for the entire game. It paints an incredibly vibrant and detailed picture of the world of Star Ocean, yet is simultaneously paced brilliantly and always serves to grow the characters just as much. Midway through the game has a twist that brings it all together and really cemented this as an all time great for me. Such a great time.

The beginning couple hours were a bit confusing due to the wealth of mechanics tossed to you to play with, combined by battles so easy I was finishing them within seconds- not allowing me the breathing room to comprehend the aforementioned mechanics. However, once the game kicked into full gear and my learning increased alongside it- I had a blast. Combat leans a little bit into the “mashy flashy” side of things, but the depth in its systems and leveling don’t make it feel mindless. You are given an absurd amount of agency into growing your characters with different skills and abilities, and finding a way to use the many tools given to you effectively is where the game really shines. I love the battles- they’re fast, exciting, and still give lots of tactical decision making- but even more so was doing things like leveling up Rena to be an author so other characters could bypass using skill points on other skills, making characters good at pickpocketing and stealing amazing gear early, or giving everyone the option to nerf stats in exchange for experience boosts. Combine that with the character recruition (which allowed me two entirely different parties by the endgames for my two playthroughs) and I just think it's pretty damn cool that everyone can adopt their own ways to play and still be validated, challenged, and rewarded for it. I found it to be just as addictive as it was mechanically dense, and I did go out of my way to fight every superboss and reach max level.

Structurally the game is a little more linear than the rest of the mechanics might make you think, always having a destination you need to go to for progression, but it still gives plenty of agency in a way that feels liberating. I found myself wandering around the world map constantly, and finding extra hard enemies that rewarded me with extra experience and skill points was really cool- along with chests, new towns, new characters, and party dialogue. The world feels very lived in and has tons of lore and history going into its details, and the lovely characters you can recruit go a long way into making it feel as such, which is just a lot of fun. The towns often have interesting NPCs to talk to, architecture, and generally feel distinct and dense. Being a part of this universe is simply captivating, and it is tied together by the excellent soundtrack and wonderful visuals of this remaster and in the pre-rendered backgrounds of the original too.

There are a couple little nitpicks I could scrape together if I wanted to, but I see no reason to given how much I enjoyed this game. I have the platinum trophy on my Playstation- obtained simply because I was having fun and not due to a previous intention. The story is great, the world is exciting, it's incredibly fun, it's presented beautifully, and I want to go on adventures with Claude and Rena in real life. I love this game and will continue to love it for a long, long time. Great stuff here and an easy recommendation to anyone who loves PS1 era JRPGs as I do.

When I first tried Hollow Knight five years ago, I bounced off it hard. I had not yet known the sweet embrace of Dark Souls. Although I did enjoy a platformer and the occasional metroidvania, the rhythm of this game's combat did not match the beat of my heart, nor did its by-the-book early traversal quicken my pulse. I didn't make it deep enough to even begin to meet the dramatis personae. I just set it down intending never to pick it back up.

That same heart, in the intervening years, grew to love From Software's oeuvre. This love has much to do with why I did eventually return, although not perhaps for the reasons you'd expect. Although Hollow Knight borrows some formal aspects from those games, most notably the bench/shade mechanic and a preoccupation with boss fights, it is on the whole more different than it is similar. And every time I've tried to dip my toe into a game because it's "like Dark Souls", I've walked away shaking my head and mourning designers' inability to learn the right lessons. That was never going to be my reason for playing this.

To understand the true reason, you must first understand what happened after FromSoft stole my heart. I played through all the games in reverse, from Sekiro to Demon's Souls, then wept for there were no more worlds to conquer. But to my friends, these paths were as yet untrodden. I would tune into their streams in vicarious delight as they first saw sights that I now knew so well. And on rare and precious occasion, a friend would ask me to take their hand and guide them through a game entire, the voice in their ear every step of the way.

I joined the journey of one friend in particular through Lordran, from believing these games were fundamentally Too Hard for them to beating the DLC bosses so fast it put the sickest Os in the group chat to shame. Playing together as learner and guide made us better friends and gave them a new perspective on their own skill broader than any video game. At the end, they told me, "I want to teach you to love Hollow Knight like you taught me to love Dark Souls". Now you understand: I had to return to this game.

So I picked Hollow Knight back up, started a new save, and began again. To be sure, after half a decade of honing my action game skills, I was far more proficient than I was before. Although the core mechanics are vastly different than a FromSoft 3D slash-and-roll, my skills transferred plenty well. I knocked out bosses quickly enough to leave Sable as dumbstruck as they had left me. But the real difference, the reason I'm wholeheartedly giving this game five stars now when I didn't even care to finish it before, was Sable. (And Sam! Another friend who was not as omnipresent, but who popped in frequently enough to substantially shape my impression of the game as well.)

Their infectious affection unlocked for me everything there is to love about Hollow Knight. With their encouragement I slipped quickly through the early game and found that the meat of it was indeed good. I could appreciate in fullness the personality of the various characters met through the game, their foibles and their tragedies. I could enjoy the environment design, have fun playing around with various builds, and really sink my teeth into bosses.

The boss design, once it gets challenging, is fascinating. Each boss has a relatively small set of moves, and the effective answers to them are highly technical combinations of movement and attacks. The emphasis is less on finding an opening and more on learning to sneak in hits while you evade. On the other hand, because you rebuild "soul" for healing while hitting the boss, in principle if you can find a hit/heal loop however inefficient you can just run it indefinitely even with imperfect play. The bosses then have to be designed around this, giving increasingly few chances to heal at all as they get more difficult but also taking quite few hits relative to, say, a Dark Souls boss.

Perhaps the place where Hollow Knight draws most from From's playbook is its plot: intricate and mournful but always a background presence, relegated to fragments of text with vague allusions and the occasional brief onscreen interaction. It must be easy to beat this game without understanding it at all, so once again I'm grateful to the guidance I had—just enough to draw my attention to key moments and answer the occasional question, never so much to shatter my nascent understanding with too explicit an explanation.

The story works so well precisely because it's understated. It's a collage of moods of which you see fragments, which the game asks you to connect yourself, to see the tendrils intertwine between what it has to say about parents and childhood, about duty and choice, about love and emptiness. It's a story in which can reflect much about what the player brings to it while still holding its own themes strong, not simply conforming to the reader's views. It's beautiful in that way.

I do have my complaints about Hollow Knight. I actually have kind of a lot of complaints. It's very clearly Team Cherry's freshman effort, full of little design flaws—why does it fire a spell if you press B to leave the menu and leave it down a little too long? why do you have to juggle charm notches just to see where you are on the map? why can't you see the world map in the fast travel screen?—that routinely drive me up a wall. But they're all small, and the ones that aren't fixable with mods are easy enough to simply ignore. And even for this, having a friend around helped. I am, after all, a huge believer in the healing power of bitching about stuff that annoys you.

Sable, since I know you'll read this: You did it. You taught me to love Hollow Knight. Thanks to you, I now have strong opinions about bug ghosts and spider/bee cross-species adoption. Dung beetles make me sad now and it's all your fault. I am changed irrevocably. Thank you.

At this point in time, the Final Fantasy series had created a pretty successful, albeit divisive at points, trilogy on the NES. These three games that would redefine the entirety of the RPG genre as we know it, garner many fans worldwide, and would cement the Final Fantasy series as Square/Square Enix’s flagship franchise from that point onwards. So naturally, after achieving a hat trick with those games, Square was ready to keep this gravy train rolling, with another installment in the series that would be the final entry for the NES, while preparing for what would come out for the SNES later. However, due to the fact that the SNES was about to be released, Square decided to shift gears and re-develop that NES game for this new system, and while they were at it, they were going to release it overseas as well… only, they would end up changing the name of the game to Final Fantasy II for us, because “lol, get fucked, America”. But anyway, just a few months after the SNES would come out for us in America, we would get this next chapter in the series, which we now truly know as Final Fantasy IV.

Before initially playing this game a good couple years ago, I had no clue about the reputation this game held, nor what it managed to do for the Final Fantasy series as a whole. I had just thought it was just gonna be another entry in the series, this time now being brought onto the next generation of consoles, with nothing else to really get too excited about. However, then I played through the game, and needless to say, I immediately fell in love with what I was presented with, as this game is, in my opinion, the best entry in the series that we had ever gotten at that point, and definitely my favorite of the series that I have played so far. Granted, it does have plenty of issues, ones that became abundantly more clear as the years would go by, but for what we have here, it is a massive leap in quality from the previous titles, and one that manages to take the series, and the genre as a whole, into new heights once again.

The story, for the time, was the most developed, character-focused, and engaging one not just in the series, but for video games as a whole, showing that video game stories didn’t have to be just one-note, and that they could show off plenty of emotions and dramatic moments when treated with care…………. even though, looking back, you can see that the story here is kind of a mess, but trust me, we will get into that later on. The graphics are pretty good, having plenty of great sprites for characters, enemies, and bosses, but when you look at it side by side with previous games, you can REALLY tell that it is just an NES game that was prettied up for the SNES, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is worth pointing out. The music is some of the best the series has ever had, with there being plenty of wonderful, iconic tunes that I love hearing even after having played it several years ago, such as with the boss theme, the common town theme, and, for my personal favorite track in the game, the Red Wings theme. And finally, as for the controls and gameplay, both of them work basically the exact same way that you would expect from a Final Fantasy game, but with notable changes that make the game so much more enjoyable by comparison.

The game is a traditional RPG, where you primarily take control of Cecil Harvey, go through plenty of different locations not just on the world that you live on, but also the Underworld and even the fucking moon at some point (yeah, things get pretty ridiculous), talk to plenty of NPCs that you will encounter who will either give you helpful hints/advice, or they will aid you on your quest in some way, find plenty of items that you can use to either upgrade yourself, get better items with from shops or otherwise, or to help you progress along in the game, and of course, get into random battles, where you will slash away at your foes before you either using your main weapon, spells, or whatever else you have lying around in your pockets, and gain experience points to level up and increase your stats. For the most part, it is your standard RPG through and through, which, even on its own, would’ve been fine enough to play through, and I would have had a good time with it. However, with the changes that this game implements, it sky-rockets it upwards into being some of the best content that I have seen out of this series so far, making me eager to get to the other titles in the series sooner or later to see where we can go from here.

In terms of the gameplay, not much has really changed, except for one key difference when it comes to the main battles, which now introduces the Active Time Battle system. Rather than taking turns to fight your opponents like in the previous Final Fantasy games, here, the battle is constantly moving, with characters taking turns based on whatever their speed is, allowing them to use commands faster than opponents in optimal scenarios. That may make the game sound pretty easy, but then you remember, the enemies can use this too, which means that, in a battle, you always have to be quick on your toes to use commands before your opponent can, making battle much more fun and exciting as a result. I have never played any other RPG before this that used this type of battle system, so needless to say, it was somewhat odd seeing this play out for the first time for me, but soon after, I quickly fell in love with it, and adored every second of it, as it did make things feel a lot more active, a lot more reactionary, and a lot more strategic, which made me get invested even more. It’s a good thing too, because apparently, this style will be used for plenty of other FF games later down the road, which I am all here for.

That’s really all that got changed for the gameplay though, as again, for the most part, it all plays practically the same as every other game in the series so far. In terms of other aspects of the game though, such as the story, the characters, and what occurs in said story… well, really, what hasn’t been changed? For the first time in any Final Fantasy game, or most other video games at the time for that matter, we have a set of characters that are already defined, have definitive personalities, relationships with other characters, and moments seen throughout that further define them. Yeah, we saw a brief bit of this in FF II, but that was pretty limited in terms of what it managed to do, as this game takes those ideas and pushes them even further.

Not to mention, each character also has a predetermined job class that they work with. You can no longer change up what job a character has, which does kinda suck, but at the same time, not only do the jobs that the characters get fit them pretty well, but they also grow and develop them overtime, learning better skills and different tactics to use in battle. This especially helps out with the boss fights, which do have more strategy to them rather than just “kill this guy while not getting killed yourself”, requiring you to pay attention to what they are doing while you continue attacking, as performing the wrong move at the wrong time can change the heat of the battle very quickly. With that being said though, for what we do get in this game in terms of character traits, dramatic moments, and character chemistry, it is all pretty basic, with elements that we have seen plenty of times ever since, which can make going back to this game feel generic and underwhelming as a result, but for what it is, I was still able to enjoy the cast of characters and the story that we got here… despite how flawed it comes off as.

Which speaking of, in terms of the story, again, it needs to be asked, what DIDN’T get changed? Out of all the Final Fantasy games so far, this one has the most developed and thorough storyline of the bunch, with plenty of character moments, overarching plotlines, and development that we have seen. On the surface, it is all pretty basic, just being another game about collecting a bunch of elemental crystals to stop a big, bad evil person, which is all well and good, but we also have Cecil going from his dark, “evil” nature to becoming a Paladin, Cain being brainwashed and needing to have himself snapped out of it by our party, Rydia losing her village and needing to learn to overcome her trauma, and several other moments that I haven’t mentioned here. Again, a lot of this is pretty basic looking back, but around the time when most video game stories were “Go save your girl” or “Go kill this big evil thing”, this went a long way, influencing video game storytelling all the way up to this day.

However, this then leads perfectly into one of the biggest problems with the game: again, the story is kind of a mess. Yes, it is pretty generic all things considered, and some parts of it have definitely not aged well over time, but when you ignore all that, there’s also several other elements of the story that feel overused and are, to put it bluntly, fucking stupid. First of all, throughout the journey, you will lose a lot of party members, such as with Cid, Porum and Pallum, Yang, and so on and so forth, with you being led to believe that all of them sacrificed themselves for the sake of your quest. But then, as you keep going through the game, you then learn that everyone is ok, and almost nobody ended up dying whatsoever! So with that being said, I have to ask, what was the point of all those fake-out deaths? Sure, a fake-out death can be effective when used correctly, and for most part, they are all pretty well done, but the more times you end up doing this, it not only becomes more predictable and less effective, but it also becomes, again, fucking stupid.

And speaking of fucking stupid, there is also the means in which a lot of the plot elements in this game are carried out. For some reason, Cecil has the biggest case of Murphy's Law that I have ever seen, as whenever he and his crew go on to doing anything in this game, and I really do mean anything, SOMETHING will go wrong, and prolong the journey forward. It all usually involves them going to some place, finding out the problem in said place, taking care of said problem, only to then have the reward or goal snatched away from them in the last second because “Ha ha, FUCK YOU”. There is one part of the game that stands out heavily when it comes to this. It’s when Cecil and the gang defeat Golbez, one of the game’s villains, inside of this sanctuary that holds one of the crystals they need. While celebrating their defeat and discussing what they should do next, Golbez’s hand starts to crawl around the room and go towards the crystal. Cecil and the crew then proceed to watch this hand go up to the crystal, steal it away, and then leave, WHILE DOING NOTHING AT ALL TO STOP IT. Call this story good all you want, but moments like that you cannot defend, as it is just way too stupid to justify.

But don’t worry, my problems with the game don’t just go as far as the story, because oh no, I got some gripes with the game too, albeit very minor ones. Most of the gameplay works pretty well, and again, I would consider it to be the best in the entire series so far, but like with all of these games so far, there just seems to be one or two areas that’s entire purpose is to piss you off. One such place is the Sealed Cave, a location in the Underworld that has one of the crystals you need to get, but it is filled to the brim with these Trap Door enemies, who can all throw themselves into lava for all I care. They can do massive damage to you whenever you fight them, most of the time even one-shotting party members, and to top it all off, they can split into multiple enemies, which can also mean more damage can be dealt to you. But then again, these kinds of issues only apply to one or two areas throughout the entire game, and even then, if you are playing the original SNES version of the game (the US version, anyway), it is very easy, so there aren’t too many instances where you will have a lot of hard-as-hell situations to deal with.

Overall though, despite having one or two annoying areas to go through, as well as a story that is repetitive and flawed when looking back on it, FFIV is, without a doubt in my mind, the best game in the series so far, bringing the classic gameplay to the next generation of consoles in a brand new and exciting way, while further enhancing elements like the story and characters even further, influencing not just RPGs, but all of video games further as a result. I would absolutely recommend it not just for those who are big fans of FF and RPGs in general, but also for someone who wants to get into either FF or RPGs in general, because while it may not be one of the most approachable or beloved game of the series, it is one of the best places to start, and I cannot recommend it enough. Although, now that I think about it, this game sets a pretty high bar for the next game to top. I’m not sure how it will be able to do it. I dunno, maybe they will find a way………. or, you know, they might fumble the ball along the way.

Game #503

For every generation of systems that Nintendo had up to this point (and by that, I mean only three of them), each one has had at least one Castlevania title, and while some of them definitely haven’t held up the best over the years, most of them kick all of the ass. The NES had Castlevania I and III, the SNES had Super Castlevania IV, the Game Boy had Belmont’s Revenge, and even other platforms like the Turbografx-16 had Rondo of Blood, so yeah, there was plenty of good Castlevania to go around. But… what about with Sega? At this point, they had received zero love from the series whatsoever, which is understandable, given Nintendo’s iron grip on developers back in the day, but come on, Sega needs some of that dracula love at some point! Well, thankfully, they would eventually get some of that love, with the only Castlevania game to ever be released on a Sega system, Castlevania: Bloodlines.

It had taken me a bit of a while to get to this game initially back in the day, probably because I had no clue that it even existed. I was well aware of the NES and SNES Castlevania games at the time, but I wasn’t aware of this particular title until I implemented a little element into my life called “research”. So, I found the game, I played it, and I loved it, which I can easily say is still the case all these years later. Not surprising, but this is yet another fantastic entry in the Castlevania series, one that doesn’t quite reach the peak of Nirvanha like Super Castlevania IV or Rondo of Blood, but one that manages to stand all on its own and deliver quite a great time.

The story is what you have come to expect from Castlevania… for the most part, where a vampire by the name of Elizabeth Bartley seeks to revive her uncle, Dracula, back from the dead, and she does so by starting World War I (no, I’m not kidding) and spreading chaos all over Europe, so it is up to two brave souls to take it upon themselves to save Europe from her deadly forces, and to stop Dracula’s revival, which is mostly what you expect from Castlevania, but the added details and new villain is a nice touch. The graphics are pretty good, being very vibrant and colorful with plenty of great animations throughout all of the stages, the music is, naturally, incredible, with it not reaching the same heights as IV and other games, but at the same time, it has a very unique style that no other game in the series had at the point, and it fits wonderfully with the game, the control is mostly what you would expect, not being as free and fun to get a handle on like in IV, but still offering plenty to work with, and the gameplay is standard for a Castlevania game, but with its own set of gimmicks and ideas to make it more exciting.

The game is a 2D action platformer, where you take control of either John Morris or Eric Lecarde, go through many different stand-out locations seen all throughout Europe, defeat the many wicked monsters that you will find with whatever weapon best suits the situation, gather plenty of gems, health items, and sub-weapons to help you out along the way to ensure success, and take on plenty of bosses, some being typical for the setting and series, with others being of a… unique variety. Any Castlevania player should be able to jump into this game pretty easily, as nothing has changed too drastically from previous games. Nevertheless, it still remains pretty fun to go through, not only while messing around with the new features the game gives you, but also with quirks it also carries.

While it does look, sound, and play very similarly to past Castlevania titles, you can tell right from the moment you turn on the game that Bloodlines has its own style and set of flavors that make it stand out from other games. Since this game is on the Genesis, Konami took full advantage of having less restrictions when it came to the content they showed off in the game. When you hit the title screen, you are greeted by a pool of blood, accompanied by the rib cage of a long-gone creature, finishing it off with the logo of the game dripping blood to add to what is already there. As you go along in the game, some enemies will have much more detailed death animations, spilling guts and blood all around them, their body parts exploding and revealing organs and bone. Hell, even when you play as Eric, whenever you die, the spear that you are holding ends up flying through the air and landing straight on you, stabbing you through your side.

They clearly did not hold back on the gore and blood factor for this game, which, while not as extreme as something like Mortal Kombat or Splatterhouse, was still pretty intense for a game like this, and it makes the game all the better for it. What also adds onto this extra layer of flavor are with the very creative bosses that can be seen throughout the game, such as with a boss made out of gears, Mothra from the Godzilla movies (it may as well be), an extremely sinister hellhound, and one of Dracula’s final forms, which is a creepy-ass demon creature that has a mouth on his crotch (if we don’t ask questions, we will remain happy). Not only are they pretty fun to fight, but their appearance and ways of attacking make them all the more memorable.

As for the gameplay, it also stays relatively similar to the other games in the series, but with several new additions seen throughout. From the start, you get the option of playing as either John or Eric, each one of them having differences that help them stand out from each other, with John playing closer to that of one of the Belmonts, wielding a whip that he can swing in multiple directions and use to swing across gaps, and as for Eric, he wields a spear instead, which doesn’t have as much versatility as the whip, but does have a longer range, and it allows him to perform a super jump whenever the situation calls for it. Both of them are pretty fun to play as, being similar enough to each other, while having key elements that make you wanna try them out. Not to mention, with these unique traits, one character can access parts of a level that another one cannot, which encourages multiple playthroughs to see what else the game has in store for you, which I am all on board for.

In addition to this, there is also the sub-weapons, which work almost identically to how they worked in the other games, but this time with a big difference. If you upgrade your weapon to its strongest form, it will also allow you to use more powerful versions of the sub-weapons, such as with the axe, you can now throw multiples of them rather then just one, and with the Holy Water, you can now unleash a wave of holy fire rather then just one spot on the ground. Honestly, I myself never really found a need to use these new sub-weapon upgrades, as the game is perfectly manageable without them as is, but even then, having the option to acquire and use these is, again, much appreciated, and I imagine it would definitely help out newcomers when they try out the game for themselves.

Now, despite all of the good things that this game has going for it, there are quite a few things that hold it back from being too good. First of all, unlike all of the other Castlevania games before this, which had unlimited continues, this game felt the need to give you only a couple of them, and can I just ask, WHY?! Yeah, this may not matter for those playing the game through re-releases and modern hardware, but just in terms of the game itself, it is still Castlevania, which means it can kick your ass whenever it wants to, and as such, you need every continue you can get. Secondly, while most of the game is fun to play through, there are some parts that are just annoying to get through.

In the last stage of the game, there is this one section where parts of the screen are distorted from each other, making it so that, visually, your body will disconnect, making it pretty difficult to judge where you are and what you should do in order to ensure your safety. Oh, and not to mention, you also have Medusa heads constantly flying by, which also adds onto the annoyance. Sure, it isn’t too hard, but again, it is just more annoying to deal with then anything, especially since you are then greeted by an anti-gravity section immediately after it, and that is about as fun as it sounds. And just to top it all off, as if the devs knew exactly how to get on my nerves, there is a boss rush that you gotta deal with, which I don’t let get to me too much, because it is almost the end of the game, but still.

Overall, despite the limited continues, as well as several sections of the game being way more annoying to deal with then they need to be, for being the series’ only venture onto Sega platforms, Castlevania: Bloodlines manages to deliver a familiar, yet fresh new experience that any Castlevania fan would be able to sink their teeth into and enjoy all the while. I would definitely recommend it for those who were fans of the previous games, or if you are fans of the series in general, because there is plenty here for you to love and enjoy all the same. But anyway, now that we are done with playing that game, what Castlevania game is next up on the list?.......... ooh, bastardization! My favorite!

Game #501

A fascinating, ornately Lynchian horror art piece. The use of the repeated traversal through a single day with Stanley Parable-esque branching decision points leading to different stories and perspectives marries fantastically well to the surreal abstraction of the game's story. The ARG stuff is cute as well, although it's certainly a shame to think that this game will likely be unplayable in ten or twenty years.

My one complaint with this, which is simultaneously a nitpick and a major issue, is its use of GAN-generated "photos" for the human faces. Even if this is an intentional artistic choice, so-called "AI art" is antithetical to the practice of art as a whole and should be given no oxygen whatsoever. It would not be infeasible to take portraits yourself if you needed them, and it's a shame that this holds me back from wholeheartedly recommending this game.

It's really cool to see the LucasArts formula, which I'm mostly familiar with through a Monkey Island context, being applied in a much more serious, storytelling-oriented context. LOOM still has plenty of jokes, but it's also trying to be a more straightforward fantasy story. It's way too short to really pull it off effectively, but it's still fun to see the attempt.

By far the coolest thing about this game is the mode of interaction. It eschews the classic point-and-click "inventory and verb" system for a set of spells that are cast by playing musical notes. Although in a sense this boils down to just a broad set of verbs, it opens the possibility of gaining more verbs throughout the run by being granted them or even deducing them, which feels brilliant. Definitely a game I wish had spawned a bit more of an evolutionary branch, or even just a direct sequel.

Although I love the idea of this "Gold Master Series" of documentaries and its importance in video game history preservation, as a product, I feel like some improvements can be made in the future.

There hasn't seemed to be a lot of editorial choices in what to put or to omit from the game here. Everything and the kitchen sink is thrown in, which results in a lot of correspondences and interviews that are repetitive or flat out boring.

It generally feels like the story of Karateka is not that interesting to tell apart from a few fascinating tidbits.

I'm super glad this exists, and it is a polished product, but it did outstay its welcome since it didn't always aim for quality in historical content, but quantity and completeness.

On the upside, the next documentary appears to be about a game designer and a bunch of his games which seems like a fantastic idea. It might just fix all the gripes I had with this first experiment in innovative documentary by having a lot more material to go over.

This is the first one of these I've actually fully completed a low-SL run on, although I've done most of one on both Sekiro and Elden Ring. I loved those runs for how much they forced me as a player to reckon with the beating heart of the bosses and learn all their secrets. The Dark Souls 1 SL1 is... not really the same way. Even without making use of the massive damage pyromancy brings to the table, I was shocked how easy I was able to damage bosses and survive hits even through the late game. I won't say it was disappointing, exactly, but it wasn't revelatory in the way that other similar runs I've done were.

That said, there are a few bosses that I feel like I understand a bit better this time around:

• Demon (Asylum, Stray, Firesage): I just love these guys. A classic for a reason. Never hard but never trivial, always a satisfying fight. They chose to bring these back constantly game after game and they were right to do so.

• Bell Gargoyle: The more I play this fight the more I like it. It teaches you so much so quickly about how to manage health bars, staggers, and spacing. It takes more strategy than luck, and it's so satisfying once you nail it.

• Ornstein & Smough: My hottest take about DS1 is that I don't like this fight that much. I think it's interesting as the first draft of a full-on duo fight, and it's undeniably effective as a wall that is ultimately surmountable, but I think they handled this core concept much better in other games. There are so many small ways in which this fight looks like the player should be able to push at it that just don't work for annoying and opaque reasons. I think it serves its place in this game well, but coming to it as one of my later FromSofts I'm not terribly impressed.

• Four Kings: This was the hardest base-game fight for me in SL1 by a pretty substantial margin. I actually came away liking it a fair amount... my main complaint is that the orbiting projectile attack shouldn't just persist forever if it doesn't hit you. What on earth is up with that?

• Sanctuary Guardian: This is the boss that improved most in my estimation in SL1, I think. It's such a glass cannon that I've always crumpled it more or less immediately in my real runs, but in SL1 my damage output was low enough and my body fragile enough that I had to really think about it. It's pretty cool! A solid and fast-paced beast fight that definitely presages Bloodborne.

• Manus: This was the hardest boss for me overall, with six hours of total attempts, but I loved every minute that wasn't spent on runbacks. I came so close to a hitless victory because I really had to meticulously understand and think through every attack he could do and how to answer it, and that's exactly what I'm looking for from a run like this.

• Kalameet: I did also have to learn Kalameet pretty deeply, but I came away with a much worse impression of it overall. I feel pretty similarly here as I do about O&S: it's a really cool historical artifact as their first draft of a proper dragon fight, but it's overshadowed by all those fights after it. The hitboxes are janky, there's no reward for hitting the head, and even once I got the hang of it it felt like a third of my failures were something weird happening rather than my own fault.

I live in Washington state. One time, probably about a decade ago, I was in the city of Tacoma out for dinner. For those unaware, Tacoma is a fairly big and bustling city- at least in the part of it I was at. On the way back from dinner at, say, 8pm- my family was casually driving only to see a man walking a full grown, real camel down the street. I have no idea why he had a camel, where he had obtained a camel, why he was walking said camel down a city street at 8pm- and many more questions. That moment has been permanently etched into my brain, and since that point every time something odd or unexplainable has happened I have jokingly cited it as being a Tacoma-esque experience.

In October of 2023 I played Earthbound Beginnings as my entrypoint into the Mother series (which I have a review for, if curious). To put it shortly, I adored that game, and cited that it not only managed to blend the genre staples I loved from games like mainline Dragon Quest- my all time favorite video game franchise- with an unprecedented level of creativity, personality, and Tacoma-esque experiences, however it did so in a way that was very touching and thoughtful. Since the months those credits rolled, I have only gotten firmer on my stance that Earthbound Beginnings is a masterpiece and a personal favorite of mine.

I started playing Earthbound Beginnings because I needed a bit of an escape from a particularly dark part of my life I was battling, and since those days my life has unfortunately continued to sour. I have been in a low and scary point, and I decided it was time to rip the band-aid off and prescribe myself another dose of leveling up and Tacoma-esque experiences with the next entry in the series- Earthbound.

Every once in a while, a piece of media falls into your lap that is just simply what you need. I have been pretty down lately, from a physical, mental, emotional, relational, pretty much any “al” standpoint- and something cozy, silly, and heartfelt was just what I needed. I was worried that the endless hype and discussion I had second-handedly picked up on over the years for this title would interfere with my enjoyment- but it didn’t, and I had such a wonderful time finally playing this game myself.

While this game retreaded quite a bit of ground from the first game, it still felt fresh and has such a strong and personable identity that there is no wonder at all why this game is so timeless and became a cult classic (though, “cult” classic nowadays might be a stretch). The world is so fun to just simply be a part of, every corner had something new, silly, exciting, and worth the investment of exploring. I talked to every npc, searched every corner of every map, read item descriptions, and soaked up every second of the soundtrack I could. It’s the type of game where you realize you’re approaching the end and feel sad because it’s just such a fun time. Ultimately, however, there isn’t all too much that I can say that hasn’t already been said about it that hasn’t been said a million times over, nor is there much I want to dive into since I think everyone should play and enjoy this title and blindness really helps.

Great gameplay mechanics, great art direction, great soundtrack, great story- just a great game altogether. I have some nitpicks, there are a handful of annoying areas and moments sprinkled in, (while unpopular opinion most likely) I missed having random encounters rather than the on-map enemies as I find it to add more tedium than it relieves, and a few other things that I frankly don’t even care to bring up because it is so trivial. This game is great. My favorite Mother game is still the first, and I doubt that will change when I reach the third game, but that is not a negative towards this one by any means and I hope if you haven’t played these two games you enjoy them just as I have. Just as I have been for that camel way back when, I'll be thinking of this game for many years to come. Why? Because I love you Earthbound.

Castlevania has been kind of nothing but hits for me so far. I’ve found a lot to like in the popular series punching bags like Simon’s Quest, which has become probably a top ten video game for me, and The Adventure, which has become a game I will halfheartedly defend as actually fine when it comes up in casual conversation. Even popular games that I don’t get along with like Super IV and Symphony of the Night are obviously incredibly well done experiences, just ones that don’t rub me the right way. On average though I think Castlevania might have the highest hit rate of any series I’ve played this many entiries in bar like, Final Fantasy where (has not played 16 voice) I think literally every one is very good to great. So I came into Legends with a very open mind. Castlevania has basically never steered me wrong yet, I find myself more positive than average it seems, you get to play as a cool anime girl, and I’ve quite enjoyed the weird formal experiements that the limitations of the Gameboy hardware make necessary in these early portable entries. How could it POSSIBLY go wrong.

I’ll tell you how. I’ll tell you.

It’s subtle because Legends might not be obviously unpleasant if you were to just watch somebody play it. It looks FINE. It feels FINE. It’s level of challenge is FINE. It has a some interesting ideas – replacing subweapons with equippable magical powers that you earn by killing bosses, giving you the super saiyan mode that this game is most famous for, multiple endings determined by how well you explored the stage (sort of, we’ll get to it) – and I think some of the charm of the earlier Gameboy titles is still here, like in the way that they still apparently just can’t crack the code on making stairs on the Gameboy so all vertical movement happens via climbing up and down ropes.

The problem with Legends is that it’s so SWAGLESS, dude. They forgot to season my Castlevania, they just cooked it as it came and like yeah it’s well made and sure I can eat it but it doesn’t TASTE like anything! Everything feels like it’s been dialed way back from Belmont’s Revenge. Enemies aren’t as weird or interesting to look at, and there are no level gimmicks at all, let alone cool ones. The mega man level structure is gone too, which is fine too, but it does call attention to the way that even when we’ve returned to a traditional Storming Castlevania level structure here everything feels REALLY indistinct. There are familiar motifs to fall back on for this sort of thing by this point in the series but it doesn’t feel like Legends even really does that. The clock tower, for example, has gears and stuff in it, but the stuff that you’re DOING and the way you’re moving around and the guys you’re hitting don’t feel very different from the way all these things feel in the keep or the graveyard.

And while I applaud any time we try to do a lot of new cool shit, I think the new cool shit in this game is also the stuff that works the least when it all comes together. The way you get the good ending is to fully explore each level until you find a hidden artifact at the end of its alternate path (the items are classic Castlevania subweapons which is very goofy I have legitimately no idea what this is supposed to be signaling about the mythic value of these objects given this game’s position as the Origin Of All Castlevania), but the levels aren’t really structured in a way that makes finding them actually interesting or challenging. Every time you’re just going to come to a point where you have to arbitrarily decide which direction to go down and at some point you’re either going to luck into your key item OR you’re eventually going to hit the boss screen and because Legends has actually pretty rigorous checkpointing you’ll have basically beefed your chance to get the item for that level unless you intentionally burn through all of your lives upon your realization and play through the level again on a fresh continue. This game carries the beautiful Castlevania tradition of giving you infinite continues and electing to use one will just start you at the top of a level rather than your most recent checkpoint, and if you were to do a perfect run with no mistakes and no deaths the game maybe has an hour or 90 minutes of content so it’s not exactly a huge ask but it’s the kind of thing where it’s like why am I the one doing this work and making these excuses, why is the game set up in this tedious way?

They’re all like this. Burning Mode, you’re super sick hyper powerful mega mode, is basically just the button you hit to win fights, and you get to pop it once per stage at any time. It doesn’t refresh after you use it but it DOES refresh if you die, so it’s incredibly easy to just pop it on every single boss in the game. I would say that for more than half of the dudes you fight here, including Dracula, I don’t even know their patterns because I just made Sonia an unstoppable monster and hit them nine times before they could do literally anything.

The power system that replaces subweapons is interesting in theory, and I especially like the idea that they’re meted out with intentionality over the course of your linear progression through the stages, but there doesn’t seem to be a ton of reason towards the order they’re given to you. You get the equivalent of the stopwatch first, and it’s mondo cheap to use, which makes it the most useful power in the game by far. The general ease of the game coupled with the lax punishments for failure make your twenty-heart-cost full heal basically worthless, and by the time you get the one that deals damage to every enemy on the screen at once you have precious few trap rooms that sic tons of enemies on you left, which are the most dangerous screens in the game where that would offer the most utility. Coupled with the fact that the whip powerup system returns from previous Gameboy entries and you really do feel arguably the most equipped to kill that I’ve ever felt in Castlevania, but it feels like a LOT when all the guys you fight are like, skeletons who don’t seem to be aware that you’re there and wiggly ghosts.

There’s at least one interesting encounter here, in both a callback to the Soleil fight in Belmont’s Revenge and presumably a bit of nice brand synergy with the contemporaneously released Symphony of the Night, Alucard pops in halfway through the fifth stage to tell you to be like “uhgghhh my beloved, you’re so cool but this is my fight alone please let me go fight dracula by myself you’re too pure and sexy to fight a mean vampire” and Sonia is like “wow Alucard that’s so true I am a stupid loser baby woman wait hang on a second what the fuck that’s dumb” and then HE’S like “oh okay well allow me to test your STRENGTH” and then you have to fight him it sucks bro. But finally at least towards the end of the game there’s a one on one duel with a guy with good AI and an interesting moveset and ha ha I’m just kidding dude I immediately activated burning mode and destroyed him in six seconds before he could literally move or act at all.

To get back to how Castlevania Legends absolutely could not pick up anybody at the bar on account of an utter lack of girlswag, I’d like to complain about how this game looks and sounds, which again, isn’t BAD. In fact the first level is scored to a pretty good remix of Bloody Tears (simon’s quest’s strongest soldier logging on), replacing the drum part with a driving baseline, changing the way the NES version has the melody constantly ascend going into the “chorus” with a neat little minor key dip, and adding that patented gameboy soundchip Crunch that I love so much. It’s great. But then alllll the way until the Dracula fight itself which is another remix of an existing Castlevania song, everything is entirely forgettable, the most absolutely generic stomping through a dungeon type shit you could possibly imagine, or not imagine as the case may be because I sure as shit can’t recall a single note of it. And I don’t mean this in a “it doesn’t Sound Like Castlevania” way because neither of the previous GB Castlevanias really did either but I think Belmont’s Revenge lowkey has some of the best music in the series in there, often eerie and weird and entirely fitting the bold art choices that game was making.

Maybe that’s also part of the problem: Legends LOOKS bland. Not bad! Fine! Okay! Medium! There isn’t anything wrong here. I hate to be that guy who’s like “well why isn’t it as good as the other one” but a lot of the ways that Legends feels bad to me is as this itch under my skin, this way that it feels like you’re wearing your shoes on the wrong feet – like yeah sure I can walk around fine but pretty soon my feet do hurt and I am going to have blisters at the end of it. It’s just an ugly kind of fine. The suggestions of environments that are boring, the gravestones and brick walls and clock tower gears and scary trees all the most basic and unexciting versions of themselves artistically. Coming off of Belmont’s Revenge which I think might actually be the best looking Gameboy game I’ve ever seen, whose greatest strength might actually be how good and subtle and creepy its art is, it’s hard not to look at Dracula’s shitty little throne and be like...that’s where Dracula sits? Do you remember the gigantic, looming, ethereal skeletons and wavering scythes dotting the background in the leadup to Dracula’s room in Belmont’s Revenge? Do you remember how the castle itself was portrayed as a bulbous, insectoid monstrosity, as vile as its own inhabitants, radiating life as much as it did cruelty in Castlevania The Adventure? Where’s the fucking SAUCE, Legends?

Playing Legends right off of Symphony of the Night makes for an interesting juxtaposition, especially considering their American releases were almost right on top of each other. I really don’t like almost any part of the act of playing Symphony, but there is such a passion behind every single element of that game, it’s so overdesigned and lovingly rendered and weird and pulsing with this almost unquantifiable desire to exist. Legends is the exact opposite, a game that feels functionally completely fine to play but otherwise very tired, and bored, and uninterested in being there, which can’t even be true because there are innovations here. There are mixups on the Castlevania formula, a lot of them, and not only ones necessitated by the hardware they made the game for. Looking up the division of Konami that made this game, their first ever project was VANDAL HEARTS and then after that they make almost exclusively ports, sports games, and mobile adaptations of existing Konami franchises, like this. But this was early, it was their second full game. I wonder if they achieved their vision, or if they had a strong vision, or if this studio existed from the beginning to squeeze pennies out of the portable market, make as much money as they thought they could get from easy marks like sports or affection for stuff they already knew people liked.

It’s a bummer, man. It feels wrong that I’m saying all this shit about the game where you fuck Alucard Symphonyofthenight without a condom. Can you believe that? That I can say “Once there was a canon Castlevania game that revealed that Alucard is straight (lmao no wonder they got rid of this one) and he fucked a girl who goes super saiyan like goku from Dragon Ball and it is DEFINITIVELY the worst one in the series.” It’s unbelievable. Sonia deserved better. Can’t believe they cancelled her Dreamcast game. 3D Castlevania girl game launch title for the Sega Dreamcast would have fucked harder than any other game maybe ever forever. Konami has been ruining franchises for decades longer than any of us even realized. It’s so fucked.

NEXT TIME: CASTLEVANIA 64

LAST TIME: SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT

As the dominance of arcades fades further into the past along with other relics of our memory, a growing collection of armchair critics have begun to question limited lives and their place in gaming, often unfairly maligning them as nothing but an outdated relic from a time where arcade operators just wanted to squeeze extra money out impressionable children. Similarly, many modern games have leaned away from actively scoring the player during the duration of the game, also to the delight of some. Obviously these don’t belong in every game (you’d be hard pressed to conjure a compelling argument as to why the scoring of Super Mario Bros. is one of the better elements to that title), but what detractors of these don’t recognize is the extra layers that immediately get added when you build a game around these two systems.

Scoring on its own may be an explicitly intrinsic reward in an old arcade game, but what happens when you’re granted extra lives for getting high scores? Suddenly the thought of working towards mastery over basic mechanics becomes a bit more alluring, especially in titles where an extra life can be the determining factor between continuing to play the game and being forced to spend more of your parent’s money. Depending on the game, you may also realize there's been a shocking amount of consideration for how scoring itself is handled - it's not just about bragging rights anymore, you’ve essentially unlocked a whole new slew of mechanics and gameplay challenges to play with in a title you may have disregarded before. These old games weren’t just a ploy to steal your money, they were designed by real people trying to make their game a more exciting and complete package than whatever other games were sharing space in the arcade.

These hidden gems of design ideas can still be found all over arcade titles waiting for a curious player to discover, and one genre that feels absolutely rich for this type of exploration is the shoot-em-up. These games tend to be so challenging for most players that the only reasonable way towards an elusive one credit clear is to earn extends through creative uses of the game’s scoring systems, because there's no way the layman would be able to get by without eventually crumbling under pressure and making mistakes. While you may not be able to read every single bullet pattern that gets thrown your way even after many hours of play, if you engage with the scoring system you’ll likely have a bit more room for error and have a far greater chance of reaching the end. While these games seem insurmountable at a glance, these truly are titles that anyone can learn and get into with enough determination and perseverance. That said, I think there’s extra room for these games to blossom and evolve even more than they already have since their inception.

Standard shmups are often complex but somewhat linear pieces of artistry. Interesting offensive mechanics may throw wrinkles into the equation and force players to consider each scenario with every possible solution, but due to the relative rigidity of bullet patterns and enemy layouts, you could reasonably find an optimal path through and solve the game with enough time, dedication, and study. There's obviously a certain beauty in that - ascending to match the piece on its level and finally seeing through the canvas between the splashes of painted bullets that get in your way of success - it's one of the more literal ways you can use games as a vessel for artistic expression and there's absolutely value in that. The only problem is that at a certain point, the core loop of the game shifts from a problem solving affair to an execution check. Obviously this type of gameplay has its own appeal, and my simplified summary doesn't account for tertiary methods of play such as score attack and pacifist runs (or any number of ways you feel like tweaking the gameplay flow to your liking), nor the arduous journey of climbing the mountain of success in the genre to even reach a point of true mastery. It's just that, with their traditional implementation, I don't find them to be the best vehicles for pure player freedom and expression in the medium of games.

On that note, I think it's unfortunate, albeit understandable to a certain degree, that Battle Garegga a title that's slipped under the radar for most. Its initial facade of an industrial war-grounded aesthetic is relatively unassuming paired next to the otherworldly architecture of galactic ambitions in more popular shooters, and at a glance it's hard to parse its mechanics any further than "it sure is a shmup". The irony here is that, once you peel back any preconceived notions on the game and really dig into its cavernous depths, this is by far one of the most enchanting takes on the genre you can find.

If traditional shmups are more about knowing what the game is about to say than what your actual response is, then Battle Garegga is all about constant back and forth exchanges where making a poor decision may blow up in your face with no easy way to bounce back. It's an active conversation, constantly flowing between leading roles of command and brief moments of reprise to consider your next plan of attack. Few games of any genre have truly captured this feeling for me, let alone shmups, but what's really surprising is that it doesn't do anything extremely complex on the surface to demand this type of engagement. There are many different selectable ships that fuzzy up the decision making during runs, but bullet patterns can be easier to read than what you may expect from your average Cave affair, your secondary attack options are multifaceted but still pretty easy to understand, and bombs mostly work how you'd expect for a shmup. Altogether, this makes the game rather easy to enjoy on a baseline level, but those elements alone are not what set it far above the pack for me. Rather, the defining element to Battle Garegga is it's infamous ranking system, essentially this game's version of dynamic difficulty scaling.

To me, dynamic difficulty is put into games for two primary reasons: putting higher skilled players in check to prevent them from feeling bored by a challenge they're far beyond the level of, and to push lower skilled players past their comfort zone and give them a taste of what's just beyond their grasp. You could make an argument that it's unfair to punish skillful play like this, but generally speaking I don't think this is done out of malice. It's fair to say most developers designing their game around scaling difficulty simply want to push players a little bit more each time they play and make sure they never hit a slump where they desync with the natural difficulty curve of the game. In its best iterations, dynamic difficulty has worked so well at keeping players in the zone that they didn't even notice it was pulling the strings at all.

Battle Garegga, conversely, feels outright antagonistic towards the player at basically every turn. Nearly every action in the game is enough to push the in-game rank just a little bit higher, and the only way to drop the rank is by dying. Don’t get your hopes up that this is like Resident Evil 4 or GOD HAND either, where you could easily tank the difficulty through repeated failure to make an upcoming section easier if you felt like it, because its limited life system will quickly net you a game over if you try to quickly drop your rank with rapid, thoughtless deaths. It sounds so simple, but applying this design idea to a shoot-em-up of all things has such massive ramifications on the game and seeps into every single facet of play. There's no doubt in my mind that many people have and will continue to drop Battle Garegga simply due to the Ranking system, and if they’re just starting out I don’t think I’d blame them. Improving at shmups already feels like an impossible task for most, so considering that the game was severely punishing them for standard play, as well as requiring more money for each credit at the game’s release, I can see why players quickly roll over to a different game after getting frustrated and confused at this one. In modern day with the benefit of hindsight however, I think brushing this aside would be a huge mistake.

As you can probably guess, Battle Garegga ignited a spark from me I haven’t felt in a long time. But what is it about this exhausting cocktail of cruelty and creativity that does it for me? Well all of it, frankly.

Rank is the big elephant in the room regarding the game as I’ve mentioned before, and it really is the backbone of the whole experience. Nearly everything you do increases the Rank, but what does this actually mean? In the long term, it means every decision made can have unforeseen consequences later in a run, varying from faster and denser bullet patterns to end-game bosses having their HP doubled, but simultaneously this means your short term stretches of gameplay are orders of magnitude more stressful. Take stage 1 for example, many shmups suffer from the first stage being a minute-long warmup before you get to the real game, and can lead to resets becoming all the more exhausting when the biggest slump of gameplay (comparatively anyway) happens right at the start. In Battle Garegga, there’s SO much shit to worry about and so many variables to consider that every fresh run feels like you’re already starting at nearly 100% mental capacity. I mentioned rigid routing earlier, but here it's not so cut and dry. Depending on your ship choice your upgrade route might swing wildly, and every item you pick up is preceded by a massive question that lingers for your entire playthrough: “how might this fuck me up later in the run?”

Looking at it on paper, it genuinely might not be a massive boon on your rank to pick up one extra shot upgrade or not, but even beyond the ramifications of prepping at the start for a stretch of the game you won’t reach for another 4 stages, there’s a blanket of anxiety that gets cast over a run from this that completely shifts the energy of the entire experience. For a mainstream comparison, I felt a similar ever-present pressure while playing through Resident Evil for the first time this year. Similar to controlling the Rank in Battle Garegga, every bullet fired and Ink Ribbon spent left me wondering much harder how my final stretch through the mansion would be, but it can’t be understated just how much of this is retained when compressing this feeling into a 30 minute game compared to spreading it across a 4+ hour one with multiple save points to catch your breath.

Not only does this change how you view items you’ve already collected and decisions you’ve already made, this has a really cool side effect on the physical space that items themselves take up before you even think about picking them up. While item drop locations are entirely deterministic, the shifting Rank means you can rarely be quite sure of when and where specific items might drop, and also inadvertently turns surprise random drops into an extended piece of the enemy roster. Some items are good at different points in the run, and also change in external value depending on how you want to deck out your ship, so every drop requires a quick and intelligent evaluation of whether it's something you should deal with or not. Options are probably the easiest example of this, being one of the most valuable upgrades you can earn for your ship, but adding more rank in one pickup than any other item in the game, so while you could pick up a few extra Options early to dramatically increase your DPS, you have to quickly decide whether or not this extra firepower is worth it in spite of the rather large immediate rank increase.

Medals are the one piece of this pie that feels a bit too rigid on paper, essentially being an item you should disregard entirely if you drop a combo and reset their value, but tied in with the rest of the items and the uncertainty of where they’ll appear, they end up wrapping around to becoming one of my favorite things to keep up with in a run. While the decision has basically already been made for you that you always want to pick them up to keep up a chain and quickly work up towards an extend, they have a nasty habit of dropping in the most repugnant places possible, as keeping track of every mechanic at once, on top of keeping a mental note of what enemies exactly will drop the item you want, is just too fucking much for the average player to juggle. Enemy formations are already beautiful and layered in their construction and consideration for a distinct challenge, so tie that in with an item that essential feels random in its placement -on top of fighting enemies that can effectively change the spread of their attacks from run to run based primarily on your rank - and you end up with fresh and unique obstacles to overcome, often when you’re not ready for it. Depending on the speed of your ship a bad item spawn can be absolutely catastrophic, so having to stay on your toes and be ready to squeeze through even the tightest of bullets to keep up your chain gives me a rush like no other. Shmups are generally defined by absurd hand crafted patterns to push through, so having a persistent piece of challenge that feels as dynamic and unpredictable as this is an absolute breath of fresh air for me.

The final layer that really makes this system so fascinating is its relation to deaths and your failure state. Death is the only action capable of dropping the rank, and hoarding your lives for long stretches of time is a surefire way to end up with an experience far too hard to keep up with by the time you hit the halfway point of a run where your Rank REALLY starts to bite you in the ass. Naturally this has led to strategies revolving around deliberate suicides before challenging sections or getting an extend, but giving you extra room to bounce back from genuine mistakes is a nice motivator to try and push sloppy runs further than you may have tried before. Even in the worst of my runs, I constantly find myself saying stuff like “well, let’s see how the rest of the stage goes”, “at least my rank is a little bit lower now”, or “shit, I better play well in the next stage to get that extra extend.” Again, it's this dynamism that really sets this game apart from not just other shmups, but most games in general for me.


Now, if you’re familiar with the development of Battle Garegga there’s a chance you already know this, but here's the part where I have to rip off the bandaid and admit something. In an interview translated by blackoak on the Shmuptacular forum in 2011,
lead designer and programmer Shinobu Yagawa admitted of the Ranking system that “...It sounds bad, but it was one of my methods for increasing income for arcade operators.” While this may just seem like a damning condemnation of Yagawa and the rest of the team, like they just made the game as a 百円硬貨 muncher and it just organically evolved into the mechanical mess it is today, that would be ignoring the fact that everything surrounding Ranking is exceptionally well considered.

I’ve already mentioned the enemy formations, but the general stage design here is just absolutely perfect. Each stage usually has a central gimmick, setpiece, or persistent element to consider that gives every stretch of the game a distinct identity and creatively blows up your rank for the next stage and eventually fuck you over by the end of it all. My favorite of these being a massive 1-2-3 punch right around the middle of the game: A mini-boss in stage 3 that you have to tear apart piece by piece and keep alive for as long as possible to earn an extend while keeping track of the fighter planes that act as safe spots for the boss and new enemies for you to deal with, the dozens of medals that come from bombing huts in stage 4 that skyrocket your rank and deplete you of your resources right before the impending boss rush, and flying platforms in stage 5 that always drop six items of varying use, but the likes of which being tied to your item drop order mean the actual layout and set of drops is going to different every time you fight them. As an addendum to my old point on items as dynamic obstacles, this stage and set of enemies is maybe the best example of this. They’re by far the easiest enemies to fight in a vacuum, but the core of each platform being an obstacle course of items to weave through to either avoid extraneous Rank increases or to keep up your chain when a Medal spawns is one of the most breathtaking pieces of design I’ve ever seen in an arcade game.

There's no doubt in my mind Yagawa did not envision the modern version of how Battle Garegga would be played, but you don’t just accidentally design and map a game out as thoughtfully as this. Somehow there isn’t a single stage in the lineup that feels out of place, and all of them contribute to the structure in ways I just can't get enough of. I especially enjoy how even the game’s pacing keeps you on your toes, going from a dense set of 4 levels where you prep for the hardest sections of the game, a massive endurance test of a boss rush right in the middle that takes place over whats by far the longest stage of the game, and two final stages that, while pretty standard as far as structure go, act as your final test of the game’s mechanics quite well. Initially I wasn’t sure how to feel about the last third of the game shifting the focus away from Rank control and setpieces, but being the section that shows most clearly the ramifications of your choices throughout the game, as well as being the one stretch that's anything like this, I think it ends up slotting into the full stage lineup quite well. Somehow, despite being as crammed full of overlapping ideas and off the wall mechanics that always have a new wrinkle to uncover, everything fits into place and adds to the game meaninfully (even dying to drop your Rank clearly had some thought put into it, with the number of lives you have when dying determining how much your Rank will drop, meaning its always better to suicide before getting an extend and not after. Brilliant.)

Maybe this persistent stress and indecision felt during play is why Battle Garegga isn’t for everyone, but I just can’t get enough of it. Even though I’m far below the level where I can truly capitalize on every millisecond of play to maximize my score, I constantly find myself pulling back to appreciate this impossibly complex web of interwoven mechanics, and ogle at the ways players have broken the game in half and bent it to their will. The fact that the game is over 25 years old and players are still pushing the limits of what's possible in it is awe inspiring. This perfect combination of its unsolvability and difficulty of wrangling with it’s mechanics, combined with its loose enough structure to allow for players to truly stretch their legs and express themselves, is a perfect microcosm of why I fell in love with video games to begin with.

What I’ve come to learn over the years of getting into games from before my time is that first impressions might fool you, and may inevitably push you away from something you’ll truly fall in love with. We always hear about “don’t judge a book by its cover” but even beyond that, I think shaking away preconceptions of art (whether it land anywhere on the scale of a singular piece or an entire genre) can lead to finding new ways to appreciate even something as overtly laced with cynicism and cruelty as they come. Taking off the rose tinted glasses, it's extremely clear that the era of arcades from the 80s and 90s didn’t always have a clean experience for the player in mind. It’s why games were tough as nails in their original pay-to-play format, and it's why a massive stretch of early console games felt like they carried over some old bad habits from their predecessors. Income was always a driving factor to their design, and pretending that wasn’t the case would be extremely disingenuous of me. Looking beyond that, however, is the key to finding what made these games stick with people back then, and continue to pull them in now. If we all cast aside our rigid understanding and discussion of certain game design concepts, I think we’d all collectively find more games to fall in love with and appreciate. Maybe we’d find more games that have an exciting platter of stuff to dig into that was truly there all along, just hiding under our noses waiting to be discovered. Maybe we’d find more games like Battle Garegga.

There are some strange rare design choices that cause minor moments of frustration, like one song constantly switching on and off between off-beat hits and another song that can overwhelm you with a flurry of notes right after an in-song cutscene, but in general, this game absolutely rules. It does a great job translating the song's lyrics and major beats into a firmly telegraphed form with the overlapping circles + lines that have to be traced as held notes, and they're all placed carefully in order to keep the chart and the player in-tune with the beat, perfect for the compact DS touchscreen. Admittingly it's not ideal relying on sheer score accrual over individual stage rankings to unlock the bonus stages, but it at least provides another incentive to master more difficult stages and the hardest settings when the thresholds are set that high. Either way, the game's charm is absolutely infectious and it never gets old watching three guys in suits and sunglasses dance away everyone's problems, no matter how minor they may be. Without a doubt, I can see myself coming back to push through the highest difficulty after clearing this on normal, so it's an easy recommendation despite some low points. I saw this advertised all over the place as a kid and can't believe it took me this long to finally try it out: hands down one of the best titles on the DS, and it's a real shame we don't see anything from iNiS anymore.