A beautiful piece of interactive media in which you freely explore a haunted city and experience strange events taken directly from japanese stories and mythology. Because of the buddhist lens in which the game approaches its events, simply accepting death and suffering as a natural condition, everything is executed in such a unique and raw way. I really wished games like shin megami tensei had taken some notes from this.

Sadly, it is extremely hard to properly emulate nowadays, between text box errors, graphic glitches and overly fast emulation, I couldn't find a VM that played it perfectly. But if you can find a proper way to play this, its really worth it.

Solid mix of JRPG and early horror genres, with good voice acting and interesting story, albeit a bit short. The entire game is set in a huge haunted monastery filled with secrets and in that pre-rendered ps1 greatness in which every room feels like a piece of art. I really enjoyed the exploration, even though sometimes it can be a bit confusing to navigate. I wouldn't have it any other way though, as the vibe the game is going for only works so well thanks to the fixed camera angles.

Also I feel people exaggerate when they complain about the combat being too slow, it kinda is, but it gives you a ton of options on how to build your characters and you can, for example, pump magic to one hit everything, so personally I don't think its slower compared to most JRPGs at the time, including the famous ones. However I believe the random encounters don't really add much to the game, they're pretty easy to begin with, so you don't feel threatened and even the battle music at times feel too "usual" and kills the horror vibe the game is going for. Probably for scaredy people like me that's actually good though.

A game that gets progressively better with each chapter imo. At first I wasn't quite sold out on it, modifying the car was intimidating, the random encounters on the map seemed annoying and loading time even more. But then you start to get it and look forward for more chances of getting better parts. Even the loading times sometimes work in favor of the game as it pulls some of the most stylish loading screens of the ps1.

And then there's the writing... It's hard to explain, it takes its racing aesthetic very seriously and is even poetic at times, but can be also very funny, its the kind of thing you could only see in a game of this era I guess. By the end I really feel in love with its characters and unique style. And the surreality of its main plot also works in its favor in my opinion.

Rayman 1 for people who don't like rayman 1.

Maybe it has some merits on its own(but certainly not the new levels, who are the worst part of it) and the original was far from perfect, but the whole project its like spitting on everything that made the original unique and replacing it with nintendo TM formulas.

People should be able to clear 99% of the game without trouble so everything is easier and you get more lives. Slow paced platformers are bad so the player must get the run ability from the start even if that makes the game even easier. Having unique enemies as obstacles is weird so we turn then into mid bosses. Also we need a recurring mid boss. And having an unique last stage is strange so we make a whole world out of it. To finish it, let's make a huge difficulty spike right at the final boss and make the fight extremely long and obnoxious leading to even more stuff.

It's not as bad as some people make it look, but I wouldn't call it great either. Often the levels are too big and confusing and you may waste a lot of time just figuring out what to do and then the things you are meant to do aren't always fun. But when it is fun, its pretty damn good, the humor and characters are great, there are many fun mini-games and places to explore and I'd say p much everything after Grunty Industries is solid.

Also unlike many other sequels at the time, it doesn't feel rushed, the content, good or bad, is unique for each world, so props for that too.

I first played this when I was 10 and felt it looked hella scary. But then I tried it again the next year and while I had trouble with Matador and got a bit traumatized at that Sakahagi scene I eventually made it... except I got the worst ending and didn't even get to fight against Kagutsuchi. So yeah, nocturne was highly influential to me and I believe it is partly to blame for my taste in strange/obscure games, even though nowadays it's pretty popular.

For starters, the turn-based combat flows well and manages to be both complex and quick, its also one of the few jrpgs where the random encounters aren't just pushovers- not only the enemies can use dangerous skills, more demons can show up after you defeat the first group and kick your ass. The bosses are simply great. The dungeons are smaller and built differently compared to the labyrinths of grid based 1st person dungeon crawlers, but without sacrificing complexity, plus most dungeons have an unique gimmick and both music and visuals are top tier. Seriously, there was so much effort put into nocturne that with all the music unique variations you get more than 200 tracks.

The storytelling is super minimalist, but every event is extremely well directed and feels like a reward for going through these long dungeons... also they are weird and alien-like compared to both past and recent SMT games. Nocturne feels more like Kaneko doing his own thing, and that's fucking great imo. Looking at SMT V, I feel like modern atlus doesn't really get this game at all.

And the fusion system is more complex compared to the snes/ps1 games, but the game is not overly reliant on it like in IV- you can go through whole dungeons with the same group and the game encourages you to actually try defeating the bosses with what you already have instead of just fusing a bunch of element resistant demons every single time you have trouble, also since the skill inheritance is random you can never fully replace a demon and every playthrough ends up feeling fairly different.

Still my favorite JRPG.

The brightness, the new dull textures, the lack of a lot of visual effects the wii version used, the lack of lineart for klonoa 2... they really gave klonoa that mobile game feel huh. Even some animations and cutscenes are worse. Imagine remaking a ps2 and a wii game in 2022 and somehow making the game both uglier and worse performing.

Not to mention some dubious "QoL" decisions, like the constant "press a to jump!!!" style popups or the on-screen reminder that you can play a cutscene 5x faster (which can actually de-sync some animations resulting in goofy stuff). Sadly PCSX2 is still the best way to play Klonoa 2.

While Adventure is my personal favorite, I believe Super Star is probably the peak of this series. Updating the copy abilities to have full movesets was such an amazing idea, every copy ability felt new in this game, it was like a combat focused kirby game. Bosses moves were also upgraded for that reason and the game gets some of the most creative and interesting bosses in the series. So interesting in fact that their moves keep getting reused both in subsequent Kirby titles and also in Smash Bros. But they didn't stop at that, they also broke away from the typical adventure structure and instead divided the game into several mini-games, each one with its own gimmick. It's amazing how creative and ambitious Sakurai was in this era.

And the unpretentious, simple and silly stories of each mini-game plus the artstyle (Kirby looks especially big in this game!) make for such funny and iconic moments and fit this series so well! And despite the unpretentious stories, super star actually gives more context and actual dialogues to characters than a lot of other Kirby games in which it simply seems that everyone in dreamland wants to kill Kirby for no particular reason.

Maybe the biggest problem of the original Super Star, is that it felt too easy, even for a Kirby game. SSU kinda fixes that giving it the much needed True Arena, but it also kinda ruins the game as all of its 4 additions are just variations of the past mini-games, making a game that was never meant to be repetitive... repetitive. Revenge of the King was actually fun, but both Knightmare Ultra and Helper to Hero were slogs. Sometimes less is more. Also most of the graphical "upgrades" kinda miss the point and try too hard to look modern, ending up with a less unique game. But maybe people want for every game in a series to look the exact same, I don't know.