Well, Helen's Mysterious Castle. I got attracted to this game because of the anime-girl-in-a-weird-16-bit-retro-environment premise, but came back with a little good surprise. I always thought this game was long since one steam user had almost 100 hours invested on it, but turned out to be fairly short for an RPG, I finished it in almost 6 hours.

What really shines here is the gameplay, an one-to-one JRPG combat system where the attacks are performed based on a countdown timer. For example, if you want to perform a hit with your broadsword, you have to wait to the counter to go all down from 14 to 0 to perform the attack, and you can't stop the movement once it's chosen, so you'll have to wait until it's performed to do another move. The enemy also has its own counter, and this is where the strategy factor comes. If your enemy has to wait 15 'turns' (so to say) to perform a powerful attack, you can deploy three attacks of 5 'turns' before getting hit, or you can use a heal movement to recover you and defend yourself from the great impact. A really unique combat style that I wish could be more standarized (or more refined in another game), since it's so fun. After winning battles against enemies and bosses, you get experience points that you can spend on upgrading your movements, something I prefer more than the common stats improvement mechanic, though it rewards grinding and that's quite a gray area for me.

Don't expect too much from the story, but at the same time, it's not like it tries to be more than what it is. The story is simple yet entertaining, with some twists and turns here and there, and that's all you really need for a game this length.

On the sound section... the music is amazing. I can't really remember who the composer was, but tracks like this one are so memorable they're still in my head after years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWJJAt4cbKM

And yes, you may ask "why after so many years, if you finished this game this year?", well, that's because I already played this game before, but didn't bother to finish in my original run. Anyway, the music is great, the sound effects are on point with the aesthetics...

And speaking about aesthetics, the game looks excellent. It's really like your generic RPG Maker 2003 game, but that's because all games created on RPG Maker 2003 look fantastic. The graphics are greatly designed and original, and they truly bring a sense of nostalgia, or longing for the times where the only preoccupation in your life was finishing up that captivating JRPG you played on the SNES (or its emulator counterpart).

Overall, this is a game I recommend strongly. I can't think of any flaws other than it can become quite grindier depending of what kind of build you want to achieve (or if you get stuck with powerness past certain point), but whatever, still good.

6.5/10

Really sweet game with a heavy melancholic mood, but not too much of an interesting story. To me, Hana is the best girl, although I still have to play Sachi's path (Edit: finished it, Hana's still the best girl). I loved the Impresionist pieces employed as soundtrack and some of the backgrounds, they do a good job setting the mood.

It was fine but kinda pointless to play when you have Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. I played the MS-DOS version, but the Arcade and Sega Genesis versions are okay too.

Unlike UMK3 for the Genesis, this game for the same platform has more voice acting and more stages, at the cost of less fighters to choose.

Atmospheric but flawed, Batman Returns is a decent platformer with interesting ideas but very broken overall. Let's start with the positive things.

The first impression you'll get is that the game is really atmospheric. It has 5 acts and each of them are richly designed in graphical terms. Everything is so gloomy, and the backgrounds are greatly detailed too. Also, that presentation at the beginning... perfect atmosphere.

The music is good too, I love the intro song and some songs from the levels, those cheap GEMS bleeps really suit the sombre mood Batman Returns tries to deliver.

Now, let's get in its biggest flaw. The second impression you'll get is that the game is painfully hard. I know there are games where this level of difficulty is the main attraction, but in those games the difficulty is well implemented (most of the time), here... not so much. I mean, no matter what you try, everything that moves will hit you because the collision boxes are all over the place (this later in the game becomes almost infuriating). Of course there are a lot of lives and health restoration items to mantain you with life no matter how much you got hit, but there are so many cheap deaths around the corner... and near the end of the game it's almost impossible to beat a level without losing 4/5 lives. At least, you have infinite continues.

In order to win the game, you'll have to conserve as much throwable weapons as you can so you can use them to quickly defeat the bosses. Now, some bosses are so overpowered that will kill you in a blink and you'll not get anything in compensation, you'll spawn with the same quantity of weapons you had when you died (so, if you wasted them while fighting a boss, sorry! There's nothing for you). The horizontal camera is short so it's hard to react to an incoming enemy or know where you will land in a jump. All of these flaws lead to some unsatisfactory-satisfactory kind of experience that's not so enjoyable.

This game could be a little bit better if the enemies were more easy to hit and the collision detection were better. As a veredict, play this game if you want a challenge and a good visual experience, but if you want to have fun, there are better games to try.

One of the best games I've ever played, if not the best. Irrational Games knows how to create a great immersive experience by taking the immersive sim concept Looking Glass was demonstrating with their games, and merging it with a complex FPS-RPG system where you can almost create a completely unique character everytime you play. Also, the storytelling is superb, with some thoughtful commentary from people in the game (with the help of audiologs you find while exploring the spaceship where you're trapped), and SHODAN. The opressive atmosphere is amazing too, the soundtrack fits very well with the places you visit in the game.

Nothing more to say, this game is a must.