Minish
2008
I love this game so much
2008
I got to the end of the third area when my Batter got stuck with some RPGMaker bug where he permanently moved at 25% of normal speed and there was no way to speed up so I just decided to stop playing. Pretty good though!
I love all games that give me good reason to write notes and draw maps
In terms of game design it's without question a very competently made work, but I feel nothing for these games
2023
Like eating Ambrosia, but half the meal is laced with small bombs exploding inside you
2007
An immaculate, beautiful game, and in my view the best RPG ever made. The atmosphere is deliciously depressing and fed back into by every facet of the game design. The narrative is the best this series gets in terms of thematic resonance and overall pacing. The combat is filled with interesting choices. Every element of friction added against the player - the few save points, the AI-only party control, the hilarious illness mechanic, having your "social links" be unlikable idiots who'd sooner break their legs than make a sensible decision - makes the play experience better, sometimes in fascinating ways, others by virtue of making it less "clean", a play experience that rubs and chafes against the player like sandpaper. I love it. Even The Answer, an awful suffering pit that would alienate the most committed enjoyer, serves a thematic purpose and contributes positively to the play experience.
2019
Definitely one of the best RPGs out there, although not without faults - specifically the erratic difficulty balancing, fumbling of its themes throughout, and inconsistent writing quality, all of which do have an impact on the overall play experience. The vibes are immaculate though, and maybe that's all that matters
It's nice to see the intricate, microscope-level design skills of the Zelda development team directed at something so blisteringly maximalist. I can't help but feel like it lacks the clarity of design that usually defines Zelda games - especially the best Zelda games, like Zelda 1, Majora, BOTW - but regardless, it definitely feels like the most fun I've had with any Zelda title. Will be thinking about my playthrough for a long time, can't wait until enough time has passed that I can replay this
2004
After thinking about what my favourite games are for about three years, which required looking individually at every game I've ever played, I came to the gradual and sudden realisation that Yume Nikki is the most powerful experience I have ever had with a video game. No other game has established such a profound emotional connection to me, or evoked the emotions I felt when I experienced it. No other piece of art, in any medium, has been able to make me feel the way I did when I played this. There will never be a best game of all time, but Yume Nikki is one of few games in this medium I sincerely regard as a masterpiece. Thinking about this game makes me love video games; I hope that, one day, I will find another game that I can suddenly realise I love so completely as I do this one.
I've played well-executed babushka narrative design games before (was reminded of Ever 17: The Out of Infinity), but delivering it in a non-linear way where the story delivery has over a billion different permutations is incredibly impressive. I am not a billion different versions of myself, so I can't ask them how they found it, but I loved it; I'm not sure it was NECESSARY but it was COOL
It's a small thing, but I did find this easier to get into than a lot of rhythm games because it gave me a small pool of songs to start with, then expected me to unlock the rest by clearing the songs I got. I very much get choice paralysis when I have a list of 150 songs. So, I like that
2022
The third and hopefully not final word in "what if a third-person shooter had the design sensibilities of a Kirby". Never gotten into the multiplayer of these games, but the puzzle-platformer-shooter modes are always premium video game tapestries
2022
I'm not a hater so I'm not holding the fact that very frequently during combat the camera will clip underneath the world and reveal the abyss beneath against it because at no point did I ever actually care about that. What I will hold against it is that I wish I could catch Pokémon without starting combat like in Arceus, and that I mean it sincerely when I say that dominated a lot of my feeling towards the game for the whole 40 hours I played it
I played Etrian Odyssey a couple years after this, and realise that everything I liked about it is just Etrian Odyssey. So I guess my conclusion is that you should play Etrian Odyssey and not this
Every time I bring up the fact this is my second favourite Kingdom Hearts game, everyone (EVERYONE) goes wild at me. Like come on! Have you PLAYED this game? It owns! Some of you need to just hang out in that Fantasia world for two hours like I did