Crusader of Centy is… a fascinating experience. It throws a lot at the wall, and not all of it sticks. But it has a goal, and at the very least it succeeds in making you consider what it has to say.
The game follows a young boy who wants to become a hero. You exist in a fantasy world filled with monsters that have been biding their time underground for countless eons. Your character comes of age into a tumultuous time, so you take your sword and venture out to discover the cause. So far, so standard. The game throws a major curveball at you pretty early, however, when a fortune teller suddenly gives you the ability to talk to animals… at the cost of your ability to talk to humans. At that moment I was hooked- I figured the rest of the game would be about flipping the classic RPG town on its head, like a Zelda game where you can only talk to the Cuccos. The game does deliver on this, but unfortunately it’s really only for the first town. After this, you come across as many animal villages as human ones, which kind of ruins the whole idea for me.
As for the gameplay, it’s pretty average. You run around, swing a sword, jump, and the combat focuses on this boomerang sword throw you can do. You also find many animal buddies throughout the adventure that give you abilities. I really enjoyed the flying squirrel, which makes the sword fly incredibly far with your camera following it. Honestly all the powers were fun to use, though some, like the dodo, get shafted by appearing at the very end of the game, going completely underutilized.
The main adventure areas were kind of a slog, even using the speed-boosting cheetah buddy most of the time. Some puzzles were somewhat obtuse (or perhaps it was just me… probably) and the objectives sometimes unclear. The bosses, however, were nearly all very enjoyable, taking advantage of the animal buddies in ways the main levels just don’t.
Getting back to the story, it quickly swaps to being about monsters rather than animals. There’s a great segment where you get body-swapped with a slime who desperately wants to be human. You get ambushed in the woods by this hero fellow that you’ve been following in the footsteps of for most of the game. He bursts out of the bushes and makes a mad dash for you, which was both hilarious and terrifying. Great stuff. It really makes you feel bad for the slimes, but I really don’t think it makes an effective point because you haven’t seen or fought any other slimes up to this point. But the game will come back around to the humanization of monsters shortly.
I do want to take a moment to talk about the music, which was a major highlight of my playthrough. The soundtrack is filled with absolutely JAMMIN’ tracks stuffed to the brim with that classic crusty Genesis bass. There are at least 5-6 tracks that are going to stick with me for years.
Once you regain the ability to talk to humans, the game’s finale ends with you retracing your steps across the world, traveling back in time in each location, learning about the history of humans and monsters. You travel further and further back, fighting boss after boss and systematically dismantling the evil influences on the present. You learn that monsters are just people who want to be treated fairly. Eventually, you travel back to a time of darkness before humans and send all monsters back to where they came from, preventing all the conflict in the first place. To be honest, I’m really not sure how I feel about this as an ending. It says a lot that the only way humans can live without hatred is to not even have contact with monsters in the first place. On the other hand, seeing your home town in peace is quite impactful, especially when you realize you have a father now, one who didn’t go off to become a soldier.
Overall, I can’t say that Crusader of Centy achieved what it set out to. It did, however, give me a lot to chew on that I’ll probably still be thinking about for quite a while. I’ll have to revisit it sometime in the future to see if my thoughts here still hold up. And to find whatever that raccoon buddy was. If any of this sounded intriguing, give this game a shot.

Pokémon Violet is, in the truest sense of the phrase, a diamond in the rough. I wasn’t originally planning on playing it at all, having fallen off the series pretty hard after half-heartedly making my way through Ultra Sun several years ago. I expected a similar experience with this game, but what I ended up with was a wildly unexpected mixed bag.
On one hand, everything that’s been said about Violet’s performance is true. The frequency and variety of technical errors was immersion-shattering, if not at least humorous. From pop-in to lag to lighting errors to clipping to every loading screen lasting just long enough to make you think the game has crashed (though blissfully it never actually did for me), this game is absolutely rife with problems. Balancing is also a major problem, with the lack of scaling combined with a non-linear story resulting in the player having little idea where they can go next. The difficulty wildly ping-pongs across the scale, though all the final battles were pleasantly challenging.
On the other hand, this might be the strongest story and especially the strongest characters in a Pokémon game yet. I truly expected the story to fizzle out when all three paths are completed and the crater to simply be some bonus area, but instead I received a powerful finale and great character chemistry between the main three. “Professor Turo” was the greatest moment of the play through. Throughout my time with the game, I continually noted that the professor had literally no personality; he was a complete plank of wood. He even moved stiffly during the cutscenes where he is visible on a screen. Imagine my utter delight to discover that there was, in fact, a good reason for this to be the case! The ending of the game was well worth seeing.
In the end, I could only feel sadness that such a great story and characters were wrapped up in a sub-par package. I sincerely hope the next games are given more time in the oven, and if they are, I’m certain the series will have masterpieces on its hands the likes of which haven’t been seen since the DS days.

Yeah, I can see how this one became a cult classic. For an NES release, and not even a particularly late one all things considered, it just has so much charm and atmosphere. The creative use of the magic spells is what did it for me. Telepathy lets you communicate with the four wise men whenever you want, mostly for hints but it also fleshes them out as characters quite a bit. The disguise spell is used for various puzzles but you can also wander the towns in different forms to get flavor text that really helps the world feel more dynamic. These two spells combined with fun characters, setting, and story create an experience I have yet to see any other NES game come close to.
Some of the puzzles were very annoying though, particularly one where you have to use the paralysis spell on a random NPC and then talk to them. The hints from the wise men mention this but have nothing to say about which NPC to use it on. Overall the experience was excellent, though.

R.I.P. Stom, forever in our hearts