Nocturne is such an immersive experience, I always feel a strong sense of isolation and danger at every moment and like I'm really fending for myself in that treacherous ruined world. It has my favorite turn based combat system of all time, which has so many possibilties that it makes every other JRPG I play feel slightly disappointing. With the way buffs work there's rarely ever a need to truly grind, if you bring a good strategy you can win, at least when doing the normal endings. There are countless memorable and epic boss battles with easily the most consistent lineup in the Megatens I've played. Everything about the game from aesthetics to concepts to soundtrack is just so metal and brutal and raw. Even when it's really putting me through my paces or beating me down again and again, I'm never too frustrated for long because another idea occurs to me and something awesome happens again. I first completed it on the remaster on TDE, and it probably goes without saying that this PS2 version has better moodier lighting. This run I skipped the Amala Labyrinth entirely and felt the vanilla content had a much better flow and variety to it, but TDE has some of the best boss fights and extreme difficulty too so it's worth trying it once. I just adore this game :)

Before I played Galaxy 2, I only ever really played crappy licensed games on my PS2 for the most part. I was a young kid at the time so I couldn't really gauge if a game was actually good or not, I just got a game based on a show/movie I liked and that was that. That all changed one day when I was scrolling on YouTube and stumbled upon Super Mario Galaxy 2. I can't even remember what I saw since it's been so long, but I remember instantly thinking "I NEED to play this". This was right before we were going on a trip to Ocean City Maryland and I knew my dad's friend who was going on the trip with us, was bringing his Wii. I go to my local movie rental store which also had video games and rented it. The trip lasted a week and while I really should've been having a ton of fun on the beach, I instead couldn't get enough of Galaxy 2. I was addicted. I think I got up to like world 4 before I had to return the game and I had to part ways with the Wii. I also remember getting a gaming magazine that focused on Galaxy 2. I also distinctly remember a game called "Ivy the Kiwi" being a big focus in it too. God, I wish I still had that thing. I lost it ages ago and can't remember the name of the magazine, and I've tried to look it up online many times to no avail. Anyways, after the whole trip, me and my brother got a Wii and I got Galaxy 1 as you know. A bit after that I remember renting the game again and then eventually getting it for Christmas that year (I think).
I eventually did beat it, but not 100%. I never completed the game until the summer of 2015, I don't know why it took me five years but when I finally did it, I was absolutely ecstatic. This game means a whole lot to me as it not only got me into non-licensed games but it really kicked off my love for gaming as a whole.

So let's start with the biggest elephant in the room, this game's story. Yes it's very lame that they retconned the first game and that the story in general is way more lame in general compared to 1. This is my biggest criticism besides the game not being quite as atmospheric/spacey as 1. It is the reason I think I do like 1 more now, but it really isn't a deal breaker to me. I think there's enough fun dialogue throughout the game for it to still have an above average story for a mainline Mario game. Still, not nearly as good as 1's which yeah is a bit of a bummer.

However, I think the game more than makes up for this by being so much fun and more fun than 1. While 1 had plenty of good galaxies, I did think having several samey ones (the beach and bee galaxies) when there's only 15 full length galaxies was a bit of a downside. Galaxy 2 however did something different. Instead of having a mini galaxy here and there, and having your main galaxies be 6 stars, here the full length ones have 3. Now while there is a good reason they did this, this also led to the game having more sized galaxies that are way more plentiful. This along with the fact the level design is way more straight forward and faster paced, makes the game more fun than 1 I think. It's up to preference of course and I still love both games approach to level design.

Another reason this game is a blast to play is the addition of Yoshi. You wouldn't think he'd add so much to the levels but he does. He's in a good amount of the galaxies and also in them are powerups for Yoshi to use. These were also a great addition and just add that extra bit of fun to the game. I like them all but my favorite was definitely the dash pepper just because it's used in the best of ways. Alongside Yoshi and his powerups are new powerups for Mario. The drill and boulder mushroom were both cool but the cloud flower? Absolutely my favorite powerup in any Mario game. It not only just gives Mario a very pleasant design to look at, it let's you create a maximum of three temporary cloud platforms to use which is just so much fun. They clearly knew it was gonna be the fan favorite since it's used in a ton of galaxies.

While I definitely like 1's soundtrack more now, 2's is also still amazing. It's funny, while the game isn't as atmospheric as 1, it may have the most atmospheric song between both games lol. That would of course be Cosmic Cove Galaxy which is hands down my favorite song in the game, which is fitting since it's also my favorite galaxy in the game. Some other songs I love are Sky Station GalaxyYoshi Star GalaxyStarshine Beach Galaxy and Wild Glide Galaxy. The game doesn't have as moody of an ost, it's more upbeat than 1 but it still has some moody tracks and is still amazing like 1. A good example of a moody track actually and a shoutout to this one is Slimy Spring Galaxy. They did not need to give a short galaxy like this such an otherworldly and atmospheric track but they did. I never really appreciated this galaxy when I first played the game but nowadays, I actually really love it. Again, while 2 doesn't have the same level of atmosphere as 1, it really does still have its moments.

I had a bit of an issue with the prankster comets in 1, not being the biggest fan of them since there's only 5 types (and one of the types barely gets used). This game improves on them I think. Instead of appearing randomly like in 1, you have to get a comet medal in each galaxy for them to appear. Once they do, they will never leave so you don't have to worry about getting them to appear again like in 1. There's also a better variety of challenges this time. You still have your speedrun comets, your daredevil comets, your purple coin comets. However, the cosmic Mario races have been replaced with cosmic clone comets. You now have a different type of speedrun where you have to collect clocks that give you 10 seconds each. You have comets where you have to kill a bunch of enemies in a period of time. These changes/additions, plus the comets not being color-coded anymore so you don't know what you're going to get until you go into the galaxy, just make them much more fun than in 1.

Another thing Galaxy 2 did better than 1 is the extra 120 stars. In 1, to get all 242 stars you have to play the exact same stars as Luigi and then your reward is two extra purple coin stars that I just never found good. In 2, you have 120 green stars to find. A lot of people don't like the addition of these and I never understood why. Sure you can say it's filler but they are brand new stars and they're usually placed in fun creative ways. They act as a sort of scavenger hunt for you to find and you can use the sound they make as a sign you're close to one. Sure, they're not quite as fun to get once you replay the game and know their locations. But a bunch of them still require more advanced techniques to get like triple jumps and stuff so I never found it tiresome to get them all even on this replay. And the reward you get is a fun challenging galaxy that blow's Galaxy 1's reward out of the water. Overall, I think it's a very good postgame and well worth doing it just for the Grandmaster Galaxy.

Just a couple of little changes I noticed between both games. The first is one I noticed all the way back in 2010 when I played both games. When you spin into a launch star in 1, there's like a little couple second delay until it activates. 2 fixes this issue and let's you activate it right away which is super nice. Something I noticed on this new playthrough is unlike 1, 2 doesn't let you spam the spin underwater. I don't know why I never notice this until now lol. I also think the automatic saving instead of giving you a prompt asking you to save is a nice addition in 2.

I love both Galaxy 1 and 2 so much, it really is hard to decide which I love more. While at this point, I'm sticking with 1, it really does flipflop back and forth a bunch for me. Chalk it up to me playing 2 before 1 maybe? Idk if I'd feel the same way if I played it way after 1 or something. Either way, I still feel the same way as I did with my 2022 replays. Play 1 for the much better story, better atmosphere and better OST. Play 2 for the better polished, all around more fun experience. The real answer though is to play both as they're both fantastic games.

Also my top 5 Galaxies now are Cosmic Cove Galaxy, Starshine Beach Galaxy, Slipsand Galaxy, Clockwork Ruins Galaxy, and Throwback Galaxy...among many others, there's just too many good ones in this game!

Complete playthrough. A very solid send-off for the best detective game in a long while, The Lemurian Vampire brings three new, fairly complex scenarios that are once again thoroughly satisfying to solve. A few new mechanics add novelty to the gameplay, now with each chapter taking place over multiple points in time, alongside a quality-of-life improvement that carries "known information" between chapters. It's a shame that this is the final DLC for the game as I'd take as much as I can get of these scenarios, but I eagerly await whatever Color Gray Games come up with next.

Sure the combat could be better but if you think its bad clearly you've never impulse mega flare permafrost dancing steel into stagger will-o-the-wykes lightning rod gigaflare zantetsuken level 5-ed before and it shows :/

I struggled a good bit throughout my playthroughs of Final Fantasy XVI. It is now the third mainline game in the series I've beaten but at the time I started it I had intended it to be my first. Its a series I've always known i needed to try to get into, and the demo of this game was absolutely amazing, it completely blew me away. I was very unexpectedly hyped for this. And playing it I was like oh yeah this is def 5/5 material, after the Garuda fight I was so sold on the game. The music is fucking fantastic and I've never seen such awesome boss fights. But then after that the game felt like it had already peaked. There are still great boss fights through the rest of the game but they never were as impactful as the first 10 or so hours were for me. I felt myself increasingly disinterested in the plot and all the lore and by extension - the game itself.

All that changed near the end when I finally actually started doing side missions. I surprisingly ended up becoming quite fond of all the side characters in the Hideaway and to a much lesser extent the different characters out in the various towns and villages. The game has a pretty damn good cast. It was around that point that I was pretty hype for the end. And for the most part the finale delivers. Its plenty epic, and I was having a great time. But in the end, I was a bit disappointed in how everything wrapped up. That's not to say that there's really anything wrong with the ending, it just wasn't what I was wanting. How i feel about that is how I feel about Final Fantasy XVI as a whole. Plenty of great moments, but in the end still just a little disappointing.

Now that I've explained that I still think FFXVI is great, I have a lot more to complain about. Mostly minor things but it all added up over my 90 hours spent with the game. Some minor annoyances like enemy phases being tied to health bars so sometimes when you set up a stagger and start unleashing, the game just lets them sit there and recover without taking damage and you being unable to do anything for like 20 seconds before the next phase begins. There's also some battles in the wild where if the fight naturally goes a little further than where it started, enemies may just become immune and run back to their spawn point at full health. There's also without fail after every big boss, a main quest that's meant to let things settle but it just kills the pacing and feels like the game is wasting your time by dishing out forced side quests, sometimes several in a row. In the more dungeon-y areas the game is also pretty bad at leading the player along, there were several times I ran completely in the wrong direction because it doesn't make it clear what doors you can open unless you're right next to them. My final complaint is that Final Fantasy mode, the supposed hard mode for NG+, is a complete joke. Now I'm sort of glad it wasn't hard because it made the platinum obtainable for me and now that i have one for a mainline game in the series I don't ever have to bother again. But like, the games idea of hard is give every enemy 50x as much HP. For normal enemies it ain't nothin a level 5 Zantetsuken can't solve but any enemy with a stagger bar doesn't actually feel harder to fight, they just take ages to fucking kill. Even though i skipped every cutscene and did minimal side content, my FF playthrough felt longer than my first where I did basically everything. It just isn't very fun.

So that's about all of my thoughts with Final Fantasy XVI. But to end on a more positive note: Jill is hot and Titanic Block + Counter is one of the most satisfying moves of all time.

Thanks for reading <3

-----TLDR----
+ Great cast
+ Amazing soundtrack
+ Awesome boss fights throughout
- Story quality and pacing is wildly inconsistent
- Didn't like the way it ended
- Too many little gameplay grievances that add up

Nancymeter - 85/100
Trophy Completion - 100% (Platinum #278)
Time Played: 92 hours
Completion #6 of November
Completion #210 of 2023

Everyone has to start somewhere right? Every person had to start with something that inspired them. Whether that be an event, maybe a tv show or film, maybe even a book, or maybe a 3D platforming shooter on the ps2. Or for me at least.

Ratchet & clank was a game born from the gods. If people were destined to do stuff, then this was the game that saw me in that direction. After insomniac lost spyro they needed a new big platforming series, so they borrowed naughty dogs engine which they used for Jak and Daxter and were able to create what would become the first ratchet game. After the release, the game would spawn a PlayStation staple franchise and specifically for this review: a boy with a small dream. But that’s for later. Let’s get onto the actual game itself.

Act 1:

Now I know I’ve reviewed this game in the past, but it certainly lacked the depth it needed, so why not give it that missing depth right now? The story sees you in control of a Lombax named ratchet. He’s alone on the desolate planet of veldin with the dream to escape and to explore other planes across the solar system. Meanwhile, there’s a malfunction in a robot making factory and the result of this is clank, a tiny robot. He finds out that an evil man named chairman drek is planning on destroying planets to create a planet for his own. Clank quickly begins to try and escape but is shot down by other bots and ends up landing in veldin. From there, he meets ratchet and clank helps him to escape the planet with the deal of finding captain qwark and putting a stop to chairman dreks plans. But before we continue the story: it’s time to go into gameplay.

Compared to future instalments, the first ratchet game isn’t as shooter heavy as its successors but it is still a core part of its gameplay. Considering the fact that before, insomniac’s only really major work were the spyro games, you can see that formula kind of applies to the first ratchet game. Even with this however, it still ends up sticking out on its own. You get a choice of 16 weapons all with different attributes. I’m not going to go too in depth about the weapons, because you can tell they were still trying to work out what works and what didn’t and believe me, the taunter is a big showcase of that. Some weapons include the decoy glove, whereby a small inflatable version of ratchet will stand and enemies will instead attack it instead of you. The suck cannon sucks up enemies and even crates which can then be launched back at enemies, this then brings me onto the next bit of gameplay.

The currency in the game is something that would still define its successors. These are bolts. These can be found by killing enemies or even finding them in smashable beige crates, or even surprisingly: bomb crates. Bolts are now explosive! There are different types of crates in the game. Those being the normal beige crates, bomb crates which explode in 3 seconds, metal crates which can only be opened through some form of explosion, and nanotech crates. Nanotech is essentially the health in the game and the crates can be found practically everywhere. Before I go in depth about the currency and its themes, let’s continue the story shall we?

Ratchet and clank end up crash landing on planet novalis but end up getting a ship from the planetary chairman (a very imaginative name) and end up finding…the plumber. The absolute legend. The crack of all jokes. But anyway. They end up going to different planets to try and find captain qwark. But just before I get onto that, I just want to take a minute and talk about another part of the gameplay.

Something that makes the first ratchet game certainly stand out is its non-linear progression. Essentially, in almost all levels you can take different paths to get to different things, these could be important items, important story beats, or just nice little bonuses. What I like about that is that, it encourages exploration and almost pushes it on the player to keep returning to places and just checking out everywhere they can. It’s a very nice bit of gameplay that I wish was continued and pushed a lot more in later ratchet games.

They end up arriving on planet kerwan whereby clank gets a heli pack upgrade and ratchet ends up getting a swingshot. To start off with, the swingshot is one of the gadgets that helps ratchet out with puzzles, these pop up all over the games and work differently to weapons as well…they don’t kill anyone. The heli pack is also an upgrade that helps give ratchet a lot more flexibility in terms of things like reaching hard to reach places. Clank ends up getting 2 other upgrades later on which help with similar things and can come in quite handy. I’ve never met anyone on this planet who hates the heli pack or thruster pack, and if someone does…do you really?

They eventually do end up finding qwark and he ends up taking them to his base on planet Umbris…however, he ends up turning out to be helping drek this entire time and leaves them to the slaughter, thankfully tho ratchet and clank make it out with their lives…but maybe not so much their friendship as clank fell for qwarks tricks. This then leads us into act 2 of the game! Oh wow!

Act 2:

So they end up getting a brand spanking new ship and end up having to try and track down qwark, however before they can…there’s a bunch of issues. For starters, they’re on the planet orxon and the air is very dangerous to breathe, so they are forced to try some form of gas mask to find the infobot and locate qwark. If you don’t know what it is, it’s essentially a small little robot that gives the coordinates of the next planet.

Also, just wanted to also talk about the themes of the game and I thought this would be an excellent time as any. So, if you’re following this I’m just wondering…have you noticed how expensive everything is? Well, you’ll never get what that is! Why it’s good old consumerism my favourite! The main theme of this game and the entire ps2 quadrilogy are obviously the satire and extreme push of consumerism. Stuff is advertised everywhere and practically nothing in the game doesn’t not come with a price. But that is the sort of genius of the writing. Everything has to come with a price and if you can’t pay it then tough shit. It gives the world an almost slightly depressing view. But I digress.

Eventually they get a gas mask from planet pokitaru and go to a bunch of other planets, including hoven where they thwart one of dreks plans…and clank hits on a girl??? This is until they eventually decide to confront qwark on the gemlick base. And oh man…this is where it gets good.

Come on, I had to mention the music at some point. The entire score was composed by David bergeaud and unfortunately he hasn’t returned to the series since quest for booty. His soundtracks in almost every ratchet game he did were excellent and fit with every planet they were inserted into. Whether it be the futuristic and busy landscape of planet kerwan or the desolate yet dangerous gemlick base, everything he composed for the game fits perfectly and encapsulates each world perfectly. It’s a shame later soundtracks wouldn’t encapsulate the same feeling the first few ratchet games did but, hey, we still have the work he did and it can still be appreciated today, if they put it in streaming services…

Act 3:

After attempting to confront qwark, they get into a fighter jet and he crashes onto the planet of oltanis. It’s at this moment when ratchet and clank decide to put aside their differences and actually defeat drek for the good of the galaxy. They try to get oltanis but clank can’t come out because of the lightning and dangerous conditions of the area. Ratchet is then forced to go on his own where he finds qwa- I mean Steve and gets the gagdetron pda…which I have to dedicate a paragraph to.

The gadgetron pda. What’s so good about this baby? It’s essentially the get yourself out of having no ammo card. You can use this thing absolutely anytime you want is essentially a portable vender. The only downside is the fact that the ammo costs more than it does at an actual vendor but who cares! If your loaded this is a perfect way of getting out of dangerous fights.

After getting an infobot, they travel to quartu, otherwise known as the robot factory from where clank was created. Clank ends up becoming giant in a pretty short section which I’m not going to go too in depth about. Essentially they end up getting another infobot for their trouble and end up making it to kalebo III to try and sneak into the robot factory in quartu. Kalebo III just happens to be the headquarters of none other than gadgetron, the company that has been selling you weapons and everything. They meet the chairman and end up having to participate in a hoverboard competition.

Hoverboarding is essentially a little racing game that you can be in. There’s only two tracks with those being in Rilgar and kalebo III. They aren’t that exciting but they certainly were for younger me, but nowadays they frustrate me as all hell. I also forgot to mention about some of the other important gadgets. Those being stuff like the grind rails which let you grind on railings (shocker), the magnet boots which let you walk on magnetic surfaces, the gas mask which I already touched upon. These not only help with puzzles but they also look really swag on ratchet.

After the competition, ratchet receives a remote that turns him into a robot. He decides to use this to his advantage and sneak into the robot factory on quartu. After doing so, they end up finding the exact place where clank was born. I’m not going to describe the scene because…I think it says everything perfectly. Afterwards however, it turns out that drek plans on destroying veldin as a sort of fuck you to ratchet. They decide to try and return to veldin immediately and stop drek in his tracks. Drek ends up revealing that he was the one that polluted his kinds homeworld and he was going to do it again on the new planet he was creating, just to make more money and repeat it over and over again. With this, ratchet and clank finally decide to take drek down once and for all.

The final battle is pretty excellent and cinematic. With the desperate attempt to try and stop drek at all costs from destroying veldin with his deplanetizer ray. Ratchet and clank end up succeeding and shoot drek to his own planet, destroying it in the process. The end shows ratchet and clank finally being really best buds and deciding to live with each other and just be…the best duo like come on.

Epilogue:

After everything…I still love this game. Of course it isn’t perfect but that’s ok. If it wasn’t for this game I probably wouldn’t reviewing different games at this very moment. This was the first game I ever played and I hold it really dear to my heart and hell even the entire franchise to my heart. The story of the first game and the themes it touches on are still perfect to this day. And whilst gameplay could’ve done with a few fixes, that’s what the other games would later help with. And even back then, I called it the game with the biggest heart, because that’s true. It was. It’s still well liked today and I honestly couldn’t thank it enough. And I can’t thank you guys enough either for sticking with me for so long!

Great gameplay, excellent story, breathtaking music, interesting selection of weapons and gadgets, and the plumber still has his cra-I mean back, thanks for the 100th review!

If I could describe this game to the best of my ability, it's kind of like you're riding a bike down a hill at full speed. As soon as you realize you're having a blast, all of a sudden a metal pipe clotheslines you and knocks all of you and both of your shoes off.

It opens to one of the most enthralling prologues to a game I've played of recent, with fun gigantic battles and fantastic orchestras that vibrate your nuts off. It's epic and mature, and I really enjoyed the more political aspect that the story of this one leaned into. It just unfortunately has horrific pacing.

The character's talk so slowly and there's so much exposition that's drawled out in explanations rather than shown. It sure as Hell makes the combat and boss sections way more exciting, but the abrupt fall into the most boring, endless MMORPG fetch quests and lore dumps made me speedrun depression, especially near the end. When it's finally time for that sick Kaiju battle theme song to start playing again, it's like getting cold water splashed on your face to wake you up. By far that is the worst thing about this game.

The combat for the most part is fun and flashy, but it gets so repetitive down the line. It's watered down and fairly bare bones for an RPG. It was okay, but I found myself wanting a bit more to play around with because there's so little powers you can use. The plot linearity didn't necessarily bother me at all because I feel like we've been getting assaulted by really shitty open-worlds lately. The areas are still gigantic and it was nice to take in the beautiful scenery for a change.

All of that being said, the story still goes pretty hard despite the pacing issues. The emotional beats did hit for me and Clive is a very refreshing protagonist for this series. You can tell that they put a lot of care in nurturing his relationships with the other characters to help bolster the themes, but I do wish that that care extended to some others. In my opinion, Jill is just yet another example of Square's inability to write women because she's basically cardboard. Honestly, a ton of the random as shit side characters get more development than her through the side quests, which is very weird.

Overall, it's good but it can be a bit of slog to get to the end. I don't think I'd ever replay it, but if I did, most of it is getting skipped in chunks.

text by Brandon Parker

★★★☆

“A STRANGE AND RARE DESERT PLANT THAT ONLY COMES UP OUT OF THE GROUND EVERY 20 YEARS OR SO, AND SO ALIEN IS ITS SHAPE AND UNIQUE ITS BEAUTY THAT THE SNAKES, LIZARDS, AND OTHER DESERT ANIMALS ALL STOP FIGHTING AND KILLING EACH OTHER OUT THERE, AND THEY ALL CALL A TRUCE JUST FOR THE CHANCE TO GET A GOOD LOOK AND WONDER IF IT'S EDIBLE OR NOT.”

I recently played Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsène Lupin, and let me inform you how excited I got after I had started that game up: real excited. Right as you settle into the game proper, instead of your everyday, commonplace tutorial screen popping up to educate you on the controls for your intial playthrough or whathaveyou, this game’s tutorial just tells you to get a damned notepad and pencil. Being that this is a Sherlock Holmes game, you’ll be playing as Sherlock Holmes, of course, and they won’t be cutting corners to make it easy on your theoretically ignorant selves. Only the beginning of the game, though, lives up to that intial assurance, in my opinion. The rest is the usual adventure game ridiculousness. Oh, well, they tried. Good for them. The main thing is, there’s a part early on where you have to find a certain painting in an art gallery. You have to type in an answer to a question, the question being, “What is depicted in the painting?” After spending half an hour typing in as many ways as I could think of to say, “HMS Victory,” I quit the game to look up a walkthrough and found the answer. It was “boat.” So: Brandon Parker is smarter than Sherlock Holmes. This is a historic fact, now. You can even add it to Wikipedia and reference this review.



Now, I worry about the kids sometimes, and myself. Back in “the fair time,” as I call it, you used to have your King’s Quests or your Monkey Islands, but nowadays, if you want a game that doesn’t involve shooting small nations of foreign men over and over in dull grey and brown environments, you’re stuck with either licensed stuff based off of Pixar movies or boring platformers with stupid animal mascots. And that’s another thing. Current kid movies have the same problem as current adventure games. Compare those beautiful, hand painted Disney movies of old to this lifeless, 3D animated computer stuff. I think a link could be drawn between adventure games and Disney movies. I don’t feel like doing it at the moment, though. Forgive me – I am exaggerating, slightly. There are the Icos and Katamaris and whatnot, but do kids even know about those things? Do those games get commercials, or do kids even watch television anymore? For all I know, these days they come out of the womb with hand cupped to the side of their ear, room for a cellphone to be slid in there, and then it’s straight to 4chan boot camp. We might be lost already.

It’s not that I don’t think they can’t handle the violence, or anything. I’m sure most can, and those that can’t will just end up as republicans, or spree killers, or something. I know I used think, wouldn’t it be great if Inspector Gadget wasn’t a dumbass and had hands that could turn into machine guns, or something useful, at the least? You’re not fooling anybody, there. Kids know that that kind of crap is dumbed down for them. That’s not what I’m asking for, however. It doesn’t have to be dumbed down or made for kids in particular at all. It just doesn’t have to be nonstop violence. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Say there’s a kid who wants to play something other than Halo. He just doesn’t know it yet. I’m sure the peer pressure to play Halo and “pwn bitches” with his peers on Xbox Live is enormous, but let’s say this guy is going to strike out on his own. Good for him. Yet, after trying to make it on his own out the real world, Poor Little Ness finds he has so few options that he ends up taking the weak man’s road of used Spec-Ops games for PSX. And he was such a good, promising young lad. Now doesn’t that break your god-damned heart?

I’m only emphasizing the kids, here, since they don’t call them your formative years because you’re free to completey heck them up however you want and change your mind later. I know I wouldn’t be the man I am today if I didn’t have all these fond memories of walking around all those green environments in old adventure games, back when trees were in games, constructing tools out of pocket lint. And personally, I’m also sick as hell of shooting people myself, anyway. By the time I play MGS4 I think the line will be dangerously blurred between player and character. I already feel like a tired, old veteran, sick of battle and death, now, so I won’t be playing so much as method acting.

I’d simply like to see something that has room for your imagination to get in there. The modern videogame is an alkali desert when it really needs to be something more, uh, fertile. Man didn’t abandon painting when he learned to sculpt. Let’s get some colors in there, some majestic green trees and clear blue skies. The imagination can’t grow in the desert. Anything creative or weird doesn’t have to be an abstract handheld game with a clever game play hook anymore. More Balloon Fight and Kiwi Kraze is what I want, I think. Remember Kiwi Kraze? You were a bird in New Zealand rescuing your bird buddies. I don’t know if anyone would even think to make something like that anymore. If they did, they’d use satellite imagery to recreate New Zealand exactly, or some bullstuff. You can do all sorts of weird stuff in games that’d be a lot harder to pull off in a movie or book. Let’s see some of that.

Back in the Fair Time, a company called Electronic Arts (you might’ve heard of them) didn’t look at those games from Sierra and Lucas Arts and see all the happy childhoods, the greenary, the cherished memories born from those games. No, to people like them, they could and can only see “markets” that need “penetrating.” Every bit as horrible as it sounds. These are the kinds of people that invent their own doublespeak business language to say things without really saying anything. The kind of people that up and buy the NFL when too many people start to buy their competition’s NFL game. Well, back when they were wanting to make adventure games, being incapable of ever creating a Full Throttle or a Gabriel Knight themselves, they merely waved their money around and brought in Sherlock Holmes, who, at the time, was the greatest detective (I’m now the best). They were decent enough adventure games, but poor Sherlock Holmes games. They were also damn ugly and lacking in the use of the color green, though I guess it’s the same for London.

Anyway, someone finally made a good Sherlock Holmes game, and it’s not even a real Sherlock Holmes game. It’s about some dude named Layton. A couple of guys making up their own stuff made a better Sherlock Holmes game than EA did, with the actual Sherlock Holmes. Is there something other than spending money that they can handle doing properly? Yeah, we’re not supposed to hate them anymore, being that they apologized for the murders of Origin, Bullfrog, and all – a standup thing to do, I’ll admit, but I won’t fall for that. I know how these people operate. They’re not like you and me. They don’t have a conscience. They’re machines, programmed to simply want more money. They’ll only show a response to anyone other than themselves if their income is threatened. They look at their invented graphs and formulas and follow them to the letter. When something new and original that doesn’t fit in these formulas does well, it’s a “big suprise” that “exceeds all expectations,” and so they imitate the hell out of it, thinking that’s all there is to it. You know at the end of FernGully: The Last Rainforest, when that machine is possessed by a demon and is going through the forest cutting everything down? EA is that demon possessed machine, and they’re cutting down that forest to make room for a new alkali desert, where, as you know, imagination is unable to grow.





Usually what makes an adventure game a stuff one is that the puzzles are just plain hecking nonsense. And, often, I think that happens because the game is just too damn long. The designers aren’t smart enough come up with enough clever puzzles to fit in the entire game for every situation, so they get desperate, and when they get desperate this leads to madness, which leads to the bizarro moonside logic. All of us here know of the Gabriel Knight Moustache Massacre of ’99. This is something now told to small children as a warning. I even think it’s in the latest edition of Bullfinch’s Mythology, under “Tragedies.” I was there at ground zero. I remember it clearly: I finally had a computer all my own for the first time, and, to celebrate, the two latest entries in my favorite game series’ at time – the games being GK3 and Ultima IX. I tell you, it did something to me, something whose effect still lingers to this day. I’d also like to point out that Ultima IX was diddled with by Electronic Arts, known by their true name, “Hexxus“. Hexxus was voiced by Tim Curry, who also voiced Gabriel Knight in his third game, and is known for sounding like a child molester. I personally believe that when the universe is trying to tell you something, you should listen.

So maybe it’s just too hard to come up with enough sensible puzzles to cover an entire game. The Big Sleep didn’t make complete sense to Raymond Chandler, and he wrote the damn thing. And remember the Holmes story where the guy injected monkey blood or something and started climbing trees? What in the heck was that all about? And what a literal pushover Moriarty was. Holmes was too smart for Doyle’s own good, in my opinion. So you wonder what hope there is for there ever being a great detective game that makes sense. But then you remember something like Full Throttle, a game so good that I actually forget it’s an adventure game, and then you think, maybe everyone else is just lazy. Well, you think too much. Just take it easy. What they’ve done here for Professor Layton is side-step that problem by just getting together a bunch of good puzzles that don’t really have much to do with jack stuff. It’s just a series of puzzles that usually come from some guy coming up and saying, “Have you heard of this one?” But they can get away with it because they’re all good ones. It’s really a puzzle game disguised as an adventure game, and therefore actually ends up being a better Sherlock Holmes simulator game than what any adventure game could ever be. Also, it’s a real nice looking game. It doesn’t look like anything else out there. A cartoon, but more The Little Prince than some anime horsestuff. So that’s pretty good.

I guess Japan has only one videogame magazine, and it’s called Famitsu. If any others exist, I have no knowledge of them. If you’re a hip American, perhaps you know all about this magazine, already. But in an issue, there was an article about Professor Layton, and the title of the article was, “Level 5’s new game’s genre is unknown? New style game to train your brain,” except it said that in Japanese, rather than English. Yeah, it seems that in Japan they see an adventure game and, to them, it is some kind of crazy Brain Training knock-off. Ha, ha, those lovable, crazy Japanese. The closest thing those primitive deviants have for comparison is cartoon sex games and Phoenix Wright, so this is a bold new step for them. I hope it takes off.

Anyway, according to the opening cutscene, Layton and I are under some sort of non-disclosure agreement by the curious village, so I can’t exactly talk in specifics about the events of The Case. Sorry. I’ll just say you missed out. A great time was had by all.

I haven't really played a 2D Mario game since the launch of the "New Super Mario Bros." series as I found it got pretty stale after the first game, but Super Mario Bros. Wonder is such a breath of fresh air. It feels like I've been teleported back to when I played Super Mario World for the first time.

This game is bursting from the seams with creativity. The introduction of Wonder Seeds takes the already fantastic levels and flips it on it's head. Every time I reach a Wonder Seed I get so excited wondering what crazy mechanic the game is about to introduce to me. Whether it's turning into an enemy, riding a stampede of bulls, or bouncing to the finish line on top of hippos; each seed is crazier than the last.

The introduction of badges also lets you customize your experience to how you want to play the game. I found myself mainly using the spin kick so I could double jump but there are so many to chose from. Whatever you pick, it truly enhances the already perfect precision platforming this game features.

The soundtrack in this game is unmatched, with the Overworld and Athletic theme being my favourites. There was never once a track I wanted to end, each song is a BANGER. Not to mention that each world gets an ADDITIONAL soundtrack for when you activate a Wonder Seed.

Each level is designed with a beautiful pastel like colour palette similar to the likes of Yoshi's Island and is given so much depth and detail in the form of parallax. Every time I load up a new level I am truly enthralled you into the wonder of this world.

The updated poses and animations to Mario and his foes breathe so much life into them. Whether it's Mario going through a pipe and grabbing his floating hat he left behind or a Goomba with the look of pure horror on his face as his best friend is being flattened right in front of him, they add so much personality to this game.

This is PEAK Mario and the future of 2D Mario is looking very bright.

“It’s often written about how Final Fantasy VII changed the fate of Japanese RPGs upon its release in 1997. Much less is written about how, one year later, Baldur’s Gate revitalized the CRPG genre. After the genre tapered off during the mid-90s, losing its appeal to “Doom clones”, RTS games, and the rising popularity of consoles, some CRPG developers were left wondering if they had coded themselves into a corner. Baldur’s Gate, though, managed to bring them back to the spotlight, selling two million copies worldwide and forever elevating the recently founded BioWare into a household name for CRPGs. It’s not that it was the only CRPG around. The revered Fallout series began a year before, to similar critical acclaim – but only a tiny fraction of the sales.” - Felipe Pepe, The CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games

As someone who didn’t grow up with Fallout or Baldur’s Gate. Two franchises continued to surprise me to no end during my ventures playing their older catalog over recent years. Fallout 2, being the last old CRPG I beat, I figured it was high time to see how much BG1 holds up, so I can familiarize myself with the universe before eventually starting BG3 down the road. First, I must confess to completing both the base game and Siege of Dragonspear with mods. I say this earlier on to not confuse my experience of a modded playthrough against a non-mod experience. As a consequence, I’ve gone the extra mile to play my switch copy to see how vanilla is to compare the two. Not to completion, but enough to grant me a fair grasp. I’ll discuss this in detail later, but I figure a warning would suffice early on to prevent any misconceptions between vanilla and modded content. I’ll talk about mods later and if I don’t discuss it, please assume I’m discussing vanilla.

Orphaned at a young age. Unknowing of their parentage. Adopted by the kindness of a stranger. Grew up sharing a loving childhood along a playful lass. Taught discipline and care by your father. Lived safely in the confines of the library fortress of Candlekeep for many years. What more could they want? Well… Such halcyon days must come to an end when suddenly you’re attacked by mysterious assassins! Questioning them leads to no answers. So we ask our stepfather later on for any information, However, he evades your queries in favor of leaving the bastion of respite and comfort you’ve known for twenty years. In search of finding answers to these unprovoked attacks in the Sword Coast of the Forgotten Realms. A campaign setting inside Dungeon and Dragons.

I adore the slow story approach to gently albeit dangerously letting the player go off to the coast and encounter whatever lurks behind the shadows, paved roads, and unbeaten paths. The unrestricted freedom is a major plus and to my delight, I found worthwhile discoveries across my travels alongside my horrible luck being attacked by foolish bandits or powerful creatures. Early on, I was scared yet excited. I came across another kind soul offering tips and directions. Yet unknowingly I wonder if such a person may have a hidden motive to backstab me. Anxiety, dread, and vigilance were my constant internal ruminations once I saw unfamiliar creatures patrolling. Even neutral bears are no exception. Capable of dealing massive damage to my comrades should I provoke one half-heartedly. Beyond the regular horrors of animals and insects, I was able to fight different manners of goblins, ogres, variants of ghouls, ghosts, etc. No shortage of interesting enemies to fight. And my axe cleaved through them viscerally. A dangerous yet fine balance emerges. Granting parties a fighting chance, and safety and instilling a sense of vigilance. I could’ve bumped the difficulty lower time, but I kept the normal difficulty throughout to give me a sense of challenge and excitement. I deeply appreciate the open freedom whilst encountering dangers and opportunities wherever I tread, reminding me heavily of roaming the Wastelands in Fallout 1 and 2.

Enjoyable isometric RPG gameplay. Dialogue choices do a good job of giving you a variety of options to be witty, sarcastic, no-nonsense, blunt, dismissive, etc. In effect, they augment conversations. A visit to the tavern to buy alcohol teases points of interest to travel and investigate. Conversing with the common folk results in similar outcomes. Innocent conversations may lead to potential side quests and multichain ones providing increased incentive to witness the outcome of an ailing NPC. Forget the conversations? Simply scrolling up on the text box reveals past lines said. A handy journal is equipped too which is interesting and provides the player character(PC) monologues of his/her/their internal thoughts about the quest or information sought. Therefore, depth to the world of Forgotten Realms is an alluring prospect. A search function is included too! I habitually checked my journal constantly to read my inner PC’s thoughts on a quest or journal entry. Occasionally to my amusement my dialogue choices can be quite witty, sarcastic, brisk, blunt, or gentle and helpful. The internal monologues are shared without remorse. And I welcome these thoughts and relish the lines.

For those not inclined to the hustle and bustle of speaking. One can dive deep into combat. No, not turn-based. No need to grind to level 100 like a JRPG. BG1 uses advanced dungeons and dragons 2nd edition(2E ADND) ruleset. This means you start at a measly level one, working your way to ten. Utilizing real-time action with pause fights they’re the main meat of the fighting aspect. Mouse over an enemy, click, and bam! Your whole party will auto-attack the individual. You can also initiate battles whenever you please. So attacking a shopkeeper or nearby civilian who’s off doing their errands is not exempt from your blade or spells. Hell, the AI will work its magic! No input is required! If the AI isn’t up to snuff. Tinker their script and check each unit’s actions. An aspect that surprised me greatly and the innate options to change their AI to your preference is excellent. Though to be fair I didn’t tinker too much! The default settings are adequate to suit my fighting playstyle. To BG1’s credit, plenty of customization options are at your disposal. Aside from the regular equipment, you can outfit each member: equip two rings, cloaks, amulets, belts, and extra weapon slots! Changeable in the heat of battle. I’m astounded by the sheer options at your disposal in 1998! Making build variety worth experimenting like a madman. Min-maxers will find no shortage to increase their stats or change spells in their spellbook to suit any occasion.

I felt super joy in clearing the nearby lands of evil and helping poor souls along the way. Despite ironically being an allegedly evil paladin. Builds and classes are plentiful and deep. I could assign any of my members in dual classes(within reason), learn spells for my mages, or slot any manner of weaponry as long as the class allows them to. Use ranged weaponry, a sling to hit enemies, and casting spells using wands. By the last chapter, I was running a six-man crew consisting of A Blackguard who is an evil paladin, a thief who is a ranger, and my childhood friend. A vengeful half-orcish Blackguard, A red wizard who begrudgingly joins our motley crew, a neutral evil drow cleric, and an unlucky wild mage who can’t control her powers. A dysfunctional group, full of uneasy alliances and explosive personalities, stayed together through thick and thin. Many fights ensued and yet. We. Did. Not Falter. Okay I must admit we did fail a lot in the final boss… but that’s a story for another day

Companions are plentiful. Twenty-four plus allies you can recruit and four exclusive ones in the enhanced edition. My feelings of satisfaction permeated once I saw a potentially new member along the horizon. Asking for genuine assistance. By random chance in a building. Stumble on unique encounters. Where any battle may ensue or a unique script may play. Choose to help, attack, or run away. These instances never rinse and repeat in a tiring formula. Instead, they felt natural. Moving on the question may arise to utilize canon units before importing to the following expansions/sequels. According to my CRPG veteran friend of mine. The individuals or other party members you choose are “subjective and a pretty fine line. I think if you're uncertain, go for the canon. If you like your setup already, keep it. A little better, but not something you should go out of your way to meet.” Upon completing the plot and seeing the difference between my non-canon friends and my switch version, I'm rolling alongside the canon company. Ultimately, I agree with their statement. Only adding follow your heart to suit your desire. Although, you should keep Dorn as a prospective acquaintance to recruit mhhm.

The Sword Coast is full of danger, excitement, and surprises. Gentle worldbuilding and clean-to-deep lore work wonders. Boosting the writing to levels near engrossing to read. I love it! Reminding me heavily of Lord of the Rings except if the fellowship decided to go off the beaten path and help those in need. Forget the ring! Anyway… a wealth of books you can buy in taverns, and shops presenting interesting backgrounds on religion, history, past historical events, legends, myths, etc. Never hurts reading! Connecting nicely in minor ways to my allies, citizens, and villains! Not pages of exposition. Mostly a couple of paragraphs or extra if you get a heavier tome. Granting informative knowledge on the races, items, and locales. Subtly nudging me to go deeper beyond the surface level “Oh that’s just an elf. Meh, a dwarf, bah a human?” Nay my marvelous friends! They’re more than meets the eye. For the elf could be a half-elf or a drow! Dwarves mistaken for gnomes! And humans themselves can prove resilient. though still squishy… And relations between people are not the norm such as jolly and peaceful. Reminds me of X-Men/Mutant/Brotherhood relationships with the common folk except fantasied. Racism, class hierarchy, and hidden factions are abundant. And I, the poor unlucky son of a gun, have to find answers?! Gimme a break. I’m only level one…

Sidequests feel natural and written well. I like how little down-to-earth they are and deal in relatable matters. One has you stop a man about to jump off a cliff! Search for a cloak to return to a dismayed individual. Clean a house of spiders for the owner to take up residence. May seem mundane and not offer much. Nevertheless, I appreciate the slightly monotonous tasks to slowly build up my user and partners' strengths. Sooner or later I was rolling level 3s party and higher. I was able to partake in extensively intricate activities. A certain thief's quest to pass a test. Passing judgment on a man brainwashed. Aiding or killing a crook who seeks to take advantage of innocent individuals and return a chicken to human life. I kid you not I’m in disbelief on the chicken side mission. A bit of RNG is involved. Incredible to see a quest fail by chance. Hell, you can sell the guy to a vendor and forget him. It wasn’t worth it. The vendor didn’t reward me enough gold… I enjoyed the progression of slowly increasing the complex quests as my friends grew stronger since they offer a realistic fantasy take in mixing inspiration from our lived experiences into a videogame and to the developer's credit I feel it works wonderfully. My members were rugged and dirty as I completed all objectives until my journal entries were tidy. The physical rewards were sufficient and lore-wise adequate. Mods restoring cut content I highly suggest checking out. I found their inclusion to not be out of place and fit superbly adding depth and giving life to the areas you visit.

In the interest of not gushing further, I must talk about my mixed feelings now. Not a positive or a negative, but for the sake of transparency I'm noting them down.

The base game without mods is a bit lifeless compared to my modded playthrough. Certainly there are moments NPC’s are designated, but the world feels sparse, has tiny reactivity, and is slightly oppressive. The absence of considerable mini/side quests and NPCs at intervals loses my interest in keeping going. I cannot send my companions to a specific place. The banter in my cabal is nearly non-existent. And reactions to story beats are missing. Voiced NPC lines are likewise gone. Identifying can be a pain. You’ll come across a sizable amount of magical items/equipment on your adventures. In demand of identifying either by a spell or by heading to a temple and having the priest identify the item to fully see their properties. Not a pain if we are given loads of unidentifiable equipment, and to BG1’s credit, a sufficient amount to tide us over. Not over-gorging amidst decision paralysis. The tediousness comes in the constant back and forth to towns to identify and sell stuff you accrue to offload the heavyweight. Being encumbered sucks. Different members can hold different amounts of carry load so it is kinda not a wonderful idea to make an associate of low weight capacity. The absence of a book bag is puzzling to a degree since decent materials are available to read and not having an ease of access hurts a bit. Sure a handful of items exist in the form of ‘bags of holdings’ to slot gems, potions, and scrolls. Their weight is not endless. Exacerbated by a considerably slow movement speed which boggles my mind as to why no movement speed slider is in the options to make our traversal faster.

THAC0 & Armor Class minus '-' numbers values can be fairly confusing for newbies. How I usually play is seeing numbers of ‘plus’ meaning ‘good’ and ‘minus’ equalling ‘bad.’ Math is different in BG1. The rest is fine as far as I know. You’ll usually see if it is beneficial to apply if the numbers are highlighted in green for favorable/better and red being bad/underperforming. So equipping a weapon displaying a green highlight is best. If it's red don’t equip or else you’ll perform in a minor capacity. Furthermore, pixel squinting in a handful of sections may be necessary. One in a pretty big optional dungeon, a main plot segment, and to a lesser extent upon exploring multiple floors in buildings. Honestly, you probably will squint maybe 5-10%. To my absolute delight, a zoom function, and a highlight everything option exists. Doesn’t alleviate the squinting issue entirely, but a cool option to use. Interacting with objects in a room to solve puzzles or clicking a secret stash can be a bit troublesome without looking carefully at your surroundings.

Can be overwhelming to understand the 2E ADND ruleset for newbies of what you can and cannot do and how values are applied during clashes. At least it's not Pathfinder homework My friends who played alongside me reported similar confusion. I feel reading the manual can help in a certain way to receive a better understanding of the mechanics. Bit lengthy at a hundred-fifty pages plus, but the combat portion is the most important to remember in my opinion. So no obligation to read all of it. Lots of tutors in Candlekeep explain the most important things: Mechanics, features, tips, explanations, etc. Before venturing off, best to chat near cohorts. Thereby gaining a better comprehension of various obscure topics.

In effect, A dangerous, rigid, unforgiving land emerges. Creating a fascinating contrast from my original modded playthrough. The benefits inside the console port I appreciate. A big green outline to all accessible buildings makes access easier, decreasing squinting. Primarily used the controller due to being so comfortable than using a keyboard and mouse(KB+M). Plenty of options in the settings to tweak to your liking. The new CG replaces the old FMV, though I much prefer the original version compared to the new one. Heavier in visceral atmosphere, conveys a darker tone, and has longer scenes compared to Beamdog’s version. As a result, I feel without mods BG1 creates a partially slower, but acceptable version to play for newcomers and veterans alike.

Base game with mods is a completely different ballpark. Much of my mixed feelings are thrown out the window. Containing quality of life features across the board. The commitment to identify is gone. The default movement speed is tweaked to be faster to my preference. NPC banter is awesome, narrative beats hit a big splash, and interactivity feels very fitting and not out of place at all in my honest opinion. The cut content is a welcome addition to augment life in Sword Coast’s areas providing I would say 50-75% additional activities to do. Mini/side quests are not exempt. And subsequently not too out of place. UI tweaks make quick looting not a chore and display data during info/shop menus are very welcome. A tweaks anthology module goes above the heavens to tweak nearly every aspect. My buddy and I strictly kept our list small and light to enhance vanilla, keeping the balance as close as possible to the original. As long as it's fun, but fair then by all means mod away! Consequently, my modded playthrough experience became fun, exciting, and very enjoyable. I extremely recommend installing mods on PC if you can.

Before I forget, my thoughts on Siege of Dragonspear the expansion to BG1. Solid stuff and a prelude to BG2. We start weeks after the events of the first title. Caelar Argent and her army arrived near Baldur’s Gate quickly. For what purpose? No clue man. But I spend the rest of my questing life confronting her forces in skirmishes and dastardly deeds. She has the gall to send assassins to me!? Yeah, I’m done lady on the assassination attempts. So now you and your comrades set off to investigate her motives, her reasons for sending agents and why the bloody hell does she need an army!? Doesn’t take long to complete. You can finish it quickly according to HLTB in 18 hours or less. For me, I did all the sidequests clocking in under twenty-five hours. Bit of a step down in quality compared to the previous entry, in terms of dialogue and non-fighting. Most if not all of them consist of fighting. These are the moments, the expansion shines a great deal. Epic battles opposing Caelar’s forces. Imagine army vs. army. Defending our position against waves of enemies, infiltrating enemy camps, finding clues to unlock an alternate path, etc. I love it! Smaller maps and favoring a linear approach dressing down the large dungeons in favor of bite-sized portions alongside their puzzle segments. Super appreciate the change of pace from a grand scale in the first, to enhanced closer encounters to test our mettle. Companions chatter at various points to talk about their gripes, goals, or on their new adventures. So they’re not left in the dust for development. Heck, the new units are a treat too! Music again hits all the right notes. No major complaints to say, despite a wish for a sprinkle of nuance in the writing giving a heavier expanse to the world. And it does so to a certain extent. I would’ve liked a bit of extra lore-building to devour. I also wish one member had received extended screen time to develop. Still, Dragonspear is a solid one and I recommend it for those who want worthwhile content and can’t get enough of the Forgotten Realms universe.

One last thing before I head out. Special thanks to the following people who played beside me. Kairoch for completing a modded playthrough. Mango and Jag for finishing the Switch version and granting me an interesting insight into their experiences and finally Donkeyworld for clarifying and providing awesome CRPG insight. This review would not be possible without their thoughts, company and countless laughter sharing our experiences. I also apologize for this long review. It has been in the works for weeks and I’ve nearly gone crazy about whether to publish this longer or shorter. Ultimately cut pages as a result. Nevertheless, I'll allocate them in a Pastebin link below for those curious.

And so after defeating the final boss, seeing the end credits, and doing everything possible plus completing Siege of Dragonspear over the course of my seventy-five hour journey. I can only say Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition is a refreshing CRPG to try out. Despite some hurdles and bumps on the road during my travels, I believe BG1EE is a fine entrypoint. An above-average effort to keep the game modernized enough for consumers today. Hold’s up nicely. Consequently, I believe the Switch copy and by extension console ports is a serviceable version to play if you don’t desire to tinker around on PC. 98% of my hours were conducted blindly. Meaning no walkthrough was used. The normal difficulty was fine for me. No story points caused me to slam my head on the wall repeatedly. I never got tired of exploring uncharted areas to fulfill my cartographer’s wish to map every nook and cranny. Sure I died. And yes I will admit to reloading countlessly. The save and loading times are fast and I didn’t mind retrying again and again until I advanced further. The fantasy setting is rich, full of wonder, chaos, order, and plenty of world-building to devour. Writing is flavorful. Full of seriousness and humorous lines. Stabilized to not throw my suspension of disbelief into a state of confusion. I completed every side quest and didn’t tire, so I can say they’re pretty satisfying and worth investing your effort in. Because you’ll require the experience to level up. I admire the slow-burn narrative approach to losing newcomers to Sword Coast, embracing their inner curiosity to explore, fight, and discover secrets. Satisfying gameplay loop in not just the combat, but in the dialogue. Installing mods fixed most of my mixed feelings to a certain extent. A likable large cast of companions to recruit and the sheer customization at my fingertips to outfit as we see fit is splendid. Graphics, music, and improvements the remaster tries to implement are commendable of Beamdogs' attempt. I applaud 90s Bioware in creating an incredible CRPG. It is a titan of role-playing and fantasy. Full of nearly everything I thirst for. An easy recommendation for any newcomer or veteran in the genre to sink their teeth. And one I can safely say shot up to my top ten Western RPGs. Can’t wait to start BG2! After a CRPG break…

Base game without mods: 7.7/10
Base game with mods: 8/10

Additional Material:
BG1EE Mods list used & Proper Mod list order
Adventurer’s guide AKA Manual on BG1EE
BG1:EE Before I play Tips
Kairoch’s Extra tips for BG1
My Cut pages from review, Final thoughts on the ending, Durlag’s tower. - Cut pages are fine to read for any newcomer and spoiler free. My thoughts on the ending, final boss, Durlag's tower - should only be read by those who finished the game.
CRPG Book Project - Felipe Pepe made the book free to download. But if you want to support them buy a copy of the book!

Nearly every level here is exquisite. You can feel multiple dozens of hours of playtesting behind every platform placement.

On one hand: the result is an incredibly tight and polished platformer.

On the other: its rough edges have been completely sanded off until a largely inoffensive square of a game remains.

In other words - I had a great time getting all 6 medals, but I felt uninspired by Mario Wonder, especially in a world where indie platforming masterpieces like Celeste exist.

that time kazuma kaneko + shoji meguro summoned a whorling liminal space that tricked jrpg fans into enjoying meat + potatoes (teleporters + pitfalls) dungeon crawling. same shit your grampa plinked away at on his apple II a century ago, same shit your grandkids will plink away at on their apple II a century from now in their neofeudal bunkers

and much like your relatives, I love that shit; I love a big ass maze with a million dead ends, and if it ain't broke don't fix it, lest we end up with whatever the fuck those P3 + P4 dungeons were

at its best and most confident it understands the simple things — things like teleporters originally being designed to thwart manual graphing; that automap needs to be accounted for with appropriately disorienting, discordant layouts and structures; and that imbuing a sense of doomed futility is non-negotiable. there's a desire here to smother, obstruct and impede; a love of mazes that reveals its hand in slow motion, peaking with twinned monstrosities — the labyrinth of amala, and the tower of kagutsuchi — that crank the pressure inch by excruciating inch

complimenting it is the arrival of press turn serving as an antidote to blobber slugfests and the sedentary JRPG-isms that descended from them — the dynamic action economy shifting combat from sludgy attrition to a revolving door of lightning round encounters closer to puzzles than math problems. it's no surprise that many of the bosses took up hallowed positions in the genre pantheon, nor that the sinewy party building was so lauded — few games in the genre that succeeded it would be so mechanically accomplished, to say nothing about those that came prior

all of this is further defined by an aesthetic sensibility befitting a "vortex world"; a collage of textures, words, images, sounds, and ideas — from solipsism to darwinism to occult esoterica — delivered in broad, painterly strokes, flickering past rapidly in service of potency and immediacy above all else

the sensation is one of extraordinary emptiness, intentional and otherwise; nihilism born from its themes as much as the capricious relationship it has with them. a fugue state drive through half-conjured nouns and adjectives that recede at the slightest touch; worlds, people, and ideologies just fuel for ephemeral spectacle

nocturne feels like it's trapped in amber: a static image of a bygone era for megaten, atlus, and the medium as a whole, still shadowed by fables and folklore about its difficulty, opaqueness, and bizarre allure. newcomers still looking over their shoulder for matador and finding themselves lost under waves and waves of dead ends and instant kills, further prolonging its mythic qualities

far from perfect in any sense of the word, it persists nonetheless as an object with no clear analogue. atlus will assuredly try and fail to replicate its appeal until heat death of the universe, but it's telling that even they can't quite pin down what happened here, why, or how — and who could really blame them?

brief thoughts on the remaster:

can't say I'm happy about the JRPG Paypig Tax or the crusty ultra compressed 128kbps OST, but it seems few people are mentioning the one inclusion that makes the remaster worthwhile: the option to play the original pre-maniax version of nocturne — previously unreleased outside of japan

while most won't be interested in seeing the game in what's widely understood to be an unfinished state — no fiends, no labyrinth, no dante raidou, or True Demon Ending — it's exciting to have the option to return to the game at its most rudimentary and see how the differences affect an experience long since overwritten by a slew of rereleases and additional material that recontextualize many of its design decisions

unfortunately, it's only present on the PC version, but credit where credit's due: atlus didn't fuck something up for once, and that's a miracle. I'd still rather eat gravel than pay full price for this thing, but it's a big, quiet win nonetheless from the least likely of places

"worst guy you know" etc.

HYRULE FANTASIES: A Long Essay about Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, and Moving Around a World

Part One: Breath of the Wild

I. Central Hyrule

As a child, when my family went to the beach that usually meant going to Kennington Cove. Driving southeast from our house, one often experiences the bizarre local phenomenon where temperatures drop 5+ degrees en route and fog banks creep over clear skies during the half hour drive. The road underneath narrows and grows more twisty and turns to dirt as you get closer: pine trees thicken around you, with the exception of the marsh over which English forces dragged cannons to siege the French Fortress of Louisbourg during the Seven Years War. Then finally the woods clear and you descend a hill and see the beach: pounding North Atlantic waves that once knocked off a cousin's swimming trunks; a creek and pond where my sister traumatically got a leech on her; and a high (to a child) outcrop that blocks the view east. After working your way around the base of the outcrop, you'll find the rocky part of the cove with a beautiful little corridor between high rectangular slabs and a cairn noting the landing of General Wolfe for the aforementioned siege, a year and a half before his painterly death on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec.

I have been inordinately lucky in how much of the world I have been to in just under three decades of life. As a child, I looked at the horizon from the Denver airport and slowly realized those were not some unified wave of massive clouds: those were the Rockies. As a teenager, I stood near the Pyramids of Giza looking down into the pit from which archaeologists had exhumed Pharoah Khufu's millennia-old solar barque, less than a year before revolution would erupt in Cairo. As a young adult, I’ve walked through Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden at sunset and knew instantly I would never see anywhere more beautiful; I’ve eaten wild boar ragu pappardelle on a warm night in San Gimignano; I’ve walked the canal in Dotonbori while thinking about my fading relationship and my looming return to academia.

All that said, I am not the sort of person to mention travel in a dating app bio or try to go somewhere new every year. Those trips I just mentioned were almost exclusively taken with and planned by my family; I tend to take travel opportunities when they are offered to me rather than seeking them out myself. After all, it’s hard to not feel somewhat uncomfortable about tourism growing up somewhere that clung to it like a lifeboat after the collapse of its industrial economy; extraction of coal from the earth transfiguring into extraction of folk culture from communities. As I’ve grown and my relationship to my home has changed from daily habitat to semi-annual refuge, it’s forced me to confront why I go anywhere new or old to me and what I hope to feel and do there.

When I go somewhere new, I hope to find the sort of things I described in Kennington Cove: somewhere to walk, somewhere to sit, somewhere to swim. Nature and humanity and the history of their overlap. Some beautiful things with marks of how people can make them ugly. Somewhere I can get lost, get my bearings, and get back on track. A place I can come back from and have a story to share with friends.

Now, this is not where I say "Breath of the Wild captures all this in video game form." Because it does not. I could feel you rolling your eyes thinking that I might say that: writing is fun! This is instead where I say that I still cannot believe a game gets decently close to the feelings I get from going somewhere I’ve never been.

Breath of the Wild condenses the feeling of traversing hills, roads, rocks, water, sand, snow, fog and rain, objectifying their essence without losing it. It simplifies the acts of climbing and paragliding in service of making every inch of the world reachable, necessarily swapping out the series' puzzle-solving progression for problem-solving. Layering its vistas with a keen eye for sparking intrigue and refusing to write any cheques it cannot cash, this version of Hyrule becomes a garden of forking paths that necessarily demands a player take up some authorial interest in the type of adventure they wish to have. It does not do anything video games had never done before, and it undeniably trades on the goodwill of a series that has been a constant presence in my life. This is not a review or critique, rather an appreciation of a work that brought me back into the fold of video games and fundamentally altered how I engage with them.

I have a lot to say about it, but I think it's worth starting with what others said about Breath of the Wild before it ever came about.

II. Necluda

One can find a fair amount of youtubers who cut their teeth on the Legend of Zelda series. Generating opinions about Zelda and finding an audience for those opinions are pretty straightforward matters given the series' reputation, availability, and iterative nature. This sort of thing was my own introduction to discussions around game design, though looking back I find a lot of them treat critiquing a game as "identifying stretches of the game that weren't exactly what I wanted them to be" without much deeper consideration of what that says about the game or—more importantly—about the reviewer. As I get older and have become increasingly annoyed by the conflation between critique and complaint, I have tried my best to distinguish between that which is not to my taste and that which I think is genuinely flawed.

Through these sorts of people (notably Egoraptor and Matthewmatosis), it became fashionable in the period between Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild to argue that Zelda needed to go back to its roots and ditch the formula that had governed since A Link To The Past. Stop hand-holding, embrace non-linearity and challenge, let story justification take a back seat to player curiosity. Certainly I agreed that Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword represented a downturn, but the originalist sentiment positioned as the ideal alternative never resonated with me.

I had (and have) no problem with Zelda games being formulaic, because the formula is rock solid. Upon that foundation Aonuma & Co. could construct thoughtful deviations and iterations that took calculated risks. Application of this formula produced games about the relationship between author and audience, about the fear of adulthood, about the question of how to commit ourselves to helping people in a dying world. This formula allowed for robust experiments in game design: dropping the player in an ocean, allowing them to merge into walls, or having four distinct versions of the overworld to consider in traversal. Revisiting each game remained fun in the way one enjoys relistening to a favourite album, but it also offered chances to reflect and reconsider in fuller understanding of where the series had been and where it would go. Prior to Breath of the Wild, I would no sooner have asked the Zelda team to stop making games in that formula than I would have asked Phoenix to stop making ten-track pop albums with jangly guitars and evocative lyrics that don't make much sense.

What was holding the series back in the decade between Twilight Princess and Breath of the Wild was less an issue with the formula and more an issue with the variables. Every Zelda game makes space to try out some new ideas and forge its own mechanical identity, but this era of shrinking down or becoming a wolf or incorporating motion controls lacked verve. A Link Between Worlds’ rocky development reflected the mounting tension: Kentaro Tominaga basically pitched the concept of puzzle shrines built around wall-merging in lieu of dungeons while Miyamoto pushed for A Link To The Past But Different. Aonuma found a middle ground, and Hiromasa Shikata shepherded in an excellent game, illustrating that thoughtful variables make it hard to complain about the formula.

Enter Breath of the Wild: both a strict originalist and a sentimentalist for the series as a whole; both a fundamental rethinking of the formula and a wildly inventive riff on it; both a safe bet and a desperate gamble. It sold like hotcakes attached to a table that lets you eat hotcakes anywhere, which is to say better than all prior hotcake sales. I watched this happening from afar, having all but abandoned video games for my undergraduate years which concluded on November 8, 2016 (one of the all-time worst days to graduate) on top of having only owned a Wii for 2007 to 2012. After some personal accounting both spiritual and financial, I figured Breath of the Wild on its own was worth the cost of buying a Switch--even if the console proved to be a dud beyond this one game. In October 2017, I bought in.

My first playthrough reflected my disconnect from the intervening years of open-world games and my desire for A New Zelda. I adopted each lesson from the Great Plateau as isolated solutions to singular overworld puzzles in the spirit of how items operated in Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. When I acquired the paraglider and the world opened, I dutifully followed the main questline to see my old pal Impa. You know the first time I saw a horse that looked like Epona I did everything I could to tame it. When I reached Lanayru and found it impossible to climb in the rain and a charming NPC was requesting my help, I felt comforted: this is what I know how to do.

Gradually, I opened up to the more free-form and improvisational spirit of the game. I found it hard to articulate the appeal beyond how it let me do almost everything games I’d played up until that point had routinely denied me, Zelda included. No more walls, just surfaces. But having sated my main quest completion instinct before confronting Hyrule Castle, I found I could just Zora swim up a few waterfalls and bypass the entire thing. This gave me pause. Was I being rewarded for diligent play, or was I cheating myself out of a good time? Before I had finished the target practice finale, the gears were turning faster: had I been cheating myself out of a better time all along?

This was not an album to replay when I wanted to hear it again. This was a piano. And I could keep playing the notes in the book at the pace of the metronome, or I could learn to make my own music.

When I went looking for insights into Breath of the Wild, I found a lot of complaint-as-critique, a lot of “it’s a great game but not a great Zelda game,” and a lot of general praise. To find people with something smarter to say, I’d have to go to new places.

III. Faron

For all my life, a constant joy has been going over rocky terrain. Yes, I recognize this makes me sound like Russell Crowe saying he loves to see how things relate to each other topographically (which is to say “very cool”). At Kennington Cove there were rocks of all sizes below the cliffs, and I found it endlessly fun to try and hop from one to the other as quickly as I could, making dozens of microdecisions fluidly: will this surface let me stand or will I slide off it, can I hop up to that higher rock, what if I maintain my momentum by immediately jumping off that one, what if I do that on that steep one to change direction, on and on. Going hiking on more rugged trails gives a similar sensation with roots and grass and soil and planks. I still do this sort of bounding now and I’m old enough to know that I’ll do it until I can’t. I don’t really like climbing because I have meringue for arms, but had I the upper body strength I imagine I’d get a similar rush from bouldering.

Naturally, the first game I played that could virtually replicate this sensation irretrievably won me over.

Traversal in Breath of the Wild—be it climbing, hiking, jumping, paragliding, swimming, shield surfing or horseback riding—requires you read the land and place your feet and hands accordingly. Every time you stumble, you get a better feel for Link’s limits and think about how it would have gone had you done it a little differently. Over time you pick up a dozen habits to optimize movement when necessary, but ambling along never loses its charm. Amplifying all of this is the ability to prioritize stamina upgrades over increased hearts, prepare stamina consumables for difficult climbs, and augment speed with clothing sets. Every time you crest a height, you can spot a new challenge. Refreshingly, the Zelda team prioritized intrinsic motivation for such traversal over extrinsic. The most you’ll ever mechanically get for satisfying your natural curiosity is a shrine or a Korok seed, which never feels as good as a vista to soak in.

What separates this from movement in similar games? It is tight and responsive with the requisite Nintendo polish, but it is more grounded than a Mario or Metroid. It maps its adaptable inputs onto dependable surfaces, never raising the Assassin’s Creed issue of snapping to some nearby target or catching a non-interactable edge and getting thrown off course. Yet it also does not demand such technical precision seen in Mirror’s Edge or Death Stranding, as this would inhibit the impulsive “what’s over there” nature of the game. For a while it seemed they had even defeated the series-fostered compulsion to roll/backstep/side-hop/sprint between stamina fruit for the sake of speed, but people eventually found the whistling glitch because old habits die hard.

For my money, this stamina system is the sturdiest spine you could wrap the flesh of a game around. Tuned expertly for moment-to-moment enjoyment, tailored carefully for thematic cohesion. If they’d built Kingdom Hearts or Bioshock or Rance around this sort of movement, I could probably hold my nose and have a good time despite them otherwise being diametrically opposite my personal taste. Mercifully, they instead made it for one of my favourite little green guys.

As you travel out from the rolling hills of Central Hyrule, the environments complicate traversal in satisfying ways. Faron is a solid example. You wander through thick jungle that’s already an unfamiliar biome for the series, beckoning you to leave the path. Trees obstruct your vision. The whole region is prone to thunderstorms that inhibit climbing or sparking updrafts to easily bypass these obstacles. You realize how reliant you’ve become on the ability to see ahead and plan your next five minutes or so of progress. Maybe you feel an echo of NES Zelda screens: deal with immediate threats, pick a direction to proceed, rinse and repeat. All this makes the need for the map more pressing. Maybe you thought to drop a marker from a nearby peak and have the general direction, maybe you’re fumbling around. Maybe you noticed the dragon rise from the jungle, maybe you didn’t. There’s ruins, lakes, rivers, and the map’s southern edge all luring you into little adventures.

Admirably, just about everywhere in Hyrule feels like it got enough attention to make it as compelling to explore first time through as Faron. Not all regions were created equal with respect to their quests and rewards, but in terms of environment design you really can’t go wrong whichever direction you take from the Great Plateau. It’s only in a Master Mode playthrough or when playing with self-imposed restrictions that it becomes somewhat necessary to think strategically rather than following your interest.

All that said, consider how you were playing late in your first playthrough. Were you still playing as deliberately as I describe in this section? Probably not, and why would you? You’ve got like a hundred warp points, the whole map revealed, all your major to-do items checked off. At any point you could materialize at the most convenient spot from which to get to anywhere you have your sights on. Based on conversations I’ve had with various people over the years, it’s typically around this point that burnout sets in. While this is a latent defect of open world game design, I would argue that losing the early game deliberateness sucks the joy from this game and a game designer can only do so much to remind someone to play interestingly. Eventide Island is often spoken of in terms of how it rejuvenated players’ enthusiasm, probably because it gets you navigating deliberately again while feeling much more capable and knowledgeable than they were on the Great Plateau.

My own repeat playthroughs have affirmed that Breath of the Wild is absolutely better when played with as little warping as possible and HUD off. Never let Revali say his gale is ready. Leave those towers untapped and your Sheikah Slate unmapped. Get your eyes off the bottom left corner and read the land all around you, then place your feet and hands accordingly. Remember what it was like to deal with scarcity, and drill down into that sensation. This should have been the basis for the game’s Master Mode: options like the Draconian Quest in Dragon Quest XI or the Pact of Punishment in Hades whose restrictions foster more attentive play. That said, none of those options should have been “enemies regenerate health whenever you aren’t attacking them”, good lord it makes fighting in that mode so tedious.

IV. Lanayru

Speaking of ways people get fed up with this game, let’s talk about those Divine Beasts. Probably the most commonly cited reason Breath of the Wild is “a great game but not a great Zelda game,” they are its iteration on the Zelda formula’s crown jewel: dungeons. They have been discussed to death. Truthfully, I don’t have much to say about any in isolation. GMTK summed up most of what I’d say were I to talk about them as Zelda dungeons. Instead, let’s talk about those Divine Beasts as examples of Breath of the Wild’s defamiliarization of Zelda puzzle-solving into Zelda problem-solving.

Puzzles have fairly rigid solutions, and one of the most reliable components of the Zelda formula was its approach to puzzle-solving: see things you can’t interact with, find an item, learn everything it can interact with, interact and feel smart. It was exceedingly rare to encounter a puzzle that just needed you to apply actual logic rather than Zelda logic. The Sacred Grove giants in Twilight Princess blindsided me growing up and the tile floor puzzles in the Oracle games still hassled me as an adult, but they were outliers. Most of the time, the difficulty was in knowing what an item could do. As the series reused items it tended to reuse their puzzles in tandem, kneecapping difficulty for returning players. Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword in particular suffered with their new items; half-baked As Seen On TV kitchen tools with one narrow function that were largely dropped after their respective dungeon (if not made obsolete by a later item). What was more consistently distinct game-to-game were the dungeons. Each room was a vessel for a puzzle or two or a combat encounter, or in the best dungeons the architecture made for a global puzzle. You find keys, open locks, kill a boss, feel good.

Breath of the Wild took a big step away from such puzzles. Shrines stuck closest to the old ways (or at least roughly 60% of the base-game shrines did), but its puzzles were more system-based than solution-based. Completing an electrical circuit is not solved by using the Cane of Electro to manifest wires. Instead, you can take any metal object from your surroundings or your inventory and bridge the gaps. As noted by Matthewmatosis, when coupled with the aesthetic sterility of shrines and Divine Beasts, the noise to signal ratio is nearly zero; it is almost always readily apparent what the end goal is, it’s just a matter of applying one of multiple things in your toolkit to reach that goal. You can feel the difference between being told “untie this knot” when all you have on hand are your hands and must make the right choices, and being told “make it so this knotted rope doesn’t bind these two things together” when you have your hands and a lighter and a knife and the ability to freeze water into a block of ice. You are problem-solving more than puzzle-solving.

The difference is even more obvious when you are navigating the overworld. Problem: get up that cliff. Solutions: set fire to grass for an updraft, use a stamina or speed consumable, wear climbing clothes, stasis-launch a tree trunk to get height, etc. Problem: big purple smoke pig surrounded by death lasers. Solution: [OVERFLOW ERROR]. Shrine problems are largely the same, but with a few more restrictions imposed. If anything, the worst shrines tend to be those that hew closest to traditional Zelda puzzle design with the fewest options for how to solve them, though in most of those cases that comes down to their simplicity. As an overarching design goal, the shift to problem-solving was cohesive with the rest of the game and had tremendous promise.

Based on conversations I’ve had over the years about this game, I find lot of people treat Breath of the Wild’s problem-solving gameplay within shrines and Divine Beasts as failed puzzle-solving gameplay. I argue that these approaches are structurally different and stoke different parts of your brain, so solving a problem doesn’t feel the same as solving a puzzle. In puzzle-solving, I find the moment of satisfaction hits when the solution that overcomes the catch occurs to me and execution is just reflexive. In problem-solving, I tend to sift through potential moves that could cohere into a solution if executed properly; the satisfaction thus hits when I see my chosen response through to completion. However, as the player gets their head around all the possible applications of their myriad tools, they are increasingly aware of the quick and easy fixes. And when the execution isn’t very complicated, there isn’t much satisfaction.

Enter a Divine Beast and you are given an overarching problem: activating five terminals. In addition to your existing toolset, you are given the ability to manipulate the architecture in some way. These are all at their core navigation problems, though some with more intermediate steps than others and with some theming. Furthermore, two of the five Divine Beasts (Vah Rudania and the DLC dungeon) have only two states while Vah Medoh only has three; only Vah Naboris and Vah Ruta involve more taxing thought than flipping a switch on or off. Experienced players will not spend much time on any of them, which seems to be somewhat intentional. Many noted the brevity of shrines and Divine Beasts was well-suited to the Switch’s portability: any time you resume your game, you can get something substantive done. But this also served to flatten out the experience somewhat. Every region has similarly distributed pockets of difficulty, and few adhere to a consistent theme for shrines throughout.

As with the Zelda formula, I don’t think Divine Beasts or Shrines were flawed and in need of fixing. Lord knows Zelda had dud dungeons before, and (for what they aim to be) the Divine Beasts are about as consistent in quality as Twilight Princess or Minish Cap. Some very good, some weak, on the whole a bit uninspired. But at first blush, they were a bag of sand swapped in for the golden idol of Classic Zelda Dungeons. While I get the knee-jerk dismissal at the time, I would hope most people have come to realize they were not a mistake. Shrines and Divine Beasts felt as prototypical as dungeons in the original Zelda did, with about as much room to grow.

Of all the things I could do with an essay about a Zelda game, the last thing I want is to tut-tut a bold idea handled messily. But that’s getting 6 years, 2 months and 9 days ahead of myself.

V. Akkala

Many discussions of Breath of the Wild upon release noted that this Zelda game was not afraid to kill you. Plenty of times that meant plummeting to your death or the weather catching you unprepared, but most jarringly it meant basic enemies could be lethal after decades of Zelda games whittling them down to minor inconveniences. Interlocked with this phenomenon was the weapon durability system, whose discourse has proven as resilient and appealing as cockroaches. Of all the aspects of the game and how much I appreciate them, durability and combat have undergone the most drastic positive shift.

No, the combat in Breath of the Wild is not as demanding, rich, nuanced, satisfying, or spectacular as plenty of games against which it is compared. That much is obvious to anyone and largely beside the point. What it is is a robust vein of expressive gameplay. That you will find a limited number of enemy camp layouts throughout the game is an invitation to hone certain strategies and experiment with others. That the game has decreased the number of discrete enemy types while vastly increasing the range of potential enemy behaviours is a salve on the late-game irritation that sets in towards the end of most Zelda games. And yes, all your shit breaks pretty quickly to get you to keep picking up new shit.

What I think cools a lot of players on the combat aside from not playing expressively (either from lack of creativity or not finding that type of play satisfying) is that you can frequently find yourself with a hard cap on how much damage you can output. Approach a camp with higher-level enemies and under-leveled weapons and you may just break everything you have without winning. You can also find yourself in situations where you can reliably get enough damage out but only through somewhat tedious means; doing chip damage with bombs and arrows until an enemy drops its superior weapon then dashing for it. Both issues undermine the dynamism and improv spirit felt when the combat is thriving.

Compared to the stamina system, where you will find almost everywhere in the world carefully tuned to allow for a smart player with minimal resources to get where they want to go, this feels poorly balanced. How anyone would try to balance such a combat system is well outside my area of expertise. Yet what irritated me more about the durability system upon my first playthrough was the thing that continues to irritate many about it: where was My Stuff?

Players love to have Their Stuff. We love a lightsaber in our chosen colour, a whip that vaporizes vampires, a sword that is also a gun. We love to have things our enemies don’t, that make us look like the protagonist and make them dead. And we want to keep these things to form an identity for our avatar. Most games succeed on this front either by having fixed characters and Stuff that are thoughtfully linked, or by having blank slate characters and an abundance of Stuff so any outcome feels meaningful by virtue of being personal. Breath of the Wild chose a different path, one littered with broken Stuff no different from what your enemies use against you. Even the freaks who bought Amiibo to get Their Amiibo Stuff found it shattering on the shields of Moblins. A handful of times I’ve seen this celebrated as some mono no aware motif, but that doesn’t ring true for me.

When it works, the durability system makes a player less attached to Their Stuff and more attached to Their Stories. The time you tried out a boomerang and forgot to catch it and an enemy behind you picked it up. The time you knocked a bokoblin backward into the kicking hind legs of your horse, sending it skyrocketing (after a slight delay where the game seemed to think “should this work?”). The time you leaped off a pillar right as a Guardian laser launched and entered bullet time with your bow, seeing the beam narrowly pass over your shoulder. Your Stuff is unremarkable and breakable because it fosters such remarkable and inimitable Stories; by this same stroke, Your Stuff becomes ill-suited for puzzles and much better suited for problems and Your Album becomes Your Instrument.

Though there are certainly parallels to how one’s items were used in the original Zelda, credit must be paid to director Hidemaro Fujibayashi. Combat in the Oracle games stood in stark contrast to the arcade qualities of the original they initially intended to remake by opening up the possibilities of Your Stuff. You can still shoot a projectile, but now that projectile can ricochet or have modifiers added to it. You still need to avoid incoming attacks, but you can now jump and block and increase your speed to more easily reposition. Restricting all this was the Game Boy’s two-button design, forcing you to make the most of your chosen combination lest you be forced in and out of menus repeatedly. Skyward Sword served as a false start in translating this more expressive gameplay to a 3D title, adding meters and upgrades to a combat system that never ended up needing them (if you broke any shield in Skyward Sword, how did you do that). Breath of the Wild found its juice by more fully embracing durability and making Your Stuff less special.

Returning to Breath of the Wild after playing both the Oracle games and Tears of the Kingdom, I find myself completely unattached to My Stuff and far more invested in My Stories. Taken on these terms, you are always able to rediscover an area even if you know where every enemy and chest and Korok will be. This section is under this heading because I love going around Akkala in both games: the autumnal colours and charm of Tarrey Town make it inviting and nostalgic, but also the dangerous citadel and towering chain of islands and Skull Lake enrich the combat encounters tremendously. Whenever the game presents such striking arenas, both in Akkala and elsewhere, the combat system sang and forged some of my most visceral memories in Hyrule.

Every time I come to this region, I find myself reminded of My Best Stories from these games. The stories I made myself and shared with others, resonating all the more when because of how Their Stories went differently.

VI. Eldin

The Game’s Story leaves more to be desired. At least, the overarching story it tells about Link does. We know Link less as a character of consistent personality or values and more as a vessel for familiar trials and tribulations. We see him venture into the unknown, find allies, encounter injustices and tragedies, struggle to right wrongs, and become strong enough to overcome some form of evil. Breath of the Wild’s Link experiences a singular tragedy upon introduction—the world he lived in was largely destroyed—then he sets out to grow strong enough to rescue Zelda. In a sense, this is another break from tradition and convention, but what grew from these cracks is of a more nebulous quality than most aforementioned sprouts of newness.

In its opening vista, Breath of the Wild cashed the cheque written by the NES original’s manual art: forests, plains, Death Mountain, all waiting for you to venture forth. Yet this environment is so bucolic, it begs the question: does this world actually need Link to save it? The Calamity is not a tragedy we guide Link through like giving Ganon access to the Triforce by mistake in Ocarina or seeing the kidnapping of Aryll in Wind Waker. We don’t feel culpable or helpless for our lack of involvement, and the century since has left Hyrule in surprisingly good shape. Sure it’s sad all those people got killed a century ago, yeah some spots are kind of hard to travel through now, and maybe we feel a bit melancholic seeing some ruined houses. But every village is doing fine: there’s no internal strife or intrigue, everyone is pretty cheery, and nowhere actually incurs damage from the looming Divine Beasts. Progressing the main quests achieves little besides stopping rain in Lanayru and quelling the sandstorm at the edges of Gerudo Desert. For the first time, Link feels incidental to the world.

Most of the story beats one expects from Link are instead bestowed on Zelda. We learn through location-specific flashbacks that she was burdened with unbearable pressure to fulfill her prophesied role, which clashed with her own curiosity and intelligence. Being a pious and proper princess got her nowhere with the distant goddesses, and doomed much of the kingdom. She instead found strength through a visceral desire to protect people she cared about, and managed to contain Calamity Ganon using this strength. Rescuing her is the one thing that feels truly necessary, and it resonates with the mechanical theme of charting one’s own course. Nothing mind-blowing, but it’s a resonant story told with touching subtlety.

It’s certainly laudable that no MacGuffins are required to defeat Calamity Ganon; he’s right where he’s always been and he’s only got so many hit points. There’s an interesting sense of non-linear excavation to finding memories and piecing together environmental context. But it all pales in comparison to the experiential narratives formed through play and discovery, and the weird tiny character nuggets found well off the beaten path. It is jarring how much more I care about a guy who tells me his name is Spinch and his horse’s name is Spinch and he doesn’t care if that confuses me than Yunobo; the only thing I remember about Yunobo is how annoying he sounded. The fastball the Zelda team has had for charming NPC weirdos has not diminished since we first met Error, but this underscores the appeal of the game’s stories are in their piecemeal nature.

A common critique is that Hyrule is underseasoned with content for its size, or that areas of the game are “empty”. While I don’t think people are misidentifying how much there is to do—plenty of spaces don’t have enemies, don’t overlap with any quest, and don’t present any unique traversal challenge—it does feel like a misunderstanding of the function of the game’s “empty” spaces. Even if you set aside the context that this is a post-apocalyptic landscape or that liminal zones give players breathing room to look around and find distant points of interest, there is the meditative quality one gets from being lonely on a rocky outcrop or in a quiet field. If you expect every inch of a game’s world to be giving something back to you, you will be disappointed in Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule. Over time I’ve come to appreciate this emptiness on the game’s part for leaving me room to make something, that it is provoking dialogue with the player rather than lecturing to them.

A national park does not come with a story, and perhaps it’s best to think of Breath of the Wild as not coming with one either. We visit it and tour through it, sometimes guided and sometimes not. We can stop to read the plaques if we want, but it is enough to give our own meaning to the terrain instead. Its appeal is in its difference from what we see in our daily life, and that it is preserved for whenever we return. Of course, this is not truly The Wild either; it is managed and mediated and selected for its picturesque scenery. Whatever we find there is what we bring with us, whatever we take back was always supposed to leave.

VII. Hebra

For my entire adolescence, video games were treated by most people I talked to and observed as products to either be avoided entirely or disposed of when rendered obsolete. To this day, many conversations about games are haunted by this churn: it didn’t age well, it’s obsolete, etc. Certain games are retired from the gladiatorial arena by critical consensus, but effigies of them can always be found burning and pin-stuffed behind closed doors. By virtue of its sequel reusing its overworld and its substantive overlap with many acclaimed releases of the last five years, the hour has come round at last for the rough beast of “is Breath of the Wild still worth playing?”

Part of the criticism you tend to see against Zelda games broadly is in the vein of "this game doesn't do anything new" and "this isn't any different from other games that aren't universally acclaimed". Breath of the Wild is no exception. These points dovetail nicely because yes, they often are doing something different though no, they are rarely doing something new. Ocarina of Time was not the first 3D action adventure game, Wind Waker was not the first cel-shaded video game, Breath of the Wild was not the first open world game where you could go straight to the endgame after the tutorial. Since its inception, Zelda has opted to arrive late to trends and take advantage of others' awkward steps onto new soil in striding more stably. And yes, it does so with the further advantage of nearly four decades of audience good-will to find deeper meaning in ordinary things and overlook technical frustrations, plus many fans who are not well-versed in video games outside the Nintendo-heavy canon.

Among contemporaries in the increasingly-maligned open-world adventure genre, Breath of the Wild is refreshingly honest in its promises. Hyrule is a verdant, idealized slice of nature rather than a blighted wasteland where people still have all the food and drink they need, or a bustling city with only a handful of buildings you can enter, or a faithful recreation of a historical time period where the only thing you can do is kill people. At no point do you improbably acquire a huge volume of data about the location of quests and collectibles and shops, or get locked into a sequence that causes a game over for reasons other than player death, or otherwise hit a wall of dissonance between the main quest and the self-directed exploration. Almost everything you need to know about the game can be learned within the first half hour, much of it following from basic intuition about how things behave in nature. Yes it has towers that give you maps and a lot of collectibles, but if you can’t tell the difference between this and a Ubisoft game you should try thinking harder.

There are no new ideas in Breath of the Wild, just great ideas. As such, it is always worth playing. In the six years since we have seen various games that were being developed in parallel were jamming on a similar beat (Outer Wilds, Death Stranding) or that began development afterward and found ways to incorporate that rhythm into their own playing (Elden Ring, Monster Hunter Rise). Independent developers have made striking efforts at emulating that mechanical freedom (Sable, A Short Hike) and this shows no signs of stopping. It is trite to credit Breath of the Wild with any industry-wide shift, but it would be equally ridiculous to act as if it had no impact. Beyond influence on developers, it serves to influence audience taste: welcoming newcomers to games, pointing passive observers to more diverse genres, pushing experienced players to reconsider what they thought they knew about this series.

Everything Aonuma, Fujibayashi, and the rest of the Zelda team committed to in Breath of the Wild was a tightrope walk. Its approach to storytelling, combat, exploration, and problem-solving systems all risked leaving newcomers and veterans out in the cold. Though they were sure to never veer so hard as to become inscrutable and thus unpopular, they picked their path and saw it through. They made the game they wanted, one that stands out from what came before without abandoning what endeared it to its audience. Standing on the summit they reached, one can see how they got here and imagine how much higher they could go. The appetite for the sequel set in, and the longer it took the more it gnawed at people. Some wanted to trek a bit back along the way to their ideal view, some wanted to find the next peak, some began imagining things that weren’t really feasible for the aging Tegra X1. After I came around to the full vision of the game, I was happy where it stood and would follow wherever it decided to go next.

Evergreenness is elusive, and certainly nothing can be for everyone. But Breath of the Wild feels like a landmark, worth visiting even if only so you can scoff and say it doesn’t live up to the hype. Like any lasting landmark, its spirit is old and its roots run deep. Veteran hands crafted this robust game that feeds simple desires, harkening back to early video games and childhood daydreaming. It is traditional in the way a snowball fight is traditional: not as a cultural practice, but as an organic consequence of humans responding to their environment. It is a game for all seasons and climates, of which we have only one more to visit.

VIII. Gerudo

Six years ago, I bought a Switch and Breath of the Wild. What I thought would be a nostalgic capstone on my relationship with video games turned out to be the foundation of my new interest in the medium. Everything it would teach me, suddenly and gradually, about how I thought about games has guided me to more interesting works to engage with and people to talk to. When I had effectively stopped following games as a medium in undergrad, the landscape still felt dominated by consumerist values and juvenile notions of objectivity in criticism. When I returned, it had splintered into both a more vitriolic and trashy thunderdome of attention and a more thoughtful and inquisitive space for creators and audiences, depending on where one chose to spend their time. Breath of the Wild received its near-customary adulation from established gaming media, but proved to have a far longer tail of speed-running, clip-sharing, and video-essaying than prior Zeldas. From where I’ve been standing, it’s seemingly never left current discourse, still standing as a peak for many and a trash-heap for others.

Most of this essay has tried to unpack what it means to me now. Like I said at the top, an appreciation. I hope it has conveyed a sentiment that has grown in me over the past six years: namely, that analyzing something for flaws in something you love isn’t very interesting.

Take a look on this website, on youtube, in forums and discords, and you’ll find countless takes on how Breath of the Wild is a flawed masterpiece, not a great Zelda game, overrated, lacking content, etc. You’ll find people who claim to want to fix its flaws, or that its sequel solved all their problems with it, or that both it and its sequels were mistakes. Over the years, I’ve engaged with a good chunk of this sort of stuff, and I revisited as much of it as I could while writing this in the hopes of not parroting others and sharpening my own perspective. What happened was I spent a lot of time bored, also kind of amazed people still complain about the Korok seeds good lord just do as many as you want to and avoid any you don’t and for the love of god understand that there are that many so wherever a player goes they are getting enough to upgrade consistently and you absolutely shouldn’t do all of them and Zelda games have never really intended players to get all the collectibles.

I was bored because a lot of people don’t know what a flaw is, don’t respect that a work of art is often smarter than the audience and the authors alike. Such conversations are especially condescending for a series that has retained a considerable amount of its core talent over decades; they know what they’re doing. The reason this whole thing is so long is to show that basically anything one person can read as a mistake, another can read as a virtue. Realistically, they are all consequences of achieving the vision the game’s designers strove for. I don’t know anyone who has nothing bad to say about Breath of the Wild, but personally I would rather celebrate what it is than lament what it is not. It is a great game and a great Zelda game, proving that the series is ultimately whatever its makers want it to be and not whatever fans imagine it to be.

Just as some people grow to scoff at The Beatles once they grow and learn they were not inventing rock music from the aether, some people abandon their interest in Zelda for its messier inspirations and offshoots. Circling back to their own introduction to the series, they might argue Zelda lost its way at some point and it no longer contains what made it appealing to them. Some take this further and misinterpret their preference for some platonic ideal, often based on that introduction or the one that hit them hardest. This instinct is borne out of a desire for constant progress and validation: I must be finding the authentic, the original, the ideal. I’ve given up on that.

Discourse around this game has run dry for me. If you think it’s not a great Zelda, or not a great open-world game, overrated and empty and a blight on the industry, go nuts. I have processed my doubts about this game and am beyond your help. Undoubtedly, somewhere people will think thoughtful things not yet said and find the words for them. However, I don’t think any will sound better than this game speaking for itself. The sound of footsteps, rainfall, and wind across every inch of a scenic world. Of placing your feet and hands accordingly. It helped me to trust myself, and in so doing I would find the right people to talk to when it came time to reconsider it alongside its sequel.

After a long journey we stand at the edge of the map. Verily, it be the nature of dreams to end. Though we can see the sands extending before us, text cuts us off: “You can’t go any further.” We turn around and go back, to find the world has changed.

We go further.

I’ve found, oftentimes, when a work exists relative to another work — be it a sequel, adaptation, etc. — that the general audience has a tendency to judge it purely by its relation to the original. “Loyalty” becomes the touchstone for which the work is defined, and should it feel significantly different from the original, or change things in adaptation, it’ll be decried as a bad work compared to the original, regardless of its actual quality separated from that context. Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, from what I understand, was no stranger to this type of reception. On its original release, in 2013, it was criticized for feeling much more stripped back compared to what it was following up on. Core mechanics that defined Amnesia: The Dark Descent, such as managing your inventory, fueling your light source, and making sure you don’t lose your sanity were not present within Machine For Pigs, in an attempt to gear the game as more of a narrative experience, as was the modus operandi of primary developer The Chinese Room. It was a tall order — especially given just how popular and influential The Dark Descent was for indie horror — and sadly reception proved to be rather mixed because of that. What the general audience wanted was something reminiscent of the original work, and when the process of creating a follow-up resulted in something far different, it was rejected: not on its own merits, but because of outside expectations that this work didn’t entirely cater to.

So it’s a little funny on my end that of all the Amnesia titles, this is the one random chance chose for me to play first. Having not played, or even watched much of anything else to do with the series, I’m coming into this divorced from a lot of the context or outside expectations that surrounded the game on its release. I wouldn’t necessarily feel this game to be stripped back in terms of mechanics, since I never had an understanding of those mechanics in the first place. I wouldn’t think about this game in comparison to the original Amnesia… mostly because I prefer to view things on their own merits, but because I came into the experience absent any previous experience. It’s far from the first game in the series (especially if you consider Amnesia as a spiritual sequel to Penumbra), but, personally, this one would be my first foray into it, and, likely, the blueprint for what I'd expect to see should I delve further into this series.

You play as Osmund Mandus, a wealthy industrialist, who wakes up from a coma of several months right on the last day of the 19th century (or, well, actually a year from the last day of the 19th century, but shhhhhh) to find that his two children are nowhere to be found. His search takes him through his manor, through the streets and sewers of Victorian London, listening to the directions of a mysterious man on the telephone who tells him he knows where his sons are. He’s eventually led into one of his factories, and through this factory, towards a machine of unknown aim and infinite proportions. As he gets closer, however, Osmund finds that the workers of the machine are anything but human, and that he might know more about the machine than he seems to think...

I think this game’s strongest point was its narrative. I think the writing did a good job of getting me to know and like the characters, and I was particularly into the varied, wild directions the plot happened to go. Beyond how effective it is at building up a mystery — and drip-feeding the player information as it slowly unfurls — I think what I really loved is that this is a story that operates on multiple textual levels. While you’re fully capable of taking the game at face value without really feeling like you’re missing out on anything, this is something that begs to be read a little deeper. Particularly, one can question how literal the events going on even are, with a knowledge of Victorian England potentially providing an indication that the events that are depicted… perhaps could be interpreted as a metaphor for something much less fantastical. I made a point to look up plot details after the game specifically because I wanted to know more, which to me I’d say is a compliment as to how much this game made me want to think about it.

As a horror game, I’d also say it’s solidly effective. The nighttime environments feel suitably dark without it being absolutely impossible to see anything (which, believe me, so many games can’t seem to get right). There’s a subtle sense — through how the sounds you keep hearing are the only things that break through the silence, how empty the streets of London are — that something is wrong from the start, driving the core mystery and providing an aura of unease as you delve deeper through the game. I’m also into the way things… escalate as the game goes on: from down to earth as you explore your mansion, then veering into the fantastical as the monsters begin to show up, then more and more off the rails the further you delve into the heart of the machine. The sections with monsters are simple, but effective stealth sections, with their presence feeling imposing enough to make the player not want to mess up. When you’re caught, or when the game dispenses with the idea of stealth, enemies are loud as they rush you down, inspiring a blind panic as you try to figure out how you’re meant to get away. It’s the little things that contribute to a horror game’s atmosphere — and mean just as much as any big setpiece or scare — and in regards to the micro level, I think this game does pretty well on that front.

Where it falters, I feel, is mostly in direct gameplay. Less the ‘walking simulator’ aspect, more when the game throws puzzles at you. They’re mostly fine, but what it really suffers from is a lack of… indication of how your actions affect the world around you. Oftentimes, I’d solve a puzzle, the game would acknowledge that I solved a puzzle… and then I’d have no clue what to do next, either the puzzle requiring an extra step that wasn’t quite clear (at one point I thought the game had glitched and softlocked me), or because the game has issues with signposting where exactly the player needs to go. There were so many points where the game was like “walk down the path we’ve set for you” but the path was in a large enough area that I got lost, or the way forward was absolutely coated in darkness that I couldn’t see it. I kept looking at guides, not for any of the puzzles, but for a lot of what was in-between, when it… really did not feel like that was what the game had intended, nor something that particularly felt like a ‘me’ problem.

Other than that — and divorced from whatever context that might have given me different expectations, or any sort of in-built comparison — I felt that this was a fairly solid narrative game. While a lot of the gameplay, and most of the segments where I was walking from place to place, felt like they could’ve been made more clear, I felt the horror to be rather effective, and the story to be something super worth delving into and interpreting. As my personal first experience with this series, I felt like this was a fairly decent introduction. Can't wait to be shocked that the next game in the series has actual mechanics. 6/10.