Ico is the type of game I dread to play, critically acclaimed, landmark classic of the medium, influenced various games and designers I love. I dread playing those because of a fear I have, a fear that's come true : I don't like ICO, in fact, I think I might hate ICO. And now I will have to carry that like a millstone around my neck, "that asshole who doesn't like ICO". Its not even really that external disapproval I dread, its the very reputation that causes me to second guess my own sincerely held opinions. I thought I liked minimalism in game design, and cut-scene light storytelling and relationships explored through mechanics but I guess I don't. There's some kinda dissonance, cognitive or otherwise reading reviews by friends and writers I respect and wondering if there's something wrong with me or if I didnt get it or played it wrong or any other similar foolishness that gets bandied around in Internet discussions. "I wish we could have played the same game" I think, reading my mutuals' reviews of ICO. Not in a dismissive asshole way of accusing them of having a warped perception, but moreso in frustration that I didnt have the experience that has clearly touched them and countless others.

But enough feeling sorry for myself/being insecure, what is my problem with ICO exactly? I don't really know. Genuinely. I wasnt even planning on writing a review originally because all it would come down to as my original unfiltered reaction would be "Playing it made me miserable". Thankfully the upside of minimalism in game design is that its easier to identify which elements didnt work for me because there are few in the game. I think the people who got the most out of ICO developed some kind of emotional connection to Yorda, and thats one aspect which absolutely didn't work for me. As nakedly "gamey" and transparently artificial as Fallout New Vegas' NPCs (and Skyrim and F3 etc) locking the camera to have a dialogue tree, they read to me as infinitely more human than the more realistic Yorda; for a few reasons. Chief among them is that despite some hiccups and bugs the game is known for, you are not asked to manage them as a gameplay mechanic beyond your companions and well, my main interaction with Yorda was holding down R1 to repeatedly yell "ONG VA!" so she'd climb down the fucking ladder. She'd climb down, get halfway through and then decide this was a bad idea and ascend again.

ICO has been to me a game of all these little frustrations piling up. Due to the nature of the puzzles and platforming, failing them was aggravating and solving them first try was merely unremarkable. It makes me question again, what is the value of minimalism genuinely? There was a point at which I had to use a chain to jump across a gap and I couldnt quite make it, I thought "well, maybe theres a way to jump farther" and started pressing buttons randomly until the circle button achieved the result of letting me use momentum to swing accross. Now, if instead a non-diegetic diagram of the face buttons had shown up on the HUD instead what would have been lost? To me, very little. Sure, excessive direction can be annoying and take me out of the game, but pressing buttons randomly did the same, personally. Nor did "figuring it out for myself" feel particularly fulfilling. Thats again what I meant, victories are unremarkable and failures are frustrating. The same can be said for the combat which, honestly I liked at first. I liked how clumsy and childish the stick flailing fighting style was, but ultimately it involved hitting the enemies over and over and over and over again until they stopped spawning. Thankfully you can run away at times and rush to the exit to make the enemies blow up but the game's habit of spawning them when you're far from Yorda or maybe when she's on a different platform meant that I had to rely on her stupid pathfinding to quickly respond (which is just not going to happen, she needs like 3 business days to execute the same thing we've done 5k times already, I guess the language barrier applies to pattern recognition as well somehow) and when it inevitably failed I would have to jump down and mash square until they fucked off.

I can see the argument that this is meant to be disempowering somehow but I don't really buy it. Your strikes knock these fuckers down well enough, they just keep getting back up. Ico isnt strong, he shouldnt be able to smite these wizard of oz monkeys with a single swing, but then why can they do no damage to ICO and get knocked down flat with a couple swings? Either they are weak as hell but keep getting remotely CPRd by the antagonist or they're strong but have really poor balance. In the end, all I could really feel from ICO was being miserable. I finished the game in 5 hours but it felt twice that. All I can think of now is that Im glad its done and I can tick it off the bucket list. I am now dreading playing shadow of the colossus even harder, and I don't think I ever want to play The Last Guardian, it just looks like ICO but even more miserable. I'm sure I've outed myself as an uncultured swine who didnt get the genius of the experience and will lose all my followers but I'm too deflated to care. If there is one positive to this experience is that I kept procrastinating on finishing the game that I got back into reading. I read The Name of the Rose and Rumble Fish, pretty good reads. Im going to read Winesburg Ohio next I think.

Ever play Metal slug and think to yourself "That was great and all but it really needs 100% more dolphin". Well boy do I have the game for you!

Evidently some former Metal Slug developers had the same thought when making this run and gun for Sammy Corporation in the early 2000s. Initially only released in arcades on Sammy's Atmoiswave arcade boards but later ported to Dreamcast by fans a few years ago to allow more people to experience it. Though adding in it's own unique ideas Dolphin Blue is such a close representation of Metal Slug you would think it was actually a spin off by SNK themselves. The military uniforms, guns and even the sound effects in places sound like they are just samples taken from it's influential forebear.

You get two characters to potentially play as, Erio an Arms Dealer and Anne a soldier. Regardless of who you play as in this adventure you will shoot through hordes of soldiers as they kidnap the Kingdom's Princess as the main premise. The most striking thing about Dolphin Blue are the visuals. It uses a mixture of chunky 3D backgrounds with 2D sprite characters and it's a gorgeous mix. Whilst the sprite work isn't the best I have seen of that era the colours and contrast with it's backgrounds make the game a real looker to play through. There is a lot going on at any one time with a lot of action and enemies on screen. A lot of the humour of the Metal Slug games is present such as scuba diver enemies suits inflating up when damaged and soldiers dangling precariously off of runaway trains in a very comic fashion. The levels themselves are pretty memorable with flooded mines, battleships, airships in a 1940's style diesel punk aesthetic.

There are only 5 levels but there only needs to be because this game is bloody hard. There are 3 types of gameplay in it's hour or so runtime though all three are run and gun type of foot, swimming or dolphin riding. Each have the same principle of shooting enemies, stabbing them if they get close whilst picking up some weapon power ups like Vulcans, missiles or firecracker grenades. These weapons have limited ammo and though frequent aren't always frequent enough and your base rifle can barely kill basic enemies but little else. Aside from that you also get a special attack that has a charge bar I was calling the RPG in my head (Rocket Porpoise Grenade) where your Dolphin flies forward doing a strong homing attack or on land you do a more powerful shot.

Now where the game gets hard is in both it's design and execution. On land your character feels stiff to control and shuffles rather than walks with no way to speed up. You can only shoot in 4 way directions despite some encounters clearly needing 8-way which I found extremely vexing often leaving me in no win unavoidable situations. The enemies will come in force from all angles leaving deaths often unavoidable and without the abilities to really deal with them except learning the game and the later levels are utterly brutal. The other modes are a lot more fluid for both underwater sections feeling more like a shoot 'em up and the dolphin Riding sequences which are a genuine blast to speed though. Even then though you can't fire backwards sometimes leaving you open to attack from the enemy encounters which was also a small annoyance. If it wasn't for the Dreamcast port I would never have beaten this as it has infinite continues and in places I just died endlessly.

I guess overall no matter how I look at it this is a good looking fun game that's a bit weird but there isn't a lot here that I don't think to myself Metal Slug already did and better. Certainly worth a playthrough for run and gun fans or people that like playing obscure retro games like me but it's not quite the hidden gem I was hoping.

+ Dolphins!
+ Great visual style and colours, striking looking game.
+ Dolphin riding!

- Too hard for me in the latter half.
- Stiff characters on land and no 8-way directional shooting. Really?

Just wanna let ppl kno that I ain't proof read this shit, i just got bored and wanted to write sumn about Final Fantasy 6.
The game is pretty ok I think.

In like 2020, I finished Final Fantasy 7 and I was like "Wow this game is really THAT good!". My knowledge of Final Fantasy before FF7 was that there are a shit ton of games + me dropping FF13 when I was like 12. I deadass didn't know anything about Final Fantasy 6 until I downloaded a random emulator and ran it up. Yes, not even the elitist discourse surrounding the game lmao. When I saw the intro scene, I was immediately locked in.

I am a big sucker for pixel art and FF6 displays the beauty of it to its very core. I was like "damn they really put they entire meat into this game". Little did I know that was basically the philosophy of how the game came to be. A giant effort for Square's last Nintendo FF game.

Not even just the art, the MUSIC? Oh my god, some of the best shit I've ever heard. I think its corny but I really do understand the comparisons of the music essentially being the equivalent of "Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel with crayons". No amount of covers, remasters. or rearrangements will beat out the OG SNES soundtrack for me cause of this alone.

The gameplay is turn based greatness at it's finest. I really love the esper system and how you can essentially build up anyone to use magic. Despite how cool the esper system is, I gotta admit it's flaws. Summons in this game are either useless at worst or kinda good/situational at best. Does not really help them fuckers have a 1 time use. Another thing, despite how fun the game is, it is admitely pretty easy, even without grinding because magic is THAT broken. Having characters have their own identity and battle gimmick is cool but "Me when I spam Ultima and win". Even physical built characters are better off learning magic, which kind of sucks but not to the point where it ruins the game for me. It's pretty straightforward even without it I would say. Speaking of characters, I GOTTA mention the gang of 14 bozos you play as.

FOURTEEN NIGGA? I was expecting like 6, maybe 7. When I found out how FF6 handles its story by incorporating a large cast of characters, I was overjoyed. There was a game I played in recent memory that I overall enjoyed, but was dissapointted due to how weak the story overall was and that game was Octopath Traveler 1. Idk why they made a game with 8 characters and they decided to make 3 of them interesting and basically none of them connect to the central plot in any way. Final Fantasy 6 was my answer to a cool RPG that handles multiple playable characters. Sure some characters in the story definitely get way less than others (Strago, Relm, one or two more characters arguably) and one kind of does not really matter (I still love you Gau), I think the fact that the cast comes together in multiple ways throughout the story is empowering to me, especially with the 2nd half of the game.

The story is something I never really experienced before. I was 15-16 when I played it initially and that game exposed me to things I never thought a game in the damn 1990s would ever show. Niggas bought games back then and expected to beat them in like 8-12 hours, mot a 30+ hour epic. The conflict with the empire and the dystopian regime the world is under, the motivations that give our little pixelated heroes life in the 2nd half of the game, the opera scene, oh man the opera scene. I was NOT expecting to see anything like that in a SNES game, just like how I wasn't expecting to see anything like "the" celes scene in the 2nd half of the game. Looking back after playing every final fantasy game (except 12, soon...), this is still my favorite scene in the game because I've genuinely felt the same way in life without going too much into detail. I never thought I would see a lot of things in FF6, and this probably was the biggest thing. Emotions were high and the musical leitmotif of her theme in the background definitely didn't help me from NOT tearing up, but it did help me personally.

It was a surprise, a surprise out of nowhere from a game that I had very minor expectations of that there always is hope in the absolute worst of the world. It's corny, its generic, but I genuinely was touched by how scenes like this as well as other scenes in the darker half of the game display hope, display love, display life. It feels like the game always reminds me of these things....because I can't stop playing it. Hell, I couldn't stop playing it then, and I sure as hell can't now.

I am really shit at sitting down and playing games, especially when I am 21, broke, and stupid. I would say overall, I am NOT a critical person, but it takes a decent bit for a game to make me sit down with it for multiple hours and FF6 is one of a handful of games that won me over. When was the last time you sat your ass down and played a game for hours, slept and thought to yourself "Damn I can't wait to play <insert mid here> tomorrow"? Because that feeling is the best and FF6 was so good upon my first playthrough, I just felt this way after every session. Beat that game in like a WEEK. Matter of fact, FF6 is so good that I just....keep replaying it. Every year or so, I just pop it in and play it start to finish. It's like therapy for weird niggas cause that shit is usually too expensive. But I genuinely feel empowered playing it and I doubt that will ever change.

TL:DR
I could go on more about the story and the funny clown being an amazing. memorable, and nihilistic villain or the funny train Supplex or some shit, but Ill be honest I wrote this review purely out of BOREDOM. I AM BORED AS FUCK and I am kinda also bored of just passing off things I like/dislike/am mixed on as just "It was goated", "it was ASS", or "It's ok". Sometimes you're passionate about something and have to yap somewhere, so I chose to yap here. I don't give a fuck about objectivity or none of that shit, i just wanted to make a personal lil essay on why I think Final Fantasy 6 is an awesome game. Free thinker opinion I know, but who gives a fuck about what people think? I sure as hell don't