Soul Hackers 2 is like the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull of Megaten. I don't think I've fully processed that it exists, even like a year and a half after finishing it. I think of this game often. It just confuses me - it's like the ultimate monkey's paw. They made a sequel to a 1997 Sega Saturn game that offers basically nothing to someone who loved the original, aside from some terminology carried over.

This game is fine - and I think that's what makes me so bitter towards it. They specifically selected one of the most unique, rough around the edges Megami Tensei games and sanded all of the interesting features down into something more digestable for general audiences. Things like demon loyalty and zoma fusions had so much more potential, but instead of exploring that they were just stripped and replaced with a combat system reminiscent of modern Persona. Dungeon design is repetitive, as is the music. They added in a pointless mascot character, there's nostalgia baiting content locked behind a paywall, and even the game's special Jack Frost variant was only obtainable by pre-ordering.

So many things about this game just reek of marketability and someone in a suit making the decisions, which is pretty funny considering it spends time critiquing capitalism and exploiting nostalgia.

Ringo is a very cool character. There are some standout tracks in the OST too. It's just not enough to justify the rest of the game for me. Some people see that this game is functional and has characters and argue its reception was unfair. I also knew people who saw Crystal Skull as their first Indiana Jones movie who said the same thing.

"This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game."

man. this was so bad that it made me start getting really annoying about gaming remakes on twitter which I'm continually embarrassed by, but it's hard for me to not be cynical about this thing on a level greater than 'i don't like what they did to a game that i think is good' bc to me it speaks to almost everything I find frustrating about the games industry at the moment

and like, I don't like to be miserable about media that isn't actively harmful! so what a shame that this remake feels actively miserable about the original game itself. it feels like the gaming zeitgeist at large sometimes have to be told when they're allowed to like old games instead of giving them the sweeping dismissal we generally give to anything older than a decade. if a game hasn't had a popular youtube essay about why it's good, actually, then it needs a remake to be playable in the modern age, right? jim ryan got absolutely demolished for asking why anyone would want to play a ps2 game nowadays, but we'll still eat this up because it has pretty lighting or w/e?

anyway to actually speak about the game itself, I think a lot of really questionable details in its presentation were largely overlooked when it came out. most people agreed that the new UI kinda sucks, but I've seen much less focus given to the janky facial animations (which will look worse in a few years than the original's lack of animation does now btw, there's a reason fromsoft straight up didn't bother) and questionable cutscene lighting and direction. a lot of scenes that from's team evidently gave a lot of care to in the original, like the dragon cutscene in 1-1 and king allant's entrance, look flat and lifeless in comparison - perhaps lit more realistically but cinematographically botched and much less effective. NPCs emote too much when they don't need to, and too little when they do, and every edge on most of the character designs has been sanded down to an unreasonable degree. the voice acting is a huge step down, the animation is all more weightless, etc, etc

fromsoftware are such an unlikely success story, and demon's souls has a weird place in their catalogue where it often gets dismissed as a kind of janky dark souls prototype instead of being taken on its own merits, so it kinda sucks to see it finally given mainstream attention only when its original paint job is stripped away in favour of something that exists primarily to show off the ps5's ability to push polygons. fromsoft's name isn't even attached to this in public, the vast majority of their original work taken out and replaced with presentation that's completely detached from the original's quiet, subversive style, despite bluepoint insisting that it's the same because they kept the gameplay intact or w/e

anyway this review is way too long and idk if i'm even allowed to post this here when it's so irrelevant to the game itself but I think this thing's mixed reception should prompt a lot of us to reconsider how we think about criticising games. is it an example of obnoxious purism when someone criticises the sweeping change in architectural style here, or the brighter colour palette? personally I think we should appreciate those details a lot more even before a new studio arrives to replace them wholesale, I have a lot more fun getting nerdy about the little things in games than I do trying to not be pretentious about them, and I think the push for better game preservation is allowed to point this stuff out without being shot down for nitpicking or w/e

(mask off, I think bluepoint are artistic terrorists and sotc ps4 was just as bad as this! give me my atmospheric haze or give me death, cowards)

went into this completely blind; didn't even know it wasn't a quake sequel. also tried the original version first, which definitely made for rough initial impact

quake ii kicks off in a way that i can lightly describe as "complete dog shit". for some ungodly reason, Club Carmack decided it'd be a nice idea to start players off with the worst pistol and shotgun combo known to mankind (even complete without muzzle flash if the og release is your preference). the fun doesn't stop not starting there, though, because then you pick up the grenades and boy oh boy - my personal favorite aspect about them is how they take 35 years to throw, which makes them only remotely viable either around corners or as a tool to very slowly kill yourself with

it was during the entirety of this first level that i thought to myself, "why does this suck so much fucking dick? who enjoys this? can john carmack really be trusted to call steve jobs an idiot for designing a mouse with one button when he actually thinks quake ii is fun?" then i got the one-two punch: the super shotgun and the chaingun

suddenly - enemies died from being shot. i no longer needed to constantly pop from cover to reliably fight hitscan baddies spongier than those seen in 'chasm: the rift' (which, ironically, is a quake clone). things only went up from here - especially in level 3 where the 90 or so grenades i'd been eagerly not using were finally given purpose via a launcher that didn't have 600 frames of startup. i'd say this is when the game really begins

...and barring the last stage - which definitely gets to a point of feeling sluggish due to its over-eagerness in spamming the most aggravatingly tanky two-legged enemy in the game - it doesn't let up. every later earned weapon (that isn't the rocket launcher) continues to feel pretty fantastic. the BFG in particular took me by surprise with its insane splash and chain damaging. you can fire this thing at one enemy and it'll clear out an entire fucking room. it's awesome and thanks to it using the same ammo as the standard laser rifle, there's no shortage of opportunities to let it loose

i'm not much for movement tech in my fps, but the levels here were designed in ways where i was pretty eager to push myself even on that front. lotsa opportunity to master bunnyhopping and circle jumping. i even skipped some chunks of levels with a few well-placed rocket jumps. fun stuff and it made me just a little more interested in giving quake 3 another shot

sonically and atmospherically, everything's obviously downgraded from q1 due to the lack of trent reznor (note: "HUH" is still intact (phew)) but the sonic mayhem soundtrack isn't totally unwelcome. i'll certainly take a competent albeit standard metal ost over the mick gordon-branded djent slop that this genre is so overly saturated with now

i've yet to play any expansions, but i did try a smidge of the n64 stages and found them to be really charming. kinda surreal to see a take of this game with so much color in it. definitely gonna get back to that, but for now i think i'm just gonna go straight for quake 4

"wait - you haven't played quake?"
~almost everyone who i've gushed about this to game in the past few days

a little about me: i'm partial to industrial grit, my favorite doom games favor grimly edgy atmosphere over 80s thrash worship, i'm a big NIN fan and the downward spiral is one of my top 5 favorite albums. so this should be a no brainer, right?

well - yeah, actually. that's exactly right. throughout my playthrough all i could continually ask myself was, "why the fuck didn't i play this sooner?" and rightfully so. i think the reason quake has eluded me for so long is because its holistic reputation is eclipsed at this point by a diehard multiplayer community that i frankly don't give a shit about. i'm not much of a multiplayer enthusiast for anything - let alone tech-y arena shooters - and honestly i probably would've continued ignoring this absolute fucking masterpiece if not for my pressing curiosity towards trent reznor's involvement

that'd have been a huge mistake; quake is easily the best boomer shooter i've ever played

this is where i could talk about how i adore the weapons and their balancing, the general focus on straightforward maps with powerups everywhere, the difficulty being largely driven by how easy it is to kill yourself in tight spaces - or even the god tier ambient score that has just the right amounts of otherworldly screams and metallic chords strewn about - i COULD go into those things and we could be here for a considerable amount of time - but instead of doing any of that, i'm just going to say that the shambler is one of the greatest enemy designs in any fps. in fact, my feeling towards quake 1 can be summarized roughly with my thoughts on the shambler; he's absolutely perfect. i love this giant, dopey, teethy foreskin man in all his fleshy (not furry - fuck you) glory. and i haven't even begun to MENTION his timbs yet

my mans butters be outright otherworldly

Evergrace is everything I want out of the medium of video games.

Is this game "good" in a traditional sense? Obviously not. The game's tumultuous development from PS1 to PS2 resulted in the game's scope being both cut back, while awkwardly lurching onto new hardware. This game feels like a strange in-between of a 5th and 6th generation more than any Dreamcast release. The plot is borderline incomprehensible, with key elements of the plot being inaccessible to western players due to a translation error with the bestiary. There are sections of the game that drag on for entirely way too long. There's an eclectic collection of stats that are incrementally increased through random drops from specific enemies, and even then, you won't notice a ton of difference. Combat is slow and lurching. Instant death from the environment is a constant. This game isn't polished in the least bit.

You'll never play anything like it though. Not even the sequel. I got this game at launch, and it's stuck with me throughout my adolescence as this alien, haunting action RPG.

Noriko Meguro's character designs and art direction are in full display here. I love how each of the game's disparate cast are instantly recognizable, even translated in game as clunky as they were. The world design is phenomenal. The skies have this pale, sick green color to it. The "trees" are bare spikes that have more in common with nuclear waste disposal barriers than foliage. There aren't any stock enemy designs in the game, the closest thing to "recognizable" is a boss halfway through one of the routes that looks like a demon. It feels like all the best parts of Morrowind's art direction, without ever feeling the comfort of a more mundane space. The entire game feels like you're in this hostile, foreign land and any respite you manage to get is something you carved out.

Kota Hoshino's soundtrack supersedes the game's own popularity at this point. The in game tracks differ from the original compositions, but not in a way that detracts from the overall experience (if anything, having a more subdued version of Buying Goods at Palmyra is a good thing). Nothing else, outside of Forever Kingdom, sounds close to this game. The highlight track for me would be Omen, the track that plays during the final cutscene/credits track. There's an assumption that this game has a very amateurish, ill fitting soundtrack (partially due to the fact that, as of the time of creating the OST, Hoshino didn't know how to read sheet music). I think the soundtrack fits the game's atmosphere perfectly, and I have a ton of respect for Hoshino for pulling off what he did.

The voice acting, at least in the english version, is terrible. It's never boring, and it instantly careens into "so bad it's good" territory. Don't play with an undub, it's part of the fun.

The large collection of equipment (that you can and HAVE to visually customize!) is admirable. Some players might have reservations with the fact that none of it is going to look like you're walking around in a traditional western suit of armor, I find that to be a selling point. Each piece of equipment also comes with abilities that have either use in combat, or exploration utility that you can only come across through experimentation. While a lot of my runs do devolve into "hit everything with the piko-piko hammer that's inexplicably the second best weapon in the game" (no prizes for guessing the first, check the dev), you are rewarded for exploiting elemental weaknesses and dressing for success.

The story requires external reading to fully understand, due to the game being the car crash that it is. That being said, fully understanding what this game's story isn't impossible and was rewarding to piece together, and unique enough to where I don't want to talk much more about it here. The main "antagonist" never shows up in the game at all and is mentioned only a few times.

All of this adds up to a game that's resonated with me since I picked up a copy back in 2001. A lot of this review just devolved into me saying "damn this game is weird" twenty different times, but I've played so many games and very few of them have such a distinct personality like Evergrace does. It's a challenging work of art to stumble through, one that requires patience. Having 100 percented the game, despite its glaring issues, it's a challenge that's rewarded me enough to call this a game I would put in my top ten. You want something different? This game will give you something different.