One of the best light gun games ever made. A dark and moody roller coaster that seldom dips below 60fps with an incredible orchestrated score. While Time Crisis and Point Blank are fondly remembered as quintessential light gun games on the PS1, and rightfully so, Elemental Gearbolt is always left out of the conversation and seems to have been forgotten by many over the years, a fate it didn't deserve.

A sort of spiritual successor and remarkable improvement of their previous light gun game on the PlayStation, Project: Horned Owl, Elemental Gearbolt ditches the modern aesthetic found in most light gun shooters at the time for full-on fantasy, much akin to Panzer Dragoon. The action is fast and frantic, and the level and boss design is all very well done. You get a choice of three attacks, a standard single shot pistol, a spread, and a rapid fire shot, though the majority of the game will be played with the pistol while spread and rapid are largely used to deal with boss attacks. It's not perfect, especially since the rapid shot feels far weaker than it should be, but it's novel and makes the boss fights pretty engaging.

The game's utterly wonderful and I can't recommend it enough. However, there's a catch. Working Designs published the American version. As is well known, Working Designs is infamous for tampering with the difficulty of virtually every game they localized, and almost never for the better. Elemental Gearbolt was no exception and the changes are especially egregious here. The Japanese version's Easy mode was changed to a Training mode that cuts the game short and ends on the third stage, but what's worse, however, is that Normal and Master modes had their difficulties -significantly- increased, approximately by 1.5x according to Victor Ireland's translation notes in the game's manual. The enemies hit so hard in Normal mode that in order to complete the game you're more or less required to keep trying over and over before you memorize each stage's layout. What makes this even more difficult is that you're only given one life and three continues to complete the game. There are no save points other than your high score. Expect to lose your last continue midway through the game and have to start over from the beginning for your first few attempts.

The increased difficulty of the US version doesn't necessarily render the game unplayable (That fate would be saved for Working Designs' localization of Treasure's Silhouette Mirage), you can certainly beat the game with enough practice and it would have been nice to have these new modes as alternate hard modes, but as is the game suffers for it. It's simply too much and turns a game you have a great experience with for an hour with the intended difficulty into one that's just kind of frustrating until you memorize most of the game. I would say this game is in desperate need for an Unworked patch that rights most of the wrongs in Working Designs-localized games, but thankfully the Japanese version is quite accessible and the story is pretty nonsensical in the first place so not much is lost by playing it with a language barrier while you enjoy the excellent cutscenes animated by Madhouse.

Also, Working Designs added fart.wav to one of the English cutscenes.

Yes, that fart.wav you're thinking of right now.

It's not even the only game they put it in.

I really love this game and the series as a whole but ultimately it feels like a glorified riddle book with some adventure game elements sprinkled on. Very, very few of the game's puzzles have any actual connection with the game itself and outside of their difficulty relative to how far into the game you are most puzzles could be swapped with one another and none would be the wiser. There's unfortunately such a drastic separation between the game's world and the puzzles within and I can only imagine how wonderful a game like this could have been had more thought and planning went into properly marrying the two concepts.

Thankfully the story and characters are charming enough that it's most certainly worth your time, but sadly this disconnect of the game and its puzzles remains an issue throughout the entire series.

For as graphically and especially mechanically superior the sequel is, this is the one I always go back to. I don't know if it's the more quaint setting or the fact that the game only has one main dungeon with an almost Metroidvania design to it, but it certainly has an "it" factor to make it such a comforting experience to replay over and over again, and there's always something new I discover with each playthrough, whether it's character interactions and side stories that can go largely ignored on a casual run but they all add up to something meaningful and really helps nail the small town feeling of the game that I love so much. I suppose the sequel is technically the better game but I really feel like the original offers the better experience overall.

For those used to more modern control schemes, I recommend mapping L1 and R1 to the respective directions on the right stick for a pseudo dual-analog scheme. It's not nearly as smooth as Legends 2 which is one of the few PS1 games to utilize a proper dual stick control option, but it helps the game feel a bit less dated if the controls are what keeps you from enjoying it.

The most tragic victim of CyberConnect 2's ever-endearing tendency to craft an extremely ambitious concept but ultimately stops short of being an engaging game to play. In spite of this, I was still enthralled from beginning to end.

I feel dirty giving this game a 5/5 because I adore everything about this game except the game itself. It's by far the most technically impressive game on the DS I've played; the characters are all charming; the story is whimsical like every shonen anime you loved as a kid; the amount of work that went into the worldbuilding alone is nothing short of astounding, the lore was carefully crafted from the remnants of Tail Concerto's for a decade and it shows. I just wish the game didn't feel the need to hold your hand so firmly by solving every puzzle in the game before you've even entered the room. I wish the combat weren't so simplistic. I wish the game weren't so easy. I wish I could say that the game were more fun to play. It's not.

But there's a kind of magic to it. It's inexplicable. CyberConnect 2 poured their heart and soul into this project, and in spite of its shortcomings, its charm overcame anything that might get on my nerves. I suppose, emotionally speaking, that's quite a feat.

Salut.