I do feel a little bad about this. When I decided I Like RPGs Now the other month I dove into this one with the mindset that I'm going to see the story through and not give up when it gets tricky, and here I am doing that.

The battles are fun, or at least they were 30 hours ago. I kind of dread them now but that's probably me getting impatient with the game. The BP and weakness system create good strategies without getting overwhelming. Thing is, I ended up building a party that relies heavily on multi-target elemental attacks to whittle down the enemy defense, and I just ran into a boss whose ability is disabling those specifically.

Not a huge deal, all I have to do is change my party and grind the weaker guys up while figuring out a new angle of attack. Except... in 40+ hours, this game has not managed to make me care about any of these characters. The story is bad. No, worse: the stories are bad. All 8 of them, equally insipid.

I could do the grinding, or I could stop playing.

Oh well. I was only playing this because I heard such good things about the sequel. I established my baseline. Mission accomplished, moving on.

Still trying to figure out if I like JRPGs and I've retreated back to the 80s. I enjoyed this a lot more than expected! It's impressive something that felt this big and grand could exist on the NES.

Definitely wouldn't have made it without some enhancements from this remaster though. I toggled encounters off from time to time, mainly when I was deep into a dungeon and wanted to retreat to restock my inventory. I'm glad they give the option to do that and trust that you'll play the game the way you most enjoy.

But I mostly left encounters on and just clicked through them, which I think made me overleveled a little? That's fine. To someone like me who's mostly here for the story, it's more fun to steamroll through encounters than get stuck. The final boss gave me a scare when I thought I might have to try strategy, but the DPS won out in the end.

I'm excited to explore the rest of this series. Which is good, because I've already bought all 6.

i remember when this game first was announced i didnt care about it at all but i realized i owned like 3 games on switch and this was the next big release so i got it and actually found it to be pretty fun, and i will say the game's overall style and character designs are pretty solid overall. then i played this games ranked mode and stopped having fun. this isnt on some scrubquotes shit but at a point you pretty much had to play on stick or else you were just throwing. the cool gimmick of playing with two joycons was essentially a debuff. i think from the point onward playing the game with stick, the level of fun just depreciated and i stopped liking the game because the arms shit got too serious and it was never meant to be played that way and it just made the game boring. not even the content updates with new chatacters could bring me back. also i remember single player content just being arcade mode stories for each character and after that was done all you had was playing online. i cant remember if there was actually more to it than that but thats just how i remember it since i ended up trading this game with a friend for his copy of wonderful 101 in like 2018. i still havent even played wonderful 101 yet but i feel like i made a good trade

Dying in Space Harrier really is one of the funniest things to happen in a video game.

You got this jacked sunglasses-wearing dude with a laser-cannon, running full-speed-ahead, no looking back. Waves upon waves of aliens, robots, and geometry, all appearing and slinging blinking bullets faster than you can react to. And then suddenly, faster than your brain can even register, it happens...

All momentum stops completely.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGH.

Get ready!"

...and you're instantly back to full speed, like nothing happened.

Goofy gaming.

Looks incredible for 1985, but still goofy gaming.