It's syntax is particular enough that it won't recognize "hq" (lowercase) as "Headquarters", but will recognize "HQ" (uppercase). I have no idea how to make progress. I ask what seem like obvious, natural questions, with correct grammar and punctuation, and nothing happens; I type in blunt, old-school adventure game inputs, and get some results, but hit a wall shortly afterwards. Maybe this is moreso an issue with the English language version (I believe this is, afterall, the first official release of Portopia outside of Japan, and is a small, free, tech demo that likely didn't get much QA), but I have some doubts. Maybe it's significantly easier if you're already familiar with the original game and know what sorts of questions you should be asking, which I feel safe assuming most English speakers won't be. Maybe this is an intentionally botched "AI tech demo" so that Squeenix doesn't get swept up in the prospects of automating parts of their development process, or maybe, just maybe, AI isn't actually all that impressive yet.

I love the funny roundfaced talking animals. Isometric autorun platforming is actually what happens when I think in real life; unfortunately the game replicates this internal ludologue all too accurately with its inclusion of bottomless pits. Murder runs into the issue I have with other dialogue-driven mystery games where the characters subtly ask you to clarify something obvious in a way that feels like the game is asking a trick question when it isn't. Soundtrack gets the job done but isn't particularly memorable. It's very cute, I'd recommend it to anyone who already likes Sonic, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't.

Sometimes you play a game and think "they just don't make them like they used to." Sometimes they barely made 'em like that in the first place.

Breath of the Wild is the best-selling game in the Legend of Zelda series, selling about three times as many copies as the game in the number 2 spot; it is also easily the most open-ended game in the series. Four Swords Adventures is linear to the point that it's split into discrete stages that must be completed in a set order, so maybe it's not surprising that it's believed to be the worst selling game in the series. Some even call the game a spin-off, but I don't think there's really a compelling argument to be made there. Oddly enough, if you go to Zelda Dungeon, Age of Calamity, a sequel to Hyrule Warriors that sold ridiculous numbers for a game in its genre for basically no reason other than being a Breath of the Wild spin-off, is right at the top in the main banner, as if was a main entry. Maybe sales, relevance, and potential for engagement is all it takes to be a "real" Zelda. Four Swords Adventures is one of very few Zelda games to have never been re-released in any form, no longer representative of the brand.

After playing Breath of the Wild in 2017 I found myself spending a few months revisiting nearly every Zelda game I could, and with that game's sequel looming only a month and some change away, I figured I'd finally go back to this one. I haven't played through Four Swords Adventures since I was pretty young, at that point I had watched my dad play through Ocarina of Time, and I had rented Wind Waker and the Oracle games but never got further than a couple dungeons in until I owned them many years later. I was kind of surprised how often I reached areas I recognized, remembering them as being particularly frustrating, only for them to be pretty manageable. Infiltrating Hyrule Castle at the end of world 4 was much easier and shorter than I remember, and the Ice Palace had a couple puzzles that I could definitely understand a kid having trouble with but really wasn't that bad. I guess just keeping in mind how little experience I had with the series at the time explains it.

Although, strangely enough I remember World 5 somewhat fondly despite it's setting being one of the more treacherous in the game, a Lost Woods about as hostile as the one in Twilight Princess, and a Kakariko Village that looks a lot more like Thieve's Town. A deku scrub in the last level of the area reveals why; Ganondorf actually has given his minions a direct warning to be on the lookout for "four travelers", but they've all assumed that a group of kids couldn't possibly be the people he's talking about. The more straightforward traversal gauntlets and dungeoneering are broken up by stages that consist mostly of the type of exploration and character-interaction-driven gameplay you would expect from a typical Zelda game's side content, and thanks to the premise of this area, we get two of these back to back, a surprisingly chill chapter of the game.

If there's a common problem I have with both of the two most recent console Zelda games, it's their pacing. Breath of the Wild and Skyward Sword are both a single consistent stream, with the former feeling like an endless sandbox (for better or worse), and the latter just feeling like one big dungeon. The more traditional Zelda structure adopted by A Link to the Past allows the player to split the game into play sessions of more or less equal size and congruent curves of rising and falling tension. Do the necessary steps to get to the next dungeon, beat the dungeon, see what the characters in the world have to say about that, see what your new item can do in the world; it'll take about an hour or two, and you can confidently assume that repeating the process with the next dungeon during your next session will take about the same time. Translating this rhythm to strictly separated levels works quite naturally, and is honestly really refreshing. I think it's a shame more "adventure" themed games don't go for a more focused structure, I think the game that gets closest to scratching the same itch is Half Minute Hero.

The mechanics of this game are kind of crazy. There are ideas in this game that feel like band-aid fixes to make it work in both singleplayer and multiplayer, or individual level gimmicks to keep things from getting stale, and some of those ideas could have carried an entire game on their own. The formation system has a bizarre effect on basic combat. The horizontal line formation will always stretch to the right when activated, and the vertical line formation will always stretch downward; since the square and diamond formations keep the four player characters pretty close together, the player is put at an unusual disadvantage if an enemy is up and to the left of them. The way that the dark world works in most Zelda games is more or less like a completely different screen, here it's actually concurrent with the light world, with objects in one appearing as shadows in the other. 2D platforming did exist in the handheld games in small amounts, but here there are a couple late game areas that mostly consist of side-scrolling. There is like, one time in the game that you can upgrade the Fire Rod and it gets the same utility as the Cane of Somaria. If you shoot a projectile through a doorway on the GBA screen, it will keep flying into the TV; I assumed at first that this only worked in specific areas, but later in the game I found myself shooting sword beams through doors by accident, so it is just a consistent system in the game.

There's a very late puzzle in the game that requires you to go into the dark world, and pick up a Link that's in the light world and carry him around. I have no idea if this is something you could always do, or if this inexplicably only works in that room, but if that's just a consistent thing throughout the game, that's crazy. If it weren't for the fact that literally nothing carries over from one level to the next, meaning there's definitely no meaningful rewards to be gained from replaying a level and finding hidden things you missed, I would have gone through quite a few levels to see what kinds of shenanigans you could get up to with this cursed knowledge.

The core gamefeel is top-notch for 2D Zelda. You can do a "smash"-style input to do a leaping slice, you can do a Zelda 2-style downward stab in midair. If you have the Pegasus boots, you're not locking into a single direction, you have a relatively wide turning radius compared to normal movement, but you can drift around. It's honestly really frustrating that the game limits you to a single item at a time; I really want a game with this exact core movement that would let you use both the Pegasus boots and the Roc's feather, or both the bombs and arrows in the same way that the handheld games do. Hell, the final level of World 7 makes we wish we could get a new game in the style of Zelda 2, I think they could make it really work this time.

And I haven't even touched the multiplayer-only Shadow Battle mode, since nobody has ever actually played the multiplayer of this game because its absurd hardware requirement. With how much game there is here it's shocking that the Japanese version has an entire third mode.

The visuals are generally pretty appealing. The use of shaders in particular could be described as "economical" (both in that a lot of the effects are relatively simple, and that a lot of the particles and things seem to be lifted from Wind Waker), but effective. The assets in the game could be split into a few different categories. A lot of sprites and environment tiles are ripped straight from Link to the Past, a game that I personally think has spritework that is serviceable at worst, and merely neat at best. The stuff that was created specifically for this game typically looks pretty good, though some of the bosses definitely look unusually "gamey", even for Nintendo. I think the Four Swords/Minish Cap design is the best Link has ever looked in 2D. Some of the NPC and boss sprites are seemingly scanned from the 3D games, and these are typically the worst looking things in the game.

Outside of a handful of trickier puzzles, the game is extremely easy. You get as many as four extra lives every time you finish a stage, in addition to the handful you can usually find hidden in jars. I probably died less than 5 times throughout the entire game, and maxed out my lives right at the end of the game. Each stage requires you to collect at least 2000 force gems, though the second level is literally the only time I got even close to not having enough. I don't know if it's just because later levels have higher numbers of more powerful enemies that yield better drops, or what the likelihood is that the game is balanced with multiplayer griefing in mind.

The audiovisual theming is typically derived from prior games. Most of the music is from Link to the Past, though we do also get a few new songs, and some cool remixes of infrequently reused tracks like the final dungeon theme from the original Zelda. The final area is accessed by a rainbow bridge that Zelda herself conjures up, and is punctuated at the end by a escort/escape sequence, just like Ocarina of Time. At times it might seem like the game is lacking much of its own unique identity, but it's a lavish time capsule of everything that The Legend of Zelda was at the time.

"Why are we here? No reason, just nostalgia, I suppose."

I've said before, only half joking, that the Wii only has about 5 good games. I still believe it has a weak library overall but I will at least admit it must surely have some hidden gems, but they are WELL hidden. As it was released in North America, Innocent Aces is a game absolutely terrified of telling you what it is. I think it's the earliest released game that I own that has a reversible sleeve; the US retail package features different artwork from any other region, making it look exactly like every other flight game on this system. A side effect of the Wii's reputation for being a "casual" console is that not only are traditional "hardcore" games fewer in number, but for the sake of marketability they are made to resemble their competition as much as possible. The only real hints as to the true nature of the game are the fact that it was published by Xseed, and that savvy enthusiasts might recognize that the aircraft on the box is like no plane in the real world. It is otherwise indistinguishable (at least, on the surface) from games like Blazing Angels, Heatseekers, or WWII Aces.

The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces is an Ace Combat spinoff made as a tie-in for an anime film directed by Mamoru Oshii. In the movie, in an alternate history setting, wars are now waged by the Rostock and Lautern corporations as spectacle. The combatants in their live-fire engagements are Kildren, genetically engineered ageless child soldiers. Nobody ever wins, nobody ever can win. There's a legend on the battlefield that somewhere in the sky is a plane with a black wildcat on its nose, piloted by the only adult man still in active duty. Sometimes some poor kid leaves the fight to try and be the one to take the man down, but nobody even comes close. It is implied that in Innocent Aces, you play as that very man in his younger years, just as Rostock starts making the switch to test-tube babies.

The presentation of the game is quite striking. In the post-mission rundown, the paths of all planes, friend and foe, are traced through the sky as red and blue ribbons. Many levels feature large environmental setpieces, a city, a volcano, a castle. Once in a while between missions you'll be treated to anime cutscenes done by Production I.G. The soundtrack is excellent, the mission briefing and debriefing tracks stand out as particularly memorable.

I was initially a bit disappointed with the weapon selection compared to Ace Combat, but that was before I understood how to use "Tactical Maneuver Commands". If you stay within close range of an enemy for a short time, you'll start filling a gauge at the bottom of the screen. Once it fills up enough, you'll be able to execute various scripted motions with a single button press that will automatically align your plane for a perfect shot. It's somewhere between the movement capabilities of Sonic's lightspeed dash and the Doomslayer's glory kills. It's very satisfying to be able to charge headfirst into a swarm of enemies, and once you've safely closed the gap, pick them off one-by-one with ease.

As you might expect with a Wii game, the controls can be an issue. While you can use a traditional controller (Classic Controller/Pro or Gamecube), it comes with some hiccups. The tutorial only teaches you how to play with the default control scheme, the remote and nunchuck. Not only are the button configurations so different between control types that you'll need to learn them yourself or consult the manual, many tutorials are actually impossible to complete with a standard gamepad because the fire button on gamepad is also the skip tutorial button. The controls are also simplified compared to typical Ace Combat fare, and while there is an "expert" mode meant to reimplement this, it puts yaw control on the D-pad meaning you'll need to use a left-hand claw grip if you want parity with the level of control you have in mainline games.

I played through the game with a Classic Controller Pro but I replayed the first few stages with motion controls out of curiosity; if nothing else, it was somewhat illuminating. For one thing, it all but confirmed my suspicion that the "Tactical Maneuvers" were a band-aid fix for how difficult it is to play with motion controls (though these moves are, perhaps accidentally, fun enough that I don't care). The motion controls are terrible. You move and aim with the nunchuck. Not the nunchuck's joystick, mind you, that would make too much sense. No, you move and aim, the most important gameplay functions of any flight combat game, using the nunchuck's motion sensor. When playing the game using the Classic Controller I sometimes found the controls to be over-sensitive, with small corrections requiring unusually subtle joystick movement. I now suspect that this is a side-effect of the nunchuck's limitations.

The game's pacing is excellent. Craft restrictions are introduced with a mission where you must use a poorly handling stealth plane to take pictures of enemy structures, and once fights break out at the end of the mission it's almost impossible to land a shot without using your TMC's. The very next mission limits the player instead to what it easily the most maneuverable plane yet. Some later missions require you to carefully regulate your speed, or navigate heavy wind currents. Even at their most challenging, straightforward air-to-air combat missions offer a breath of fresh air.

Aside from the controls, the most frustrating aspect of The Sky Crawlers is that even after playing the game and watching the movie I feel like I've still only seen too small a sliver of this world. We don't see much of what goes on outside of the battlefield, the newscasts, the bars, bowling alleys, and brothels near the bases. When we do get a glimpse into the lives of civilians in this world, they might sigh, they might slouch and stare out into the horizon, but they don't say anything. What do they think? What goes on in this world, who needs this war and why? Maybe the novels go deeper into this, but they're only available digitally and I've heard mixed things about their translation.

I don't know if it's quite fair to Pizza Tower to say that it's a rebuttal to Wario Land: Shake It's style-over-substance approach to iterating on Wario Land 4, because Pizza Tower is definitely not lacking in style. Shake It not only relegated most of Land 4's more expressive abilities to discrete level design widgets, in "upgrading" the visuals to Production I.G.'s professional hand-drawn animation the game completely lost its snappy flow. Pizza Tower not only incorporates the more situational maneuvers of Wario's toolkit into the core moveset, it offers wonderfully expressive animation without making a trade for the game's tactility. This game provides a logical evolution for Wario in the same way that Spark 2 finally offered a logical evolution for 3D Sonic.

Even on repeat playthroughs, with a better understanding of both Peppino's movement and the enemy's patterns, I do not like the boss fights in this game at all. The platforming is loose, hectic, and pretty forgiving, the only punishment in typical circumstances is a decreased score. Conversely, the boss fights demand a level of precision and concentration found nowhere else in the rest of the game, they all have too much health and drag on, their mechanical gimmicks don't mesh well with the game's core, they often rely on cheap tricks (the second half of The Vigilante's fight being in silhouette is particularly frustrating), and they must be overcome in order to progress and access more of the actual fun parts of the game.

I played more of this game this week than I have since I was a kid; I did not beat it, but I do think I've ran out of patience for it, for the time being.

This might be the fastest, tightest handling that Mario has had in a 3D game, but there isn't a single environment that this control feels natural in. It's similar to how the speed increase and expanded moveset of the Switch version of 3D World completely changes the feel of that game, but here it isn't even clear how the pieces were meant to fit. It feels like they moved fast and broke stuff and never got a chance to put it back together. They ripped out half of Mario's moves and replaced them with this crazy new idea, and FLUDD does certainly have moments when it's utilized well, but it really feels stapled on. The level design mostly suffers in the same way that World does compared to the NES games, Mario's greater capacity for midair correction results in spaces without focus.

And yet nearly a quarter of the main shines are secret areas that do try to give more directed, linear platforming challenges, and they take these corrective maneuvers away! Without these Mario's options are far too limited, yet in these moments Sunshine may require more precision than any other 3D Mario game. The lack of a long-jump is a point of contention, some say it should be here, some say it would be overpowered when combined with FLUDD; I say the game isn't remotely put-together enough for these kinds of balance concerns to matter, and that the long-jump's absence is the least of my concerns. Mario no longer has the somersault, he has no safe way to get air, you either need the space to sideflip or take a gamble on whether a spin-jump will send you in the right direction. Mario no longer has the mid-air kick to halt himself in midair. If you overshoot by a hair in these secret areas, you are dead. In SM64, the dive was dependent on Mario's speed, here pressing the B button in midair launches him forward from a complete horizontal standstill (I certainly appreciate now that future games require pressing Z+B, which is a much more deliberate input).

And yet sometimes I prefer the secret levels, because at the very least failing one doesn't boot you out of the level. In SM64 if you run into a wall while riding a koopa shell, you fall off; in Sunshine if you run into a wall while riding a blooper, you die and get booted out. In SM64 if you loose a race with Koopa the Quick, he says "better luck next time!" and you can exit the level yourself or explore and find another star. In Sunshine, if you lose a race with Il Piantissimo, you die and get booted out. When you get booted out in SM64, Mario says "Mama Mia!", stands up, and you jump back in and select the star again. In Sunshine, you get a cutscene reintroducing you to Delfino plaza, you jump back in, you select the shine, you get another cutscene showing off the level. All of these is punctuated by time-consuming (though admittedly stylish) animations and short, but very much extant, loading from disc. I you do get a game over in a secret stage, heaven forbid, you'll often have quite a trek to go through to get back.

The game has a lot of stuff that we just don't see in a lot of other Mario games. It has a unique, consistent setting that we only see again in pretty small doses in the Galaxy games. It has a number of what could be described as "physics puzzles" where games both before and after would focus almost entirely on discrete actions. It has a roster of mostly new enemies, and what enemies do return from other games do so with a unique appearance. It implies continuity with Luigi's Mansion in a way that feels more "real" than some of the easter eggs we see in the RPGs and such. It's not hard to see why people like it, and even I find a lot to enjoy; it's one of very few GameCube games I care enough about to keep in Dolphin, but it's also a game I care about enough to be bothered by how different it feels playing in an emulator with an Xbox controller. Even so I think this is without a doubt one of the weakest entries in the series.

I think my single favorite think about the game is the "text boxes". What other game puts the dialogue on curved lines like this, how many other games put their dialogue in something that isn't just a literal box, period?

Considering the games asking price (which is low enough that it practically forces consideration), what you get here in terms of content and style is a steal. As far as what the game is, it's enjoyable but leaves something to be desired. Depth perception is a near constant issue, made worse by how much of the platforming takes place over bottomless pits. The music, while fine, is kind of one-note, the only exception being some corny Toby Fox-esque clown music, and you can't even tune that song out because it's in a level with a rhythm gimmick (think beep blocks). Even after beating the game, the conditions for acquiring the hidden collectables required to unlock the true ending are nebulous; I assume you need to collect all the origami cranes, but one of the levels has more than 500 of them, and I don't feel eager to trawl through the whole space. The look and feel of the game is generally fine, the levels' visual theming is aesthetically pleasing, the character and enemy designs are good, it's well paced, and what core gameplay issues do exist are not particularly egregious. I had a good time with it, but the experience is straightforward enough that I don't see myself getting much more out of it.

Everything about its design is masterfully curated and refined, including the clever ways in which it is deeply aggravating and flawed. The gamefeel is so intrinsically enjoyable that I don't care that the entire structure of the game is built on training you to spend real money on fake cars. The UI design is so clever that I knew it couldn't be a new concept that anyone had for this installment. Every time I get one of those "gacha" style lootbox tickets, they show you five possible things you might get, I literally always get the smallest possible reward, and I must assume this is by design. I saved up for the fancy car I wanted only to realize A: the car looks cool but it actually kind of sucks to drive, and B: I'm playing this game in the minimal first person view anyway, I'm never gonna see that shit. Probably the best PlayStation game of the year, but it likely won't be remembered that way when the servers go down.

There's something terribly violent about living...

Sephonie is one of a handful games that I've been checking out specifically because I've seen it on other people's Game of the Year lists and it wasn't on my radar at all. Sephonie is an island, or maybe better described as the manifestation of the essence of the island. Sephonie is the game's narrator, or, at least for a while? Sephonie is one of the most strange characters I have ever seen in a game. It's like a Half-Life zombie texture stretched across a Kingdom Hearts nobody's model, wearing some kind of clownish leotard and high-tops.

The game is quite eclectic, a unique blend that's sort of difficult to describe in brief, but follows a clear pattern. You traverse a branching cave system using wall-runs and air-dashes, your main goal is to find creatures and interact with them by solving a puzzle minigame; whenever you find the "boss" puzzle and complete it, you get a long cutscene that usually details some aspect of one of the playable characters' lives, and you get a new ability that helps you reach a new area. While the core gameplay is platforming and puzzle solving, the progression through the gameworld could be compared to a "metroid/vania", and the overall structure of both the narrative and delineation of gameplay styles could be compared to a JRPG.

Sephonie is doing a lot of things that I really like. This game has one of the best soundtracks of this past year. It has a rather pleasing aesthetic style in both its environments and characters. I like that it's a platformer with no enemies, no combat; the challenge is firstly in getting somewhere, and second in the puzzle "encounters" which while having an adversarial tone in gameplay are contextualized in narrative as a kind of hybrid of scientific analysis and spiritual resonance. The game is generally nonviolent enough that it makes me wonder why stage hazards and bottomless pits exist in the game at all, it seems needlessly treacherous.

I almost never feel like I'm actually going the right way, even when I know I am. Maybe this is thematically appropriate for an expedition to a remote island, but it's no surprise to me that the game features its walkthrough on the main menu so prominently. The game has a lot of narrative, text, dialogue, cutscenes, the gameplay at times feels like a secondary part of the experience, and the puzzle elements are very slow. The game is clearly geared towards a casual, comfy, "wholesome" crowd, but there are so many points where I could easily see someone beating their head against a wall; fruitlessly trying to interact with something they can't yet, trying to make a jump to an unusually attention-grabbing background element, or mistaking the unusually obtuse forward path for a dead end. "Unnatural" isn't the right word, if anything the level design is naturalistic to the point of being hostile.

The puzzles are very easily to clear, but very difficult to clear with any degree of elegance. By the time I had finished the opening coral puzzles, I assumed this game would have some theme of "it's fine to make mistakes because everything will be fine in the end". I'm pretty sure the reason the puzzles were so easy was because I had sought out many of the optional creatures, and I think solving each new puzzle adds a piece to your "deck" which probably opens up a wider variety of potential moves.

Whatever the case, I assumed that the game's narrative would more closely parallel its puzzle mechanics, and would deal with the main trio learning more about and opening up to one another; while some of that does go on as a kind of necessity of the nature of their research, it's far from the story's throughline. I don't really know if I think the game has one singular narrative focus, I was more confident in my interpretation before I played the epilogue. It's a work that seems pessimistic about the present, but optimistic about the future, a work where the personal lives of these characters, real world events and politics, and broad stroke concepts don't quite feel like they come together into a single statement. It's just juggling a few too many big ideas for me to even know where to start.

In both its narrative and its gameplay, Sephonie is at times too complex for its own good. The final platforming stage introduces something like half a dozen new mechanics; new platforms, new walls, locked doors, keys that rotate around the player and kill you if they touch anything, a "cosmic Mario" style player ghost that you need to avoid, and I very well may be forgetting something. Nearly every new puzzle introduces a new space or block type, and the game has a dedicated button for telling you what the properties of the currently highlighted block and space are.

I wonder if I'm coming across as more negative than I mean to, but while I did ultimately enjoy the game I also found it frustrating. At times I think it seems impenetrable, at other times I wonder if there's much else under the surface. Whether it's a masterwork or just working through the time in which it was made, Sephonie does at least feel like a genuine piece of personal art in an affecting way not many games did this year.