I've played through this game twice. It is a visually magnificent game, but I can't get past a number of unlikable characters and some of the strictest linearity in any FF game ever.

It's really noticeable when you first reach the Gapra Whitewood early in the game and see a number of branching paths going into the forest -- of which you can't take any. It feels like there was a lot of ambition on hand and things got in the way of execution -- maybe they ran short on time or spent too much budget on pretty-ifying the game? Needless to say, the first ~25-30 hours of the game are like this. Then it commits a deeper sin.

[SPOILERS (minor) AHEAD, READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL]

Once you touch down on Gran Pulse, the game gives you the illusion of freedom by letting you wander out into the world in any direction you desire -- except that if you don't head directly toward a certain group of monsters, any other encounters are likely to annihilate you on contact. Gran Pulse essentially becomes a trial-and-error test of which encounters are the ones that are okay to fight and dictate which area you should be in until your party becomes hardy enough to take on the next big threat.

[END OF SPOILERS]

I wasn't fond of the Eidolons or Paradigm system, either -- but these issues (for me) were negligible compared to the sheer linearity imposed on the player with a ragtag crew of (mostly) frustrating characters.

Count Dracula acting through proxy vampires to initiate the First World War from the comfort of his English castle is such a darkly rich conceit that I’m surprised it was a video game that had the idea first. Despite being a Mega Drive game that has more in common with its straightforward NES and SNES sidescrolling siblings than any PlayStation descendants, Castlevania: Bloodlines does a pretty decent job of exploring war’s truths and horrors just through good sprites, background work and instruction manual blurbs.

I know it’s a Backloggd cliché at this point to read video games far more closely than they deserve, but the American John Morris arrives in 1917 Europe to clear out a German munitions factory full of dead men walking and then heads to the Palace of Versaille to soak in a fountain of blood with more skeletons bearing army helmets - I think this game is trying to say something!! It wasn’t until I was more or less done with the game that I even put together that I was playing as the dad from Portrait of Ruin (set 1944), too. I really like that Castlevania’s bloodlines and relationships feel like genuine legends that you have to explore via dusty old ancillary texts (i.e. crusty Fandom sites and 2004 forum posts) instead of being linearly spoon-fed through exposition that nobody really needs to hear before they go around whipping werewolves. (Netflix, if you’re looking for another Castlevania story to do after Rondo of Blood…)

Because I am obliged to talk about how the game actually plays, I will let you know right here that the gameplay of Castlevania: Bloodlines is, indeed, Castlevania. You stiffly jump, you whip, you beat up Frankenstein. It’s clear by this point that Konami had more or less exhausted the formula; this is solid-well made Castlevania, but it isn’t a ton of miles removed from 1986, and it’s plain to see why Symphony of the Night came a few years later, because this series would otherwise have been buried in a crypt. The not-mode-7 effects totally rule, though, and the music rips, too. Glad to finally trace the genealogy of Iron Blue Intention.

This was already a really great entry, but for a long while I felt like New Leaf was still just a tiny bit better....until the 2.0 update and the Happy Home Paradise expansion that is. With 2.0 and the expansion, this is, hands-down, the ultimate and most fun Animal Crossing experience.

I'm honestly at a loss, I have no idea what they can even do to improve or build upon the series as it is now in any big meaningful way outside of just making the individual characters even more unique and adding even more furniture/customization options.

This was one of my childhood games and I never made it past the first level; I always wondered if I was just playing it wrong. After dabbling with it again on and off over the past couple months I've come to the conclusion that my kid self had the right idea. Below is a by-no-means-exhaustive list of what's wrong with it:

The controls are laggy, unresponsive, and unintuitive (I still have the manual from before, but if I didn't it's conceivable I could have played for hours without knowing you can jump on enemies to defeat them thanks to needing to hold down while jumping on them). It's nearly impossible to tell what you can jump/walk on and what's part of the scenery, and just as impossible to know what is a hazard and what isn't. Enemy movement patterns are completely inconsistent, making each moment a test of memorization because it's impossible to know what any enemy is going to do even if you've seen it before. But perhaps the worst part of the game is that it's a collectathon with completely arbitrary and illogical conditions to find the collectibles, which means having to replay the stages over and over in order to either find all the items or rack up a high enough score to advance - seriously, every normal longplay of this game on YouTube looks more like a speedrun because of the sheer amount of "what the heck did the player just do there and how did they even think to do that?!"

For the final addition of insult to injury, the soundtrack features some of the worst rearrangements of classical tunes ever - in most cases the voicing is so bad that the main melody is completely inaudible over the accompanying line. And any soundtrack that turns https://youtu.be/bcDCHnAd8N4?t=209 into https://youtu.be/cawAz_xNzE8?t=55 is worth a half-star rating all by itself. I barely made it halfway through the game but life's too short to spend any more time on this - brb, gonna listen to Claudio Abbado's Rite of Spring to detox (I highly recommend it, by the way).

Underrated N64 gem. One of the best puzzle platformers I've ever played. Wide range of game mechanics (driving, platforming, roller coaster simulator, flying, etc.). The idea of a 'vacation' themed game is obsolete and Rocket fully embraces it. It's fun to explore each world and find all the tickets and tokens. The power ups are awesome; my favourite is the grapple beam. The music is also incredible, utilizing brass sections and a stellar keyboard. A truly phenomenal game that I already miss playing, so I will definitely revisit this one!

Best Parts:
• Magic carpet ride
• Roller coaster builder
• Pyramid Scheme
• Jojo's Werld
• Creative end credit sequence

Replay it? - Yes

No one really remembers Baten Kaitos in spite of the huge fame the studio behind it gets for their much lauded Xeno series of games, either because of the platform the game is on or the unbelievably bad voice acting and utterly bizarre combat system acting as an, admittedly, high barrier to entry. However, what this game lacks in modern values such as accessibility in gameplay (and a respect for the player's time) is an utterly unique and beautiful transitional JRPG that iterates upon the last generation of JRPGs by taking advantage of what new hardware can bring and managing to take off as a distinctive game even to this day. No other game does a card battle RPG system quite like it, nor do any other card battle RPGs being anywhere near as good.

Baten Kaitos retains, or possibly births given it's release date, a lot of storytelling quirks that would be present in future Xeno games too, taking an utterly unique premise with its world, and giving you story beats that twist and turn in fantastic ways as the story progresses with an endearing cast of characters. It really should be experienced for yourself, and nowadays there are a good number of ways you can play this game not on the original hardware so I highly encourage anyone to check out this game and not let it be lost to a wikipedia article or some dude's reddit post or backloggd review.