I've been waiting on this game for quite a while. A Mega Man X fangame with Touhou characters? Sounded right up my alley. Honestly, it's quite good!

First off, don't let the name of the game fool you. Outside of the "8 stages in any order, followed by 4 castle stages" progression structure and how the game generally plays, many of the main features of the X series aren't really present here. There's only like, three different weapons here: your normal shot and its charged variants, a bomb that, when upgraded, clears bullets around you, and a barrier that takes a few hits for you and costs three bombs. No special weapons from bosses or anything. There aren't as many upgrades to explore for and collect, either. In addition to the one dropped by the boss, every stage has one hidden P item, which are used to buy upgrades in the shop. It's pretty basic; besides the obligatory health and charge time upgrades, you also have upgrades that make your bomb more useful, allow you to aim your shots, strengthen you when you're low on HP, etc. It's neat stuff, but nothing very exciting.

Although the hallmarks of the X series may come off as half-baked in this game, I didn't really mind too much; I was never THAT big on that stuff. The level and boss design is much more important to me. And I'd say that Udongein X delivers on that front. Each and every level is well-crafted, and maintains a consistent level of quality. Unlike most of the X games, there was never really a point where I was like "wow, I'm not having fun at all!" Even when I was running into the same set of spikes over and over, I could still confidently say that I was enjoying myself. A few of them even have some really fun gimmicks. Seija's stage flipping feature was nice, and Doremy's hori shmup gimmick is so much better than literally every non-traditional stage in the X series, by virtue of actually being an enjoyable experience. I do have one problem with the stages though. The enemy variety. It's not a problem in EVERY stage, to be fair, but I did get a little tired of seeing the same two fairies and kedamas everywhere.

Speaking of enemies, the bosses are a joy to fight. They were a lot closer to Mega Man Zero fights instead of X boss fights, where you have to put a little effort into learning the boss patterns to succeed. The lack of weaknesses or subtanks further prevents any brute-forcing. A few of them can feel just a TAD bit bullshit, like Seija and the final boss' dash attack (yeah, fuck that one move in particular).

All things considered, it's a pretty good game. I keep flip-flopping between 7 and 8 out of ten because while it feels a little barebones and unpolished, the core design is very solid. Don't tell anyone I said this, but it mogs the FUCK out of like, half the X series. I'd definitely recommend it if you're a fan of action platformers and Touhou. Looking forward to Konpaku Zero!

What do you get when you cross Touhou, Inti Creates, and old japanese message board memes that I've never seen before in my life? Complete fucking nonsense, that's what.

The game plays like a mix of Mega Man Zero 3 and Touhou 17.5 (which came out like a decade after this), and that's the simplest way I can put it. You can shoot, dash (which allows you to "graze" bullets, by the way), and do all sorts of kicks and special skills. Thanks to the crazy amount of mobility and attacks at your disposal, levels focus less on traditional platforming and more on using your repertoire to mow down enemies as fast (and I mean as fast) as possible.

To further encourage this playstyle (or, I suspect it would be more accurate to say that the game was built around it), there is also a sort of "chaining" mechanic that feeds into a greater scoring and ranking system, which, again, is very reminiscent of Mega Man Zero. As I mentioned before, scoring essentially revolves around blazing through levels while constantly hitting enemies hard and fast with all you've got. While actually successfully pulling this off obviously requires extensive knowledge of the game, far more than one playthrough would give, getting even a little taste of a massive combo is nonetheless exhilarating.

But beyond all that, the execution is messy as FUCK. Enemies pop in from out of nowhere and bullets fly everywhere, while you frantically dash around and mash attacks with barely an inkling of what you're doing, as you rush to find the next enemy to extend your chain, despite the fact that you know your ass is getting another D rank anyway. You'll fail attacks and run into enemies like an idiot so many times that the invincibility window will become very dear to you. Attempts to understand what's going on and formulate some sort of strategy will prove futile, and you'll instead opt to operate on pure instinct. Bosses are generally a lot more tame at least, with identifiable and reactable patterns and openings, but even then they can get incomprehensible, like with the duo boss rematches near the end. Much of this constitutes what a lesser being might call "poor game design", but I don't give a shit. This lunacy put me in the zone, and as far as I'm concerned, that makes it GOOD.

The nature of the japanese message board memes only adds to the insanity too. One minute I'm being besieged by five ketchup(?) bottles and some soy sauce, a walking squid, and a Flandre spider, and in the next, I'm fighting for my life against what appears to be Nue combined with a Magneton. Come, large tampura Iku Nagae, we shall do battle. Oh, now I'm fighting a big fat Yuyuko yukkuri in a Space Harrier-clone. It is what it is!

Look, the game is a joke, a great joke, a joke that only a specific type of person could laugh at, and a joke that even fewer could actually get. Basically, what I'm trying to say here is, it's kino.

TL; DR - clears throat FINAL FANTASY V IS SO F-ING AWESOME THAT IT MAKES MY DICK ROCK HARD

I have to preface my musings by making the distinction between 'puzzle'-style gameplay and 'playground'-style gameplay in RPGs. FFVII is a typical playground-style RPG: the materia system is very flexible and customizable, so you can feel free to express yourself, build your characters in any way you like, and take any number of creative approaches to combat. FFIV, on the other hand, is a typical puzzle-style RPG: it often changes around your party composition and throws different challenges at you, often geared towards forcing you to make clever use of the resources and tools you have at that particular time with that particular party.

Time for my hot take: FFV is a better playground RPG than FFVII and a better puzzle RPG than FFIV. While FFVII does afford much more customization, it's also very easy which means you never really get incentivized to really explore the materia system and the varying combat options beyond spamming attacks/limits and healing when needed. FFV, on the other hand, is just tough enough to push you to explore the vast network of jobs and job skills to find combinations that work on that one boss.

The 'puzzle' aspect of the game comes from limited-job challenges like the Four Job Fiesta (let an RNG pick 4 of the 20 jobs which you have to limit yourself to over the course of a run). While this wasn't exactly what the devs had in mind, the fact that you can complete the game with any combination of four jobs (yes, even four Berserkers!) is a testament to how well balanced the game is. Playing the game with different job combinations each time forces you to come up with ever more creative solutions (no healer? Just equip flame rings and nuke yourself with Firaga!) to the puzzles the game presents, and unlike FFIV, the solution to the puzzle is different every single time you play. The sheer replayability and depth of the job system is what makes this my favorite game.

Run count: 51 and still not bored

I was born in the mid-80s but my first console was a Genesis, and so games from the 8-bit era - which I saw friends and relatives playing but narrowly missed out on experiencing for myself - hold a kind of mystique for me. I see it as an era of charming jank, a time of experimentation as the steadily-growing home console industry started to find its feet as a medium. Some games flopped, a rare few games hit on the perfect storm of good design and are still iconic today, and I'm realizing more and more that most games ended up like Rygar - where the ideas were great and some parts of the execution were good, but a mix of hardware limitations and naivete meant we ended up with half a good game.

Rygar controls well, with his limited moveset feeling satisfying and tight enough in the moment-to-moment gameplay; however, the other half of the combat - the enemies - are pretty hideously unbalanced, with some being either laughably easy or nearly impossible depending on how you approach them. Pretty early on, you have to face a short enemy on a small platform whose attacks leave you a miniscule timeframe to jump onto the platform, crouch, and kill him before he knocks you off the platform to your death - however, you can take advantage of a glitch by simply walking backwards and causing him to disappear. In a more 'legal' example of this imbalance, most bosses have attack patterns that are extremely difficult to evade but are trivialized if you have access to the 'Attack and Assail' spell that allows you to hit them from anywhere on the screen. This makes most bosses either an easy but tedious exercise in grinding spell charges, or something that requires cuphead levels of precision, with nothing in between. (Thankfully, the game seems to realize how hairy some parts of its difficulty curve are and offers unlimited continues)

The exploration elements of the game are similarly mixed: the gradual opening up of the world through finding items is remarkably polished for such an early game, but there are too many trial-and-error moments (such as knowing to throw your grappling hook upwards without any indication of anything there) for the game to feel fair.

Still a very creditable effort, with the RPG and exploration elements doing enough to distinguish this from the more straightforward arcade original. There's probably an alternate timeline out there where this game released late in the NES lifespan and was more refined as a result, and everyone today talks about "Rygarvanias".