I can see why this was never released. The core gameplay is similar enough to Gauntlet that with friends, it can be really enjoyable (that gameplay being "run around and murder endless hordes of dweebs"), but the game fights you every time you want to enjoy it.

It has awful presentation, even for the time it was released. The difficultly doesn't scale with multiple players, so the game is either brutal or a cakewalk. The music didn't play for me at times, but this was an unreleased ROM, and considering the quality of the other tracks that might have been a good thing. The game was clearly unoptimized, with the framerate committing suicide the moment there's more than 3 enemies on screen.

The worst part though? You'll never, ever play with friends. These games only work if you can keep it together enough socially to have 1-3 other people willing to sit in a room with you and murder a small country's worth of goblins by hand. I don't know how you're going to convince anyone in 2023 to spend 3-4 hours going through a campaign that can be best described as "fine, for not being finished"

People wanted this game when it came out. I know it's hard to believe, considering the game's reputation, but there weren't really any "creative" games at the console's launch. Wouldn't it be cool to have a game with in depth customization? There's some sort of social element to the game, going off of previews and this was still in the time where the .//hack franchise could be taken "seriously", virtual worlds still held some sort of appeal. I wanted Ping Pals when the DS was coming out.

This might be the worst launch title for any console before the 2nd generation, which admittedly aren't games I'm really familiar with. Go through the list, try to find one that you'd have less fun with. Originally, I going to type out a list of games that were released across all consoles but I just didn't have much to add other than "yeah, this was worse." Even inept disasters made by devs unfamiliar with the hardware like Gundam Crossfire hold up favorably to Ping Pals.

There's a very limited selection of clothes that were pre-existing assets that the devs got from a Korean MMO developer. If you want to unlock more, you need to earn them through playing inane minigames like "guess a number" or "can you name a fruit that's the color orange?" You can't even unlock everything in the game with one cartridge! To have access to a full selection of uninspired assets that weren't good enough for Nexon's B team, you'll need multiple cartridges of Ping Pals.

The worst part of it all though, is that the in game conversations you have with the game itself, most of what your single player experience will be in Ping Pals, is worthless. The conversations consist of questions you'd ask a five year old like "do you like when it's hot or cold outside", followed up by a canned sentence or two about a character's specific preference to weather. There aren't "characters" in the sense that you get to know them or they have any actual motivation, they're transparent dialogue trees that don't even last very long.

I don't feel like this game, at any point, was able to justify its existence. The more I dug into this game, the more recycled and stale I felt, and I already had an awful impression of this game. There's children that got this game over Warioware Touched, Feel the Magic or SMB64 DS. Easily the worst game on the console, and if this game could muster any emotional reaction out of me, it's awe in just how hard this game dropped the ball on every level.

The font looks bad compared to Pictochat, it's not even an aesthetically pleasing upgrade. This could have all been worth it if it was a redundant program that looked better than what you could get for free. Then I'd have an excuse to keep it on a hacked DS or a flashcart or something and then use DS Download play (because nobody's going to have this ROM laying around) to jack off over stupid DS bullshit. I have the most optimal situation for Ping Pals and it probably couldn't even do that correctly.

The polar opposite of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. That game had the problem of not being focused on cards, while having cards dictate the flow of the game to the extent that without them sometimes you couldn't attack (or rather, you could, but would be heavily penalized for it).

Arcana's main flaw is that there's not enough cards. That sentence was going to be all I posted for this review originally as a shitposty blurb, but I genuinely think that this game's "gimmick" is so undercooked that all you're left with is a serviceable but entirely forgettable dungeon crawler. The card motif was this game's selling point, but in game it's relegated to either sprite borders or feels like you're using a consumable item.

It plays totally fine as a dungeon crawler. The music is pleasant and it's easier to navigate these dungeons than something like Shin Megami Tensei 1. If you had to sit down and play this game, you wouldn't be miserable. But why would you go back and play this over SMT1? That game is held together by shoestring and aged much worse than Arcana, but it's still a 5/5 because you're Doomguy with a small legion of hell/your girlfriend following you the entire time. In this game, you have a nerd with a dumb blue hat, that nerd's friend during specific levels (side note, this game's separated by levels to the extent that there's a level select option in the game), your girlfriend and at best one hellspawn (the monster fusion mechanic being the best part of the gameplay, more than anything relating to cards).

In an ideal world, HAL would have swung for the bleachers and made a JRPG that properly incorporated card elements that turned out like Unlimited Saga. It would have been total mess and we'd all gaslight ourselves into believing it was cool so hard, we'd forget that the plot of this game happened. Instead, we got a below average dungeon crawler and still forgot the plot of this game. At least we got a rare Kirby out of it.

I like how even the description for this game on here uses "best" in quotations. Good idea in concept and the presentation and "polish" are up to regular Nintendo quality. The build quality of this game isn't the issue.

The games that this collection has, however, are weak as hell (the "randomly cut the rope" minigame appearing four times) and there's not much to unlock or see, really. Once you beat those games, there's not much left to this game collection. I'm a Mario Party Advance defender, and even I think this game is too weak to stand on its own. As of the time of writing this, this game still costs $50 USD and at no point should this game have been priced any higher than $5 USD.

Eight characters? Are you telling me you had no models laying around for anyone else? No online play, no bringing back previous boards (because it doesn't really play like a Mario Party game), just nothing but 100 of the easiest games to throw onto the Nintendo 3DS in 2017. They might have gotten away with this in the summer of 2011, but releasing such a hollow collection six years into the handheld's lifespan was brazen.

An acceptable port of Populous to the DS. Kind of a wet fart for the series to go out on, all things considered. The different gods and their powers aren't as meaningful of additions as previous entries in the series, but add enough to make this worth picking up if you've exhausted the other three games. It looks ugly, but not in a way that harms the readability of what's going on or detracts from the overall experience.

The highlight of the game are the apocalypse sections. The crunchiest DS rendition of Ode to Joy starts playing while everyone on the map engages in a final holy war. You'll get a laugh at the "spectacle" of a part of the game that lasts about 3 min tops, which puts it in the upper half of all DS games released.

The medium in which games are experienced should dictate how they're made. What you want out of a game when you're willing to spend two hours on the couch is different than the sort of game you'd want to play for 15-30 min on a lunch break. SaGa 1 (which I'll be referring to the game as from this point on) succeeds because, in a time before handheld game design had a standard to follow at all, the staff that worked on this game understood their assignment. They got with the program.

This is a game you can spend half a hour in and make significant progress, while not compromising on the sort of experience you could expect from a JRPG around this time. The pacing is excellent. The overworld(s) that you visit are large enough to create interesting exploration, but small enough to where even if you're totally lost, you can reliably exhaust every nook and cranny the game will let you in and probably get on the right track. Fights are quick and reward enough XP to where grinding sessions, if they need to happen, wouldn't last more than a single bus trip. The story is sparse, but there's enough worldbuilding to make the journey engaging.

All of that said, the game is still the first SaGa game. The franchise has been willing to experiment with JRPG mechanics through most of their entries, and this game manages to balance experimentation and accessibility. The different party combinations allow for replayability that goes beyond what Final Fantasy 1 offered, but there aren't a ton of wrong choices. The monster transformation system of eating meat rewards players who are willing to break the system over their knee, but the way that meat is tiered doesn't punish players for rolling the dice blindly. As long as you're progressing the plot, you'll be given what you need to clear the game. This game has permadeath that matters, but if you're willing to spend the time to gather enough cash, you can buy your way out of having to actually worry about it. None of the fights take more than that sweet fifteen minutes mark, but still require the player to optimize their party to the best of their ability.

It's such a unique RPG, especially for the time it was released, but it also makes total sense as to why this was the second "Final Fantasy" game that Square brought over. For years, the only real competition this game had on the Gameboy were the other SaGa games, and neither of them managed to be as concise as this game. God is a tiny amish man in the gameboy screen, and I don't think it was unreasonable at all to ask the RPG luddites who owned a Gameboy for Tetris to walk up a bunch of stairs and saw him in half.

If you're going to churn out a licensed game, please just do what this game did instead.

For those who don't know, this game is a reskin of Elevator Action EX, a title that only released in EU/JPN territories. The game handles almost the exact same, with the different characters from the original being different costumes for Dexter. The "shamelessness" in the way that the game is retooled is almost worth checking the game out on its own. They even reuse the soundtrack. The first stage's music has a James Bond motif that makes sense within the original game and is totally out of place in this version, although it's still a nice background track.

There's an argument to be made that this is a very cynical way to get more sales out of different regions and that the gameplay might have been better suited if they crafted an experience to fit the source material. There's one Cartoon Network game that anyone remembers fondly, developed by the Dead By Daylight devs and almost every other game was just as cynical but didn't leave the poor six year old who bought the game with anything worth playing. I'm on the other side of this camp. I want Craig McCracken's Mercenary Force. On this website, Elevator Action EX has at least a full star rating higher than this game. I think this game deserves the higher score, it did more good in the world. Parents bought this Gameboy Color game for their kid because hey, that's what my little shit watches on TV, and instead of a The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror, or a The Powerpuff Girls: Bad Mojo Jojo, they got a decent translation of an arcade game.

If you're a new player, and you pick Sol Badguy, this game drops to a 2 and stays there until you switch to another character. This isn't like, "oh, he's really strong how do you deal with this" complaint, I've seen so many people try this game, pick up one of the hardest characters in the game with dogshit combo routing that can't play neutral outside of dash-blocking or wildboy bullshit and then drop the game after a month of saltposting.

You're not Billy Badass, better people than you have tried and failed to get consistent at Sidewinder routes. And there's no negotiating around learning character specific Sidewinder routes, Sol's gimmick that keeps him viable is that he spends 3/4ths of the match getting bullied by most of the cast, and then he converts one stray mistake into the exact same special move done with increasingly difficult timing, and ideally that'll chunk your opponent for 70 percent of their health. Wanna take a break from the game for a week or two? That's muscle memory that you're going to have to build back up, and it's going to feel awful until you get back into the swing of things.

This is unlike most characters in the game outside of I-No, which most people in general know well enough to not put time into unless you're already a human synthesizer in other games. The reason this game's a 5/5 for so many people is that you can learn the basics and add what you need through play and go from there, and +R Sol doesn't reward that. Pick Faust and have a good time like the rest of us.

Vibe is unequivocally the most important part of a video game. The game can be an incompetent car crash held together just enough to run on someone else's device, and if the vibe's good enough, it doesn't matter. Contact and Evergrace are two of my favorite games of all time and those games are a chore to play. Perihelion is such a pain to play that the vibe, as great as it is, makes this game one that I couldn't even recommend to check out what good the game has.

There is a narrow black box at the bottom of the screen, not dissimilar from a news ticker. Dark orange text scrolls to the left across this ticker in a single row. In a majority of cut-scenes, overworld exploration, and combat, this is the main way the game conveys information to you. This isn't an idea without precedent, the Amiga port of Eye of the Beholder also has a similar presentation, except the text in that game is much larger, the font color contrasts against the ticker background, and there's two rows of text, most of which is dedicated to one sentence blurbs like "you stepped on a kobold". You have to read 80 percent of this game's text in the same way you would read about stocks on CNN, and it's not even easy on the eyes to do so.

This game wouldn't be fantastic even if they used traditional text boxes, and there are conversations/terminals/etc that has a box that uses slightly more of the screen, but this design choice buries the game alive. Imagine trying to play Chrono Trigger, except every new word takes 3 seconds to display on screen, and you had to squint. It's not like they didn't have the space for more text either! All the menus in this game are overdesigned to the point of hurting the overall experience. Open up the inventory and taking up a full 3rd of the screen is a random dude frozen in carbonite, while switching weapons requires pressing an up or down button and cycling through the one you want, one by one. In combat, there's a minimap, and a metallic face wincing in agony takes up more space than said minimap. Even the compass in the corner uses orange on orange to display N/W/E/S and the font they use takes a second to read what direction you're facing. There are occasions where the game will overlay the screen with a red tint, and at that point the game is less playable than any North American Virtua Boy title. It's not unintuitive design, it's outright hostile design.

Combat's also a low point in the game. There are notably less combat sections than most RPGs from around this time, which is a blessing because it's somehow worse than having to suck this CRPG plot through a straw. There's zero music during any combat encounter. The overworld dungeon design and character portraits look fantastic for the Amiga. The combat sprites look so bad, I regularly had a hard time telling my party apart. There's no scrolling when a party member moves from tile to tile, instead going for an abrupt screen shift that makes trying to get into position disorienting. Characters can perform actions based on how full another orange bar is at the top of the screen. This is supposed to be a visual interpretation of a static number, but instead they'd prefer to obscure even more information from the player. The speed of combat is agonizingly slow, and the encounters are large, both in the amount of enemies you have to fight and the combat arenas themselves. Most rounds consist of trying to pick at whatever grey blob that's antagonistic towards your not space marines with pellets. There's no shooting around corners. Friendly fire is on for every ability. There are a limited amount of spells, and most of them are variations on "zap". When the gears are turning, it's less engaging than its CRPG peers, and those gears turn very slowly.

All of this is in support of what amounts to "an early version of the direction post-ironic Warhammer 40k would take". The art and worldbuilding of Perihelion are good, if not great given the context. It's wasted on a story that's as ambitious as most D&D games from around this time. I don't think I could describe any character without describing their role in the game. It's a world filled with Psychodivers from Shin Megami Tensei 1. It's not even a game I can suggest looking up a longplay of to see the 5-10 cool moments of the game (like the ending, which has stuck with me since I've played this game two years ago) because of how hard it is to real the screen. If this game was canned and they threw all of the ideas they had into a RPG splatbook it would have stolen Dark Sun's lunch money. As a 10-15 hour RPG, it's miserable.

Essential clowncore. Every stage in this game involves some sort of clown or circus motif. By far, it's the most interesting part of the game.

Ace Lightning left me feeling really awful, not because the game was repetitive shovelware, but because the source material seems so bad that it makes me feel bad for the kids who had this put in front of them. One of those games where you play it and you just imagine how painful a child's life has to be to where this is an IP that sticks with them. Like, again, not knowing anything about this IP you hear the way Ace talks, and what he has to interact with and how this world is built and it's like watching a Frederick Wiseman documentary. "I need to collect these Doom Coins" sounds like a legally distinct stand in for a superhero property in a better movie, except this was meant for living people without any real autonomy over their media consumption.

Even his design makes me sick. Look at that stupid bomber jacket and those jeans. His sword is a pointy stick. His face looks like a BJ Blazkowicz doll that you'd buy out of a bin at the state fair for a $1. The only reason Ace Lightning get's half a star rating above the minimum is because of the intense emotional reaction I got digging into what brought this game to life and who played.

DON'T NOD, their writers and their collected work are aggravating. I don't think they have the ability to write any supernatural elements into their story competently, and yet most of their game's plots have a heavy focus on time travel of telekinesis or whatever superpowers Diana Troy had. It's not even like I can write their games off, because despite some awkward dialogue at points, DON'T NOD is able to write fantastic characters and interpersonal conflict that's so compelling, I feel like I have to sift through the time travel bullshit to get to the best parts.

The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit eviscerated me. It's the best demo I've ever played, and the best thing the Life is Strange alumni ever put out. The fantasy aspects to the plot don't have any real impact on the overall way the story plays out, and the way that Chris interacts with them shows him more respect than was awarded to any of the other LiS protagonists. The character writing of the cast in this 150 min long game is as strong as the other games in the series, except there aren't any expectations that the plot has to go in these weird, discordant tangents because of the alignment of Jupiter. There's enough confidence in their writing to put the spotlight on a 10 year old boy playing with dolls.

Their confidence was well founded, I broke down multiple times playing this game. It's not a game that spends its runtime wallowing in how awful Chris's situation. He's still written like a kid, he likes to game and play with toys and fucks up around the house and makes a mess. There weren't any lines that didn't make me think "this is an adult writing for a kid", nor are there any overly profound statements on loss, because he's fucking 10. Lesser writers wouldn't add in little details, like Chris having to tiptoe around his own house. Even the more benign actions with his father are tense. The abusive elements of their relationship cut so much deeper than any game I've played with a similar dynamic because the game doesn't allow Chris any more emotional (or physical!) agency than what a preteen could expect. There are no "shacka brahs" or "hellas" (I think the focus on LiS's out of touch lingo is a bit overblown) in a game where they could have totally gotten away with it.

I don't know how they got the rights to use Death with Dignity, and the game would still be great without it, but the Sufajn Stevens motifs in the story make this game so special. I don't have much else to add on the soundtrack, I couldn't imagine any replacement that would be more fitting, it's as perfect as you're gonna get.

The ending tie in to Life is Strange 2 was gratuitous, but doesn't impact the experience overall. Life is Strange 2 ended up living up to my expectations sadly. Sean and Daniel ended up being compelling, well written characters shoved inside a 2/5 game overall. Even if you have no intention of playing LiS2 or any of their other games (even the good ones like Before the Storm), this game is free and won't take more than an afternoon to finish. This game is in my top 20, and if there's any fault I can find with it outside of the ending (which, again, not that big of a deal), it would be that the writers and developers would take very little from this game going forward.

Fantastic example of what a homebrew game can be. There's a PC port and the game's good enough to where I've put a good amount of time into playing this game on older laptops, but the game was designed for flashcarts and homebrew enablers by someone who understood those platforms. The core gameplay is fun enough to where the limitations of its creation either don't really impact the overall experience or, within the context, exceed expectations.

The presentation's a prime example. The game's look is simple, but it's trying to convey a large amount of information to you with a relatively small screen. Even with hordes of enemies on screen, everything is clear and readable. The tilesets included make this one of the easier games of its era to go back to without mods. I never feel like the camera needed to be zoomed out further than it was.

This doubly extends to the gameplay. It has closer ties to classic roguelikes in the amount of actions a player can take. You have some esoteric commands and interactions that don't feel like a chore to partake in. Character progression is meaningful and in depth, but a level up doesn't take more than 20 seconds to iron out. The length of the journey is about two hours~, but there is a suspend save feature that doesn't necessarily require save scumming.

So much was shaved down to get this game working on a GBA, but the core design of the game is so solid that it doesn't feel like a stripped down experience and makes as a great introduction to the genre. This isn't a fun novelty or proof of concept tech demo, Powder's just smart.

A 40 hour game with 20 hours worth of content that desperately wants to be FFT at times. Seriously, there's a stage early on with a windmill and a reoccurring antagonist that's camera angle and even font presentation are begging for Antipyretic to start playing.

The pacing and balance drag down what would otherwise be a very good SRPG to one that's just fine, PeevedLatias's review of the gameplay mechanics is excellent and sums up most of my thoughts in that regard. I think those issues would have been easier to swallow if the story wasn't agonizingly slow at points, there's at least 10 different fights that could have been cut from the game and you'd miss nothing of value. There's a lot of cool stuff in this game, and along with the presentation still prop the game up, but this is a grind heavy game with few ways to circumvent that.

Also Gilles de Rais is a main party member, a historical figure who did NOTHING wrong and you should not google.