Started with Elden Ring, going back and playing through all the Souls games minus Demon's Souls/Bloodborne because I don't have a Playstation, surely it'll come to PC soon right? My only frame of reference so far for Soulslikes is Elden Ring so if you don't like me comparing the two then stop reading.

I find it rather interesting that a lot of the DNA in Elden Ring can be found here in the original (sans Demon's Souls) in that there are a lot of diverging paths and exploration is on some level free-form. I was expecting a mostly linear experience but found it was actually pretty open-ended which was really neat, and stumbling randomly across new areas when I was just expecting a dead-end with some item was fantastic. The whole "if you're stuck somewhere go some place else" idea is present here as well, although the lack of fast travel until O&S ended up being really annoying for backtracking.

I was expecting to be more annoyed by the massive walks of shame but I got pretty used to them quickly. There are some that are more egregious than others, but the game teaches you to be patient and slow when exploring, so taking time to go back to the boss room wasn't as frustrating (unless I had to go through annoying enemies to get there.) The walks in this game make the run back to Placidusax look like child's play, since while it's pretty long with that fight, you can at least run past a lot of the enemies whereas in this game you often are pretty much forced to fight them unless you want to get stabbed in the back.

PvP is just as bad as Elden Ring, tried it out for a bit, and got teleport backstabbed by a gravekeeper UGS that one-shot me three times in a row before I gave up on trying to guess where he was on his screen due to latency. Speaking of, it's really neat and interesting to me that there are so many different PvP factions that often have unique mechanics. Makes me wonder what it was like in the hayday at peak activity. Kinda rare to get invaded in my playthroughs.

Damage scaling was a nice surprise but it took me one bricked build to realize that vigor is a stat you basically don't have to invest in for half the game. I got stuck on Moonlight on my first playthrough because my ZDPS dex build was failing to 6-round him and it was getting annoying. Read a thread that said you should be 3-rounding him and that re-speccing isn't in the game and got the hint. On my second I basically didn't even level Vigor at all for like half the game.

This game does Dual Bosses right which is a shame since Elden Ring seems to have deeply forgotten this methodology of design. O&S might be one of my favorite bosses now and it's comical to compare it to the foreskin duo in ER. That being said, while boss design in some respects is better, some are just kind of... bad? Capra Demon stands out to me since he's really aggressive and in a tiny room with two dogs that also rush you down, so there's basically nowhere to run and heal. Sure, you can just adapt by playing aggressive and using shield instead of trying to heal off all damage, but I can't help but feel like this fight would be more fun if you had A LITTLE more space between the enemies before they were on you and the arena were maybe... twice as large. with another arena that size placed horizontally? I don't know.

idk how to finish this off, I'll just say Claymore is my baby (love the rolling two-handed R1) and it's insane how they only have one ring slot in the game since one of them is permanently taken up by Ring of Favor and Protection. Moving on to Dark Souls 2 next, surely it can't be that bad right?

Whenever im in a social place like a bar or something and they have darts or foosball or something I always wish they also had Super Street Fighter 2 Super Tubo. Because it is a rather simple game and everybody should be able to play it because I want to play this against random strangers 24/7
im just honest

This is a perfect game. Simple and fun. I think modern fighting game should really take inspiration from Super Turbo's simplicity. You can dumb down Motion Inputs all you want, add modern controlls or whatever but that doesn't change the fact that modern fighting games are just too bloated with mechanics and long combos. I don't like that fighting games evolved into the direction of: "how many mechanics can we invent to extend combos". There was nothing wrong with the simple "Jump Attack > Ground Attack > Special" formula. Combos never needed to be longer than that.

Despite all their efforts I still think this is one of the most accessible fighting games out there. The comparatively smaller roster also works to this game's benefit imo and makes it all comprehensible enough. Deserves one of my few 5/5 ratings

A real testament to swinging for the fences. It packs in so many ideas and tries so much impossibly cool shit that it's pretty easy to excuse just how much it botches basic design in spots. It's a massive game with a really vast galaxy to explore, and yet there's no quest log or journal of any sort. It has really smart, Valkyria Chronicles-esque squad management for staffing all your ships, but it doesn't make the barest effort to teach you about any of it. It is one of the least user friendly games you will ever find.

But I love it, I really do! It's so impossibly ambitious it's hard to believe they even attempted going for this on the DS of all things, let alone the fact that they pulled off so much crazy shit. It is one of the least polished games Platinum has ever put out, but it's left more of a mark on me than like 80% of their library. Its plot is a smart, full-on space opera that cares so deeply about the world it creates. It's vast and ambitious and spans decades and countless planets and it's just...so damn cool to think about. I love this game so much.

There's something intrinsically beautiful in games where dying is a mechanic in itself, but no game will ever get close to Romancing SaGa 2 where death is not only expected but enforced by the mere passage of time. If you wanted the videogame mechanics version of Snake's lecture at the end of MGS2, this is definitely the best you can get.

The inheritance system makes it clear that bloodline does not matter at all in the grand run of Empire sucessors. What does matter is everything your last emperor could pass on to their friends, family or perhaps children, in this case, stats, skills and magic proficiency. They never make it a point that this is one big lineage of the same bloodline, but rather that they all work towards a common goal: the expansion of the empire with the objective of amassing power to defeat the Seven Heroes. The very first showcase of this mechanic is your father dying against one of them so that his son can learn how to counter a very powerful spell via his inheritance, which is an ability you do keep for the rest of the whole game. It's deeply and silently powerful, because that's what you do in your (collective) journeys, get stronger so that the next generation can thrive.

This is game is also one of the games apt to be The Videogame Of All Videogames. Yes, the one fictional characters in other media will make comments about all the time and that we feel deep down how alien what they're describing is because most of our games have specific flags for events and a very predictable progression system. This game, however, is so open-ended that it's quite hard for two people to have the same experience, barring the use of a guide.

For example, I had to help a village with their monster problem, due to the fact that their band of protectors, some sort of martial arts monks, couldn't defeat a slime due to it being immune to physical damage. These monks specifically asked me to let them deal with the other big monster so that they wouldn't look so useless compared to the empress. That's fine, it's just that I absolutely forgot this was a SaGa game, and when I saw more dungeon to explore after beating the slime (and kinda expecting some kind of quest flag or cutscene, naive as I am) I just went there and kinda killed the other boss, which then made the monks furious, so their leader challenged me. I crushed him mercilessly and what happened is that their band lost any reputation they had, including the departure of every disciple that was inside their cave before, and I effectively wrestled control of the town out of their hands so that it would be empire territory. Whoops!

It's also infinitely interesting how this game has the angle of you being the emperor or empress of a perpetually expanding empire. Of course most of it is justified to you wanting to save the world, some tribes just give your their land as thanks and mostly you're seen as a good and benevolent empress (except the few times you have the choice to be terrible). But the brutal feeling of this expansionist crusade is not lost on many of the cities you visit, some that are afraid of being just lapdogs for the Empire. I'm pretty sure Kawazu took a look at FF4 and just wanted to make you be the Empire instead. (Although the payoff at the ending is pretty sensible)

All in all, this is one of the most impressive games on the system, terribly ahead of it's time for 1993 too. Yeah the final boss is infamously hard, so maybe read a guide on leveling and playing through the events so you don't suffer like me. But then again, playing this blind and not worrying if you'll be able to see every event or not creates a very special vibe to it just like the first game. One that sometimes would be nice to have in our current Game Design zeitgeist where everything must be available and experienced by everyone on their first playthrough.