fe17
1994
(This is the 98th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
Couldn't really bring myself to get back to this game after having played it for 10 or so hours a while back. Probably a prime candidate to be replayed some time in the future but for now, there are two main reasons for why I ended up dropping this.
1) I played a lot of Final Fantasy the past year, 3, 4, 5 and now 6, in addition to other JRPGs of its time. As commendable and ahead of the pack Final Fantasy was at this point, these turn based battles are usually tolerable at best, considering that the majority of battles are very simple and repetitive in how they unfold. If you loved combat from FF3-5 or even the successors to FF6, then this should not discourage you from playing FF6.
2) The above would be more tolerable if I enjoyed the dialogue and liked the cast of characters as well as where the story was headed. In this regard, FF6 chooses to do things differently to other entries in the series, which, again, is very much going to be something each individual will have their preferences about. In FF6, there are a lot of "main characters" instead of one or up to 4 of them, and you are sent back and forth between them over the course of this game. Considering that there are multiple characters with mysterious backgrounds who don't have much in personality in the early going, I thought giving them little screen time made me care very little about pretty much the entire cast as a result, at least during the time I played. The resolutions might be satisfying, but combined with everything else, I could not make myself play this for 20-30+ more hours to see the results.
Again, I might revisit the game at some point, especially if FF7 and beyond finally make me fans of Final Fantasy games. For now, what I can say, despite my subjective criticisms, is that it is clear during every minute that you play this that FF6 is way beyond 99% of video games at its time in terms of production values. And if there is one thing I really liked about this game, it would be its soundtrack. Terras Theme is definitely my favorite Final Fantasy theme as of now.
But to conclude, FF6 progresses the series forward but the paths it chooses to take in storytelling combined with your affinity (or lack thereof) for the battle system will determine whether you will want to see this through.
Couldn't really bring myself to get back to this game after having played it for 10 or so hours a while back. Probably a prime candidate to be replayed some time in the future but for now, there are two main reasons for why I ended up dropping this.
1) I played a lot of Final Fantasy the past year, 3, 4, 5 and now 6, in addition to other JRPGs of its time. As commendable and ahead of the pack Final Fantasy was at this point, these turn based battles are usually tolerable at best, considering that the majority of battles are very simple and repetitive in how they unfold. If you loved combat from FF3-5 or even the successors to FF6, then this should not discourage you from playing FF6.
2) The above would be more tolerable if I enjoyed the dialogue and liked the cast of characters as well as where the story was headed. In this regard, FF6 chooses to do things differently to other entries in the series, which, again, is very much going to be something each individual will have their preferences about. In FF6, there are a lot of "main characters" instead of one or up to 4 of them, and you are sent back and forth between them over the course of this game. Considering that there are multiple characters with mysterious backgrounds who don't have much in personality in the early going, I thought giving them little screen time made me care very little about pretty much the entire cast as a result, at least during the time I played. The resolutions might be satisfying, but combined with everything else, I could not make myself play this for 20-30+ more hours to see the results.
Again, I might revisit the game at some point, especially if FF7 and beyond finally make me fans of Final Fantasy games. For now, what I can say, despite my subjective criticisms, is that it is clear during every minute that you play this that FF6 is way beyond 99% of video games at its time in terms of production values. And if there is one thing I really liked about this game, it would be its soundtrack. Terras Theme is definitely my favorite Final Fantasy theme as of now.
But to conclude, FF6 progresses the series forward but the paths it chooses to take in storytelling combined with your affinity (or lack thereof) for the battle system will determine whether you will want to see this through.
2013
I really wanted to like this game. Games that are lean on gameplay and heavy on writing don't scare me, I specifically chose to play this game due to that. I didn't know much else about it though.
When I played through the first Act, I thought to myself: OK, what the fuck? I have 0 idea what is going on. I don't know if I like it, but let's give it more time
When I played through the second Act right after, I thought: OK, what the fuck? I have 0 idea what is going on. I don't really like it, but I'll give it more time. There must be something that I hang on to at some point.
When I played through Act III, I realized that the game was not going to satisfy what I'm looking for. I like the visual style, I think the songs that play are nice (albeit not really leaving any impact on me) and I think the game's style is unique and certainly worth experiencing for yourself to see if it sticks with you in a way it didn't with me.
One major thing that I didn't really gel with was the "magical realism" style that this apparently has. Never heard of the term before, but it's basically a realistic, mundane setting with magical elements in it. It's not sci fi, not fantasy but it's own thing and personally, I dislike magical realism. At first I thought the game would have a grounded setting and would tell a deeply human story. There is certainly the attempt of it here (a successful attempt if you ask many others), but I just couldn't buy this setting. Give me something grounded or buy into the magical more. I, subjectively, dislike the middle road a lot and I doubt I'll interact with media in this literary style again.
The game has a heavy focus on dialogue (I don't mind. I read plenty of books, I enjoy visual novels and Disco Elysium is one of my favorite games of all time for example), but a lot of conversations just felt so odd and unpleasant. For one thing, too often I think characters don't conversate, they just say things unrelated to what their conversation partner is saying. The game was sold to me as very realistic, but I've never done that in my life. Second, a lot of conversations drag on by going on tangents for no apparent reason. Third, a lot of the dialogue and characters were too cryptic. Sure, I get that there is commentary about life, about the highs and lows, about death, about regret and a lot more topics that make life what it is, but the way these topics are addressed left me unimpressed for a lack of a better word than be brought along a mysterious, bittersweet journey like it seems to be the case for many others. Ultimately, I have felt more emotional about these topics while playing dozens of other video games, either by telling a grounded story and or a story in a fantasy setting with human stakes involved rather than what Kentucky Route Zero tries to do.
Look at the review score for this by critics and on many online sites. They're pretty high. Needless to say, this is just my opinion and it's not shared by the majority. So if you own it, give it a try. For me personally, the game was not fun as game, which was a given, but also was not enjoyable as a novel, which was not.
When I played through the first Act, I thought to myself: OK, what the fuck? I have 0 idea what is going on. I don't know if I like it, but let's give it more time
When I played through the second Act right after, I thought: OK, what the fuck? I have 0 idea what is going on. I don't really like it, but I'll give it more time. There must be something that I hang on to at some point.
When I played through Act III, I realized that the game was not going to satisfy what I'm looking for. I like the visual style, I think the songs that play are nice (albeit not really leaving any impact on me) and I think the game's style is unique and certainly worth experiencing for yourself to see if it sticks with you in a way it didn't with me.
One major thing that I didn't really gel with was the "magical realism" style that this apparently has. Never heard of the term before, but it's basically a realistic, mundane setting with magical elements in it. It's not sci fi, not fantasy but it's own thing and personally, I dislike magical realism. At first I thought the game would have a grounded setting and would tell a deeply human story. There is certainly the attempt of it here (a successful attempt if you ask many others), but I just couldn't buy this setting. Give me something grounded or buy into the magical more. I, subjectively, dislike the middle road a lot and I doubt I'll interact with media in this literary style again.
The game has a heavy focus on dialogue (I don't mind. I read plenty of books, I enjoy visual novels and Disco Elysium is one of my favorite games of all time for example), but a lot of conversations just felt so odd and unpleasant. For one thing, too often I think characters don't conversate, they just say things unrelated to what their conversation partner is saying. The game was sold to me as very realistic, but I've never done that in my life. Second, a lot of conversations drag on by going on tangents for no apparent reason. Third, a lot of the dialogue and characters were too cryptic. Sure, I get that there is commentary about life, about the highs and lows, about death, about regret and a lot more topics that make life what it is, but the way these topics are addressed left me unimpressed for a lack of a better word than be brought along a mysterious, bittersweet journey like it seems to be the case for many others. Ultimately, I have felt more emotional about these topics while playing dozens of other video games, either by telling a grounded story and or a story in a fantasy setting with human stakes involved rather than what Kentucky Route Zero tries to do.
Look at the review score for this by critics and on many online sites. They're pretty high. Needless to say, this is just my opinion and it's not shared by the majority. So if you own it, give it a try. For me personally, the game was not fun as game, which was a given, but also was not enjoyable as a novel, which was not.
(This is the 100th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
I've played 100 games as part of this challenge now! Shame that the milestone was achieved with this game in particular, but also kind of fitting as one big theme of the challenge so far has been me finding out that Spider-Man games were shockingly bad for many, many years, so why not reach the 100 mark with another one of those?
Well, if there is another silver lining to that, it's that hey, you know what? Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage is the best of the 8 (!) Spider-Man games I've played between 1990 and 1994. That says much more about the other seven than it does about this game, but it's worth acknowledging nonetheless.
This beat 'em up game released on September 16, 1994 to be exact, was developed by Software Creations (who developed the other, actually functional, Spider-Man game in 1992) and published by Acclaim Entertainment / LJN, who retro fans need no introducing to. It feels like yet another game where the publisher went "fuck it, do what you want with the license, here are 8 bucks", and the developers went "Ok, we'll actually try".
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10
The plot is apparently the first ever for a Spider-Man game to be picked straight out of an actual comic book story. It's told in a comic book style as well, which is a cost-efficient and fitting way to do things for a Spider-Man game. Finally a Spider-Man game that picks the easy and better path in that sense.
While there is more emphasis on the plot here than for most non-RPGs of the time, the problem here is that the storytelling is a jumbled mess at times because there are so many characters involved and just appear seemingly out of nowhere, so it is very easy to get confused by what is going on. The simple version of it is that Eddie Brock is released out of jail, and the Venom symbiote bonds to his former cellmate Cletus Kasady, who turns into supervillain Carnage. Venom and Spider-Man begrudgingly work together to defeat him whilst Carnage builds a team of villains.
For gameplay, this translates to fighting the same 5 or 6 types of enemies through well over a dozen stages and fighting the villains themselves about a dozen times overall as well. The pacing is pretty weird and clearly a lack of budget and/or time limited enemy variety so much that the devs just re-used the same events many times to make each encounter feel less and less special.
Overall, I think comic book fans who are more aware of all the characters will easier understand what's going on and get a little more enjoyment out of this, and I'm glad that comic book storytelling was used here, but it's not going to be the driving force to keep you playing, if gameplay doesn't do it for you.
GAMEPLAY | 8/20
If you play this and think "man, controls are not great", than boy do I have something to show you with all the other Spider-Man games that preceded this one. Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage's gameplay controls OK actually, but the issue is that enemy attack patterns are hard to discern in many ways, which will lead to you getting hit a ton, even though you are in the midst of attacking an enemy that for most of the time staggers enemies (meaning they don't attack back), until it somehow doesn't.
To explain it a bit further, this is a beat 'em up game in the same vein of Streets of Rage, Double Dragon and Final Fight. You walk down alleyways and can progress as you beat up enemies that show up continuously, until you reach the end of a stage and face a boss. You control Spider-Man, but the game lets you pick between him and Venom from time to time as well, which is pointless since their moveset is pretty much identical.
You hit enemies with punches for the most part, but you can also tie them up with your webs, use your webs to jump up and kick them in the air, jump & kick and pull them towards you with your webs to punch and throw them. If you time it right, you can sit inbetween two enemies and pull them towards each other and make their hands bang together, which is the highlight of this combat system.
There are stages where you have to dodge bombs and projectiles from above by swinging from one building to another and then back, but mainly it's the classic beat 'em up gameplay here.
Enemies are more or less aggressive depending on the color of their clothes, which indicates toughness, and enemy types do have their own attacks, but as mentioned, there are just very few of them in this game. It's so limited that they actually use a specific enemy type as a boss upon first introduction, before throwing them into the normal enemy pool in the next stages.
Then you have the fights against the main villain group, where you face up to 4 of them in one boss rush-type sequence. This is where the gameplay falls apart, as you can't reliable hit and dodge them, and their health pools make the fight last for way too long. The idea is to hit Carnage once or twice and move away, because he will not be staggered and just rush towards you. Then you gotta watch out to not dodge into Shriek's path, because she will just horizontally shoot her sonic energy blasts, which covers way more space than it appears she would. Then you punch her a couple times, at which point she teleports to another area on the screen, but not before leaving a vertical energy blast in her stead, which is going to hit you 100% of the time unless you punch just enough times to tread backwards before she teleports. Punching one too few times however will open you up to her horizontal blast, so it's a tediously tight game of do enough but not too much until she is disposed of, at which point you can focus on the others. You do this, as I said, 10+ times, which is not very creative nor fun.
To help you out a little bit, you can pick up power ups that let you spawn your allies, who will do a special attack that knocks out all bosses on screen and takes just a little bit of their health, or that kills all normal enemies on screen. It's OK but not too useful.
Overall, the gameplay works but is too unfair and repetitive to be considered fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
No voice acting besides grunts. Sound design is a pretty basic SNES soundboard affair, while the rock soundtrack itself is actually pretty good. Not too many tracks in it, and I can't say it's all that unique, but you'll be OK with listening to it at minimum.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10
The graphical quality is average for an SNES title. It stands out though for the fact that many locations look and are identical/repeated, enemy variety is low and overall, visual diversity is just too little. Unlike all other Spider-Man games from its time, Spider-Man doesn't have horrendous posture though, which is at least something.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 5/10
Feels like a Spider-Man game thanks to the comic book storytelling and the multitude of characters appearing, but doesn't feel like a Spider-Man game because all the normal enemies are just random dudes and gals hitting you with frying pans and ... their hair.
CONTENT | 3/10
You will play this game for 3-8 hours depending on your skill level, if you want to beat it. For that run time, the game offers you fairly little. The moveset is very limited, enemies are always the same, levels look similar, there are no surprises the game really ever has in store for you in its gameplay, and the frustration levels here are very high anyway. With all these points combined, you'll see everything the game has to offer in an hour and probably not want to spend more than that anyway.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 3/10
Alleyway, rooftops, the insides of bland looking buildings. That's what you'll get in terms of locations for the majority of this game. In almost all of them, you will be doing the same thing as well. Move from side to side (sometimes even back the way you came???), punch a bunch of bad guys, fight bosses that are the normal enemies, just tougher and move on with the story. Very bland.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 3/10
The game doesn't do anything do differentiate itself from prior beat 'em up games. It just uses that formula to make a functional, not terrible video game. The most (read: only) inspired part about this game is the comic book storytelling, but that loses its novelty after a while once you realize the story is not particularly well told despite the method they chose fitting the titular main character very well.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
You can choose Spider-Man or Venom as part of an illusion of choice for some levels. In reality, the only replayable part about the game is the high score system, in that you can try to beat your previous one.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 43/100
So yeah, the best Spider-Man game of the early 90s by far, but only because the other ones are so much worse. This game doesn't do so much wrong, it just does very little right. If you want to play a Spider-Man game, play the modern ones or those from the early 2000s, and if you want to play a beat 'em up, play Streets of Rage or Final Fight. The devs clearly had some passion for this game, which is nice, but an LJN-led (Spider-Man) game being only pretty bad is probably the best we got.
I've played 100 games as part of this challenge now! Shame that the milestone was achieved with this game in particular, but also kind of fitting as one big theme of the challenge so far has been me finding out that Spider-Man games were shockingly bad for many, many years, so why not reach the 100 mark with another one of those?
Well, if there is another silver lining to that, it's that hey, you know what? Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage is the best of the 8 (!) Spider-Man games I've played between 1990 and 1994. That says much more about the other seven than it does about this game, but it's worth acknowledging nonetheless.
This beat 'em up game released on September 16, 1994 to be exact, was developed by Software Creations (who developed the other, actually functional, Spider-Man game in 1992) and published by Acclaim Entertainment / LJN, who retro fans need no introducing to. It feels like yet another game where the publisher went "fuck it, do what you want with the license, here are 8 bucks", and the developers went "Ok, we'll actually try".
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10
The plot is apparently the first ever for a Spider-Man game to be picked straight out of an actual comic book story. It's told in a comic book style as well, which is a cost-efficient and fitting way to do things for a Spider-Man game. Finally a Spider-Man game that picks the easy and better path in that sense.
While there is more emphasis on the plot here than for most non-RPGs of the time, the problem here is that the storytelling is a jumbled mess at times because there are so many characters involved and just appear seemingly out of nowhere, so it is very easy to get confused by what is going on. The simple version of it is that Eddie Brock is released out of jail, and the Venom symbiote bonds to his former cellmate Cletus Kasady, who turns into supervillain Carnage. Venom and Spider-Man begrudgingly work together to defeat him whilst Carnage builds a team of villains.
For gameplay, this translates to fighting the same 5 or 6 types of enemies through well over a dozen stages and fighting the villains themselves about a dozen times overall as well. The pacing is pretty weird and clearly a lack of budget and/or time limited enemy variety so much that the devs just re-used the same events many times to make each encounter feel less and less special.
Overall, I think comic book fans who are more aware of all the characters will easier understand what's going on and get a little more enjoyment out of this, and I'm glad that comic book storytelling was used here, but it's not going to be the driving force to keep you playing, if gameplay doesn't do it for you.
GAMEPLAY | 8/20
If you play this and think "man, controls are not great", than boy do I have something to show you with all the other Spider-Man games that preceded this one. Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage's gameplay controls OK actually, but the issue is that enemy attack patterns are hard to discern in many ways, which will lead to you getting hit a ton, even though you are in the midst of attacking an enemy that for most of the time staggers enemies (meaning they don't attack back), until it somehow doesn't.
To explain it a bit further, this is a beat 'em up game in the same vein of Streets of Rage, Double Dragon and Final Fight. You walk down alleyways and can progress as you beat up enemies that show up continuously, until you reach the end of a stage and face a boss. You control Spider-Man, but the game lets you pick between him and Venom from time to time as well, which is pointless since their moveset is pretty much identical.
You hit enemies with punches for the most part, but you can also tie them up with your webs, use your webs to jump up and kick them in the air, jump & kick and pull them towards you with your webs to punch and throw them. If you time it right, you can sit inbetween two enemies and pull them towards each other and make their hands bang together, which is the highlight of this combat system.
There are stages where you have to dodge bombs and projectiles from above by swinging from one building to another and then back, but mainly it's the classic beat 'em up gameplay here.
Enemies are more or less aggressive depending on the color of their clothes, which indicates toughness, and enemy types do have their own attacks, but as mentioned, there are just very few of them in this game. It's so limited that they actually use a specific enemy type as a boss upon first introduction, before throwing them into the normal enemy pool in the next stages.
Then you have the fights against the main villain group, where you face up to 4 of them in one boss rush-type sequence. This is where the gameplay falls apart, as you can't reliable hit and dodge them, and their health pools make the fight last for way too long. The idea is to hit Carnage once or twice and move away, because he will not be staggered and just rush towards you. Then you gotta watch out to not dodge into Shriek's path, because she will just horizontally shoot her sonic energy blasts, which covers way more space than it appears she would. Then you punch her a couple times, at which point she teleports to another area on the screen, but not before leaving a vertical energy blast in her stead, which is going to hit you 100% of the time unless you punch just enough times to tread backwards before she teleports. Punching one too few times however will open you up to her horizontal blast, so it's a tediously tight game of do enough but not too much until she is disposed of, at which point you can focus on the others. You do this, as I said, 10+ times, which is not very creative nor fun.
To help you out a little bit, you can pick up power ups that let you spawn your allies, who will do a special attack that knocks out all bosses on screen and takes just a little bit of their health, or that kills all normal enemies on screen. It's OK but not too useful.
Overall, the gameplay works but is too unfair and repetitive to be considered fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
No voice acting besides grunts. Sound design is a pretty basic SNES soundboard affair, while the rock soundtrack itself is actually pretty good. Not too many tracks in it, and I can't say it's all that unique, but you'll be OK with listening to it at minimum.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10
The graphical quality is average for an SNES title. It stands out though for the fact that many locations look and are identical/repeated, enemy variety is low and overall, visual diversity is just too little. Unlike all other Spider-Man games from its time, Spider-Man doesn't have horrendous posture though, which is at least something.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 5/10
Feels like a Spider-Man game thanks to the comic book storytelling and the multitude of characters appearing, but doesn't feel like a Spider-Man game because all the normal enemies are just random dudes and gals hitting you with frying pans and ... their hair.
CONTENT | 3/10
You will play this game for 3-8 hours depending on your skill level, if you want to beat it. For that run time, the game offers you fairly little. The moveset is very limited, enemies are always the same, levels look similar, there are no surprises the game really ever has in store for you in its gameplay, and the frustration levels here are very high anyway. With all these points combined, you'll see everything the game has to offer in an hour and probably not want to spend more than that anyway.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 3/10
Alleyway, rooftops, the insides of bland looking buildings. That's what you'll get in terms of locations for the majority of this game. In almost all of them, you will be doing the same thing as well. Move from side to side (sometimes even back the way you came???), punch a bunch of bad guys, fight bosses that are the normal enemies, just tougher and move on with the story. Very bland.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 3/10
The game doesn't do anything do differentiate itself from prior beat 'em up games. It just uses that formula to make a functional, not terrible video game. The most (read: only) inspired part about this game is the comic book storytelling, but that loses its novelty after a while once you realize the story is not particularly well told despite the method they chose fitting the titular main character very well.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
You can choose Spider-Man or Venom as part of an illusion of choice for some levels. In reality, the only replayable part about the game is the high score system, in that you can try to beat your previous one.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 43/100
So yeah, the best Spider-Man game of the early 90s by far, but only because the other ones are so much worse. This game doesn't do so much wrong, it just does very little right. If you want to play a Spider-Man game, play the modern ones or those from the early 2000s, and if you want to play a beat 'em up, play Streets of Rage or Final Fight. The devs clearly had some passion for this game, which is nice, but an LJN-led (Spider-Man) game being only pretty bad is probably the best we got.
2023
I wanted to like this a lot more than I did because I enjoy the immersive sim genre (though I'd say System Shock isn't the most accurate representation of the genre) and all of the well-known games that were inspired by the original System Shock to this day.
Unfortunately, System Shock has something that regularly makes me fall off of similar games, which is a big reliance on quick-saving and reloading. Enemies that kill you with a few shots, health items being very scarce compared to how easily and how much damage you take, multiple areas that you just aren't supposed to be at yet (keyword 'radiation') that will empty your health items before you eventually realize that you shouldn't have been here in the first place and more. It's something that makes me hesitant to say I'd recommend it to everyone, and I think that's more than acceptable among gamers. It's a niche game made for a certain audience who will love it, popularized and refined in games like Bioshock, Prey, Deus Ex, heck even Dead Space and more. And even beyond that, System Shock has done things that I have not previously seen in the 100 other games I had previously played as this retro challenge I'm doing (see bottom of the review), especially in terms of its storytelling, which has caught on in the years to come.
Yet, despite the fact that I can acknowledge and respect what this game has accomplished at its time, it unfortunately never managed to grab me. Both because of the first issue I mentioned, but also because of some other issues. For one thing, the progression in this game truly shows its age. That's a good thing for those who want the remake to be faithful to the original. But to start the game and have a general idea that you're meant to stop SHODAN, but other than that rather aimlessly walk through 9 or so separate areas to just progress further and further to the end, didn't feel all that engaging. It can't be helped that in each area, you look for keycards to unlock progression, a pretty common thing back in the day, and do the same few puzzles and shoot the same few enemies throughout. Enemies that either felt too weak or too overpowered to me. Another thing is the recycling system in the game. To get currency, you grab junk items and vaporize them in your inventory, which turns them into scrap to recycle for the currency. That becomes pretty tedious after a while, and it's not as optional as I anticipated it being because items will be very useful in this game (healing items in particular) and you get very little currency outside of recycling.
The storytelling is pretty good to this day, as it's told through voice recordings for the most part, which gives you an idea of how it was for the people working at the space station this game is set in while SHODAN went rogue. Some of the voice acting is less good than most of it, but I enjoy this style of storytelling and that's true for this game too. The atmosphere grabbed me as well, and the threat of SHODAN was portrayed really well throughout.
Unfortunately, as a package, the gameplay loop itself did not grab me as much as I would have hoped. There is a demo for the game on Steam, so I'd urge you to try it and decide based on that whether you want to buy the full game. It has its many fans, but it's worth mentioning that the game is definitely not for everyone. And I'd definitely say that has more to do with the taste of the player then with the quality of the game, though the game does have its flaws.
(This is the 101st game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
Unfortunately, System Shock has something that regularly makes me fall off of similar games, which is a big reliance on quick-saving and reloading. Enemies that kill you with a few shots, health items being very scarce compared to how easily and how much damage you take, multiple areas that you just aren't supposed to be at yet (keyword 'radiation') that will empty your health items before you eventually realize that you shouldn't have been here in the first place and more. It's something that makes me hesitant to say I'd recommend it to everyone, and I think that's more than acceptable among gamers. It's a niche game made for a certain audience who will love it, popularized and refined in games like Bioshock, Prey, Deus Ex, heck even Dead Space and more. And even beyond that, System Shock has done things that I have not previously seen in the 100 other games I had previously played as this retro challenge I'm doing (see bottom of the review), especially in terms of its storytelling, which has caught on in the years to come.
Yet, despite the fact that I can acknowledge and respect what this game has accomplished at its time, it unfortunately never managed to grab me. Both because of the first issue I mentioned, but also because of some other issues. For one thing, the progression in this game truly shows its age. That's a good thing for those who want the remake to be faithful to the original. But to start the game and have a general idea that you're meant to stop SHODAN, but other than that rather aimlessly walk through 9 or so separate areas to just progress further and further to the end, didn't feel all that engaging. It can't be helped that in each area, you look for keycards to unlock progression, a pretty common thing back in the day, and do the same few puzzles and shoot the same few enemies throughout. Enemies that either felt too weak or too overpowered to me. Another thing is the recycling system in the game. To get currency, you grab junk items and vaporize them in your inventory, which turns them into scrap to recycle for the currency. That becomes pretty tedious after a while, and it's not as optional as I anticipated it being because items will be very useful in this game (healing items in particular) and you get very little currency outside of recycling.
The storytelling is pretty good to this day, as it's told through voice recordings for the most part, which gives you an idea of how it was for the people working at the space station this game is set in while SHODAN went rogue. Some of the voice acting is less good than most of it, but I enjoy this style of storytelling and that's true for this game too. The atmosphere grabbed me as well, and the threat of SHODAN was portrayed really well throughout.
Unfortunately, as a package, the gameplay loop itself did not grab me as much as I would have hoped. There is a demo for the game on Steam, so I'd urge you to try it and decide based on that whether you want to buy the full game. It has its many fans, but it's worth mentioning that the game is definitely not for everyone. And I'd definitely say that has more to do with the taste of the player then with the quality of the game, though the game does have its flaws.
(This is the 101st game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
1995
(This is the 108th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
You probably know about Heavy Rain's JASON and SHAUN. Now get ready for D's Laura. Laura. LAURA... Laura. If you can appreciate the hilarity inherent in low poly character models coupled with the developers trying to give them serious, vivid expressions, D will have plenty of stuff to laugh at for you.
D, yes, just D, is an interactive horror game that initially released for the 3DO in April 1995 and later was released for the Sega Saturn, PlayStation and MS-DOS, as well as Steam and GOG decades later, where it's still available today. It's a game in which you control the main character through FMV sequences. Each time you choose to walk in a direction, a video plays moving the character in that direction, so there are only a limited number of spots in each room your character can stand in.
The director of this game is a pretty interesting character in his own right. Named Kenji Eno, he has done some wild shit during his time as a video game developer. For starters, he added some violent and pretty dark elements to the game, which he removed in a "clean version" shown to the publisher. Getting the game approved due to that, he then swapped out the clean version for the actual, violent/dark version on his way to the manufacturer, which is why we got that stuff in the game.
When the game released for the PS1, Sony did not print enough copies to match the pre-orders, which upset him so much that he exclusively released games on Sega platforms from then on. When presenting his next game at a SONY press conference, yes Sony, he showed a Sony logo warping into the Sega Saturn logo and announced the game would be a Sega Saturn exclusive. Again, AT A SONY PRESS CONFERENCE.
He also shipped condoms with one of his games "Short Warp" and probably even more wild shit I didn't find. Definitely quite a character, but his games, if they are anything like D, and they seem to be, are certainly not of the highest objective quality. He unfortunately passed in 2013 at the very young age of 42.
D is certainly a unique game for this time period where distinct video games releases and overall innovation were seemingly non-stop occurences, so let's see what it brought to the table.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
The game starts with an opening cutscene showing us a hospital at which a revered doctor turned into a mass murderer. Some text explains this to us alongside an awkward scene depicting a man with overly long limbs shooting a handgun with some weird looking recoil on it. Anyway, the text goes on to say that the daughter of his, Laura Harris, gets a message by the LAPD that her father went on a mass murdering spree, so get this, she rushes to the scene in her sports car and just rushes into the hospital while the LAPD just chills outside at their cars trying to contact the man, not giving a single fudge that a young woman puts herself in insane danger by going into the hospital on her own. When I tell you that video game developers trying their hand at storytelling during this era of games will be quite an awkward struggle, I'm probably understating that by quite a bit. All the more impressive what Kojima is about to do just 3 years later.
Back to the story. Laura gets into the hospital but gets teleported to some sort of castle where she is met with quite a task. Solve the mystery in two hours (no save points, no pauses) or start over. Here is where the game begins and you start doing a bunch of puzzles to find your way to your father, who regularly interrupts Laura by saying "Laura...Laura...LAURA", showing up in warped-head form, and telling her to not come closer.
It's a story that makes little sense, so unpacking it will do your enjoyment all harm and no good. Know that the poor voice acting makes the experience funny at times but it's not a priority for this game where atmosphere is more important to the experience.
GAMEPLAY | 8/20
The game, as explained, has you control Laura by clicking buttons on a directional pad to turn and move through FMV sequences that play out whenever you press something. If you get closer to an item you can interact with, click the circle button and a short scene plays out, such as Laura looking into a bowl that turns into a pool of blood, or a hand coming at you out of a mirror or Laura opening a door. That's pretty much it. You walk around and interact with stuff in a puzzle game / point and click adventure type fashion.
It gets the job done and the walking motion is quite cinematic, which adds to the feel of the game, but your interaction with the game is primarily solving puzzles and watching Laura as she veeeeery slowly executes your solutions and opens up her mouth wide to express surprise, shock or horror no matter what happens.
There are some sections that are slow and some that are even slower, but you should still be more than OK with the 2 hour time limit. At worst, it will take you two tries I'd predict.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
The voice acting here is twofold. You have Laura breathing heavily whenever she is scared and you have Laura's dad, the murderer, doing all the talking. It's pretty bad overall. The sound design gave me mixed impressions, as some sounds added to the atmosphere well and some didn't really sound all that accurate, like turning a handle early on in the game, which sounds like some developer letting himself get kicked in the nuts and squealing in pain. The soundtrack has a limited number of tracks in it, and they're OK. The game mostly lives on atmospheric sounds, such as the gong that you hear throughout the first area alongside some static noise. Music plays during interactions or other cutscenes do amplify the horror in a situation, and I think it does a solid job there, typical to any horror movie of that time you'd watch.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10
You have many ways you can feel about the visuals in this game. On the one hand, you have the cinematic feeling of the FMV sequences, which are relatively well made actually. You got the aesthetic of the castle, the disgusting nature of all the bodies and the flashback scenes and also some of the animation as positives. The walking sequence also adds a lot to make the visual experience more distinct.
On the other hand, the character models lend themselves to hilarity, whether it's the overgrown limbs of the murderer, the Dwayne The Rock Johnson-esque shoulders on Laura or the exaggerated expressions on her face. Then there are the blurry textures and the 15 FPS the game runs in, which will dampen the experience depending on your sensitivity to that.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10
The atmosphere and immersion are the main priorities in this game, and I feel like the game does a solid job in that regard for the most part. The voice acting and character models can unintentionally make the game funny rather than scary, but depending on how susceptible you are to being frightened in horror games and the age you play this game at, you might actually get really scared by the game. The retro look and feel to it also amplifies that in these games I feel.
If you're wondering, the game does not kill you, but has plenty of jumpscares and near-death experiences in store for you, both optional and mandatory to experience, and there is one singular QTE fighting scene. You get these events nearly all the time, so tension is high throughout. It'll all depend on your tolerance. It's no Resident Evil 1 or Silent Hill 1 which would release for the PS1 in later years, but it definitely can be scary and disturbing.
CONTENT | 6/10
Content does not mean the game needs to have a lot of it. If the game takes only 2 hours to beat, how does it fill those two hours? Well, D has you running around doing puzzles, which is a straightforward process for the most part, but the castle is also filled with lots of optional areas to go into which will give you some scenes that you don't have to see. So both the mandatory and optional content is designed to have you on the edge of your seat as you figure out a way forward, and I don't think there is much wrong with that for a game like this. Execution lacks sometimes though.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10
Moving around is a slooow process, which drags down the experience a bit. Then there is the rotation room, where you need to rotate a wheel around and then turn around and see which of 5 available doors opened. This happens randomly and seemingly 8 out of 10 times, you get a brick wall to appear, which means you can't enter that at all. You need to enter the remaining doors in a specific order, so you will be stuck for many minutes overall trying for the right door to appear. Rotate, turn around to check on the door, see that it's the wrong door, turn back around to the wheel, rotate again, turn around to check on the door etc. It's a really dumb level and takes over a third of the time you will spend on the game. Other than that, you got rather simple puzzles to solve, and that's that.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10
A game full of FMV scenes that is not a Night Trap-like game but rather a horror adventure game was conceptually unexplored at the time, and looking at how the game turned out, I don't think D managed to get it quite right. That said, I can tell that with the start of the 5th generation of consoles, experimentation is a big theme, so I can appreciate that about D, as well as the fact that it atmospherically did plenty right.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
There is a good ending that you can impact at the last scene. Do a specific something and you'll get it. Don't do it and you'll get a bad ending. Exceed the two hour time limit and you get a game over ending. Then there are plenty of optional rooms to open and cutscenes to watch. I'd say those are kind of worth the second playthrough if you really enjoy the game, but no replayability here otherwise.
PLAYABILITY | 4/5
Works well, but the 15 FPS and the slow pace of it all makes it a slog to play through at times.
OVERALL | 53/100
I don't think the game is worth playing today because what it aims for has been done better by many of the horror games we consider mediocre these days. D doesn't stand out in any way anymore, but if you do see yourself as a retro (horror) games fan, D is probably a niche title you could get a bit of enjoyment out of for its 2 hour run time.
You probably know about Heavy Rain's JASON and SHAUN. Now get ready for D's Laura. Laura. LAURA... Laura. If you can appreciate the hilarity inherent in low poly character models coupled with the developers trying to give them serious, vivid expressions, D will have plenty of stuff to laugh at for you.
D, yes, just D, is an interactive horror game that initially released for the 3DO in April 1995 and later was released for the Sega Saturn, PlayStation and MS-DOS, as well as Steam and GOG decades later, where it's still available today. It's a game in which you control the main character through FMV sequences. Each time you choose to walk in a direction, a video plays moving the character in that direction, so there are only a limited number of spots in each room your character can stand in.
The director of this game is a pretty interesting character in his own right. Named Kenji Eno, he has done some wild shit during his time as a video game developer. For starters, he added some violent and pretty dark elements to the game, which he removed in a "clean version" shown to the publisher. Getting the game approved due to that, he then swapped out the clean version for the actual, violent/dark version on his way to the manufacturer, which is why we got that stuff in the game.
When the game released for the PS1, Sony did not print enough copies to match the pre-orders, which upset him so much that he exclusively released games on Sega platforms from then on. When presenting his next game at a SONY press conference, yes Sony, he showed a Sony logo warping into the Sega Saturn logo and announced the game would be a Sega Saturn exclusive. Again, AT A SONY PRESS CONFERENCE.
He also shipped condoms with one of his games "Short Warp" and probably even more wild shit I didn't find. Definitely quite a character, but his games, if they are anything like D, and they seem to be, are certainly not of the highest objective quality. He unfortunately passed in 2013 at the very young age of 42.
D is certainly a unique game for this time period where distinct video games releases and overall innovation were seemingly non-stop occurences, so let's see what it brought to the table.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
The game starts with an opening cutscene showing us a hospital at which a revered doctor turned into a mass murderer. Some text explains this to us alongside an awkward scene depicting a man with overly long limbs shooting a handgun with some weird looking recoil on it. Anyway, the text goes on to say that the daughter of his, Laura Harris, gets a message by the LAPD that her father went on a mass murdering spree, so get this, she rushes to the scene in her sports car and just rushes into the hospital while the LAPD just chills outside at their cars trying to contact the man, not giving a single fudge that a young woman puts herself in insane danger by going into the hospital on her own. When I tell you that video game developers trying their hand at storytelling during this era of games will be quite an awkward struggle, I'm probably understating that by quite a bit. All the more impressive what Kojima is about to do just 3 years later.
Back to the story. Laura gets into the hospital but gets teleported to some sort of castle where she is met with quite a task. Solve the mystery in two hours (no save points, no pauses) or start over. Here is where the game begins and you start doing a bunch of puzzles to find your way to your father, who regularly interrupts Laura by saying "Laura...Laura...LAURA", showing up in warped-head form, and telling her to not come closer.
It's a story that makes little sense, so unpacking it will do your enjoyment all harm and no good. Know that the poor voice acting makes the experience funny at times but it's not a priority for this game where atmosphere is more important to the experience.
GAMEPLAY | 8/20
The game, as explained, has you control Laura by clicking buttons on a directional pad to turn and move through FMV sequences that play out whenever you press something. If you get closer to an item you can interact with, click the circle button and a short scene plays out, such as Laura looking into a bowl that turns into a pool of blood, or a hand coming at you out of a mirror or Laura opening a door. That's pretty much it. You walk around and interact with stuff in a puzzle game / point and click adventure type fashion.
It gets the job done and the walking motion is quite cinematic, which adds to the feel of the game, but your interaction with the game is primarily solving puzzles and watching Laura as she veeeeery slowly executes your solutions and opens up her mouth wide to express surprise, shock or horror no matter what happens.
There are some sections that are slow and some that are even slower, but you should still be more than OK with the 2 hour time limit. At worst, it will take you two tries I'd predict.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
The voice acting here is twofold. You have Laura breathing heavily whenever she is scared and you have Laura's dad, the murderer, doing all the talking. It's pretty bad overall. The sound design gave me mixed impressions, as some sounds added to the atmosphere well and some didn't really sound all that accurate, like turning a handle early on in the game, which sounds like some developer letting himself get kicked in the nuts and squealing in pain. The soundtrack has a limited number of tracks in it, and they're OK. The game mostly lives on atmospheric sounds, such as the gong that you hear throughout the first area alongside some static noise. Music plays during interactions or other cutscenes do amplify the horror in a situation, and I think it does a solid job there, typical to any horror movie of that time you'd watch.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10
You have many ways you can feel about the visuals in this game. On the one hand, you have the cinematic feeling of the FMV sequences, which are relatively well made actually. You got the aesthetic of the castle, the disgusting nature of all the bodies and the flashback scenes and also some of the animation as positives. The walking sequence also adds a lot to make the visual experience more distinct.
On the other hand, the character models lend themselves to hilarity, whether it's the overgrown limbs of the murderer, the Dwayne The Rock Johnson-esque shoulders on Laura or the exaggerated expressions on her face. Then there are the blurry textures and the 15 FPS the game runs in, which will dampen the experience depending on your sensitivity to that.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10
The atmosphere and immersion are the main priorities in this game, and I feel like the game does a solid job in that regard for the most part. The voice acting and character models can unintentionally make the game funny rather than scary, but depending on how susceptible you are to being frightened in horror games and the age you play this game at, you might actually get really scared by the game. The retro look and feel to it also amplifies that in these games I feel.
If you're wondering, the game does not kill you, but has plenty of jumpscares and near-death experiences in store for you, both optional and mandatory to experience, and there is one singular QTE fighting scene. You get these events nearly all the time, so tension is high throughout. It'll all depend on your tolerance. It's no Resident Evil 1 or Silent Hill 1 which would release for the PS1 in later years, but it definitely can be scary and disturbing.
CONTENT | 6/10
Content does not mean the game needs to have a lot of it. If the game takes only 2 hours to beat, how does it fill those two hours? Well, D has you running around doing puzzles, which is a straightforward process for the most part, but the castle is also filled with lots of optional areas to go into which will give you some scenes that you don't have to see. So both the mandatory and optional content is designed to have you on the edge of your seat as you figure out a way forward, and I don't think there is much wrong with that for a game like this. Execution lacks sometimes though.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10
Moving around is a slooow process, which drags down the experience a bit. Then there is the rotation room, where you need to rotate a wheel around and then turn around and see which of 5 available doors opened. This happens randomly and seemingly 8 out of 10 times, you get a brick wall to appear, which means you can't enter that at all. You need to enter the remaining doors in a specific order, so you will be stuck for many minutes overall trying for the right door to appear. Rotate, turn around to check on the door, see that it's the wrong door, turn back around to the wheel, rotate again, turn around to check on the door etc. It's a really dumb level and takes over a third of the time you will spend on the game. Other than that, you got rather simple puzzles to solve, and that's that.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10
A game full of FMV scenes that is not a Night Trap-like game but rather a horror adventure game was conceptually unexplored at the time, and looking at how the game turned out, I don't think D managed to get it quite right. That said, I can tell that with the start of the 5th generation of consoles, experimentation is a big theme, so I can appreciate that about D, as well as the fact that it atmospherically did plenty right.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
There is a good ending that you can impact at the last scene. Do a specific something and you'll get it. Don't do it and you'll get a bad ending. Exceed the two hour time limit and you get a game over ending. Then there are plenty of optional rooms to open and cutscenes to watch. I'd say those are kind of worth the second playthrough if you really enjoy the game, but no replayability here otherwise.
PLAYABILITY | 4/5
Works well, but the 15 FPS and the slow pace of it all makes it a slog to play through at times.
OVERALL | 53/100
I don't think the game is worth playing today because what it aims for has been done better by many of the horror games we consider mediocre these days. D doesn't stand out in any way anymore, but if you do see yourself as a retro (horror) games fan, D is probably a niche title you could get a bit of enjoyment out of for its 2 hour run time.
(This is the 115th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
Just when you praise a Spider-Man game for not being complete garbage like the previous seven (!) video game entries for the franchise, and just when you say that Acclaim Entertainment actually published a game that doesn't suck complete butt, you get Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety. Now the 9th out of 9 Spider-Man games I played that hasn't even hit 50/100 in my review system, Separation Anxiety (1995) is an uninspired and clearly unbudgeted sequel to 1994's Maximum Carnage.
Basically, Software Creations made an OK Spider-Man beat 'em up game. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that sold at least OK. So whatever budget Acclaim Entertainment gave Software Creations, which based on the quality of their games probably wasn't a lot, they saw how well the devs did despite the odds and said "Hey, if you can make a game that is actually half-OK with a budget of $10, then make a sequel with a budget of $1." And that's what this game is.
It features the same gameplay pretty much exactly, with only two differences. 1) Some of the basic, repetitive enemy types are replaced with equally basic, repetitive enemy types. 2) They removed the comic book storytelling and replaced it with simple text.... Yep. A sequel offering less than the original is not the ideal way to do things, is it?
Similarly to the original, gameplay is really bad and involves mashing one button for most of the time and watching as you can pretty much not avoid getting hit constantly. How people beat these games without emulators and rewinds is beyond me. I tried without that feature for the first 45 minutes, couldn't even get past the first level, tried for 15 minutes with rewinding, beat the first level and gave up shortly after because this game does not deserve to be played, let alone beaten.
The game is riddled with everything that makes Spider-Man video games just the saddest thing I've discovered about the 90s as part of this challenge. Low budget, bad gameplay, bland and repetitive visuals, boring and basic soundtrack, and just a very unfun time overall. Avoid.
Just when you praise a Spider-Man game for not being complete garbage like the previous seven (!) video game entries for the franchise, and just when you say that Acclaim Entertainment actually published a game that doesn't suck complete butt, you get Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety. Now the 9th out of 9 Spider-Man games I played that hasn't even hit 50/100 in my review system, Separation Anxiety (1995) is an uninspired and clearly unbudgeted sequel to 1994's Maximum Carnage.
Basically, Software Creations made an OK Spider-Man beat 'em up game. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that sold at least OK. So whatever budget Acclaim Entertainment gave Software Creations, which based on the quality of their games probably wasn't a lot, they saw how well the devs did despite the odds and said "Hey, if you can make a game that is actually half-OK with a budget of $10, then make a sequel with a budget of $1." And that's what this game is.
It features the same gameplay pretty much exactly, with only two differences. 1) Some of the basic, repetitive enemy types are replaced with equally basic, repetitive enemy types. 2) They removed the comic book storytelling and replaced it with simple text.... Yep. A sequel offering less than the original is not the ideal way to do things, is it?
Similarly to the original, gameplay is really bad and involves mashing one button for most of the time and watching as you can pretty much not avoid getting hit constantly. How people beat these games without emulators and rewinds is beyond me. I tried without that feature for the first 45 minutes, couldn't even get past the first level, tried for 15 minutes with rewinding, beat the first level and gave up shortly after because this game does not deserve to be played, let alone beaten.
The game is riddled with everything that makes Spider-Man video games just the saddest thing I've discovered about the 90s as part of this challenge. Low budget, bad gameplay, bland and repetitive visuals, boring and basic soundtrack, and just a very unfun time overall. Avoid.
(This is the 117th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
NOSTALGIA OVERLOAD. I didn't play many games as a kid (I played plenty, just not many different games), and just a few weeks ago I found out that the game I played the most at like age 6 or 7 was this one right here, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. The weird feeling of both joy and, surprisingly, anxiety this game gave me was unreal. It didn't take long to realize where that came from. Turns out, I made it quite far as a kid, to World 4 or 5 in fact, and the boss fights, which are actually mostly very easy, just had me feeling all kinds of anxious when the Magikoopa, Kamek, would make normal enemies into bosses.
But it was 99% pure pleasure to play this game, as I found myself remembering all the sounds, the music, the enemies, some of the puzzles, the platforming, the egg-shooting, the stairs and flowers that would come out of the clouds with a question mark on them, the sound of the plants dying when I shoot them with an egg, the power up mini games where Yoshi turns into a chopper and Baby Mario can become invincible, the balloon minigames, just all of it. Pure. Pleasure.
It helps that the game aged extremely well and is one of the most unique games I've played so far in the 6 years I've now completed as part of this challenge. Super Mario World 2 is not necessarily an actual sequel to Super Mario World because its main character and some of its core features are different, but that's a good thing because the way Nintendo was able to innovate for a soon to be replaced SNES in favor of the N64 is just magical. It feels like they're showing off just because they can. Turns out, this game had one of the longer development cycles for any game ever at the time, so it makes sense that they went a little extra with the variety on display here. Then there is of course the hand-drawn aesthetic to the game, which looks beautiful, and probably even if you don't look at it with nostalgia glasses like I've done the whole time.
The level design is fantastic, with more room given for exploration than per usual and lots of secrets to uncover without having to go back a level and bring Yoshi or a power-up with you like in SMW1, and constantly new threats and abilities that change things up nearly continously. Worlds 3 to 5 didn't offer as much in that regard as worlds 1, 2 and 6 but even those levels alone show more variety than 99% of platformers have in their entirety at the time.
The soundtrack is great as well, with my only issue being that songs keep repeating after a while. With the talents at Nintendo, I would have thought they could have introduced more songs in later worlds. The only new songs I remember later on where remixes of the main menu theme and boss fight themes, which were incredible.
Gameplay is smooth and wasn't as tough as I imagined, with most deaths feeling fair and like they were my fault and not BS thrown at me by the game. Those moments did happen, and Yoshi slipped off the edges more often than I would have liked, but it is still incredibly fun to play this game today.
One of the best platformers of its time, one of the best platformers to this day, an incredible final 2D game for Mario (kinda, more like a first Yoshi game) before he moves on to 3D in 1996 for the foreseeable future with Super Mario 64.
NOSTALGIA OVERLOAD. I didn't play many games as a kid (I played plenty, just not many different games), and just a few weeks ago I found out that the game I played the most at like age 6 or 7 was this one right here, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. The weird feeling of both joy and, surprisingly, anxiety this game gave me was unreal. It didn't take long to realize where that came from. Turns out, I made it quite far as a kid, to World 4 or 5 in fact, and the boss fights, which are actually mostly very easy, just had me feeling all kinds of anxious when the Magikoopa, Kamek, would make normal enemies into bosses.
But it was 99% pure pleasure to play this game, as I found myself remembering all the sounds, the music, the enemies, some of the puzzles, the platforming, the egg-shooting, the stairs and flowers that would come out of the clouds with a question mark on them, the sound of the plants dying when I shoot them with an egg, the power up mini games where Yoshi turns into a chopper and Baby Mario can become invincible, the balloon minigames, just all of it. Pure. Pleasure.
It helps that the game aged extremely well and is one of the most unique games I've played so far in the 6 years I've now completed as part of this challenge. Super Mario World 2 is not necessarily an actual sequel to Super Mario World because its main character and some of its core features are different, but that's a good thing because the way Nintendo was able to innovate for a soon to be replaced SNES in favor of the N64 is just magical. It feels like they're showing off just because they can. Turns out, this game had one of the longer development cycles for any game ever at the time, so it makes sense that they went a little extra with the variety on display here. Then there is of course the hand-drawn aesthetic to the game, which looks beautiful, and probably even if you don't look at it with nostalgia glasses like I've done the whole time.
The level design is fantastic, with more room given for exploration than per usual and lots of secrets to uncover without having to go back a level and bring Yoshi or a power-up with you like in SMW1, and constantly new threats and abilities that change things up nearly continously. Worlds 3 to 5 didn't offer as much in that regard as worlds 1, 2 and 6 but even those levels alone show more variety than 99% of platformers have in their entirety at the time.
The soundtrack is great as well, with my only issue being that songs keep repeating after a while. With the talents at Nintendo, I would have thought they could have introduced more songs in later worlds. The only new songs I remember later on where remixes of the main menu theme and boss fight themes, which were incredible.
Gameplay is smooth and wasn't as tough as I imagined, with most deaths feeling fair and like they were my fault and not BS thrown at me by the game. Those moments did happen, and Yoshi slipped off the edges more often than I would have liked, but it is still incredibly fun to play this game today.
One of the best platformers of its time, one of the best platformers to this day, an incredible final 2D game for Mario (kinda, more like a first Yoshi game) before he moves on to 3D in 1996 for the foreseeable future with Super Mario 64.
(This is the 118th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
I've spent the past two months or so playing Super Mario RPG whenever I got the time since I'm currently spending a semester abroad. Finding the time to sit down and play this has always been a treat because Super Mario RPG is such an easy going, chill and funny video game. It should probably be in every Top 10, if not Top 5 SNES RPG list out there, and is definitely one of the best starting points to RPGs for newcomers, if the Mario setting sounds interesting to you.
The story is that there is something called the Star Road, where wishes are fulfilled. One day, when Mario once again goes to Bowsers Castle to rescue Princess Toadstool, a massive sword falls down from the sky and onto Bowser's Castle. The sword tears through the Star Road and scatters seven star pieces throughout the land, and it is Mario's job to collect them to repair the Star Road. You get the help of companions like Bowser and Princess Toadstool, but also two characters that I think are new to the Mario universe in Mallow and Geno.
The story is rather simple and character development, while there for Mallow and Geno, happens pretty quickly when they get their moments and isn't at all fleshed out, which makes sense considering the game is aimed primarily towards young gamers. Still, you got a wholesome party to support you on your journey, and that makes for a chill time almost throughout.
I say almost because like all RPGs of its time, Super Mario RPG requires you to grind for levels at certain points. At least that has to be the case, as I literally couldn't get past a certain fight against the Axem Rangers very far into the game. For a game like this where progression is otherwise very easy, this was a shame. Because the thing with Super Mario RPG is that it is not just a simple RPG in terms of knowing where to go, the low number of items and skills to keep track of or the battle difficulty for 90% of fights. It's also lacking in combat depth, so it would have just been tedious for me to go back and grind for an hour or two to get past the Axem Rangers, only to probably be in a similar position with even later bosses. Additionally, while the game has a parry-timing feature, in that you need to press the A button right when you are attacked to reduce or null damage, a lot of attacks by tougher bosses are unblockable, and I feel like focusing more on the timing would have resulted in a better flow. That said, whenever the parry-timing was usable, I had fun with it and as someone who loved that in the South Park RPGs, I was happy to see the feature appear here.
The soundtrack includes great tunes and remixes and the map design overall is solid. My favorite part about the game has to be the constant mini games and challenges the game throws at you to keep things varied. They added a lot to the humor often times too.
Overall, I'm definitely keen on playing the remake of this some day and I enjoyed my time with it. It's just a shame that I didn't see the necessity to grind coming. As someone who falls victim to this many times when playing (old-school) RPGs, I didn't expect the original Super Mario RPG to have any grinding included as well, but whether you see this as a bad thing will obviously be a subjective opinion. I'm thinking the remake is more lax in that regard, and considering that it seems very faithful to the original, I don't think there is much reason to track down the original anymore. Unless you'd like to emulate over paying for the full remake, in which case the original certainly holds up well.
I've spent the past two months or so playing Super Mario RPG whenever I got the time since I'm currently spending a semester abroad. Finding the time to sit down and play this has always been a treat because Super Mario RPG is such an easy going, chill and funny video game. It should probably be in every Top 10, if not Top 5 SNES RPG list out there, and is definitely one of the best starting points to RPGs for newcomers, if the Mario setting sounds interesting to you.
The story is that there is something called the Star Road, where wishes are fulfilled. One day, when Mario once again goes to Bowsers Castle to rescue Princess Toadstool, a massive sword falls down from the sky and onto Bowser's Castle. The sword tears through the Star Road and scatters seven star pieces throughout the land, and it is Mario's job to collect them to repair the Star Road. You get the help of companions like Bowser and Princess Toadstool, but also two characters that I think are new to the Mario universe in Mallow and Geno.
The story is rather simple and character development, while there for Mallow and Geno, happens pretty quickly when they get their moments and isn't at all fleshed out, which makes sense considering the game is aimed primarily towards young gamers. Still, you got a wholesome party to support you on your journey, and that makes for a chill time almost throughout.
I say almost because like all RPGs of its time, Super Mario RPG requires you to grind for levels at certain points. At least that has to be the case, as I literally couldn't get past a certain fight against the Axem Rangers very far into the game. For a game like this where progression is otherwise very easy, this was a shame. Because the thing with Super Mario RPG is that it is not just a simple RPG in terms of knowing where to go, the low number of items and skills to keep track of or the battle difficulty for 90% of fights. It's also lacking in combat depth, so it would have just been tedious for me to go back and grind for an hour or two to get past the Axem Rangers, only to probably be in a similar position with even later bosses. Additionally, while the game has a parry-timing feature, in that you need to press the A button right when you are attacked to reduce or null damage, a lot of attacks by tougher bosses are unblockable, and I feel like focusing more on the timing would have resulted in a better flow. That said, whenever the parry-timing was usable, I had fun with it and as someone who loved that in the South Park RPGs, I was happy to see the feature appear here.
The soundtrack includes great tunes and remixes and the map design overall is solid. My favorite part about the game has to be the constant mini games and challenges the game throws at you to keep things varied. They added a lot to the humor often times too.
Overall, I'm definitely keen on playing the remake of this some day and I enjoyed my time with it. It's just a shame that I didn't see the necessity to grind coming. As someone who falls victim to this many times when playing (old-school) RPGs, I didn't expect the original Super Mario RPG to have any grinding included as well, but whether you see this as a bad thing will obviously be a subjective opinion. I'm thinking the remake is more lax in that regard, and considering that it seems very faithful to the original, I don't think there is much reason to track down the original anymore. Unless you'd like to emulate over paying for the full remake, in which case the original certainly holds up well.
2014
(This is the 119th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
RESIDENT BACKTRACKERRRR. I loved playing Resident Evil, both because it was about time I finally played some more of this series and also because it just simply has a timeless survival horror gameplay loop. In what is obviously a subjective taste however, I can't say I was the biggest fan of the constant (!) backtracking required in this game. The classic door animations that play every time you enter a room, while they do add to the atmosphere (and kudos for designing all (?) of them individually), they also add on many minutes to your playthrough, possibly up to an hour or more. This makes backtracking even more of a hassle. It helps that everything you do in between that is fantastic, but I should mention it to anyone who is potentially reading this before thinking of playing the game.
I believe there is a mod though that removes the door animations, so if I ever do replay the game (which I'm confident I will), I would have to do it with the mod. Considering the game oozes with atmosphere even without the door animations, I would be OK with this decision, and maybe you too.
But I want to share more thoughts about the game (spoiler-free), so if you're interested, keep on reading. TLDR of it is above. Great game, backtracking makes it a bit of a chore depending on your stance towards it.
I also played the 2014 Resident Evil HD Remaster version, not the original 1996 version. I did that because I don't think all the backtracking plus tank controls would have been doable for someone with my patience. Having seen gameplay of the original, I do feel like it has its own vibe enough (in a good way) that I want to try that some time as well, but since the games are otherwise pretty much the same in all that matters, I chose the convenience of the most modern version of the game.
The original came out on March 22nd, 1996 for PlayStation, and later for Windows, Sega Saturn and Nintendo DS. It was especially fun to play this game because I had played Clock Tower and Alone in the Dark previously. It is well noted that the game's primary inspiration came from 1989's Sweet Home, but from personal experience, this game just felt like a well-refined and much more grand type of game that Alone in the Dark and Clock Tower were. All three of these games just feel like Escape Rooms that you slowly solve as you make your escape. And I just realized that all three play in a mansion. Were developers not allowed to go outside of mansions at this point in time? Or were mansions just seen as this creepy in pop culture in the 90s? I guess they still are perceived that way.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10
You can choose to play as either Chris or Jill. Interesting: All three survival horror games I mentioned (AitD, Clock Tower and this) have a female main character.
The setting is like this: You are part of S.T.A.R.S. (Special Tactics And Rescue Service). It's 1998. A series of murders on the outskirts of Raccoon City (murdered people even getting eaten) got your departments Bravo Team sent to investigate. Contact to that team was lost, so your Alpha Team is sent in. You discover the site of their crashed helicopter, at which point you are attacked by a group of murderous dogs and run to safety. Safety at this moment is the creepy mansion in the distance.
I played as Jill (the easier of both choices), so Jill, Barry and Wesker made it to the mansion. Chris is missing. You go with Barry and Wesker heads off somewhere on his own. When you return to the rendezvous point, Wesker is missing and Barry (after stating how massive this mansion is), suggests splitting up. Amazing.
From here, you head off on your own and there are only sporadic appearances of Barry, Wesker, Chris and a bunch of side characters. The cool part is that you can get certain cutscenes depending on where you go at which point in time, and your actions and how quick you do things can impact whether some of them survive.
Other than this though, character development in the game is practically nonexistent and the story doesn't go anywhere outside of what nearly every gamer in the world knows anyway. There is a virus turning people into zombies.
Cutscenes are kept very short and most of the backstory is told through logs you find here and there. Whenever there are cutscenes, such as you finding Barry a bunch of times, you just listen to some of the WORST dialogue in video game history for 30 seconds, get given a nice gift and move on. Plot twists are not done very well, character motivations are questionable and it's all just hilariously bad. My favorites.
"What the hell is this thing?" "I found Kenneth killed by this thing." or
"Who would do this to him?" "I don't know, but I'm gonna find out what did this to him"
It's just the stiffest dialogue you could ever imagine. I didn't get tears from laughing, but the voice acting and dialogue might singlehandedly bring me to play the original, because I watched the opening of that and oh my god, that's just art right there.
GAMEPLAY | 16/20
Again, outside of the issues of backtracking, I pretty much got no complaints. Well, outside of one. The issue is that these complaints go hand in hand and can be a pretty big deal depending on what kind of player you are.
That other point is Inventory Management. If you play as Jill, you have eight spots. Every item takes up one spot, outside of daggers and the stun gun. This means key items, literal keys and every weapon and ammo type uses up a space. The lighter and kerosene needed to light zombies on fire use up two spaces too. They are very useful but I never used them because I couldn't really afford to.
If you choose Chris, it's even worse: You only have six slots. Six! Include your handgun, ammo and a healing item and one key that you always have one you for 80% of the game and you only have two slots remaining. Find a healing item on your way? Great, now you can only pick up one key item and on you go to the storage room.
I think the inventory management part of the game has its merits, but I think this is a bit too excessive here. I don't know how Resi 2 and 3 handled it, but I imagine they came to the same conclusion and gave the player more space.
Outside of this, the game is pure survival horror fun. You are in this gigantic mansion, trapped and alone, and need to use your wits and your survival instincts to get out in one piece. There are many zombies to fight (or avoid, if you're smart), dozens and dozens of rooms to check, hundreds of key and resource items to find and many puzzles to solve. As you get more comfortable, thinking ahead and creating routes to destinations becomes important to avoid as many fights as possible and preserve that precious ammo. The loop is fantastic, and it works great.
As there are so many rooms, another big difficulty becomes figuring out where you saw certain things that you know you need to go to to put this key item in that you just found. Making notes will surely help, or really paying attention to where important looking things are. Playing this for an hour or two once a week might make progression even more difficult for this reason.
You can either use the new controls which lets you move around with only one restriction: When you aim, you can't move. Outside of that, you can turn on the spot and have lots of freedom, while the classic tank controls mean you gotta tuuuuuuurn to move the opposite way, which I'm sure is not all that fun.
Shooting is restrictive because when you aim, you can only point straight, up or down. Since headshots are very useful (you don't need to put zombies on fire if you incapacitate them), it's frustrating to not just be able to aim at their head. You need to let them get real close for upwards aim to do the trick, or be lucky and have a body shot trigger a headshot.
Puzzles are actually very straigthforward for almost the entire game and only very slightly cryptic, which is nice. You do think a little bit here and there but I never had any trouble.
Enemy types are on the lower end. Normal zombies are commonplace, but they turn into steroid-versions of themselves (don't remember the canon name) and get massive claws, if you don't incapacitate them in their normal zombie form or burn them after killing them normally. These stronger versions also take more damage to kill, making passing through their area a danger to both health and resources.
Then there are crows and wasps which you can mostly avoid, as well as dogs which are a pain in the butt (as per usual for enemy dogs in games). The game introduces some other enemies later on, but these are your primary opponents.
Overall, there is a great game here. The remake did clearly not change much about the gameplay loop here, which allows me to say that for 1996's standards, the loop feels really good and creative. For their first try at this, Capcom obviously therefore didn't perfectly balance everything out (in my opinion), and so I'm looking forward to see how that improves in the sequels, if Capcom felt the same way about this as me.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
There is mainly ambient music here, and it fits really well. There is different music playing for different rooms, and then there are many areas with no music and just you, the environmental sounds and your character's footsteps, which is an eerie silence that I always enjoy in games like these. Resident Evil does not have a soundtrack that a normal human being will listen to outside of this game, but within the game it is perfect.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
I played the 2014 version, which has great background and environmental design to add a lot to all the locations you visit in the game. That's the most striking difference compared to the original (after the increased resolution of course) and while I prefer it, the simplicity of the original (which mainly has interactable objects as part of the background) has me very intrigued as well. Enemy design is very good and visuals overall look very good to this day. I can't say it couldn't profit from the modern Resi Remake treatment, but it will age very well in its current state too.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
Horror games rarely ever scare me. If they accomplish this, it will be due to a jump scare or, like in this game's case, through great game design. This is truly survival horror, where you live on the edge of survival at all times. Limited resources, limited saves and lots (but not too many) of dangers. Each decision can be fatal, which is why I was on the edge of my seat throughout (and I played on EASY). Usually, I have enough ammo or have an auto save close enough to put me at ease, and while those games can accomplish dread just as well, Resident Evil is one of the earliest games to ever do it for me.
CONTENT | 9/10
The sheer volume of content in this game is impressive. You have your 15 hour normal playthrough. Then you have your second 15 hour playthrough with a different character and some different cutscenes, as well as a change in items. Jill has the lockpick, Chris has the lighter. Chris can take more hits but Jill gets a grenade launcher and improved shotgun. There is a clear easier route, but both worth playing. Then there are the different outcomes and endings based on who you manage to save.
The only issue with the content is that 15 hour playthroughs include about 5 hours of backtracking and door opening, which can drag down the experience depending on your preferences. That said, your second playthrough should be a few hours shorter since you know where to find everything at that point.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
They have done a great job at the survival horror gameplay loop, but I can't say I felt like the level design was perfect in this. I'd argue there are a few too many doors and a little too much backtracking with not enough interconnectivity in my opinion. Otherwise, great.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 9/10
Resident Evil made survival horror mainstream and even helped bring zombies back to pop culture. This type of game was done before in a much simpler form, which keeps me from giving it a full 10, but the impact of Resident Evil cannot be understated.
REPLAYABILITY | 5/5
Two characters, lots of different cutscenes and outcomes, and a number of challenge runs you are asked to do for 100% completion makes this a very replayable game. I mean look at this. Beat it in 5 hours, beat it in 3 hours, beat it with no saves, beat it with no saves ... I've got no chance, but for people who dare, this is great.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 86/100
Resident Evil is one of the best games I've played as part of this challenge and has rightfully started a major franchise that spread to a bunch of different media over the years. Not all done with the name ended up being good, but the original sure was. It made me realize that I truly do love survival horror, though I'm also not the biggest survival horror nut considering my thoughts about all the backtracking. A game that is a mix of this and Resident Evil 4's focus on action feels like it could be insane. Perhaps Resident Evil 2 Remake is that game, I will see soon enough.
RESIDENT BACKTRACKERRRR. I loved playing Resident Evil, both because it was about time I finally played some more of this series and also because it just simply has a timeless survival horror gameplay loop. In what is obviously a subjective taste however, I can't say I was the biggest fan of the constant (!) backtracking required in this game. The classic door animations that play every time you enter a room, while they do add to the atmosphere (and kudos for designing all (?) of them individually), they also add on many minutes to your playthrough, possibly up to an hour or more. This makes backtracking even more of a hassle. It helps that everything you do in between that is fantastic, but I should mention it to anyone who is potentially reading this before thinking of playing the game.
I believe there is a mod though that removes the door animations, so if I ever do replay the game (which I'm confident I will), I would have to do it with the mod. Considering the game oozes with atmosphere even without the door animations, I would be OK with this decision, and maybe you too.
But I want to share more thoughts about the game (spoiler-free), so if you're interested, keep on reading. TLDR of it is above. Great game, backtracking makes it a bit of a chore depending on your stance towards it.
I also played the 2014 Resident Evil HD Remaster version, not the original 1996 version. I did that because I don't think all the backtracking plus tank controls would have been doable for someone with my patience. Having seen gameplay of the original, I do feel like it has its own vibe enough (in a good way) that I want to try that some time as well, but since the games are otherwise pretty much the same in all that matters, I chose the convenience of the most modern version of the game.
The original came out on March 22nd, 1996 for PlayStation, and later for Windows, Sega Saturn and Nintendo DS. It was especially fun to play this game because I had played Clock Tower and Alone in the Dark previously. It is well noted that the game's primary inspiration came from 1989's Sweet Home, but from personal experience, this game just felt like a well-refined and much more grand type of game that Alone in the Dark and Clock Tower were. All three of these games just feel like Escape Rooms that you slowly solve as you make your escape. And I just realized that all three play in a mansion. Were developers not allowed to go outside of mansions at this point in time? Or were mansions just seen as this creepy in pop culture in the 90s? I guess they still are perceived that way.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10
You can choose to play as either Chris or Jill. Interesting: All three survival horror games I mentioned (AitD, Clock Tower and this) have a female main character.
The setting is like this: You are part of S.T.A.R.S. (Special Tactics And Rescue Service). It's 1998. A series of murders on the outskirts of Raccoon City (murdered people even getting eaten) got your departments Bravo Team sent to investigate. Contact to that team was lost, so your Alpha Team is sent in. You discover the site of their crashed helicopter, at which point you are attacked by a group of murderous dogs and run to safety. Safety at this moment is the creepy mansion in the distance.
I played as Jill (the easier of both choices), so Jill, Barry and Wesker made it to the mansion. Chris is missing. You go with Barry and Wesker heads off somewhere on his own. When you return to the rendezvous point, Wesker is missing and Barry (after stating how massive this mansion is), suggests splitting up. Amazing.
From here, you head off on your own and there are only sporadic appearances of Barry, Wesker, Chris and a bunch of side characters. The cool part is that you can get certain cutscenes depending on where you go at which point in time, and your actions and how quick you do things can impact whether some of them survive.
Other than this though, character development in the game is practically nonexistent and the story doesn't go anywhere outside of what nearly every gamer in the world knows anyway. There is a virus turning people into zombies.
Cutscenes are kept very short and most of the backstory is told through logs you find here and there. Whenever there are cutscenes, such as you finding Barry a bunch of times, you just listen to some of the WORST dialogue in video game history for 30 seconds, get given a nice gift and move on. Plot twists are not done very well, character motivations are questionable and it's all just hilariously bad. My favorites.
"What the hell is this thing?" "I found Kenneth killed by this thing." or
"Who would do this to him?" "I don't know, but I'm gonna find out what did this to him"
It's just the stiffest dialogue you could ever imagine. I didn't get tears from laughing, but the voice acting and dialogue might singlehandedly bring me to play the original, because I watched the opening of that and oh my god, that's just art right there.
GAMEPLAY | 16/20
Again, outside of the issues of backtracking, I pretty much got no complaints. Well, outside of one. The issue is that these complaints go hand in hand and can be a pretty big deal depending on what kind of player you are.
That other point is Inventory Management. If you play as Jill, you have eight spots. Every item takes up one spot, outside of daggers and the stun gun. This means key items, literal keys and every weapon and ammo type uses up a space. The lighter and kerosene needed to light zombies on fire use up two spaces too. They are very useful but I never used them because I couldn't really afford to.
If you choose Chris, it's even worse: You only have six slots. Six! Include your handgun, ammo and a healing item and one key that you always have one you for 80% of the game and you only have two slots remaining. Find a healing item on your way? Great, now you can only pick up one key item and on you go to the storage room.
I think the inventory management part of the game has its merits, but I think this is a bit too excessive here. I don't know how Resi 2 and 3 handled it, but I imagine they came to the same conclusion and gave the player more space.
Outside of this, the game is pure survival horror fun. You are in this gigantic mansion, trapped and alone, and need to use your wits and your survival instincts to get out in one piece. There are many zombies to fight (or avoid, if you're smart), dozens and dozens of rooms to check, hundreds of key and resource items to find and many puzzles to solve. As you get more comfortable, thinking ahead and creating routes to destinations becomes important to avoid as many fights as possible and preserve that precious ammo. The loop is fantastic, and it works great.
As there are so many rooms, another big difficulty becomes figuring out where you saw certain things that you know you need to go to to put this key item in that you just found. Making notes will surely help, or really paying attention to where important looking things are. Playing this for an hour or two once a week might make progression even more difficult for this reason.
You can either use the new controls which lets you move around with only one restriction: When you aim, you can't move. Outside of that, you can turn on the spot and have lots of freedom, while the classic tank controls mean you gotta tuuuuuuurn to move the opposite way, which I'm sure is not all that fun.
Shooting is restrictive because when you aim, you can only point straight, up or down. Since headshots are very useful (you don't need to put zombies on fire if you incapacitate them), it's frustrating to not just be able to aim at their head. You need to let them get real close for upwards aim to do the trick, or be lucky and have a body shot trigger a headshot.
Puzzles are actually very straigthforward for almost the entire game and only very slightly cryptic, which is nice. You do think a little bit here and there but I never had any trouble.
Enemy types are on the lower end. Normal zombies are commonplace, but they turn into steroid-versions of themselves (don't remember the canon name) and get massive claws, if you don't incapacitate them in their normal zombie form or burn them after killing them normally. These stronger versions also take more damage to kill, making passing through their area a danger to both health and resources.
Then there are crows and wasps which you can mostly avoid, as well as dogs which are a pain in the butt (as per usual for enemy dogs in games). The game introduces some other enemies later on, but these are your primary opponents.
Overall, there is a great game here. The remake did clearly not change much about the gameplay loop here, which allows me to say that for 1996's standards, the loop feels really good and creative. For their first try at this, Capcom obviously therefore didn't perfectly balance everything out (in my opinion), and so I'm looking forward to see how that improves in the sequels, if Capcom felt the same way about this as me.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
There is mainly ambient music here, and it fits really well. There is different music playing for different rooms, and then there are many areas with no music and just you, the environmental sounds and your character's footsteps, which is an eerie silence that I always enjoy in games like these. Resident Evil does not have a soundtrack that a normal human being will listen to outside of this game, but within the game it is perfect.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
I played the 2014 version, which has great background and environmental design to add a lot to all the locations you visit in the game. That's the most striking difference compared to the original (after the increased resolution of course) and while I prefer it, the simplicity of the original (which mainly has interactable objects as part of the background) has me very intrigued as well. Enemy design is very good and visuals overall look very good to this day. I can't say it couldn't profit from the modern Resi Remake treatment, but it will age very well in its current state too.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
Horror games rarely ever scare me. If they accomplish this, it will be due to a jump scare or, like in this game's case, through great game design. This is truly survival horror, where you live on the edge of survival at all times. Limited resources, limited saves and lots (but not too many) of dangers. Each decision can be fatal, which is why I was on the edge of my seat throughout (and I played on EASY). Usually, I have enough ammo or have an auto save close enough to put me at ease, and while those games can accomplish dread just as well, Resident Evil is one of the earliest games to ever do it for me.
CONTENT | 9/10
The sheer volume of content in this game is impressive. You have your 15 hour normal playthrough. Then you have your second 15 hour playthrough with a different character and some different cutscenes, as well as a change in items. Jill has the lockpick, Chris has the lighter. Chris can take more hits but Jill gets a grenade launcher and improved shotgun. There is a clear easier route, but both worth playing. Then there are the different outcomes and endings based on who you manage to save.
The only issue with the content is that 15 hour playthroughs include about 5 hours of backtracking and door opening, which can drag down the experience depending on your preferences. That said, your second playthrough should be a few hours shorter since you know where to find everything at that point.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
They have done a great job at the survival horror gameplay loop, but I can't say I felt like the level design was perfect in this. I'd argue there are a few too many doors and a little too much backtracking with not enough interconnectivity in my opinion. Otherwise, great.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 9/10
Resident Evil made survival horror mainstream and even helped bring zombies back to pop culture. This type of game was done before in a much simpler form, which keeps me from giving it a full 10, but the impact of Resident Evil cannot be understated.
REPLAYABILITY | 5/5
Two characters, lots of different cutscenes and outcomes, and a number of challenge runs you are asked to do for 100% completion makes this a very replayable game. I mean look at this. Beat it in 5 hours, beat it in 3 hours, beat it with no saves, beat it with no saves ... I've got no chance, but for people who dare, this is great.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 86/100
Resident Evil is one of the best games I've played as part of this challenge and has rightfully started a major franchise that spread to a bunch of different media over the years. Not all done with the name ended up being good, but the original sure was. It made me realize that I truly do love survival horror, though I'm also not the biggest survival horror nut considering my thoughts about all the backtracking. A game that is a mix of this and Resident Evil 4's focus on action feels like it could be insane. Perhaps Resident Evil 2 Remake is that game, I will see soon enough.
1995
(This is the 111th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
I didn't think Chrono Trigger, a 1995 JRPG by Square for the SNES, would live up to the incredibly high expectations I had that came from years and years of reading about how Chrono Trigger is still one of the best JRPGs today, if not one of the best games period. I would stumble upon quite a few of these types of highly praised games, only to have their impact lessened by the expectations going in.
With Chrono Trigger, there were two differences for me. First, I have done this challenge of mine for over a year now, starting all the way back in 1990 and arriving in 1995, having played 110 different games in the process, including over a dozen RPGs. So my expectations for what a great game in the 90s looks like were set rather accurately I'd say.
Second, unlike some of the other older games I would hear about and be slightly disappointed by, Chrono Trigger actually aged incredibly well. It won't make you a fan of the JRPG genre if you've tried many other games and don't enjoy the gameplay loop, but for fans of the genre, I'm gonna go ahead and say that there are few JRPGs out there who are as complete a package as Chrono Trigger. From 1990 to 1995, it's absolutely the best one, and possibly my favorite game as part of this challenge I've played so far. If you call yourself a JRPG fan, do yourself a favor and check this game out.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
Chrono Trigger uses a time travel theme for its main story. You play as Crono (or however non-canon name you would like to give him), who looks like a DBZ character in the game's cover, which makes sense since the art designer worked on DBZ as well. The game starts in 1000 A.D. You wake up and go to the fair that is in town, where a local girl named Lucca has a transportation device to showcase, which teleports you from one box to the other right next to it.
An accident happens and a girl you were hanging out with, Marle, is sent into a portal that opened up by the power of her pendant. You choose to be the hero and go after her. Soon after, you realize you are now in 600 A.D. That's all fascinating and stuff, but all you want to do is grab Marle and get out of there. Events transpire, and not much later, you find yourself in the future and uncovering something very dark: The planet is dying. With the power of time travel at your hands, it's up to you and your friends to go back and forward in time to do what's necessary and prevent this horrible death.
What impresses the most about Chrono Trigger's storytelling is that it incorporates time travel and does not end up in a jumbled mess by the end. Quite the opposite actually. The time travel theme gives the story lots of options to explore different settings, events and permutations of said events, which lends itself perfectly to the fact that this game has not one, not two but 13 (!) different endings that differ quite notably from each other based on when and where you take certain actions.
Additionally, Chrono Trigger reaches the impressive feat of having a time travel story make sense overall, while also avoiding being as formulaic as JRPG stories tend to be at this time period. The main villain in this game is really interesting and actually scary as shit the more I think about it, and as someone who loves a good villain, that's awesome, though I won't say much more than that. There are also many other villains of which many were well-explored, and the game has a diverse and charming cast of characters. I found some to be one-dimensional, like Robo or Ayla, but the others have some stand-out moments as part of the main story or their own side stories. I wish there would have been more moments where the entire casts interacts like in one singular scene that I found throughout the whole game, but the game is more focused on its plot, which is well-paced almost throughout, and that makes for a great experience as well.
One final note I want to make is that the game does a really great job at foreshadowing certain events, locations and characters, and when you get to the points where they become relevant, it makes for some of the best moments in the game.
As someone who likes well-developed characters as much as a good plot, I would personally have liked a little bit more in that aspect, but the plot is great, characters are easy to root for and there are at least a couple that do have great backstories and development, so if you're looking for a JRPG who ticks these boxes, Chrono Trigger probably comes up at the top of most lists for a good reason.
GAMEPLAY | 15/20
JRPGs have a pretty well-established gameplay loop, and Chrono Trigger does not distance itself from that either, which is understandable considering it was made by the same company that is reponsible for Final Fantasy, the SaGa series, the Mana series and more. That said, what Chrono Trigger achieves is three-fold.
First, Chrono Trigger makes the loop less grindy and cryptic. I never felt the need to farm XP mindlessly for hours to have a chance at a random mid-game boss. There was one boss fight that was unusually tough, sure, but I beat it by adjusting my strategy and was able to continue through the rest of the game. The game also never forced me to use a guide, which, believe me, means something. There is always that one time in these RPGs where I'm stumped as to where to go or what to do, but with Chrono Trigger, I always figured it out eventually, without fail. Talk to all NPCs and you will definitely find your way forward.
Second, Chrono Trigger introduces quality of life changes and general improvements to the genre. Talk to an NPC accidentally? Just walk away mid dialogue without having to click each line away. Don't want to be thrown into random encounters? You don't have to, enemies almost always appear on the screen and you can often just walk past them. Feel like you're usually missing out on the good skills/weapons in JRPGs because you can't find them? The game has "Techs", which the characters unlock naturally as you use them, which are more than enough to overcome any challenge as long as you use them correctly.
Third, Chrono Trigger avoids filler, at least the SNES version does. It adds a lot to the pacing of the story that you're rarely out there searching for item X to supply to NPC Y to unlock Dungeon Z to find item A to supply NPC B to finally meaningfully progress the story. Yes, there of course is still some of that here, but I can't say it was a chore to go through any dungeon this game had to offer because it was well-balanced with progression of the story and your character, and dungeons usually have unique puzzles for you. Both in actual puzzles and in terms of the battles, where you need to figure out how to "solve" a fight before you actually beat the enemy. Certain enemies for example can block almost all of your physical or magical attacks. That's simple enough. Then there are some who first have to be shocked with a lightning attack before they lower their guard and take damage. These "puzzles" get more and more tricky as the game goes on, up until the final boss fight, where the game throws one final curveball at you, though I'll let you discover that on your own.
At the end of the day though, Chrono Trigger is still a turn-based Square JRPG. If you didn't enjoy these before or especially after Chrono Trigger, the "Tech" skills won't be enough to change your mind. Even to me, watching the same attack animations play out slowly over thousands of times in encounters against much weaker enemies is not very fun but rather something you have to do to get to the next big fight, or something you do as part of solving a dungeon. Square still use their Active Battle System, which I dislike as much as ever because it has 0 to do with strategy and one billion to do with being quick on the buttons like a 12 year old Fortnite player building a castle in four seconds. Losing battles can throw you up to an hour back if you die shortly before getting to your next save point (unless you use save states).
So, to put it short: If you enjoy gameplay in JRPGs, you'll enjoy this. If you don't, you won't here either, but it's the most fun non-Shin Megami Tensei (J)RPG I've played that came out in the 90s so far.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
Did you hear that Chrono Trigger has a great soundtrack? Well you heard correctly. I loved this soundtrack from beginning to end. The fair theme and Gato's theme at the start already had me getting earworms for the rest of my first day playing this. The battle theme is great and just doesn't get old. Then there are numerous character and location themes that range from great to perfection. I could name you a dozen songs that I loved and would gladly listen to outside of the game, and others would probably name you another dozen that they remember very fondly. It's a terrific soundtrack and if you want a taste, I recommend you to check out Gato's / Gonzalez's Theme, Secret of the Forest, Guardia Castle, Battle with Magus and probably my favorite, Corridors of Time.
They call me Gato ♪
I have metal joints ♪
Beat me up ♪
And earn 15 silver points ♪
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
Thanks to the time travel theme and the many different ages you visit, this game has a ton of visual variety, which helps the game to visually never get stale. Enemy design is great, the world design helps give each age its distinctive properties and while I thought the characters had some weird looks sometimes (Marle doing the squilly face for example), I did like their design as well, though the characters to me stand out a lot more in their avatars than their in-game sprites.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
This game packs so much detail for a game of its time and for any game period. I have one party scene in particular in mind where a unique song just for that scene plays and you got a bunch of characters just dancing as you walk around. I then interacted with Marle, who said something along the lines of "let's party", after which she went over to someone else and started mingling. Talking to her again prompted her to say "let's dance" and she started busting out the moves, and apart from the fact that I interacted with her to prompt these lines and actions, it all felt so natural. Or going to Lucca's home and talking to her mom, only for her dad to show up and then give us an item shortly after. Or the entirety of the millennial fair and how seemingly tiny interactions there are brought up later.
There are tons of small details like that and if you ask me what every great video game has, it is those small details. If you put that much care into those, it's almost a safe bet that the main portion of your game will be quality as well, and that's certainly the case here.
Outside of the details, the game is very atmospheric thanks to its varied locations and use of its songs. Funny thing is, even now a small detail comes to mind, like healing up in the future and getting the "you're still hungry" notification, which is such a small thing but only is added in this era. It helps paint the picture of the life the people who are there are living, and it makes a later moment stand out even more.
CONTENT | 10/10
The game is PACKED with content. It has a lot more content than you will see in one playthrough, that's for sure. It got all the endings, all the different ages, all the different side quests, lots of techs, double techs, triple techs, secret items, optional dungeons, New Game+ (which is a term coined in THIS game) and all those permutations to events you can have depending on your actions, not to mention plenty of bosses, high enemy variety and a ton of interaction that you can have between the ages, which is often optional but rewards you for your time pretty well. If you could only bring one JRPG with you on an island, and you had never played Chrono Trigger, this would keep you busy without you finding all the content in it for quiiite a while.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10
The pacing in this game is great and the way the game rewards optional exploration is one of the better examples I've ever seen. The fact that grinding is not required even a single bit is a great achievement in itself. If there is one negative I'd have, it's the final dungeon (I played the SNES version, I hear other versions have bad optional dungeons). This dungeon takes a bit too long for my taste and keeps throwing the same enemy at you that disables your tech/items, which turns these battles into boring "Press A and wait for the battle to end" slogs. The final boss form then has a BS attack that insta-kills your party unless they are at full health (2 of my 3 party members died even then), so I didn't enjoy that either, plus the GolemTwins fight was BS, but those would be my only negatives in a game I played for 25+ hours. The least frustrating retro JRPG I've played overall by a mile.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
In many core ways it doesn't differ from contemporary JRPGs, but the time travel mechanic and great pacing help the story stand out, the Tech system is one of the most fun satisfying systems I've experienced in retro JRPGs and the game helped popularize having a lot of different endings and NG+. Even if you are one to play through a game once and that's it, the way you can choose how and when to do things is a terrificly executed in Chrono Trigger.
REPLAYABILITY | 5/5
Don't think I stumbled upon a more replayable game up to this point, Chrono Trigger can be played many times over and present you with vastly different events.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 90/100
Chrono Trigger aged tremendously. If you're a fan of JRPGs and haven't checked this out, I don't even know what to tell you. Is it the best JRPG today? Probably not, but I agree that it's the best JRPG up until the time of its release. And even if it's not #1 today, it still isn't too far from that spot in my opinion. Few games offer such a complete package, and I'm glad I finally got to experience this game.
I didn't think Chrono Trigger, a 1995 JRPG by Square for the SNES, would live up to the incredibly high expectations I had that came from years and years of reading about how Chrono Trigger is still one of the best JRPGs today, if not one of the best games period. I would stumble upon quite a few of these types of highly praised games, only to have their impact lessened by the expectations going in.
With Chrono Trigger, there were two differences for me. First, I have done this challenge of mine for over a year now, starting all the way back in 1990 and arriving in 1995, having played 110 different games in the process, including over a dozen RPGs. So my expectations for what a great game in the 90s looks like were set rather accurately I'd say.
Second, unlike some of the other older games I would hear about and be slightly disappointed by, Chrono Trigger actually aged incredibly well. It won't make you a fan of the JRPG genre if you've tried many other games and don't enjoy the gameplay loop, but for fans of the genre, I'm gonna go ahead and say that there are few JRPGs out there who are as complete a package as Chrono Trigger. From 1990 to 1995, it's absolutely the best one, and possibly my favorite game as part of this challenge I've played so far. If you call yourself a JRPG fan, do yourself a favor and check this game out.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
Chrono Trigger uses a time travel theme for its main story. You play as Crono (or however non-canon name you would like to give him), who looks like a DBZ character in the game's cover, which makes sense since the art designer worked on DBZ as well. The game starts in 1000 A.D. You wake up and go to the fair that is in town, where a local girl named Lucca has a transportation device to showcase, which teleports you from one box to the other right next to it.
An accident happens and a girl you were hanging out with, Marle, is sent into a portal that opened up by the power of her pendant. You choose to be the hero and go after her. Soon after, you realize you are now in 600 A.D. That's all fascinating and stuff, but all you want to do is grab Marle and get out of there. Events transpire, and not much later, you find yourself in the future and uncovering something very dark: The planet is dying. With the power of time travel at your hands, it's up to you and your friends to go back and forward in time to do what's necessary and prevent this horrible death.
What impresses the most about Chrono Trigger's storytelling is that it incorporates time travel and does not end up in a jumbled mess by the end. Quite the opposite actually. The time travel theme gives the story lots of options to explore different settings, events and permutations of said events, which lends itself perfectly to the fact that this game has not one, not two but 13 (!) different endings that differ quite notably from each other based on when and where you take certain actions.
Additionally, Chrono Trigger reaches the impressive feat of having a time travel story make sense overall, while also avoiding being as formulaic as JRPG stories tend to be at this time period. The main villain in this game is really interesting and actually scary as shit the more I think about it, and as someone who loves a good villain, that's awesome, though I won't say much more than that. There are also many other villains of which many were well-explored, and the game has a diverse and charming cast of characters. I found some to be one-dimensional, like Robo or Ayla, but the others have some stand-out moments as part of the main story or their own side stories. I wish there would have been more moments where the entire casts interacts like in one singular scene that I found throughout the whole game, but the game is more focused on its plot, which is well-paced almost throughout, and that makes for a great experience as well.
One final note I want to make is that the game does a really great job at foreshadowing certain events, locations and characters, and when you get to the points where they become relevant, it makes for some of the best moments in the game.
As someone who likes well-developed characters as much as a good plot, I would personally have liked a little bit more in that aspect, but the plot is great, characters are easy to root for and there are at least a couple that do have great backstories and development, so if you're looking for a JRPG who ticks these boxes, Chrono Trigger probably comes up at the top of most lists for a good reason.
GAMEPLAY | 15/20
JRPGs have a pretty well-established gameplay loop, and Chrono Trigger does not distance itself from that either, which is understandable considering it was made by the same company that is reponsible for Final Fantasy, the SaGa series, the Mana series and more. That said, what Chrono Trigger achieves is three-fold.
First, Chrono Trigger makes the loop less grindy and cryptic. I never felt the need to farm XP mindlessly for hours to have a chance at a random mid-game boss. There was one boss fight that was unusually tough, sure, but I beat it by adjusting my strategy and was able to continue through the rest of the game. The game also never forced me to use a guide, which, believe me, means something. There is always that one time in these RPGs where I'm stumped as to where to go or what to do, but with Chrono Trigger, I always figured it out eventually, without fail. Talk to all NPCs and you will definitely find your way forward.
Second, Chrono Trigger introduces quality of life changes and general improvements to the genre. Talk to an NPC accidentally? Just walk away mid dialogue without having to click each line away. Don't want to be thrown into random encounters? You don't have to, enemies almost always appear on the screen and you can often just walk past them. Feel like you're usually missing out on the good skills/weapons in JRPGs because you can't find them? The game has "Techs", which the characters unlock naturally as you use them, which are more than enough to overcome any challenge as long as you use them correctly.
Third, Chrono Trigger avoids filler, at least the SNES version does. It adds a lot to the pacing of the story that you're rarely out there searching for item X to supply to NPC Y to unlock Dungeon Z to find item A to supply NPC B to finally meaningfully progress the story. Yes, there of course is still some of that here, but I can't say it was a chore to go through any dungeon this game had to offer because it was well-balanced with progression of the story and your character, and dungeons usually have unique puzzles for you. Both in actual puzzles and in terms of the battles, where you need to figure out how to "solve" a fight before you actually beat the enemy. Certain enemies for example can block almost all of your physical or magical attacks. That's simple enough. Then there are some who first have to be shocked with a lightning attack before they lower their guard and take damage. These "puzzles" get more and more tricky as the game goes on, up until the final boss fight, where the game throws one final curveball at you, though I'll let you discover that on your own.
At the end of the day though, Chrono Trigger is still a turn-based Square JRPG. If you didn't enjoy these before or especially after Chrono Trigger, the "Tech" skills won't be enough to change your mind. Even to me, watching the same attack animations play out slowly over thousands of times in encounters against much weaker enemies is not very fun but rather something you have to do to get to the next big fight, or something you do as part of solving a dungeon. Square still use their Active Battle System, which I dislike as much as ever because it has 0 to do with strategy and one billion to do with being quick on the buttons like a 12 year old Fortnite player building a castle in four seconds. Losing battles can throw you up to an hour back if you die shortly before getting to your next save point (unless you use save states).
So, to put it short: If you enjoy gameplay in JRPGs, you'll enjoy this. If you don't, you won't here either, but it's the most fun non-Shin Megami Tensei (J)RPG I've played that came out in the 90s so far.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
Did you hear that Chrono Trigger has a great soundtrack? Well you heard correctly. I loved this soundtrack from beginning to end. The fair theme and Gato's theme at the start already had me getting earworms for the rest of my first day playing this. The battle theme is great and just doesn't get old. Then there are numerous character and location themes that range from great to perfection. I could name you a dozen songs that I loved and would gladly listen to outside of the game, and others would probably name you another dozen that they remember very fondly. It's a terrific soundtrack and if you want a taste, I recommend you to check out Gato's / Gonzalez's Theme, Secret of the Forest, Guardia Castle, Battle with Magus and probably my favorite, Corridors of Time.
They call me Gato ♪
I have metal joints ♪
Beat me up ♪
And earn 15 silver points ♪
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
Thanks to the time travel theme and the many different ages you visit, this game has a ton of visual variety, which helps the game to visually never get stale. Enemy design is great, the world design helps give each age its distinctive properties and while I thought the characters had some weird looks sometimes (Marle doing the squilly face for example), I did like their design as well, though the characters to me stand out a lot more in their avatars than their in-game sprites.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
This game packs so much detail for a game of its time and for any game period. I have one party scene in particular in mind where a unique song just for that scene plays and you got a bunch of characters just dancing as you walk around. I then interacted with Marle, who said something along the lines of "let's party", after which she went over to someone else and started mingling. Talking to her again prompted her to say "let's dance" and she started busting out the moves, and apart from the fact that I interacted with her to prompt these lines and actions, it all felt so natural. Or going to Lucca's home and talking to her mom, only for her dad to show up and then give us an item shortly after. Or the entirety of the millennial fair and how seemingly tiny interactions there are brought up later.
There are tons of small details like that and if you ask me what every great video game has, it is those small details. If you put that much care into those, it's almost a safe bet that the main portion of your game will be quality as well, and that's certainly the case here.
Outside of the details, the game is very atmospheric thanks to its varied locations and use of its songs. Funny thing is, even now a small detail comes to mind, like healing up in the future and getting the "you're still hungry" notification, which is such a small thing but only is added in this era. It helps paint the picture of the life the people who are there are living, and it makes a later moment stand out even more.
CONTENT | 10/10
The game is PACKED with content. It has a lot more content than you will see in one playthrough, that's for sure. It got all the endings, all the different ages, all the different side quests, lots of techs, double techs, triple techs, secret items, optional dungeons, New Game+ (which is a term coined in THIS game) and all those permutations to events you can have depending on your actions, not to mention plenty of bosses, high enemy variety and a ton of interaction that you can have between the ages, which is often optional but rewards you for your time pretty well. If you could only bring one JRPG with you on an island, and you had never played Chrono Trigger, this would keep you busy without you finding all the content in it for quiiite a while.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10
The pacing in this game is great and the way the game rewards optional exploration is one of the better examples I've ever seen. The fact that grinding is not required even a single bit is a great achievement in itself. If there is one negative I'd have, it's the final dungeon (I played the SNES version, I hear other versions have bad optional dungeons). This dungeon takes a bit too long for my taste and keeps throwing the same enemy at you that disables your tech/items, which turns these battles into boring "Press A and wait for the battle to end" slogs. The final boss form then has a BS attack that insta-kills your party unless they are at full health (2 of my 3 party members died even then), so I didn't enjoy that either, plus the GolemTwins fight was BS, but those would be my only negatives in a game I played for 25+ hours. The least frustrating retro JRPG I've played overall by a mile.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
In many core ways it doesn't differ from contemporary JRPGs, but the time travel mechanic and great pacing help the story stand out, the Tech system is one of the most fun satisfying systems I've experienced in retro JRPGs and the game helped popularize having a lot of different endings and NG+. Even if you are one to play through a game once and that's it, the way you can choose how and when to do things is a terrificly executed in Chrono Trigger.
REPLAYABILITY | 5/5
Don't think I stumbled upon a more replayable game up to this point, Chrono Trigger can be played many times over and present you with vastly different events.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 90/100
Chrono Trigger aged tremendously. If you're a fan of JRPGs and haven't checked this out, I don't even know what to tell you. Is it the best JRPG today? Probably not, but I agree that it's the best JRPG up until the time of its release. And even if it's not #1 today, it still isn't too far from that spot in my opinion. Few games offer such a complete package, and I'm glad I finally got to experience this game.
(This is the 48th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
I think if you're looking to get into the much-beloved Metroid series for the first time, Metroid II: Return of Samus (Dev: Nintendo R&D1 / Pub: Nintendo) won't be the best place to start. The game released in November 1991 for the Game Boy, unlike the original which came out for the NES, and if you really don't want to pass by this game, you would probably be best served going for its remake from 2017 for the Nintendo 3DS.
The game isn't 'objectively bad', not even close actually, but it suffers from pretty much all the lack of QoL features that you'd expect from games of this time. This makes it tough to play unless you don't mind looking for the way forward for, potentially, hours at a time, and even then, the future releases will serve you with much more enjoyable gameplay in pretty much every way. But all of that I talk about in detail below.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
As in the original, you play Samus Aran, who is a Space Hunter working for the Galactic Federation. Her goal is once again to go to the planet SR388, where she is to exterminate the remaining Metroids after both a ship full of researchers and armed soldiers went missing. All of this can be found in the manual. In the game, you press START and are immediately loaded in and stand in front of your ship and are not given any further information.
The main things you will take away from this game in terms of story/characters are the following
Samus is a badass character just simply based on design and she gets shit done when others can't (not unlike many other one hero vs the world games, but effective)
The fact that there was no color for the Game Boy meant that the devs had to add the round metal shoulder pads to differentiate between her Power Suit and Varia Suit, a feature that has stayed with Samus ever since
POSSIBLE SPOILER: The ending cliffhanger, without dialogue and voice acting, is really well done. Samus finds an egg of a Metroid hatchling, which follows her to her ship. What will this cause in the sequel?
So Metroid II doesn't really do much different from many other platformers / Action Adventure types like this in terms of story, but it does manage to stand out a bit thanks to its ending and its main character.
GAMEPLAY | 9/20
You will most likely be familiar with the Metroid formula by now. Start with limited abilities, explore multi-pathed levels multiple times by leveraging new abilities that you gain constantly as you progress. It's a pretty popular genre, and Metroid games pretty much pioneered them. Unfortunately, early iterations come with some growing pains as the developers looked to find a balance of their vision and what they could realistically expect players to be willing to push through.
Before we get there, here is the gist of how this game plays. You control Samus in a 2D side-scrolling game where you can shoot projectiles, jump and even roll up into a ball to squeeze through holes. Your goal is to traverse this map and find all Metroids, which are parasitic creatures that, unsurprisingly, form the main enemy types in this series. Throughout your journey you get access to new skills and attacks, which not only allow you to stand a chance against later bosses, but to also unlock areas that were previously inaccessible.
I personally have a mixed relationship with Metroidvanias, though "utility-gated progression" usually isn't my main issue but rather the convoluted design of the maps and/or the gameplay itself, and both creep up their ugly heads here as well, though I can excuse it much more for a 30 year old game rather than some of the newer entries into the genre.
Firstly, this is a Game Boy game, and unlike the NES version, Samus covers 1/4 of the screen here, which from the get-go makes for an awkward affair when trying to dodge enemies reliably. Her jumps are not sensitive to button presses at all, so you need to press JUMP quite a while in order to make a long jump, and in areas where platforms are separated by some sort of health-evaporating substance in between, these jumps can become quite unreliable and hence frustrating.
Frustrating is actually a big thing with this game. The reason why you want to take hits as few times as possible is because there are few save points here and they are pretty far from each other, so you will constantly find yourself warp all the way back to the checkpoint whenever you die. And due to the level amount of health you're playing with, you'll find yourself die a lot. There are no immediate do-overs. Die and you go all the way back.
The worst part however is the fact that there is no map. So you either have to draw the map along as you play or have great memory. Plus, progress forward isn't as cut and dry as moving forward. Sometimes, progressing means finding some randomly placed hole in a wall that you can only reach by turning into the balled-up shape I was just talking about. It doesn't help that many areas look exactly the same in this game, adding to the confusion of it all.
Overall, the concept of this series I definitely like. This one just didn't age well and I don't know how children at the time could possibly beat this unless they'd spend dozens and dozens of hours of running through walls and having to rely on magazine guides, and whether it's fun to have to use those sources to beat a game is in the eye of the beholder I suppose.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
No voice acting. There is an interesting that happens from time to time where the music simply cuts off and you're left playing for a while whilst just listening to the sound effects. It's odd on the one hand, but satisfying on the other because I actually like the various sound effects that you hear, whether it's shooting your projectiles, the sound of each step you take, collecting items and some beep sounds that play that apparently are part of the "Caverns 1 Theme". Whenever the music does play, you've got to understand the limitations of the Game Boy sound engine. So what they managed to do with that is pretty impressive. Obviously, if you give a listen to the 3DS remake OST, you'll see what increased technical capabilities will allow you to do, but the soundtrack here plays into the atmosphere of the levels very well here, and gets downright eerie whenever you get into a boss fight. In contrast, the surface of SR388 theme sounded a bit too playful to me, but I get it considering that's the music that kids will spend most of their time listening to. Do you dare and get further into the game than you're expected to? That's where you are met with tracks that match the increased tension and where this gets a lot more atmospheric.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 5/10
If you rate this based on the capabilities of the Game Boy, the game doesn't look all too bad. If you rate it compared to what you would have gotten had this been an SNES game, it doesn't rate quite well. If you go somewhere down the middle, you can appreciate that this game was the reason that the Samus sprite got changes to it that would last until today, that the Metroids look positively disgusting and .. well yeah, that's pretty much it. The blackground is simply black, levels look very similar in design, the sprite size of Samus looks kind of awkward and creating holes in walls that hide progress and not giving any graphical indicator that something might be behind there is just an odd choice. And overall, the game simply doesn't look so good due to being a Game Boy game, which you might like yourself but is what I'd call an "acquired/nostalgic taste".
ATMOSPHERE | 8/10
The game does a pretty good job actually of throwing you into hostile territory filled with vile and disgusting creatures. Whenever the non-music track plays or the tracks that hit the eerie tones of the graphical presentation play, this can become quite atmospheric and immersive, and downright scary I'd imagine for young gamers whenever a Metroid is chasing you down.
CONTENT | 5/10
Many different abilities that you can get your hands on as you play the game. The journey there can be rough however, as you will spend many hours trying to figure out where to go next, which some might call intentional and I'd call boring and not well executed here. Apart from that, there isn't much content here, but if you enjoy the bashing your head against walls aspect of it, this will be enough to keep you occupied for a dozen hours+.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 3/10
I appreciate the idea behind this game of having to traverse a hostile environment and find your way through it without any hand-holding. Unfortunately, my idea of a fun game is in contrast to what the game design philosophy of Metroid's creators is, at least for the early entries in the series. No map is tough on its own, but progress hidden in walls (forcing you to check every wall), same looking areas and abilities that don't control all that well (the spider ability) makes for too many (subjective) issues here.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The concept remains intriguing, though I'd say the sequel has not yet gotten it to where it will eventually go in this series.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
There isn't really any particular reason/motivation given for replaying this. Chances are, if you somehow beat this, you'll be satisfied and ready to move on.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 53/100
Unless you really enjoyed the original or really, really enjoyed the later entries in the Metroid series, I think this game is very skippable. Even if you did enjoy later Metroid games, you will likely miss the QoL features that will be introduced later. What this game does well is create a tense atmosphere, but I would agree that that's the gist of it, unless you are a big fan of the concept of hitting early wall to see if you can go through some of them, or if you enjoy drawing a map as you go. Otherwise, you will likely have to rely on guides to make progress, and have to do so many times. So right now I would call this a good proof on concept, just like the original, but the next step hasn't really been taken yet in my opinion.
I think if you're looking to get into the much-beloved Metroid series for the first time, Metroid II: Return of Samus (Dev: Nintendo R&D1 / Pub: Nintendo) won't be the best place to start. The game released in November 1991 for the Game Boy, unlike the original which came out for the NES, and if you really don't want to pass by this game, you would probably be best served going for its remake from 2017 for the Nintendo 3DS.
The game isn't 'objectively bad', not even close actually, but it suffers from pretty much all the lack of QoL features that you'd expect from games of this time. This makes it tough to play unless you don't mind looking for the way forward for, potentially, hours at a time, and even then, the future releases will serve you with much more enjoyable gameplay in pretty much every way. But all of that I talk about in detail below.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
As in the original, you play Samus Aran, who is a Space Hunter working for the Galactic Federation. Her goal is once again to go to the planet SR388, where she is to exterminate the remaining Metroids after both a ship full of researchers and armed soldiers went missing. All of this can be found in the manual. In the game, you press START and are immediately loaded in and stand in front of your ship and are not given any further information.
The main things you will take away from this game in terms of story/characters are the following
Samus is a badass character just simply based on design and she gets shit done when others can't (not unlike many other one hero vs the world games, but effective)
The fact that there was no color for the Game Boy meant that the devs had to add the round metal shoulder pads to differentiate between her Power Suit and Varia Suit, a feature that has stayed with Samus ever since
POSSIBLE SPOILER: The ending cliffhanger, without dialogue and voice acting, is really well done. Samus finds an egg of a Metroid hatchling, which follows her to her ship. What will this cause in the sequel?
So Metroid II doesn't really do much different from many other platformers / Action Adventure types like this in terms of story, but it does manage to stand out a bit thanks to its ending and its main character.
GAMEPLAY | 9/20
You will most likely be familiar with the Metroid formula by now. Start with limited abilities, explore multi-pathed levels multiple times by leveraging new abilities that you gain constantly as you progress. It's a pretty popular genre, and Metroid games pretty much pioneered them. Unfortunately, early iterations come with some growing pains as the developers looked to find a balance of their vision and what they could realistically expect players to be willing to push through.
Before we get there, here is the gist of how this game plays. You control Samus in a 2D side-scrolling game where you can shoot projectiles, jump and even roll up into a ball to squeeze through holes. Your goal is to traverse this map and find all Metroids, which are parasitic creatures that, unsurprisingly, form the main enemy types in this series. Throughout your journey you get access to new skills and attacks, which not only allow you to stand a chance against later bosses, but to also unlock areas that were previously inaccessible.
I personally have a mixed relationship with Metroidvanias, though "utility-gated progression" usually isn't my main issue but rather the convoluted design of the maps and/or the gameplay itself, and both creep up their ugly heads here as well, though I can excuse it much more for a 30 year old game rather than some of the newer entries into the genre.
Firstly, this is a Game Boy game, and unlike the NES version, Samus covers 1/4 of the screen here, which from the get-go makes for an awkward affair when trying to dodge enemies reliably. Her jumps are not sensitive to button presses at all, so you need to press JUMP quite a while in order to make a long jump, and in areas where platforms are separated by some sort of health-evaporating substance in between, these jumps can become quite unreliable and hence frustrating.
Frustrating is actually a big thing with this game. The reason why you want to take hits as few times as possible is because there are few save points here and they are pretty far from each other, so you will constantly find yourself warp all the way back to the checkpoint whenever you die. And due to the level amount of health you're playing with, you'll find yourself die a lot. There are no immediate do-overs. Die and you go all the way back.
The worst part however is the fact that there is no map. So you either have to draw the map along as you play or have great memory. Plus, progress forward isn't as cut and dry as moving forward. Sometimes, progressing means finding some randomly placed hole in a wall that you can only reach by turning into the balled-up shape I was just talking about. It doesn't help that many areas look exactly the same in this game, adding to the confusion of it all.
Overall, the concept of this series I definitely like. This one just didn't age well and I don't know how children at the time could possibly beat this unless they'd spend dozens and dozens of hours of running through walls and having to rely on magazine guides, and whether it's fun to have to use those sources to beat a game is in the eye of the beholder I suppose.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
No voice acting. There is an interesting that happens from time to time where the music simply cuts off and you're left playing for a while whilst just listening to the sound effects. It's odd on the one hand, but satisfying on the other because I actually like the various sound effects that you hear, whether it's shooting your projectiles, the sound of each step you take, collecting items and some beep sounds that play that apparently are part of the "Caverns 1 Theme". Whenever the music does play, you've got to understand the limitations of the Game Boy sound engine. So what they managed to do with that is pretty impressive. Obviously, if you give a listen to the 3DS remake OST, you'll see what increased technical capabilities will allow you to do, but the soundtrack here plays into the atmosphere of the levels very well here, and gets downright eerie whenever you get into a boss fight. In contrast, the surface of SR388 theme sounded a bit too playful to me, but I get it considering that's the music that kids will spend most of their time listening to. Do you dare and get further into the game than you're expected to? That's where you are met with tracks that match the increased tension and where this gets a lot more atmospheric.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 5/10
If you rate this based on the capabilities of the Game Boy, the game doesn't look all too bad. If you rate it compared to what you would have gotten had this been an SNES game, it doesn't rate quite well. If you go somewhere down the middle, you can appreciate that this game was the reason that the Samus sprite got changes to it that would last until today, that the Metroids look positively disgusting and .. well yeah, that's pretty much it. The blackground is simply black, levels look very similar in design, the sprite size of Samus looks kind of awkward and creating holes in walls that hide progress and not giving any graphical indicator that something might be behind there is just an odd choice. And overall, the game simply doesn't look so good due to being a Game Boy game, which you might like yourself but is what I'd call an "acquired/nostalgic taste".
ATMOSPHERE | 8/10
The game does a pretty good job actually of throwing you into hostile territory filled with vile and disgusting creatures. Whenever the non-music track plays or the tracks that hit the eerie tones of the graphical presentation play, this can become quite atmospheric and immersive, and downright scary I'd imagine for young gamers whenever a Metroid is chasing you down.
CONTENT | 5/10
Many different abilities that you can get your hands on as you play the game. The journey there can be rough however, as you will spend many hours trying to figure out where to go next, which some might call intentional and I'd call boring and not well executed here. Apart from that, there isn't much content here, but if you enjoy the bashing your head against walls aspect of it, this will be enough to keep you occupied for a dozen hours+.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 3/10
I appreciate the idea behind this game of having to traverse a hostile environment and find your way through it without any hand-holding. Unfortunately, my idea of a fun game is in contrast to what the game design philosophy of Metroid's creators is, at least for the early entries in the series. No map is tough on its own, but progress hidden in walls (forcing you to check every wall), same looking areas and abilities that don't control all that well (the spider ability) makes for too many (subjective) issues here.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The concept remains intriguing, though I'd say the sequel has not yet gotten it to where it will eventually go in this series.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
There isn't really any particular reason/motivation given for replaying this. Chances are, if you somehow beat this, you'll be satisfied and ready to move on.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 53/100
Unless you really enjoyed the original or really, really enjoyed the later entries in the Metroid series, I think this game is very skippable. Even if you did enjoy later Metroid games, you will likely miss the QoL features that will be introduced later. What this game does well is create a tense atmosphere, but I would agree that that's the gist of it, unless you are a big fan of the concept of hitting early wall to see if you can go through some of them, or if you enjoy drawing a map as you go. Otherwise, you will likely have to rely on guides to make progress, and have to do so many times. So right now I would call this a good proof on concept, just like the original, but the next step hasn't really been taken yet in my opinion.
1991
(This is the 37th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
I'm going to guess and say that the majority of you have played this game or, more likely, a game that is pretty similar to the idea that Lemmings puts forward, a puzzle(-strategy) game by DMA Design, initially released on February 14th, 1991 and ported to dozens of systems after its success as an Amiga game. I played the SNES version for this review.
FUN FACT: DMA Design, the developer, today goes by the somewhat known name Rockstar North and are creators of the GTA series.
____________
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS
You control Lemmings, which do exist in real life (small rodents). In this game, they are anthropomorphized, meaning they walk upright and can do human tasks like digging, climbing, jumping down whilst holding an umbrella etc.
There is a misconception in pop culture that Lemmings commit "mass suicide", something the devs seem to have chosen as inspiration for creating this game.
In this game, all lemmings are identical copies of each other, you simply can change their behavior by equipping them with a certain task/skill like the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph.
The goal of every level is to rescue at least a certain percentage of all Lemmings that are present in a given level. Once you do that, you can try to rescue the rest or have them blow themselves up and end the level.
Every time the puzzles go up in difficulty level, a little cutscene plays showing the Lemmings move across the screen.
I feel like there was some potential here for these little guys to have a bigger name across gaming than they ended up having because they do offer a certain charm.
But as far as storytelling goes, the game doesn't offer anything beyond the basic goal of each level.
GAMEPLAY
There are up to 120 levels depending on the port you play that are spread between four difficulty levels. In each level, a door opens that releases a set number of Lemmings. The game tells you how many of them you need to save to beat the level.
The lemmings move forward at all times, no matter what, and if there is something that blocks their path, they simply turn around and go the other way. You are equipped with a bunch of "tasks" that you can give to the lemmings and your job is to choose the correct ones, at the correct times and in the proper order to successfully send enough Lemmings to the exit.
For example, in the first level, you have to give your Lemmings the "digging" task, which makes them start digging up the ground beneath them. This opens up a path to the exit once they're done.
With each level, it starts getting more and more complicated of course. You need to mix multiple tasks up at once, figure out how to make a lemming cancel his task to help him escape as well, and well, ultimately decide how much you value your time.
Because as creative as the game design is, and as much fun it is to figure out the solution, it often is not the path to the solution that is hard to figure out. It is the wait.
Once you have the solution, like for example digging open the ground beneath your lemmings, you now have to wait. and wait. and wait until they all slowly make their way to the finish line. I am not joking if I say that it takes minutes a lot of times for things to play out like you already know it will.
I've played for a few hours and a too significant amount of that was spent waiting instead of solving puzzles or applying the correct strategy. That made the game significantly less enjoyable that it probably would be in a more modern release where your characters would probably start moving much faster once the game knows that you opened up the winning path.
It doesn't help that later on, levels often became repetitive and, when checking a YT playthrough, I realized it just ended up being more or less the same over and over again, so I decided that I saw enough after a few hours.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Voice acting is limited to some high-pitched noises and a few words. "Yippie", "Let's go", "Oh no" are things you will hear quite often, but generally the Lemmings remain pretty silent in this one. The soundtrack features some nice music, including a remix of Jacques Offenbach's "Infernal Galop".
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The graphics aren't anything special in this one, but the animations are really good for its time. The way the Lemmings hair flies from side to side as they keep digging for example is really detailed.
ATMOSPHERE
Nothing special that I want to mention in this regard. The artistic design of the levels, the kinda cutesy Lemmings, the noises they make, the music, it all combines to make a game with a cozy enough atmosphere but one that can stress you out pretty fast if you ever are stuck with any particular level, especially since it means you will have to blow everyone up to restart.
CONTENT
120 levels, gets repetitive. Too much time is spent waiting on the Lemmings to walk around, too little on actually doing puzzles. It's an effective brainteaser but doesn't translate to a whole lot of fun at too many times.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
You have all those skills I mentioned at your disposal and try to figure out which ones to use and at which point. Some levels only allow you to use specific skills and all require you to get a certain number of Lemmings to safety on each level. It's fun, but the design does get a bit repetitive over time. More skills obviously would mean more variety. The amount available here doesn't really seem to support 120 levels whilst keeping it fresh.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Obviously very innovative in its design, even if it doesn't always translate to a lot of fun. Especially once you figure out how to do a puzzle and are stuck waiting for minutes for your Lemmings to get a move on, the design shows its cracks. But the design could have been taken a number of different directions from here on out, and I'll be honest, as of now I don't know what happened to the series and if there are any spiritual successors.
REPLAYABILITY
Pretty high. You can keep replaying to try and get more Lemmings out of a level, and you can even try your hand at figuring out how to get 100% of them out each time. It involves some advanced techniques that I didn't figure out myself, and one that adds a lot more waiting time to your playthrough, but it may be a worthwhile reward for people with plenty of patience and resilience.
PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL
I can appreciate the game for its innovation. Unfortunately the way this is designed makes for a slow affair because a lot of the time playing this game is spent waiting for the Lemmings to go from A to B. More QoL improvements in later versions maybe have resulted in cleaner and faster experiences, but as it stands, this game was definitely way more enjoyable in the past than it is today, at least if you're a newcomer to this type of puzzle game.
I'm going to guess and say that the majority of you have played this game or, more likely, a game that is pretty similar to the idea that Lemmings puts forward, a puzzle(-strategy) game by DMA Design, initially released on February 14th, 1991 and ported to dozens of systems after its success as an Amiga game. I played the SNES version for this review.
FUN FACT: DMA Design, the developer, today goes by the somewhat known name Rockstar North and are creators of the GTA series.
____________
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS
You control Lemmings, which do exist in real life (small rodents). In this game, they are anthropomorphized, meaning they walk upright and can do human tasks like digging, climbing, jumping down whilst holding an umbrella etc.
There is a misconception in pop culture that Lemmings commit "mass suicide", something the devs seem to have chosen as inspiration for creating this game.
In this game, all lemmings are identical copies of each other, you simply can change their behavior by equipping them with a certain task/skill like the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph.
The goal of every level is to rescue at least a certain percentage of all Lemmings that are present in a given level. Once you do that, you can try to rescue the rest or have them blow themselves up and end the level.
Every time the puzzles go up in difficulty level, a little cutscene plays showing the Lemmings move across the screen.
I feel like there was some potential here for these little guys to have a bigger name across gaming than they ended up having because they do offer a certain charm.
But as far as storytelling goes, the game doesn't offer anything beyond the basic goal of each level.
GAMEPLAY
There are up to 120 levels depending on the port you play that are spread between four difficulty levels. In each level, a door opens that releases a set number of Lemmings. The game tells you how many of them you need to save to beat the level.
The lemmings move forward at all times, no matter what, and if there is something that blocks their path, they simply turn around and go the other way. You are equipped with a bunch of "tasks" that you can give to the lemmings and your job is to choose the correct ones, at the correct times and in the proper order to successfully send enough Lemmings to the exit.
For example, in the first level, you have to give your Lemmings the "digging" task, which makes them start digging up the ground beneath them. This opens up a path to the exit once they're done.
With each level, it starts getting more and more complicated of course. You need to mix multiple tasks up at once, figure out how to make a lemming cancel his task to help him escape as well, and well, ultimately decide how much you value your time.
Because as creative as the game design is, and as much fun it is to figure out the solution, it often is not the path to the solution that is hard to figure out. It is the wait.
Once you have the solution, like for example digging open the ground beneath your lemmings, you now have to wait. and wait. and wait until they all slowly make their way to the finish line. I am not joking if I say that it takes minutes a lot of times for things to play out like you already know it will.
I've played for a few hours and a too significant amount of that was spent waiting instead of solving puzzles or applying the correct strategy. That made the game significantly less enjoyable that it probably would be in a more modern release where your characters would probably start moving much faster once the game knows that you opened up the winning path.
It doesn't help that later on, levels often became repetitive and, when checking a YT playthrough, I realized it just ended up being more or less the same over and over again, so I decided that I saw enough after a few hours.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Voice acting is limited to some high-pitched noises and a few words. "Yippie", "Let's go", "Oh no" are things you will hear quite often, but generally the Lemmings remain pretty silent in this one. The soundtrack features some nice music, including a remix of Jacques Offenbach's "Infernal Galop".
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The graphics aren't anything special in this one, but the animations are really good for its time. The way the Lemmings hair flies from side to side as they keep digging for example is really detailed.
ATMOSPHERE
Nothing special that I want to mention in this regard. The artistic design of the levels, the kinda cutesy Lemmings, the noises they make, the music, it all combines to make a game with a cozy enough atmosphere but one that can stress you out pretty fast if you ever are stuck with any particular level, especially since it means you will have to blow everyone up to restart.
CONTENT
120 levels, gets repetitive. Too much time is spent waiting on the Lemmings to walk around, too little on actually doing puzzles. It's an effective brainteaser but doesn't translate to a whole lot of fun at too many times.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
You have all those skills I mentioned at your disposal and try to figure out which ones to use and at which point. Some levels only allow you to use specific skills and all require you to get a certain number of Lemmings to safety on each level. It's fun, but the design does get a bit repetitive over time. More skills obviously would mean more variety. The amount available here doesn't really seem to support 120 levels whilst keeping it fresh.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Obviously very innovative in its design, even if it doesn't always translate to a lot of fun. Especially once you figure out how to do a puzzle and are stuck waiting for minutes for your Lemmings to get a move on, the design shows its cracks. But the design could have been taken a number of different directions from here on out, and I'll be honest, as of now I don't know what happened to the series and if there are any spiritual successors.
REPLAYABILITY
Pretty high. You can keep replaying to try and get more Lemmings out of a level, and you can even try your hand at figuring out how to get 100% of them out each time. It involves some advanced techniques that I didn't figure out myself, and one that adds a lot more waiting time to your playthrough, but it may be a worthwhile reward for people with plenty of patience and resilience.
PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL
I can appreciate the game for its innovation. Unfortunately the way this is designed makes for a slow affair because a lot of the time playing this game is spent waiting for the Lemmings to go from A to B. More QoL improvements in later versions maybe have resulted in cleaner and faster experiences, but as it stands, this game was definitely way more enjoyable in the past than it is today, at least if you're a newcomer to this type of puzzle game.
1993
Star Fox released on February 21, 1993 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and is a rail shooter that you play in both first-person and third-person perspectives. The special part about it is that this is a 3D game during a time where this was uncommon, and from the get-go you can tell that what Star Fox does is pretty unique, especially for the platform it released on.
It was developed by Nintendo and Argonaut Software and has turned into a pretty popular series, warranting multiple sequels from Star Fox 64 in 1997 all the way to Star Fox Zero and, I suppose it is worth counting, a sequel to this original Star Fox game called Star Fox 2 released alongside the SNES Classic Edition. Star Fox 2 never ended up releasing back in the day, but it did exist, so it got its debut all these years later, which is pretty fascinating stuff.
In this original Star Fox, you control the character 'Fox' and his spacecraft, the "Arwing" in scrolling 3D environments. You dodge obstacles in the environment, shoot enemy spaceships and take on boss battles in each stage. Before you begin, you can select one of three routes to take to the final boss on a planet called 'Venom'. I took the Level 1 route thinking it was just the first level. Turns out, no, the Level 1 route is simple one of three routes that all lead to the same ending. The difference is that each route has a distinct difficulty, which is a system that allowed the devs to forgo any difficulty options. Personally, I like this a lot because it adds a lot of replayability to the game. Each route takes you through different planets and missions and therefore not only plays more difficult, but simply different in terms of the design of the levels. In turn though, the routes individually are not very long. The main reason why you might take more than a few hours per route is the difficulty, which even on Level 1 is no cakewalk.
That's in large part to how the game plays. The game is undeniably impressive and ahead of its time, but one negative that comes with that is that you will have to compromise. Compromise in Star Fox rears its head through low FPS (10-15) and below-average controls. Low FPS for a flight sim was very common in 1993 and the years before it, and those games usually had even less, so it's not the worst thing here. But just like many of those flight sims, this makes the original Star Fox slightly harder to play today and means it didn't age quite as well as some other games of its time. That said, I didn't have a lot of trouble with the low FPS apart from the parts where many effects on the screen would lead to slowdown.
The poor controls on the other hand I didn't quite get used to until the end of my playthrough. I dislike inverse control schemes in general, so that wasn't great when I had to decide to move up or down within a second, but often I felt the controls not be very responsive, I felt that it was hard to judge whether I was far enough away to evade certain projectiles and figuring out where to aim to actually hit something always took me a second of shooting somewhere (and missing badly) and then adjusting from there, which wasn't quite intuitive.
Issues like these were exacerbated by the fact that sometimes so much action would be on the screen, that projectiles would not be visible until they were very close, leading to a hit that would take quite a lot of health, so expect to die quite a lot of times early on due to things like that. Otherwise though, the polygonal graphics looked good enough here and were generally quite a big deal at the time. Having played dozens of games from its time before this, I can attest to not playing many games that were graphically impressive like this from a technological standpoint.
You also do get used to the controls, so there is that, but it's never feeling great, so I'm not sure if that's something one would necessarily deem a lot of fun at this day and age. I think it's fair to say that it's easy to appreciate Star Fox even today, but don't be surprised if you turn it off after the novelty wears off. If you really get into the boss fights however, which for the most part are well done and fun to tackle, you might get hooked enough to want to see one route through like I did, for which I recommend the first one. Whichever route you take though, you start on the planet Corneria, which has a great soundtrack, so look forward to that, while I myself look forward to playing Star Fox 64 one day, which I hope brings a lot more to the table at a time when 3D graphics were much more common and for the fact that it is the best selling Star Fox game to date.
(This is the 83rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
It was developed by Nintendo and Argonaut Software and has turned into a pretty popular series, warranting multiple sequels from Star Fox 64 in 1997 all the way to Star Fox Zero and, I suppose it is worth counting, a sequel to this original Star Fox game called Star Fox 2 released alongside the SNES Classic Edition. Star Fox 2 never ended up releasing back in the day, but it did exist, so it got its debut all these years later, which is pretty fascinating stuff.
In this original Star Fox, you control the character 'Fox' and his spacecraft, the "Arwing" in scrolling 3D environments. You dodge obstacles in the environment, shoot enemy spaceships and take on boss battles in each stage. Before you begin, you can select one of three routes to take to the final boss on a planet called 'Venom'. I took the Level 1 route thinking it was just the first level. Turns out, no, the Level 1 route is simple one of three routes that all lead to the same ending. The difference is that each route has a distinct difficulty, which is a system that allowed the devs to forgo any difficulty options. Personally, I like this a lot because it adds a lot of replayability to the game. Each route takes you through different planets and missions and therefore not only plays more difficult, but simply different in terms of the design of the levels. In turn though, the routes individually are not very long. The main reason why you might take more than a few hours per route is the difficulty, which even on Level 1 is no cakewalk.
That's in large part to how the game plays. The game is undeniably impressive and ahead of its time, but one negative that comes with that is that you will have to compromise. Compromise in Star Fox rears its head through low FPS (10-15) and below-average controls. Low FPS for a flight sim was very common in 1993 and the years before it, and those games usually had even less, so it's not the worst thing here. But just like many of those flight sims, this makes the original Star Fox slightly harder to play today and means it didn't age quite as well as some other games of its time. That said, I didn't have a lot of trouble with the low FPS apart from the parts where many effects on the screen would lead to slowdown.
The poor controls on the other hand I didn't quite get used to until the end of my playthrough. I dislike inverse control schemes in general, so that wasn't great when I had to decide to move up or down within a second, but often I felt the controls not be very responsive, I felt that it was hard to judge whether I was far enough away to evade certain projectiles and figuring out where to aim to actually hit something always took me a second of shooting somewhere (and missing badly) and then adjusting from there, which wasn't quite intuitive.
Issues like these were exacerbated by the fact that sometimes so much action would be on the screen, that projectiles would not be visible until they were very close, leading to a hit that would take quite a lot of health, so expect to die quite a lot of times early on due to things like that. Otherwise though, the polygonal graphics looked good enough here and were generally quite a big deal at the time. Having played dozens of games from its time before this, I can attest to not playing many games that were graphically impressive like this from a technological standpoint.
You also do get used to the controls, so there is that, but it's never feeling great, so I'm not sure if that's something one would necessarily deem a lot of fun at this day and age. I think it's fair to say that it's easy to appreciate Star Fox even today, but don't be surprised if you turn it off after the novelty wears off. If you really get into the boss fights however, which for the most part are well done and fun to tackle, you might get hooked enough to want to see one route through like I did, for which I recommend the first one. Whichever route you take though, you start on the planet Corneria, which has a great soundtrack, so look forward to that, while I myself look forward to playing Star Fox 64 one day, which I hope brings a lot more to the table at a time when 3D graphics were much more common and for the fact that it is the best selling Star Fox game to date.
(This is the 83rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
1992
The way I first got into the Megami Tensei series is actually not too dissimilar to how many did over the past decade I would imagine. First, I got into the Persona series, which is a lot more approachable due to its social sim aspects and its bigger focus on story and characters. Persona 3 became one of my favorite games of all time, and I wanted more like it. Persona 4 was only available for the Vita at the time, Persona 5 didn't release yet and so, all I had was this series called Shin Megami Tensei. Apparently, it had the same combat system and I should probably start with Nocturne, which also was the only SMT game I was able to play on platforms I had available. I ended up playing Nocturne for about 25 hours before giving up. On the one hand, I was initially put off by the fact that gameplay played a much bigger role than story (though I wasn't promised otherwise) because I sucked at the battle system and finding the right demons to get past those incredibly challenging early bosses (Matador still gives me nightmares). That didn't change throughout my playthrough, but I got better and as combat was becoming less of a worry, I started to take the atmosphere in more and to this day, I get an itch from time to time to dive into a game with a hopeless, oppressive atmosphere because the type that SMT games manage to create remain unique in video games. Though I'd be lying, if I said I wasn't drawn to the Persona series more, and have only played SMT 3, 4 and a tiny bit of 5 so far, even though I know the franchise has lots of spinoffs as well.
So know I am doing this challenge where I go through all types of games chronologically, and I am in this great position where I am looking forward to appreciate the Megami Tensei series from its (near) beginnings, playing almost all the games fully blindly, from Soul Hackers to Digital Devil Saga to Strange Journey and everything in between, and I am happy to say I took a big step in that regard by beating Shin Megami Tensei.
Shin Megami Tensei is the third game in the Megami Tensei series, the first to be released on the Super Famicom and a remake of the second Megami Tensei game to indicate a new beginning for the franchise. It released on October 30, 1992 and unfortunately, did not release in the West until it got an iOS release in 2014, which doesn't even work anymore unless you have a phone using IOS 10 or a previous version. Luckily, there is a fan translation for this game, so you can still play it in English using an emulator. The game apparently didn't release in the West due to its heavy use of religious themes, which led Nintendo to reject a western release. The game released on a lot of other platforms as well (PC Engine, Mega-CD, GBA, iOS/Android), including the PlayStation, which also didn't get a Western release due to a similar veto by Sony.
Shin Megami Tensei is an RPG with first-person dungeon-crawling gameplay and demon-fusing as its core forms of gameplay. You play the Hero that you give a name of your choosing. You are also to give names to a 'Law Hero' and a 'Chaos Hero', as well as a 'Heroine'. The game plays in Tokyo, another factor that makes this game stand out amongst the sea of medieval fantasy JRPGs of the time. It starts in the year 199X. A scientist opened a portal to another world that leads to demons invading Tokyo. You get an email by a guy called Steven, who gives you access to a "demon summoning program", which allows you to recruit and summon them.
You discover that there are multiple factions fighting for control over Tokyo, and that you and your companions have a big role to play in the fate of humanity. First, you have the US military led by ambassador "Thorman", who decide to bring their forces to Tokyo when they hear the news about the demon invasion. They are opposed by Gotou and the "Japan Seld-Defense Forces", who are more keen on using demons. Then there is the resistance led by the 'Heroine', who are there to to prevent conflict between the other two factions. Gotou starts looking for any woman in Tokyo with the same name as this otherwise, to him, unknown 'Heroine', which leads to all women with her name captured. These actions lead to Gotou's faction being "Chaos" aligned. Thorman and the US military look to purge Tokyo from demons, which makes them "Law" aligned, however they do not fear using any methods to accomplish this, as they have atomic bombs aimed at Tokyo as the conflict waits to be escalated.
I don't want to take away much more than this, but understand that you can decide to side with either faction or no faction at all, which is one of multiple decisions in this game that will put you on the "Law", "Chaos" or "Neutral" route. This decision manifests itself in multiple ways. If you are either Law or Chaos, you 1) have to defeat all bosses with the other alignment, but not the one's that have the same as you (Neutral fights both), 2) can only summon demons, if they align with your alignment, 3) have to pay extra to use healing services of the opposing alignment and 4) get a different ending. This is pretty nice and adds plenty of replayability.
There is plenty of story to uncover in this game and it is well told, with the level of maturity present pretty much throughout that is unheard of for games of its time. It is downright depressing to see what happens to the main character and humanity as a whole in this game, and I love it.
Throughout the game, you travel the overworld of Tokyo and go from dungeon to dungeon. There are some optional dungeons you can take on and some dungeons are open to visits before you are supposed to go there, which is neat, but usually there is no point in doing so, and it feels like the only reason for why you can go there is because the devs wanted you to get lost.
Dungeons mostly are designed the same. They differ in size, but almost all have simple wall tiles with plain colors and no textures that you traverse in first-person. The same-y look can lead you to getting lost quite a few times, which means opening up the map a whole lot, which can only be done by going to the menu, entering another menu and selecting map, looking at the map, exiting the map, exiting the sub-menu and exiting the main menu. There is a patch to make the map accessible through one button press, but I didn't know this until beating the game, so I was left frustrated by this from time to time.
In dungeons, there are a lot of optional areas you can go to and optional enemies you can fight, which often drop items that you could have skipped otherwise. Your human party members all have levels and stats (Strength, Magic, Vitality, Speed etc.) that can level up as you gain XP. You can also gain 'Incense' items that let you increase stats by one as well, which are often hidden in dungeons at random points. Likewise, other items are hidden as well, like Memory Boards, which you need to give to a character called Steven (who looks like the late Stephen Hawking) to be able to hold more demons in your computer, something that is easily missable.
Your main task though is to find specific characters / items / bosses in dungeons to progress the story. As you navigate the dungeons, you are thrown into random encounters every few steps and engage in battle. First, a quick rant on the encounters. Forget what you know about random encounters in other retro JRPGs. This game is the KING of them. It is ridiculous. Every couple steps you take, a random encounter pops up. Escape, and you are thrown back a couple steps, only to take those steps forward again and get into another random encounter. Some dungeons have a lot of encounters, and some dungeons have even more. It is the #1 thing that keeps me from giving this an otherwise easy "Recommended" seal, because it is that ridiculous.
It helps though that the battle system is relatively fun. You can use physical attacks (sword, gun) with your main character, magic attacks with the other Hero characters and demons that you summon and the assortment of elemental, buff, debuff and ailment attacks that are common in the Megami Tensei series. This game doesn't have the Press-Turn system yet (that gets introduced with SMT III), which is a shame, but it was enjoyable regardless. That said, the high encounter rate and the low XP you get relative to the length of normal fights made me escape a lot of them. Especially around the halfway mark, you get so much XP from frequent boss fights that it didn't make much sense to me to put myself through all of these. Boss fights didn't turn out to be so bad either.
Demon negotiations and fusing is present in this game as well. Obviously, it is much more basic here then in future iterations, but it is just as fun to fuse demons here. Negotiations weren't quite as fun, as most would fail. There are few answers you can give and they appeared to be random, as the same demon would react differently to the same answer at times. Failing didn't always have any negative consequences, but often enough it would allow the demon to get the first hit in.
Overall, the game's loop is fun enough to push you through the game, at least in my opinion, and what will make you want to stick around is its incredible atmosphere and unique story presentation for its time. The Shin Megami Tensei feel is very much present in this game.
Apart from the atmosphere, the other highlight of this game to me was the soundtrack. The soundtrack is the best on the Super Famicom I've heard so far (by far) and likely among the best to ever be released for the console. What Tsukasa Masuko achieved on the Super Famicom is incredible. Pretty much all tracks did a great job of capturing the mood, the battle theme is kick-ass, the Ginza track is an instant classic and the boss theme always had me alert that serious shit was going down.
If you like the Shin Megami Tensei series and are OK with the lack of QoL features present (or not present) in retro RPGs, and if you think you can live with the high encounter rate (emulating allows you to fast-forward, which helps move things along quicker), then this is definitely a game I can recommend to you. Otherwise, probably not, though I myself am very glad to have played this and am looking very much forward to the sequel that released in 1994.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
Engaging apocalyptic story with multiple memorable moments
Three different route options which impact the ending and your allegiance with characters
Fittingly depressing scenario that adds to the overall atmosphere
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
Addicting gameplay loop of exploring, battling and demon negotiation & fusing
Lots of strategic choice in battle
Navigating dungeons can become confusing
Encounter rate is RIDICULOUSLY high. Think of high it could be for the entire game, double that number, and that's how many encounters a dungeon has
Demon negotiations can become frustrating, as you fail most of the time
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
No voice acting
Easily one of the best soundtracks on the Super Famicom, simply amazing
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10
Dark and atmospheric visual style
Lots of unique demons with varied designs
You spend most of the game staring at texture-less wall tiles
Dungeons graphically only distinguish themselves through color of the tiles
Easy to get lost / be forced to open the map due to sometimes confusing, similarly designed areas
Few animations, majority of battles and cut scenes play out with quasi-still sprites on-screen
ATMOSPHERE | 9/10
Incredibly atmospheric in terms of visual style, soundtrack and overall theme
Staring at pretty much the same wall tiles for most of the game does take its toll on immersion
CONTENT | 7/10
30-40 hours to beat
Many mandatory and more than a couple optional dungeons and bosses
Plenty of demons to fuse and battle
Most dungeons have no texture and look very similar
Encounter rate should have been lowered, even if that would have shaved off 5-10 hours off the game's overall length
The game makes up for that with three routes you can take, which adds replayability
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10
Leveling up to get stronger, face bigger challenges and be able to fuse better demons is a fun loop
Around the half-way mark, most enemy encounters can be skipped, as the time spent for the XP gain is not worth it due to the high number of bosses that give you a lot of XP
Encounter rate didn't have to be so high as a result
Some dungeons are hard to navigate and some have an annoying "fog" gimmick that makes this even worse
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
Atlus imprinted their DNA into this game so well that it sticks out all these years later
The first SMT game I'd deem approachable for non-hardcore RPG fans
Very unique in terms of theme (religious themes, use of Norse mythology etc.) and demon fusion system compared to pretty much every RPG out there at the time, especially on the Super Famicom
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
A ton of replayability thanks to three routes you can take
Your alignment impacts gameplay in a lot of ways as well
High encounter rate is the one problem that makes replaying the game less appealing
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Worked well at all times
OVERALL | 78/100
(This is the 77th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
So know I am doing this challenge where I go through all types of games chronologically, and I am in this great position where I am looking forward to appreciate the Megami Tensei series from its (near) beginnings, playing almost all the games fully blindly, from Soul Hackers to Digital Devil Saga to Strange Journey and everything in between, and I am happy to say I took a big step in that regard by beating Shin Megami Tensei.
Shin Megami Tensei is the third game in the Megami Tensei series, the first to be released on the Super Famicom and a remake of the second Megami Tensei game to indicate a new beginning for the franchise. It released on October 30, 1992 and unfortunately, did not release in the West until it got an iOS release in 2014, which doesn't even work anymore unless you have a phone using IOS 10 or a previous version. Luckily, there is a fan translation for this game, so you can still play it in English using an emulator. The game apparently didn't release in the West due to its heavy use of religious themes, which led Nintendo to reject a western release. The game released on a lot of other platforms as well (PC Engine, Mega-CD, GBA, iOS/Android), including the PlayStation, which also didn't get a Western release due to a similar veto by Sony.
Shin Megami Tensei is an RPG with first-person dungeon-crawling gameplay and demon-fusing as its core forms of gameplay. You play the Hero that you give a name of your choosing. You are also to give names to a 'Law Hero' and a 'Chaos Hero', as well as a 'Heroine'. The game plays in Tokyo, another factor that makes this game stand out amongst the sea of medieval fantasy JRPGs of the time. It starts in the year 199X. A scientist opened a portal to another world that leads to demons invading Tokyo. You get an email by a guy called Steven, who gives you access to a "demon summoning program", which allows you to recruit and summon them.
You discover that there are multiple factions fighting for control over Tokyo, and that you and your companions have a big role to play in the fate of humanity. First, you have the US military led by ambassador "Thorman", who decide to bring their forces to Tokyo when they hear the news about the demon invasion. They are opposed by Gotou and the "Japan Seld-Defense Forces", who are more keen on using demons. Then there is the resistance led by the 'Heroine', who are there to to prevent conflict between the other two factions. Gotou starts looking for any woman in Tokyo with the same name as this otherwise, to him, unknown 'Heroine', which leads to all women with her name captured. These actions lead to Gotou's faction being "Chaos" aligned. Thorman and the US military look to purge Tokyo from demons, which makes them "Law" aligned, however they do not fear using any methods to accomplish this, as they have atomic bombs aimed at Tokyo as the conflict waits to be escalated.
I don't want to take away much more than this, but understand that you can decide to side with either faction or no faction at all, which is one of multiple decisions in this game that will put you on the "Law", "Chaos" or "Neutral" route. This decision manifests itself in multiple ways. If you are either Law or Chaos, you 1) have to defeat all bosses with the other alignment, but not the one's that have the same as you (Neutral fights both), 2) can only summon demons, if they align with your alignment, 3) have to pay extra to use healing services of the opposing alignment and 4) get a different ending. This is pretty nice and adds plenty of replayability.
There is plenty of story to uncover in this game and it is well told, with the level of maturity present pretty much throughout that is unheard of for games of its time. It is downright depressing to see what happens to the main character and humanity as a whole in this game, and I love it.
Throughout the game, you travel the overworld of Tokyo and go from dungeon to dungeon. There are some optional dungeons you can take on and some dungeons are open to visits before you are supposed to go there, which is neat, but usually there is no point in doing so, and it feels like the only reason for why you can go there is because the devs wanted you to get lost.
Dungeons mostly are designed the same. They differ in size, but almost all have simple wall tiles with plain colors and no textures that you traverse in first-person. The same-y look can lead you to getting lost quite a few times, which means opening up the map a whole lot, which can only be done by going to the menu, entering another menu and selecting map, looking at the map, exiting the map, exiting the sub-menu and exiting the main menu. There is a patch to make the map accessible through one button press, but I didn't know this until beating the game, so I was left frustrated by this from time to time.
In dungeons, there are a lot of optional areas you can go to and optional enemies you can fight, which often drop items that you could have skipped otherwise. Your human party members all have levels and stats (Strength, Magic, Vitality, Speed etc.) that can level up as you gain XP. You can also gain 'Incense' items that let you increase stats by one as well, which are often hidden in dungeons at random points. Likewise, other items are hidden as well, like Memory Boards, which you need to give to a character called Steven (who looks like the late Stephen Hawking) to be able to hold more demons in your computer, something that is easily missable.
Your main task though is to find specific characters / items / bosses in dungeons to progress the story. As you navigate the dungeons, you are thrown into random encounters every few steps and engage in battle. First, a quick rant on the encounters. Forget what you know about random encounters in other retro JRPGs. This game is the KING of them. It is ridiculous. Every couple steps you take, a random encounter pops up. Escape, and you are thrown back a couple steps, only to take those steps forward again and get into another random encounter. Some dungeons have a lot of encounters, and some dungeons have even more. It is the #1 thing that keeps me from giving this an otherwise easy "Recommended" seal, because it is that ridiculous.
It helps though that the battle system is relatively fun. You can use physical attacks (sword, gun) with your main character, magic attacks with the other Hero characters and demons that you summon and the assortment of elemental, buff, debuff and ailment attacks that are common in the Megami Tensei series. This game doesn't have the Press-Turn system yet (that gets introduced with SMT III), which is a shame, but it was enjoyable regardless. That said, the high encounter rate and the low XP you get relative to the length of normal fights made me escape a lot of them. Especially around the halfway mark, you get so much XP from frequent boss fights that it didn't make much sense to me to put myself through all of these. Boss fights didn't turn out to be so bad either.
Demon negotiations and fusing is present in this game as well. Obviously, it is much more basic here then in future iterations, but it is just as fun to fuse demons here. Negotiations weren't quite as fun, as most would fail. There are few answers you can give and they appeared to be random, as the same demon would react differently to the same answer at times. Failing didn't always have any negative consequences, but often enough it would allow the demon to get the first hit in.
Overall, the game's loop is fun enough to push you through the game, at least in my opinion, and what will make you want to stick around is its incredible atmosphere and unique story presentation for its time. The Shin Megami Tensei feel is very much present in this game.
Apart from the atmosphere, the other highlight of this game to me was the soundtrack. The soundtrack is the best on the Super Famicom I've heard so far (by far) and likely among the best to ever be released for the console. What Tsukasa Masuko achieved on the Super Famicom is incredible. Pretty much all tracks did a great job of capturing the mood, the battle theme is kick-ass, the Ginza track is an instant classic and the boss theme always had me alert that serious shit was going down.
If you like the Shin Megami Tensei series and are OK with the lack of QoL features present (or not present) in retro RPGs, and if you think you can live with the high encounter rate (emulating allows you to fast-forward, which helps move things along quicker), then this is definitely a game I can recommend to you. Otherwise, probably not, though I myself am very glad to have played this and am looking very much forward to the sequel that released in 1994.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
Engaging apocalyptic story with multiple memorable moments
Three different route options which impact the ending and your allegiance with characters
Fittingly depressing scenario that adds to the overall atmosphere
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
Addicting gameplay loop of exploring, battling and demon negotiation & fusing
Lots of strategic choice in battle
Navigating dungeons can become confusing
Encounter rate is RIDICULOUSLY high. Think of high it could be for the entire game, double that number, and that's how many encounters a dungeon has
Demon negotiations can become frustrating, as you fail most of the time
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
No voice acting
Easily one of the best soundtracks on the Super Famicom, simply amazing
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10
Dark and atmospheric visual style
Lots of unique demons with varied designs
You spend most of the game staring at texture-less wall tiles
Dungeons graphically only distinguish themselves through color of the tiles
Easy to get lost / be forced to open the map due to sometimes confusing, similarly designed areas
Few animations, majority of battles and cut scenes play out with quasi-still sprites on-screen
ATMOSPHERE | 9/10
Incredibly atmospheric in terms of visual style, soundtrack and overall theme
Staring at pretty much the same wall tiles for most of the game does take its toll on immersion
CONTENT | 7/10
30-40 hours to beat
Many mandatory and more than a couple optional dungeons and bosses
Plenty of demons to fuse and battle
Most dungeons have no texture and look very similar
Encounter rate should have been lowered, even if that would have shaved off 5-10 hours off the game's overall length
The game makes up for that with three routes you can take, which adds replayability
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10
Leveling up to get stronger, face bigger challenges and be able to fuse better demons is a fun loop
Around the half-way mark, most enemy encounters can be skipped, as the time spent for the XP gain is not worth it due to the high number of bosses that give you a lot of XP
Encounter rate didn't have to be so high as a result
Some dungeons are hard to navigate and some have an annoying "fog" gimmick that makes this even worse
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
Atlus imprinted their DNA into this game so well that it sticks out all these years later
The first SMT game I'd deem approachable for non-hardcore RPG fans
Very unique in terms of theme (religious themes, use of Norse mythology etc.) and demon fusion system compared to pretty much every RPG out there at the time, especially on the Super Famicom
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
A ton of replayability thanks to three routes you can take
Your alignment impacts gameplay in a lot of ways as well
High encounter rate is the one problem that makes replaying the game less appealing
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Worked well at all times
OVERALL | 78/100
(This is the 77th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
2019
I jumped into Yakuza 4 straight after Yakuza 3 but that might have been a mistake since I'm going abroad for 6 months and didn't have much time left to finish Yakuza 4 before I leave. This means I bypassed most of the content outside of the main story and the review will mainly be focused on that. Though even if you just focus on the story here, you will constantly be shown the type of side content that is available, such as the hostess makeover minigame that was introduced in Yakuza 3, a similar make-a-fighter minigame, and a bunch of stuff that the series introduced in previous entries.
As far as the main story goes, Yakuza 4 has 4 main characters who each have 4 chapters focused on their part in the overall plot before it all culminates in a final chapter. The 4 main characters all have distinct personalities that succeed in making them all stand out. You got the charismatic Shun Akiyama who stole the show for me, but you also got his polar opposite in the stoic Taiga Saejima. I thought I'd go over each of the characters before I give my thoughts on the rest of the game overall.
I do want to say that I had mixed feelings about 4 main characters throughout. Yakuza 0 had 2 and remains my favorite Yakuza game, so I have nothing against multiple protagonists, but 4 felt like it took away from the connection you get to the character and the satisfying feeling of upgrading your character and seeing how he continues to get stronger. Here, by the time a character gains enough skills to make fights more interesting, you switch to the next protagonist. That said, side content and their own parts in the main story do offer plenty of time with each character to allow them to leave an impact, I'd just prefer a game with 2 protagonists who you switch between a la Yakuza 0, or just one character. (And yes, I do realize that Yakuza 5 has 5 protagonists. Let's see how that goes.)
Shun Akiyama: The game starts with him and his personality takes center stage pretty much off the bat. His mannerisms, voice acting and overall character made his chapters go by really quick, and I find both his backstory and the whole Sky Finance business fascinating. His fighting style is also probably my favorite in the game. Don't know the name of it but he's mainly using kicks during combat and it was a fun way to mix it up.
Taiga Saejima: Very dark character with some very memorable moments (some positively, some really negatively (you'll know when you see it). Hated his fighting style and his fights because the balancing is pretty messed up (Saito battle I'm looking at you), and he doesn't really ever become satisfying to play with. Even outside of combat, exploration with him was a horrible time because of all the police everywhere.
Masayoshi Tanimura: An overly confident police officer who doesn't shy away from breaking the rules at times. Definitely ended up being a lot more interesting character wise than I expected going in, and his parry-heavy combat style lets you pull off some of the coolest combos for sure, though his final boss fight was the biggest AIDS-inducing fight of my life, especially since I went in with just one healing item like a stupid person.
Kazuma Kiryu: His part was pretty short overall but solid as expected. I understand why they decided to add more protagonists to be able to tell stories differently, and I think that was a good call but I love Kiryu, so playing as him longer would have been what I'd have preferred.
The story in the game overall has some strong and some weak parts. For one, there is a saying called "too many cooks in a kitchen", and I think too many antagonists in a story applies here. I laughed out loud at the number of plot twists the story through at me, which I think indicates that there were too many. It's not very well written overall but rather felt like a guilty pleasure type story, and reminded me even more of a soap opera than Yakuza stories can tend to feel like. Not a terrible thing, because the protagonists are great overall and many of the antagonists and their parts in the story were well explained, but then you got guys like Daigo who feels like he was added in last second and some other names who have some odd moments that are questionable in terms of their logic. Then there are the countless "what are the odds?" moments where events occur way too perfectly for the story to progress in a certain direction, especially involving Kiryu. I can live with a few of these but I thought the game overdid it. But overall, the story had many badass moments involving badass characters and even if it wasn't well written at all times, that alone was satisfying to watch unfold. A final negative note for me was, clearly due to budgetary issues, the fact that so many key cinematic moments were interrupted and conversations ended up happening unvoiced outside of cutscenes. It does take something away from them and I wish we could have gotten half an hour's worth of additional cutscenes at least.
The combat felt improved from Yakuza 3 but also worse in some ways. Probably the most frustrating I got at a Yakuza game ever, and continuously so. Boss fights were frustrating, sure, but there were also too many mini-bosses who pissed me off. One big issue for me was that combos never worked with some of these guys because they'd just hit you with an unblockable attack to end the combo. Or that they just wouldn't get knocked down. Another big issue was that you could so easily be stunlocked. Often it took one hit and you were unable to move for 3-5 seconds. Why?? Or even worse, every group you fight has that one cunt who grabs you. Sometimes, there were even 2 or 3 of those, so you'd escape one grapple to walk right into the next with no way to avoid it. It all culminated in the final boss fight, which, until you figure out to do it in one very specific way, I'm calling it now, is just the worst thing to happen to the Yakuza series. You got the antagonist and 10 of his henchman in the way. The antagonist shoots you with his pistol and the only way to avoid them is to grab enemies and attack them that way. Going straight at the antagonist doesn't work because there are 3 guys with knives who will just stab at you incessantly and you'll actually not even see your character in the sea of enemies sometimes. Trying to input commands and being unable to do anything is so frustrating, holy moly. But there is less guarding 99% of hits (now it's 50% guarding, 49% dodging) compared to Yakuza 3 at least.
Overall, Yakuza 4 has its unique strengths and weaknesses. I liked the story and its bad parts made me laugh more than annoyed, plus the protagonists are great additions to the overall story of the series. The combat has some great parts but also some of the worst in the series (from 0 to 4), at least in my opinion. The soundtrack is great and includes some absolute bangers (Receive and Bite You, For Faith, Material Delights etc.). If you're a fan of Yakuza, the game is great and I enjoyed it, but I'd say it's the weakest of the bunch for me when you combine everything.
As far as the main story goes, Yakuza 4 has 4 main characters who each have 4 chapters focused on their part in the overall plot before it all culminates in a final chapter. The 4 main characters all have distinct personalities that succeed in making them all stand out. You got the charismatic Shun Akiyama who stole the show for me, but you also got his polar opposite in the stoic Taiga Saejima. I thought I'd go over each of the characters before I give my thoughts on the rest of the game overall.
I do want to say that I had mixed feelings about 4 main characters throughout. Yakuza 0 had 2 and remains my favorite Yakuza game, so I have nothing against multiple protagonists, but 4 felt like it took away from the connection you get to the character and the satisfying feeling of upgrading your character and seeing how he continues to get stronger. Here, by the time a character gains enough skills to make fights more interesting, you switch to the next protagonist. That said, side content and their own parts in the main story do offer plenty of time with each character to allow them to leave an impact, I'd just prefer a game with 2 protagonists who you switch between a la Yakuza 0, or just one character. (And yes, I do realize that Yakuza 5 has 5 protagonists. Let's see how that goes.)
Shun Akiyama: The game starts with him and his personality takes center stage pretty much off the bat. His mannerisms, voice acting and overall character made his chapters go by really quick, and I find both his backstory and the whole Sky Finance business fascinating. His fighting style is also probably my favorite in the game. Don't know the name of it but he's mainly using kicks during combat and it was a fun way to mix it up.
Taiga Saejima: Very dark character with some very memorable moments (some positively, some really negatively (you'll know when you see it). Hated his fighting style and his fights because the balancing is pretty messed up (Saito battle I'm looking at you), and he doesn't really ever become satisfying to play with. Even outside of combat, exploration with him was a horrible time because of all the police everywhere.
Masayoshi Tanimura: An overly confident police officer who doesn't shy away from breaking the rules at times. Definitely ended up being a lot more interesting character wise than I expected going in, and his parry-heavy combat style lets you pull off some of the coolest combos for sure, though his final boss fight was the biggest AIDS-inducing fight of my life, especially since I went in with just one healing item like a stupid person.
Kazuma Kiryu: His part was pretty short overall but solid as expected. I understand why they decided to add more protagonists to be able to tell stories differently, and I think that was a good call but I love Kiryu, so playing as him longer would have been what I'd have preferred.
The story in the game overall has some strong and some weak parts. For one, there is a saying called "too many cooks in a kitchen", and I think too many antagonists in a story applies here. I laughed out loud at the number of plot twists the story through at me, which I think indicates that there were too many. It's not very well written overall but rather felt like a guilty pleasure type story, and reminded me even more of a soap opera than Yakuza stories can tend to feel like. Not a terrible thing, because the protagonists are great overall and many of the antagonists and their parts in the story were well explained, but then you got guys like Daigo who feels like he was added in last second and some other names who have some odd moments that are questionable in terms of their logic. Then there are the countless "what are the odds?" moments where events occur way too perfectly for the story to progress in a certain direction, especially involving Kiryu. I can live with a few of these but I thought the game overdid it. But overall, the story had many badass moments involving badass characters and even if it wasn't well written at all times, that alone was satisfying to watch unfold. A final negative note for me was, clearly due to budgetary issues, the fact that so many key cinematic moments were interrupted and conversations ended up happening unvoiced outside of cutscenes. It does take something away from them and I wish we could have gotten half an hour's worth of additional cutscenes at least.
The combat felt improved from Yakuza 3 but also worse in some ways. Probably the most frustrating I got at a Yakuza game ever, and continuously so. Boss fights were frustrating, sure, but there were also too many mini-bosses who pissed me off. One big issue for me was that combos never worked with some of these guys because they'd just hit you with an unblockable attack to end the combo. Or that they just wouldn't get knocked down. Another big issue was that you could so easily be stunlocked. Often it took one hit and you were unable to move for 3-5 seconds. Why?? Or even worse, every group you fight has that one cunt who grabs you. Sometimes, there were even 2 or 3 of those, so you'd escape one grapple to walk right into the next with no way to avoid it. It all culminated in the final boss fight, which, until you figure out to do it in one very specific way, I'm calling it now, is just the worst thing to happen to the Yakuza series. You got the antagonist and 10 of his henchman in the way. The antagonist shoots you with his pistol and the only way to avoid them is to grab enemies and attack them that way. Going straight at the antagonist doesn't work because there are 3 guys with knives who will just stab at you incessantly and you'll actually not even see your character in the sea of enemies sometimes. Trying to input commands and being unable to do anything is so frustrating, holy moly. But there is less guarding 99% of hits (now it's 50% guarding, 49% dodging) compared to Yakuza 3 at least.
Overall, Yakuza 4 has its unique strengths and weaknesses. I liked the story and its bad parts made me laugh more than annoyed, plus the protagonists are great additions to the overall story of the series. The combat has some great parts but also some of the worst in the series (from 0 to 4), at least in my opinion. The soundtrack is great and includes some absolute bangers (Receive and Bite You, For Faith, Material Delights etc.). If you're a fan of Yakuza, the game is great and I enjoyed it, but I'd say it's the weakest of the bunch for me when you combine everything.