(finished this a week ago and have not been able to write my thoughts then, so keep in mind that my onions are rotten!)

played this on the 3 heart challenge this time, which is something i have always wanted to do! and bow howdy it was pretty tough in some places! the issue i always have with 3 heart challenges in games like this is that there is no reason to search and explore, or at least limited reason, as you can't take all the rewards. everytime i play i notice this because it means one of the fun aspects of a game like ocarina of time is not readily available! i have tried not to let that - or the difficulty of a 3 heart challenge - influence my feelings TOO much. and to be honest, the difficulty wasnt that much of a problem most of the time! the game provides you with enough hearts casually that you can always be stocked full of them when you're in a tight spot, and that with bottled fairies and the defence increase before ganon make it honestly not too difficult! there were a couple of particularly frustrating parts. first of all, any stalfos encounter was hard, but the double stalfos encounters were damn near impossible. i dont remember them being too tough in the regular game but i can imagine getting my ass whooped by them even with 7 or 8 hearts, let alone. the most fun stalfos encounter was in the shadow temple where two attack you on the ship. i could not, for the life of me, find any hearts after the ship, so going into Bongo Bongo I NEEDED to be on full health, which meant not getting by stalfos on the boat. the ideal strategy was to not fight, but stun with deku nuts and avoid. took me multiple tries lmao, but better than fighting! the other hard bit in particular was volvagia. holy fuck. he made me so fucking mad dude, although my freezer malfunctioning during this fight also contributed to my foul mood. it never got as difficult as it was with volvagia. his fire breath and hair whip attacks would kill me instantly, taking up valuable fairies or giving me the sweet game over. and to top it off, if he hit you with his hair whip (and killed you anyway) then he would go back in the lava so i couldnt even hit him! made the fight last very very long. the relief on killing volvagia was palpable, let me tell you.

generally speaking though i still think most of this game holds up really, really well. it doesnt really have a story to speak of but it does have a vibe, and that vibe is particularly strong when playing as young link. i think this is the best part of the game because it's chilled out and you get to see all these locations for the first time when theyre full of life. and then you leave Market, or Goron City, or Zora's Domain, and you're a lonely little boy in a big world! the vibe is truly immaculate. it is perfectly captured in the moment saria says goodbye to you in the lost woods, and all youve got is the the noise of the woods to accompany it. chef's kiss. as for gameplay, swordplay is not really the game's strongsuit. i found myself having to swing the sword like 10 times to hit pots haha (which might say more about me) but also most fights are just "wait for the weakspot to appear" which isnt fun. https://bit.ly/3gdTVOa sums up the problems with the fighting better than i can. otherwise most items are pretty fun to use, if a bit gimmicky. i think the dungeons are mostly really good (dodongo's cavern is probably my favourite, with a shout out to the short ice cavern) but most of them are difficult in an artificial way where they are totally labrynthian and hard to navigate. the puzzles are never heard, but going "where the fuck is the one room i havent explored to find the key" is pretty frustrating! i found this true of specifically Inside Jabu Jabu's Belly, The Forest Temple, and The Water Temple. but oh well! isnt the graphical thing they do on the walls cool, where its like theyre wet and theres an animation that just runs down them? ive never seen that in any other game really! the wallet system is so weird and interesting in this too, because the game knows youre almost always capped on ruppees so expensive stuff is not really rare, but you need extra walletspace! but then why constantly reward you with ruppees? but if they DIDNT constantly give you ruppees then youd never be capped and youd not need the extra walletspace! this is NOT a part of the game that needs as much examinaing as i am giving it

I like Ocarina of Time quite a lot! it's crazy to think playing a game without moving the camera with an analog stick was just... normal. but you get on with it and dont even notice at the end of the day!

beat NEO Spamptom on my first try dude nice

another very solid piece of writing and work from toby fox. always very taken with how good a mystery builder toby fox is. i think of gaster, and now this "knight" and how little we know about them and how intriguing they are. he knows the perfect place to cut the music and just have it be dark, a nd serious, and silent

its good shit

more often than not when a final fantasy game's mechanics get changed up for something a bit more experimental it doesnt work. final fantasy 8 is no exception lmao
playing this game was a fucking nightmare. girlfriends make us strong, and thats the core mechanic of this game. however junctioning them, magic, and abilities, and having to switch them back and forth between forced party members is such a tedious pain in the ass. there are so many times in this game where its like "change to zell and his gang" for two fights then it switches you back to squall and his gang, and it takes multiple minutes everytime to switch over all my GFs!!! i'm not leaving GFs and magic on characters im not using bc i'm just weaker for it with my main team! even in the final battle its not like you actually NEED everyone, you just let the people you dont want for the fight die so you can use the actual good characters (Squall, Irvine, and Rinoa). on the magic front of things, drawing it from draw points and monsters is fun in theory but just sucks the fun out of the game if you want to play optimally you will draw all the valuable spells 99 times from every enemy. this makes spell quantities pointless, but again, youd be stupid not to do this because it's just the optimal and easy thing to do. and it takes ages! leveling up in this game is basically pointless because the stat ups are minimal, but they can be worth it when you have GF abilities like STR and HP Bonus on your best boy Irvine Kinneas. However when the game deems Squall too high levelled then the amount of XP you get from battles dramastically decreases... for everyone. so if Squall is overlevelled, NO one can level up anymore. tbh I didnt check BUT i'm pretty sure you also have to take Squall with you so you cant get out of this... maybe i'm wrong but i will not be playing this game again to find out! also the game kinda wants to level its enemies with the party; this isnt necessarily a bad thing, but the devs decided that enemies of different level-tiers drop different loot. this means it can be very easy to obtain certain materials from enemies in the early game, but once you level up a bit too much some items because borderline impossible to get your hands on. this SUCKS!!!!!!!!! i could go on and on about all the weird gameplay decisions they made in this game that make it frustrating and not fun a lot of the time, but the gameplay experience overall wasnt TERRIBLE it was just really, really annoying at the worst of times, and reminiscent of better final fantasys at the best of times.

all of that being said, the story in this game is the thing that kept me going. i am, famously, an FF7 fanboy which i love to death. i think that games story is just like, the bee's knees. i love its down-to-earth human action, its lack of divine intervention, its relatable anti-capitalist pro environment message, i Love it. this game leans more into anime asthetics to tell a more personable story about, essentially, teenagers falling in love with themselves, and then other people. its cute! its good even! squall is genuinely insufferable for a really long time, but his inner monologue throughout the game really does a lot to explain why he is the asshole he is. the game even lets you choose how much you want to play into with dialogue options. i didnt want to play squall in anyway other than how i saw him; an asshole; so for a lot of the game i always picked the dickhead options like "whatever" and "shut up" etc etc. but as the game progresses and squall is confronted with love and earnest attempts to open him up, i felt the need to respond in kind, and i enjoyed that i could allow squall to be more open with his friends and be honestt. the simple character arc over 40 hours genuinely works very well! i dont necessarily like all of the characters (sorry selphie) but there's a lot of good stuff in here. the world is more explicitally fantasy/sci-fi and less relatable. Midgar and Shinra's politics in FF7 are much more laid out the state of people in the world made clearer, but in FF8 there's conflict as a plot device that doesnt apply to the characters and its fine. this game also has the interesting idea of having an alternative storyline playing out, with Laguna Loire, Kiros, and Ward. dude, i love Laguna. he's such a himbo. i like his battle theme, i like how handsome he is. I like how he is the polar opposite to Squall. it's a really nice idea! the gameplay doesnt quite compliment it really; i feel like it would have worked better with FF7's materia system where the other party have their own stash of stuff and you dont need to worry about rejunctioning them. then when the characters finally rendevous maybe you can even have them join up for one fun bossfight or something! still, a lot of good and fun story stuff. i like the Shumi, the Moomba, Fisherman's Horizons was fun. I wish there was a bit more with Seifer. I like how the world is populated with goofy, funny characters that Squall just has to react to. i love the idea of stone-hearted Squall looking at Shumi building a statue, KNOWING he needs to assassinate the sorceress, and just going "I could help them build a statue" for no reason. i love that; its great

so thats final fantasy 8. its pretty weird. if it had better gameplay mechanics i probably WOULD play this again, but as it stands, i dont want to go through that shit again bc it suuuuucks. Irvine Kinneas best boy forever; moomba OUT

this game has a pretty good GBA port (and a weird DS remake where FuSoYa's stats go DOWN on a level up! but we'll talk about that LATER) and so this version of the game isnt SUPER necessary? it cuts out the developer's room in the dwarven castle which is mondo sad, and also doesnt have the optional stuff at the end of the game (including choosing your party for the final dungeon)... furthermore, and this is both a good and bad thing, this version is markedly easier than the others. the XP requirements for leveling up are less so just by playing the game you level up faster. this was probably due to the fact that you can run diagonally now, meaning you'll get less random encounters. still, it felt a bit too much. bosses i remember struggling against once upon a time didnt mean dick to me here. this includes Lugae and his frankenstein freak, i think Golbez in the dwarven castle, and uh, zeromus? still it was nice to play it again! FF4 pisses me off bc of the low accuracy mages have and that part in the story where you have three fucking wizards with you. also dark knight cecil needed a longer duration in the story!!!

conclusion? kain in the after years is sexy BEFORE he gets paladinised. play FF6 instead

miitopia's not a perfect game by any means, and you have to be willing to put up with silly JRPG stuff and backtracky stuff (although, funnily enough, there's no need to grind if you dont want to which is nice) but i love this game so much. i LOVE miis. i love them so much. i love my little guy, KJH is his name. i made him in january 2007 shortly after the nintendo wii came out. in that time, i have made ONE edit to KJH, which was to make his head slightly smaller. that's it. he's the same otherwise. anygame that i get to see my silly little boy having fun is a game i'm going to love. and this game has so many ways of having fun! the classes are all very varied and have lots of fun aspects too them (some more than others, sorry Tank) and the fact that miis play every single NPC is so great! being able to put anyone you want in is so much fun! this game is just truly charming if you enjoy the gameplay involved. i really, really love it so much. there's some annoying stuff about how certain classes get slightly worse when they level up? like when the Cat starts stealing food instead of attacking its just a wasted turn! some personalities are just better than others (Stubborn and Cool are better than Laidback and Airheaded for example) and there could be MORE to do in the towns too, for the fact that after the story there's almost no reason to ever return to them. more opportunities to actually run around and talk to people, maybe lean more into the JRPG and actually buy stuff from each town's stores? that could be fun! but idk! gimme a sequel!!!!

ive only played 4 and 8 at this point, and bc of the village-to-castle vibes of 8 i thought itd be similar to 4. and it kind of was! i played on controller for that reason, which was kind of a mistake actually, bc it being first person meant that shooting wouldve just been easier with a mouse. really good fun still though! i think for having inventory management stuff it gives you items all the time, so either i did a really good job managing my shit (doubt) or it gives you too much stuff. guessing the latter. the characters are pretty fun this time around too! :)