I don't often share information about myself online, but I think the fact that I'm a musician is relevant to my thoughts here. Most musicians who play an important rhythmic role (conductors, drummers, etc.) all keep a mental list of songs they are intimately familiar with at every tempo for reference's sake; for example, if I need to lead something that I know is at 80 beats per minute, I play a couple of bars of Cbat in my head before I start. Well, the beats here are so earwormingly catchy that I've scratched "120bpm - Stars and Stripes Forever" out of my mind palace and replaced it with "Patapon".

Patapon is one of those games that just works - like the rare piece of music where you don't know if the composer came up with the melody or the chords first (because that melody only makes sense with that specific harmony and vice versa, and both of those only make sense with that specific rhythm), each one of Patapon's mishmash of genres somehow comes together. Part rhythm game and part strategy game with a dash of RPG and town-builder sim thrown in, the player is cast as the god of the Patapon tribe, issuing commands to its soldiers in the form of 4-beat button commands. The need to relentlessly sound the drums without skipping a beat in order for the army to operate at full effectiveness elevates Patapon above its individual genres - rather than just being about issuing the right commands or following the right rhythms, this is a game about multitasking and planning ahead. Since the Patapons essentially follow your commands on a 4-beat lag, you need to read the battlefield situation (unit positioning and things like wind direction), decide what to do, then input the right button combination while thinking 2-4 seconds into the future and taking care not to skip any beats. It's amazingly engaging! The town building and RPG elements also have an important role here, allowing players to gradually unlock and access a variety of unit and equipment types which allow for different playstyles.

I have to say that Patapon appealed to me despite me generally not being a big fan of its main genres. As someone who doesn't enjoy the busywork of strategy games, Patapon's unique mechanics allowed me to issue more general commands and not get caught up in micromanagement, without being boring. And (sorry to brag a bit) as someone who can play lots of stuff by ear and therefore doesn't really see much of a point in most rhythm games, Patapon engaged me by having its rhythm mechanics as a tactical means to an end, rather than simply being "press buttons to play song".

Really, the only reason I'm not rating this higher is that there are certain things that could be more refined (it's pretty easy to get screwed by some enemy attacks that simply give you no time to react, the game doesn't always communicate how you can improve, the movements of some Patapons are ever so slightly de-sycned from the beat so as to be misleading, the minigames lack variety), and I know there are a couple of sequels which I'm really hoping will address those issues.

But this is one of the gaming highlights of the year for me. It's brilliant, it's unique, and it's going to be playing in my head for quite some time.

Mega Man X is like the Chrono Trigger of '90s action platformers; genre-transcendingly good by virtue of having great presentation, excelling at everything it does with no notable weak points, and being extremely welcoming to novices - it feels like what you would get if you eugenically bred platformers for a hundred generations. As with Chrono Trigger, there are some who would see its relatively low difficulty as a weak point, and its extreme polish as sterility; however, it's really hard to argue with how refined and slick the entire experience is. The hidden items and power-ups are rewarding to find, and the levels are short enough that backtracking through them rarely feels like a chore. The controls are smooth, intuitive, and satisfying (bar one little niggle I'll get into later). The bosses have their own unique gimmicks and a wide repertoire of moves, but never feel unfair because you always fight them in a large enough space that their attacks don't "gotcha" you out of nowhere. I know that the difficulty curve works from experience; this was one of the first games I completed (sans cheats) as a kid because it was so good at teaching and motivating me to get better that I went from trundling along and DPS-racing every enemy I came across to flying past obstacles while holding down my charge shot within a few days of picking it up.

Some of the negatives:
- The four Sigma stages sagged a little, with their rehashed bosses and lack of secrets or power-ups to discover making them feel like padding
- The one negative on the controls was the fact that double-tapping left or right would cause X to dash; given that some bosses require careful adjustment of positioning through little 'baby steps', it felt way too easy to accidentally dash straight into an oncoming attack. I wish there were a way to disable this in the options and have the dash tied only to a button.
- Earlier games in the Mega Man series felt a bit railroady in terms of needing you to have the exact right weapon in order to hit a boss' weakpoint; I feel like MMX occupies the other extreme, where you can play nearly the entire game with the buster only and all the cool weapons you acquire being heavily situational. They're super cool, but the low difficulty means that you're never really incentivized to get really familiar with their use.

That said... if the above points are the worst thing about your game, you did an exceptional job. This was a formative experience in my video gaming life and a must-play for anyone at all interested in this genre.

A simple way to sum it up is to say that Breath of Death VII is a proof-of-concept/demo of Cthulhu Saves the World; it's an extremely short and no-frills outing whose chief purpose seems to be to take the engine and mechanics of CSTW out for a test drive. And as someone who really liked CSTW's spin on traditional JRPG mechanics, Breath of Death plays pretty much the same, which is not a bad thing at all! It also has the same irreverent and scattergun approach to humor, some of it being clever (the MC being a silent protagonist because he doesn't have a tongue), some of it worth a chuckle or two (a French zombie who periodically yells "LE BRAINS!" mid-conversation), and some of it falling flat.

As to be expected, this game is slightly less refined in pretty much every way that counts - the exploration not as engaging, the game balance and difficulty curve slightly wonkier, the presentation not as slick, and the game too short in order to fully explore the mechanics and abilities to their full potential.

And that's all forgivable given this game's place in Zeboyd's resume as a first RPG outing, and it would be churlish of me to expect more from something I essentially got for a dollar. However, on further thought, I actually wish that this game switched places with Cthulhu Saves the World - CSTW's silly premise would have worked better as a test-drive, and Breath of Death would actually have made a better fully-fleshed-out game! It has a far more interesting setting, with vampires, zombies, and ghosts becoming the dominant species on Earth following cataclysmic nuclear war; a setting that is more or less wasted given the near-total absence of any kind of worldbuilding or anything, really, to differentiate this postapocalyptic undead society from any other medieval game. There is even a decent late-game twist that ties directly into the setting, that could have been played for drama and poignancy had the writing actually been more than an excuse-plot with one-note humor.

It's a very decent game for what it is and led to far bigger and better successes for its dev team... but if any of them are reading this, I think a remake would kick all kinds of ass! The setting deserves better.