Coda clear | Playtime: 709h

All the guild card awards and the treasures done

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Clunky and often obtuse game, took a bit to get used after coming from the latest entries.

As with every Monster Hunter title, it's extremely helpful to consult online resources for monster weaknesses, gathering points, etc. Perhaps even more so in this one.

After passing the initial wall that is the early low rank (the lack of money and the paradigm shift make it really hard to even craft an armor before you start fighting monsters), the game is surprisingly good, although it can be quite frustrating from time to time too. I certainly won't be missing the awful camera near walls or F&H 9 any time soon.

Played all the way through with another player, except the elder quests obviously, and it was a pretty good experience. We sometimes struggled with the nasty monsters (e.g. black gravios and black blos farming) and wished we were 4 players instead, but the game is perfectly doable at 2 players. Solo, on the other hand... I'm sure there will be quests, especially urgent end game, where you'll want to rip your hair out.

For a first try, they nailed a lot of things. The game loop is slightly different from the later titles, and I wouldn't have a good time if I had to decide which one I like more. Basically, because the item storage is very limited, you can't store a lot of honey and raw meat, which results in doing some gathering between hunts. This is a very different pace from the newer titles which are a lot more hunt-focused, with some early game gathering.

It's clear the weapons need more polish here. The Great Sword lacks any charge attack whatsoever and as a consequence is really hard to use, and some of the slower weapons like the lance and hammer, while good, suffer from the hyper aggressiveness the berserk small monsters have. Gunners are also shafted here because the ammunition takes the precious slots of your item bag.

The armor crafting system is also nuts. With every piece asking for the monster's rare material, and the rath species having their very own rare materials (!), it'll take a serious amount of time to even make your first G rank armor set. I appreciate the simplicity of not having slots nor armor upgrades, it was a fresh change of pace from other games, even if this makes armor pieces obsolete sooner/lowers your defense more than necessary.

Despite the rough edges, Monster Hunter Freedom still packs a lot of charm, and one thing is clear: Kokoto will live forever in my heart.

All achievements | Score: 26875

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The visuals and the chiptune music are appealing, and that's what drew me initially to this.

Unfortunately, the game has little enemy variety with similar enemy formations and the same boss after each wave.

On top of that, it has poor controls that feel as if you were sliding on ice while moving, and a level-up gimmick that seems to do nothing at all until you get a shoot upgrade at max level.

Look elsewhere, there are plenty of better games out there.

Cleared the relevant achievements (aka the 10M run)

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I didn't have the best experience with this one.

The visuals and music are interesting with that strong synthwave theme, and the game controls are responsive and it plays fine. It's gimmick is that the levels are generated randomly and change daily. This helps keeping the game fresh, but also the random generation exposes itself wide open at the 7-8M score mark, where the hazards become so obnoxious that you are pretty much forced to move at snail pace, using the occasional ramp to score in ten or twenty thousand points at a time, thus turning the late game into a slog.

Unfortunately, at the time I've played this game, it is half broken and keeps freezing all the time after you restart while playing the two main competitive modes: Top Dog and Hardcore. The first mode isn't really much of an issue because you don't die too frequently, but the second one is actually unplayable.

The rest of the modes are seemingly working fine, aside from the occasional lag spike.

The textless menus are funny the first time you see them, but there are too many options and it's often unclear what they do or mean.

Other than that, it's a fun experience for the most part, but you can and will lose a run regardless of your extra lives if you didn't predict that there would be a slope nearby, so it can get frustrating fast if you try to score high since the runs are super long (or maybe I just don't know how to score).

All in all, it's an okay-ish free game, but still needs quite a bit of polish.

Found all collectibles (I think).

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Pure, raw fun.

The controls take a bit to click, but when they do, it's a really fun time.

Pretty cool demo. Lasts enough to give a good feeling of the game while leaving you eager for more.

3000CC run. May try clearing a 1CC if I figure out how to lower the movement sensitivity.

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Almost boss rush-style shmup whose main gimmick is that it controls entirely with the mouse.

This allows for some crazy patterns that require really fast movement and you wouldn't see in most other games.

The controls though aren't that great; The movement is way too sensitive for the precision that some patterns demand. The game gives you a million of extends, but still it doesn't feel that good to play...

Killed HR3 Fatalis in 2 player co-op. If that isn't a milestone I don't know what else could be.

Crimson next.

We destroyed Ashen Lao

All achievements

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Bastard child between Super Hexagon and Undyne Undertale.

The game itself is fine, featuring cool music and visuals. But it's rather short with only 4 difficulty levels: 2 on the easier side, and the other 2 on the harder side.

Heavily recommended to turn off the background animations if you don't like seizures.

This game is also free with the "steamdb trick", so no excuse to give it a quick shot if you are into reflex games.

Cleared pantheon 5 with all bindings.

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Greatness all the way through ever since you fall into the King's Pass until the credits roll.

Visuals, music, gameplay... everything is on point here, and excluding a couple of dream bosses, there's not a lot of bad stuff I can say about this game.

Heck, even grinding a run of the boss rush with all the bindings enabled was a lot of fun. This is most likely a case of stockholm, but I'm okay with that.

Also the randomizer mod cranks hollow knight's replayability value to eleven.

All achievements | Ain Soph Aur mode cleared

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That's a great shmup right here.

An arcade run, which is around 15 minutes long, throws everything the game has to offer since the very first second.

You know how a lot of times in shmups, you have to go through the first 2 sleeper stages before the game gets serious on stage 3? Not the case here! It's impossible to get bored while playing Gundemonium.

There's quite the scoring toys in the game too

Got all the achievements

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GundeadliGne is a mythical creature in the form of an horizontal shmup where you can turn around.

The particular release (Steam) that I played has a really good soundtrack, and plays really well as with the other platine titles.

As per the game's difficulty, it's a bit weird:
The three characters are bizarrely spread in terms of balance. Eryth seems to be the weakest by far, at least from what I played with her. Elixirel is pretty strong in comparison, with a wide laser shot that deals fairly good damage and incidentally doesn't let you see the enemy bullets, and the ability to shoot both sides when fast tapping the shoot button. Finally, Nagi is actually broken, able to cheese the hardest difficulty as if it was nothing.

When it comes to the difficulty modes, playing on anything higher than Standard will be a serious challenge, as you stop receiving extends after defeating the bosses. Getting extra hearts via the Alter Breaks is tricky regardless of the difficulty though.

As far as secondary game modes go, Eternal Babel mode exists and Demonic Challenge is a fun excuse to revisit and master the bosses. The game also features online Co-Op, which sounds enticing but unfortunately I couldn't try, given how niche this game is and how far of the release date I played it.

All in all, it's a fine game by itself, but the weakest of the trilogy by a lot.

All achievements

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This game is straight up amazing.

It's a gimmicky shmup that plays like nothing I've played before.

The gimmick is that you have to kamikaze against the bosses before they timeout you, or you'll lose immediately. The stage 0 boss acts as a tutorial and is there to make you learn this the hard way if you didn't read the manual.

To balance the need for sacrificing your own extends, the game gives you a lot of them, and this turns Hitogata Happa into a management game at the highest difficulties.

The different characters are all very fun to play as and every single one of them has its own use. They are also quite well thought out and there's not one that I'd say it's particularly strong compared to others, as the strongest ones on paper usually have at least one aspect where they pale against others (platina for example, while being amazing for stages, is terrible at bosses and is quite expensive as well).

There's some extra modes which are fine and help to learn the ins and outs of each character, but the main arcade mode is the meat as it lets you go ham with the character order.

It's very advisable to learn the stage 3 milking to have an incredibly easier time clearing the game.

Cleared X Challenge in normal mode

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The collection itself is well put together with some really nice extras, and the soundtrack remixes are really good too. Although the Day of Sigma OVA could have had more audio options other than the english dub...

The X Challenge mode is such an interesting concept, especially when both of the bosses work really well together (spiral pegasus and neon tiger come to mind), and it's a fun time at least on Normal difficulty.

On Hard, stage 2 is a nightmare as expected, and the increased boss HP makes the whole thing a lot slower and not that fun.

Cleared Master mode 101%

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Not bad at all.

Fun and simple action puzzle gameplay with bullet avoidance elements, decent music reminiscent of the GBC days... yes, this is right up my alley. You can even marry a treasure chest too!

Oh, and it's also free.

Opening the jealous chest in Master mode can turn the early game into hell, be warned though.

The engine doesn't handle upscaling very well and the game looks like a blurry mess if you play it fullscreen on a recent monitor sadly.

All Hearts | All Treasure Maps | All Gems | Stowfish caught | All boat parts | Temple of the Ocean King cleared with 25:00 remaining

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This game suffers from heavily holding your hand all the time, even by TLoZ standards.

The infamous lid puzzle is the one that gets mentioned all the time, and the reason for that is that it's the only puzzle in the game that you don't get told the answer 5 seconds later after finding it.

There's creative usage of the Grappling Hook for example, but the game is scared of you taking too long to figure it out, and it straight up spoils the answer right after you find a torch. It also happens with the enemies that are weak to loud sounds, among other places.

The controls haven't aged very well too. Combat is fine because it's very simple, but you'll find yourself doing actions you didn't want to do, rolling when you didn't want to roll, etc. It can be a bit frustrating sometimes.

Sea travel is whatever, and the crane minigame gets a bit boring after a couple of treasures, and a bit frustrating when the jumpscare current changes start appearing (minor nitpick because you get plenty of hearts, but you still need to teleport to the first island in order to fix the Salvage Arm).

The Temple of the Ocean King actually gets more shit than it deserves. Sure, you need to go back to the isle all the time, but you need to anyway given that it's the only place where you can fix your boat / change parts / sell treasures, etc.

The temple itself enables a teleporter on your first revisit, meaning that you'll only need to replay the same part of that place once, and then once more for the second half of the temple. There's shortcuts that you can take if you got the items too, so it's not that bad.

For what I liked the most of the game, Linebeck is a cool dude, and drawing your own map on that particular isle was an interesting concept too.

All achievements | Gold ranked everything

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Pretty good. The stages can feel long on a first playthrough (because they are). Getting used to the boss weapons and especially to the double gear gimmick does wonders on the other hand, and subsequent replays just feel great in my opinion.

If there's something to criticize is the Wily stages. There's only two real stages since the other two are the boss rush and the final boss, therefore, the game will be over before you realize it.

I wasn't really a big fan of the electronic music Capcom went with either. There's fortunately the option to change the robot master stages to instrumental arrangements that I liked a lot more, so that's fine.

The weapons in this game are fantastic. It's one of my favorite array of weapons, (maybe second behind MM9), because they are all very useful. They also work very well as boss weakness, with the exception of maybe the Acid Barrier (which also happens to be the final boss' weakness :P).

The bosses are just great, very charismatic thanks to the voice acting, and very fun with and without using the buster to defeat them.

Finally, I have to praise the double gear system, even if it's confusing to use at first (you'll be mixing the buttons to use either of the modes a lot). The speed gear is extremely useful through the levels to one-cycle certain patterns or kill the sturdiest enemies really fast with decent mashing, whereas the power gear is best to finish off bosses quickly, but it's certainly the least useful of the two.

There's also the ultimate move that you can use when you're at low hp, and combines both gears at the same time for a small amount of time before leaving you powerless. Let me tell you that there's no better feeling than getting at one hp on a boss, and using this to turn the tides of the battle.