we're 25+ years removed from this game's release and it feels incredibly obvious to say that this game has aged remarkably well. i'm not going to say anything new when i say that replaying this game still feels fun and fresh in a way that a lot of 3D platformers from this era fail to. i wouldn't say this game was necessarily future-proofing itself either; instead i think this game just had a very solid consideration of its mechanics and how players would engage with them along with a large creative streak in its ideas.

banjo-kazooie benefits from having a good sense of humor about itself in both its character interactions and its gameplay. there's a lot of small, charming things in this game that soften the player and suck them in. whether it be the jiggy dance that results in kazooie eating said collectible, the constant rhyming riffing that grunty spouts, or the distinct and memorable character animations of the titular pair, this game is brimming with character in small and major ways. this also extends to the level design, which manages to make level themes that could otherwise be pedestrian come off as inspired. sure, clanker's cavern and gobi's desert could be neatly categorized as sewer and desert levels respectively, but they have fun design choices that make them stand out amongst contemporary takes on those level themes. in fact, i would say that there's no bad levels in this entire game, something i find extremely difficult to say about any 3D platformer, regardless of timeframe. even my least favorite level, bubblegloop swamp, still has fun moments and a memorable layout. banjo-kazooie juggles both memorability and polish to create a dense and unique experience.

another element i adore about this game is grunty's lair itself. even though i could mentally map out all of it, the lair feels greater than the sum of its parts. it's a fantastic hub that benefits from having level-specific renditions of its theme (my absolute favorite is the click clock wood version of grunty's lair). it has variance in its layout that adds to the illusion of enormity. most importantly, it's fun to explore, even on repeat playthroughs. witch switches are a brilliant way to lean in to the lair's dynamic nature and keep the player engaging with the environment as they learn it and as it changes. again, it feels old hat to praise something like this in a 3D platformer due to how expected it is now to have a hub world of this caliber, but i have to stress that banjo-kazooie was one of the first to do it this well. super mario 64 had peach's castle and sure, it had some fun secrets, but it feels minuscule and token compared to what rare did here.

as far as the platforming goes, banjo-kazooie really hits it out of the park in combining challenge with engagement. there's a strong sense of progression in the first half of the game where the player is gaining access to all the various abilities that can be performed, with the second half of the game being a test of the player's competency and eventual mastery of these abilities. the grunty fight especially highlights this integration of mechanics where it feels like there's no stone left unturned or path untraveled mechanically. and while i did discover that the grunty fight has a fairly heinous glitch in its fourth (of five) phases that makes the fight literally unwinnable, i still stand by it as one of the all-time great final boss fights. meanwhile, levels like rusty bucket bay and click clock wood are simultaneously inspired creative romps and difficult final tests that help the game end strong. sure, it can be extremely disheartening to die in one of those levels when you're at 70-80 notes collected, but there's very few games of this era that give a better sense of accomplishment than when you manage to clear those levels out entirely. it's doubly rewarding knowing that banjo-kazooie asks the player to get nearly every one of its main collectible, something i still wish more collectathon type games had the gumption to ask of the player. this is a challenging game that avoids the "it's too hard so i'm not having fun anymore" feeling because it feels just as rewarding to accomplish the goals it sets for you, on top of the aforementioned excellent gamefeel. seriously, play any 3D platformer of this era and find me a game that has a better camera. you won't be able to.

banjo-kazooie really was lightning in a bottle not only for the genre but also for rare as a studio, i think. i say this as someone who also adores tooie and even defends DK64: they never truly recaptured the brilliant design and polish that this game has. i still enjoy those works (in spite of their glut of redundant minigames), but banjo-kazooie had so much passion and intelligence put into it that it helped proliferate the collectathon genre for years to come. super mario 64 is the go-to example of influential games of the early 3D era, but i think people fail to give banjo-kazooie its flowers for how much it refined the genre into what we know it as now. over 25 years removed and it's still a fantastic play that doesn't feel old in the slightest. what other 3D platformer can you say that about?

persona 3 was a game with identity, intent, purpose, intentionality, heart, and, most importantly, creativity. i don't enjoy the lot i've been cast in life where i have to play bad versions of persona 3 and say why they're bad, whether it be the answer, portable, or this. reload is not just a bad remake of persona 3, it is a bad game that tells an interesting story in a ho-hum and pedestrian way. it takes so many narrative risks and choices from the original presentation and either waters them down or overly explains them to make sure the lowest common denominator doesn't have to interpret art. even divorced from its source material, this game fails to create a gameplay experience worth investing time in. as a remake, it fails to capture what persona 3 meant. as a JRPG, it is a dull affair with little challenge or complexity. persona 3 reload fails to be worth the effort it takes to play it.

the design doc of persona 3 reload had a very clear goal: leave no one behind, whether it be in story or gameplay. this results in story cutscenes being more explicit and less interpretive (compare the opening FMV with yukari) and gameplay that refuses to obstruct the player in meaningful ways. to be more specific, reload sacrifices any need for the player to become competent with its systems to make sure that anyone can beat this game. theurgy makes the game brainless and poisons basically every boss fight (ken can get a theurgy skill a little over halfway through the game that casts mediarahan + samarecarm + tetrakarn + makarakarn on the entire party). resource management is embarrassingly easy to trivialize (yukari can cast media for literally 1 (one) SP; there is a veritable buffet of SP items that you can trip over in daily life for little to no investment; theurgy overall negates the importance of SP and running out of SP is not the death knell it could be in orginal). social links as a whole are extremely easy to manage both due to point requirements being lower to accommodate for needing to spend more days on new content like linked episodes. hell, remember persona fusion? now it's been greatly dumbed down such that even triangle fusion isn't available anymore. this game is a concession that persona 3 was too ambitious and needed to be toned down. this is a remake that asserts that persona 3 did too much and tries to do less instead.

i'm not even beating the dead horse that is my opinion on party control because there's so many more issues to address. on basically every level, this game has either simplified or deescalated the complexity of its mechanics to accommodate a mainstream audience. i don't think there's inherently anything wrong with making persona 3's systems more accessible, but i think these capitulations go overboard and rob the game of compelling gameplay moments. there are no bosses in the game that truly force me to approach a challenge in a new way or think outside the box in the way that bosses like change relic did. every boss in this game is made longer to accommodate for theurgy damage values without any sort of intelligent design to make the fights feel more exciting for that length of time. boss fights are longer and easier because it's more cinematic to see mitsuru skate around and use her theurgy instead of letting the player use their own competency-based skills and strategy to end the fight. i am not the person who's going to cry that atlus sold out or whatever, but i am the person who's going to tell you that persona 3 reload feels like an undercooked experience because it consistently refuses to ask anything of the player. this game is easy, this game is simple, and this game is uninteresting.

above all else, this game begs one question: who on earth is telling atlus/sega that persona games need to be longer and have more content? persona 3 was a game that had a slowburn start that reload now turns into a bloated nightmare. everything takes so much longer in reload and everything feels more belabored, so i can't blame anyone for getting burnt out or even fucked off from this game's plot by the time things start picking up steam. on top of this, a lot of the new slice of life content wastes so much of the player's time. why do we need multiple scenes dedicated to kenji's performance on job day? i remember when saying that persona 3 was 70 hours felt like i was talking about this gargantuan piece of art. meanwhile, in reload, i hit 70 hours somewhere between september and november. these games do not need to be this long, and it actively ruins the experience to do so. persona 5 being a triple digit hour experience was a bad thing, not something to aspire to.

it's hard to not be at least a little offended because, whether or not P Studio intended it, they have basically hollowed out what made persona 3 so unique, so special. reload looks drab and unimpressive in UE4, and so much of the moody visuals get lost in the graphical fidelity. iwatodai dorm feels too bright, and then when january rolls around, they make the color scheme so muted that it is genuinely comedic. and there's just some really baffling and ugly visual decisions they made, like how everyone in club escapade stands motionlessly in pose. meanwhile, lotus juice has his fingerprints all over the OST in a way that just doesn't work ("mindin' my biz, so mind your own biz"). persona 3 was more than just a game with impressive systems that engaged the player, it was also a piece of art that had an aesthetic that gets lost here. this game feels completely identity-less when compared to the original because the original was both a deconstruction and a hybrid of genres. in many ways, reload doesn't just fail to live up to that artistic intent, it outright doesn't seem to know it was even there in the first place.

and i get it, as a fan of persona 3, my opinion has a giant asterisk at the end of it. why listen to a star wars fan tell you about why phantom menace is the worst movie ever? i will own up and openly admit i expected this game to be bad and had greatly wanted it to not exist. i had a feeling atlus would fuck it up somehow. i don't like being right about that. at the same time, i think there are missteps here that would stand out regardless of familiarity with the source material. yukari's edginess is completely deleted from her character here and she now just sounds and acts like chie on vyvanse rather than a girl with abandonment issues and trauma. fuuka got turned from "weird girl who serves as the empathetic core of the cast" to "girl who could have a thrilling conversation about spoiled milk". and reload isn't the first time akihiko's been sanded down to "protein fanatic who trains a lot", but it's probably the most offensive here. wouldn't it be really fucking funny if, the whole time you were studying with him, akihiko was doing something wacky like squatting above his chair instead of sitting normally?

these characters have been reinterpreted so much that they've lost their core identity that was integral to the plot of persona 3. i don't get the feeling that i'm seeing akihiko or mitsuru, i instead sense that i'm getting how someone interprets them after nearly 2 decades of fandom and spinoff content. yukari still has those "mean" lines but they lack any emotional root, so they come off as nonsense mood swings rather than a scared girl lashing out. and i'll just say it, karen strassman clears the fuck out of dawn bennett when you compare the final aigis monologues (fwiw, in both these instances, i blame the direction, not the VAs). these characters have been done better and it's really jarring that reload tries to flatten them rather than give them more dimensionality.

there's room to broadly interpret these characters, but constantly trying to make a self-serious character like akihiko the butt of a joke that he's in on speaks to how much he's being mischaracterized here. when akihiko was in a comedic scene, it was because he was the straight man, not because he was a this big goofball constantly playing to the crowd. these characters don't feel like themselves in a profound way, and i'd have to wonder how much that comes across to anyone who hasn't played original. does akihiko just seem like a wildly contradictory character to new players? truthfully, i have no idea if any of these people would've resonated with me had this been my first exposure to them.

i don't hate all of reload's new content wrt characterization, and i honestly really liked some of the stuff they added for shinjiro and ken. but there's just as much that is unnecessary and outright bad. when we said they wanted more backstory on strega, we didn't mean that we wanted you to turn takaya into another akechi. if you're going to remake persona 3, why even bother if you're going to do such a disservice to its characters and setting? sure, you made some of the UI stuff look neater and more Persona 5-y, but what does that meaningfully add to the experience? when i saw the trailer for reload, i immediately asked myself "what does the water motif have to do with persona 3? why is the main character sinking into water? what are they going to do with that?" and it turns out they just wanted a cool main menu animation and nothing else. i want to say that P Studio was just misguided, but some of this content is so actively bad that it makes me wonder if any of them even liked persona 3. so much of this feels like it's trying to fix something that isn't broken, like it's an apology for the source material. this isn't a persona 3 remake for people who liked persona 3. but, then again, who else was it supposed to be for if not people who wanted another persona 5? persona 5 is the new cash cow and my dread for this being a P5ified version of persona 3 was well-founded.

i kept trying to go "how would i feel about this game if it wasn't a remake of a game i love?" and that's an impossible question for me to answer. i can never know because i will never play this with the eyes and ears of someone who didn't play the original. again, as much as i've come to detest this game, i don't have it in my heart to give this a lower score, mostly out of pity, but also out of overcorrecting my harsh opinion as a fan of the original. still, i think many of reload's failings come from a place of trying to simultaneously be a remake and game for everyone. i don't think it's wrong for games to put off people. in fact, the best games often aren't for everyone because they can't be. P Studio emphasized making a game that was so mainstreamed and accessible that it would never present any obstacle or mechanic that could alienate players at the cost of making a game that players could actually be engaged with. i can't think of a broader way you could miss the mark with a persona 3 remake.

gotta be honest, i don't get the hype for this thing. it's enjoyable enough and i think it has some fun movement options, but it feels very undercooked in both presentation and polish. also, it's really easy to get lost in a "everything looks the same" type of way considering how indistinct a lot of the environments are. and it's not necessarily the game's fault, because it does go out of its way to make varied room layouts, but something about it makes the whole map blend together in my head. it's a jam game so i'm sympathetic, i just feel sorta lost on how people are giving this outlandishly high scores. there's just genuinely not a lot to say about this game, and i felt like the game basically ended when movement finally started to get more interesting. on the bright side, i'm on the low end of the spectrum when it comes to enjoyment with this game (relatively speaking), so if a short 3D metroidvania with some well-received mechanics sounds appealing to you, then you should give this a shot.

crash team racing (CTR) is a game for the longest time i've wondered if undervalue. as far as kart racers go, MK64 was obviously the big trendsetter, but i do think CTR succeeds in a lot of ways MK64 falls short. the movement feels so much better and less stiff, and it feels like you're given a lot more room to do interesting things, whether it be short cuts or miniturbos in short turns. i think if we were just judging the kart racers of the 90s on how they feel, CTR would easily take the gold medal.

where i get lost with CTR is in the surrounding crust of it. adventure mode is fine for what it is, but relic races are agonizingly tedious if you're trying to go for platinums (what, you play crash bandicoot games and don't go for the platinum relics?). and boss races largely feel useless; anyone who has a basic competency with CTR's systems will be able to pass a boss character by the first lap and leave them in the dust until the end. lastly, i just don't really feel very passionate about a lot of CTR's tracks. they're extremely hit or miss for me, and while the good ones (hot air skyway, polar pass, oxide station) are usually ones i look forward to racing on, the bad ones (n. gin labs, tiger temple, coco park) are either dull or genuinely unfun to race on.

hell, even some of the tracks i like, such as papu's pyramid, sewer speedway, or polar pass, become nightmares to try and optimize for either relic races or time trials. the tracks in CTR have a love for cycle-based obstacles that make optimizing them have this annoying element of RNG that ruins the experience for me. i also have broader nitpicks with the game, like how the whole "you have to do a minimum of three time trials per stage if you want to complete everything" aspect is really tedious and annoying, especially when your first time trial beats either of the ghosts (which it often will). and i expect that this point will be contentious with fans, but i've never really given a shit about the soundtrack and found it to be fairly unmemorable, especially when you compare it to contemporaries like diddy kong racing. that's pretty bad for a crash bandicoot game, but it's also the kiss of death for a kart racer, regardless of when it comes out.

i'm dogging on this game a lot in this review because it feels like the positives are obvious to state. the game looks great for PS1 (and still holds up in most respects, imo), it controls well, the items are fairly balanced and it never feels like you lose a race because your opponent got lucky, etc. i have never outright disliked CTR, let's be clear on that. when i was younger, i was obsessed with it, if anything. i just also see that it has a lot of things that hold it back from being that special type of game to me. i appreciate what it did for the genre, though, because i suspect it was what really sold the idea of the kart racer as a viable spinoff for later series to try. and how can i dislike anything that might've helped lead us to the eventual apex of kart racers known as sonic & all stars racing transformed?

a game that i will always adore. it's impossible to divorce this game from how it made me feel playing it as a 5 year old, and any time i replay this game, that precious joy is evoked. level design peaked here with levels that end up being the perfect length so they don't overstay their welcome, and the variety of levels aids this game, despite what popular modern consensus says. i do share the sentiment that they could've likely cut off a jet ski and motorcycle level or two to make room for another platforming level, but my playthroughs of this game never leave me feeling unsatisfied. i especially love how time trials are handled here, as the changes in boxes and added element of time stopping radically change how you'd view a level compared to the initial run.

i dunno man! i just love this game. i love the level themes, i love the bosses, i love the music, i love the graphics. . . it's just one of my favorite games i've ever played. i have very little negative things to say about this game, and i can only say that there will always be a deep reservoir of love in my heart for this thing.

i hate discussing this game with fans because they always move the goal posts. no, this isn't the first time i've played an older 3d game, and no, i don't dislike this game because i can't appreciate them. i greatly enjoy and love games like resident evil, tomb raider, crash bandicoot, and sonic adventure; those were all early 3D offerings that were rough around the edges. they had very thought-out mechanics with intentionality behind their level design and were consistently engaging to play. i cannot say the same about this game. super mario 64 is not fun for me play because i do not find the mechanics or level design engaging. additionally, the camera is atrocious and has aged poorly. there's also this weird pseudo-tank controls aspect that changes how mario moves without warning and killed me several times in the later levels like TTC and RR. movement is actively one of the worst parts of this game, which is the kiss of death for a platformer. i don't dislike this game for being old, i dislike this game for being bad.

i respect what it tries to do, and i think there is some level of admiration game devs of the time express for it that i understand. i get why this was such a groundbreaking game in some ways. but, i grew up in this era, and even as a kid, this game didn't connect with me. finally sitting down and playing it as a fully grown adult, i can understand and verbalize what it is that fucks me off from this. am i impressed with the attempt to focus so much on momentum as a platforming principle? yes. do i think this game hits the mark with that lofty goal? absolutely not. again, it's not that this game is old; i had this same exact feeling when it was still a new game. i do not enjoy super mario 64 not because it is dated, because dated things can still be enjoyed. i do not enjoy super mario 64 because i do not enjoy super mario 64.

1.5/5.0 feels harsh, but it's a combination of not enjoying my time with this game as well as resenting this game's legacy. i don't understand how this is still regularly discussed in contention for greatest game of all time. i hate how it's still seen as hipster and contrarian to say this game isn't the second coming of christ. and, most importantly, i am very tired of this idea that the games that we love cannot have flaws and cannot be criticized.

it's hard to overstate how powerful nostalgia is. ever since i started understanding how memory can be easily manipulated and self-fabricated (all unintentionally), i've been very wary of how i view the art and stories i grew up with as a kid. some days i think i'm overcorrecting, some days i think i'm not going hard enough against my biases. after replaying snowboard kids 1 (sbk1), i felt primed to go into this and be let down in some capacity. it's only natural. and, let's be clear, i think snowboard kids 2 (sbk2) has obviously aged in a lot of ways. but, ultimately, i fully replayed this game and got a swell trip down memory lane while also being able to re-appreciate just how quaint and charming this game is.

sbk2 takes the base formula sbk1 established and basically refines everything about it. there's more characters, a small "slice of life"-esque story, more varied stages, and even a little hub world where the characters can run into each other and say "hi!". it's all very quaint, and these small things go a long way to making the game endear itself to you. there were even these adorable yonkoma strips in the instruction manual (https://imgur.com/gallery/h1erE) that i absolutely adored reading as a child, and they helped make this game feel more unique and memorable than a contemporary like 1080 boarding, which i played as a kid but i could not tell you a single thing about to this day. these things add up and matter, and they give sbk2 an identity that endured.

as far as the actual racing goes, it is relieving to say that the racing AI isn't horribly mangled in this game and avoids the rubberbanding problems that sbk1 was plagued by. it's genuinely surprising to see that the game actually has the kids now adapt to the rules of their board + build, so you're not gonna run into nancy being faster than christ and when someone uses a slow board like the ninja board, they're usually gonna be at the back of the pack. again, small but compared to both its predecessor and something like mariokart 64, which, to the best of my memory, completely doesn't give a shit about this sort of thing, it's nice to see. if anything, this game is on the fairly forgiving and easy side, but maybe going from sbk1 to sbk2 can be likened to when goku's fighting piccolo in dragon ball and takes off the leg weights and is suddenly zip zooming around. ice land is a difficulty jump, which is fitting for the final level of the game, but it's not as absurd as any of the final three levels in sbk1. i normally like harder games, but sbk1 was challenging for the wrong reasons, so i'm completely fine with this game doing a lower gear shift to let me soak in the stellar OST and level design.

speaking of levels, i love the variety we get here. i think sbk1 already had a pretty great selection of levels, so to see sbk2 hit it out of the park and improve upon that is impressive. standouts include the aforementioned ice land, starlight highway, and wendy's house. there are some true platform highlights in this game, and it's no coincidence that each of those levels has a killer music track to accompany it. so much of this game is just the simple fun of racing in unique locations and taking in the sights. even the relatively tame locations jingle town get a section with aurora borealis that shockingly translated pretty decently on N64 hardware.

the biggest problem with this game happens to be items, and, in a weird way, when i played some of these tracks without them, i had more fun. there's just a huge lack of oversight when it comes to item distribution. tell me: why the fuck am i able to get boosts in first place? hell, why the fuck am i able to get the pan in first place? speaking of the pan, i think it has to be the single worst item in a racing game, and i'm trying not to be hyperbolic when i say that. it's far too common, for starters, and it's the lightning bolt from mario kart but instead of capping speed, it stops racers dead in their tracks if they don't have an invisibility item to protect them. i wouldn't mind this item's existence if it was, to counterbalance those problems, either much rarer or less overpowered. its existence can turn races into very big stop-and-go affairs that ruin the feeling a racing game should have. i'm also not entirely crazy about the ghost items due to how swingy and game-changing they are in a game where momentum management is king, but compared to the pan, they are eclipsed in severity. i don't have a segue for this nor do i want to type up an entire paragraph about them, so let me also just state here that the boss fights are all extremely bad and unnecessary, and god help you if you do them on expert mode.

i get that this game isn't for everyone, and there's always going to be an aspect of this game that i forever associate with how it felt to play this when i was 5. i maintain that it hasn't aged nearly as badly as other racing games of the time, and the art style utilized N64 graphics better than most games on the platform. still, it is a fairly basic racing game with a fundamental item issue, so i get it. i also get the feeling that, in spite of my replay and critical eye, i still manage to overrate this a tad. oh well! i've wanted to replay this game for literally a decade now and only just gotten around to it, and i enjoyed my time with it. this was a special game to me as a kid, and it was a joy to discover that its star hasn't dimmed for me in adulthood.

katamari damacy is a very easy game to undervalue. there's likely a decent portion of people who have gone "oh so this is just a quirky game about rolling a ball around to grab stuff? okay" or something to that effect, and disregarded the game. it's very hard to pitch the game without gameplay footage to complement; telling a coworker about this game reminded me of trying to sell someone on ace attorney being fun in spite of its droll-sounding premise. yet, even with this obstacle, i can safely say that this game might be the single most widely appealing and approachable game on the PS2's library short of tetris ports.

this is a deceptively simple game that focuses on doing one thing, and doing it superbly: movement. it is in its precise focus on movement that anyone can enjoy this game while still leaving a high skill ceiling and appropriate challenges to match. truthfully, i think this is a very, very easy game to sit down and beat. if you're just going for the minimum size requirements, even a bad player could swing that, give or take a handful of retries. meanwhile, for anyone who wants to really challenge themselves, the game has comet times, size thresholds, and collection aspects to tickle the brain. and while i think all three of those could use more transparency for the player in plainly stating what they're asking for, that simultaneously lends itself to this mystique that katamari damacy's aesthetic thrives on. i do want the raw numbers, but also, i kind of love that the king of all cosmos will just go "that's a 4/10" and belabor the point by saying he would've done it much better instead of telling you what size would satisfy him.

there's something to be said about what katamari damacy feels like to experience. clinically, i don't think i could name a game that utilizes sound design in a more synapse-stimulating way. this goes beyond the soundtrack, which is immaculate. rolling over objects is accompanied by this extremely memorable sound that i struggle to describe. it sounds like if you were to fire a rubber band at a giant plate of jello. it's minor, but considering all you are doing in the game is moving to collect things, making the act of collecting have an intrinsically pleasing sound is an elegant way to elevate it. and the moment-to-moment gameplay of scanning for both objects your size to get right then while also looking for objects bigger than you to hunt for later as goals is diabolically brilliant design. the player makes both conscious and unconscious decisions about what to preoccupy themselves with and what to work towards. the magic is that it's done instantly and often without the player even realizing how they're being conditioned. katamari damacy doesn't fatigue the player with analysis paralysis, because it immediately makes it apparent that you want to get shit, and you want to constantly be in the process of getting shit.

as for collecting itself, many objects will have sounds that play when you get them, adding to that feedback loop. you roll up an egg and boom, a little chickling briefly hatches and peeps a bit. you roll up a truck and you can bet you're gonna hear its horn. this even extends to people when you roll them up, and often the most fun part of any given level is when you get big enough to roll up random civilians and hear their associated voice lines when you get them. whether it's random teenage girls who give their all in screaming, old men who have no earthly idea what's going on and just moan a little in confusion, or the Towel Guy who makes this sound that easily puts him in contention for most lgbt character of all time. sometimes the fun of the game is not only seeing what you can roll up, but how it will react to you.

and while the game does have only 3 main areas, the structure of each level greatly varies. you could have one level in the house where you're just collecting random household objects like food and legos and then the next level in that same house you're suddenly swarmed with crabs to collect. something i appreciated on this replay was how dollhouse-esque this game's levels feel in their arrangement. they have this exactness to them where you can feel the dev team telling their little stories through object and people placement. it all feels so neatly arranged and deliberate, and it creates this reptilian brain response of wanting to destroy something delicate when you arrive on the scene. people lowball this game a lot and chalk up its appeal to being this silly and quirky game with not much to it, but i think that greatly does a disservice to the intentionality behind the design choices here. katamari damacy organically fosters a curiosity to its world in a way that appears effortless. all of this is done without dialogue or lore drops, just visual arrangement and responsivity to player actions. it's a masterclass.

it feels very surreal to say that this game turned 20 this year. i still vividly remember the toonami mini-review of this game when it was new. i don't want to make this about how i'm getting older, things are aging, and the like, because there's no real place for it here. i don't think katamari damacy has aged in really appreciable, significant ways. there's an evergreen quality here that will never have an expiration date. the simple nature of its gameplay lends itself to this timeless quality. moreover, we're never going to reach a point in the medium where movement becomes something dated. movement will always be inherently part of any game with a world to explore and play in. katamari damacy may not have been planning for the future with its laser-focus on a game purely based around movement, but it is one that has aged better than anyone could've speculated. this is a perfect game in that sense, and it's one of the first things that i would nominate we encase in steel and eject into space to preserve it for future civilizations and species.

this is a great DLC, and helps validate my claim that returnal could've been a better game if the roguelike elements had been retooled. this DLC ends up being less roguelike and more arcadey third-person shooter, which works a lot better for this formula imo. improvements include that the tower of sisyphus has guaranteed drops in it that housemarque was able to design its challenges around. there's still choice to be had in these drops as well (do you go for the health upgrade or the damage upgrade? which penalizing parasite do you go for? etc.), so it never feels like the game is taking you on a railroaded experience.

but, most importantly, you're given a guaranteed random level 3 gun by the second floor to pick from, which suddenly makes every single run feel like it can 100% be my fault as opposed to "i got stuck with the shitty base pistol and died because i couldn't get something else to drop". i know i've harped on this, but the guns are such a vital part of returnal as an experience, so amplifies the player experience to get more self-expression from the getgo. these things sound small, but they add up to making the moment-to-moment gameplay retain that fun, frenetic energy while also keeping the player consistently challenged. lastly, algos is a great boss and honestly blows the base game's bosses out of the water for me. he's simple, but focused, and it's refreshing that the game staggers out his second and third phases so you can get comfortable with his first one.

yeah, i'm just really impressed that they were able to refine what didn't work about base game and turn it around here. this has overall made me more positive on returnal as a package, and seeing this much improvement in a free DLC surpasses my expectations. if anything, this has made me interested in seeing what housemarque puts out next, because i can see this being part of an upward trend in quality for them.

the nostalgia has worn off and it's hard to say that this was a "slept on classic", like i used to view it. it's still definitely a good platformer and stands out amongst the unsuccessful mascot platformers it was rubbing elbows with. the biggest drawback to this game is that the level design feels less tightly designed and engaging. if gex: enter the gecko was crash bandicoot meets spyro, this game is just super mario 64 (all weird comparisons, i know). you have levels like organ trail and red riding in the hood (dumb but great level name) that are functionally just tall, tall mountain. meanwhile, i don't really have a good analogy for a level like poltergext or samurai night fever. etg was less conventional and it paid off in that way, but dcg does conventional level designs moderately well in a fairly decent presentation, especially compared to etg's rougher textures and fidelity. gex also controls what feels like a trillion times better in dcg than he does in etg.

the biggest thing that might shy people away from this game is that there's less emphasis on platforming as opposed to collecting, though it's not absent wholly. this game leans much more into the collectathon aspect, and it doesn't always hold up (see: the fact that flycoins can glitch out and go beneath level geometry in my three goons.) i do think it's a lot more fun in the moment-to-moment gameplay, though, because the levels are more focused in their theme, and having them only appear once means that there's nothing left on the cutting floor to warrant redoing the level theme. levels like sleepless in seattle, organ trail, unsolved mythstories, and red riding in the hood are great because they each focus on simple ideas and then execute them fairly precisely. meanwhile, levels like my three goons and superzeroes suck the fun out of the game like a vacuum. this is due to their tedious nature and lack of fun level gimmicks that make the moment-to-moment gameplay of traversing the level 3 times more memorable and engaging (something each of the 4 levels i listed prior succeed at.) the contrast between etg and dcg is much more stark after playing them in quick succession; in some respects, i think the best gex game could've been a marriage between etg's solid level design and dcg's polish and refinement.

i would ever so slightly say that dcg is the better gex game of the two (why did they call it gex 3 when there's only 2 gex games? i hope someone got fired for that blunder.), but it's definitely closer than i would've said half a year ago. if you take the best designed levels of etg and put them through dcg's polish and presentation, you'd have probably some of the best 3D platforming you could find from a midbudget title of that time.

i have been doing WAY too much this first month of 2024. this makes my 11th game that i've finished in january, and i swear it's not that i'm just no lifeing this shit. this was a hard mode playthrough i set up about a year ago, and only just finished now. you could say the same about a lot of games i've finished this month (FE7, SSX 3, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel), but it's worth mentioning here because i spent a loooooot of time in this game.

it's funny whenever games have a hard mode and then just completely fail to balance mechanics around it. did you know that, in hard mode, because of how the Mole1 and Mole2 viruses work, it's impossible to get the chips they drop (PopUp and Meteor18) through normal means and instead have to roll for them at the chip trader? extremely fun oversight aside, hard mode doesn't feel like the major difficulty spike it should be. earlygame is definitely hell, and getting good bust ranks is a lot more difficult to accomplish until around midgame. but, hard mode, just like normal mode, still gets broken in half by gater. sure, the boss HP totals skyrocket when you multiply them by 1.5 (MagnetManV3 boasts an intimidating 2700 HP meanwhile PlanetManV3 has the highest total at 3300 HP), but the same basic strategies will work here just like they did in normal mode. Invis3 still makes you untouchable, Gater still deals a stupid amount of damage while being easy to make flow in your folder, and FullCust is still broken. this is by no means a complaint, it just feels odd that capcom would go through the effort of hiding this hard mode behind so many obstacles only for it to feel relatively unconsidered.

MMBN2 is still at its base a fantastic game and i still had a great time with it. if anything, the hard mode experience has left me thinking that the overall ease and simplicity of normal mode could at least be somewhat solved by using some of these HP totals. maybe keep the virus HP totals the same (to make random encounters + escaping be less tedious) but use the navi HP totals from hard mode? i could always just play the "remove the letter G from the game" mod, but something like this feels at least a little more sensible and organic. ah well, difficulty issues aside, it's still one of the best games on the GBA and a highlight of the series.

i've owned and adored this game for years, but i had never bothered with the ranking system. in the past, i had always regarded it as a largely irrelevant feature to how i wanted to play and basically ignored it. however, something crawled up my ass last year, and i decided to do a ranked run of HHM. as preparation, i did a ranked run of HNM to get an idea of what it would be like and how to adopt the mindset. and while some things are actually more strict in HNM ranked (for whatever reason, night of farewells has a way tighter turn count), it was an educational experience that steeled me for my real goal: S rank HHM.

i now talk to you as someone who has scaled the mountain that is S ranking HHM. after several months of meticulous planning and arduous resetting, i got my S rank. and while it was extremely shitty to do for a myriad of reasons, this experience has not only deepened my appreciation of the game, but it has reminded me of how constraints make for better design. let's be clear, FE7's ranking system is fucked and its refusal to be transparent with not only its set goals but also how to achieve them is bad. i do not think this game does ranking very well (chapter requirements are literally being broken on hector mode chapters like talons alight and the berserker such that they're considered chapters you should beat in 0 turns to avoid penalization). add all this together, and i understand why casuals are so offput by it.

but, i do mourn it retroactively now, as i think we lost something significant when IS decided to ditch it instead of improve and refine it. ranked runs require a different mindset and encourage you to think of the game as purely tactical as you can. turtle and grind strategies suddenly become inoptimal and the last thing you want to do. meanwhile, the experience rank obligates you to use units that you would otherwise almost certainly have not touched, forcing you to use basically everyone in at least some capacity. the strangest thing is that they already revamped how the game would judge the player via a ranking system in going from 6 to 7, so it adds on to the disappointment that they abandoned it in sacred stones. hell, sacred stones could've been like 20x better if there was anything resembling a challenge in it. the closest thing we've gotten since then was the bonus experience system in the tellius games, and while that is good, something all-encompassing like elibe's rankings is preferable to me. i've realized that i'm a huge sucker for when a game assesses and grades your progress, whether it be on micro scales like in MMBN and FFXIII, or on a playthrough-wide scale like Resident Evil and this game. it was a flawed system and needed polish, but, fuck, i kinda miss it now.

that said, i love this game, but, i confess, this ranked run did inspire great amounts of anger and hate out of me. on top of S ranking HHM being one of the hardest things i've ever had to do in a video game, i think i can confidently say that fire emblem is one of the most infuriating games on earth. with how pivotal RNG is to not only character progression but even just basic offensive interactions, it is the perfect simulator of "i made no mistakes and still lost" in video game format. i get that RNG is invariably going to affect personal experience in both extremely positive and extremely negative ways, i just deeply wish there was some way to curb it a bit. for instance, all three of my lords were complete dogshit this run, and i had to use boosters on all three at some point just to get them to their average stats. granted, you don't have to use lyn and eliwood, but see me after class if you think i'm doing lloyd's FFO. plus, they're mandatory deployments on certain chapters (including but not limited to the final one), so it's frustrating when diceroll level ups turn against your favor and give you completely trash units. it's still a wonder to me that a fixed stats mode was only ever used in path of radiance and it's never been used ever again. it's truly baffling considering how convenient and consistent it would make replays of any of the games. in that sense, the most appealing method of ever playing this game again is on emulator with tony's mod, a player-made fixed stats mode.

either way, this is still one of my favorite games of all time, in spite of the colossal deep fissures of flaws i have with fire emblem as a series and even this individual game (seriously, why doesn't eliwood use lances?). i can rest easy now and say it's going to be a looooooong time before i do another playthrough of this beast. yet, tellingly, when i do get that urge, i've already got a plan of what i want to do next. imagine if i used these autistic impulses to do something of value. what if.

one immutable thing about gex is that, whether you love him or hate him, if you grew up in the 90s and played video games, you probably know him. this was back during the mystical bygone era of the midbudget title, back when games were allowed to be shamelessly inspired by other groundbreaking ones (in this case, super mario 64) and they were allowed to just try to ape the design as best they could. and as much of a meme as the "15 million sales" claim is, gex was still a memorable entity, even in the peripheral. it's '98-'00, you go to blockbuster, look at all the games available for rent, and even if you didn't rent gex: enter the gecko, the box art with gex in a dynamic and memorable pose stuck with you. i think something like this is one of the largest reasons gex has endured as a recognizable mascot, even if it is almost entirely ironically. but, irony can only get you so far, and there is genuinely goodwill for these games that has also endured for a lot of people, myself included.

it's fun coming back to these games i played disposably as a child and actually trying to assess the game design and development/production aspects that i would've otherwise never contemplated. in particular, i'm able to say that gex: enter the gecko actually has some fairly solid level design. the levels are engaging, they have loads of landmarks that help the player not only mentally map out a level, but also create memorable platforming segments. these don't always pan out, and i'm not going to sit here and tell you that every single level is a homerun, but there's definitely more interesting and memorable levels than there aren't. in particular, i think some of my favorites are poltergext, mazed and confused, samurai night fever, frankensteinfeld, and fine tooning. each of them has either some genuinely creative design or otherwise memorable platforming sequences that help put this game ever so slightly above the other contemporaries trying to replicate grab the super mario 64 crowd. tell me, does anyone still feel this passionately about croc or, god forbid, bubsy?

it's not all roses down memory lane. anyone who's played this knows and will tell you the camera is angry video game nerd voice like piss soup seasoned with wet diarrhea. the best you can hope for is to set it to manual and just babysit the damn fucking thing as much as you can, and even then, the game still fights you tooth and nail whenever you try to adjust it with a wall anywhere near it. it's not only made the game aged incredibly poorly, but it was something that, on launch, made the game stumble out of the gate. gex: enter the gecko is actually enjoyable in those moments you can escape the burden of camera control and just mock the stupid shitty and sometimes vaguely racist things gex says. there's probably a good argument to make that this game is one of the better mascot platformers of the time because there was at least a solid design foundation here. i don't adore gex in the way that i could really defend his games to anyone who didn't grow up with a playstation/N64, but there is value in them.

if nothing else, this game takes a lot of swings and most of them hit in some capacity. again, we're not dealing with high water mark platformer territory here, but this is fun in a very approachable and simple way. just remember to forget about the camera as much as you can.

hell has frozen over. 2024 is here. and, as is typical of the new year, it's time for a new me. with that, i announce a great paradigm change: i am now a kingdom hearts II liker. again. please, hold your gasps of shock and awe, we have much to cover.

jokes aside, those who've known me for years and have talked about video games at length with me have likely heard my take on the KH series: it should never have gotten sequels. it's a fun quick summation of my feelings to give. i can now upgrade that to a delightful "it should never have gotten sequels after II". 358/2 Days has always been an exception to this either way, so the one-liner loses its potency. but what was it about kingdom hearts II that was so polarizing for me? i've come around on RECOM, so, truly, anything is possible. but what made II such a dislikeable game?

my history with KH II is interesting. i was obsessed with KH I as a child. it was basically my first JRPG, for however much you consider it a true-blue JRPG. it captivated me by presenting me these complex (to an 8 year old) ideas of strategy and stat management in a familiar environment. i've never been much of a disney fan, even as a child, but you can't deny that there's cultural osmosis shared with aladdin and the little mermaid that makes them feel immediately familiar. i was being introduced to a world i'd never explored, and it helps that the execution of the concepts KH I had was nearly pitch-perfect.

KH I was a tragic game defined by its longing and sense of childlike thrill. being a child taken seriously was something to both crave and fear. KH I was able to capitalize perfectly on what it feels like to be someone just coming into their own sense of self and identity, personified by its characters' own struggle with identity and restraints. sora and riku and kairi are more than just preteens wanting to set sail and see the world, they're also your next door neighbors who want to escape suburbia or their small town or wherever and be free. this spoke to me in a profound way that a lot of art and media with child protagonists didn't. the game never admonishes the destiny islands trio for their desires and wants, nor does it treat them as childish or foolish. these characters were played straight in a serious context. without having the words to vocalize what about KH I spoke to me, i just knew there was this feeling the game evoked out of me that very few things had in my life by that point. i wanted more. i needed more.

so, all this leads to me playing the game relentlessly and waiting like a coiled spring for a sequel. i had played COM, and that gave more questions than answers (though it did give us axel, who's just a special little guy to me). even as a kid, i could recognize that its existence was largely just to serve as a soft-recap of the events of KH I for a ninendo-audience, and the scant bits of new information were difficult to process and determine the significance of. what is the deal with the guys in the black coats? what is "the organization"? what's axel's full deal? who the hell is diz? etc. etc. little did i know that writing for the KH series would follow this tendency of presenting the player with more questions than answers in each installment in time.

still. i was excited for kingdom hearts II. its release would be my woodstock. i can scarcely remember how it felt to want a game so badly, to feel so assured in knowing it would be not only a good game, but that it would be a life-changing event that would radically alter my personality down to the cellular level. i didn't have friends who were into kingdom hearts at all, so i was on that same metaphorical island as sora, wanting someone to share my experiences with. i bid my time, hoping patience's reward would visit me soon.

eventually, it came. i got home from middle school. i put the kingdom hearts II disc into my playstation 2. i hit new game. "i wanna line the pieces up - yours and mine." cue "sanctuary" by utada hikaru.

and you know what?

it FUCKED.

i still remember the feeling of watching that opening FMV. what a fucking showstopper of talent. i would go so far as to say it's a pinnacle achievement in the medium. it not only recaps (without a single word!) both the plots to I and COM in a "here's all the big points you need to know" way using the visual storytelling of a cutscene, but it's done so effortlessly, with such grace and precision. it's what we wanted. i remember starting up new games of KH II later that night just to rewatch it. it was just. . . impeccable.

what followed was me consuming the SHIT out of KH II. i will say, my initial playthrough of this game feels very much like a blur. i barely remember how i played, what i thought of things, and i didn't even properly digest some of the plot elements of it. in that way, i treated KH II like a rollercoaster ride: something to experience, not to contemplate. it couldn't necessarily be helped; at 12 years old, the nuance of the roxas cold open was entirely lost on me nor did i even really comprehend it. i didn't even connect the dots on roxas being a former organization member despite it being explicitly spelled out several times. again, experienced, not contemplated. it's worth stressing that i missed all these story beats and didn't even largely understand a lot of the text of the game because, and this is the important part, i still loved kingdom hearts ii. i was apeshit for it. i thought it was an incredible achievement. my DNA had been altered from playing it. i was a different person. society was post-"sanctuary". i lived in a different world than the one i did on march 27th, 2006.

and then, when i became a more thoughtful, analytical, and critical teenager, i revisited kingdom hearts ii. and you know what?

it was fucking terrible.

"sanctuary" still hit those everest highs. but the gameplay had largely been solved once i realized there's next to no punishment for mashing attack, reaction command, and healing as necessary. was there any fight in the game that challenged this standby? even sephiroth could be bruteforced by a level 80+ player using this mentality. i didn't even use magic beyond cure. reflega? firaga? why would i use something that isn't my explosion finisher? all these boss fights i had thought on my first playthrough to be these accomplishments of skill suddenly became revealed as artifice. so many boss fights felt disposable and unmemorable to me in this playthrough. i had lost the ability to see the magic that had enchanted me. and, truthfully, i still understand this mentality i had. i don't even necessarily disagree with it; i find vanilla II to be a pretty easy game to bulldoze with mindless tactics. gameplay isn't everything to these games, but it's the lion's share of what you're doing. if i'm not having fun, what good is the game to me? if it's not challenging me, what is the value of combat? if it's not engaging, what is the value in engaging?

this was a viewpoint that i had predominantly held onto for several years, dating to even recently. it's worth stating that even playing final mix did not amend this for me. if anything, it arguably made it worse. i got the platinum in PS3's KH II FM and that is not an easy task to accomplish for the uninitiated. much of my "success" with the superbosses was a result of me bruteforcing my way through fights that required more planning, strategy, and creativity than the entirety of II vanilla had required. it was incredibly frustrating fighting someone like data vexen and getting my ass tapdanced on because i didn't know dominant strats or how to utilize the options i had. sure, i had learned that reflega exists, but limits were still a mystery to me, and it was beyond my expectations that there would be combo modifiers i'd want to unequip (i.e. dodge slash and aerial sweep).

none of the things i needed to do felt explained, none of my tools felt like options i could even use. truthfully, it wasn't just that it didn't click. it was that it was infuriating. it felt like i was missing something. it was a game i had endured seeing heaps of praise for from speedrunners and high level action game players alike. i wanted to understand, and i was dealing with a client that refused to let me in. my opinion managed to sink lower. what's worse than casually being disappointed by a game you thought you loved? exclusion from the cool kid's club and being incapable of finding the way in.

that was 2018. i played II FM as a refresher for III as well as to see how different FM would play. now that we live in a post-kingdom hearts III world, it's easier to see how nothing matters and everything is decaying. but it's worth sharing this poorly arranged medium-article of a review because KH II is a personal game for me. one of great success and failure. i think art, especially video games, can be an intimate experience for people in profound ways, and it feels as though i can segment periods of my life with my experiences with kingdom hearts ii. it's relevant to this review because i am who i am now because of kingdom hearts as a series. not in a major way, but also in an observable way. these anecdotes are relevant to my review because they are me and my feelings on the game are defined by these experiences.

so, with that preamble said, we reach 2023. by this point, i've made my peace with not being in the cool kid's club. if anything, i've been bolstered in my opinion by finding the KH II hater now and then. i know who i am, i am a matured adult. i know what i'm about. still, in spite of my harsh misgivings with KH II, i'm also a person makes mistakes and does not always agree with my past opinions. i even have a list dedicated to games that i used to hate but now love (and one for games i used to love but now don't). i am a person with a perspective, and perspectives change with time, age, and experience. i am struck by a sudden urge to replay kingdom hearts II final mix. i own the story so far collection for PS4 (which has wondrously short load times). i decide to replay it. worst-case scenario, i know the bad things i'm in for, so i can't be surprised. i pop in the disc. i hit new game. "i wanna line the pieces up - yours and mine." cue "sanctuary" by utada hikaru.

and you know what?

it FUCKED.

okay, maybe fucked is a bit much. i still have misgivings with the game (most notably in the plot). and i cannot deny that one of my larger complaints that still resonates with me is with the game's design is level structure that feels open and empty. i still have things to critique about this game. but i do find much more joy in it now as someone with tempered expectations. it's funny, my first playthrough was too much hype that colored me into a state of blind adoration without the adequate understanding to verbalize why i liked the game. then, after that, it was sophomore slump-esque cynicism that failed to see any value or joy in the game at all. thesis, antithesis. it's logical that synthesis would follow.

one of the largest hurdles i had to deal with was coming at this game with the right set of expectations. it's not necessarily a misnomer to call KH II a JRPG, but it is a lie by omission. whereas you could potentially get away with calling KH I a JRPG and not an action game, KH II is a prominent and unapologetic action game. KH II lives and dies by the moments where the player is managing space between an enemy(s) and weighing what options they should use to solve the encounter. this is more than just "use fire on the enemies weak to fire" logic of I. fire is more of a magic function than an element, with emphasis being on using it as a character-orbiting hitbox more than for its elemental status. blizzard gives the player ranged damage in the way ebony and ivory would in DMC. magnet gives crowd control options to help the player deal with larger numbers. reflect is downright busted when you learn how to utilize it. all of this sounds redundant, but starting to view magic as functions rather than JRPG elements is a microcosm of the perspective shift i needed to appreciate what the game is doing. i have to meet the game as it is, not what i demand it be.

the thing about all of this is that the game does not ever expect any competency with these systems, and, as mentioned, it's easy to just bruteforce. in fact, KH II's greatest shame is that it seems embarrassed to tell you about the things you can do and when you should do them. it doesn't even seem to want to provide you with the obstacles that would necessitate them. everything can be largely solved by attacking it, and while there's more efficient ways than just attacking, they're almost always unnecessary. the greatest flaw KH II has is that it lacks the confidence to provide better explanations of these tools and simultaneously demand players use them. what good is a jewel that is too precious?

i now get it though. i understand why people say that this game shines at higher levels of play with critical mode and data organization. to be frank, critical mode feels like the only way i could ever recommend someone experience this game, as it gives that level of burden i had earlier alluded to. it's not a perfect system, and complementary explanations are woefully absent, but it does alleviate so much of what made KH II dull to me. i now understand the value of limits and what tactical advantage they can provide. i now use limit form fairly regularly as a panic button (and because it's busted as fuck for certain fights like roxas lol). i needed third-party suggestions and information to get to this point, but i met the game halfway and got more out of it as a result.

the bittersweet nature of kingdom hearts as a series continues on, however. this was the entry that tied up all loose threads, yet, here we are, characters with stories still being told. the plot was essentially self-contained and could easily be the final entry for the destiny island trio. literally all you would need to do is delete that "chamber of repose" FM cutscene, the letter from the king teaser, and remove references to xehanort from the BBS teaser. from everything i've seen, xehanort might as well be an entirely new character in BBS (a game i have not played yet), so there's no reason to tie the destiny islands trio back into it. KH II was a closure for their story, a finality. sora, riku, and kairi had their adventure, they saw the world, and they returned home to each other. they matured and got to satisfy their yearning for freedom to greater appreciate their surroundings. it was the end of the book. the final scene. the last moment. i know i'm tardy to the party on this one, but KH II did not and should not have gotten sequels that involved these characters anymore. i do plan on playing BBS in the near-ish future, and it's going to be a monumental task for it to overcome this finality in my mind.

overall though? i'm glad i replayed this game. i gained a greater understanding of it with age, and i feel as though i've finally reached a closure with with game that i've denied myself for years. an open wound has finally scabbed over and begun to heal. i can appreciate the heart and soul of this gargantuan entry in not only the series but the PS2 library as well without losing focus of its shortcomings.

new year, new me.