The longer you play Dragon Quest III, the more you really come to appreciate just how far the game took the burgeoning JRPG genre. The class system is great with long-term payoff. Having stats be halved when changing classes is especially genius, giving real weight to that decision. There are much more unique and interesting scenarios in each town, and the main story overall feels more involved with some awesome, even emotional plot twists. And of course, the graphics and music are really nice.

It's still an 8-bit RPG, which means it's still grindy (but not nearly as bad as DQ2 by the end) and lacking QoL features that became common sense in the 16-bit era. Remakes address this, but the fundamental game design still has some cryptic moments later on, even with all the NPC hints in mind. I couldn't fully relax and fall in love with DQ3, but it's still quite an inspired game. The endgame was especially great, and further elevated this game as something special. Maybe the Super Famicom version of Dragon Quest III is where it's really at.

This game is pretty fun and it's really cool how it reuses a bunch of assets from Breath of the Wild, including a lot of the menu and interface stuff. They even worked in stuff like the cooking system, flurry rushes, and a ton of the original game's weapons, armor, and even crafting materials. It really does feel like an authentic action-packed prequel (ish) to that game thanks to that.

Playing it also sorta made me realize more how lukewarm I am on the world and characters of BOTW compared to most prior Zelda games though. The voice acting, which is reminiscent of a mediocre anime dub, really doesn't help. The returning cast from BOTW sounds like they've grown more into their roles, but Impa and Purah's voices are just awful and some of the dialogue is obnoxious.

It's still cool to see those characters and that world in this context though. The final boss in this was also better than the actual one in BOTW, at least for me. It made up for this game's lame antagonist. If Musou/Warrior games seem like your thing and you liked Breath of the Wild, absolutely check this out.

It's cool that they tried to make a platform adventure game early on, but Konami's first attempt with Vampire Killer sucked. The levels loop forever until you find the key which is such an annoying way to do this type of game. Maybe if the levels were closed off instead of looping so they made more sense to navigate, it could actually be kind of fun to navigate them...but it's not. It's nice that it has the graphics and music from the NES version more or less, but they're terribly downgraded and the game can't even scroll between screens because it's for the MSX. Save your time on a better game.

The presentation of Brutal Legend gets everything right as far as a metal-themed video game goes. The soundtrack rocks, and they even got Ozzy and Lemmy in on this! But I found the actual gameplay to be quite middling and couldn't get past the second-to-last level. The game's attempt at genre mashup was ambitious, with the driving hubworld and overall hack and slash + RTS style at least being an interesting experiment, but really I think a more straightforward action style would've done this concept more justice and probably been more fun. It also doesn't help that the game's audio mixing was totally fucked up for me unless I made sure to update to a version that was more recent than the launch game, but not the most recent version, which is especially egregious for a game whose primary appeal is its connection to a genre of music. I recommend that metalheads check this game out but otherwise feel free to skip.

This game catches a lot of flak and to be sure, Tunnel Rhino's stage and some of the boss battles (especially minibosses) are really ass. My initial impressions were honestly rather poor. But it still plays like a Mega Man X game, and the upgrade system and amount of items to find are pretty cool. It's especially neat when you get the helmet upgrade and it shows you how many items are left to find in each area. Many of the levels seem to be designed more around allowing you to zip through them and fuck around finding stuff with the items, and there are also some minor branching paths in the lategame dependent on finding stuff earlier. It's like this game is a further evolution of the exploration aspects established in X1, and that's pretty cool.

The soundtrack is an interesting conundrum. It has a lot of great melodies and driving energy, but some songs are so short and Toxic Seahorse's theme weirdly clashes in pockets during the first half. The SNES version's music is in a heavy metal style that matches the game's overall darker feel and I really dig that, but it doesn't really take great advantage of the SNES's audio hardware. The guitars can be a bit grating and the drums sound really lame at times. The game did receive a PS1/Saturn port with enhanced music which sounds great, but the arrangers made the horribly misguided decision to redo all the songs in a more lighthearted synth-heavy jazzy style. A few tracks came out pretty good, but most of them feel so wimpy in comparison, lacking the kickass guitars and incorporating more relaxed rhythms. Blast Hornet's theme in particular is a travesty.

Ultimately I think this is still a good game, but it definitely suffered from being outsourced. Also the final boss made my right hand hurt a lot.

It's more Mega Man X! The level design definitely isn't as good, but it still has some novelty to it, the fast action-packed gameplay still fucks, the music is still pretty good, and the graphics are still colorful and detailed. I especially like that this game utilizes some of the Super Nintendo's tricks, with some wireframe graphics and Mode 7 special effects frequently utilized on the bosses. This doesn't have that "goddamn this is AWESOME" near-constant high of the original Mega Man X, but it's still worthwhile.