disappointed by this one, I expected to find a new fav but this thing gets pretty frustrating, and the north american version making the JP 'very hard' mode its default difficulty is such a kick in the teeth

I gave up at the giant robot fight but the lava section and the "haha don't stay at the top left of the screen :)" moment when the stage 5 shmup section's boss flies in were some real lowlights too, I haven't audibly expressed frustration at a game in a while but that did it for me

sparkster is a perfect little guy though. would die for him

fascinating as a game that's fundamentally structurally different to almost all modern RPGs of its ilk, fallout 1 hardly even has a traditional gaming narrative as much as it has a world

i have no idea if that's the norm for CRPGs of this era but i found it really cool and refreshing! the 'main quest' quite literally is just your three different objectives, which unravel themselves really seamlessly as you discover more about the wasteland

the only thing that i think really lets fo1 down is how buggy it can be, as well as some of its more questionable balancing decisions. i know generally when an RPG presents you with some kind of horrible disaster you're supposed to just carry on but it still stings having your companions hit for more hp than their entire (fixed!!!) health pool while fighting entirely level-appropriate enemies, it feels less like a mistake you're just going to have to live with and more like an obvious quick load point

still very close to being a masterpiece though. other reviews on this page have put it much better than i ever could but the atmosphere presented here and the ending will stick with me for a while, the master is a mindblowingly written and voiced character for a 1997 game, genuinely unbelievable stuff

so incredibly imperfect! really unique and shockingly polished for what it is, but totk really vindicates my opinion that botw's meditative slant on the open world template was what made it work. still ultimately a cool thing that i'm glad exists though, i just wouldn't want another of this game any time soon. in a similar fashion to elden ring's heavy asset reuse, it's a testament to the wild shit that's possible when studios opt to heavily build on their prior work. there's no way it would be possible to make a game like this without an existing game world and mechanical framework to utilise, and that allows for some insane mechanical experimentation - if botw was a detailed and polished but ultimately fairly restrained immersive sim -like then totk is the "fuck it, we can make this work" version of that. link warp through every ceiling in the game who gives a shit anymore

have found myself with a very 'flirting vs harassment' relationship w this compared to nocturne. love the music here, love the atmosphere, dislike almost every change they made to these systems. it's easy to find smirk hate online but what the hell did they do to fusion? having a look at some online resources seems to point towards nocturne being an outlier among these games for giving each demon 5/6+ potential skills of their own but... that is SO much more compelling to me than the system here where you get 1 or 2 mediocre new skills and otherwise carry everything from your sacrifices over unchanged

anyway i'm 30 hours into this and locked into the neutral route and this story's pacing has actually aged me several years. really hope i can finish the chalice of hope quest before i actually turn to dust

have finally overcome the hurdle of 'not finding this game fun' by doing a playthrough with a huge club and smacking the shit out of everything. have realised they nerfed straight swords to shit here to encourage use of the expanded rpg mechanics and that's why i was having a bad time

as for everything else? i am literally completely neutral on it now LOL - ds2 has some of the older fromsoft games' vibes for sure but i do think it lacks a lot of the genuinely interesting design + aesthetic decisions of games like evergrace or shadow tower abyss

the soundtrack is particularly mediocre, i wasn't a huge fan of sakuraba's ds1 offerings but his compositions here are as uninspired as they come, and while i think yuka kitamura's work here fares better overall, it's still not nearly as good as the later games' OSTs

fun little game with some good ideas though! just obviously made with a lack of time & confidence, ambitious in scope but not entirely willing to commit to what it puts forward, i long for the original version of this game before it changed hands as well as the one that got to deliver on its revised set of concepts fully

after replaying this i definitely get why its beloved status is contested among some, it's probably the easiest of the mega drive games to actually finish but it's designed in a way that encourages mastery a lot more - ultimately a very good thing but after sonic 2 it can feel a little slow if you aren't familiar with these levels! that flow state is much harder to achieve here, but it's by far the most rewarding and tightly paced of these games. so massively impressive and detailed for its era, 90s sega were insane

fascinating, influential, masterfully atmospheric and also kind of a disaster, perhaps in a good/unique way but not my cup of tea at all. I genuinely wasn't strong enough for this one LOL, at first I was really digging how much thought the combat requires and the way enemies feel like a legit awkward alien threat, but oh my god it's just too much for me after a while!! it's not necessarily that hard, it just requires a lot more effort and patience than most games. I really wanted to give it that, I tried my hardest to embrace password saving and even downloaded some tileset mapping software from itch so I could make my own maps, but for now I'm going to give something else my time