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

checked out the ign walkthrough to see how far through this chore i was and almost started crying when i saw the video linked for "how to find the infinity gauntlet easter egg" guys i can't do it

this is literally stale white bread in video game form like i don't get it!! what do we all like so much about this?? i see the upgrade menu and the quest log and all the useless extra skills and my eyes glaze over instantly. i literally have not felt less of a drive to keep playing something since i trudged through bioshock infinite. this thing is 20 hours long apparently and even with my relatively generous amount of free time i absolutely cannot imagine getting through all of that

also the combat is barely functional and contextually boring as shit, i've been spoiled by other games that make an effort to characterise their enemies bc seriously - what is there to be engaged by while i'm fighting generic troll #8 or a fucking stone golem. at the worst of times there's absolutely nothing here

i'm gonna go retreat back to my cave. fallout 2 here we come babeyyyyy!!!

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

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

near-perfect bite-sized metroidvania with impeccable art + music, I want to live in whiteleaf memorial park

also having bosses drop overpowered equippables & including a one hit KO mode is genius, I finished insane mode a few years ago and it was genuinely fun as hell

fuck the fanservicey stuff though, that one questline with the mushroom makes me want to puke

one of the best games I have literally ever played, consistently ahead of its time to the point where the rest of us probably haven't caught up

also nowhere near as hard as its reputation had me expecting! it is near-impenetrable at first but supereasy mode is plenty forgiving and it has a surprisingly well-considered difficulty curve, it ramps up pretty gradually with the exception of a few "wall" bosses to serve as proper skill gates, like sniper honeyviper, seven force, etc

I need to also point out that on supereasy there's a fucking manual slow-motion feature!!! the madmen including an accessibility feature that's STILL rare all these years later back on the mega drive... insane

I do almost yearn for a version of this game made for the genesis 6-button pad but the insane, unwieldy control scheme is better than it has any right to be and mostly serves as a reminder of how bold treasure were willing to be, and besides, only having to move your fingers between three buttons probably does help with how manic things can get

but yeah, game is a technical masterpiece and damn near perfect, anyone want to go 68000 THE HEART ON FIRE with me

I haven't even FINISHED this yet and I already need to comment on how good it is - it's fucking insane how quickly you learn to parse all the insane shit going on in these levels and reach that state of intentionality + flow, for me stage 5's combat gauntlet became a kind of "holy shit i get it" moment where everything just CLICKED

hoping the last few levels aren't too much of a wall bc i want to get into treasure's catalog so bad, I started this and alien soldier on the same day and both have me v excited to dive in more

update: the last few levels were - in fact - quite the wall LMAO, I've finished harder stuff so this isn't going on shelved just yet but god it's hard to find the motivation to get good enough at the final stage to complete all those consecutive bosses, especially when green is kicking my ass so hard