1: richter is a hunk. best belmont i think

2. this has a really good difficulty level on a richter-only run RIGHT UP UNTIL the stage with shaft's ghost. fuck that part

3. the copy-paste CV1 dracula fight these games love to trot out sucks so bad! it's so tedious... at least he doesn't teleport on top of you so much in this one though

game is fun! I can see why CV fans love it and it did occasionally get me v hyped up when it was at its peak w/ music and level design

HATE when the little freak jumps at me

(wanted to come back to this lil joke review after playing SCIV bc that game really makes me appreciate this one more. I think it's really easy to see why CV1 is such a thoroughly canonised part of the NES library, it's just effortlessly iconic and weirdly tasteful for what it is! I seriously think that HUD is one of the best and most underappreciated pieces of video game graphic design, and the little cinematic touches w/ stuff like the opening and level transition map are all just really solid and effective. game is legit gorgeous all the way through, and before it descends into "please just holy water cheese this" territory it's damn near perfectly designed)

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

it's such a revalation that samus' moveset actually provides a lot of room for creative and fun combat - the bosses are obviously the best part of this game imo and maybe the best they've ever been in this series? at least divorced from context, because that's where dread starts to falter a lot

there's like, zero atmosphere here imo, the soundtrack is completely unmemorable and it would probably take me a while to remember which zone is which. this is also, pardon the obvious joke, one of the least dread-inducing metroid games yet. everything is so compartmentalised and checkpoints are aplenty, I was pretty happy that the EMMI encounters felt pretty distant to me as I finished the game bc imo they're 100% garbage! not scary in the slightest, you can bash your head against each section where you encounter them until you trial and error your way through with little threat to your actual game progress, if I were a fucking hack I'd make a joke about "metroid mild annoyance" but I'm not gonna play that straight, I promise :]

game is a lot of fun though, especially on a 100% run! if mercurysteam keep at it then metroid should be in good hands, which is definitely not something I would've said after playing and subsequently dropping samus returns, I just hope their future efforts have a little more slow-burn tension, even if it means they need to tone the difficulty down

(also let me control the next one with the d-pad pleaseeeeeee I hate the analog stick and I don't think 360 degree aiming is worth using it exclusively for)

unbelievably ahead of its time, the meta storytelling & unwaveringly ambitious presentation give this game an atmosphere and general vibe like nothing else - it feels like it belongs to the same band of hugely accomplished 5th gen games as silent hill and vagrant story but you can definitely feel its influence pop up in some v different gaming circles, the team ico vibes here are exactly as potent as you might expect

I didn't come out of it feeling like I had just experienced a total masterpiece or anything but I was still VERY into its sense of subtlety and restraint, the team's attempts to turn saga into a genuinely countercultural jrpg consistently shine through. the character design is strange and hard to parse, the cutscenes have a consistent sense of quiet tension and the gameplay often takes a backseat when it needs to, it's really great!

I love the decision to keep the voice acting in japanese in all versions as well, I'd probably prefer a pseudo-language so that the untranslated version would have this too but the sense of mystery it gives the dialogue when you can't understand it is fantastic, it's a shame 'panzerese' generally sounds kinda goofy but something like NieR's chaos language would've been perfect. as it stands it seems very well acted to someone not versed in the language, I just can't be bothered to dig up any japanese discussion of the game to find out whether that's true lmao

anyway i'm going to steal azel's gender. thank u for reading