I really wanted to like this, but it ended up being a pretty big disappointment.

The art and music are great - it feels like aesthetics were their major focus. Playability suffers a lot though. The focus on detailed sprites means your ship and enemies are enormous despite the small screen, which gives you very little space to maneuver. It's even worse because your ship's speed is so fast; you want the ability to move slowly to dodge large waves of bullets, but you don't get that here. Since the screen is so crowded with large sprites enemies have a tendency to spawn out of nowhere, which makes it even more dangerous to move. It seems to be influenced by Cave games but doesn't really take into account that they make ship positioning a big part of gameplay - Gun Trails actively discourages you from moving around the screen or trying to stake out a position.

The super weapon feels like an attempt to do a take on Dodonpachi's hyper - a strong laser that does high damage, and that charges up as you maintain enemy combos. Unfortunately, the game intentionally takes away any stored charge when you encounter minibosses, which denies you the ability to use a stored up super weapon in exactly the time you'd want to use it. It's also the only way to slow down your ship's movement, which feels awkward and limited.

After playing I booted up GG Aleste again and it reminded me how other portable shmups on small screens have intentionally gone for smaller sprites to maintain maneuverability and the sense of a larger playfield. I found myself wishing Gun Trails had made the same choice.

something about playing this game on virtual console non-stop for 24 hours straight during the summer of 2009 as a sixteen year-old taught me a valuable life lesson.

i learned how to scam the exhaustion system in the game. if you work late enough in the day, time will eventually stop in the early morning (i believe 5am to be exact).

once you reach this point, the only limiting factor you have is your stamina, which can be continually increased by visiting the hot springs in the mountains outside your farm or eating specific foods. by doing this repeatedly, you can lock into this cycle: tend to your farm until your virtual self collapses, go to the hot springs and wade around for a few seconds, and then repeat this cycle until you complete everything you need to.

i did this for two in-game years, until i had what i considered to be the ultimate farm. however, my farm required too much upkeep every day to keep everything happy. i had so much money that it became meaningless. i had spent so much time each day farming that i had NEVER ONCE EVEN TALKED TO ONE OF THE BACHELORETTES.

i couldn't garner the affection of one of the girls in a measly six months. it had to be earned over time. i would be alone in a decaying farm when my father showed up to evaluate me six in-game months later. i supposedly had everything that i thought i had wanted, only to see it crumble before me. i cried and turned off the console. in this moment i realized that capitalism makes fools of us all.

five stars.

My issues with this game are as follows: the jump-platforming feels horrible. The maps are obnoxious to traverse and have horrible enemy placement to the point where about halfway through the game I just started running past 99% of enemies. Combat simply doesn't feel good. Nobody reacts to getting hit by a lightsaber at all, and having to parry large groups of enemies so you can break their poise so you can do a cutscene attack that gets interrupted by one of the other 9 enemies attacking you was more than frustrating. The wildlife was cool, but were far and away the most annoying enemies to fight (fuck the goats in particular). Parrying humanoid enemies or attacking during their endlag felt like nothing. People are swinging their weapons so wildly that it was difficult to ascertain when they're attacking or when they're in an animation that doesn't actually do any damage. The player hardly does any damage even after upgrading lightsaber strength, leading to some of the late-game bosses being a game of Simon Says where you just have to wait for one of the three safe openings so you can do .02% of their health bar. Dathomir is one of the most annoying areas I've seen in a Souls-like, which is a shame because the Nightsisters and brothers are cool as hell. Also for some reason the audio started lagging in every cutscene about halfway through the game, so characters would "say" something and then like 5 seconds later the audio of them saying it would come through. The story itself feels like they cut some stuff. Like when Greez comes to have a heart-to-heart with Cal, I was only thinking about how effective of a scene this would be if they put this in the game just a smidge later so I felt more attached to the relationship between the characters.

What I liked: mmm yummy star wars inject it into my veins. also the uncharted/assassin's creed platforming stuff worked pretty well. Customizing the lightsaber was pretty neat, and BD-1 is the best droid design I've ever seen. I want one. The coliseum area was really fun, although it was an extremely weird point to have it in the story and I'm still not totally sure what that was all about.

Overall, lots of actual gameplay stuff that made me want to drive my head through a wall, but the set dressing was great. Excited to play the sequel when that drops and feel Exactly The Same Way.

Despite its title this can't help be feel like as much a sequel to Demon's Souls. Partly this is down to the structure of the game, a central hub area branching off into a few different independent linear routes that you can tackle in any order you want before the game ultimately culminates in you finding and killing the monarchy of this land.

Partly this is down to the almost reckless creativity on display. If Dark Souls took the things from Demon's Souls that really worked and cut away the bits that arguably didn't, Dark Souls 2 has not a care in the world instead saying lets fuck around and find out. This was very much to my frustration in my first playthrough, but returning to this game a year later a lot of the things that previously frustrated me are honestly just endearing. As rough edges go, I think there's a lot of charm and personality to these ones.

Returning to this game in a post-Elden Ring world was also a lot of fun to me. People disparagingly compare that game to Dark Souls 2 occasionally, but I feel like playing Elden Ring taught me a lot about how to enjoy playing Dark Souls 2. It turns out a lot of the parts of Dark Souls 2 that are decried as being unfair are actually much more reasonable when you take advantage of all the tools the game gives you. This playthrough I abandoned my usual approach of just two-handing the chonkiest sword I could find all by my lonesome to instead play an extremely-multiclass build (turns out the excessive number of levels DS2 hands you are perfect for enabling you to dabble in everything) with summons alongside me and I actually had just a great time.

That's not to say there aren't some problems with the game even outside of the notorious Dark Souls 2 weirdness, and the last portion of my run was honestly a bit exhausting; I think the pile of dlc the game has is both very overhyped, and kind of excessive considering how gargantuan the base game already is. That said, somehow, I sit here a convert. Despite all its problems Dark Souls 2 is actually a rather delightful oddity.

38 pages. That's how long our Google Doc was for this game, myself controlling the leading archaeologist Lemeza whilst my girlfriend assembled this fastidious record of game text (some parts given to us, others hand-translated), environmental clues and ancient drawings; seeing this document come together is like living inside that Pepe Silvia meme, bizarre connections constantly being drawn between disparate hints scattered several zones apart, a riddle from the second area of the game still highlighted halfway through the game because we somehow haven't found a use for it yet, a note saying to return to that statue for the twelfth time at some point because goddamn did it ever look at us funny. The thing is though that in La-Mulana all those moments that make you feel like you're going crazy are just true; hints or strange inklings that have bugged you forever will turn out to be helpful 30 hours later halfway across the map, no flavour text or background detail is safe from turning into critical information, and against impossible odds seemingly everything is interwoven into such a beautiful, fascinating, maddening tapestry in ways that were at times genuinely mind-blowing.

La-Mulana is a hard game to recommend. I think its reputation in regards to mechanical difficulty and unfairness is overstated, and the game has such a brilliant sense of humour that even its meaner traps tended to elicit smiles and laughter more than anything else, but it does ask a lot of the player in regards to patience, perseverance and thoughtfulness. Its reputation in regards to the difficulty of its puzzle-solving, however, is well-earnt; we did manage to complete the game largely without looking at hints or a guide (with the exception of checking what the various computer programs actually do about two-thirds of the way into our playthrough) so it is certainly very possible, but the game asks for a level of perceptiveness, deeply outside-the-box thinking and even just logical leaps of faith that you'll often feel like it is breaking you.

It's such a gorgeously crafted game though, one where you can feel the passion and love that went into it, with a killer soundtrack, one of the most deeply and rewardingly interlinked maps in all of gaming history, and a sense of imagination so vivid that it never ceases to surprise and inspire. La-Mulana is something special.