Part of my 'unofficial Final Fantasy' canon. Like some kind of bastard love child between Tekken and FFX, The Bouncer is a techno-infused take on the beat 'em up genre through a distinctly Y2K era SquareSoft lens. Characters with spiky haircuts and nonsensical outfits fight their way through retro-futuristic locales, set to a backdrop of slick electric guitars and techno rock.

At first glance, you'd be forgiven for mistaking The Bouncer for a new entry in the Final Fantasy series, as they share so much aesthetic makeup with each other that they may as well be related, thanks in part due to Nomura's heavy involvement in both titles. It also feels similarly well produced with an attention to graphical fidelity and a gorgeous all round presentation.

In essence then, The Bouncer is basically a beautifully rendered, feature length Final Fantasy cutscene that's occasionally injected with short and sweet bursts of arcade beat 'em up action, which play out like a simple version of Streets of Rage in the Tekken engine. These sections are fun enough, thanks mostly to the hilarious ragdoll physics which lets you launch enemies into the air and send them hurtling in to one another, but all too brief and unfortunately don't offer much in the way of depth or variety. With a focus so clearly placed on its story and presentation above deep gameplay or mechanics, you often feel like you're spending more time watching than playing- but that's not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary,The Bouncer takes some interesting creative risks to stand out from the crowd and in hindsight could be considered one of the first truly cinematic movie games.

Clocking in at around only 2 hours, the game is easily beatable in one sitting but offers some decent replay value, as it can be played from three different perspectives with unlockable characters and features branching paths, reframing certain events within the story.

Harshly judged at release for not living up to sky high expectations (being Squares first release on the new console), The Bouncer is more than the sum of its parts and well worth revisiting for those looking to indulge in some mindless fun and early PS2 aesthetic kino, if nothing else. And boy does it deliver on that.

I LOVE the characters and story of this game.

Shame it's in Revenant Wings, one of the most bullshit, cheap games I've ever fucking played.

Watched the rest of the story post-Chapter 8 on YouTube.

Second verse, mostly same as the first. I won't dally on an introduction.

Presentation has been upped significantly. Lots of colorful characters, new and old, but none of them really have any depth. The story is nothing to write home about, particularly if you're not into the "tournament" trope. The music takes a page out of Klonoa 2's book. Less soothing and dreamy, more jovial and jubilant. All the themes got stuck in my head. The levels are all visually distinct, and even give all the enemies unique outfits for each world (that's something I wish more games would do in general).

Dream Champ Tournament's level design is simultaneously better and worse. There are a lot of brand new mechanics that add to puzzles, and match the thematically distinct worlds well. Most new mechanics are carried over from Klonoa 2 on PS2, and they fit right in. Other improvements are the addition of an optional collectible in the form of the Sun Stone, one per level. The bosses are a highlight for me especially, making unique challenges that fit into the "tournament" plotline quite nicely. Some of the levels can get really tough and complex though, to the point where I begin to wonder if the wacky shit I'm trying to pull off is actually the dev-intended solution (and sometimes it actually is). Also, not a fan of the ranking system. I just don't feel like it fits this style of game.

On the negative side of things, I almost feel sorry for calling the previous game's airboard stages bad, because this game swapped them out for a much worse version. They look pretty cool in terms of graphics, but in terms of gameplay, I find them insufferable. Depth perception fails me at every turn, causing me to miss collectibles (aside from the Sun Stone, I didn't even try to get all the gems on these stages), or worse, perish. The other part that doesn't help is the airboard's "acceleration". When moving left or right, the airboard kinda drifts a bit further than you want it to after you let go of the dpad. All of this combines to create what I feel is the worst part of the game by far. Also, the underwater stages of world 4 can suck it. Extremely slow, sluggish, and generally unfun to play. Almost made me feel like quitting.

Overall, it's still a really solid title. If you enjoyed the first Klonoa GBA game, it can't hurt to check this one out as well.

For the longest time, I assumed Mystic Quest was 'Actually Pretty Good' and people just hated on it because the prospect of a low-difficulty, linear RPG made them feel inadequate or attacked.

But nah, Mystic Quest is stale bread.

There's barely any world to interact with, no sense of exploration or adventure, combat never becomes anything more than spamming attacks and heals, and what little plot is here is a sequence of self-perpetuating fetch quests. There's an attempt to branch out by introducing environmental quirks and swappable items reminiscent of 2D Zelda, but they go mostly underutilized. The party structure was neat at first - your second member is a progress-sensitive partner who's far stronger than you and acts as a keystone for the protagonist to mature into, - but these characters remain one-dimensional and don't have visibly strong designs to carry them, either.

The ONE saving grace - as many have already stated, - is the music. Sasai and Kawakami call upon their past experience in OVA composition and SEGA arcade music (respectively) for a score that's both aggressive and mournful. The hard contrasts between rocking battle themes and waverly overworld tunes create an incredible identity.

But in the end, good music can't save a sauceless RPG.

This game was supposed to be an introduction to RPGs for Western gamers: a "my first RPG" if you will. As such, it needed to be easy and intuitive... and unfortunately is neither of the two.

I had absolutely no idea what to make of any of the menus (the layout for the equipment screen in particular, made absolutely no sense). And while the game was extremely forgiving by simply bringing you back to the beginning of the battle if you died, it was also difficult, and difficult in the worst sense - RNG-based difficulty.

An example: your two-man party fights a party of three enemies, each capable of inflicting paralyze with their attacks. Since you need to use a turn healing paralysis, and there are three of them and two of you, it's very possible that they will stunlock you to death with minimal participation from you. So while the game was generous in letting you respawn infinitely, this seemed to add more to the frustration and tedium of replaying the same battle again and again with the same approach (the gameplay didn't allow for much strategy) and just waiting for the RNG to roll just right.

I will give it this though: the soundtrack was full of bangers, there were no random encounters, and the dungeons had some interesting puzzle elements.

Absolutely god tier game with fun gameplay and some incredibly soulful moments. Could be biased just because I actually like Disney, but some of the worlds were an absolute joy to go through even if some of them could be a bit frustrating. I played on proud mode as well so I kinda got my ass beat a lot but it never really felt unfair to me and I had a lot of fun nearly the whole time. I had the all in one collection on my shelf for about a year now and played this on a whim just because of Sora getting announced for smash. Now I kinda wanna go ahead and play all of them asap lol.

p.s.: the cabal got to me

It's... okay? Has some absolutely asinine design decisions and there is literally only one or two good bosses in the entire game but I suppose it was charming enough to be worth my time

Aged like already-expired milk

Now that I've actually played Kingdom Sharts I'll have to start telling people that my name is NOT a KH reference

what exactly is it about this game that has struck such a chord with me? if you asked me about the gameplay itself i'd probably shrug and mumble something about it being mediocre. progression throughout the majority of the worlds is generally obtuse and frustrating, the combat isn't much prettier either, for at least the first half of the game you lack a lot of your major abilities and as a result it ends up becoming very samey and underdeveloped for a big chunk of the playtime, a large problem in a game that ends up landing at about 30 - 40 hours long. so why? why was I sitting down then, playing for hours at a time? why do I sit here, writing this, perfectly content with the score i've given it?

playing through Kingdom Hearts it suddenly becomes so easy to realize just why this game - and by extension franchise has stuck with so many different people. the square + disney vibes come together to create genuinely one of the most unique, surreal gaming experiences i have ever sat through. from the moment you boot up the game even, you're greeted by that gorgeous watercolor, the sound of waves crashing, and blissful piano. then bang - in the first five hours you jump from a eerie void to a tropical island to a colosseum to cruising through an asteroid field and so and so forth. i'm not even a Disney fan and yet as I was bouncing between all these worlds I was so thoroughly entertained.

even at the game's lowest points, where the combat is in it's most basic form, where the exploration is at it's dullest, I kept going. it could have been any other game and I most likely would have dropped it right there and then, but Kingdom Hearts is different. many times it's campy, other times confusing, but maybe it's these that draw me to the game instead of pushing me away. it's so goofy and wild that even the most imaginative minds couldn't come up with something as absurd as this, and yet they did. hell they shouldn't have even been able to - this game exists on some cosmic blessing of chance. who knows if we'll see something like this franchise in video games again... ever? but if it was going to happen, i'm glad it became Kingdom Hearts. what a charming, whimsical little game.

So I've recently been reading through some old Nintendo Power issues I got my hands on. They serve as great little time capsules of a completely different era of games, as well as an interesting look at the things Nintendo prioritized at the time. All four of the issues I have are the months before and after the release of the Nintendo Gamecube. All of the big previews and reports are on its presence at that year's Spaceworld, each issue has several pages dedicated to a different launch game, they're making this console sound like it's gonna make Luigi real. And yet, this is kind of an awkward time for Nintendo when it comes to their console releases. The N64 is winding down with games like Madden 2002 and Tony Hawk 2, so there isn't a lot for Nintendo Power to try and sell their audience on. Because of this awkward middle period between the N64 and Gamecube, the GBA and GBC saw quite a lot of coverage. I mean, games like Pokemon Crystal and Advance Wars were always gonna get promoted heavily, but I noticed a lot of games that I'm pretty sure would have never gotten the features they ended up getting if it hadn't been for this vacancy. Every issue I read had multiple pages dedicated to Dragon Quest Monsters 2, and when it finally got a review from the outlet it got a 7. Lara Croft on Game Boy Color, several Jurassic Park games, Klonoa on GBA, Spyro on GBA, obviously these aren't all the same level of quality, but seeing them getting large previews or multi-issue game guides was just odd. Among those games, the one that stuck out to me the most was Lady Sia. See, all those games I mentioned in that previous sentence are all either well known or at least from series that are well known, and yet here's Lady Sia, a completely new game and character from a company that dealt almost exclusively with licensed games before this one. Each issue I have has a full-page advertisement for the game, and one of them even has a guide for the first two worlds of the game. Not only that but in the letters to the editor section, someone sends a message complaining about the lack of girl characters in games, and the editor's response has this quote: "...there's not a gamer alive who wouldn't call Joanna Dark, Samus Aran, or Lady Sia a hero." OK, so, the game literally hadn't even come out yet, so I think several living gamers wouldn't call Lady Sia a hero and be reasonable in saying so. But more importantly, this certainly gives an idea of how they were trying to make this game a thing, which is why I was so curious about it that I had to play it for myself.

So it turns out Lady Sia is incredibly basic. Like, to the point that I was pretty disappointed, it's a bad ending to the paragraph of setup I did and now it makes even less sense for me to have gotten this invested. It's a very basic platformer with very basic combat. You run-up to an enemy and mash the B and R button over and over until they die, they usually manage to get one hit in on you, but who cares because there's almost always a health pick-up nearby. Platforming is mostly okay, except you're weirdly slippery, which can trip you up but it's still completely manageable. The story is very generic fantasy, except there's also some technology, but I wouldn't call it steampunk, things just kind of show up in this game. Some bird enemies started showing up and they were really bad to fight, but I still made it past them and up to the end of the second world. That's when the Retroid Pocket I was playing this on decided to start having really bad controller issues and made the game basically unplayable. It was here that I had to decide if I wanted to do all the levels I did again on a different platform in order to finish the game, or just end my playthrough here. I simply stopped playing.

I guess if I had to give the game some points, the animation on the opening cutscene and the character sprites are kind of impressive, it's not a bad-looking game. I could see someone back in the day being won over on the visuals alone considering this is very early in the GBA's lifespan. If I were a child and the only game I had on the GBA was Lady Sia, I would finish it, I might even finish it a second time. Again, if I were a kid and this was the only game I had.

Nintendo Power gives this 4 1/2 stars out of 5, higher than the scores they gave to Klonoa: Empire of Dreams, Mega Man Battle Network, and Pokemon Crystal, games that are also covered in the issues that I have. The score is high but no one in the review really says anything all that glowing about it. "It's not bad, just a little too straightforward" "The gameplay isn't very challenging, but that may just make the game more accessible to younger gamers" "With stylized art, great control, and a lot of variety in action, Lady Sia is a very pleasant surprise. The only thing that keeps me from giving it a perfect five is the repetitive music" I know Nintendo Power gives out high scores like candy, but there's so little about what the reviewers say that sells the score, even the quote of one person saying they would give it a perfect score. It's just a little baffling, trying to figure out why this game got pushed so hard, besides the most cynical and obvious assumption of being paid to do so. If so, I guess if a publisher like TDK interactive had to push any game, it would be their original property. According to MobyGames, RFX Interactive went back to licensed games after this until RFX Interactive closed down in 2003, along with TDK getting bought by Take-Two. There even was a Lady Sia 2 in development, and it seemingly got decently far in production until the closure of the studio. It's kind of sad now that I think about it, this developer that's only known for making licensed games trying out the start of a big new franchise, getting this big Nintendo Power bump, only to end up getting all that cut short due to the brutal nature of the industry. I don't think Lady Sia is a bad game, and I bet a sequel could have made things better, but regardless of quality, I find it to be a pretty interesting case of a game just totally falling into obscurity despite its best efforts. I know this isn't much of a review, but I felt like I needed to let people know about this strange obsession I've had over the past couple of weeks. I might even try to go back and finish Lady Sia someday, because I bet there is some cool stuff I haven't seen yet. I don't wanna let the Lady Sia fandom down.

As a followup to Moonlight Museum, Empire of Dreams tightens up the controls a bit, the visuals are obviously much more vivid and appealing, and it introduces some new mechanics to toy with.
Unfortunately it never reaches the highs of the previous game and its puzzle design feels neutered in comparison. Boss fights, jetboard stages, and autoscrolling stages focused on timed platforming over any amount of core puzzle solving dilutes the experience of the game as a whole.
Moonlight Museum felt confident in its lack of gimmick stages or boss fights. Focusing purely on making the puzzle solving engaging for an entire playthrough, with cute little pictures as rewards for players that went out of their way to get the most out of the game. In contrast, Empire of Dreams lacks any real completionists bonus aside from half the amount of EX stages as its predecessor had.

A decent game overall, but disappointing coming right off Moonlight Museum.