npckc is a creator who’s never shied from making games directly based on the joys and frustrations in their personal life. Obviously this is not an uncommon thing in media but considering the genres that mainstream games skew into vs the extreme indie scale and intimate scope of kc’s work I do think these traits are more notable in their ouvre than they might be in, say, John Carmack or Shinji Mikami’s. Casting Hearts, to cut to the chase, is a covid game, in the flavor of “god dude I know you weren’t expecting to play a two-years-deep covid game but cards on the table I wasn’t expecting to be one either so, fuck, I guess.”

Casting Hearts is a one-scene game where you step into the role of Marjoram, a student of indeterminate gender (and species) at some kind of magical university doing their gosh darn damndest to treat their girlfriend Ginger to a lovely birthday date, or at least the loveliest approximation of one Marjoram can muster via some spellcasting and a crystal ball skype call. It’s a short game and mechanics-light, with only a few aesthetic changes and branching paths via the frequent dialogue options, but I found some nice variation and flavor to explore across two playthroughs and two endings I saw in not quite an hour of playtime.

The game is as sweet as it looks, but anyone familiar with npckc’s work will know that while this isn’t a straight up melancholia like all things equal i would prefer it if we were safe & lonely instead of together & afraid but i cannot deny that it is hard; or: a solitary spacecraft, the treacly art style doesn’t mean the game won’t take its characters seriously or treat their problems respectfully and with import. this is a game about making the perfect mind palace cake for your girlfriend and giggling over the goofy whale that’s waving to you from the waters of the astral beach that your date overlooks, but it’s as much a game about the pressure Marjoram puts on themself to make that date perfect because everything else is so imperfect and this is the best they can do; about being angry at what the world has taken from us, in people, in time, in life experience; fear about how much longer this will go on and the certainty that we’re just not built for the kind of solitude a lot of us are forced into by necessity these days (or force ourselves into, if we must, which is harder, and gets harder every day).

But that’s not all there is either, I’m not just here like “broooo this CUTE game is actually KIND OF DARK” lol I’m not thirteen. These characters are people and they’re in a relationship and life is hard, right? They talk to each other, and there are multiple ways for things to break bad in this game that revolve around how forthcoming you the player are with Marjoram’s anxieties vs. the mask of Perfect Party Purveyor. At the end of the day though, regardless of how thoroughly feelings get hashed out or left a bit hanging by the end, these are people who are here for each other as much as they can be and that’s not nothing.

npckc is one of my favorite game creators working right now because they’re so good at balancing these tones. Their work does aim to please, of course, I mean like, look at it right? But it always comes tinged with a deft realism. There’s never a sense that things that are difficult or uncomfortable are being shied away from or deflected in the name of being cozy or wholesome. Instead these games insist that we can and must find comfort where we can get it within the hardship. It’s always going to be hard, and it’s always going to be worth it – not always in equal measure, but our loved ones are there to help up out when we need it, if we can find the strength to ask.

It's a balanced experience, one that in a very short amount of time encompasses two years’ worth of bad feelings and what we’ve made in the wreckage of them. npckc has been experimenting a lot lately with a lot of really micro-sized projects and I appreciate how emotionally substantial they almost always are, it’s the real magic touch that’s made me so attached to them as a creator. And now that I know how to add games to IGDB and therefore backloggd it’s over for you fuckers I’m adding them all bay bee.

I’ve played a lot of Mega Man games in the last six months, and even when they start to show the signs of burgeoning narrative ambition in the X series, those games are too held up by their own stupidity and refusal to consider the implications of their own worldbuilding for me to say that they’re really About anything. By the year 1997 we’re at a clear point where the X series has established characters, sort of, and a jumble of recurring ideas, kind of, but there’s no real coherence to anything narratively, no actual throughline to that world. And that’s fine with me, it’s really not what I’m here for, it’s mostly something I focus on a lot in my writing about these games because that stuff takes an ever-growing presence in these games to thus far no payoff.

But that IS also what makes Mega Man Legends feel like such a breath of fresh air when it hits the scene on the Mega Man timeline. It’s not just the radical directional shift in gameplay this one adopts (though I do really enjoy that too), and I wouldn’t call it an entirely aesthetic thing either – no, this game is obviously one of the most beautiful and pleasant to look at in the history of the medium, but Mega Man has always had exceptional aesthetics, it’s the one thing that’s virtually unassailable across every iteration of the series so far. For me I think the thing that’s so immediately remarkable about Legends is the clear and deliberate focus on the voice of the game and the characters, something that has never been present in the franchise before. The series has a lot of CHARACTER, but it doesn’t really have characterS, right? Even X and Zero, the closest thing to fleshed out guys we have so far are kind of shallow and stupid caricatures of cardboard cutouts. Legends may not win any awards for MegaMan Volnutt’s personality but the fact that this guy has such a strongly defined voice and wants and, most importantly, that the cast of people around him is much more strongly defined and central to the game than he is, makes the game stand out immediately from its parent series.

Because as much as Mega Man Legends is a run n gun 3D dungeon crawler with light RPG elements it’s equally if not moreso one of those cool mid 90s to mid-00s Japanese games where you don’t have a lot of clearly defined goals (or if you do they’re not really urgent) and you kind of just vibe with all the side characters in a small semi-open world. This is a hard thing to describe but I feel like you know what I’m talking about right? Games like Majora’s Mask, Shenmue, Chulip, most mid-period Harvest Moons, maybe Chibi-Robo? The kind of game where when you were a kid it was easy to ignore the main plot and just chill out. I never played Mega Man Legends as a kid but it would have fit right in with that collection of “games that aren’t walking sims that I forced into that mold because I’ve always been like this I guess.”

This small island and it’s little city of comically fastidious bureaucrats and fantasy policeman who are just inept enough to be funny and unthreatening and workaday tradespeople baking bread and selling clothes and operating tv stations is outrageously detailed, full of little secrets and stuff that help you fill up your health bar during unexpected boss fights in normally safe zones or crafting materials that let your friend research new weapons for you, but it’s full of entirely superfluous stuff too, seemingly just for the sake of character. Multiple buildings and storefronts let you enter and are full of NPCs with bespoke dialogue that have no practical in-game benefit to you, with a fully modelled interior to explore. Lots of NPCs will give Volnutt a little yes or no question to answer for no reason, it’s cute! There are sidequests too but they’re usually stuff like help out the local kid gang with building up their clubhouse by finding a hammer and a saw, or hang out with a local sick kid, or find something this lady could use to add a little splash of color to her landscape painting. It’s a relaxed atmosphere, a game full of friendly people being generally nice, full of unthreatening villains and bright blue skies. The vibes, as they say, are immaculate here. I do want to shout out the voice acting in particular, which strikes that Saturday morning cartoon vibe perfectly but because it’s 1997 there’s not really an entrenched anime voice actor industry that just defaults into all of these roles, so you get a bunch of low budget Canadian tv people doing these voices instead in a way that gives this game some incredible character. MegaMan Volnutt himself is actually voiced by a thirteen-year-old boy rather than an adult woman doing an Anime Kid voice it’s a really distinct sound from anything you would hear today.

The gameplay is pretty slick too. I assume this is an unpopular statement here, I feel like it’s easy to see any game with tank controls and be like ah it’s clunky it’s old it doesn’t feel good or intuitive, and fuckin surprise surprise here comes ina crawling out of her well to defend an old game’s aged elements but hear me out a little bit. Anything that feels unintuitive only feels that way because we don’t have muscle memory for it, right? I have two really distinct memories from my childhood of Adult Non-Gamers pretending to take an interest in my video game at a family gathering and just being unable to conceptualize the basic movement controls of Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia and Dragon Ball Z Legacy of Goku II. These are not, these aren’t difficult games to parse, right, it’s just that someone who has literally never interacted with a game until her 50s doesn’t know how to do it. It’s fine!

So having the weird control scheme it has doesn’t automatically make Mega Man Legends unworthy, right? There’s more to it. You have to consider the game that’s built around those controls, and I think MML is pretty well constructed. If anything, the game is tuned a little too easy, with most enemies absolutely confounded by the very simple strategy of a nonstop circle strafe around them, which will serve you like 90% of the time. But by and large I found that enemies were placed pretty thoughtfully, platforming challenges were designed with the fact that your control over your character and the camera is slow and limited, and in general things are designed in such a way that I rarely felt that I was wrestling with the controller, it all felt really well done to me. There are a lot of movement options in this game too, within a couple hours of starting I was really just zooming the fuck around.

The ending of Mega Man Legends isn’t a triumph or a tragedy or a big sequel hook or anything. It has all of those thing but those aren’t the focus. The ending is the quiet few minutes where the car is getting packed up at the end of a trip and you have a moment to say goodbye. You’re encouraged to take one last lap around town, where all the important characters and sidequest NPCs are scattered around to let you know they’re gonna be thinking about you, and they appreciate the little stuff you’ve done for and with them over the last 15-or-so hours. It feels right. I did sing the praises of the dungeon crawling a bit, and I did like it, but the core of the game is fucking around, competing in game shows, helping out a pregnant woman, adopting cats, thwarting the world’s least threatening bank heist. It feels right to spend the real time saying goodbye to the stuff that matters, and spend relatively little on the actual plot stuff which is mostly pretty limp. Just like meeeee I’m very sick right now if this review is incoherent that's why okay I’m gonna go take a nap game good

An admirable attempt to recreate some lightning in a bottle that is MOSTLY successful. My heart fell a bit when I saw that this, the first outsourced Mega Man, was developed by Minakuchi Engineering, the company that would eventually go on to absolutely biff Mega Man X3, so I was pleasantly surprised at how well the feel of NES Mega Man is approximated here. It looks right, it sounds right, and it more or less feels right too. Maybe a little bit looser than you expect, but I lost a lot more lives to some truly hateful enemy placements and overhead platforms forcing pixel perfect horizontal jumps than I did from any trouble with the controls.

The crop of robot masters reused for the game is good, and 4 is the right call I think for a bite sized experience, but they ARE all rendered easy as hell presumably by the memory limitations of the gameboy. Not that the Mega Man 1 guys had genius AI scripts to begin with but I was cheesing all of them here by accident, I didn’t even know HOW to make the fights fair and I was actively trying to. There’s one new guy in the Wily stage too and he’s very cool, I like him a lot he’s got a sword that looks like a needle because on the gameboy sprites.

Even with SEVERAL game overs I was in and out of this thing in like 80 minutes, and they were mostly pretty fun! When they aren’t INEXPLICABLY fucking you SUPER HARD at key points these are a very smooth set of levels.

I always crave more classic mega man and I am rapidly running out of it so hats off to the fallen heroes at Minakuchi Engineering for keeping this train going just a little longer. It’s, Good Enough.

X-PLOSIVE GAMEPLAY.
X-TREME GRAPHICS.
MEGA MAN X4!

Fucking sick back of the box copy. Nintendo hire this man. Etc. It’s true though, X4 has a lot going for it, X-ADJECTIVES being mostly attributable to the X-THIRTY-TWO BIT PROCESSING POWER of the series’ new primary home at the Sony Playstation, which can handle the ambitions of the X series’ level design a lot more ably than the SNES. I’m not IN LOVE with the 32 aesthetic these games have adopted. I feel that there is a degree of homogenization in capcom’s 32-bit sprite work in the 90s and this art style, while beautifully rendered and artfully executed, is generally a downgrade from the look of the SNES trilogy.

HOWEVER. However. I’ve been. Pretty hard. On the stories of these games. Because they are awful and stupid and not really in a funny way. That all changes here. X4 is just as stupid as all of these but it has two HUGE things going for it: first, this is the first one of these that seems like it’s even REMOTELY aware of the social dynamics of the world they’ve created and while they don’t do much of anything with that and is some increasing toe-dipping into the “all the violence in the world is due to an evil computer virus and not the violent injustice baked into our social order” but for most of it this is on the back burner to this is I think the most successful outing for one of these so far, plot-wise. The other thing is the thing this game is most memetically famous for which is that it’s inherited Mega Man 8’s anime cutscenes and completely UNHINGED voice acting, something which would be funny enough on its own but is WAY BETTER given how incredibly poe-faced and self-serious this game is. The X games have always tickled me for having the exact same ending every time, with a closing narration where Mega Man ruminates on some empty philosophy re: his place in the social order and the killing he will surely be forced to visit upon his peers in the future, but X4 extends this sophomore-in-highschool existentialism to boss dialogue, between-stage cutscenes, and of course its infamous anime segments. It’s not just those, though, they’re funny all the way around. The sheer ineptitude of the production never stops tickling no matter how many times they try to cram a very long sentence into a very short lip flap. It’s basically all gold. I love it.

This stuff is all secondary to the actual play of the game, though, right, we like to play Mega Man around here, and I think this is a really good one of those. Like this game’s immediate follow-up, Mega Man & Bass, there’s a split campaign here, but unlike that game these levels feel designed pretty well around both playable characters. There’s more immediate deviation between them too, with X playing as he always have and Zero being pretty much the same but with a sword instead of a gun. They diverge more as they collect boss upgrades, Zero evolving into the same flavor of simple action game character that a lot of the robot masters in this one feel like. The characters share largely the same navigational verbs, and only branch out from each other in combat, which makes getting around the levels easier for both of them than it was & Bass, which I think clearly has Bass in mind in its main design and Man in mind for its secrets. Here both characters fair equally well, and only the order you might tackle levels and acquire upgrades affects your path and the frequency with which you may need to revisit levels.

The levels themselves are the most coherently designed since the first game, too, and I think they take a lot of design cues from that one as well. There are really discretely designed chunks to these levels and even though they stick to familiar themes (OVERLY familiar, perhaps – just a volcano or just a forest seem more at home in the classic series than X) there’s a LOT of cool shit packed into each level. You’ll get collapsing platforms, disappearing platforms, gimmicky slide segments and more packed into the ice level alongside segments where you have to be careful to only destroy enough of the terrain to progress without also destroying the path you need to walk on. Most of the levels have a lot going on like this, and even the ones that don’t usually don’t in service of more variation on the typical Mega Man formulas – a cyberspace-themed stage is comprised of three speedrunning challenges populated by enemies that only impair your movement rather than pose a serious threat to your character, and while there may seem at first blush to be two vaguely water-themed levels, one of them is entirely a side scrolling vehicle segment after years of flirting with the concept in prior installments.

Some might say that these inclusions dilute the length and challenge of the game, especially given that this is the shortest and limpest set of final levels and bosses in the entire series so far (typically a meaty portion of these games, almost as much as half the length in a lot of them, and barely a footnote here), but I don’t mind it; I’ve played eleven Mega Man games and I welcome the variety on display. It’s fun to try new things this deep into it and have them feel so successful. The challenge in general is definitely diluted here but I don’t mind that either when that means that the difficulty has gone down from Mega Man’s standard of Very Demanding to Reasonably Smooth. There’s room for a more relaxed Mega Man Experience in my book and the four hours or so I spent across my two playthroughs were just that, without much pressure to find all the upgrades or make sure I was always fully stocked on lives and e-tanks just to scrape my way through the endgame. Call me casual but I welcome these vibes.

I don’t know what these games look like moving forward, I’ve literally never heard a single peep about X5, and all I know about 6-8 is that they are generally disliked-to-hated? I THINK? But this is about as rock-solid a reintroduction as you could as for, especially for a series as tumultuous as Mega Man X. Really nothing more to say one it, sometimes games' reputations are just spot-on.

It’s really incredible how much you can accomplish within a genre space with what feels like very little to work with if you’re only willing to step outside of convention even just a little bit. There’s a commonly tossed off criticism of modern AAA games that is often deployed unthinkingly or without proper elaboration, that they “look like HBO shows” or like Hollywood blockbusters, with the understanding that most Hollywood blockbusters these days look like shit even as they dominate pop culture. I’m guilty of using this shorthand myself. I think when people say this it doesn’t mean that it’s bad inherently for video games to pull from other mediums for filmic inspiration, only that it’s bad to unthinkingly chase trends and replicate the aesthetics of things that are popular despite an absence of actual artistic intent or merit behind the inspiration beyond that. I actually think that it is generally cool and good to take overt influence from your inspirations if you pull it off. Across its disparate chapters, Live A Live not only pulls popular tropes and story structures from the genres it flits between, but more than once openly, probably actionably lifts scenarios directly from popular movies and tv shows. It does so with aplomb, and the game is better for it. It steals these things and adapts them to the strengths of the formats of 90s Square Enix JRPGs and this is the key difference between wholesale merging the plots of Every Toku Show From the 70s through 94 and Akira and something like the way we talk about your average modern Sony Studios game. There's a lot more intentionality in the selections and the implementations here even as the actual references and stylistic touches are a LOT more overt.

But it’s not JUST that one chapter of this game is Just Alien Plus 2001 A Space Odyssey, it’s also that the game knows when to mess with the structural conventions of RPGs, and, wisely, that is Almost All The Time. Of the seven main chapters of the game, only two of them even remotely resemble a typically structured RPG, with regular combat encounters, story interludes, equipment, etc. And even then, one is set in caveman times and playfully communicates its small story entirely through pantomime. Each of the seven chapters is set in a different time period and the wide array of settings is utilized to get really playful with the verb sets without ever actually changing the fact that you interface with the game via traditionally JRPG means.

For example, the kung-fu themed chapter has essentially no true combat encounters, focusing on the story of an elderly master finding, selecting, and beginning to train three possible successors to his martial art. A couple times you beat up some like, muggers, but they go down in one shot. The combat screen is also used during training sessions with the students, and the attacks you use on them most frequently will be the ones that they learn. As you engage in more and more training sessions the students’ stats increase rapidly and it starts to become evident that this powerful master who mops the floor easily with the local town’s shitty rival dojo’s riff raff, is actually a frail man nearing the end of his life. This is communicated as well via the stats screen and the fact that by session 12 Li or Yuan MIGHT almost get you to take a knee as it is by the ever-more-frequent scenes of the master huffing and puffing when he gets up in the morning. And that’s all there is as far as combat goes! You COULD grind, I guess, in ONE zone in the map, but it’s out of the way of all of the story scenes, there are only like five non-random enemies there, and they don’t even spawn in if you ever have to walk through that part of the map for a story reason. And that makes it all the more effective when finally, at the end of this chapter, the water boils over and the drama arrives and the tension breaks into an explosion of real violence. The climax is way more impactful than it would have been if you had been fighting tigers and bandits as you walked up and down the mountain paths for the two hours leading up to it. Every chapter is like this, and three of them are potentially devoid of combat entirely if you feel like it.

Even when the game is at its most tedious, in the two chapters that lean the hardest into normal JRPG conventions, there are always strong aesthetics (for example Yoko Shimomura is here doing the definitive, standout work of her early career in a decade that includes osts for street fighter 2, Mario RPG, Legend of Mana and Parasite Eve), and even excellent encounter design to compensate for the fact that you’re participating in The Grind. The Mecha chapter is mostly made up of encounters where there is one weak enemy you can take out that will end the encounter immediately and get full experience but as you level up the pattern, numbers, and strength of his robot minions will become stronger or more complicated, which not only makes getting to the weak leader harder but also increases the risk/reward present where if you DO kill all the robot minions first you get items that upgrade your own robot party member, which is the only way to power him up because he doesn’t level up via experience points like your human characters. It’s a layer of tactical depth that isn’t present in most of the rest of the game’s encounters (some of them though! The ninja chapter is a notable exception and the wrestling chapter is entirely comprised of intense combat strategy puzzles with no play outside combat whatsoever – something for everyone!) but usually isn’t necessary because of the prioritization of other shit than combat.

Live A Live was directed by Takashi Tokita, most famous for his work as lead designer and/or director on Final Fantasy IV, Chrono Trigger, and Parasite Eve, as well as SPECIFICALLY just event planning for Final Fantasy VII, and the scenario design was largely handled by Nobuya Inoue, famous for, well, this, and then for leaving Square a couple years later to cofound Brownie Brown and direct Magical Vacation, Magical Starsign, and Mother 3 before that company was tragically entirely subsumed into Nintendo’s first party support studio network. Clearly there is a design lineage here, with both of these creative leads interested in playing with the form and format of the JRPG – making games where atmosphere, narrative, and aesthetics take precedent over combat design or length. A lot of that DNA is present here in Live A Live, and it’s very telling that these guys, even an up-and-coming big shot like Tokita was made to exercise these design sensibilities in Square’s comparatively lower budget, smaller in scope, unpopular-even-in-the-country-it-got-released-in project of 1994, compared to the much more traditionally designed and obviously mass appeal Final Fantasy VI. I’m not a young adult in Japan in 1994 so I can’t say how much of this is a natural progression of popularity given Final Fantasy’s momentum as a series vs Square actively choosing to abandon this one to the wolves. Probably a little of both. Hopefully now that it’s getting a proper international release with the upcoming HD-2D remake, it’ll get some of the recognition I think it sorely deserves.

It's not that this game didn’t have any influence, but it definitely feels to me like that came more from the general interests and careers of its staff than from explicit love for Live A Live, which is a shame, because even with a shockingly, borderline offensively tedious final chapter this is easily, without question the most formally interesting and simply pleasurable traditional JRPG I’ve ever played. Games don’t get ANY better than Live A Live. A classic. A titan. Honestly shocking to me that they kept making these after this.

Mid-period Mega Man is an exercise in ennui. After five perhaps creatively safe but steady entries, the Super Nintendo and Mega Man X seemed poised to barrel this series headstrongly into a bold future, or at least a powerfully entertaining new holding pattern. Instead, we got maybe two solid and ambitious games out of that series at the same time as we would get waffling half-steps into the past in Mega Mans 7, and, before long, Capcom would join many other third party developers in jumping ship to take advantage of the raw, sexy power of systems like the Playstation and the Saturn for flagship entries of their real cash cows. Mega Man X4 AND Mega Man 8 would debut on the PS1, radically transforming the X series in a pivotal moment and uh, making another Mega Man Classic in another inessential one. But Keiji Inafune didn’t forget his ROOTS, uh, I guess? Because in NINETEEN NINETY-EIGHT, a full two years after the N64 was released in Japan, we get this, something of an expansion pack sequel to Mega Man 8, which reuses that game’s assets, scaled back to run on the inferior hardware, and supposedly aimed at younger kids who couldn’t afford to just go out and buy a $300 machine every few years. A weird mission statement considering what we have here is the most difficult Mega Man game by a pretty wide margin up to this point, and often unfairly so, but we’ll get there.

The big thing in this game is its Sonic 3 & Knuckles situation, where you get to play as Mega Man’s very own Knuckles, Bass, a guy who is also a super robot hero-cop with a cool flying surfboard dog, but who has a shonen anime rival’s drive to be the best which mostly manifests in an occasional desire to murder Mega Man, the Other Best Robot Around. Bass acts on this need whenever it arises in him, he’s really funny and I love him. Nobody seems that worried about it. HE doesn’t seem that worried about PROTOMAN, the OTHER OTHER best robot, a worry which is proved to be warranted when Protoman is brutally murdered, completely bisected in one stroke by this game’s decoy villain King in the tutorial level, which is, again, very funny. These games rule. You could, I GUESS, also play as Mega Man, but I don’t know why you would want to? You’ve played as mega man 8 times already. Bass is new, AND he’s cool, his color scheme is BLACK AND YELLOW and A MURDERER, and when he absorbs boss powers he glows purple like a BADASS.

More importantly though, he plays very differently from good ol’ ‘Man, which is important because regardless of who you pick you’re running through the same levels and they seem to me to be more designed with Bass’ skills in mind than da Blue Bomber’s. Mega Man plays like Mega Man: he slides, shoots directly in front of him, and he can charge his gun into a big gun. He CANNOT utilize Rush in this game which does limit his movement options in ways that feel really consequential to the demanding platforming of this game. Bass has a rapidfire weapon that can’t charge but CAN shoot in eight directions, he can’t move and shoot at the same time, and he can’t slide, but he has a double jump and a dash and he can do the dash jump from Mega Man X. At first blush it seems like the game is designed to be fair to either character, but the more of the game that I saw the more I began to think that this game is actually tailor made to Bass’ skillset, with the “mega man” tailoring for the stages amounting mostly to built in little gaps for him to slide through that regularly lead to collectibles instead of progress. MUCH more useful is Bass’ omnidirectional machine gun, especially given how much of this game’s difficulty boils down placing a LOT of enemies in every room and in positions that would be really difficult to deal with if your only tool was a horizontal shot. Additionally, Bass’ dash jumps and ESPECIALLY his double jump make what could be some borderline unfair platforming bits into, y’know, normal ones.

This is the tension that underpins the entire experience – there’s a lot of good shit in there that’s just obfuscated by a patina of grating, surface level bullshit. Despite the most limited control over which robot master stage you pick in the series yet, which might suggest a more streamlined experience, this is one of the most demanding sets of levels and bosses in the series, with satisfying gimmicks to each level and a degree of strategy required against a few of the robot masters that goes beyond “use the weapon he’s weak to.” Timing windows, unique mechanics activated by the weapon applications – stuff the series has flirted with occasionally (particularly in the X games) but rarely to this degree of implementation, and it’s a great ask on top of learning the boss patterns. This is such a strong set that I don’t even particularly mind that two of them are straight up reused from Mega Man 8.

Also lifted from Mega Man 8 is the entire look and soundscape of this game, but I think it works a LOT better here? Compromises were made to retain the graphical style on the SNES but it doesn’t run BUTTERY SMOOTH like its next-gen predecessor which I think is to its benefit. I complained about the visuals in Mega Man 8 and to a lesser extent 7 when I played those games, because of their intense animation and popping colors keeping things extremely busy on screen. Everything was a little too hard to parse, Mega Man’s movements a little too difficult to track precisely given the demands of the platforming. It turns out that limiting the performance of the game cuts that problem almost entirely, and while the colors don’t pop quite as much I think that’s a fair trade.

I’ve played a lot of Mega Mans in the last like four or five months and there are only so many ways you can say “wow they did a weird one and I am interested to see where this transitional period in the series takes us!” because it seems at this point like this transitional period is most of the franchise. But I do think that And Bass is one of the bigger and better swings that they’ve done, really only held back by this weird, blistering fake difficulty slathered over what I think are genuinely some of the best levels in the series. So it’s good. As I stare down the barrel of the later X games and their reputations I do hope I continue to find myself feeling pleasant surprise like this. At least, if they’re bad, they’ll be interspersed with the Zeros. It’s weird that those were coming out at the same time. Mega Man’s a strange franchise!

I’m in a difficult place with this game because on paper it’s checking a lot of my boxes, and compared to probably MOST other video games it is just flat better in most ways, but its pedigree is really weighing it down. Unfortunately for Final Fantasy Tactics, it’s the last Matsuno game I never played, and when it’s stacked up against what’s come before it AND what will come after, it finds itself unfortunately lacking in almost every department.

Narratively, I like what’s going on here, I like it a lot! You might say this story was specifically crafted to appeal directly to me, a horny little communist who thinks chocobos and demons are cool in equal measure. Unfortunately I have also played the SNES Tactics Ogre that this is kind of a sequel to, which hits a lot of these beats more thoroughly and with more freedom of expression. For supernatural twists, the idea that this is all playing into the machinations of greater supernatural powers who must be resisted and that this is going to become the primary story at the expense of discussing or resolving the actual political tensions at play, well, Final Fantasy XII may be this game’s stupider, goofier little cousin but it does THAT specific thing with a lot more elegance and heft than this game does, even if its ultimate conclusions are extremely dumb. Vagrant Story too offers much deeper character portraits and more interesting views into versions of the machinations of sinister churches and occult demonology than this game does. It’s not that anything here is bad by any means, far from it! I just couldn’t shake the feeling that there were three or four other games that I would rather be playing that this one was CONSTANTLY reminding me of.

The gameplay I have less to say about, it’s fine. I DO like playing this game better than Tactics Ogre. I think paring down the number of guys you have on the field and cutting the map sizes by like 60% is an extremely smart move, it’s just better to have 20 minute encounters given the grind of this game. Perhaps it is less tactical but with the breadth of options you have on display there is certainly no want for things to be mulling over, especially with how intentionally obfuscated many of the systems are. This is my big complaint I think. There are too many things to do? Too many classes, too many spells, too many stats. I don’t mind a complex game by any means but I don’t think a lot of the stuff here is particularly additive. I understand that this game has an ardent following of hardcore fans who have broken it over their collective knee and this shit is what they live for and I do respect that. But for me it was tedious. There are generally too many things to do, too many options, and too many encounters – and not enough are interesting or challenging enough to justify how many of them are here or how long it takes to accomplish anything. The grind was just keeping me from the next cutscene of a guy talking cool about wanting to kill a rich dude, or the next absolutely incredible bespoke animation of a squat little sprite grabbing another one by the collar.

But god, how good ARE those animations? How good ARE those sprites? This game is fuckin beautiful, dude. There’s a guy really early on, I think it’s the beginning of chapter 2, who realizes he’s about to die after he thought he was hot shit and he gets mad and throws his hat on the ground and there is so much EXPRESSION in that animation. There’s gorgeous little work like that that you’ll see only once in the whole game peppered throughout the entire thing and it’s always a treat. The music is uniformly incredible, as expected from the legendary Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata. The Final Fantasy-ness of it all is definitely just kind of an aesthetic hastily pasted over the story and world this team actually wanted to create and to me that’s just more charming. Ivalice as it was originally conceived is a very weird little place, it’s got a lot of charm to it.

So yeah I dunno. I feel weird about it. A game I like a lot in chunks but in the moment of actually playing it would really rather be doing almost anything else by a lot of these people.

I can just imagine the gamers getting all worked up in 1986, FURIOUS that King’s Quest 3 dared to shake up the formula. Can’t believe they made me play as this COOL character in an INTERESTING situation instead of the faceless, blank slate nobody I’m familiar with!!! Let my fury echo across time so that two generations from now people will somehow be UPSET that they make you play as the ARBITER???? Gamers are a truly hopeless breed. Every single popular video game homogenizing into a generic slop is just one symptom of a time-honored problem with pop art, and Gamers happily eating the feed because they’re comfortable with these narrow modes of play and expression is an equally ancient tradition.

That said, I do, like, I do GET IT, to some degree. I like to poke around at these games and failing in them never bothers me even slightly. I keep a meaty stable of frequent and rotating saves and the exploration is a lot of the fun for me. I THINK that’s the appeal for a lot of people who enjoy this kind of game, and King’s Quest III’s attempts to complicate that formula are as inelegant as they are bold and exciting. Couple that clumsy implementation with what FEELS like a sharp uptick in Unfair Sierra Bullshit (I’m not sure how true that actually is – certainly a bit but denser screens and a smaller world map might be working against the game here) and I get how it’s frustrating. FOR ME HOWEVER, intense pedantry for spelling and strict time management gameplay with NO room for error are the kind of video game gimmicks that I eat the fuck up so I was goddamn living the life for all three hours of this bullshit. That’s twice as long as either of the other two games took me, and I suspect that might have something to do with this game’s reputation as well. It’s not a LARGER sequel, but it’s a more compact and CERTAINLY a more obtuse game, one that reveals its complex and substantial layers pretty much exclusively via rng and trial and error. It’s a much stricter enforcement of these principles than either previous adventure, even as it retains all the unfair bullshit from those games in near equal if not excess amounts.

And yet I find it utterly compelling, much more so than its predecessors. The setting is instantly more characterful, with the intensity of the stakes laid out from moment one: Gwydion is a slave in this house and you are going to fuck up this evil wizard and get the fuck out of here. That’s more than Graham ever got. The game does a small but great thing where it drops you into the full mechanical situation before the game in earnest begins. There’s an ever-ticking clock on the screen that helps you track the wizard Manannan’s comings and goings and sleep schedule. If he’s not out or sleeping, Gwydion will be confined to the house and to a very limited set of actions and interactions within it; some infractions result in lectures, others in instant death (there are good reasons for Manannan’s overreactions that become apparent later). None of this is explained to you, but you’ll certainly find out as you try shit, and when he does make his first trip away after five minutes elapse on the clock, there’s certainly a freedom to that, but it’s a trepidatious one. You’re not actually free; you barely have the illusion of it. You don’t know how long he’ll be gone, he could be back any time. There’s fear in that, anxiety. I know from personal history how good that precious faux-freedom feels but I also know intimately the dread-pit in your stomach that accompanies it – it’s not you’re house, and every moment you’re somewhere you’re not supposed to be is a moment you could be caught. This extremely crude, borderline experimental attempt to prevent the adventure game setting and formula from becoming stale on Apple II computers or whatever other boxes it was out on because that’s how we were doing things in 1986 captures this feeling better than almost anything I can think of from the following forty years, and this comes with the bonus of true escapism because I never had the opportunity to poison my dad’s food, turn him into a cat, and steal all his shit on my way out.

There are other things that don’t work as well as the clock. Everything bad about KQ1 and 2 that I haven’t mentioned as improved is still pretty much the same here; the spellcasting system that doubles as outdated copyprotection is genuinely hateful but in a way that is pretty funny and kind of fun to fuck around with. Stairs are still the most challenging obstacle in the entire game, but here they’re much more frequently troublesome and come with obstacles?? Fucked up. There’s a part of the game where as far as I can tell you do just have to stand in one place for like ten minutes straight which, again, sucks but is also extremely baller, just a huge swinging cock move from Roberta Williams, the queen bitch.

I guess I just don’t get it, really. I was WARNED, by more than one person, about this game, but it’s by far my favorite experience with the series so far. What’s bad here is the same shit that’s bad in all of these, and what’s good is so singular and full of interesting character and ideas that even crushing difficulty and obviously unfair programming couldn’t keep this one out of my heart.

This is the first time I found myself glad it wasn’t a ghost. This is the first irony of Shadow at the Water’s Edge: considering this might be tit for tat the most explicitly and effectively frightening game Her Interactive has done, and my usual clamor for the supernatural to appear in earnest in these games that, scooby-doo-like, are constantly teetering on the cliff of indulging in it. But for once I was happy for one of these games to give me what I got, which in this case is easily the best writing in the series to date, a quietly unfolding story that first seems to be one of the failures of deep-seated cultural structuration and generational trauma that slowly reveals itself to be, while not NOT that, also one of deep and mundane inability for a small group of people to work through their own shortcomings, both to themselves as individuals and to each other as family. It’s a dark, fresh situation that Nancy walks in on, unusual for this series, where it’s much more common to parallel the modern day mystery with something in the distant past. Here, the supposed ghost that’s ruining the ryokan’s business is the mother/daughter of the main characters of the game; that wound is fresh, and open, and frankly none of Nancy’s business, and picking at it is a genuinely uncomfortable affair. There’s a real sense that Nancy is kind of out of her depth in this game, that she’s stepped in something a little bit over her ability to emotionally handle. No one has hired her, no one asked her to do this, she just kind of stumbles into somebody’s ugly past while she’s on vacation and she kind of brute forces it into the shape of one of her mysteries – seriously this might be the most unintentionally ghoulish Nancy has ever been she’s a fuckin sociopath in this game - but things can’t and don’t really resolve as cleanly or happily or whimsically as they always do for her.

This marks a moment of maturation for these games. In the past, even when we’ve tackled really difficult and sober subject matters, difficult questions tend to go unacknowledged and the themes of the work tend to get swept aside in the name of wrapping everything up in a bow (I think about the Mexican government official arm in arm with the American museum employees at the end of Scarlet Hand despite the situation of the violent robbery and exploitation of Mexico’s cultural artifacts not being even slightly different than it was at the start of the game all the time). Here there are gestures towards healing and Nancy certainly forces some wheels to turn, but nothing like the sunny rejection of any backbone the story might have had.

The second irony, then, is that all of the above is true while this game indulges in a not unexpected but certainly disappointing amount of LOL JAPAN SO WACKY racism of I guess you might, for lack of a better word, call a more “subtle” variety, coupled with overt racism like having three of the four Japanese characters in the game be voiced by white Nancy Drew Series Regulars who are all doing deeply offensive fake Asian accents. It does muddle things a bit, when you’re trying to tell an actually affecting story about how the strict social mores of traditionalist Japanese conservative politics have effectively destroyed three generations of a family, resulted in one actual death, and twenty years later almost a murder, when one of the characters driving the conflict sometimes borders on cruel stereotype. I don’t think it’s QUITE there, and it’s not as bad as some other depictions of other cultures have been, but I think that there is also a lack of care here that points to Her Interactive’s general lack of understanding of the responsibilities of the storyteller, especially in an educational role. Yes, this is a better depiction of Japan and its culture than, say, the outrageous caricatures of Ireland and its people in Castle Malloy, but the United States have done incalculable material harm to the Japanese people over the last 80 years and I think that in the context of a game like this with the kind of interests these games have, the bar for how they depict some cultures is higher than others, and if you ask me this game doesn’t QUITE clear it even as it’s not nearly AS fucked as others have been in the past.

That said it IS pretty funny that “taking the subway” is by far the most difficult puzzle in the game. That’s a solid goof, you got me there.

NANCY DREW CUCK WATCH: It’s been a minute but since she can’t namedrop him to ward off all the GAY TEENS at boarding school I do think it’s worth noting that Nancy just DOES NOT EVEN MENTION Ned he doesn’t even COME UP idk dude if I was going on a vacation of indeterminate length with my best buds I would maybe invite my boyfriend who is the fourth member of our friendgroup and is also best friends with my other two friends. Seems suspicious lol.

PREVIOUSLY: TRAIL OF THE TWISTER
NEXT TIME: THE CAPTIVE CURSE

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

I have an apology to make: I was too harsh on Mega Man 7, which upon further reflection since my initial review has firmly rooted itself as one of my favorite Classic Mega Mans, an opinion only strengthened by basically everything I said felt weird and bad in that game being WAY worse in this one.

EVERYTHING is over-animated. Now it’s not just hard to judge where precisely you’re standing and how far or high your jumps are gonna go, but mega man’s comically floppy animations make it feel like you’re going slow as hell too. The buster feels weird. Additional weapons feel weird. Colors in every screen element are so intense as to be elevated from pleasantly cartoony to uncomfortably garish. The menu has these long animations to load in and out of it. There are little voice barks now and I hate that lol.

It’s a textbook Bad Mega Man Game death by a thousand cuts scenario where very little about this game is actually technically wrong but a lot of the little choices chafe on me personally. I could see this being a middling to high ranking Mega Man in someone’s estimation if they weren’t bothered by all the little aesthetic and game feel things here that fuck me up, and indeed I spoke to two people last night who enthusiastically defended this game from me when I, two levels deep, said what the fuck man how did this happen. So like, I get it! It’s not a Mega Man X3 situation where the game is just a sad shadow of its own defining traits from the ground up. It’s just firmly Not Working For Me. I’m always trying to convince people that I’m not just being a contrarian for the sake of it and lo, here it is: i think mega man 8 blows.

WHICH IS NOT TO SAY there isn’t joy to be had here, it’s just that unfortunately that joy comes, for me, almost exclusively from the non-play parts of the game. The hideous aesthetic choices that make looking at the game so unpleasant while you’re playing it also make it REALLY funny when you’re just watching it. Just fully leaving the bounds of Earth’s gravity with these robot master designs. Got an evil clown robot, got a- got a guy who Is An Igloo I guess, that man is a GRENADE. That’s just the first three guys right in a row. God’s bounty is endless. I don’t need to mention the English voice acting it’s incredible. Every line a treasure. I finally understand what Bass’ problem is man, he lives in a world where everybody is named after music and they’re all clearly mispronouncing his name on purpose!! I would be pissed too.

So that’s it I guess, classic mega man over. Weird one to end on. Oh I guess I should play Mega Man And Bass? That probably counts. Anyway. Didn’t like this one lol.

Something is rotten here. I don’t know what changed, but the core of this game is fundamentally different from its predecessors. Mega Man X3’s design feels like it’s shifted into the realm of strict secret hunting and fake difficulty that especially older Mega Man games like this are so often (and so incorrectly, imo) accused of. But if you were to, for some reason, ONLY play X3, I would get it, I think. Bosses routinely kill X in three hits, there are a LOT more instances of kill pits or spikes being placed just outside of the player’s vision or on the other side of a “screen transition,” designed for you to lose a life to them on your first go for no reason other than to check you for one, many more instant kill platforming challenges. It’s not that the game is HARDER than what came before, it’s that it’s harder in ways that feel needless. Almost worse is the change in the way the sense of progression has been tuned; where before 100% completion felt like a challenge for the dedicated, here it feels almost mandatory, like the game is built around the assumption that all players have been and always will want to ferret out every armor upgrade, every heart, every big mech suit. Maybe I would if these levels were designed more engagingly.

I don’t just mean that from a play perspective either. X3 is easily one of the dullest Mega Mans in the franchise. And I do mean DULL – it’s not ugly by any means (this is still Mega Man, after all), but its colors are more muted, its levels less heavily themed. What you’re left with is a lot of brownish grayish factoryish hallways that don’t feel distinct enough from each other and aren’t high enough quality on their own to make up for it. The music is also utterly forgettable here too, but worse than that it’s often actively grating, with shockingy short loops that just aren’t fun enough to justify their brevity.

At the end of the day the core of this is still as solid as a rock, but I don’t know what happened to the rest. Maybe the dev team shuffled around, or they were chasing trends, or they had less time, I dunno! This game is clearly pushing the limits of the SNES hardware with how much it buckles in larger areas or during some of the boss fights. It’s a shame because a lot of the time in the moment to moment I am just having a good time dashing and hopping and shit, only to be reminded every few seconds that actually I have done this so many time before, and almost all of them better.

This one’s okay.

PREVIOUSLY: WARNINGS AT WAVERLY ACADEMY
NEXT TIME: SHADOW AT THE WATER’S EDGE

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

No matter how deep we get into this series and how many settings we explore there’s one thing Her Interactive will never be able to resist for long, and that’s spooky Rich People Houses. Could be a gothic mansion, or a Victorian castle, or a Victorian MANSION, or an IRISH castle, or a haunted TOWER, doesn’t matter. Every two or three of these they find a way to get back to old, stuffy hallways with elegant wall art, hidden passages, kooky old owners with an inevitably valuable cryptic secret, and lots of room for unsettling creaking noises and trembling shadows leaking in from the windows. And frankly, I applaud them for it. I’ve always said that the art direction and environmental design is the standout element of this series and I’ve also consistently felt that they’re at their best when they’re leaning into the low-key horror elements that are always going to be present in these kinds of locations. Imagine my excitement then when, after an exhaustingly disappointing foray into the Dossier subseries, my first game back with mainline Nancy Drew is set in an old, prestigious, all-girls East Coast boarding school with strong historical ties to Edgar Allan Poe, of all people. Do they lean into this, you may ask me, NAIVELY? Let’s just say that the final puzzle of this game is on a timer, and the timer is Nancy’s impending death at the hands of a fellow student, who has activated a giant pendulum blade trap to decapitate her. IN OTHER WORDS this game FUCKING RIPS.

So there’s this fancy school, right, and kids there are getting absolutely fucked up. There’s this person who is PROBABLY another student, going by the moniker The Black Cat, who leaves threatening notes targeting girls who are in the running to be valedictorian. The first note is always a warning, but if you get a second note, usually a few days later, that always indicates you’re about to run afoul of some kind of specifically targeted event. These aren’t just pranks or standard bullying either, but full on assault - one student is poisoned with nuts she’s severely allergic to and has to be hospitalized; another who suffers from claustrophobia (like, real claustrophobia) is trapped in a very small closet overnight and comes out of the experience scarred. The atmosphere is tense, parents are ready to pull kids out of school, and the most recent victim’s mother is threatening a lawsuit if something isn’t done QUICKLY; so obviously the headmistress gets in touch with TEEN SLEUTH NANCY DREW to go undercover under an alias over winter break to cozy up with the smart kids in the valedictorian dorm and identify The Black Cat before the second term gets started.

Before we really dig into the game I just gotta get something out of the way here: Waverly Academy is the kind of high school that indie directors in the 90s made movies that would accidentally become lesbian cultural touchstones, and then indie directors in the late 90s and early 2000s would purposely make gay movies about, and that turn people trans years before they realize this. The word “sapphic” exists to describe Waverly Academy. If the team at Her Interactive didn’t know what they were doing with the very specific tropes and archetypes they were deploying in this game then this is way funnier than it already is because almost every character you meet is like a laser sharpened gay girl catnip cliché, it’s incredible. Now listen I’m queer, and I almost exclusively associate with people who are women or gender-nonconforming, and almost all of those people are also queer, so maybe my perspective is skewed, that’s possible, I’ll concede that. But I also feel like we are the experts in Types of Girls and there are so many of them here it’s SO funny. How many fifteen-year-olds did Her accidentally make gay here? It’s gotta be like, a notable percentage. HAS to be. Okay.

So this game is an interesting beast because it’s not like…I wouldn’t say that the part where you PLAY it is really hitting the gas in any real way. The puzzles aren’t anything to write home about but there’s only one that really had me going damn I wish this wasn’t here which is like, much better than usual for these. Some classic Nancy Drew stuff makes a comeback here like managing a day/night cycle to solve certain puzzles, and this marks the unexpected return of a much-refined version of Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake’s photography system. Everything just kind of proceeds very smoothly in Waverly Academy which I think is one of its strengths. This is an all atmosphere, all characters Nancy Drew the likes of which I feel has been absent from the series for a long time. A more objective hand might say this means the game is unbalanced but I prefer this for this game. This is a compelling cast with a fun central mystery, and even though that mystery doesn’t really feel like it’s taking center stage, and you do a lot of meandering, getting caught up in the very heightened intensity of the lives of these isolated, unhinged teens who can’t see anything past the confines of their very small, incestuous world (more than normal teens, even) is more than good enough for me.

So you have your awkward roommate who is kind of a bitch but maybe not on purpose but definitely on purpose because she is very very obviously the Black Cat from the very first conversation you have with her; goth teen who is nice; sporty teen who is also basically nice; student body president teen who is a huge bitch; and meek friendly teen who IS meek and friendly but is also doing a Her Story (if you know you know lmao). These guys are all great. I love every single one of them, and they sell this insular world where failing a test and falling out of the race for valedictorian, and getting a death threat, and stealing somebody’s shitty boyfriend who looks like 2010 Justin Bieber but wearing a bowling shirt (incredible) are all the same level of important, and they do it MOOOOOSTLY without leaning on too many LOL TEEN GIRLS AMIRITE comments.

This is a game that mostly takes being a young adult seriously and treats them and their problems with the same degree of respect that it treats any other characters in any other game. Even beyond the obvious contempt that we as a society hold for women (and particularly women around the age of those depicted in this game), I think there’s an additional impulse a lot of the time to dismiss the real anxieties and travails of teens as unimportant, frivolous, and transient. “You have the rest of your life ahead of you” type stuff. And that’s true to some extent, sure; it can be hard to see past stuff when you’re 17 and your world is small and your experiences are limited. But that doesn’t make it NOT shitty when your boyfriend treats you like garbage and you live with the person he cheated on you with, who is not sympathetic at all. The money issues you have thinking about college aren’t gonna go away, they’re gonna get more complex and harder to deal with. This is a game that, on some level, understands that. It takes these kids seriously and treats their problems like they’re real, even the ones that aren’t life and death, and I appreciate that.

It does suck a little bit that Waverly Academy is one of the sleeker, more compact entries in this late stage Nancy Drew Cyberverse, because it does feel like there could be more here. The Intense East Coast Boarding School With Dark Secrets is such rich setting and it does feel like Her was trying to stuff every associated trope into the game regardless of how much time they could spend on it or how well it fit into the narrative. Not the ONLY example of this but by FAR the most egregious is the Blackwood Society, a group of witchy, cloaked figures that Nancy spies on doing a midnight ritual on the school grounds one night who appear in exactly one scene and have literally no bearing on the plot. When you identify one of the members and say hey what the fuck is going on with that she says “shut the fuck up” and other than using it for one small clue later in the game it just doesn’t come up again. It’s wild.

But that’s a small quibble – when my biggest complaint is that there were too many cool bits in the game that I felt should have gotten more screentime, I feel like that’s a solid win for Nancy Drew, lmao. Perhaps the bar is low, but I do think this is a case where a game has an innate charm that, for me at least, leaves me feeling really positive about a work that may end up being greater than the sum of its parts.

PREVIOUSLY: NANCY DREW DOSSIER: RESORTING TO DANGER
NEXT TIME: TRAIL OF THE TWISTER

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

To my deep shame and regret I am a noted Trails Fan like deep like bad like got my hands on the Chinese PC Crossbell games and patched them into English BEFORE the good geofront translations were out bad (other Trails fans DEE ENN EYE) and yet I had never touched an Ys game, Falcom’s other big long franchise – much older and more respected than the modern incarnation of Legend of Heroes, even. This is largely because by the time I became interested I had developed my current brain ailment where putting games in the historical context of their series and their moment in time is deeply important to me and I had no way to access the whole franchise. HOWEVER I’ve recently done some work on my Playstation Vita and with some encouragement from your friend and mine kingbancho here (https://www.backloggd.com/u/wowgoodname/list/hit-me-with-a-game-and-ill-play-and-review-it/), the Ys train has left the station.

And it rocks it just fuckin rips ass dude! I’ll die for bump combat it’s so much fun to just zoom around the maps with Adol’s ludicrous run speed toggled to default and just fucking plow through hapless demons who were minding their business, racking up xp and gold that I will spend on nothing, killing only for the pure joy of the feeling of it. TRULY, This Is What Gaming Is All About. I was worried when I realized that, despite these games being packaged together and rightly so as they very much are the split halves of one story and one gameplay experience, Ys II made some tweaks to the game feel, making enemies more durable and less violent, but it became quickly apparent that nothing had truly changed. There are few joys in all of gaming that measure favorably to Bump Combat. Can’t believe I’ve been missing out on this for so long.

There’s a lot of other joy to found here, though. Ys is a very standard late 80s/early 90s Fantasy Anime in setting and tone, and those just happen to be pretty fun to chill out in. It’s a game with a relaxed vibe, with yeah like mysterious evil towers slowly killing the land and demons making the local mine unworkable, but also giant ancient trees ponderously bequeathing swords and every dude over the age of 35 being identifiable as such by having a mustache. There is absolutely nothing unique on the table here but there is specificity to the character of this world, and the games do a lot to endear themselves to me despite their barebones trappings. Stuff like talking to major characters bringing up a whole separate screen with a lovingly rendered portrait and background to conduct the dialogue in; a notebook cataloguing all of the unique npcs in every town and their relationships with each other, of which there are many and of all whom have unique dialogue that often changes with the circumstances; the often well hidden sidequests and secret interactions that don’t give huge payouts mechanically but do give the guy at the bar or the merchant in one of the item shops a lot more verve that they would otherwise have the opportunity to have, and obviously more than anyone would ever care for them too – these things add up to a game that obviously cares a lot about its setting and wants you to care to, and I do. A thing doesn’t have to be unique or complex to be good or well-made. Sometimes it is enough to care.

And it’s obvious that a lot of care went into both of these worlds in both of these games, even though I don’t particularly enjoy exploring them. Darm Tower, the evil presence that makes up essentially the second half of the first game is a giant, tedious dungeon of simple puzzles padded by a LOT of walking up and down the same hallways. It’s not visually interesting or mechanically interesting, and the enemies aren’t any more challenging to approach than anything else in the game. By the time I was at the tower I had hit that game’s max level and had the best equipment available. There’s no real difficulty to speak of at that point outside of bosses. The combat is, again, and endless parade of blissful death, but trudging through endless identical stairwells and corridors back and forth for an hour and a half isn’t so much. But like everything in Ys, the FLAVOR of the tower is cool as hell, this bizarre place that sucks people into itself and never lets them out, where they are presumed to die but in reality, once you’re in there, you discover that there are a fair number of people eking out a frightened, exploratory living in this evil place, always hunted but carefully clinging to life. There’s nothing as egregiously boring or long in Ys 2 as Darm Tower, even as the maps quickly become more complex in the later game, but the little drips of flavor are always there, the game carefully meting them out over the short runtimes so you’re rarely JUST exploring a shitty cave.

That’s the thing about Ys I & II Chronicles – I remember being like, actively frustrated a lot of the time I was playing these, especially Ys I, but in hindsight, even just a few hours down the road, I am only really thinking of all the cool shit. That’s gotta mean it’s doing something right, yeah?

Also, every single game remake should give me the option to turn on Original PC-88 Music and also make sick PC-88 soundchip covers of their buttrock anime OPs this is Gold Standard Shit people. Gold Standard.

I could be writing about The Game That Famously Turned Fellow Backloggd Nancy Drew Connoisseur Nerdietalk Gay, Warnings At Waverly Academy, which this game has the gall to reference even, but NO we have to waste our time on this shit instead. It’s fine. I’m on a real hotstreak right now, struggling real hard through Ys 1 & 2 Chronicles on one hand, struggling REAL HARD through Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger on the other. These games share similar flaws in that they have these really fun, special cores to them that are just caked in layer upon layer of tedium. Unlike the Ys duology though, which has the excuse of being a remake of a PC-88 game from 35 years ago that was blazing trails in its genre and mostly just suffers from inelegant dungeon design, Resorting to Danger is marred with deeeeeep structural flaws that made a game that barely breaks two and a half hours of play time feel like it could have encompassed an entire work day.

The setup is almost identical to that of the previous Dossier game, with Nancy hired by the guy running a fancy resort that caters to the rich and famous to clandestinely investigate and put a stop to a series of “construction accidents” that are actually bombs being sent by somebody for some reason. So Nancy goes around defusing a frankly alarming number of bombs while constantly being interrupted by a series of very rude wealthy people and employees who force her to engage in a bunch of minigames that emulate her doing the menial labor of her cover identity. Eventually she gets enough evidence to identify the bomber, there’s sort of a confrontation about it, the game’s over.

Everything is more or less the same here as in the previous game with some minor tweaks that are clearly designed to make this seem less like a game made on eleven dollars and a prayer. The noir stylings are dialed back a great deal, for one, with cutscenes featuring full color illustrations and generally more animation across the entire game. Gameplay environments for the hidden object segments now feature rigs animated to appear to be 3D models so other characters actually appear on the screen when they would logically be around. The minigames aren’t really more varied in scope but there’s more of an effort to make them fit into the scenario diagetically and the assets are reused creatively sometimes. And there are some cute flourishes here and there, like obviously reusing a voice actor and writing that into the game by having the character be the sister of the character that actor played in the first game. Those kinds of little things are the details that have always made these games charming and feel like they aspire to a higher standard of writing than their place on the bargain shelf would have implied, and it’s nice to see some of that effort rub off here in the spinoff zone.

None of this stuff can save the game from being generally tedious and unpleasant, though. Constantly having to stop the already annoying running of nonstop bomb defusal to do other chores for obnoxious jerks isn’t exactly Super Fun even by the standards of Nancy Drew Chore Games, which Resorting to Danger might be the ultimate nadir of. The biggest problem is that there are three minigames that are returned to CONSTANTLY over the course of the game: bomb defusal, maze navigation, and giving facials, which are all fine in their own way but are repeated so endlessly, often with nothing in between sessions and with so little variation or escalation in difficulty that any pleasure to be derived from them is sapped quickly. The Maze bits are the best in this regard as the objectives are changed every time, from chasing characters to leading them to certain places to solving a puzzle based on writing on statues placed in the maze, but at the end of the day you’re still walking a little Nancy around the same very large maze map doing kind of nothing for no reason. It sucks.

The story elements don’t fare any better. The cast of characters is bigger than in the previous game but they mostly fall under various flavors of “Rich Asshole” and I think boosting the number of people you’re interacting with might have undercut any depth we might have given them, leaving everyone with only one or two scenes to kind of leave you with a bullet points of their unique personality traits and reasons to maybe want to be a bomber (oh yeah and the bombs aren’t like explosion bombs they are all prank bombs this game has basically no stakes). The character you spend the most time with by far is a dog you spend most of the game chasing around and cleaning up after which is as obnoxious as it sounds.

The most interesting thing Resorting to Danger does narratively also feels like a thinly veiled way to paper over how shallow all of the writing is. Something I didn’t know until I was doing some reading after I finished the game was that there isn’t one set villain. At a point roughly two-thirds through, a character asks Nancy who she thinks the bomber is, and whoever she chooses in that moment turns out to be the culprit. Is everyone so shallow and petty because everyone needs a good reason to be able to turn out to be the bomber at the end of the game? Maybe. It definitely feels more to me like some elements were hastily added towards the end of development after this twist was decided to retroactively make it work rather than organically planned from the start, as some of these are certainly more natural than others. The guy who runs the resort milking the publicity and covering it up as construction to overcharge the guests who he graciously lets in anyway while they’re “closed” and then embezzling away the extra money while he receives praise from his bosses for handling the situation so well from both a business and PR standpoint has a much better reason to both commit the bombings and keep them going than the receptionist who is secretly dating one of the resort’s rich actress clients and who also happens to keep some very funny anarcho-communist literature in his desk, or the wealthy woman who is just a bitch and is mad someone who works at the resort recommended a surgeon for her dog who she was unsatisfied with. So sure this is an interesting concept and I think it’s been done well elsewhere (shoutouts to Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments Bay Beeeee) but here it’s a big whiff imo.

And that’s kind of the whole game, and this whole experiment. A lot of interesting ideas that just don’t really add up to anything substantial enough to be compelling. Clearly I am not the only person who thinks so because despite having a teaser at the end for a game with a sick concept that should ABSOLUTELY be repurposed into a mainline game if they ever make one again (HAUNTED CRUISE SHIP ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING MEEEEEE), that third one was canned mid-development and the Nancy Drew Dossier series was quietly forgotten, which, like, yeah. I get it. There’s not much here.

PREVIOUSLY: RANSOM OF THE SEVEN SHIPS
NEXT TIME: WARNINGS AT WAVERLY ACADEMY

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