Is it a good game? ...no. It clearly isn't.
Is it a fun one? Fuck yes.

I can complain about some of the level design, the OST isn't that great, story can be downright gibberish at times, but if anything, this game proves that having a good gameplay loop can be an immense boon. It's not really a Megaman X game, but it's certainly fanservice-y enough for fans to be happy for seeing all the characters from different subseries playable at once. And it's a power fantasy on its own right to play a gacha and be able to just buy whatever the ♥♥♥♥ you want without having to spend real cash for it. Speaking of cash, I would only say that this game is slightly overpriced, but it's definitely worth it on sale at least.

And I hope this becomes a trend. Un-gacha-fy some of these games and release them as an offline package. Games as a service will always eventually die, but this way you can at least preserve some of these for posterity. It was fun playing as Vampire Zero even if it's not something you'd expect to see in a Megaman game. Or maybe precisely because of it.

Mega Man fans are too receptive to Capcom's bullshit. Their sheer incompetence during the 7th gen has been well-documented, and all they've done since to rectify their countless missteps is a single Mega Man game. Despite the fanbase turning around and making MM11 the best-selling game in the franchise, we're at 5 years since its release, the 35th anniversary has came and went and Capcom has shown no sign of a new game. Instead, we got X Dive.

Now unlike most people, I'm no stranger to gacha games. I've tried many, and I've enjoyed many. As a result of my lack of seething hatred for them, I was more hopeful than most when the game was first announced. I went into it with an open mind, lasted about a week, and then dropped it out of boredom. It's not a good gacha game, nor is it an acceptable Mega Man game by any stretch of the imagination. Haphazard level design that felt AI-generated. Grindy progression that is simultaneously boring and tedious. Borderline incomprehensible english translation. From head to toe, the game hardly had any redeeming factors. Playing as various characters across the entire franchise would be neat, if not for the fact that playing the game itself is a complete slog. I would genuinely rather beat X6 and X7 back-to-back than consider booting this garbage up again. And then they had the gall to charge 30 bucks for this slop, despite essentially just removing the gacha system and leaving the rest of the game's myriad problems. You can buy entire series' in the franchise for that price.

The existence of the game is damn near insulting. Hell, we can't even say the game is funding new projects, like the Star Ocean gacha or Fate/Grand Order did, given the game failed and died after a woeful 2-3 years (and there are no new projects to speak of). Not to mention they're making and selling NFTs to promote it too.

It's basically another episode of Bad Boxart Mega Man. The fanservice at least could've been cool if it weren't for Capcom's continued incompetence and the franchise circling the drain. And if I hear one more Capcom cockguzzler say "this should be the standard for mobages", you're gonna see me on the evening news.

"The 11th born son of this world shoots at the soul of man with guns of silver."

Some background on this game for me. When I was at the end of my high school years, Sega Saturn emulation started reaching major breakthroughs, and Mednafen was our new saviour. I've always been more of a Sega fan than any other console developer, but the Saturn was a massive blindspot to me. So one fateful summer, I went on a binge through the Sega Saturn's library while focusing on its major exclusive, discovering one of my new top 3 game systems.

Ever since I was a young child, Treasure games had truly blown me away. Dynamite Headdy had the inventive setting and powerups to really make the player feel like a wacky action hero. Gunstar Heroes had the weapon combination system and truly out there stages like the board game level. Astro Boy Omega Factor was perhaps the most ambitious GBA game of all time with amazing love for the source material. To say they were always my favourite developers would be an understatement. Naturally, when I discovered they made 3 games for the Saturn, those were my top priority.

At the time I played Radiant Silvergun, I was still a while away from getting into 1cc culture. I would credit feed shmups to just take in the aesthetic. So, I focused all my time into Silvergun's story mode. Everything about it was simply stunning in how it perfectly blended RPG elements with a shmup. The story emphasis, the hidden dog collectibles, and of course the weapons which level up. It was all so much to take in. In a genre where the player usually has to choose between a set of powerups, Radiant Silvergun instead threw in one of the biggest toolkits out there at all times. There's so much to master and I always felt so accomplished discovering new strategies for killing bosses. For example, the lock-on spread shot racked up crazy points against Nasu while allowing the player to dodge.

Story mode was a real crowd pleaser in my eyes. I felt so accomplished for bashing my head against a wall so to speak, restarting a million times with stronger weapons until finally I killed the Stonelike. And for years, that was good enough for me.

However, this year with the release of the PC port, I decided to get into 1ccing the arcade mode. After ~50-60 hours of practice, I went from being overwhelmed by chaining the first area in the game to achieving a truly impossible run where I chained almost every area except the train, finishing with 3 spare lives. Radiant Silvergun is not a forgiving game in the slightest, but it really makes the player feel like a badass.

The usage of leitmotifs for the soundtrack is amazing to boot. The story about how the characters are stuck in a time loop really helps the tone, for it's almost like a dark parody of the shmup genre where the whole joke is about how much the player needs to continue endlessly to achieve their goal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kGWHANcOnY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVuWvEXS8Es

Over the last 3 or 4 years, I've gone from never 1ccing any shmup in my life to 1ccing roughly 40 games. Silvergun perfectly characterizes my growth and realization that routing is god in this genre. Anything is achievable if one perseveres enough.

All in all Radiant Silvergun is a very special game to me that represents just why Treasure was top dog. In an era where 2D games were slowly being phased out for a while to make way for 3D, Treasure made a game that felt like the ultimate love letter to its genre full of countless homages to other shmups and even tokusatsus like Ultraman and Gamera. This game will make you its bitch, and I'm all for it. It's the kind of game only the Saturn would have, the kind of game only Treasure could've made.

Devil May Cry at its worst is still better than most of the shit I played for fun as a kid.

Real videogamers don’t skip Devil May Cry 2, I’ve heard, so I figured it was high time I actually took a look at it for myself. I’d heard for years — decades! — that this was one of the most historically impressive pieces of shit ever put to market, and so I avoided it like it was a nuclear waste disposal site. This was not a place of honor, the signs warned me, and I wasn’t about to go digging for treasure against their advice. But now, with all of the pretentious gamethinker wind at my back, I wanted to see for myself how it really was. I actually started thinking that it would be immensely funny if it turned out to be the greatest game I’d ever played, so I could come on here and parade the fact that I liked it in front of all of you stuffy sheeple, all of you blindly following the opinions of whoever told you it was bad.

That was wrong of me, and I’d like to apologize. Devil May Cry 2 is bad.

But it’s not that bad, and that’s kind of where the problem is. You compare this to Devil May Cry, and it’s really bad. You compare it to Devil May Cry 3, and it’s unforgivable. But we live in a world where, somehow, this didn’t completely kill Devil May Cry as a series. I legitimately have no idea how it survived. Better games have killed better franchises for less. Even so, when something this bad exists but it doesn’t murder the series, it becomes kind of hard to really hate it. Capcom released three more mainline Devil May Cry games after this one, and they’re all ridiculously good (Devil May Cry 4 haters need not respond). You’ve always got the option to not play this one, pretend it doesn’t exist, and just experience the rest of the series without noticing anything different. If Devil May Cry 2 got It’s a Wonderful Life’d out of existence tomorrow, nobody would even think to ask if there was anything different. You know that joke about releasing three pigs with the numbers 1, 3, and 4 painted onto them, and then watching everyone freak out when they can’t find the fourth pig? I know the person who came up with that joke wasn’t a big Devil May Cry fan, because nobody who cares about Devil May Cry ever gives a shit where Pig #2 went. Hell, we even got a fifth pig a little while ago, and everyone was more than content to continue pretending this one didn’t exist.

But I stuck it out, because real videogamers don’t skip Devil May Cry 2. I saw the Stinger animation and ignored the saliva that filled my mouth, warning me that I was about to puke. I beat the Infested Chopper by spamming the square button so hard my thumb went numb. I swung at the switches to open the sliding door and auto-focused on the flying enemies instead and I promised the universe that I would keep going no matter how much I was starting to hate myself. You know, if you force yourself to play Devil May Cry 2 for long enough, it actually kind of starts feeling like a Devil May Cry game. I know this is just me eating the grey slop from The Matrix and pretending it’s a juicy steak so I can keep it down, but some of the small-scale, tightly-packed room fights feel remarkably complete. It’s no secret that this game only had about six months in the oven, if that, so it’s mostly a mess. Even so, you can still get a pulse every now and then to remind yourself that both you and the game are still alive.

Anyway, after slogging through the boring encounters and the frustrating level layouts and the way that Dante lifelessly stares into the camera during cutscenes with those indescribably weird eyes, I managed to get to the final boss. Unsurprisingly for a game rushed out the door this quickly, the final boss is actually a boss rush, followed by a piss-easy final form that gets completely blown apart the second you press the Devil Trigger button. Unfortunately for me, I took my very first death on this boss fight, and decided that I would just start the level from scratch to avoid incurring a continue penalty. The game asked me if I wanted to continue. I said no. The game asked me if I wanted to go to the main menu, or if I wanted to save. I didn’t want to save. I wanted to restart. I went back to the main menu. I was then prompted to load a save. My last save was about forty minutes before the final boss. I decided that it wasn’t such a bad thing to lose to Devil May Cry 2.

It would probably reflect worse on me if I’d actually taken the time to beat it.

We have no record of who the original director of this game was before Itsuno took over.

“Being touched makes me feel safe. But at the same time it also makes me anxious. After all, I have no idea how I could ever repay someone who makes me feel this happy. I can’t find the words to say. With just a simple hug, all of these feelings are revolving around inside me, and I’m just so afraid that I’ll end up crushing this moment into dust. And just like that, the happiness has faded away completely, leaving nothing but coarse anxiety coursing through my heart. Am I just not used to dealing with kindness?”

“Maybe I’m a little lonely.”

Okay now were those quotes from Sayoko, the protagonist of the video game Ghostpia after the first time someone was nice to her in so long that she can’t remember the last time she physically touched anyone, or was that a quote from Ina, the me who’s writing this little thing about the video game Ghostpia four months into an acute mental health episode that my doctor recently described as “really concerning”?

Jkjk obvi these are quotes from the first few minutes of Ghostpia but I did find myself struck throughout the ten or so hours I spent with the game just how well it captured with words the vibe of Being Depressed, which I do think is really hard to do in the format that developer Chosuido has chosen for this story. Being a visual novel with absolutely no player input beyond proceeding the text and which never leaves Sayoko’s perspective means you’re really sitting in the sludge with her, and while she’s a really engaging character, she’s often a difficult one to be around. Unmotivated, sad, and anxious, she actively avoids her friends in the early goings of the story, and even by the end of the game she is still largely nonverbal in group settings. But a combination of incredible scene direction, one of the most clever localizations I think I’ve ever seen, and a really lovely score help bolster an already very strong character voice. I think it’s a lot easier to communicate a VIBE of depression than having to constantly assert the fog of it with a running first person narration, but Chosuido makes it look easy.

“Hopefully I’m not so empty that the wind blows me away.”

Ghostpia takes place in a city surrounded on all sides by a vast desert of snow, populated by immortal people who live nocturnally and whose forms are painfully melted by the light of day. If they’re ever caught by the sun or otherwise killed, they simply reform and wake up within a couple days at the local garbage dump, which also happens to all inanimate objects in the town upon damage or consumption. The population is small and fixed – no one has ever been able to leave, and no outsider has ever shown up. There’s a fascist church that nominally runs the town but given that it’s difficult to cause any permanent harm to anyone or anything, even stuff as extreme as murder or arson seems to kind of slide out of consequence if the perpetrator gets away with it for more than a day or two.

Lots of things “happen” in this game and lots of things “have happened” over the course of ghostpia’s five episodes. It becomes evident pretty quickly that the literal only thing Sayoko is good at in life (death?) is killing people, with guns, with her hands. She’s amnesiac and the church seems to have a vested interest in her not remembering the circumstances around the last time she and her only two friends last tried to permanently escape the town. She gets to know professional worlds both legitimate and criminal. Schemes are hatched, assassinations plotted, battles beyond the scale you might expect are waged. None of this really coalesces into much of anything though. There’s a lot of worldbuilding, and it’s all interesting. There’s a lot of teasing, a lot of implication, hints that there is a coherent vision of What’s Going On here, but Ghostpia is firmly Season One of a planned two seasons and the core of this game is obviously an emotional one, uninterested in answering literally any of the questions it opens up.

“She’s so dazzling, I can’t help but look down at the floor to avert my gaze. She and I are different. The two of us are actually quite distant from each other, but only just so happen to be physically close right now. Just thinking about it like that makes me want to cry.”

The throughline that ties the season together is the arrival of the town’s first ever New Person in, well, no one is sure. Nobody keeps time, they don’t age, they don’t measure things, there’s no real point. All the days are the same, and over time it becomes evident that the milieu that consumes Sayoko enough that she rarely leaves home and doesn’t bathe or eat without instruction is silently haunting everyone. Everyone’s going through their motions, and the thing that makes her different is that she doesn’t have any motions to go through. The ghosts don’t technically have physical needs, so doing things like eating and bathing and staying warm are comforting rituals they keep going to make themselves feel like they’re retaining what they guess to be their essential human nature. Performing humanness is to some degree an essential part of a ghost’s life, and it’s ambiguous how seriously we’re meant to take it when early on one of Sayoko’s friends says they haven’t really hung out with her for several years.

So when a new girl shows up, immediately on the church’s bad side, and Sayoko rescues her, and gives her a name, and a place to crash for a while, well, it becomes immediately harder to be isolated. So as much of the game is taken up by the intrigue of the new girl, Yoru’s, situation, and by association the aspects of the lives of Sayoko’s other friends that she had either forgotten or never taken enough of an interest in before to learn about, the core of the experience is really just hanging out. Conversation. Establishing and re-establishing bonds. Learning to be vulnerable, and getting to know someone well enough that you can be vulnerable with them without being open with them.

“I don’t understand why you believe in her so much.”

“She doesn’t know what it means to love someone. She’s only ever been loved...That’s all she lives for...I find myself unpleasant. I know my mind is warped and repulsive. But I want to keep doing what I’m doing as long as I can.”

“I don’t understand you. But I might be jealous.”

It’s very easy for me to focus on the bits of Ghostpia that I connected with, because they resonate very strongly with me and I think when the game is on it’s so fucking on. I find the main cast pretty uniformly incredible – there’s Pacifica, who is tall and kind and shrewd and confident and ambiguously evil (no one is QUITE sure what her job is but “criminal kingpin” seems not implausible); Anya is handy and moody and warm and deeply invested once she opens up, which comes easier than she suggests it does; Yoru is bubbly and crude and perceptive and unreadable. Sayoko herself, when she starts to feel safe again, never stops being awkward but it does seem like she is kind of just Like That in a way that is flavored differently from the way people clam up when they’re anxious, she’s also a little bit genuinely cruel and deeply empathetic.

Each episode ultimately revolves around Sayoko’s ability to connect with one of her circle of friends or otherwise deeply relate with a side character, often ones who are hostile and cruel. Everywhere she goes she finds mirrors of her loneliness, her fear of vulnerability, her anger, and her aching want for the relationships she thinks other people have. And while this isn’t a game about “getting over it” or otherwise shrugging off depression, through those mirrors Sayoko is able to find a version of herself who is comfortable and able to believe that the people around her want to be there, and believe that when they tell her they feel about her the same way she feels about them, they’re being genuine.

“YOU JUST DON’T VIBE WITH HER.”

That shit isn’t the totality of the game though. Ghostpia is a lot of things, including, often, zanier than I would prefer? Not that I dislike jokes, and I do in fact like a lot of the comedy here, but there’s a juvenile streak that feels really out of place with the rest of it. A strange fascination with the word “poop” that spans the entire game, a mean-spirited running bit aimed at a homeless man that thankfully disappears relatively early on, and a bunch of out of left field otaku goofs at the eleventh hour stand out the loudest in my memory as Goofers that just don’t hit, but Ghostpia’s wacky diversions fall flat for me as often as they hit. If the characters and their dialogue weren’t so compelling through pretty much any scenario they get pitched into this stuff would be way more of a problem for me structurally.

This extends to action and violence too. The game is outright gruesome, and I think it’s to the writers’ credit that when they choose to play that gruesomeness for drama or horror it works really well even though characters are constantly reminding us and each other that death has literally no meaning for them and in fact would often get them out of the pickles they find themselves in. But probably 85% of the time the violence (which is usually like, A Lot, is what I want to emphasize) is played for comedy by the narrative even if Sayoko is taking herself seriously – the people of the town call her The Ninja because she jumps around and is so good at murder, and whenever she’s about to get into something there’s a cartoonish Ninja Flute Musical Cue to herald the coming bloodshed. Characters are bisected, mutilated, impaled, sometimes graphically, almost always for The Bit and I’m not OPPOSED to that sort of thing (I’m a documented sicko and in fact with one character who is the most consistent target of this to the point that it’s a running joke I think it’s pretty funny), I just don’t really get what we’re going for with the tone a lot of the time here. The weirdest bits are when the stakes of the genuine character drama are tied up in this cartoonish violence that otherwise comes off as a really dumb bit. The main plot of one episode revolved around one of the main characters being abused by her employer but the circumstances of this abuse are so brazenly stupid that it’s hard to feel the way I assume the developer wants me to feel about the scene. Nothing really offensive happening, it just feels a little at odds with what feels like the game at its best in multiple other directions.

“I don’t really wanna say something like ‘that’s the power of friendship’ because that’d be so cheesy. So I say it ironically. As a joke.”

Obviously, though, I HAVE connected pretty strongly with Ghostpia. I don’t think of those things I was just complaining about. I think about Sayoko’s endlessly evocative narration, and the soundtrack when it’s jaunty and the soundtrack when it’s melancholic. I think of the way all of the main characters are united in their hatred for Clara, the local nun in training who is so genuinely cheerful and naive that our misfit losers can’t help but be intrinsically disgusted by her mere presence.

I think of how, in chapter one, when she’s reconciling with Anya after going no contact over a slight she can’t even remember anymore, Sayoko says I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and Anya tells her “you don’t have to say it twice.” And then I think about how, at the end of the game, when Yoru is at her lowest and she’s testing the boundaries of the shaky relationship she’s developed with Sayoko, and she’s admitting to her that she knows more about everything and everyone than she lets on but that she can’t say any of it, and needs to know whether Sayoko could understand this, whether she’ll stay with her, Sayoko says “Of course I do. Of course,” and Yoru replies “I get it. You don’t have to say it twice.” I think about stagnancy, and transformation, and how to be content. Those things seem bigger in hindsight. I think Sayoko might agree.

I'll be real. As a kid, I always thought the first Shinobi game was kinda arse and just poorly designed. It's hard to fault Sega when it was made in 1987 and the blueprint for a fun action platformer wasn't really something they could just copy yet. However, as someone who tremendously enjoys the first Castlevania, Mega Man, and of course Ninja Gaiden games, it's important to note all the ways Shinobi 1 dropped the ball compared to those games, and why it didn't make such a cultural impact.

The player dies in a single hit. There are cheap as hell enemies spawning left and right, so that coupled with the previous part means the player must slowly inch their way across the screen and use the bomb right before dying whenever possible. The player cannot move around like a badass ninja at all. There are 3 different powerups, but they all behave exactly the same way with only animation differences for some fucking reason. The levels are balanced around rescuing the small ninjas for powerups, but each ninja can only be rescued once which makes stages exponentially harder should the player lose any life. Yet, the best way to progress in many stages is to continuously retry them after killing the boomerang enemies since they are the only enemies who don't respawn.

It's just a nightmare of a game! As far as ninja action platformers go, I've beaten every Ninja Gaiden game, every Strider game, every Shinobi game, Hagane, etc and even done challenge runs for a lot of those. I am not shitting on the game just for being hard; I am shitting on the game for being the wrong kind of challenge, the one where every single enemy is equally dangerous in an action platformer.

However, after the recent Shinobi 4 announcement, I promised myself I would replay every single Shinobi game. That meant starting with 1. I had heard some inklings about the SEGA AGES version, so on a whim I decided to play it for my replay and, well...

Wow! They made Shinobi 1 fun!

The SEGA AGES port rebalances the game in various ways. There is now a turbo button, which makes Joe's attacks far more reliable for both the bonus levels and hitting fast as hell enemies. Joe wears his iconic white costume now, which looks way better than the completely generic costume in the original game. Speaking of things that are now in line with the rest of the series, Joe can actually take a hit before dying. No longer are levels balanced around saving the ninja girls since the powerups are permanent; now the player can actually move more freely around levels and feel like a badass ninja.

It's really the little things that help. The original arcade version had a copyrighted picture of some famous actress. On Switch, it was hacked and changed to an Altered Beast ad. Very charming! I also really appreciate all the extra options. There are options to fit the screen to be pixel perfect along with a solid scanline filter.

Perhaps my favourite change however is the melee mode. The player can now use melee attacks whenever with the click of a single button, as opposed to the original where it was context sensitive. Coupled with the vibration option, it feels really smooth. Definitely in line with the 6 button mode of Shinobi 3.

Also I loved the ending omg! The twist that the villain was actually Joe's mentor who wanted to bring about a great civil war since he wanted ninjas to be important to society again would have been mindblowing if I played this in 1987. It wasn't quite as shocking as Fantasy Zone's ending which left me thinking about video games as an artform, but for a silly ninja arcade game it was insane.

So yeah, my thoughts are the AGES version elevates the game from maybe a 4-5/10 to a 7ish/10. You're still left with an all too short game that isn't the most visually memorable nor does it have the best music. However, the levels are a lot more fun to breeze through than ever thanks to the improved gameplay mechanics, and it's a short and sweet experience with a great ending. If nothing else, it laid the foundation for Shinobi 3 which is definitely a top 20 game of all time for me at the very least. The SEGA AGES version knocks this from an experience that can take hours to master to a 15 minute ride. Definitely check it out any way you can.

I look forward to replaying and reviewing the rest of the series!

Anime is far more prolific and accessible now than it was when I was in high school. That's definitely a good thing, but there was a certain rush to being at the whim of whatever was available at the local Blockbuster that can't be replicated today. Being a 15-year-old and pulling stuff like Appleseed or Vampire Hunter D off the shelf made you feel like you were being exposed to something forbidden and strange. I still remember shoveling snow after watching The End of Evangelion - having not seen a single episode of the show - and just trying to process what the hell I watched. Sure, I could load up Crunchyroll or whatever and spin the Anime roulette, but Anime is of a more known quantity now, it's hard not to have a good idea of what you're getting into, and the charm of physically exploring the tiny Anime corner tucked in the back of the video store can't be so easily experienced today.

The 1990s adaptation of Berserk is one of those rentals that stuck with me, and its cliffhanger ending led to me seek out fan translations of the manga, which at the time was in the middle of the Millennium Empire arc. Unfortunately, enduring the lethargic pace of chapter releases in real time leaves you itching for more Berserk, which might lead you to play games like the non-canonical Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage. Nothing says "Berserk" more like sticking Guts (or Gatts, or Gattsu depending on how far down the alliteration hole you wanna go) in tight corridors where his movement is restricted and his steel girder of a sword constantly bounces off walls. What a great game that's totally not annoying to play at all.

Sword of the Berserk's sequel never came out here. Can't imagine why. But it's a shame, as (deep breath) Berserk Millennium Empire Arc: Chapter of the Holy Demon War - baller name - is not only directly based on the manga, but makes significant improvements over its predecessor. An English patch for the game was released several years ago, but reports that the patch caused issues with playing the game through emulation made me put it off until I was able to put the ISO on a hard drive and play it on hardware. The second Sign by Susumu Hirasawa started blaring through the tiny speakers of my CRT, I knew I was in for a proper Berserk experience.

Guts is perfectly embodied here. His weight, the heft of his movement, the lumbering swings of the Dragonslayer, the force of his arm cannon ripping into endless hordes of demons... it's spot on. Remarkably so given when it came out - not even the more recent Band of the Hawk captures Guts' physicality quite as well, despite the Musou genre being such a good fit for the kind of action present in Berserk.

The level-to-level gameplay typically sees Guts running between set objectives, zipping back and forth in large, labyrinthine stages littered with enemies that spawn endlessly. Tearing your way through monsters feels good for a while but grows tiresome as defeating them rarely comes with an actual win state, they're just an obstacle between you and your goal and you could, you know, just kinda run there and not deal with any of it. So much of the game is this, and it just drags, especially towards the end when the fog of war stars tricking you into running down dead ends, or when the game expects you to hop through portals that might just send you back to the start of a zone.

Conversely, the boss battles in this game are incredible. I mean just look at all the cool shit you can do! Games should let you do cool shit more often!! All these modern games with their precious stagger meters and tight parry windows that make you feel like a weak little frail baby boy, ohhhh please sir, can I do damage now-- a standard counterattack in Berserk Millennium Empire Arc: Chapter of the Holy Demon War lets you chop both of the boss' arms clean off and it rules.

Every major fight of the arc (before its perspective shifts away from Guts) is accounted for, along with some recurring fights against the former members of the Band of the Hawk, who are summoned by a game-only character named Charles that haunts Guts at various points throughout the story. I think this is a pretty smart way to integrate more of Berserk's backstory for less familiar audiences, and it provides necessary context for Guts' growth as a character. Unfortunately, the English patch seems to be a translation of a translation, which results in some goofy and grammatically incorrect dialog that took me out of the story. My brain is usually pretty good about auto-correcting stuff like this but the translation is rough and really only excels at making the game readable enough to be completed by someone who doesn't speak Japanese.

It really is too bad that so much of your time will get eaten up whaling on demonic trees so you can just move forward. Even then, I think it's an easy call that Berserk Millennium Empire Arc: Chapter of the Holy Demon War is the best Berserk game, edging out Band of the Hawk and blowing out Sword of the Berserk for the top spot. But, boy, pulling back and realizing that the best this series has gotten is a middle of the road PS2 game is really depressing.

Maybe Fromsoft will get to take a crack at the license someday, as seems to be the want of anyone who has connected the dots between Souls and Berserk, but for my money the right man for the job is Hideaki Itsuno. I just need more people to internalize this so it happens. Please. Please i need this

Haunted Castle is funny, and you're probably asking, "funny hah hah" or "funny peculiar"? Truthfully I think it goes both ways. I would like to first articulate the "funny peculiar" part as Haunted Castle sticks out from the rest of the games in the series like a particularly sore thumb.

It is of course an arcade game, an attempt at bringing the gameplay of the beloved NES title to the mean streets of the coin-op cabinet at your local pizzeria. You may have noticed it is also called "Haunted Castle" instead of "Castlevania", unlike the JP title Akumajō Dracula where it shares the same name with the Famicom Disk System game (along with later the Super Famicom and Sharp X68000 games, thanks lads I'm sure that's not confusing over there). I could actually wager a decent guess as to why they did this change. You see, the director was a massive fan of the Atari 2600 classic Haunted House, they just had to get their reference in. Remember the bat and the ghost? They in fact guest star in Haunted Castle, that's actually the same characters from Haunted House. I shit you not, my logic is infallible.

The game also bizarrely begins with an obvious Ghosts n' Goblins-esque intro with Simon peacefully walking along with his bride-to-be, only for an explosion to go off in the distance with Dracula flying in out of nowhere to whisk her away to god knows where (Ohio maybe) as Simon gives off a "curse you Dracula!" pose. Official documents state this was supposed to be a retelling of the first game, but I like to imagine that Dracula is constantly trying to inconvenience Simon at every turn. In the next Adventure Simon will be peacefully enjoying a meal at his favorite steakhouse only for it to be revealed that his steak was well done, then Dracula explodes from the background revealing his new ownership of the place and proceeds to put on the most annoying song in the jukebox.

This is where I stop farting about and actually comment on things that legitimately annoy me that have nothing to do with the gameplay, and that's the fact that Simon does not do his famous strut in this game. Instead he looks like he's clutching his tummy and needs to take a massive shit. It turns out there's no bride at all, Simon is just breaking into Dracula's castle to use his bathroom and ruin his plumbing. I am continuing the charade that this is all a childish rivalry between Mr. Belmondo and Mr. Dracula. There is also a second thing that annoys me, and that's that the best upgraded weapon in the game is a sword. That's right, Simon has sold out. He throws out his trademark whip for the most dull weapon to ever hit dullsville. The reason all of these peculiar things happen is most likely because Haunted Castle was originally not supposed to be related to Castlevania at all, and everything kind of got shoehorned in during the middle of development. It was also painfully early in the series' life, so maybe they figured they could just do anything since it was the new hotness and would probably make massive bank.

However! If you wish to make massive bank at the coin-op, maybe you should allow infinite continues! For the original release of these games, one credit was one life. That's all you got, and you could only continue with an additional credit three times, and after that? Do I hear wedding bells? Oh my, another explosion has taken place and Dracula took another one of your wives! Dearest me. Apparently Konami couldn't quite wrap their heads around how to properly gouge people of their money, because I doubt new players are going to bother with this kind of brutality, especially when the North American release features an insanely high damage boost to the enemies. In the original JP release of Haunted Castle, a bone thrown from an enemy skeleton results in a bit of damage. In the American release? One of those bones is now powerful enough to level the broadside of a Nimitz-class Supercarrier. There is also no pot roast in this game, and your health is not refilled between stages. You are given very little room for error.

Astonishing.

To say Haunted Castle is a hard game would be the biggest understatement since they invented the word "understatement". It is a game designed to make you pull your hair out with how often your Boston Big™ hitbox will be nailed by everything in sight as you get to watch a bat pull some spectacular aerial maneuvers to somehow not get hit by your whip and nibble your face off in retaliation. To be frank as Frankenstein, I also think the game just looks ugly. Many sprites feel haphazardly drawn, which gives credence to the game being quickly rejiggered into a Dracula of some kind instead of whatever it was originally going to be. The rock golem that's the boss of stage 4 literally doesn't do anything after you kill it. The game just freezes as the victory jingle goes off and you're given no satisfaction for your patience, no explosions, no decapitation, no nothing. Stage 6 is literally just walking to the left and hoping you can get by all the bats flying at you without the collapsing bridge behind you catching up. It's meant to be a setpiece, but it's just painfully boring and feels like a creative setup to make the final stage quickly, and make it less obvious that this was rushed out to bank off the success of Akumajō Dracula's name.

Now you may be thinking, "where's the funny hah hah"? Well, there's these boulders in stage 2, they make an incredibly cartoonish Scooby-Doo "bonk" sound when they hit the ground.

:)

I feel like I've done nothing but drone on here, but I guess that's what happens when it's both a Castlevania title and a bad game. Now imagine if it were also a fighting game on top of that, wow I wouldn't shut up. Oh god, I just realized something and had a vision please keep it away, oh god, oh jeez, oh god, oh fuck, oh jeez.

The puzzles+OST are good but I am not patient or observant enough (I am diagnosed with ADHD lmao), for the secret hunting so I didn't enjoy that aspect and had to look up things which soured the experience for me. I didn't enjoy the repetitive nature of the game either.

I liked the story in NG, NG+, NG++, but the true ending raises more questions than answers, and the story in general didn't feel very integrated with the gameplay depending on how you played, whereas ZeroRanger did that perfectly.

In my opinion, the bullshit parts of ZeroRanger (like the save deleting at the end) are amplified in this game. Keep your save backed up at all times, just in case a mistake sets your progress back by a lot. Also note down things and take screenshots.

It's probably a 10/10 for the very niche group of people that:
1) enjoy puzzles
2) aren't impulsive and/or inattentive
3) are very good at thinking out of the box
4) can tolerate or even like repeating the same levels
5) enjoy anime tropes

But anyone else is probably going to have a very mixed experience with some high highs and some miserable lows

EDIT: Raised the score bc I can't get it out of my head

Oh.

From the start of the game, this tries to impress me as much as it possibly can. The overworld is simplified and uses trains! There's more of an emphasis on story with cinematic animated cutscenes! The soundtrack is catchy and more pronounced! Zelda is an actual character that has actual screen time to develop and interact with Link instead of being captured/turned into a rock the whole game! Instruments are back! There's only 5 dungeons, so it's short and concise! Alas, the longer I played and further I progressed, the more the cracks began to show, the smoke and mirrors fade, and the truth becomes blatantly obvious.

This game is just Phantom Hourglass in a train-colored trenchcoat.

Pretty much every problem that I had with Phantom Hourglass is still in full blast here, from the clumsy controls and movement being entirely locked to the touch screen (though to give them SOME credit at least you can double-tap to roll instead of having to draw those dumb circles on the edge of the screen, thank christ), to the giant tartarus-ass main dungeon that requires constant retreads, all the way to the overworld being a painfully slow time waster with really not much to do whatsoever. If you weren't a fan of Phantom Hourglass, this game will give you deja vu in all the wrong ways.

And again to give them some credit, I can see that there were attempts to improve the general experience. The new items are more interesting and unique than in PH, and the giant central dungeon no longer has a time limit and you can start from the beginning of each unlocked section rather than only from either the very start or a singular checkpoint, and there are the aforementioned control and aesthetic/narrative upgrades. It's just that despite all the polish it's still using a game I didn't like as its foundation.

The two biggest new titular elements, Ghost Zelda (the spirit) and the train (the tracks), weren't even that interesting. Having Zelda be able to possess the guardians of the main dungeon to work on your side is conceptually really cool and there are a handful of interesting puzzles that come from the dynamic between link and ghost zelda, but the guardians crawl-like movement speed combined with the games insistance that you and zelda pass through doors together means there's a WHOLE lot of just waiting for her to just mfin catch up. Zelda's AI pathing isn't the smartest either, as I had multiple instances where calling her to me would cause her to go in the complete opposite direction, which was very fun and not at all irritating. Zelda's inclusion basically turns the big central dungeon from one giant annoying stealth mission to one giant annoying escort mission. Pick your poison. The train turns the mindless sailing of Phantom Hourglass into train track navigation that at its best is equally as mindless as the PH sailing and at its worst is some messed up game of pac-man where you gotta dodge insta-kill suicidal bomb cars that move faster than you when I just want to goddamn get back to a town already!!!!!!

Shoutouts as well to the flute that requires actual constant blowing into the DS mic to play and the final stretch of the game for being a gauntlet consisting of a dungeon with way too much slow guardian-swapping backtracking, a game of unfair train pac-man, boss fights with arguably unavoidable attacks depending on RNG, a perfect game of projectile tennis, and even more mic flute blowing shenanigans. FUN!

If you like trying to control fully-faceted adventure games with a stick, Nintendo has you covered with this game and its predecessor. I can't believe I had more fun with the fucking Tingle games than I did with the actual mainline titles when it comes to the zelda series on DS. What in the hell was Nintendo cooking dude