This is a game I think I’ve seen in person a time or two, but the cover and title were just so unimpressive that I never really paid it any mind. I didn’t realize it was a 2D-Zelda type game until a friend of mine mentioned it offhand to me when I was talking about how I was playing through Brain Lord a few days ago x3. Very much not wanting to let a game in one of my favorite genres pass me by so easily, I got right to playing it once I was done with Brain Lord. It took me about 8~10 hours (I didn’t keep super good track) to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware only abusing save states very rarely (which I will specify more on later).

Lagoon is the story of a teenage boy named Nasir (or “Nassel”, if his transliterated name in Japanese is anything to go by). Sat down and instructed by his father figure at the start of the game, he’s told of the kingdom of Lakelyland and how a curse at Lagoon Castle is causing all of the water in the land to turn foul. If that weren’t bad enough, it’s also causing monsters to spawn all over the kingdom! So begins the story of Nasir, Lakelyland’s Hero of Light. It’s all around an okay story. The pacing is honestly pretty decent, and there aren’t too many characters to get lost in either, so I had a good amount of fun with it. It’s nothing amazing or anything, as it’s a pretty stereotypical fantasy adventure story for the time, but for 1991 on the SFC, it’s nonetheless a pretty good showing for an action/adventure game.

While the story was more or less what I expected (if not a little above my very meager expectations), the gameplay was immediately surprising. It’s a top-down 2D action/adventure game, sure, but this is no Zelda-clone. It’s a heckin’ Ys-clone! xD. The original Sharp X68000 version of this game had bump combat, but they’ve switched to giving you a physical sword in this one, and it’s VERY short. You go around towns and a handful of dungeons along your quite linear quest to save Lakelyland, but the combat is never particularly great. That said, enemies tend to be pretty simple to deal with between your sword and your magic, and just learning their movement patterns makes things not too difficult to deal with eventually.

This is down to three factors. Factor 1 is that you actually regenerate health and mana by just standing still (as long as you’re not in a boss arena). This means that, as long as you can beat an enemy, you don’t really need to worry about running short on resources, since just standing still for a little while will get you right back up to perfect readiness. Sure, it’s annoying in the late-game to stand still for like a minute to just fight one or two more enemies, but at least you won’t die. Factor 2 is that this game actually has save-anywhere functionality. As long as you’re not in a boss arena, you can save anywhere, and you’ll appear right back there upon death, so even getting sniped by an unexpectedly strong enemy or boss doesn’t need to be much of a set back as long as you’re saving frequently.

Factor 3 is that, much like Ys, you have levels that you gain from fighting stuff, and there’s little that just grinding a bit won’t eventually solve. However, unlike Ys, the maximum level is something way higher than you’ll need to fight almost anything in the game quite comfortably. Sure, your sword is so uselessly short that you’ll take hits a lot, but between hunting down better swords/armor and grinding up a few more levels, there’s usually just a bit of grinding between you and being able to tank that boss well enough to finally beat it.

The only real exception to this is the final boss, who is a pretty unforgiving gauntlet of hard-ish fights with the penultimate one being NUTS hard, and you basically just gotta get lucky to kill that guy. You actually can’t use magic in boss fights, and instead you have magic rings you can equip that buff your stats in exchange for draining MP constantly, but even then, that final boss really is a step too far. Sure, the boss fights are already not very good, as there’s not a ton of strategy beyond having the stats to tank and spank your way to victory with your puny sword (that’s far too difficult to hit things with when facing up or down), but I was having a good amount of generally frustration-free fun with the game until the final boss came and ruined things. He was what I finally had to start using save states for outside of a faster alternative to the save-anywhere system, and godspeed to anyone brave enough to take that jerk on using original hardware. Overall, the mechanics of the game will probably wow few and frustrate far more, but as a big fan of the genre, I thought it made for a good enough time that I was excited to go back to playing more Lagoon after getting home from work the past few days, and I think that speaks for itself in regards to how engaging the game manages to be despite its relatively poor mechanical polishing.

Aesthetically, the game is pretty good for the time even if it’s still very heavily drawing from Ys for its mechanical inspirations. The graphics are simple and very Ys, but they have a simple charm to them that I found quite fun. While the monsters (and especially bosses) are big, fairly detailed sprites, the adorable simplicity of the human sprites made me smile and giggle a lot, and that goes double for Nasir’s friend Soa and his 80’s hair metal haircut XD. The music is all around pretty damn good though! There were quite a lot of times where a field theme or boss theme had me bopping my head along to how good it was, and the music is honestly the highlight of the game in terms of how little there is to criticize.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While this is apparently a bit of a meme-bad game in some circles (given that several of my partners began to laugh when they heard I was going to be playing it x3), I think it’s nowhere near that bad. It’s something that only big fans of 2D Zelda-style or Ys-type games should really consider looking at, but I had more than enough fun with it that I can recommend it at least a little even if I understand that it’s actually a relatively weak game at the end of the day.

After playing through the previous two Frog Detective games the previous week, my friend and I finally got to playing through the third and final one this week. We did it just as we did the other two, with them controlling it and me doing the bulk of the voice work, and we did it over the course of three or so hours between two Twitch streams.

The third Frog Detective game, as the title suggests, takes place in Cowboy Canyon, and you’re here to solve the mystery of who stole everyone’s hats! There’s a bit more to this game than the previous two, and it’s about twice as long as a result, even if the same overall principles apply. It’s another simple adventure game where you walk around, talk to people, and do trading quests, but it’s back and better than ever this time. The graphics are also once again similar but just that much more polished than the previous entry, with more animations and larger locations this time. I’d go as far as to say the map here may be as large as the previous two game’s maps combined, and what could be more appropriate for Frog Detective’s biggest adventure yet.

Verdict: Recommended. If you liked the previous two Frog Detective games, then this one is a no-brainer of a pick up. The story and writing are the best they’ve ever been, and it’s a lovely bow on the end of the series. If you have any interest in adventure games at all and you don’t mind something that doesn’t get too heavy (and certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome length-wise), then this is a great pick up along with the rest of the trilogy.

I watched this movie a few months back with a close friend of mine, and it got me thinking about this GameBoy game of it. I’d always heard that this was quite a good GameBoy game, especially for a licensed game, and this seemed like a great excuse to check it out, but finding a Japanese copy proved difficult enough that I was ready to give up on it and focus on other things. But my friend is such a sweetie that she actually found a copy local to her and bought it for me! I played it on Twitch via my Super GameBoy, and it took me just about 2 hours to get to the end of the English (British, technically ;b) version of the game.

While the story of this does ostensibly mirror the film’s (even down to recreating the introduction of the film quite charmingly), in grand 8-bit fashion, they add a LOT more action and combat to things XD. The only story really in the game is that title crawl at the start, and the submarine kinda sorta following the path from Russia to America that the sub takes in the film over the course of its 8 stages, but it hardly matters. Given that it’s a 1991 GameBoy action game, licensed or not, a good or compelling story really isn’t what you’d expect here, and the game is perfectly fine even with such a threadbare story x3

The gameplay is you, as the titular submarine “The Red October”, dodging all manner of (Soviet, I would presume?) enemy submarines, destroyers, aircraft carriers, jets, helicopters, and giant crazy undersea fortresses and robo sea mines in your quest to reach the end of each stage and make it to America! In your arsenal, you have equipped unlimited front shooting, weak missiles, a limited number of very powerful heat seeking torpedoes (which can even heat seak out of the water and into the air! XD), and the ever valuable EMP to slip by distant enemies while mostly avoiding their AI (as well as making their heat seeking missiles inactive). It takes a bit of getting used to how the Red October controls, as stuff like tapping left or right twice to change direction and only once to just move that direction without turning has a real learning curve to it, but thankfully you have a big radar of enemy movement at the bottom of the screen to help you avoid ambushes (and it even points out power ups too~). Stages are well designed, and even though the difficulty is a bit front loaded, it’s got a pretty darn good (certainly for the time) difficulty curve as well. I was honestly shocked I was able to beat it over just 3 tries (one of which was game over-ing basically instantly XD) over two hours, but I was certainly happy that I did it, and I had a fun time too! X3

The presentation is pretty much what you’d expect for a quite early life GameBoy game, but even still it does the job very well. Enemies and bosses as well as their projectiles are easily distinguishable (at least via a Super GameBoy screen), and your little sub marine is never confusedly stuck against terrain or anything. The music is also quite impressively good, with some stages having some really surprisingly good tracks. Though nothing can, of course, top the incredible 8-bit rendition of the Soviet National anthem on the title screen xD

Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you’re in the market for some 8-bit GameBoy action, this is a great place to find it! It’s not too difficult and not too long, but it’s also unique enough and well balanced enough to be a good time well worth trying out (and you don’t even need to have seen the movie to enjoy it either, even if it is a movie really worth watching x3).

Like I played through the first Frog Detective game earlier in the week with my friend on stream, we did this game a couple days later as well~. It took us about 2 hours to play through the game with her and I reading the voices for the characters (her as the frog once more, and me as everyone else).

It's in effect the same as the first game, but a bit bigger and a bit better. It's a first-person adventure game just as the first one was, and you talk to folks to figure out the items they want to complete the puzzles associated with them. It's a very simple thing, but that just makes it an even more effective medium to convey the silly story, which it is! The puzzles are a bit more complicated, and the writing is a bit more fun and funny than the first game.

Verdict: Recommended. It's not gonna sell anyone who wasn't a fan of the first game, but it's a very nice sequel that expands on the first game's strengths in a way I found enjoyable. This one was so fun to do, it's got me looking forward to the next one even more than the first one did~ ^w^

A perfectly middle-of-the-road runner game that, for some reason, I decided to 100%
Most of this was easy. It's a fine enough game save for some bugs where you escape into the infinite dark void, finally freeing the character until you decide to reload.

But then there's "Mass Creation".

Mass Creation needs you to "interact with 10000 objects". I'm still not 100% sure what counts for this, but it is the only achievement with this high of a bar to clear in the whole game. I certainly did it though. It took me over a year on and off, but I did it.

Fuck.

This is a game a friend told me about months back, and I couldn't help but be intrigued. I'm a sucker for Pokemon clones thrown together back during the original Poke-mania boom, and one I'd never heard of, released in English and by Capcom no less, was too tempting an offer to pass up! That said, in my usual fashion, I found a copy for 500 yen and then proceeded to sit on it and never get around to playing it for like half a year, but the important part is that I got to it eventually! XD. It took me around 12 or so hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (via my GameCube GameBoy Player).

Metal Walker takes place on a secluded island called the Rusted Land. 50 years ago, there was some horrible experiment gone wrong that made a huge explosion and destroyed a ton of the island. Core Metal, the main focus of the island's research, is still very valuable though, and core hunters from all over come to the island hoping to make their fortune while avoiding the dangerous metal monsters, Metal Busters, that roam the island. You, the main character Tetto, are on the island with your core hunter father when you're suddenly separated by a metal buster attack. He draws the monster away, leaving you with only your robotic Metal Walker companion Meta Ball for protection and company. Upon waking up, you realize you've been rescued by some kindly folk on the island led by the eccentric Professor Hawke. With the aid of his Pokedex-like wrist watch device, you set out to the island with Meta Ball at your side to find your father and discover just what mysteries the Rusted Land still holds.

The writing is overall just Fine (TM). It's really nothing special, and though it's quite hilariously dark at times, it's still just a kids story at the end of the day. It feels very much like a copy of lots of other "boy goes on an adventure to do The Thing"-type stories that were EVERYWHERE in the 90's, Pokemon-clone or otherwise, and it's not a particularly inspired one of those. The dialogue writing is cute, and it the story does a fine enough job of setting up the action at hand, but it's nothing to care much about on its own.

The gameplay is a very weird thing, and it's what attracted me to the game in the first place. My friend described it as, "Pokemon meets billiards", which prompted the same confused response from me then as I imagine it's eliciting from you now XD. Basically, random battles take place with Meta Ball and from 1 to 3 metal busters on a board. There are various types of board that can spawn depending on where you are in the game, but they all have walls to bounce off of as well as an exit hole for you (or the enemy) to aim for if you want to flee. Much like a billiards (or golf game, to use a likely more familiar example), you pick a direction, gauge the power of your shot, and send Meta Ball pinging into your enemies. If he's the one to initiate the hit, they take damage, but if they're crashing into him, he takes damage, and getting knocked to 0 health means you lose.

There are some other side systems, like finding various core metal elements via boss fights that allow you to transform Meta Ball into new and stronger forms, and there are also items you can toggle on and off to spawn in battle. For your different forms, they're generally just stronger versions of what you already have, but there's also a rock-paper-scissors mechanics where water beats air, air beats land, and land beats water, which is also relatively important to take into consideration (especially for boss fights). Items range from power ups to traps that can hurt you, with both being clearly identified by the former being balls of the light and the latter being skulls. There are even terrain changing items as well to boost certain types of player. While your selected items deploy on your turn and your enemies on theirs, either of you can use items picked up (both power ups and traps), so caution is necessary to succeed if you wanna live, as some of those traps are super dangerous. Lastly, you have money you can use to buy items. Unlocking more items to buy is done by enemies getting scanned in battle, and to do that, you need to bring analyzer items into battle and bump enemies into them, and then take that scan data to shops to unlock the items. It's all a LOT to take in, admittedly, but it's ultimately a lot more straightforward than it seems at first blush.

Unfortunately, it's also a lot more clumsily put together than it might sound at first blush (or perhaps its exactly as clumsy as it sounds here, idk XD). While there are issues with encounter rate being too high and Meta Ball's world-map traversing powers being annoying to use, the game's biggest issue is that the balance is overall quite poor. What type an enemy is is often unclear and matters SO much that you're basically instantly dead in harder fights if you happen to have brought a bad type with you. Items are also really poorly balanced, with some like the attack dropping item or the "touch it and you lose several turns" item being SO overpowered that there's really no reason to consider using anything else in bosses. The game is also quite grindy, and I had to grind at the start for over an hour just to have a Meta Ball powerful enough that he could comfortably take on the enemies in the starting area without fear of dying after just one or two battles.

This all wraps around to the game's premise just not being a terribly strong concept for a video game. The Meta Ball transformations are a neat concept to mirror Pokemon's HM system, but there's too much direct power scaling, so there's really no reason aside from type disadvantage to not use a 3-tier Meta Ball as soon as you have him available (outside of drastic type disadvantage). Items are also generally not very useful for random battles, and so they become more of a chore avoiding the enemies' stuff than your own, especially with how long random battles can take with their lengthy power up and damage animations. Another really big problem is that the GameBoy's hardware just really can't handle the level of precision that you'd really want for a billiards game like this. You only have 16 different angles you can shoot your ball in, and that really severely limits how you can battle. Sure, depending on the weight and movement stats of your respective Meta Ball vs. your opponents', you can fly and ricochet further when struck, but the very low number of possible angles you can actually fire at makes battles start feeling very same-y very quickly. The mechanics are OK enough for a quick single-player RPG experience, I suppose, but they're a far cry from being anything possible to make something meaningfully better than Capcom already made with this.

The game's presentation is about what you'd expect for a GameBoy Color game by '99, but nothing really special. The top-down overworld is pretty and nice looking enough, and the music is fine but overall not terribly memorable. The real highlight of the game's aesthetics are the Metal Walker designs themselves, so if you're a fan of cool looking, very mechanical/non-humanoid robots, then this game will have a lot of fun art to look at for you at least.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This isn't a bad game, as far as GBC RPGs go, but it's a decidedly quite flawed one. I wouldn't really stay it's particularly worth checking out unless you've got a deep curiosity for Pokemon-clone games like me and/or the strange nature of the gameplay makes it sound like something that worth picking up. For all the things you can say about Metal Walker, one thing I cannot deny is that it's a very novel premise for a game, and that's something that neither quality nor the passage of time can take away from it. How much that actually makes it worth playing, however, is gonna be up to you, at the end of the day.

A close friend of mine recently invited me onto a Twitch stream with her, and she said this would be a great game for the two of us to play together~. I'd never heard of the game before, but she turned out to be super right! She controlled the game, but it's so straightforward that, like with the VNs I've played with my wife at the helm, it's barely different from me controlling it myself, so I'm calling it beaten for me as well <w>. It took us a little over an hour to play through the English version of the game while reading out all the voices together on stream~.

Frog Detective is a series of short first-person adventure games. You walk around an environment talking to people and grabbing items, and it's honestly something much closer to a visual novel than it is something like Portal or even The Stanley Parable. In this one, our detective is solving the mystery of a haunted island (as you could probably already tell from the game's title x3). It's pretty fun! The narrative is a short, silly story, and the gameplay is light enough that just about anyone could do it. It's a very simple-looking game and there isn't much music, but it's such a bite-sized piece of fun that the aesthetic becomes much more of a feature than a bug (so to speak).

Verdict: Recommended. If you want something cute and fun to play either by yourself or with someone else, this is a really good option to do it with~. Especially if you can find it for cheap, this would be a great option to gift to a little kid to help them get into video games if they're only just starting out being able to read and/or work out first-person control systems. Not the funniest or most exciting thing in the world, for sure, but a fun time that more than justified the price of entry.

This is a Kickstarter-borne Metroidvania I heard a LOT about last year, and seemed to be right up my alley, but I didn't end up picking it up until the winter sale on Switch this year. I'm always one to take joy in playing a new Metroidvania, so I knew this was one I couldn't miss out on. I did nearly 100% of the collectibles and stuff in the game, and it took me a little under 15 hours to do so on the English version of the game.

Blasphemous is a game whose art style and setting are heavily inspired by European Medieval and Renaissance paintings and writings on the nature of hell, the afterlife, penance, and the day of reckoning. The game isn't explicitly Christian in a diegetic sense, but that's clearly where the inspiration comes from. The land of Custodia, and perhaps the entire world, have been ravaged (or blessed?) by a phenomenon called The Miracle for quite some time. They bring divine retribution and penance upon sinners and twist reality and pervert their bodies in order to have them serve out their due punishment. You play the role of The Penitent One, a warrior wielding a blade forged from guilt, whose own penance is to walk the world silently. You embark on a quest whose initial goals are quite unclear, but will ultimately carry you to meet with the biggest names around in the god-forsaken land of Custodia.

The narrative of Blasphemous is, like its mechanics, very much inspired by Dark Souls. The natives of the world have odd, cryptic ways of speaking about things, and every item has a long description to give you little glimpses into the wider lore of the world you're questing in. You'll meet all nature of twisted and strange people along your quest, both friend and foe, whose motives you often only have the vaguest ideas of, but the Penitent One cares little of things that don't relate directly to advancing his quest. The game has a lot to say about the nature of penance and guilt in religious thought (and how it extends to everyday life), as well as just how much of that guilt and punishment is deserved, necessary, and actually even divine.

While the effects of the Miracle are ever present in the world of Custodia, I often found it difficult to take every character at their word regarding how worthwhile their perverse punishments often were, and it makes for a very interesting and intriguing adventure. I really didn't get into the lore of the world very well, but just trying to navigate a world trying to eke out your own semblance of justice and judgment in a universe where divine punishment literally exists everywhere. The game has two endings, and I got them both (first the bad, then the good), and I think they also say interesting things about the nature of sacrifice (especially in the case of the player character). I found the sheer amounts of lore a bit overwhelming, but it's nice that they're tucked away behind a "Lore" button for each item, so you thankfully need not bother yourself with them if you don't want to. I don't really care for these kinds of "hands off" narratives like Soulsborne games tend to do, but I think this game does it pretty darn well.

The mechanics of the game are very Dark Souls inspired, but thankfully a bit more forgiving than that. It's a 2D melee-focused Metroidvania not unlike something like Hollow Knight in how your character wields his sword. You have bonfires you can light and revive at, you have blood vials (estus flasks) which refill at these bonfires and you use to heal yourself when you're out fighting stuff, and you even leave a mark upon death. Thankfully, you don't lose any of your hard earned money (used for buying items and new moves) when you die. Instead, more like Demons Souls, you lose some of your max mana until you go back and retrieve the marker at the place of your death. You actually gain back a lot of health when you grab one too, and I even used them as mid-fight free heals in a couple of the harder boss fights XD

The bosses are all really unique and cool (as are all the enemy designs), but I didn't find the game especially hard. There are about 10 or so bosses in the game, and only 3 of them even killed me once. Blasphemous doesn't have a level-up mechanic, but it does have tons of passive charms you can equip to boost your defense to certain elements or augment your abilities in some other way. Between that and finding more blood vials for more healing, powering up my blood vials for better healing, and finding new spells and max mana/health upgrades, I overall found that I didn't have much fear of dying even as I barely used the parry mechanic. I overall found the level of challenge very satisfying, and you could certainly make the game harder by trying to finish it with less loot, and if that isn't enough for you, you even unlock a harder mode (with more content) after you beat the game once~.

The game is also a little bit of an unconventional Metroidvania in that all of the mobility items you ultimately find are actually optional. Making hidden platforms appear never actually gates your path in any meaningful way, so unlike Hollow Knight where you gradually get more abilities to help you both traverse the world AND fight stuff, this game largely just has you powering up as you explore and fight things. Doing quests for NPCs and finding new items always involved some element of careful platforming and/or killing stuff, and the world is just so well designed that I always wanted to see more of it. This game is definitely focused more around its combat than its exploration, but that definitely isn't a bad thing.

The art design is absolutely stellar. The pixel art is highly detailed and animated to really make the world come to life, especially on larger characters. Seeing all the grotesque things in the game brought to life so deftly really made me wanna uncover every possible path I could to see what cool thing could be behind it. The music is orchestral and slow, and very atmospheric. Not really anything I particularly remember or would wanna put on an MP3 player, but it's all very well done and lends to the game nicely. The game is also a pretty hard M-rating, having a fair bit of nudity and a LOT of blood and gore. Very well animated blood and gore, but blood and gore nonetheless. It's not quite the 2010 Splatterhouse reboot, but the occasional executions your character can do at times are particularly nasty, so I'd at least be ready for that going in.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is an absolutely excellent Metroidvania and a must play for fans of the genre. The combat feels great, the bosses are fun and challenging, and the world is beautifully crafted. It's not my favorite Metroidvania of all time (I'd personally rank it just below Iconoclasts), but it's still an excellent game and definitely one of the new greats of the genre.