Nocturne is such an immersive experience, I always feel a strong sense of isolation and danger at every moment and like I'm really fending for myself in that treacherous ruined world. It has my favorite turn based combat system of all time, which has so many possibilties that it makes every other JRPG I play feel slightly disappointing. With the way buffs work there's rarely ever a need to truly grind, if you bring a good strategy you can win, at least when doing the normal endings. There are countless memorable and epic boss battles with easily the most consistent lineup in the Megatens I've played. Everything about the game from aesthetics to concepts to soundtrack is just so metal and brutal and raw. Even when it's really putting me through my paces or beating me down again and again, I'm never too frustrated for long because another idea occurs to me and something awesome happens again. I first completed it on the remaster on TDE, and it probably goes without saying that this PS2 version has better moodier lighting. This run I skipped the Amala Labyrinth entirely and felt the vanilla content had a much better flow and variety to it, but TDE has some of the best boss fights and extreme difficulty too so it's worth trying it once. I just adore this game :)

One of the best games ever made, for reasons that everyone has already said, and yet I will repeat anyway.

This game's design just holds up so well. The way it rewards exploration is timeless, and makes the game downright cathartic to revisit. The game somehow manages to give you no guidance while simultaneously avoiding being outright cryptic (with some exceptions which I'll get to) and letting the player figure out solutions for themselves. That is a groundbreaking achievement in exploration-based game design and it's no wonder that this game essentially spawned a genre. When you find a solution in Super Metroid, it truly feels like you earned it, and the game completely understands how good that feeling is. Environmental clues and experimenting with your abilities are the keys to finding your way through (and if not, just use the X-Ray visor), and it is just as satisfying a gameplay loop today as I'm sure it was in 1994. The game is not very lengthy, but it's just long enough that I feel the game gets the most out of its gameplay structure and locations, without going on for so long that it starts getting monotonous. I feel I must stress this game's lack of monotony; each of the game's locations are very distinct from both a visual standpoint and design standpoint. They're all just the right size, with no repeated rooms, and some notable landmarks to help you remember the layout, which is a huge improvement from the first two Metroid games. I also appreciate how the game starts small before opening up. The compact beginning area where you get the morph ball and missiles is a great way to ease new players into the structure of Metroid games before letting them out in the deep end. And of course, this game wouldn't be nearly as fun to play if it didn't have that map.

That's not even mentioning the game's incredible presentation. The visuals are fantastic, with great attention to detail and subtle but impactful visual effects bringing the world of Zebes to life. And of course, the atmosphere is unparalleled. Between the creepy and the serene, every tone is executed perfectly in Zebes' compelling mixture of sci-fi and nature. Gorgeous environments matched with an ambient yet melodic soundtrack really does go far. I love Crateria, the moody rain and damp grassy caves is such an appealing aesthetic to me and it would be recaptured with Prime's equally breathtaking Tallon Overworld. And that moment when you go down the elevator and the energetic upper Brinstar theme gradually fades in is just... wow. It's so subtle but it really feels like the game kicks into gear in that moment. It's a perfect demonstration of how this game excels in atmosphere and tying its audiovisual design with its world design. It's an all-time great moment for me, and this is a game filled with all-time great moments. The opening in the space station is an immediate hook, the previously mentioned beginning area serving as a recreation of certain Metroid 1 rooms is a great bit of continuity (something games of the era almost never had), Ridley's Lair isn't very long but the music and visuals make it feel like the epic last stand that it is, and the story comes full circle with an absolutely legendary final boss and ending that still ranks among the most memorable in any video game. It's mindboggling how cinematic this game feels considering the time it came out, and it does so without speaking a single word outside of the opening!

I don't think this game is a 10/10 though. It just has too many flaws that hold it back. My first issue is the occasional lack of clarity. While the vast majority of this game can be solved with good intuition, there are a few moments in the game that outright require a guide, which is a huge no-no for a game like this. Some stupid moments that come to mind are: that bridge in Brinstar that requires you to run across, breaking the glass tube with a super bomb to enter Maridia, being able to go through lava with the Gravity Suit, and exiting Ridley's Lair through a completely normal looking wall which the X-Ray visor doesn't work on for some godforsaken reason. None of these are ever told or indicated to the player. I thought putting players in a situation where they have absolutely zero way to know what to do without a guide was Zelda's job, not Metroid's! It would also be nice if doors were indicated on the map; I think that's the main quality of life feature this game is missing. Side note, but I also found the Maridia area generally frustrating and unfun to traverse, but it's immediately followed up by Ridley's Lair and that is peak Metroid so I'll forgive it.

My other main criticism is the controls and movement, which I find downright unenjoyable. The jump has too much vertical momentum and not enough horizontal momentum. Pressing L to aim diagonally downwards and R to aim diagonally upwards is archaic. Why is there even a run button? And wall jumps are the biggest offender. You all know what I mean. Screw that one pit. What I'm saying is, if you got MercurySteam to remake this game in Dread's engine, add a few QoL features, and make a few small alterations to the world design, you'd probably have the perfect game. Some food for thought.

Basically, Super Metroid is a masterpiece, a must-play for literally everyone, the single best action game on the SNES, yadda yadda yadda. You get the idea. PLAY IT.

And yes, I saved the animals.

For the love of GOD: do not get this at full price or anything less than a 50% discount, you will almost certainly regret it. Having gotten it at half price I'm still torn on whether the game represented any real value for money, even in its current state.

The core gameplay loop is tedious busy work and quest marker hell. Knowing about the game's development was a clear detriment in this respect, as I quickly became painfully aware of how I was spending precious hours of my life on what is essentially a visual skin over a noise function. At least when you're grinding away in a Far Cry game, you're interacting with hand-crafted content that hundreds of people labored on for years. Here you are doing the exact same thing you do between missions in those games, only what you see on screen is all generated at run-time using some nerd's fancy Perlin noise algorithm. The more you think about it the more disconcerting it becomes.

The sheer idiocy that the game's systems generates and expect you take at face value is staggering. We're talking swimmable liquid oceans on planets with 130 degree or deep sub-zero temperatures, vibrant plant life and mammalian fauna on planets with little to no water... the list goes on and on. Every space station and point of interest is not just very similar, but completely identical, up to and including the placement of chests and other interactable items. The repeating patterns become obvious quickly, contributing immensely to the overall sense of tedium and despair that sinks in after a few hours with the game.

Yet, as I've progressed through the story I have to concede that it has kept introducing new systems and switching things up, enough for me to be compelled to continue as a sort of ambient activity when I'm too tired to do other things. At around twenty hours, I'm still getting new hooks introduced around the core loop, and have started seeing new varieties of alien life pop up that are significantly different from the mammal analogues that have populated the game until this point.

I don't know if the devs really believe their pablum about the game somehow being about the "joy of discovery" or whatever. In any case the game is not about that at all. It is certainly an interesting exercise in... something, but that something seems more like a variation of the dumbed-down gambler/collector loop that powers most of today's open-world time sinks. Like these games, it consumes a lot of your time and gives almost nothing in return. And unlike those games, you don't get to absorb the energy of intent and artistic flair from all the effort that goes into their production. One and half stars. May update if I ever manage to complete it.

I'm nowhere near close to finishing this shit but yknow its fun! Got a simple but fun gameplay loop. Characters are neat too but I care more about the gameplay than them for the most part. Maybe it'll get more engaging later on, iunno for now. I'll probably give it a higher score when i finish it.

Also as a certified homosexual™, I dont find any of these guys hot. Am I supposed to find them hot? Cuz they're not hot. Dionysus maybe? The rest of these are either just anime boys, women, or like a skeleton.

also every time these greek gods call me "mate" it immediately breaks my immersion like why is this funny death man australian