The long awaited sequel to The Legend of Zelda (1986) is finally here.

I've played almost nothing but this game for the past 7 months oops

At first, Tuffy is the terror of jumping in your car to rush to the hospital, after getting the call that your pregnant wife has gone into labor, only to realize far too late, as you barrel towards the first intersection at alarming speed and your foot slams the pedal into the floor, that someone has cut the brake lines on your car.

Often, Tuffy is the frustration of climbing up the staircase in your office building, like you have done every day since you started working there. This morning you're running late and in a hurry, so you're taking the steps fast, two at a time, when you lose your footing and fall tumbling down the stairs, shattering multiple bones on the way.

Eventually, like any good platformer, Tuffy becomes the thrill of the parkour master who, after paying the toll of bumps, bruises, and breaks, has developed an intimate knowledge of their body's physical capability, as well as the layout of the urban landscape. In a semiconscious flow, they stylishly leap and bound between fixtures and over gaps that no human being with any sense of self-preservation would dare to try, for no other reason than it being really cool.

The game that I loved no longer exists in this world.

With the relentless march of time, the game grew, changed, twisted, and morphed into another, different game bearing the aesthetics of Ragnarok. As is the fate of all live service online games, when updates come and changes are made, the previous iterations of the game are lost forever to the ether, becoming playable only in the memories of those who were there to experience it.

There is a loose network of small fan-run servers that attempt to emulate how the game once was. They are imperfect, as all memories are. Still, it is a comfort to me knowing they are there, maintaining those recreations of a bygone virtual world, keeping the doors open in case any previous resident becomes too nostalgia-drunk and stumbles in.

The sequel to Ragnarok Online blindly plagiarized the MMO trends of the time, implementing them in such a half-hearted, surface-level way that could never be compelling enough to pull players away from the behemoth that it so desperately aped, World of Warcraft. In doing so it also abandoned the core values of community and cooperation that made Ragnarok Online a fantastic experience for the small, dedicated fanbase that it had cultivated. The result was a game for nobody. A Ragnarok sequel in name only.

The Yakuza team made a Dragon Quest game. Ichiban is fantastic as the new main character of the series. The turn based combat feels great, battles are brisk and snappy (outside of bosses.) The game could use some more attention to detail regarding balance between jobs and abilities within the same job. The ultimate abilities of each class dropping the timed hit mechanic was a slight disappointment.

Exploring the facility, picking up lore fragments strewn about, and advancing the narrative was a joy when it wasn't being interrupted by fairly uninteresting combat encounters, which, despite the setting being a facility where all sorts of supernatural things are hosted, consist mostly of standard "dude-with-gun" third person shooter enemies. A slew of superfluous systems (like enemy levels, crafting, and a talent tree) add little to the experience and feel like they are included simply for suits to tick off boxes on a checklist of things a Triple-A video game in 2019 must have.

The best version of Smash yet is marred by Nintendo's eternal incompetency when it comes to online play. If this game had a robust online experience, I would play it for the rest of my life.

A true masterwork of multiplayer game design that still shines brilliantly today despite a more than a decade's worth of additions duct taped and super glued on top of it.

The writers missed the entire point of the narrative of the 2016 game and cannot help but jerk themselves off furiously over the concept of Doomguy at every opportunity.

I played this game twelve hours a day for three weeks straight while unemployed. If only working in a real factory was this engaging and fun.

The platonic ideal of the JRPG.