As someone who completed both Klonoa: Door to Phantomile (2022) and Klonoa: Door to Phantomile (1997) back to back, I can confirm the superiority of the original to this new half assed “Phantasy Reverie Series” version.

Klonoa: Door to Phantomile (1997) is a very charming game. Much of that charm lies in its art direction. The 2.5D makes everything look different, unique and unlike anything else. All of that is lost in this version and in Klonoa (2009) from which this Phantasy Reverie version is supposedly based on. It instead looks plain, generic and like any other platformer, but with the addition of over-saturated & -exaggerated lighting and colours.

How is it possible that no-one on the entire development team ever thought of maybe removing the gigantic ”SKIP” & ”5x SPEED” buttons which smudges itself on every cutscene. It’s so distracting and it’s almost as if they want you to skip the cutscenes because of how lacklustre they are. Sometimes the dialogue can feel sluggish, other times dialogue is too fast to be able to read. In the original PS1 version you manually went through the dialogue — that way you could read it at your own pace, without being bored out or stressed about following with.

The game has some incredible music, but that’s something I didn’t realise until playing the original. There must be some odd mixing going on it the new game which prevents it from popping like it does in Door to Phantomile (1997)

It does the job and it’s undeniably fun despite its flaws. 50$ for two games you could emulate for free and at the same time be made looking and running better is what ultimately makes this bundle not worth being bought, unless you’re a console-only gamer.

Christ this is a tough one to write about.
First, I'd like to thank Mitsuru for sending me download links with this game and Fate Stay/Night. Like 10 months ago.

Anyways is this game good? Yeah, mostly. The greatest flaw in this game is Near Side routes. It's not the worst VN I've played but a bit close. They are so slow paced and after playing the Far Side routes, I found them to have almost zero reason to exist. Not gonna lie, Near Side felt three times as long while Far Side felt like it was half as long. I don't know why. Maybe it was because it took me seven to eight months to wrap up both of them and I finished all the Far Side routes in less than two. I checked with other people and they said Ciel and Arc were terrible routes.

Far Side is great in my opinion. Akiha's route is my favorite. I liked the twists and turns it takes and the ending was quite sweet. Hisui's was also nice and added some interesting concepts. Kohaku's was a bit confusing. It definitely was explaining literally everything about what the fuck was going on but Huh?

The Music? Great buuuut...ten tracks. TEN. This game is forty hours long. It's like Xenogears' lack of music but twenty times worse. I just turned on some classic rock music or fifteen different versions of Ys III - Morning of Departure on repeat. I actually did that. I swear I'm not a schizo. The tracks the game has are actually pretty good in the time I was actually hearing them.

Final Review: Would be five stars but the fact that Near Side is god awful and the game includes Neco Arc made me lower the score just a bit.

I think I've had enough with Type Moon for a while so I'm gonna go back to playing some nice PC-98 VNs.

MiHoYo's guide to a mickey mouse game:

- soulless characters with generic & recycled designs
- dry ass story completely reliant on dropping the longest most boring exposition dumps of your life that never even go anywhere
- painfully verbose wall of text explaining some shit you already knew Paimon: So what you're SAYING is... says the same exact fucking thing again
- baby easy combat w/ no real endgame
- employees are probably overworked and rarely get to see their children
- gacha

This game deserves some amount of respect for how it consistently maintains Fire Emblem's popularity. Not just in the sense that it keeps the brand alive, but for how it shows care for every entry in the series, including the ones lesser known in the eyes of the west. It serves as an amazing gateway into the older games for newer fans just coming off the modern titles. Hell, it definently served as inspiration for me to go through and play almost every major entry in the franchise. And I adore how there's genuine passion shared amongst the infinitely talented artists who participate, some of who take it upon themselves to draw fan art for various FE characters. Too bad its a gacha game, so its going to hell when its servers shut down, but I am ultimately glad for its existence.

is it weird to review what is basically an incomplete alpha of a game that never came out, and also unfair to rate it higher than the final-yet-very-different product it got released as?

yes and i don't care. researching this game made up a good chunk of my childhood and i enjoyed it, leave me alone.

there's a good lot of Dinosaur Planet that was left unchanged in the retail Star Fox Adventures (specifically the galleon intro and most of darkice mines for example), but it's still a vastly different beast altogether. unlike SFA, DP's pacing is a lot slower and seems to be mostly focused on environmental puzzles and exploration rather than the more fast-paced action and challenges than SFA brought. not a bad thing (especially when the environments are pretty gorgeous even for the N64), but definitely an acquired taste when you're more used to how things were in SFA.

isn't to say Dinosaur Planet is better (or worse) than the game it ended up becoming tho; there's definitely more to DP than SFA in a lot of areas, but alpha-state-bugginess and unfinished-ness aside, there's quite a few quality-of-life things that SFA had that i really wish were in the build we got. two that i can name off the top of my head: bomb spores IMMEDIATELY vanish upon touching the ground, and some items like mushrooms you have to manually pick up rather than automatically picking up when you walk onto them. plus some challenges that got reworked in SFA are substantially more difficult in DP coughcloudrunnerjetbikeracecough.

but yeah that's. kind of the reason why i can't really rate this the full five stars. SFA's got its issues, and DP isn't exempt from it's own flaws.

due to the state it's in, Dinosaur Planet is essentially impossible to truly complete, and with some areas and tasks being empty or unfinished, you can't really go through the story "as intended". still, DP's a trip to explore what could've been, as well as compare it to it's finished Starfox-ified verison. there's a sense of mystery and atmosphere to DP's original N64 incarnation, and i'm so glad i can finally experience it after 15+ years of researching the game.

will this game ever be truly "finished", be it in Rare's hands or by the dedicated fans decompiling it? hard to say, but with this and the tsukihime remake coming out in the same year, weirder things have happened.

and even then, i'm fine with what we got. it's some sense of closure to a mystery over two decades old now, and it's been a real treat to explore.

ARE YOU READY TRUE BELIEVERS
CAPCOM AND MARVEL HAVE JOINED FORCES ONCE AGAIN TO BRING YOU
IT'S MARVEL SUPER HEROES VS STREET FIGHTER
LOOK! SPECTACULAR ACTION!
DON'T MISS OUT ON THE ENJOYMENT OF A LIFETIME
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DON'T MISS THE MOST AMAZING TAG TEAM FIGHTING GAME E V E R
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EXPERIENCE
MARVEL SUPER HEROES VS STREET FIGHTER

"Visuals Novels is shit. I'll be here fighting angels in the name of chaos while you cling to Chee. Can you even take on the armies of YHVH and fight in the name of Chaos? I bet you dream of holding Chee's hand instead of claiming the world in Lucifer's own glory. Do you even dungeon crawling? Try not to feel too bad, but the objective best waifu in the entire series is actually Louissa Ferre, from Strange Journey, and Chee is but a bakuh and unpure girl compared to her."
-Rog, 2014 (RIP)

Playing SMTV has kinda made me think back to what it is about this game that'll make it always hold that special place for me that is "my favorite RPG." It's pretty far from my favorite one from a gameplay standpoint, or a story standpoint, really my favorite in terms of much except for one thing: A phenomenal sense of atmosphere. Strange Journey is a game that does almost everything in service to making an atmosphere of absolute hostility. The dungeons are sprawling labrynths of hidden doors, poison traps, and random teleporters. Just about every boss is infamous for some kind of bullshit status ailment abuse or overpowered attacks (Asura Roga funny moments). The music, while hardly my favorite in the series, looms over like a constant blanket of dread. The game really goes to efforts to make you feel like the small, powerless grunt in a foreign hellhole that you are. Every challenge, while maybe not the fairest thing in the world, makes you feel like an absolute god once you overcome it.

The other stuff is good too! While SMT as a series isn't really known for its stories, this one's about as rock solid as the franchise gets. Plot's cool and got some neat twists and turns, Zelenin and Jimenez are objectively the best alignment reps in the franchise, and the BBEG being someone other than YHVH or Lucifer is certainly a nice change of pace. Also, it's cool how this is like the only game that doesn't fully incentivise going down the neutral path to get all the content in the game, since each ending has it's own unique shit to do. Rare neutral L is appreciated. Combat's good. It's an SMT game, the combat's generally gonna be good. The lack of press turn is maybe a little unfortunate, but giving alignment an actual gameplay purpose was a cool addition to it.

Shin Megami Tensei peaked as a franchise when the stupid bucket head man went into the earth bussy and we need to free ourselves from the shackles that Cuckturne and Peesona 5 set upon us. Reject press tvrn, retvrn to massive fvcking teleporter mazes. It's fun, i swear