(played as jill)
awesome game!!! very fun puzzle solving, great audio design and beautiful pre-rendered visuals make RE1 an absolute treat. story is engaging the whole way through, the voice acting is great in an endearing sort of way but the localized text is genuinely great, i love reading all the lab reports and such. the item management can be a little difficult sometimes, i'd often go out of my way to put away certain weapons and key items only to realize i needed them 3 rooms ahead from where i was. (not entirely sure how much of this is my fault!) i think it's cool that this is basically just a sierra/lucasarts style adventure game with combat. remains to be seen if i will do a chris run... excited to check out re2!

very complicated game to talk about! you may remember i had a 1 star review for this game before i deleted it. somehow in retrospect i've really started to warm up to MMZ1, even disagreeing with most of what i wrote just a couple days ago. i don't think it's a particularly fun or well-executed game but there's certainly something compelling about it.

MMZ has a very strange learning/difficulty curve to it, and it's not helped by how weak zero is at the beginning of the game. the choice to lock basic combat skills behind grinding is frustrating; luckily it doesn't take too long if you know what you're doing. MMZ's difficulty is somewhat infamous, as it reaches a steep incline the moment you fight the first mission boss. this was what completely turned me off from this game for a long time, in tandem with its notorious lives system - lose a life and earn a heavy score penalty, lose all your lives on a level and it becomes completely inaccessible, potentially locking you out of one of the three boss weaknesses. i opted to (sigh) use savestates, as i know the recent collection has some form of this, and the alternative consisted of reloading from my save and playing the levels over again.

this is where i have to mention that these levels kind of suck! they suffer immensely from GBA screen-crunch, leading to leaps of faith in many platforming sections (factory level being an infamous example of this) and getting blindsided by enemies who are all too often faster than you can react to. of course, you get used to the handful of environments after the third forced revisit to them, but it doesn't make them any better. the music kind of sucks too sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.

of course, on the flipside, this is a mega man game, so it plays pretty well on a base level, oddly a lot better than any of the PS1 MMX titles it owes so much to. the movement and combat are genuinely fun and satisfying, to a point where they do almost make up for many of the shortcomings i listed. the weapons are fluid, fast and have an excellent feel all around. i kept coming back to this game because as bad as i felt the bosses were on a design level, it was a little fun to strategize and see what i could do to make the fights as quick and dirty as possible (charged z-saber FTW). perhaps this is commendable. (haven't mentioned the cyber elf system but that's because it kind of sucks and i almost never used it outside of healing.)

i don't have any deeper analysis of the story but it's fairly good stuff and i wish it was told through more than static dialogue scenes. copy X twist is kind of lame but i get why they did it that way.

kind of hoping Z2 fixes any of my issues but from the brief sections i played of it... not looking good

(EDIT: i can't believe i spent so much of my childhood looking at Sprites-Inc only to forget to mention how good the sprites are. shameful)

underappreciated game from the "sf2 clone" days, not especially well-balanced as you might expect but good enough that it still has a decent scene in japan! this game has that oldschool flavor of neutral i like with some really crunchy buttons and high damage. the combos, while very tricky compared to something like SF2HF, are incredibly satisfying once you figure them out. lane system is pretty silly and ultimately vestigial, but it's still surprising how well-thought out it is. saying this both for FFS and its earlier iteration in FF2, but i feel like the roster goes underappreciated, tons of strange and interesting guys as well as beloved SNK mainstays. i personally love big bear and axel hawk a lot, and for kim and mai's first appearances it's a little crazy how they basically appeared from thin air, playstyle fully-formed.

if south town was real i would go there every summer it seems like the coolest place in america