when people bring up final fantasy iii they usually bring up the job system as the main selling point, but what struck me the most playing thru this is how many cool memorable moments they're able to sprinkle in throughout the game's runtime... something about this title really captures some kind of adventurous spirit and feels like where final fantasy really starts to find its identity as a swashbuckling fantasy series.

seeing the map expand after leaving the floating continent on your airship, exploring underwater caves, taking the plunge into the dark world... this game really piqued my imagination in a way the previous two titles didn't and i think that's what puts it as the best famicom title in my mind rather than anything to do with the mechanics (which are also really solid!)

they shouldve probably given a heads up before that point of no return/subsequent final gauntlet though. jeez

not certain how much of it was because of the rebalancing on the remasters' part but i kind of vibed with the leveling system up to a certain point. kept me engaged with all the actions i was doing in regular battles instead of just mashing through my strongest moves to win and it was an interesting way to mold my party according to my own desires. guy was an insane dual wielding barbarian freak by the end of the game and was doing like 2k damage per hit by the end of it. it was sick. that being said once my party got powerful enough i was kind of mashing through battles anyway so does it really matter in the end...

the emperor coming back from hell to take back his throne before your rival boss fight can even happen is an all-time hater move

played this after III and I which makes it evident this is where the growing pains are. the skeleton of a better game is here in that the JRPG mechanics are as airtight as ever but it really suffers with some balancing issues; the prince of cannock wasn't well thought out in his role as a party member (supposed to be a "jack of all trades" character but the game doesn't commit to making him a strength powerhouse or a full on mage so he's kind of just mediocre at both), the endgame is an insane gauntlet that sort of requires some good RNG with encounters or else you wont be fully equipped to deal with the final boss and it's a pain to traverse the open world without a reliable fast travel after a certain point

a lot of the missteps can be attributed to a short dev time and luckily a lot of the ideas presented here are fine tuned and made 100x better in DQIII but in hindsight maybe i shouldve saved III for last instead....

The brutality of Hotline Miami but totally recontextualized as slapstick comedy. Gabe Cuzzillo and the gang made this game specifically for me but also for everyone that has ever had the innate primal urge to go monkey mode. Doesn’t outstay its welcome, controlling Mr Ape is simple yet fluid, the pop-art inspired graphics and dynamic jazz percussion soundtrack really make this thing shine. This whole thing really clicked for me during the office level where you can just toss dudes out of windows and have them plummet to the cityscape below. Really addicting, captivating stuff. I love monky

masterclass in how to screw up a time-tested gameplay formula that at this point probably should've been failproof for capcom

the overall pacing is bad - it's a 12 hour game that should only be around half its runtime

level design is wonky - you're either constantly backtracking from location to location or you're moving around an entire facility with no real way to get from point A to B concisely. it's an ordeal to grab one item needed for progression (in a game series about resource management and planning routes effectively!). comparing the maps in this to the RE1 mansion or the RE2 police station is such a stark contrast

for some reason the game gives you way too many bullets and resources? the way enemy placement is laid out encourages you to use them too. by the time you've explored a map once, you've killed all the zombies and then you're just running around empty corridors with no tension or need to plan ahead with your loadout - again, bad pacing. you can argue this can happen in the other classic REs but their level design guarantees youre not really visiting those same places over and over and over again. CV wants to be an action game but without all the mechanics to make that actually work

and even with that abundance of resources they never seem to be in the place where you actually need them - like, before boss fights?? i've seen more than one post here from people saying they had to restart the game completely because they ran out of healing items or explosive arrows or what have you (it all comes back to bad pacing...). to be fair - this can be mitigated by just rotating your saves but if it comes down to it that often that feels like bad game design on the devs' part

steve fucking sucks ass

the art direction overall isn't... great? it's softer and lends itself to being a lot less, idk, spooky, but i think there are individual parts of the game that are pretty cool - the victorian stylings of ashford residence, the cabin on the island, etc. and before it sunk in just how fucking long this game was, some of the backtracking felt almost comfy - like a walking sim pure vibes game.

and then i beat the tyrant on the plane and claire went to antarctica. and then after another hour the perspective shifts and theres a whole other half to the game. okay jesus christ

plot's bombastic and ridiculous but it's a different bombastic and ridiculous than other titles - and i do think a lot of it is genuinely really fun because of it. alexia and alfred are goofy weirdos, the first meeting with neo wesker is fun, it's INSANELY contrived in a way that works in its favor because of how goofy RE is as a series already so all the plot beats are just seeing how quirky the writers can get with it

this game would probably benefit from a remake like a lot of code veronica defenders say - but i don't see why capcom would feel the want or need to when the source material just isn't quite there. better to move on to revamping one of the best-selling games in the series in RE5 rather than a complete overhaul of a game that most folks don't really care about - and for good reason

was recommended to play this version instead of the version of castlevania 3 released in the west... not sure if i like this or castlevania 1 more but damn the musical and graphical upgrades the famicom disk system adds are incredible for the time. both kicked my ass but gotta give 1 some brownie points for putting a checkpoint right at dracula. for this game's dracula fight i used my one and only save state bc a game over puts you right back at the beginning of the level instead and i wasnt about that shit. forgive me.... my goofy ass probably couldnt handle finishing the western version at all... i'm a fake gamer ahh....

EDIT: it was the VRC6 chip responsible for those upgrades not the famicom disk system..... i'm even more of a fake gamer now ahhhhhh.......

(writing a real review bc i cant stop thinking about this game, sorry)

My first real experience with Treasure aside from when I tried Radiant Silvergun once and couldn't quite make it past the first stage. It’s a doozy - something you get from a team that’s /really/ confident in the game’s core mechanics but also really willing to see how far they can push their own creation’s boundaries.

There’s new ideas or setpieces introduced at such an insanely fast clip that you can barely mind when one of those ideas falls a bit flat. Certain points (ok I really mean the Dice Palace) could have been a lot less frustrating with some tweaks, but when a dev team is really going for it like Treasure is here, and when controlling the player character feels as good as it does, it’s easy to forgive some slight missteps. And it’s tough to even really call them missteps; all the unforgiving checkpoints and endgame boss rushes seem very much in line with Treasure’s ethos of wanting to have the player meet the game where it’s at and rise to the occasion. They knew what they were doing with that goddamn board game level.

There’s just an insane freedom of movement and options for a run-n-gun platformer game here to the point where I’m sure mastering it feels a little bit like mastering a modern character-action game (THEY ADDED AIR GRABS?). My initial Backloggd review was me just half-jokingly saying ‘they should call rival characters “greens'' instead of vergils”’ in reference to the game’s rival character and recurring boss, and while your Vergils and Jeannes of today certainly have more rizz and general staying power, I think there’s something to be said about how the game was able to fit the whole action-game-rival-battle-sequence trope in a 2D platformer so well. That’s mostly credit to the game allowing you all these options and freedom of mobility. It feels like another example of Treasure being so insanely sure of how the game plays that they were able to fit that sort of thing in and it didn’t feel underwhelming by any stretch (I still ended up kind of cheesing it though with the chaser beam heehee).

And the game’s just charming as hell. Squeezes every drop from the Mega Drive it can to render some really impressive looking boss fights, and has art style that looks admittedly kinda jank at first but really grows on you with its expressiveness the further you play. Some really fun villains and pretty stage backgrounds, particularly in the final stages.

Some highlights:

- The entire Seven Force boss fight
- The airplane that partially leaves the the screen during a boss fight so you’re forced to fight with some verticality/limited mobility
- They just switched genres in the middle of the game and it becomes a shmup for one level?
- One of the jobber villains being We Have M Bison At Home was really funny to me
- The endgame boss rush playing out on a big ol’ security camera monitor the rogue’s gallery of villains are watching, all leaving the control room to challenge you one by one


What a game. Probably going to try out Alien Soldier next. Or Sin and Punishment. Or Contra Hard Corps. Idk

(sidenote: how the hell do you make it through radiant silvergun. Is it me? Do I just need to get good at the game or is there something I'm missing. Please help)