Taking any sort of dormant franchise and bringing it back into the “modern” era is always a risky move, no matter what the franchise in question is, but it was clear that Rare was able to pull this off seamlessly with the original Donkey Kong Country for the SNES. Sure, the bosses may have been lacking in plenty of areas, and there is some bullshit to be found when it comes to some of the secrets, but all of that is made up for with the game’s tight platformer, superb gameplay, wonderful gimmicks, impressive graphics for the time, and wonderful music, tying everything up together in one, banana-flavored package that many have enjoyed ever since it had initially released. Not only that, but the game was also extremely successful, selling over 9.3 MILLION copies, so it was clear that both Rare and Nintendo needed to keep this money train rolling with a sequel of some kind. However, this is the part of Rare’s life as a company where they were going to go through a bit of character development: they were sitting on a gold mine with this property, so they couldn’t just hash out something cheap and terrible like they did with Battletoads. They needed to make sure that this game was better than the rest, the true king of the jungle, one that can stand amongst the greatest of the greats, and personally, if you were to ask me, I think they succeeded in doing that and then some with Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest.

While I did get the original DKC as one of the first games on my SNES, and I would go onto playing it a lot because of that, I initially didn’t get DKC2 for quite some time, even though I was well aware of it existing for a while. It was only when another video game convention managed to roll through my town a good couple of years ago that I was able to snag myself a physical copy of the game to try it out, and HOT DAMN, I definitely should’ve hopped on it a lot sooner before then. The original game was already great enough as is, but this game manages to take everything that game did, expand upon it, and improve upon every criticism that I could have with that game, making for what I would say is not only a perfect sequel, but also a masterpiece of the platforming genre.

The story is just that little more complex when compared to the extremely simplistic premise of DKC 1, where while relaxing on the beach, Donkey Kong is suddenly ambushed and kidnapped by a group of Kremlings, who take him to the dastardly Kaptain K. Rool. Shortly after this, he then sends a message to the other Kongs, saying that if they want to ever see DK again, they need to give him the banana hoard that he failed to get from the previous game, which the Kongs refuse to give up, so it is up to Diddy Kong now, alongside his girlfriend Dixie Kong, to travel through the lands of Crocodile Isle, save DK, and defeat Kaptain K. Rool once and for all. It is still a very basic premise, one that decided it wanted to be even more like Mario and involve a kidnapping of some kind, but it is still an effective story, and not gonna lie, having the main character of the previous game be the one that needs rescuing in this is a bit of a nice twist.

The graphics are pretty great, looking on par with the original game in many different aspects, but also expanding on the visuals with much more creative environment, character, enemy and boss designs, with great animations paired right alongside them as well, the music is fantastic once again, having plenty of incredible tracks that range from the menacing and exciting like this one, to the much more calm and serene like this one, all of which are an absolute joy to listen to even after all this time, and the gameplay/control is just as tight, fun, and masterfully put together as last time, not only providing plenty of fun levels and gimmicks for you to mess with ahead, but also plenty of challenges ahead that will make you feel like a true champ for conquering.

The game is a 2D platformer, where you take control of either Diddy Kong once again or Dixie Kong, go through many different worlds of varying shape and size, each having a very different, unique theme that makes them stand out from each other, while also not feeling like complete copies of what came before in the previous game, defeat plenty of enemies using various techniques while gathering plenty of different bananas, collectibles, animal buddies, and power-ups along the way to help you out, run into many other members of the Kong family such as Funky Kong, who is STILL the coolest motherfucker on the planet, Wrinkly Kong, the one that reminds you of all the horrible teachers that you had back in school, and Swanky Kong, the one that will prove to you just how much of a dumbass you really are, who will each help you out in their own way (except for Cranky again, who I’m surprised hasn’t dropped dead from a heart attack at this point), and take on plenty of bosses who, unlike the last game, are not only very fun to fight, but also have a level of creativity to them that makes taking them each on feel incredibly fun and rewarding. As any good sequel does, this game takes all the great elements from the previous game and retains all of their great qualities, while expanding on them just enough to make it even better than before, and trust me, back when I first played this a long time ago after only having the original game some time, I was FLOORED by just how massive the jump in quality really was, despite not being all too clear by just looking at it.

For starters, since he is now the damsel in distress of this game, you can’t play as DK anymore, which does kinda suck, but hey, at least you still get to play as Diddy Kong, who still plays just as wonderfully as he did in that original game, being very nimble and quick. Not only that, but we now also have Dixie Kong in the crew, who when you start to play as for the first time, you will decide from there on out to ONLY play as Dixie Kong whenever you get the chance, because she is AWESOME in this game. Not only does she have all the same strengths (and weaknesses) as Diddy Kong, but she can also twirl around in the air with her hair, allowing her to safely glide over plenty of obstacles, which, by default, makes her the better character to play as. It’s just like when you discover how Peach can float in Super Mario Bros. 2: it is just broken enough to where you will stick with it for the whole game, and you will accept no other alternatives……….. except when you are forced to.

The game features just as many different kinds of levels as you would find in the original game, this time featuring plenty of new, creative gimmicks that do make it feel a lot more exciting and fun to play. Of course, at first, you just get your standard kinds of levels, where you just run through, jumping on enemies, collecting things, and watching Diddy perform a rap at the end of the stage, just as a means of getting you back into the groove of things, which it manages to do so very smoothly. This then leads onto the levels then quickly spicing things up, with levels where you will have to change the temperature of the water via some magic seals, making it so that you gotta make a mad dash through before you end up dead, levels where you have to ascend up a pirate ship quickly before the water catches up to you so that the piranhas will eat you, levels where you will have to maneuver on hot air balloons to catch hot steam over molten lava, and even levels where you are riding a roller coaster while being chased by a creepy spector, needing to hit checkmark barrels to open gates to avoid your own ghastly demise. Those are only just SOME of the gimmicks that you will encounter with the levels in this game, and they are much more fun to mess around with this time, making the game feel more like a proper evolution of what came before it other then just a simple retread.

This can also be seen in the game’s difficulty, because this game is HARD AS FUCK, even more so compared to DKC 1. Sure, there are plenty of easy levels that you will run into that will take no time to beat, but even by the second world of the game, you will be running into plenty of tricky platforming challenges, enemies that you can’t take out as easily as you would like to, gimmicks that push you to the limit in many different ways, even forcing you to play as certain animal buddies in some levels, and then you add getting the collectibles on top of that, and that adds a whole nother layer to the difficulty in many different instances. This even extends further beyond what you would expect to see from traditional video game difficulty, which can be seen with the simple aspect of saving the game, where you initially can save the game normally once in each world, but then after that one time, you then have to pay banana coins each time, making it so that you will now focus on collecting these things much more in levels, which can lead to plenty of other roadblocks as well. Hell, if that doesn’t convince you enough, how about the fact that there is an enemy in this game who, if he touches you, can zap away your lives from your life counter until you ultimately have nothing left? That is just one of the many cruel ways that this game can fuck you over if you aren’t ready.

However, with all that being said, the harsh difficulty that the game presents you with is one of the reasons why the game is so fantastic to begin with. It truly feels like you are being presented with a challenge, where the original DKC could be seen as the training grounds for you to get used to how this kind of game works and what it could throw your way, and now this game is the true test of everything you have learned, throwing whatever it can at you to kill you, while also giving you everything that you need to conquer every single challenge you face. It never feels unfair in that regard, which makes playing through these levels much more fun, especially whenever you do eventually succeed in beating some of these challenges, as the wave of satisfaction washes over you, making you feel like you truly have accomplished something here today, and that feeling carries out through most of the game.

But of course, what would a DKC game be without having some sort of collectible, and this game has plenty of them for you to find. There are still the many different bonus areas you can find, each giving you a Kremkoin for beating them, as well as the new DK coins that you can get in each level, which if you get enough of them, you can place yourself amongst the others in the Video Game Heroes Contest, allowing you to beat out Mario, Yoshi, Link, and even non-Nintendo characters like Sonic and Earthworm Jim. It’s a pretty cute easter egg to get, and it does prove once and for all that DKC is better then all of those other games, and you can’t change that fact no matter what you say. That’s not all the reward you can get though, as with the Kremkoins in hand, you can then gain access to the Lost World, a bonus world of the game that houses some of the hardest levels in the entire game, such as one level where you have to complete multiple sections as each of the animal buddies that you found throughout the whole game. Needless to say, these levels are no joke, but again, completing them only adds to the satisfaction you feel throughout, and helps you stand on top as the best Video Game Hero of all time.

Overall, if I haven’t made it clear enough at this point, this is a near-perfect sequel to the original DKC in just about every way, and one of the best games that you could find from the SNES era, not only providing many more fun levels to run through, exciting boss fights, incredible music, and gameplay that is as fresh and tight as ever, but it also provides quite a hefty challenge that feels oh so satisfying to overcome, leading to plenty of neat rewards waiting around the corner. I would absolutely recommend it, not just for those who played and loved the original DKC, but also to anyone in general, because it is just that damn good to where if you haven’t tried it out at least once, then do yourself a favor and load it up, possibly with a friend to join you, and get ready to have a blast. satisfied sigh... man, it felt great to revisit this game again after so long, and it really has me looking forward to what comes next in this series. I mean, come on, how could they possibly screw it up at this point now?............... oh right, with a stupid little fuck named Kiddie Kong, that’s how.

Game #586

Coming from the Danganronpa series I wasn't sure what to expect playing this game but it sure wasn't this. They both might be death games but zero escape has a different approach to the genre. A very interesting puzzle game that captivates you the instant you finish an ending and wants you to keep going for more of the endings for you to slowly find out the reason why junpei and the others are here as you find out how to escape. Learning the backstories of all the characters as you play the different routes you learn the reason why they were chosen for the game as you grow to like them. This game really surprised me as the true ending was definitely something that was different from my expectations. It's a very solid VN that makes me curious to try out the rest of the series one day

This review coming to you from inside the fucking wall of Blue Mountain Zone, which I clipped through several days ago. Please send help! There's something in here with me!!

If there's two things I love in this world, it's kart racers and complaining about Sonic the Hedgehog. You might view that as a problem, but I don't have a friend group that tells me things like "George, you're loved, you don't need to play Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers." Nope, it's just me and my brain, so with the help of my instructor, Jim Beam, I finally buckled down and spent an hour getting my class Robotnik operating license in Ring Racers' infamously long tutorial.

While the experience of jumping into Ring Racers has been streamlined after the game's first major patch, I would still encourage anyone who wants to pick it up to go through each lesson in the tutorial. Ring Racers is the most technical kart racer I've played in my life, and that might strike you as being a bit funny considering it's essentially Sonic Kart, but keep in mind this was made by Sonic fans, and those people are psychopaths. You'll want to know the ins and outs of your vehicle and what it's capable of before hitting up the Grand Prix, and though I've seen a number of people complain about it, I see the wisdom of blocking off the online mode until you clear the first cup. I can't imagine what it would look like if players skipped the tutorial and jumped headfirst into multiplayer, but I'm gonna guess it'd be a disaster for everyone involved.

I'm confident in that considering half of the single player experience could also be characterized as "a disaster." Managing ring consumption, learning where sneakers spawn to break shortcut barriers, understanding how to maximize your 3rd-tier drift burst, anticipating when you should "hold" your cart rather than drift, figuring out where and when to use your spindash... it's a lot to manage even without all the stage hazards and player-laid traps that are out to straight up kill you. Pico Park is my god damn storming of Normandy, I've seen people lose limbs on the straightaway, and good men stretched to the width of an atom after colliding directly with a Drop Target that bounced them back into the path of a Gardentop careening around the corner at maximum velocity.

Even the pre-race is a nightmare. You don't just line up all nice and neat like in Super Mario Kart, patiently waiting for the green light. You can roam freely so long as you don't cross the starting line, which means you can also bump into other players and force them over the line to penalize them. I said Pico Park was a nightmare, but I didn't even survive the first three seconds of Carnival Night Zone, because everyone kept bumping me into hazards in the pre-race, and when I was sucked into the magnetized tunnel that serves as the track's opening straight, I was flung directly into several hazards that caused my kart to explode. I died and I barely made a single input.

For the last week you could find me hunched over my laptop, drenched with sweat because it's 80 degrees here at night and my computer is overheating, gripping my controller and hissing "fuck you, FUCK YOU," and you might assume I'm not having a good time... but I am. Despite how chaotic and complex and downright vicious this game can be, I'm into it.

Maybe I'm just in the market for the kind of depth and sadism Ring Racers offers, or maybe I've played so many kart racers that the problem I'm having is that they don't have enough esoteric bullshit in them. Mastering Ring Racers' mechanics is satisfying, but understanding how they play off one another achieves an even greater high... I've graduated to a stronger drug. Naturally, courses are constructed around these systems in a way that's both mindful of low- and high-level play, and the loop of replaying tracks and developing better strategies to maximize your ring consumption and attain better clear times feels good, with few exceptions (Balloon Park and Blue Mountain can eat me.)

I really like the visual design of the game, too. The stylized menus, expressive character art, and detailed tracks all lend a high level of production to the game that's genuinely impressive for a fan game born out of a fan game born out of a fan game using the Doom engine. It can be difficult to parse the action sometimes, especially in levels with more unconventional color pallets, but I think the game has a look to it that really makes it stand out while feeling like an authentic progression from Sonic Robo Blast 2's aesthetic. I will add that this is one case where IGDB fucked up by allowing a cleaner thumbnail, though. I prefer the original, which looked like a magazine scan of a grainy off-screen photo taken at a CES. Much more fitting, if you ask me.

Of course, like everyone else, I still have issues with Ring Racers that I think really sour the experience. The pandemonium of the aforementioned pre-race wears out very quickly, with stage outs and starting line penalties becoming more annoying than humorous, especially given how long it can take to recover. There's also a lives system which feels wholly unnecessary when you consider that the capsule minigames that appear every two races could otherwise be used as checkpoints if you don't place high enough in a circuit to advance. The trick system is also interesting in concept but utilized so rarely that I often forgot it was a thing until I needed to exploit it, and I typically found myself fumbling it as a result.

I've said before that Sonic fan games are in something of a golden age, with hobbyist-led projects being of a caliber that genuinely blows me away. Credit where it's due, Sega appears quite comfortable with letting fans create games like this without interference, something I think has helped give the scene space to mature and which has helped to keep Sonic so relevant. Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers' kinetic gameplay and strong art direction impressed me the moment I saw it, and I think there's a lot of potential in introducing a higher level of technicality to a kart racer, but it does need some adjusting in places and falls a bit short of its promise.

Addendum: Apparently the game also controlled worse pre-patch so I may be benefitting by having waited just a bit to really dive into it. Seems worth mentioning.

One of the rooms in this game has the shape of a heart and is full of capybaras, and if that doesn’t prove to you that this is the clear GOTY of the year of the decade of forever so far then I don’t know what will.

Despite being a highly anticipated game for me, probably one of this year’s releases that excited me the most this year… I had no fucking clue what Animal Well really was. By that I don’t mean that ‘’I didn’t know what to expect’’, there have been a ton of games I didn’t have expectations of what they would be prior to playing them, but at least I had a small idea what they were about, their mechanics, and overall ideas. But with Animal Well, I had no clue about how it could even play like.

It was supposed to be a Metroidvania? Is it Puzzle-Platformer? Or perhaps an immersive-atmospheric experience? Maybe a highly experimental take on open spaces and secret finding? I didn’t really know before I hit ‘’start game’’ to be honest, and yet, even before that point there was something that called me, that fascinated me. This world of blues and greens seen through the lenses of an old CRTV is an aesthetic I didn’t know I missed this much, or maybe is that it’s done so effectively here; the surround sound and flickering lights that accompany such abandoned yet beautiful looking structures and the nature that melds perfectly with it… I don’t know, it reminisces of feelings and memories I don’t think I can properly put into words, but still filled me with a desire to explore this rabbit hole.

Well, I finally played it, and I have finally found the answer to all of those questions that once plagued me:…

…Yes.

Animal Wells is an experience that feels like it takes inspiration from a million different places and ideas, and yet it molds them together to create something unlike any other game I can think of; is the idea that surrounds the ‘’Metroidvania’’ genre distilled in its purest form, yet it’s far from being simple.

The well is a place of few words; none of the areas have a proper name, there are no NPCs to chat with, and it’s not like the small slime-like creature we play as has a mouth to begin with. The only text present is one found in menus, small one-word prompts, and the name of the items, and that’s more than enough… because the rest speaks for itself. Each area and the animals that live in them chant a different song, each room a part of a puzzle of their own; I didn’t know for them to have a name for places to stand out vividly in my mind, like the Lake of the Cranes, or the Giant Bat’s Cave, or even smaller locations like the Peacock’s Palace or the Disc’s Shrine. The world of Animal Well may be quiet, but everything speaks volumes, like visting an abandoned virtual zoo: every encounter with a new-found critter, whether friendly or aggressive, every new interaction like distracting dogs using the disc, or every major tense moment like running away from the Ghost… Cat? Dog? I actually don’t know which of the two is supposed to be, nor do I need to know that the entire sequence and puzzle is an amazing highlight and super satisfying to overcome completely on your own… No wait, that’s also the rest of the game!

Managing to create a world that feels so well thought-out and designed so every puzzle feels intuitive, while at the same time offering such fun to use and multi-purpose items that can break open the game completely and taking ALL THAT into account is honestly worth getting up and applauding. The Bubble Wand is the clear star of the show for me; being able to create temporary platforms is already a game changer, especially when pairing it with fans and wind currents, but then you realize you can ‘bubble hop’, as I like to call it, by pressing the action and jump button both at the same time and completely bypassing many parts and sections that otherwise would have required other actions, and best thing is that even if it seems that it breaks the game at times, the dev clearly accounted for it since some rooms have passages too thin for you to maneuver or create bubbles or even animals like hummingbirds that immediately pop them once you make one. I normally wouldn’t like when a game makes a tool completely useless for the sake of a puzzle, but in here it makes total sense and balances out the moments were you make out your own path with pre-designed puzzles this amazing, and it’s not like that’s the only tool that lets you get creative anyway.

The moment you get any item, about two seconds is all you need to realize the possibilities it can offer, yet, as in the rest of the caverns, nothing is ever spelled out; you yourself and your own imagination and problem-solving are the ones that need to overcome the challenges this wildlife imposes; I’ve never felt so rewarded in such a long time than when using the Yo-Yo effectively, learning the code to fast travel to the main hub with the animal faces —which remind me of a certain game, I think it starter with ‘’Super’’ and ended with ‘’2’’… can’t put a finger on it tho—, or skipping completely the Ostrich escape sequence and its puzzles, near the bowels of the map, by using the Spring, Yo-Yo and myself. It honestly comes really close to feeling like the levels in Mosa Lina, now that I think about: you have incredibly useful tools that serve a clear purpose, but ones you can also use whichever way you like to, only with the difference that Animal Well is an already built, profoundly engaging and interesting world, and using all this arsenal while interacting with the animal and the curse that seems to affect the well is amazing, and little things like fall or water damage aren’t taken into account to incentivize and reward experimentation even more than it would have otherwise.

If I had to point out a flaw, and one that may honestly be a ‘’only me’’ thing, is the inconsistency with how it handles some switches and shortcuts. While I get and really enjoy some gauntlets of puzzles, he fact some of them reset, like the ‘’On and Off’’ switches, reset every time you teleport or get out of a room, just makes things a tad more annoying, in contrast to how the yellow door switches stay activated even if you don’t press them all or die, which makes other rooms kind of a joke and strips them from the tension found in the boss encounters, for example. I understand that this won’t be that big of a deal for many people, but when the rest of the game is so impeccably designed and each room amounts to so much, these little annoyances are noticeable.

A game that otherwise… I still don’t think I can say I've come close to experiencing all of it. In a way, it’s kinda interesting to have played this so close after beating Fez for the first time, because while both of those games have a similar sense of wonder and are brimming with secrets, that game created its mysteries through the tools you can find within a same room and code-finding through a fragmented world , while Animal Well is an ecosystem on its own, with the complete freedom that entails. Even after finding out what dwelled at the bottom of the well, it's insane how much there’s for me to find, not only the Eggs, but I’m convinced there are things that I haven’t even seen yet, and I know for sure that there are far more items than it seemed at first.

At this point, it shouldn’t be a secret that one of the things I love the most in games, or in any form of art for that matter, is when they give so much food for thought, letting the imagination run wild and feel so massive and grand even if their locations are small; Animal Well is only a 30 MB game, and it’s the perfect representation of all this, the wild desire to explore, to have fun, and to fear the unknown, even when it's scary as all hell.

I’m obsessed with Animal Well, and its ambience, roars, and silence speak to me in a way few games do, and I’m happy to see that’s a sentiment already being shared by so many people.

Game Freak? Yeah, I'm a real freak for continuing to dive into GF's non-Pokémon games. Today on the menu is their rhythm-platformer hybrid.

Harmoknight's a simple game: jump over and smack obstacles in your path to the beat of the background music. Er, a little before the beat? This is one of those rhythm games where anything beyond perfect timing counts as a miss, there is no "late" timing. Still, there's an inherent joy to filling out the backing track with a melody created by your own platforming prowess.

As a rhythm game, this game makes some pretty bad missteps. Several songs get reused twice, or even thrice. Most of them share a very similar lietmotif as well. It doesn't matter too much to me personally; A lot of musical platformers reuse their compositions for multiple stages, even the GOATed BIT.TRIP.RUNNER. No, the actual issue is the bosses. Their musical variety is highly limited by being a game of Simon Says, call-and-response. It's a lot of waiting and watching the cinematics, as opposed to the reactive gameplay of the normal platforming stages. Kinda fun the first time, underwhelming on replays. Missing certain actions will also kill you outright instead of just penalizing you, like falling into a pit, or missing the final hit on a boss. Certain levels also just stink. Minecart and Clock Tower stages change tempo on a dime, something you can only work around through raw memorization.

The real star of Harmoknight's character and world design, penned by the one and only James Turner. You may know him as the guy who designed Shadow Lugia, but I'm particularly fond of his work in this game. Musical imagery has been integrated into pretty much anything you can spot: cymbal plants, bongo boars, tambourine spiders, drum springs, ocarina ghosts, and so much more.

I feel like Game Freak has a real tendency to whiff certain aspects when they branch out and experiment, but I hope they never stop trying. They have all the money you could ever dream of from making Pokemon titles, they deserve more opportunities to make more left-field projects. I probably go easier on them than I should, but I like rooting for "small indie studio" Game Freak.

It's not a meme review this time I swear!!!

I've been wanting to do a full-fledged Luigi's Mansion review for awhile because its a game that has a special place in my heart. Since this will total out to be my 190th review, I figure now would be the perfect time to do so.

One random day in my early childhood not too long after I began playing video games, I was at Target checking out the video games section. Upon doing so, I discovered one particular game that caught my eye, Luigi's Mansion for the Nintendo GameCube. Despite not owning a GameCube or having the cognitive abilty to realize not every single game was on the Ps1, I begged my parents to get me this game. Alas I never did until years later when I began collecting GameCube games. I probably got about halfway finished with the game until I dropped it along with 95% of the other games I owned. Since then I've beaten this game & its 3ds remake about 3 times in total. With every time I finish this game, I grow more fond of the game that was most likely underappreciated during its initial release.

Usually its Mario that gets the spotlight and saves the day, but not this time. Mario got scammed and turned into a painting by King Boo. To help save his brother, Luigi, with the help of a scientist named Professor E.Gadd, ventures into King Boo's mansion. To assist Luigi on his quest to rescue Mario, E.Gadd gives him the Poltergust 3000, a machine that will allow Luigi to do some Ghostbusting.

The game is split into 4 parts consisting of a variety of different portrait ghosts to collect. The first part of the game serves mostly as a tutorial for the remaining 3 parts of Luigi's adventure. During part 1, E.Gadd teaches you how to use the Poltergust and the first few rooms & portrait ghosts serve as a way to getting use to the game's controls & mechanics. Overall, the game feels incredibly well-paced and each part doesn't overstay its welcome.

Atmosphere aside, the gameplay is probably the best part of the game. You explore each room looking carefully for ghosts & money by sucking up everything around you. Once you find a ghost, you need to hit it with your flashlight. If the light connects, it will play a sound that prompts you to suck up the ghost. Sucking them up is pretty much like a game of tug-of-war as you will need to maintain a grip on your controller as the ghost will attempt to escape. It is not only something unique that hasn't really been done before previously, but it also makes the gameplay incredibly addicting. The money hunting isn't super important to the game and you can skip collecting coins if you so choose, but if you want to get a better ending then you will need to collect as much cash possible.

There are really only a couple of minor issues I have with the game overall. The main issue being how frustrating Boo collecting can be sometimes. Thankfully, there are no soft-locks in regards to it, but there will be plenty of times that a Boo will run into a room you can't access if you fail to immediately get it in your Poltergust. You can always go back and get it once you progress further, but it's one of those things that really bothers me during my playthroughs since I tend to struggle with getting them in one try. The only other thing I take issue with is the controls taking a little bit to get used to, but overall its not that big of a deal.

Luigi's Mansion is a game with fun, addicting gameplay, phenomenal atmosphere & aesthetics, and great pacing. It's a one-of-a-kind game that can't be replicated.

HarmoKnight is one of the two 3DS games that were developed by Game Freak. It's a rhythm game that meets platforming where you jump and attack enemies to the beat, and it's a unique concept that could've been fleshed out a bit more

You play as Tempo, as he sets off to save Melodia and defeat Gargan and his Nozoid army. The story... exists. It's completely basic, but it does the job when progressing through the game. Along the way, you'll meet a few companions that will help you in certain stages, adding a bit of variety to the gameplay department

The music here is... ok. It's not terrible by any means, but it's pretty average and not all too memorable for a rhythm game. The standout songs from the soundtrack are the five Pokémon songs that are unlockable later on, but they're surprisingly short in length. I also find the timing for some segments to be quite off, and that is no more evident than the clockwork and minecart levels. Not only do I feel like they're kind of off-sync, but they're based on trial and error, leading me to retry several times, and I didn't enjoy my time with these

HarmoKnight is a decent 3DS eShop exclusive game. It has a unique concept with a neat art style that could've used a bit of polish. While I enjoyed my time with the game, I think something like Rhythm Thief (another 3DS rhythm game) is worth more of your time. Sad that this has never been ported outside of the 3DS, but if you have a modded 3DS or Citra, I say check this one out if you're curious about the games Game Freak made outside of Pokémon

i am not sure how the events surrounding the proposal, approval and development of this game went. supposedly, story goes, game freak allowed employees to initiate more side projects at the start of the 10s, anything other than pokémon. this shift produced a number of small, cute games that seem to be remembered by no one, relegated to and literally doomed on the 3ds e-shop. one of these projects was developed and directed by james turner, the first ever western pokémon designer at game freak and behind the designs of pokémon such as buzzwole or golurk. soon, shigeru ohmori, game designer at game freak who would later become the director for the 8th and 9th generation of pokémon games, was also brought onto the team. the game was born a platformer, but soon incorporated rhythm game mechanics and eventually became what i just finished playing, harmoknight.

why did i make all this preamble? because the game is legitimately good and it mostly came out of a development team known for making games of dubious quality for the most popular franchise in the world. they managed to create a product with an incredible artstyle (the noizoids are simply spectacular and also shoutout to lyra), a fun gameplay style (which was easily picked up even by an idiot like me who has barely even heard of the concept of 'rhythm'), impressive boss battles (i did let out a little scream when in the final boss stage i reenacted the ending to jojo battle tendency i am not going to lie) and an adequate difficulty curve (game held my hand like a baby just until i became a big boy able to walk on his own two legs). that projects like this can come out of a development team that is often derided, offended even, by critics of pokémon games (category i participate in in the same way a student spontaneously chooses to sit in the last row of class, yes i am there but please pretend i am not even here) is a sad state of affairs. i can feel vital energy pouring out of the screen here. maybe a cry for help? i hate wasted potential, it crushes your spirit. is that why the game is surprisingly mean in some of its parts? i intend that literally. during the beginning parts of the game, you are told that you are no harmoknight, that you are just a kid that has to pass the only weapon of the game, the note staff, to the true heroes of the land of melodia, although in the meantime you proceed to effortlessly beat several stages and a couple of bosses in the process. further, in the little dialogue boxes that come after the end of each stage, the other characters often direct comments to the main character tempo that belittle his efforts. only tempo's trusted buddy tappy seems to be supportive. are the developers trying to elicit some sort of emotional response from the player in order to support tempo and to generate second hand support the development teams efforts? nah. but to be honest there is something stifling creative drive at game freak. and if you want to have a feeling of what that creative drive could potentially be if let a little looser, play harmoknight. it certainly sparked an interest in me over all the other odd side projects developed at game freak.

ok the one piece fans were right though it literally does get good 27 hours in

seriously a combination of patch 2.2 and improving my skill over the course of the last while has turned this from a game i was really mixed on to a game i can’t put down, it’s a crazy turnaround. i still can’t say my old review was wrong, though. it’s a real criticism that the experience as a beginner is so rough, and while i got stockholmed into sticking with it, i can completely understand why others would just give up after a few cups, ESPECIALLY on earlier versions. if you did, though… maybe try again? special stages are much easier to get into and much fairer, cpu rubber banding is nerfed, slopes don’t drag you down as much without rings, and the weirder challenges are finally starting to get well documented alongside the game itself making them easier to skip.

…balloon park still exists, though, so it’s not all good news. oh well.

My long journey to Hi-Fi Rush began when I was 7 years old, during the absolutely sweltering summer of 2003. It was one of those weekends where my family and I were "driving into town", because everything good was in Chattanooga and not where we were living. They took me to the local Circuit City (lol) and on the clearance rack they were "pennying out" (selling for a single penny to remove from the inventory system) a variety of cast-off video game and computer merchandise. One of these cast-offs was a little demo disc known as the Nintendo GameCube Preview Disc. It contained four demos, but my parents would have had a shared aneurysm if they saw me playing Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, so really, it only had three.

- Sonic Adventure DX, which was what got me to pick it up in the first place after playing the absolute shit out of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
- A strange game called Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, which I had a close eye on because they were talking about it in Nintendo Power and it was from the Sonic guys.
- And finally...a little game called Viewtiful Joe that absolutely blew my little 2nd grader mind.

I played that demo over, and over, and over, rewinding and fastforwarding and slow-moing with my newly-acquired VFX powers, and my parents, bless them, actually cared about and paid attention to what got me excited and passionate, because being inured to child-raising with a then-in-vogue-but-now-outdated pediatric dogma that children with autism are "stuck in their own little worlds" meant they felt an intense pressure to pay attention and reward any sign of neuron activation.
My dad thought it looked promising, because he's always had a fixation on superheroes, and he was online but not extremely online enough to differentiate "superhero" from "tokusatsu", so they preordered it for me.

Maybe I'm overstating it, but what followed on October 7th, 2003, was something of a religious experience. We picked it up from Rhino Video Games (rip, you're excused if you're too young to remember when there were tons of cool video game store chains before GameStop bought them all just for the land value), and I played that game like crazy. Back then I could never get past the absolute brutal boss rush that has you fight every boss you've already fought back to back, ending in a fight with the vicious and cruel boss of bosses Fire Leo, which, if memory serves, sends you all the way back to the beginning of the boss rush if you fail. Pretty far for a 3rd grader though it may be, I didn't quite have what it takes to reach the ending, but that game planted a seed that altered my personality for good. Henshin-a-go-go baby!

A few months later my dad handed me down his GameFAQs.com forum account so I could ask for help being stuck on the opening stage of Sonic Heroes where you play as Team Chaotix. With not a ton to occupy my time, I went on the the online to go "surfing" on this new and exciting ""web"". GameFAQs had this sidebar where they would show game industry news from their sister website, GameSpot. This meant I started paying attention to industry news, and it became apparent to me that Viewtiful Joe didn't just come out of nowhere, it came from a small outfit within Capcom called Clover Studios, that benefited enormously from institutional knowledge imported from other parts of Capcom.
I gobbled up every mention of Clover, they quickly became my favorite of all studios from the moment I even had a concept of developers.
I learned that games were not the subject of immaculate conception but rather an intense process of iteration and cultural feedback, that they existed within a canon.
I learned that Viewtiful Joe was part of a miniature canon of five games for the Gamecube known as the Capcom Five, which was really more like the Capcom Four because one of them, Dead Phoenix, got cancelled before I even heard about it. You know, for a game that never was, its title is so on-the-nose you'd be excused for thinking I just made that up.
I learned that I was supposed to be angry at an evangelical Floridian lawyer named Jack Thompson.
And, most influentially, I learned that Viewtiful Joe was the singular vision of a cooler-than-cool motorcycle-riding custom-Oakleys-wearing 80s John Hughes movie protagonist character of a man named Hideki Kamiya.

The very next year (wow, remember when amazing sequels used to only take a year? what the fuck happened?) I got Viewtiful Joe 2 on release date. I followed every bit of news about Clover Studios, heard about these wild new games they were making called Okami and God Hand, had my little pre-teen heart absolutely shattered by the news that Clover had shut down, and then subsequently kintsugi'd by the news that they had reformed into a new studio fittingly named Seeds. And then Seeds merged with another studio, and became this new studio called PlatinumGames, and that the auteurs behind Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand had went with them, and they signed a contract with Sega to give them a whopping FIVE new games, all of them being next-gen, paralleling the famous Capcom Five.

In 2003 I played Viewtiful Joe. In 2004 I played Viewtiful Joe 2. In 2005 I played Viewtiful Joe Double Trouble for the Nintendo DS (and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney! but aside from Shu Takumi's bromance (and possible unrequited love?) for Hideki Kamiya that's not particularly relevant).
In 2008 we were really really poor that year (huh I wonder why) so that Christmas my parents bought me a used PS2 Slim to replace the PS2 that had broke to where it keeps showing that scary red screen, and with it came a newly-released Greatest Hits reprint of Okami, which had me jumping up and down with joy that I had finally found a copy, because it had become low-print-run eBay scalper bait from pretty much the moment it came out. I subsequently do every sidequest and acquire every Stray Bead, leaving absolutely no stone unturned to adequately pay tribute to my idol Hideki Kamiya.

In 2010 I finally find a sunfaded-to-the-point-of-disintegrating copy of God Hand at the local outdoor drive-in theater/swap meet, for the low low price of 5 dollars. I remember it got bad reviews which is why I never played it, that on top of the aforementioned parental-aneurysm-inducing M-rating, but hey, I'm a teenager now, my parents just said they think I'm mature enough for the M-rating, and I end up playing the fuck out of that too. My online Venezuelan pen-pal who ended up introducing me to so, so many games I adored due to South America's vibrant culture of piracy, I mean, he said God Hand was fantastic, and I trust his word, so why not? (we haven't talked in probably a decade but we're friends on Backloggd so a shout-out to you if you're reading this, thank you for everything! thank you for Deadly Premonition! I hope we get to talk again one day, so much has happened!)
God Hand was directed by a man named Shinji Mikami, and word of mouth got around that he was really, really good at designing action games. 4chan-adjacent contrarians exalted it and used the famous IGN 3/10 review as fuel for their paranoid distrust of and superiority complex to game journalists. It became the subject of a meme comic template based on how the game's hidden excellence took everybody who played it by surprise. Tim Rogers then writes a review wherein, among many other extremely colorful metaphors, he compares moments in God Hand to "the feeling of catching a bully's punch, effortlessly uncurling his fist, and snatching out a fifty-dollar-bill". My bullied 15-year-old self nods, agreeing with his assessment.

In 2012, I played Devil May Cry 1 and 3 out of the HD Collection after the sage advice of the net told me to skip 2, and I played Ninja Gaiden Sigma Male, and I played the return of the Mikami and God Hand design ethos, a game called *dramatic title-screen-announcer voice* VANQUISH. I adored Vanquish, and I spent the next 11 years rawdogging estradiol and waiting for, finally, another action game bearing the stamp of Shinji Mikami. Thank you for reading so far into something this personal, you probably get where this is going, yeah? Keep going though.

In 2013, I buy the last game of Platinum's Sega deal, Anarchy Reigns, and I have an excellent, very fun month with this hypermasculine game while its online was still alive, getting my mind off the crippling anxiety of having just came out to my parents. The next month, I play Platinum's Metal Gear Rising, the first game they've made outside their deal with Sega, and like Jack, it rips. In 2015 I finally, finally get to play Bayonetta, because I always heard the PS3 version was bad, so I avoided it until I got a Wii U, and I am reminded of my intense fondness for Hideki Kamiya's trademark embracement of stylish action, camp, and cringe. Meanwhile, the man himself begins blocking basically everybody who speaks English to him on Twitter because most of them are begging for Bayonetta 2 on their preferred system and calling him slurs.

In 2016 I play Furi, a particularly inspired indie game specially crafted for "genetic freaks!" who are "not normal!" such as myself, while living out of a motel, on a Wii U Pro Controller while my dad sleeps in the same room. I finish the game at like 5 AM. The credits give a very special thanks to Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Keiji Inafune (lol, I'd put Akira Kitamura if only for Cocoron), Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Genyo Takeda (director of Punch-Out), Platinum Games, Grasshopper Manufactures (sic), and Treasure Co, in that exact order, probably close to the order I'd put them in too. Thank you for all the great games and memories! so they wrote.

In 2017, under conditions of more stable housing, I play Nier:Automata from Platinum, and it's great! But this review isn't about how I've been Facebook friends with Yoko Taro since before Drakengard 3 came out. Where are you, Yoko Taro? I miss you.
Also in 2017, Hideki Kamiya's next big effort, Scalebound, is cancelled by Microsoft, making me shake my fist in anger at the Xbox brand and how anything good it produces seems to be in spite of themselves. I make a post online about how they should retrofit it into Drakengard 4.

In 2019 I back The Wonderful 101 Remastered Kickstarter, because somehow I hadn't got around to playing it yet. Surprise surprise, as expected from a Hideki Kamiya joint, it was incredible. In 2020 I buy Vanquish AGAIN, the moment it got released on PS4, and in the midst of intense anxiety over an incoming plague and Bernie Sanders primary results, I finally accomplish the infamous "Tactical Challenge 6", iykyk. Sega has posted a survey for people who bought the Bayonetta/Vanquish collection, I spam every field with "VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2". My longing for the return of Shinji Mikami intensifies like a kid on their birthday remembering their dad who stepped out for a pack of smokes and never came back.

It is 2021. I finally play another Capcom Five game from way back when, Mikami and Suda51's Killer7, in 4K widescreen. They never collaborated again, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. It is everything I was told it was. The m4m craigslist guy was right. I continue to miss Shinji Mikami so fuckin bad

It is late 2022. God Hand is selling on eBay for the high high price of 160 dollars, and people are buying, because it's worth it. I am reading the r/gamingleaksandrumors subreddit, as I am wont to do, even though I don't have a Reddit account. Some guy is posting about Microsoft registering a trademark for a new game called...HI-FI RUSH. They think, via process of elimination, that it could be an unannounced project from Tango Gameworks, Shinji Mikami's studio. They think it might be an action game! I excitedly message my one friend who watches my streams, similarly obsessed with this canon as I am, in the hopes that it could be that fabled second coming of God Hand. Could it be? Do I dare to hope?

It is January 25th, 2023. Microsoft just straight-up drops the game I've been waiting for for most of my life during a presentation I'm not watching, with zero fanfare. I immediately buy it based solely off reflex from my sympathetic nervous system, before my conscious mind can even comprehend what just happened. Despite having been ravenous for this for most of the time I've been a conscious human being, I save it for a rainy day.

It is late 2023. I am on mushrooms. I remember there is a new Shinji Mikami produced action game I still haven't played, and so I boot up Hi-Fi Rush. I quickly realize that by my personal barometer, it is one of the greatest games ever made, and that I would still be feeling this way even if I wasn't on drugs. It means the world to me that this game was allowed to exist, it feels like coming home.
The character action genre is my favorite genre of game, and I’ve always considered it the most pure, joyous, evocative genre of video game, they represent everything uniquely special about the medium while radiating a tangible aura of inspired fun, mechanical depth, flashy setpieces and an effortless sense of “cool” that shaped my personality more than I could ever untangle from myself.

I guess what I'm trying to get at by autobiographizing like this, is that I am glad this game exists at all, and from a young age, younger than I should have been to learn such a life lesson, the shutdown of Clover Studios taught me something really important. Don't be sad because it's over, be happy because it happened. Because it could've been so easy for it not to, you know? Everything about your life and mine only happened because everything landed in the right place, this game only existed because everything landed in the right place, it's so incredibly easy for something to never come together, or get cancelled before we ever even heard about it. With how many minds are warring for supremacy, it's an absolute miracle anything ever gets made at all, let alone a game this good and coherent and visionary. And just like I saw growing up alongside them, watching them rise from the ashes like a (dead?) phoenix with how Clover became Seeds became Platinum became Tango, you can kill a studio but you can't kill their spirit, the influence they have on the family tree of design. Tango will return.

It is February 29th, 2024. Leap Day, a liminal space that only comes around once a presidential term. I am on mushrooms again. I decide now is the time to finish Hi-Fi Rush. I beat the game a couple minutes after midnight, which disappointed me slightly because I wanted the achievement date to say the 29th. My first playthrough was on Very Hard difficulty of course, because this personal history has made me into quite the tryhard. I sit through the credits as a gesture of respect, of course. How could I not? I waited most of my life for this game, it's the least I could do. The director himself starts serenading me. I look around nervously, wondering if I am hallucinating this or something. I am not. Everything I wrote about in this review comes flooding back. It becomes apparent to me that the world is filled with overwhelming beauty, that it is truly beautiful that people can collaborate and make something with so many moving parts, and that it is beautiful that everything I've experienced and the ways those people like Mikami, Kamiya, and now Johanas contributed to a shared lineage made me who I am, and I feel loved and personally spoken to in a way I've never felt before. Of course, of course I cry my goddamn eyes out.

We somehow made it through

All of this.

Making things is hard,

Things never go as planned.

Too many features, not enough time.

We want the best

But can only do so much

With what we have.

So this is what we made.

We've never been more proud.

A game, a song, a million different pieces working together

Brought to you by all of us.

It may not be what you expected,

Everything

(Everything that you want)

But we did our best

And here it is:

A piece of our heart,

The hard work from all of us.

So please don't complain

And just enjoy.

Because at the end of the day, it's all just a game.

One we spent thousands and thousands of hours

Arguing, building, and polishing.

But hey,

No sweat. 😅

After sinking more than a hundred hours into Rebirth, I know the last thing I should do is try to bite off more Final Fantasy. I've already had too much, I'm bloated on chocobos and moogles and nearly ready to burst, and yet I've been eyeballing Final Fantasy IV and thinking "I can handle it." Comparatively speaking, 23 hours of gameplay is light, downright brisk. Rebirth's after dinner mint... Why shouldn't I indulge?

Well, back-to-back negative reviews from mutuals - both of which abandoned the game - should be reason enough for me to pass, at least for the time being.

It's so over.

Or is it? I'm Weatherby, when have I ever listened to anyone about how bad a game might be? Especially for a game I already paid my money for. The cellophane on this unopened Final Fantasy Chronicles is coming off, baby!

We're so back!

It's probably worth pointing out up front that by going with the Chronicles version of the game, I am effectively playing the real Final Fantasy IV, which originally released stateside on the SNES as a port of Japan's easy mode. For babies. I'm not a baby, how hard can this version of the game be?

Turns out very, at least in fits and bursts. Final Fantasy IV is a very inconsistent game in a lot of ways, and I think a lot of this inconsistency is born from the unique space it occupies in the overarching trajectory of the franchise. The SNES allowed Square to do so much more than what they previously accomplished with the NES trilogy, especially in regard to story, but a lot of FFIV's mechanical features feel as though the game has one foot firmly rooted a generation behind. Things like a highly restrictive inventory is just unnecessary thanks to the SNES' expanded memory space, and the encounter rate is just as bonkers as it was on the NES, sometimes sending you from one daunting battle to the next with only a mere tile separating them.

Guest characters, something Final Fantasy II leaned on with its rotating fourth party slot, are commonplace in the early half of FFIV, and a some of them feel more like a hindrance, resulting in a lot of stretches where you need to nanny idiots like Edward, who has no useful abilities, low health, and straight up runs off screen when you try to heal him up. Likewise, you'll occasionally be gifted with guest characters that are too good, creating this pendulum swing of the game being "too annoying" and "too easy."

This combination of antiquated design elements and inconsistent party composition makes the early game a drag, and it's no wonder I ditched the GBA version around Mt. Ordeals back when I originally played it in 2005.

It's so over.

Final Fantasy IV's story also struggles in the early half of the game and spends a bit too long meandering around. It is interesting to play this right off the heels of Final Fantasy III as both games feature numerous character sacrifices, though the greater scope of FFIV means you'll get to spend more time with them rather than coming upon each character briefly before they like, chuck themselves into a furnace or whatever. Each death feels meaningful, which is why it's a bit upsetting that FFIV walks back most of them, sheepishly shrugging and going "I don't know, they lived I guess."

Thankfully, both the story and gameplay eventually find their focus, and once FFIV dials things in, I found that I was starting to have a really good time with the game. Turns out a stable party of well-rounded characters who share a clear and common goal is just what you need to get me invested, even if it may not address every single problem I had with the game up to that point.

By the time the party awakens the Lunar Whale and takes a trip up to the god damned moon, I was fully in it, and I loved the way the game handles the reveal of its true antagonist, Zeromus, who is less a singular consciousness driven by focused malice and more representative of the game's greater themes concerning good and evil, its presence in all men, and the cyclical nature of war and peace. I am a noted Necron defender, so the idea that the party has to do battle with something more representative of a thought or manifestation of man's own nature is my kind of thing.

Also, he's got a sick battle theme.

We're so back

Unfortunately, actually fighting Zeromus is another matter entirely. I thought the Cloud of Darkness was a motherfucker, but this might be the most I've struggled with a final boss in any Final Fantasy game. Apparently this guy can cast Meteo, Holy, Bio, AND Flare, but you'd never know it because he spends 90% of the fight spamming Big Bang over and over again. The solution here is to let Rydia stay dead as all of her spells will result in an immediate counterattack that operates separately from the fixed timer that dictates Big Bang. This also buys you better healing as Rosa only has to split Curaja between four characters instead of five. At the 11th hour, Final Fantasy IV deigned it necessary to saddle me with more dead weight, and the constant run back through several floors with high encounter rates and ~ten minutes of mashing through mandatory dialog is a steep price for failure, which unfortunately sucked a lot of the wind out from Final Fantasy IV's ending.

it's so over. literally, i am done playing this video game

Rating games in a series can be a little tricky, but I think I've more or less settled on a curve when it comes to Final Fantasy. I gave the original game a 3.5/5, which seems a bit high when you consider how approachable, engaging, and bombastic later titles are. All qualities I would assign to FFIV even if I think it spends a little too much time playing around in the protoplasmic puddle left behind by the previous three entries. That's why it's simultaneously the easiest of these four for me to sit down with, yet it's also a 3/5.

Maybe one day I'll check out the SNES version. I am genuinely curious if the easier difficulty curve results in a more evenly paced game, or if it simply makes combat dull and predictable.

Anyway, the next game has a protagonist name Butz. We're so back.

I can sympathise with the casual crowd that was alienated by this, I understand SRB2 Kart was largely famous for being a game that people can quickly pick up and stream, and mod to have any character they like, so I understand that brutally difficult Kart racer was probably not something they had any interest in, but man, this pushes all the right buttons for me.

Is it flawed? Undeniably. I'm sure you've already read that the tutorial is dogshit, and the items and CPUs can definitely be a bit much to handle. But in my opinion, it's super compelling. Substantial and fun singleplayer content, countless secrets, incredibly engaging races (NONE of them feel like autopiloting which is what I find a lot of Kart racers fall into) all compliment an incredibly fun to control driving system that, while yes is poorly taught to you, clicks faster than you'd think.

If you are a casual who just wants this game to be Mario Kart but with any character then you've probably already made up your mind and that's fair, I get why that's a desirable experience. For anyone else who has perhaps grown a bit tired of modern kart racing offerings feeling samey I implore you to give this a shot. Try to do at least the first few cups. I honestly kind of wanted to put this down after the first cup but I absolutely got hooked after I tried another cup and things started to click. Also, don't be afraid of the easy mode, it's there for a reason!