I played this all the way through when it came out, and after replaying the first Zero game for the third time, I thought I'd try this one again for the second. Welp, I forgot most of it, because it's mostly forgettable and it can get incredibly frustrating quite often.

I love the idea of trying to replicate the thrill of an old NES game, but in reality, it's really hard to do right. The first Zero worked because it was just polish on what was already a competent game. Some things were streamlined as there were more buttons to use and greater processing power, but the maps, avatars, and creatures generally stayed the same. They moved at the same pace, they had the same behavior, and because it worked 35 years ago, it continues to work now.

But with Zero 2, they attempted to create new levels, new creatures, and new rules, but unfortunately didn't change the avatars enough to make the clashes work. Jason still moves like a turd, but some of the new creatures now move faster, or there will be an unfair number on the screen and they all can shoot, and they shoot often. So instead of having the space and ability to plan out how to react (because Jason can't run, you need that space), you have to mash the dodge button and hope you get enough parries off to clear enough of the screen away to get some breathing room.

The car just drives and jumps with that satisfying heft, but now you have to fight other cars, and they can shoot faster than you and hit harder than you. These battles turn into ones of attrition, as you repeat the same moves in a cycle, firing off shots conservatively, which isn't inherently bad, but this should last 3-5 cycles, not 20-30.

There's a neat story in here, where Jason and Eve meet other cars with drivers and robots, but it is reduced down to a handful. This one is a Japanese farmer swordsman, this one is a plant lady (with plant boobs), this one is a WWII soldier guy, and of course, none of them will listen to Jason until after a dumb fight.

It's exhausting and frustrating, and it really dampens the fun in the car exploration. I put this down in the second half of the split planet in favor of something else. I'm not sure if I'll ever pick it up again or if I'll pick up the third one or not.

It's not a wash, it's not terrible, it's mostly fun, but the parts that aren't fun are REALLY not fun. It's a bummer.

This is a gold standard remake. I played the original Sunsoft game a LOT as a kid, and never made too far during my rentals. It had no save feature, no passwords, so you got as far as you could in the two or three hours you could play before you had to turn the NES off.

All this entry really does is add polish. Graphics are better, you have more weapons options and flexibility, but the core game feels the same. The car jumps and lands with weight, Jason moves like a turd, but the outside threats are programmed around those things, which is important (something 2 fails at).

So when you go into a battle or are traversing the world, nothing feels unfair. Creature movements almost always fit around how your character moves. Nothing is faster than Jason without also telegraphing where it's going, nothing is impossible to dodge in the car if you know what you're doing. This does make the game not feel too challenging, but it also never feels unfair.

The story is, well the original was about a guy looking for his frog, so it's a lot better, but it's still nothing to write home about.

Still, I've played this three times in the seven years since its release, so that's something.

I love this game. I've been playing it for 30+ years and it's a great one to go to when I just need good music and a discarmor.

It's a very early Metroid-like, but much smaller and with less backtracking. There is a plot, but it's barely there and has to be pieced together from poorly translated things bald giants tell you, nothing is explained, monster design is solid, and so much is left to the imagination.

It's made up of six areas, with kind of a hub, and you have to find items to access each section but it's over in a few hours if you know what you're doing. It's not quite as tight as Metroid is, and it doesn't encourage speedrunning, which is ideal, because there is a bit of a grind to this thing.

But that opening level's music and sunset have been etched into my head for just about my entire life. I love it.

Just about perfect in every way, started it on the day it was released and played probably 80% of it. Got all the shrines, all the tears, did every fun thing I could and most every meta puzzle I stumbled on.

Then I got to the end, with one last little bit of the underground left to uncover and... I stopped. I didn't mean to stop, I just knew I needed two hours of uninterrupted time to truly finish the game and enjoy the ending, and I just... never did it.

So I'm logging it now, knowing that i will likely never go back. It's been too long, none of the (thankfully few) boss fights were fun so the last one almost certainly won't be either. I did everything I wanted to do, and I may still come back to it. But it's been 8 months, so who actually knows.

I guess I should add stuff I know at this point I'll likely never get back to. I made it to the tower bit, and while that was cool, I didn't like the sudden time limit and I just walked away.

The narrative here is beautiful, the writing excellent, the design gorgeous, the puzzles... just fine. There were some brilliant puzzles, the kind that really gust me, but to many of them were "three doors, two keys", where you have to figure out how to juggle things through and around doors, and that's just not fun.

But when this game is good, it's GOOD.

I forgot when I started this, but I got right to one final boss option and just put it down for a month or so, for no good reason. I was enjoying it, I was just done a little bit before the game was.

The boss fights were probably the weakest part, so once I got through all the exploration stuff, I didn't really feel like I had to finish it, even though I was enjoying the story.

I did finish it, though, at least the first final boss option. I did that twice to see both endings, then I went to the other ending section and that area looked to be a perpetual dungeon where the prizes for winning are just... more stuff? But I'm at the end? So I don't know that there's much of a point to that, except to get one more boss fight I'm not going to have fun doing, so I think I'm good.

But the game part of the game was great! Exploration was fun, areas were varied enough, the time travel stuff was fun, and the artwork and music were beautiful. There's a nice variety of weapons to play with, and there are lots of fun combinations to play with.

Everything has a level, the familiars, the spells, and the weapons, but they go fast and you can buy them to more quickly catch up, so it's actually fun to experiment with new tools.

The writing was a little rough here and there, and it was weird to see all the characters have their stories all be about romantic relationships with other characters, but it was fine enough.

For a little independent Metroid clone, this is a pretty good one.

Apparently I'm on a Quintet roll instead of on a Soul Blazer trilogy roll... I had this on the SNES in college, but couldn't make it very far, because the action sequences are unforgivably clumsy.

There is a desire to excuse how bad they are by saying, "Well, it was 1990", but in 1990 we had good platformers. There's no excuse for how messy they are, because they aren't doing anything new. It's disheartening, because the rest of the game is daring.

The sim segments are fun and creative, attempting to do a light Populous thing, telling its story through the work you do for people, but without giving you the option of being a huge jerk. The only stories actually being told here are told by your worshippers, and they do feel like proto-Quintet narratives. Lost faith, the stress of being a person in a civilization, and the growth from one dying age of humanity to the next thriving age of humanity (a nice touch: Every area has a Stonehenge looking thing you enter to fight, and when you beat the monsters it becomes a Grecian/Roman looking structure).

I liberally used the rewind button on this one, and the last boss rush was a real piece of shit move, but hey. This game was a big deal in 1990, and while I didn't understand it then, at least it impacted enough people to get Quintet on the path they ended up on. I can't be mad about that.

I tried to make this one last, just like with the previous entry, but I wasn't able to... I just wanted to keep going, and then before I knew it, it was all over. But what an all over!

There are new mechanics that are introduced here with no explanation, but discovering what they do is a fun little meta puzzle, one that adds a fun layer to the puzzles.

The story slips in and completes the circle, finally telling the missing piece of the story and I'm sad it's over. I am so excited to see what these people do next, and I hope they do it ASAFP.

For whatever reason, Illusion of Gaia is always one I get halfway through and then put down. I finished it once on a rental in high school, once in college, and then once today. About halfway through it's like the designers got scared that they were building areas that were too repetitive and mixed it up, but the way they did was incredibly aggravating.

The last three big areas, Mt. Kruik Angkor Wat, and the Pyramid, are all long, confusing, and frustrating. There's no longer a clear indication of where to go, not even a little bit, rooms and screens all start to look the same, and enemies become unfair or irritating.

So it's usually around Euro that I feel like I've had enough and I'm ready to move on. The ending has been seared into my brain for almost 30 years, so it's not like I need a refresher on that. But what I had been missing was how deeply sad the back half of the game is. There are early interpersonal/character moments that are hard, but the longer the game goes on, the more horrible things it shows us about the world -- and our world. There's hope there, but there's also a deep sadness, like maybe that hope isn't going to be enough.

And today, in 2023, I felt that. It doesn't have the melancholy that Soul Blazer has, maybe because in Soul Blazer the world had already ended at the start of the game and in Illusion of Gaia the world was still fearing the end.

But we get slavery of both the child and the adult varieties, pleas for vegetarianism, cannibalism, poverty, despotism, and this admission that maybe, despite what we want to believe, it's always been this way and it will always be that way.

The closing text, over the modern city, hit hard this time, especially the bit about the earth looking sad, even as everyone on it was happy. I will likely go through Terranigma next, and I'm already thinking about the modern city section of that game and the depressed people inside it.

Every few years I get a hankering for Link to the Past and some Zelda clones. That always involves me playing this, then most of Illusion of Gaia (I may actually finish it next time), then some of Terranigma, and maybe a Ys or two for good measure, and then I'm done.

But of all of them (besides LttP of course), this one is my favorite. As a game, it's... primitive. Gameplay is simple and feels like it's crafted to make your weapon range and easy enemy patterns make up for the original intended complexity. Your sword swing hits in a full circle around you (even if it's not animated to look like it, it does), enemies are programmed to have complex movement and attacks but generally come out of the lairs in a straight line, and there is no currency so there's no resource management (outside of a single HP recovery item you can hold).

But it also feels like Quintet wasn't interested in making a game, they were interested in making everything else. Back in 1992, these graphics were among the most beautiful I'd ever seen. I wanted to live in Grass Valley, I still do. Everything feels like it takes place in a cold, mountain sunset, which is fitting, because the game itself is about being alone and how you manage.

The core mechanic of dungeon crawling, releasing people, getting stuff from people, then returning to dungeon crawling is very satisfying, even though I've done it twenty times or more in the last 30+ years. I still love being in this game.

There's a very real sadness here, which you can really hear in the music, and even the happy ending is laced with melancholy. Characters grow and make promises they may never keep, but it doesn't matter to us, because we won't be there.

And the final bit, the close up on Lisa and the text about her growth, hits me harder the older I get, as do the dwarves who only live a year.

There's so much beauty in this little game, and so much to admire. Quintet never really got past this, and I wish they were still around, making games.

After the Just Okay Bloodstained, I thought I'd play through IGA's actual masterpiece for the 20th time. I also played through it on the luck build for the first time, which lowers all stats to almost nothing, except for luck, which is at 99 + 20.

And it was actually hard again! Harder than the very first time, 26 years ago. Wargs in the opening hallway kill in one hit! The bone tossing skeletons in the Alchemist's Laboratory killed me in three! I saw the Game Over screen more often in that first hour than I had since 1997! It was great!

But high luck also means you find all kinds of cool shit, including rare weapons and armor, and by the time I was at the Outer Wall, I was regular strength again. I did have to rethink how to play, because I'd never played with fists before and my best weapon by far were the jeweled knuckles, so it was still fun.

By the end, I had the Crissagrim and 90% of attacks were just taking a single hit point away, so I pretty much ruled. It was still really fun to play through again, because it always is, even if the new localization and voices are all wrong.

I wish I could put that and the shitty Kenny G credits song back, but I also get that this is pure nostalgia and that those things were objectively awful.

Completely and totally okay, just perfect fine, right there in the middle, laying there, not really doing anything special.

I had a hankering for a good SOTN clone, but as I had just replayed it a year or so ago and recently replayed all the GBA ones, I didn't really want to go back to those quite yet. This was on sale and I had some credit, so it ended up being $5, and I'd say it's worth about that.

It's appropriately gothic, sexy, horny, violent, and IGA, completely and totally IGA, so that was nice. It's also like an Asylum version of Castlevania, called... maybe... CastleMANIA. It's got everything. There's a Belmont you can fight, and a boss that throws sickles and teleports. There's a chapel and a clock tower, a soul collecting system like in the future sky castle ones, lots of weapons to play with, and tons of food. It's basically Less Good SOTN, and that's okay!

But it's not SOTN. Your character moves like a real turd. Not quite like a classic Belmont, but she's slow and her backstep doesn't always work. The music is all fine, but none of it is memorable, and I ended up listening to podcasts for a lot of the endgame, where in SOTN, I'm always into that soundtrack. The graphics do not look good, all shiny and rounded in weird ways. Even the backgrounds that are supposed to provide the illusion of this castle stretching on forever look flat and weird.

There is also a LOT of grinding that you have to do to succeed, because most of the bosses are frustrating and a few areas have huge difficulty spikes (if you love grinding and you did all the grinding to get all shards to 9 and all the food etc, more power to you, but god damn I just can't imagine doing that).

They frequently move faster than you, have short tells, hit hard, and often require more than one try to figure them out. This is fine for SOME bosses, but in Bloodstained, this is true of all of them, including the first one. You never get that feeling of being okay enough at the game to feel successful, and even by the end I always felt irritated coming across a boss door. I was supposed to feel anxiety mixed with confidence, but instead, I was already mad about a boss fight before it had even started.

There are just so many weird places that the designers seemed to turn their brains off. The passport is a perfect example. At no time is it set up for the player that the people you meet may have pertinent information for you. Dominque and Johannes sometimes tell you stuff after you visit them, but the none of the other villagers ever talk about anything besides their quests. So how I was supposed to even think that Alucard was going to give me a passport if I had a photograph of myself? It's insane, NES era logic, which is inexcusable in a game that has endless memory and space for scripts and hints. And that's just the start.

Special moves require more perfect precision, rendering them useless. invert does as well, which pushed me to the D-pad to make sure I could pull it off more than 50% of the time. There are an endless amount of weapons, but most of them never have a reason to be used. Why would I use boots for anything when they are never as strong as a faster weapon with longer distance? In SOTN, the punch weapons felt like they were included because someone had fun programming it in, and it was the beginning of a new era of programming, so they were just tucked away in there. But here, they feel like they are here because, well SOTN had punching so we have to too!

But they DON'T have to too! All they had to do was make a good game, but they were too focused on making a game that had already been made that they just couldn't pull it off. In comparison, the Record of Lodoss War game that came out a few years back was not only an excellent SOTN clone, it was shorter and tighter, offering an evolution of the form.

Bloodstained is regressive and irritating, an attempt to be something that already exists instead of being something fresh that reminds us of that thing that already exists. Like how the Castelvania III Bloodstained game was! That was a fresh, new, tightly programmed game that made me remember Castlevania III without being beholden to Castlevania III! And that's what I was hoping this would be. Oh well.

I was very excited for this game when I first read about it in Nintendo Power, but never actually ended up owning it. I got a SNES not long after this came out, but it never got on my wishlists (Final Fantasy Mystic Quest did... maybe I'll replay that one soon...).

Because I rented this instead of owned it, for many years, I only ever made it to the dolls, which feels like it should be halfway through, but is instead only about a third. Eventually, I borrowed it from a friend and completed it, some time after Final Fantasy III came out, and after playing (and replaying) FF III, this one was a bit rough...

At the time, as we didn't get FF II or III, this did feel like a second entry in the series. It referred back to the first entry plenty, but within a completely, unrelated story. We got the four fiends, we got the music and scrolling text post-prologue, we got the rat tail, we got the vehicles, we got the crystals, it was all there.

But this time, there was also MORE! A LOT more! And while much of that "more" is clumsy, at least they tried to really push the SNES to its limits (its 1991 limits, at least).

There are a ton of playable characters, but they come and go, and sometimes never come back. Plot points are raced through in order to get to the next section or story beat, and then sometimes they just draaaaaag (the robot walking just takes for fucking ever).

But it's beautiful and the music is great, and there's no way to actually describe what it was like to see everything we loved from the first entry, but in 16 bits. It was revelatory.

I will say, while the DS complete remake of this entry is much better in just about every way, I prefer this version for one reason: The Tower of Zot/Babel. For whatever stupid reason, Square started to undo the sci-fi elements they put into their entries. The Tower of Zot was like the flying castle in the first game: a sudden surprise. Here we are in this fantasy world, and suddenly there's future tech (see also: Might and Magic III)? That was a shock, and Square just made the tower into a brown, dusty tower. Boring as shit.