Look at all of you. Complaining about superfluous issues in your vidya. "Waaah, the story's unengaging! The aesthetics aren't as good as nocture/sj/whatever! They changed the gameplay! Too few save points! It looks ugly!" WHo fucking cares bro. This shit is the best playing megaten and it aint even fucking close. Does anything else really matter?

Perhaps blowing my load a little because I haven't fully completed it, but I think I can safely say this is the best game it probably could have been. Top notch gameplay, basically every change made to the battle system from 4 is objectively better (them removing smirk entirely, changing how light/dark attacks work, changes to buffs/debuffs, STATUS AILMENTS BEING ACTUALLY USEFUL).

And sure, maybe the story isn't as engaging as your personas and the like, but you know what this game has that those dont. Fucking cutscene direction. God, after playing FF10 and this I have no idea how the fuck people ever put up with peesona 5's decade long cutscenes of models standing there and doing absolutely nothing but a couple of stock animations. Jesus, jrpg fans have been putting up with that kind of shit for too long.

Anyway. Game's fun. Aesthetic's cool. Doi's design work has increased tenfold from 4a and SJR. I like running around the mountains collecting shit. Sidequests perfectly alleviate any need of grinding while giving you fun new content. Ratio. L. You fell off. Stan Bladee.

Nocturne has been one of my favorite games of all time for about 15 years now. Half of my lifetime at this point, so it's a very important game to me. It must not be as important to modern Atlus though, as they offloaded it to some 3rd party developer who made a lazily slapped together and inferior version they could use for a quick cash grab.

For $50 you get:

THE GOOD
+ The ability to manually choose inherited skills.

THE BAD
- Constant stutter before and after attack animations with particle effects that wasn't present in the PS2 original. (Bonus of more additional frame drops all over the place if you're on the switch version, too!)

- A new lighting system that is overblown and severely compromises the artistic vision of the game.

- A low effort dub that feels like it was recorded as a joke at points, which negatively impacts the atmosphere of the game. (thankfully this can be turned off, but the fact that it's on by default and is how most new players will experience the game is saddening)

- A questionable retranslated script. (Nekomata's Club Inferno dialogue has been sterilized, Incubus using an internet meme phrase that will seem dated in 5 years, ect)

- Music that is STILL compressed to high hell

- 4:3 non upscaled cutscenes that cause a jarring effect when it switches to one from the 16:9 gameplay.

- 30fps cap.

- The opportunity to buy additional day one paid DLC for a PS2 game.

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest (or Diddy Kong’s Quest, as I and many other illiterate 8 year olds knew it) was a game that held a powerful lustre for me as a kid. As a rascal raised on Diddy Kong Racing and attitudinal promotional artwork from Nintendo Official Magazine, I found that Diddy Kong projected untold levels of Cool that could be matched only by the almighty-90s Bart Simpson himself. Something about a baseball cap with Nintendo written on it was just so insanely Cool to me. My undeveloped baby brain could barely handle it! And he wore the cap backwards! And played the guitar while wearing his cap backwards! Oh, I wanted to be Diddy Kong so badly.

Despite being a prime child of the SNES era, I never owned a SNES. When my brother and I asked for a SNES for my birthday, my dad got us a NES by way of an honest money-saving mistake - he didn’t know the NES and the SNES were two entirely separate and incompatible computer game machines, which was a totally forgivable thing to believe in 1996. This was a long time ago, back in the days when “the Nintendo” really was just “the Nintendo” to almost everyone on the planet. Diddy Kong remained eternally out of reach.

Our friend up the road’s big brother did have a SNES though, and sometimes he let us all play it when he wasn’t calling us f#cking r#tards for not knowing about the 1-1 shortcut to Birdo in Super Mario Bros 2. He’d never let us play the good games, though - for some sadistic unknown big brother reason, we were always stuck with the Mickey Mouse platformers and Clayfighter and Mortal Kombat on the Super Game Boy. Diddy Kong’s Quest remained on the high shelves with the sticky magazines and the empty bottles of Jack Daniels that Big Brother had found in the bushes at the park, and I never plucked up the courage to take the cartridge down and replace Rocky Rodent with a game that Nintendo Official Magazine had once declared to be Certified: Awesome. All this ritual and ceremony for a video game about a monkey who played the guitar with his hat on the wrong way round only gave it more power. Diddy Kong’s Quest took up way more than 4MB of space in my soft little brain.

A few years later, I got on the internet. While scouring video game message boards in a vain attempt to find out when Super Mario 128 was coming to the Nintendo Dolphin, I found out about emulators and ROMs. A few weeks later, after workshopping a convincing story to tell the FBI when they raided my house for illegally downloading a video game, I got my first emulator and ROM - ZSNES, and my very own copy of donkey_kong_country_2_diddy_kongs_quest.zip. I played it for a couple of minutes, but was too afraid of a life spent in jail to really appreciate the momentousness of the occasion. A few days later, while looking for Bloody Roar: Primal Rage cheat codes, I discovered you could look up pictures of naked ladies on the internet. And I forgot about Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest.

A few years later, after many Youtube-watching 12 year olds harassed @NintendoAmerica about it every day on Twitter, Nintendo released Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest on the Nintendo Switch Online service, and a man in his thirties decided to play it for the first time. Properly, mind you. Without save states, or that really awkward rewind function - the one that’s not as useful as the rewind function that the man remembered using on ZSNES while drenched in guilt-ridden sweat during an illegal gaming session some decades prior.

Turns out that playing games properly is a fucking stupid idea. This game is a really fucking annoying piece of shit and I hate it. Diddy Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong Quest came out on the Nintendo Switch a year ago, and I’ve only just beaten it today. After much SHITting and FUCKing about how brutally unfair it is, I crawled the stupid backwards-capped guitar-playing prick Diddy Kong to a measly 40%ish completion stat. Fuck you and your game, Diddy Kong. Never meet your heroes, because you’ll only get your dick crushed by falling platforms.

It may be an annoying piece of shit, but it’s also a beautiful work of art. Beautiful in ways I probably wouldn’t have appreciated had I got it for my 9th birthday or snuck it into someone else’s SNES or tried to play it on a Compaq Presario 95’s keyboard. Elegant rotosprite work comes together with the best music that the SNES chip and David Wise were capable of to create a really unique dream-ape gamefeel. I don’t need to say much more than that about the game’s presentation - presumably most people on here have read that one Onion article that’s all like “Man Tasked With Making Score for a Monkey Riding a Swordfish Underwater Creates Transcendent Piece of Music” or whatever. Just don’t play it past the first few worlds if you want to preserve the crystalline beauty of the memory of your past. Some games are better played on your mind’s eye than a SNES.

I have one reason for writing this review.
In this "enhanced" port of the first two Peggle games for the DS, there are ten unlockable bonus levels. These levels are named "Flamingo Sqall", "Magician Girl", "Roar of the Ancients", "Egyptian Treasure", "Garden of Dewdrop", "Home Sweet Bjorn", "Satori", "Alien Attack!", "Yhtapelet", and "Bubbbbbbbbllle". As far as I am aware, this review will be the first mention of literally any of these levels by name on the current readily available english speaking internet. I just thought that was cool. There's basically no information about the weird exclusive content of this game. Shame, some of the background art for those levels (Yhtapelet and Satori in particular) are really cool.

Anyway, the game. It's Peggle. Peggle with slightly off physics, slightly modified levels, some slowdown, and some crusty ass graphics, but like, it's still Peggle. Still fun. Not as good as the standalone releases of the og game or nights, but good for what it is.

In some ways, this improves on the original, but in others not so much.

I find the combo system and the lack of pre-rendered backgrounds everywhere are a welcome change, but I really disliked the shift from gothic horror towards a more comedic approach, which just came off as lame and unfunny 100% of the time. It ends up causing a huge tonal clash when it expects you to suddenly take it seriously in dramatic moments. The result for me was just not caring at all about what was going on in the story, or about the characters themselves, which I found to be almost universally annoying.

There's some really terrible dungeon design at parts here as well. Some of them felt like a chore at times in a way the original never did for me. The SP system also seems much more lenient than the original, I basically never paid any attention to it and never really suffered any consequences because of it. I guess that could be considered a good thing since it was kind of irritating to manage before, but It makes me wonder why they even included it in the first place.

One thing that didn't change is how tiresome the judgment ring system starts to become over time. It's especially noticeable here since the game is a good bit longer.