Games Beaten 2024

[Note]

1. Lufia & the Fortress of Doom (SNES)
2. OutRun 2 SP (PS2)
3. Dynamite Cop (DC)*
4. Soul Calibur (DC)*
5. Melfand Stories (SFC)
6. Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals (SNES)
7. Dynamite Cop (Arcade)*
8. Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil (PS2)
9. Kishin Douji Zenki FX: Vajra Fight (PC-FX)
10. Wild Arms (PS1)
11. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX (GBC)
12. Lucky & Wild (Arcade)
13. Ico (PS2)
14. Champions of Norrath (PS2)
15. OutRunners (GEN)
16. Final Fantasy Adventure (GB)



17. OverBlood (PS1)

My experience with OverBlood started at a Software Etc. in the Cross County Mall, where I saw the game available on one of the rare instances where I had spending money to purchase a game outside of the holidays as a kid. The game seemed to be a sci-fi survival horror title in the same style as Resident Evil, and RE was a game I really liked, so I went for it.

OverBlood didn't click with me back then. I had a tough time with the puzzles and without a guide or much help from friends or family, I kept getting stuck. A buddy of mine was also interested in it, and I ended up selling my childhood copy to him back then. However, he also got stuck at a certain point. OverBlood became this mysterious and mythical oddity in our friendship that we couldn't crack. So, all these years later, it feels great to take another go at it and finally beat it. For this playthrough, it took me about just under six hours to finish.

OverBlood is a survival horror game, but it plays out fairly differently than Resident Evil or others in the genre on the PS1. The emphasis is on elemental puzzles, with enemies coming few and far between. You have the ability to control three different characters, including a small robot nicknamed Pipo, who can interact with additional aspects of the facility and get into spaces that the others can't. Regarding controls, you have a button to duck, so that you can inspect things on the ground and crawl, and you also have a button to jump, which is needed for some frustrating platforming segments. You also have the ability to change the camera angle to a more zoomed out view or a first person view. The additional camera angles do help in certain segments, but in general the camera can be a pain.

One interesting design choice is that you do not have an inventory limit, so you don't have to worry about item management. This seems like a luxury in comparison to the early RE games, but scrolling through all your items can be a chore.The game does not pause while you're looking at your items, so I found it tough to use a health aid or equip a weapon during a fight sequence. During most of the adventure, a health bar is not present; however, during specific segments, one will pop up, which notifies you of imminent danger. Another difference is that once you find the item you need to save, you can save at any point. This is a nice feature, especially when instant deaths are lurking. I saved quite often.

There are also some brief platforming segments and a few instances that are similar to quick time events, except you do not get a hint for what you need to press. You'll have to figure it out through trial and error. Regarding the few sequences where you need to make fairly accurate jumps, this is one of the areas I had trouble with, but eventually I managed to do it perfectly, the way OverBlood demands. The controls are quite rough for a game that requires precision at certain points, which is one of my main criticisms. The few combat sequences also control pretty rough and for the most part don't instill that sense of dread that other games in the genre do, until perhaps the final showdown.

OverBlood does have an interesting plot with a few twists, so I have to give it credit for keeping me intrigued. Also, I thought the voice acting was pretty good for the era. There are some cheesy moments and funny lines, but I think it holds up fairly well. The music here is also on point, and it adds to the lonely atmosphere of traversing through a mostly abandoned facility.

Overall, I'm really happy to finally beat this bucket list game that had gotten the best of my friend and I for many years! I would only recommend OverBlood for fans of the survival horror genre, as the game's flaws are pretty hard to overlook. However, if you can deal with a title that is rough around the edges, there's a unique and interesting adventure to experience here.

[BEEGROOW]

I don't usually have a lot of time playing games, so I intermittently finished the Mafia trilogy. I think, except for the low degree of freedom, the plot of the third installment completely exceeded my expectations.

[PartridgeSenpai]

See, I always enjoyed and was pretty good at the NES Baseball games and I kind of thought it would be like one of those. Unfortunately, it was not and I was disappointed in the game. Maybe someday in the future I will go back into it and try it again, but I think that will be a long time. I just saw no incentive to keep on playing.

I mean, if the Japanese copies are like really cheap, then maybe it would be fun. But, I have seen the games you are beating and those seem much more enjoyable.

I had a lot of fun with stuff like RBI Baseball on the NES too when I was little!
I also have one of Konami's Power Pro games on the N64 to get to eventually, so I have at least one baseball game to play around here if I wanna already x3

You're probably right that the other stuff I'm playing is a much more fun use of my time though, hard to fault you there X3

[MrPopo]

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023

1. Tormented Souls - Switch
2. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II - PC
3. Fantasy Empires - PC
4. Vagrant Story - PS1
5. Might and Magic 7: For Blood and Honor - PC
6. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown - Switch
7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project - NES
8. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth - PS5
9. Tomb Raider Remastered - PC
10. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth - PS5
11. Unicorn Overlord - Switch
12. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries: Solaris Showdown - PC
13. Princess Peach: Showtime - Switch
14. Fida Puti Samurai - PC
15. Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money - PC
16. Fallout New Vegas: Honest Hearts - PC
17. Fallout New Vegas: Old World Blues - PC
18. Wrath: Aeon of Ruin - PC
19. Fallout New Vegas: Lonesome Road - PC
20. Super Buff HD - PC
21. SaGa Emerald Beyond - Switch
22. Blasphemous 2 - Switch
23. Trepang2 - PC
24. Homeworld 3 - PC
25. Blood West - PC
26. Marathon - PC
27. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord - PC
28. Little Kitty, Big City - PC
29. Dread Delusion - PC
30. Alan Wake 2: Night Springs - PC
31. PO'ed: Definitive Edition - PC
32. Space Cats Tactics - PC
33. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree - PS5
34. Balatro - PC
35. Afterimage - Switch
36. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak - PS5
37. Lords of Exile - Switch
38. Infernax - Switch
39. Gravity Circuit - Switch
40. Doom 2: No Rest for the Living - PC
41. Doom 2: Legacy of Rust - PC
42. Doom 2: Master Levels - PC
43. The Lost Vikings 2 - PC
44. Visions of Mana - PS5
45. Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered - Switch
46. Warhammer 40000: Space Marine 2 - PC
47. Doom 2: TNT Evilution - PC
48. WrestleQuest - Switch

WrestleQuest is an RPG that serves as a giant love letter to the golden age of professional wrestling. It's full of references both to wrestling culture and cameos from a large number of wrestling icons of that era. It's also a giant technical and design mess, and never have I played a game that I so wanted to love but so disliked the execution.

WrestleQuest features two protagonists: the Muchaco Man Randy Santos and Brett Hart-expy Brink Logan. The Muchaco Man believes in his heart of hearts that wrestling is an unscripted contest between good and evil, and he wants to be the greatest hero of all. Brink Logan is a jobber for his wrestling family who is looking to finally be able to make a name for himself and his technical wrestling style. The two exist in the world of the Toybox. And it's here that the game has its first really weird decision. All the characters and environs are based off of a world where everything is a toy, a la Toy Story. But unlike Toy Story, there is absolutely no reference to any sort of humans. Like, there's a bunch of potential implications to a world like this that are completely unexamined. You just have a bunch of different character aesthetic styles (Lego figures next to Barbie dolls next to GI Joe next to animal toys) and a bunch of references to the facts of everything being toys. It doesn't have any actual impact on the narrative told, it's just an aesthetic choice, and I don't understand why.

The world is divided into several different wrestling promotions, resembling the days before the WWE swallowed everything up. And the WWE stand-in is the PAW promotion, led by the promoter L. F. Font, sometimes known as the Helephant. The Helephant wants to expand the PAW promotion to all corners of the Toybox and have everything follow his scripts. Yes, he is very obviously Vince McMahon, and the comparison gets even more on the nose at the end of the game when he hulks out.

Mechanically, you have the standard RPG stuff. The fights all take place in a wrestling ring, with a crowd watching. You can attack, use items, use a special move (a gimmick), or taunt, which reduces your defense for a turn but builds crowd hype. Hype is one of the ways the game plays into the wrestling theme. As hype goes up, you gain bonuses, while if it goes down enough you take penalties. It represents whose side the crowd is on, an important part of professional wrestling. The gimmicks involve various wrestling moves, like DDTs and flying elbow drops. The game involves timed hits, but with the twist that while the timing on them is always the same, the button you press is not. Personally, I wasn't a fan of this, especially when sometimes the penalty for missing a button was an instant KO. The game doesn't give you good feedback on which moves to use; often they are multi-hit with timing, so you can't follow the damage you do because you need to wait to see what button you need to press. There is no "move power" stat given to the player, and most frustrating of all, you can't see enemy health except in the moment after you deal damage (the bar shows up, goes down, and disappears). You're left to just assume that the more expensive stuff is better. This also means that after you gain a few levels and stop being resource constrained you stop using most of your arsenal. The tutorial claims that you need to mix it up to generate the most hype, but this is patently false; a given move generates a given amount of hype no matter what.

The game's narration has a tendency to meander. It bounces between the two protagonists, but not always at moments that make sense from a flow perspective. And at one point it introduces a third POV for a while before it merges back into one of the two main lines. And that third POV could have been part of one of the main lines from the get-go. The cast is quite large; at the end of the game you traverse the final dungeon with three parties, and you still will have characters on the bench. The cast could have used some trimming, and that's just from a narrative perspective; several of them are extremely underwhelming from a gameplay side as well.

The biggest issue the game has is the technical problems. Now, some of these have been patched on the Steam version, but that hasn't made it to consoles yet; my assumption is they're waiting to be final before submitting a single console patch due to the price of certification. For starters, the game just straight up does zero asset caching. So every time you trigger a fight, it needs to load the assets for combat into memory from disk, which takes a couple seconds. This is the kind of thing you used to see in PS1 RPGs that were pulling from a slow CD-drive; it should not be occurring on a modern game on an SD-card or something similar. There's also some sort of memory leak going on; the game will crash regularly after a scene transition, whether that's combat to field or from one field screen to the next (oh yeah, every screen transition is also a couple seconds). I've even seen hiccups mid combat because I triggered an event that seemed to require a load of a sound that wasn't already in memory. This is simply jank when it triggers when I instant-KO something, but it's actively a problem when it happens during the pin-attempt timing minigame. All of this unoptimized loading and crashes also means the player is going to actively avoid any of the quests related to backtracking, as it isn't worth the headache. And one final bug that ends up being in the player's favor if they realize it. When you game over you're given the option to load a most recent (auto)save or to go to title. If you load the save you will discover your party's equipment has been reset to their default equipment when they join. However, all their stats will be identical to what it was when you got into that combat. That's right; instead of storing characters in one data structure with base stats and then having a list of equipment and composing that to have the final stats for any calculations, they store only the final modified values and do the addition/subtraction when you change a piece of gear. What this means is a game over followed by equipping a copy of whatever gear you lost to the bug means you've now increased your stats quite beyond what the game is expecting. I realized the second half of this bug was occurring when I noticed the stats for one team was far higher than the other, as the one team had run into some bullshit instant-death stuff. I actually was able to one-shot end game bosses due to having stacked my stats to about 3x what the game was expecting in an honest playthrough.

All in all, this is a deeply flawed game that is built on top of a genuine love for the subject matter. I cannot stress enough how much the devs are massive wrestling fans who wanted to share that love with everyone else. They just didn't have the chops to pull it off. If you do decide to give this a try, go for the Steam version, as the console version is a mess.

[MrPopo]

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023

1. Tormented Souls - Switch
2. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II - PC
3. Fantasy Empires - PC
4. Vagrant Story - PS1
5. Might and Magic 7: For Blood and Honor - PC
6. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown - Switch
7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project - NES
8. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth - PS5
9. Tomb Raider Remastered - PC
10. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth - PS5
11. Unicorn Overlord - Switch
12. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries: Solaris Showdown - PC
13. Princess Peach: Showtime - Switch
14. Fida Puti Samurai - PC
15. Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money - PC
16. Fallout New Vegas: Honest Hearts - PC
17. Fallout New Vegas: Old World Blues - PC
18. Wrath: Aeon of Ruin - PC
19. Fallout New Vegas: Lonesome Road - PC
20. Super Buff HD - PC
21. SaGa Emerald Beyond - Switch
22. Blasphemous 2 - Switch
23. Trepang2 - PC
24. Homeworld 3 - PC
25. Blood West - PC
26. Marathon - PC
27. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord - PC
28. Little Kitty, Big City - PC
29. Dread Delusion - PC
30. Alan Wake 2: Night Springs - PC
31. PO'ed: Definitive Edition - PC
32. Space Cats Tactics - PC
33. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree - PS5
34. Balatro - PC
35. Afterimage - Switch
36. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak - PS5
37. Lords of Exile - Switch
38. Infernax - Switch
39. Gravity Circuit - Switch
40. Doom 2: No Rest for the Living - PC
41. Doom 2: Legacy of Rust - PC
42. Doom 2: Master Levels - PC
43. The Lost Vikings 2 - PC
44. Visions of Mana - PS5
45. Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered - Switch
46. Warhammer 40000: Space Marine 2 - PC
47. Doom 2: TNT Evilution - PC
48. WrestleQuest - Switch
49. Doom 2: The Plutonia Experiment - PC

Plutonia is the other half of Final Doom, made by a couple of the mappers who worked on TNT Evilution. Like TNT, it's 32 levels of Doom 2 mayhem. Unlike TNT, its mission in life is to kick the player in the nads over and over. At the time, Plutonia set out to be the hardest Doom mod ever, and it succeeded. Now, it's not hard for the right reasons most of the time, but there are moments here and there where the difficulty is fair and fun.

Plutonia's hallmark is the fact that it tosses out a shitton of Chaingunners, Revenants, and Arch Viles. There are almost as many Revenants as Imps, and you will learn to hate them with the fury of a thousand suns. The Chaingunners are mostly used to drain player health in either large packs around corners or as a prime trap enemy. Speaking of traps, the game is full of them. You step past a part of the floor, either a bunch of closets open or a bunch of enemies spawn in. Often, these traps will just kill you if you don't have the right weapon out in anticipation. While sometimes it creates large combat arenas that reward good movement and triggering infighting, other times you're just hoping you don't lose too much health in the process. I will say, the maps do understand how much pain they toss out and are not stingy with health and armor, including the mega sphere and mega armor.

Compared to TNT Evilution, the level design involves smaller levels and a general lack of thematic coherence. It really feels like just a bunch of levels the authors thought were interesting, without trying to do any sort of storytelling through the level progression like the original Doom campaigns did. I will say, though, that it doesn't overuse darkness like TNT did.

Overall, Plutonia is hard in a way that often is unfun. When the umpteenth trap triggers and you get killed in two seconds because you didn't have the right weapon out (since Doom weapon swap is surprisingly slow) you'll wonder if it's worth forcing your way through. It does get somewhat easier near the end, and its Icon of Sin fight isn't the worst; better than Doom 2's, worse than TNT's (in that TNT is trivial and Icon of Sin is fundamentally boring, so at least you get it done quickly).

[elricorico]

1. Sonic Lost World (WiiU)
2. Kirby and the Forgotten Land (NS)
3. Kinect Adventures (XB360)
4. Metal Slug (PC)
5. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (SNES)
6 Modnation Racers (PSP)
7. Mario Kart 8DX - Expansion Pass (NS)
8. Splatoon! (WiiU)
9. Tactics Ogre:Let us Cling Together (PSP)
10. Sackboy, A Big Adventure (PS4)

11. Mutation Nation (PC)

It has been a while since I've posted so it's time to catch up. These will likely be short and sweet. Mutation Nation was a Neo Geo beat-em-up I had got for free on Amazon Prime Gaming. I was looking for a reason to hook up my arcade stick and this fit the bill. Credit fed my way through. Action was pretty solid and the graphics were good for the time it was made. I liked the enemy sprites quite a bit. It did get a little repetitive and the boss rush at the end felt a bit much, but overall it was worth a playthrough.

12. Bad News Baseball (NES)

I picked up this cart for cheap at a recent garage sale. NES Baseball games struck a chord with me growing up, Little League Baseball and Baseball Stars both got a ton of playing time in my youth. This one plays about as well as those two do. Beating it means beating each of the teams once in a round robin type setup. Once I got the hang of it most games went smoothly, but there was a few times where it seemed the computer decided it was just going to destroy me and the opponent starting hitting back to back homeruns no matter what pitch I threw.

I had a good time with it though, the controls are solid and the little cut scenes are cute. Worth a play if you like 8 bit baseball. I didn't keep this after beating it though, sold it locally for someone else to enjoy.

13. Star Ocean First Departure (PSP)

I've had this in my collection for a long while. I recently picked up the Second Story remake and it made me realize that even though I owned several Star Ocean games, I'd never played through a single one, so I decided to start from the beginning. 2024 has also been a bit of a PSP revival for me.

This game took a while to grow on me. I never really felt like I understood all the skill systems(crafting and art and music etc), and I found that the amount of backtracking to move the story along felt excessive. However the battles were fast paced and felt didn't get old. Once I got a larger party I enjoyed switching out and trying different team combinations. The story took an odd turn at the end where the endgame actually felt a bit more like "post-game" to me. By the end I feel like this was a solid RPG that was a little dated, but still worth a playthrough if you've been enjoying RPGs since the late 80's like I have.

14. Star Tropics (Switch)

I got Star Tropics for Christmas one year as a kid, and I never beat it on the original NES. Of the 8 Chapters I got stuck on the 6th and eventually gave up. My sister got to Chapter 7, but that cartridge never did roll the credits. I had recently been listening to a couple of the songs from that game(classic NES music in my opinion) and decided to take a crack at playing this on the Switch's online library.

I really enjoyed the first 2/3rds of this game. It felt well paced and I remembered many of the puzzles from my youth. Difficulty really ramped up in Chapter 6, and Chapter 7 was pretty brutal in spots. By the late game I was heavily abusing the rewind function. Eventually I persevered though, and it was nice to feel the closure of rolling the credits on this game. There is no way I would have put in the efforts to beat it without save states/rewind though. Even with those things I did have a moment where I had to put the Switch down and walk away before frustration got too much for me.

Still, pretty high on my list of great games for the NES, but certainly one that was "Nintendo hard" for me.

[REPO Man]

Beat Mortal Kombat 1's story mode yesterday on PS5.

[Raging Justice]

Animal Well - Switch



Animal Well is a Metroid game that has some nice puzzles and some tricky platforming. It also has an interesting world populated by many interesting forms of wild life, often leaving you wondering whether or not new creatures you encounter are hostile, friendly, or neutral. It's also an immersive game that uses very little music, giving it an atmosphere kind of like the original Tomb Raider.

On the negative side, it has a frustrating lack of save points and no checkpoint system, and too much backtracking without enough fast travel options. You also have limited resources leaving you frustrated when you need to use an item, but already wasted it in a previous room.

The game is also obnoxiously vague and ambiguous, often leaving you uncertain where to go next, what to do next, or how you are supposed to deal with certain threats. There were several times I find myself tempted to go online for help when playing this game, before stumbling onto what to do just through sheer dumb luck or trial and error.

It's a mixed bag of a game with a lot of good and a lot of bad. It's being heavily overrated by a lot of people. I'd rate it a 6 or 7 given the large amount of options people have today when it comes to Metroid games

[MrPopo]

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023

1. Tormented Souls - Switch
2. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II - PC
3. Fantasy Empires - PC
4. Vagrant Story - PS1
5. Might and Magic 7: For Blood and Honor - PC
6. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown - Switch
7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project - NES
8. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth - PS5
9. Tomb Raider Remastered - PC
10. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth - PS5
11. Unicorn Overlord - Switch
12. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries: Solaris Showdown - PC
13. Princess Peach: Showtime - Switch
14. Fida Puti Samurai - PC
15. Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money - PC
16. Fallout New Vegas: Honest Hearts - PC
17. Fallout New Vegas: Old World Blues - PC
18. Wrath: Aeon of Ruin - PC
19. Fallout New Vegas: Lonesome Road - PC
20. Super Buff HD - PC
21. SaGa Emerald Beyond - Switch
22. Blasphemous 2 - Switch
23. Trepang2 - PC
24. Homeworld 3 - PC
25. Blood West - PC
26. Marathon - PC
27. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord - PC
28. Little Kitty, Big City - PC
29. Dread Delusion - PC
30. Alan Wake 2: Night Springs - PC
31. PO'ed: Definitive Edition - PC
32. Space Cats Tactics - PC
33. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree - PS5
34. Balatro - PC
35. Afterimage - Switch
36. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak - PS5
37. Lords of Exile - Switch
38. Infernax - Switch
39. Gravity Circuit - Switch
40. Doom 2: No Rest for the Living - PC
41. Doom 2: Legacy of Rust - PC
42. Doom 2: Master Levels - PC
43. The Lost Vikings 2 - PC
44. Visions of Mana - PS5
45. Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered - Switch
46. Warhammer 40000: Space Marine 2 - PC
47. Doom 2: TNT Evilution - PC
48. WrestleQuest - Switch
49. Doom 2: The Plutonia Experiment - PC
50. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom - Switch

Echoes of Wisdom is the latest in the Zelda series, and for a first (not counting the CD-i games), you get to play as Zelda, not Link. It's something the fanbase has been wanting for decades, and now we finally get to experience it. And I gotta say, it manages to be both familiar and new in a way that doesn't just have Zelda be "Link but girl".

The game begins in media res; Link is diving into a dungeon to rescue Zelda from Ganon. However, after Ganon's demise a black portal opens up beneath Link. As he's sucked in he fires an arrow at the crystal imprisoning Zelda, freeing her. After escaping and returning to the castle, Zelda finds another portal opens in the throne room, swallowing her father and his ministers. However, this time it spits out three evil duplicates, who have her imprisoned under the accusation of being the one who is opening the rifts across the land. While in prison, a spirit comes up to Zelda and informs her that they and their friends are able to close the rifts, but something has been stopping it. The spirit Tri gives Zelda a magic staff which has the power to remember objects and conjure them later. Using this, Zelda breaks free and begins her journey to get to the bottom of the rift problem, as well as rescuing everyone captured by them.

The primary mechanic is the learning and conjuring of echoes. Initially you will be learning pieces of furniture, such as stepstools and boxes that can be used to create stairs over barriers, and beds to create bridges across long gaps. But once you take out your first monsters with some thrown rocks you discover that you can learn to conjure defeated enemies as well. You can learn to conjure every single non-boss enemy in the game, and they are your prime means of dealing with enemies. You can only conjure a limited number of objects at a time; it's based on your progression through the game and the relative usefulness of the objects. A powerful enemy can potentially use all of your capacity, but it's worth it.

There's one other very important mechanic; you have the ability to have your spirit grab onto nearly any moveable object and move it around at a distance; upon grabbing you will maintain a constant distance (minus any adjustments when the object runs into a wall), which is used for many bits of puzzle solving. But you also can change the polarity so that instead the monster moves you at that constant distance. Combining these two with your conjured items gives you a ton of mobility options, and once the world begins to open up after the forced intro you are pretty much free to go wherever based on your cleverness. In fact, this combination of summoning objects/enemies and the manipulation shows the game is a fusion of traditional 2D Zeldas and Tears of the Kingdom.

The game has a lot to discover, and it's a real joy to discover a new enemy and try it out. The dungeons are very classic in their structure; they make use of specific categories of summons (e.g. fire), but don't usually require any one particular kind. And it does a good job of the expected railroading while letting you come up with interesting solutions in individual rooms. The bosses use the classic "deal damage in a certain way to put them in stun, then wail on them", but now you make use of your summons and strategic pulling.

Overall, Echoes of Wisdom is an incredibly strong title that rewards creativity and has Zelda handle differently from Link, while still having an overall familiar game loop. I highly recommend this one to everyone.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2024 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat

1~50

1. Terranigma (SFC)
2. Eastward (PC)
3. Pulse (PC)
4. Lost Ruins (PC)
5. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (PC)
6. Dropsy (PC)
7. Call of Juarez Gunslinger (PC)
8. Pokemon Ruby (GBA) *
9. Secret of Mana (SFC)
10. Fire Watch (PC)
11. Bokura (PC)
12. Romancing SaGa (SFC)
13. Trials of Mana (SFC)
14. Castlevania Legends (GB)
15. SaGa 2 (GB)
16. SaGa 3 (GB)
17. Celeste (PC)
18. Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit (PC)
19. Celeste 64 (PC)
20. CB Chara Wars: Ushinawareta Gya~gu (SFC)
21. To The Moon (PC)
22. LOVE (PC)
23. Pikuniku (PC)
24. Night in the Woods (PC)
25. The Beginner's Guide (PC)
26. Suikoden (PS1)
27. Chocobo Dungeon 2 (PS1)
28. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Advance! Fire Adventure Team (Wii)
29. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Go! Storm Adventure Team (Wii)
30. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Aim! Light Adventure Team (Wii)
31. Line Attack Heroes (Wii)
32. The Quest for Camelot (GBC)
33. Tales of Destiny (PS1)
34. Metal Walker (GBC)
35. Frog Detective 1 (PC)
36. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team (GBA) *
37. Frog Detective 2 (PC)
38. Frog Detective 3 (PC)
39. Super Robot Wars Alpha for Dreamcast (DC)
40. Brain Lord (SFC)
41. Lagoon (SFC)
42. Dark Hunter: Jou Ijigen Gakuen (PS1)
43. Ys: Books I & II (PCE)
44. Ys III: Wanderers From Ys (SFC)
45. Ys IV: Mask of the Sun (SFC)
46. Dark Hunter: Ge Youma No Mori (PS1)
47. Ys V - Expert (SFC)
48. Jaseiken: Necromancer (PCE)
49. Paladin's Quest (SFC)
50. Adventures of Lolo (NES)

51. Adventures of Lolo (Famicom)
52. Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES)
53. Adventures of Lolo II (Famicom)
54. Adventures of Lolo 3 (NES)
55. Kickle Cubicle (NES)
56. Adventures of Lolo (GB)
57. Cocoron (Famicom)
58. The Darkness (PS3)
59. Haze (PS3)
60. Animaniacs (GB)
61. Lair (PS3)
62. Bionic Commando (PS3)
63. Donkey Kong Land (GB)
64. Darkwing Duck (NES)
65. Donkey Kong Land III (GBC)
66. Donkey Kong Land 2 (GB)
67. Metroid II (GB) *
68. Pokemon: Brilliant Diamond (Switch)
69. Eggerland (FDS)
70. Eggerland: Meikyuu no Fukkatsu (Famicom)
71. Eggerland: Souzou he no Tabidachi (FDS)
72. Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima (SFC)
73. Legendary Starfy (GBA) *
74. Legendary Starfy 2 (GBA)
75. Tales of the Abyss (PS2) *
76. Tales of the Tempest (DS)
77. Tales of Eternia (PS1)
78. Nier: Replicant (PS3)
79. Tales of Symphonia (PS3) *
80. Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (PS3)
81. Tales of Zestiria (PS3)

82. Tales of Berseria (PS3)

After finishing Tales of Zestiria, it was right onto this game. The whole reason I played through the decidedly flawed Zestiria was so I could play through this game alongside my spouse (who has played through it before years ago), and I was really excited to see a game that I’ve heard so much good about. I haven’t heard all that much collective good about the post-Xillia 1 Tales games, so this being considered the stand-out best of the pack has always piqued my curiosity. It took a while (about twice as long as it took my spouse XD), but I finished it! It took me a little over 70 hours to finish the Japanese version of the game on real hardware while doing nearly every side-quest I could possibly find.

Tales of Berseria follows the story of Velvet. Several years after her older sister died, she’s been living peacefully with her little brother Laphi and her brother-in-law Arthur in their very rural village. However, one day, a terrible incident robs her of the both of them and sees her cursed with demonic powers and imprisoned for it. Three years later, a familiar face breaks her out, and she sets onwards on her path of revenge for that which was taken from her.

Berseria is a prequel to Zestiria by several thousand years, and it even shares a main writer with that game, so I’ll admit that my expectations were fairly reserved going into this despite the fairly consistent praise I’d heard for this game. This game’s writing isn’t exactly perfect, but it’s still pretty damn good! Berseria is a much better considered, plotted, and executed story than Zestiria was in just about every way. At its most surface level, it’s a story about emotion versus reason, but beneath the surface, it’s a very thoughtful and well told story about the murky lines between good and evil (especially about what is societally determined as “good” and “evil”) as well as finding meaning in being alive and what you’re fighting for. It’s a really enjoyable story that’s full of well-written characters and funny moments, and it was something I had a far easier time just enjoying than I did with Zestiria’s unfinished pile of wasted potential.

Berseria’s biggest writing problems are in a very literal sense “meaningful”, as in, “they meaningfully hinder the story from being excellent, but they don’t get in the way nearly enough for it to not be at least great”. There are a few main characters who aren’t really thematically relevant the way the more strongly written characters are, and many of the antagonists just aren’t that deep or connected enough to the story to really say much with them. That’s not to say that the game spends a lot of time just spinning its wheels and not doing much, because there’s frankly nearly nothing I figure you could cut, but I still think that there’s a lot of wasted potential in certain characters and thematic aspects that don’t feel fully explored.

On that point, the unifying thing behind nearly all of the narrative issues I had with the game were things tied to this being a prequel to Zestiria (at least the things that the localization doesn’t struggle with by virtue of the difficulty of translating Buddhist-grounded societal ideas around “sin” vs. the more prominent English-language Christian-grounded ones). Even though we’re narratively far enough removed from Zestiria that even the few returning characters can be reframed to be better used in this story than they were in that one, the one major thing this story can just never escape is Zestiria’s clumsy world building. Exactly what the corruption is and how it forms as well as how the demons/monsters exist (and why) is handled *far* better in Berseria than it is in Zestiria. I’d consider it a fool’s errand to try and argue otherwise. However, the fact remains that there are a variety of thematic through lines that we really can’t follow through to a logical conclusion cleanly because the fundamentals of how the setting operates prevents us from getting a clean answer there. It’s hardly a world-ending problem for the game’s writing, of course, but it’s a major self-inflicted obstacle that we’re stuck with by virtue of being Zestiria’s prequel that better put together Tales games like Abyss or Graces didn’t need to deal with.

Mechanically, this game is mercifully a massive step forward from Zestiria and cleans away just about all the clutter it possibly could from Zestiria’s very troubled systems. First of all, while we’re still having fights that take place in the environment we’re in on the map, dungeon design has been significantly improved since Zestiria and they feel far less cookie-cutter and copy/paste than they used to (it’s still there, granted, but far less frequently). Environment designs on the whole have been really significantly improved, and this game manages to thankfully free itself from the huge, overly empty spaces that Zestiria is lousy with. There’s still a bit of an issue with your default movement speed being a *bit* too slow in the early game, sure, but that’s a far less significant problem than the ones we were dealing with in the previous game.

Another very important change is with the combat which has mercifully been given the fixes it so direly needed. We still don’t have a mana system and used a combo and refresh-based system like the past few Tales did, but we’re no longer stuck with a camera locked behind the player. Now the right analog stick controls the camera freely, and free running is on by default. This game takes to heart how nearly useless artes felt in Zestiria compared to your directional normal attacks, and now all four face buttons are connected to different combo strings that you can customize however you want as you unlock new moves by leveling up. The game also defaults to very widely applicable ones in case you’re like me and don’t feel like fine-tuning them each individually, but this game’s combat was so much more easy to get a hold of than Zestiria’s it was such a relief to have combat that regularly felt *fun* again.

Another aspect that I’m happy to report is that this game’s also a lot less focused on being difficult than Zestiria was, so it’s way easier for a less experienced action game player to have a fun, challenging time with this without bumping it down to easy mode. Overall, the mechanics are a desperately needed step forward that is overflowing with all of the innovations that Zestiria was trying to have but failed to execute on. If Zestiria was too much of a chore to play for you, then this will be a very welcome improvement basically from the word “go”.

Aesthetically, we’re not *too* far beyond Zestiria on the surface level, but there are a lot of more fundamental changes in this game’s designs that pay massive dividends in the ultimate execution. Most welcomely, we’re rid of the scads of really awkwardly and stiffly directed cutscenes that pack Zestiria’s story. In their place, we have a whole new approach to the long-running skit system that these games have had for decades. Less than half of the skits in the game are actually optional like usual. Those other 200+ skits are the bulk of the game’s main story cutscenes, and they’re brought to life through a new, more animated style of skit that really helps them carry the huge narrative weight that’s been placed upon them. The voice acting is great and the music is also quite good as normal, and even though the game’s visuals won’t exactly blow you away if you’re familiar with even another one or two of the more recent PS3 games in the series, it’s a game that at least looks a lot less shoddy and stilted than Zestiria did a lot of the time.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is easily the best Tales game available (at the time of writing) on modern hardware. It does a far better job than Zestiria ever did in being a 20th anniversary celebration of Tales games from nods and references to older games to just generally bringing the level of quality that the series had grown to bring fans to expect. While it may not be the best written game in the series, that’s a *really* high bar to clear, and the fact that it manages to come so close did a lot to restore my faith that Namco Bandai even *can* still make a great Tales game in this post-Namco Tales Studio era of the series. If you’ve been at all curious about the wider Tales series and don’t have the older consoles to try out the older great ones, this is just about the best you could possibly do to give the series a try in terms of games easily available on modern hardware.

83. Gargoyle's Quest II (Famicom)

I played the first and third games in this series years back, and I always planned to get around to playing this one too, but it just never fit into my budget. I waited so long to play this on real hardware, that I actually ended up totally forgetting about it until well after my ability to play it on real hardware was gone XD. Still, a friend of mine played through this recently, and that reminded me that it existed enough to finally get me to play it on something even if it isn’t real hardware X3. It took me around 2 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without using save states or rewinds.

Gargoyle’s Quest 2 is, as the name suggests, the second action/adventure game starring Capcom’s most infamous gargoyle: Fire Brand. This is yet another tale of him saving the underworld from the forces of the king of destruction, Breger (whose name looks so much more ridiculous in English than it does in Japanese <w> ), and there’s not a whole lot more to it than that. It’s a Famicom action/adventure game, so I wasn’t really going in expecting a whole heck of a lot, but this game doesn’t really raise the ante up any higher than its GameBoy predecessor did in this regard.

It also doesn’t raise it particularly higher in terms of mechanics either, to be brutally honest. In a very similar formula to Gargoyle’s Quest 1, you go from town to town talking to NPCs, sometimes gain some information on where to go next, and then carry on to the next 2D platforming stage between you and your ultimate goal. You’ll jump, fly, and fire all sorts of breath spells at enemies, and that stuff feels great to do as you’d expect in a Capcom game, which is nice at least. I’m very much a believer in “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but this game just seems somewhat perfunctory in just how middling the whole thing ends up being. My biggest problem isn’t really that this is too derivative of the previous game, I suppose, rather than it is in many ways just a less impressive game than that one ^^;

The game still has an inverse difficulty curve just as all three games in this series do, but this is probably the easiest of the three games on the whole. Stages are quite short and extra lives aren’t too hard to get, and even bosses tend to be pretty easy compared to the stages you’re going through to get to them. Heck, just the fact that you start with 3 health instead of 2 makes this game SO much easier than the first game despite the fact that random health drops from enemies don’t even exist in this game XD.

The biggest pain in the butt for difficulty are certain ability checks in the early game. There are a handful of places where, to test your proficiency with your newly enhanced flight, jump, or breath powers, the game puts a jump that you can JUST barely make. Not only that, but these jumps are usually the start of their respective stages and not some one-off challenge. Couple that in with how true save points (that being places where you get passwords from which you’ll respawn after running out of lives) are actually very uncommon, and you’ve got a recipe for needing to constantly redo these super annoying jumps just because you messed up somewhere along the line later on. I thankfully never had that much trouble with that stuff, but that was often more down to luck and very narrow victories than the game being in some way particularly generous.

Aesthetically, it’s a quite pretty game that doesn’t suffer from slowdown or flicker nearly as much as you might expect from so late a Famicom game with such big sprites. However, while the graphics are very pretty, the music is much more forgettable. Gargoyle’s Quest 1 has one of my favorite songs in a GameBoy game for its final boss’s castle, but this game’s final boss castle ended up being so unimpressive in graphics and music that I debated whether it was actually the final boss’s castle in the first place until I reached him at the end of it.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This isn’t a bad game by any means, even for a Famicom game, but it’s still just OK in terms of quality (particularly for a Capcom game). It honestly deserves at least some praise for being a quite forgiving game as far as Famicom action/adventure games go, but even if it’s on the *easier* side for an action game of this type, that doesn’t really translate to “better”. If you’re a big MegaMan fan on the Famicom, then this game is likely going to really fail to impress. I had heard that this was the weakest of the series, and that definitely turned out to be the case. Even if this game is decent for what it is, I’d still argue it’s likely not going to be worth your time unless you’re a really big fan of action/adventure games of the time and simply must have your curiosity sated. At the very least, I’m certainly glad that I never threw down the cash I would’ve needed to for a physical copy way back when XP