Games Beaten 2025

Post by **marurun** » Wed May 07, 2025 10:27 am

MrPopo wrote: ↑Tue May 06, 2025 11:08 pm Some of the late game bosses get incredibly obnoxious with their mobility, forcing you to have to be completely reactive and making use of the perfect block mechanic to interrupt attack chains before they land damage on both sides of you faster than you can turn.

Thanks for this detailed review. I have a pretty good idea of exactly how I'd like this game, which is not much.

Wed May 07, 2025 12:01 pm

Limewater wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 2:01 pm
RobertAugustdeMeijer wrote: ↑Tue Apr 08, 2025 3:33 pm 18. Fantastic Dizzy
Stupid puzzles and annoying platforming are combined into something more than the sum of its parts. Perhaps the anticipation of seeing if your solution actually works is heightened by putting dexterous challenges in your way. And there's adorkable energy abound, as the Darling Brothers yet again shamelessly slap together a jury-rigged budget title according to a proven formula. While it is not recommended to be played, it should nevertheless never be forgotten.
5/10
Did you play this on real hardware?

If so, about how many tries did it take you to finish?

I have this game and like it, but it seems pretty rough to complete in three lives and no continues. It kind of becomes a chore working through all the early puzzles just to kill myself over and over again in the mine-carting. I'm trying to get a sense of how reasonable it is to complete in one sitting.

I've beaten Dizzy the Adventurer several times, but I get the strong impression it is by far the shortest and easiest Dizzy game.

Nah, emulation.
My girlfriend and I first tried the NES version but the spiders required crazy good timing. The Genesis version on the other hand was much easier. Not sure how hard the microcomputer versions are!

Wed May 07, 2025 12:08 pm

On Death's Gambit Afterlife:
"If you think this means that you can lock yourself out of the true ending through not being skilled enough, you're 100% right."

This is one of the best features of the game, imo. It's rare for an adventure game to have a fail state. Which is a shame

Electric Underground just released a video essay about this:
The Deepest Games are Dumb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOAU3SdJ68A

Post by **PartridgeSenpai** » Thu May 08, 2025 4:16 am

Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat

1~50

51. Wave Race 64 (N64)
52. Bakushou Jinsei 64: Mezase! Resort-ou (N64)

53. Mother (Famicom)

I’ve been a fan of the other games in the Mother series for a long time, but this is a game I’ve heard too many bad stories about for too long to have ever considered taking a crack at it. Even my retro gaming buddies who love old 8-bit RPG jank have told me to stay away from this one because it’s so rough, so if even they couldn’t tolerate it, what hope was there for me? XD. However, one of my partners is a huge fan of this game, and after talking with her last weekend about it, I decided to finally take the plunge. With a walkthrough open in one tab and a series of maps open in the other, I eventually found my way to the finish line. It took me around 18 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game via the Switch Online Famicom service only slightly abusing rewinds here and there.

Mother 1 is a game that opens a lot more straightforwardly strange than its sister titles. After an intro text crawl detailing a mysterious disappearance of a husband and wife from rural America around a century ago, you’re put into the shoes of Ninten, our main character, as the lamps and dolls in his house come to life and begin to attack him and his family. Finding a strange music box inside one of them, he sets out on a journey to find out just what is causing all this paranormal weirdness in his otherwise sleepy part of the world.

On one hand, Mother 1 is a pretty typical turn-based RPG out of Japan for the time in how memory limitations mean that we have only a precious amount of text with which to tell our story. On the other hand, this is also a much more weird and eccentric game than most others of the time too. Your main characters and party members are fairly light on characterization (as would be the case with Mother 2 after it), but the NPCs of the world have so much bizarre personality to them that it really helps make up for that a bit. This is a story about how love conquers all, but it’s a very different version of that kind of story than most others you’ll find out there (especially back on the Famicom), and I ultimately really like how this game tells its story.

I’m still not a massive fan of how story presentations are done in games this old (I need a bit more meat the bone to really get into a narrative), but I think Mother 1 saves its biggest moments for where they really matter, so it ends up mattering a lot less how thin things are most of the rest of the time. Even playing Mother 1, which has a significantly shortened ending compared to Earthbound Beginnings, I really love how they do the ending of this game, and I honestly wish Mother 2 had ended up borrowing more from it in that regard. I had never been able to appreciate it until now just how much of a reimagining of this game Mother 2 is of this game, and that new perspective makes me appreciate them both all that much more. This is still just a narrative of a Famicom RPG at the end of the day, so it’s certainly going to feel quite inferior to things you’d be getting even just a year or two later on 16-bit systems, but it still manages to stand out as something cool and worthwhile on the system nonetheless, and it's not hard to see why it has gained the following it has despite its difficulty.

And what a difficulty that is! This is a game infamous for how vindictive its design is even among fans of retro RPGs, and its really not hard to see why. On its face, this is quite simple and straightforward Dragon Quest clone of the time. You’ve got HP, MP, and a party of eventually 3 characters to tackle the challenges ahead. Much like Earthbound would later have, you’ve got a main character who’s more of an all-around type while you’ve then got a spell-casting girl and a spell-less boy who is good with special tools. Nothing here will be all that unfamiliar or difficult to figure out for even the most casual of retro RPG fans, but that just means that success is *that* much more dependent on both grinding and luck in the game’s harder areas.

The game’s dungeon design and world design are utterly unrestrained even for the time. Mt. Itoi, the game’s final dungeon, is a very infamous location full of brutally strong enemies who love flinging around instant-death spells, and even as well-deserved as that reputation is, it’s only the final challenge in a game packed with such areas. Maps are far, far too large and dungeons are far too labyrinthine to navigate quickly or reasonably. The signposting isn’t necessarily bad, as you’ll always have at least some person in some town mention an important location if you’re meant to go there, but the nature of the quest itself is so nonlinear that it’s frankly harder to *not* miss something vital simply because you happened to wander right past it.

Enemies are strong enough and the encounter rate is (often) relentless enough that exploration for the sake of it is far from any simple feat. You’re going to be grinding quite a lot, and even then, running from battles or just getting lucky enough to avoid getting in any in the first place is going to be your friend far more often than any meager stats gained from level grinding will be. While this game is something of a rarity at the time for having *any* way to counter enemy instant-death spells, that’s cold comfort with just how quickly enemies can slam your health down nonetheless. This game isn’t quite as epic an indulgence in player-inflicted RNG misery as something like Dragon Quest II, that’s damning with faint praise ^^;. Mother 1 may not be the most unfair-feeling RPG on the Famicom, but it’s still going to be a brutal fight to the end for all but the most dedicated RPG fans, so using save states, rewinds, maps and guides is frankly a must for anyone who isn’t going to hunt down a rebalance patch to play the game with instead (even with the numerous balance changes the NES English version adds).

The aesthetics of this game are a mixed bag. On one hand, the graphics feel very simple for the time, especially outside of battle. Character sprites are very simple for ‘89 as are the palettes with which areas are drawn. However, not only are the character sprites and such very cute and fun in their designs, they also have the isometric perspective that later Mother games would continue to use rather than the far more common top-down view of most contemporary RPGs. Similarly mixed are the battle screens. While they lack any kind of background (an oddity for the genre, especially by ’89), the enemy sprites themselves are very detailed and look great even now. There’s nothing mixed about the music, though. The soundtrack is standout excellent, no notes, and it’s not hard to see why Mother 2 would go on to remix and pay homage to so many of these tracks, because they’re just that good!

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as I did ultimately enjoy my time with Mother 1, it’s really impossible to recommend you play *this* version as it was originally intended. The game is far too unforgiving and easy to get lost in to ever be appealing to any reasonable person these days. If you’re a big fan of later Mother series games, however, and you don’t mind using some aids I mentioned earlier (maps, guides, balance patches, etc), then I think there is really something worth checking out here. It may be a pretty difficult sell to recommend any 8-bit RPG these days (even the best ones), but there’s just enough novelty and sparks of brilliance here, particularly in regards to how it relates to its descendants, that I think a good few people will have a pretty good time with this one like I did (even if the difficulty will have you rewinding like nuts sometimes) <w>.

----

54. Famista 64 (N64)

I’ve played a lot of baseball games on this console over the past few months, and I saved this one for last on purpose. Part of that is because it plays so differently to any other baseball game I’m familiar with on the console, and part of it is due to just how weird “beating” it via the main single player mode is. However, this past Golden Week was the perfect time to finally sit down and complete it. Playing on real hardware, it took me about 2.5 hours to beat the aliens in the World’s Strongest Team mode with the fielding on automatic and the AI difficulty on very easy.

In the normal game modes, this is just a pretty typical team-versus-team baseball game, but there is actually quite the story to the game’s World’s Strongest Team mode. As the opening title crawl tells us, on the far end of the universe, there were aliens who were CRAZY good at baseball. They decided to take over Earth by beating all of its best baseball teams, and nothing could stop them. South Korea, America, Cuba, one by one all of the world’s best baseball teams were soundly beaten by the aliens. Not even Japan’s teams were safe from them. The teams were all disbanded, and the players returned to their respective hometowns. Around this time, there’s the main character, you. You were an up-and-coming Japanese player with dreams of making it big, and you were shocked to hear that there wasn’t even any NPB to join anymore! Not letting that stop you, you decide to simply make your own team instead and take on these nasty aliens and send them back where they came from!

What this involves is going around Japan and assembling the best team you can. You start by picking your home prefecture, and the number of pros from that respective area will give you better players for free as the game goes on. At the start of things, all you’ve got is a bunch of company team members in their 50s. Good at baseball compared to a normal guy, but nothing compared to a pro (or alien) team. You start the year with a scouting report of pros currently known around Japan, and you then have the rest of the year to race around Japan, either on foot or by public transit, trying to beat the aliens to each pro so you can recruit them onto your team before the aliens snap them up. Getting these good players on your team is the only way you’re going to have a chance to beat the aliens at the annual new year’s humans vs. aliens match, because there’s only so much that good play will make up for the awful stats on your starting team.

However, these former pros won’t just join you out of the goodness of their hearts. In order to get them to join you, you’ll have to beat them in mini-game first! The game has around 10 mini-games that they’ll challenge you to before you can recruit them, though few of them have anything to actually do with baseball. Things like the target hitting, knocks, or home run derby are all at least somewhat related to the baseball parts, but stuff like the drawing contest is far too difficult to ever be possible, and the balloon inflating game is just Mario Party-like excuse to destroy your joystick. The snowball fight mini-game is great fun, I’ll admit, but these mini-games largely suck, and even though the years aren’t that long, I couldn’t help but feel woefully out of practice every time the match against the aliens came around.

The baseball in this is really weird too, and I am not a fan of designing your baseball this way. This relatively unique (among retro Japanese baseball games, anyhow) approach actually keyed me in to how Namco were the ones who made the old Mario baseball games I played as a kid. Those games are also kinda bad, admittedly, but I played the heck out of them back in the day XD. Regardless, there are certainly some good aspects of this. The fielding in particular is actually very intuitive since they actually use the really retro approach of having your inputs direct the whole team at once, like it’s an old 8-bit baseball game, rather than assigning you what it believes to be the closest player automatically and you needing to just respond from there. This is still an imperfect system, but it’s honestly my preferred way to field.

The biggest part I just cannot gel with is the batting, though. Rather than the Acclaim, Genki, or Konami-developed baseball games of the time, we don’t use the behind-the-batter approach where you aim at the incoming ball with a targeting reticle. Instead, the ball is always(?) effectively thrown right at the bat, and different kinds of pitches affect speed and curvature more than anything else. The trajectory of a hit ball is dependent on both where it hits the bat as well as where the batting player is holding the joystick at the time of the swing. Holding it forward will aim the ball towards the ground, and holding it back will aim the ball towards the crowd. It’s almost like you’re piloting a plane instead of hitting a ball.

While I’ll admit that some of the challenge here comes from using a hall effect replacement joystick that’s less accurate than the old optical joysticks the N64 was designed for, this was a system I always found far too finicky to actually be effective or fun. I found it very difficult to quickly get the stick in just delicate enough an alignment to hit the ball in a far line drive rather than a wicked infield pop fly, and if I held the stick in position too early, I’d always end up slowly drifting to the right or left on the spot instead of sticking where I was. Even on very easy, the challenge to even hit a decent ball so I could actually get a man on base, let alone score, felt far more down to simple luck than anything I could meaningfully control as a batter, and pitching certainly didn’t feel all that intuitive or great either. Perhaps there are people who are really used to this style of batting and pitching and it’s super intuitive for them, but I can’t stand playing baseball this way, and it’s easily the weakest part of the game for me.

The awkward and janky approach to the actual playing baseball is a real shame, since I honestly love the aesthetics of this game. The music is fun and good, sure, but the graphics are where the game really shines. The cutscenes in the story mode have your players bouncing around just as torso as they emote at one another, and the simple humanoid models always look so funny when they’re bobbling around like that. This goes extra for the aliens, who themselves look more like Metal Mario-versions of normal baseball players than any extraterrestrial you may conjure up in your head XD.

The world map and dialogue have a lot of fun aspects to them too, and that’s especially true for the “Namco” stadium which is a massive pile of Namco references even down to the stadium’s maximum capacity of 7650 people x3. That silliness goes even harder for the original Namco team they’ve made, whose player roster is such an insane list of deep cuts that even several groups of retro-loving friends couldn’t help me get to the bottom of some of them (with my personal favorite being the one named after the Italian restaurant chain Namco had owned since the 80’s).

Verdict: Not Recommended. There is so much silly character in the design to this game, from the joyously bizarre story mode to the crazy reference filled Namco stuff, that I really wish this game were actually fun to play. As I said before, perhaps there are some people out there for whom this is just the most perfect and intuitive way to play baseball ever, but I am frankly unconvinced this is a better way to do things than how Konami and Acclaim were doing things in their respective PawaPuro and All-Star series. I only paid 100 yen for this, so I hardly feel cheated or put out by picking it up in the first place, but if you’re the kind of weirdo like me who’s earnestly looking for a fun time from retro baseball games, your time is definitely better spent looking elsewhere unless you’re somehow already a huge fan of this series (in which case I can’t imagine this review was all that agreeable or helpful for you in the first place XP).

Post by **Limewater** » Fri May 09, 2025 11:31 am

PartridgeSenpai wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 4:16 am 53. Mother (Famicom)

Heh.

I got halfway through your write-up on Mother, thinking to myself "the game really didn't feel that broken or unbalanced to me."
Then you commented about the changes for the aborted western release and I understood. That's the one I played.

I still haven't played Dragon Warrior II, but I'd take Mother over the original Dragon Warrior any day, though I also always felt like Dragon Warrior was a bit of a slog without enough going on between all the grinding. But I really enjoyed Mother.

Post by **PartridgeSenpai** » Sat May 10, 2025 2:04 am

Limewater wrote: ↑Fri May 09, 2025 11:31 am
PartridgeSenpai wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 4:16 am 53. Mother (Famicom)
Heh.

I got halfway through your write-up on Mother, thinking to myself "the game really didn't feel that broken or unbalanced to me."
Then you commented about the changes for the aborted western release and I understood. That's the one I played.

I still haven't played Dragon Warrior II, but I'd take Mother over the original Dragon Warrior any day, though I also always felt like Dragon Warrior was a bit of a slog without enough going on between all the grinding. But I really enjoyed Mother.

There are a few really welcome quality of life changes that the English version brings (like there actually being an ATM in Magicant, for one), but I'm not sure the actual game balance is all that different. From what I could find, at least *some* bosses (what few there are) actually seem to have far *more* HP in Earthbound Beginnings than they do in Mother 1. However, at least in the broad strokes of things (for the meaner bits of design), I don't understand the English version to be all that easier than the Japanese original. The encounter rate can be very weird, and it's far from impossible to just get the really mean encounters be too rare to appear or even go dozens of steps without finding a single encounter. Maybe you just got lucky with the meaner stuff leaving you alone, or maybe you just have a much higher tolerance to that stuff that me? Hard to say <w>

Post by **MrPopo** » Sat May 10, 2025 8:30 pm

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024

1. Tomb Raider II Remastered - PC
2. Tomb Raider III Remastered - PC
3. Blade Chimera - Switch
4. Cyber Shadow - Switch
5. Signalis - Switch
6. Ender Magnolia - Switch
7. SimCity 2000 Special Edition - PC
8. Ghost Song - Switch
9. Citizen Sleeper 2 - Switch
10. Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider - Switch
11. The Last Faith - Switch
12. Anger Foot - PC
13. Avowed - PC
14. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: Classic Mode - Switch
15. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: Classic II: Dominque's Curse - Switch
16. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II - PS5
17. Pacific Drive - PC
18. Mekkablood: Quarry Assault - PC
19. Tempest Rising - PC
20. Astalon: Tears of the Earth - Switch
21. Voidwrought - Switch
22. Death's Gambit: Afterlife - Switch
23. Mechwarrior 5: Ghost Bear: Flash Storm - PC

Ghost Bear: Flash Storm is a piece of DLC for Mechwarrior 5: Clans. It follows an elite Star of the Ghost Bears once the Clan Invasion resumes following the election of ilKhan Ulric Kerensky. This Star is part of the force looking to take the planet Alshain, which will become the capital of the Ghost Bear territory as they move into the Inner Sphere.

Unlike the base game, your force is made up of veterans with bloodnames, except for one new kid who replaces a casualty. This gives some verisimilitude for the DLC to have you start off with your pilots having a bunch of skills pre-learned and your scientists having researched a bunch of upgrades. Your power level is about the midpoint of the base campaign, with your starting force having a spread of mechs from lights to heavies. This makes up for the fact that there are fewer missions.

Aside from new biomes (including space, though they don't implement any zero-g stuff), the main new addition is several chasses. In addition to the Ebon Jaguar and Night Gyr omnis that you trial for at the start of the game, you get access to several standard battlemechs; a few different IIC models and the Kodiak. Like MW5: Mercs, the battlemechs lack omni pods and so if you want a different hardpoint layout you need to purchase a different variant. But now the game lets you swap out the engine on the standard battlemechs; you're still restricted to sticking with standard or XL, but the flexibility to go faster or slower (and the associated free tonnage shift) gives you some new flexibility. You also never have to deal with fixed MASC and jump jets (looking at you Executioner).

It's another good spread of missions, and I enjoyed the story. It's a pretty easy decision to make; if you liked the base game, get the DLC.

Post by **pierrot** » Sat May 10, 2025 11:45 pm

Note wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 1:39 pm

6. Suikoden (PS1)

Hawt!

Finally posting about this, but I feel like I recall that I also saw you had either started playing or picked up the PS1 Lunar games, which I found kind of amusing with the two Suikodens and Lunars just receiving remasters within the last few months.

I think it's cool that you decided to play the originals, though; Don't get me wrong.

I do really like the beginning of Suikoden, but I was a little surprised to see you describe it as 'starting with a bang,' because in my mind it takes maybe an hour or two until the primary termult. I guess those first couple missions didn't take you much time.

I just have to say that I will be very disappointed if you don't continue through to Suikoden III with data carried over from Suikoden II, by the way. Also, I don't know if the guide you were using actually spelled it out, but if I recall correctly character data carried over to Suikoden II cuts their level by 1/3, so most of the time your endgame characters from Suikoden join at about level 20 in Suikoden II. I think there was some carry over with weapon levels and runes too, but honestly if you really just wanted to have an easy time with Suikoden II, there's a bug in the PS1 version that allows you to get into an area of the latter half of the game from a fairly early point, and do an optional quest that will basically break the game balance for ~2/3 of it. That's the way to go if you really want a leg up, but having a couple of characters in the early~mid game that are slightly stronger than normal isn't bad.

Also, Tappy and Higashino did make some amazing music together. Overall I tend to like the Suikoden OST considerably more than Suikoden II's, but probably III has my favorite of the series.

Post by **TheSSNintendo** » Sun May 11, 2025 4:11 pm

Donkey Kong (Game Boy)

Post by **Note** » Sun May 11, 2025 9:56 pm

pierrot wrote: ↑Sat May 10, 2025 11:45 pm Hawt!

Finally posting about this, but I feel like I recall that I also saw you had either started playing or picked up the PS1 Lunar games, which I found kind of amusing with the two Suikodens and Lunars just receiving remasters within the last few months. I think it's cool that you decided to play the originals, though; Don't get me wrong.

I do really like the beginning of Suikoden, but I was a little surprised to see you describe it as 'starting with a bang,' because in my mind it takes maybe an hour or two until the primary termult. I guess those first couple missions didn't take you much time.

I just have to say that I will be very disappointed if you don't continue through to Suikoden III with data carried over from Suikoden II, by the way. Also, I don't know if the guide you were using actually spelled it out, but if I recall correctly character data carried over to Suikoden II cuts their level by 1/3, so most of the time your endgame characters from Suikoden join at about level 20 in Suikoden II. I think there was some carry over with weapon levels and runes too, but honestly if you really just wanted to have an easy time with Suikoden II, there's a bug in the PS1 version that allows you to get into an area of the latter half of the game from a fairly early point, and do an optional quest that will basically break the game balance for ~2/3 of it. That's the way to go if you really want a leg up, but having a couple of characters in the early~mid game that are slightly stronger than normal isn't bad.

Also, Tappy and Higashino did make some amazing music together. Overall I tend to like the Suikoden OST considerably more than Suikoden II's, but probably III has my favorite of the series.

Yeah, I owned both games already and they were both high on my list to playthrough, so it's funny I got around to them around the time of the remasters. The physical copy of the Lunar remaster seems elusive for the time being, but I might try to track it down when its restocked. It's being sold for higher prices online and even at one of my local game stores.

In regards to the transfer of characters from Suikoden to Suikoden II, I maxed out the weapon levels for all the characters that transfer over, and equipped a few with runes to give myself an advantage in the second game. I wasn't aware of that bug, not sure I'll take advantage of that, but appreciate the info!

I didn't realize you could transfer your save over from the second game to the third on the PS2. The art style of Suikoden III isn't as appealing to me, but if you recommend it, I may try to check it out eventually. The first game left a good impression and I think I'll enjoy the second as well.

Games Beaten 2025

Re: Games Beaten 2025

Re: Games Beaten 2025

Re: Games Beaten 2025

Re: Games Beaten 2025

Re: Games Beaten 2025

Re: Games Beaten 2025

Re: Games Beaten 2025

Re: Games Beaten 2025

Re: Games Beaten 2025

Re: Games Beaten 2025