Games Beaten 2025

Post by **MrPopo** » Wed Jul 23, 2025 5:29 pm

I dunno, "best game in the series" was next to "aside from Crystal Chronicles", so the opinion holder is suspect.

Post by **SyedDanishAnwar** » Wed Jul 23, 2025 6:06 pm

Markies wrote: ↑Tue Jul 22, 2025 7:46 pm Markies' Games Beat List Of 2025!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

1. Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii)
2. Mario Party 4 (GCN)
***3. The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (PS2)***
***4. Pokemon Snap (N64)***
***5. Dead Or Alive (PS1)***
6. Rogue Galaxy (PS2)
7. Pokemon Blue (GBC)
8. Mario Kart 8 (Wii U)
***9. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising (NSW)***
***10. Sonic The Hedgehog (GEN)***
***11. The New Tetris (N64)***
12. Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls (GBA)
13. Yoshi (NES)
***14. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (SNES)***
15. L.A. Noire - The Complete Edition (PS3)
16. Batman: The Video Game (GBC)
17. Splatoon 2 (NSW)
18. The Punisher (GEN)
***19. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time / Master Quest (GCN)***
***20. ChuChu Rocket! (SDC)***
21. Advance Wars (GBA)
22. Shadow of the Ninja (NES)
23. Tecmo Super Bowl (SNES)
24. Child of Eden (PS3)
***25. Atelier Iris 2: The Azoth Of Destiny (PS2)***
***26. DuckTales: Remastered (WiiU)***

I completed DuckTales: Remastered on the Nintendo WiiU this evening!

Like most people, I absolutely loved DuckTales on the NES as a child. I had many fond memories playing the game when I was younger and I even had fonder memories purchasing the game again and playing the game again as an Adult. In fact, when I got older, I appreciated and enjoyed the game even more than I ever did as a kid. Back in 2023, I played through DuckTales: Remastered and it was my 2nd favorite game that I played that year. It barely lost out to Golden Sun at the end. Of course, my desire to replay the game grew after beating it. I wanted something a little shorter after Atelier Iris 2, so I figured this would be the perfect remedy.

With Hollywood and slowly the Gaming Industry being creatively bankrupt and just becoming an endless parade of rehashing old properties into something new and terrible, it really is rare to see somebody remake an old property correctly. DuckTales: Remaster is the perfect update and nailed perfectly that you couldn't ask for a better game. They took everything great about the old game and made it better along with fixing any small issues that they found along the way. The game play is absolutely perfect and everything you would want in a game. The animation and graphics are some of the best I have ever seen in my life. It really feels like you are playing a beautiful hand painted animated show from your childhood. The voice acting, which can be a bit intrusive at times, is spot on and each actor nails their character perfectly. And the music is updated, but still has that classic feel and keeps the same melody that you remembered so fondly. Add in some extra features and some unlockables and you have the total package for anybody that would want to revisit their youth. The game never expands too much or makes the game too tedious to play. Everything just works so perfectly that you can't help but appreciate the care that went into the game.

Overall, I absolutely loved every moment that I played DuckTales: Remastered. It took everything that I loved about the original, added a new spin and made a brand new game. They even had some new updates recently where you can quickly skip through all of the cutscenes making an already great game even better. Add in the classic 8-bit music and it is just perfect. This is an absolute must play and a perfect example of how to redo an old property. One of the best experiences I have had in quite a while!

Loved reading this post. Keep 'em coming.

Post by **pierrot** » Wed Jul 23, 2025 10:59 pm

ElkinFencer10 wrote: ↑Wed Jul 23, 2025 8:59 am Bro hooooooowwwwwww is this the best game in the series?!? It was mid af!

Pretty simple.

Also, best work of Uematsu's career.
Japanese gamers over 40 know what's up, at least.

Post by **PartridgeSenpai** » Wed Jul 23, 2025 11:36 pm

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)
54. Famista 64 (N64)
55. Weird and Unfortunate Things are Happening (PC)
56. Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (Wii U)
57. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
58. Wario Land: Shake it! (Wii) *
59. Mario Party 8 (Wii) *
60. Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure (Wii)
61. SimCity 2000 (N64)
62. Prototype (PS3)
63. Prototype 2 (PS3)
64. Final Fantasy X (PS2) *
65. Final Fantasy X-2 (PS2)
66. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2)
67. Crackdown (Xbox 360)
68. Crackdown 2 (Xbox 360)
69. Alan Wake (Xbox 360) *
70. Dead to Rights (Xbox)
71. Medal of Honor (PS3)
72. Mario Kart 8 (Wii U)
73. Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii) *
74. Mario Party 9 (Wii) *
75. Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 (PS2)
76. Splashdown (PS2)
77. R4 Ridge Racer Type 4 (PS1)

78. Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) *

I played this game a TON when it came out. I have very specific memories of getting it early through our online preorder and then spending the next three days straight unlocking everything I could in it and then spending weeks afterwards trying to get every single trophy (though I never could manage that in the end). I recently replayed through the original Smash 64 as well as Melee after finding them locally for cheap, so trying out Brawl again has been on my to do list for a decent while. It was all a matter of finding a copy first. Luck was on my side recently, though, as I finally happened across a 200 yen copy of this locally last week. In the last few days I have here before summer break starts, I decided to give it another go to see how it compares to the older ones as well as newer ones. Playing the Japanese version of the game, it took me about 8 or so hours to play through Subspace Emissary on normal mode and unlock every character, and then I spent another 4-ish hours doing all the single-player events as well as messing around with some other single-player content and multiplayer mode trophy hunting.

Compared to previous Smash games, there actually is something of a story to this one with how the new big Adventure mode works. In Subspace Emissary (SSE), Mario, Kirby, and all the other characters have their world under attack by a mysterious entity that seems to be trying to seal it all off and drag it into subspace. Not taking that lying down, our heroes set off to try and find out what’s up and why these strange assailants and monsters are attacking them and kidnapping them and their friends. It’s a really cool mode that’s got a lot of fun references, cutscenes, and set pieces even if it doesn’t have any dialogue. The way everyone communicates basically only through gestures is a really fun and clever way of storytelling, and the dynamics (shallow as they are) between different characters are communicated very well despite the lack of spoken words.

I was a lot more unfamiliar with most of these series back when I was a pre-teen, so seeing this again for the first time in so many years and being able to actually appreciate all of the little winks and nods (from particularly musical stings to even subtle Dragon Ball references) made it all way more fun. If you’re not a fan of crossover stuff that’s silly for the sake of it, I think it’ll probably be a lot harder to appreciate the more fun and silly parts of SSE, but if you’re not a fan of that, then I can’t imagine why you’re going back to try out Smash Bros Brawl in the first place, frankly ^^;

Building upon the much shorter adventure mode from Smash Bros Melee, Subspace Emissary is basically a Kirby-style game made specifically for Smash Bros Brawl. You play through a bunch of platforming stages and fight special bosses that often operate outside of the normal characters and mechanics of the multiplayer fighting formula that’s more familiar to the Smash Bros series. This has both pluses and minuses. There are lots of times where you’re forced to use one or a few particular characters, so it’s a cool way to try out a bunch of different characters before you set off to try and tackle the other single-player or multiplayer content. The bosses are big and impressive, and it’s really neat to see these familiar Smash Bros mechanics put to use in such a novel way for the series.

However, it becomes apparent very quickly that not all characters are built equal when it comes to how they play in a platformer environment. Characters who are slower or have worse jumping have a much harder time maneuvering around the stages and battling the non-standard mob enemies. Thankfully, you’ve got five whole difficulties to pick from in SSE that can be changed at any time, and the continue system is also very forgiving. I was surprised at just how tough it was only playing on the 2nd lowest difficulty of normal, but it was still a fun challenge nonetheless. I think SSE is *just* as long as it could be without overstaying its welcome. Even as things are, it’s a bit long in the tooth for what it is, and I think they’d have a very hard time doing something like this again if they ever decided to if only because they’ve kinda already done everything they really could with this mode. Still, SSE is a really fun and novel bit of crossover content that I’m glad I went back and experienced. Sure, it was nostalgic, but with just how much better I can appreciate all of the series and characters being shown off here, in some ways it really did feel like I was playing through it for the first time.

Outside of SSE, there have been a lot more general changes to how Smash Bros Brawl plays compared to how Melee played. From the perspective of Current Year, I found Brawl to play shockingly familiarly to more recent Smash games like Ultimate than to another older game like Melee. Where Melee has very floaty physics and jumping that still feel more consistent, there’s a remarkable amount of weight to how characters in Brawl move. A lot of this is down to momentum no longer being conserved when you jump. Jumping now slows you down a lot compared to how it used to, and that takes a LOT of time to get used to, and it can make a lot of formerly famously fast characters like Captain Falcon feel bizarrely slow, especially in SSE’s platforming sections.

Another thing that tripped me up a lot is that the timing on smash attacks are often very different from how they’d play in Smash 4 and Smash Ultimate despite the moves themselves looking and operating a lot like they do in those later titles. A lot of the difficulty I had with this game’s single-player content was just down to me whiffing a smash attack and leaving myself wide open when I’d meant to go for a killing blow XP. I totally don’t begrudge the game for playing differently, and I think a reassessment of the game’s systems was perfectly reasonable as they tried to move on from Melee, but it’s something that definitely makes the game more awkward to go back to if you’re like me and have put a LOT of time into more recent Smash games too.

Speaking more generally, I know a lot of competitive fighting game fans and Melee fans like to complain about things like the random tripping that fighters do in this game, but I don’t think you need to play it very long to see that Brawl (much like the Smash games that came before it) was not meant to be a balanced fighting game at all. It’s a party game, and it’s great at that. This game cuts a couple of more uninteresting characters from Melee like Young Link, Roy, or Dr. Mario, but it adds a bunch of cool new ones like Sonic, Solid Snake, and King Dedede. The new stages are really fun and cool, and overall I’d say Brawl does a great job at providing a “next gen” Smash Bros experience that builds well upon the party game platform fighter experience that Melee did 7 years earlier.

Aesthetically, this is a really good showing, especially for a Wii game. I’m not a huge fan of the sorta washed out/sterile graphical style they’ve gone for with a fair few of the textures, but that’s just how a lot of early Wii games look (as I also complained about in my Mario Kart Wii review recently). The 3D models and such do look really good though, and they’re really good likenesses of the characters from their various series. From the cutscenes to the normal taunts, the animations have a ton of personality, and I even cackled out loud when I realized that one of Lucas’s taunts is just Piccolo’s special beam cannon charge up pose from Dragon Ball XD. The original enemy designs are really fun as well, and it’s all around a very nice-looking game for the time that still holds up pretty well today, too.

The sound design is also really well done. I never noticed it before, but hot damn does Brawl have a lot of really awesome music. One reason I had a ton of fun just messing around in multiplayer mode after I’d had my fill of the single-player content was just how many awesome remixes of classic songs graces this game’s OST. The sound design in general is really fun, and I had no idea until this playthrough that Brawl had so much entirely different voice work for the Japanese version. It’s a small touch, but it makes the experience hop to life that much more. The good voice work and such a good soundtrack make a great bow on what’s already a fairly tight package.

Verdict: Recommended. Outside of the sheer novelty of Subspace Emissary, I don’t think there’s a ton of reason to go back to this game if you’ve got Smash Bros Ultimate to play already. That said, Brawl is still a remarkably solid and fun game to go back and play even all these years later. It’s got nothing on the sheer scale of Ultimate’s content, of course, but the novelty and design quirks that it does have help it retain an identity all its own even after so many years have passed. If you’re a fan of this style of game and have been curious about older Smash games or even just what all the hubbub about stuff like Subspace Emissary is about, then Brawl is a game well worth tracking down and giving a look (as long as you’re not somehow hoping that it’ll be the next hottest competitive fighting game for you <w>).

----

79. Star Fox (SNES)

I’ve been a huge fan of Star Fox 64 for damn near my whole life. We never owned the SNES original growing up, though, so it’s something I’ve only been exposed to in tiny bursts once I was already an adult, and I’ve never really seen the appeal over the N64 reimagining. However, With only a bit of time left before summer break starting, I decided to give a real attempt at finishing some route of this game, and that’s what I did. Despite having so much trouble and difficulty with this game in the past, I managed to beat it on one continue without using rewinds or save states at all. Playing the American version via Switch Online, I beat the level 1 difficulty in about 45 minutes with only three deaths~.

This is the classic Star Fox story that they’ve touched upon again so many times since. The armies of the evil Dr. Andross have the peaceful planet of Corneria under siege and on the ropes. Putting the last of Corneria’s faith in the mercenary band Star Fox, General Pepper’s last gambit is a final assault directly on Andross’s base on Venom to put a stop to this once and for all. There’s a lot less story and personality to the characters as we’d see in something like Star Fox 64, but it’s still perfectly good for a SNES game, and the iconic funny animal babble sounds for your fellow members of Star Fox still get everyone’s personalities across very clearly. It’s a simple story of good versus evil, but it sets the stage for the action at hand very nicely.

The gameplay is the rail shooter style the series would go on to be known for, and it’s nothing of an achievement that Argonaut’s Super FX chip managed to do this on a SNES all the way back in ’93. There are three paths from Corneria to Venom to choose from, and the difficulty increases as you go up from paths levels 1 to 3 (with only level 3 getting you the true ending). Each path gets you quite to totally different stages, so there’s a pretty good amount of content here available for the truly dedicated. Flying along that stage’s set path in your spaceship, the Arwing, you can spin to deflect bullets, turn vertically or boost/break to avoid obstacles, and blast everything in your path to keep yourself safe. It’s a technical achievement, yeah, but I just think it comes with a few too many caveats for my liking.

Part of the compromise of getting a game with this level of 3D graphics running on a machine like the SNES is that the framerate is pretty darn low. Being perfectly honest, I don’t think this is actually as much of a problem as most people make it out to be. The game running so slowly is what gives you the time to actually maneuver around obstacles and take aim properly, and the game would be darn near impossibly difficult if you didn’t have that slow speed. I certainly wish it managed to keep a *steady* framerate, because the slowdown in later more hectic stages can make already quite dicey stages all the more dangerous later on in the game, but the framerate on its own is far from my greatest issue with how this game plays.

My far greater bugbear with this game is the hit detection. This time and every time I’ve played the original Star Fox, I always feel like I’m operating on pure guesswork for which of my bullets are going to hit the enemy and which of theirs are going to hit me. For your own bullets, things usually aren’t so bad. Lacking a targeting reticle in third-person view stages does make hitting things a lot harder, but as long as you keep firing, you can usually have a pretty good idea of where your shots are going to go. Whether they’ll ultimately deal damage to the weak points you’re aiming at is another question entirely, but aiming your own shots does get easier as time goes on and you get used to how the game handles.

What I never felt like I got a good handle on was dodging enemy shots. This is especially true in the space stages where you’ve got a first-person view from the cockpit (thankfully with a targeting reticle), but even in the third-person stages where just how big your Arwing is can make seeing stuff you’re trying to dodge so difficult, it always felt so down to luck whether an incoming shot would actually make contact with me or not. Slamming face-first into a boulder was obviously worth a lot of damage, but for the slew of enemy ships and bullets that are so often flying at you, nothing ever felt sure enough to let me guide my ship in a way I felt sure would keep me safe. I’m sure if I played the game a LOT more I’d eventually get a firmer handle on exactly how my Arwing’s hitbox functions, but I just don’t enjoy the game enough to ever give it more time than I already have, to be perfectly honest ^^;

The aesthetics of the game are kinda weird to talk about in Current Year. The actual graphics themselves are pretty unimpressive by even the standards of a few years later with how many simply texture flat polygons make up this world and at how slow a speed they’re going by you. Granted, I still think that they succeed at making a suitably abstract aesthetic out of that nonetheless, but it’s not going to be blowing anyone’s mind these days like it would’ve back in ’93. The 2D sprites for the characters are really detailed and fun though, and the music is great too. There’s a darn good reason so many of these tracks are still remembered so well these days right alongside tracks from Mario World and Link to the Past, after all!

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I think this game is *just* fun and forgiving enough to be worth a look if you’re a fan of better aged rail shooters like Star Fox 64 (or just rail shooters in general), but there’s a lot of old game jank you’ll need to deal with as a result. While I do understand some people like this game better than any of its successors, I just can’t bring myself to understand that way of thinking with how rough this game is to play so often. There certainly is fun to be had here, and I still certainly wouldn’t call it a bad game, but it’s a game that nostalgia and prior experience help so much to enjoy it that I’d have a much harder time recommending it to a new player than I would something like Star Fox 64.

Post by **ElkinFencer10** » Thu Jul 24, 2025 6:57 am

pierrot wrote: ↑Wed Jul 23, 2025 10:59 pm
ElkinFencer10 wrote: ↑Wed Jul 23, 2025 8:59 am Bro hooooooowwwwwww is this the best game in the series?!? It was mid af!

Pretty simple.
More than half of the series isn't very good. Especially the overwhelming majority of the ones without job systems.
Also, best work of Uematsu's career.
Japanese gamers over 40 know what's up, at least.

I am neither Japanese nor in my 40s

Post by **ElkinFencer10** » Sat Jul 26, 2025 11:55 am

Games Beaten in 2025 - 13
* denotes a replay

January (Not Shit Beaten)

February (Not Shit Beaten)

March (Not Shit Beaten)

April (Not Shit Beaten)

May (Not Shit Beaten)

June (6 Games Beaten)

July (7 Games Beaten)

13. Alan Wake 2 - PC - July 22

It's not a lake; it's an ocean.

Those are the cryptic last words players were left with at the end of Alan Wake in 2010. After 13 years, we finally have a continuation of the Alan Wake story and get to know where that cliffhanger ending leads. Sure, we got Alan Wake's American Nightmare as DLC for the original game, and Control takes place in the same universe and ties in, especially with its DLC, but a true follow-up? Not until 2023's Alan Wake 2. Taking an even darker and more horror-focused tone than the original game which felt more like a horror-themed action game, Alan Wake 2 is a cinematic mystery thriller that will have players on the edge of their seats from start to finish.

The most striking thing about Alan Wake 2 is that it doesn't just follow Alan Wake; this game is a split narrative with two co-equal protagonists. You actually start the investigation as Saga Anderson, an FBI agent who, along with her partner, Alex Casey (yes, just like the main character of Alan Wake's crime thriller series), is in Bright Falls investigating the disappearance of another FBI agent, Agent Nightengale, who himself was investigating the 2010 disappearance of famed novelist Alan Wake. Right from the get-go, the game throws supernatural horror at you as you investigate what appears to be a ritualistic cult murder in a claustrophobic and flooded woods along the shore of Cauldron Lake...the same lake where Alan Wake had gone missing 13 years prior.

The game consists of 18 chapters (excluding the Lake House DLC expansion and the three Night Springs DLC chapters), and you play nine of those as Saga Anderson and nine as Alan Wake. Saga is in the "real" world investigating the increasingly strange events unfolding in Bright Falls while Alan Wake, trapped in the Dark Place for the past 13 years following the events of the first game, tries desperately to outwit his evil doppleganger, Mr. Scratch, and escape the Dark Place. After a few chapters, you gain the ability to switch freely between the two protagonists up until the game's last few chapters. Of the two, I actually found myself much prefer Saga's portions of the game. Collecting evidence, uncovering secrets about the cryptic Cult of the Tree, and piecing together what exactly is going on kept me much more interested than Alan's sections. That's not to say that Alan's chapters were boring; they were fascinating in their own right, and his chapter "Initiation 4: We Sing" is hands down the best chapter in the entire game. As a whole, though, I found Saga's Return chapters to be more my speed than Alan's Initiation chapters.

Visually, the game is stunning. I built a new PC right at the beginning of 2024, and I was asking my friends what the most graphically demanding PC game available then was so I could really put my 4090 card - at the time, one of the best GPUs on the market - through its paces. Popo said Alan Wake 2 was what I wanted to play. Then the dude goes out and not only buys the game for me on the Epic Games storefront but buys the digital deluxe edition which (once they released) contained the two DLC expansions. What an absolute unit, am I right? He won Teacher Appreciation Week that year. I started the game and played a few hours, but then I got distracted. It was around that time that my mom's vision deteriorated to the point where she wasn't safe to drive, and I had to start making plans to move back home, sell my house, and hunt for a new house close enough to take care of her. Anyway, fast forward a year and a half, and I finally got back to Alan Wake 2, and I'm actually glad I ended up waiting before diving in in earnest because it gave the Lake House and Night Springs DLCs a chance to release, so I was able to play the whole game including DLC in one fell swoop, and let me tell you, that Lake House DLC alone made the entire game worth playing. It's definitely the most challenging part of the whole experience in my opinion, and it was also the part I found to be the scariest.

Being the game that most pushed my GPU to its limits in early 2024, Alan Wake 2 is obviously a gorgeous game visually, but Sam Lake, the game's director, really proved his immense skill and talent with this one. Not only are the regular graphics fantastic, but the game brilliantly and seamlessly blends regular gameplay with live-action FMV cut scenes. These aren't jarring transitions like the 1990s FMV cut scenes could be, and if you played Quantum Break on Xbox One, they're way more natural feeling even than that. The first time it shifted to a live action scene, it took me a good ten seconds to realize that it was live action. That's a testament both to how good the game looks at max settings on a 2160p display but also to how seamless the transition between gameplay and live action scene is. And that's not even getting to "that one chapter" and how mind-blowingly amazing and unique it is...

One of my favorite aspects of the game is that the in-game band, The Old Gods of Asgard, are brought to life in a way that far surpasses their mentions in the first game. The real-life rock band, Poets of the Fall, assume the pseudonym of The Old Gods of Asgard for the game's soundtrack, and I don't just mean that they recorded music for the soundtrack; there are actual music videos and even a dedicated YouTube page for them as if they were a real band separate from Alan Wake. It's a touch that makes that aspect of the game feel alive in a way that most games never manage. Granted, that's not just an Alan Wake 2 thing - "Old Gods of Asgard" are also credited in the soundtracks for the first Alan Wake game as well as Control - but they're so central to the in-game story in Alan Wake 2 that the blending of game universe and real-world tie-ins is a lot more interesting. The acting is just as top-notch as the soundtrack. Matthew Porretta returns as the voice of Alan Wake in an even better performance than his in the first game, and Ilkka Villi returns as the motion capture and live action actor for Alan Wake. The fact that, even in the live action scenes, there is a different actor for the voice of Alan Wake than the actor who physically played him is impressive considering that I had no idea Alan Wake's lines had been dubbed over the actor's lip movements. I genuinely thought it was the same person. Clearly, the greatest contribution Finland brought to the NATO alliance was not a historically Russophobic army to glare across an 800+ mile border with Russia; it was the talent at Remedy Entertainment.

Alan Wake 2 is an artistic masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. Technically, there are a few hiccups; there are still some bugs that I encountered even roughly two years after release including a bug that prevented me from completing Saga's evidence board. That said, though, those bugs are relatively minor unless you're an obsessive completionist. Poets of the Fall did an absolutely killer job with the lion's share of the game's soundtrack, and the Night Springs theme performed by Finnish pop singer Keira Lundström is one of the most addicting earworms I've heard in a long time. The game's visuals are amazing, and the live action segments make you yearn for a feature length Alan Wake movie (as long as Sam Lake directs it). The game's story not only hits the "psychological horror" nail on the head but dives into a horror metanarrative that honestly puts it at the top of my list of best horror game narratives. I don't know if I'd say it's my all-time favorite horror game, but it's definitely in my top five, and with how many horror games I've played, that's a pretty dang high accolade.

Post by **MrPopo** » Sat Jul 26, 2025 8:24 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
24. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - PS5
25. Doom: The Dark Ages - PC
26. Haiku the Robot - Switch
27. Alwa's Awakening - Switch
28. Warhammer 40000: Boltgun: Words of Vengeance - PC
29. Alwa's Legacy - Switch
30. Wizordum - PC
31. Project Warlock II - PC
32. Exophobia - PC
33. Haunted Castle Revisited - Switch
34. Mario Kart World - Switch 2
35. Rebel Transmute - Switch
36. Guns of Fury - Switch
37. Street Fighter Alpha 3 - Dreamcast
38. Street Fighter III 3rd Strike - Dreamcast
39. Vampire Chronicle for Matching Service - Dreamcast
40. Record of Lodoss War - Dreamcast
41. Skald: Against the Black Priory - PC
42. Between the Stars - PC
43. Evoland - Switch
44. Donkey Kong Bananza - Switch 2

Bananza is the latest Donkey Kong game, giving us our first new Donkey Kong game in over a decade. Like Breath of the Wild before it, it serves as the showpiece game for the Switch 2, and like Breath of the Wild, it succeeds in this role wildly.

The game begins with Donkey Kong mining for gold and banana gems. However, a giant meteor of some kind lands on the mines, pushing them deep underground. While trying to figure out what's happening, Donkey Kong discovers a purple rock creature who eventually turns out to be a young Pauline. It's up to DK and Pauline to dive into the planet's core to get to the wish granting magic said to live there, so they can both get back home.

The game has a lot of Mario Odyssey DNA. You traverse through a series of worlds with different themes and collect a bunch of banana gems, a la the moons from Odyssey. Some of them belong to common tasks, others are unique to the individual worlds. You'll get bigger bunches after beating bosses. The thing that makes Bananza different is the emphasis on the terrain destruction. This is a feature that has been tried many times in the past; notable games with significant usage are Magic Carpet and Red Faction. The latter also ran into the tension around it; it makes level design extremely hard, and you also need to tailor player interaction around it. Bananza manages to finally make the system a core gameplay feature that works really well, through two mechanisms. The first is that since Donkey Kong punches stuff, having his punches go through terrain feels correct. By contrast, Red Faction, being an FPS, used explosives, which then screws with the combat balance. The second is the game, being an open world exploration in a fantasty world, both requires far less indestructible layers (usually just a floor) and provides a "restore the world" option in the pause menu that doesn't feel out of place, so even if you've gone completely ham and made things more difficult for yourself you can fix everything and start anew. The terrain destruction is extremely satisfying, and the game makes use of different terrain types well, both for traversal and their imapct on the destruction.

As you progress through the game, DK will gain various animal transformation abilities. These are time-limited behind a meter that refills as you pick up gold, so you can use them pretty much at will, but can't just completely fuck around with them. Each one has a specific utility for getting through the game, like being able to smash concrete, or being able to run fast over collapsing terrain. Wise use of these abilities can make various parts of the game much easier, while other parts straight up require their usage (barring speed runner strats, which currently skip two of the transforms in any%).

The collect-a-thon aspects are implemented well; in addition to the bananas, most worlds have fossils to collect which are traded in for cosmetic items. Some of them are cosmetic only, while others provide benefits. While digging around you can find treasure chests (which are randomly generated) that sometimes will contain maps that mark the location of collectables on your map. You also can spend gold at a vendor to get those same marks, so you always have a nice path for rounding out your 100%.

Overall, this game is a stand-out title that is a must-have in the same way Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey were for the Switch.

Post by **ElkinFencer10** » Sun Jul 27, 2025 12:13 pm

Games Beaten in 2025 - 14
* denotes a replay

January (Not Shit Beaten)

February (Not Shit Beaten)

March (Not Shit Beaten)

April (Not Shit Beaten)

May (Not Shit Beaten)

June (6 Games Beaten)

July (8 Games Beaten)

14. Final Fantasy IV - Switch - July 26

Having recently gone through the pixel remasters of the three NES Final Fantasy games, I was eager to dive into the SNES titles as I'd heard they're longer and have much more in-depth and complex narratives which is what I crave in an RPG. I'm not sure how much longer the game actually was, but it was definitely a big step above the previous three titles in the narrative department.

The story revolves around Cecil, a Dark Knight who commands the Kingdom of Baron's elite airship fleet, the Red Wings. The king of Baron, who has seemingly developed a lust for power, has been sending his forces out to pillage neighboring kingdoms and steal their crystals to take their power for his own. Seeing the barbarity of his orders to kill unarmed civilians and steal what is not, by right, theirs to take, Cecil begins to face a moral dilemma as he faces the mutually exclusive choice between obeying his orders as a soldier of Baron and following his conscience that is screaming against the wanton slaughter of innocents. As his choice ultimate tears apart his close-knit group of friends, he embarks on a quest that will take him across the world and beyond.

Final Fantasy IV feels similar to Final Fantasy II except significantly more fleshed out. Each character in the game is named and has a distinct personality and important connection to the story. There are numerous side quests that you can choose to complete or not as you feel inclined. No character feels completely irrelevant to the story, though, even the ones that you spend half of the game thinking just kind of...vanished from the narrative. There's no freedom of choice here as far as a character's class or job goes, but as I said in a previous Final Fantasy review, I actually tend to prefer that as it removes the dilemma of choice for me. The game has made the choice for me of what class each character will be, so I don't have to worry about "Am I optimizing my characters' class set? Am I using the wrong class for this character?" All I have to worry about are weapons and armor, and the displayed stats make that a fairly manageable decision to make.

Final Fantasy IV introduces the beloved by most fans and utterly reviled by me "Active Time Battle," or ATB, for its combat. It sort of blends turn-based and real-time gameplay by giving each character an action meter that fills over time with different characters' having meters that fill at different rates. That's the real-time aspect. The turn-based aspect is that as each character's meter fills, actions are taken one at a time. If multiple characters' meters are full at the same time, you sort of stack actions, and one action will begin as soon as the previous action is finished. It takes a little bit of getting used to if you've not played one of the later Final Fantasy games that uses this system, and it's definitely more tuned and refined in later Final Fantasy games, but it works well enough here.

As I've said three times before in my previous Final Fantasy reviews, the visuals are excellent and have been completely redone by the original design staff with some more modern effects like smoke, particle effects, lighting effects, etc. added in for some extra modern polish. The sound design, like the other pixel remaster games, is equally high quality. The original SNES chiptune soundtrack is kept intact and available if that's what you prefer, but a new fully orchestral arrangement of the soundtrack is also available and what is enabled by default. I recommend using the new orchestral arrangement, but if you need to scratch that nostalgia itch, the original sound profile is there for you. Another noteworthy update is the script. The original North American release of the game - released on Super Nintendo as Final Fantasy II - is famous (or perhaps infamous) for changing names, simplifying the story, and omitting dialogue. To some extent, this is understandable as the SNES had some serious character limitations for text, and Latin-based languages usually use more characters to convey the same idea and meaning compared to East Asian languages like Mandarin and Japanese. The pixel remaster uses a different translation that restores the story and dialogue to the state it was intended to be and in doing so, restores some of the tone and nuance of the story that got lost in the original SNES translation.

In addition to the visual, auditory, and translation improvements, the pixel remaster also features a number of quality-of-life improvements. Most of these are fairly common across the six games in the pixel remaster collection. You can toggle between walk and run as the default movement speed, and you can toggle random encounters on or off. The boosts to tweak exp and money gained are also present and, like in the previous games, allow you to adjust them from half the original rate to four times the original rate to tailor the grind to your patience level and desire. The random encounter rate is also slightly reduced, making dungeons less of a slog, and the difficulty spikes of the original game have been smoothed out a bit. Each boss and dungeon still mark a noticeable increase in difficulty, but they don't feel as steep and sometimes unfair as the original version did. You're also given the ability to save at specific points in dungeons, and you can quick save anywhere. That is in addition to the frequent auto saves that the game performs. All that combined creates a game where you won't lose a lot of progress if your party is wiped or your idiot sibling closes the game or pops out the game card while you've got the game suspended.

Just as important to note as the new quality-of-life features are the features and content absent from previous releases. This version, unfortunately, does not include The After Years or Interlude from the PSP release. As I mentioned in my Final Fantasy II review, the goal here was to make a remaster faithful to the original vision of the game, and that meant leaving out ancillary content added later. I really enjoyed the story of Final Fantasy IV, so I am a bit bummed about that, but I suppose that just gives me an excuse to revisit the game on a different platform in the future. It does, however, masterfully do what it set out to do - bring the original game up to a modern playability standard without compromising the design, story, or core experience of the original release.

Final Fantasy IV is, in my opinion, the first truly great Final Fantasy game. I thoroughly enjoyed the first two games, and I liked Final Fantasy III, but IV is the first in release order that I genuinely loved. I didn't love everything about it - the narrative changes your party's composition pretty frequently whether you want it to or not, and I didn't enjoy that; and Kain, just as a character, is annoying as piss, but the game's narrative, characters (other than Kain), and the environments and dungeons that you get to explore are fantastic and top notch. If you're down for some old school brutal grinding, the SNES version is perfectly serviceable, although I would recommend finding a fan re-translation that you play on an emulator or flash cartridge. There are numerous ports to later systems, and this pixel remaster is available on and playable on all modern platforms, so finding a way to play Final Fantasy IV shouldn't be an obstacle for anyone. If you don't play any of the NES Final Fantasy games, at least check out the SNES ones. I haven't played Final Fantasy V or Final Fantasy VI yet - those are up next for me - but IV definitely surpasses I, II, and III in my opinion.

Sun Jul 27, 2025 2:36 pm

Star Fox really hit me hard as a kid. Up until then, everything Nintendo (Power) recommended was gold.
But as a twelve year old I was not at all impressed. It was basically Zaxxon from another perspective, but with sluggish controls. Okay, the music was fantastic, but other than that, it felt like downgrade to a decade old game.

I have always wondered: who designed the levels and gameplay? Was it the British? That would explain a lot.
I also wonder how the Japanese reacted to such a substandard Nintendo game. It didn't sell well there. But was there outrage that their greatest video game company was working with foreigners and creating worse games?

Post by **ElkinFencer10** » Sun Jul 27, 2025 3:14 pm

RobertAugustdeMeijer wrote: ↑Sun Jul 27, 2025 2:36 pm Star Fox really hit me hard as a kid. Up until then, everything Nintendo (Power) recommended was gold.
But as a twelve year old I was not at all impressed. It was basically Zaxxon from another perspective, but with sluggish controls. Okay, the music was fantastic, but other than that, it felt like downgrade to a decade old game.

I have always wondered: who designed the levels and gameplay? Was it the British? That would explain a lot.
I also wonder how the Japanese reacted to such a substandard Nintendo game. It didn't sell well there. But was there outrage that their greatest video game company was working with foreigners and creating worse games?

Sir, this is not the hot takes thread, and that take could set stone on fire.

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