Games Beaten 2026

[marurun]

Gotta disagree with your verdict on Epic Yarn, Pidge. I absolutely adored the game. It's a super chill, relaxed experience and oozes cute charm, in my opinion.

I'm with Elk on this one. I found it charming.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Hot Take: Kirby’s Epic Yarn is mid…just like every other Kirby game.

[MrPopo]

Hot Take: Kirby’s Epic Yarn is mid…just like every other Kirby game.

This take starts off fine, then plunges into a volcano.

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

Hot Take: Kirby’s Epic Yarn is mid…just like every other Kirby game.

Based.

[PartridgeSenpai]

I step away for like two days, and this place becomes total Kirby madness

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2026 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat

1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *
6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)
7. Tales of Hearts R (PSVita) *
8. Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered (PC)
9. Mega Man 11 (PC)
10. Gravity Circuit (PC)
11. Mario Party DS (DS)
12. Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)
13. Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island (PS5)
14. Astro's Playroom (PS5)
15. Michael Jackson: The Experience (PSP)
16. Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PS5)
17. Control (PS4)
18. White Album (PS3)
19. Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World (GBA)
20. Kirby's Epic Yarn (Wii)

21. Breath of Fire III (PSP)

I've owned this game digitally via my PSTV for absolutely ages. I managed to get it on sale years back (before I even had a PS1 or PS2 to play the original release of BoF3 on), and I had planned to play it relatively soon after buying it (because I'd recently finally finished BoF2). Well, as you can see, that didn't exactly go according to schedule, but better late than never! X3. My partner loves this game, and her talking about it is what finally got me to finally sit down and give this game a look. Though I played the PSP version of this game, I played it via my PSTV and my PS3 controller, so it wasn't all that different from playing the PS1 version of the game (save for better load times than either the PS1 or UMD PSP edition of BoF3), because much like the GBA ports of BoF1 and 2, this is a night identical version of the game to the original save for a few slight cosmetic changes. Playing the Japanese version of the game, it ultimately took me around 47 hours to beat the game with the good ending. (This is also another review where I'll be getting fairly into spoiler territory regarding my narrative analysis, so reader discretion please be advised).

Much like with all the other Breath of Fire games, our story once again follows a blue-haired swordsman named Ryu who's also part of the dragon clan (or "the Brood", as they're called in the English version of the game). Dragon clan members can appear human or as powerful dragon forms, and that dragon form is how Ryu starts this game, in fact. However, it's far from all that powerful. He's just a little baby dragon discovered by some miners deep underground. They immediately try and attack Ryu, who fights back with his powerful dragon breath. Taking out tons of miners in a panicked escape from the mines, they ultimately get the drop on him with a thump on the back of the head. Carting him away in a cage, Ryu manages to knock himself off the cart and lands on the cliff far below, where he's found by Rei. However, Rei finds Ryu once he's already turned back into a little boy, so he's none the wiser that Ryu is part of the (supposedly) long extinct dragon clan. Ryu joins up with Rei and the other orphan Teepo as their gang of thieves out in the wilderness (another familiar plot beat for a Breath of Fire game), and so begins Ryu's journey to once again defeat the great evil and save the world!... once he's grown up a bit more, of course ;b

Despite the bad translation, I quite liked the narrative when I played Breath of Fire II in English years ago. It suffers in terms of the specifics, but the themes of its story still ring loudly enough to really pack a punch even if the character aspects of the narrative aren't terribly deep. Given all the praise my partner has for it, I had relatively high hopes for this game going into it. It's still a pretty early PS1 RPG (mid-'97), so I hardly expected the moon and the stars from it, but I figured it'd be on the better end of these earlier RPGs regardless. What I ended up finding is a decidedly transitional game. It's hard to say whether or not the same writer(s) worked on this as worked on BoF2 (because that game has no credits), but I would not be surprised to learn that that was indeed the case. Breath of Fire III comes off as a very transitional evolution of its predecessor as it tries to wed the relatively strong thematic beats of Breath of Fire 2 to a much greater focus on character-driven storytelling, and the results are very mixed to say the least.

On the more positive end, the banter between characters is really strong. There's a ton of great, funny dialogue between the main members of your party, and especially in the first 1/3 of the game or so, it's incredibly strong and very well paced. Honestly, the game is pretty stand-out excellent for the PS1's library with just how tightly focused and well paced that first leg of the game is, as the initial antagonists of Balio and Sunder are incredible drivers for the plot... until they're not. Once we lose them, the plot never really picks up steam again, and even once we get to the time skip, the story keeps this sorta meandering pace until the end credits. I'm not sure how it would've been possible to keep that momentum and still have anything like the story we finally end up with, mind you, but it still remains that this drop in performance is a firm indicator of what's to come from that point on.

Breath of Fire III's main issue is that, much like the large bulk of its PS1 RPG brethren, we're just not really good enough at character writing in video games yet to provide a satisfying deeper narrative experience. If you want a fun, interesting adventure, that's fine, of course, but Breath of Fire III *touches* on so much more yet never actually manages to tie all of that together to say anything deeper. It winds up feeling like a real waste of opportunity when you have so much good material here in the first place. You have Nina's conflict between weighing helping Ryu versus her obligations as the princess of Windia, you've got Garr grappling with the fact that his whole life's mission as a Guardian was based on a baseless lie (and that he was an unwitting accessory to genocide as a result), and you've got Momo's efforts to be her own person now that her father is gone.

It's a lot of really ripe material for deep, thoughtful storytelling, but the main problem is that we set these characters up so meticulously yet never actually do anything with them in the end. While we kinda get some resolution with Garr's internal struggles, it just amounts to a pretty unsatisfying "he decides to continue helping you as he's been doing nearly the whole game". Nina and Momo honestly barley even get that much, as their deeper struggles feel like mostly lip service with how little they matter beyond a periodic mention here and there. The big note the game ends on, the final question that they pose at you right at the final boss, is "would you rather closet your real self and live in safety, or is that kind of living a death in and of itself, so you'd rather venture out in the dangerous unknown because it at least means not living as a shell of your real self?" It's a really powerful note to end on, but it rings really hollowly with just how little of the rest of the game's narrative actually leads up to it in the first place.

Main main issue that makes that final note and so much of the story writing in general so weak is the baffling decision to leave our main character, Ryu, unvoiced just as he was in the previous two games. Ryu is now more of a character than he's ever been before. He's the last of his race (or so he thinks), and he learns that Garr is one of the main people responsible for that state of affairs. We specifically address that Ryu's love for his comrades and pain for his lost people are very meaningful to him, but it's only through secondhand information or *very* rare narration to the larger narrative. A big, important story about living as your real self rather than being a prisoner in your own, hollow meaningless existence (living in a state of death, so to speak) is pretty hard to actually care that much about when your main character is already so damn shallow in the first place. I cannot fathom why the decision to keep him as a silent protagonist was made in the first place, but whatever the reason they made it, they've really succeeded in clipping the wings of what could've been, at least, a quite stand-out good story for the early PS1.

While the overall story is fairly weak, it also commits another real sin of writing that hangs like a shade over the whole thing. They try to do a whole "do the ends justify the means?" analogy with the dragon folk and their relative power compared to any other living thing. The whole reason that the goddess wipes them out (or nearly does) in the first place, is because the dragon folk's dragon forms are immensely powerful. If they wanted to, if even a fraction of them wanted to, they could easily destroy the world. The only reason they didn't destroy the world in the great dragon war centuries ago, is because they lied down and let themselves get slaughtered rather than fight back and risk global destruction. That's a very contrived way for a fantasy race to act, sure, but my bigger question is what are we even trying to say with this in the first place?

If we take into account the whole point our narrative ends on, "live in the closet or live as your true self?", I think we cheapen that moral point *very* aggressively by the fact that the persecuted minority our story focuses on are genuinely world ending-levels of powerful in the first place. We never actually dispute the fact that the dragon folk, hell nearly Ryu all on his own, could destroy the world if they were of poor character. Seemingly the only thing that's kept the world from getting destroyed so far is that generations of dragon folk have collectively gotten lucky enough to never have racial supremacists among their number who feel like destroying all of the rest of the world simply because they can. This isn't just DC's Superman here. It's an entire race of people whom we, the writers, have made objectively extremely dangerous should they one day decide to use the great power they have. While I ultimately do think that it *is* fair to simply have faith in the argument that this is just a story, a work of fiction where you *can* have the dragon folk just always make the right choice to make our larger moral point, that still crumbles very badly when trying to make any kind of real-world parallel from this analogy.

Real world persecuted minorities do not have the luxury of world ending power in their back pocket. One could say that the "world ending power" they *do* have is sociopolitical rather than literal in nature, and while I wouldn't say that that's wrong, it still doesn't rectify the case of BoF3's analogy. The goddess views dragons as dangerous both materially *and* sociopolitically because the whole global sociopolitical order is of *her* making in the first place. By her reasoning, allowing them to have their great power endangers her constructed world order as well as the bodily safety of the living things in the world, and that's not something you can map onto real world persecuted groups. The framing device of this story effectively gives actual bigots a legitimate out for viewing people different from them as dangerous because of how the story constructs the dragon folk as a people. This is far from the only fantasy story (from Japan or otherwise) to fall into this trap, but it's something that bothered me for so much of the larger part of the story that I couldn't not mention it here. It's all subtext in a story that's already not written that well in the first place, so it's hardly some great, terminal flaw in an otherwise amazing story, but it's also a writing sin so great that I couldn't omit detailing it here in good conscience.

So yeah, the writing is fun quite often, but ultimately very unsatisfying. What about the gameplay, though? The gameplay, as is so often the case with Capcom's Breath of Fire series, is very adequate. It's not trying to reinvent the wheel at all, and the main appeal of this game is much more focused in the strength of its aesthetics and narrative (and on the shallower aspects of the latter, at least, I would be comfortable in saying they succeed at that well enough once again). However, that's not to say that they're not doing *anything* with the mechanics that aren't interesting or experimental beyond just a 3-man party turn-based RPG.

There are some interesting aspects that BoF3's mechanics dabble in. Principle among them are the monster viewing system and the masters system. The former is the ability to "view" or observe monsters in battle to have a chance of learning blue magic spells from them. The latter, meanwhile, are masters whom you can seek out over the course of the story to assign characters to study under. What this means in practice is that you can quite majorly adjust the stat growths of your party members by having them study under particular masters once you find them and fulfill their conditions, as studying under a master means you get significant stat boosts and penalties upon leveling up. While ignoring masters entirely is a perfectly safe way to play the game, you can get some pretty crazy stat growths by specializing different characters under magic, tanking, or speed if you like. It's pretty hard to know what's actually valuable for different characters on your first time through the game without a guide, granted, but it's not the end of the world.

Honestly, that "without a guide" part is the real devil in the details here, because much like the narrative, a lot of BoF3's mechanical design is also terribly unpolished, and it makes for some truly tedious quality of life issues in the normal gameplay. For one, that whole monster observation thing is practically useless. Sacrificing a turn off a character to observe a monster and *hope* that they happen to use the move you're trying to learn is one thing, but that's far from the only issue there. Not only do you have a pretty low learn chance to actually learn the move once you've managed to observe it, but there are also plenty of monster-exclusive moves you can't learn at all. They don't even tell you that you can't learn them until you manage a "successful" observation roll on a monster's move either, so you can easily waste a ton of time trying to learn a move only to then learn that you were wasting your time from the start. A small consolation is that nearly every monster move isn't worth having in the first place, but that still begs the question of why the system is there at all.

Observed monster moves fall specifically under "skills", and skills can be transferred between party members by burning an expendable resource at camp. Studying for enough levels under a master can also give you these skills, but only one of these skills can be known among the entire party, so you've gotta think carefully about whom you give what move to. That's not so bad, but the master system as a whole is frankly more of a pain than it ever needed to be, and is a pretty big pain on the general gameplay in the first place, too. For starters, you don't learn those master moves upon leveling up enough times. You need to just keep traveling all the way back to that master, in person, to hit them up to see if they have any moves for you for each level up, and when some take as many as 8 or 10 levels to learn all of their moves (there's at least an indication when you've learned all the moves from a master), that can be really annoying and take a lot of time.

Masters are also the reason why EXP isn't shared among party members not in the present party. While I readily accept the fact that this not being the case would make masters incredibly awkward to use (because it'd mean you have nearly no control over a character's growth or lack thereof when they're not assigned to a master), this necessary evil also means that you're going to have a pretty under leveled half of your party for a good chunk of the game unless you take a lot of time to level grind. Levels are a pretty important resource in this game, because Breath of Fire III is *tough*. It's not quite a vicious as BoF2 was, thankfully, but with how often they force you to bring along certain party members, either for story reasons or because they have some active move that you're required to use to progress in a dungeon (and needing to leave a dungeon halfway to go get another character for their active move is a huge pain, as you can imagine), you can sometimes be very rudely awoken by the fact that you didn't bother to level Momo until now, so you'll need to level grind a bunch to make it so she can actually survive against the increasingly brutal foes the game puts you against (both bosses and normal enemies). This game is pretty money and EXP-poor when it comes to grinding, so it'll be good to have a nice playlist of music or videos to listen to while you play this one, I imagine. I'd say that easily 15 or more hours of my playtime were just grinding among various points in the game, because the game frankly starts tough and doesn't really let up unless you go in with knowledge of some of the more easily abused master & pupil info or some such.

Level grinding isn't *that* brutal as a practice, though, as you can "camp" anywhere to heal up when you're out in the world map. It's a bit of cumbersome menu-ing, sure, but it's nice that it's there. You can even talk to your other party members at camp, and their input on what's currently going on is where an honestly shocking amount of important characterization comes from for the party (much like Star Ocean: Second Story would also later do). While that heal anywhere-ish feature is nice, the camp system as a whole is a really inconvenient system because of how much player information and QoL they needlessly gate behind it. Checking any specific information on masters, swapping skills between players, and even just swapping out who's in the current party is all stuff that is bizarrely not possible from the normal pause menu. You *must* go to the camp and check the book in the tent, and it's a process that's time consuming enough (especially with the longer load times of non-digital versions of the game) that it's gonna get horribly tedious wayyyy before you hit the credits.

While I have ragged on the details a lot, Breath of Fire III is ultimately still a simple enough game that anyone not super familiar with the genre will probably still have an okay time with it. The difficulty is often high, but strategy and tactics are simple and limited enough that getting past any difficulty point is generally more along the lines of just grinding more than some radical reworking of your whole party design. Ryu's dragon form is back and stronger than ever (imo) in this game, and most boss fights frankly just boil down to keeping his dragon mode up and running with your two other characters while Ryu pummels stuff to death. The sheer overwhelming power of Ryu's dragon form is honestly something that keeps the larger turn-based gameplay loop from potentially being anything deeper than it is in the first place, but it at least keeps the game sweet but simple in the strategy department even if it's not all that short a game in the play time department. If you don't demand a lot of depth from your mechanical systems (and I honestly prefer mine on the shallower end), then Breath of Fire III should be just up your alley as long as you don't mind the grind.

Aesthetically, this is a really pretty game, and it's easily the aspect of things I have the most straightforward, uncritical praise about. The 3D assets aren't too impressive, but they're also pretty few and far between in general outside of the environment designs. Character and enemy sprites are all beautifully animated in 2D, and those little animations give so much personality to the various characters in your party (with Pico's being my personal favorites, even if I never used him all that much). The music is also excellent. It's not very typical fantasy RPG fare, but that funky beat it has makes it all the more memorable and enjoyable, imo, and it frankly blows me away that reviewers were apparently so negative on it back when this game was new.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I have spilled a *lot* of ink here on Breath of Fire III's shortcomings, they're ultimately just that: coming up short. I was disappointed in the narrative and more than a bit bored by the grinding, sure, but the fundamental pieces here are still good, quality fun if you're looking for a more simply put together RPG on the PS1. There's not *that* much other than the aesthetics and such to set it apart from other games, and I think I'd more quickly recommend a shorter, better paced game like Wild Arms 1 before this, but you can still do a lot worse than Breath of Fire III for your PS1 RPG adventures.

[REPO Man]

Beat Sonic Triple Trouble 16-Bit again for Android. Story mode as Sonic and Tails with all the Chaos Emeralds.

[MrPopo]

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025

1. Dead Space (2023) - PC
2. Dead Space 2 - PC
3. Dead Space 3 - PC
4. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon - PS5
5. Stellar Blade - PS5
6. Dragon Quest VII Reimagined - Switch
7. Silent Hill 2 (2024) - PC
8. Silent Hill f - PC
9. Resident Evil Requiem - PC
10. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist - Genesis
11. Sins of a Solar Empire II - PC
12. Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! - PC
13. Gauntlet Dark Legacy - GC
14. A Street Cat's Tale 2: Outside is Dangerous - Switch
15. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time - SNES

Turtles in Time on the SNES is a pretty faithful recreation of the arcade game, with extra content. Compared to the NES game's significant graphical changes, the SNES game has enough power to make the two fairly indistinguishable at casual glance. There are a few tweaks when it comes to the gameplay, but the most notable thing is the extra stage and the boss changes.

Turtles in Time starts off with Shredder shrinking down the Statue of Liberty and stealing it. The Turtles set off to stop him. However, when they confront Shredder they get tossed into a time warp and have to make their way back. This is mostly an excuse to give more varied stage graphics; the actual enemies are still just foot soldiers and rock soldiers.

When it comes to changes from the arcade version, the first two you will find is around the moves. The SNES version has the ability to do a dash by double tapping forward, whereas arcade is just based on distance. Additionally, the SNES version adds a health cost to landing your super attack, while the arcade version is free. Thus, you're going to mostly be spamming dash attacks with supers reserved for bosses, compared to spamming supers in the arcade (especially Mikey's with its horizontal travel).

The second big change is around stages. In the arcade, when you finish Sewer Surfing you get a graphic of Shredder's head appearing and sending you into the time warp, somehow. By comparison, the SNES port has a Rat King fight and then a full Technodrome stage. The mid boss is Tokka and Rahzor (moved from Skull and Crossbones) and the final boss is a unique fight against Shredder, from the viewpoint of him in a mech. You must use the "throw foot soldier at the screen" move to toss them into the mech and defeat him. When you do, he jumps into the Technodrome's transporter and then uses it to send you in time. So at least, compared to the arcade, there is some sense being made around the time travel. Neon Night Riders now uses Mode 7, but it's still just an auto scroller. And finally, there's some more boss changes. Instead of Cement Man, you fight Slash in Prehistoric Turtlesaurus (a much better choice), and now Skull and Crossbones has Bebop and Rocksteady in pirate outfits.

Overall, it's a very strong arcade conversion, and honestly is probably the definitive version of the game, since you don't have to put up with the arcade version's intense damage numbers to munch your quarters.

[TheSSNintendo]

1. Deja Vu: MacVenture Series
2. Deja Vu II: MacVenture Series
3. Earthworm Jim 2 (SNES/Switch Online)
4. Crash Banidcoot: The Huge Adventure (Gameboy Advance)
5. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (Switch)
6. Lego Batman: The Video Game (Steam)
7. Ys III - Wanderers from Ys (SNES)
8. Suikoden II HD Remaster (Switch)
9. Technobabylon (GOG)
10. Crystalis (NES/Switch Online)
11. Mega Man II (Game Boy/Switch Online)
12. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers (Game Boy/Cowabunga Collection)
13. Prison City (Steam)
14. Mega Man X2 (SNES/Mega Man X Legacy Collection)
15. Tunic (XBox One) - I got the "bad ending", and sometime down the line I might try for the good one.
16. Ducktales 2 (NES/Steam - Disney Afternoon Collection)

[prfsnl_gmr]

Hot Take: Kirby’s Epic Yarn is mid…just like every other Kirby game.

Based.

Thank you!

These are the Kirby games I’ve beaten: Adventure, Dream Land 1-3, Super Star, 64, Epic Yarn, Amazing Mirror, Nightmare in Dreamland, Triple Deluxe, Forgotten Land, and Fighter’s Deluxe. All of them are good; none of them are great (although Adventure and Super Star are close). What am I missing?