Games Beaten 2026

[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)
16. Ducktales 2 (NES/Steam - Disney Afternoon Collection)
17. Talespin (NES/Steam - Disney Afternoon Collection)
18. Freddy Pharkas - Frontier Pharmacist (GOG)
19. Sam & Max Hit the Road (GOG)
20. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Switch)
21. Sonic Blast Man (SNES)

[Ack]

1. Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil (FPS)(PC)
2. Doom 3 (FPS)(PC)
3. V Rising (Adventure)(PC)
4. Teardown (Action)(PC)
5. Control: Ultimate Edition (Action)(PC)
6. Peak (Adventure)(PC)
7. The Exit 8 (Horror)(PC)
8. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (RPG)(PC)
9. Killing Time: Resurrected (FPS)(PC)
10. Darkenstein 3D (FPS)(PC)
11. Metal Garden (FPS)(PC)
12. Caput Mortum (Horror)(PC)
13. Corridor 7: Alien Invasion (FPS)(PC)
14. Extraneum (FPS)(PC)
15. Dead Trash (FPS)(PC)
16. Dead Trash: Operation Yellow Snow (FPS)(PC)
17. Withering Rooms (Action)(PC)
18. Green Hell (Adventure)(PC)

Green Hell is another survival crafting game, set in a jungle full of predators, with a hostile native tribe as well as natural elements happy to kill you. Oh, and also dehydration and starvation. It's like the grandchild of Robinson's Requiem, but set in the Amazon. Also, you're crazy, but that's ok, you've been in a jungle for God knows how long and you hit your head.

Here's how it works: you build yourself a little base, travel to the next point, and build yourself a little base. You have to keep up your levels of carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and water. You also have your sanity. You have to monitor your limbs for injury and leeches. Different kinds of wounds require different treatments, from using particular kinds of healing wraps to prying burrowing worms out of your skin. You also need sleep to combat exhaustion and insomnia, and bad eating decisions can lead to food poisoning or parasites. Also, you're sometimes being hunted by the likes of jaguars, pumas, and caimans, the hostile tribe is watching you and waiting to attack en masse, and you might accidentally get too close to a rattlesnake or a dangerous spider, which will bite and poison you and leave you with a nasty fever. So build your base, resupply yourself, then move to the next point of the story.

The base building is modular and surprisingly vertical. You can build a frame and a roof, but you can build more frames out to the sides and more on top, enabling towers or bunkers. You can also build treehouses and floating houses on waterways, or you could simple settle for a tiny hut or even a bed of banana leaves and a sole campfire to keep you going. But if you want the big stuff, like mounts for torches, shelving and chests for supplies, high quality armor, and so on, you're going to have to do a lot of construction, and that's going to require finding access to trees, vines, stones, water, mud, and so forth.

Find a fruit you like? Great, harvest it for its seeds and make an orchard. Your axe break? Build a new one, but it's gonna take sticks, vines, and some kind of rock. You have skill levels which increase damage, tool integrity, lower stamina cost, and even allow for things like getting more meat off an animal carcass. Some of the skills are pretty much useless, but others can have a major impact, like how long your tools last before they break, because you really don't want your spear to snap while you're fending off something trying to eat you.

There is a plot. You're an unreliable narrator, but essentially you're stuck in the jungle thinking you're looking for your girlfriend and struggling to figure out why you keep finding evidence of other people, like drug runners or military. Also, you make a lot of ayahuasca, which leads to truths and opening doors and trippy hallucinations but also reveals more of what's actually happening, bit by bit. Like how you've been to the jungle before and why. Some of the major truths in the game are also hidden in side areas you wouldn't normally visit if you aren't rushing, and some things are never answered, like what happened to certain people you find evidence of but never see. The storyline is surprisingly dark at times, and there is one drug-fueled trip sequence that is particularly chilling and will stay in my mind a long time about the cost of rushing to exploit resources and find miracle medicines without thought of repercussions.

Green Hell is difficult. But if you like a challenge that doesn't hold your hand and isn't going to tell you exactly what to do to survive, great. Because odds are you're going to die a lot in this game, particularly when you first start out. But as it goes, and it opens up to you, the experience becomes a lot of fun. Sometimes intensely frustrating, but also a lot of fun.

[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)
22. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (PS2) *
23. Sly 2: Band of Thieves (PS2)
24. Army of Two (Xbox 360)
25. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (PS2)
26. Jak II (PS2)
27. Jak 3 (PS2)
28. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3)
29. Pokemon Sapphire (GBA)
30. Watch_Dogs (PS4)
31. Watch_Dogs: Bad Blood (PS4)
32. Legend of Hero Tonma (TG16)
33. Alan Wake: American Nightmare (PC)
34. Banjo-Tooie (N64) *
35. Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters (PSP)
36. Super Robot Spirits (N64)
37. Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii)

38. Tales of Arise (PS4)

I’ve been a pretty big Tales series fan for quite some time now. In fact, I’ve been steadily playing through every game in the main series for the past several years, and after finishing Tales of Destiny 2 last year, this was the last one left to complete. I’d heard very polarizing opinions from my friends about it. Some of my friends quite liked it (and the game reviewed well too), but others were incredibly negative on it. If nothing else, I knew my time with Arise would be something interesting, and it definitely ended up being something I can talk about a LOT XD. It ultimately took me around 53 hours to beat the Japanese-language PS4 version of the game playing on my PS5 (for whatever that matters for the technical performance of the thing) on normal difficulty. (As usual with these narrative-heavy games, I’m going to be getting decently into spoiler territory for the story, so reader discretion please be advised).

Tales of Arise is the story of a character known only as Iron Mask, at the start of the story. An amnesiac, he’s one of countless slaves living on the planet of Dahna. 300 years earlier, armies from the neighboring planet of Rena invaded and enslaved all of Dahna. Divided into 5 different regions each governed by a Renan Lord, all any Dahnan has to look forward to is the sweet release of death. But all of that changes when Iron Mask happens upon a strange captive being brought through their camp. Shionne, a young woman whose uncontrollable “thorn” powers harm whomever touches her, is a hardly willing but natural ally for Iron Mask (who, himself, lacks any ability to feel pain). Breaking out of their prison camp, the two join up with a local resistance group to take down not just the Lord of the region they live in, but every last Lord of the 5 Renan regions of Dahna. While their motivations don’t exactly align, their means of achieving them are more than good enough, and the pair set off on their revolutionary adventure.

Arise starts off with a pretty damn bold premise. Being a colonial slave on a mission to liberate every last one of his countrymen, Iron Mask (whom we quickly learn is actually named Alphen) has a hell of a task on his shoulders not just on a literal level but on a metatextual thematic one, too. Not to bury the lede too deeply, Arise fails at this task, and many others, more spectacularly than I’ve seen almost any other game do. Tales of Arise is easily one of the worst written games I’ve ever played, and I can only hope that I can do my thoughts as to why justice as I record them here.

While the politics around how they handle all of the slavery stuff are indeed worth complaining about, the thing that underscores all of it is just how poor the greater writing fundamentals are. Far more than just a story I find insensitive, misguided, and/or distasteful on a moral level (all of which are points that are also, in fairness, true), Tales of Arise struggles incredibly badly with the basic practice of communicating ideas in an engaging way as a piece of fiction writing.

First off, you have the characters and dialogue writing which are both incredibly shallow and weak. Alphen & Shionne end up with a main party of six, including themselves, by the end of the story, and a main party that small usually makes for a pretty tight, focused narrative in my experience, but Tales of Arise is far from your average narrative in that regard. All of our main characters have awful chemistry with one another, and it makes their interactions incredibly boring to watch and read. Everyone seems to lack any meaningful internality or three-dimensional aspects to their characters, and the end result is a main cast who barely exist beyond the surface-level tropes that describe their respective places in the plot. This gets incredibly tiring over the course of a 40~50+ hour RPG, because despite how little they have to talk about, they still talk a TON.

From the very start of the game, characters will repeat back information to you that you’ve *just* heard back to you ad nauseam. One of Alphen’s first lines, in fact, is talking to himself out loud (something only for the benefit of the player to hear), describing how hopeless his life as a slave is. That isn’t necessarily a problem in a vacuum, but it’s also, beat for beat, all things we, the audience, can not only already observe with our eyes but were also just told minutes ago by the narration in the opening cutscene. I couldn’t tell you if this is down to just trying to give the characters *anything* to talk about because their shallow personalities afford them few other topics to speak of, or if it’s just down to the author’s incredibly poor opinion of a prospective player’s attention span, but this endless repetition of things you already know is a consistent factor for the entire game, and things do not get better from there.

Our main cast aren’t just boring characters, but they often fail to even maintain consistent characterizations in the first place. The examples that I feel best illustrates this are in the fourth region of the game you go to. In this place, the citizens of the capital seem to have already overthrown their regional Lord, so your party is something of a rudderless ship, and have nothing to do but talk to the leader of the resistance movement who pulled it off. Their leader is an arrogant, bully of a man who distrusts and hates Renans more than anything, and he grates against the party quite badly. Being an Dahnan who travels with Renan, Alphen has had no shortage of misunderstandings and confusion from other previous resistance groups who doubt how trustworthy his companions are. However, he’s never been anything but an extremely mild-mannered leader for the party. His reputation as a liberator proceeds him, but he’s never done anything but professed his trust and care for both the Renans and Dahnans who make up his party. Alphan has never once been someone who jumps to violence, and he always chooses dialogue to clarify confusion between himself and others (even when talking is really not the smarter course of action at the time). Even still, at the suggestion that he’s only travelling with Shionne because he’s sexually attracted to her, this sends Alphen into such a rage as we’ve never seen him before, and he sucker punches the guy in the face.

Later in this same location, it so happens that the Renan Lord was never defeated in the first place, and this was all a clever trap to root out the resistance once and for all in one deft swoop. Rinwell, a younger girl in your party, has been on the hunt for this particular Lord all her life. This Lord not only killed her parents but her entire clan, and that desire for revenge has secretly been her motivation for the entire story. However, she’s stopped from achieving this vengeful conclusion to her quest because she’s blocked by another party member, Law. Law is the son of the leader of the first resistance movement Alphen & Co. met, but he was killed by a different Renan Lord earlier in the story. Law tells Rinwell not to kill, to take revenge, out of hate, because there will never be any going back from that. However, this whole setup will likely seem very strange to the player, because Law actually killed the Lord who killed his father earlier in the story in a really flashy cutscene, but that was never treated as any kind of bad thing or toxic action that’d damage his integrity in the future. Regardless, Law suddenly treats the action he did earlier with no long term consequences as an unacceptable moral action for Rinwell, and he does not let her carry through with attacking the woman who personally wiped out her clan and murdered her parents.

These are definitely two of the biggest cases in the story, but it’s what woke me up to just how badly done the actual character writing is. These characters don’t just not have properly done arc. They don’t even have consistent characterization, full stop. They’re more like dolls that just act accordingly to the needs of the plot to move it along towards whatever new set piece the author thought would be cool. The main cast are basically just walking tropes. Most of what they do is either repeat their specific trauma exactly like they have before, never delving any further into it thematically or emotionally, or repeat one of their respective handfuls of food preference or hobby tropes. No one ever really bonds over anything, sees themselves in one another, or feels like they’re making meaningful connections. As so many RPGs of this type do, the cast often spits passionate words about how one another are such valuable comrades, irreplaceable friends, but these people feel much more like friendly coworkers than they ever feel like genuine friends who would enjoy one another’s company. That not only feeds into the aforementioned consistent boredom that permeates basically every conversation they have, but it also makes their interpersonal struggles and victories very difficult to care about, too, because they’re just so shallow.

The biggest place this manifests is in the (supposed) romance subplot that our two main characters go through. Alphen and Shionne are *meant* to have this slow burn, emotional romance over the course of the story. They spend a ton of time together without other party members, and even their basic character intros of “lady who emits literal & emotional pain” and “oblivious guy who feels no physical pain” are very clearly meant to be thematically intertwined. However, as a big fan of romance stories (of which Tales has some of the best I’ve seen in video games!), their romantic chemistry is *terrible*. There are a comical amount of cases of the same conversation between them, Shionne almost opening up but then Alphen says something that makes her stop, and it just never gets any deeper than that. There is no actual building of trust beyond the story just alleging that it’s happening despite the actual behavior between them never changing, so when we do get to the big “He hugs her after a big, passionate speech” moment, it feels so inappropriate because it still feels like they barely know each other. The authors (particularly the main writer, Takaaki Okuda, at whose feet I lay pretty much all of the issues with this game’s writing given his past works’ similar failings) clearly have no idea how to actually write engaging, natural feeling human interactions, and that makes for an absolutely dreadful character-driven narrative.

But the characters are only one part of the larger narrative, because there’s also the politics of this story, and they are frankly disgusting. Given the political climate of the 2020’s, the authors have chosen a really bold premise for their narrative. As eluded to earlier, while fantasy racism is hardly a novel thing in fiction, your main character being a slave explicitly leading a revolt against the very institutions of slavery and colonialism that bind him (robbing him literally of both mind and body) is not exactly your typical fantasy RPG adventure, but the authors here clearly have just as weak a comprehension of the basics of anti-racism and liberation ideology as they do an understanding of basic human interactions.

Much like Takaaki’s previous major work, Tales of Vesperia, so much of this story only serves to spout centrist platitudes about morality without even the most basic of justifications behind them. Rinwell speaks up *so* often about how she doesn’t like the casual racism she has to endure, by Rena they meet or even the other Rena in the party, and yet the reaction from the party is always to minimize her feelings and victim blame her for being disruptive and voicing her displeasure at all. There are so many parts of the story where characters are looked down upon or framed as bad for doing revolution in a way that isn’t aesthetically nice enough or emotionally “pure” enough. Like in the earlier example with Rinwell trying to act vengefully against the woman who led a genocide against her people, doing things “angry” is framed as making any action worse regardless of any of the surrounding context of that action. Acting with emotion is simply bad, full stop, and we leave it at that without ever so much as giving a proper example as to why this is somehow a slippery slope of morality.

This story so earnestly believes that reverse racism is real, and with that knowledge in mind, it takes leap after logical leap to ever avoid meaningfully addressing the immorality of the institutions that our characters operate in and against. It’s not like the story is pro-slavery society or anything, mind you, but it’s also demonstrably incapable of ever confronting the genuine bad actors, actually selfish and hateful people, that perpetrate and benefit from these systems of subjugation. They go out of their way to invent this massive, strange plot surrounding brainwashing by aliens who were themselves mind controlled by a planet who wants to merge with another planet for totally unspecified reasons ALL to avoid ever having to actually confront the fact that slavery and the dehumanization it requires actually does societally and economically benefit classes of people. In our real world, people did and *do* support slavery (either metaphorical or literal) of those they deem lesser beings than them because it ideologically and materially supports them, and that is something Tales of Arise never even comes remotely close to so much as acknowledging in its plot.

We even go to the trouble of giving the amazingly evil 5 Renan Lords sob story backstories to paint them as sympathetic victims themselves, too, because EVERYONE is a victim of someone else. Not of the harmful systems that they perpetuate in the same way that patriarchy binds and harms men too, of course, but literal, material victims of the next bigger guy with the biggest offender being that sentient, evil planet I mentioned earlier. This feels all the more gross because it compounds with the shallow character, tepid writing that fills our main cast. The flippancy with which they treat the extremely serious topics their story uses as a premise is constantly reinforced by our pathetic shells of anime people that our narrative follows and vice versa, making for a narrative that is actively disgusting, boring, or both the whole way through.

It’s not even like they haven’t given themselves plenty of opportunity for meaningful deep thematic storytelling either. Alphen’s mask breaking off, his repeated costume changes (from slaves’ rags to resistance clothes to a black knight to a white knight) could easily be used to reflect changes in his mental stability, ideology, view of himself or otherwise, but they’re never anything but simple aesthetic markers of where you are in the story. Shionne, a Renan who was nonetheless a subject of fear and discrimination her entire life because of her thorns curse, is a character *ripe* for interesting, nuanced portrayals of how hierarchical societies never stop at making more out-groups to other (and therefore are harmful and destructive even to themselves. They don’t need evil planet-driven aliens to manipulate them into being evil for that), but we just have her do crappy “Oh, she loves to eat!” comedy the whole time instead.

Even the/a main(?) villain of our story, a Sephiroth wannabee (much like Vesperia had), has a meaningful contrasting worldview with Alphen. It’s something that could’ve easily served as a narrative device to help reframe the entire second half of the game into a scope of “revolutions built on love for your fellow man vs. revolutions built on others’ fear of you” (to simplify things a bit for the sake of brevity), but instead we just make our Arise Sephiroth into fiction’s greatest hater and have him attack Alphen constantly just because he can’t stand being the ruler of everything. Frankly, I can’t even blame that the rival’s feet, because he’s actually more or less holding up his end of the narrative bargain. Alphen is just such a shallow, nothing burger of a character that he has no way to effectively connect with anyone, friend or foe, as he’s tossed about the endless pages of exposition the final stretch of the game dumps on you.

On that point, the pacing of this game is an bizarrely mangled mess as well. Going through and liberating each of the five regions of Dahna takes a pretty consistent 6~8 hours each. It’s not a well written or executed time any of those five times, but it’s at least got a recognizable formula to it. By contrast, the game after that is an absurdly exposition heavy slog. There was one section where I was watching cutscenes or walking between them for the better part of 6 straight hours with only one short, tedious dungeon in between (that they make you go through twice). The narrative foundation built up through that point is already incredibly weak, and it makes all of this constant exposition that much harder to care about and so mentally draining to sit through. It gives the whole game a big vibe of just feeling unfinished, like there was originally going to be another 10-ish hours to set up all of our cool end game set pieces, but we ran out of time and just had to cram it all into back-to-back cutscenes.

As an example I feel is fairly illustrative of the pacing here, Tales games often have one or two moments where the party rests before a big event. They split up around the location, and our main character goes and talks to each one of them to get a good perspective with one another about where they each are regarding the situation they now find themselves in. It’s something a lot of these games use to varying degrees of success, and they’re usually pretty effective even in the weaker Tales games. Arise, for its part, has *four* of these sections, and THREE of them take place within that 6 hour “turbo cutscene hell” (to borrow my spouse’s description of that section of the game). Now, I doubt that the narrative would’ve been meaningfully better had the development team not had to make the compromises for time they seemingly had to, but it at least would’ve made for a better flow into the trash fire of a conclusion this story has.

Tales of Arise’s story has so many myriad problems and disgusting morals it pushes that I could never hope to catalog them all here in a way that was intelligible, but the consistent factor in all of it is *boredom*. Yes, the characters don’t have fulfilling arcs, and the politics of this story are so ignorant as to be frequently outright offensive, but it is all done with so little flair beyond twists that exist for the sake of it (this story has a very troubled understanding of setup and payoff, needless to say) that it actively bored and exhausted me from beginning to end. Arise takes the cake for poorly executed narratives as I’ve experienced them, because most other games I’ve played at least have a veneer of being interesting. They set up a plot that seems engaging, but only after the first act or two do they show their hand that they don’t have any idea what they’re talking about, and ultimately the romance is boring, the arcs go unfulfilled, the political intrigue goes unaddressed, etc. Arise is both condescending and lifeless in its delivery from the very first hour, and this is an experience that absolutely begins as it means to carry on.

On the note of being unfinished and boring, that’s frankly my view of the combat as well. Arise takes a pretty bold step away from Tales convention, even greater than the new direction Zesteria began paving two games earlier, in its combat system, and I found it to be a remarkably unpolished slog. More than just the shift from the player’s profile to behind the back, playing like a more typical third-person action game does, than Zesteria altered things to be, Arise adds much deeper combo systems into the mix as well. In a move I appreciate, they’ve continued to move away from MP-limited battle systems and instead limited you and your party’s spells to character respective pools of AP. This AP recharges over time, and different artes consume different amounts of AP to cast. With one set of artes for fighting on the ground and another for aerial combat (and eventually the ability to have a second set for each as well), when combined with your normal attacks, you can get some pretty crazy combos going.

Major changes have also been made to staggering enemies. Rather than enemies usually being staggered by your hits unless they’re blocking (or are special tough enemies) like the old Tales games did, enemies in Arise don’t stagger normally. Instead, your likeliness to “break” their poise and interrupt them is bound to a new Penetration stat, and this was presumably done in order to create a good balance with the new hectic combo-crazy pace to combat so enemies wouldn’t just be permanently staggered constantly from your attacks. An enemy getting to low enough health lets you more easily fill up a bar to push them into a critical state where pushing a direction on the D-pad allows for a fancy instant execution (like various Tales games have done in the past), which can also damage nearby enemies, but bosses are immune to such vulnerabilities. To help with both tough enemies and bosses, you’ve got the new Boost Attack system, which are special moves that can be activated after enough BP has been respectively accumulated. These tend to instantly down enemies if used at the appropriate moment (most characters can only instantly down a particular type of enemy, like fliers, or an enemy doing a specific action, like casting a spell). Much like things had been with the new direction that Zesteria had taken things in, it’s a pretty big change for the series, and not necessarily a negative one either, but its execution is incredibly lacking.

The biggest issue here is that enemies just have too much damn health. Your attacks do such incredibly pitiful amounts of damage that combat takes an exceedingly tedious amount of time against *everything* from bosses to normal enemies, and it’s just nowhere near satisfying enough to ever feel rewarding for the amount of time you’re putting into it. Nearly one fifth of my total playtime ended up being *just* time spent in combat (a stat Tales games have been kind enough to keep track of for you for well over a decade), and that is a crazy ratio for a typical Tales game in my experience. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m far from a fan of technical 3D action games, but I quickly stopped bothering all that much with the crazy combo stuff because it never actually seemed to make combat go any faster than playing more casually did, so it never seemed worth the trouble. It’s not like you can practically juggle most enemies, since they don’t stagger, so your big combo chains are more so based around dodging, but all that effort is repaid so little that I didn’t see why it was worth going the extra mile for so little reward in the end. Even your powerful mystic arte finisher moves do paltry amounts of damage to even normal enemies, let alone bosses, and overlimits being shifted to triggering randomly rather than something deliberately activated doesn’t exactly help with that either.

It’s not even a case of difficulty, either, though the game does have pretty meaningful issues with that, too. The first 15 or so hours of the game are quite tough, especially on bosses. The one limiting factor you have to your party’s artes are for your healing spells, and you also don’t get money from fighting enemies (they only drop items that you can craft into weapons or sell for money). As a result, resource management both in and out of battle becomes one of the most important things to pay attention to right from the get go. It’s that much more pressing to pay attention to in the early game because you can die *really* fast if you’re not really on the ball, even against normal enemies. This made the game feel a lot more like some Dark Souls or Bloodborne-wannabee than a Tales game at the outset, and that was remarkably reinforced by the default attack button being insanely bound to R1 by default (a very common light attack bind in Souls-likes, but one that Tales games have never used for that).

Up through fighting the second Renan Lord, the game was remarkably hard, and I only barely avoided game overs against major bosses up until beating him, but then that just stopped. After that second Lord fight, the game just got easier and easier until it was quickly never hard again for more than the entire second half of my playtime. Bosses were often crazily easy, from their attack patterns to the damage they dealt, despite my overall playstyle barely changing. Combat was never difficult again beyond the third region of the game unless I was going out of my way to fight strong, optional bosses (who are often so stupidly powerful you need to be playing extremely carefully or just be killed in 1 two-hit combo from their normal attacks). The combat never being exciting definitely lent a *lot* to worsening the tedium and boredom of the narrative, I’m honestly hesitant to chalk this up to *only* bad difficulty balancing. Much like Tales games have had since Vesperia (i.e. as early as they possibly could have), this game had day 1 DLC for big level boosts as well as big in-game cash gains. Call my cynical if you like, but I cannot help but think that this weird difficulty peak near the start of the game that’s weirdly absent from later mandatory content is a deliberate choice on the publisher’s part to push players towards the microtransactions.

Whatever the reason for it, as a big Tales fan, the combat was just never very satisfying or fun. It’s either nails hard or horribly boring with rarely any middle ground in between, and the new combat design’s bad polish is squarely to blame for that, in my eyes. Even if I don’t find the new combo-heavy technical gameplay fun, just how long combat takes to do is boring as heck regardless because it makes the fun you *can* find in the combat lose so much of its spark with how much effort these endless, grindy fights take. This is enhanced further by the mistakes in the Boost Attack system, which I found largely just served to briefly hinder the scads of annoyingly very agile and dodge-happy enemy. Don’t have a Boost Attack primed for this annoying enemy type? Well life’s gonna suck for the next 30~60+ seconds as you chase these enemies around the battlefield waiting for that BP to finally finish building up.

Additionally, the approach to how combat is difficult, an emphasis on dodging, waiting for the right moments to strike, don’t really mesh well with a *party*-focused action RPG system. You can be playing as awesome and on the ball as you can, but that’s not going to help much if your AI allies are just too stupid to stay alive against the two-hit kills from the unstaggerable and/or hyper agile boss you’re trying to take on. For either kind of fight, both boring and difficult, things are often moving SO much around you, from your enemies’ attacks to your allies’, that it can be hard to focus on everything you need to in order actually dodge all this crap in the first place. It seems like some people enjoy this combat system, but as a fan of the combat approach in every other Tales game (save for the Tales of Destiny remake), I cannot get behind this new approach, at least not in this form. There was simply too much evidence over the time that I spent with Arise that the marriage of the high risk/high reward gameplay of other, harder action games has been done far too messily for me to comfortably write it off as just not my thing. If they had another game to polish things up, much like Berseria fixed so many problems with Zesteria’s combat, then perhaps this could be more fun the way older games’ were, but that is not the case with Arise as is.

For one final note about the combat, call me cynical if you must, but not unlike how the wonky difficulty balancing makes me think that might've been done to push people towards microtransactions, I'm also not convinced that the crazy amounts of HP enemies have wasn't done to just pad out the game's playtime. While it took me 53 hours to beat this doing most of everything but the non-crazy end game side content, it hasn't taken much looking at sites like howlongtobeat to see that Arise is a remarkably short Tales game (especially not doing all the side content), as such things go. While I'm not about to personally jump on the bandwagon of "long game = good game" or vice versa, so many people *do* that I cannot help but suspect that Namco Bandai wanted to compensate for the relatively lackluster amount of content the game had by just making combat take longer to satisfy the vocal minority who demand high-price games take a lot of their time to finish.

Some time ago, I came across an old movie review quote that described a film as "a feast for the eyes and a famine for the mind." As much as I'd like to use that here as well, as I think it's a fun play on a popular phase, I can't even comfortably say that Arise manages the former despite how well it successfully fulfills the latter. Tales of Arise is the first Tales game to be made in the Unreal 4 engine instead of Namco Bandai's own engine, and it *shows*. At least on the PS4 version, texture pop-in is incredibly common and impossible to ignore, as textures on armor, weapons, and environments frequently take a very noticeable half-second or more load in during cutscenes. Beyond that, the whole game just has this very shiny flair to the environments that don't really compliment the 3D-anime art style. A lot of games from all eras pull lots of little tricks to make their cutscenes seem better or more detailed than they really are. Clever camerawork and scene transitions can make the human brain experience things in a lot more detail than actually existed, and it's something video games have been borrowing from films for decades now. Arise has a lot of these tricks too, but just how shiny and high resolution all of the environments and such are only really serve to draw attention to how cheap so much of everything else looks (especially the muppet-like lip sync on so many lines, even in this original Japanese version).

A scene quite early on in the game has stuck with me the most for this, where the first Lord is shown grasping a cup, squeezing it until it breaks, but the break only happens after a cut to black. There is no actual animation shown to indicate he's gripping it any more hard than normal, so it comes off as really strange when we get a close up on the cup, wait a few beats, then a quick cut to black followed by a cracking sound. This is all in contrast with the genuinely fantastic motion capture work. It's not hard to see why everyone's motion capture actors are front and center in the credits alongside their voice actors, as I don't think I've ever felt an anime game like this have motion capture *this* damn good. Sadly, though, it was a ton of effort gone to waste. Yeah, the mo-cap looks good, but it's in a gaudy looking game with cruddy combat and an appalling story. Hopefully they put that amount of effort in again the next time they make a Tales game, I suppose.

Beyond that, the voice work is good, but the voice actors have such awful material to work with, they can only bring so much to the table in bringing it to life. The music is extremely forgettable, generic fantasy RPG music, and I disliked the first main battle theme almost after only a couple of listens, but the biggest issue I have with the presentation is what they've done to the skits. Skits have been in Tales games all the way since Tales of Destiny 2 (or even earlier, depending on what you're counting as a skit). They're little optional voiced scenes between characters that you have the ability to view after specific points in the story, and they generally serve to give exposition as well as, more importantly, flesh out character relationships beyond the purview of the main story. They're one of the strongest storytelling tools in the Tales toolkit, and this game has made them look uglier than ever. For a long time, Tales skits were little faces in boxes that bounced around. Then, in Tales of Graces and Tales of Zesteria, we transitioned to full-body portraits that would change between various stances to give much clearer and dynamic views of what the characters were doing. Tales of Berseria upped the ante on this further by not just having full-body portraits but also manga panel-like inserts that the characters would use for specific looks, interjections, etc.

Berseria's formula was a brilliant way to bring skits to life, and Arise has taken that and tossed it into the wood chipper seemingly only because 2D is boring and 3D is flashier and more next gen (an insane thing to do in the 2020's, but here we are). They've leaned even further into the idea of manga panels, but to do it, they've gotten rid of the 2D entirely. Now, instead, it's positioned 3D shots of the characters interacting just as their normal character models with their mouths moving along to what they're saying (and basically no other movement). Where your brain will do a good job of assuming implied movement and positioning in 2D interactions, that rarely works the same with 3D. The skits, as a result, look awkward and cheap because they have all the rough, gaudy edges of the character designs (and cruddy lip syncing) with none of the great motion capture work that helps the normal 3D cutscenes get passing grades visually. Tons of story important cutscenes are done in this skit format, too, presumably to cut down on the amount of motion capture work needed, but that really doesn't help very much when these skits look so awful in the first place. While it's cool that the models reflect any costume changes you may've done to the characters at the moment, and you would also assume they'd have a greater range of positioning being 3D models (where 2D art would need a whole dedicated new asset to show a new kind of emotion or action scene), the same positions are repeated a ton, so they end up really under utilizing the main benefit that this new style would presumably bring. Setting aside the fact that they're ugly and also are just tedious addendums to an already boring, tedious story, the worst thing to me about these skits is that they show no understanding of actual manga panel usage at all. The panels have no sense of motion or flow to them at all outside of how they already appear sequentially as each new line starts. You'd be hard pressed to guess the flow of one panel to the next if you were just given a full "page" of them and the respective dialogue for each. If Namco Bandai are going to insist on this hideous new style for their Tales skits, I must ask that they hire a proper mangaka who can make the fundamental flows of these manga panel skits more tolerable, because as far as I'm concerned, they're a flat downgrade that reeks of nothing but trying to appeal to people who think 2D is boring and 3D is good & "next gen".

Verdict: Not Recommended. If this verdict was any surprise to you, I would very seriously ask what review you were reading up until this point XD. This is easily the worst Tales game they've ever made by a country mile, and it's not even close. Not even just Tales game, but it'd be the worst written game, full stop, that I'd ever played had I not played Ghost of Tsushima earlier in the year (which is a very tough bar to beat, in fairness). Tales of Arise is riddled with the kind of fundamental mistakes I'd expect to be complaining about in a PS1 game; not a 2021 AAA game from one of the biggest third-party publisher's marquee franchises. Frankly, a ton of this game, from the feckless writing writing to the Souls-wannabee gameplay to even the 2D-hating aesthetics, feels terribly self-conscious of everything that has given the Tales series its identity up to this point. This is one of the most amazingly cynical slop piles of a product I've ever had the misfortune of experiencing. Maybe all of these flaws were an earnest attempt at evolving a formula they thought they just couldn't beat with Berseria's mechanics. Maybe all the writing is just Takaaki Okuda's fault as a hack writer, and he was actually only brought on to the project because development was immediately after the Tales of Vesperia remaster sold well. Maybe this game really is just that unfinished, and the result of a very tumultuous transition to the Unreal 4 engine that needed to be rushed out the door, so a ton of polish just never ended up happening. Whatever the reason, the main impression that I was left with was a profoundly negative one: A soulless game whose only motivating factor for all the major players was just how many units it'd sell. I'm aware that's a very unkind thing to say about any piece of art, but after being so thoroughly bored and aghast at this for over 50 hours, I'm not about to water down what I genuinely believe just to protect the feelings of developers who will definitely never see this. In conclusion, there are so many other better Tales games, better RPGs, and better games out there, period, that I cannot imagine a single reason why anyone would give even a moment of their time to this burning dumpster fire of a game.

(spoiler'd for sheer size of review otherwise)

[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
16. Dragon's Crown - PS3
17. Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom - PS3
18. Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara - PS3
19. Shadow Hearts - PS2
20. Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred - PC

Lord of Hatred wraps up the plotlines from Vessel of Hatred, giving you a climactic showdown against the titular Lord of Hatred himself: Mephisto. It consists of one new zone, two new classes, and a revamp of the end game to remove some of the mindless grind. It also was the impetus for a revamp of the skill trees, bringing in a bit of Diablo 3 flavor of focusing on the skills themselves and various modifiers to transform them, rather than the large amount of passive buffs of the base game.

Lord of Hatred is set on the Skovos Isles, the home of the Amazons from Diablo 2. Mephisto walks the land in the guise of Akarat, the prophet, and is seeking something on the islands. The plot is reminiscent of the plot of the Lord of Destruction expansion for Diablo 2, with you chasing a villain who is always a step ahead of you towards a goal of ancient power. It adds more texture to the world compared to Vessel of Hatred, and was an enjoyable run, with a very memorable final boss fight.

On the class side, we have the Paladin and the Warlock. The Paladin has all the old tricks from Diablo 2, hitting that armored holy warrior class fantasy pretty hard. The Warlock is a caster class that seems to be a bit of a mix of the Witch Doctor of Diablo 3 and the trap Assassin from Diablo 2, featuring a lot of skills that summon something that then stays in one spot and does damage things around it. It's also the single most visually noisy class they have produced, not helped by the visual effects matching what the enemies are using in terms of color and particle effects. In group content, you will get killed because you couldn't see enemy on-death stuff behind all the Warlock spam.

The end game has two major changes. The first is the warplan system, where you have a skill tree for each major endgame activity that can be leveled up by engaging in warplans. You're given a random set of nodes of different activities, and you plan out five of them to do. Some of these will have a bonus reward. Doing that set of five gives you experience for the aforementioned skill tree. The tree lets you unlock various bonuses to a given activity, such as giving you improved rewards, or getting special monster spawns that can drop better loot. The second is that the Hodradric Cube has returned from Diablo 2, giving you various ways to further improve your items. One of the most notable is the ability to reroll any of your affixes, with some ability to control it. This makes it much easier to get a good set of end game gear; while you still need luck on drops to get the best stuff, there's now a much bigger range of gear that's a step below top tier once you apply the Cube, meaning you can be pushing the hardest content much faster than before. A very welcome change indeed.

Overall, this game makes up for some of the disappointing aspects of Vessel of Hatred. Personally, I would rather the two of them had shipped as a single expansion, as it would have been a more complete experience overall, but they ended the current story arc on a strong note.

[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)
22. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (PS2) *
23. Sly 2: Band of Thieves (PS2)
24. Army of Two (Xbox 360)
25. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (PS2)
26. Jak II (PS2)
27. Jak 3 (PS2)
28. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3)
29. Pokemon Sapphire (GBA)
30. Watch_Dogs (PS4)
31. Watch_Dogs: Bad Blood (PS4)
32. Legend of Hero Tonma (TG16)
33. Alan Wake: American Nightmare (PC)
34. Banjo-Tooie (N64) *
35. Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters (PSP)
36. Super Robot Spirits (N64)
37. Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii)
38. Tales of Arise (PS4)

39. Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex (PS2)

I played through the Japanese versions of the PS1 Crash games a few years back, and save for Crash Bash, I enjoyed all of them decently well. I hadn’t really planned to get to any of the later ones (as I’d heard they weren’t too great) until my wife gave me her old American PS2 and games a couple months back, and this was one of those games. Even if I’d heard less than stellar thing about Wrath of Cortex, getting it for free was a price of entry perfectly tuned to pique my curiosity. Unfortunately, her copy ended up not working, so rather than just write off a possibly bad game that I’d already gotten excited for, I just had to go out and buy my own Japanese copy instead X3. After how awful 100%-ing Crash 2 was, there was no way I was ever 100%-ing any Crash game ever again, and this game was no exception. Getting 51% completion (20 diamonds and 1 ankh), it took me about 4 hours and 40 minutes to beat the Japanese version of the game.

Wrath of Cortex (amusingly enough actually having the supertitle “Crash 4” in Japanese) sees Neo Cortex up to his old tricks again. The evil mask Uka Uka is terribly unhappy with his and the other N evil geniuses (N. Trophy, etc) latest failure and inability to come up with a new plan to finally defeat Aku Aku and Crash once and for all. Cortex’s latest invention *could* work, he says, but he lacks the power to make it happen. This is when Uka Uka finally arrives at their new sure fire plan to defeat Crash: The Majin (as they’re called in Japanese). Four powerful elemental mask spirits, they’re not exactly the most trustworthy or stable sort, but they should be more than enough to get Cortex what he needs. With this new elemental upgrade, Cortex’s latest super weapon, the evil Crunch Bandicoot, Crash & Co. will have their work cut out for them stopping the bad guys this time! Much like the earlier PS1 Crash games, the story doesn’t exist much outside of the initial and ending cutscenes (and you’ve also gotta get every last diamond if you want to see the true ending), but you still get bits of smack talk from the Majin, Cortex, and Aku Aku between worlds and after some stages. It’s silly fun, and a fine premise for the latest Crash Bandicoot adventure.

That adventure, as it so happens, may be new, but it’s also not exactly novel. Better known for their later Lego games, Traveler’s Tales had no easy task putting this game together. The original deal with Sony completely fell through thanks to Universal, their publisher, and so TT suddenly had just 12 months to make the whole game from scratch on unfamiliar next-gen hardware. That being the circumstance, rather than the more ambitious, more open world approach they’d originally intended to do, they fell back on what had worked in the earlier Crash games. As such, Wrath of Cortex is basically just more Crash 3 but with new levels and on the PS2.

The linear platforming levels that Crash has been known for with the first game are here, of course, and the various vehicle stages that have graced the series since the later PS1 games are also here in various degrees. Particularly pulling from Crash 3, you’ve got flying stages, underwater stages (which still suck), and driving stages that will likely look very familiar to anyone who remembers Crash 3 to any meaningful degree. You’ve even got progressively unlockable moves like Crash 3 had, and you’ve got some levels where you play as Crash’s sister Coco, too. There are some “vehicle” stages that have you running away from an obstacle (in traditional Crash Bandicoot fashion) towards the screen in a car, on a scooter, etc., but these are only superficial differences and not actually a meaningful change from how older games did it.

There are a couple new stage archetypes, though. One has Crash lumbering around in what looks like a bazooka-equipped version of the power lifter from Aliens, but those aren’t too different from normal stages (especially once you unlock Crash’s own bazooka he can use anywhere after beating world 4). The other type of new stage is the main genuinely new one, thankfully, and it has Crash rolling around in an orb like he’s playing Marble Madness. They’re neat for what they are, but they’re hardly going to knock the socks off of anyone hoping for genuinely new approaches to Crash Bandicoot gameplay after being thoroughly satisfied with Crash 3 on the PS1.

You’ve got all the approaches to secrets and collectibles that earlier Crash games had (diamonds for smashing all the boxes in a stage, hidden diamonds only findable if you reach their entry point without dying on that level, and varying difficulties of time trials after beating a level once), so anyone hungry for more nails-tough completionism still has a ton to sink their teeth into here. That said, while the 100% for this game is as soul destroying as these old Crash games ever were, the actual game is actually a remarkably approachable time to beat if you’re not trying to perfect it.

Not only does Crash control really well, but this game also gives you tons of 1-ups compared to the older Crash games. It’s frankly to the point that it feels weird that they’re here at all, because I had capped out the life counter at 99 without even trying well before I reached the end of the game. In addition, they’re also quite generous with checkpoints, and bosses aren’t too mean but are also a nice challenge. As a more experienced 3D platform player, I found the game a comfortable but reasonable challenge, but this is probably the first Crash game I’ve played that felt properly enjoyable for a kid or someone not particularly used to the genre. It’d be a weird game to use for that explicit purpose in the current year, of course, but it was still nonetheless nice to see Traveler’s Tales making a game that can be as hard as you’d like it to be whether you want to ignore the 100% completion collectibles or not.

Aesthetically, this game is pretty darn impressive for such an early PS2 title. It’s not exactly as stunning as something like Final Fantasy X, of course, but it does a better job of looking like a super powered PS1 game than a lot of other PS2 games this early in the console’s life that I’ve played. The real star of the show, however, is the music. As much as the gameplay is a competent but not exactly novel experience, this game is packed with great, boppin’ tunes to Bandicoot around to, and they’re definitely the part of the experience that’ll probably stick with me the longest.

The only real negative in regards to presentation is the performance. While the actual game plays just fine and holds a decent framerate, it also has some *very* bad load times for a PS2 game. With wait times of 15~20 seconds to load into a stage or load back to the hub area level select zone, these loading times would be surprisingly bad even for a PS1 game. I ultimately found them tolerable enough, but it’s something that makes me easily believe that the PS2 version is the weakest version of this game, and the Xbox port is really the one to go for if you want a more definitive experience. This is also a blue disc PS2 game, so there’s a decent chance your PS2 may be unable to play it anymore given the common issues with the “fat” PS2s and playing blue disc games. Even on my PS2 slim, it made the thing shake like a jet engine about to take off whenever I was playing it. I’m sure everything was ultimately fine, but it’s still worrying to hear the PS2 whir *that* loudly just from spinning the disc whenever I was playing without headphones XD

Verdict: Recommended. It’s not gonna rock your world, but I think Wrath of Cortex is a pretty darn fun time! It controls great, the level design is solid, and while a few of those diamonds seemed awfully miserable to try and go for if I were going for the true ending, I still had a fun enough time that I’m actively considering putting the PS2’s life back in danger for another go at those hidden diamonds I missed X3. If you’ve got a hankering for some more Crash 3-types of goodness and aren’t too fussed by long load times or a lack of originality, then this is a very quality game to give your time to~

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

25: Don't Stare

Most video games desperately struggle to give the medium (a screen, controlled by a couple of buttons) enough depth to mimic the simulation being portrayed. Don't Stare simply doesn't bother. Instead, it just mimics the shallowest of interactions: staring at noticeable abnormalities on other people. You get twenty seconds, and your "goal" is to make as many people as you can feel uncomfortable by holding your cursor at scars, pimples, third eyes, second heads, you get the idea. No matter what you do, you'll be kicked out of the speed dating event. Might as well see how far you can get. There's some enjoyment in remembering what their weak spots are. You might marvel at the creator's goofy designs. Perhaps there's something cathartic about being able to simply do what society tells us not to do. But don't expect to play this longer than a couple of minutes. And there's a pretty good chance you won't feel good for having done so.

4/10

[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
16. Dragon's Crown - PS3
17. Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom - PS3
18. Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara - PS3
19. Shadow Hearts - PS2
20. Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred - PC
21. Shadow Hearts: Covenant - PS2

Shadow Hearts: Covenant is the sequel to the original, taking place six months later and continuing Yuri's story after the bad ending of the first game. Once again, you battle occult forces during World War I with a timing-based battle system. With Covenant, the battle system has been majorly revamped, but the story tone also has undergone a significant shift that can be quite jarring.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant is very reliant on you having played the first game; many of the important plot figures come directly from the first game, and their motivations are a result of the events of that game. The game begins with Yuri having isolated himself after the events of the first game, and rumors spread of a demon taking residence in an isolated town. The female lead and a priest team up to try and seal the demon, but the female lead, Karin, discovers she has some strange feeling when she meets Yuri in his demon form. She ends up teaming up with Yuri after the priest puts a curse on him to try and undo the curse, collecting an eclectic cast of party members in the process.

Unlike the first game, this game definitely feels like a proper PS2 game. Environments and characters are more detailed, camera angles are more dynamic, and you can now have four people in battle at once. The game is now spread over two disks, with the disk two point at the same "you defeated the intro boss, but now the real boss has revealed himself" point that the first game had. Unlike the first game, though, there is less connection between the two big bads. It feels less like a natural escalation and more of two somewhat disjoint episodes.

The battle system has been majorly revamped. The first game had characters and enemies statically taking positions on an implicit grid, and effects that had a range might be able to hit multiples. Now, characters and enemies move around as they act, coming closer or apart depending on actions. You can also manually move characters close to one another or use a spell to gather enemies together so you can hit them with an AOE spell. If characters are close enough, they can engage in the combo system. After the first character successfully acts, you have a brief window to activate the next character. This can continue through all four characters, with a damage multiplier occurring based on the number of total hits in the combo. However, enemies can also combo up against you. Unfortunately, the combo system is a bit too clunky; attacks have a property around how they knock enemies around, and this affects how well attacks can chain. If you use a bad attack for the position of an enemy, it will break the chain prematurely. The system ends up being too fiddly compared to some of the stupid things you can do around stacking damage multipliers.

On the flip side, the judgement ring system has been improved. Each character now has a certain number of hits in their basic attack, from one to three. You can reduce it down to one, or you can add up to two more over their base; each additional attack is a 10% damage boost, but the damage is amortized over all the attacks. Like before, there is a regular and a critical hit area on each segment. But now there are equippable items that let you increase the size of each area. With enough, you can make an entire segment into a critical area. Finally, you can adjust an overall mode of operation for your ring. The standard ring only deals hits you land, while the technical ring significantly increases the critical bonus but requires you to hit every area. There's proper risk/reward in things, and you feel rewarded for mastering it.

Like the first game, you will progress over various areas of Europe and Japan from a world map. The game has a very weird tone to it. While the main plot is pretty heavy, the game likes to break the tension with full gag-anime segments. Characters will act incredibly silly, do asides to the camera, or even engage in full fourth wall breaks. I'm not normally bothered by tonal shifts, but it is so jarring in this game that I felt the need to comment on it.

Overall, it's a sequel that improves on the original in every way except those aforementioned tonal shifts. It's also significantly easier, once you realize some of the busted stuff you can do with stacking buffs. By midway through the game, I could one shot bosses after a turn of setup, much to my delight. If you enjoyed the first game, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up. But definitely do not play it without playing the first.

[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)
16. Ducktales 2 (NES/Steam - Disney Afternoon Collection)
17. Talespin (NES/Steam - Disney Afternoon Collection)
18. Freddy Pharkas - Frontier Pharmacist (GOG)
19. Sam & Max Hit the Road (GOG)
20. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Switch)
21. Sonic Blast Man (SNES)
22. Batman Returns (SNES)

[prfsnl_gmr]

1. Ninja Gaiden Ragebound (Switch)
2. Metroid Prime 4 (Switch)
3. Darkwing Duck (Gameboy)
3. DuckTales (Gameboy)
4. DuckTales 2 (Gameboy)
5. Wonder Boy in Monster Land (Sega Master System)
6. Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield (Switch)
7. Depths of Sanity (Switch)
8. Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition (Switch)
9. Ghostrunner II (Xbox)
10. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yo-Yo (Switch)
11. Hudson Selection Vol. 4: Master Takahashi’s Adventure Island (GameCube)
12. Adventure Island (Java)
13. Master Takahashi’s Adventure Island (MSX)
14. Dragon’s Curse (TG16)
15. Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap (Game Gear)
16. Wonder Boy in Monster World (Sega Master System)
17. Wonder Boy (SG1000)
18. Goof Troop (SNES)

I’m not really playing video games right now, but I still need to get some reviews off my chest! Here are some two-sentence reviews for some pretty OK games.

Dragon’s Curse is an enhanced port of the Wonder Boy Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap (Sega Master System). The updated graphics and sound don’t really add anything, but they also don’t distract from the very solid metroidvania design and gameplay.

Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap for the Game Gear is also a port of Wonder Boy Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap (Sega Master System), but whereas Dragon’s Curse (TG16) updated the graphics and sound, but kept the game design entirely intact, the Game Gear port keeps the graphics and sound from the Sega Master System original, but remixes the design. Specifically, many areas of the game are re-designed to accommodate the Game Gear’s smaller screen; the difficulty is turned down a bit; and the annoying “charm” points system is removed entirely. Breaking my two-sentence rule here to tell you all that this is really spectacular port worth exploring even if you’ve beaten the game on another system.

Wonder Boy in Monster World for the Sega Master System is an 8-bit demake of the Sega Genesis original. The graphics and sound are spectacular for a Sega Master System game, but the design and enemy animation is so scaled back - the bosses don’t indicate in any way when you are dealing them damage! - that it makes for a very “just OK” experience.

Wonder Boy for the SG1000 is a unique version of Wonder Boy for Sega’s most primitive system. Still, it’s fun, and the new mechanics (and very short length) make it a good choice for people who’ve completed other ports.

Goof Troop is a fine Capcom Disney game for the SNES with mechanics like a manic “maze” arcade game. The game is made for two player co-op, though, and the difficulty spike at the end is almost too much for one person.

[newaj23687]

Beating Resurrection of Evil on Nightmare is seriously impressive, especially with the brutal Revenant spam and the constant 25-health limitation. Your description perfectly captures how punishing and chaotic the expansion becomes later on. The Grabber definitely feels awkward compared to Half-Life 2’s gravity gun, but surviving all that on Nightmare is a real achievement. Now Doom 3 itself awaits.