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

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

I had originally picked this game up to serve as a more serious counterpart to the two Bad Company games I was playing. Bad Company seemed like something that’d be more deliberately tongue-in-cheek compared to a typical Battlefield game, so I grabbed this to get an eyeful of something more “typical” for DICE’s flagship series. This also quickly became a project of morbid curiosity as well, as I had heard from several friends that this was one of the worst FPS campaigns of that console generation. After how much I hadn’t liked Bad Company 2, I was champing at the bit to see just how bad its successor could possibly be XD. It took me around 5.5-ish hours to beat the English-version of the campaign on normal mode.

Battlefield 3 is very much part of the trend of FPS campaigns trying to present themselves like prestige films and television often did. We follow the story of a US Marine, Sgt. Blackburn, as he recounts the events that led him here (with “here” being the room his CIA interrogators are questioning him in). We see glimpses into other unconnected US military figures as well as a Russian mercenary’s perspective on events as well (though how and if exactly these characters know the specifics of those things is often left vague), but it’s all one big effort to put the full picture together from this scattershot of perspectives until it leads us right back to the present time.

The story is in a word: Boring. From the ways it utilizes the split perspectives to even the overall events of its story (jumping between the middle east, Russia, and other assorted places), this is a story that felt like it was *aggressively* living in the shadow of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s campaign from four years earlier. However, unlike that game, this game takes itself deadly seriously, and it’s immensely dull as a result. It’d almost be enjoyable as a parody of itself if it weren’t so humorless about everything. You’ve got a big story packed with jingoism, racism against the people of the middle east, and glorification of the life of a soldier, and the cherry on top is that it’s all in the service of a story about jack-nothin’. This story has nothing to say about anything and ends incredibly unsatisfyingly too. It’s not the most dreadfully hateful thing I’ve ever seen from the period, sure, but gods damn is it one of the most boring FPS campaigns I’ve ever gone through. It fails at being entertaining as a big dumb action movie, it fails as a commentary about anything in the life of a soldier, and it above all simply fails to be entertaining. It’s one big, boring slog, and the gameplay is no help in that regard.

I vaguely recall people saying in the past that Battlefield’s campaigns were largely ignorable and not really worth playing, and this was by far the biggest glimpse I got into clarifying why that perspective is so prevalent. This is a really sloppily put together campaign that is just largely not very fun to play. Part of that is due to bland level design and uninteresting set pieces (done no favors by the boring and badly paced story), but a lot of it is also down to how they use weapons as well as the very short time-to-kill. As for weapons, it just always felt like there were far too many of them. They never give any immediate stats for guns, and for a relative novice to the FPS genre like me, all of these long, complicated gun names and silhouettes don’t mean anything to me. This meaningless slurry of guns they throw at you made combat feel, ironically, devoid of choices as it didn’t feel worth experimenting because there was no safe knowledge in being able to get a good gun back if I dropped it to try out something new. This is small potatoes, however, when compared to that time to that aforementioned time-to-kill problem.

To put it as simple as I can: You just die too fast. I’ve played about a dozen FPS campaigns from around this console generation now, and this has the shortest time-to-kill by far out of all of them. While I’m sure that works just fine in the multiplayer, they really could’ve stood to increase it for the campaign, because it just serves in making the already kinda dull campaign that much more boring. Poking your head out from cover (or just having your body visible and not realizing it) can get you mulched to death SO quickly, and it’s a problem that exists over the entire game. Loading screens to respawn are not short, and checkpoints are not nearly frequent enough to not make it feel immensely tedious if you’re stuck on one particular area. So much of the base mechanics are also just so similar to Call of Duty’s now that this game just made me constantly wish I were playing one of those instead XD. The campaign here felt like nothing more than a time waster if you didn’t have anyone to play the online multiplayer with, and I’ll tell ya, my time certainly felt wasted by the time I was done with it.

Aesthetically, the game isn’t terribly great either. I’ve heard a lot of EA’s PS3 ports being really underwhelming and badly optimized, and Battlefield 3 is easily the worst EA game I’ve seen on this platform. There’s a lot of dropping into low framerates and texture pop in, but that’s at least excusable by the age of the hardware this is running on. The PS3 was 5 years old when Battlefield 3 came out, and a lot of developers were putting out games that really made you feel that age when compared to their PC counterparts. What’s a lot less excusable for me is just how bad the textures and models often behave. There were a good few points where models and/or textures would clip into oblivion on and off repeatedly. The game even bugged out basic objectives, making them out as not completed when I’d clearly completed them, which then resulted in a hard crash of the console later on when it failed to load the next level. I’m not usually much of a stickler for how a game’s performance is, but Battlefield 3’s performance is *so* bad that it started to make me fear for the health of my console, and that’s something I have a much harder time looking past. At the very least, the Japanese version has the neat ability to switch between the English and Japanese voice tracks whenever you want in a stage, which is good for a laugh or two and a neat convenience feature on the whole.

Verdict: Not Recommended. I’ll admit that I’ve been a bit harsh on the verdicts for some of these FPS campaigns that’ve I’ve played recently. The bar for better games is just so high that Between the generally mediocre quality or the addition of several really pain in the butt sections, I have a really hard time recommending one of these short games these days when you could be playing something far more fun instead. Battlefield 3 is a game I feel no such reservations about XD. Battlefield 3 may’ve had fun multiplayer, but its campaign is easily the weakest of the ones I’ve played through these past few weeks. It’s a game clearly incredibly jealous of Call of Duty’s campaign design, but the developers either lack the resources or the ability to make something as compelling or competent as Activision’s heavy hitter series. It may not be the worst game I’ve ever played, but I can still say with some confidence that almost nobody is going to play this and feel satisfied with the time spent on it compared to some other contemporary title.

After playing through one infamously bad FPS campaign (Battlefield 3), it only made sense to go on to Call of Duty’s most infamously bad title of that generation X3. It’s only the third Call of Duty game I’ve played, and I had originally been planning to play only through the greatest hits of this series, but Ghosts has a reputation I’ve heard about for years, and there was no way I could let this one go unplayed when it’s so easily acquired for 100 yen out here. It took me around 6 hours to play through the Japanese subtitled version of the game on normal mode.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is the story of Logan, a soldier in the US Armed Forces during a time of great strife in the near future. When a big event makes the middle eastern oil fields collapse, the resulting turmoil results in a new explosive military force sweeping all of South America by storm: The Federation. Their wave of conquest quickly races through the Caribbean and Central America before it’s knocking right at the U.S.’s southern border. By hijacking the U.S.’s orbital strike satellite, they conduct a massive strike on the southwestern United States, creating a massive, earthquake-prone no man’s land between the two superpowers now locked in a stalemate. Logan, inducted along with his brother into the secretive special ops force known as the Ghosts, is one of the last things standing between the United States and conquest at the hands of this foreign enemy.

If that sounds like the plot of a trashy 80’s action movie (as I described it to a friend), that’s because there literally IS a trashy 80’s action movie with a very similar premise (Invasion U.S.A.) XD. Despite the incredibly negative reputation this game has, I did not find it to be massively different to prior handful of games I’d played in the series. It still glorifies the U.S. military to an almost embarrassing degree, and it still frames the U.S. as the Main Character Good Guy against a world of terrorism and chaos because they simply hate us for our freedom. What I’d say probably puts this game above and beyond other games in the series in terms of racism/jingoism is the very nature of its premise. While you evidently clearly could get away with “South America invading the U.S. just because” as a premise in the 80’s, with all of the political rhetoric demonizing the people of Central and South America by 2013, it was *immensely* tasteless to make a game about an army of blindly evil Spanish speakers invading the U.S. across the Mexican border. This is the kind of premise that I would’ve otherwise thought was too obviously a bad idea to ever get greenlit, but that clearly wasn’t the case for Activision! XD

There are a handful of other things I could complain about with the writing, sure, but it’s all tinged and contextualized so much by the tastelessness of that premise that it all gets pretty overshadowed. The main villain’s motivations are incredibly shallow for no good reason, for example. They set up a perfectly good reason for him to be after you and the U.S., betrayal, but they still feel the need to add in that he was SUPER tortured with secret South American & Amazonian tribe techniques to be at the beck and call of these evil invaders. It feels like it’s there for no reason other than to give them an excuse for their crappy cliffhanger at the end, frankly. It’s tasteless, racist, and adds virtually nothing to the story, and there are plenty more little tidbits I could complain about similarly (like the unintentional(?) very bad framing as a result of how they use black and white stylized scenes between levels), but it’s all just beating a dead horse at this point.

ALL that said, I do mean it as much as an insult as I mean a compliment when I say this isn’t really *that* much worse than any other Call of Duty game. The villain being a badly set up weirdo is ultimately no huge sin when the story mostly treats itself as a big dumb action movie. It just adds to the overall comedy of it all when he does stuff like suggest he and the main character have so much in common, because the main character is completely mute! XD. Logan never utters a single word in the entire story, and the lengths they go to perpetuate that premise had me cackling with laughter every time it happened. This is a game with big, delightfully stupid set pieces that involve using a rifle in space as well as others that involve stealthing past sharks underwater.

This is hardly high art, and the worst bits of its storytelling come off far more as ignorance and incompetence than anything else. That isn’t to excuse those things being there, mind you, but they’re similar complaints that I could (and often have) leveled against other FPS games of the time as well, especially Call of Duty. If you’ve gotten entertainment out of the comic absurdity of the nonsense in other CoD games, then I think this game is as ripe for laughing at than any other. If only as a piece of comedy, I quite enjoyed the writing in this game, and it’s overall fun enough that I think they can make the worse parts of the premise bearable if you’re in the right headspace for that.

What also helps a lot is that this has the same main benefit that every other CoD game I’ve played has: It’s just darn fun to play! The gunplay is great, snappy arcadey fun. The set pieces are varied and memorable, and you never feel bogged down doing the same thing constantly. The way you can control a dog to stealth around and attack people from the shadows in one level, and then bomb a river of ice in another level to send jeeps hurtling into the freezing water is just so wonderfully absurd that I was always looking forward to whatever the next piece of glorious nonsense they’d have me doing in the service of protecting AmericaLand. It doesn’t quite have the tight design of something like Modern Warfare, but it makes up for it with sheer ridiculousness. If you’ve been a fan of Call of Duty campaigns in the past, then I reckon this one will not disappoint you either.

Aesthetically, this game is pretty good! It’s got a very funky soundtrack in places, and it certainly made for some “well ain’t this WEIRD” additions to certain action sequences. It’s also quite a nice looking game for the time too (at least when you’re not being assaulted with literal strobe effects coming from your own guns :/). This being the first cross-generational CoD game, I honestly expected something with much rougher anti-aliasing (much like Advanced Warfare had), but I was pleasantly surprised! Not much more to say than that, but if you’re one who cares a lot about looks, then I’d say you don’t need to fret too much about grabbing a “next gen” copy of ghosts if you’re in the mind to play this but don’t have the option to do so on PC. Also, gotta give this game a shout out for actually having the option to turn off rumble! Not nearly enough games from this era have that, so I want to give credit where credit is due as someone who really values that feature.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. It’s got a lot of bad stuff, absolutely, but I cannot lie that I ultimately quite enjoyed my time with Call of Duty: Ghosts. It’s got worse problems than a lot of other CoD games, but at least from my experience with the series, I honestly can’t say they’re *that* much worse than usual. If you want a big dumb action movie to laugh at that also plays pretty darn well, then you can do a lot worse than this. If you want a cheap piece of entertainment to spend a weekend playing, then this can be a pretty good fit for that as long as you know what to expect going in~.

This whole marathon of PS3-era FPS games got kicked off by how much I disliked Killzone 2, so it only felt appropriate to end the marathon the same way it began. I really didn’t know what to expect out of this game, but I definitely didn’t go in expecting to love it after how I’d felt about its predecessor <w>. I remember people quite liking this when it was current, so in my mind this was the general favorite of the community (though I understand now that it seems to compete with Killzone 2 for the title of “best one” among fans). Regardless, there was no way I was going to leave the other Killzone games of this era unexplored, because my curiosity wouldn’t be sated otherwise XD. It took me around 7-ish hours to play through the English version of the game on normal difficulty.

Killzone 3 is an immediate sequel to 2 narratively. Taking you right back through the events that followed the end of the last game, you pick up with Sev (your character) and Rico (your buddy) exactly where they were after Rico disobeyed orders and killed the Helghan leader (totally screwing over your side in the war). What follows is Sev and the other surviving ISA military members stuck on Helghan as they try to figure out a way to still win this conflict despite so much being still stacked against them.

To get my more general feelings out of the way, this game may not be the same kind of poorly written right-wing neoliberal trash that Killzone 2 was, but it’s still very much those things. The form it takes is just different. Starting out with things I liked, one very welcome improvement over the previous game is that the Helghan actually have more characters with faces! Most of them are still mask-wearing scary guys, but they actually have a good number of unmasked characters, and it helps the Helghan feel more like actual people than the nameless, faceless horde that you faced off with in Killzone 2.

Another positive note is that we’ve actually remembered to make the Helghast evil this time! Rather than the last game where it felt like we were just supposed to take the game on its word that these mask-wearing, stereotypically scary looking guys were evil, they now lean REALLY hard into just how heartless and cruel the Helghast are (almost farcically so). There’s not really any more depth or nuance to what we’re doing with that, mind you. We’ve just clarified that our main guys are much more straightforwardly the good guys through actions rather than simply words.

The main bizarre thing in the writing, however, is that I just have no idea what they’re actually trying to say in this story (and I’m frankly unconvinced that they know what they’re doing either). The whole story was set into motion by Rico giving into his racist, violent intuition and disobeying direct orders by killing the Helghan emperor. Without his act of selfish, racist violence, the whole story (and all the suffering in it) never happens or at least happens very differently. A setup like that might lead one to think that this would go on to be a story where our characters, particularly Rico, have to learn a lesson about how following orders is more often than not the right path to victory, even if it may not seem like it at the time. Heck, maybe it’ll be a story about how working together means putting aside your selfish assumptions and actually confirming what the best path forward is *with* your group instead of just deciding that for everyone yourself? The story we’re given, however, is nothing of the sort XD

Despite the inciting action of the story, we are given a narrative where, time and time again, Sev and particularly Rico defy orders from their commanding officer. Their commanding officer is shown time and time again to be too cowardly and weak to do what needs to be done, and it’s all but explicitly stated that they’d all be dead and the Helghast would’ve won had they followed his orders. Hell, there’s even a part where a character friendly to Rico (this game’s token Hot Girl Character) even cheers “Never follow a stupid order!” to his immediate agreement! This is a story that laughs at the notion that its initial premise would be followed through in any meaningful way thematically, and it’s frankly disgusting for it.

We even get a scene with our ISA good guys that says thinking of the safety of the men is bad: Putting what’s necessary to win the fight and honor their sacrifices is the righteous and correct thing to do. That scene is then followed about an hour later by a Helghan leader sacrificing his men in pursuit of wider victory, but now it’s EVIL when their side does it. The story is an absolute mess and I don’t think there was ever any real thought given to what they were trying to say with it. It’s a self-contradictory story that glorifies selfishness, might making right, and military supremacy, only to give a fart-sniffing “Really makes you think” big event at the end just like the previous game did. I’m not sure I could really say outright that I hate this game’s story *more* than Killzone 2’s, but I’d certainly be hard pressed to say I hate it any less.

The gameplay, on the other hand, is a real mixed bag. We’ve improved a lot of the fundamental issues with how Killzone 2 played, but it still feels like for every big thing we’ve fixed, we’ve wound up ruining something else. Things like not being able to reload while you’re aiming down sights has mercifully been fixed. We’ve still got the awkward first-person cover system thing, but this game at least felt like it outright required it less. Vehicle sections are good fun in this, and the gunplay overall feels much more fluid and better than the last game (we even have a less claustrophobic frame-of-view!), but this stuff gets overshadowed pretty badly by all of the ways they’ve made combat so much more annoying.

The key culprit to that effect is how they’ve changed how damage is calculated. Enemies generally have quite a lot of health and take a lot of punishment to put down, and that feels pretty darn annoying when you still die so fast nonetheless. This game frankly gives Battlefield 3 a run for its money with just how short the time-to-kill is, but at the very least it’s not that bad. In levels where you have a buddy with you, they’ll even revive you for free, which is very much needed with how quickly you can die. A big factor in enemies having so much health is that they’ve actually lowered the lethality of headshots *very* significantly. Very few guns can actually put an enemy down with one hit anywhere on their body, and that includes the head. Even weaker scoped rifles take 2 or 3 shots to put down a basic enemy.

The game ended up feeling like a long, frustrating slog as a result. Killzone 2 had issues with feeling a bit too slow at times as well, but this game takes it to a whole new level. Part of the reason for that is with astonishingly stupid choices like a long level where you can’t even use the cover system at all because they give you a jetpack which replaces the “cover” button with a “fly” button, so now you’re a more visible and easily mulched target than ever. There’s even a level where you get to deal with frustrating and poorly implemented stealth mechanics, but at least going out of stealth isn’t an immediate fail state.

Level design as a whole feels significantly worse due to just how much tougher enemies are in this game, and things only really feel satisfying and fun during the brief periods where you’ve got a heavy weapon strong enough to put down enemies quickly. Normal rifles felt barely worth using unless you absolutely had to, and that’s just about never a good thing in a straightforward action game like this. Much like Battlefield 3, I’m sure this all worked just fine in multiplayer where all parties were on equal footing, but it all makes the campaign feel like a much more tedious chore than it needed to be, and it’s one that I was very glad when it was over.

The aesthetics of the game are pretty good but still very strangely flawed, much like the last game. The field of vision has been fixed, thankfully, and the animations and overall graphical fidelity are quite good for the time. The game even has several different colorblind mode filters for various aspects of the UI, which is always very appreciated. The music is also very memorably funky, which was something I was happy to see return from the previous game. Something I was much less happy to see return, however, was the general voice direction. While the Japanese dub (what little I checked it out) is just fine, Killzone 3, just like Killzone 2, is full of really baffling line delivery in its English dub. I cannot tell you how many times I thought “*That* was the direction you gave for that line? *That* was the take you kept?”. So much of the time, characters just sound weirdly confused, emotionally flat, or bored, and it makes for a very confusing time as a result. At the very least the bad guys all have very fun line delivery, and characters talking strangely at least makes for something to liven up the otherwise cruddy story <w>.

Verdict: Not Recommended. This game is just as much of a narrative junk heap as the previous game was. You *might* enjoy the gunplay, I guess, if you’re more willing to put up with the crappy parts than I was, but even then, it’s so mediocre that you’re better off checking out something else instead. All the best bits of the gameplay are done better in other shooters like Call of Duty or Halo, and the narrative is just so nonsensical, and when not nonsensical, rancid, that it’s hardly worth experiencing outside of morbid curiosity. There’s a lot of competition for FPS campaigns of the PS3 era, and in that competition, I found Killzone 3 to be just as much of a loser as Killzone 2 was, and I honestly doubt you’ll feel all that differently.

Once Killzone 3 was finished, all that was left for me to Killzone was the singular PS4 entry (at least for the easily available console entries). I have never heard much about this game, and honestly until recently I had through “Shadow Fall” was the subtitle to a PS4 Resistance game XD. Still, I remembered hearing people thought this game was at least okay, if hardly something to write home about. I was hardly expecting to love this game after how much I’d disliked the previous two games in the series, but this also had the peculiar honor of being a game fans didn’t like very much because it was trying to be so mechanically different than other games in the series. Games like that often tend to be something of an overlooked gem, so this was a game I’d been extra excited to finally get to. It took me around 9-ish hours to play through the English version of the game on normal difficulty.

Shadow Fall takes place 30 years after the events of Killzone 3 where the Helghan homeworld was functionally destroyed after that game’s main antagonist crashed his Earthward-bound ship full of super nukes into it (after you defeated him). The Helghan and the Vektans agree upon a strange but uneasy peace where the survivors of the “Terracide” receive half (that’s right, HALF) of the planet of Vekta to live on, kicking out the Vektans already living there and the two sides building a massive planet-length wall between themselves. As a child, you saw your father gunned down by the Helghan forces kicking out and your neighbors out of your home as they began to create New Helghan (their half of Vekta), but you’re rescued by a Vektan military Shadow Marshal. Now a Shadow Marshal yourself, it’s your mission to work behind the scenes to ensure the safety of the Vektan people from their new, suspicious neighbors.

Now this story is pretty poorly written, but I do have to give it *some* credit for being one of the only Killzone games to try to have something at all meaningful to say with its narrative. Rather than just sorta ignoring the contradictory and hypocritical actions and words of the Vektan military as the other games do, it actually uses them to present a larger point about the nature of the Vektan government. That’s about all the credit I’m comfortable giving, it, however XD. Setting aside the baffling nature of the premise (which, to me, makes little sense from Vekta being blamed for the Terracide to that the planetless Helghan somehow had enough bargaining power to get HALF of the planet of Vekta for themselves), how it introduces tons of aspects to Helghan society that make very little sense to have ever been there before (such as them in any way valuing “freedom” as a society), and the incredibly flat character writing, the story has an extremely uninformed and naïve understanding of the topics its dealing with.

Shadow Fall has all the understanding of war traumatized societies and race relations of a junior high schooler, and that’s about where its understanding of political nuance begins and ends as well. It views political problems as both deep and class-based (we’re all just people, in the end, so why not get along?) as well as simultaneously having the simplicity of a school yard bully fight (take out one bad guy, and everything’s better!) The amount of real-world examples it pulls from to construct the “paranoid & strong but also poor and exploited” Helghan society gets frankly gross in just how wrought the display ends up becoming. For example, it has an extended scene that I can only really describe as “allowing the player to indulge in a white savior complex towards other white people”, which was absolutely astonishing to see play out so unironically. If the Helghan were at all non-white, this game would’ve been dragged to hell and back for being so tastelessly racist in how their society is depicted. It’s something I said way back about Killzone 2, and it’s something I feel MUCH more strongly here. Just because you change the skin color of the characters of the story, that does not, in fact, make it any meaningfully less racist when you appropriate so much imagery from real-world impoverished, colonialized nations for your depictions of slums, poverty, and discrimination :/

The gameplay of Shadow Fall is certainly quite different than previous Killzone games, and I don’t really blame fans of the series for bouncing off of it as a result (even if it does let me see where Horizon: Zero Dawn gets a fair few of its mechanical ideas). However, as much as I could complain that they’ve cut more and more of the game’s more novel aspects just to make the game play more like Call of Duty, I think that’s missing the forest for the trees (even I’m hardly sad to see the awkward first-person cover system disappear almost entirely). I think the bigger mechanical issues come from trying to be a jack of all trades but winding up as a real master of none.

The big new focuses here are stealth mechanics and more open level designs generally. To facilitate this, they’ve given you a host of new abilities view your OWL drone you can send out at people as well as a sonar ping you can do to see enemies through walls (much like Dishonored’s Shadow Vision spell). The drone takes some getting used to, but it can be really useful in a fight. The gunplay generally feels pretty darn good, generally, and I super appreciate the ability to compare stats between the gun you’re holding and the one you’re about to pick up (and that’s something more of these games would really benefit from, at least in their campaign modes). All guns even have an alternate fire mode, which is another mechanic I love to see in these sorts of games. I also super loved the adrenaline pack system, where you can press right on the D-pad to get a quick heal back to full as well as bullet time when you aim down sights, and you can even have your drone buddy use one to revive you with the press of a button if you get downed. That said, for just about every one of these, there’s some other aspect of the design that makes it a lot harder to outright praise.

It's really neat to have all those cool guns, but you can only carry one at a time because your other main rifle is one you can never get rid of. You can never get rid of it because it has an energy weapon mode that you use to destroy enemy forcefields, and without that gun, those guys would not just be annoying: They’d be invincible. That wouldn’t be so much of a problem if that gun were easy to find ammo for, but you can only ever get more ammo for it from general ammo crates, as the gun is unique, so you’ll never find ammo from enemy drops. The end result is saving that gun for emergencies only, and you’re otherwise basically back to the old Killzone 2 system of “One main gun + basically never used mandatory gun”.

Heck, even the changing of the cover system gets super annoying because Guerrilla Games loves making your whole player physically exist in space and operate like it too. You’ll constantly be prevented from aiming down sights properly because there’s not enough space between you and the rail in front of you to actually zoom forward, meaning its up to you to walk back and forth trying to find the perfect place to snipe from because the game has decided that the particular centimeter you occupy isn’t good enough. And don't even get me started on just how many mini-invisible walls there are on the hitboxes of objects that you could otherwise think you'd shoot through just fine. I had so many shots whiff due to that that it felt like I was playing a PS2 game. Utterly unbelievable problem to have on a game on the PS4.

It all ends up making the otherwise fun gunplay way worse feeling than it needed to be, and that’s all on top of the bizarre choice to make you pick up adrenaline packs manually with the O button. Much like with ammo, there’s never any reason you’d not want to automatically pick up an adrenaline pack you got near, so why they force you to do it manually is beyond me. This gets extra EXTRA annoying because O is also your crouch button. There’s *still* no visual indicator (like in Call of Duty) for being crouched or not, even with the new stealth mechanics, and trying to pick up a health pack will make you crouch as well very frequently, which is a great way to get killed in a tense firefight where you’re running away from enemies at the time :/

The really big loser here is those stealth mechanics though. The gunplay already largely feels like a poor man’s Call of Duty, and now you’ve got a poor man’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution for your stealth mechanics. Despite the big emphasis on stealth with the sonar ping vision to see through walls and such, the game is remarkably lacking in actual ways to utilize that stuff properly in both player control methods and the general design of the game. For your player control options, actual silenced weapons are extremely rare and basically don’t exist at all normally. You *must* perform a melee stealth kill to silently kill enemies most of the time, which means all the stealth mechanics usually amount to is just a novel way to position yourself for the start of an otherwise typical big firefight.

The actual game design itself doesn’t utilize them very well either, though. The level design is very lacking in actually encouraging different ways to get around, let alone allowing them (as discussed in the previous paragraph). A lot of the larger areas are just that: Big areas. If you couldn’t press up on the D-pad to be shown your current objective, you’d be getting lost constantly with just how big and poorly signposted the level design is. There are lots of enemy types, which is neat, but the game really suffers from your lack of the ability to go prone to protect yourself in these big areas. A lot of the game’s most frustrating combat arenas just come down to a lack of cover, and I found my drone’s shield ability rarely made up for that.

The other big loser here is enemy AI. I’m not sure if it’s down to the new, more nonlinear approach to level design that makes encounter design harder or what, but enemy AI in this game is absolutely pitiful. It feels like a bit of a waste of effort to be stealthing around for the perfect angle of approach on an enemy when it’s so often trivial to just alert them, get to the end of a hallway, and wait for them to funnel themselves down it, one by one, to your waiting see-through-walls-enhanced headshots. The AI don’t even know how to account for your stealth mechanics a lot of the time. I’ve broken through a destructible wall to attack enemies from another angle, and then seen them first barely register me only to then start filing out the front door to start looking for me. This game got a lot of flak when it came out for its poor AI design, and damn did it ever deserve it.

This is all in a game where your enemies are otherwise *incredibly* eagle-eyed, and there were countless times where I was trying to stealth, but an enemy spotted me through a buttonhole-sized gap in the environment and rendered all of my careful stealth completely pointless. Shadow Fall is certainly trying to be different; I’ll give it that, but its under-commitment to actually making these new mechanics work in ways that are fun is dreadfully poor, and the whole game ends up being much less than the sum of its parts as a result.

Aesthetically, the game is a mixed bag (as I’m sure doesn’t surprise anyone who’s read up to this point). On one hand, it’s a pretty darn good looking “next gen” game for the time. It’s got a very weird affection for high close ups of faces that doesn’t do it any favors, admittedly, but the models at least look nice and well enough like people that the kinda weird animations don’t make it too bad. Voice acting is still far from where I’d say is typical of the time though. It’s nowhere near as comical as Killzone 2 and 3 often were, but there’s still a lot of really weirdly stilted and flat dialogue, and it’s so crazy to me that a Sony flagship title coming out in 2013 is struggling with these problems. The music has its moments, but it’s definitely weaker than the previous two installments and way more forgettable.

The last big critique I have here is the accessibility options, which are really remarkably poor for the time. Heck, they’re poor even for a Killzone game, in some places. On the more positive side, you’ve got quite a few different, discrete colorblind options. We love that! What we don’t love, on the other hand, is just how dreadful the subtitles are. In a serious step back from *Killzone 3*, this game has absolutely no indication of who is talking for any given subtitle. This is a pretty serious problem in a game where your main character, whose perspective you’re seeing from first-person, talks quite a lot! They don’t even break up subtitles between lines, and instead they just make them all blend together from person to person, from line to line. Hell, they don’t even let you turn off rumble, and this game has a TON of rumble for how its special weapons need to be used. Sony has gotten a lot better with their accessibility options in the ten years since this game came out, but holy crap is this game a steaming pile of crap for accessibility to the point it’s even worse than its PS3 predecessor.

Verdict: Not Recommended. This is hardly the worst game I’ve ever played. It’s not even close to the worst FPS of this era that I’ve played. However, at the same time, I struggle very heavily to think of a good reason to recommend this thing at all. On a mechanical level, everything decent about it is done far better in other games (some contemporary, many a good bit older), and it’s got no shortage of things it does outright poorly. The story is certainly trying harder than previous Killzone games were, but that’s just damning with faint praise. There was a lot of criticism for this game’s story when it came out, and while I doubt those reviewers’ issues were the same as mine are now, I’ll be damned if this game’s story doesn’t deserve a fair bit of criticism. Even for being back in 2013, there are a lot of low bars this thing still manages to fail to pass. It was a disappointing, mediocre time back then, and there’s even less reason to go back and trudge through it these days.

01: Monster Hunter Rise
Still too much time spent in menus for my liking, and the enemies could have used more attacks, but otherwise enough experimentation possible to make it worth my time.
6/10

02: Age of Empires II
Because it's so easy to understand what buildings/units do, this is probably a great starting point for folks new to RTS's. It has pretty much everything you'd hope from the genre, but I prefer the armies and fluidity of StarCraft II.
7/10

03: The Last of Us
Stupid, schizophrenic, and pretentious. The mechanics are lacklustre in scope, and inhibit the game's narrative more than it supports it.
1/10

04: Spelunky HD
Having to start over and over as a mechanic does not gel well with exploration. But you can't help but admire how everything works together as a system, offering the suspense of a great platformer and the ingenuity of an immersive sim.
8/10

05: GoldenEye 007
It's fun to see how the developers went all out to simulate Bond movies. Bad level design, stupid AI, horrible controls, and confusing objectives make this a slog to play, but what a sight to behold!
04/10

06: Injustice 2
Compared to anime fighters, this one plays stiff and defensive. But it still has everything a good fighting game has. Really stupid story and edgy dark aesthetic put me off.
05/10

07: BioShock
15 years ago I gave it a shot and figured I might was well watch a Let's Play. Now that I've beaten it, yups, the combat options expand but never make a fight exciting. Really cool setting that, however, mostly only makes a good first impression.
6/10

08: Infernax
Way more than a remake of Castlevania II. The multiple characters and story options make it interesting, while the combat is an old-school good time. Ultimately, rather dumb, but gruesome without reservation.
7/10

09: Storyteller
The decade old demo was mind-blowing, so this might be a bit disappointing. Still, pretty clever, occasionally funny, and most of all, very original. It still has me wondering if this could be expanded into something greater!
7/10

10: Sega Rally Championship
Fairly unique premise, as you have to ride four races after another fast enough to win. Has way more depth to it than say, OutRun. But it's no Richard Burns Rally, either. I wish it had the pizazz of Daytona USA.
6/10

11: Pathologic 2
Outrageously sophisticated and simply unforgettable. Don't be intimidated by the difficulty because you'll want to see the 'bad' ending anyway. Aim for better endings your second playthrough. The Hbomberguy video essay is spot on!
9/10

12: Cocoon
Well balanced puzzles in a fairly interesting psychedelic world. The 'worlds in worlds' element never blew my mind, but was pretty cute.
6/10

13: Adventures of Lolo
Sokoban taken to the nth degree. Occasionally some dexterity is required, so get your emulator save states ready! Clear, punctual, and hard to put down. But it's still Sokoban.
6/10

14: Fable II
If you can bear the painful frame rate, and painfully simple combat, there's a lot of fun to be had in this lively world. Sculpting it to your whims is done better than Fable 1, but don't expect too much. Just more adventures with way more personality.
7/10

15:Dragon Quest III
In hindsight, this is an extremely generic RPG. But it throws the occasional oddball out there, the kind of thing you don't see anymore, as the NES's limits clash with the designers' intent. Often bland, at times fascinating.
6/10

16: Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blades
You can royally screw up your party if you don't level them up correctly. Expect to restart many battles, or be kind to yourself and use save states. Also way too much talking. But the fights show some creativity and are executed well.
5/10

17: Days Gone
I guess the motorcycle physics are fun to check out, as are a couple of fights against 50+ zombies. But other than that, horribly written, and just shallow gameplay, despite all the mechanics. Also, way too long.
3/10

18: A Highland Song
Majestic hike through Scotland, with many different paths to discover. You probably won't get the good ending on your first run, partially due to the frustrating controls. Don't worry, you'll probably want to play it three+ times, and by then you'll easily make it. Lovely main character, and touching revelation at the end. <3
8/10

19: Crackdown
Gets straight to the point, quite refreshing, but stupidly easy. As you mow down enemies you'll improve your stats and weaken the enemies' bases. Jumping controls are nerve-wrecking, would love to see how it's improved by air dashes in the sequels.
6/10

20: Gears of War
Terrible. If you're delighted by the idea of a gun with a chainsaw on it, perhaps this will be your cup of tea. Dull story, slow combat, amazing lack of color, low frame-rates, wonky controls... really puts into perspective why I didn't get an Xbox 360 until 2010.
2/10

21: Bayonetta 2
Awwyeah, fast and stylish, this is peak hack 'n' slash action. Has a lot of depth for a single player game, but why delve into this when there's Guilty Gear / Soul Calibur / UNI2 / etc.?
8/10

22: Prince of Persia
There's some fascinating stuff, like the mirror image. But the slow platforming, tedious puzzles, and random combat keeps this from being worth your time.
3/10

23: Papers, Please
In retrospect, perhaps the choices are shallow, and the document checking too taxing. And yet, striving for a just society via paperwork is an unforgettable and often touching experience.
8/10

24: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3
It's more Tony Hawk! I'm not sure if this one features anything that weren't already in the second game, but the levels are cute, and long strings still feel great.
6/10

25: Doronko Wanko
Within an hour, you get to totally mess up a house because you're a cute dog. And collect accessories to dress up. And it's free!
7/10

26: Deathloop
Style and substance! There's a friction between the rogue-like element of repetition, and the immersive sim element of seeking everything out. But once you embrace the cyclical nature, this is spectacular romp!
8/10

27: Banjo-Kazooie
Besides the funny characters, there's a lot of charm in seeing how 90's developers experimented with 3D physics and objectives. It still plays clumsily!
6/10

28: Animal Well
Gotta love how this game respects the players ingenuity. The most interesting parts are nevertheless so obscure and out-there, that they require an online community to figure out. Your mileage may vary on how deep you want to go.
8/10

29: Sekiro
Lacks the creativity of Miyazaki's other epics, but this lets the combat be more streamlined. The sword-fighting and grappling hook offer perhaps the best visceral experience I've ever felt in a game.
8/10

30: Radiant Silvergun
On one hand, the six weapons make this a tactical shmup. On the other, since you have to level up your weapons by shooting certain colors, you have to treat it like a puzzle. Still, plays superbly, has great patterns and bosses, and sweeping up bullets for a bomb attack never gets old.
8/10

31: Xenosphere
Fascinating concept, taken to its limit. Yes, you actually play as a Twitch streamer. Great job on the acting, and doesn't overstay its welcome. It's a one-trick pony you gotta experience.
7/10

32: Paranormasight
Highly produced visual novel, with good writing and excellent plot. The occasional puzzle requires you to follow the plot and figure out the crime, which is worth paying attention to in detail.
7/10

33: Halo 3
I hear the multiplayer was great for console players, but did it have anything that wasn't already in Quake/Unreal on PC? Anyhow, the campaign is dumb and brisk. The new weapons make it ever so slightly more fun that the first two, which isn't saying much.
5/10

34: Persona 5
Characters, plot, music, interface, and snappy combat are better than ever. Should have gone deeper with its sex-positive attitude. Ultimately, the real challenge is figuring out your schedule, which makes 'time off' surprisingly stressful!
8/10

35: Super Mario Wonder
Still lacking behind romhacks in creativity and controls, it's nevertheless everything you could hope for from a commercial product. Best part is helping other in online mode.
8/10

36: Stardew Valley
The presentation is so inviting, you just want to fall in love with the characters (which are cardboard cut-outs) and the premise (which is made of shallow chores). And yet, fascinating to see how far a single developer can go with this genre.
6/10

37: Metal Slug
My gosh, those animations go a long way to carry what is otherwise a c-tier run'n'gun. Perhaps even worse since there are context sensitive inputs. But this is a defining piece of what the Neo-Geo could do, and unfortunately, only did.
5/10

38: Mario Kart DS
Excellent performance for something on the Dual Screen. But it's still a step backwards from Double Dash. It was part of EVO 2006, so for one glorious moment, perhaps the greatest racing experience ever. But in a vacuum, nothing special.
6/10

39: Tecmo Super Bowl
Everything a football game should have, nothing more, nothing less. So good, I feel a tinge of sorrow for everyone who doesn't have friends to play this with. Or didn't have because they didn't grow up in the USA
8/10

40: Wonder Boy in Monster World
Everything in this game, besides the cute graphics, is under-cooked, from the combat, to the bosses, to the level design, to the puzzles, to the music. Final boss of the NA version might be the most frustrating I've ever had to beat.
4/10

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

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

51. Adventures of Lolo (Famicom)
52. Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES)
53. Adventures of Lolo II (Famicom)
54. Adventures of Lolo 3 (NES)
55. Kickle Cubicle (NES)
56. Adventures of Lolo (GB)
57. Cocoron (Famicom)
58. The Darkness (PS3)
59. Haze (PS3)
60. Animaniacs (GB)
61. Lair (PS3)
62. Bionic Commando (PS3)
63. Donkey Kong Land (GB)
64. Darkwing Duck (NES)
65. Donkey Kong Land III (GBC)
66. Donkey Kong Land 2 (GB)
67. Metroid II (GB) *
68. Pokemon: Brilliant Diamond (Switch)
69. Eggerland (FDS)
70. Eggerland: Meikyuu no Fukkatsu (Famicom)
71. Eggerland: Souzou he no Tabidachi (FDS)
72. Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima (SFC)
73. Legendary Starfy (GBA) *
74. Legendary Starfy 2 (GBA)
75. Tales of the Abyss (PS2) *
76. Tales of the Tempest (DS)
77. Tales of Eternia (PS1)
78. Nier: Replicant (PS3)
79. Tales of Symphonia (PS3) *
80. Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (PS3)
81. Tales of Zestiria (PS3)
82. Tales of Berseria (PS3)
83. Gargoyle's Quest II (Famicom)
84. Bionic Commando: Rearmed (Steam)
85. Resistance: Fall of Man (PS3)
86. Resistance 2 (PS3)
87. Killzone 2 (PS3)
88. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (PS3)
89. Jak & Daxter (PS2)
90. Kileak: The DNA Imperative (PS1)
91. Legendary Starfy 3 (GBA)
92. Medal of Honor: Frontline (PS2)
93. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (PS3)
94. Battlefield: Bad Company (PS3)
95. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (PS3)
96. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (PS3)
97. Halo: Reach (Xbox One)
98. Battlefield 3 (PS3)
99. Call of Duty: Ghosts (PS3)
100. Killzone 3 (PS3)
101. Killzone: Shadow Fall (PS4)

After playing through the Quintet Trilogy late last year (Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma), I was shocked to learn a month or two ago that there’s actually a fourth game in that series! Not one to leave a job half finished, I picked up a copy as soon as I could and fast tracked it on my “to play” list. This was understandably a game I’d heard barely anything about, but what I had seen was very mixed. After loving Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia but having roundly negative feelings towards Terranigma, I didn’t quite know what to expect with this game, but that only made the mixed reviews all that more exciting! X3. It took me around 21.5 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

I’m not exactly sure what the title is meant to refer to, in all honesty, but The Granstream Saga is the story of Ryuun (or “Eon”, as he’s known in English). The disciple and son figure to the hermit Baros, the two of them oversee the maintenance of their floating island of Sylph. That maintenance happens to be shaving off huge chunks of it, as the magic keeping the islands of the world afloat is slowly running out, and reducing the weight of the islands is the only thing buying everyone more time. That is until now, however, as the magic stones they use to allow them to shave off these huge chunks of land have also now run out. With their doomed world looking more and more doomed by the minute, a chance meeting with a pair of mysterious girls sees Ryuun on a journey that will change (and maybe even save) their world forever.

Illusion of Gaia (at least in Japanese) had a really well told story, especially for a SNES game of that era, which is why I was so disappointed with Terranigma having such a poorly written story afterwards. This game is thankfully much more of a successor to Illusion of Gaia though, as its story is actually quite top notch! In an almost DQVII way (though far shorter, as the playtime shows), your time on each island is a smaller story among a bigger adventure, all building towards a larger collective theme. It’s a story about how, while it can be difficult to hold on to hope when things seem so doomed, that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. It’s also a story about how it’s never too late to start trying to do the right thing, and the only one keeping you from making the right choice is, ultimately, yourself. There are some less than excellently written parts (I appreciate what they’re going for with the twist in the last act, but it’s integration into the larger narrative is less than graceful), but the overall product is still very well done, particularly for ’97.

While some twists and the pacing are a bit weird at times, my actual biggest issue with the writing is just how much of it there is, and it’s likely to be the biggest issue for anyone else approaching this game (especially if you’re hoping for an experience that’s very reminiscent of this game’s SNES predecessors). This game has a TON of talking and cutscenes in it. The writing is good and the cutscenes are well animated anime-style cutaways, so that’s all fine, of course, but the sheer amount of it and how long those scenes take is definitely going to rub some people the wrong way. I’d reckon at least 40% if not more than half of the game is composed of watching cutscenes, being in dialogue, or going between those activities. While I was quite gripped by the story, I absolutely wouldn’t blame someone for finding the game utterly glacial to get through. While the 3D cinematography would’ve certainly been quite cool back in ’97, that’s not much to lean on these days, so it’s definitely best if you go into this game ready for a slower paced, story-heavy experience.

The actual gameplay itself is more of a successor to Illusion of Gaia than it is to Terranigma, and while I personally find that to be a good thing, I can certainly understand those who would find it to be a less than ideal state of affairs. The game has a fair few dungeons to go through, but, much like Illlusion of Gaia, they tend to be quite linear. We’ve thankfully got more puzzles in dungeons than the SNES games tended to, and they at least break up the pacing a bit. While the game design is much more linear than Terranigma, that also means that we’re mercifully free of Terranigma’s dreadful signposting, and there was almost never a time (save for one conversation tree puzzle) where I was truly lost on where to go next. On that note, we’ve also abandoned the terrible platforming that Terranigma was so in love with, so my complaints with this game’s predecessor have just about all been solved, if nothing else! XD

The most unique aspect of the gameplay, however, is the combat. While we still have a top-down perspective that evokes a 2D Zelda style of gameplay, just like the SNES games had, we no longer do combat remotely similarly to that. Rather than having a weapon you can just slash at enemies in front of you uninterrupted, touching an enemy now triggers a dynamic transition of the environment into combat mode. In combat mode, the camera shifts to be behind your back with your view locked facing your opponent. Combat is only ever these one-on-one sword fight battles, and it’s almost like an early 3D fighting game.

It’s got some nifty tricks in how you can do D-pad input special moves with some weapons, double tap directions to dash or side-step (and dashing into an enemy to shield bash becomes truly invaluable very quickly), but it’s nothing truly groundbreaking. This is largely down to relatively poor enemy variety. They’re pretty good about giving new versions of enemies new attacks that change up how you need to approach them, but if you’ve mastered how to block, triple slash, and shield bash, then you’ve more or less mastered the combat. Magic is too bound by MP to really be much use outside of occasional fireballs to do last-hit chip damage, non-sword weapons are either too weak or too slow to ever be particularly worth using, and your special moves are also so slow to activate that they will rarely result in anything but you taking a hit mid-windup. I overall found the combat fine, but this is definitely a game where the narrative is the main draw over the gameplay, especially these days where a 3D combat engine like this is a LOT less impressive than it would’ve been when this came out.

The graphics are pretty good overall, but they largely would’ve been novel for the time rather than being something super impressive now. As someone with a lot of knowledge on the context of when this game came out, a game that markets itself as the “first fully 3D RPG on the PlayStation!”, I can certainly appreciate just how nice so many of these animations and models would’ve been back in late ’97, but it’s largely just retro charm these days. It’s got a style that all does work together well, but compared to how gorgeous the 2D counterparts to this still are on the PS1, this suffers the fate of most early 3D games in how dated so much of it is gonna look by today’s standards. The music, however, is pretty damn good. A lot of the sound design feels very nostalgically SNES-like (and some sound effects are ones I can explicitly remember from FF6). One aspect where it definitely doesn’t let down its lineage is that music, and it was always fun finding a new area to enjoy the music of~.

Verdict: Recommended. It’s honestly really weird to recommend a kind of game like this. This is the sort of game that reminds me of the old Twitter post that says how “a 7/10 game is someone’s best game ever”, because this totally fits the bill for that. For all of its faults or odd design choices, this game really excels at what it’s good at, and the whole of the experience really is greater than the sum of its parts. While I totally understand big fans of Terranigma getting to this game and being bored to tears by it, Granstream Saga is doing its best to imagine a new kind of action adventure game for the time, and if it happens to be the kind of thing that works for you (like it did for me), then you’ll have a great time saving the world with Ryuun and company~.

Looking for something a little faster paced to play in between PS1 RPGs I’ve been focusing on recently, I saw that our friend AJ recently put up a review about this game. Faxanadu is a game I’ve heard no small amount of praise for over the years, but my historic aversion to these Zelda II-type of action/adventure 8-bit games always kept me away from it. I’ve really come around on that type of game over the past few years, though, and AJ’s review reminded me that it’s about time that I finally try to get through this game myself. It took me roughly 6 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without using rewinds or save states (but by using maps and a guide for reasons that will become very apparent).

Like with most of these 8-bit action/adventure games, the story here is pretty thin. You play an elf returning home to his homeland under the world tree after some time away, but you find things completely in disarray! A meteor has slammed into the world tree, and the previously peaceful dwarves (or “DWORF” as one humorous bit of text calls them) have gone mad, and they along with a bunch of monsters have erupted out of the tree and have begun attacking any elf they see! Feeling the call to adventure, you go to the king and take up the quest to find out just what’s going on and save the land. It’s a very perfunctory story, but it does the job it needs to just fine for setting up the action at hand.

The gameplay is a 2D side-scrolling action/adventure game of the kind there were MANY of in ’87 and ’88. If you’ve played Castlevania: Simon’s Quest or Zelda II, then you know more or less just what you’re in store for here. You go left and right, up and down to explore the world from town to town. You’ll find new equipment and items in dungeons and towns, and you can get money and experience points from monsters you kill to buy stuff and level up respectively. It’s nothing particularly groundbreaking for the time, but Faxanadu has a few wrinkles and strange aspects to its design that definitely made it a more lukewarm experience for me than past games in this style that I’ve played.

For starters, despite all of the ground-dwelling enemies that you’ll come across, you actually can’t duck at all. This means that you’re completely at the mercy of even the very first enemies you come across until you’ve gotten rid of your cruddy dagger for the game’s first sword (which will be your only new weapon for quite a while, annoyingly). You thankfully have magic early on to deal with those shorties, but MP can only be healed in towns, and enemies respawn infinitely, so it means you’ll need to use those spells very sparingly if you want to get any real mileage out of them. You can’t even level grind to get stronger, as all getting lots of EXP and cashing it in at a church to raise your level does is raise the amount of money you start with upon respawning after death.

Combat in general is often quite annoying, and that’s partly down to your weird movement, but it’s also down to generally poor level design and frustrating enemy design. Whether it’s bosses or normal wimps, enemy variety on the whole isn’t terribly great, and taking advantage of your slightly longer range on your sword will take care of basically all normal enemies. What that can’t save you from, however, is that there are a *ton* of doors and entrances to other screens with enemies placed such that you actually cannot avoid being hit by them. Sometimes knowing they’re there and immediately slashing will solve the issue of getting bumped back to the previous screen, but there are still plenty of times where you just have no choice but to take the hit and carry on. The game’s annoying platforming doesn’t make this problem any better, and the copious amounts of backtracking and often cruddy signposting aren’t doing you any favors either.

A lot of annoying mini-bosses and enemies are reused the entire game, and the first mini-boss in the game is the most annoying among them with just what crazy amounts of damage they deal out. Your movement is too stiff to ever make anything other than rushing down enemies the most effective way to deal with them, so the only real strategy for tough enemies like that is to just carry as many healing potions as your pack will carry. This makes backtracking through areas all that much more of both a necessity and a nightmare due to the MANY doors in the world that are only unlocked with single-use keys acquired in shops (but only in *some* towns. More backtracking!), and these doors also re-lock once gone through. Juggling keys is easily the most frustrating aspect of an already frustrating world to navigate, and just knowing what keys I should be bringing with me before leaving town was the main reason I started using maps and a guide to play the game.

I don’t super mind all of the useless areas or red herring dungeons the game has. They’re more or less a necessary evil when playing games from this era. What I mind a lot more, however, are the keys and other consumable items that the game expects you to not bring with you because you’ve had no reason to think you should bring them. The combat is not particularly fun or good for the time, and there are a lot of mechanics and design aspects that really only serve to waste the player’s time more, and that’s when you’re not simply lost on what to do next or confused due to the graphical design of the map not making it clear enough that a wall can be passed through because it leads to a town (for example). Faxanadu’s mechanics and design aren’t terrible or anything, especially not for the time, but even compared to a notoriously “bad” game like Simon’s Quest (a game I honestly like a decent bit), I found it compared fairly poorly in regards to the overall gameplay experience.

Aesthetically, the game is just fine. I’m not super one for music or graphics in games, but I found everything here just about what I’d expect for ’87. The graphics and enemies are distinct and well put together. Even if we’re sacrificing animations for larger sprites a lot of the time, those larger sprites at least look nice in exchange~. The music is also nice enough, but I’d be darned if I really particularly noticed any of it. It makes for fine background sound for your adventure, but don’t expect anything particularly worth grabbing to throw on your MP3 player.

Verdict: Not Recommended. This certainly isn’t a bad game, but I have a very hard time recommending it among the sea of fairly to significantly stronger games in this genre on this system. If you’re a big fan of the genre, then this is a no brainer to try out (and you frankly already probably have), but this is definitely not going to be anything you haven’t seen elsewhere but better. On the other hand, if these sorts of games are usually not your kind of thing, then Faxanadu is absolutely not going to make you a believer.