The 2023 Backlog Challenge

[Reed Rothchild | 9,641]

11 minutes ago, Gloves said:

Bro that's a 20-25 hour long game.

I think that leaves me moving at a beat pace roughly similar to @FireHazard51 and @Splain 

[Floating Platforms | 750]

Last night I finally finished the last bit of Picross S2

I have been chipping away at this all year. Anytime I have just a little bit of time to play at night and don't feel like going through a story focused thing, I pop this on.  Really not much to say about it, other than the Jupiter Picross games have consistently been solid with a great difficulty progression.  This one introduces clips, which are mini puzzles that combine to make a larger picture. If S3 doesn't add any new features, that'll be just fine as I'm cool with zoning out and playing more of the same.

I'm almost done with Sly Cooper Thieves in Time and might get that done by the end of the month.

[Splain | 2,626]

5 hours ago, Reed Rothchild said:

I think that leaves me moving at a beat pace roughly similar to @FireHazard51 and @Splain 

Hey.

[Sumez | 3,013]

Bubble Bobble 2 (NES) - Beaten 24/10

I have to admit when I've been too hard on a game, and Bubble Bobble 2 on NES is definitely one. I played this game for a short while immediately after getting a copy and really turned off on how different it felt from the classic Bubble Bobble games, without playing it far enough to see it actually demonstrate any sort of interesting level design. That was completely unfair, because this game has a lot more going on than it first appears.

 

This is the second of three games bearing the prestigious title of "Bubble Bobble 2" - the first sequel of course being Rainbow Islands: The Story of Bubble Bobble 2, while Bubble Symphony, released internationally as Bubble Bobble 2, was the first Taito-developed sequel to eventually return to the bubble blowing gameplay of the first game.
This game wasn't made in-house at Taito, but by I.T.L. who are surprisingly still around, and handled a lot of high quality arcade ports for Taito at the time, and it is technically the fourth game in the Bubble Bobble series. And to add to the confusion, it is actually a canonical sequel to Rainbow Islands, while also borrowing elements from Parasol Stars (the third game in the series).

I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm a pretty massive fan of the Bubble Bobble series 

The amount of new ideas introduced in this game is actually quite staggering. We got stages that wrap horizontally, moving platforms, lethal spikes, new types of weapon bubbles, and a plethora of new enemy types and surprisingly original boss fights. Some things only appear on one stage of the entire game, such a one that scrolls horizontally, or spiked blocks that drop on you like thwomps.
Among the most interesting additions I think are the hearts which are functionally quite similar to extra lives, but allow you to take a hit without losing your powerups. Taking a singly hit in the original Bubble Bobble can easily ruin your entire run, due to how reliant you are on the powerups. In this game they don't make as much of a difference though, but you still want to keep them. Second is the ability to charge your shots. This also exists in Bubble Memories where it lets you blow giant bubbles - but in this game it works quite differently, instead blowing out multiple smaller bubbles simultaneously, allowing you to also cover more ground above and below you, which is occasionally quite useful.

More importantly, however, is that while charging your shot, your bubble dragon will inflate and take off, flying along the same air currents that guide the bubbles. Many places in the game you're expected to make use of this to reach new specific areas, rather than the classic Bubble Bobble approach of bouncing on your bubbles, which is also still used here.
In many situations inflating yourself is quite a bit more manageable than jumping on bubbles, and I think the mechanic fits extremely well into the game's core gameplay, with many of the stage puzzles benefiting from a combination of all of these additions.

Bubble Bobble 2 starts easy enough. Deaths are rare, and you'll get new hearts very frequently, and extra lives even moreso just from scoring points.
Before you know it you'll have more than twenty lives in the bank, and ultimately that makes this a really easy clear. But towards the last 20 or so stages, the difficulty starts getting a lot more vicious, to the point where it's not as far from its Arcade brethren as it would first appear. Stages become much more strictly about figuring out and adhering to specific solutions to unique situations, and the game is really good at making each new round feel like a unique scenario to solve. Get stuck somewhere, and your lives count will quickly start to plummet.

And this might just be me, but when a game is so generous with forgiving mistakes due to awarding you so many retries, I tend to loosen up and play much more sloppily. There are even places where sacrificing a life is a simple solution to a problem that might otherwise be a lot tougher to solve. And you might as well, because you have plenty to spare.

[Brickman | 4,073]

3 hours ago, Sumez said:

I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm a pretty massive fan of the Bubble Bobble series 

I think your user icon may have given it away 

I really need to play the NES Bubble Bobbles. I’ve only played the arcade (which I was obsessed with as a kid) and puzzle bobble games. 

[Floating Platforms | 750]

Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time is done and so is my goal for the PS3

This is the second Sly Cooper game I've played (Thievius Raccoonus was the other) and I quickly remembered why I abandoned it years ago.  The game is fine, but it all centers around navigating hub worlds that are completely pointless, unless you're going for 100% completion. Watch the cut scene to introduce the next mission, then go to the hub world where you have to then get to the starting point of the mission, load, likely watch another cut scene and then play inside a specific disconnected building for a couple minutes.  It really throws the rhythm of the experience off.  The best parts are the final missions that are longer and usually involve using multiple characters.  The gameplay is varied, but still a bit repetitive, but maybe that's from slogging through the overworld in a way that doesn't involve any of the abilities you acquire.  Those are only for specific missions and for collectibles. You don't use level one's costume in level five, for instance.  The boss encounters are different enough and the checkpoints are incredibly generous, auto-saving after every phase of a fight. I like the characters and the 2D animated cutscenes but this one needed a bit more polish and structure to be better.  I would love to see what a PS5 Sly Cooper would look like.

[Sumez | 3,013]

Turns out Xexyz is completely impossible to make any progress in if you can't understand what people are saying. I'm going to need an English language copy. So probably gonna have to scratch that game from the backlog this year.

[Philosoraptor | 468]

18 hours ago, Sumez said:

Turns out Xexyz is completely impossible to make any progress in if you can't understand what people are saying. I'm going to need an English language copy. So probably gonna have to scratch that game from the backlog this year.

I don't know how keen you are about holding your phone up to the TV, but that's what I've been doing to play Rozen Maiden Gebetgarten on my Japanese PS2. It turns out the action-ey battle parts I saw in the trailer are only like...5% of the game. The rest is a visual novel.

Google translate can translate Japanese text in real time using your camera, and, while it's not 100% accurate, it's worked well enough for me to get through the game and get a good gist of the plot. Granted, I have seen the anime...20 years ago, so I kind of know what's going on. However, it's a solution, and you don't even have to take pictures for it to translate on-screen text.

[Sumez | 3,013]

@Philosoraptor I ended up playing Rygar instead (which I also only have a Japanese copy of) , and actually did exactly that. But I got weird changing text about soy sauce and pants - I don't think it's very good at parsing NES fonts.

Fortunately it did give me enough to work out phrases such as "top of this tower" or "*something* is needed here" which was all I needed. Turns out the guys you talk to in that game don't ever say much of use.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,641]

Thinking it's going to be a close finish for me...

November: See if I can finish Trails and Danganronpa (pretty iffy)

December: 50 hour visual novel, Last of Us Part II, Prey (super iffy)

That just leaves Shenmue on the chopping block.  Which I'm fine with.  It can be relegated to 2025.

[Philosoraptor | 468]

1 hour ago, Sumez said:

@Philosoraptor I ended up playing Rygar instead (which I also only have a Japanese copy of) , and actually did exactly that. But I got weird changing text about soy sauce and pants - I don't think it's very good at parsing NES fonts.

Fortunately it did give me enough to work out phrases such as "top of this tower" or "*something* is needed here" which was all I needed. Turns out the guys you talk to in that game don't ever say much of use.

Oh yeah, it's not perfect. I eventually figured out that I had to wait until the whole message displayed before trying to translate it. Even then, sometimes I had to point my phone away from the screen and back again to get it to "refresh" and try again. However, sometimes, no matter how many times you try, it's just going to be wrong:

And no, this isn't one of "those" games. It's rated "A," which is basically the equivalent of "E for Everyone" in the ESRB. The Rozen Maiden anime is also not lewd. For context, the girl on the right is dying, and her "life force" is shared with the puppet on the left. She begs the puppet to use her remaining life force quicker so that she can finally die from whatever illness that has kept her hospitalized her whole life.

How Google Lens ended up with the translation it did was beyond me. I tried retranslating it four times, but Google Lens really, REALLY liked that translation.

[Brickman | 4,073]

1 hour ago, Philosoraptor said:

Oh yeah, it's not perfect. I eventually figured out that I had to wait until the whole message displayed before trying to translate it. Even then, sometimes I had to point my phone away from the screen and back again to get it to "refresh" and try again. However, sometimes, no matter how many times you try, it's just going to be wrong:

And no, this isn't one of "those" games. It's rated "A," which is basically the equivalent of "E for Everyone" in the ESRB. The Rozen Maiden anime is also not lewd. For context, the girl on the right is dying, and her "life force" is shared with the puppet on the left. She begs the puppet to use her remaining life force quicker so that she can finally die from whatever illness that has kept her hospitalized her whole life.

How Google Lens ended up with the translation it did was beyond me. I tried retranslating it four times, but Google Lens really, REALLY liked that translation.

That translation made me laugh.

I’m still far from fluent in Japanese but I think it should have been roughly translated to “I think you should go ahead and do it quickly. My body is worn out anyway”. Which seems to match with the context you said the scene was based around.

Google translate is ok for menu items or a line or two in a NES game, but I couldn’t imagine playing a full JRPG or VN with Google translate. 

[Floating Platforms | 750]

Earthworms is done as is the Nintendo Switch for this year

I think this is one of those games that perpetually went on sale for less than $1 before Nintendo stopped people from doing that to such an extreme.  Anyway, it's a point and click adventure game that has an intriguing, unique art style.

I had an alright time playing it, but I'm sure glad I didn't pay anywhere close to full price. Visually, it does look great. The environments are intriguing, but not enough is done with them. The story and puzzles are very linear and once you leave a section, you will never be back. There will be things that are completely unexplained. I'm sure part of that is by design, but this is also written by someone that does not speak English as their first language and it shows in the translation. Not grammatically, necessarily, but in the simplicity of the presentation. There's a noticeable lack of flavor text, speech options, and context. The sentences technically make sense in the splash screen entering a new area, or when talking to the NPCs, but it's really missing a lot of surrounding information. It's almost like we should know the full story ahead of time to actually comprehend things. The puzzles aren't too bad. Many of the doors don't require you to find things, but rather figure out a logic puzzle through shapes or other means, and not just inventory and that was nice. However, there were a few instances where the progression was gated by needing to do a very specific order of events and even though you knew where it was leading, you can't pick up that item until you talk to that person, do the thing, talk again and now you can interact with it. The art style did unfortunately also make a couple things very hidden and your cursor likes to snap onto items, but if there are multiple things (or if you haven't done the right steps, or if it's literally hidden by the foreground), it's not going to snap and you could miss a key area for a while.  Long story short, good atmosphere and art but an average P&C adventure experience.

[Sumez | 3,013]

Battle of Olympus - Beaten 27/10

I gotta say, this is really my kind of game. Well, not so much the awkward movement and janky combat. But an open-ended side scrolling "RPG" full of secrets, meaningful upgrades, and NPCs saying just one thing that you better pay attention to.

Battle of Olympus has the face of a Zelda 2 wannabe, right down to the unique sword stabbing animation, and the interior decoration of people's houses. But lacking the overworld map entirely I'm more inclined to rank it among games such as Faxanadu, Wonderboy or Cadash. For as popular as the "metroidvania" subgenre is with indie games of today, it's easy to forget how prominent it also was in the late 80s, outside of just the Metroid approach.

The world progression is actually mostly linear, but upgrades are easy to miss, and you are very rarely strictly gated from progress anywhere, which means the game always trusts that you'll take care of exploring all your options at your own accord, without pushing you in one specific direction. The items you get feel like natural upgrades that affect the way you play the game, rather than just "keys" allowing you to go somewhere new, and many of them are definitely not required, although they can be very helpful.

In practice, the game isn't quite as brilliant as it seems on paper, though. Enemies can be really annoying, and not really placed in a meaningful way that makes interacting with them a fun challenge. One particular late-game area makes the final stage of Castlevania feel like Kirby.
The game has some annoying grinding as well. A few NPC vendors will sell you things for a number of "olives", the single in-game currency which most enemies drop, albeit randomly.
Getting these isn't too hard, but you need to actively engage a lot more enemies than otherwise necessary to get all the olives you need. Three vendors show up almost back-to-back at the tail end of the game, requiring a total of 230 olives, which all drop individually. You are not going to have anywhere near that much by the point you get there.

If you die, you can choose to "reload" from the last place you "saved" (ie. got a password) with the number of olives you had - probably preferable if you had a lot, and didn't make too much progress sine then. Otherwise you can choose to continue in the area you are currently in (which might still be a ways back), keeping everything you've acquired except losing half your olives.
So you probably want to spend the ones you have before exploring particularly dangerous places. However, even falling into a pit will kill you immediately, and one particular item you can buy is located beyond a series of aggressive enemies and numerous pits, which means there is no way you'll have any currency left once you first reach that place. Better go back and grind up 70 of them, and hold on to them until you get back

Aside from the grind however, and a few really janky enemy encounters, Battle of Olympus really is the sort of game I'd love to see more of - a lot more of! With how popular metroidvanias are now, I think it's long overdue for indie devs to tap into this particular school of them.

[Foochie776 | 1,066]

I started playing Stardew Valley and holy shit it’s taken my life over. Hoping to knock one more off before the end of the year! 
 

Looking at changing things up considerably next year in terms of games! 

[Sumez | 3,013]

Whomp 'Em (Saikyuuki World 2) - Beaten 28/10

I'm sure this is well known, but Whomp 'Em is actually a sequel to another JP-exclusive game called Saiyuuki World. And that game was in fact a reskinned version of Wonder Boy in Monsterland - one of three different reskins of that game, due to the notorious licensing issues with that series, which similarly spawned the Adventure Island series.

A really useful summary for those who did not yet have it memorized

Saiyuuki World 2 then got reskinned in the US, now featuring a native american instead of the monkey king inspired character featured in the original. Though I entered "Whomp 'Em" in my backlog, I've never played the US version, but from what I can tell the reskin is pretty half-assed, basically just replacing the main character and leaving nearly everything else intact.

The game itself is a really unimpressive platformer. On a system already ripe with unimpressive platformers. It's perfectly playable, but has just enough little annoyances that I never found myself particularly fond of it. To put it in another way, I'd take Yo! Noid over this game.

On the surface the game really tries to go the Mega Man route - pick from six thematically (marginally) diverse stages and fight a boss to get their power, which you can then use on the next stages you play. Unlike Mega Man, these powers don't consume ammo, but have their own drawbacks - most commonly simply just being useless against certain enemies, and you probably don't want to bother figuring out what works on what when your default staff does the job most of the time.

After completing those six stages, you'll enter a single final stage. Ultimately still a much shorter game than even the first Mega Man, which arguably only puts more demand on the quality of each individual stage, something it definitely does not deliver on.

I never found a reliable use for most of the weapons you get, but I did manage to figure out a few boss weaknesses. On the final stage however, you'll be forced to make use of a few to make any progress. This one is much, much tougher than the others you have gone through, and potentially the most enjoyable part of the game just for the added demand.
But man, switching between weapons is such a pain. I know I bemoaned having to go through a menu every time you do it in Krion Conquest - but having just a single toggle button is a much bigger pain when you're cycling through 8 different weapons every time, and occasionally have to deal with incoming enemies at the same time.

Weirdly, the game has no lives. Instead when you run out of energy you'll just be prompted about whether you want to retry at the start of the current stage. I was playing the Japanese version, and the text was all in Japanese, so I'm unsure if the game considers this a "Game Over", but it does seem like an odd way to do it. In the place of lives, you can find lanterns hidden throughout the stages, which basically just work as an extension of your life bar. When you run out of hearts, you'll automatically expend one lantern to refill them completely.
Along with a few other helpful items these appear when you touch an invisible trigger, often somewhere inconspicuous. And getting them usually allows you to just tank your way through a boss fight rather than bothering to learn it.

[Sumez | 3,013]

Rygar (NES) - Beaten 29/10

Bearing the same title in the west, the NES Rygar is an odd approach for a sequel to the renowned arcade game.
Rather than a straight-forward action game, this is an early action RPG, fascilitating free exploration in a slightly open-ended world which switches between sidescrolling platforming action akin to the original game, and a whole new top-down view where enemies are scarce, and exploration is mostly tedious and unrewarding.

 
Rygar (left) vs. Rygar (right)

Killing enemies will gradually make you stronger, though without announcing any kind of leveling up. Your stats are shown in the pause screen, though their exact workings are unclear. What matters however is that eventually enemies will die in fewer hits, and you will instead take more hits to take down, as your lifebar grows. Ultimately the game is really just six individual stages (two of them topdown) that you'll have to navigate between on your own. Your route through the game is somewhat dictated by the items you get, required for progress in other locations - but the last three before the final castle can be taken in any order, which ended up giving me a harder time than I should have had, due to having to learn a series of boss fights that I could have just tanked through if I'd postponed that area.
Though ultimately that made this specific area a bit more involving and enjoyable than most of the rest of the game.

It really is a "lazy" production for a lack of better words. What obviously must have happened was that the game was rushed out the door the exact moment it was technically playable from the start to the end, with no time spent into balancing things, adding anything of substance, or even making sure things work right. The game is one of the buggiest I have ever tried on the NES.

Items will glitch in and out of existance, and you'll get stuck in walls and floors whenever the game feels like it. And probably one of the more famous issues is how impossible to use the ziplines in the overworld are. The game is littered with identical NPCs who will say something to you, but as I already mentioned I was playing the Japanese version, and couldn't make any sense of them anyway. Though turns out I didn't need it either, as the game is mostly self explanatory. In many ways, this is the exact opposite of the ideal demonstrated by Battle of Olympus.
I know I said I wanted more games of that type, but some more effort put into them would have been nice.

The game is not much of a looker either. It retains the iconic Rygar sunset in the first room of the game, and then immediately regresses into repeated basic tiles that give the game an incredibly drab look, though there's one area where you navigate around inexplicably floating rock formations which have a real cool atmosphere to them.

The best aspect of the game I think is the core platforming action. The game's emblematic disc yo-yo is less versatile here, allowing only sideways attacks, and although the head-bopping is still quite enjoyable it no longer kills enemies, instead freezing them in place for a short while.
This is used to great effect in a few locations where enemies will constantly spawn and rush at you from both sides, and jumping on or over them is often advantageous to retian your momentum. The action is a lot less intense than in the arcade classic, so jumping to killing enemies would probably have made you a little too powerful anyway.

The game froze on a greyscale palette when I killed the final boss, I don't think the ending is supposed to look like this

It is regrettable then, that the game shifted the focus to a much less functional grinding/exploration design. Only a few sidescrolling levels manage to really tap into the game's combat action, while others are nearly devoid of enemies altogether. When you're dodging hostiles left of right trying to make your way forward, the game is fun - but it's a rare occurance.

[Philosoraptor | 468]

An interesting beat this episode: Rozen Maiden ~gebetgarten~. This is an untranslated, Taito-made, PS2 "3D fighting game" that ended up being a visual novel with 3D fights sprinkled throughout. After beating the game, you can play the 3D fighting game arcade all you want, but it's locked until you do.

OK. Cool. Well, I watched Rozen Maiden 20 years ago, but I don't speak or write Japanese. I know basic phrases and common sayings, but I'm lost on anything substantial. I might recognize 500-1,000ish words audibly and 0 written. So, I turned to Google Translate through Google Lens to help me through the game. Thankfully, this game is fully voice acted with most, if not all the original voice actors, so some of my limited knowledge came in handy.

Alright, I'm going to tackle the big question first; is it possible to point your phone at the screen and get through a visual novel well enough to enjoy it. I'd say "yeah, well enough." Are you going to miss some nuances that are lost due to colloqualisms, Japanese-specific jokes, common Japanese phrases, and so on? Sure. Absoultely. Japanese is a difficult language to translate for Google for a variety of reasons. On top of that, Google Lens struggles to correctly identify subjects of the sentence, and incorrectly translates names regularly. You also have to either zoom in a bunch or get close enough to the screen for it to make out the characters, and I wonder whether some of the mistranslations come from the lower resolution of the PS2. For reference, I was about eight feet away from my TV screen, and zoom worked for me most of the time. Finally, expect to have to point your phone away from the screen and back on it several times to get Google Lens to refresh the translation. If it makes no sense, try again. However, it sometimes really, REALLY likes a translation, as y'all saw in my first post.

I Initially tried Google Lens on another recent beat, Shinkon Gattai Godannar, and was much less effective because that game automatically scrolled to the next block of text when the characters on screen finished saying their line. That usually didn't give Google Lens enough time to translate the text before it was off the screen.

So, how good of a job did it do? I'd say between my limited knowledge of Japanese and Google Lens, I was able to get the gist of what was going on 75-90% of the time. It also helped that I had watched the anime. Gebetgarten is also pretty light on Kanji, and there's not a lot of difficult concepts or sentences in the game, so maybe that's also working in its favor. Compare that with maybe getting 50-70% of what was going on in Shinkon Gattai Godannar because of the autoscrolling and my unfamiliarity with Godannar (mostly the autoscrolling). I'd say hoping for high-quality, exact translations will leave you disappointed, but it will give you an idea of what's going on, which is better than nothing.

With that said, the game is mid. The game very, very closely follows the second season of Rozen Maiden. The same stuff happens, the same events happen (more or less), and pretty much the same conversations happen. The only difference is in Gebetgarten, you can can see "endings" for four or maybe five of the puppets instead of the singular one you get in the anime. Are they better, fleshed-out endings? Not really. Are they transformative in any way? I'd say no. But I wouldn't say the effort isn't any lower quality than the anime, it's just not much more either. It was nice to play through the game with Suiseiseki instead of Shinku.

Ever played Psychic Force 2012 on the Dreamcast? That's what the 3D fights are like. However, Taito has somehow managed to oversimplify and poorly implement their own 3D fighting system so badly in Gebetgarten that whatever fun could be had in Psychic Force 2012 has been lost. The dolls might have six attacks, including a one-button special, a long range attack, a grab, and maybe a melee attack. There are also one or two combos for each character. The grab moves you towards and hones in on opponents, too, so it's hard to not be grabbed if you push the button second. However that also means when you got opponents into a corner where they couldn't really run away, you could cheese the fight by just grabbing over and over. There was only one occasion when this strategy didn't work, and I wasn't playing on the lowest difficulty. Now, I know that "gameplay elements" are typically simplified in visual novels, especially when they amount to more than QTEs, but the description of this game on the internet says "3D fighter" or "fighting game" more often than not. It's a failure when compared to almost anything in the fighting game genre, especially when they just lifted their own fighting system from a fighting game they made almost a decade earlier and made it worse.

Overall, on Reed's scale, it's a 5/10 for me (it's okay, but maybe not something you'll go out of your way to play.) If you really, really need to experience doll thunderdome for yourself, and you're not familiar with Rozen Maiden, I'd say pick up a copy of Psychic Force 2012 for the "gameplay" and watch the Rozen Maiden anime if you're curious about the story. Better yet, if you want a more in-depth version of the story, try the Fate series. It's the better experience nowadays.

Edit: Just popped in Fate/Unlimited Codes and it seems like the font affects on how well Google Lens translates Japanese. Fate/Unlimited Codes has a much clearer and thinner font, and I'm getting much better translations from Google Lens because of it.

Edited November 3, 2023 by Philosoraptor

[Brickman | 4,073]

Sonic generations for the 3DS is done.

I’m a big fan of the original trilogy and played them to death as a kid. After that I have played bits here and there of other games, but mostly got bored so never finished the other sonic games I played. I had heard that this was a great throwback.

Overall I think this is a very good addition to the sonic library but isn’t without its flaws.

Starting with the good. The 3D is great and I had it on the whole game. Loved the soundtrack and most of the levels were a lot of fun with some throwbacks. I really enjoy how each level was broken up to classic sonic, modern sonic then a timed course to get the chaos gem. 

Unfortunately a few of the bad points bring it down. I feel there should have been more levels. Maybe 2-3 more levels. The bosses were boring and not fun at all (especially the final boss), some of the levels were a bit frustrating and really not that enjoyable.

Despite a few shortcomings it is still a great game worth playing. I’ve heard sonic colours is even better so I will have to give that one a go.

8/10

[Brickman | 4,073]

Starfox Assault for the GC done.

This game seems to get a bad wrap but I personally really enjoyed it. It’s not perfect and not better than the 64 Starfox but it is still a good addition to the series.

The story is decent (at least as far as you can go with these types of games), incredible graphics, soundtrack is an amazing orchestral arrangement with remixes of N64 songs, really good voice acting (I played the Japanese version so the English version could suck), fun boss battles and a variety of levels.

Where I think this game really falls short is the length. There are only 10 levels and because of the story it is linear. While branches like N64 would have been great it probably wouldn’t have worked so well in this game so they definitely should have added more levels. There is also nothing to unlock so short of trying to get gold medals, there’s not a lot of reason to replay the game.

Some people complain about the ground levels but I found them to be ok. Some do feel a little repetitive and the controls for fox could have been a bit better. But there are some good ones that have you playing as fox then jumping into the tank then getting in your Arwing. 

The Arwing levels are obviously where this game really shines. They are really fun and the controls work well. They feel epic and tie into the story well. 
 

8.5/10 for me. Namco tried something different so the series wouldn’t become a N64 clone and I think it mostly paid off despite what the game site reviews may say.

Edited November 5, 2023 by Brickman

[Reed Rothchild | 9,641]

@Sumez passed me up on the leaderboard, and @Floating Platforms is about to as well.

I played the shit out of Trails in the Sky over the weekend due to the weather and the kids being at birthday parties and other such things.  Nearly done with chapter 3, and it appears there's only one more chapter after that.  We'll see if I can finish it off in the next two weeks.

On chapter 2 of Danganronpa.  With 15 people in the "game", my educated guess is it runs to chapter 6 or so.

[Sumez | 3,013]

Crystalis - Beaten 4/11

Here's another game that often gets the "hidden gem" treatment, and given it never saw any release around these longitudes I rarely meet anyone talking about it at all. However, it seems to have been quite succesful overseas, because I frequently hear Americans hype up the game, and honestly it's not surprising. For an NES game, Crystalis is a remarkably well realised action RPG.

It might have been making a bit more waves though, had it been just a couple of years earlier. By 1990 the SNES was just about to come out, and we were already getting used to video games showcasing quite a bit more polish, with A Link to the Past of course coming up just the following year to run laps around this game. But for the genre, Crystalis is probably one of the first that doesn't really feel truly limited by the 8-bit platforms - despite being designed for one.
The visual presentation is very pleasing, and the game effortlessly scrolls in all directions (though scrolling artifacts are extremely apparent on a modern TV), while enemies are able to persist even after going off-screen for a while. Things we take for granted today, but which weren't so common yet at the time.

The game also attempts to tell quite a grand story, invoking a post-apocalyptic setting, with the main character awakening into a mediaval fantasy world after being cryogenically frozen for 100 years. While that sounds interesting, it barely plays a role in the actual game, which mostly just plays out like a completely standard fantasy adventure. Find four wise men/women to help you acquire skills and fight off an evil empire.
There's a tiny sci-fi twist at the tail end of the game which was a pretty common plot twist for 80s video games - but this one makes that setting known in the intro, so it doesn't offer much of a surprise. It's honestly too bad that the post-apocalyptic approach isn't invoked more heavily, as it would have helped Crystalis stand out a lot more, especially with a myriad of new SNES action RPGs just around the corner.

Either way the story is a mess. It's terribly communicated, and you can tell the translation definitely doesn't help - obviously struggling to fit multiple pieces of information in just a single a line of dialogue, when they clearly didn't have the opportunity or skill to expand dialogue to additional boxes for the English localization.
But it's okay, because Crystalis is really more of a hack'n'slash RPG in the vein of Ys, where the core of the game is running carelessly around fields and dungeons and slaying monsters as your skills continuously improve.

While I did find this aspect mostly enjoyable, it also did leave a bit to be desired.
You'll probably not be swinging your sword much. Instead, standing still while holding the attack button for a short while will charge a shot which makes it much easier to hit enemies safely, but also does more damage. And for each of the four elemental swords acquired throughout the game, you'll quickly find an object which allows you to to charge an additional level, which is pretty much mandatory for dispatching enemies without wasting too much time.

This charging, and holding that charge, gameplay loop is a little annoying. And the moment you start getting more swords, enemies will also gain immunity to one or more elements, forcing you to switch them out regularly, and experiment with which works where, because there's no real rhyme or reason to it. This constant switching also serves little purpose outside of inconveniencing the player, especially because the upgrade that gives each weapon more power needs to be individually switched out as well! There's really no reason to ever use the water bracelet while equipping the thunder sword, so it's super confusing why they even designed it that way.

Another element of frustration is added when you find a second upgrade for each sword which gives you a third charge level, that uses a bunch of magic power but makes short work of enemies. This is very useful, especially with bosses. But when exploring a dungeon you always want to conserve your magic, so making sure you charge just two levels, and only use the third when you really have to, is just a constant annoyance.
If I were to play the game over again in the future, I'd probably avoid picking up those upgrades entirely. But in 2023 we have so many other alternatives, Crystalis isn't really a game I could see myself longing to return to.

Maybe if it had just a tad more creativity to fuel it - There's an interesting dungeon or two, but it's not much, and the setting feels like a hundred other games. By far the most of the game is the same repeated bits of dungeon tunnels. Even the overworld layout reuses familiar formations everywhere, which was probably not the most ideal place to save ROM storage. Crystalis is close, but doesn't really hit the homerun.

[Floating Platforms | 750]

On 11/6/2023 at 12:05 PM, Reed Rothchild said:

and @Floating Platforms is about to as well.

If I were adding my Game Boy challenge to the backlog totals, I'd be way ahead.  Including those, I've finished 76 games this year so far.  I might just barely eek past you as I think I'll still cross 40 games from the backlog list. I'm halfway through Guardians of the Galaxy and just got 3 weeks off from work approved before year's end! That mean's I'm going to finally take care of Metroid

[Brickman | 4,073]

Super Monkey Ball for the GC done and I never want to play this game again 

This game is essentially a take on marble madness except you choose a monkey to roll around in a ball.

The game has three levels of difficulty, beginner has 10 levels, advanced has 30 stages and expert has 50. If you can also beat the mode without using continues you can play the bonus stages. I never saw those and don’t have the patience for it.

Beginner and Advanced modes I felt were the right balance of difficulty but fun. Expert just felt way too brutal and I ended up resorting to playing it emulated and using save states (saved at the start of each level). 

You can also unlock mini games with the points you earn which is a nice addition.

The controls are tight and the soundtrack is top notch and fits the game perfectly.

Despite my issues with the expert level I think this is a great game and a lot of fun. When it was released I thought it looked like rubbish. I’m glad to say I was proven wrong.

A 8/10 feels about right for this game (yeah I’ve rated a lot of games in the 8 range lately).

And with that I have accomplished my silver medal. I’m going to push to reach gold.

[Sumez | 3,013]

8 hours ago, Brickman said:

Expert just felt way too brutal

I can understand this sentiment completely. 

But have you *seen* how people who are great at monkey ball just tear it apart? This game needs a super tough expert mode for those folks!