Review the last game you finished

[I am nobody]

7. Full Metal Furies (2/18) (PC, One)
Screen:

Spoiler.

Rogue Legacy's developers trade roguelites for a co-op brawler/bullet hell kinda-sorta-not-really based on the Greek Titan mythology. Unlike a lot of games in this subgenre, it's got four characters that all play very differently and have their own equipment and skill unlocks. Both of those add even more variety to the game - equipment unlocks add all sorts of advantages and drawbacks to your attacks, and skills progress through smaller versions of Rogue Legacy's stat tree.

Most of the stages are about three screens of increasingly difficult fights against standard enemies (of which there are probably around 10 species) followed by a boss. These can get very difficult, but you keep any currency you gained before dying, and there are plenty of optional levels, so you've got options if toughing it out isn't quite your style. Combat is theoretically pretty simple since you only have four attacks, but they do a fantastic job of shaking up scenarios to prevent you from ever getting comfortable with a strategy, and the skill ceiling is very high.

Normally these kinds of games are only really satisfying in co-op, but Full Metal Furies gets around that by letting you pick two characters in single-player. You can instantly swap between them at any time using R2, which opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities for comboing and balancing health. Enemies will often spawn with a shield that can only be destroyed by one of your characters, and those shields can change color as they take damage, so learning to swap well is absolutely necessary to progress. It's a great system.

I don't think anyone plays this genre for the stories, but FMF is actually pretty solid on that front as well. It has a very silly sense of humor that almost always worked for me, but everything is skippable if you'd rather it just stayed out of the way. Regardless, none of the scenes are very long.

Unfortunately, while I always had enough currency to level up both of my characters (Sniper and Engineer) once or twice after missions, I don't think it's possible to keep more than your player count up to level without replaying levels. I didn't have a problem with that, because I loved playing a team of all glass cannons, but mileage may vary. Also, the true ending is locked behind a sequence of clever puzzles that I'm not really convinced work with this genre. Finding all of the hints requires going back and meticulously exploring the backgrounds of older levels, which I found needlessly tedious. Again, mileage may vary.

I haven't found a co-op brawler that really grabbed me since Scott Pilgrim and Castle Crashers 8+ years ago. It's been a long wait, but Full Metal Furies is absolutely as good as, and perhaps better than, those games.

[I am nobody]

8. Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology (2/25) (3DS)

The original Radiant Historia is widely considered one of the best DS RPGs, but I never finished the first chapter in my three attempts to play it. It's a time travelling story where you bounce back and forth between two timelines in order to reach the "true" history, and with a story that, amazingly for a JRPG, features neither teenagers nor killing gods. All of the political machinations and military focus have more in common with Dishonored than Final Fantasy. The battle system is even more unique, setting the enemies on a 3x3 grid and allowing you to push foes onto the same space to hit multiple at once. You can also freely swap turns with enemies or allies, allowing you to set up massive combos at the price of being briefly more vulnerable to damage.

Unfortunately, that unique combat system is also the game's greatest weakness. It becomes apparent almost immediately that the ideal strategy is to just knock enemies into eachother and nuke them with magic, but that's not interesting after the third time, and the game never comes up with a fun way of shaking it up. Thankfully, Perfect Chronology adds "friendly mode", which lets you kill everything except story enemies on the overworld map. It makes the scripted fights even worse, of course, since you'll be stupidly over-levelled in addition to dealing with the tedious system, but it does at least spare you most of that misery. I finished in 18 hours on this mode and the average time for the original is around 38, so you can probably expect something like 60% of your time to be spent in combat in even normal mode. It sounds like torture.

The story, for its part, isn't anywhere near good enough for me to recommend sitting through a full day of that awful fighting, but its worth the lesser price in friendly mode. It has no concept whatsoever of subtlety, so you'll probably pick up on every supposed twist several hours before you were supposed to, but it's an entertaining enough fantasy world war tale. My only issues with the first 90% of it were that armies seem to spawn from nothing when the plot needs them and that, since the DS couldn't render more than a few sprites at once, there are a lot of scenes where you have "battles" of about 5 dudes. That's a bit silly.

The supporting cast is really what carries the story. All of the major NPCs have their own motives and interact in interesting ways until the very end, when it abruptly devolves into a destroy the world plot. The party is somewhat more mixed - Locke, the protagonist, Aht, Eruca, and Rosch are all great for reasons similar to the above. Gafka and Raynie don't have convincing motives and fall in the middle. Marco feels like he only exists because they needed a healer. There's also a truly bizarre mix of practical and nonsensical armor from the female characters. It all feels a bit cynical, since none of them are ever sexualized in the story and the headshots are perfectly positioned to show off their lack of chest covering. Oh, and the one CG in the game is of Raynie changing clothes, which comes out of literally nowhere and is extremely facepalm-y. The remake also added voice acting for all the major characters, which ranges from pretty good to very good.

Up until the last few hours, I'd expected that my main disappointment with the game was going to be how all of the bad endings are almost comically immediate, denying you any chance to really explore the timeline, and how they hint at some really cool multiple time traveller themes without committing to them. Unfortunately, the dreadful final few hours topped those complaints several times over. The last four hours of the game (again, without combat) should have been one hour at the absolute maximum, but much worse than being painfully drawn out is how the story absolutely loses it. We go from finding out that, yep, it's just a boring destroy the world plot to the previously limited time travel powers suddenly being capable of whatever the plot needs of them at that moment, and it all becomes such a nonsensical mess that I think the writers lost track of what characters were even supposed to be doing at several points. I didn't get the true ending, because there's no way I'm sitting through that crap again, but I doubt it's much better. It's really disappointing that what's otherwise a decent, entertaining story ends on such a bad note.

There are times when Radiant Historia is frustratingly close to greatness, and other times when you wonder if parts of it were farmed out to an entirely different team. I'm glad I finally finished it, and I do think it's worth playing if you can circumvent that combat in one way or another, but it's just not quite an essential RPG.

[Dux is not you]

LIMBO

PC puzzle/platformer with a gloomy atmosphere and lots of clever, deadly challenges.

Unlike the last puzzle/platformer I'd played, VVVVVV, whose difficulty lies in execution, LIMBO isn't about tough sequences of jumps that are right there for you to see but have to be timed perfectly. Indeed, LIMBO's at times clumsy controls only contribute to the feeling that you're a helpless kid in a dark void (which is right where the game wants you) and do not lend themselves well to a platforming-heavy game.

Instead, LIMBO's theme is "there is exactly one way forward, and it's going to take you a lot of ingenuity and imagination to find it". The challenges this game presents you often feel totally insurmountable, but there is always one way out, no less, no more. A few of the puzzles near the end made me give up and look up the solution, so this game might actually have been too hard for me? It was absolutely enjoyable regardless.

If you're interested in a game that won't take you more than a few days to beat and will make you feel really smart for clearing its puzzles, you can't go wrong with LIMBO.

[I am nobody]

9. Yakuza 0 (3/3) (PS4)

I've been playing Yakuza 0 with various levels of commitment since late November, which is definitely a contender for the longest I've ever taken to finish a game without ever definitively putting it in the backlog - except for when I was also playing NieR: Automata, it's been on in PS4 rest mode almost non-stop. You might think from that that it's a 100+ hour game, and it can be if you really dig into all the side content, but I only ended up with 27 hours when the credits rolled. I think the reason it took me so many times longer than a game of that length normally would is that Yakuza 0 isn't really sure what it is. It constantly shuffles between gameplay modes and narrative tones, and while it's actually very good at almost all of them, I was never sure that they meshed together.

This is most evident in the narrative. Although the story is great and the accompanying voice work and direction are some of the best I've seen in a game, period, it's tonally inconsistent with both itself and the gameplay. For instance, one of the protagonists, Kiryu, is framed for murder very early on and his yakuza bosses make it out as a huge thing that he'll have to surrender to the police over, are stunned that he had a gun, and you're seemingly supposed to see it as taking place in a realistic Japan where murder is reasonably notable and the police exist. But then the police are literally never mentioned again, except for a brief moment 2/3rds of the way in when the plot needs a prison, and someone gets killed in basically every cutscene in the second half. All this while the yakuza operate with a level of impunity most warlords could only dream of. It's very difficult to believe Kiryu has any reason to be concerned about the murder investigation.

Injuries are similarly inconsistent. You can never be sure if a character is dead until the game explicitly tells you they are, because everything from bullets to baseball bats is exactly as lethal as the plot needs it to be in that moment. And while this is true of a lot of games between regular play and cutscenes, I'm *only* talking about cutscenes here.

And it carries over into the gameplay. There's loads of great minigames and sidequests to play that could probably extend the games length several times over, but I barely played them after the first few chapters because they just don't fit after that. They're good, but the main quest is much better, and it's constantly presenting the kind of serious tone and urgency that make it very difficult to then go sing karaoke without it feeling weird. Sleeping Dogs got around that by interspersing quiet moments in the main story, but Yakuza 0 never lets up.

But like I said, all of those weird parts that don't work together are individually brilliant. All of the stupid minigames had a ton of attention put into them and are absolutely worth pursuing. The combat, although there's a bit too much of it against mooks by the end and guns are aggravating, is consistently satisfying and allows for a good range of playstyles. It has some of the most reliably entertaining and humorous sidequests I've seen. And the story held my attention so well that I was never even upset that the cutscenes occasionally ran so long that my controller went to sleep.

Yakuza 0 is basically a collection of pieces that each could've been the foundation of an absolute classic on their own, but that combine to something a bit less than that. It's still an undeniably great game that's well worth your time and has me excited to play the sequels, but I was never able to shake the feeling that it could've been even better if it had picked an identity and stuck with it.

------------------------------------------------------------

Nitpicky thing I couldn't fit into that review: the tutorials for the mahjong and shogi minigames were clearly written for Japanese audiences already familiar with the games and are the only two things localized badly. Mahjong overwhelms you with every single scoring hand at once with barely any attempt to explain what you should be doing and then goes on for an eternity. Shogi is less immediately intimidating, but starts you against an AI that is definitely beyond the "has never seen a shogi board before" level. And I could at least read the kanji they didn't bother translating - good luck scoring a straight in mahjong without being able to read numbers.

[I am nobody]

Tried to avoid doubleposting and then some games turned out to be shorter than I thought, and now I've got three to review. Spoilering them so that this post isn't a full page long.

10. Into the Breach (3/4) (PC)

Spoiler.

Subset's follow-up to FTL: Faster than Light doesn't obviously have much in common beyond the art and interface style, but Into the Breach has a lot more of its predecessor's DNA than you might think. They're both roguelites that take place on a series of large maps in which you select smaller nodes/levels to visit. FTL's big insight to this idea was ship customization and mixing in choice nodes with the battles, so that you never new exactly what you were stepping into and had a metagame about advancing your ship technology and crew skills going in parallel with the combat. ItB takes almost exactly the opposite approach. Before you select one of the four (pre-designed) islands to go to, you always know which (random) enemies will spawn there and what the island boss will be. As soon as you visit that island, you immediately know what the rewards for completing each of the levels will be, and what those maps look like. Before each of your turns, you know exactly what the enemies are going to do and how much damage that will cause.

Which might sound like it defeats the purpose of a TRPG-style game. That's where the other innovation comes in - Into the Breach is about defending humanity, not killing aliens. It doesn't matter if you kill any enemies - they'll all go away after 5 turns. It doesn't matter (much) if your units die - they'll respawn as skill-less AI the next mission. Instead, you need to stop the aliens from destroying the cities scattered around the map. Hits to those will damage your power grid, which persists between levels and immediately ends the game if it ever reaches zero. Every turn becomes a puzzle in which you have to utilize your limited abilities and the environment perfectly in order to take the minimum amount of damage in the least important places. Sometimes that means standing on top of a spawning enemy to delay its appearance. Sometimes it means pushing an enemy into another's shot, or even into a lake. When things are really bad, it might even mean using your units as suicidal shields to protect civilians.

That could become unmanageable very quickly at the typical scale of a TRPG, but ItB wisely limits you to three upgradeable (but not replaceable) units per campaign and keeps all battles on 8x8 maps. In keeping with that theme of doing a lot with very little, each of your units only has two default upgrades and two weapon slots that might each have two more. Again, that might not sound like much, but each upgrade offers a small, but immensely consequential change to your abilities, and you won't find anywhere near enough power cores to use them all over the course of a campaign.

The roguelike progression comes in the form of being able to send one of your pilots back in time after every campaign, preserving their levels but not their mech upgrades. Any non-random pilots you discover will remain selectable at the start screen as your traveller in future campaigns. You can also unlock 7 additional mech squads that play extremely differently using medals you get for completing challenges with each squad. Random squads and custom mix-and-match are also options, and come with their own reward challenges.

All in all, it's a masterful strategy game that manages to top the already brilliant FTL. I was a little underwhelmed to beat the game on my third try after going 0-142 on FTL normal mode over several years before giving up and finishing on easy, but that's down to a mix of me being better at these kinds of games and the final boss actually being fair this time. Besides, there's still hard more, and I haven't even come close to unlocking everything.

11. Aviary Attorney (3/6) (PC)

Spoiler.

I had my eye on this one when it was announced years ago because of course I did. It's Ace Attorney set in 1840s France with birds and art out of an old children's book. How could that possibly not be good? Then the reviews weren't great and I forgot about it for three years.

Well, it came in the Humble Bundle this month and it turns out the reviews were wrong. This game is exactly as good as it sounds. It plays like a more logical and faster paced AA, in that each of the four chapters can be comfortably completed in an hour and I never felt like any of the arguments were tenuous. It's similarly comedic, but I found the humor hit more consistently than in AA, which is not a knock on those games. The big difference from AA is that you can lose cases, whether as a result of bad lawyering or missing evidence. It's also got a more compelling plot outside of the cases and spends a lot of time exploring the whole idea of "winning" cases and questioning the system. I don't know if it's necessarily deep, but it's interesting.

I loved it because the length and logical jumps of AA were always the big things holding that series back for me, but it could definitely disappoint people who weren't bothered by those and particularly enjoyed that exact style of off-the-wall humor. This is similar, but it never goes as far as throwing mugs of coffee in the courtroom. I may also be biased towards anything with birds in it.

12. Fire Emblem Warriors (3/7) (Switch)

Spoiler.

I like this game a lot, but I still can't call it good. Combat consists almost entirely of just mashing X/Y randomly and pressing A or R when your special meters fill up, unless the enemy is strong against you, in which case you send another character to do that instead. Almost all of the battles play out almost identically, and they couldn't even be bothered to come up with a different condition for unlocking the collectibles for each map - every single one of them is "Defeat 1,000 enemies" for your first playthrough. Most of the characters play pretty similarly, and there are only something like 7 different enemy types over the course of 22 levels.

But that's true of every Warriors game, and I've never even finished the prologue of one of those before, so why's this one different? Because they finally put their unbelievably bad writing in a series I liked that also had unbelievably bad writing, and the result is glorious. This game basically the fever dream of people who have no idea how human interactions or motivations work being given a million dollars to write a fan fiction about what was already at fan fiction level. It produces such amazing lines as "That's enough love and hugs... it's time for sorrow and woe!", has some of the most predictable plot twists ever to grace a video game, and can barely think of a single way to introduce a character besides having them test your strength by trying to kill you or mistake you for kidnappers. It's soap opera stuff.

But it either doesn't know that or does a very good job of pretending it doesn't know that. It plays its unrelenting stupidity completely straight-faced, much in the way that regular FE does, and that turns almost every scene into comedy gold. It somehow even worked for the gameplay - it is undeniably mindless repetitive garbage, but the it's presented so earnestly and happily that I couldn't help but enjoy it.

Like all Omega Force games, it's rather lazy and very mediocre. It's not well-designed or well-anything, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless you enjoy both FE and a very specific level of awful writing. But that very specific group of people will get a ton out of it.

[I am nobody]

R-4. Bastion

Supergiant have carved out a very specific niche of making mechanically innovative action-ish games set in broken worlds and accompanied by beautiful art, amazing soundtracks, and wonderful narrators. Bastion is started it all seven years ago, and although both Transistor and especially Pyre have surpassed it in my eyes, it's a testament to Supergiant's skill that their "worst" work is still an absolutely essential game.

Bastion's gameplay is primarily a series of isometric arena battles in very claustrophobic spaces. You get new levels or upgrades in almost every level, and there's a frankly absurd variety of enemies for a three hour game, so combat consistently feels fresh even though it's the only thing you're ever really doing. Levels have very short side paths that might have collectibles or extra currency, but for the most part it's all quite linear. There are optional challenge levels for each weapon and particularly tough wave arenas to dig into if you're into those, however. My only complaints about the combat are that you're sometimes forced into situations where all of your weapons feel appropriate after picking up a new item and that the combination of busy backgrounds and large numbers of enemies can sometimes make it difficult to keep track of danger. Some throwing weapons also have a random spread that feels unnecessarily punishing given that they take forever to charge up and that aiming is already somewhat difficult.

Progression comes from unlocking new buildings or, later, upgrading old ones in the Bastion. Most of the upgrades are passive percentage boosts, but they're sizeable enough that they shake up your approach enough to be interesting.

The story does its job. It's interesting enough to keep you going, and has a few genuinely good scenes towards the end, but for the most part it's the novelty of the setting and narration that hold it up rather than its innate quality.

Which brings me to the main reasons anyone plays a Supergiant game. The art, music, and narration are still almost in a class of their own even after the better part of a decade. Any of them would be enough to carry the game on their own, but they combine to deliver an experience that you just can't get from any other studio. They're what elevate it from being a very good action game to something truly special.

I could say more, but I'm going to go listen to more of the music instead:

Spoiler.

[Artemis008]

I completed Yume Nikki yesterday.

In Yume Nikki you.... walk around.... and see things... that's about it. You'd think it would be a boring and tedious experience just from that, but I found this game so much fun to play. You are just walking around seeing stuff, but there's so many unique areas you can travel through and tons upon tons of "events" you can witness. Each and every one of them is bizarre, which makes the entire thing feel really surreal. On top of that, most if not all of the areas are inter connected, so your path through the game can go any number of ways. The only real objective is to find the "effects" which give you new abilities. You'd think that these abilities would allow you to discover new areas unreachable with out, but no. A grand total of three abilities are used to get to new locations. This means most of them are useless, but on the upside it makes the game VERY open ended. My only complaints with the game are the foot step sound effects which are absolutely draining, especially considering the entire game is about walking to new places, it's not any where near as bad as Yume 2kki's foot steps but pretty damn close. The other issue I have with it is the lack of land marks and/or a map. You thought Castlevania II was confusing? I almost never had any idea where I was going in this game. All the areas are distinct to each other, but the stuff in those areas is usually the same 4 objects repeated in different patterns. This is actually kind of cool early game, because every trip is a new experience but when you've only got one or two effects left to find it can get very, very annoying. The effects aren't very cleverly hidden either, it's mostly just about being in the right area.

Over all, I can't recommend the game to everyone. It's definitely a hit or miss kind of game. If you like exploring bizarre environments and seeing new things then give it a shot. It's free, so you've got nothing to lose from playing it at least once.

[Hotel Security]

Just finished this hot new game called Super Mario Galaxy 2. All you guys should check it out...it's from this Japanese card game company called Nintendo. I think they might just make it in this industry.

Bad jokes aside, it's near-identical to Mario Galaxy 1 but in a good way. The first one was pretty fun and creative and so is the second...in fact, it's been so long since I played the first, I was kind of wondering if they were just recycling levels or bosses since it felt SO similar...but I doubt that was the case outside of the "Retro" extra level with the Galaxy 1 bosses.

Even the plot is the same. The first Galaxy has a comet that comes around every 100 years raining stars on folks...then Bowser shows up and kidnaps Peach's castle, brags about stealing all the power stars, and vows to make his own galaxy. The second Galaxy game starts with the same dialogue of stars falling once every 100 years and then it's just a giant Bowser who shows up who kidnaps Peach, brags about stealing all the power stars and vows to make his own galaxy. Not that Mario plot is ever really worth even paying attention to but this felt so familiar I had to look up Galaxy 1 just to prove it wasn't the exact same intro.

Anyway, I got all 120 Stars and, while it was challenging, I vaguely remember struggling and dying more in Galaxy 1 but maybe that's just me. But it's a nice challenge with only a few sections making me tear my hair out and some great variety to the challenges. Beating it unlocks 120 Green Stars which I REALLY wish would have been available to find while I was doing the main game...it's hard to motivate myself to go back to each level multiple times when I've already been to each level multiple times for the normal stars. I'll get these green stars eventually but I needed a break from it.

Was going to start Metroid Prime 3 after this but the disc seems bad so I actually fired up Galaxy 1 and I'm working on beating it as Luigi which I never bothered with before because it's the same as Mario's game...but after a few years, I hope it feels fresh again. I'm curious to see how similar the two games are.

[I am nobody]

13. Hob (3/18) (PC)

I'm doing this one three days late because I'm really struggling to come up with anything to say about it. I've heard it compared to Zelda a lot, but I honestly got more of a Team Ico vibe out of it, per it being a kind-of action game starring a silent duo in a ruined world that is allergic to direct lore. There aren't really any bosses until the end, you only get a few items that don't massively alter the gameplay, and the puzzles are even more "use X on the Y" than your normal Zelda fare. It is perfectly functional at what it is trying to be, but it's forgettable to the point that I already can't recall much of it.

Beyond being largely unremarkable, the only major complaint I had was that the platforming controls and camera are terrible. Almost all of my deaths were to accidentally walking off of cliffs or letting go of ledges because the button to jump suddenly changed.

Can't recommend it unless, like me, you're using it as a podcast game. And there are better options even then.

[Hotel Security]

^Nice write-up. I've had Hob on my "maybe I'll get this game" list for a while since I'm a sucker for a Zelda clone. There's a lot out there so it's hard to figure out the good ones.

[I REALLY HATE PRESENTS!]

When people say "Zelda clone" are they referring to LoZ, LttP, or OoT style? They're all pretty different. I guess some day we'll add in "BotW style" to that list but it's kinda just an open world game.

[I am nobody]

14. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Remastered (3/22) (PS4)

(nothing like remasters with different titles to inflate the completion count )

I played the original Uncharted twice around when I first got a PS3 and loved it, but that was seven years ago. Now that the series is finished and I'm no longer judging it almost solely against mid-2000s Nintendo games, does it hold up?

The remaster updated the shooting and jumping mechanics to be similar to U4's, so there's almost nothing lost transitioning from that game. Combat is usually trivial (probably my fault for playing on normal), but nonetheless enjoyable. Weapon variety is sorely lacking compared to later games, however, and the starting pistol is just about objectively the best gun until military-grade stuff starts dropping 2/3rds of the way in. Melee combat is awful and there's basically no reason to ever do it.

As for the series' trademark silly jumping, it's basically what you'd expect. There were a few frustrating parts where the controls felt wonky or paths were poorly communicated, but nothing too egregious. That said, the setpieces the series became known for are nowhere to be found. That, and the stretches of silence that would've been filled with banter in any of the later games are really the biggest differences I noticed. It's very clearly a lower budget affair than even Among Thieves. I don't mind that, but it could be jarring if this isn't your first experience with the series.

Graphically, it is a PS3 game with better textures. This isn't one of those crazy remasters like the recent Yakuza games where they redo everything. That's perfectly fine considering the price.

Although it isn't quite as obvious as the absent setpieces, there are also some major differences between this game's story and the later ones. You spend quite a lot of it alone, presumably because voicework is expensive, and they embraced the dumb fun aspect far more than they ever did later on. They still have the obligatory moment where Drake wonders if the treasure is really worth murdering hundreds of the same six guys over and over again, but it is quite literally a moment and brushed off by Elena, who has no obvious motivation. The villains are just there to shoot at you and their characters rarely add anything. Still, it's entertaining enough and doesn't get in the way, so I was fine with it.

One minor weird thing is that a stunning number of Elena's lines are bad enough to pass for early 2000s voicework. I don't know if it was a direction problem or if the actress just didn't care, because she's fine in later games, but they're bad enough that I have to bring it up.

Overall, it's still a fun eight hours. It's worth playing even if you never got around to the original.

[Hotel Security]

When people say "Zelda clone" are they referring to LoZ, LttP, or OoT style? They're all pretty different

I lump them all under that since I like all versions of Zelda. But most Zelda clones I see seem to be of the LoZ/LttP type (which are both the same type to me).

I guess some day we'll add in "BotW style" to that list but it's kinda just an open world game.

Yeah, I don't know if "BOTW-style" will catch on. Like you said, it's just "open world."

(nothing like remasters with different titles to inflate the completion count )

I've noticed even games with the same name on different consoles will get their own set of trophies so people can double-dip on those.

And what do you mean by "absense of setpieces?"...You mean, compared to the later games? That's true, but it's the first game so obviously they weren't sure how they wanted the series to go. With that said, I always recommend folks play in release order so UC1 should be the first UC game they play anyway.

I will say that UC1's advantage is that its Brutal difficulty is much tougher than the Brutal mode in the later games...I kinda liked how easy it was to die in UC1's Brutal mode and they clearly scaled it back in later games. I hope the remaster didn't dumb it down but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.

[X-3]

5.) Super Metroid

This is pretty much my "pick up and finish" game. Short but sweet. Normal Missiles are borderline useless though, which is unfortunate considering that they're the most common item pickup.

6.) Devil May Cry

While the series is known for crazy fast-paced action, the first game is relatively grounded, owing to its roots as an early version of RE4. Appropriately, the setting is more menacing than later games in the series, with stunning gothic architecture, foreboding environmental music and creepy enemies. Weapons (Devil Arms and Guns) are more situational in usage than they are later in the series, though it is not hard to see that some get used a lot more than others. Dante's moveset in general is powerful, with many cool and satisfying techniques to perform on enemies. Said enemies have a surprising amount of depth to them, but most of them will inevitably die before being able to showcase some of their more interesting characteristics leaving boss battles as the game's sole difficulty walls. Bosses are tests of endurance, with attacks that are fairly telegraphed but still somewhat tough to avoid. (ie: Griffon's lightning in general, Nelo Angelo's swords) On the highest difficulty setting, these bosses are very difficult and very fulfilling to finally defeat.

The game's fatal flaw is its camera, which uses a fixed angle system akin to early Resident Evil games. This type of camera ends up being downright disruptive during boss fights, as rooms will have multiple camera angles that more often than not leave the boss in question off-screen. Considering every boss has at least one projectile attack, this can also be fatal or at the very least incredibly disruptive to the fight. This is the type of camera system that takes you out of the game by making you think about how nonsensical its operation is.

While things like the camera can get in the way, the first Devil May Cry game is still a very good adventure game with combat that remains satisfying to play through to this day.

.) Devil May Cry 2

No number because I only played like an hour or two out of morbid curiosity. This game is just boring. Melee attacks have absolutely no weight to them and guns are stupidly powerful. In Mission 5 you fight an EVIL helicopter (:o) and to overcome its powerful attacks you stand still and hold the gun button. This game isn't worth continuing when DMC3 exists.

[I am nobody]

^I like the idea of doing reviews of terrible games with no number.

And what do you mean by "absense of setpieces?"...You mean, compared to the later games? That's true, but it's the first game so obviously they weren't sure how they wanted the series to go. With that said, I always recommend folks play in release order so UC1 should be the first UC game they play anyway.

Yeah. Like I said, I don't mind that they're missing, but I think the difference in design philosophy would be pretty surprising for anyone who did play out of release order.

[Hotel Security]

5.) Super Metroid

This is pretty much my "pick up and finish" game. Short but sweet. Normal Missiles are borderline useless though, which is unfortunate considering that they're the most common item pickup.

They're even more useless when you realize the charge beam is often stronger than Super missiles. And yet, despite that, I collect them all and go for 100% every time I play it. I did like how Metroid 2 (and the remake in AM2R) found a nice way to make regular missiles still useful.

Nice review on DMC...I liked that game but there's a few things that bug me like the lack of a dash move and some other minor details. Bayonetta to me is like "DMC with flaws cleaned up" which is why it's one of my favorite H&S games.

Yeah. Like I said, I don't mind that they're missing, but I think the difference in design philosophy would be pretty surprising for anyone who did play out of release order.

Yeah, good point...especially when UC2 is so awesome and over-the-top.

[I am nobody]

Abandoned:

Spoiler.

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 - I had never played anything in this series before because I'm not a Disney fan. Finally got around to it on the hope that the Final Fantasy could make up for it. It didn't.

RAGE - It has the mechanics to be a really good linear first person shooter, but it's constantly breaking that up to shove a bland open world and almost unbelievably badly acted story in your face. Another case of a game that'd be improved by removing most of its content.

15. Minit (4/7) (PC, One, PS4)

It's basically the trading/environmental puzzles from Link's Awakening or the Oracle games except that you die every 60 seconds and get sent back to the last house you visited. It's an interesting idea that could've been something fun with the right level design. Unfortunately, it doesn't add much to the game. The game took less than two hours to finish, and at least 40% of that was spent repeatedly wandering through the same few screens while dealing with a handful of unintuitive puzzles. It's alright when you're solving the rest of the puzzles, but there are only a couple that use the time mechanic in any meaningful way. There's a NG+ mode that I hear changes things up, but I have no desire to spent any more time with Minit.

I'm sure there'll be some cool speedruns from people who know exactly where everything is, but I can't recommend it for purchase unless you're planning to do one of those runs.

[The Deku and the Ivy]

Just finished Samus Returns last night. Pretty solid 2D Metroid entry. Good controls, and some really good boss fights. I really liked the cutscenes too, fwiw.

[Apollo the Just]

I'm trying not to spam this thread EVERY time I beat Tales of Symphonia again but since it's the only game I ever actually finish nowadays it's all I can really add to the topic.

...I've never been one to defend the dungeon design in this game, but oh gods, it's... not good. Granted NO ONE plays this game for the fun and engaging temples and movement. The battle gameplay and story and world and lore and sidequests and character dynamics are what sell it, and the dungeons are just padding to get between plot moments and fun bossfights.

But, learning to speedrun it is giving me a whole new appreciation for just how "eehhhhh" the dungeon design is. The Temple of Lightning has 3 identically-designed mazelike dark rooms that take you to different parts of the temple and it's SO frustratingly easy to get lost trying to remember where you were going and having to backtrack across them to get where you need to. I still need a guide for this crap and I've played it probably going on 20 times at this point. And the AI for the little **** s in the Temple of Darkness is just so infuriating like if I wanted this I would have actual children but I don't so WHY.

But--! God the battle system is continually so FUN AND REWARDING. Bless the GameCube version for having spell canceling which is the most broken **** in the world. I like that you can assign AI commands to the C stick and force the computers to not be useless, which makes it feel all the more like the outcome of every battle is up to YOU being good or not. There are certainly random elements and things out of your control but for the most part, if I mess up it's on me and my own inputs. I like that feeling of control. I like the feeling of the battle system, period. Nailing Regal's infinite feels like a dream even if I usually drop the combo before all too long.

Remains 100000/10 eternally even if it's largely 7 hours of mashing A or B and trying not to encounter overworld enemies. I thoroughly enjoy having new reasons to play my favorite game and I'm determined to completely memorize it - annoying dungeons and all - soon.

[I REALLY HATE PRESENTS!]

I remember almost quitting ToS because of the ice dungeon.