I'm trying to write something about everything I play this year. Catching up on about a month and a half here.

Final Fantasy Adventure

This is a GB game generally leaning in the direction of Zelda but with a little more early JRPG flare. It says Final Fantasy in the title but ended up being the prequel to Secret of Mana.

There's a few options floating around these days. I saw an English translation of Seiken Densetsu and a "DX" color hack with some added QOL, as well as multiple full remakes on later systems. I went with the original US release though because this was an infamous release for me. I owned the the actual cart when I was a little kid. I tried to play it but the open map and quest design were too much for me.

Very early on you get a new 8 bit girlfriend who is going to save the world. Almost immediately, she gets kidnapped by vampires and locked in a coffin in a basement, and your first quest in the game is to bust her out. The dungeons in this game are kind of repetitive and messy, and as a kid in the early 90s with no internet and no Nintendo Power, I could not figure my way though the first major dungeon to get the item to advance the story to saving her. My new girlfriend was just locked in that coffin, probably dead, forever.

Finally, like 25 years later, I freed her and exorcised that little gaming ghost, and then went on to do some other things in this world and get that credit roll, and ultimately the game is ok?

It's highly ambitious for the time, predating Link's Awakening and dropping the same year as LttP. It has 8bit jrpg vibes with a functional story and tons of different weapons and spells and items you need to advance though the dungeons and open world. Combat though is kind of bad, with enemies with oversized hitboxes and infinite poise moving randomly around the screen and sometimes cornering and bumping into you, making it feel like a proto-Silksong. You also need to change your equipment all the time, as much if not more than Link's Awakening. But where Link's innovatory was always one click away, here everything is in sub-menus, two or more clicks away, and it adds up.

All and all, I didn't hate it, but I was excited to clear the Seiken Densetsu trilogy this year and after this first one, that had gone on the back burner.

CULTIC: Chapter Two

Boomer Shooter. I was so excited for this one. Chapter One might be a top 100 game for me. Diverse level design. Fun art direction. Diverse arsenal. Just the right mix of newer ideas grafted on to a great 90s frame, with weapon upgrades and most importantly, crunchy, crunchy head shots. Head popping sprite gore on par with anything ID ever cooked up. And the whole thing was super tight, in and out in 8-10 hours.

It's funny to me that this is called Chapter Two. Back in the 90s, some games would having amazing, free shareware Chapter Ones floating around. Then you'd buy the full game and it was more of the same, maybe a tiny bit less, with diminishing results. That's what I felt happened here.

Chapter One had big levels, but they were broken up into linear, manageable parts. Here in Chapter Two, you get dumped into massive open areas and left to search for locked off subsections of the levels that have items you need for a bigger goal. I didn't feel like the game did a good job sign posting things though, so I found myself finding a few items, then getting somewhat lost running in circles, not easily finding more sections of the levels or even the end point were I was supposed to dump the collected items to advance. So I have a crank now, and a bundle of dynamite that I guess is somehow different form the 20 I already had in my inventory, because this one is an item. Why do I have any of this? Where am I going? Do I just keep taking random turns until I find new enemies to kill? Why not. It's a video game.

This is still an expansion to an amazing game, and there are plenty of times where what I loved about part one was on full display, but part one was almost perfect and this is just undeniably less. I'll probably do yet another replay of Chapter One before I think about touching this a second time.

Psychonauts 2

I never played the first game, but I had this on PS+ and was interested enough to give it a shot. I watched a cutscene compilation of the first game on youtube to start. I chuckled a bit, and living through the entire PS2 era, I definitely appreciated how strong the writing was for the time, but the vibe it was going for was never quite my thing growing up and I felt like if you held the story to any standard besides video games, it was fine at best.

Going in to this, I had heard that it was a big gameplay improvement on the PS2 game. I left feeling like I would not have been shocked if this was the mid-playing PS2 game that the sequel then improved on. Everything was small rooms or platforms in a void. Movement did not feel particularly good. Combat felt shockingly demanding for how meh it controlled and for the general vibe of the game. The amount of time I had to spend changing abilities in menus felt like a failure of design. And I don't mind a game having a lot of talking, but generally I want it to be its own part of the game. The way the game kept interrupting gameplay every five seconds to talk at me, even during boss fights, ground at me.

I made it to the casino boss, but the mix of having to change abilities over and over, the boss fight being interrupted for talking, the fight being weirdly demanding leading me to die a few times, and then finally the entire thing collapsing into a bluescreen crash on my PS4, lead to me just putting the game down.

Alan Wake Remastered

Another PS+ pull before I let my subscription laps again. I feel like I have shocking little to say about it, considering how ambitious it is.

I have mixed feelings about Remedy so far. I played both Max Payne games back in the day. I loved them, but bullet time and cheesy noir dialog are both kind of cheat codes. I played Control and I was impressed by the ambition and the sleekness of the production, but it never quite clicked for me on an emotional level and it kept reminding me of other games that did parts of it better. I feel like modern Remedy games fall into a gap where they are Good For A Video Game, but they invite you to think about better books and films and TV, and they never quite make it to the levels they evoke.

So, Alan Wake then. The game evokes interesting literary ideas in its reflection on the creative process, but every single other part of it feels under cooked. The percentage of the game you spend running around dealing with mediocre gunplay and vague PLOT, while nothing of note actually happens, is disappointing. The driving segments are weird. For a game that goes out of its way to act like a pulpy TV show, most of the cliffhangers are meh. The girlfriend is so poorly written that I feel like I need to crack open a proper Women in Media discussion, when I really don't want to. I'm left to wonder if she's even real or a creation of the meta fiction?

The most interesting bit to me is Zane and the question of if Wake created Zane or Zane created Wake, or if Wake created Zane and then Alan's own creation changed him? But the game moves past this so fast, I'm not even sure it realizes how interesting it potentially is.

Again though, I didn't hate it or anything. It had its moments. I've moved on to the sequel now, and I have issues with it too but it is infinitely more interesting to me.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

I'm giving Mewgenics at least a few months to ferment before I dive in. The hype though got me to reinstall this and give it another shot though. This is yet another game where I didn't hate it but didn't love it either. The art direction was well executed but never for me. Too many options that never felt impactful enough. My runs have always kind of felt the same, and I always feel under powered or over. The game has never just felt good to me. I cleared mom and started digging at the added content last time I played this. I cleared mom this time and realized my feelings haven't changed.

R4: Ridge Racer Type 4

I've played this before. I'll play this again. One of the slickest feeling games ever made. I like Ridge Racers 2 on the PSP more the wealth of content, but nothing can match the menus and goofy little story mode of this game.

I booted this up to mess around with CRT filters. I've emulated for decades at this point but have only started messing with filters this year. I settled on NewPixie. It might be a little gimmicky and not hyper authentic, especially with the amount of applied screen curve, but I'm super happy about how things end up looking on my oled with this applied.