What Games Have You Completed? (2022 EDITION!)

1. Trails in the Sky Second Chapter|PC
2. Operation C|Gameboy
3. The Outer Wilds|PC
4. Kid Dracula|Gameboy
5. The Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye|PC
6. Illusion of Gaia|SNES

Illusion of Gaia

Quite disappointed in this one. It's regarded as one of the best Action RPGs of all time and I found it had a lot of issues was just merely a good game rather than the all time great it's held up as.

Illusion of Gaia is made by Quintet who made Actraiser and then followed that up with their 'Heaven and Earth' trilogy on the SNES. Illusion of Gaia is the middle game of that trilogy between Soul Blazer and Terranigma. While Quintet games are usually pretty strange takes on the action RPG genre that leave progress quite open to the player, Gaia is a very linear game with not much in the way of RPG mechanics. Despite a world map there's very little reason to move between areas, you are just going from town to dungeon to town.

Gameplay is your standard hack and slash affair. You are encouraged to kill all enemies in an area, not only because some will open up the way forward in the dungeon but because killing all enemies will upgrade one of your stats and its the only way to level up in the game. Enemies that are killed will also stay dead. The game actually makes good use of this mechanic with some puzzles being based around finding those last few enemies. Dungeon quality varies wildly. Some are a slog while others are well designed with some fun puzzles. One annoying thing is later in the game finishing a dungeon doesn't teleport you out and instead you have to make your way back which can often be more confusing with the lack of enemies.

There's a really interesting story in illusion of gaia that covers some very dark subjects. There's slavery, suicide, lose. There's a real melancholic feel to the game. And this is all spoiled by a really ropey translation. By the end of the game I was none the wiser to what happened and had to read up on it and the melancholy is ruined by some bad attempts at humour by the translation team. People die or lose loved ones and the people close to them get over it in seconds or don't seem to care. I've heard Illusion of Gaia being described as the first time JRPGs got 'pretentious' and was a precursor to the convoluted stories seen in PS1 era RPGs. Hell there's even an ominous comet heading towards earth.

However it wouldn't be right for me to blame the stories failings on the translation and 'everything is better in japanese'. The game does have one of the most unintentionally funny scenes ever. Late in the game the kids are captured by starving african war children that try to cook them for food. Then during this headscratchingly racist moment a characters pet pig Hamlet sacrifices themselves by jumping on to the fire. It's not helped that interacting with his roasted corpse informs you that the air smells of roast Hamlet.

One annoyance with the game is that there are 50 red jewels to be found in the game. The majority of these are missable and you will need all 50 to enter a bonus dungeon with a secret boss fight with one of the bosses from Soul Blazer. The game came with a walkthrough so these would be easy enough to find but playing it now with no manual you will need a walkthrough to find them. However, don't bother. It's a nice extra but not worth it.

Graphically the game is gorgeous with some stunning pixel art and nicely animated main character. The music is pretty good as well although tracks get repeated a lot and can grate towards the end.

So Illusion of Gaia is a fun if occasionally frustrating action RPG which leans heavily on action and can barely be called a RPG. It's a good game but I wouldn't call it essential.

That's an insult to house of the dead.

1. Trails in the Sky Second Chapter|PC
2. Operation C|Gameboy
3. The Outer Wilds|PC
4. Kid Dracula|Gameboy
5. The Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye|PC
6. Illusion of Gaia|SNES
7. Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3|Gameboy

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3

The two Gameboy mario land games were always kind of weird. Youcould feel that Nintendo R&D1 wanted to be a bit more adventurous with their games but where constrained by making the mario games recognisable to the Mario games by Nintendo EAD. Their follow up to Mario Land 2 puts that game's antagonist Wario in the lead role and R&D1 have a lot of fun with this character.

The first wario land game never strays into complete subversion of the platforming genre like later wario games. The game runs on the Mario Land 2 engine, feels like a Mario game but Wario operates on this own rules. Wario is a brute and can stun enemies by just bumping into them. He can bash through obstacles in his way. His power ups are very different to Mario's. As a result Wario is a more aggressive and powerful character to Mario. If you play Wario Land start to finish like a traditional platformer then it's a rather easy game. However that isn't the main goal.

Wario has lost his wealth and his main goal is to collect as much coins as possible. There's also hidden treasures in some levels that can be found that are worth huge sums of gold coins. Wario Land is more about exploring each level fully and finding hidden coins, treasures, levels and at one point a whole hidden world. The ending you get depends on how many coins you finish the game with.

Wario Land was a game I initially found hard to get into. I never got past the first 2 or 3 stages as they seemed a bit slow and uninteresting. However I'm glad I stuck it out because after the initial few stages Wario land becomes far more inventive and that Nintendo magic is present in every stage.

It's a great little platformer that is sadly over shadowed because of the incredible sequels.

1. Trails in the Sky Second Chapter|PC
2. Operation C|Gameboy
3. The Outer Wilds|PC
4. Kid Dracula|Gameboy
5. The Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye|PC
6. Illusion of Gaia|SNES
7. Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3|Gameboy
8. Shantae|Gameboy Colour

Shantae

I played the limited run release of this on the switch. Glad I finally had a chance to play this even if I didn't love this game. Shantae was a very late GBC game that came out when the GBA had effectively replaced the system. Although it was WayForward's first game after they restarted their game production, they had a hard time finding a publisher for years as the cart size necessary for it was a massive 32 mbit cart. It meant the game became very rare and commanded high prices. It was bandied about as a hidden gem on the system but like what happens sometimes with these games, the game's rarity made people exaggerate how good the game actually is.

Although this was WayForward's first developed game, it wasn't their first published game after they restarted game production. Shantae really feels like a game from a first time developer with loads of ambition but lacking experience in actual game design, whereas their first two published games actually feel way more polished.

Many people call Shantae a metroidvania, and it is in a way but I find it's closer to Wonderboy 3: The dragon's Trap. It has a similar world layout (an overworld that loops on itself interspersed with dungeons) and the abilities you gain in both games transform you into various animals. The developer has said that this influence is organic as they hadn't played Dragon's Trap and I kind of believe them as Dragon's Trap doesn't make the same mistakes as this game.

There's some really basic game design flaws here. Areas are way too big and take too long to traverse with infrequent checkpoints. Enemies are also really annoying to fight and take way too many hits to kill meaning you are better off avoiding them. You transform into various animal forms by dancing which is a neat gimmick but slows the game down. It takes an awful long time to gain your first transformation and many of the abilities that allow you to attack in these transformations are hidden and also don't appear until you've nearly finished the game making them useless. There is fast travel in the game but it relies of you finding very well hidden items in the games four dungeons which is very frustrating. The game just doesn't have the polish or pacing of better designed games.

What the game is well known for is its technical prowess. I can safely say this is one of the best looking games on the Gameboy Colour, looking better than a lot of Megadrive and SNES games. The developers were animators by trade and all the enemies and characters are beautifully animated. There's great variety in the stages and they all look great. They manage to pull off some impressive hardware tricks as well, faking transparency effects and multiplane parallax scrolling, effects that shouldn't be possible on the GBC. The music by Jake Kaufman is fine. He channels the music of 8-bit micro machines like the C64 and while it's impressive, there's nothing that stands out. Jake would go on to much better things such as the Shovel Knight soundtrack.

Overall, this is a game you can safely ignore for the later Shantae games which are a massive improvement. It's a technically impressive game that's a good first effort by WayForward. They would later become much more competent developers creating some of the best modern 2D games. Their spin off studios would give us the likes of Yacht Club Games and their Shovel Knight series.

I'm guessing someone got an Analogue Pocket as well? :D

I'm a bit megaman'ed out after the slog of Megaman and Bass. I'll get around to Xtreme but as I only beat MMX and MMX2 last year I'll probably move on to X4.

GG Shinobi is my next Pocket game.

1. Trails in the Sky Second Chapter|PC
2. Operation C|Gameboy
3. The Outer Wilds|PC
4. Kid Dracula|Gameboy
5. The Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye|PC
6. Illusion of Gaia|SNES
7. Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3|Gameboy
8. Shantae|Gameboy Colour
9. The Forgotten City|PC

The Forgotten City

I think there's been enough written about how good this game is. It's just a brilliantly written time loop game with excellent writing and really great character interaction. Enjoyed this so much and it didn't out stay its welcome. Probably my favourite game from last year.