This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

We are going to jump right into this one, because I have a feeling that this write-up will be on the lengthier side of things when all is said and done. Today we are talking about Final Fantasy X (I played the re-master on PS4, but I think most applies to the original), I think everyone should know what that is by now, so I will spare that nonsense. I will warn everyone that there are going to be major spoilers when we get to talking about the plot, and hopefully I remember to block out that portion so you can enjoy this write-up without having the game spoiled for you. If you need an early preview of how I feel about this game, it was a game I have played previously (not for this series), and yet despite spinning my “what game I playing wheel” and ending on the equivalent of a free space, decided I want to play this game again.

When we are talking about Final Fantasy X I think there are two things that we need to address right at the top of the hour here, even though it is out of order. Blitzball is not that f*cking bad! And that laughing scene is not the worst moment in video game history. I feel like whenever this game is brought up, people who either don’t like it (or never tried it) bring up those two things as these huge demerits to a fantastic game. First off, Blitzball is a side activity that you can COMPLETELY IGNORE! You are forced to play a single game that will take you 15 minutes tops and whether you win or lose impacts nothing in the game. It technically changes what a character is holding in a short cut-scene, but it never comes up again. And good news, you are never forced to play another game throughout the entire game. Now I can already see some people complaining that if you don’t engage with Blitzball, then you miss out on some specials and the best weapon for a character, but again it doesn’t matter. I have never completed this game having all of the best weapons, I have never fully leveled up a character, I have never come close to 100% this game with all the side quests, and it doesn’t matter. You can still beat the game without any of those things, and you can make Wakka (the character in question here) a powerhouse without those specials and ultimate weapon, by just leveling him up normally. I’m sorry Blitzball is not triple triad (from FF8), which is where I think the hate really stems from, but it is just as deep and fun to play IF you do enjoy it. Maybe we will talk about Blitzball more, but we need to address the other issue people have with this game, the laughing scene.

Yes, that laughing scene is weird and could have been handled differently, but it makes sense within the story and the rest of the game I would argue isn’t the worst voice acted scene of all time, as some people want to deem it. See (without getting into the spoiler portion yet), it is supposed to sound like a forced fake laugh, It is not supposed to sound natural, because it is not natural. Your player character, just learned some heavy shit, but he can’t share that with the group, so when the girl he likes tells him he needs to be able to smile and laugh through sadness, he has to fake it and then it diverges into kids (remember these are essentially teenagers) being kids. You can hate the moment and that’s fine, but it is…if anything… a very small blemish on a game that otherwise is very good. Is all the voice acting perfect? No, there are some bad line reads and just some poorly voiced side characters, but I would argue that a majority of the main cast does a good job. You have voice acting professionals in Tara Strong, John Dimaggio, and James Arnold Taylor all lending their voices to the game, these aren’t one-off voice talents that you check IMDB and they never worked again, these are people who were already industry vets who did a lot of voice work in cartoons and anime, or would later become vets who did it. Should I also mention this is the first final fantasy that is fully voiced? But I get it, lets look at a single 5 minute scene for something 22 years old and then complain that it doesn’t resemble the voice acting being done in today’s games.

Ok, coming in hot, but now that those two things are out of the way lets talk about the game and how it differentiated from the norms set by previous Final Fantasies. Let’s start by acknowledging that this game continues the trend of giving you a moderate sized party to manage, but how it feels more inclusive. Ever since Final Fantasy 6, the amount of playable characters in your party at one time has expanded. Gone are the days of the game finding a reason for your party to always stay at a manageable 4 person party size. However, one we hit 6-9 we started getting a little more characters that didn’t have to leave our party to handle other business, turn to stone, or die from rolling boulders. However, there was still the party limitation of 3-4 party characters only being allowed to be out and about at a time. We were led to believe that despite trying to save the world, whomever we weren’t using was content just to sit on an Airship, or back at home-base playing solitaire waiting for the chance to be called up. In Final Fantasy X the story involves our cast of characters all going on a journey together, mainly on foot, so they need to be around for every scene and presumably every battle. So while your “starting” party is only 3 deep, on any of your turns in battle you can swap someone out and a new person in. Need a magic user, swap one in.. someone close to death, swap them out. A character has to take a turn in battle to gain XP, but the game does a good job of dolling out enemies that have weaknesses that fit each character, that you will end up doing this pretty naturally in most battles. Personally, I love this system, each character close at hand and able to jump in at a moments notice. It can add strategy as you start to plan out your moves, plan out the enemies moves, and give yourself the best chance to win. Sure, does it get frustrating when you are trying to make sure everyone gets a touch during an easy random encounter, and you have to use free skills like “cheer” or “guard” just to constitute a move because you don’t want to kill the enemy too fast, but overall a positive. Like in every previous Final Fantasy, your team is going on a world saving adventure, why are we sending team-members home to do laundry.. this change makes them all feel present at every moment. Cut-scenes can have every character there, they can interact with the surrounding world, comment on what just happened, and it’s not up to chance that you picked that character to be in your party, or were locked into taking them along.

Tangentially related, but another change to the battle system, is being able to see the turn order front and center. This is something that has become normalized more in current day, but at the time was used by very few games, and there are no downsides to report. It allows you once again to use strategy in almost every fight, plan more than one step at a time, and feel great when it all works. While you can’t see the movies the enemy is planning, you can certainly see when they are coming up, so you know who is going to act first. Perhaps its time to heal your party before a next turn, or risk it for extra damage, but at least you know the order. You don’t have to hope that your moves happen first (looking at you Lost Odyssey), now you know and can plan accordingly. If you know an enemy is about to launch a big attack, well you can buff your team, swap in someone with more health, or summon an aeon (this game’s summon creatures) to potentially take that blow for your team. It’s also not a cakewalk either, so anyone who misses the old system because of “a challenge.” There are instances where you aren’t going to be able to pull off your plan A. Perhaps your healer is already out, and not getting their turn before the enemy attacks. Perhaps the person low on health won’t get an action, before the next enemy boss, so you can’t pull them out early. There were numerous instances where I was in a fight and had to think a few steps ahead to be able to survive the battle. The challenge isn’t gone, but the guessing game of what person is going to act first certainly is, and that is a benefit.

At some point I mentioned XP, and another thing that this game does better than its predecessors is how it handles level ups. Previous games, you gained enough XP and then hit a level up, where stats would increase in the background (yes, some earlier games had it in the foreground). Was this level-up going to increase my HP, or my speed? Am I going to learn a new spell or is this a just a boost to Strength. Introducing the Sphere Grid, a huge grid that you moved your piece around picking up upgrades as you go. While this is essentially the same system just housed differently, it allowed you to see what was upcoming, and it gave you some choices in order to work towards how you wanted to craft your character. You could potentially see that you were 2 spots away from learning “Life” so maybe it would be worth doing a couple extra battles to get it, or a few battles away from more HP. If you were playing the original version of this game, the sphere grid was mostly a linear path for most characters with small outshoots, but later in the game it gave you the ability to make changes to someone’s character. The White mage (healing magic) and Black mage (damage magic) have their paths close together, at some points you could potentially use a path to move one of those characters to the other level-up tree changing all of the skills that they were potentially going to learn. Want Yuna (white mage) to switch over and learn all of the strongest damage spells, she can do that. It might cost you a little bit of time (and a key), but you can have her swap over. Maybe this means she won’t learn “Full-Life” but in return she will learn “Firaga” instead, and giving you choices is never a bad thing. On this playthrough I played the re-master and used the advanced Sphere Grid, which essentially starts all your beginning party members at the same spot, and you can have them go in any direction you want. Want Wakka to be your White Mage? You can technically do that, and have Yuna go down his path, its possible. There are some starting stats that you will have to overcome but it is a real way to play that game, and if you put the work in, they can assume each other’s roles. Now, if you are not careful you can really mess yourself up, but as long as you have some strategy to your decision you should be fine. For instance, I had Auron (tough guy) jump out of his lane too early in the advanced role, preventing him from learning a skill that is very much needed to make some fights easier towards the end game. I was still able to get through those fights, but I had to use a different strategy to get over those bumps. I have never fully maxed a player out (getting every upgrade on the grid), but that doesn’t stop me from believing it is a real possibility every time I start the game. That is the beauty of the Sphere Grid.

I saw some comments that people would complain that they got themselves stuck because they moved around the sphere grid and missed out on a pivotal skill or ability that is needed to move forward, and I am going to call bunk on that possibility. First off, it should go without saying that the advanced sphere grid should not be the one you use the first time through the game, I think it even says that in the warning before you pick it, but even if you do, as long as you aren’t wasting your level-ups walking back and forth on the same two squares you should be able to make progress. Why do I say that? Because I just beat the game missing two key skills for most of the game. “Armor Break” is an ability that allows you to essentially remove the armor benefit to any enemy that can be hit with that skill. If you are in a fight and notice that your melee attackers are doing low damage, chances are you can armor break that enemy and then watch them do real damage again. If you are following the normal path, this is like Auron’s 3^rd or 4^th skill he learns. I wasn’t paying attention and had him go in a different direction and he started learning other abilities and I never got Armor Break until way later in the game then I should have. Guess how I got around it, well I had a Wakka overdrive (think special move (status Reels)) that allowed him to hit an enemy with the break attacks. I used a teleport sphere (move around the sphere grid to a past location), to have Auron learn “Full Break,” or used more magic and summons to get through tough spots. In addition to that, I beat the whole game without any character learning “hastega” (case haste on all characters). A spell that if you look at the IGN guide for FFX, is usually the first ability they say to use during the final 5-6 bosses. I never had a character close to that ability, because I had them going all sorts of different directions, but I was still able to overcome every single boss that apparently required it. So is it possible to fully break your game, I guess, but that would either require you to really not understand the basics of the sphere grid, to move all characters onto the same path, or to hate the game so much that you refuse to do even a little bit of extra leveling, but just missing out on “Dark Buster,” or “Holy,” isn’t the detriment that you might think it is.

The other big change compared to previous games is that the world appears to be much more linear compared to previous games. The key here is the word “appears,” and the reason for that is in every other game you would stumble upon a big world map, where you can wander around and get into random battles, but you could start marching towards towns or dungeons or just strange locations that you see from afar. It gave you the ability to explore the world map looking for secrets and potentially stumbling upon them, but rarely were you ever able to sequence break or find an area that you weren’t supposed to get to yet. For instance in FF6, when the stories divide for the first time and you select Sabin, it would appear you have this huge map to explore on your way to recruit Cyan or on your way to the ghost train, but every direction is either blocked by impassable mountains, or a lake that your characters can’t go through. So while the world map appears to give you this huge freedom, it really funnels you to the same locations just in a different way. In FFX, the world map is gone, and so it feels like you are just going one main location to the next, with only some divergency when looking for treasure chests, but it is essentially the same. After FF7 and how that changed the world, FFX was their attempt to be more cinematic and to make it feel more like a movie. We got more cutscenes, more voices, more emotion, and they did that by cutting out some of that world map wandering. There are still side quests in FFX (granted almost all of them are late game), but they don’t feel as epic as the airship comes in much later, and you don’t have that worldmap to see your characters hike through. I’m not saying this is a good change, but I think it evens out as neutral. Do I miss the world map screen, and the music that played while you wandered around? Of course. Do I miss that world map screen allowing me to save anywhere? Of course.. but I can also appreciate that I don’t really have to guess as to which way I need to go.

While I talked around some of these things (combat, exploration, side quests) we can do a little clean-up around those things before moving on to plot and all the spoilers I need to talk about. Combat is still random encounter based, and still turn-based at this point. In fact this was the last turn-based “mainline” Final Fantasy, because after X was the MMO of XI and the real time combat of XII. You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that because I love turn based combat, I love the combat in X. I already talked about how I feel the game adds a level of strategy to each fight, and I like being able to plan my moves out. There are very few fights outside of some low level random encounters where I think you can use the “press x to win” strategy.

As for exploration the area maps are fairly big that allow you to search in nooks and crannies for treasure chests, or fun pickups. My biggest complaint is that I wish your mini-map you could zoom out to get a better lay of the land. For some areas like “Mt Gagazet” or “Bikanel Island” the mini-map is too small to see how far certain overshoot paths continue in one direction, and while I am sure that is the point (making you choose a path) it also means that if I want to comb through the whole map looking for pickups, that I might have to do excessive backtracking because I accidentally went down the main path, when I wanted to initially look down a side path. You can chalk some of this up to just extra leveling, and the risk/reward for trying to get all the treasure in a given area, but a simple zoom-out of the mini-map would have done wonders for me.

Side quests, are where this game really drops the ball. Its hard for me to classify what I consider a side quest and what I consider a side activity, because I think something like Blitzball is not a side quest but rather a side activity. But regardless, if I am using that distinction then I will say both sections drop the ball. For one, there just isn’t enough good side content in this game. The best two things I can think of, is getting the bonus aeons (Anima, Yojimbo, Magus Sisters) and the Omega dungeon, but both of these things come very late in the game (with both needing an Airship to be completed.) These aren’t really side quests you can tackle without having a fairly sturdy team to even begin, and some (like the Omega dungeon) are so late game, that by the time you beat this, you will probably be over-leveled for the final boss of the main game. As for the Side Activities (Blitzball, getting ultimate weapons, monster catching, etc.) these constitute some of the worst padding. Listen, I am a blitzball defender, but even I can’t play enough Blitzball games to get the item Wakka needs to get his ultimate weapon. Almost all of the ultimate weapons require you to do some task that is borderline torture to achieve. I have only fully played through the game twice, but started and played big portions many times, and this playthrough is when I got the most ultimate weapons.. You know what the number was? A whopping 2 out of 7 (Rikku and Kimahri). I could have probably gotten Yuna’s and maybe Auron’s if I wanted to grind out some more battles, but ultimately moved on to save time. Even Rikku’s which I will say is the easiest of all the ultimate weapons to get, has you doing a very long sequence of looking for cactuars in the desert, that should only be attempted when you have equipment that removes random encounters. I won’t even bother discussing dodging 200 lightning bolts in a row, or trying to get a SUB 0:00 time in Chocobo Racing, these activities will try your patience in order to even attempt. Even with the hindsight of 20 some years since the game came out, there are no cheats or great tips to get these you can find online. Are they doable? Sure, if you are either incredibly lucky or incredibly disciplined, but since I see no need in 100% this game, I can’t argue that those items are that necessary to put myself through that peril.

Ok we have put it off long enough, lets dive into the story of this game. I will try to do some non-spoilery talk here in the beginning and then block out any twists and turns, but I think the draw of this game is the story and the emotion that it pulls through making a surprisingly personal journey. You start off the game controlling a person whom you believe is ripped through time to the world of Spira. The world of Spira is a very religious world that is constantly plagued by this ultimate evil, which is simply known as “Sin.” Depending on whom you ask, Sin is the punishment bestowed upon Spira because they gave up their religious teachings and started using magic technologies to defy god. So until Spira atones for the transgressions of their ancestors, they will have to deal with this ultimate evil. Which Sin, totally is, we see it attack villages, kill people (including children), and ultimately cause destruction everywhere it goes. It was the monster that grabbed our main character and pull him into the future. The only way for Sin to be defeated is for specialized summoners to go on a pilgrimage, pray and visit all the temples for strength, and then to battle Sin and use their final ultimate power which results in killing themselves and Sin. It has been done before, many times, but Sin only stays dead for 10 years, and then is reborn to wreck havoc again. Very early on into the game, our Tidus character stumbles upon Yuna who is just starting out on her pilgrimage to try to fight Sin. Tidus tags along, as the party feels bad for him that he doesn’t know anything and because he is good at blitzball. Eventually he proves his worth and joins as a guardian in order to help Yuna complete her pilgrimage. As you continue down this journey, you eventually find that there is a corruption at the top (when isn’t there) and Sin actually is not your only enemy on this journey. If we stop there at the main story, I know this is a trend that we have seen in other RPGs, this collision of religion versus technology, or magic versus technology. Hell, that is a focal point of Lost Odyssey (the last RPG I completed), and a big portion of Final Fantasy 6 (the last Final Fantasy game I completed). However, I think the framing of this game tells that story better. You see remnants of destroyed cities as you walk through the land, you hear about it from the people, and you learn about how this all started. It is what makes some of the twists in the story work.

While the game doesn’t explicitly do this, the main character of this whole story should be Yuna. Tidus has his own reasons for continuing the fight (more on that in the spoiler section), but Yuna is the girl who at a young age not only decided to become a summoner but committed to trying to do everything to help the world gain just 10 years of calm. To put things into perspective our main characters are supposed to be about 17 years old. Think about that, before she would even be out of high school, she trained to be someone who would willingly give their life to bring a sense of calm to the land. There was also no guarantee that she would even make it that far, but she has the resolve to start that journey and if everything went according to plan, to die before her 18^th birthday. I know our world is very different than Spira, I am also sure life expectancies are a lot different, since our world is not constantly being attacked by a Godzilla like monster every ten years, but at 18 years old I wasn’t ready to do anything near uplift the entire world with my actions. This is who the story should follow, a young girl who is willing sacrificing her life, her childhood, and more in order to bring joy to people she has never met.

Okay tangent over, there are obviously things that I left up in my story portion that we need to talk about, but these are spoilers for the game. I would encourage you, if you have any interest in playing this game for the first time, to not click through the spoilers and just play the game for yourself. It has my seal of approval, and while that doesn’t mean anything, I think hitting all those stories beats for the first time in the game is worth it a lot more than just reading about it. ****SPOILERS***** However we can’t talk about the whole story of the game without mentioning two critical pieces. The first is that Sin is in fact Tidus’s dad. See when a summoner uses their most powerful summon, they have to convert someone they love into an aeon. When that Aeon kills Sin, it is then destined to become the next Sin. Tidus has a fraught relationship with his dad, and part of that is the fact that he was led to believe that his dad died one day off doing some training, which had a domino effect on Tidus’ mom never recovering from the grief and Tidus growing up in a broken home. It isn’t until now, some 10ish years later, that Tidus learns his dad was alive… somehow transported to Spira… gave his life to help save Spira… and is now the enemy that is ruining the world. There are a lot of emotions to work out here, it comes out during the game, and quite frankly I loved this little wrinkle. I thought this characterization was done very well.

Now that part I hate to point out is the next big story piece. In fact, when I think of this game, I REFUSE to actually acknowledge that this is part of the story, I would prefer to live in my world where the main story is the pilgrimage to stop Sin, the corruption of people in power, and the whole Tidus’s dad bull, but we have to be honest with ourselves. For some unknown reason, the writers of this game needed another twist, so you find out later in the game, that Tidus and Zanarkand, Jecht, none of them are real. Yup, they are all just dreams. Without really going down the rabbit hole, the fayth are people who willing gave their life during a great battle. They are who summoners pray to at all the temples and then give the summoners access to call an aeon which is a manifestation of that fayth’s power. An aeon is technically real, it can be touched and talked to. Well there is a whole wall of fayth who are “dreaming” the Zanarkand that Tidus came from, including all the people that lived there. Those people don’t really know they are just dreams, but they are. When the game ends, part of the plot is that the fayth, want to stop their endless dreaming, because they are getting so tired of having to manifest all this stuff, so in beating Sin and Yu Yevon (we don’t need to go into that guy, but basically created Sin and the wall of fayth) the fayth are allowed to stop dreaming, and thus end their dreams of the Aeons (they will cease to exist) and magical Zanarkand, and Tidus. Now there are a lot of interpretations here, and I haven’t played X-2 yet so I am sure some stuff gets explained, but you can choose to believe that because Sin came in contact with Tidus, and that so many people remember him (like the movie Coco) then he is at least somewhat real, and that as opposed to just not existing he gets to go to the farplane (think Heaven). It doesn’t really matter what the real reason is for all the justification, but what matters is this is the single worst plot point of the game. The game does not explain it well, a lot of my understanding comes from visiting old message boards of people who did more research, and a lot of dialogue and other information about it, comes from you going the extra mile and re-visiting old areas and getting that sweet extra dialogue from sources. However, on top of the terrible explanation, I don’t understand it’s existence as a plot point. We have a plot twist in Jecht being Sin, we have plot points of Seymour and Mika essentially wanting Sin to continue to exist so that they can stay in power (or in Seymour’s case, destroy the whole world so it can get a fresh start). There is enough there to give this game the emotional weight it wants, without coming up with some over the top reason, so that Yuna and Tidus can’t be together at the end. This game doesn’t have a perfect story, but it had a damn good one, and then at the 90% mark they decided to just throw in some bullshit about a character being a dream, and ruin it. Yes, I know that Auron is actually dead the whole time, but that makes sense. They explain how un-sents work way better than how the explain dream kids work. ****Spoilers****

So yes, I think that ~90% of the story is great, but the reason it is great is because I love this cast of characters. Sure, there are some tropes here, but I could have played this game for another 10 hours easily because I liked existing in the world, and I liked engaging with the characters. Nearly every character has an arc that you actually get invested in, and that makes them enjoyable to be around. Some get it more than others, but you can see how their personalities change or show themselves as you go through the game, you feel the pain as to when they experience loss, whether that is literal loss of someone/something, or a loss of sense. As an example that isn’t a spoiler, but Rikku is an Al Bhed which is basically the classification of characters who are on the opposite side of the religious grouping. She is trying to protect Yuna and other summoners, because she hates knowing that they are marching towards the end of their life. She believes that there has to be another way to defeat Sin that doesn’t end with the summoner dying. She gets frustrated, angry, and scared at the prospect of losing Yuna, but she still signs up to be a guardian and go on this pilgrimage in order to be there to protect Yuna as she marches on. Auron who is considered this wise old sage, you get to see throughout the game that he is just as scared and worried as the other guardians are. He wanted his previous summoner to drop out, because he couldn’t stand losing him. He tried to fight a god by himself, because of his rage in losing his friends. He is loyal and at first you don’t understand why, but then his story plays out and you realize everything he has gone through and how he is still going to uphold his promises to those before him. I could go down the line, and nearly every character has a story and an arc that make them good characters. You could convince me that Lulu grows the least, but that is because much of her story comes in the early part of the game, and she isn’t as impacted by late reveals, but I digress, what kept me playing this game, and what almost made me play it more, was because I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to this cast of characters. I liked leveling them up, I liked seeing them in cut scenes and hearing their dialogue. I liked watching them grow as people. For anyone that doesn’t like the story or the characters, I’m not going to convince you otherwise, but there is a reason that all the thumbnails of people do playthroughs of this game, have them in tears towards the end. It’s because they got attached to these characters and the story and that is a good sign of a well told game.

Last thing I should touch on, but that is the music of this game. It is fantastic and I would expect nothing else. It is a damn near perfect soundtrack to the game. When you are on Besaid island or Kilka island in the early stages of the game, the music perfectly fits those scenes. When you are right after the Sin aftermath by Mushroom rock road, you feel that music in your emotions as you mourn. When you finally get to Zanarkand and you are working your way to the temple, *Chef’s kiss.* Music for Final Fantasy can be a very personal taste, and a lot of it comes down to nostalgia. My first Final Fantasy was FF4 and I can still listen to any track and know exactly where it occurred in the game. FF6 has some of my favorite tracks of all time, but FFX has such a unique and perfectly suited soundtrack to the game, that it amazes me. It can’t be a soundtrack that your first listen is outside the game, but after you have played it through, then you can listed to the tracks and have them hit the same way.

If it wasn’t apparent from nearly 7,000 words, I really like FFX. I breezed through 60 hours of it, being the only game I played during that time. Normally I alternate playing games to not get bored or make any game feel like a slog, but when I had a minute to sit down with a game, I only wanted to play FFX. I could have easily played 80 hours and gone for every weapon, and fighting extra bosses, or just to complete some sphere grids, but ultimately I felt I had to move on and play the other games on my shelf. Before we get to rating this game, I had to have a long conversation with myself as to if this is my favorite Final Fantasy game, and it was difficult. So my top 3 (not in any particular order) have always been FFX, FF6, and FF7. I had to do some real soul searching, and comparing the two and trying to remove years of nostalgia and bias to really decide should I rank this one over 6. I think 10 is an easier recommendation to someone who (just between those two games) is looking to try out a Final Fantasy for the first time, because it’s more streamlined, more modern, and has some great quality of life improvements compared to 6. FF6 certainly has better side quests/activity than 10 does, and might have better showpiece moments (world of light/world of ruin moment, opera scene, ghost train). The music and characters are a tie to me. I think the characters have more of a life in 10 than 6, but 6 also has more characters to juggle, and for every great character with an interesting story (Locke, Shadow, Celes, etc.) there are some stinkers in the mix (Gau, Strago, Umaro, Gogo). To make up for that the characters of 6 all have unique abilities that make them more enjoyable to play, while in 10 those differences get leveled out the more experience you gain. They both have a great story, but I think 6 takes the edge here because 10 loses some points because of their weird twist at the end. Whichever one you pick, I could make an argument for, so without further ado.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No, but it currently a top 10 game

Where does it rank: I think initially upon completing this game, I probably had this above FF6 and below Yakuza 0, but i let my food settle, i weighed pros and cons and changed my vote. I still think this is a fantastic game with an insane amount of heart and some fantastic emotional moments with a killer soundtrack, but.. I hated the story beat that I hid in the spoilers, and the side content is either lacking (if we are being generous) or downright awful. Side stories in other Final Fantasies (and especially in Yakuza 0) are better and allow you to dawdle in the world better than monster catching, or dodging lightning bolts. So, I still have FF6 being the superior Final Fantasy game (but I would still highly recommend people play 10 or give it another shot) and have it ranked as the 6th Greatest Game of All Time. This is out of 150 (woo hoo!) games, and it sits between X-Com 2 (5th) and Stardew Valley (7th). I liked this game so much that I "almost" wanted to roll right into X-2, which I have never played before, but I need to hold steady on the process and spin to see my follow up first.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up (actively playing) 1) Judgement 2) Dorfromantik 3) Catherine

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Sometimes you start a game and within 2 minutes you already know everything about the game. This isn’t in a predicted sense of what this game is going to be about, but in the quite literal sense of knowing exactly what this game will be the whole time you play it. Extreme Exorcism is that game, it doesn’t try to hide itself, there isn’t deep lore or a bunch of hidden depth beneath the surface. It is a game that I purchased before an extra-life marathon thinking it would be a fun game to play with friends locally, but something we never got around to during that particular event.

To be clear, Extreme Exorcism is a score based arcade game that has you pick a level and then play infinitely until you run out of lives, only leaving you with a high score to show off. There are two modes in this game, the first is the arcade mode, and the second is a challenge mode. For the sake of this review, I completed every single challenge in the challenge mode, and played every level at least once in the arcade mode.

The game itself is rather simple, you pick from a character mainly based on what color they are, and then a level where you want to exorcise ghosts. Keep in mind that the characters have no inherent traits, skills, positives or negatives, and they don’t even have names (maybe I don’t remember them). When dropped into a level, there is a single possessed chair on screen that you need to defeat. At multiple points on the stage there are weapons that spawn from whatever weapons you have unlocked on your profile (you unlock future weapons based on total kills). Once you have a weapon, or 5…(you can hold multiple different types of weapons at one time) you then proceed to attack the chair.

A single hit will kill all enemies you will ever encounter, but that also means a single hit will kill you as well. Once the chair is gone, the round ends and a new round begins. At the start of a new round you lose whatever weapons you had at the previous round, and you will notice a G-G-G- Ghost has appeared. This Ghost mimics everything you did as the player character in the previous round. Every time you hit the attack button, every time you jumped, and where you went. Your goal for the 2^nd round is to hit the ghost before he hits you, when you do so a new round begins. Every round you survive a new ghost will appear on the level that mimics the previous round, so in round three there will be two ghosts (one mimicking your actions from round 1, and one mimicking actions from round 2). This process will continue until things can get hectic and you can have 20 or 30 ghosts on screen at a given time should you survive that many rounds. The ghosts can’t hit each other, so every bullet you have fired for 20 or so rounds will be the same ones you have to dodge later on. Each round doesn’t end until you have killed the newest ghost, so you can technically end a round just by killing one ghost and not really worrying about the others that are floating around, but the other ghosts might be in your way or make it harder for you to achieve your goal.

All of this can get overwhelming, but there is hope. Occasionally a super-power will appear at a weapon pickup spot, and should you get it, allow you to create a fairly small exorcism circle, that should any ghost get captured in it, they are permanently exorcised and will not appear in following rounds. The key here is to make sure you know where the hotspots of the ghosts seem to go (perhaps you always went towards the top corner, so a lot of previous ghosts are over there) and then to time it so that you can capture the most ghosts at any given time. In order to survive to later stages and pad your scores, you will need to make sure you use these to great effectiveness so that you are clearing out 3-7 ghosts on every usage. I think the power appears after every 5-6 ghosts you kill so you can (and I have) worked my way from a large selection of ghosts back down to a single ghost 20 rounds in at that point.

When playing the arcade mode, you are asked with getting to a certain point threshold which will unlock the next level, and so on and so forth. You don’t automatically move to a new level, it just becomes available for selection should you start the arcade mode over. Each level is roughly the same size, but each “world” has its own unique obstacle to overcome. Fighting on any of the balcony stages, means you compete with wind which can push you around as well as any grenades you might launch. Playing in the Kitchen areas mean you have to dodge fire because you can be killed by the environment, and playing at the altar (the last level) only has one weapon spawn that means all of your past ghosts have to go there as well. I found that the further I went in the arcade mode the least I wanted to play it. Playing 5 minutes versus 50 hours in this game is the same but the later levels require higher scores to keep unlocking future levels and that just means more playing. I eventually got to a point where I would hit the score goal and then just kill myself to end the run.

The final alter level is the end of the game and you do face off against a boss. This is very weird, because you don't face a boss in any previous levels and unlike the ghosts in the previous levels this boss is large enough to take up a 4th of the screen and can kill you just by touching you. The boss will slowly release ghosts that follow your movements and if you kill enough of them a Exorcism charge will appear. You can use that to hit the boss, and 4-5 hits later the game ends. I appreciate the end having something different than just another level, but I have to assume that very few people are going to make it all this way. Its not because its difficult, but because playing those earlier levels can be so monotonous that you might just not want to see it to the end.

In arcade mode you can play 4-player Co-op, but it doesn’t really work in the way you would think. As opposed to spawning 4 new ghosts every round (one for each person playing) it only mimics the person who landed the killing below on the target ghost/chair. It technically colors that ghost the same as the player who killed it, but if you were looking to compete to see who killed the goal ghost more, that doesn’t really work here. The same person could kill the ghost everytime, while other players stand in corners and there is no push or pull that changes that dynamic any different than single player. In fact a strategy for single player is to limit how often you actually fire your weapon, because that means the ghost of you fires less time in subsequent rounds. Since the 3 players that don’t get copied are free from this constraint, they could sit there firing their guns 100s of times and you won’t have to worry about that next round as long as they didn’t get the final kill. I think it would be far more interesting if each player’s ghost appeared every round and maybe the only goal ghost is the one that won the previous round, but at least you would have to account for what the other players did previously. It would potentially up the difficulty and make it more hectic because clearly you aren’t going to remember what your friends did every round.

Challenge mode is not much different, except it picks the level and gives you a goal to achieve each time instead of a score to hit. These goals can be anything from only using a certain gun, to surviving for x minutes, to having all ghosts kill you on touch. For me personally having these smaller goals made the game more focused and more enjoyable since it set parameters for me to work towards. It’s nothing amazing, but the kills you earn in challenge mode do count towards your unlocks for the game (not levels) so you can unlock weapons in that mode if you want to switch it up. Speaking of which, every so many kills unlocks a new weapon that will randomly show up in the levels, it adds variety to the fighting, but isn’t something I would suggest you should focus on. I didn’t have any extra fun once I unlocked a boomerang compared to playing the game before it.

Which leads me to the final point here, this game is exactly what it looks like with no extra hidden bells or whistles. It is a potential co-op game you could play with other people for 15-20 minutes and then not touch again for months without really missing out. When I finally did play this with friends, we had an ok time playing the game, but everyone was pretty bored less than an hour in. While it’s a neat idea thinking about how your past actions can kill you, its also pretty easy to manipulate if you plan accordingly. Go stand in a corner for a long time without firing a bullet, and then the next round you know a safe place to kill the goal ghost, or only hit the attack button when you know you are going to kill so you aren’t littering the world with stuff you have to dodge next time. I could consistently make it to round 15 in each level by using a few of those steps and then move on. The problem is that this game doesn’t grow into anything, the levels don’t get more exciting to unlock, the game doesn’t get harder or faster, and you can play level 1-1 the same as you play 4-1. Sure there are minor annoyances to avoid in later levels, but it never took me more than 2 tries to beat a score goal in arcade mode.

Perhaps it’s just me and my sensibilities now, but a game where the goal is just to get on a leaderboard with no beginning, middle, or end, has no appeal for me at this stage. I don’t mind leaderboards in general, but a game that is just dedicated to it seems to harken back to the olden days of gaming but without the charm. Having a boss at the very end is a nice touch, but it's so far into playing the game that only the die hard players will even get to him and I can't imagine how many die hard players can exist into this game.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Not even close

Where does it rank: There is nothing inherently wrong with this game, but it just isn't really all that interesting or fun to play outside of the first 20 minutes of the game. I was excited about the premise, but it doesn't hold up much and even playing multiplayer doesn't add much longevity to the game. I have it ranked as the 138th Greatest Video Game of All Time, it sits between Golf Peaks (137th) and Lost Lands: Dark Overlord (139th). It's not an inherently bad game, its not broken, but you play 20 minutes and then never again.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

I never picked up a Gamecube until it was well discontinued. It wasn’t that I had anything against it, but that it came out during a time in my life where I was already all in on other consoles (ps2, Dreamcast, Original Xbox), that I could never make sense of getting yet another system when it was out. I know it is a beloved system and I know that it has some quality games. I purchased my first Gamecube within the past 3 years, because there just happened to be a good lot for sale on eBay that made it enticing enough to get. I bought and played The Wind Waker (see ranking) as I was told year over year that it was the best Zelda game of all time. One game has always eluded me on the Gamecube, and its not because it is hard to find but because Gamecube games are getting a little pricey for me. I mean I can’t justify paying $70+ dollars for a used ‘common’ Gamecube game. So I did the next best thing I could manage, and that was to play the Switch game, Luigi’s Mansion 3.

Now hopefully I don’t say anything outlandish since I missed the first and second game in the series, but outside of meeting E. Gadd in previous games I think I will be able to fairly judge this game based on it’s merits alone. Let’s pretend you are all novices, like I was, and explain exactly what this game is. You play as…. wait for it…. Luigi as he attempts to rescue his friends from some no good ghosts who have captured them. Unlike the first game or second, where I believe the location is an actual haunted mansion, this game takes place in a haunted hotel and Luigi must battle ghosts on each floor to unlock new elevator buttons so he can travel higher and higher up into the hotel.

At his disposal, Luigi has his trusty vacuum cleaner (ghost sucker 5000), a flashlight, plunger launcher, a goo version of himself (named Gooigi) and a little shockwave burst. Most of these moves are actually unlocked as soon as you get your cleaner. Gooigi and a more powerful attachment are the only two things that get dolled out over time and there is a big space between them. While I love a Metroid-vania or Zelda approach to you getting a new ability or item frequently, in LM3, you may have the same abilities but you learn to use them in new ways to tackle different challenges. For instance in the early stages the burst move is used primarily to open up areas during exploration, but eventually (the game doesn’t tell you) you will learn that you can use it as a short hop to dodge boss AOE attacks, or to cause ghosts to drop some items they are carrying. Most ghosts are tackled by simply hitting them with flashlight and then sucking them up into your vacuum, later enemies might be immune to the flashlight at first requiring you to dislodge glasses from their face, or forcibly remove a shield from their hand before they can be stunned.

What this game does best, is that the design of each floor of the hotel is substantially different and as they get more outlandish allow the gameplay to still feel relatively fresh despite your repertoire not changing. While the first 2-3 floors might seem like basic hotel fare which isn’t very interesting, eventually you will get to a floor that doubles as a television studio, a natural history museum, a pharaohs pyramid, and a pirate’s lair and accompanying ship, amongst others. The floors don’t have to make sense (how can they have that much water on the pirate floor, without having serious leakage on the floor below), but they are fun to explore. I was consistently amazed at how the physics of the game worked as well. Sand can be pushed around or sucked up completely allowing you to make ramps or find buried treasure, faucets can be turned on or off, not just in specific areas, but in any room based on if you was using the pull or push of your vacuum. Sheets can be pulled off beds, curtains can be ripped down, bookshelves destroyed, etc. you will be spending a lot of time in this game absolutely trashing rooms, not for what is to be gained, but because its fun to see what happens.

Trashing all these rooms will usually net you some good cash, maybe a collectable, or encounter with a ghost, but ultimately its fairly frivolous. Cash can be redeemed for 3 items, a continue, a map marker for a collectable item, and a map marker for a collectable ghost. The continue is nice to have in your back pocket, as during a multi-staged boss fight you might want a little assurance that if you die you aren’t starting the whole thing over, but I really wish there would be more to buy. If you are going in every room, fighting enemies, and poking your head around corners, you are going to get SO MUCH MONEY, and there just doesn’t seem like anything to really spend it on. I went through at least half of the game before I bought my first collectable map marker, and probably 2/3rds of the game before I got my first continue. Luigi left the hotel much richer than he went in. While I did spend my time getting all the collectable ghosts and items, outside of unlocking an in-game achievement it doesn’t really do anything. Now that might be because I was missing a big portion of my collection that was only to be gained through play multiplayer online, so perhaps if you truly get everything in the game, you unlock a new title screen or bikini outfit for Luigi, but I can’t confirm.

As I was stating earlier, each floor (17 in total) has a unique boss fight that goes along with its theme. You come across a ghost chef boss in a kitchen, or a ghost water polo player in the gym area. Unlike your regular run of the mill ghosts, each boss fight is more of a puzzle than previous encounters. Some of these puzzles can be fairly easy or telegraphed about what you need to do, and others can be a real pain in the ass to not only figure out what you need to do, but to execute it as well. Ignoring the final bosses, I had a real hard time with the dinosaur boss (the secret is Gooigi) because it just wasn’t something that I would naturally think of. Not to do any spoilers, but at one point you have to switch to Gooigi and let the T-rex eat him, so that you can then shoot him while he is distracted. Playing video games as long as I have, the solution of let yourself get hurt is never one I am going to first. I also really struggled with the hillbilly in the basement. His was a case of, I knew exactly what I needed to do, but the timing and the execution was a problem for me. Even with that said, I enjoyed most of the boss fights, as I found them clever and a good closure after exploring each floor.

Last 2 positives I want to heap onto this game. First, the game looks fantastic. I am sure not everyone will agree with me, but everyone complains about the switch showing its age, but playing this game on the big screen it still looks phenomenal. Maybe it amazed me more, because I am not always playing the newest and greatest games, but I certainly noticed this one and wanted to give it a special call out. The other benefit, is that this game can be played fully cooperative once you unlock Gooigi. You can have a second player controlling Gooigi and he has nearly all the same abilities and can suck up ghosts and solve puzzles all the same. Now there are sections where the game requires only one person to progress, for instance there are sections where Gooigi has to go down a drain to hit a switch to open areas up for regular Luigi, or Luigi has to turn off water to open up areas for Gooigi to go, but that should hopefully not be a deal breaker for anyone. It also has the Kirby benefit where Gooigi can die and repeatedly be re-created without any repercussions.

Now, not everything is perfect in the game. I found the control layout to be a bit clunky and when using a pro controller to play the game I found myself having to change my grip to a weird claw when I was trying to activate certain abilities. This was mainly when I was using the flashlight’s secondary feature and scanning full rooms to see what I might be missing, so it is certainly not an “all-the-time” issue, but it did happen enough for me to call it out. This can be especially difficult when trying to direct kids on what they need to do, but again this only happens in a few instances. I also found that the game outside of the bosses really lacked enemy variety which can really become apparent after 17 floors of fighting. Now there are variations here, (blue ghost, blue ghost with shades, blue ghost with shield, etc.) but when all is said and done there are only about 4-5 different types of enemies. The variants do make up for this a little bit, but they were able to come up with almost 20 unique bosses, I was surprised that the normal fodder ghosts was limited to such a small amount. I’m nitpicking here, but I would say that the cat ghost could have been cut from its second fight and I don’t think anyone is complaining. Backtracking to old floors to look for a single boss, is not something we should ever be doing.

When all is said though, Luigi’s Mansion 3 has a lot more positive things to say about it rather than negative ones. I never found myself getting bored playing the game, or that it was taking too long to finish, like I did when playing Kirby. Part of that reason is that I was invested in seeing what each floor would hold, and knowing that each floor (depending on your exploration levels) can be completed in 20-30 minutes meant that even if I was getting sick of an area, I wasn’t far from seeing the next one. Plus there is nothing better then seeing that scared Luigi face on each floor completely ignorant to the fact that he is far scarier to the ghosts than he thinks. Luigi, you cleared out 14 floors of ghosts, why are you still scared about the 15^th floor?

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: Luigi's Mansion 3 is a really fun, family friendly switch game. It's a pseudo horror game for kids and adults, with great unique floors and some engaging puzzles and gameplay. The draw for me was always seeing what floor was next, but I will admit that I was upset about the lack of enemy variety and some annoying backtracking moments that kill some of the momentum of the game. I would say this is a worthy switch game to own, but it certainly isn't the peak of the switch games. I have it ranked as the 24th Greatest Video Game off All Time out of 148. It sits between Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (23rd) and Return to Monkey Island (25th). However, I do think there is a imaginary gulf between 23rd and 24th as I think other games (none I have in mind currently) will slot in between these two. I just think Mario Kart and above is a different tier than Luigi's mansion 3 is at.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

I like to think that I am pretty good at video games. By no means do I have what it takes to be an E-sports athlete, or do I have the patience or ability to be a top tier speed-runner, but I feel like I can play any game, in any genre, on regular difficulty and beat it. Back in my achievement hunting days, I was “forced” to play a lot of games on expert or whatever the hardest setting was in order to finish out a game. So far (knock on wood) I have never had to abandon a game based on its difficulty and nothing on the list previously has gotten me nearly as close as the game we are going to discuss today.

Today’s discussion is about a game called “Nuclear Throne,” a 2015 game by Vlambeer that has an incredible 96% positive review score on Steam. It is a roguelike, semi-bullet hell, twin-stick shooter game where you take the control of a select mutant and fight your way through multiple levels to become ruler of the wasteland. Like most roguelikes, everything is fairly randomized to make each run unique. While the levels will be in the same order, the level layouts themselves will be procedurally generated. How big is the map, how many enemies, how many chests, what weapons drop, etc. is all randomized and nearly every run will have a different combination of the before mentioned fields. As you progress through the areas you will level up by collecting radiation which can then be used to select 1 of 4 random abilities that appear at the end of the stage.

At the start of the game you pick from a handful of mutants who all have their own special ability or benefit that comes with picking them over a different mutant. There is a plant that allows you to throw a snare out that will slow down your enemies, or a fish monster that has a dive roll as its special ability. Your goal, is to kill every enemy in each level, which will open up a portal to the next level. You can hold two weapons at any time and alternate between them as you see fit, or drop them for other weapons you find along the way. You have 5 different ammo types, and each weapon will fall into one of those 5 (or a 6^th, melee) category. You need to balance out, not only what weapon you work best with, but also what weapon do you have ammo for. Every few levels you fight a boss which is obviously a supped up enemy of the area. For instance the first boss is in 1-3 and is a stronger version of the bandit that you have come across previously. He fires a machine gun instead of a pistol, has more HP, and can charge to break through walls you might be using as cover. Make it to the end of the game and you can kill the Nuclear Throne and be the ruler of the wasteland.

It is all what you would expect from a roguelike game of this caliber. Some new characters are unlocked by completing certain objectives during a run, another character is unlocked by beating the game. There are hidden areas and hidden characters that require more precise things to happen that you will either have to get incredibly lucky to trigger, or find by looking it up on the internet. However, unlike similar roguelikes that I have played, nothing carries over from run to run. The only thing you gain by failing is potentially knowledge about what to do or not do in your previous run. While that knowledge might be helpful on your first few trips into new areas, eventually that commodity runs out and you are left with nothing gained for your time through this game. There is no save at any point during the game, and your weapons, ammo, upgrades, map layout, nothing will carry over to your next run. This will be our first real topic for this game.

As I said at the top of the article, I think of myself as a good gamer, but it took me 202 runs in this game before I beat it for the first time. I don’t know if that is normal, but it certainly seems like a lot of deaths before things finally broke in my favor. Those 202 runs were also roughly 18 hours of gametime, and this is making me sound even weaker in hindsight, but I played a game where a winning run can be sub 30 minutes, and for 18 hours I only beat it once. There is no difficulty setting for this game, trust me I would have found it after run 100, so you just have to keep persisting if you truly want to beat it. Now I know there are people who beat it on their 5^th-10^th try through the game, because this is the internet, I am sure someone has left a comment saying they beat it on their 1^st or 2^nd run through of the game, and I believe it. The difference between my 200^th run and my 202^nd run is the randomizer working in my favor, and that sounds a lot like luck, but I can’t think of another way to put it.

After so many runs I knew what my strengths were and what helped me get the farthest in the game. I knew that my ideal weapons was either the shovel or wrench, and a bazooka or cluster launcher. These two weapons would allow me to not really worry about ammo and I could tackle a lot of what the game throws at you. However, in addition to those weapons I would need certain abilities. For instance having a melee weapon, means you need the “long reach” upgrade and if you can pair that with the “bloodlust” upgrade (sometimes gain 1 hp from kills), means that you can potentially kill enemies through walls (your swing can go through walls) and get health from them. In a game where health and ammo drops can be quite rare, you need an ability that can hopefully recover some health when you lose it. In this game, at most, you can take 3 hits from enemies and later in the game some enemies will do enough damage to kill you in a single hit. My win came when I played as the crystal character that starts with a max HP of 10, and usually a single bullet in the first level might do 2 to 3 hp. In later levels, a hit might be 6 HP or more. Circling back to what made this run successful, was that I got the weapons I liked and could use, I got the upgrades that benefitted me, and on top of that I was blessed with the random level god to not put me in position where I was going to be screwed.

Sometimes 1 or 3 of those random elements will not be in your favor. I have had games where I got the right weapons, but never the right upgrade, making my melee attack dangerously short ranged and my ability to regain HP off the table. Sometimes you get lucky with 2 things, but get dropped into a level where there is no geometry to use as cover and you have 20 enemies all shooting you in a circle. I can’t possibly explain how frustrating it is that the level geometry is a narrow corridor that you can’t see far enough ahead, only to have a kamikaze enemy come flying in from offscreen killing you instantly before you react. In order for me to win, I needed everything to line up in my favor and it finally did. Now don’t get me wrong, not all previous 201 attempts were because the randomizer wasn’t in my favor, a good portion ~130-150 deaths, were certainly my own doing. Maybe I was rushing too much or not enough, forgetting to use my secondary ability, blowing myself up with a grenade or explosion because I wasn’t paying attention to where I was shooting. Hell some of my deaths can be attributed to me setting the character select screen on random and trying to play as the bloated corpse who starts with 2 HP and is essentially playing on hard mode. If I would have always played as the crystal maybe I could have beat the game in 150 tries.

To the game’s credit, I rarely felt cheated with my deaths. It wasn’t a perfect system as, sometimes I would be cheated by the randomizer, but after a lot of my deaths I could usually think, “If only I would have done X I could have survived.” While this game can be played in slow motion, trust me that’s how I play, this is primarily meant to be played by constantly running and shooting to take out enemies. If you want to watch any high level of play, it seems like the player playing never lets off the shoot button. I am certainly not that good of a player, and I would slink behind cover like this was The Order any chance I got. Endlessly creeping so that I could take enemies out with very minimal risk to myself. Of course, just because I rarely felt cheated doesn’t mean that I also wouldn’t get frustrated trying to beat this game. I mentioned at the top that I have never given up on a game, but the thought occurred on multiple occasions while playing Nuclear throne.

One of the biggest hills I struggled to climb was the boss of the third area. The snow boss, is a tiny little guy who drops from the sky and has a gun that allows bullets to ricochet off walls for a little bit. Before I started exclusively playing as the crystal, who has a temporary shield ability, I really had no strategy for him. He appears early on in the level, where you probably haven’t dealt with a lot of the other enemies around, so if you try to stand pat in an alcove, he will drop from above and unleash a volley into your hiding spot. If you decide to run into a wider area to deal with him, well you might find yourself wandering into a larger enemy supply where you will be dealing with multiple other enemies that can all kill you quickly. While he is alive, he also summons the police enemies to keep re-appearing so that you are not battling him alone, and should you still kill him, he bounces around and then blows up, potentially killing you with his dying breath. Were I to fire up the game again, I can say that he is still the main breaking point of a run. There are still several levels after him, including one heavy kamikaze level, but I don’t consider any run of mine officially started until he is dealt with. No joke in probably the last 50 runs I had, I probably only beat him on 10 of them, and of those 10 only got to the final boss 3 total times.

Perhaps this whole article is just to show how much I stink at this game, because upon completion of the game and checking the stats so I knew what I finished with, I noticed a category for largest win streak.. I chuckled to myself, because I spent 200 runs to get 1 win, I can’t imagine turning that right over and somehow getting a win streak of 2 or even 3. Perhaps I just need to git gud.. One thing I was disappointed to see, and something I only learned about after I beat the game, was just how much of this game is hidden from what I would consider the normal run. There are a bunch of hidden areas, characters, even a special chest where you can put an item so, should you find the chest again, you can have it for another run. However, to unlock most of these things you would need to have a guide open for you, because they are out of the ordinary.

This is perhaps my “old man yells at cloud” moment, but I dislike when games expect you to play with a guide, or to study a game online to get the most out of it. Now, don’t get me wrong, if this was to unlock a golden gun, or some cosmetics, you can keep that stuff hidden where only your diehard fans find it. However, after finishing the game, I was wondering how to unlock other characters, or to visit levels that I missed, to unlock new “heads” or cosmetics, and the answer to almost all that stuff is to look it up. For one area you need to get a screwdriver as a weapon (not something you would normally ever take, given it’s weak and short ranged) in one of the earlier stages (like 1.1-1.3) then use that screwdriver on a very specific car in 2.1 and then you get whisked away to a new level. Or how about taking a specific mutation (level-up power, that shows up randomly) finding a frozen flower in 5.1, and then sacrificing 4 HP (1 HP x 4) to open up a portal to access a new level and get a new character? I’m nitpicking here, and I understand that a majority of people probably are looking up the game they play constantly, but I still think it’s a bad system. Can you beat the game without these bonuses? Yes, obviously, but I come from a time when unlocks might be hinted at in game, and not something you just luckily do. This game doesn’t have the equivalent of it, but in RPGs you might get hinted towards a treasure based on an NPC, in shooters maybe there would be some graffiti on a wall, for Nuclear Throne, the answer is just skip to the internet.

Even with all my failings, Nuclear Throne is strangely addictive. This won’t apply to everyone, because I certainly know people who will be offput by the difficulty, but the runs can be short enough and you can convince yourself that the next run the randomizer might be kind to you which makes it easier to give it another go. Its also cooperative, but I was not able to test it out as this game is too difficult to either have my wife or kids try, but consider that a feather in its cap. While part of this series is finishing up games on my backlog and constantly moving forward, so I don’t just play the same 10 games over and over again, and despite the fact that I angrily told myself and wife after a grueling defeat in this game that, “Once I’m done, I am deleting this game forever,” I left the game installed, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I might still boot it up from time to time. Never to the point that I become good at the game, heavens no, but maybe just maybe I can beat it with one more character outside of another 200 runs.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: It's a weird Stockholm Syndrome where despite failing over and over again, and being frustrated by the randomness of drops, and level geometry, the game still comes out of this review fairly favorable. I am by no means someone who is going to plug 100s of hours into this game, or even bother unlocking much more in the game, but on occasion I can see myself still firing this up and playing a run or two. It's difficulty is certainly a sticking point and you will either bounce off or power through and I won't blame anyone for bouncing off. I have this ranked as the 59th Greatest Game off All Time. It sits between Psychonauts (60th) and Golf Club Wasteland (58th)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Good news! We are going to have a short review this week, but not for the reasons that would normally constitute a short review. We are talking about Super Mega Baseball 3, yeah you know the follow up to SMB2 (I’m just not realizing the acronym is the same as Super Mario Bros). Super Mega Baseball 2 was that fun arcade-y baseball game that released a few years ago and was quick-looked by Dan and Vinny, remember when those two were together? Well I had the hankering to play baseball again, and the sequel was on sale so I figured why not.

Let’s start at the top shall we. Super Mega Baseball 3 (or SMB3 for the rest of this article) is a arcade style baseball game where you play as cartoonish characters and teams that contain no licensing from the MLB or any other baseball league in the world. You get teams like the Croc dons (a mafia crocodile) and players named stuff like “Dave Beefcake.” It’s baseball but faster (and better). Hitting and pitching involves moving a reticule and timing your release. Fielding is… you know, fielding. You can alternate by trying power swings or power pitches which require you to dial in your timing better or risk hitting a pop-up or throwing a wild pitch. Everything plays just like the 2^nd game, and outside of adding an age stat to the created players (more on that later) I didn’t actually notice any difference in the way you play the game minute to minute. You can still hit the ball back into the pitchers face, and that is still very satisfying.

If you are still refusing to read my original ranking of SMB2, fine, then this game offers you the ability to create full custom teams and players and define their look and stats based on how you see fit. A lot of customization options and while it is certainly not limitless, you can make lots of different teams all with unique logos, uniforms, and arenas. You can mix male and female players all on the same team, like before and truly craft your own dream-team. Hell, want to re-make the cast of Frasier as a baseball team, you can do it.. or if you have no creativity, re-make the Dodgers, both are acceptable. The two big changes that this customization had over the previous game are: you add ages to players and you can give them up to two bonus traits. The ages only matter when it comes to playing franchise mode, but the bonus traits are used in game. They can be positive or negative traits, + contact against left handed pitchers or – contact when behind in the count. Each character can only have two and they can add a little more variety to characters that have similar stats.

One of the biggest features that I appreciate is that if you have a SMB2 save file, you can import all the custom teams you made from that game into this game. That was so amazing it almost brought a tear to my eye, when I saw the option. See, I am a psycho and in SMB2 I probably made close to 20 different teams (team of family members, team of friends, Simpsons characters, super villains, etc.) and I certainly didn’t want to start from scratch and make all new teams. The process worked well, it names your teams something shitty like “Star_Wars_SMB2”, but you can clean that up so it doesn’t look like a command line on a computer. The other factor to consider if you bring teams and players over, is that in SMB2 you didn’t have to assign ages to your players or have the benefit of giving them bonus traits, so ages are populated randomly and no traits are assigned. You should do a once over and fix what you want to fix, because the traits might make your team slightly worse than the teams pre-made in this game and the ages could impact your team in the franchise mode.

Speaking of which, franchise mode is the MAIN attraction that this game has over its predecessor. Like in the previous game, you could play individual games, 1 game seasons, playoffs, etc. all with a custom league where you can set rules, teams participating, and so forth. With franchise mode there are some new wrinkles to the gameplay that you have to consider. For the main thing, franchise mode is trying to make a team have sustained success across multiple seasons. You can now sign and cut players, players retire at the end of the season, and there is a budget that you have to consider in terms of how much your team costs. It is adding some of that realism that people crave into a game that has virtually none of it. Throughout franchise mode, you will be given the chance to do player development which cost some of that bank (you get a small amount after each game) to improve a character’s stats on your team. These are usually done on a coin flip from being successful to highly successful, but some of the trainings will come with chances of gaining a negative trait or having a different stat decrease in addition to the other ones increasing. These player development trainings in the grand scheme of thing aren’t likely to change a player that much, because you are mainly talking about a stat changing 1-5 points on a 100 point scale, but it is always exciting when you win a coin flip and see something go up 10-15 points instead.

However, there is a frustrating aspect to franchise mode as well. Randomly during a season, a player will have an event happen to them that will adjust their stats as well permanently. You have no say in the matter and I couldn’t really gauge an understanding as to why or when this happens. You could have a player that is on a hot streak just randomly say they feel weaker and see their power and contact each go down 5 points. There are some random instances that cause stats to increase, but I found these much fewer and far between the stat decrease. It adds a randomness which I can appreciate, but these changes are permanent and not just like a 3 game decrease. So a character that you just spent big dollars to develop and increase their power by 7 could see a decrease a week later by 5 making your upgrade pretty pointless. Based on how much the computer was adding and dropping players, I got the feeling that the purpose of this is to constantly make you evaluate your team and see if you can get someone better to fill a role. I think I would feel better, if these changes correlated to their play on the field. Overuse of a player, or them slumping would see a decrease, while them performing well would see an increase. It just didn’t make sense that hitting .500 for three straight games, a player would all the sudden have trouble seeing the ball and lose some contact ability.

At the end of the season and playoffs (if you make it there) a random collection of players will retire. I say random, because while this is supposedly based on age, I think there is still a dice roll behind the scenes regardless of the age the player is. For instance I lost 4 players after my first year including a 25yr old who led the playoffs in RBIs and HRs. This isn’t a player who wants to change teams, but just one who is gone from the pool altogether. Maybe that player wanted to go out on top, or ride off into the sunset, but it makes me question if age is even relevant. You then have an offseason where you can pick up players to fill those spots you lose and start another season of the franchise. The franchise mode for this game is obviously not going to be as deep as you might expect from a simulation sports game, and while it can be fun to try and make a team successful in year two or three after losing your best players, it’s also frustrating that there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why people are retiring.

Those are really the only changes to the game that I can think of. Franchise mode is going to be a mixed bag in terms of how much mileage you get out of it. For me personally, I hand-crafted dozens and dozens of teams and worked on balancing to make sure not one team was a super-team, to incorporate all those teams into franchise mode and then watch the CPU cut and re-sign generic players or half of all my created players retire at the end of the season isn’t what I really want. If I want to play as my created Simpsons team, I don’t want half the team to be non Simpson’s players, so for me I might mainly stick to just Season mode where I can still take a team to the championship and then switch to another team next time. If you didn’t play SMB2 or you did but didn’t make anything custom, the other big change (importing previous work) won’t impact you at all.

The game still has all the hallmarks that I loved from the previous iteration. It still has fun baseball gameplay where you can finish a game in 20-30 minutes. It has a very generous difficulty setting where you can individually set different difficulties for batting and pitching on a scale of 1-100, and it’s still really dumb (in a good way). It is technically better than SMB2, but I would only recommend upgrading to this game if you are really interested in that franchise mode, OR you don’t have SMB2 in any capacity. However, if you already have SMB2 or are looking to pick one up… depending on the price I might say that SMB2 will get you what you need just as well. For instance if SMB2 is $5.00 and SMB3 is $15.00, I don’t know if the upgrade is really $10 better, but if you love franchise mode, or want to play online, you probably will think its worth it. In terms of ranking, it’s never been easier for me… this game is basically the same with a slight improvement so it is one game up on the list.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: Its good, its technically better then the previous version, but it doesn't really do much else to really warrant a new version of the game. It sits right next to its predecessor. It is the 37th Greatest Video Game of All Time. It sits between #38 (SMB 2) and #36 (Theatrythm Final Fantasy Curtain Call)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

The year was 2022 and a little steam game was getting ported to consoles that looked like it would be a great game for my wife and potentially for one of my kids. The game was called “Let’s Build a Zoo” and its art style and promise of running a tiny zoo seemed like a slam dunk for someone who was having a hard time finding a game to grab her interest. And… it worked, I ordered the physical version for PS4 (because I am stuck in the past), and she played the hell out of it for a good two weeks. During those two weeks, I would watch her play and it seemed deep and interesting enough that I was going to have far more fun playing alongside her, so I ended up starting a zoo myself, despite not spinning this game on my randomizer. For that time, we had fun… She might play for an hour and then I would play for an hour. The game was inoffensive enough that the kids paid no attention to it when it was on TV, or were interested in our new animals. We would compare notes to see how far we were: “ I just got horses!” or spark creativity in each other as to how to layout our zoo, or better prepare for what is to come. However, I am getting ahead of myself.

Let’s Build a Zoo is a management simulation game. You play as an overseer to a zoo, and control all aspects of it including building habitats, hiring employees, researching new items, purchasing decisions, etc. You start off as a basic zoo with just rabbits and eventually trade, rescue, or purchase other animals to live in your zoo. Occasionally you will get little tasks to complete from investors or customers where you will have to build a certain item, obtain a certain animal, or make so much money in a given day. These tasks don’t have timers, meaning you can’t fail them, and just something to work towards while you are chipping away at the overall goal, which is simply to build the best zoo you can. At the end of each day your zoo closes, and you get a little stat sheet for how you did, and at the end of each week you get a weekly summary for your finances. If you can’t pay your bills, you automatically take out a loan and have to start paying it back.

There are literally a million things we could talk about all the systems in this game at play, but lets just focus on the animals. Every animal in this game has preferences to what habitat the pen should be (Grass, Sand, Jungle, etc.), how big the pen should be, what animals it sees as threats, the types of food it eats, how fast it ages, how long its life is, and how fast it reproduces. I am sure I am leaving something off in that list, but there was a lot of thought going into each animal. If you want a healthy animal that reproduces and lives a life to the maximum age, you will need to think about all this stuff. For instance rabbits, can have a relatively small pen, and can even share that pen with other calm animals like cows or capybaras. You could technically put rabbits in with your bears, but even if they survive they won’t have a high quality of life and reproduce or make your guests happy. When building a pen for these animals, you can’t just have a 4x4 square with an animal in it, because animals need water and enrichment (fun) otherwise your guests will be unhappy and thus your profits will start to sink. Happy animals mate and produce offspring, which can be a boon (people loving seeing babies) but also have negative effects (more space, more water, more food, more fun will be needed). You will be balancing not only one animal’s needs but every animal in your zoo.

Lets talk about breeding here, because it is perhaps the largest part of this game. Yes, you heard that correct. There are 9 variants for every animal, which means that if you want a full set of rabbits, you will have 18 rabbits in a pen (male and female of each variant). How do you get variants? Well through breeding, of course. When animals mate they have a percentage chance that their offspring will have a variant. Certain combinations of variants create other variants and so forth and so on. Eventually you will open up a nursery, where you can see the percentages laid out in front of you, as well as what variants will be produced. Variants are pivotal in this game, because most of your animals you will get by trading with other zoos. Other zoos don’t usually want the basic animal in order to trade with you, so you might need (for instance) the 3^rd variant of a rabbit in order to get a pig. Then the 4^th variant of a pig to get horses, etc. etc. While you can control a lot as the overseer of the zoo, you can’t control the animals in the pen, so while you are bound to get a couple variants that just appear from random breeding in pens, the majority of your new variants will come from very selective breeding in the nurseries. My advice, is to build at least 3-5 nurseries as soon as you are able in order to help speed up this process. Of course as animals age, they no longer become fertile, or they die out and depending on what animal you need you might need to re-start breeding to get earlier variants, or use a special building called the CRISPR in order to help fill in the gaps.

The CRISPR is a special building that allows you to create any animal that you have unlocked (they call it cloning, but you might not even have the animal in your zoo anymore). It costs a little bit of money and will take a few in-game days, but if you need a specific animal that you have unlocked you can just create one out of thin air, without breeding. Now this is great, but you can’t pick its gender as that is randomly assigned, so if you are looking for a female or male version of Variant 3, it might take you a couple swings on the CRISPR to get the desired result. The other aspect of the CRISPR is to create hybrid animals by mixing the genes of any two animals that you have at least unlocked half of the available variants for. It’s a fun idea, and fun to mess around with, but your hybrid animal can not reproduce and is not needed for any trades with other zoos, so I found that it wasn’t usually worth it to create hybrid animals towards progression.

Want to make your nurseries and CRISPR more efficient and better, let me welcome you to this insane research tree. Early in the game you will be able to build a research hub and hire a researcher. Once that is done, you will slowly start accumulating research points which can then be allocated into this tree to unlock all sorts of things. Here is the catch, you start in the middle of this tree and research out, but you can only see what you can research, right next to what you have already unlocked. However, the tree is not organized in any meaningful way. One direction is not all the cosmetics and another direction is all the buildings, or anything of the sort. Something you really want and need, might be hiding just around the bend, but you won’t know until you pour points into new trash cans, or be able to change the ground your characters walk on. Now everything you upgrade has a purpose, and even when you feel like you are wasting points, it does contribute to a bigger picture, so for instance spend your research points on 3 bathroom packs, and your bathrooms might be able to hold more people now, or people relieve themselves faster. That doesn’t alleviate how frustrating it can be, if you are looking for something in particular. Some task might ask you to build a burger shop, but you have to find it and research it first… well that might be anywhere between the next thing you research or the 50^th thing you research based on the direction you go. A perfect example is that when I was playing alongside my wife, I was able to find a farm and start planting crops to save money from buying all the animal food, but she went in a different direction and never uncovered farms until much later. It would be one thing, to make that choice if you can see everything in front of you… its another thing when you are blindly picking a direction and hoping the next uncovered tile will be something you need. It’s hard to get excited about wasting research points on new flowers for your park, when you really need to find a new habitat to house some animals.

I will just get this out of the way, I didn’t “beat” this game like I would beat other games. I never rolled credits, and so perhaps there is a final task, or a final animal that you have to get before the game says “you win,” but I just can’t play anymore of this game. That sounds damning, and maybe it is, but this game is more of a grind than any JRPG I have ever played. I can appreciate how much thought went into all the systems in place, and for a good month I was invested in playing this game a little every week, but eventually you are going to get to the following point in the game. You will either need to wait to get a special variant to trade with a zoo, wait to get enough research points to spend on something you need, or wait to make an insane amount of money so you can buy more land and you just sit with the game at full-speed waiting to get what you need to progress. When you need a certain variant, and it only has a 20-30% chance of being born, there is nothing enjoyable about flying through days waiting for animals to become pregnant, have their kid, nurse their kid, and then potentially try again if you didn’t get the variant you need. I know you can be working on other stuff at the same time and usually I was, but at some point you are just going to be skipping days waiting for a dice roll to go in your favor. Initially I thought, that I would play and try to get at least one of every animal, before I called it quits… but I am finishing the game with probably 45ish animals out of 62. My loop now involved waiting to make upwards of 100,000 so I could buy a single new land plot, just so I can expand the size of some of my current pens, waiting to get a certain variant, and researching in random directions to hopefully find something useful that isn’t new benches or lake decorations. My park is successful and makes 20k a day, I spend about 15k a week on animal food.. I have high ratings in all the things that matter, but I’m bored of sitting through this game. I can play for an hour or two and make close to no progress in getting the remaining 17 animals. Maybe I didn’t fulfill the brief by running credits, but this game would only suffer more if I have to spend another 20 hours of my gaming time fast forwarding to get the last few animals.

Hey did I mention this game has a morality system. Yup on top of all the other systems, your zoo has a morality system and that impacts what buildings you can get. In true video game fashion, toeing the line between morality gets you nothing good, so you either have to go full saint or full devil to get the best benefits. If you are good, you unlock greener energy items that will save you money (recycling instead of just trash, wind power to cut energy costs, etc.). When you are evil, you get to invest in buildings that make real snakeskin wallets, convert some of your zoo pigs into bacon, or siphoning energy from nearby businesses and houses. Some events pop up from time to time that will also allow you to make moral choices. The mob might pay you to dump a body in the pig pen, so that the pigs eat and destroy any evidence, or to paint a dog to look like a lion to trick customers. Some choices will net you money or animals (for instance choosing to take in animals from a fire will grant you monkeys), but ultimately it is about that morality scale, because certain research items can’t be built until you get to a certain number. Other than those weird new buildings, I didn’t see a need for the scale, customer’s don’t really complain if you are a good zoo or an evil zoo, other zoos don’t stop doing business with you, etc.. Even after establishing what zoo you are, I still have people trying to sell me bootleg animals, or hide bodies for them, regardless of what my current morality was, so it doesn’t matter outside of putting another obstacle into the game.

Being the non-villain that I am, I went the high ground route and was able to basically make my zoo fairly self-sufficient. I generate more energy then I use, so I don’t have energy bills, I grow plants and use that to feed animals that rely on plants, and have converted all my trash cans to recycling bins to cut my trash pickup cost. The big reward you get is a building that allows you to re-introduce animals into the wild in order to help save their dwindling populations. At any time you can donate animals and it removes them from your zoo and you get more morality points. This can be done if you have elderly animals that can’t reproduce (better to give them away then have them die on property), or if you have a pen that is overflowing with animals and you need to make some room. I can’t tell you how much time I spend just donating animals, because animals are constantly making babies. You won’t need 30 animals of the same variant, but since it’s a dice game, you might get that many sitting in a pen, so you donate the rest and move on, until you have more to donate because the flamingos just had 3 kids and now their pen is too small. You can actually make a pen stop producing kids, which will buy you some sanity, but that comes at the cost of potentially getting new variants, and keeping a cycle of younger animals in the mix to replace the ones that get too old. Quick aside on that, my wife was sick of dealing with her Geese having kids, so she removed their ability to reproduce, but then forgot that setting and when she remembered most of her geese were too old to reproduce and she had to start pretty much back at square 1 with those animals. My advice is sadly to never stop animals from reproducing and instead to waste precious moments of every day combing through the animals you have and just getting rid of the oldest animals of each variant. (yes, there is a research you can find where someone does this for you, but they only remove animals based on age based on the size of your pen… so if you want to make sure you keep certain variants around, or know that you need to expand a pen, they become useless).

I am positive that I am missing something about this game, like we didn’t even talk about building the actual park. Balancing making paths, bathrooms, subways, and food stalls for your customers against making bigger pens for the animals, against making the park look beautiful by adding decorations throughout the whole thing. I would say that for me personally, this game is probably too much like running a real zoo. I mean, I know this game is far easier than running a zoo, but there are so many things to keep track of and manage just to make your life slightly easier. (Did you know your employees have stats too, and level up…. Because why the hell not add more into the hopper). When I come to simulation games like this, I only want 2/3^rd of the real-life experience. Let me build the pens and get the animals, but I don’t want to have to worry about their diet, or their breeding habits. Let me place buildings and make a really cool looking park, but I don’t want to have to worry about setting the nutrition for the hot dogs I’m selling or the cost of a soda in a vending machine (things you can do). I certainly never want to just sit in place for long periods of time waiting around for a dice roll to go in my favor. I don’t mind the research tree, or unlocking animals in a branching path, but eventually I am going to tire of this treadmill.

I think of similar games and how they handle keeping you moving so you don’t get bored in the same fashion. Planet Coaster has you hitting certain criteria at parks and then encouraging you to go somewhere else and get a change of scenery. Two point campus has different schools for you to go between so you are working towards different goals in new environments. SimGolf had you create multiple different golf courses and rollercoaster tycoon had 21 different scenarios as well. Sure all these games had sandbox mode, or you could sit in one location and perfect it, if that was your desire, but Let’s Build a Zoo makes you do that. Yes, there is DLC that opens up a dinosaur park… and yes there is a sandbox mode that allows you a little freedom from the grind of getting animals in certain order, but ultimately your “main” mode is still just sandbox mode. This game would have benefited from giving you certain scenarios to keep it moving. Build a successful zoo with only the first 4 starter animals, or convert this garbage land into a thriving zoo, or make a profitable zoo with no animals and only shops… I don’t know, just throwing out some scenarios that would break up the mundane. I’ve played my zoo forever, and my only option is to start a new zoo that looks the exact same, in the same locale, with no animals…. Or continue my one zoo.

Now this game is certainly someone’s cup of tea, there are over 550 animals to collect (62 animals x 9 variants, not including hybrids or dinosaurs for the DLC), lots to manage, and plenty of hours to be had in terms of finishing the game properly. I did enjoy my time with it for the first 10-15 hours, everything seemed new and managing the first few pens you create isn’t that taxing, but when you are trying to make sure 45 different animals are happy and healthy and enjoying life enough to keep making variants, just to get to animal 46 and so on… that fun wears thin. To give you just a general idea, to get all the achievements in this game is around 80 hours (with some people having over 100-120 hours on record). Now some of those are building two zoos (one good, one evil).. but that also includes getting all the animals and all the variants. I also think that hour count is head down, doing everything in your power to get achievements and move on, my playtime with the game was probably close to 40 hours and I’m certainly less than halfway with all the achievements/trophies.

So perhaps this is the first game I didn’t technically finish, but I don’t think there is a finish for this game. Sure we could argue getting every animal is beating the game, or buying every plot of land, researching everything that can be researched… but those seem like completionist goals to me, which is far removed from just beating a game. I think this game in particular, the end is when you have decided you have done enough. I built a profitable zoo, I have over 300 animals in the zoo, and customers line up every day willing to spend $50 a ticket to get inside. That sounds like a better zoo then the 3 actual zoos that I live near (within an hour drive)…. So I am going to take this as a win and a finish.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: I don't know.. This game is alright and like most games in it's genre can be incredibly deep for people who want to dive right in. Sadly I think the experience gets stale and the grind is far too long in this game for it to be something incredible enjoyable for everyone. I stopped before I got Lions or Tigers, and people who love animals or love the idea of running a zoo are going to have to wade through long hours where your best animal is a snake before they can get some good stuff. I understand that this game takes a "walk don't run" approach and you have to start somewhere, but having a zoo game where a lot of the fun animals are in the back half or back quarter of the game seems like bad design. I am ranking this as The 94th Greatest Game of All Time. Its sits between "Hand of Fate" (93rd) and "Phantom Doctrine" (95th)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

We did it. 2022 reviews are finally done and we can start on games that I have completed in 2023. Which despite only being a month in is actually a lot. Now a lot of those games are ones I started in 2022 that I didn’t finish until after the clock struck midnight, but that is neither here nor there. I wanted the first one to be a big one, at least in my eyes, so we are going to talk about the long awaited “Return to Monkey Island.” Now we haven’t gotten the chance to talk about my love of the series, and with good reason. The monkey island series is easily my favorite video game series of all time (more than Mario, Yakuza, even more than Bubsy). It has had some ups and downs, and not every game I love with the same energy as others, but I am and will always be a day one purchaser for a monkey island game and this was no different. I have purposefully not chosen a monkey island game in the past, when I spin on the “dealer’s choice” option to pick a game, because I don’t know how I would be able to review them fairly. I know all the puzzles by heart, I have played them to death, they (games 1, 2, and 3) would be at the top of my list (not necessarily the top 3 spots, but still) and all previous games reviewed would feel small compared to them. I don’t want to do that to the integrity of the list, so while I figure out how to review those games honestly, we can talk about a new game that I have never played before. I can start fresh with this game and give my first impressions, which will be my most honest.

A little background, Return to Monkey Island is the 6^th game in the monkey island series, which is a point and click adventure game series. Ron Gilbert who worked created (with help) the first two games, and originally saw this series as a trilogy left the company that owned the IP before he got to finish the story. The end of the second game was a unique twist, but since he didn’t work on the 3^rd game he couldn’t expunge on whatever idea he had at the time. The 3^rd game of the series basically had to ignore the ending and move forward, and thus the series continued without knowing how he truly wanted to finish the series. For many, many years, people wanted Ron to make the real 3^rd game in the series and to pay off the end, but he didn’t own the IP and outside of consulting on the 5^th entry, admitted that it has roughly been too long to just wash away all the hard work of the other games and pretend that those don’t exist. In secret he and Dave Grossman (another original creator of the series) were working with Devolver to create this game. When this game was announced, a lot of expectations were heaped onto this game and Ron and his team. People who grew up with this series wanted it to look a certain way, to end a certain way, and to right whatever they felt wronged by, because of the ending of the 2^nd game. It was surely an impossible feat, and something that probably scared him away from making more. I think when all is said and done we (fans of the series) will have this final game, and we will get to point to the crowd that potentially ruined future installments because they felt owed for purchasing a game in the 80s.

Onward we go.. This game in particular sees Guybrush Threepwood (our pirate avatar from all previous games) telling his son the story of how he finally found the “secret” of Monkey Island. A quick interlude, the first game was called “The Secret of Monkey Island,” and while you initially visit the island in search of treasure, you get wrapped up in fighting LeChuck (your nemesis) and heading back to a different island to stop him from marrying your crush. So, this game, in theory, is going to tell the tale of what treasure was really on Monkey Island, that you didn’t get to find on your first visit. A nice thing they do is to occasionally remind you, the player, that this is a story that you are telling your son. If you stop playing the game for long enough, and then load your save, Guybrush will ask his son if he wants a refresher as to where the story left off. As you might expect the story involves island hopping, voodoo curses, and plenty of familiar characters throughout the series. It would be impossible for me to talk about this game and not address the ending, which I will earmark with spoiler tags, but throughout this game there is a meta narrative that Guybrush is ruining people’s lives (like every adventure game hero does) in order to pursue his goals. At one point the game explicitly has a discussion, is the amount of work and energy you (Guybrush) is putting in to find this secret, worth whatever the secret is? One of the many interpretations of this text is to ask the fans of the series, can this game really live up to the expectation of what people have had in their heads for years. It’s an interesting thought experiment, and there are other interpretations here (Ron isn’t talking to the fans, but to himself and question what his expectations are to re-visit a series he built his career off of), but if it is about the fans of the series, it makes a generalization about all fans that everyone has large expectations for this game, when others of us are just happy it exists.

Return to Monkey Island, is as close to a modern take on point and click adventures that you can have at this point. Gone are the days of multiple verb choices and trying to remember when to use each verb and instead everything boils down to (mainly) two options for each interactable item. On one action is to simply “look at” which will have Guybrush explain what he is looking at, and the other action is variable on what the item is. If it is a person, you can “talk,” if it is a door “open,” food = “eat.” The guesswork is gone, and it has been changed simply to “interact” with said object. Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of inventory puzzles, and dialogue puzzles to be had throughout the adventure. This change just removes a barrier in the way of usability. There are other improvements to the formula that just come with playing a game in the modern day. An in-game hint system can be used from your inventory to give you clues as to what you might be missing. A “to-do” list keeps you on track as to what is the overarching goal you are looking to achieve, and collectable trivia cards can be found in game that allow you to test your series knowledge. While this is certainly less of an issue now, your character can’t die (unless you are really working overtime to kill him) and you can’t get to a point in the game where you can’t progress because of missing out on a pivotal item. Those last two have been mainstays in the monkey island series forever (Lucasarts answer to Sierra adventure games), but it's still worth stating.

In terms of puzzle difficulty, like all adventure games it can be a bit of a mixed bag. There were some puzzles where I was a comfortable 2-3 steps ahead after seeing what items I had to acquire and some that had me walking up and down a ship over and over again to find the answer. There was a pretty clever puzzle that had you filling out a questionnaire of about 40 questions to see if you could gain entry into uncharted waters, and I enjoyed the puzzles associated with being the queen of Brr-muda, but struggled with other puzzles because I was overthinking things. How to make a good Burnt Alaska, or making a chicken vomit (have to leave the room and come back) had me struggling. The only puzzle that made me use a hint, was because despite having figured out the solution, I wasn’t starting the puzzle at the beginning, so I was wandering around lost for awhile. Turns out I just hard to start at the beginning and then follow my solution. I honestly don’t think anything stands out as difficult as the monkey-wrench puzzle from 2, the weird time loop, or monkey combat from 4, that’s not to say they are all logical, but I was able to start working backwards on some puzzles (like: ship with scurvy, need to give limes, need to convince them limes are good, Elaine Marley’s campaign). Perhaps the hardest puzzle that I can think of that I solved, was the final puzzle where it resembles a code wheel that you would have gotten with the early PC copies of the game to prevent piracy.

I apologize for that big spoiler block, especially if you don't want to be spoiled but want to read my thoughts on the game. That chunk is really the meat of this whole review, because it's what stood out most to me after all the game was complete. A non-spoiler way to sum up the last two paragraphs would be, I love the monkey island series, and I think this game is good, but has a questionable ending that left me wanting.

A nice little bonus for those new to the series, is that there is a scrapbook, accessed from the main menu, that allows you to re-live some of Guybrush’s old adventures to catch you up to speed on previous games. Every game got a little addition here, but you can tell which ones they truly cared about, because some games received pages upon pages to review, others got a solitary picture.

"Oh, ok.. we are going to boil all of 4 into one picture? Listen I think it is a weak entry as well, but cmon."

Upon completing the game, you will get a little note from Ron and Dave where they explain some of their thought process about re-visiting the series after so many years away. It’s a short little read that will give you a little insight into their minds about working on the game and feels like a touching sendoff to the game.

Little odds and ends here, the art of the game never bothered me before, and didn’t bother me while playing it. I think some people were expecting it to look pixelated, but those people sadly live in the past. Everyone who has played the series has had their favorite games, and favorite art in those games (mine is the 3rd game). The series hasn’t conformed to one set artistic look in 5 games, I don’t know why they thought the 6^th would be any different. To those put off by the art, it seems like a crazy thing to get hung up on when you have supposedly been clamoring for this game for 20 or so years, but I’m not going to tell you how to live your life. Dominic Armato does a fantastic job once again playing Guybrush, and most of the cast is fantastic. I do miss the legendary voice of Earl Boen as LeChuck in this game, as the new voice doesn’t quite make LeChuck as threatening as he was in the past. Sadly Earl passed away in January, so any future installments won’t have his voice either. The music in this game didn’t really pop like it did in previous games, but I might be able to attribute that to nostalgia for the old games and unfamiliarity with this one. I’ll re-visit this post in 20 years, when I have played RTMI at least a dozen times before I say definitively.

Looking inside my love of the franchise, RTMI sits firmly in the middle of the pack. It doesn’t hit the highs that the series has to offer, but it isn’t in the forgettable dregs that saw the series hit its low point. However, if I am looking outside my love of the franchise, I don’t know where people might see this game ranking. It is a series that comes with a lot of baggage, and was made with some of that baggage in mind. It’s nice that they gave people a scrapbook to maybe catch themselves up a little on the series, but I don’t know if that does a good enough job of setting the scene. If I was talking to someone who has never played a monkey island game before, I don’t know if I could recommend this game because of the unsatisfactory ending that would make their one journey through feel incomplete. For the old school adventure game fan in me, it has solid puzzles, good characters, and feels like a fun reunion with your high school friends 10 years after high school. You get to talk about inside jokes that you had, you get to tell stories of what you did in the good ole days, and it all feels comfortable. You had a good time, but if anything it made you nostalgic for the good old days.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Sadly no

Where does it rank: It seems crazy to me that the first Monkey Island game on my list isn't going in the top 10, but while I can be incredibly happy and giddy that they made a new Monkey Island game, I don't think it quite hits me the same way that others do. Don't get me wrong, I think this is a really solid adventure game. It has good puzzles, is the perfect length, makes me want to play more adventure games when I finished, but I also know that it doesn't hit the highs of other games in the series. Could someone unfamiliar with Monkey Island pick this up and enjoy it, certainly. The scrapbook will get them acutely aware of what they are getting into, but some of the jokes or call-backs won't hit the way the developers want them to, if you are unfamiliar. I have ranked this games as the: 24th Greatest Game of all time out of 144 total games. It sits between Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (23rd) and NBA 2k18 (25th)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Rules update - Ok, we need to get some clerical work out of the way before we can talk about the last game I completed in 2022 that I haven’t yet written about. A lot of older games are coming packaged together as anthology collections on a single disc or remastered versions of older games. That isn’t some big news in itself but it calls into question how we rate things as it pertains to this list of greatest games of all time. I have 3 examples here that I think are worthy of talking about and you can determine if it makes sense.

1. Old games that are re-mastered will be reviewed separately than their original counterpart because it is certainly possible that the new re-mastered edition has changed the game in some way that is appropriate to discuss. For instance Tony Hawk 1 + 2 remaster has changed the look of the game, the music in the game, how leveling up is treated, and essentially removed the separation between games. Unless you are familiar with the original games, you wouldn’t really know where game 1 and 2 separate, as it is one cohesive game. That means that I will eventually re-view the original versions, because the game is different enough. (Also see Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father, and the Re-mastered anniversary edition).
2. Old games that have a re-master but the main game is mostly in-tact and nothing warrants a separate review. Then a game played via this version will also count as a review for similar versions. For instance: Final Fantasy 6 was released on the SNES and then again on the PS1. The PS1 adds a few cut-scenes and a monster encyclopedia, but is essentially the same version of the game. Reviewing one of these versions is akin to reviewing both. They will not be getting separate reviews, because the differences are minimal enough that they won’t really move the needle on if the game is good or not.
3. The third version is perfect for the game we are about to talk about. “Mercenaries Saga: Chronicles” is a switch game that comes packed with 3 individual games, but this collection just offers a hopper to pick which game you want to play. There are no bonus options, and the games don’t really link in any meaningful way (nothing you do in game 1 mixes with game 2, etc.) and each game is roughly in-tact with the original (some small changes). This is just a fancy hopper. Each game in the collection will be reviewed independently, and when all is said and done, you could say “wow: I pay $15 and I get the 40^th, 60^th, and 70^th greatest games of all time.” The hopper (packaging) has nearly no impact on the ranking of these games.

Now do we remember not too long ago, when the remake of Tactics Ogre came out on Switch? Because I do, and as a fan of the original I was really hankering to play it, but I somehow convinced myself that I don’t need to buy the game that I actually want to play and that I have plenty of tactics games that I could just start without dropping money. Normally this would be a noble decision by me, because I buy games constantly with no intention to play them soon-ish, but here I was wanting to play a very specific game and then telling myself that another game will scratch that same itch. That game nominated to scratch that itch was… this one. A game from a franchise I never played, never heard of, and bought on a whim years ago because it was on sale digitally. Let’s see how it holds up… (Side note, I have since purchased the Tactics Ogre remake)

With all that being said lets talk about our game today “Mercenaries Saga: Will of the White Lions.” This is the first game of the Mercenaries Saga series which, was originally only released on phones in Japan. That will be a pivotal piece of knowledge later, but first lets talk about what this game actually is. This is a tactics RPG game, you move your party on a grid and then select attacks, spells, items, etc. to attempt to wipe the enemy off the map. If you wipe out the enemy, you win, and if you get wiped you lose. In between battles, you can buy weapons or equipment, level up skills, and eventually change the role of each of your team-members, before hopping into the next level (Chapter).

Lets talk story next, because there isn’t much to chew on there. You play the role of a mercenaries group called the White Lions (hmmmm.. I wonder where they got the name from). The captain is Leon and he is joined by a ragtag group of other characters. You have a timid healer, an archer, a strong axe man… you know the usual band of heroes. Throughout the game you will get more characters that you can mix into the fold but you do have a cap about how many characters you can bring into battle, so eventually you will have to make cuts about the types of characters you want to use. Anyway.. you play as this mercenary group as they take odd jobs from the bar to fight baddies or recover loot and then return to the bar to claim your reward. Eventually, like it always happens, you get brought into a bigger job and wrapped up in the broader conflict in the world. There are a few instances in the story where you do make a binary choice of help/no help certain people, and that will change the story somewhat including later levels, but ultimately this story is nothing to write home about. All the characters are pretty one note, and remain throughout the story. Leon, our main character, has the personality of paint thinner, and the route I took had a villain who just wanted power to take over the world by making a pact with a devil. You know some fairly rote tropes, that can work in some games, but this is just one you can button mash through the story.

Now where you will be spending most of your time in this game is the battlefield, where it controls like most tactical RPGs that I have played. You select a character you want to move, there is a grid showing the area where they can move to. You then choose to move or in some cases not move, and then select an action. You can attack with your equipped weapon, which will cover different distances depending on the weapon, you can use a skill(which include magic) and they will have different radius to affect friends or foes as well as cost various amounts of your SP power, use an item, or set your character to defend. Those are your main actions for each turn, and while skills are the most useful and will usually do the most damage, you only gain so much SP each turn. One thing I should mention, is that only if a character takes an action do they gain XP for their move, defending or idling will grant you no XP. So, if you want to maximize your characters turn, even when they can’t reach the enemy, they should be using low value skills to buff or heal characters just to get XP, I will explain why this is important later. After all of your characters have taken their turn, then the enemy gets to take theirs and the whole thing repeats until only one team is remaining on the battlefield. Attacking from higher ground, or from a side or behind flank will grant you an easier hit rate and more damage, but the same goes against you as well. There is a hit % for each move and skill and you will curse it when the dice roll goes against you. I have missed reviving characters who had fallen, or missed killing blows on enemy despite having an 80 or 90% hit rate. All of this does make positioning important and trying not to engage in too many enemies at a time.

In case you were wondering, yes, you will always be outnumbered on every battlefield at the start, but the good news is that most enemies won’t engage with you until you are in attack radius or very close. This will allow you to section off areas of the map to focus your advancement on, until you pick off the enemies and move farther on. While it can work on occasion, I would advise against splitting the party into anything more than 2 groups. In some missions, enemy reinforcements do show up and if you don’t know where on the map they are going to show up, they can quickly decimate your smaller groups if you aren’t prepared. Good news is that there is no time limit or turn limit to any of these battles (at least any that I can remember), so you can really take your time or stop and regroup between encounters if you so choose. The only benefit to clearing a level quickly, is that at the end of each skirmish you are scored and given extra XP based on a few criteria including how fast you cleared the level and how mush treasure did you find.

Speaking of treasure, lets talk about one of the most annoying aspects in the whole game. On some maps, there are just straight up treasure chests, which is fine, this is not what I am mad about. You can take a character have them go to the treasure chest and open it to get an item. Nearly all treasure chests are booby trapped and unless you use a certain skill to remove the trap it will spring on whomever opened it. Sometimes it might be a status effect spell that hits the character making them poisoned or slow for a portion of the battle, and in other instances it will do damage to said character. These treasure chests will have some mediocre equipment or items locked away, worth getting, but maybe not breaking your neck to get. The real treasure are hidden items that are scattered on the battlefield, here is where my gripe comes in. It will be on a specific tile and you won’t be able to see it with your naked eye while looking at the tile, you will either have to move a character onto that exact tile (lucky) or use a skill or item that searches a small radius and the tile will glow if something is up ahead. These items are usually huge blessings to find for one of two reasons. You either find a collectable that can be traded in at the shop for the best items for sale, or are magic equipment that will greatly boost a character who uses it. Here is where the rub comes in, you don’t know how many are on each map, and once the last enemy is killed, you can’t explore the map to mop up any remaining pickups. You either need to commit a character on your small team, to basically use their whole turn, multiple times to just finding these hidden treasures, or commit to a painstakingly walk on every tile approach, to see if you find one (you can luckily not end your turn on every tile, but you will need to stop and pretend to select an action to see if the tile holds anything). Eventually you might find that some of these items are always on tiles that are out of the way, or tucked into a corner you probably wouldn’t go on normally, but if you aren’t using a guide (like I wasn’t) finding these can be a real pain.

So after battle, you get a little scene that sets up the next part of the story, but you are always then dumped back into the menu where you can make all your team changes. Keep in mind this is just a menu and not a town or a hub that you might be accustomed to. There is no part of this game where you are walking around, not in battle. Your characters do level up on their own, by gaining XP on the battlefield, but they also earn points that can be spent to upgrade their skills and you can do that here in the menu. You should be doing this after every battle. Each skill can be upgraded to a maximum level (usually 7 times) where the SP to use it increases, but it will cause more damage or have a bigger radius or even a better hit %. Each class also contains 1 to 2 passive abilities that can be upgraded as well. Reach a certain character level and you can change what class they are. This will grant you access to new skills, potentially new equipment, but it always removes everything you have equipped, so if you are changing classes make sure you re-equip your character afterwards.

This game is very stat heavy. Now as a RPG nerd, that didn’t come as a surprise to me, but there were stat abbreviations here that even I wasn’t familiar with. Hell there is a jump stat, that’s sole purpose is to show if your character can get up on higher ledges, or if they have to walk around. I’m not going to go into the nitty gritty on every stat, but I am going to let you in on a little secret. One of the most important stats is avoidance. It is a stat the governs how easily an enemy can hit you, and it can be your lifeblood. At one point I equipped a monk with every piece of equipment I could that brought that stat up as high as could be, at the next battle I could confidently throw that monk into battle first and the enemy would miss 4 out of 5 times. Something to keep in mind, but if you are balancing equipment, just because the DEF or ATK goes up 3 or 4 points, if it costs you 10 or so AVD, it probably isn’t worth it.

So what else can you do at this hub. Well you can visit the shop which periodically gets updated after certain chapters (but you won’t know which ones), spend your gold on normal items, or your collectable stars on super items, in order to better equip your team. However, shops are shops, nothing new there… what you are going to care about is the generic skirmishes you can go on. After each story beat, you unlock a new skirmish that you can go on that takes place on the same map, but without any of the treasure and with a bunch of new enemies. You will be doing these skirmishes a lot, because this is an incredibly grind heavy game, and each story mission has harder and harder enemies that you will not be able to make up the difference by just playing the story. As incredibly boring as it sounds (and is), I would suggest that you do at least 2 skirmishes for every 1 story mission. Even then I won’t guarantee that your characters will be leveled up enough, but it should give you a fighting chance in the story mission and with good strategy you can clear it. I played this game for dozens of hours, and I rarely felt I was over-leveled for a story mission.

This game does do one of my gaming cardinal sins, which is to give you a bunch of characters, but not level up the ones you aren’t using. Pretty early on, you will hit your peak of characters that you can take into battle, and you will have to decide who you are going to leave behind. That person will gain virtually no XP for the fight (I can’t say for certain that they get 0… but if its more than 0 it’s a sliver), and while that makes sense in the grand scheme of things, it actively prevents you from wanting to go back through and level up the character. In the early game, when perhaps you are only a level or two ahead of another character, you might make the decision to test them out in a skirmish to see if you like them and move on, but you are getting new characters after 10 missions or 15 missions in the game and at that point, you would have to be crazy to sit and try to catch them up in this game. Don’t get me wrong, I like games with big parties that you have to balance, but this game seems like once you start playing with your initial set of 6, it is hard to switch off of it.

The only final piece I have to talk about, and I am ashamed I am just thinking of this now, is it’s music. IT IS AWFUL. Now to be clear, each piece is not entirely that bad, but there are only 3 tracks in the entire game, maybe 4. There is 1 battle song, 1 menu song, and maybe 2 cutscene songs. You will tire of the music so fast, and you will either turn it off, or it will drill its way into your ears until you attempt to silence the noise by repeatedly punching yourself in the head. Again, you might read this and be like “I am going to check out a song on youtube” and you will listen to it, and say “this isn’t that bad,” but I want you to listen to that song for roughly 20 hours straight. Easy fix, right? As you approach hour 2 of the game just turn off the sound and you won’t miss anything. There is no voice acting, barely any sound effects, so you aren’t going to miss anything.

It’s a fairly competent but bare bones tactical RPG. You aren’t getting an intriguing story or a lore filled universe to play in. The characters that you do pilot are fairly one note, and stay that way through the game. The draw here is if you just like doing tactical battles, then this is a relatively cheap avenue to go through. There is nothing exceptional that this game does really well, but not much that it fumbles either. It is grindy like all older RPGs were, I don’t like hunting for actual valuable treasure, the goddamn music, and I miss exploring a town or an area that isn’t just battle to battle, BUT I have to remember that this was originally just released on phones. Now I didn’t play this on a phone, and I couldn’t tell you what has been changed or upgraded to fit the switch format. If what I have been led to believe is true, that this game got minimal improvements, then I am jealous I didn’t get to play this on a phone. While the missions might have been a little long to sit and play on a phone, the game itself would have been perfect for me to drop in play a skirmish and then put it down. I know phone games have come along way, but I wouldn’t expect a great story, lore, or big universe to play in from a phone game. Just a hopper of different levels would probably be all I expected, and this is essentially what that game is. Now I am not going to grade this on a curve, seeing that it was originally a phone game, but even so, this game is fine…. I have a hard time recommending it, when there are bigger better versions of this genre should you be hankering for a tactical RPG, like I was. The caveat here is that I didn’t play the 2^nd or 3^rd game of this collection yet, and so it’s possible that #2 and #3 are much better and some of my minor gripes go away. I’m not expecting that, but it’s possible. So, for the first game of the Mercenaries Saga series, you could do worse…. But you could also do something much better.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: nope

Where does it rank: I stated this earlier, but this game is fine... its not broken or bad in any way... but its very bare bones and not something I would recommend when there are so many better tactical RPG games that are coming out. I can argue that for an original phone game, this would have been great and one of the best phone games I have played, but that doesn't earn any bonus points on this list. If you are intrigued, feel free to pick it up for cheap (I would say under $10) and you might enjoy yourself, but if your time is limited and you only want to play the best of the best, then this is a skip. It ranks as the 108th Greatest Video Game of All Time. It sits between Dice Legacy (107th) and Miitopia (109th), out of 143 total games.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

*It feels slightly weird to release this a day after the announcement of firings at Giant Bomb. I wrote it a few days ago, and it's not that there is anything in here that talks about what is happening, but I almost feel like the site should be down for like a moment of silence for the people let go. I hope that they land on their feet somewhere else and recover soon.. Like I would love if Jason joined Nextlander, and Jess was able to work for Minnmax or Kinda Funny, and potentially get away from the corporate world. I hope Giant Bomb survives because I like the work they do, the cast they have, and the community here.*

I have two final games to talk about that I finished in 2022, that I could never find the words for. Regardless I need to clear out these backlogs so that games can get rated, before we move on to 2023 in earnest. I will be honest, I still don’t have the words for this game after completing it, and I am going to come down a little harsher than I think this game is known for, but I can’t change my feelings. Today we are going to talk about NBA Street Volume 2, and how its not as good as I remember.

NBA Street Volume 2 is known as being one of the best Arcade Basketball games of all time, which for those who just want to understand the classification, an arcade sports game is a faster paced, un-realistic, inflated version of the sport. For basketball that might mean players can jump higher and dunk from further away, or that rules like the shot-clock or fouls aren’t called. NBA Street was made during a time when And 1 (a streetball basketball brand) was at its highest point. People were becoming disinterested in the NBA product and were instead enjoying basketball that had flashy dribble moves, big dunks, and fast action. Of course And 1 didn’t include any of the household names of NBA players, so EA decided to meld the two together. Take the And 1 style of basketball, but attach the teams and players that are more well known. It was an incredibly successful series that saw sequels as well as spinoffs for other sports, such as NFL street. The 2^nd game (NBA volume 2) is seen as the pinnacle of the series.

Now moving on to the other hard stuff, is how do I classify beating an arcade sports game? This game had essentially two main modes: Be a Legend and NBA Challenge. NBA Challenge has you play against all the NBA teams that exist at the time with their roster of players, similar to NBA JAM or NBA Hangtime. Be a Legend is where you take a custom character and rise through the ranks of streetball and build a team that can topple the giants. For the sake of this discussion, I considered the Be a Legend mode as the main mode and played it through to completion to count it.

Once in the game, you build a created character, spend your limited skills acquired to make him just a hair above shitty and then draft other YMCA gym buddies to be on your team. At the start you have one location on the world map to play games, but eventually you open up tournaments and other cities where you can show off your talent to prove you are the best streetballer in the states. As you select a location, you mainly play 3 v 3 against other players that are relatively your current skill level to a game of 21. Anything inside the 3-point line is worth 1 point, and 3s are worth 2, normal blacktop rules. However, this is not a game about just scoring points, it is about giving the audience a show, being flashy, and then scoring points. You are given a gamebreaker meter that fills up as you complete tricks, make baskets and make good plays. Ideally this is built by stringing together tricks, passes, and dunks into an impressive possession and not getting turnovers or stopping the ball from moving. If you can fake out the opponent, perform harder tricks or dunks, and put on a good show the meter fills faster. The faster you fill your meter you get to do a special action. Gamebreakers come in two forms and can be used to potentially swing the momentum to your team, or just decimate a team you are already beating. You can use the Gamebreaker to score, which results in you getting points and the other team losing points (at the same time), you can use a gamebreaker to cancel one your opponent might have saved, or you can store it for future use. If you store it and get a gamebreaker again (without your opponent canceling ours) you can unleash a huge devastating move that not only guarantees a make, but is worth a lot more points. For instance using a gamebreaker level 2 from the 3-point line, is like a 6 point swing.

At the end of the game (win or lose) you get points which can be used to either upgrade your skills, buy new skills (dunks and tricks) or clothes, and even some players to be on your team. If you win the game, you can choose to take a player from the team you just beat to join your team. This is much more important as you start playing against really good players, but in the early game its nice to have small upgrades by taking a player who is 2 out of 5 and replacing that 1 out of 5 you started with. Also should you win, you get location points which allow you to progress through an area and unlock more locations. Most pick-up game locations you will have to play multiple times to max out the location points you earn from them, before progressing, but tournaments you will only have to play once. You will go through this song and dance while you level up, slowly grabbing players who are incrementally better, until you start playing against NBA players and in tournaments where you can unlock some streetball legends. These legends (just FYI) are made up characters. This goes on until you have essentially unlocked and maxed out every location by winning there a set number of times.

Before I demoralize my credit as the ultimate game ranker in the world, I am going to tell you that this game is still fun to pickup and play. Pulling off a great combo that leaves your opponent on the floor from a trick and then nailing an alley-oop for massive points still feels great. There is also a fairly large roster of “current” (at the time) NBA players to pull into your team, and legends that you can buy to load up your team. As a die-hard Chicago Bulls fan, I loved seeing 3 versions of Jordan in the game, and yes you can build a team that is just 3 different Jordans. Or perhaps, you would rather your custom player team up with Shaq and Kobe, which is also possible. For the most part I found myself using NBA players instead of the made-up streetball legends that they put in the game, but either solution works as you play your way through the areas. It’s also nice that each location has a fairly unique looks to their courts, I mean they are still basketball courts, but they have tried to make the locations feel different which is appreciated. There is also a fairly robust (for its time) customization element where your created player can look unique. You can dress him in different clothes, throwback jerseys, or jeans and a sweater, but on top of that give him tricks and dunks so that you don’t feel so generic. One of my favorite elements is that you can have multiple save files (stay with me here) but created players from one save file might show up in your game and you can pull them onto your team. Now granted you can’t upgrade them once you get them, but if you made a friend or a family member you could have them play on your 3 v 3 team for as long as you want.

Ok, so overall the game is still fun, I’m not going to say that this is some terrible game we have had wrong all the time, but I am going to pick out some problems I have with it that maybe give me pause in calling it the best basketball game ever. Alright, for one, the beginning is slow and a pain in the ass. I understand the concept of rags to riches here, but nothing is less fun than playing a game and having your team miss every 3-pointer or fall over when performing a trick. I want to play when my character is competent. They don’t have to start me at the level of an NBA star, but I don’t want to start as a newborn fawn who has never played basketball before. Still with me? Great! For as flashy as this game is, they sure made the NBA players fairly boring by all having the same move-set. Outside of legendary players or the streetball legends, all NBA players have the same tricks and same dunks. You also can’t customize players that aren’t your created player, so no chance of changing those around. You are going to end up playing with some players for a long time, and seeing the same tricks or dunks can not only get boring to watch, but can make the joy of performing them slip. Minor gripe right? Speaking of boring animations, how about the Gamebreaker animations? If you are playing this game the smart way, the best bang for your buck is using the gamebreaker level 2 on a 3-pointer. It is worth the most points, you can’t miss it, and it either gets you back into games the fastest, or wins the game the fastest. Well those gamebreakers are canned animations, that you can’t skip… and they made two variants for a level 2 3-pointer. My goal was to perform one of those a game, and you play a lot of games in this mode. That is a lot of repetition.

Now I hear what you are saying, all those things are small gripes and easily fixed based on team makeup, or doing a different skill. You aren’t wrong, but those aren’t my only issues. If this is your first time playing the game, or you haven’t played in awhile, the computer can cheat in a very frustrating way. The computer will almost always fill their gamebreaker meter faster than you and doing what seems like weaker tricks. Eventually you can counter this, by learning what combo can get you more points, but early on it felt like a CPU steal, crossover, dunk was filling their bar halfway. Whilst my four different tricks into an alley-oop was barely making a dent. If you play at a harder difficulty, this can be the difference between wins and losses.

My final gripe is that the game is weirdly grindy to finish out the last location. When you finish what you think is the last tournament, you see that there is one final stage that hasn’t unlocked yet and requires you to get a higher location points. Now up to this point, you would scour the map to see where you might be missing some location points and go there to get the remaining. However, at least during my playthrough, I had acquired all the possible location points from every-other location. I thought the game glitched on me, or broke.. How was I supposed to get 100 location points, when all the other locations only add up to 90 (or something like that).. The answer was to replay areas you already beat and maximized, win those games and you would slowly get more points. Now it has been awhile since the game was in front of me (and it wasn’t backwards compatible on a 360), but I feel like I remember getting 1 point per game played, when previously you would get 3 or 4 per game played. You may be saying, what’s 10 more games (in my example) above? Well the difference is that I have already maxed out my player, maxed out my team, and beat everything else… I shouldn’t have to go back to playing pick up games in Philly just so I can tackle the final level. It was an annoying stall tactic the game seemed to pull out of nowhere… Now to be fair maybe I got to the end too early, or I had an extra loss in my name than I should have, which lowered my points, so maybe there is an explanation as to why I had to do makeup games, but the game certainly didn’t offer me one so I am left to speculate.

So I think my biggest issue is that the game is just not as fond as I remember it. Trust me when I say that this used to be my favorite basketball game of all time. I had dozens of created players, that I had at least started their journey through this mode, still saved on my Xbox. I remember building super-teams with my created players and different legends to tackle the mode, but upon re-visiting this game that same desire didn’t come through. I found my playthrough sandwiched between boring aspects of the game. The early part where I hated being under-powered, and the end part where I was bored and grinding out the last few locations and wins to just call it completed. I know this happens, nostalgia is a terrible drug and games that you remember fondly, won’t always hold up when you replay them, but usually I can see that coming. I knew Kickle Cubicle wouldn’t hold up when I re-played it, I know to temper my expectations when I re-visit Goldeneye, but this one really took me by surprise.

I think this game is still fun for a pick-up and play. I think if you got together with a buddy, and just wanted to play a few games with a pre-built team, I think you would be fine. However, I think by playing “Be a Legend” mode, the shine disappeared a little. If I would have only played 2-3 games, who knows maybe I would have said this is still a top 10 game of all time, but right now… at this moment… if you were to put this game or NBA JAM/Hangtime on a table in front of me and tell me to say which is better, I am going to go with Jam/Hangtime.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: no, and I dont even have it as the greatest basketball game of all time

Where does it rank: I will be honest, that maybe this expedition into the game may have clouded my judgement. If I based my ranking on how I felt this was 20 years ago when I played it, this might be higher up on the list, but sadly I have to go based on how it played recently. The game is still fun, probably better served in small multiplayer doses with friends, but it didn't crack my top 20 games of all time. I actually have it as the 29th Greatest Game of All time out of 142 games. Right under recently reviewed Kirby and the Forgotten Land (28th) and Dishonored (30th). Both games that were good, but had some flaws I had a hard time overlooking.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Its time to finish up some 2022 holdover reviews from games that I finished but didn’t get around to talking about and we will begin by talking about an actual game that came out in 2022. Now, I am normally not ever someone who not only gets a game the year it comes out, but then goes on to complete the same game, but this was the rare occasion. Of course it didn’t not start with my desire but rather my son’s. Grey, became obsessed with Kirby even before the game was out and I have no idea how it happened. I don’t own any other Kirby games, he has never seen me play anything Kirby, and we don’t have cable television where he perhaps saw a commercial about an upcoming new game. His only exposure, that I can think of, is a Target ad in store that he would have seen whenever we went shopping, but regardless he was ready for it. We made him hold out until Easter, but it was at least an every other day occurrence asking me if the game was out. Now he is four, so I don’t expect him to quite understand the passage of time, but he was ready. As soon as we got it, it was over for me.. even if I wanted to focus on other games, I was seeing it so much while he played and helping him with bosses or trying to find waddle-dees that I might as well start a game of my own, which I did.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land, for those unaware is a 3D platformer where you play as Kirby a blob that can suck up enemies and gain their powers. You progress level to level, and eventually fight a boss of each area before moving on, until you beat the game. In between levels you can go take part in challenge levels which will earn you coins or an upgrade token (more on that later), go back to the town to take part in minigames or refill health, or re-visit old levels to complete your optional objectives and rescue more waddle-dees. In addition to playing as Kirby you can play this game cooperative with another person who takes the role of a warrior waddle-dee to help Kirby on his adventure. He lacks the ability to suck up enemies and change his power, but in return he can die a million times in a level and as long as Kirby remains alive, he will come back to life a little down the way.

Now I will start with what was most important to me, this game is very accessible. There are two difficulty options, one which makes Kirby have more health and the enemies have even less, and while there are still difficult parts or bosses that the difficulty won’t let you breeze past, it does allow you to have littler ones more freedom in making it through this game. The big takeaway for me, is that there is drop in and drop out Co-op mode which can be accessed from the pause menu at almost any time. While in Co-op mode the game is still focused very much on Kirby. The camera follows him around, special areas like Kirby flying or driving a car have to be done by whomever is controlling Kirby, but if there is a troublesome boss or section of enemies, you can pop in cause some damage and then pop out once the part is over. The one frustrating part about play co-op mode is that if the warrior waddle-dee is ever too far from Kirby (and we are talking like a full screen away) the game will just teleport the waddle-dee forward. It makes sense that the camera follows Kirby, and the 2^nd player is just helping, but it does mean that the 2^nd player can’t really explore or go get items on their own. This can be both a blessing and a curse depending on who is controlling Kirby. If you have your kid or someone not adept at gaming, having them control the extra player means that they don’t have to worry about landing tricky jumps, and can attack enemies with reckless abandon since they can’t really die. Of course the 2^nd player also has to be ok, with being a clear second fiddle to Kirby. This is not a Mario & Luigi situation where you are separate but equal partners, this is almost exclusively one sided. Regardless, this feature was great for me, because as my kid gets increasingly independent as he plays video games I can take a more backseat approach and just help him with tricky parts, and in the case of this game, I don’t have to take the controller from him, I can just jump in fight a boss, and then jump out.

As you go through the myriad of levels, depending on the enemy you inhale, Kirby can be granted one of several different powers (fire, ice, spikes, sleep, etc.). If this is your first time playing through, you won’t necessarily know what enemy grants a power until you inhale them for the first time and *unlock* the skill. Essentially every-time you encounter a new enemy a good rule of thumb would be to inhale them and check to see if they have any power associated with them, once you are comfortable with knowing what each enemy, then you can start focusing on just keeping the powers you want. When you first unlock a power, they are essentially at level 1, but hidden throughout levels are blueprints that allow you to upgrade each power (with coins and upgrade tokens) to make the ability more powerful. For instance the fire skill, eventually moves from just fire breathing, to allowing you to briefly fly like a dragon, burning everything you touch. The bomb skill allows you to go from rolling a single bomb, to being able to link bombs together for a bigger explosion, to eventually giving your bombs a homing ability. You can only upgrade the abilities if you do the additional challenge levels and earn the upgrade tokens, challenge levels can not be replayed so while you eventually (if you do all the challenge levels) can buy all the blueprints for each power, sometimes there can be a big gap between powerups, so you should prioritize your favorite abilities first. Once an ability is powered up, and you have it set in the store, then anytime you inhale an enemy or are granted that power, it will be the upgraded version. I should mention that these are certainly not required, you can beat the game with all the base level powers and while that might make it harder for yourself, there is no requirement to upgrade any ability. I know this, because my kid hates the challenge levels and beat the game with only minor upgrades to the Sword and Ice ability.

What obviously garnered all the love during the announcement is the abilities Kirby can get from inhaling cars, traffic cones, and soda machines amongst other big items. While these are certainly enjoyable moments, they make up a rather small section of the game and the powers you get from those items trump whatever other power you have at that time. For instance a soda machine can shoot a limited number of cans out breaking walls, or hurting enemies, but that can’t be combined with a fire breath or sword slash. Those powers just get put on the back burner while you are in this enhanced state. My big issue with these abilities is how I wish the game used the more, or had even more variety. Too often you would get to enjoy a little sample of these abilities only to have to transform back to lone hammer Kirby and you miss the feeling you had previously. I understand that they certainly can’t have you be overpowered for too long, and too much of a good thing would certainly reduce the fun factor, but I feel like it skewed a little short on time given the length of the game.

Speaking of length… This might be an unpopular opinion, but this game is too long. Perhaps its my fault for getting the optional objectives in the levels, and doing all the challenge levels so that I could power up my abilities, but I had to drag myself over the finish line. I will fully admit that this could just be a me problem, and even then it is something I am conflicted about. When it comes to entertaining my kids, I want the game to be on the longer side (as long as they are enjoying it) so they don’t complete a game and turn to me and say; “that’s it?” However, when I sat down and made this one of the two main games I was playing at the time, I kept wondering “does this really keep going?” Even after finishing what appears to be the final boss, it opens up another (condensed) world that you need to go through in order to get the “real” or “good” ending. Could I have stopped and ignored that dangling carrot? Of course, but somehow I feel that wouldn’t quite be the same thing as beating the game if I left the “true” final boss on the table. I feel like I say this a lot, and there are very few games where the opposite is true, but this game is best played alongside another game so that you don’t get burned out trying to beat every challenge map, or tackling bosses without getting hit to get the last waddle-dee.

It is good to see that Kirby is finally shown some love, and I am glad that this game was successful and fulfilled the lofty dreams my kid had about it, before release. Hell, there is even a new Kirby game coming out soon, granted I think this is a port or a re-master, but it’s still another Kirby game in the bucket. However, I think a lot of people were perhaps over-praising this game and comparing it to Mario Odyssey as some huge testament of a game. I think the game is good, and fun, but I wouldn’t put it on the same pedestal that is Mario Odyssey. You may now send me hate.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: It's good, but not the greatest

Where does it rank: I think Kirby and the forgotten Land is really solid, and it is one of the few games that I can play with my kid and we can both feel like we are contributing. The Cooperative aspect is huge for this game, but I admit it shines more because I'm a parent with a young kid, and I don't think it hits the same if do 21 yr olds are playing this Co-op. Perhaps my view is clouded because I wasn't playing Kirby games since its inception, and I didn't suffer through 2D games for years and then finally get the 3D game of my dreams, but I have Kirby ranked as: 28th Greatest Game of All time. It sits between Dishonored (29th) and Griftlands (27th).

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening