Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine opportunity to finally tick off a few items I've had on my various backlog lists/spreadsheets for longer than I'd care to admit.

November

• Game: Nintendo's Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
• System: Nintendo Entertainment System (via 3DS).
• Original Release: 1987-01-14.
• Time from Release to Completion: Thirty-two years, ten months, and twelve days.

I think it was Dan Ryckert who discussed playing through Zelda II for the first time a few months or maybe even a few years ago now, intimating that he didn't really consider himself a true Zelda aficionado until he'd seen every one of them through. I was mildly perplexed while listening to the Beastcast episode where he made his case, wondering how he could've avoided it for this long. Black sheep status aside, surely everyone of a certain late-millennial age group who fell in love with Ocarina of Time or A Link to the Past either spent a whole summer trying to figure Zelda II out or at least booted it up on an emulator out of curiosity. Then, just a few days ago, I watched the first part of "Kacho" Shinya Arino's Zelda II playthrough on GameCenter CX and realized, "oh hell, I don't recognize any of this." I guess I've never seen it through either. So here I am, following in Dan Ryckert's footsteps: something both my parole officer and cardiologist have cautioned against several times.

So what's it like playing Zelda II in 2019? Well, as you might assume, it's a mix of respect for what the genius designers at Nintendo pulled off in 1987 given the limited resources and relatively primitive game design theorem of the late '80s combined with a strong abhorrence towards what often felt like a vindictive level of difficulty. I'll expatiate on both those talking points in due time, but on the whole there was a long string of incremental discoveries and victories punctuated with moments of sheer despair after I once again ran out of lives and was dumped unceremoniously back into Zelda's temple, where the eponymous princess soundly slept through all my anguished conniptions. Progress in Zelda II is hard-fought and that much more valuable as a result: each new cleared dungeon, each new learned spell, each new acquired level-up - while my progress in geographical terms was always tentative at best, these milestones were permanent. When I next awoke in Zelda's dungeon after one too many tumbles off a bridge or an ass-whupping from those indomitable Blue Iron Knuckles (I guess there's a difference between Iron Knuckles and Darknuts?), I felt heartened by the assurance that I was slightly better off for the next run. That you eventually acquire the means to break through roadblocks led to recovering your overworld progress that much faster, and perhaps ceases to be much of an issue at that point.

There's not a whole lot else I can say about Zelda II's basics that aren't already common knowledge. It's the first - and presently only - Zelda game to use a standard XP system, points of which are rewarded for defeating enemies as well as collecting "P-Bags". These bags can drop from enemies but are also found littered around dungeons (named Palaces in Z2) and in hidey-holes in the overworld, similar to the well-hidden Pieces of Heart in other Zelda games. A notable characteristic of these naturally occurring P-Bags is that they only appear once, and your XP resets after every game over, so while you could still theoretically max out from regular exploration and grinding enemies the benefits of these particular bags can be lost to you forever. A number of times I'd found a few and been close to a new level, suddenly deciding to go full-on turtle defense in case I died and wasted them. For the most part, though, you gain levels pretty easily - tougher enemies start dropping them in the hundreds, and you also gain an automatic level-up after completing a Palace - so it was one of those mechanics that generated more anxiety than it perhaps warranted. The game's also fully a side-scroller, as opposed to the occasional underground side-scrolling areas in the first Legend of Zelda, and so the Palaces have been designed around elevators which can be driven between multiple floors and may have multiple (well, two: left and right) exits at each stop. The dungeons are actually a little easier to navigate as a result of this narrowing of dimensions, at least in theory because the game quickly compromises this advantage by ensuring that the player is never given a map. In fact, there's no overworld map either: I figure Miyamoto or one of his staff figured it'd be closer to the reality of forging your own path ahead in the wilderness if you also had to play amateur cartographer via some graph paper and a ruler. The conceit of the designers wanting you to make your own map (or just buy the next Nintendo Power; I'm sure they wouldn't mind that) rang especially true for the game's two - two! - overworld maze sections, each of which had plenty of hidden pitfalls and enemy encounters to struggle through.

It's a little tough to rate Zelda II's innovations for two reasons: the first is that no other Zelda game would follow the blueprint of this one, not even in a loving nostalgic throwback way like A Link Between Worlds was for A Link to the Past. Whatever Zelda did differently here clearly didn't jibe with the extant Zelda fandom, because hardly any of it survived save perhaps a few enemy types and, of course, the town names that were later repurposed to be the names of the six sages of Ocarina of Time (I think in the confused chronology of the Zelda timeline, these towns were in fact named for the sages instead). Besides the XP system, there's also the combat engine that supplemented Link's standard sword and shield - both of which he starts with and never upgrades, so either the Master Sword and Hylian Shield were just lying in Zelda's temple somewhere or this is an older Link from the first game - with up-stab and down-stab attacks, which are a great deal of fun even if an annoying amount of enemies seem to be immune to them. The only time I've seen those moves reused were for Link's Super Smash Bros. appearances, and are also a big part of the reason he's my main in those games. Few characters dominate the airspace like that guy. The magic system with its gauge and variable cost spells, though, was something they brought back for future Zelda games; though they were thankfully less contingent to certain puzzles, which sucked when your progress was impeded by a necessary spell you no longer had the MP to cast.

The other reason it's tough to rate what Zelda II does new is because it was following the example of a bunch of other side-scrolling dungeon crawlers I've yet to check out. I was going to double-barrel this entry with Hudson's Faxanadu: while Faxanadu was released a few months after Zelda II, both games take after Falcom's action-RPG Xanadu, upon which Faxanadu is largely based. Falcom's earliest RPGs have always felt like proto-Zeldas in some respects, and I was hoping to get a better sense of where Zelda II's new perspective and mechanics came from by scoping the competition as it were, but... nah. Zelda II took a lot out of me, and I've got a backlog of GOTY contenders to work through in the coming weeks. Certainly going to put a pin it for later though, especially after the great time I had with the (considerably more modern) Xanadu Next back in June.

So I now find my way back around to the final talking point from before, which neatly dovetails with my opinion on whether the game has truly held up. Honestly, the "Nintendo Hard" difficulty really did it for me in the end. I refused to use save states except for areas that flirted with cheap falling deaths - getting knocked into a pit by some floating medusa head motherfucker was all too common - but I couldn't escape it when it came to the final gauntlet. In order to reach and complete the game's seventh and final dungeon - the immense Great Palace - you first have to take a winding mountain road around the overworld. This path has no fewer than six fixed encounters, all of which are filled with tough floating enemies and as many lava pits for them to knock you down into. Even if you somehow avoid that fate, though, you get so worn down by all these encounters that you're in a sorry state by the time you reach the Palace itself. At that juncture, you then have to pass through twenty-odd rooms (though it's probably around a dozen if you take the direct route) with some of the toughest enemies in the game - the Red and Blue "Fokkas" are aptly-named - and then take on the game's two toughest boss fights in a row. Zelda II had its rough patches throughout the game - particularly the remote palaces where your mana, health, and lives count would all be exhausted before you could finish them - but this last gauntlet was overwhelming to the extent that it'd take a superhuman effort or many, many failed tries to navigate through it. Maybe that speaks to how inured I've become to the softer, more player-friendly games of the modern age that I can't muster the skill level to tackle a NES game on its own terms any more, but considering the difficulty curve had been manageable up to that point I have to wonder what possessed the designers to go full Jigsaw for that final stretch of deathtraps.

In a modern light, I don't think Zelda II's commonly reviled problems are all that significant as detractors. The magic system was a little undercooked, with certain utility spells being way too expensive considering their paramountcy to progress, but I liked the way the game would set up these side-quests for the towns where the reward was a critical spell, and the way it would find frequent outlets for these spells to uncover the way to secrets. The jump spell is only strictly necessary for one or two high walls, but continued to be useful throughout the game for unreachable items and against certain aerial enemy types. The very first spell, Shield, was indispensable for boss and sub-boss fights, provided you had enough MP left to cast it. Obviously the Heal spell was the most vital, though unsurprisingly also the most expensive. The combat could be mashy but the intelligence of the enemies, particularly the humanoid ones like Iron Knuckles and Dairas, made every fight with them tense as they'd block your blows while retaliating with their own for you to quickly deflect or avoid. And like I said before, that dichotomy of ephemeral and permanent progress - where devastating game overs were frequent but rarely ever meant a complete erasure of all forward momentum - had the same hardscrabble appeal as a modern roguelite that keeps at least some enduring remnant of the previous run. Just don't expect to finish Zelda II unless you have a lot of patience, a lot of skill, or a lot of not-giving-an-eff when it comes to abusing modern amenities like save states.

I realize the IGotW feature is in a little bit of a rut here, with yet another explormer with heavy RPG elements that spent a long time bouncing around Kickstarter. It's Indivisible from Lab Zero Games (the Skullgirls people); an RPG that is overtly riffing on tri-Ace's Valkyrie Profile but also subtly on Konami's Suikoden. Indivisible follows impetuous axe-girl Ajna as she chases after the despotic monster who burned down her village; however, this is only the first act in what emerges as a classic JRPG conflict for the sake of the very world. Ajna has the distinctive ability to "absorb" friendly fighters and summon them for combat, allowing them to chill in her "inner realm" (not a euphemism) in the meantime. The game splits its time between platforming sections, where you're controlling just Ajna as she climbs walls, slides under gaps, and learns new abilities that expand her traversal capabilities further, and in battles where she and three companions quickly demolish enemy encounters with a real-time/turn-based hybrid combat system.

Let's focus on the combat first. The player's party is arranged in a diamond formation so that each individual fighter corresponds to a face button on the DualShock/XBox controller, and that button is used to both attack and defend (when the enemy is attacking). Defending works like the Mario RPGs, where holding the defense button mitigates some damage and holding it right at the moment the enemy strikes mitigates even more. Attacking is closer to Valkyrie Profile - the main similarity the two games share, in conjunction with the way other fighters just hang out inside the heroine's head - or Project X Zone, where it's not just about unloading attacks when they become available but harmonizing with your other fighters to create effective combo chains. Indivisible goes one step beyond VP by having separate attack functions depending on whether you're pressing that character's attack button while holding up or down (or neither, i.e. "neutral"). A mage, therefore, might have a fireball attack on neutral but could use the up+attack function for a party buff and down+attack for a heal. Each character has a different assortment of abilities, often meant be to complementary with other skills they possess or those of their party members. It's... a lot. Especially when you factor in how many characters this game has: though you can only roll with a party of four at any given moment, including the compulsory inclusion of the protagonist, I currently have at least ten companions with me and I'm sure that's not all of them.

In that regard, it can be said that the game can feel a little overwhelming, especially early on. Though in some ways far more simple than most turn-based RPGs - characters only have three attacks, everyone heals back to full automatically after battle, and there's no equipment or skill trees to be concerned about - the number of companions and the way their abilities complement each other as a unit makes it tricky to figure out which assortment works best for the player's style. There's also the matter of proper attack timing: you're essentially creating fighter game combos (the team repurposing their experience with Skullgirls to an extent) with four separate characters with twelve distinct actions between them, figuring out how best to send an enemy into the air to juggle them without ground-based attacks whiffing, or how to quickly demolish a guard stance with an up+attack/down+attack combo (I think the idea being that you can't block high and low at the same time) before laying in the damage before that enemy can rally and put up their barrier again. It sounds more complex than it actually is though, because by using the same characters regularly you get a feel for how and when they should strike. That the game keeps throwing more characters at you is where it starts to feel a little much again. However, in spite of this, encounters have been relatively breezy to get through; while enemies hit very hard if you aren't blocking, there's a way for the protagonist to easily heal and resurrect the party early on, and most enemies telegraph way ahead of time who they're about to hit. It's no big ask to have them defending in preparation, though obviously a little tougher to get that perfect guard timing down with each new enemy type. I've had a few party wipeouts with some bossfights, but I wouldn't say I was struggling at any point. That you respawn instantly at checkpoints, which are also plentiful, helps considerably.

Then there's the platforming. Ajna controls well enough and while I've only acquired a few new traversal upgrades, they've already immensely when covering new ground. Ajna starts with an infinite wall jump, and she can later use an axe as a makeshift foothold to make climbing even easier. A high-powered dash not only smashes through certain obstacles, but greatly expedites your passage across level terrain and will even count as a pre-emptive hit on wandering enemies if they happen to be in the way. I just acquired something akin to a high jump (though it's only slightly higher than normal) and am looking forward to gathering more. The map is doing a fine job logging where I cannot yet go - barriers I have the right ability to surpass are indicated as such with an appropriate icon, while those for which I lack the ability have a question mark - as well as keeping track of quest sponsors and destinations. I'd say the platforming makes up a significant amount of the gameplay, at around a 60/40 split with the combat, though obviously the latter is where most of the game's mechanical focus is concentrated.

Indivisible's art design is top notch. The excellent character designs and animations of Skullgirls are equally at the forefront here, and the whole game world is roughly analogous to the continent of Asia: Ajna and her village invoke India, as do the game's early antagonists; the climactic Mt. Sumeru and its protectors have a distinct Nepalese or Tibetan feel; the hub-like port city of Port Maerifa suggests an Arabian background; and early impressions of the kingdom of Tai Krung hints at a steampunk variation of China. Half of the cultures depicted are very rarely seen in video games, at least outside of single stages within the Tomb Raiders and Uncharteds (which are only ever as respectful as "nice stuff you guys have, don't mind if I do"), and the variation in colorful styles only enhances the art direction further. It's well voice-acted on the whole too, with actors specifically chosen to match the real life equivalent ethnicities of their characters. RPGs regularly draw from exotic locales and customs for their distinctive worldbuilding, but rarely with this level of detail. It's a shame most of it is purely aesthetic; the game doesn't do a whole lot of optional lore gathering outside of story cutscenes and conversations. I did like how some of the monsters were drawn from all across Asia as well, including a favorite of mine: the unsettling Malay vampire penanggalan.

While my playthrough is dogged by a nagging feeling that I could be combo-ing better or working on a more palatable party composition, on the whole I'm greatly enjoying both sides of Indivisible's platforming/RPG dynamic. I always appreciate when Indie RPG developers take after the lesser known or more ambitious RPGs of my childhood (fine, late teens if we're talking PS1) like Valkyrie Profile or Suikoden. The latter's influences are a little more muted, but are most apparent when, in addition to new fighters, you also find yourself absorbing NPCs who provide services like upgrading, hints on future destinations, to playing selected tunes from the soundtrack. The number "108" also appears frequently, most prominently in the game's achievements, which is an important figure for any Suikoden fan. As I stated the game's RPG elements are more downplayed than they might initially seem; characters gain levels regularly but this only seems to bump up their HP and damage output slightly. The bigger evolutions come through finding well-hidden and out-of-reach collectibles called "ringsels": a certain number of which expands the amount of times your characters can attack in one turn, or can be put towards making defensive plays even more effective. These upgrades make a huge change to your combat prowess, but the combat's been approachable enough that they aren't strictly necessary if backtracking to earlier areas with new abilities isn't your deal. I both like and am made slightly anxious by the vast number of characters that can join the party, as each offers a unique method of playing them that takes some acclimatization, but too much choice is hardly a negative.

I'm around the halfway point of Indivisible as I write this and plan to stick with it for the long haul, curious about the way the game has suddenly opened up to allow for multiple destinations while suggesting that progress in each will be incremental as I bounce between them with newly acquired skills. I haven't seen a whole lot written about the game since its release last month, but I think it'll appeal most to those who sit on that rare Venn diagram overlap of fighter fanatics who love to spend hours "in the lab" with team compositions and combo mix-ups, and explormer stans who enjoy a well-annotated map of barrier puzzles to solve later on with the right tools.

Rating: 3 out of 5. (Downgraded from 4 because of the rushed final chapter and terrible end boss fight.)

I was struck when listening to the Beastcast conversation on Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts III that, when prompted by Dan to explain what Kingdom Hearts was, Vinny never thought to compare the progression of Kingdom Hearts III - or any given KH game - to his beloved Mass Effect. In both franchises, the player spends their time pursuing smaller stories isolated to particular worlds - the Therian on Feros in ME1, for example, or the Quarian/Geth dispute that pops up in all three - while also grappling with an overarching story that affects the entire galaxy. The player also visits these worlds in a semi-linear order (you often have the choice between two or three planets at any given juncture) and completes their objectives before the larger story kicks back in, giving each planet and its troubles a sort of episodic structure like a TV season that revisits the main arc every few episodes or so.

As anyone familiar with the Kingdom Hearts franchise would tell you, these worlds are invariably based on a particular Disney or Pixar property. In the past, the series has visited worlds based on The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Tron (and Tron: Legacy), The Nightmare Before Christmas, Alice in Wonderland, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. (None of these places are in Kingdom Hearts III, incidentally.) Kingdom Hearts also has this unusual practice where the "quest" of each world corresponds with the plot of the movie they pertain to: using an above example, in the Aladdin world Agrabah you help Aladdin find the Genie and defeat Jafar after the latter steals Genie's lamp and kidnaps Princess Jasmine. However, in some worlds - especially revisits - the movie's story has already occurred and the designers have found something new for that cast of characters to do once Sora arrives.

When rating the worlds of Kingdom Hearts III, which is what we're here to do today, I considered three criteria:

• The accuracy of each world. How effectively do they convey not only the themes and characters of the movie(s), but the visual design?
• The variety in the gameplay and level design. Some worlds get bonus points here for creating imaginative fight scenarios, or distinctive geography with its own rules of traversal, or even mini-game distractions (dependent on their quality).
• Transformations. While not particularly vital to the game, I appreciate whenever a new world polymorphs Sora, Donald, and Goofy to some new "inconspicuous" form to help them integrate easier. I guess I also like the idea that the Kingdom Hearts universe has its own version of Star Trek's Prime Directive.

(This is where I'd normally post a disclaimer about there being Kingdom Hearts III spoilers throughout, but how do you even go about spoiling the plot of Kingdom Hearts? Even if you had the context nothing really makes any sense. To clarify then: there will be mild spoilers regarding the individual worlds and the events within, but not a whole lot about Xehanort and the Keyblade Wars and what Organization XIII is up to.)

TL;DR: Kingdom Hearts III worlds in order of preference. Let's do this. From worst to best:

Keyblade Graveyard

Source: Kingdom Hearts Original.

For as ominous and climactic as the Keyblade Graveyard is in the grand scheme of things, it really just a wasteland filled with keyblades. Like two whole areas total, neither of which has anything but fights and boring mesas. In fairness, the desolation is meant to convey a ground zero of some ancient conflict that destroyed whatever fertile ecosystem used to be here, but this stack of reddish-brown rocks is not all that interesting to look at and offers very little in the way of gameplay variety or a visual style with any character. Good if you like keyblades though, because it has a bunch.

The Keyblade Graveyard also includes the Skein of Severance, which sounds like something you'd get after being laid off from a textiles factory. This area's just a giant labyrinth where seven or eight of the game's final boss fights take place, and again isn't visually arresting or fun to navigate in the slightest. I'd hate to suggest the developers ran out of time and money when it came to the game's finale, but considering what happened to the similarly delayed and re-delayed Final Fantasy XV it's a distinct possibility.

Twilight Town

Source: Kingdom Hearts Original.

My resentment over Twilight Town is that it replaced Traverse Town as the game's effective "hub" of civilization. Traverse Town was cool because it contained the diaspora of many destroyed worlds who had gathered together there because they had no other place to go. Twilight Town lacks this melting pot of refugees (which included The 101 Dalmatians, suggesting London got blown up by Ansem at some point, so good on him) and instead is just this vaguely nostalgic steampunk setting that is only revelant to the plot because it was recreated as Roxas' virtual world (or prison, if you prefer) in Kingdom Hearts II. This "real" version of Twilight Town doesn't even have Seifer in it, which makes it even more pointless.

The whole world consists of the town itself, a few sewer pipes (and if you've seen one sewer dungeon you've seen them all), and the creepy mansion in the woods where the computers that ran Roxas's virtual world are situated. Landmarks include Unca Scrooge's bistro, where Remy the rat (though he's never referred to by name) cooks up hoity-toity French cuisine in one of KH3's better mini-games, and the local projection booth which broadcasts classic cartoons. I dunno about it says about me, but listening to Unca Scrooge talk about waving a "GummiPhone" over a QR code on a movie poster to play a tie-in mobile game was perhaps one of the lowest points of the series so far. Is nothing spared from your relentless marketing, Disney? Why not have a subplot where the Beagle Boys steal a bunch of user data from Disney+ while we're at it.

Arendelle

Source: Frozen (2013).

I think Frozen is just an OK movie. I don't really get the hype, but at the same time I'm not reflexively going to dump on it because of its wild popularity. It has some catchy tunes, a sweet message about the platonic love between siblings, some of its auroral visuals can be striking, and I can almost tolerate Josh Gad as that damn snowman. However, I'm far more inclined to say Frozen's Kingdom Hearts III world absolutely does suck.

For one, almost the entire world is set on that one mountain Elsa runs off to. You get to visit the lake where the movie's climax takes place, briefly, but you don't see the actual kingdom of Arendelle at all except from a heightened distance. The one time the level design breaks away from cliff-faces and snowy pine trees is when you get trapped in Larxene's icy abyss (not a euphemism), which has a few elevator puzzles to solve but isn't all that engrossing. Finally, there's a snowboarding equivalent mini-game that is more annoying than thrilling: imagine SSX where the slightest collision sends you careening off to the side. They don't even give Sora and friends any warm clothes to wear as a transformation option, though the benefit of that is you get to hear them complain endlessly about the cold. Awesome.

What's worse is that the usual practice of adapting the movie's plot for the KH story of that world is so tangentially done here, more so than in any other world I can recall. Sora and friends pop in just as Elsa escapes to make her own little ice fortress of solitude and only very briefly meet up with Anna and Kristoff, and most of the movie's big moments - Anna and the kingdom getting struck with the ice curse, Anna's whole fling with Hans, anything to do with the snow trolls - you only hear about second-hand if at all. Two-thirds of the movie happen off-screen, while you're busy traipsing up yet another identical stretch of wintry mountain path. The only thing Sora and co. are there to see - in full - is the "Let It Go" musical number because you couldn't really have a Frozen thing without it. It is definitely the Wonderland of KH3: the place that felt most like a chore to get through.

Kingdom of Corona

Source: Tangled (2010).

On the whole I prefer Tangled a little more than Frozen, and that's reflected in how I feel about their KH3 appearances also. The same issues plague both worlds - there's only small fragments of the movie plot which mostly treats Sora and friends as bystanders rather than active participants, the general world design isn't all that varied or interesting to move through, and there aren't any fun transformations - but overall the world of Tangled feels a little more Kingdom Hearts-ready than Arendelle was. What helps a lot is that the companions you get in Corona - both Flynn Rider and Rapunzel herself - have some fun chemistry with each other and with the usual group, and Rapunzel comes in useful for crossing gaps by using her hair like a rope, which is the one part of the Rapunzel mythos I always had an issue with. Even if her hair did have that kind of tensile strength, how much pressure is it exerting on her skull to carry that many people? Not that I expected Kingdom Hearts to go full "Homer Simpson ripping her scalp off" with it, but carrying the whole party over chasms is kind of a stretch. Whatever, it's magic hair, they established that pretty quick.

If you're wondering what kind of workable geography the Tangled movie has that could be leveraged by a video game, the response is "yeah, good question". Turns out most of it involves wandering through the woods, and then through a spookier marsh, and then through more woods, and then a mine for some reason, and finally a big slide down past some more woods. When you get to the kingdom itself - and you do, so that's another point in its favor over Arendelle - there's a brief recreation of Rapunzel's newfound joy of line-dancing with the commonfolk before the plot kicks into gear and you head to the boss and the end of the segment. There are no interiors - excluding cutscenes, you only see Rapunzel and Gothel's mysteriously tiny tower from the outside - and while it did recreate that fun montage where Rapunzel rapidly switches between giddy and distraught after leaving the tower despite Mother Gothel's orders, there's a whole lot of nothing happening story-wise in that long stretch between leaving the tower and reaching Corona. That they then have to jam in half the entire movie once you get to the end feels like a slight failure of the designers to figure out how to pace this world out better. All the same, it feels a lot less sweaty than Arendelle's half-assed integration of the Frozen story.

(You might ask at this juncture what the importance is of accurately displaying the plot of these movies in-game, given everyone coming to Kingdom Hearts has presumably already seen them: I'd argue that the way Sora and his friends are integrated into these movies' plots are where the game's story can be seen at its most cleverly adaptive, and I'd also argue that even if you're already familiar with the beats these stories should still be conveyed in such a manner that it makes sense in isolation, for the sake of the game's storytelling if nothing else. If you're just getting a highlights reel with very little of the necessary context, that world's plotting comes off as rushed and incoherent - and Kingdom Hearts really can't afford to make itself any more incoherent than it already is.)

Scala ad Caelum

Source: Kingdom Hearts Original.

As the final destination, there's not much I can say about Scala ad Caelum that wouldn't be spoiling things, but it's both simultaneously one of the most original worlds Kingdom Hearts has ever created and a massive disappointment due to how the game's ending feels rushed (see above, with the Keyblade Graveyard). Scala ad Caelum is Xehanort's old stomping ground, from some untold number of years in the past, and looks the closest to a Final Fantasy setting this series has ever produced. For all we know, it could be where a few of the series' Final Fantasy characters originally hailed from. Well, back when the Kingdom Hearts series still acknowledged them anyway.

That "for all we know" is important, because there's a whole lot we don't know about this enigmatic wind-powered island utopia and the game never thinks to tell us. We don't know how it disappeared and why (though we can assume it was an early victim of the Keyblade Wars that the antagonist is trying to re-invoke), we never get to see the place in its prime (the version Sora visits is a memory, absent of people), and we don't spend nearly enough time there before the final boss fight warps it beyond all recognition. After all, for "warped beyond all recognition" to work as a dramatic visual concept, you need to be able to recognize a place somewhat first.

It earns some points for being a visually striking location for a final battle and one that I'm positive future games will dive back into, or maybe one of the many interquel games already has. Even its name is cool: Scala ad Caelum is latin for "Stairway to Heaven," though it's a setting sadly absent of Jimmy Page guitar solos. But the odd throwaway nature of its appearance in this game - I suppose an issue with any Final Fantasy final dungeon - means that it lacks the backstory and context to be properly memorable. Cool windmills though.

The Hundred Acre Woods

Source: Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966).

It's not that I dislike hanging out with everyone's favorite silly old bear and his friends in Kingdom Hearts's most wholesome of recurring worlds, it's just that this world always feels the most tacked-on and inconsequential in any game in which it appears. There is no conflict in the Hundred Acre Woods, unless you count Rabbit getting pissed that someone stood on his cabbage patch again, so you can't create combat scenarios filled with Heartless like you can anywhere else. Instead, visits to the Hundred Acre Woods invariably involve a handful of mini-games and story cutscenes that are entirely irrespective to the rest of the game. Kingdom Hearts III is no exception in this regard.

The only real change for KH3's Hundred Acre Woods are the new mini-games: suppressing Hong Kong protesters and forcing Bobby Kotick to fire a couple of disrespectful Hearthstone streamers helping Rabbit harvest some fruit, some veggies, and some flowers. These mini-games all riff on Bust-a-Move with slightly different rules, the chief connecting mechanic (one it took me a while to figure out) is that you can send multiple versions of the same item out at once, making it a lot easier to create chains. These mini-games aren't particularly difficult, perhaps befitting of the kindergarten-age property they appear in, so I bounced quickly after I got everything I needed to from this world. Bye for now Pooh, and I look forward to some Tigger Tetris when KH4 rolls around.

Olympus

Source: Hercules (1997)

Olympus has the unenviable task of being the first world out of the gate, and saddled even further by having the voice of professional crappy person James Woods to cause exasperated sighs every few moments. I didn't watch the Hercules movie, but Olympus has popped up in both the previous games so I'm at least familiar enough with the Kingdom Hearts version. In the first game all you saw of this place was the Coliseum: a place where you'd get into a few story-related scraps early on with the likes of Cloud and then kept returning to for optional battles against increasingly tougher encounters. In the second Kingdom Hearts, they gave the characters that dwell in Olympus a little more to do, bringing in Meg and the plot of the movie as well as dragging in Final Fantasy X's resident cool dad Auron as some reluctant undead muscle. If the Olympus events of KH1 and KH2 combined were roughly analogous to the Hercules movie give or take a booze-swilling samurai, KH3 is very much in the post-movie timeline: this gives the core characters like Meg or Phil (who doesn't even speak) less to do, as their arcs are over, but does at least have a neat little coda with Hercules and Sora about what true strength means.

As the first world, Olympus is also given the task of tutorializing a lot of the game's new (or recent, at least) traversal mechanics. Subsequently, the level designers really had to go all out in creating a set of scenarios that could showcase every one of them, ensuring that the player was well-equipped to deal with any similar obstacles in the worlds ahead. This includes context-based commands (in Olympus's case, using Goofy's shield to bypass burning areas of Thebes) and an ascent up Mt. Olympus by using the new wall-running mechanic to sprint up the sides of sheer cliffs. There's not much of a story here - Hades figures out how to summon all the Titans at once, and Hercules and Sora has to take the fight all the way up to Zeus's seat in Olympus - but as a prologue it works adequately for setting the stage and introducing the player to everything new. I also appreciate that some effort was made in recreating the "antiquity" artistic flourishes seen in the movie, though we were robbed of seeing Donald and Goofy in togas.

Monstropolis

Source: Monsters, Inc. (2001)

Motherfucking Mike Wazowski! No kidding, Monsters, Inc. was one of the worlds I was most excited to visit upon starting up the game. In part because I knew Sora and friends would turn into some goofy-ass monsters, but also because I was curious how much of the movie and how much of the titular Monsters, Inc. building we would get to see. Now, to be fair on the game, I wasn't exactly expecting something like Control's The Oldest House or anything, but I knew the level designers could have a lot of fun recreating the innards of this enigmatic scream (now laughter) factory from the fast assembly lines of "active" closet doors down to the battery center and converters and other power plant paraphernalia.

I will say this for Monstropolis: you do get intimately acquainted with the power plant of the movie, from a brief glimpse of Roz's cluttered office to the "shop floor" - now filled with balloons and comedy props, because we are talking post-movie here - to the deeper floors full of heavy duty machinery and explosive fire hazards. Boo's still here, along with Mike and Sulley, and there are a few occasions where you have to make her laugh in order to overpower the machinery and make progress, which was always cute. The reason it's somewhere in the middle of this list though, is that running through all these factory areas was a little too boring for its own good: I wasn't sure what I was anticipating, but the Monsters, Inc. factory looks a lot like every other damn factory out there. There wasn't even any fun "make sure to keep your tentacles away from the heavy machinery" type mock safety posters, at least none that I could see. It looked more to me like the concept artists just took a day tour around an actual power plant and sketched out all the relevant areas. A mite on the dull side in terms of geography then, but I have to give it props for two decent soundalike companions and some cool monster designs for Sora, Donald, and Goofy (Goofy in particular looked like he could pass as Toejam's cousin).

San Fransokyo

Source: Big Hero 6 (2014)

I liked the movie Big Hero 6 plenty enough; it felt like Disney finally acknowledging that, for a large portion of their younger audience, the star-studded localizations of the Japanese Studio Ghibli movies were what the company was best known for producing. Big Hero 6 was an overt attempt to combine western and eastern cultures - the main city is called San Fransokyo, after all - with all the requisite mecha and superheroes and kaiju and comic one-liners. It's also another KH world where the movie's plot already came and went, and so Sora is introduced to a fully formed Big Hero 6 team with little (but not zero) of the trauma that defined the movie's themes.

What I liked about this world and the one following it on the list is that the level designers realized they couldn't really make every single one of KH3's worlds a strictly linear affair. Instead, the format of San Fransokyo takes after that most commonly seen in a comic book-based video game: the open-world genre. San Fransokyo's tasks involve traversing a large but static urban map of high-rises and train tracks to accomplish multiple objectives, including one where Sora has to quickly whiz around the map saving each individual member of the Big Hero 6 (besides Hiro, who has a support role, and Baymax, who is your companion for this world) in their respective conflicts with the Heartless. It was also a joy to comb that cityscape for all the hidden collectibles (KH3 has two main types: treasure chests and circular icons that look like Mickey's head), and I appreciated the effort that went into making both a day and night version of the same map, with different encounters. I even thought its little tale about the return of the microbots and an earlier, corrupted Baymax was one of the better of KH3's self-contained stories.

The Caribbean

Source: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)

It's hard for me to get a solid grasp of how I felt about the Pirates movies, given what's emerged about Johnny Depp in recent years but also because of the way that original trilogy went so deep up its own ass. The first movie had some fun double-crosses and pirate trickery, as befitting of the literary genre it was playing around in, but the second and third just lost me with how much you had to follow who was betraying who and for what reason when they were supposed to be silly pirate movies produced by Disney where Jack Sparrow kept falling over because his brain was suspended in fermented molasses. That KH3 chooses to follow the events of the third movie, skipping the second entirely unless I missed an interquel somewhere, makes it even harder for Sora (and the audience) to know what the hell is happening with Davy Jones and Tia Dalma and Barbossa and that one smarmy bad guy in a powdered wig whose name escapes me.

However, what this chapter does have in its corner is a remarkable microcosm re-enactment of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. As soon as you're done with the sub-aquatic prologue of this world, where you and Jack eventually discover a fancy new ship hidden inside a mountain Goonies-style and take it out into the open sea, you make a small pit-stop at Port Royal to catch some crabs (long story) and are then prompted to head to where to the boss and chapter end awaits. Before then, though, you can take your new boat and travel across an archipelago of different isles full of treasure, puzzles, and sea-themed Heartless to slay. Along the way, you bump into enemy ships in what I reckon is a pretty decent facsimile of the ship-to-ship combat of the Assassin's Creed games, or at least the ones with nautical sections. Collecting crabs from all over the Caribbean further evolves your ship (again, long story) and makes these battles even more layered and fun, with unusual abilities like launching the ship several hundred feet into the air and bring it crashing down on an opponent. The thrilling two-prong final boss fight with Davy Jones and his ship, The Flying Dutchman, makes up for all the dense plotting they have to squeeze into the start and end of this particular world. And hey, Sora's pirate captain transformation is back - including missing teeth and a ragged waterlogged look that must smell like a barnacle's armpit when the sun hits it.

Toy Box

Source: Toy Story (1995)

I think everyone's most anticipated KH3 world was the Toy Story world, and to the game's credit you go here almost immediately once you're done with the prologue chapter in Olympus, presumably because the developers know how impatient we are for it after hours of climbing a mountain to face a guy we've beaten twice before. The chronology of the movies, which are all a few years apart, makes it difficult to determine when in the lives of the toys this particular adventure is set. They side-step the unusual quandary of the giant-sized humans by suggesting that this particular group of toys - a carefully curated selection of just Woody, Buzz, Rex, Hamm, a squad of army men, and a trio of the claw-catcher aliens - is trapped in a simulation not unlike the one that imprisoned Roxas so many moons ago. They also account for Sora's appearance as a stylish anime action figure by suggesting he's a toy based on a video game that is currently popular in the Toy Story world, which is some kind of Inception spiral of toys based on games based on toys in a video game that I'm not awake enough to sort out right now.

Besides the action figure transformations, the other great thing about the Toy Story world is just how imaginative the level design is. In particular, the way each part of the multi-floor toy store that the crew finds themselves in has its own self-contained adventure: there's a pre-school area that ends up being fairly creepy with its evil dolls, a store full of cool action toys that pits you against dinosaurs and mutants, a video game store where you're temporarily transplanted into a MechWarrior style arena shooter, and a "kiddie corral" play center that includes a ball pit and a fortress of blocks and slides. From the small perspective, these areas are a blast to run around and fight in, and this world is the only one to have a substantial number of unique enemies, most of which are toys possessed by a specific type of puppeteer Heartless. The fights with the gothic lolita dolls and the manned mech suits were unlike anything else in the game.

The Toy Story world definitely felt like the most realized of all the worlds in KH3, and is presumably why it was rolled out early so the game could begin with its best foot forward. It's a shame the rest of the game's worlds couldn't quite stack up by comparison, beyond the original concepts (for KH, at least) brought forward by San Fransokyo and The Caribbean. I think if the whole game exhibited the ambition and variety of Toy Box, Kingdom Hearts III might make a stronger case for its inclusion in the GOTY discourse. Unfortunately, I think overall there were too many cut corners and ideas that weren't as fully realized as they could've been. I might still prefer KH3 to its two predecessors, if only because so much time has passed and game design (especially where quality-of-life tweaks are concerned) has evolved so much since then, but even with all these Pixar ringers to draw from it feels a little underwhelming. Still, I won't brook any arguments that the game was a total wipeout: Toy Box and its plethora of highlights are an indication of what Kingdom Hearts can be at its best.

All right, all right, so it's another explormer. However, I would argue that Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is the most important explormer of this year, and it's therefore paramount that I cover it here instead of some minimal budget thing from 2016 (not that I mean to denigrate minimal budget things from 2016; plenty more of those coming in 2020). The big surprise return of Koji Igarashi to the genre he helped define through Castlevania: Symphony of the Night started with a Kickstarter project that was wildly successful, to the extent that it even made a stretch goal to develop a completely separate prequel game. It's fair to say that for all those who backed the game at least, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is one of the most hotly anticipated releases of this year. And I hated it. Nah, I'm just kidding; can you imagine waiting years for some Japanese auteur designer to finally release his dream project free of any shackles only to find out it's a horrific disappointment? Heavens forfend.

Talking of heavens forfending things, we've got a castle chock full of demons to slay. Bloodstained follows the adventures of Miriam: a "shardbinder" who was cursed by human alchemists with a crystal embedded into her body that is capable of channelling darker forces so she could be a pawn in a conspiracy to summon a demonic horde to overwhelm the complacent populace of the 18th century, who had long since stopped giving alchemists money for their research because fancy steam trains and automated factories were more the rage. That's a loose approximation of what sense I can make out of the story, because it's really just an excuse for Iga to cast Shanoa in the leading role again without violating any Konami copyrights. Like Shanoa, Miriam is covered with demonic tattoos that confer a number of demonic powers, and each enemy in the game can potentially drop their "shard" for Miriam to collect and use; some shards are active spells while other provide passive effects like familiars that float around and support you, or provide boosts to stats and resistances. If you've played Order of Ecclesia (or either of the Aria of Sorrow/Dawn of Sorrow duo) you already know the score. The game's antagonist is another of these shardbinders, Gebel, but you get the hint early on that it's another "Richter's being possessed" situation: I've no doubt I'll need to figure out what's controlling him and remove it if I want to see the rest of the game and its true ending.

But these familiar beats are part of Bloodstained's charm. Igarashi is careful to make sure the game is highly evocative but not entirely a carbon copy of his previous works. Part of that process is the new look, of course, which has a much heavier emphasis on 3D character models and environments. Some of it works, though a lot of it is pretty rough going: some odd lighting choices here and there, some dubious canned animations, and when the game decides to play with parts in the background that suddenly become "active" once they enter the plane Miriam is working in, the transition between when something is there and when it isn't is really hard to judge. This was certainly the case with the first boss of the game: a kraken-like monster called Vepar, who would swing its tentacles menacingly in the background before swiping them across the deck to damage you. Most of the changes, though, are welcome mechanical improvements. These include quality of life changes like being able to change the dimensions of your mini-map or gaining permanent stat boosts by eating new types of food (the Igavanias always had lots of food items, but they were usually ignored for the standard potions). There's a side-quest structure that usually has you killing certain monster types or collecting/crafting rare items, there's farming (of the literal kind) through which you can get a lot of food ingredients quickly, and there are waystone items that teleport you directly to your home base which are vital when you're stuck miles away from the nearest save room and are in a critical health state.

Despite these changes, though, it feels just like playing a classic Igavania and I suspect that was the whole point. These additions are relatively minor tweaks in the grand scheme of things, and the meat of the gameplay is still in picking your favorite weapon type, exploring a castle from top to bottom, making notes of which areas are inaccessible and for what reasons, coming back to those places once you've procured the right upgrades, and figuring out how best to defeat the game's no-joke boss fights without just spamming Heretical Grinder. It's about finding an enemy close to an exit where it can be quickly killed and respawned and deciding to farm it until it finally drops its shard. It's about using enemies to get higher up by air-stomping their head for extra height, M. Bison style. It's about swinging your weapon just before you land and attacking immediately again as soon as your feet touch the ground for a sneaky twofer. These were all fondly remembered habits from Sorrow and Ecclesia that I quickly fell right back into, and are clear evidence that Igarashi and his team at ArtPlay knew exactly what their fans wanted and where to pick up after their time at Konami came to an end.

If I had to create an analogy for what it feels like to play Bloodstained, it's like one of those times where Giant Bomb moved studios for their live shows. It was a bit rough initially aesthetically speaking, but it was clear that the team hadn't skipped a beat and the new digs would eventually offer all sorts of advantages and amenities that the previous studio lacked. It'd take a little while longer before it really began to feel like old times again, but the faith you had in them to put on a quality show was sure to be rewarded. Bloodstained has its little flaws and bugs - I especially don't care for when the game refuses to let you collect an enemy drop because it fell into some weird seam in the geometry, and the load times are on the languid side - but the core is solid and the developers knows all the right notes to hit. I'm looking forward to digging even more into it, possibly even catching up to the currently ongoing GBEast playthrough before they reach the end. Another strong contender for my GOTY list this year.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine opportunity to finally tick off a few items I've had on my various backlog lists/spreadsheets for longer than I'd care to admit.

October

• Game: G-Craft's Arc the Lad
• System: PlayStation (via PlayStation 3)
• Original Release: 1995-06-30.
• Time from Release to Completion: Twenty-four years, four months, twelve days.

It has been something of a nightmare trying to arrange this October edition of the Bucketlog, a feature that - overall - I'm sort of wishing I'd organized a little better from the get go. Due partly to the week-long Extra Life streams but mostly to this frankly irresponsible idea of mine to delegate each entry to a separate non-current console, I bounced between a DOS game that was way too long, a decade-plus old Indie game that I could not figure out at all, a "classic" Xbox game that my Xbox 360 absolutely refused to boot up despite being on the backwards compatibility list, and eventually a glance through my small library of PS1 games on PS3 that I impulse bought because they were all games previously inaccessible to Europe. That is how I eventually settled on the first Arc the Lad game by G-Craft.

An early game by PlayStation standards - released on the dead center of 1995 in Japan, on the very same month that saw the release of EarthBound on the North American SNES - Arc the Lad is the first part of a planned trilogy of strategy RPGs in the vein of a Shining Force: in the sense that each member of your party is a story-critical character with a unique range of skills, not an interchangeable archetype with a specific martial focus that fits into some vague rock-paper-scissors structure. It's primarily pixel- and sprite-based barring a handful of slightly wonky CGI cutscenes, and - most critically for my purposes here, some two weeks after the Bucketlog deadline I'd set myself - its status as the first chapter of a three-part story meant it was relatively brisk. I'd first encountered the Arc the Lad franchise not via the original Arc the Lad (which was a Japan-only release) or the Arc the Lad Collection, the Working Designs-localized compilation of all three games (which was only released in North America) but by the somewhat distant descendant that is Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits for PlayStation 2, which I discussed back in 2017 as part of my The Top Shelf feature. It's been a point of interest since then to see where this franchise originated. More vitally, how does Arc the Lad stack up against Vandal Hearts and Final Fantasy Tactics: its closest PS1 contemporaries?

While I'm not making any bold claims about quality at this juncture, I will say that Arc the Lad has a few remarkable facets that involves its status as the first part of a series. Chiefly, that it establishes a lot of world geography and plot-lines like Arc's missing father that are left for future entries to flesh out which, while it doesn't make for compelling storytelling playing the game on its own divorced from its sequels, does at least create an interesting precedent for what we now call episodic games. I see so few games from this era with the kind of unfounded confidence in its continued longevity that Arc the Lad exhibits, to the extent that the developers feel like they can create a handful of countries, spend around an hour in each one, and then pad out the brief runtime with a 50-floor bonus dungeon (more on that horror in a little bit) and story-inessential "training" maps of pre-determined mob placements. The core story of the game would probably take somewhere between 10-15 hours to complete (less if you're buttoning through cutscenes) if you just stuck to it, which means you could feasibly fit five or six Arc the Lads into a single Final Fantasy VIII or Xenogears (though, again, not that I'm complaining about a mercifully short RPG).

In addition, your team is limited to seven people in what feels like a nod to Kurosawa: the main hero Arc, who maintains a jack-of-all-trades balance of physical and magical prowess; Kukuru, the kunoichi deuteragonist who can't hit hard but is hard to hit, and also fast with her support magic; Poco, the out-of-his-depth military musician whose instruments provide a wide range of support and offensive skills; Tosh, a purely offensive swordsman whose higher movement rate allows him to dash right into the front lines; Iga, a burly monk who is the master of counterattacks; Gogen, a venerable sage who is the party's pure spellcaster; and Chongara, a linguistically-challenged merchant/thief and designated comic relief who relies mostly on summoned units. Between the seven you get a great variation of skills and talents, though some naturally shine brighter than others. For instance, when I'd completed the game both Arc (the hero) and Tosh (the pure offensive swordsman) had hit their max level as both would regularly be sweeping the battlefield. Poco and Kukuru, conversely, were seriously falling behind due to the lack of XP earned from using their support skills. As the game and enemies grew ever more challenging, these softer units would fall even further back, sometimes dying in a single hit if an enemy happened to squeeze past my frontline fighters.

However, despite these deficiencies and limitations, there are sparks of originality and innovation throughout Arc the Lad. The most striking is the game's presentation, which is distinctly Japanese: I had always seen its bandanna-sporting hero in bulky iron plate and assumed the usual medieval fantasy setting, but instead Arc the Lad feels both beholden to Japan-focused RPGs full of yokai and samurai like the Momotaro Densetsu series as well as riffing on Final Fantasy VI (and Final Fantasy VII, in an unexpected bit of precognition) in how the world is filled with technology haves and have-nots, with regions of the world living a humble feudal existence while other kingdoms, like Arc's home continent of Seiryu, having technology like giant airships and enormous televisions in the city square. The more technologically advanced kingdoms were also, inevitably, the ones causing the most damage to the world's natural order: the natural order that Arc and his party eventually set out to make right again, by travelling the world and befriending a series of elemental "Guardians." It took me a moment after absorbing what I felt was a generic JRPG plot that it only became so because of what followed years after this game: Final Fantasy VII had taken the world by storm and begat a number of imitators, and we slowly became inured to seeing fantasy worlds with present-day contemporary metropolises where spiky-haired heroes wielded swords against robots and monsters alike. It's hard to think back to before that particular aesthetic was everywhere.

There's also a handful of mechanical innovations, which while perhaps weren't ideas that would set the world on fire certainly still further enhance the game's own distinct personality. Throwing and grabbing mechanics, for instance: a character with points in the former becomes more adept at using items on other combatants, heals for allies and traps for enemies, while points in the latter allows the character to grab enemy items thrown at them and toss them back. There aren't really enough enemies in the game that toss items around to make these statistics noteworthy - they're mostly there to stop you throwing powerful items at bosses, which usually have decent grab stats - but I could see the future entries making them a more prominent fixture. The XP gain seems to derive from both damage given and taken: in theory, if a weaker unit were to take a serious hit and survive, they'd gain a huge amount of experience and be able to catch up to their teammates faster. Unfortunately, this also made it harder for lagging characters to catch up, as their damage output was often in the single-digits against higher level enemies. Finally, the versatility of Chongara's summon pot and Poco's instruments makes them both very interesting units on the battlefield, if not broken with the right amount of focus: Chongara's summons can be individually leveled up and even given equipment, and one of the game's superbosses actually becomes one of these summon options (albeit only in the aforementioned story-inessential training maps, since she'd massacre any story battle you throw her into), and the first two you get can heal other units and build little bridges to inaccessible areas respectively, which are useful utilities to have early on. Meanwhile, Poco's instruments recall the bard class of the Wizardry games: they start relatively useless, being behind the pure warriors and mages of the party in terms of damage output, but the powerful effects of the infinite-use mid- to late-game instruments they find eventually allows them to equal and even dwarf their more limited comrades.

I mentioned a little earlier that Arc the Lad's story, being rather short, meant that the developers sought to expand the game's meager runtime with a bunch of time-consuming bonus dungeons. One involves training at the monastery where you recruit the monk Iga, where you take on eleven progressively tougher challenges. Another involves the arena, a slightly more comic chapter where the emcee gleefully hints at a violent death for any who participate (and a set of matching luggage to the tournament's runner-up) that provides a near-endless amount of one-on-one fights with prizes for every successful tenth bout. Finally, there are the Forbidden Ruins near Chongara's store, in which you only need to descend five floors to progress the story. I have no idea what possessed me to partake in this fifty-floor monstrosity, be it curiosity or determination to see what lay at the bottom, but the idea of this place is to fight your way down to the fiftieth floor - without ever healing or having the chance to leave with what you'd found thus far - and then defeat the game's hardest opponent on the bottom floor: a prepubescent anime girl called Choko. Then, you had to fight all the way back up to the first floor before you can leave. It's an undertaking that took me an entire day, one fraught with tension as there was never an opportunity to save my progress throughout, and while only two characters emerged intact they were forever changed by their ordeal: not only were they twenty levels higher than everyone else in the party, but they had seen some really serious shit. There's a few end-game bosses like the Wyvern and the Fate Dragon that appear in huge numbers on the lower floors, and of course Choko herself is no pushover: twice the HP of any enemy in the game, and a nasty habit of inflicting the darkness status which made her already prestigious ability to dodge even more effective. Though a constant source of anguish, I have to admit that playing through that whole debacle gave me memories of this game that won't soon abate, for better or worse.

On the whole, I'm still not sure where I stand with Arc the Lad and I suspect I never will unless I bite the bullet and buy its two sequels from PSN (Sony had the temerity of selling off the Arc the Lad Collection piecemeal). It's about on an even keel with the first Vandal Hearts - the sequel, which I love, is a completely different and way crazier story - and certainly a big drop in complexity from Final Fantasy Tactics (and, I have to assume, the Tactics Ogre game that preceded it and was released on the Super Famicom a mere three months after Arc the Lad). It's also completely unbalanced and easy to break apart due to its copious bonus content - which when added to the game's story missions probably still accounts for more than half the game. I have some fondness for it and SRPGs of its type though; I like going through these maps with a posse of familiar faces, utilizing everyone's well-established strengths to divide and conquer the enemy forces, and seeing them all interact in the story scenes in-between as Chongara cooks up another scheme and everyone complains about Tosh not bathing as often as he should. The game even ends with a Trails in the Sky-style romantic confession and sudden tragic separation, building towards an arc (so to speak) that would no doubt stretch across all three games. It's wholly unlike Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits, which changed far more than just the grid-like structure of the first Arc the Lad, but I'm glad I got a taste of this lesser known exemplar of the SRPG sub-genre.

IGotW is entering GOTY mode for the final six entries of 2019, focusing only on games released this year as I desperately try to pad out my top ten. Despite all that, it's still business as usual this time with another quirky explormer, this time with a cat that controls a robot suit. Gato Roboto is a monochrome, 8-bit-styled (though the smooth animations belie its more modern roots) explormer specifically in the Metroid mold: most of the game's combat is focused around guns and missiles, there's the Zero Mission feature of having an armored protagonist and a much weaker version outside of that armor who instead has to rely more on stealth and careful platforming, and Gato Roboto's traversal upgrades even include a screw attack variant.

To get back to that armor/unarmored aspect, the game has you controlling the cat of a spacefaring patrolman, the latter of whom was drawn to an abandoned research station by a mysterious S.O.S. but crash lands en route. As a cat, the player is exceptionally vulnerable to the bizarre creatures prowling around the disused facility, but she can fit herself inside an exosuit at any save point which is far sturdier and has the means to fight back. However, there are times when the cat form is necessary, as only the cat can climb walls and fit into narrow passageways. The game's progression is roughly devised in the fashion of a classic Metroid game, Metroid Fusion most of all, as it requires that the player visit each region of the station to fix its problems before they are allowed to access the core where the end-game awaits. Each of these sections has their own smart gimmick: the aqueducts are flooded with water, which the exosuit cannot go into but the cat can (with some reluctance), and after draining the water the exosuit can then be brought through the now-dry sections. Some, like the steaming heater core, requires you find an exosuit upgrade to get past the lava flumes, in this case a mid-air dash that passes through obstacles. While there is some thought put into each of these scenarios, they're all still riffing on various Metroid zones like Norfair and Brinstar and the game frequently feels like an extended homage happy to simply revisit the Metroid franchise's high points than making the effort to evolve beyond where those games left off like many of its more ambitious contemporaries.

I will say that the game is remarkably cute; even its strange alien monsters and hostile robots. The cat is still a regular cat, albeit one with a little more loyalty to her master than any cat I've ever met, and even when she's gallivanting around in power armor she still has bouts of catlike behavior like being resistant to jumping into water or picking fights with mice. She cannot talk, with most of the game's exposition coming from her human master Gary or through consoles scattered around the facility. There's even a little Doom-style face in the corner of the HUD that emotionally reacts to shooting, taking damage, or using the spin jump (the cat really likes spinning around). Add to this the cosy lo-fi presentation of the game and it sort of has this charming Tamagotchi atmosphere to it.

Unfortunately, in addition to being mostly uninspired, I ran into a few other issues. Bosses tend to be dull bullet sponge affairs - each boss's enemy health reserves were presumably bumped up to fit the developer's desired level of challenge, though this has the effect of every boss fight taking four or five minutes as you spend ages chipping away at their health bar only to lose the battle of attrition when your own is extinguished. For such a relatively short game - about three hours on my first playthrough, collecting everything - so much of that time feels spent fighting these boss encounters. Worst of all is that the pre-boss dialogue is always there and can never be skipped; just rapidly buttoned through each time as you impatiently try to get back into the fight. That you can game over in the solo cat sections from a single hit is often a bummer, as the caution with which you need to approach those sections often feels counter to the game's more breezier exosuit traversal, especially when you're zipping around with the spin jumps and air dashes. At one point I left my suit to complete a task as the cat only to come back to find the suit gone, and since all the exits required the suit to open I was forced to run into the nearest spikes and start over from the last checkpoint. Minor quibbles perhaps, but little irritations that can build up into a coalesced ball of teeth-grinding annoyance before so long.

I'll give this game a thumbs up for its presentation, especially the animations, and for the general flow and feel of the controls. Once you have the traversal upgrades and are zooming through areas it feels like a proper explormer should, and there's nothing too awful about closely emulating the Metroid series given they were exceptional enough to have a hand in codifying the entire sub-genre. I just don't think the game has that much of its own character to commend beyond the cute kitty heroine, and half the time I spent with it I was feeling annoyed about one slight or another. I'll be tossing it into the enormous pile of Indie explormer also-rans I've covered in this feature; charming and competent, but not the sort of breakout hit that'll entice anyone who doesn't already zealously play through every single one of these types of game like a certain chump right here.

Rating: 3 out of 5. [Played on Nintendo Switch.]

October is and will always be my favorite month: it's where my birthday lands (the 25th, which was also the release date of The Outer Worlds, so it was a good day for a lot of other people also), everyone's all giddy about Halloween and a season of wholesome spooks and less wholesome getting sloshed at costume parties, and the weather's hit that right zone between cold but not too cold. The fall season's just a beautiful time in general, if a little melancholy, and it's only now - once the month is over - that the dual specters of the busy holidays and the GOTY deliberations loom uncomfortably ahead.

I feel like I have a handle on what my GOTY list will look like this year - I've played four 2019 games, have four more on the docket, and there's two games in particular I want to grab in the Black Friday sales if possible and add to my homework - but I still might not hit a full 10 by the end of the year. If it happens, it happens, but I've got a lot planned for November regardless. Now that I've finished another year of the Mega Archive, for example, I'll want to update the Mega Drive's Mega Drivers list with all the research into the big and small companies that contributed to Sega's 16-bit success story. I also have a month free for various one-off "Tuesday slot" blogs, there's still the issue of the missing Bucketlog entry for October (let's just say a week of constant Extra Life charity streams hasn't given me a lot of free time to pluck some obscurity from the dustier regions of my backlog), and I and some of the other mods are thinking of launching a special community "Game of the Decade" liststorm in the near future to see where the GB family's heads are at regarding the last ten years and two generations of consoles.

That's all in November, though, and that's not the month that's mentioned in the title of this blog. I forget which one was, and I'm too lazy to scroll up to check. Let's assume October.

Indie Games of the Month

October comprised the 140-144 entries of Indie Game of the Week, outlined below:

Unbox: Newbie's Adventure (IGotW 140) falls into my self-inflicted mandate of trying out every Indie game seeking to resurrect the Rare collect-a-thon era of 3D platformers, and while there are a lot of developers around my age that cut their teeth on that genre it's proven to be one that's very difficult to get right. That was as true back then with major companies unsuccessfully chasing genre leaders like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie as it is for the Indies of today, who have the ambition and ability but not the time or resources to get such a persnickety type of game right. I couldn't even begin to imagine the problems a small development team might bump into creating fully 3D environments with the right balance of platforming challenges, concise controls, and a camera that behaves itself. To its credit, while the silly box hopping antics of Unbox has an unusual method of traversal it is nonetheless zippy and has a certain screwy logic to it once you've spent enough time with the game, and while its worlds are huge and unwieldy it makes the collect-a-thoning aspect palatable with plenty of hints for where to go for wayward shiny gizmos and NPCs who have challenges awaiting you. It also nails the sort of wholesome energy that made those Rare games a fun and breezy experience, even when they were kicking your ass.

Oknytt (IGotW 141) is an adventure game from a subgenre (or more like a subtheme, really) I've been dubbing "folklorist games": those Indies that include a mildly educational aspect with regards to the local customs and legends of the developers' home region. Inspired by this local folklore, games like this can build their stories (and base their mechanics, sometimes) on some free public-domain mythology at no cost and still create stories and artistic depictions of beings and worlds that many players across the globe have never seen before. Oknytt's nocturnal story is full of chills and spooks, but its unfailingly polite hero and the way everything eventually works out for him puts the game's tone in more the vein of a classic fairytale for kids. Of note is the way the hero commands the powers of nature, if only to a mild extent, and the player can use symbols that represent earth, water, air, and fire to solve some of the game's puzzles (using water, for example, to make rain fall and cause a plant to grow).

Hue (IGotW 142) is a puzzle-platformer that, like the enormous pantheon of those that came before, more or less can be traced back to Braid. Braid repurposed the blueprint of the traditional 2D platformer with its stalwart hero chasing his unseen princess and layered in a time manipulation mechanic that had players occasionally tripped up by familiar circumstances that instead required some lateral thinking to solve. Hue continues in that vein, creating a selection of platforming sequences and puzzles that requires the player's growing mastery over the controlling color scheme of the level, switching between eight colors in the spectrum to remove obstacles and add platforms to the immediate scene. Didn't care for the verbose story too much, but the game itself is solid with a moderate difficulty curve and some smart puzzle design, and I particularly liked the vaguely "Game & Watch" visuals of the duochrome world.

Mr. Robot (IGotW 143) comes from 2007, which might as well be the Jurassic era for the modern Indie gaming movement, and balances isometric action-platformer sequences (a uniquely British invention) with a more traditional turn-based RPG - the former for when exploring the imperiled colony ship that you and your robotic colleagues have been maintaining for the sake of a cryosleeping human crew, and the latter for hacking sequences set inside the programming of a console or hostile robot. Neither half shines too brightly on its own, but the dichotomy of the two and the pacing changes they bring actually make the game more compelling in the long run.

Reveal the Deep (IGotW 144) was just a little horror game I felt like throwing in the mix for October 31st, though I don't generally play a lot of the more conventional survival horror types out there (I've yet to try a single Outlast game, and am not really itching to do so either). Reveal the Deep is a 2D pixel-based game that doesn't have a lot in its quiver to produce spooks and chills, but does its game best by setting itself underwater in a claustrophobic sunken ship environment filled with dark beings and ominous creaking sounds. That uneasy sound design is the game's chief strength, with its epistolary storytelling and navigation puzzles a close second and third.

Hey Everybody, It's the Tuesday Slot

Mega Archive: Part XIII: From ToeJam & Earl to Marble Madness

Mega Archive: Part XIV: From Pit-Fighter to Mario Lemieux Hockey

Mega Archive: Part XV: From Buck Rogers to Valis

I spent a significant portion of October researching and writing about Sega Mega Drive games, specifically those released in the last three months of 1991. This brings us to the end of 1991, the third full year of the Mega Drive's lifespan and perhaps its most eventful yet, as well as a natural conclusion to the Mega Archive feature for at least the rest of 2019 if not also a good chunk of 2020 also. These wiki features, where I'm concurrently working on the Giant Bomb Wiki pages for older games while writing about how well they've aged and their history for these blogs, also hits two of my favorite aspects of writing about games: getting to learn more about the history of this medium, and dunking on bad games.

The Sega Mega Drive was always "the rival" growing up in a predominantly Nintendo household, which is why I saved it for last out of the main triumvirate of 16-bit platforms (after the SNES and TurboGrafx-16, the latter barely counting as 16-bit), but I've learned a great deal about where it came from and its status during its pre-Sonic years. We're now decidedly in post-Sonic territory with the above three blogs, and we'll soon gradually see more of Sega's biggest home console franchises - as opposed to its pre-existing arcade franchises like Space Harrier and Golden Axe - come into being and flourish. Streets of Rage being one fine, recent (as of 1991) example of how Sega was as equally adept on the home consoles as they were in the game centers. We're also seeing more western developers make the Mega Drive their home in the above three Parts with the EA Sports juggernauts and the iconic likes of ToeJam & Earl, as well as a bunch of Amiga/ST/PC conversions.

Of the fifty games covered in the three blogs above, here's a few of my personal favorites: ToeJam & Earl, Wonder Boy in Monster World, The Immortal, Marble Madness, Ys III: Wanderers from Ys, Rolling Thunder 2, Chuck Rock, Quackshot Starring Donald Duck, Dahna: Megami Tanjou, Golden Axe II, and Valis: The Fantasm Soldier.

Skipping a Beat: Kingdom Hearts III and Consideration for the Lapsed

I have two blogs planned for my time spent with this year's Kingdom Hearts III, and the first was this piece looking into how (and if) the game addresses those lapsed fans like myself who haven't played a new Kingdom Hearts since Kingdom Hearts II fourteen years ago. It feels like the most natural progression in the world to go from the second core game in the series to the third, provided it has a serial story like the Kingdom Hearts franchise, but KH is a special case where so much attention is spent on its many side-games and spin-offs, many of which follow brand new characters not seen in Kingdom Hearts 1 or 2 but are nonetheless critically important to the overarching story the games are spinning. Some, like certain Organization XIII members, had a small amount of character development in Kingdom Hearts II but the lion's share could only be found in spin-offs like Chain of Memories or 358/2 Days. Others, like Aqua, Terra, and Ventus, debuted in the spin-off Birth By Sleep and the audience is expected to know who they are and what their deal is moving into this chapter of the overarching timeline. Needless to say, the story would've been a mess even if I had all the context to understand it.

The Games of October

Kingdom Hearts III

...Fortunately, following from the above, I'm here for the gameplay too and some welcome tweaks and balance fixes means it's the most approachable game in the series, at least out of the core three. The level design (which will be the topic of my second blog) is a little more mixed though, with some taking full advantage of the Disney/Pixar enterprises they're based on while others are set to toss out the same dozen identical looking areas over and over. The Frozen world, Arendelle, is particularly bad: besides an interesting ice labyrinth early on, it's the same patch of snowy mountainside everywhere you go. I also preferred the areas where you caught the characters post-movie, as opposed to reliving the events of the film, because it gave the developers an opportunity to write a more Kingdom Hearts-focused tale with that team. Big Hero 6, and its world of San Fransokyo, was one of my favorites because the titular team had already sorted the plot of the movie out and was fully invested in helping Sora to fight the Heartless, with a few nods to the movie's lingering loose ends.

I was dreading playing Kingdom Hearts III a little, knowing I'd be out of the loop to some degree, but I had a fine time with it. The action-RPG combat is compelling because it relies so much on movement and finding opportunities, even if the AI assistance can be uneven, and all the tweaks and evolution that the combat system's seen in its nearly twenty year existence means it's more polished than ever. The Gummi Ship sections are back and have a bit more depth to them, especially in how they create these enormous areas full of enemy encounters and treasures to find, and the "Classic Kingdom" Game & Watch mini-games are a neat addition if not particularly compelling individually. It's not without its problems, but I didn't feel like my time was wasted with it. (I did think it was a bit rich to rip off NieR Automata's Ending E though.)

428: Shibuya Scramble

428 was one of those stealth pushes during GOTY season that, while it was obvious no-one on GB had played it all the way through or was going to, there was nonetheless an underswell of community support for this offbeat Spike Chunsoft visual novel. Originally exclusive to Japan as a 2008 Wii release, it was remastered and rereleased for PS4 and Steam ten years later in what I imagine was an anniversary affair that they didn't really emphasize for its English localization debut, because why bother when it's new to us? The game uses a mix of walls of text, static images of real actors and scenes, and the occasional FMV clip to tell a story about one crazy day in the Tokyo district of Shibuya.

The game predominantly follows five characters, each of whom has their own separate storyline that occasionally intersects with the others both directly and indirectly: Achi Endo, a tough but community-minded young man who can't leave a needy person hanging; Shinya Kano, a police detective stressed out about meeting his fiancée's disapproving father while also involved in a kidnapping case; Minoru Minorikawa, a dogged investigative reporter whose outspoken personality frequently lands him in hot water; Kenji Osawa, a genius virologist and withdrawn father of two on the cusp of a nervous breakdown; and Tama, a mysterious amnesiac currently trapped in a cat mascot costume.

Like 24, the player can follow these five storylines in any order but must complete the current hour with all five before the game will continue to the next. The player will frequently butt into sudden stops on each route, either caused by the game's insistence that you learn pertinent facts in a specific order via a different character or a bad ending caused by the actions of another protagonist. Though limited due to its status of a visual novel, where interactivity is never usually a high priority, lot of the game's deeper storytelling mechanics are tied into the way you have to weave through these multiple narratives and consider carefully the multiple choice questions that appear. A bad ending might occur from choosing the wrong choice, but even an innocuous choice that has no apparent effect on the plot may greatly affect another protagonist in their storyline. Right up until the final chapter of the game, it'll be free with the hints: if you get a bad ending, you'll have some idea why it happened, even if it's an ambiguous hint that "somebody" should've done something different thirty minutes ago. The fun part is that, after the game is over, you can then work backwards to get the bad endings you missed by trying all the other decision branches.

It's a remarkable story-focused game that balances levity with thrilling drama, and the "choose your own adventure" nexus of branching paths and their Butterfly Effect consequences makes for a compelling knot to untie. The game is absolutely full of secrets too, with multiple silly bonus gaiden stories about all the game's ancillary characters and at least three significant post-game campaigns (one of which, Canaan, ties directly into the game's mostly unrelated anime spin-off).

Control

I have a lot to say about Control though I'm struggling to pare that list of observations down to something that hasn't already been discussed and disseminated at great length. I think everyone was so collectively stoked that Remedy got their groove back after a string of OK to so-so games following Max Payne that we're instinctively rooting for it to win GOTY, if only because it feels so due. Like Marty Scorsese finally winning an Oscar for The Departed, before the Academy was contractually obliged to take it back off him because he said some mean things about people in costumes punching CGI monsters.

Control was a perfect confluence of everything Remedy gets right and everything they usually get wrong but this time somehow did not. The stuff they usually get right is the presentation and tone, and especially how invested they clearly get into establishing their worlds and characters and backstories, having fun throwing together live-action footage in someone's garage and figuring out how to place it in a scene without it being too distracting or immersion-breaking. It's writing a thousand text documents and leaving them over the place, except in this rare case you actually want to bother finding and reading them all. It's starting with a simple enough premise - SCP Foundation is a big hit with the kids, and everyone liked Twin Peaks and The X-Files - and aiming well past the outfield and into the parking lot with the execution, incorporating a kickass transforming gun and psychic powers that let you fly around and toss masonry at twitchy monsters with the force of several thousand newtons.

Combat is so fast and so chaotic and yet feels so good because you're right in the moment reacting instantly to stimuli with a mercifully small pool of useful psychic abilities to draw from, alternating between headshots with your gun in any number of apposite configurations before switching back to telekinesis and detritus shields to weather the retaliation. Even when there's no fighting, though, you might wander through a quiet, meticulously furnished room and see a document or Matthew Porretta's jovial scientist Dr. Darling projected onto a wall ready to deliver another minute-long lecture about the void between worlds and think "hell yeah, inject that lore directly into my veins". And then just completely trash the room by running around in circles because you're the Director, dammit, and someone else is going to have to clean up after you.

I really can't say enough positive things about Control. If it didn't have such an exceptional presentation, I'd argue it was still one of the best third-person shooters to come along in years, perfectly modernizing the likes of Psi-Ops: The Mind Gate Conspiracy or Half-Life 2's Gravity Gun sections with a smart selection of psychic powers, gun modes, crafted upgrades, and skill trees. If the combat sucked, I would still argue that it was worth checking out for all those juicy federal reports about possessed TVs and evil mirror universes and an affable Finnish janitor who straight up does not give a hoot about world-threatening terrors crossing over as long as it doesn't interfere with his vacation to parts unknown. That it has both feels like some blessed conjunction of the stars. It's going to take some doing to knock it off my 2019 GOTY perch, especially this close to the year's end.

Other Distractions

BoJack Horseman (Season 6A)

I really don't have much for Other Distractions this month, because I've been watching a lot of ongoing serial TV that haven't ended their seasons yet. BoJack's the one exception, as a streaming service show that dropped the entire first half of its final season late last month. BoJack Horseman has this reputation for being to depression what Rick & Morty is to intellectual nihilism, which is reductive to the smart humor and plotting of both shows, but there's no mistaking the throughline of misery for this particular season as the show makes it clear that most of the cast is suffering some form of the clinical blues. BoJack spends most of this half-season in rehab for his drinking habit, which three seasons ago led to one of the darkest episodes the show's ever done, and pushing past his natural reluctance to be a better person for the sake of those he keeps hurting. Princess Caroline is trying to "do it all" (to use the parlance of '90s female-focused workplace dramas) of having a career and caring for an infant and burning out at a rapid rate. Diane is considering new life directions and grappling with the depressive inertia of denying that which would be beneficial to her happiness. Mr. Peanutbutter's eternally chipper nature is tested by the fact he's done some very reprehensible actions in the past season. Todd... is still Todd.

The remarkable thing about this season is that, despite the show starting as an ensemble comedy, it's stopped trying to contrive of reasons to keep this group of people together and instead episodes largely focus on individual members of the cast off doing their own thing with BoJack's letters and calls from rehab - some part of his therapy, some just to kvetch about his therapy - being this connective tissue between what everyone has going on. The way this half-season ends does a nasty job of raising hopes for everyone's future happiness before setting up the dominoes for an almighty fall from grace that I'm sure the second half of this final season will spend dissecting before ending on a note that, while probably not the cheeriest, will at least be germane to the show. I'm looking forward to seeing how the chips fall when the show resumes in January.

(For the record, the other serial TV I've been following include: The Good Place S4 (also on its final season), Mr. Robot S4 (also on its final season), My Hero Academia S4 (whole lotta fourth seasons happening), and Hi Score Girl S2 (this show is dumb but I'm still invested).)

Looking Ahead

It's probably for the best that there are very few November games I'm looking forward to, because this year has been busy enough. Not 2017 busy, but it's certainly left behind a considerable wishlist for me to pursue in future years. I feel like the following list of four is going to be fairly divisive in the long run, and certainly within the Giant Bomb offices:

• The 8th will see the wide release of Death Stranding, a game notable for the fact that everyone in the review industry is already sick of talking about it and hearing about it, which makes me very excited to see if the public zeitgeist is nearly as short-lived. While the critique community in general is fairly positive on it, our own Giant Bomb panel seems to widely dislike the game on the whole, with that tone overflowing into actual bile in the case of Dan and Vinny. I only came into the Metal Gear Solid franchise lately and only because I wanted to stay ahead of Drew's playthroughs so I've no firm allegiance to Kojima like others seem to (I liked MGSV though!), and everything I've heard about this game is suggesting I stay away despite my curiosity. Could well be the case that in a few months copies of this will be selling for a song, given how polarizing it is for a major Sony exclusive, so perhaps I'll decide to take that plunge during in a weaker moment in 2020.
• The 14th brings us Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory which, on the one hand, is based on a wickedly funny table-top RPG setting where the world is ruled by a capricious AI that will regularly kill and clone new humans from an endless supply of materials, and it's the player's task to survive for as long as possible by avoiding suspicion while also perhaps concealing traits that would normally arouse same, such as a rogue mutant genetic strain. It's a bit like a cross between X-Men and I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream, and there's potential aplenty for some sharp satire about the increasing amount of surveillance and lack of autonomy of modern society, but here's where the "on the other hand" comes in: it's being made by Cyanide, which doesn't have the best track record as an RPG studio. Might well be that I get my subversive RPG kicks from The Outer Worlds and Disco Elysium this year and give Paranoia a wide berth.
• November the 15th be with you, as that also happens to be the date of the new Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Of the four games listed here, I think this has the best odds of being a genuine late-comer entry for the GOTY discussion, though I'm curious how far the GB staff will get into it before their GOTY podcasts enter the recording phase. It's sounding like a Souls game set in the Star Wars universe, which is reason enough to be excited, but the downside is that it's another giant game from EA and they've had a terrible track record so far this year between all their dodgy microtransaction and lootbox fiascos and the ongoing slow footage of a train crash of a game that is Anthem, which is only above Fallout 76 on the scale of big-budget online open-world games with more cursed baggage than a Transylvanian airport. It's possible for a company to run into every hurdle but still jump over the last successfully, and that's what I'm hoping for here if not for the hardworking developers involved with the game then at least for the poor old Star Wars license, which is still reeling from its miserable treatment by 2017's Star Wars Battlefront II.
• My son is also named Fireboylt in the upcoming release of Shenmue III on the 19th, long awaited by an increasingly small subset of Yu Suzuki diehards if not perhaps fans of Japanese open-world games in general who have all since flocked to Yakuza, myself included. Gosh, I really don't know if Dan and Vinny can stomach a second game as achingly languid and obtuse as Death Stranding in as many months, but I sure am excited to listen to their reactions anyway. I mean, who else are they going to convince to review that game? Noted Shenmue lover Jeff? Alex, who sounded like he dying well before the Shenmue Endurance Run was over? Jan, who will have completed his Pokemon Sword run by then but only be halfway through his Pokemon Shield run? Brad? Brad doesn't even play games that aren't Destiny 2 and Dota 2 any more. Nope, I think Vinny and/or Dan are in for another unpleasantly slow gaming experience later this month and their suffering is my joy. Sorry, it's been that kind of year.

I suppose it was unavoidable that I'd pick a horror game on this particular date, given that Bonfire Night is only five days away with all its terrifying conflagrations and loud noises from the fireworks. Reveal the Deep might not be the scariest game I have in my Steam backlog, but it explores venues of the horror genre that few other games and media does: the suffocating claustrophobia of the deep sea, trapped in a diving suit and with nothing but darkness and waterlogged corpses all around.

Reveal the Deep is a 2D adventure game with some mild puzzle and platforming aspects; while the latter makes up the bulk of the gameplay, it feels the game developers were more in the mind of delivering a slow-burn spooky tale in an atmospheric location. Particular attention has been given to the sound design: the ominous creaks of the submerged wreck of 19th century steamboat as you pass through its innards are omnipresent, but you'll occasionally hear noises you can't account for too. One of the game's significant mechanics, which also complements this tense ambience, is that the player must turn off their diving suit's lamp to solve certain puzzles. The ship is in this accursed state of limbo, and when the lights are off some of the ship's areas glow with an unearthly luminescence that reveals how the ship appeared prior to its sinking, like a ghostly echo of the past. This past version of the ship might have a different configuration of platforms to navigate if the illuminated way was impassable, and several epistolary artifacts left by the ship's passengers - diary entries, unsent letters, sketches - can be perused in these snapshots of the ship's better days. It's not new to create a horror game where turning the lights off and plunging your own self into darkness is occasionally required, given the way it allows these games to overlap game mechanics with a means to force players out of their comfort zone in the manner all horror fiction should, but it's still used to great effect here even with the limited visuals of the low resolution pixel graphics. (It might be fair to say, even if it's a backhanded compliment, that the sound design is doing most of the heavy lifting in setting the mood.)

Reveal the Deep certainly isn't a long game - I logged about 100 minutes for my sole playthrough according to my Steam profile - but it rewards those who take the time to meticulously explore with more reading material and thus more context behind the calamity that caused the ship to sink to the ocean depths. The personalities and eventual fates of the passengers, the cause of the incident, the identity of the player character; some of these facts are weaved into what little story the game has but most are gleaned from wandering off the critical path and finding areas that might require a little more puzzle finesse to discover. I'm sure I left a few notes behind in my journey through the ship's hold, for as small as the game world is, because the maze-like design of the ship and the way new passages open up depending on whether or not you have your lamp on makes the wreck an occasionally challenging place to fully reconnoitre.

I'll be real: this game does a lot with very little. It's a small-scale, low-key underwater spook game that takes just over an hour to complete and works best as a brief chiller hors d'oeuvres on this most fearsomely festive night of the year. Don't go in expecting something as elaborately staged as something like SOMA: though there's certainly a lot of thematic similarities (both games seem obsessed with covering half their aquatic environments with weird black goo) we're talking several zeroes fewer on the development budget. If you're looking for an effective horror game on Steam that's more about suspense and ambience than gore, and only have pocket change to drop in the current Halloween sale, there are far worse options at your disposal.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Here we are, the last of the 1991-based Mega Archives and the last one I'll be putting together for a while. I, perhaps unwisely, squeezed all twenty December releases for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis into one entry here, so expect it to be a little larger than normal.

A conspicuous absence here, and something I'm going to have to carefully consider moving forward, are games available for the Mega CD. This optical disc media peripheral debuted in Japan on December 12th 1991 with two launch games - Heavy Nova and Sol-Feace - and four more later that same month: Earnest Evans, Wakusei Woodstock: Funky Horror Band, Nostalgia 1907, and Tenka Fubu: Eiyuutachi no Houkou. Heavy Nova is featured in today's episode due to a simultaneous Genesis release, while Earnest Evans and Sol-Feace will show up on the Genesis in early 1992 (the latter as "Sol-Deace") for a later Mega Archive entry to look at. Between the price, a minimal amount of third-party support due to a lack of devkits, and the low user install base for the Mega Drive in Japan, the peripheral didn't sell huge numbers and saw few games in its first year. It'll begin to explode once it launches in the US on October 15th 1992 as the Sega CD, but it'll be a long time before the Mega Archive gets there. Until then, there'll be a slow trickle of Mega CD games throughout 1992 that I'll have to contemplate whether or not to include. It's a different platform, one that's harder to glean screenshots from, and might be the purview of an entirely different Sega-based wiki feature. We'll see. (Hopefully by then I'll have come up with a better name for this hypothetical feature than "Sega CD's Nuts".)

One last note before we start: the Japanese Sega Mega Drive turned 21 today (October 29th)! Be sure to pour your alcoholic beverage of choice directly into your MD's cartridge slot to celebrate. While you're doing that, feel free to peruse all the Mega Archive entries thus far:

• Part I: 001-020 can be found here.
• Part II: 021-035 can be found here.
• Part III: 036-050 can be found here.
• Part IV: 051-065 can be found here.
• Part V: 066-080 can be found here.
• Part VI: 081-098 can be found here.
• Part VII: 099-115 can be found here.
• Part VIII: 116-130 can be found here.
• Part IX: 131-145 can be found here.
• Part X: 146-160 can be found here.
• Part XI: 161-175 can be found here.
• Part XII: 176-190 can be found here.
• Part XIII: 191-205 can be found here.
• Part XIV: 206-220 can be found here.

Part XV: 221-240 (December '91)

221: Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday

• Developer: SSI
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1991
• EU Release: January 1992
• Franchise: Gold Box / Buck Rogers
• Genre: RPG
• Theme: Sci-fi
• Premise: Earth has been attacked and only Buck Rogers and the Neo Force can avenge it. Twiki better show up later or I'm out. Biddi-biddi-biddi.
• Availability: GOG has most of the Gold Box series, but not the two Buck Rogers games. If I had to guess I'd say it was a licensing issue. Dude's been around long enough that he has to be getting close to public domain, though (or maybe not).
• Preservation: I'd only been introduced to these Gold Box (referring to SSI's older RPG range, many of which were D&D branded, that balanced first-person exploration with a strategic top-down combat engine) sci-fi variants relatively recently, but I wasn't aware that one had made it to the Sega Genesis. Nor did I realize that this would be the only Gold Box game for the system. It makes a few concessions presumably for the sake of the console format, like switching the first-person adventuring to an isometric top-down perspective similar to the combat - maybe it was easier on the cartridge space to have both take similar forms? - and they greatly pared down the races, classes, and number of skills you can give characters during the creation process, helpfully eliminating all the skills that you would never actually need to beat the game but were options anyway. I don't think this is the ideal method to play something as relatively complex as a Gold Box game, but in these past few months the Genesis has been busy introducing classic CRPG franchises (Might and Magic, StarFlight, King's Bounty) to a younger audience that might've otherwise missed out on them.

222: California Games

• Developer: Novotrade
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: February 1992
• EU Release: December 1991
• Franchise: California Games
• Genre: Sports
• Theme: Summer Jams
• Premise: Epyx brings you the Palm Springs vibes with this selection of beach and beach-adjacent activities. Anyone for footbag?
• Availability: If you own any system from the late '80s, California Games is probably available for it. There were rumors about a PS3/PSN rerelease, but I guess that didn't happen.
• Preservation: Epyx cornered the market on sports mini-game collections that were bizarrely difficult to play, and their ubiquity in the late '80s meant that a Genesis port was inevitable. Curiously, it doesn't seem like Epyx was involved with this port: it was developed by Novotrade, later known for the Ecco the Dolphin games, and published by Sega themselves. Novotrade improved the graphics but eliminated one of the better modes, the "flying disc" (gotta avoid branding), to reduce the total number to five (BMX, surfing, half-pipe skateboarding, rollerskating, and footbag/hacky sack). I always thought there was something serial killer-y with how the box art clipped off everyone's heads.

223: Chuck Rock

• Developer: Core Design
• Publisher: Virgin Interactive
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1991
• EU Release: September 1992
• Franchise: Chuck Rock
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Prehistoric
• Premise: An early human rescues his girlfriend from his rival "Gary Gritter" (huh, just how old is she?) and a whole bunch of not-at-all-anachronistic dinosaurs. How much rock could a Chuck Rock chuck if a Chuck Rock could chuck rock?
• Availability: Nothing more recent than the '90s. The IP belongs to... Rebellion, I think? They've been remaking some of their older games (Rogue Trooper, for instance) but I doubt they'd be interested in dropping the two Chuck Rock games on GOG or Steam.
• Preservation: Now here's a game I know well, at least well enough to have written the GameFAQ walkthrough a whole other lifetime ago. The most enduring memory I have of this otherwise generic caveman platformer is its incongruously great theme music, something the Genesis version did a fair job trying to recreate. We also welcome Core Design with this entry: a UK Amiga/Atari ST developer that began porting over their games to the Mega Drive from this point on and would rise to global prominence many years later with the Tomb Raider franchise. We'll see the Chuck Rock sequel when the Mega Archive reaches 1993, and perhaps even its Sega CD cart racer spin-off a little later.

224: Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe

• Developer: The Bitmap Brothers
• Publisher: Arena (NA) / Virgin Interactive (EU) / CRI (JP)
• JP Release: 1992-06-19
• NA Release: December 1991
• EU Release: October 1992
• Franchise: Speedball
• Genre: Future Sports
• Theme: Future Sports
• Premise: Future sports! Where would we be without them? Probably right where we are already, because future sports don't exist yet.
• Availability: Speedball 2 HD, a flawed but faithful remake, is available on Steam and GOG.
• Preservation: Our second British Invasion for this entry, Speedball 2 is perhaps The Bitmap Brothers's most accessible hit - a sequel to their bloody future sport that is part football, part basketball, and part gladiatorial arena. It's actually a bit more like Rollerball by way of Quidditch, in that there's many different target zones you can hit to score extra points - from the reliable to the risky but rewarding - and it requires a bit of experimentation before you figure out which is the best course for you and your team. There's also some shallow team management/customization options as you're meant to switch out team-members for better players as you ascend through the league and earn more cash. I didn't play it a whole lot back when I owned the original Atari ST version, because for as much as I liked hurting people it quickly dawned on me how uncomfortably close it was to a real sports game.

225: Ninja Burai Densetsu

• Developer: SIMS
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1991-12-05
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Strategy
• Theme: Ninja
• Premise: You know what's cool? Ninja. Can't get enough ninja games on the Mega Drive. Especially strategy ninja games.
• Availability: Though it reviewed well, this game might be a little too generic to be fondly remembered enough for rereleases/remakes.
• Preservation: If I had to pluck for a comparison, Ninja Burai Densetsu is close to the 16-bit Fire Emblem games: units aren't so much separate characters but archetypes, each fitting a role that makes them superior against some unit types and inferior against others, and the player can upgrade them by visiting NPC towns and hopefully wandering into generous locals. Of course, the Mega Drive would get something similar in the Shining Force series before too much longer. This game's wholly in Japanese so I didn't play too long, but it does have those neat cutaways that Fire Emblem has where you see a 2D close-up of the two units duking it out. The internet seemed conflicted about who actually developed the game: Sanritsu or Sega. I figured SIMS was the likeliest suspect, as a joint production of the two companies set up earlier the same year specifically to make original Mega Drive games. (I was unable to localize the middle part of that title, but I think the whole thing might be something like "Legend of the Ninja Thunder Corps", as in suggesting a fast-acting team of ninja operatives. Kinda rad if true!)

226: Exile

• Developer: Micro Factory / Riot
• Publisher: Telenet Japan (JP) / Renovation (NA)
• JP Release: 1991-12-06
• NA Release: December 1991
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: XZR
• Genre: RPG
• Theme: Alternative History (and Time Travel?)
• Premise: Middle-Eastern badass Sadler gets dragged into another adventure involving all the major religions while taking any amount of hard drugs. It's a miracle this ever got localized, frankly.
• Availability: It's either this, a slightly more faithful TurboGrafx-CD localization, or the Japan-only MSX2 original. Telenet went defunct in 2007 but its IPs were bought by Sunsoft, which has expressed interest in re-releasing them in some form.
• Preservation: I covered Exile previously when going through all the TurboGrafx-CD releases and though it was hard to work out what was going on in the plot - you move around the world constantly, there's a lot of proper nouns based on obscure historical figures, and it's the second part of a contiguous series - the game itself is relatively straightforward, with side-scrolling action sequences bookended by top-down exploration and NPC dialogue. It's a breezy action-RPG that definitely goes some places, though the console versions sadly drop the part of the game where the Crusades-era desert warrior Sadler travels forward through time to modern day Manhattan to fight skateboarders.

227: Fighting Masters

• Developer: Aicom
• Publisher: Treco
• JP Release: 1991-12-06
• NA Release: April 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Fighting
• Theme: Sci-fi
• Premise: Twelve alien champions fight for the privilege of having their race spared from a giant supernova. Also, everyone's absurdly tall and they only have one attack button.
• Availability: Well, Aicom and Treco were both Sammy subsidiaries, and Sammy's part of Sega now. It's up to them whether or not they want to rerelease their 16-bit system's most powerful fighting game.
• Preservation: The game that introduced Goldrock to an unsuspecting (and dare I say undeserving) world, Fighting Masters is one of those fighters released during a time where - though Street Fighter II was already doing the rounds in arcades - there hadn't yet been that standardization of the genre where everything was either SF2 or a clone of SF2. Put another way, developers still thought they could come up with a more compelling structure for fighting games that wasn't all quarter-circle motions and 360 radials. Fighting Masters, bless its heart, figured that most players would be satisfied with just the one attack button and another dedicated to jumping, where punches, kicks and throws were determined by opponent proximity rather than bound to separate prompts. What galls most is that the Genesis had three face buttons and I'm sure everyone working on this game knew that. At least the alien fighter designs are cool, even if I have trouble believing Earth's champion would be some dude in blue Speedos called Larry.

228: Heavy Nova

• Developer: Micronet
• Publisher: Micronet
• JP Release: 1991-12-12 (for Mega CD)
• NA Release: December 1991
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Fighting
• Theme: Sci-fi
• Premise: Jerk aliens tried to take us over but we fought them off with their own giant robot suits. The military now trains new robot operators in case they come back, and the player is looking to become the best one.
• Availability: A heavy no. Micronet is still around but they abandoned game development decades ago.
• Preservation: Talking of novas and terrible fighting games, Heavy Nova is the first of a brief number of games that were released for the Mega CD in Japan but the normal Sega Genesis in North America, during that ten-month window where Japan had the CD peripheral and America did not. It features mechs (or maybe robots) that fight each other in really stiff and sluggish battles that, in all fairness, is probably accurate for giant machines weighing several tons apiece. I will also say in its defense that at least it has separate buttons for punches and kicks: an extremely small bar to pass, but somehow worthy of note in this particular instance. Otherwise, it's a proto-Rise of the Robots without anything like its rad Brian May soundtrack (at least for the Genesis version; the Mega CD had the benefit of CD audio). (Also, some sources seem to think a company named Holocronet made the game, but there's absolutely zero information out there on this mysterious developer. I wonder if it wasn't Micronet being cute with a sci-fi alias.)

229: NHK Taiga Drama: Taiheiki

• Developer: NHK / TOSE
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1991-12-13
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Strategy
• Theme: Feudal Japan
• Premise: It's a strategy sim based on a TV show based on a medieval book based (loosely) on a real-life historical period. Some strong "Telephone Game" interference has to be settling in at this level.
• Availability: NHK explicitly commissioned this game as a tie-in for their show, so unless they're scheduling reruns I can't see it coming back.
• Preservation: NHK is Japan's equivalent of the BBC - a publicly owned company that solicits a "license fee" from its native citizens, and tends to produce a lot of worthy period dramas in addition to mostly neutral news, coverage of big sports events like the Olympics, and other entertainment media. If NHK is known for anything overseas, it's probably their toothy brown mascot Domo-kun and the memes that surround it. This game was either developed by a division within NHK or produced on their behalf by Sega, as there was another Taiheiki adaptation for the PC Engine out around the same time that looked a lot different: it could well be two distinct spins on the same material. The Mega Drive game, at least, is another like Ninja Burai Densetsu above where it's a grid-based strategy game with medieval Japanese units. However, whole troops fight in automatic skirmishes when two unit icons meet rather than one-on-one fights, and there's even a playable segment of these battles where troop leaders take each other on in these cool horseback archery duels.

230: Quackshot Starring Donald Duck

• Developer: Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1991-12-20
• NA Release: 1991-12-19
• EU Release: December 1991
• Franchise: Disney / Donald Duck
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: High Adventure
• Premise: Donald's travelling the world doing the usual touristy stuff: checking out landmarks, eating local food, and stealing priceless cultural treasures to put in a museum back home.
• Availability: Quackshot's return is really up to Disney. They were happy enough to sign off on a 2013 remake of Castle of Illusion... at least until it got delisted a couple years back. As for video games starring Donald Duck, you could always play Kingdom Hearts III from earlier this year. I mean, you could.
• Preservation: This Indiana Jones-styled platformer with Donald Duck is part of a larger series of Disney-Sega collaborations that are usually followed by "of Illusion" for their localizations, and is more explicitly based on the Donald Duck comic book universe of Carl Banks that was more heavily influenced by the same kind of adventure serials that also begat Indiana Jones (and DuckTales, of course). The game has a mild non-linear edge to it where you might revisit earlier stages with some newly upgraded plunger weapon that allows you to reach new areas - it's not quite a full spacewhipper, but something closer to Mega Man X where it's sometimes worth going back a few levels for some useful upgrades. It also looks and sounds great: a testament to how seriously Sega took their partnership with Disney.

231: Dahna: Megami Tanjou

• Developer: IGS
• Publisher: IGS
• JP Release: 1991-12-20
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Action
• Theme: Fantasy
• Premise: Someone stole Dahna's magical grampa and now she has no end of asses to kick to fetch him back.
• Availability: IGS, along with this game's license, is lost to the ether. No-one seems to know what happened to them.
• Preservation: My favorite part of doing this series is discovering some badass game I'd never heard of before, and Dahna: Megami Tanjou - "Birth of the Goddess," not to be confused with Megami Tensei ("Reincarnation of the Goddess") - fits that bill. It's specifically built like Rastan (IGS has former Taito staff) but with a female protagonist who will occasionally befriend some fantastical creature and ride it into battle. This also gives the game a bit of variance between stages, as you can be chopping your way through faceless blue troops and monsters one moment and then be racing down a mountain on horseback or through the skies on a griffin the next. Like Rastan, and modern day takes like Volgarr the Viking or Valfaris, the game is exceptionally challenging and will only reward those that are already somewhat adept at it: Dahna can use magic but she must kill enough specific enemies that drop magic orbs for the stronger spells, and she can increase her maximum health by gaining XP but that means killing every enemy instead of safely letting them pass by. Definitely not a forgiving game, and maybe a bit stiff with its controls, but still kinda rad. Shame it never left Japan.

232: Double Dragon II: The Revenge

• Developer: PalSoft
• Publisher: PalSoft
• JP Release: 1991-12-20
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Double Dragon
• Genre: Brawler
• Theme: Crime / Martial Arts
• Premise: Machine Gun Willy isn't going through all the trouble again of kidnapping a hostage and having to feed her and such, so he just guns down Marian instead. Surely the Dragon brothers will be OK with that? They won't even have to get up off the sofa.
• Availability: The Mega Drive version might be a pain to track down, but if you just want to play some Double Dragon II in its purest form you can buy it on Switch via the Arcade Archives.
• Preservation: Though the Sega Mega Drive was the arcade gamer's 16-bit console, it didn't have too many brawlers beyond Sega's own fantastic Streets of Rage and Golden Axe franchises. Even Double Dragon, Technos's more US-receptive brawler series, only showed up several years into the console's lifespan and only on the Japanese Mega Drive (and it's the goofier sequel, no less). Sadly, it's not a particularly good port: the colors are washed out, the combat's stiff, and it seems way easier to get stun-locked by enemies with weapons. PalSoft is the credited publisher, but it's unclear whether they also did the port development or hired some unknown contractor to do it for them. If you want a better Double Dragon II port that's equally off-piste, try the PC Engine CD-ROM version with its hot/wild music and cutscenes.

233: F1 Circus MD

• Developer: Nichibutsu / Micronics
• Publisher: Nichibutsu
• JP Release: 1991-12-20
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: F1 Circus
• Genre: Racing
• Theme: Motorsports
• Premise: The F1 Circus franchise comes to the Mega Drive for this one-off entry. Thrill, as you take to the courses in a top-down perspective that gives you very little forewarning of upcoming corners. Gasp, as you spend hours fretting over components to go on your F1 car because the course might be a little wet. Lament, as you realize this is probably the eighth or ninth one of these interminable F1 Circus games you've added to the wiki by now.
• Availability: Gonna say a 1991 F1 game rereleased this century is going to have trouble finding an audience, let alone a worthwhile licensing agreement from the Formula One Group.
• Preservation: My old nemesis returns. There are certain long-running franchises of so little significance that some sucker finds him or herself adding every single one of its near-identical entries to the wiki. That's frequently the case for sports and racing franchises in particular, which depreciate so much over the course of a single year and are quickly forgotten. The F1 Circus, which are usually but not always top-down racing affairs, has four TurboGrafx/PC Engine entries and five for the SNES/SFC; for some reason Nichibutsu just did the one for Mega Drive, which is an almost identical port of the TG16's F1 Circus '91. The Circus will be back in town eventually, but only for a single Mega CD entry in 1994.

234: Nakajima Satoru Kanshuu F1 Grand Prix

• Developer: Varie
• Publisher: Varie
• JP Release: 1991-12-20
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Nakajima Satoru Kanshuu F1
• Genre: Racing
• Theme: Motorsports
• Premise: Let professional raceman Satoru Nakajima tell you how to race the best out of all the other racepeople in this, another racing game.
• Availability: If a 1991 F1 game was hard enough to rerelease in 2019, one that also features the likeness of a retired driver would be even more so.
• Preservation: That's always the way with Formula One games, you wait forever for none to show up and then two appear on the same day. The appeal of Drew S. and Danny O'D.'s favorite motorsport is lost on me, but I think that's largely because of working on all these darn pages. They're not the highlight of this little archival journey I'm on, but I can at least appreciate that it's one of the few sports, like soccer and rugby, that Japan and the UK seem to share an affection for while the US is left scratching their heads over how anyone could prefer it to the endlessly cyclical fun of the Indy 500. Nakajima Satoru, Japan's version of Dale Earnhardt Jr., lends his name to this particular F1 racer which already puts it on firmer ground than F1 Circus MD. Varie had interests outside of licensed F1 games but you wouldn't know it from seeing their MD catalog, which is wall-to-wall open-wheel vrooming around. Back over on the SFC they squeezed out the universe's first NJPW games, so it's probably a shame to Sega puroresu fans that they never thought to bring those over too.

235: Nobunaga no Yabou: Bushou Fuuunroku

• Developer: Koei
• Publisher: Koei
• JP Release: 1991-12-20
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Nobunaga's Ambition
• Genre: Strategy
• Theme: Sengoku
• Premise: In Nobunaga: No! Yabbos!, Nobunaga's grown another pair of yabbos and needs to keep this embarrassing anatomical secret from his closest general buds in an all-new season of the lewd but heartwarming anime. (Nobunaga no Yabou is Nobunaga's Ambition and is exactly what you think it is.)
• Availability: There are newer and presumably better Nobunaga's Ambitions games out there, but if your heart's set on this one the SNES release was localized as Lord of Darkness. Might be easier to follow in English.
• Preservation: It's strange - I must have mentioned Koei and its output so many times when referring to other strategy games on the Mega Archive, but I believe this is the first time they've shown up on here in person. Bushou Fuuunroku is Lord of Darkness, the official third game (though it's technically the fifth) in Koei's long-running franchise about Sengoku warfare and riveting prefecture management. Koei felt right at home on the Mega Drive, possibly due to its PC developer-friendly Motorola 68k chip, and would continue to release over a dozen of their simulators on the system from franchises like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Aerobiz, and Uncharted Waters. Koei also dug up and released the first Nobunaga's Ambition on Mega Drive in 1993 (which also received a localization). These games were as popular as they were dense, which is why we've been seeing so many clones. Don't expect those to stop now that the real McCoy has shown up.

236: Task Force Harrier EX

• Developer: Jorudan
• Publisher: Treco
• JP Release: 1991-12-20
• NA Release: February 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Shoot 'em Up (Vertical)
• Theme: Modern Military
• Premise: I wish I was piloting a harrier. I wish I had a barrier. I wish I had a girl, giving missions, I would marry her. I wish I could shoot enemies a bunch, then eat lunch, on an aircraft carrier.
• Availability: Unlikely to come back. UPL, the original developers, vanished in '92 and its IPs presumably belong to its parent Universal/Aruze, a pachinko machine company. (Apropos of nothing, but Aruze also owns the rights to Shadow Hearts and I really wish they'd let someone work on a HD trilogy.)
• Preservation: It feels like it's been a hot minute since we've seen a classic vertical shoot 'em up on the Mega Archive, when not too long ago half the entries in a single episode would be interchangeable shmups. The big deal with Task Force Harrier (they added the EX for the Genesis version) is that you could acquire two options and then cycle through formations for them, putting them ahead, behind, or a further apart on the sides. These options, in addition to adding to your firepower, could also absorb bullets, making their positioning tactically invaluable for boss fights and similarly tense enemy waves. It's also a Xevious style shoot 'em up, which means both air and ground targets to aim for (the game's kind enough to map the air-to-ground bombs and air-to-air bullets to the same button).

237: Undeadline

• Developer: PalSoft
• Publisher: PalSoft
• JP Release: 1991-12-20
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Shoot 'em Up (Vertical)
• Theme: Horror
• Premise: Just in time for, uh, Christmas, this horror-themed shoot 'em up is full of death. That's my dignity-preserving way of saying that I could barely survive more than a minute.
• Availability: D4 owns the rights to T&E Soft's library, so this might wind up on their Project EGG service some day. Hope you have a Japanese credit card handy.
• Preservation: This is a cool if odd approach to a shoot 'em up that you only occasionally see, where the protagonist is a dude running around but the game still flows like a shoot 'em up with its automatic vertical scrolling and incoming enemy waves. It somehow manages to be a horror game too, with lots of unexpected surprises that you have to be ready to dodge or shoot down at less than a moment's notice. It has a Mega Man style level select if you're dying too often on one level and need a change of pace, and though I was unable to reach one the bosses look cool. Like PalSoft's other Mega Drive port this episode, Double Dragon II, they made some compromises like cutting the number of protagonists to just the one blond dude and decreasing the amount of horizontal space you can move in, but it's playable enough.

238: Romance of the Three Kingdoms II / Sangokushi II

• Developer: Koei
• Publisher: Koei
• JP Release: 1991-12-26 (as Sangokushi II)
• NA Release: July 1992 (as Romance of the Three Kingdoms II)
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Romance of the Three Kingdoms
• Genre: Strategy
• Theme: Ancient China
• Premise: Get to warmongering already. Ancient China isn't going to unite itself. I wonder if Cao Cao ever executed anyone for comparing him to Winnie the Pooh?
• Availability: Like with Nobunaga's Ambition, Koei's been putting out slightly better games based on the same exact conflict for over two decades. I might not recommend the most recent Dynasty Warriors though. Yikes.
• Preservation: Koei moves fast, huh? Not even a week has passed and they already have their second release for the Mega Drive: the second chapter of their Chinese-themed strategy series Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It's really just a Sinocentric take on Nobunaga's Ambition with the same format in place. Pick a scenario, pick a warlord, and then pick apart your enemy's forces one by one as you take over China. Of the features added to RotTK II, there's a new reputation system where your honor decreases if you decide to raze too many peasant villages or cut down retreating enemy forces. If it gets low enough, eventually your generals and lieutenants will actually defect from your side figuring anyone would be a better future emperor of China than Burny McMurderboner over here.

239: Golden Axe II

• Developer: Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1991-12-27
• NA Release: January 1992
• EU Release: January 1992
• Franchise: Golden Axe
• Genre: Brawler
• Theme: Fantasy
• Premise: See what happens when you just leave the Golden Axe lying around? Some other armored goon with Schwarzenegger abs comes along and claims it. Time to go kick some gnomes in the face again.
• Availability: It's in almost every Genesis compilation of note and can also be purchased as a standalone from Steam directly. Not on the Genesis Mini though, oddly.
• Preservation: There was a tendency of Sega's to release Genesis-exclusive "sequels" to their biggest arcade games, like Space Harrier II and Super Thunder Blade, which were actually just slight remixes of the originals. That's also the case here, with Golden Axe II close to a carbon copy of the original with the same three protagonists and most of the level design and enemies still intact. What's weird is that the Genesis already had a Golden Axe port a long time ago [Ep. II] so this really feels like Sega trying to pull a Malibu Stacy (With a New Hat!) on us. Even so, there are perhaps enough new tweaks and additions to justify buying it again, especially as it's still one of the best first-party arcade conversions for the platform. Hard to mess up a game where you walk right and hit people with a sword.

240: Valis: The Fantasm Soldier

• Developer: Riot
• Publisher: Telenet Japan (JP) / Renovation (NA)
• JP Release: 1991-12-27
• NA Release: December 1991
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Valis
• Genre: Brawler
• Theme: Fantasy / Anime
• Premise: A typical highschooler unexpectedly becomes a demon slayer in the first of these anime-styled hack n' slashers. With its Genesis debut, you can no longer say that Valis doesn't live here anymore.
• Availability: Let's skirt right past where the Valis franchise eventually ended up and say that it's probably for the best it doesn't come back. Some things can't be undone.
• Preservation: For any western Valis fan, the Genesis localization of Valis: The Fantasm Soldier is fondly remembered for being the only official version of the first Valis released in English. However, it has been heavily modified in comparison to how the original 1986 MSX game used to look and play: this is due to this port coming on the heels of Valis II and Valis III, incorporating new gameplay tweaks and additions from those games such as a high jump and a magic system, while retaining the original story of how Yoko Aso first came to be the Valis Warrior. The PC Engine CD version is a lot better, both graphically and in how it feels to play (for whatever reason, Genesis Yuko is sluggish as hell), but there are certainly worse Valis games out there. Good lord, yes.

Sam Esmail's tense cyber thriller Mr. Robot is back on our screens for its final season this autumn, and what better way to celebrate by playing the official game of the show? In a subtle nod to the hacking drama's prescience of a near-future world in the grip of a corporate dystopia, Mr. Robot The Game had the foresight of being released in 2007: a good eight years before the show itself aired. Instead of following around the skittish genius Elliot and his sinister alter-ego Mr. Robot, we instead have a similarly talented infiltration specialist by the name of Asimov: a mover robot operating on the colony ship Eidolon, which is presently ferrying its cryosleeping passengers to a far off world.

All right, fine, maybe this Mr. Robot is not necessarily related to the TV show Mr. Robot. Maybe. (You can never be too sure, what with A.R.G.s being a popular choice for hacker fiction.) It does have hacking in it though, featured in one of the game's two halves: the first being an isometric action-adventure platformer game - think Solstice or Equinox, or Lumo for an example even fresher than this game - and the second, a cyberware-based RPG. Neither mode is particularly compelling or deep on its own, but having that alternation of the active "outside" jumping and puzzle-solving sequences and the contemplative "inside" turn-based hacking makes for an engaging dichotomy. I'll just address both of these halves separately:

The action-adventure aspect, where you're entering a room and trying to figure out how to get to the other exit, maybe collecting the various hard-to-reach power-ups and currency items along the way, relies a lot on the player's ability to think isometrically. That is to say, it's not always easy to judge jump distances and the proximity of hazards when everything's at an acute angle. I grew up with these games, with the likes of Knight Lore and Head Over Heels being staples of the '80s British gamer's repertoire, so even if it's less of an issue for me there's always a little bit of visual ambiguity that trips you up and reminds you why platforming games in this perspective never really caught on with the rest of the world. Mr. Robot also seems to de-emphasize shadows, increasing their transparency to the point of near invisibility, which is usually the only sure way in this game genre of knowing just how high up you are or where you will land if you happen to be in mid-air. The game can be pretty strict about damage too: you can take about three hits (with a small grace period of invulnerability in-between) before you vaporize and return to the entrance of the room, all progress within reset (besides collectibles). If you lose all three lives - and you sometimes have fewer for reasons unbeknown to me - you instead go back to when you last hit a checkpoint, and all your progress is reset (including collectibles and any party tinkering you may have done). This is especially painful when the game decides to pull its favorite party trick: crashing randomly. It really loves that trick, in particular when it's been some time since you last saved.

The computer hacking has you travelling between nodes on a grid of computer components, any of which could trigger a random encounter with some of the system's security programs. These start small - basic processes that can do nothing but attack - but eventually become more intelligent with more elaborate character models to match. The late-game enemies will frequently heal and buff each other, letting the less sophisticated enemies in front deal (and take) most of the damage. These are all simple turn-based affairs where each character attacks in an order determined on a per-turn basis, and while the player begins with only their own "ghost" - the AI mind inside the robot body - the player will eventually meet their beleaguered robot colleagues and, with one thing leading to another, end up downloading their ghosts for safekeeping. These ghosts, in turn, then join your party while hacking, taking up various roles: repair and maintenance (healing/support), ICE-breaking (melee), high-level security programs (DPS mage), and so on. You can find and buy consumables and equipment, the latter adding more damage and armor and occasionally providing upgrade chips that allow you to siphon energy (health) and power (mana) from enemies. I played the game on normal and found these RPG battles to be extremely easy, so it might be that playing on hard is the way to go. I suspect (but cannot confirm) the stronger enemy types show up sooner and in greater frequency, adding to the mode's strategic challenge and variety.

In all, it's surprising to see an Indie game this ambitious and robust from as long ago as 2007. This was back before Braid and Spelunky and Minecraft, in that halcyon period where we were just beginning to understand what the Xbox Live Arcade and its influx of new, bite-sized morsels might mean to the game industry moving forward. It's by UK studio Moonpod, who I've met before with their equally ambitious top-down space sim Starscape with which Mr. Robot shares its often dry and sardonic sense of humor (and, unfortunately, a great deal of bugs). I feel like I'm being a little unfair decrying a game like this for its flaws and lack of serious depth when I'm subconsciously comparing it to those twelve years its junior, because that's a hell of a long time in game development terms, but the frequent crashing really clinched it for me. It's not something you'd expect from a game that's had over a decade to find some stability. Still, if you were in the process of forming a long-form article or video on the constantly expanding Indie development scene starting with its earliest pioneers, Mr. Robot may have a few dents and scuffs but has held up well enough. (I'm perhaps just a little irked that the game didn't provide any hints about where the final season might be heading. You win again, Esmail.)

Rating: 3 out of 5.