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

How did I do?

*Warning – This writeup is going to be longer then most of previous ones.. I spent more time this year on this game than any other game [Including FFX (which I loved), and Hitman: World of Assassination (also loved)… and I have a lot more to say about it.*

Recently I hosted Thanksgiving for my family and opened up my home to family members who would normally never see my inner sanctum. One of those family members would happen to be a cousin who is “really into video games,” or at least that is what I would always hear from Aunts and Uncles whenever people are trying to get us to bond. While I was making one of the main dishes in the kitchen I was able to spy my cousin looking at my entire game collection, that covers all the shelves around my TV. To a genuine collector it is a paltry amount, but to most people, it would seem like I own every game in existence (I don’t, for the record). Later that evening I was talking to my cousin and he said and I quote, “For someone with a lot of games, you sure don’t have many good ones.” I didn’t really take offense to the comment, because obviously good or bad is somewhat subjective, but also because I knew I wouldn’t be able to convince him that there is merit in playing video games that aren’t “mainstream.” See his initial comment really meant that I didn’t have that many games that he actually plays. The last Call of Duty game I own is from the 360 generation. I have Madden 2018 back when Tom Brady was still with the patriots. I don’t own a physical edition of Fortnite (and I didn’t have him look through all my digital only games to show him, I was in fact cool), and I still don’t own a Ps5. In his eyes, I am the weirdo. I play video games, sure, but I am wasting my time and presumably money by owning games like “Pig Eat Ball,” and a CIB “Croc: Legend of the Gobbos.” Honestly, I have always been that way growing up and not just in games. It wasn’t done to be an asshole or contrarian, but I like things off the beaten path. So, it’s no surprise that I would have picked up Operation Darkness some time ago sitting on a dusty shelf in Gamestop and decided to buy that instead of a new Call of Duty, Madden, or the like. The game sat on my shelf for years, and I always wanted to play it because the idea intrigued me, but things would get in the way and I never got around to it… until NOW.

We are going to dive into every system in great detail about this game, because why the hell not, but lets just lay some groundwork. Operation Darkness is an alternate history game that re-tells the story of world war II. You take the on the role of a private who in the first level has his unit wiped out and later joins a very special unit to continue fighting. Each mission is a turn based strategic battle where, in most levels, you will attempt to kill all enemy combatants without losing one of the story critical characters under your control. There are hit points, individual experience points, a leveling system, special abilities, and a whole host of other systems bubbling under the surface that you will have to adapt to or risk an early exit in the game. If anyone remembers this game at all, it is because you aren’t simply battling generic allies vs. generic axis soldiers, but rather you will fight a slew of monsters as some monsters yourself. Your main enemy is known as the blood clan, and they are vampires. You have stumbled into your own clan that is made up of werewolves, a Frankenstein’s monster, and a witch amongst others. Also fun sidenote this game is selling for like $100 on eBay and I have to assume that it’s because it has Atlus’ name on the box and not based on the quality or review scores of this game.

Ok, where to start the deep dive? I suppose we should begin with combat as that is where you are going to spend a majority of your time. As mentioned earlier, the combat is done in turns, but not in a good guys and then bad guys turn, but rather by individual units. On the right side of the screen, on by default, is a big turn order. For the most part you will control all of the blue characters (with some exceptions). When it is one of your character’s turns you basically have two action points per turn in order to do some familiar (to the genre) things. You can move a certain distance, you can use an item, or you can attack. Those all take one action point, but you can’t double up on a single action. You won’t be able to move twice or attack twice regardless. For two points, you can go into cover mode (overwatch), that can either trigger on an enemies movement or to piggyback off of another allies attack, or you can use a special move. These special moves are different for nearly every character, but they stem from the “monster” that character is. The werewolves can use their claws to attack a certain distance, the witch can hurl a fireball, and your Dr Jekyll equivalent can cast revive, amongst other moves. Obviously the specials and the cover mode have their benefits which is why they take both turns but not being able to move is a big detriment. You can’t move first to get into range and then use a special or go into cover, so if you are planning on using either of those options it will almost always be a two turn process to execute to your vision, and a lot can happen during those two turns. When you aren’t using your specials or monster powers, all of the weaponry is “roughly” weapons from the time. I am not a historian, especially not WW2, but you aren’t going to really be using fun guns for your non specials. I do say “roughly” because there are a few weapons that I’m confident in saying were probably not used in WW2. For instance I have a dragon sword that does huge damage to dragons if used, it doesn’t shoot lightning or anything else, but I just don’t think a lot of dragon swords were used in the war. Single shot rifles will allow you to “snipe,” but are limited to a single target, while some bigger guns will require you to be up close, but can sometimes group attack two or three enemies in a single shot. Not every character, can use every weapon, and some specials require certain weapons to be equipped, so keep all that in mind.

So let’s go one layer deeper. This is an RPG in the sense that there are individual stats and you can level up, get more health, learn more abilities for each individual character. Characters not used or used seldomly, will not gain levels and be quickly obsolete and weak, while a character that is over used can, in theory, be over-leveled and really decimate enemies (I wouldn’t worry about this, because unless you pour in a crazy amount of extra hours doing power leveling, this won’t happen naturally). For instance, it won’t be surprising that your healer will be under-leveled because as far as I could tell, XP was only gained when dealing damage to enemies, or getting a kill. If you use your healer, as an actual healer.. you won’t be gaining a hell of a lot of XP. I digress, there are a lot of stats for each character that will impact them on the battlefield. ‘Speed’ determines how fast their turn comes up, while ‘movement’ impacts the range at which they can move. There are things like; Hit, attack, defense, crit chance, Hp, Ms (special power.. like MP), dodge, accuracy, etc.. There is an abundance of stats, and for the most part you are at the whim of your character’s leveling up with a few exceptions. For instance after you beat certain levels you learn an equip able skill that you can use to adjust certain stats. Each character can equip four different skills (3 really, but we will get to that later) and those skills can also level up 4 times. However, they are only useful if equipped, so once you level up a skill to level 4 (max level), you can swap it for something else that you might like, but you don’t get to carry over whatever benefit that skill originally granted you. So one skill might increase your speed, which is very useful, and you can get that to level 4 as a big boost, but those aren’t permanent upgrades and if you swap that out for an HP boost, then you can say goodbye to that speed boost. It makes it really hard to remove skills you have leveled up early, because starting over with a new skill at level 1 is a big downgrade from whatever you had previously. Do I want to sacrifice my accuracy boost for more Def, knowing I am going to go from like an 80% hit rate to a 50% hit rate? The only other stat that can be manipulated is ‘speed,’ which might be the most important stat in the game.

You see Operation Darkness also uses everyone’s favorite system, encumbrance. Each item has a weight, from the guns you use, to the medkits you carry, to the backup ammo you hold in your pouch. The more weighed down you are, you take a bigger hit on speed, and if you carrying nothing you get a big bonus. Ignoring the fact that each character does have limited item and weapon slots they can carry, the main purpose of this encumbrance is to essentially prevent the player from equipping every character with a bazooka and 15 backup rockets. In case it wasn’t obvious, your character isn’t guaranteed a turn at a certain place in line, and no matter how good of an idea you have for a character, the later levels will make it impossible for you to use characters that are not optimized in terms of their equipment. My 2^nd piece of advice if anyone decides to play this game (my first piece of advice is “don’t”), is to figure out how you are going to use each character and try to optimize their equipment to back that up. If you find that you have a character where you rarely fire their regular gun and you are using their specials or rockets for them, then don’t give them that gun and ammo. My most stubborn lesson from this game was learning that I can’t have it all. Bazooka guys and gals can’t also have a heavy machine gun or any gun for that matter. That shit might fly in early levels, but when you face off against your first vampire and they get 3 turns in a row before that person can do anything then you know you have screwed up.

Sorry these all build on each other, and speaking about one makes me think of the other things. Hey, so you remember when I said you really only get 3 equip able skills instead of 4, well that is because the first skill you learn is called “auto-restore” and that will need to be equipped on all characters, unless you are trying to ruin your real life playing this game. Auto-restore means that when your health falls below a certain % that your character will automatically use the weakest healing item they have equipped. The first less sexy reason this is important, is that it saves you an action point to heal your character. No one wants to waste an action point using a medkit when they can be shooting and hopefully killing enemies to beat a level, and while you may think you are better at knowing when to use a medkit then the computer, in reality you will need it because… This ability can still be used if a shot were to kill your player. That’s right, if you take a shot that was to bring you to zero, but you have this ability equipped, then the character will use it and still be in the fight. I shouldn’t have to explain how important that is, but there are story critical characters that if they die at all (regardless of the fact that you have a character who can revive people) the mission automatically ends. The game doesn’t give you a chance to revive them or anything, it just ends and you get to start that whole mission over again no matter how far along you were. Did you hit a mine in the early levels, because you weren't scanning the ground one square at a time? Well, start over… did a tank fire a shot into a crowd, because you havn’t gotten a turn yet and kill one of those main characters? Well, start over... All of those things can be avoided with auto-restore. Also, let’s not pretend that this is the first skill you learn for any other reason then during testing for the game they realized how vital this skill is. It only takes a few level restarts before you realize that this skill should always be equipped.

So why do the death of some people matter, but the others don’t? Well because this game wanted to do permadeath, but they also couldn’t ruin parts of the story, so they had to make some characters off-limits. People can hate or love perma-death in games, and that is a debate for another time, but there are two things to note here. First, permadeath can’t be turned off in this game, there is no character retreat and the promise they will be recovered back at camp. If a character is dead when the mission ends, that character is dead for the rest of the game. Second, just load your game when that happens. This game is poorly balanced, (and I won’t hear other people say otherwise) every named character is relatively indispensable when compared to a generic recruit. Generic recruits all start at level one regardless of where you are in the story, so have fun leveling them up on optional missions over and over again, and generic recruits have no special abilities and can’t learn them. When you get to the final levels of the game, you have long been moving away from using guns at all, unless it’s a bazooka, so having a character that can only wield guns is going to severely handicap you for a game that is already excruciatingly difficult at times. Unless you are imposing restrictions on yourself, for some dumb reason, where you aren’t going to load a save, every character is worth going back for. Sure could you convince me that you can beat the game without Jack the Ripper (yes that is a real character, and a good guy), sure.. but I would much rather have him on the team for his high speed, movement, and up close attacks, over generic character B who at best will get two bazooka shots for an entire mission. Perma-death can work in games where it is an interesting mechanic, and characters can be a big loss but replaceable in the grand scheme of things, or in a game where there are so many characters that you can pivot easily. Newer X-Com (I guess it’s the only X-com people know now), it hurts to lose a leveled up character, but the gap isn’t insurmountable to bring in a new rookie and level them up. Fire Emblem has a huge roster, where you can lose someone, and it stinks and maybe they were your marriage partner, but their skill set is replaceable. Operation Darkness does not have that.. If you can you leave one enemy on the field until you get a chance to revive the dead character do so, but otherwise it is best to just start that mission over. And that is because..

There are no mid-mission saves or checkpoints. Every mission has to be done in one sitting (I mean, I suppose you could leave the game paused for an extended break, but that wasn't realistic for me), and these missions are long. On average each individual mission would take me between an hour and an hour and a half, which may not seem that long to you, but seems like an eternity to me in terms of limiting saves. Also I should remind you that with no mid-mission saves, that any failure or death in a mission that kicks you back to camp is just full time lost while playing the game. Even losing 30 minutes can be frustrating, but it can be downright devastating to lose over an hour of progress because the game decided to be cheap at the last minute, or you made a mental lapse that cost you. I can see some of you doing the mental math to figure out how I could play this game for so long. If there are 27 main missions and even if you say each one took an hour and a half (skewing the average to the high point) that only puts you at around 40 hours, which is the length of a relatively well-oiled RPG. Well lets count in the 15 optional missions, because while they are in fact optional and not *required* for completion, you will need to use them to level up your characters to account for some difficulty spikes that happen throughout the main game, so add in another 20ish hours and we are now at a meaty 60 hours which is still less than the time I spent on FFX. Well sir or madam, that is because I also lost so much freaking progress to countless deaths that are full level restarts. While it certainly isn’t every level, I would say at least half of all the main missions I had to play twice, because I would die at some point because I was un-prepared, so now we add in another 20 hours and you start to see what I mean. I didn’t even do the super difficult bonus missions that are an additional 20 missions. I could have easily been playing this game for an additional 20-30 hours just to tackle those. Listen, I get it, if the game allows mid-mission saves then you are going to have people abuse that system so that they roll back a save every time a player get’s injured and that really ruins whatever difficulty the game wants to go for. Those people exist, and that’s fine.. but there are also people who need to put the game down because other stuff came up and can’t always game undisturbed for multiple hours at a time. I got to the point playing this, where I didn’t even fire the game up, unless I knew I had at least 2 hours of undisturbed time to play. You know how rare that is for me? It’s partially why the game took me so long to beat, because I couldn’t consent to leaving a console on pause for hours at a time, but I also wasn’t going to just hope that I could finish a long and grueling level on time or risk losing whatever progress I made. In a world where I can save in the middle of an NBA2k game, or a Madden game, it doesn’t make sense why I can’t save in the middle of a mission. I’m not even playing online.

But, Phil, you seem like a super cool, competent, handsome video game playing veteran, who loves turn-based-strategy games… how can you be so bad at this game? Well let’s talk difficulty. In general any game that relies on some sort of dice roll to affect outcomes, like % to hit, % for crit, etc., then there are going to be days when the dice rolls are just not in your favor. I remember distinctly when people bitched and moaned about the % to hit in X-Com as being unfair, well buckle up, because this game is even worse. The amount of times my sniper missed a 75% shot or better is truly disgusting, and while you don’t ever get to see what the enemies % to hit is going to be, you better believe it is a hell of a lot better than yours. You might know that a single use rocket launcher from a distance of X only has about a 20% chance to hit when you fire it, when it comes from an enemy, just chalk that shit up to landing at your feet. When a tank gets an action before your team has moved off the starting blocks, and they are all bunched up, then consider that tank shot a direct hit on multiple party members. Oh and I should mention that if a tank runs over you, it is instant death with no chance of auto-restore, so if one of your main characters even sneaks inside a tanks movement radius, they will almost certainly get squished sending you back to the menu to start again. When a main character has used the last of their health kits, then they become cat-nip for every enemy on the battlefield, no matter how improbable the route to get to them is. The game loves being difficult. Remember that whole speed conversation about not carrying too much so you can get more actions than the enemy? Well in later levels it doesn’t mean shit, a Tank or a dragon will get more actions then a character who is only equipped with a dagger and nothing else. You have to be lean just to get a turn in, and that is still after the enemy gets multiple turns in a row with what should be a heavy unit. If that wasn’t enough for difficulty, every mission comes with a “twist.” During the mission, at some point (whether you killed X amount of enemies, or X amount of turns have been taken, or any other trigger) then the twist of the mission occurs. This twist is almost always in the form of reinforcements, but you don’t know what reinforcements or where or how many are going to spawn. You better hope you are prepared, because running out of rockets when a tank battalion is the twist, or having enough medkits when a bunch of skeletons spawn right behind your main character, just means you are now looking to restart so you know what ammo to conserve or what you need to bring at the start of the mission, on attempt # 2. There is no mid-mission re-supply, and while you can harvest items from dead bodies, there is no assurance that it will have health when you need it, or a rocket to take care of a tank. So, you somehow have to be lean and bring as little equipment as possible into missions, but at the same time bring enough equipment so that you are prepared for whatever the twist is that you know is coming, but have no idea what enemy they are going to drop.

As a quick aside, there are people out there that love this game. That claim that the game is easy if you understand the “mechanics, and if you are good at strategy games.” People who claim they can beat the game without using the auto-restore ability, and can get the speed running achievement (clearing the game in under 35 hours). These people love to shout on old message boards that reviewers of this game were just bad, and that this game doesn’t pose that much of a challenge, and while this is nothing new to existing on the internet, I also believe most of these people to be liars and cheats. If you have a walkthrough open, that tells you where every enemy is going to spawn, what each dead body has on them, and exactly where to stand at every turn as if it was a chess match, then yes.. this game is easy, but that is because you are doing one step above watching someone else play the game. When you do know the twist, where the enemies spawn and you are on your second playthrough of the level, it can be easy to make sure you leave a rocket guy to stand at this exact spot so he can decimate a portion of the army immediately, or know when to conserve certain ammo. If you know that you are going to go up against a tank division, you know that you will need extra rockets, so you aren’t screwed after the halfway point, but if you play this game for the first time as it is meant to be played, where those twists are surprises, then the game is a real bastard. I was struggling on a level, the first level that introduces dragons, and I was looking for any advice as to how to get past it. The only advice from a so called “expert” (on someone else’s very similar question) was to either start the game over or from a save that was 7 missions back, because there is a super weapon that is hidden on a corpse in main mission 16, that makes fighting those dragons easier. “Ex-squeeze me?!?” Your advice is to lose over 7 hours of progress or all progress, because I missed a single chance at getting a weapon that makes a fight easier? Either you suck at the game because you don’t have any alternative strategy, or the game is incredibly poorly designed (both can be true.) If you watch the only youtube video walkthrough of the game and pause it at just the right moment, you can see that they severely over-leveled their squad before each mission. At one mission where I was at an average of level 23, they were all at 30 (each level is a pretty big deal.. not BG3 big, but still big). When I did a mission at level 30, they were all at 40.. Well shit, I too could cakewalk through the enemies if I power leveled 13 characters another 10 levels between every two missions (something that would take you an incredibly long time). Needless to say, I beat that stupid dragon level and the levels afterwards without rolling back a save or starting over, or even power-leveling. I did it by one part luck and one part strategy… oh and trying the level multiple times.

Okay aside over.. you know what else stinks, there is no real cover in this game. Yup, outside of a few buildings you can hide on the other side of during missions, your characters are not smart enough to use cover of any kind. Most guns have a range of attack, and while a tree offers the slimmest cover directly in front of you, the enemy (or you) could aim one square to the side and still hit the person in cover. Almost all enemy magic, tank attacks, and dragon abilities can hit you right through the tree or any other cover you might be posted behind (burned out tanks, even some buildings, etc.). One thing that cover does, is completely screw up your own character, because they lack the ability to lean or shoot around. Because you are a smart person, in the early game you might think I am going to shoot and hide behind this tree, or hide and then shoot. Only to realize that when you are behind the tree and you go to shoot, your dumb dummy just points the gun directly at the tree trunk and then says he can’t see any enemies. So you will have to move out into the open to take your next shot. It would make sense if this tree was the size of the Deku tree, but it can be as slim as a piece of bamboo, and your team cant figure out how to shoot around it. So you know that whole strategy aspect you have been using for other games, where you utilize cover and try to minimize risk… well it doesn’t really work here because there is no true cover. You can hide someone like a main character behind a building, and as long as there are no enemy magic users they can be safe from simple fire, but you are doing so by also removing that soldier from your attacking squad. In later levels you might as well be having every fight in the middle of a big open field, because neither you nor the enemy is relying on regular guns anymore, so trees or buildings be damned as a use of cover.

So what is an effective strategy, well it obviously depends on what enemies you are looking to fight, for basic combatants, the solution is to put 2 to 3 snipers in cover mode (two on ambush, one on attack), make sure none of your buddies are in front of the snipers (because they will get shot in the back) and hope that you can whittle down some troops over time (cover is also generally weaker than just straight up attacking). That is the basis for all of the strategy, but then you have to mix in what the other enemies are. Skeletons mean you will need melee or explosive people picking them off, tanks mean you will need bazookas and lots of them, and dragons mean you need everything under the sun. 40 + hours into the game and I still didn’t think I had a foolproof strategy for most levels.

I think that covers most of the gameplay and then some. Between missions you are at camp, here you can re-equip characters before going to the next mission, take on optional missions (if they are available) or spend some time boosting up your surplus supplies and weapons. There is a supply depot where you can turn in your in game currency, in terms of “kill money,” into purchasing items. In the early stages you are probably scavenging enough items and weapons that you don’t need to spend much time in here, but for me in between every mission since like mission 20, I was having to do full re-stocks of health and rockets for the next level. I don’t quite know what the conversion rate is for each kill that you get, it is certainly not 1 for 1, but it is possible to run out of currency and not be able to re-stock the way you would like. The supply depot also has a limit to the amount of items it is carrying, so you might be able to buy 40 medkits, but they might only have 4 rockets in stock. While I luckily never ran out of currency, you can re-do optional missions as many times as you want, so you could pop into an early mission, rack up some easy kills (for almost no XP) and then buy the items you need. My biggest gripe is that you have to buy one object at a time. Can’t select the qty and say I want 20 med kits, nope… you have to confirm 20 individual purchases of medkits. I touched on this earlier, but you can also recruit soldiers here. There are three types (Female, Male A, and Male B) they all start at level one no matter if it is the first mission of the game or the last, they won’t have any special powers and you will drop them in favor of any named character. I had one recruit that I got around the second level that I took all the way to the end, but sure enough any mission where I had to decide who to cut because I could only take a portion of my army, she was always the first cut.. so invest at your own risk. Overall the menu is a little clunky to navigate but it does enough to get the job done. (all menu time also counts towards that speedrun achievement.. so if you are going for that, you better practice).

We move on to the story, and I probably have the least to say about it. You play during a fantastical alternate history of World War II. The game does a fairly nice job of setting the game against the backdrop of real-life world events. In between most missions there is a little video that plays that shows actual clips from the way along with what was happening at the time. I did not fact check everything they showed me, but it all seemed pretty close to what I know of the history of the war. Obviously the missions your team goes out on dip into the fantastical, as you deal with all these mystical creatures that presumably exist in other battles, but are either disguised better or wipe out the allies so no one can say that a Skeleton army is attacking us. Of course the war between countries is really the backdrop for a story that is more focused on the individual characters. Hitler may be leading the Germans, but your main antagonists are two vampire generals that pop in on occasion, cause chaos, and leave before you can kill them. From them you will learn more about the Blood clan (vampires) and the Fang clan (werewolves) and will slowly piece together bits of the centuries long war between them. However, since this game has perma-death for every character except for 3-4, most of the story beats are focused on those 4. Sure you might learn that Frank is (drumroll please) actually Frankenstein’s monster and that is a fun moment, but that happens fairly late in the game and only if he is still alive when you get to that point. Other characters like Keith (werewolf) and Cynthia (just a sniper) have a few lines of dialogue here or there but don’t really have much growth as a character. In fact it seems the “interesting” aspect of this game is just who is going to appear next. At some point you get Jack the Ripper on your team, and it’s not really mentioned why you have a notorious killer on your side. Even later you get a Van Helsing, not the exact same one that fought Dracula, but still a Van Helsing. The introduction of these characters are about as much as you are going to get story wise for them, because there isn’t an option to really talk to your squad. Even the big story-point of your character getting a blood transfusion from a werewolf and thus helps give you werewolf powers is just over and handled by mission 10. Once the initial shock is over and we did our 10 minutes on the subject no one brings it up again. I saw people “praise” the story as being the draw for the game, but the elevator pitch for this game is the story.

“What if like Hitler had vampires on his side, and the Allies had like Werewolves and other monsters during World War 2?”

“Whoa, that sounds cool, I bet that would really change the whole war, right?”

“Umm, not really”

I would have loved some sort of Fire Emblem down time where I could have gotten to know the characters more, but that isn’t this game. I wanted to learn more about some ancillary characters, but you get the intro and then an aside here or there. I understand the difficulty of writing a story and including permadeath, because these characters could all be dead the same mission they are introduced, so why waste all that time making their arc deep when people might not even see it. The alternative is that these characters exist in cutscenes or presumably at camp and they add so little to the story. Yes, the story is the war and stopping the Germans from winning through any means possible, and maybe that is enough, but if I am going to put in 80 hours into a game, I want to know the companions I spent 80 hours fighting alongside. I know every characters entire story in FFX, including some non-party members and I technically spent less time playing that. I know a bunch of fire-emblem stories and that game has Permadeath and managed to still craft narratives around characters that could die. Even for the main character of Operation Darkness I know that he lost the love of his life and his family to the Germans.. which is why he joined the war, and I know that he is going to be a werewolf, oh and he really hates the Germans… that’s about it.

There are some other things I didn’t touch on, like the camera being absolutely atrocious in combat. In every battle the camera will have you turned around or make it difficult to navigate to where you want to go on the map, but as long as you don’t rush your turns you will be fine. Or how this game has an online multiplayer where each person takes control of certain units, but it isn’t much different then just handing the control to someone else in the room as you see fit. Believe it or not, I didn’t find a lot of hits online to play that mode, but uhhh… It exists. Also this game needs a speed up button during gameplay. Inevitablely there will be a point in battle where the computer gets 5-10 turns in a row before you get to act, and you have to sit and watch every action, and sometimes every long animation before you get to do anything. I don’t need to see every vampire cast the same spell, just fast forward and then sum up all the damage I got. Also you know what's a "fun" thing they did, if you want to play the bonus missions that are supposedly the super difficult ones, you have to find 12 specific items (one in each mission starting at mission 13). These items are being held by a 'random' enemy and after killing them you will have to loot their body and grab the item before the mission ends. Since you don't know who is carrying it, you will need to loot everybody until you find it, and clear out the inventory space to pick it up (because it does take an inventory slot). Should you not find it, or heaven forbid that it is on the last enemy that you kill has it, (thus ending the mission) you have lost out on that item forever. You can't replay main missions after beating them, so you either need to load a save before the mission, start the game over (if you don't have a save), or accept that you will not be able to unlock the special missions. Thank Gorp I don't care about achievements anymore, because so many are tied up into not only finding all of those items, but then completing all those missions that ONLY UNLOCK WHEN YOU FIND ALL 12.

With everything being said, and there was a lot said, the game isn’t awful. I know that doesn’t sound like a bold declaration, but when outlets gave it like 2 and 2.5 out of 10, you would think it was some of the worst stuff imaginable, but its not and that was genuinely surprising to me. Now don’t get me wrong, there were days and weeks where I hated playing this game. It felt needlessly unfair, it played fast and loose with its own dumb rules, and I lost countless hours of progress because of any number of reasons (and not one of them being failure to remember to save). Levels that I would be forced to slog through 2 or 3 times in hope that a different strategy worked, or I got lucky with dice rolls, just so I could move on to the next problem. I would never actively recommend this game to any normal human in the planet. You would have to be a sick person that loves JRPG, Turn Based Strategy games, AND (the most important part) have played all the better games out there that fit into that genre and still want more, only then I would recommend this game. I’m also thrilled to be done with this game, and will probably never play it again in my entire life.. hell I should sell while it’s hot and see if I can get a cool $100 for it.

But, there is something incredibly satisfying when this game breaks your way, which it doesn’t do often. When enemy tanks miss, and you land a crit to dismantle a big obstacle. When you have finely tuned your team's equipment to allow your swordsman to get two turns before the enemy allowing you to wipe out a good portion of enemies before they can do any damage, and when you finally beat that level that you have spent hours on without needing to revive anyone and barely re-stock them before the next mission. That stuff all gets to me. I mean my favorite two genres are rolled into one game (RPG and Turn based strategy), so I knew something was going to get me. Plus there is still a magic feeling watching a character level up and unlock a skill that you know is going to change the course of the battle immediately. Planning and pulling off a great strategy (even if it seems more luck based then skill), these are all high moments that don't happen often, but I'm still going to appreciate.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Wouldn't it be funny if it was, but no.

Where does it rank: So is the game the greatest of all time? No of course not. It probably doesn’t even score higher than a 6 out of 10, but when my expectations were in the toilet and around level 8 of 27 I was pulling my hair out with frustration, because I didn’t “get” the game yet, that seems like an incredible turn around. But, while this game eventually grew on me, it is also a warning for other people. That warning is not that this game will grow on you too, but rather that you have to work at this game to even find the fun. The original reviewers of this game were not entirely wrong about this game. It’s camera is awful, the game looks dirty, and it’s difficulty will kick you in the teeth until you lament and try to meet at its level. It isn’t fun-difficult like people might find Dark Souls, but those reviewers also weren’t playing this game for three months straight, like me, continuing to beat my head against the game after a hidden landmine made me restart a level, or a stray tank bullet hit my main character after he used his last med-kit. Know that if you do decide to pick up or play this game, that A) Play it on an emulator so you can cheese it and avoid the $100 charge for this game, but also B) be either prepared to meet the game at it’s level or give up very early on. I have it ranked as the 96th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between Ring Fit Adventure (95th) and Moving Out (97th) out of 179 Total Games.

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

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) MDK2 2) TMNT Shredder's Revenge

So Valkyria Chronicles is still the go-to for anime turn-based WW2 then. Good to know, I've been curious about this one.

Also, mid-mission twists almost always feel cheap. Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius loves them, and throwing a billion enemies at you, and not having anything that blocks line of sight (granted it takes place in space, but still). Sunrider also has no mechanic to let you replay levels, so if you realize you just did not spend your money correctly to beat a mission, or didn't earn enough on a previous mission because you didn't use the enemy carriers to farm enemies for money, that's it, game over, you're SOL.

So I guess I'm saying Operation Darkness could be worse?

@cozmicaztaway: thanks for the read and comment.. what's most frustrating about the mid mission twist is just managing health kits.. you play a certain way calculating how many enemies are left and how much health you have, only to get burned by a mid mission twist or the dreaded double twist after you already dealt with the mid mission one. In level 26 you fight Hitler and his cronies, they all have magic because of course they do, so you throw everything at him.. the mid mission twist is a super up tank, and after you deal with that you think you are good... then you "think" you finish off the last enemy and psych.. a dragon spawns and Hitler's health is refilled. Hope you saved up enough shit to do this all again.

It could be worse, but damn if I wish it was better.

@imunbeatable80:

That sounds pretty awful. I can totally imagine taking some risks to finish an objective and that leaving you completely screwed for the next thing too. Which just sounds tedious.

But yeah, thanks for the write-up