Game of the Month: Umineko When They Cry: Answer Arcs (07th Expansion, 2017)

That's right, I played the rest of the visual novel series that's 10% about murders, 20% about freaky supernatural witch and demon nonsense, and 70% about rich jerks arguing over succession rights, inheritance, and business ventures. Despite being an incredibly slow experience for the vast majority of its run, the Question Arcs (episodes 1-4) of Umineko When They Cry made the occasional overture towards some satisfying twists and turnabout arguments as the dopey protag Ushiromiya Battler continued to clash logic against fantasy with the antagonistic "Golden Witch" Beatrice who had trapped his family on their ancestral island of Rokkenjima and murdered them one after the other, offering different variations on the same slaughterfest that Battler had to grimace through before he could start putting together the particulars about how those crimes were committed. If he decides they couldn't be done without the witch's magic, or else forfeits the contest, the witch wins and the entire dead family becomes the "canonical" way things went down; if Battler can prove how it was done absent of any "deus ex magica", though, he would be allowed to pick a timeline where most if not all the Ushiromiya family survives the ordeal including himself.

That's essentially the set-up for the first game's four episodes and their divergent spins on Rokkenjima's two nights and three days of serial killings, but rather than seeing a proper explanation for all the seemingly impossible closed-room murders the game's been more content to keep chugging along and throwing new wrenches into the works whenever it can, introducing even more of Beatrice's supernatural coterie including a demon butler and some bitter witch rivals with their own ideas about how the "game" should be played. The Question Arcs, true to its name, left a lot of mysteries left to solve and now, after almost a year of waiting, I was ready for some explanations by way of Answer Arcs.

I've written some thoughts on the individual episodes, jotted down while playing and left as-is to prevent corruption by any future knowledge, and I've naturally spoiler-blocked them here. If you've already been through this series before by all means check them out, but I'd recommend anyone curious enough to play through the games themselves. It is a mystery game, after all.

Episode 5

Episode 6

Episode 7

Episode 8

Overall, I'm not entirely sure I enjoyed Umineko When They Cry given the huge time investment and the comparatively damp payoff. In its favor, there's plenty of interesting threads and theories on the mystery genre, the power of belief and fantasy, an unusual and unpredictable array of storytelling and framing devices, and for as goofy as the sound effects and the original art could be there's a distinct charm to them in the same way as other Indies and doujins that have always had to do a lot with a little, especially when it's evident the creators' talents lie in producing the core narrative substance more than a showy presentation (or lack of one, in such cases).

I am tempted to seek out the other adaptations (there's a manga and an anime) of Umineko in part because I think having all that content pared down into something more digestible will also make it easier to process in full, and partly because I wouldn't mind seeing half the bizarre shit they do in this game translated into another medium—especially in how its many action scenes are handled pretty abstractly in this limited low-budget VN form. Either way, I'm glad to have another staple of the Japanese visual novel medium in my mental rolodex, as I'm sure I'll encounter many more VNs in the future that were directly influenced by the adventures of Battler and Beatrice and company. Heck, I might even get around to Higurashi (or Ciconia if it ever gets finished) one day.

Darling Indies and Other Gaming Tomfoolery

The Kobashotty Mario is a little thing I threw together to demonstrate the creativity of RetroAchievements sets and how they can elevate already entertaining material like "Super Mario 64 but you have a shotgun now". I've outlined each achievement and how you might go about earning it, highlighting the unique challenges involved with each one, and I've hopefully left just enough of an impression that folks might want to pursue the set themselves. I'll say that it's relatively approachable unlike some of these speedrun-tech-masters-only sets on there and a good way to get indoctrinated into the world of SM64 hacks and the concomitant achievement hunting. Or maybe it works better as a cautionary tale to push people away from that self-destructive spiral of Shine Gets and flip-jumps: take from it what you must.

Speaking of continuing to fall into a bottomless pit, I embarked on yet another Super Mario 64 hack with RetroAchievements support to keep myself busy while listening to Game Mess Mornings and the Bombcast; my ideal podcast game being one that does not demand too much higher brain function that can be played windowed so I can keep an eye on chat (I suppose I could get a second monitor, though I've no idea where I'd put it). Super Mario 64: Through the Ages is that hack for October and it's a real intriguing one, creating its level design around famous periods of history (as well as Planet Namek from DBZ, for some reason, though they let you fly anywhere you want which was cool). The other gimmick is that you could spend Stars to purchase Pokémon partners, each of whom could help out with the platforming using one of their special moves. This system didn't work as well as I'd hoped—most just give you some variant of a vertical boost, and Weezing is so much more effective at that than any of the others—but there were a few unique benefits to this system, like how Magnemite could draw in coins from a distance to make all those 100-Coin and Red Coin Stars so much easier or how Hypno sends you to sleep as a means to recover health. The achievements were on the right side of challenging also, giving you the usual completion milestones as well as stage-specific goals that could often be a handful, including a few no-damage boss runs and some "don't press A" types. The Pokémon each had a single Star bonus course that doubled as a tutorial on how to use them and all of them had an additional achievement challenge that, ironically given their purpose, usually involved finishing those courses without using the Pokémon at all. Demanding, interesting, and inventive: the marks of a good hack.

Next hack? Well, I'm eyeing up this semi-unofficial Mario 64 Randomizer and curious about some of its associated achievements. I didn't think you could do a randomizer with achievements, given one person's experience might be very different (and way easier) than another's, but I guess I'm curious enough to find out how that all works. It'll require a few playthroughs too since there's achievements for different randomizer settings, but fortunately only one full 120 Star run is required. After this, I gotta stop with the Mario 64 for a while and switch things up; there is such a situation as having too much of a good thing.

Pictlogica check! New recruits from the most recent region include Relm (FFVI), Steiner (FFIX), Rosa (FFIV), Penelo (FFXII), and Firion (FFII). Kind of progressively less compelling, that cast of characters. I don't think I'll be changing my current team of Garland, Auron, Selphie, Celes, and Amarant but I always have an eye open for new talent just in case. Very tempted to toss T.G. Cid into the mix, just on the basis that if he was able to carry me through Tactics he could do so again here.

WonderSwanning, Mega Driving, and Sixty-Forging Ahead

Part Nine of Anyway, Here's WonderSwan saw me drop the whole random pick process and focus on whatever highlights were left that I still wanted to check out. I'm not sure I'll revisit the WonderSwan at any point after the tenth and final part of this series in November, so I wanted to spend the last couple of these ensuring I'd left nothing noteworthy behind. There'll still be a few remainders regardless, though, so maybe I'll come back for one last round-up at some point in 2025 or beyond. Going from worst to best of this group, at least according to my final ranking list: Wild Card is a curious if inscrutable card-based RPG from Kawazu's (SaGa guy) team at Square that has you creating a world piece by piece in a semi-random fashion; Mr. Driller is an absolutely fine port of Namco's frantic Dig Dug successor except I don't really care for the game itself too much; Raku Jongg is a neat idea for a block-stacking puzzler that incorporates the rules of mahjong as a means to hand out little bonuses for strong "hands"; Final Fantasy IV is a game I'd normally be happy to revisit in full via this slightly graphically improved form were there a more comprehensive fan translation (since it helps to know what you're doing and where you're going); and Puzzle Bobble is as delightful as ever even in monochrome.

Part XLIV of the Mega Archive (that would be Part 44; not sure why I stuck with Roman numerals this long) sees the last of the games released in December 1993 and, indeed, the year 1993 as a whole. A larger entry this time, fifteen games in total, I managed to cap a wiki project that's been a long while in the making. Since 1994 promises to be even more work I'm going to have to either figure out a way to truncate the process or just bail on it entirely; it's not like the future of the GB Wiki is all that certain right now. Still, though, this process is never not enjoyable for me even with the wave of licensed crap that most Mega Archives devolve into these days. Highlight this time was almost certainly the big swansong first-party RPG that was Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium, considered the best in the series, while the worst game is either the super generic (and very late, given where RPGs were at then) turn-based RPG Maten no Soumetsu or the doubly-boring EA Sports Double Header compilation.

64 in 64: Episode 47, the penultimate episode in its season, covered Killer Instinct Gold as the pre-selection and Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside as the random pick. The former was out of a sense of obligation due to having already covered every other Rare game for the platform; I don't have anything against Killer Instinct in particular but as a fighter on a system with a controller not ideally suited for fighters it was never going to rank too highly even with its great Robin Beanland soundtrack. The basketball game was entirely fine due to being more accessible than a dry sports simulation like the NBA Live series, but obviously a little less polished in turn. I managed to fit in two pre-season games before discovering that the pre-season mode is permanently stuck in easy mode, so that took the wind out of my sails a little after two surprising victories as the Sacramento Kings.

The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Shantae and the Seven Sirens (WayForward, 2019/2020)

Kind of a so-so gathering of Indies for this month, mostly abandoning the October horror theme almost immediately, but otherwise very much the sort of selection folks have come to expect from me by this point: an RPG, an explormer, an adventure game (the more point-and-clicky the better), and a Zeldersatz. I'm going to give the top spot to previous Apple Arcade exclusive Shantae and the Seven Sirens (#393) because WayForward really knows how to polish a game to a fine sheen even if there's not a whole lot to distinguish it from all the other Shantaes. Sometimes, something familiar and well-made is all you want out of a game: after all, that's how Ubisoft is managed to hang on this long (though I suspect this statement will age badly by next year).

As for the rest of this month, we have Light Fairytale Episode 1 (#390) as the inaugural chapter of a multi-episode turn-based RPG very much looking to invoke the PlayStation 1 golden era of JRPGs, at a time where the huge mainstream success of Final Fantasy VII (Light Fairytale's clear main inspiration) helped lift the tide for a great many other RPG franchises both new and extant like Suikoden, Chrono, Mana, Breath of Fire, and others. The game itself is extremely sparse in tactical substance and narrative content alike but there's an ambition here that I hope future entries can help realize as the developer grows in experience and confidence. Strangeland (#391) sees the welcome return of Wormwood Studios, who previously worked with Wadjet Eye to produce the gloomy but intriguing world of Primordia a decade or so back. Strangeland has a similar atmosphere but much more overtly horror-themed its subconscious world of regrets and sorrow, creating a story that's rarely cheerful but very appropriate for this month of creeps and bad times. Speaking of death, Arietta of Spirits (#392) presents a tale of a young girl accepting the death of a grandparent by taking on the responsibilities of a "Bound": a human who joins forces with a spirit to access the land of the dead and help trapped souls move on, while also keeping at bay a large destructive force of "roamers". Despite the Zelda affectations the game is very direct and combat-focused with little other variation in the way of gameplay, but I will say that it has a very attractive pixel look and a big ol' beating heart that might make it a good pick for someone younger, perhaps one that's also been struggling with the concept of death.

We'll have five more Indies for November and then I'll be just about done for the year, so be sure to check in next month to see what I pulled out my backlog (phrasing?) then. No spoilers but, well... looks like I might have another turn-based RPG, explormer, Zeldersatz, and graphic adventure game combo. Really wouldn't hurt to expand my horizons a little, huh? I'm old and set in my ways, give me a break.

The Bonus Indie: A Triple Bill of Terror!

'Tis the season and all, so for the October Bonus Indie I've reviewed three smaller-sized psychological horror games that I've presented here from least to most scary (to me personally, anyway). They're all legit Indies as far as I can tell but given they're all about the length of a movie they might've been challenging to spin into 1,000-word IGotW reviews. Bite-sized horror is usually the best kind of horror though: it's not a thematic genre that is best served by sticking around too long doing menial tasks, given how quickly that can deflate any tension.

Lydia (Platonic Partnership, 2017)

Lydia's a point-and-click adventure game about an eponymous little girl and the concerns she has about a monster in her closet. However, and I realize certain members of this site don't care for games that do this, Lydia is also deeply metaphorical: the monster is less a snarling creature but abstractly the parental neglect Lydia suffers as the game fast-forwards through her childhood and reviews pivotal interactions with her family and friends. Her dad, initially the more supportive parent who regales Lydia with bedtime stories until he gets distracted by his social life, ends up walking out on the family while she's still in elementary school. Her mother continues to blame all her problems on Lydia while shacking up with an unpleasant fellow named Frank and getting addicted to pills, and even Lydia's childhood friends Sheila and Steve prove to be as equally dysfunctional after growing up to become bickering teenage lovers with substance abuse problems.

Another recurring thread is the exacerbating effect of alcohol—everyone in the story save Lydia liberally partakes in libations, and it ends up taking several lives—which is why the game's mobile port actually got itself a sponsorship by a major national alcohol retailer who I'm guessing gets regularly guilted into supporting media with anti-alcoholism messages condemning the deleterious effects of tying one (or several) on. While visually a little on the rudimentary side the game's artstyle often works in its favor as an exaggerated perspective of this unfortunate world of misery and heavy drinking from the eyes of an innocent child, with adults often appearing as looming, stumbling shadows and unknown dangers lurking in the darkness just out of view, and that heightened effect is juxtaposed with the more grim and down-to-earth slices of domestic drama when the game flits forward in time to a teenage Lydia trying to escape the house for a spell. While there are a handful of classic adventure game puzzles, they're entirely dialogue-based (no walking around with a bunch of inventory items) and largely unobtrusive to the main narrative thread, which seems to be the focus.

Overall, Lydia isn't so much scary as it is hopelessly bleak (you'd never guess it was from Finland) with Lydia surrounded by barely functioning adults who drink to escape the tedium of their lives while dealing with the loneliness and rejection that will probably cause her herself to fall down a similar abyss before too long. Still, if games can't occasionally tell stories like this they're not going to grow as a narrative medium so I'm all for a little video game seasonal depression from time to time. (Dang, should've saved it for Christmas instead. Way more fitting.) (Rating: 3 out of 5.)

Now You See (Screaming Void, 2019)

Here we go, something a little more traditional in the horror space: being trapped inside the home of a murderous, deranged redneck as you figure out a way to escape. Now You See is a point-and-click adventure game that has entirely hand-painted artwork, at least according to the game itself several times over, which does give its gory environs that little extra touch of class. After all, if I'm going to see a pile of viscera, I'd want to know that someone spent hours carefully using a paintbrush to create it rather than copy-paste a bunch of anatomical art assets and then used the MS Paint spray tool for the blood. Wait, I'm revealing too much about how I'd go about things. Anyway, the game's a fairly standard adventure game beyond that: you have an inventory, a means of examining notes and other important info, and some deeply annoying puzzles including a part where you crawl through some vents for an hour.

Given escape is the goal here, there's a touch of Escape Room logic to the game's progression. You first have to figure out a way to get out of the basement, which helpfully only consists of the room you wake up in and a corridor where a sightless fellow keeps watch while the master of the house, the gap-toothed Elijah, goes about his corpse dismemberment business you interrupted in the prologue. After that, you have the run of the place for a while, and then the game gets a little railroaded and frantic as Elijah gives chase as the game builds to its climax. Whole lot of eye stuff too, if you're curious about the name, though I'd also like to think it's the game commending you for finally solving a tough puzzle ("Yes! Now you get it!"). The puzzles weren't bad overall, though some of the hint-driven ones could get a bit too abstract, but the game did have this very old-fashioned adventure game habit of never removing anything from your inventory regardless of whether or not it still had a purpose. That's not an issue early on, but once you have several screens full of crap after a hour it gets a bit much to juggle. It's one of those game design dilemmas I can sympathize with though: if you're routinely throwing out trash on the player's behalf it kinda makes things a little too easy for them, and if you factor in verisimilitude your character would probably want to hold onto all these screwdrivers and scissors just in case they're ever needed again. For as much as I didn't care for it dropping me into a Wizardry dungeon for a while, I'll admit the game does you a solid by giving you chalk—with that you can make frequent marks on the environment so you won't keep turning around on yourself.

It's a pretty basic horror game with a few grisly scenes but not a whole lot of tension, but then as an adventure game fan I much prefer solving puzzles to getting chased around by Leatherface so I guess I can applaud its direction. Horror games are a dime a dozen so I can appreciate needing something to stand out that won't be catastrophic to a small Indie outfit's budget, and the hand-painted direction was a good means of setting yourself apart from the low-effort asset flip jumpscare crowd. I might not necessarily rate this as a lost classic of the horror genre but it was charming for what it was, if charming's the word I want to use for a game where I had to fish around a blood-filled toilet for a vital item. What is it with horror games and fishing around in toilets? Is plumbing the true terror? (Rating: 3 out of 5.)

One Night Stand (Kinmoku, 2016)

All right, here we go, the scariest game of the night. Deep breaths. In One Night Stand you, as you might expect, wake up to find yourself deeply hung over and in someone else's bed. Someone who is currently still in the bed with you. At this point your mind, as it would mine, is probably going a mile a minute: Who is this? Why are you here? What happened? How drunk were you? How drunk was she? How much of a gentleman can you honestly believe you were last night, or is someone about to call the cops? What should I ask her without revealing that I don't even recall her name? How would anyone carefully extricate themselves from this situation in a way that was sufficiently polite, respectful, and empathetic in order to not leave any hard feelings behind? Where the hell did my boxers fly off to?

It's the type of short narrative game built for replays: that is, you wake up again the same morning and try a different approach for a hopefully better outcome. Maybe she throws your inconsiderate ass out onto the street, maybe the two of you take inventory in the cold light of day and end up having a proper conversation and become better acquainted without any major faux pas on your part, or maybe you even end up kindling something a little more meaningful from this encounter than a relationship that begins and ends after a single eventful night.

I just know that in a blind panic I had to get the fudge out of there as quickly as possible without coming off as a complete asshole in the process, which I almost managed to accomplish, and I've no intent at all of seeing the other endings. Seriously, with my social anxiety a situation like that would give me the dry heaves and nightmares for weeks afterwards, which is why I'm once again thankful that I gave up on socializing around the same time as I quit carbonated drinks and snacking between meals: sometimes your health has to come first. (Rating: 3 out of 5.)

Well, if I've learned anything from this Halloween it's to never touch another drop of alcohol again (and also maybe avoid weird farmhouses in the middle of nowhere). Let's get as far away as we possibly can from the topic of sleeping with women by talking about anime instead:

The Weeb Weeview

It was long past time to scale this segment back a bit, otherwise people will start suspecting that I enjoy watching anime recreationally. So to that effect, I'm only going to gab about three shows that have stood out so far in this season and then do some single-sentence impressions of that list of "might check this out"s I put out into a cold, unfeeling internet last month. Can't stop, won't stop weeviewing though, you have my word.

Dandadan

Dandadan occasionally becomes a case of style over substance, since nothing much has actually happened in these first four episodes, but man is there is a whole lot of style. Momo Ayase and Ken Takakura (not that one) have been thoroughly and unceremoniously introduced into the world of banana-hunting aliens and curse-wielding ghosts by the end of the pilot and by this point have dealt with the immediate aftermath of that veil-lifting process by thwarting the all-powerful Turbo Granny ghost. Even so, they're not out of the woods just yet as this bizarre world to which they've become newly cognizant continues to hide all manner of spectral and astral antagonists, and once you've seen what's out there, well, what's out there tends to look back at you in turn. Staring at abysses, etc. and so on.

I'm probably not saying anything original by stating this but the show reminds me a lot of FLCL so far, at least its original season (I never saw the sequels/reboots). That there's a whole lot of crazy opponents and bizarre shit going down, all conveyed beautifully with a very fluid and vivid animation style, but when you dig right down to the core it's a highschool slice-of-life about awkward crushes and drawing strength from supportive friendships. Kinda. FLCL wasn't always that wholesome if I recall but it did have that similar balance of insane alien shit and quiet moments killing time in a normal suburban home.

I do like Dandadan so far but I'm curious about where it might be heading in the long-term, since it's been running its wheels with this Turbo Granny plotline while slowly introducing its ancillary characters and I figured the plot would be moving a lot faster than this given the hyperactive presentation. It does seem like a show I'll want to stick with for the rest of this season though, since you really can't predict what will happen next (unless you've read the manga, of course).

Shangri-La Frontier (Season 2)

Shangri-La Frontier is still exploring the mythology of its setting, specifically the MMO-game-within-a-show one, as the defeat of a unique monster has caused a massive server-wide shift in the game's progression. Avian-masked protagonist Sunraku doesn't care too much about the lore—he has united with the main lore-gathering guild, but mostly because they asked and he seems like the accommodating sort (if the price is right)—and is more enthused instead about all this mysterious technology he found as loot after said special boss encounter. That's what the start of this season has been about so far: digging into parts of this MMO no-one has ever seen, encountering distinctive dangers (mostly of a self-destructing golem kind; some great explosions so far), and getting hassled and hassling in turn both the gaggle of animal NPCs that have joined him as well as his antagonistic PVP buddies and fellow kusoge enthusiasts Pencilgon and Oikatzo.

Season 2 is definitely not interested in acclimating those who skipped ahead (why would it, I suppose) and has hit the ground running with the meta-gaming hooks and fun action sequences that made the first season such a treat, frequently pausing both for the sake of some levity here and there mostly at the expense of the overconfident (but perhaps deservedly so) protagonist, and I think if you were binging this show from the start you wouldn't even notice the break from this season and the last. As long as it continues to pace itself the way it has, occasionally dipping into what the extended cast is doing (including the imposing Attack Master, played by a young woman absolutely down bad for our hero yet too shy of a wallflower to make a move), it'll probably be one of my favorite shows for this autumn period. And winter too, I guess, since they made this a double-cour season also.

Re:Zero Season 1

Re:Zero first aired back when I'd stopped watching anime regularly but was semi-responsible for heralding this current trend of "nothin' but isekai". Since its third season just started I figured it was due time to get all caught up, given this autumn season's overall pretty light. Dang, but this anime is definitely not light though. I figured it was going for a funtimes KonoSuba vibe with its goofy-ass NEET protag who goes around a fantasy world wearing a tracksuit while making licentious comments towards comely half-elves, but they put some Steins;Gate into this thing when I wasn't looking and I'm not talking the happy first half of Steins;Gate where everyone's nerding around and having fun but the real "shit hits the fan" second half of Steins;Gate with the constant death 'n' trauma time-loops of a slowly unraveling protagonist.

That's the general theme of Re:Zero if you're not familiar: typical Japanese teen deadbeat Natsuki Subaru is dropped into the fantasy world of Lugunica quite suddenly, with no money to his name and no special cheat skills (that he knows of), and in the process of finding his bearings and meeting some friendly people he ends up getting butchered by an unseen killer and wakes up earlier that same day, repeating his own apparently unavoidable death a few times before he finally figures out a solution. The show does not hesitate in the slightest about putting its chirpy everyman goofball hero through the wringer, trapped in a world and a predicament he lacks the tools and knowledge to understand let alone navigate, but it also does some solid character work as Subaru hunts for routes that spares not only him from a grisly fate but the allies that he painstakingly wins over with his confidence and compassion. Like with Groundhog Day, it's only when he finds an "optimal" path through the day that he's allowed to move past the current loop and enter a new one. Neat twists so far and the animation and performances have been great, if unsparing in the amount of suffering depicted.

Definitely a cut above most isekai in dramatic terms, so I understand how it's been able to get a third season going. Curiously, I think both this and KonoSuba work best as deconstructions of the genre, each creating something very tonally different (comedy in KonoSuba's case, psychological horror in this) to the usual superhero "at least people appreciate me here" power/validation fantasies most isekai end up being. That the popularity of those two shows in Japan was certainly in some part due to this subversive element makes it all the funnier that they were two of the first isekai shows to really catch on internationally too, where the tropes aren't quite so worn down to merit this refreshing change. Will probably spend the rest of autumn getting caught up here since both seasons 1 and 2 are a beefy two cours each in length. (Also, I've heard that creepy "ooWEEEuuu" sting in all sorts of memes and it's illuminating to finally have a source for it.)

And the rest:

• As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill (Season 2): At last, we're getting some fantasy warfare with some thinking-outside-the-box strategizing and the return on investment of seeing Lord Ars and his team get some recognition for their prowess; it's good shit so far, if nothing spectacular.
• Loner Life in Another World: This show's been matching the manga's tone, which is all over the place early on here given the subplots about delinquents planning SA and a serial killer classmate, but it'll even out soon enough and be back to what I liked most about the material: efficient problem-solving purely for the sake of getting to skip out on doing any work for a while.
• The Most Notorious "Talker" Runs the World's Greatest Clan: Been fun reading the comments for this one, since the protag is far from the idealistic hero that generally runs the show in these things, and him assembling his overpowered team was a great early hook for the manga that the show will take its time with (the fourth member isn't even in the opening yet, so either they're keeping him secret or the first season won't even get that far).
• Arifureta (Season 3): For as skeptical as I was about this before the season started, I think Arifureta's figured out its strengths as a trashy edgelord wish-fulfilment isekai and so it's been having some fun with this rabbit beastperson arc as the once gentle and skittish race go full assassin commando squad against their oppressors thanks to broody anti-hero protag-kun's training and guidance.
• Ranma ½: Pretty much how I remember the original show, swapping some of the classic animation's hyperactive elasticity for a more grounded style that incorporates some cute manga-like elements in the backgrounds instead; seems like a worthy retelling of the manga so far, though fans of the original series have been a little divided I hear.
• Uzumaki: Haven't started watching this horror manga adaptation yet but I heard its quality fell off a cliff (or a downward spiral, would be the more apt wordplay) in between the first and second episodes, making it something I'm even more curious about than I was before.

Next month, I'll talk about some shows I discovered since October started. Nothing that stands out too much but there's a few minor delights in the fantasy and romance genres including a fake marriage sitcom, a humorous ode to imposter syndrome, and a slapstick comedy about a school for yokai. See you again in November.

Too Long, Do Relinks

• Indie Game of the Week 390: Light Fairytale Episode 1
• Indie Game of the Week 391: Strangeland
• Indie Game of the Week 392: Arietta of Spirits
• Indie Game of the Week 393: Shantae and the Seven Sirens
• The Kobashotty Mario
• Mega Archive: Part XLIV: From TMNT: Tournament Fighters to Tinhead
• Anyway, Here's WonderSwan (Part Nine)
• 64 in 64: Episode 47

We're getting ever closer to Halloween and what's scarier than genies? Y'all seen Wishmaster, right? Those greedy fools didn't get anything close to what they bargained for. OK, fine, so I'm just playing another Shantae game from WayForward because I guess this has ballooned into a full-blown addiction to explormers now. Last time I was here it was with Half-Genie Hero for IGotW #106, but I've covered Risky's Revenge and the Pirate's Curse elsewhere. Shantae and the Seven Sirens had the dubious distinction of being an Apple Arcade exclusive for a while there—I guess that's still better than a Stadia exclusive—but it escaped that world of overpriced planned obsolescence and hit all the consoles and Steam around a year later. The story this time sees Shantae meet up with some fellow half-genies at the vacation resort of Arena Island before they're kidnapped by a mysterious gang of sirens that live in the ancient underwater city beneath.

I was slightly concerned that the game's mobile origins would mean a compromised experience one way or the other, but evidently that hasn't been the case for mobile gaming for a while since Seven Sirens might be the most ambitious Shantae game to date. That's perhaps still not saying much, since this is a series very content to follow the IGAvanias with very small changes to what's admittedly a winning formula of exploring a beautifully-rendered world and powering up via a selection of traversal ability upgrades and other boons. Shantae's animal transformations are back—the first being a very convenient air-dash and wall-climb combo—but adding to those are the magical powers of her fellow half-genies, temporarily gifted over through an arcane process revolving around "fusion stones" (which, naturally, constitute several fetch quests of their own to obtain). These abilities are connected to Shantae's dancing, selected from a quick wheel, and likewise offer skills that are occasionally vital but are almost always somewhat helpful. The first, for instance, is a scanning ability that reveals hidden objects that are usually gem caches but might also include platforms and other needed furniture.

The game is economical with its world design, creating one large overworld with various town hubs and a warp system that vaguely connects to points on the island at the furthest cardinal and intercardinal directions and within that overworld are several self-contained "labyrinths" which can be explored in full on the first visit. These labyrinths take the Zelda dungeon route of funneling the player around a bunch of impassable routes until they find some upgrade contained within that then allows full exploration of the remaining areas and, finally, a boss fight at the end. It's pretty clean too: you might be required to backtrack all over the overworld for every item, but chances are you'll never need to head back into a labyrinth unless it's for the heart squids (the game's health upgrade system; there's exactly three in each labyrinth and there's icons in the GUI to tell you how many you have, making them hard to miss) or some monster cards.

Speaking of which, the game has a few more Castlevania affectations than usual, one of which is how you can collect trading cards of monsters by defeating them enough times that it finally procs the drop %. This farming practice works very similarly to the soul-harvesting of the Aria/Dawn of Sorrow duo, complete with how you can equip up to three of them and enjoy their passive benefits. The game also has an unusually (for Shantae, at least) robust economy and inventory where you can buy any number of sub-weapons, healing consumables, and weapon upgrades at multiple tiers of effectiveness, using the vast amount of wealth you can collect from enemies and hidden caches to really keep yourself stocked with anything you might need. The healing potential alone trivializes much of the game, which is why I've opted to chase after a tough achievement-based challenge where you have to hang onto all the heart squids (rather than "spend" them to turn them into health). Bosses and sub-bosses have been tough enough so far, and they're doing more damage per hit as I keep progressing, so I'm not sure how tenable it might be to get through the game on just the initial three hearts but I've not really run into any serious problems so far and I've so much cash that I can just splurge on these "revive from death" potions regardless. Challenge is never really a major factor in explormers, barring the more explicitly Dark Souls-like ones such as Hollow Knight or Momodora, so I don't really mind having all these convenient heals at hand but even so it's sure hard to avoid feeling spoiled by all this.

Shantae and the Seven Sirens is, in many ways, the Shantae series at its peak. The larger world with its self-contained dungeons is a nice tweak to the formula and though we've seen Shantae transform into animals plenty of times before all of them this time have multiple functions to make them feel a bit more versatile and useful throughout the game, not just in those handful of occasions where you might need it to break down a wall or something, and this is helped by having them all take over different buttons and be available simultaneously rather than force you to toggle between whichever one is active. It should probably go without saying that the music and visuals are still top-notch, something you can usually rely on WayForward to get right, adding a few more catchy tracks to Shantae's repertoire in that trademark Arabic style (one in particular keeps sounding like it's about to break into the Indy theme though, which is a little distracting but I guess thematically apropos). Given Castlevania's current status as a half-hearted shrug from Konami management, Shantae is probably the secondmost prestigious active explormer franchise out there (after Metroid, naturally) and even if they do tend to run the same with their similar ideas and set-ups they're still reliably solid games that offer well-crafted action and presentations alike. To add on that, Seven Sirens is possibly the best this series has ever been if nothing too revolutionary, making it a fine choice if you ever needed a reason to go back or are perhaps checking the franchise out for the first time.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Hoo boy, here we are at the penultimate episode of 64 in 64, unless I get so desperate for feature ideas that I just revisit this again. Really a case of "when" not "if". I'll just slap "new game plus" on the banner or something and pretend I never made a big show of concluding everything. That'll fly. What also flew, directly off the shelves (and into the bargain bin) are this episode's two N64 games: an apathetic obligation pick and yet another sports game plucked out by a randomizer almost as checked out as I am. Doesn't that just fill you with enthusiasm to read what follows? I know it does for me. I love low expectations.

But seriously folks, this has been a ride and a half going through the Nintendo 64 library and I hope when this feature concludes someone like the Mighty Gerst will decide to pick up the figurative trident controller and continue on in my stead, perhaps offering tidbits of what it was like to demo these games as a journalist active in that era. I suspect that, even without my assistance, the new Analogue 3D platform being sold to all those rich nerds with no sense—the type that would consider this kind of ad copy deeply profound somehow—will bring about a new wave of scrutiny to our little friend once more, and I can only hope it's a wave born of pleasant memories and a muted appreciation for the awkward growing pains all video games had to suffer when they became 3D. Nothing like waking up to discover you have cameras where there were no cameras before. OK, this is getting weird, let's just move onto the rules.

Rules? In a video game blog? You'd be surprised. Or not, since this is the 47th time I've iterated these. But hey, maybe I've hidden a secret message across all these blogs? One that could be assembled by taking the first word after every bulletpoint from every entry? I absolutely didn't do that, but it would've been cool if I had thought that far ahead.

• I play two N64 games for 64 minutes each. I picked one, the other was picked for me by my neighbor who had been coming over dressed like a robot this whole time. I believed in you, Boxxo. I even fed all those cigarettes through the mouth holes like you asked for to get these random game choices. This is how you repay me? With lies? With betrayal?
• Every 16 minutes, I pause the game, take a big inward sigh, and then get to jotting down my thoughts about the playthrough so far. The sighing step isn't strictly mandatory yet still I rarely forget it. We also have a bit of a history lesson and a mini-review for those that don't just skip past everything that isn't sarcasm humor. Joke's on you, I'm up to something like 94% sarcasm now.
• For what I laughably call ethical reasons given the legality of everything else we're doing here, we're not looking to play any game that is presently on the Nintendo Switch Online service or has been announced as an upcoming addition. Very soon that will also include Banjo-Tooie, though I've already covered it on here so Nintendo were a little late. You snooze, you lose. Maybe if you weren't so busy building museums and theme parks we'd already have a better selection on there.

When I'm not mocking the hand that feeds, I like to construct tables. Spreadsheet tables, I mean, not actual carpentry that would be of use to anyone. Here you go, eat off this if you can:

Killer Instinct Gold (Pre-Select)

• Rare / Nintendo
• 1996-11-25 (NA), 1997-07 (EU)
• 8th N64 Game Released

History: Killer Instinct Gold is a modified port of the arcade fighter Killer Instinct 2, which was developed in-tandem (mostly) with the original game as an intended launch title for the North American release of the Nintendo 64. Delays meant it missed the launch window (the N64 came out in the States in the September of 1996) but was still an early third-party champion for the platform and the first of many renowned N64 games from UK developers Rare. As a sequel, there are many roster additions and other tweaks to the combat of the original Killer Instinct though the FMV cutscenes, the fluid 60fps animation for its pre-rendered characters, and some of the voiceover clips had to be scaled back due to the space limitations of the N64 cart. This version of the game was later added to the Rare Replay compilation for Xbox One, along with several other Rare N64 games.

Right, Killer Instinct. I've spoken before on here that I'm not a particular fan of fighters at the best of times and even less so when they're trying to map the various kicks and punches to the C-buttons. However, this happens to be the very last Rare game I've yet to review on 64 in 64 (barring Banjo-Kazooie, which is disqualified as per the rules) and I would've felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction, like I left a job unfinished, were I to conclude this feature without it. It's right near the end here because I was hoping the random picker would choose it for me but we're just about out of opportunities for that to happen. So, here we go, a fighter game I sorta liked on the SNES (the OST was fun) that had its sequel become a slightly enhanced launch-window N64 game. I've taken on worse in this feature.

16 Minutes In

Well, if I've learned anything doing this feature it's that I have even less patience for fighters than I did before. That's what decades of internet usage will do your concentration and focus I suppose. The one thing I recalled from playing the SNES version of the first game is that I had the best affinity for the character Cinder due to his fast attacks and relentless combos, allowing me to just spam the opponent into stun-locked victory in much the same way the Eddie "I've no desire to dedicate myself to this game so I'll pick the guy who can win if you just keep pressing the buttons" Gordo mains were like back in the day. So, uh, Cinder's not in this one. That's normal, right? To remove characters from fighter sequels that may or may not have been someone's favorite? Good way to reward fans for their loyalty.

Instead, I tried the training mode with Fulgore (my alt) and went through the usual circle-motion + button combos until it got to the level where you were mixing up three moves at once. Thing is, Killer Instinct Gold is another one of these N64 fighters that assigns the harder punches and kicks to the C-buttons, which for me is akin to assigning jump to a button. I kinda wonder why anyone thought to port over fighters to N64 after this, since it made it clear that not even a huge(ish) deal like Killer Instinct could walk away unscathed by the N64's awful face button configuration. Anyway, sixteen minutes in and I've already lost all motivation to keep playing: always a sign that we have a good 64 in 64 entry in the making (and this is for the one I got to choose).

32 Minutes In

I've been tackling the default arcade mode but barely passing the third opponent—like they actually expect you to learn the game and improve before they'll reward you with the happy endorphins that come from making progress in a video game—so my next gambit is to find a character that I can excel at without needing the heavier attack buttons, since I'll never be able to remember which is which. That means back to the training mode to see what other options I have. Here's a semi-exhaustive list of who I've checked out so far:

• Fulgore: I mean, pointy robot Fulgoraboudit's seems like an entirely fine choice for a newcomer like me. He's like the Ryu of this game, or would be if it didn't already have a humorless monk who lives for fighting in Jago. I must've forgotten how annoying his mechanical shrieks were though.
• Glacius: Frosty's teleporting uppercut is cool and all but he seems a bit sluggish overall. Almost like he was completely made out of ice. Weird.
• Kim Wu: One of the new characters. I totally get why they took my man Cinder out to put more half-naked women in here. You have to consider the priorities of this particular market. Kimpossible plays fine but most of her attacks involve getting real close first, besides an air fireball that's awkward to land—mostly because it goes sideways, rather than diagonally downwards, so you'd only need it if you and the other guy happened to jump at the same time.
• Sabrewulf: Ah, here we go. All of Wulfy's specials are simple left-right-attack combinations so I could see myself easily chaining a bunch of these together despite my limitations. Will mean having to put up with the wounded puppy noises every time he gets punched though.

I'll stick with training for the next segment but Sabrewulf's my current pick if I feel like daring the arcade mode again. I forget if Rare put any more fighters in here named after their old ZX games but it wouldn't surprise me to fight Knightlore or the diabolical Atic Atac, if only as bosses.

48 Minutes In

Just to make it clear that I know what Killer Instinct is all about, since I'm sure some of you are worrying that I'm just hammering buttons without even watching the screen, but the big hook is that you can use basic "filler" attacks to chain together the strong hits and specials and by doing so can keep your opponent on the ropes for longer without giving them a space to retaliate unless they can bust out a combo breaker. This combo-heavy "if I've hit you once, the match is probably already over" approach is also popular in the MvC games too, I understand. These filler basics are called "auto-hits" since they'll take a single button press and turn it into a little combination of unblockable attacks: the idea being, I think, to give you a slightly bigger window to set up the next combo input. I'd liken them to using manuals to chain together the big scoring moves in the THPS series, but in fairness I mostly just wing it in those games too.

Back to the training grind, here's who I looked at this time:

• B. Orchid: Back to a bunch of quarter-circle-motions again. The thing that sucks about these in KI is that they're all like "down-right, down, down-left", starting on the 45 degree angles instead of the 90 degree ones. I just find it easier to visualize a move if it looks like a right angle, you know? Anyway, "the B. Stands for Boobs" is like a mascot of this series almost so she has a fairly straightforward moveset to master that's perhaps a little faster than Fulgore's (the other mascot).
• Maya: Leafbra is essentially a female Sabrewulf (ew) in that her moveset also uses a bunch of simplified left-right-attack combinations. One major difference is that she's a little bit faster and that one of the specials is this huge leap across the screen which is almost impossible to hit anything with. People may cast strange aspersions on my sexual preferences if I say this but I'm going to stick with the dog.
• Jago: Jagoff is your typical monk albeit with some atypical laser tech for his swords (it's probably qi or something) and another one where all the moves have awkward quarter-circle motions. I'm sure he's highly valued in competitive circles but I'm not going to bother with anything that fiddly.
• T.J. Combo: Our first (and only) charge character. Some of his charge specials involve holding forwards for a second rather than the usual hold back, which seems risky to me since you'll be eating anything thrown at you until you finish the special. Tug Job's a sturdy fellow though so maybe there's some extra defense he gets to account for this. Otherwise, he seems more like a character intended for experts.

The thing with the training mode, which makes it distinct from the one in Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha that I'm familiar with (which released about six months after KIG), is that instead of letting players take on the prompted combo at their own pace and feeling things out here you're instead given nine seconds to pull off what might be a three-stage combo and if it runs out (and it will) the game will halt everything you're doing, tell you that you suck, and then play the demo of the CPU pulling off the same move again because you clearly aren't getting it. I get that western fighters of this era had to have this whole aggressive attitude about them but all this negative reinforcement isn't improving my mood. Time to git gud before it yells at me again, I guess.

64 Minutes In

Just two more characters to take for a spin in the training mode:

• Spinal: I liked Skeleton Warriors more than most of the others I've tinkered with here. Quarter-motions again but they were all the proper right-angled ones and he has a neat little sliding tackle thing that's super easy to pull off and could work as the opener to any combo.
• Tusk: I assumed Fabionan the Himborian was the game's other charge character given his size but, no, we're back to the awkward in-between quarter-motions again. Not my style. He does have this neat half-circle special which has him swing around to the opponent's flank, which seems handy.

Anyway, since I couldn't hold off on playing the actual game again any longer I decided to see how far I could get Wolfboy through the standard arcade mode. I was doing pretty well until I met my doppelganger, whom of course has all the same tricks I do. That only goes to proves the old adage true, "the only thing that can stop a werewolf in orange cargo shorts is a werewolf in red cargo shorts". The timer ran out before I could retry the fight and, let me tell you dear readers, I was entirely fine with letting it go.

How Well Has It Aged?: My Instincts Have Dulled. I dunno if I've mentioned this anywhere but fighters are entirely not my bag and though KIG is clearly one of the better ones on the N64 (like that's a competitive field) it's still not something I wanted to spend an hour with, let alone anything more than that. It's really that this genre requires a level of dedication I just can't find it in myself to summon, especially as the only reward to be earned for your hours of commitment is that you don't get maimed by teenagers online quite so often. That scene's not a fun place to be; if I wanted to read entire screeds where every third word was "skibidi" I'd just subscribe to the Scatman Crothers newsletter again. The soundtrack still slaps though.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Ultra Unlikely. Rare did just recently drop another game on the service but given how the recent KI reboot has firmly made it a Microsoft property in the eyes of many (and their only fighter, I think) Rare might be a little more reluctant to stick KIG on there. I say that, but they did already put the SNES Killer Instinct on NSO back in February so I guess nothing's really stopping them. My one hope is that they instead focus on adding Diddy Kong Racing or Donkey Kong 64 or really just about anything else.

Retro Achievements Earned: 1 of 78. I got that one because I managed to land a 12-hit combo, out of pure luck. There are separate achievements for 10-hit and 11-hit but I guess they don't stack.

Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside (Random)

• Left Field Productions / Nintendo
• 1998-04-27 (NA), 1998-06-10 (EU)
• =91st N64 Game Released

History: Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside is a five-on-five basketball game exclusive to the N64 that included the various NBA licenses required for the proper team names and player names. Its titular star was one of the youngest athletes ever featured on a game cover in its day: Bryant was 19 at the time, having only recently joined the LA Lakers as their shooting guard yet still racking up enough noteworthy achievements to earn the honor of starring in his own N64 game. Developers Left Field Productions would later become better known for the reboot Excitebike 64, based on the well-loved NES motocross sim Excitebike, but prior to landing that cushy Nintendo gig they put out both this basketball game and its sequel NBA Courtside 2: Featuring Kobe Bryant (dang, relegated to a "featuring" credit). Building off their Excitebike success, LFP continued to put out biking games like MTX Mototrax and Dave Mirra BMX Challenge for the next console generation before folding sometime in 2011 after releasing the desaturated demo derby game Mayhem.

And so here we are, about to embark on an hour of trying to maintain my sensitivity filter and not mention anything about certain aircraft. That sadly means I'll have to focus all my comedic energy on basketball humor instead, so don't expect too many three-pointers in that regard. There was some part of me that hoped I'd continue beating the odds of not having to cover any more sports games on here but I was really just deluding myself: they do, after all, constitute around a quarter of all the games on the N64, as I did the hard math to determine a little while ago. Well, I suppose this is thematically fitting enough because if there's one thing the random chooser enjoys doing on this feature, it's dunking on me.

16 Minutes In

All right, let's get through this. I opted for a pre-season game to get myself attuned to the mechanics here, or at least the ones that aren't obvious like "place ball in hoop". As with NBA Live 99 back in Episode 3 I've chosen to once again main my beloved Sacramento Kings (or as I call them, the Holy Mento Kings) and selected what I figured would be a half-decent opponent in the New York Knicks. The first two quarters combined took almost sixteen minutes exactly, conveniently enough, so for the next segment I'll be moving onto the other half of what has inconceivably become a one-sided thrashing. Like, I know the Knicks have their off seasons but losing this much to the Kings seems unprecedented. Manhattan would be on fire if this actually happened. Brooklyn would be cook...lyn.

Gameplay-wise, at least the above can attest that the game's fairly approachable in its controls and mechanics if a complete neophyte can pull off an upset like this. The one thing that took a while to find was the switch player button when the other team has possession (it's C-Down, turns out)—I later found an option in the main menu that made switching automatic. The game doesn't feel like it should be quite this easy though, given there has to be a difficulty curve as I continue to polish my offensive and defensive chops and make smarter use of team compositions and player specializations or whatever else constitutes as getting better at virtual basketball. Maybe the whole point of the pre-season mode is to give cowards like me a bit of a confidence boost by offering an easier game to encourage the player to then engage with a full season like a big boy might. We'll see if that theory pans out after I'm done with this drubfest first.

32 Minutes In

That game ended with a score of 100-55, which strikes me as not completely impossible but still fairly improbable. What's odd is that the game started glitching around the fourth quarter, refusing to add points to my score after I clearly dunked it home and then surreptitously adding them back on later after a few more nets. Right at the end of the third quarter the Knicks had a Hail Mary shot from deep into their side of the court, which naturally landed well short of the mark, yet as soon as the fourth quarter began they had a mysterious three-pointer added to their score (for the record, neither side managed to score a three-pointer the whole game, so there's no reason either side should've had an odd number). It did seem like something screwy was going on in the way the game tracked things, but maybe it was in a similar state of bewilderment over the Kings beating the Knicks into the dirt.

Now, I'm not going to go around claiming the Knicks suck or anything. I don't need that heat, Miami or otherwise. So instead I checked the in-game rankings to make sure: according to the '96-'97 season statistics (that the game uses as a basis for its playoff and season modes) the Kings ended up in sixth place out of seven for the Pacific division while the Knicks were runners-up in the Atlantic, so that match result really did seem unusual. I've decided to figuratively take off those special dunking gloves I'm sure some guys have and get serious for the next game: the Kings versus the Bulls. No way I'm going to stand a chance against the Player Formerly Known As Michael Jordan (apparently His Royal Airness got his ass anonymized last second due to some licensing mishap or another) even with the game's curious generosity to newcomers.

48 Minutes In

Being put against the indomitable teamwork of Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and *Lawyers Insert Name Here* has proven to be a much steeper hill to climb for the Kings, but we're still comfortably leading by 46-34 as the second half begins. I've noticed my side is now missing their lay-ups more frequently, which is either due to the nebulous influence of the Bulls' higher defense stat or my guys are finally remembering who they are—a mediocre NBA team—and not some secret cabal of ringers I put together through secret underground trials and expensive cloning techniques. Even so, I gotta give it to the Kings, man: they're doing pretty well in spite of the pressure that comes with squaring up against the Bulls as well as the less-than-adequate godly influence calling their shots.

To expand on that, I don't feel like I'm getting any better at the game. I learned long before now not to keep going for risky three-pointers for the sole reason that "three is a higher number than two" but besides that I'm not figuring out the defense stuff at all. I tend to foul more often than I knock the ball away; there's probably some ideal time to make a lunge for it that isn't when the player with possession of the magical scoring pumpkin (as those in the know call it) has his back turned and is looking for someone to pass to. Instead of hitting the "push the dude over" button I just kinda crowd them and hope the discomfiting sense of physical intimacy with another human being that comes with such close proximity would be enough to make them too awkwardly shy to aim properly, since that usually works on me. Being a dozen points ahead, though, I guess I'm not really doing anything particularly wrong either. Let's pop the orange dragon egg back into its white-stringed nest a few more times here and then call it a day.

64 Minutes In

Well, that match ignominiously ended in a 90-60 loss for the Bulls after they performed pretty poorly in the last quarter (see above) and that was well beyond the point that I realized something was up. Going into the main menu options afterwards with the three minutes I had remaining, I discovered that every mode besides the pre-season had a difficulty toggle, along with various other options for foul frequency and whatever a "five second inbound rule" might be (my guess is that it's a rule where you can send food "inbound" if it's been on the floor for less than five seconds). The default difficulty was "rookie". Ah. I think I figured it out why the Kings beat the Bulls so comprehensively, then. Still, I'm not going to let a little thing like playing the game on easy mode negate the victories I achieved here. Just call me the Wicker Man, since there's two things I'm good at: making baskets and being on fire.

Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside seems like an entirely OK one of these. I can't say I'm seasoned enough in the genre to know qualitatively one way or the other but anything that's as immediately approachable as this is probably doing something right for casual fans of the sport if not perhaps the diehards who demand perfect simulation accuracy. You got some fun camera angles in there whenever someone got close enough to the net for a dunk and that's all that's really important in basketball games. I even liked the cute little bias shown by the announcer quips as they drily read out the names of my teammates every time they scored, but conversely sounded very excited when someone like Scottie Pippen or Patrick Ewing managed to bring home the Ochre Orb. Given the many other sports games on this platform I'd rather not be playing, I suppose this wasn't such a bad pull.

How Well Has It Aged?: My Attorneys Have Informed Me Not to Go Forward With The Joke That Was Originally Here. I guess it plays well enough but it seemed a bit... technically insufficient? Maybe I'm focusing too much on those weird scoring bugs but it didn't seem as polished as that NBA Live game, though maybe it was a little more accessible in turn given how things shook out. Also, I didn't hate it? And that's high praise indeed for a N64 sports game.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: As Likely As the '97 Kings Making the Playoffs. (Ooh, look at me, making it seem like I know what I'm talking about with anything sporty.) No, I don't imagine an outmoded licensed basketball game will be coming to NSO even with its first-party publishing arrangement. Also, given Bryant's situation it strikes me that it would draw too much negative attention to try to cash in on his name now.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A.

Current Ranking

1. Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)
2. Diddy Kong Racing (Ep. 6)
3. Perfect Dark (Ep. 19)
4. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Ep. 3)
5. Donkey Kong 64 (Ep. 13)
6. Doom 64 (Ep. 38)
7. Space Station Silicon Valley (Ep. 17)
8. Goemon's Great Adventure (Ep. 9)
9. Bomberman Hero (Ep. 26)
10. Pokémon Snap (Ep. 11)
11. Tetrisphere (Ep. 34)
12. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Ep. 19)
13. Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)
14. Rocket: Robot on Wheels (Ep. 27)
15. Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
16. Worms Armageddon (Ep. 44)
17. The New Tetris (Ep. 42)
18. Super Smash Bros. (Ep. 25)
19. Mega Man 64 (Ep. 18)
20. Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (Ep. 46)
21. Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! (Ep. 41)
22. Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (Ep. 42)
23. Forsaken 64 (Ep. 31)
24. Wetrix (Ep. 21)
25. Harvest Moon 64 (Ep. 15)
26. Bust-A-Move '99 (Ep. 40)
27. Hybrid Heaven (Ep. 12)
28. Blast Corps (Ep. 4)
29. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
30. Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (Ep. 4)
31. Tonic Trouble (Ep. 24)
32. Densha de Go! 64 (Ep. 29)
33. Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren 2 (Ep. 32)
34. Viewpoint 2064 (Ep. 45)
35. Snowboard Kids (Ep. 16)
36. Spider-Man (Ep. 8)
37. Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)
38. Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)
39. Mickey's Speedway USA (Ep. 37)
40. Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
41. Body Harvest (Ep. 28)
42. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Ep. 33)
43. Gauntlet Legends (Ep. 39)
44. O.D.T. (Ep. 45)
45. Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (Ep. 29)
46. 40 Winks (Ep. 31)
47. Buck Bumble (Ep. 30)
48. Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Ep. 20)
49. Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Vol. 1 (Ep. 39)
50. Conker's Bad Fur Day (Ep. 22)
51. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Ep. 33)
52. BattleTanx: Global Assault (Ep. 13)
53. Last Legion UX (Ep. 36)
54. Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
55. Cruis'n Exotica (Ep. 37)
56. San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
57. Killer Instinct Gold (Ep. 47)
58. Iggy's Reckin' Balls (Ep. 35)
59. Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt (Ep. 43)
60. Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
61. Charlie Blast's Territory (Ep. 36)
62. Big Mountain 2000 (Ep. 18)
63. Nushi Tsuri 64: Shiokaze ni Notte (Ep. 35)
64. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Ep. 14)
65. Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
66. Mahjong Hourouki Classic (Ep. 34)
67. Mahjong 64 (Ep. 41)
68. Bass Rush (Ep. 46)
69. Milo's Astro Lanes (Ep. 23)
70. International Track & Field 2000 (Ep. 28)
71. NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
72. Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside (Ep. 47)
73. Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
74. Command & Conquer (Ep. 17)
75. International Superstar Soccer '98 (Ep. 23)
76. Starshot: Space Circus Fever (Ep. 43)
77. The Powerpuff Girls: Chemical X-Traction (Ep. 44)
78. South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
79. Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (Ep. 7)
80. Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
81. Rally Challenge 2000 (Ep. 10)
82. Monster Truck Madness 64 (Ep. 11)
83. F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
84. F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
85. Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey (Ep. 14)
86. Wheel of Fortune (Ep. 24)
87. Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (Ep. 15)
88. Yakouchuu II: Satsujin Kouro (Ep. 40)
89. Mario no Photopi (Ep. 20)
90. Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)
91. Dark Rift (Ep. 25)
92. Mace: The Dark Age (Ep. 27)
93. Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. (Ep. 21)
94. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (Ep. 32)
95. 64 Oozumou 2 (Ep. 30)
96. Madden Football 64 (Ep. 26)
97. Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (Ep. 22)
98. Heiwa Pachinko World 64 (Ep. 38)

Pull on your hoverboots and don those green tunics because we're back in Zeldersatz territory with this spooky October Indie Game of the Week: Arietta of Spirits by Third Spirit Games, released back in 2021. Arietta follows its eponymous preteen heroine as she vacations to a remote island retreat with her family, specifically to a cabin once occupied by her recently deceased and much loved grandma. Upon exploring the island Arietta discovers she has a rare gift for communing with the "spirit realm": a place between this world and the next. This naturally allows her to say her goodbyes to her lingering grandparent but also an opportunity to dig into the island's sordid secrets—the skeletons in its closet, if you'd prefer—with her new mustelid spirit guide friend Arco.

Arietta promises a lot early on with its impressive pixel art and music, creating a world not too dissimilar to ConcernedApe's Stardew Valley but with more of a heavy arboreal vibe as you run around its forested environments while following your nose for supernatural trouble. However, while the game has plenty of style it doesn't quite have the substance to match. Whenever I get on a tear about Indie Zeldersatzes I tend to focus on the way it prioritizes only part of the full Zelda package, largely due to the budgetary limitations of its developers compared to the big pile of money Nintendo's bigwigs always has on hand to throw at Eiji Aonuma whenever he comes sheepishly knocking on their shoji doors. That full Zelda package, in short, tends to include a mix of puzzle-solving dungeon instances, an elaborate enough combat system (depending on the era) full of evasive hops and lock-on attacks, and a whole wide world of NPCs and bonus objectives to explore for both those who are easily distracted and for those who get easily defeated and might be looking for some additional upgrades to buoy them through the next plot-mandated boss fight.

Arietta has almost none of that. It has combat, but only in the sense that you frequently need to swing your stick at something with a bad attitude bearing down on you, the local wildlife at first and then later some blob-like evil spirits called "roamers". You can upgrade your HP three times by filling leftover boss artifacts with the souls of other roamers and there's a couple of optional collectible quests—one that hearkens back to the squeaking Maiamai hunts of A Link Between Worlds and another that involves random manmade junk sold as curiosities by a ghostly trader unfamiliar with human inventions—but that's about all. For the most part, you're either running through a forest or running through a cave system bashing monsters and getting to the end. In most cases, you don't even have to fight anything besides pivotal bosses: the only thing regular enemies drop are hearts to recover the ones you lost because you chose to stop and fight them. It's that classic modern Paper Mario conundrum of being worse off the more you decide to grind enemies, not better off, and so you might as well just run from everything.

I'm not going to claim Arietta of Spirits is a complete waste of time. The presentation is great if you're a fan of pixels and the story, though light and intended for children, is affecting enough in its emotional moments and the few friendly spirits you meet make for memorable encounters. Discovering the tragedy that lies at the root of the island's ghost monster problem is a compelling hook also. It's just so much of the gameplay revolves around the so-so combat with absolutely nothing put towards satisfying exploration (everything is a linear path, to the extent that you don't even need world/dungeon maps nor are any provided) or engaging environmental puzzles to solve. The combat does improve slightly once you acquire the ability to create temporary shields, allowing you to tank or deflect incoming hits with the right timing, but given the limited number of enemy types to strategize around and the game's one and only weapon (a wooden sword) it can get dull fast. The boss fights are really the game's only saving grace in a gameplay sense, offering a challenge that tests the culmination of your skills polished from smacking around wasps and slimes for hours.

I did want to like Arietta more because Zeldersatzes are something I have a distinct fondness for, in part because The Legend of Zelda has this immutable blueprint that yearns for wilder variations from imaginative Indie devs with less to lose by pushing the proverbial red lion boat out, but maybe that has a downside where any action-adventure game with that familiar overhead view can't escape comparisons to the celebrated exploits of Elf Boy Shoots a Pig Wizard. Maybe Arietta just wanted to be something a lot more down-to-earth and simple in order to tell its story about loss and despair and greed and attract a broader, younger audience that perhaps was not interested in pushing switches and acquiring a whole trunk full of traversal-enabling gadgets across a 20-hour-plus long epic quest. It has every right to be that, of course, and maybe if I thought of it as an "Illusion of Gaia-like" instead I'd be giving it more of a fair shake. All the same, I can't help but walk away from Arietta of Spirits wishing there was more soul to be found in its attractive but largely hollow—if only from a gameplay perspective—shell.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

It's WonderSwan time again and what a wonderful swathe of games I have for you this month. If I sound more chipper than usual about having to process yet another batch of unlocalized (and unlocalizable, in some cases) half-assed anime-licensed games for the Bandai WonderSwan and its chromatic cousin the WonderSwan Color it's because... I don't have to do that any more. I never did, technically, but now I've let myself off the hook in a rare case of giving my self-loathing a break and can now bask in the best the system has to offer, or at least five games that seemed cool enough to garner my curiosity.

You might recall from Parts One through Eight that, up until now, I've been laboring under the yoke of a coalition of random chooser associations with their unholy power of collective bargaining (I need to knock it off with the unnion-busting vibes around here, for real) but no longer! I have thrown off my shackles, run deep into the mountains, and now feast on the figurative poisonous berry bush that is my emancipation from months of anime-license-tainted drudgery. In less melodramatic terms, I'm not doing the random picker business any more and these five have all been personally selected both because I wanted to play them and also because there's only going to be one more entry after this and I'd rather have a clean break from Bandai's semi-transparent little box without the regret that I may have missed out on something amazing. Even if the WonderSwan does have 200 games total across both its variants I'm fairly sure I don't need to see more than a quarter of that amount so here we are with the penultimate batch, absent any Gundams or Inuyashas or Digimons (Digimen? Digimin?) or any other wildly successful anime of the early '00s: it's all killer, no filler episodes.

That said, I'm not going to claim that these will all be excellent games either, just that they caught my eye for one reason or another. In a way, if I suffer at all this month it'll be entirely self-inflicted and not a case where I can shift the blame onto some inculpable machine to make myself feel better. Oh hey, I think I just stumbled onto the reason why I was using random chooser apps in the first place. Better late than never figuring that out, I suppose. If you wanted to see the kinds of horrors I've been subjected to so far, be sure to check out the previous parts here:

Anyway, here's WonderSwan:

#41: Final Fantasy IV

• Developer: Sting
• Publisher: Squaresoft
• Release Date: 2002-03-29
• Inscrutability: Moderate (partial fan translation)
• Selection Process: Curated
• Is This Anime?: Nope!

Field Report: Square ended up porting over three of their Final Fantasy games to the WonderSwan, skipping III and going straight to IV for reasons that are probably obvious to anyone who played III. Final Fantasy IV was the first in the series to hit 16-bit systems and took advantage of that technological step up to create a more character-driven and twisty story upon which to hook their usual turn-based combat and dungeon exploration mechanics (something they'd do again to even greater effect with Final Fantasy VII and the opportunities provided by its generation of hardware). Also new to this particular game was the series's trademark "active-time battle system": an opt-out means of adding a level of tension as it gave enemies a chance to attack while you fiddled around with options, adding to the verisimilitude of a real battle as you're forced to think on your feet. The game's plot concerns the expansionist nation of Baron and its disturbance of the world's careful equilibrium of elements controlled by four crystals, at the heart of which lies the internal conflict within the Baron Empire's suddenly conscientious Dark Knight enforcer Cecil Harvey. Like if Darth Vader suddenly grew a conscience and defeated the Emperor, if you can imagine that.

This would be Sting Entertainment's second WS foray with Square following their port of Hanjuku Hero: Aa, Sekaiyo Hanjuku Nare...!, another SNES RPG with close links to Final Fantasy IV. I wonder if Hanjuku Hero might've been a dry run for this somewhat more important project: a chance to show off their chops before being allowed the flagship franchise to tinker around with. Sting Entertainment also produced a few other games for WonderSwan, including the previously-covered port of hoary dungeon-crawler Wizardry Scenario 1: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord as well as their own WS original RPG Riviera: The Promised Land (also released on GBA a little while later, and again much more recently on Steam). This would also be our sixth Squaresoft WonderSwan game (of ten) for those counting.

The fan translation that's out there right now is a utility-minded one that only covers the items and menus, so the main story and dialogue have been left in Japanese. Thankfully, for my sakes at least, there's no kanji—only hiragana and katakana—so I can make out every fifth word or so. I'd say I could read the names too, except I already recall what they all are; guess it helps to know who's talking though. As such, even though I'm always happy for a chance to play Final Fantasy IV to its conclusion again, the WonderSwan version isn't all that attractive a prospect without a complete translation. It's not so much that I forget specific story beats (I do) but more that there's usually directions buried in that dialogue that are very handy in the pre-quest log era of 1991. Otherwise, this is pretty much Final Fantasy IV as I remember it, with some amount of graphical boost to the characters outside of battle (in-battle they look fairly identical, since those sprites were always well-defined and the WS only has so much screen resolution to work with) as well as the monsters and backgrounds. It's been pretty easy too, so either I'm still in the gentle opening hours or it's possible that it's at least partly based on the later "EasyType" release for SFC (which was the basis for the American SNES localization, known there as Final Fantasy II, though I've read that version was made even easier). One thing I'm near-certain wasn't in the SNES original is a "memo" option: a means of creating a temporary save file that quits the current session, deleting the save once it's reloaded. This lets you make a quick emergency save anywhere you want if you suddenly need to put the WonderSwan away (or it's low on charge) and a traditional save point (like the world map) is currently unavailable.

In terms of progress, I got up to one of my favorite scenes—where the wizened sage Tellah, in his grief, starts absolutely beating the snot out of the ineffective bard Gilbert for allowing his beloved daughter Anna to sacrifice herself on his behalf, telling him in no unambiguous terms just how spoony he is before he leaves to find the perpetrator—and decided I was good. That amounts to one smallish dungeon in the Mist Cave and a larger one for the Waterway that separates the oasis town of Kaipo to the desert kingdom of Damcyan of which Gilbert is regent. Cecil's still a Dark Knight at this point in the story but after being tricked into incinerating Mist Village with a booby-trapped Bomb ring he's on a revenge mission against his former king with the orphaned summoner girl Rydia in tow. This part of the game has an annoying habit of giving you low-level characters to babysit (first Rydia, now Gilbert) so some amount of grinding is warranted before you get too far into the next dungeon with its boss fight waiting at the end. I might revisit this save at a later time since there's a full (and kinda compelling) RetroAchievement set for this port of the game—one that's considerably less intense than the RA set for Final Fantasy IV for SFC—but for now I think I've seen plenty. It's not like I'm hard up on methods to play some Final Fantasy IV one way or another.

Time Spent: Around two hours.

#42: Puzzle Bobble

• Developer: Yoshidayama
• Publisher: Sunsoft
• Release Date: 1999-07-01
• Inscrutability: Minor
• Selection Process: Curated
• Is This Anime?: Nuh-uh!

Field Report: Puzzle Bobble, known in the west as Bust-a-Move despite having no rhythmic component, is an accuracy-based puzzle game featuring the Bubble Bobble kids (now turned back to dinosaurs; I guess it's one of those relapsing curses) as they shoot down colored bubbles with a ballista-like device. The goal is to connect several bubbles of the same color, causing them to pop and remove any extra bubbles that were only suspended in place due to their support. Trick is, trying to aim for the bubbles higher up is that much harder to pull off and those bubbles are always descending so there's little time to fine-tune the shot. Puzzle Bobble saw several arcade incarnations that were ported to the systems of the day and as far as I can tell this port is based on the 1994 original.

Yoshidayama is a Kyoto-based contract developer that we encountered once before on this feature with the inscrutable therapeutic life-sim Metakomi Therapy: Nee Kiite!. Fortunately, they also worked on real WonderSwan games too, including Puzzle Bobble and the golf game Wonder Classic. Puzzle Bobble was originally a Taito game so where Sunsoft got the license to publish home versions of it is anyone's guess; they were also behind a WonderSwan Space Invaders port too so I guess the two companies must've had some kind of relationship. (Doing a bit of digging and it looks like Taito published a lot of Sunsoft's early arcade games internationally. I could see the two being in cahoots from that point forward.)

Much like Magical Drop for WonderSwan and Side Pocket for WonderSwan, Puzzle Bobble for WonderSwan immediately runs into the issue of "how do we translate a game for which color was so integral into monochrome?" and, in pretty much the same way Magical Drop did it, they changed the colors to patterns. This works well in some contexts and less so in others: they have one type where there's a black circle inside a white circle that's like 70% black and another where it's 70% white and they're not always the easiest things to tell apart when the chips are down and you're getting desperate. A benefit to the reduced resolution though is that it's much easier to line up shots, since there's less distance the bubble has to travel before it hits something. Since this is traditional Puzzle Bobble rules, you're given a limited amount of time to make a move (or bust one, as the case may be) but the terrain starts dropping lower to the ground based on the number of moves taken not time taken, so you are given some amount of leeway (and incentive) to aim things up properly. This is also an earlier version of Puzzle Bobble where the whole ceiling slowly comes down rather than constantly adding new rows of bubbles, which also keeps things manageable.

Because this version of Puzzle Bobble is more accommodating than usual, I managed to rapidly clear the first fifty rounds in just over an hour. Once I hit "Round 51" I realized it was probably going for the full set of 100 stages much like Bubble Bobble itself and decided to cut my losses then and there rather than stick through it for the long haul. While Puzzle Bobble can be deeply satisfying if you manage to fling a bubble past all the barricades and take out a linchpin near the top to cause everything to collapse, it can be irksome in turn due to how your next bubble is dependent on luck: as long as there's at least another one like it on the field, no matter how buried, there's a chance it will spawn as your next bubble "bullet". Sometimes you could wipe the last one off the board only to have it be the next one in the chamber, which of course then leads to more now that there's at least one on the field again, and occurrences like these are as dissatisfying as the cascades are the opposite. As such, though I like Puzzle Bobble a lot, I find that an hour's playthrough is just about right for this series (which suits my purposes both here and in the franchise's recent appearance on 64 in 64). Glad to know the WS version isn't horribly compromised even with the limitations of the platform: turns out puzzle games just kinda work on portables, who'd have thought?

Time Spent: Just over an hour.

#43: Wild Card

• Developer: Squaresoft
• Publisher: Squaresoft
• Release Date: 2001-03-29
• Inscrutability: Hyper Mega
• Selection Process: Curated
• Is This Anime?: Naw!

Field Report: Wild Card is a deckbuilding RPG and the first game Squaresoft developed specifically for the WonderSwan Color. The game uses cards not just for its combat system but for much of its worldbuilding also, essentially crafting components of the narrative and setting in a randomized order similar to the player-directed world construction of Legend of Mana. A modified version of this card-based system would then later appear in the director's next project, Unlimited SaGa for PlayStation 2. Like Blue Wing Blitz, the game has yet to receive a fan translation possibly owing to how complex its rules are (or maybe how little most westerners care about the WonderSwan; it's not like I knew much about it before this year).

This would be the seventh of the ten games Squaresoft produced for WonderSwan that we've covered here so far, but only the fourth out of those they developed themselves as well as the third and last game that was unique to the WonderSwan. Wild Card's director was Akitoshi Kawazu, best known as the director of Final Fantasy II (the real one) and the creator of the SaGa spin-off franchise, with artwork from Akihiko Yoshida: an artist that joined the company via the Quest Corporation takeover along with designer Yasumi Matsuno and composers Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata (this group of four had already worked together on both Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story). Regular SaGa composer Kenji Ito did the music; it would be his last project for Square before resigning to go freelance. (Gotta say, not exactly filled with excitement for an untranslated Kawazu RPG based on procgen and deckbuilding but it's the last of these Square WSC originals and I at least wanted to see the Yoshida artwork.)

Yeah, this one's completely impenetrable without a localization. All I did was randomly generate my protagonist, what looked to be a potion-user named Maria, from some multiple choice test (very Elder Scrolls) and then get dropped outside a city where I could explore for a bit, find some shops that sold gear I had no money to buy, and enter some taverns that—for whatever reason—prompted some kind of battle system when I got close. There looked to be other adventurers to hire but maybe the idea was that I had to impress them in a duel first before they were convinced to join me. Either that, or Maria is the type to go around picking fights constantly. Since I didn't know what I was doing in any part of the game I found what looked to be the "run away" card and used that for every situation, and more or less just milled around for a bit until the mandated ten minutes was over.

The game does look pretty nice with that artwork though, and if I didn't think I was on a road to nowhere with Kawazu calling the shots I might've been drawn in by how player-deterministic this adventure was becoming. I couldn't even leave the starting town to see if there were procgen dungeons or some sort of equally-procgen story intrigue to embroil myself in, or if the goal instead was to find as many of these worldbuilding cards as possible for the album found on the starting screen's main menu. Presumably there's some sort of demon lord or crystal or something to pursue in the long-term but I'll be darned if I could make heads or tails of anything that was going on. In short, it seemed "aggressively Kawazu". I still have strongly negative vivid flashbacks to trying to figure out Unlimited SaGa over the course of ten hours or so and if that game is as closely linked to Wild Card as it would seem then I'm satisfied enough with what little I've seen so far. This kind of game is like the Lament Configuration: even if it's inscrutable enough to be intriguing, your curiosity likely won't lead anywhere good.

Time Spent: 10 minutes.

#44: Raku Jongg

"Fallen Sparrow"

• Developer: Enterbrain
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: 2001-05-31
• Inscrutability: Minor (Major if you don't know mahjong)
• Selection Process: Mostly Curated
• Is This Anime?: Nein!

Field Report: Raku Jongg is a mahjong-themed block-stacking game that was originally released on Windows PCs by ASCII Corporation and Enterbrain (and I believe originally developed by one person before they picked up the license). It was later ported to PlayStation and, seeing as portables are a good fit for this genre, the WonderSwan Color. Its name comes from the jong in mahjong (meaning sparrow) and raku/ochi, to mean fallen or dropped. The goal of the game is to drop mahjong tiles into a playing field and match three connecting mahjong tiles which are then added to the player's "deck", as if they were assembling a winning mahjong hand. Legal sets of three, or "melds", include both three of a kind (pon) and straights of three in a row (chi) with ideally one set of dragons or a valuable wind (such as the current player's wind, assigned at the start of each round) to ensure their hand is worth something. Expert players can aim for more elaborate combinations, like having multiple chi that when combined produce a long straight from 1-9 or having multiple versions of the same chi/pon in all three suits. The player's score is then determined by their hand's value, with failure states for putting together a useless hand or letting the tiles stack up too high in the playing field. Some hands are also forbidden: "seven pairs" or "thirteen orphans", for instance, wouldn't work given how the game operates in triplets.

Enterbrain is probably best known as the custodian of various "Tsukuru", or "Maker", game-creator series with the most famous of which being RPG Maker. While primarily a publisher of magazines themed around video games, they've had their share of producing "disk mags" in the past and were responsible for the development of smaller original games to present on them along with the usual demos and apps. Without knowing for sure, I'm guessing that's what happened here: Raku Jongg was one of these shareware freebies that became an endearing enough hit, what with it combining two popular pastimes (competitive block-stacking puzzle games and mahjong), that Enterbrain saw fit to produce retail versions. While I'm not doing the random chooser thing any more there were a batch of WS puzzle games I was curious about, and since I couldn't narrow down their number easily I instead threw them all into a raffle and took a few winners to pad out these last two entries. Raku Jangg is definitely a little more intimidating than most of the block-stacking types available on WS but since I know the rules to mahjong I'm sure I can muddle through this. Famous last words.

OK, this was a bit more elaborate than I thought from watching a short demo before starting. It's both a mahjong and a block-stacker in the sense that you're fighting your opponent on two fronts. Assembling a strong mahjong hand is essentially a means of cornering your opponent but really it's the block-stacking half where the pressure is felt keenest. In order to keep your field manageable it's ideal to be removing trash tiles constantly: if you can connect three of the same suit that aren't identical or run together in a chi, then they simply vanish but in many cases that's exactly what you want to keep the field clear for valuable pieces. Dragons and Winds have some odd rule about them where they'll occasionally act as wild cards: they're rarer to drop but of course you ideally want a meld of them to make your hand a valid winning one (unless you're aiming for something more specific, like "all simples"). You'll also have non-mahjong tiles come down occasionally: arrows wipe out anything in the direction they point at, while hammers destroy the bottom tile of any column they land on. Good for removing buried junk but easy to let something valuable get caught in the crossfire. After you have four melds the game has these elaborate animations for the final pair needed to complete the hand—they remind me of the animations you get on pachi-slot machines when it tries to increase the drama of whether you hit the jackpot or just missed out—and if you get it, you get your score added to your current total. If you fail, one of your melds is destroyed and you're dropped back into the block-stacking mode. Your points are a combination of the mahjong hand scoring and the usual match-3 bonuses from eliminating blocks in combinations or in lines higher than three.

I couldn't follow the story much at all but the game part was pretty compelling once I'd figured it out, though obviously highly contingent on luck (much like mahjong itself, I suppose). If you have a pair of dragons you might be waiting forever for its third brother to arrive—Double Dragon fans are still waiting for Tommy Lee to show up—but that's just the luck of the draw. Chis feel like they're a little harder to get going and run into the same issue of needing a single tile type to arrive and finish the set (say, if you have the two and three of bamboo already lined up, you still need to wait for a one or four of bamboo depending on the set-up) so you'd might as well stick with pons since they're involved in more of the high-scoring hands. After earning both a haneman (seven han) and a baiman (nine han), both of which I'd be very happy to receive if I was playing regular mahjong in a Like a Dragon game, I opted to retire on top.

Time Spent: About 30 minutes.

#45: Mr. Driller

• Developer: Namco
• Publisher: Namco
• Release Date: 2001-04-15
• Inscrutability: Near Zero
• Selection Process: Curated
• Is This Anime?: Negatory!

Field Report: Mr. Driller is a fast-moving drilling puzzle game inspired by (and originally meant to be a sequel to) Namco's venerable Dig Dug series, dropping Susumu Hori (the son of Dig Dug protagonist Taizo Hori) (yes, that's a boy) into a vertical shaft and having them quickly dig down for oxygen tanks while avoiding any falling debris created by drilling through load-bearing blocks or else having them combine into groups of four or more and disappearing on their own. The game scores the player on how far down they can make it before being smushed, and it's often in the player's best interest to keep moving so the falling junk never catches up with them. The bright color palette and heart-pumping pace quickly made it a fan favorite, albeit one that was hard to survive for long. It was first released in arcades in 1999 and ported to PlayStation, Dreamcast, PC, Game Boy Color, and the WonderSwan Color in short order.

Namco's well represented on the WonderSwan as one of its big-name third-party supporters, though its total of six WS games is a little shy of the ten offered by Square or the eight from Sammy. We've covered one other game from them so far, the Klonoa side-game Kaze no Klonoa: Moonlight Museum, but we might see a few more before we're done with this feature. Mr. Driller appears to be the only one they published themselves; they were happy enough to let the console manufacturers Bandai put out the rest. I've never super enjoyed Mr. Driller because it's really hard to get a good session going given how easy it is to die, but I'm sure if I was better at it I'd appreciate its nuances a whole lot more. It's definitely more intense than most games of its type, the cutesy pastel vibes belying a ruthless core. Still, no need to worry about requiring a fan translation in order to play it.

As always, Mr. Driller is an easy game to like if a hard game to love. The wholesome vibes of its little driller guy and the deep pit of colorful blocks makes for a visual confectionary, as does its chipper quirky OST. The rules are quickly seized upon by any new players but it's the speed at which they descend that distinguishes experts from novices. You don't need to figure out a way to collect every oxygen tank, for example, if you're clearing the current 100m portion of the level in seconds; chances are, if you go fast enough and let everything chain-react itself into oblivion above you the only things that will remain are the tanks, dropping down to greet you as freebies instead of something to pause and consider a route to reach. Of course, that only works early on where things can often just work out in your favor: later on, the tanks are zealously guarded by those brown chocolate-shaped bricks that, while you can drill through them in an emergency, take as much air from you as the tanks provide. There's always the matter that you can fall afoul of poor luck and just have some block fall on your head with nothing to intercept it: again, rare early on, more common as you descend as the layouts become less fair to you.

I could definitely see an alternative universe version of myself getting hopelessly addicted to beating my best depth result as I continue to assail The Infinity Pit but it feels all too easy (and often remarkably quick) that you go from having two or three lives to fall back on to no safety net at all, at which point the tension rises and naturally it only takes one more mistake to see you kicked back to the title screen again. Like Puzzle Bobble, it's a puzzle game that works best in shorter sessions with gaps in-between so you can forget the frustration you felt by making that one dumb error that cost you everything and go back to loving its cutesy vibes and arcade "live, die, start over" sensibility.

Time Spent: 20 minutes-ish.

Current Ranking

(* = Don't need fluent Japanese to enjoy this and/or it has a fan translation.)

1. O-Chan no Oekaki Logic (Ep 4)*
2. Rockman & Forte: Mirai kara no Chousensha (Ep 5)*
3. Kaze no Klonoa: Moonlight Museum (Ep 3)*
4. Puzzle Bobble (Ep 9)*
5. Final Fantasy IV (Ep 9)
6. Final Fantasy (Ep 4)*
7. Rainbow Islands: Putty's Party (Ep 4)*
8. Raku Jongg (Ep 9)*
9. Flash Koibito-Kun (Ep 1)*
10. Magical Drop for WonderSwan (Ep 1)*
11. Mr. Driller (Ep 9)*
12. Hataraku Chocobo (Ep 7)*
13. Wizardry Scenario 1: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Ep 6)*
14. Slither Link (Ep 5)*
15. Gunpey (Ep 2)*
16. Judgement Silversword -Rebirth Edition- (Ep 1)*
17. Neon Genesis Evangelion: Shito Ikusei (Ep 8)*
18. Makaimura for WonderSwan (Ep 6)*
19. Golden Axe (Ep 7)*
20. Side Pocket for WonderSwan (Ep 5)*
21. Battle Spirit: Digimon Frontier (Ep 8)*
22. Final Lap Special (Ep 2)*
23. Densha de Go! (Ep 2)
24. Gomoku Narabe & Reversi Touryuumon (Ep 3)*
25. Rockman EXE N1 Battle (Ep 8)
26. Kurupara! (Ep 6)*
27. Guilty Gear Petit (Ep 3)*
28. Hanjuku Hero: Aa, Sekaiyo Hanjukunare...! (Ep 5)
29. Blue Wing Blitz (Ep 3)
30. Makai Toushi SaGa (Ep 8)*
31. Wild Card (Ep 9)
32. Beatmania for WonderSwan (Ep 4)*
33. SD Gundam: Gashapon Senki -Episode One- (Ep 7)
34. Super Robot Taisen Compact for WonderSwan Color (Ep 3)
35. Inuyasha: Fuuun Emaki (Ep 1)
36. Chou Denki Card Battle: Youfu Makai (Ep 5)
37. Meitantei Conan: Nishi No Meitantei Saidai No Kiki!? (Ep 2)
38. Shaman King: Mirai e no Ishi (Ep 6)
39. Shin Nihon Pro Wrestling: Toukon Retsuden (Ep 4)
40. Inuyasha: Kagome no Sengoku Nikki (Ep 7)
41. Sangokushi II (Ep 6)
42. Kyousouba Ikusei Simulation: Keiba (Ep 7)
43. Metakomi Therapy: Nee Kiite! (Ep 2)
44. SD Gundam Eiyuuden: Musha Densetsu (Ep 1)
45. SD Gundam Eiyuuden: Kishi Densetsu (Ep 8)

Remember when adventure games got real weird around the mid-to-late '90s? Not just explicitly horror-themed stuff like Phantasmagoria, Dark Seed, or Bad Mojo but in the way every other graphic adventure game became "whimsically dark" like Toonstruck, The Neverhood, or Normality. The makers of 2021's Strangeland sure do remember that era; they'd better, as Wormwood Studios is one of many developers working with adventure throwback specialists Wadjet Eye in producing pixel-based games that felt like they were plucked out some missing disk library of Alexandria for the genre circa maybe 1992-95, when CD-ROM tech was at a level of nascency that meant full voice-acting and redbook audio but not necessarily the chops to run a whole bunch of polygonal environments and characters. I have covered Wormwood before, incidentally, not on this feature but in one of its May Madness antecedents: 2012's Primordia. Glad to see this studio is still has a knack for bleak, overcast worlds full of horrors. But hey, what better description is there for the month of October?

Strangeland sees an unnamed protagonist wander into a metaphysical carnival on what appears to be sitting on the edge of reality, and is psychologically tortured by various figures as he attempts to save a golden-haired woman who keeps throwing herself into the abyss despite his protestations. In a story heavy on the semiotics and, frankly, some slightly (if also knowingly) overeducated dialogue about the nature of man, of mortality, of self-inflicted misery, of mythology, and of masks, this stranger in a Strangeland goes about completing the usual series of adventure game puzzles albeit in a setting that doesn't necessarily lend itself to logical processes. Thankfully, that doesn't also mean that the puzzles are as abstract and bizarre as the world they inhabit. That the game is mercifully short both chronologically and geographically means that getting stuck for hours on end on a real tough headscratcher isn't really the modus operandi here. It's more in the pursuit of spinning a yarn and simply using the traditional adventure game format as its figurative vellum and quill with a minimum of filler. As I've often said, most Indie adventure games tend to acknowledge and sidestep the usual issue of having too much real estate to traverse and too much junk in the trunk to juggle by deliberately limiting the amount of inventory and hotspots to deal with, so even when the solutions can feel a little opaque and contingent on an unpredictable world built out of dreams and shadows there's not a whole lot of what I'd consider annoyingly prevalent roadblocks due to the ever-limited moves at the player's disposal.

As to what those puzzles involve there's obviously only so much I want to write about here without running into spoiler territory, but there's a few fetch quests that stick out specifically regarding the forging of equipment to help traverse the more out-of-reach parts of this nightmare carnival which later becomes a recurring solution to obstacles. For instance, it took a while to open up a hole through a tent flap, its canvas apparently immune to both blade and acid, until you finally figure out a way of creating what you need. It also becomes clear early on that the final destination is up a roller coaster track but most of the game's broken bridges sit directly between you and its zenith. The arrival of "The Dark Thing", a malevolent entity whose identity is a mystery right up until the end of the game (unless you've spent as much time on the couch as I have, metaphorically speaking), creates a sort of ticking clock and recurring threat throughout your journey following its emancipation which adds to the game's tension and sense of horror survival. In fact, death is your constant companion in Strangeland: you learn early on that any demise is transitory at best, and dying even factors into the puzzles occasionally (there's also an achievement for kicking the bucket in every way it's possible to do so, which made for a fun if somewhat macabre scavenger hunt).

I quite like Strangeland's vibe, for as inscrutable as it is initially, in part because of the aforementioned nostalgia factor of tapping into that era of adventure games where they got super trippy as a matter of course, perhaps inspired by some beloved and famously idiosyncratic forebear (that I've ironically forgotten about) or else just joining an ongoing trend of drawing an audience through thoroughly confusing them with the trailers and promotions, but I also just appreciate any game willing to get weird with it. Adventure games have always been the best avenue for this because their mechanics are relatively simple, offering a structural anchor of straightforward sanity in a tornado of stylistic senselessness, and Strangeland knows its adventure game history and how to differentiate between merely discombobulating the audience and frustrating them. I also think its visuals are pretty good, especially on those close-ups of its haggard protagonist and its menagerie of grotesque creatures, though it still runs into the problem a lot of pixel-based adventure games (and Wadjet-produced modern incarnations of same) do where the way it tends to messily scale sprites moving in and out of the background has a real uncanny edge to it, and not in the sense of uncanny the game is otherwise reaching for.

So that's Strangeland. As stated, it's a fairly brief descent into madness at around four hours completion time but that's probably long enough to comfortably soak in its surreal atmosphere like a warm bath without getting all wrinkly afterwards. Brain wrinkly. I forget where this analogy was going. Point being, much like other adventure games made in this archaic model in modern times, it knows exactly how long it needs to tell its tale and bow out gracefully while dropping the stage curtains instead of padding out that time with puzzles that never amount to anything or a deliberate attempt to sabotage the player with impenetrable solutions or pointlessly irrelevant empty screens that necessitates hours of feverish clicking to add to the game's time-based illusion of value. Don't mind me, just getting flashbacks to being an adventure game fan in the 2000s. I wouldn't recommend that. But I would recommend Strangeland, especially if you—in this scare-ready time of the year—prefer the slow-burn type of horror that's meant to unsettle and disconcert over those that are content to merely startle you into a premature cardiac episode. I get enough of those from my poor lifestyle choices already thank you very much.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

So here we are, the final Mega Archive of both 2024 and 1993, covering the final fifteen games that were released in 1993 in one jumbo-sized denouement. This block covers all the games that debuted on the Japanese Mega Drive in December 1993 (and one case where a North American debut had a specific release day rather than a month-wide window) followed by a group of games for which I could only narrow down to the year of release rather than a month or even a quarter. In so many words, it'll be a mix of obscurities from across the world, though there's two or three games in this group that I'm sure will be familiar to most at least.

Of course, I say this is the final one but we still do have Mega Archive CD '93 to polish off as well. The final part of that archival process will arrive in November and will probably be the last one of these I'll be doing for quite a while: 1993 was a behemoth that took forever to explicate in full and 1994 has even more games to expound upon. I'll ponder my options for potentially downscaling this operation a little bit should it ever return but those musings can wait until the true "season finale" next month.

In the meanwhile you can consult the mega stock of 1993 remainders below or through the Mega Archive Mega Spreadsheet, which mega conveniently and mega compactly collates all this data together in much the same way most spreadsheets tend to do. Truly fascinating stuff, this whole spreadsheet business.

Part XLIV: 541-555 (December '93)

541: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters

• Developer: Konami
• Publisher: Konami
• JP Release: 1993-12-03
• NA Release: 1993-12-02
• EU Release: January 1994
• Franchise: TMNT
• Genre: Fighter
• Theme: Heroes in a Half-Circle Motion
• Premise: The Turtles are forced to fight their old adversaries as well as evil clones of themselves and their friends, providing a canonical excuse for mirror matches.
• Availability: This version of Tournament Fighters, along with the NES and SNES versions, can be played in Digital Eclipse's excellent The Cowabunga Collection.
• Preservation: Yeah, the TMNT fighting game, or at least the first one. I recall there being a lot of hype around this, in part because of the strong foundation created by Konami's earlier brawler game forays with this property. I also remember renting this game for SNES at some point and playing it with another TMNT fanboy friend of mine who then went and rented it for Mega Drive right after, and we were surprised to discover that—unlike the two more or less identical versions of Super Street Fighter II for 16-bit consoles—they had a completely different feel and roster. The SNES went for more obscure comic-only characters like Armaggon and War while the Mega Drive version remembered to include Casey Jones (I thought it was kinda weird he wasn't in the SNES game, as he was a favorite of mine) and a blonde April O'Neil who fought like Chun Li. It was the first time I'd seen comic-only characters since I, like most kids back then, were only really acquainted with the TV show and the movies so that was a neat surprise (though I probably assumed they were from episodes I hadn't seen yet). Anyway, age-betraying '90s-kid nostalgia anecdotes aside the game was definitely fun enough to consume a whole weekend and one of the few fighters I got halfway invested in gettin' gud at, if not quite enough to draw me into the FGC fold. (Ranking of Fighters was kind to it also, with a final placement just outside the top ten once that feature ran its course.)
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Just some minor clean-up.

542: Dyna Brothers 2

• Developer: CRI
• Publisher: CRI
• JP Release: 1993-12-03
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Dyna Brothers
• Genre: Real-Time Strategy
• Theme: Dinosaurs Versus Aliens (Finally)
• Premise: Those pesky aliens are back so what's an allosaurus to do but multiply and devour all that moves? I guess they'd be doing that aliens or no.
• Availability: Japan only. There was a Virtual Console release for Wii but that was Japan only too.
• Preservation: We covered the first Dyna Brothers back in Part XIX but to give the pitch again, it's a rudimentary RTS/God-Sim type of game where the goal is to out-breed and out-consume your alien antagonists, using a mix of herbivores to generate energy (or currency) from the local greenery while your more carnivorous types keeps the alien's units on the defensive. There's also a weak but useful unit whose only job is to eat eggs before they hatch into new alien soldiers to deal with. As well as choosing what units to send out, you can pull a Populous and spend resources on changing the weather to be more advantageous to the dinos. The second Dyna Brothers adds more features and a few extra unit types but is otherwise a very similar game, which makes sense given the two releases weren't even eighteen months apart. This sequel would later be enhanced further and added as a Sega Channel exclusive in 1995 with the name Dyna Brothers 2 Special: that's also the version that was added to the Japanese Wii Shop in 2007. Despite the fairly simple mechanics and the fact that CRI is as close to first-party Sega without technically being first-party (I've explained it before, but they had the same "parent") no version of this game ever got localized. How Sega came to the conclusion that dinosaurs fighting aliens wouldn't appeal to a western crowd is anyone's guess.
• Wiki Notes: Skeleton page so it needed quite a bit of work.

543: J.League Pro Striker Kanzenban

• Developer: Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-12-17
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: J.League Pro Striker
• Genre: Soccer
• Theme: Soccer
• Premise: Soccer
• Availability: Official licensed annual sports game. Hell, not even annual but a subannual remaster. You tell me what kind of shelf life to expect.
• Preservation: J.League Pro Striker Kanzenban is a half-sequel, half-remake of the first J.League Pro Striker released earlier that same year in April. Kanzenban, by the by, means "Perfect Edition": it even reiterates this in English on the box art, as you can see, so my input here was unnecessary. It's whatever I can do to pad out this paragraph about another boring sports game. I believe this Perfect Edition is just your usual mix of gameplay tweaks and roster updates, following the then-new J.League professional soccer competition and the mere ten teams its inchoate form hosted. As Sega's premiere first-party soccer sports brand you would probably expect to see a few more of these Pro Striker games on the Mega Drive—there's actually only two more after this though, as the series tapped out in 1995 to join the Saturn like so many other Sega enterprises. I really wish I had more to say: it's not a particularly exciting vertically-aligned soccer game, like almost every non-FIFA one on the platform. Did you know the J in J.League stands for Japan? OK, fine, I'll stop.
• Wiki Notes: Like the original Pro Striker, I had to add this to the wiki myself. Somebody's gotta jump on that grenade. Oops, I'm posthumously lionizing myself again. Bad habit of mine.

544: Metal Fangs

• Developer: Sega / Genki
• Publisher: Victor Musical Industries
• JP Release: 1993-12-17
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Simulation
• Theme: Like Football Manager but for WipEout
• Premise: Wanna participate in a high-risk, high-octane cyberpunk hovercar team racing circuit? OK, cool, you can be the manager then.
• Availability: Never left Japan.
• Preservation: Metal Fangs is just weird. It feels like some obscure European home computer game given both its aesthetic (complete with doctored images of western celebrities as cyborgs for its character select screen, most of which are musicians like Madonna and Robert Smith) and its more passive management gameplay. However, it's a Japan-only game and its background heavily suggests the involvement of an internal Sega development studio before they essentially Alan Smithee'd themselves off the credits and handed the game over to the indiscriminate Victor Musical Industries to release. From what GDRI claims, the game might've been mostly complete by the time Sega cut it loose and VMI grabbed the prototype and hired contractors Genki to apply the finishing touches. As intimated above, you pick a team of racers and sort out their hardware and then just... watch them race. It becomes clear from switching perspectives during the race which ones are lagging behind and might need some cash-injections and which are perfectly fine as they are. You're looking to have more members cross the finish line before the other team rather than just one "all the eggs in one basket" champion to easily take first place every time, so there's some degree of spreading the lucre around in an efficient manner. Since it's all in Japanese though, it's not an easy game to figure out.
• Wiki Notes: Mostly complete, just needed a little bit extra. The only other person to work on this page was Jeff Gerstmann himself, so it was cool to see that guy in the wild. The wiki wild. The wiki wiki wild wild (west).

545: New 3D Golf Simulation: Harukanaru Augusta

• Developer: T&E Soft
• Publisher: T&E Soft
• JP Release: 1993-12-17
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: New 3D Golf Simulation
• Genre: Golf
• Theme: Golf
• Premise: Golf
• Availability: Nope. Japan-only.
• Preservation: So the thing with Harukanaru Augusta is that this game was first shipped as a super-realistic golfing sim... in 1989. Four years is a heck of a long time for the evolution of realism in gaming, especially in the 1990s, so it almost certainly came off as dated by the end of 1993. Harukanaru Augusta—"Harukanaru" meaning "far away", which tracks since Augusta is in the US state of Georgia and that's about as far from Japan as you can get (in terms of longitude at least)—is the first in a series of these realistic golf sims that T&E originally released for home computers, though it saw a 1991 SNES port and then this a couple more years later. It follows the Mega Drive port of Pebble Beach Golf Links—the second game in this series, released just two months prior—and was eventually followed by two others: New 3D Golf Simulation: Devil's Course and New 3D Golf Simulation: Waialae no Kiseki. Unlike Pebble Beach Golf Links, none of the other games (including Augusta) on Mega Drive saw western localizations. After those four, T&E would switch from Mega Drive to Saturn game development where'd they go on to release another six golf games (and Virtual Hydlide, which might be the bigger crime).
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Needed screenshots and releases.

546: Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium

• Developer: Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-12-17
• NA Release: February 1995
• EU Release: November 1995
• Franchise: Phantasy Star
• Genre: RPG (Turn-based)
• Theme: Legally Distinct Star Wars. Does Star Wars Have Catgirls? No, It Does Not.
• Premise: Uh oh, Dark Falz is back and screwing up more planets. I guess it's up to the invincible hunter Alys Brangwin to solve this problem as she contemplates her retirement, just a few days away.
• Availability: Presently you can buy it from Steam directly or play it as part of a Switch Online subscription (albeit the more expensive tier that also includes N64 games).
• Preservation: Easily the most important of the remaining games of the year, Phantasy Star IV sees Sega's flagship RPG series go out in style with this expansive adventure that takes to heart all the lessons learned from previous entries as well as pushing the Genesis tech to its limits. Taking a leaf from the more narratively-focused Lunar for Sega CD, Phantasy Star IV adds more cutscenes and dialogue—depicted as comic book panels, since FMV would be asking too much—to its tale of a group of adventurers saving their planet (and eventually their star system) from a mysterious force mutating the local flora and fauna into monsters while degrading the planet's environment into a desert wasteland. I've not had the chance to play it myself—PS having always been a conspicuous blind spot of mine as a self-avowed JRPG guy—but fans tend to swear by this one the most, especially after the perceived misstep that was the third game. After this, PS fans wouldn't get anything new from the series until it changed the blueprint of RPGs once again with the innovative if maddeningly repetitive Phantasy Star Online six years later in 2000 (ironically, at the end of the millennium). PSIV was also the first game of an internal Sega division built for RPGs, creatively called Sega RPG Production, that would later become Overworks after a few more personnel shuffles: known best as the creators of Skies of Arcadia. Quite the lineage.
• Wiki Notes: Usually the case with these bigger games is that the pages don't need any work at all but holy smokes did this one keep me busy. There was a very enthusiastic wall of text in dire need of editing due to all the subjectivity and second-person and there's almost 400 screenshots, none of which were tagged. I try not to be a dick about one-and-done wiki editors who happen to notice their favorite game's page is lacking in detail and do their best to fix that; it's not like we've ever had an easily accessible style guide or anything of the sort and you can only get so rigid about a video game wiki regardless. (Man, I phrased that weird.)

547: Battle Mania Daiginjou

• Developer: VIC Tokai
• Publisher: VIC Tokai
• JP Release: 1993-12-24
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Battle Mania
• Genre: Shoot 'em Up (Horizontal and Vertical)
• Theme: Filthy Couple (man, that's actually even sleazier than "Dirty Pair")
• Premise: The Trouble Shooters Mania and Maria, or Madison and Crystal in another space and time, are once again called into action to defeat the assassin cult Kikokukyou after they resurrect the leader the pair previously vanquished.
• Availability: Japan-only Mega Drive cart.
• Preservation: This would be the Japan-exclusive sequel to Battle Mania, released in the west as Trouble Shooter, the shoot 'em up that homages the anime Dirty Pair with its heroine duo whom are controlled simultaneously. Mania, the main one, is controlled directly and has a weak initial weapon that can be improved with power-up collectibles. Maria, the more laid-back support, acts more like an option that can be configured to face backwards for more coverage or forwards for her additional firepower (which is strong, but not upgradeable). It features both horizontally and vertically scrolling levels as well as multiple weapon types to choose from, making it one of the more versatile shoot 'em ups for Mega Drive. Since Dirty Pair, the inspiration for the Battle Mania franchise, isn't the most serious sci-fi anime out there the game embodies its anarchic sense of humor and high explosions-per-minute ratio. A real shame it never got localized but there's a fan translation floating around at least.
• Wiki Notes: Oh hey, it's another chickengeorgewashington page. This dude worked on the pages of a whole bunch of cool obscurities back when the site was new and if I ever see his name in the wild it's usually the case that the game itself is a hidden gem. The pages tend to be a bit on the rough side owing to their age (Daiginjou was no exception) but I can't fault the dude's enthusiasm and I try to preserve it as best I can.

548: Maten no Soumetsu

• Developer: Kodansha Research Institute / Geo Factory
• Publisher: Kodansha Research Institute
• JP Release: 1993-12-24
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: RPG (Turn-based)
• Theme: Those Demons Are Fixin' to do a Mischief Again
• Premise: A young man embarks on a quest to figure out why he was being carried around by a flying demon when his foster family rescued him. Did they just confuse a stork with a monster, or what?
• Availability: Japan-only and long out of print.
• Preservation: Maten no Soumetsu, which I think translates to "Annihilation of the Demon Sky" but you know how it is with these all-kanji titles, is a pretty rudimentary-looking turn-based RPG for this late period of the Mega Drive and it didn't do it any favors to be released so closely to the ambitious Phantasy Star IV. Hard to find much on the internet about this one but what I gathered from the opening cinematics is that the world has a demon problem and, after defeating a flappy type outside his village, a man discovers it was carrying a human infant which he then decides to raise as his own. Sixteen years later and that kid's curious about his origins and ready to go on a journey for answers. Pretty standard stuff but I can't say I could ascertain much beyond that, as I was taken out by a random encounter with bats between the hero's house and the nearby town. Very old school, to be stomped into the dirt by the very first monsters you meet. Print media producers Kodansha (or specifically its video game wing) appear to be the main contributors to the development of the game as well as its publisher, but GDRI suggests contractors Geo Factory were brought in to complete some of the work.
• Wiki Notes: About as skeletal as you can get. Needed everything.

549: Barbie Super Model

• Developer: Tahoe Software
• Publisher: Hi-Tech Expressions
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Barbie
• Genre: Slice-of-Life?
• Theme: Taking a Break From Smashing the Patriarchy to Do Some Modelling Work
• Premise: The Insectron invasion force inches ever closer to Earth as they prepare their vaporizers and electric slavery nets to force humanity into an eternity of hard labor in the Rigellan sugar mines, but Barbie wouldn't know anything about all that. She's got a fashion show to put on.
• Availability: Licensed game so probably no reissues.
• Preservation: One of those odious "games for girls" before anyone knew what it was girls actually wanted to play (cute farming sims and dating games where the boys make out with each other) (I'm being facetious, don't cancel me again) Barbie Super Model sees the eponymous doll scrounge up various pieces of apparel from around town and assemble an ensemble with which to hit the runway in style. In-between sedate driving sections you're tasked with recreating catwalk choreography and fashion magazine covers from memory: therein lies the game's challenge. Well, the actual challenge is to not fall asleep while playing it. There was going to be another Barbie game, Barbie: Vacation Adventure, but I guess they canned it after the poor sales of this one. That's a shame. I'm sure booking a hotel and lying on a beach somewhere for hours would've made for a game almost as riveting as this one.
• Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Mega Drive-specific screenshots, releases, and box art.

550: Disney's Beauty and the Beast: Belle's Quest

• Developer: Software Creations
• Publisher: Sunsoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Disney / Beauty and the Beast
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Stockholm Syndrome
• Premise: Belle can't let Beast do all the work in breaking the curse and bringing everyone in the castle, including all the servants who almost certainly didn't deserve being cursed with their boss, back to normal.
• Availability: Licensed game.
• Preservation: Well, we're back on the "games for girls" circuit, though there's a little more credit given to the female half of the audience in this particular game. Based on the 1991 animated movie, Belle's Quest focuses on the eponymous heroine as she completes puzzles and mini-games to further the goal of uncursing her bestial beau. She's not an aggressive type, however, so when enemies are around you're expected to avoid them by any means: jumping over them, ducking underneath them, or in the case of the annoying Le Fou hiding in the doorways of shops. Sunsoft commissioned Mancunian outfit Software Creations (one like Rare where their original games far exceeded the licensed ones in terms of quality) to create both this and its sibling game but there's no firm release date on the internet for either of them. I could buy that they were released half a year apart but I'm not sure Software Creations had the resources to work on both simultaneously. The very "cheap and cheerful" vibe to both of these games would suggest a quick turnaround though.
• Wiki Notes: Body text and its single release. We have old GB blogging legend VGK to thank for plenty of screenshots though.

551: Disney's Beauty and the Beast: Roar of the Beast

• Developer: Software Creations
• Publisher: Sunsoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Disney / Beauty and the Beast
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Verbally Abusive Kidnapper
• Premise: Beast is aware that Belle's on her own quest to fix his curse but decides she won't get far if she's not constantly murdering everything. Different strokes for different folks.
• Availability: Licensed game.
• Preservation: So here's the other one. It does raise an interesting idea about perceptions about the movie—whether Belle or the Beast was the protagonist, which might change depending on the gender of the viewer (I think at the time I knew it was Belle though I of course related more to the ugly weirdo loner who never left his house)—but I suspect Sunsoft was just hedging their bets, figuring a game starring a female protagonist that avoided trouble was only going to do so well in a male-dominated space and thus supplementing it with a combat-heavy brawler the boys would enjoy more. Points for trying to appeal to a female market though: it wasn't a common thing back then and usually lead to no-budget half-assed attempts like Barbie Super Model. It only really started to become a serious consideration around 1994 with Konami's Angelique (the first major otome dating sim).
• Wiki Notes: Body text. This one had a release at least.

552: EA Sports Double Header

• Developer: Park Place Productions
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: 1993
• Franchise: NHL Hockey / Madden Football
• Genre: Hockey / Football
• Theme: The Two Most Armor-Heavy Sports, Together At Last
• Premise: EA drops two of their original EA Sports games together in one package for you lazy Euros who only play soccer and tennis games.
• Availability: Released only in Europe, though you could of course still buy them separately in the States.
• Preservation: This is the first of a small batch of compilation titles released in Europe at some point in 1993 that we might as well cover here too and, well, there's not a whole lot I can say about them. Presumably this double header—which includes the first Madden NFL, Madden Football, and the first NHL game, EA Hockey, both of which were still missing their respective league endorsements back then—was meant to draw in the Europeans who might've been a little slower to adapt to American football and hockey, neither of which are particularly celebrated here (though hockey might be a bigger thing in Russia and Scandinavia). Curious they went with the first games of those franchises rather than the most recent (and polished) EA football and hockey games but I suspect the fact that they don't have licenses to worry about was probably a factor.
• Wiki Notes: Screenshots. There's a limited amount you can do with compilation game pages without just copy/pasting sections from the pages of the games that are included. I'm less inclined to figure out a way to pad these pages out as a result.

553: Mega Games 2

• Developer: Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: 1993
• Franchise: Mega Games
• Genre: Brawler / Compilation
• Theme: Three is a Higher Number Than One
• Premise: The Mega Games compilation series is back with another three bangers from the system's halcyon days. Games include The Revenge of Shinobi, Streets of Rage, and Golden Axe.
• Availability: All three games can be bought separately on Steam and all but Streets of Rage can be played on a premium Switch Online subscription (they have the second but not the first for some reason).
• Preservation: Well, there's a limited amount I can talk about here too. I mentioned back with Mega Games 1 (otherwise known as Triple Score) that these things were mostly aimed at the European market possibly as a way to entice that audience towards some of Sega's originals rather than the computer game conversions they were probably drawn to given that was where the industry was concentrated for us Euros. Either that or they were designed to be pack-in games, giving new system owners a boost to their nascent Mega Drive libraries as a compelling value add. You could do a lot worse than those three games, honestly.
• Wiki Notes: Screenshots and release. Though, again, less important for compilations like this.

554: Mega Games 3

• Developer: Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: 1993
• Franchise: Mega Games
• Genre: Shooter / Racing
• Theme: Three is Still a Higher Number Than One
• Premise: We're back with another three games from the early Mega Drive library, if not quite as good as the previous three. They include Super Thunder Blade, Super Monaco GP, and Alien Storm.
• Availability: The Genesis Alien Storm and Super Thunder Blade are available on Steam. Alien Storm is the only one of the three on Switch Online.
• Preservation: It kinda felt like they were starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel already with this one, and to be fair the Sega Mega Drive was in a much different place in 1993 than it was when these games came out towards the end of the 1980s. As I said with Harukanaru Augusta above, that's a real long period of time considering the rapid development of game design in the 1990s. Then again, you could feasibly stick all three of those in one cart for a decent value proposition. After this, there would not be a Mega Games 4 or a Mega Games 5 but there are two Mega Game 6s, though in their case it only refers to the number of games on the cart. They won't be a concern until we hit the dregs of 1995 regardless and I'll probably be dead by then (or bored of talking about Mega Drive games, which might as well be the same thing as far as I'm concerned).
• Wiki Notes: Same as above, screenshots and a single release.

555: Tinhead

• Developer: MicroProse
• Publisher: Ballistic
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Shooter / Platformer
• Theme: Head of Tin, Balls of Steel
• Premise: Tinhead is just a little guy running around collecting twinkly crap in maze-like levels with a whole lot of gradient fill backgrounds. Sounds like an Amiga platformer to me.
• Availability: Yes! Shockingly! You can buy it on most digital storefronts due to Piko Interactive's efforts to revive it.
• Preservation: So here we are, the last 1993 Mega Drive release that I could find. Tinhead's a fairly standard mascot platformer but for the fact that its release date is oddly elusive, hence why it's down here instead of somewhere more specific like Bubsy or Aero or B.O.B. or all the other also-ran mascot platformers from this era. Run around, shoot balls from your helmet, sometimes you get a unicycle, usual business. It doesn't look too bad at least and there's all sorts of in-game incentives to play well, including avoiding damage and shooting with perfect accuracy, which pre-empts achievement systems to some extent. That Piko Interactive pulled this out from the mists of obscurity and put it on a whole bunch of modern systems is nothing new for them but really any amount of conservation is good.
• Wiki Notes: Minor edits all around.

Unless I (or any of my usual sources) dig up any more 1993 games I believe that's all of them. We'll be back for another Mega Archive CD but this'll be it for the standard Mega Archive. Thanks for reading over the past year or so as I worked through the massive 1993 library of the system and maybe I'll be back with 1994's offerings in the future. Until then, keep... circulating those Sega tapes. Wait, don't, I think that's illegal.

Just a mini-revisit of The Kobayashi Mario feature to yap more about the fun Shotgun Mario 64 hack (created by Dan_GPTV) I mentioned back in the previous Mento's Month (which you've all read of course but I'll relink it just in case you misplaced your bookmarks) and its equally intriguing achievement set over on RetroAchievements (devised by RA user MaddieKittyTV).

There's no real metaphorical nuance behind the mod's name—you have a shotgun now, so therefore you're Shotgun Mario—but the new hardware means there's a few neat mechanical additions where certain approaches that were formerly impossible, or only possible through speedrunning tech beyond the abilities of normal humans, can now be accomplished by anyone thanks to the magic of modern ballistics and the set takes full advantage of that to create some novel challenges.

Those gameplay changes in full:

• You can shoot things. A lot of things will break if you shoot them. Doors, gates, boulders, Thwomps, Stars, you name it.
• There is a third-person shooting mode as an alternative camera that lets you aim. This turns the game into something akin to a Jet Force Gemini or a Ratchet & Clank.
• If you jump and shoot, you'll shoot straight down for some extra height just like the primary function of the rocket-launchers in Quake. It's about equivalent to a normal jump's height, though if you do so while longjumping it'll retain the forward momentum too. You can clear some pretty long distances with it.
• You can't do the shotgun jump while standing. I wondered why this was the case so I attempted a real-life experiment and, well, long story short I no longer have toes. C'est la vie.
• As a reminder from the original Kobayashi Mario, while the achievements that prohibit the A button might make it seem like you can't get any vertical movement going, by running at full speed and hitting the B to dive and B again to roll out of the dive you can still clear small gaps. Shooting while in the dive or rollout gets you even higher. That's usually the key to many of those achievements.

(Disclaimer the First: A large chunk of the achievements are single-point types that amount to "hey, did you know you could shoot this?!" so I've elided those. Others are for standard progression, like beating Bowser, getting all seven Stars for each world, or getting the full 120. I've excluded those too.)

(Disclaimer the Second: Working out how to complete these challenges is half the fun, so I've spoiler-blocked my solutions in case you wanted to figure them out on your own first. The achievement's value, either 5 or 10 points, should give you some idea of the difficulty. There's download instructions in the official RA forum thread if you'd like to give this hack a shot, so to speak.)

"Flying Like a Falcon" (10): Collect the 100 Coin Star in Bob-Omb Battlefield without pressing A

"Sliding Sharpshooter" (5): Collect the Box Star in Princess Peach's Secret Slide without pressing A

"Stone Cold Sprint" (5): Collect "Blast Away the Wall" in Whomp's Fortress using only the FPS camera and in under 20 Seconds

"Wooden Will" (5): Collect "Fall Onto the Caged Island" in Whomp's Fortress from the wooden pillar

"Mining the Rubble" (5): Defeat King Whomp in Whomp's Fortress without pressing A, B or Z

"Ye Scallywag, Get Back Here Yer Thief!" (5): Collect "Plunder in the Sunken Ship" in Jolly Roger Bay without lowering the water

"Extracting the Sunken Treasure" (10): Collect "Red Coins on the Ship Afloat" in Jolly Roger Bay without pressing A

"Melting the Ice Caps" (5): Collect "Wall Kicks Will Work" in Cool, Cool Mountain while holding Tuxie

"Breaking Boo's Curse" (5): Collect "Big Boo's Balcony" in Big Boo's Haunt without using a single door or entering the Mansion

"Vanishing into the Void" (10): Collect the Red Coin Star in Vanish Cap under the Moat without pressing A

"Busting Bowser's Doors" (10): Defeat Bowser in "Bowser in the Dark World" with 30 or more coins without taking damage, using only the FPS camera

"This is It, The Apocalypse" (10): Collect the 100 Coin Star in Hazy Maze Cave without pressing A

"Burning Passion" (10): Collect "Hot-Foot in the Volcano" in Lethal Lava Land starting a longjump past the second pole for "Elevator Tour in the Volcano" without touching the ground

"Stone Handed Menace" (5): Defeat Eyerok in Shifting Sand Land in only 2 shots and hitting each hand once without pressing A or B

"Gold Medalist" (5): From the star platform in Bowser in the Fire Sea, longjump to the beginning of the third floor

"Defrosting Heights" (10): Collect "In the Deep Freeze" in Snowman's Land by longjumping from the snowman's head

"Swimming in the Abandoned City" (5): Collect "Go to Town for Red Coins" in Wet-Dry World without lowering the town's water

"Breaking Ukiki's Treasure" (5): Collect "Secret of the Monkey Cage" in Tall, Tall Mountain while holding the Ukiki at the top (Star 2 selected)

"Never Surrender. Never Fall" (10): Starting from the wooden line at the first longjump in Tall, Tall Mountain, scale the mountain vertically in under 18 seconds

"Swarm of the Century" (5): Defeat Wiggler in Tiny-Huge Island while only standing on the green platform

"Arduous Mountain Climber" (10): Collect "The Tip Top of the Huge Island" in Tiny-Huge Island without pressing A once or entering the tiny island

"Ticking Time Bomb" (10): Collect "Roll Into the Cage" in Tick Tock Clock on the random setting without pressing A

"Robbery in the Skylines" (10): Collect "Big House in the Sky" in Rainbow Ride without using a Carpet, Warp and only using the FPS camera

"Wear Your Pride" (5): Collect "Swinging in the Breeze" in Rainbow Ride starting a longjump from the closest blue block to the maze without touching the ground

The joy of a hack like this is that, while it certainly does trivialize a lot of the game, it does so in ways that are unexpected and enjoyable to discover—mostly in the vein of "oh hey, I can just shoot this and skip a big chunk of the level". Having this RA set then add some of the missing challenge back in—even if they're on average much more palatable than the ordeals chronicled in the Kobayashi Mario—really demonstrates how effectively a good set of achievements can completely transform a game for the better. It's why I'll always be ride or die on the inclusion of achievements in games (and why I play so few games on Switch): they're often integral to elevating already strong material to even greater heights.

Anyway, expect some feature-length Kobayashi Mario and RetroAchievements antics in 2025. As for me, I gotta get back to polishing off this enormous Mega Archive entry; no time to be sitting around having fun with shotguns when there's Mega Drive games to research.

Light Fairytale Episode 1 is the opening chapter of a multi-episode narrative project that seeks to revisit the creatively ambitious PlayStation 1 era of RPGs, notably taking after Final Fantasy VII in its presentation and setting but also bits and pieces from Wild Arms and others. Another Indie throwback, in so many words, though at least that period of 32-bit RPGs taking their first steps into the immersive possibilities of polygonal 3D is not an era that many small developers have the means or ambition to recreate. Subsequently, this game's making the smart choice (possibly also inspired by FFVII, at least in its current Remake incarnation) to cut up its epic-length story and release each episode independently with the revenue from each funding the next. It does create this sort of detached feeling when the episodes take a while to come out but still expect players to be all caught up with where the story is at each time—I feel like this estranged disconnection problem is why Toby Fox has chosen to release the remainder of Deltarune's episodes all in one go—but it's a small price to pay if it helps see this adventure through to its end.

The story presently concerns Haru and Kuroko, two orphans living in a lower strata of a subterranean urban center that humanity flocked to once the surface became unlivable due to some ancient environmental calamity everyone's long forgotten about. Dreaming of the sky, something the people of this city have lost all knowledge or context of, and tired of the tyranny of the local governance and their well-stocked armies after they arrest a friend of his, Haru eventually opts for rebellion and the lovestruck and impulsive Kuroko follows his lead out of habit. This opening chapter is about two to three hours in length with a smattering of battles and puzzles to solve and a single dungeon by way of a warehouse attached to an old sewer system (gotta have that early-game sewer dungeon) which leads to the episode's cliffhanger conclusion.

Given the point is to recreate RPGs of the late-'90s, the turn-based combat is very straightforward and right now doesn't offer a whole lot of tactical variation beyond standard attacks, a single spell, and an alternate weapon slot which I'm guessing later on will allow you to equip gear of multiple elemental types to account for a range of enemy weaknesses. There's also a limit break "fury" attack, though Haru's is actually a heal spell which is also the only means to recover HP besides items. The encounter system is set up in such a way that you'll bump into "Battle Zones": these have visible areas of effect (sort of, they require the use of your AR goggles, which also helpfully point out area transitions and NPCs to talk to) where a battle might occur and a limited stock of encounters before they're exhausted, giving players plenty of agency when it comes to clearing them out at their own pace. Most encounters are simple enough to be brute-forced though the episode's final boss takes a bit more consideration due to its heavy firepower.

Beyond the basic combat, the game's mostly going for a style piece with an underworld setting very reminiscent of the murkier areas of Midgar beneath its plates complete with gaudy neon signs, pipes running everywhere you look, and a rundown, rust-covered playground that's nevertheless of great sentimental value to its young heroes dreaming of a better world. It utilizes that similar sort of atmosphere-drenched meandering feel as the intro to Final Fantasy VII as it endeavors to draw you into this dystopian milieu to punctuate just how much more bleak living in these conditions is compared to the fresh and bright world awaiting the party just outside the city limits; given there's a flyer for Light Fairytale Episode 2 which shows a snowy and more natural region I suspect this game's story will take a similar environmentalist-friendly route. As stated above, while this part of the game is mostly a "Point A to Point B" affair, there's incentive enough to investigate everywhere and talk to everyone for extra details and backstory that's incidental to the main narrative but serves as workable worldbuilding. There's a couple of mini-games too: a pretty basic arcade racing game and a story-related stealth game where you earn points for moving between cover as guards patrol nearby, the more daring the better.

Light Fairytale is evidently a game where I'm going to have a better sense of its potential once more of its episodes are out. The second is available, and I happen to already own it, so I'll probably give that a spin sometime next year. It has me intrigued enough with its storytelling and the way the game feels geared towards the narrative strengths of its genre rather than the gameplay ones—I am still hoping the combat improves, of course, once it has more variety and features to it—and I'll admit to being curious about its episodic format too and how it intends to factor all those cliffhangers into what was probably originally intended as a single, lengthy, contiguous storyline. While the episode takes about three hours to complete there's the aforementioned event scavenger hunt plus an entire alternate retelling from the perspective of Kuroko—though this runs into the issue Tales of Xillia had where the two protagonists' respective viewpoints spend a long time being identical owing to how often the two are together—to bump it up a fair amount, giving you plenty to be getting on with for how little these episodes are going for on Steam. Though what's presently here is an attractive but surface-level RPG, at this point of the process it's more of an investment than anything: like a demo or early access for what promises to be something special once it's fully complete.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Game of the Month: Like a Dragon: Ishin! (Ryu ga Gotoku Studio, 2023)

That's right, my Bakumatsu buckos, it's Ishin again for the second month in a row. The Yakuza-ified retelling of the tale of the Kyo-bound Shinsengumi militia and their involvement (if mostly fictionalized) with the end of the Edo era in Japan and the start of the Meiji Restoration, following the abdication of the Shogun, as a means to unite the country in the face of overwhelming foreign firepower. Like another recently played game set in Japan around the end of the 19th century, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, this has been both an entertaining and educational adventure in a period of Japanese history I've grown slightly more interested in of late, especially given how much of it concerns the United Kingdom once again involving itself with a distant country's affairs (something we did a lot back then, as is my understanding).

As the type of weirdo to luxuriate in every Like a Dragon game (hence why I never play more than one a year) there was plenty in old Kyo to keep me busy over the past month and, while I've reached the end of the story, there's still a whole bunch of content locked up in the game's Battle Dungeons mode and a few others. Hell, I haven't even fought Amon yet; you can't really say a Yakuza game is complete without that. To that effect, here's a semi-exhaustive list of everything in this game that isn't just the main story (which was very good, though I had my reservations with certain characters and moments):

• Karaoke: Of course. They made a whole bunch of samurai enka for Ryoma to croon his way through, as well as Baka Mitai of course. I love the idea that Kiryu's favorite song (or at least his signature karaoke go-to) is canonically over 100 years old. Perfectly fits his character.
• Buyo: That is, traditional Japanese fan-dancing. Takes a real man to learn how to dance like a lady. This mini-game is super hard because it forces you to divide your attention on two different circles with their own rapidly-moving note trees, the game adopting something similar to the mechanics of the disco dancing mini-game in Y0, so it's one of the few I've left to the end.
• Udon: There's an udon noodle serving memory mini-game too. I sucked at it until I started cheating. Then it got a whole lot easier somehow. Figures.
• Gambling: You have your usual selection of poker (considered here to be some upstart foreign game no-one's heard of), cho-han (which you gotta have in anything samurai or yakuza related), koi-koi (just gotta remember which hanafuda cards are worth anything), oicho-kabu (the hanafuda baccarat where the term "yakuza" originated, so it's mandatory), cee-lo (like in the bathroom, there's serious repercussions if you miss the bowl), and the newly added chicken racing. I appreciate the puns in the chicken racing mode as well as how easy it is to exploit it for massive profit. Maybe more the latter.

• Mahjong/Shogi: These board games are old as dirt so it didn't surprise me to see them here. Played plenty of the former (the completion list goals for it are very modest) and just enough of the latter as I needed to. I think I might actually be improving in mahjong, though given how much of it is random chance it's hard to tell.
• Another Life: This is where Ryoma forgets about his troubles and just has a happy home family life with Haruka, who I guess he just adopts out of nowhere in this continuity, on a little farm where he raises chickens. Don't sleep on this mode: it's where you can get an awful lot of cash and strong curative items through its cooking mini-game. And here I was thinking it only existed to be a relaxing mini-Starkiryu Valley.
• Battle Dungeons: As a captain of the Shinsengumi, Ryoma is expected to actually do some work occasionally (in an optional context, of course). These are represented by sorties to clear out bandit caves and, eventually, a mountain stronghold. They're fairly generic (and proc-gen, I suspect) but they're also the source of a huge amount of the materials you need for the real deal game-breaking weaponry you can put together. Plus, it's more fighting if you like the fighting and who doesn't like the fighting in these games? Tiger Drops all day, fool (there's even a cool flashy sword version of the Tiger Drop too! I love it!).
• Arena: I haven't even stepped one foot in here yet, though there's a trophy in it for me if I get through ten of its thirty-five bouts. I usually do the arenas in these games because, as I said before, the fighting is good stuff and you can't really appreciate it too much just bashing through the random mobs that accost you in the street. Plus, the opponents they gather for you can be real weirdos.
• Cannon Training: I cut a cannonball in half with a sword, no big deal.

Besides mini-games, I've been getting more acquainted with Ryoma's four fighting styles. Wild Dancer is still a very effective way of avoiding getting hurt if you remember to just spin around like an idiot for half the battle (spinning: never not a good trick), while Gunman has gotten real strong after I upgraded to a powerful gun. I can just absolutely unload on anyone that's fallen to the ground or has decided to stand back and shoot fireballs at me (there are way too many dudes that do this). Swordsman got more fun once I unlocked that aforementioned Tiger Drop equivalent, and Brawler's still mostly useless without the damage boosts you gain from weapons but man is it fun to troll people with. Just hit the parry, which causes you to swing around behind them, and then sucker punch them in the back of the head until you've had your fill of being a jerk.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the historical Kyo map compared to the usual series haunt of Kamurocho or the now-recurring city centers of Osaka's Sotenbori and Yokohama's Isezaki Ijincho. It separates Fushimi and Rakunai, the two main population centers (and thus the two places where most of the stores/restaurants/mini-game places are), with this long and mostly empty dusty suburb area of Rakugai that has the blacksmith and the gambling places and not much else. Mukurogai (the scary slums) and Gion (the fancy upmarket place with all the geisha) are in these weirdly partitioned-off areas and you're given very few narrative reasons to ever visit them, so they feel kinda incidental in many cases. Fortunately, you still have taxis (except they're palanquins now) to fast-travel at no great expense but there's still way too much running through empty streets for my liking. At least Ryoma got his cardio in.

Anyway, that's all a fraction of an explanation as to why I lost an entire month (and change, I suppose) to this samurai open-world game even though I try to convince myself I won't go full completionist nutcase with every new Yakuza I play. Sigh. I guess meet me back here in a year or so for Infinite Wealth and its Infinite Mini-Games. (Oh, and Assassination of the Bodhisattva is a damn jam.)

Darling Indies and Other Gaming Tomfoolery

As has been the case for most of this summer, the bulk of the tomfoolery was centered around the Game OVA feature, with Game OVA Season 3: Episode 3 — Ushio to Tora presenting the conclusion of a shorter season of my frequently cursed forays into anime licensed video games. Ushio to Tora is a mismatched buddy comedy masquerading as a YuYu Hakusho-style supernatural shounen action show as the spear-wielding scion from a family of mystical warriors gets tangled up in the human-eating business of the millennia-old tiger demon spirit that lives trapped in his family temple's basement until the kid frees it. Initially antagonistic, the idea is that the two characters eventually form a partnership to protect the human world from the sudden influx of yokai and other malicious beings. As with Mashin Eiyuuden Masaru last time, its two video games adaptations included a 16-bit action game (Ushio to Tora for SFC) and an 8-bit RPG (Ushio to Tora: Shin'en no Daiyou for Famicom) with the latter proving to be the more interesting of the two, in this case because it opted for an intriguing system where you could siphon health or MP from the enemy whenever either got low in lieu of the more traditional curative spells and items and quick inn visits. Definitely glad I slaked my curiosity about this one, though I wouldn't say either of those games were bangers. "Better than most licensed fare", is about as generous as I'm willing to go.

Another month, another N64 3D platformer ROM Hack with Retro Achievements that I can work my way through as I listen to podcasts. This time, it's one literally called Another Mario Adventure, which has an anthology feel as multiple creators contributed to it. Rather than simply just replacing the worlds (which I'm sure is not actually all that simple) like many hacks I've tried of late, AMA also tinkered with the game mechanics to add a whole lot of welcome quality-of-life touches. For instance, while there are still 1Ups (they're made deliberately hard to find and constitute a good chunk of the achievement set) there's no lives or game over states to worry about. Quitting a course just drops you outside like you died rather than warping you to the initial spawn point, there's a tracker for red coins if you're not into scavenger hunts and the game will give you a pass if you only collect seven out of the eight available, and the 100-coin stars have been replaced by bonus stars earned by collecting all the blue coins from those timed switches (which are still challenging, but don't have the irksome "please, Mario, just don't die" tense endurance aspect of scrounging 100 coins together). There's also no fall damage, so the level designers can put together more vertical areas without the fear of death for long drops, and the swimming's been modified so you can hold the button to hit max speed rather than have to match the rhythm. Even with these changes, the hack is pretty tough and fairly inconsistent with its challenge level (and the quality) given the different contributors. Otherwise, it's been a whole bunch of unpredictable fun with those QoL tweaks really making a positive difference.

Since I finished Another Mario Adventure just before the end of September I have since embarked on another RA-blessed Mario 64 hack, the insatiable pasta fan that I am, called Shotgun Mario 64. Nothing ironic about that name: it really is just Mario 64 with a shotgun. It's been unsurprisingly cathartic (that thing makes quick work of most enemies) but there's a few sneaky challenges in this achievement set that can only be done with the added mid-air boost a shotgun grants you. For one, you wouldn't think you could get the 100-coin Star in Bob-Omb Battlefield without pressing the A button a single time but it's just about doable with a shotty in hand. The hackers went above and beyond in programming ways you can absolutely destroy many Mario 64 levels with enough firepower, smashing open shortcuts and what have you. It's also really funny. I shot MIPS and he ricocheted around the basement at mach speeds. Entertainment like that doesn't grow on trees.

I reached the end of BoxBoxBoy! shortly after publishing the previous Mento's Month but it turns out to have quite the tail to it. A whole bunch of post-game worlds opened up after a conclusion (of sorts) and the staff roll (I considered it "beaten" by that point) and these have proven to be way more precise and demanding than the rest of the game. They're actually a bit more fun as a result, forcing me to narrow it down a specific intended solution rather than the jerry-rigged ones I'd been coasting by on until now. Since most worlds have six-to-eight stages (never seven though; there'll be no odd numbers on my watch, this isn't TriangleTriangleBoy) I've been busy with the six new worlds that are now available in-between my Pictlogica escapades. Talking of which, now that Pictlogica: Final Fantasy has settled on a two-week gap between new areas I'm managing two zones per month and probably will for some time yet (it's not looking like a 2024 completion). New Memoria acquisitions include something called a Yda (XIV), the rad Aussie spearlesbian Oerba Yun Fang (XIII), the laid-back immortal Sherlotta (CC: Echoes of Time), and everyone's favorite Materia thief Yuffie Kisaragi (VII).

WonderSwanning, Mega Driving, and Sixty-Forging Ahead

Given our Anyway, Here's WonderSwan adventures returned to the darkest place imaginable, another low-budget SD Gundam RPG, this is the last update in which I'll be relying on my team of random picker robots. Two more "Parts" after this, both of which will have assortments fully curated by me instead of only partially. That I'm looking forward to them that much more really puts my adherence on using random chance in half of my blog features in a stark light. I guess I still want that element of surprise and danger, you know? Or at least an element of spinning my pain into comedy gold, or possibly comedy zirconium depending on how my sense of humor is holding up that week. Oh right, I should talk highlights and lowlights: Best game was probably... actually, I don't think there was one. Neon Genesis Evangelion Shito Ikusei, a.k.a. Gainax's Angel-raising Tamagotchi knock-off (that isn't this one) sure was intriguing but the real-time aspect made it more tedious than I was hoping, while Makai Toushi SaGa despite being fan-translated was still as impenetrable and inaccessible as every other SaGa. Rockman EXE N1 Battle had me excited as a Mega Man fan but it's easily the most text-heavy and tactical of that entire franchise and not having it in English was a dealbreaker. That leaves our first Digimon game, Battle Spirit: Digimon Frontier, a so-so anime platformer-fighter, and the aforementioned SD Gundam trainwreck. Well, I can guarantee that Parts 9 and 10 will be more pleasant to assemble at least.

Likewise, the 43rd Mega Archive took on one of the more cursed ensembles we've seen so far in the current ten-games-per-entry system and I'm honestly struggling to find a highlight for you all here too. RoboCop Versus The Terminator maybe isn't as terrible as you might reasonably believe it to be? Lotus II: RECS is probably fine if you like arcade racers? Worst might be ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron if only for how badly it lets down the brand but I'm inclined to pick the one I've played the most (it was on SNES too) which is the Terminator 2: Judgment Day adaptation from Acclaim. Roooough stuff. Next month will be the finale (of the regular cart edition of Mega Archive anyway) so maybe the larger assortment will prove more promising. At least I squeezed some fun jokes into this entry; how often do you get a chance to do NBA Jam/Dynasty Warriors crossover gags?

64 in 64: Episode 46 sees off the month with another couple of N64 games to consider for the NSO digital platform, once again proving that 64 minutes is plenty of time to form an objectively correct stance on any given game. I chose Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine as my selection, since I'd never seen it before and folks are getting hyped about that new original MachineGames Indy adventure Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. I was enjoying it though there's no argument that it's become a little antiquated over the years (but then that's how Indy likes 'em). The random selection was Bass Rush: a mediocre sponsored fishing game that never left Japan, even though its main fishy targets aren't even indigenous to that country. Sometimes when you play a game like this you can actually see your time on this Earth running out; it's something like a small, partially-transparent hourglass that sits in your peripheral. Mine's actually flashing right now? That's... ominous.

The hint for the next duo: The Pre-Select is sort of an obligation pick, as it's the last in a series of games connected by a certain theme. The Random is, no surprise, a sports game and one where I'm going to have to be very careful with my jokes.

The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Frogun (Molegato, 2022)

My reviewing style has often been called (by no-one) a "4s majeure" because I'm forever drawn to that "great but not perfect" numerical score for what feels like most of my IGotW entries. I think that's largely because I tend to take on games I'm pretty sure I'm going to like, usually only raising to a 5 or dipping to a 3 when my expectations didn't quite match up to reality (for better or worse, respectively). So with a month like this where all four games received the same score, it becomes that much harder to find a winner. For as much as it occasionally frustrated me, I'm going to give it to the grapple-gun 3D platformer Frogun (#388) for having the most distinctive visual style and for offering the most challenge this month, both of which will impress my time with it in the memory banks that much more firmly.

Following very closely behind are the inventive sci-fi explormer Ghost 1.0 (#386) with its many neat QoL and gameplay features, such as a game-wide scavenger hunt for secret triggers to make passive upgrades appear (which effectively replaces Metroid's "shoot this one innocuous block in the corner that has a power-up in it" obtuseness); the droll, bite-sized adventures of a supernatural investigator in The Darkside Detective (#387) which found its charm in its episodic approach to its not-so-spooky shenanigans; and the equally jocose Renaissance painting-inspired sinful mishaps of Four Last Things (#389), the graphic adventure precursor to February's "Indie Game of the Week of the Month" The Procession to Calvary. As ever, be sure to click the links for the deeper dives.

The Bonus Indie: Access Denied: Escape (Stately Snail, 2023)

So far, I've been using the Bonus Indie section as a dumping ground for all the backlog items that, while perfectly acceptable games in their own right, fell short of what I'd consider optimal material for a 1000-word (or thereabouts) review for Indie Game of the Week. So far that's included Indie compilations of non-Indie games like the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection and not-strictly-Indie-but-Indie-shaped games like Bandai Namco's Doronko Wanko (which comes from a huge publisher) or remasters/reboots of once retail games like PowerSlave Exhumed and Kao the Kangaroo (which are now Indie, mostly, but certainly didn't used to be). I'm also going to be adding games like Access Denied: Escape which are both incredibly short and incredibly hard to talk about owing to their status as a game built on puzzles and surprises, since there's no way I'd get to a decent word count with what little I can actually say.

So, Access Denied: Escape is one of those "puzzle box" adventure games that The Room expertly cornered the market on a decade ago and has gone to closely define: a very intricate first-person game built like Myst but far more focused on isolated puzzle instances usually surrounding one large object that can be turned around and manipulated from (almost) every angle. Access Denied: Escape follows a sci-fi theme rather than The Room's more supernatural steampunk leanings, presenting a series of "data vaults" to open—usually by way of a password gleaned from clues scattered across the box's five visible sides (nothing's ever on the bottom)—as you attempt to construct something called the biomatrix that your client is asking for. Intermittently, you'll be tasked with exploring the small office space that these data vaults are stored in for additional tools like a screwdriver or a data disc with some necessary information, but also a few pieces of incidental background lore about what this scientist client of yours has been doing and how much of this assignment is actually on the up and up.

It's a series of neat little mysteries couched inside a larger overarching one that works well as a puzzle game that's unlikely to ask more than two hours of your time. The many forms of the password extraction process of the data vaults, the various asides to discover in the office space, and the slow-burn narrative are all best enjoyed first-hand though, so I'll just say that this is a game worth picking up in a sale (or a bundle, as I did) if you're a big fan of those The Room games and others like them. I'll say it doesn't quite have the same tactile satisfaction of its clicky-clacky Victorian counterpart but the challenge level was just about right: even if I managed to clear a dozen of those data vaults in seconds there were definitely still a few that had me going for a while.

The Weeb Weeview

I've already talked about all the anime I watched across summer in the two previous Mento's Months, so I'll just rank them all based on how much fun I had with each and how well their season/cour held up: some dropped off as they lost focus and began to meander, while others conversely picked up once they'd found their footing and moved beyond their slow, worldbuilding-heavy introductions. There'll be some rating on a curve here: I won't argue that a few of the anime I've put high up the list are probably a bit cheap-looking and generic compared to this season's critically-acclaimed winners further down, but the fun of a subjective list is that I can just be a trash person who likes trash things.

(Disclaimer: There may be a few vaguely spoilerish things said about each season's arc. Like if I say "the back half got a lot more intense" you could probably safely assume something big happens before the final few episodes. Anything more specific I'll be sure to spoiler-block.)

1. Oshi no Ko (Season 2): Oshi no Ko's second season did these occasional animated flights of fancy, akin to the trippier moments of a Spider-Verse movie, where it gets all abstract as a visual metaphor for the amplified emotional states that theater actors invoke to reach their audience. I've taken to calling these sequences "the Oshi no Ko flow" (sail away, sail away) since it feels like the drama and seriousness of the show temporarily fades into the background to highlight the élan of live theater performances. Touches like that are what makes this show special, beyond it being an intense revenge mystery with a bizarre reincarnation premise. But, yeah, still as dark as ever so caveat emptor.
2. I Parry Everything: Man, did I not expect I'd end up enjoying I Parry Everything as much as I did, figuring the joke would wear thin a few episodes in. It's very much in the One Punch Man "how do you deal with an OP protag? Just make it a comedy" school of thought, its parry-happy hero handily dispatching Bahamut Zero, the entire Shinra army, and then the Midgar Sister Ray cannon (or non-litigious equivalents) just by hitting the parry trigger at the precise right moment. Since I'm playing a Like a Dragon game right now (see above) and once again fussing over the Tiger Drop timing, it's smack dab in my area of interest. Seriously underrated show that's worth sticking through those slow and sorta demoralizing early worldbuilding episodes (as long as you can tolerate how knowingly goofy it all is).
3. The Elusive Samurai: Of course, if parries aren't your thing there's always dodge-rolling. Evasive parkour is not all of what The Elusive Samurai is about, however, as this expressive and beautiful jidaigeki anime was definitely the standout of this season animation-wise. While the first episode had some real dark business to establish the high stakes the rest of the season has been relatively light, drawing together Lord Tokiyuki's capable retainers, introducing a few recurring villains that range from scary to silly, and presenting a few small but still significant battles as the titular grade-schooler warrior polishes his "dodge everything" combat style. That the show continues to mess with real world canon makes for a fun alternative historical angle, or it would if I was at all familiar with 14th century Japan's political climate. I guess the European equivalent would be if a moé Joan of Arc won the Hundred Years' War by fast-rolling around like a Dark Souls character.
4. Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!: Makeine maintained its fluffy but emotionally resonant tone throughout its run (likewise its fantastic animation) though I'm not sure where a second season might feasibly go, having not read the source material. Given the theme is "loser heroines all flock to this one meek dude for emotional support", and that the heroines in question have now mostly gotten over their respective heartbreaks, the show's just become... this guy hanging out with all these girls that aren't all that into him. It's a more realistic depiction of a HS harem anime concept at least, and the characters are fun enough to be around that it works as a sitcom still, but besides a long road to hooking up with one of them (or adding a bunch of new losing heroines) it's probably going to lose some of its raison d'être.
5. VTuber Legend: How I Went Viral: VTuber Legend did kinda lose steam towards the end there, turning into something a bit more of a standard rising star idol/showbiz story, but I hope they get all that sentimentality out of their system by next season and we're back to anime ladies talking about gooning and fetish cosplay and all the other unhinged shit that's still only at like 30% the intensity of whatever VShojo or Kureiji Ollie is yelling about at any given moment. At least the cute and wholesome vibes felt earned after a season of getting to know this group and I imagine it could've switched a few anime viewers onto the real thing. Heck, you could make an entire award-winning season of anime based on Hololive's GTAV RP server shenanigans alone.
6. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (Season 3, Cour 2): The third season of TenSura was far slower-paced than the big twists and dramatic throwdowns of previous seasons, now that Rimuru is absent any major antagonists (at least those that are actively gunning for him) and can focus on what he's always wanted: to build a peaceful, advanced society that is equitable to both humans (what he was) and monsters (what he is). There's a whole lot of statecraft and politics as a result which might not be to everyone's speed but I found myself enjoying regardless, not quite transforming the show into some Master of Magic version of a slice-of-life but finding the opportunity to explore a level of power and influence isekai protagonists rarely reach since they're all mostly about conquering dungeons and having seventeen girlfriends. TenSura got confirmed for a fourth season and a second movie so folks are evidently still on board with more of it, as am I.
7. No Longer Allowed in Another World: The suicidal author isekai show ended up having a lot more heart than many people anticipated, especially since its main joke feels like a mean-spirited jab at the profoundly depressed. I'd read the manga (or at least what's been translated) so I knew what to expect but I like how the source material was handled, with the right degree of emotion and levity where applicable. I'm not sure if they'll manage to squeeze another season of material out of a burned-out dude popping sleeping pills while occasionally dispensing some frank commentary that his enemies invariably needed to hear, but I'll be there for it regardless.
8. The Ossan Newbie Adventurer: Ossan was a total dorkfest of a show, predictable and familiar, but I'll admit to finding it an enjoyable way to pass the time. The arc of the season improves slightly once the titular Ossan ("old man", though he's only 32) gets over his inferiority complex and instead has his inherent niceness compensate for how he could punch a hole through any opponent (that isn't his mentor, the orc Broughston, who is even more ridiculously OP) during the show's compulsory tournament stretch. Still a pretty funny show all round, though not quite to the level of the thematically similar I Parry Everything (though they're close enough that I could brook arguments on the contrary).
9. Mayonaka Punch: The vampire YouTube streamer show. It's remarkable that they mostly drop the vampire thing pretty quickly, instead focusing on the characters and their mundane video ideas once they're conveniently forbidden from showing off superhuman abilities on camera (the Masquerade apparently extending to anime universes too). Still a pretty decent ensemble comedy that provides a glimpse into the tough, cutthroat, and emotionally-injurious world of online content creation. I say that, but writing a bunch of garbage and publishing on the internet is super easy, guys, I dunno what to tell you. Maybe harder if you're hoping anyone reads it, of course.
10. Wistoria: Wand and Sword: Wistoria remained flashy and earnest to the end but it's not a particularly intriguing magical school anime outside of its production values quite yet. I'm not saying it's not worth your time but it was a slow introductory first season that I'm sure later ones (a second has already been confirmed) will build on as they develop the odd lore of this world and an apparently endless dungeon of insanely powerful monsters just under the main school's campus (that's something you wouldn't want to deal with on the first night after you get lost on the way to the bathrooms). I will say that the studio is taking this material very seriously if they're pouring this much cash into it, so maybe it'll stick around a while.
11. Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian: Sweet and leisurely-paced right up until the end, Alya was a great show if you like slow-burn romances and some decent (but not over the top) character work. Not a whole lot happens but then that's the slice-of-life genre for you: more about hanging out with some romantically-awkward goobers than big dramatic twists. That said, it does have some strong funny moments that might sneak up on you and Suou will no doubt continue to be an entertaining menace in the (now confirmed) second season.
12. Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start: Dahlia in Bloom proved to be one of the more languid shows of the season but there's nothing particularly wrong with a slower pace. I'd use some wordplay to say it was the kind of show to "stop and smell the Dahlias" but, uh, something ain't quite right about that phrasing. When the most exciting thing that happens in an entire season of an anime is an outbreak of foot fungus that should give you some idea of how low the stakes can be in iyashikei, even fantasy ones. Still, if you like shows where characters just have friendly chats over lunch about patent laws and the etiquette of the nobility, this might be for you.
13. Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything With Low-Level Spells: Failure Frame didn't leave the best first impression but the awful CGI was used more sparingly as the season continued, which seemed like the wrong way around if you wanted to draw in a viewer base. Bring them in with early episodes that use the lion's share of the budget and then have them stick around for the uglier back end as sunk cost fallacy kicks in. It's still pretty dumb (surely not every minor villain has to be all rape-y to engender animosity in the audience) and not a whole lot develops in this first season but it slowly found its feet with a few of the more entertaining reversals later on and definitely ended on a better note than when it started. Whether that's enough to earn it another season through which to further course correct is a separate matter.
14. My Deer Friend Nokotan: Nokotan turned out to be no big deal despite all that initial hype around the trailers, failing to match the energetic chaos of a Pop Team Epic or Cromartie High or even the pointless but cute JK stupidity of a Nichijou or an Azumanga Daioh. The absurdist gags that almost always seem to revolve around antlers or the photorealistic deer bystanders tended to land with a dull thud and Koshi-tan's nonplussed straight man commentary throughout is often beyond the point of excessive. I get what it's going for, most of the time, but it feels like it didn't have a whole lot of comedy juice about deer and deer girls in the tank. Disappointing, but then humor's a hard thing to get right (especially when you also factor in the cultural barrier).

Before we move on from anime, as I know that's what you all actually come to read about here on Giant Bomb: A Website About Video Games, I'll add some shows I plan to follow once the new autumn season starts (and how I discovered them) in descending order of interest:

• Dandadan: This feels like the mega-hyped "one to watch" for this season. A surreal magical realism story about a competing aliens nerd and occult nerd realising both are real and present threats before acquiring the abilities to fight them all off. Someone's gotta figure out how to turn this into a GB feature with Ryckert, right?
• Shangri-La Frontier (Season 2): First season of this not-isekai VRMMO show was phenomenal in its animation, its world-building, and its deeply nerdy meta-gaming and so I'm all in at this point. That fight with the robot samurai dude towards the end of the first season was truly something else in terms of visual spectacle.
• As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill (Season 2): First season aired a little while ago and felt incomplete, probably because they had this second one cued up right behind it. Plenty of tablesetting in that first half as it established the shrewd lordly protagonist and his cadre of hyper-talented retainers, so seeing them go to war is more for the sake of paying off that investment.
• Uzumaki: Not the biggest horror fan but trailers for this adaptation of Junji Ito's seminal work about a town's literal spiral into madness were super trippy and I know it's going to mess me up. It's already started its run but this might be a series to pick up around late October, perhaps.
• Loner Life in Another World: I've been reading the manga of this "entire class gets transported" isekai variant since I like lone wolf protagonists that aren't especially moody or pissed off or anything but just prefer chilling in solitude. The class loner develops into its most powerful and reliable member entirely by accident and so becomes a "fixer" of sorts for the rest of the class as they adjust to a fantasy world. Manga was wholesome, novels slightly less so (not read 'em but I've heard there's way more harem shit), so I'm curious which the show will take after most.
• The Most Notorious "Talker" Runs the World's Greatest Clan: A non-isekai fantasy show about an extremely pragmatic (read: asshole) support class who, to compensate for his lack of martial talent, becomes very effective at manipulating others on and off the battlefield in order to become #1. His goals are pure but his methods are... well, problematic doesn't start to cover it. Could be a compelling Death Note-style grim anti-hero show and the manga had some amazing art that I'd like to see in animated form.
• Arifureta (Season 3): Big maybe on this one. Arifureta can be trashy edgelord fun but isekais lose steam remarkably quickly after a few seasons (if they had any to begin with). Rising of the Shield Hero was running on fumes by its third season, for example, and that's not a property a million miles away from what Arifureta's doing.
• Ranma ½: A new reboot of Ranma ½ to follow that recent Urusei Yatsura show as part of a wave of modernized Showa-era anime (though actually I think the Ranma ½ anime squeaked into Heisei just under the wire, so never mind). Turns out Hollywood aren't the only ones recycling everything. I might catch a few episodes and then decide whether to continue or dip back into the Studio Deen originals, since I never got around to them. All depends on which one proves to be "the good Ranma ½", you know?

Thanks for reading and I'll leave you with the usual link dump and a promise for more introspective fun in October. It's my favorite month, after all (despite what I said about not being a horror guy).

Too Long, Do Relinks

• Indie Game of the Week 386: Ghost 1.0
• Indie Game of the Week 387: The Darkside Detective
• Indie Game of the Week 388: Frogun
• Indie Game of the Week 389: Four Last Things
• Mega Archive: Part XLIII: From Lotus II: RECS to Winter Olympics
• Game OVA Season 3: Episode 3 — Ushio to Tora
• Anyway, Here's WonderSwan (Part Eight)
• 64 in 64: Episode 46