I was told this was a Zelda clone, but I feel like mostly the game has ideas that were inspired by Zelda but involved some interesting other directions:
linear exploration (but with upgrades)
boots that let you fly everywhere (as my brother said, some programmer was like “what if we turned of collision detection”
you don’t need special items to reveal caves (mostly), not like Zelda where you would have to bomb everything.
the enemies are quite aggressive. There are some maps where you can use this against them and force them to only come at you in one direction, but often there’s a lot of them making strange movements quickly towards you.
The side scrolling sections where you can’t go back….without a map I would definitely have gotten stuck on the caves leading to the boss fights. I'm not sure these really added to my game experience, but I suppose it's a good change of pace.
Also, the game looks way cuter than Zelda.
I will admit that the fairies giving advice was really annoying XD You work so hard to find a cave and then the fairy is like “Hi”.
It’s a platformer and sequel to Xanadu (Dragon Slayer II), which I didn't play. It requires a lot of precision. Save states yippee. I think the story is something like “you, an elf adventurer, return home to find that everything is crumbling. turns out the dwarves, the elves’ former friends, have been fighting with them, because the dwarves have been corrupted by a meteorite that poisons the water etc. but after fighting your way through various villages, you get the ‘dragon slayer’ from the king dwarf (who mutated into a dragon) and use it to defeat the “Evil One” from the meteorite which was responsible for the corruption in the first place.”
Personally I found the graphics bland and dark. You can upgrade your weapon (unlimited uses), magic (limited uses), and armor with money, so you can stop and grind if struggling. I found the limited inventory space combined with having to buy keys to unlock doors quite annoying — different doors require different kinds of keys, but you don't actually know which keys are needed until you actually interact with the door, so without a map(through) you would have to either buy more keys than needed or keep backtracking after finding each door. You also can't sell a key to a shopkeeper unless they can sell that key to you, so at some point I wasted all the money I spent buying a key.
Again, random thoughts since I played this some time ago.
Instead of a straightforward platformer relying on skill, in Castlevania II you level up and explore an “open” world with lots of secrets before confronting Dracula when you feel appropriately powered up. There’s an added soft time limit, where you have to navigate the overworld efficiently lest you take too long to kill Dracula and die immediately afterwards in the ending. (I think the biggest obstacle to this is the grinding at the beginning, honestly: you need enough money to get the items to access the first mansion, and I took a really long time to do that.) As usual I hate stairs.
I had fun looking for the secrets and dropping garlic in graveyards and the like, though I must note I was playing with a patch that fixed the poor English translation, so the hints were far less confusing. Also, even though there is a time limit, it freezes in the mansions, so you can grind the infinitely respawning enemies there…the developers did stop you from leveling up on weak enemies, though, which was kind of sad XD. The correct strategy for the boss battles is “toss sacred flame at them so they stop moving repeatedly”. If you have enough hearts, guaranteed to work.
I suppose the game was meant to be replayed several times — the first time, you take a really long time trying to figure out where everything is, and on later iterations you can immediately perform some steps while figuring out how to optimize your route or discovering more secrets.
I played the Playstation 2 remake (Phantasy Star Generation 1). Random thoughts, since this was also some time ago:
Played this a while ago so this is more a collection of scattered thoughts.
We've evolved from the one-man party to a three-man party that are distant descendants of the DQI protagonist. We also encounter the descendant of the DQI villain and can later visit Alefgard, the DQI continent. The gameplay has also evolved! With more allies and monster groups, there's more flexibility in battle. We get to sail around the whole map and teleport.
My main memory of the game is when your team gets to Rhone, the last area of the game, the difficulty spikes tremendously. That's mitigated by a couple hours of grinding, but it was kind of demoralizing XD
In 2018, Cygames and Nintendo released the mobile gacha game Dragalia Lost. At the time, I had no interest in playing because I had heard that it was a clone of Shironeko Project and Nintendo had sued Colopl over some aspect of the movement and attack system in the game. Dragalia Lost's servers shut down in 2022, a pretty average lifetime for a gacha game. But I recently discovered that the game has a thriving fan-maintained private server (actually, two of them). Playing Dragalia Lost through its private servers has helped me reflect on how 1) Dragalia Lost is actually good and 2) getting to play it in its end-of-service state is probably how I would love to experience a lot of gacha games.
I ordered a Paper Pro because reMarkable said their prices would increase in May (so I guess that marketing email worked) with the assumption that I could return it within the 100-day mark if I didn't like it.
Documenting this for my future attempts to map controller inputs in Mednafen and change hotkeys.
My attempt at explaining what I do to a non-mathematician:
I played the NES version. Another Falcom game, though this one is an adventure game set in Chichen Itza. (The map of the game actually, uh, looks like Chichen Itza!! I was so impressed.)