The Famicom Disk System may have famously been the only way to play the first two Zelda games in Japan for many years, but it had few other attempts at open world adventure RPGs to its name; mostly because the lack of space on your average disk largely restricted developers to relatively simple action-adventure or puzzle oriented games. Silvana was one such attempt, though. Developed by Pack-in Video (who also brought us games like Rambo, Die Hard and Knight Rider for the NES), you notice right away the similarities to the oft-maligned Hydlide. The bump combat, having a dual save system (quick saves at any time, hard saves only in town) and the overall visuals and tinny music are quite similar. It is a little more sophisticated than Hydlide at least - you earn gold by defeating enemies which can be traded for stronger weapons and armor in towns, there is a bit of NPC dialog (minimal, but it's there) and can find hearts to upgrade your maximum health. At one point you also enter an "evil" version of the overworld, which mirrors the map and changes it to a darker color palette - slightly reminiscent of Link to the Past's dark world, though in a much more primitive form. Not much about Silviana really stands out otherwise - it's a take on Hydlide, a game that was already dated at the time of its release on the system, and while its improvements are welcome, there's just little reason to play it when the Zelda games (and Castlevania 2) are readily available on the same platform.
Developer: Pack-in Video Publisher: Pack-in Video Released: 1988 Platform: Famicom Disk System
After Krondor proved to be a slow burn success for Dynamix and Sierra, they naturally wanted to make a sequel; unfortunately by the time the game had turned a profit they no longer had the rights to adapt the Riftwar saga, and instead had to make their own. A pretty stock fantasy world called Ramar, with some equally tepid writing by Susan Frischer and Peter Sarrett; neither of whom worked on the original game, and the quality from it is sorely missed. Our first scene is literally a prince and a young farmhand uniting, with the latter tossing out a lightning bolt out of the blue to showcase his magical talent; yes, I understand compelling world building is difficult, but surely you can try harder than this. We've also got voice acting now (of a very mediocre sort) and the game isn't much better looking than Krondor was, despite coming out four years later.
Aside from a few small changes and improvements, this is basically just a bog-standard retread of Krondor in every respect. Instead of the word-lock chests you now get lever chests, in which you pull a series of levers in the correct order to spell out the word for the puzzle. There are also bead chests in which you attempt to create a sequence of colored beads through exchanges, though these are largely superfluous changes. Lockpicking is now luck based (blah), and combat was used relatively sparingly in Krondor, making each battle feel significant; here it feels like blatant, boring filler as you're fighting the same handful of enemies almost constantly everywhere you go. Spells are no longer learned through scrolls, but must be "researched" before they can be used, with new types found through certain environmental actions and research carried out very slowly as time passes. On the upside, the game does autosave before battles in case they go wrong (and they will, a lot), and there are now touch-range spells, so you're not stuck if an enemy bum-rushes your mage (which they will, a lot). Unfortunately the lackluster writing, dragging combat and overall slow pace make this a poor imitation of Krondor. To say nothing of the bugs - the game crashes frequently and many mechanics simply don't work as advertised. Krondor was a virtually bug-free experience, so having so many of them in what's supposed to be a followup game is a major strike against it. And considering how subpar an experience it is already, there's just no reason to recommend Antara over its predecessor.
Developer: Sierra On-Line Publisher: Sierra On-Line Released: 1997 Platforms: PC
A controversial launch marred it, a big-time turnaround with numerous subsequent patches aided by a successful anime tie-in redeemed it, and now Cyberpunk 2077 is regarded as another modern classic from CD Projekt Red. But is there anything here for me as someone jaded by open world design that focuses more on volume than quality, or is it done in once again by its own hubris?
Cyberpunk 2077 was a public relations disaster when it launched, for a variety of reasons. Whether completely unnecessary health hazards to epileptic people, allegedexploitation of CDPR employees (later offset by a suspiciously large number of positive employee reviews appearing to offset negative ones), or a conveniently timed data breach that may or may not have been staged for publicity, the game was a pretty big font of negativity when it launched and continued to be so for some time after. Of course, it had its defenders too; mostly people who decided it was the best game of all time years before they ever played a single second of it and continued to do so in spite of its horrifically buggy design and poor performance.
I passed it for several years for all those reasons, as well as just not enjoying the Witcher games at all. Mostly because rather than showing you tangible evidence of themes and ideas and letting you draw your own conclusions, they instead sit you down every five minutes to smugly tell you all about how intelligent and important and poignant and progressive and visionary they're being, all while showing disappointingly little in the way of innovative design, compelling writing or interesting gameplay. I mean, unless you count "follow quest marker and push confirm button until it says you've finished it" design, permanently botchable quests, no hard saves and guessing at which dialog options will lead you to a bad ending 40+ hours later as compelling; I certainly don't. It's the equivalent of a pretentious film student roping you into watching his 2-hour magnum opus and then spending the next six hours explaining all the symbolism in extreme detail to make sure you get it. Not because they have any anything poignant to say, but because they desperately want you to admire and worship them; preferably through their wallet.
Cyberpunk (the heavily-patched version) at least has more to offer in terms of gameplay than Witcher does. Built as a gigantic open world game in a sprawling city, it feels like a logical mashup of elements from Grand Theft Auto, Deus Ex, Borderlands and Watch_Dogs. You drive around, you get into fights with hostile NPCs, evade the cops, and complete various side missions, getting different dialog and rewards depending on your approach. Going in guns blazing, using stealth to disable enemies and hacking to create distractions or destroy targets (NPCs and mundane objects like air conditioners, lights and even oil barrels can be "hacked" with destructive results, which makes little sense to me). There's also semi-randomized loot in the form of armors and weapons with various random attributes and stat bonuses, and you get core stat upgrades and perks depending on your playstyle. You can install implants to improve your character as well, either finding them about the world or ripping them off dead gangers and psychos; so long as you have the cash to install them, of course.
Of course, balancing all these elements out is never an easy job in a sprawling open-ended game like this, and Cyberpunk... doesn't really do a great job. I mostly stuck to melee weapons as they consistently drop enemies in two or three hits, whereas even an average thug can absorb half a magazine of assault rifle ammo or more without even flinching. Combat doesn't feel good in general either, with some very floaty movement, weightless action that lacks any visceral impact and strange hit detection at times - I've visibly leapt backwards from a boss enemy, saw their weapon fly right past me and still taken damage, while I've swung at them multiple times while they're a foot away and dead center on screen and never seem to land a hit when it counts. Some of the earliest powers you get also afford you health regeneration at a pretty substantial rate, and you get free regenerating grenades and emergency health packs, so as long as you don't take too much damage at once you're pretty difficult to actually kill.
Dialog in the game is also considerably more streamlined than most. Outside of scripted cutscenes you're not locked into a separate dialog screen, instead just getting options for what to say next depending on the character you're currently facing. There's usually little choice in these - you can generally just ask a second or third option for a bit more information before you're forced to pick the first one in order to progress to the next part of the dialog and ultimately accept or decline a mission; Ultima-level deep conversations laden with puzzle solving these are not. They're also punctuated with a lot of V's smarmy dialog and characters bouncing constant comic book one-liners off you, which is cute for a bit but quickly gets grating when they have to cram heaps of it into every single exchange. Hell, they never manage to turn it off even during the serious moments.
Presentation wise I can't say I like the game much even when it is performing well. The dialog is all well-acted and some of the radio tracks are honestly pretty catchy, but it's just not a pleasant game to look at. The whole world is dingy, grimy and utilizes a pretty garish color palette and overbearing harsh lighting. I suppose it fits the cyberpunk aesthetic in that regard, but it does get a little annoying when there's bright neon/sun glare in your eyes every 2 seconds and all your targets just blend into the constant environmental haze and clashing colors. The only thing that does stand out are the weapons, which are painted in bright yellows, purples and blues; they look more like Super Soakers and Nerf toys than anything that can do harm. It all controls decently enough with a controller, though if you're playing the Switch 2 version you can also utilize gimmicky Wii-style motion controls with detached joycons. I mostly just stuck to the Pro Controller; normally I'm not a fan of twin stick aiming but in conjunction with axis aiming it's good enough here.
Cyberpunk 2077 is relatively competent at everything it does, but nothing it does is very unique, deep or fun. It just feels like a mish-mash of every popular open world game and futuristic action-RPG made in the last 25 years, cynically engineered for maximum marketability and play time with little thought spared for giving it any identity of its own. Not to mention stretches where CDPR takes control away from you for several minutes at at time so they can play long, plotless cutscenes full of head-banging music and terrible self-aggrandizing narration about how badass and cool their world and characters are; how unconfident do you have to be to straight-up tell your audience what to think instead of letting the material speak for itself? The gameplay kept me amused for a few hours, but with the repetitive setup, bare-bones core story and combat, uninteresting characters and dialog that's more tedious than compelling, I got bored of it well before the end. It's the most competent CDPR project yet in terms of design; unfortunately being competent and being captivating are two very different things, and CDPR still has yet to get a grasp on how to do the latter well.
Developer: CD Projekt Red Publisher: CD Projekt Released: 2020, 2022, 2025 Platform: PlayStation 4, PC, XBox One, PlayStation 5, XBox Series, Switch 2, macOS Recommended Version: Definitely avoid the early releases on PS4 and XBox One and go for one of the newer versions instead, or the PC port if you have a powerful enough machine. The Switch 2 version is surprisingly solid though, with a smooth framerate and overall good performance.
Bravely Default: Flying Fairy, ridiculous title aside, is clearly meant as another callback to 16-bit Final Fantasy, copying in particular from Final Fantasy V. The overall storyline and job system is there, with each of the 24 jobs having around 20 abilities to unlock, as well as the ability to mix-and-match class abilities and skill sets to create hybrids. Aside from that, the new additions are mostly ancillary - there's a little achievement system built in for filling out the bestiary, equipment lists and hitting certain story points, and various other little quests to complete that serve as compliments to the tutorial messages by awarding items when you successfully put their lessons into action. A major subplot/sidequest is rebuilding a town by assigning workers, which takes numerous hours of real time; finding "Passing Souls" (avatars of other players on your friends list) will give you more workers to utilize to speed up the process, and the town in question can be accessed at any time outside of battle via the menu to take advantage of its services. The only notable addition to combat is the titular Brave and Default system - Default is your Defend but also stores up an extra turn for you to use, and Brave spends those extra turns, as well as letting you spend later turns in advance, allowing you to get up to four consecutive actions per character in a round. All this sounds interesting, but they forgot to make any of it particularly fun or engaging. Combat is super slow and drawn-out, with even normal enemies being walls of HP that take numerous turns to whittle down, and boss battles reach into almost unbearable territory. The incredibly high encounter rate manages to make even relatively short dungeons torturous, and even the option to turn it down to half doesn't help much. Fights all give a pittance of Experience and Job Points so it takes absolutely forever to power up and learn skills, and that's just ridiculous; modern RPGs, even ones that are allegedly "homages" to what came before, should be more briskly paced and less grindy than games from the '80s and '90s, not worse in both categories. It never feels like you're building an effective team to counter a bosses' patterns or exploit their weaknesses, just trying to outlast them through sheer endurance regardless of your party build. Also not helping the engagement factor are the extremely basic and derivative story, clichéd characters and ultra campy dialog that feels like it came straight out of an episode of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It's just baffling why they got big-name VAs like Erin Fitzgerald, Bryce Papenbrook and Spike Spencer aboard just so they could waste their talents with terrible directing and such an insipid script. I only spent about five or six hours with Bravely Default; in that time, I saw nothing to convince me that this isn't just another forgettable, mediocre game coasting on nostalgia for an earlier era, which makes little sense considering the games it's clearly aping from were readily available on numerous platforms even at the time it was originally released on the 3DS. Really, just grab a copy of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters instead of settling for this lame knockoff; Final Fantasy V is a timeless game that still holds up beautifully, whereas this game (and franchise) will only get a few more fleeting months of attention before everyone remembers why it sucks and it's cast into bargain bins to be forgotten once again. And hey, you get five more games for your $60 with the Pixel Remaster collection; four of them are even good!
Bioshock was an easy enough game to make, in large part because most of its credited staff had already made it several years before. All they had to do was copy System Shock 2's script and do a find-replace to change "claustrophobic spaceship" to "underwater city
covered in art deco decor and shiny brass because it looks nice in
the Unreal engine" and "hostile aliens" with "goofy muppet-people that
bring less than 1/1000th the level of fear". Then have it appeal to the lowest common denominator by releasing it on a popular console and stripping out all the
character building, tension and strategy by making you an
invincible
superhuman with an unlimited arsenal of powers and weaponry. Top it off with a cherry of pretense by making
every plot point and character a straw man of an easy-to-scorn, widely unpopular ideology like objectivism and some cheap emotional manipulation by having young children be the pawns of this lame supervillain take on it, and bam, you've got a hit. Why objectivism in particular? Well, it's not because Bioshock's creators are interested in pushing whatever opposing philosophies they might live by (wouldn't want to say anything divisive and lose potential sales, after all), it's just so Ken Levine can sit on his high horse and conspicuously denounce evil acts any sane, rational person would so he'll be lauded as a hero by twelve-year-olds who mistake moral posturing for actual morality. His scheme must have worked too considering Bioshock's gotten zillions of
awards, millions in sales and Ken is still actively canonized by hack journalists who just rebroadcast publisher propaganda and have no actual appreciation for the medium of video games or the storytelling therein. If they did they'd realize BioShock is just digital sociopathy - an outwardly charming façade with no genuine insight or moral center beneath it whatsoever, only cold, calculated manipulation in service of personal gain.
But when Ken decides to face a worthy opponent he somehow does an even worse job, as I'll highlight in my next review...
Developer: Irrational Games Publisher: 2K Games Released: 2007 Platforms: XBox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, Mac OS X, iOS
With Mass Effect, BioWare takes another crack at an original RPG universe with a science fiction inspired epic spanning three games and well over 100 hours of gameplay. But is there something great to be found in their attempt, or does it just collapse under the weight of its own ambition?
Mass Effect is a game I was pretty unimpressed with even when it was new for a number of reasons. I loved the Infinity Engine games on PC for their deep, strategic gameplay and storytelling, but like most digital RPGs they were a bit lacking in the, well, roleplaying department. Whether you played a "good", "evil" or "neutral" character you were still walking through the exact same linear plot, beat for beat. The only difference is you could maybe resolve an encounter a slightly different way for a different reward or do a branching plotline for a short while, but for the most part it was just empty choices leading to the same end state. Instead, their replayability was derived from trying out a wide variety of different classes and party compositions much more than for their roleplaying potential.
Mass Effect takes that hook away in favor of homogenized third-person cover-shooting action and gives very little back in exchange. You get to choose one of three flat, predetermined backgrounds for your character (which just changes a line of dialog here and there and affects precisely nothing else) and as for classes... well, they're all just variations on "guy who shoots stuff and maybe has powers that make him more efficient at shooting stuff". Which makes no tangible difference in how you play anyway since the AI-controlled enemies are dumb as dirt and constantly leave huge portions of their body outside of cover for easy sniping. There's no ammunition management to speak of, just cooldown between each shot, and virtually every enemy you kill drops more guns with randomized stats, so you'll be drowning in them unless you stop to inventory manage every ten minutes or so. Also, you're required to carry one weapon of each type at all times even if you have no skill points in using them and even if you're playing a class that can't ever put any skill points into that weapon type, so you'll be pulling out the wrong one in the middle of a fight constantly. I didn't think I'd ever be pining for the lame two-weapon system of modern shooters like Halo, but hey, at least Mass Effect managed to surprise me once.
There are no decent diversions from all the shooting, either - every planet you visit is just another nondescript hallway full of cardboard targets to shoot, and the only 'puzzles' are lame minigames you've seen in dozens of other things. But don't worry about having to think about these puzzles or spend more than 3 seconds solving them, because you can also just pay some omnigel and completely skip past them. Vehicle segments exist but are just as boring, having you center every enemy on the screen and pump them full of infinitely-regenerating ammo until they're dead. I also figured out very quickly that quicksaving and reloading will top off your car's shields any time you want, so vehicle trips just serve to fill more runtime and give you free experience points in an exceptionally monotonous way.
Mass Effect was lauded for its "choice based narrative", even though it's just as shallow and insubstantial as everything else it has on offer. You periodically choose to be a nice guy ("Paragon!") or a jerkass ("Renegade!"), with more choices opening up later depending on how many such choices you made before; so of course you're locked into picking one or the other exclusively or you miss out on content later. Like in Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 though, your choices make virtually no difference to how the story plays out - sure things change a little in that some races will be more friendly/hostile to you in future games (in cutscenes, almost never gameplay) and some characters will survive or die, but given how they're almost all just exposition machines with no real personality to speak of, it's a bit hard to care. Moreso because ME exhumes any actual worldbuilding in favor of relegating everything to a boring "plot codex" so you can bring the whole game to a dead stop and have paragraph after paragraph of dry Wikipedia text read to you to get caught up. Having a cinematic presentation with narrated cutscenes or bits of lore to find in-game or doing literally anything more complex than shooting things and picking menu options would alienate the Halo-worshipping Xbox fanbase, you see. Even the actors seem absolutely bored to be here, reading off line after line of their characters' dry text with all the passion of a text-to-speech program. That's some supremely bad direction and/or actor apathy in play, because there are big names here like Seth Green, Jennifer Hale and Keith David, and I know all of them are capable of turning in a quality performance.
I can't say I blame them for only putting in the bare-minimum effort to get a paycheck, though, because there isn't the faintest hint of originality to be found in ME's story. It lifts characterizations and plot points wholesale from earlier works like 2001, Star Trek, Star Control, Xenosaga and StarCraft while putting no new twists on any of them, leaving the player with any open-ended questions to consider or even attempting to capture any of the personality and/or humor that made those franchises so memorable. It's also a pretty weak, thirty-hour-at-most plot at its core, pointlessly stretched out to a "trilogy" by cramming it with tedious filler, which seems to have set a pretty godawful precedent for modern gaming as a whole; thanks a lot for that, guys. But hey, it has boobs and almost-nudity and really forced romance scenes, so that automatically makes it good, right? Never mind that when Star Control played on the already-long-dated cliché of the green-skinned space babe in 1990 it was mostly for humor (for crying out loud, they pilot penis-shaped ships called "Penetrators") and Fallout 2 openly mocked cheap, shoehorned sex scenes in video games just like this all the way back in 1998; Mass Effect roars ahead with it in 2007 with no irony whatsoever!
In short, Mass Effect is an overlong and dreadfully bland shooter glued to a boring, badly presented and shamelessly derivative RPG. Like all lousy fan fiction, it's way too in love with itself over the sheer volume of its content to realize it has no ideas of its own or any idea how to fit it all together into a well-constructed story, or realizing that its trite tale of an infallible ubermensch uniting the clans and vanquishing a great faceless evil by any force necessary reeks of autocratic propaganda. I honestly can't tell you why anyone considers this game a "classic", let alone one of the greatest video games ever made, when its triteness is plain as day to anyone who's remotely savvy about intelligent science fiction or digital roleplaying games. Saying Mass Effect is great science fiction is like saying Olive Garden is a great Italian restaurant; the only time someone earnestly makes that assertion is if they've never experienced anything better. Just because Game Informer told you it's the absolute pinnacle of its medium and you never need to experience anything made before or after it doesn't mean it's true; I mean, it's not like they'd say anything to get you into the game store that owns and sells subscriptions to their magazine just for an easy sale, right?
So yeah, just partake of any of the much better, smarter things Mass Effect lifts all its ideas from; or if you really set on playing an actiony space opera video game with a long and convoluted plotline, just play Kingdom Hearts instead. Yes Kingdom Hearts is also a clichéd cheesefest and shamelessly retreads plot points from other things (sometimes word-for-word from the original movies), but at least it knows it has nothing poignant to say and refrains from taking itself so damn seriously. Plays a lot better and looks much nicer than Mass Effect, too. And please, if you want cheap T&A, just go to Pornhub. Stop wasting hundreds of dollars and hours of time on shitty games just to see two seconds of booba before the camera cuts...
That's your reward for over 100 hours of repetitive gunfights, plagiarized plot points and trite, boringly-acted dialog. There, I just saved you a whole heap of money and time you can now spend on something decent.
Developer: BioWare Publisher: Electronic Arts Released: 2007, 2008, 2012 Platforms: XBox 360, PC, PlayStation 3
P.S.: Kindly spare me the lame talking points about how not liking this series for any reason makes me a 'homophobe' because it features cheap, shoehorned-in gay romance options and how BioWare is so brave for taking a standtokening on these important social issues and how I'm on the wrong side of history and I have no soul and and bla bla bla. Those are just red herrings dreamed up by EA's PR team so they can score more sales and make negative publicity of their company and games disappear by getting chronically-online Tumblr activists to false-flag unfavorable content and/or harass the families of its creators until they disappear out of fear for their safety. I'm sure all the evangelical conservative millionaires on EA's board of directors are grateful for your support though, as are the super gross Neocon/MAGA politicians they routinely donate to in order to secure even bigger tax breaks for themselves and pass more laws oppressing people they hate; the very same ones you purportedly care about, in fact. But hey, if your carefully curated cult of enablers still says you're doing good in the world and you teach yourself to conveniently ignore or suppress all evidence to the contrary then who cares, right?
Deus Ex is one of the most highly acclaimed games of all time and was an enormous success for Ion Storm, so I understand why a sequel was made. What I don't understand is why it was made this way. Invisible War makes the leap to a new engine (Unreal 2) and jumps ahead to the future, where somehow all three endings of the original game have occurred simultaneously and somehow have all canceled each other out, resulting in the world being in the same violent, dystopian state it was at the beginning of the first Deus Ex. A fact I'm sure Ubisoft took note of, as they've since engineered every sequel they ever make to nullify everything that occurred in the previous game. The engine does IW no favors right away - the awkward, buggy physics and severely shrunken-down levels (clearly from being built as a console game first and the PC port being an afterthought) greatly subtract from the grandiose, interconnected feel of the original. It hits the gameplay beats of Deus Ex, having the player find upgrades via augmentation cansisters and tweak weapons to make them more useful, but virtually nothing new is added and everything is scaled down. Weapons all inexplicably run off the same ammunition pool, so the "strongest weapons" will drain your reserves in only a few shots and once you run out you have no backup save possibly a melee weapon (which I ended up using the majority of the game as a result). The story is just a retread of the first game with none of the subtlety, ominous mood or grounded real-world conspiracies to lend it credibility, and as a result it all just rings of going through the motions to make more money. Go here, go there, learn about the generic "new" bad guys, see a few familiar faces from the first game, rinse and repeat until the final showdown where all three factions convene at Liberty Island (from the first game! again!) and you choose to spare one of them to guide humanity's future or destroy them all and plunge the world into chaos. Just like the first game. It looks pretty enough for a 2003 game and it does feature substantially better voiceover, but with an overabundance of rote repetition and an absence of any decent ideas of its own, Invisible War just falls flat on its face. What a lame, unnecessary sequel.
Developer: Ion Storm Publisher: Eidos Interactive Released: 2003 Platforms: XBox, PC
One of the very first professionally-published RPGs, though it's not really spoken of much these days. Like many very early computer RPGs Telengard is a game inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, even to the point of having many suspiciously similar monsters, terms and the same six core statistics for your character. It's also among the earliest to use comparatively large and detailed character "sprites" constructed of ASCII characters. The gameplay is quite primitive, that said - while there is a large and vast dungeon, there is no win condition and no set goal outside of powering up your character. Every step you take (or indeed, don't take - if you pass a turn the same rolls happen) also has a chance to generate treasure or pit you against a monster; sometimes several levels above yourself. It's actually very common to start the game, get into a fight with a level 3-4 monster on your first step into the dungeon and immediately die. Death is also permanent (there is a quicksave, but it deletes as soon as you reload it) and while there is gold and treasure to find, there are no shops; however, escaping the dungeon and returning to the inn converts them to experience points. If you're a genre history buff this one's worth a quick look, but those looking for something with more solid goal-driven design or a captivating story to follow should probably skip aheadto Ultima IV, or even go back to 1980 and play some Rogue.
Developer: Daniel Lawrence Publisher: Avalon Hill Released: 1982 Platforms: Apple II, TRS-80, Atari 8-Bit, PET, Commodore 64, CP/M, MS-DOS
The first (and it would seem, last) outing from Luminous Productions; a subsidiary of Square Enix comprised mostly of alumni from Final Fantasy XV's dev team. It certainly got attention when it was announced, seemingly allowing for fluid movement over any terrain a la Saints Row IV or a much faster paced Breath of the Wild, having you battle enemies while zipping across the landscape at high speed. It does indeed have that, but not quite to the extent you'd hope - while you can run relatively quickly over flat terrain, you can't really go up too steep of a cliff or wall without some handholds, so it's not nearly as free and exhilarating as you'd hope. Combat in the game is downright dull too, mostly just consisting of repeatedly pressing the trigger buttons to pelt enemies with projectiles until they fall down, earning bonuses for hitting enemies from the side or behind, doing an aerial melee attack or landing finishing moves and having points deducted for taking hits. Charged attacks and supportive spells (like restricting enemy movement in a radius) don't really add much to the experience either; the latter doesn't have any sort of homing ability unlike your basic shots and stops dead when it hits any sort of terrain, making it worthless outside of point-blank range, while supportive spells take far too long to recharge to be much use. It's also pretty hard to get invested in the story when it has to rely constantly on such forced humor (trotting out the "peasants of this medieval world don't understand modern lingo" cliché about twenty times in every cutscene), and the near-constant witty repartee with your magical cuff throughout the gameplay just gets grating after the first twenty minutes, let alone a fifteen-plus hour journey. It's very clear that none of Final Fantasy XV's talented writing staff worked on this one, as I actually found the banter in that game quite charming and the scenes to be consistently well-staged and acted, furthering the story brilliantly. There are some fun ideas in Forspoken, but the gameplay's lackluster execution, the tired premise and consistently grating protagonists made it a game I quickly grew tired of.
Developer: Luminous Productions Publisher: Square Enix Released: 2023 Platforms: Playstation 5, PC
An offshoot of the Valkyria franchise set in an alternate history, which on paper sounds like a great idea - the series is known for its wonderfully realized world and characters. Sadly, Revolution does not implement the idea well; in fact, it has far too many ideas and no clue what to do with any of them. Like the Chronicles games you move about in real time and pause to take actions like aiming and shooting, but you're afforded many more options now - almost too many. You have spells, grenades, a rifle and a melee weapon with an array of special attacks, and you still use the cover system from the old games to reduce damage and heal your troops. On top of that, the game tries to jam in elements of just about every popular action title of the last 15 years; so you get Metal Gear Solid 4's emotion system, cover shooting, hack-and-slash (with one button press doing a combo followed by a lengthy recharge period), commanding your squadmates and reviving them when they fall like in Mass Effect, and managing morale as you capture points a la Dynasty Warriors. All actions besides simple melee combat and defensive dodges and blocks are handled in the clunkiest way possible - by having you press Triangle to bring up a menu to completely pause the action, then selecting your commands from a circular menu. The gameplay already is an enormous mishmash of half-cooked ideas, and that's before you even get into having to buy and scavenge materials to craft new gear and weapons for later missions, which just adds a layer of tedious micromanagement on top. Despite ostensibly being set a century before the timeframe of Valkyria Chronicles, the technology level is far more advanced and distinctly unbelievable, with gigantic mecha and mechanical limbs with superweapons, and the protagonists all wielding improbable weapons like buster swords and giant spears; a stark contrast to the more grounded low fantasy take on World War 2 the mainline series presents. But on top of all that, the pacing is absolutely atrocious - you get maybe one or two missions in between solid half-hour blocks of nonstop cutscenes, all with a dopey framing story about a teacher and her student going through the history of the Five Traitors. The rest of the series uses a graphical engine designed to resemble a pencil-drawn story (complete with onomatopoeic sound effects), but Revolution goes for more of a watercolor painting look that just looks overly busy and distracting; not to mention it really doesn't pair well with the exaggerated anime designs of the characters. Valkyria Revolution tries very hard to take the series down a new path, but with no goal in mind other than desperately trying to appeal to everybody, it ends up pleasing nobody; not even the most die-hard of Valkyria fans.
Developer: Sega CS3, Media.Vision Publisher: Sega, Deep Silver Platform: Playstation 4, Playstation Vita, XBox One Released: 2017
Metal Max is a franchise built around open-ended exploration and vehicles you can find and customize to aid you in battle, all set in a post-apocalyptic setting; sort of like Wasteland or Fallout but with JRPG-styled turn based combat. Metal Max Xeno is only the second game in this franchise to be localized, and it does its best to try and fit in with a more modern school of design. The minimal approach to story scenes and characterizations and the overall desolate world gives it a slight Fallout 3 vibe. Its gameplay takes a few cues from games like New Vegas as well, with a lot of side-quests to undertake and incidental objectives called "miniquests" that give you bonus experience for doing even mundane things - collecting a certain number of an item, customizing your tank for the first time, finding new records for the jukebox back at your base, and so forth. Switching between combat and exploration is pretty seamless - instead of having a separate combat screen, enemies draw a (literal) line of sight to you, and if you fail to move out of range before the gauge fills completely, you move a turn-based engagement; however, you can still move about freely in the time between your turns, allowing you to position yourself behind cover to avoid attacks or flee combat before you take too much damage, and once you defeat a foe, you move straight back into exploring. Weapons also have ranges now, covering a blast radii or cone-shaped areas of effect, allowing you to hit multiple enemies at at a time with well placed shots. Per previous games, there is a pretty heavy focus on collecting parts to build new weapons, engines and armor plating for your tank, and extras can be sold for a good bit of cash; far more than you get from battle. It still hits some common pratfalls for the series, though - as you travel about you'll frequently encounter boss-tier monsters whom you can defeat for large bounties, but they're often far, far beyond what you can handle at first, necessitating that you avoid them and come back later (with no indication of how much later - you don't ever get to see how much HP an enemy has). The overall bleak tone is also a detriment to a series which, up to this point, was known for its oddball humor; now the whole world is one big desert with almost nobody in it, making the whole thing feel pretty drab and lifeless, and you don't get oddball enemies like a giant subterranean VW beetle anymore - just a lot of repetitious tanks and mechs. Metal Max Xeno tries to be something more akin to the modern Fallouts, but in doing so loses much of its own identity. More damningly, it's missing that all-important satisfying gameplay flow, sense of freedom and subtle storytelling that make good open world RPGs so compelling.
Developer: Kadokawa Games, Cattle Call, 24Frame Publisher: Kadokawa Games, NIS America Platform: Playstation 4, Switch, PC Released: 2022
The third game in the Babylonian Castle Saga franchise, the first to be made exclusively for a console and a prequel to its initial entry (the Tower of Druaga) that explains exactly how Ki got to the top of that tower; a logical expansion after the first and second games chronicled Gilgamesh's trip up the tower to save her and the second showed their escape. Quest of Ki also marked another changeup in gameplay for the series - exhuming the RPG elements and, indeed, even disposing of combat entirely, Quest of Ki is a pretty simplistic puzzle-platformer, with the twist that you can continue to gain vertical height indefinitely as long as you hold down the jump button; however, if you hit your head on a ceiling, you'll drop straight down and be left in a vulnerable state until you've touched the ground for about a second, so careful control of your movements is required. A few nods to the original puzzle-driven game still remain, though - you still have to collect a key to open the door and exit the stage, and you can collect powerups that aid you in various ways. To name a few, there are candles that make ghosts visible, a sleep spell that temporarily renders some enemy types harmless, and wings that grant temporary flight (allowing you to 'jump' in midair). Perhaps taking a couple of cues from Mario, you can also find hidden warps that skip you ahead several stages, though once you hit the bonus levels they'll start sending you backwards instead. Overall, not one of the Famicom's more memorable platformers or puzzle-driven games, and as it's not even really an RPG, it only gets special mention on this site because of its status as a prequel to two of them. If you're absolutely set on playing all the Babylonian Castle Saga games this is your first stop chronologically, but everyone else should probably pass it up in favor of something more enjoyable.
Developer: Game Studio Publisher: Namco Released: 1988 Platform: Famicom
The direct sequel to the Tower of Druaga in the most literal sense - it starts exactly where that game ended, following Gilgamesh and Ki as they attempt to escape the tower. Return of Ishtar is probably the very first co-op action RPG ever made, and I do mean co-op - having two players at the controls is required to play! Thankfully, the game's action is considerably more straightforward than the puzzle-driven experience the first one provided, having Gilgamesh battle enemies in melee range (with touch combat similar to Hydlide or Ys) while Ishtar battles enemies at range with spells; however, if either player dies, it's a game over and you must spend a quarter to continue. The layout of the dungeon is also considerably more complex; there are still 100 maps to go through, but now they're interweaved with multiple exits that can take you forward or back to previous rooms, so it's still a very long and involved process to complete. Thankfully, you don't have to go through the whole thing in one long sitting - a password system keeps track of your progress through the dungeon. It's also a fairly unbalanced asymmetrical experience - Gilgamesh's health drains when he attacks, making him completely dependent on Ki's healing to survive, while Ki gets all manner of ranged attack spells, supportive spells, buffers (including some that give Gil his only means to even harm certain types of enemies) and healing spells, and the camera only tracks her movement. Basically, Player 2 just ends up being a glorified meatshield for Player 1, who dies in a single hit. Worth a try for RPG historians as an interesting period piece that would lay the groundwork for co-op RPGs down the line, but there are many better such experiences to be had today.
Developer: Game Studio, Namco Publisher: Namco Released: 1986 Platforms: Arcade, FM-7, MSX, PC-8801, PC-9801, Sharp X68000, emulated versions are available on Namco Museum Volume 4 and as part of the Arcade Archives series on Switch.
Rambo for the NES is another game steeped in notoriety and unmet expectations. From the title and the cover art one would expect a fairly straightforward run-and-gun action game a la Contra or Ikari Warriors (indeed, the Sega Master System version of Rambo released a year prior plays very much like the latter), but Pack-in Video opted to create a nearly point-for-point copycat of Zelda II instead; though it was released about seven months earlier in North America, Zelda II came out first in Japan. So, Rambo platforms about, defeating enemies to earn experience points (or "Anger" in the Japanese version), which grant him more health and power up his survival knife once he hits certain plateaus. As you defeat enemies, you can also earn other weapons to use like throwing knives, arrows and grenades, and toward the end you get explosive arrows and a machine gun, and even temporary powerups that allow you to run faster, jump higher or restore health on the spot. The problem is, none of this is particularly fun - hit detection is weird, aiming some weapons (like your grenades and bow) requires precise placement, and even your knife has an awkward delay on each swing you have to compensate for. Navigation is made difficult by the bizarre design of the map - the game takes place on flat planes you must switch between by standing on an arrow and pressing Up to move north or south, and sometimes paths are one-way, meaning you can't even easily go back if you take a wrong turn. But the most notorious thing is how cheap and buggy its design is - Some screens constantly bombard you with bombs that are almost impossible to avoid, particularly in swampy areas that slow your movement. Rambo gets kicked backwards after a hit, which causes him to fall through bridges and can get him stuck in scenery (or even to fall out of the bottom of the screen and end up at another part of the game), and the password system is infamously faulty, to the point where some guides recommend writing down not one, but three different passwords before shutting the game off. The final battle is another infamous element - a frustrating and overly long endurance test pitting you against a constant barrage of soldiers and a helicopter bombarding the screen with missiles that takes a total of fifty grenades to destroy. An early NES game that's annoying to navigate, frustrating to play and has Rambo fighting far more jungle fauna (and later on, bizarre anomalies like hopping aliens and cyborgs) than enemy soldiers; is it any wonder few look back on this one fondly?
Despite the name, it's also based on Rambo: First Blood Part II rather than the original movie. I guess a game about a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD who gets abused, harassed and stalked by fascist cops would have been just a bit too controversial for Nintendo.
Developer: Pack-In-Video Publisher: Acclaim Platform: NES Released: 1988
Dungeon crawlers aren't quite as prevalent in gaming today as they were in the '80s and early '90s, but they continue to have a devoted fanbase nonetheless, with gamers drawn to their addicting design - traversing a big maze full of monsters and traps, collecting treasure and solving puzzles is the quintessential RPG experience. The Turbografx-16 had relatively few examples of the genre to its name compared to its competitors, and I imagine Double Dungeons didn't win over too many fans. It's a pretty simple game overall- you just maneuver through a given maze, bop monsters, get money to purchase equipment and fight a boss at the end, with a second player optionally joining in (starting at a different point in the maze) to help you if you wish. There's little in the way of narration (you just get a bit of text at the start explaining your "objective" for that stage, which has no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever), and there's basically nothing in the way of puzzles, traps or obstacles other than monsters. There's virtually no penalty for death, either - you just get dropped back at the start of the maze and respawn to full health to try again, so the whole thing feels pretty insubstantial. Just a bland experience in general, and having a second player along adds surprisingly little to the experience; surprising considering this is one of the earliest co-op RPGs I'm aware of. But when Wizardry, Might and Magic and Ultima already had several defining entries on both consoles and PC, and hell, even the legendary Ultima Underworld wasn't too far off by the time this one was out, there's little reason to play Double Dungeons other than morbid curiosity.
Developer: NCS
Publisher: Masaya, NEC
Released: 1990
Platform: Turbografx-16, Wii Virtual Console, Wii U Virtual Console
Heroes of the Lance (the first adaptation of the Dragonlance novels and tabletop modules) was decently received on computer platforms while its NES incarnation was heavily maligned; both for its much worse graphics and just being an underwhelming game in general, providing nothing satisfying to RPG fans nor comparing favorably to other action-oriented titles on the system. Strangely, that didn't stop them from trying again, though the sequel game would only be released in Japan for the Famicom. Still, those who played it saw a marked improvement within only seconds of starting - there are now dialog scenes advancing the story at key points and a top-down world map (with visible monsters rather than random encounters!). The presentation is much improved - still not great, but the graphics are much cleaner and the music isn't nearly as grating to listen to. Even the action has seen much improvement, doing away with the dice rolls and having actual hit detection based combat, as well as the ability to jump and duck to evade attacks. That said, it's still a very short game (beatable in roughly an hour once you know where to go), and the exploration element is still overly tedious, with both monotonous side-scrolling and top-down maps to make your way through. Dragons of Flame is worth a brief look as a much-improved sequel to a notoriously awful game, but still far from matching up with other top-tier action-RPGs on the platform.
Developer: US Gold, Atelier Double (Famicom) Publisher: Strategic Simulations, US Gold Released: 1989, 1992 Platforms: Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, FM Towns, Famicom, MS-DOS, PC-9801, ZX Spectrum
The third in the series and the only one anybody seems to talk about. But is that because it addresses the flaws of its predecessors and becomes something amazing, or is it just a lame game getting by on empty hype and pretty graphics?
I really wasn't impressed with the first Witcher game; a general sixth-grader-trying-to-sound-tough maturity level and lackluster design overall took me out of it pretty quickly. The third game in the series at least makes some significant improvements, adding considerable polish to the combat (still pretty brainless though) and attempting to give the player more to do with numerous side-quests (that don't all lead to cheap smut, surprisingly), an in-depth crafting system, banter as well as a less grating, though still very sex-heavy and profanity-laced, tone to the dialog on the whole. It still hits all the same sour notes that turned me off to other modern RPGs like Mass Effect, though - overly simplistic and hand-holdy design despite describing itself as "open-world" and near-constant scenes of dull/inane exposition between characters you get zero context or buildup for beforehand and therefore have no reason to actually care about; not to mention Geralt's constant smug speechifying just to give the illusion this game is taking some kind of moral stance when it really isn't.
The boredom is only compounded by the stock gameplay that consists largely of endless tedious material farming, monotonous combat, buggy collision detection (getting my horse snagged on things was an all-too-common occurrence. And since the game auto-saves with no opportunity to make manual ones, I was out of luck if that cost me a mission), and overall design that requires no mental engagement whatsoever. Quests consist almost entirely of autopiloting from one map marker to the next, and there's never any decent puzzles and rarely any problem-solving more involved than "kill scripted monster" or "push button when prompted". Not to mention it flatly spells out for you what choices will change the narrative later, which immediately ruins any feeling of gravitas; or at least, it would if it ever allowed you to form an organic bond with any of the disposable cardboard-cutouts who milk every drop of pathos they can out of their one throwaway scene each. Gee, another character I've never met before and will never hear about again (save maybe in one line of dialog long after I've forgotten about this dumb side-story) is subject to trite fantasy racism/sexism/classism/homophobia and I can side with them or their oppressor because CDPR is too cowardly to commit to a message for fear of harming sales; rinse and repeat ad infinitum. And this is supposed to quality as intelligent storytelling; yeah, right.
Witcher 3 as a whole just feels manipulative and cynical, like the devs are trying to cover for their tedious, sterile game design by manufacturing whatever moments of trite emotional weight they can so they and their trained attack-dog fanboys can easily write off all criticism, related or not, as the words of a homophobic sociopath nazi (or a godless filthy hippie commie socialist lib; it's generic and toothless enough to let bigots of all stripes project their personal bugaboos into it) and give pen-for-hire gaming rags easy fuel for their glowing reviews and meaningless award shows. It's all done not because CDPR's devs have any genuine attachment to the content they're creating, but because they want to make back all that money they spent on ad space (the true determinant of any game's Metacritic score) and rack up enough millions of sales to earn their conditional Christmas bonuses. To say nothing of their games being shamelessly derivative of countless older, better titles they've been selling on GOG for years, and are probably mostly financed from sales of those games too. Witcher 3 is a graphically gorgeous title, but with such shallow, monotonous gameplay, a stock dark fantasy setting, a cast and narrative that put no new spins on any of their already-ancient tropes, nearly all of the characterization and lore relegated to flat exposition in dry articles in an in-game wiki you have to bring the whole game to a dead stop to read, and an active contempt for the intelligence of its audience, it's painfully clear that this is all just a shallow confidence trick to make numbers go up, not a fresh gaming experience that must be played or anyone's poignant story that needed to be told. CD Projekt Red is the RPG sphere's equivalent of a failjock who bulked up on cheap protein powder and infomercial gym equipment - nothing but water weight that looks impressive but is completely useless for doing actual work. Like telling a compelling story, writing characters that are more than cardboard cutouts or even having a decent gameplay hook.
If you want a game that consists of much more than watching a boring character run from dot to dot for 150 hours and an narrative where the characterizations, emotions and storytelling come from a place of genuine passion and don't just feel like some committee of shysters trying to Pavlov emotional responses out of you, there's dozens of better games to play. But to name just one: NieR Automata. Not only is the game's design way more compelling and entertaining, Yoko Taro is comfortable enough with his bizarre style and tone that he allows his
settings, concepts and characters to speak for themselves and he doesn't
have stop every other minute to beat
you over the head yet again with how DARK and ADULT and MEANINGFUL and IMPORTANT
his work is until you start saying so too just to make the abuse stop.
Developer: CD Projekt Red Publisher: CD Projekt Released: 2015 Platforms: PC, Playstation 4, XBox One, Switch
Yep, Hydlide continued into the 32-bit era, seeing release as one of the first Sega Saturn games. Its also a product of the era, with graphics that are a mixture of dodgy CGI sprites, 3D polygons and performance-captured live actors. The game is mostly a remake of the original right down to the silly plot, though they do attempt to remix things by having a randomly generated world - well, "random" in the sense that it takes a number of premade world fragments and shuffles them around each time you play. I imagine this was a fairly impressive design element for the time, but I struggle to see anyone having fun with the game even then - the incredibly sluggish framerate and samey graphics that lend to disorientation, weird hit detection and random nature of everything lend themselves to constant frustration, and there's ultimately little point to exploring, making it feel less like a grand adventure and more like a sterile chore list. In fact, the game actually preempts an oft-criticized element of many modern RPGs and always has an arrow pointing directly at your next objective, so it really is just a matter of running straight from one key location to the next and fighting bosses until you win. They've also implemented a clunky score system that also doubles as a currency counter - completing various objectives and finding treasures earns you points, and buying items at shops costs them. So, if you want to try a slightly more feature-rich but somehow even clunkier-playing version of Hydlide on the Sega Saturn, give Virtual Hydlide a try; otherwise, skip it and play Shining Force III or Panzer Dragoon Saga instead.
An extremely rare title released exclusively on the VIC-20 computer system in its twilight days. Despite the name, though, it doesn't resemble Ultima whatsoever in terms of design, instead being more of a simple dungeon crawler - each floor gives you 99 seconds to navigate a simple 8x8 maze and reach the end. Combat is a strange affair, putting the player in a side-view and having them position their character and try to hit a specific point on the enemy's body with a timed button press before they approach too closely and take one of their few "lives". The problem, though, is that the game isn't particularly fun; the mazes themselves have no interesting gimmicks, and though the combat seems simple, landing hits is irritatingly precise, making getting through the game a source of extremely tedious trial-and-error and luck rather than a test of skill. Because of this, as well as being released well after the Commodore 64 launched, the game has since become extremely scarce, with only around thirteen copies known to still exist and selling for thousands of dollars during their rare appearances on eBay. A complete copy of the tape has never been made available online to deter counterfeiting, making it difficult to even emulate. It may be worth trying out the fan remake for PC platforms briefly as an odd curiosity, but if you've got the money to burn, I can safely say that this one simply is not worth the asking price. Proof positive that just because something is rare and expensive doesn't mean it's any fun to play.
Developer: Keith Zabalaoui Publisher: Sierra On-Line Released: 1983 Platforms: Commodore VIC-20
How do you take a sprawling, expansive and massively interactive open world game like Ultima VII and port it to a console? Well, you can't, really; you'd either need to invest in a massive amount of ROM space for your cartridges (which would probably be passed on to customers, resulting in low sales) or you need to basically make an entirely new game that only faintly resembles the original. The Black Gate is a case of the latter, reimagining the experience as a top-down dungeon crawler slightly reminiscent of the Zelda titles. The problem, though, is that it lacks any of the polish that make both Zelda and Ultima such brilliant franchises; dungeons are extremely samey and tedious, movement is stiff, hit detection is shoddy, and combat is nothing short of a chore. The plot has been trimmed down to bare basics, there are no other party members to recruit or play as, and, owing to Nintendo's content policies of the time, violent and sexual content is scrubbed; enemies simply vanish when killed, and the murders that drove the plot are changed to "kidnappings". Grinding is a huge part of the gameplay too; everything you need costs hundreds or even thousands of gold and enemies rarely drop more than one or two coins, so you spend the overwhelming majority of your time searching for items to steal and pawn off at the shops for pennies toward your next purchase; at least until their inventory inevitably fills up and you can't anymore, then it's back to farming for pennies in dungeons and endless monster brawls. The world design doesn't have any logical sense to it, either - you can easily step into an innocuous basement in a village and meet gremlins who drop exploding powder kegs at your feet, killing you instantly. They arbitrarily introduce elemental-themed weapons too, though there's no real point in using them as it just ensures that some enemies will be completely immune to your attacks and get free hits on you while you figure this out; something non-elemental weapons don't have any issue with. Basically, it's a mostly linear action game with only light RPG elements now, and not even a particularly good one, especially when compared to Link to the Past or the Quintet offerings on the same platform. The only passable carryovers from the PC version are the graphics and music, which made the transition across the hardware gap quite well and still effectively carry a somber mood. Other than that, SNES Black Gate is a bastardization of an immortal classic that's only worth a look as a morbid curiosity.
Developer: Origin Systems Publisher: FCI/Pony Canyon, Electronic Arts Released: 1994 Platforms: SNES, PSP (As part of the EA Replay compilation)
