Bravely Default: Flying Fairy (HD Remaster)

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.  Theincredibly high encounter rate manages to make relatively short dungeons unbearable, 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 '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 game it's clearly aping from was 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 buck with the Pixel Remaster collection; four of them are even good!

Developer: Silicon Studio/Cattle Call
Publisher: Square Enix
Released: 2012,2025
Platform: 3DS, Switch 2

Ultima: Kyoryu Teikoku aka Worlds of Ultima: the Savage Empire (Super Famicom)

The last distinct Ultima game I had yet to spend any real time with, in no small part because it only came out in Japan and remained untranslated for nearly thirty years.  The original release of Savage Empire on PC was built on the same engine as Ultima VI, though its SFC does not use the platform's port of that game as a base, but rather the same action-RPG engine used in the SNES port of Ultima VII.  Which means this game has all of SNES Black Gate's problems, further compounded by Savage Empire's sparser design.  The hit detection is awkward and annoyingly inconsistent, and even the most basic snake and spider enemies take several hits to kill while taking off a huge chunk of your health every time they land a hit.  Experience is very sparse, requiring you to fell dozens of enemies to gain just one level and gain more HP.   But even that doesn't help you much; the lack of post-hit invincibility and the fact that enemies swarm you on a frequent basis means your only chance of making any real progress is saving every other minute or so.  There also do not seem to be any beds or even bedrolls, so when night falls you'd best have a light spell handy.  The game does surprisingly retain the small crafting elements of the original, including the ability to construct crude firearms and grenades with Dr. Rafkin's aid, and the overall world map and puzzle design remains largely intact, unlike SNES Black Gate.  That said, it's still a pretty underwhelming remake, and the only people will likely have any sliver of interest in it are weird die-hard completionist Ultima nuts like myself.  For anyone else interested in checking out Ultima's short-lived Worlds spinoff series, just grab the original PC releases instead; they're both much more playable than this, and free downloads on GOG besides.

 

Developer: Origin Systems
Publisher: Pony Canyon
Released: 1995
Platforms: Super Famicom

Bioshock

Bioshock was an easy enough game to make, in large part because most of the people who worked on it had already done so several years before.  All they had to do was copy System Shock 2's script and do a find-replace to change "claustrophobic space station" 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 widest possible audience by releasing it on a popular console and taking out all the character building, tension and strategy by making you an invincible superhero with an unlimited arsenal of superpowers and ridiculously overpowered weaponry.  Top it off with a cherry of pretense by making every plot point and character a straw man of an unpopular ideology like objectivism and some cheap emotional manipulation by having young children be victims 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 bettering the world by pushing whatever opposing philosophy they might live by (wouldn't want to say or do anything divisive and lose potential sales, after all), it's just so Ken Levine can sit on his high horse, take shots at an easy target and put his writing and directing credits in huge screaming letters so he'll be lauded as a genius by twelve-year-olds who will put his game's safe, uncontroversial messages on their Facebook banners and completely ignore the lack of any decent gameplay, original ideas or earnest exploration of its concepts so they can pretend to be smart and morally upright too just like their hero.  It must have worked too considering Bioshock's gotten zillions of awards, millions in sales and Ken is still actively canonized by game journalist hacks who just transcribe publisher propaganda and never bother to to any actual research on video games, let alone play them.  It's digital sociopathy - superficially appealing, but with no genuine insight or humanity once you look beyond the façade.  Ken's just found the magic words and showy imagery necessary to hit the dopamine button in people's brains and thinks that's enough to build a 12-hour game out of; well, it isn't.  Not unless you get more out of shiny chrome than compelling characters, storytelling or puzzle solving, anyway.

By the way, taking digs at hugely unpopular ideologies like objectivism and libertarianism in your "big important game with a big important message" is like making a story where you denounce Saddam Hussein; doing a thing any decent, remotely rational person would might earn you some easy favor, but it sure as hell ain't profound or praise-worthy.  Then again when Ken decides to aim at a bigger target 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

Mass Effect

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 weapons 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 boring 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.  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 way I can see someone earnestly saying that is if they've simply 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 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 it's lifting 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 than Mass Effect, too.

And please, if you want cheap T&A, just go to Pornhub.  Stop buying crappy 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 stand tokening 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 despite all evidence to the contrary, that's good enough for you, right?  Actually doing anything beyond taking tough on the internet is for suckers; you can go to bed tonight with a dopamine high and a clear conscience because you spent your entire day whipping your personal army into stalking and bullying some random stranger over a review of a video game you have a purely performative attachment to.  And don't even consider using your time or disposable income to contribute to causes that actually help gay and trans people who get abused and abandoned by their parents or unjustly fired from their jobs or beaten to a pulp by bigots and left to suffer for hours by apathetic school and hospital staff, and definitely don't encourage your soldiers to either - those ingrates should be paying YOU for all the hard work you do in their name!

Deus Ex: Invisible War

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

Telengard

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 ahead at least 3 years to Ultima IV or NetHack, 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

Forspoken

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 cliched 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

Valkyria Revolution

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 Xeno: Reborn

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 Quest of Ki

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 Return of Ishtar

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

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

Double Dungeons

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

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Dragons of Flame

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 Witcher

Based on a series of books I've never read (and after playing the game and interacting with the gross-ass fandom, I can now confidently say I never want to), the Witcher is purportedly an "adult RPG".  Like so many that apply that label to themselves, it mistakes gratuitous gore, T&A and foul language for "adult content" and as a result becomes far more juvenile than E or T-rated games of similar design.  There are too many examples of this to recount in a short review, but the most prominent one is that a major sidequest involves bedding every major female character in the game so you can get nudie pictures of them as trophies in the main menu.  Yep.  It isn't very fun to play either, being a mostly-railroaded experience with endless sessions of boring follow-the-dot quests and mediocre combat that, while ostensibly based around timed button presses and dodges, is rendered trivial by the fact that you can simply mash the left mouse button and win every battle with ease, doing damage with every press while your character's swing animation resets over and over again.  Yeah, somehow nobody caught that in testing.  Witcher also sells itself on having choices that actually matter (and which you don't see the consequences of until several hours after making them to prevent save-scumming), but when my intelligence is being constantly insulted by being served a version of Krondor that's ten times crasser, less than one-eleventh as engaging, plays worse and stars a really lame Gary Stu protagonist, I don't particularly care about what happens in its present, let alone hours later owing to a choice I likely won't even remember making.  Too grim, gory and smutty for kids but too shallow and sophomoric for adults, the Witcher might get a small, fervent following from hormonal middle schoolers who think using the word "fuck" eleven times per sentence makes them sound tough and that buying anything with blood and boobies in it automatically makes them more grown-up and manly than everyone else in the room, but I suspect they'll lose interest immediately once the next grimdark reimagining of a four-color comic book character comes out and they spend months pouring over every inch of it in search of "hidden depth" which coincidentally always aligns with their own naïve worldviews.  Or they turn fourteen, whichever comes first.

Developer: CD Projekt Red
Publisher: Atari, CD Projekt
Released: 2007
Platforms: PC, OS X

Virtual Hydlide

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.  So, if you want to try a somehow even clunkier 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.

Developer: T&E Soft
Publisher: Sega, Atlus
Released: 1995
Platforms: Sega Saturn

Ultima: Escape From Mt. Drash

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

Ultima: The Black Gate (SNES)

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)

Tokyo Xanadu eX+

 Xanadu isn't a particularly well-known name among RPG fans; at least, not in the west. It was the second game in the Dragon Slayer series and one of the founders of the action-RPG subgenre, inspiring games like Zelda and Ys. Only a few of its games have been localized (the best known being two cult NES games - Legacy of the Wizard and Faxanadu) but Tokyo Xanadu is the latest turn for the series, and an odd one at that.  Indeed, Falcom seems to have seen the success of the Persona franchise and taken a crack at making their own version, which is particularly evident in its focus on life-sim elements; between dungeons, you have the ability to complete sidequests, interact with characters to build relationships, and bolster your own personality traits to do more of the same.  These scenes do tend to be very long and dialog-heavy, however, which hampers the pacing if you're comparing to Persona.  By contrast, the dungeon element seems to be over with much too quickly.  Much simpler, too, as the game opts for a basic hack-and-slash format not unlike the Ys games - dodge, attack, jump-attack and ranged attack enemies, getting bonuses for winning battles quickly, keeping combo chains going and striking elemental weaknesses.  Defeating foes earns components that can be crafted into weapon and armor upgrades, and between missions one can also cook to create new items.  It all sounds good on paper, but the dragging pace, overly simple action and inane dialog overall ensures that it fails to strike that all-important balance and actually become fun.

Developer: Nihon Falcom
Publisher: Nihon Falcom, Aksys Games
Released: 2017
Platforms: Playstation Vita, Playstation 4, PC

Shining Soul

The Sega-owned Shining series is one of their oldest and longest-running RPG franchises, seeing release across a wide variety of platforms and genres over the years and having widely varying quality to match.  Shining Soul for the Game Boy Advance attempts to turn the series into a top-down hack-and-slash somewhat in the vein of games like Diablo, though with very underwhelming results.  The experience just feels shallow overall - you pick one of four character classes, walk through repetitious corridors, battling the a handful of enemies on each screen, slowly powering up and hoping to eventually fell the boss at the end after several hours of throwing yourself at his minions and then him and hoping that's finally enough.  There's relatively little strategy regardless of your class choice, and while the semi-3D visual style looked pretty neat at the time, it's not nearly enough to save it from being a bland experience.  Even in 2003 there were much better co-op action RPG experiences available.

Developer: Nextech/Grasshopper Manufacture
Publisher: Sega, Atlus
Released: 2003
Platforms: Game Boy Advance