Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard - Thoughts

For anyone that bounced off of the first Etrian Odyssey, I have some bad news: the second is unabashedly more of the same. Etrian Odyssey II carries over the same classes, same mapping system, custom levelling, item grinding, dungeon dimensions, story beats... hell, even the UI is basically copied over! Sequels typically offer the developer a chance to make their franchise more accommodating and mainstream, but Etrian Odyssey II laughs at the suggestion, doubling down on its exotic blend of labyrinthine madness. If punishing mechanics or obtuse progression has deterred you from delving deeper into labyrinth of Etria, then take heed: the sequel is just as harsh and baffling, if not more so.

But for anyone charmed by Etrian Odyssey's brave debut, then prepare for an even bigger, smarter, and better adventure.

The best way to think about Etrian Odyssey II in relation to its predecessor is to picture the change from Mega Man 1 to Mega Man 2. To an outsider, it'll appear as if you've paid full price for a sizable expansion at best and a shallow reskin at worst. But veterans of the first expedition will find a massive new adventure in a familiar-but-fresh universe—with some absolutely essential quality of life tweaks! The foremost among these is found in the shop: your party's equipment is displayed on the bottom screen, letting you swap out and sell gear much more quickly. Not only that, but you can finally see how many materials a new piece of equipment requires, giving you a firm grasp on which enemies to keep an eye out for. Those may not sound like huge upgrades, but in a 50+ hour RPG where story accounts for 5% of your play time (if that), speeding up the inventory management is a delectable godsend.

Etrian Odyssey II also gives the shoulder buttons a much-needed reassignment, allowing you to strafe while walking around the labyrinth floor. But where they really shine is in battle: tapping the L button initiates a sped-up auto-battle, reducing much of the game's tedious grinding to a one-button affair. A slight kink however, is that it overwrites any of the previous commands you've entered as soon as you begin automating combat. For instance: want your samurai to a unleash devastating AoE guaranteed to kill the enemy forces, while not caring about what the rest of the party does? Well a single push of the L button will send everyone into a melee frenzy, erasing all previous commands so that the party focuses on the enemy with the lowest health (which is often the least troublesome foe). Even with that hitch, auto-battling is a great addition to the series—but it's clear there's still room for improvement here.

The changes made to map making however, are a splendid surprise through and through. The number of available icons has more than doubled: there's now closed doors, a FOE tile, a new event tile, two more gather location tiles, and multiple arrow tiles to keep track of the game's numerous secret passageways. Floor tiles also come in two more colors now, letting you differentiate between floor hazards and FOE walkways at a glance. Like the shop upgrades, these ostensibly minor additions have a huge impact in the grand scheme of things, making the game categorically better just for having them. Another small touch I like is how none of the icons come with pre-written tags (like "use this for treasure" or "use this for passageways"), encouraging the player come up with their cartography system. It's a simple touch that makes the bottom screen feel that much more like a digitized parchment scroll you must carefully maintain.

Not everything in Etrian Odyssey II is sunshine and rainbows, but there's barely any complaints here that can't also be leveraged at the first game. Strategy is sadly frontloaded; the bulk of your gameplay decisions apply to character building, as battles out in the labyrinth are simple, straight-forward affairs. While I applauded the first game for its risk management challenges, I found that aspect a bit routine this second time around—you'll almost always return to town when you're out of mana, use a warp wire when cornered by a new FOE, and check every wall in the game for invaluable shortcuts. By far the biggest improvement the series should make going forward is to display more conditional information on characters and enemies, like defense up, provoke, attack down, etc. It's also hard to tell if a boss is immune to a status effect or simply resistant to it, a frustration my hexer shared as she gambled every turn trying to figure out which ailment was the "correct" one. More information provided to the player is very rarely a bad thing.

An unexpected misstep Etrian Odyssey II makes that the first entry (arguably) avoided, is that your journey begins needlessly overbearing. The start of these games is always the most precarious: you have terrible gear, barely any abilities, and the abilities you do have are junk for the first few levels. But Etrian Odyssey 2 adds a ruthless economy atop this, providing a pittance for the items gathered in the labyrinth while bankrupting you whenever you're in need of a resurrection—let alone a night's stay at the inn! It took hours of grinding just to make it past the first boss, a task made stupendously more difficult due to FOEs providing no experience whatsoever. Should FOEs have awarded less experience in the first game? Sure—but this is an overcorrection you'll be reeling from the entire journey, given the sheer abundance of patrolling FOEs that bar your path.

Despite all of these gripes, I still found Etrian Odyssey II to be a good game—or at the very least, an inarguable improvement over the first. Geomagnetic poles wisely replace healing pools, cutting down on the backtracking required while simultaneously allowing bosses to hit harder (as you're always a stone's throw away from their front door). Dungeon events are also far more common, going from a rarity in the first game to an infrequent-but-exciting occurrence that can bestow anything from healing, to items, to lore, to robbery-by-rodent. Lastly, Etrian Odyssey II feels more balanced than its predecessor... though I confess I'm unsure how much of that is due to my new party composition. Going from LPD/AM to LPR/HM, I found this game much harder than the first; hell, I didn't even try the last stratum due to how brutal my battles with the Colossus and final boss were, especially with my rare item stock all but depleted.

(Plus I looked at a youtube video of how much damage the true last boss dealt and proceeded to laugh as I hurriedly ejected the cart from my 3DS).

Etrian Odyssey II is an admirable follow-up to the first, although it does little to address the most off-putting characteristics of the series. But hey, that's fine! Etrian Odyssey II is a half-step in the right direction, offering a better, smoother experience through a gorgeously lethal fantasy labyrinth. It's paradoxically more punishing and less cruel than its predecessor, being easier to get through while demanding more time, thought, and focus from the player. Admittedly, I still have a smidge more fondness for the original entry, only because it made a stronger impression as my first JRPG dungeon crawler (I shall never forget the hell that was B18-20). Nevertheless, Etrian Odyssey II is the superior onboarding point for newcomers...

... but I have the sneaking suspicion it won't stay that way for long.

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Images obtained from: steamgriddb.com, dungeoncrawlers.org

Wizard of Legend - Thoughts

In the world of Wizard of Legend, mage battles are a lot closer to samurai duels than they are to the cover-based shootouts of Harry Potter. The game ranks as one of the fastest action titles I've ever played, requiring blisteringly precise inputs and split-second reactions in order to survive. It is merciless to the point of ludicrousness, rarely doling out full heals all while gleefully locking you into rooms with enemies that can (and will!) combo you to death. There are no i-frames, no insta-win upgrades, and no meta-progression to make the game more fair; you will learn to play by Wizard of Legend's rules, or get decimated trying.

And during its first twenty hours, I sure as hell got decimated.

In a lot of ways, I am reminded of my time with ScourgeBringer, another excellent roguelite where one badly bungled room can destroy an entire run. Both games aren't shy about hammering the player over and over for petty mistakes, but at least ScourgeBringer offers permanent upgrades that will become essential to your victory. Wizard of Legend instead boasts wider customization options out of the gate: your choice of a starting relic, cloak type, and your four core attacks. But its in-run upgrades provide significantly less impact than the blessings found in the Ordeal. I don't think one approach is superior to another per se—especially since you'll have to learn both games to the point of mastery anyway—but at least ScourgeBringer provides a sense of momentum as you gather upgrades throughout a run. Wizard of Legend on the other hand, is a vicious, no-holds-barred brawl that can kill you at the start just as easily as it can at the end.

What makes Wizard of Legend one of the most cutthroat roguelites I've played is that everybody in it is susceptible to stunlocking. Enemies, the player, bosses—all will kneel before the great leveler of the infinite combo. Well, provided they don't have any hyper armor on—which your enemies will evolve by floor two, by the way. Even the lowliest of dregs are capable of interrupting your earth-shattering specials, a mere slap setting you up nicely for their brawny buddies to tag-team you into oblivion. Some players may enjoy this ruthless "first to strike is first to win" philosophy, as it forces everyone to play by the same rules. But I guarantee that no matter what your preferred playstyle is, Wizard of Legend will wrench more than one exasperated expletive from your mouth as you watch your tiny warlock hopelessly battered back and forth like a well-worn tetherball. (I believe my first utterance of "Jesus Christ" was when two cyclopses beamed a geyser of red 5s out of my forehead.)

Due to the aggressive combat, you'll likely lean heavily into the game's ranged arcana—especially since flashy melee attacks leave you exposed for a fraction of a second too long. This has a tendency to render runs somewhat samey, especially once you discover that each elemental arcana comes with the same staples (rushdown attack, big AoE, delayed AoE, weak summon, strong summon, buff, totem, etc). This may imply Wizard of Legend lacks variety, but that couldn't be further from the truth; there's an impressive amount of arcanas, relics, cloaks, merchants, room layouts, and enemy attacks to memorize, fully capable of surprising you with something new 20 hours in. The issue is that you'll be quick to play favorites and slow to experiment, treating some of the relics and arcanas as obstacles in your path rather than tools to play around with.

Personal preference is inevitable in every roguelite, but since you can decide your most of your equipment before a run begins in Wizard of Legend, you'll have little reason to veer from your intended course. Which is a shame because it's a lot of fun in experimenting with new arcana and seeing how they work, even if they may not be all that useful. Better yet is when a previously-thought "worthless" arcana reveals its value as you grow accustomed to it: summons provide an excellent distraction, dash arcana can punish bothersome pursuers, and buffs can turn basic arcanas into full-fledged wrecking balls. Ranged attacks remain king of course—especially when dueling the final boss—but at least you'll have plenty of attacks to cycle between if you get tired of your usual loadout.

Speaking of the final boss, Wizard of Legend's big bad master mage joins the nightmarish ranks FTL's Flagship and Slay the Spire's Heart, where you must build your repertoire around their abilities. Dominating the rest of the game with a solid loadout means nothing if you're unable to strike Master Sura while he's vulnerable, a task that'll only grow harder as the fight wears on. And even if you manage to stun him, he can recover in the blink of an eye and retaliate with a string of lightning-fast combos, erasing your health with the fury of a teacher cleaning a swear word off their chalkboard. Even if you enter into it at full health, the duel remains a horridly lethal race to the bottom; I reckon I've lost more times to Sura at the last 20% of his HP than I've actually beaten him.

I hope my endless griping about Wizard of Legend's difficulty doesn't belie the fact that I really enjoyed my time with it. While it doesn't hit the consistent highs of the genre's best, in no way did I find it lacking or failing to live up to its potential. Sure, maps have too many dead ends and the game struggles to encourage experimentation, but for the most part it ticks all the right boxes: a good amount of randomization, an enjoyable combat system, fantastic animations, no external wiki help required, and a hard-earned victory you can be proud of. I suppose I'm hammering on Wizard of Legend's difficulty so much because the game lives or dies based off of whether you think it's unfair or not. And make no mistake—you will definitely find it unfair at times (like when you're being juggled to high hell during the wind master's signature arcana god damn knock it offfff!)

Similar to Spelunky, death is an ever-looming presence in Wizard of Legend, a shadow you're unable to shake. It forces you to play at a distance at all times, turning certain arcanas into a must-have, certain relics into a must-buy, and certain curses into a must-take. Wizard of Legend does offer build variety, with melee and rushdown builds blinking on the horizon like a shy lighthouse, but to cross the water is to chance drowning in a game full of turbulent waves. One wrong move, one miscalculation, and you'll be spent spiraling into the nether, death's icy grip clamping around your throat. In high-intensity games like Devil May Cry and Doom Eternal, you are the one to be feared, a force of nature laying waste to those foolish enough to get in your way. But in Wizard of Legend, you are a glass cannon, capable of shattering into a thousand pieces due to one impulsive misfire.

Wizard of Legend is cool—and fun!—but it has zero qualms about pulling down your pants to turn your ass into a pair of bongos.

Loop Hero - Thoughts

Loop Hero is a novel concept that struggles to "wow" the player beyond its drawing board. You're not likely to notice it during your first dozen hours or so, where everything is new, exciting, and strange. Unfamiliarity will usher in intrigue, the sense of discovery propelling you onward as the next upgrade, tile, and unlock is just around the corner. In that sense, I think Loop Hero succeeds in being a worthwhile experience with plenty of highs to look forward to—but its foundation is shaky, its philosophy confused, and its mechanics drunkenly slapped together. It's a beautiful game full of conflicting bits and frustrating design choices, leaving a bitter aftertaste only because it shows so much potential.

It's important to emphasize how utterly ingenious Loop Hero is—especially in a genre overflowing with imitators. Roguelites often fit snugly into "X-like" categories (eg "Isaac-likes, Spire-likes), but Loop Hero skirts all comparisons and mimicry. It's a bizarre amalgam of ideas: base building, auto battling, tile laying, hand management, and crunchy RPG equipment juggling. You get a little bit of everything, from loadout tinkering to permanent progression, from reliable strategies to RNG-derived wins. There's likely something here to tickle your fancy, as well as a gameplay concept you haven't encountered before—or at least, not in the peculiar way Loop Hero handles it.

On top of all that, Loop Hero's aesthetics are downright unmatched. The pixelated art style captures the world's bleakness better than its stilted writing ever could, with easily readable tile design and phenomenal color composition. The character portraits in particular are wonderfully rendered, with each friend and foe being as wildly strange as they are hauntingly beautiful. Complementing the carefully crafted visuals is a chiptune soundtrack that slaps so hard that you'll have to check your ears for bruises afterwards. It's impossible to name a favorite tune—pick any track out of the expansive OST and you'll get toe-tapping beats, chill jams and moody meditations. But where Loop Hero goes its hardest is in its boss-appearance themes, tossing the player into some of the most exceptional, hype-inducing headbangs to rouse your anticipation of the upcoming boss fight perfectly. I can't commend Deceiver and blinch enough for their positively phenomenal work

So if everything about Loop Hero stands out, where does it fall apart? The answer to that will require some digging...

... or rather, some constructing.

The base building system in Loop Hero is terrible in just about every conceivable way. While promising at the onset, you'll soon realize it's an elaborate front for unlocking new tiles. The placement of your shantytown is largely nebulous; only farms and lumber mills benefit from adjacency bonuses, but both are straight-up sunk costs, requiring way more resources to construct than they'll ever produce (seriously, you're giving me stable branches?!) In fact, a lot of the upgrades come across as the developers tossing crumbs at the player: 1% potion heals, garbage starting equipment, +30 max HP, and needless supply cap increases. Building upgrades are arbitrarily assigned (no upgrades for the warehouse and alchemist, but five for the watchtower?) and you're not likely to even notice this feature without the "?" tooltip on. Perhaps worst of all is that the intel center—a useful catalogue of everything seen and unlocked in the game—can only be built halfway through the campaign, forcing the player to learn much of the game's inner-workings on their own.

Exacerbating this problem are the game's numerous currencies, making it hard to parse what you need and where to get it. The resources start off simple enough—wood, stone, food, and metal—but they soon spiral into a grocery list of metaphysical concepts—evolution orbs, unity orbs, expansion orbs, and more. Each of these also come with their own fragmented version, complete with a different name and icon from their parent, just so you'll have to deal with nonsense equations like how 10 time shards form an astral orb or 20 noticeable changes form a metamorphosis. Loop Hero's intention is to encourage variety and experimentation (eg fight slimes for resource X, skeletons for resource Y), but the player doesn't know where these goods come from until they unlock the intel center! And by then, the player is two upgrades away from discovering alchemy, allowing them to transmogrify one resource into another—completely bypassing the need to diversify your tiles!

And this is a real problem for Loop Hero because the game's tiles are an imbalanced, chaotic mess that push you to play favorites.

Every tile comes with its upside and downside, the upside usually being a buff or reliable enemy spawn, and the downside being a... well, an enemy. It's a smart way to ensure that the player has to be cautious and temperate with their tile placement, lest their road becomes one long monster crossing. But some tiles are categorically inferior to others: swamps are terrible, sands are terrible, chrono crystals and bookeries are better off being other tiles, and temporal beacons aren't worth the obnoxious watcher fights. Meanwhile the forest, blood grove, oblivion, and village tiles (with complementary vampire mansion) are so essential that you won't ever entertain a run without them. Sure, occasionally you'll flirt with an outpost or storm temple, but the benefits provided by the "good" tiles will have you crawling back to your original deck before day's end, no matter which class you start as. The impressively dubbed "gold tiles" also suffer the same fate, with the arsenal tile being the only reliable pick of the lot (the necromancer and crypt can synergize, but once the HP-gain kicks into high gear you're already unkillable anyway).

Battles are my last point of contention, though I admit a big part of it is that auto-battlers simply aren't for me. Loop Hero's bestiary has a shocking amount of depth and diversity woven into it—the sheer number of status effects puts most RPGs to shame—but that ultimately means very little in regards to gameplay. Whether an enemy can poison you, or buff its allies, or shields itself matters not, as you have no control over your character's actions during battle (besides donning and doffing equipment, which you'll very rarely do). You can influence the pace at which monsters spawn outside of battle, but the dominant tactic by far is to open the flood gates. Gear is only acquired from routing enemies, with better gear dropping from stronger opponents—so you'll want to toss as many aggressive foes at your tiny patrolman as possible. Not only that, but certain monsters (like blood golems and vampire lords) provide categorically better loot than their peers, further differentiating the good tiles from the bad. I think if the player was given limited abilities they could activate per run, or one-time-use items, or even the option to manually activate their own healing potions, I would've been at least engaged in most of the combat, rather than browsing the internet on my second monitor.

I didn't realize until writing this entry just how much Loop Hero and Vampire Survivors have in common. While the promise of progression serves as their main hook, most of my enjoyment was wrung out of discovering the optimal strategy for both games. These titles aren't like Dead Cells or Hades, where a successful run leaves you giddy to toy with a new weapon or perk path; once you figure out how to properly "play" these games, all that's left to do is sit back and let your kill count skyrocket. But whereas Vampire Survivors succeeds in being a clever little diversion, Loop Hero displays a lot more potential—and thus, falls from a greater height. It's worth a playing to experience just how unique of a game it is, but Loop Hero is less of a diamond in the rough and more of a... murky gemstone.

It's pretty, but sadly undercooked.

Vampire Survivors - Thoughts

Mindless grind in games is a double-edged sword. On one hand it's a flagrantly obnoxious chore, a naked tax on your time that can drag down—if not completely ruin—an experience. On the other hand, it can provide a peaceful, low-pressure reprieve that allows your mind to focus on something else, similar to toying with a stress ball during a conversation. I've waded through numerous audiobooks while harvesting Monster Hunter materials, churned through podcasts during Destiny dailies, and listened to countless video essays on countless (failed) roguelite runs. Games like World of Warcraft, Pokemon, and Diablo are excellent multitasking outlets... provided you're in the mood for microscopic progress and tedious tasks.

Enter Vampire Survivors, the perfect bite-sized, grind-focused time-waster.

The reverse-bullet-hell genre Vampire Survivors has popularized is an unmistakably weird one. At first blush one might mistake Vampire Survivors for a twin stick shooter, but (believe it or not) it has more DNA in common with Cookie Clicker than Geometry Wars. Dodging and crowd control take a backseat to damage optimization, which gets easier and easier to manipulate and attain the more you play the game. You'll be able to permanently boost your base stats, unlock new characters & weapons, and discover game-changing relics like the map & randomazzo. While the first few runs may see you struggling to survive the full thirty minutes, just stick with it and you'll be showering the screen in bullets in no time.

The key to dominating Vampire Survivors like a BDSM-loving Belmont lies in discovering its strange weapon evolutions. Each weapon has a "superior" form that can easily double your damage output—provided you find the passive item that's required to unlock the upgrade. It's here where the game can devolve into its most chaotic form, granting some truly absurd abilities you can use to decimate Death himself. It's fun trying to figure out which passives are the key to which weapons, provided you can withstand some aimless trial and error. Once you stumble upon the correct combo for the first time, expect your eyes to light up as bright as the screen.

This ties into the next Clicker-esque mechanic that's guaranteed to dig its hooks into curious players: a copious amount of strange, secret unlocks. It's the main reason why you'll return to the game night after night, long after you've grown tired of its shallow and repetitive gameplay. You're always a run or two away from a new relic, weapon, character, stage, card, or feature that'll tickle the imagination, prompting some haphazard theory crafting and experimental combinations. Plus for the completionists out there, you can nab every achievement in the game in roughly 24 hours—or destroy your sanity in an attempt to complete every stage with every character, a task I can only imagine takes at least 100 hours to achieve. But no matter your preference, there's bound to be something that'll keep you up past your bed time, just itching to squeeze in just one more run.

However, none of this turns Vampire Survivors into what I'd call a good game.

It's fun and addictive, sure! But you have to overlook a host of issues in order to maintain the excitement you once felt at the beginning of your journey—the worst of which being the aforementioned shallowness. Each run made past your exploratory phase will be downright identical, with every character, arcana, and stages prioritizing the same weapon evolutions. You can play suboptimally and go for stuff like knives, garlic, and cats, but to what end? Any run capable to carrying you to the thirty minute mark will likely require zero input past minute fifteen, whether or not you've taken some inferior weapons. Like with Cookie Clicker, once your engine starts running you may as well step away from the computer and go fix yourself a snack.

And this is where another terrible aspect rears its ugly head: boredom. Bobbing and weaving around dense enemy clusters isn't as important to Vampire Survivors as its level-up slot machine is, making the optimal strategy on every stage to wander in circles collecting XP until you can forge one of the busted evolutions. The only real roadblock is figuring out what power-ups to take in what order, a challenge that's mitigated with the game's generous reroll and banish system. Expect brief jolts of excitement when a projectile enemy spawns in or a cluster of bats rushes by, but they're fleeting foes, barely taking up a minute of the stage's run time. Besides that, you'll fight off wave after wave of samey enemies, differentiated only by how long they each take to die. Even on Hurry mode, runs can drag intolerably on, wearing out their welcome like milk past its expiration date.

Vampire Survivors is ugly as sin, too. I don't usually find low-res sprite-based art styles to be a lazy or uninspired, but Vampire Survivors epitomizes the worst of the aesthetic. The UI is messy potluck of different font sizes, backgrounds are dry and featureless, and the bestiary is plagued with bargain bin Castlevania knockoffs. If you turn off your brain you can be mildly amused by all the flashing lights and colorful explosions, but the game is a far cry from being a looker. The best thing you can say about it is that the visuals are serviceable, which given that early SNES titles are more pleasing to the eye than this rainbow cacophony, isn't really saying much.

In spite of all my criticism, Vampire Survivors endures thanks to one simple fact: it's cheap as hell. The (initial) asking price of $3 is low enough to be worth the risk, as you can't really feel regret over that amount—or at least no more than buying a questionable bag of potato chips. That's why it can feel kind of silly criticizing the game over its shallow systems and janky artwork—Vampire Survivors is a dopey passion project, not a premier indie title that's crafted more carefully than an ice sculpture. Vampire Survivors doesn't tug at your emotions or leave you ruminating over its themes; it's ludicrous, droll, and tickles the primate part of your brain that likes seeing a deluge of numbers go up. In the video game world, it is a questionable bag of potato chips—but one of the more delightful ones that might just become your new favorite for the next few months.

Super Mario Bros. 3 - Thoughts

Perched upon a golden throne atop the vast NES library sits Super Mario Bros. 3, one of the greatest games ever made. It's singular flaw is that it lacks a save function, seeing as a full run of the game spans 3-4 hours of non-stop playtime. Besides that however, Super Mario Bros. 3 is practically unassailable. It boasts over 90 creative levels spread across eight thematic worlds, with quadruple the amount of power-ups that were present in the first game. It's a marathon of brilliant ideas, excellent courses, and stunning secrets, managing to surprise me with something new every time I play it. Countless platformers have followed in its wake, many of which have overtaken it in style (DKC), speed (Sonic), substance (the New series), and physics (Celeste). Yet few games so carefully, so expertly, blend these facets together into an cohesive and consistent experience, all while pushing the hardware it's on to the absolute limits. Super Mario Bros. 3 is no mere footnote in video game history—it is a mythic titan that vies for the top spot, a Cronus among the pantheon of platformers.

You may be able to deduce from my feverish praise that Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of my favorite games of all time, so believe me when I say it's in dire need of a save file. Not only is the game a serious challenge to surmount in a single sitting for children and time-strapped adults, but failure is costly—a single game over will flip every single level back to its unbeaten state. Fortunately, every fortress you topple will unlock a permanent shortcut. Unfortunately, these shortcuts will be of little use when an airship starts zipping around all over the board. Though there are plenty of other catch-up tools at the player's disposal (warp whistles, hammers, item houses resetting on game over), none can remedy the pain of getting six and a half worlds deep and then being told, "Turn off the Nintendo, it's time for bed!" If you want to complete Super Mario Bros. 3 from start to finish, you better block off a whole afternoon—or prepare to kiss your progress goodbye.

But hey—at least there are a number of modern solutions to this problem. The most obvious fix is in Super Mario Advance 4 and the All-Stars collection, two visually enhanced remakes sporting multiple save files. There are also a host of SMB3 re-releases on the Wii, Wii U, Switch, and NES Classic, all of which come with officially sanctioned save states. For those willing to go the extra mile, there are some clever rom hacks that inject a battery straight into the game's code, as well as flash carts for those that prefer to play on original hardware. If you're a purist... I suppose you could always leave the console on overnight? In any case, the lack of a save file may have been an issue back in 1988, but it's easily circumvented nowadays—as long as you're willing to bend the rules a little.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what other obvious flaws Super Mario Bros. 3 exhibits. Perhaps players used to the longer levels of the New series may be alarmed by the brief, relay-style stages strewn across SMB3's wacky landscape, but I see this as a difference in philosophy rather than a shortcoming. What makes levels here so delightful is that they're punchy vignettes, designed as obstacle courses that end almost as quickly as they begin. They're not vapid or insubstantial either—plenty of enemies and secret rooms await, decorated with a bevy of pits, power-ups, and coin trails. Plus this is the first (only?) Super Mario title that lacks checkpoints, an absence you'll keenly feel during the game's longer gauntlets. To call the stages bite-sized is a misnomer; levels are closer to single portion appetizers, filling you up nicely when consumed over the course of an entire world.

And the content of the stages themselves? Platforming perfection.

Gone are the repetitive and directionless designs of the original Super Mario Bros.—each stage is now built with a distinctive idea in mind, tossing new mechanics, hazards, and enemies at the player constantly. Somehow, despite being packed to the gills with levels, SMB3 rarely uses the same gimmick more than twice: an angry sun torments you in 2-Sand & 8-2, boss bass hounds you in 3-3 & 3-8, chain chomps guard the walkways of 2-5 & 5-1, directional lifts guide you through 4-Fortress2 & 7-6, and you'll have to slip by stretch boos in 3-Fortress & 6-Fortress3. There are a number of interesting one-offs too: the sudden tornado in 2-Sand, the fire-spewing nipper plant of 7-8, the para-beetle parade of 5-6, the missile bill barrage of 4-5, and the woefully underused kuribo's shoe in 5-3. I could gush over every single one of SMB3's additions (air ship stages, hammer bro variety, ice blocks, donut lifts, coin ship) but suffice to say, the game doesn't ever leave you wanting for more.

Hell, even the stages that lack something "new" manage to stand tall because of their smart design. 2-Pyramid sees you kicking open crawl spaces, 3-8 is littered with vines to keep you safe from boss bass, 5-9 is a treacherously tight diagonal climb, 4-4 bombards you with spiny depth charges, and 7-9 is a time-consuming but coin rich maze. Numerous levels also offer an alternate route through them: 1-6 & 5-2 offer paths above and below ground, 3-9 & 6-9 let you choose between sprinting or swimming, 2-4 hides a golden oasis above the starting mark, and 4-6 is the original Tiny-Huge Island. Do you like puzzles in your platforming? 7-Fortress1, 7-5, 8-Fortress, and the devious 6-5 got you covered. How about secret power-ups you have to work to find? 1-3, 5-1, 5-5, and 6-10 might have what you're looking for. Perhaps you yearn for difficult, white-knuckled platforming? Then prepare yourself for 7-8, 7-Fortress2, and nearly all of World 8! No matter your preference, Super Mario Bros. 3 is guaranteed to have at least one level that will leave you grinning ear to ear when you finish.

I suppose the only thing I'm not enthusiastic about is the overuse of Boom Boom as the fortress boss. Occasionally SMB3 tries to spice up his battle (the ice arena of 7-Fortress3, scrolling floor of 8-Fortress, the numerous winged variations of the boss) but at the end of the day you're left fighting the same rudimentary crab-walking, arm-swinging patrolman that you learnt how to beast back in 1-Fortress. The koopalings suffer a similar case of recycling, but there's at least minor differences in their arena and fighting style (and in the case of Wendy and Lemmy, an entirely new projectile). Plus, due to the reflexive use of their wand, the koopa kids a little trickier to attack as soon as they're vulnerable—whereas I could ensnare Boom Boom in a head-stomping loop in my sleep. The orange brute is an alright boss, but I feel that more effort and variation could've been applied to each of his fights (if we get to fight hammer bros in knee-deep water, why not him?).

And the power-ups! What a fantastic collection of quirky abilities! Standing in parallel to the fire flower is the super leaf: a sturdy tail that grants the Italian plumber flight, letting him explore stages with a newfound verticality. The P-wing acts an alternate suit that can keep him permanently skyborne, while the Tanooki variation provides a brief—but potentially crucial!—moment of solemn invincibility. The frog suit is a pain on dry land but grants the player substantially more control and speed underwater, letting them weigh the cost of when to don the suit. Stars can be stored up and used to bum-rush stage starts (always useful in 4-3 and 7-Piranhas), and Jugem's Cloud let's you skip some of the game's peskiest stages—provided you can defeat the next level. But the most precious item has to be the rarely-acquired hammer suit: a padded, fireball-deflecting garment that can vanquish nearly any foe with a single toss of its onyx mallet. Only the music box is a bit of a dud, briefly letting you skirt by hammer bros (whom are otherwise easily dispatched with a star).

Speaking of music, Konji Kondo's laid back, playful score has an amazing amount of range, despite there being only a handful of core compositions. One touch I've always appreciated is that each overworld map gets its own short theme, only needing a few seconds to convey the perfect mood. Stage themes are now split between low and high energy outings, utilizing chill reggae drums for the former and a playful melody chase for the latter. Underground sections get a cool drum & bass remix of the original subterranean tune, while hammer bros battles sound like straight-up surfing duels. It would've been nice to have an even larger arrangement of tracks, but this is an issue that admittedly plagues the entire 2D Mario series—even Yoshi's Island only has five main tracks!

Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the perfect note the game ends on—namely, the final fight against King Bowser. The castle itself starts as a slow burn, throwing some odd curve balls your way like steep steps and backtracking pathways, before speeding you across rickety platforms and over tightly-placed fireballs. Then you'll come face to face with the towering turtle himself, with nary an ax in sight! A momentous struggle unfolds as you dodge and juke the fiery tyrant, all while he's trying to crush you beneath his sheer mass. You'll need some deft footwork and smart maneuvering in order to survive, as even coming equipped with the fire flower doesn't hand you an automatic win. It's a brilliant battle to close out this 8-bit odyssey with, like a freshly-picked cherry capping off the best sundae you've ever had.

For the longest time, I considered Super Mario Bros. 3 to be my favorite game of all time. I'm not exactly sure when it was—probably some time around my teenage years—but eventually Super Metroid dethroned the NES classic, claiming the top spot for the rest of my life. Nowadays SMB3 lurks behind Dark Souls in third place, vying for the position along with the extremely-flawed-yet-extremely-fun Mega Man 2. So when it came time to write this entry, the words felt bound in a knot; it was difficult to determine where to begin and end this ardent stream of consciousness. If given unlimited time I could probably write a detailed entry for every single level, providing a blend of reasons and excuses for why I enjoy each one so much. But I have to contend with the fact that a lot of my passion is simply nostalgia burning brightly; had I not grown up with the game, perhaps I would've felt the same with Super Mario World or—god forbid—Sonic the Hedgehog.

But another part of me believes that Super Mario Bros. 3 transcends my personal preferences and childhood memories. If you sit down to play it, one can't help but notice its remarkable merit, its strengths made apparent and inarguable. I don't think everyone has to love the game of course, but it's a Sisyphean task to deny that the game isn't at least good or worthy a playthrough. Mario as a franchise owes a lot of its history to SMB3: airships, world maps, ghost houses, slopes, flying, item huts, P-switches, the koopa kids, and much more made their first debut here. There's a good reason why the New series worships Super Mario Bros 3's design blueprint like a long lost ancestor deity—there's a mind-boggling amount that this 8-bit masterpiece got right.

And it absolutely still holds up, nearly 35 years later.

Outer Wilds - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

I've been slowly chewing through my backlog this year in an attempt to get to any acclaimed indie game that came out in the last half decade or so (Hollow Knight, Celeste, Obra Dinn, etc), which has now led me to the great interstellar adventure of 2019: Outer Wilds. And woof what a game it is! As I knew practically nothing about it beforehand, I was left blindsided by its main gimmick: you're caught in a time loop where in 20 minutes the sun goes supernova and destroys the entire solar system. What first feels like a goofy and playful romp through outlandish biomes becomes a harrowing tale of loneliness, helplessness, and the spark of resolve. Outer Wilds isn't just one of the most creative games to come out in the last ten years—it's an brilliant, moving experience that succeeds precisely because it is a video game.

One of the things I love most about Outer Wilds is that it unapologetically embraces the bizarre. Your starting planet is a backwater podunk inhabited by good-natured, four-eyed yokels that have inexplicably built not one, not two—but six spaceships! And as the newest star-faring pioneer, your adventure only gets weirder from there; every celestial body in the solar system is beset by a strange anomaly. For example, the Ember Twin is sucking the sediment from its neighbor, Brittle Hollow is imploding from the black hole at its core, and Dark Bramble is infested with a spacetime-defying thicket. There are plenty of other eccentricities on these planets and elsewhere (a certain moon comes to mind), but what makes these phenomena truly spectacular is that they're all believable, despite their apparent impossibility.

Outer Wilds constructs its universe with a scientific outlook in mind, expecting the player explore, discover, and question their findings. While plenty of handwaving is done for the more preposterous leaps in logic ("was that a space fish?!"), Outer Wilds maintains a veneer of plausibility thanks to a plethora of alien text you'll come across. Through it, you'll find out how the forerunner species communicated across the solar system, why they're not around anymore, what that weird satellite orbiting the sun is, and—most impressively—how the player is able to re-live the last 20 minutes in an eternal loop. But clarifying these mysteries will require a continual effort on player's part, as the causal explanations are scattered throughout the cosmos, buried in some hard-to-reach places.

Which brings us to the most contentious—yet arguably best—part about Outer Wilds: its absolute freedom.

From the moment you launch into space, it's possible to finish the game on your first run—but only if you know what you're doing. To attain that knowledge, you'll have to poke and prod your way through the solar system, first trying to understand just what you're looking for, and then how to go about achieving it. And while this could've been done in a guided, linear way, Outer Wilds simply hands you the keys to your space shuttle and cheekily cheers, "Good luck!" There's no set order to the planets, no journal entries to uncover first, and no text prompt that will pop up to ask "did you get all that?" It's up to the player to pursue any of the leads they find interesting, cobbling together their discoveries until they've built a path to the ending.

It's kind of terrifying being placed at the helm of a ship without a map... but it's simultaneously liberating, letting you work out this apocalyptic puzzle at your own pace. Outer Wilds understands that the allure of open world games isn't just handing you the ability to go anywhere you want—it's also about making distant landmarks and loose threads rewarding to explore. Most structures and caverns will have something worthwhile inside, whether they be a journal entry, primitive sketching, or a lone corpse that signals the end of an ancient adventurer. When you finally piece together everything that has, is, and will happen in this universe, there's a solemn, zen-like beauty to it all—akin to piecing together an excellent whodunnit and basking in the intricate tragedy of it all.

But you're not completely on your lonesome during this task: Outer Wilds smartly includes a ship log that will track every anomaly observed and article read. While it initially looks like an impenetrable "Pepe Silvia" corkboard of unrelated leads, I found that switching to the game's "map mode" offered more clear guidance. It organizes your discoveries into a planet-by-planet index, providing a quick and easy way to see which locations you've finished and which still need some de-secret-ing. As long as you keep poking at the game's nooks and crannies (as well as pursuing different leads when you feel "stuck"), the game will smartly funnel you towards its finale, proffering one last Hail Mary to this time-looping solar catastrophe.

But again—the tricky part is that it's ultimately up to you to unearth it.

I covered this in my entry on Dark Souls lore, but this kind of nonlinear approach to backstory is a unique and unappreciated aspect of video games. As the player, you're responsible for absorbing and understanding the snippets of information you're given—even when they're provided in a non-intuitive order. I've talked with friends and family over our Outer Wilds experiences, and it's been fascinating to hear about how we arrived to the same conclusions through different means. Working with our own incomplete maps of the universe, we told tall-tales to each other, sharing the strange things we've seen while trying to avoid spoilers. We tossed out tiny hints and nudges, like "maybe you should look over there a little more", offering guidance as a mountain hermit might—while simultaneously being clueless ourselves of what awaits at the summit.

And what blew me away the most wasn't just the game's wild goose chase to its ending, but that there  was a significant portion of it I had missed because I failed to grasp a core mechanic. Only after speaking to a friend did I finally learn how it worked, which was especially surprising because I had utilized that mechanic during the ending—completely unwittingly! It's hard to describe without specifics, but know that I returned to the game to uncover that area myself, even though there was no point to it other than to sate my own curiosity. Outer Wilds may lack the traditional gameplay hooks of powerful upgrades and branching skill trees, but what it has is more potent, more memorable: the promise of an answer. It dangles in front of you like a fisherman's bait, occupying your thoughts whenever you're not playing the game because maybe—just maybe—you already have the tools at your disposal to figure it out. It's the anticipation of discovery, the intrigue of a curtain reveal; it's a gift more spiritually satisfying than anything found in a loot box.

Outer Wilds isn't just a standout experience for me—it's possibly the best game about time travel I've ever played. Nearly every aspect about it I found immaculate: the vibrant color palette, each planet's strange theme, the folksy soundtrack, the intuitive ship controls, and the crushing fatalism of watching the sun burst into a beautiful, murderous wave of light over and over and over again. Every loop will pull you in a different direction, giving you new avenues to explore based off the logs you've read and the theories brewing at the back of your mind. And when it all starts to fit into place—when there are finally more answers than questions—only then can you appreciate how meticulously crafted this humble indie darling is.

To finish, let me paint you a little picture.

At some point while you're playing the game, you'll likely be stranded from your ship. Maybe you'll jump into a portal, or boost too high off of a planet's surface, or expect your ship to stay grounded to a comet despite the sun's gravity obviously being a stronger force. You'll watch your tiny ship slip away, the bleakness of the situation slowly dawning on you as your vessel shrinks to a mote smaller than the distant stars. And sure, the loop is just gonna reset anyway—this death is just one of many—yet you'll be compelled to stay, to drift hopelessly in space as the end casts its eternal shadow. Maybe you'll suffocate, or get pulled into the sun, or live just long enough to die along with the rest of the universe. But you'll stay that first time, just to see what happens...

... And that's only one bit that makes this game so very special. Make sure to savor your first playthrough of it—it's a remarkable adventure.

Scalak - Thoughts

It's hard to imagine anyone playing through Scalak and feeling as though they've wasted their time. In the subgenre of brief, minimalist, non-numerical puzzle games, you can run into a lot of unfulfilling titles that either fail to reach their potential (Naboki) or are annoyingly obtuse (Understand)—but Scalak is neither of those things. What you'll get is an interesting, colorful, varied puzzle game, one that appears to be about matching similar shapes but is really about object manipulation. If you like the idea of having to flip, twist, and turn blocks in order to get them to satisfyingly "click" together, then Scalak might just be for you.

What helps make Scalak stand out compared to other manipulation games like The Room and PUSH is that there's very little experimentation required. You won't find any hidden compartments or secret switches; brute forcing your way to a solution via trial & error is not an option here. The only unknown you'll have to contend with is what the opposite side of an object might look like—a problem that's easily solved with Scalak's intuitive rotation controls. The main challenge of the game comes from deducing what the solution should look, and then arranging the pieces before you to match that image. It sounds simple in theory but gets pretty perplexing as the number of pieces increase.

Of course, this comes with the stipulation that you can handle rotating 3D images in your head. I was reminded of Organic Chemistry while playing it, specifically picturing how organic compounds would interact with outside elements. While the technique came was natural for me, I know other folks struggled with it—and perhaps Scalak would similarly drive them up the wall. But it's not nearly as fraught with complexity as its molecular kith, at most giving you three rectangular prisms to deal with at a time. That's not to say that there isn't a surprising amount of complexity in its later puzzles (there is), but Scalak never gets to the point that you'll want to pull your hair out. It knows to keep things calm, the ambiance warm, and new mechanics flowing like good wine at a wedding reception.

I'm not as head over heels for Scalak as I was with Linelight, but I find it as equally deserving of a recommendation. There are a lot of cool bits and head-scratching puzzles, all promising a rush of relief if you can get the pieces to fall perfectly into place with one another. But there's no pressure; Scalak is calm, clean, and simple without ever feeling effortless, boring, or like it's stalling for time. Think of it like a good meal at an affordable restaurant: you'll be done with it in two hours and it'll be worth every penny you spend.