Partridge Senpai's 2021 Beaten Games:Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021* indicates a repeat
1.
Dandy Dungeon: The Legend of Brave Yamada (Switch)
2.
Dandy Dungeon 2: The Phantom Bride (Switch)
3.
Mon Amor (Switch)
4.
Terraria (PC)
5.
Puppeteer (PS3) *
6.
Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon (PS1)
7.
Project Altered Beast (PS2)
8.
Devil Summoner II: Soul Hackers (Saturn)
9.
Kirby Star Allies: Heroes in Another Dimension (Switch)
10. Kirby's Dream Land 2 (GB)
After playing Star Allies a bunch, I was on quite the kick for more Kirby games, and I played through a good few I'd played through before. This was the only one of the bunch that I couldn't remember if I'd ever actually beaten, let alone with the real ending, so I felt writing a review for this one at least was proper. It took me 4 hours or so to beat an emulated version of the game using my Xbone controller.
The story is, as expected for a GameBoy game, very simple. Dream Land is once again under threat, and this time by the nefarious Dark Matter! Kirby needs to set out to stop him with the help of his three new animal friends, and if he can collect the 7 rainbow drops spread throughout the land, he can take on Dark Matter and stop him for good! It's a simple story that does exactly what it needs to to set up the action.
As for the gameplay, it's a continuation of the copy ability-based platforming that began in Kirby's Adventure. You've got 7 worlds worth of levels to go through with the help of your animal buddies, and if you're daring enough, you can even hunt down the rainbow drop hidden in each world. The game's a pretty tough one, though pretty standard for Kirby at the time. What's really tough is getting those rainbow drops and fighting Dark Matter at the end (who's a really tough cookie, even for a real final Kirby boss). The level design is all around solid, but the animal friends often feel more like burdens than aids, and while their variations on Kirby's copy abilities are neat, they very often feel like outright downgrades to his normal abilities. It isn't awful, but it's definitely a bumpier step on the road to finer Kirby level design like we'd come to see in games like Kirby 64.
The graphics are very nice as is the music, and you can tell a lot of love went into this one. My only real complaint is that the graphical limitations of the GameBoy kinda interfere with your ability to actually tell what destructible blocks are broken by which power. The blocks just have patterns on them to differentiate them from one another, but these patterns are rarely obvious as to what power breaks them. There was more than once where I had to redo a quite difficult platforming section with an animal companion because I found when I got to the rainbow drop at the end that I'd brought the wrong power to break this particular weird pattern of blocks XP. It's not game-breaking, as you can always just look up what breaks what online, but it does make for a more frustrating baseline experience than a game that could use color would likely allow for.
Verdict: Recommended. This is far from the best Kirby game, sure, but it's still a very solid one. If you're looking for something fun but challenging to play on your GameBoy, this is a fine game to look out for~.
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11. Tales of Vesperia (PS3) *
This is sorta a replay and sorta not a replay. My original Tales of Vesperia review is not only up on this site, but it's also one of the very first ones I wrote here~. Granted it's so short that it's hardly a review by the standards of how I write them these days ^^;. With that in mind, with a close friend of mine also starting to play this for their first time, I figured now was as good a time as ever to replay through this, and play through the PS3 version that has the updated content in it (the same content that's in the most recent remastered international version). It took me around 70 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware. (which is a little odd, given that it took me less time to beat the 360 version and yet I feel I messed around aimlessly a lot less in this playthrough, but whatever).
Tales of Vesperia is the tale of Yuri Lowell, a vigilante who dropped out of the royal guard after becoming disillusioned with their way of meting out justice. What starts as a quest to capture the thief who stole the power supply to the slums' fresh water supply (predictably) eventually ends up becoming a quest to not only stop a corrupt government, but one to save the world itself from a fiendish and monstrous foe. This wasn't the first Tales game I beat, but it's the one that made me a fan of the series, especially with its wonderful and fun character writing. I've been curious for years how it'd hold up to a replay, and I can say for sure that at least the character writing (up to and including the new addition to the cast, Patty) is still excellent and very charming. The greater narrative however... failed to impress ^^;
Vesperia, at its core, has an environmentalist message above all others. However, it also has a lot to say about justice with the dynamic between Yuri, a vigilante, and his childhood friend (and captain in the royal guard, trying to change the system from the inside) Flynn Scifo. It also has a lot to say about governance and a fair amount else, but it casts far too wide a net. Fun and charming character writing aside, its environmental and political metaphors get terribly confused and difficult to discern by the end (and following some to their logical conclusions, you can arrive at some rather unfortunate ones).
Character arcs are for the most part alright, but with the big exception of Yuri. His entire arc sorta relies on you, the player, buying into the game's core assumption that his way of doing things, killing people on his own idea of justice, is inherently wrong. But the game does an awful job of convincing you on this point, and really just expects you to believe that at face value (despite that fact that everyone he kills on his own initiative is a cartoonishly evil and irredeemable person (not to mention they're also often offensive stereotypes in one way or another), and honestly the game suffers from generally poorly written villains on the whole). Yuri's dialogue writing is fine, but his character arc being so poorly, coupled with the poor construction of the larger themes, drags the overall quality of the narrative down significantly, and for anyone who likes to dissect the messages in the media they enjoy, they will likely find a quite frustratingly mixed experience with Tales of Vesperia.
Gameplay-wise, Vesperia is a really solid improvement on the 3D Tales games up to that point. Continuing on from the trend from Tales of Symphonia and Tales of the Abyss before it, the 3D action combat system works really well and feels fun to engage with, and it's been tuned up very nicely from those games. Boss battles also have 'secret missions' you can do, which while ostensibly a mechanic focused around achievement hunting, is still a fun way to spice up the weaknesses bosses often have in these games. Granted, some of these secret missions are pretty damn hard and/or very hard to figure out without a guide, but they're still a fun additional gimmick for this game. All in all, it's a simple to learn and fun to master system that's not quite at just how complicated the system would get come the following Tales of Graces.
The presentation is very nice. Though it's a bit of a shame to have the step down from 1080p to 720p going from the 360 to the PS3 version, the game's anime art style still comes through very well and in a way that doesn't tend to tank the framerate either (though that does still happen sometimes ^^;). The music is quite nice too, and it does a good job of setting moods and atmospheres.
Verdict: Recommended. This is still quite a good game, though it's certainly nowhere near as good as the Tales games that would come after it. If you aren't as much of a media studies person as me, the writing likely won't bother you nearly as much as it did for me (just like it didn't really bother me when I played it years ago when I was much less up on media studies stuff). The remaster's English VA is pretty awful in how it didn't get the original VA back for their new lines, but if you can stand that, this is a perfectly fine game to get into the Tales series with if you were so inclined~.
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12. Art Style: BOXLIFE (DSi)
With the 3DS and Wii U eshops shutting down soon, I took the chance to look into what the stores still had to offer, and one thing that I remembered most quickly were the Art Style games I hadn't looked at yet! I really enjoyed PictoBits, and even though I've very often heard that that's one of the best of the bunch, this game also came highly recommended, so I grabbed it as well. It took me about 2.5 hours to get through the R&D section and get to the credits, and also to mess around in the score attack mode a bit. I played it in English and on my New 3DS XL.
BOXLIFE is a puzzle game all about getting big sheets of squares and cutting them in such a way that you can fold the cut piece into a cube. Of course, there are only so many configurations of 6 squares that they can fold up into a cube, so you need to take care in how you do your slicing and dicing. The game's R&D section is basically your tutorial for the score attack section, as it presents an increasingly hard selection of time attack modes that introduce to you a new way to fold a cube each time, and you need to cut and fold 10 large sheets of squares into cubes before the timer runs out. As the sheets of squares you get get larger and larger, it gets trickier and trickier to get it perfect, and it gets to be a real doozy by the end of it. Each sheet does technically have a pre-determined set of patterns that it can be cut into to make squares, but especially for the larger sheets, there's very often more than one correct answer (although you will be given the pre-determined set as a hint if you take more than 10 or so seconds to solve it). The end result is a puzzle game that's incredibly addicting, and if you're anything like me, it might have you end up looking at things in your real life with your brain trying to turn them into cubes without you even trying XD
The presentation of the game is very simple but also very charming. The little worker men who work at the box factory are simple but cute, and all the furniture you earn for your little worker's "Box Life" in the score attack mode is adorable as well. There are a good handful of music tracks, one for each level of difficulty, and they fit the game great, and provide excellent background atmosphere for cube forming~.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is definitely up there with PictoBits as an absolutely great time in the Art Style series of games. It's definitely not easy, but it's so darn fun and addicting that even if you can't make it to the credits, there's still tons of fun to be had in the score attack mode. This is absolutely one to look out for if you're looking for goodies on the 3DS eshop and aren't quite sure what to pick up~.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me