Plok

 I just played Plok.

This is a SNES game from 1993

I played it on the proper SNES. I bought the cartridge from CeX the other day.

This game has never been re-released on anything. It's been SNES exclusive since the day it came out.

I had seen this game mentioned before a few times here and there, but I had never actually seen much of what the game was actually like until I played it just now.

Plok is a platforming sidescroller starring a funny yellow and red cartoony character named Plok.

The graphics are quite cute in this game. It's very cartoony and colourful. The sense of humour is also pretty good - Plok himself is very irritable, and he always has something to complain about between each level.

Plok has the ability to throw his limbs forward - his two arms and his two legs. His limbs will boomerang back towards him and reattach themselves automatically. 

Plok throws his limbs primarily to attack enemies.

You can throw out all four of Plok's limbs rapidly, but then you'll be left hopping around on your torso, unable to walk normally until you get at least one leg back. 

Rapid attacks aren't too useful anyway, since enemies who take multiple hits to defeat have a moment of invulnerability in between hits. So don't spam the attack button! It rarely helps.

There are also certain switches that will require Plok to leave behind a limb to activate. Plok can then pick his limb back up from the corresponding coat hanger, which is usually nearby. There are several sections of the game where Plok has to leave behind a few limbs in order to activate a sequence of platforms. And if you don't come back for them, you'll kinda just have to play the rest of the level without arms. It's funny.

The character kind of reminds me of Rayman in some ways, though the limb-throwing system in Plok is actually a lot more meaningful than in Rayman.

Rayman is kind of just a regular platformer with animations that depict detached limbs, without it really meaning anything in the gameplay. Whereas Plok's main gameplay gimmick is the whole detached limbs system.

Plok has two jumps - a short jump, and a somersaulting high jump. The high jump doesn't allow you to throw limbs, which complicates matters a little - you need to make sure you're using the right jump if you also need to attack.

I think this system is decently unique and interesting enough for this game. They make good use of the high jump with the level design, as there are plenty of jumps that require the extra distance. 

There are two main types of level in Plok - regular levels where you just need to reach the end, and flea-hunting levels where you need to find and defeat every flea before going to the end. There are around twelve or so fleas to find each time.

Every once in a while during a flea level, an arrow will appear on screen pointing to the nearest flea to keep you on track. And additionally, you can collect little beehives that allow you to summon friendly hornets that will chase after enemies, including fleas. 

The flea levels tend to be more exploration-focused and open-ended, while the regular levels are linear.

The level design in Plok is.... honestly, a little hit-or-miss. Overall, I'd call it "...maybe not so great". I think the camera is just a little bit too zoomed-in, it's often difficult to see where the enemies and platforms are. They made the characters and background so big and detailed, which looks nice on-screen, but can be a bit of a detriment to the playability. A moving platform can take you directly into a cluster of spikeballs, without much opportunity to get out the way. Or other times, you have to make a blind jump because you can't really see where you're going to land. 

Plok is always centred on screen, even when moving quickly, which means that there isn't a lot of time to react to oncoming obstacles. It would have been better if they had some sort of system to pan the camera, but I can understand that that isn't always so easy to implement.

Some of the levels are pretty long, and this game has no mid-level checkpoints at all. You only have one health bar to do the whole thing, and if you lose a life, you just have to start again. Thankfully, if it's a flea level, any defeated fleas will remain dead, so it's not quite as bad as it could have been otherwise. Even so, it is very harsh, especially in the longer levels. Healing pickups are very few, especially later in the game where most levels only have one healing pickup in the whole level.

Many of the flea levels have quite confusing layouts as well - it's often a puzzle just to figure out how to get anywhere.

I get the feeling that... a lot of these levels weren't playtested sufficiently enough to iron out the unintuitive parts.

Plok starts with four lives,

Each level has collectible shells - 100 shells gives Plok an extra life, though annoyingly, the number isn't really shown on screen - instead, you get a little Plok head silhouette in the hud that fills up yellow the closer to 100 you get. Would have preferred seeing more precise numbers, but whatever.

The continue system is very strange in this game.

Whenever you collect four "Plok Tokens", you earn a continue. You can find them hidden in certain stages (pretty rarely), and you get given one token every time you beat a level without dying once.

When you lose all your lives and use a continue, it doesn't start you from where you died - instead it starts you from the level where you obtained that particular continue.

So if you earned a continue in level 4, earned another continue in level 7, and then lost all your lives in level 10... you would be sent back to level 7 to try again. And if you lost all your lives again, this time, you'll be going all the way back to level 4. The continues are single-use, and it remembers exactly which level you earned each one...

The checkpointing system feels so harsh in this game. If you're dying just a little bit too often, you'll need to be prepared to replay a whole bunch of levels to get back to where you left off.

It's honestly quite demotivating.

Thankfully there is one saving grace - there are "Permanent Continue Positions" in the game. After specifically level 19 and level 29, the game sets a new starting point for when you Press Start on the title screen. So even after losing all of your continues and receiving a Game Over, as long as you don't turn off the SNES, starting a new game will actually start you from either level 20 or level 30, instead of the beginning. ... which is nice. Thanks for that. Though that still doesn't make me any less demotivated if I lose all my continues in level 27 and have to redo so many levels anyway.

Plok does not feature a save system, password system, level select menu, cheat codes, or anything else that can help. There is no way to fake it - you NEED to actually play through the levels properly in order to get to the end. 

There are a few hidden warp zones that can skip levels, but in order to actually successfully warp, you need to complete a challenge room first - and if you fail, the warp is missed with no opportunity to try again unless you die. They really want to make you work for your progress, huh.

The final stretch of levels take place in the Flea Pit, the home of the fleas. Annoyingly, every single Flea Pit level is a gimmick level where you need to ride vehicles through obstacle courses - there are seven: a unicycle, a car, a jetpack, a motorbike, a helicopter, a tank, and a UFO.  These levels really test your patience, because these are long courses with enemies shooting at you everywhere, very few healing opportunities, and each one has its own awkward set of controls to figure out. And it's during these levels that the poor camera really feels problematic, as the shooting enemies can aim at you even when they're offscreen.

To be quite honest, I'm not really a fan of this at all - the final levels kind of don't have anything to do with what the rest of the game is about, which is limb-throwing and flea-hunting. It would be one thing to have vehicle levels dotted throughout the game, but shoving them all in one after another right at the very end just doesn't feel right.

It took me two play sessions to finish Plok. The first time, I lost all of my continues and didn't feel like redoing seven levels just to get back to where I was, so I gave up.

The second time I played, I actually beat the whole game without using a single continue - I had managed to earn enough extra lives through collecting shells to last me the whole game. It was pretty close, though! I only had one spare extra life during my encounter with the Flea Queen in the final level. I was worried, but thankfully the final boss was actually kind of easy.

Phew!

Overall... I'm very glad I played Plok. It's a really interesting little game, and I had a lot of fun with it. I do think it has some very questionable game design choices, especially in regard to the checkpointing and continue system, but once you are skilled enough to not die too much, it matters less... so it's less of an issue. 

The level design unfortunately did not impress me, but the game is funny and charming enough that I am a fan regardless.

Hooray for Plok!

Lufia & The Fortress of Doom

I played Lufia & The Fortress of Doom

This is a SNES game from 1993. it was released in Japan under the name Estpolis Denki, and was never released in Europe at all.

I played the US version via emulator.

Lufia is a fairly typical Dragon Quest-style JRPG developed by Neverland, the same developer who would eventually go on to develop Rune Factory. ...I was not aware of this connection before I started looking into this game. I think Lufia was in fact their first game! 

The story involves a group of heroes who go on a journey to defeat the evil warriors known as the Sinistrals, who have revived after being defeated by a previous group of heroes 99 years ago.

This is an RPG that is extremely derivative of Dragon Quest. It has a very similar structure, a similar style of overworld, a similar style of dungeon design, a similar battle system - basically everything in this game reminds me of Dragon Quest, mostly Dragon Quest 3 in particular.

 

The exploration in this game is your typical RPG fare - the world has lots of towns dotted around a large overworld map comprised of multiple continents. At first you explore on foot, going across the overworld and through connecting caves in order to reach new towns. Eventually you get the boat, giving you more freedom, as well as a Warp spell to easily return to previous towns. And finally, towards the end of the adventure, you get the flying boat that grants you full freedom to explore every part of the map. This is very typical of not only Dragon Quest, but Final Fantasy and many other classic JRPGs too. But to me, it felt closest to Dragon Quest, specifically with how it feels to accumulate all the town warp locations, as well as the way the overworld feels to explore. It's difficult to describe exactly how DQ and FF and other JRPGs differ in this regard, but there are subtleties there I suppose. Lufia is mostly on the DQ end of the spectrum.

The way the dungeons are designed reminded me of Dragon Quest 3 in particular, because every single dungeon in this game is either a cave or a tower, with the exception of the titular Fortress of Doom seen during the prologue and ending. 

The dungeons are all mazes with the occasional puzzles to solve, and plenty of treasure chests to find. The mazes are not bad individually, but there are quite a lot of dungeons in this game, and the encounter rate is very high, so I did find myself getting rather fatigued as I played more and more of the game. 

I also found the treasure chests in this game to be disappointing, as there are just too many of them, and they generally don't contain unique or interesting items. Mostly potions and stuff. ...didn't stop me from compulsively wanting to open them all of course.

The tower dungeons let you fall off them - if you walk off the edge of a tower, you get to drop all the way down to the overworld map, as an easy escape. ...which is something pretty much taken directly from Dragon Quest.

The combat in Lufia is a very typical turn-based JRPG combat system. You have a party of four heroes (you start with two, and meet the other two as you progress), and you select Attack, Defend, Item, or Magic. Nothing out of the ordinary here. You can get attacked by multiple types of enemy at the same time, and when this happens, you cannot select individual enemies to target. If you get attacked by three frogs and one scorpion for example, you can decide to target either "frog" or "scorpion", but you can't select which frog to target - instead it's chosen randomly. This, yet again, is a gameplay thing lifted directly from Dragon Quest. And at this point, I'm starting to get a little annoyed with how on-the-nose Lufia is about copying its inspiration - especially considering this inability to target specific enemies is something I never liked about the early DQ games.

The four heroes in Lufia are:

The main hero, who doesn't have a canon name (so I called him Benjy). The main hero has the strongest stats, and gets access to healing and buffing magic.

The second hero is Lufia, the hero's childhood friend, and the mage of the group. She has extremely strong spells, but is rather fragile.

The third hero is Aguro, the captain of the guard in one of the later towns, and is the only hero who has no magic. His only strategy is to do regular attacks, or occasionally use items.

The fourth hero is Jerin, the half-elf who we rescue from being sacrificed to a monster. She uses a bow that hits multiple targets as her regular attack, and also has access to powerful magic spells.

The main hero is the son of Maxim, who was one of the four heroes who defeated the Sinistrals 99 years ago. Maxim was accompanied by three friends: Guy, Selan, and Artea. 

One interesting thing Lufia does is that the prologue of the game takes place in the original battle from the past - you play as the party led by Maxim, travelling through the final dungeon, the Fortress of Doom, on their quest to defeat the four evil warriors known as the Sinistrals. This prologue is quite interesting - it's a way for the game to show you the high-level spells you will get to use later on, and it also lets you see the main bad guys right from the start, which is a good way to introduce them into the story.

I also like how the front of the US box for the game says "Battle in the opening story!" as a selling point. I guess they were really proud of this prologue, huh?

After the prologue is over, the game begins with the hero and Lufia in the present day, as they learn about monster attacks suddenly occurring in other towns after 99 years of peace. They go out to investigate, which eventually leads them on a quest to hunt down the Sinistrals who have revived themselves through unknown means.

The plot of the game is not all that revolutionary - the hero decides to confront the Sinistrals in order to restore peace to the world. Lufia, his childhood friend, also plays a key part in the story, as she has a mysterious past that connects her to the Sinistrals in a way neither of them were aware of.

Overall, the story is nothing to write home about. Each new town you explore has a few scenes here and there to set up the local quests that progress the game, but there isn't all that much actual plot development throughout.

Some of the story scenes struck me as rather poorly-paced. The one that comes to mind in particular is when the team meets Guy, one of the original heroes who is now old and retired. The scene starts with Guy saying "I'm still alive and kicking!", but it immediately transitions to "well, it seems my time has come...", and then it immediately goes to show the heroes mourning at his gravestone. ... Like.. hold on a minute, this scene is moving way too fast! ... I mean, I get it. The point of showing Guy's death is to give our hero more resolve for completing his mission. I've seen storytelling before. But the way they handled this scene was very jarring and abrupt. Feels like it comes out of nowhere, just so the game can claim that it includes some important plot moments here and there. Not really a fan of how it was handled.

Regarding the story, there were some other minor moments that didn't make sense to me - for example, there is a thief boy who steals a ruby from a town in order to take it to his friend in another town. He seems perfectly able to travel between towns on foot by himself, yet whenever I have to travel between towns, I have to fend off random encounters with monsters. ... the game makes no attempt to explain how the boy is able to travel safely at all. It's a minor thing, but to me, it shows a lack of consideration for consistency in how the world works.

 

There was also a dungeon room that has a signpost outside of it saying, "Only women can enter this room" with no further explanation or justification. Lufia needs to enter this room by herself to retrieve an item. ...... but why though. Why can't the hero just go in with her. Why does he unquestioningly respect the signpost's authority over Lufia's safety? It's never even brought up again later or anything. There are no other points in the game where this happens. They don't even attempt to make it make sense. This completely baffled me.

Speaking of arbitrary gender things, there are quite a lot of stereotypes in the game. Early on there's a town known for its big shopping centre, and of course Lufia is sooo excited to try on the dresses. ...I guess it's not too big a deal, but the game seems to lay it on quite thick. Lufia is very much a stereotypical girly girly anime girl, and it seems like the game is trying to make the player sympathise with the hero, who has to put up with her silly girlisms. ....kiiinda not a fan of that tbh. I prefer my stereotypes thoroughly subverted in my rpgs. ...but I guess I'll let it go.

Oh, and as long as we're talking about parts of the game that don't make much sense, I guess I'll mention the game's translation.

The dialogue is fine for the most part, but there are a few translation choices that made me question things. We recruit Jerin into the party by saving her from becoming a ritual sacrifice, however the game doesn't call it a sacrifice, it calls it a "ransom" instead, which is.... kinda not really the correct word? I mean, I guess you could say it applies, but it's certainly not the commonly-used term for this trope. Just comes across like the translator didn't know what was going on.

More annoyingly are the spell names. Spell names such as "Poison" or "Sleep" don't inflict statuses, but instead cure statuses. You need to cast Poison on a poisoned friend to cure them. Or cast "Death" on a downed ally to revive them. It's unconventional, but you can get used to it. But then we have some of the other spells. The main healing spell is called Strong, and the full-heal spell is called Champion. The party-wide heal is called Boost. The attack-raising spell is called Trick, and the agility-raising spell is called Fake. .... huh. it's a weird uncanny area, where the word choices don't make enough sense to be useful names, but still make just enough sense that you can kind of see where it's coming from. somehow.

The spell that inflicts silence on a foe is called Bounce, which is very confusing because the spell that casts a reflect shield on an ally is called Mirror. ........ these names are not so easy to get a handle on.

There is a spell called Float that lets you walk across swamp tiles without getting hurt. But it doesn't actually make you float for real it seems - if you walk over a hole with Float active, you'll still fall in the hole. ....... i mean come on guys. that's just poor. It feels to me like they just didn't even consider this basic interaction when they decided to name the spell. ....they should have just called it Stepguard or something, like how it's called in Dragon Quest. ... because, again, damage-dealing tiles with a spell to counteract them is a game mechanic lifted straight from Dragon Quest. Of course.

Item names are weird too - there's a shield called a "Brone Breast". what the heck is a brone? did they mean bronze? or bone? And if it's supposed to be a breastplate, why does it go in the shield slot? 

One of the magical staves that Lufia can equip is called a "Glass Robe". I'm sure they meant rod, not robe lol.

Sometimes you can come across cursed equipment - they have negative effects such as damaging the user, and can only be unequipped by paying the church in town. But I wanted to point out that two of the cursed items are called "Broad Sword" and "Broad Rod". ... ....do you think they meant it to say Blood instead of broad?? that would make more sense to me. Because otherwise, why would a regular old broadsword be one of the cursed items. 

anyway.

...

I do want to mention that some of the battles in the game are not too bad. I do remember thinking that some of the boss encounters were quite challenging in an interesting way. One of the earliest encounters is against three goblins, and they were tricky enough that they forced me to re-equip my party to maximise defense on Lufia so she could focus on healing the others. Later on, there was an evil spirit on top of a red tower who was so strong, it forced me to adopt the strategy of buffing up Aguro with attack up, buffing down the boss with defense down, and focusing entirely on healing with the Hero, Lufia, and Jerin - only ever attacking with buffed-up Aguro. I couldn't squeak by unless all three of my magic-users were on constant healing duty. 

The fact that the game can force me to come up with strategies like this is a good thing, I say.

Though ... I will complain about how the game doesn't ever tell you when buffs and debuffs run out and return to normal. You just have to pay attention to the damage numbers I suppose.

Despite liking some of the fights, I did feel like there was an important part of the battle strategy the game was not letting me take part in. You get so many rings with weird names like "Dragon Ring", Undead Ring", "Ghost Ring", Heavy Ring", "Sea Ring", " etc etc etc..., yet unless they provide a stat boost, there's no way to know what they actually do. I worked out that some rings boost the power of specific spells, but aside from this, I have absolutely no idea. There are no in-game descriptions for items, only for spells. It makes the game a lot more shallow because, without this knowledge, there is no way to make use of all my available options.

Aside from these few interesting bosses, though, combat is on the whole extremely extremely repetitive and overly frequent. There is an item, Sweet Water, which can help reduce the rate of encounters, but I still felt like the encounters were way too much, even when I had a Sweet Water active for pretty much the entire game. Since I was playing on emulator, I made ample use of that speed-up function. 

Enemy encounters have decently interesting strategies to them - such as which order to take them out, which ones to use spells on etc - all good RPG combat stuff.... and it's even possible to inflict statuses like confusion on enemies, which is a good thing - there are too many games where enemies are immune to statuses, so I'm happy to be able to here. But yeah. On the whole, there are just too many encounters, and it makes the game as a whole feel like a real drag.

There is one section in particular that struck me as overly pointlessly annoying - in order to repair a bridge in a cave, you have to find the architect in a distant town. He then moves to the castle of the town nearby the broken bridge. He tells you to go look at the bridge before he starts working on it. He doesn't join you, he just stays in the castle until you go. So you go there, look at it, and come back. Then he goes there himself ready to repair the bridge. So you have to go all the way to the bridge again. Then he says "ok now go stand on that ledge". So you have to leave the cave and enter via a different entrance to reach the high ledge area. He builds the bridge with you watching from the ledge. And then in order to actually cross the bridge, you need to go back out, go back to the other entrance, and go back in. What the heck is this part of the game, it's ridiculous. How many times do you except me to go back and forth? And for what, a scene where a bridge is repaired? That's not interesting enough to justify this much hassle!

Later on in the game, in order to create our flying ship, we need to collect 7 pieces of Alumina Ore. And each one is located in a different cave area. ..... it's at this point I was starting to really feel the fatigue of the dungeon exploration, and I finally resorted to using maps from the internet in order to get through the mazes more efficiently. That's sooo many caves in a row, come on. :( Give us a break.

Immediately after the 7 Alumina quest, the game throws the absolute worst puzzle at you:

You have to figure out a four-button combination lock by trial and error, and every failure forces you into an encounter with four pirates that cannot be ran away from, even if you use the Smoke Ball item that guarantees runaways. And these guys use party-wide sleep attacks and confusion attacks, too, so they're extra irritating to deal with. 

There are four buttons you have to hit in the correct order. So 24 possible combinations. And... that's all there is. You have to just guess??? Yeah. You need to just try each of the 24 combinations, one by one, until you get lucky. And... yes. That's literally it. That's actually all there is to this puzzle. 

There are two hint plaques, one that simply tells you that you need to hit the switches in the correct order before trying to open the door, and another that says "The door won't open if all the switches are already down". ...but this is an INCREDIBLY BAD hint! Because it's NOT TRUE. You do need to hit all four switches before trying to open the door, otherwise it will summon the pirates every time. 

This hint is trying to inform the player that the puzzle isn't doable before the point in the story where you're supposed to do it - if you get here early, the switches are all sunken into the floor and uninteractable. But if you didn't see what this room looks like beforehand, you'd never know - you'd assume that the hint meant that the switch puzzle requires you to only hit three of the four switches, and you'll be here forever trying wrong combinations because of it. Wow, what a horrible misleading hint to an already horrible puzzle. Honestly inexcusable. Especially bad considering this comes immediately after the quest to get 7 Alumina ores, which already was making the game feel like a huge chore. This puzzle is the icing on top.

I gave up around 10 failed guesses. After having to fight the most obnoxious pirate encounter ten times in a row, I just looked up the answer online. ...What an absolute disaster of game design this puzzle is.

... Any goodwill this game still had with me was entirely out the window after that ordeal.

So anyway. Toward the end of the game, we finally reach the Fortress of Doom and confront the Sinistrals. Interestingly, the final dungeon is in fact the very same dungeon from the prologue. It even has the same hint tutorial signposts, which is kind of funny to see right at the end of the game. 

But annoyingly, the game removes Lufia from the party for plot-related reasons. She's given back during the final fight, but this means that it's now impossible to re-equip her or level-grind her beforehand, since she's not given back before you trigger the end of the game. So if you save in an endgame state, you'll just be stuck in a world without your full team. That's rather annoying - I always feel like, in an RPG, the endgame just before the final boss should be the time to tie up all your loose ends, with free reign over the whole map. But since they take away Lufia, your options become significantly limited. Not a fan.

Anyway. I don't have much else to say. This game was okay, but not amazing. It definitely tested my patience. 

It is pretty much just a decent Dragon Quest clone, with some questionable game design decisions, and nowhere near the level of quality as actual Dragon Quest.

A bit unfortunate. But I don't regret playing it. 

I've heard that Lufia II is super amazing, so I look forward to playing the sequel in the future.

:)

The Sword of Hope II

 The Sword of Hope II

Okay, so after playing the abysmally unfair adventure-RPG that was The Sword of Hope on the Nintendo Switch Online service, I remembered that I had actually purchased "The Sword of Hope II" from the Nintendo 3DS eShop before it had shut down. I remember at the time finding it strange that the eShop had the sequel available but not the original. (well, nowadays the 3DS eShop has nothing available, so I guess it's all moot at this point)

So... I suppose now's as good a time as any to actually play through it. I mean, presumably I bought it with the intention of playing it at some point, right? And it turns out that point is now.

Since I just finished having a rough time with the first game, I was hoping the second game would be better.
And...well, it is! it is better. It's still a real slog to play through, but it certainly is a better game.

The sequel takes place after the first game. An evil guy named Zakdos has taken the Sword of Hope and is planning to do something evil with it. Theo must once again stop it. There's not much more to it than that.

The basic commands are carried over from the first game - "Look", "Open", and "Hit" commands are the main way you interact with the world, with the ability to use Items and Magic as well. It has the same exact same point-and-click first-person presentation as the fist game. Though I do think the visuals are better in this game.
The world design is better in this game, too - environments are more varied and interesting compared to before. There's an underwater volcano, a beanstalk castle tower, and a bunch of other interesting locales. Compared to the first game, the adventure is a lot more straightforward too - there is no more required backtracking to previous areas, which means there are no longer points where you have to remember something unusual from an earlier screen. There also aren't as many trapped rooms that warp you to different screens - at least, not until the final castle. I guess this game could be considered a bit more streamlined.

The biggest improvement to the playability is the ability to save the game at any time. In the first game, there was no proper saving, and you could only get your password from the shaman NPC in the starting area. But in the sequel, you can just save at any time and it's fine.
So even if the combat goes poorly, as long as you've been saving on every screen, you can reload and continue without too much worry.


Combat has improved. The extremely wild fluctuations for damage rolls from the first game have been toned down significantly. The damage rolls now resemble that of a normal RPG battle system. So finally, it's actually possible to have any kind of combat strategy. fancy that.
The spells are also decently useful in this game - you can blind enemies to incapacitate them and make them attack their allies, which is fun. And some spells can target multiple enemies at once. It's a decent JRPG combat system, but it's nothing mindblowing. Overall, the enemy difficulty is quite high, so it will take a decent amount of grinding encounters to get strong enough to win.

We now have multiple party members too - Theo is joined by a mage boy named Mute, as well as one of three additional party members who join and leave the party as the story progresses.

With all of these combat improvements, I now no longer feel like the game would work better as a strictly point-and-click adventure - I do think the JRPG combat is worth having now that it's functional. But...as much as the combat has been improved from the first game, it's still not really all that fun to play.
The problem is, combat is so extremely SLOW to resolve. It's abysmal. The text scroll is slow, enemies' attack animations are slow and happen one-by-one... it all feels very clunky, and it just takes so long to sit through. And it doesn't help that encounters are extremely ridiculously frequent in this game too. Almost every step you take into a new screen triggers an encounter. It's not all that fun to explore because combat is constantly interrupting you, and the interruptions take such a long time every time.


I think it was actually a mistake to play this on the legit 3DS Virtual Console version I bought. I would honestly have had such a better time if I was on emulator and had access to speed-up functions.

Because... to be fair, the world design and dungeon design is not bad at all. And even the JRPG combat system is good - it works well and provides a reasonable challenge.... it's just too slow and painful to sit through so much boring combat. If I had the freedom to roam the dungeons and fight stuff at a decent pace, this would honestly be a really cool little game. But as it is now, it was just a frustrating slog.

So... if I was going to recommend Sword of Hope II to players nowadays, I would have to insist you play on an emulator with speedup. That's all it really takes to make this game fun tbh.

The overall verdict regarding the Sword of Hope series is... The Sword of Hope 1 requires rewinds in order to be fun, and Sword of Hope II requires fast-forward in order to be fun.
Funny that. Neither game really holds up without emulator functions propping them up.
Yeah. Don't play either of these games on original hardware if you can help it.

But I do think they are decently fun GB adventures. I'm glad I got to see them. ...now I want to go and play some actually good games next.

The Sword of Hope

 The Sword of Hope

Recently, a little Game Boy adventure called The Sword of Hope was added to the Nintendo Switch Online service.

I decided to give it a go.

The Sword of Hope is a small dungeon-crawler style exploration RPG released for the Game Boy in 1991.

You play as prince Theo, who must defeat the evil influence of a dragon who is controlling the king. Theo must visit three wizards to gain the power to confront the dragon. ...There isn't much plot in this game aside from this. It's a basic fantasy premise.

The game is played in the classic dungeon-crawler style. You have a small window showing a first-person view of the current room, a window showing the current available directions you can travel, and a window showing your commands: "Look, "Open", "Hit", "Magic", "Item".

As you travel through the rooms, you will encounter enemies, which are dealt with via classic JRPG turn-based battles. 

The adventurey aspects of the game are fun enough. You begin in a forest, and at any time you can "Look" at the trees in each room, and the forest spirits will give you hints about where to find hidden items or passageways. You need to find three keys in order to meet the three wizards, and each wizard has a small task for you to complete before they give you their aid.

The map design is okay. There are one or two confusing mazes, but there are generally enough unique landmarks that it's not too difficult to keep your bearings. It would have been nicer if we had an in-game map though. :/

As you explore the game, Looking, Opening and Hitting every interactable thing you come across, you may see messages saying "It looks like there may be something here...!" yet, oddly, nothing further happens no matter what you try. Later on you may get a hint saying "Go back and find something in the swamp" or "look for something in the graveyard", and if you've been paying attention, you might remember which particular rooms had the funny text last time you were there. So finding your way to the next objective isn't too bad in this game, especially compared to other games of this style such as Shadowgate. You just need to interact with everything on every screen, and not get too lost.

This game's English translation is pretty terrible, but it adds a certain charm to the game. I kind of love these really unusual and awkward phrasings, and thankfully none of the puzzle hints were botched too badly by the weird choice of words, so I've got no complaints there. You don't really get games with such weird English like this any more, so I like to relish it when I see it.

However... despite being a decent little adventure game, there is one aspect that makes this game bad. Not just bad, but truly miserable to play. And that is, unfortunately, the JRPG-style combat.

The combat in this game is just plain unfair. First of all, enemy encounters are extremely frequent. Not untypical of old RPGs, but still very annoying. 

But the biggest issue is in just how completely random the numbers are. You can do an attack, and it can randomly decide to inflict 6 damage or 45 damage. You can take a hit from the enemy, and it can deal either 7 damage or 50 damage. ...By endgame, you've got around 100 max HP total, to give you an idea of how bad the fluctuations are. It's bad.

Levelling up can mitigate this effect somewhat - regular attacks from enemies will get weaker and weaker the higher your level. But annoyingly, it seems that magic attacks are completely unaffected. You cannot level up your magic defense at all in this game, which means that the final areas of the game are a nightmare to traverse through. 

And this isn't the kind of game where level-grinding is satisfying either, because all of the damage variance means that you can never feel safe in how much damage you're doing. So in order to grind, it's either fighting nothing but weaklings for hours, or trying your luck against the stronger enemies, and dying repeatedly as you do so.

It honestly kills the playability of this game because you are always dying in unfair ways against any magic-using enemies. And the final dungeon is full of them.

The final boss is the most ridiculous final boss I've seen in a while. He is entirely immune to your spells, and he will take anywhere between 1 to 40 damage from your sword attack. And he will cast high level spells at you every turn, dealing anywhere from 7 to 70 damage. It's just impossible to plan for it and there really isn't much you can do to protect yourself other than pray you get lucky.

The only way I was able to defeat the final boss was making heavy use of the Nintendo Switch Online app's ability to rewind. If I got a low damage roll versus the final boss, I'd rewind until I got a good one. And if he killed me in one hit, I'd rewind until his hit did less.

I can't imagine playing and beating this on an actual Game Boy. It's so unnecessarily unfair. I honestly just wish it was a fully point-and-click puzzle kind of thing like Shadowgate. There was no need for the JRPG combat to be in the game at all tbh.

So anyway. This game sucks. the combat design completely kills the enjoyment. I guess it's good that the NSO version exists now with the rewind functionality available, but as a game from 1991, it's horrible.

Soul Blazer

 Another quickie. ...I was just playing a bunch of emulated snes games so I could get some quick game completions done before the new Switch 2 Donkey Kong game comes out, heh.

So anyway. this time I played Soul Blazer.

This is an action-RPG from 1992 published by Enix. ...I seem to be playing a whole bunch of Enix SNES games as of late, huh? 

in Soul Blazer, you play as a warrior, sent down to earth under the watch of The Master (...is this the same "The Master" from ActRaiser perhaps?), in order to restore a land that has been completely wiped out by the evil Deathtoll.

The game is structured like this: You arrive at a town area which is completely empty. You venture into a dungeony area and defeat monsters. Defeating the monsters frees the spirits of the trapped living beings, who begin to repopulate in the hub town as real people again, one by one. Freeing spirits also causes new buildings to appear and new areas to open up in the town. After reaching the end of the dungeon area, you fight a boss, free the spirit of the main townsperson who holds one of the magical orbs you need to collect in order to find Deathtoll, and you are then granted access to the next town to do it again. There are six such towns in the game.

Soul Blazer is a simple little action-RPG. Your main actions are walking around and attacking with your sword. The attack feels good in this game - your sword has a good arc to it that can hit enemies beside and behind you comfortably. You get Exp from killing enemies and can level up to become stronger. You can also find new equipment to increase your attack and defense as you progress through the story. 

Soul Blazer has an Ys-style inventory system where your weapons and armor menu contains every piece of equipment you've found, and you can freely swap back to previous ones if you want. This is useful since some armours have specific effects, such as the ice armor that prevents hot floors from damaging you, or the bubble armor that lets you survive in underwater areas. 

You have a little spirit orb that floats around you, which helps you cast magic spells. When you kill enemies, they drop gems, and you can cast spells by spending gems. You find spells throughout the game - it's fireballs and other things like that. The spell will be cast from the spirit orb's position rather than from the hero's position, which is a bit odd, but it means that your magic requires a bit more timing and precision to aim.

In order to free the trapped spirits of the living, you need to destroy monster lairs. Lairs are tiles in the dungeons that continuously spawn monsters. In order to destroy them, you need to kill every single monster that emerges from the spawn point until it runs out and there are no more monsters.

This system is.... kind of interesting, and kind of monotonous, at the same time?

The interesting part is that, if you want to do it efficiently, you kinda need to figure out a good position to stand in so that the stream of spawning monsters will each approach you in a way where you can safely dispose of them. Sometimes this is a simple matter of standing near a corner, but sometimes it can be a bit more tricky than that. It depends on the monster and on the terrain. The monotonous part is... since some of these lairs can have quite a lot of monsters in them, there's a lot of time spent in this game just repeatedly pressing the attack button standing in front of the spawn points, waiting for them to finally run out of monsters...It can feel like it takes a bit too long sometimes, because you don't know how many monsters are left in a lair until they're all gone.

The boss fights in this game are an unfortunate difficulty-spike in my opinion. The first boss, for example - it deals a lot of damage, and the arena has three conveyor belts in it that make it difficult to find a good place to stand. The later bosses aren't much better, especially one really annoying boss fight atop an airship, which has gusts of winds blowing you around the entire time...this one is especially hard.

 There is only one healing item in this game, a healing herb that restores all your health. You can always replenish your herb as long as you've resurrected the herb shop owner's spirit, but you can only hold one herb at a time, which means that there's no way to "stock up" on more items to help you with tricky bosses. You can grind enemies for level-ups if you're truly struggling, but for the most part, this is a game where you need to figure out the boss patterns and get good at dodging. 

Aside from the bosses, I'd say the difficulty of the game is pretty relaxed and easygoing. The dungeons never feel too complicated to figure out, even though there's no map. And there are enough opportunities to warp back to town and restore your health so that it never feels too oppressive to explore deep into the dungeons. I really like the way it plays.

Once you have rescued people, you can talk to them in the towns. They give you little sidequests, give you hints, or simply just say thank you. The NPC dialogue in this game is quite interesting in my opinion. They believe in reincarnation, and they even give hints about which of their loved ones might have reincarnated into some of the animals that populate the town. It's oddly sweet in a half whimsical, half melancholic kind of way. 

The second town is a very cute forest clearing, populated entirely with animals and trees, with no humans at all. In this game, trees also contain spirits, and even objects crafted from wood still retain their soul and can be rescued. There's a section where a bunch of wooden raft platforms refuse to let you ride them across the swamp until you've proven your allegiance to the forest town. I found this very cute. 

One of the more interesting locations was the mountain village, populated by a race of dwarves who only have a one-year-long lifespan. Yet the people here are happy and thriving, and it is said that they never once consider their lives to be too short.

This game seems to have a lot of things to say regarding life and rebirth. The themes and the messages of this game give it a unique spiritual feeling.

Overall... I really really like Soul Blazer. It's a short, cute little action-RPG, and it has nice, easygoing exploration and combat, plus some interesting meditative feelings to express. Very cool interesting experience that I would recommend to all fans of classic RPGs. :) 

Brain Lord

 

Just played Brain Lord

I don't feel like going too in-depth for this game. So instead I will just write some basic impressions.

so anyway. Brain Lord.

I don't understand the title of this game at all.

Nothing in the game is a "Brain Lord". The main villain is a Demon King. The plot involves the power balance between Demons and Dragons - as the last Dragon is slowly dying, there will be nothing to counterbalance the Demon King's evil. So it's up to the hero to defeat the Demon King before that happens. Y'know, normal fantasy RPG stuff.

...So where does the name Brain Lord even come from? What is it referring to??

"Brain Lord"...???

I don't think the word "brain" is even uttered a single time in the entirety of the game's script. ...is there any explanation? or did they think it sounded cool for some reason?

I don't think it sounds cool, it just sounds...  not representative of the game at all. it sounds way too 'heavy metal' for a regular ol fantasy rpg.

Weird title aside, Brain Lord is a SNES game from 1994 published by Enix. It's an action-RPG. I played on emulator.

You play as Remeer, the son of a Dragon Warrior, who is tasked with exploring and investigating the disappearance of dragons from the world. Remeer is part of a squad with four other members, and as you play through the story, you'll frequently run into your squadmates during your expeditions in the dungeons. Which is a cute detail. Sometimes they give you items, give you tips, or even open a shop so you can buy and sell items. It's nice to feel like you're adventuring as a team, even in a game with only one playable character.

The graphics of this game.... are honestly kinda not so great in my opinion. Environments are fine, but the character sprites just look really really weird. Characters are represented at an awkward half-overhead view that doesn't read well. Remeer looks weirdly broad when viewed from the front, and weirdly fat when viewed from the side, I just... don't like the way it looks lol.

Remeer can attack with a variety of weapons - sword, boomerang, bow, flail, axe. They aren't all useful - sword has the best arc, bow has the best range, flail has the best damage, and axe can break small rocks In one cave but is otherwise useless. Boomerang feels entirely useless.

Remeer can also jump, which is used for platforming in the dungeons. There is no EXP, rather Remeer gets stronger by finding powerups in chests - health upgrades, strength upgrades, and defense upgrades. Also by equipping stronger weapons and armour of course.

The game structure is quite skewed in favour of dungeon-exploration - the game has two small towns, two tiny overworld connections between them, two small connecting cave areas, and five MASSIVE dungeons to explore. The bulk of your playtime in Brain Lord will be spent inside the dungeons.

The dungeons are full of traps, monsters, puzzles and secret passages.

The first two dungeons are the trickiest and most interesting in terms of puzzles - they have secret walls to push, button combination locks to solve, and occasionally specific holes to fall down that lead to secret areas. These puzzles are hinted at by signs you see on the walls of the dungeons. Gives this game a very dungeon-crawler feel to it, which is something I always like.

You get "x-ray glasses" that can be used to see a map of the current floor you're on, but it really only shows the floor plan, and doesn't show doors or stairs very clearly. It can be useful for noticing hidden pushable walls though, if you're paying attention.

Most of the secret stuff is hinted at in some way, which is good, but there are a few optional secrets that aren't. Or at least I didn't find the hints. 

But there are some puzzles in this game that are just...plain bad. The worst puzzle in the game is this: There's a locked door, and three buttons on the floor. A sign nearby says "To open door, the secret is on your control pad". ...try all you might to press the buttons in the correct order, nothing ever happens. The solution is to face the locked door and press the X button on your controller. ... ... the buttons on the floor do nothing. ... I mean, what? What kind of puzzle is that? Just a red herring puzzle? I had to look up the answer online.

 

The third dungeon is the most obnoxious dungeon, in that it has slippery ice floors, spikes that pop up from the ground without any visual cue to watch for, fountains that poison you instead of heal you, signposts that poison you when you try to read them, and some other things designed to antagonise the player. Also, bizarrely, the Ice Castle is the only dungeon you can't return to once you complete it, so if you accidentally missed a health upgrade, it'll be gone forever if you beat this dungeon before getting it. ... I don't understand why this happens - nothing in the game necessitates the dungeon locking itself after beating it - it just literally removes itself from your warp menu with no explanation. ...all the other dungeons are fully backtrackable, and nothing else in the game is missable. Did they just want to make the Ice Castle as annoying as possible, or what?

The fourth dungeon, the volcano, is annoying in its own way - its main gimmick is rocks that randomly exist or not exist whenever you scroll the screen over them. Most of the time the passage is blocked by the rocks, but if you walk back and forth a lot, you can eventually get lucky enough that enough of the rocks chose not to exist, allowing you a path forwards. This isn't really a puzzle, this is just annoying. The cherry on top is when you find a special "Rock Breaker Axe" in this dungeon - its description mentions it can break rocks, but it doesn't work at all on these gimmick rocks, and in no way helps you overcome the dungeon. It just breaks the regular small rocks from earlier that any axe can break. ... Is this game just full of jokes at the player's expense, or what?

The fifth and final dungeon's gimmick is that it has a lot of pitch-black rooms with invisible walls to navigate through. it sucks.

The later few dungeons also get really annoying with the enemies and traps and platforming jumps too. You end up taking a lot of stray hits as you navigate around. Thankfully, just before entering the third dungeon, you get given a familiar who can restore your health. If you grind the familiar up to max level, it will restore life at a rate of 1hp every few seconds. Which means that you can at least mitigate the damage from the traps if you keep this familiar equipped at all times. As long as you don't mind spending a while leveling it up first. 

Overall... This game was okay. The first two dungeons set expectations high for a game full of interesting unique puzzles, but the latter half of the game really phones it in with bad unfun gimmicks that I wouldn't exactly call puzzles.

I don't really recommend playing this game tbh.

Also the name "Brain Lord" is stupid.

the end.

ActRaiser 2

 I just tried and failed to beat ActRaiser 2.

ActRasier 2 was released for SNES in 1993. I played it on emulator.
As far as I know, this game has never been re-released.


ActRaiser 2 is a slow-paced sidescrolling action game with extremely high difficulty.
In fact this is one of the most difficult SNES action-platformers I have played.


You play as The Master, a godlike being who descends to earth in order to fight the evil forces of the demonic Tanzra.


The game has a world map menu where you can choose from a selection of levels to play in the order you like, however some levels will only open up after beating certain previous ones. In total there are 14 levels in the game.


The Master can walk, jump, crouch, double jump, glide, and swing his sword forwards or in mid-air. He can aim his sword diagonally upwards while standing, and can thrust the sword downwards while jumping as well. Additionally, he has a shield that will block projectiles as long as he is standing still. So there are quite a few moves in this game, more so than the typical SNES platformer.

The Master's walking speed is.... really slow. This is quite a slow-paced game.
As a huge fan of Castlevania, I am no stranger to slow-paced action games, so I get it, but... I dunno, this game does feel especially slow-paced, even when compared to Castlevania.

The double jump and gliding controls are really awkward. This biggest issue is that the Master will automatically begin to glide after every double-jump. In order to double-jump without gliding, you have to hold up on the d-pad in order to preemptively cancel the glide, which is super awkward to do.
If you mess up the timing, then the Master will start soaring through the air, which will often lead to your death if you did it accidentally. Whenever he touches the ground while gliding, he has this sliding-braking animation that can get you in trouble... If you're stuck sliding, you can't avoid enemies, and you might slide off the ledge into a pit. It's really annoying.

I kind of just wish that this game had a specific button you needed to press in order to start gliding. I wish I could just double-jump without having to constantly worry about also needing to cancel the glide...

From a glide, if you press down + the attack button, the Master does a diving attack, which can be pretty handy on occasion. But it is also rather awkward to pull off.


Additionally, the Master has seven magic spells he can use. If you hold the attack button, he will start charging and glowing red. Once he fully charges, releasing the button will do a spell depending in which direction you hold:
If you are standing, he does a flamethrower. If you are crouching, he does an earthen barrier. If you are holding up, he does a fire bomb. If you are in the air, he does an electric blast. If you are gliding, he does a sonic wave. If you are gliding and holding up, he does a thunderbolt. If you are gliding and holding down, he does a phoenix dive.

I do like this system where your magic depends on your current action, but... most of the spell effects are pretty underwhelming in this game. The spell animation doesn't really last very long or look that impactful, and they're all super awkward to aim.
The only spell that I found to be any use is the fire bomb, as it travels in a big lobbing arc, and it inexplicably deals a ton of damage to the bosses. All of the other spells, especially the ones you need to glide to do, I found way too awkward to ever use seriously. Especially since it requires you to hold the attack button, meaning you lose the ability to defend yourself whenever you want to charge one up. So most of the time, trying to use a spell causes you to just take damage trying, and more often than not you don't even manage to land the hit after all the fuss.

Casting a spell costs 1 MP too - you start each level with 3 MP, and can occasionally find more from random enemy drops or from breaking specific power up pillars. So it is pretty limited.

...

So... what makes this game so hard?

To put it simply, you move slowly, there are enemies everywhere, and the checkpointing is extremely unforgiving.


So here's a typical first-time experience with ActRaiser 2...

You begin the game, and the world map cursor defaults to hovering nearby Industen, the forest level. You select this level and begin. First thing you notice is how beautiful the environmental scenery is. Lush jungle foliage, fantastical giant mushrooms, this game has some great environmental pixel art.

Second thing you notice, is that there are goblins on the mushrooms that jump directly in your face the moment you approach, there are worms crawling out of the ground and emerging directly underneath you, and there are dragonflies flying right at you, all at once. All at the same time. You can't make it very far before being completely overwhelmed by this cacophony of enemies.

So you try again. Again and again. You take it slower. You start paying attention to exactly how the enemies behave and where they are located. You learn exactly what distance a goblin will jump from the mushroom so you can back off at just the right time to deal with it. You learn how many hits it takes to kill a dragonfly so you know how safe it is to let them approach. You learn where not to jump in order to not trigger additional dragonfly spawns. You learn which enemies to prioritise - if there is a worm and a dragonfly chasing you at once, which one will reach you first? You might even figure out that your down-thrust attack can kill a worm or goblin in one hit. Nice. So you die and try again, you die and learn, you die and figure it out, piece by piece. And... eventually you get a decent grasp of the first few screens and can even sometimes get through without taking damage.

Eventually, you make it to the mid-boss. It's a carnivorous plant with a big flytrap maw. It charges at you, spits fireballs at you, and you die immediately. ...So you make it back to the midboss again. Every attempt requiring you to get through the hellscape of goblins and dragonflies beforehand. And you die immediately again. It's impossible. The plant's vulnerable point is behind its huge jaw, how can you reach it without taking a hit?

Eventually you might figure out to use the magic fire bomb for its high damage, or the flamethrower for its brief period of invulnerability. Or you might learn how to continuously down-thrust its weak point to do more damage than just slashing. There are ways to get through the fight, but none of them are intuitive, and so it will take some experimentation to figure out. And each and every death requires you to brave the previous path again.

And when you finally manage to triumph, what happens next? Well... the screen continues scrolling. That was just the midboss after all. ...And you don't even get a health refill either.

Immediately afterwards is a swampy mud floor, which spells instant death if you fall in. So you need to do some actual platforming now. You jump onto the mushroom platform hovering over the mud pit, and.... an offscreen frog jumps into you from below, completely unpredictable and unreactable. You die and it's back to the very beginning.
What in the actual heck was that. How was I supposed to know...?????

So okay. Try again. Goblins. Dragonflies. Big plant. ....do it again. And again. Until you can get through the plant boss consistently.

Okay finally. Now we know to avoid the frog, but... what is this next section? There is a faraway platform inside a tree trunk that can only be reached with a glide-jump. And not just any glide jump will do. It has to be an almost pixel-perfect glide jump.

...
For whatever reason, ActRasier 2 has a fascination with pixel-precise jumps. Almost every stage has at least one of these. A jump that requires you to get riiiight up to the very edge of the platform, and then jump as high as you can, initiate your double jump at the exact highest point of your jump, glide perfectly straight forwards, and land just on the very very edge of the platform on the other side. It's ridiculous. And if you fail this jump, it's back to the beginning for you. There hasn't been a checkpoint yet. Go kill that plant again if you want to try this jump again.

It doesn't help that this particular pixel-perfect jump also has an unreachable enemy in the way too? So you either have to somehow dodge the enemy mid-flight, or waste an MP killing it beforehand. And you only start with 3MP, so you'll have to have not used them all up on the plant beforehand, and have no plans to use them at the end-of-stage boss either.

So at this point, after failing this ridiculous pixel-perfect jump for the billionth time, you might decide to try one of the other stages.
There are six levels available on the world map from the start, after all.

Well............ the other levels aren't much better. what are you even expecting? Starting afresh with a new level means learning all the enemy placements and level layouts anew. Learning new miniboss patterns, learning new specific techniques that help in specific sections. And then failing to yet another pixel-perfect jump or unfair enemy spawn deep into the level. And doing this over and over and over.

The typical player's impression of this game is one where they try playing for hours, and yet never managed to make any progress at all. They try all the available stages, don't manage to complete a single one, and then give up entirely. I've seen this story online several times when looking up opinions about this game. People tend to dislike this game because they can't get anything accomplished, and have nothing to show for their hours of efforts.

...

So, anyway. I decided to play ActRaiser 2 for two days straight. I learned those levels and figured out how to damage the bosses efficiently. It took a lot of patience and a lot of practice. And you know what? I was actually kinda enjoying the game. I wasn't having an awful time by any means. It was pretty fun figuring out this game and getting the hang of things. There's something satisfying about getting to grips with a difficult game, even if it is designed to be maddeningly difficult.

And eventually, after all of this practice and repetition, I did manage to beat....12 of the 14 levels. ...That's as far as I could get.

The problem with level 13, the Tower of Souls, is that... in addition to a fairly lengthy platforming level with precision jumps and swarms of ghosts who love to appear right in front of your face without warning, is that the level ends with a boss rush segment. You have to defeat six minibosses in a row, and THEN the end-of-stage boss immediately afterwards. And... I just couldn't manage this. I was getting too frustrated because I kept having to redo the tower platforming so many times. It's so irritating when you just want to get back to try the bosses again, but keep failing the precision jumps because the glide is too finicky to control. It was getting on my nerves.
So after trying and trying and trying again and always eventually dying to the boss rush... I just gave up.

I looked up a speedrun of the game online so I could see the ending. Apparently level 14 ALSO contains its own boss rush! what the heck. And the final boss looks ridiculously difficult on top of that.
So you know what, I think I'm done with this game. 12 out of 14 levels is good enough for me.
...

Anyways. I had a fun time with ActRaiser 2 overall, even though it was way too hard and unfair for my liking.
It's not a bad game, but maybe they could have balanced it a bit better to make it more palatable?

If I was younger and had fewer games to play overall, I believe I would have probably stuck with it until I beat it. I have beaten every single Castlevania game after all, so I'm always up for a challenge. But for the point in my life where I'm at now, I'm just happy to have reached as far as I did.