Oh my God, I was joking. I didn't think there would actually be a mobile spinoff, and if you hadn't told me I never would've known. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a match three type of game.

...ahahaha actually maybe I'll just uh, wait on that advice because I am reading things such as "fry your console" if I eff up.

Oh shiiiit I just did some research and I also have an unpatched model! Time to learn how to homebrew...

I... I don't think I know what most of those acronyms were. Mind explaining to a total newb to Switch moddery?

After all, there may be a chance I can also do this if my Switch is old enough...

Wow, it sure does look awesome. I never got to experience the original Platinum, but Pearl was my first mainline Pokémon as a kid. The disappointment I had in these indefinitive versions of Gen 4 coming out after Legends: Arceus seriously hit me with nostalgia I didn't even know I had, was palpable.

My only problem is that I still can't afford a second Switch to do modding/homebrewing on

I KNOW emulation is an option, and I can definitely probably run it, but the real deal in my hands feels like a necessity for my enjoyment. I've run into this same dilemma recently when wanting to mod Breath of the Wild (for fun) and Pokémon Violet (so it actually runs decently at all), and the potential of Nintendo banning me from the eShop and other online services is just too terrifying for me...

Luminescent Platinum... That one's new to me. What sets it apart from Renegade Platinum?

I really liked Prime all the times I've played it; it was one of the first Shooters I was really able to get into, because I suck at them too badly to ever play one with a controller; my princess ass needs a mouse and keyboard. That said, I haven't played it since discovering mouselook and playing several Shooters after that, so I don't know how well it'll hold up for me. The Wii version is a definite no-go, though; 3 really pissed me off with how the lock-on would constantly fight with the point-at-to-make-die interface that the Wiimote provides.

I'll have to see if I can figure anything out about it, whenever I get around to replaying it. Magic of Scheherazade is a game I played and abandoned without even finishing the first chapter on at least my first two playthroughs, but once I did dig in and take the time to finish it, it became one of my all-time favorite NES games. It's got some hardships to endure, but the experience isn't quite like anything else I've ever played; it felt like Culture Brain finally achieved what they set out to do. It takes a little while to figure out the combat, especially, because you've got both real-time and turn-based battles that work completely differently from each other. The U Can Beat Video Games channel on YouTube has a great guide for it, too.

As much as I loved Reggie, he might as well have been the trumpeter of the goddamn Apocalypse, because he was first and foremost a businessman. Not to mention that those business models don't make any kind of logical sense, aside from, "This is how to squeeze the most money out of players; we don't care if it totally breaks the game." That doesn't surprise me, if my assumption that WB is the publisher is correct; not that any of the other major publishers are blameless or even customer-friendly, but WB is pretty awful.

I do usually like that kind of thing; I'm a big fan of the Mega Man X games and how many movement options they give you, because it's super satisfying to chain them together in places other than "HERE IS A BLOCK THAT SAYS TO USE THIS ABILITY". That's a pretty surprising addition; I can't think of too many games that do something like that. Of course, the Metroid community at large is OBSESSED with speedrunning and sequence breaking, so it makes sense they'd bake that right into it. That said, I'm not, but I do try to keep up on the different tricks you can perform in Super Metroid, because a lot of cool hacks require them; I have to brush up on some of the newer ones, but the only well-known one I can't pull off is mockball. If you'd said that about one of the Prime games, I'd be worried; I can't play those twitchy Shooters to save my life!

That does make sense; it's interesting that it knows what the best counter would be, too. I wonder if it's something like Magic of Scheherazade's formation system, or if there's a bit more complexity to it. Shame it's not a more popular game, since that'd make it more likely for someone to crack it open and see how it all works. Of course, that didn't stop Zaraktheus from doing that with SaGa Frontier, so I suppose it's always possible.

Well, that sure tracks, especially today; seems like that's more obvious than ever with the bigger budget games that have come out in at least the last 10 years. The medium started making too much money, so the businessmen moved in and shoved the artists out. Maybe, if we're lucky, they'll totally ruin the industry, cause another gaming crash, move out, and then we can have people who actually care about making games calling the shots. If not, I'll just keep saving a lot of money on new games. 🤷‍♀️

I do really like the subgenre... subsubgenre? so I generally look out for them, too, but I've found a lot of duds just the same. I haven't played Metroid Dread yet, but then, I don't actually have a Switch, either; my lady does, but she's not as into Metroid, so we don't have a copy. I think my sister does?

Oh nice! So, are you playing it in Japanese or English? It is a very solid game; maybe not going to blow anyone's mind, but once you've played all of the Final Fantasies and even Breath of Fires (Breaths of Fire?) on the system, it's a great one to check out. It went really hard, too; I remember there being several different systems present in battle, so it wasn't just the same basic system that's been around since Dragon Warrior. I'm pretty sure I didn't get all of the living toys, but I do remember Mi Armour. Don't think I ever figured out how the transformations work, either. It really does resemble that artstyle, though; I hadn't been super familiar with either of those games when I played it, so I'd thought that the main character looked a little like an animated scarecrow.

That's pretty good; as someone who's done translation work, I know that some things, ESPECIALLY jokes, just don't translate well. Surprising that it got such a good localization, though, since it was a very tiny fish in a sea of RPG sharks, though Earthbound was like that, too.

I don't remember much of that; what I do remember (that's not spoilery) is a tournament, a certain duo, a certain trio and the final boss. Yes, the cave music is also excellent, and it has one of the most unusual battle tunes I've heard, along with the Phantasy Star 2 boss music and the Democratus battle music from Anachronox; none of these really sound like battle music, but they're good out of context.

I'm enjoying it quite a bit, too; it was at the top of my Steam wishlist at one point, and then it came out on GOG, so I snapped up that DRM-free copy. I was a little worried playing it on the heels of Foregone, Smelter, and Even the Ocean, which I'd been even more excited about, but it's still really good; very Symphony of the Night in a totally different way from how Chasm was. Thanks for the tip about weapon leveling, too; that stuff always gets me in a twist, and I wind up doing a lot more than I should with it. I do like how your main weapons just get stronger, and how elemental attacks are a viable option; Order of Ecclesia really blew it in that regard, because the elemental stuff was always weaker than the straight weapons. Oh HELL yeah! I love this one, too; think I just got here last night, though that's a safe bet, since the only other time I played, I didn't make it much further than the first boss.

Yooooooo, I can't even REMEMBER the last time I heard someone mention Guardian's Crusade! I haven't played it since it was new-ish, but now I kinda want to pick it back up again. I do pretty vividly remember the overworld music and some of the characters, though.

24 Killers is coming out on March 9, 2023! Check the trailer: [Link]

Hmmm, it's hard to comment too much on Dark Cloud 2 since I haven't played it... But your impressions definitely paint a picture of a sequel that looks at the first game, cuts out elements that didn't work, and then also cuts out elements that did work for some strange reason.

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As for Tron Bonne, for a significant portion of the game the control scheme is possibly exactly the same as Mega Man Legends... but I think there's at least a couple things that make it more tolerable.

(1) The rigidity of the controls feels more appropriate since you're controlling a lumbering mech suit... as opposed to MML where you're a dude but the control scheme feels like it wants you to play like a fighter jet doing fly-by raids.

(2) The game in general emphasizes action and combat a lot less. If you do all of the missions, I'd say only about 30% of the game's run time is action-based at all. The rest of the game is taken up by a couple of other modes which weren't in MML at all: a puzzler mode where Tron has to steal containers of goods from a shipping dock, and a first-person "RPG" mode where you explore a mine in search for Crystals. These two modes were probably my favourite part of the game, generally.

The missions can be done in any sequence, so if you found yourself really disliking combat, then you could save the action missions for last. Once you have the final weapon, the Bonne Bazooka, nothing in the game will really pose a challenge anymore; you can wrap up the stages quite effortlessly with it.

But yeah, great game. Like with Mega Man Legends, I think it's greatest strength is definitely in the character interactions and its saturday-morning cartoon energy. A particular favourite character of mine (and probably everyone) is Denise, a rookie cop who ineffectually attempts to apprehend Tron at various points in the story.

Yep, that's my main issue here, team plasma you can see that there is a clear difference between what N, the grunts and Ghetsis are thinking and what their goal is, so you can at least somewhat understand and relate to them. The problem is everyone else really, the gym leaders are REALLY aggressive when they talk to you about pokémon and how you should bond with them, then you have Cheren in his power trip (but honestly, that was basically a rival staple for some of the older games so it's fine), and then there's Bianca who is there to give you the contrast of "you can actually just have pokémon because you like them and not to be strong", but at the same time she's travelling and keeping up with you so it's not like she's weak either.

It's not only about the main characters either, if you talk to everyone even random NPCs are constantly talking to you about how great having pokémon is to the point that you really have to wonder who is in the right here lol I love how N tells you at one point that you're in a position between pursuing strength and pursuing bonds regardless of strength so you are "neutral" and I was so flabbergasted at that. It's less about being neutral and more about nobody asking me for my opinions lmao MC just gets involved in everything because other people tell them to, Team Plasma never gets directly in your way and the MC never goes out of their way to fight them.

Hm, I think you nailed it on the distribution of weapons. Thinking back, I always remembered that the game felt like it had draughts and gluts of equipment drops. I imagine most similar games must have some kind of pseudo-random RNG to make it so that you don't go too long without getting something good, but Dark Cloud must be purely random.

I'm a bit surprised to hear that you didn't use Xiao or Ruby much. You're right that their move-sets are super basic, but they're ranged characters in a game that was clearly designed with melee combat in mind most of the time. In my playthrough I remember the vast majority of enemies having nothing at all that could really hope to stand up to them, and they trivialized encounters to the point where it felt cheesy even using them. You mentioned agile enemies... I feel like I can recall a few of those, but it was the exception to the rule. Maybe there's more in the last few dungeons.

I definitely remember Goro... I honestly think he had one of the worst feeling attacks in any game I've played. And I guess Osmond is ranged *and* can always be on the move! So I guess he'd make a lot of enemies feel even more trivial than the other two ranged toons.

I agree that the durability system encouraged you to swap characters. I think the game could have used more organic reasons to engage with everyone like that. Probably the best way is to just have the different moveset be stronger or weaker against different enemies... but I suppose in an RPG it's difficult to make movesets matter more than just raw numbers. I think the challenge floors ended up feeling rather contrived and could almost be a punishment if it was a character that you didn't enjoy or weren't as itemized on.

I am sad that I never got to see how the last couple of towns worked, I was definitely still enjoying those. (Although, as I said, the first one I thought was the most enjoyable to put together.)

Perhaps if I ever catch you starting Dark Cloud 2, I'll try to pick it up at the same time!

How far are you in Dark Cloud? I started off loving it too... but then the dungeons get longer and longer, you get more and more characters that they expect you to level, and the gimmicks of later towns feel a bit more phoned in. Some of those characters have truly awful feeling animations too... I'll be interested to see if you eventually check out like I did. Gotta love Steve the slingshot, though!

Very curious to try Dark Chronicle / Dark Cloud 2 one of these days. I think having just 2 characters addresses my biggest grip with it.

Rush Adventure was fantastic, yeah! We actually did get a sort of sequel to it with Colors DS. It doesn't have Blaze as a playable character, but the same general gameplay is retained. It's also better paced than the Wii version, imo, as it doesn't make you go through six acts before each boss, it only asks you to play three instead, with three bonus, optional acts if you're up for it. None of them feel as expendable as stuff like the yellow spring auto-scroller levels in the Wii version, either. Special stages are pretty tame, too.

I'd love to see more DS remakes with updated control schemes for some games. I think that'd be great to have and help make them more approachable to people without compromising on the good parts. I'd totally be down for that given how many early titles were forced to have some kind of touch screen gimmick thanks to Nintendo.