Recent reviews by (M3) spd12

Advance warning: Both games in the collection are photosensitivity hazards, and the store page doesn't warn of this (though the in-game start-up screens do). No effort was made to smooth out the flashing lights in battle effects or animated scenes. In fairness, this would have probably involved significant additional work on part of the developer, especially for said animated cutscenes. Since this may be a dealbreaker, I feel compelled to lead with that point.

Context: did play 2/3rds of the first game on PS1 when I was much younger, completely fresh to Lunar 2. Played through first game in about 20 hours, and got to the second game's postgame content in about 22.

These are very old Playstation 1 games, themselves updated ports of Sega CD games. As role-playing games, the gameplay itself uses turn-based battles, where the challenge is less 'winning individual fights' and more 'conserving your resources across a dungeon.' Many of your characters' abilities are strong and useful for clearing these fights, so you have to strike a balance between when to spend MP, setting aside money for recovery items, and knowing when it's time to head back to rest and restock.

A lot of the depth with the boss fights themselves - which always require you to bring your A-Game - is how all enemies will use unique animations in order to communicate which attack they will do on a given turn. This makes fights feel a lot more fair in terms of decision making, once you learn what animation signifies what incoming danger.

There's also a positioning element which I feel can be clunky and frustrating to work with, rendering 'Zone' range attacks difficult to gauge as to who they'll actually hit at times. There's always a strong risk that said enemies will move in a way they separate from one another, which can lead to making the tests of attrition more aggravating in places. Positioning your own characters in-battle (beyond pre-set formations) is limited, with two options: defending and moving somewhere, or using normal attacks to run right up to the enemy's face. This rarely comes up as an issue, but it can.

This collection reverses the gameplay changes that the original localization company - Working Designs - did in order to artificially increase the game's length by either necessitating further grinding, removing vital in-game information to sell strategy guides, or otherwise making certain things more resource-intensive (more for the first game than the second). One unique balance change the collection itself does is for the first game, enabling you to use items from the full inventory rather than those pre-loaded into a character's inventory, but this can be turned off.

What the collection does keep, is the vast majority of Working Designs' translation work - which took significant liberties with the source material and added a lot of (often dated) jokes. This hasn't stopped the game's casts from being very charming in their own right, even if many are simplistic archetypes of the genre. The narrative beats that call for genuine emotion still hit the bullseye, and memorably so. There are a few changes to the text that feel like pragmatic dodges of a higher ESRB rating more than anything (as well as one particular stand-out racial slur in the second game that has fallen out of favor in the decades following), as almost all the vulgar and off-color humor has otherwise survived. It may not be entirely accurate to the original Japanese script, but it is largely faithful to the memories of those who played the game in the PS1 era.

The English voicework in the collection is brand new, which may be jarring for some. Having played the first game, Nall's voice required the most getting used to, but everyone does a fantastic job with the material and some may even exceed the original cast (which is no small feat). The battle voice clips may grate over time due to repetition, but the delivery is top-notch. There's only been a few instances where deeper-voiced characters had their sound mixing set too quietly when their tone goes lower, but otherwise it's as clear as can be - especially with subtitles available in cutscenes.

I've seen balking at the 50 USD price tag as the remastering was ultimately done with a light touch, but these are two well-balanced, well-paced games that were celebrated in their day - the second, especially! - available commercially again for the first time in many years. I missed out on the second game entirely, and having gone through it, I'm glad I got the opportunity to finally experience it. The first game remains a charming, breezy tale, but the way the second ramps up the stakes and takes a more nuanced look at the setting's trappings still holds up here in 2025. If it were 50 USD just for the second game alone, I'd do it.

It's unmissable if you're a fan of the genre, especially if you missed the games outright in the past.

It's a simple and inoffensive monster catcher game for the most part, with its main story doable in ~12-15 hours of play. If you just want to bite into a Game Boy Color-like 'me too' of the genre's earliest years of popularity, it scratches the itch. From what I can tell, it's all put together by a solo developer with a love of the genre.

I can't really give a 'mixed' review, so I'm erring on the side of thumbs up because I did enjoy my run with it to this point of the game's update cycle (Jan. 11th, 2025 as of writing).

However, it feels rough both as a stand-alone game *and* as an advertisement for the developer's MonMae engine.

The game could benefit from a little more downtime in its flow, such as more broadly pointing out specific type match-ups and giving a little bit more lead-in to what Elite Trainers use (something I think only two of them get the benefit of in-game). Many of them are just abruptly plopped in your path with little lead-up or chance to prepare, and the back half of the game almost seems to just grudgingly include them for the sake of having them as a genre convention. The power curve feels all over the place and difficult to know when you're good and ready to take on later challenges.

The story, I can tell, comes from a heartfelt place about old friends and loss, but feels disjointed between the villain team and discussion of psychic powers that never really gels well. I enjoyed how it ended, but feel if the game just slowed down some and did a better job of inter-weaving your friends with what the villains were doing and how certain other key NPCs were involved, it would've come together as something even better.

The biggest problem is that I feel it's not a clear showcase for what MonMae both provides and is capable of. It shows you can put together a competent, if simplistic monster catcher game. However, the game never really blocks out the experience to give any special notice to a specific feature to the engine, and in fact is missing enough genre staples at this point (passive NPC raising, breeding, fast travel) that it feels like I've been sold an Early Access game without that label. (The game's main story can be completed just fine, I need to reiterate, but the omissions are visible and noteworthy.) This could also probably be solved with better pacing in the main game's story and flow, slowing down to give spotlight to specific engine features here and there.

There are still some very neat ideas in play here. The ability to set your Dokimon's moveset from a limited pool at any time, and the ability to re-fight most 'Rangers' for money and experience - where they also grow in strength and thus given experience on repeated defeats - took some of the edge off the genre's pitfalls of time-costly commitments in making choices and raising creatures.

This isn't lined up to be an all-time hidden gem, but if you just want a quick jaunt through a simple monster catcher game, this will do.

A fantastic action platform game that makes use of a grappling arm as its central mechanic for getting around and fighting, with strong art direction, a killer soundtrack, and an intriguing story to boot - though it should be noted the game is very story-heavy with platforming sequences being more of a break in the (in?)action sometimes. Later platforming sequences are no slouch in asking you to know what you're doing, though.

The biggest knock I can give it is that it overstays its welcome towards the end, and a handful of the late game setpiece encounters asked for maybe a little too much precision with little leeway for reacting. They use every game mechanic idea to the absolute fullest, but it did start to feel like it was simply going on for the sake of going on in that final stretch.

As the story feels like the main draw, I decided to call it good after finishing my one run on Veteran instead of trying the 'one hit instant loss' difficulty, as I see some areas where revisiting with that restriction would feel not fun to revisit.

Still, a friend gifted it to me out of nowhere for Christmas and I found myself gripped enough to want to see it through to the end.

A compilation of 50 games spanning a whole lot of genres, where even the least of them are pushing forth interesting ideas. There's something here for everyone, and several of them would be worth the asking price of 25 USD alone.

It's one of the few games where I feel the less you know going in, the better, as a lot of fun is in discovering the games one by one. Most don't come with very much in the way of instruction, as they want you to get a feel for what's what on your own. As the game's control schemes are simple in terms of button presses (directionals + two action buttons, usually), it doesn't feel too daunting to go a few clumsy rounds in which to figure out what a game wants of you.

If you just like "games" as a general whole, it's a steal.

Sep. 14th: Edited with an additional thought as to why the game ends up shorter than most games of the 1991 era of similar length.

This game feels more like a novelty in 2024, even if it's relatively authentic to the early 1990s. If it existed back then, it'd be a fine Blockbuster weekend rental, but there's only 90 minutes of content here (which includes a few level replays for missed coins).

This is a simple run and jump platformer that apes a few design notes from the US Super Mario Bros. 2 (rather brazenly, in a way devs of the early 1990s might not have risked doing), and for the most part it knows the lanes it's staying in. You run, you jump, you can pick up and throw lettered blocks or stunned enemies. Sometimes you climb, sometimes you dig in sand.

The imagined level themes both feel like real era-appropriate stereotypical level designs, and have fun cameos of the adult cast going about their lives in ignorance of their kids' adventures. On the default difficulty, the cookie-based life system and separate life meters for the babies encourages you to swap as needed, though in nearly all circumstances Lil and Chuckie handle the levels better than the other two babies.

The level design is mostly good, but both the Attic and final level both have serious problems with sine wave movement enemies in tight corridors, blind jumps into pits, and enemies you can't have known about until they hit you. The final level has an occasional issue with a respawn point placing you over a pit, which wiped out a cookie's worth of life before I could wrest back control of the respawned baby's descent. A descending enemy needs to have its sensitivity to player presence raised, as it's otherwise impossible to bait without damage.

(New paragraph, Sept. 14) One major detail about this game compared to others of the era it's mimicking, is that it is way less punishing in terms of checkpoints and falls. In most games of the 90s, falling into a pit was an instant loss. Here, it's no different from being hit by an enemy, and you're always spawned close by. This means less time spent 'catching up' to where you were, which means the game feels shorter - but that's the trade-off for respecting a player's time more.

The Kitchen level stands out as the best-designed in terms of teaching its gimmicks and using the puzzle elements involved to good effect - I'd consider that the game's highlight level. Even then, all of them are devious about hiding the side paths with coins, which requires you to be curious and unlearn the immediate urge to always go up and to the right - something that might come more naturally to younger players.

I played my run specifically in the HD graphics specifically to see if the art design can sometimes mask the actual platforming gameplay, and I'm pleased to say for the most part that it passes this check. The Bedroom level can be a little too visually overwhelming, and the final level does attempt to hide bottle springboards just out of sight.

As said in the beginning, it's a novelty at best in terms of length, but I can applaud the effort of the MIX Games and Wallride for making an actual NES game out of a property that never received one! It's just harder to give a whole-hearted recommendation when there's some game design decisions that we've all long since outgrown in the decades that have come after.

Strangely enough, they've decided to offer this game for free within a day of its Steam release on a competing store platform, which reads like the publisher having low confidence in their return on investment by accepting a mere lump sum and calling it good. This development team deserves way more confidence in their work than that - I think without the stringent limitations of NES game design limitations, they could make something special if given another chance.

This is a very old NES game! It should be noted that this is the original Japanese game, Hebereke, and not the rare European release that got translated, so all the in-game dialogue is in Japanese. Even the options are in Japanese at first, but this can be changed from the first screen. You can go to a menu after seeing an in-game dialogue box to check out a 'Special Snap' and see what was said in the 'Ufouria' localization and thus clarity on what's going on, though it is a bit cumbersome and the translations sometimes a bit spotty (a missing word here and there, etc).

To look at the old 1991 game with 2024 eyes, it's quite something!

This is an early Metroidvania! You start with someone who can't swim or cross ice, and gradually open up the world as you find your three friends and a handful of specific power-ups that let you further explore the world. It guides you early on with directional arrows, then lets you take it from there.

The four characters are all utilized fairly well and have plenty of chances to shine, though Jennifer (the fourth character) has to deal with some repetitive brick digging and Ochan (the second character) has at least one finicky freeze-block puzzle for sake of a major time-saving convenience going into the endgame.

Most enemies are dealt with by stomping them (pressing down as you descent is a good idea), or by picking up round faces (Popuun) left behind by defeated enemies or stomped bosses. Bosses themselves usually have a 'stomp them, throw Popuun' rhythm with only a few exceptions and are typically simple enough to grasp and fight. Some enemies can be mean about their movements (jumping chicks out of eggshells, upright frogs tossing smaller ones), but usually a little patience saves you trouble.

A modern rewind function in this new edition lowers the frustration of time-consuming mistakes that better represents a player's time, and even in 1991 early pick-ups give you a map and glowing spots to say, 'there's something here!' Thanks to the latter and less so the former, I was able to clear the game in roughly three hours while finding everything, so keep this in mind - it's a short and sweet affair.

For speedrun enthusiasts, one doesn't even need to scour the entire map to get the bare minimum to clear the game - a genre staple even back in 1991 - and it can be fun to try and route out your optimal path to winning. This game has a mode dedicated to timing your runs (which for my part I have yet to try), if this interests.

This is an easy recommendation for someone looking for a quick, simple game that left a small legacy in its time. Hebe and friends are a charming lot, going by the translations of the original Japanese, and it's a shame they've only recently got a chance to bring that to international audiences long after their original run.

The 'Enjoy Edition' is well-named, and an enjoyable romp even if you intend to play it casually the once.

First things first, given the 25 USD asking price: this game is very short, even if you're taking your time with it. I messed around for a while and still finished the game in less than four hours. The price is the biggest knock I can give it.

Beyond that barrier, it's a short and sweet platformer with some Metroidvania stylings. Each level is short, but does mix up its structure a little every time you play it to cut down on repetition. Some repetition is necessary, in order to both find Utsu-cans (that unlock upgrades) and coins (that let you buy the upgrades). They're all punctuated with amusing skits between your playable cast that also do a good job of explaining almost everything that matters. The aesthetic is charming and well-realized.

Boss combat always remains simple, as it's always some permutation of throwing a projectile and then performing a stomp. Sometimes the projectile angle is a little finicky to work with, and you need to commit to the jumping attack in order to score a hit. The game understands the narrow scope of its combat, so the bosses are all simple beyond variations of their movement, placement, and room features.

While this plays on the long legacy of a series that didn't make it out of Japan except for the platforming game - which is where the '2' comes from - I feel its best audience would instead be with younger players newer to platforming games and also a gentler introduction to Metroidvanias on top of that. If this were out in the 1990's, this would be the definition of an excellent rental game. There are some legacy jokes that will be lost on younger audiences, as 30 years is a very long time ago.

Be forewarned there is one nasty game design mistake that's a real sucker punch - late-game, some platforms spawn that also shoot enemies. One is set beyond a pool of lava, and it can very easily strike you out of the air with no warning... or fill the edge of it full of sludge, leaving you with no place to land.

This is a simple action platforming Metroidvania title, at its heart - and that heart is in good working order.

The appeal is in how it invokes the aesthetics of an infamous set of games using licensed Nintendo characters on a failed multimedia system (the CD-i from the early 1990s), so if you aren't familiar with Hotel Mario, the Faces of Evil, or the Wand of Gamelon... you might be left wondering what's so special about the intentionally silly low-resolution animations of intentionally hit-and-miss voice direction. The homages to characters animated by the long-defunct Animation Magic studio might fly over your head, but for those 'in the know' they're a treat to discover.

Even so, it's a technically competent action game with simple design, gorgeous level design that is only rarely unclear on what is a platform, and the rare bit of aimless backtracking across replayed short levels when it's not clear where to go next. There are a few instances where one needs to make a blind descent which is the biggest level design issue by far, though the penalty for death is merely just resetting the room you fell in, so the annoyance rarely lasts long.

General advice: always carry bombs, and if something looks cracked, throw a bomb at it. Hitboxes can be a bit deceptively large, but as your sword deflects virtually all projectiles the issue is usually mitigated. You can find a shielding item early on that lets you take projectile-heavy situations at your own pace usually, and enemies that only attack with projectiles tend not to deal damage by being directly touched (so if you encounter a shielded enemy you can't yet damage, typically you can just walk past them - and will need to do so at least once).

With some better signposting this would be an even better game, but on a ~5 hour first time run this didn't overstay its welcome.

Star Ocean's second game in the series was the first to make the leap outside of Japan, and arguably the best. At face value, it's a simple action RPG that's a little clunky in targeting flying enemies and managing distances, and an interesting story whose stakes ramp up over time (and splits interesting tidbits between its two viewpoint protagonists - one of whom you choose to play as and encouraging you to replay the other later for any missing context). This would have been a fine game on its own. They layered a skill and crafting system on top of all this, enabling someone 'in the know' to all but break the game over one's knee... and the rest was history.

This remake goes a long way to sanding off the rough edges of the old game, while handing you the keys to the game's skill system almost from the jump and says, 'have fun!' The only complaint I can give is that it's possible to purchase skills to certain crafting options you aren't given the means to actively engage until some ways in, but other than that, it does a much better job of explaining the game's systems so that you can explore without constantly diving into an online text FAQ to figure out what was what (a common thing in the old days). Even the battle system has received a little extra depth in terms of timed defenses and the Break system, which adds welcome layers while respecting the original game's design.

The game is gorgeous, respecting the original spritework and animations - if not the particle effects - while updating all the environments and lighting to take advantage of the modern day's capabilities. Modernizations like fast travel and clear indicators of content to be found (or able to be missed) allows it to respect your time better across a roughly 40-hour playthrough. While some content is now locked away behind clearing the final boss once (compared to the original, where there was no such restriction), a New Game+ option also allows you to replay the game with minimal fuss to catch and see what you couldn't the first time.

I could keep going on, but this game should serve as the golden standard for a remastering update of an old game going forward and is worth the time and money if you wanted to see one of the better RPGs of the late 90s in an accessible and respectable way.

If you're a fan of the Sonic franchise characters, this is an excellent story and a legitimate (if simple) mystery.

There are isometric action sequences whose difficulty can be adjusted in the main menu if they are putting up too much of a fight for you, but there are red flashing lights that might pose a potential seizure risk.

Beyond this health warning, wholly recommend.