Dandy Dungeon: The Legend of Brave Yamada

This is great. It's Yoshiro Kimura's (former Square and Love-De-Lic employee, director of Chulip and Little King's Story) first independent effort, and it's definitely my favorite free phone game. It's a grid-based dungeon crawler with a meta-twist; it has a really solid gameplay loop, which consists of drawing your way through the floor of the dungeon and engaging in auto turn-based battles with the enemies you pass through. There's no ads, and I was able to beat it without spending any money. It has tons of loot and outfits and items and optional dungeons and daily and seasonal events---it's a pretty meaty offering.

Mostly I love it because it's just really strange, crass, and entertaining. It's full of goofy characters and designs, like Yasu, a suit-clad child who looks up to Yamada; an Indian coder who's such a master laptops levitate around him; a giant two-faced asparagus monster that emerges from the floor; and Yamada's love interest: the much younger Maria-chan who loves sweet potatoes. It has a real goofy sense of humor that's totally in line with many weird Japanese games from the 90's and 00's, which is suitable given Kimura was a part of so many.

It's full of surprises and it's free. If you like weird Japanese games (Eno, Suda, SWERY, Nishi, etc.) you owe it to yourself.

People play games for a lot of reasons, so it can be almost anything that causes people to drop them as a hobby. I'd say that people who grow out of them are probably people who weren't fascinated by or drawn to the fundamental form of video games, but rather saw something in or through them that was really something else; and video games, being available when they were younger allowed them to access that thing.

So for example: bonding. I stopped caring about sports when I stopped spending time around other people who also followed them. I didn't have any motivation to do so on my own. I think there were a lot of people who liked games because it was something to do with friends---I think this is especially true for local multiplayer. I think this could be for true other people who observe stories that are interesting to them (but those kind of stories are better served in literature or film), or find aesthetics they enjoy (that are more prominent in visual arts) and so forth. Games are really accessible; if people don't have a console in their house the odds are they have a phone or means of mobile gaming.

And then the time factor comes into play too. A lot of games ask for time that some people just don't have. I know people who like reading who won't go near Anna Karenina; just like I know people who play games casually who wouldn't start Persona 5.

Kirby Super Star

It looks good and there's a lot of content, but that's about all I'll give it. Each stage or game is really underdeveloped, and the buddy ability trivializes the already lame difficulty and level design. There are some neat ideas, but they're either passed over or only half-committed to.

Nightmare does a couple cool things as a franchise. I think Dream Warriors and New Nightmare do some neat things conceptually.

Wanna give a shoutout to Sin and Punishment and Lack of Love, which would have made my list but they're Japanese.

Also glad FFIX beat out Majora's Mask, which starts and ends great but doesn't mess with the Zelda formula in any way I found interesting or valuable.

Alice: Madness Returns

This might have been a solid 5 hour game, but holy moly is it padded. Just about everything is barely competent, but the level design really kills it: floating platforms with the occasional puzzle and a whole bunch of flat areas with enemies. There are little minigames to try and break it up, but even those are repetitive and overlong. The thing is, I think it looks really good. The visual fidelity helps bring out McGee's art style, especially when it comes to the character design.

The first game isn't very good either---the gameplay is a good deal worse, but it feels both more unique and more in-line with Alice in Wonderland. The environments felt like more than a palette-swap too. Conceptually I think these games are neat, but they're a real chore to get through.

Haven't finished this yet, so the jury's still out, but Skies really captures the spirit of breezy adventure in a way that few RPGs outside of Chrono Trigger and select Dragon Quest entries do. The visual design is excellent, the pacing is fantastic, the combat is simple and gratifying, there's engaging side activities and collectables, and the characters are plucky and work off one another really well. It's a real triumph of tone---that sort of lyrical optimism quality JRPGs are able to achieve. This is one that I feel could be higher if it was a better known and distributed game.

God of War (2018)

I see all the money on the table, but that might be all. I never had that high of an opinion of the previous GoW games, but the previous ones were coherent, flamboyant, and used their mythology in an enjoyable, pulpy way. This one sorta doesn't on all counts--well doesn't as well anyway.

The camera was annoying to me, since more effort needs to be put into managing off-screen enemies than the one(s) in front of Kratos, and given that this series gets its challenge from throwing enemies by the bucket-loads, it's a frequent problem. It seems better built for single enemy encounters, and it works for that when they aren't pushovers; some of the valkyries were fun. There's also the 'one-shot' concept of its camera placement, but I don't think it does anything interesting with that concept (a concept made less interesting due to a non-physical camera). It rarely ventures more than 3 feet from our protagonists, even in non or semi-playable cutscenes.

And the storytelling just seems half-baked. There's a lot of exposition, more than the actual events of the story require. It's simple: a father and son venture to the top of a mountain pursued by the bad dudes, but it's just spread thin. You ostensibly get to the top so quickly, then the game just tosses contrivances one after the other to send you in other directions for the magical this or that. It felt padded to me, and the character work, how Atreus and Kratos play off one another is fine, but it wasn't enough to keep it afloat, especially among all the optional, out-of-the-way areas. Also Faye might be the most interesting new character in the game; she's the reason why the story is happening at all and I think seeing rather than hearing why Kratos and Atreus thought so highly of her would have been really cool. Too bad this thing opens with you lighting her corpse on fire.

I wish it was meaner, riskier, leaner.

I didn't like Persona 1 or 2. They just played like slow, lame SMT games. Haven't got around to 3 through 5, which I understand are a lot more gratifying and unique.

I have a list of favorites and a list of stuff I want to play, both are organized by debut year, and I've been trying to go through my to play list in chronological order if possible. Been working through the mid-90's of late.