Klonoa

Pretty good! I like it more than a lot of other early 2.5D platformers, there's a real clarity to its design and moveset. It's a bit on the short and easy side, but it's a very pleasant playthrough. Funny that I played this not long after Mischief Makers, another semi-polygonal grabby-throwy 2.5D platformer from 1997. Hard to say which one's better, but I might go with MM because it tries to be more things, even if it isn't as refined.

Alright, 12 I plan to beat this year:

Persona 3
Gravity Rush
Shadow of Destiny
Riven
Alundra (quit)
Megaman Legends
Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey
Xenogears
Doshin the Giant
Viewtiful Joe
Nier
Moon: Remix RPG Adventure (depending on if I get a Switch)

I think you can skip The Laundromat and maybe Birds of Passage---that one has some interesting cultural value, but I thought it was structurally and dramatically a pretty underwhelming and ordinary drug empire story.

Mischief Makers

Pretty cool. I was surprised by its structure, with very short levels and a fair amount of ones with unique objectives and design. As always with Treasure, the boss fights are fun and the game controls well, though its strangeness doesn't always work in its favor. For one, I think it's a little ugly---I don't like that a good number of the levels are made up of these blocks with faces on them, I would have rather seen them try to craft unique environments. Some of its experiments don't quite pay off, but I like that it's trying things.

Still fun though. Not top-tier Treasure, but in the better half of their games imo.

No order:

-Beyond Good & Evil
-Drakengard
-Sutte Hakkun
-Panzer Dragoon Zwei
-Maximo: Ghosts to Glory

Celeste

So this is a pretty rigid game. It's responsive, but so much of it plays like a manicured execution test rather than a process of navigation that allows for a player to really stretch and improvise. All that I heard about this game before I played it was about the storytelling, and I think that facet is really bad. Just bad cutscenes and annoying characters and some of the most heavy-handed metaphor use I've seen in a game. Did people like it because it was encouraging? Because stroking the player's ego is one of my least favourite things a game can do.

Still, it's nicely put together and well segmented. I played it all, even if I didn't feel good about it afterwards.

Eternal Darkness

I like the first half of this game, which plays like a survival horror Timesplitters, with all the protags getting smoked by evil gods, but it begins to repeat its environments and throw legions of slow, boring enemies at the player---a player with entirely too much ammunition and spells. The sanity effects that everyone hypes up aren't that impressive and shouldn't be happening in the back three quarters of the game, as the player gets a spell to replenish sanity fairly quickly. There's no genuine psychological dimension, a story that starts off promising and then goes nowhere, and weak, overused combat.

A shame, because I like the setup and the multiple time periods and settings.

@tokyoslim Have you ever seen a Japanese silent film with a benshi? I've watched a couple with benshi audio tracks before and it's great!---I'd really like the opportunity to see one live. That's why the dialogue cards tend to be pretty infrequent and bare in Japanese silents, there was usually someone orating at the same time.

Also it's a shame that it wasn't That Night's Wife; I think that's the best Ozu crime story.

Dragon's Crown

The first Vanillaware game I've played, and I thought it was pretty tedious. It's about 3 hours of game that it wants to stretch out to over 8. It wants to ask things of its player in its story and sidequests and the like, but they all amount to running back and forth in town or going back to the same handful of levels and playing them again. Its beat-em-up combat is ok, but I wish the enemies were more of a challenge and asked for more than just being stunlocked. I guess the art (which is neatly stylized, but only really impressive with screen-filling enemies) comes at a price---there are only so many assets that can be made. Hard to tell if the amount of artwork couldn't fit the ambitions, or they just really wanted to pad the thing out. Pretty lame.

Resident Evil --> Only in Darkness Can You See the Stars