Pure Of Heart, Egg Of Head

I’m trying to be unbiased about my reviews so I’m not using letter or number grades here, and I’m also trying to think of a stand out high and low point of every game.

Hollow Knight

Primal Planet

Axiom Verge

Axiom Verge 2

Worldless

Ultros

Voidwrought

Metroid: Zero Mission

Gestalt: Steam & Cinder

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Metroid Prime

Strider (2014)

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon

Laika: Aged Through Blood

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

Ori and the Blind Forest

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

Blasphemous

Fusion is a good game. I like that it gives Samus a slightly different set of abilities, and I like the stealth segments, and I like how the X feels like it’s atapting against you and hunting you most of the game, this is all very cool.

This game controls like a modern Castlevania title, and the art style is immediately stunning.

The enemy design is absolutely gruesome, I love it.

What’s not so stunning is how hard it is. You die in six hits to basically everything, and spikes and pits kill you instantly. It’s extremely unforgiving, and feels oppressive. Unfortunately, as a result it’s just not that fun.

Maybe that’s intentional but I’d prefer it was a little easier.

Most of the time, I can’t play these games on calls or while riding in a car, or something like that, because i want to experience the full game’s experience that it has to offer. I want the sound, i want the music, I want to pay attention.

Harmony of Dissonance. Is not like that. And it has not aged well at all.

To start, there’s the visuals. On the one hand, they were designed for the original gameboy, on a non-backlit screen, for everything to be readable that way. This, at least, is a cute artifact of how gaming has changed over the years. It doesn’t make it look any less like shit today, but it at least excuses it.

I can think of no such excuse for the music. You can argue it’s because of limited memory or computing power, but I know none of that is true. Circle of the Moon came out a year earlier and sounds better. Hell Megaman 4 came out 11 years earlier, and its musical composition still goes hard. So there’s no excuse as to why Harmony of Dissonance sounds bad.

The gameplay is pretty good, although I was looking up Juste’s abilities for this and for a big death battle tournament thing I’m running with some friends and I realized I don’t remember a damn thing about it even though I definitely beat it.

Okay, so the game looks bad, sounds bad, and plays unmemorably, but the story? Oh boy, the story????

It’s also mediocre.

You’ve heard it before. You’ll hear it again. Ori is a great game. I started it a while ago but got distracted for a few years and had to restart it as part of this Quest.

Story-wise it’s heartfelt, it’s bittersweet. It’s a story rooted in loss, and sorrow, and hope.

Gameplay-wise, it’s a lot of tight platforming, and Ori’s movement is extremely smooth.

My one and only complaint is how much late-game relies on staying airborne 80% of the time, by jumping off of projectiles shot by enemies that have… Inconsistant targeting.

I liked what this game was going for, managing resources, and a spin on Prime 1 with new gameplay implementations.

But… I really hate Spider Guardian. I gave it a handful of attempts, and I could probably push past it now, now that I’ve played much, much worse games. But when I played this the first time, the runback combined with how annoying it was made me rage quit.

I’m at the point where I could give it another go, but dusting off the gamecube is inconvenient, buying the trilogy is expensive, and emulating makes this game 40x worse.

Many interesting Metroidvanias bring something new to the table. In Laika’s case, it’s being on a motorcycle the whole time.

I think that the fact that this game pushes too far into the Trials: Evolution style movement holds it back though. Past a certain point, basic navigation is really annoying. And that’s something I don’t really want in a Metroidvania.

Circle of the Moon is a bit different from what I’m used to for Castlevanias. It’s quite a bit harder, given the sparcity of save points, and general lack of healing items.

Back when I played it, I was emulating it, and I abused Turbo and save states a lot.

Still, it has a lot of charm to it. The DSS is fun to play with, the bosses are fun and memorable, especially Aldramelech and the Zombie Dragon.