Integrity

non-coincidentally, the one that came out when i was sixteen e: to be less pithy, i voted for tellius, but i specifically only mean radiant dawn

it sounds like he's being sarcastic but he isn't, i did actually enjoy the little ufo chaser game lmao

SONIC MANIA (CHRISTIAN WHITEHEAD, 2017) Finished: 19/4/24. Playtime: 20.5 hours. Sonic has treated me weirdly so far as a franchise. It's batting almost exactly .500; I deeply disliked Forces and Generations, largely enjoyed Lost World and Frontiers, and unrelated to this thread had an absolute ball with The Murder Of. None of the four games I've gotten achievements for have benefited from the process of getting achievements for them, so I really probably should stop. But, of course, I won't, in that eternal seeking of the thread that unites what I like and dislike about Sonic, searching for the ones I like in the mix. You've seen all the goddamn Mega Man posts by now. Mania sits comfortably at the bottom of the list of Sonic games I've played. It fought valiantly with Forces to stay off the bottom for quite a long time before the final zone of the game lost it the war. Even besides that awful final experience, I just never had any fun playing Mania at any point. At its absolute peak, the thrilling heights of my Mania experience, it was just happening at me with minimal friction. At its worst, I was getting actively stuck in stages because of a simple interaction that the game's one-button gameplay doesn't hint at unless you'd known about it from a previous game, like going up the oilfalls. Crucially, though, none of this was ever... fun. At the end of the day, though, I'm almost glad that I did play Mania, because in my experience with the game came a certain amount of revelation as to what about these games, Generations in particular, isn't working for me. I think that the biggest thing this has shown me about my Sonic experience is that there's a fundamental disconnect between the game that I think Sonic is and the game that Sonic wants me to think Sonic is. It isn't a game of blistering speed and quick reactions to stay on the tightrope to blaze through a stage, it's a game of memorizing upcoming hazards and learning the stage design language deeply enough to predict jumps so that you can maintain that speed. Your ability to go fast is purely stage-based and has next to nothing to do with how well you control Sonic, which I think I touched on a fair bit in the Lost World recap as well but it's more cemented now. Sonic is the maps, the levels; without those, he's just Diddy Kong with fiddlier controls and floatier jumps. Sonic himself is empty. He's simply a vessel through which you are able to project yourself to experience the stages. So, reversing my thinking, a different problem emerges. I don't think these stages are particularly fun or interesting to explore. If they're not interesting to explore, I have no motivation to seek out alternate paths. If I'm not seeking out alternate paths, I'm not replaying stages. If I'm not replaying stages, I never get to go fast, outside of the (frequent) times that the game autoscrolls you quickly through a series of springs and loops and cannons. It's something I mentioned in the Mega Man 10 recap - it might be a game that feels great to be good at, but the process of getting good at it sucks enough that I never get to the point where I am good at it. "It gets good 20 hours in" can work for an 80-hour RPG, contextually, but it works a lot worse for an 8-hour platformer. All of that is high-concept and none of it is touching on the real stinkers that Mania lays down. Every stage (12 split into two Acts apiece) ends in a boss fight, and the boss fights almost universally suck, and no two in different ways. Some are opaque, some are boring, some are actually hard; I don't think I enjoyed any of them except for the Puyo Puyo one, which is incredibly random and a total pacebreaker but at least Puyo Puyo is fun. The actually hard ones, including the final boss, truly take the cake. Sonic Mania (2017) cleaves hard to old styles of life management: you have three (and maddeningly game over when the counter goes down to 0 rather than when you lose your 0th life), extra lives are sparse, and if you get a game over you go back to the start of Act 1 of whatever stage you were on. For a good few stages this is a retread of maybe ten minutes, something to grumble about and then get terrain crushed again and lose another life. For the finale, Titanic Monarch Zone, even after the practice of a few game overs it was still a 15-20 minute slog to get back to Eggman and to hope I still had enough lives to give him another real go. That's another anecdotal thing that really gave me the shits during Mania: terrain crushes. I don't know if I'm just not used to the old ways of Sonic or if Mania leans into this more heavily than most, but any time a single pixel of Sonic's hitbox is pinched on opposite sides by moving gubbinz, he will die instantly. This happened to me more times than the sum of all bosses, and possibly more than the sum of all other deaths in the game, and so many of them are just dickish. There's spikes that pop up from the floor in Titanic Monarch Zone to catch you unawares, but in one or two of the placements, the top of the spikes to the ceiling is less than a Sonic tall, so you take damage and then instantly get terrain crushed. There's plenty of times across many stages where you have to swap between alternating platforms, and a little mental or control latency means Sonic gets clipped by the edge of the next one, and that's a death. A big shoutout goes to the magnetic halls in Flying Battery Zone - I came up to a certain hall for the first time and jumped over the spike ball in my way just as the magnetism turned on, and the ball terrain crushed me against the ceiling. I came back up to it the second time, waited for the magnetism to turn on so it would hit the ceiling, laughed at the cheap gotcha, and then went under it. The magnetism, it turns out, cycles off and on. The next spike ball fell on and terrain crushed me. This was both the most frustrating and most prolific way for me to die, and probably contributed more than any other single element to my lack of enjoyment of Sonic Mania. The other major element is that, for a momentum-based platformer, Sonic's wielding of physics and momentum is gently deplorable. The biggest point of contention I have here has to do with the many, many backwards-facing springs you're supposed to sprint into during many sections of the game. Back in the Ishin! review, I made a comment about the sorcery of how RGG's camera transitions into stores and shit, where you'd have an unnoticable grace period to adjust the direction you were running so that Kiryu didn't run into a fixed camera area outside a Don Quixote and then instantly turn and run back out of the store because the camera flipped. Ishin! didn't have that input protection, so Ryoma would run into a camera transition, pivot on a dime because he's not on tank controls, and run straight back out. Sonic works the same as Ryoma here. You'll be holding left to gain speed (gotta go fast!) up and around a loop, and you'll shit out of the loop into a spring facing to the right because that's how the stage is constructed for you to go. If you're holding left after you hit the spring for any amount of time at all, Sonic will skid to a halt and lose enormous amounts of momentum. Without anticipation to let go of the buttons so you can properly transition at the spring, a shitload of the time you'll just hit a spring and either skid to a halt or, worse, burn off the speed you need to get up a slope, and then just have to meekly turn around and go back to the spring to try again. It's annoying and, worst, it's constant. This is a multiple-times-every-single-stage occurrence, not a once in a while thing. Not that the once in a while things are less crappy. There's a few instances, notably a boss you chase who fires missiles at you and the entirety of Mirage Saloon Zone Act 1, where Sonic is running forward at all times and his jump becomes fixed, not added, velocity. The Mirage Saloon Zone version is funny, because every time you jump you move steadily to the left, but the aforementioned boss is stupid obvious because you come to a full stop at the apex of your jump even if you're continuing to hold right. It makes a long and dull boss into a long, dull, and frustrating boss. Maybe it's the engineer in me talking, in which case I need to shut up, but I feel like these kinds of things - handling momentum sort-of properly - should be the absolute first thing you nail down when making a game whose entire mission statement is using momentum to go fast. On the other hand, maybe that isn't the game's mission statement at all. Maybe people are here because they like slow exploration and finding places to do what amounts to physics exploits to laugh at them. Who knows. To move on to the achievements, and to continue to harp on Mania for pettier shit, I'm baffled by the wealth of content in this game that's completely ignored by the achievement set. None of the Sonic games I've played have had what I would call a "good" set of achievements, with Frontiers coming maybe the closest, but Mania misses on such a strange pair of levels that I'm left scratching my head. Let's wax philosophical for a moment, if you don't mind. Loosely, I think, a "good" set of achievements for a game should accomplish one (or both) of two things: show off that you've experienced the breadth of a game's content, or show off that you've gotten really quite good at a game. There's exceptions, absolutely, but I'd say a good set at least accomplishes one of those two. Yakuza is a good series to look at for the former and easy to point to. A typical game in the series will have its achievement set based around finding everything in Kamurocho (and outlying cities), doing all the side quests, catching all the fish, etc. Even the bad achievement sets, like Ishin!'s and Lost Judgment's, are bad because of the content contained therein and less because of the achievements themselves. To the latter, you might look at a Call of Duty or any one of many other shooters. With no need to polish up my own skills, Call of Duty 4 took me fewer than 12 hours to crank out 100% on in a single Veteran run, and collection achievements were deeply deprioritized. Most games won't focus exclusively on one of these, but will rather have a mixed approach that skews towards one or the other. Something like Dark Souls has a completionist bent to it, set on getting you to experience all the content, but experiencing all the content is itself quite difficult to do. Super Algebrawl has achievements that can be earned in the alternate mode, but isn't particularly concerned with you experiencing it explicitly. The meat of it is to finish the main game on the top difficulty. This all sounds pretty banal, but the reason I bring it up is that Sonic Mania is neither focused on being comprehensive or focused on you beating the challenge, and leaves an absolutely bonkers wealth of content on the table. To wit, Mania has five different characters to take through the main campaign (six if you count Sonic+Tails separately), each of which can get two different endings (did / did not get all seven emeralds), and a separate campaign under Encore mode. All of this is distilled into a single "get any ending" achievement, as well as one to get the seven Chaos Emeralds but you don't have to refight Eggman with them or anything, you can just get them in the postgame stage selection. It's neither a check on your breadth or depth of knowledge of the game, and there's nothing beyond it. Each stage has a single achievement associated, but most of them are just finding a secret interaction in the stage. That's it. That's fourteen of the eighteen achievements, and fifteen and sixteen are just "spin a checkpoint post really fast" and "get the hidden item boxes at the end of a stage", which I'm told is a Sonic 3 & Knuckles reference that I would never have figured out without a guide. Then, on the other hand, Mania is completely comprehensive about one element of the game. When you touch a checkpoint post with at least 25 rings, you can go to a bonus stage where you have to tag blue orbs to make them red, and if you tag them in certain patterns they turn into rings to be collected. If you tag a red orb, you're kicked out. You get a gold medal for turning all possible blue orbs into rings, collecting those rings, and then collecting the rest of the blue orbs. There are thirty-two of these stages. There are two achievements for getting all silver and all gold medals in all thirty-two of these. Sonic Mania is a game with a ton of ways to play through it and, if followed like a roadmap, the achievements have you pick a single one and shrug about it, and instead asks you to shove your nose deep into and require comprehensive mastery of a kinda-shitty minigame that goes on too long and does not at all beg master of it. It's baffling, genuinely. It's even stranger to me than Möbius Front '83's achievement set of "beat the campaign on normal difficulty" and "win 100 rounds of cribbage solitaire". I don't understand why the decision was made to weight the achievements in this way, and it bothers me that I don't understand. To add onto that, late in the writing process, is Collect 'Em All. The final boss of World 11 is, for whatever reason, a gachapon machine. Collect 'Em All asks for you to spawn all eight possible critters from that boss without killing any of them before killing all of them. This is one of the worst bosses I have ever seen in games, as a concept, because he literally does nothing if you never press his gachapon trigger. You can stand under him, idle, for ten minutes, and the stage will just end with a timeout as he does nothing. So you have to jump into him to spawn the gacha children! This is further muddied by the fact that they take three forms, and one of those three forms suicides on you to do damage. Sorry if he decided to randomly spawn an Amy and you got hit by her, achievement is over. This is one of the worst achievements, on one of the worst bosses, that I've done for this thread. At the end of Mania, I can genuinely say, without reservation, that I did not like the game one bit. What's worst, at the end, is that I still cannot reconcile what it is that other people see in it. I still don't get it. I want to look at my experiences and go "yeah, I thought it was bad, but", but I don't see the but. This isn't a situation where I didn't enjoy the game, like Duke 3D, this is a situation where I don't see what's there to be enjoyed outside of a basic test of skill and pretty pictures whizzing by, and that's far more annoying to have experienced. Anyway, happy Apink day.

BUGGOS (INTREPID MARMOT, 2023) Finished: 17/4/24. Playtime: 13 hours. Real-time strategy is among the least accessible genres out there. It's, pretty correctly, perceived as intimidating and tough to get into, with a wide range of games from the unapproachable Starcraft requiring precision micromanagement to the unapproachable Command and Conquer requiring insane gamespace awareness to the unapproachable Hearts of Iron requiring... well, whatever the fuck you need to successfully get into a Paradox game. Out of the major players, Starcraft 2 might actually be the most approachable due to its wealth of campaign and, especially, co-op content. Because of this, I'm always really happy when someone does a more casual introductory kind of RTS and does it well. Here's Buggos! Buggos is pretty simple on the face of it. You cannot do any micromanagement, it's a game purely based on control and gamespace awareness. You control which hives spit out buggos, which kinds of buggos your hives spit out, and can place a flag for each kind of buggo that they will attack-move relentlessly to. You can also set up structures for your builder buggos to automatically build, limited to extra hives, economy nodes, and various defensive structures. That's it, that's the game. You start small, you get global tech points between maps that you can invest into permanent buffs or more types of buggo, and you can respec at will. Losing a map just lets you back out, reallocate your tech points, and try again. It's very digestible, very easy to get into, and actually does make for a pretty good playground in which to learn decent RTS habits. It's an honest-to-God good introduction to the RTS format for the curious but intimidated. The highest compliment I could give it is that I played half the campaign, fell into a rut, and restarted the whole thing on the top difficulty without either feeling mad about the loss of progress or fatigued by retreading maps. It even knocked me off my game a good few times in the later maps! Fantastic little game. The achievements are not complicated. Ridding each world of humans is an achievement, and beating the campaign (propagating downwards) on each difficulty of five is one apiece. There's a handful more ambient ones to get along the way, but one campaign on Impossible is enough to get all that if you have the background and a bit of chutzpah. The other other set of achievements are for the Survival mode, which is just what it says, with an achievement per ten waves, up to 50. I did it in one try; if you're good enough to do Impossible this will be peanuts to you.

i think that's a fair take, but unfortunately i'm gonna have to ban you for trying to apply nuance to a discussion 😕 i hope you understand

i don't think it's gatekeeping at all unless you're super inclusionary about the term gatekeeping (is that ironic? i think it is) to say that the minimum bar to have a supportable opinion about a video game is to have fisthand experience playing it. watching LPs is all well and good, but they're going to objectively give the viewer a shallower and, at worst, legitimately biased take on the material, especially if the LPer is competent at all at editing and cuts out / compresses grinding sessions and shit to make it entertaining. you can't get a comprehensive Take out of just reading/watching someone else playing, even if you can absolutely get Vibes. post with your mates and joke away, for sure, but when you get to the point of saying "three houses sucks i don't get why anyone likes it" or whatever, i'd hope you at least took a stab at three houses and bounced off of it yourself. e: illustratively, if someone watches my gaiden LP from twelve years ago in lieu of playing the game, and thinks the game looks like shit and they shouldn't play it, that's a completely valid stance to take and there's no legitimate reason they ought to go out and play the game just to have a "legitimate" take on the game to be a real fire emblem fan or some bullshit. i'd also expect that person to know that they don't have the breadth of knowledge to participate in actual discussions about gaiden, because at the end of the day their take would boil down to "integrity thought this game was shit and, hell, i agreed secondhand". e2: i am very deliberately leaving the typo in the first sentence because it's making me laugh

MEGA MAN X LEGACY COLLECTION (CAPCOM, VARIOUS) Finished: 13/4/24. Playtime: 23.2 hours. Are you tired of Mega Man? At this point, I've just become proficient at the games, and I'm enjoying the experience of having takes about them to post about online more than I enjoy having several hours of my life and tens of my dollars. Plus, you know, I did find some gems in there. Mega Mans 4 and 9 showed that the classic formula could work for me, and I did enjoy 7 as a shakeup. I'm sure none of the legacy games will live up to 11's pure majesty, but I've become convinced that they're at least worth my time to play and either learn some shared misery or find a new angle to enjoy. Here we go! MEGA MAN X (CAPCOM, 1993) So as it happens, Mega Man 7 was not Mega Man's big step into the new generation. In the same year that gave us Mega Man's last NES hurrah, X brought Mega Man to the SNES, with new graphics and tools and, honestly, pretty crisp controls for a thirty-year-old game. The game's more action-forward than the surrounding Mega Men. Rather than presenting you with discrete screens of foes to vanquish, platform out of, and move on, the platforming is kept to a relative minimum, the screen transitions are almost completely gone, and there's more and more dangerous enemies to gut through. Mega Man (X? I genuinely don't know the difference) can walljump, swap weapons on the fly using the SNES's bounty of buttons, and dash impressively including retaining his momentum on a dash-jump. It's Mega Man's Bloodborne, is what I'm saying. How's it all come together, though? Well! The structure is the same as its peers, with eight robot master stages and then Sigma's (the series' Wily) stages as a chaser. The robot master stages are, despite occasional friction, I think the best of the pre-11 games so far. It strays a little too far in the direction of having upgrades in stages kind of randomly scattered that you really want to get, but at least it's consistent about them rather than just having 1-3 stages you must not miss an upgrade from. X's problem is that it takes Mega Man's proud tradition of fucking cratering in quality when Wily shows up, and does it far worse. The Sigma stages of X are genuinely deplorable, have way too much shit going on, and culminate in a three-phase boss fight that stands up with all the worst Wilies of the main series. Awful way to go out, but X cannot take its good times away from me despite it. MEGA MAN X2 (CAPCOM, 1994) I'm not used to Mega Man doing anything besides deranged yo-yoing. This is weird. Mega Man X2, I think, I liked a very little bit more than X, but it's a deeply mixed bag. The controls have been gently patched to make dash-jumps off walls not feel like complete ass, which was one of my two main points of friction with X. Besides that, at a fundamental level, busting feels better than it did in X, the dash is intrinsic instead of unlocked, and the leg enhancers give an airdash instead which is fiddly but a good idea. The tradeoff is that pretty much all of the special weapons from bosses feel worse than just busting for everything besides boss weakness exploits - and, honestly, in some of those cases I'd still rather just use the buster. It's a better game, probably, but an objectively shittier Mega Man. The stages fall into a similarly weird paradigm. The robot master stages are, largely, weaker than their X counterparts, but the Sigma stages are far more forgettable (and thus better) than their predecessors. On aggregate, I think I liked it more, but it was a far safer kind of game compared to the first one. X2's omega advantage is in the X Hunters. Mega Man X is, himself, a Maverick Hunter, hunting maverick robots. The maverick robots, themselves, patent the X Hunters, three maverick robots who hunt the maverick hunter. Alan Moore, eat your heart out. The way the X Hunters work is that they seed into three random stages, with their boss doors occupying a side path, and shuffle every time you come out of a stage. If there are only two stages left and they're not all dead, they all leave and your window to fight them is gone. I really like this as a way to shake up the game and encourage you to do anything more than the Mega Man typical boss weakness order clear! I think it's a fantastic effort! The problem is that it's just not terribly meaningful, in the end. Your reward for clearing all three is a Steam achievement and you skip one miniboss fight in Sigma Stage 2. That's it. I don't know how I would have incentivized fighting these guys, but I really wish they had been better incentivized, because this is hypothetically exactly the kind of shake-up the Mega Man formula needed. I hope it's iterated on in the future, but I have the feeling that it won't be. MEGA MAN X3 (CAPCOM, 1995) Oh. Oh no. What happened?? Mega Man X3 sucks. There's no gentle way to put it. The core gameplay is still the X-series gameplay and thus is still fine, at least. The game's got some great ideas, like extra mechs for Mega Man to pilot and cribbing the random bosses from X2 to shake up your playthrough and adding things you might expect from later like an upwards airdash, and it just fumbles the ball on every single one of them. The boss weapons are even worse than X2's, with multiple different weapons that are a slowly accelerating projectile that's difficult to hit enemies with. The upwards airdash takes an epoch to start up and cancels instantly if you input anything including another direction, making it completely worthless in combat and existing only to eat a horizontal airdash and thus make you eat a hit. Speaking of eating a hit, collision damage is off the goddamn charts in this game in basically all situations, so dropping inputs is a way more punishing problem than in previous games. The random bosses just seed into two random stages and don't telegraph where they are, so you just either fight a boss or don't and have no reason to deviate from the weakness order every time. The extra mechs are unlockable all over the stages (4 in total), but you need to unlock the neutral one before any of the others do anything. There's even a set of mutually exclusive upgrades (the chips) that, if collected, lock you out of the ultimate upgrade later. It's a mess. X3's worst sin, though, is that the arm upgrade (required for achievements, alas) actively makes Mega Man worse. A recurring, but pretty lowkey, problem with Mega Man as a whole is that anytime a shot sprite intersects with any single invincible pixel of an armored enemy, the entire shot is canceled. Hit an armored enemy's entire head with a charged shot, but the lower 10% hit the body armor? Tink, whole thing's canceled. This isn't usually a huge issue, more a thing to grumble about and post about the one or two times it screwed you a run, but X3 actively exacerbates it. The arm upgrade enhances your buster to add a fourth level of charge. The fourth level of charge is actually a two-step shot that you can stagger as much as you feel like, but if you make the second hit the first you create a shock combo-style huge shot that does tons of damage. Here come the problems, though. First up, just the shock combo itself - making the shot larger (in this case about 2.5 Mega Men tall) means that it's absolutely worthless against anything that needs the damage to clear it. Even a fair portion of regular enemies have invincible bits, like projectiles they fire out, and if a single pixel of those intercepts a single pixel of your shock combo, you get Missile Commanded. The second, and even more crippling, problem is that firing each step of the fourth charge briefly stops Mega Man, making it a quick ticket to death in a game that's about quick and precise combat maneuvering. You sacrifice the ease of holding a level 3 charge for good damage for the ability to not do damage and much more easily take damage yourself for the privilege. On top of that, the shot fires at the end of the pause in movement (because it's so powerful) rather than when you release the button, so on armored or mobile enemies you don't have the snappiness of control to even land the shots! It's awful! Fortunately, it's not all bad. The stages are pretty decent, and the Doppler stages (this game's Sigma stages [this series' Wily stages]) aren't the massive tank that many other games have been. The core jumping, running, busting loop is at the X level of quality for the most part, which is good. It adds an upgrade that lets you see what upgrades you're missing from the stage select, which is an absolute godsend for when you don't know which single piece of a heart you didn't get. The bosses are the letdown here, with far too many of them falling into the worst Mega Man vice: "bait the boss into doing this attack and dodge and punish, repeat forever because the AI script is so predictable". Game ends on its worst note, too - the Kaiser Sigma fight is among the worst final bosses in franchise history, even including things like 2's alien. Deeply disappointing overall. Is this why Valve is scared to count to 3? MEGA MAN X4 (CAPCOM, 1997) X4 slots itself in as the most whateverest of the Mega Men I've played. It's kind of comparable to 10, honestly, in that it was more disappointing than bad, like they could have done much more (and did in previous entries) and then just failed to cook. There's been a complete graphical redesign with the leap to the Playstation, and X looks like absolute hot ass now. The game's just a bit floatier and just a bit less crisp than the SNES games, and enemies are just a bit spongier than they've been, combining to create a plodding, more Mega Man-esque X game. Combine that with the boss weapons being a total set of flops, and it becomes just not interesting to play. I mentioned in the X3 recap that many of the bosses fell into the bait and punish trap that Mega Man's lamest bosses do, and X4 takes this and cranks the dial all the way. An unreasonable number of the robot masters boil down to "if you hit him with his weakness, he will Always Do This", and you simply memorize the single response and hit him again. Even the Sigma stage bosses - including Sigma himself, twice - boil down to making sure you're positioned right to bait attacks where one attack is unreasonably punishing and difficult to dodge while the other involves hovering in place and shooting him. The Colonel, the game's midboss after you've done four robot masters, is one of the absolute worst bosses in Mega Man history for this. If you stand in a certain position, you can literally take your left hand off of the controller for the rest of his (obscenely large) health pool, because your responses to his attacks amount to "jump to max height and hover" and the twist on that of "jump to max height and hover". Hover, fall, shoot, jump, hover, for like two minutes. At least the Sigma stages aren't the total flop they were in other, much better games. On the other hand, this is because they're complete nonentities, existing only to funnel you through one to two corridors of enemies into a boss fight. X4 ended up being more dull than bad, so at least it wasn't X3, but I'm not exactly jonesing to replay this one again. Naturally, this is the one I have to play twice. MEGA MAN X4 [ZERO VER.] On the other hand, what the fuck? Mega Man X4 as Zero is everything I've wanted these games to be. I'm so completely, utterly baffled. The minute-to-minute action is genuinely fun and engaging, being significantly faster and more dangerous, and Zero's platforming is more generous than X's with the addition of a double jump. Minibosses that take X ages to take down melt as soon as you figure out how to exploit their patterns as Zero due to his multi-hit sword attacks. It's an absolutely fantastic react-and-counter style of action platforming to the point that it hardly even feels like the relatively-tepid Mega Man X4 anymore. I'm floored. Zero's progression is gently different to X's, but in a way that completely changes the game. X progresses in two ways: he finds ambient pickups across all stages and he gets a thematic boss weapon to swap to after each boss. Zero limits his pickups to only the E-tanks and pieces of heart, the replicable upgrades, and doesn't get any armor upgrades that radically change his playstyle. Instead of boss weapons to swap to, Zero gets a technique from each boss that's activated with some input, such as the Shoryuken on up+triangle or a slash that comes out of a dash. Some bosses add fundamental things to Zero's kit, like a double jump or an airdash, instead of just a sword technique. Because of all of this, Zero gains lower-impact tools from beating bosses, but he has access to all of them simultaneously and cannot swap weapons from his Z-Saber, which is supposed to be your default method of dealing damage to things. This changes Mega Man X fundamentally, because rather than picking up elemental damage shots that you have to guess and check enemy weaknesses on, you're essentially gaining different directions in which to project your sword damage. Weaknesses are far less often hitting the Fire Button and waiting for the reset to hit the Fire Button again and far more that Slash Tiger is vulnerable to the thunder shot because you can project it from a safe distance where you can react to his claws. The spider's "weakness" is the spinning slash you get from the double jump, not necessarily because it does more damage, but because it crushes his adds and lets you get extra hits off on him while he's retreating. This leads completely organically into messing around with the weapons all the time, because anytime an enemy is above or below you you're going to be thinking about using the Shoryuken or the downwards Zelda-style stab, without any need to be cycling weapons and consciously trying them out. While it's not a perfect game as Zero - Magma Dragoon stands out as a particularly shit fight - most of the friction from X's run is absolutely smoothed out with access to Zero's tools. The double jump and the ability to use his omega attack (much lower damage but many more charges than X's) to gain some i-frames make the Sigma fight so much smoother and let Zero exploit far more chances to damage the guy, taking it from a roulette of getting the "good" attacks and taking far too many punish windows to die and making it into a roulette of all fairly dodgable attacks and punish windows limited only by how gutsy you want to be. To top it all off, the absolute worst boss from the X run (the Colonel after Stage 4) is just simply not fought at all by Zero! There's no replacement! You just have a cutscene and then go back to stage select. I'm actively excited to gut through the X Legacy Collection 2 games now and get to the Zero collection, because there's a real chance I actively like those games. Fucked up. THE ACHIEVEMENTS Mega Man X Legacy Collection takes a significantly different tack to achievements compared to the classic game collections. Each game has separate achievements for collecting everything, accomplishing optional objectives like taking out Vile in X3, and doing various boss kills and challenges like taking off Flame Mammoth's trunk in X or getting the special Kurosawa kill on Sponge Man in X2. The closest any of these come to getting nasty is a pair of achievements: Covert Ops and X-Treme Danger. Covert Ops tasks you with sneaking through Magna Centipede's stage in X2 without getting spotted by a single searchlight, which isn't terribly bad but definitely took an hour or so of attempts to pull off. X-Treme Danger has you fight Final Sigma in X3 without getting the ultimate upgrade, and this would be a legitimate piece of shit achievement if it didn't work on easy mode. I have no shame. Wrapping up the list is X's take on Challenges from the previous Mega Men, and somehow these are significantly more deranged than what came before. X's Challenges are very straightforward: you are Mega Man X, fully upgraded, and you square off against two bosses mixed and matched from all four games in a single arena at the same time. Beat three waves of this, and you win. There are nine of these stages in total, for twenty-seven paired fights. At the very beginning, you can pick up to three special weapons from a selection of eight, letting you equip yourself to counter a particular boss if you just really hate fighting them. There's a difficulty selector (Easy, Normal, Hard) that's irrelevant to achievements, and as an added bonus you can drop with no special weapons at all, with leaves you with only the leg armor for added mobility rather than a fully upgraded X. In any case, the achievements for this are to complete all nine on any difficulty (no shame, I did it on Easy) and to complete any one stage (three fights) Buster-only. The issue I have with these is that they also incorporate fights from the future games, X5 and X6, that are in the next legacy collection. I think that's a bit of a cheap trick, and fighting the future bosses has definitely left me not looking forward to fighting them when they come up in the next games. Somehow, now, I've beaten sixteen Mega Men. Sixteen! That's a stupid number of them. Here's to four more in another anthology post in another month or two. The updated ranking is now: 11 >>> X4-0 > 4 > X2 > X1 > 9 > 7 > 6 > 2 > 10 > X4-X > 5 > X3 > 8 > 1 > & Bass > 3

nah lol that's a really shitty and stupid way to handle fandom as a concept. there shouldn't be a minimum lived experience to post an opinion on a fire emblem online, i don't care if you've played the game once or 36 times "competitively". hell, people who are neck-deep in the filth of a franchise have a horrible tendency to lose perspective on it, it's not like more experience is equivalent to more understanding. e: hell, just the concept of prioritizing the opinions of people who play a single player game "competitively" is clown shit on the face of it

i was in totality and it fuckin rocked

WE LOVE KATAMARI (NAMCO, 2005) Finished: 5/4/24. Playtime: 13.6 hours. There was an interesting phenomenon, particularly in but not limited to the late '80s into the mid '90s, where you'd get bands made of three to five talented guys and they'd get together and make a kick ass fuckin' album that would get some surprise commercial success, they'd sign a record deal and get real funding, and the next album just wouldn't have that charm. Powerman 5000 are the absolute epitome of this for me; 1999's Tonight the Stars Revolt was technically produced with funding from DreamWorks Records, but it was still very much a band in their garage days and they put together what remains my first or second favorite metal album ever made. Their followup work just didn't land for me. To the curious, the other contender for the top spot is Eisbrecher's sophomore 2006 album Antikörper. We Love Katamari is Katamari's Anyone for Doomsday?. It just doesn't quite work for me, despite having higher production values and still having Spider One on vocals. Something's not there, and I've struggled a good bit to articulate it over the last week or two, but here goes another take. I think the first, largest, and most influential thing is that Damacy felt effortlessly weird. It was surreal in a very organic way, washing over me with the sheer vibes. We Love, by contrast, feels like it's being weird for the sake of it. The surreality is very diminished, replaced by something more akin to wackiness, and a formulaicness has crept into the whole thing. It feels like it's hitting the beats of Damacy, exactly the kind of thing we were all afraid Portal 2 was going to be before it turned out to actually be Portal 2 instead of Portal 1.2. It's too tongue-in-cheek, rather than being its own beast, and the end result for me was that it felt a little hollow. There's a stage where the objective is to roll up a single Bear Or Cow which I think illustrates this perfectly. In Damacy, you roll up the biggest bear you can get to make Ursa Major, and the biggest cow you can get to make Taurus. In We Love, you do it because you did it in Damacy. It's exacerbated a fair bit by the weird effect these kinds of remasters have on games. From what I've read, back in the day, We Love had notably snappier controls and better performance compared to Damacy. This really just isn't the case anymore, and in fact We Love has more pop-in issues than its predecessor did and nothing really to compensate for it. It doesn't look or play better for the privilege, unlike back on the PS2. The music, also, just didn't hit the same way as the first. There was an article I read many years ago about how the issue with Doctor Who those days (whenever those days were) was that everyone who was working on Doctor Who was a childhood Doctor Who fan and the creative process had become deeply incestuous. I think that massively overstates the issue I had here, but it felt like We Love was trying to make Katamari songs, where Damacy inventing them from first principle inspirations produced a better, if rawer, sound for it. Hey, we're back to Powerman 5000. The gameplay doesn't really compensate for it, either. Since there's no upgrade in control scheme to exploit anymore, We Love has to fall back on its variety of levels and what things you get to roll up, and it doesn't really excel at this. The fundamental rollup levels aren't particularly worse than in Damacy, but they're diluted by not at all feeling like parts building up to a whole like its predecessor did. It has more varied locales, for the better and the worse, but loses a significant amount of cohesion for the privilege. I know this is ironic to hear from a Dark Souls 2 fan, but doublethink rules and you should try it. We Love, then, gets defined by its gimmick levels, which are a wild mixed bag. Some are actually quite fun, like Hansel and Gretel's candyland stages or the F1 Racer's set of tracks where your speed is hugely boosted and you can't reasonably stop. Some have interesting ideas but poor execution, like the Sumo Wrestler getting huger by eating being a fun idea dragged down by being kind of piss to control and the victory condition being fairly opaque. Some just suck, like the Fighting Spirit rollup in Royal Reverie or the one where you have to roll up clouds. There's more to do, for sure, but it's not all for the better. The achievements are at least easier than those of Damacy. You don't have to roll up the entire collection list for this one, it's enough to do each stage once (including Royal Reverie, which is just overall complete filler) and then roll up the entire royal family. The royal family consists of one achievement for all cousins and one each for your mom and dad, and they start out pretty reasonable. Most stages have a cousin or two in them, usually not terribly hidden, that you get on one of your two clears of the stage. For stages that have multiple cousins, each will only spawn after the previous one has been collected and the stage completed with them in the katamaurus, and therein lies the issue. It's fine when there's two cousins, you're intended to get one on the Go Large challenge and the next on the Go Fast challenge, but that takes us to Grandpa and the Elephant. Grandpa and the Elephant have three distinctions that combine to make this miserable in a very first-world problems way. First, they share a stage completely except for that the Elephant's has higher requirements and a longer time limit. Second, that these stages are the two longest in the game. Third, that they have three (and four) cousins on them and these cousins can be quickly missed by crossing a size threshold despawning all objects below a certain size. I didn't get the first cousin of either stage in either the Large or the Fast challenge of each, so that was four clears to clear and then seven more to get the cousins out of, again, the same stage except Grandpa's takes twelve and the Elephant's takes about seventeen minutes. The King and the Queen, now, spawn only on the Elephant's stage, and you're best off getting them in the Eternal version, which doesn't spawn cousins. You need to get to about 3000 meters of katamaurus (for reference, the stage itself is cleared at 500m) to be able to capture them, and the kicker is that the Queen doesn't spawn until you've cleared the stage with the King in the katamaurus. That's two more clears for a grand total of eleven katamari built from all the same thing taking about fifteen minutes per clear, each sojourn to get a single mutually-exclusive collectible. Damacy's stages do not stand up to this kind of vigorous grinding, and it didn't expect them to. We Love's don't either, and the cousins are blocking a bonus stage rather than just laughing at you for going for 100% completion or something. In the end, it's still Katamari, and still fundamentally pretty fun, but the welcome's being outstayed and it's a big disappointment. I'd hoped the novelty would last more than a single game. Two disappointing sequels in a row, man, and you guys don't even know yet that I just played Mega Man X3, which was kind of dogshit and came off the heels of the pretty-good X2, so it's three disappointing sequels in a row. Hopefully this isn't an omen for Final Fantasy 8!

i remove my crown. i am a fake fan of legend of dragoon in comparison. jesus christ

SAVE ROOM: THE MERCHANT (FRACTAL PROJECTS, 2023) Finished: 2/4/24. Playtime: 3.5 hours. Scope creep is a fascinating thing. I was really happy with my three buckaroo bills spent on Save Room, and I spent a titanic hour and a fourth in it. Save Room: The Merchant is also three dollars, is also forty puzzles long, and is nowhere near as good. Save Room's strength was in the simplicity of its design: fit these things into this Spicy Rectangle. Sometimes you combine items, sometimes you eat them, but it's all in service of packing everything tightly into a Spicy Rectangle. The Merchant adds, well, The Merchant to the mix. Puzzles are now two-step: pack every piece of starting kit into the Spicy Rectangle, go to The Merchant and sell it, buy everything on your grocery list, sometimes repeat this loop for certain treasures, and pack it all back into the Spicy Rectangle. The puzzles are no longer resting on a core, elegant gameplay loop. They've become bloated; you now have (counts on fingers) four different submenus to navigate to make your loadout, as opposed to the simplicity of one screen, one puzzle. It becomes fiddly, less engrossing, and less satisfying, despite being significantly longer. It's weird how that works. Friction is the bane of games, in the end. Our sequel's other innovation is to have a story! It is cringey. Save Room wore its influence on its sleeve and let the mechanics of the puzzles tell a background story, and it was good. The Merchant tells an actual story and it's just full of "that joke from Resident Evil". It's awful. It's fairly short, praise be, but it does actively drag the game down compared to the predecessor. Dissappointing! Ah well. It was only three hours and as many dollarydoos, not such a great loss. e: lol i forgot to even talk about the achievements - same deal as the first, with the addition of grinding (???) achievements where you have to spend X money on upgrades or craft Y bullets, where X and Y are more than you'd do in two clears of the puzzle game. puzzling.

damn sounds like you shoulda played the legend of dragoon, the only psx rpg instead

FINAL FANTASY VII (SQUARE, 1997) Finished: 1/4/24. Playtime: 78.9 hours. Well, here it is. It's time for the cultural titan, the game that wasn't even Legend of Dragoon, but which somehow gained traction among all gamerkind despite this tremendous handicap. Now, at the end of it, I'm quite sure I only played through to the end of Midgar back in 1999, not even to the end of Disc 1. How could I go on? It wasn't even Legend of Dragoon. In a lot of ways, I felt 7 was the lightside version of a lot of things I ended up not liking about 6. Where 6's story went all over the place [derogatory], 7's story went a little less all over the place [complimentary]. Where 6 let you customize every single character into the inevitable same übermensch, 7 lets you customize your guys into many wildly different flavors of übermenschen. Where 6 had weird and slow ATB that got in its own way a lot, 7 had... uh, we'll get there. Let's kick off with the vaunted plot of Final Fantasy 7: it was great! Not my favorite story ever told, or even my favorite Final Fantasy story ever told, but I found it held up with absolutely shocking grace considering the rough translation and the fact that it's old enough to have kids in grade school by now. There were some slumpy bits here and there (a lot of post-Midgar Disc 1, yeesh), but overall I had a fantastic time with it. In particular, coming into this without too much concrete knowledge, I was super surprised that Cloud of all people ended up being my favorite character. Sometimes it's fun to just be basic. The rest of the cast didn't flop (Cid came pretty close, though), but I didn't fall in any kind of especial love with any of them besides Cloud. Barret took second, at least. That's only out of the playable cast, though! The weirdest thing is that, after decades of hype, Sephiroth turned out to just actually be that bitch. The entire Cloud-Sephiroth relationship, itself the core of the story, was by far the best part of the story. Everything I did was in service of getting more Cloud and Sephiroth. Even knowing the broad strokes and the big twists didn't diminish them when the game smugly pulled them out. It was a great, if flawed, story, and I'd love to see an updated stab at it with actual game design principles and a steadier hand to pen it. Great news, I guess, for after this main-numbered game run. This carries into the world design, as well. While I found myself tuning out for a lot of the Costa del Sol-Rocket Town road trip arc, one interesting thing that struck me late into the game is that I remembered all these places concretely. When I got to the end of 6 and was bestiary hunting and the guide said, like, "Kohlingen area", I responded "where?" That never happened for 7. The world's a bit bloated in raw size for its own good, but it feels more cohesive and the (sparser) points of interest within it all earn their keep and all stay in the mind. It's not perfect, but for a first stab at 3D, it's damn close to it. Speaking of 3D, let's talk ATB. I'm done with praise: Final Fantasy 7 makes the most incredibly avoidable own goal possible. Now that fights are in 3D and models move around and such, targeting has moved into the 3D space and out of clean lines or even menus - and this is a really bad thing. When Cait Sith is about 30 degrees south of west from Cloud in this specific camera angle, do you press down or left to target him? It's a trick question! Cait Sith's model movements change whether left will target him or will skip straight to Tifa at any given moment! It's remarkably bad and, on top of that, causes multi-part bosses to not even adequately convey that they are multi-part, let alone where the parts are or how many of them there might be. It introduces a completely pointless friction to the most basic interaction with the game. It, in a word, sucks. For the most part besides that, though, ATB relegates itself to the background. It's stupid, and it still sucks on a deeply fundamental level, but now that all animations are longer and even putting the system on Wait doesn't cause bars to stop all the time you think they should, it ironically becomes more palatable. Enemies are inscrutable enough in their patterns and when they queue actions that you don't even know when you're dropping them. Things are slow enough, the party is manageable enough (dropping to three), and single actions are impactful enough that you can weirdly get away better with reserving a guy to take a response action than you could in the 4-man predecessors. This is ATB at its slowest, and thus earning the least from being ATB instead of turnbased, but at its most bearable. The major exception [negative] is that certain enemies have undulations that count as part of an ATB attack but don't pause the timer and begin long before their action actually identifiably starts. One of the final boss forms is the absolute worst for this, where you'll queue an action and then just sit through four seconds of dead air before it turns out that that dead air was the warmup to an action that he queued way back when. The major exception [positive] is that they're finally starting to do something with ATB at all; charging your Limit Break makes your next turn almost instant, and queuing the Limit Break itself always puts the action at the top of the action queue, no matter what else was queued. But, as always, the minute-to-minute gameplay of Final Fantasy is generally just a proof of how well or badly you planned and built. Materia is 7's contribution to the world, and it's a damn good one. Each character can have varying amounts of materia attached to slots in their gear, which give the ability to cast spells, modify other spells being cast, give legacy commands (steal, throw, counter, etc.), grant limited charges of summons, or just passively modify stats. What makes this system click is that, unlike Espers from 6, AP gained goes onto the materia themselves. You don't bond Cloud to the Restore materia to make Cloud a healer, you level up the Restore materia by using it so that it's better when you need a healer, no matter who you put it on. Leveling up a materia improves it (granting more spells, more charges of a summon, a higher chance of a passive proc, etc.) until you get to the final tier, which usually requires a lot more AP investment and gives nothing except a Mastered! marker on it... and a fresh copy of the same materia. The requirements on Mastery are generally too high for this to have much of an impact on a regular run, but I very much like that leaning into a playstyle makes you significantly more flexible in that playstyle as a concept. This is added onto by the modifier materia, which I alluded to earlier. Many pieces of kit had paired materia slots where, if you put a command (say Fire) into one and a modifier (say All) into the other, they get combined on the battlefield (this character's Fire spells target All enemies). This is particularly interesting early on, where you only have one All and need to decide whether it would be more useful to have all-Cure or all-Fire for the next encounters and things like that. It also gets into more interesting and harder to immediately conceptualize interactions: pairing Fire and Elemental on an armor piece makes that armor halve incoming fire damage, and as Elemental itself levels up that becomes nullification and then absorption of the damage instead. Pairing Death and Added Effect on a weapon makes the wielder's attacks able to cause Death; doing the same to an armor makes the wearer immune to instant death. Added Cut, when paired with a spell, has you follow up that spell with a melee attack; if you pair it with a special attack, say Deathblow or Mug, then you follow up an attack with an extra attack instead. This isn't even getting into equipping multiples! If you have two Thunder materia, you can equip both on the same character and, by sacrificing efficiency (the second doesn't give you more spells or anything), pair different modifiers with each and have both effective on every Thunder spell you cast. The amount of meaningful optimization that can be done with the system is completely bonkers, and the amount of ways to build guys out in the short, medium, and long runs are all healthy and huge. I've got nitpicks with the system, for sure, but they're meaningless in the face of just how great it is. Everyone will inevitably become super broken, like in 6, but the sheer breadth of ways characters - even individually, not exclusively because of materia - can get there makes everything so much fun and so much more personal. When 7 is great, it's spectacular; when it fails, it flops. The glacier at the end of Disc 1, as well as many of the minigames (the fucking parade), are just showstoppers, and I think prevent it from landing over 5 in my overall ranking. Even so, despite all that, it's taking a handy second place and it's far from the others. I probably won't replay it for a long time, if ever, just because of how slow it plays overall, but I'm glad that I tackled it and finally was able to formulate a Take on this flawed game which absolutely deserves its place in the pantheon. 7's achievement list is a complete buttblaster. Complete the game, with the usual caveats (though fewer than in the last two) about missable stuff you need for achievements. The get-alls are blessedly just limit breaks and materia, but each of those is a little topic for below. Get a character to 99 (this is completely inevitable if you're doing everything else), get 99,999,999 gil (insane but see below), and kill all three superbosses, who are wildly unfair and completely horseshit fights, but they're in a game where you can break everything beyond belief. Sucks to suck, Emerald Weapon. Try being in a less breakable game next time. The get-alls are where everything becomes horrible. Every character except one has seven (get it) limit breaks organized into three tiers. Limit break meters charge based on damage taken, with higher tiers of limit break taking more damage but delivering a proportionately larger payout. Everyone starts with LB1-1 and gains LB1-2 by using LB1-1 a certain number (high single digits) of times. Each individual character learns LB2-1 by getting the killing blow on a certain (50-80) number of enemies, and LB2-2 by using LB2-1 a certain number of times. LB3-1 and 3-2 are gained in the same pattern. LB4 is gained through a manual that's found somewhere in the world. Cloud, uniquely, needs a shitload more kills than anyone else to learn his tiers; while Cait Sith only has an LB1 and an LB2. For the remaining seven, there are two issues. First is the simple tedium: enemies come in pods of one to four, generally. Getting typically 160 kills per party member just takes a lot of brute grinding, and unless you really want to optimize your time, you're probably just going to sit down someplace and chew on easy mobs for your backup guys. I took Ultima and MP Absorb, paired them, and went to town on the beach south of the Gold Saucer - your average MP absorbed per cast is more than the cost of Ultima, so it's boring but free and most of the pods are 3-4 enemies. The other problem, now, is that - I dunno if you heard this - Aerith dies. You have to take specific care to grind out her entire LB4 (which is, itself, opaque as hell to get) before she leaves the party to, well, die close to the end of Disc 1. Everyone else's can be done as close to the end of the game as you want, though, and I don't think any of them are missable. That brings us to Materia Overlord. Materia Overlord fucking sucks. There are 83 materia in the game, loosely divisible into three categories: 78 standard materia, four bonus materia, and Enemy Skill. A handful (I dunno, maybe a dozen?) of the standard materia are missable, and simply gathering the rest sends you all over the world. You need a few thousand Gold Saucer Points from minigames or from resetting a single screen until a guy spawns to let you buy a hundred from him and then fucks off. You have to clear the Battle Square many times, and your Battle Points are all lost if you leave the screen, so you have to grind up any given materia in a single session with no saves or quits. You have to at least win enough chocobo races to unlock A-spec races, and then either bet on races or win them yourself until you get two materia there - take note, though, that the materia isn't guaranteed to be in the prize pool, and if it is and you win you only have a 1/3 chance to get what you want. Speaking of, you need a gold chocobo from chocobo breeding to get four of the strongest materia. This is just the nastiest of them, though; there's still dozens just scattered in ambient chests or only sold by one merchant in the world, including all the way up to just before the point of no return. So you have all 78 standard materia, right? Here's where hell begins. Over the course of the entire main game, I mastered I believe 7 of them. AP per fight is generally in the double digits, and it is applied equally (not split) among all materia equipped by all living party members. Each piece of equipment can hold between zero and eight materia, and some sacrifice slots for double or triple growth. The hugest AP gains in the game outside of single-fight bosses come from the Magic Pots and Movers in two screens of the final dungeon, which award a whopping 2,000 and 2,400 AP per pod, respectively. The top-end materia require around a million AP to master. This just took, I dunno, twelve or fifteen hours of nothing but dummy grinding in a single screen forever, as efficiently as I could make it work, with a spreadsheet to keep track. It was boring and after the first about three hours of settling in, nothing changed at all. Just slap new materia in, pull mastered ones out, forever. It's like five screens of final dungeon away from the nearest save point as well, so you can't just decide to stop and take a break; you have to plan your breaks out. There's no feasible way to automate it, either, because there are about three different sets of actions required based on the enemy pod that spawns. This is all manual, baby, and it sucks. There's two bits of good news, though! By the time you're done with this, your grinders are gonna be in the mid to high 90s and ready to tackle the superbosses with all the maxed out materia you have, and getting 99,999,999 gil is absolutely infeasible without this kind of a grind. By the time I was done with all this, I had around 7 million. The good news is that All materia are cheap and level fairly fast and sell for 1.4 million gil after being mastered. Once I started falling below 40 materia left to master, the extra slots just became an eternal churn of All materia in and out, pumping AP into them to turn into money later. By the time I was done, I was able to make a save and liquidate my stock for northwards of 150,000,000 gil, and then reload the save. I don't know how you'd get this much money without grinding Alls out. That takes us to Enemy Skill. Enemy Skill (shocker) is just blue magic given a new name. There's four Enemy Skill materia in the game, and something neat about them is that they don't share skills and each individual one has to be hit by an enemy skill in order to learn it. A character can just carry all four and get the skill on them all at once, though. Anyway, to master Enemy Skill you need to have every single learnable blue magic (24 in total) on a single instance of the materia. It's not enough to know every skill but spread across multiple materia; a single one has to have twenty-four gold stars and none hollow. This comes with all the caveats of blue magic in the previous two games, including a need to rig casts in certain ways (using Manipulate, making sure a character is paralyzed, etc.) and with a fun new caveat to go alongside them. Two of the blue magics are missable, which is nothing new on its own. Trine is used by three different enemies, but they're all either bosses (and thus fought once) or random enemies in a zone you can never go back to. Pandora's Box is the fun one. Pandora's Box is used by Dragon Zombies in two screens in the final dungeon and by no other thing anywhere else. Pandora's Box can only be opened once, and it will be used on death by the first Dragon Zombie you kill in any given save file. No other Dragon Zombie will ever used the skill again, no matter what happens. There is literally a global variable in the game's code that exists only to check if Pandora's Box is open on this save and to prevent any enemies from ever casting the spell again. It's genuinely incredible in a completely insane fuck-you-completionists way. You need it on your Enemy Skill materia, of course. The bonus ones, thankfully, are easy if everything else is done if you do them the right one of two ways. Master Magic, Master Summon, and Master Command are single materia that can be equipped and give access to all of their type of ability according to the name. They can be earned by mastering all types of materia associated with them and then presenting the mastered materia to the Huge Materia to combine them into a Master Materia... at the cost of all of the relevant mastered materia. Note that the achievement is for possessing one of each mastered materia at once, not having mastered all of them at some point. If you go this way, you will find yourself having to remaster every spell, summon, and command after trading them in for their Master Materia, essentially doubling the length of the grind. The good news is that you don't have to do this; killing the Emerald Weapon (which you have to do anyway) drops an items which you can trade to a guy in Kalm to get all three Master Materia for free. The better news is that you don't have to master the Master Materia, just possessing them is enough. It's easy to avoid fucking yourself over, but it's funny that you can so completely fuck yourself right at the end of a satanic grind. And that's Final Fantasy 7! A great game with some massive pitfalls followed by a hellish grind. It was the Most Game even more than 6 was the Most Game, but in a far more endearing way than most other Most Games. I have even far less prior experience with 8 compared to 7, so it's off into the wild blue yonder next time after a little bit of a JRPG murder nap. The work's only uphill from here, lads.

holy moly i kneel to you