Earth Defense Force is a series that has a VERY special place in my heart.  It's like the SyFy movie of video games; it's completely ridiculous from premise to execution, and you have no idea how they make enough money to break even let alone justify an entire series, and yet lo and behold, game after game comes out.  At its core, every EDF game is pretty much the same.  They're all third person shooters in which you play as a generic soldier with mercifully unlimited ammo as you massacre thousands of giant insects sent by an alien force to invader the conquer the Earth.  Not only is the concept the same throughout the series, but like half of the games are just remakes of each other anyway.  Has that ever stopped me from buying every single one my greedy little eyes behold?  Not a chance.

Iron Rain is a little bit different from other EDF games, and I attribute that largely to the fact that this is the first game in the series to be developed by Yuke's.  Iron Rain is, in a lot of ways, like a reboot for the EDF series.  It changes up a lot of the gameplay mechanics to make things feel more customizable, more modern, and more accessible while still keeping it feeling distinctly EDF.  It's still a third person shooter, but it's a very different feeling EDF.  First and foremost, there are a TON of customization options with your player character.  You can choose between male or female, obviously, but you can also tweak certain aspects of the appearance beyond that - height, bust, etc.  There are a variety of hair styles and voices from which to choose as well as a TON of outfits.  Want your avatar in standard EDF military fatigues?  No problem.  Want your avatar in a cleavage-heavy blouse and mini skirt?  This is your game.  Want your avatar in Daisy Dukes and a tight fitting tshirt?  Look no further.  It doesn't stop there, though; not only do you have a lot of variety in the types of outfits your character can rock, but they all have eight different color patterns so that you can mix and match to your heart's desire. 

Continuing with the "It's basically a reboot" theme, the story of Iron Rain is unrelated to the previous games, essentially taking place in a separate universe.  Rather than being based around an attack in 2017 and another attack in 2025, Iron Rain is set seven years after an initial attack between which there was tense period of relative stillness wherein the Aggressors (the giant insects) were present on Earth but seemingly holding the territory they'd taken rather than actively expanding.  The other thing that sets the story apart (aside from the obvious fact of being an alternate universe) is that it takes itself a lot more serious than most EDF games.  That's not to say that the game totally takes itself seriously - after all, you're still fighting thirty foot tall spiders - but the character dialogue and the way the story's told maintain a more serious tone throughout, the few comic relief moments notwithstanding.

Stylistically, the game is most similar to Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon with its plot unrelated to the main series and more serious tone.  It manages to avoid one of the common complaints with Insect Armageddon, though - the length.  Insect Armageddon only had 15 levels - a far cry from the series norm of having five or six dozen levels.  Iron Rain, on the other hand, has 52 levels - still a little shorter than most EDF games but a respectable length nonetheless.  The game's campaign can, of course, be played multiplayer in addition to a few specifically multiplayer game modes.  Each of the game's missions has multiple difficulty settings which affect the quality of the weapons you can unlock, giving the game a large amount of replayability.

Earth Defense Force has, from the first mission I played in Earth Defense Force 2017 years ago, been one of my favorite game series, and Iron Rain takes that formula and almost perfects it.  It's definitely the best game in the series so far, and I don't think I've ever seen so wholly satisfied with an arcade-y game as I am with this one.  It's the best performing game in the series with only a couple of mild frame rate drops (whereas most games in the series are known for the truly abysmal frame rates), it looks great considering the series's low-budget origins, and most importantly, it's fun and addicting to play.  "One more mission" usually turned into three, four, or five more before I realized what had happened.  The series rarely gets much attention in the West in gaming discussions, but if any game in series deserves attention worldwide, it's this one.  If you have a PlayStation 4 and like a fun, goofy good time, you need to look into Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain.

Also available on PlayStation Vita, Linux, OSX, and Windows

Timespinner is a game I've had a handful of friends urging me to play for a good while.  I'm normally not the biggest fan of Metroidvania style games, but I have to admit, this one is truly fantastic.  I've never had a problem with Metroidvania games, but as a style, it just doesn't usually do it for me.  Timespinner, however, is just a brilliant game from start to finish.

You play as this top-tier waifu chick with blue hair name Lunais who's part of a clan that guards a chronomantic relic called the Timespinner.  This clan trains people called Time Messengers whose job is to use the Timespinner to travel to the past to warn the clan about some catastrophe so that they might avoid it.  As tensions with a stellar empire attempting to colonize their planet further deteriorate, these Time Messengers have become more and more important, and at the game's start, your character is officially named the newest Time Messenger.  Then plot progression happens, and you set off on a quest to kill the emperor all by yourself to avenge your slain clan.

Timespinner is actually set over two time periods.  It takes places in the same area but partly around the same time as the prologue and partly a millennium in the past.  Once you reach a certain point in the game, you travel between the two time periods from portals scattered throughout the world.  During your adventure, you're armed with two weapons, a pair of close range orbs for bashing enemies and a magic attack based on your orb for foes at longer range.  As you explore, you help a stranded raiding party trapped behind enemy lines 1000 years in the past as well as a library in the imperial capital in the present as you investigate what happened in the past and what changed in the present as a result of your actions in the past.

Mechanically, the game is superb.  The controls, both for movement and attack, feel crisp at responsive at all times.  The platforming is sublime with only one instance I found to be more annoying than fun.  There are numerous orbs that can be collected for use in combat, and each of those orbs can be upgraded to improve their combat ability, crafted into rings for passive benefits, or crafted into necklaces to unlock new magical attacks.  The variety of loadout options as well as the relatively short playthrough time and multiple endings in the game create a good bit of replay value.  If you find the game too easy, there's a hard difficulty, and if you're fond of speedruns, there's a speedrun mode so you can try to beat your best time.  All things said, there's pretty much something for everyone here.

Timespinner is a fantastic game with a compelling narrative, a beautifully crafted world, and addicting gameplay.  The story, revolving mainly around imperialism and the moral ambiguity of independence movements and despotism, is somewhat slow to get going, but once the world building starts to unfold, it's an intriguing plot.  The game's cast of characters are wonderfully diverse, but unlike most games, they don't really make a big deal of it.  Some characters are gay, and you just find that out in passing dialogue.  They're not like J.K. Rowling on Twitter going "HEY GUYS, DID YOU KNOW THAT THIS CHARACTER IS GAY?!?"  They do the same with an asexual character, a transgender character, etc.  With the importance of representation in games so paramount as time goes on, that kind of thing gets some major props from me even though I'm a white cisgender straight male, the most over-represented demographic there is in gaming.  Long story short, this is one of those games that comes along once every few years that really does stand out as something special, and y'all are doing yourselves a major disservice by skipping out on it.

Also available on Xbox One and Windows

Battlefield V was a controversial game upon release to say the least.  Fans of multiplayer criticized the game for focusing too much on the single player.  Fans of single player criticized the game for focusing too much on multiplayer.  History buffs criticized the game for being inaccurate.  Misogynists criticized the game for featuring women on the battlefield.  With all of that, I wasn't too sure what to expect when I started Battlefield V, but fortunately for me, I don't really agree with much of the criticism at all and ended up having a fantastic time. 

If I were going to agree with any of the criticism, it would be that the game DOES have some historical inaccuracies.  For the most part, however, these inaccuracies are creative decisions.  The whole point of Battlefield V's campaign is the "untold stories" of World War II.  One of the missions has you assume the role of a young Norwegian woman in the Resistance.  One has you play as Senegalese soldier fighting for France and encountering European racism for the first time.  One - and my personal favorite - has you assume control of a German Tiger commander at the end of the war struggling between his obligation to carry out his duty and the knowledge that the war is lost and his country has committed unforgivable sins.  When I first saw that you played as a German commander, I was a bit uneasy.  Are they going to try to portray the Germans as somehow less guilty of horrific war crimes?  Are they going to just have the player do horrible things to reinforce the point that Nazis are history's shittiest people?  Fortunately, however, they didn't do either.  They managed to humanize the Germans without sanitizing them.  The four characters in the campaign each represent the major archetypes of soldiers.  Your character, the commander, is, as I said, struggling with doing his duty despite knowing his country is wrong.  The driver is jaded and disillusioned, bitter from the horrific things his people have done in a war they can't win.  The gunner is the patriotic party-line toting loyalist who executes traitors without mercy and never questions Germany's righteousness.  The loader is the terrified, young recruit who doesn't know what to do, who to believe, or what to trust.  They never try to suggest that Germany was right in this war, though, and that's a relief.

My biggest complaint with the game as far as historical inaccuracies go is their refusal to use the swastika.  They make mention of the swastika as a metaphor for German control, but they never use it actually in-game.  Everything from uniforms to tanks to symbols on banners in Germany all uses the Iron Cross; there's not a swastika to be seen.  Obviously the use of the Iron Cross isn't a problem; it was still a symbol wide used throughout Germany during the war.  The problem is the use of the Iron Cross to the total exclusion of the swastika because that is a big point of historical inaccuracy.  The Nazis put the swastika up all over Germany.  That probably wouldn't bother most people, but as a history teacher, that kind of erasure REALLY irks me.

I never played the multiplayer as it's just not a feature that really interests me that much, but as for the gameplay in the single player, I was pretty satisfied.  I've read that there were a lot of complaints about the accuracy of the weapon models in the game, but while I am a history major, I'm not a gun nut, so I can't speak for how accurate and appropriate the weapon models are.  The aiming seemed pretty well polished and responsive, weapons were well detailed, and the firing sound effects are full bodied and satisfying.  The vehicular combat, while fairly limited in most of the single player, is extremely gratifying.

Battlefield V is definitely not one of the better efforts in the series, but it's still a good bit of fun if you're a fan of World War II shooters.  It's definitely not as good as Battlefield 1 was, and it's certainly not the WW2 glory of yesteryear's Battlefield 1942, but the single player is a good experience, and it tells stories that you're not likely to see told elsewhere.  That alone won the game some major points in my book considering that I play games for the stories they tell and the experiences they provide.  I wouldn't pay any more than $20 for Battlefield V, but if you can find it for that price or less, definitely give it a play.

Also available on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Windows

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen is actually an enhanced re-release of Capcom's original title in the IP, Dragon's Dogma.  Joshua Michael French, founder the venerable #SwitchCorps, took it upon himself to serve essentially as an unpaid one-man marketing army for the Switch port of Dragon's Dogma by plugging the game HARD on his Twitter, encouraging other Switch enthusiasts to buy it, and even starting a pretty massive DM group on Twitter for those of us playing through the game on Switch.

The world the game creates is probably its greatest strength.  The interaction with NPCs, the Pawns wandering throughout the fields, and monsters and human NPC foes that you can encounter in the field all give the game world a truly lived in feel.  The game's main quest is compelling enough, but the side quests that shed light on the corruption within the capital of Gran Soren and the political intrigue going on throughout the duchy in spite of the threat from the dragon are what really set Dragon's Dogma apart of the multitude of "generic fantasy setting" games.  The game does have some flaws, though.  The biggest flaw in my opinion is that the pop-in with NPCs and environmental features is egregious.  You'll be running through the field and watching trees and bushes endlessly pop into existence in front of you.  Part of this is, of course, due to the limitations of the Switch hardware, but even so, pop in to this degree is something I never once encountered in Skyrim or Breath of the Wild.  The controls, as well, could stand some improvement as they end up feeling a little clunky although not to the extent that some practice can't overcome.  The game also includes a lot of escort quests.  Fortunately these are all optional, and your ward will typically find you no matter how far ahead you get, but the AI for these escorts is abysmal.  If you're walking through the field and encounter a dragon, rather than run the opposite direction like a rational unarmed townswoman, your ward will instead just kind of stand there as if inviting the dragon to tea.

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen looks at first glance like just another generic fantasy game, but those willing to put in the time will discover that it's actually a strong and compelling experience in its own right.  Playing a cross between Dark Souls, Monster Hunter, and The Witcher, Dragon's Dogma feels simultaneously both familiar and new, a balance that few games these days manage to strike efficiently.  A couple different difficulty settings are available to make the game approachable to players of different skill levels, and if a challenge seems insurmountable, some level grinding, equipment upgrading, or Pawn team changes is all that's needed to gain an edge in battle.  I have to admit that I was skeptical when I began, but what I found once I got into the game, I was pleasantly surprised by what I found.

Also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows

Every now and then, a game comes along that defies all of your expectations.  Wargroove is one such game for me.  This game hits three items on my "Shit That Makes A Game Great" checklist - a strong female protagonist, solid strategy gameplay, and a dog.  The last one, obviously, is the most important; at no point has there ever been a game featuring a dog that I didn't love.  Not only does Wargroove have a dog, but the dog is a general who inspires his troops to feats of valor and justice with this stalwart bravery and his floofy charisma.  Truly Caesar exemplifies the best that pupperkind has to offer.

If you've ever played Advance Wars or Famicom Wars, then you basically know how Wargroove plays already.  I've seen a lot of people draw comparisons online with Fire Emblem, and that makes sense given that Fire Emblem is more popular than Advance Wars in the West these days, but Fire Emblem is really not the best comparison because it's not an SRPG.  Your units don't level up, and aside from the commanders, they don't have unique names or personalities.  You do, however, get to build up resources every turn and create new units and take cities and shit like Advance Wars.  The way I've described Wargroove to friends is the gameplay of Advance Wars crossed with the basic setting of Fire Emblem crossed with the humor of slapstick comedy.

There are a couple different of game modes in Wargroove.  In addition to the campaign, you've got the standard multiplayer as well as a sort of survival thing called "arcade mode" where you have to pick a commander and clear five random maps in a row.  The last game mode is a puzzle mode where you're given one turn to complete a certain objective - usually either defeat an enemy commander or get a specific unit to a specific spot on the map.  Puzzle mode proved more frustrating than fun for me although I can definitely see how folks fonder of problem-solving type games would love that game mode.  With the multiplayer mode, however, there is a map editor so you can create your own scenarios.  It actually reminds me a lot of the scenario creator in Age of Empires II from way back in the day.

The story of the game isn't really the highlight here as it's pretty standard.  The main character is the princess of this kingdom called Cherrystone, and then this skeleton army invades, and the whole story from there is pretty much exactly what you'd expect - run away, meet up with allies, counter-attack, discover plot device, save the world, etc, etc.  What keeps the story interesting isn't the story itself but rather the characters and how they're developed over the course of the story.  I can't say that I loved all of the characters in Wargroove's cast, but I definitely found the vast majority to be quite likable and endearing.  Especially Caesar.  15/10 best boy.

Wargroove doesn't reinvent the wheel when it comes to turn-based strategy gameplay, but it still does the genre extremely well.  The units are well balanced to counter one another, the characters in the story mode are likable and well developed, and the visuals are bright, colorful, and well detailed despite the pixel art style.  Perhaps the best detail of the game, however, is its approachability.  Wargroove's difficulty is fully customizable even beyond the handful of difficulty setting with sliders allowing players to set to their liking the rate of resource income, damage taken, and the speed at which the generals' special abilities charge.  This means that the game can be enjoyed by those who've never played a game like this before as well those who've beaten every game the genre has to offer.  In a time when most games seem to handle difficulty by making the whole thing mind-numbingly easy or brutally difficult, the extent of customization that Wargroove's difficulty settings provide is a welcome change of pace.  Given the game's exclusivity to the Switch, this is a definite must-own for Switch gamers even if it is sadly only available digitally.

Also available on Linux, OSX, and Windows

It's often said that heroin, nicotine, and cocaine are the most addictive things in the world.  Have no experience with those substances, I can only take recovered addicts at their word.  I do, however, carry with me a strong suspicion based on personal experience that even as addictive as those drugs are, they pale in comparison to the highly addictive nature of Civilization.  "Just one more turn, I swear" inevitably turns into 50 more turns.  "Oh, it's only 9:15," you think as you glance at the clock.  Five minutes later, it's 4 am, and you have to get ready for work in an hour.  Oops.  The only saving grace we had with Civ 6 before was that it was tied to PC meaning that one had to be at a computer in order to play or, if one had a laptop, survive having the heat of a thousand suns on one's lap as that poor laptop CPU tried desperately to keep up with everything going on.  Then, out of a void in our hearts that we never knew needed to be filled, 2K says "Hey, what if we put this on Switch?"  Thanks, figurative drug dealer, for enabling my addiction even further.

When I finally broke down and ordered Civilization VI on Switch, I was expecting it to be a lot like comparing Civilization V and Civilization Revolution - the same core Civilization gameplay but in a MUCH simplified form that works better on console.  To my surprise, that's not at all what I got.  What I got was Civilization VI.  Not slimmed down, not condensed, not kinda-sorta-but-only-barely.  It's legit Civilization VI.  The only big differences between the Switch version and the PC version (aside from the obvious visual effects absent) are the lack of the two major expansions on PC and the lack of community mod support.  Other than that, this is the complete Civilization VI package.  Even the small expansions like the Nubian and Australian civilizations are present.  The fact that they put that masterful PC game on what is frankly an underpowered tablet and got it to run beautifully is in itself an amazing feat in my book.

The game I played lasted (so far) about 700 turns since I'm the very definition of "methodical" in my Civilization games, and in all that time, I only experienced one crash.  The only two complaints I have with the game are the solid five or six minutes it takes to load a game and the tenish seconds of hiccuping that happens between turns as the system processes what the AI opponents do during their turn.  Those two things do definitely get annoying, but it's worth noting that Civilization VI isn't exactly a fast loading game on PC (unless you're rich and have an all SSD build with shit tons of RAM), and it's not at all uncommon to have some short lag between turns on PC, either.  It's worth noting that the vent on the top of the Switch DOES sound a Boeing 747 during takeoff and pumps out enough heat to melt steel beams during gameplay, but the game volume usually drowned out the fan in my experience.  Besides that, it's not like it could possibly be any louder than the Dreamcast's disc drive.

This all sounds great, right?  A no compromises port of Civilization VI on Switch - what could be better?  Well, buckle up, buttercup, 'cause it gets better.  Not only is this a dream of a port job, but it supports cross platform cloud saves.  Provided that you don't use expansions or mods unavailable on Switch, you can start a game on PC, play two or three hours, save, and as long as your 2K account is linked both on PC and on your Switch, you can download your PC save and keep playing on Switch.  "One more turn" just became an even deadlier lie to tell yourself.  It works the other way, too; if you're on a plane, let's say, and you start a game on Switch, but you're just 10 or 15 turns away from finally shutting up those damn French for good, you can save the game, boot up your PC at home, and keep playing from the comfort of your undoubtedly overpriced PC chair.  It's a feature I never knew I wanted, but dear god, is it a nice feature to have.

I know that older Civilization games had been ported to consoles during the 90s, but having only been playing Civ for the past five or six years, I was admittedly unsure of how a console port would go.  I've played Civilization V and Civilization VI on PC, and I've played Civilization Revolution and Civilization Revolution 2+ on 360 and Vita, respectively, so that's what I was expecting a console port of Civilization VI to be - stripped down and bare bones - and I suspect that other Civilization fans probably had similar concerns.  Let me assure everyone, then, that this is not the case.  Civilization VI on Switch is as full fledged and full featured a console port as possible, and absolutely no aspect of the game whatsoever has left me disappointed.  I've read that sales of Civilization VI on Switch have far exceeded 2K's projections, too, so that makes me hopeful that the Rise and Fall and Gathering Storm DLC expansions will make their to way to Switch someday, as well.   If you're a fan of disgustingly deep and addicting strategy games, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of this game on Switch.

Yoshi's Crafted World was honestly probably the Switch game currently available for which I've been the most excited leading up to launch day.  Yoshi's Woolly World is my absolute favorite first party game on Wii U, so when a follow up on Switch got announced, I was bursting at the seams (no pun intended) with excitement.  Feel Good had already proven they knew how to make a fun, approachable, and cute platformer with Woolly World, and with them at the helm for Crafted World as well, I had full confidence that this would be an instant classic.

So does Crafted World stand up to the high bar set by Woolly World?  Well, mostly.  I think Woolly World was still a much better game overall, but that's not to detract from the exceptional experience that Good Feel crafted for Switch owners.  You've got something like 50 levels and over 500 smiley flowers (basically this game's power stars) to collect.  Some of those flowers are found as collectibles throughout the levels, but every level has one that's awarded for collecting 100 coins in that level, one that's awarded for finishing the level with all 20 hit points, and one awarded for finding all 20 red coins in that level.  Each level also has a "flip side" with three flower-bearing Poochy pups to find.  If you find all of that level's Poochy pups within a set time limit, you're awarded an additional smiley flower.

The levels themselves provide a ton of variety to keep things interesting, as well.  Most levels are the standard designs you'd expect from a platformer - get to the end of the level, yay, you're the winner.  Every now and then, however, they throw in a challenge level where half of the collectible smiley flowers are based on your performance.  One, for example, has you pilot a giant Yoshi mech, and you have to rack up 9000 points - easier said than done - to get all three flowers.  One is a race in solar powered cars, so you have to carefully change lanes both to keep out of the shade and to keep ahead of your AI opponents.  One has you flying a plane from a horizontally scrolling perspective where you control the pitch of the plane.  On top of that, there are a few boss levels scattered throughout the game as you seek out the five scattered magic dream meth crystals or whatever plot device they decided to use to justify the purpose of the game.

As was the case with Woolly World's yarn style, the use of a craft theme naturally lends itself to gorgeous visuals.  I do, however, with Nintendo didn't seem to have this stubborn refusal to use adequate anti-aliasing.  Yoshi's Crafted World looks great, but it would look downright stunning if the jagged edges were just smoothed.  Despite the jagged lines, though, it's still a beautiful game with a fantastic art direction.  The music, as well, is the same high quality that most Yoshi games bring to the table.  It's not a perfect game, but it's still an exceptionally good 2D platformer and a definite must-have for any Switch owner.  It started to get a little bit tedious towards the end, but it does provide a perfect way to relax and unwind at the end of a long and frustrating workday.

Have you ever been playing Pokemon and thought to yourself, "Man, I wish these adorable little creatures that I'm forcing to fight to the death were SUPER adorable little girls I could force to fight to the death"?  If so, then you're in luck, because Moemon turns Pokemon Emerald into exactly that game.  In terms of content and Pokemon included, it's exactly the same game as Pokemon Emerald.  With the exception of Pokemon sprites, absolutely nothing is changed, but holy shit, these new sprites are impressive (and kawaii af).

All 386 Pokemon sprites have been completely replaced; every Pokemon sprite has been made into an adorable anime girl.  From my experience with the game, a good chunk seem to have had their Pokedex data removed and replaced with just "X" presumably as a placeholder that, at least by the release of the version I have downloaded, never got replaced.  Honestly, though, who actually reads the Pokedex entries?  We're all here for the  cute moe girl catching and the death battles, and in that respect, it delivers beautifully.

What this ROM hack doesn't provide, however, is a truly new Pokemon experience.  The story, region, NPCs, etc are all 100% identical to the original Pokemon Emerald from what I could tell with the ONLY alterations made being the Pokemon sprites.  To some folks, that's going to be disappointing, but to others, that might be a welcome thing.  I, personally, like my Pokemon hacks to be as new and different as possible, but I know some folks are going to want to just experience a familiar with with a twist, and Moemon provides just that.  If that return to familiarity is what you want AND you like cute 32- bit anime girls, then look no further.  If you want an all new and original Pokemon adventure, however, then I'd probably direct you towards Pokemon Vega.

Also available on Wii U

One of the ironic things about the sixth Fire Emblem game, Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, is that despite the fact that the inclusion of a character from the game - the protagonist, Roy - in Super Smash Bros. Melee is a big part of what got Westerners talking about Fire Emblem, it's never received an official English translation.  Fortunately for SRPG aficionados likes me, Fire Emblem has a pretty dedicated fanbase which produced a high quality fan translation patch for the series's handheld debut. 

The first game in the Fire Emblem series to get a Western release was the seventh game, Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade (simply titled "Fire Emblem" in the West), but that was actually a prequel to this previous game.  In Binding Blade, the game centers around Roy, the son of the seventh game's Lord Ephiram, as he sets out to discover why the nearby neighbor of Bern has launched a war of aggression and shattered the peace that the continent had worked so hard to maintain.  Most Fire Emblem games follow a fairly similar story structure, but in typical Fire Emblem fashion, the quality of the storytelling and the absolutely fantastic character development make up for the relatively generic nature of the story itself.

From what I've read about the game's development, Intelligent Systems tried to make Binding Blade more forgiving than the previous entry in the series, the Super Famicom's Fire Emblem: Thracia 776.  That alone makes me terrified to play Thracia 776 eventually as Binding Blade already had more than its share of challenges.  The game's overall difficulty was tough but fair, but there were a few bosses and individual levels that were absolutely brutal if you didn't have a weapon that could exploit a specific weakness.  I appear not to be alone in that opinion as Blazing Blade and the 8th game in the series, Sacred Stones, both saw the overall difficulty toned down a bit.

Binding Blade had an interesting development cycle having started its life as Fire Emblem: The Maiden of Darkness on Nintendo 64 before being virtually completely scrapped and moved to Game Boy Advance with only the protagonist, Roy, and a swordmaster character, Karel.  Beyond the scrapped development of Maiden of Darkness, though, Binding Blade ended up introducing its own new spins on the series.  First and foremost was the introduction of the magic triangle.  Since the Super Famicom era, Fire Emblem games have had a weapon triangle; sword beats axe, axe beats lance, and lance beats sword.  Binding Blade expanded that mechanic to magic in a system where anima (elemental magic) beats light magic, light magic beats dark magic, and dark magic beats anima.  Binding blade wasn't technically the first game in the series to have this sort of advantage system - that would be Genealogy of the Holy War, the fourth game - but whereas Genealogy only had the dis/advantage affect accuracy, Binding Blade expanded that to have an effect on both accuracy and damage, making it much more crucial to the development of effective strategies.

All things considered, Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade made about as impressive a debut on the handheld scene for the series as one could want.  The game isn't perfect as there are some minor quality of life things that I found annoying - the inability to use non-combat items like Speedwings and Hero Crests from the pre-battle prep screen, for example - but those are nit picks at best.  The only real complaint I have is that the game's balance could have used a little bit of tweaking, but at no point does it feel unbalanced to the point of being broken.  I'm not willing to say that Binding Blade is the best game in the Fire Emblem series, but it definitely is the best of the first six games that saw retail release.

Also available for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Wii, Nintendo DS, OSX, and Windows

Call of Duty 4 was the first game in the series that feels truly modern not just in setting but in overall design.  Being one of the most popular games in the series, it's since been remastered for the current generation of consoles which is the version that I played most recently.  Before I get into the actual review, since it has nothing to do with the game itself but rather the idiots who name these games and the dudebro fuckboys playing them, let me just vent for a moment.  Everyone these days seems to assume that when I say "Modern Warfare," I mean Black Ops IIII.  Like, bitch, no.  If I meant Black Ops 4, I'd have said Black Ops 4.  There's only game that was titled "Call of Duty 4."  Don't blame me for the fact that you're too stupid to tell the difference between a title and a subtitle.  Furthermore, does no one at Activision have any understanding of the most basic Roman numerals?  "IIII" isn't a thing.  Yes, symmetry for cover art, I get it.  That doesn't make it any less stupid than saying that the number after ten is "zeroteen."  The Roman numeral for "4" is "IV," not friggin' "IIII."  Seriously guys, it's not that hard.  It's one thing if you don't know Roman numerals for some number like 5372, but 4?  Seriously?  You can't even figure that one out?  Sorry - actually,  nevermind, I'm not sorry - but shit like that pisses me off.

Okay, so here's where the unpopular opinions come into play.  I don't think Modern Warfare is the best campaign in the series, and I don't think it's even close to the best multiplayer in the series.  It's a good campaign, but it falls way short of all three Black Ops games (since the Black Ops 4, in addition to screwing up basic Roman numerals, went the way of the fuckboi and omitted the campaign entirely in favor of just-another-Fortnite-slash-PUBG-rip-off battle royale), Advanced Warfare, Infinite Warfare, Call of Duty, and Call of Duty 2.  As for the multiplayer, again, it's good, but doesn't come close to Black Ops III, Ghosts (oof, there's a really unpopular thing - saying literally anything positive about Ghosts), or WWII even with the modern remaster.  The campaign, however, is definitely the part of the game with which I have the biggest issues since most of my issues with the multiplayer are super subjective and rather vague since I don't usually waste my time on FPS multiplayer.

Okay, let's dig into my plethora of problems with the campaign.  First off, everyone knows (or should know) that the golden rule of writing is "Show, don't tell."  That's not quite applicable to writing a script for a video game, at least not in the same way.  When you're doing something as basic as establishing the setting for your game, yes, you need to show, but you also need to tell.  Don't just have a map quickly zoom in on what geographically-savvy people know is Oaxaca, Mexico and then proceed to spend the entire game just calling it "Central America" and having every character be short, overweight, wear a massive sombrero, and eat tacos throughout every mission.  That's basically what Modern Warfare does.  They may zoom in on what some folks know is Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or Iran in the second or two of world-map visible in the loading screens, but they never call the setting anything other than "Middle East," and every single enemy is a walking caricature of stereotypes that Americans hold about Arabs.  And it's not like this was a stylistic choice - in the other part of the game, they not only say "Hey guys, the country you're fighting in is Russia," but they sometimes specify regions of Russia.  Like, whose sales are you afraid of losing?  Do you really have that many customers in Yemen, Iran, and Oman?  I get it, we're all terrified of anger the desert boogymen (/s), but seriously, this is not acceptable when it's something as fundamental as your story's setting.  And maybe I just missed something - I was drunk through a chunk of my playthrough - but I'm still not 100% sure why the Russian ultranationalists and the people from Nonamestan were allies.  Did they just want to make the Russians and the Muslims work together for the sake of putting the two groups Americans are the most irrationally terrified of in the same game?  Regardless of the "why," Modern Warfare is a prime example of bad narrative set-up.

So now that we've established I have absolutely zero respect for the writing here, I guess I can address the actual gameplay in the campaign.  It's good.  Honestly, the gameplay in the campaign mode is more than half the reason I'm giving this game a good score at all.  For as suck as the writing was, the gameplay direction was spot on.  Most of the game is your standard FPS affair, but there's enough variety to keep anything from getting stale.  Sometimes you've got a whole squad to back you up, and you're gunning your way through a town.  Sometimes it's just you and your homie on a stealth missions DEEP behind enemy lines.  Sometimes you're trying to get to a specific point as quickly as possible.  One mission has you control the guns on an AC-130 and turn enemies on the ground into meat paste from long range.  Some missions are long whereas some are super short and serve only to show story progression.  Honestly, I have complaints with almost every aspect of the campaign, but the one aspect for which I have nothing but praise is the mission design and variety.  It's an exemplar of what a modern military shooter's design should be.

I don't know how much of an improvement the game's visuals will be for most folks, but consider that my first playthrough was on Wii at 480i over composite, and this second playthrough was at 2160p over HDMI, it scarcely even looked like the same game to me.  I never played COD4 in HD, so going from SD straight UHD was like putting on glasses for the first time.  Everything looked so crisp, clear, and photorealistic.  I'm not an audiophile, so didn't really notice a big improvement in sound, but that's just not the type of thing I'd typically notice.  Regardless, though, Modern Warfare Remastered holds up as a model template of what a remaster should be - keep the game itself as unchanged as possible while polishing every aspect of it that you can.

Call of Duty 4 - be it the original release or the remaster - is definitely not even close to the best game in the series, but it is an excellent FPS title nonetheless.  If you're not a fan of the genre, there's not a whole lot here - the writing is questionable, the multiplayer gets really stale really fast due to the repetitive nature of the genre - but the level design and mechanics of the game are really polished and well designed.  I'm on the edge here with the score I'm giving it, but I'm going to err on the side of a higher score because of how truly well designed the single player missions are.  If you're into shooters, I definitely recommend checking this one out.

Also available on Gamecube, Wii, Switch, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Windows

I first played Resident Evil 0 back on Gamecube, and it was actually one of my early Resident Evil experiences after the PlayStation original and Resident Evil 4 (which I played on Wii).  Zero's release at the end of 2002 was the perfect accompaniment for the remake of Resident Evil that had come out in the beginning of 2002 as it takes place immediately before the first game not far from the infamous Umbrella mansion.  It was originally a Gamecube exclusive before being ported to Wii and then remastered in HD for Microsoft's and Sony's 2000s HD systems, and while it does somewhat show its age as a 17 year old game, it still holds up as a pretty good game in 2019.

In Resident Evil Zero, a team of elite cops from Raccoon City - a sister squad to the STARS members that starred in the first game - is sent to investigate a series of cannibalistic murders in the forested mountains near Raccoon City.  They quickly discover a crashed military police vehicle and two dead MPs who were apparently transporting a dangerous murderer named Billy Cohen.  You start off playing as Rebecca, a rookie STARS medic, and are investigating a mysteriously stalled train while also searching for Cohen.  Upon realizing that there's some cataclysmic outbreak going on, Rebecca realizes that the only hope for survival is to cooperate with Billy.

The game overall feels a lot like the original Resident Evil; most of it takes place in a mansion with zombies where you have to solve ridiculous puzzles that would never exist in the real world in order to proceed.  It's really good overall, but there are a few stylistic choices that really kill it for me to some extent.  The biggest issue is the inventory.  Inventory space is extremely limited which, in and of itself, isn't a problem.  The problem is that there's no item storage like in the original game, and some of the items take two spaces.  The hookshot especially is a problem because it takes two slots, and you need it at various points through the game right up near the end, but it never tells you when you're done needing it.  Like, I get it, scary horror spoopy games use limited inventory to make it spoopier, but this is just annoying.

Having gone from playing on Gamecube to playing PlayStation 4, the visuals were quite impressive given that it was just a simple upscale.  The controls can feel a little archaic especially where the tank controls are concerned, but the game is much more playable in a modern context than 1, 2, 3, or Code Veronica are (although I still love those games).  Resident Evil 0 does leave a bit to be desired in the details, but it's still. an extremely playable game.  Whether you play it on the Gamecube, the Wii, or the PS4 or Xbox One, it's a fantastic experience.  

Square has been on a real roll of putting out some high quality retro-styled JRPGs lately.  After playing I am Setsuna and Lost Sphear, I was hyped for Octopath Traveler.  I resisted the urge to buy it at launch in my brutal struggle to make not-stupid decisions with my money, but I only held out for a couple months.  Then I sank around 100 hours into the game.  I ALMOST 100% completed the game.  I did all four chapters for all eight characters.  I got all of the best equipment.  I unlocked every job and completed every side quest.  ALMOST was I was at 100% on the game....almost....

So before I go into the one single thing that stood between me and completionist glory, I'll explain the structure of the game.  There are eight protagonists in the game, and when you start, you pick one as your "main" protag.  Who you pick doesn't really affect anything other than whose Chapter 1 you start on, and you can't remove whomever you picked from your party until you finish all eight characters' stories.  Other than that, it makes no impact on the story who you pick.  You then go from town to town, starting new characters' Chapter 1 and then continuing their story.  That's where the game's first shortcoming appears - the game is laid out to have eight separate stories that intersect, but those intersections are loose and sparse at best until you get to the very end.  When you finished each character's Chapter 4, you start to see common strands linking them, but they don't really converge at all until you get to the post-game dungeon (after a solid 15 or 20 minutes of unskippable credits.  Then you find out how they've all been connected all along, and that part is really cool, but they feel completely unrelated throughout the first 90% of the game.  Why are these people randomly traveling together and helping each other?  There's no interaction between the characters aside from unvoice "travel banter" that pops up infrequently and never contains any meaningful or significant dialogue.  It all feels like a gigantic missed opportunity.

The one part of the game I didn't complete is the post-game dungeon.  I finished almost all of it.  There's a boss rush with eight boss rematches and then a two-phase fight with the true final boss.  I got about the final boss's second phase down to about half health before I got rekt.  After six tries and never making it past that point, I said screw it and gave up.  It's post-game, the credit rolled.  I count that as beat.  What makes that post-game boss so damn frustrating is that he spawns souls that lock all of his weaknesses to keep you from breaking his defenses and stunning him in addition to making him completely invulnerable to any damage whatsoever.  The only way to unlock his weaknesses and deal damage is to kill all of the minion souls.  What makes it worse is that all but one of the souls' weaknesses are always locked, and the boss will respawn a soul within a turn or two, so you have one or two turns to kill all of the souls, stun the boss, and dish out as much damage as possible before the boss recovers and spawns more souls, starting the whole process over again.  The boss rush isn't hard, but it's extremely time consuming.  The boss's first phase, however, is tough, and the second phase is downright brutal, and the ridiculous invulnerability ends up making the difficulty spike from "stay on your toes, but you'll be alright" to "wtf balls to the wall" hard, and difficulty spikes like that are - in my opinion - a sign of a poorly made game and kill the fun for me.  So screw it, I got close.  As one of my college professors always said, good enough for government work.

Octopath Traveler's biggest problem is that it just falls short of its potential.  It's not a bad game; it's just a disappointing game.  The characters are all pretty interesting.  Olberic is a noble knight setting out to find the truth about a painful betrayal.  Therion is a master thief on a quest to redeem himself from a shame brought on him by his own pride.  Tressa is a young merchant traveling the world to see what their is to see and gain experience from her journey.  Ophelia is a cleric on a religious pilgrimage across the continent.  Alfyn is a wandering apothecary who just wants to help those in need.  Cyrus is a brilliant scholar seeking out an ancient and taboo tome that vanished from his university's archives mysteriously 15 years prior.  H'aanit is a huntress on a quest to find and rescue her master.  Primrose - Octopath waifu #1 - is on a quest to kill the trio of assassins who murdered her father and brought to ruin her family's once powerful noble house.  Had these stories been written to intersect before the very end of the game, it would have been a fascinating experience.  Instead it ends up feeling like eight extremely short, separate RPGs haphazardly pasted together.  It's still a fun experience with a beautiful world - seriously, the background's visuals here are top notch - but it could have been so much better with a little more TLC in the writing department.

Octopath Traveler is a bit of a mixed bag for me.  On the one hand, the gameplay is a lot of fun, and it feels a bit like Bravely Default.  The multiple protagonists give it a fairly unique feel, but the writing connecting those characters' stories just doesn't feel cohesive enough to live up to its potential.  The difficulty level also spikes from time to time especially if you're going for the "true" ending.  You've got eight characters in a party with a maximum of four characters, and the inactive characters don't gain any experience.  That necessitates a certain degree of grinding which is definitely NOT a welcome feature to a JRPG in 2018 or 2019 for me.  Octopath Traveler is definitely a game worth owning and playing for Switch enthusiasts, but as a JRPG, it's kind of run-of-the-mill and not particularly outstanding in any area aside from "missed potential."  It's good, but it's definitely not great.

Also available on Xbox One and Windows

Fallout 76 is a divisive game to say the least.  In a time when compelling single player games with deep lore and world building are increasingly scarce, Bethesda has long been a beacon of light in a dark cavern of multiplayer garbage with its Elder Scrolls and Fallout series.  Elder Scrolls Online was sort of to be expected because it's basically just Bethesda's version of World of Warcraft, but Fallout 76 was a game that could easily have been amazing or disastrous depending on execution.  It's the first online Fallout game, and that's a hard thing to get right; you don't want a straight up empty world, but it's not very in keeping with Fallout if there are thousands of people in one settlement.  Unfortunately on the spectrum between success and disaster, Fallout 76 falls a bit right of center.

Fallout 76 manages to strike a pretty good balance with the world population.  There are something like a dozen and half max per world which, while still leaving the world feel pretty desolate and empty, keeps running into other players from being a rare occurrence even if it's not exactly common.  The post-nuclear world of West Virginia is also extremely well done and possibly one of the best and most interesting worlds to appear in a Fallout game yet.  Unfortunately that's about all that Fallout 76 gets right.  The rest of the game more or less varies between "disappointing" and "what the hell, dude?"

Let's start with the story.  There isn't much.  The overarching "main" quest line involves following in the footsteps of Vault 76's overseer as she tries to evaluate the damage Appalachia suffered in China's nuclear barrage and to secure the nuclear weapons still unlaunched in the region.  These quests are basically just a scavenger hunt; it's just going from place to place and stumbling upon the supply boxes and holotapes she left behind.  There are four "categories" of quests in Fallout 76 - "Main" quests which include the overseer quests and a handful of other major lore-establishing quests, "Side" quests which shed life on what happened in West Virginia in the 25 years between the falling of the bombs and the day that Vault 76 opened, "Daily" quests which are relatively short and simple quests that can be repeated every day, and "Event" quests which are tied to specific regions like restoring a power plant or repairing a food processing facility.

Because Fallout 76 is an online game, Bethesda wanted to encourage interaction between players.  To achieve this, they decided not to include any human NPCs whatsoever.  Anyone you encounter is either a player character, a robot, or a mutated horror that's trying to kill you.  On the one hand, I can somewhat understand it.  It's only been a couple decades since the bombs fell, so most folks are either dead or ghouls.  On the other hand, we know from holotapes and notes found during side quests that there WERE people who survived the bombs and were alive fairly recently (since you can find mostly undecomposed bodies around).  Not only that, but we know that that there were people long after the bombs because we've all played the older games (shame on you if you haven't), so when you really start to think about it, it's just bizarre that the ONLY living people are suddenly vault dwellers when there had been survivors not long before the vault opened.

Let's turn now to the mechanics and gameplay.  Can someone please explain to me why the hell a game that came out four months ago is built on an engine that's old enough to have a Bachelor's degree?  Oh, sure, it's gone through "revisions" and "major updates," but at the end of the day, Bethesda is still using Gamebryo, and that engine has been around since 1997.  You should not release a full retail price game that's built with an engine that's old enough to drink in the United States.  It shows, too, that they're using an ancient engine and that Bethesda still hasn't learned what the phrase "quality assurance" means.  When the game launched, it was a buggy mess.  Some quests couldn't be completed because you couldn't interact with certain objects, items were unobtainable because the model would spawn but without any actual hit box or item linked to the model, perks were broken, enemies would randomly regenerate, achievements didn't always trigger....it was atrocious.  I was a hardcore apologist at the time, too.  "Oh, it's not THAT bad.  No worse than their other games!"  No, it was worse than their other games. 

Lastly, I need to vent about the carry limit.  I understand that for balance purposes as well as server stress purposes, you need to limit how much weight a player can carry in their inventory.  However if food has weight, bobby pins have weight, ammo has weight, fully broken down resources have weight, that adds up FAST.  But that's fine because you can put it in your stash, right?  Well, maybe.  Most players have, I'd say, about 200 carry weight on average.  The stash can hold 600 (it could only hold 400 at launch).  That fills up FAST especially when some of the powerful weapons that you probably save for Scorchbeasts and Mirelurk Queens weight like 30 or 40.  I understand that server stability - or stability with anything really - isn't Bethesda's strong suit, but the whole game is pretty much an exercise in being ALMOST overencumbered.

Fallout 76 is a massive exercise in missed opportunity and botched efforts.  For the plethora of complaints I addressed above plus the fact that entire factions' traders are limited to 200 caps per day (not individual trader robots) which I didn't even mention, Fallout 76 is a depressingly disappointing game that highlights what happens proper time for bug testing and bug fixing isn't allowed.  Now to be fair, I have still had a lot of fun with this game, and I've had some great experience with impromptu groups.  The base building has been DRAMATICALLY improved from Fallout 4, and the diversity in the locations in the game keep your adventure for looking the same constantly.  Unfortunately, despite the fact that it is a lot of fun to play if you manage to avoid the major bugs (or are very patient with them), it's just not a very well made game when you get down to the details and stability.  That's a shame, too, because this could have been an absolutely incredible game.  As the president of the United States would say, SAD.

Earth Defense Force is my guiltiest of testosterone pleasures.  The whole series from the earliest game on PS2 to this most recent one on PS4 are objectively mediocre games, and they were originally designed to be budget titles.  But DAMN, is it ever fun to massacre entire swarms of 50 foot tall insects with huge rocket launchers.  It's like what would happen if SyFy ever hired me to make one of their crappy made-for-TV monster movies.  It's truly a thing of beauty.

The basic story in EDF - all of them, pretty much - is that giant insects appear and start destroying cities, marking the beginning of an alien invasion.  Then you, as a proud soldier of the Earth Defense Force, must bravely charge into battle with your weapon of choice, be it a sniper rifle, rocket launcher, shotgun, whatever, and use the blessing of unlimited ammo to massacre the invaders and keep those aliens out of our home!  WE'RE GONNA BUILD A GREAT, GREAT SPACE WALL, AND WE'RE GONNA MAKE THE ALIENS PAY FOR IT!  WITH BLOOD!  Literally nothing about this game takes itself seriously, and that's honestly its biggest strength.  It's absurdly ridiculous, and it embraces that whole heartedly from the ludicrous concept to the over the top voice acting.

Unfortunately for us Westerners, EDF5 is the first game in the series not to be released physically in North America since the series first debuted here.  You can get is on PSN for the normal $60, but if you want it physical, you've gotta import it.  Fortunately there's an Asia English version available, and at least when I pre-ordered it from Play-Asia back in November, it actually ended up being about $7 or $8 cheaper (once you factor in tax) even with the shipping.  Not sure why since I usually pay a premium for a physical import vs digital, but I'm not complaining.  Hell, I'd have paid an extra $20 to have it physical; Earth Defense Force is one of my obsessive-lunatic series alongside Legend of Zelda, Fire Emblem, and Army Men.

Earth Defense Force 5 is a really stupid game.  It's the same kind of stupid as when my friends and I duct taped a lawn chair to a skateboard, tied a rope to the back of a 4 wheeler and tied a handle to the other end, and had the 4 wheeler pull us like dry land redneck wakeboarding.  What I mean by that is that it's objectively stupid, but it's also objectively freaking amazing.  If you're into that kind of stupid, there are few games that will give you as good a time as Earth Defense Force, and this latest entry in the series on the PlayStation 4 performs better than any of its predecessors with the series' staple frame rate drops pretty much limited to heavy action scenes, and I didn't have the game outright crash on me a single time.  It looks great (given what series it is ), and it controls super well, too.  All in all, I don't have any complaints.  Normal people would probably have very few complaints.  With 110 levels, 5 difficulties, and multiplayer, too, there's a TON of content here to experience.

I love Gundam.  I loved the Encounters in Space compilation movie.  I've loved every Gundam game I've play (except New Gundam Breaker; that game was trash).  This game, however, is just...not good.  I tried to like it.  I really did.  There's even some potential for a good game here.  Unfortunately, it's just not that much fun, and they find a way to take an awesome story and make it super boring.

The game basically follows the last third of the original Mobile Suit Gundam storyline with the Federation's push to take Solomon and A Boa Qu to end the One Year War, but it doesn't do a very good job of telling that part of the story in any interesting way.  That in itself was a bit of a shock to me considering that, with the exception of maybe Operation British and the Battle of Odessa, the endgame of Mobile Suit Gundam was the most exciting part of the series.  Maybe it would be more interesting to someone who hasn't seen Gundam, but since I've actually seen these battles and whatnot, it just felt like a bad imitation of something incredible.

The gameplay is a really awkward 3D space combat set-up.  It feels, in a lot of ways, like they had a solid plan for what they wanted to do, but then Bandai was like "Hey, by the way, you have half an hour to finish the game before we start pressing discs," and it got rushed.  The whole control scheme just feels a bit unrefined to me.  The lock-on controls feel cumbersome, movement feels rather sluggish, and as for weapons, your vulcan is useless whereas the beam rifle is basically a noob-tube.  The melee attack feels more like a short ranged attack because to a certain extent, your mobile suit will just rocket towards the enemy even if they're a fair distance away (in the context of melee), but it's hard to tell exactly how far is too far.  The entire control scheme just feels extremely rushed to me.

Visually, the game looks pretty good for the most part.  The mobile suits themselves lacked some detail that I think could have been a big boon for the game, but overall, it's a good looking game given how abysmal the PS2's video quality tends to be (at least in my opinion).  The sound design is fine, but it would have benefited a lot from the inclusion of more music, sound effects, and voice clips from the show.  It certainly would have made it feel a lot more "Gundam."

Mobile Suit Gundam: Encounters in Space is okay I guess, but it just does not hold up well against either other Gundam games that I've played or the compilation film on which it's based.  The controls feel rushed and unpolished, and while the visuals are pretty nice, that doesn't make up for the disappointing gameplay and lackluster storytelling.  If you find this for $5 or less, then sure, it's worth it for a Gundam fan, but honestly, I really just can't recommend this one.  It was mostly just boring to me.

Also available on PlayStation 4

I was a HUGE fan of Persona 5 when it hit the PS4 a while back, and I was a HUGE fan of Persona 4: Dancing All Night when I finally joined the #VitaMasterRace.  While I enjoyed it, however, I found myself a slightly disappointed with Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight when it hit the Vita alongside Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight.  It was good, for sure, but it felt underwhelming next to Dancing All Night.  How does Dancing in Starlight stack up?

Fortunately for me, while it doesn't quite stand up as Dancing All Night's equal, Dancing in Starlight left me feeling much more satisfied than Dancing in Moonlight did.  I largely attribute that to the fact that Persona 5 had a much better soundtrack than Person 3 in my opinion, but truthfully, it's probably also partly because I knew what I could reasonably expect going in.  The relatively minimal content compared to Dancing All Night, rendering it a fairly standard rhythm game just with Persona music, caught me off guard with Dancing in Moonlight.  I knew to expect that going into this game, though, so there was less of a risk of disappointment.

As far as actual gameplay goes, it's exactly what you'd expect - standard Vita rhythm game affair.  You use the Triangle, Circle, X, Up, Right (or is it Left?  I forget), and Down buttons along with and analogue stick (or the touch screen, that works for the scratch as well) to match prompts in time with the song.  The responsiveness is great, the tracklist is fantastic, and it's overall a great time for fans of rhythm games.  They don't really do much to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, but it's definitely a fun game and a must play for Vita (or PS4) gamers who enjoy rhythm games.

Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight doesn't really do much to set itself apart from the average rhythm game aside from the use of Persona 5's FANTASTIC soundtrack, but it really doesn't have to.  It may be a largely standard rhythm game in design, but the execution is absolutely brilliant.  I can't speak for how different or similar the PS4 version is, but the Vita version is fantastic and a definite must play.

Mega Man 6 was the Blue Bomber's last hurrah on Nintendo's 8-bit powerhouse.  When this game released in 1993, the 16-bit Super Nintendo was already on store shelves.  Capcom, owing a huge amount of their success to the NES, insisted on giving their Mega Man franchise a glorious swan song.

In most regards, Mega Man 6 is just more of Mega Man 5.  The visuals, while no different stylistically than the previous five games, are bright and colorful throughout with some fantastic boss sprites.  The music is superb, keeping up the series's unbroken record of awesome soundtracks.  The controls and platforming feel tight, response, and polished nearly to perfection.  There's one thing that sets it above Mega Man 5 for me, however, and that's the Rush Adapters.  Mega Man basically fuses with his dog to get a couple of different armors that give some cool new abilities like a jet pack or an extra strong punch.​

There was almost a second addition that set Mega Man 6 above Mega Man 5, but unfortunately, poor execution ruins it for me.  They implemented some alternating paths in a few levels, but not only to the paths feel rather pointless - they branch out in the middle before coming together at the end rather than having alternate level endings like Mario 3 - but they feel like a bit of an afterthought with their implementation.  Only two of the robot masters' levels have alternate paths whereas something like half of the castle's levels do.  It's not that they're bad, per se, but they feel like a last minute addition that could have been so much better if a little more time and thought had been put into them.

Mega Man 6 is an example of what an 8-bit action platformer should be, and as far as I'm concerned, it's right up there tied with Mega Man 5 for "Best 8-bit Mega Man Game."  Overall, it's more of the same from Mega Man 5 with a couple of things that make it better and a couple of things that are slight detriments.  Still, though, if you had to choose one of the six NES Mega Man games to play for the rest of your life, I'd definitely suggestion going with Mega Man 6.

Also available on Xbox One and Windows

Just Cause 2 was an amazing slaughterfest, but it suffered from the hardware limitations of the PlayStation 3.  Just Cause 3 took everything great about Just Cause 2, expanded it, and then used the extra horsepower of the PlayStation 4 to fix the performance drops.  I've still got my gripes here and there with it, but hot damn, it's a world of improvement of its predecessor.

Like the previous game, you play as Rico Rodriguez, a "dictator removal specialist" as the game calls him.  Rico makes his return to his home island of Medici - a bizarre mix of Italian and Spanish influence as far as I can tell - which has been under the grip of a tyrannical dictator since a coup usurped power from the legitimate president.  From there, you help the rebellion in their revolutionary war against the despot, murdering and exploding your way across the island from town to town and military base to military base.

Honestly, the missions don't take up that much time; you could blow through the main story missions in 12 hours, probably.  What kept me occupied for a week was the obsessive compulsion to liberate every town and conquer every military base, and that will keep you busy for 50+ hours, I reckon.  It's so satisfying, though, to steal a bomber and just carpet bomb an enemy base, laughing in malicious glee as the destruction notifications pop up all over the screen.

Truthfully, I only have three big complaints with the game, and they're all fairly minor, all things considered.  First, the steering sucks on two wheeled vehicles.  Cars, tanks, jeeps, etc?  They're totally fine.  Motorcycles?  It's like riding a wild bull that's been violated with a cactus.  Second, the controls when piloting an airplane are REALLY finicky and tough to work proficiently.  Helicopters are fine, and I eventually got a passable ability to pilot planes, but it never felt comfortable.  I understand that controls in a 3D space can be difficult to make both adequately responsive and simple to pick up, but it felt like more of an obstacle than it needed to be.  My third and final gripe with the game is just how relatively few of the buildings were destructible.  In a game that uses "blow shit up" as its major selling point, I can't help but feel like I should be able to level entire cities if I wanted to and had enough explosives.  Instead, only certain guard towers and metal structures can be destroyed.  Everything else is bizarrely indestructible no matter what obscene amount of ordinance you throw at it.

Just Cause 3 is, in a lot of ways, like Grand Theft Auto...except with more explosions, fewer hookers, more government toppling and nation building, and less gang warfare.  If you enjoy murdering brutal autocrats and leaving a wake of corpses and wreckage behind you, this is absolutely the game for you.  If you enjoy stories about political machinations, then this may well be the game for you.  If you enjoy games about friendship, building up peaceful towns, and improving a settlement, this is definitely not the game for you.

​Also available on PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Gamecube, Xbox, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Wii, 3DS, Wii U, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, Android, and Windows

Mega Man 5 keeps the smooth controls and solid gameplay of Mega Man 3 and Mega Man 4, but it also, thankfully, addresses the rather boring selection of robot masters that left me a little disappointed ​with Mega Man 4.  Mega Man 5's cast of boss robots, while not especially crazy or outlandishly creative in their designs (with a couple of exceptions), are interesting and well done enough to keep me entertained and keep boredom and monotony at bay.

The latter five of the 8-bit Mega Man games didn't stray too far from the core concept established in the original game, but little bits here and there were added to keep things interesting, and Mega Man 5 is no exception.  The level designs are generally the among the best that the series has to offer although there are some bland spots here and there.  The robot masters are all really well designed, but there are two specifically stand out to me as especially fantastic and, in my opinion, stand out as the best robot masters of the series to this point - Napalm Man and Crystal Man.  Their character sprites and level designs are both absolutely fantastic, and the weapons they drop after you beat them are among my favorite of the series.  Those two bosses and their levels show how much creative talent Capcom had and how much potential the NES color pallet had when properly utilized.

One of the most immediately noticeable changes in Mega Man 5 that most fans might take issue with but that I, personally, loved was that the difficulty level in Mega Man 5 was markedly lower than previous games.  As one who sucks at video games despite loving them, this was a welcome change for me.  The music also really stands out here even in the context of the 8-bit Mega Man games.  There's not a single bad track in the game's soundtrack, and if you've got some good speakers connected to your TV, you're in for a great time.

Mega Man 5 takes the series to new heights and fixes all of my complaints with the somewhat bland robot masters in Mega Man 4.  The visuals are bright and colorful, and the sprites seem to pop off the screen.  The music is top notch, and the difficulty curve make this an especially approachable Mega Man game.  I still have a few gripes - a couple of the bosses were a little TOO easy in my opinion (looking at you, Star Man), but that's a very minor gripe in an otherwise fabulous game.

Dr. Discord's Conquest is a My Little Pony themed fan hack of Mega Man 3 which I reviewed yesterday.  Truthfully, there's really nothing of interest here to anyone other than retro gaming bronies - a niche market if there ever were one - but for those of us who DO happen to be both a brony and a retro gamer, this is a pretty neat hack.  It's far from perfect, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't thoroughly enjoy going through Mega Man levels as Twilight Sparkle blasting things with my unicorn magic.

As far as gameplay goes, the game is exactly what you would expect from a Mega Man 3 hack; you run and jump your way through a platforming level while blasting every enemy in your path until you reach a boss you have to destroy.  Then you get a special power that can help you defeat other bosses.  The end boss, obviously, is Discord, but the stage bosses (standing in for the robot masters) are Celestia, Fluttershy, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Trixie, Rarity, and Luna; and the character portraits for each on the level select screen are actually really well done.  The music includes some decent 8-bit renditions of MLP songs, but it's not quite as impressive as the MLP music in Pony Quest.

 Being a hack of Mega Man 3, the game obviously plays amazingly, but the real star of the show as far as I'm concerned is the attention to detail that went into this hack.  The visuals, both enemy sprites and environments, have been totally redone to reflect the My Little Pony theme.  It's a bit weird seeing Twilight walk exclusively on her hind legs, yeah, but the sprite itself looks good.  Even Derpy makes an appearance as a bubble-chucking enemy even despite not being one of the boss ponies.  While just a random fan project, it's obvious that this hack was a labor of love with the amount of care that was put into it.

Dr. Discord's Conquest may be "just" a Mega Man 3 hack, but it's a hell of a Mega Man 3 hack that had a lot of effort put into it.  From the presentation to the quality of the sprites to the music to the level design, nothing was half-assed in this hack.  It's a little awkward to see Twilight spend the whole game on her back legs, but that's more than made up for by the fact that you spend an entire game blasting enemies in hours of gameplay reminiscent of the changeling swarm scene during the season two finale.  There's really not much point in playing this if you're not a fan of My Little Pony or a FERVENT Mega Man fanatic who plays every halfway decent ROM hack, but if you are a fan of MLP and classic Mega Man, then I absolutely recommend checking out this hack.  It's fantastic.

I spent a good ten minutes trying to think of some halfway decent intro for this review, but after reviewing four Mega Man games in a row (excluding the MLP fan hack of Mega Man 3 that I'll be reviewing soon...or five if you count that one), I got nothing.  The NES games all play so similarly that an intro seems rather pointless.  Continuing my admittedly excessive critique of the box art, though, this is the best looking Mega Man of the four.  He still looks like an evil ventriloquist's dummy, but it's the most normal looking Mega Man we've gotten so far.  The gameplay maintains the high standards set by Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3, but as for overall game design...it leaves some to be desired.

In terms of game mechanics and control, Mega Man 4 is fantastic.  In terms of visuals and music, Mega Man 4 is great.  In terms of enemy and robot master design, Mega Man 4 is a bizarre step down in quality from its predecessors.  To the game's credit, Capcom did give each level an obstacle that's unique to that level, but when the boss at the end of that level feels lackluster and rather uninspired, it doesn't really break even.  It feels a lot like some of the Pokemon in Black/White or X/Y like friggin' "Roggenrolla" or literally an ice cream cone.  Like the inspiration just wasn't there this go around.

Mega Man 4 also replaces Dr. Wily (at least initially) as the antagonist and replaces him with some lame Soviet Ruskie named Dr. Cossack who just happens to build robots that are just uninspired rip-offs of Dr. Wily's minions.  That's not to say that Cossack ruins the game or anything, but it does seem like an unusual shift.  The slide returns from Mega Man 3 along with the addition of a charged shot that does additional damage.  That's balanced, however, with what feels like dramatically increased enemy  health.  That might be all in my head, but it felt like the enemies were a lot tougher, at times in excess of the added damage of the charge shot.

Mega Man 4 is definitely a step down in terms of overall design from the high standards of 2 and 3, but that's certainly not to say that it's a bad game by any stretch of the imagination.  The robot masters may feel a little uninspired this go around, but the game design and mechanics overall are still rock solid, the visuals are still fantastic, the music still phenomenal, and the platforming is still superb.  It's not as satisfying overall as Mega Man 2 or Mega Man 3 in my opinion, but it's still a damn good Mega Man experience.

Practice makes perfect, and by 1990, Capcom had released their third Mega Man game, and following true with the old adage, it builds upon the foundation of the two previous games and surpasses both.  The North American box part is similarly the best of the first three games; it looks weird, but at least this time it looks like an evil ventriloquist doll Mega Man rather than a middle age super hero well past his prime running around with a laser pistol. 

Mega Man 3, in my opinion, is the pinnacle of the 8-bit Mega Man games.  As Mega Man 2 did with the original game, Mega Man 3 capitalizes on what made the second game exceptional and made it better.  Levels are exceptionally well designed, the boss weaknesses and resistances are excellently balanced, levels are generally tough but fair, and the inclusion of the slide and Rush (best doggo roboi) make Mega Man 3 a truly spectacular game that stands out not only among Mega Man games but among NES games in general.

In terms of performance, the 8-bit Mega Man games generally have a bit of an issue with slowdown, and while Mega Man 3 is not exception, it seemed less severe and less of an impact on gameplay in this game than in the previous two.  Couple that with the fact that the visuals are bright and detailed - especially with the robot masters - and it's clear that Capcom's team had really gotten comfortable with the NES and how to program for it by this point.  As is usually the case with the Mega Man series, the music is exceptional and maintains the high musical standards set by the previous two entries in the series.

If you played Mega Man 2 and were impressed (and let's be honest, if you weren't, there's something wrong with you), then you'll be blown away by Mega Man 3.  As Mega Man 2 did with Mega Man, Mega Man 3 takes everything that was great about Mega Man 2 and makes it even better.  This definitely does stand out as one of the premier action platformers on the Nintendo Entertainment System and highlights just why Capcom was a juggernaut of game design back before the post-Resident Evil 4 days when they abruptly forgot how to make games.  As was the case with Mega Man and Mega Man 2, this game is readily available on just about every console under the sun in one collection or another, so there's no excuse to miss out on this game.  It's not perfect - the slowdown does still get annoying, and it's not totally devoid of the occasional difficulty spike and cheap kill - but it's truly fantastic in spite of those occasional flaws.

​Also available on Genesis, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Gamecube, Xbox, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Wii, 3DS, Wii U, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, Android, and Windows

A year after the release of the first Mega Man (two years for North America), Capcom saw fit to bring the Blue Bomber back for another platforming pew-pew party on the NES.  The box art for the North American release still looks more like a Chinese knock-off Power Ranger than Mega Man, but at least it's not as ugly and downright creepy as the cover of the first game was.

Everything about Mega Man 2 is an improvement over its predecessor.  The robot masters feel generally better designed, and there's more of an open ended weakness system with them.  Whereas in the first game, each robot master had one specific weakness, your options are a bit more varied in the second game.  The basic mega blaster will usually take care of them easily enough in a pinch, but they usually have a couple of weaknesses rather than just one, and they have specific resistances this time, too.  In one instance, a certain boss is actually healed by a specific weapon, and in another, a boss is weak against his own weapon.  It's clear that more time and energy went into the weaknesses and strategy in the sequel which makes sense given that the first game actually didn't perform particularly well commercially.

Another area in which Mega Man 2 excels over its predecessor (in part because of the aforementioned attention given to the boss weaknesses and strategy) is the difficulty.  In the original Japanese release, your only option was "balls hard," but when it got brought over to North American and Europe, they added in a "hard but not emasculating" difficulty alongside the "balls hard" difficulty of the Japanese release.  You can also get three special items - creatively called Item-1, Item-2, and Item-3 - in addition to the robot masters' weapons that can make traversing levels MUUUUUCH easier (and I'm pretty sure are required in a few areas) which add to the problem solving that the game requires.  The difficulty still doesn't feel as finely tuned to me as some of the later games, but it's an astronomical improvement over the original.

Mega Man 2 is an entirely different breed of game from the original.  I seem to be in the minority in that most folks seem to think that Mega Man 2 is the best of the six NES games, but even if I don't necessarily think it's THE best, it's definitely in the top three of the six.  The difficulty is much more approachable, the robot masters have some legitimate strategy elements to them with regards to weaknesses, the platforming takes a bit more thought and planning, and the overall game mechanics just feel more refined and polished.  This is basically everything that a sequel should be; fix what's wrong with the previous game and expand what was right.

Also available on Genesis, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Gamecube, Xbox, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Wii, 3DS, Wii U, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, Android, and Windows

Mega Man is for Capcom what Mario is for Nintendo, what Sonic is for Sega, and what a blinking red ring is for Microsoft.  He's their most recognizable and iconic image, and while that image is more than a little disturbing on the box art for the series' first release on NES in North America, the game itself holds up surprisingly well today.  It's not without its bullshit to be sure, but it's still a good time for those who enjoy action platformers.

Mega Man is, at its core, an action platformer.  This first game in the series is an extremely unbalanced action platformer, but the gameplay itself is simple - make your way across a level, shoot the bad guys, avoid the traps, and then beat the boss.  Each boss has a special weapon that it drops upon being defeated, and each boss has a specific boss weapon to which it's weak.  The levels can be played in any order (except for the last area), but given that the bosses are WAY easier if you exploit those weaknesses, there is a "best" order in which to play the game's levels.

The biggest issue I had with Mega Man was the balance.  Some levels would seem brutally difficult only to be capped with a total pushover boss.  Other levels would be a breeze but end with a boss that left me wanting to snap my controller.  There would be abrupt difficulty spikes in the levels followed by a return to a more normal difficulty.  Maybe I just need to git gud (I definitely do), but it seemed like the balance and enemy placements could have used just a little more tweaking.  From what I've read and heard from other fans, though, it seems like the first game is pretty widely known for being rough around the edges with regards to balance, a mistake that later entries don't make.

Mega Man definitely isn't a perfect game, but it definitely is a good game, and the series that it spawned is truly fantastic (for the most part).  The difficulty balance could use a bit of work as parts of the game are down right inhumane, but all in all, it's a solid action platformer.  The original NES cartridge is somewhat valuable (though not nearly as much so as the latter releases), but it's readily available on just about every system under the sun in one form or another given how many collections it's been included with, and I absolutely recommend playing this one however you can.

Also available on X1, PC-8801, PC-9801, FM-7, MSX2, X68000, Master System, TurboGrafx-CD, Saturn, PlayStation 2, DS, PlayStation Portable, iOS, Android, AppleIIGS, MS-DOS, and Windows

Over the past couple years, I've fairly rapidly become something of a major fan of the Ys series.  With my transition to Everdrives for my old cartridge consoles and the addition of a RetroPie to my HD set-up, I've decided that I'm going to play through every different version of the original Ys game (and probably Ys II and III).  Joining the Master System and TurboGrafx-CD ports on my "Versions of Ys Beaten" list now comes the port to the Famicom which, thankfully, got a fan translation.

Given that my previous experiences with the original Ys was on the TurboGrafx-16 (the greatest of all 16-bit consoles) and the Master System, a 8-bit system with superior specs to the NES, I went into this playthrough with tempered expectations.  I knew it was unlikely to be as visually impressive as the Master System version, and given that I played the Master System version with the FM Sound enabled, I knew this Famicom port wouldn't hold a candle to the Master System version.  I was pleasantly surprised, though.  I mean, it definitely met my expectations in general, but it wasn't as severe a step down as I had feared.

Visually, the game looks a lot like Hydlide.  It looks like an older NES game with less detailed sprites, but the only area where I felt that was at all to the game's detriment was enemy sprites.  The sprites aren't bad, but they leave some....interesting interpretations.  There are blue gummy bears, self-immolating porcupines, random amorphous grey blobs that look suspiciously like the eggs in a high school cafeteria, etc.  The music is honestly the biggest let down.  I'm certain that part of my disappointment is because I was spoiled first by FM sound on the Master System and then the CD quality audio on the TurboGrafx, but the music in this game just felt mediocre.  It was definitely a solid 8-bit rendition of the music from other versions of Ys, but it felt like playing a classical flute solo on a recorder.  I mean, yeah, it works, I guess, but it's...just disappointing.

The combat - the core of the experience - is thankfully 100% Ys.  It's the bump combat we all know and love (and if you don't love it, you're wrong).  The same strategy still applies; his them from the side, back, or the edge if you have to hit them head on, and you're fine, but if you hit them dead on, you're going to end up taking a ton of damage.  It's a fairly unconventional system for those who haven't played a version of Ys before, but I absolutely love it, and it's iconic Ys.  By no means do all Ys games use this system (I'm not even sure that most do although I've not played past IV, so I can't speak to that), but from my experience, when you mention Ys, what first comes to mind for most people who've played it is the bump combat, and in that respect, the NES port of Ys I is true to form.

Ys I for NES is definitely not the best version of the game to play, but if all you've got is a Famicom, there are definitely worse ways to experience Adol's first adventure.  The music is a far cry from Master System's FM Sound or the TurboGrafx-CD's perfect everything, but it serves the purpose.  Likewise, the visuals aren't quite as nice as the other two version I've played, but they're totally decent.  It's like playing Call of Duty 4 on Wii as opposed to PS3 or 360.  It doesn't play as smoothly, and it definitely doesn't look nearly as good, but judged on its own merits, it's still a perfectly competent and enjoyable game.  I wouldn't recommend this version if other options are available to you, but if you don't have any other options, it's totally worth a playthrough.