Finished ActRaiser (SNES).

ActRaiser plays like two games in one. One half is a top-down 'god game' city-building simulator, the other half is your standard side-scrolling platformer with very oldschool difficulty. Although the two modes have such different visuals and gameplay, they are integrated. Your success in the citybuilding increases your health/spells in the platformer, and your success in the platformer unlocks the next part of the citybuilding.

I have to admire how much effort it would have been to include both these two modes. They are so visually different you basically can't recycle any assets between them. Another cool thing is that the overworld map, shown with the 'mode 7' efffect, shows how your city actually looks at the present time- the terrain changes, and the placement of cities- not just some constant pre-canned thing.

There is a sequel to this game, ActRaiser II, but they axed the city-building part in favor of just having the platformer alone. Kind of a curious decision since that's what really made this game unique.

The difficulty of the game varies wildly. The SIM parts are quite relaxing, and some of the early-game bosses are a joke, but the final boss gauntlet is something else. You need to fight all the bosses from the latter half of the game in succession, and then an additional final boss with two forms. In between bosses your health doesn't replenish. Your magic doesn't replenish. You can die twice but no more. Oh, and the bosses are all sped up compared to before. I was able to put together a 'take no damage' strategy for a few of them but not all. I got through it by the skin of my teeth.

This was a very challenging but fun game, I loved the two-genres-in-one and visual style. I had rented it a couple times when I was younger but never owned it, and for some reason, I had never beaten it even though it's short. Maybe it was too hard. Now I got to revisit it. There are a lot of games I was not able to beat when I was younger but I can beat them now, I think because I became better co-ordinated.

And between this, Kirby's Marx and Lagoon- seeing any 2D game level whose background is just a moving starfield makes me instantly know what's going on... It's a huge cliche!

Finished Secret of Evermore for the SNES.

This was an action-RPG I had really wanted to play when I was little, but wasn't able to obtain a copy. Nowadays the world is at your fingertips so I can finally play it. It plays very similarly to Secret of Mana.

The graphics and visual style really left an impression on me. Compared to most other RPGs from around the same time period, everything feels very 'larger than life', probably because it's actually bigger in terms of pixel size- that is, if you compare it to say, FF5 or FF6. More frames of animation too. The design for the bosses "Thraxx"/"Coleoptera" was really cool. And as for the art style, it feels kind of realistic and gritty, none of the words seem too inviting, and it works for this game. Combined with ambient sound instead of background music for a lot of parts, the environments tend to feel kind of lonely and spooky.

It turns out it was developed by a North American division of Square which explains a lot. It is loaded with gags and pop culture references and in general feels way too western to be a JRPG. Although it does follow the cliche of having the obligatory Mode-7 airship type of thing toward the end. Overall, 10/10 would recommend.

Defeated the campaign, watched end credits for Star Fox: Zero. Now I will admit this game has some redeeming qualities. But not a lot. The control scheme never agreed with me, there is just a lack of precision using the Wii U controller tilt and it's not optional.

They keep forgetting Star Fox is a rail shooter. Rail. Shooter. Why do they force you to use the Landmaster? Why are you forced to use the Walker so often? It's Star Fox not Ground Fox. Nobody in the history of time has ever asked for this. On the bright side, I guess, once you beat it it tells you how much your team got paid, which is sort of funny

Although I played this game eons ago, I completed it for the first time today.

Playing this game to the end revealed it glitching out at times (can you spot it?):

Beating it for the first time.

This graphical rogue-like was incredibly addictive and challenging. Here I finished the main questline.

What do I do now?

End game unlock-

Nope.

DARK SOULS III
The Dark Soul(Platinum)
Acquire all trophies.

This might be the best game, ever. Reason: Can't remember the last time I've come across a game with literally zero grind. No repetitive action. For the 'meat' of the game, solving puzzles- each puzzle is different with no repeats, nor any cheesy reprising the same puzzle with an only-slightly-different flavor. Shouldn't be such a novel thing but it really is.

Also no puzzles that rely on pure anagrams, big-time number crunching, external knowledge of other languages / scripts.  Nice.

Finished Braid for the first time.

The levels are really clever. Got all the puzzle pieces, got the ending/epilogue, and was left really confused.

What the heck is going on! I understand 0% of the lore of this game.