Master of the Monster Lair

I recently finished Master of the Monster Lair another example from the "under $10 and looks neat" pile. It's half-sim, half dungeon crawler, in which you build a dungeon with your magic shovel and then go back the next day to kill the monsters which have populated it. It’s fun, and cute in a goofy Atlus-translated sort of way.

( Silly little time-waster, cute concept, but nothing special. )

Overall, if you know what you’re getting into, it’s fairly mindless fun. If you get bogged down by the system early on, there isn’t really enough to pull you back. It’s a cotton candy game, sweet and fluffy but ultimately lacking much substance.

Alcahest

I've been trying to work down my backlog, so since I set up my old PC to play emulators on my TV, I've been playing more of the fan-translated emulator games that I've been meaning to. Alcahest was one such game, an action/adventure game made by Square that I expected to take me much longer than it did.

( It's not a jrpg, really at all. )

I think I was expecting something that would take a few weekends, maybe 10-12 hours of gaming, like a Zelda or later Castlevania game would. I suppose I could have taken longer with it, but for this type of game, I'm just as happy to have blitzed through and called it a day.