Final Fantasy VIII Remastered (Steam)

While FF8 doesn’t get the full multi-game total rebuild treatment that FF7 did, it warranted a facelift and a new version release for Steam. It’s been quite a while since I played this and wanted to revisit it. And I apparently have a lot to say about it!

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Overall: This was an adventurous game; both ground-breaking and very much a product of its time. The character development system is like nothing seen before or since; it’s incredibly breakable but interesting at the same time. The dungeons are gorgeous and inventive and often frustrating and boringly repetitive. The scenery is gorgeous and I spent five minutes wandering the orphanage flashback because I couldn’t figure out that the path to the beach was a place you could actually walk to…which was a common problem. It’s a game that desperately needs “where to go next” arrows; and the fast-forward button massively improves the modern play experience. I love what it inspired and don’t think I’ll ever play it “honestly” again.

The Last Few Short Game Reviews of the Year

Final Fantasy Adventure – Legend of the Mystic Sword (Game Boy, Replayed on RG350) – This hack is more of a “cleanup” than an overhaul. It fixes a bunch of bugs, cleans up a bunch of the text, tweaks a couple of minor graphics, restores better translations for a bunch of names (“Shadow Knight” instead of “Dark Lord”, “Bon Voyage” instead of “Bowwow”, etc), associates the eight elemental spirits with the eight spells you learn, names the level-up bonuses according to classes like in the Japanese original, and makes the clues certain NPCs give you more useful overall. It also apparently rearranges a couple of monster locations so you can’t get trapped without keys in certain spots. The other big change—which is optional—is you can choose to play as Amanda, in which case “Duke” will take her place in the plot as Lester’s sibling. I’ve played a bunch of hacks that attempt to be a “definitive” version of a classic game, and I think this does well on that front.

Golden Axe Warrior (Sega Master System, Played on RG350) – I had never heard of this Zeldalike until one of the Taking Time commenters created a hack to make it more playable by reducing grinding for health and money. It’s pretty decent as a clone of the original NES Zelda with some adjustments/enhancements, and the hack reduces the difficulty notably. That said, it’s still pretty hard and gets nastier as it goes on, because the monsters ramp a lot faster than your weapons, armor or health do. I made it through the third dungeon (of ten) and decided that even with the hack and save states I wasn’t hardcore enough to power through the game. As a side note, this was the first time I used PicoDrive on the RG350, and for the first time I was really not impressed with the emulation—lots of graphical glitches, and the save function didn’t work (though the save states did).

Gemcrafter: Puzzle Journey (Android, Replayed on my Hyundai Tablet) – I played this back in 2016 and periodically revisited it; it’s a sliding-gem match-three-to-upgrade game and a fantastic casual touchscreen puzzle game if you grok the system and accept that sometimes the RNG will just declare you can’t win on that try. My perfect playthrough didn’t carry over to my new tablet, so I started replaying levels…and didn’t stop. (There are 250 levels, and you need to 3-star all of them to get the gems that fill out your gem box. And apparently this is something I’m willing to get perfectionist about—I got 745/750 stars in this run.)

Echoes of Mana (Android, Played on my Hyundai Tablet) – I haven’t really been enthused by any of Square-Enix’s gatcha Android games when I tried them a few years ago, and this continues in that mold by really not inspiring me. The loose plot is that the Mana Tree is the only thing that remains in the world, but the fruits of it are memories of other worlds and both the Mana Sword and assorted companions can be retrieved from them. So you get draws for new characters to joins your party for side-scrolling battles that remind me of Legends of Mana, and limited stamina to work through story scenes and battles where you gain XP and vendortrash for character upgrades. This game also has the problem of being huge (there’s a 5 gig additional download after you clear the prologue) and running slowly on my new tablet. Given that it’s clearly intended to be played for months, paying real money for extra draws/stamina and without an ending that you’ll reach any time soon…I don’t think I’ll play more.