The World of Insufficient Light

Flowstone Saga – In the isolated island town Ocean’s End, an amnesiac girl named Mirai stumbles upon a mysterious power that lets her fight monsters and construct objects; and traces it back to her connection with relic “Pangaean” technology as pirates and the local Empire bear down on the island. This won me with the concept of a jrpg where the battles are all games of Tetris. They do a decent job with that concept! You get “perks” as you level up, can equip items and consumables, and can change classes; all of which affect the pieces you get and the special effects they cause on monsters. (I never really got the knack of strategy within battle using powers and equipment—you can win just by being good at Tetris.) There’s a lot of scrabbling for materials for upgrades and sidequests and most of the gameloop is “watch a scene with a villager request, then go to the new area and find 100% of the stuff in it.” My complaints are that most of the actual sidestories and some of the lore is hidden away in the restaurant cutscenes; and the lategame feels a little unfinished. Oh, and getting 100% is annoyingly hard because there’s no way to skip battles with weak enemies when you revisit an area searching for the single thing you missed. (And a few of the percentages and an achievement may be bugged!) But in general, it’s an excuse to play lots of Tetris with a plot, but manages that without microtransactions. Works for me!

Axiom Verge – I’m pretty sure I picked this up in a Steam sale at some point; I think it had been on my Wishlist for a while. It’s an interesting metroidvania, emphasis on the “Metroid”, as both the graphical style and the fact all of your initial upgrades are different guns would indicate. I found the difficulty level a bit too high (as is often the case for me with metroidvania games that don’t have any rpg elements), and was all set to cull this until I discovered that it has a cheat system: You can enter the Konami code at the start screen to start a new game with the password item (that you otherwise find about a third of the way into the game) and you can enter an invincibility code. Once I wasn’t constantly dying, I thought the navigation puzzles and upgrades were very clever. (There are some really inventive power-ups including a glitch gun and an upgradable teleporter that lets you pass through one or more blocks.)

Trinity Trigger – In a world where the gods of order and chaos had a war that left their gigantic weapons scattered over the land, our protagonist has a magical mark that names him the Warrior of Chaos, destined to continue the battle for the gods in proxy. (I will give this credit for the worldbuilding, because the giant god-weapons as both dungeons and hazards that warp the world around them really works.) His first companion is a Trigger, a cute little sidekick monster that can shapeshift into different weapons; and he’s eventually joined by two more humans with their own triggers and ties to the tumultuous world political structure. This feels like an Ys game, between the 3/4 -view action-rpg style with rotating weapons to hit enemy weaknesses; and also given the extensive vendortrash-based crafting systems. The character designs share a lot with The Legend of Legacy, which at least some of the same developers worked on. It honestly feels a little padded for what they have here—despite the areas having distinct looks and some unique features, the gameplay loop gets very repetitive and there really isn’t enough plot and character development to support a 15-20 hour game. It’s a fun little action-rpg, but I skipped the postgame (apparently just more sidequests and superbosses) because I was ready to be finished.

Blossom Tales II: The Minotaur Prince – The second in a series of 2D Zelda-like adventures that are framed as Grandpa telling a story to his two grandkids; which also means there are bits where the kids argue about what enemies you should fight or what sort of puzzle you face, so you get to choose. The prologue section is a tutorial and is deceptively easy; this isn’t insane but it’s not a beginner’s game. It’s also much more linear than you’d think, as the item/plot gating is very effective in keeping you to the areas you’re supposed to be in. But it is a solid 2D Zeldalike, with a full variety of tools and puzzles (both tool-based and brainteasers) and plenty of sidequests and hidden prizes. Basically, if you want something cute and A Link to the Past inspired, this has got you covered.

Lenna’s Inception - I played this a few years ago, and was in the mood to do it again when it showed up in the Games Done Quick Humble Bundle. (Also, it meant I could get the Steam achievements for it.) It still delights as a randomized 2D Zeldalike drawing from the culture of randomized Zelda speedrunning; and I totally recommend it if that appeals to you.

And two games I’m culling:

Eastward – Clearly inspired by Earthbound and Undertale, but this is an action-rpg with Zeldalike combat and puzzle solving. (And it’s very linear, broken up into chapters with missable sidequests but without backtracking.) You play an orphan and her adopted father in a repressive, dirt-poor underground society who believe there’s nothing in the world above but disaster. This also features a Dragon Quest-inspired game-within-a-game that you can play at an arcade machine. I’m not entirely certain why I didn’t click into it very well, because it’s ostensibly things I like. Maybe it was the extended sections with two-character switching; maybe it was the chapter progression forcing you to play very carefully to avoid important missables. I played more than 5 hours and into chapter 3, so about a quarter of the game, but I’ve been avoiding going back to it. It’s a shame that the aesthetic is really cool; it’s got a serious MOTHER 3 (“Cute, quirky, heartrending”) vibe going and the story is interesting. I just didn’t vibe with it as a game.

I Am Setsuna – An official Square-Enix game that tries to recapture the magic of the SNES era with prettier graphics. You’re a mercenary from a tribe of mercenaries who is tasked with killing a girl named Setsuna; but she’s the designated “sacrifice” who’ll stop monsters from overrunning the world, so you end up as her protector on her pilgrimage instead. It’s straightforwardly derivative in the way I’ve come to expect from KEMCO; with blatant references to other games mashed together but no real commentary on them. The plot has clear allusions to FF10; the battle system is much more like Chrono Trigger; and the upgrade system is closer to FF7’s materia crossed with FF12’s vendortrash setup. And the VFX artists really like snow. I made two attempts at this, each several years apart before finally making a third go at getting into it—and giving up about a quarter of the way into the game. (This is another game where only 65% of players have the Achievement you automatically get for following the plot for an hour.) It’s too derivative and insufficiently fun.

Final Fantasy II - Job System (SNES, Played on R36S) – A hack of the original SNES version of FF4 that adds a job system and keeps the party consistent without changing the plot at all. Honestly, it feels more like a tech demo than a full hack, because the battle system and the plot no longer match up (Kain constantly leaves your party but stays in the battle lineup, for instance; and they handle automatic plot battles by just making your whole party fight them, whether or not that makes any sense). They accomplished the job system via equippable items, so you can't have more than one character of any class, which means you're really just choosing who's in your party. But since characters’ stats are adjusted as they gain levels in a class, you can’t freely swap around like in FF3; if you spend 50 levels as a Monk you’ll be a really lousy White Wizard. They added some extra weapons at various points and rearranged some chests/renamed some items, but it felt like there was less really usable equipment overall. I think I also might have missed something, because the writeup mentions 14 classes and I only count 13 (and there’s no Cid class). The wizard classes power up at plot points to get more spells, which is a decent way to handle those. You’re stuck with a 4-person party for more than half the game, because Edge joins at his normal point and at level 1. (And he’s the only character who can really make use of Ninja or full use of Monk, because he’s the only two-handed attacker.) They did a few minor changes to dialogue and minor changes to layouts of dungeons; such as no invisible bridge in the Lunar Subterranean, for instance. I found (and lost) a bonus encounter in the Sealed Cave that smashed me but didn't give a game over (and had dialogue that might have been from a different battle). And then the extremely long, very varied new Zeromus fight trounced me despite having level 80+ characters with the best equipment. Needless to say, difficulty is wonky. Overall it’s a cool idea, but it’s not fully baked—I think some adjustments to the plot (Kain never leaves, Yang joins and stays as the 5th member, tweaks around guest characters) would go a long way.

Gargoyle’s Quest - Remastered (GB, Played on R36S) - A hack built on the retranslation patch for the Japanese version of the game, this adjusts some of the graphics to remove borders and import graphics from the second game. While I’m not sure how well it would work on an original Game Boy screen, the graphical upgrades looked decent and I suspect they work better than the originals for various colorizations. The retranslation fixes some errors in the original (a couple of places that didn’t make sense), but makes most of the names less evocative (“Dark Power” isn’t as cool as “Talisman of the Cyclone”) and adds an incorrect clue for the correct serpent path at the last town. I appreciate the effort that went into this and it comes out collectively very polished, but I don’t think it’s actually better than the original at the end of the day.

Secret of Mana Plus (v2.4) (SNES, Played on R36S) - An “expansion” hack that adds to the game but changes very little. The opening act of the game is basically unchanged except you can carry 7 of each item and the cpu characters can wander further off screen. There is a new cutscene with a historian when you leave the ruins in Pandora; and you can rescue a dwarf from the goblin camp (that you can re-enter) for a small reward. The translation is unchanged--this is very much about the "additions" rather than improvements to existing. The Wind Palace is built out into a full dungeon with a gimmick where you need to find captured moogles. The Empire is greatly expanded, with an overworld area before you reach Southtown, then another overworld area combined with caves and a new boss before reaching the sewers. The Gold Isle adds an outdoor area before you go retrieve the palace key, and expands the palace with new floors and enemies. That leads to a new scene with the Scorpion Army at the top, who crash their airship next to the Moon Palace, which is much longer and full of crystal orbs you need to activate to dispel illusions. Does this do what they intended, which was to improve the pacing of the mid-game? Absolutely. That said, especially the overland sequences are very repetitive and all the monsters are palette-swaps, and if this were a commercial production you’d need new art assets and a few new monster designs to keep those parts exciting. They added a bunch of small sidequests in the endgame where you can get a 9th weapon orb for each weapon. (Or some, at least--I found the Northtown Cannon will send you to a bonus area in the Lofty Mountains, there's a woman who you have to meet in several towns, there's a hidden treasure in the desert near the starry sea, and you can get one by letting Luka out of the Water Palace basement.) Also, Buffy and the Lime Slime drop orbs rather than random drops from enemies--but either overall random drops were turned way up or I got really lucky, because I picked up a lot of extra accessories in the Fortress. Overall, while it's clearly not a professional effort, I think this hack did a very nice job on its stated aims. I'd love to see it combined with the Retranslation hack I played a few years ago.

Soul Blazer: Dark Genesis (Standalone Fan Game) - Available on Itch.io, this is a standalone game (not a romhack) that uses graphics and music from Soul Blazer but recreates the mechanics. (And almost perfectly, at that.) It’s only a couple of hours long with only one town area, a handful of upgrades, and only one spell (the Phoenix; you never get a Soul of Magician). There are four hidden emblems to find to get the best sword; and I actually played most of the game with the starting sword because I missed the second one until I was searching for the last emblem. There’s a very clever innovation where some monster lairs are sealed by puzzles (step on all the squares, Simon-style memory game) instead of monsters. The one issue I found was I missed one lair and went back for it after beating the final boss, and the ending glitched out a bit, probably because of that. Overall loved it, though.

Breath of Fire Definitive (SNES, Played on R36S) – A massive overhaul hack that uses the War of the Goddess retranslation (which I believe I reviewed elsewhere) and assorted other changes. The start of game is really hard; you can't survive more than one battle with Ryu at Level 1 and so the grind to a better weapon is very slow. Once you can afford the better sword and you’ve gained a couple of levels, then you can kill enemies in one hit and go clear out the castle…for a full new set of better equipment. In cute Easter eggs, the third soldier (who ferries Ryu and joins your party for a couple of random battles) is very high level and if you have something to swap it with, you can steal his high level equipment. Which is very helpful in making Ryu and Nina durable enough to handle the next area without excessive grinding. I got through retrieving the King Key honestly, and then plugged in some cheat codes because the XP curve seemed wonky and the difficulty is definitely increased from vanilla. Some of the changes really make sense, like swapping Debo and Shin (which means you can use Debo in the underwater volcano). Others, like making dragon transformations cost ongoing MP make endgame bosses into a horrible slog. Frankly, a “definitive” version of this game needs reduced grinding to go with the retranslation, fuller story, and quality of life additions. I had my complaints about Breath of Fire Improved (GBA), but I think it ended up more playable than this. And if you want to experience the War of the Goddess retranslation, play that straight.

When you get hit by a truck, it turns out that Earth was all just a simulation and you actually live on a floating island called Everafter Falls with a bunch of animal people (and a robot buddy!) who have peace, prosperity, and very minor drama.

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Overall: If you play Stardew for the villagers and the romance options, there’s much less here than usual. If you play it for the completionist aspects of discovering all the different items and craftables and don’t mind occasionally needing the wiki because something is too obtuse, you might also have a good time.

This is a vertical Game Boy styled 3.5” screen device that we’ve seen plenty of before. It’s got USC-C charging and a headphone jack, two SD card slots (but you only need one), and a dedicated menu button. (And oddly, a downward-firing speaker. Not sure I’ve seen that before?) Side-by-side with a R36S, it’s a little bit heavier and feels a little sturdier, but has basically the same dimensions. It’s also running EmulationStation as the front-end, with a different default UI from an R36S, but similar results. (After tuning it to my preferences, I expect the experience to be very similar.)

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Overall: The big selling point here is that it’s better than the R36S at the same price point as the R36S. This is probably the best Tier 2 device at the $30 price point, so then it’s just whether you want to pay up for higher-end system performance or a different form-factor.

I thought that between the advances in retro handheld technology and the ridiculous tariff nonsense that I was done getting packages from China. Well, that lasted a couple of months, but then there was a sale and I figured I probably didn’t have a lot more chances, so I got three more handhelds, all around $30 after various discounts.

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Overall: What I’d really want to do—which I’m certain isn’t feasible—is take the internals from this and put them in the RG50XX, because that had half-decent (though still cheap, let’s be honest) build quality but was hobbled by terrible software, and this gives you access to all the software tools to make things playable but is one of the worst-built handhelds I’ve used. Honestly, most of the $10 Famiclone bootleg handhelds (…though not all) were more playable.

Terrifying rifts in space keep opening in Hyrule and swallowing up everything…including Link! Fortunately, Princess Zelda has a magic duplication wand and a magical buddy and she’s coming to save the day.

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Overall: I give them a lot of credit that it’s a 2D Zelda game but it’s also something new and different.

Another Stardew Valley-like, but in this one you’re playing as a member of a primitive tribe who were led by the spirits to the new land and must build their civilization there. Find wild seeds and wild animals and domesticate them as your tribe invents the trappings of civilization for you to use.

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Overall: This was familiar gameplay with some cute quirks; not perfect but clever enough to be a little different. If you want more Stardew Valley, it’s another fun option.

Clearly inspired by the success of Stardew Valley, this is a farming sim with heavy rpg elements and Zeldalike combat. You move to the new town (a medieval fantasy pastiche) and start your new job, which defaults to farmer but you can also start as a crafter, rancher, warrior, etc. rather than learning those skills as you go. You do farm chores, explore the surrounding dangerous areas, meet all the townsfolk and run errands for them; you know, the usual.

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Overall: If you want more Stardew Valley-like experience, this delivers it solidly.

It’s time to clear a variety of games off my Steam backlog. Five roughly ten-hour experiences in radically different genres:

Kingdom Rush Vengeance - A tower defense game with a nominal plot (a sealed-away dark wizard escapes and sets out to conquer the world) that’s really an excuse to set your minions against everyone in your way. The Kingdom Rush series has always sat in my “middle ground” place for tower defense, because what I really want is something totally grind-able (like Gemcraft), and this only gives you upgrades when you complete the main campaign stages and has limited levels for your heroes. (I do really like the click-and-find achievements hiding in most stages, though.) Still, it came as part of a Humble Bundle and I got my money’s worth of entertainment, even without re-doing every stage at higher difficulty/challenge mode and also doing all of the expansion stages.

The Messenger – A Ninja Gaiden-em-up with tongue planted firmly in cheek; you spend a lot of time clinging to walls, air-jumping off projectiles, and rope-darting across gaps. The second half switches from being linear to being a metroidvania that I would have found too obtuse without a guide—the world is too large, the travel too treacherous, and the fast-travel points too few for the amount of crisscrossing the map you have to do. The difficulty starts very reasonable (for the genre) but my number of deaths rose dramatically as the game went on. (You have infinite lives, but the demon buddy who revives you takes a bunch of the Time Stones you collect when you respawn.) I found that the difficulty level teetered just on the edge of too much; I had a bunch of points where I died a lot, got frustrated, but eventually came back and made it through. This was very much a game I had to play in bursts and stop to rest when I started getting sloppy—but in turn I’m rather smug that I got through the whole thing.

Ocean’s Heart – A 2D Zeldalike with a mixed amount of open-worldness; pirates attacked your town and kidnapped your friend, so now you need to follow in your father’s footsteps and go hunt them down. Along the way you’ll find the usual selection of bombs, bow, boomerang, and spell amulets. (Bombs are maddeningly limited for much of the game.) Instead of heart drops, you need to collect fruit or craft potions to restore health, though that also means you can build up a huge stock of healing by the midgame. There are also a lot of weapon and armor upgrades to find and collect, so the difficulty of various areas can be wildly variable depending on whether you’ve done sidequests. I died a LOT in the first couple of hours, but once I had a few armor upgrades and health upgrades (not to mention a proper stock of health potions) I didn’t die at all in the latter two-thirds of the game. Especially if you’ve been keeping up with upgrades, bosses are actually really easy and it’s only attrition that’ll take you down—which is avoidable with your massive stock of healing items. I would have liked proper dungeon maps and maybe a more detailed world map, but the quest log is great and the fast travel is very helpful. This is a fun game with just enough plot for the dungeons and vice-versa.

Children of Zodiarcs – A “Square-Enix Collective” game which mashes together a tactical rpg, a deck-builder rpg, and a dice-based combat system. You maneuver around the battle map in classic trpg style, pick your attacks from your custom attack deck (and the size of your hand also impacts some effects and can be affected by spells), and every attack is resolved by rolling custom dice. You gain new cards by gaining levels; you win new dice in battle or craft them from your excess stock. There’s no equipment or consumables; and each character is unique with no class system or anything like that. Despite the abundance of systems, there’s actually very little customization and you don’t even get to choose your party for battles (and about a quarter of the battles are with completely uncustomizable teams anyway). You can grind side battles on normal mode, but if you’re underleveled the enemies are weakened anyway, so it’s not necessary and at least once for me was counterproductive; you really can just charge right through and if luck goes against you, reset and try again. This game has an amazing amount of board game-ness to it for something that doesn’t play at all like a board game. The plot revolves around a small street gang who’ve happened into a very important artifact in a world that had previous been decimated by wars that used the Zodiarcs; but it stays in a very small corner of that world and you basically fight the same battles with the city guard, the rival gangs, and the weird cultists half a dozen times each. I suspect people were expecting a big Final Fantasy Tactics experience from both the systems and the story here, and the disappointment is what lead to mixed reviews of the game. That said, while I don’t think it was brilliant and I didn’t feel the need to thoroughly do everything, I beat it and had some fun with it.

Worlds of Magic – I backed a Kickstarter for this and it was released back in (checks notes) 2015…and it’s sat on my backlog since. It’s a fancy, juiced-up version of the 4X classic Master of Magic, that I’ve replayed (and played official enhanced hacks of) several times in that interim. They added a lot of new overworld features and tweaked a bunch of mechanics, but the majority of the actual gameplay (including unit types and tech trees) is identical. A bunch of the mechanics are a little janky (and not just in that they fight my muscle memory), as units tend not to move along set paths you make for them and need to be micromanaged. There are also graphical glitches in battle to the point of the game freezing if you bring a magic spirit into a battle on water. Also, Hero inventory is a mess where things appear and disappear at random. But the biggest change and the biggest problem I found was that units don't gain experience over time, only in battle, and the battles that you can beat are very limited. Which means leveling up your heroes is a mammoth endeavor (of micromanaging!) and that really changes the power curve of the game. I think it’s also interesting that most of the achievements—including the really basic ones you can get in the first few hours—have a very low percentage of players who have them. That implies that a lot of people who bought this barely touched it. (And reviews from the people who played more of it complain that it’s unfinished and prone to crashes in the late-game.) I gave it the ol’ college try and played ten hours, conquering the Prime Plane (and covering it in settlements) and meeting the enemy wizard in the Water Plane before I decided I’d gotten the experience and my money’s worth.

Overall: A mixed bag, though I enjoyed them all for the time I put in. The Messenger and Ocean’s Heart get recommended if the descriptions appeal to you.

This is a squat and remarkably square device, which is more screen than anything else. The unusual form-factor was the reason I bothered with it, as it’s mostly just another device in the $30-40 range that plays the standard range of classic systems.

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Overall: This picked one thing to do well (play GBA games at 2X resolution on a small form-factor), but that’s kind of the only selling point. It’s not quite compact/pocketable enough to compete with one of the 2.8” screen micro devices at the same price point, but a RG35XX-H or Trimui Smart Pro has it beat on power and capability for only slightly more money. I like that it’s a little different, but I think it’s trying to stand out in a niche that’s already pretty saturated.