Zone of the Enders

October 2, 2025 - 7 mins read

Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner has become one of the ball-knower’s character-action games, but it’s worth giving some love to its predecessor for laying the groundwork. Its release being less than six months before Devil May Cry gave it some room to stretch its legs outside of DMC’s reliance on combo depth and i-frames, while it also has a stronger hand-to-hand combat basis than its few notable mecha predecessors, such as Omega Boost or Love & Destroy.

Napple Tale: Arsia in Daydream

September 21, 2025 - 7 mins read

This has a distinct Quintet-esque flair to it: a solemn world-restoration myth communicated through gameplay that shallowly evokes its contemporaries, although here it’s 2.5D platforming instead of hack-and-slash. Protagonist Porch Arsia’s soul is mistakenly reaped by bumbling spirit guide and dessert auteur Straynap, and the duo must retrieve the “petals” of her soul from around the purgatorial plane of Napple Town. An assemblage of both humans and surreal creatures1 live in Napple Town day-to-day, and some of them have inadvertently imbued themselves with Porch’s petals.

Grand Theft Auto III

September 15, 2025 - 6 mins read

A systems-driven game with one amazing core system and a whole bunch of shitty ones in its orbit. DMA Design salvages a lot of elements in here by threading everything through the game’s driving mechanics, which perfectly straddle the line between fiddly accuracy and easy-going simplicity. The taxis clogging the streets give you that front wheel drive that’ll keep you from ending up nose-first in the bay, but if you comb through old parking lots and alleys you’ll find much sportier cars to outspeed police cruisers and pull ahead in races.

Boku no Natsuyasumi 2: Umi no Bouken-hen

August 31, 2025 - 7 mins read

The childhood nostalgia angle hits well as a thumbnail teaser or a loopable GIF of warm glow dusk, but Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 is less concerned with portraying the ideal child’s summer and more with letting the disarming naivete of your avatar Boku open up the reality around him. “Stark” may not be the right word here, because for all of the pain and intrigue that worms its way into his surroundings, just as many of his days are filled with genuine joy or tame ennui.

Shining Force

August 12, 2025 - 4 mins read

There’s two possible games here: one where you spam main character Max’s Egress spell to restart fights while retaining all the EXP you’ve gained, and one where you tough it out and push through even as the enemies far outpace you. The difference is difficult to reconcile because going the latter route directly interferes with one of the game’s strengths: its robust cast mixing together fantasy, sci-fi, and horror influences.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

August 7, 2025 - 23 mins read

It’s tempting to split the game down the middle here somewhere to try to rectify its conflicts: overworld versus dungeons, story versus gameplay, even Koizumi’s Clock Town versus Aonuma’s outer villages.1 Pithy comments like “an official edgy ROM hack” don’t do justice to the staggering depth of the developer’s notebooks, tossing out off-kilter concepts on the fly and slamming them into the game with just months until the game went gold.

Múseca

July 29, 2025 - 4 mins read

Múseca’s initial launch, with its shop-based progression system that required grinding the game’s story mode, inevitably doomed the game to obscurity. Beyond hastily released updates that unlocked all of the charts and removed the influence from the unlockable “grafica” characters on score, support for the game tapered off only a couple of years after release, leaving fans to add standard features like leaderboard widgets, hard mode, and end-of-play continue settings.

Super Magnetic Neo

July 24, 2025 - 5 mins read

It’s a Crash-like with a twist: you can emanate a magnetic field for either polarity, north or south. Magnetized items (with color-coded polarity for your convenience) will respond appropriately, where if you use the opposite polarity, you’ll be pulled towards the object, and if you use the same polarity, you’ll be pushed away. In practice the implementation is rather ticky-tacky, with the actual interactable set being primarily jump pads and swings/ziplines.

Super Mario 3D Land

July 20, 2025 - 7 mins read

Although my initial impression felt like the callback-heavy aesthetic and the linear level design were undercooked, Super Mario 3D Land now reads to me as compact and focused. 3D Mario traditionally struggles with providing proper applications for the nuances of its movement mechanics from second-to-second, which 3D Land solves simply by keeping its platforms tight and giving them dynamic properties. Early levels have more continuous topographies with explorable elements similar to the Galaxy games, but by the halfway point the paradigm shifts to providing momentary safe zones in between obstacle gauntlets.

Loom

July 15, 2025 - 6 mins read

You can imagine the theoretical version of this game per the emergent, systemic gameplay I discussed in my recent interactive fiction article. Without the need to create unique assets for everything, it would be easier to apply many more of the draft (in this game, a spell using notes plucked on strings wound to a distaff) effects to each object, and universal actions could have been integrated in to allow more freeform puzzle solutions.