May: Crash Bandicoot (PS)
I’m not sure what exactly prompted me to acquire the Crash Bandicoot trilogy, but I came about starting it as I was looking for a light, no-dialogue action game to play on my RP5. My only prior experience with the series came with Crash 3: Warped as a child, which was just a random game we got for the PlayStation back in the day. Warped is a banger, but it’s not like I was a huge Crash fan or anything, we just played it a lot because we were kids and you played the games that you had. I never managed to beat it, either, thanks to the notorious difficulty of Crash Bandicoot. Game journalists caught some flack for complaining about the difficulty of these games when they were recently remade for modern platforms, but Crash Bandicoot actually can be pretty dang hard. The platforming is precise, yet you have to do it with digital controls, and almost everything will insta-kill Crash unless you have picked up a mask power-up. Add that to a paucity of checkpoints and you got yourself some classic gaming frustration. I won’t lie, I used save states to add some more checkpoints in there. Overall, the first game is pretty barebones so I’m looking forward to seeing more interesting ideas in the later games.
May: Final Fantasy XVI (PS5)
I hadn’t planned on playing XVI so soon, but when I saw a used copy on sale for a paltry 1,700 yen, I purchased it on impulse and decided to jump in. Final Fantasy XVI was actually the first PS5 game I “played,” at my friend’s house, but while I was impressed with the graphics, the lack of actual gameplay in the intro made me turn it off and try out Armored Core VI instead, and that was the game that ultimately made me buy a PS5. It turns out, waiting around for the cool part to happen ends up being the overriding theme of the experience of this game. The highs are astronomically high here (sometimes even literally, c.f. Bahamut boss fight) but you spend a lot more time down in the dumps. The Ifrit, Titan, and previously-mentioned Bahamut fights rank in as some of the most singularly awesome experiences I’ve ever had in games. Unfortunately you have to trudge through dozens of hours of utterly boring quests and piss-easy mobs to get to those parts. In particular, the side quests are godawful and nothing interesting ever happens in them. If you’re starting this game today, I highly recommend skipping every side quest except the ones that give you actual rewards (like the Chocobo mount) and try to complete the game as quickly as possible. It’s an awesome 20 hour action game, but a pretty bad 50 hour RPG.
May: Sonic Adventure DX (PC)
There comes a time in every man’s life when he must play 3D Sonic. For me, that time was May of this year. A combination of Dunkey’s video on the new Shadow Generations game and Sonic Frontiers going up on PS Plus made me spontaneously decide that I should finally try some of these much-maligned games. Granted, the Adventure games are well-loved, but the Sonic series has largely been a laughingstock ever since the hedgehog made his switch to 3D. Even I have piled on Sonic Team before, but I figured at some point I should probably try the games for myself. The Dreamcast restoration mod for the PC port of Adventure was also something that caught my attention: you can say a lot of things about Sonic fans but you can’t deny they are some of the most impressively dedicated fuckers out there. Sonic Adventure is decidedly jank but it is pretty enjoyable despite it, with the lighthearted tone doing a lot to carry the experience. I said elsewhere that if a Saturday morning cartoon had bad controls, this is what it would be. Considering that the game is a 3D platformer that originally came out in 1998, a scant two-and-a-half years after Mario 64, we have to give it some slack.
May: Zone of the Enders (PS3)
As a Kojima stan, I knew I had to play Zone of the Enders eventually. I have a PS2 copy of the game, but it turns out the game’s particle effects don’t play particularly well with PCSX2, at least on my PC. I had avoided the PS3 remasters of the games initially because I heard they were bad ports, but it turns out the port of the first game is relatively unblemished, so PS3 version it was. The game has a deliciously early-2000s science fiction anime tone that really takes me back, and couples it with some pretty decent robot combat. For a Kojima game, though, the story isn’t really a whole lot to write home about; I assume it’s the much more acclaimed Anubis where it’s going to pick up on that front. Jehuty is cool and all, but I’m not sure the game lived up to decades of hype I’ve heard about it from my robot-loving friends. For a short five-hour action romp though, it’s not bad.
May: Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster (Switch)
I was, and to a degree still am, a certified Pixel Remaster hater, so I’m not sure what exactly compelled me to pick this up. Part of it is probably that Final Fantasy II was never a game I intended to play otherwise, since the progression system is notoriously broken and basically demands that you exploit it to get through the game. Like many people playing the FF series, I always intended to skip II, but when I learned about the tweaks to the system made in the Pixel Remaster version, as well as the cheats included, I decided to give it a shot. Ultimately the game is nothing to write home about, especially if you use the cheats to give yourself an easier time through the game. From a conceptual standpoint I do like the idea of having the fourth party slot being a rotating door of companions that join you on the various legs of your journey, but that also just means you end up not ever investing anything into the fourth party member and they’re dead weight a lot of the time. Of course, Final Fantasy II is where the SaGa series got its start, so it’s an interesting historical artifact, but for a game to play for fun in 2025, it’s little more than a time-killer.
May: Monster Hunter World (PS4)
I think my first real exposure to the Monster Hunter games may genuinely have been Kajetokun’s “gotcha bitch” video on YouTube all those years ago. I’ve been passively aware of their existence for a long time, of course, because these games were a borderline social phenomenon in Japan, particularly in the PSP era. I remember seiyuu I followed posting about how they were getting hunts in with their costars in the waiting rooms at recording studios. Everyone was hunting those monsters. When I got a hacked PSP back in the day, I actually did try one of those PSP iterations of the series, but I couldn’t get past the notorious control scheme—movement on the analog pad, camera on the D-pad—that required you to play the game with a “claw grip.” I also knew that these games generally encouraged a ton of grinding, where you would hunt the same monster over and over to get parts for armor, which didn’t really appeal to me. When I randomly learned that World has a main story that’s a lean 30 hours to get through, though, I decided that maybe it was finally time to hunt my first monsters, and man am I glad I did. You really don’t need to engage with the whole grinding situation if you aren’t intending to play postgame content, and if you treat it as a linear action RPG where you go from boss fight to boss fight, it’s a game where the whole thing is the good part. There’s no tedious dungeons, no boring puzzles, no mowing down hordes of mooks. It’s just banger boss fight after banger boss fight against some of the most brilliantly-designed creatures in the entire medium. Even with an easier weapon to master like the greatsword, it pretty much never gets old.
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