Words On Wednesday

“Golden Sun” and it's sequel "Golden Sun: The Lost Age" are a pair of JRPGs released on Nintendo Game Boy Advance in 2001 and 2002 respectively. Frequently featured in lists of the best RPGs and JRPGs of all time, clearly they're good games, but what makes them so special? Also, why would I cover BOTH in the same post? I'm putting these two games together because they're almost more like two halves of the same game. Not quite like Pokémon where it's the SAME story with slight variations between versions. Golden sun is effectively the part 1 to The Lost Age's part 2. Playing JUST Golden Sun would leave you with an incomplete story. I don't want to suggest that this reflects poorly on either game. On the contrary, I think it was kinda nice to be able to sink about 25 hours into the first game, then take a break before continuing on to the second game. A sort of built-in intermission, if you will. I often burn myself out if I bum rush through a singl...

“ Hollow Knight ” is a Metroidvania released on all major platforms in 2017. I steered clear of Hollow Knight for years due to its "Souls-like" description, but a recent whim turned my opinion and made me open up a bit more to the genre. It's no secret that  I hate Souls games , and as much as I love Metroidvania games, I didn't want to get frustrated by a prohibitively difficult experience. As  Silksong  was coming out around that time and the original Hollow Knight was on sale , I decided to pick it up and give it a try. You can't say you don't like something without ever trying it, and I considered that my love of the Metroidvania genre might make up for the Souls elements. After no more than an hour in, I was pretty hooked. Sure, I could see how aspects of Hollow Knight did resemble Souls in certain ways, but I didn't hate it. Benches are just like bonfires, and going back to retrieve your geo from your corpse after you die was a concept I was pretty  ...

“ Hitman: Absolution ” is a stealth game released on the most platforms in 2012. With a name like "Hitman," it's pretty clear what the game entails: you kill targets in creative ways and escape (ideally) undetected. As the fifth game in the franchise, one might expect the game to be immediately in line with its predecessors, but Absolution makes some polarizing changes to the Hitman formula. Story -2/10 I really hate to give such a low score, especially when previous Hitman games didn't really *have* much of a story, but it's just so heavy handed. To quote Family Guy, "it insists upon itself." The prequels didn't NEED a story. Give me a target and let me kill them however I can: gunshot, poison, or perhaps drop a chandelier on their head. Absolution has fairly lengthy cinematics before and after each mission, and they just feel forced and unnecessary. There's this big plot about a young girl and "The Agency," but I just don't care. ...

“ The Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker HD ”  is 2013 Wii U remaster of a 2002 GameCube game. It cleaned up the visuals, introduced a few quality of life changes, and tweaked the game to make use of the console's two screen system. In 2025, it might be a struggle to decide which version to play, or whether to play a 20+ year old game at all, but I can tell you that Wind Waker HD is still a fantastic game and a great representation of the Zelda series as a whole. Wind Waker is tough to analyze from the perspective of someone who didn't live through it. It came out in North America in 2003, at which point I already had a GameCube (I'm pretty sure). I played through once, started a second play through, and put it down for a good 15+ years. On that first run, Wind Waker was... fine. The visuals were bright and cheery, a stark contrast from Ocarina of Time and Majora's mask before, as well as Twilight Princess after. Plus, the cel shaded graphics were just strange to me. Not ...