Woodlings draw near!

I had no idea how to classify this one for reasons I will explain shortly. Abandoned, I guess..? It's hard to classify.

Familiars.io is a universally accessible browser game (it supports keyboard, click, and touchscreen controls, for PC and mobile consumption alike) that's basically stripped down, simplified Gen 1 Pokemon Online for the ZX Spectrum.

You pick an avatar and a starter mon and are dropped into the world with some balls, some antidotes, and some potions. Mon and bags of items randomly spawn everywhere, so go get them. There's nothing like an inn or a Pokemon Center, so healing depends on finding and using potions. There is no reviving; we're playing by Nuzlocke rules apparently. Moves do a set amount of base damage but can be modified by the target's physical/magical defense and type advantages/weaknesses. Leveling happens instantly (there is no XP gauge; you just gain one level per battle, period) and the per-mon level cap is 15, so you can raise a maxed out team fairly quickly.

This is all well and good, but ultimately this game feels more like a fun little sandbox demo project to run around in than anything else. There isn't really an... objective, per se? There is no dialogue or anything, not even so much as a way to interact with objects. There's one map, and it's a big and nice and well put-together map, but there's no real progression to it, no starting and ending areas or final dungeons or anything like that. There are a lot of rooms that look like something important should happen here, but they're all empty (remember, there's no such thing as overworld object interaction.) You really just wander around for the sake of wandering around, and collect items and grind mons for the sake of collecting items and grinding mons, and that's it. You can optionally turn on PVP and fight other trainers, I guess, but ehh.

The lack of healing besides hoping you can find enough potions scattered about makes things harrowing, too, unless you do what I did and bypass that mechanic entirely with the following setup:

1) At the start of the game, choose Patch.
2) Patch has a move called "Vampire" that does a lot of damage and drains some of that damage dealt back to you as healing.
3) Spam Vampire on everything that isn't immune to it until Patch is maxed out. (Don't fight the things that are immune to it; there's no reason to.)
4) At this point you could maybe try raising some other mon besides Patch, but like, why.

Anyway, this was neat until I finished that procedure and then the lack of there being any sort of goal or plot or progression or like, anything to do kind of led me to decide we're done here.

Is this game COMPLETE? I mean, how could it be; it's an open sandbox MMO with no actual end condition, nothing to make one think "there, I beat the game" besides self-imposed challenges like raising one of every mon or something.

Is it ONGOING? I dunno, I kind of stopped after the lack of goal got to me.

So it's ABANDONED, I guess...?

This was fun while it lasted, though. I do recommend checking it out, if only for the few minutes it takes for the charm to wear off, because it is charming.

To steal a quote about an unrelated game from xyzzysqrl: "An interesting idea, I hope someone makes a game out of it someday."

More housekeeping. I was really trying on this one until fairly recently, until I wasn't anymore. It still feels weird to be writing these, like I'm letting them go before they're actually dead. That feeling is wrong (I could still come back at any time,) but knowing something and feeling it... you know how it goes.

NO THING is a strange little indie gem that we acquired on the Switch eShop, but it was also in the Racial Justice Bundle, so there's a good chance you actually own it and you just didn't see it in there. If you do, you should play it! It's neat.

It the retro-future year 1994, and you are a simple office clerk tasked with delivering a message to the queen of ice. The game is a first-person auto-runner with exactly two buttons: Turn Left and Turn Right. Your speed gradually increases each time you make a turn, starting out at a brisk jog and eventually feeling like an F-Zero game, and your task is to stay on the path, not turn too early or too late, and not fall. Meanwhile, a non-solid visions of people, objects, or whatever nonsense the game wants to throw at you appear everywhere to sell each level's overall look and theme, there are randomly cycling aesthetic filters, and a robotic voice spouts cryptic lines every few turns. It... I think there's a plot here? I think? Or at the very least there are litcrit-able dissections and explorations of themes, which the game handles very well.

Consider level 6 as an example, which is done up to look like a suburb: the ghostly visions that float by look like houses, SUVs, and suburbanite families. The stage's main gameplay gimmick is that the entire first half of it takes place on a J-shaped track that just keels looping around in enough laps to lose count, and that alone plus the imagery gives it a sort of intentionally monotonous "everyday work routine" feel. Then the voice helpfully adds things like... well... the soundtrack is available on Bandcamp and includes bonus track "vocal" versions where the in-game voice is preserved for the full effect, so here's the level 6 one.

Anyway, as with a few other housekeeping ABANDONEDs from tonight, the main problem we ran into in this game is that it is brutally hard. Again, the object is to turn left and right and not fall off the track, which sounds easy enough, but by the time the speed gets blinding enough the timing can become... tight. The visuals and voice are intentionally distracting, and if you hear a line that makes you go "wait, what?" or can't quite see the next turn through the cloud of floating Ben Franklin heads or whatever and end up missing your turn and flying off the course, that's part of the difficulty. I made it all the way to level 7 (out of 10) and I want so bad to push on because we're past the halfway mark, only four stages to go, come on we're almost there (no we're not) etc. but man. Man.

So, yeah. This is 3D first-person vaporwave Clinger Winger complete with Talking Heads lyrics. Which is cool, I'll give it that. It's interesting as heck and I want to see where this all leads, but I'm just not skilled enough. Not... right now, anyway.

Anyway, if you're curious, the itch.io trailer has just about everything you need to know in a "That's it, that's the game" sense.

Another housekeeping ABANDONED entry. I have nothing against this one at all. I never quit it on purpose, I was having a lot of fun with it, but at some point my attention span struck, other games came along, and I guess at this point it's been months since I touched it? Oops. I'm still not used to these housekeeping ABANDONEDs yet; it still feels weird to write this up like this one's dead (even though I can always go back and that's literally what the Extra Life category is for.) Still trying to get used to this. Please bear with us.

Mario Adventure is an incredibly ambitions Super Mario Bros. 3 ROMhack that adds a lot of features I would not have expected the SMB3 framework to support. Infinite lives (we know you're just going to try again and death is nothing more than a "go back to the world map and try this stage again" bounce, so let's not even bother with the unnecessary counter there,) coins are persistent and strictly a form of currency, the Toad houses can be visited as many times as you want as long as you have coins (thus making them shops more than anything else,) stages can be revisited as well, overall the world map feels more Mario World-like, speaking of Mario World the box for holding a backup powerup/item is there too, there are all new items and powerups....

It's an astonishing feat of turning SMB3 into an entirely new (obviously all the stages are original too) game that almost feels more like a demade Mario World hack than an SMB3 one at times. It's impressive as hell just from a technical standpoint, and the end result is a vast world that I really want to explore, and I had quite a lot of fun doing so for a while there until ??? . It takes a special patch for the game to work on hardware emulation (that is, if you want to put it on your NES Classic instead of playing it on PC) but it seems to work well enough for us once the patch is applied. Overall, it's neat and if it sounds like your sort of thing from the description, then it probably is.

I only have three major knocks against it, and two are the difficulty. First off, being a Mario ROMhack and all, this game is hard. It's... I mean, it's not Kaizo level or anything. It's not one of those Super Expert levels where they assume you're playing it on an emulator anyway so they may as well escalate things until savestates are required. There's no trolling. There's no reliance on arcane physics mechanics that casuals wouldn't have needed to learn before. There's none of this bullshit. It's like, hard by normal human player playing a normal Mario game standards. But it's still hard by those standards. Maybe comparable to some of the meaner parts of the Special World in SMW, I guess? The Mario version of Mega Man Unlimited, perhaps. It is fair, and I cannot stress that hard enough or frequently enough because yes I know how many Mario ROMhacks out there aren't, but you still will be grateful for those infinite lives.

The second complaint is the key mechanic, which on its surface is actually pretty cool. Beating the warship and the Koopaling of each region is no longer the end goal of that region; finding the key is, and that's a matter of some "in level 4, crouch for 7 seconds and then make a jump standing between these two specific bushes in the background to reveal a secret" nonsense. It's still worth it to beat the Koopaling, because clearing each region in that sense unlocks free travel (you can move all about the map and stages you haven't cleared yet will no longer stop you... roaming forced encounters like the Hammer Bros. still will though) and the thank-you letter from the Princess reveals a big clue about the location of the key in that region. However--and this is purely a matter of personal taste, but according to my standards--I feel that the key locations are a little too arcane even with the hint, approaching "bring a walkthrough" territory.

The third is the weather system, in that there are daytime, nighttime, raining, etc. versions of every stage and which one you will play is chosen at random every time the stage is selected. In theory, "the stage can cycle through different weather effects" seems like a cool and mostly harmless little visual boost that adds some variety to each level, and for the most part it is. However, one weather pattern in particular (when it's snowing, naturally) adds ice skidding physics, and the others do literally nothing except look pretty I guess. Thus, in practice you have a 1/(4? 5? I forget) chance of "oops, it's snowing, maybe I should just not even try and throw myself into the nearest pit and just load the stage again because the last thing this already-difficult section needs is to also be an ice level." This can be obnoxious when you started the stage as Raccoon Mario or one of the other high-level powerups because of course you still lose those on death.

Still, this is a cool hack. Even if it felt like beating my head against a stage I just couldn't clear, I was still having fun slowly (very slowly) forcing my way through it until I randomly stopped.

WOW! WE LOSE!

Bokosuka Wars is an old game that got ported around to various systems of the day, with the Famicom version the one most people would be familiar with in the days of emulation. It is... rather infamous early-Internet kusoge, with every early 2000s comedy site lining up to take a swing. Something Awful's ROM Pit covered it, for example, back when the non-forums sections of Something Awful were relevant to anyone or anything ever.

It's easy to see why: the game is kind of an impenetrable mess at first. The common take was and mostly still is "So you're this white blobby dude and you kind of die for no reason and get the WOW! YOU LOSE! screen and what even is this game?" I decided to take a deeper look, mostly because xyzzysqrl brought the world's least necessary sequel to our attention and, you know, I wanted to see if the original deserved a fairer shake than what it got.

Answer: Sort of. The common "lol what is this" perception, where this is bullshit and you die randomly, is completely unfair. Once you find a guide and actually learn how to play, there is a carefully thought out strategy game here. It's just that the clear-headed strategy game is also bullshit and you die randomly.

Okay, so, let's start at the beginning.

You are King Suren (protip: if you ever want to tell the reviews that actually gave this game a fair chance versus the early SA zeitgeist-chasers, look for the ones that actually learned and recite his name.) You start 600m (one step/tile is 1m) away from the enemy king, and the game ends when either he dies or Suren does. There are three types of allied units, each with their own power levels and abilities, and army unit management becomes the name of the game after a while.

Combat is done by taking the allied and enemy units' respective power levels, adding random numbers to each, whoever has the higher total wins, and the loser instantly dies. There is no health stat or "softening up" or "wearing down" units through repeated battle or anything like that; just a binary "two units enter, one unit leaves" roll. If an allied unit is victorious, it gains some power. Suren gets a flat +10 power per fight up to a cap of 320. Knights and Solders mostly get +10 per battle but they also get massive promotions with a +90 or so boost and a gold color upgrade upon attaining their third victory. Then the promoted units go back to +10/fight up to caps of 310.

Given this plus the way the combat system works, the idea is to have a strategic risk/reward dilemma in regard to how much combat to pursue. Is it better to send your units into battle to get them stronger, even if you could lose them entirely on a bad roll? Is it better to avoid combat as much as you can, only to be left with weaker units when faced with the unavoidable fights?

On its surface, it's an interesting idea, and this game could be really neat and strategic. Its big problem is... well. On a randomness scale of 0-10, where 0 is "Absolutely no randomness whatsoever, a 50 power unit will defeat a 40 power unit 100% every time, no upset victories ever, this is 100% predictable and RNG-free and is literally just chess" and 10 is "every battle is a coin flip, I don't know why this game even has power levels if every fight is just 100% pure chance anyway," Bokosuka Wars is hovering around an 8 or 9. Promoted and level-built units do have a better chance of surviving than a freshly hatched 30-power Soldier, sort of, but not that much better, and if you think hitting that 320 cap means you can send Suren into an entire field of weak 10-power grunts like a Dynasty Warriors game and not die then you're going to be seeing that WOW! YOU LOSE! screen.

Let me put it this way: I tried to have Suren pick a fight with the first five enemies I saw before even worrying about recruiting units or anything else, because losing and restarting in the first 60 seconds of gameplay isn't a problem, while actually pulling it off means a hefty +50 boost for the entire rest of the game. These enemies all had 50 power, which means the literal first fight in the game is 220 vs. 50 in my favor, and I lost that matchup twice in about fifteen total attempts. The second would be 230 vs. 50, and I lost that matchup four times. I got through all five guards of my self-imposed "beat five guards" challenge once, at which point I proceeded to have an overall run that lasted until Suren (who'd worked his way up to an even 300 power by then) eventually fell to a guy with 10.

In short, this game has all the "what do you mean I had like twenty dice to roll against your one and I lost ALL of them" frustration of RISK. There are what appear to be strategic elements on paper built around managing a capricious RNG (the "should I avoid this enemy, try to take it out with one of my weaker common units for the XP, or send my heavy-hitting incredibly rare guy to hopefully take care of it" dilemma) but in practice the RNG is so capricious that managing it just... isn't very fun? This game does not feel like a fair test of skill. I could keep trying until the stars align enough to win every roll I need, but would I really prove anything to anyone by doing that? The CRPG Addict (in a rare "okay but this isn't as kusoge as its reputation suggests, let me explain" defense piece, even) cited that winning could take around 1-2 hours depending on how careful you are, and that's 1-2 hours of trying your best while knowing that one bad roll could surprise Suren and oops there goes your entire game. It's... not a great feeling.

I tried, there's more to it than it's given credit for, but... nah.

Let me just say that I do not regret this experience at all. It was great until it... wasn't anymore, at which point I stopped. But it was incredibly nice while it lasted. I'm calling this one a recommendation even though I hit a wall and noped out eventually.

Down Ward is a pixel action/puzzle/exploration thing about an owl on a quest to gather up all the magic glowing feathers in each level, then take them to the tower/beacon that will whisk her off to the next. Being an owl, you have access to a flying mechanic that is mostly unlimited (no "can only stay airborne for X seconds" stamina system or anything like that) with the only catch being that you have to keep moving forward in a straight line; stop or change direction and you plummet until you can regain enough forward momentum to rise again. That said, you can fly up by going back and forth so long as you have a wide enough space to have a net gain of height on each direction, but (like many maneuvers in this game) it's kind of tricky and the controls take some getting used to at first.

The music is one single song that loops infinitely, but it is a very good song, a jamming keygen-style beat that's somehow catchy yet not obnoxious no matter how many times you've heard it. I really like it. The graphics are gorgeous, with a pixel art style that's expressive and easy to track while visually stunning, sprites and landscapes that look every bit as good in stills or in motion. Everything is done with a four color palette that can be changed around like a Super Game Boy, with such a dizzying array of choices that I can't possibly have seen them all. There are so many that it honestly wraps around to the other side and becomes cumbersome to navigate, such that I settled for a palette I actually really liked without scrolling all the way through the list to check if there was a better one later, because I didn't want to lose the one I was on if I scrolled like fifty choices ahead without seeing anything. (A suggestion to the developer: Perhaps some way to see the entire list as a clickable drop-down menu, rather than left/right-scrolling single selection?)

I experienced a kind of bell curve of enjoyment with this game in practice. The first few levels were rough, as I was struggling to get used to the flying controls and almost gave up before I'd even really started. Then, things just... clicked, everything grew on me, I love that song and those graphics and I was really getting the hang of flying and just... yeah, this was great! Then the difficulty ramped up, and eventually it stopped being fun again. Not even in a way I can fault the developer for; I absolutely respect a good well-made masocore challenge, especially one that's such a well-made audiovisual delight. It's just that that's not really why I'm here, you know? This is good but once the ninja-rushing invincible bird skulls came out, it was no longer for me.

The only thing I can genuinely fault in this game (aside from maybe needing a better system to browse that many palette options) is the utter lack of a way to sense progression. I played this game for about an hour and a half and stopped at the first appearance of the bird skulls, which was level ??? out of ?????? Was I almost at the end? Was I barely out of the starting gate? How long is this game, anyway? It's maybe a minor thing, but I do feel like not having any sort of sense of how far along I was had a psychological effect on my ability to withstand grueling level after grueling level. Do these impossible challenges just keep coming forever, or...?

Still. This is well made, pretty, fun to play at least for a while, and is the kind of experience that sticks with me. The developer honestly could have gotten away with charging money for how much quality went into this game, yet it's free. By all means, you have nothing to lose by checking it out. I don't regret trying it and then stopping when I did. I stopped before things got frustrating enough to tarnish the experience, and will look back on the parts I played very fondly.

There was a limited time thing where this game was 100% free on the Play store, so I grabbed it because literally why not. "Because it's a mobile port and those never have playable controls" is why not, of course, but it was free and shut up.

Anyway, Downwell is a procedurally-generated pixel action game about trying to make it as far as you can before you die. There are powerups to be earned between levels and in stores, but you start from scratch with every new run.

I tried and kind of bounced off of The Binding of Isaac years ago because this particular formula isn't really to my tastes. In BoI's case, I guess I was expecting a game with checkpoints or saveable progress that could eventually be beaten, and the "do a fresh random run and get as far as you can" approach makes it hard to feel like I'm actually accomplishing anything. This isn't to say these sorts of games are bad or that it's a failing with them; rather, I think the lesson here is just that Roguelikes are not my genre.

So it is with Downwell, which I tried a few times and then got frustrated with the controls, because of course I did, it's a goddamn mobile port. However, unlike games that I might still be interested in if they were presented in a more playable format (I recently re-purchased Anodyne on Switch; we'll see how that goes if I ever get around to it someday) I just... really didn't care about this one enough to want to bother reuniting with it elsewhere. Sorry.

I completely forgot to write about this one! Because davidn has VR in his home, I played and wrote about Moss while I was there. But he also has Robo Recall, and I got to try that one too! So this would be from around the same time; I just forgot to make this post.

That said, anything I could say is honestly covered better and more enthusiastically by David himself here. Go read that instead. Any notes I have about how the game itself actually runs or plays or looks or feels like are... basically just that. He covered it already.

I only have one thing to add to personalize my experience with it, which has nothing at all to do with the quality of the game itself. The game itself is very well done and exactly as awesome as David makes it out to be! However, I personally struggled with the... "ethics" is the wrong word, but I'm not sure what the right one would be. But the robots in that intro all seemed cute and happy and friendly until whatever weird glitch turned them evil, and now your job is to exterminate the fuck out of every last one of them you see, and I just... I'm an impossible weenie, I know, but I was too distracted by feeling bad for the poor robots to feel awesome about my newfound ninja moves. (The game has a very GLaDOS dark humor way of laughing this off, an approach that has never once succeeded in making me feel better.) The tutorial has a deactivated robot in your hub office HQ and teaches you about the VR mechanics by having you physically grab it at any two different points and then rip it apart with your bare hands, and I almost couldn't bring myself to do it. I mean, I did do it, and I even played the first actual stage too, because I didn't want to cause a scene or anything (and I was admittedly curious about the technical capabilities and how cool the VR was and etc.) But it kind of felt like the Milgram experiment.

It is a really awesome experience for people who aren't me, though, which is the main reason you really should be reading David's review instead for max awesomeness. I am a crouton petter and a statistical outlier who should not be counted.

Do not be alarmed by this being an abandoned entry; this was a foregone conclusion from a long string of technicalities:

1. Any "real" game I play for more than about ten minutes is officially on my radar.
   
2. Once on the radar, it gets a complete entry when I complete it or an abandoned entry when I either give up on it or I'm no longer in a position to keep playing it. The two "ongoing" exceptions were both because they're MMOs. The only games I've played and haven't written about yet are ones that are still actively (even if occasionally) being pecked at here and there, and therefore I have neither completed nor stopped playing them.
   
3. We are currently out of town visiting our friend davidn. He has an Oculus Rift (and Moss) and we do not.
   
4. Therefore, it was inevitable before we even left on this trip that I would be writing an Abandoned entry for Moss, because of course I'm going to try it while we're here, and of course I'm not going to beat it while I'm here, and of course I can't exactly keep playing it once we get back home.

All that said, the game itself is fantastic so far, I'm completely sold. Look for us to acquire it someday if we're ever fortunate enough to get a VR headset (and a big enough apartment to effectively use it.)

Moss is a VR game about an adorable mouse named Quill. There's a strong storybook motif, wherein the cutscenes are represented by physically turning pages of a book set up in a big cathedral-looking room (VR!) and most major characters are aware of you, the capital-R Reader, an apparent figure of legend. You have a floating cursor with which you can drag blocks around for platform puzzle purposes. Or to pet Quill. You will spend at least half the time petting Quill.

It's a really neat experience, at least so far. The fourth wall "Reader as an actual character" mechanic is a great way to make the VR interface work, Quill is the cutest thing ever, and the scenery is almost as gorgeous as Ori and the Blind Forest only now it's in VR where you can physically look around at it. There are a few "behind the black" secret tunnels and such in actual gameplay, and those are a perfect use of the medium, too: if you want to see what's in that hole over there, just physically crane your head, bend over, and look into it.

So yeah, this was fantastic so far and look for it in Extra Life contention, considering the only reason we stopped is lack of system and physical living space availability once this trip is over.

THIS IS A BLATANT AND DELIBERATE PORN GAME. THIS IS VERY NSFW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

The last two parasite porn games I played were on this tfgames.site place, so I did a quick search to see what else they had. I swear I don't normally spam this many porn games (there weren't any at all last year, you know,) but I was on a kick and was curious.

My master, the Parasite (sic re: capitalization) is a seemingly abandoned CYOA. The download link works as of when I'm writing this, despite what that page says. However, I'm just going to take the ambiguity as a warning that I probably shouldn't hold my breath waiting for the next update.

I don't have a lot to say for this one, because there's almost nothing here. No graphics/sound/anything but a rudimentary save system, which you will not need, because any route you try will hit an "Oops, this section not written yet, sorry, click here to go back" wall about four or five choices in. Maybe if this game is finished, I might come back? But I somehow doubt it ever will be.

I want to channel my inner RoahmMythril and conclude this review with a noncommittal "So, that was a thing." However, in this case, it really wasn't.

God.

Okay, so.

Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest is an old SNES RPG aimed at entry-level players. It is widely known as either a bad game or a so-bad-it's-good kitsch-appeal game, with phenomenal music. (Whether you like MQ or not, even the haters admit the music is good.) It is easy. It is ridiculous. The plot is a desiccated skeleton. I've seen outlines of stories (let alone the actual thing) that are more fleshed out. Here is, word for word, unedited and unabridged, the first ten minutes or so of the game:

(Starts off on the Hill of Destiny, were an earthquake just happened)

Benjamin: My village is gone!! What is going on?
Old Man: This place is going to sink any second! Let's climb up quick!
(Benjamin walks north a screen or two to the top of some stairs)
Old Man: Press the "B" Button, and jump across!

(Benjamin jumps across, and the side of the mountain he was just on sinks. Benjamin and the old man then turn and look north, at a tower)

Old Man: Look over there. That's the Focus Tower, once the heart of the World. An old Prophecy says, "The vile 4 will steal the Power, and divide the World behind 4 doors. At that time the Knight will appear!" The Prophecy has now come true. 4 monsters have locked the doors of the Focus Tower and escaped with the keys. They're draining the light from the 4 Crystals of the Earth, and the World is in Chaos. The people are in desperate need of help. Benjamin, only you can save the Crystals and the world.
Benjamin: Me?
Old Man: Yes, you Benjamin! Only you could be the Knight spoken in the Prophecy...
(Monster appears)
Man: Look out! A monster!
(Battle)

(After battle)
Old Man: Seems I was right! At last I've found a true knight!
Benjamin: But you said you were SURE I was the one!
Old Man: Well, actually it was more of a guess...
(Benjamin SHRUGS)
Benjamin: Forget it. Just tell me where I can find the Crystals.
Old Man: It's up to you to find them.
(Mountain shakes)
Old Man: This place is becoming dangerous! Follow me to the Level Forest!
(Old Man flies away)
Benjamin: Got to get out of here. Who is that guy, any way?

(Benjamin walks south, to the world map, and then to the first accessible area from it, Level Forest. The old man is there waiting for him)

Benjamin: There you are! What do you think I should do first?
Old Man: Save the Crystal of Earth. See you!
(Old Man flies away)
(Benjamin SHRUGS)

Benjamin's village is, of course, never mentioned again.

Characters zip through plot points as if they were being charged by the word. The entire script was written hastily on a cocktail napkin by an Artifex Mundi employee, spiced up by Ted Woolsey taking liberties to make it entertaining, because God knows this wasn't great writing anyway.

Unsurprisingly, young me loathed this game, and gleefully vengefully riffed it to shreds with all the fury of the 90s Barney anti-fandom, because it was dumb as fuck.

Older me has come to appreciate its goofy charm. It is dumb as fuck, but it's fluffy and fun. It's... not even a popcorn game (cotton candy at most) but if you just want to RP some Gs without having to take anything too seriously, you could do a lot worse.

Not kidding about the music, either.

Meanwhile, Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest Remastered is a scam. No, really. Someone remade Mystic Quest in RPGMaker, and boy oh boy does "farted out in RPGMaker" show (more on this later,) but this person then had the cheek to claim it was an officially licensed and Square Enix approved and supported remake. This person then tried to sell it. That was around when Square Enix was like "ahahaha no" and blasted them into a crater.

I played it anyway, because I am a bad person and I make bad choices. I hadn't replayed Mystic Quest in a while, and I was feeling oddly nostalgic. I could just replay it again, but... I mean... I have done that. Even in my "I hate this game" phase I explored every single thing there was to explore in it. (I wanted to make an MST but I couldn't find a script anywhere, so I played the entire game to 100% completion and carefully wrote down every word just so I could compile the script myself. Because that'll show how much I totally hate this game, all right. Take that, Square Enix.) By now, I'm at the point where I could scratch an old itch, but there's really nothing left that would be new about it.

MQR, for all its scammy shadiness and "cobbled together in RPGMaker" jank, at least offered something new. Revised and rewritten plot points here and there! A full party instead of one-partner-at-a-time switches for the endboss! Etc! I figured it was about the best chance I'd have to play Mystic Quest again and be in any way curious what's coming. With certain clanmates helping me find a cracked version with the "please enter the serial number you got from your purchase" checks removed (sorry, but this is one "official" release you shouldn't support) I set off.

MQR, for as far as I got into it, is... uh. Well. It's certainly Mystic Quest in RPGMaker, all right. The graphics certainly are bigger and have more colors and detail and all, though the new ones do look a bit... I'm not quite going to say "RPGMaker default assets" but it certainly has that aura about it. Corners were cut and entire gameplay mechanics (such as using any weapon outside of battle except the sword and jumping) were removed entirely every time the author ran into something RPGMaker couldn't do. Instead, we got clumsy workarounds, unstable code (supposedly there's a chocobo forest in Foresta now, but every time I went to activate the well that took me there, the game crashed,) and, uh... let's just say bold and uniquely original ideas of what is and is not a solid tile whenever there's water.

I was enjoying this game despite myself, though! Everything it did was Like Mystic Quest But Worse, but at the same time it was interesting, and I still had that "I could just go back and play the original instead but I mean I've done that" feeling weighing on the back of my mind. If nothing else, it was an entertaining trainwreck, something that generated a lot of fun discussion and mutual bonding over the "lol what even" factor whenever I experienced and subsequently posted something like that gif.

Unfortunately, jank and instability are powerful forces that not even the most high-level player can overcome sometimes. Even getting my bootleg cracked version of a bootleg unauthorized game to run at all involved a very fiddly and finnicky setup where (among other eccentricities) it only seemed to launch if the shortcut was run from my desktop (I couldn't move the shortcut anywhere else or the whole thing would collapse,) the odds of it actually launching are slightly improved if I run it in Administrator mode, etc. I had a held-together-with-bubblegum arrangement that got me through Aquaria and just starting the Fireburg portion of the game....

And now it just won't work anymore. Like, at all. Even the workarounds I tried to get it to even launch last time it did this aren't doing anything anymore, and at this point I give up. Look, I'm sorry, but even though I actually was enjoying this and would have beaten it if it had let me, there are only so many layers of this game refusing to open that I can take before I have to wonder if this is my PC and my own survival instinct trying to tell me something.

A disappointing anticlimactic end to what at least sure was a trip, and I'm not really happy with that, but... bleh. What can you do? I mean I do have other games that aren't a steaming mess, I suppose.

Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest is goofy silly charming fun if you haven't played it before, or maybe even if you have and you're not tired of it yet. This picture of Kaeli is the official icon for our group chat, even, because it's such a perfect mixture of "fluffy and adorable axe-wielding murder muffin" and "reference to certain old games we like because we have no taste" that it really is the perfect symbol for us on several levels. The game itself is a classic (by my standards) too. I highly recommend it!

But please, please don't play the Remastered version. Don't make my mistakes.