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The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages: 20th anniversary

The Game Boy Color games Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons launched simultaneously as interrelated sequels to Link's Awakening . The Pokéman Game Boy games came in two colors, but these are completely different games! Ages emphasizes puzzles, while Seasons focuses on combat. How amazing to receive two new Zelda games the same day! The central gimmick of Oracle of Ages is that Link travels between past and present in the world of Labrynna (somewhat similar to the light and dark worlds in A Link to the Past ). Playing the Harp of Ages allows Link to move between past and present. The threadbare plot mostly confuses me: the villain, a sorceress named Veran, has possessed an oracle named Nayru (who, I assume, can prophesy on behalf of the goddess Nayru). Under her baleful influence, Qeen Ambi is building a dark tower in the past. Fantasy stories love dark towers. Anyway, for some reason the solution to this problem, according to the great Maku Tree (not to be confused with  Ocarina ...
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Super Mario Bros. 3: Best NES game ever

Like other 80's kids, my first taste of Super Mario Bros. 3 was in the 1989 movie  The Wizard . Due to the lag between its 1988 Japanese release and 1990 American port, Nintendo of America was able to unveil the highly-anticipated third installment in the most popular video-game series via a movie. In The Wizard , starring The Wonder Years ' Fred Savage, a boy goes on an unsupervised, underage road trip in California so his mentally-disturbed little brother can play in a video-game tournament. The final competition requires the contestants to compete in the yet-to-be-released-stateside SMB3. Though a critical failure, the movie made a big impression on me.  Super Mario Bros. 3 is on the shortlist for the title of Best Video Game Ever. It vastly expands, improves, and refines everything that made Super Mario Bros. great, with more levels, secrets, items, enemies, and bosses. Many levels scroll both vertically and horizontally, and Mario and Luigi can backtrack. Although SMB2 ...
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Mario vs. Donkey Kong: DK for a new generation

Mario vs. Donkey Kong is a Game Boy Advance sequel to one of the Game Boy's best games: Donkey Kong . It spawned two DS sequels (and a couple mini-games), but it has more in common with its 8-bit monochrome predecessor. The main part of Mario vs. Donkey Kong plays almost exactly like Donkey Kong '94. Mario has the same robust set of moves, including a handstand and backward somersault. He navigates easy puzzle-platforming levels. Every stage has two parts. In the former, Mario must find the key and take it to the door. If he sets the key down for more than twelve seconds, it returns to where it began. The door leads to the second half of the stage. Mario must reach and pick up the Mini Mario toy (see below). Various classic Mario villains get in his way, such as shy guys, spear guys (from Yoshi's Island ), thwomps, thwimps, ninjis, snapjaws, and bob-ombs, as well as some new ones, like ramrams (rhinoceri). The usual Donkey Kong fare abound: vines, ladders, platforms, swit...
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Paper Mario: 25th anniversary

A quarter century ago, Paper Mario was released on the N64. A quasi-sequel to Super Mario RPG , it refines the kid-friendly Nintendo take on the RPG genre, leaving behind some elements Square borrowed from Final Fantasy in favor of a uniquely "Mario-ish" implementation. Like Mario RPG, Paper Mario is very fun. As the name suggests, Paper Mario uses a cartoon style: all the characters are paper cut-outs. It's reminiscent of Yoshi's Story : the whole game is a story with paper puppets. The characters being made of paper mostly doesn't matter. There's an occasional graphical flourish, like when Mario wafts under the covers of the bed in a Toad House or curls into a tube when going down a pipe. Paper Mario uses a 2.5D world. There is usually a foreground and background, with different elevations, similar to beat-'em-up games like Double Dragon. In a few cases, there are curved paths, and the camera rotates automatically as Mario walks around. One of the bigges...
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Dragon Warrior (Quest) II: Bigger, longer, harder

Dragon Warrior II is a bigger Dragon Warrior: more heroes, monsters, equipment, spells, items, towns, and dungeons. The formula is the same, but with three party members instead of just one, who battle up to eight monsters at once. But it released a few months after Final Fantasy in the U.S., to which it compares poorly (in Japan it predated FF by almost a year). An opening cut-scene shows Moonbrooke Castle being destroyed by monsters; a lone survivor escapes to warn the neighboring kingdom of Midenhall. At first you control only Midenhall's prince, a descendant of the legendary Erdrick, but he is soon joined by his noble cousins, the prince of Cannock and princess of Moonbrooke. She has been transformed into a dog, but the Mirror of Ra, which the men retrieve from a swamp tile on the world map, reveals her true shape. She is a magic-user, who will learn powerful, new spells like healall [fullheal], revive [kazing], and explodet [kaboom]. The prince of Midenhall is a warrior who c...
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Dragon Warrior (Quest): Save the princess, save the kingdom

For the fifth anniversary of this blog, I am reviewing an oldie but a goodie: Dragon Warrior! My lifelong love of RPGs began with a free copy of Dragon Warrior sent to new subscribers to Nintendo Power. It's not often one gets a video game for free (I guess it didn't sell as well as Nintendo had hoped). Before Dragon Warrior, the RPG genre was not popular in the U.S., unlike Japan. I suspect this promotion helped kickstart it. Today RPGs are one of the most popular genres of video games worldwide. The series finally broke through in the U.S. with Dragon Quest XI in 2018, which became the best-selling game in the storied series. Thanks largely to that success, the original trilogy has been remade in the acclaimed 2D-HD art style, with a fully modernized remake of Dragon Quest VII coming soon. The original Dragon Warrior/Quest is primitive even by NES standards . It pales in comparison to its three NES sequels because it is short, grindy AF, and, worst of all, has a single charac...
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The Final Fantasy Legend: Mutants and monsters find and kill God

The Final Fantasy Legend was a pioneering release for the Game Boy, being its first RPG. Early Game Boy games were tiny, just 128 kilobytes of data, so it was an achievement to create a complete, albeit small, RPG. The game is not actually a Final Fantasy game but the beginning of a separate series, called SaGa in Japan. Square (successfully) slapped the FF name on it to capitalize on the success of Final Fantasy . Due to the memory limitation, FF Legend is structured around four small worlds connected via a central tower. You create a party of four characters using any combination of three races: humans, mutants ("espers" in the Japanese), and monsters. The game's mechanics are unusual. Firstly, there are no experience points. Each race has its own growth mechanism. You boost your humans' stats by buying items that increase strength, agility, or hit points (HP). Some weapons use strength and others, like whips and bows, use agility (which is also a defensive stat), s...
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