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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest builds upon and adds to everything the first game did well. By the way, if you didn't catch the pun in the game's subtitle, read it again—it's not Diddy Kong's Quest, as some have misread it. Donkey Kong has been kidnapped by Kaptain K. Rool (formerly King K. Rool, a detail I didn't clock while playing). This may be an homage to the sequel to the Donkey Kong arcade game , Donkey Kong Junior , in which Mario took the big gorilla captive, leaving DK Junior to save him. Well, I don't know what happened to Junior, but now Diddy and his girlfriend Dixie must rescue DK.  The action takes place on Crocodile Isle, with a world map set up like in the original. Per usual, each of the seven worlds boasts a different, tropey biome: a pirate ship, volcano, poisonous swamp, abandoned amusement park, haunted forest, K. Rool's castle, and finally his airship. The biggest change from the original is replacing DK with a chimp named ...