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Category: Reviews

Touhou a Go-Go

The Mystery Dungeon clone Dungeon clear! Reimu in Touhou Genso Wanderer ReloadedTouhou Genso Wanderer Reloaded was one of those games I picked up on the strength of my experience with it at a PAX, specifically at the sparsely-populated UNTIES booth in 2018. This was a year before I played Touhou Eiyashou: Imperishable Night, which was my proper introduction to the Touhou series. Later on, I would play through its predecessor, Touhou Youyoumu: Perfect Cherry Blossom, before starting the Switch port of Genso Wanderer, my first Touhou spinoff, more than a year later.

As it turns out, Genso Wanderer would lead me to starting a third mainline Touhou game, and the last one I had in my backlog: Touhou Fuujinroku: Mountain of Faith. This was because there are several prominent characters in Genso Wanderer who were first introduced in Mountain of Faith, the tenth entry in the core series of magical shmups. Two of these characters, Aya and Sanae, star in their own post-game sidestories in Genso Wanderer; another one, the kappa Nitori, plays a key role tied to the crafting system; and the rest of the cast make notable appearances at various points. While there are a bevy of characters from all over the Touhou canon featured throughout, I got the impression that Genso Wanderer‘s developers must’ve loved Mountain of Faith in particular.

Pre-Move Braincrumbs

EVERYONE IS HERE. From Project X Zone's opening movie.The world is weird right now, especially here in New Jersey, but given that we had spent most of our time at home pre-pandemic anyway, some things haven’t changed. We did buy a house, though, a process which began during more “normal” times and concluded with a socially-distanced closing. Some painting and other work is being done on it right now, and we’re hoping to move in this coming Saturday. In other words, we’ve been keeping busy with packing, contractors, and related bits of business. We’ve also been patronizing our favorite local restaurants as much as we can via takeout, especially since we’ll soon be moving on to a new set of eateries in a different town.

There have been many strange little things about this pandemic—the memes have been a highlight—but one of the oddest for me personally has been seeing jigsaw puzzles explode in popularity. I’ve been a jigsaw puzzle hobbyist for a long time, as has my mom, and finding puzzles to send to her as an early Mother’s Day gift to help stave off some of her boredom was tough, as many online shops’ stocks have been depleted. I currently have a dozen puzzles in my personal backlog, but couldn’t do any of them after a certain point because they had to be packed away for moving. This whole situation with puzzles’ popularity is baffling but understandable, and I hope some people stick with it after this is all over, as it’s a relaxing and meditative hobby.

Anyway, let’s get started. Today’s reviews feature a 60+ hour JRPG, and a JRPG that was nowhere near that long, but felt like it. I’ve also included the platforms I played on this time, something I’ll try and stick with for future reviews.

Braincrumbs Variety Pack

So far, February has been a busy, stressful month in real life, and rather productive when it has come to beating games. My struggles with Age of Empires II HD, which started in January, eventually led me to quitting the game altogether this month. Other than that set of headaches, things have been smooth sailing. With that said, here’s what I thought about the three games which I most recently finished.

A Link to Zelda’s Past

It had been nearly nine years since I had played a Zelda game for the first time (in the intervening time, I beat the DSiWare title Four Swords Anniversary Edition, but that doesn’t really count), and I was finally ready for more. As my first “core” Zelda was, well, the first Zelda, for the second, I skipped the sidescrolling second title, The Adventure of Link on NES, in favor of the more traditional third, A Link to the Past. It also helped matters that I had A Link to the Past‘s 3DS sequel, A Link Between Worlds, in my backlog.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was originally released for the SNES in 1992 and has what might be the most misleading title in the entire Zelda franchise. Much to my surprise, especially given the plots of certain later entries in the franchise, there is no time travel in this game. As I learned later on, the title is a reference to the Zelda timeline; this story takes place before the events of the first two games. However, there’s no mention of this in either the game itself or the manual, so perhaps you can understand my confusion.

Link begins his journey on a rainy night. Image from Zelda Dungeon (zeldadungeon.net).As with many other 16-bit RPGs when compared to their 8-bit predecessors, the plot in A Link to the Past is much more involved than in The Legend of Zelda, though still relatively simple at its core. Long ago, a Golden Land had to be sealed away by seven wise men due to the presence of evil. In the game’s present day, the wise men’s descendants are being kidnapped by the wizard Agahnim in a plot to undo the seal to the Golden Land, now called the Dark World. One night, Link receives a telepathic message from Princess Zelda, which is where his adventure begins. During its course, Link will collect three pendants, the Master Sword, and a certain pair of items which allow him to safely travel between the Dark World and his home dimension, the Light World. From that point, his quest shifts to the recovery of seven crystals, each tied to a wise man’s descendant (all of whom happen to be maidens) and the defeat of Ganon, the source of the evil which transformed the Golden Land.

Braincrumbs: Burninating the Countryside

It’s Steam Summer Sale season and despite my best efforts not to, I’ve been eyeing a couple of games to add onto the Pile of Shame. Said pile has grown quite a bit this first half of the year, thanks in part to the Wii Shop’s closure and our cross country move (we picked up a some co-op Switch games for the drive, but ended up not needing any of them). There was also the delisting of Telltale Games’ back catalog at GOG, which led to fears that the same would happen at Steam, and, in a roundabout way, the second review for this post.

However, let’s kick things off with something I’d had in my backlog since last year’s Steam Summer Sale…

The First Fantasy

My party fights in Final Fantasy. Originally posted via Twitter.
During my playthrough, I would sometimes post photos of the action on Twitter. Here, I marveled at how well Amano’s enemy designs were preserved.
When I played The Legend of Zelda back in 2011, it was my first hands-on experience with a game in that franchise. In a very different situation, I recently played through Final Fantasy, the debut title in a franchise which I am all too familiar with.

My first JRPG of any sort was Final Fantasy VII, and it remains my favorite, for sentimental and other reasons. I’ve beaten most of the others up through Final Fantasy X, including all of the Tactics and 3DS Theatrhythm spinoffs, a couple of the Chocobo ones, and two direct sequels, the fun and campy Final Fantasy X-2 and the truly dreadful Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII (on the plus side, at least a a very entertaining Let’s Play came out of it). I was the webmaster of the Final Fantasy VII Citadel for a time, and founded a few other FF fansites, some more successful than others. In other words, I spent the better part of a decade with Final Fantasy regularly on the brain. My interest started to decline around the time I gave up on the unwieldy Final Fantasy XII, and especially after leaving the webmaster post at the Citadel. However, I still like to dip my toes into the franchise every once in awhile, and my acquisition of an NES Classic earlier this summer gave me a good excuse to tackle the game that started it all.