Spelunky 2

 There are two kinds of sequels you can make: you can try to completely reinvent the original game while preserving some element of it (how it makes players feel, the theming, etc), or you can just refine the original game. Spelunky 2 is the latter kind of sequel. Considering no one else even came close to the original in 12 years, that still makes it a pretty incredible game. Doubly so since the vast majority of changes they made make it a far better game. It also makes it weird to review because it's kind of just more Spelunky. So let's break down the changes instead.

1. Sublevels

One of the big new features is that every level is now two levels that you can go between by finding secret (or not so secret) doorways. Prior to release this was the feature I was worried about the most, since it seemed likely to bloat the game's pacing. Evidently so were the developers, as most of the randomized sublevels in the game are just empty passageways that occasionally hide treasure or can operate as shortcuts. While it does use these for incredible effect for some of the static discoveries, I'm not sure these add much to the game. They can also be really frustrating when you notice something hidden in them, but the entrances often have few reliable clues which makes them cost a lot of precious bombs early in a run.

2. Branching Paths

Spelunky is pretty heavily built on the concept of avoiding discrete modes. Getting to the hard ending of it still uses the same locations as the normal ending, it just puts different requirements on the player (and then rewards them by extending the game). In a game built around 30-60 minute permadeath runs, this makes expanding for a sequel without extending the length of a run tricky. They opted for having the game branch off into different biomes depending on where players decide to go. It's a slick solution to the problem, and early on I found myself making a lot of tough choices on where to go based on what equipment I had gained so far and whether I wanted "harder but more rewarding" or "faster but more prone to bad luck". That said, in the long term the game doesn't do a great job making every branch feel like a viable choice for a lot of esoteric late game reasons (on the other hand: I haven't looked much up, so maybe I'm full of crap and have just missed compelling reasons for each branch).

3. Level Design

This is the part where Spelunky 2 really blows the original out of the water. The most obvious example is just looking at a single piece of equipment: the jump boots. They let you jump a few tiles higher. In the original, they were occasionally useful. In the sequel, they are amazing. And that's because the level design is smart enough to have numerous patterns where important treasure is hanging out on a ledge that you can only get to by using a rope or an equipment upgrade like the jump boots. This thoughtful design extends to making ropes useful for more things than just backtracking as well, which then makes the resource management at the heart of Spelunky more compelling than the original.

I won't list every subtle difference (and there are a lot of them- not all of them positive, requiring bomb cooking for key items is a bit much), but the biggest one is how radically different the starting area is. Spelunky 1's was very much designed as a tutorial: most enemies died in 1 hit, and they had easy to predict trigger behavior (spider drops when you're under it). Spelunky 2 by contrast loads its starting area with three types of multi-hit enemies, demands that players understand that enemies use sight lines, and throws in more traps just in case you weren't dead enough. The end result is that the sequel is way harder (especially up front), but it also avoids having the most played area in the game also being the most boring. As a tutorial, it also imparts more lessons to the player than the original (ie, I learned things I never knew about 1 by playing 2 because they become vital techniques).

Needing the first area to be a tutorial, yet not boring to expert players having to replay it constantly is a pretty classic arcade game problem that I think about a lot. Making it harder for the sequel is probably the right choice, but it's also a problem that kind of turns me against the underlying design philosophy of avoiding modes and difficulty settings. Splitting the game into a newbie dungeon that unlocks the real dungeon would probably be a much better option (yeah I know don't write suggestions in a review, bite me).

It also feels weird to review this game right now because patches keep changing it radically. On release, the game would generate "dead end" parts of levels that, once entered, required using bombs or ropes to get out of (or just die if you don't have any). I found this pretty interesting, but as of right now they've been completely removed from the game. I don't exactly miss the dead ends, but it does make 2 feel more similar to 1.

4. Speed

You may recall me referring to the original as "a bit like a way too fast slippery janky freeware platformer". Apparently the developers had the same thought, so Spelunky 2 slows everything down ever just so slightly. It's really subtle, at first you only notice it with the drastically slowed down shopkeepers (who had comical "someone turned the entity speed to the max the engine allows" speed). But it actually applies to everything, and opens up new techniques like jumping over arrows. It's a huge improvement, and makes 2 feel like the professionally made version of the game.

5. More viable play styles

In the original, it was phenomenally boring to get the hard ending without stealing from shopkeepers (though plenty viable for the normal ending, which means this was likely intentional to force harder play styles). The sequel thankfully walks this back with small but important changes to make it a viable play style no matter what ending you're going for: 

• There are fewer rooms that are just "all dirt blocks", meaning that getting money doesn't require using as many bombs- something that made buying early items very luck dependent in the original (it also means you spend a lot more time navigating levels, so it's just generally better across the board)
  
• There's a new fragile item that can consistently get you a big chunk of money in every level (it also enables even riskier money strategies for high score runs, but those aren't usually necessary for buying things now).
• Stealing in general has been heavily re-balanced such that it's riskier, but is also much deeper with different choices and strategies if you choose to do it.

The end result is that going for harder endings is no longer as suffocating about how you can play it. I cannot overstate how big of an improvement this is. It's one of my biggest pet peeves: games that create difficulty by removing options from the game. Sure you made it harder, but you also made it narrower. And those choices were what made playing it interesting to begin with. This is probably the biggest reason why I ended up playing Spelunky 2 for 2 months straight, while the original would get stale after a week or two.

6. Quests

The original game featured a sort of puzzle where the player needed to obtain certain items and do certain things in order to unlock the final world and see the true final ending: the hard ending chain. It's a really clever way of giving players a puzzle to chew on while trying to build up their skill and experience necessary to get the regular ending. Naturally, the sequel doubles down on this by changing up the chain itself (subverting and acknowledging the original's along the way), and the presence of multiple branches complicates it. On top of that, it adds little sub-chains involving NPC characters in the world (the simplest is rescuing all 3 NPCs in the jungle netting you rewards later in the run). The end result is that playing the early/mid game is a pretty overwhelming but rewarding experience of having a pile of puzzle pieces on a table and no idea what to do with them. I had an incredible time sharing new discoveries and theories with a couple friends as we cracked the case. We also sounded like lunatics. Even though most of it is just standard adventure game "take the thing to the place", putting it in the context of a roguelike platformer made it something special to figure out.

Maybe more interesting is that the same design philosophy that allowed for multiple valid play styles, applies to the quest chain too. While 1 provided few opportunities to veer from the its chain, 2 allows alternative (but way harder) options for almost every step. Miss an item? Don't quit the game yet, there's still a razor thin chance that you can do something crazy to get there without it. It's mostly just there for stupid good players to exploit, but it also gives a certain degree of hope and late game discovery for normal players as well. 

7. New Items

Most of them are pretty mediocre additions, actually. Their presence is nonetheless appreciated for more variety. The way numerous old items are made far better just by changing how you get them and the levels around them is maybe the bigger deal.

8. Continuity

Spelunky 2 stars the child of the original game's protagonist on a quest to find her missing parents. The world of the original game was a bunch of nonsense that the creator almost certainly pulled out of his butt as needed for the level/enemy design. So it's kind of incredible that 2 takes that hodgepodge and made me care about its lore just a tiny bit. Time has advanced since the original, characters have aged, different characters take up the role of old characters, etc. Even the enemies have evolved since the original game, getting new gadgets or moving to new areas because you ruined their life in the first game. You'll finally get to see some of the places those enemies came from. In short, it's loaded with completely unnecessary references to the original game. With so much time passed since the original, it all hits surprisingly hard if you're familiar.

I'm more Spelunky than man after sinking hundreds of hours into the game so I don't really appreciate this part of it anymore. But those first few dozen hours? This stuff was really cool.

9. The Town

It also introduces a sort of lobby area where all of the player characters you rescue show up and build little rooms to live in. There are some nice touches to it, like characters having different things to say depending on who you're playing as. But it falls completely short of matching something like Azure Dreams at creating a relaxing home to come back to between runs. Partially because only reaching new areas/endings unlocks things in it (rather than giving smaller goals like spending gold), partially because you get no choice in where or what to build in it, and partially because there's nothing to actually do in it since there's very little dialog variation.

I'm not that dissappointed with it, since it's really hard for a pure roguelike to pull off town building when the town cannot give anything back to the main game without breaking the purity (and the main game cannot create incentives to play it poorly for the sake of town rewards). At the same time, man it would have been pretty cool to buy a sweet couch with the money I earned from my previous runs? The fact that they did it poorly is almost worse than not doing it at all.

Conclusion

I still haven't tried the co-op mode (because the online is still disabled months after release). I still haven't beaten Spelunky 2. I got the normal ending, the hard ending, and I know how to enter the special ending. I'll probably never see the special ending, but I'll definitely enter it one of these days. I'm writing this review now because I'm going to forget my early thoughts if I wait any longer.

Should you play it? Yes, absolutely. Unless you hated the first one. In which case, the sequel will do nothing for you. Probably play the original first if you haven't because it's easier and the references are cool (it's also sufficiently different that 2 doesn't really replace it). If you didn't beat the original and don't want to, that's fine. The sequel is still a game worth playing even if you never beat it (quite literally since it features a true ending that is probably impossible for most people).

Spelunky HD

Spelunky was originally released in 2008, so early in the indie boom that it was released as freeware since being able to sell a game on the internet had yet to really explode. Spelunky HD was a remake that wouldn't be released until 2012 in an effort to actually make a profit off it, and included quite a few refinements, additional secrets/areas, etc. It's probably one of the most influential games of all time since it was the first platformer roguelike (that is, randomly generated levels in a platformer)- a genre you can't walk in a digital store without tripping over these days. Even more than that, it sparked the imagination of what other genres you could apply random generation to. Diablo technically predates applying random generation to an action game by many years, but it also lost the feel of a roguelike in favor of loot gambling.

What makes Spelunky particularly incredible is that I would honestly say that it is still, 12 years and countless similar games later, hands down the best of the genre in terms of actually translating a roguelike into an action game. See, the thing about randomly generating a level is that it actually kind of sucks. If you just drop in a few rooms at random and plop down a few enemies from a pool, it will only be as entertaining as fighting those enemies is. If you hand design the room layouts, and make terrain relevant to the gameplay, then you have only created a few permutations of fighting those enemies. Add in some power ups / money, and you have only made it as interesting as how big an impact those powerups make. You might go "ah, but what if we add lock/key progression where the generator is smart enough to only put the red key before its locked door and etc!". And you will quickly find that the only reason that lock/key gameplay is interesting is because the level designer put things in interesting positions. The reality is that most games don't have mechanics that can be interesting through simple random permutations. At best you get a modern version of an arcade game where randomization makes harsh death penalties more palatable (which is frankly what the majority of action roguelikes, or roguelites, or whatever you want to call them actually are- souped up arcade games).

The thing that makes roguelike random generation work above all else is that they rely on chain reactions. Imagine a fictional game where a monster can explode and destroy terrain around it. Shopkeepers will attack you for destroying their store. As a result, this monster and shopkeepers both become more interesting when together. Now a trap that pushes things, pushing the monster into a shop, where it explodes. That's three things interacting together. Suddenly, random permutations start to have enough different combinations to become interesting. This is the foundation of roguelikes (though plenty of non-random games use it as well).

Spelunky's choice of genre being platformer allows for an incredibly natural action adaptation of these systems, since it comes with the most intuitive system there is: physics. Darts can push you and enemies into other things. Falling onto spikes can kill you- and monsters. A poorly thrown rock into an explosion can come flying back to your face. Specks of blood can cause explosives to go off. It's an incredibly smart choice, and it also highlights why attempts at other genres of roguelike are so difficult. It also just makes dying funny. Which is important in its own way. Because you'll be doing it a lot.

These types of chain reactions weren't unheard of in action games, with things like Doom allowing demons to attack each other and traps to damage them. But the necessity of players being able to read a situation in real time somewhat limits the allowed chain depth compared to a turn based game like a traditional roguelike. Spelunky works around this in a really clever way: almost every monster and trap in the game is stationary or in a set pattern until the player gets near it. It shakes it up in various ways (spiders fall from the ceiling, snakes pace, humans use their weapons only when facing you, etc), but the rule is only broken with great care. This prevents the chain system from spiraling out of control, or out of sight. In a way it even makes it a turn based game in a sense, as you usually have time to process a situation before reacting to it.

Even outside being one of the few to successfully translate chain reactions, I find it surprising that the progenitor of the genre also does a lot of things better than its own spawn. In particular, the thing I absolutely detest about most action roguelikes is that they tend to fall into a pattern where the early areas become trivial (due to the need for a skill difficulty curve), but it's still in your best interest to loot everything in them. This makes the start of every game a choice between tedium or a disadvantage. Spelunky sidesteps this in a slew of ways: levels are relatively small, runs are relatively short (30-40 minutes), early areas have intense resource costs that often require skipping parts of them, a timer spawns an invincible killer ghost if you take too long, and even when you're experienced at the game it requires a lot of focus such that it's easy to trip up even on the early areas. It's certainly not perfect about it, with some high score tactics requiring wasting a lot of time. But relative to its progeny, it does a remarkably good job of keeping the early run tedium down.

Would I recommend Spelunky HD? Uh, absolutely. Pretty much everyone should play it. The years have only made me appreciate it more after watching other games fail to emulate it. I could nitpick a bit in terms of the game perhaps feeling a bit like a way too fast slippery janky freeware platformer at times. But that speed is also pretty important for reducing the repetition and allowing risky play. I could nitpick that occasionally the randomization will screw you over in impossible ways (admittedly pretty rare, though). But that's it, just nitpicks. 

Bonus: Stages of Beating It

With Spelunky 2 coming out soon, I finally decided to actually beat the original. While I always considered it the pretty much definitive action roguelike, I also don't really play roguelikes to win. They're more like slot machines I spin now and then to see all the possibilities. So actually setting out with the specific goal of beating it was weird, but I'm glad I did it. In this bonus section, I'm going to describe how I felt about the game at each stage of beating it.

Messing Around

What a cool game. I killed a bunch of spiders with a lady! Oh no, she fell on spikes and died.

Warping Around

The game lets you unlock shortcuts to each biome. Being some roguelike purist weirdo, I refused to use them until now because I considered them cheating. Since the goal was now to beat it, I swallowed my pride and tried them. I'm glad I did? This is still an action game, which means it requires some practice and learning of patterns. The warps make that possible, which makes my gut think that the action and roguelike marriage is maybe inherently wrong in some sense (it feels like a really hacky solution to a problem). Maybe more interestingly, the warps show off how every biome in the game is designed to be winnable no matter how poor your equipment luck is (the final area via warp is practically a different, harder game than a full run). The fact that the game doesn't feel broken even with good equipment is remarkable, since the equipment also manages to feel incredibly useful.

Beating It

Doing a full run was mostly a matter of learning one important lesson: the longer you spend in the world, the more likely you are to screw up. So it was mostly a matter of resisting greed and moving on. Not the easiest lesson to learn.

Actually Beating It

Naturally, the process required to unlock the true final area requires throwing away that lesson by forcing you to thoroughly explore certain areas to unlock it. I have some mixed feelings about this ending since it limits available strategies pretty severely, but at the same time I have to really appreciate that I was constantly honing my strategies for it throughout? When I reached the final boss for the first time, raw addiction set in and I was losing track of time- the temptation for just one more run was the strongest it has ever been.

I'd outline the progression of my strategies like this (don't read if you haven't beaten it, honestly):

• Is it even possible to make enough money for this?
• It is! I learned and honed several different methods for earning money.
• But ultimately it's really boring and slow to grind money (which means fewer total run chances), so I switched to robbing every shopkeeper I saw to get practice.
• Eventually I realized it's even more consistent to buy things and only steal when reaching the black market (excepting for important stuff).
• I made it to the final boss, and realized it's one of the few areas that isn't littered with one-shot kills. Which means doing sacrifices to get more HP would be incredibly useful for learning the boss. Suddenly, altars and the haunted castle got me INCREDIBLY excited to find while I previously didn't care.
• Victory
  

Trials of Mana

The Original

Seiken Densetsu 3 was kind of a bad game. At least, relative to its predecessor Secret of Mana. The duo exist in a weird forgotten niche of Action RPGs where, after attacking, you have to wait a few seconds before you can attack again. The closest modern comparison is something like Demon's Souls or Monster Hunter where each attack drains a constantly-recharging stamina bar, with some negative consequence for fully depleting it (the far more prevalent modern system for Action RPGs just being simplified combo attack systems that lets you button mash to your heart's content to various degrees). But since the Mana games only allowed a single attack, it gave them a very distinct rhythmic feel.

Where Seiken Densetsu 3 went wrong was in trying streamline the format of its predecessor: it removed the option of 0-damage semi-stunlock enemies by mashing the attack button, it removed charge attacks (which took time to charge up, and also slowed your movement while doing so and were pretty fundamental) in favor of simply giving you charge for each successful hit and then unleashing a special attack with a single button press, and probably worst of all it stripped Secret of Mana's robust armory of 8 weapons down to 6 extremely similar-feeling characters (of which you only get 3 in a single play through).

It tried to make up for the gutting of the action part with deeper RPG systems featuring a customizable party (complete with partially different storylines and antagonists), a branching class change system, and more customizable characters by letting players allocate stats on level up. But in the end, the RPG systems don't make that big of a difference and Seiken Densetsu 3 mostly just comes off as an extremely repetitive button masher (albeit a very pretty one).

And yes. To be clear, this is a pretty fragile argument because in reality magic is incredibly overpowered in both of these games and a lot of encounters just boil down to spamming things to death with magic that pauses the game entirely (probably even more so in Secret of Mana that featured a tedious system of leveling up magic by using it). But when and if you chose to engage with the action systems of these games, Secret of Mana comes out way ahead.

The Remake

The fact that Seiken Densetsu 3 was kind of a bad game actually made the prospect of a remake far more interesting. Remakes generally only happen for games that were popular, and most popular games were at least pretty good for their time, if not outright timeless classics. This makes most remakes a boring proposition of just upgrading the visuals/audio, cleaning up a broken translation, easing a few bad elements, and then just calling it a day. Do it for a bad game, and suddenly you get to give good ideas a second chance. It's an exciting prospect.

The actual end result in the case of Trials of Mana is... hard to say. It throws away the original rhymic combat in favor of a modern light combo action game with light/heavy attacks, the number of light attacks in sequence changing the properties of the ending heavy attack (with a few different options like pushing an enemy back vs. locking in place with multiple heavy attacks). Considering Seiken Densetu 3 was already creeping into being a button masher, I can't really hate the remake for turning it into a decent button masher. The aforementioned system of every 4 attacks charging you up to do a fancier heavy attack has been replaced with a much flashier special attack system that you use less often for more screen-clearing effects. There are a few other tweaks like back attacks doing extra damage, and dodge rolls replacing the rhythm of the older system. The changes line up to making random encounters a more pleasant brainless button masher than the original game.

If that were all, I would probably still be just as bored of the remake as the original. The bosses are where it salvages the combat by essentially ripping off Final Fantasy XIV's system of indicating future area attacks with big ol' red circles, cones, and lines as well as gimmicks like "hey kill this thing real fast or you're going to regret it". Using a fairly deep well of variation on these fundamental elements they actually juiced pretty distinct boss fights out of what was "eh it bounces around a bit and casts some spells occasionally" for a ton of bosses in the original game. It would be genuinely impressive if they didn't also make your now-mandatory AI companions incapable of dodging these things like 75% of the time. It's particularly nasty on hard mode where a lot of these attacks will one shot or nearly one shot characters. It doesn't make the game unplayable, and arguably makes the RPG elements come to the forefront since you will chew through healing items like crazy on Hard, but mostly it just made me wish my party members didn't exist so I could just focus on the fun boss fight instead of constantly pausing to heal? (beating more than a few bosses with my party members dead and all revival items gone was admittedly satisfying in its own way, though).

The other element of the remake that shines is, oddly enough, treasure hunting. Most of the time when a remake transitions from 2d to 3d it doesn't make much use of the extra dimension. And looking at Trials of Mana's extremely literal re-creations of most of the maps you'd think that would be the case here. But in reality, this feels more like an early 3d game in terms of "LOOK AT WHAT WE CAN DO WITH 3D!". There are chests behind trees, under cliffs, behind stacks of boxes, on roofs that were never accessible in the original because now there's a jump button, etc. It's honestly some of the most satisfying looking around the world for treasure that I have experienced in a game in ages. My only complaint is that a late game upgrade marks chests on your map ,which kind of destroys it, but you get it fairly late in the game so it didn't ruin much (and if nothing else revealed that I actually missed quite a few chests despite my best efforts of poking around).

While we're heaping praise on the remake, it also makes the RPG elements work a lot better too. Stat allocations no longer just upgrade the stat, but also unlock new abilities. The passive ones are new to the remake and add a satisfying RPG system of having to make the best use of limited slots for them. It's just the right amount of extra RPG complexity that was missing from the original without bogging the game in it.

Somewhat less successful is the upgrade to cutscenes and voice acting. The cutscene direction is actually surprisingly better than most midbudget JRPGs that have fallen into "I give up let's just tell our story as a visual novel" or "rotate in place on-map cutscenes because turning animations are hard". There's actually some camera work and custom animations here and there, and the angles chosen wisely avoid showing the character's feet when they turn. They even have NPCs that look like the belong to the same game thanks to the lower budget. The problem is more that they went with what seems like an extremely direct copy of the original game's dialog, and it's often (especially exposition parts), way too wordy for voice acting. Thankfully the game also lets you skip cutscenes on a per-subtitle level, so it doesn't actually damage the pacing as much as it could have. (There's also plenty of questionable voice direction going on, like Riesz having extremely stiff delivery which was probably an attempt to translate extremely formal Japanese because she's royalty, but in English it just comes off as more like she's speaking a second language or something).

So that's a lot of praise for the remake. By all means, they drastically improved a kind of bad game. But I still can't quite bring myself to say they juiced a great game out of it. The random encounters are still incredibly boring (I very nearly quit, but the later parts of the game start throwing tons of bosses at you which turned it into the best part of the game). The much improved boss fights are still held back by poor AI. It doesn't replicate that rhythmic combat I fell in love with, but that is as much a fault of the original game as the remake. The storytelling is honestly probably made worse by the upgrades (compare the classy silent cutscene of the fairy's companions, visible only as orbs, dying by slowly drifting off screen, too tired to fly... to the remake's explicit, cartoon voices telling us what's happening with awkward close-ups that kind of sap all the sadness out of it). The remake is merely... pretty good.

Would I recommend playing it? Yeah, if you're in the mood for a light mostly brainless Action RPG. It's probably not the best one of those you could play, though. A stronger recommendation if you played the original, because it is genuinely fascinating to see how closely they adapted it while still adding things like jumping.

(There's also a new post-game added to the remake. The brief epilogues it adds for each of the characters to unlock their fourth classes are decent. The main post-game dungeon itself is horrible because it consists almost entirely of random battles on recycled maps, and those battles are the worst part of the game.)

Bonus: The Adaptation

Maybe the most interesting thing about this remake is just the weird aesthetic clash that is created by bringing it into the modern day. For instance, the new 3d character models are extremely modern anime game (which is true to their original concept art). But rather than changing the intro to some anime opening with a Japanese vocal song, it has a very faithful reproduction of the original including the classy 90's Squaresoft music. It's weird! That clash of expectations exists to some degree across the entire game (though offset by the very anime dub acting).

But maybe more interesting is coming to terms with how different pixel art versions of characters are from their original concept art. By which I mean you might look at the 3d version of Riesz here:

And go "dang, was that skirt always that short?!" (particularly in a free 3d camera game with rolls and constant cutscenes from certain angles). So you look at the original sprite:

And go "eh no not really.. though maybe if you interpret it just right.. but everything else was definitely made sexier". So then you refer to the original concept art:

And go "ok yeah that 3d model is actually pretty spot-on aside from the dramatically enlarged chest."

This general principle applies throughout the remake. In some cases it's just a matter of things like short skirt lady witch soldiers working fine in 2d, but very much not working in 3d when you have their dead bodies lying all over the place with no effort being made to deal with it. Mana is just a sexy anime game franchise now, I guess (which wasn't false for the original Seiken Densetsu 3 either, but was also mostly using it as part of Angela's character. Secret of Mana had a completely different art style too, so it's kind of just SD3's fault.).

I don't have a lot to say about this, but it is an interesting facet of remaking old games: do you go with the more detailed concept art, or are you faithful to the sprites that players spent most of their time looking at? Were these sprites different due to the practical limits of pixel art, or because the sprite artists thought they just looked cooler? We'll probably never know.

The Last of Us

The Last of Us might be the clearest example of something I like to call a "role playing game". No, I don't mean the RPG genre. It's a pattern I've started to notice about high budget video games, but has been around for a very long time. It's when a game presents itself as having a mechanic/element, but streamlines it down so much that it no longer resembles the original idea- merely the flavor (maybe I should be calling these Vapor games or something). A clear example of this is how most open world games present themselves as having exploration/navigation, but in reality streamline it down into having on-screen quest pointers that guide you directly to everything (often including radars for nearby treasure to remove even nearby exploration, minimaps for detailed navigation, or just straight up drawing a line to show the full path). The result is a game where the player can role play that they're an explorer, but exploration isn't actually present as a mechanic (an effect I first noticed while playing an Assassin's Creed without having slept in over 35 hours: "hey this game is kind of fun when you're sleep deprived").

The Last of Us does this for survival horror. The game goes out of its way to present the idea that every bullet matters, and that you should aim carefully and make every shot count. That you should use stealth to kill or avoid opponents as much as possible to conserve ammo. Resource management, in other words. In reality this is mostly an illusion: the game is rigged so that when your total ammo count is below a threshold, enemies will start dropping random ammo. Skillfully stealth murdering an entire room of guys with guns will yield no further ammo if you're above the threshold (but ancient civilian zombies will drop them in abundance if you're low on ammo). This results in a weird meta game where, if the game has mostly given you ammo for guns you don't like, the strategically best option is to just start shooting things with it in hopes of forcing the game so start spawning ammo for the guns you do like. It all just comes off as one of the most blatantly artificial systems for producing scarcity I've ever seen. I also kind of get it, since these kinds of systems often turn into jokes when players play carefully (since developers have to balance around the dumbest possible player not getting into an impossible situation). But this attempt at solving the problem just comes off as insulting (even as someone who doesn't give a crap about realism in games, and will always prefer good systems over flavorful systems)

What really tips it over the edge is the game's aggressive checkpointing system, though. It does it even in the middle of encounters. This resulted in several situations where I found myself invested in figuring out the optimal situation, only for the game to just put me back half-way through it. So when I was excited to thoroughly explore a space, exploit the enemy's AI, and just figure out a level the game would just slap it out of my hands and tell me it was okay to sloppily bungle my way through it. This also lowers the value of the resource management on health kits quite a bit- why burn one when the penalty for failure is so low anyway? The end result is a game that is thematically survival horror if you choose to "role play" that you're playing it like that, but in reality is just another cinematic third person shooting game (with a mild "don't miss too much" mechanic).

Now you might be saying "Hold on just a second, Hawk- this game has multiple difficulty settings, just crank it up to the highest!". Which I did. And the highest one does, in fact, remove some of my gripes with checkpointing. But it mostly just made the artificial nature of the resource management even more obvious. And it also made it such that my total inability to actually aim with a gamepad became a severe detriment since head shots are pretty crucial to getting any use out of guns with so few bullets. I actually quit the game the first time I played it in 2015 when I tried to do the highest difficulty. I gave the game a second chance with merely Hard mode, and all I found was the same issues being expressed in different ways. I would not say the game is too easy, just that it isn't what it presents itself as.

So is it actually a problem that big budget games keep watering mechanics and ideas down so hard that they effectively cease to exist outside of the player's imagination? No, not really. There's room for expressing ideas with a range of complexities, including the very bottom of the scale. I'm even glad they experimented with this extreme of a simplification of resource management. It just didn't work for me.

And finally there's the story. I guess. It mostly seems to be a response to how there was a criticism of Uncharted for presenting its protagonist as a fun loving likable dude while also having him shoot, like, a thousand men to death in every game (a body count vastly exceeding its cinematic inspiration of Indiana Jones, but ultimately the problem of celebrating killers is just part of the Action genre). The Last of Us tries to correct this by making the protagonist a Sad Dad who did a lot of Bad Things to Survive In The Apocalypse, with his companion being a girl losing her innocence by learning from the violent world around her how to Kill. It's kind of just miserable and bleak, and feels excessively long compared to the average Cinematic Game, mostly so it can spend more time developing the two protagonist's relationship. Most of it was kind of flat for me, but I did love the penultimate chapter where the game stops to go all in with the best antagonist in the game who goes through several predictable but enjoyable twists. As a whole it's alright, but I also didn't feel like the bleakness had that much purpose to it.

So would I recommend playing The Last of Us? No. Not really. It literally came for free with my PS4 and I still kind of half-regret the time investment (yet I am also half-curious where  the sequel goes- but it sounds like they didn't change the game formula so I probably won't try it). I also don't really get why people found Uncharted 2 so incredible, so take that into consideration with my advice. (From what I gather half the people were floored by the setpieces like a physicsing building mid-firefight, and the other half were floored that a game finally achieved the storytelling quality of a Hollywood movie. I found the setpieces unimpressive because they didn't actually impact the gameplay that much, and achieving Hollywood quality meant nothing to me because I love trash.)

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Adaptation

Final Fantasy VII represents RPGs when they were basically a different medium from modern games. Rather than voice acting, you had text. Text lets a writer get away with far more difficult lines because readers are extremely generous towards line delivery in their heads (so long as it isn't clunky to read). It was also a time where you had characters using exaggerated miming instead of facial expressions to communicate (far closer to silent movies than anything). And most importantly, music expressed emotion when the other elements could not. Final Fantasy VII's composer explained it best:

"In the era of the Famicom, when there was blocky animation and only three channels to work with for the audio, melody was the only way to add drama to the proceedings. If the melody was emotional, then that would give the scene drama. In the old days, you had no choice but to make use of melody. [...] But now, the graphics in games are very powerful, there are spoken lines, and there is a lot of ambient background noise. If you try to force a melody into a situation where it’s not called for, it is liable to clash with these other elements. It’s better to leave space by simply playing an ambient chord for a whole note, or semibreve." -Nobuo Uematsu

So remaking this game as a high budget modern game was basically less of a remake, and more like adapting a book into a movie. A process that fails more often than not, and the high budget studios of Square-Enix have had uneven results at best lately. I had zero confidence in them pulling it off.

Somehow, they did. I would go so far as to say I fell in love with the main cast more in the remake than the original- partially due to the voice cast delivering nuance text has difficulty with (even if the dub as a whole is wildly uneven from line to line), and partially due to taking more time to detail the world. I'm legitimately shocked. Prior to this game, I would have said properly translating a text RPG's story into a new medium to be a near impossible feat. Now I'm like, screw it: just adapt every old Final Fantasy (IV-IX). If they were all at this level, it'd be incredible.

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Nostalgia

I probably haven't played the original Final Fantasy VII since it was released. It was one of the first games I remember actively looking forward to, since Final Fantasy VI was my first RPG and kind of a transformative experience of getting me to retroactively play a lot of other SNES RPGs after it (but not IV which was impossible to find for whatever reason). As if that wasn't enough reason to be excited for it, VII itself was hyped to heck and back with its cutting edge graphics. But when it came time to actually play it, it wasn't the magical experience for me that a whole lot of other people got out of it. Just a pretty good RPG that was really pretty.

I might even say it was a tad disappointing. Magazine previews of the time heavily emphasized things like the Golden Saucer's generous buffet of 7+ minigames, chocobo breeding with ridiculously detailed instructions for getting rare chocobos, numerous super bosses, etc. SNES RPGs definitely dabbled with this kind of thing and getting to The Casino Town was very much my jam at the time (often ending there in cases like Lufia 2's Ancient Cave, which was a roguelike dungeon I played more of than the actual game). But the scale of side activities VII was offering was mind blowing to me. So when the game actually opens with a 4+ hour long linear story hallway that is Midgar, that a whole lot of people call the best part of the game, my response at the time was just: "WHEN DO I GET TO THE CHOCOBO BREEDING?!". Thematically on point with Midgar being a terrible place the party wants to escape from, but a very different experience from others. And when I did get to those promised minigames? Well, their quality is kind of what you expect from a game with so many of them (even if the scale of it all was still overwhelming at the time).

And then there's the after effects of the game being Squaresoft's defining hit that vastly expanded the genre to a wider audience. Three spin off games, constant character cameos in other games, and a sequel movie. Besides all that, the sheer popularity of it means there was a time its fan base was kind of annoying. It's largely forgotten in 2020, but I would argue that Final Fantasy VII was other pillar of popularizing anime in the west, next to its big brother Dragon Ball Z. What I'm saying is there were as many XxSephirothxXs as there were SSJ420Gokus, with everything that implies.

The over saturation of Final Fantasy VII doesn't even stop there, though. When a lot of key staff left after Final Fantasy XI due to the failure of their movie, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, it left a gaping creative hole. Final Fantasy XIII features a female version of VII's protagonist, has freedom fighters briefly fighting against guys with guns, and starts in a mechanical city before moving to the wild natural world (the actual meat of it is way different, but it sure won't stop evoking VII). Even prior to that, VIII doubled down on the new futuristic setting and made the protagonist even more brooding. New entries kept having protagonist names that played off VII's Cloud: Squall, Tidus, Lightning, etc. There are far more compelling parallels than this, but the point is that VII became an inescapable shadow over the series. And that makes it kind of really annoying for a fan that wasn't completely in love with it.

Basically I just spent numerous paragraphs to say in the most long winded fashion possible that I very much was not looking forward to this remake, and I vaguely resent the popularity of the original game. The remake continuing the trend of turning Final Fantasy into an action RPG made it even less appealing. And yet, when the trailers played those recognizable songs I couldn't help but feel a tinge of something for it. When they re-created the iconic opening scenes of the original, I felt a little tug. And when I finally played the demo and found it to be an actually faithful translation of Final Fantasy into an action RPG, I gave it a chance.

When you take all these factors into account, playing Final Fantasy VII Remake was a real rollercoaster ride of emotion for me. At first it was mostly just really surreal that they did, in fact, make a ultra high budget remake after decades of fans harassing them for one. Then it started playing up the game's villain, Sephiroth, far earlier than the original game with really groan worthy lines of dialog, and my heart started to sink that this was just another cash grab written by people with little grasp of the original. Then Cloud hit his stupidly large sword on a door frame in a comical cutscene, and I was suddenly super onboard. Then Aerith shows up, and I was even more on board. Then the funnest sequence in the game happens with breakneck speed, and I was just straight up enjoying it more than I ever did the original. And it just kept going, with several penultimate sequences also getting me real pumped up. I was even down with the ridiculously over-extended version of the original's bike minigame. Then I hit the questionable ending, and I was right back to where I started.

All along this bumpy ride I was constantly having to ask the question: is this genuinely really good, or are they just hitting me with nostalgia? Normally it's pretty easy to separate this kind of feeling, but I really couldn't here- even with my uneasy relationship with the original. This is maybe the most obvious with the music. Remember like a million paragraphs ago when I was talking about how the original game used melody to express emotion, and how that doesn't really work with voice acting? The composers were well aware of this problem, but they were also faced with an iconic soundtrack that they couldn't just throw out. Their solution was to tease the player by having pieces of those memorable melodies play here and there (sometimes with multiple melodies referenced within the same song), before going back to more generic noise. All this teasing often builds up to playing more and more of the melody, before finally violently climaxing into a full blown remix of the original tune with none of the filler. The effect is often incredible, but I wonder how well it plays to someone unfamiliar with the original. This question permeates through everything else, as I often found myself more excited to see the next familiar scene re-created rather than propelled by the narrative itself per se. I still don't have a firm answer.

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Battles

Single Player Party-based Action RPGs are basically a paradox. There are two extremes that games have to avoid: making the AI so good that players don't have much reason to play at all (since there are usually 2-3 more bots than them), or the more common AI being so bad that they're a burden on the player by running into attacks and wasting resources on healing them. It's honestly a nonsensical genre since the AI add nothing to the game, and only really exist to allow for more characters in the story. The absolute best case is that you just end up with some background noise, which is a pathetic standard for a mechanic.

Squaresoft in particular has been pushing this Sisyphean boulder since 1993's Secret of Mana. In that case they were still trying to figure out how to bridge Action and RPG, resulting in an action game where an awful lot of time is spent pausing it in a menu, picking a spell, and then.. doing that some more until MP is an issue. They quickly evolved more towards the hitting things with sticks part of the spectrum, culminating in Kingdom Hearts where spells are more smoothly integrated as a type of attack rather than necessarily pausing the game with a menu (also, everything I just said about Kingdom Hearts is probably wrong because I can't stand to play any of them longer than a few hours). 

When it came time to convert a mainline Final Fantasy into an action RPG (because you can't sell more than a few million copies of a turn based game, please pay no attention to Final Fantasy XIII still selling over 8 million despite its mixed critical reception, action will solve all our problems do not question it), this hitting things with sticks approach had completely dominated the genre (the stray Tales game might still let you pick something from a menu, but rarely forced it). Final Fantasy XV was faced with trying to bridge the gap between the stick hitting audience and the existing menu-based enthusiasts, and ended up with a peculiar system of: hold attack, or hold guard. In its fear of alienating the existing audience it committed the most obvious action RPG balancing crime in the world by allowing players to carry double digits of items, with no way for enemies to interrupt using them. The end result kind of sort of worked, but was fundamentally broken. I beat the game by only using a spell like once or twice.

Final Fantasy VII Remake, shockingly, goes all the way back to Secret of Mana's RPG first approach. While games like Mass Effect answered the question of "why not just constantly spam magic?" with unsatisfying cooldown systems, Remake goes for a better solution: using basic attacks charges ATB, and you need ATB to use magic or items. It's a beautiful system for finally harmonizing Action and RPG: you need the Action to charge the RPG, and you need the RPG to deal serious damage. It's also used to solve the classical Action RPG problem of letting players carry 99 items, because now players need to take some risk to use those 99 potions (along with a lengthy, easily interrupted animation for using them). It's blindingly obvious in retrospect.

With the RPG piece actually existing, Remake goes wild with translating the original's gimmick heavy approach to battles into the new system. Using a specific element to damage an enemy, using an element to open up an enemy, targeting parts of an enemy, waiting for an enemy to be in vulnerable state before using an element, guarding when an enemy does its big attack, etc- it's all there. The only major critique I have is that the game's analyze system is extremely detailed in describing exactly how most weaknesses work, which kind of indicates a failure to make those weaknesses readable in an intuitive visual way which robs the player of figuring things out on their own since it heavily promotes using the system.

So how does it deal with the classical AI problem? Once again it draws on the RPG side of things by making many enemy attacks impossible to dodge (even going so far as to make the dodge roll have no invincibility frames), instead expecting players to hold the guard button to minimize damage. It  ultimately makes it so you have to take some damage like a normal turn based RPG. This coincidentally makes it far easier for the game to have reasonable AI since all it really has to do is guard attacks it knows are coming, rather than having to decide whether or not they have supernatural dodging. 

On the offensive side of things it goes for the other side of the spectrum: AI hardly attacks at all. It tries to fix the classic Party-based action RPG problem by flat out forcing the player to have to frequently switch between characters, hence controlling the entire party like a turn based RPG. It's an approach that is so counter to the genre standard that a lot of players interpret it more as a bug than a feature. In a system that is already rife with breaking genre expectations with things like forcing players to take damage, this is the one that people just cannot deal with. You can tell they saw as much in testing, because the game is absolutely dripping with the designers trying to force players into this line of thinking: monsters that grab characters and force the player to pick someone else to free them, bosses that focus the active player and require switching to the other character to go behind them and attack, the ATB system itself promoting "saving up" charges across characters manually and then strategically unloading spells at once, and even the fundamental monster AI system for the entire game basically focus fires the active character after 10-15 seconds of playing- requiring the player to either switch or do something to mitigate the incoming damage. All this, and people still just can't deal with the fact that the game doesn't want them to just play Cloud for the entire game like a normal action RPG. It's depressing. Doubly so because it means the sequel is almost certainly going to give up and become more traditional due to the feedback. It's 2020's version of people complaining about Wind Waker's sailing being too slow. You're wrong, and people like you are why we can't have nice things (Yes, AI standing around doing nothing is immersion breaking, but it's a small price to pay. And yes, exclusively commanding party members via the menu is still technically using them. But it weakens the balance between Action and RPG, and it reduces the strategy of managing ATB and focus fire).

That said, it still feels a bit like a first step. The targeting system is abysmal, especially for flying or fast enemies. The puzzle elements often don't feel especially satisfying with the analyze descriptions reading more like a strategy guide than a hint (but also possibly being necessary because missing cues is more frustrating in an action game, and some enemies have complicated patterns that are more about execution than understanding). The way the damage system works often translates to "if you're good this battle will be over in 5mins, if you're bad it's going to be 25mins" rather than just killing the player for failure which can feel kind of tedious in practice. In general the game feels almost artificially rigged: while I came close to death rather frequently, I rarely actually died since bosses usually go into a slower mode after unleashing their big attacks- giving me plenty of time to get enough ATB to start pumping out recovery. Creates an illusion of death as a possibility, but it's unlikely to actually happen (to be fair if you waltz around with everyone at half health, those high damage attacks absolutely will wipe your party so it isn't completely toothless). These are all fine for a first game, but there are plenty of things to clean up.

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Sinking Feeling

So by all means they achieved two impossible things with this game: successfully adapting a silent RPG, and bridging the gap between RPG and action more successfully than anyone prior. That means, logically, that this game is incredible? And indeed I had a really great time with most of it. It even pulls off humor in ways I never expected Square-Enix to be capable of anymore. But I also have an inescapable sinking feeling about it. You know how some games are really good when they first come out, but a few years later the opinions on them dramatically crater for whatever reason? That when the latest graphics, excitement created by marketing and the zeitgeist, and novelty fade away you realize there was nothing underneath it all? I have that feeling about this game.

Today it's pretty easy to forgive the dopey (but technically ballsy) story additions they made to it when everything else is of shockingly high quality, but I feel like years later they're going to grow into blemishes that ruin it as a whole. If the sequels end up awful due to the groundwork this game sets up, they'll become even bigger sores than they are today. It's also easy to forgive the molasses pacing created by stretching out the original forty hour game into multiple forty hour games, since they use the extra detail in a lot of really good ways. But I feel like the novelty of smoothly integrating party chat into the dungeons is definitely going to fade with time, in the same way as the original's bombastic summons that forced you to watch minute long cutscenes are dreadful today. Honestly I think it already has, since most of these interactions are literal filler that didn't exist in the original story, and I was basically sick of its structure towards the end of the game where it felt like I had been in mostly dungeons for over eight consecutive hours. Same deal with the "being bad just makes combat longer" approach to failure. Right now my nostalgia-addled brain is too busy tripping that they totally nailed re-creating 1/8th of a 1997 RPG, but I'm not so sure it holds up over time.

So should you play Final Fantasy VII Remake? Yeah, almost certainly. Outside of the absurdly lengthy dungeons and a mixed bag ending, this is a damn good video game. Until it ages, anyway.

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Bonus Notes

This is actually my sixth attempt at writing a review for this game. It has a multitude of topics to talk about, but I quickly realized I had very little to say about most of them when going into detail. So let's just summarize them as thoughts instead:

• Final Fantasy VII is a foundational pillar of the spectacle video game, by taking pre-rendered graphics to a much higher budget and total package than its predecesors (Myst, Donkey Kong Country, etc). This makes it a really interesting comparison point to modern spectacle games, that have largely moved on to making the spectacle slightly more interactive and seamless. For example, Uncharted 2 has a sequence where you have to climb up a train that's hanging off a cliff and slowly falling down, but it takes care to still use the existing climbing mechanics from the rest of the game. When the original Final Fantasy VII needed a spectacle sequence, it just threw in a minigame or uninteractive cutscene and called it a day. Remake pretty much ignores all modern standards (outside of tighter pacing) in favor of following the original's style. They certainly could have tried to turn Midgar into an open world where Cloud rides around a motorbike to make such a sequence more natural, but they didn't. And frankly, the older style still works fine today- maybe even refreshingly honest about its spectacle.
• While the SNES entries started the trend, the original Final Fantasy VII was deeply into hiding permanently missable stuff in obscure areas. Want to see a secret cutscene that explains who a character is? Well I guess you should have went back to some random town unprompted and investigated everything twice, sucker. Whether to sell more guides, or to create an aura of infinite mystery is unclear (probably the latter- Japan has a whole fascinating history with Tower of Druaga being a massive hit in arcades even though it was filled entirely with arcane bullshit. But it succeeded because arcade operators would leave guide books for players to write down things they figured out about the game to share with others. It's a gaming cultural missing link that can still be felt to this day with things like Demon's Souls allowing players to leave hint messages to others online). But regardless, VII's position as being many people's first RPG also meant it scarred a whole generation of children into being afraid of missing arcane secrets. Modern games have steered far away from this, so it's pretty interesting to see Remake also discard it by making all hidden items visually hinted at from multiple vantage points, and even opening a menu warning players they're about to miss something at one point. I sure didn't mind not having to stress out about missing things, but it also really does make the world feel smaller and more artificial than the original despite being several times bigger.
• Similarly, the original dabbled in adventure game styled puzzles that required the player to talk to everyone numerous times, find key items to bring to them, etc. with a variety of different final outcomes. The remake jettisons that in favor of being the same "follow the quest pointer" as the rest of the game. This type of streamlining is sort of a mixed bag. While I never really loved Squaresoft's attempts at adventure games, it sometimes helped give things better pacing and variety than simply alternating between following arrows to the next cutscene and battling. The remake takes a reasonable approach, but modern big budget games sure are missing something by streamlining themselves into vapidity (this hurts the sidequests hardest- the modern style falls flat when you don't have strong writing filling the void). 
• Looking up at the metal sky from the slums in a real 3d space is one of the things that really justifies this remake. It presents how cool the setting is in a way that the original game's technology simply could not.
• Sometimes when you play a game, you can just feel how much the developers loved making it regardless of the objective quality of the result. Final Fantasy VII Remake gives off an entirely different vibe, of being mostly made by people who just really loved Final Fantasy VII? It's a weird feeling, especially considering even most movie remakes created by fans of the original movie usually go for a different take on the material rather than shot-by-shot recreations.
• (Spoilers about the remake's bigger changes are next, if you care about that kind of thing)
• Despite not actually being a huge Final Fantasy VII fan, this game kind of turned me into one? By which I mean I didn't give a crap whether they made radical changes before it came out (sure whatever make it more interesting if you're going to make this stupid thing instead of Final Fantasy XVI). After actually playing it and finding out the big changes are pretty much universally worse than the adapted or expanded material, I kind of wish they just didn't bother with the changes at all? Some of the ideas are conceptually cool, but the execution is just awful. And even if they were actually done perfectly, I still think playing it straight might have been better? They just adapted the original so damn well. 
• While everyone seems to be blaming Tetsuya Nomura for the extremely dumb twist (since he's known for them with Kingdom Hearts), I actually think he was probably more of a figurehead director due to working on the original (especially considering he was also working on Kingdom Hearts III for most of Remake's development). I think the actual person to blame is co-director Motomu Toriyama, mostly known for working on the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy. Everything about the game is stylistically much more up his alley than Nomura's: extreme linearity (but he learned how to disguise it with maps that loop on themselves so fewer people complain about tubes), incredibly pretty progression menus that are also functionally painful, a stagger system ripped straight out of XIII, cutscenes that don't feature stiff robots, etc. And most importantly, the final twist's themes of fighting against fate are incredibly similar to those that ran through XIII and Lightning Returns. It also doesn't, you know, monologue for an hour explaining the exact details. This doesn't really change anything, and maybe the core idea was still Nomura's because he was sick of being harassed to remake the game but hey maybe cut him some slack this time.
• My initial, surface level take of the new ending was just that I hated how unearned it is with the characters magically gaining knowledge of a situation and then instantly resolving it (well that and being a big modern game spectacle of random floating shit, and buildings flying around and exploding and just generally being a dumb spectacle in ways the original was never trying to be which creates a tonally dissonant nightmare). On further thought, by taking the original game's story into consideration, I had to admit that there were at least a few logical ways understand why these specific characters get this knowledge (even if it's totally nonsensical to newcomers). 
• Then I started thinking about how the game reads the player's expectations based on the original game. The first time you meet Aerith, it plays a snippet of That Spoiler to wink and say: yeah we know you know what's going to happen. At first I found this to be really clever. But on further thought, I think this is also what really makes the new ending suck. The writers have gone all the way down the modern thought process that knowing spoilers can ruin a work to its logical conclusion: for a remake to be good again, we need to change the spoilers (or imply that we might, anyway). This is, quite frankly, a sick thought process. Stories have value beyond what they can surprise us with. Sometimes they're even more interesting when you know them ahead of time. So for them to do an entire remake around the premise that surprises are the only thing that matter is kind of terrible, and makes me question their judgment on everything else.
• I deeply regret how long this review is. I stopped proof reading it half way through because I am sick of it. Sorry.
  

Dragon Quest II

(Version: GameBoy Color, as recommended by a crazed man who ranted about random encounters with instant death in the original NES version.)

Doubling the cartridge size of its predecessor from 64kb to 128kb, the main theme of Dragon Quest II on first blush appears to be "more and bigger". The world map flaunts its size by literally containing the previous game's world map inside of it, you have three party members instead of one, and you can face six enemies in battle at once instead of only one. Releasing only 8 months after the first game, the upgrades were probably pretty spectacular to console players at the time. But I actually think just saying "it got bigger" is underselling it. Dragon Quest I was such a primordial console RPG that it doesn't actually resemble the genre it created that closely, while Dragon Quest II's changes basically establish it as the first proper console RPG (I hate the term JRPG and you're just going to have to deal with me not calling the genre that).

The first game's dungeons were in a weird limbo of trying to re-create first person dungeon crawlers in an overhead view (whether from technical limitations or to make mapping easier for kids is unclear). It did this by having a basic lighting system- initially only showing a few tiles around the player, but eventually expanding to several tiles with better spells. I never found the end result as satisfying to map as first person dungeon crawlers since it basically entailed copying the screen to paper, rather than having to do directional mental considerations with a compass. The sequel turns lighting into a vestigial mechanic of alternating "inside" and "outside" views, making it so it can obscure rooms when it wants to. It rarely takes advantage of this, so it's no wonder future games largely drop it entirely- though it does end up using it as a spectacular trap of tricking inattentive players into falling off a tower dungeon at one point.

Inside/outside transitions are used to so little effect I forgot to take a screenshot of them.

The original also had to use passwords for saving, which meant that it couldn't remember whether players had opened most chests. This turned dungeons less into dangerous resource management, and more like grinding hot spots (since you could repeatedly loot the chests). The sequel finally gets to put equipment and other unique things in chests, making exploration far more satisfying.

With these limitations lifted, the sequel transitions fully into proper console RPG dungeons. What took me by surprise is that they're actually pretty well crafted, something I didn't expect since modern Dragon Quest games pretty much reduced their dungeons into hallways with monsters. You've got the ability to jump off towers and land a few tiles further on the overworld (a little underutilized, but really cool for 1987), complete fake dungeon paths to throw you off the real hidden path, "three-dimensional" navigation of having to navigate numerous staircases, and for better or worse a trial-or-error version of the lost woods. Not only that, but the still present cartridge limitations mean that these dungeons are still relatively compact in size and strive to use every inch of space they've got- particularly beneficial for the hallway dungeons that do exist, since dead ends remain brief. In short, there's a genuine effort to give several of the dungeons their own identity.

The granddaddy of stairs.

 The original had so little space that most NPCs were reduced to strictly offering hints. With those limitations eased, this game adds NPCs that exist purely to give flavor to each town- a touch that pays off beautifully when all of their plots resolve in the victory lap ending where you can freely check out the world after beating the final boss (the original did the same, but it plays much better here). Not only that, but NPCs can finally be a little more dynamic. The opening of the game flexes that by teasing the player with narrowly missing the first party member as he moves between different locations, until you finally catch up. Even little cutscenes can play where you rescue a villager from monsters, or get lured into a trap by a mysterious stranger. The console RPG storytelling format gets established in this game, even though it still didn't have the space to really take advantage of it (your party member's character development ceasing entirely once they join, for instance).

This is more character building than the entirety of the first game.

The original Dragon Quest was very much an experience of figuring out where you were strong enough to go, and writing down every curious piece of NPC hint dialog you could. As these hints started to pile up, it evolved into a game of staring at your notepad, searching your memory of the world, and trying to piece things together of where to go next. The sequel very much keeps this format and expands on it by adding a new element to scratch your head about: looking at the massive paper world map and asking yourself: "can I get here?", "did I miss something in this spot?", etc. So rather than just evoking the sense of solving a mystery, you start to feel more like an explorer charting a dangerous world.

Get used to seeing this boat.

The downside is a slight simplification of the hints- most things just have one hint telling you where to go for something or how to solve something. They're self-contained hints, rather than needing to piece together two hints to get a solution. When they aren't giving you directions, they're usually giving you the solution for the immediate area rather than a different town. A necessary change for the expanded size since it wasn't nearly as much of a time investment to trek across the entire world in the original game.

But sometimes you still get stuck and end up having to traverse the expansive world all over again. The game tries to mitigate this by providing a teleport system across portions of it, but it isn't extensive and it doesn't always warp your boat with it, so it only goes so far. Worse, that heavily expanded combat means trash encounters suck up even more time while traversing it (alternately you get to constantly go into a menu to cast a spell to avoid encounters, but it quickly wears off). To put it simply: I played the majority of Dragon Quest I without resorting to an emulator's fast forward (primary exception being the hours of grinding required for the final boss). I hate using it because old games were designed in such a way that the player's time was also a factor (for example, you'd  be more inclined to try changing equipment for a boss rather than grinding to surpass it, but fast forward makes grinding a more appealing option). In short, I abused the hell out of fast forward for this game. It just goes over the line, despite best intentions.

You see that tiny continent between the two big ones? That's Dragon Quest I's overworld.

In a similar vein, I don't actually find the expanded combat improves the game so much as slows it down with all the extra monsters and players. I actually used even fewer spells than the original, which had a few enemies that you simply could not beat without proper spell usage. In the game's defense, the GBC version boosts the experience rate so maybe that just resulted in me being over leveled for everything until the endgame. But even in the best case Dragon Quest II's combat still pales in comparison to the game it was ripping off: Wizardry.

Possibly translated by a time traveler.

So what's the final verdict? I think Dragon Quest I is ultimately a far more timeless video game that I could see still recommending today to anyone willing to deal with some nuisances (especially since the note-taking mystery element just doesn't exist in modern games, making it fresh for newcomers). Dragon Quest II pushes the genre way further, but all the bumps in the road of progress make it way harder to appreciate today. There are a shockingly large number of cool things in it if you're willing to deal with (or cheat around) its flaws, but I can't recommend it casually (it will definitely reward you for your patience, though). It's maybe coolest as a historical piece since almost every console RPG trope gets established in it: a protagonist's town gets burned down in the opening, you have to fight in an arena, there's a slots minigame, a surprise true final boss, etc.

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And now here's a list of all the cool (and not cool) stuff in the game that I could not find a place to put in the review, but feels wrong to omit. Contains spoilers, so only read this if you have no desire to actually play the game:

• The epilogue victory lap is seriously so full of great little touches. The shopkeep you steal from actually notices you did it during the ending, they finally let the guy who got locked out of his town back inside, Old Hint Man finally gets to reunite with his brother Other Old Hint Man since you unlocked the portal out of his hint hut, your party member gets to reunite with her dead father's ghost, that amnesiac guy reunites with his lost love, etc. These are great moments even today, and outright incredible for the time (only hindered by most NPCs still having to use stock lines due to space limits). This is a genuinely good ending in an era where most games ended on a mistranslated black screen.

The true reward for saving the world.

• There's a puzzle where you have to choose a hidden item in a shop menu. That's rad. 
• For some reason they made the optional hint item that clues you into the presence of required items one of the most obscure things in the game, and the only thing I had to check a guide for between DQ1 and 2. It's literally an unmarked spot in the entire, vast ocean where the only hint is that it's in "the northern ocean". It took me by surprise since DQ has been shockingly clean of typical NES impossible puzzles (possibly just due special circumstances of them being translated years after release so text didn't have to be cut and their success in Japan possibly compelling them to hire a real translator?). Maybe this is just an issue of the GBC version translating the hint poorly? I have no idea.
• Returning to DQ1's world is incredible. Partially because it's just showboating that the original game is a fraction of the new game's world. But also because it's so dang well executed. The game actually plays DQ1's overworld music on it, almost all of the old towns have been destroyed which is kind of an emotional gut punch, and then finally you make it to DQ1's final dungeon. The recreated all of it, they are showboating that hard. You finally work your way down to it and... oh my god, the old villain is back too?! But no, he's just his ancestor that your ancestor slew in DQ1. And this new villain? He's so bad the old villain's family is asking you to take care of him. Oh my god, what a perfect way to build up your new villain.

I expected no one to be in this chair.

• It's interesting how much of a direct sequel this game is (even including continuity!) when a lot of other NES sequels went off in completely different directions from their original games. 
• The start of the final dungeon is an illusion and complete recreation of your home town, with everyone telling you to chill out: this villain guy is an ok dude. It climaxes in a bunch of bunny girls hanging out in your throne room telling you to stay. The only part of this that isn't super rad is that there isn't a bad ending where you can accept their offers. That would have made Dragon Quest Builders 2 a very different game (the first Builders acted as a sequel to DQ1's bad ending). But this still makes DQ2's villain really cool, even if there's not much follow up after breaking the illusion.
• The first time I played DQ2 I actually quit when I saw how it made me run around the same few towns trying to find where the other prince ended up. I was severely concerned that this was an entire NES game of obscure NPC triggers. It turns out nothing else in the game is like it, which was a relief. Like it's a cool segment relative to DQ1's NPCs-who-never-move technology, but boy would it be a terrible game.
• As someone who started with DQ8, then played 9->7->11 it's legitimately shocking how many clever moments and gameplay spins DQ2 does considering how the newer games barely bother to do anything with dungeons or other gimmicks. It makes it really obvious that the new games are mostly made by taking Yuji Horii's story notes, a couple grand scale game ideas (8's overworld/style, 9's clothing/random dungeons, 11's twists, etc), but otherwise being scared of changing anything else. It's... really sad that the old games feel less old than the new games in a lot of ways?
• Wow I spent more time gushing about the game in the notes section than I did in the actual review. It really does have a lot of cool stuff for the time period, it actually makes a lot of sense to me now that Dragon Quest became such a phenomenon in Japan (even if most kids probably never saw the super rad final dungeon because they didn't bother to balance previous dungeon)

Update: Apparently after doing some research, some of these moments are exclusive or expanded on only in the SNES and onward versions of the game: the Illusion NPCs trying to convince you are just copies of the real town's dialog, bunny girl sprites didn't exist yet, most flavor NPCs don't actually change dialog in the ending (they use the same template as everyone else, but the flavor NPCs themselves did exist in the NES version to some degree), etc. So in summary:

1. I'm dumb.
2. The Internet has done a terrible job documenting the version differences of these games in one place.
3. Some of these moments are less impressive for the time than I thought (in particular, I take back that this was a great ending for the time- it's basically the same as 1's).
4. It's interesting that they sexed up the illusion.
5. Most of these changes are subtle and really good and probably what they originally wanted to make, but couldn't due to limitations.

Doom (2016)

I think this game can be summed up pretty well by the first two story sequences. It opens up with our protagonist, Doom Guy, ripping off his chains, ripping apart some demons, etc. It quickly moves on to Some Guy trying to exposit the plot at you, only for Doom Guy to smash the monitor he's on. When I first saw this sequence I was like, "oh shit, are they seriously going to do an entire game where the protagonist is actively ignoring the plot?" (aka the least ludonarrative dissonant game of all time). Mere hours later the game seals you into a room where you can't shoot anything, and proceeds to have Plot Guy exposit the story to you anyway. I felt betrayed. Was this even the same game? Did they add the intro at the last minute of development? This gap in aspirations to reality kind of describes the whole game.

While there are probably only 5 of these exposition sequences in the whole game and their length is pretty short, it sure as heck wasn't the game I was imagining where NPCs spend the entire run time desperately pleading with the protagonist to stop smashing things- leaving the player to piece together what the plot even was with scraps of dialog. The same theme applies to the level design where they try to evoke the original Doom, without necessarily going all the way back to labyrinth mazes. Yet I would describe exploration in this game as.. unpleasant. But I also can't quite pinpoint what my brain found so bad about it. So I'm just going to put a list of my theories here instead:

• Most of the levels are linear, with secrets branching off the main path at random. But these levels are also way longer (and slower to move in) than an original Doom level, so this creates an unpleasant routine of "clear area, check map for unexplored rooms" with each chunk of the map because it's way too much of a hassle to backtrack (if the game even lets you), and you rarely get a sense of "there must be a secret here" just from looking at an area.
• There are a few levels that are less linear that use a pattern of "central room that branches out into many other rooms, unlocking in a linear fashion". These are also unpleasant to explore because the game does a poor job of giving areas distinct landmarks- while some individual rooms might be distinct, their connecting hallways/entrances are just copy paste repetitions. The quest compass diminishes the impact of this for the main route, but trying to find secrets in these places involves a lot of running in circles.
• Modern game visuals are ridiculously detailed, and this game doesn't use the modern technique of glowing interactive objects (or the older technique of "brighter palette") for secrets. This turns finding them into a really annoying version of a "spot the difference" book. There were numerous cases where I simply did not notice an openable hatch or an open air vent that I had passed by 6 times already, just because there's so much detail in every room. It honestly gave me a new appreciation for why so many new games have so much glowing crap in them?
• The original Doom's level design is incredibly historically important for establishing the art of complex levels in the following years of PC games (until the original xbox killed the tradition). You don't get Thief without Doom. But it's also very much a primordial version of the art. Maybe sliding along walls hitting the use key looking for secret doors isn't great design by itself? While they definitely didn't copy those ethos entirely, maybe they went a little too far back. Or not far enough. I haven't played the original in so long I can't really say for sure.

 The game is divided between these exploration sections, and what amounts to combat arenas. You get sealed in a wide open room (with various goodies/hazards), monsters continually spawn, and when you kill enough waves you get to move on. This is where the game is more effective at reimagining the original game. Rather than modern regenerating health, you have to melee near death demons to get more health. Rather than modern infinite ammo, you have to use your chainsaw (which has ammo of its own) to restore your ammo. Rather than the modern 2 guns, you get the full suite of over 9 weapons (and while some are definitely more useful than others, the game does a reasonable job of making you switch to different ones for different enemies). No reloading, demon projectiles are slow enough to dodge. It's pretty fun. But it also kind of devolves into the following pattern:

• Dump all of your heavy weapon ammo into the biggest demons
• Chainsaw a weak monster (since you get full ammo, but use less chainsaw ammo)
• Repeat
• (Occasionally use weaker weapons to clear out small demons)
• (Occasionally save powerup for later waves)
• (Occasionally use BFG to clear mass waves (I actually think the game wants you to use it way more than I did because I didn't realize what BFG ammo looked like until a loading tip told me in the final level))

It's admittedly pretty ballsy that the game actually doesn't have a single scripted setpiece gimmick moment (even the few bosses are just fairly traditional boss patterns). The purity of gameplay is remarkable. But it's also hard not to feel like they just stretched out an arcade game into a different structure. It's also only roughly 10hrs long, because even they knew the core of it couldn't last much longer (to its credit, it's one of the few games where I think the end is the best part). I come away from it feeling like I played a prototype more than a game, I guess? I respect the purity, but something was missing. Maybe I wouldn't have even noticed if the other parts were just as good as the combat.