The Rabbit Hole

Terranigma Redux (v1.5.2) (SNES, Played on Trimui Smart Pro) - I had a combination of thoughts regarding both the original game and the hack. In things that weren’t changed; there are a lot of obtuse things you need to do and the signposting isn’t that good. And it's way too easy to miss stupid event flag snags in the late third chapter while trying to upgrade the cities—without a walkthrough, you might just conclude you’d locked yourself out of sidequests or that they don’t exist. (That said, there isn’t a lot of value to doing them—you unlock a couple of equipment upgrades that there’s no point to using because the HeroPike you get automatically is better; and a couple of MagiRocks when magic is only useful at one point you’ve already passed.) Regarding the hack, the difficulty is definitely different from the original, forcing you to use different elemental weapons and still requiring some grinding. The translation is a little smoother and I’m pretty sure they added a few more signpost dialogue bits. And the items/weapon descriptions are an excellent addition given the elemental and special effects. I used the optional patch where the CrySpear and ElleCape you get at the beginning are upgraded to +99 weapon and armor effects; and these are helpful, but not overpowering-- levels still matter a lot. And they didn't fix Bloody Mary (she still took minimal damage from all of my weapons at the point I reached her), which really feels like an oversight. Overall, I think the increase in difficulty versus the original isn’t worth the gimmicks.

Final Fantasy Adventure DX (GBC, Played on Trimui Smart Pro) – A hack that colorizes the game up to Game Boy Color standards and nothing else. There are a few cases where I felt like they could have gone a little harder—I feel like there are places where the colors could have been more vibrant or where caves could have been more varied to make them feel less same-ish. But they did successfully make the Dragon green and the Red Dragon red, which means a lot of other things can be forgiven. And they did successfully make it pretty and not garish.

Final Fantasy Legend 3 DX (GBC, Played on Trimui Smart Pro) – I’m apparently impatient with the grinding in the early game; I actually turned my mutants into a cyborg and a beast but expected better from them. As I note every time I talk about this game, it gets a lot easier once you have access to instant death/stone attacks. In this hack there were a number of graphical glitches, random colored boxes, and weird transparencies that were less noticeable in the original. Maybe it’s a little too "classy" with the muted colors? There were also issues with some houses being glitches in the first Pureland town and the credits were messed up. Large bosses were two or three color palettes neatly split and it was weird; but Xagor was multicolored and that actually worked.

Final Fantasy Legend DX (GBC, Played on Trimui Smart Pro) – The monsters that get left white actually look weird, like a stark contrast to the rest of the colors. The castles in the first world have the same problem—they entire sprite is white, including the ground around the castle, so it sticks out oddly. I only played the first two worlds of this; for this experience you’re better off playing the fan-translated Wonderswan version of the game, which manages to be prettier and fixes a lot of bugs.

I fiddled with a few more of the Game Boy colorization / DX hacks; the one for Metroid 2 was solid and the ones for Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2 are actually really vibrant and pretty, especially since they change some sprites to take advantage of having colors to work with.

Daiva Story 6: Imperial of Nirsartia (NES, Played on Switch) - A Japan-only blend of genres where you search for various planets, then conquer them in side-scroller shmup mode; but enemy fleets try to retake them and you need to fight them off in turn-based tactical space battles. There are also some sort of resources you get from conquering planets that let you build more ships at your home world. We beat the game on level 1 in a couple of hours; apparently if you play on level 4 you can find the hidden planets and get the secret best ending. The difficulty is reasonable at level 1, but I don’t feel a strong need to replay it.

Tetris Blast (Game Boy, Played on Trimui Smart Pro) - I’ve actually been playing this on-and-off on several of my handhelds, because it successfully captures the casual nature of Tetris. What I discovered recently was that it also has an ending: If if you finish Level 25, you get a credits roll! Which also means there’s a theoretical “perfect game”, because each level starts with 100 points and decreases by one for each piece you use, but increases slightly if you create a big bomb or clear 3+ rows. The closer you get to 2500 when you finish, the better your run.

The latest Stardew-like I’ve played; this one has you as an alchemist from the big city who comes to provide modern medical care to a small town. You have the usual loops of going into dangerous areas to get materials and giving gifts to win the love of the townsfolk; but instead of a farm you have a clinic and need to play minigames to diagnose and cure people who come in. The central mechanic is making medicine out of materials with your alchemy pot, where each ingredient is a tetrad and each recipe is a shape—you can make the same potion out of a variety of ingredients, so long as they fit. This is very quest-driven; upgrading friendship with each villager to the next level will require a quest from them, which might just be watching a cutscene or might be a big fetch quest. You need to also do quests to upgrade your standing in the village, which in turn lets you unlock new areas for better materials.

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Overall: This was fun and a little change of pace in the cozy genre. Hunting down NPCs to turn in quest rewards can be a little irritating, the money-making loop is a little grindy, and the late-game Achievement selection is kinda weird; but overall it’s a fun time and a reasonable length.