Fire Emblem - A Gaming Diary

I'm surprised how long it's taken me to write about Fire Emblem on this blog.  Not actually, of course, I obviously have an idea of what I want to write about and have absolutely cancelled Fire Emblem drafts before.  Maybe some day I'll get that Three Houses draft together.  Probably not though now that Nintendo has promised us five more years of Three Houses discourse.  Anyways, I used to adore FE.  It was probably, for a like 7 year stretch between Awakening and Three Houses, my favorite Nintendo franchise.  I, like most people in the West, found out about FE from Smash originally but I also had the benefit of a content creator I watched being an FE fan.  

Former content creator and anime journalist Jacob Chapman, then going by JesuOtaku online, used to do streams on Twitch where he would play dating sims and watch Detective Conan.  They were super fun and also super late night, which was perfect for me at the time as I was a homeschool kid who had never slept well in his life.  But Jacob would also play Fire Emblem, specifically the Ike duology.  And I remember falling in love with just the core ideal of Fire Emblem.  An RPG where failure had a very steep consequence was novel to me, and I was enthralled by the implications therein.  I remember excitedly telling high school friends about Fire Emblem, trying to convert them over since they had played Advance Wars and so were familiar with the core gameplay.  Unfortunately this was still a time when I was, a, not buying games for myself so had to be picky, and 2, not in a place where I could easily access Fire Emblem games.  My GameStop's PS2 section was full of cheap copies of every RPG you could ever think of but a single FE game?  Nah fam.

So I'm excited to get into this. Excited to finally play FE for the blog, hopefully not for the last time.  By the way, I know people can probably infer which Fire Emblem I'm talking about because there's only one that has ever been released in any country I'm pretty sure that just carries the title "Fire Emblem".  But I am talking about the seventh game in the series, first to be released outside of Japan, Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade.  It's been on my to-play list forever and I'm excited to finally get into it.

Review:

I did not finish Fire Emblem.  Not in the sense that I'm DNF-ing it and calling it quits, it's just playing Fire Emblem on its WiiU VC release proved to be more annoying than I had thought it was going to be.  Fire Emblem for GBA is a game best equipped for like playing curled up in bed or playing on the go and the WiiU made both of these things either inconvenient or impossible!  Having to completely reset maps each time a Lord died proved to be very frustrating and the WiiU just made that worse by both limiting where I could play, ensuring I couldn't easily pick up and play, and also how long I could play as the WiiU gamepad has a worse battery life than the Sega Game Gear.  So in the interest of not playing Fire Emblem for the rest of the year and wanting to have the best experience possible with Fire Emblem, I'm putting it on ice until I can afford to get the NSO version where I can at least rewind when a Lord dies.  So I'll only state, for now, that I really liked Fire Emblem and look forward to someday playing it for real.  8.1/10

Diary:

3/27/26

Okay, so two things real quick.  The first is that I have, in the past, played a chunk of Fire Emblem.  I bought the game on the WiiU Virtual Console years ago and had, at that time, played through to chapter 10 I believe before getting walled by the big boss of that chapter and going "oh I'll get back to this later."  I never got back to it.  So everything I played tonight is something that I had experienced before.  But also I'm glad that I didn't pick up from where I previously played because I forgot so much of the first part, let me tell you.  The second thing is that, for this Fire Emblem game and any Fire Emblem game I play for the blog with permadeath on, I'm going to just take my losses.  I know I'm going to regret that later on, trust me, but here's the thing.  I used to be the type of FE player who would turn permadeath on and then play a map over and over again until I did it deathless.  What is the point?  Legitimately, what is the purpose of that.  The whole purpose of permadeath as a mechanic is that you have to live with your consequences, just resetting an infinite amount of times renders the whole thing worthless.  No, I'm choosing to just play through, take my losses as they come, and if it puts me in a no-win situation later on because I've lost so many units that I can't progress, then I'll gladly take the L.

I was immediately reminded how much I love Lyn as a character.  I don't want to pretend like Fire Emblem has the best writing in the world, mind, especially when it comes to its characters.  Three Houses is notable among the fandom for being a game with an actual story that has something interesting to say about the nuance of war, that's kind of where we are.  But Lyn is so atypical for a "Lord" archetype.  Fire Emblem lords are people who are usually defined by their sense of honor and duty.  They're usually princes and fit the same rough vibe as characters.  See: the Smash Fire Emblem roster where we have 8 Fire Emblem characters and it's difficult to tell them apart.  Lyn, meanwhile, is just totally unique among the cast of Lords.

She isn't a super refined classically trained fencer, her swordsmanship was learned surviving as a nomad on the plains.  She attacks swiftly and, usually, tries to cut as many times as possible, a stark contrast to the typical FE lord who is more classically trained.  And this fighting style reflects in how her character moves through the world.  She is disinterested in becoming a noble, in ruling.  She's a nomad first and foremost and an heir second, a woman hyper aware that the nobles she would be playing politics with look down on her for being, essentially, half-Romani and only play nice when there is favor to gain.  She just simply wants to meet her grandfather before he passes on, and finds her granduncle's attempts to assassinate her to be a waste of time as she does not crave the throne.  I know Lyn isn't the character we follow long term, that FE7 is built around the three protagonists.  But she's a nice introduction to the world of Fire Emblem and it's not surprising how popular she remains, especially among Western Fire Emblem fans.

The rest of the cast is pretty whatever though so far.  Like, Fire Emblem characters have a habit of being pretty one note and fitting into existing archetypes.  You have two knights, one who is a boring stick in the mud and the other who is a flirtatious cad.  An awkward and shy pegasus knight who finds combat easier than talking to men.  The healer who is an absolute gremlin, sewing chaos in the group.  The cynical and sarcastic mage.  The thief who is a bit too forward about his profession.  You get the idea.  They aren't bad but they also aren't like.  Noteworthy.  I understand that FE7 does have support conversations but support conversations seem like a nightmare to try and get in this game and don't seem super worth it in the end so if they reveal more nuance about these characters, then ignore me about them being one note.  But also, don't lock the depth behind optional supports, y'know.

I completely forgot that basically the entire first part of FE7 was just tutorial chapters.  Now, on the one hand, I appreciate this.  Every game in a series is likely to be a player's first game in that series, and I feel like playing it safe and overtutorializing is, more often than not, the better play.  Onboarding new players is better than shutting them out in most cases.  And I do like how FE7 presents its tutorials, starting with just Lyn battling a couple grunts to learn the combat and strategy basics, then introducing knights to communicate increased mobility and weapon switching, then introducing a different kind of objective, and so on.  And also I've been out of FE for long enough that reminders on the basics are kind of welcome.  On the other hand, I do think it goes on for a bit too long?  You could've probably condensed down some of these tutorials, like why do we need two separate entire maps to tell us how "knights" and "knights that fly" work.

I forgot that you get Dorcas this early.  Dorcas is not a super notable character in the actual game, he's an ax-wielding warrior who is introduced in the game's chapter about recruiting enemy NPCs.  He's a man who is in desperate need of money to afford a healer for a disease that makes his wife have great difficulty walking and in that desperation, he finds himself allied with a group of bandits.  Dorcas is, however, infamous to me because he makes me think of the original US Fire Emblem commercial which bizarrely tells the player to "trust nobody", which is not the point of Fire Emblem at all, but also features a moment where Dorcas falls over dead because one of his allies poisoned his ale.  My guy catching strays.

I haven't lost anyone yet!  I mean, I'm still in the tutorial so it's not expected that I'll lose anyone, hopefully I'm not that bad of a strategist.  But still, I have yet to get a disastrous 1% crit that just murders someone out of nowhere.  I have to say, having gotten so used to the modern games, I'm finding it a little difficult to adapt to classic FE where there's like.  Limited experience due to not having random mercenary fights to grind with, having units that cannot deal any actual damage and thus serve hyper-specialized roles and rarely, if ever, level up, just in general not having my units be even levels.  In particular the fact that like, the Healer is only meant for healing and the bard/dancer class is only meant for giving extra turns is something I need to get used to, I'm used to those classes being able to do SOMETHING in battle.  Also, just as a random aside, the way this game uses Together We Ride is hilarious.  The classic FE theme is used literally any time a new recruit joins the party so sometimes Lyn will literally walk into a home and it'll start playing because there's an NPC there that can join up.  Anyways, here's hoping that my entire army has a long and prosperous life and I don't lose anyone throughout the game.

3/29/26

I'm just going to complain about the WiiU controller battery here for a sec, hope you don't mind.  So, I've been playing this on the WiiU, as previously stated, because that's just where I own FE7.  I bought it off the VC many years ago and played through most of the first 10 chapters before I stopped at literally the boss of Chapter 10, as I got in a situation that, to me, seemed unwinnable.  So what I would like to be doing with this playthrough is to curl up in bed using the WiiU gamepad as a handheld device to play the game on while I throw up like, a movie or a YouTube video essay on the TV.  After all, the gamepad has a screen for this very reason, to play on it so the TV can still be usable.  And maybe it's because my WiiU is now 12 years old so it's getting a bit long in the tooth, but I swear it's like.  I'm playing for maybe 90 minutes before the red light comes on.  It's ridiculous.  The WiiU, man.  Decisions were certainly made.

It's so funny getting to the end of Lyn's story and getting a series of descriptors on what happened to the cast after you beat it.  Like this is an actual ending to the game only 4 hours in.  I wonder how many kids turned their game off at this juncture thinking they had beaten the game, not knowing that the game had barely even started.  I knew FE7 was split between three protagonists, it's difficult not to know actually because the box art of the game is the three protagonists standing side by side in battle.  So I figured Lyn's story was going to reach its conclusion partway through the game.  I did not expect it to both be so early on in the game, nor did I expect it to be such a definitive changeover.  I assumed there would be a more natural transition, like you follow Lyn until chapter 14 and then she fights with Eliwood by her side and then that would be the end of Lyn's story but because you already have Eliwood, you just follow him from there instead.  Wild that it's as abrupt as it is.

Something I forgot about Lyn's character, which also serves to make her feel very distinctive from other Lords in the series, is that she is just willing to throw hands with anyone.  Like, she's not violent by any means, but it's clear that her different perspective, being a woman who has had to fight in the plains to survive with no concrete home, has led her to be quick to throw down.  If there is someone who needs to be taken care of, there is very little hesitation on Lyn's behalf, very little hand wringing about whether it's "right" to kill someone just because they're a bad person.  She sees a problem, and she wants to solve it.  Other lords will get super philosophical about whether or not wanton violence is truly the only way but Lyn is like "I will make sure you never know Mother Earth's embrace".  She's so much fun, I wish we got more time with her as the main character.

Unfortunately though, we have to spend time with Eliwood.  Eliwood is fine, I think of the Fire Emblems I've played, he's by far the most boring lord.  For a long time I thought he was Roy from Super Smash Bros. Melee, his actual game of origin, because they look a lot alike.  He's actually Roy's father, go figure.  Eliwood is the way more traditional FE lord at the center of this game, a young, heroic prince to lead the army behind a truly noble cause.  He's so refined that his default weapon is literally a rapier, like THE sport fencing weapon.  Eliwood detests the concept of going to war as he cannot stomach the hardship that war will cause the innocent citizens of the various kingdoms scattered about the continent.  He believes that individual conflicts are easy but a largescale war would be too much.  Also, he can be very trusting, and is loyal to a fault, something the villains try to exploit at one point in the part of his story I played.

But forget about Eliwood, because we also meet our third lord for this adventure, Hector.  Hector is introduced in Chapter 12, the chapter after we take control of Eliwood, and he's also the lord from FE7 I've heard the most about over the years.  Like obviously there's a lot of love for Lyn out there, she's usually the one who gets brought back for other projects.  But people who have played FE7 tend to really like Hector, in my experience.  And it's not difficult to see why, dude's a blast.  Hector is the second son of the Marquess of Ostia, a large and powerful nation on the continent.  He's sarcastic and unpretentious, he lets his feelings be known directly and usually in a smarmy way.  He feels the least like a Lord of the three lords we have in FE7, having more in common with Fire Emblem's history of thief and barbarian characters.  Which is, itself, pretty on point as Hector favors a large axe over the typical swords the other Lords tend to use.  He's a lot of fun, and the dynamic between himself and Eliwood is very entertaining as, despite being close friends, they are so definitively opposites.  The enemies in Chapter 14, the chapter I left off on, seemed surprised they were traveling together for this very reason.

So we've stumbled into the plot of the game, though arguably we stumbled into it in the last section it's just like.  At that time, the main villains were just a bunch of grunts trying to kidnap a girl.  We'd be here forever if I described the story to each individual map.  Anyways, the Black Fang are our big bads (for now), an assassin's guild on the continent who is the backbone of a conspiracy that is brewing under the noses of Eliwood, Hector, and Lyn.  Eliwood's part of the story starts with Eliwood leaving his kingdom to go search for his lost father, who rode off one day to investigate rumors of unrest across the continent and never returned home.  Upon reaching a neighboring kingdom, with whom Eliwood's kingdom has always had close relations, Eliwood seeks their aid.  Only to then be attacked by Black Fang assassins who cut him off in the mountains, using the auspicious terrain to put Eliwood at a disadvantage.  The Black Fang are attempting to stop Eliwood from moving forward by any means necessary, as they do not wish for him to uncover their conspiracy, a conspiracy which unifies multiple kingdoms across the continent for a goal we know not yet.

I believe FE7 is the first game in the series where the Tactician is a real character in the plot and not just a representative of the player on the map, and you can tell.  Like, the tactician is still meant to be representative of the player, but now it's more of a player self insert than it is just "there's a little green guy on the map sometimes and that's the strategist making the plans".  Characters will now talk to you directly and have conversations with you.  The way they choose to handle this, however, is very funny.  You don't get like dialog options or anything, instead the characters stare directly at the screen and talk at the player, and then when they ask them for questions or advice they pause for a second before saying a response to some advice the player allegedly said.  It's such an odd vibe to include.

As well, in Eliwood's story they will slowly trickle in characters that were part of Lyn's party in the first part of the game, and all of these characters will react excitedly to seeing the player again.  But again, it's like.  We're not enough of a character to be able to appear on screen and respond but we're too much of a character to be allowed to fully be a self-insert, it's kind of a clumsy incorporation.  It's very charming, mind, and there are some scenes where it works.  Like Lyn saying goodbye to the player at the end of her story does feel more impactful because she's talking directly at us.  But it's very clumsy and it needs a lot of refinement.

So far I've only lost two units and both of them were in Lyn's part of the game, meaning they weren't actually lost.  It is weird that the game has training wheels for the first 10 chapters before being like "okay, NOW if anyone dies they're dead".  I have to wonder if this game was always made with the intention of it being the first game to release overseas, as they seemed to really focus in on this being a tutorial game.  Anyways, Lucius, the Monk, was lost to me in Chapter 8 of the story, the ballista tutorial level.  I had Lucius as part of a squad that was taking a sneaky path around the mountains to try and pincer attack the enemy while my other squad tried to blitz attack the Ballista, but I miscalculated how effectively I would be able to descend on the ballista and it took me considerably more time to get there than I would've liked.  Lucius got overwhelmed on his trek around the mountains, the ballista found an easy target, and so he was picked off.  RIP.

The other unit I lost was Erk, the mage.  Erk I lost in Chapter 9, the fog of war tutorial level.  If you know this game, that does mean that both of my offensive magic users were out of commission before the boss of Lyn's section, so you can imagine how tedious that was.  Erk was just the result of me not being cautious enough when going into the fog.  I again split the party up into two, this time not trying to pincer the enemy but rather to access the northern part of the map, where there were houses to access.  I left Erk a bit too open as we entered some of the foggier parts of the map, thinking foolishly "how many enemies could there really be anyways, it's so far from the objective".  Blissfully unaware that there was a fort up north which was spawning new units every couple turns for the first so many turns of this map.  Erk got swarmed and I lost my only other mage.  But hey, at least both of the deaths so far were my fault, right!?  I can accept it when it's my fault, it's way more upsetting when it's like "you played correctly and the opponent just landed a 1% crit on you".  I actually haven't had a 1% crit situation yet, if you can believe it.  I did, however, miss two 93% hits in a row.  Fire Emblem's calcs are wild, y'all.

4/4/26

I know, that's a pretty wide gap between entries.  I got in kind of a writing mood, I was writing "who was the first playable woman of color in Super Smash Bros." and then I used that momentum to start writing a review/essay on Pyre which hopefully will be out by the time this gaming diary is out so I can link it.  Then I did a big dumb, like just a massive dumb.  I got curious what my save state was on my WiiU and reloaded it, setting me back three chapters, so I had to replay three chapters.  Actually kind of four because I did do the sidequest on chapter 13.  So understandably I kind of didn't want to play Fire Emblem for a few days.  Reloading the wrong state and losing a ton of progress is the worst feeling, I swear.  Thankfully I still didn't lose anyone on my replays of those chapters but man, did the game want me too.  The enemy landed a 20%!  They miss every 80 they have but they sure can land a 20, huh?

So, the good news is that I still haven't lost anyone.  I've come close, god knows, especially in chapter 15, the second of the two maps I've gotten done tonight.  Chapter 15 is a siege map, your goal is to cut enemies down until you can successfully route a path to the central goal.  At which point, after capturing it, the map ends.  And it's common in siege maps for enemies to respawn endlessly so that the player doesn't just stall for a million turns and is incentivized to win the map.  So in Chapter 15, they just keep spawning enemies to descend from behind you, sort of entrapping you if you can't push forward and putting a clock on how long you can hold your central position.  But outside of losing my tent for that map, I haven't permanently lost anyone yet.

The bad news is that the reason why I haven't lost anyone yet is not because I haven't been losing.  Instead, it's because I keep losing my lords.  This isn't uncommon, your lords are often the strongest units you have so it's not difficult to end up in situations where you send them out to deal with a problem, only for them to get overwhelmed and die.  And especially in this game, it's an outcome that you'll run into from time to time just because you have three Lords, so there's a lot more opportunity for each of them to get overwhelmed individually.  The thing is, lords aren't allowed to die.  It's the one exception to the permanent death rule, if your lord dies, you have to either restart from the start of the turn that killed them or just restart the map over.  Except it's not really a real option, because FE7 calculates the enemy's hits at the start of their turn, so you can't keep reloading a turn to try and manipulate the RNG.  If your lord dies on an enemy turn, you have to restart the map.  Which is also probably why I only got two maps done tonight.

Lyn is back, by the way.  Hence why I now have three lords.  After the events of Chapter 14, which reveals the conspiracy to Eliwood and Hector, and also implicates Eliwood's missing father in said conspiracy, we move to Lyn's nation of Caelin.  Caelin has been taken over by the big bad of this section of the game, the Lord who would be king if the conspiracy succeeds, overthrowing the current ruling house and redistributing their power among the Lords involved with the conspiracy.  Who are now mostly dead.  They're mostly dead.  Anyways, Eliwood and crew move into Caelin to aid Lyn in reclaiming her home, meaning Lyn reunites with the player insert AND Eliwood.  And also meets Hector.  There is drama immediately.  Lyn, who is very measured and precise in how she handles her weapon, having been taught to preserve the blade and strike only when needed, finds Hector to be a brutish oaf who swings his weapon without a care in the world.  She chides him immediately, before apologizing for speaking out of turn.  I hope there's more drama to come between these two absolutely.

I feel like progress is going to slow down considerably.  Not because I don't like the game, mind, I do.  Playing Fire Emblem has been a lot of fun.  It's such a junk food RPG, just good mindless fun.  It's the kind of thing I need sometimes.  I'm just sick of fighting the WiiU.  I really don't like how quickly the WiiU gamepad battery drains while I'm playing FE, with it losing its charge after only a map and a half usually.  And I don't really want to play with it on the charger the entire time because I like being able to curl up in bed with it.  It feels like, out of necessity, I'm probably going to have to adapt to only playing one map at a time.  Disappointing but like, I'll do it.  I want to finish this game.  Don't be surprised though if other games get done/other gaming diaries have come out while I'm making my way through Fire Emblem, only being able to play for like 90-120 minutes before the WiiU throws a fit does open up as lot of possibility.

4/10/26

It was a week, y'all.  Yeah so I didn't play like any Fire Emblem this week.  I was dealing with an eye infection and just not feeling like doing anything, really.  Probably a bit of gaming burnout too.  Also time blindness has been hitting REAL HARD lately, I don't know what that's about, but there were a couple nights where I was like "I'm going to do at least a chapter of Fire Emblem, I'm just going to watch this YouTube video first" and then I watch like five and suddenly it's midnight and I missed my window to play.  I'm mad at myself because it's like.  It's not that I don't want to play more Fire Emblem, I really like this game, it's just that I haven't found the drive to do so.  It's been a week of "I don't want to play right now so maybe I'll just work on some drafts" too but that's also been slow going.  It's been making me big depresso.

On top of that I will admit that my fighting with the WiiU Gamepad has made me not want to return to Fire Emblem.  It's been genuinely deflating getting like a chapter done and being excited to jump into the next one only for that red light to come on.  I know this is such a minor thing, but like, I like being able to really commit to a play session, y'know?  Spend 3 or 4 hours on something, especially if my goal is to write about it.  So the WiiU being this way just got me like "I don't know if I want to do this".  I think I have a solution though, and I'm mad I didn't think of it before as it's the solution I usually come to: the Super Nintendo controller.  I own the SNES Classic, lovely little device, and something fun about the SNES Classic is that the controllers have the same input as the Wii Remote port.  So what you can do is plug a SNES Classic controller into the bottom of the Wii Remote and use it as a Classic controller for Wii/WiiU games.  It's not a very good Classic controller in most situations, mind, since it lacks sticks and therefore couldn't really play the more "hardcore" Wii games you'd want to play with it.  But for VC stuff, it should work well.  If I had a nickel for every time the Super Nintendo controller came in clutch, I swear.  A friend's FireRed playthrough improved tremendously once she switched to SNES controller.  Truly the GOAT, I should always be thinking about it.

So I finished Chapters 16 and 17 in this play session.  The plot to this game like so doesn't matter, y'all.  Like, again, Fire Emblem plots are famously just nothing, this isn't surprising.  It's just like, man, this plot is hard to latch onto.  But basically what happened in this section is that we met a spy who, allegedly, has been working as a double agent for Hector's kingdom by posing as a Black Fang.  Or I guess a triple agent?  She's working for Hector's father by pretending she's working for the Black Fang by pretending she's working for Hector's father.  I don't know, I don't really trust her but like, this is early Fire Emblem.  There are rarely characters with super complex allegiances.  Anyways, she informs us that the Black Fang were once a vigilante group operating on the continent, killing corrupt nobles who abused their power to make life better for the citizens.  But that just over a year ago, their leader remarried, and their new wife has ties to a mysterious figure known as "Nergal".  Nergal seeks to use the Black Fang to ally a group of kingdoms and stage a coup, and that Eliwood's father is very likely alive and with the other leaders of the other kingdoms.  Although the spy cannot say if his father is truly part of the coup or is just being held hostage by them.  Oh also, the girl the Black Fang tried to kidnap earlier is back.  Her name is Ninian.  She's obviously very important to whatever plan they're scheming but right now she's just a girl with no memory.

With that, we sail South.  Which means we get a boat stage!!!  Love a good old Fire Emblem boat stage.  Hilariously, despite there literally being a class of character in Blazing Blade called "pirates", the pirates that attack the boat aren't actual pirates.  Annoyingly, they are mostly dark mages, meaning that my army has an uphill battle with them.  I do appreciate that dark magic in FE7 has a pretty low chance of hitting, rarely over 50%, which means it's not immediately decimating a party.  Unfortunately my luck is terrible and enemies have hit basically every hit below 50.  And, for reasons I'll get into in a minute, I don't actually have a party member who is equipped to counterplaying dark mages specifically.  So my strategy ended up being "throw out my Pegasus Knight, have her tank every hit, retreat her when her health got to low, deal with the fallout".  It worked surprisingly well, but I did have to rely on lucky rolls because when Florina retreated for heals, she did leave my party pretty vulnerable.  That being said, Florina is the GOAT, she held down that map basically all on her own, Pegasus Knight supremacy.

Speaking of being unlucky, man, my level up rolls y'all.  So, bad level up rolls are a universal experience to Fire Emblem players.  It is very common that you will finally get a character to a level up, which is much harder for some characters than others, only for your level up reward to just be "+1 HP".  Or, the worst feeling, you get a cracked level up where everything goes up +1 or you roll a very rare +2 on a beneficial stat, then you lose the lord and have to replay the map and your next go through you get a much worse level.  But in particular, I've been getting horrible roles.  Florina is like the only unit that has gotten strength upgrades in like 3 hours of play, despite many of my units being almost in a position to reach their higher class many of their attack stats are really low.  It's very difficult not to rely on the singular pre-upgraded unit I have unlocked, Marcus, because I know the pre-upgraded units are usually worse long term.  But like, he's the only one with a decent damage output right now.  And that's just strength buffs!  I don't even want to talk about how fragile all my units are!  So many level ups are just "HP and Luck".

Still haven't lost anyone... kind of.  I did lose Guy on the boat level but then had to reset when Lyn died (as she is want to do, apparently).  And then upon reload I was like "I'm not going to force Guy to die just because he technically already has".  Though maybe I should've, given how I intentionally didn't let him die when I replayed through chapters earlier when I reloaded my save incorrectly so he'd still be where he would end up "canonically".  Hmmmm.  Regardless, the problem is actually that I failed to gain a couple new recruits.  In Chapter 16, there is a prisoner of war who joins up with the enemy party, as he seeks to take revenge on Hector for what the kingdom of Ostia did to his family.  He does this despite swearing loyalty to Lyn's royal family.  This guy, Raven, is apparently the brother of my Troubadour party member Priscilla and if I had brought her all the way to him to talk to, I could've recruited him.  I don't know if that's something Priscilla said and I just missed it or it's something I would've found out through like context clues?  Regardless, I played cautiously, as I often do, and the non-playable green army got to him.  More pressing though is that he was imprisoned with his friend Lucius, a person that we had met in Lyn's part of the story.  Lucius is a monk, meaning he is capable of using Light Magic.  Not recruiting him is the exact reason why the boat mission was so hard, as he would've had advantage on all those dark mages.  Oh well, though, we eat our losses.  Two units officially lost so far.

4/13/26

Welp, I finally lost someone for real.  If you're counting, this is technically my fifth unit lost but it's also the first one that is actually "lost" per se.  In Chapter 18, I recruited the sister of my GOAT Florina, Fiora, and thought I had safely cornered the boss, surrounding them with lance users.  He got a tricky hit on Fiora and she died on her very first mission with the party.  RIP Fiora, I was excited to have a second Pegasus knight if only for a moment.  By the way, I don't know when the Pegasus Knight is able to get a class up, I would really like that about now.  Florina has been putting in the work and I really want her to get the credit.

I got a singular chapter done in this session, though not for lack of trying.  I was really wanting to sit down and go "I'm going to play like A LOT of Fire Emblem tonight".  At least get through 3 or 4 chapters.  And it seemed like it was going well, I made it through Chapter 18 with losses but not too many all told and I was almost to the end of Chapter 19.  It seemed like getting through a few more chapters of Fire Emblem was more than in the cards.  But as I reached the boss of Chapter 19, the kind of main villain of this act of FE7, I started to rally my units and get a good position to try and storm the boss.  What happened, however, was that enemies started flooding in from my backline and I set up Eliwood, who is the main lord, to defend.  He had full HP and had just received a pretty crucial level up, so he was a good candidate in my mind.  Eliwood then proceeds to be hit by 5 40% hits in a row and dies in one turn, meaning I have to reset.  I got Fire Emblem'd hard.  And because of how FE7 works, I just have to reset the map.  As much as I enjoy Fire Emblem, I'm not going to pretend like having to reset so often isn't a very deflating experience.  It feels like there are just a lot of reasons working against me, Fire Emblem 7 is probably going to be a very long term project.

I don't enjoy having three Lords.  This is more a criticism on Fire Emblem as a whole, especially in the modern era, but the number of Lords available to us in this game is more a detriment than a boon.  Especially on a map like Chapter 19, wherein the three lords must all be deployed.  I know that this is one of the reasons why FE7 is so beloved, the triple Lords who all have their individual storylines coexisting.  Although Lyn basically exists as a side character in the Eliwood section.  But from a gameplay perspective, having this many units that are instant game overs if they die is just a headache more than anything.  I've probably actually had like 9 or 10 unit deaths at this point but they're always the Lords so they just don't count for anything.  It's especially annoying as you reach the bosses, who are just always a massive difficulty spike.  Like, the reason I lost Fiora is that I could not outpace the boss in damage before he could start attacking my units.  I'm having to swarm bosses and hope that I get good hit and dodge rolls as I deal 3 damage knowing that every boss in this game can just swing for an entire character's HP.

So the spy from the last section is dead.  The Black Fang effectively crucified her, stringing her up as a warning to Eliwood's party to turn back.  I guess she was actually on our side in the end.  The Black Fang revealed in this part what their plan actually is: their boss, Nergal, wants to bring dragons back into the world, intending to use them as a powerful force with which to conquer the continent.  It's a good thing I had watched the intro for the first time last play session, otherwise I wouldn't have even known there were dragons in this Fire Emblem.  I could've assumed, mind, it is a Fire Emblem.  There are very few Fire Emblems without dragons.  But I wouldn't have known that the dragons had a war with humanity that ended with them losing and being sealed away.  And now Nergal seemingly wants to bring back dragons to get their revenge on humanity.  This is also why Eliwood's father was "involved" in the coup, he was trying to see what the Black Fang's goals were so he could put a stop to them.

While Chapter 19 did make me feel pretty deflated after losing it right at the end, it's probably my favorite map so far?  It takes place in this abandoned fortress with a bunch of locked doors and breakable walls.  It's very nonlinear with how to progress, you have multiple pathways through which to attack the goal, it's super cool.  I actually really like maps that are in enclosed like this, it feels like I'm properly flanking the enemy, using my best strategy possible to enclose them.  Which ultimately doesn't matter when you get to the boss and he's just sitting there, menacingly, and your party struggles to take him down for like 8 turns while he can just one shot everyone but it's really fun map design regardless.  Also, unrelated, I've finally figured out the deal with Merlinus and his tent and I really love it actually.  I think it's fun to have to work with limited resources on a map, leaving units behind to defend the castle as I push forward.

I hope progress starts picking up because like.  I do like Blazing Blade.  I think it is fun, I think it is a solid Fire Emblem.  But there is no worse feeling than having to redo an entire map over and over because of unlucky rolls.  Just instantly deflates my want to play.  I want to beat this, mind, I am committed to beating this.  It's just progress is slow going and every time I have to reset a map I just no longer want to play.  I've been thinking of alternating games since Fire Emblem is being like this and I might just start doing that, especially since we're now in mid-April and I have yet to beat a game this month.  Start doing some of my smaller projects that don't need gaming diaries.  Or maybe some that do, I don't know.  A problem I'm having is that a lot of the games I want to play ARE games that I want to do gaming diaries on.  Like currently on my queue, I have 3 games I want to write about for sure (including another TRPG, ahhh) and then a few more that I'm sure once I start feeling them out, I might want to write about them (Hi Sonic Adventure).  We'll see.

4/21/26

Y'all, I don't know if I can do this.  I don't think I'm strong enough.  Which is disappointing to me, because I like Fire Emblem and I want to play it.  I think this game is very good, when I am making progress it's really fun.  I redid a map 5 times because an opponent kept hitting a 30% on me.  And I still haven't beaten it.  It's to the point where I feel like, before I end my turn, I have to make a save state and save scum, hoping my opponent rolls poorly to make genuine progress.  It's not a thing I'm above, lord knows I've always save stated and rewound on NSO games before when needed, but the WiiU just makes this so much more frustrating than it needs to be.  A massive part of me is just like "scrap this, put it on the backburner until I can play it on Switch" because the entire experience of playing Fire Emblem on the WiiU has made me not want to play the game in any capacity.

As you may have noticed, the updates are very staggered for this one and there are a number of reasons why that is, but I legitimately have just has a lot of nights where I go "this whole process seems miserable, I don't want to do this".  I think I would just simply have a better time playing it on Switch where I can at least have some recompense when the game just has my Lord catch a stray.  So do not expect this to be my only Gaming Diary about Fire Emblem the Blazing Blade, because like, I think it's kind of over at least in this form.  I'm not having fun, even if I like the game a whole lot, and I have the potential for another version which would allow me to have more fun.  The decision seems simple.

It sucks though because I was finally gaining access to upgraded units!!!  I upgraded the knight Oswin to a General, which maybe wasn't the play.  Dorcas, my boy whose mutton was poisoned, he got upgraded into a Warrior.  My girl Rebecca became a sniper, with their comically large bow.  And, of course, my girl Florina, the GOAT, my best unit, she became a Falcoknight and started tearing up things before I had to redo the same chapter 5 times.  Which was also the chapter I got the item to upgrade her, so I had to upgrade her five times.  I really like how they introduce the upgrades.  You start to gain them at about the halfway point but they give you time to sort of settle into who you want to gain said boons.  Let you think on it for a bit.  But also not too long, they do just go "hey, you have to make these choices or else".  Powercreep comes for the units quickly, especially with regards to bosses.  Chapter 19 in particular is very much an "upgrade your units now or die", as the boss can very easily decimate an entire party without a few upgraded units.  It gives you the room to make choices but doesn't let you go forever without making them.

The story, for how kind of "yep that's a story", was also just starting to pick up.  We get to the end of Chapter 19 and have this dramatic confrontation with the main villain, Nergal.  We had, unknowingly, brought him exactly what he wanted as Ninian was needed to open the Dragon Gate and unleash all the dragons into the world.  So by rescuing Ninian out at sea and taking her with us onto the island, we had ensured Nergal could complete his ritual.  This is also why Eliwood's father, Marquess Elbert, was led here.  Nergal requires the willpower of humans to complete his goals, their "essence" in a sense.  It's why he wanted to start a war that would span the continent, a war is a good way to harvest human willpower.  People die en masse, and Nergal can absorb all that through his proxies, amassing more and more power.  But Elbert walking right into his hands was very beneficial to Nergal.  Elbert has enough willpower for a hundred people, his single sacrifice could be enough to open the Dragon Gate on his own.  With everything in place, Nergal manages to open the gate, bringing forth a dragon.  But he is stopped by the combined efforts of Elbert, who spends his last moments trying to stop the dark mage, and Ninian's twin brother Nils, who manages to break Ninian from the trance Nergal put her under.  The dragon gate closes, for the moment, but Nergal escapes.  Eliwood cradles his father's dying body, before returning to the mainland to regroup.

I will return to Fire Emblem some day.  I promise.  I really want to play this title, as well as the other GBA English release, the Sacred Stones.  It's just the WiiU was not the vibe.  I don't mind losing units, I think that's part of what is great about Fire Emblem.  That there's this large cast of characters you grow to care about, and that your decisions might result in their deaths.  But having to restart entire chapters over and over again because the Lords keep dying on a console where I have no option to just rewind and try again is frustrating in a way that kills my want to play this game.  This isn't the end for Fire Emblem, but for now I feel like I have to shelve it.  That being said, I did really enjoy this game.  This isn't the best Fire Emblem title by any stretch.  Its plot is pretty basic, its characters don't really do a lot, it having three Lords is really cool until you realize how often it causes problems.  It's also very difficult, as I'm sure you can tell from how I've spoken of it.  But it is, in my mind, the platonic ideal of Fire Emblem.  It has fun maps, good strategy gameplay, a nice risk vs. reward balance, Lyn.  It's just a very solid game and I look forward to returning to it later on and going through it for real.  Until then.  8.1/10

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles - My Life as a King & My Life as a Darklord - A Gaming Diary

 Okay, so this one is going to be a little weird, right?  But bear with me.  So, one of my favorite Wii games growing up was the digital only title "Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King".  I loved this cozy little RPG town-builder so much, I've probably played through the whole game like four times.  And I've long wanted to play its sequel, My Life as a Darklord.  But you know, there's just never been a good time for it.  Now though, it's the game I rolled on my backlog and I'm stoked to play it but... I kind of feel like it's a little weird to play this without playing My Life as a King and refreshing myself on the whole like.  Deal.  Of this whole story.  Because it has been literal years.  And so I'm doing it.  It'll double the length, sure, but I'm doing a total runthrough of the "My Life" duology.  Replaying the first game and then experiencing the second one.  I'm actually pretty excited about it and I hope for you, the reader, this creates a better experience overall, gives you more context.  So, without further ado.

Review:

(Note, the following is only a spoiler free review of My Life as a Darklord because that is the game I'm actually clearing this time around.  If you want to know my thoughts on My Life as a King, please read through to the end of that section.  Thank you~) 

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord is a very average game.  It's a decent enough little tower defense with a good sense of humor, great soundtrack and pretty easy to pick up gameplay.  The key problem with it though that keeps it down is that it's really poorly paced.  The game takes a pretty long time to get into a good flow and/or good gameplay loop, taking far too long to introduce pretty basic elements in its attempts to keep a specific progression going and at times just making a level unreasonably difficult by holding off said elements.  Many critics have criticized the game for feeling as if, by the time you finally get all your toys to play with, all your pieces to strategize with, the game is just almost over with nothing to do.  But the good parts about it are really good, it doesn't fully save its unsatisfactory gameplay and progression but it does a good job balancing it.  It's fine.  I don't think it's a great loss that you can't buy this anymore but it's a solid little time if you really like Tower Defenses and want one with JRPG-trappings.  6.2/10

My Life as a King Diary:

7/25/25

Man, the good vibes just rolled in immediately.  This game is such a wholesome little game, I swear.  It's really sad that Square-Enix hasn't made a remaster/port of this game, I think people who like city-builders and/or RPGs would really enjoy My Life as a King, even if it's pretty simple overall.  It's like, the whole game is about building your own little wholesome RPG town and it gets the vibes right immediately.  It also just feels good playing it again, this game, as mentioned previously, is a game I played quite a bit in the past.  I even purchased all of the DLC, I think this might be the very first game I ever purchased DLC for, which is CRAZY to me.  I'm not one to be taken in by nostalgia but it does bring back some great memories strolling through the town.  By the way, growing up, had the BIGGEST crush on Chime and her goth outfit, while not awakening anything in me that wasn't already there, definitely fueled a flame, lol.

I'm a pretty big fan of the fact that rather than convincing people to move into your town, everyone who is in your town already lived there in the past and you're just magicking them back.  My Life as a King takes place after the events of the original Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, so up until recently the entire world was consumed by an evil miasma and we are among the first venturing out into the world to reclaim our towns and cities.  So many of the residents are ex-refugees who are now restarting their lives and they come with interpersonal relationships and families and what have you.  Despite this being a simple download game with very limited space, it really enhances it that these people feel like they already have a rapport.  One of my villagers, Zack, wanted me to open a bakery in town and obviously that's a good idea but we come to find out the owner of the bakery is one of Zack's friends from the before times and he'll comment on how excited he is to have his bestie back in town.  You'll also see your villagers running off to spend time with other villagers they're close to or having conversations in the street, it's nice.  They're not particularly deep or complex characters but for a simple Wii era download game, it's a surprising amount of depth.

The adventurers in My Life as a King are the funniest things about this game.  Like, you have to hire the town's teenage residents as adventurers to go out and replenish your stash of "Elementite", because without Elementite you can't make buildings.  It's a whole thing where you pay adventurers to go find elementite so that you can build more buildings, collect more revenue, and better pay your adventurers and improve the town's infrastructure.  Basic stuff.  The adventurers are so funny.  So the adventurers can have multiple different reactions and success rates for the day.  When they show up to take jobs they'll either be excited, resolved, or despaired at the listing and you can either tell them to take the job, go on a side mission to gain EXP, or just like.  Go home.  If they're despaired.  Take the day off.  And also when they head off to gain EXP or do the job they either will succeed, fail, or just like have an existential crisis and give up.  When they return to town they'll be like "am I really cut out for this, is this what it means to be an adventurer".  So you can start to fill in personalities for these guys pretty quickly.

Like, my strongest adventurer, Val, is great.  All her stats are really high, she gets jobs done very effectively when she's out on them, she's probably going to inevitably be the sort of "leader" of our little guild when it's built.  Her stats also give her a million options on what to do about classing, she can be an excellent knight, thief, or black mage due to her high strength, constitution, agility, and intellect.  The thing is though, Val is a disaster.  She has no confidence in herself, she often freaks out while in dungeons and comes home early feeling miserable, she often has to take days off.  This woman has just the worst case of imposter syndrome I've ever seen, despite being the best in the village she really does not think she's cut out for this.  Like part of me is like "girl, you can quit if you don't want to do this" but also I desperately need her not to quit because right now she's holding the fort down because ya boy thought he was doing a million IQ play by recruiting someone with really high wisdom for when I unlock the white mage school and he sucks and I want to fire him.

My Life as a King also does the fun thing where it has a singular theme that gets increasingly intricate as the game goes along.  It could do more, admittedly, I believe it ultimately only has three iterations, an early, mid, and late game version.  But it has a pretty simple melody that grows more grand and complex as it goes along.  I feel like this is probably just a common element of city building titles that I simply find novel because I'm largely unfamiliar with the genre, but if city builders are not doing that, they should.  It's such a good thematic element for the genre, I'm brought back to the early days of New Horizons, the best part of New Horizons really, where before you had the hourly themes you just had this "island music" that would grow and change as you turned this island into a proper town.  It's such a good note, and it's really a shame that here we only get it in these three parts, because the music is also real good.  The My Life as a King soundtrack is short, I think only 13 tracks, and for all I know is reusing tracks from the first Crystal Chronicles, I've never played that one admittedly, but it's real good.  I'm sad Kumi Tanioka doesn't seem to do composition work as much anymore, it seems like it's for good reason mind.  She apparently prefers live performance to composing.  But her music is super nice and super unique, she has a lot of "world music" influence, and her main thing is mixing and matching various culture's musical stylings to create super unique sounds.  She mostly did Crystal Chronicles and bounced, only doing stuff from time to time mainly on Minecraft strangely enough.  Her composition stylings are missed.

Oh also there are tons of frogs.  Like just so many frogs.  We're told by one of our advisors in a story about our parents that the Queen loved frogs (based) but the King hated them (cringe).  However, the King loved his wife so much that he made the entire Kingdom frog themed.  The royal crest is a frog, hanging above the door to the castle is a golden frog, the job boards are frogs, the wooden has frog prints carved into it.  There are even frog prints carved into the stone work around the town.  Our dad is already dead by the time the game starts but we already know that, a, he was a wife guy, and b, he had just full commitment to the bit always.  And you know what, good on him, I love seeing all these frogs about.  I wish I could capture from my WiiU so I could show you all the frogs, frankly.

7/27/25

The villagers in this game are so funny, y'all.  So, in this part we finally meet the antagonist of this game, simply titled "The Dark Lord".  In a shocking turn of events, the Dark Lord appears to be our own father, not just in his appearance or his mannerisms but he even has a few of our father's memories.  It's a pretty decent plot twist for this early in the game, especially since so much of this game is built on this idea that our father was this kind, noble king whose footsteps we're following in, so seeing him be the villain in all of this is pretty wild.  But like, most importantly though, our villagers react to this in one of three ways: despair at the revelation, resolve to double their efforts to defeat the Dark Lord, and, the funniest, simping.  Many of the female townsfolk had crushes on the king, who is a handsome man admittedly, and now they're just like fully on team Dark Lord because of this revelation.  Hilarious.  10/10 writing.

I've finally unlocked the class system in the game!  Every single adventurer you hire, at least if they are human (which they're always going to be if you don't have the DLC) starts out as a warrior and then as you progress in the game, you unlock the facilities necessary for changing their class.  Namely a casino for thieves, a school for black mages, and a church for white mages.  Moreover, the game not only incentivizes you to keep a variety of classes in rotation but also to kind of set up your town to where the adventurers all live near their facilities.  Like, your adventurers will get better at their jobs if they live close to the black mage school or the church or whatever.  It's also just good for convenience to keep everything together because the more you add to the town for adventurers to do, the longer it takes them to go off adventuring, which is a problem as they frequently will be out much later which like.  I don't KNOW if it has an effect on their performance, but it feels like it does, especially if they are on their own.

Which, speaking of being on their own, I unlocked parties!  In classic RPG fashion, you have to build a tavern for your adventurers to meet in order for them to form a party.  Such a good bit.  I love how taken aback Chime is by your want to build a Tavern, which, by the way, isn't just like RPG shorthand, it's a literal tavern, they serve alcohol there.  Their sign is a barrel of beer.  But then she is the one who runs the taverns, she sits there and serves drinks all day while also tending to the kingdom's taxes and helping you build buildings.  Having parties is nice because, a, it cuts down on the amount of time adventurers need to spend preparing for quests because the party leader will just arrive at the board in the morning while all the others gather their supplies for the day automatically but also, unsurprisingly, your adventurers are better as a unit than they are as individuals and are better equipped to handle tasks accordingly.  Parties will form naturally, but you can also assign a party to each tavern, so officially my girl Val is the first time leader of my little town.  So proud of her, she's adapting to the role well, she doubts herself way less now.

I also unlocked the non-human races this past play session.  I need to expand my ability to build houses before I can really do anything with it mind, the game puts pretty hard limits on what you can build at any given time until you progress in the game for balancing reasons.  Still an RPG at the end of the day.  These guys were, originally, DLC and the main thing about them is that, unlike the humans, the other races in the game are class locked but excel at that given class.  It's not something I'm the biggest fan of, admittedly, I know for a long time that loads of RPGs either locked your available classes to race or strongly incentivized you to go with a specific class setup dependent on your race.  But like, idk, it's always felt weird to me to be like "oh all of this race is just naturally good at stealing stuff, they are all thieves".  It's really amazing how little fantasy tends to have evolved from the Tolkein days sometimes, I swear.  But like, it's nice having them, I feel like the eccentric races are something that makes the Crystal Chronicles series visually interesting and it's kind of bonkers they weren't already in the game, y'know.

Unfortunately I've gotten to the part of this game where you're just like.  Waiting.  Constantly.  I mean you get to walk around and talk to your villagers and that part's nice but they run out of new things to say pretty quickly.  The sad truth is that at least half of your days are wasted in this thing, you hit your caps on buildings you can build and you're kind of just waiting around for your adventurers to find new stuff for you to do.  Thankfully the game lets you skip to the end of day at any point so if you can't do anything that day you can just skip to end but like.  Idk, I wish that progress was happening at a faster pace, you know.  Like, I get it, it's a way to get more content out of a pretty basic game and I appreciate the effort given that this was, originally, one of the most expensive WiiWare games at $15 I think it sold for.  But still.

7/29/25

Y'all, I need to tell you about Oz.  So, Oz is one of the first villagers I gained in my little Kingdom, in fact he lives basically in town square, I would not be surprised if he was one of the first five houses built in the town.  Oz lives in a small house with his younger sister Alma, who wants nothing more than to be an adventurer and help the kingdom thrive.  He's often seen wandering the streets throughout the day, in particular seeming to prefer crossing town to get better prices on his baked goods.  And Oz is the most hated man in my Kingdom.  For a long time, I did not actually know who he was or where he lived, I would just hear the legend of him.  I would check profiles of my villagers and if they ever mentioned Oz, it was always the same message: "Oz has been distant".  Which is just a pretty nice way of saying "we don't like him".  But he was usually at home, seemingly not bothering anyone.  I thought maybe, genuinely, people were just expressing concern, saying he has been distant because he's such a homebody.  And then Oz started roaming around town and boy howdy, did I find out why he's hated.  

I mentioned Oz walks across town to go to the bakery, it just so happens that the route he takes just so happens to take him to basically every house with a young, unmarried woman in town.  And he never stops in to say hi, just always leers at them through the windows it feels like and then makes uncomfortable comments about them.  He doesn't even buy anything from the bakery, it's literally just an excuse to be weird.  He also appears to be a habitual drinker and is always stopping in to see Chime who, I'll remind you, is also the prime minister of the kingdom.  He makes several comments about catching the woman bending over, revealing her stockings to the world.  This guy sucks, just the worst guy, throw him in jail, nobody likes him and nobody will miss him.  I don't even think his sister likes him.  That's not true, his household affinity score is always very high, Alma might be the only person who likes him.

As the town fills up more and more I genuinely feel like there's less and less I can do with it to still make it look good?  My Life as a King has specific lots where you can build buildings and it often feels like the deeper into the game you get, the less likely you are to find a place to put things to make them look and/or feel good.  It feels like there are also specific lots where the game is choreographing you to place things, like.  The school and the church are the largest buildings you can place, being 6 squares each, 3 wide and 2 deep.  There are two exactly 6 square lots in the town, both of them near town square, and it feels like they're telling you just "hey, put these here".  And like, admittedly, it's a convenient placement, but it also ends up looking pretty ugly because no matter how you arrange these two buildings in the lots in question they don't look good.  They block each other and mess up the sight lines.  But also they equally don't look good anywhere else because there's not really a better lot for them where they don't look off center.  It's rough.  I would love to see this idea re-explored with way more freedom, I think that would go hard.

I'm also never sure how to feel about the dismantling system.  Like on the one hand, I kind of like how inefficient the ability to move things is given how choreographed the town layout tends to be.  It really makes you have to live with your choices because undoing a bad placement is a time sink, you have to mark something for demolition and then wait a day and then rebuild it and you can only dismantle so many buildings in a day.  Your town becomes unique because of the errors you made, in effect.  On the other hand, like, in the late game especially when you really want to start being serious about what the town layout looks like, you're spending just a lot of days dismantling and moving.  It honestly kind of feels like dismantling was an after thought, something they realized they should add later on into production.  Like again, I do love this game, but I'm really starting to realize why for all the times I've started a new kingdom, I've only ended up finishing one like twice.

Oh also I unlocked Inns.  That part is cool.  Inns, obviously, bring in more revenue to your kingdom but the fun part is that adventurers, while they're staying in town, will help out around the city.  They'll show up to the quest board and be like "hey, I want to help out your guys, I like your kingdom's vibe".  This can sometimes help you out immensely, the traveling adventurers tending to be at or above your own highest level adventurers.  It also incentivizes you to leave your options open when planning dedicated party structures as to allow these new adventurers to aid and assist properly.  Or you could just be like me and have so many adventurers wrapped in existing dynamics that the wanderers end up squadding up with each other most of the time, that's cool too I guess.  The other neat thing about inns is that they bring in new random NPCs into your kingdom who have very unique descriptions.  One of the first outsiders staying in my kingdom, for instance, was a traveling diplomat from another nation having a brief vacation in the countryside.  It makes the world feel that much more alive, you know?  And I think in the base game, it was the only way to encounter the other races of the Crystal Chronicles world?

8/2/25

Progress stalled this session, my god.  For some reason, none of my adventurers were accomplishing like ANYTHING for what felt like an entire in-game month.  They would keep going out on missions but because they took so long at the start they would basically get to the dungeon and then immediately turn around.  It was so frustrating.  The worst part about it is that like, I needed them to complete the tasks given to them specifically so that this exact scenario wouldn't happen.  One of the buildings locked behind one of the dungeons they weren't completing was the Emporium, a massive bazaar which not only drastically increases the happiness of your townsfolk, but also improves the stock of every adventurer shop in the city.  It unlocks stuff like Daggers, Shields, and most importantly, torches.  Torches allow adventurers to stay out later, making them far less likely to come home early from a mission because it's getting dark.  So the situation torches were designed to prevent was exactly the thing stopping me from getting torches.  Infuriating.

The Dark Lord finally showed himself truly.  I guess technically he showed himself last time and I forgot to report on it because I was too busy talking about the real villain of this game, Oz.  Something I find really interesting, and which sets up the theming of the next game very well, is that the Dark Lord's appearance creates something of a sympathetic atmosphere among the townsfolk.  The Dark Lord reveals that the kingdom that we are currently occupying was originally built by him, designed to be a safe haven for the monsters of the realm, and that our father stole it from them as they retreated when the miasma cleared.  It's why the Dark Lord seems to have a vested interest in the continued development of our civilization, it is his hope that he will one day return to claim it for his people.  And the town has largely adopted this atmosphere of "we don't believe what the Dark Lord is doing is right, per se, but we do wonder if a future can exist where we can coexist with the monsters that we fear, rather than just sending our adventurers out to kill them".

Something insane I learned, or at least remembered, I guess, is that because of how the game determines how parties function, if you have three parties set but only two job boards, then one of your parties will just go on autopilot and train forever every day!  My best party, the one belonging to Val, just spent several days this play session going on unproductive training missions.  What I have to guess is that the way the game codes parties, it counts the party leader standing at the board accepting the requests as if the entire party is there, accepting requests.  And it is not coded to accept/understand the idea that 8 or more characters will arrive at a board seeking jobs.  So it forces a completed party to go on autopilot until another job board is added to the village.  What a wacky way for that logic to work!  I fixed it though, the third party I made is benched as a cohesive unit until I unlock a third job board.

I don't know if I'll have another update between now and the end of the game.  I'm kind of in this weird point in the game where like, the next story beat is going to be end game, iirc, and it's just a matter of clearing dungeons until that happens.  I know it seems like I've been increasingly negative on the game and I will admit, it definitely kind of goes wonky in the midgame, but I really do enjoy this game a whole lot.  Part of it may be nostalgia, mind, like I said me and this game have a pretty intimate history together.  But this game is just so warm and cozy.  I would love an improved remake of this game a whole bunch, I've said it a million times but I think there's a real untapped market for this city building game where you make a cozy RPG town.  I'm really happy I replayed this, it's been a fun experience.  And I think it's good to look back on things you're nostalgic for and re-evaluate them when you're older, tbh, rather than just letting your nostalgia lead you for the rest of your life.

8/3/25

I beat the game!  The final boss is actually super interesting, they effectively do a raid boss for it.  Like, instead of how the game usually functions where dungeon bosses are taken on by individuals and/or parties as a specific job, when you declare the battle against the Dark Lord, your entire selection of adventurers are put on that job for the day.  Or at least as many adventurers as can fit on a singular job board because instead of making it appear on every job board it just appears on one, causing the issue to happen that I mentioned in a previous section.  Anyways, you send out everyone and then they battle the Dark Lord, taking down as much HP as possible before they die.  Pack it up, restart the next day.  The Dark Lord doesn't appear to heal in between days, it may in fact do so, mind, but on a day to day level it's so minimal that it's not even noticeable.  I think you'd likely have to leave it alone for an extended period of time for it to heal any health for it to be a real problem.  It took me like an in-game week to defeat it, all told.  And the person who took down the final boss?  My girl Val.

I'm pretty sure there was a spy in my kingdom.  One of the people who would come in and out of staying at the inn was a traveling diplomat from the Selkie people, a race of primarily attractive women.  I believe there are males but if you see a Selkie, it's going to be female.  Even our prime minister, or "chancellor" as the game calls her, Chime is half-Selkie.  Anyways, this diplomat's descriptor literally says she keeps coming back into town to learn the secrets of the king's magic, the Architek that he uses to summon buildings.  I'm like PRETTY confident that she was spying on us, especially since other townsfolk often imply the Selkies tend to keep up unscrupulous company, with some even positing that they're closer to monster than human.  A rumor even starts that the Dark Lord himself, under all his armor, is a Selkie mage.  She also was very weird about the King, commenting how handsome he was despite being, you know, underage, and saying stuff like "I look forward to seeing you grow up".  Weirdly common thing in this game actually, older women hitting on the King, it's such an out of pocket detail.

I'm surprised how long it takes you to unlock villager requests.  You have to raise your town up pretty high before the game allows you to gain the ability to do favors for your villagers.  Or rather, spend a day sending your adventurers to do favors for your villagers.  It's a surprisingly late game ability, you upgrade your town into a different civilization type by using spheres you collect by talking to your townsfolk or them talking to each other.  And I think it's the upgrade that requires 16 of them that unlocks villager requests!  They're fun little bonuses though, especially if you have three job boards but only two available jobs for that day.  Just send your adventurers around town looking for some rando's lost trinket.  This is a scenario that happens more often than you think, actually, there's always like one party out exploring a new dungeon and another party fighting the boss of another dungeon and party three doesn't really have that much to do!

Something I found extremely cute was that, when you get the cutscene to be like "okay, go fight the final boss now", everyone says how much the King and Kingdom means to them, except for Chime who can't bring herself to really say it.  Instead, what Chime does is write it in her journal, the game is revealed at this point to be Chime recounting the events of it inside of her journal, and as you go around town entering all these buildings you built, Chime has little comments to say about them.  How the King was so worried about his people getting hurt that he built a weapon shop, or how he built a bakery so the town would stop having to subsist on stale bread from the castle's storerooms.  Basically every building has one of these, unless it was a DLC exclusive building.  It's really nice going through town and reliving all these memories, hearing what these buildings meant to both the townspeople and Chime herself.  This is YOUR town, that you built up from nothing into this thriving civilization.

I'm really glad I revisited this.  Sorry I've been lacking on the saucy drama department, unfortunately my villagers end up kind of boring and nice 90% of the time.  I still think this game is solid, I think it's a perfectly fun, perfectly fine time.  But I also found more criticisms with it than I did back in 2009.  It's definitely an excellent concept for a game, I don't know how this hasn't become a more common practice in the life sim/farming sim boom.  Executionwise though, you can definitely tell the game is really padded.  Like, it was a downloadable Wii title, this thing is tiny, it lags when you try to go to end of day because it has to make a hundred different checks on the adventurers you've sent out to see if they succeeded or failed their missions.  It's simple, it's basic, it could be fleshed out way more.  But I still think it's a fun little time.  In the past I would give it like an 8/10, maybe an 8.5/10.  I think now my rating is more like a strong 7-ish.  It's very imperfect but still very fun.  And like, I'm never going to hate this game, I have too much nostalgia caught up in it.  7.2/10

My Life as a Darklord Diary:

8/5/25

My Life as a Darklord starts out with a very interesting idea on rip: that the giant battle with the Dark Lord, the thing that took me an in-game week to complete in the previous game, was staged the whole time.  That the Dark Lord, seeing that he was fighting a losing war, intentionally let himself be imprisoned so that his people would be spared from any further assault by the people of the Kingdom from the first game.  This game then picks up an indeterminate amount of time after the first game.  It's really hard to figure out how long exactly, as none of the characters from the first game have physically aged at all, but also it's been long enough to have people begin to settle the wilderness that the Dark Lord once ruled over.  We pick up with our new protagonist, Mira, the Dark Lord's daughter who recently turned 16 and thus is finally old enough to ascend to the throne her father left vacant.  And she is MAD.

Mira is so funny, y'all.  So, her father literally sacrificed himself to make peace with the humans, right.  Just totally took the L so his people would stop being killed en masse by an invading army.  Mira, frankly, thinks this was dumb.  Mira is not about the "live peacefully with humans" life AT ALL.  What Mira wants is to crush the entire world under her boot, bringing in an era of monster domination that made the miasma days from the OG Crystal Chronicles look easy by comparison.  She is a petulant, spoiled brat who truly believes that she's owed world domination just because she's the Dark Lord.  She's so funny, I love her so much.  She assaults her own soldiers for annoying her too much, she almost executes her chancellor, Tonbetty, yes really, for thinking that apples are an appropriate end goal when clearly apple pies are what we should be after, she throws temper tantrums when she loses and gloats relentlessly when she wins.  She's so good, she's such a brat.  But she does also have a softer side, she is quick to hype up her minions during battle and is fiercely loyal to those who are loyal to her at the end of the day.  She's a spoiled child who was gifted a mobile fortress for her 16th birthday and is now like "time to crush everyone" but there's also a heart in there somewhere.

Speaking of the mobile fortress, My Life as a Darklord goes in a very bizarre direction for a sequel to My Life as a King.  Like, it being so closely tied, you may think it's a city builder from the other side, maybe building up a monster encampment in the wilderness to try and reclaim your father's kingdom.  It's a tower defense.  You build up the literal tower of your mobile fortress, using dark energy you obtain from knocking out adventurers to add floors to the tower and then staff those floors with monsters.  The goal being to not allow adventurers to climb all the way to the top and take the crystal sealing your father that you have hidden up there.  I think Mira mostly needs it to channel her dark magic through, tbh, because otherwise there's not a lot of reason why she specifically would even want her father to stick around.  She seems to resent him actually, he gave up on their dreams of world domination!!!

Low key, I actually thought this was going to be an immediate wash.  Like, I don't know if this is just a me problem but it's not necessarily that I dislike Tower Defense games.  Plants vs. Zombies is literally one of the only games I've ever rated 5/5 stars and is the reason I even started dabbling into PC gaming.  But it's definitely the genre where like, at the start of it I'm usually going "this is boring and simple, I don't know about this".  That being said, I also feel like this game is taking way too long to introduce mechanics.  Like, I understand using my example of Plants vs. Zombies, that game is always introducing mechanics, in the vast majority of levels you are getting a new plant that can completely change how the game is played and how you choose to strategize going forward.  But I think by the end of level 1 or 2 you still, like, get it, you know?  The basic gameplay loop is spelled out for you and so it's just up to you to figure out how to strategize with the different pieces they add in later.  Darklord introduces a class triangle, warriors beat thieves who beat mages who beat warriors, but by the end of Chapter 2, when they finally introduce warriors, they have not given you the tools to dispatch with them.  So you're just like low key hoping you can outpace them in damage before they get to the top of the tower.  I'm not asking the game to hand me a win con without any work, mind, but I do wish they would get on with introducing mechanics so I feel more like I'm making educated decisions.

Speaking of class triangles, I do find it super interesting how the game handles adventurers climbing the tower.  When an adventurer climbs up the tower they HAVE to stop at a floor if it is unoccupied by another adventurer.  Each floor has a built in trap to it and the trap will go off if an adventurer stops on the floor, assuming the trap is not meant to provide support for monsters that may be on the floor.  If there are no monsters, the adventurer will attack the trap, dealing a bit of damage to it, before moving on to the next floor and repeating.  Here's the fun part though, if there are monsters, they will initiate a JRPG battle with them.  This is your primary way of stalling out and defeating adventurers, forcing them to battle your waves upon waves of summoned minions until it wears them down.  Each adventurer only spends so much time on each floor, however, so you really have to bulk up the tower ASAP if you're going to be battling a wide variety of adventurers.  Furthermore, as previously mentioned, floors that are already occupied by another adventurer will be skipped over by other adventurers, so you really have to rely on your tower's height as well as its defenses to properly deal with adventurers.

It's very funny how they choose to incorporate the characters of My Life as a King as well.  Like these are characters with their own specific roles and histories in the original game, many of whom are not even proper adventurers in the first place.  Like Chime, the chancellor of the first game, very clearly tells you that she has no stomach for adventuring and, despite her education at the Black Magic Academy when she was very young, she only really uses her abilities to better serve the King as his advisor.  And in this game, she's the first boss!  She's now a powerful wizard, defending one of the cities from your mobile fortress.  It's kind of an insane place to take her, given that she strongly implied that once the war was over and the King was able to take on more duties of his own, she was going to take a sabbatical to get married and raise children.  Like, settling down was legitimately a very important, hopeful note for her, and now here she is, defending a sister city from a giant monster tower roaming the countryside.  Objectively it seems like things have gotten worse for her!  And also the world!  It seems like the war is going poorly, actually!!!

Admittedly, I'm not super sure if I'm going to ride this one out until the end?  Like, I'm enjoying it, don't get me wrong, it's fun enough.  But I feel like I kind of "get it" already, you know?  Like, again, I don't dislike Tower Defense games, but I tend to feel like of the genres, it's the one the one more than others where I get a couple hours in and go "okay, I feel like I've seen everything this game has to offer".  I'll do at least one more play session, but don't be surprised if I bounce off this one in the end.  Which would be a shame because I put so much time into playing an entirely different game to prepare for this one, completely reshaping how I felt about a favorite growing up, only to then be like "yeah I'm just not feeling this one", lol.

8/7/25

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord is not long for this world, y'all.  I mean, it literally isn't, it's a WiiWare game so officially there's no way to play it right now.  But I also just... I don't know.  Maybe it's because Tower Defense isn't my speed, but I've gotten most of the way through chapter 3 and I'm like "I don't think I really want to continue this".  I'm very sorry if this is, like, anticlimactic, but you gotta go with what you feel, right.  And I just was not feeling this that much.  I frankly wish they had just made another city builder and tweaked it a bit, that would've gone hard.

So the big reveal at the end of Chapter 2 was that Mira is half human.  This is not unexpected, Mira just does not look like a monster.  It's kind of something that I haven't been super fond of, that they really didn't go hard enough with making the Darklord look more monstrous, especially when there's so many ways to make a monstrous character design look cute.  Mira just looks like a teenage girl with weird hair and different colored eyes to indicate her monstrous half.  It's disappointing, I want a proper monster girl.  Anyways, she does not take this news well at all.  She assaults her own citizens in anger for not telling her, and then realizes they didn't know either, which is even worse for her.  Because that means the only person she can talk to about this is her father, and she hates that guy.  I had speculated she hated her father before, but in this part of the game she just says it.  She thinks he was a coward whose quest for peace made him weak.  So talking to him, not exactly on the table for her, instead she's going to rampage across the countryside until she feels better.

So, the thing that finally made me go like "nah, I'm good" was the introduction of White Mages.  White Mages are, on the surface, pretty unproblematic.  They don't deal any damage to either your units or the floor and kinda just slowly go up the tower, stopping on each floor to do nothing.  The only thing they can do is heal!  This is the reason why they made me give up.  White mages are so overtuned.  First of all, they don't really have any weakness per se, so unlike most units in the game you can't counterpick them to get an advantage.  You simply have to outdamage them.  At the current capabilities I have in the game, the highest damage output I have available to me is a room of 3 Scorpions with a trap that deals damage such as the Iron Ball.  This setup will net us about 45-50 damage on a white mage.  They heal for 30 on each of their turns.  At level 1.  If they're a higher leveled white mage, they heal for considerably more.  White mages warp the entire game around them in a very unfun way, you no longer are really rewarded for smart planning, good strategy, and good improv.  You're now only rewarded for having a real big, real well stocked tower that can hopefully out damage the white mage's healing capabilities.  It sucks, it's so bad.  It almost feels like luck sometimes, like if my monster's movement bars aren't in the right sync, I just lose.

I do want to compliment this game's soundtrack, real quick.  Kumi Tanioka returns to do the soundtrack and I loved her work on the first game a whole lot, y'all know.  I think this one is leaps and bounds better.  It's honestly kind of a shame that this game is unknown that it doesn't even appear people have uploaded the soundtrack, it's a super underrated one.  It has this great main battle theme which evolves over the course of a battle as more powerful units start coming in.  The boss theme is great.  A lot of the incidental music is fun.  Kumi Tanioka cooked and so few people get to enjoy the dishes, travesty.  Maybe I need to learn how to get music online so I can introduce y'all to this great soundtrack (I won't, that takes effort, lololol).

Having now given up on Darklord, I decided to just go ahead and look to the future, see what I was missing out on.  It doesn't seem like the strategy gets great at any point unless you bought the DLC which, you know.  I can't anymore.  But the plot seems to go exactly where you think it's going to.  Eventually Mira realizes she has to talk to her dad and hash things out and finds out his wish was for Mira to finally be the bridge between human and monster.  I can only imagine she doesn't take that well but as she nears the end of her campaign, she comes to realize that her father was not a coward but rather a noble leader doing what is best for not just his own people, but for all the races of the world.  And after confronting the kingdom of the first game and taking down the little King, she decides to form an alliance, ending the way once and for all.  I do like that these two games, King and Darklord, do have this thematic throughline of "maybe there is a better way, maybe monsters and humans don't need to fight" and it's realized through Mira's conquest.  She may be a reluctant bridge, but she is a bridge nonetheless.

I don't think My Life as a Darklord is a bad game.  I know that seems contradictory because I've abandoned it but like, low key, I've abandoned a lot of games I've liked or even loved.  I think if I was MORE of a tower defense person, I would've seen this to the end, but like.  I guess Tower Defense needs to move faster and be more of a vibe for me.  I did enjoy this entire process though, revisiting such a fun game from my past and finally experiencing its sequel.  I have to wonder if I had played it when it was new, if I would've enjoyed it more too.  I feel like I had more patience for games being kinda mediocre when this came out, certainly more than I do now.  And like, this game IS fun, when a level was going well or had a neat structure I was having a blast.  I just think it's kinda too slow, too poorly paced.  6.2/10

Pikmin 1 is the best Pikmin game (because it's the worst Pikmin game)

I have recently beaten Pikmin 3 as part of my ongoing, foolhardy quest to actually play through enough games in my backlog to make it decrease instead of increase. Pikmin 3 was a long time coming, I originally got Pikmin 3 as part of the deal Nintendo had back when Mario Kart 8 was coming out where you'd get a free first-party WiiU game alongside it and I had played through basically the entirety of it back then. I had collected all of the fruit, found all the data files, etc. The only thing I had yet to do is beat the final dungeon and the final boss. A rational person would likely just go do that but instead I chose the much more insane option of "play through the entire game start to finish so that I have accurate data on my spreadsheet", which, let's be real, updating your spreadsheet is the most fun part of game clearing.

Replaying it, I feel, ended up being the correct choice though. First of all, I had literally not played it in over a decade so I would not have been able to easily slide right into the final boss like it was nothing. But more importantly I think starting from 0 on Pikmin 3 allowed me to analyze it in a new way and come to different conclusions on the game than I had previously. I won't get fully into it but the too long, didn't read is who I was when I had initially played Pikmin 3 was a person who enjoyed series. Pikmin 3 was a game I loved a lot in 2014 because it was a Pikmin game, and a great Pikmin game at that, and I loved Pikmin. A decade later though, I find myself being more of a fan of works, how an individual game exists on its own merits disconnected from a branding I may be attached too and only evaluating the game in question in context of its series to compare and contrast how well it compliments a previous work.

A brief review of Pikmin 3 since we're already here

Pikmin 3 is, in many ways, the best Pikmin game. I know it has ended up being a rather controversial entry in recent times due to its general lack of difficulty and it stepping back on many features introduced in Pikmin 2, but I feel it is, by far, the best the series has been as a strategy game. Pikmin 3 utilizes the WiiU Gamepad excellently, allowing you to easily command your captains to move and work autonomously while you are busy accomplishing more complex tasks on your own. While I do often think the three captains are a bit too much as, frequently, it feels like one captain is just off doing nothing, waiting for other tasks to be done so they can gather up the wayward Pikmin, it is undeniable how much map control you get in this game, both from the multiple captains and the ease at which you can move them about the map and switch between the three.

As well, Pikmin 3's usage of three captains allows them to really play around with the complexity of the puzzles. There are several instances where you'll encounter a puzzle that needs all three captains to be doing various different things, be it stepping on weights to balance out while the third captain manages Pikmin distribution between the two others, throwing other captains on ledges and then having them go on individual ventures to reunite the other captains, or just using captains as middle men to easily get a squad across a large untenable obstacle, like a river. It leads Pikmin 3 to being incredibly fast paced while maintaining the depth of the previous entries.

This pacing is also enhanced by how snappy combat tends to be. The introduction of the Charge mechanic, allowing you to dismiss your Pikmin to swarm an enemy you've locked onto, allows most combat encounters to be over quickly, as your entire squad can decimate an enemy health bar like it's nothing. This does, of course, tend to make the game a bit easy, but I also feel like it's a well designed mechanic, streamlining gameplay while still providing enough of a risk to make you think about how you use the mechanic, as overestimating your Pikmin's abilities can now have disastrous consequences.

That's not to say that Pikmin 3's gameplay is perfect, however. The game is, often, let down by the console it is on. Pikmin 3, being on the WiiU, opts to include multiple different control schemes, touch controls, classic controls, and motion controls, a sort of best of all worlds. Touch controls allow you the best map control, allowing you the easiest usage of the map and, by extension, the best map control. This comes at the cost of having a lot of inconvenient gameplay/combat controls, like having to tap to throw Pikmin. Classic controls, in contrast, gives you a more typical controller layout, with almost everything being mapped to the buttons. This control scheme does give you minor touchscreen access as well so you can still do all the things you would be doing with the touch control scheme. The issue with Classic though is that "Classic" in this instance means "GameCube" and in the GameCube Pikmin games, your cursor was locked in a straight line directly in front of you, meaning actually controlling the game becomes way more stiff and awkward. Lastly we have motion controls, this control scheme sees you hooking up a Wii Remote and Nunchuck to control the game as if it were one of the Pikmin ports on Wii. Undeniably, this gives you the best field control, you have a pretty useful button layout while also having full control of the cursor. To many people this is the definitive way to play Pikmin, I take issue with it, though, as while it gives you the best control in the field, you lose a lot of the convenient map functionality of the Game Pad. In short, Pikmin 3 has three control schemes, and every single one of them does exactly half the job you want it to. To be honest, all I want is "GameCube controls but you control the cursor with the stick and the map with the screen" and I would be happy.

I, of course, cannot stop talking about Pikmin 3 without talking about its visuals. It is no exaggeration to say that Pikmin 3 is not only the most beautiful Pikmin game, a high bar for a series that has always pushed the graphical capabilities of the systems they are on. It's also arguable that Pikmin 3 is the most beautiful WiiU game and, honestly, maybe even the most beautiful game Nintendo has ever made. Its environments are serene and bizarre, finding a deep beauty in scattered trash of the old world that has been reclaimed by the new environment. The lighting is dynamic and sharp without being overbearing or too bright like many other WiiU games tended to skew. Its water visuals are some of the best ever produced, the water Miiverse guy must've had a field day with Pikmin 3, I swear. All these visuals are also enhanced by wonderful sound design, the environmental noises in this game are superb, I cannot tell you the joy I felt the first time I encountered a rainy day and the world was filled with frog songs. While I've had my problems with Pikmin 3, I do like it a whole lot and think it's a great game, I find it unlikely it'll make my top ten list for the year (mostly because, at the time of writing this, it's already down at number 7) but it's absolutely going to be an honorable mention.

A bizarre relationship with the Pikmin series

But, there was something else that was eating at me the entire time I played Pikmin 3. As I previously stated, at a certain point in my life I considered myself a Pikmin fan. You could've counted me among the ranks of people like "the Cookie Monster but for people who refuse to admit that the GameCube sold poorly" and "monotone Scott the Woz". A large part of this love of Pikmin came from a very singular source, the first Pikmin game. I played Pikmin 1 on its rerelease for the Wii and fell in love with it, for a long time it ranked amongst my favorite games of all time. I used to keep a rather extensive catalog of what I considered "5 star games" on my Backlog but kinda retired it after both finding it difficult and insufficient to upkeep, as well as doing a lot of rethinking on how I rate and rank things, and up until that change which came literally about a month ago, Pikmin 1 was on that list. I genuinely would've told you that Pikmin 1 was one of the greatest games ever made. I also would've told you that Ecco the Dolphin was one of the greatest games ever made, so maybe my scale is broken, but I think I'm right about Pikmin.

As I was playing Pikmin 3, I could not help but feel myself drift to thoughts of Pikmin 1. Despite loving Pikmin at least through 3 initially, I have not played 4 because that was well after the point I stopped just getting any game that had a brand I thought I liked on it, something that has always been true is that no Pikmin game has ever hit as hard for me as Pikmin 1 has. It's always been a bizarre dichotomy, I always acknowledged that, as games, the Pikmin series was constantly improving, becoming more fun with each entry, becoming better as games.

And yet, something about them never felt as right as the first game. For a long time I just chalked this up to nostalgia, that while I love Pikmin 1 the most, it's obviously not the best Pikmin game and as time would go on while I would continue to look at the first game through rose-colored glasses, I would eventually come around to preferring the newer entries on the level of being better games. Or, I would say "well, it's not that Pikmin 1 is necessarily even hitting harder for you, sure you love it the most but it's also the most unique". I'll admit, as much as I don't want this to be true, I have ultimately grown to value uniqueness. It's not a total blanket opinion, that something unique is inherently better and that later versions of said thing are always going to have diminishing returns, just this year already a serious contender for my game of the year is a sequel that has near identical gameplay and keeps almost the same tone, structure, and design as the first game, down to having half the game take place in the same location. But despite this I do tend to value a game being something all its own, even sometimes gravitating towards games most would find terrible due to them being weird, surreal, unique pieces of art.

This playthrough of Pikmin 3, however, was illuminating. As I was in the trenches thinking about what did and did not work about the third Pikmin game, at least in my opinion, I found myself gaining answers to these long held questions. How is it that, in a series that objectively gets better with every entry, I find myself underwhelmed by every single one after the first one? Does Pikmin 1 bring things to the table that other entries have been unable or unwilling to recreate? Why am I like this where I can't just like a game without making it a thing? I did not find an answer to the last one, for what it's worth. However, I think I have found my answer to the previous two: I think Pikmin 1 is the best Pikmin game specifically because it is the worst Pikmin game. Let me explain.

A summary of the first Pikmin game, AKA "What is Pikmin?"

In 2001, Nintendo released Pikmin for the Nintendo GameCube, barely missing the console's launch by a short enough time that most just consider Pikmin a launch title. Pikmin is noteworthy for being one of the last new IPs to be created by industry icon Shigeru Miyamoto, as he would spend the rest of his career as a general producer for most of the Mario, Zelda, and subsequent Pikmin titles, only really creating Nintendogs after this. Pikmin is, famously, as much of a technical showcase for the GameCube as it is a video game. It is built off the software from the tech demo Super Mario 128, a tech demo meant to show the GameCube's ability to render an impressive number of models who can all partake in individual actions and which was believed for many years to be an actual cancelled sequel to Super Mario 64. Kind of wish that were true, I would love to see what the game of "128 Marios on a giant pizza in space" would've ultimately entailed, however, Miyamoto and likely most of the other people involved see Pikmin as Mario 128's full release.

In Pikmin you play as Captain Olimar, an astronaut from the planet Hocotate. On the trip back to his home planet from a deep space mission, Olimar awakens to find himself stranded on an unknown alien world after his ship has crashed. The atmosphere of this world is toxic to his Hocotatian physiology and without the ability to easily find food befitting of his anatomy, Olimar is, at first, in a lose-lose situation, unable to repair his ship or survive on the planet should his resources run out. As he investigates this strange, alien world though, he quickly comes across his ship's missing engine, a potential glimmer of hope. If he could just find a way to carry the piece back to his ship, then he could work on getting the ship capable of flight again and maybe starting to search the planet's surface for the remaining missing ship parts. And this is when Olimar discovers the Pikmin.

Pikmin are these tiny little creatures native to the planet that Olimar names "Pikmin" due to their resemblance to a foodstuff on his home planet, the Pikpik carrot. Pikmin come in three distinct varieties, at least in the first game, the Red Pikmin who are generally stronger than the others and can easily exist in high temperature environments, the Blue Pikmin, who have evolved gills to allow them to move easily underwater while most other species of Pikmin drown, and the Yellow Pikmin, who are the most aerodynamic of the three species, allowing them to be thrown higher and further than the others. Also, only in Pikmin 1, the Yellows are the only species of Pikmin capable of using Bomb Rocks, last Pikmin games open up bomb rocks to everyone and give Yellows resistance to electric currents and the ability to conduct electricity through them. Individually, Pikmin are incredibly weak, serving as little more than foodstuffs for the various predatory creatures that call this planet home, but as a unit, Pikmin become incredibly strong, tearing through the same creatures that would otherwise seek to eat them and turning the tables on them, using their defeated foes as sustenance for their main spawn point, the onions, which will convert the creature into more Pikmin seedlings. And good news for Olimar, they're very receptive to his commands.

For some unknown reason, Pikmin naturally gravitates towards Olimar and his suit's built-in whistle. It's possibly behavioral, Olimar represents some sort of leader role the Pikmin are naturally lacking, someone with a more tactical thought process to turn their disorganized power into an organized battalion with which to combat their natural predators. It's possible that, due to Olimar plucking them out of the ground, they see the captain as something of a parental figure, in the same way birds may imprint onto a person if said person was there when they hatched. There's even the implication that the Pikmin were near extinction and Olimar's awakening of the Onion brought the species back. If Pikmin have some manner of higher brain function, they may be following Olimar due to gratitude for saving their species. Or maybe they just like the whistle. Regardless, the Pikmin become exactly what Olimar needs, an army to aid him in the acquisition and retrieval of the parts to his spaceship. Olimar's goal is now clear: use the Pikmin's aid to overcome the dangers of this strange alien world, retrieve the parts to his ship, and successfully repair it before his suit's life support systems shut down in 30 days.

Why I like Pikmin 1 so much

After overcoming the first day and the "setup" of the game, Pikmin wastes no time throwing you to the wolves. You start by landing at the second area of the game, named by Olimar the "Forest of Hope" due to containing his hope to get home, and here you enter a world that, simply, wants you dead. Giants roam the land, monsters that seem to even overwhelm your army of Pikmin despite its massive numbers just due to the size of the creatures. These monsters are also not passive, they are predators, seeking to consume not only yourself but to decimate your numbers. The singular kindness you have is that many of these predators are nocturnal, allowing you to sneak up on them to gain a small advantage over them in combat. Or at least this would be a kindness if it wasn't for the smaller but similarly deadly creatures that surround the giants. And that's not even to mention the things that have hidden themselves underground. This world is brutal and deadly, a harsh, alien landscape testing Olimar's will to fight at every turn. And I love it.

Pikmin 1 is, in my opinion, one of the best survival narratives in the medium's history. This world feels truly like a world that could exist, a planet with its own rules and ecosystem and complex evolutionary history that Olimar is a stranger to. The various creatures of this world don't feel like "just video game enemies" but rather animals, they behave in a very understandable way. Many creatures are opportunistic, not actively hunting the Captain and his army but instead lying in wait and only striking when an opportunity to feed presents itself. They don't tend to chase Olimar indefinitely either, they'll get tired and realize the hunt isn't worth it, which does serve as a convenient moment for Olimar and his Pikmin to regroup but also feels very real. The creatures that aren't predators that also stand in Olimar's way are equally dangerous but in ways that, while eccentric and not always logical (hi Fiery Blowhog), behave in very real ways. They feel threatened by a present predator, the Pikmin, and use their defense mechanisms in turn. Sure, eventually you'll learn the AI and these creatures will seem less real than they once did, but Pikmin 1 makes impressive strides to making this planet feel very real and make you feel as if you don't belong in it.

This feeling is enhanced by Olimar's diminutive stature. While you do find this out pretty quickly, there are recognizable obstacles to the player that give Olimar a distinctive sense of scale, it really starts to hit you in the Forest of Hope just how small the captain truly is. When you first encounter the underground insect enemies, the Shear grubs, you realize that Olimar is not just small, Olimar is "the size of random grubs" small. Olimar is a mere 1.9cm or .75 inches tall, just slightly larger than a cough drop. I feel this sense of scale is very important to making this world seem as brutal as it is, you are not a man fighting giants, you are an ant fighting spiders. You are tiny in this world of monsters, so small you cannot even begin to fathom what creatures eat the creatures that are eating you. It not only makes the world feel just that much scarier but also just that much more hopeless. Made even more so by the time limit.

As previously stated, Olimar's suit's built in life support system will only be able to keep him alive for thirty days. At the end of the month, he will simply die and, as depicted in the bad end, become himself food for the Pikmin to produce more. You are on a clock, every minute of every day counts, and you have to solve these puzzles, kill these enemies, build these structures, whatever is necessary for you to recover every necessary ship part before your life support runs out and you die. This sense of urgency it instills is made even more so by the fact that Olimar can only work during the day. See, most of the predators on this mysterious planet are nocturnal, and as such, the planet's surface becomes infinitely more dangerous at night. So much so that Olimar has determined that the best course of action is just to not risk it and to take off at sundown each day. Olimar thus only has 30 days, from sunup to sundown(about thirteen real world minutes) to repair his ship. Admittedly, this deadline is not as tight as one would think it is, as a new player back in 2009 with barely any idea what I was doing, having only seen part of a Let's Play to get my bearings, I still had about a week to spare on this timer. But it does give the game a sense of weight, of urgency. Every Pikmin death feels like it counts so much more when you feel like you have so little time. And if you have a full squad kill? That is an entire day of raising back up your numbers to be able to resume your mission, a day you may not be able to afford. I realize you're probably reading this being like "this seems bad" and that's fair, but I find this all to be infinitely compelling, a true test of survival.

Through all of this though, these insurmountable odds, this harsh environment, the deaths of so many of these tiny creatures who are selflessly protecting him, Olimar never loses hope. At the end of each day, Olimar writes a new entry into his journal. These journal entries contain everything from thoughts about how the day went to scientific theories about the creatures of this odd world (Olimar is a biologist by trade, which makes later games much weirder but we'll get there), to just talking about how he misses his home and his family. It's a lot of great character building, you learn a surprising amount about this kinda stoic, mostly silent protagonist through these end of day check-ins. He feels horror at the death of Pikmin and hope at a particularly productive day. Who Olimar is to you is based on your experience, what you did and didn't do, how effectively you did it. Most importantly though, it gives the player a much needed optimistic outlook in a game with impossible odds. Olimar never gives up, so you never give up. It's kind of masterwork.

All of this comes together to be one of the greatest pieces of survival fiction in the medium, at least in my opinion. It's tense, it's atmospheric, it tells a very gripping story through no dialog, sparse written pieces and player input. It's kind of superb, I genuinely think that Pikmin 1 is one of the greatest works of art that Nintendo has ever made. But, in spite of this, Pikmin 1 has almost been fully replaced by its successors in more modern times. There are some, like me, who are ride or die for Pikmin 1 but they become a smaller demographic every year as Pikmin becomes more popular, the fanbase expands, and frankly like. What's going on there?

Let's talk about Pikmin 2

I want to start the following segments by saying that I have never played Pikmin 4, the most recent entry in the series at the time of writing this. I'm not going to say "oh I'm never going to play Pikmin 4" because I don't know that, if I pick up a copy down the line I'll probably add it to my "shortlist" and who knows, I may play it, love it, and make all this work I've done writing about why I think Pikmin 1 is so good a massive waste of time. It's not a high priority for me at this moment, however and I'm not going to really consider it in this essay as a result. I'm more interested in analyzing the Pikmin series from my perspective as, I guess a lapsed fan is what you'd call it, and why when I was a fan of the Pikmin series, I felt this feeling that I still feel to this day of no Pikmin game reaching the heights of Pikmin 1. It's been rough, I've had to cut out a couple jokes already from this thing because they were little jabs at Pikmin 4 and I felt that was unfair given I hadn't played it or watched someone else play it. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, Pikmin 2.

The second Pikmin game, appropriately titled Pikmin 2, released for the GameCube almost three years after its predecessor in 2004. It sees Olimar successfully returning home only to immediately be hit with a string of unfortunate news; his employer, Hocotate Freight, has had to take out a large loan to cover a missing expensive shipment that was trusted to his incompetent coworker and noted worst person alive, Louie, and is at risk of going under. They have had to sell off almost all their assets, including the ship we spent so much time trying to repair in the first game, in an attempt to stave off financial ruin, seemingly to no avail. The company has been reduced to a singular ship and three employees, the President of the company, Olimar, and the aforementioned Louie who remains at the company despite getting them in this mess in the first place.

While the President is explaining all this to Olimar, a souvenir he brought from the planet from the first game, what appears to be a bottle cap, rolls out from his stores and into scanning range of the one remaining Hocotate Freight ship, who scans the foreign item and discovers that it is worth a considerable amount of money. This exciting prospect gets the President's wheels turning, and he immediately orders Olimar and Louie to head back to the planet Olimar had just returned from, scouting out more treasures hidden on the surface to save the company from financial ruin. The duo must go to new areas, battle new foes, recruit new species of Pikmin, and explore the newly discovered underground cave system in order to work up enough cash to pay off the loan and return home to their families.

Pikmin 2 is, in many ways, a massive improvement on the formula established in Pikmin 1. For starters, it gives the player a second captain to work with. This addition, just out the gate, gives you so much depth to the gameplay. The area design can get more complex and the puzzles more intricate because of your ability to work with multiple captains now. It's not quite where Pikmin 3 is where you can very easily control Captains to do certain tasks while you're off doing things, but it still lets you split up the captains at any point and walk them and a squad of Pikmin to wherever the work needs to be done. It's honestly kind of crazy how big of a leap in complexity this is on rip, you'd really expect them to play around with enhancing the single captain gameplay for an entry before doing multi captain gameplay.

Pikmin 2 also sees the introduction of dungeons to the series. These multifloor underground structures are where most of the game takes place. Time freezes while you are in a dungeon, removing much of the urgency present in the previous game, but exchanging it for this claustrophobic feeling of being trapped. Dungeons are home to all sorts of powerful enemies, including the games' numerous boss arenas, and contain many of the treasures needed to accomplish your goal, buried artifacts of whatever civilization used to call this place home. They are also something of an evolution of Pikmin 1's brutality, Pikmin 2 in general makes several moves to be more difficult than the first game as its balancing around the overpowered new Pikmin types, but dungeons especially are very difficult sections, including one dungeon that almost functions as a horror game as you are stalked through its halls by an invincible enemy seeking to murder all your Pikmin. The two new Pikmin types, for the record are Purple and White Pikmin, Purples contain the strength of 10 Pikmin and are able to stun most enemies due to their increased weight, making them your new go-to combat units, while White Pikmin are small, fast, and poisonous, making them efficient workers but also a good nuclear option against many foes as enemies take serious damage and/or get instakilled by eating white Pikmin.

I mentioned time and time is, in general, something Pikmin 2 gives you in spades. The first game notably had a strict time limit, Olimar had a month to accomplish his goal or he dies. Pikmin 2 has no such time limit. You can spend as much time on the game as you need or want and the developers take advantage of this. Pikmin 2 not only contains more to do than the first game, it contains so much more that Pikmin 2 is 4x the size of Pikmin 1. This includes something the first game was genuinely kind of lacking: a post game. A considerable amount of the content in the game, about 60% is only accessible in the post game. There's an entire area to explore with a bunch of dungeons but also due to the fact that the game ends after you reach a certain dollar amount, you have a lot to still do in the areas previously unlocked. Pikmin 2 does all of this, and so much more, for a singular goal: to make sure that the experience of playing Pikmin is way more fun for the player.

Oh look we're back to Pikmin 3

Before we finish off here, I would like to circle back around to Pikmin 3. Despite Pikmin 2's numerous gameplay upgrades on the original game, it was not without its controversy. There were always fans who found the second Pikmin game's far less compelling story and lack of any real survival elements to be a step back despite all its numerous steps forward, an opinion which only grew in the long gap between the second and third Pikmin game; largely due to the rerelease of the first Pikmin game making it more accessible and defining more to people what Pikmin is. And so we have Pikmin 3, something of a compromise between the two styles, an attempt at making "the ultimate Pikmin game".
Pikmin 3 is noteworthy for moving the story away from Captain Olimar and instead introducing not only new captains but an entire new planet to the Pikmin universe: Koppai. The planet Koppai is facing something of a crisis at the moment, the citizens of Koppai are, exclusively, fruit eaters and the planet's supply of fruit is running dangerously low. In an attempt to stave off their own extinction, they send out probes out into space to find a planet with the precious fruit they need to survive, eventually discovering a planet they name PNF-404 which not only has fruit, but has so much fruit that, should they cultivate it properly, could support the species indefinitely. An exploratory squad consisting of three people, Captain Charlie, botanist Brittney, and engineer Alph, is sent out to the planet and after crashing onto the planet's surface and getting separated, find Pikmin.

As you could've probably guessed, PNF-404 is the planet from the previous Pikmin games. The trio must find enough fruit to survive as they work to reunite themselves and find their missing Cosmic-Drive Key, which was lost in the crash and is a necessary component to being able to return home. But something also doesn't feel quite right to the trio. Why did their ship, which was functioning perfectly, suddenly crash onto this alien planet with no warning? Who is leaving all these memos they're finding all over the planet's surface? And who, or what, is behind this mysterious SOS they keep being led to?

You may have gathered from the synopsis, but Pikmin 3 is the most narrative driven of the Pikmin games thus far. Not only does it have the highest stakes seen from the series thus far and genuine mysteries for the player to unravel as they proceed through the game, but it also has a very traditional narrative structure to it. Whereas previous games opted for a very nonlinear style of "find things in whatever order you come to them and once you get x amount of things, you can unlock a new area to find more things in", each area in Pikmin 3 has a specific arc with very noticeable and satisfying plot beats and a specific, unique boss enemy at the end to let you know that you're done with the area's story. These individual arcs culminate in a pretty defined three act structure; Alph awakens on the planet and has to overcome obstacles to reunite himself with his missing crewmates Brittney and Charlie; the crew is reunited but receives a distress signal from another astronaut lost on the planet, who they believe to be the mysterious "Captain Olimar" whose logs they keep finding, and mount a rescue mission; the crew rescues "Olimar" but he absconds with their stuff, including their entire fruit reserve, forcing the crew to chase him down, only to find out it is not Olimar but worst person alive Louie, who informs them of where the real Olimar and their Cosmic Drive key is, leading the crew to mount another rescue mission. This very traditional story structure not only makes it a good jumping on point for new players, but also clearly shows that the Pikmin team wants Pikmin to be something more, a universe to tell stories in with its own history and lore.

Speaking of lore, Pikmin 3's more narrative focus allows it to finally answer some questions that have been hanging over the series for a while. As you'll recall, the major theme of Pikmin 2 is unearthing treasures, you find weird, lost artifacts of a civilization that occupied PNF-404 once upon a time. These treasures are, largely, real world items, often being name brands like Duracell batteries. This implies PNF-404 is our world, but it's our world far enough into the future that any recognizable creatures have gone extinct and our civilization has been reclaimed by the elements. Pikmin 3 effectively confirms this, its world map showing the areas from orbit and revealing they exist on what are clearly our continents, but far enough into the future that they have drifted, adopting new ecosystems and being almost unrecognizable. Australia and Antarctica are now one continent and are equatorial, Southern Asia is now near the pole and is a tundra, South America is a fair climate akin to the Mediterranean. It's a wild world. The other big question it answers is why all these astronauts are drawn to this planet and, more importantly, why they seem to crash land on it. These are major spoilers for Pikmin 3 so I won't get into it but it's a fascinating answer and one I would like to see explored in more detail in a future entry.

Besides the deep and more complex strategy gameplay mentioned earlier, the biggest thing Pikmin 3 does to evolve the Pikmin formula is the introduction of major boss fights. Previous Pikmin games have had boss fights, of course, but whenever you encounter a boss in those games it is not treated with the grandeur of a video game boss fight. They're treated more as bigger, stronger, deadlier regular enemies that require a bit more strategy than your average foe. Pikmin 3 though has some real boss fights, entirely unique enemies fought in giant arenas that drastically play around with the mechanics and scale of the game prior. These larger than life boss fights also serve as the end point for each individual area's storyline, with each area containing at least one major boss to defeat. This all serves to create a Pikmin game that's more decidedly game-y, Pikmin 3, in keeping step with Pikmin 2, wants to create a more decidedly fun player experience, something that both new and returning fans can get on board with and have a decidedly fun time.

Fun

E3 2009, Nintendo ended their show with an absolute showstopping game, Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Nintendo Wii. Released the following year Mario Galaxy 2 was, obviously, the sequel to Super Mario Galaxy, one of the most critically acclaimed of all time. Mario Galaxy 2 went on to be as critically acclaimed as its predecessor, with both games remaining on Metacritic's "best games of all time" list literally in back to back places at #4 (Mario Galaxy) and #5 (Galaxy 2). This sentiment was echoed by the general populace, Mario Galaxy 2 was incredibly beloved by the Wii's audience and especially fans of Mario Galaxy 1 who saw the game as more Mario Galaxy and, moreover, more fun Mario Galaxy.

While the original always had its advantages, it seemed pretty clear to most that Galaxy 2 was the better game, it took the strengths of Mario Galaxy and made a whole batch of new, more fun levels. It included new powerups, new minigames, new iconic levels. It's such an upgrade in seemingly every way that if you liked Galaxy 1 more, it was just because it hit at a point where it was more impactful to you. Or you're one of those weirdos who cares about story in a Mario game, but that'd be ridiculous right, who goes to Mario for the story(hi, it's me). But, as you probably know, this opinion did not hold.

In fact, Mario Galaxy 2's reception would be less positive upon re-evaluation. Basically everyone acknowledges it's a fantastic game, mind, but the idea that it is just a better Mario Galaxy 1 became more and more questionable as time went on. Mario Galaxy 2 is indeed a more fun game, but it almost sacrifices much of the magic Mario Galaxy 1 has in order to be that. Mario Galaxy has a stronger story, arguably it is still the perfect Mario story, it has a more cohesive theming as it almost never drops its space opera roots, it has this sweeping, beautiful orchestral score that makes it feel like an epic, something far more grand than we've ever experienced from Nintendo before. Mario Galaxy 2, meanwhile, feels more like a Mario game, it kind of adopts the obstacle courses in the sky level design that Mario would go on to be criticized for in the coming years, the theme becoming incoherent, the design streamlined to a fault and the story, famously, absent. In Nintendo's quest to make a more fun game, they scrubbed Mario Galaxy of the things that made it an impactful piece of art.

Pikmin 1 is undeniably the worst Pikmin game. It even says so in the title and it's something I have made clear throughout this piece. It's clunky and basic and buggy. Pikmin die for no reason, they get caught under things they are actively building, they're dumb as rocks with AI you would expect from an early era GameCube game and at times it ruins the experience. The time limit forces the game to be small and forces the player to feel rushed, barely being able to take in the scenery of this weird alien planet and punishing them for not being good enough at a game that does not adequately teach you how to be good at it. It often feels like it's from a bygone era where it expects you to buy it and just be your life for a summer, which is insane when it has such limited content and is also in a very new player unfriendly genre, the real time strategy game. Pikmin 1 is a product that needs to be improved on.

However, much like the earlier example of Mario Galaxy, I feel as though Pikmin loses something in its "improvements". As noted previously, Pikmin 1 feels like a very real environment, something that could exist when the player isn't there to experience it. Unfortunately I feel as though the later games really fail to capture this aspect of the game. Pikmin 1 certainly has its out there enemy concepts and encounters, late in the game there's literally a pig that has evolved to be a balloon for no discernable advantage as all it seems to do is float above water and push things in to drown them, but as the series goes on, this element becomes more and more lost.

Pikmin 2 makes a number of interesting decisions with regards to new enemies. Some of them are very fascinating plays on the enemies already seen in the first game, such as a variant of the series' staple, the Bulborb, who has evolved a hair-like adaptation to aid it in cold weather. Some of them are a little out there and don't make a ton of sense, like the Antenna Beetle, a bug evolved to replicate the distinct whistling noise that attracts Pikmin despite the fact that, as far as we knew, the entire Pikmin whistle thing is a recent development brought about the crash landing of Olimar. Strange, but I guess you can suspend your disbelief there. But some enemies are the Man-At-Legs.

Resembling a giant "daddy long legs" spider, the Man-At-Legs is a boss seen in Pikmin 2, appearing in one of the final dungeons of the game. The Man-At-Legs is noteworthy for its striking appearance, having a seemingly robotic body with four long spider-like legs coming out of it, three organic and one robotic. The creature constantly emits steam and other mechanical noises, and it attacks by locking onto an enemy at which point a gun comes out of its mechanical body and fires onto the creature it is locked onto. The Man-at-Legs is, as you could gather, a cyborg, a creature that has evolved a symbiotic relationship with the leftover technology of the planet that came before. There are a few other such creatures in Pikmin, the Groinks are notably fish that have evolved to hunt on land using mechanical components, but the Man-At-Legs I think is the most egregious of these examples. The idea of an animal naturally evolving a symbiotic relationship with technology is a neat idea, don't get me wrong. I don't know how feasible it is, but it's something that if handled well I could suspend my disbelief. Unfortunately the way they handled it is "a spider with a gatling gun".

The Man-At-Legs is an absolutely jarring enemy to throw at the player in what is otherwise a pretty grounded universe. Pikmin 2 has other eccentric enemies, as previously mentioned, but the enemies that have technological components are the breaking point to me. What once felt like a real planet now feels like a video game world. These enemies don't feel like they were designed with the idea that they are natural parts of the world, they feel like the designers wanted enemies that have guns and worked backwards from there. They sacrificed the world that had so elegantly been created for the sake of making a more challenging boss fight. They sacrificed their personality for the sake of making it more fun for the player.

Speaking of boss fights, I feel the way later Pikmin games handle their bosses also makes this world feel less tangible. Pikmin 1, of course, had its fair share of boss fights, with each main area having at least two to its name. However, in Pikmin 1 bosses didn't really feel like bosses in the same way that they would in the later games. Bosses felt like part of the ecosystem, the geography of the areas communicating to you "this is definitely a boss" but also making it feel very natural, as if these were simply more animals you were naturally stumbling across on your quest for survival. The sole exception to this being the final boss, the Emperor Bulblax, which takes place in an area dedicated to it. I'm not the most fond of this decision either, the Final Trial I feel misses the mark with what makes the rest of the game so great, but I can appreciate it on a certain level as sort of a test of the player's knowledge and resourcefulness.

Starting with Pikmin 2 though, basically every boss encounter is a final trial. The introduction of dungeons to the game also saw the introduction of more dedicated boss areas. Most dungeons end with this large room that exists only to contain a boss fight, as you would likely expect dungeons to. There is also a clear lack of bosses that naturally occur in the overworld on top of this. I feel this ultimately makes the bosses in Pikmin 2 feel less substantial. Despite the fact that sometimes they would be fascinating looks into the creatures that exist in the Pikmin world, like the Empress Bulblax which is a giant matronly Grub Dog who is constantly giving birth to young Bulborbs, it becomes difficult to see them as anything other than video game boss fights. This disconnect only becomes greater as the game progresses, dungeons may have multiple boss encounters which all choreograph that they are boss fights, the realism slowly vanishes as bosses become more eccentric, culminating in the games' final boss which is a giant insect that uses a sink and a vacuum tube to fight you.

Pikmin 3 is somehow worse about this fact, though. Despite Pikmin 3 in many ways being a return to form of Pikmin 1, including having many of the games' bosses just naturally appear in the overworld as if they're normal creatures inhabiting this planet, it makes a much bigger blunder by introducing major area bosses to the formula. The six major bosses of Pikmin 3 are not only entirely unique enemies unseen anywhere else in the game, but they all have incredibly specific battle arenas that all have little build up sections, have little intro cutscenes to show off the boss in all its splendor, and have entirely unique fights with specific mechanics and, usually, some sort of puzzle to be solved to gain the ability to attack them. They are very literally Zelda bosses in the middle of this Pikmin game, bosses designed to be more fun and more interesting than all that came before. Bosses are designed to have this feeling of grandeur to them, for the player to look at and feel like they've accomplished something, like they've defeated a real, honest to god video game boss. And they are fun, they are unique, interesting battles to both flex the designer's creativity and the players' understanding of the mechanics. But they also feel like they once again are sacrificing what made Pikmin so special in the first place for the sake of fun.

The dungeons introduced in Pikmin 2 are the biggest example of this idea, however. Dungeons are the most contentious mechanic in the Pikmin series to me. So much so that their reintroduction turned me off of Pikmin 4 almost entirely. I think if you have read this far, you can imagine why. Pikmin originally operated under this idea that it was a race against the clock, you only had so much time to accomplish goals for the day before the night comes and you have to leave the planet due to hostile nocturnal predators. While I find this element extremely compelling as it adds to the survival nature of the story, admittedly a lot of people find time limits like this anxiety-inducing. I have had plenty of trouble getting people into one of my favorite games of all time, Majora's Mask, due to the time limit at the core of its gameplay. So Pikmin 2 effectively removes it with the introduction of dungeons.

Dungeons are by far the mechanic that robs Pikmin 2 of the thing that made Pikmin 1 so special. I've talked a lot about Pikmin 1 feeling so real, like a functioning world that Olimar is a trespasser on. And dungeons, wholesale, undo this idea more than any other. Not only does time freeze in them, making the entire day restriction pretty superfluous all told, but dungeons make Pikmin's world feel like a video game the most. You'll enter one and it'll have this absolutely unhinged scenery ranging from "an actual cave system" to "what appears to be leftover plumbing from the world before" to "an illogically hollow space that looks like a classroom". I'm pretty sure at least one dungeon takes on the appearance of being in the sky despite all of them being entirely underground. These are not lost places, buried ruins of a forgotten civilization that Olimar and Louie are uncovering, these are meaningless backdrops, designed to be visually stimulating without any care for what they mean to the atmosphere.

Not only that but they completely ruin the whole idea of this being a functional ecosystem in the first place. You are bombarded with loads of rooms of just enemies hanging out together with no rhyme or reason. The idea these were all real animals was always limited by the game's AI, mind, which is why in all Pikmin games you rarely see enemies interact with each other. But due to dungeons' tight, enclosed areas, it can't help but draw attention to how much the creatures of the Pikmin world are just video game enemies. They are there to serve a specific purpose, to be a problem for the player, and have no greater context beyond that. What was once a world full of such potential, such promise, such ecological value now feels like nothing more than it is, a video game. A good video game, mind. But a video game.

Pikmin 1 is not a great video game. It's arguably not even a good one anymore; over two decades have passed since it came out and it has aged considerably. It's mechanically lacking, so much so that an entire type of Pikmin is relegated to doing an incredibly specific job because the intended mechanic for it couldn't be implemented. The AI is terrible, Pikmin are incredibly dumb, putting themselves in danger constantly just from losing track of the player or their pathing back to base being terrible. I think I have genuinely had more Pikmin die falling through a bridge they're building than to any of the numerous non-boss enemies in the game. The game can be almost entirely solved on your second playthrough, making almost all of the core points to its favor seem kind of trivial. Honestly, I feel like it can be solved pretty easily on your first playthrough, I only didn't get to the optimal number of days on the first try because of a bad run in with a Wollywog or two. It is a rough experience, especially with all the later Pikmin games that just improve the gameplay a hundred fold. Pikmin 4 even contains something of a better remake of Pikmin 1, with an even tighter time limit to battle against. Literally I have had multiple friends attempt to sell me on the fourth game entirely on this mode, saying I have to play it if Pikmin 1 is my favorite (this mode is locked behind a game I'm unsure if I would otherwise enjoy). As a game Pikmin 1 is the worst entry in this series.

But Pikmin 1 is also a totally unique work of art, doing so much right that its successors fail to capture. It's something that can only be created by someone who has an entirely out there idea with no clue if it's going to work and the wherewithal to push forward regardless. And I feel as though Nintendo did to Pikmin what it always does, smooth out its edges when its edges are the things about it that make it brilliant. Pikmin is now a better video game, there is no argument to be had there. For all my talk about what does and doesn't work about Pikmin 3, I had more actual fun playing it than I ever had Pikmin 1, despite my clear bias towards the latter game. But, I feel as though in making Pikmin a better game, they made it a worse piece of art. It has lost something in its numerous iterations, something that was seen as a problem to be solved by a company that puts fun over art.

I cannot in good conscience say we would be better off with a world where Pikmin prioritized the things I loved about the first game. The public has certainly spoken on that fact, Pikmin continues to sell more and be enjoyed by new players with each entry. And I cannot bring myself to mourn the fact that all those people are choosing a more fun game. That's the medium, fun should be paramount, I recognize the artistic significance of Soulsbornes and yet I don't play any of them because I don't think they're very fun! But, to me, Pikmin 1 will likely remain the best Pikmin game for many of the reasons people would cite it as the worst one.