u/RuefulWaffles

Howdy folks! Waffles here. It has, admittedly, been a while. First I had two major end of semester projects due, then I was playing the longest game I've played for this project so far (and the next three are also long, so expect another large gap). But I have not abandoned this, and I'm back with the first half of the F games!

As a reminder, since it's been a while: I'm playing these in alphabetical order (mostly, I am arranging series in proper chronological order), and I'm committing to at least a half hour of each game. I'll note games that got more time. Without further ado, let's begin!

F-1 Race: Having played other Game Boy racing games, I had relatively low expectations for this one. I was actually pleasantly surprised. It's not as simplistic as some of the other GB racing games, and was in fact kinda hard. Took me a good few tries to actually do well enough on the first race that I could move on. I'll admit that I didn't play much past that (racing games aren't my thing) and that I don't think the Game Boy is necessarily a good platform for racing games, but if you wanted to play on one Game Boy, this is probably the direction I'd point you in. 6/10

F-15 Strike Eagle: I'm mostly just impressed they tried to put a combat flight sim on Game Boy. It's not actually fun to play. I tried looking up the manual to see if that would help, but I could not actually find the manual online anywhere. What I could find was gameplay footage of the MS-DOS version, which actually looks cool. Don't play this version. 2/10

F1 Pole Position: Four of the games in today's batch are F1 games. They're all kinda same-y. I'd still recommend F-1 Race out of the four, but this one was fine? Just not as good. 5/10

Faceball 2000: A delightful first person shooter. Sure, it runs at like, ten frames per second, but it's surprisingly competent. It's a lot of fun, actually. I'll admit that I don't know that I can recommend this one, because it did make me feel ill, but perhaps if you're not prone to motion sickness and migraines, you might have a better time. This is also a port of a PC game, and that version is probably better if you really want to play this, but this one is worth checking out. 6/10

Fastest Lap: Another F1 game! This one's the worst. It's top down with pivot controls. Terrible. 3/10

Felix the Cat: I actually really liked this one. It's a fun little platformer. It does very much feel like "We have Kirby at home," but that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you like fun little platformers (with terrible bosses) and want to kill forty-five minutes, you can do worse. This one was fun enough to get a recommendation. 6/10

Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge: Yet another F1 game! I'll admit that I don't know enough about F1 to know which, if any, of these is the best actual representation of it, but F-1 Race is still my recommendation. 5/10

The Fidgetts: God this was just awful. It's a platformer where you have to switch between the fat mouse and the skinny mouse, and I'll admit that I didn't get past the first level because the time limit is incredibly punishing. You have basically no room for error, which just kinda sucks. I think, without the time limit (or with a looser one) it'd be worth playing, but as it stands, it's just awful. 1/10

FIFA Internation Soccer, FIFA Soccer '96, and FIFA Soccer '97: These are basically the same game. They have slightly different menus, but they all play exactly the same (the third one actually plays slightly worse because it's slower). Confession time: I actually kinda like soccer. I played in school before my knee stopped working, and while I was never any good at it, it was a good time. I was looking forward to these, but...yeah. They're not good. I acknowledge that the answer here is "capitalism" and soccer's incredibly popular internationally, but I genuinely don't get why they kept trying to put sports games on the Game Boy, which just is not meant for it. If you want to play a soccer game, play on a real console. The Game Boy isn't where you should be looking for good sports games, tbh. 2/10, 2/10, and 1/10

Fighting Simulator: 2-in-1 Flying Warriors: Have you ever done so badly at a game that the game itself stops and tells you to read the manual and try again? Yeah, that happened here. So I did. I tracked down a PDF copy of the manual (which I could actually find for this game!), and...yeah, it didn't help. I think that part is necessary to point out: I did the extra work and it didn't help. The issue is the controls. The first part of adventure mode is a fun, if simple, side scrolling beat'em up. The first level was a bit short, but like, that's whatever. Then you get to the boss fight, and guess what? It's a completely different control scheme. This is a truly baffling choice, and to be honest, the manual doesn't help here at all. All around just an awful game. 1/10

Final Fantasy Adventure: As of right now (5/12/26), this is my favorite game that I've played for this project. Just, truly a fantastic game. I've played Sword of Mana before (and also a bit of Adventures of Mana, which I've had on my phone for years and is a more accurate remake of this game), but this is my first time playing this version. And you know what? I think I prefer this one. It's just so charming? It plays a lot like Link's Awakening (or rather, Link's Awakening plays like this, since this game predates that one by two years) rather than the other Mana games, but that's not really a downside. It's also very much a Final Fantasy game rather than a Mana game -- you fight the Four Fiends, there's a chocobo, and the FFI classes show up as NPCs and enemies -- but all the seeds of what would become Mana lore are here. The translation's a bit rough, but that's mostly due to the character limits and what can be fit on screen at any given point. The sprites are nice, the music's nice, and overall I had a lot of fun with this one. 10/10

So that's the first half of the Fs! That brings us to 150/501 games, or 29.94%, with an average rating of 3.89/10. Of those 150, I'd recommend 22 (the list will be posted below), which is a recommendation rate of 14.67% Like I said, the next batch of games includes some more long ones (all three Final Fantasy Legend/SaGa games), so that one will likely take me another few weeks at least to get to. I hope you had fun reading these, and I look forward to posting again in the future!

Recommended Games

• Alleyway
• Amazing Penguin
• Avenging Spirit
• Balloon Kid
• Battle Arena Toshinden
• Battle Unit Zeoth
• Bionic Commando
• Bomberman GB
• Castlevania: The Adventure
• Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge
• Castlevania Legends
• Catrap
• Contra: The Alien Wars
• Donkey Kong
• Donkey Kong Land
• Donkey Kong Land 2
• Donkey Kong Land III
• Dr. Mario
• Disney's DuckTales
• Disney's DuckTales 2
• Felix the Cat
• Final Fantasy Adventure

Howdy folks. You may know me as that crazy woman who's playing Every* NA Game Boy Game in Alphabetical Order, but I do, in fact, play other games. Such as Persona 5 Royal. And you what? Despite everything I'm about to say about it, I think I actually mostly enjoyed my time with the game. I really enjoyed the dungeon crawling, and Press Turn/One More is always a delight. Fair warning, I'm going to discuss the entirety of Persona 5 Royal here, so expect spoilers.

But before we can talk about Persona 5 Royal, we need to talk about Radiant Historia.

Radiant Historia is a JRPG for the DS released by Atlus in 2011 (in North America, at least). I'll admit that I never played this version; I was a broke college student so as much as it tempted me, I was never able to actually afford to play it. However, as luck would have it, in 2018, as Atlus is wont to do, an updated version was released for the 3DS, called Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology. This is the version that I ended up playing, and as is the style of Atlus rereleases, it has a bunch of new content of dubious quality. And that's what we're gonna talk about now! Spoilers for Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology here, click at your own risk. >!A recurring plot thread in Radiant Historia is the increasing desertification of the world. Without getting too much into the nitty gritty of the plot, the desertification is caused by an out of control spell used by an ancient empire to try to ensure their prosperity, and the only known way to halt it's spread now is through regular sacrifices. But one of the sacrifices decided he didn't want to die, went rogue, and caused a bunch of problems. The true ending of the game has you convincing that sacrifice to do their duty, while all the side quests you've done to unlock the true ending are about researching ways to halt the spread without using sacrifices. It's bittersweet, but it's a nice conclusion to the game.!<

>!So of course, the 3DS content exists to undermine all of that.!<

>!The new epilogue added in Perfect Chronology reveals that the desertification is actually caused by a big scary monster in the spell, and if we do the new side quests, we can fight this big scary monster and solve the desertification that way! And then we don't need a Sacrifice at all, and everyone's happy, and the former villain just kind of gets to go wander the world and enjoy his new life, while the hero settles down with his girlfriend and the Atlus Remake Girl gets a happy ending with her boyfriend, who was previously the big scary monster causing the desertification, but now is a regular guy again. Happy endings for everyone! And there's no hard work needed. Those themes the original game had about peace and prosperity being hard work? Yeah, ignore those. All you've gotta do is beat up a boss, and the world's problems are solved.!<

Basically, if you don't want to read all those spoilers: I enjoyed the original game, but when I got to the new content, it was disappointing and didn't feel like it worked with the context of the game.

And that's what the Royal content in Persona 5 Royal feels like. Full disclosure: I had not played the vanilla version of Persona 5 prior to this, but it's still very obvious what the new content is, due to the semi-awkward way in which the new character only rarely interacts with the original characters so that they didn't have to call them back to record too many new lines.

I'm not going to discuss the plot of the vanilla game too much, because it's not super relevant to what my actual issue is. I think it's poorly paced, and that the nature of social links means that the characters are at their least interesting during the actual plot, but again, not super relevant. No, what I'm gonna talk about is the third semester.

The central premise of Persona 5 Royal, if you don't know, is that the Phantom Thieves (your party) are changing the hearts of various people to get them to be better people, basically. This ranges from minor changes (your various side quests) to full on stopping people from being mobsters (your main quests). And then, if you've met the requirements to unlock it, after you've finished the main game, you get the third semester. The "villain" of the third semester is Takuto Maruki, a psychiatrist who also has a Persona, and has been using that power to change people's hearts to take away their pain. And this is where the game fell apart for me.

You see, there's no real argument you can make that what Maruki is doing is wrong that can't also apply to the Phantom Thieves, and no argument you can make that the Phantom Thieves were doing good that doesn't also apply to Maruki. You can argue scale, I suppose, but when the only real argument you can make for why an action is good when your heroes do it and bad when someone else does is "well they're doing more of it," that feels like an admission of failure. And worse, the game never examines this. Your party never realizes that actually, they're fighting a guy who's doing exactly what they did. It's just that they were doing it to people who were so obviously evil that the universe itself created manifestations of their evil to be dealt with, which apparently makes the whole "forcibly changing people's minds to make them do what we want" an acceptable action.

Sadly, this kind of follows from the rest of the game. There's a section earlier where there is an unintended consequence to the Phantom Thieves' actions, and they have to deal with that moral quandary by -- oh wait, no, that one actually wasn't their fault at all, turns out there was a third party that caused all the bad stuff, the Phantom Thieves were right the whole time.

And that's kind of my issue with Persona 5 Royal. Every time it seems like there might be an actual, interesting discussion of what the Phantom Thieves are doing, and the complicated morality of it, nope! The game just moves right past that. No complicated moral discussions here, just a fun little romp where every time we get close to an examination of your party's actions we throw up a distraction and hope you forget about it. It's ultimately narratively unsatisfying, and left me wishing I'd stopped at the original ending instead of continuing on to an ending that seemed to undermine the game's messaging.

Now, once again: I actually enjoyed playing this. The dungeon crawling was fun, the Palaces had fun designs, and the combat is top notch. I also (attempted) to play in real time, starting on April 8th of last year and playing only the parts of the game that happened on that day. I really enjoyed playing the game that way, and I'm probably going to try to do the same with either Persona 3 or 4, both of which I'm still interested enough in the series to play. I had fun with the game bits of Persona 5 Royal, I just wish the writing had been more interesting.