Beaten

Zelda Picross – My excitement for Breath of the Wild prompted me to use come My Nintendo points to get this 3DS game. Picross is great in general, and this is a solid little freebie. Picross is Picross; it is pretty hard to do it badly. This is kind of a no frills themed Picross game, but there are some good puzzles here. It is much less meaty than the technically free Pokémon Picross, but all of its puzzles are available from the beginning. If you have the My Nintendo points you should definitely pick this up.

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – read about it here. And here.

Super Mario Bros 3 – read about it here.

Blaster Master 0 –

This prequel/remake of Blaster Master captures what was great about the NES game while providing numerous quality of life improvements that make it a delightful, breezy play. There are still flaws, the out of tank gameplay is passable at best rather than actually very good, but exploring in a jumping tank remains a ton of fun. The original Blaster Master was a near classic, a really good game doomed by a few flaws, but each sequel got further and further away from what made the first game great. Blaster Master 0 captures that perfectly.

Ongoing

Dragon Quest VIII –

I am a little over halfway through this game and I am surprised at how much I am enjoying it. I liked this game a lot when I first played it on PS2, but it isn’t a very complex game, with perfectly fine but straightforward story and somewhat basic gameplay. But there is some kind of magic in this game’s simplified approach and well realized world. Even with the somewhat compromised graphics there is just something comforting about this game. It is a throwback, but it play like you remember games playing instead of how they actually played. Plus, Yangus remains a top 10 JRPG party member. I should have a full post ready as soon as I beat this.

Super Mario 64 – This is one of the most important games ever made and despite showing its age it is still a lot of fun to play. It suffers a little from being the first to get 3D action even remotely right, but that also means that we have 20 years of using this game a baseline when making 3D action games, so there are certainly plenty that have done it better. Still, despite its primitive graphics and occasionally wonky controls, few games can compete with the sheer variety and inventiveness found in this game’s level design.

Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber – I played through the first chapter of this after downloading it on a whim. I still love this game, and once I’m free from Breath of the Wild/Persona 5 I’ve got something big planned to celebrate my love for this very underrated game.

Yakuza 0 – I barely played this game, but I’m not abandoning it. It just fell by the wayside for Breath of the Wild. I didn’t play enough to actually have much to say.

Robotrek – a full article will be coming soon. I didn’t finish this game, but I am more than ready to move on from it.

Upcoming

Persona 5 – I recently both purchased a PS4 with my income tax return and switched my Persona 5 preorder from PS3 to PS4. It is now going to be my first game on a new console instead of my farewell to an old one. While Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE was decent stopgap, it has been nearly 10 years since Persona 4 hit. I can’t get my hands on this soon enough.

Super Mario World – Mario 64 comes first, but this is on the docket just after. I’ve played this game a lot and could probably write it up right now, but that is kind of beside the point when replaying the whole series.

Yoshi’s Island – I’ve already got this started and I am going to continue from the middle of the second world, but it will wait until after Super Mario World at least. I might actually play Mario Sunshine first, since I think I’ll tackle the 3D entries as almost a separate series.

Lufia 2 – With Robotrek out of the way, I intend to move on to the last couple of games in my 25 SNES games project. I am going to finish this, I swear.