This is going to be the second game I didn’t complete. With Lufia I just got bored and couldn’t force myself to keep with it at the time. I don’t feel the same way with Uncharted Waters: New Horizons; it may in fact be a masterpiece. With this game I am drowning. There is just too much. It is a detailed and complex game with little in the way of tutorial or explanations. It is just the sort of game I would have spent months when I was younger, now I just don’t have the time to devote what could be hundreds of hours to learning the ins and outs of this game.

There is a lot to love about this game. The graphics are not the most impressive on the SNES, but while the characters are squat, they are sufficiently detailed to get things across. It actually looks a lot like Final Fantasy IV, a game that was released three years before Uncharted Waters: New Horizons was. Still, the look of the game is more simple than unappealing. It manages to convey a lot of information with a small number of sprites. The trading and exploration systems are fairly deep, especially for a 16-bit game.

Where the game trips me up is just how much there is to do in this game. There are eight protagonists to choose from, exploration, trading and combat to sort through as well as a metric ton of other factors to take into consideration. Each of the characters has their own storyline and their own focus. Otto and Catalina are focused more on combat, being a privateer and a pirate respectively. Then there is Ernst and Pietro, who have stories mostly about exploration. There is also Ali, who is a straight up merchant. And finally Joao, who does a bit of everything. I tried Catalina, Ernst and Joao and was able to make a little bit of progress as each of them. But the game is big, and I never really felt like I knew what I was doing or making any real progress.

The game starts with a brief story segment outlining each character’s goals. Then you outfit a ship, guessing blindly at first at exactly how to make that happen, and set sail. You can fire on other ships, though there isn’t really any explanation on how combat works you’ll have to figure it out on your own, or stop at other towns to buy or sell goods. You do have to keep track of your supplies, like food and water as well. There are just so many things you could do, with little to no in game explanation on how or why you would do those things that the game makes me feel as though I am drowning. I am doing things, but I am not sure I am making progress or even treading water.

I’ve tried to read FAQs and watch videos to get a better idea of how to play the game and what I’ve learned is that I need to play the game a lot more than I have time for. I have enjoyed what I’ve played so far, but this game is too much of an undertaking for me to really complete. Still, from the dozen or so hours I put into the game it is clear that there is something here. I just don’t have the time or inclination to plumb its depths and find its treasures.

I’m not finishing this series this year, that is becoming increasingly obvious, but that is not going to stop me from trying. So on with Wild Guns, a simple and delightful game from Natsume. Wild Guns is a shooting gallery game. Your character stands at the front of the screen and shoots enemies in the background. That is just about all there is to it. Still, Wild Guns remains a delight, as much due to its simplicity as despite it.

The game gives the player two characters to choose from, Annie or Clint, obviously named for Annie Oakley and Clint Eastwood. The story is that Annie hires space cowboy Clint to help her get revenge on the bad guy (who I am sure has a name but I can’t find it for the life of me) for the death of her family. The characters look initially like they came straight out of a western, but the world is full of robots and other science fiction stuff. The setting is one of the game’s greatest strengths. The Western and Sci-Fi themes mesh surprisingly well. The big, colorful graphics that flesh out this old west filled with killer robots is the stuff that all 16-bit games aspire to.

While the game is exceedingly difficult, it is rather simple to control. The d-pad controls both the character and the shooting reticule. The character moves around the foreground, shooting at targets in the background. You start with a pea shooter, but that can be upgraded to a shotgun or machine gun, as well as a few others. There is also a secondary weapon of a lasso that momentarily stuns the enemies you with it. You also have a screen clearing bomb and a melee attack for the handful of enemies that come into the foreground. At times bad guys will also toss dynamite at the player which can be tossed back at the bad guys. There is quite a bit the player can do for being stuck on a flat plane, but it all comes intuitively. Which is good, considering how ridiculously hard this game is.

I played this game on the WiiU VC, with its rudimentary save state. Even with that considerable crutch, I found the game nearly impossible to complete. On easy difficulty. While the game is only about an hour or so long, it is not a game designed to be beaten in just an hour. Wild Guns requires the player to learn the game. There are a lot of enemies and a lot of bullets coming at the player. Knowing where to move and where to shoot is vitally important. I guess it is technically possible to react fast enough to clear many of the games hurdles, that is essentially what I did with my save state aides to get me through when my reflexes failed me, but this is a game that requires some learning if not explicit memorization. But that learning is how you play this sort of game, it is no different from Star Fox or Contra 3.

Wild Guns is the definition of cult classic. It isn’t a great game, not is it a game designed to pull in a large number of devoted followers. It does what it does exceptionally well, but this kind of shooting gallery game is always going to be something of a niche interest.

Sony Imagesoft’s game output isn’t exactly well regarded. Most of the games they put out during their brief existence, which lasted from 1989 to 1995, were tepid movie tie-ins. The did make Solstice and Equinox, as well as publish Super Dodge Ball and Game Freak’s (of Pokémon fame) Smart Ball, but mostly it was a lot of junk. Near the end of their existence they put out Skyblazer, a surprisingly good action platformer.

Skyblazer bears similarities to classic games like Castlevania, Mega Man and Demon’s Crest. It especially shares a lot with the last two. The protagonist, Sky, can cling to walls and climb around levels that way. It gives the player a lot of mobility, especially in the tight confines of the fortress stages. He is just a fun character move around. The game also looks good, with big colorful sprites and sounds good, with some classic SNES tunes. It is all an around well-made game, though not a flawless one.

The biggest problem with the game is that the levels only barely seem designed rather than just haphazardly assembled. There are a lot of stages and they are usually very short. With a protagonist as mobile as Sky it can be easy to skip the vast majority of obstacles with judicious use of his special skills. There are lots of little short cuts that don’t seem to be there intentionally, that only seem to exist because the level designers didn’t take into account just how acrobatic that player can be. It doesn’t help that a lot of the stages are super short while the fortress stages can be rather long. It makes for an uneven experience at times.

Still, that doesn’t derail what is otherwise a great experience. The bosses are big and good looking, as well as being a solid mix of challenge and fun. While some of the stages are bit awkwardly set up, they are still mostly fun to play through. There is a story, but only barely. The evil Ashura kidnaps the Princess Arianna, so the valiant young Sky must rescue her. That’s about it.

I don’t really have a lot to say about this game. It is an above average action game. I wouldn’t quite put it up there with the other game’s I’ve already mentioned, Mega Man X, Castlevania or Demon’s Crest, but it is definitely well made. Nothing it does, however, inspires much comment in me. It’s good, but that’s about it. Maybe I’m just making these games seem like work by forcing myself to play them. If that was the case it wasn’t enough to derail this experience completely. I’m still going to finish the last seven games, even if there is not chance I do so before February. I’ll have another one ready in a week or two on Wild Guns or Secret of Evermore.

I long thought that Super Mario RPG was a game that passed me by. It is exactly the sort of game I like, but somehow I never managed to play. I love Mario games, I love JRPGs, I love SNES games, I love Nintendo and Squaresoft; it was perfect confluence of my interests in 16-bit gaming. The commercial for this game, as terrible as it may be, was one of the first I remember that really got me excited to play a game. Despite spending all of my time, and money, on SNES JRPGs, though, I never ended up playing Super Mario RPG at the time. I had a few chances to play it over the years. It was one of a handful of SNES game’s at my aunt’s house, but my only chance to play them involved staying at her place in the summer, doing farm chores and eating stale cheerios with weevils in them for breakfast. So that didn’t really work out. Neither did when it first came to the Virtual Console or any of the many chances I’ve had to emulate it. It was just a game I missed out on. Until this year.

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is a great example of a Squaresoft SNES JRPG and a Mario game, but it doesn’t really meld them. It does a good job of turning Mario mechanics into RPG mechanics, but there is a fairly clear delineation between the Squaresoft stuff and the Mario stuff. I think that has a lot to do with why characters like Geno and Mallow have rarely appeared after this game. There are likely some rights problems, but the bigger problem is that they just don’t fit in with Mario crew. They stand out as something clearly different. That is not to say they don’t work in this game, this game itself is something different. And something great.

Squaresoft did a great job of making Mario into an RPG. They kept the heart of the character by focusing on platforming like challenges and a timing based attack system. It manages to feel like a Mario game despite the awkward perspective. Really, the games it great but it biggest flaw is that isometric perspective, which makes a lot of jumps harder to judge than they should be. It is clearly a Mario world, inhabited by Mario characters. Honestly, though I am coming to it late, it is clear that it helped set some of the details of Mario’s Universe. Those details were further codified in Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi, as well as the sports games, but this one did some work as well.

Despite having a lot of Mario touches, though, this more accurately captures the feel of a 16-bit Squaresoft game. The Mario stuff is window dressing; this is the guys behind Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI at it again. (I know it is not literally the same guys) No one was better at making SNES JRPGs than Squaresoft. Those two games I mentioned are among my favorites of all time. I’ve played a lot of mediocre 16-bit games chasing the experience of playing those games for the first time. Some get close, like Breath of Fire 2, but most just feel like games. There is something indescribable about Squaresoft’s best games at the time; they felt like they were taking full and perfect advantage of the system. Great music, well balanced battle systems and stories that were just deep enough. While I wouldn’t put it quite with Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VI, once Super Mario RPG gets going it is right there on the next rung down.

I really wish I had played this game back in the day. It would likely be among that select group of games that I try to replay every couple of years: CT, FF6, Earthbound and Suikoden 2. As it is, I finally understand why so many people consider it one of the best games on the system. It was the first full collaboration between Squaresoft and Nintendo one of the last games Squaresoft released for a Nintendo system for nearly a decade. At least they split on top.

The SNES was not the go to system for shoot ’em ups. It had its fair share, UN Squadron is a personal favorite, but the system wasn’t really known for blazing fast action games. The lack is mostly due to the SNES’s tendency to bog down when more than five or six sprites appeared on the screen. See Gradius III for a prime example. The other shoot ’em ups on the system are what makes Space Megaforce so astounding.

I don’t know that Space Megaforce is a great game. It is too hard for me, which isn’t really a point against it considering my limited shmup skills, but it is a barrier to my ability to enjoy and judge the game. It is, however, quite an achievement, running as fast and as smooth as it does on the SNES. Space Megaforce, which is the terrible American title of Super Aleste, is an SNES shmup with no, or little, slowdown. It is hectic and challenging and most of all fast. It is unlike any other game on the system. Space Megaforce was made by Compile, a company known for its excellent shooters and Puyo Puyo before it died and was reborn as Compile Heart, which is known for churning out terrible JRPGs. Whatever wizardry Compile employed to get Space Megaforce to run as smoothly as it does has, as far as I know, never been replicated.

Its power up system manages to be robust without being as punishing as something like Gradius. In Gradius, your ship eventually becomes a tornado of destruction filling the screen with projectiles, but when you die it takes forever to build that power back up. It is almost easier to just restart and build up you power during the easier first level than to try to rebuild in the middle of a more difficult section. Space Megaforce does not give the player the same breadth of options as that game, but it is easier to keep going after a death. There are 8 or so weapons, all of which can be powered up by grabbing more of the same power ups. All of them have multiple fire patterns as well. Getting killed sucks, it always does, but you can grab on power up and be back in some form of business.

There are flaws, the biggest I encountered being the uneven length of the stages. Some stages seem endless, just super long and repetitive. The challenge is as much in endurance as it is in skill. Some are short, ephemeral bursts. I don’t know that either choice is wrong, though those long stages are not to my preference, but a middle ground would have worked better. The more I think about it the less sure I am that the stages were excessively long, but they certainly felt that way, which is as big of a problem.

Space Megaforce is pretty great. It is a stellar example of a genre that wasn’t really the SNES’s forte that somehow just ignores the weaknesses of the system to give a fast, twitchy experience.

This is exactly the sort of game I was hoping to come across in my deep dive into the SNES library. This is the sort of game that made the SNES’s reputation. From the big colorful graphics and distinctive sound to the sprawling yet abrupt plotline, this game is vintage SNES. And I loved every second of it. I don’t know that it ranks up in the upper echelon of SNES games, next to A Link to the Past or Chrono Trigger, but at worst it goes on that next step down. Illusion of Gaia is a game that wears its heart on its sleeve, one that aches to instill strong emotions into the player. It occasionally achieves that in its own melodramatic way.

Essentially, Illusion of Gaia is a Zelda game with all the exploration removed. And all of the tools. It is very simplified compared to A Link to the Past. You play as Will, a young boy with slight psychic abilities and a flute. He can hit things with the flute and spin it around to pull certain objects toward him. He eventually gains other abilities, like a slide and dash attack, but his repertoire stays pretty limited. The other big skill is his ability, at save points, to turn into Freedan, a dark knight who is stronger and tougher than Will. He too gets a few abilities, like a ranged attack, but they play mostly the same. At the very end you get a third form that hits very hard and you get too late to really do anything with. Most of the game is spent switching from Will to Freedan whenever appropriate. Luckily, the dungeons themselves shine. They get to be sprawling mazes that don’t so much have puzzles as just navigation difficulties. It is supremely satisfying, especially combined with the game’s progression mechanic.

In Illusion of Gaia, the player gets stronger, for the most part as there are a few other stat upgrades to be found, by defeating every enemy in a room. That gives a bump to the player’s HP, Attack or Defense. Since enemies don’t respawn, each dungeon sees the player slowly but surely eradicating every enemy to get all of the possible stat increases. It is an addictive, though occasionally tedious, system. As good as the gameplay is, this game would still be something of an also ran if it wasn’t for the real heart of the game, and that is its world spanning story.

Illusion of Gaia doesn’t have the greatest or most nuanced plot of all time, but its sheer abrupt melodrama is hard to match. It opens with Will meeting a Princess and soon a globe-trotting adventure unfurls. Will is the player character, but he is joined for most of the quest by Kara the Princess, a trio of his school friends named Lance, Eric and Seth, fairy-ish girl Lilly and Will’s cousin Neil. That is quite the big troupe, especially considering that Will does all the work. Still, each town and area allows each of these character’s story to develop a little further. Kara starts out spoiled and impulsive, but by the end of the game she is slightly less spoiled and impulsive. Lilly helps the most early on, using her magic powers to turn into a dandelion and help Will out. When the team is separated by a shipwreck, she tends to Lance, who develops amnesia. Eric, the youngest member of the group tends to stumble into trouble frequently. And Neil makes tools of various efficacy. Sometimes he his plane flies you to your destination, sometimes it crashes into the ocean. The game constantly throws unspeakable tragedies at the player, and the team just bucks up and keeps going, for the most part.

The only thing really holding the story back is the localization, which if I was feeling generous I would call passable. It is hard for story beats to have the proper impact when they aren’t incomprehensible. I would Seth as an example, if I had a clue about what happened to him. When the team is shipwrecked, he is eaten by the leviathan named Riverson. Only he then becomes Riverson? And later he is dead so his spirit helps the team out? I really don’t know what happened to him. Still enough of it comes through to give the game an overwhelmingly melancholic feel. You find a golden Incan ship, with the skeletons of the Incans trapped inside waiting for their king to return. There is a constant thread of people from everywhere you visit being forced into slavery (but your cousin Neil’s parents apparently). At one point you need to get some animals to travel through the desert, so you play a game like Russian roulette in order to get them. Only it turns out your opponent needed the money to make a new life for him and his pregnant wife. The whole game is full of stuff like that.

The main plot has to do with a comet possessed by a dark force that is making everyone act strange. It is getting closer to Earth, and only Will can help repel this evil force. It is more weird than interesting. But there is an air of hope throughout all the tragedy. It makes the game something of delight to play. There is nothing to do but keep forging forward. This is exactly the kind of game that I hoped to find playing all these old SNES games. What is sad is that I bought this game at a garage sale more than a decade ago. I should have played this game years ago. Now that I beat it I am very disappointed in myself for not having done so.