Entropy Pump →

aka Hammerin Harry

• It’s sorta hard to figure out all the different versions of this game, but the rom I’ve got came from the Famicom version and as far as I know has no English translation patch. This does not cause any problems, there’s hardly any text in the game until the ending screen. I think maybe it was released in English in Europe(?) but I didn’t want to deal with any NTSC vs PAL nonsense, I just wanted the original game as written
• Anyway this game is super fun, and there are several more for other consoles that came out over the years, and I’ll probably give those a try as well. It’s short and sweet, with a basically-fair difficulty curve. Nothing is too hard or too easy.
• You can tell it’s a later release because it also looks really good. The sprites are super crispy, the animations are smooth, and each level is distinct with several unique enemies.
• The controls get a little wonky when there are tons of enemies on the screen, especially when it comes to making precise jumps. This doesn’t really affect anything except in the very final level when there’s a lot going on on-screen at once during a very precise jumpy-section. This annoyed me but I couldn’t stay mad for very long because it’s not like I had to try it and fail very many times, because the final boss is super easy.
• This ending screen is only for the first loop; I did not make a run at the second loop

• This is a really awesome little platformer that I HIGHLY recommend. You don’t need to have seen the show, and you don’t need an English patch (if one even exists)
• Not just “good for a licensed game,” it’s an actual good game full stop. A little bit on the easy side, but the music and artwork and character and enemy designs are so good that you just don’t care.
• Best viewed as a pretty chilled out experience where you’re not gonna be asked to work very hard in order to see some very cool stuff. Even if you don’t think it’s easy, it’s not gonna punish you. The continue system is generous.
• By and large, the actual level design is stronger than the boss fights (especially the final boss). They are beautiful to look at, and you’re rewarded for exploring
• The area where most licensed games fall down is IMO the actual gameplay. Plenty of them can show you characters and settings that you like because you know them, but many of them sorta stop there and don’t dial in the “feel” of what it’s like to play the game. One of the more impressive things about GS Mikami is that they did not slack off when it comes to gameplay. The controls are smooth and sensible, moving around in the world feels great, and when you die you never feel like you got your ass beat by “jank”
• Depending on who you are, the following could be good or bad: When I say the game is easy, mostly what I mean is that there are almost 0 hard-memorization checks. Nearly every single thing about every level and every enemy can be reacted to. I don’t think this is always great in every game, and I like it when a game has some memorization checks, but this is the biggest contributor to that “chilled out” feeling I mentioned earlier.

• I only played this because I wanted to play Suikoden II, and planned on doing the thing where you use a Suikoden save to start the game so you get whatever extras that comes with
• By and large, not a very good game, but it is pretty short for an RPG (my time was around 26 hours) so it’s not like the agony drags out for weeks on end.
• For those who don’t know what Suikoden is, the entire “hook” of the game is that there are 108 possible party members, from which you will choose 6 to make your party at any given time. You “recruit” them throughout the game, and after being recruited they go to a castle that serves as your home base.
• This is a very, very good idea, which in this game is not executed very well. There are two big problems:
• (1) Even though you can have 6 people in the party at a time, this is almost never true in practice. The Main Character can’t leave, which is understandable, but every new chapter of the game seems to have at least 1 required party member taking up space. Even at the very final battle, there are 3 required members so you’re really only choosing 3 more out of the possible 106 left. It feels almost like the HM system on Pokemon. Like there’s this terrible game mechanic always standing in the way of your absolute freedom
• (2) Despite (1) being true almost all the time, you can tell the developers really wanted to make it so that any party can win the game. It is very, very clear that you are supposed to choose the characters you like, rather than trying to minmax. For this reason, the game ends up way WAY too easy. There is not a single difficult battle in the game, never a time when you have to use your brain power to think up how to exploit weaknesses or devise some kind of special strategy, literally nothing at all that the game is asking you to do as far as execution.
• Which, honestly, (2) would almost be forgivable if it wasn’t for (1) being in the way.
• There are also things about the game design which aren’t even annoyances, but seem poorly thought out. For example, there is an MP system which works like Final Fantasy 1, where every spell has a set number of times you’re allowed to cast it, and those casts come back when you sleep in an Inn. In Suikoden, these spells come from Runes which you attach to your character. Each character can only have exactly 1 Rune attached, and you get whatever spells the Rune comes with. If it has some really high level magic on it, and you don’t have the MP for that, you raise the character’s level until they get an MP and become allowed to cast it. Some characters, however, come with Runes attached to them which cannot be removed. Their 1 Rune slot is forever taken up by something special to their character. The problem is that some of these characters have MP, despite their Rune not providing something that requires MP. Their MP can literally never be used, because their Rune cannot be switched out, so what is the point of giving them the MP at all?
• All of that being said, I do still think I’ll move on to the 2nd game eventually, because I know this is a long-running and beloved series, and I know there are a lot of good ideas here and they just needed to be refined across a few more games.
• There is also a LOT else they got right. The character avatars and sprites look awesome, their personalities are all distinct, which are mostly believable and lovable. The music is famous and for great reason. The sound design and story design is great.
• Speaking of which, this game is also one of the rare few JRPG’s where the story is coherent. It has a beginning, middle, and end; characters have their own motivations which you can understand; events logically follow one another from one plot beat to the next. Credit where due on that; you don’t see many JRPG’s where that’s true so I gotta call it out when I spot it

• A truly excellent port of a truly excellent game. Like several other retro games featured on this site, the Switch version is part of a larger pack (“The Dominus Collection”). The price of the entire pack is worth it just for the port of this game.
• I don’t want this entire review to just be about how good M2 is at porting software, but every affordance you could think to want is here; nothing about these games “doesn’t translate” just because they were originally DS games.
• By this point in the life of these Castlevania games, I think Konami had learned to avoid a lot of common problems. For example, in Order of Ecclesia, yes you can grind as much as you want, but it’s never really needed if you’re not hunting for rare item drops or something. By the same token, there is no Symphony-of-the-Night issue where you’re essentially invincible by the end of the game and there’s no challenge any more.
• This playthrough was just a normal run through Normal difficulty. I did not do the extra hidden areas just outside Dracula’s castle, or go for total side quest completion in Wygol village.
• The glyph and union system never ever gets old; learning new setups, cycling between them, figuring out the best combos for different bosses, all extremely rewarding.
• Some of the boss balancing it a little wack; there are definitely main-game bosses which took me way more tries to beat than Dracula himself. But you kinda forgive this because the balancing is so perfect in all other ways. Enemy weaknesses and resistances are also taken very seriously which means you’re always working the glyph system.
• And it’s a damn good thing the regular enemies in regular rooms are well-balanced, because the overworld of this game is HUGE. Yes you’re in Dracula’s Castle by the end, but you have to fight through several earlier levels, themselves each filled with several bosses, in order to get there.
• Everyone who likes metroidvanias even a little bit should absolutely play Order of Ecclesia. It is Mt Rushmore of the genre.

• Very fun little adventure game / collectathon which can be as deep as you make it.
• There is a “linear” way to play the game, where you ignore all side missions and only go straight for the missions that will advance the story
• However, side missions are REWARDING. They get you power-ups and better guns, which brings us to the WHOLE THING that this game actually is:
• The weapons system. There are so many different guns, which do so many different things, it never gets old.
• While barely any weapons are required to finish 99% of the game (if you’re good enough), there is still a sense of choosing the right loadout for the right situation. Yeah you CAN do almost everything with just the wrench. But you are rewarded for not doing that
• As indicated in the ending screen, I got barely any secrets on the first play through. The replay value is I assume because on a new game you keep all your stuff, you’ll know where to go for every secret, and you can keep piling up money and finish buying all the upgrades.
• The only thing about Ratchet & Clank which is NOT that great, is the final boss fight. There are 2 ways to beat it, and neither requires any skill whatsoever on your part. (1) There’s a super ultra giga weapon you can buy earlier in the game if you farm enough bolts (don’t remember the name of this and I didn’t get it) or (2) bring enough bolts into the fight that you can always use the PDA to replenish all ammunition. There is no way, as far as I know, to beat the final boss with the wrench.
• Taking the skill out of the final boss fight just makes it boring / anticlimactic when there are so many sections in the rest of the game which do ask you to do something skilled as far as platforming, combat etc.