Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin

 Rating: 8/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸😸😸

Ages: 10+ (combat is on the complicated side, but if your younger one just likes riding a monster around, it might work for them)

My son bought Stories 2 and played it quite a bit after playing through Monster Hunter Rise. I saw the combat in Rise and thought, "Nope, too much coordination needed for that." But then I got bored and was looking for something new and he suggested I try playing Stories. "It has turn-based combat. You get to ride monsters around. It's mostly exploring things." Yeah, he knows what I want in a game.

So, I've spent many hours playing this game. It's like Pokemon meets Dragonwarrior. Beat up monsters, steal their eggs so you can hatch your own monster, then ride that monster around to beat up new monsters so you can steal their eggs so you can hatch your own so you can ride that monster around...

There is a story underlying the monster-collecting. It's an okay story. Sometimes it feels like the game and story were meant for the 5-8yo crowd but the game mechanics feel more like a 10-15yo audience. Either way, I found most of it enjoyable. There is a lot of space to explore and a lot of monsters to collect and level up. You can play dress-up with your character's armor and weapons. And who can't resist beating up big mean dragons with a giant teddy bear that puts them to sleep half the time?

It's a quirky mix of serious RPG and silliness that somehow works for me. I've made it through the main storyline and most of the side quests but still have a long way to go before I can even get close to 100% on this one. There is so much content!

This is mostly why I bought myself a switch and another copy of the game. There are a few quests and things you can only get with partner missions, which require a second switch and a separate copy of the game. My son and I had fun playing through a couple of them already and I'm looking forward to doing more.

Overall, it's a little complicated with the combat and everyone I've talked to who's played the game wants to squish Navirou the companion cat who is beyond annoying, the story is a little pretentious and cliché, but there is so much to do in this game and so many ways of doing it that I can overlook those issues. It's an expensive cartridge game, but I've definitely gotten my money's worth of entertainment out of it.

Excuse me while I go steal more monster eggs because, you know, Gotta catch 'em all! Monster-mon!

DragonQuest Builders

 Rating: 10/10 😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻

All Ages

(No image because sometimes the internet is stupid)

DragonQuest Builders is what happens when you mash up DragonQuest/DragonWarrior and Minecraft. It results in a very fun game with loads of freedom to play it your way.

Just to be very very clear, this is the FIRST dragonquest builder game, NOT the second. I played the demo for DragonQuest Builders 2 and detested every minute of it. They took out everything I loved about the first game and gave me more of the things I didn't like.

DragonQuest Builders is a 3D cube world similar to Minecraft. You can smash things, dig up dirt and other cubes, explore everything you can reach, fight monsters, and build things. For me, the problem with Minecraft was that the world was too open. There were no goals or storylines, just piles and piles of raw materials. I like having some kind of checklist or guide to my gameplay. But I also like the wiggle room to do it my way, not just be railroaded down a plotline. DragonQuest Builders delivers on this.

You start with basically nothing except a mission to find the ruins of a town and try to survive. There are ghosts that roam at night and yes, they will murder you very quickly early in the game. Unless you can find a closed room to shut yourself into and a bed to sleep on. Because sleeping is the best way to avoid ghostly attacks. So you build yourself a dirt hut, roofs are not necessary in this game, and start searching for clues. The missions you get are pretty open-ended - mostly "go find X" - with no time limits. You do eventually have to do them to progress to new areas and new materials, but you could spend weeks just slaughtering monsters and collecting resources if you want. And other than following the blueprints you are given to get the prize from doing it their way, you can build the buildings any way you want. The room 'recipes' are just a list of things that have to be in the room for it to count as that type of space. Some rooms/buildings will give you bonuses so they are worth exploring.

There are boss monsters in the stories that are really annoying. I spent hours building my town just the way I wanted it, then the boss comes along and just trashes everything. So I smashed everything and started over. Just like in the Six-Million-Dollar Man show, "we can build it again, bigger and better." Or something like that.

The biggest drawback and worst part of this game are the boss fights. They don't feel like they are connected to the rest of the game play. They aren't even like the boss fights in the original games that this is based on. They are too finicky with the controls and timing and coordination. I handed off the controller to my son and had him fight the bosses.

Overall, this game is loads of fun. I adored the open-ended nature of most of the checklist items. It was fun to see how I could experiment to build the towns. I had one with eight stories above ground, most of them floating on a single staircase. When the monsters got inside my obsidian wall, I just knocked out the stairs so they couldn't trash the rest of my town, and slaughtered them.

The game also includes a free-play level that lets you pretty much play the Minecraft version of the game - no checklists, no goals, just sandbox free play.

The art is adorable, mostly. Even the ugly poison slug monsters are cute. Most combat is simple enough I was fine with it, although I still detest the wyverns. Stupid sneaky guys cost me more than one life.

LEGO Jurassic World

 Rating: 8/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸😸😸

All Ages

LEGO Jurassic World was a lot more fun than I expected. It's a mashup of three of the dinosaur movies, done with Legos, of course. I really only watched the first movie, so I'm not a huge fan of the franchise. I've also been burned with a lot of the more recent Lego games - buggy, not fun to play, confusing, overwhelming visually, and just not a good experience for me. I'd also heard that you didn't get to play as a dinosaur in this game so I was going to give it a pass.

Until I found it on sale.

Cheap.

So I took a chance on it. And I'm glad I did.

You DO get to play as a dinosaur. As a whole lot of different ones in fact. They're a bit clunky to control, especially the bigger ones, but still - you get to be a LEGO DINOSAUR AND TRASH EVERYTHING!!! Because that's really the point of Lego games - destroy everything you possibly can.

The overworld on this one takes a little getting used to but I really like the way they have it laid out. You are on different islands that unlock as you finish story levels. There are loads of puzzles and challenges to tackle in the overworld, most of them can be cheesed as a raptor, as my daughter figured out. It was so frustrating for me to do all the legwork to get one of the puzzles solved only to get to the final jump point and she'd already cleaned out the gold brick.

Overall, this was a fun game. Not too difficult but not too easy, either, with plenty of Lego smashing to go around. Some of the story levels were painful to play through. I hated the stuff falling through the truck scene where you had to dodge it while hanging on a rope. At least Lego gives you infinite lives even if they steal all your gold coins when you die. But when you have to play through a level two or three times so you can collect everything (sometimes more but we won't talk about those levels or my need to 100% Lego games), bits like this one just get painful to the point where I paid one of my sons to do that part of the level for me. Multiple times. After once or twice, I had to start raising the price. 

This is my way to get around parts of video games that require too much coordination or skills. I bribe my kids to do it for me. Since they are all adults now with years of video game experience, they can usually beat the boss or challenge with no trouble. Me? I struggle with games that require me to be coordinated or jump or process lots of visual input. I still enjoy the stories so I keep struggling. And no, practice isn't going to improve my skills much at this point. It's a losing race with bad eyesight and arthritis. Getting old isn't for wimps.

Back to the game.

I wouldn't pay full price ($30-60 depending on if you like cartridges or not), but I'm glad I picked it up on sale. I definitely got my money's worth of fun out of running around as a raptor destroying things and terrorizing the tourists.

LEGO The Incredibles

Rating: 6/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸 

Ages: all ages, although younger children and impatient adults might get frustrated by some of the fiddly mechanics

I'm a fan of Lego games, have been for years, but a lot of the more recent ones left me feeling meh about the whole Lego game thing. Too many of them were buggy and felt like re-treads of previous game mechanics. A lot of the game just didn't make sense and the stories were just straight re-tellings of the movies they were based on. The fun little easter eggs and character goofiness was missing.

I loved the Lego Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, and Pirates of the Caribbean games. I enjoyed most of the earlier superhero ones and the Harry Potter ones, but the Hobbit was not fun. It included an unwinnable race and a lot of flaky programming. The Lego Movie game was too weird. The more recent superhero ones felt just off.

I bought Lego Jurassic Park (review coming soon!) on a whim when it was on sale cheap. And had a ball playing it. My daughter (18yo) decided to play with me for a while, but only if she could just play as a raptor. The whole time. This game was NOT play-tested for a raptor in EVERY situation. We crashed it multiple times. And laughed hysterically at the silliness of it.

Lego The Incredibles does not have dinosaurs, unfortunately. But it has superheroes with lots of superpowers. This is a good thing and also a bad thing. The good is that you can fly, shoot lasers out your eyes, swim underwater, throw fish bombs, slam the ground really hard, and a bunch of other things. The bad is that the powers are only labeled by an icon so it's hard to figure out what the powers are if it's not obvious. There is a way to find text titles for the powers but I was at over 80% of the game finished before my daughter found it. They are a bit overwhelming, too, trying to find the one character that has that one rare power that you  need in that one spot. The other bad is also a good, if you're an anarchist in these game like me, it's really easy to cheese a lot of the jumping puzzles with a flying superhero. Or a helicopter, which I found and stole in the first half hour of gameplay.

The game crashed a lot, too. I'm not sure why. We were just playing it. Maybe because the game felt like it was mostly programmed to be a one-person game with the second player added as an afterthought, although there were places where it was almost impossible to play as just one player. It was weirdly uneven in this regard.

By far, my biggest gripe about the game is the way the story levels are integrated. In the older games, the cut scenes usually came just at the beginning and end of the level with a short one maybe in the middle at the checkpoints. This one had the story/animated sequences so integrated into the play areas that it was really hard to figure out if I was actually playing or watching a movie. And some of them were SOOOOO LOOOOOONG. Seriously, I took a lot of bathroom breaks in the middle of playing levels because of this.

The story levels also took place in the overworld half the time, which was even more confusing than the long cut scenes. Sometimes you could go off and explore and do what you want and other times you were limited to the story characters and settings which were the same but not. Yep, so confusing to play.

A lot of the extra overworld prizes, like the gold bricks and building bricks, didn't become available until after you did the crime wave for that area. Which would not be that big of a problem, but the crime waves were tied to story levels so you don't get half these goodies until after the game is mostly finished. What's the point in giving me a special brick that has great superpowers that would have been very helpful early in the game after I've already done all the things it might have helped me do?

Money also has little meaning in this game except as a way to keep score. You only purchase a few things and they don't cost much. I remember scrounging coins like crazy in the earlier games so I could buy that one character I unlocked that I wanted to play SO MUCH, but this game? Meh, most of them you just get once you find them. No money necessary.

My other major complaint is the extremely long load times especially the ones where the screen goes black for almost a minute. I kept wondering if the game had crashed while loading the next scene.

Overall, it's been a fun game. The overworld is amazingly large. There are plenty of places to explore, hidden treasures to find, simple puzzles to solve but a lot fewer than previous Lego games, plus loads of fun characters including a lot from other Pixar movies. Would I have played full price for this? Probably not. But it was worth the ten bucks I dropped to get it.

I'm still missing the silliness from the previous Lego games, though.

DragonQuest/DragonWarrior III

 Rating: 15/10 😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻

Ages 8+, violence (but not animated), some scary bits of the story, but mostly it's all still cartoons, a few very mild innuendos and gambling but those aren't necessary to the story

DragonQuest III is seriously one of the best RPGs I've ever played.

The game is a huge open-world experience that just keeps giving. You think you're down to just one last area, but wait! There is more, lots more. And that final boss? Not the final boss, there's more. The ending is hands-down the most satisfying ending I've experienced. That said, I'm not sure it would have had the same impact if I hadn't played the first two games. So go play DQ 1 and 2 first, then get ready to spend hours with this one. The story is that big, the world is that big, the whole experience is that big. Very little of it is grinding for levels. That happens organically as you search for the next pieces of story.

In this one, you are the HERO. You can't change your class. I tried. But you get to pick three friends to travel with you - names, classes, abilities, and all the rest. And if your friends aren't what you want for a particular area, you can swap them out with other friends. In fact, there's a whole inn in the first city just for your friends you create to hang out and wait for you. There are so many subtle things you can do with your characters in this game. If you want to micro-manage them in combat by picking what they do, you can. Or you can have them play automatically. You can set their preferred strategy for the auto-combat mode, too, so they will focus on healing or buffing the party or just slaughtering whatever monsters you are fighting.

They did some tweaking to the balance in this update which just made it that much better. I loved all of the story, although I really hate the apes. Still.

The world has very few hard barriers. You can explore whatever you can reach. The worst that happens is that your party gets slaughtered, but then you resurrect back at the first city. That only happened to me twice in the entire game. Usually if one of the other members of my party died, that was my cue to run away and get higher level characters before I attempted that particular challenge again.

There are some strategies to what class you choose for your companions and when to switch them to other classes. But mostly it was just fun to experiment and see what happened. A lot of the newer jRPGs get really complicated when it comes to combat. DQ3 keeps it on the simpler side, which I appreciate.

There are fun side stories and side quests to complete, that are actually part of the main storyline. The whole thing was just such a joy to play. It ticked off all my boxes for a good game - rich storyline, fun characters, some silly moments, monsters to fight that weren't too hard, a few boss fights that stretched my strategy muscles, and not too much grinding for levels or resources.

I'm a fan for life of the first three games in the DragonQuest series. This one was the perfect culmination for the trilogy. I actually cried over the ending, partly because I wanted it to keep going but mostly because it was such a satisfying and emotional arc over all three games.

Seriously, if you like the old-school exploration RPGs, go buy these three.

AER: Memories of Old

 Rating: 8 😸😸😸😸😸😸😸😸

Ages 5+, some reading but you can play the game without it

And again, no DragonWarrior 3. I really need more time to do that game justice.

AER: Memories of Old was another purchase-on-a-whim. I don't regret any of it. This is a very zen game. It's visually beautiful and doesn't really require any kind of rush or hurry.

You are one of the few remaining people in a world fractured into floating islands. You have the power to transform into a bird and fly everywhere. I have to admit, when I got lost early on with no idea what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go, it was fine. I spent a couple of hours just flying around and exploring until I picked up the threads of the story again. But that's kind of the point of this game. The story is deep and meaningful, but only if you as the player fill in between the very sparse lines. There are several temples full of puzzles to solve. The game is overwhelmingly visual. The puzzles are pretty much all visual as well. There is no combat or tricky maneuvering, except maybe some jumping in one of the temples but even that was pretty simple.

The story of a major cataclysm is told through ghosts frozen in one point in time. You read their dialogue and make your own interpretation of what really happened. It feels layered in on top of the basic game play and not really integrated with it. One of the rough edges to the game, but it doesn't really detract.

Overall, I found this game relaxing. The music, what there was, was quiet and calming. The flying was fun. If you get twisted around and fall through the clouds, it's no big deal. You just show back up on the last save point you visited. I found the story intriguing and wished there was a little more of it and that it was more integral to the game play, especially solving the mysteries of the temples.

It's a beautiful little game and well worth the few dollars I paid for it.