My Top 3 Games of Heisei

If you're a piece of weaboo trash like me then you'll know that on May 1st the era of Heisei is coming to an end and it will change to Reiwa.  If you aren't a piece of weaboo trash and don't know what that is the name of the era in Japan changes when the emperor changes.  This effects the Japanese calendar so right now the year is Heisei 31 but as of May 1st the date will change to Reiwa 1.

I saw a tweet that said that Japanese gaming magazine, Famitsu, asked 7000 people what their top 3 games of the Heisei period were.  Heisei started in 1989 so that's a huge pool of games to choose from.  The top 3 for them was Chrono Trigger, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Nier: Automata.  So of course like the self important little shit that I am, I'm going to tell you my top 3 games of the Heisei period.

#3 Hotline Miami

This entry could have been one of so many things.  It could have been Undertale, it could have been ANY Shin Megami Tensei game, it could have been Dragon Quest 11.  Ask me tomorrow what my number 3 would have been and I promise you it will change, I just can't really pick with great certainty.  The game that sticks out in the front of my mind right now though is Hotline Miami.  Released in 2012 (Heisei 24) it was a violent, retro style half action half puzzle game that had you don an animal mask and mow down men in white suits.  It was fast, frantic, fun as hell and became one of my core speedrun games for a long while

If you've not played it then please give it ago.  Great gameplay, great soundtrack and great style.  It's cheap on Steam so don't dilly dally, go buy it NOW

#2 Shadow Hearts

Shadow Hearts is a sort of unique JRPG released in 2001 (Heisei 13) on PS2.  It follows the adventures of half Japanese, half Russian protagonist Yuri Hyuga as he travels across Asia and Europe in an attempt to stop all manner of nightmare creatures and an English gentleman from doing all manner of unspeakable things.  The games most interesting point was its "Judgement Ring" battle system, every time you did ANYTHING in a fight you had to play a sort of little timing mini game that would decide the outcome of your action.  Miss the ring and you'd fail your attempt but get right near the edge of the hit zone and you'd be awarded bonus damage/healing or, lets say if you were using a stat-up item, a greater increase to that stat.  The game also had a sanity system where if your characters fought for too long the stress of battle would cause them to go berserk and you would lose control of them.

Yuri also had an ability to fuse into one of about 21 demons to aid you in battle, all with really cool abilities.  If you REALLY knew what you were doing you could get some secret demons too that would essentially break the game and make you an unstoppable power house.  Getting them was a challenge but when you pulled it off the reward was very much worth it.

It also has a sequel, Shadow Hearts 2: Covenant which is also worth playing but nothing quite beats the charm that the first game had.

#1 Panzer Dragoon Saga 

I mean, I gush about this game a lot, did you really think it could be anything else for me?  Released in 1998 (Heisei 10) for the Sega Saturn, Panzer Dragoon Saga is easily one of the best RPGs I've ever played in my damn life and almost nothing has come close to besting it.

I could go at LONG length about why this game is so good but instead I'll just link my playthrough of it and you can see it for yourself

I'm also learning how to speedrun it currently so drop in the stream to see my progress with that.

If you can play it for yourself you ABSOLUTELY should.  Don't question me, just do it.

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Of course, 1989 to 2019 is an extremely long time so I'm sure almost everybody will have a different set of 3 games that mean a lot to them.  If you feel like telling me your top 3 then let me know, maybe you'll really love something that I've not heard of and I can find a hidden gem that I missed during my youth

Silly Gaming Habits

The great thing about gaming is that if a small group of people play a game then they'll usually play it in slightly different ways.  Weather it's going stealth or guns blazing in Deus Ex, genocide or pacifist in a game like Undertale or even something as simple as party selection in an RPG, everyone experiences a game in a slightly different way.

That said, there's a couple of weird habits that I have when playing games that I think are shared between quite a large number of players no matter what your play style is.  So because I'm feeling a bit lazy today here's a numbered list of weird habits I have while gaming 

1) Item Hoarding 

This is a bad gaming habit that I feel A LOT of people have.  Probably the most prevalent when playing a survival horror game but present in all genres.  Let's say your playing Resident Evil and you find a sick grenade launcher and a handful of grenade rounds.  That's going to come in handy for when you fight a boss or come across one of those Hunters right? Fuck no! What if you need it for later?! That constant worry that if you blow through all your cool shit now you'll make the next part an almost impossible struggle.  

What this results in is you getting to the end of the game with stacks full of all the best shit and the credits roll with all the cool stuff rotting in a box or at the bottom of your pockets.  This is disgustingly true for almost every RPG I've played.  I end up killing the big bad guy and he goes down in a ball of flame while my inventory spills over with max heals and other useful crap that I never used "just in case".  Even know as I play Dark Souls 3 I have so much ember I could probably use 3 in all the remaining boss fights and still have some left over but there's something in the back of my mind that just won't let me use them.  

2) Rounded Item Numbers 

This one is extra stupid because it doesn't affect ANYTHING but if I don't do it I get a deep feeling of disgust for myself.  

Let's say you're playing an RPG and you come across a town.  You go to the shop and they are selling  potions.  You look into your inventory, you're carrying like 63 of the things and you haven't needed to pop one in a LONG time.  Well that doesn't matter because now you HAVE to buy two more to make that 65 or you ain't ever leaving this town.  In extreme cases even 65 is no good, and you'll either have to buy 7 more to make it 70 

I knew one guy with such an extreme case of this that when playing Final Fantasy 1 together I tried to leave a town with 19 potions in my inventory and he violently wrestled the controller off me to backtrack into town to buy 1 more because "it's just not right".  Never fuck with a man and his supply numbers 

3) Multiple Saving
I feel that this habit comes from the same part of the brain that's responsible for making you horde items.  You've finished a session in whatever you're playing and you go to save.  You hit save and you watch it until the "save complete" sign comes up.  Then you reach for the power button but you stop dead right before you push it....."did I just save?"  So you sit back down and do it again and this process can repeat a number of times before you're fully convinced that your progress has been properly recorded.

This creates an extra layer of mental torture when you play a game that doesn't have traditional saving and just auto saves everywhere.  You see the little icon for the save and you turn off the system but you just can't trust it.  You spend the whole day wondering if it really did save and it eats at your sanity until you get home only to realise that everything was totally fine.  I've had situations where I've turned off a game like that, only to return to the console about 5 minutes later and powered it back on again JUST to make sure.

4) 100%ism
Now if you're the kind of person who buys only one game, completes it fully and then trades it in then congratulations you're some kind of mutant that needs to be captured and tested upon by the government and also this point doesn't apply to you.

Many however suffer from the dreaded backlog.  Games sitting on a shelf or in an online library just waiting to be played but you can't yet because you've not finished the X amount of other games that came before it.  A backlog is made worse if you're the kind of person who's obsessed with seeing a little 100% marker or getting the platinum achievement or whatever for whatever game you buy.

Personally, my backlog is so huge that I can't bring myself to even consider buying certain games because I know that if I start playing it my backlog will never progress or, even worse, I'll never get around to playing it.  Breath of the Wild is a great example of this since I really want to own my own copy of it but I know that I'll chase that 100% so obsessively that the hundreds of games in my steam library alone will continue to sit, unplayed, for god knows how long.

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These are the ones that plague my life but if you have any other weird ticks or habits when it comes to your gaming let me know in a comment! 

We Don't Need A Female Link

One of the games that came out of E3 this year that actually sort of surprised me was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.  It looks really cool and is sort of giving me weird Souls vibes which is something I would never expect from a Zelda game.  It's definitely something I'll be keeping an eye on in the coming months and I'm looking forward to getting my grubby mitts on it.

So of course, like whenever there is a large piece of gaming news that people are happy about, certain outlets had to run articles crying about a lack of a female link.  These so called "journalists" even got interviews with some people from Nintendo and asked them about it.  They were told that they considered the idea for a while but ultimately scrapped it because it didn't fit in with the game they wanted to make, fair enough?  Well of course not, this idea makes them sexist, women hating misogynists because the cry baby social justice regressives can't get their way and Nintendo will not be bullied on the matter.

Link doesn't need to be a fucking girl anyway, he's already the protagonist of a well established and much loved series, suddenly changing him to female would be just weird.  People have argued that they could at least put in an option but that doesn't work either because this isn't a game where you fucking role play.  You are playing as Link, he is the hero and you join him on his adventure through Hyrule as he breaths on wild things or whatever this game is going to be about.  Link is not you, you do not need to imprint your personality, or lack thereof onto him.  You don't see anyone moaning about how Samus from Metroid should be changed to a man for the exact same reason.  Both Link and Samus are good characters in their respective games and people like them the way there are.  I don't need Samus to be a man for my to sympathize with her quest to save the galaxy because I'm not an overly sensitive little shit stain.

It's not like Zelda is a particularly original or hard concept either.  It's about a character going on an adventure to find a bunch of trinkets to save the world.  This is a concept that is, and has been, easily copied.  If you REALLY wanted a female-led Zelda game, you could quite easily make one. Call it "The Story of Belda: The Whistle of Minutes" or some shit and have a female protagonist wandering around a large world collecting shit in order to save it.  3 of this, 6 or 7 of that and a nice big over world to put it all in and BOOM, there you have it.  Are you seriously telling me that there isn't a single female developer in the industry that can make this happen? Really? Because I'm almost positive there is.  If Clover Studios can do it with a dog, you can do it with a girl.

So fuck all these shitty "journalists" and their whining.  If you don't like playing as male Link, then don't play the fucking game, go find something that suits your tastes or better yet, stop playing fucking video games and put isolate yourself from the rest of the world so that we can have our fun without having to listen to your stupid shit.