Numbered lists! Some of the emptiest SEO calories! As usual, these are our lists of Top and Bottom 5 Marathon moments, meaning they have to be narrower than broad complaints against a game, probably no longer than a story arc, but better a scene or single event. Every title from this section was viable, including ones that didn’t make the re-reviews like Eternal Calm and Will, and Kyle was allowed to select moments from my solo Journals if he so chose. The “moments” can be intentionally planned parts of the game, or they can be things that happened to us as we played. Those are the rules, so on to the lists! We’ll be doing Kyle’s entire Bottom 5 list first, then mine, and so on with the Top 5 lists!
The Marathon Look-Back continues with our re-reviews of the Mega Man games we played in the last four years of blog coverage!
Mega Man Battle Network 1
Kyle says:
When you see a “Mega Man” game, your first thought is probably a platforming game where you destroy Robot Masters to take their powers, and defeat that dastardly Dr. Wily or Sigma. Battle Network, however, gave us a Role Playing Game with a very different combat system. This is also a series of games that ended up being heavily influenced by their own anime, the Mega Man NT Warrior anime series.
Here we are again, four years after last time, which was four years after the first! Time to look back on the games that were. Was the identical, four-year gap on purpose? Honestly, for a time it looked like it would be three, and probably should have been, if it wasn’t for Final Fantasy XII. Just picture me there, in my monk’s cell, writing my Journals and planning ahead for things like our upcoming, Marathon Rewind through older titles, and muttering, “This is Final Fantasy XII’s fault! I’ll get my revenge. I’ll throw Balthier into the past with me, and refuse to explain it to anyone!”
Once again, Kyle and I will be re-reviewing every game we’ve played since the previous Look-Back, and next week we’ll be looking at our Top 5 and Bottom 5 moments. Quite a few interesting bits in here, with Kyle and I walking away with completely different conclusions! Things may have gotten a little hefty on our side (you can’t imagine what we cut!), so I’m going to be splitting the reviews up. Final Fantasy reviews will go up today, Mega Man reviews will go on Tuesday, and the big Top 5 and Bottom 5 Moments lists will go up next Thursday as planned, though they’ll be a little bit longer than our usual post size. Hope you enjoy!
Because I apparently can’t keep to a format, we’ll be alternating like normal people this time, based on a coin flip, and I’ll reverse those results when we get to Look-Back #4 in the future. This year, Kyle’s reviews and lists will show up first! That said, Kyle will only be reviewing the titles he actually played, since it would be weird to force him to review manga he never read, or radio dramas he never heard, you know? Not least because, in a previous draft, he addressed some of them as “very unkind.” So keep your eyes on the headings to see who’s writing what. With that, I’ll turn things over to him!
We return to our Marathon Look-Back for the PSX era and its continuations with our Top and Bottom 5 Moments. While a lot of these “moments” can be intentional parts of the stories or gameplay of their respective games, this is ultimately about the experience of playing, watching, or, in the case of Before Crisis, even reading about these products, which means they could also be things that happened organically as a result of the game, or in one case, even a faulty walkthrough! Have a look!
Well, it’s that time again: time to look back at a long period of gaming spanning several years in both development and playtime. The last time we did this, we were covering the NES, SNES and GB eras, plus their direct continuations. The games we’ll be covering this time are all the PSX-era RPGs and their continuations, basically everything we played after FFVI and up to the present day, including six Final Fantasy games (seven if you count Before Crisis), three Persona games, two Final Fantasy movies, and one Final Fantasy TV show. This is proximate to our last look-back in terms of product count (our last Look-Back covered twelve Final Fantasy games, one OVA that we pointedly ignored, and the undersized FFII Soul of Rebirth and FFIV Interlude), but represents way more blog posts overall. The Directory was really getting unwieldy. Admittedly, as Kyle comments in one of his reviews, all these spinoffs and sequels are going to make this something of a FFVII-centric post, but it’s how it’s gotta be.
This time around, it’s not about the full games – it’s about specific moments, and our Top 5 Worst and Top 5 Best Moments of the Marathon. These can be moments built into the game or things that happened to Kyle and I while we were playing, a great blend of the personal and the well-designed. Enjoy!
Since we wrapped up the FFVI Journal last week, we decided to take the opportunity to do a celebration here at Marathon Recaps and look back over the past two eras of Final Fantasy: the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. And it won’t just be me because, for the first time you’ll be hearing Kyle’s thoughts directly from the source! With many of these games, it’s been years since we last played them, and we wondered if a good look back might have changed out opinions. So here’s the plan: this week, Kyle and I will alternate talking about each game, giving some time-aged insight into each, with Kyle going first as selected randomly (Ed. well, mostly, I’ve eliminated a more complicated format to avoid confusion). Next week, we’ll be back with two Top 5 lists each: our Top 5 Worst and Top 5 Best Moments in the Marathon! Be sure to be back for that!
Marathon Recaps 