Crono needs a legendary sword that requires a time-hopping fetch quest to get all the ingredients. Frog requires a sword that’s already legendary, and a whole episode devoted to getting it powered up further. Marle, Luca, and even Magus require triple techs and in the case of the former two, a deliberate power up by Spekkio to even be able to access them in the first place.
I was not aware it was released in that packaging, but I’m pretty sure that’s still a Playstation 1 disk dressed up in a PS2 style DVD case, meant to be used with the PS2’s backwards compatibility mode. To my knowledge SotN was never rereleased as a native PS2 title and wasn’t rereleased at all until the PSP version. (And then later the Xbox 360 and PS4 as downloadable titles, and also the ghastly mobile phone versions.) If you have a PS1 kicking around you can try it and see, I suppose.
For what it’s worth my copy is the green-stripe “Greatest Hits” reprinting, so what it’s worth is alas not much.
I’m just being that guy on the internet as usual, but Symphony Of The Night is a PS1 title, not PS2. I’m sure OP can run a PS1 emulator on his her Deck if she wants to, though. It is a great game.
Re: Final Fantasy games not tying together or having continuities.
Yes. Except, ironically, specifically Final Fantasy X, which had a direct sequel in X-2. Final Fantasy XIII also managed to have a direct sequel in Lightning Returns. Thankfully, if you care to think of it that way, it was crap and can be safely ignored.
Anyway, have an upvote for not blithely suggesting that everyone start with VII.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 was pretty close to the peak of the series if you ask me, and the PS2 version was the superior one. THPS4 also came out on the Playstation 2. I see you already have Underground on there.
If you’d like something you can handily use to consume the rest of your entire life, Disgaea and/or its sequel will probably do you.
Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are also legendary. I haven’t tried in ages, I have no idea if modern emulators can get the latter to run at a non-crap frame rate. It’d be a lot nicer if so.
Odin Sphere is an often overlooked 2D action sidescrolling fighting thing wherein you Norse In The North and beat the shit out of absolutely everyone. Its sequel, Muramasa: The Demon Blade is much the same thing except therein you Ninja In The Night instead. The latter stayed locked to the Wii to my knowledge but the former was on the PS2.
The PS2’s library is quite vast. I’m not going to go looking this up to prove it right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s got the most titles ever released for a home video game console (i.e. not the PC) in history. Even just trying out unknown games at complete random, it’s likely to be able to keep you entertained in one way or another basically forever.
The synopsis in the manual also states that Bowser turned the residents of the Mushroom Kingdom into “stones, bricks, and field horse-hair plants.” In a given playthrough, most players probably smash a lot of bricks. Bricks which used to be Mushroom Kingdom people, who are now dead. Because Mario killed them.
It’s a big maybe on Mario being the hero because he may or may not actually succeed in reaching Bowser and rescuing the princess depending on how much the player happens to suck, and/or of Luigi winds up being the victor instead.
With the best will in the world, given the dire performance of Borderlands 4 even on much more powerful hardware, the notion that it was ever going to work on the Switch 2… how should we phrase this… was never realistic.
Randy seems more interested in running his mouth than getting anything done about the game’s performance issues on any platform, so this decision is hardly unsurprising at this juncture. The fact that they were able to pull the plug this close to the alleged release date also points to the fact that this was to be yet another one of those game-not-actually-on-the-cartridge deals, if they were even planning to make cartridges for it at all, so that would have been yet another nonstarter for many potential buyers. This whole thing was dead on arrival. The only difference is, now we know it’s official.
Borderlands as a whole doesn’t have a great track record on portable platforms anyway. The OG Switch version also had less than stellar performance, and the best that can be said about the PS Vita version of BL2 is that even with all the cuts and downgrades its frame rate is probably better measured in seconds-per-frame rather than frames-per-second. (I have direct experience with that one, being one of the six people on Earth dumb enough to actually own the Vita version of Borderlands 2. But in my defense, it was literally cheaper to buy the BL2+Vita bundle than to buy a Vita on its own. That’s right: It’s so bad, the Vita release had a negative retail value.)
Here’s one that’ll hit them closer to home: The original Donkey Kong is literally a mod for the earlier Radar Scope cabinets. Nintendo had better hope they don’t wind up with any video game nerds in any juries or they’re going to open a can of worms on themselves that they really don’t want to have wriggling all over their lap.
All of the updates and content expansions and so on and so forth have really made Isaac unmanageable in that regard. Throw in the fact that there are quite a few item drops that are objectively detrimental in basically every situation so that a not insignificant fraction of the item pool is just trash drops that nobody in their right mind would ever pick up, and it gets ridiculous quickly. Once you have enough unlocked that you’re regularly getting runs down into the lower sub-basements of hell, unless you’re an absolute guru the meta is literally just to meta. Know a couple of the game-breaking combinations off the top of your head and cross your fingers that you’ll run across all of the components. Ignore all other risks.
This is in stark contrast to e.g. Dead Cells, which is why I’ve got such an immense respect for the latter. If you’re willing to adjust your play style slightly, every single drop in Dead Cells is a viable weapon that can be deadly in the right hands. You could be wielding a legendary golden abyssal trident, sure, but you can also just as well beat the shit out of all the boss monsters with a pair of frying pans tied together with some rope. It must have taken an immense amount of work to get all of that even vaguely balanced and ensure that there were no duds, wheras Isaac’s strategy seems to be more just throwing shit at the wall (probably literally…) to see what sticks, with a garnishing of deliberately adding things to troll the player for the lulz.
Binding of Isaac items are explicitly in that vein, in fact, given that its version of potions (pills) are indeed randomized on every run. I haven’t checked out the new update yet but insofar as I’m aware those still are.
I believe initially this was supposed to be part of the appeal. Any item may or may not screw you over if you don’t know what it does which is in keeping with Isaac’s theme of being beat down by your circumstances. Part of gutting gud was intended to be memorizing what the often idiosyncratic items actually did. Except now with years of updates and content expansions there are so many items it’s unrealistic to keep track of it all anymore. In the early days I might have disagreed with this but now it makes sense.
At least according to the patch notes you still have to collect an item the first time to get its full description, and the new descriptions don’t show at all until you beat Mom for the first time (i.e. you clear at least one basic run), so new players still get to experience the Fun and excitement of potentially getting hosed by an unfamiliar pickup.