Final Fantasy VII Remake Ultimania

 

The latest art book is a pretty nice one, full of FFVII concept art. It also has huge pages. Most of the art here, I haven't seen before. Gonna take a quick look at it. As usual, click the images to blow 'em up.

Mortal Kombat 11 (Playstation 4, 2019)

Alternate timelines and meeting your past self were all the rage in our entertainment circa 2019, and this game is no exception. Considering it came out the same week as Avengers: Endgame, it shares a lot of concepts with that movie.

(This is the only MK post that isn't entirely new, as I did this in 2019, so I'm rewriting it now. It probably won't go as in-depth as some of the others as a result.)

Mortal Kombat X (Playstation 4, 2015)

 

After MK9 basically remade the first 3 games in the series, this one is a retelling of MK4. Except it does way more than MK4 does, giving us a sizable time jump and showing what everyone had going on 20 years or so later. We've got characters with grey hair, grown-up children of the old guard, and so on. It's good stuff. Also Liu Kang and Kung Lao are both DEAD. How will MK do without its Shaolin Monks?

MK11 is pretty much entirely new (and my favorite of the new crop of post-IX MKs) while MK1 (which should have just been called MK12) retells the Deadly Alliance, Deception, and Armageddon stories to an extent. So at this point they've kinda remade the first seven games all over again, over two different new timelines for some reason.

Welp, I'm almost done with the series, two left after this one. Let's go.

The 1000 Games I've Beaten (#239 - 255)

#239 Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi (Playstation 2) – Winter 2006

Another good DBZ game that I can't remember much of. I think there were a couple more Budokais between the first one I played (end of 2002) and this one. I remember being super stoked about this one and telling people about it and them not knowing what I was talking about. It's a 3D fighting game and probably heralded the latest step forward for DBZ games because it played extremely well. I don't think I did much with this, and mostly remember Tenkaichi 2 being the really awesome one that I spent a lot of time with a few years later.

Thing I Missed: At this point I had a driver's license so the era of "reading the instruction booklet in the passenger seat on the drive back from the game store" was completely over. Which is both good and bad. That era was pretty nice, but so is having a car.

The Terminator (Sega Genesis, 1992)

 

Wait hold on. There's another good game based on the first movie? And somehow I didn't know about this until 2024 when it got ranked on a "good Terminator games" list.

It isn't the Sega CD game, but this appears to be a respectable earlier attempt at a Terminator video game by a completely different developer. We've seen a lot of Terminator games go very badly, so any time I find out about a decent one I have to check it out.

Future Editor's Note: This game isn't actually good. It's quite bad. A respectable attempt, but a bad respectable attempt. Did I mention it's bad? The good news is, it's only like 15 minutes long.

The 1000 Games I've Beaten (#232 - 238)

 

The List continues with the entirety of 2005. Game #1004: ARM-BAR.

The 1000 Games I've Beaten (#214 - 231)

 

#214 Final Fantasy X-2 (Playstation 2) – Spring 2004

Today I'm looking at 2004 which was characterized by the Zelda Crusade I went on. But first! A sequel I was pleasantly surprised by and spent most of the Spring playing, just like I had with FFX two years earlier. This game makes me think of Spring more than any other game. It's such a fun, lively game, with a peppy soundtrack and all kinds of wondrous locales to explore.

Dragon Quest VI SFC, Part V - Sea Legs

 

My God! ...wait, who?

Mortal Kombat IX - Second Half

 

The next chapter has Jade on the way to rescue Kitana from the clutches of Shao Kahn. So she's more loyal to Kitana than to Outworld's emperor. Face turn alert!

Mortal Kombat IX (Playstation 3, 2011)

 

Technically this game is just called "Mortal Kombat" but it's known by fans across the board as MK9. It reboots the series by retelling the story of the first three games, which was a great choice, and completely resets the MK timeline. The story reason for this is that Raiden was able to send some kind of telepathic message to his past self about Shao Kahn winning Armageddon, so now in a new timeline Raiden has the foresight to prevent that and put things right.

This is where I got back into the series back in the day after a many-year lapse, and I was just in time because this might be the series' best game. Whether it is or not, it being a retelling of the early parts of the saga is really what people like me had wanted to see more of for a while.

The 1000 Games I've Beaten (#195 - 213)

#195 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest (Gamecube) – Winter 2003

Today we're covering all of 2003, where I beat 18 games.  This was an awesome remix of Ocarina of Time for the Gamecube that people got for free when they ordered Wind Waker. It also included OoT in its original form. Pretty incredible bonus here. I never pre-ordered Wind Waker, so I'm not sure how I got this. It must have also been sold individually.

The 1000 Games I've Beaten (#182 - 194)

 

#182 Final Fantasy X (Playstation 2) – Spring 2002

Today we've got the entirety of 2002 on deck, starting with the game I got a Playstation 2 for. There were 3 games I wanted to play, but I could only get two with the system. That's okay, because the first thing I played was this incredible game. Just getting the game was an adventure, as I went to Electronics Boutique on a bicycle during a rainstorm (at night, no less) when I found out they had PS2s on sale and FFX in stock. The good news is EB was like a 15 minute trip from where I lived, even at night in a rainstorm. No, I didn't have a car. Glad I didn't because that was a fun adventure. I stuffed the PS2 box into a backpack that wouldn't zip up and pedalled back with it strapped to my front to keep it together, like in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial or something. The rain was pretty light so it was all doable.

Dragon Quest VI SFC, Part IV - Training Montage

Took me a while to get back to this one, but it's time.

The SFC version of this game is completely different looking enough to justify it getting its own series. Time to do the back half of this one as a lead-in to ::groan:: Dragon Quest VII.

Need to issue a BIG correction: I said in the past that class mastery bonuses (+10 to a stat, etc) carried over. Since then I've been informed that they don't.