Technically I play 30 minutes or so of Overwatch every night, and that’s not an MMO, but let’s set that aside and talk about me actually playing a game with a defined start and end and stuff to do in the middle, because that’s been a rarity of late.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a GREAT game, but what the hell.

I originally bought Shantae for the GBC back in 2002 or so, and didn’t much get on with it. It had a cute heroine, but I kept being stuck in a loop of being damaged – needing to grind money for healing items – maybe getting a little further in the game – needing to grind again, and so on.  I spent most of my time with the game running around two or three screens, killing the same enemies and not making any progress.

There have been a few games since then.  I haven’t played them, because most of my experience was colored by the first game.

On the other hand, “Half-Genie Hero” was on Xbox Game Pass a few months back, and it looked cheerful and colorful at a time when I wanted to play something cheerful and colorful, and I wound up really liking it.

Then I decided to go back and try some of the earlier games, leading me to Risky’s Revenge.  Originally this was a Nintendo DSi game, I guess?  Anyway, I played the PS4 version and it was… well, it was better than the GBC game.  I had to resort to a walkthrough after a few hours with it, mostly because I kept running into situations where I had no idea where to go next, and that took some of the frustration off.

I mostly stuck with it for the cute characters and the funny writing.  That was worth it for me.  If it didn’t have charm on its side I probably would have dropped it with no guilt.

Looking at the trophy stats for this game, I kinda think a lot of people got stuck and decided to just drop it instead of resorting to a walkthrough.  There’s a trophy you get about five minutes into the game, and 97% of people have that one.  Only 17.5% of players actually FINISHED it, though, and it’s not like it’s a terribly long game.  I took a hair over six hours even with getting lost, and there’s a trophy for finishing it in under two hours.

I’ll probably give the third game in the series a try at some point.  I’m kind of curious to see which quality-of-life changes I liked in Half-Genie Hero were around for game #3.