Blog Timeline 2025

And well I'm not gonna say I hated 2025. Wait, why are we starting out with THAT sentence? Because of the times I said it multiple Blog Timeline posts ago. To be perfectly honest, this might have been my most productive year yet and it will be a precedent for years to come because soon I'm bound to be submitting more things to the internet, whether it's reviews or internet walkthroughs or such. I had to renew a few things for my real life, including my card for this yearly payment thing for this whole blog, plus I went back into the college life, though it's mostly virtual and I find most of the subject matter easy to follow. It will damper my activity somewhat, or will it? I'm making some seriously good progress on games I both play a lot and do a lot.

Doomwiki: As usual I provide the template in adding in secret descriptions and anyone can re-edit things to make them more descriptive if that's their thing. Ever since December 10th's Cacowards I am actively trying to mull through anything that currently has a redlink on Doomwiki, and am still doing it into the new year. But when these new mods get pages, my descriptions are already ready. Yeah, so that's more or less copypasted from last Blog Timeline post, but it's EXACTLY how this has been going and amusingly enough I'm almost done with this stuff. But DAMN some of these newer WADs I'm mulling through are taking a toll on me. Physically, I might add.

Music: I got quite a lot of favorites this year. We have new releases from Tremonti, Chevelle, and Deftones (The End Will Show Us How, Bright as Blasphemy, and private music), they keep doing what they do and they do it extremely well. Volumes went for the djent-pop route in their latest release Mirror Touch and it's not too terrible, while Unprocessed's Angel is trying to straddle the line between the Polyphia-pop sound and trying to be edgier metal, considering how poorly received their last album seemed to have been. Dance Gavin Dance let loose with Pantheon, with Andrew Wells as the new lead vocalist and the sound is all over the place, but not in the best of ways, arguably in my opinion this was my biggest disappointment. 40 Below Summer and Earshot returned with Untethered and Humaning, respectively, and these two actually managed to make fantastic albums. The biggest surprise though? Three Days Grace with Alienation. While I preferred some of the other albums to this, the big surprise was making it so that both main vocalists were kept, and there's some really great tracks on this album.

What I've been watching: Obviously it's gonna be some more Pretty Cure. I binged through Wonderful Pretty Cure, an enjoyable but less combative season rather quickly. It then took me months before I saw its movie and that was fine. I also got on to watching Mirai Days, the sequel to Mahou Tsukai as well and it's like Otona, very few episodes and not overdoing things, thankfully, making it an appropriate sequel season I guess. Soon I'll be binging through Kimi to Idol Precure next, as it's getting ready to end.

ROM Hacks: Surprisingly for Pokemon ROM hacks, I only actually did six (technically seven). Even more surprisingly, I did guides and walkthroughs for ALL of them. Pokemon TDT, Gold & Silver '97 Reforged, Ultra Fire Sun (not a full walkthrough cause this game's setting is unchanged from Fire Red), Sapphire in Reverse (read above, but for Sapphire), The Wooper who Save Christmas 1 + 2 (two hacks technically), and finally Saiph. I am currently playing through the gargantuan hack that is Cloud White, trying to make a walkthrough of it, but it's taking a while due to job commitments and now college work.

And now THIS! If you've seen my pinned walkthroughs post, guess what, I've created some guides for Legend of Zelda (NES) ROM hacks! Oh yes, I got so bored with playing some of the same things over and over that I branched out slightly and played other childhood classics. So I just downloaded one ROM hack which changed only parts of the overworld and some dialogue and made a Google Sheets guide for it, then I moved on to the true classic ROM hack: Zelda Challenge: Outlands. I then made maps for it in the same format. And I plan to do more for other games. I did mention last year I went through custom levels for the Super Monkey Ball games. I just may revisit those and make walkthroughs of those ROM hacks, among other things that could come soon.

RPGs: Last year was 18. This year? 13, technically speaking. But that's because several of these were games plus their expansion packs. I am of course talking about this because of how I separated my Heroes of Might & Magic III and IV playthroughs to include expansion packs separately. Including expansion packs, my actual number was 17. So the vast majority of this was Heroes of Might & Magic mania. I told everyone I would get to this series and I made it quite clear. Started from the beginning, played the first game, the second game and its expansions all in one, and when I got to the third game I separated things and tried to play in the best chronological order possible. I then did Chronicles and then Heroes IV and its expansions. Whew, all in a year's work, but I gotta rest from all this. Apart from that, the start of this year saw me go through the Last Bible spinoffs to the Megami Tensei franchise, they're a whole lot easier than the mainline games for sure. And then I did not one, but TWO Kingdom Hearts games this year! One of which was my 200th RPG reviewed. Yippee! It's an example of hack-and-slash action RPG I actually enjoyed for that matter, though the card game mechanic with Re:Chain of Memories was enjoyed a little less. I'm just glad these games aren't that large. The current franchise I'm tackling, bear in mind, there's a ton of games in it, is another CRPG series, this time it's all Advanced Dungeons and Dragons stuff. Really going old school with this, and I've already completed three games already. But if you're expecting me to play Fire Emblem at some point, or Ultima, hold your horses. They are coming. I promise.

Other games: As I said earlier, I've been tackling Legend of Zelda ROM hacks, so that's something I am gonna do for certain. And the Super Monkey Ball ROM hacks for that matter as well. I did say I messed around in Freelancer more recently, and I played a lot of Discovery's newest update. A more recent thing was that I made a walkthrough for a licensed game I owned. I did in fact make a walkthrough for Turbo Turtle Adventures on the GBA, yeah it's an old game but it was an addicting puzzle-like game and I do in fact plan on making more game walkthroughs, mod or official game, in the future.

Productivity on my end has hit quite the peak for 2025 in terms of what I do for gaming and I don't plan to slow down. This of course means I will slow down when I least expect it though, because I did have to deal with some real-life issues, such as a loving pet dying and two grandparents also dying this year. I don't want to lose more than I gain. But I want to go through 2026 as strong as I went through 2025. 

Blog Timeline 2024

Remember when I said that I hated 2022? Now remember when I said that I hated 2023? Well, you can guess that I hate 2024. I lived through it, thankfully, but I've been basically grinding my ass off keeping the EXACT SAME work positions and getting basically nowhere. So when I have the time to write on this blog, it's entirely due to completing a game, though I did make one fine and formative post about one game in particular. Oh and in case you're new to this whole blog, yeah, this is a gaming blog. 2024 was, well it was a year I didn't like, but it was one where I gamed a TON. You'll see quite easily in a moment. The primary reason this was my gaming year was that I decided to actually game while at work more often. Dangerous, yet I get stuff done. Honestly I would much rather get paid a whole lot more for this, if I had the right platforms, but there's always gimmicks to that kind of stuff too and I feel relatively comfortable that a good change could happen in 2025 soon enough to prevent debt.

Doomwiki: As usual I provide the template in adding in secret descriptions and anyone can re-edit things to make them more descriptive if that's their thing. Ever since December 10th's Cacowards I am actively trying to mull through anything that currently has a redlink on Doomwiki, and am still doing it into the new year. But when these new mods get pages, my descriptions are already ready. For added bonus, I even did all of RAMP 2024's secret descriptions, even though it's probably not gonna get individual map pages any time soon.

Music: My favorite released this year were a small EP from 10 Years and Erra's Cure. That's actually it. A lull year when it came to stuff I really, really enjoyed.

What I've been watching: Nothing much aside from movie reruns and all that. Lame again. But like, I'm not that into most TV shows anyways. I did finish the 20th Pretty Cure seasonn, Hirogaru Sky, which actually was a very good season with many norms being busted and had plenty of stakes going for it. Then, in December, in just a single day, I finished watching Otona PreCure, the adult-oriented season where the first three generations of Cures are now adults, but still transform and such. Just 12 episodes there, and I'm glad it was short and enjoyable in a way.

ROM Hacks: Only 4 were done today in terms of Pokemon ROM hacks. First was Polka Aqua 2, an experience that went over the top in a number of ways but was a lot alike its prequel. Then I went ahead and got girly with the Moemon hacks. Specifically Mega Moemon Fire Red, which of course was Fire Red but with Gens 1-6 and with fun sprites and QoL things around. Moemon Liquid Crystal followed, this was just Liquid Crystal but with worser Moemon sprites and no actual gameplay changes. This was a hack I didn't even bother to review. But for my 50th ROM hack review, it was something that blew up on Reddit. Yeah, I'm on there now if you didn't know, but it was Pokemon Emerald Seaglass. Couldn't find it in the forums, so it was actually something people talked about on Reddit. And it's...Emerald but done in the style of Gen-2 spritework but still keeping most mechanics intact while adding in some more modern things like Z-moves and such. I have made guides for Polka Aqua 2 and a simple walkthrough for Seaglass (since there's plenty of documentation overall). These are the Pokemon ROM hacks, and while I primarily focus on these, I'll also say that I've been churning through custom levels for the Gamecube game Super Monkey Ball 2. I remember owning this game a long time ago and I thought finally now I'd give some of these extremely hard levels a try. As far as I know I'll only play these while I'm at home since my frustrations cannot be seen at work.

RPGs: As I said, this was totally my year, especially with regards to RPGs! Last year I got 13 done, this year it went up to 18. Most of what I had said last time that I would get to, I actually did indeed get to. I finished up the Arc the Lad series starting with 3 and then going to Twilight of the Spirits. I played Tales of Symphonia as previously planned. I am currently churning through as many games that make up the bulk of the Megami Tensei franchise, having done 5 games so far! I also did two Final Fantasy games, X-2 and Crystal Chronicles, as well as two Alundra games and another Shining Force game. So much progress! But with it comes likely changes, and I did announce that after I was finished with Crystal Chronicles in particular I plan to check out more franchises than just Final Fantasy or so. And Fire Emblem is on the bucket list for later. Along with quite a few others, like Heroes of Might & Magic, other spinoffs of CRPGs, the rest of the Megami Tensei franchise (if I can, I found out that quite a few games have no translations or so!), and Ultima. It's endless, but I damn well will get to what I can.

Other games: Removing my platformers section cause I did not actually play any platformers this time around. Unless you count Super Monkey Ball as one. It's an arcade game with platforming elements, but, like, you don't jump or anything, so I'm not counting it. During my winter break I am churning through the ROM hacks though. Speaking of modded games, another thing I do on occasion is ALTTP Randomizer. It's a nice randomizing experience, as I have not done any randomizers in any games yet, since I'd rather play ordinary games through, but I find it the most fun so far. Finally, and this is the big one, Freelancer. This was another game like SMB and ALTTP that was from my childhood, and for years I have played as a kid until I started playing Discovery mod, having fun with it even though I just play singleplayer for exploration and fake roleplay. I stopped playing due to having the thing crash multiple times. With my brand new computer, I am unable to use compact discs, as does everyone else with a Windows 11 machine, but at least I can prove to others I have the disc itself as I downloaded online, played the campaign again with HD graphics, and got the newest Discovery mod which has, dare I say it, regressed somewhat. But that regression might not be a bad thing, as I am not dealing with crashes and exploration and NPC interactions have differed greatly and things DO feel balanced. I am currently enjoying this, and one thing I love about the game is how I can set myself to cruise and do other things while the thing is on autopilot. Meaning this was one game I left on while I did my jobs or so! Man, I have a lot of fun when I'm not stressed out trying to improve my life.

Overall, 2024 was an extremely productive (if you consider gaming productive) year for me. I multitasked like a mofo, and by that I mean writing posts, reading news, managing classes, applying for jobs, doing my current jobs, and playing ALL of my games all at once. I like to live dangerously but I get a ton of things done doing so.

Blog Timeline 2023

Remember when I said that I hated 2022? Well, you can probably imagine how this post starts. I hated 2023. And I'll just say it now since I can immediately guarantee a prediction, if I live long enough to say it, but, I hated 2024. And it is only a day before it starts. But it's gonna happen. I'm still surprised a bomb hasn't blown up my area yet, and I don't want one. Nobody does. We don't want to be civilian casualties given the number of conflicts that either started or escalated in 2023. But people in power are nerds who somehow have everything while civilians get nothing. At least I keep my current work position, even if I'm working myself to death this time around, but it felt like I went nowhere. Nobody wants to hire anymore, and it seems that bigwigs in our public and government sectors want it that way. Keep us dumb and desperate. Somebody is going to burst and actually harm them.

Blog: This is the same as before. I only really do something after I finish a game. Or making a post like this. There's not much to write about!

Doomwiki: Arguably what I spent a lot of time on. Yes, even when all secret descriptions are already done whenever a new custom level pack has a page added I'm already on it. Frankly I could care less, I'm just providing a template for when someone decides to expand on it. That's how I see the Doomwiki and I like it that way. I may get more involved with getting descriptions for other custom content in the future though.

Music: More or less the same as last time. There's plenty of great stuff that I remember listening when I flummoxed around on Pandora during college days that I added to my library, and as for new stuff? Got plenty of awesomesauce. Periphery V, Sevendust's Truth Killer, Metallica's 72 Seasons, In Flames' Foregone, Staind's Confessions of the Fallen (I actually saw a concert, my first one!), Unprocessed's ...And Everything in Between, Veil of Maya's [M]other, Taproot's SC\SSRS, Tesseract's War of Being, all are amazing. But my personal favorite this year is Invent Animate's Heavener. This is how you make metalcore utterly beautiful, and it was one of the first releases of the year too. But it's outright unforgettable. We'll see a lot of good tracks from other metal artists soon.

What I've been watching: Nothing much aside from movie reruns and all that. Lame. Okay, I did finish Delicious Party PreCure, but I of course wait until the next season is finished (of course avoiding spoilers) before I start with the next one. DelPa is actually a good season by the way, though I wish the food theme wasn't used all that much. I'll start watching more immediately next year, but the good news is I have at least two seasons to see. Well, that's it.

ROM Hacks: Ten were done this year. That's great. First was Red Fire, meant to be a kaizo Fire Red but not as famous as Emerald Kaizo, then Ephemerald, spicing up a regular Emerald game with variants, then Kalos Crystal, which brings Gen-5 and Gen-6 to a Gen-2 engine. Next was Voda Red, an extreme mess that I hated, then Green Chapter, finally finishing the non-Red manga chapters. Next were two broken hacks, Hyetology and Sky Twilight, the latter is better until the end. Touhoumon Cirno followed, which was playing through Hoenn but with Touhou characters, cute. Next were Kanlara Ultimate and Azure Horizons, both stellar achievements and I used Allen's guides and even helped with new differences for the latter one. I also heavily updated my Pokemon Nameless guides (which I dissected into multiple ones), for the new updates, and damn does that storyline keep getting more interesting. Just glad to be doing what I can. My current playthrough in a ROM hack right now is Polka Aqua 2, and I am creating a guide for it, but it's on a hiatus since I wanted to focus on this next thing more...

RPGs: Got 13 done this year. Overall, this year was more productive in my gaming exploits, and there are moments when I do this while in school which is risky. Anyways, I finished up four Might & Magic chapters, the four Digimon World games (which took up all my summer), Makai Kingdom (quite fun like most other Nippon Ichi games), Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (long but worth it, loads of fun aside from the STUPID JUDGE SYSTEM!), and Tales of Destiny 2 (the real deal, had to go on Youtube for translating the dialogue, shame this was never released outside Japan!). Right now, I'm on the Arc the Lad franchise, having finished the second game which was quite long but already going quite well into the third one. Some games are on my bucket list, the remaining Arc the Lad games, Tales of Symphonia, and I'm hoping to do some games with Digital Devil Saga/Shin Megami Tensei/Persona or some crap like that. Got a lot to go through.

Platformers: Oddly only three, but the only reason I reviewed them is because I'm also rummaging through a 700-in-1 set that I felt the need to. The platformers I found were Spelunker (not related to Spelunky), Nuts & Milk, and Ninja Jajamaru-Kun, all arcade games of some kind. Don't think doing platformer games is going to be a trend in the future.

Overall, 2023 may be a year I hate because of events, but at least I was much more productive with my gaming, as risky as it's getting. I want to survive through these things and I'm gonna. I promise.

Blog Timeline 2022

I hated 2022. Yes, I realize I hated 2021 the last time I made a post like this but when you have all these world events enveloping your very surroundings the way they are, and the recourse of the many jobs I had over this one year, this year was substantially worse, and you know what? I feel an "I hate 2023" already brewing 365 days from now. Had lost a full-time teaching position which surprisingly paid LESS than the next position I had, which felt a bit insulting when you consider the rates some teachers get paid, now I'm sort of back where I began in my favored school system with a job board-style layout for the latest one. Hey, it's better than nothing, and I still nightly tutor students elsewhere, so at least my income is somewhat stable. But it's like everything is encroaching and it feels like an inevitability with everyone out to get you while lying directly to your face about it.

Blog: If you can't tell, I rarely update this blog unless I'm actually finished with a game. I just don't have much time with the blog in general when I have friends to contact, work to worry about, games to play, etc. But hey, at least I don't neglect it, so that's something!

Doomwiki: Secret-hunting is still my forte over there and frankly I'm still doing it each time a new mod has pages for their levels. I basically go until there's nothing left, because filling in the space is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned. Didn't expect to have over 10,000 edits, I had realized I was hitting that mark at some point, but of course December 10th when the Cacowards get released meant more new articles and pages created, so more hunting is fine! I'll do it whenever possible.

Real-life: I kinda talked about this already. To be honest, the only advice I can actually say is look out if some place wants to hire you almost immediately. Because they're probably lying to your face about it. Either they'll hire you and you'll realize they are a terrible company to work with (or the environment flat out sucks) or they just duped you into trying to get in. With my preferred school system at the moment I'm doing some phone calls to ensure a proper environment and such, and that's my current goal.

Music: The tail end of the year was an interesting one for me because I finally put in several albums into my playlist that for some reason I haven't done yet. In other words, albums I have listened their entirety of on Youtube, like Ultraspank's Progress, but never bothered to have them in my official libraries. Helping matters was getting a brand new computer for the idea. And I was doing this because I actually ran out of all the other stuff to do. For the new stuff this year, the only ones I can even remember listening to this year that I liked were Alter Bridge's Pawns & Kings, Novelists' Deja vu, Monuments' In Stasis, and Dance Gavin Dance's Jackpot Juicer. Maybe I'll update this with stuff I remember later on?

What I've been watching: So I finished watching the Pretty Cure seasons up to Tropical Rouge, which I finished some time in...October I presume. Right now I'm probably going to binge watch Delicious Party, it's ending some time next year and they will have a new season out for it soon. Maybe some day I'll offer a ranking post on this blog of some kind. But I really do enjoy these seasons and their action and fun.

ROM Hacks: I stated that Pokemon Polka Aqua was under my belt last year, and I did finish it this year. Aside from that this was a year of me finishing quite a lot of ROM hacks for Pokemon, 13 more besides Polka Aqua to be honest. I did several betas, including Adventure Blue Chapter, Adventure Gold Chapter, Dark Crystal, and Luria. Gold Unova was the first Gen-2 hack I did since Prism. Metal Red was a jumbled mess. Dark Cry: Legend of Giratina was somewhat interesting. Dark Violet was an interesting revamp of Kanto games while Blazed Glazed was a surprisingly inferior version of Glazed. Stigma was an attempt to put strange lore in a game format, while Red Fire was intended for Nuzlockes and is actually not hard if you're not doing that gameplay style. But Pokemon Dreams? That stole the show and is my new favorite, having nearly everything including the kitchen sink. I really do recommend playing some of the ROM hacks that have the CFRU if anything cause they are a lot of fun.

RPGs: Might and Magic III was something I had been doing, but I put it aside for a while for some reason because of the platformer reviews. However, past completing that, this was my least active year yet for RPG playing due to only completing a whopping nine. Two more M&M games were finished, I finally reviewed Vandal Hearts, and even got to its interesting sequel. I also checked out the predecessor to Shadow Hearts, Koudelka, as well as two games from Realms of Arkania. Plus Chocobo's Dungeon 2 which was a load of fun. But that was it. Damn jobs, having to ruin my schedule a lot.

Platformers: Okay this is surprising. While I ended up doing a ton of platformers in the previous year, my intention this year was to not do nearly as much this year, and in the end, I finished...nine.

Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion

Alex Kidd: High-Tech World

Looney Tunes

Xargon

Crash Bandicoot 2: N-Tranced

Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap

Kabuki: Quantum Fighter

Solomon's Key

Moai-kun

Aside from maybe three of these, I didn't feel as much excitement with them and frankly I only played them because I felt like playing them. The latter two were part of a 750-in-1 NES bootleg set and I wanted to try that out, and well maybe I'll get back to that if I'm extremely bored.

So yeah, what a year. Did terribly with RPGs and platformers, while ROM hacks are starting to be my forte for a while. Plus all the Pretty Cure stuff I've been accumulating, and the fact that real life is taking more out of me than usual. I want to survive 2023. I want to. I believe that I won't be doing much in 2023 with regards to platformers unless I really don't want to do anything else. ROM hacks will happen, and the occasional RPG will show up too. Maybe these both will show up more often due to not having as much on Doomwiki to do left.

Blog Timeline 2021

I hated 2021. There, that's the post. 2021 was a huge amount of turmoil in the world, politics seeping into every single corner of every single thing that ever was a thing, entertainment had its ups and downs, COVID has messed up lifestyles, including my own despite vaccines and all, while mental health was on the decline in a number of ways. There were a few positives, and I tend to argue with people who say 2021 was better than 2020 because so many of their reasons were personal instead of, you know, in a broader scope. But let's see what's been going on.

Blog: First of all, I haven't really been updating the blog nearly as much. The biggest issue has been Doom Musings, but at this point I'm going to hang up bi-monthly stuff from now on. Maybe I'll make a musing tomorrow on New Years. However, you may have noticed that I haven't made any posts regarding RPG or ROM hack look-backs. So it really does seem that there wasn't much in actual writing work. I did have moments of writer's block at several moments, which of course led to the musings being mostly soundtrack rankings instead of the usual bunch of stuff. But perhaps the main reason why I haven't really been doing stuff on this blog will come right now.

Doomwiki: So yes, I've been sensationally active on Doomwiki. Sensationally active. Secret-hunting was my forte and I really wanted to document descriptions for each secret for every WAD I could find. This took up more or less the last four months or so of work and was one of the primary reasons why I haven't been active in other departments.

Real-life: While I kept a nice tutoring position up until summer break, I also took an auxiliary online course that ended up furthering an application to becoming a full-time teacher. Wahoo! Though this of course meant that I have less time to work on other things, as I'm in a classroom on weekdays. Still, I primarily use my computer to do all the planning of fun lessons, and during those times I will probably get involved with some stuff on the side.

Music: There's been some fantastic metal stuff I've been listening to these days. Volumes releasing an album on my birthday was excellent, with a good vocal combination and all, though I wouldn't consider it my favorite album of 2021. Two albums really peaked my interest, those being Whitechapel's Kin and Erra's self-titled, both have excellent qualities, with Erra continuing to refine their sound while keeping their vocalist and Whitechapel further evolving into a more melodic band with excellent cleans. I have to express my glee at how wondrous these guys have done their music.

What I've been watching: Pretty Cure, and LOTS of it. I'm up to Suite Pretty Cure now, and I've been analyzing every character and really am dedicating a good amount of time to this stuff. Yeah, I'm really planning to probably even put some rankings of things there too, just cause there's surprisingly not a lot of it. I really enjoy the All Stars movies more than anything, due to the Avengers-like meetups and all. But hey, gotta get through it all eventually.

ROM hacks: Gaia was the last one for last year, so what did we have this year? Well, we had eight! Grass Jewel 2, Dark Rising: Order Destroyed, Sweet, Mega Power, Nameless, Adventure Yellow Chapter, Scorching Scarlet, and Vega. There was certainly quite a lot of variety, but I think, on the overall course of things, Nameless is the clear winner. The funny thing is it was still in development with a brand new episode as I played, but it was worth it, and my walkthrough sure as heck went incredibly well with what I had experienced. I have Polka Aqua 1 under my belt, which I haven't touched much since September this year, but I'll resume it eventually.

RPGs: only 14, how bad was that. Most of it is continuing the CRPGs with Wizardry and Might & Magic, and I really flummoxed my way through the entire Wizardry set. I also reviewed the original Pokemon games, Spectrobes, and my pick for the best this year, Final Fantasy X, a fantastic example of storytelling, interesting characters, sidequests, and it wasn't really that difficult on the whole. Oh, and I also finished a game called Vandal Hearts this year, but I didn't get the chance to review it. It'll come though. As well as I shall continue the gaming at some point. But that leads me to this...

Platformer: This year I did myself a favor and explored a different game genre in depth, the platformer. All your Mario, Sonic, Mega Man, Castlevania, Metroid, Tiny Toon Adventures, Spyro, Crash, Valis, all of these franchises I explored, plus many other games. I managed to somehow ECLIPSE the number of RPG reviews by platformer reviews, finally ending at 170. There were tons of favorites here, with a number of non-favorites, but overall this was something I enjoyed doing. Maybe I'll do more platformers at some point and talk about them on this blog, or maybe I won't. I still want this to be primarily Doom/RPG/ROM hacks though. Favorite platformer: Lode Runner Online

Next year I swear I will return to my roots and get all those unfinished businesses done, as well as create more content when I can. Happy new year 2022.

Blog Timeline 2020

Yep, still going to do these autobiographical blog posts at the end of each year. Even though this is only the second-to-last day for this year, I may not be able to finish the next Wizardry installment before New Years Day nor do I have anything else planned at the moment. Also because of adding a few things, this is just a blog timeline instead of an RPG timeline now.

So first off, I've been invested heavily in Doom since freakin' middle school, and one of the things I promised when I created this more-or-less crummy blog had to be Doom Musings. I wanted to talk about things that I always found interesting in Doom, whether they were in custom mods or otherwise. As a result, each month of the year I ended up with two blog posts of Doom Musings, one at the start of a month and the other at the halfway part. Needless to say this will continue into 2021, so expect 24 more of these kinds of posts. On the subject of stuff I reviewed, I made a thread on Christmas day documenting each review I made for wads in 2019 and 2020; this is mostly because the beta downloads page on Doomworld hasn't been updated since November 2018. And I went through a lot of mods, most of which were Cacoward winners or were made by otherwise noteworthy authors. As far as I know, Newstuff Chronicles (which usually does this kind of review that I do) is dead, but me and several others are reviewing stuff consistently and that's always a thing.

As for non-game related stuff, what can I say. 2020 is the year of the shitshow, and well that's something that can be interpreted in many different ways. I surprisingly didn't lose my job and got paid-time off for the remaining school year, and even for the next school year I was given a golden opportunity to work virtually. Things are more complicated when students don't participate in virtual group activities though. I managed to complete an online class for teaching disabled students as an added plus. I also got a second job at a different learning site, this one I actually go to in person and wear a mask and social distance and all that. Fairly quaint, but that's going to be good experience and I even get a few rewards on the holiday occasions. One major tragedy was the loss of a great feline friend in late April. Also something I found out with my desktop computer, the USB ports were utterly compromised. There was even one instance in June where I had consistent BSODs over something I have no idea about. But seriously, the USB trouble is far and wide the most annoying thing I've dealt with and it seemed to occur every month after a new Windows Update*. Nowadays I game on my laptop unless I really need better specs.

The lockdown that occurred in March was all I needed to restart on playing of Pokemon ROM hacks. I had kept my save from Light Platinum confidential at that time, which was neat, so I finished that up. Afterwards when it came to selecting a new rom hack, I just sort of went by random pick and by things that could interest me. So Flora Sky was next, then Victory Fire, and from there I paid attention to Wind's hacks and plan to get to Mega Power when I can (still haven't done yet). Played through a few (in)famous hacks in AshGray, Snakewood, two Dark Rising games, as well as a semi-obscure one called Grass Jewel and a double-pack known as Altair and Sirius. Not to forget Resolute as well. So my 5th rom hack to my 14th this year. Well done I'd say on my end. Even better, I have decided to become a member of PokeCommunity as well, creating walkthroughs for some of the ones I played that don't have written walkthroughs yet (Victory Fire, Resolute, AshGray, Dark Rising 2, Grass Jewel, Snakewood, Altair and Sirius).

Best ROM hack I played this year: Pokemon Gaia

Funny enough, I still haven't completed it yet, so I haven't made a review. However, this has the largest mon selection available, the graphics work well (even though not super-substantial), and the story and evil team are quite interesting. Even better is that it's not one of those rom hacks that goes the uber-hard route. I may end up completing it next year, but I'm seriously impressed with the entire thing.

Alright time to reminisce on the RPGs I played this year. First up, I was still with Dragon Quest VI and only managed to finish it at the midpoint of January. Yes, these games are getting longer. I surprisingly went through La Pucelle Tactics pretty fast too, despite it being a Nippon Ichi title. Two NES Silva Saga games followed, then Seiken Densetsu 3, all finished in the month of February. March saw 5 RPGs tackled, all of which were more or less small titles like the Ranma 1/2 RPG, Silva Saga 2, Ys III, Deep Dungeon 4 (finishing a franchise), and Bahamut Lagoon. Princess Crown was finished at the beginning of April, but Dragon Quest VII, the epicly long adventure Dragon Quest, took the entire month. My goal was to finish it before the end though, and I succeeded. Usually I tend to take breaks between RPGs, so May was more or less a breather month, having taken week long breaks, but the next two RPGs I finished, which was Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya, were quickly done away with.

June saw absolutely NO RPGs finished, but on the 4th of July, I finally managed to complete Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, after spending more than a month grinding and checking out post-game content. Following that was the peculiar PS2 game Orphen: Scion of Sorcery along with another SaGa game, both were surprisingly quick to deal with. This was also the segment where I played a lot of sequels I never got to. Much of August was spent raging at Grandia III, which sucked, but at least that's another franchise down. And the latter half of August and beginning days of September was done with another bad sequel in Wild Arms 4. I then rethreaded through Final Fantasy II but on a remake of the game before spending the rest of the month and the first bits of October with Tales of Eternia. Mystic Ark was also completed that month. As my next game was a Dragon Quest game, I invested more time in it to ensure I would beat it fast enough, which had me postponing my Pokemon Altair and Sirius rom hack playthrough just so I wouldn't waste the entire month on a Dragon Quest game. Gotta say that's impressive, having to go through three of the longest Dragon Quest titles like that.

Oddly, I spent way more time on Lufia: The Ruins of Lore than I did Dragon Quest VIII, probably because I was losing steam, but I managed to beat it on December 1. My goal for December was to finish a long-awaited game, Super Mario RPG, before Christmas. I overplayed that hand, having beating it in a single week. With that, I considered the year a successful endeavor in RPG reviewing, but I surely wasn't done. Although the Wizardry series is going to be grinding, I stayed my hand with them and got at least two games done. With that in mind, the total number of RPGs played this year was a whopping 27. This is two above the previous year's number of 25. Quarantine does sure make me play a whole lot of stuff, doesn't it?

Best RPG played in 2020: Bahamut Lagoon
Honorable mentions: Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door

Honestly I fell in love with Bahamut Lagoon. It was a perfect treasure of a Japan-only strategy RPG and proved to be better than Final Fantasy Tactics. It falls just short of my Top 10 RPGs on my countdown, but it was fantastic. I spent a lot of time with Disgaea and loved much of it too, and it's just under Bahamut Lagoon for similar reasons. And yeah, I enjoyed The Thousand Yaer Door, even though the Mario RPGs end up the easiest and some of the most simple, this storyline was worthwhile.

Let's hope that 2021 is a much better year, both in productivity and in general.

*Hey Microsoft, quit rushing your damn updates onto users. This is how you lose your respect when things go wrong.

My RPG Timeline: 2017-2019

Continued from that last post I made just minutes ago.

2017

Live-A-Live (#49) was started pretty much after Christmas of 2016, and went on into this year: 2017. Around this time I was contemplating a plan for what games I want to try out afterwards, formulating a schedule that only I am familiar with, while leaving people who viewed my TheTopTens profile just wondering what game I played next. I knew #50 had to be a special game, so I went with the revered Final Fantasy VII. Apart from FF1 (#2) and FF4 (#4) and all the FFLs (which are SaGa games) this was the only Final Fantasy game that didn't go by my mantra of playing a FF game on a multiple of 5, but I could care less about that.

From there, I went all the way to The Legend of Dragoon (#60) during my spring semester in 2017. I do have to admit, my grades were dropping at this point, and that was NOT a good thing. I should have spent less time gaming all the time, but there was so much to play and I focused on it quite often. Of course, I spent a lot of time studying too, I had five courses to juggle around, and unfortunatly I had that one professor who never helped students or answered questions via email. But I will say that I did beat Hydlide (#53) in a single day (well two days, but I took a break during half of one day and finished the other half another day so it still counts).

At the time I was playing the long game The Legend of Dragoon, I also got a new summer job, albeit a crummy hotel one where I was overworked and underpaid. During the times I was home I finished The Legend of Dragoon, played Romancing SaGa (#61) until I got through the intros, then revisited Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time (#62), a game I played in my childhood that took me only two days to beat. Heh, I remember doing that when I was in 5th grade. Afterwards were Kartia (#63), Paper Mario (#64) and Final Fantasy V (#65) before I decided to quit that horrible job that did not treat me well. You can tell I wanted Paper Mario to be my 64th RPG.

By the time I played Suikoden IV (#66) I was starting a fall semester at college. And I did a little better even though the classes were harder and there was an intensive group project I was off and on about. I remember beating Vagrant Story's (#70) main story on my birthday in November, and did some postgame stuff afterwards, the December portion of my semester was spent on Phantasy Star III (#71), and I started Soul Nomad & The World Eaters (#72) near the tail end of that semester. I managed to somehow beat it before the year's end, but since I was so vexed by how amazing it was, the next year I played bits and pieces of the game in between other RPGs playing it for some new game stuff before deciding to stop playing for now.

So I went from #49 to #72, which was quite a number of reviews done in 2017, that number being a total of 24 games done. That was somehow more than the last year by about four RPGs. Nice!

2018

The snow outside caused much of my last semester at the four-year university to have closing, and it gave me a lot of time to just play some more games. While I replayed parts of Soul Nomad this year, I played Langrisser II (#73), Growlanser III (#74), and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (#75) before deciding to just strictly play one game again. I had some pretty hard classes for my last semester, and I did something insanely risky during some of the games, notably 7th Saga (#77) and Romancing SaGa 2 (#78). Because I'm aware of how much grinding I did, I would play the game while simultaneously doing my schoolwork on my tablet. Miraculously the class I did the extensive work on I actually got an A in, and I did decently enough to keep my GPA above 3.0 right as I graduated. I ended up finishing Suikoden Tactics (#81) by the time I officially graduated from the four-year university.

Around this time there was a major shift in what I had to do, as I got accepted into a position that had me moving up north to a more corporate location to do some coding training for a new position. I knew I had to finish up Suikoden Tactics, because I won't be seeing my computer for a long time afterwards, if even at all. Basically I brought along an HP laptop, one that was capable of playing most emulators EXCEPT the PS2 ones, and had to formulate which games I will play over there.

Needless to say I only ever played one (Shining in the Darkness, #82), while living in the apartment there. The training was extremely intensive and required all of my concentration and it STILL kicks my ass. I ended up having to tell them this really wasn't the path I wanted after all through the experience I had, and I ended up going home. Before I went home though, I should mention, I actually started this blog in June of this year. I had intended to hopefully get some money out of it, but I don't care if I do or not to be honest. I just like to write now.

So in June of 2018 I was jobless, trying to find the thing I wanted most, all the while playing Romancing SaGa 3 (#83), Rhapsody (#84), and starting Final Fantasy VIII (#85). Around that time I got a retail job that payed very little but at least treated me properly, and I also somehow landed a housekeeping position at the same time. I tried my luck tackling both positions and doing well in both, ending up finishing FF8 and starting Dual Orb 2 (#86) at that time.

My retail position was only temporary and it ended up being finished in just a month. But I did land the position that I still have to this day, a really nice position where I tutor students in the public schools, getting to know what problems they have and helping them solve the problems. Around this time, for the rest of 2018, I had the housekeeping position and this one that I currently have now. I played Treasure of the Rudras (#87) in October, Earthbound ZERO (#88) for the rest of October to the beginning of November, Dragon Quest III (#89) for much of November through my birthday, and Skies of Arcadia (#90) in most of December. I formulated a plan to play the MOTHER games for my 88th, 99th, and 111th games, just because I want to follow weird patterns.

So the summary for 2018 in terms of RPGs played goes from #73 to #90. This was only 18 games played, which was definitely a small number. But I had so much going on, people expecting me to do so much. Thank god I found a good path to switch to.

2019

In the latter half of 2018 I started Phantom Brave (#91), and that went through January of 2019. I started Phantasy Star IV (#92) at the tail end of that month, through the start of February. Tenchi Muyo (#93) was short, and I got through Dragon Quest IV (#94) quickly around the time March came by. Much of March was taken up by me playing Final Fantasy Tactics (#95). I then played up to Earthbound (#99), before my current position ended. It was a school year position after all, and it ended in June, but I asked if I can come again for the next school year with more hours and that's exactly what I've been doing by then.

I had to contemplate what my 100th RPG would be. It had to be quite well-revered, and it obviously wasn't Earthbound which I was currently playing as my 99th. So I went with The World Ends With You, a game I hear about while looking up numerous tropes and wondering just how good it was. Well, it was good! I ended up beating it just before US Independence Day, and it took up quite a lot of time in June. Around the time I finished it I was also investing in Pokemon ROM hacks out of curiosity, and I have since stopped that for a bit since I'm not interested in it at the moment, but from Robotrek (#101) to Secret of the Stars (#107) I played some ROM hacks during times I didn't feel like playing the RPGs I was playing.

That stopped once I started Suikoden V (#108). I knew it was a long game, so I refrained from playing Pokemon ROM hacks and invested a lot of time into Suikoden V, playing it for much of September and October, then went to Star Ocean: Blue Sphere (#109) or at least as much as I could before I got annoyed with the unfinished translation. Then the unthinkable happened. My virus scanner effectively killed the usage of all applications on my computer (including itself) and I was completely screwed from doing anything. It took a few days in October to fix it up, and now my operating system is Windows 10 and it runs a lot smoother (though I think my dad may have overclocked my machine, as it has some crashing at times). I basically am thankful I had a flash drive with almost all of my important files, my backup of RPGs, my music files, my emulators, and the games I wanted to keep.

And things got better as I finally got back into the job that I loved for the last school year, this time getting more hours and more travel, and it certainly feels wonderful. I played Secret of Mana (#110), beat it before November, beat MOTHER 3 (#111) during the first half of November, the Deep Dungeon games (#112, #113, and #114) during the rest of November, and December was the month where I took all my time to invest in Final Fantasy IX (#115). It is definitely the last game I played this year, as while my 116th RPG will be Dragon Quest VI, I certainly won't be able to finish it within the two days we have before the next year!

So there you have it, my 2019 RPG record goes from #91 to #115, which is 25 games done. A prolific year! And yes, we've reached the end of this two-part autobiographical look back at all the stuff I did during the 2010s as far as RPGs go.

My RPG Timeline: 2014-2016

So it's almost 2020, things have happened, and I often neglect to look back on exactly what has been going on in the past few years. Luckily for me, my memory of everything is excellent. I remember all the embarassing stuff I did in elementary school, my ability to avoid trouble in middle school despite people hating me for things I no longer care about, and being a generally good and ambitious high school student. Wait a minute, isn't this an RPG-centric blog? What am I even talking about? It's obvious isn't it? I'm reminiscing when I played certain games and what I was also doing around those times.

2014

I started going to community college around this time, starting in fall of 2013, eventually ending at fall of 2015, graduating in December of that year. In 2014 I created an account on TheTopTens, a site I've been lurking on. There was so much to do during this time and I basically went in and started putting up music lists. At the same time I also went ahead with getting a seasonal summer job, one that was okay at best but nowhere close to worthwhile. I think it was around this time I was also playing JRPGs, but I wasn't actually keeping track of any of the games I played. I don't even recall which games I played in 2014 but I do know for certain when I started reviewing them.

2015

It may have been sometime 2015 when I played the game I made the first review on TheTopTens for Threads of Fate (#1), which was during a rather difficult semester where calculus actually kicked my butt for once (I did excellent for the first half). That review I did for Threads of Fate is amazingly outdated now. When I started these reviews, I called them "old RPG reviews" and well they are old, especially when we are going into 2020. The Playstation, SNES, GB, NES, Genesis, all those systems will be 20 years old, with the Playstation 2 and even the Nintendo DS not being far behind. The reviews I made were clunky, following a formula of rating them by gameplay, characters, plot, and music. I spoil a lot of the plot, and describe many different gameplay mechanics and talk only a bit about the music. Bits and pieces of that formula still apply to all my reviews, and I keep a backup of all the reviews I've got.

After the Threads of Fate review I began reminiscing about the JRPGs I played at the time, usually because writing about this stuff is a fun pasttime and that I wanted to be well-known on TheTopTens. From the first to the twenty-first review, I basically reminisced all the stuff I remembered for the games I played during the 2014 and 2015 years. I got my summer job back this year, and I played Wild Arms (#22) at this time. This was important because I basically decided to write a review after playing through each and every game I complete or get close to completing. During those times I was at my seasonal job I played Lufia II (#23), and was playing Wild Arms 2 (#24) before I left to continue my final semester at community college. I beat Lunar 2 (#26) on Halloween, Suikoden (#27) on my birthday, and the last RPG I remember playing was Breath of Fire 4 (#28) before the end of the year came. Also this year, I had attempted to play Warsong (#57) and Secret of the Stars (#107), but quit due to frustration and boredom, respectively. I eventually revisited both games though.

So in 2015 I made 28 reviews, though not all of the games I played were played this year.

2016

I played Wild Arms: Alter Code F (#29) during the tail ends of December going into January. This review marked the change of name to "RPG Review" for a brief moment, because at the time I did not consider the Playstation 2 to be an old system. Also during this time I was transferring from my associates degree to a bachelors by going to a four-year university, thankfully I lived relatively close by, so I didn't have to move at all. During my first semester at the four-year, I spent less time actually playing RPGs, only managing to get from Xenogears (#30) to Suikoden II (#33). I had to focus immensely on the classes I was in of course, but I had quite some time to do some gaming. Xenogears (#30) and Grandia (#32) in particular were very long and grinding games to do.

I ended my first semester around the time I finished Suikoden II (#33) and my parents and I planned a vacation to Universal Studios in Florida (my mother really wanted to experience the Harry Potter attractions if you wanna know) I played no RPGs when I was in Florida, but I did play the GBC Zelda games both before and during the trip as a leisurely pasttime in between the amusement.

Going home I eventually decided to play Odin Sphere (#34). I also started Lufia: The Legend Returns (#36) at the tail end of my playthrough there, playing one game by day and another by night. After finishing Odin Sphere, Wild Arms 3 (#35) became my day game, and amazingly enough, I took even longer with Lufia: The Legend Returns than I did with WA3, so it became #35 and the Lufia 3 became #36. I tried the same formula for the next two RPGs, playing Suikoden III (#38) by night and Sailor Moon: Another Story (#37) by day. I ended up beating the latter game in about a week, and the former in two months. Yeah, it went for that long, plus by the time I started it I started my next semester as well, so that ate a lot of time up. I had to abandon the "play two RPGs" gimmick and just play one game at a time by then.

I did pick up the pace though and beat it, then moved on to the other games. I think I beat Chrono Cross (#40) during the Halloween times, or was it Grandia II (#41)? I don't remember. Once I reached Soul Blazer (#42) I abandoned the "old" moniker for the ones that weren't Playstation 2 titles and just generalized it to "RPG Review" from then on. I then played that game and a lot of smaller ones, with Final Fantasy VI (#45) setting a new benchmark. From FF6, I went ahead and played a Final Fantasy game every time I reach a multiple of 5. Also, I would play a mostly revered RPG on every multiple of 10. This actually started last year when I played Chrono Trigger (#20), then continued with Xenogears, then Chrono Cross.

So Final Fantasy VI was slated to be played late November to December, and it took awhile. However, I sped through several more RPGs, and the last one was the Magic Knight Rayearth RPG (#48) which took only three days to play. This basically closed out 2016 in terms of RPGs for me, I finished #29 and ended with #48, which was a total of 20 games finished that year.

Continued in another post.