[Revisit] Roundup!

I've been playing through several games from my past lately since it's been a stressful last few weeks. I figured writing quick recaps of them in a blog post was less overwhelming, so let's do it!

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Switch)

I've probably beaten this game half a dozen times over the years, but never with my wife! She got to kind of experience the lot of it while I played. She tried playing but the archaic controls turned her off almost immediately. This game is still paced exceedingly well and signposted wonderfully. I think the only thing that really stuck out to me was the amount of times that you need to pause to pick your needed item or change your equipment (looking at you water temple). Holy cow do these make the game grind to a halt. Having all the different ways to interact with the world of Hyrule is wonderful, but man does pausing every couple minutes take you out. At least it did me playing as a 33 year old. Still a great game, but I think I'd recommend the 3ds port these days for the couple extra item slots and being able to assign different boots to your buttons.

Pokemon Emerald Randomizer (emulated)

I don't recall for sure if I'd played through Emerald, but I know I had Sapphire growing up and played through that. Those games are in the same generation, so I think this counts as a replay. I gotta say, playing through a Pokemon game with a randomizer mod was the way to do it. I was way more surprised by the random teams than I remember ever being playing through a main series game. Some gym leaders were trash and some normal trainers took me a few tries to beat! It was really fun and I think if I ever replay Pokemon game sin the future this will be how I do it. Playing on a little emulation handheld was fun too. I did the majority of it while watching TV and cuddling with my wife, it was an excellent experience.

Legend of Zelda: Windwaker Randomizer

I played through again! Big surprise I bet. Still super fun and I think it's the most fun way to revisit this beast of a game. My seed this time was really weird, I think I had almost all of the triforce before I even had any new items. Lots of exploration on the great sea!

Kingdom Hearts 2 Randomizer (PC)

I have been having a Kingdom Hearts itch for a bit and broke down and bought 1.5+2.5 on the Epic game store. I did some research beforehand and found out that the ports aren't great, so I did a little research into modding the game to fix/smooth some things that Square Enix couldn't be bothered to finish properly. In my searching YouTube let me know that randomizers for KH2 existed! I've played through a couple different seeds now and man, these are really fun. My first time through took ~10 hours and the second took ~7. I think I may crank up the difficulty a little and play through again before I'm done with this kick.

I really can't say enough how much fun it is to replay old games (that you remember well!) with a randomizer. It really breathes fresh life into a game that's familiar to you already. Playing through two different KH2 randomizers in a row really showed me how different each playthrough can be. It's a fun way to keep an old game fresh.