I got a lot done in April. I moved several states away from my childhood home at the very beginning of the month, and I think all the stress and excitement that comes with that may have given me a little extra energy for streaming. I played ten games this month, most of which were totally new to me, and beat eight. One of the ones I didn't complete has since gone on to become a fixation that I suspect will last for months, if not years.

Let's start off with the platformers. The first Platformageddon game of the month was Rockin' Kats, an NES game I'd never played that's on so many "hidden gems" lists that I think it's fair to just call it a gem at this point. These sorts of games are always a crap shoot to stream; sometimes people are cool about it, but since people tend to really latch on to and fixate on cult classics, there's always the risk that someone in chat is the Psycho Dream expert or something like that, and it can feel a little bit like watching someone's all-time favorite movie as they shoot you a nervous glance over their shoulder every couple of minutes to go "what do you think? Pretty cool movie, huh?"

Fortunately, I didn't really have that experience with Rockin' Kats, but unfortunately, I didn't really have a great time with it, either. I think by this point platformer developers were getting a little tired of traditional hop-and-bop mechanics and looking to branch out into more complex control schemes with grappling hooks, climbable walls and stuff like that. That's fine when it works, but I find that these late NES games more often than not end up feeling a little janky -- think the shitty jetpacks in Power Blade 2 and Mega Man 6, the weird overanimated cinematic platformer style movement in Moon Crystal (which I'll get to), etc. I think it might be a hardware thing, but Gimmick's physics feel fine, so maybe it's just that publishers were rushing dev teams to wrap up their 8-bit games so they could focus on the Super Famicom or something.

In Rockin' Kats, you've got a giant cartoon hand you fire out of a gun, and it is definitely more of a Power Blade 2 jetpack than a Gimmick star. You can use it to catch and throw objects, punch walls and floors for a little speed boost, and swing from ceilings. That sounds great on paper, but Rockin' Kats is not a fluid game. Bouncing off of the floors gives you an awkward superjump you never really need, bouncing off of walls launches you a couple tiles horizontally but can't be interrupted by jumping or attacking or anything, the swinging isn't smooth at all, hitstun completely halts your momentum, the rocket shoes aren't too great... It's just not for me. I also found the game way too easy until the secret post-credits level, which was pretty damn hard, although I think part of that was that the bonus level is really the first time you're required to use any of the game's silly physics tricks, so if you're the type to just haul ass to the end rather than take your time, you'll suddenly have to learn all these finicky mechanics you've been neglecting. The bonus level also ends with a refight of the final boss, so you have to fight him twice in quick succession, which is a little anticlimactic. It's not the worst game in the world, though.

Up next, we have CT Special Forces: Back to Hell. I hate it. It's a PAL PlayStation port of a GBA game that felt a little slow at that system's native refresh rate of 60hz, meaning at 50hz it feels absolutely glacial. This is one of those games where you can save, but lives and continues aren't infinite, so by the time you realize you only have one life left, you've already saved in the next-to-last stage and have to choose between starting over or powering through with no resources. It has almost nothing going for it.

Moon Crystal is a little better. This is another one of those not-so-hidden gems, but unlike Rockin' Kats, I'd played about five minutes of this game before, so I knew what to expect. Moon Crystal has really, really fluid animation, which is kind of novel for a Famicom game, but I found it kind of awkward to control as a result. You have to pivot to change directions on the ground, but you don't skid to a stop like it's Mario or something; you're basically stuck in place doing a little dance move. Your attack is a little sticky, too. That's not to say the controls are bad, though; they just take some getting used to.

I'm not really a sequel or remake person, so I almost never say this, but it would have been nice to see another Moon Crystal at some point. It's got some interesting ideas: you do massive bonus damage to bosses if you hit them in the head when you're low on life, there's a double jump (which might not seem that novel now, but it wasn't exactly common back on the Famicom), there's a 3D-platformer-style ledge grab, etc. But you just play it like a standard action platformer for the first several levels, and I found it pretty easy, so by the time it starts to get interesting, it's pretty much already over. It's also got a powerup system, but it's really poorly realized; you can upgrade the range on your main attack and your max HP, and the double jump is also gated behind a powerup, but since so much of the platforming requires it, they just kind of give it to you for free after every respawn checkpoint. This was the best new-to-me action platformer I played in April, but since it's competing with Rockin' Kats, CT Special Forces and Power Piggs, that is not saying much.

I also replayed Kid Icarus for Platformageddon, but I don't have much to say about it. It's an excellent game, and also clearly not Platformageddon-eligible, but if you had a giant list of games you were honor-bound to play to completion that included, like five Asterix games, you'd sneak Kid Icarus on there too.

Last and absolutely least for the April Platformageddon lineup was Power Piggs of the Dark Age. Here's the thing. I'm an open-minded person. I love Mortal Kombat Mythologies, Skuljagger, Batsu & Terry, Transformers: Convoy no Nazo and a whole bunch of garbage like that. Power Piggs is horrible. It was an obvious craven attempt to kickstart a TMNT ripoff franchise and we are all better off for its failure. The sound effects are more disgusting than Boogerman, the level design is labyrinthine in that sprawling Daze Before Christmas way, the hitboxes make no sense -- everything is about this game is horrendous. And you know the best part? I didn't even get to beat it. The final boss had some dumb gimmick where you had to combo it a few times to win, but since I only had 1 HP when I got there, I used a safe hit-and-run strat that whittled down its HP over what seriously felt like six minutes of gameplay. Guess what happens if you kill him this way? You softlock. I had to look up the ending on Youtube, and yes, it was of course a silent text crawl.

By the way, this game wasn't made by the same developers as Skuljagger, but it was produced by the same company, Barr Entertainment. The games have almost nothing in common, but it does use the same "CRUEL MAN CRUEL BIRD" password system. You know how many passwords you get? In an entire playthrough? One.

I also started up Shadowrun for the Super NES. I was enjoying it quite a bit, but my friend and I decided to stream it as a collab, and I'm not sure that's the best way to enjoy CRPGs; I don't think you're setting yourself up for success when you're playing a game where you're expected to explore, experiment and take notes while your attention is being pulled in another direction by your Twitch chat and yet another direction by your friend. I might come back to this one in private or something.

Final Fantasy IV is my favorite video game, but I'd never streamed the original Super Famicom version before; in fact, I'd never even played it. Technically, I played the Namingway Edition fan translation, which I believe is supposed to be the same thing with a few ill-advised embellishments meant to connect the game to that horrible After Years "sequel" and work in some of the new story details from the DS version, but there's so much bad information out there that I'm not actually sure. I wasn't super in love with the translation, but having played many versions of the game, I do still think this is the best way to play it. Unfortunately, I think 4 and 7 are kind of in the same place where there's no one English-language version you can recommend without at least a couple asterisks. Also, as a PSA, Ted Woolsey did not translate 2 US. In fact, as I understand it, FF2 was so legendarily bad that they put him on translation for the rest of their SNES releases specifically to fix the damage they'd done. Please do not blame him for that version of the game. He can actually write.

Not much to say about this playthrough, but the thing happened to me that seems to happen every time I play this game; I went "I've got, what, 2 hours left, right?" and it was actually 6. I'm not the only person I've seen do this with FF4, either. There's just something about the pace of the game, I guess.

Finally, I played two life-changing games in April. After marathoning the first three installments in 2023, I put off Dragon Warrior IV for months on end because I had convinced myself it couldn't possibly live up to the Alefgard trilogy. For one thing, you can't control your supporting party members in DW4 -- just your hero -- and I was expecting that to be a dealbreaker. Plus, for some reason -- I think just because I'd seen the beginning of the Chrontendo review of Dragon Quest 4 -- I was expecting leveling the entire cast up from 1 at every chapter break to be a chore. Normally, I do everything I can to go into games without expectations, but I was sure Dragon Warrior IV was going to disappoint me.

Well, that was stupid. Dragon Warrior IV is one of the best games I've ever played, full stop. You always hear that 8-bit RPGs are dated and clunky, and for most of my life, I never really questioned this idea. After I got into Twitch streaming, though, I learned that I'm kind of a contrarian, and also that I have pretty high jank tolerance, so as time has gone on I've cared less and less about "quality of life." Having said that, though, I really don't think this idea is fair. I've played every Famicom FF and every NES Dragon Warrior now and I don't think I see the big deal. Are you sure you think these games are slow? Maybe you're like I used to be and you've just heard that 8-bit JRPGs are like wading waist-deep in molasses for so long that you've accepted that it must be true without ever really checking them out for yourself. The Dragon Warrior games are fine. They might be slightly slower than the NES Final Fantasies, but have you gone back and played FF9? Like, the original on the PlayStation, not the remakes? Do you remember just how long those attack animations are? What about the loading times? 8-bit RPGs haul ass in comparison. Not that that even matters, since I don't understand why we dunk on all those success win guys who watch movies at 1.5x speed to save time if we're going to act like double-tapping A to pick "TALK" instead of tapping it a single time is somehow unplayably antiquated.

I'm getting a little off-topic here, but I'm also bringing this up for a reason. Conventional wisdom on JRPGs is wrong. I'm aware everything is subjective and I'm sure many of the people who hate old RPGs made a genuine effort to wring some enjoyment out of them and found them wanting. But I think social media, Youtubers, reviewers, and other influencers have done an awful lot of work to set expectations and it's really easy to internalize their ideas without realizing it. Just like I always used to hear that old RPGs were clunky, I can't tell you how many times I've heard that the Dragon Quest series is "conservative," "rooted in tradition," or even "all the same game." I would go so far as to say if someone says this, you can safely assume they've never played any of the original Dragon Quest games all the way through. 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all excellent games that are all radically different from each other. In hindsight, I don't know how the whole of the English-speaking video game intelligentsia all managed to convince each other that the best-selling and most beloved RPGs in the entire world were prehistoric artifacts, playable only if you derive some sort of dystopian worker-bee joy from mindlessly grinding in between grueling shifts at your soul-sucking salaryman job, but it's bullshit and we have to start pushing back against it. We have been lying to each other about Dragon Quest for years because we take for granted that remakes are an unalloyed good and that as hardware gets more powerful, "quality of life," an aspect of game design we see not as an art but as a solvable engineering problem, improves in linear fashion over time. So right now I'm begging you: you don't have to like these games, but please try them for more than a couple of minutes before you write them off. My life is better for having played through every Famicom Final Fantasy and every NES Dragon Warrior. I was missing out. Maybe you are too.

Anyway, as for the game itself, I think it's way ahead of its time. I believe Horii Yuuji has some history in the manga publishing industry, and I don't know if that's why this is or if the Dragon Quest team was just that good, but I think Dragon Warrior IV features some of the best storytelling of any video game to date. That's not to say it's an especially deep or complex story -- on some level, "excellent by video game standards" could be damning with faint praise -- but I think Chun Soft had a touch for writing simple, charming characters with strong personalities, and while the first three Dragon Quests have plenty of character, 4 is really where they came into their own. This is the hidden genius of the combat system, too. If you're not aware, this game is broken up into five chapters. The first four introduce the supporting cast of Ragnar, Mara and Nara, Alena, Cristo and Brey, and Taloon, and you control them directly for the beginning of their respective journeys. In the fifth and final chapter, you control the Hero and recruit the cast of the first four chapters...but this time around, you don't control them. You can instruct the party to heal, play defensively, or go all-out, but they have minds of their own. Between Cristo's love for the Beat and Defeat spells, Alena's nonstop critical hits, and Taloon's surprisingly useful repertoire of slapstick comic relief attacks, there's almost as much characterization in the combat as in the dialogue. This system does definitely make the game harder, but frankly, it's also just nowhere near as hard as II or III, so if you could, for example, cast Sap or Bikill on command, I think it would be way, way too easy. The game must have been balanced with this "herding cats" system in mind.

I can't say much else about Dragon Warrior IV without also talking at length about the first three, and I've been halfheartedly working on a video script on this subject for months now, so I guess I'll end this by reiterating my first point. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with you if you find 8-bit RPGs too clunky or too outdated to enjoy. But I know a lot of people who go straight to the remakes for their "quality of life improvements" who readily admit they haven't so much as tried the originals. I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy and you don't stand to lose anything by at least giving the classics a try.

As for the second life-changing game, the original Super Famicom version of Shiren the Wanderer, this game completely took over my life for half of April and the entire month of May. I have so much to say about it that I don't even want to get started now. There is a reason this game caught on like wildfire in the retro Twitch scene this past month. Shiren the Wanderer is one of the best games ever made, and I think it is severely underappreciated in the English-speaking world.