"Describing anything in this game is impossible without sounding like a deranged person."

The best description of my beloved Fantasy Zone I've ever heard.

I was leaning more towards the "Zig set us up the bomb" meme. Guess you did do it on accident. I am disappoint.

I don't think of Zig-friend as gone. I like to image him skulking around the edges, quietly fuming I can finally play all the Utawarerumonos.

So do I. Reason #1 I played this game to review it: the fact the secondary villain was named Zig. Might not be reviewing anymore, but I won't let the legacy die!

"Zig sets him up"

I see what you did there.

I refuse to believe it was an accident.

I was kinda-sorta in the same boat with my first few Sega Saturn games. I was happy to get a Sega Saturn for Christmas... but my local electronics store had a very-lacking and small selection of Saturn titles. It got so bad that I had to resort to renting Saturn games to experience some of the better games in its library.

There's a lot of details I'm leaving out, since that would end up being at least five more paragraphs, but that's the basic gist of it.

Thanks for reading. I almost didn't get this review out in time because of other stuff, so this was a major crunch to play, screenshot, review, and proofread just to get it out on the 4th.

I got this game for my birthday one year, from my Mom. She tried. But the local video store only had a few games, apparently, and this was one of them. She thought it would probably be pretty cool. The year after that, she got me San Francisco Rush for the PlayStation, which had 1-minute load times and extremely bland visuals between them. It was not a great few birthdays, for sure, but it was the thought that counted. Those disappointments just hit harder because I was lucky to get 2 new games in a single year. One of them being a stinker caused trauma.

It's clear you have a lot of passion for Deltarune, which has a much larger following than I realized until this very week. Apparently, despite all those other big games getting announced, a lot of people were still eager for more information about Deltarune, which is pretty impressive for Mr. Fox.

While your passion came through just fine and you did give me a better idea what the game is about than I had when I started reading, there are things you might do to make your review more convincing. You like the story, for instance, but you might have told us more about things like themes that resonate for you, possibly with one example that won't spoil much. And you might have discussed how those themes are communicated through more than just the dialog. Does the game's graphical approach work in support of the theme? Does it allow the game to tell its story in ways you find innovative? That's the sort of thing readers often like to know about a game they haven't played, particularly one that was awarded five stars.

Personally, I'm not huge on games that ask me to love them because they have a great story. I care about the gameplay first, which is one area where Undertale sometimes left me feeling disappointed. But it also had a lot of neat components, and I suspect Deltarune does also. How does it feel to play, when it's not feeding you more of its awesome story?

Definitely don't let go of the passion you clearly have for Deltarune and other games you might enjoy. I hope the chapters that are yet to follow meet or exceed your high expectations.

Thank you so much for writing this, just played this game and holy fuck its shit.

IT is indeed a gorgeous full of charm piece of shit, but shit regardless.

I am truly convinced no one really played this, it is truly unplayable in the most literal sense, moving around the world feels aimless and brainless at the same time.

Thank you folks for shedding a "ray of light" on the subject!

I don't remember most people giving a crap about "ray tracing" until Nvidia made it THE thing your graphics had to have in order to be taken seriously by tech bros. The tech dates back to the 80s, but broadly, people didn't care. So, I think it's as noted. There were other "Ray" games, and "Ray Tracers" sounded cool for another "Ray" game. I don't think it's any deeper than that, honestly.

I actually tried finding any development history concerning the game after reading your comment (ie 10 minutes) and couldn't find any explanation for the title. Though, I should mention that Taito also had another series, a shoot'em up series, around this same time where each game started with the word Ray: RayForce, RayStorm, and RayCrisis.

My basic take on this is that maybe they really liked using the word Ray and thought Ray Tracers sounded cool.

How interesting to see a 1997 game called "Ray Tracers", given that ray tracing has recently become better known for providing fancy graphics in systems like PS5. I wonder why Taito used such a technical name for their title?

"I had to fight through the labyrinth of sub menus to try and find the order to turn on the tractor beam under a very harsh time limit, and I ended up ejecting the warp core instead."

Something tells me Kirk & Picard had better computers than that...

Congratulations on reaching that milestone. It was exciting to watch, even if I didn't always have anything to say in the moment.

I hated writing this review, and I've been trying to do it for near on 10 years now. The only reason I pushed through to the end now was because that awful T.V. show of the same name was loosing relevance by the second and I didn't want to rewrite the intro for the dozenth time. I remember it started with 'this show has been announced' and then 'this show is being made', then 'this show is out', 'this show's season has completed', 'this show has been cancelled'. Even then, it belonged to a completely different review because I'd tried to write something based on talking about a single playthrough but realised it was painfully unfunny and dull. And that was after I'd scrapped one which was more of a hard comparison between the SNES and the 32X strains, which meant I put hours into both bloody versions (the SNES has less missions, less ship models does not have the pool mini game and, unsurprisingly, looks pretty bad by comparison). And now we have this; something with a casual intro and the rest just stuffy, hard facts. I had an easier time writing for the text-heavy strategy game released solely in Japan...

But now it's done and I can stop. I think there's a very good chance that I've spent more time with 32X games than anyone else in the world and that the end is this game is kind of fitting; it was an idea whose ambition was destroyed by the technological limitations of the time. It leaves me only with the memory of a mission where I had to fight through the labyrinth of sub menus to try and find the order to turn on the tractor beam under a very harsh time limit, and I ended up ejecting the warp core instead. I did not pass that class.

Thanks for reading this and the rest of the 32X reviews no one asked for. Genuinely, I'm not sure I would have powered through this nonsense if I thought I was writing stuff that was just dropping into a void, so I appreciate all the feedback from yourself and everyone else.

I can't recall ever playing a menu-heavy based game on an older console, where actions took place in real-time, and having a good time. At the very least, the games I remember with heavy menus paused the action when accessed.

Looking at the images, the 3D in this game, based on the slow movement described, seems like it could have easily been done on a normal Genesis or a Super Ninten... oh.

Good review, and congratulations on finally reviewing every 32X game for the site! I actually thought you would never touch this one, and it got to a point where at one time I actually contemplated playing the SNES version out of morbid curiosity.

I have a decent amount of nostalgia for ActRaiser, I think mainly because it was one of the first SNES games I played and it looked and sounded so much better than the NES stuff I spent most of my time with, so it was one of those games for that system that truly captivated my imagination. Which would ordinarily mean I'd have some sort of desire to play this game, as I do occasionally bust out reviews for games I played simply due to some sort of nostalgia factor.

But tower defense stuff added to the mix? No thanks. I'm on the other end of the opinion on that than you, not being a fan. Hell, I remember with the last Ezio Assassin's Creed game how, if you were too active in being an assassin without paying off guys to lower your infamy, you'd have to do a tower defense sequence around a district's hideout. After doing the tutorial one to let you know what you were facing, I made sure to pay off people every single time I did anything to raise that infamy even a tiny bit. Just not my thing.

You know, I was looking through his catalog of games, and I was surprised just how many non-Double Dragon/Kunio-kun titles I played that he was involved with in some capacity.

I didn't know he was involved with the arcade version of Block Out, which makes a helluva lot more sense why Technos Japan created a "similar" game for the PlayStation 1 called Geom Cube a few years later.

I also own the Sega CD ports of Cobra Command and Road Blaster, which I think I recall him being director of the latter arcade version but didn't know about the former.

Surprised about him producing the PS1/Saturn Choaniki games.

Regardless of the quality of some of his games, he certainly made an impact on the industry considering a lot of mechanics from his titles are still incorporated into newer games to this day.

!@#$! Leroux reviews still slap. Really good writing in the end section about the boss fights.

Glad that my descriptions were clear enough to understand! I would've submitted some images, but SMS screenshots are a colossal pain for "reasons."

The mechanics make this, at least for me, one of the more fascinating games for the system, but the brutal difficulty escalation ruins any potential fun past the first ten stages. There's zero continues and dozens upon dozens upon dozens of stages... isn't that hard enough???

Thanks for reading.