flac's liked content | Backloggd (2025)

I have a lot of baggage with A Link to the Past. Despite it being one of the most formative games I've played, I never had a soft spot like I did for other Zelda games, let alone SNES games. I found enjoyment in the first two Zeldas tickling my brain in enticing ways that ALttP didn't, perplexingly enough.

With Echoes of Wisdom for the Switch on the horizon, I still couldn't help but lament that I couldn't play it due to a lack of funds. And after an exhausting discussion of Zelda among friends, it kept coming back to the fact that I haven't played A Link Between Worlds yet. And that's through no sleight of its own; there are a lot of good 3DS games I haven't played yet either. It has been on The List for a long time. But with nothing better to do and now with the Zelda itch, I decided to start on A Link Between Worlds almost on a whim.

Also I was stoned during this discussion and decision, so that was probably it, too.

Let's talk about nostalgia, because boy howdy does this game evoke it. ALttP is like a parasite in my brain; I know virtually everything about it, I remember the locales, I remember the enemies, I remember the music. I booted up ALBW for the first time, and what a massive slap of nostalgia in the face; the opening is almost beat-for-beat the same as ALttP. ALBW is a true sequel despite coming out over two decades later. Everything in the game feels like ALttP, and it's mindblowing how faithful they managed to be, to evoke nostalgia for a game I haven't played in literal decades.

Everything gets turned on its head when the dungeons start, though. First off, dungeons have stakes now; die, and you drop all your items and have to trudge back to your house in shame to rent them again. I wouldn't call the game hard, but I've died in this game, and it feels punishing when you do. Ultimately it amounts to rupees lost, but your wallet feels important. The item rental system is ingenious; it feels like the world is both open to you and closed off simultaneously; you can tackle most dungeons in whatever order strikes your fancy as long as you have the right tools at the given time, which won't be the case most of the time. Dungeons feel themed after particular items, and the game feels very focused as a result, ironic given its open-ended structure.

At the time of starting to write this, I did the first three dungeons and just entered Lorule, the parallel sibling of Hyrule. The first three dungeons turned my brain to paste already. Let's talk about puzzles. Ultimately the puzzles amount to finding a way to traverse into the next area; they almost feel like levels within a dungeon world. And finding that way to traverse into the next area gets tricky. Full disclosure: I am bad at spatial puzzles. Captain Toad whooped my ass a lot. Zelda has these puzzles in spades. It's one of the only games where I feel like the 3D is necessary to gain perspective in a lot of the puzzles that involve height. There is a lot of verticality to ALBW's puzzles that really lend to the game's depth, both figuratively and literally. It's actually kind of a lot to take in.

And then you add the wall merge mechanic.

Wall merge is what takes these dungeons to the next level, because now you're working in effectively four dimensions. Dungeon levels basically become rubix cubes where you have to go “Am I at the correct height to reach this platform? Can I cheese the walls and get over there?” And it's a serious learning curve. My brain has not had to struggle this hard since Baba Is You. The Eastern Palace is a tame introduction to the game, but using effectively a jump and doing puzzles in the House of Gales gets complicated, and the Tower of Hera gets even wilder by having jump pads with the Hammer and scaling the massive building. Traversal is very much a puzzle in and of itself, and it's been a blast finding out how the game tries to push that concept to the limit.

The only real flaw I have with the game are the bossfights, either being retreads of ALttP which function as nostalgia bait, or more frustrating encounters like the Knucklemaster making me catch that hand for multiple game-overs in the Skull Woods.

The story is good. No notes. Go into it unspoiled.

ALBW is utterly riveting. I have not felt a game sink its claws into me for quite a long time. It is everything I enjoyed about ALttP but more. And it also fucks with my feelings on how I feel about Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. In fact it retroactively makes me recontextualize the entire series. It's non-linear but still makes room for Link's unique toolbox of items and gear. The toolbox enables the tight and focused dungeon design, each with a specific mission to make you rethink how said tools can be pushed to their limits to solve some complex and frankly mind-numbing puzzles. I wanted Zelda in 3D to be like this, and this entire time I've been sleeping on what makes the 2D games so great.

What a ridiculous video game. Absolutely demented in every regard.

This is arguably the best Fire Emblem game in the series. Path of Radiance is a bit of a cult classic, never being a monstrous seller in a franchise that at the point saw little exposure outside of Japan. But I think to this day it has one of the most compelling narratives I've played in a video game.

Ike as a main character is not a "destined one": he's a mercenary born in relative obscurity who by chance stumbles into a global conflict. He's one of the most well-written characters in the franchise, being stoic and pragmatic most of the time but has a genuine warmth and empathy towards those in need. His upbringing makes him both sheltered and open to new experiences. Ike is a good foil to most of the conflict in the game, in a story about political isolationism, genocide, vengeance, and racism. The writing elevates this story even more into something truly fantastic.

As a functional game, PoR is very intelligently designed for the most part. Character classes and builds are diverse and fulfill their own specific purposes without feeling over-centralizing or useless. Level and map design requires you to play intelligently and utilize your characters to their utmost potential, and the game remains punishing if you misplay at any moment.

The only real issues I have with the game are exclusive to the series itself, like bonus XP trivializing the difficulty a bit, class skills feeling unbalanced, and specifically the Laguz being interesting mechanically but never quite get their footing compared to your regular units. And the story's tail end does sort of devolve into "fight the tyrant with the power of god", but it's nowhere nearly as egregious as Radiant Dawn was.

If you can track it down, it's an absolute classic and works fine as a stand-alone story despite having a more dramatically flawed sequel.

It’s good to experience changes as you drift through life, but it’s also comforting to be reminded of all the ways you’re still you. A formative part of the way my taste in games developed was my voracious consumption of freeware RPG Maker games as a teenager. Like most very-online people my age, I have a soft spot for Yume Nikki and other games like it. These moody solo projects spoke to me as a depressed kid trying to find a foothold on my own mental health; they were made by people going through the same things as me, running into just as much difficulty expressing themselves as I was.

My Big Sister was made with Adventure Game Studio, a similar program to RPG Maker, by an anonymous developer—and it’s full of reminders that this is an amateur project primarily made by one person. There are a number of bugs you’re likely to encounter, the writing is stilted, and it’s clear that it wasn’t proofread by someone with a fantastic grasp on the English language. The game tells a story of two sisters that have an awkward relationship with their mother and a strained relationship with one another. It aims to tackle themes of loneliness, depression and suicide but does so with all the grace of a swan with an extra leg. The game’s creator doesn’t suggest any substantive solutions to these problems, instead opting merely to point them out. The writer clearly doesn’t have answers, but that’s what makes this game so compelling to me—neither do I.

Things do end on a hopeful note, but the landing doesn’t quite stick. There’s a humanness to this ham-fisted story that reminded me at every turn that it was assembled by one person simply trying to get a handle on their own experience. I was brought back to my days of playing Yume Nikki and LcdDem alone in my room, sharing what I felt was a deep kinship with these people I would never meet. In my own endeavors, I try to put out a feeler for whoever might need it; a signal someone might receive that will affirm for them that they’re not the only person feeling what they feel because I also feel it.

I wonder, when playing My Big Sister, if the developer feels like they succeeded. I wonder if they feel embarrassed at the ways they came short of communicating effectively. When I look back at almost anything I’ve written, I question if I managed to be successful. Occasionally, I get a bit of external validation from someone that appreciates that I put a piece of myself out there. Ultimately, once you release creative energy into the world, it’s no longer yours; whoever catches what you release is free to use it however they like. I come away from My Big Sister feeling appreciative that I’ve shared a moment of humanity. That’s enough to affirm for me that the torture of creating is always worthwhile.

One of the worst insults you can throw at a video game is to call it an “asset swap.” To say that your work amounts to a fresh coat of paint over something that already existed is, essentially, to say you’ve done nothing. Almost as bad is to call something a “clone,” which implies that you may have done original work, but you’ve failed to iterate upon the inspiration you draw from. There are situations where these pejoratives are appropriate—the flood of “trash” releases on Steam certainly apply—but they’ve become overused to the point that they’ve lost their bite. In the wake of Suika Game’s surprise viral success, a number of games have taken its simple but genius premise (in brief: a sort of physics-based 2048 in which you combine matching objects until you can make the biggest one) and run in their own direction with it. Some are pale imitations with shoddy physics (like Big Watermelon Match), but even games that alter the calculus of gameplay by changing the shapes of the objects or the conditions of the fail state, like PuzzMiX, aren’t immune to being called cheap ripoffs. You would have a hard time criticizing Matsutake Game for being a low effort clone.

Let’s get the obvious thing out of the way: thematically, it’s absolutely nuts. The playing field appears to be a woven basket, and the objects you’re dropping into them are mushrooms; it’s as if you’re a mycology student collecting samples. You drop the adorable fungal friends, each dotted with a pair of beady eyeballs, and a squeak resembling a chew toy clenched between the jaws of a playful pup is heard. It doesn’t even take more than a couple of seconds to get annoying. The core concept is exactly the same as Suika Game, combining mushrooms until you make the titular matsutake—considered a delicacy in Japanese cuisine due to its partially endangered status. As you make your way up the chain of evolution, the name of each mushroom is announced by a cute Japanese voice. (Kikurage, shiitake, maitake, etc.) This also quickly gets overstimulating. The totality of the aesthetics are amusing, but they serve another important purpose: they’re disarming. It’s simply hard to be upset at a loss when lightning streaks across the screen, announcing “GAME OVER” in a fashion far too dramatic for a game about collecting mushrooms.

But it’s not just superficial differences that set Matsutake Game apart from Suika. The shapes of the mushrooms are irregular, in contrast to the perfectly round fruits. This makes their behavior less easy to predict, but more surprising. Chain reactions can come suddenly as pieces jostle around in ways you couldn’t possibly plan for. Most meaningfully, though, is the fact that Matsutake Game is the only Suika-like (that I’ve seen, anyway) that is actually in three dimensions. Pieces can fall behind your field of view or roll into positions you didn’t intend. You can use the extra volume to your advantage, too, filling as much space on the board as you can to set up future chains. It’s a brilliant remix of the formula, while still feeling familiar enough that there’s no sense of a learning curve. The z-axis of the playing field is so narrow that you can almost see everything, but wide enough that you feel the depth of the container.

Matsutake Game feels a world apart from Suika Game to me, though I can still imagine a casual observer saying it’s not different enough to justify existing. This is partially due to the fact that you can intuit so much from a physics game simply by looking at it; Suika-likes hide little from you, allowing you grasp the objective in only a couple of seconds. What you can’t glean from a cursory glance is how it feels. Suika Game is, itself, a clone of a Chinese mobile game called Synthetic Watermelon. It became a phenomenon because it refined the formula it copied, perfecting previously unreliable physics and wrapping it in an aesthetic that was far more pleasant to look at. Matsutake Game feels like a similarly significant leap. If you’ve only messed around in a Suika-like for a few minutes and gotten bored, they’re probably all the same to you—but if you’re really about it, there’s a whole new world to find inside that wicker basket.

Man, I have some feelings about Phantasy Star Universe, a lot of them nebulous and uncomfortable. Everybody has that one video game where they in retrospect realize is really bad, but it doesn't stop you from pouring dozens if not hundreds of hours into it just because it evokes a certain pathos from you.

I got drafted into playing PSU because of a psychotic friend who has thousands of hours in the X360 version. I ended up putting a few hundred in myself. Then we watched the world end together as the servers came to a solemn close. Cue several years and one privately-run server later, PSU is back! But I'm well past the age of thinking this game is good, so I'm happy the private server exists. ...Alright fine, so I started playing it again.

And I don't know why I have, because again, this isn't a good game! It's not bad, but it's very very old. The combat is mindless button-mashing and corralling enemies into groups to slaughter them with. There's no dodge or block or dash button. Guns have an arbitrary ammo system that just makes them straight-up suck to use. Techniques and photon arts only leveled up the more you used them which lead to shitloads of grinding and "buff parties". The weapon-leveling system could fail and destroy your weapon permanently. There's just a lot of needlessly obtuse and mean-spirited systems present in the game. So why play it?

Phantasy Star Online remains one of my favorite games of all time, and this game feels like a step sideways for a Dreamcast-to-X360 game. Honestly I couldn't tell you which game plays better, which is either a testament to how well PSO's aged or a testament to how terrible PSU is. But the vibe remains similar. There is a cool dystopian future vibe to the entire game, with locales overrun with monsters and enemies, and bastions of civilization seeming sparse and empty due to it being relative to how many real-world players occupy each area. The music is still pretty solid (but still incapable of touching PSO) and the general art direction is still pretty evocative.

Phantasy Star Universe was meant to be a follow-up to Phantasy Star Online's enormous legacy, but it's a game that does pretty much everything just as well or worse than a game that came out 6 years ago. It's a sidegrade to a game that precedes it by a whole generation. With the Portable games improving on PSU's formula and PSO2 going in a separate direction that felt faithful to PSO, Phantasy Star Universe is just going to occupy an awkward part of Sega's history.

Anyways, I'll be on it if anybody needs me.

When I bring up the 2000s nostalgia of JRPGs, there's a good chance I'm referencing this game at some point or another. In preparation for making this list I usually read some literature, listen to some music, or more simply, just play the game to get caught up to speed. The Last Story was a game I remember very fondly, but I couldn't remember for the life of me why. 2012-2013 were some of my most turbulent years of my life, so a lot of gaming done around that time ended up in the memory hole, never to be seen or heard from again.

Fast-forward to 2024, and I've hooked my Wii back up to my HDTV. It took a converter to do so, but I have a lot of Wii games I want to play, especially for this list. The Last Story I bought the collector's edition for when it had a pricing error of 8 dollars on Amazon. It was a part of the Operation Rainfall trilogy of games--one with arguably the largest pedigree--and was developed by Mistwalker under Hironobu Sakaguchi's guiding light, with Noduo Uematsu's beautiful music accompanying it. The game has a compelling art style that, while looking like somebody smeared vaseline on my TV, still looks compelling and gorgeous to this day.

The Last Story had a rather subdued release. It's not particularly remembered among the Operation Rainfall games considering the massive shadow Xenoblade Chronicles cast, but at least it's not Pandora's Tower, lost somewhere to obscurity. And given that, I've met so many people who don't know what the Hell this game is or anything of note other than who made it.

The Last Story is a love story meets political struggle. Let's not mince words here; the story is generic. But its strength lies in the fantastic characterization, banter, and investment in its characters. Even booting the game up for the first time in over a decade, they immediately throw you into the action with all these characters charmingly shooting the shit and working with each other. The romance feels organic and developed. The world and aesthetic they created is very much a fantasy setting you'd expect from Sakaguchi.

So how does it play? Well, it's an Action RPG with a lot of tactics work behind it. The game utilizes a cover and stealth system, and you can aim your crossbow at enemies to signal your party to do various tactics like dumping magic in a chosen spot. There's also an aggro system. The combat is Ys-styled where it consists of running aggressively at enemies until they die, while blocking and dodging. Frankly there's a lot going on with the battle system. It's a fascinating take on a battle system that feels like it could've laid the groundwork for a lot more tactical ARPGs to come in the future.

But honestly, we are here for Sakaguchi and Uematsu. The story has a classic JRPG feel to it, accompanied by gorgeous music. The game has an immaculate vibe to it that just makes the worldbuilding and storytelling compelling, even if it covers a lot of ground both have covered before. It's just a very back-to-basics strong JRPG with some unique spins on the gameplay (ONLINE MULTIPLAYER).

"Final Fantasy" has sort of become a word salad as time has gone on, two terms that just signal an ongoing JRPG franchise, unaware of the irony that it's neither a singular fantasy nor the last one. The Last Story was Mistwalker's last game on console platforms before jumping ship to mobile and iOS. It's a very self-contained, succinct, complete story with a happy ending. And coming out in the twilight years of the Wii in the early 2010s as the gaming industry moved towards the AAA singularity, The Last Story really does sort of feel like the last of its kind, a very faithful-to-tradition, honest JRPG.

Strongly recommend. It's a hard game to play nowadays, but worth it for some forgotten nostalgia.

Kirby's Adventure was a monumental follow-up to what was at best a retail tech demo on the Gameboy with Kirby's Dreamland. Emerging on the NES in its twilight years well into the beginning of the SNES's life cycle, Kirby's Adventure was a game pushing the limits of the console it was on. It really was a grandiose adventure through a wide variety of locales with fantastic music (BUTTER BUILDING) and actual cutting-edge graphics for the NES.

And let's not even get started on the fact that this was the game that introduced one of the most iconic abilities in video games, Kirby eating dudes and obtaining their powers through osmosis. If you wanted Kirby to breath fire, ice, shoot lasers, throw cutter, or turn into a fucking wheel, this game has you covered. The imagination at work was nearly endless, only further innovated on in later games in the series by making Kirby wear funny hats. It really was a game you could play however you want.

Whereas Kirby's Dreamland established Kirby as a cute quirky mascot for Nintendo, Kirby's Adventure was the game that solidified his place in the video game pantheon of great franchises. Even if it's a bit on the easy side and not a particular long game, it's fantastic to see where Kirby came from, and the game's platforming and weird boss fights still hold up 3 decades later. What a master class.

I remember when Ocarina of Time came out. It was close to my 10th birthday, and was a particularly warm and dry winter. The game was 75 dollars and the carts were gold. I have so many distinct memories of the game that it would be impossible to narrow down which ones stuck with me the most.

Ocarina of Time was a weird, dark, and creepy game. Redeads freezing your controls and slowly meandering their way towards you while screaming is an all-timer in "horror elements in a non-horror game", next to whatever the fuck Dead Hands are doing, what ghoulish shit to put into an E-rated game. Of course that wasn't the end of how dark and fucked-up this game got, but people tend to forget how bleak OoT actually was when its successor was basically OoT's dark weirdness cranked up to 11.

The game introduced the ground-breaking Z-targeting system, or when your camera locks onto an enemy. Yes, this game created that. It introduced a slew of what would later become popular tropes or game design decisions because this became the blueprint for 3D adventure games.

It really felt like the epic fantasy game we dreamed of in 1998. This was after A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening, big shoes to fill. And given Super Mario 64's success, people expected Zelda's introduction to 3D to be just as grandiose and game-changing. And there's nothing clever or witty to say about that, because it was those things and more. Ocarina of Time is considered one of, and frequently just the greatest game of all time for valid reasons.

Ocarina of Time's success did a lot of things for better or worse for Zelda. It became the emblematic title, the industry standard. A lot of Zelda titles have spent their time chasing OoT's success or innovation, and all of its successors have shown their age in one way or another. While time has shown the cracks in titles like Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess, and even The Windwaker, Ocarina of Time has only been reveled more for its impact.

It's a game that just doesn't seem to age. It still holds up. It's still a miraculous adventure game with a massive scope, epic setpieces, and immaculate pacing. Whereas I felt like other Zelda games have issues with bloat or had uneven pacing, why did they get it right so much the first time. The rate of which the story unfolds and you gradually progress through it is still untouchable. Whereas some items you got were clever one-offs in later games, every tool you got in OoT felt like a meaningful impact in how you interfaced with the world, felt like Link was gradually becoming stronger and more capable.

Part of me thinks I'm a nostalgic old bint, but I can see other 3D Zelda games pre-BotW warts and all, beautiful but flawed games attempting to get out from underneath Ocarina of Time's shadow. Its legacy seems insurmountable to overcome. The only reason other Zelda games are higher on this list is because they had to deviate so heavily from what's become formulaic for the Zelda series. When you look at the origin point of most modern adventure games, virtually all of them have some of OoT's DNA in them.

I'm just past 35 and I can still vividly remember every corner of this game. I remember details of this game from nearly three decades ago more clearly than I remember my relatives' faces. Ocarina of Time has stood the test of it. Still a marvelous game.

It’s rare that a video game gets a second shot at life. The three weeks after a title’s release is the critical window where most sales are made and the strongest impressions are left. After the proverbial ink dries on the pages of review sites (if you’re fortunate enough to get any) and the chatter dies down, sales gradually taper off to a slow trickle. Unless you’re Nintendo—whose games buck the trend and continue to sell year over year—your options are limited; you can release an update or tack on some DLC for a modest bump, but it only delays the inevitable. However, there’s one wild card that can occasionally bring a stagnant game back from the brink of death: social media trends.

Among Us is doubtless the most famous example; released in 2018 to little fanfare, the Mafia-style multiplayer game exploded in popularity at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic due to popular live streamers setting up games with friends. It was an organic moment in which the game’s appeal was demonstrated by regular people simply playing it and enjoying themselves, free of marketing campaigns, stilted tech demos, or money exchanging hands under the table. These days, with the increased prevalence of streaming, it’s not uncommon for games to get rolled up into the online ecosystem, extending the tail of their lifespan and keeping them in the public consciousness much longer. (This outcome is so desirable that some developers even try to court influencers with their game design choices.) Suika Game is the latest benefactor of these surprise viral trends.

The physics-based puzzler began life as a Chinese mobile game called Synthetic Watermelon (合成大西瓜), spreading through word of mouth via Weibo (China’s equivalent to Twitter) in early 2021. The premise is extremely simple: fruits fall from the top of the playing field, and combining two matching ones creates a larger fruit. Your goal is to continue combining fruit until you create the largest one (the watermelon, of course) while keeping your stack low enough so that it doesn’t spill over the top. The game became massively popular in China, but avoided crossing over to other countries due to the walled garden of Chinese app stores. (Searching Synthetic Watermelon or Suika Game on Western storefronts turns up a bunch of imitators, but don’t download them; they’re all terrible.) Synthetic Watermelon would eventually leapfrog over the Sea of Japan later in the year through an unlikely avenue: a high quality clone version by the company popInAladdin, developed for their line of home projectors as little more than a demonstration of the technology. The new remix on the Chinese mobile hit was modestly popular—enough that the company thought porting it to the Nintendo Switch as Suika Game (スイカゲーム) was a good business move—but it didn’t make waves right away.

Suika Game really started to blow up in 2023, circulating around the Japanese-speaking internet and eventually catching the attention of influencers. Popular livestreamer Futon-chan (布団ちゃん) played it on September 7th, describing it as “a game I often play in my bedroom.” From there, it shot to the moon; VTubers from Nijisanji and Hololive are streaming it for insane amounts of hours, and it’s currently the top selling game on Nintendo’s online storefront in Japan as of writing.

But what makes it such a good stream game? First of all, it’s easy to comprehend; you don’t have to observe for long before you’ve gotten a grasp on the gameplay loop. The goalposts can shift the moment you accomplish a milestone you’ve set for yourself, which keeps you playing for a long time. First, your goal might simply be to make one watermelon; then, you get fixated on making two; after that, you have to beat your high score. It’s also highly competitive, so people that love to backseat are instantly engaged and eager to prove they can put up better numbers. Most importantly, there’s an element of unpredictability. Suika Game is a matching-style puzzler, sort of like a Puyo Puyo or Drop Mania, but the fact that each piece of fruit has physics that affects every other one can lead to amusing and unfortunate consequences. Often, you’ll accidentally launch a tiny cherry off into space and immediately get owned. More opportunities for the player to suffer means more entertainment for the viewer—the popularity of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy as a livestream game has proven this.

“Stream game” has become a sort of pejorative in certain circles, carrying with it the implication that it’s a better experience to watch than actually play. (These criticisms often get lobbed at things like the Five Nights at Freddy’s series or Tsugunohi—a game that a disingenuous person might describe as nothing but “walking to the left.”) Depending on your values, it might sometimes be the case that you’d rather be the observer than the person at the controls. There’s nothing wrong with that! What makes Suika Game great, though, is that it’s a good time no matter which side you’re on. I enjoy testing my fruit stacking abilities just as much as I do scrolling the game’s hashtag and observing random Twitter users succeed or fail at it. The game’s taken a hold on some of my friends, and it’s been a blast sharing scores and screenshots of my misery. To put it simply: Suika Game is a good stream game because, more generally, it’s a good social experience. It’s fun to share the moment with someone else.

If you’re into retro games, there’s a good chance that you’ve spent some time thinking about the fraught state of media preservation. Maybe you’ve looked up a game you remember from your childhood on the secondhand market and lamented how prohibitively expensive your hobby has become. Maybe one of your favorite games is finally available again after the company holding the rights benevolently decided it was worthy of a remaster, and you wondered why it hasn’t been there all along. You’ve likely at least entertained the idea of downloading a few pirated ROMs. All things considered, the state of video game preservation is currently pretty good.

Organizations like the Video Game History Foundation and Gaming Alexandria work tirelessly to ensure games and supplemental materials are accessible in (mostly) legal ways that are amicable to publishers. By less law-abiding means, passionate amateur preservationists have ensured that the complete libraries of almost every mainstream gaming platform are available, with good tools for emulating them. But for every Nintendo Entertainment System with immaculate documentation, there’s another obscure platform without that community momentum behind it.

Munkiki’s Castles has been a slow work in progress, with preservation efforts beginning in 2017 at the latest. The 2002 Sokoban-style block puzzler with a simian protagonist (the titular Munkiki) was developed by IOMO exclusively for the Nokia 3410 mobile phone—a device not exactly known for its games. The 1.0 version of Munkiki was included with brand new 3410s, but wasn’t part of its stock firmware; Nokia sideloaded the software before shipping the phones out. This is important to note, because resetting the phone wiped the game from memory. Over time, this would reduce the amount of phones holding a copy that could be extracted. To make matters more difficult, the game was dependent on the Club Nokia digital distribution portal for updates. The service was a rudimentary precursor to modern app stores, operating on WAP (Wireless Application Protocol)—a standard for accessing web pages over mobile networks, which was depreciated rather quickly in favor of modern HTML. The 3410 also only had 180 kilobytes of storage, meaning that if you needed to download much else from the Club Nokia servers, you eventually had to make room. Munkiki’s Castles was likely one of the first things to go.

Finding a phone with a copy of Munkiki wouldn’t turn out to be too much of a challenge, fortunately, but a problem immediately presented itself: there was no way to run it when the executable file was recovered. The game’s 3D graphics, which were the first of its kind in a mobile game, were only able to be rendered due to a custom API embedded in the 3410, which supplemented the extremely limited early version of Java ME the program ran in. No progress would be made until the following year, when an update to the FreeJ2ME emulator allowed the game to boot. The emulator’s detailed error reporting pointed to the missing files the game attempted to refer to, allowing the proprietary software to be reverse engineered. Once the game was running properly in emulation, another issue became apparent: version 1.0 was bugged and the game couldn’t be beaten. It wasn’t until mid 2023, when the 1.03 and 1.06 revisions were extracted, that Munkiki’s Castles could be played to completion on anything other than the aging Nokia handset.

For all the effort it took to rescue the game, there’s a difficult truth that must be acknowledged: if more people actually cared about it, the work would have been done much faster. A handful of people obsessed over it in the time they could spare from their busy lives, but Munkiki’s Castles is the sort of title destined only to draw the attention of enthusiasts. It’s the first mobile game with 3D graphics, one of the first games ever released for the Java ME platform, and both of those things are true because of the impressive ingenuity of early mobile software developers—but is the game actually good?

Well. It’s pretty neat, but its relatively simple concept of block pushing with light platforming probably wasn’t impressing anyone in 2002. To put things into perspective: its contemporaries were The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Most people that played it likely thought it was fun for what it was, but put it out of their memory before throwing their old phone into the garbage. It might live on as a vague recollection to a former 3410 owner; they may not even be sure it actually existed.

The double-edged sword with media preservation is that we’re constantly walking a tightrope. Anything you recall can be forgotten just as swiftly. How many times have you found something you misplaced, only to lose it again? The moment something moves out of our collective eyesight, it might as well not be there anymore. Media preservation only works as a community effort because more sets of eyes are trained on the treasures we seek to protect. Seeing how easy it was to collectively forget Munkiki’s Castles, you should feel even more motivated to remember. Throw the emulator into your documents folder and tuck it away safely, the same way you might hang your keys up by the door.