I went back to Oracle of Ages after a long hiatus and after a bit of confusion on where I was I managed to get back on track and do two more dungeons, the more I play this the more I absolutely love it! The dungeons so far haven't been too taxing but I think they're very well designed and I have greatly enjoyed solving the puzzles, something the dungeon items you get help by being pretty cool and the boss fight where you have to trick the boss into recombining by placing blocks down was awesome!
It's funny watching OOT Remake streams while playing this and thinking about how much 3D changed the game, it added a lot of steps to the proceedings but I think I'm a 3D Zelda guy for sure
Back to Ages though, I'm enjoying it enough to where I can't wait to replay Minish Cap now and see how it fares, the GBA brought a lot of significant visual and animation quality but how does the dungeon design hold up? The Minish Cap gimmick is a good start and leads to cool stuff like a simple slime becoming a boss fight as it towers of you. This is all not even mentioning Link's Awakening, which feels like the most popular of the 3 GBC games.
I also own the GBA version of A Link to the Past which as we all know, is one of The Big Three of the SNES so by default it's got the highest expectations from me, but what a lineup of games to look forward to. 
Yes I'm getting into a bit of a Zelda mood
The re/decompilation well has been well and truly poisoned for me by an absolute onslaught of vibe coded crap, it was really exciting when we had stuff like Dusklight (Twilight Princess) and the Lylat Wars but now several are coming out of the woodwork almost daily it feels like, there's a user on twitter called VideogameEsoterica or whatever the fuck and none of them are on the level of something like Dusklight imo. I guess grudgingly I'll admit some are so simple you probably wont notice, but there's another Youtuber who showed two 2 decomps for Goldeneye, one AI and one that had actual effort put into it, the AI one was a buggy mess.
So now, I'm not excited by them anymore, everyone should check out dusklight though
I like the FF7 remakes but I think most people would agree that Rebirth at least went a bit too far with the 'reimagined' part, they made a town that was like 3 screens into a full on jungle map, it's like turning Market Town into a Labyrinth, or Kokiri Forest into an actual forest sized area, I think how they made it seems best.
I think the best value for this IMO (at least for me) is playing a 'new/non remake' non BOTW style 3D Zelda again, maybe the '3D' qualifier is just me unfairly discounting the Link's Awakening remake and Zelda but I haven't played those and I think separating top down Zelda from 3D ones is okay right?
Play
Now I'm not playing absolutely terrifying games for a while again, I was kinda' like '…what was I doing again?' and decided I was probably playing Dark Chronicle so I resumed my save, very comfy dungeon crawling IMO. I will try to stay blind with regards to inventing so I can drag myself kicking and screaming into the realm of joy and discovery for once in my adult life, but I might need to look up the basics of upgrading and synth, although I did just make a Bastard Sword for Monica so maybe I do get it.
Ace Combat 5
Massive step up from Ace Combat 4 which was okay but feels very Ace Combat by numbers the more I play this, which has more varied missions, more interesting story and vastly better control feel somehow? The concept of modern jets with missiles that have the range of a few miles is actually pretty funny the more I think about it though
Afterburner Climax - Now I can emulate XBLA I can fucking finally play this…and it's way harder than I thought! Or maybe I just don't know how to play it, but it really does have the same Sega Arcade spirit of games like Outrun though, and it's somehow similar to Ace Combat but completely different, both games are in essence about shooting down planes but only of them has a super gauge for bullet time and full screen multiple missile lock on
Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave
I've been up and down with my feelings on this game, but if there's one thing I am sure on it's that this game without the downtime of the World Map is an easy 10, with it the game is honestly just a slog sometimes, such a slog that I can't see me playing this game more than once. I think this is the absolute worst game to recommend to someone to get into the series, the insane bloat does not represent what the series is about, thankfully Path of Radiance is right there and doesn't have a world map whatsoever to boot. Underneath all that? Good story, good characters, some of the best maps in the series, eh.
Want
Been watching streams of the Zelda remake and I have to admit I'm still not crazy about how it looks but I won't deny some of the dungeon design looks pretty damn good, going to play it sometime next year probably, were it not for Fire Emblem and GTA6 (which I wish was delayed a bit further, yes I know I could just simply not play it day 1 but…) I'd probably be playing it right now
EDIT - ACTUALLY I should get back to Dragon Quest 6 ooooh
Do you have to pretend to be an Orc now or something on that server though 🤔
Alastor