Topic: Backlaugust 2026 - (Splatoon) Raiding the Backlog

[broodwars]

Well, as one of the few still using the forums these days and one of the bigger contributors to this event each year, I figured I'd step in and do hosting duties this year while the regular hosts are otherwise occupied. Figured I might as well post the thread a little early, or I'll just keep putting it off.

It's been an eventful year so far, and certainly one fit for reflecting on the road not traveled as we see companies like Sony lining up to strip us of one of the things that allows us to do this event every year: physical games. In fact, I hooked up and updated my PS3 a few weeks back in anticipation of defending my 2 time Backlaugust title, so bring it on! I have a few games lined up already to kick off the festivities. 

The points don't matter and the rules are arbitrary, but here the usual ones with some modifications:

1. Play whatever you want, wherever you want. - If there's a game you want to play, play it. It can be any console, PC, main game or DLC.

2. You are done when you feel you are done - If you want to call it when you roll credits, great. If you want to be a lunatic like me and 100% it, welcome to the club.

3. Please keep it on the forums if you care about your completion scores - You're welcome to chat about the games you're playing on the Discord and elsewhere, but if you want your game to count towards the overall completion count, please post about your games in this thread. It's easier to keep track of that way.

This thread will be updated with a running tally of the completed games as we go along. Let's have some fun and get around to those games we've been putting off!

BACKLAUGUST 2026 GAMES

1. UNSIGHTED - Evan_B
2. The Legend of Zelda (NES) - Broodwars
3. Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories - Broodwars
4. Caravan SandWitch - Evan_B
5. Mouse: P.I. For Hire - Broodwars
6. Splatoon Raiders - M.K.Ultra
7. Splatoon Raiders - Broodwars

Backlaugust 2026 Total: 7 Games

Backlaugust 2026 Leaderboard

1. Broodwars - 4 games
2. Evan_B - 2 games
3. M.K.Ultra -1 game
4. X
5. X

[M.K.Ultra]

I am super excited for Backlaugust this year! I have mostly cleared the decks, though there is a game that will just cross the finish line tomorrow. I have been focusing on playing new releases as they come out instead of putting them at the back of the queue. To that end I am planning to play Rhythm Heaven Groove and Splatoon Raiders this month. I also got the switch 2 version of Xenoblade and as much as I want to play that now, it would really hurt my stats. Plenty of other games lined up that I will talk about as I get to them. Time to put Star Fox multiplayer on hold and just focus .

[broodwars]

I am super excited for Backlaugust this year! I have mostly cleared the decks, though there is a game that will just cross the finish line tomorrow. I have been focusing on playing new releases as they come out instead of putting them at the back of the queue. To that end I am planning to play Rhythm Heaven Groove and Splatoon Raiders this month. I also got the switch 2 version of Xenoblade and as much as I want to play that now, it would really hurt my stats. Plenty of other games lined up that I will talk about as I get to them. Time to put Star Fox multiplayer on hold and just focus .

I'm definitely leaning into what would be called "retro" this year, which to my disintegrating eyes' dismay includes games that came out just after I graduated college. In particular, I want to tackle a game that's been mocking me from my backlog ever since the PS4 came out and I gradually retired my PS3: Puppeteer. I loved that game when it came out, but for whatever reason I never finished it. Naturally, I'll be restarting it this time. I have hundreds of other games on my PS3 I could play at this point as well, including some PS1 games I forgot I even owned like the Parasite Eve games.

In more modern gaming, I'm also playing Splatoon Raiders and I really should get around to finishing Kirby Air Rider's Road Trip story mode as well as playing the Star Fox remake at all. I abandoned Mouse P.I. in July to finally get around to doing my Platinum run on the 1st Kingdom Hearts game, so I should get back to that 6/10 Too Much Cheese game.

And yes, I have 2 games set aside that I intend to finish line tomorrow to start things off, myself. All in all, it should be a good spread this month.

[Evan_B]

So, I guess I’ll count my first finish, as I was up until 12:00 am last night closing it out: I just completed a “good ending” run of UNSIGHTED, which I had not done previously. This involves a late-game quest and new boss fights that are particularly brutal. I won’t lie- I did kick on “Explorer Mode” for additional stamina and more forgiving combat, as the game’s reliance on perfect parries and additional mobs in the final boss phase were a bit too much for me to handle. I have no qualms in admitting this.

I’ll circle back to my initial rating of the game in my own thread, but to be honest, I doubt it will change much.There’s some post game features that make the whole thing even more appealing from a NG+ perspective, and some extra modes that unlock as well (roguelike dungeon crawler mode?! Completely unnecessary but amazing) that make this easily one of the best top-down Metroidvanias (maybe also a Zelda-like?) I’ve ever played.

I have a few smaller games to tackle this month, and about a week and a half of decent down time where I can invest in them, so I’m hoping I can give some folks here a run for their money.

[broodwars]

I'll go and throw a few of mine in that I finished this morning, both of which have been in the backlog for a very long time:



The Legend of Zelda (NES) - For around 40 years, I've been trying to get through this game, but for the life of me I could never stand to play this game for more than few dungeons. Ironic, really, considering that up until Breath of the Wild, Zelda was my favorite gaming series. Well, figured I'd finally take advantage of Switch Online and get it done.

Yeah...I'll give the original Zelda credit that it's much more fully formed than something like Metroid or Kid Icarus, but this game's execution is a real mess. You pretty much need a vintage Nintendo Power or the modern internet just to figure out how to progress in this game, and to my surprise that's not really due to needing to bomb every wall or burn every tree. Yes, there are a few secrets hidden that way, but only 1 dungeon and no progression-critical items. That said, I didn't appreciate this game having a fast travel system, but it's hidden behind a bracelet hidden underneath an armos I didn't know existed until I was trying to track down the last few items in my inventory.

The biggest hurdle to progression is just how the dungeons seem to be randomly scattered around, with no regard as to what players will have available to them, and the pure moon logic required to access some of them. For instance, there's one dungeon you can only find by playing the whistle in front of it, which is a dungeon item you might not have found and up to this point you've maybe only explicitly used to deal damage to one specific enemy. And in the overworld, this whistle largely works as a fast travel system, teleporting you to a random dungeon entrance. Who the **** would think that playing the whistle in front of a pond would do anything? The only hint an NPC gives you about it is "Ponds without Faeries hide secrets" or some such thing. Considering that pond is patrolled by a random Moblin, I thought this was where you maybe used the meat. Thank god for rewind.

You can definitely tell in the dungeons that this is a first attempt, as there are just some boneheaded design decisions. For instance, enemies seem to have fairly random movement patterns (especially the Wizzrobes) and hit like a truck (again, especially the Wizzrobes), and yet they almost never drop hearts. It's almost always nothing; ruppees; or the occasional bomb. You're basically required to find the item that unlocks the ability to buy potions from the witch by the 4th or so dungeon, because you just won't have the health. One of the dungeons (#4, I believe) has more locked doors than there are keys, so if you explore you'll actually run out of keys and will have to leave the dungeon to go find or buy more.

And why do you need to kill all the enemies in a room before moveable objects become moveable? It doesn't work that way in any other Zelda game.

And don't get me started on the cluster**** that is Dungeon 9, the final dungeon. I probably spent more time in that dungeon than the other 8 combined just because it's huge; full of bombable walls you need to open to proceed; and it loops back in on itself multiple times with one way doors and hidden stairwells. I never did find the ring that gives you the 75% damage reduction, but I sure did find Ganon before I found the Silver Arrows required to kill him or the map and compass that would have told me where he was. THAT sure was a fun discovery!

Overall, I'm glad I finally finished it, but like most NES games it really is more of a proof of concept.

And no, I've never finished Zelda 2, either (though I have gotten close) but I also really don't want to.

[broodwars]

So, for my other game I've been in a bit of a Kingdom Hearts mood lately. The game I've really been wanting to replay was Kingdom Hearts 2, as it's the only game in the series I've never played in its HD form. I've always felt like I should replay the other games in the timeline first, so last month I finally sat down and did my Proud Mode run through KH1 to complement the Never Change Equipment + Speedrun + Never Die run I did a decade ago. After that, I reloaded my decade old save and finished 100%ing the game for the Platinum.

With KH1 out of the way, that only left 1...huge annoyance...in my way of getting to KH2.




The GBA version of Chain of Memories was my first-ever Kingdom Hearts game, and I remember finding it OK at the time but very confusing since I'd never played the original. Years later, Square-Enix remade the game using KH1 assets, and gave...some...of the cutscenes voice acting. I hadn't played it since back on the PS2, but I'd been dreading coming back to this one because...

Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories fucking sucks. It sucked then, and it sucks now, and it ESPECIALLY sucks after having just dumped a ton of time into KH1 so you can really see just how lazy and thrown-together this remake is.

Every bad story habit the KH series ever developed either started or got considerably worse in Chain of Memories:

1. Making spin-off games on other consoles required reading for understanding the plot of the MAIN games.
2. Endless cutscenes featuring dudes in cloaks spending minute upon agonizing minute just standing stiff as a board in empty rooms and talking absolutely meaningless **** AT people.

Or to put it another way...



3. Really terrible voice acting from the KH-original characters.

4. Disney worlds where the plot is ultimately a complete waste of time.

And on top of all that, you have a card-based battle system that is both irritating and completely broken. The devs wanted to have their cake and eat it: they wanted the button-mashy combat of the original Kingdom Hearts, but they also wanted the player to stragically play the card game WAR at the same time. The 2 just don't go together. Enemies attack too frequently to really make it practical to take your time shifting through your cards, and yet unless you set your deck up with high value cards trying to button mash is just going to result in constant broken combos.

Progression is reliant on drawing random map cards with particular values, but if you care about leveling-up and acquiring rare enemy cards, you'll only use a handful of map cards so what's the point of having the rest?

And I feel like whoever designed the Sleights system in this game wasn't talking to the rest of the dev team, because you can absolutely embarrass just about every boss in the game (except Vexen, who loves his 0 cards) by just setting your deck up for sleights like Sonic Blade and Megaflare to stunlock them all to death.

And if you want the full experience, you have to play the game as both Sora and Riku. Riku uses fixed decks and can't use healing cards, so his is definitely the harder experience, but that's really not saying all that much. At least this isn't the PS3 version of COM, where you had to beat the game 6 times for the Plat (3 as each chacter, 1 for every difficulty level).

And what is all this tedium in service of? A story that is both critical to understanding Kingdom Hearts 2, and yet utterly pointless. SDG don't even remember it happened by the end. The main purpose the game seems to serve is to explain why half of Organization XIII is dead by the events of KH 2, and it seems to me Nomura could have just set aside his 13 obsession and just made the Organization...not contain 13 members (and yes, I know there are actually 14, and it's stupid).

Oh well. At least the game is done and I'm clear to finally get to KH 2 Final Mix by the end of the year. I still have to go back and finish-up my Platinum runs (plural) on Birth By Sleep, but as that's generally considered the hardest game in the series to Platinum (since you have to 100% the game as all 3 characters) and it's a prequel, I feel content letting it wait until after KH 2.

[broodwars]

So, I guess I’ll count my first finish, as I was up until 12:00 am last night closing it out: I just completed a “good ending” run of UNSIGHTED, which I had not done previously. This involves a late-game quest and new boss fights that are particularly brutal. I won’t lie- I did kick on “Explorer Mode” for additional stamina and more forgiving combat, as the game’s reliance on perfect parries and additional mobs in the final boss phase were a bit too much for me to handle. I have no qualms in admitting this.

I’ll circle back to my initial rating of the game in my own thread, but to be honest, I doubt it will change much.There’s some post game features that make the whole thing even more appealing from a NG+ perspective, and some extra modes that unlock as well (roguelike dungeon crawler mode?! Completely unnecessary but amazing) that make this easily one of the best top-down Metroidvanias (maybe also a Zelda-like?) I’ve ever played.

Might pick this one up, myself. It's on sale on PSN right now for $8. Concerned about the game's description referencing a time limit, though. I don't generally enjoy speedruns.

[Evan_B]

Might pick this one up, myself. It's on sale on PSN right now for $8. Concerned about the game's description referencing a time limit, though. I don't generally enjoy speedruns.

If its any consolation, the game features a variety of ways to extend the time limit, and there are quality of life features that allow you to remove the time limit mechanic entirely. The "Good" ending even involves resetting the game's clock entirely, so that you don't have to worry about any of that stuff.

[Evan_B]

Following up with Caravan SandWitch. I was very intrigued with the art style and premise of this game, and while the narrative is a bit too loose to ever feel like its eponymous SandWitch feels like a legitimate threat or presence (there are some neat "disappearing acts" she performs along the way, though you might honestly miss some based on your camera positioning), the characters are endearing enough to earn the game's purported "cozy" aesthetic. I essentially did a 100% run on this, missing some currency-operant components along the way but all of them are not required for unlocking everything the game has to offer. I was a bit disappointed with some of the puzzle designs but the character loadout is so restrained that I feel the developers sort of programmed themselves into a corner, so to speak. Anyway, cute game with some strong aesthetic workings and a nice "hey megacorporations are evil" as well as "grief of loss" narratives.

[broodwars]

Next up for me is Mouse: P.I. For Hire, the game made famous because IGN assigned someone extremely pretentious to review it.

Unfortunately, I have to largely agree with IGN's now-legendary 6/10 review, though I would argue it's not so much "too much cheese" as it is "too little creativity. It's a 1st time effort from a team of developers who were previously animators, and it really...really...REALLY shows with how slapdash this game feels at time.

I really wanted to like this game coming in. I love vintage noir stories, having spent a considerable amount of time over the years listening to 1930s radio dramas of The Shadow and Sherlock Holmes. I adore quality 2D animation. I quite enjoy Troy Baker's voice acting. So why do I find a game that combines all of these things in a shooter experience to be somewhat tedious and dull?

Well, it doesn't help that this game has exactly one design philosophy: you enter a large arena, doors open, and a bunch of goons swarm you in waves. I didn't enjoy this format when Uncharted was doing it, and I find it just as annoying here because outside the boss fights the game never really CHANGES. And perhaps more than any other genre, shooters rely on combat & level design variety since there's only so long you can make "shoot them in the head" interesting. Unfortunately, the enemy types are very limited, and certain weapons like the Varnisher are so ridiculously overpowered (one shot from it will kill most enemies, and the ammo is common) that there's really no reason to use more than 2-3 of your 12 weapons. You can easily coast through the entire game using just the Varnisher; the (Tommy) Gun; and your pistol.

Level design really feels like a first draft: corridor -> arena -> room -> corridor -> arena, etc, with invisible walls and visual bugs all over the place. The game didn't even let you replay levels for missing collectibles and side quests until a very recent patch, baffling for a game that places as much emphasis on them as it does.

And it REALLY doesn't help that this is an around 20 hour game presented (with one lone exception) entirely in Black & White. Yes, it's a unique visual aesthetic, but I don't want to look at it for the entire length of Chrono Trigger. There's a reason I was switching between this game and Kingdom Hearts 1 for a while in July before I eventually just gave up on Mouse P.I. and put it down 3 hours in. But beyond the eye strain of looking at the game, the entire game being shades of gray also means that it's a lot harder for the devs to draw the player's attention to things like collectibles or even the critical path. So much of the game is just a sea of gray and white that it's very easy to get turned around at times. I have a feeling the D-pad button press that lets the game show you at any time where the path forward was added very late in development to address this problem.

Overall, the game's not bad. It's a perfectly serviceable, average arena shooter (or "boomer shooter"), but it feels like it needed another 6+ months in development to fully cook. The story in particularly doesn't feel fully fleshed-out, considering how much emphasis the game puts on it. I can't remember if the game's final boss was even mentioned before his appearance in the 2nd to last level. And so much of the writing is "hey! here's a reference to something famous!" without adding anything clever or interesting to the joke.

[M.K.Ultra]

Late to the party as usual, but I am ready to get put up on the leaderboards. I rolled credits on Splatoon Raiders on Switch 2 yesterday. I mostly just moved through the main campaign and it took me about 11 hours. For folks not aware of the game it is like the single player campaigns in the mainline Splatoon games with a few exceptions. One difference is the focus on the gameplay from the Salmon Run. The other is the way the multiplayer is handled. You get one member of Deep Cut as an NPC companion on your team and you can request help from others online. I got stuck on some of the final levels since I was a little under leveled and it actually worked great to have some randos come help me. You can of course volunteer to help others as well though I didn't try it. Overall the game was really fun and I liked it more than the single player modes in the 3 mainline games. There is still plenty to do and I will probably come back and complete it some day.

[Mop it up]

I'm probably gonna go for quality over quantity this time. Two Nintendo titles I've been curious about for a while are The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Princess Peach Showtime!, neither of which seem like particularly lengthy games so they should be good for an event like this.

That is, if I can pry meself away from my current Pokopia addiction. Though, perhaps if I finish that in August, I can count it too...

[broodwars]

Late to the party as usual, but I am ready to get put up on the leaderboards. I rolled credits on Splatoon Raiders on Switch 2 yesterday. I mostly just moved through the main campaign and it took me about 11 hours. For folks not aware of the game it is like the single player campaigns in the mainline Splatoon games with a few exceptions. One difference is the focus on the gameplay from the Salmon Run. The other is the way the multiplayer is handled. You get one member of Deep Cut as an NPC companion on your team and you can request help from others online. I got stuck on some of the final levels since I was a little under leveled and it actually worked great to have some randos come help me. You can of course volunteer to help others as well though I didn't try it. Overall the game was really fun and I liked it more than the single player modes in the 3 mainline games. There is still plenty to do and I will probably come back and complete it some day.

I'm about halfway through Splatoon Raiders, myself. I only just beat the 2nd story boss, but I've also been playing it in short sessions, mostly my lunch hour at Work, and I've been trying to do the Spicy missions, too.

[broodwars]

Decided to just lock in and finish the main campaign of Splatoon Raiders myself. Cleared the game at Level 40 with all Ink tanks fully upgraded. I did not do the bonus levels, and I'm not sure I will considering the "True Ending" is locked behind 100 floors of pure grind.

Gonna hold back on the image on this one, as in retrospect the one I posted to social media is a minor spoiler.

In general, I think the game's just OK. The shooting was never what made the Splatoon games interesting, so you would hope that the developers would have come up with some great ideas for how to make it interesting over the course of a 10-15 hour campaign.

They did not. The devs had exactly 2 ideas for the encounter design, and man do they outstay their welcome:

1. Kill swarms of enemies.

2. Kill swarms of enemies under a strict time limit.

That's it. That's the extent of Nintendo's creativity. Even the final boss is just 3 rounds of defeating enemies under a time limit while it spams Dragon Ball Z energy beams at you, which is especially tiresome because you have to slog through 19 floors of "kill all the enemies under a strict time limit" just to GET to the final boss (and I had a lot of trouble with that last floor 10-19 gauntlet, so I had to do it several times before I cleared it). Yeah, some levels may have you run through big empty corridors on your way to the enemy arenas, but that's it.

Previous Splatoon games have offered variety by forcing the player at times to clear levels using only certain weapons, which are relegated to one-off training courses in this game you have to unlock. That basically meant 10-15 hours of using the same gun type to kill the same enemies in the same same-y arenas, because there was really no reason not to outside of stats.

I just can't agree that this is the best Splatoon SP game, not when other games in the series (+ their DLC) had better variety and placed more emphasis on the unique movement options that make the series special.

That said, it does make for a good portable game. Performance in handheld mode is excellent, and the stages work well in short sessions. The enemy variety itself is decent, even if the game resorts to just throwing in armored versions of every enemy to add difficulty and double the roster. The online co-op works very well, though I wish you had some form of control when "offering help". It being purely random means you will often get matched up with players dramatically higher level than you, which means the enemies are scaled to them and you're not really "helping" at that point when you're getting 2-shotted.

It's not a bad game, just kind of a...boring one, after a while.