When I looked back at the previous year and saw how much time I'd spent on extremely long open-world games, I promised myself I'd dedicate an equal amount of 2017 to smaller games to ensure I'd play more overall. The fact is, though, that as long as I'm enjoying every second of an enormous game - whether that's mainlining its story-critical content or through something more chill and off-hands, like grinding or hunting collectibles - I'm not sure if the whole "play more games this year by cutting out the long ones" approach is necessarily the right one.

There's an ebb and flow to open-world games with a lot of slower periods - though let's not confuse that with pointless filler, which is a major problem with that genre of game - that makes them entertaining to play in different moods. Likewise, RPGs are best when they pace themselves a little, making the long climb to level 99 demigods feel more like scaling a mountain than a hill. It's all subjective of course, and there are many who wish games were shorter and could better fit into their increasingly busy lifestyles - and have had that wish granted thanks to the Indie market. Though, for as much as I like playing Indie games (to the extent that I started a whole weekly feature around them), I often find myself drawn back to whatever big AAA open world game seems the most palatable, or a JRPG with a "completionist" HowLongToBeat time close to triple figures. I suppose it's like the choice between a 200-piece jigsaw or a 1000-piece: the latter will take a long time, but feel more satisfying once it's concluded.

Anyway, I'm going to come back and read this in a few months after a couple open-world games too many and no progress made in my backlog, and admonish the slightly younger me's foolishness. Wouldn't be the first time. As I stand on the precipice of another potentially month-long playthrough spurred on by a certain GBEast premium feature that just started, let's summarize a week of new content:

• I'll let you in on a secret with The Top Shelf, since this is another week where I made some heavy cuts. Some of those games, like Shadow Hearts and King's Field IV, hit a little harder than I expected them to, and the one second round survivor is already hobbled because I lack the light gun peripheral that makes it as fun as its arcade counterpart. The secret is this: I've already gone down the full list to see how many games I intend to move directly to the shelf, the nigh-mythical "Approved" rating, and it's actually a considerable number. That also means there's going to be way more games in the "Considered" category than there will be remaining slots for them, so I'm going to have to get extra critical when we hit the second round. Just know that we'll be seeing more of my favorites show up soon enough, with a lot of effusive praise for each, and so hopefully the feature will come off as less draconian and cavillous in the weeks to come. It's going to become a lot harder to narrow that library down to forty-four favorites, I'll tell you that much.
• The Indie Game of the Week is VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action, a visual novel from Ysbryd Games with a Cook, Serve, Delicious-style drink mixing game to break up all the text. I've still not completed my first run of the game, and I'm probably not going to play it over and over for the alternative endings I hear it has, but I've enjoyed what I've seen so far. I get in more detail in the article above, but suffice it to say that an adventure game with this much dialogue needs to have a great script and some excellent world-building, and the game adroitly delivers on both fronts. If visual novels aren't your speed, or if you're one of the anime-averse, I might not recommend it for you. To anyone else, though, it's certainly a great gateway into a style of traditionally Japanese game that's been gaining in popularity on Steam and elsewhere. If you come for the drink mixing game and stay for the oodles of dialogue with eccentric cyberpunk dystopian archetypes, you might be a fan of this genre after all.
• It'd been a while since my last list-based The Legend of Zelda thought exercise, where I looked at the series as a whole and tried to determine how each one stood out in its own way without mentioning its plot or characters, hoping to dispel the notion that every Zelda game is effectively identical in mechanical terms. This time, I wanted to see how Princess Zelda's characterization had improved or stagnated with each game, and how frequently she even made an appearance in her namesake series. Video game royalty is a curious thing to Americans, who have never had a reigning monarch. Both Japan and the United Kingdom (and half of Europe for that matter) have constitutional monarchs you're free to deride or praise at your prerogative, but it wasn't too long ago in the history of either nation that the word of the King or Queen or Emperor was absolute, and so was one's loyalty to same. It's why Link can assist Princess Zelda (or Mario with Princess Peach) without them necessarily needing a romantic reason to do so. That also means that Zelda, more often than not, is treated as some irreproachable paragon of purity and wisdom that doesn't leave a whole lot for personality quirks or humanity. When we do see a more human side to Zelda, or a glimpse of her interests and worries outside of the well-being of the Kingdom of Hyrule, it can be a rare and precious thing. That's what I'm trying to uncover with this list.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

Now free from the oubliette that was Xenoblade Chronicles X and its impressive running time, I decided the best thing to do would be to immediately move onto another Wii U game, taking the Xenoblade disc out and safely ensconcing it in its case lest I find another excuse to boot it up for another session. The next most pressing Wii U game on my backlog was Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, an entire game built around those wonderful diorama-style bonus stages from Super Mario 3D World. I was fairly lukewarm on 3D World compared to others for a number of admittedly trivial irritations (one of which was carried over into Treasure Tracker, which I'll get into at the end of this segment), but the Captain Toad levels were a highlight for how they turned the Mario series's usual mechanics on its head by removing one feature in particular: the ability to jump.

Being unable to jump in the Mushroom Kingdom turns out to be very limiting indeed, which might suggest why Mario is often regarded as a legendary hero. (I mean, you'd have to exclude the many denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom and Bowser's empire that can actually fly for that to work, though.) Captain Toad, then, has to rely on his maneuverability and stealth to get past enemies like goombas and shyguys, both of whom are now indomitable foes without an easy way to leap on their heads, and find a path to the exit of each level in the form of a glowing power star. Of course, it's never enough to simply get to the end in a modern Mario game, and so each stage has three bonus diamonds to find. These diamonds can be fairly well hidden, so the player needs to check every nook and cranny. In addition, each stage has a specific bonus challenge to complete - collecting a certain number of coins, avoiding detection from enemies, finding a golden mushroom item that is usually even better hidden than the diamonds, etc. - that is only revealed after the level has been beaten, giving you a reason to revisit.

These treasure hunts become the game's core impetus, and the way the little diorama style box stages are set up means that you have to make ample use of the camera to spin the stage around and find all the little exits and hideyholes. There's a few Wii U-specific elements too, like using the mic to blow aerial platforms around or tapping the screen to raise and lower specific glowing blocks. Captain Toad is a very vulnerable hero, only absorbing two hits before he croaks, but the game compensates for that by having each stage built to only take a handful of minutes to complete if you know where to go. It's almost a shame they're so brief, because each stage is so adorable and well-presented with its isometric diorama style and HD Mario graphics. You can imagine these little stages being sold as scale models in glass boxes. I know I'd more inclined to buy a series of those than I might amiibos. There's some fun little secrets to find by thoroughly exploring each cubic stage, such as wanted posters that give you a coin if you tap them, or the omnipresent Luigi sprites from the original Super Mario Bros. which appear in all sorts of places - a cute but weird affectation that was present in Mario games made during "the Year of Luigi".

What was a pleasant surprise was just how substantial the game's content is. I half-anticipated the first "book" of eighteen stages to be the total game, given how much effort went into each one. The stages are very short, even if you were to take the time to find all three diamonds, though there are the occasional boss stages that require a bit more time and effort. In actuality however, the game has something closer to 64 stages (with a few remixes) and a lot of bonus areas that let you replay earlier stages with a more challenging goal - find all members of Captain Toad's expedition, first seen in the Super Mario Galaxy duology, and bring them to the exit without letting any of them get hit - as well as replay the simple tutorial prologue levels, each of which now has a very well-hidden bonus item.

My one gripe with Treasure Tracker, coming back to that ominous parenthetical in the first paragraph, is that it follows Super Mario 3D World's decision to make the final, final stage about ten times more difficult than anything else in the game, disturbing the difficulty curve for no other reason than to apparently anger completionists expecting an easy ride to 100%. In 3D World, that was an exceedingly long and challenging obstacle course with no checkpoints. Here, it's a fifty-floor randomized dungeon crawl based on a mini-game where you have to constantly keep moving to escape one or more mummy ghosts in hot pursuit. The mummy cannot ever catch up to you if you're always in motion, but you can get caught if you hit a wall, run backwards into it or stop for any other reason. Fifty floors is a heck of a lot of ground to cover also, and each one is filled with a changing assortment of extra enemies to boot. Some of these enemies, like the Chargin' Chucks of Super Mario World infamy, are extremely difficult to avoid. It goes without saying that, if you get hit the regular two times, the game is over and you have to start over from the beginning of the crawl. I've not been able to get close to 50 floors yet - I reached level 29, but the shyguys on floors 26-29 always trounce me - and the level of challenge is a far distance from anything else the game offered. I intended to put the game away after the two days I spent playing it, but I might come back every so often to see if I can complete that final challenge. It irritates me to leave behind a game so close to completion.

I keep meaning to pick up Treasure Tracker. I have also been thinking about Xenoblade, but I just don't think I have enough time to commit to it.