Agartha-S (Switch)

 Agartha is a game that's been on my radar for a long time, and I recently got a Nintendo Switch, and it seemed like a good omen that it happened to be on sale for next-to-nothing the first time I was browsing the eShop on there. I didn't even know it had a console port! On first sight, it appears to be a generic indie 2D platformer with super low resolution graphics, but as soon as you actually start pressing buttons and playing the game, it reveals itself to be something far more interesting.

 

What makes the game interesting can be boiled down to two essential ingredients: the world in which it takes place, and the actions the playable characters can perform. The world is made up of various materials: water, dirt, rocks, lava, oil, steam, and so on. And the player characters can manipulate these materials in various ways. The first couple of characters you get to play as have temperature manipulation as their main way of interacting with the world.

 

They can freeze water into ice, or boil it into steam (and of course, steam can be cooled into water, too). Lava can be cooled into rock and vice versa, too. Water and oil can both be swam in, though you go a lot slower in oil, so you mgiht as well just burn it away if it's inconvenient to you. Later characters have more interesting abilities, like teleportation, the ability to push and pull stuff using telekinesis, wearing a hat, swinging around on grappling hooks, and more! There's some slightly more subtle stuff too, like the wizard having a lightning attack that's got a significantly longer range when used underwater.

 

The aim of each stage is simply to use your various abilities to find and reach the exit without dying (whether through taking damage, drowning, or suffocating), though occasionally there'll be a boss to kill before the exit opens. Furthermore, some stages will have a secret second exit that won't appear on your radar, and you'll get no indication that it's there, you just have to find it yourself. All the stages are laid out on a world map in the form of a grid, so suspicious empty squares on there might provide clues as to which stages might possibly contain extra exits. Though I've cleared most of the stages and filled in almost all of the map, I haven't completed the game yet, and I'm actually not sure what the ultimate goal is.

 

What I do know, though, is that Agartha (the S presumably referring to the console that plays host to this port) is a ton of fun, and I just keep going back to it, replaying stages to see how the different characters are able to get through them, and to look those elusive extra exits (and the rare gems that are needed to unlock more characters). It's a definite recommendation, you can get it on PC and Switch for a pittance, and it's totally worth it. Unfortunately, though, it's been out for a few years now, and it doesn't look like the developers, Kanagawa Electrotechnics Laboratory, have released anything since (though they have plenty of earlier games, including Virus Crashers, which I've previously reviewed).

Kunio no Nekketsu School Fighters (Mega Drive)

 I've really been enjoying the current rennaissance that the Mega Drive is going through. The past few years have seen new games getting released for the thirty-seven-year-old console, with even industry veterans like Yuzo Koshiro being involved in new games, the officially-sanctioned port of the original Darius released on the Mega Drive Mini, and even indie games like Xiaomei and the Flame Dragon Fist Master getting full cartridge releases with boxes and manuals (meaning that this indie game on an ancient console comes as a more complete package than almost all games on modern systems).

 

It's unfortunate, then, that Kunio no Nekketsu School Fighters is a fangame, made purely out of love for fighting games and for the Kunio-kun series in particular (and the love for both those things is very evident). Unfortunate because it's one of the best fighting games on the Mega Drive, and almost definitely the most fully-featured. It's got all kinds of stuff, that was uncommon, if not unheard of in the time when fighting games were being commercially released on Mega Drive: there's alpha counters, forwards and backwards dashing, dodge rolls, super moves, taunting, and so on. 
It looks great, too, with all the characters being really well animated, stages that show the passage of time between stages, and lots of cool little stylistic flairs like little manga sound effects appearing when attacks land, and so on. There's even unique pre-fight interactions for certain pairs of characters! All of this would be pointless if it weren't fun to play, which luckily isn't a problem. The fights are fast, the controls work perfectly, the characters all feel different to play, it never feels unbalanced or unfair. Really, the only negative I can think of to say about how it plays is that while everything it does is incredibly well executed, none of it is particularly original. It might have had more of its own identity if it had introduced at least one new or unusual mechanic.

 

Even that criticism is taking into account the fact that the game came out in 2025, and that we can all play hundreds of fighting games across many different host systems. Specifically as a Mega Drive fighting game, it definitely stands out from the crowd by having all of those aforementioned features coupled with the flawless execution, and if it had been released thirty years earlier, it would have absolutely blown minds. Obviously, it couldn't have come out thirty years ago, though, for many reasons related to both technological proliferation and socio-economic factors. I'm not certain on this, but I don't think there would have been many avenues for an independent developer in Brazil to make a commercial-quality fighting game for the Mega Drive in 1995, let alone for that game to be released to the world.

 

Which is why it's such a shame that this is a fangame! I'd love to be able to buy a real copy to play on my real (well, Chinese clone) Mega Drive, and which would make some money for the devs. Hopefully, they'll make more Mega Drive games in the future, and those ones belong solely to them, to sell as they will. Obviously, I very much recommend this game, especially since it's free/pay-what-you-want. I've enjoyed it a great deal, and I look forward to whatever the devs bring out in the future.