No cookies for Squenix.

You know what's an affront? This is a-huh? Well, yes I-oh, yeah that's a-and what's that? Oh...oh God...ok, lots of things are affronts, but what I'm referring to specifically is this:

See? An affront. Now picture it with 
thumbs covering 45% of the screen.

Holding the rest button while hitting the
power button is a kind of nerd shibboleth. If 
you get it, congratulations. Also, you're old.

I mean how could-huh? I should explain and brace yourself, because we're going to get in the weeds here so if you need to bail out, now's the time. Just be sure to hold reset while you do. Anyway, this is the mobile version of Dragon Quest III. Dragon Quest III is a great game and if you were an indoor kid in 1992 it's what you did with your summer vacation. And, like any grown-ass adult who was an indoor kid in 1992, I can be counted on by game companies to re-buy Dragon Quest III every time they re-publish it. No matter how badly they screw it up. See the above mobile version. 

It, like a lot of publisher SquareEnix's mobile versions, was released inexplicably in a locked portrait orientation in flagrant disregard for how human eyes work. But it didn't stop at aspect ratio, SquareEnix, or Squenix if you're in a hurry, also love to screw up the graphics. They kept the pixelated backgrounds of the 16-bit version, but replaced the character sprites with that gross art style they use in mobile games and Facebook ads. It's the actual worst.

Incidentally, who's coming up with these scenarios and are they on a watch list?
Because they probably should be. This is some Saw level sociopathy.

I guess the sepia tone is to make it
look like a video game from the 1880's?

The good news however, is that grown-ass indoor kids like myself will soon be able to pay Squenix again for another version of this game. And this time it's remade in the style of Octopath-swear to God, this is the actual title-Traveler. That game, an homage to early 90's Japanese Role Playing games, used a tilt-shift-ish filter to make everything look like a model or a diorama. And then it washed everything in a weird sepia tone, which I totally hated, but hey, it was better than that mobile game nonsense.

Fine, they can have a cookie, but 
it's going to be one of those cakey 
grocery store ones nobody likes.

The absurdly, yet descriptively titled Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake eschews the sepia thing, and that's great. But it still doesn't excuse the fact that Squenix has time and time again leveraged the Death Star ventilation shaft that is gamer nostalgia to get us to buy and re-buy (and yet rarely replay) the same game four or five times, just because there's a shiny (or tilt-shifty) new version. They don't get a cookie for finally re-releasing a game in an art style that isn't objective garbage. They should have known better and done it this way it in the first place.

Huh? What's that? No. No, I can't just not re-buy it. Gamer nostalgia is a serious condition, and I'll thank you not to judge. 

Yes, I know democracy is crumbling around us and the world is spiraling
into madness and this is the kind of thing I'm railing on about. But I can be upset 
about more than one thing at a time. I contain multitudes. Of bitterness.