Beat Albert Odyssey on Thursday - what a nightmare of a final dungeon... carnival-esque music that doesn't really fit the area it belongs to (a floating sci-fi city with laser-red hexagonal floors), warps and passages everywhere, a counterintuitive progression (you have to use elevators to go up and down to certain floors, and warps will send you throughout the tower, so you can't even tell if you're making progress), and a nightmarish encounter rate. It got so confusing that I felt I was wandering around the same few floors in perpetuity, till I reverted to a mid-dungeon save and then just used a guide to find my way. The final battles didn't seem to take me as long individually as any of the bosses of the 4 towers that proceeded the final dungeon. Glad to be done with this, honestly if you like 90s WD humor it may be worth playing up until you get the airship and have to go to the 4 towers. Then the best part (the humor) pretty much stops and you just have a big grind.
Also been playing a lot of the vastly better Magic Knight Rayearth... a fun if slightly sluggish (before you get the insta-dash) action RPG. It has the WD problem of rebalanced bosses that all seem to drag on for 2x as long as they should, but the bright visuals are nice and some of the music is good. I'm pretty close to the end, just collecting the 'amulet' bonus items that I missed so I can unlock some neat special items.
And playing some of the Saturn mode of Radiant Silvergun. I love the RPG like progression even if shmup snobs shit all over it... it feels cool that I can level up my weapons and make the beginning portions of the game absolute cake. This game is such a technical masterpiece for the system, and the over-the-top epic Hitoshi Sakimoto soundtrack only adds to that feel. It's probably my alltime favorite shmup.
And a slew of random NES games, of course. Ikari Warriors 2P with my best friend, what a broken mess of a game with super long levels, awful controls, glitches galore (we got to a part where my friend spawned on another background layer, he was invincible to everything but eventually got stuck at the end of the 3rd level). And Micronics other big NES "hit", Tiger Heli... which is actually originally a Toaplan game. This one isn't great (it has that low framerate Micronics were known for) but much better than
Gonna start Berseria once I'm done with Rayearth. Been too long since I've played a Tales game, tbh Graces F turned me off from the series a bit, sadly right when it was starting to have a little renaissance in America after years of no localizations. So I haven't played Hearts, Xillia 1 and 2, Zesteria, or Berseria... even though I keep buying them.