[Awards] Game of the Year 2024

As of writing this we're a couple months into 2025, so that means I need to talk about the games that I played in 2024. I actually didn't play that many this year, despite this being the year I got a PS5. Well, maybe that's because it has no games? Well that's not true, I played two games that were exclusives, but are now on PC... not like I coulda ran them on there though. I don't regret my purchase for several reasons, for example PS5 is just a better PS4 so I can play my PS4 games on it too, I can play PS5 upgrades to make games look fancier and give me the fun haptic feedback/adaptive trigger stuff, and a lot of the games I want to play on it are only being released on it, switch, and steam. I don't wanna get a switch, that's for sure. But I still did end up not using it that much. I actually ended up just not getting a bunch of the games I was planning, like that PS5 version of Master Detective Archives: Rain Code which I thought looked pretty cool, for example. There are still more I have to get around to. Moreover, I played too many very long games that cut down on the time I could use to play other games. And then, add on the fact I actually rewatched/watched a bunch of anime instead during the middle of the year, and you just result in me playing less games than last year. But, I do have a bunch, and a lot to talk about, so let's get to them.

They called this the year of JRPGs but I didn't play that many or any that I thought were particularly good, oh well. This is a year full of games I thought were good enough, or even mediocre, with most of the good really stuff being games that were released before, or that I already played. Ah, that happens sometimes.

 

First off we'll do the "old games of the year" segment like always, let's start with stuff I've played before!

 

OLD GAMES OF THE YEAR:

 

Technically a New Game of the Year:

Paper Lily Chapter 1: 

I edited this into the last GOTY post, that I played the full version of Paper Lily Chapter 1 after it was released on steam. Since I already gave it an award last year, I won't give it an award the year. Though it's technically a game released at the start of this year. I would have just given it GotY this year if I did, it's really good. Go read last year's post for why. If you didn't read the update, and you didn't: The full version contains expanded/different puzzles in some places, new puzzles entirely, new optional things and ways to progress, new bad endings you can get, and an expanded Boss of the chapter. The beta version was good but the full version is great, I'm looking forward to the next chapters.

Games I Replayed:

Asura's Wrath(w/Part 4 DLC): 

Not much to say here, Asura's Wrath is great. An unparalleled melding of gameplay and story, an actually really good and warranted use of QTEs, an actually pretty good action gameplay when not doing QTEs, and a great story inspired by classic shounen in it's directing, fight choreography, and writing. They got Ichiro Itano in here to do stuff, god damn. The QTEs are meant for you to fully synchronize with Asura, his struggles become yours, the bond between player and Player Character is strengthened by this need to be in-step with him. All the QTEs make sense. If he hits normal it's the light attack button, if he hits hard it's the heavy attack button, jumps it's the jump button. Pummel punch? Mash that button. Dodge? Hit the direction he's dodging. It's a game designed around this and you're rewarded with S ranks for it and being good at the regular fighting. I played on hard and got S ranks up until Part 4 where I settled on A ranks, they're tougher for sure. This game's great! You could tell before Capcom mandated they cut the last part out and sell it as DLC that you were meant to be further rewarded for high Synchronization Rate with the true ending of the game. If you get S ranks on a certain number of stages or just 50 S ranks in general, which you'd need to replay stages a bunch to do, you unlock the TRUE episode 24 which leads into the DLC, and I imagine originally meant to lead into Part 4 without buying it. Now, you just buy it and can play it, you don't need to unlock it. I'm sure the original plan was to do so, because it's not only your reward for doing well and synchronizing with Asura, but it's thematically relevant. You have to repeat the same events over and over again, just like the repeating cycle that comes into play in the last part. I won't go too much into that, but I think it was meant to be a meta-game element being relevant to the story, representative of it thus letting you go to that part of the game. Now after doing it over and over to get it just right, you're going to defeat the one who made it necessary and put and end to all of that. It's really cool, and I just kinda have to pretend that's still how it works. I could get not giving the game credit for something that didn't make it in, and saying that being good at the QTEs is thus not really used for anything substantial or meaningful since most of them you don't even have to succeed at. But also, it gives you ranks, so I mean no. I dunno, it doesn't matter, I think it's fucking great and I wish you didn't have to pay money for the DLC for the best part of the game. Capcom should re-release this game with that shit included.

Signalis:

I also replayed Signalis this year, I wanted to go back and see if I could understand the story more, it's very dense and hard to really wrap your head around fully. I also am not sure if there is an objective answer that I'm keying in on or if it's just *my interpretation* of it which I normally don't like, obviously some things can be left up to interpretation but I normally don't like it when the whole thing is, but if that's the case here I think it works. I'm pretty sure I've mostly got it, but it's funny when I see someone else talk about it and say something almost completely differently(and in a matter of fact way.). I think I undersold it last time, but that was probably because I was still trying to figure everything out. I think I still am, but this game's amazing and I'd love to play it again and figure more of it out. Obviously that's just the story, and what's a game without gameplay? Well it's still really good, had a better time on normal this time than hard which I played before, could probably handle hard smoother if I play it again. Shouldn't have assumed I wouldn't have issues just cuz I've played survival horror games a lot. It's really well made, I don't think as good as like the REmake or RE2, but I think it's up there with Resident Evil and the story puts it on par with the first Silent Hill. There's lots of amazing imagery here that lends to an amazing atmosphere and it gives me a lot of that good survival horror gameplay that I love. The only real issue is the level design is very simple, I know it's a sci-fi brutalist dystopian setting but the layout's a little too utilitarian and uniform. It works for the kind of interconnected area they're going for, so maybe it's more of an issue with art direction as the repeating grey corridors aren't too interesting, and it only gets interesting when you go in a room most of the time. I guess also the aiming feels a little wonky lol. Really great game though. 

Silent Hill 2:

Also replayed SH2 in preparation for the remake. Not much to say here, uhh it's better than Signalis aside from the gameplay but obviously SH2 isn't really going for the RE style. SH2 is still amazing and is way ahead of the remake.

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter:

I think I really didn't do this game justice when I talked about it in my now 10 year old Top 10 RPGs post. I didn't do any of the games justice and I also wouldn't even list several of them as my top 10 anymore, like Chrono Cross. So I'm not even gonna link it, you wanna read it find it yourself. Persona 4's still the champ though, and FFX would definitely make the cut. Probably put Xenogears on there instead of Xenosaga honestly. Anyway, Dragon Quarter is still one of my favorite RPGs and one of my favorite games in general. I love both its story, and it's gameplay. I love its story because I love it's gameplay, and I love its gameplay because I love its story. Both are perfectly melded together, with both clearly being designed around each other. The oppressive setting and atmosphere goes hand in hand with it's oppressive mechanics. But something dawned on me playing it this time; I said in that old post that it was designed around you failing and restarting with a lot of bonuses that will make the early parts of the game easier and thus let you conserve your good items and your dragon powers, which increase a counter that will give you a game over if it reaches 100%, for harder parts of the game. This is still true, it's made so you're likely to have to use at least the SOL Restore option. I didn't go into that, there's SOL Restart which lets you start over with the money, equipment, skills, and party EXP you had and see new SOL scenes, but there's also SOL Restore. This gives you the same things as Restart, but puts you back at your last hard save with it and your D-Counter set to what it was when you saved. Using either of these is expected on your first playthrough... however, what the game really wants is for you to restart entirely after clearing it, doing a NG+ and getting all the new SOL scenes and getting through it in one go perhaps without your dragon powers so you learn how to take care of the bosses normally, so you can then start a fresh run and beat the game in one go, a "1CC" or "1 Credit Clear" to borrow arcade lingo. Because the game keeps track of how many times you've retried, how many "continues" you've used. It also keeps track of how many times you've cleared the game and gives you a higher rank based on your completion rate, which will open up new areas of the game and even more new SOL scenes. There's even an ultimate weapon that scales it's damage based on how many times you've cleared the game. Arcade lingo? This is arcade inspired design. The game wants you to play it over and over and get better and better at it, maybe do the ultimate run where you clear it without using dragon powers at all and beating the bonus dungeon and super boss. This also ties into the themes of the game, the dragon powers are shown as something Ryu is frightened of and will eventually kill him, something he doesn't want to rely on and is worried are controlling his will. To avoid using them is to prove he's doing it of his own will, and doesn't need them to succeed; a "Low-D", an inferior class of citizen with no potential, gains these powers despite his astronomically low chances of doing so and then kicks the asses of a bunch of demigods who run the place without even using them. This is what I mean by the mechanics and story being so intricately linked. Anyway, all this is to say, I figured this out when I got extremely far before I needed to restart and that was just because I used my dragon powers sometimes in situations I didn't really need to because I had wanted to restart and get as many SOL scenes as possible due to how much they add. When I did, I used my dragon powers one time, the one mandatory time in the game. And you only need to attack the boss once, it pops up a battle message saying the draconic shield has been destroyed which implies I could have then just attacked in normal form. So next time I'm gonna try to do it all without the dragon powers on a NG+, then I'm gonna try for beating it all in one go on a fresh save, no dragon powers and if I can't handle that just use them as sparingly as possible. Maybe some time I'll even do the bonus dungeon, but that requires doing the Fairy Colony side quest and I just dunno if I wanna do that... Still this game is fucking great.

Game I Played Before But Didn't Finish Because It Broke In My Emulator But The One I'm Using Now Doesn't Have That Problem So I Finished It This Time:

 

Tales of Eternia/Destiny II

 

 

 

Actually, I originally played this when I rented it from a video store, but I never got very far because I was a kid and just bad at action combat, I got stuck on one of the bosses. Weird thing is, it wasn't even a difficult boss that did it. Because there are plenty! But first, yeah, I originally played this with ePSXe, which did not correctly render the underwater sections. I got about 2/3rds of the way through before my progression was halted! Eventually I actually went out and bought a copy, which goes for ridiculous prices(worse now than when I got it) because I was planning to just cut out the middle man and ensure I could finish it. But I used Duckstation this time, and I downloaded an endgame save so I could check if the underwater stuff worked and it did. I did try using my discs but whenever someone cast a spell the game would freeze while it loaded the voice file and I couldn't figure out a way around this. In the end it's probably for the best, as those discs will wear down with use and I know disc rot is a thing, would prefer not to speed that up. Besides, if something happened, I wouldn't be able to replace them! Typically I don't think you should buy games without the intention of playing them but I think there's exceptions for if you just want to own a copy, I think that's different from this gay "I only buy SEALED games and then NEVER open them!" shit or worse, grading. Oh man, I got my game sealed in a plastic tomb you have to cut it out of if you want at it that says what this grading company thinks the condition level is! I got an A+! My copy is now useless outside of jerking myself off over how good condition it is and selling it to other people who exclusively deal in graded games! What a pointless bullshit market! But I think what I'm doing here, owning this for the sake of having all the games in this series I really like, is fine. I recently bought a copy of Tales of Rebirth, you know the Japanese game. Even if I could figure out how to burn the english patch onto it, I think there is a way to do that, I can't play it because I don't have a modded PS2 or the tools to play NTSC-J games. It's there to just be in my collection. As long as you're playing the game you own somehow, some day, it's fine. A lot of people collect games they have zero interest in simply because they're rare, which is one thing if you just want to own every game on a console or something, but a lot of the time it's purely a cool trophy to stare at which is lame. 

 

Anyway, the game. There are a lot of difficult bosses. I played Rebirth right after that which, stay tuned for the next GOTY post for that one, but it was about the same level of difficulty I think. I say this cuz I was going to call this one the hardest Tales game I've played, but yeah I think they're about equal. What's crazy is, last time I actually had it set to Hard somehow, I found this out when Volt used Indignation on me which is something that happens on hard, he just opens the battle with it and kills you if you aren't prepared. Dunno how I survived any battles on hard before! Maybe it ran too well and the game's balanced around a bit of slowdown lol. There were a ton of times where random mobs would wipe me out because I was slightly too careless and I got stunlocked. Same enemy configuration again? Destroyed them. It's that kinda game. I actually quite like it even if it means going back to the load point a few too many times. But then there's shit like fighting Volt again, he's tough right? You wanna just get out to where it's safe after, right? If you save it'll put you back to before the boss cuz of how the save and load system works, right? Well after it you have to do a dumb slot machine minigame where you line up the symbols on shit with the symbols on the wall. Hope nothing happens! Can get a bit annoying. Sometimes the game asks you to do dumb shit to progress too like find all these dumb hidden caves underwater or worse, remember where the hell on the map a character's house is when to get there you end up going underground and coming out on an island and when leaving, you ride away in a boat and don't see the world minimap until you're way away from the island. Had no clue where it was and guides described it poorly, had to look up a let's play. But normally I like the challenge level and amount of trust the game puts in you to figure out where to go next, and I think the story, while simple, is pretty well told. I should probably explain the saving system. See, you can save anywhere but when you load, you'll be back at the last Load Point you touched, there are no save points. It's kinda cool, and can actually work for grinding since I believe when you choose to continue, any EXP and items you got stay with you when you go back to the load point. I also think the combat is great, it's a vast improvement on Phantasia's and probably Destiny's(need to get around to it some time), which was mostly a cool gimmick but didn't facilitate good gameplay. Here it's so much better. It's fast, fluid, though at times it's tough in a way where it feels like they were still trying to work out how to do this. Still I think they did a mostly good job even if I felt like I had to use too many healing items to keep people alive/not dead because the boss was a little too capable of killing you and your party. I like the way you learn skills, this time it's about both level and how many times you've used a corresponding skill, you'll learn upgrades and combinations of other attacks you know and you have to use the involved ones enough times to have "mastered" them, thus allowing you to use the more advanced techniques. Symphonia would expand on this by having two sets of attacks based on which ones you're using, being either Technical or Strike, and kept the max amount of times you need to use a skill at 50 so you don't have to keep spamming one to learn another like here where some need you to do it 150 or more times. But it's still cool here and neat to see the progression of mechanics. I also thought the optional stuff was pretty good, I did some but not all of it and I enjoyed it, like the puzzle tower where you gotta fight the Valkyrie from Namco's Valkyrie series. That was a tough fight!

As for the game's characters and plot, I quite like them. Much simpler than Tales characters would later be, though maybe that's because they cut out the skits? Regardless, still fun. We have Reid, our protagonist, who actually doesn't want to go on an adventure because he wants to live a normal, quiet life as a hunter, and spends most of the game refusing the call of adventure and going along with things because his friend Farah believes its important and he doesn't want to let the people he cares about go get killed. This inevitably is what leads him to accept his role, as the destruction that would be caused would of course kill those same people and he simply wants to protect them. Though he wants to live simply, he has a strong desire to protect the people he cares about, partly due to a dark event from his childhood. Farah on the otherhand is adventurous and more straightforwardly heroic, she thinks with her heart and rushes straight into things all the time, caring only about what the right thing to do is and if she wants to help someone. She's energetic, brash, fights with her martial arts, and always tries to stay positive. But like with Reid, much of this might be because of that event from their childhood, which binds them together with their other friend, Keele. Keele is the scholarly nerd type, he's more logical and levelheaded but because of this often more cowardly, though over time he learns to become more courageous and put aside the logical part of his brain saying "This is too dangerous and risky." because the risk is worth taking. He can also often get emotional, getting mad and flustered easily, so while he's logical he's not unemotional. Keele was kicked out of his university because people didn't like his theories, as they went against church doctrine. He is, in particular, studying what brought the 4th party member to the other three's world, strange happenings in the Orbus Barrier, which separates the worlds of Inferia and Celestia. This 4th party member, Meredy, is a Celestian here to warn everyone that an event called the Grand Fall will happen, and the two worlds are going to collide. Unfortunately, Inferians believe Celestians are a race of basically oni who wanna kill all Inferians, so that's not going to go so well as this heretic and his friends are aiding the enemy? Meredy is as bright and cheerful as Farah, she's always positive and is a little bit strange, often breaking out into dance. She's very simple minded which can obviously be both to her detriment, and her benefit at times. Meredy will stop at nothing to get the Grand Fall stopped and doesn't care what dangers she has to face, a very strong will and one that also may be backed up by a tragic past. Meredy's positivity hides the pain and suffering she's gone through which is closely linked to why the Grand Fall is happening. That brings us to the villain of the story, it's twofold and I can't talk too much about them. There's a human one who, as usual, has some kind of backstory as sad as the protagonists' which has broken their heart in some way that they can do this, and said human allows themself to be controlled by the inhuman, god-like secondary, or perhaps primary, villain who wants to return the world to nothingness. It's a good reveal as to why, that leads to some interesting themes and dilemma so I won't tell you what, nor who this human antagonist is. All I'll say is that it's one of a long line of conflicts in this series which originally stems from the cruelty humans are capable of, as this person's life was destroyed by human greed and ambition. By the end everything comes together for a very satisfying though simple story, other games in the series do all of what it's doing better even if it's spread across multiple entries, but I think this one does it quite well still and if you enjoy the stories, themes, and characters of these games you'll enjoy this one too. There's also some great ways the game tells its story with gameplay, as there are 3 "trials" Reid has to overcome to acquire power he needs to stop the antagonist, the Aurora Artes. Each of these is basically a playable story segment which teach Reid some kind of worldly lesson, at the behest of the world's god. After that, there are two instances in which you need to use these powers to not die, one is to counter the first phase of the final boss's super move, the second is to counter the last phase of the final boss's instant kill move and win. Not only is it just a cool moment gameplay wise, making sure you're quick on the draw and remember what to do in order to counter the move, it's also just great to put you in charge of how the battle ends while still making it a scripted scene. Kingdom Hearts does a few of these and they're always cool, but this is more of a challenge I think as you need to react to seeing it do the move and think "oh shit this sounds bad I should probably use the thing." and then press it in time. I am glad I knew it was coming cuz again, would have had to fight both phases again if I failed! I think this is better than having it be a purely scripted thing where something cool happens when you press the button after getting the boss down low enough or something like Omnislash in FF7. Tales games would do this a few more times in games like Xillia and Zestiria, but I think this one might be my favorite since it's so heavily set up in the story. It seems like a thing where, once you get there your dude will do it in a cutscene but no, you gotta do it yourself. Remember the move you learned!

This all results in what I think is a great game! I like a lot more in the series more than this but it's still really good and worth it, just be aware it's probably going to gang up on you a lot. 

Oh also it was localized to "Tales of Destiny II" because Tales of Destiny came out previously but Tales of Phantasia didn't, I think they thought people might not know it was part of the same series if they didn't? I've also seen theories saying they didn't wanna get in trouble with the Hasbro over He-Man's Eternia but I'm not sure about that one.

Games I Tried To Play But Didn't Want To Keep Playing:

Here we have some games that are "new to me" as I've never played them but they weren't released in 2024, but that I didn't finish. Cuz they sucked.

Danganronpa 2

So Danganronpa sucks, that's the conclusion I came to trying to play this.

Previously, I had assumed it sucked because I didn't like the character designs and people who liked it were really annoying, but I had gotten interested in giving it a try after playing Your Turn to Die, which while having better character designs is a very similar game and also has really annoying fans. 1+2 Reload for PS4 was on sale for like 6 dollars so I said "hey sure I'll try it out" and I did. I chose the second game since that seems to be the most popular one, and it has an antagonist who seems to be really interesting. But I'm not going to find out because the act of actually playing it sucks shit.

I also don't care for almost all of the characters and I don't know if it's intentional or not, they all just kind of suck and I don't like them aside from a few. The exploration part was fine I didn't mind that at all, but then I got to the class trial, the part I was looking forward to. Instead of being really good like Ace Attorney or Your Turn to Die, it's really shit. And this is the second game! First off, there's like a billions gimmicks to refuting an argument and they're all awful. I don't even remember the specifics I just hated them all, tons of steps before you can even start refuting, it all being in real time so you gotta wait and then catch them in time, you gotta "cut" statements with the analogue stick in the direction they're going which meant I had to turn on english voice acting because I couldn't read the sideways text in time. There are all sorts of shitty minigames too like oh you wanna say a word so you gotta spell it out by shooting the letters as they appear but like there's debris that will hit them and destroy them so you gotta shoot those too or something it's so fucking obnoxious. Every step is just dumb bullshit instead of just fucking picking evidence or arguments out of a menu. Like just do it like Ace Attorney how the hell am I supposed to think this fast and even if I did I wouldn't wanna do all this gimmick shit. It's not fun, I don't need more "gameplay" in this visual novel! It was just obnoxious so I stopped played. This game sucks.

I'm interested in that Master Detective Archives game by the same person though, the character designs look better in it and the gameplay looks less terrible. It's got similar kinds of gimmicks like shooting words but it looks like it controls better and is more reasonable in what you have to do. The way it's done here is just annoying.

Higurashi Chapter 1

I don't dislike the Higurashi sound novels at all but boy, it's SO slow paced. I completely understand what Ryukishi was going for here, you spend so much time bonding with the girls and all this silly fun stuff happens you take your time enjoying the mundane life, learn about character quirks which are funny now that will be more serious later, start to enjoy your simple fun time and feel like the characters are your friends... before things go horribly wrong and it all crumbles down as you descend further and further into paranoia and psychosis. This not only makes the breakdown of reality and your happy fun life with your friends more impactful, makes you want it back more and be more horrifying that these nice goofy goober girls could possibly be this cruel(or are they?) and makes the eventual tragedy all the more painful, but it also serves as even more motivation to want to see the end to defeat this never ending tragedy, end the loop, and achieve The Miracle so that you can all go back to your happy friend fun times. But like... there's too much happy friend fun time it's like after the 4th scene of them playing a game or fucking around at a picnic I'm like okay let's move on to the psychological horror-thriller part now. I get it I like these characters I don't want bad things to happen to them I want to save them but actually I DO want it all to fall apart so something else happens. You know it's like Railgun lingered on the slice of life episodes just long enough so you're endeared to the characters, got your fill of comedy, and are ready for the action to start and make the stakes more meaningful because you want them to succeed and go back to their peaceful daily lives. Higurashi overdoes it. The anime definitely cuts it down TOO much, especially the first one, which is why the second season had Ryukishi as a supervisor, but I'd honestly rather watch it instead. Read the manga, too... which is what I did. I wanted to re-experience the story of Higurashi but the sound novel was too slow for me, so I ended up reading the manga adaptation and it's very good. I actually cried during Satoko's break down during her arc, Keiichi's despair at how he's so powerless to stop the abuse his friend is suffering at the hands of her legal guardian is heartbreaking when combined with her having a PTSD attack to the point of vomiting at school. The one-two punch just knocked me down for the count. There are some things the sound novels clearly do better, like the scene where Keiichi remembers the other timelines where he's murdered his friends in a fit of psychosis is significantly better done than it is in the anime or the manga and also plays this song which automatically makes it better, I just don't have the fortitude to get to that right now. I will say, the manga version of Tsumihoroboshi-hen is one of my favorite manga now, though. I think I will some day have the will to read through all of Higurashi, because after revisiting it through the manga adaptation I've realized I think it might be one of my favorite stories with some of my favorite characters. Some day, I will return and battle against fate with them once more, and take back all our happiness, a thousand years worth; and do it the right way this time. 

 

But for now, I'll settle for just a hundred years worth.

Monark

Not a whole lot to say here, this one is just kinda mediocre. It's a game by FuRyu who are notable for making mediocre-to-bad low budget JRPGs and I'd say this one is mediocre. The core gameplay and the story are good enough, there's some interesting artwork here when it plays scenes informing you about the current antagonist, and the characters seem fine. But the game just doesn't inspire enthusiasm from me, nothing about it's presentation or writing has any energy to it, and the gameplay is solid but quickly gets repetitive and I also got to a point where I already needed to go grind bonus battles because I was getting my ass heavily handed to me. Reviews seem to be mentioning it's grind heavy so I doubt it's even me. There's interesting ideas here and I also liked it when I fought a boss and an insert song by one of the singers from Kamitsubaki Records played. They were clearly banking off of stuff like that, I got interested in this game cuz the reveal trailer used a song by KAF, one of the singers from that record label. This game is why I'm a fan of KAF now so I'm happy for that, but ehhhh, it's whatever I stopped playing. Doubt I'll ever play more, wasn't bad but wasn't really anything honestly. I think that talking about getting into a musical artist was more interesting than the game. Check out KAF's songs if you haven't heard any, she did one of the ED's for the recent Urusei Yatsura anime, Tokyo Shandy Rendezvous.

New To Me Old Games of the Year:

Now here we have old or previously released games that I've just not played, so they're new to me, but this time I did finish them. Cuz they don't suck. Well okay one of them kinda does.

Top Nep

Very easy to talk about this one. It's alright. 

Top Nep is a Neptunia themed Space Harrier clone and it's totally okay. It's fun but it's way shorter and way easier than Space Harrier, the only achievement I couldn't get was the one for not getting hit at all. I've cleared it without continues and gotten a score of over 200,000pts so I mean I've gotten as much as I really want out of it and it didn't take that long to do so. I bet if I played it a few more times I could do the no hit run too, so even going by arcade "play it a bunch until you master it" design it's very easy and won't offer much playtime. I know it's easy because I'm not good at these kinds of games, I managed to get enough points for a trophy in I think the RGG Fist of the North Star game's version of Space Harrier but that's about it. So I think judging by the standards of it's genre it's not good, you could master it in a day easily, for people better and more experienced I doubt it'd even take you 3 hours. However, that's not to say it's not fun for what it is or not well made, the pixel art is good and the music is good and it being easy made it so I could actually be good at it and go for a high score. I do like it, it's cheap, and it'll give you a few hours of fun. So it's alright!

We Love Katamari: Reroll+ Royal Reverie

 

 

 

This one's good, but just not as good as the original. For one thing the amount of straightforward stages has decreased, or maybe it's that the amount of gimmick stages has increased. If that was what you liked most and not the "just get it as big as possible" ones, entering into a zen-like state where you think only of getting the next thing to get bigger, then you'll probably enjoy this more than the original. Me, I think there's a fun, relaxing feeling to just rolling stuff up. There's challenge there, it's not easy to do well and you do have to pick your targets well, I'm compelled to try again until I'm satisfied with my results, but it still has that feeling and state that you get in. I don't dislike the gimmick stages but I think they're less fun than just how big you can go. So the fact this game has so many more of these makes it a less fun game. Not to mention, the rest of the levels are gated behind finding every cousin and I just didn't wanna do that. They're fucking tiny, man. By the time you can pick them up, it's more feasible to pick them up on accident which is what most of the times I found one was. I'm not gonna scour the stages for them so I can do the rest of the levels, come on. Overall definitely not as good as the original, but still good. I would recommend it if you liked the original, it's a lot better than the other sequels that've been put out.

Touhou: Mystia's Izakaya

 

 

 

Touhou: Mystia's Izakaya is a restaurant management sim, but with Touhou characters! You play as Mystia Lorelei, who has opened an Izakaya, and wants to expand her business and make enough money to be able to put on a concert where she and her friend can sing. And also, she may be the key to the fate of Gensoukyo because I mean, there's always something threatening the fate of Gensoukyo, right? The story's not really the appeal here, the characters are fun of course, it's all your favorites and even some of your unfavorites, they all have little social link like affection stories you can do on the side which will help you out when serving food and even make them easier to satisfy as you learn more about them, and just gives you EXP I think. I have somehow forgotten a lot of the finer points of this game so you'll have to excuse me, but I do think it's really fun. You open at night and during the day you have to collect ingredients. These can be bought or they can be found, but finding them takes time and buying them takes money, so you have to carefully plan out what you want to do to get your foodstuffs. When serving food, you'll have normal customers which all have the same tastes according to type, and special customers which are the Touhous, whose tastes you'll need to learn to satisfy them. They will often order a specific kind of food but not a specific food item, and you'll need to give them stuff which matches their criteria and more so they can be more satisfied. When they're maximally satisfied they may use a spell card which has a lot of good effects, like keeping people from getting impatient waiting for food, earning more tips, giving you high quality ingredients, etc. It's tough but once you figure out a method to make money you can really rake it in, which is good because there's a debt repayment system as well! After a certain amount of calendar days you gotta repay your loans or Chen will break your kneecaps. I would describe this game as like a mix of Cook, Serve, Delicious, Reccettear, and one of the older Atelier games. The characters are very cute and endearing so it makes you wanna try your best to help them out, the gameplay is fun and can be stressful at times but in a good way, and when you get into a flow it feels great and even plays a nicer song! I had a lot of fun playing this game and would like to go back and finish the different characters "social links" that I didn't before the end. My only problem is the "final boss" is kind of a pain in the ass. This is a really good game though, if it was a new release I might have given it Game of the Year even though I don't have a ton to say about it.

Remothered: Tormented Fathers

 

 

 

Remothered is a horror game inspired by the Clock Tower games(which I have played as of writing this, and will talk about next time), as it's about navigating your way around a mansion trying to solve puzzles and shit while an insane and invincible person tries to find and kill you. For the most part I thought the game was fine up until the ending, it wasn't really doing it for me as I often became stuck as to where the hell to go, running back and forth trying to find a door I could open. I believe at one point the game bugged out and wouldn't let me open a door I needed to until I loaded a save. But that's okay I mean not every survival horror game can have really good puzzles and intuitive progression, sometimes it's a bit obscure and also maybe I was just dumb. But the last part of the game both story wise and gameplay wise was just not good. There's a chase in the attic where you gotta stealth around this guy and I think activate a generator and the window of opportunity you have is so small and they catch you easily. There aren't enough defensive items around to stun them every time either. When you finally win you're treated with 20 minutes of confusing droning with reveals and plot twists and the bad guy just musing about their life and the nature of trauma and tragedy or something I don't even remember, just endless philosophizing that didn't really make sense to me(and trust me, I can wrap my head around a lot, this shoulda made sense) and talking about their own character and then like the two of them make up while laying on the ground after falling out a window and then the bad guy finally fucking dies from it after going on forever. Just a strange confused mess of a story that didn't land. Big old 5 out of 10, mediocre. I dunno why Miles from Hikkikomori Media likes this game so much that he could get disappointed by its sequel, but it's his fault I played this since it sounded good. Yet another reason to not get game recommendations from youtubers.

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare

This is a very frustrating game. I like survival horror a lot but this one is too rough. For one think I think playing it on a modern system screwed up the timing for a lot of things and just made it harder, but generally the design or at least execution of it's not great. Carnby's story is okay for most of it then goes to shit at the end where it's just corridor after corridor of shooting enemies, no survival horror at all after that it's just here's a lightning gun that you can recharge kill everything. The final boss is beaten by stunning him and then going and getting a magic sword to kill him with, so all the ammo for all the good weapons you stockpiled is useless because I mean you didn't even need it for the hoards earlier. There was basically never any survival because you should just be blasting everything the whole time! Aline's campaign is good with actual survival elements you'd expect from a game like this and some more interesting story stuff, until you get to the end and it's a lot of shooting the lightning gun again. In the end this results in a game that's just "okay" I think since it's good at the start then becomes bad at the end, it averages out to "okay." But man, the parts that suck, suck HARD. No wonder there wasn't another until that reboot, which was shit, which is why there was then nothing but a mobile game I think until another reboot recently, which I heard was mediocre.

Maybe I'll like the old super polygonal Alone in the Darks more...

Fatal Frame II

 

 

 

I liked this one quite a lot but I don't have too much to say about it. I played the original Fatal Frame a while back when you could still buy from the PS3 PSN store(can you still? feel like they finally pulled the plug on that), cuz I bought the PS2 Classics version of first one and played it on there. I didn't ever get 2 and 3 so I thought, what with the prices being really high, I wasn't gonna be able to play them. But, I tried to see if the second one would run on this potato I have and... well I mean It does, dips in the framerate at a bunch of points but I was able to play it mostly comfortably. Due to various circumstances, personal things I don't wanna talk about, I acquired a PC that can handle emulating PS2 games better than this potato not long after. Oops. Woulda been nice to play without the slowdown. Either way, even with it, the game was good. It's too easy I think, I ended up with too much healing and ammo by the end, even having to let my health bar drain once so I could pick up another one of the revive items lol. But man, I think the camera gameplay is so much more refined from the first one that it makes up for it. It's really fun, especially now that I can change the controls for it to standard first person ones, automatically better than the first game. It's so cool to maneuver around these ghosts' attacks and wait for the shutter chances and get the titular Fatal Frames! Though uh, it's called Project Zero in Japan and PAL territories. Uh, well, the Zero Shots are also cool, they come before the Fatal Frame and do less damage. Either way it felt really great, very good kinda action/arcadey feeling gameplay that somehow still fits the survival horror approach.

The story was also quite good though it's of course pretty standard for a Japanese horror story, lots of dark rituals to appease angry spirits, sacrificing outsiders to save the village, stuff like that. Interestingly though, the village in question already failed to appease the spirits as one of their rituals went wrong long ago because some involved tried to escape before it could be done, now it's trapped in time and those who end up there get caught in this timeframe, and in the ritual. The ritual involves a pair of twins and a pair of twins has gotten lost in the village. There are a lot of little twists and turns so I can't go into much, but there are some interesting things and if you get the normal ending, it's quite tragic. Since the game had so much slowdown I didn't replay it on hard, but now that I can without slowdown maybe I will to get the true ending. I did end up coming to care about the sisters and it's unfortunate how things ended up. The bad ending's scene is pretty freaky and kind of harrowing, fittingly dark and disconcerting for a horror story. Lots of good directing in this too, good oppressive and scary atmosphere, didn't really scare me but as they say the "mood" of it's really good. Exploring the old creaky Japanese houses, especially when there was some kind of aftermath of some brutal death that went down, was pretty creepy. I think I actually enjoyed the one-off, individual ghost stories more than the main story, especially the one about the little girl who wants her brother to save her. Very sad. Puzzle wise it's mostly good even if there were a couple dumb puzzles I had to look up the answer to, though really it's a thing I coulda figured out if I tried harder, I just didn't want to.

 

All in all a really solid survival horror experience even if normal mode's a bit too easy, even accounting for the slowdown. Do recommend it especially if you thought the first one wasn't very good.

Policenauts

 

 

 

One of Hideo Kojima's pre-Metal Gear Solid works, Policenauts was an adventure game with an anime style(and animated scenes produced by AIC), that was originally released on the PC-98, before being ported to the 3DO, Sega Saturn, and Playstation. Though the Sega Saturn version is considered the best, I played the Playstation version. This one's english patch was put together by Slowbeef, yeah the Retsupurae guy who invented Let's Plays, and now nobody cares about him. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but he edited all the english text into the game files after he got the script translated himself. I actually used his LP of the translation to solve a puzzle, since it actually required the manual to solve and I didn't have that. 

 

Policenauts is a hard sci-fi buddy cop murder mystery & mecha story set well into the future, when the rich have left earth to go live on the space colony Beyond. Jonathan Ingram was one of the "Policenauts", the first police officers to become astronauts who were meant to be the first law enforcement of the colony when it was finished. Jonathan's EVA suit "accidentally" gets severed during a space walk and he ends up lost in space, luckily frozen in the emergency cryo sleep pod that his suit had. They find him 25 years later, after which not only has the world moved on, but his wife Lorraine has too... Now, he's a private eye living in New Los Angeles doing all sorts of seedy jobs to get by. But, his ex-wife shows up one day asking him to look for her current husband now that he's gone missing. He understandably is conflicted about this, as he definitely wants to help his wife and can't blame her for eventually re-marrying after he was lost and probably dead for so long, but also doesn't wanna just go rescue the bastard who replaced him. However, Lorraine is killed in a car bombing in attempts to silence her, so Jonathan decides to honor her last request and look for her missing husband. 

 

As a story, it's biggest flaw is that the mystery is largely easy to solve. You won't understand all the details right away, that's pretty tough, but one of the big things is super obvious right away. You shoot at the guy who triggered the car bomb and he bleeds white blood out of his right arm. You get on a space plane to the colony and meet a guy who's skin is pale because he has white artificial blood and happens to have a bandaged wound on his right arm. Hm... He's not a red herring either, though his name is Redwood. No, it's totally him. Who's behind it is, constantly, insanely easy to guess. But I suppose it's fine, since this is a hard sci-fi action movie over a murder mystery. You go and team up with your ex-partner Ed, who was also a Policenaut but has been callously and conveniently demoted to the far too tiny and underfunded vice department, considering how big of a drug problem there is on Beyond. Hmm... suspicious. There will be several shootouts and eventually robots trying to kill you. Aiming with the controller during these parts is very hard, definitely switch to a mouse if you aren't playing with it the whole time. That's the biggest flaw in gameplay for me, a lot of the fights are ridiculous. However, I realize I'm playing on an emulator on an LCD display, I imagine these were designed around it being the 90s and you using the playstation mouse on a CRT and real playstation which is prone to slowdown. Still, I feel like one in particular is just bad and I shouldn't be letting it slide, oh well. Mechanically it's surprisingly simple, you have no inventory of items to use it's entirely figuring out what to examine or interact with and what to ask people in order to progress. I did get stuck of few times as sometimes you need to ask and re-ask in certain orders, but just keep asking questions and skipping through text you've already seen and you'll get there eventually. It's just left click to do everything, right click for the menu. 

There's copious amounts of worldbuilding in this, so much I got tired of looking into it! It's for sure hard sci-fi, as there's some explanation for everything, somewhere in the game. Kojima is one of those guys who loves long winded technological explanations, as seen in MGS games especially in optional codec calls. It's the same here, most of it is optional and the main game keeps it to the most relevant information and focuses on progressing the plot, but takes time to develop the characters. It mimics an 80s action anime that's mimicking and 80s action movie while mixing that with adventure game gameplay quite well, taking a lot more time than those would to develop the characters especially though optional dialogue. The characters are definitely those kinds of archetypes you'd expect out of this sort of thing but with a surprising amount of depth and pathos to them, like Ed taking care of this actually autistic child and treating him like he was his own son, despite their difference in skin color. There's something really interesting going on with that, but it's big spoiler as to what the backstory there is, but it makes part of the ending scene all the sweeter when you see proof that his foster son sees him as a father as well. Things like that litter the game, surprisingly moving and meaningful scenes from something, again, mimicking an 80s action movie. Though maybe not so surprising; after all, this is a Hideo Kojima game. His blend of very 80/90s action movies and character types, with the more character and theme focused nature of anime and other Japanese fiction, shines through in this game just as well as it does his others. I was very invested in Jonathan Ingram's storyline and wanted him to avenge his dead wife, especially with how well the game conveys his sorrow at how their relationship ended and how much he misses her, helped especially by the very good Japanese voice acting. It's a lot of stuff like that, it really does well for investment and feeling for the characters' struggles, even when most of them are actually pretty simple. So it doesn't really matter that who's responsible is blatantly obvious from the start, besides there will be twists and turns you definitely didn't expect to excite you just the same as in a Metal Gear Solid game. You can definitely tell who directed this. I would recommend it if you're a fan of his games and haven't gotten around to this one yet, like I was until recently.

I wanna get around to playing Snatcher sometime too.

Alan Wake II

 

 

 

Alan is Awake for the Second Time is a game that is in some ways better than the original and some ways worse.

First off I think the graphics and atmosphere are fantastic, there are a lot of visually interesting places to see in this game especially when you're doing Alan's parts where you're in The Dark Place, which is a surreal and malleable version of New York City, rendered in dreamlike detail. I really like that. The story has a lot of interesting things about it, lots of cool concepts for those sections specifically because you're doing things like altering reality by changing parts of a manuscript the way you did in some of the DLC for the first game, it's really damn cool. It's two or three times as meta as before in a, once again, surreal and often unnerving way, quite good for a horror game and not some of the kind that they usually go for. The lines between reality and fiction become blurred as several scenes are done in live action and are clearly directing commenting on themselves in a confusing way that got my brain all tied in knots trying to work it out. There are interesting ties to other Remedy games as well, like the FBC being important in the story, following up on Control confirming that yeah, Alan Wake happened there and the events of the game were one of their Altered World Events so they came to set up shop and research it. There are so, so many interesting ideas here that go deeper into musings on fiction and the creative process and those that take part in it than the first game and if that sounds pretentious, well maybe it kind of is but I found it really fascinating and thought provoking. On the psychological horror side it's just really compelling, and spooky, to dive into the broken mind of a writer trapped within his own story in some kind of writer purgatory who's gone insane from it looping over and over. There are interesting things there with some pre-destination timeloop sort of deals, though it's obviously just been something repeating in his head, him forgetting what happened and then setting up the very thing he was trying to prevent as he looks more into the mystery, each step taking him closer to making the prophecy self-fulfilling. Likely a metaphor for a creative's, or maybe your, own mental health, stuck in a dark pit that you think you're climbing out of only to cause yourself to fall back down to the bottom each time in your efforts to get out, then forgetting this lesson when the time comes again. But there may be a way out, Alan says a line at the end which hints at the idea that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and it won't go on forever. I won't say what it is, cuz it's really cool, and a great way to end it. Yeah it kind of ends on a cliffhanger, and there's a game coming up that I bitch about for having ended on one too, but this feels far more conclusive even if it's saying "Yeah just you wait for Alan Wake 3!", I think it fits better narratively and thematically. I'm a little disappointed I waited all this time for the second game only for Alan to not end up getting out of The Dark Place but oh well, I'm sure Remedy will actually do this, weird financial troubles notwithstanding. Oh and yeah I'm spoiling that part because honestly, it's better to not go in thinking he's going to. There's a lot of stuff in this game that's just plain "kino" though and it was a really, really cool experience so I can let that slide. Before going any further, I wanna impress upon you that it's totally worth it for that.

 

But then, there are some issues, just with the game part and story part. For one thing, while it's not a full on movie game, it's definitely mimicking film a bit too much. Specifically, prestige TV, but hey, aren't they all? At least this admits it. It also has somewhat of an excuse this time, since the first game was already going for a TV show style presentation and format, with episodes and next episode previews and previously ons. It's just doing the logical conclusion and making it more like a TV show, nowadays. But still, I can't help but feel like it's still doing it to appear more "legitimate" and "artistic" because well, we respect these TV shows but we don't respect old ones or video games at all, unless they're being like these kinds of TV shows. Much like the maligned movie games, this is more like a Limited Series Game, but at least it is more honest about that and actually trying to genuinely model itself after that for pure creative reasons and not "this is how to be taken seriously.", like the Uncharted games clearly just being made by people who wanted to make cool action movie games. Still, therein lies the problem, that's still less interesting.

In my brief talk about the first Alan Wake, I said the best parts were those talk and talk scenes like in a Sony Movie Game, but I take that back now. I've found a greater appreciation for Alan Wake's combat, it definitely stretched on and there was very little survival in the horror because you were given ammo and supply pools at certain points meaning you really did not need to conserve ammo, you'd only run out if you totally sucked. But, the shooting was good. The shooting was Remedy shooting, made me wanna play Max Payne sometime. It felt good, it was fast, fluid, had a bit of challenge to it. It could be a little wonky and frustrating sometimes, I've never played a western video game that wasn't(this is my hot take, western games by and large feel more "janky" to me than Japanese ones), but it was still pretty fun and really well done. Here, the combat is way too grounded, slow, there are so few enemies and now you need to shoot their big weak points? The shooting isn't satisfying anymore. And maybe that's fine, we've gone more survival horror now. You have save points, ammo and health caches, it's easier to die, it's more like a survival horror game. And it's a good one. But that's maybe the issue. I'm sorry for what I said to you Alan Wake 1, I prefer how you did things over this. Too much aping off of Resident Evil 2 Remake, every god damned horror game not made by some indie dev seems to want to be RE2make. It's getting tiresome. The fucking inventory menu is the same, you expand it the exact same way as in that game. You tetris the pieces around to hold more weapons and have item boxes in safe rooms, holy shit man. What are you guys doing? This isn't bad, but it's taken so much of Alan Wake's identity as a game out of it, leaving only it's story to set it apart. That's not a big issue on its own necessarily, but when you're replacing more unique gameplay with a more homogenized one, that's a problem. I really would rather be doing the old game's style of combat, but such a thing isn't in vogue now. It wasn't in vogue when the first one came out though, people wanted cover shooters at the time. This appeal to popularity didn't even work! It didn't actually sell that well despite it's critical and fan praise! This is a solid survival horror game to be sure, but the problem is the first game kinda wasn't going for that hence the ammo pools and was going for a horror action thing, different from the horror action games of the time like RE5 and Dead Space 2, and now you've turned the series into the same as everything else.

Then of course there are too many damn collectibles to go and get. This game took me like 30 hours total cuz I went and got all the collectibles. It's not like they don't do anything either, they're very useful. You have stuff to upgrade you, accessories you can find that do nice stuff including one that'll auto-revive you, stuff like that. You wanna do them, there's optional weapons that are really useful too! And maybe Alan Wake should be more linear like the first game? You know that helped it? Cuz it was a TV show and it had pacing? Alan Wake's combat sections went on for too long, Alan Wake II's combat sections don't go on for long enough, instead the wandering around the woods looking for secrets lasts too long!

But the story is honestly maybe the bigger issue. The walk and talk scenes are the worst this time because you're doing them as Saga Anderson, fan fiction Mary Sue strong independent black woman, who don't need no man. She's so heavily, heavily linked to what's going on with dumb shit like oh she has weird psychic powers and she's related to like Tor, or was it Odin? Yeah the white norse guys who are The Old Gods of Asgard, one of them is related to this black woman. He also has psychic powers too that's where she got them. There are some things which seem like they might explain it in a meta sense, but all of that shit turns out to be true and not fiction if I recall, it really is how it's supposed to be. She later has this dumbass line when she finds out, spoilers though this was happening in the first game too, what's going on was written by Alan Wake and the curse of Cauldron Lake is bring it to life, about how "Another white asshole" is "dictating what to do and who to be." and it's just like wow, what the fuck even is that? Shut the hell up, this is just some dumbass "blacktivist" line a normal person wouldn't say. What a shocker that Sweet Baby Inc. turns out to have been involved in this, I'm sure they nudged the writers saying "Make sure she's black, and says some strong black thing about how white people suck and take away blacks' self-determination." She's a lame, dumb character. Another sign is how the hispanic female FBC agent just randomly mentions that oh she's a lesbian who has an ex-wife :^). It's so forced and dumb, patently obvious why it's here and that it isn't here naturally for some kind of purpose, or even just because it's to the author's interests. Black plight and lesbianism is not at all important to this story in any way, it's just tossed in here because well, you know, it's current year we gotta have "representation." Would black people and lesbians even be satisfied with this? Does this even work as pandering? Maybe this game really is "Alan Woke." 

So Saga's part of the story is mostly lame because she's mostly lame, though there are some fun characters like these finnish brothers who make the shittiest commercials for all of their horrible, failed business ventures. Her story is mostly about solving the mystery and that's actually pretty fun, I liked going to the string board and connecting the dots for all the different clues. Even if I was in this strong black CIA woman's "mind place"(an offshoot of the "mind palace" technique that she created. No really, she actually says this). 

But man, these things drag down what was a game that coulda stood at the same level as the original for me and just doesn't. I think Alan Wake's half of the game in particular is great, maybe better than the original despite the homogenized gameplay due to what it offers, and if the whole game was just that it might have been better than great. But it's just not, I was open-minded with Saga but it just kept dashing my hopes every time. 

 

Still, the game's not bad or anything, it's still good. It's just not nearly as good as the first one, and it's lucky it does so many good things to somewhat make up for my issues. Like I said before, I still do recommend it if you liked the first game and wanna see the next step, but if the gunplay, fighting the darkness monsters was your favorite part, you'll probably be disappointed. It was a better game than this, for sure. 

 

Final Fantasy XVI

 

 

This was the best image of the boxart I could find.

 

Final Fantasy 16 was a disappointment. Or rather, it's more like it's underwhelming? It's a fine action game with RPG elements with a fine story, it's just one that set up higher expectations for me and then failed to meet them. Really, of course the expectations were high, it's the most recent numbered Final Fantasy title. If KH3 wasn't in the works for so damn long, I wouldn't have been so let down by it. But also I mean, I did go into this with tempered expectations because I knew, yeah, they're doing full on DMC with this to the point they got one of the guys who worked on DMCV to direct the combat. The RPG elements are so light in this one they're likely to float away! But hey, while I don't like the action instead of turn based approach FF took, it's not like it's bad. I would love it if the next FF was a turn based combat game again and maybe now that shit like Baldur's Gate 3 and Metaphor ReFantazio have won awards, Square might be willing to do that again. However, I've made my peace with the idea it won't. However, however, I've also heard mixed reception on this even from die hards, so I didn't know. I know 15 has that same opinion, with lots of "Well the game just wasn't finished :^)" excuses(it's no less finished than any other game, movie, book, what have you where they approached the deadline and didn't have enough time to keep unfinished parts or implement planned ones), and I think that one's still great despite it's flaws. Regardless, I went in hoping it was good, it started to become great, and then it outstayed its welcome and didn't follow through with what made it so good to start with. People are right, it's just okay, though I dunno if it's for the same reasons others have. 

First and foremost, it's too damn long. If you do the side stuff, some of which is important and you have no idea which so you gotta do it, it takes like 80 hours. Took me like 80 hours at least, and that's too long for an action game with this kind of combat and enemy encounters. With something like the Tales games, you have more serious RPG elements to it, you have things like learning new skills and moves, like I mentioned with Tales of Eternia. You learn some new moves based purely on story progression, like this is a 10-15 hour Devil May Cry game or something... You learn stuff too slowly and don't learn enough, don't have other party members with their own moves, don't have enough other RPG elements, and have to fight way too many damage sponges. I don't even know why I'm comparing the two honestly since the kind of combat is so different. I think I lack the words to really explain why, but there's something about how it's done that makes one satisfying for 60-80 hours and the other not nearly as much. All I know is I got tired of depleting stagger meters by the end of it and kinda doing the same combos over and over because after a certain point you run out of new options and you wanna do the most efficient one to get the 5 billionth fight over with anyway. But this isn't that big of a deal, the core combat is pretty good anyway and when you have a unique boss to fight, things get a lot better, I just think playing DMC lite for 80 hours wears on me. The side stuff, I mentioned that, and how some of it's important so you gotta do all of it. Well, that's a pain, because most of it's pretty lame. It must be because this team is so used to making an MMO, because 90% of side quests are MMO filler quests. You go up to a guy who does a bioware style canned animation and tells you Egads, my fields are being assaulted by the goblins! Can you go and slay them for me, mysterious and slightly broody warrior? Goblins you say? That's no good, I'd better get rid of them before someone gets hurt. Right, I'll take care of them for you. And then you go and kill the goblins and come back and he says wow hey thanks here's a few potions for your troubles. But then, sometimes, it'll be a quest where you're reunited with your long lost chocobo, or near the end of the game it'll end with an important character moment that caps off their subplot. Maybe there's some interesting lore! Better do all the quests, cuz who knows, the fate of one of the towns and it's leader, an important main character, might be there. On top of side quests where you're sent to fight "Bigger, stronger version of a common enemy." there are "hunts" where you also fight a Bigger, stronger version of a common enemy! Oh joy. JRPGs are having a problem lately where they're getting the Western Game Curse, and feel the need to chock their games full of filler Content with a Capital C so that they can justify charging you 70 whole dollars for them. Well I got this game for 30, so you didn't have to. I'd really rather 40-50 hours of really good, tightly made main content and either tightly made side content or at least far less of it if it's gonna be insubstantial. I wouldn't even mind the insubstantial nature of it if you had to, like, go find it yourself. Instead of me talking to a guy and he offers me 1000 gil if I go get him some mushrooms from the forest, the game advertises a guy who is just gonna pay me 1000 gil for some mushrooms I can go press x on with a BIG EXCLAMATION POINT on my map and even above his head like it's some big event, and it's not. 

But hey, whatever, that's not that big of a deal either. Hell, Tales of Berseria actually had a good deal of that and that game's one of the best games I've ever played. The problem is the main stuff isn't great. The bosses are fun but even then the combat still gets old by the end, and the common enemies are still too damage spongey making everything feel like it takes longer. The story on the other hand starts off really good and is doing great, but over time just becomes more and more of a let down. I can't go into it for those who haven't played but I think for one thing, it's pretty messy, with each part of the game practically being unrelated to the plot and themes of the last one. For another, it really handles it's whole "slavery is le bad" stuff poorly and childishly, despite the grimdark stuff that happens with it. Tales of Arise did this too but I kinda expect that from a Tales game and can focus more on what it means thematically. 16 still has this, coming back to freedom and self-determination, the right to choose our own destiny and purpose and all of that sort of thing. That part is pretty good, but the problem is we have this gritty Game of Thrones inspired dark fantasy story and yet we have scenes where characters go "Wait, you mean it's not okay to completely dehumanize someone, take away their rights, own them, and then do horribly cruel things to people!?", or worse, the angsty anti-hero who worries his only worth is in how many bodies he can pile up lecturing comically evil people who don't give a shit and clearly only do it to the slaves because it's legal about how this is wrong, and you can't do it because it's bad. Then there's things like them mishandling my favorite character, some characters kind going nowhere despite it seeming like it's going to, aspects of the story just kinda petering out, the ending just being kinda lame and confusing. I again can't explain exactly why for spoilers but the story just kept losing me more and more as time went on, each underutilized idea, underdeveloped theme, underdeveloped character, just chipped away more at my good will towards the story. The antagonist is dumb and is the same kinda thing as always in these games but looks stupider and there's much less investment in the human element it's all a backdrop and vehicle for, so I end up not really caring about the ancient civilization with crazy tech or the evil god who wants to destroy the world. 

Now, I will say there are some great parts of the game, the Eikon battles, because they're just really cool and I honestly enjoyed their combat more. It helps you don't get to do them often but it left me kinda wanting a whole game that was just those fights, though only for like 10 hours. Also, uh, they're kinda just Asura's Wrath lite so I guess I could just play that again. But, they were certainly a highlight! Now I actually still do think the game is okay, especially since early on I thought it was great, it was just the last 2/3rds or maybe 3/4ths that let me down, progressively so, and not even to the point that any of it was bad or anything. I focused on the negatives and it's hard to explain the positives without spoiling it, but there's still a lot about the story and characters I did enjoy and was quite good. I thought Benedikta's story was sad and well written, Hugo's too honestly, Clive is still a pretty alright character all things considered and I think the prologue when he's a kid is great. Dion, the dragoon from the empire was my favorite character until they squandered him at the end. Mid is really cute, I liked her enough I didn't mind doing mandatory fetch quests for her(forgot to mention that earlier! jeez!), stuff like that. The bosses are really good the combat does shine during them and a lot of them are just really cool. The Square Enix budget shines through for sure! The graphics are quite nice in general though the art direction isn't fantastic. And, much of the music is really good as well, enjoyed Masayoshi Soken's compositions for sure, though I think he put his all into 14 and not this. I think that's kinda it, the team focused more on 14 and did this on the side, hence why it took so long and how so much of it is underdeveloped or filler. They focused on their main work, I'm sure. Still, it wasn't bad and I'm not regretting I played it, I just wish it didn't take up so much of my time for relatively little payoff.

New Games Of the Year:

 

And here we are, finally, at the games that were actually released this year that I've played. Now I can tell you which ones are the best, or whatever. That's not really what I do. I can tell you which one is the worst though.

Most Shit Award:

 

Silent Hill: The Short Message

No key image included here because it's STINKY.

 

This "game" is terrible. This is another PT clone; that's right, Konami copied themselves and just went and full on made a Silent Hill game that's a bad copy of PT, a game that was a teaser for a Silent Hill game. And it's really bad. For one thing, it's so fucking on the nose, the game basically explains to you that a PT-like situation is happening. Hell it goes out of it's way to explain everything to you, if the symbolism wasn't already on the nose to begin with, most of it is directly explained to you anyway. Everything is directly explained to you, and it's just the most out of touch old man trying to make a #Relatable story for angsty zoomer teens. It's so fucking stupid like the whole thing is centered around teen suicide and like the pressures of social media and the current generation's neurosis related to the internet and like fucking cyberbullying in the way that shit like Cyberbully is, but with way more horror and symbolism and stuff. It is very much made in that way, where an out of touch exec(not even a proper artist), thinks they're making "art" that is "important" because it "tackles modern issues". Like it's not even that the themes and issues being dealt with in this game aren't fitting for the series, we've done people guilty over what they've done and denying the reality of it, we've done abusive mothers, we've done the cycle of abuse, we've done being suicidal. The problem is the way it's done here, which is just so forced and so many lines are silly and again absolutely feels like it was written by a middle aged japanese man who has never experienced these feelings thinks he's totally got it figured out though, but does not. Forgetting all that, there's no gameplay to talk about anyway. There's notes you can find, you get chased by an invincible monster that represents your sins through some halls, the final chase is obnoxious because you have to collect a ton of mementos to open this door all in one go and it's a confusing layout. The worst part about that is Masahiro Ito clearly did so much nice work on that area's art direction and there's just no time to look at it. For good things, yeah, Sakura Head's design is good he did a good job. I think the ending was pretty good, actually. It was a nicely directed moment and I liked that what saved what's-her-face from killing herself was her friend saying "Hey you know let's just go and hang out, just go shopping and do some girl stuff okay?" I could see that coming off as silly to people but it makes sense to me, sometimes that's what a person really needs, a break from everything to help them relieve that tension and moreover it's reminding her that there's someone who still cares about her in her life. A good friend who knows that just hanging out and being there for her will help and wants to do so. It was nice. I mean, it didn't earn it at all and you could tell they wanted you to be like "omg that was so kino what a great positive ending to such a tragic dark tale" but no, no man no. It's a good ending for a good story, not this thing. So it doesn't really help out much. That's seriously the best I can say about it, it's not super terrible and has some moments, it coulda been way worse. But I mean, this reveals the "Silent Hill Phenomenon", a state of mind where you believe this kind of shit is happening to you or something, making it so that 1. it's all in your head(pretty sure) and 2. it can happen anywhere. Boy, that's really stupid. Like, if that's the explanation for Silent Hill f I'll be really pissed. Honestly I could see Ryukishi making that work, that's somewhat what Hinamizawa Syndrome is like, he might be able to handle all of Silent Hill f being the protagonists fevered hallucination. But man, I dunno, maybe I was misunderstanding something, but I'd be pissed if they made the stupid "it's all in their heads" fan theories true for any of the games other than this piece of crap. This game sucks, can you believe someone on Backloggd said that it opened his eyes to the bullying problem or something like that? Imagine finding out that bullying is bad from something like this. Some people can't figure out something is bad unless a story tells them it is and worse, can't figure out it's telling them it is if it doesn't turn to them and say "it is bad." Also, Backloggd's user reviews tend to be just as stupid as Letterboxd's, I'm so glad I only use the sites for logging and keeping track of what I wanna watch or play.

But, what about the games that were not the worst? Let's get into the "various awards that I pulled out of my ass to talk about each game" section.

 

 

Most Disappointing Award:

Slitterhead

 

 

 

Slitterhead's a game I wanted to be good because it's the new game of Keiichiro Toyama, his first game since he left Japan Studio, and his third horror game! Well, this is an action game with heavy horror elements, but still. I actually never played Gravity Rush because when it came out I didn't have a Vita so I said oh nevermind, didn't know it was him either. I do wanna get around to both some time since they seem like cool games. If you don't know, Keiichiro Toyama was the director of the original Silent Hill and is also the director of Siren. So he's got a pedigree. But, I think the studio he's working with, Bokeh Games or something, just couldn't execute on his ideas. I mean fuck, I've never heard of them before, what a shock. Also worth noting is that the OST is by Akira Yamaoka, and to get that right out of the way I do like some of the tracks but it's mostly forgettable. I saw people say it's his best work since Silent Hill 4 which isn't saying much, personally I think the best tracks in this aren't even as good as the best tracks in Shadows of The Damned, though it also has equally forgettable music over all. The music doesn't really enhance or detract from the experience, so I won't talk about it much.

Slitterhead isn't a fundamentally not-good game, in fact conceptually it's great! Just from the premise, it sounds good. Though he certainly was wrong when he said he thought this was the first game to do this, off the top of my head Geist from 2005 is this same kind of game where you control a spirit and possess people to fight and stuff. Man, now Geist is a game. I expected that level, Geist's not a great game but it's pretty good, the gimmick is done well and you even get to manipulate objects and animals and do stuff like make enemy soldiers kill each other. In fact that's how you defeat enemies, possess one of them and use them to shoot the others. None of that here, it's just NPCs and special characters.

But that's still fun. And a lot of it is fun. I think when you get into the flow of it, when I'm just swapping between people and smacking around the boss, getting hit and almost dying so then I quickly swap to my next host and hit the boss some more, when I'm able to properly utilize the special characters' abilities, it's a blast.

Which is unfortunately few and far between.

Let's get into the issues one by one. First off the story kinda sucks. It's told in a confusing, and trust me I understand convoluted stories told in confusing ways, way that makes it hard for me to engage with. It jumps around in time and timeline often with no warning and just casually reveals big twists constantly with so little fanfare you barely register that you just got a mindblowing piece of info. Then there's the problem of all the cutscenes, rather than having voice acting, using the battle grunts the characters do randomly when a new text box comes up. Not even just a quick voice clip of them saying the first word or two or something, just a totally unrelated phrase. This results in the hilarious situation of the british guy, who I randomly unlocked without ever meeting him and I'm not sure why(?), often just saying "Roight!" and "Roight..." no matter what he's saying because again, it's just his battle phrases. This does lead to a cool stylistic thing where Night Owl, your strange entity you're playing as, saying strange phrases that kinda sound coherent but kind of don't in a way that maybe is relevant to what he's saying in text? But it sounds very dreamlike, like the kind of thing people say in a dream where you kinda understand it and it makes sense in the dream but when you've woken it makes no sense. Generally, I think that's what these scene are going for, trying to work within budgetary constraints for surreal presentation; the weird colors and camera spinning around the room while slightly translucent models of the characters appear for these scenes suggests this as well. The problem is this all results in me being unable to really connect with the characters or care about the plot. It's not just because of no voice acting either, I obviously can get deeply engaged in a story where dialogue is delivered entirely in text boxes. Presentation matters though and the game's presentation is unique, but not gripping. It's boring. Worse, most of the dialogue itself is boring! It might be more interesting were there voice acting, but there isn't, so it's kinda boring. Much of it's just exposition and when they try to develop characters or themes it's done so haphazardly it feels very dry and hollow, it just falls flat. I don't really care about any of them. It's not even a matter of them just being uninteresting characters, one of them is a homeless guy with a sordid past who punches the shit out of monsters. It's simply a matter of a sub-par writer having interesting ideas and no skill at executing on them, or someone not able to implement the writer's work well.

But hey, the gameplays what matters in a game, right? Even if it's story heavy, if the gameplay's great you can forgive it right cuz you got good game to play? Well I mean if it's really focused on it and won't let you skip it that's maybe even worse, because it wastes your time with a bad story and keeps you from the good game, but luckily that's not the case here. Cuz the gameplay's not great either. Again, part of it is, but then you get to all the stuff that isn't.

You have to play these levels over and over, in two ways. One is that missions take place in the same, I dunno 5 areas, several times. The second is that you have to replay those missions again to progress, either to go back and get a new character you need to unlock the next part of the story, or simply because with the time travel stuff the game tosses at you unceremoniously you might need to go back through the same time period after looping to do something. That doesn't sound bad, right? That sounds kinda cool even! Discovering the secret of a level to unlock a character so he can show you the way to the next thing, going through the timeloop and changing things this time, re-doing an older mission differently for a different outcome. But in execution, it's just tedious. Because these missions aren't designed to be done more than once, or at least they're done in a way that makes playing them again a slog. For one thing, so often you have to stop so whoever you're possessing can lean down, examine something, then stand back up straight in their bad canned animations so your entity can point out the obvious. I had to do one mission like 3 times for something and every time he would kneel down to this pile of dead bodies and go "Gasp! These people have been massacred! I wonder where the guy who did this went!?"(the guy very clearly jumped off in an obvious direction and he could just chase him down now but no you have to examine the bodies). For another there's bad stealth sections in several of the levels where you gotta sneak around slowly and it's just boring. Then there's lots of hand holding, time wasting shit that rips control away from you so it can do things like have the protagonist wonder how he can get around these guards, hmmm, and then when you get close enough to where you need to go to get around them rip control out of your hands again to camera pan over to an open window and then have him say "Oh, I bet I could go in through that open window!". Every. Time. You do. The level. For one thing, what's even the point of going through the window if I don't even need to figure out I need to do it? You may as well just make it unobstructed if there's zero resistance from the game in me getting to the next area. Surely there coulda been a better way to force me out of my current host. But to then make me sit through this every time like I don't fucking know I can do it is just annoying. The character has canonically been through this before! He knows! He already knows! Only one of the characters you have to unlock to progress actually makes logical sense, the bum can pick a lock letting you get at another character. But getting that guy just unlocks the next part, because the game says so. No story and gameplay merging at all. Then there are these chases, which you cannot do differently. Sure, you can maximize efficiency at them, and you can lose them, but they're really just set pieces. You can't get to the guy early, you will always chase him until he ends up at the designated battle point and then you can fight him. Doing this over and over is so frustrating because it feels so pointless, I know how it's gonna go just zap me to the fight. Again, the main character knows this has happened before, why when he's coming back to do this wouldn't he try and do it differently? You can only do that if it's another loop's version of that mission where he's doing that and it's a totally different mission anyway. I just got so tired of doing this shit. Then there's the problem of most enemies just being way too fast and stunlocking the shit out of you. Had so many times where I was trying to fight as one of the characters but I just kept getting knocked down on my ass over and over so I could watch their tedious getting-up-from-the-ground animations. I know it wants you to switch to another person to keep up the offensive but often when I tried to do anything other than attack a couple times with one guy the monster would of course not get stunned himself and just turn around, and far too quickly to get out of the way start stunlocking my character. Rarely actually got to use combat abilities because well, I would be on my ass before I could. Some of the bosses are just aggravating in how they can fuck you over, doesn't feel balanced to me at all. I also wanna mention the abilities have cooldowns but that is okay, since you're meant to switch to someone else while they're cooling down and that incentivizes you to. So that's alright.

Finally we have the bullshit ending. The story started getting kinda good at the end and the final part of the story was really cool. I was learning about the slitterheads, some stuff was going on with the characters that was cool, and the final confrontation was tough but actually fairly balanced and a good challenge.

Then the ending happened.

It ends on a "The Adventure Continues..." stinger where the conflict wasn't actually resolved, the antagonist is still going and we weren't able to beat any sense into him, and it says oh man, to be continued this battle will go on! Like wow, fuck you, waste so much of my time just for a cliffhanger? It's not some kind of ambiguous ending where things end before they've fully concluded, it's implying it will be concluded at a later date. No it's not dude, what are you talking about. You went to some small budget studio and got published by XSeed, do you really think you're gonna be able to make a sequel? I hope this is a matter of not being able to fit everything you wanted into it due to the low budget scenario, because if it's either you really are planning a sequel or you actually intended for it to end on this kind of cliffhanger that's way worse. 

This is the kind of mediocre that's not because it's bland and unengaging across the board, but because it's a good game trapped in the shell of a bad one, balancing out to a solid 5/10. 

Disappointing.

Most Okay Award:

Unicorn Overlord

 

 

 

Like I said, this game's okay. I really, really liked the demo and wanted to play the main game, and so when it came out, I did! And I liked it a lot for most of it but as time when on, it just started to lose me. The characters are all entirely one-note and not that interesting, their bonding events are so bland and formulaic I started just not caring about getting them outside of a few. A lot of the dialogue really treats you like you're a child, overexplaining things that are obvious even more than your average anime or anime game. The localization is crap and makes a lot of story scenes tiresome once the ye olde english has outstayed its welcome, either it or the original script just isn't strong enough to stay interesting the whole time. As for the game part, it starts off pretty good but starts getting weaker and weaker as time goes on. I don't mind at all that the strategy consists of putting good units together and choosing the right enemy unit to attack, and while everyone does whatever you programmed them to do automatically, watching the battle play out is actually pretty cool and useful for determining why something isn't working when it seems like it is. But, the problem is that the battle prediction is 100% accurate, you will lose that much hitpoints and not beat the enemy if it says so. Other way around is true as well. If it says you're gonna win, you're gonna win. Only thing you don't know is who's gonna be killed. The battle will also play out the exact same way every time if you load a save and do it again, I checked. So watching the battle is actually only useful sometimes by the end. Sometimes you'll fight a boss and it says oh, you'll do this much damage to it, so you go in trying to just do that until you finish it off. But the problem is you were only able to take out one of the enemies and now the other one is really strong against your unit, or maybe he keeps summoning more adds so you're just killing them and not doing damage to him every time, so you do need to check that out. But most of the time, you really can just skip it and check who needs healing after. This game is effectively a RTS, not a turn-based strategy and RTS hybrid. To compound this is the game's difficulty. Rather than optimizing, I tended to have well balanced teams that seemed like they're make up for each other's weaknesses or specialize in certain situations. This is definitely not the most effective thing to do as shown by other players. But for 2/3rds of the game I wasn't having any trouble. Then, randomly, I was. I couldn't kill any enemy units in one go, things were getting tough and I was taking too many losses... but then I realized that a soldier's position, outside of front-row back-row, in their unit has a huge affect because it changes turn order and who's gonna be targeted and such. So I started going up against units it seemed like I could beat and if it said I wouldn't win, I swapped the position of characters until it gave me a favorably projection. And then the game was pretty easy again. The final boss which guides talk about as some really, really hard thing was pretty easy with basic strategy. So I kinda just ended up on autopilot by the end. And there sure are a lot of battles to fight, I played this for about 100 hours and did everything aside all the bonding events and yeah, there's too many of them. Lots of fucking about here too, not nearly as bad as the others I mentioned, but like there are these search points where you just walk over them press x and don't even stop to get materials, and you gotta go do this so you can give them to towns to rebuild them. Really feels like filler and surprise, this game is also on the switch so it's gotta be content for content's sake, shit you can do on a commute or something. It feels like something I'd do in a mobile game is the best way to describe it. There's also these encounters on the map which don't give you EXP and you don't even need to win them, just not die to them, and you can progress. They seem kinda pointless? I guess they work as a beef gate so if you're underleveled and die they'll push you back so you know not to go that way, but still. So I stopped being interested in the characters, the plot, or the gameplay after some time, so why is this even "okay"?

Well, the artwork, art direction, character designs, music, and atmosphere of the game is still pretty good. the story's not bad it's just not that interesting, the characters are likeable enough they're just kinda underdeveloped or written in a way that's not gripping when they are developed. But they look good, and that does actually count for something. There are a lot of cute and/or hot warrior and mage babes in this game, I like that! Besides I did enjoy it quite a bit for the first half. This is nowhere near Vanillaware's best game, and I can say that having only played most of Odin Sphere, some of Muramasa, and all of 13 Sentinels. It has the Vanillaware style, charm, and good art design sense. But I'd really rather finish Odin Sphere.

Most Inconsistent Award:

 

Apollo Justice Trilogy

 

 

 

Before we begin, for the year it came out I forgot to talk about Great Ace Attorney Chronicles so I'll do that now.

It was an port and compilation of the two Great Ace Attorney games that were on 3DS originally, and I was happy to finally play them! They take place in the meiji/victorian era of Japan/England, you play as an ancestor of Phoenix Wright, Ryunosuke Naruhodo. If you're purely familiar with the western localization of Ace Attorney, you might not pick up on this, if you don't know Phoenix is actually Ryuichi Naruhodo in Japanese. But yeah, that's who this is. More like Phoenix is his reincarnation, as they're extremely similar characters. Before playing I had assumed everyone would just be old timey themed versions of all the Ace Attorney characters, and while there are some of those for fun, most of them are not. Your assistant is Susato who isn't just a copy of other characters, you have best friend and fellow defense attorney Kazuma who wishes to reform and refine the legal system of Japan by learning from Britain's, you have the prosecutor van Zieks who isn't like the other prosecutors at all, and you even hang out with Sherlock Holmes! Well, for some reason he's localized to Herlock Sholmes but he is supposed to be the same character. It's really great story-wise, actually, it's the second best after the original trilogy and the two games are more clearly meant to be one story, though both have their own narrative arc so it's not a big cliffhanger in the middle of act 2 or something. There are new kinds of gameplay segments too, like the Summary Examinations where you have to convince the Jury, which we finally have, to overturn their decisions, and correcting Sherlock's very incorrect deductions as this Sherlock is actually a total bumbler who needs Watson to steer him in the correct direction or else he'll make the wrong logical conclusions about things. These are both very stylish in their presentation, the animations and cinematography used is, what's the word, kinetic? Dynamic? It's something like that. There are dramatic angles and camera swings, and so many poses. It's a hell of a lot of fun, the latter is sometimes easy but still feels good to do and other times actually pretty tricky, and the former has you using different logic and reasoning than standard court gameplay normally has you do. These are great additions to the Ace Attorney formula and makes these more that just a great new story to play through the same way as always. That woulda been nice since I love the story and gameplay of this series, but it's far more than that. The only thing preventing it from being on the level of the original series is I feel like the finale is kind of a let down, it's very convenient and contrived how they manage to beat the bad guy, extremely ass-pull-y, deus ex machina-y stuff.

Meanwhile, Apollo Justice Trilogy isn't nearly as good as all that. It's a collection of 3 games that were on DS and 3DS, Apollo Justice, Dual Destinies, and Spirit of Justice.

First off, I think Apollo Justice and his game are really weak. Apollo's not a good character. Whenever you're playing as him, he strangely just feels like Phoenix but not as good. When you're not, he actually seems like a slightly different character who's totally okay, but that doesn't help for the game where he's the only playable character. The game is lame, it feels stock, like it's just yeah here's some more Ace Attorney cases we had ideas for, so they could make another one instead of not. So I dunno maybe it's fine for Capcom to sit on it's IP, if they're just gonna do this when they gotta get out an obligatory game. The only thing that really sets it apart is using his weird truth bracelet to hone in on people's tells when they're lying, I did enjoy that quite a lot. But all the new characters are snore, even Trucy who's kinda cute isn't that endearing. The climax is really anticlimactic, you present a few pieces of evidence and the Apollo and Gavin just team up to explain what the bad guy did with zero input from you for the next like 10 minutes. Still, it's got the Ace Attorney gameplay I enjoy, I don't think it's mediocre but this is definitely my least favorite game in the series.

Now, Dual Destinies on the other hand, that's a good one! First off, a bunch of cuties in this one, like Jinxie Tenma, Myriam Scuttlebutt(Box Girl), and of course the new character Athena Sykes. I really like Athena as character, she's definitely a really fun and charismatic character. The animations in this are great as they were, or rather would be since it came out after this, in Great Ace Attorney, lots of charm and style to them, which adds to the characters quite a lot. I really like the new prosecutor, Simon Blackwell; he's over the top in such a fun way that I first thought might be too much for the series, but is honestly just right. He's this crazy looking dark and brooding dude with a pet falcon who wears shackles because he's actually in jail for murder, but he's a great prosecutor so we need him. He's also like a samurai? He's allowed to carry a sword for some reason even though he's a prisoner??? Oh well, who cares. One of his cool ass poses/animations is him leaning against his desk with his back towards you and then smugly looking over his shoulder, like he's just not taking you seriously at all. He's great, I love him. There is some issue with him and Athena though, like they know each other and they even have a dark backstory that ties them together quite personally, like they really know each other. When that is a factor, it's really good. The problem is neither of the mention this or, unless I missed it, show any sign of knowing each other until the last case where that's what the story is about. That's bad, right? You see the issue? Come on man they should at least say something, considering their relationship neither of them should want to go up against each other in court but at one point they do and say nothing. No one mentions anything until it's most relevant. Great.

 

But otherwise I think it's really good. You have new additions to gameplay as well, like keeping Apollo's looking for tells, and introducing Athena's psychological profiling. Sometimes witnesses will be overcome by the traumatic memories of being involved in a god damn murder and all that, so you'll have to calm them down and help them see what happened clearly. It's good for them and for you, since their emotional distress is preventing you from getting accurate testimony. Not only is this thematically relevant and relevant to Athena's own arc, it's just kinda fun and interesting to do and you get these fun 2D illustrations of what they're remembering. Athena's arc does kinda cop-out and re-use something from the very first Ace Attorney even, but I think things like that are just preventing it from being as good as that game. Otherwise I think this game is really good. The new music is great and really tense for trying to root out lies, and exciting for when you catch them. The breakdown animations are really surreal and crazy and they really enhance the experience. I again think all the new characters are good and like all the cases, including the DLC case that's included. Apollo is even alright when you're not playing as him, and the multiple playable characters thing is actually pretty interesting. Phoenix isn't a fucking hobo who acts like a different character anymore, and there's even one more gameplay addition. When you're right about to solve the case and clear your client's name, one more wrench will be thrown into the cogs, and you'll have to do a turnabout in thinking. Here you zoom into your guy's mind, where there's this little light traveling through a line, representing like synapses firing or something and logically connecting things. You'll have to choose between a few possible answers to a question he or she's asking his or herself about the facts of the case, keep extending that logic until you reach it's conclusion and then BLAM. The words containing the answer, the big twist, will slam onto the screen in a satisfying and cool way signifying that you've done it. 

I think this game's great! Apparently, this one is AA fans least favorite? Can't imagine why, there are some disappointing things about it, but I like it a lot.

Meanwhile, Spirit of Justice is good but nothing special, really. I like most of the new characters, especially Rayfa who I think is a pretty cute little tsundere who's dedication to her duties is endearing, but overall it's just not as good as Dual Destinies, though way better than Apollo Justice. This doesn't feel like a great end and this is, chronologically, the last Ace Attorney game. Dang. It's just another one of Phoenix and Friends adventures. I do like how it takes place in both Japa- I mean, America, and uhhh the made up asian country who's name I forgot, it's an amalgamation of several east asian countries. A bit of China, a bit of Tibet, a bit of Mongolia, stuff like that. They have an interesting legal system and hatred of defense lawyers stemming back to a big incident in the past involving them and a current revolution headed by the man who caused it... supposedly. Spoilers it was a conspiracy, who could have forseen this? Yeah I think that's part of my issue with it. The revolutionaries are actually super good boys who would never do anything actually bad in the name of revolution or anything, that's 100% entirely propaganda. They also, in their extremely limited AA presentation and budget, try to depict this revolution taking place and it just doesn't really work. Further, they try to tie Apollo to it as well. The games keep trying to dramatically reveal that Apollo has a relationship with previously unmentioned characters who are actually really important to him, in a vain attempt to make him more interesting and it just doesn't work. I won't tell you cuz of spoilers but one of them went nowhere and continued to go nowhere. 

However I find it cool we keep cutting back to him and Athena in "America" as they battle with a prosecutor from that same country, and then cutting back to Phoenix in that country as he defends people there. When there, Phoenix will do the spirit channeling part of the game, where Rayfa, the priestess, will channel the spirit of the victims to show "objective proof" that who we said did it, did it. In this you have to carefully examine the "footage" and point out any inconsistencies in what Rayfa is saying is happening and what you're seeing is actually happening, poking holes in the idea it's that straightfoward. It's extra bad for Phoenix here because if he loses, he'll be put to death for defending a criminal! Dang, talk about totalitarian! Honestly, I wonder why the even let him do this shit instead of putting their feet down and saying nope, sorry, you're not even allowed. The people don't seem like they'd question it, they're all super set on hating Phoenix. Well, part of it is that Rayfa is actually a good person and truly believes in what she's doing, when Phoenix points out these issues, she starts second guessing what she's been doing the whole time and wants him to help her properly sort out the last memories of the departed souls. I think that's some good stuff, but it's the bare minimum I'd expect out of one of these games. The prosecutor Athena and Apollo fight, as well, has some cop-out shit worse than Athena's at the end, so that sucks. This game is good, though, I just kind of expect more out of these games.

So, you get why I'm calling it inconsistent? Great Ace Attorney chronicles was consistently good, both games are on the same level. This one however, is not. Each game is of varying quality, with the middle one being my favorite and the first even being my least favorite in the whole series. That's pretty inconsistent! Thus, the collection itself ain't great, but has 2 games definitely worth playing.

 

Second Most Inconsistent Award:

 

Miles Edgeworth Collection

 

 

 

Meanwhile, this one is also varying in quality, but it has 2 games instead of 3.

The first one is honestly not much better than Apollo Justice. I found it to be kind of a slog to get through and none of the cases were that interesting. Most of the new characters I don't really care for, only really Kay Faraday is good, and I think most of the time the game's overwritten to the point of tedium, overexplaining things worse than I do, so I get bored. I was pretty glad when it was done. It's important as the second game which is better builds off of it, a point in it's favor, but as it's own thing it's like whatever man. Gameplay wise it's really mostly the same as the others aside your method of traversal, you go around and examine things to find your clues or humorous asides, and then when you got them you gotta debate with people. It's the same thing in a different setting, sometimes it works slightly differently because of what you're trying to prove, which threw me off a couple times, but typically you're merely presenting evidence that contradicts what a person is saying. It's the same stuff. Which is fine, I like these games enough that like Apollo Justice, this still isn't even mediocre, but I think this and Apollo Justice are tied for least favorite. Even playing as Edgeworth doesn't really elevate it, though that's what makes it eek out victory over Apollo since I don't like him as a character but do really like Edgeworth.

The second game isn't particularly impressive and still has that overwritten to the point of tedium issue, causing it to just drag at times from how much reading you have to do, but it's a lot better. The story is a lot more interesting this time and includes a chapter where you get to play as Edgeworth's dad, Gregory Edgeworth! It's pretty cool, and you meet and work with someone who was his assistant. The cases are more interesting this time, the music is better than the first one which was fairly unmemorable, and the new characters introduced in this one are also more interesting. Like I said before, this builds on the plot, in more than once sense of the word, established in the first one and brings it to a close, so that's really nice. The game also introduces the Mind Chess segments where you need to gauge your opponents reactions to things so you can figure out what to say that will trick them into spilling the beans, so you can go back to previous statements and point out how it's a lie due to what they just admitted. It's pretty fun and a good new addition, which again the last game didn't really have any of. But in the end, I don't think this is great and I like it even less than Spirit of Justice, everything in it isn't as good as that game but it is somewhat enhanced by getting to play as Miles Edgeworth. There is some interesting stuff in here about introspecting on his role in the legal system and the path he wants to walk, but it's mostly just re-affirming stuff and it will likely not have an impact on future games, since this is a spin-off they probably won't expect you to have played. This isn't Kingdom Hearts.

Some day, I hope to play the crossover with Professor Layton so I can have finally played all Ace Attorney games.

Game I Most Don't Know How I Feel About It:

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

 

 

 

I'm in an interesting position here. It's basically the same position as people who didn't like the first of the Remake trilogy. I have the same problems; A lot of the parts they're adapting straight just aren't as good as how they were done in the original, and when it does do something totally new I don't really care for it and the ending being all meta doesn't excuse it for me. As for why I didn't think that about the first one, well I liked how they handled things and most of the new stuff was pretty good and I thought the meta ending and promise of new and exciting things was interesting. I think that's the first mark against it though, the "unknown journey" was more like the "mostly known journey" because it follows everything from leaving Midgar to the City of the Ancients really closely, just worse. In the first one, they did handle some characters and events differently, but while I liked how they were done in the original, perhaps more, I didn't think they were markedly worse at the very least. Equal most of the time. And I felt that for a lot of things at first here, but then I got to the most notable downgrade, Dyne. I won't tell you exactly how, but I think they really screwed his section up. Everything from how the "Someone with a gun arm shot people." scene was done, to how Dyne himself was written, to how Dyne inevitably meets his end, is just such an inferior version of the idea and it just sucks because that was one of the best parts of the game. Sure, like, only around the end of the top 10 but still. It was tragic, it was important for Barrett's character, it was thematically relevant... I guess it still is, but like, in so much less interesting of a way this time, outside of a greater emphasis on how it affects Barrett as unlike the original, characters don't just have their designated Character Development Story Arc before being mostly irrelevant if they aren't Aeris, Tifa, or Cloud. Also, they do something really terrible with Red XIII that I hate. And actually, on that note, I think they fucked up Elena. In the original she was certainly the newbie, but that was what led to her being overly serious about her job. She seemed more serious and standoffish, but here she's a brat who even complains about her job, she's an entirely different character. I dunno if this is a translation thing like the original got her character off, but I feel like she wasn't like this in Advent Children either, though you don't see her that much.

Then you get to the end, which I won't spoil the big thing that's supposed to be a meta commentary of some kind, but I will spoil something else. See at the end of the first one I was like oh, damn, I want some answers about this weird timeline shit going on with Zack! What's going on, why'd that happen? Are these things existing concurrently? There's stuff at the end of the Yuffie DLC and even in this game that implies they are! But guess what, they're not. There isn't really an answer either, it's not some weird pocket dimension or anything like that. You wanna know what the big explanation they give you after cutting to The Zack Dimension every so often over the course of this 130 hour game, building up the mystery and the intrigue? There are, get this... Multiple timelines! WOAHHHHHH! When we beat Fate, we opened up the possibility for there to be multiple timelines because there's no set events that have to happen! So there can be a timeline where Zack doesn't die now! 

Oh, so it's the thing I already realized it was at the end of the first one. I waited all this time with you teasing me about it for you to say "That thing it clearly was? That's what it is!" 

It's possible they might have a further explanation, because obviously I have more questions about it than just that, like how the fuck the timeline Zack's in where he just carried Cloud into Midgar also has Cloud already having joined Avalanche and blown up several reactors. This is never addressed but the problem is, the scene at the end feels like it's trying to be so big and revelatory like you're supposed to go OH WOW THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING! but it doesn't, I just feel like that was the explanation.

Then we have the game part. There is so much fucking bullshit fucking around nonsense busywork in this open world game because it's an open world game. It took 130 hours because it takes for fucking ever to just travel around each area, even on chocoback, and so much of what you're doing is yet another tower to climb and activate, yet another crystal to scan, yet another different kind of crystal to scan, yet another hot and cold minigame, yet another cliff you slowly scale so you can get up to a thing where there's another tower. These areas did not need to be this big nor did they need so many pointless things to do in them. 

 

But then, it's not like all of the side content is bad. The good stuff can be a pain to get to because traversal takes so long, but I liked all the extra strong monsters, because you have challenges associated with them like beating them within a time limit, pressuring them, exploiting their weakness, or even not getting hit by certain attacks. I made sure to do all of them because they were fun and tested my skill at handling each enemy type. Then there's the protorelic side quest, which is an actually substantial thing with story and unique encounters connected to it. Then there are the sidequests where you take on missions for people, half of them are pretty lame but that was true of a lot of them in the first one too. The other half have things like following up on side characters after their part of the main story, or just more encounters with a side character, or just some kind of fun little story to them even if the actual gameplay part of it's usually something really simple. It's just a lot of the game takes forever and is tedious, one of the side activities is "There are 3 chests at this location somewhere, can you find them all?!" Wow!

In the end, I just dunno how I feel about it. I did enjoy a lot about it, there are a lot of new story segments and some story segments are handled just as well in a different way, but others really aren't including the most important parts like fuckin' all the stuff at the end. It took way too long to get there too. On the other hand, I think the combat system has been refined to a great degree, and perfect blocks have been introduced. If you block with the right timing, you negate the damage entirely! I did it on purpose a bunch of times, and it felt great! There are some good challenges here and I enjoyed playing on dynamic most of the time, felt like just the right amount... until it didn't. The end of the protorelic side quest is a pain, and it's not just me who feels that way, a lot of people are saying it's too hard. I did the big boss of it one time on normal before putting it down to easy when I died right as I was getting him down to his last bits of HP. It's a huge difficulty spike, some of the hardest fights in the game, randomly out of nowhere because no other step of the sidequest was this demanding of you. I'd say that's bad design, how about forcing me to sink or swim earlier instead of in the final stretch so I can decide if I want to just not bother or push through and git gud? Don't pull the rug out from under me right at the finish line man. But man, I think that questline is really good though! There's so much fun stuff, like the cactuar minigame where you gotta score enough points by defeating different kinds of cactuars which all have different weaknesses, it's tough to juggle all of them at once and effectively take them out by switching to the right method. I did it though, got the high scores, and that was rewarding.

So it's tough to tell exactly how I feel about it. I've settled on "it's good" because just "okay" doesn't feel right, I enjoyed too much about the game, like the card game for example, to say it's not good. But then again, the end of the card game quest was also a massive difficulty spike where I had to look up a cheese strategy and even that took like 15 attempts to work. You see? There really is a lot of good here but there's so much frustration and disappointment as well. And again, way too fucking long, if you do literally none of the side stuff in which case you are definitely missing out it's only like 30 or so hours I think? So you gotta do a lot of it. Even if I didn't do all of it, it'd probably still have been so much longer than needed just cuz the areas are so huge. After the first two I was already done caring about the impressive size and splendor of the pretty UE environments, and just wished I could get right to the next thing. You also have to unlock the fast travel points by slowly picking up a Chocostop sign so the chocobos can stop there, wow thanks. But then, in the worst area because it was complicated to navigate on top of being huge, you also get some of the best story segments of the whole game, stuff that wasn't in the original and is also as good as what the original game did if not better in some aspects. So I guess it balances out? I dunno man, I just don't. I do know I hold it against it that it made me sit through so much stuff I didn't like to get to the stuff I did, that's a big sin. It was good and I do think it's more than worth playing especially if you liked the first one, definitely do try and get around to it because the good parts are great, but in the end I just expected a lot more, especially because everyone, including people who would normally be more critical of something like this, acts like this game is amazing. Man, I didn't even think it was as good as the first one! Or, did I? I don't fucking know. Because honestly when I think about it, there are so many good parts of the story and character interactions and development that work so well, just as before, and I love these iterations of the characters. For most of the game, even when they did arcs from the game worse, they handled the main characters great and I loved spending time with them again. A really great JRPG party to adventure with and that feeling is even greater than the first game, and the original game! Like, the Gold Saucer date is expanded from the original and an even better character moment than it was in the original! There's lots of stuff like that. It has a lot of great parts, I just feel like sadly it wasn't greater or even as great as the sum of it's parts. The same can be said of it's gameplay, and it's the weak parts of it that get in the way of getting to both its strong parts, and the story's strong parts. I really just do not know how I feel about it, I almost wanna dislike it, but I also did enjoy a good enough amount of it. There's just too much here that disappointed me, but what's good is more than worth it. Maybe when you play it, you should like, skip most of the side content. Look up what quests contain what so you can know which ones you wanna do and what other things you gotta do to unlock them, and just say "fuck it" to doing all the other side activities and map completion. Shouldn't be hard if they just tell you where shit is. Really, it's the parts of the story and last bits of quest lines that disappointed me the most, I wanna stress that. I do think this game's more padded out than the first game and I wish there wasn't so much unengaging fluff, but I think it's definitely better than it would be in a western AAA game and there is enough actually worthwhile side content here and it's still side content even if a lot of games have great side stuff. It's just that it's another piece of weight that causes it to buckle under the strain, the story and gameplay problems are a much heavier weight, I just think that I would have been more patient with that stuff had it not taken be 130 hours to get like 50 or 60 good hours out of it. 

 

 

Most Frustrating Game:

Silent Hill 2 Remake

 

 

This was also, somehow,

 the best picture of the box art I could find...

 

This and FF7R2 could be swapped honestly, these are both the same category. They're frustrating because I don't know how I feel about them.

On the one hand, it's a pretty good game and there's a lot I like about it. The art direction and level design are really good, similar to but different enough from the original to feel justified. Bloober's environmental artists have been the only good thing about them for a while, they do make good looking spooky environments like in The Medium. As I said I think the art direction and visuals resemble the original enough in spirit and tone but are different enough in appearance it makes sense. The apartments for example are more ornate but still look dreary in a way with their uniform nature. The original game's environments looked great in the way they were meant to, as in you wouldn't wanna be where they took place in real life and that helps convey the sense of unease, dread, and melancholy. Here I do think they look at little too flashy which hurts some of the cold, sad feeling they used to exude but it's not too much and besides, I get to look at nicely modeled architecture. A lot of the imagery is really great in a different way to the original's as well, I would say that's on par and what is here is quite good. I'm thinking of one in particular that shows up in the otherworld apartments, it looks creepy enough on it's own but when you come back later, something has changed... some good stuff. It was also symbolic, which there is a lot of here too. Some of it's kinda on-the-nose but it's still good, though that factors into what I don't like. As for the actual level design, I think in some ways it's an improvement over the original, but the original wasn't really going for a Resident Evil style design to it's levels and was focusing more about atmosphere. This still has good atmosphere, but it's lessened compared to the original. But it does have enjoyably complex levels with lots of shortcuts you can unlock and interconnected, looping design, on a more complicated level than the original. And I like that, because I like that kind of level design for this kind of game, that's a huge boost to the enjoyment I get out of games like this so it's an important point. I also for the most part like the takes on the characters, they aren't as good, but they are still good and interesting iterations on them. While most of the time the cutscene direction is very basic and flat, there are some scenes which I think are done as well as the original. The things I've mentioned are very important for survival horror games, so it makes sense that I think it's good.

But then there are the problems I have with it. First I mean the item management is honestly kinda worse than the original. At first I was low on healing and ammo so I rationed them out, but by doing any kind of smart play I ended up with a ton by the end and the game kept handing me more and more. I tried playing on hard one time but I ended up finding it more frustrating, with encounters with more than one enemy draining me of too many resources and it just felt like a chore. Maybe I'll try it again sometime because with how plentiful it is, giving you a bunch right before the final boss even, it might end up balancing out eventually leaving me with barely anything consistently so I at least have something to fall back on. 

 

And that kinda leads into the things I don't like, which is how they modernized it. 

 

I don't care for the combat, the original's combat was fine and I don't like this "magnetize to the enemy" crap where if you're within 3 feet of anything James will rush in to hit the enemy himself. I saw someone say this started with Arkham Asylum because it was popular and had tons of movement assists to help with the flowing combat system, and now every modern western game thinks the player can't handle, uh, moving in close to attack the enemy by themselves. It's like, fuck you, I've been playing games for like 25 years, I know how to do positioning. The original game made it easy enough to hit your enemies just give me that. People have said it's too actiony but I don't agree, I think it's not actiony enough to be worth it. I'm glad it isn't going full on combo mad like Homecoming, you can't just stunlock enemies to death with a knife, but I think the problem is you can't stunlock enemies at all! Sure, it's harder than the original because it's pretty easy to just go up to an enemy and hit them as soon as they're not attacking and bonk them until they're dead, but I'd honestly prefer it if you still could because here it's like NOPE sorry your attack did basically nothing because you attacked right at the start of this animation they were doing so they don't even react. They kinda translated the standard tactic in the original of waiting for the enemy to attack, and closing in once it was finished to just bash it over and over. I think it worked tonally as a "die die die!" situation even if it was easy. Here you actually have to counterattack after an attack or it's not really going to work. That's how it goes, they attack you and then you dodge and counter. That uh, that feels more like an action game. Except you don't have enough movement options and in one of those you usually aren't beholden to enemy animations and actions. I dunno man it just doesn't work and doesn't really help the spook factor. I don't think "Oh an enemy, okay time to dodge then counter attack!" feels very scary, just totally pointless half-step. Should have had balls and instead did it one-to-one, just hold down the button to ready and softlock onto your target, the press x to swing. It's not bad I think it'd be worse if it was more actiony but this isn't great. I also don't care for shooting now being the same third person shooting as in the REmakes. Just kinda lame, it feels better than it does in Homecoming again but man, like come on. Of course, how do you do lock on aiming in this kind of third person game?

And that's the next issue. On top of trying to be more like modern RE in it's level design and shooting, it's presentation is the same as well. Same as a lot of games now. If your game is a single player with any story whatsoever, it's now third person over the should camera and shooting. Because of The Last of Us. It's not exactly a Sony Movie Game, it has like, actual gameplay and there are only ever 2 or 3 cabinets to look through instead of you stopping every time you get to the next Designated Rest and Character Development Zone to look through a billion drawers. But there's too many instances of stuff that's in those kinds of games; crate pushing, crawling under shit, crawling through holes in walls. slowly making holes in walls to crawl through, pushing bookcases out of the way, etc. Because this is what games aspire to be now. Tediously "cinematic." Which honestly, wouldn't even mind it as much if it were a movie simulator because then there's a justification for having you do this, that's the game. Here it's like man, do I gotta do so much of this? I got to not because it's survival horror game, but because it's a modern game. We modernized it, it's what the people want!

That ties into so much of the "bigger and better" aspects I don't like. There are weird set pieces where the wind picks up and fog's rolling through, can't see 3 feet in front of you which is luckily the distance you need to be to attack an enemy because there are now a billion of them. It's so dumb, this does not fit the somber melancholic tone that the game still has. And then, there's shit like there being around 3 or 4 more holes James has to stick his hand into to progress, like wow man yeah you're right. Remember, remember the hole? We have to do that

more times because it's iconic. The Abstract Daddy fight is now multi-phase and he crashes through walls during the first part. Actually, all the bosses are multi-phase now, with them doing that "become angrier the closer they are to death" thing, like it's some kinda action game again. The final fucking boss, the one that represents James's dead wife, has multiple phases now. One of them is where she crashes down into a basement area. Like come on man, can you not? For this really important, somber moment? I know a lot of people don't even like that there was a final boss to begin with and felt it was totally out of place!

Then there's the fact that, while a good interpretation of him, James is like they took one of the ways you can interpret James and said "that's him." The original is somewhat ambiguous, the way he acts is kinda distant and odd sometimes and you can take his behavior and lines in multiple different ways. Which it is is kinda determined by the ending, which changes exactly what kinda person he is and can color his previous scenes in a different light. Here though, he's more straightforwardly sympathetic looking and acting, which I mean I personally am okay with because I sympathize with James even after the big twist, but I feel like there's just too much ambiguity being lost here. There's still plenty of nuance and he can become a much darker character depending on what endings you get. But man, kind of a downgrade. There's lots of downgrades about the story, mostly the way the lines are said. I don't care what anyone says, the original reads are fantastic. When they're off in a bad way, it's charming. When it's off in a good way, well it's really good. Part of it is I've just heard these lines so many times and am attached to the way they're said... but I mean yeah. I'm just not gonna like them as much. "Nostalgia blinded!" yes. That's how this works, am I supposed to be some robot who doesn't evaluate things emotionally at all? Either way I feel like the new voice acting and line delivery is just alright. In general the story is presented in a way more modern "prestige TV" kinda way, much more traditionally "good" and "classy" then the original which felt like a surreal horror thriller of the time, though done even better. But the way it's done isn't as accepted or at least execs think it isn't. I bet a lot of this is Konami meddling, including just the presentation and control scheme, since Konami has straight up said it just wants the RE2make crowd. Well, it got them, I hope you're happy because they are very obnoxious.

 

But then it's also like, the ending is still determined by your in-game actions, not some kind of binary moral choice or obvious choose your own adventure stuff. If you spend more time with Maria and keep her from taking damage you're more likely to get the Maria ending, you look at Angel's knife and let your health drop low all the time you're likely to get the In Water ending, etc. The dog ending has James speaking polish because the devs are polish! The UFO ending has him meet the original game's model of James who says he's Space James and the real James! There are two new endings you can get on NG+! A lot of the time the atmosphere is so oppressive and heavy it's even better than the orginal! Though it did that more consistently. There are variants of every enemy so you have more variety! There are more scenes of Maria and James together so you get a better feeling for why he might choose her in the Maria ending! James's chemistry and relationship with Laura is better handled and actually really endearing, making the Leave ending make more sense! The scene of and after the reveal is great! I especially like how the tape is done, it's more unnerving than before! Several puzzles can be skipped on a second playthrough if you remember the codes you gotta go find! There are lot of really good things about this game.

But then it's also probably too long, being 15 hours. Some of it feels padded out and kinda drags. And you're thinking what? 15 hours isn't very long... But for a survival horror game it kinda is, especially one you're meant to be able to go back and speedrun with ease, especially to get the second ending. The parts that drag, drag extra hard on NG+. Sure you can cut it down a ton but like, there's a trophy for beating the game in under 10 hours. That's longer than it'll probably take to finish the original! I managed to get it down to about 8 hours by cranking it down to easy, killing everything with the chainsaw, and bypassing several puzzles. That's about how long the original takes me, playing normally. Damn man, it's not like there are any new areas either, the bowling alley is replaced with a theater so you go to just as many locations. It's a bit too expanded for the kind of game you are meant to replay and go through it more efficiently. 

You see what I mean? How do I feel about this game? I mean, I think it was good? But I have so many problems with it. It feels like it has to be like so many other games and stories, when I liked the original because it was an original and unique game. But on the other hand, it has about the same problems, and kind of problems, as the RE4 remake and well, I still do like that one. See, it's frustrating, and I don't know how I feel about it. It's frustrating because so much of it is good and feels like it was made by a genuine fan of the game while the rest may as well have been design by committee. 

 

Such is the life of a Silent Hill fan.

Best RPG of the Year:

Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance

 

 

 

Let's get this out of the way real quick: This isn't as good as Nocturne. Nocturne is the better game and it's not even a contest, there is no question. There's no need to weigh them and look close at which side is lower. It's Nocturne, Nocturne is better.

Because this one is another open world RPG with too much filler fluff content to give you something to do which goes on way too long. To a much lesser extent than FF16 or 7 Rebirth, which is actually a surprise since this was originally a Switch game. You can tell it was designed to just have lot of little battles and shit to collect while you're playing in mobile mode on the bus or some shit. Gotta have lots of little collectibles, if Nintenbabies can't collect sparklies for too long they get antsy. It's not that bad but it did end up outstaying its welcome.

I think the story and atmosphere are big, big downgrades from Nocturne. Nocturne had a lot philosophical and ideological pondering that I think was very good, which made up for the lack of emotional investment I had in the characters. Here, it tries to be more like a normal JRPG and be about these recurring characters and their interpersonal dramas and lofty ideals and goals, and I just don't care about them that much. Well, the Vengeance storyline does this at least. I picked it cuz I heard it was more like that, but this is no persona, I don't think they did this kind of story that well. It's like Nocturne, those aspects are alright I appreciate what you wrote, but there's something about the execution preventing me from getting that into it. I shoulda gone with the original storyline maybe? And this game is trying to be like Nocturne 2, basically. It's the same thing of like, we're all fighting for the right to recreate the world after The Conception fucked everything up, though it actually fucked everything up a long time ago. Lucifer shows up, you fight Beelzebub; hell, though it was DLC originally, if you do one of the quest lines you fight the Fiends again, in the same order. I know some of these are recurring elements too, but trust me when I say this game seems to be going more for 3 than it is 2, and 4 seems to have been completely different. I also felt story-wise there was this weird disconnect, you kinda canonically are this paragon of good, even in the Chaos ending you can't really be evil. But the gameplay's still the same, and in some of the quests the characters even bring up how much it sucks we're killing all these demons when we know they can actually be reasoned with and aren't just evil, even "evil" demons have some strong ideological belief, and most of the time it's just part of their culture like with the Oni who feel might makes right. But this conundrum is never really expanded on or goes anywhere, the only thing that ever matters is who you choose to do quests for when you get the choice, and no matter how much you side with evil the Nahobino is on the side of good and acts heroic the whole time. You can be as callous and cruel in gameplay as you want. So my question is, why bring that up? Why not ignore this entirely then, and let the gameplay and story be segregated like that across the board? Do not think about mercilessly mowing down demons it's fiiiiine, you're the hero. Either do something with that or don't have it be a factor. More importantly, it just draws attention to the fact there was no such issue in Nocturne. See, in Nocturne it's established it's this might makes right, fight and survive world you've been put it. It was cruel and unforgiving, so you had to be too. That was what was so sad about what happened to the world, and why you would be so mad at the god who allowed- nay, wanted this to happen. This naturally leads into the True Demon Ending, you become powerful and barbaric to survive this wasteland, you become a demon yourself, and you side with the one who's going to fight the one who made it so you had to become one to survive in the first place. Your life was ruined and you became an amoral demon, so now you're going to seek retribution for it. It was good stuff. It acknowledged the inherent nature of JRPGs being games where you have to methodically murder countless living things to increase your own power and money like some kind of villain, and basically became one through doing this. I don't expect all JRPGs to be undertale and make it so you gotta not do that to get the good ending, I'm saying is Nocturne doesn't even bring this up and yet it's still part of the story so it feels justified, while V does bring this up and then makes nothing of it. This isn't to say this is some big mark against V, because it's just a video game who cares, I'm saying it sucks that we got such a good story and gameplay meld for Nocturne where the setting and premise facilitates you mowing down countless foes for EXP and then didn't get that for V, the follow up, which then decides to bring it up instead of just saying it's a video game oh well. It's only a point out of favor for V because this is a follow up, and we've once again downgraded. For one more mark against it, I felt like it went on too long in the end. The climax had this annoying gimmick boss which wasn't hard as long so you made sure to do the same thing over and over or it'd just kill you, but it took a long time of doing that same thing over, and over. Then you fight Lucifer who's just immune to all buffs and ailments and absorbs most elements and has high phys and mag defense so it just takes forever to kill him while you're dealing with some of his more punishing attacks. Just ended up being something I just didn't wanna do.

But, in general? This is a good game. For one thing I'm happy to be playing with the Press Turn System again. It's such a great turn-based combat system, probably the best I've encountered. Each round of combat you have one turn point for each member of the party. When you exploit a weakness or get a critical, you gain one back, meaning your characters could all act twice before the enemies get a turn if you play your cards right. However, missing an attack loses you one, and when it's the enemy's turn, they can also exploit weaknesses and get crits to gain turn points for themselves. But, they can also lose some if they miss an attack. Hopefully you can see how you could use this to your advantage, or how the AI could as well, and how you could get royally fucked if you're careless. And you can here, for sure, I died a bunch but I never felt the game was unfair... okay, never is a strong word. That's one more point in favor of Nocturne, I felt every fight, even Lucifer, was fair. Here, some of them are a little... hmm. I had a lot of trouble in the early game, some fights just have very annoying gimmicks. But, most of them are really good, and even when they're grueling they feel satisfying to finally win after it felt like the game was pulling out all the stops to prevent your victory. Plenty of what you have to do for side stuff is lame but there are also plenty of good quests too, like the Fiends quests as I enjoyed fighting all of them. Lots of good optional fights to test my turn based combat skills, I definitely enjoyed them. A lot of them have actually interesting or fun stories tied to them, one of them got me Artemis who is really, really cute. Another got me a demon for my party who helped out a lot, Cleopatra, who had great attack and support magic and some nice big boobies. Apparently both of those were DLC originally though, ugh. While they coulda cut back on things to do so this didn't take a whole 75 hours, a good enough chunk of it was worthwhile even if I spent too much time wandering around the open world, hitting treasure orbs... again. But there's a lot great about the gameplay, a lot that's still interesting about the story, some cool ass locations you get to go to, and all that good stuff. To top all this off, if you do a NG+ there will be a bunch of hints that your previous playthrough happened before and if you do the other storyline you can unlock a superboss that will go into the nature of that loop and this story's place in greater SMT story. Pretty cool! Probably not gonna do that but I like it's a thing! This isn't a great RPG, but it is a good one. It's the only other new RPG I played this year, and I'm more clear about how I feel about it, so I won't give best RPG to FF7 Rebirth but to this. Besides, that's an action RPG, this is a proper turn-based RPG, so ehhh unless the other one is massively better this should get it anyway.

And now, finally, the moment you might have been waiting for, this year's Game of the Year. This would actually go to Paper Lily Chapter 1, had I not already included it as a game from last year due to it's beta version being released. Maybe I should actually just count it as this year lol, well it's really good so it's co-game of the year I guess. Anyway, here's the other one. 

Game of the Year:

Crow Country

 

 

 

Wasn't too tough to decide this because out of all the new games I played this year, it was definitely my favorite. Easy pick.

Crow Country is really good. It's another classic style survival horror except this time we don't have the fixed camera angles, but an isometric rotating camera. The graphics kinda look PS1-ish, but have their own style that doesn't really fit with anything, just kind looks like a game that would be on an early 3D console. Maybe a Sega Saturn? A little bit? Just a smidge? Anyway, it's all that survival horror gameplay that I like. The map is surprisingly small and kinda simple and yet I still felt that same feeling I get from a more complicated survival horror map. I did have to play on hard in order to get the proper experience, I still ended up with a decent amount of health and ammo by the end but there were definitely times when things were rough and I had to avoid enemies and use up my last heal. It's the same as what it normally is, you gotta pick and choose what enemies to avoid, who to take out, when to take them out waiting for when you have enough of the good stuff to spare, check every little nook and cranny for supplies because you're gonna need them, and approach every area methodically and you'll come out on top. There's not much more to say about it than that, it's giving me what I want out of this sort of thing and it's giving it to me really well. The puzzles are all pretty good didn't have much trouble with them and when I did I said "Oh yeah, that was me being stupid." instead of thinking the game was expecting too much. I enjoyed finding secrets, putting together and finding the finite ammo for the Magnum, I liked all the creepy monster designs, I liked the characters. I thought the story was really interesting too, told in a very mystery-like way, bits and pieces getting dropped on you as they slowly fall into place. I also figured a lot of it out before the reveal, maybe it's too obvious, or maybe you're just given the right info to figure it out if you play detective a little bit. It's a simple story overall but one that's really interesting and has some nice existential, cosmic horror to it that's spookier in retrospect. I think the ambient music and atmosphere are all good and convey the sense of tension and dread very well, never scared me but did make me on edge and unsettled quite often. Especially the long spindly monster and his accompanying weird creaky-sounding music, just very disconcerting. Had a great time conquering a map, braving the dangers, thinking strategically in my use of items and when to save, and getting told an interesting and mysterious story. It is a really, really solid survival horror game and I'd like to play it again some time. Would recommend it! I know that seems pretty weak for what I have to say about my Game of the Year, but that's really just it. Too much about the story to spoil, the most I can do is say it starts with a girl who introduces herself as Mara Wilson going to the now abandoned Crow Country theme park, looking for it's owner who has gone missing, as she's apparently some kind of law enforcement agent. The theme park is unfortunately full of these horrible humanoid abominations and all sorts of locked doors and strange security measures, which honestly have a good explanation as they're trying to protect an important and lucrative secret. Some of the story is told through newspaper articles and rumors, before seeing these monsters you hear about them from tabloid reports and blurry UMA style photos, before encountering one yourself. You'll meet a cast of various characters including some people who actually worked there, a lawyer here to solve a dispute about an incident that happened here before the place shut down in which a little girl was bitten but a mysterious creature, a cop that Mara knows, and a particular sleazy looking guy. I think the story is told quite well, survival horror games do this all the time but the way it doles out the info and keeps the mystery and intrigue going while sometimes having you meet with various characters in cutscenes feels similar to the original Resident Evil. Like Silent Hill for example, you tend to go for a while and then in the next area you meet up with Cybil because she walked into the door, then you don't see her again until way later in another area. Here, it's that thing of after progressing to a certain point you'll go to an area and oh hey, that guy's here too! I do wish there was variation and multiple endings like RE though, seems like there isn't here, but still. Combine all this together and you get a very good survival horror experience, and sometimes that's all you need for a really good game.

 

 

And there we have it, another year, another Game of the Year post. I hope you enjoyed reading that, because I don't have much more else to say. I'll get around to games like Metaphor ReFantazio eventually, I said I'd play it but the closer we got to launch the less sure I was and playing the full game for a bit made me say ehhhh, I'll play this later. Just didn't feel like playing it for 80 hours. Played way too many long games in 2024, wanna try keeping them all 60 or less, and preferably not even 60 if I can help it, more like 30 or 40 tops. So I'll probably play shorter games and older JRPGs, which I do need to get around to. I'm probably going to be playing very few new releases this year, since there aren't too many coming out that I'm interested in, and instead focus on my backlog and games I didn't get around to that came out this year. I've already played a few that will be included in next year's GOTY post, so stay tuned for that!

 

See you again!!!