Was more conflicted about this when it came out, in retrospect despite digging everything it's doing aesthetically I just don't think it works - the UI gets in the way of the combat being readable and the writing is on-the-nose in a way that was already dated in 2021 and probably comes off even worse in 2024. There's some decent character beats and I have a lot of empathy for what Love was trying to do here but I don't think she was particularly successful. Between this and Don't Take It Personally it may just be the case that Love is not great at overtly topical writing.

I’m a Final Fantasy XIII sicko so when I found out that Get in the Car, Loser! was heavily inspired by the divisive but unique 2009 JRPG, I raised a brow in curiosity. A lot of indie JRPGs are concerned with “fixing” the typical idea of the genre which has never grabbed my interest. Someone making something inspired by FF13, though? That is a decision. Call me a “l’cie” because playing that game would be my Focus.

Get in the Car, Loser!’s take on FF13’s combat sands off a lot of the extraneous math from the original game’s design and simplifies things, for the better I think. The lack of proper exploration that most JRPGs have makes GITCL snappier. There isn’t a lot of stat math, either. The game gets a lot out of a little and maybe it wears out its mechanics quicker than other RPGs but that’s okay because it’s also a shorter experience, clocking in at about ten hours.

The combat loop took some getting used to but once I wrapped my head around it, I liked shifting through the three boards the game gives you and then topping off a cycle with Grace’s Fate attack. There’s more customization and equipping trinkets to switch up a hero’s moveset is the most drastic (and dynamic) difference between this game and the FF13 that inspired it.

I didn’t like juggling elemental affinities, though. Too often did I restart a battle because I had a Ravage attack the same element as an enemy. On the positive side: healing spells being temporary worked as a good balance between the urgency of combat compared to the long-term strategy of a battle.

On that note, making the protagonist a support character (instead of a mainline fighter) is a nice twist on a JRPG trope. I guess maybe that’s why the story is so focused on personal problems rather than a big fantastic plot? I can’t say I like it, though. There is some cool lore in this game that feels very inspired by later Final Fantasy games, but most of the in-car dialogue is concerned with the anxieties of the characters rather than the plot at hand. I don’t mind a lot of soul-searching– road trip stories typically have their characters be introspective and reflect on things– but the balance is heavy on the contemplation side and not enough on anything else. A lot of the discussion is about queerness and a lot of it was stuff I’ve seen before. It’s took until Act III and Sam to examine her own problematic thoughts for anything to get interesting. The game also employs that “texty” ironic dialogue style unconcerned with correct punctuation and spelling and I am not the person for that.

The villains are modern fascists taken wholesale out of the real world. The game opens with some dickweed harassing Sam with a monologue you could read off of Twitter. I don’t mind these kinds of jagoffs being the villains in the story but it’s extremely blunt with it. The fascists worship the main villain the but the rest of the narrative doesn’t do a good job of tying queerness and fascism to the world-building in a way that feels like a wasted opportunity.

The game’s road trip theming and modernpunk setting feels distinctly inspired by Final Fantasy XV. I like how all the healing items are corner store food like samosas and bottles of iced tea. I like the general style of the game, too. The music’s great. It seems to take more from the Persona games than any Final Fantasy with its funk-soul flavour across many tracks. The vocal track battle themes quickly got stuck in my head and I’m also a big fan of the “Store ‘n’ Gas” theme with its psyched up production.

I complain a lot but this ended up being my favourite new game experience of 2024 and I this is still very much worth checking out even if you are not a FF13 goblin like myself.

This is quite a charming game all things considered, the writing is a bit over-the-top and the characters do lean hard into LGBTQ+ tropes most if not all of the time, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad.

The story is goofy and lighthearted in a good way, the characters are cute and endearing in some of the best ways making me excited to come back to it, but what really put me off was the gameplay eventually. While not abhorrent (or even bad in any aspect) I actually think the real-time party-based combat is really fun and inventive in a minor way, making you cycle to use parts of your movekit and so forth. Around when I got the 4th character however, the game slowly became less interesting and less engaging, while the writing kept up, the gameplay just left a lot to be desired, and I made it about halfway before I got sick of the game.

This doesn't mean the game is bad by any means, I do recommend it a lot for lovers of jrpg-enthusiasts as a less-hardcore spin on the genre, but for me it just hit a wall. Overall a good time though and praises.

I am so conflicted on this game. On one hand it's about a queer roadtrip to defeat fascism, on the other hand, I absolutely cannot get into the combat at all.

For the most part I really enjoy the writing. That meme about writers who use subtext being cowards is totally relevant here.

I particularly enjoyed Act III for diving deep into Sam's psyche. I ran out of steam in Act IV, the final part of the game, against the final boss no less.

The combat system is... very weird to me. I've heard that it's like FFXIII, but as someone who hasn't played many FF games, this doesn't help me at all.

The tutorial is pretty short, and by Act III I had played the game so poorly I soft locked myself. See, I was like 4 levels below the boss I was trying to fight, so they literally instant killed all of my party members constantly, and I didn't have enough money to buy gas so I could keep grinding to level up. This game is weirdly a resource management game with the money in a way I've never felt so oppressed by before. I genuinely had to restart the game from Act I because I had been foolish enough to repeatedly save in the same slot, despite the game offering like 50 save slots or something.

So the second time around I minmaxed leveling as hard as I could... without making myself completely out of money since I could mess up the game again. AND I turned on Story Mode combat difficulty. Which, frankly I find the name a bit offensive. It's not like you can simply button mash your way thru boss encounters on that level, at least not the final one. See, the upgrade system is the whole way you level up, and there's lot of spells and if you don't read them all very carefully you can end up with a pretty shit build. I think that's what happened to me at some point and it was making the game a lot harder.

Sadly, the encounter rate just gets too high, and it literally interrupts party dialogue. Gracefully the game resumes conversations where you left off, but I found myself dreading the interruptions. Even on Story Mode where you apparently get more money, I constantly was running out of money for upgrades if i wanted to keep enough money to not run out of gas and lose the entire game.

Eventually I just looked up a Lets Play to watch the final boss play out. Also, apparently at some point the game was patched to prevent you from using your entire item collection during fights, because it was considered messy/confusing. As far as I can tell this was a massive nerf to your combat ability. You have to constantly remember to restock the items in your 5 slots, and it's hard to balance which items you want to take to each fight. In particular Act III and Act IV bosses have some items you really want to have around and I had to restart both fights because I hadn't taken the right loadout.

Anyways, the writing is definitely cheesy at times, but I like the parallels to fascism, LGBT rights, and ineffective liberal government "status quo" woes. Oh, and all the stuff about social media in Act III again was great.

Sadly, my lasting thought about this game is that it needs a massive balance tuning. Maybe I'm "bad" at the game or something, but it just didn't click and I kept feeling frustrated. I wish this game had just been a visual novel instead.