Sega: "I got a present for you. It's a little dirty. A little rough around the edges, just like your dear old ex con game company with a heart of gold."
Sonic Frontiers is a Video Game. A game that carries the sentiment I've missed of true soul, of wanting to just make something. And while all its parts don't fit together perfectly, they do mesh well enough that I enjoyed my time with this.
The open worlds are a bit weird and somewhat empty, but I also found it fun to worm my way through it and hit all the challenges. The combat isn't that complex, but it felt cool to figure out how to solve different enemies and bosses. The cyber space levels really aren't much, but when you're going through them for only a minute on a good run and seeing the various gimmicks they try, I don't mind that there are only 4 environments.
The game is 100% something that could have used more time and money, but with the game play and story I had fun with, I'm glad I played it and am anticipating how this will be iterated on.

As the first step up in new capabilities of Role Playing Games, this is charming until it isn't.
A quality of Final Fantasy IV that shines throughout the game is the sense of boundaries being broken. Bosses could have multiple sprites, dungeons could have layers to hide secrets, party composition could change, characters could each have their own abilities that brought something new to a battle, even sprites could be moved around to elicit a form of acting. All throughout the game, there are so many qualities that might seem simple today but are so clearly amazing advancements for the time it would have been released.
The story isn't too special. There are more character "deaths" then there are interesting plot developments, but the mere idea that these dots on a screen were characters with a history that had motivations and could develop would have been amazing to see. That said, there still isn't that much that's going on. The events and plot are basically cyclical until the end when things just kinda work out. As you might expect, this gets grating after a while, and by the end, the reveals would seem cool if they had much of anything behind them.
The game ends up sharing a similar sentiment. It's really awesome that these characters all have their own special ability, and each part of the game ends up feeling just a bit different from the last because of how your party composition ends up. Seeing these classic jobs be a thing in universe attached to their own character is neat. Even having the main character change his job completely is cool until you're at the end game and your party hasn't changed or developed much at all past their basic roles. Your main character gets the ability to cast spells but stops learning after 5 so you're at the final boss with a status effect healer as the best thing he can offer. At this point also, the game's only way of challenging you is to use attacks that hit for most of your HP or outright kill party members.
Despite this, the game is mostly fine. It being the first SNES Final Fantasy speaks for its quality. There is a roughness around the edges but also a lot of cool concepts that needed to be built upon, it's the middle ground between the simplicity of FF1 and the mastery of FF6.

So, it hurts a bit more the second time.
With the story and gameplay that this game has, a second playthrough where everything is sitting in the front of your mind is destined to be smoother. Items you had no thought in now aren't skipped over or stashed away, navigation and puzzles are that much easier as you've already seen the areas and solutions before, and those little things that didn't add up are staring you in the face.
Coming back to the start of the story after getting the sparse details it gives and connecting some dots around what it all means paints a different picture of what was going on... even if it wasn't exactly subtle in what it was originally setting up. It's blatant that this is a time loop story and having a full view of the mechanics and setting of the world makes everything even clearer. Which then leaves all the murky spots all that much worse when you still don't have that full a picture.

Neat game about going through it.
I'm coming to the party a bit late, so most of what I knew about this game before playing it was that it was something that was a "trans people game." Looking at it you might think that it means that it's going to be a Wholesome 100, Feelsie game about transitioning or something, but it really isn't. The game is pretty genuine about the idea of people having different struggles and the difficulty of what it takes to get through them, even having a fake out “your parents just don’t understand you” scene. It’s hard to get through whatever you’re going through (the game is pretty vague about Madeline’s problems specifically, which I think helps in sympathizing with the game’s concepts), but being with other people, wherever you can find them, helps. At the same time, you need to be willing to accept the problems you do have and not just push them down in hopes you’ll be better for it. That all said, there’s only so much I can say about the story as there’s only so much of it. The game says what it wants to say and not much more. The gameplay on the other hand has a lot more than the initial run through.
One of the strengths of indie games is that the simpler game concepts can often be explored in so many different ways without also feeling like they were drawn out too long. Basically every 45 minutes or so, you’ll have some new mechanic on top of jumping, dashing, and holding. Add on different aesthetics for each chapter, the whole game felt fresh and kept me interested the whole 7 hours it took me to go through the main campaign. With there being even more optional stages and collectables, this could be a game someone could really engross themselves into.
Overall, a pretty good game that ended up being a lot different from what I was expecting but not overwhelming. Madeline is just like me, fr, though.