Trails of Cold Steel 2 : Fascinatingly Bad

Previously, in my journey through hell the Kiseki series, we covered the first game in the third arc of this now cult classic series and I concluded rather harshly and in length that it was indeed one of the worst JRPG that I’ve ever played.

In response to such vitriolic hatred for what is essentially a very mediocre bargain bin RPG of the week, my friends quickly responded to me with the following statement : “If you think CS1 is bad, I can’t wait for you to try the 2nd one, it’ll make you think it was actually a masterpiece” which instead of dissuading me from continuing on with the franchise actually got me curious about what that might entail.

You see, Trails of Cold Steel 2 had a bit of a rocky development history. Around 2012, the PS Vita was slowly but surely put on the front as the successor to the PSP, Falcom just went through what could be considered their 2nd golden age with the PSP with a wide variety of titles across both PSP and PC a lot of action-rpg of course since it was until recently their main activity as game devs but also the Trails series which was picking up some speed, so much so that the fabled “Zwei 3” was instead released as “Nayuta No Kiseki” to profit off of the Kiseki brand (a fruitless effort since it was one of the last RPG on the PSP and by that point people have already moved on to other things).

This transitional period was a bit rough for Falcom which had two big projects for the PS Vita, the first one was “Ys : Memories of Celceta” a (bad) remake of Ys IV and of course the next entry in the Kiseki series aka “Trails of Cold Steel”. However, in a moment of extreme “lucidity”, Toshihiro Kondo asked the team at Falcom to develop the game for both the PS Vita and the Playstation 3, marking the first time Falcom has worked on a a game for home console since the mid 2000’s (if you can count porting Ys VI on PS2 as making a console game).

This of course lead to a lot of undesired results, the game was a buggy mess on release with tons of issues running on both platforms and on top of that they had to cut corner everywhere because Cold Steel was simply becoming too ambitious for the studio to reasonably finish it in time, but no worries because they just decided to cut the last hours of the game and release it later as its own standalone experience. What was supposed to be one game probably followed by one more sequel like the Crossbell saga became a 4 game long epic separated into 2 sub-arc each, of which Cold Steel 2 was the second half of that first arc (yeah it’s a bit complicated to follow, I swear I’m trying my best here).

So what exactly is Trails of Cold Steel 2 ? Well imagine if you took the second half of Final Fantasy VI and made it an entire 70h game instead because for some reasons Falcom decided that it would be a brilliant idea to do the “Search for your friends'' bit from FFVI again making it the third time this has happened in the series and I really must ask myself.

“Does Falcom think we wouldn’t notice they’re just shamelessly recycling ideas from other titles AND themselves ?” Well perhaps.

But I don’t really mind, if it’s done well, it could still save itself from the plagiarism allegations and besides the series has its own set of quirks to compensate (for better or for worse).
I’m sorry in advance if this review is gonna be shorter than the previous one (post edit note : this is a lie) because honestly my thoughts on this game are not nearly as intense, most of what was bad about CS1 still carries over from CS2 there’s very little change between the two titles, it is for the most part a straight continuation of what was done previously and that’s gonna be the main bulk of the issue.

Because the foundations that CS1 established were so weak to begin with, it was really hard to get invested into what CS2 wanted to tell me with its story. One thing that I will say CS2 has over CS1 is that the story is a bit more “engaging”, it’s less about experiencing slice-of-life moments between the most boring RPG party you’ve ever interacted with and more so about following a terrible mess of a story that would make Nomura’s writing seem sensible in comparison.

I guess I’ll get the gameplay out of the way first since there’s a few new additions, the battle system remains almost exactly the same as CS1 with the little addition of the “overdrive” gauge, if you’ve read my review of Azure I’ve explained that this game had something called a “burst” gauge which could unleash a massive boost on your characters abilities, getting them priority moves, let them cast spell cost-free and acting as an emergency heal button on top of that, pretty much the “fuck shit up button”. Well overdrive is more or less the same except instead of acting for the entire party, it acts only for the two characters that are linked together on the field and also only acts for three turns instead of dropping down based on your actions.

This small addition is welcome and definitely make battles a little bit more dynamic but it still a very feeble addition with the only real strategic use being to buff your party very very quickly (and the main reason why I used Jusis way more often this time around) during boss fight to more quickly dispatch of them in one hit thanks to Laura aka “What if we turned One Punch Man into a party member” s-craft.

Because yeah, unsurprisingly, the game balance here is even more awful than it was in CS1. Again, I've played the game on normal like with all the other entries but here it almost felt like I was cheating the game and I probably should’ve upped the difficulty to give the game any semblance of challenge. The reason why the game balance is so bad here is because you retain most of your broken crafts and stats from the previous game, since this game acts more like a 2nd disc than a sequel. This means that you start the early game with what were end-game abilities.

It’s nothing new in the series mind you but here since the game is so craft-centric and they didn’t even bother to nerf your crafts like Azure did coming off of Zero, it makes the early, mid and endgame stupidly easy, heck the second you obtain the “Domination” quartz which doubles the damage output of any attack/crafts/s-craft first used in battle, you can pretty much destroy any bosses in one-hit with a turboboosted Laura.

Which further emphasizes how the changes made to the orbment system to make it more accessible/straightforward only made the game battle system a complete mess and while it is fun to break the game in half, it doesn’t necessarily make for an engaging combat system for more than 70 or so hours. Some fights required a bit more strategy like the cryptids which are superbosses scattered across the map but even then, it’s often not that deep either.
But now on top of the regular battle system, you have GIANT MECH FIGHTS !

Those were already featured in the last 20 minutes or so of CS1 but here they are more present, punctuating or sometimes concluding big stretches of the main story for spectacle purposes and while they definitely do a good job at making me hype thanks to the music and the presence of giant robots and all of the implications surrounding their existences on the battlefield, the actual gameplay is a bit rough… but if I’m being perfectly honest, I’ve rarely seen any RPG 100% nailing mech combats so I’m not gonna hold it against the game for not perfecting the formula.

The fights are just a guessing game where you have to hit your target in specific areas of their body, that part changing depending on the stance they’re having, a pretty interesting concept bogged down by the fact it’s never obvious what part of the body becomes the weak point and that even if you do hit the weak point, you don’t have a 100% chance of breaking the opponents guards, meaning the best strategy to win most fight is to put yourself in counter stance and let the game break the guards for you. There’s definitely room to improve those fights, they’re a nice little distraction from the mundanity of the main combat system but they definitely need some tweaking to be more engaging and less gimmicky.

Now that we got the most minimal change out of the way first, let’s talk about the actual big ass elephant in the room which is, you guessed it, the story !

CS1 was meant to be an introduction to the world of Erebonia but if you go back and read my review of it, you will quickly notice that this introduction was not only lackluster but also presented in the least engaging way possible. From long drawn-out info dumps dropped in the worst places, the repetitive, dull and predictable structure of its chapter based narrative, its bland and shallow characters I ended up having little to no attachment to by the end of the game and of course a confused mess of a main political conflict backed up by Kondo’s new weird obsession with centrism and faux gray morality and complete misunderstanding of basic concept such as class warfare and the separation of power.

Out of all the 90+ hours it took me to finish CS1 only the ending portion was of any significant interest because that’s where the game started to have an heavier atmosphere with soon to be child soldiers dreading the very real possibility to be drafted and of course the introduction of the big giant mechs introduced earlier as well as the heel turn of one of our party member Crow who is somewhat of a rival to Rean in this game in a kinda Amuro-Char kinda way (which is equally as gay but not equally as good as that aforementioned dynamic).

We start the story in the mountain range separated from all of our comrades with an understandably distraught Rean crying over the potential loss of his friends and after a quick walk in the area, you get saved by your sister Elise who welcomes you to your hometown of Ymir.

Ymir which by the way is a place the team have already visited in CS1 and even fought an Ouroboros member one time, don't you remember it ? Of course you don’t because it was a chapter that was completely absent from the original game instead being repurposed as a freaking Drama CD and let’s be frank, nobody ever in the history of forever listens to those.
After an altercation with the local Ouroboros super bad guy working for the newly established “Noble Alliance” who acts as the main antagonistic force in this game, your sister and the princess of the country gets kidnapped so now Rean has to gather all of his comrades thanks to his giant robots convenient teleportation magic ability.

One thing I appreciate about CS2 compared to CS1 is how the game decides to shake up the core structure of a Trails game, not by much of course but enough to be noticeable. Instead of the game being separated in chapters, this time the game is separated into 3 acts, meaning the narration and overall game structure can be little more free form and if the first act is pretty straightforward (gathering your friends by revisiting previous areas), the 2nd act decides to do something that is in part interesting from a game design aspect but also terrible from a story pacing perspective.

See CS2 was originally meant to be the last 10 hours of the original game, this game’s final act and the entire game pretty much feels like one drawn out quest to gather up your forces and take on the bad guy which I guess is fine if like for Azure it’s the last arc of an otherwise pretty long and substantial game but here, you quickly come to realize that CS2 really struggles to fill its gametime with meaningful story content somehow even more so than the original game which was mostly about nothing.

But the few story bits there are, are in fact a bit more substantial, I just wish that they were actually good.

Starting with the character writing.

It’s no surprise that I value good characters in my stories and the first game completely failed at making me care about the massive cast of playable characters it had. But the Kiseki series is a long series of games with a solid sense of continuity and usually can surprise me with the way they shake things up and manage to make me care about characters I didn’t truly have any reason to give a shit about in the sequel.

But sadly, CS2 manages to somehow fuck up that aspect beyond belief, none and I mean NONE of the characters aside from the main protagonist goes through any form of development, arcs or anything of the sort during the course of the main story. The only character in this game that approaches something even resembling a character arc is Jusis and it just isn’t a good arc whatsoever. It’s an arc about having to come to terms with his family's shitty actions and fight for himself and what he believes in, pretty standard stuff and honestly not handled super well because of something about this game story I will develop in a minute.

Any semblance of characterization or even minuscule amount of development these characters are contained almost exclusively within their bonding events which means that for some reason, the developers thought that something as basic as character writing should be given to the discretion of the player and be completely optional and missable contents !



Alisa or Machias could be the most 10/10 characters to ever grace the medium and I will still have nothing to say about them because I didn’t focus on them at all when allocating bonding points and I certainly wasn’t going to save scum to see all character events which often times can be up to fucking FIFTEEN AT EACH CHAPTER TRANSITIONS. This design philosophy is not only completely asinine but also completely antithetical to the idea of good character writing or just good writing in a video game in general.

Since my love for these characters have been almost non-existent, I had little to no desire to learn more about them and if they wanted me to care, they should’ve given me something to chew on outside of this pathetic excuse of a social link system which completely misunderstood the appeal of such a system from a game which itself already had issues balancing it correctly, but at least Persona feels somewhat competent in the uses of such mechanics, CS1 and even more so CS2 are embarrassingly bad with their take on it.

It’s not even like the bonding events are all that good either, the ones I’ve focused on mostly for gameplay reasons (focusing on characters I actively use in battle for stat boosting rather than because I’m interested in them) have been for the most part barebones, bland and uninteresting.

How come a character like Laura even get past the conceptualization process, all of her bonding events involves her either talking about swords, swinging a sword or philosophizing about… you guessed it SWORDS. Her entire personality and arc revolves around the idea that she’s a swordswoman like she’s a knight class character from some 80’s RPG on the freaking NES and those usually didn’t TALK about their job so goddamn much.

And you can apply this to pretty much any characters in your party, somehow the development team sat at a table and probably pinned drawings of the characters on a white board and then glued sticky notes on them with random words and said “yeup that’s going to be the whole character !”.

Millium is a literal super-spy working for the government but all of your interactions with her will be about cooking stuff and generally be the resident pedo-bait character because this is yet again a very self-indulgent japanese RPG aimed at teenagers or creepy weirdos with reprehensible fetishes.

Emma literally is a walking plot device, her entire character can be summed up as “I knew about it but I didn’t tell you because of my secret mission as a witch” and then bla bla bla exposition and self-pitying about having to hide shit from us, weirdly enough that makes her the most relevant character in the story because she’s pretty much the spokesperson for all of the random lore shit the game plot gravitates around during certain key point of the narrative and she’s also related directly to one of the main antagonist and resident Team Galaxy Admin : Vita Clotilde, a witch that can manipulate people through her singing.

I could go on and on about the characters in this game but really who cares, if the game doesn’t even make the bare minimum to make them interesting or likable, why should I make efforts trying to analyze and discuss them in the first place.

They had two 70-90 hours worth of gametime to do so and they failed miserably so fuck it fr.
HECK EVEN TOWA, THE ONE CHARACTER I LIKE IN THIS DUOLOGY DOESN’T HAVE ANY MEAT TO HER BONES IN THIS ONE, I’ve still defaulted to her for continuity reasons (which further emphasize how dumb that bonding system is in a game series with a supposed one true canon) and because I like her the most but Jesus Christ they even managed to not make me care as much about the only character I had even the slightest of attachment to in this cast.

Which leaves us with our homeboy, our hero, our guy, our light at the end of the tunnel, our shining beacon of hope and righteousness ! Our Protagonist, Rean Schwarzer !

In the original game, Rean was… not that interesting, he was a rather bland, uninteresting character that I didn’t have much attachment or even strong opinion about, he was generic but I guess that in a world full of walking anime clichés passing off as real human being, he fitted in as a player stand-in and blank slate.

That’s not to say he had nothing to his name in the original, we saw the beginning of his self doubt and self-pity linked to an ever consuming desire to protect others oftentimes prioritizing the well-being of others before his own. We also had some hints about his inner powers, like how he can go beast-mode sometimes and have cool white-hair like the dude from Tokyo Ghoul (do people still care about Tokyo Ghoul ?). And lastly, he’s an awakener, one of seven chosen ones (to which we only see 2 of them) who can control the fabled Divine Knights, powerful ancient machines that can do cool magic robot things (and I’ll admit that Valimar’s design is pretty sick !).

But it’s in this game that Rean finally come into his own as a proper character and let me tell you, I wish he kept his mouth shut because Rean went from a character I was completely indifferent towards in the first game to one I actively fucking despise and perhaps one of the worst protagonist I’ve had the displeasure of playing in a JRPG.

Rean is a whiny insufferable little centrist who believes in literally nothing, wants to get involved with nothing in the story and just accepts whatever comes his way like a good little dog without thinking about his actions or developing a single thought or philosophy of his own… NOT A SINGLE FUCKING TIME. Rean lives in a world drought in conflicts and injustice. A world with a rigid class-system that divides the country he lives in. A country where an elite of people can decide on a whim to start a war on its own people in an attempt to push their domination. A world where a minority of its population have nothing but contempt for the people below and will literally sacrifice civilians to prove their superiority.

And yet, the game insists on painting a morally gray framework on such a basic class-warfare type of conflict with the noble alliance presented as “not entirely in the wrong” except the Noble Alliance does absolutely nothing commendable or justifiable for the entire duration of the game, if anything most of them are random cartoon villains who commits atrocious crimes (that you never get to actually see aside from that ONE time but we’ll get back to that) because of their pettiness and need to push their domination on the masses not just through propaganda but also through literal honest to god warfare !


You can’t get more nazi than the noble alliance and yet Rean will still be like : “Yeah but we shouldn’t interfere, we shouldn’t take a side tho, not all nobles are bad people” and I get that being a noble himself, he doesn’t have the perspective to really refute that status-quo but that’s what character development is for, it’s to make him see the injustice of the world and change his vision and work towards making the world a better place. That ideological nonchalance and hypocrisy isn’t just shared by Rean though, it’s shared by all of his comrades of Class VII who are too busy stroking his One Leaf Blade when they’re not busy being drones with no thoughts or personalities of their own.

Which brings me to my next problem with CS2 storytelling, it’s over-confidence in thinking you care about things. See, in most stories you have a build-up and a pay-off and ideally you’d want both of the ends of that rope to be equally as solid to create a good memorable piece of work. CS2 sadly doesn’t have that luxury and as such needs to ride on the very little highs left by CS1 which they weren’t many. What I mean by this is that CS2 being a sequel is normally a game all about pay-offs.

The entire first act is about reuniting with your long-lost friends and seeing what they’re up to in the turmoil of the war, these moments are meant to be filled with joy and relief at the sight of our friends being ok and fending off for themselves pretty well which on paper is great but since CS1 failed to deliver on any reason to care about these characters you just end up sighing when Machias becomes the first party member to join your party in this game because out of any character you wanted back in your crew, that dude should’ve been left to rot inside his freaking windmill.

And the thing is that the entire game has this sort of warm atmosphere to it but since the characterization was so poor in the first game and also didn’t get better with this sequel and at points even got worse, there’s tons of moments that just fall flat !

For example, there’s a scene in between Act 1 and Act 2 where Rean is having a little moment of self-pity, now that’s also something about Rean that just simply doesn’t work, his inner “demons”. During that scene, which is the culmination of hours of character build-up for the guy and a significant character growth moment, we learn that the reason why Rean protects others to the point of self-sacrifice is because of that one time he killed a bear as a child to save his sister Elise. Since then, he swore to be the baddest, strongest motherfucker around to protect others and … really ?

That’s the reason Rean is such a whiny piss baby boy sometimes because he feels weak for… killing a bear as a child ? Either I’m completely media illiterate and feel free to shit on me in the comment for this or the writers had absolutely no idea how to add flaws to the guy to make him feel more human or relatable. The conclusion to that scene is Alfin (Olivier’s adorable but slightly pedo-baity sister) telling Rean that you know… he’s not just the one protecting others, his friends also protect him because they love him. And then Rean takes that information as a completely shocking turnover realization followed by a text box telling you that you can now transform into Kaneki mode in battle at will now in one of the lamest directed and worst written “character realization” scenes you’ve ever witnessed.



Are you fucking serious ? Are we talking about the guy who is disliked by nobody to the point that any vagina equipped individual in a 100 miles radius of him wants his divine blade inside their baby room going “wait a minute… people … like and care about me ???”. I swear on christ that this isn’t a fucking joke, I’m not making a bit here. It’s been a while since I’ve read or watched any of those “Light Novel” related media but oh my god, I love anime but fucking hell it’s stories like these that make me remember that yeah… anime can also be… that bad.

If you really wanna play on a real flaw the character has, why not play out of the fact that the dude is an indecisive fuck who has so little awareness of himself and the world surrounding him that he can’t pick a side or form a single thought of his own that isn’t “let’s go class vii, we’re gonna do it!” and it could potentially lead to some catastrophic situation down the line.

Rean is such a nothing character such a bland power fantasy schmuck for teenagers to project themselves onto that they relied on the oldest trick in the book by sticking a good old “trauma” to the guy to make him somewhat more relatable, because every kids these days have self-doubt so it’s cool and relatable you know ! It’s cool when the character that exists to be my ideal fantasy also has doubts about himself, he really is just like me ! A random whiny zoomer with no thoughts and no real conflict in their life but still want to pretend they’re making a difference while the only thing they’re good at is changing nothing at all and being a pretentious little shit that need to stay the fuck out of adult space because they have nothing to add to society aside from their ADHD riven rant on basic morality while never acting for the good of anything but the small little problems that only concerns them and them alone.

A problem which is even made worse by the fact Rean has a rivalry with another character, Crow ! Crow in the previous game was revealed to be a terrorist dead-set on killing off Osborne for some misdeed he did to the people of Erebonia and while his reasons for living a life of terror and danger is somewhat justified by his circ…

Wait…

What did you say to me ?

They’re not ?

Oh but of course what did I think, that this was a good game with a good inside political, ideological or philosophical conflict ?

Silly me, I almost thought I could develop empathy for an antagonist in this freaking series. Nah, Crow’s backstory is that his home country got annexed by Chancellor Osborne, not because of a violent cold raid but simply through a simple business manipulation tactic that he won fair and square. His grandpa wasn’t even killed by Osborne directly or indirectly nor did he kill himself off of the guilt of losing their territory to the hands of the Empire. His grandpa simply had to retire and live the rest of his life in regret sure but he simply died of old age at least. Heck, Crow even says it himself, he doesn’t think Osborne is that bad of a guy, he simply killed because he got involved with the wrong people in a moment of his life where he was lost, afraid and unsure about how to live his life… YOU’RE THE LEADER OF A TERRORIST GROUP MY MAN HAVE SOME FUCKING SPINE WOULD YOU ????
He even warns us before dropping his backstory that “his story is just yet another sappy story, don’t mock me please” like Falcom themselves are excusing this sorry attempt at character motivation and backstory.

In fact, why the fuck does Crow and his crew still hang out with the noble alliance and helping them committing atrocious war-crimes, his goals and motivation doesn’t seem to align with the noble alliance and he has already accomplished the goal he set for himself by teaming up with the noble alliance so why the fuck does he still commit warcrimes on account of the Alliance… oh yeah probably to fulfill some dumb prophecy about the war of the lions that the people at Phantom Brigade reject are looking to activate for their stupid anime villain plan.

Kingdom Hearts has a better ambiguously homo-erortic rivalry relationship between an MC and his lover rival and if you’re worse than freaking Kingdom Hearts writing, there’s something severely wrong with you as an author.

But could Crow be any better than this ? Yes of course he could, if he had a rival who actually believed in something but since Rean doesn’t believe in anything but solving only the issues that affect him and his friends I guess we’ll never have the Amuro-Char of the zoomer generation but oh well.

Cold Steel has this tendency to try and make you pretend that you care, it doesn’t actually make you care through clever writing or proper scene direction and good dialogues, it only does it in clichés and a complete lack of talent, that whole section I just mentioned took place during the time where the game literally forces to go talk to every single person on the Noble Alliance ship to try and see the other side and understand their point of view. They never actually show you anything, they just tell you stuff in hopes that you would feel even an ounce of empathy for the people on board except for the fact that the noble alliance has really nothing for them aside from either “Osborne did some mildly bad shit to me back in the day”, being literally hired mercenaries or being Ourobozos which might as well be hired mercenaries but see, they’re only helping because of “THE PLAN” ya know, can’t wait to wait another 30 years or so for these chaotic neutral fucker to boast about how strong and powerful they are and how cool and intriguing their “plan” is… (can you tell I’m just tired of Ouroboros at this point, this game as some new members showing up and I’m not even giving a damn… Oh well… I guess Duvalie is cool).

The game always fails at making you feel for anything in its story, world or characters. The game takes place in the middle of an actual honest to god civil war but you never get to see any of it, the world is mostly unchanged, cities and towns are running pretty much the same as usual except you see a soldier from time to time to remind you that this is a war.

Act 2 of the game in general is this gigantic narrative void where the story goes to a halt and turns into a fetch quest hub of epic proportions where you fly around in your airship left and right to do side-quests, explore the world and kill some superbosses. Pretty much doing anything but progressing the story or exploring the consequences of the war (which aren’t even shown since most cities are just kinda… fine and NPC are not all that bothered by the situation either), nah instead you’ll be finding someone’s horse or find ores to craft a neat sword for your cool robots in a McGuffin hunt that only pads out the game story even more.
Act 2 is neat in concept, having a more open structure inside of a Trails game isn’t something this series is known for but the actual content and things you do in those fetch quest are just boring and doesn’t change from the typical mmo-type shit you’d expect from a shitty modern JRPG and the length of that second act is freaking absurd too which only further emphasize how little actual story the game has when out of a potential 70h game at least 30 of those hours are dedicated to… literally nothing !

Most of the action is taking place on the western front but since Rean and his crew doesn’t wanna fuck with the war, they never actually go there and only take back random places because a friend of them was conveniently placed their to be kidnapped and making Centrist Che Guevera intervene.

Yeah isn’t it strange how Rean and his crew is all about not picking a side and not intervening but all they do since the start of the game is infiltrate military bases, do sabotage and other stuff to mess with the noble alliance which just helps the imperial army anyway.
You can even just run around Imperial Army camps no worry, they’re not antagonistic to Rean’s group, heck your party literally has 2 spies working for the (for now) deformed reformist faction which isn’t even something Rean doesn’t know yet it rarely if ever get brought up during the course of the game. Nothing is here to put into question Rean dumb behavior and position in this war. I just think this is actual insanity, Olivier even gives them the key to a literal warship to just go nuts and do whatever.

There is no nuanced political framing here where one camp is so obviously evil that the game fails so hard to find situations to make you feel that what they do is justified and not every noble is evil…

Which leads me to talk about…

The Celdic Incident

So in the middle of the Act 2 Fetch Quest grind, one of the towns, Celdic, gets destroyed by Jusis’s father, a tragic event that claimed the lives of…

check notes

1 random NPC and a couple of non-important, non-habitable buildings… ?

Well whatever, I can’t believe my man Otto freaking died, they must pay for this ! Quick ! Rean ! Activate your sperging power to find a way to psy-op yourself into intervening yet again without you explicitly making the conscious choice to do it… oh wait ! Rufus the 2nd in command of the army and Jusis’s brother made a call, they need to stop Jusis father because he only did this for himself, not for the noble alliance cause, we don’t actually kill people in the noble alliance… at least not on screen !

Well huh… ok then time to fuck him up !

During that entire time, we get to see noble citizens having nothing but contempt for the low-lives of Celdic because they deserved him and also how dare they put Jusis dad in prison ! He was a good governor ! A true noble at heart (a literal war criminal).

So… are we going to have a scene where Rean reconsider his point of view and realize the system is fucked and promise himself to find ways to change it by casting his outdated system of beliefs and make real progress ?

Well no… but maybe closer to his political alignment he would try to reconcile the two sides or find a compromise, well he can’t do that either because centrists never provide solutions, they just observe, say “well that sucks” and move to the next McGuffin dungeon.

This is the closest CS2 has gotten to portray any consequences of this conflict and yet it still amounts to a footnote at best before moving on to the next section of the game.

For a game that take such obvious cues from FFVI in terms of structure and story setting (with the world being fucked over and our heroes having to gather their forces), they never quite understood what made that part of FFVI so memorable and good to begin with...

In FFVI, the world is dead, it’s destroyed, you start the second half in control of Celes stuck on an island with Cid, an old dude and the closest thing Celes has to a family, you go outside your tent and the world is dead, the music is harrowing with a feint empty wind being heard on the overworld even the random monsters you fight die on their own as even they can’t support the corrosion brought forth by Kefka during his rise to power. You're tasked to go get some food for Cid, something you can actually succeed at but the context of the situation will likely make you lose Cid…

Celes, overtaken by all of her bottled up feelings and anxieties and loosing all hopes commits freaking suicide in a freaking 90’s Super Nintendo game, you miraculously survived and back on the continent by that point the game tells you nothing more and your free to see what remains of the rest of civilization and it’s not pretty, eventually, you get back with Edgar and then Setzer the only 2 other mandatory party member to finish the game and with hopes of defeating Kefka by gathering all your forces the most beautiful Airship theme plays out as you go on a quest to “Search for your friends” !

Everything you can do next aside from taking on the Kefka tower is completely optional but highly recommended if you want the best ending and of course because taking on the Tower with 3 under-leveled character is suicide meaning that all the thing you do in this game is to prepare yourself to defeat Kefka, no matter how innocuous the activity may be. When you meet your party members back it’s not just a sappy reunion, it’s more complex, most of the characters are still carrying over the traumas of the days the world wasn’t completely fuck and they now need to find a new place in this new fucked up reality while dealing with the remnants of the demons of their past and grow as persons all of this leading up to your confrontation with Kefka.



Heck, nothing state in the game that taking on Kefka will magically heal the planet, Kefka already won, it would take years for civilization to rebuild itself, you’re just taking one burden off of the people on Earth, it’s an ending that is equally as bittersweet as it is hopeful GOD I LOVE FFVI SO FUCKING MUCH !

NOW THAT’S A GAME THAT USES ITS STRUCTURE AND GAMEPLAY LOOP IN COMPLEMENT OF THE STORY ! NOW THAT’S A GAME THAT USES THE UNIQUE TOOL OF THE MEDIUM OF VIDEO GAME TO TELL A POIGNANT STORY THROUGH A COMBINATION OF MUSIC, DIRECTION, GRAPHICS, MECHANICS TO MAKE YOU FEEL SHIT FOR THE CHARACTERS AND THE FATE OF THE FUCKING WORLD ! NO TIME WAS WASTE HERE, EVERYTHING FUCKING MATTER AND THE CHARACTERS ACTUALLY DO STUFF TO MAKE THE WORLD BETTER AND MOST OF IT IS TECHNICALLY OPTIONAL SHIT BUT WHO CARES YOU WANT TO DO EVERYTHING AND YOU’LL MISS OUT ON STUFF BUT THAT’S OKAY IT’LL MAKE YOUR NEXT PLAYTHROUGH MORE INTERESTING AAAAAAAAAAAH

SEE FALCOM ? THAT’S WHAT YOUR STUPID VIDEO GAME LACK ! IT LACKS AMBITION, IT LACKS FINESSE, IT LACKS ALL OF THAT SHIT YOU STUPID MONGREL HOW DARE YOU EVEN TRY TO EVEN ATTEMPT AND PRETEND TO COPY FF VI WHEN YOU CAN’T EVEN REACH 1/100th OF ITS BRILLIANCE WITH QUINTUPLE THE RUN TIME AND A BIGGER SCRIPT THAN IT HUH ???

Hey you wanna know what all that stupid fucking fetchquesting leads toward the reconquering of Trista, you know the hub-town from the first game ? That’s an exciting moment the entire game has built toward I wonder how it i-

ITS ASS

The army just… leaves for no reason and task the hostages (?????) to run the school and keep it under control, so Rean and friends take on this occasion to go there and low and behold, the noble hostages just confront Rean.

“But this is pointless ?”

“Yeah we know, but we still need to fight because pride of the nobles or some shit”

So you do a boss fight that had literally zero reason for happening and then everyone nods, the hostages were actually fine the whole time and it was just a playful fisticuff for the older students and… Trista is taken back… ending act 2 on a very anticlimactic note…

Hope you enjoyed the 35 or so hours you wasted on Act 2 that lead to this…

The game… really doesn’t give a fuck… it’s insane, there was zero effort put into the actual story.

Yeah sure, you still have Falcom sense of details in NPC dialogues and books but… not the main fucking story, it’s just… wild as shit to me I can’t even begin to process how much this game doesn’t give a fuck and constantly cucks you from experiencing a little catharsis.
It just doesn’t care, even the neat idea of making this game set during the same time as Azure is just an after-thought and the conclusion to that leads almost fucking nowhere and impacts the story very little.

This nonchalance not only translate during the story but even boss-fight, most boss-fight you win in this game by the skin of your teeth (that is a joke, the game is Press Laura to win what did you expect), your characters are on their knees, the boss is going “mmph, that’s all you got ?” then you get your glory stolen by the adult cast which are all way cooler and way stronger than you, you’ve been doing all the heavy lifting but at the end of the day, you guys are just a bunch of students heh ?

I get that this is part of the series to make you understand that the MC will never be the strongest dude around and there’s so many people equally as strong if not more but it wasn’t so in your fucking face before and to lead to something so anticlimatic…

Heck the ending of the game ends on a barely moving death scene (aaaw) followed by the big revelation ! OSBORNE IS BACK AHAHAHA…

Wait a minute…

But we already know that from Azure ?

Wait a minute…

The game just reveals shit to us that we already knew ?

So all of this was for nothing ????

Anyway, Osborne comes tells Rean that he is his real father and then look at Ourogoonos and tell them to fuck off while stealing their plan like a chad because he planned this entire war on himself this entire time to turn Rean into a national icon for his newly establish fascist ethnostate.

Rean of course… agrees to participate in doing warcrimes for the reformist because… well huh… gotta help daddy I guess ???

Look fuck this game

And like a bad joke, it even keeps going after the credit because you thought the final chapter was the final chapter ? Well no you dumb fuck, there’s 2 MORE EPILOGUE CHAPTER

One is … legitimately the only good part of the game because you get to play as Lloyd and Rixia ! OH MAN I MISS PLAYING AS ACTUAL PEOPLE IN THIS GAME THANK GOD ! AND YOU EVEN GET THE CHANCE TO KICK REAN’S ASS WITH LLOYD FUCKING BANNING 10/10 GAME ON FUCKING GOD !!!!

Followed by several hours of the worst fucking final dungeon you’ve ever played through.
Yeah in the last chapter of the game, you go through a randomly generated multi-floor dungeon where you fight recycled bosses from the main game AND a swap color of the final boss of the first game who literally tells you that doing this dungeon… was actually pointless, he literally says it verbatum, I’m not making this up ! Gotta love Falcom’s brand of cheeky humour ahahaha…

I kneel Kondo, I really am kneeling hard, one last final goodbye to the cast and …

OH NO FUCK OFF KONDO ! WHY DO YOU WANT ME TO PLAY ON NG+ TO GET IMPORTANT LORE FOR THE NEXT ENTRY WHAT THE FUCK MAN WHAT THE ACTUAL SHIT I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD THIS GAME SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS

RAAAAAAAAAAAGH THIS GAME SUCKS

So you’re probably wondering why I’m ranking this slightly higher than CS1 well…

For 2 reasons :

Witnessing a story failing at everything it sets out to do in marvelous over the top fashion is somewhat entertaining in its own twisted kind of way
As mentioned earlier, I like what this game does structurally compared to the rest of the franchise (any game where you get to fuck around in an airship and built up an home base by recruiting people has a few more points in my book) and even the dungeon design has seen a significant improvement that I hope to see come to fruition in the rest of the series so there’s that.

CS1 was literally just “white noise : the video game”, homework to do to experience true gaming in the sequel and I must admit that at least CS2 didn’t commit the sinful crime of making me bored to death, there’s definitely a good game buried under all of this trashy nonsense…

But you won’t find it here…

Which leaves me to my conclusion…

Why would you play this ? Yeah the obvious answer is to experience the next chapter in the epic Trails saga, especially if you’re a fan or a masochist like me looking to satiate my curiosity but in general… Why ?

The few good things that CS2 does and heck even what it’s trying to do story wise are things you have likely seen done better in other titles some of which I’d consider true work of art worthy of your attention. Trails is being championed left and right as this life-changing franchise but all I get almost everytime are some average at best game with good ideas and good feelings behind them… But CS1 and CS2 only exacerbated the problem with this franchise, I actually now regret to have been so harsh towards Azure or SC because man, at least they tried, Cold Steel is just chasing trend, taking ideas and throwing them at a wall to see what sticks and if they could bait out the fishies with some good old waifu war.

But if it was only the anime bullshit, it’s also a mediocre attempt at political commentary ? I guess ? Even ideologically speaking, this game is spineless to the point of no return and is constantly trying to sound and look smarter than it actually looks but doesn’t have the balls or the shoulders to carry the boats and the logs ! The writing team behind this game must’ve felt so fucking proud for this last plotwist !

“Hey guess what it’s actually about how centrism is bad because it helped the bad guy !” and it could’ve been almost clever except it’s not and even after that revelation, Rean continues to be a good puppy dog with no spine, no thoughts, no choice no freaking nothing god I hate that character.

So yeah gameplay aside which sucks anyway, there’s the structure and yeah, it’s fun, I must admit I wasn’t completely bored playing this. But… is it really enough ?

If I wanted to play a poor’s man Persona, I’d play Persona
If I wanted to play a game with heavy political writing and a complex nuanced geopolitical setting, I’d play any Matsuno game
If I wanted a game about going around the world to gather people and grew my forces by doing tons of side-content, I’d play FFVI
If I wanted both of the previous statements, I’d play Suikoden which also has the benefit to be like Trails with each entry building off of the previous game in cool ways like .hack did too and those games are also damn good.
Heck I’d even throw Chained Echoes a modern indie RPG that did all of what I just said aside from Persona way better than what CS2 did

Heck if I wanted to play a series with a rich lore to chew on and a solid continuity with charming characters and humors, creative gameplay systems and some surprisingly insightful and dare I’d say ballsy attempt at delivering political messages

I’d play fucking Rance, yes… Rance, an actual honest to god porn game with the most reprehensible protagonist and content in existence but which has more heart and soul poured into it than anything I’ve ever played in my life.

I’d rather fully admit to being a degenerate and a Kingdom Hearts fan (which I am… I know… shocking) than playing Cold Steel 1 or 2 !

CS1 and CS2 are just a copout answer to a regular game recommendation, a good person will direct you to the good restaurant but the weirdoe cultist member who only knows the confine of his cult temple since childhood will tell you that you never eat better than at Veggietales.

Heck by the the time it took me between finishing the game last month and writing this shitass review, FFXVI came out and it had many similarities to Cold Steel especially in terms of structure, pacing and quest design (and not in a good way if you ask me) but by god, after playing FFXVI, CS2 barely was thought at the back of my head, it’s like a version of CS2 that actually worked, with an interesting story, a war setting that takes itself seriously, a badass anarchist hero and some seriously kick ass boss fight that is humanity pilled as fuck.

CS2 was a fascinatingly bad experience and I can’t believe I’m too deep enough into this shit to not hop on CS3 and … CS4 (that one seems to smell some exquisite taste of ass that I just can’t wait to experience)

So TL;DR : Play FFXVI, it’s on PS5 right now and it’s fucking awesome and Clive uses Rean’s asshole as an onahole anytime of the day

Before I start this review I need to preface that this game is an extremely good game there's no reason to deny the sheer quality and scope of such a project.

With that said, was it a completely satisfying game to me ? A long time Zelda fan who also happened to have the original BOTW ranked super highly as one of my favorite game of all time ?

Heeeeh not quite

By the time I'm writing this review I have completed every single shrine, gotten every single light roots, gotten every single bubul frog crystals, done a couple of the most important mission, got all the dragon tears and ofc finished the 5 temples as well as defeating the evil Ganondorf.

So I'm confident in saying that while all of this was still a relatively fun and addicting experience, there's a lingering feeling at the back of my head telling me that this wasn't really that great of a sequel to BOTW

But why ? Why did I have this awkward feeling ?

I guess it's because BOTW was such a unique experience on release, one that could be difficult to top even with the best of effort, it's such a unique take on Zelda going back to its roots and giving the series the proper evolution it needed after years of stagnant attempt at recapturing the magic of OOT with more or less good success.

It was an ode to freedom, to adventure, it was a game that had the balls to throw away 20 years of Zelda convention and was making no compromise to deliver the best experience possible.

It's hard to deny how much of an amazing title BOTW was when the only people complaining about it are game design illiterate Zelda fans who thought it wasn't "Zelda enough" (which in my book was a good thing) and personally speaking it was hard to recapture a similar experience.

TOTK feels more like what happens when you're bored of playing Minecraft Vanilla and you want to spice things up with some mods to add more stuff to do and that's how I feel about most of the new features in this game, nothing that truly enhances the original game experience in any significant way but just add more stuff on top of what was already a pretty meaty game.

But in doing so, I don't feel that the new stuff was thought with the same minutia or the same sense of vision that BOTW did.

I start with the big elephant in the room which is the map of the game.

As you may know, the map of TOTK is mostly lifted off of the one from BOTW, the surface world isn't entirely devoid of new stuff but it's still relatively the same world just slightly touched up.

The problem with this is that it completely change the way you experience the world, in BOTW I was discovering the world, I was letting myself go loose and absorb the entirety of the game in all of its scope, in TOTK the exploration feels a bit more processed.

I know these plains, I've climbed these mountains, I've sailed those seas, I've been there so I don't approach the world of TOTK the same way I did the one in BOTW.

BOTW felt like actually exploring a world and creating your own adventure, TOTK feels like checking a list of stuff to revisit to see what's different as well as progressing through the very disjointed story of the game (more on that later).

But TOTK has 2 more layers to its map, the sky and the depths !

These were the main selling point of the game (especially the sky) and the two biggest addition to BOTW's world and what do I think of both of them ?

They're honestly not that amazing, there are very few sky islands and most of them outside of the starting area are just the same copy pasted layout of one island with a rotating platform, a distributor and an empty shrine you have to bring a crystal to either by going to an island with an underground where it lies or going to an island where the same cube boss guards it on its back.

There's only maybe 2 or 3 sky island that are actually different and offer a different set of challenges and going to them is kind of bothersome with no proper way to traverse the sky (unless you decide to create an airbike), at some point the sky islands were becoming a bit too predictable but at least they were better than...

The Depths...

So ok, when I first entered the depths my jaw dropped to the floor, these crazy mf made an entire map under the map ???

But then you actually explore the depth and realize its depressingly void of interest, it's the same biomes and structure repeated infinitely with little to nothing of value to be found in here and the only real appeal of it is making surface shrines easier to find (due to the map being symetrical) and grinding for Zonite Ore to upgrade your battery (and I guess that neat little quest with the Yiga Clan but even that got dull pretty fast), every trip down here ended in disappointment and felt like a massive waste of my time until I decided to make an air bike to skip on most of the cumbersome traversal (because god the geography of the depth coupled with the limited light sources just makes me loose my mind)

The best addition to the world at least to me are the caves and wells, these should've been more advertised because these are awesome ! They're the kind of places that feels like it actually belonged in the original game map, they have unique and interesting layouts and they hold lots of surprises within them without feeling too samey and I wish the Sky Islands and The depths were designed with the same philosophy as them.

Another problem arise when discussing the story of the game. See BOTW structure really doesn't mesh well with a more narratively driven story and it shows, you can feel that there was an intended order in how you're supposed to experience what the game has to offer but if you played BOTW before, you don't wanna do that, you just want to explore the world and do things in whatever order you want !

But TOTK encourages to qualm your drive to explore and go on an adventure because not doing so will lead to a worst narrative experience, sometimes you get cutscenes out of order, you experience story segment out of order and the whole story gets broken because the first memory you get is of Zelda traveling to time and the second could be Ganon transforming into a demon and there's like 15 different step you just skipped.

It's sad because it makes some of the stronger more controlled moment of the story less effective as a result

In conclusion TOTK is a game that I enjoyed but it lacks the cohesiveness of the original game even if its fun to play around with the new ability

If anyone know me, they'd know that I am Studio Quintet's strongest soldier and as such one of my favorite game of all time is a little game known as Actraiser.

While not necessary an unknown gem of the Super Nintendo, Actraiser is a game that still manages to this day to be an interesting piece of gaming history thanks to its unique concept of mashing action-platforming Castlevania-type sequences with an effective (albeit pretty surface level) town simulator.

Since then other titles have iterated on the Actraiser formula (The Dark Cloud duology comes to mind which are also 2 of my favorite games of all time) but as time went on, the original Actraiser stayed on the Super Nintendo, seeing very little re-releases and letting itself age with time.

Actraiser being an early Super Nintendo game, There is no doubt to any people here that it's a game that aged in several areas and thus when Square announced and shadowdropped a remake of Actraiser out of the blue I was quite ecstatic not only because its been decades at this point since anything from the old-school Quintet Lineup has been acknowledged in the modern age but also because giving access to Actraiser to a new generation in a revamped and modernized format could make the tough and rough old-school pill easier to swallow.

So I booted up the game and I was ready to experience this reimagining of this old-time classic

The end result was probably the most insulting tacked on job Square has ever done on a remake yet and they don't really have the best track record with those already (I could go in length about similar attempt like the terrible Secret of Mana remake or any of their goddawful "PC" ports of old classic).

On the paper Actraiser Renaissance should be the superior game to the original, the action sequences gives you more control over your characters as well as several additional moves to make combat more fleshed out, the city building aspect is now an actual city builder and not just a limited simulacrum of SimCity, the game has additional action sequences as well as an entire new tower-defense phase and most of all Actraiser now boast a collection of proper actual characters whereas the original only had you the player and the people below worshipping you.

But Actraiser is a formula which could break under the weight of so much ambition, what made Actraiser so effective was its relative simplicity which made the game's pacing quite excellent or a Super Nintendo game

Clearing the first town of Filmore in the original Super Nintendo version take upwards of maybe 2 to 3h assuming you're not too bad at the action segment, the first town in renaissance took me up to 7 hours to complete because of all of the added bloat the remake put on top of it.

Actraiser has 6 fucking Towns meaning that the game goes from a decent 15H to double that length for no particular reasons and without really adding anything of value to the original experience.

Everything in this game shows a complete lack of understanding for Actraiser's design philosophy and message which makes the game shallower than its original counterpart in many ways.

The Battle sections have been revamped and while the actual level designed has been left intact, the readability of these segments have been completely muddled by this game goddawful art direction (which I will talk about in a separate segment) but also rendered a complete joke by the game new movement and combat option. This is the issue when you reproduce the level design and enemy design of a Super Nintendo game but give the main character the moveset equivalent to moving with a loaded infinite ammo shotgun.

The action segment of the original have definitely aged but I don't think this was the way to fix it, if they wanted to change how the game plays, they should've have rethought everything alongside it to make them more interesting instead of worse and it's not like the control ain't as stiff if not more than the original (which as a reminder only allowed you to jump, crouch and swing your sword with maybe the option to cast a spell if you happened to find one earlier in the level)

The city building segment have been severely revamped, now its complete with ressource and economy management making this a true city-building simulator, they probably had to compensate with this part of the game after making what was the main meat of the original so shallow but in doing so they made these section drag for an unbelievably long amount of time.

On top of this now each town has their own little storyline featuring the local hero of the town which are characters that adds nothing to the story or the narration of the original and actually make the point of the original worst especially since these are also the catalyst for this game new Tower Defense phase which are fucking awful, I hate Tower Defense game already so it wasn't this game who was going to reconciliate myself with one of the shallower genre of videogame out there but there its especially awful and completely unnecessary and only help bloat the game time with more pointless bullshit.

Actraiser Renaissance sucks ass because it's trying to overcompensate the "weakness" of the original but in doing so, they made a game that is far removed from the cult classic its trying to reimagine.

Quintet are storytellers, they make their games in a way to make you feel a certain feeling of accomplishment mixed with somber melancholy once you reach the game climax.

In the original Actraiser, you play as a fallen god who need to regain the trust of its followers by pushing away the darkness and help humanity rebuild society from the ground up and the game was amazing at making you feel like a god that sometimes has to make tough decisions such as destroying building to push society forward.

The people of Earth are waiting for your guidance and the more you help them, the more they can manage things on their own, the less they need your help and can thrive as a civilization without the need of godly intervention, in the original whenever a monster nest was open it's the people who sealed the holes, in Renaissance you have to physically go inside and do a pointless 30 min long arena segment to deal with it yourself which is completely pointless and removes agency and growth of your followers as a character.

Because that's what the people of Earth are. The faceless crowd representing your followers are in it of itself a character with motivations, dreams and hopes for the future and at the end of the day, they grow to be independent like a child leaving the nest of its parents.

The ending of Actraiser is a beautifully sad but poetic end to this war of gods vs demons, the people you so graciously helps are now thriving, the churches which used to be filled with people begging for your blessing are now silent and empty but the game portrays this as a good thing because that means that all is good and it's time to let humanity grow by themselves and take a backseat to that development as you raise one last time into the sky to take a peaceful rest.

Actraiser Renaissance blurs the meaning of that ending through a ton of gameplay additions that are not relevant to the original game's point and as such make the story that the game wanted to tell weaker as a result.

A point which is also ruined by the addition of a post-game quest where suddenly everyone comes back to church because another god has shown up and want to fistfight you, now while this boss is the best boss of the game since its entirely original, this addition yet again muddles the original point of the game much like the addition of the heroes

The different "heroes" of each town being characters with unique design and unique motivations are a superfluous addition because not only are they shallow as characters (too busy sucking your dick and waiting for your orders) but they also lessen the importance of the people of earth which also has portraits on top of that which is just ugh...

The final nail in the coffin of this game and likely the first thing that will throw anyone of playing it for the first time is the general art direction, being an early Super Nintendo game, the original Actraiser wasn't a power-house of graphical prowess on the system but it was nonetheless a pretty game to look at and even served as a tech demo for the capabilities of the console in many magazine and promotional material so the game was far from being ugly.

But this game is putrid, it's like the mutant child of a cheap Korean mobile game and a Sega Saturn game (and that's insulting the Sega Saturn to say this), the portraits are generic looking and feel like they're from a random gacha that will close in a year after its launch and the actual in-game graphics makes my eyes bleed and my pupil vomit, just take a quick comparison between the original game and the remake to see what I mean.

Also the effective sobriety of the game original UI's has been completely ruined by a bunch of additional information on screen and so much handholding and notifications that it completely ruin the serene atmosphere the city building segment are supposed to have.

Lastly the music, while the general composition are still excellent since they're based of Yuzo Koshiro's masterful original score, I was pretty disappointed at how subpar and unimaginative this reimagining of the ost was despite being played with modern instruments, thankfully the game lets you play with the original tracks which is probably the only thing this remake has going for it.

In the end, Actraiser Renaissance is a game unfit to be called a cult classic let alone a good way to experience Actraiser and the fact that nobody who worked on the original game are credited since Quintet's member have long since disappeared from the radar's should tell you about how this project was gonna turn out and the fact they just shadow dropped it out of the blue is pretty telling at how much this was a rushed hack job.

The original Actraiser is far from perfect and has plenty of room for improvement, QoL and other type of zany modernization but when you want to iterate on a beloved classic, one that you didn't work on originally, you need to do it embracing the same passion, thoughts and care as the original and improving it without loosing on its original meaning heck, try to enhance the point of the original.

Or else you end up with a cynical cash grab like this game rather than a sincere piece of work

Let's just say that I hope to god they don't give the rest of the Quintet lineup the same treatment (if they would even consider doing so since this game was a commercial failure)

Earthbound : A Masterful and Deceptively Modern Classic


When you look at my account, you might think that it seems like my prolific gaming career means I’ve played almost all of the games most people consider “classic must play video games” and that couldn’t be further from the truth and that’s actually something I’ve been meaning to repair since I have massive gaps in my gaming culture that I never got the chance to fill and the Mother Series was one of those.

A week before finishing Earthbound I went through Mother 1 which I only did a short review on as despite the game being surprising in a few areas, I didn’t have much to say but don’t think it means I don’t respect the fuck out of Mother 1, it’s a janky mess of an early 80’s RPG in which the jank was cleverly integrated into a subtle but terribly effective narrative throughline which lead to yes a lot of frustration but also one of the best ludo-narrative experience on the NES alongside another long-time favorite game of mine : Dragon Quest III (which is the smartest JRPG on the planet and if you haven’t played it yet, what the fuck are you even doing with your life ?)

But now’s the time to talk about the real meat and potatoes as I enter the realm of cult-classic beloved RPG’s with Mother 2 aka Earthbound (and sorry if I bounce back between the 2 names during this review).

Now playing Earthbound in 2023 is kind of wild, I had some history with trying to get into the game, I always started it, played the first few hours up until the first sanctuary and then I always kinda just forgot to continue or push forward perhaps because my attention span is indeed terrible or because some things I was more interested in came up while I was trying to play it.

But what I meant mostly is that Earthbound is pretty much the precursor of an entire memetic genre of games, the so-called “Quirky Earthbound-Inspired Indie RPG with horror elements (optionally about depression)” which I’ve experienced and some of which became some of my all-time favorite games of all time, games like Undertale, Lisa or Yume Nikki which and others that I’ve also quite liked such as Off, To the Moon, Oneshot and others I found depressingly overhyped (might say it but it’s Omori, sorry).

So my experience with Earthbound was a bit odd because being the basis and the foundation of something that was expanded upon for years by other people meant that I didn’t know if I was going to be thoroughly enthralled by the experience.

And yeah ngl, the start of the game was about the same as the other time around, the start of Earthbound much like Mother 1 is a bit rough, just getting past Frank and his robot was a pain in the ass and I didn’t really have any incentive to continue the game as it was fairly basic from the outset but… the true brilliance of this game is that it hides its best content past those relatively basic and tedious first couple of hours.

Because as soon as you enter Twoson, shit start getting crazy, freaking hobos starts attacking you at the flea market, you have to stop a cult that’s a parody of the Ku Klux Klan but who wants to paint everything blue and it only get crazier and crazier from there.
One thing that’s actually pretty impressive with Earthbound is how much it still holds up in comparison to many of its modern clones, the humor of this game and the situation you find yourself feels like they don’t belong in a game from 1994, the game feels like it came out yesterday on Steam and people went crazy about it from its biting commentary on American culture to how bizarre and hypnotizing some of the setting and situation you find yourself in can be, Earthbound is a weird game but it’s a game with lots of charm and most of all a true sense of adventure as you go far and wide to fulfill the prophecy and defeat Giygas, I actually love how little we know about the guy until we meet him, he is an ever-present overwhelming force but he hides himself cowardly in his lair and you a simple little kid represent the biggest threat to his existence as he shits himself.

Heck even by the end of it, you still don’t know what Giygas is supposed to be, sadly I knew what Giygas looks like from years of exposure to meme about this game and cultural osmosis but I have no doubt that if I had met him an earlier age after going through the numerous wacky antics of the story, I would’ve deadass shat my pant and much like Ness, I would’ve probably called my mom crying because what is this legitimately, what is this entire endgame even it’s so fucked up !!!

The game has a very earnest almost candid like approach to RPG that feels completely different for its time period and the weird part is that it’s not just wacky for the sake of being wacky or wasting your time, your goal is set from the start and everything you do stems from that goal, heck the game even split up into multiple path like the original, while I was playing through this game I actually skipped straight from Melody IV to Melody VII without even noticing and without the game holding me back on my decision to do so.

It’s a game all about wonder and surprise, it’s a sincere piece of art that captures the heart of the small children that lives inside your head and it even managed to speak to you as an adult, some lines in this game actually hitted me deeply with how right they hit with my current circumstances and as someone who’s not really living his best life right now being far from being the children I used to be and craving a simpler time through simpler games with lower stakes, I think Earthbound came right into my life at the best possible time, no wonder I couldn’t get into it before, having the right mindset going into this game is essential to appreciate its beauty.

It’s avant-garde without being pretentious

It’s post-modern without being cynical

It’s childish and naive but without taking you for an idiot or insulting your intelligence

And even manage to be a somewhat decent RPG with competent and unique dungeon design, resource management and even some unique novelty in its main mechanics to not make it completely basic beyond the aesthetic of it all.

However I will say that inventory management is awful and the game has perhaps some of the most obnoxious implementation of "enemies on the map" that I've seen yet but it hardly ever matter, you get used to it after a while since the game is still thoroughly engaging at every turn.

Earthbound is a one of a kind game, it was one of a kind in 1994 and still today I find it at times more touching, more sincere and better executed than a lot of its clones who often come up as pretty tryhard. The game is funny as shit too like I didn’t expect to actually laugh out loud but this is amazing. What can I say except, just play it ! You might find yourself a new favorite

Mother 1 (that I'm playing through this official English release known as "Earthbound Beginning) is a game that if anything is confident in what experience it's delivering.

The game is charming and the 80's sobriety of it all make for a truly unique experience, the game doesn't tell you much outside of a small context at the start and boom, you're send off to a bizarre adventure of epic proportions, so epic in fact that the game overworld feels as massive as an actual U.S. state.

The game in general "works", very early on you're introduced to all the different mechanics of the game as well as a main objective that you don't fully understand yet but that you do eventually do and it's done with some elegance that I rarely ever felt the need to check out a guide and only 2 out of the 8 melodies are a bit more cryptic but not really if you talk to all the NPC's which all have charming albeit simple dialogues because of the limitation of that era.

The game is weird and embraces its weirdness, it's absolutely a rough game don't get me wrong at time I wanted to throw my controller at some of the bullshit curveball this game throws at you and the jank would probably kill the average zoomer and make games like the early Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy feel like modern triple-A production.

But eventually, you do start to love it, I can see how this game and perhaps more its sequel that I have yet to experience was so influential on gaming in Japan, I'm surprised at how sincere it all feels too, it's less about mocking or parodying the tropes of JRPG at the time more so than to transform them into something truly unique and bizarre and the comedy never feel forced, it feels like a natural part of the world.

The ending of the game is also so freaking amazing, having an ending like this on the NES of all thing is kinda crazy, the final boss is perhaps the most ambitious display of ludo-narration I've seen from this time period

Congratulation Itoi-San, I'm ready for your wild ride

Trails of Cold Steel : “It’s a game about nothing”

Been a while since my gigantic review of Azure right ?

I think taking a break between the arcs or heck even between these games is important if you don’t want to end up burning on them. You know, give it a fresh start, give it a fresh new look, give yourself the time to forget about the bad things and enjoy the serie's strengths in retrospect.

Well good for me because the Kiseki grind is not over and there’s a whole new arc to explore this time around with the Cold Steel series. Now to be frank, I was wary about this one, I got a lot of mixed signals from my friends about this, some people loves Cold Steel like it’s the second coming of Jesus Christ but then you have others more reasonable people who have a lot of criticism of the game and let’s be frank neither of those people managed to sold me on Cold Steel.

And looking at it from a distance, this didn’t seem like a good start, a high-school setting, a main character that look just like every Kirito wannabe on the face of the earth even more blatant coomer bait otaku pandering than usual and some stuff I heard from my friends did not bode well for the future of my mental health getting into this game. I knew what I was getting into, it’s trashy JRPG stuff for teenagers to get crazy about on Twitter dot com and kneeling at Rean for being an extreme giga chad of normalcy.

So I went in, tampering my expectations below the ocean floor for this one, thinking that, the series already proved itself enough already and maybe there was a way that my prior investment into the series and the few qualities all the games share with each others in terms of worldbuilding might keep me invested and interested in this right ?

Like this series has set a standard of quality, I’m not a fan of Trails but I can’t deny that in all the issues I had with the series (namely what frustrates me about it that I mentioned in my other reviews), it’s still an ambitious, sincere piece of work with a lot of charm to carry you out for hours even when nothing is happening.


So here I was, bored out of my ass once again in one of my afternoons, and I felt ready, I needed to know what Cold Steel was all about, I needed to form my opinion on it, heck with my expectations being so low it can only positively surprise me right…?

Let’s not play around any longer.

The Legend of Heroes : Trails of Cold Steel is one of the single worst JRPG I had the displeasure of playing and every minute of it felt like actual mind numbing mental torture.

Now claiming such a bold statement for a piece of work with a decent following of people who loves it to death might as well be a death sentence and please, do re-direct all of your future death treats to my dm’s or in the comment so that I can completely ignore them and pretend I’m morally superior to you for not partaking in such trivial display of self-defense and bad intentions.

But I need to get this out of my chest anyway, not only because I have nothing better to do, giving my unneeded opinion on everything is pretty much the solid foundation of my career and because this looks like a job for me, so everybody just follow me cause we need a little controversy cause it’d be so empty without me.

I’m not going to do the old song and dance in this review by re-explaining the strengths and weaknesses of the Trails formula because at this point very little has changed (or at least they took a worse direction overall in terms of execution, more on that later) so let’s just talk about the game itself.

The game is set in the Empire of Erebonia, a vastly overhyped land that was constantly mentioned in the earlier entries in the series most of the time as an antagonistic force so let’s at least address the one positive of such as a setting.

You’re witnessing the event leading up to a full-scale war launched by an expansionist faction who just love to colonize and annex stuff from inside the invader country, it’s a really interesting setup as we rarely get games taking place inside of the “evil empire of doom” most RPG’s tend to have and Erebonia’s situation is a bit more complex than it may seem at first since the Empire itself has its own sets of issues mainly a social caste one. With the nobility still being a thing so we have dukes and lords and barons and the plebs, the commoners but with the advance of technology and change in social habits and custom some commoners have gained prominence in the higher state of society and are now politicians, CEO’s, Generals and some of them have formed the “reformist” faction who are opposed to the “noble faction” which have two lines of thinking “Nobles are cringe and commoners rules but expansionism is based and we should conquer more land to get the point across'' think of it as Stalinism interpreted by a Japanese author who is not super well read on those ideologies.

That is arguably, a fascinating setting for a JRPG and one that could if done correctly rival with the setting of Crossbell which was a whole can of worms onto itself and this is in those instances that even thought the entire rest of the game will absolutely fail at doing anything remotely interesting with that setting that if anything Trails is good a framing the action of their stories in interesting coat of paint.

But then you scratch the paint and you realize that the game is very, very, very rusty and full of cavities and holes and its inner machination is faulty and at times completely out of touch with any form of tangible reality or common sense.

So what POV does the game choose to tell this story, in the Sky Series we played as bracers a private militia with the goal to help the common people without involving themselves in politics, in Crossbell we played as the SSS a special brigade of the police who does the job of bracers but unlike them can actually run investigations and involve themselves with political affairs.




In this game, you play as Rean Schwarzer (a piece of white bread that the game will pretend to be a good protagonist) , a fresh new student going to Thors Military academy. So yes, the framing for this story is that you’re playing as… high-school students… and yes… it’s as thrilling as it sounds…

Look, I don’t mind school setting, I really don’t and in fact some of my favorite pieces of media have a school setting or heavily feature teenagers but as I grow older and bitter and more cynical, my tolerance and patience towards those elements decreases with time. I guess this is my L for playing a video game aimed at a certain demographic of people and complaining about not being catered to but let’s see how the game execute that concept, afterall, I’m all for a good, funny, wholesome high-school slice of life from time to time and it seems like the main bulk of the game anyway.

Now ok, what is the single-most important aspect of any story ? Regardless of genre, regardless of conventions, regardless of scale or ambitions.

That’s right, it’s the characters, my rule of thumb is that you can make even the most basic mind-numbingly cliché story amazing if the characters are awesome (cf. Most of the “Tales of “ series) and boy we sure have characters this time around because guess what, you don’t just have 1, not 2 not 3, not 4 but 9 !

9 fucking playable characters in this game which compose your main party, as you can see this is a large cast of characters which I mean, fine, I don’t mind it but that’s a bit overkill this early into a story as you can’t possibly hope to make all of them standout by the end and you will run into the issues of having a few weak link amongst the party.

Heck even my favorite RPG, FFIX with its cast of 8 playable characters by the end of the game, ends up having 2 characters pretty much being slot fillers that don’t contribute much to the story as a whole and are just here to break the game in half with their abilities but at least you meet them progressively and not all of them dropped on you from the start so they can get a bit of breathing room for them to get introduced before they can wipe the floor with Death Blue Magic.

And you know at least, these characters have personalities, interesting dynamics, layers to them and their arc and even though not all the characters are special, at least the ones who stand out are some of the most compelling characters I’ve had the pleasure to accompany in an RPG.

This is something JRPG understood fairly early on when they started giving a shit about pushing deeper more ambitious narrative into the forefront of the experience, if you want people to spend hours in a game and getting invested into its world, lore and themes, you need good characters to channel those elements and make them shine more brightly.

Well let me tell you that Cold Steel spectacularly fails in epic proportion at making its cast of characters likable or at least interesting, they are the equivalent of paper cutouts with a ChatGPT prompt attached to their mouth and the depth of a glass of water that’s been half-emptied and then left unattended for 9 days straight.
While it is usually a pretty low criticism to say, here it is legit the truth, most of the characters in this game are just a collection of one note anime cliché with almost nothing more going for them beyond that initial first impression. And maybe you’d be like : “But Cani, maybe they start as clichés but then evolve into fully fledged characters through trials and tribulation”, they don’t and I wish I was kidding.

“But do they have like… conflicts with the world or between themselves to make them grow as characters ? Motives that drive them to do the things they do ?” At this point, you might just be grasping at straws trying to find gold. Falcom decided to do the novel idea of making you use your imagination to imagine what these characters could’ve been had they been handled by competent writers who actually cared about the topics they were trying to talk about.

So the context behind how our ragtag team of wet towels got together to become friends and maybe saving the world or some shit is fairly straightforward. At Thors Military academy, classes are usually separated between nobles and commoners with nobles getting extra privileges like exclusive rooms for them and an actual extended vacation period whereas the commoners have a whopping 5 days of break in the whole school year (terrible news, I know right ?) but this time, things are getting a bit wacky and experimental.

Usually the academy has 5 class but this year there’s a 6th one cleverly name “Class VII” (they make a joke about it but don’t expect it to make sense at least in this entry), in class VII members of the nobility and commoners are mixed together into one group to see if they can get along and be friends with each others, they also have a special curriculum which mostly consist of going on on field trips where they’ll fulfill request for the citizen of Erebonia (which is the convenient excuse this game found to justify its terrible structure and quest system more on that later).

This opposition between commoners and nobles is the main conflict of the narrative but it’s only crystalized by two of the most annoying characters I’ve seen in an RPG yet, Machias and Jusis. Machias HATES the nobility because of some old trauma about her sister being bullied into suicide or at least that’s what you learn about after 40h of the game in perhaps the game worst chapter and the dude just can’t stand having to team-up with nobles (rightfully so) so you’d think he’d have a problem with all the nobles but he only has issues with Jusis, a snarky, indifferent asshole, who’s a noble but doesn’t care about all the etiquette coming up with it.

These two character dynamics is the most annoying and cliché thing shit ever, it goes nowhere, they grew to tolerate each other in the span of one chapter but that’s about it and their dialogues might as well be sandpaper for my eyes, they literally have the dynamic of the “enjoyer vs fans” meme, if you liked poor people before, get ready to fucking hate them with Machias… or will you ?

See, you quickly realize that even in its own setup, the game cannot handle that conflict for shit, in Class VII there are only 9 members, 3 of which are nobles and the rest are all commoners, the ratio is a bit unbalanced but alas it gets worse. See because this is a JRPG, every character needs to be a super special character, so all the commoners in class VII do not actually fit the definition of commoners, if anything they’re a product of bourgeoisie.
The commoner characters are either the sons of important political figures, generals or CEO of a multinational company or in the case of Emma while the game doesn’t say it outright yet, she’s a member of a long lineage of secret guardians of the world which is meant to guide Rean (the chosen one of some prophecy we haven’t been briefed about yet but it might happen in the sequel). The only character in the party that can fit the definition is Gaius but that’s because he’s an immigrant from a society where social caste don’t even exist at all so the man is completely outside of that conflict except to show us a different point of view (and pointing out how dated Erebonia’s society is).

This of course gets even worse when around the 70h mark, you get 2 other party members who are also commoners and also have a deep secret past that make them super special (except one will turn out to be the main antagonist of the game real identity, woops, spoiler I guess), now mind you this is actually very thoughtful of the game to finally give us characters that are actually likable and endearing in our main party so late into the game, I’m fine with that but still it’s a bit too late on the uptake.

So you have nobles (who are for the most part not representative of the noble faction at all, nor nobles in general since they need to be “one of the good ones” to be in a JRPG party) and commoners who aren’t really commoners at all and never once represent the real struggle of the common everyday man, a great way to introduce this arc central conflict I guess but somehow it gets worse.

With this setup alone, you realize that what little conflict and themes the game had behind it is completely muddled by a confused writer who has no idea how class warfare even works, this is something I already noticed back when I reviewed yet another game by Kondo “Ys IX Monstrum Nox” which was also another boring slog of a game that shat on Ys’s entire legacy with empty fanservice and terribly bare bone gameplay and level design while trying to make a somewhat confused weirdly political point that just amounted to “Centrism the videogame”.

Chapter 4 of Cold Steel was perhaps one of the rare occasions while playing an RPG that I felt like somebody was ripping my brain apart. A whole lot of things happen in this chapter and a whole lot of nothing too, the gang goes to the capital for some annual festival. Two characters didn’t have an established character arc or any conflict yet so let’s just spawn one out of the blue despite these two characters barely interacting with each others for the past 40h so they have a bit of beef with one another which is this bizarre “I hate you because I love you, stop hiding shit from me” deal and like… what the fuck is this bizarre excuse to lead up to a character dumping their entire life story on you. I get that these are teenagers and teenagers tend to act irrationally at times but this felt very tacked on and was also presented in the lamest way possible (in the lamest in-engine combat cutscene I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing).

But on top of this, you also have more “Machias” moment who at this point of the story stopped being a shitty nerd with prejudice against the nobles and became an advocate for the #NotAllNoble movement, this scene where Machias explain his backstory and then proceed to explain how he changed his opinion made me cringe so hard that I let the game ran in the background for a solid hour and decided to take a shower and grab a beer at how asinine this take is.
Cold Steel, but I’d say Kondo is the kind of person that just runs on sophistry alone, Kondo is the type of person who is wholly uninterested in answering the political conflicts of his story that he will just either not address them or address them in the most out of touch way possible. See, the idea that a society is divided in two camps, one with privilege and the other without any is enough to set the stage for a revolution plotline but not in Kondo’s stories, Revolution is a brutal, outdated way of leading up to a deep change in power dynamics. Kondo prefers to stay in his position because there are good people in the dominant class, therefore, the system is fine and just needs some tweaking to flow better.

That is complete horseshit and sophistry of the highest level, we live a world right now where social divide is as steep as ever, people at the top are indifferent pedantic asshole with the power to get anything they want at the flick of a hand and can exploit millions of people just for being born under the right circumstances or because they stole assets and profited out of them. For as much as I’ve criticized Falcom’s villain for being corny Saturday Morning Cartoon characters, we now live in a world where these characters can be seen as almost realistic depictions of real life individuals.

Let me indulge in being a massive commie here, when people point out systemic issue in a general sense by saying X privileged group of people are responsible for the suffering of less fortunate people, if you answer is : “But not all of them are bad tho”, get ready to have my foot up in your ass because we simply do not care. What we care about is changing the system for the better or at best get rid of it entirely if its based on no solid foundation and the fact that noble exist in Erebonia don’t have solid foundation and that’s even something that the characters point out in the chapter right before it during one of the game many side-quest so why trying to push a narrative of common ground and acceptance, a so called “third” way that takes the best of both world when one side clearly is answering for the plies of the majority of the country’s population.

Mind you, this is just what I got from what little time the game actually brought up these topics up because and that’s the worst part about this game, Cold Steel seems to be wholly uninterested in its own setting and also in addressing the questions and themes they brought along with them, because this doesn’t constitute the bulk of the game and also because in order to make me even care about these topics, it would’ve been a good start to make us follow characters that are well written and likable and entertaining.

Because of the game's shitty structure, whenever tension arises in the story, the game just looks the other way and wants you to grind for more conclusions making it a game about nothing. Most of this game is just empty and void of any potential interest and is only interested in wasting the players time in pointless trivial matters like preparing for a school festival or retrieving someone’s hat (and I swear this is a mandatory quest, you need to do to progress through the game).

In great part due to the game’s structure and pacing.





As you’ve probably noticed by now, I’ve mentioned my game time at several point in my review, to contextualize when the stuff with the game I had problem with arose and that’s because I just wanted to point out that Trails of Cold Steel is a game that took me 100h to complete but since the in-game time is affected by turbo-mode, I will probably say it was closer to roughly 75-80h, nonetheless without turbo mode almost constantly on, this would’ve been the tangible reality of my game time with this game.

Trails games and this isn’t something that started with Cold Steel are long but they often struggle to justify their own length in a meaningful way. There is this common misconception in media analysis that the more time is spent on a piece of media is representative of its level of complexity and interest, that if a game takes its time to tell the things they have to tell then it must mean that it has a lot of things and a lot of interesting to either tell or to make us experience from a gameplay perspective.

Now it is no surprise that Trails game are very wordy, it’s a fact I already pointed out in the Crossbell arc which was a duology of game I’ve jokingly called “more of a visual novel than an RPG” especially for how long the cutscenes and dialogues were in comparison to the time you spend playing the game. Nonetheless, you do play the game, and the game lets you explore its gameworld to participate in classic JRPG affairs like combat, dungeons and of course side-quest that has always been the main point of contention of the game.

Now Trails of Cold Steel is the 6th entry in the Kiseki series, less than 10 years separate the first Trails in the Sky to Trails of Cold Steel so you’d naturally think that the formula has add a positive evolution from the rigid constant use of back and forth between segmented area of the first game, heck even Crossbell proposed an interesting change of pace by having an hub town attached to a bunch of adjacent routes you explore almost in its entirety in the first 15 to 20h of the game but that’s because Crossbell was a small country, here in Erebonia, to give you the sense that the country is large, you traverse the country by train. Meaning the game forces you to go where it wants you to go, but given that those games are linear by nature, it’s not all that terrible.

The problem is that the series already rigid structure has been more rigidified by some choice, each chapters and I mean each chapters plays exactly the same :

-A first day of going around talking to NPC
-A Free Day of going around doing quest and talking to NPC ending on the exploration of a new floor old school house (which is very mysterious place you visit multiple time which is just a reason to get one similarly boring se and repetitive sewer
dungeon to go through at the start of each chapters)
-Followed by a practical exam day which are literally small tutorial fights (and yes you get tutorial fight even in the final chapter 90h into the game)
-Followed by an exposition train trip where you play card games for extra bonding point (more on that later)
-2 (sometimes 3 when the game feel very spicy about it) days worth of pointless fetch quest inside one of the games many town and surrounding areas
-Concluded by (but only starting with Chapter 3) a terrorist attack where you beat the bad guy but they get away and then the news says “Damn, lots of shit happened heh?”
-Then it’s back to the start of the cycle repeat for 6 10 to 15 hours painfully long chapters
Rarely does the game ever deviate from that structure which makes every individual chapter more predictable than the last but also makes each instance of the game padding itself out even more obvious and increasingly annoying as time goes on.

In my previous review of Trails to Azure, I said that the game pacing was excellent but bogged down by the game constant need to pause its action to make us partake in pointless errant of various quality and for the first time ever some of these errant were mandatory to progress into the game with the game sometimes having a weird sense of priorities as what was considered important quest (and as such mandatory) and the ones that could be skipped (which sometimes were actually more story relevant).

And I suggested naively that if they wanted to go moving forward in that direction, they should make things more explicit as to avoid people missing out on important context and lore like that was the case with Azure and so they did the most logical move, make 90% of the side-quest in the game mandatory.

You’ve heard me right, long are the days of getting the luxury to skip on mediocre monster hunt side quests if you didn’t like going through them since this time around you WILL hunt these monsters inside sewers and you WILL enjoy it whether you like it or not. Oh sure the game still has a few game objectives that are completely optional (and even dares to still have secret side quests seriously how is it still a thing). And the worst thing is that they didn’t stop and thought for one second to change the way these games plays out, I hope you like having to arbitrarily do a random monster hunt to progress through the game because this is what most of the climatic big quest of this game consist of and it’s fucking terrible.

Let’s indulge in a bit of game design analysis and try to comprehend this sudden rise in rigidity in a series which already had an issue liberating itself from the shackles of its own faulty foundation.

See, with Trails Falcom has created a really cool world that they’re really proud of and one of the things they are probably even more proud of more than anything else is their NPC’s who constantly update their dialogues for every minor advancement in the story and help the world feel more lived in as you experience micro-level arc and the life of these random people alongside your own journey.

It is one of the core aspect of the series and one of its best idea ever since the original game but in order for this aspect to work on people, you need to condition people to participate in it and while some people are easier to convince than others when it comes to asking them to always recheck all the NPC’s every time you advance the story even in a minor way, others may not.

See most JRPG only ask you the bare minimum when exploring a JRPG town, usually you’re going to enter a town, talk to all the NPC’s to gather clues, learn more about the world or more broadly to advance the plot and maybe check the shops and explore the area to see what other thing might hide in between the streets of these bustling cities but in general this is a one and done thing and unless we’re talking about a semi or full hub town that you come back to constantly and change with time, most of the time it’s a one and done kinda deal, rarely do talking to NPC multiple time at different point worth the hassle.
But in Kiseki it is such a core aspect of the experience, so how do you unconsciously manipulate your player into partaking in such an activity ?

Well by designing the game in a way that will push the people toward that experience and it’s with this game that I finally understood the secret sauce behind what makes Trails side-quest so terrible, these fetch quest and not meant to be interesting, they aren’t meant to be fun, heck they aren’t even meant to fill out the game with content like you’d see in a lot of modern RPG’s.

They are meant to put you on a tour, each quest consist of you going back and forth around the areas the chapter take places in so that you will probably think unconsciously to re-check on all the NPC’s, it’s not about how good the side-quest are, it’s about how these side-quest will force you to a second, third, fourth or even fifth lap of the single area the chapter takes place in and as such, you will have the reflex (or not) to re-talk to the NPC who are on your path to complete these various objectives.

But then how do you encourage the people to even do the side-quest if they’re so boring ? Well before Cold Steel the main incentive behind them was to gather money, you see in Trails you can trade elemental crystal called “sepith” for money but Sepith are also used to create quartz and unlock orbment slot to make your character stronger so using too much Sepith for money means missing out on making your characters better in battle and they might be drag behind the game (very generous) difficulty curve, monsters do not drop money in this game so the only method to get money without trading Sepith were, you guessed it, the side-quest which always gave just the right amount of money to upgrade all of your characters gears as you proceed to the next chapter.

But the Sky games were smart about this by giving its players choice, you can choose to do the side-quest or not, so imagine if there’s a couple of quests that you didn’t want to do like let’s say the monster hunts which were always the most fillerish type of quest in any JRPG, well you can simply skip them, you might not obtain the money, or bracer point for 100% completion or the extra goodies that come along with them but you will spend less time doing unfun shit and you can always use some spare Sepith to fill the gap in your wallet.

But in Cold Steel a new type of Sepith was invented, Sepith Mass, the only purpose of Sepith Mass is to be sold for money, you can’t use them in any other ways (and at this point, why don’t the game simply give you money I hate that gameplay quirk) meaning that the game brought back regular money grinding into a series that has always structured its difficulty and gameplay loop around limiting the player sources of income to force them into doing things they might not have been willing to do in the first place.

Mind you, you can still use regular Sepith for money and by the midway point of the game where all your character are fully upgraded they make it so you never run out of money ever, but that risk vs reward between selling sepith over doing side-quest is completely gone and so with the main purpose of those side-quest being removed, people will be more inclined to skip them and we’ve already mentioned how Falcom doesn’t want to do that for the sake of not making the time spent on making all the NPC’s and their updated dialogues wasted because of the regular player unwillingness to be curious and it’s especially bad to lose your player, especially in a game that was meant to attract a new audience.
So what is the obvious solution ? Well if players won’t go to the side-quest, we’ll make the side-quest go to them and that’s how you end up with a game that has to pad out and fill the gap between important event with pointless errants that the players now MUST WITHOUT ANY QUESTIONS DO !

Oh sure they are still “optional quest” but they represent 10% of the quest this time around and also yes, you’re not rewarded with money for them so feel free to skip them, I did all the side-quest in this game and most of the optional quest reward was not worth the hassle of doing them, I did them just out of completionist sake and to get those sweet sweet AP bonus which are this time around the only thing pushing you towards those optional thing.

And so you’d think, maybe they would make those errant more entertaining, fun or enticing in any way, well no and most of the time the game will make you understand the definition of insanity when most of the quest in the game are regular monster hunt quest and this is how you end up with a game where you’re still rendered at killing monsters in sewers at the 40h mark of the game while the story has still gone nowhere interesting or is spectacularly avoiding to get you in on the good shit.

And this time around, this particular Trails cannot compensate for its shitty structure with good, entertaining or even charming writing for the life of it and can’t even do it through its gameplay either.

Oh yeah because it’s not enough that the game is a boring slog with almost nothing engaging or even charming going on for it, it’s also a boring slog that made the gameplay of the series worse somehow. Trails gameplay was always kinda fun, it was not the revolution of the century but you could see that the more the series progressed and they more they tweaked some of its elements to make more varied boss and monster encounter and make use of its excellent arts and craft system at the center of it all and one thing that lays the foundation of such a solid system were the Quartz system.

Well fuck me because they decided to make orbment and Quartz way worse in this game, see in the previous games in the series, you had to arrange quartz in certain way to gain access to new and more powerful spell, the players needed to struck a good balance to get access to the most move possible while still profiting of the advantages given by each individual quartz like stat increases or additional effect, the system allowed for a lot of customization and a bit of experimentation, often times limiting the player with the characters different align to push them into playing them a certain way or to try and overcome these limitations.

Not this time tho, now you have quartz that give you stat boost and additional effecst and now you have quartz who are specifically designed to give you one spell, no more messing around with crystal combination and doing math, our players don’t care about an actually good progression system or having fun with an RPG, they want to get through the shitty slog part of the game faster so they can get to the twisty twist turn shit faster. This change severely reduces the utility of Arts which used to be main meta of Trails especially on higher difficulty and as such render characters who are either full-caster or mixed-attacker in the game completely and utterly useless outside of spamming their support crafts which are for the most part absurdly good.
Now be ready to just jack your physical attackers with as much strength boosting accessories and quartz as well as passive status effect and spam the ever living shit out of AoE attack like it’s FC’s endgame on steroid, past the midway point of the game most fight can be trivialized by out-dps’ing or simply not let monsters and bosses take turn.

Because all of your characters have insanely broken crafts, the crafts are so broken in this game whether they’re offensive or support type that they render the use of certain arts completely useless, in fact most arts are useless after a while despite the game tutorial making you think that it wouldn’t be the case and that you’d still need to cast a spell and heck now with the Zero-Arts bonus in combat that can pop-up, you can still use them without any cost.

More than never, the determining factor towards victory now are the master quartz an element introduced in Azure that didn’t have much influence on combat and was this game attempt at a job system but now in a setting where Quartz have been jumbled up to favor just powermaxxing everything, Master Quartz are now going to be essential to mix up your gameplay… or not…

The one that are installed by default on your characters are for the most part the best quartz adapted to them and even if you can get new master quartz throughout your adventure, by the time you get them, you MQ would’ve already evolved past a point where it would be worth changing them (Rean and Laura Master Quartz makes them absolutely stupid from the early game all the way to the final boss)

Wow amazing how the game has 11 party members by the end but half of them are rendered almost useless by this change, what else do we have to do to save this mess of a change ?

Well the main new feature that Cold Steel adds to the gameplay of Trails is the addition of links, you can link your character between them for additional advantages in battle and by using certain type of weapons on enemies (with the damage type borrowed from at the time Ys Seven and Celceta), you can initiate a break and chained them with an additional attack.

As you progress through the game, chaining link attack become a good way to inflict serious amount of damages and after a certain point in the game, you can do the rush attack from the Crossbell titles after chaining 5 link attack (which I think is a good limitation over how Crossbell games handled that feature). The more characters are linked together and the more they gain link points and when their link levels up, they can do even more additional action like counter-attacking or protecting their allies or auto-healing.

This is a pretty neat system sadly not exploited to its full potential here in this title because outside of 2 notable exception, this game is painfully easy, ofc part of the blame is on me for playing on normal like always but no thoughts was put into most of the aside bare the 2nd fight against C which was a welcome raise in difficulty.



Sadly 2 things bog down the fun factor of the system for me, the first one is having to resettle the links everytime someone dies, resettling the link doesn’t sacrifice a turn but it’s something you can easily forgot to do until you’re 5 turns in wondering why you can’t break enemies and then realizing that you just forgot to re-link, I think link should be regenerated if one of the pair gets revived without having linked to another character in the meantime, it’d be a great way to do this, also regenerate the link after battles, it’s just kind of stupid but heh, a bit of QoL wouldn’t have hurt and the other thing is the fact than in order to make full use of this system well… you have to actually give enough of a shit about the character to bond with them and level them up faster.

Because yes, back to writing (and also gameplay).

CS1 seems to take a lot (perhaps a bit too much) inspiration from other popular RPGs at the times, the setting is like Final Fantasy Type-0 (to the point of plagiarism) and the way the game tells its story borrows a lot from the Persona series. I could make a commentary on why I don’t think NU-Persona (heck Rean strikes the same pose as Yu Narukami in battle if that isn’t enough proof) should be this influential on this market but that’s not the subject what I mean by this is that the already rigid structure of the game is completed by a bunch of mechanics and narrative trick ripped straight out of Persona without really understanding the point of them.

The game has a calendar system and even multiple time slot often mention each day but that’s about it, it only serves to place the events of the game on a timeline something that the other titles didn’t need to do in the first place so I don’t know why it’s here, there’s no time management, there’s no prioritizing activities or social link over the other, there’s no meta to that system. However what the game has is something similar to the Social Link from Persona called “Bonding events”.

Now Bonding Point and Bonding events was already an element I complained about in Azure but in that game it was sort of an hidden but hinted at feature that was sadly ruined by bad programming and also by Azure oftentimes bad sense of narrative priorities (hiding who character backstory behind the final bonding events for exemple).

I also said that while I don’t mind a bit of player agency and choice for a personalized experience in my JRPG, I also felt like this feature was a bit pointless in a game that is supposed to have one true canon and that there is no way any subsequent game especially from different arcs could follow through on the individual romantic (or not) choice of the players.

But in Azure, it was discreet, badly programmed and not implemented super thoughtfully but at least it was a subtle way to make the player experience with the game more unique depending on how he acted during the game. CS1 decides to fully embrace that aspect of the game and making it more explicit and I do not feel like it pulled that off successfully either and in fact because the characters in this game are rather dry and bland, I had a lot of trouble actually giving a shit about any of them during regular gameplay and I guess they expected me to like them more through their bonding event and fellas, let me tell that if this was the plan then I’m sorry to say that I see the vision but I feel like the vision is shit.

Persona at least try to make the characters and their dynamic compelling outside of their social link and even though the divide between Social Link and main story creates inconsistencies, at least you were probably more willing to learn more about these characters because they have fun interactions with one another that cement them as real people with personalities, doubts, feeling and not just a succession of one-dimensional anime trope with a character design.

I think a lot of CS problem also comes from the presentation of its story, being the first game of the series for the PS Vita and the first game in Full 3D, I can’t say that the change in arstyle brought with it a net positive, sure environments are in 3D but from the dungeons to the different towns and cities that doesn’t really make a difference since they seem structured in a similar fashion than in Azure except now the game presentation needs to rely on cinematography and I think that Falcom didn’t really nail that aspect at all, the scene composition and direction of the scenes and dialogues are so bad, because the party is so large a lot of cutscene just involve all of them sitting around and blocking each other from the view and it makes for very cluttered scene where not much emotions or anything could be displayed to full intensity.

While I was writing this review, I got curious and watched the CS1 musical adaptation and while it couldn’t fix the gaping ideological and thematic holes in the story it definitely did a better job in selling me on these characters in 2h than this game failed at doing in 80 and that’s saying something about how just a little change like characters being more expressive and proper stage direction can do wonder to an average/mediocre story (in fact RIP character portrait it legitimately hurt the game even more visually). I’m not criticizing the graphics here since Falcom probably wanted this game to sell to a wider audience and most of them can’t handle anything else in terms of artstyle but I will say that the transition to 3D wasn’t an improvement but could’ve been had Falcom would have cared more about directing than just dumping a bunch of text to fill textboxes and embrace other type of narration something they’ve always struggled to do even in the earlier titles.

In fact even the writing this time around I felt to be a bit stiff and lifeless which definitely didn’t help me care about what the game was trying to say, I think this is more of a prose issue this time around, I’m missing the charm and quirkiness of the writing in games like Sky (especially sky) and the Crossbell game. CS1 relies a bit too heavily on unfunny forced sex jokes because “anime” or make their character just have the most annoying dialogue ever like Machias, it’s like CS1 is Trails skinwalker because it’s trying to be like those legacy titles but can’t do it even in the NPC dialogues.

The game just doesn’t let the character group dynamic shine because it also feels the need for gameplay reason to separate the group in 2 in all field studies which makes you feel like you never get time to know these characters as people despite the game spending a considerable amount of time trying to make you care about their school activities.

Some people might say that finding CS1 boring but FC charming is gonna be up to my taste and while it is true, FC only got better with time and while FC has less things going on than CS1, at least it wasn’t trying to blueball you with a real story until the final moment which was genuinely hype as fuck, it was a game carried entirely by the relationship and complicity of its two main lead and the guest characters coming along the way.
CS1 has too many characters and doesn’t have time to spend for a lot of them, Trails work best with a smaller cast that grow larger as the game goes on but CS1 build such weak foundation that you’d rather do anything but waste your time desperately grasping at straws to find an ounce of quality to the game’s writing, atmosphere or structure which all works against him.

Even Rean, the main character of this game couldn’t be more barebone for the life of me, he’s a random LN default looking guy with a sword with the personality of a brick and the social awareness of a cloister and the narrative always try to propel him to be this incredible badass while also pushing a Shirou FSN narrative of him being reckless because he hates himself or has trauma or ofc has some sort of curse in his vein that turn him super saiyan from time to time because anime… he has almost no chemistry with any of the female characters even Alisa which is a character many people like but that I just found annoying the whole way through (definitely has at least character motives which is more than nothing I guess),

I just couldn’t bare to care about these characters or even the few good things borrowed from the series legacy had to offer, I think that after 6 games, effort should be made to improve a game formula and not making it worse in every conceivable way and a lot of the tool the game uses to keep you going and invested are really cheap including the ending.

Crow standout as a really cool character but the way the game foreshadow his twist couldn’t be more obvious and in general you feel like this game just care as much about me about all of the stuff it’s presenting to you, it’s infodumping you on stuff in the most bland way possible like in bar or classroom, it’s reflecting on subject matter it barely has any knowledge or deeper understanding of, it nullify all sense of urgency by showing and telling you that shit are happening but you’re doing things that has nothing to do with the shit happening despite having chapter names that make those story beat more badass than they actually are.

They give so little shit, that the final chapter of the game, I kid you not is the worst lead-up to a final dungeon and final boss I’ve ever seen, first of all the final chapter is about a school festival and preparing for a concert like it’s some bad Naruto level filler, you play freaking mini-games, you go on date, suddenly the old schoolhouse lights up and the characters take the whole situation super seriously, you got the epic music, you got the chuuni quotes, you got the weird surreal environment, yeup doesn’t feel like the climax of the game but it’s the final dungeon anyway and you’re going to fight the final bos which is just a really lame fight coming off of the last boss you fought which was the only genuine challenge of the game.

Then it’s followed by several hours of cutscenes to complete the school festival arc with the final concert which… I understand it was meant to be this emotional peak and a huge accomplishment for the characters solidifying their bonds but because of how badly the game managed to develop or make me care about them, this doesn’t feel earned at all and then…

Well



The only really well done part of the game happens in the last few hours, a roller coaster of twist and turn and melancholic vibe featuring child soldiers being scared of being deported and giant robots punching each other in … huh… let’s say … functioning gameplay ?

But even these last moments feel like a cheap way to make you stay and check out the sequel rather than something truly impactful and earned, like yeah sure if this was let’s say FC, I would be like “oh shit” but here, not really and it’s sad really.

Because that ending really slaps dick, it’s really cool, I just don’t feel like the game earn such a finale after failing at building all the foundations necessary to make this ending worth it, the game feel like a waste of my time, a waste of my energy, a waste of my mental health.

And then it just decides to blueball you like that, I just don’t really have much respect for this, even earlier it was doing it with the intro of the game being a flashforward to an event which was a red herring and nothing really major or important and it even dares make you replay through the intro again when you reach that part, gotta love reused content and padding, well played guys.

Mind you, I do plan on still checking the sequel one of these days, not out of excitement to know what will happen next but because I’m too deep into this to stop now and I’m also morbidly curious to see how low that ship could sink.

So…

Huh…

I forgot to mention the actual one positive of the game

IT’S TOWA HERSCHEL OMG, GUYS, GUYS, GUYS, I LOVE HER, SHE SAVED ME GUYS, ALL THE MOMENT WHERE SHE WAS ON THE SCREEN IS THE BEST MOMENT! SHE’S SO SMOL AND CUTE AND HARDWORKING AND I WANT TO GET HER OUT OF THIS GAME AND SHE’S THE ONLY REASON WHY THIS GAME IS A 2/10 INSTEAD OF A BIG FAT 1

FUCK AM I GETTING PSY-OPPED INTO PLAYING MORE OF THESE BECAUSE OF CUTE GIRLS ?

FUCK YOU KONDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I expected nothing and I still got blown away, a very simple yet terribly smart game which reminded of my experience trying to figure out the first Zelda back in the day with the same level of confusion

The later half is definitely more on the cryptic side of things but holy shit it's also the smartest part of the game

There's tons of secrets I probably missed but I got the true ending and found the golden path on my own and I love gaming fr

Chained Echoes : Impressive yet flawed

If you know me, you know that I love myself some classic JRPG especially of the SNES-PS1 era variety, there’s a magic to these grand epic journey of traveling a gigantic world on foot, uncovering the secret and mystery of its setting, experience memorable scene written by master hands with a bit of endearing jank to the style.

So when I heard about Chained Echoes through some of my friends and RPG youtubers and saw that it was on the Gamepass (that I got for free thanks to a friend of mine who got a spare code), I was like “Look why not”. I was a little worried about getting into Chained Echoes at first, usually speaking I feel like western developers trying their hand at the Japanese style of RPG usually ends up feeling try hard and forced and without lying to you that’s the impression I got from the game at first.

But then upon realizing that the entire game was made by literally one dude on his spare time on kickstarter money, I started to reconsider my position and while the first few hours of the game were a bit rough eventually upon reaching the 2nd act of the game everything started to click in my head once we got access to the Sky Armors which opens up the game significantly in terms of exploration and a decent chunk of superbly well-crafted and put together side content (actually these are some of the best side-quest I’ve seen from this genre since the PS2 era at least !).

Chained Echoes is not gonna break any new ground, the game owes a lot of its solid foundations to what came before it, if I have to boil down the story to its mere essential, I’d say it’s the bizarro child of Final Fantasy Tactics and Xenogears ! Both incredibly ambitious titles with a crazy ambitious scale and tone for their times mixed together with the same level of ambition as the titles of old. The game isn’t shy about its inspiration and while it can feel try hard at times because it’s a genre that tends not to reinvent its wheels all too often, I can only admire the sheer effort and passion that was put into such a project. The world of the game is vast and full of details, various cultures and mythologies clashing with each other, it has warring factions and characters working for their own agenda with a very Matsuno style of human to human conflict with a tints of gray morality and nuance that I admire a lot. The character writing is also nothing to shy on about, Glenn for exemple is an interesting twist on the hard-boiled soldier boil haunted by the sins crawling down his back and always trying to one-up himself for the mistakes he previously committed, this actually takes an interesting direction later into the story when we realize the true nature behind his existence and I actually like how well the game paces its revelations, it’s not a constant rollercoaster ride but they’re placed at just the right time to keep you going further and get more and more invested into it.

The game setting is super ambitious and while that’s definitely one of the game's biggest strengths it also comes to the game detriments especially near the end of the game, the last act of Chained Echoes feels very anti-climatic and very sequel baity. I don’t know if Matthias plans on making a sequel to this game and considering it already took 6 years to do all of this, I don’t think this will happen very soon or at all which is why I think that a co-writer would’ve helped tampers Mathias’s ambition down a bit for what is essentially a small indie release which was probably going to be a one hit wonder anyway.
The last act over-indulges on its lore, events go by super fast, arcs are wrapped up in very ungracious fashion, the game suddenly is way too easy due to the abundance of options you get by the late game and the final boss being more of a narrative spectacle than a challenge. Literally 2 minor but significant villain just disappear into nothingness never to be heard from again, the big bad god deity the game has been urging us about never shows up at all and the conclusion to the story feels very tacked on and cheesy when the rest of the game wasn’t so sappy about “redemption” for its most villainous characters. With many questions left unanswered, let’s just say that what was a pleasant ride kinda ended on a wet fart, I literally wasn’t thinking the game would end during the final dungeon but it actually did and it’s weird as shit, let’s hope a sequel or at least DLC’s or in the work to bounce back from all of this, cause I could genuinely see this being the solid basis for a whole franchise if done correctly.

So while the story is indeed pretty surprising and enjoyable, it’s held back by Matthias' ambition being way too big for the kind of project he’s working on, I can say that ambition helped make the rest of the game all the more enjoyable.

One thing that’s immediately clear right off the bat is how gorgeous the game looks, this is some truly high quality pixel-art right there and at times the game has some pretty stunning looking areas and sprites. The only thing I’m not too big on are the character portraits, they’re not terrible but the fact they only have one expression and the artstyle is pretty uneven between characters makes me feel like these were an unnecessary additions which at times takes away from the intensity or emotions of the scenes, I would’ve rather not have any portraits at all if that was going to be the end result, Glenn’s face especially makes it very hard to take all of his emotional trauma-dumping seriously when he’s just blankly staring into the void with a neutral expression all the time.

Music wise, it’s just ok, it gets the job done, can’t say I was impressed by this game soundtrack it sounds very “everyday snes game” which is about as much of a decent compliment I can give to it.

Now let’s talk about the juicy part of today’s review which is the gameplay. Chained Echoes goes a long way towards doing the thing most JRPG inspired indie games do by trying to “fix” some of the more “tedious” elements of JRPG’s to make for a smoother experience. I personally am someone who’s grown too attached to the roughness of most JRPG systems. I’m a guy who has NES games amongst his favorites despite not being from this generation at all, so I’m going to give my most honest and brutal opinion on the matter.

I don’t think JRPG as a genre needs “fixing” and there has never been an attempt in recent memory that has actually managed to fully convince me that trying to do so ends up in a more fulfilling or even fun experience. Grinding is not a problem in any JRPG’s since the SNES, in fact the only people I see complain about grinding are the people who plays Pokemon and tried a single JRPG once and got bored fast despite the fact that Pokemon has been way behind the curve on its game design ever since the very first generation and is something you notice even more when going on self-imposed challenge to make the game more appreciable as an adult.

In fact, I will defend the idea of grinding as an accessibility function, while most RPG don’t rely on overleveling to get things done as a good game is often supported by various system to circumvent the level curve, grinding for levels is an option that I at least like to have and liked to have especially as a kid when my brain couldn’t process the dullness of such an activity.

In fact, traditional levels and growth structure actually allows to have a better sense of progression, it’s ok for regular encounters in RPG to be mindless because for the most part, part of the fun is figuring out a set strategy to go through these encounters faster and also the game can better control its difficulty and balance with random encounters than field encounters which encourages people to overlevel on reflex (or at least that’s true for me because my OCD refuses to see a single mob left on the screen).

With that said Chained Echoes actually has a few fun systems but not all of which fully convinced me to think of them as a significant improvement over more traditional old-school RPG and it’s mostly due to a weird imbalance between the random encounters and the bosses.

You can’t level up through battle in this game, you level up through getting grimoire shards that you get at certain key point in the game (usually after defeating a boss) or through completing the game reward board which is an achievement system that rewards you for doing certain task and by chaining them together on a grid, you get points to get bigger rewards like the aforementioned grimoire shards.

This way of gatekeeping progression pushes a bigger emphasis on exploring to be more powerful rather than fighting many enemies to be more powerful but here comes the issue I have with said system. Regular encounters can be a bitch to go through, in fact I will say that this game have the quite annoying tendency to have regular encounters sometimes be more challenging than bosses themselves, I actually died more often on these than I did on the game various bosses which are often more straightforward in how you’re supposed to approach them (although some of them have interesting gimmicks that are quite cool to figure out, especially in the end-game). Because of this, you rarely ever feel like you’re getting more powerful, sure you unlock more options, you get more passive abilities, you get more active skills but that doesn’t change that most fight in this game can be a drag and an half and while the encounters are field based like Chrono Trigger, it doesn’t change that you’re going to spend a lot of time on those anyway (and don’t you dare use quick travel or else most of them will respawn).

Which bothers me because for how tough some of these encounters are, the reward is practically non-existent, you get some materials which exist only to be sold at shop to get extra cash (and “deals”) or upgrade your equipment and some SP to level up your skills which takes so much goddamn point to upgrade and you get so little SP that it doesn’t feel like an actual good substitute for exp.

While it creates an interesting new approach to combat in which most encounter cannot simply be mashed through, it does get tiring after a while especially with how bloated and inflated some of the enemies HP bars can be, making most strategies around taking out multiple enemies with multi-target attack often fruitless and a time waste at worst.
I know some people actually praised this approach for being unique and not let regular encounters be dull but I’m not sure I think giving that level of importance to regular encounters is always that great of an idea, it really depends on a case by case basis and a game where you barely even feel an actual sense of progression because the game decides for you what options you may have at certain point (with some space for customisation but not by much) can be pretty ass at time.

But the fights are still incredibly fun anyway, the game is challenging in all the right place, the synergy meter mechanic is a great take on traditional turn-based system that prevents you from again mashing through them like a maniac, the game does a few interesting things with that synergy meter but It quickly loses its steam as the game progresses, I wish more bosses would mess around with that meter or gimmicks involving that meter being more prevalent but oh well, I’ll take what I get (especially since THANK GOD they let status effect actually work on bosses so stalling strats are actually viable).

There’s a part of the progression system I forgot to mention which is the weapon and armor upgrade system. Simply put, this entire part of the game is needlessly complex but also terribly pointless. The idea is that you can upgrade your gears to make them stronger and upgrade the number of crystal slots available to them just like materia. Attaching these crystals that you can farm at certain gathering points on the map allows your gear to get new properties like more passive abilities that help you in battle.

The problem with these is how tedious the entire process is. You have to combine crystals of the same type to make a stronger crystal but wait can’t reuse a crystal you already used silly ! Also since crystals attach themselves to weapons, it means you’re gonna spend a few minutes upgrading and tinkling with said weapon and have all that effort being for naught as you get the higher tier of weapon literally 10 min after you spend time upgrading the previous one.

It’s especially grating in the mid-game where you constantly get new gear in quick successions so at one point, you just completely ignore that aspect of the game and frankly the game hasn’t been made more or less difficult from me completely ignoring this feature even in the later part of the game or the optional content so whatever.

Another feature of the game that went solely underutilized are the class emblems which is the closest thing this game has to a job system but closely resembles more guardian forces or master quartz from Trails, it’s an equipable item that gives you a stat boost and a couple of passive and active skills, most of which are just worse version of skills you can already unlock from the skill tab once you level up meaning that outside of the first one you get which let any characters becoming an healer (especially since you don’t have one until at least act 2 and she’s not really all that useful with Health and Mana always replenishing after battles).

In general the game is bloated with annoying filler passive like “do more damage to x type of enemies” but since the encounters are fixed and the game erased grinding from its gameplay loop, I don’t see the point of these being a thing at all, heck the Blue Mage character literally only has that kind of passive (and also is the worst blue mage I’ve ever seen in an RPG).
There’s also the Sky Armors, much like Xenogears, the game oftentimes have fights taking place inside giant mechs which are more or less customizable. These are way better than the ones from Xenogears as they actually require a bit of thinking and strategy to handle the synergie bar this time around but once you figure out the trick to it, they become pretty dull compared to the on-foot encounters, still it’s a nice pace breaker if nothing else.

But what the Sky Armors add to the game is the possibility of fast seamless travel across the game's various maps and the second you get them during the second act, the game evolves from a mostly linear structure to an exploration galore of epic proportions !

In fact, the second and third act of the game was the best part for me, the game opens up significantly and shows us its side-content and believe me, that side-content is to die for ! Between the extremely rewarding and fun exploration complete with the game super tight level design with many secrets to find, the recruitable NPC’s you can add to your newly build home base which adds different new mechanics in the game and makes your central hub prettier the more you go back to it and of course the side-questing which is to die for.

I’ve grown pretty tired of the way side-quest are handled in RPG’s these days, a lot of filler content without much substance with quality over quantity plastered all over it, tedious fetch quest that forces you to go back and forth between locations to do specific task or collect X amount of items but there’s nothing of the sort in this game, oh hell no !

Each side-quest comes with proper story development, character arcs and even their own mini-dungeons and bosses ! These side-quests are so rich and plentiful that it made me feel like I was playing an actual golden age RPG again, they were all super fun and incredibly rewarding as they help you understand more about the world and its secrets as well as making your main cast and the side-characters more interesting.

Heck there’s even a super-side-quest that’s less telegraphed than the rest of them which leads you on a quest to hunt the game various superbosses and that quest is long sprawling multiple new environments and dungeons and feel like actual secrets you stumble upon at random and heck, it leads to an even cooler superboss that the game only slightly hinted at earlier during one of the game side-quest and let’s just say that it was a great surprise and a great moment for me as these superbosses are truly excellent !

So in the end can Chained echoes stand on its own on the shoulders of giant, hey maybe not but it definitely is a more competent attempt at living up to these classics and I’m sure that with a bit of tweaking and perhaps a sequel to build up on its truly solid foundations, it could end up being really special and the game has no shortage of very engaging and profound moments that are synonymous of the style of game it’s trying to emulate and like its inspiration was the result of ambitions being led astray by the limitations of the industry but that’s life.

Considering most of the game is a one man job, it is thoroughly impressive all the way through but doesn’t change the fact that maybe with a few more people on board, it could’ve been perhaps even better than what it reached out to be !

Overall, play Chained Echoes, it’s a good time if nothing else.

Rance IX : A Solid Enough Revolution

It will probably come off as a surprise to most people here but I’m a huge fan of the Rance series, I’ve been so pretty recently as I started truly getting into the series around September 2021 and it quickly ruined any sort of credibility I had left in any online argument about RPG’s as it became my new hyper-obsession. Suffice to say that when I finished the latest release of the series (Rance Quest Magnum) I was craving for more and lo and behold the translation of Rance IX was right around the corner and it became by default one of my most anticipated game of 2023 (despite being a 2014 eroge).

Rance IX is a game which is a bit special even amongst other titles in the series, Rance IX places itself at the tail-end of the series most long-running subplot which is everything surrounding the Helman Empire, this is a subplot introduced for the first time in Rance III and which has been expanded upon in almost every single entry ever since. The series has rich lore and pretty consistent continuity but everything surrounding the Helman Empire and the Holy Magic Sect is the one part of the lore that the series fully embraced instead of shying away from so I was pretty excited to see how they will pay off more than 20 years of buildup surrounding this mysterious land and its secret and how they’ll reimagine the Kichikuou Arc related to it.

In another surprise twist however, this game more than simply being a pay-off is also a pseudo-remake of Mamatoto another AliceSoft game released in 1999 that I’ve played in preparation and which Rance IX heavily pulls away from. From its gameplay to different plot beats and themes, Rance IX isn’t shy about its inspiration to the game's benefits and sometimes to its detriment.

As it is tradition in the series, each entry has a different gameplay system. This time Rance IX is a Tactical RPG where you place units on a grid and fulfill different objectives. The game is fun but isn’t going to win any award in originality or complexity, Rance IX is perhaps one of the easiest game in the series which at least since Rance VI has tried to deliver a decent challenge, the game has a NG+ feature which allows you to up the difficulty a lil bit but I haven’t messed around with it as 2 runs of the game was enough for me to experience most of the content I wanted to see anyway.

The different maps are pretty barebone and straightforward and even though the game likes to spice things up sometimes with objectives which aren’t just “kill everything on screen”, you won’t be finding these battle instances to be substantial enough to warrant an epic “fire emblem killer own” in a random Twitter argument. It is a shame to say that I felt Mamatoto definitely fared better in this department with more challenging maps, more varied win conditions and a better overall difficulty so while Rance IX tries to copy the game-feel of Mamatoto, years of experience didn’t lead to a significant enough upgrade to call it a better game than the original.


Character growth is also pretty straightforward, only the weapon upgrade system is a bit quirky where you pretty much an increasing amount of money to maybe have the chance to boost your equipment, in any other case I would’ve complained about such a system but since Money as a resource is only used for this purpose, I don’t mind it as much but it might seem more problematic on higher difficulties. Much like Mamatoto you can allocate skill points to different stats and you get an overall bonus for reaching certain threshold for all stats of one character (something I forgot during my first run but wasn’t detrimental in the end)

Unlike the other title however, you won’t be doing many battles, since the game is definitely more focused on telling a grander narrative about Rance going to Helman to find a way to save Sill, fuck a couple of girls along the way and maybe help the revolution as a bonus. Progressing through the game is done through a series of clickable events most of which are just story driven with the occasional battle, if you’re really craving more fights however, there’s the optional (but not really) “free battle” which unlocks as the game progresses and reward you with items as well as Monkey Orbs for the game’s titular “Rance mode”.

Since the story is definitely the bigger focus this time around, how does it compare to the rest of the franchise ? Well I will say that Rance IX is an overall pretty pleasant ride all things considered.

The game is definitely more for the lore-addict of the series more than anything so if you’re not familiar with the rest of the franchise there’s not a great chance that starting with this one will give you much value since it really is here to pay-off several plot-points spread across the rest of the series. The game is excellently paced in my opinion as it is the case in almost all Rance games, it’s never boring, always fun to go through and the antics of Rance and his interactions with his surroundings is always a joy to go through.

Something that I definitely did appreciate this time around (and which was apparently a point of contention in its home country, different folks, different strokes I guess) is the heavier focus on different POV’s, a lot of Rance game tend to strictly follow the POV of Rance which is great but tend to not properly put into light the high stakes of the narrative at place. The game also has a surprising amount of male characters getting the spotlight this time around outside of Rance which in my opinion is great as most of these male characters went pretty under-utilized in the other title despite their appearances being more than welcome, some might say that so much sausage of burly men sitting around talking about war and stuff isn’t the most exciting premise for an erotic JRPG (especially ones that doesn’t focus on fiery male skinship) but it’s been long since I’ve given up on the Rance series actually being fully erotic for me and it’s not this game which is going to prove the contrary.

The main mean of obtaining h-scenes in this game is through a separate mode called “Rance Mode” where you spend Monkey Orbs obtained in battle to raise affection level with one of the game 7 main heroines, you will need 3 monkey orbs to raise one affection level and you can only stack up to 7 of them until you need to inevitably spend them (a baffling design decision as 7 isn’t a multiple of 3 which triggers my game design OCD). Spending these orbs will trigger an h-scene and this is where my main point of contention with this game will rise.

Most of the h-scenes in this game, while the art is still relatively fantastic, are honestly pretty barebone, generic and often-time kinda boring but less so than the erotic nature of the scenes. It's what they tell about the characters that bothers me a little bit more. Simply put, I have nothing against character development and this game delivers plenty on that, the idea this time around is that Rance will try to actually make the character fall in love with him, this includes ofc 2 characters which throughout the course of the series has been (and understandably so) averse to Rance’s typical bullshit, these are Kanami and Shizuka.

The issue is that the game has no sense of progression whatsoever, Kanami’s whole arc in this game is realizing that the happiness and normalcy of a healthy relationship she’s been looking for this entire time lies within the arms of the most unlikely person that just happened to be the one constant in her life (Rance). The problem is that Kanami comes to this realization literally on the first tier of affection level and this bothers me because that means that for the rest of the game onward, Kanami’s entire character will just boil down to “I love Rance” with very little to no variation towards that sudden realization.

Kichikuou did something much more interesting with Kanami in my opinion where her good ending is killing off Rance and running away with a stranger who is ostensibly worse than him showing that Kanami is the kind of girl who to quote Chaos “is the kind of girl that will let a bad man ruin her life”.

While I know Orion decided against reusing Code in the modern title as he actually hates the character, a bit of tension and drama wouldn’t have killed to make this new development for her character work and not reduce her to a one-note anime archetype which she wasn’t really to begin with.

The only time where that arc goes anywhere interesting is during her heroine route during the last chapter of the game where Lia figures out about Kanami and Rance’s relationship and throws a tantrum which almost lead to a global geopolitical warfare, that was indeed pretty funny and also gave some insight towards Kanami and Lia’s relationship not only as contractors and employees but also as friends and I admit that the ending of that arc wasn’t as catastrophically bland as the build-up leading up to it so in the end I felt satisfied.

Shizuka on the other hand is a bit more complicated, now for the record at least she has an arc going on outside of getting courted by Rance (which is the main objective of the dude, turning his biggest hater into a potential love interest) which is to save her sister Nagi who’s been burning with revenge ever since the events of Rance VI. So at least this is an on-going plot within the main story which isn’t solely about how she will end-up falling for Rance.

But again the game lack any sense of progression, Shizuka in the other titles tend to be reserved for the end-game, since Shizuka holds genuine grudge against Rance and is often the one to call out on his bullshit and trying to protect her best friend Maria from being more miserable trying to chase this man. From an erotic fan POV, the build-up/Pay-off nature of finally being able to get on with Shizuka has always been amazing but nothing more than a punchline which is fine since Shizuka is better when she puts up some resistance but here…


They did some weird things, first off Shizuka can be h’d toward the mid-game and is weirdly assertive about doing it with Rance even if she does it under some conditions. This creates a bizarre loop where Shizuka actually reaches for Rance’s affection like she “gave up” somehow and I can’t help but feel like this is a blatant case of character regression. While in the other game Shizuka was wary of Rance, here Shizuka fills more of a typical tsundere role where she actually enjoys having sex with Rance but is too prideful to admit to having feelings for the guy. Eventually laxing out and seeing some form of comfort for her underlying father issues into him.

It’s certainly a surprising turn for the character who has been firmly opposed to Rance’s advance since 1990 but I don’t know if it’s really all that great of a development. In fact this is kind of a pattern I’m starting to notice with Yoroide’s take on Rance and the relationship he has with most of the other female party members.

While Rance still does a lot of horrible shit, he sees a bit less comeuppance for doing so and while Yoroide is pretty good at introducing and writing for new characters (and making funny as shit situation about them), he seems to still have a problem having a grasp on characters with years of history behind them. It seems like Yoroide is not really daring enough to explore character dynamics that isn’t just strictly “X loves Rance '' which tends to pack these characters into a comfortable little hole. In general, Yoroide with Rance IX seems to try and reach a comfortable position to prepare the terrain for X and doing so as quickly and inelegantly as possible rather than incorporating nuance into his writing style to make the overall group dynamic better.

In the end it works out since progression is still progression and I’m pretty sure X definitely delivers plenty on paying-off from that (and Yoroide isn’t the sole man on board to make all the decisions regarding the writing of the series) but it’s sad that he seems buttheaded on boiling down these characters to their mere essential stripping them of what once made them so special back when Tori was still at the helm of writing for the series.

Many characters in IX are just here to be here, Maria kinda just exist in the plot and outside of a few exchanges like her going “wow” at funky magic technology, she doesn’t seem to do much despite the fact that her technical knowledge of war weaponry could’ve given an edge to the group during the main conflict and the same could be said about all the characters who don’t have a dedicated Rance mode. Tilde is an unfortunate character as a reinterpretation of Raftalia from Kichikuou I find her relatively weak as a character (and the whole sexual training arc really doesn’t help make her character shine the way she should) even Senhime, I’m all for bringing back Senhime since she was one of my favorite unit in Sengoku but in this game she’s pretty one note and about as deep as a puddle (with the whole joke about her being that she really isn’t “all that deep” which admittedly is a funny plot-point).

Pigu and Miracle end up being the best addition to the cast because if anything Yoroide is good at coming up with wacky funny concepts for characters and rolling with it to the extreme, their h-scenes were extremely funny and goofy and actually felt like the type of h-scenes you expect from this series instead of very long and drawn out too vanilla for my taste smut. Miracle herself is just absolutely perfect in her role and her existence and lore surrounding her power promises some really interesting stuff for the near future of the series

I think Yoroide still struggles at truly “getting” the Rance series, while the plot of IX is genuinely engaging, well-paced and fun to go through with both serious and emotionally charged moments as well as moments of levity as it is first and foremost a parody RPG. Rance IX lacks that edge, that biting style of self-awareness and socio-political commentary than a game like Kichikuou, Rance VI or even Sengoku Rance seemed to have. Which makes a lot of the elements of this game hit way less than they should.

Combine this with the game's obsession with following the throughline of Mamatoto almost to a T and the story becomes weaker as a result because of some choice that could’ve made the story better (like incorporating Io into the story, like what the hell AliceSoft ?) just weren’t made in order to keep the game true to his inspiration. In the end it does work out because these little winks at Mamatoto help enhance the charm of the game but I wonder if it would’ve been better to let Rance IX's own ideas shine brighter.

In Quest many of Yoroide’s problem came from not being able to quite manage the subtle balance between comedy and seriousness leading to some baffling narrative design decision that made a lot of the stronger aspect of his style weaker as a result as well as leading to a more “flat” interpretation of the series setting and characters, something that definitely carries over in Rance IX which is a more serious plot in comparison.

Another addition I wasn’t super fond of were the bad endings, apparently this was added by Orion and I’m going to be totally honest their inclusion was done really poorly. Not only do these scenes rarely feel like a punishment for the players own incompetence (since the game is really easy, actually getting these bad endings are harder than missing them) taking away from the “bad” side of these endings.

But outside of Sheila’s and Miracle’s bad ending which genuinely are harrowing and depressing as shit in a character accurate way (more so the aftermath and context of the h-scenes than the actual scenes themselves mind you), most of them are just gratuitous and feel like shock value for the sake of shock value. I know the easy answer behind their inclusions is “Some people are just into that kinda shit” but while the series is very self-indulgent to a fault, this is just another degree of it that I find didn’t add anything especially when similar types of content were included much more gracefully in previous titles such as Kichikuou or Sengoku Rance.

Now I’ve been going on negatively ranting about some of the game weaker aspects so you might expect me to come out the other end saying that the game is trash and not worthy of the expectations I projected onto it and this would be a blatantly false assumption because the game still manages against all odds to be one of the best entry in the series, not in my Top 3 mind you but at least in my top 5.


If like me you’ve been following this series from the beginning to the end and have been waiting for some form of pay-off on some of the game more in-depth plot line then you will be served with this game from the returning characters finally getting some closure to their arc like Patton, Hunty or even Hubert to some stellar reimagining of Kichikuou characters (Lelyuokov, Aristoles and especially Rolex were re-written wonderfully in this modern iteration of their character, I’m glad Rolex doesn’t die too meaning that he’s here to stay and be a badass for Rance X which is great, I wish he was my d-) to a deeper exploration of the lore surrounding the magic sect that’s been laying dormant since Rance IV.

This is genuinely a fantastically ambitious title that will have you at the edge of your seat and always wanting more at every second of it. The different endings are glorious, pretty hype and while it is kinda stupid that the game hides some of its content on NG+ because AliceSoft just needs to be quirky or they would probably die from a stroke. This is still a well-polished, well written, exceptionally satisfying entry into the series.

Sheila is a great character and a great main heroines and with Sill lacking in the cast it was cool to have someone to counterbalance Rance’s antics even if she does so in a very different way and discover different things about herself in the end (despite the circumstances of their meeting and relationship still being relatively fucked up, this is still Rance we’re talking about), I already mentioned how Miracle although she comes off pretty randomly in the middle of the plot absolutely slays in every scene she’s in with her dumb chuuni antics that will give Rance’s manchild attitude a run for its money and in general I still love the writing enough to be entertained by it.

I also got genuinely emotional and hype at some scene in this game and if that isn’t a testament that Yoroide has it in him to make scene like this work in-spite of the weaker aspect of his style I mentioned earlier then I don’t know what more prove would you need to convince yourself that I actually much like all the other title love this game.

In general the heroine route which serves as the conclusion to the different heroine arcs more than makes up for the shortcomings of everything building up to them which are more of consequences of structure issues than actual writing issues ! My favorite one being Shizuka’s and Kanami’s ending but all of them (outside Sheila which was kinda unnecessary) had something to look forward to and get hype about.

AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON THAT TRUE END EPILOGUE ! I ABSOLUTELY KNEEL FROM ALL SIDES !

In the end, I will blame the weaker aspect of the game’s plot to Yoroide still needing to round up his skill a little bit, the structure being a bit awkward on the “affection” side of things and a general lack of bite that sadly won’t probably return to the series even in X since Tori isn’t her to provide on that front but it’s alright since a softer more straightforward style is probably what the series need leading up to its final entry !

I am VERY VERY excited for Rance X and can’t wait to see if all the fuzz and hype surrounding it was worth it (but 03 first ! And I also happen to be pretty excited in this one too)

Sonic Frontiers is a game I think will probably please more so the hardcore fans of Sonic than people like me who just casually check out these games either with fond nostalgia or pure ironic enjoyment.

I'm actually happy that at least on the writing department, Sonic is finally trying again, Sonic stories have never been amazing but the earlier 3D entry just scratch that autistic itch of camp and seriousness that can only be replicated either here or the Kingdom Hearts series.

No more meta cynicism, the game fully embraces its lore and try to haphazardly put all of it into a coherent timeline, which I'm ngl, I didn't even know most of these were meant to have any connection past characters returning.

The game as usual for Sonic games is a lot of interesting ideas held back by a lack of polish (especially in how rough the game feels to play) and questionable design decision that are specifically made to be anti-fun and seems to not understand the strength of its own gameplay loop.

Roaming around the open-world as Sonic feels good but then you realize that you're just speeding through a succession of randomly placed automated obstacle courses which quickly become repetitive and often hinders actual exploration (especially when you're thrown into a forced 2D section for no reasons like it happened oh so many times on the 3rd island) but the game goblin gamer brain effect tend to make these more fun on quick succession than they actually are.

The Cyberspace levels however are for the most part all fucking dogshit, the gameplay stops being responsive, you're nerfed in your abilities, most of them are insanely easy and the ones that aren't are an annoyance and to top it all of a bunch of them are recycled from previous Sonic games and all have the 4 same level skins plastered over them.

Some Cyberspace levels are taken from the Adventure era title and these just do not work with the wack ass physic and gameplay of these sections of the game and don't get me started on the fully 2D levels which makes me wonder why Sonic team is still fucking trying with these when so many people have complained about the 2D sections in all the previous titles that had them.

There's combat in this game, it's nothing remarkable, gets old very fast and makes you question why they even try to have that kind of gameplay that don't really fit in a Sonic game but aight

The bosses while nothing special and kinda wacky are actually the highlight of the game thanks to the absolutely banging music playing that just makes you feel like anime !

The music aren't Crush 40 levels of iconic but they have MGR vibe and I think every videogames in the world need MGR style vocal track it just improves everything

Why is the Final Boss an Ikaruga stage tho ?

Believe me, I LOVE Ikaruga but it was super out of place and could've been even more epic had they actually made a proper boss fight here

Other than that huh...

Game's fine

Spark 3 definitely clears it tho lol

Dark Souls : Timeless Classic or Outdated ?

Thinking back on it, 2011 was kind of an insane year for gaming as a whole, we were reaching near the end of the seventh generation of console which has been kinda dry in its first few years and suddenly boom, we got classic after classic after classic released on the daily (and Zelda Skyward Sword).

From Portal 2 to Skyrim to the Binding of Isaac and so much more, mostly games that are still fondly remembered to this day and are talked about as seminal classics of their respective genre.

But one of these games was always an outlier, a game that’s seemingly in opposition to every genre and gaming convention of that era, a game that made people re-discover the simple joy of struggling through a rigid learning curve and face the challenges ahead of a fundamentally flawed but terribly well executed experience. A masterpiece that invented an entire sub-genre onto its own due to how influential and iconic it became over the years.

That game is Dark Souls

Now for the longest time I have avoided the hype surrounding From Software’s title, it’s one of these gaping hole in my gaming culture that I never felt like catching up on especially now that this new subseries of SoulsBornKiroRing has so many outings all of them improving on the last and sweeping awards like a fat kids at the donut alley. I simply felt that I’ve missed out on the hype around these games and that I simply just wouldn’t get it and tbf it didn’t particularly look appealing either from the outside.

I’ve seen footages of Dark Souls and heard a bit about what it’s about but it never tempted me, I enjoy difficult games but games that pride themselves on being difficult because of some bullshit mechanics and hitboxes, Idk, the game felt like an overhyped jank fest that somehow caught on because gaming was becoming more and more casual friendly and people desperately needed that resistance (and I’d tell these people to go play some shmups instead).

But a week ago, a good friend of mine “Golden “Capybara” Warframe” which made me do the worst money investment in my life decided to make up for it by gifting me the 2018 remastered version of the original Dark Souls on Steam, suffice to say that the “remastered” aspect of the title completely went past by me because of my shit tier PC that manages to struggle running this game properly without lowering all the settings possible so I won’t be commenting too much on the technical aspect of the game since it would be unfair. Despite all this I rarely if ever experienced any issues aside from some FPS drops here and there that made some sections of the game more painful than they should have.

So I said, screw it, I was getting more and more curious about this From Software hype and now I had little to no excuses not to check it and fill that gap in my knowledge to satiate some weirdo sense of curiosity.

And the result was something deeply interesting that made me felt all kinds of contradicting emotions all clashing to understand what just happened.
I’m gonna cut straight to the chase here, a lot of games these days are so well loved and recognizable that you can have an idea of what to expect just by cultural osmosis alone. But not Dark Souls.

Yeah sure I knew about some stuff like the Asylum Demon, Tupac and Biggie and the crushing difficulty that’s haphazardly plastered on every marketing campaign for the game but I was nonetheless thoroughly surprised and in awe at the rest of the experience.

Dark Souls is, in all but age, an 80’s video game that somehow got lost in the year 2011 and I mean that in the best of ways and also in the worst. It’s a game that asks a lot from you and most importantly something that a lot of gamers have forgotten about “Patience”.

A lot of design choice in this game feels completely ass backward, not being able to pause the game at all, very old-school menu navigation that feels straight out of some PC Adventure game with tons of stats and numbers the game barely explains to you, enemies that never and I mean NEVER give up purchasing you so you’re almost always in a position of struggle, very little to no indication to what the next step of your quest is supposed to be and of course the absolute king of bullshit stuff, having to run back from the last checkpoint to retry a boss that you failed to fend off.

The game asks a lot from you right from the start and it can be pretty daunting especially since the game has a completely blind trust in its players to understand and work around some of its more cryptic game mechanics. But this blind trust actually enhances the experience.

Dark Souls is a game that’s super adaptable, no matter the build you’re going for there’s hardly any way to fuck you over and having to re-start your game since the game can easily be finished no matter what you’re going for and will simply require a different set of skills to get around.

By default, I went with the adventurer class, a pretty balanced build that’s more targeted towards dexterity so I naturally went for a full dexterity build which yes, limited my options of gear by a lot (since you also have to upgrade strength if you want to profit from using Katanas, Halberds and spears) and made me do less raw damage in favor of faster hits (well as fast as the game allows). My final weapon was the Painting Guardian Sword, a powerful blade that carried my ass through the second act of the game but also has a pitiful range forcing me to be really up close and personal toward the enemies or else I’ll miss my shots (which happened a lot).

I’ve barely used any ranged options because I simply couldn’t figure out how the spell system works and bows were complete ass.

And despite all of this and despite the fact that I feel like this build wasn’t really all that fun to use, it was nonetheless effective and I don’t know how my experience would’ve been had I gone for something more meaty like a fat roll strength build or a build based on magic and that approach to how much freedom the game allows you to have is simply fantastic.

In fact the freedom doesn’t just stop at the build you can have, it also starts with the way the game world is overall structured. Dark Souls isn’t an open-world game in the traditional sense but more in a Metroid sense, each area is connected to another one and you can reach for certain end-game places very early on and get stuck in the bone zone. This can come to the games detriment especially for new players who are going to learn the hard way that these skeletons are not meant to be fought at their current level but in the end nothing stops you from just going for it and even reach all the way down to the end of the catacombs and beyond if they truly feel like it.

The game doesn’t really give that much indication to where you’re supposed to go next, someone at the start of the game tells you about a prophecy, about a chosen undead that needs to do very specific things in order to progress like ringing some bells. But the game won’t tell you for the most part how to access these parts. In fact, something that’s magical about at least the early part of the game is how interconnected the world is, the game doesn’t have any sort of fast-travel system until the midway point. This forces you to memorize the layout of the world, unlock shortcuts, and find the fastest route to your next destination.

Heck at the start of the game, you can even start with something called “The Master Key” which allows you to open any doors in the game and skip huge chunks of it if you so desire (and you bet your ass I’m skipping Blight Town the next time I play through this game).

While the game can feel unwelcoming, cryptic and oftentimes disorienting especially towards blind new players, it compensates by making you re-discover the simple joy of struggling through a game, barely knowing what you’re getting into and being amazed by it at every second.

But in order to fully appreciate it, you first need to get past the first wall that’s the rigid learning curve of this game. To adapt yourself to its clunky sometimes counter-intuitive control schemes and mechanics and I can understand how for some people that was the end of the line and they never touched the game ever again after a first bad experience of not knowing what the fuck you’re supposed to do and dying endlessly trying to beat the game as fast as possible.

Dark Souls is a game of patience more than a game of pure skills if you ask me, this is probably gonna be the coldest of take but I don’t think Dark Souls is the most challenging game I’ve ever played in my life, I’m a Megaman player, I’m a shmup player, I’m an old-school kinda guy. I’ve played games with even steeper learning curves with even higher skill floors than what Dark Souls asked from me.

Sure if you compare Dark Souls to most of its contemporaries, it’s more demanding of its players than any games from that time period but I think that once you get into the “flow” of the game, you will be surprised at how manageable the entire thing is. But it will requires many tries.

I will say that the difficulty aspect disappointed me in one area : The Bosses

Bosses are one of Dark Souls most striking feature to a lot of people and I’m afraid that I can’t really say the same for myself as I found a lot of the bosses to be terribly unchallenging and unmemorable aside from one or two outliers these being ofc the meme fight against Drake and Josh at Anor Londo or some of the bosses from the DLC (namely Artorias and Manus).

The bosses aren’t scripted at all but they are more impressive than hard, usually they revolve around a very specific set of weaknesses to exploit, they’re more like puzzles than actual bosses, sometimes to their detriment (hi Bed of Chaos, I hate you). You can cheese a lot of them through exploiting their AI and vulnerability frame, it’s often more a matter of consistency and pattern recognition than a test of pure skill that’ll make you sweat buckets and I was surprised to see I’ve managed to defeat a lot of them on my first try. Sometimes even to a disappointing degree, like Sif which was a pretty mediocre fight despite all the cool lore surrounding him.

Most of the “hard” bosses in this game are the ones that are just fundamentally broken design wise, like the Capra demon who attacks you on frame 1 with his 2 schizophrenic dog in a tiny ass arena that was clearly not meant to host a boss fight or the CEO of bad boss design in the Bed of Chaos that decided that we’re now running on Super Mario Bros design philosophy for no reason at all and test your platforming skills in a game with no dedicated jump button (and forces you through a painfully long and boring slog through an unfinished alpha built of an area to get back to it every time you fail to get around its shitty hitboxes and holes).

While I probably wished bosses were a little more challenging, I can’t say they’re bad, I just probably came into this game with the wrong expectations. I actually struggled more inside of the levels than the bosses.

The levels are actually really good, for the most part (hi Blight Town), they feel more like Castlevania levels than something out of a 3D action game. You can’t just rush through these levels without a care in the world, you need to always be on your guard, ready for any traps and occasions to fuck you over especially with how your character controls.

Eventually after dying for the millionth time, you will download the areas and its layout in your mind and be better at it, but once again, the game is rarely ever unfair (except when it puts a trap you will fall into just for the fuck of it), when you die, all the strong ennemies you defeated never spawn again, you retain all of the pick-ups you took and any shortcut you unlocked will allow you to proceed to the next part faster and get back to where you die an claim back those sweet sweet souls.

The game manages to create such a personal connection between you and the world and it truly feels magical at times. The feeling of struggling for hours and then opening a shortcut in this game is absolutely immaculate, finding a bonfire to rest after struggling through a huge chunk of the levels is amazing too. And this feeling remains true for at least the entire first half of the game.

Yeah it’s time for my “hot take”, you can say.

While the first 25h of Dark Souls is an out of this world return to form in terms of gaming experience, the second half is a bit mediocre in comparison.

After Annor Londo, which is an area that could constitute a climax onto itself for how iconic it is, the game asks you to go defeat the 4 lords to unlock the door to the final boss. In the meantime, you can also partake in some sidequesting to discover new areas and fight secret bosses, complete NPC quests if possible and you also have access to a limited but still gratuitous fast-travel option.

On the plus side, the game still keeps its non-linearity, you can tackle most of these objectives in any order you want but unlike the first few hours of the game that felt like a web of environments weaved together into a coherent world, the second half of the game make this central web a hub for boss levels à la Megaman where you select a level, complete it and fight the boss at the end.

It’s already a bummer but that wouldn’t have been an issue if the levels in questions weren’t some of the weakest and most gimmicky areas of the whole game. The Catacombs are fun but annoying which is then followed by the Tomb of Giant which is JUST annoying, the Demon Ruins are fine but Izalith is outright just an unfinished area that barely works, New Londo more like I sure love having no check points and having to consume items to deal damage to foes (thank god for the shortcut) and finally the library which is actually quite a cool, unique and challenging area built more like a Zelda dungeon than any other levels but is then followed by the Crystal cave which is just annoying to traverse with its invisible platforms.

Even the optional areas, while really cool in concept often falls apart either because of their ridiculously low difficulty like Ariamis (except the DLC area but it’s mostly because of its bosses rather than its levels) or are visually stunning surprises that serves no purpose other than to exist (Ash Lake is one of the best environment in the game and it must be quite the experience if you happen to find it by accident but the reward for it is just a covenant and I don’t know what those are for aside from PVP which I deactivated).

I’m not saying these levels are bad by any mean (well except Izalith, that shit is just an anomaly) and trying out new stuff was necessary as to not make the game formulaic and keep the sentiment of surprise alive but I’m afraid the game never quite was able to recapture the magic and wonder of the first half and the padding felt real during this second half that felt more like a check-list than a proper well constructed adventure.

Of course a lot of design choices, even the bad ones, are pretty deliberate. I complained about Ariamis being too easy but it was probably on purpose since it’s meant to be a once peaceful land desperately trying to stop you from desecrating their deity.

In fact I’ve probably missed a lot of content, especially on the NPC Quest side of things as the indication towards them wasn’t always clear and could be easily fucked over.

In fact this small complaint about NPC quest is a good gateway to one of the most interestingly underrated parts of the game, its story or more specifically its narrative design.

When I said that Dark Souls is a modern take on 80’s game design sensibility, it also shines through its story-telling which is very indirect at times subtle and voluntarily misleading. Like an NES game, you’re given a brief resumé of what happened to the world before your awakening.

This is all given without proper context but help sets the stage of what world you’re about to traverse, very quickly you start learning about a prophecy and are tasked to ring bells and then reach Anor Londo the city of god. Like an old RPG, the game gives you a context and an objective to your quest but no real purpose outside of maybe saving the world and god knows does this world need saving.

Lordran is a depressing, moody place, where life is barely hanging on a thread or flourished in completely different ways. Most humans you meet define themselves as undead and you are in fact an undead that can turn human for a brief moment thanks to an item called “humanity”.

Everyone you meet is searching for a sense of purpose in a desolate hopeless world, guided by the prophecy and its promises of glory. You know very little of this place and will likely come out the other end of the tunnel as confused as you first were and that’s because the story is very discrete outside of those few exchanges and tips that feels more like NPC guiding you through the game with helpful tips, the way the old men did in Zelda 1.

And that’s the fascinating part about old RPG’s and this game’s narrative, back then games having little story to contextualize and give purpose to your action was a common practice due to the limitation of consoles at the time not allowing for well-developed narrative both in visual and written form because of memory limitation. So they had to find a work-around to tell you a story and guide you through the game, to give your quest a purpose on top of a goal.

When it comes to stories in game, I tend to have grown a bigger and bigger appreciation for this type of narrative. In fact Dark Souls reminded me of Quintet games which often disguised a quest with grand purpose behind a veil of melancholy filled moments. Dark Souls sent you on a quest to fulfill a prophecy, you can take it at face value and rush to the end of the game never questioning anything or realize that something feels off about all of this.

The game manipulates you into doing things not because you want to but because you have to, becoming a tool to the hand of fate that guides this entire narrative. You have to rekindle the flame of life to save everyone but is there even a world left to save ? Or are you simply just delaying the inevitable ? Are you just a tool for the gods to use or the one that will break the cycle and bring forth a new age with it ?

The game gives you very subtle hints through item descriptions, environmental storytelling, bosses, NPC dialogues and occasionally cutscenes about the truth of this world. Heck you might even go the entire game without learning about the truth behind this quest of yours, since the dialogue explaining all of this is hidden behind a very ass-backward and cryptic ways of acquiring it (telling you to go off the beaten path and start defeating one of the lord before you’re even told to do so).
During all of this, you will be tempted to give up, pushed to your absolute limit. Is there even a purpose to this eternal occurrence of death and rebirth ? Those who give up are turned into husks called Hollows which is a metaphor for the flame inside of you dying out because you lost your purpose and gave up which is in a meta way represent you the player who could stop playing at any point and be amongst those who failed to fulfill the prophecy and lost their purpose along the way.

Dark Souls is a beautifully tragic tale that’s not afraid to make you face its inner darkness and invites you to embrace it and face the consequences. And no matter what the end result is, there is not a guarantee of a good ending but the journey through that ending fills you with a sense of accomplishment whether that accomplishment is empty or not that’s up to you to decide at the end of the day.

Giving up on Dark Souls is an admission of defeat, not giving up is an opportunity to change things up even through the darkness that lies ahead. That’s why the so-called difficulty of Dark Souls and its exigence is such an essential part of the experience, not just because of balancing reasons, it’s just that making the game easier, more accessible would just take away that meaning, that purpose. This is true game-design, a game that knows what medium it uses and uses it perfectly to tell it while offering a decent enough challenge for those ready to take it.

Dark Souls is not a perfect game, it’s a flawed game, a game that will make you consider giving it up at any point for many reasons either because you just can’t keep up with it difficulty wise or because of the fatigue caused by the second half dubious pacing and design decision. In fact maybe the second-half of the game being so thoroughly below the first was on purpose, the fact that it feels like a check-list means you somehow forgot or even questioning why you’re doing all of this and for what purpose. Is your curiosity gonna make you keep going or will you simply be done with it ? It may not have been intentional but that would make sense in the end wouldn’t it ?

The fact this game manages to catch mainstream appeal and launch an entire genre onto itself is kind of a miracle. Because if anything the game feels like peeking through a parallel universe where action-games or video-game in general have taken another path, where they keep their root firmly planted to the ground and expanded them downward to blossom into an ancient wise tree instead of branching outward and reach the sunlight by incorporating more elements from other medium and abandoning its uniqueness along the way.

Dark Souls might not be for you and frankly that’s alright. Don’t let the hype persuade you, this game is made for a niche audience and it was mostly an accident that it became so widespread to this day.

But I feel it’s game that you should try at least once in your life, just to get a feel for it, it’s not even that absurdly long, capping at 50h which is a relatively medium length for an RPG of this kind and could’ve been shorter if not for all the incessant runbacks and other dubious checkpoint placement. Had I been younger playing this, I would’ve fallen in love with it thoroughly but suffice to say that despite all this the game didn’t leave me indifferent either, it truly is a timeless classic and one that I hope will still be fondly remembered for years to come.

IF YOU ARE NOT A FAN OF THE WORDS

-PEAK FICTION
-GOAT
-RAW
-FIRE

DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME BECAUSE THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT YOU'LL GET

While the first 2 games were average as fuck and full of issues from pacing to badly coded physics and dull combat, this game improves on literally every aspect established by Spark 2 and super-charged it to eleven.

The levels are what I would consider peak SA2 like levels mixing elements of momentum coupled with moderate boost and vastly open area with little to no walls to hold you from just going batshit insane on platforming at high speed while exploring the levels for hidden secrets and shortcuts.

Most the games have lots of variety both in their mechanics and environnement making so not a single moment of this game feels dull (except of a few places like the space level but that was the only low point for me)

The combat has been significantly improved and is now actually fun to mess-around in, I still think it's kind of "too much" and not as fun as just zooming through levels without a care in the world but heh, if they're really adamant on making this a core aspect of the franchise then so be it.

And on top of that they finally figured out how the physics should work and no moments were ruined by the physics doing bullshit, everything work as intended.

This game is to Sonic Adventure fan what Sonic Mania was 2D Sonic, a game which perfected a formula and made it more than the sum of its parts by getting rid of the awkward stuff and focusing on the right one.

The soundtrack is also pure cum in music form and the plot while not super present this time around goes places I never expected to during the final chapter and it's probably the most batshit insane plot I've seen in a platformer since Klonoa 2 or Mega Man Zero maybe

All in all, this is a game I absolutely recommend for those looking for a fun high speed action game with tons of additional challenges for completionist on top (and as a bonus, all the levels from Spark 2 have been recreated and made really good thanks to tweak in the physic)

A generous game, made by passionate people who aimed for greatness and achieved it flawlessly

Slightly better than the first 1 because the game is faster and more well paced and we definitely needed more Sonic Advenutre Clone in these days and age.

The game perfectly recapture all the right sensation from these games with tons of room to maneuver around at high speed with tons of branching paths and verticality as well as cool short cut, the game might be fun to speedrun and the game indeed does reward you for completing stage as fast as possible.

Sadly it reproduces SA a bit too well in all of its glory and all of its horror, the jank is everywhere especially in the wall climbing and looping segment which can get truly irritating as you have barely control over them and fucking up once means a certain death which gets slightly annoying during the more spectacle oriented segment when they don't work properly

That tower level can suck my nuts, the combat system still feels like an after thought that I just didn't bother with outside of boss battles which outside of having a great music sadly are all absolutely goddawful to actually fight and clearly the weakest part of the game

Overall, it's alright, tons of room for improvement and I heard Spark 3 finally hits the series strike.

Pretty average 2D Sonic clone that far overstays its welcome, it can sometimes be fun but the levels are often way too long and confusing to navigate any Jester Power that isn't the Edgy transformation make the late game platforming painfully unfun especially with how slippery Spark gets (and they expect you to do precise platforming with this control scheme).

Ennemies are for the most part a bother and they truly went overkill in some of the later areas by adding a shit load of them and especially some that take multiple hit, I know they're going for a different experience than base 2D Sonic but there's a reason 2D Sonic and combat don't really go well together.

I didn't bother finishing Fark mode, the parry mechanic is super janky and the reduced health made every boss encounter and areas full of ennemies and hazard a slog and a pain to go through.

However, it's not totally awful and there's some fun to be had here with the different transformations and the early parts of the game. There's also some cool level gimmick

Good to pass the time but nothing much behind it aside from the sick ass OST