EtG is a peculiar title for me to collect my thoughts on because it's simultaneously a lot of things i hate about art and corporatism while also being kinda just fun to play.

the gungeon "series" has no particularly important continuity or overarching lore, it is a vessel for you to shove "references" into (1-1 things from other media, sometimes changed enough to prevent an issue of copyright from coming into play, sometimes unadapted), similar to the setting of Dead By Daylight, and while i think it has a little more going on in terms of substance, Dead Cells makes me feel the same way. if there's anything cool in Gungeon, you can bet your ass there's a trivia bulletpoint on the fandom wiki somewhere that tells you how it's actually just from another piece of media as a derivative. i do not like this very much, and i am not at all a fan of getting keys jangled in my face so that i get the pavlovian response of "oh, like a car! i see!" and clap.

on the flipside, though, this is genuinely a fun roguelike that has a lot of design decisions that i think are rad and fun, simultaneously being difficult with genuine resource management most of the time while also being willing to give you a god run for the lulz from one or two pickups, which is something i think other roguelikes attempt to strike a tenuous balance of which can ultimately make them feel unsatisfying, middling, or oddly consistent for a roguelike, with Risk of Rain 2 coming to mind.

i feel bad for getting attached to any characters in particular, i think some are cool though in simultanea i know it's either a basic checklist trope quota or it's a pull from another piece of media. comparing it to a roguelike i don't even particularly like playing, Isaac, which while occasionally containing references, goes in & goes hard for its setting. i remember a ton of things about Isaac even though when it comes to the question of "would you play this again? even if someone forked out like 50$ for you to do it, would you actually have any fun playing it?" i would answer "no." in regards to isaac, but yes to gungeon. it's strange.

overall i don't know how to feel about it. i would agree with someone dismissing it as "mid", though wouldn't disagree with someone saying "it's quite good". i don't entirely regret getting 100% on it because i did have fun, but i also bring up Gungeon as an example of what you should never do with your setting unless you are completely devoid of passion and love for planet earth. yet it's also not a game like Blazblue, where i can say "some parts of this are genuinely some of the sickest things ever created and the rest of it blows ass", because it is not a game of "best evers", nor is it necessarily a game of "worst evers", it just purely goes neutral in all things. peculiar game. soulslike.

yeah, this one's the good one. like the other unique titles Fromsoft has made, like Bloodborne, Sekiro, Armored Core, & etc.

they care about it more when it's not just a brand thing (unless it's elden ring, apparently. though that was off of someone else's brand of george rr martin miyazaki open world to a degree. so... shrug). shocker. take it to the bank.

overall optimal design of a """souls""" style game due to prioritizing bosses that have a "bit" or gimmick as opposed to just being Very Aggressive Beastthing or Dude In Armor W/ Sword as a lot of bosses in the DS series (especially ones anyone has any actual acclaim for as "good design") are. lets the fact that it's a good RPG shine more over being a video game that's fodder for a youtube commenter to be elitist about. as said in prior log, uses everything that gets repurposed in DS1 or later entries more impactfully than DS1 uses it, overall, despite being a shorter experience. the tightknittedness of its package comes together to make a game that doesn't feel as crunched, unfinished, or rushed, though, which is nice (not that it's the fault of developers' in the case of dark souls 1, please force game companies to let their workers unionize and not be restricted to fiscal quarters and publisher-demanded release dates for their arts & works to be finished).

i like it. i'll play it again soon. it's good.

!! this review is for the Cinders mod but i also don't like Dark Souls III very much !!

this overhaul mod has been highly appraised and it is the pinnacle of mid. not even. it's a little bit actively offensive if you actually care about the series more than an influencer or the same level of engagement a Built by Gamers podcast has.

re-using assets again will surely make a game better, right, i mean they're good assets. unfortunately using things that get one-and-done'd with importance and weight to their appearance 4-5 times on a NG playthrough and you being extremely encouraged to re-fight bosses several times to get things from them actually hard detracts from the game in general despite a majority of it being technically ignoreable

some of the balance changes and changes to progression were good, but many made you overpowered or with an easy way to farm your way into a position that would otherwise take until endgame (which is both good and bad, because dark souls 3's intense linearity and overall snooze-inducing progression path make it so that doing anything with variety early is nigh-impossible and if it is possible it's heavily ineffective).

if you did like elden ring a lot, this is right up your alley, though. i don't think this game would've been worth me getting softbanned were i to use them on live servers, i don't think it was worth hosting a custom server for in order to play with a friend, and i definitely don't think it deserved the excitement i had for it early on. every "added boss" is an offensive-to-look-at asset re-use, all the additional added lore and even item descriptions are mid as fuck and sound like something i'd write when i was fourteen and wanted to wannabe write mod dialogue or other creative projects for the "souls" series when i was still an obnoxious teenager who said "git gud" and was generally unpleasant; very little of this content is worth installing at all for, and it genuinely detracts from a game i already am indifferent about at best overall.

play with a randomizer or something if you want a fresh experience.

Uh oh, I sure hope this doesn't shake the foundation of why i find things important to me cool!

i'm not done with Demon's Souls yet, and i'll come back to this review later, potentially. but i primarily began playing the 2009 original on PC instead of borrowing a family member's ps5 and playing the remaster due to the (relatively scarce) opinions that the Demon's Souls PS5 remake is, in no small way, inferior to the original in terms of atmosphere and narrative cohesiveness, in addition to being an overall downgrade of aesthetics despite much higher texture and model fidelity.

After playing Demon's souls for about 6 hours, I can safely say that it's a correct assessment. Of the "souls" series, which i'm very obsessed with, I did not like Elden Ring for reasons that took me a 40 page google doc to surmise and found few people to be relating to, whereas 3 wanes on me significantly (and an in-joke with a friend involves strawmanning almost every plot point we come across with "Do you guys remember... Solaire?" which does not feel like reductiveness in the vast majority of scenarios) and 1 and 2 are great with caveats. Demon's, aside from other "original" properties like Sekiro, Bloodborne, as well as King's Field & Armored Core; is easily, from the gate, first-hour recognizable when you consider the timeline of releases as the most inspired and passionately cared for title. It oozes, it leaks, and it drowns in its innovations and unrelenting desire to stick with its uniqueness for the time. i adore it.

in comparison to the remake, however, there's a great video titled "The Demon's Souls remake is inferior to the original" by Ratatoskr that roughly surmises my views on it after getting more angles to come to a conclusion for myself; and the video made me consider playing the original then the remake in sequence, which was my plan originally. unfortunately, the playstation five, having no games, no backwards compatibility, and no digital access to a vast majority of their earlier library resulted in the 2009 DeS not being available through Playstation Now or any other service, unless i decided to purchase both the original hardware and a likely-scalped-price copy. I decided on using another method to play it, as while i think a PS4 is potentially worth buying for the purposes of being a "Bloodborne machine" and a couple other titles (namely, Infamous: Second Son) i don't think there's any merit to me forking out the lowball 300$~ to do so.

one last thing which i mean to expand upon which i mentioned at the start of this review was that it feels negatively impactful to other things foundational to me, which is true. after finally having played "The Original" after all my years of assuming i'd never get to touch it due to console exclusivity, i can now see how much re-use Dark Souls 1 takes from Demon's Souls; and after a replay of the former earlier this year with a friend, the shallowness of it begins to creep up on me.

Worse still is that i feel like Demon's uses all of the repurposed assets that DS1 takes better than DS1 does. I'm particularly passionate about this subject as it's the largest reason why i can't stand any part of Elden Ring and DS3 wanes on me, whereas i appreciate DS2's uniqueness and desire to do a full overhaul of its core. It also results in an overall better feeling of "cohesive and consummate RPG" instead of "hard game" like DS1 feels & felt to me from the get-go, with any "tools" being "unlocked" feeling like pieces of a puzzle i'm recieving, such as your first available bow or crossbow. Bosses are also handled in a way that much better fits the narrative, being difficult, but largely centric around puzzles instead of an approximation of a PVP fight. Bosses, for the most part, have their "Bits", which are all very interesting and unique and make them wholly memorable even if their design theming or plot relevance is lacking (something that, regardless of how i feel about the overall game, is very apparent in parts of every single game in the series). The animation can look a bit stiffer, have less total frames, or be a bit jerky, but at the same time their keyframing is much better, they feel more satisfying and varied to use even if the total number of animations for, say, a weapon are lower than in DS1. I would use Critical Attack (Backstab & Riposte) animations as the prime example for this; comparing DS1's uneventful albeit dramatic snap-into-place where the opponent stands perfectly still in the middle of the fight; or the riposte animation for anything that doesn't directly puncture someone wherein you lightly grasp their shoulder to keep them standing, while they again kinda just stand there without having looked particularly bothered by the initial act of being parried. Demon's uses what later became Hornet Ring animations, yet they also feel different. Their damage is distributed immediately instead of across multiple hits, yet they also manage to feel better than any later iteration of said animation despite that. DS2's critical animations and critical system overall are great, and i'm sure you don't need me to tell you that if you've looked at them before, but they are very fuckin cool, and reasonably it makes more sense that someone's reaction to getting their attack's momentum reversed towards them when they're doing a big, flashy swing or are using a colossal weapon that depends on weight - would be a complete loss of balance as you land on your back.

anywho, game's good, extremely evidently from start to finish. i will never forgive the remake team for, in addition to all their other bad changes and arguable downgrades, not fixing the Northern Limits archstone and not adding any new content to a game in a series notorious for having almost-done almost-implemented content that couldn't quite make it for release besides a new armor set which doesn't matter. Watch Lance Mcdonald's video on the Northern Limits if you want to feel a supreme and unfathomable yearning (assuming you're as attached to this series as i am). thanks for your time.

man in suit shaking head side to side gif captioned "It's Mid..."

longform, Friends vs. Friends is a game that by all accounts should be good. many people i know - including myself very early into release, and hordes of people that i don't know personally - seem to have been gaslit into thinking it's good, because like, by all means, right?

unfortunately, FvF is a gimmick shooter with a gimmick that barely matters, it never really being used in a way that's fun for either party; and its gunplay as a first person shooter is incredibly bland even taking its gimmick into account when it's utilized at its best.

the art direction is good. the intangible nature of the "vibe" is well done, and in concept "mario party shooter" SOUNDS like it should be fun, absolutely. but really, you're better off getting this experience from either Half-Life Deathmatch than trying to stockholm syndrome (yes, i know that's a falsely rooted term) yourself into thinking that the game will become good or that you will become good at it after long enough.

"the gunplay is boring, bland, and has nothing going on in it" is a tell-all statement that i'm not sure i can elaborate on. every gun feels without solid punch, and in the occasions that you do get to use any different piece of weaponry, they all feel... kind of the same. it reminds me of my issues with how Deep Rock Galactic firearms feel, wherein their "punch" in animation, sound effect, and hit registration, as well as overall numbers, don't make them "fun to shoot". every character's silhouette, movement, and animations are all homogenous (not even accounting for skins) and feel like a developer placeholder Unity asset or something, like you'd see in pre-release 3 years before the game comes out which makes you go "wow, i'm glad it became good, later."

the gimmick is intended to be the cards - "mario party FPS". issue being is that cards are somewhat of a rare resource, they take actual millenia to grind out, "grinding out" the cards is done through gacha pulls so you can't pick which ones you'd want, often making your inventory cluttered with uninteresting and usually ineffective cards that don't do anything nor are they silly, and finally, but most importantly: nothing any card does is actually interesting.

i truly want to convince myself that there's something going on with one of them, but really because the "actual game" (being, the gunplay, where you move around with WASD and shoot people by clicking on them with your mouse) is so stiff and stale, it feels like... i don't even know how to describe it, like i'm playing as a footman trash unit in an RTS or Clash of Clans or something, and my benevolent ruler just gave me a buff-boon that either makes me win or lets me contest with the opponent's buff-boon. not that it's done in any kind of an interesting way where my input on clicking on the opponent feels like, important. or fun.

all of the maps are also boring. some of them have a level of base aesthetic interest, but i, in 100% honesty, have not played a first person shooter video game, indie, AAA, or anything in between, that has had as weak of a stage roster as this game, especially on release. some are stylized well in artstyle, sure, but none are even stimulating to play on. Screencheat and Ratz Instagib are other examples of "gimmick party shooters" which have a set of (mostly) memorable and stylized stages, but they're very dynamic and fun to move around and shoot in. cannot say the same for even a single choke in FvF.

having a full cast of NB furry creatures with kinda fun designs is cool, but they're also not distinct, and their gameplay differences from eachother are incredibly minor, only being that character's signature or passive card, which is always incredibly boring. 20% more damage. start with a golden retexture of the starting glock that like shoots a little faster and has 3 more bullets in the clip. be a bit more accurate. it's so fuckin' boringggg.

i hope the art directors can improve a bit more on diversifying their silhouettes and making their personalities a bit more punchy, and then move on to better things. i also hope the victims of gaslighting who think/thought this game was fun stop leaving flowers on its' grave every weekend and can move on.

Darkwood is good as hell. you'll be able to tell, yourself, if you get an hour or so into it, but i assure you, your only thoughts will be "oh, this is One Of The Good Ones". it's Got It. the intangible something, the quality, the care, the passion.

now, going into it, one's initial impression would be "but... i'm not super into (x)". and, lemme tell you: i know. i felt and thought the same going in; and then it simply kicked enough ass that i kept playing it. and then i did it three times over.

horror? weird top-down angle? inventory or base management? extreme body horror? punishing, untelegraphed decisions with NPCs and the like which can have permanent and undo-able ramifications about characters or things you care about for the rest of the playthrough? didn't think i'd like any of it, either. was skeptical. but it looked too cool to not peer into, at least a little...

and now, i love it. so, my testament: you're probably going to feel the same.

Vegaful is a solid contender for a top 3 LISA fangame. it's not a perfect project, and as of my writing, they're still working on updating and overhauling it from scratch for the fourth (or so) time; but even still, you can tell that they really want to build more upon a world they care about dearly and they succeed at doing so very well. i'm attached to this project and most everything about it.

Vegaful has a special case wherein i don't really feel like there's a bad or slog-y part of the world or game in general; and it's intangible and can't be defined in a rhetoric i can put on other games as a basis but it just feels nice to exist in it for a while. not quite like you're "home", as a feeling, but like you're in a flawed, mixed world, yet one you're also comfortable with being in, and very excited to explore and indulge.

Vegaful's comprised of a lot of moving parts that don't get put on the backburner for so long as to let you forget about them yet also don't segment parts of it into "The (topic) Arc/Area", there is a vibrant sense of interconnectivity and community between different groups and even sovereign individuals. while this version has some issues in making the protagonist's speech incomprehensible babble, whereas later versions try to specify or correct this as "he's talking, he's just very blunt and stupid.", generally i just kind of enjoy listening to people talk in this, with a minimized sense of "oh, this is a meme" as with some things from Painful or the intense hostility or poetic obtuseness that comes from Pointless' beautiful writing. while i value said game's writing very greatly, here it feels like genuine conversations with humans. weirdos, yes, but ones i feel "the same as" to a degree.

the music is the heaviest hitter for me. it can make me very sad, almost too sad to fully return to at times, knowing that one of the musical artists deleted all of their work & disappeared themselves, and won't presumably make things for the public eye again. i really enjoy space/admiral hippie's tracks, and every one speaks to their dearest, deepest emotions, i feel, even if they didn't entirely intend for it to. vegaful, i feel, is a good resting place for them, of sorts. any given track is given the prominence and, "respect", i guess, in the scenarios they're chosen for, and none feel misused or overdone as a "hey, i guess this is free reign to use, now" thing. Whiteout still makes me wanna cry sometimes.

for those familiar with other fangames, i think the party dynamics are very fun. at least in later versions (Sample Update) i think Jerry, Johnny and Gary are distinct individuals that bounce off of eachother quite well and, in gameplay, offer a unique combat experience that feels entirely fresh from a lot of RPGmaker combat.

if you're a general rpgmaker or LISA enthusiast and this hasn't been on your list, you must give it a try. i implore of you. Pointless and Timeless are also excellent projects for different reasons, so give those a whirl if you ever have a moment (and are willing to get a new hyperfixation or three).

hypest it's ever been. there is no reason to money match this game, but it remains the absolute sickest. audio design is horribly loud like +R and SBX. virtually every character is capable of killing off of one touch. bottom tiers are the worst ever, and top tiers are the best ever.

this game was hype enough to make me sit through the entirety of Hokuto No Ken, a show notorious for being the forefather of Shounen Filler where it's just protag goes to town to beat up a nameless throwaway baddie to put off the actual plot for #sales. i appreciated it and am attached to it even throughout its obvious flaws, mostly because HNK (arcade) was such a cool final realization of the show's actiony elements.

king of shitty fighting games. never to be dethroned. it will never be more hype than HnK.

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile was made by an alternate universe version of me that knew exactly what i'd like; is my leading theory on how this lil' thing came to be

one of the best character action games that's been released just kinda Overall. Ska studios makes good-ass shit with very intriguing settings, a lovely to look at artstyle, and the right amount of teeth-kicking "do this over and over until you're good at it, or leave" overwhelming, difficult design to it. this is no exception, and i think it's a greater testament to their games overall than Salt & Sanctuary just because it's so them.

i for one also specifically like taking any given opportunity to RELISH in full-package scene & emo aesthetics. this game occupies the same ten-or-however old girl in me that'd want a gory, unabashedly edgy, monochromatic kill-murder game about you butchering dudes in suits. integral to healing the inner child of me that didn't get to experience that as much as they wanted to, and i'm always here for it.

from the perspective of game design specifically, i think this is one of the only games that Gets It in regards to designing your protagonist to be weighted towards a specific style of sorts rather than being an all-rounder or a zippity, fast little shit, which are archetypes i can appreciate but it leaves a severe lackage of, in fighty game terms, Grappler or big heavybody lumbering shits. the only games i think really get the feeling of that nebulous concept "right" are Vampire Smile's Yuki & DMC4's Nero.

it is occasionally not about doing an anime combo as you port around the screen all the time. sometimes it is about grabbing a small wastrel and making them into a new carpet and/or wallpaper. no substitutes are sufficient.

The entirety of the BlazBlue series, for me, is describable as an "it sucks, but I like it" interest.

I do appreciate many of its unique bits very greatly, but for everything interesting in it, if you want to actually experience it wholesale - as in, go through the story, play matches against random players, know all the quirks of everyone in the cast - there's going to be a lot of "wow, this blows. at least there are good parts of it, and said good parts are really good."

Between game balance itself (though i'm one to enjoy "actively shitty" games, especially in the fighting game spectrum of things), design of characters, quality of writing in the entire spectrum that entails, and many more - a lot of it can be surmised in "really cool shit worn down by Anime Bullshit", for a lack of a less reductive term. I haven't watched Kill La Kill because nothing about what i've heard or seen has been at all enticing, but people recommend that show under similar merits that i recommend BlazBlue.

Calamity Trigger's still my favourite in terms of how it makes me feel even though that game's a little actively offensive in terms of balance. The entire series soundtrack kicks ass and has very little in terms of "actually bad" tracks, the only ones i really go "ugh, i wish it rolled a different song on random select" are the ones with vocals that i don't like (typically game opening/credit songs performed by pop artists).

this is, full stop, one of the better rhythm games i've ever played. i have minimal complaints about the charting, how good the inputs feel, and the overall quality of the music and aesthetics. i come back to it very often for an example of "a good ass rhythm game, doesn't rely on a single gimmick to stand out".

achieving "progression" in it can be pretty grueling, though. more accessible rhythm games will allow you to get by with a number of mistakes, or expect you to be making about as many mistakes as you would make correct note hits (ala more recent & popular titles, like Friday Night Funkin).

SCGMD4 will pretty brute-force tell you "hit 1000 notes in a row on this song before you're able to progress more." or "beat this boss which makes the chart play 20% faster than the song and can only have their health bar damaged if you're at a perfect (10x) combo modifier (meaning no mistakes)". it's got that flash game roughness, but is all the more beautiful for it.

Akane is an underappreciated little thing. I care for it dearly.

Largely you can tell the developers cared that they were making Akane even in aspects that aren't fully fleshed out, such as the story or physical presentation of the world: it isn't the most illustrious game in terms of budget, yet it still doesn't stutter or falter in delivering what it wants to.

It's a cute little package. The sound design & soundtrack are excellent and do a great job at vacuum-sealing the aesthetic of putting you in a cyberpunk murder-trance.

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”