First of all. Petty grievance: This game does not have controller support so it's kinda ass to play on a Steamdeck, not helped by the fact that it, for some reason, also sets the device on fire.

Anyhow.

This is an allright shop simulator that builds on the Atelier/Recettear formula. I can't be too mean about it because, yeah, it's a small mechanically dense game that makes a good use of deadlines and scheduling mechanics to create stressful situations and force the player to use clever planning to overcome them. Like, on paper, this is great. The systems work well togheter and there's enough information available to the player for them to actively plan for their goals (the early Atelier games Really struggled with that bit).

I say on paper, because practically I don't know how much the mechanical density adds to the experience. Is this game really more fun for having a deckbuilding game as its haggling mechanic?

Like, there's a lot to this game, and I feel the same goal could have been achieved with... less than a lot.

Also the pacing feels Very quick at times, even compared to something like Atelier Marie. I don't think that's necessarely bad, but didn't fully work for me (Like, games like Atelier or Recettear use long rpg sections as a way to slow down the pace and add an element of real time waiting to the shop-simulation aspect. I like that choice a lot structurally, but I can definitelly see the appeal of a shop-simulation game that cuts down on the rpg faff. It just didn't quite work for me this time around).

It's fun. But again, I think I like it more in theory than when actually playing it.

The fundamental flaw of TEW, and all TEW-like games, is that they seem to basically misunderstand what makes Wrestling exciting and appealing.

To put it simply, when I want to play a wrestling company-simulator, I don't want to do so because I crave an accurate business simulation featuring wall of texts of sports stat. But I want to do so because, at its core, I want a systemic framework within which to play/experience fanfiction.

I love spreadsheet simulators, and TEW is an impressive spreadsheet simulator. But again, I'm not sure a spreadsheet simulator is a great medium for wrestling.

TEW2020 is the closest thing available on the market to a game I would really love to play, but sadly, it is not that game (She said, having played the previous versions for 100+ hours back in uni)

I'm not gonna go through each of these singularly, but yeah. I actually read/played the Sorcery! books a couple of years ago, and they're really fun! Some of the game-y-ers game books, with their prose being often short and to the point, a fun enough combat system and a bunch of interesting decision points.

The inkle adaptation of the books does everything that it should do. Streamlines some game-book-isms, adds some simple yet pretty visuals, and re-structures the combat system to be more video-game-y. All of the addition and changes not only still convey the source material perfectly, but actually end up elevating it somewhat.

Yeah, this is fun. The original books are pretty good and this adaptation is actually a great way to play them. (I would never suggest skipping the source material, because, remember: "True Gamers™ always play games in their original historical context, so that they can have a real and not corporately-curated knowledge of the history of the medium". But y'know, after you've read the original book once, this is the best way to replay them!)

Although I got the Steam version that technically collects the first and second one, and I'm struggling to figure out how to play the second one... that's probably just me being dumb tho.

This is an incredibly frustrating game. I wish I could sing the praise of it, cause yeah, the writing is fluffy and cute and pleasant, the combat is fun and interesting (if a bit easy in most places), the UI does some cool Persona-like stuff, and the whole game is full of that kind of low-budget ps360-era plucky jank that gives it a specific underdog charm... problem is it. just. won't. stop. being. extremely. gross. about. its. high-schooler. protagonists.

Like, seriously. I love the low-stakes high-school shenanigans Blue Reflection is built around. They're pleasant and nice and as well written as something like that can be. But it very much grosses me out when the camera won't stop staring at these kids' asses, while said high-school shenanigans take place.

It would already be eye-rolly and off-tone if the characters were adults. But it's just gross when they're high school students. Especially because this is not just a couple of unfortunate shots, the whole game is filled with SO much of this bullshit. It's gross and creepy and bad and honestly infuriating, because it just gets in the way of what would, otherwise be, a fairly pleasant game.

I dunno, I just want a fun fluffy low-stake magical girl jrpg that's not constantly trying to gross me out and embarrass me for liking it.

This game makes me sad.

A little RpgMaker-adventure-core queer-adjacent game. Really stylish. Fun use of different art styles.

Could have had a more dramatic/climactic ending. The game basically turns to the camera and goes "Coralina. Will return...", and then the thing just ends.

Looking forward to the second episode tho, I dig the general vibes.

Couple of thoughts:

1. This is the classic "do a thing to gain money -> use money to do a thing" game loop, with an evolving central hub setup through which you slowly unlock new features. This stuff is always enjoyable and I'm surprised more modern low to mid budget games don't use these tropes more. I generally classify this stuff as "Atelier Marie" vibes in my head, but I'm pretty sure many games before Atelier Marie did this.

2. That said Everblue 2 kinda lacks a consistent resource sink. I often found myself with no reason to get more money cause the game was not dangling anything interesting to buy with it. On the same note, the crafting system is neat, but given that I had no reason to backtrack to old locations, it fell a bit flat.

3. The most striking thing about Everblue 2 is how incredibly entrenched it is in PS2 Aesthetics (capital A). Between the statically rendered hub town and the beautiful full-3d low-poly ocean, this is both an extremely visually pleasant game, and a game that fully displays all of the generational tropes that PS2 Aesthetics Twitter bots thrive on.

It's kinda weird, cause I lived through 2002, and like, back then this wasn't "a style", this was just what stuff looked like. But it's not in doubt that when decoupled from that sense of "current technology"-realism, the visuals of games like Everblue 2 feel extremely striking and stylized. I don't even think it's a nostalgia thing tbh, it just looks real pretty and otherworldly.

It's the late 80s right? Like, almost the 90s really. The Legend of Zelda, and other Nintendo and Nintendo adjacent titles, are thriving on an aesthetic of minimal abstraction, which gives them a certain absurdist charm and a kind of timeless and ageless quality. Like, Mario is a plumber that jumps on turtles and stuff, and no one even knows what the hell Link is doing. In the world of Nintendo-aesthetics there's no space for logic or urbanism, there's just a dude living in a cave that's like "here, have a sword", and that is, and has always been, kinda beautiful.

On the other end of the spectrum, PC RPGs and dungeon crawlers were presenting aesthetics deeply rooted in fantasy novels and D&D, with the latter connection made stronger by their mechanical density. These were clearly aimed at a vaguely more mature audience, and every character looked like either Conan the Barbarian or Gandalf.

The original Ys kind of lived in between those aesthetics. Way more concrete and "realistic" than TLoZ, but way more streamlined and simplistic than most PC RPGs of the time. Its aesthetics and tone are naive and direct in a way that almost lays bare the absurd framings that make the foundations of the RPG genre. Like, where TLoZ is the rich inner world of a child playing pretend, Ys: The Vanished Omens is a passerby looking at that child and only seeing an idiot who's waving a stick around. You play it and you can't help but think that it's kind of weird that most RPGs, no matter how mature and complex, are fundamentally built on a foundation of us playing pretend that we're warriors on some silly quest.

I'm not really going anywhere with this really, but yeah. I don't know why we're so obsessed with medieval times honestly.

Anyhow, this is a pretty fun RPG with fairly streamlined mechanics. It has nothing too obtuse on it, and the progression is quite satisfying. Honestly, it has aged quite well. Someone could have released it in the 2010s as an Indie game (capital I indie), with some obnoxious tagline like "Finally we're streamlining boring RPGs with the innovative mechanic of bumping into things", and it would have been a modern critical darling.

(Ok, the level design of the dungeons is a bit ass, but that was sort of the style at the time)

This is a lovely little adventure game.

Fun characters and writing with a couple of surprisingly dark moments. Really nails the vibes of episodic detective TV shows.

The rpg-like navigation adds a neat interactive layer, and I love that the npcs naturalistically traverse the map instead of just appearing at their new location when flags are triggered.

Very enjoyable.

Was not expecting for this to straight up be a first person dungeon crawler. Like, there's some pretty good game-boy art in it, but it does not feel like its source material at all. There's barely any humour to it, it's just an easter egg hunt in a labyrinth with a Urusei Yatsura skin pasted over it.

I went through the first three floors (of seven), and it is a functional, if a bit boring, game boy dungeon crawler. I like that you can talk to any enemy (would have been a good place to introduce some jokes into this... except they didn't and most enemies just spout generic lines), I dislike that there are no map-markers to remind you of things like stairs and NPC locations.

I'm very much a Breath of The Wild centrist, in that while I really enjoyed it, I thought it still had a couple of glaring game-isms that stopped it from being the transcendental adventure full of discovery and wonders it promised.

Tears of The Kingdom interestingly, while being basically built on botw's foundations, seems to approach the player with a completely different promise. Much less wonder, much less adventure, and much more puzzles. Way more of a video game-ass game. And while it fulfils that promise almost perfectly, I can't help to think that it's a much less interesting promise that what botw set out for.

I'm sort of darting around the map completing very compelling puzzles, and while that's fun, I can't help but miss botw and its sessions filled with "I want to climb that thing cause maybe there's something organically neat there". Like, there would rarely be something neat there, cause that was sort of the game, but still, it was a very unique experience.

Totk on the other hand is Way more structured. Everything is a quest. Everything is discrete and directed. Everything is a puzzle. Which again, is fine, they were definitely going for a more traditional hub-world structure and stuff, cause it's a game about discrete puzzles. But like, yeah, that kind of structure is way much less my thing. Ngl 50% of the times I'm running around in this game I feel like Nintendo tricked me into playing an Assassin's Creed.

I dunno. This is still a good game. The moment-to-moment gameplay is excellent and really technically impressive, and it's definitely one of those very design-y games, where you can clearly see how all the systems fit with each other and marvel at the work that went into fitting it all together. So yeah, it's alright.

Additional thought: I don't like the Depths. Not for any design-y or real reason, just every time i go into the depths my brain goes "I don't like being here". They're also sort of boring and featureless so far tbf. Wish there were less of them.

Update: I have now finished the game and have two additional thoughts:

1. Gotta respect this game for going "We have 4 dungeons. 3 of them are elegant and sleek and small and really fun. The 4th one is the most confusing mess of rooms and tracks you've ever seen and is also on fire fuck you"

2. lol @ that Lord Gwyn-ass bossfight

good game

Tears of The Kingdom comes out in, like, 4 hours, so I'm unlikely to ever actually finish this. It's really no fault of the game though, I've gotten about halfway through and I'm having a decent amount of fun, I just started it at an inconvenient time.

That said, the first handful of hours ARE significantly better than the mid game. The game definitely starts with a bang, with very interesting systems, and a cleverly designed open world (it reminds me a bit of LttP), but as the player settles in and get comfortable with the game's objectives and mechanics, the experience gets definitely flattened a bit. Honestly, at the point I'm in in the game, most non-boss battles have started to feel more of an annoyance than anything else, even though I still Really like the combat system.

But yeah this is cool, it feels like an SMT game wearing a Pokemon skin, really (it doesn't really do the whole Pokemon 1v1 competitive battling thing, nor does it represent the monsters as actual pet companions, both elements which I think are core to Pokemon's identity), which is not a bad thing. As mentioned, clever open world and good rpg combat systems. Very enjoyable.

It Does check all the check-marks for 2020 wholesome indie tropes though, so that might be a bit off-putting. Like it has them all! Twee indie music that's trying really hard to sound like the worst Japanese Breakfast record, relationship mechanics, chill vibes 80s nostalgia, etc. (we seriously need to stop it with the 80s nostalgia stuff, I get it. TV static is neat. But please stop. No one who was alive in the 80s is alive today). But yeah, it's fine, whatever, I don't even want to make too much fun of it, this is a good one, I enjoyed it.

P.S. I joke about the soundtrack but a couple of the battle themes are sort of TWEWY-ish and I can definitely vibe with that. It's just the twee town theme that gets old Very Very quickly.

I feel like in the 2010s we were all playing stuff like this and being very smug about it, but by 2019 (and especially now), that kind of "clever mechanic + an art style + game feel" style of game, had started to feel a bit quaint and dated.

I dunno, this is ok. It's unique looking and the jazz sound design has its appeal.

I completed "Disc 1" and I'm not sure if there's more to it. The ending menu made it look like there were more "Albums" to unlock, but pressing play on the main menu just starts the game all over? Probably won't go back to it to figure it out tbh.

I dunno. This is sort of cute and quirky but it feels like the whole of the game is just an excuse to get to the eventual twist ending.

It could have been a more nuanced exploration of identity and determinism or whatever, but it really just feels like they had this random idea for an ending, never thought about it further than that, and just made a weird rpg to get to that point.

I know it was directed by one of the Love De Lic dudes, but it definitely lacks the warmth and substance of something like Moon.

That said the skill system sort of reminds me of the SaGa games which is, like, sort of funny but also sort of appropriate.

This game mostly reminded me that I still have to play Michigan: Report From Hell (also directed by Akira Ueda). As a kid I always used to see ads for it on TV but could never actually find the game in stores.