So... Xenogears kind of sucks, doesn't it?

Like it doesn't even suck in a cool underdog way that's easy to gloss over. This is an Expensive game; one of the last Big Big RPGs to use the whole 2d sprites + 3d environments combo, and one of the aesthetic highs of that specific art direction. Like, it's not some scrappy Saturn low-budget title, where you can be "This is dogshit, but it has moxie!".

And yeah, like 90% of the time I'm pressing buttons to move dudes around, this game is miserable. The combat, while aesthetically interesting, is extremely streamlined and fairly boring, the environments are incredibly confusing to navigate, and it is generally trying to imitate the pacing and structure of SNES-era RPGs while most of the actual design fights against it (the Xenosaga games, for all their flaws, will finally nail the "linear story RPG"-pacing)

That said, what's left of the game, after you subtract the bits where the game is miserable, is sort of amazing? Like, it's incredibly pretty, it does so many cool and creative things with the blocking/cinematography in the limited context of a game about lil 2d sprites, has a genuine and proper sense for drama and grandeur, and now and then even throws some really cool setpieces at the player?

And yeah, it suffers from Big cases of proper-noun-itis, convoluted lore and messy referentialisms. But hey, the characters and themes are still really really strong (way more than in Xenosaga, which sort of falls apart if you don't enjoy that kind of storytelling), and most of the big story beats are pretty effective for at least half of the game!

Like, I'm not playing this thing ever again, it sort of sucks. But also it sort of rules so much.

(Also ngl, this game is already long and mechanically annoying as it is. I'm sort of glad they ran out of money and had to make disc 2 a giant slideshow. If every single thing they describe in that ending bit was its own playable dungeon i would have probably thrown the disc into the sea)

A solid little surreal game.

Excellent vibes and aesthetics. Big 3DO vibes but replacing the clunkiness with a surreal sped-up pace.

Maybe a bit too long... or at least not offering enough sense of discovery to support a whole 1-2 hours of dungeon crawling. The ending was funny tho.

I absolutely loved this. It's like a more mechanically dense Ace Attorney set in a sort of catholic-inspired sci fi monastery setting. And like, yeah, literally every word of that sentence makes it sound like a game made for me specifically.

The three cases included are really really fun to solve, and craft a surprisingly effective self-contained narrative despite the really short length of the game.

The systems often require some small leaps of logic from the player to actually incriminate people, as the game is way more abstract than Ace Attorney, but if anything, that's really cleverly justified by the setting (you play as an exorcist, rather than any kind of formal law enforcement figure, so there's no real implied formal procedures there).

All three cases in this game go for a very self-contained puzzle-box approach, which is very fun to solve, but can lack a bit of a narrative flare. If the sequel ever happens I would love them to try and work in multi-stage cases in, to give a bit of narrative progression to the investigation.

Anyhow this absolutely rules. And the setting is so cool! And the mechanics are so satisfying to interact with! aaaaaaaaa

I love Dark Souls, it's one of my favourite games ever, but at this point I feel like it has done untold damage to video games.

Like, Hollow Knight is a really good metroidvania. The platforming challenges are solid, the vibes are immaculate (if a bit too bleak in points), the bosses are Really fun and creative and the trinket system is a really good reward system. And yet all of its souls-inspired mechanics seem to just go against the rest of the game's design.

Losing money on death locked me out of the fast-travel system multiple times; the checkpoint system makes some areas unbearable to navigate if you come at them from the wrong "side"; and getting a fully functional map is too laborious to the point that it just ends up making exploration less compelling.

The game is still Pretty Good, don't get me wrong. It's not even a difficulty thing, like, the boss fights are really hard and I very much enjoyed them. But some of these mechanics just don't gel that well with the metroidvania formula, to the point that I ended up giving up on the game about 6 hours in. (maybe it gets better as it goes on? Maybe).

Ok so. You got: a plot that seems to be picked straight out of a quaint YA fantasy novel, aesthetics that are peak late-00s, and combat mechanics that desperately try to mimic the play aesthetic of seventh gen western action games while at the same time being also, like, sort of very fun in their own right. I'm honestly here from all of it.

Is The Last Story clumsy? Sure. I died laughing the first time I saw enemies hiding behind chest-high walls like this was Gears of War, despite everyone in the fight being armed with swords.

But, I dunno, I love how briskly is it paced; I love how it completely commits to its silly narrative tropes; I love the idiot main character having a full-on dissociative episode when he discovers that the military is actually bad; I love how creative the boss fights and setpieces get at times; I love that everyone in this high fantasy world sounds like they're from modern London; and honestly I just love its state as the historical oddity that it is. Being a full-fledged artifact of an era where the industry was Really trying to bridge the gap between classic jrpgs and modern action games.

While in the end, we realized that that gap maybe didn't need to be bridged at all, I'm glad those in-between years gave us games like The Last Story. As their exploratory nature makes them very unique and interesting.

But yeah, I really enjoyed my time with this game. It's a silly fun time. It joins Crystal Bearers on the short but ever-important list of "Wii games with unique vibes that have surprisingly detailed interaction design and are generally very good and fun and too few people have played". Which is not an actual list, but eventually I might have to make it an actual list.

It feels like I should like this way more. Like, it mixes classic Resident Evil exploration, Silent Hill-ish environments and some big aesthetic inspiration from Square's CGs/FMVs... And yet I'm left sort of cold by it.

It could be the clumsy backdrop of nuclear-era anti-communist propaganda. But it's not like I haven't loved culturally clumsy games before. It could be that at this point Lovecraftian reference soup as an aesthetic has very much worn out its welcome for me. But again, I have liked lovecraft-inspired games before, and Signalis sooort of uses it as a metaphor more than anything else(?). I mean, the isometric visuals, for how pretty, I didn't think fully worked with the genre, but that's a nitpick tbf. It might just be that the game is neither as scary as the first Silent Hill nor as vibe-y as Silent Hill 2? I guess...

Honestly I think it's just too... polished? Too successfully big and cinematic? There's no underdog charm here, none of the counter-cultural kavorka that many micro-games on itch.io have when touching on similar themes and aesthetics. It has a that sort of, sterile big-game feel, and while it's overall a solid experience, I don't think that its, separately great, elements come together well enough to transcend that.

Also I think I would have liked it a lot less if I didn't realize that, playing it on steam-deck, you can limit the game to 30fps. The game is too smooth in a way I really don't like when running at 60fps.

Also the 3d bits are neat.

(P.S. I know that it was functionally made by two people, so it's not a big production per se, but that's the general vibe that the big level of polish of the game gives me)

Tcg visual novel on the gameboy colour. Hell yeah!

I tried playing this with machine translation and had to stop because the tcg battles were unplayable without a proper translation.

Narratively though this is sort of bonkers and had me fairly engaged even through the machine translation awkwardness. Really hope this gets a proper fan-translation eventually (although it's probably too niche of a game for that to ever happen, sadly)

The protagonist is someone who's basically described as perfect and beautiful and talented and has done nothing wrong in her life ever but yet she still can't find a boyfriend and then five minutes in she dies, and i strongly identify/resonate with that.

I won't fault it for basically being "Slay The Spire but different" cause yeah, I'll play more Slay The Spire but different no problem.

I will fault it though for relying on the tcg trope of minion-combat-based gameplay though, which makes most of the mechanics feel a lot less original than in Slay The Spire.

It's fun tho, I'll probably sink a bunch more hours in it while listening to podcasts or something.

It gestures at the kind of "big serious fantasy" of past games but ultimately lacks the thematic consistency of a Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre.

It's "just" a solid fantasy story, but it's, if anything, elevated by some really strong character writing (Stocke is an incredibly likable protagonist) and the extremely compelling time travel conceit (There's something very satisfying, both mechanically and narratively, in the loop of "witness bad thing that could be avoided" > "continue the story while being on alert for the means to avoid it" > "acquire such means" > "go back to fix the thing").

All and all this is really good. Could have been like, 40% shorter tho.

I don't think there's much value in playing this game today tbh. As an rpg, it's extremely stripped down and doesn't have much going on¹, and as a tcg is... well, early pokemon tcg, as in you either make a casual deck and resign yourself to every game being decided by irritating coinflips, or build Haymakers/Rain Dance and just steamroll every NPC.

That said, if you were a kid in the early-to-mid 00s the collectable/perpetual nature of this game sort of ruled.

Anyhow, play Card City Nights.

¹That's actually a bit of clever design tho. I've tried playing some of the Nintendo DS Yu Gi Oh games and immediately gave up on them cause 3/4th of the game was walking around and talking to people, and it mostly felt like it got in the way of the TCGing. Pokemon TCG GB actually hits a good sweet spot of rpg-ness, where you still get the pleasant progression system and some flavour, but it never just stops to a halt asking you to do rpg things.