A game that's impossible to not find alluring, if you've ever had the optimism in your heart to believe that something this charismatic wouldn't eventually fall into the limelight it deserves. Deeply in love with a lineage that has never been able to capture the zeitgeist as much as it naturally should. It's also teetering on a mid-life crisis that I suspect has drained everyone involved with the series to some extent - it’s your Dad’s newfound obsession with motorcycles that wakes you up early in the morning from how fucking loud it is.

Guilty Gear has always had an infectious self-obsessiveness to it - the way you can sense its author let these characters and elaborate stories churn in their head for years, and the way its visuals bring said character's fermented personalities to life is incredible. Phrasing this very expensively produced game like it's a one-man passion project would be misguided, but it's hard not to feel excitement seeing someone's twenty year old notebook scribblings brought to life so lavished. Fleeting glimpses at a full spectrum of human experience within the cast as each hand-animated frame of emotion cascades in its character's faces. The soundtrack echoes a similar feeling; the in-character lyricism creates a bridge between the series' hieroglyphic storytelling and links it to the writer's spirit with excessive clarity and newfound sincerity. Bluntly think the composition is a lot worse than previous entries in the series; the songs barely even function as songs in-game due to often having intros that go on for as long as a full round. And yet, there's something oddly beautiful in how this soundtrack is largely comprised of 5-7 minute long theatrical anthems that you'll literally never hear the entirety of in a single match; the indulgent opportunity to write a musical about your OCs was chosen over creating a soundtrack that suits its source material...I get it. Twenty years of storytelling conclude with the stage curtains raised, resolution brought to a cast that had clearly been rotated in its creator's mind nonstop for longer than I've been alive. Real inspiring.

Despite that, a haze of low morale permeates throughout the community. At launch, the game was praised for its netcode; you could actually play this one with your friends from a different continent, and the fans didn't have to patch it in themselves! But after proving the necessity of rollback to its contemporaries, it's beginning to fall behind. It's sad that I played this game for the first time nearly four years ago, and its lobbies still constantly break on me. Makes the Open Parks feel like walking through someone else's property without permission. Someone dubbed "hackerman" by the community routinely snipes streamers by destroying ping and crashing games - and it's really funny seeing developers also refer to them by that name - but frustratingly still unsolved. And at the core of all of the maelstrom of discussion is the game's modem of modernization: its "casualization".

It might seem obvious at first, but who are these simplifying changes for? The classic high low mix-up system enriches every fighting game with goals of mindfulness; becoming aware of your opponent's tendencies during long sessions is a deeply rewarding process. But when you're starting to learn fighting games, and haven't tapped into that awareness yet - especially if you're playing short sets with randoms, rather than with people you know - it can feel random and frustrating. This is where Strive's simplification becomes a problem: Small health bars and a lack of strong defensive systems result in very turn-based defensive play that is oppressive even at high level. Strive puts more emphasis on the moments you lose a single mix-up taking a chunk out of your health, and makes stages smaller and air-dashes weaker. The neutral in this one feels claustrophobic with so few layers of approach, and so much to lose from a wrong guess; this isn't fun for me, but it's especially not fun for anyone new. Strive is trying to untangle itself from a set of system mechanics that series elders routinely used to bully any new Xrd player, but it seems that they've built a game that still leans towards people who know how fighting games work. Now that the game has had a few years, I can tell there really is a niche for this: I know a lot of people who have been fighting game loosely for years, picked up Strive, and actually got good at it. The first opportunity they've ever had to feel truly successful at a game wrapped in the same packaging as the other anime fighters they've loved, but this time they arrived on-time to grow alongside everyone else. So, is Strive just an expensive video game therapy session, telling its players the obvious fact that you can get good at any fighting game if you just...play it. a lot. I think the answer to this comes down to personal preference...so, I guess I just gotta say how I feel.

I like Guilty Gear: Strive. I like it more than most of my friends who are critical of it, even! It just doesn't have my favourite parts of Guilty Gear - to play a game that is so endlessly in-depth that there are countless routes for improvement in every direction - but it captures the true core appeal for 90% of people, which is playing as the coolest cast of characters ever. I am not immune to this. I just miss when it truly embodied the term "anime fighter": dynamic poses hit in mid-air as both players push to break the game's speed limits. I wish Strive compartmentalized that feeling better, even if it was easier. Regardless, I still felt blessed to be able to share with a lot of my friends what's special about this series. Whenever I had the opportunity to teach someone the game, I'd keep doing really obvious tricks like roman cancelling moving specials into throws, and they'd be like "woah!!". It was cool to see the light in someone's eyes as they learned how to express themselves through a fighting game for the first time. An extreme sense of both passion and compromise runs through Strive's hulking mass - this sorta thing is still difficult to discuss, and its goals are impossible to obtain without crucial sacrifice. Strive both yearns and succeeds to bring people together, and it's hard not to get emotional seeing a series I've loved for a long time change people's lives. It's just a little too socially awkward to connect to every other person; a biomechanical beast wearing casual clothes.

One of my favourite shows is an anthology drama series called midnight diner.

Its about a small hole in the wall, and each episode is about a regular who frequents the place, telling their story to the chef of the diner. What goes on in their lives in that specific period of time, and then it ends. There's no big event, no epilogue, no closure or clear definitive end to the story. Just a few days in a person's life, and then the story ends, usually with the customer's favourite dish being shown. Not much happens.

And it's brilliant.

Vallhalla reminded me of midnight diner. Which is probably why it's one of my favourite games I've played all year.

Vallhalla is about the last few days before a bar's closure, Jill's interactions with her regular customers and the lives they live in glitch city, a cyberpunk shithole. But just through these interactions, the place feels lived in.

You're thrown straight into the middle of Jill's life, with no context and information, but it's easy to gain your bearings when the world building is as strong as it is in vallhalla.

Every character's visit was something I was looking forward to, my personal favourite being the head writer of a local newspaper. The events going on in their lives never failed to entertain, mundane or otherwise.

The snappy writing and distinct character design makes the 12 hour runtime of this bartender simulator feel short, and I'm excited to see what the developers of this game have in store for the sequel.

The drinks are crappy, the location is awful, the place makes no money, and it smells like dog piss.

Time to mix drinks and change lives.

you START to feel like it fuckin rocks with the art style and the freneticness of dishing out beef bowls but likeeee
there's some problems here lmfao
i got this to see if it'd scratch the sort of fast-service food itch i like doing in video games like overcooked or diner dash or somethin along those lines
a lotta my friends HATE shit like that but I actually find the stress.... fun! for hm... some reason! idk! kinda like when i realized i enjoy movies that make me feel a lot of suspense and thrill and worry for whats happening explicitly to the characters even if they suck, how will they stumble
how will they succeed or choke aa!

ahem. this is very different though this is a game definitely made to advertise and self-suck beef bowls and yoshinoya meals in general
its like if nesquik had a game about stirring nesquik powder into cups of milk and splashing them in the faces of geriatric children(?) as a rabbit

but all that aside i think its cool the game has BOSS. FIGHT. and such but there's only really three levels here and i think its just EHHHHHHH....... like its fun for a bit but i think it being leashed and ball-chained to the floor as a tool for something clearly meant to be a mouthpiece at you to eat their shit weighs it down and definitely has me wishing there was another game in this visual style and takin the boss battle idea and expanding on it in something different.
thats p much it though!

Huh? Retro throwbacks are based on games like Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden, right? Mega Man Zero is still pretty new...


Gravity Circuit is a premiere example of creators not truly understanding the inner workings of the many things they are inspired by. Not as vapid as many games that do this-- and ultimately still a solid (but far from great) game-- it manages to show a lot about platformers and the culture around "retro" games in a bite sized 2 - 3 hour package.

The reason why I even wanted to play this game in the first place was the cool grappling hook, and I am proud to say that it is Fun. Unlike a certain other Mega Man game, the swinging in this game feels great to do and moving across ceilings fluidly is some of the better movement I've been able to use in a high speed platformer like this. Grabbing and throwing enemies with this same hookshot is also real fun, and it might be the best feeling "chuck enemies at other enemies" game I've ever played. Things usually die from being smacked with one of their cohorts: so it becomes a satisfying process of killing each subsequent enemy with the other when you can, and using your superior movement to personally destroy vulnerable mooks. This is all really cool, but this game commits the sin that most platformers do: it doesn't evolve its ideas.

Despite what I just said about the grappling hook, most of Gravity Circuit's levels do not make you use it in ways that matter. It is a mechanic comprised entirely of intrinsic value, and sole mechanic that makes this game's movement unique should simply not be like that. Another issue with the level design is its emphasis on collectibles. The way these stages flow when you're playing properly it feels terrible to do that really obvious "hit the breakable wall and do a CHALLENGE..." type secret shit, and this game has a lot of that. It is confusing to me that Gravity Circuit decides to have in level collectibles for your health and super meter. Like no, dude, make it a reward for literally anything else. The other major gameplay problem are the Burst Mechanics: the super moves you get and the "stand in" for special weapons in a classic Mega Man game. These are lame. Despite sounding on paper like they open up various possibilities for how you deal with combat, they instead heavily centralize them. If you have meter you hit them with a big move and grab afterwards. Even bosses are not safe from this sort of design.

The Zero games are some of the most expressive platformers I've ever played. They have their own issues, sure, but a consistent strength of the series is how good it feels to perform under pressure. There's a lot of ways to move through levels efficiently and stylistically as Zero, and the series knows this. Much of the level design is intentionally made in ways that flow comes from smart game knowledge and tight execution. Mistakes are meaningful and even one misstep in the wrong place can destroy your flow at best and outright kill you at worst. Gravity Circuit is severely lacking in these aspects. Sure, there is sincere game knowledge required in using the grappling hook in effective ways: it isn't enough alone. The stakes are not high enough and the game is not freeform enough otherwise for me not to feel like I'm "going through the motions" even when I play well. Mixing up my gameplay is deemed irrelevant by the level design, and what does it matter if I get die? I go back to one of the 5 checkpoints per level and lose nothing from it. The Zero games put more on the player, and that's what makes them fun. The dance between player and designer is not as strong here, and as a MMZ inspired game I expect a little more from Gravity Circuit.

Overall, Gravity Circuit gets a lot wrong, especially in comparison to the MMZ games. The skill expression is significantly worse, the levels don't push the player and the "12-bit" presentation is unremarkable (because like hell am I doing a whole section on that shit). Despite it all though, it's a decent game. There is fun to be had playing it and it most definitely is an enjoyable high octane platformer in its own right. I hate to compare it to MMZ so much because they don't truly feel so similar when you get down to it, but in practice the Zero series embodies a lot of things: including a lot Gravity Circuit doesn't quite reach.

Let me tell you somethin'.

New York is the greatest fuckin'
city in the world.

My city.

I was a kid in these streets,

I started in the fuckin' gutter,
and I made it to the top.

This life ends one of two ways,
dead or in a boxing match against a racial stereotype.

I did both.