Jojol
9 reviews liked by Jojol
This review contains spoilers
Finally, after all these years, all this waiting...a sequel to Metal Gear Solid 4.
Less of an elegant melding of the design philosophies of Xenoblade 1 and 2 and more a Burnout-Esque car crash of systems, careening discordant mechanics at each other again and again, piling mechanic upon mechanic upon mechanic, leaving each one shattered by impact, until finally, just when it would be funniest to...another system comes screaming in and collides with the pile-up. On paper, Xenoblade 3 seems like it might really be the best of both worlds, but paper is famously two-dimensional. Practice reveals that Xenoblade 3's complete incoherence, its inability to make any single element of its design work fully with any other results in a game that was, for me, actively unpleasant and frustrating to play through.
So many things about Xenoblade 3 reward you with experience points, be they sidequests, chain attacks, or exploration, and certainly the most fun I had in Xenoblade 3 was the initial thrill of abusing the chain attack to get 1000% extra EXP and go up like 4 levels at once. But because the ability to level down to keep apace with the level curve of the main quest is bafflingly locked behind New Game+, and because fighting enemies below your level substantially slows down the unlocking of your Jobs, which the game encourages you to switch near constantly but also encourages you to remain on a single job so that others can use it too, what gaining that EXP practically means is a short burst of endorphins at seeing Number Go Up in exchange for an hour or two of staid misery as your progression grinds to a halt and you languish in a party composition you aren't enjoying so that you can unlock one you do like later. A game where you are punished for progression, and punished for not progressing by potentially missing out on the first game in the trilogy where there is more than a handful of sidequests with actual stories and meaningful gameplay unlocks in them. Xenoblade 3 represents the point where the memetic maximalism of the series, something I have always enjoyed about it, finally buckles and collapses under it's own weight, the cumulative effect of all this is being that you are left with a game built on systems of rewards that actively work against things the rest of it is doing, that make the game frustrating and unpleasant to play, the RPG design equivalent of being pulled in 4 separate directions by each of your limbs.
The story produces a similar effect. While the pretty great core cast provides a solid foundation for the game, thematically or stylistically there's not a single theme or idea that Xenoblade 3 brings up that it will not at some point contradict or muddy, not a single thing it ever fully commits to. Sometimes this is borderline parody, like the scene where the party rages with righteous fury at members of Mobius for having the temerity to treat killing people as a game, only to then in the very next screen meet a hero character who treats killing people as a game that every single character is completely on board with except for Eunie, who is chided for the crime of consistency and is asked to undergo a sidequest character arc in order to stop committing it. It often has the feel of a first draft, especially in how characters significant to the histories of our crew are introduced in flashback seconds before they reappear in the present to have a dramatic and tearful finale. Down to the very basics, the broad theme that comprises so much of the story and the gameplay, of two disparate peoples doing good by coming together, is shattered by an ending that sees their separation as a tragic necessity. By any conventional standards of narrative or mechanical coherence, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is an unmitigated disaster.
This isn't a unique failing of this game, however. Some of this is not unique to Xenoblade 3, but rather represents a degree of exhaustion I have with elements of Xenoblade that have remained unchanging. Xenoblade has always taken influence from MMORPGs, but it's influences have never really extended beyond the experience of the player character. Playing through raid or even dungeon bosses in an MMO, with their own discrete mechanics and designs that throw wrenches into your rotations you must react to, alongside Xenoblade 3 thoroughly demonstrates that if Xenoblade is a single-player MMO, it is a single-player MMO where every single enemy is a mob, where every single fight plays out almost the exact same way. Whether you are fighting a lowly bunnit or the God of Genesis, you're going to be just trying to execute your rotation all the same. And the rotations themselves are incredibly simple, the actual challenge is navigating around the uniformly terrible AI of your squadmates. The chain attack has always felt like a concession to this, and never more so than here, where at almost any time the + button lets you opt into a mode of play that tosses out basically the entire rest of the battle system to play a minigame that also happens to be a completely dominant strategy that is more powerful than anything else in the game, at the cost of being incredibly drawn-out and boring. Similarly, the world design, which is basically the same as the prior games but much wider, exposes just how uninteresting these spaces are to explore when the visuals and atmosphere aren't doing the heavy lifting. But Aionios is a particularly bland and staid world, with precious little interesting visual scenery and barely buoyed by a soundtrack that, Mobius themes aside, I found almost totally unmemorable. Both in the things it takes away from prior games that may have distracted from it, and the things it does itself, Xenoblade 3 does an admirable job at demonstrating the rot at the core of this entire series, the flaws and failings that have always been there, brought into the light more completely for the first time.
And it almost works. It genuinely, sincerely, almost works.
The world of Xenoblade 3 is a literal mash-up of the worlds of Xenoblade 1 and 2, a staid, in-between world maintained in eternal stasis and backward-looking by a group of (awfully-dressed) manchildren who treat all of this as consequence-less entertainment for themselves, who hang out in a theater watching clips from the world outside as if they are little more than episodes of a weekly seasonal anime. This lack of coherence, the way the writing never takes more than a step without stumbling, the way the ungodly chimera of systems and mechanics makes simply existing in Aionios feel genuinely stressful for me, against all odds does manage to feel resonant with the parts of the story that are about how existing in this singular moment is awful, how we need to forcefully draw a line under all this and move on. When characters talk about how much they hate this world, I sincerely agree with them. I hate it because the time I have spent here, because I have hiked across its vast empty wastes, seeing off dead bodies in a spiritual ritual reduced to a Crackdown Orb, because I have fought the battles of this endless war between Keves and Agnus and found them to be unpleasant and unsatisfying, because I have found the carrots of progression it offers to be hollow and tasteless. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 earnestly and sincerely represents a formal boldness that I genuinely did not think Monolith Soft was capable of, a willingness to produce a game where the act of playing feels terrible in order to underscore its point about how the world it presents must be ended. Even if it's lack of materialism and eagerness to abstract it's themes means it's never going to hit me like games that name their enemy (I've seen people talk about XB3 as an anti-capitalist game and while I can see how it's talk about destroying the Endless Now would be resonant with feelings like that, I'd like to direct your attention towards the early scene where a nopon explains the Free Market to the party and they all go "that's so poggers" and also the unbridled Shinzo Abe-ness of certain scenes, you know the ones) it nonetheless represents Xenoblade going further and reaching higher than, frankly, I ever thought it capable of. When a late-game boss starting randomly spouting contextless lines from Xenogears' theme song, I knew that some part of this game knew what was up.
I wish the rest of it did.
Perhaps Xenoblade 3 would be dishonest with itself if it did not also muddy and fumble the one part of it tying all the disparate strands together, but by indulging in earnest and straightforward nostalgia to an almost comical extent. One of the earliest things that intrigued me about Xenoblade 3 was how each of the two nations is ruled by a figurehead representation of a prominent waifu character from a prior game, where the uncritical worship of these characters is manufactured and exploited in order to maintain the endless war machine. It was cutting, it was incisive, and seemed self-aware, however briefly, of just how wretched the fandoms of these games are. Of course, it couldn't last. By the end, these figureheads are replaced with the Real Versions of these characters, who actually are uncritically good and brilliant and worthy of worship, whose immense power is absolutely necessary to destroy "The Endless Now", and also my willingness to find something that means anything in this mess. The one thing you absolutely cannot do when making a story about clinging to the past being wrong and bad is to parade around that same past as if it's the second coming, to indulge so completely in uncritical fanservice that buries anything interesting beneath tuneless self-indulgence that sounds like a thousand teenage boys yelling "BRO PEAK FICTION". If Xenoblade 3 isn't willing to commit to what it's doing, why should I? Why did I spend 100 hours of my life that I will never get back on a game that's just going to throw away everything interesting it's doing a the final hurdle? What was the point of any of this?
The angry tone of the prior passage is not how I feel now, given time to relax and reflect on the parts of the game that do genuinely work for me, like the main party (Eunie and Taion prove that Monolith Soft is in fact capable of writing a good romance, they have thus far simply chosen not to) and, of course, the parts that Really Don't Work, which are the things that worked most of all. But I'm not really able to get over that the one thing I found was truly interesting and exceptional about this game was something it just couldn't resist the allure of Servicing Fans enough to bring home. With Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Monolith Soft set out to prove that Xenoblade cannot continue the way it is, and the worst part is that they succeeded...just in a way that convinced me that the problem might lie deeper within Monolith Soft, not simply with Xenoblade itself.
Ultimately, I just think these games aren't for me anymore. I really gave it the best try I could, but I'm content to let the people who do still love them enjoy it themselves, whilst I let time turn it into a faded memory. The best Xenoblade, on paper? Definitely. But then, cardboard cut-outs don't make for great company, do they?
Less of an elegant melding of the design philosophies of Xenoblade 1 and 2 and more a Burnout-Esque car crash of systems, careening discordant mechanics at each other again and again, piling mechanic upon mechanic upon mechanic, leaving each one shattered by impact, until finally, just when it would be funniest to...another system comes screaming in and collides with the pile-up. On paper, Xenoblade 3 seems like it might really be the best of both worlds, but paper is famously two-dimensional. Practice reveals that Xenoblade 3's complete incoherence, its inability to make any single element of its design work fully with any other results in a game that was, for me, actively unpleasant and frustrating to play through.
So many things about Xenoblade 3 reward you with experience points, be they sidequests, chain attacks, or exploration, and certainly the most fun I had in Xenoblade 3 was the initial thrill of abusing the chain attack to get 1000% extra EXP and go up like 4 levels at once. But because the ability to level down to keep apace with the level curve of the main quest is bafflingly locked behind New Game+, and because fighting enemies below your level substantially slows down the unlocking of your Jobs, which the game encourages you to switch near constantly but also encourages you to remain on a single job so that others can use it too, what gaining that EXP practically means is a short burst of endorphins at seeing Number Go Up in exchange for an hour or two of staid misery as your progression grinds to a halt and you languish in a party composition you aren't enjoying so that you can unlock one you do like later. A game where you are punished for progression, and punished for not progressing by potentially missing out on the first game in the trilogy where there is more than a handful of sidequests with actual stories and meaningful gameplay unlocks in them. Xenoblade 3 represents the point where the memetic maximalism of the series, something I have always enjoyed about it, finally buckles and collapses under it's own weight, the cumulative effect of all this is being that you are left with a game built on systems of rewards that actively work against things the rest of it is doing, that make the game frustrating and unpleasant to play, the RPG design equivalent of being pulled in 4 separate directions by each of your limbs.
The story produces a similar effect. While the pretty great core cast provides a solid foundation for the game, thematically or stylistically there's not a single theme or idea that Xenoblade 3 brings up that it will not at some point contradict or muddy, not a single thing it ever fully commits to. Sometimes this is borderline parody, like the scene where the party rages with righteous fury at members of Mobius for having the temerity to treat killing people as a game, only to then in the very next screen meet a hero character who treats killing people as a game that every single character is completely on board with except for Eunie, who is chided for the crime of consistency and is asked to undergo a sidequest character arc in order to stop committing it. It often has the feel of a first draft, especially in how characters significant to the histories of our crew are introduced in flashback seconds before they reappear in the present to have a dramatic and tearful finale. Down to the very basics, the broad theme that comprises so much of the story and the gameplay, of two disparate peoples doing good by coming together, is shattered by an ending that sees their separation as a tragic necessity. By any conventional standards of narrative or mechanical coherence, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is an unmitigated disaster.
This isn't a unique failing of this game, however. Some of this is not unique to Xenoblade 3, but rather represents a degree of exhaustion I have with elements of Xenoblade that have remained unchanging. Xenoblade has always taken influence from MMORPGs, but it's influences have never really extended beyond the experience of the player character. Playing through raid or even dungeon bosses in an MMO, with their own discrete mechanics and designs that throw wrenches into your rotations you must react to, alongside Xenoblade 3 thoroughly demonstrates that if Xenoblade is a single-player MMO, it is a single-player MMO where every single enemy is a mob, where every single fight plays out almost the exact same way. Whether you are fighting a lowly bunnit or the God of Genesis, you're going to be just trying to execute your rotation all the same. And the rotations themselves are incredibly simple, the actual challenge is navigating around the uniformly terrible AI of your squadmates. The chain attack has always felt like a concession to this, and never more so than here, where at almost any time the + button lets you opt into a mode of play that tosses out basically the entire rest of the battle system to play a minigame that also happens to be a completely dominant strategy that is more powerful than anything else in the game, at the cost of being incredibly drawn-out and boring. Similarly, the world design, which is basically the same as the prior games but much wider, exposes just how uninteresting these spaces are to explore when the visuals and atmosphere aren't doing the heavy lifting. But Aionios is a particularly bland and staid world, with precious little interesting visual scenery and barely buoyed by a soundtrack that, Mobius themes aside, I found almost totally unmemorable. Both in the things it takes away from prior games that may have distracted from it, and the things it does itself, Xenoblade 3 does an admirable job at demonstrating the rot at the core of this entire series, the flaws and failings that have always been there, brought into the light more completely for the first time.
And it almost works. It genuinely, sincerely, almost works.
The world of Xenoblade 3 is a literal mash-up of the worlds of Xenoblade 1 and 2, a staid, in-between world maintained in eternal stasis and backward-looking by a group of (awfully-dressed) manchildren who treat all of this as consequence-less entertainment for themselves, who hang out in a theater watching clips from the world outside as if they are little more than episodes of a weekly seasonal anime. This lack of coherence, the way the writing never takes more than a step without stumbling, the way the ungodly chimera of systems and mechanics makes simply existing in Aionios feel genuinely stressful for me, against all odds does manage to feel resonant with the parts of the story that are about how existing in this singular moment is awful, how we need to forcefully draw a line under all this and move on. When characters talk about how much they hate this world, I sincerely agree with them. I hate it because the time I have spent here, because I have hiked across its vast empty wastes, seeing off dead bodies in a spiritual ritual reduced to a Crackdown Orb, because I have fought the battles of this endless war between Keves and Agnus and found them to be unpleasant and unsatisfying, because I have found the carrots of progression it offers to be hollow and tasteless. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 earnestly and sincerely represents a formal boldness that I genuinely did not think Monolith Soft was capable of, a willingness to produce a game where the act of playing feels terrible in order to underscore its point about how the world it presents must be ended. Even if it's lack of materialism and eagerness to abstract it's themes means it's never going to hit me like games that name their enemy (I've seen people talk about XB3 as an anti-capitalist game and while I can see how it's talk about destroying the Endless Now would be resonant with feelings like that, I'd like to direct your attention towards the early scene where a nopon explains the Free Market to the party and they all go "that's so poggers" and also the unbridled Shinzo Abe-ness of certain scenes, you know the ones) it nonetheless represents Xenoblade going further and reaching higher than, frankly, I ever thought it capable of. When a late-game boss starting randomly spouting contextless lines from Xenogears' theme song, I knew that some part of this game knew what was up.
I wish the rest of it did.
Perhaps Xenoblade 3 would be dishonest with itself if it did not also muddy and fumble the one part of it tying all the disparate strands together, but by indulging in earnest and straightforward nostalgia to an almost comical extent. One of the earliest things that intrigued me about Xenoblade 3 was how each of the two nations is ruled by a figurehead representation of a prominent waifu character from a prior game, where the uncritical worship of these characters is manufactured and exploited in order to maintain the endless war machine. It was cutting, it was incisive, and seemed self-aware, however briefly, of just how wretched the fandoms of these games are. Of course, it couldn't last. By the end, these figureheads are replaced with the Real Versions of these characters, who actually are uncritically good and brilliant and worthy of worship, whose immense power is absolutely necessary to destroy "The Endless Now", and also my willingness to find something that means anything in this mess. The one thing you absolutely cannot do when making a story about clinging to the past being wrong and bad is to parade around that same past as if it's the second coming, to indulge so completely in uncritical fanservice that buries anything interesting beneath tuneless self-indulgence that sounds like a thousand teenage boys yelling "BRO PEAK FICTION". If Xenoblade 3 isn't willing to commit to what it's doing, why should I? Why did I spend 100 hours of my life that I will never get back on a game that's just going to throw away everything interesting it's doing a the final hurdle? What was the point of any of this?
The angry tone of the prior passage is not how I feel now, given time to relax and reflect on the parts of the game that do genuinely work for me, like the main party (Eunie and Taion prove that Monolith Soft is in fact capable of writing a good romance, they have thus far simply chosen not to) and, of course, the parts that Really Don't Work, which are the things that worked most of all. But I'm not really able to get over that the one thing I found was truly interesting and exceptional about this game was something it just couldn't resist the allure of Servicing Fans enough to bring home. With Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Monolith Soft set out to prove that Xenoblade cannot continue the way it is, and the worst part is that they succeeded...just in a way that convinced me that the problem might lie deeper within Monolith Soft, not simply with Xenoblade itself.
Ultimately, I just think these games aren't for me anymore. I really gave it the best try I could, but I'm content to let the people who do still love them enjoy it themselves, whilst I let time turn it into a faded memory. The best Xenoblade, on paper? Definitely. But then, cardboard cut-outs don't make for great company, do they?
Metroid Dread
2021
It's fascinating to me how much Metroid Dread's greatest strength and its most disappointing weakness are intertwined. I love Metroid Dread's approach to linearity. The journey from the game's start up through ZDR to Hanubia will for most people be a straight line of sorts, the game always funnelling you towards an intended route, but it rarely feels like a straight line. Terrain will be redefined either in smaller instances or via impressive set-pieces to guide you onwards, even smaller item pick-ups are sometimes placed with leading you in a specific direction post-upgrade in mind. This aspect isn't perfect, there are times where you push at the edges of your surroundings a bit too hard and discover how boxed in you actually are, or where the game is a bit too keen to withhold rewards for your attempted backtracking and exploring, but for the most part it's remarkable how much the game maintains a sense of forward momentum, a constant stream of progress and discovery, without feeling as linear as it truly is as it repeatedly twists in on and redefines itself. In this regard Metroid Dread's level design kind of rocks.
Metroid Dread's level design also just kind of sucks. I can't remember the last time I played a Metroidvania game that failed so badly at making me feel a physical attachment to the world I'm wandering through, each of the areas of the game feels somehow at once both divorced and homogenous. I couldn't tell you, even after having beaten the game and backtracked for most of the power-ups, how each of the areas actually relates to one another; each section feels less like a part of an interlinked, believable world and more just like its own little videogame level. This is exacerbated by the game's love of warp points that take you from one arbitrary part of one zone to some far-flung corner of another; these feel necessary to make the game's approach to linearity succeed like it does, but come with the cost of making the world of ZDR feel much more explicitly videogamey than previous Metroid titles, and never allowing for the physical reality of this world and how everything links up to imprint upon you. ZDR never comes even vaguely close to feeling like a real world.
And yet all at the same time, this world blurs together. Part of this comes back to the warp points excitedly plucking you out of one zone into another, mixed with the constant forward momentum, meaning that you're given little time to build up a defined relationship to many of these biomes. More problematic though are the EMMI sections. Much has been said about these parts of the game and how hard it is to reconcile how great many of the moments of horror and tension found here are with how much these sections lean on a frustrating trial-and-error approach. My quibbles lie more just with the aesthetic though. Every EMMI section looks pretty much the same, and every biome tries to naturally loop you in and out of their respect EMMI zone a handful of times through patterns of tension and then relief naturally building towards their exciting climaxes when you're finally able to deal with that EMMI once and for all. It's a great gameplay pattern, but when mixed with the sterile aesthetic of these EMMI zones it's hard for ZDR to not just visually homogenise in your memory as a result, a blur of inhospitable, bizarrely zig-zaggy, blank white hallways.
Despite all of this, I still had a good time with Metroid Dread. The world left little impression on me, and the story is a mess, but as a rollercoaster ride of sorts Dread hits a lot of beats very well. Samus has never controlled quite this fluidly before, which isn't to say that Dread controls better than previous iterations (Super Metroid's movement is uniquely suited to that game's world design and atmosphere in a way that would make trying to put Dread's movement in that game feel misguided and crude at best), but it certainly is nice how easy it is to just drop into the game, how smoothly movement flows and how well the myriad abilities get to seamlessly function in tandem with one another. Even parts of the movement design that it feels like I should dislike just work; Metroid never needed a parry mechanic, but this one feels incredibly satisfying to land, suits the game's more action-orientated tone, and even the quick-time events that take advantage of it are used tastefully. There's a fair amount wrong with Metroid Dread, but ultimately a lot of it is also just really good fun and you can do a lot worse than that.
Metroid Dread's level design also just kind of sucks. I can't remember the last time I played a Metroidvania game that failed so badly at making me feel a physical attachment to the world I'm wandering through, each of the areas of the game feels somehow at once both divorced and homogenous. I couldn't tell you, even after having beaten the game and backtracked for most of the power-ups, how each of the areas actually relates to one another; each section feels less like a part of an interlinked, believable world and more just like its own little videogame level. This is exacerbated by the game's love of warp points that take you from one arbitrary part of one zone to some far-flung corner of another; these feel necessary to make the game's approach to linearity succeed like it does, but come with the cost of making the world of ZDR feel much more explicitly videogamey than previous Metroid titles, and never allowing for the physical reality of this world and how everything links up to imprint upon you. ZDR never comes even vaguely close to feeling like a real world.
And yet all at the same time, this world blurs together. Part of this comes back to the warp points excitedly plucking you out of one zone into another, mixed with the constant forward momentum, meaning that you're given little time to build up a defined relationship to many of these biomes. More problematic though are the EMMI sections. Much has been said about these parts of the game and how hard it is to reconcile how great many of the moments of horror and tension found here are with how much these sections lean on a frustrating trial-and-error approach. My quibbles lie more just with the aesthetic though. Every EMMI section looks pretty much the same, and every biome tries to naturally loop you in and out of their respect EMMI zone a handful of times through patterns of tension and then relief naturally building towards their exciting climaxes when you're finally able to deal with that EMMI once and for all. It's a great gameplay pattern, but when mixed with the sterile aesthetic of these EMMI zones it's hard for ZDR to not just visually homogenise in your memory as a result, a blur of inhospitable, bizarrely zig-zaggy, blank white hallways.
Despite all of this, I still had a good time with Metroid Dread. The world left little impression on me, and the story is a mess, but as a rollercoaster ride of sorts Dread hits a lot of beats very well. Samus has never controlled quite this fluidly before, which isn't to say that Dread controls better than previous iterations (Super Metroid's movement is uniquely suited to that game's world design and atmosphere in a way that would make trying to put Dread's movement in that game feel misguided and crude at best), but it certainly is nice how easy it is to just drop into the game, how smoothly movement flows and how well the myriad abilities get to seamlessly function in tandem with one another. Even parts of the movement design that it feels like I should dislike just work; Metroid never needed a parry mechanic, but this one feels incredibly satisfying to land, suits the game's more action-orientated tone, and even the quick-time events that take advantage of it are used tastefully. There's a fair amount wrong with Metroid Dread, but ultimately a lot of it is also just really good fun and you can do a lot worse than that.
Deltarune: Chapter 2
2021
its like omori but with lesbians and actually funny flavor text
This is my "Masterpiece that you played as a child and have never heard anybody else mention"
America, America, Chicago to Missouri. When i think of the USA's depiction in video games produced within it's own borders, my mental state is assaulted by images of heroic patriotism, defenders of the glorious nation and it's allies repelling evil invaders and bringing honor to the fatherland. The parallel domestic depiction of the nation would of course be the titles that revolve around the mindless violence and larceny that civilians feel compelled to commit, the equally-popular crime game that represents the nation in a simultaneously similar and opposite way.
The foreign idea of the USA has only ever been critical from my experience. Games like Wolfenstein criticize the torrid history of racism and oppression, while games like Dead Rising are simply extended hitpieces on the for-profit medical and general media calousness.
One would then consider Japanese developers when it comes to making American games. The seemingly apolitical hyper-reality action game that's fueled by nothing but pure adreneline and admiration for the American-made tales of military might and superheroism in ordinary soldiers.
Sakura Wars V falls somewhere outside all of them. A game released in 2005 that attempts to romanticize The Big Apple in the way the previous games had done for the settings of Tokyo and Paris. So Long, My Love is a game about New York created through the perspective of a Japanese developer writing a story about a japanese immigrant living life in the city. It's a simple game about learning to live with the hustle and bustle of the greatest in the city in the world.
What strikes me so hard about the game is just how positive it is about the USA, in all aspects, and how it attempts to blend american cultural values and rhetoric together with the usual themes associated with this kind of story. At a certain point in the second half of the game, The Revolutionary War, The Civil War, and the two-party system are cited as examples of americans putting aside their differences to work for the greater good, the typical "power of freindship" story being compared to these concepts. There is a certain knee-jerk reaction when to be had when the game beats you over the head with narrative of New York being a city of hard-work and dreams, a cultural melting pot of people that accept each other. Since stories usually have this little thing called "conflict" things aren't peaceful and just 100% of time, the game delves into the topics of racism, organized crime, class divide, gentrification, poverty, and homelessness with only slightly more intricacy than you would expect from a game about a theater troupe fighting demons with giant robots.
As for things like gameplay i felt somewhat lukewarm while playing it, but was ultimately satisfied by the unique semi-real time strategy combat, and the heavily unique usage of setpieces. No two levels in this game felt the same, but that could also be a flaw since it means that you have to spend your first attempt at basically every map just figuring out what you were doing. I find the concept of trial and error to be antithecial to a good strategy game, a strategic victory should be brought by proper thinking, not brute force. I did strongly admire the overwhelmingly variaty between the 6 playable characters, all having their own types of attack, move range, super attacks, even their animations have so personality in them, it's the kind of attention to meaningful detail that is rarely seen in modern games.
Not being able to skip animations is always a bummer, and it's not any different in this game. I was playing this on an emulator and making frequemt use of the speed-up function, but even then the tedium was palpable by the end. It's a thorough mixed bag in terms of combat.
As for the VN elements, Sakura Wars has always been the series that i felt accomplished this sort of non-gameplay the best, the high points of this game are all the dialogue and QTE segmants, due in no small part to the genuinely excellent character writing. Even when certain characters aren't the focus in the story they still really stand out, this is one of those stories where the smaller moments are going to stick with you the most.
Choice in Sakura Wars falls inbetween the two pillars of "nothing you do matters" and "every route is a different story entirely", there's more than a few moments in which you make a choice only for it to essentially be erased in order for the narrative to proceed as planned. Your choices will never matter in the grander scheme of things but i found myself making plenty of decisions that felt like they actually affected my enjoyement of the game, again, some of the best parts of this game are entirely optional.
The one thing i genuinely HATED about this game are the technical aspects, the atrocious audio mixing that makes the (often bad) voice acting borderline inaudible at times, the slow-ass UI, unintuitive button assigments, etc. Most of this is probably just the fact that it's an old game.
Overall, i can't name a batter japanese game about america, nor can i name a better dating sim/strategy hybrid video game. Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love left a fairly large impression on me by the end, to the point where i was thinking about going back to it several different times over the 6 years it took me to complete it. It's the black sheep of the series, and the game that some might say put the franchise on hiatus for nearly 15 years, but i never once felt that this game was anything other than stellar.
The foreign idea of the USA has only ever been critical from my experience. Games like Wolfenstein criticize the torrid history of racism and oppression, while games like Dead Rising are simply extended hitpieces on the for-profit medical and general media calousness.
One would then consider Japanese developers when it comes to making American games. The seemingly apolitical hyper-reality action game that's fueled by nothing but pure adreneline and admiration for the American-made tales of military might and superheroism in ordinary soldiers.
Sakura Wars V falls somewhere outside all of them. A game released in 2005 that attempts to romanticize The Big Apple in the way the previous games had done for the settings of Tokyo and Paris. So Long, My Love is a game about New York created through the perspective of a Japanese developer writing a story about a japanese immigrant living life in the city. It's a simple game about learning to live with the hustle and bustle of the greatest in the city in the world.
What strikes me so hard about the game is just how positive it is about the USA, in all aspects, and how it attempts to blend american cultural values and rhetoric together with the usual themes associated with this kind of story. At a certain point in the second half of the game, The Revolutionary War, The Civil War, and the two-party system are cited as examples of americans putting aside their differences to work for the greater good, the typical "power of freindship" story being compared to these concepts. There is a certain knee-jerk reaction when to be had when the game beats you over the head with narrative of New York being a city of hard-work and dreams, a cultural melting pot of people that accept each other. Since stories usually have this little thing called "conflict" things aren't peaceful and just 100% of time, the game delves into the topics of racism, organized crime, class divide, gentrification, poverty, and homelessness with only slightly more intricacy than you would expect from a game about a theater troupe fighting demons with giant robots.
As for things like gameplay i felt somewhat lukewarm while playing it, but was ultimately satisfied by the unique semi-real time strategy combat, and the heavily unique usage of setpieces. No two levels in this game felt the same, but that could also be a flaw since it means that you have to spend your first attempt at basically every map just figuring out what you were doing. I find the concept of trial and error to be antithecial to a good strategy game, a strategic victory should be brought by proper thinking, not brute force. I did strongly admire the overwhelmingly variaty between the 6 playable characters, all having their own types of attack, move range, super attacks, even their animations have so personality in them, it's the kind of attention to meaningful detail that is rarely seen in modern games.
Not being able to skip animations is always a bummer, and it's not any different in this game. I was playing this on an emulator and making frequemt use of the speed-up function, but even then the tedium was palpable by the end. It's a thorough mixed bag in terms of combat.
As for the VN elements, Sakura Wars has always been the series that i felt accomplished this sort of non-gameplay the best, the high points of this game are all the dialogue and QTE segmants, due in no small part to the genuinely excellent character writing. Even when certain characters aren't the focus in the story they still really stand out, this is one of those stories where the smaller moments are going to stick with you the most.
Choice in Sakura Wars falls inbetween the two pillars of "nothing you do matters" and "every route is a different story entirely", there's more than a few moments in which you make a choice only for it to essentially be erased in order for the narrative to proceed as planned. Your choices will never matter in the grander scheme of things but i found myself making plenty of decisions that felt like they actually affected my enjoyement of the game, again, some of the best parts of this game are entirely optional.
The one thing i genuinely HATED about this game are the technical aspects, the atrocious audio mixing that makes the (often bad) voice acting borderline inaudible at times, the slow-ass UI, unintuitive button assigments, etc. Most of this is probably just the fact that it's an old game.
Overall, i can't name a batter japanese game about america, nor can i name a better dating sim/strategy hybrid video game. Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love left a fairly large impression on me by the end, to the point where i was thinking about going back to it several different times over the 6 years it took me to complete it. It's the black sheep of the series, and the game that some might say put the franchise on hiatus for nearly 15 years, but i never once felt that this game was anything other than stellar.
Lake
2021
A Hallmark movie in a video game.
Lake
2021
this is the second strand type game
Valkyrie Profile
1999
Tri-Ace's Valkyrie Profile hopped from JRPG to action, 2d platformer, and puzzle with ease - almost organically so, while boasting elegant sprite art and animations in the process. If the jumbling of genres isn't unique, the way they're utilised to reinterpret JRPG stereotypes certainly is.
Exhibit A: Its distinguished combat system occupied the middle ground between action and turn-based, locating the challenge in combo experimentation and optimisation, forming creative attack sequences that mutate in parallel to loadout or enemy changes. All contained in short bursts thanks to the format, and brimming with minute details both RPG (element/type weaknesses, row-based formations), and non-RPG (range, pushback, guard crush, supers, etc.), adding ever more complex layers to the idea. Enchanting as they may be, the lengthier battle animations can get overly cinematic, which detracts from the battle flow to an extent. The equally adventurous gameplay structure offered another unique viewpoint, abandoning conventional linearity and instead simply leaving players free to prepare for an impending final boss, split into chapters that evaluate their performance to determine the ending. An 'open' world whose main storyline runs secondary to the character substories and dungeon crawling.
Speaking of which, the powerful scenes also work in its favor, particularly the recruitment sections that stage brief but grim stories - of course, naturally due to the subject matter. Even still, the highlights (Yumei, Lucian, Shiho & Suo, etc.) are devastating. Furthermore, its abundance of RPG systems evoke Tri-Ace's past, revisiting Star Ocean's multi-dimensional character growth and large roster, but expanded for a greater progression-related purpose. The weakest aspect of the bunch turns out to be the clumsy, slippery platforming. Normally, this would hamper dungeons, but most still contained a fair few tricky (if occasionally obtuse) puzzles and rewarding secrets, synergising well with its diverse movement options.
A monumental work; ambitious, stately and polished at the same time, but more importantly: A refreshing reconstruction of JRPGs, far removed from the genre's worst vices.
Exhibit A: Its distinguished combat system occupied the middle ground between action and turn-based, locating the challenge in combo experimentation and optimisation, forming creative attack sequences that mutate in parallel to loadout or enemy changes. All contained in short bursts thanks to the format, and brimming with minute details both RPG (element/type weaknesses, row-based formations), and non-RPG (range, pushback, guard crush, supers, etc.), adding ever more complex layers to the idea. Enchanting as they may be, the lengthier battle animations can get overly cinematic, which detracts from the battle flow to an extent. The equally adventurous gameplay structure offered another unique viewpoint, abandoning conventional linearity and instead simply leaving players free to prepare for an impending final boss, split into chapters that evaluate their performance to determine the ending. An 'open' world whose main storyline runs secondary to the character substories and dungeon crawling.
Speaking of which, the powerful scenes also work in its favor, particularly the recruitment sections that stage brief but grim stories - of course, naturally due to the subject matter. Even still, the highlights (Yumei, Lucian, Shiho & Suo, etc.) are devastating. Furthermore, its abundance of RPG systems evoke Tri-Ace's past, revisiting Star Ocean's multi-dimensional character growth and large roster, but expanded for a greater progression-related purpose. The weakest aspect of the bunch turns out to be the clumsy, slippery platforming. Normally, this would hamper dungeons, but most still contained a fair few tricky (if occasionally obtuse) puzzles and rewarding secrets, synergising well with its diverse movement options.
A monumental work; ambitious, stately and polished at the same time, but more importantly: A refreshing reconstruction of JRPGs, far removed from the genre's worst vices.
Understands that the true Dark World is adulthood and that Time will mold us all into adults, whether we want it to or not. Collect your spiritual trinkets if you want some illusion of choice, but those in charge are pulling up the strings of your playpen from the shadows. Seven years will pass and the apocalypse will arrive with droughts and flames and frozen wastes, the leaders and heroes of youth rendered useless against the unstoppable forces of evil, leaving you to pick up the pieces. Masterpiece. You had to be there. Each playthrough allows you to see your past gaming selves as Young Link; you now naively see yourself as the more capable and wise Adult Link who is too embarrassed to use the boomerang. A Nintendo game that forces you to grapple with mortality and innocence and the cycle of fathers and sons in ways that grim Atlus JRPGs about demons could only dream of. Godlike!!! Majora's Mask stans will talk about their little stories that they write down in their little bomberman notebook or whatever, but it was all in here too - you just didn't have a checklist or trinkets to reward you for engaging with the material. Gameplay is still rock solid (on Nintendo's first try!!), but you come to this thing for mood, atmosphere, text, subtext. OCARINA OF TIME BABY