Utterly bizarre abrupt ending that really killed what was otherwise a pretty great metroidvania. Cookie Cutter features exhilarating combat and a very solid loop of discovery that a lot of the other games in the genre i've played recently have lacked. However, it's held back by a few key issues: like the parry mechanic not working in the slightest--fortunately the game can mostly be played without it, but the parry mechanic is explained in a misleading and incorrect way that doesn't actually communicate how it works. It's frustrating.

The ending is extremely abrupt, and due to a lack of information about the game online, it's hard to tell if I missed a True Ending signal or the game really was just gonna cut to black on a sequel hook. I definitely enjoyed myself though.

What a dissapointment. Easily the weakest of the Yakuza games I've played thus far, with a bloated yet flatline of a plot and way too much side content, Yakuza 8 is a complete slog. I'm 25 hours into the game and the main storyline hasn't inched a budge. Ridiculous, fortunately I wasn't scammed by buying it for full price, but this is just so rough.

Kasuga Ichiban is a character who feels completely lost here, devoid of purpose after his native storyline finished in 7, now consigned to wander aimlessly looking for a mother nobody cares about because Yakuza doesn't care about women. Kiryu is here, he has cancer now. The rest of the cast is fine, but they all feel like retreads of prior cast members.

I'm genuinely so sad, 7 was the game that made me love Yakuza, and it's immediate sequel is a boring nothingburger of a game way longer than it has any right to be. I was hoping so hard it would be great, and I was just bored instead.

I kinda fucking hate this game. I hate the football guys, I hate Yoshi's cowardly ass, I hate the way secrets are laid out. I played this for so long because I kept hearing it's one of the best games ever made and I was hoping it would click at some point, but it never did so instead I just used the secret woods warp to the final level cause I couldn't handle it anymore.

But as much as I hate this game, it's too well made for me to give it anything lower than a 3/5. Whatever, the other Mario platformers are better.

While the platforming is undeniably fun, the game takes too long to hit its stride, with the first several areas being very repetitive and uninteresting. The pacing is all over the place, with each area having an inconsistent number of levels and the boss fights all being not great.

The busker sequences at the end of each level are way too involved for what is clearly attempting to evolve the Kirby endlevel minigames, but the reason those work is because they are simple and quick. The busker sequences involve landing at the top of a layer-cake-esq contraption, with each level indicating a different amount of stars you can obtain from a quick-time event minigame, which is dreadful each time. It's just too much for what should be a quick end to a fun level.

This game's fatal flaw is the pacing, which is a shame because everything else is very well realized. While the story is nothing to write home about, being completely serviceable (and a bit cute near the end), it never really evolves beyond the solid core gameplay, which ultimately leaves it as an ambitious and fun platformer that never quite sticks the landing.

I’ve been looking forward to playing I Am Setsuna ever since Oninaki–Tokyo RPG Factory’s third title–was announced back in 2019. I feel it’s rare to see a studio so specifically devoted to one genre of game with nothing else in their portfolio, no matter how mediocre those products might be. I Am Setsuna is nothing if not a profoundly and shockingly mediocre title that nonetheless attracts attention due to its unique-if-compromised creative vision. Taking place in a desolate world drowning in an endless snowfall, you play as Endir, a masked man tasked with assassinating (for no real reason) the young sacrifice, Setsuna, whose life must be given to save the world for another cycle. However, upon their initial meeting, Endir sees no reason to murder this child who is going to die soon anyways, so he becomes her protector alongside a group of cliche and uninspired party members.

The party’s goal is to save the world via bringing Setsuna to Zanarkand–i mean the Last Lands. If the premise sounds familiar, it’s because I Am Setsuna’s plot is highly derivative of the painfully overrated Final Fantasy X, and the game’s combat system is ripped straight from Chrono Trigger but worse in every way. These derivative elements were part of what drew me to this game, given that that FF10’s story of sacrifice and cycles is the only redeeming part of it’s otherwise bloated and inconsistent narrative, and Chrono Trigger is a functionally perfect game and its combat system could never be made mostly bad (it is.). The changes that I Am Setsuna makes to its inherited combat system mostly involve making the combo system much more complicated to use by not condensing everything. The menus are clunky and barely usable, with the combo options never being shown when equipping Spiritnite (this game’s version of Materia) and the gameplay generally relying on this terrible wait-to-charge system that is barely explained. If I have to look up how to make the game work post-tutorial, the game has probably failed at explaining itself (looking at you FF8).

While the story itself isn’t much worth writing home about outside of pointing out how much it takes from FF10 (thankfully they didn’t adapt Seymour Guado), I Am Setsuna was at the very least able to engage me with Setsuna’s emotional journey. Setsuna learns to value her own life by the end, even when she still has to sacrifice it, and she’s made unforgettable bonds with all of these other mediocre characters. It almost pulled at my heartstrings.

The game’s visuals are another component, while I really appreciate the decision to commit to the snowy environments, I could only hope for more visual variety in these cold locales; as-is, I Am Setsuna vastly underscores the diversity of biomes present in cold climates. Let the player explore some tundra! Maybe the clouds blend in with the mountains and the player can’t distinguish what is solid ground and what is cloud! Maybe some of the towns are inventively placed on the ice of a lake or have the colorful characteristics of Scandinavian towns. There’s a lot of missed potential here. I also think all of the town chop vendors just being copy-pasted into random buildings in each town is super boring and a simple solution would have been to make them like a traveling wagon of merchants that have small dialogue snippets the first time they encounter the party in a new town. Would make for a more natural way of engaging with the shopkeepers without having to build a market for each town.

While the game is profoundly mediocre in its execution, I Am Setsuna has a clear identity that carries it through that mediocrity and provoked me to actually finish it despite the copy-and-pasted dungeons and meandering plot and extremely repetitive visuals. I hope the next two releases from Tokyo RPG Factory are able to carry that same sense of identity despite being otherwise mediocre products.

ZeroRanger’s colorblind mode does nothing to help the visibility of your ship. Featured as an esoteric shoot-em-up with a two-color aesthetic (the colors being green and orange), ZeroRanger is one of my first exposures to the SHMUP genre. I grew interested in the genre with my exposure to the first few Star Fox titles and found myself wanting to experience something similar. ZeroRanger fails to make any interesting statements aside from its rewarding gameplay, unhelped by how everything blends into a green and orange mush that makes visibility even more of an issue than necessary for a SHMUP.

Though possessing very fun gameplay, beautifully rendered sprite work, and good solid music, ZeroRanger’s visibility issue is crippling for someone with visual issues like me.

I have been following solo game dev Bobby Schroeder for several years now through her personal and Sonic-related blogs on Tumblr.com, and I was immensely excited at the prospect of the openly, aggressively queer turn-based RPG that she was developing. Unfortunately, when the game finally came out I did not have a keyboard with arrow keys, and could not play the game. Now, I have finished the game much later than intended and can finally talk about it.

Perhaps no other game is as open about its contents as Super Lesbian Animal RPG< a game declaring itself right on the tin as being a roleplaying game about lesbian furries, and it does not disappoint. Within the narrative are four major lesbian romances, one of which appears to be optional (via Clair’s sidequest near the end of the game). Each one focuses on one of the four main party members, Melody (the foxgirl protagonist and party healer), Allison (the punky DPS bunny), Clair (the chaotic messy wizard cow), and Jodie (the tiger tank). Each character is well-developed, and their romances are as sappy and earnest as one could hope. Each character’s motivations and personalities are fully laid out and eventually pulls a Chrono Trigger by opening up several character-specific side-quests in the endgame. This is among a character development strategy that I love whenever it appears–from Chrono Trigger to Mass Effect 2, giving optional character quests is an excellent way to highlight and develop that party member outside the main cast.

Each NPC stands out in my mind and breathes life into the Sapphire Isles. And for as delightful as the colorful cast of furries are (Pepper, the retired Dark Lord’s daughter, is a favorite) each oozes personality via charming portraits with multiple expressions each; the combat is just as good as the story and world. Taking place in a first-person perspective turn-based combat (it’s an RPG Maker game obviously) each party member has a specific class, with customization coming from equipable spellbooks that offer specific abilities to each character. While the game is extremely linear in terms of progression, the actual challenges of combat are tailored to each character’s specialization. Combined with solid pacing that never spends too much time in one area, SLARPG (as it’s been called by Schroeder) makes for a fantastic time, so long as you have arrow keys.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a frustrating game for me to talk about; for one, I keep having arguments with a close friend of mine (the friend who insisted I play this game both back in Early Access and once it was fully released) who insists the problems I have aren’t with the game, but due to me being unable to enjoy things. This is obviously wrong, but I’d rather talk about what makes me dislike BG3 so much, and why it is still a good game in spite of that.

Baldur’s Gate 3 occupies a genre I have little experience with: the western CRPG, with my only prior taste of the genre being the masterpiece Disco Elysium–which features none of the problems I’m about to list–I came into BG3 with very little expectations aside from my brief time playing the Early Access multiplayer with friends back in 2020. From what I have been able to interpret from the zeitgeist surrounding this title is that it isn’t particularly innovative or compelling for any unique reason, rather that BG3 is a masterfully done execution of tried and true tropes of the genre, and unfortunately those tropes have very little appeal to me. Clicking on a location and watching the characters slowly jog from place to place, too many menus (all of which are far too small and unintuitive even on the largest setting), characters who all share the same body types despite the pitch of “player choice” (what about the player’s choice to not be fucking anorexic), and the extremely cliche generic fantasy setting.

It took me listening to a recent episode of the Triforce Podcast about BG3 to even understand what the appeal of the game was for people (outside of everyone who is unbearably horny about the generic pretty people in the game), and that appeal is the variety of choices and control the player has on being able to choose their own path.

And I, uh, don’t care about that, lol.

While BG3 is undoubtedly an achievement in what it is doing, and its execution is profoundly excellent, nothing about what it is doing appeals to me in any way. I have little interest in playing a game where the focus isn’t on fun minute-to-minute gameplay, but on character interaction and CYOA style narrative branching. And I am upset that I don’t enjoy it! It isn’t fun to see a game everyone else is loving and nothing about it clicking for me. Fortunately, however, I don’t actually have to play this game. The only things about the experience that actually spoke to me was the Dark Urge playthrough and Lae’Zel being a whole-ass BDSM freak, and I really appreciated her for being the sole party member who was slightly less generically attractive and having an openly off putting personality.

I constantly found myself lost among the overly-realistic environment, where nothing stood out against one another and signposting was vague at best. I could never tell what I was supposed to find compelling about the setting or plot scenario (almost like a bad D&D campaign!) and was barraged with unappealing dirt the whole time. Even with as much freedom as BG3’s camera gives the player, you are still not allowed to even see the sky.

How much is all that freedom of choice worth if I can’t even look at the sky?

Not much, I’d imagine.