A Pretty Nuts game. The first in a series of teen murder courtroom simulators and what a start to the series! I feel like the sequels improved on what this game did but I have to give it a lot credit for not only laying down the basics for the series but also pulling it off in really cool ways.

First of all, the aesthetic to this game is really impressive. The art style and character designs are unique, colorful and bursting with personality. Having them presented as cardboard cutouts is also pretty neat. The OST packs a punch to match the visuals, with infectious electro-pop and rave tunes that help push the personality of the game over the edge. The presentation and music of the game really shine with the courtroom scenes.

For those unfamiliar, the game is about a bunch of teenagers who are locked in a school and are forced to participate in a killing game by Monokuma, a black and white cuddly bear who manages to constantly steal the show in every game he's in. Shout out to the dub version of Monokuma...he's perfect. Anyways, when a student is killed, you investigate the scene to find evidence to try and pinpoint the killer which leads to the centerpieces of Danganronpa: the courtroom scenes.

All the surviving students are gathered in a circle and everybody must present evidence and argue over who the killer is. Sometimes these segments can last for several hours and as I said earlier, the presentation really shines with these. The camera pans, the expressive character potraits, the way speech is plastered as these imposing 3D words on the screen, the thumping rave music playing over the top and the voice acting preformances make these scenes absolute gaming highlights. Unfortunately, this game probably has the worst ratio of Good/Bad cases out of all three of the games but it does contain probably the two best cases in the series (Cases 2 and 6). Man, they're amazing.

And I guess that's the main problem with this game; the quality of the cases can be a bit of a mixed bag. The first case makes it all too obvious who the killer is early on. Some of the cases later on just feel complicated for the sake of being obtuse and lose a bit of impact because of.

But it's really hard to dislike this game because of the wonderful art, music, presentation, characters and world of Danganronpa. If you like the sound of a colourful, punk japanese detective game then boy do I have the game for you!

It's the sequel to Danganronpa! Instead, now it's on a tropical island instead of a school and Nagito is there. Pretty solid follow up to the first game.

Biggest improvement over the original being the quality of the cases. Whilst the first Danganronpa's cases were a bit mixed in quality, Danganronpa 2's cases are all consistantly solid (except for the final one, unfortunately). The new cast are my personal favourites of the series and Nagito is a strong highlight. Only real downside with the game is that, yeah, the ending kinda sucks.

It's more Danganronpa but (mostly) Better!

the Human After All of video-games; nowhere near as good as the first two releases, gets largely repetitive mid way through and people are trolling if they say it's their best.

In all seriousness though, I appreciate the game at the very least. Deciding that the next place to take your safe but solid 2D specific stylized courtroom investigation game is into a 3D puzzle third person shooter with very little in common with the previous games? A brave and fun move, just a shame that it doesn't really pay off in the end.

'Cus the game starts off pretty strong! You're locked up on this mysterious island, you escape from a bunch of evil Monokumas, you meet the villains and get the low down on what's gonna happen and the first level is genuinely great! You're excited to be playing a different new danganronpa, it throws a bunch of new attatchments for your gun and there's a cool scene with a bridge. After you beat that first boss though, game starts to go downhill.

Second level is all over the place. Immediately you start going in a circle, with your only reward being a monologue from the villain of the cast who REALLY DIDN'T NEED A MONOLOGUE OH MY GOD, and then you're left to wander a straight linear sewer level! Yay! You do eventually get to a camp full of humans and get to interact with some people but, from this point onwards, the game never really gets back to the highs of the intro+first level. It just starts to get real repetitive and runs out of ideas gameplay wise.

Also there's some things story wise that I think kinda blow or were unnecessary: the origin of what Monokuma is, the actual villain's motivations and the minigame with the idol girl. They're all just kinda like...really? Don't think it's a coincidence that around this time I started to care less about the universe that danganronpa was creating and maybe wished it stayed as the more mysterious world from the first game.

Cool idea; bad execution.

A really cool game! Kinda went into this game blind and was happily surprised at how great it was.

The game to me has three main pillars; the combat, the farming and the characters and each one of them is done to a gratifying degree! The combat feels simple but very punchy, due to the main gimmick of the game being the crash system. You can smack dudes or use your grappling arm to chuck and throw people around and when they connect with other enemies (or the enviornment), they crash into them dealing additional damage to both the airplane and the destination. Speaking of that grappling arm, I should probably say that yeah, you get a grappling arm from the first minute of the game and it's a valuable tool in making the combat feel very expressive. But overall the combat is simple but fun.

The farming actually totally caught me off guard. I went into this game aware of the combat/farming sides but kinda expected the farming part to be a more throwaway side part of the game. Boy was I wrong! The farming goes into a sometimes exhaustive video-game recreation of farming, with you having to do heavy labour and managing all the different stages of cultivating and sowing your rice crop. That means manually planting hundreds of seeds in the early game one button press at a time, by the way. While this may scare or bore some players off, I think they did a fantastic job of it and it was one of my favourite parts of the game.

I'm a sucker for forced monotony in games as long as it has some sort of purpose (games being bad on purpose being one of the highest art forms, of course) and sakuna defintely fits into this mold for me. Going through eahc stage and feeling the labour of each part really struck a chord with me and made the whole process much more rewarding in the end of my first few years. The game does something smart though and actually have an exp system built in to the farming side and the more experience you get at doing each part of the farming process, the more upgrades you get. For instance, with seed planting you start out planting seeds one by one, but them you unlock a grid overlay to judge spacing better and you also unlock different skills that you let plant a different amount of seeds all at once and in individual patterns. It's really cool and helps stop the farming from becoming too much of an actual chore over the time.

Also I know I've been blabbering about the farming a lot but I just wanna also praise the system where the rice you grow at the end of the farming process is how you level up. Killing enemies and completing stages doesn't grant you experience points to level sakuna up but all your experience points actually come from the farming side of the game and depending of MANY variables during the farming process, such as tempreture, weather, season, fertilizer, seed spacing and WAY more, depend on how much you level up and also what stats you level up, like strength, magic, luck etc. It's a really, really neat system and I gotta give the dev team praise for how well they pulled off the farming partof the game.

Then there's the characters which, I'll be honest, the story isn't amazing in Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin. Sakuna is blamed for humans breaking into heaven and causing an accident, so sakuna is punished along with the humans to live on a demon infested island where they gotta find something. The story doesn't do too many interesting things but it does act as a vehicle for the characters who I fully enjoyed. The game does a really good job of letting you get to know each character you work with in the game and giving them their own individual stories and personalities. These are backe dup with not only good writing but also a lot of random cutscenes on your home base that, whilst short, usually tell you a little something about a character or their relationship with someone. There's an abundance of them in the game and their all pretty swell. At first it starts a bit light on character building but after the halfway point it really starts to shine (Sakuna and Kokorowa are great).

There's some gripes I have with the game, mostly the level design and the length. Levels maybe feel a little bit too similar/basic and the game feels maybe a little bit too long for my taste but overall I had a great time with Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin. Hihgly recommend those who loves good aesthetics, fun combat and unique games that try to do something a little different.

As invaluable as this game was for the first 3 weeks of my lockdown experience, I can't say it''s really stuck with me much past that. I'll still log in every so often and feel warm and relaxed at the amount of charm, cuteness and customisation work you can do in-game, but then it slowly gives away to the grindy nature of the game which kinda kills it a bit for me.

I dunno if I'm just playing Animal Crossing games wrong or they're not for me or maybe there's just a lack of content atm that makes the game feel less lived in and natural. Whatever it is, it's unfortunate that I haven't stuck with it more.

I do love my villagers though. Including myself. Half of my Switch screenshot album is just me in Animal Crossing. Lewisiscute.

Amazing game, it's a wonderful mix of action, platforming and metroidvanian topped with some high quality art and music.

Exploring felt excellent, just getting lost in the world in both meanings of the word was a real highlight of the experience and just seeing how many different places, routes connecting to other routes and content there was hiding away in the world was deeply satisfying.

The base game was already great and the DLC managed to add even more flavour to it. It's an awesome game, heavy recommend.

Oooooooooooh Astral Chain, you do so much good stuff. The combat is so incredibly satisfying to learn and pull off in this game, the fact your dodge kinda sucks or isn't the most effective way of moving around in combat felt like the team knew they wanted to create something different from the usual Platinum gameplay style and I'm glad they went with it. The chain mechanic and having helpful buddies to swap out at will is rad. Big thumbs up.

I also really like the art style and look for the world. Some characters can maybe feel a little plain but there's a tonne of real standout looks and visuals in this game. Most of the OST I didn't fuck that hard with but the base theme....fuuuuuuuuuuuck. Also Marie Wentz/Lappy a cute.

As for the stuff Astral Chain doesn't do too well...well, for the start the story is kinda trash. Like I know Platinum games aren't expected to have great story but even something as boiler plate as Vanquish's story felt miles better than the one in Astral Chain. For most of the time it kinda stays plain/building stuff up and then two thirds of the way through the story it decides to completely forget characters (remember the cool looking dude with the electronic dreads who was set up to be your rival? yeah.) and just prematurely rush you into the end game where it doesn't even bother giving you the dignity of a satisying ending. Literally fade to black. Awesome!

Also the pacing I found to be a bit dodgy sometimes. The balance of this game is between the real world, where you mostly do fights and explore, and the astral plain, where you sometimes do fights and platform, and I don't think either area are that bad, it's just you sometimes stay in one area for way too long. This especially feels bad with the astral plain sections because I already wasn't too hot on the platforming in the game, so having those sections going on for long felt really bad. Just in general, the flow of the game can feel pretty uneven and sluggish at times.

Also something that sucks is that I feel like you don't really get a good amount of time to feel the full potential of the combat in this game since it keeps handing you out buddies and abilities up until the later parts of the game. Top that with having the combat take a little bit to get used to, you don't ever really feel like you're making the most of the combat potential until you're getting near the end of the game which kinda blows. In something like Devil May Cry this doesn't matter too much since you can just replay the game easily but in Astral Chain that becomes a little bit more laborious due to the amount of dialogue and cutscenes as well as the playtime (my save file said 30 hours when I finished my first playthrough) to the point where you wonder if it's even worth going into the game again.

Also, just in general, I feel like the game has less soul to itself compared to Platinum's other titles.

I know I really went on about the game negatively there but I still do love the core of this game. The combat system, the aesthetic, the world: it's all really good! It's just a shame it also comes with problems that really hurt itself.

Marie still cute.

slick detective game, got a lot out of this one! really liked the whole open-world mystery that the game presents you, where the scene of the crime is pretty much an entire island. conceptually i think it's pretty rad but also having a good half and half between visual novel/interviewing segments and open world exploring felt really nice.

aesthetic is on point. the game stylistically feels like a heavy homage to past suda51 games as well as some sprinklings of something like danganronpa. little descriptions on the relics and objects you find in the game are wonderfully detailed and willingly obtuse. the relic descriptions really give a nice flavour to daily island life before the purge of civilians and the descriptions of the gods really help give this idea of a chaotic, strange universe filled with obtuse gods. the universe within this game was fantastic.

also the art style and music are worth pointing out. art direction is on point in both the tropical island look and the character designs. really good, disctinct looks to all the suspects in the game. also the music is a highlight, really dreamy soft 80s synthpop that vibes with the island. perticularly enjoyed the touch of having the music be a physical concept on the island and having it played through speakers scattered across the island.

stroy wise the game isn't too shocking or suprising but it gives you a nice little murder mystery to follow and a cool final trial, that i actually got anxiety over before going ahead with it because the game kinda expects you to do your homework before going ahead with it by looking through the evidence and making some sort of narrative. it's pretty cool. one other point i liked was how open the final trial was. I feel like there's always gonna be the same suspect that you have to accuse if you wanna get anywhere but you could totally save certain characters you liked who were implicit by merely ignoring the evidence and letting them go free. or choose who you thought really did the murder in the end. or after the trial just go around and murder people found innocent by the trial if maybe you feel like you didn't get the evidence right or thought they were involved somehow or maybe you just didn't like them.

overall, game is pretty good! enjoyable in pretty much all aspects. it won't blow your mind i feel but if you want to have some slightly abstract murder investigation funsies, this is defintely one worth checking out.