LordDarias
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đź’ś This game was gifted to Catizens Curations for review.
Nukearts Studio once more deliveres an amazing success of a game in their series of hidden cat games. Like it's predecessors, Hidden Cats in Berlin delivers an impressive array of details in it's artworks, with cats hidden in multiple different places and a couple of different modes to enjoy. You start with an uncolored illustration and it gets colored as you find more and more cats until the last one is found and the final awesome artwork is revealed in all of its beautiful color.
You get to play through two different modes of the main game, normal and advanced, as well as extra kitten levels that are unlocked from finding special named cats in advanced mode! There is also a big bonus level, which is unlocked by doing all of the bonus kitten levels. It's similar to what they started to include in their few previous games.
The game is relaxing and addictive like all the games in the series and I would highly recommend this game wholeheartedly, not just on sale, but even with full price as it is not only cheap, but supports the developers to make more of these amazing hidden cat games! Try it out!
Nukearts Studio once more deliveres an amazing success of a game in their series of hidden cat games. Like it's predecessors, Hidden Cats in Berlin delivers an impressive array of details in it's artworks, with cats hidden in multiple different places and a couple of different modes to enjoy. You start with an uncolored illustration and it gets colored as you find more and more cats until the last one is found and the final awesome artwork is revealed in all of its beautiful color.
You get to play through two different modes of the main game, normal and advanced, as well as extra kitten levels that are unlocked from finding special named cats in advanced mode! There is also a big bonus level, which is unlocked by doing all of the bonus kitten levels. It's similar to what they started to include in their few previous games.
The game is relaxing and addictive like all the games in the series and I would highly recommend this game wholeheartedly, not just on sale, but even with full price as it is not only cheap, but supports the developers to make more of these amazing hidden cat games! Try it out!
This game is a masterpiece - one that captured me from the start and turned out to be even more of a delight than dos2. You could say that the first ten hours start out slow and that the music lacks variety, but those are its biggest flaws imo.
Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is a phenomenal isometric crpg that is perfect as is. Admittedly poe2 isn't as visually stunning as dos2, but it takes a more humble, home-y approach with its immersive 2-D world, which is still massive. I actually find the 2-D world preferable because sometimes with 3-D worlds like dos2, sometimes there's a bit too much going on and almost too many visual details, making it difficult to see what you're looking at.
Exploration in pillars feels highly rewarding. Definitely one of those games that'll have you saying "just one more thing" and then you find yourself lost in a dungeon that takes you through three more dungeons. Excellent story writing, world-building, and tons of lore (yes pillars is text-heavy - what else did you expect?). Another thing, the dual class system is remarkable and allows for more possibilities than dos2 without being complicated. Did I mention that it's pirate themed?
I'm a slut for rtwp so I LOVE that the player can choose between rtwp or turn-based combat. As someone who plays a ton of turn-based games and rpgs in general, I find rtwp refreshing bc I understand how the tb grind inevitably get tiring after awhile, no matter how stellar the game is. In pillars, the combat never felt like a chore, which I feel says a lot for games within the crpg or jrpg genre.
At 105 hours, I still have not completed the game. I purchased the dlc around 95 hours and as a completionist, plan to experience as much as I can before completing this playthrough. I already can't wait to revisit this game again in the distant future because it's worthy of being played more than just once. Overall, an absolute must-try for rpg fans.
Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is a phenomenal isometric crpg that is perfect as is. Admittedly poe2 isn't as visually stunning as dos2, but it takes a more humble, home-y approach with its immersive 2-D world, which is still massive. I actually find the 2-D world preferable because sometimes with 3-D worlds like dos2, sometimes there's a bit too much going on and almost too many visual details, making it difficult to see what you're looking at.
Exploration in pillars feels highly rewarding. Definitely one of those games that'll have you saying "just one more thing" and then you find yourself lost in a dungeon that takes you through three more dungeons. Excellent story writing, world-building, and tons of lore (yes pillars is text-heavy - what else did you expect?). Another thing, the dual class system is remarkable and allows for more possibilities than dos2 without being complicated. Did I mention that it's pirate themed?
I'm a slut for rtwp so I LOVE that the player can choose between rtwp or turn-based combat. As someone who plays a ton of turn-based games and rpgs in general, I find rtwp refreshing bc I understand how the tb grind inevitably get tiring after awhile, no matter how stellar the game is. In pillars, the combat never felt like a chore, which I feel says a lot for games within the crpg or jrpg genre.
At 105 hours, I still have not completed the game. I purchased the dlc around 95 hours and as a completionist, plan to experience as much as I can before completing this playthrough. I already can't wait to revisit this game again in the distant future because it's worthy of being played more than just once. Overall, an absolute must-try for rpg fans.
Long ago, in the world of Picnic, a world that was then monochromatic, a magic brush sprung forth, allowing its wielder to bring color to the lands and happiness to their people. Ages passed since that day, and pass did the brush, hand to hand, every few years, to a new artist courageous enough to bear the responsibility of wielding it. In the present, the one holding the brush is none other than the talented Chicory, a rabbit who spent years studying art and training under the previous wielder.
It is in this scenario that you, the player, enter the story, taking on the role of none other than... not, actually, Chicory. You play as Chicory's janitor, a small dog who... definitely, uh... janits... or something. The wielder lives in a big tower, after all, and someone has to clean it. And so, our unremarkable pup is going about their unremarkable day, when suddenly, disaster strikes: all of a sudden, the world loses all of its color. Scrambling to find the wielder and get to the root of the matter, the janitor finds not Chicory, but her brush, and dares to try painting with it. With Chicory still MIA, the accidental new wielder finds themselves in the eye of a storm, as a mysterious threat looms over the land of Picnic.
Chicory isn't simply a game, it's a vibe. The player's main means of interacting with the world is through a brush controlled with either the cursor controlled either by the mouse or the right stick, and a lot of time is spent trying to get the player into painting for fun. There are hardly any constraints or requirements even when a specific type of drawing is requested, so inevitably, there will be players that are not captivated whatsoever by the game's premise and just submit whatever to progress in the game. To those people, Chicory will come off as a pretty bland experience.
I almost fell into that group, in part because Chicory takes its time in showing its cards. The game takes heavy inspiration from The Legend of Zelda series, its top-down maps being filled with secrets and, more importantly, there being power-ups to collect that enable exploring new areas. This design, however, only really comes together towards the latter half of the game, when areas become more elaborate and the protagonist's toolset becomes more interesting. For example, the very first power-up the janitor get lets their ink light up dark places, which not only isn't much of a brush-y thing, but also reinforces the slow pace of the opening hours.
And I remember the exact turning point, the moment where I went from "Chicory might be better suited for young children" to "Chicory resonates with me". Somewhere before the midpoint of the game, the janitor meets Chicory, and the duo agrees to each paint one another -- prompting the player to draw Chicory as best they can. This is a pivotal moment in the story as it establishes the type of person (bunny?) the titular character is, and is a time when the central themes and mechanics are beginning to coalesce. And for some reason, even though most drawing assignments the game gave me were done half-heartedly up until that point, I found myself trying my absolute hardest to paint Chicory.
Which leads us into the second reason why the game might not resonate with many: Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a story made by artists, for artists, about the process of making art. Not professional artists, necessarily, but anyone who has ever tried to do art, whether or not they succeeded. Making art is grueling. It requires mastering a swathe of topics with no clear roadmap all while being constantly compared to peers who seem to do way better than you. At the end, what awaits you is very little reward, as any painting, or song, or whatever the end goal is will take hours, if not days of work, assuming it even comes out the way you envisioned it.
(And in the current climate, some dumbass techbro is likely to steal your work and call it an innovation, so there's that too.)
And it's easy, having only the goal in sight and so much pressure to achieve it, to begin to loathe the process, forgetting the fun there was in it in the first place and eventually just giving up on trying. It is the cause of the demise of many an art journey. It has been the biggest struggle in mine, and because of that, a lot of the text in Chicory, its allegories and character archetypes, speaks to me on a personal level. However, this wouldn't have always been the case, and it's easy to imagine many a player seeing it all go way over their head because making art was never really in their minds.
To be fair to that player, the whole flavor given to Chicory due to its narrative and main form of interaction with the environment is what makes the game stand out. Without those, it's just... fine. It has its many pros, but also its many cons. As a Zelda-like adventure, it's lacking in interesting dungeon designs, but does feature good puzzles and an overworld filled with nooks and crannies to unravel. Boss battles are a standout part of the experience, but they're made confusing by the lack of a health bar, and while many questlines are fun, 100%ing the game means chasing after some pretty frustrating collectibles.
So should you play Chicory, after all? If you've dabbled in art yourself, yes: you're likely to find something that resonates with your own journey, and if anything, it's refreshing to know you're not alone. If you've never tried to create things yourself... well, maybe do that. It's very enlightening, and earns you an appreciation for how intricate works like games and movies are. Once you've spent some time challenging yourself in that process, then, and only then, come back and decide if Chicory is the game for you.
It is in this scenario that you, the player, enter the story, taking on the role of none other than... not, actually, Chicory. You play as Chicory's janitor, a small dog who... definitely, uh... janits... or something. The wielder lives in a big tower, after all, and someone has to clean it. And so, our unremarkable pup is going about their unremarkable day, when suddenly, disaster strikes: all of a sudden, the world loses all of its color. Scrambling to find the wielder and get to the root of the matter, the janitor finds not Chicory, but her brush, and dares to try painting with it. With Chicory still MIA, the accidental new wielder finds themselves in the eye of a storm, as a mysterious threat looms over the land of Picnic.
Chicory isn't simply a game, it's a vibe. The player's main means of interacting with the world is through a brush controlled with either the cursor controlled either by the mouse or the right stick, and a lot of time is spent trying to get the player into painting for fun. There are hardly any constraints or requirements even when a specific type of drawing is requested, so inevitably, there will be players that are not captivated whatsoever by the game's premise and just submit whatever to progress in the game. To those people, Chicory will come off as a pretty bland experience.
I almost fell into that group, in part because Chicory takes its time in showing its cards. The game takes heavy inspiration from The Legend of Zelda series, its top-down maps being filled with secrets and, more importantly, there being power-ups to collect that enable exploring new areas. This design, however, only really comes together towards the latter half of the game, when areas become more elaborate and the protagonist's toolset becomes more interesting. For example, the very first power-up the janitor get lets their ink light up dark places, which not only isn't much of a brush-y thing, but also reinforces the slow pace of the opening hours.
And I remember the exact turning point, the moment where I went from "Chicory might be better suited for young children" to "Chicory resonates with me". Somewhere before the midpoint of the game, the janitor meets Chicory, and the duo agrees to each paint one another -- prompting the player to draw Chicory as best they can. This is a pivotal moment in the story as it establishes the type of person (bunny?) the titular character is, and is a time when the central themes and mechanics are beginning to coalesce. And for some reason, even though most drawing assignments the game gave me were done half-heartedly up until that point, I found myself trying my absolute hardest to paint Chicory.
Which leads us into the second reason why the game might not resonate with many: Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a story made by artists, for artists, about the process of making art. Not professional artists, necessarily, but anyone who has ever tried to do art, whether or not they succeeded. Making art is grueling. It requires mastering a swathe of topics with no clear roadmap all while being constantly compared to peers who seem to do way better than you. At the end, what awaits you is very little reward, as any painting, or song, or whatever the end goal is will take hours, if not days of work, assuming it even comes out the way you envisioned it.
(And in the current climate, some dumbass techbro is likely to steal your work and call it an innovation, so there's that too.)
And it's easy, having only the goal in sight and so much pressure to achieve it, to begin to loathe the process, forgetting the fun there was in it in the first place and eventually just giving up on trying. It is the cause of the demise of many an art journey. It has been the biggest struggle in mine, and because of that, a lot of the text in Chicory, its allegories and character archetypes, speaks to me on a personal level. However, this wouldn't have always been the case, and it's easy to imagine many a player seeing it all go way over their head because making art was never really in their minds.
To be fair to that player, the whole flavor given to Chicory due to its narrative and main form of interaction with the environment is what makes the game stand out. Without those, it's just... fine. It has its many pros, but also its many cons. As a Zelda-like adventure, it's lacking in interesting dungeon designs, but does feature good puzzles and an overworld filled with nooks and crannies to unravel. Boss battles are a standout part of the experience, but they're made confusing by the lack of a health bar, and while many questlines are fun, 100%ing the game means chasing after some pretty frustrating collectibles.
So should you play Chicory, after all? If you've dabbled in art yourself, yes: you're likely to find something that resonates with your own journey, and if anything, it's refreshing to know you're not alone. If you've never tried to create things yourself... well, maybe do that. It's very enlightening, and earns you an appreciation for how intricate works like games and movies are. Once you've spent some time challenging yourself in that process, then, and only then, come back and decide if Chicory is the game for you.
Nightmare Kart
2024
If you truly dedicate yourself to the art of shitposting, you too can make something like Nightmare Kart.
Genuinely excellent and fun. I've also never experienced such in-depth CRT television simulation options in a video game before. Extremely cool. FatherGascoigne Gregory doing his short monologue about turning into a beast and then doing the breath thing, only for the camera to do a quick zoom-out to reveal that he's riding a golden motorcycle is hilarious. And yes, he does in fact do an Akira-slide on it.
I hunted.
Genuinely excellent and fun. I've also never experienced such in-depth CRT television simulation options in a video game before. Extremely cool. Father
I hunted.
Still Wakes the Deep
2024
Still Wakes the Deep is a game of two halves. One is rote, with slow climbing and stealth sequences, dull monster encounters and "puzzles". The other half though is breathtaking – stellar voice performances and direction, juiced-up fidelity and set pieces, and an incredible sense of place aboard the oil rig. Despite my frustrations or boredom with that first half, the strength of the game's presentation and environmental design do a LOT of the OSHA-approved heavy lifting on this one.
I really wish the horror elements were explored just a bit more, as the monstrous element is kept fairly foregrounded through the story but it's not particularly frightening or scary beyond the initial "reveal". It's a bit like they thumbed through the rolodex of Horror Themes, stopped on "body horror", and decided to explore no further. There's distended flesh and viscera a-plenty here, but towards the end, it becomes a bit of a homogenous slurry and loses a lot of its staying power. Likewise, the encounters with the creatures themselves are repetitive from-the-jump, consisting of little more than throwing something to distract a monster and hiding in a vent, repeated ad nauseum.
So it should once again speak to the strength of the incredible voice performances, script, and visuals that I still came away really enjoying this. The story is well-crafted and presented wonderfully, with the protagonist in particular easily being the best performance I've heard this year. This is my first experience with The Chinese Room's ouvre, so it may not come as a surprise for others, but this feels far more of a game for fans of narrative and walking sims than for those fans of strictly horror games.
Spent a lot of time going back and forth on 3-stars or 4 for this one, but the strength of its ending sealed the deal for me (though I admit, games like this make me reconsider my no-half-stars scale).
I really wish the horror elements were explored just a bit more, as the monstrous element is kept fairly foregrounded through the story but it's not particularly frightening or scary beyond the initial "reveal". It's a bit like they thumbed through the rolodex of Horror Themes, stopped on "body horror", and decided to explore no further. There's distended flesh and viscera a-plenty here, but towards the end, it becomes a bit of a homogenous slurry and loses a lot of its staying power. Likewise, the encounters with the creatures themselves are repetitive from-the-jump, consisting of little more than throwing something to distract a monster and hiding in a vent, repeated ad nauseum.
So it should once again speak to the strength of the incredible voice performances, script, and visuals that I still came away really enjoying this. The story is well-crafted and presented wonderfully, with the protagonist in particular easily being the best performance I've heard this year. This is my first experience with The Chinese Room's ouvre, so it may not come as a surprise for others, but this feels far more of a game for fans of narrative and walking sims than for those fans of strictly horror games.
Spent a lot of time going back and forth on 3-stars or 4 for this one, but the strength of its ending sealed the deal for me (though I admit, games like this make me reconsider my no-half-stars scale).
Iggy's Reckin' Balls
1998
Every once in a while I will get bored and play something off the wall. I got on the ole Switch and updated all of the retro systems since it had been a minute since I had. I flipped around through games for a minute bored and hovered over this atrocity of a cover art. I chose what I assumed would be a bad choice and booted up the game.
The first thing we get to do is pick our head…uhh character. By character I mean an Iguana head, a clown..? head, a Jack-o-lantern, or other equally stupid heads. Now that you’re a head of some sort it’s time to race… vertically. How vertically I hear you asking? Well you roll on a platform until you are under another platform and then somehow jump, even though you’re just a head, and use your tounge to grab the platform above you to vault you up. That’s it that’s the game. Oh but you also get to do it to some of the most sinful graphics and horrific sounds (I don’t dare consider it actual music) if all time. The fact this game is rated above a 2.5 is unbelievably to me.
Don’t play this unless you want to punish yourself.
I’ll save you time. It’s last on the list.
https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/games-i-played-in-2024-ranked-1/
The first thing we get to do is pick our head…uhh character. By character I mean an Iguana head, a clown..? head, a Jack-o-lantern, or other equally stupid heads. Now that you’re a head of some sort it’s time to race… vertically. How vertically I hear you asking? Well you roll on a platform until you are under another platform and then somehow jump, even though you’re just a head, and use your tounge to grab the platform above you to vault you up. That’s it that’s the game. Oh but you also get to do it to some of the most sinful graphics and horrific sounds (I don’t dare consider it actual music) if all time. The fact this game is rated above a 2.5 is unbelievably to me.
Don’t play this unless you want to punish yourself.
I’ll save you time. It’s last on the list.
https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/games-i-played-in-2024-ranked-1/
đź’ś This game was gifted to Catizens Curations for review.
Hop on and drive into the colorful adventure of this very cute game! You play as Corbid, a cute elephant, with the power of color on their side. You meet a cute friend, Poppy the axolotl, who helps you on your adventures.
You play your way through two different gardens which contain a few different levels and a boss "fight" for each. It's a very well made and enjoyable game, with cute enemies and a colorful look. The enemies in this game are defeated non-violently, so it's a very lovely game for children. The puzzles in this game include simple navigation, complex paths to unlock doors, use pressure plates and switches, targeting, navigating through different slimes, finding the different colors, combining them and more!
I absolutely enjoyed the game, the first garden was rather simple, but it was clearly meant as a "teaching the basics" kind of stage. The second garden was a little bit harder and it had me scratching my head at some times, but it was still rather simple and great for kids as well! I also read some reviews where people said there had been some bugs, but for me, I encountered none, so I believe they had fixed them rather quickly.
In conclusion it's a very lovely and enjoyable game in my opinion! Definitely worth the price it sits at and it was super fun. Absolutely recommended!
Hop on and drive into the colorful adventure of this very cute game! You play as Corbid, a cute elephant, with the power of color on their side. You meet a cute friend, Poppy the axolotl, who helps you on your adventures.
You play your way through two different gardens which contain a few different levels and a boss "fight" for each. It's a very well made and enjoyable game, with cute enemies and a colorful look. The enemies in this game are defeated non-violently, so it's a very lovely game for children. The puzzles in this game include simple navigation, complex paths to unlock doors, use pressure plates and switches, targeting, navigating through different slimes, finding the different colors, combining them and more!
I absolutely enjoyed the game, the first garden was rather simple, but it was clearly meant as a "teaching the basics" kind of stage. The second garden was a little bit harder and it had me scratching my head at some times, but it was still rather simple and great for kids as well! I also read some reviews where people said there had been some bugs, but for me, I encountered none, so I believe they had fixed them rather quickly.
In conclusion it's a very lovely and enjoyable game in my opinion! Definitely worth the price it sits at and it was super fun. Absolutely recommended!
Scribblenauts
2009
If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But in this case it's not because of the premise - the game really does let you spawn basically anything you can think of outside of swear words and other vulgar things. It's still a Nintendo DS game where you can make God fight Cthulu though which is kind of crazy.
There's a good amount of easter eggs between item interactions too. Plus references in level set-ups, like the one designed after Pac-Man, with moth balls in place of the usual dots, and generic ghosts to run from.
What's "too good to be true" in this case is the game built around the concept. The game is split into puzzle levels and action levels. The puzzle levels require you to spawn specific items or complete a task in order to spawn the starite. Action levels have the starite in the open and have to be navigated to somehow. Though there is some overlap - a lot of action levels are basically puzzles and vice versa.
The issue comes in how repetitive many of these stages can get. For example, one level had me saving a lamb and getting it to its mother, and between them was a wolf. In my case I used a helicopter, spawned some rope to attach the lamb to the helicopter and flew past the wolf. Then in the same "world" or whatever a set of levels is called, I had a mission to get a penguin to safety over a pool of water with a whale in it. I just used the literal exact same solution.
I get that the games whole schtick is that many levels can be completed in many ways, but it's way too easy in this game to fall back on tricks you know work due to how many times the devs seemed to put the same basic problems. So, so many of the action levels are just obstacle courses with things you need to kill, which sure can be done in so many ways, but eventually you get bored of experimenting and just spawn the same overpowered creature. You stop thinking of ways to fly and just spawn the same jetpack or pterodactyl. Thinking of spawning the sun to light up a pitch black level is pretty fun the first time - not so much the next 10 times. It got so repetitive that by the end for the action levels I was using a certain glitch involving a vending machine and handcuffs to skip most of the levels.
Way too many levels come down to "Kill thing" "Find a way to fly" and "Find a way to swim underwater".
The game doesn't really do much to encourage you to experiment either. Playing a level once beaten does have a challenge mode where you need to beat the level 3 times in a row using different words, but even this has issues. For one thing, the first of those 3 times can just be the exact same solution as the original completion of the level. Secondly, the game doesn't really care about using synonyms - you can use "cop", "police" and "policeman" as different words. And lastly, because of the repetitiveness of the missions, this method doesn't necessarily require you to think up lots of different solutions, but 3 solutions that will apply to a huge chunk of levels. Basically just falling in to the exact same trap as playing the levels once, but taking longer to do so.
Oh and the game also controls like poopy. It's purely stylus controls which means you're so often moving when you meant to click an object, accidently jumping off cliffs, accidently unequipping something and so on. Apparently there was a re-release that switched to button controls but I didn't play that one. Luckily it was also changed to button controls in all future games, so I definitely wanna try that out. Maybe if the game was more fun to control I wouldn't feel the need to rush through all the later levels.
I really give props to the devs for the huge amount of effort gone in to this, it's just that I don't find the game that fun to really complete. They could have cut down half of these levels easily and lost nothing.
There's a good amount of easter eggs between item interactions too. Plus references in level set-ups, like the one designed after Pac-Man, with moth balls in place of the usual dots, and generic ghosts to run from.
What's "too good to be true" in this case is the game built around the concept. The game is split into puzzle levels and action levels. The puzzle levels require you to spawn specific items or complete a task in order to spawn the starite. Action levels have the starite in the open and have to be navigated to somehow. Though there is some overlap - a lot of action levels are basically puzzles and vice versa.
The issue comes in how repetitive many of these stages can get. For example, one level had me saving a lamb and getting it to its mother, and between them was a wolf. In my case I used a helicopter, spawned some rope to attach the lamb to the helicopter and flew past the wolf. Then in the same "world" or whatever a set of levels is called, I had a mission to get a penguin to safety over a pool of water with a whale in it. I just used the literal exact same solution.
I get that the games whole schtick is that many levels can be completed in many ways, but it's way too easy in this game to fall back on tricks you know work due to how many times the devs seemed to put the same basic problems. So, so many of the action levels are just obstacle courses with things you need to kill, which sure can be done in so many ways, but eventually you get bored of experimenting and just spawn the same overpowered creature. You stop thinking of ways to fly and just spawn the same jetpack or pterodactyl. Thinking of spawning the sun to light up a pitch black level is pretty fun the first time - not so much the next 10 times. It got so repetitive that by the end for the action levels I was using a certain glitch involving a vending machine and handcuffs to skip most of the levels.
Way too many levels come down to "Kill thing" "Find a way to fly" and "Find a way to swim underwater".
The game doesn't really do much to encourage you to experiment either. Playing a level once beaten does have a challenge mode where you need to beat the level 3 times in a row using different words, but even this has issues. For one thing, the first of those 3 times can just be the exact same solution as the original completion of the level. Secondly, the game doesn't really care about using synonyms - you can use "cop", "police" and "policeman" as different words. And lastly, because of the repetitiveness of the missions, this method doesn't necessarily require you to think up lots of different solutions, but 3 solutions that will apply to a huge chunk of levels. Basically just falling in to the exact same trap as playing the levels once, but taking longer to do so.
Oh and the game also controls like poopy. It's purely stylus controls which means you're so often moving when you meant to click an object, accidently jumping off cliffs, accidently unequipping something and so on. Apparently there was a re-release that switched to button controls but I didn't play that one. Luckily it was also changed to button controls in all future games, so I definitely wanna try that out. Maybe if the game was more fun to control I wouldn't feel the need to rush through all the later levels.
I really give props to the devs for the huge amount of effort gone in to this, it's just that I don't find the game that fun to really complete. They could have cut down half of these levels easily and lost nothing.
Let's set the mood with a little music.
Do you care about Super Sentai shows? Cool. This is #15, saved the franchise and prompted the ongoing adaptation of the shows into the Power Rangers series. Have a favorite cast member? Don't worry, all the characters are viable, acting as lives and coming back between stages. Admittedly, the universal melee attack means there's not much reason to not just pick Blue Swallow or White Swan (the gun-bearing characters), but you already know you're going to pick just one or all five, so it's nice that there's no duds.
Don't care about Super Sentai at all? Good news, it's still a fun little game. Easy, for sure, with just one enemy type in Area B bringing the tiniest bit of spice. Boss fights are easy enough to figure out on the fly and somewhat reminiscent of Ultraman on the SNES. Solid designs, translating the sentai weirdness with remarkable fidelity. A pity turtling them is so effective, but hey, it's a game for kids. The graphics are nice, the music is good, there's a fun rhythm to the stages despite the lack of challenge. A good time, easy to recommend for a quick session regardless of your affinity for the franchise..
Do you care about Super Sentai shows? Cool. This is #15, saved the franchise and prompted the ongoing adaptation of the shows into the Power Rangers series. Have a favorite cast member? Don't worry, all the characters are viable, acting as lives and coming back between stages. Admittedly, the universal melee attack means there's not much reason to not just pick Blue Swallow or White Swan (the gun-bearing characters), but you already know you're going to pick just one or all five, so it's nice that there's no duds.
Don't care about Super Sentai at all? Good news, it's still a fun little game. Easy, for sure, with just one enemy type in Area B bringing the tiniest bit of spice. Boss fights are easy enough to figure out on the fly and somewhat reminiscent of Ultraman on the SNES. Solid designs, translating the sentai weirdness with remarkable fidelity. A pity turtling them is so effective, but hey, it's a game for kids. The graphics are nice, the music is good, there's a fun rhythm to the stages despite the lack of challenge. A good time, easy to recommend for a quick session regardless of your affinity for the franchise..
Slay the Princess
2023
The Western visual novel is, conceptually, Sisyphus on an escalator.
His hill are the ones who turn their noses up at anything resembling a work that didn’t come directly from the glittering kaigan of 日本. These people, high off a diet of VNDB kamige machine translations (hallowed be Nitroplus’s name), never had any intention of giving the westoids a chance. It’s hard to blame them; every year there seems to be a new developer who gears up to give the world yet another ironic “dating simulator” without adding any of the actual fucking dating, or some Ren’py creepypasta glitch nonsense that was old when Doki Doki Literature Club did it and has only gotten older and moldier since. There are good visual novels made by people outside of Japan, obviously, but they’re almost never the ones that take off. The ones that get big — the ones that get talked about — tend to be the wooden shavings scraped from the bottom of a rotting barrel. Why give them a chance?
His escalator is, by contrast, made up of the westerners who have active disdain for Japanese media in all forms. While they have a passing interest in anime as an abstract concept, anything insufficiently western may as well carry leprosy. To them, all visual novels are “dating sims”, and all of these “dating sims” are creepy. It’s hard to blame them; there are only so many times you can insist to a person that the themes of humanity overcoming all obstacles can only be explored through brutal scenes of sexual assault that are intended for the player to jack off to before they stop talking to you. The western visual novels are easy to discuss, easy to dissect, and open for anyone to pick through and chat about. There’s so little obscurity — a trait inherent to anything not gated behind a language barrier. More and more of them have started including content warnings from the opening screen, and English-speaking communities have an easy time priming people for English games. They’re safe, and they’re exploring novel (to the west, at least) concepts. Why not give them a chance?
So it goes. Sisyphus makes a new game and begins rolling. The hill works against him, the escalator works with him. He gets some marginal degree of success. There’s some discourse. The boulder rolls back down. Sispyhus makes a new game and begins rolling.
Here I am, the great centrist. Slay the Princess is mediocre.
It’s always a bit of a ride to go into a story without any real expectations and then get slapped with the wet fish that is Yet Another Multiverse Tale, but Slay the Princess is so scarcely about that to the point where I never quite knew what it was going for. There’s a narrative woven in here about two godlike entities who were split from one another at some point in the past; the Princess is change, and the player is...something. It’s not quite clear what exactly The Long Quiet is relative to the Princess/the Shifting Mound. She’s the one responsible for “change” in all forms — creation and destruction — which doesn’t leave much for her other half to take care of. I suppose The Long Quiet is the void, is nothingness, but it also has the power to kill The Shifting Mound and create a new world that never changes. There are a long list of implications brought forward that go unanswered in a way that feels less like the author tucking a lore bible behind their back and more like a gentle shrug before the credits roll. Yeah, you’re both actually gods. Make a new world, or don’t, or kind of do, whatever. You’re here for the Princess anyway, aren’t you? This is all just a vehicle for you to see her.
It’s a character drama more than the reality-shaping conflict it presents itself as, but the characters themselves aren’t explored in any particular depth. The extent of their characterizations go as far as “an archetype”, but no further. All you need to know about a particular princess or a particular voice in your head are their names to understand what their characters are: The Hero, The Adversary, The Nightmare, The Fury, The Stubborn, The Contrarian, The Smitten. There’s a version of the princess for everyone. There’s a meek and unassuming princess. There’s a a total bitch ice-queen princess. There are two (three, technically?) ghost princesses. There’s a buff warrior-lady princess who wants to fightfuck the protagonist. There’s a furry catgirl princess. There’s a giant goddess mommy princess. There are even a few fucked-up, twisted, evil princesses for the monster-enjoyers, too. I don’t think this was made with the intent of something like Towergirls where you’re guided in the direction of whoever you want to have sex with the most, but its undeniable that a large amount of Slay the Princess’s staying power online is in the fanart of people who would vastly prefer laying to slaying. There’s not anything wrong with this, per se, but I think it demonstrates how little the story itself connected with most players that they’d rather spend their time in the months since release discussing their idealized abstractions of already idealized abstractions of one character. “I can fix her,” they say. Of course you can fix her! That’s one of the main endings! That’s a couple of the main endings!
The Princess herself is the obvious standout of the principle cast, which is really unfortunate in a work that really only has two characters. The voices in your head technically count as individual “characters”, but they’re even less developed than the many forms taken by the Princess. They exist only to reflect some aspect of the situation that you’re in, which makes them feel less like an extension of you and more like an authorial note explaining to the reader how they ought to be feeling in a given situation. Many of them will bicker among themselves and with The Narrator, always in voices that aren’t quite distinct between the lot, and dropping constant “he’s right behind me”-tier quips to pump the brakes on any real tension. I do not envy the two voice actors who were asked to give a minimum of twenty(!!!) performances for these characters while trying to sound different in all of them. They can’t quite succeed, because they’re not quite Mel-fucking-Blanc. The overwhelming majority of people are not capable of doing this. Their voices are stretched so thin that I can see through them, and I wound up just turning the vocal volume all the way down so I wouldn’t have to listen to these poor people struggle through another line read. The developers are inviting the Disco Elysium comparisons. It’s only by virtue of the fact that I think people are getting tired of me bringing that fucking game up that I’m not drawing said comparisons any further than that mention.
With all of these branching paths, I was gearing up to make a whole bunch of different choices to poke through all of them — much in the vein of your 999s and your Virtue’s Last Rewards. I was caught pretty fiercely off-guard when the game ends after you’ve met just five Princesses. Considering how there are twenty in total, you’re sent to the final confrontation after experiencing only 25% of the game. I don’t know why this is. There’s so much material here, and none of it is bad, just vaguely uninspired. I did, ultimately, still want to pick through all of it. As it stands, the game is over in under ninety minutes despite having enough material to fill four hours, and then have those four hours filled with something reasonably enjoyable. It’s confusing. The only explanation is that they could only come up with five connecting arguments for the final confrontation where all of the various Princesses are brought forth as part of a rhetoric battle, but that’s seriously no excuse. Each of her different forms has an argument written, it’s just that you only ever get to see five out of the twenty in a single playthrough. This necessitates either playing through the game a minimum of four fucking times without ever accidentally overlapping a route, or (more likely) looking them up online. Considering how the devs themselves encouraged people who couldn’t play the game to pirate it due to how important they felt it was to be able to make your own choices, this feels like a wildly misguided last-minute decision on their part.
Why would you not just ask the player to play all twenty routes before sending them to the ending? They’re not long. Each one is maybe fifteen minutes, tops. Those are rookie VN numbers. What’s really not helping matters is the fact that The Shifting Mound is collecting all of these different forms of the Princess in order to become whole again, and she asks that you get as many as you can for her so that she can learn and grow. If there are twenty Princesses, why in the fuck does she settle for five? There’s a perfectly good story explanation for why you ought to get all of them! It’s completely wasted! It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen a game’s mechanics go to war this hard with its own narrative. There’s zero reason to end the game after just five out of the twenty routes. Did you think people were going to get bored? How little faith did you have in your own work to cut it that short?
Slay the Princess is frustrating, but it’s harmless. That is the damning of faint praise that it sounds like. There are some decent nuggets of writing contained within, but it’s all in service of a game that squanders a lot of its own potential before it’s given you a chance to pass judgment of your own. It reminds me of those people on dating apps who talk shit about themselves and make themselves seem like the worst possible person you could ever consider dating, and then get confused when people take them at their word. Don’t pull the rug out on yourself! If the player isn’t interested in what you’re doing, then they aren’t going to forgive you just because it ended quickly. Have a little more confidence in your work. As it stands, all I really see is a lot of potential that went nowhere except to the worst parts of the game, and I think that’s a really sad outcome. I understand that this was just a side project while the developers worked on Scarlet Hollow, but that doesn’t mean that it needed to be treated like an afterthought. It's so much wasted potential.
The boulder rolls back down the hill.
His hill are the ones who turn their noses up at anything resembling a work that didn’t come directly from the glittering kaigan of 日本. These people, high off a diet of VNDB kamige machine translations (hallowed be Nitroplus’s name), never had any intention of giving the westoids a chance. It’s hard to blame them; every year there seems to be a new developer who gears up to give the world yet another ironic “dating simulator” without adding any of the actual fucking dating, or some Ren’py creepypasta glitch nonsense that was old when Doki Doki Literature Club did it and has only gotten older and moldier since. There are good visual novels made by people outside of Japan, obviously, but they’re almost never the ones that take off. The ones that get big — the ones that get talked about — tend to be the wooden shavings scraped from the bottom of a rotting barrel. Why give them a chance?
His escalator is, by contrast, made up of the westerners who have active disdain for Japanese media in all forms. While they have a passing interest in anime as an abstract concept, anything insufficiently western may as well carry leprosy. To them, all visual novels are “dating sims”, and all of these “dating sims” are creepy. It’s hard to blame them; there are only so many times you can insist to a person that the themes of humanity overcoming all obstacles can only be explored through brutal scenes of sexual assault that are intended for the player to jack off to before they stop talking to you. The western visual novels are easy to discuss, easy to dissect, and open for anyone to pick through and chat about. There’s so little obscurity — a trait inherent to anything not gated behind a language barrier. More and more of them have started including content warnings from the opening screen, and English-speaking communities have an easy time priming people for English games. They’re safe, and they’re exploring novel (to the west, at least) concepts. Why not give them a chance?
So it goes. Sisyphus makes a new game and begins rolling. The hill works against him, the escalator works with him. He gets some marginal degree of success. There’s some discourse. The boulder rolls back down. Sispyhus makes a new game and begins rolling.
Here I am, the great centrist. Slay the Princess is mediocre.
It’s always a bit of a ride to go into a story without any real expectations and then get slapped with the wet fish that is Yet Another Multiverse Tale, but Slay the Princess is so scarcely about that to the point where I never quite knew what it was going for. There’s a narrative woven in here about two godlike entities who were split from one another at some point in the past; the Princess is change, and the player is...something. It’s not quite clear what exactly The Long Quiet is relative to the Princess/the Shifting Mound. She’s the one responsible for “change” in all forms — creation and destruction — which doesn’t leave much for her other half to take care of. I suppose The Long Quiet is the void, is nothingness, but it also has the power to kill The Shifting Mound and create a new world that never changes. There are a long list of implications brought forward that go unanswered in a way that feels less like the author tucking a lore bible behind their back and more like a gentle shrug before the credits roll. Yeah, you’re both actually gods. Make a new world, or don’t, or kind of do, whatever. You’re here for the Princess anyway, aren’t you? This is all just a vehicle for you to see her.
It’s a character drama more than the reality-shaping conflict it presents itself as, but the characters themselves aren’t explored in any particular depth. The extent of their characterizations go as far as “an archetype”, but no further. All you need to know about a particular princess or a particular voice in your head are their names to understand what their characters are: The Hero, The Adversary, The Nightmare, The Fury, The Stubborn, The Contrarian, The Smitten. There’s a version of the princess for everyone. There’s a meek and unassuming princess. There’s a a total bitch ice-queen princess. There are two (three, technically?) ghost princesses. There’s a buff warrior-lady princess who wants to fightfuck the protagonist. There’s a furry catgirl princess. There’s a giant goddess mommy princess. There are even a few fucked-up, twisted, evil princesses for the monster-enjoyers, too. I don’t think this was made with the intent of something like Towergirls where you’re guided in the direction of whoever you want to have sex with the most, but its undeniable that a large amount of Slay the Princess’s staying power online is in the fanart of people who would vastly prefer laying to slaying. There’s not anything wrong with this, per se, but I think it demonstrates how little the story itself connected with most players that they’d rather spend their time in the months since release discussing their idealized abstractions of already idealized abstractions of one character. “I can fix her,” they say. Of course you can fix her! That’s one of the main endings! That’s a couple of the main endings!
The Princess herself is the obvious standout of the principle cast, which is really unfortunate in a work that really only has two characters. The voices in your head technically count as individual “characters”, but they’re even less developed than the many forms taken by the Princess. They exist only to reflect some aspect of the situation that you’re in, which makes them feel less like an extension of you and more like an authorial note explaining to the reader how they ought to be feeling in a given situation. Many of them will bicker among themselves and with The Narrator, always in voices that aren’t quite distinct between the lot, and dropping constant “he’s right behind me”-tier quips to pump the brakes on any real tension. I do not envy the two voice actors who were asked to give a minimum of twenty(!!!) performances for these characters while trying to sound different in all of them. They can’t quite succeed, because they’re not quite Mel-fucking-Blanc. The overwhelming majority of people are not capable of doing this. Their voices are stretched so thin that I can see through them, and I wound up just turning the vocal volume all the way down so I wouldn’t have to listen to these poor people struggle through another line read. The developers are inviting the Disco Elysium comparisons. It’s only by virtue of the fact that I think people are getting tired of me bringing that fucking game up that I’m not drawing said comparisons any further than that mention.
With all of these branching paths, I was gearing up to make a whole bunch of different choices to poke through all of them — much in the vein of your 999s and your Virtue’s Last Rewards. I was caught pretty fiercely off-guard when the game ends after you’ve met just five Princesses. Considering how there are twenty in total, you’re sent to the final confrontation after experiencing only 25% of the game. I don’t know why this is. There’s so much material here, and none of it is bad, just vaguely uninspired. I did, ultimately, still want to pick through all of it. As it stands, the game is over in under ninety minutes despite having enough material to fill four hours, and then have those four hours filled with something reasonably enjoyable. It’s confusing. The only explanation is that they could only come up with five connecting arguments for the final confrontation where all of the various Princesses are brought forth as part of a rhetoric battle, but that’s seriously no excuse. Each of her different forms has an argument written, it’s just that you only ever get to see five out of the twenty in a single playthrough. This necessitates either playing through the game a minimum of four fucking times without ever accidentally overlapping a route, or (more likely) looking them up online. Considering how the devs themselves encouraged people who couldn’t play the game to pirate it due to how important they felt it was to be able to make your own choices, this feels like a wildly misguided last-minute decision on their part.
Why would you not just ask the player to play all twenty routes before sending them to the ending? They’re not long. Each one is maybe fifteen minutes, tops. Those are rookie VN numbers. What’s really not helping matters is the fact that The Shifting Mound is collecting all of these different forms of the Princess in order to become whole again, and she asks that you get as many as you can for her so that she can learn and grow. If there are twenty Princesses, why in the fuck does she settle for five? There’s a perfectly good story explanation for why you ought to get all of them! It’s completely wasted! It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen a game’s mechanics go to war this hard with its own narrative. There’s zero reason to end the game after just five out of the twenty routes. Did you think people were going to get bored? How little faith did you have in your own work to cut it that short?
Slay the Princess is frustrating, but it’s harmless. That is the damning of faint praise that it sounds like. There are some decent nuggets of writing contained within, but it’s all in service of a game that squanders a lot of its own potential before it’s given you a chance to pass judgment of your own. It reminds me of those people on dating apps who talk shit about themselves and make themselves seem like the worst possible person you could ever consider dating, and then get confused when people take them at their word. Don’t pull the rug out on yourself! If the player isn’t interested in what you’re doing, then they aren’t going to forgive you just because it ended quickly. Have a little more confidence in your work. As it stands, all I really see is a lot of potential that went nowhere except to the worst parts of the game, and I think that’s a really sad outcome. I understand that this was just a side project while the developers worked on Scarlet Hollow, but that doesn’t mean that it needed to be treated like an afterthought. It's so much wasted potential.
The boulder rolls back down the hill.
Dynamite Headdy
1994
Dynamite Headdy is a very mixed bag with some things I loved and thing I hated. Ending in a game that I felt extremely mid about.
As always, I'll start with the positives. Far and away the star of the show is the visuals and music. Not that I have a long library of Genesis games I've played but it may be the best mix of visuals and music. The colors pop on every level and every character and just visually a marvel for the early 90's.
The gameplay is super simple but the way they take your simple move set and use it in complex ways through intelligent level design. The levels aren't just great but several of the levels have amazing names, with the first amazingly named level of Toyz in the Hood.
While the level design ideas were awesome the gameplay is extremely basic. The upgrades are also very basic with most fights leaving you wanting more variety. Except for the few times the do give you variety which ends up being awful. What I mean by that is most of the time you or the enemy is standing still giving you time to aim and fire your head in one of 8 directions to hit them. Well sometimes the enemy is either moving way to fast to both aim and dodge. Or even worse the enemy grabs you flailing you around where you have to aim your head at the enemy while it's moving and you're moving (against your control) and trying to aim your head while that's all going on. It's annoying, infuriating at times, and extremely stupid in my humble opinion. I do think the difficulty is unbalanced, as sometimes it was a breeze to run through a level or boss and sometimes the bosses were insane with balancing dodging and attacking.
Overall, I think it's a fine game. I could easily see someone saying the love it but I could also see reasons people may hate it. If the gameplay was a little different I feel I would probably rate this game much higher.
My 2024 rankings:
https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/games-i-played-in-2024-ranked-1/
As always, I'll start with the positives. Far and away the star of the show is the visuals and music. Not that I have a long library of Genesis games I've played but it may be the best mix of visuals and music. The colors pop on every level and every character and just visually a marvel for the early 90's.
The gameplay is super simple but the way they take your simple move set and use it in complex ways through intelligent level design. The levels aren't just great but several of the levels have amazing names, with the first amazingly named level of Toyz in the Hood.
While the level design ideas were awesome the gameplay is extremely basic. The upgrades are also very basic with most fights leaving you wanting more variety. Except for the few times the do give you variety which ends up being awful. What I mean by that is most of the time you or the enemy is standing still giving you time to aim and fire your head in one of 8 directions to hit them. Well sometimes the enemy is either moving way to fast to both aim and dodge. Or even worse the enemy grabs you flailing you around where you have to aim your head at the enemy while it's moving and you're moving (against your control) and trying to aim your head while that's all going on. It's annoying, infuriating at times, and extremely stupid in my humble opinion. I do think the difficulty is unbalanced, as sometimes it was a breeze to run through a level or boss and sometimes the bosses were insane with balancing dodging and attacking.
Overall, I think it's a fine game. I could easily see someone saying the love it but I could also see reasons people may hate it. If the gameplay was a little different I feel I would probably rate this game much higher.
My 2024 rankings:
https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/games-i-played-in-2024-ranked-1/
Spelling Bee
2018
I try to get the pangram but it either takes 5 seconds or my brain breaks after thinking about it for 10 mins straight
Connections
2023
My current favorite NYT game. Even though the ingenuity of Wordle has yet to be topped, this is a lot more fresh at the moment. I feel like a god when I get purple first
Scramble
1981
Scramble is definitely a game that exists.
Considering it came out in 1981, it may've been impressive for the time, but the game itself feels very... unfulfilling.
You can't really go forward much, and the ship controls very slowly. You can shoot your normal beam and you can drop bombs. Problem is, sometimes my shots miss and the bombs land farther than you want, and it's quite difficult to plan the bomb's landing ahead.
There is no soundtrack, and the sound effects are there. The graphics are simple, but for the era they probably looked decent. Although, considering this came out in the same year as the original Donkey Kong, I feel like Scramble doesn't age as well as that one.
I am glad I got to play Scramble, mainly to see one of Konami's earlier games, but besides that, it's a very unremarkable game.
Considering it came out in 1981, it may've been impressive for the time, but the game itself feels very... unfulfilling.
You can't really go forward much, and the ship controls very slowly. You can shoot your normal beam and you can drop bombs. Problem is, sometimes my shots miss and the bombs land farther than you want, and it's quite difficult to plan the bomb's landing ahead.
There is no soundtrack, and the sound effects are there. The graphics are simple, but for the era they probably looked decent. Although, considering this came out in the same year as the original Donkey Kong, I feel like Scramble doesn't age as well as that one.
I am glad I got to play Scramble, mainly to see one of Konami's earlier games, but besides that, it's a very unremarkable game.
This review contains spoilers
With television, I - and I suspect many others - are often willing to give things that annoy them a pass in the hopes that they'll be resolved or addressed later on. This has a bad habit of building up lingering resentment which often erupts when the payoffs are underwhelming.
With live service games, this effect has been brought to the medium of videogames! Hurray!
I was relatively fond of the moment-to-moment of Penacony. I liked all the worldbuilding in 2.0 and the first reveal of how creepy the "real" Dreamscape is still sticks with me. 2.1 and 2.2 were great ruminations on Nihilism (I'm noting a pattern in my writing...) that, surprisingly for a big-budget gacha, were willing to approach it from the angle of people who weren't in a position of power as well as someone with a chronic condition. Also the character writing was phenomenal, so much so that my character-loving brain and my meta-whore brain often got to pull together in harmony.
The environments were beautiful and, after relatively straightforward encounters on Jarilo and the Luofu, Mihoyo took off the limiters and delivered much more enjoyable encounters that weren't as easy to unga-bunga. Music was wonderful too, it was nice to see a company tackled "Jazz inspired" in a way that wasn't just "we want the Persona 5 market".
But if you're familiar with how I write you're probably aware by now that I'm very rigid most of the time, and with low-star reviews there's usually a pittance of praise before I go all in. Well, in the same way I found Penacony to be predictable when I didn't want it to be, I too am going to meet your expectations and nothing more.
True to the opening, there were parts of Penacony I very much didn't like, but omitted them from any discussion about the arc because I was under the impression that they'd either be addressed directly, or at least expanded on.
In 2.0 I wasn't really fond of the Firefly stuff, feeling that it went a bit too hard on the character shilling in ways that call to mind the uncomfortable shit FFXIV keeps doing with G'raha Tia. Similarly, I felt the reveal of Robin's murder came out of nowhere and had little weight for both the player and the protagonists given that she had a grand total of, what, two appearances beforehand?
2.2 comes along after the inoffensive 2.1 and it goes back to the Firefly-is-your-bestie stuff, while also forcing Robin into the narrative in ways that frankly feel out of character for this game? She doesn't really get an introduction or anything resembling development, she's just there and helps out at the finale. Her brother Sunday, at the time of writing an NPC, steals the spotlight.
But there's also a moment near the end of 2.2 where, upon realizing you're in a fakeout good ending, the path to the actual final boss occurs in a brief cutscene, and also someone tells you that Firefly died off-screen. Oh and once it's done you find out Aventurine somehow escaped from the Nihility, which is wrapped up in of all things a missable text message. (Argenti saved him... What?)
I was willing to forgive all of this because the core was mostly solid, and for 2.2 especially I assumed 2.3 would wrap it all up.
Unfortunately, it doesn't wrap much of anything up.
Just to walk this through back-to-front, I really don't like that Aventurine was given so much focus in 2.1 and his status as "basically doomed" in the Nihility's embrace highlighted so cleanly at the end, only for him to get rescued off-screen by a random gay guy that players can potentially never meet if they skip the Washtopia quest. I figured they wouldn't explicitly kill a popular character, but if Tingyun can exist in will-she-won't-she limbo for a full year then Aventurine can play cards with himself in Sin City Limbo.
Similarly, I'd assumed that him abruptly being pulled out of Cumbernauld- sorry, limbo, was meant to signify that he'd have a role in the upcoming IPC vs Penacony negotiations that've hung over the entire arc like a Sword of Damocles, but he doesn't. He's just... there.
And speaking of the IPC stuff, it feels at odds with both the story before it and also the characters participating in it.
Jade (one of the Ten Stonehearts, Topaz and Aventurine's coworker/elder) appears and after a lot of vague infodumping to catch inattentive players up to speed, she browbeats a rather alarming Greedy Merchant stereotype into submission, getting a 30% stake in the Penacony corporation and giving 5% to the Astral Express.
That last bit is what I take issue with. In the last IPC-centric storyline involving Topaz, it's made super clear that Himeko is merely neutral towards the IPC and is entirely willing to sabotage their operations for the benefit of any potential victims. It's somewhat strange and - dare I say the forbidden words - out of character for her to just blindly go "Oh yup sure this deal is fine :)" and end the conflict.
That all of the exchanges leading up to her assisting in the capitalistic colonialism of Penacony are off-screen doesn't help. Penacony has a bit of a problem with off-screening vital things and it's at its worst in this patch. It's doubly strange because Penacony was the arc where Mihoyo wisely decided to switch the playable focus over to other characters at crucial plot moments, yet a lot of the stuff involving Himeko and her motivations is just left to the player's imagination.
I single Himeko out because we're a year and change into HSR's lifespan yet, of the Astral Express crew, she's the most flimsy in terms of actual character. I had assumed that, given Penacony was the first arc where she took to the field, we'd get something from her, but no. Off-screen. Yay.
But also just, on a narrative level, this resolution to the IPC stuff isn't very satisfying? As Penacony unfolded it became more and more apparent that a lot of the present-day issues affecting the region stem from the IPC's abuse and tyranny during their initial control over the region. The threat of the IPC even setting foot in Penacony again has, on-screen, several relevant characters go "nuh uh" and plot their downfall. The very notion that Penacony would fall under their ownership again is framed as a huge no-no, a total failstate for the story.
And the Astral Express just let it happen? They encourage it, even. It's an incredibly strange outcome for a game where there's an entire side story about how badly you need to oppose an IPC takeover of Jarilo.
Moving on from that though, this patch goes really hard on the "Firefly is your girlfriend :)" stuff that I found nauseating the last few times, and to be honest? I wish they'd killed her. Not out of spite or malice or whatever, but because the fakeout death she gets is the saddest and wimpiest attempt at drama I've seen since amateur fanfiction.
To wit: Sparkle appears at the end and goes "Muahahaha I planted 999 bombs" which locks you into 5 minute segment where there are far too many jokes, before she reveals there's a 1000th bomb. You go up to Firefly, she gives a very teary-eyed speech about what it means to live with a chronic illness, and flies up into the sky.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaand then Sparkle appears to say "nuh uh it's just fireworks she's fine :)". She pushes the Trailblazer off an airship, who is then saved by Firefly. She carried them bridal-style into the sky, they hold hands and twirl, and...
It's cringe. I don't have anything else to say about it. It's cringe. It's embarassing. It made me turn away from my monitor in shame. That one Folding Ideas clip played in my mind, bass boosted and with the volume up.
I wager other people who, like me, were cynical about Firefly will come to the same conclusion, but for me the wedge issue isn't so much the Firefly shilling so much as it is the relative childishness of how this is all written.
On Jarilo-VI and the Xianzhou Luofu, there are two companion quests which start off innocently enough but ultimately turn into haunting and nakedly vulnerable depictions of people with leftover grief. There are no happy resolutions or well-earned smiles, because the people they love didn't die for any good reason, they just died. I know the target audience for this game is teenagers with no impulse control and adults who're a bit too eager to say the word "waifu" (as with most gachas), but these are good quests and they're not the only ones to be so frank about human ugliness.
And, just to preface everything: I do like Firefly. I think it's nice to see some chronic illness representation in a genre where the closest we get is pale people who sometimes cough. As an extension of Penacony's ruminations on the meaning of not only Life but what it means To Live, I think it was great of Mihoyo to add a character whose lifespan is arbitrarily cut short through no fault of her own.
Which is where my umbrage comes from. The resolution to Firefly's arc is some vague and deeply overwritten nonsense about how she has to "just live", sandwiched between a bunch of metaphors about light/darkness and a hamfisted callback to one of Kafka's lines as a playable character.
So, I don't believe in 'potential'. Unless a creative comes out and says "I wanted X to be more", I just don't believe in it. A work is a work, it is what it is, and focusing on what it could've been is a total non-starter to me.
With that fresh on your screen, though, I'm somewhat disappointed that Penacony squandered the potential of Firefly's character as a vessel to transmit its own themes. In the end she isn't much more than a decent Destruction unit and a character whose entire legacy is the writers trying to bait you into falling for a new girlfriend character, as if March 7th hasn't been there the entire time.
Ultimately, the Aventurine segments of 2.1 and the Sunday parts of 2.2 are still the best written part of this arc because they're the parts which directly engage with what's actually being written, rather than writing around itself in a weird ouroboros of nouns.
Look, if you know me on a personal level, "the male characters are the best parts of this story" should be a massive red flag.
Penacony is over now, at least. Unlike the average FFXIV expansion cycle, I don't need to be disappointed for two straight years. That's a silver lining, and a benefit of Mihoyo's tight patch schedule.
That said, my opinion of 2.3 isn't entirely negative. Two entirely new game modes is great, and Apocalyptic Shadow is already becoming a great way for me torealize how much of a dolphin I am use a lot of my teams to their fullest. Hurray, content Black Swan can do without overdamaging everything!
Which is the one benefit of live service storytelling, at least. One I've noticed both with this patch and with my return to FFXIV not as a story player but as a content tourist cutscene skipper: It's a lot easier to brush off the narrative being shit when you can open up a menu and have actual honest-to-god fun.
With live service games, this effect has been brought to the medium of videogames! Hurray!
I was relatively fond of the moment-to-moment of Penacony. I liked all the worldbuilding in 2.0 and the first reveal of how creepy the "real" Dreamscape is still sticks with me. 2.1 and 2.2 were great ruminations on Nihilism (I'm noting a pattern in my writing...) that, surprisingly for a big-budget gacha, were willing to approach it from the angle of people who weren't in a position of power as well as someone with a chronic condition. Also the character writing was phenomenal, so much so that my character-loving brain and my meta-whore brain often got to pull together in harmony.
The environments were beautiful and, after relatively straightforward encounters on Jarilo and the Luofu, Mihoyo took off the limiters and delivered much more enjoyable encounters that weren't as easy to unga-bunga. Music was wonderful too, it was nice to see a company tackled "Jazz inspired" in a way that wasn't just "we want the Persona 5 market".
But if you're familiar with how I write you're probably aware by now that I'm very rigid most of the time, and with low-star reviews there's usually a pittance of praise before I go all in. Well, in the same way I found Penacony to be predictable when I didn't want it to be, I too am going to meet your expectations and nothing more.
True to the opening, there were parts of Penacony I very much didn't like, but omitted them from any discussion about the arc because I was under the impression that they'd either be addressed directly, or at least expanded on.
In 2.0 I wasn't really fond of the Firefly stuff, feeling that it went a bit too hard on the character shilling in ways that call to mind the uncomfortable shit FFXIV keeps doing with G'raha Tia. Similarly, I felt the reveal of Robin's murder came out of nowhere and had little weight for both the player and the protagonists given that she had a grand total of, what, two appearances beforehand?
2.2 comes along after the inoffensive 2.1 and it goes back to the Firefly-is-your-bestie stuff, while also forcing Robin into the narrative in ways that frankly feel out of character for this game? She doesn't really get an introduction or anything resembling development, she's just there and helps out at the finale. Her brother Sunday, at the time of writing an NPC, steals the spotlight.
But there's also a moment near the end of 2.2 where, upon realizing you're in a fakeout good ending, the path to the actual final boss occurs in a brief cutscene, and also someone tells you that Firefly died off-screen. Oh and once it's done you find out Aventurine somehow escaped from the Nihility, which is wrapped up in of all things a missable text message. (Argenti saved him... What?)
I was willing to forgive all of this because the core was mostly solid, and for 2.2 especially I assumed 2.3 would wrap it all up.
Unfortunately, it doesn't wrap much of anything up.
Just to walk this through back-to-front, I really don't like that Aventurine was given so much focus in 2.1 and his status as "basically doomed" in the Nihility's embrace highlighted so cleanly at the end, only for him to get rescued off-screen by a random gay guy that players can potentially never meet if they skip the Washtopia quest. I figured they wouldn't explicitly kill a popular character, but if Tingyun can exist in will-she-won't-she limbo for a full year then Aventurine can play cards with himself in Sin City Limbo.
Similarly, I'd assumed that him abruptly being pulled out of Cumbernauld- sorry, limbo, was meant to signify that he'd have a role in the upcoming IPC vs Penacony negotiations that've hung over the entire arc like a Sword of Damocles, but he doesn't. He's just... there.
And speaking of the IPC stuff, it feels at odds with both the story before it and also the characters participating in it.
Jade (one of the Ten Stonehearts, Topaz and Aventurine's coworker/elder) appears and after a lot of vague infodumping to catch inattentive players up to speed, she browbeats a rather alarming Greedy Merchant stereotype into submission, getting a 30% stake in the Penacony corporation and giving 5% to the Astral Express.
That last bit is what I take issue with. In the last IPC-centric storyline involving Topaz, it's made super clear that Himeko is merely neutral towards the IPC and is entirely willing to sabotage their operations for the benefit of any potential victims. It's somewhat strange and - dare I say the forbidden words - out of character for her to just blindly go "Oh yup sure this deal is fine :)" and end the conflict.
That all of the exchanges leading up to her assisting in the capitalistic colonialism of Penacony are off-screen doesn't help. Penacony has a bit of a problem with off-screening vital things and it's at its worst in this patch. It's doubly strange because Penacony was the arc where Mihoyo wisely decided to switch the playable focus over to other characters at crucial plot moments, yet a lot of the stuff involving Himeko and her motivations is just left to the player's imagination.
I single Himeko out because we're a year and change into HSR's lifespan yet, of the Astral Express crew, she's the most flimsy in terms of actual character. I had assumed that, given Penacony was the first arc where she took to the field, we'd get something from her, but no. Off-screen. Yay.
But also just, on a narrative level, this resolution to the IPC stuff isn't very satisfying? As Penacony unfolded it became more and more apparent that a lot of the present-day issues affecting the region stem from the IPC's abuse and tyranny during their initial control over the region. The threat of the IPC even setting foot in Penacony again has, on-screen, several relevant characters go "nuh uh" and plot their downfall. The very notion that Penacony would fall under their ownership again is framed as a huge no-no, a total failstate for the story.
And the Astral Express just let it happen? They encourage it, even. It's an incredibly strange outcome for a game where there's an entire side story about how badly you need to oppose an IPC takeover of Jarilo.
Moving on from that though, this patch goes really hard on the "Firefly is your girlfriend :)" stuff that I found nauseating the last few times, and to be honest? I wish they'd killed her. Not out of spite or malice or whatever, but because the fakeout death she gets is the saddest and wimpiest attempt at drama I've seen since amateur fanfiction.
To wit: Sparkle appears at the end and goes "Muahahaha I planted 999 bombs" which locks you into 5 minute segment where there are far too many jokes, before she reveals there's a 1000th bomb. You go up to Firefly, she gives a very teary-eyed speech about what it means to live with a chronic illness, and flies up into the sky.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaand then Sparkle appears to say "nuh uh it's just fireworks she's fine :)". She pushes the Trailblazer off an airship, who is then saved by Firefly. She carried them bridal-style into the sky, they hold hands and twirl, and...
It's cringe. I don't have anything else to say about it. It's cringe. It's embarassing. It made me turn away from my monitor in shame. That one Folding Ideas clip played in my mind, bass boosted and with the volume up.
I wager other people who, like me, were cynical about Firefly will come to the same conclusion, but for me the wedge issue isn't so much the Firefly shilling so much as it is the relative childishness of how this is all written.
On Jarilo-VI and the Xianzhou Luofu, there are two companion quests which start off innocently enough but ultimately turn into haunting and nakedly vulnerable depictions of people with leftover grief. There are no happy resolutions or well-earned smiles, because the people they love didn't die for any good reason, they just died. I know the target audience for this game is teenagers with no impulse control and adults who're a bit too eager to say the word "waifu" (as with most gachas), but these are good quests and they're not the only ones to be so frank about human ugliness.
And, just to preface everything: I do like Firefly. I think it's nice to see some chronic illness representation in a genre where the closest we get is pale people who sometimes cough. As an extension of Penacony's ruminations on the meaning of not only Life but what it means To Live, I think it was great of Mihoyo to add a character whose lifespan is arbitrarily cut short through no fault of her own.
Which is where my umbrage comes from. The resolution to Firefly's arc is some vague and deeply overwritten nonsense about how she has to "just live", sandwiched between a bunch of metaphors about light/darkness and a hamfisted callback to one of Kafka's lines as a playable character.
So, I don't believe in 'potential'. Unless a creative comes out and says "I wanted X to be more", I just don't believe in it. A work is a work, it is what it is, and focusing on what it could've been is a total non-starter to me.
With that fresh on your screen, though, I'm somewhat disappointed that Penacony squandered the potential of Firefly's character as a vessel to transmit its own themes. In the end she isn't much more than a decent Destruction unit and a character whose entire legacy is the writers trying to bait you into falling for a new girlfriend character, as if March 7th hasn't been there the entire time.
Ultimately, the Aventurine segments of 2.1 and the Sunday parts of 2.2 are still the best written part of this arc because they're the parts which directly engage with what's actually being written, rather than writing around itself in a weird ouroboros of nouns.
Look, if you know me on a personal level, "the male characters are the best parts of this story" should be a massive red flag.
Penacony is over now, at least. Unlike the average FFXIV expansion cycle, I don't need to be disappointed for two straight years. That's a silver lining, and a benefit of Mihoyo's tight patch schedule.
That said, my opinion of 2.3 isn't entirely negative. Two entirely new game modes is great, and Apocalyptic Shadow is already becoming a great way for me to
Which is the one benefit of live service storytelling, at least. One I've noticed both with this patch and with my return to FFXIV not as a story player but as a content tourist cutscene skipper: It's a lot easier to brush off the narrative being shit when you can open up a menu and have actual honest-to-god fun.