Yakuza: Dead Souls is a non-canonical entry to the Yakuza series that takes place one year after Yakuza 4 and presents the following scenario: what if Kamurocho was hit by a zombie infestation? It's a pretty fun and absurd twist on the crime-drama franchise. It's also famous for having very nearly killed the series's popularity in the West.

I didn't know much about the game going into it, only that it was legendary for its badness and sort of a meme within the small part of the fanbase that did play it. I had bought it years before, for less than $5, in some Black Friday sale, before I even got into the Yakuza franchise. Before people could ever warn me about it.

And I'm actually kinda glad that happened, because I might not have played it otherwise. Is it that good, you might ask? Absolutely not!

Dead Souls plays like someone saw Resident Evil 4 and Dead Rising, decided that they wanted to make one of those, but then released the beta version by accident. Although, I'm not even sure what the finished product would look like, as the game is amazingly janky, and feels dated next to games released five years before it. It's no wonder gamers in the West received it so poorly.

Yet somewhere in this jank, I found something captivating. Maybe it's because of how stale the industry, and especially shooters, have gotten nowadays, but there's an arcade-y quality to Dead Souls that entranced me from the start. It is unapologetically a game about pressing R1 and seeing zombie heads pop, without much regard for precision, weight, or insights on human nature, and I love it.

The guns in the game also reflect this philosophy. Many of them are really silly, and most don't feel or behave realistically at all, having ridiculous stopping power and capacity, among other features. There's a ridiculously powerful sniper rifle, a satellite laser... and a fan-favorite character now walks around with a gatling gun for an arm.

Speaking of which, the plot is equally goofy, marrying the absurdity of zombie B-movies with the high-stakes drama of the Yakuza series. I mean, Kiryu enters the story and decides he's going to punch the zombies down, an incredibly bold move that's still in-character. The game won't overstay its welcome, either: a full casual playthrough of the game is just over ten hours, fast enough to finish in a single day.

And I really recommend you do that if you're a fan of the series who played at least up to Yakuza 4. The story fits just in with the rest of the series, and if anything, the janky mechanics help break the sameyness of the gameplay that builds up to that point. Just have low expectations, and play on Normal.

I still look back at the Ezio trilogy and remember it fondly. These games surgically took what made the original Assassin's Creed interesting while leaving out (most of) the bad, delivering on a much more stylish and dynamic experience. This was also where the series' overarching narrative really hit its stride, with lovable playboy Ezio as the leading man, much higher stakes for the main plot and much better acting and directing for the main and supporting cast. The series would never have reached the heights it did without ACII -- although considering the abominations that inhabit its corpse, nowadays, maybe it would have been best if it never had.

BW was a game that I had to force myself into finishing. And you know what? I feel sort of bad about it. Seeing how the trend for the series right now is for games to come out incomplete, BW is easier to appreciate. It at least had a complete, somewhat coherent narrative you could follow. It tried something different. But I remember the experience of playing it as being insufferable.

By the 4th generation, the franchise was spiraling out of control a bit. More legendaries! Larger areas! More evolutions, and more evolution stones! More convoluted secret bases! Expanded contests! More more! Everything was an attempt to expand on what previous games had done, which resulted in a game that struggled to establish its identity. Whether they realized this or not, Game Freak decided to take a risk and reboot the series in the next generation.

The setting was changed to America, and the landscape was made much more urban than before. There’s still forests and deserts and caves, as usual, but the difference is felt nonetheless in cities like Nimbasa or Castelia and their metropolitan areas. Some areas also break from the strict north-facing top-down camera previous games had, and in fact the world map itself is no longer that tiled thing that we had since RBY. I'll come back to this later as there's a huge issue within the map itself.

But just a different setting was not enough: because this was such a faraway geographic location, GF decided they had to go further, and -- in what's probably one of the most regrettable decisions in the history of the franchise -- make it so the new region, Unova, had only entirely new Pokémon. And so, they introduced 156 new creatures, the most for a single generation ever, and made it so those were the only ones you could find in Unova.

There are... a lot of issues with this idea, some immediately noticeable, others becoming apparent much later. It's important to note that, while you can't catch older Pokémon, the game supports all of them, which means GF took a massive hit in the scope creep department without doing the one thing they could have done to solve it, which would be to restrict support to a subset of the then 600+ Pokémon. Similarly, an isolated region allows balancing the new creatures independently, but instead, power creep just shot up straight from the previous gen.

More than that, though, the sheer amount of Pokémon, unmatched by any other game, means there are a lot of redundant or awful-looking Pokémon that made the cut. Now, you’re probably thinking I’m about to spout some genwunner crap about how the original 151 were better and how Unovian designs are not true to the series. I’m not.

Okay, small rant: it's sickeningly common to hear that the OGs are better and every other gen is ice-cream Pokémon and trash Pokémon. But those people, in their rose-tinted nostalgia glasses, conveniently misremember what the first generation was like. If I’m going to hear about how Klink is bad, I’d first like to see people do the same to Magnemite. Not only do both seem man-made, but if Klink is stupid because it just adds more gears as it evolves, well, a Magneton is simply three Magnemites.

Maybe you want to talk about the karate Muppets, though, and how they got their Gis complete with a black belt. Except Machamp has that speedo with a champion’s belt and nobody ever asked where it came from. Is a pokémon made of trash stupid? So is a mound of toxic sludge, that evolves into a meaner-looking mound of sludge. The same is true for every generation of Pokémon. Depending on the standards you apply, you'll always find something to be angry about.

But to go back to my point, the real problem with Unova is that, because of the sheer amount of pokémon, a lot of poor ideas made the cut, especially those that involved redundant Pokémon. Why let the muppets through, when you could use the Hitmons? Or the snowflake, when there’s Glalie? A bigger-yet-unrelated Luvdisc, when there’s Luvdisc? The new Bellossom, when there’s Bellossom? A dragon with the wrong head, when the game doesn’t even need more dragons? The elemental monkeys, when more pokémon being available would have solved the coverage problem?

The monkeys touch upon the issue that really bothered me about White: the deliberate limitation of Pokémon means that BW feels like the first generation in a very bad way, in that routes are devoid of variety, and the Pokémon available at the beginning of the game are almost all horrible. The game has a painfully slow start. Your starter is usable, but it seems like nothing you can catch can put up a fight. They even rub salt in the wound, giving you a worthless elemental monkey that your team is better off without. From B2W2 onwards, the games would offer 5+ Pokémon to catch per area, mixing old and new ones, a far more elegant and replayable idea that required less new Pokémon in a generation.

So without much to catch, you can power through with your starter as if you were in preschool, I guess, but it's clear the system designers did not want you to do that anymore, as the new Exp yield formula gives far less experience to higher level pokémon, meaning the game will punish you for using fewer Pokémon. It's a change that thankfully never made it out of this generation, as later games opted to reward players who used multiple Pokémon (through the new Exp. Share) instead of punishing those who don't. A more sensible alternative, even if it came with other complaints.

So the game drags itself as you try to get a functional Pokémon team. As you go through each map, having your rivals pull you by the nose gets extremely annoying, not simply because they appear at every turn, but because it doesn’t quite make sense for them to. I mean, Bianca is fine, but Cheren, it’s like he’s waiting for you after every single door instead of training his pokémon or something. And then he wonders why he can’t beat you.

Eventually, though, the story picks up. The evil team this time around is Team Plasma, and their thing is campaigning for people to release their pokémon, claiming humans use them as slaves. Their big idea is, if everyone falls for it and only Plasma have pokémon available, they’ll easily take over the world. And they kind of need Reshiram so they can increase their e-penis, or something.

There's ludonarrative dissonance between what Team Plasma are supposed to be and what they actually are in a gameplay sense. The idea behind the team is solid: they show how a benign message and ideology can be co-opted for evil means, and that even if that idea is good in theory, it might not work in practice. If it were for that alone, they would probably be the best evil team yet.

But gameplay dictates that they must act as mobs and bosses for you to defeat, so they're constantly aggressive, battling you for the silliest reasons, using Pokémon as weapons in front of you and everyone else, undermining their supposed message. Even N, who is pure boy supreme and I love him, even N at a certain point in the story has to be put down by force, because he is a boss and because you need an excuse to catch the legendary Pokémon. They just do not feel like coherent antagonists whatsoever.

But maybe I’m taking everything too seriously. The culmination of the game’s story is one of the most hilarious and unbelievable plot twists ever. Team Plasma strikes by... well, I won't spoil it, in case you somehow have yet to see it a decade later. But it's the most ludicrous plan in the history of the franchise, probably making most cartoon villains out there feel like reasonable, level-headed and efficient people.

And so, Black and White come to an end. Team Plasma's plan has been foiled, but they're still going, and Ghetsis is still out there. It's a bit of an anticlimatic ending that, in retrospect, was blatant sequel bait. In fact, B2W2 cashes in on a lot of setups this game makes, and fixes a lot of its issues. But that's a story for another day. For now, let's go back to talking about the world map, and why I hate the post game and think the main story could have been better.

Simply put, the story takes place in a very long hallway. If you look at Unova's map, with the knowledge that your adventure begins at the bottom right corner, there's a linear path until the sixth city, Nimbasa, where the map forks symmetrically with three cities on each side until finally meeting up again at Opelucid, on top of the map, where there's a path to the end of the game.

This is by itself an uninspired map design. Look at the world map for every generation before or after this one. Even if the story forces you through a set path, there’s no way you’d guess it just by checking the maps. They look and feel organic, due to the many cities placed irregularly, and many roads leaving each city. Look back at Unova’s, now. Does it look remotely like something humans would build in real life?

But maybe you're optimistic, and looking at the one fork you get, you’d think, hey, choices! Except heading east at that fork is impossible until after the credits. You’re forced to stay on this completely linear path, only ever moving forward during the whole story. Unova felt not like a world, but a sequence of videogame setpieces where the antagonists were always just a bit ahead and your rivals were eager to drag you there.

Since they leave the three cities to the right of the 1 (one) fork unused, when you get there, you think it’s going to be awesome postgamey stuff. Not really. They only serve to catch pokémon from past gens, a problem GF created by itself, and maybe face some stronger trainers. The levels here start at about 15 over the league, so traversing these areas means having to visit a Pokémon Center every time you enter tall grass.

And... there's really nothing there other than a couple of legendaries. It's just a ton of wasted real estate, that the sequel would make far better use of. In fact, B2W2 fixes a lot of my gripes with the game, from the map, to the Pokémon, to the story, to the postgame. It's a much better game in every way, that makes evident how many decisions in BW were simply mistakes.

Which in itself makes it even more painful to look back to BW. Again, looking at the franchise as it is today, it's far easier to appreciate a game that experimented a bunch with the formula, but it doesn't change the fact that that game was a drag to play. The best I can say about White is that it's worth playing for its sequel.

The person that recommended the Atelier series to me made such good points that I bought the two PS3 trilogies on impulse before actually trying the games out. Looking back, it was a terrifying idea to own six games I could, just by playing one of them, find out I disliked. I’m glad, then, that Atelier Rorona proved to be such a fascinating experience.

Atelier is a series of turn-based RPGs that revolve around alchemy. In general, its protagonists are alchemists who are given some task to perform in a limited amount of in-game time, and it’s your job as the player to manage their use of that time so that they are successful.

This is a very long running series, dating back to the PS1, and since I started it in 2018, if I were to play every single game, well, it would likely take a decade for me to catch up. Fortunately, the series is split in trilogies, each of which begins a new story with a new setting and characters, so it’s pretty easy to jump into.

Atelier Rorona came out on the PS3 in 2009 and was the series’ first foray into full 3D, beginning a new trilogy that came to be called The Arland Trilogy. The game was later rereleased as Rorona Plus, which brings mechanical improvements and an expanded story to the original game, and Rorona DX, which is a remastered version of Plus for newer platforms and is the recommended version nowadays.

Atelier Rorona puts you in the role of Rorolina Frixell, or, how people usually call her, Rorona. Rorona is an apprentice at the alchemy workshop in the Kingdom of Arland, however, her days working there might be numbered: the palace has decided to shut down the workshop unless it can be proved, over the three years that follow, that its existence is beneficial to the kingdom. Her master having bailed out, Rorona takes up the challenge of meeting the palace’s demands, a task that will require the fledgling alchemist to rapidly improve her skills.

Already, you can see the game subverting some of the expectations you might have coming into an RPG. There is no huge central conflict here, at least not in the sense that you’d usually expect a JRPG to have. You know, ominous prophecies, a looming evil, a powerful villain threatening to destroy the planet… Instead, Rorona’s mission is one of self-improvement, fulfilling a rather bureaucratic ordeal to prove her capabilities as an alchemist. Stabbing people with swords, or walking into someone’s house armed to the teeth won’t help her achieve that.

It’s a narrative that's ultimately peaceful. There are no boss fights in the story and the antagonist, if you can call him that, is merely a bureaucrat who never confronts you directly. There isn’t even anything remotely like a final confrontation to wrap up the game: once the three years run their course, the story ends, and Rorona’s story gets a conclusion that corresponds to your performance over the course of the game.

The person who sold me on the Atelier series described it as “feminine”, and I think that’s sort of fitting. If there’s one thing I despise, it’s the male power fantasy that so often appears in Japanese media, where the protagonist, male, often unremarkable, becomes an extraordinary hero and gets rewarded with fame and one-dimensional women. It’s something I try my best to avoid when picking which games to play.

But Atelier doesn’t simply evade these tropes, it runs straight in the opposite direction. It’s protagonists are almost always female, there are no “chosen one” plots or heroes of legend, and its plots forgo the emphasis on fighting in favor of being about building something up, be that a business, a reputation, knowledge, relationships with other people…

Going back to Atelier Rorona, it’s only appropriate that, in a story that doesn’t need a hero, our protagonist is not hero material. Rorona is clumsy, shy, largely inexperienced and oblivious to many things that happen around her. Because of her nature, she gets into all sorts of unexpected (and hilarious) situations with people.

Befriending the supporting characters is part of the joy of playing the game. Each of them is quirky in their own way and has their own backstory to be uncovered, and it’s here that Rorona shines as a protagonist: she’s a gentle and caring soul that will do whatever is in her power to help others, someone who’s impossible not to like. It’s worth taking the time to get closer to everyone, in fact, the game’s multiple endings are affected not only by your performance as an alchemist, but also, the relationships you build.

Over the three years you play through, the game will have you fulfilling twelve requests by the kingdom, each of which has a deadline set approximately three months after starting it. In general, you’re tasked with providing the castle with a certain kind of item, either by crafting or by gathering. It sounds simple, maybe too easy, but the game has enough depth that those three years spent in Arland are sure to be hectic.

For starters, the time management is surprisingly severe. Every item you craft, as well as every gathering area you visit, takes at least one day of your time, and the further you go into the story, the higher the amount of days required. This forces you to make many saves and carefully plan your moves.

Then there’s the power creep, and how the game manages character growth and progression. Managing time is not simply about completing the palace’s demands, but also, keeping your equipment updated so you don’t fall behind the enemies you face while travelling. Note that I say “equipment”: while there are character levels in the game, they’re largely irrelevant compared to the power items net you, and even then, the game’s time requirements actively discourage grinding exp.

The dynamic that results from this design choice of focusing on items is very interesting: if you were to plot the difficulty over time of the average JRPG in a graph, it would probably look like an ascending slope. In Atelier Rorona, since new items are less frequent but provide significant boosts, the curve would look like a series of steps: you’re faced with a seemingly unsurmountable challenge and have to work your way into creating a new, powerful item, with which you proceed to steamroll everything until your arsenal becomes obsolete and you need to find something new to create.

I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Over and over again, the game gives you something that makes you completely overpowered, like nothing in the game will be able to stop you, and then follows it up with making you utterly miserable and helpless, forcing you back to the drawing board to find some new asset and restart the cycle.

While those hurdles are mostly found in combat, the crafting system itself isn’t free of twists, even if it remains more or less the same the whole game. Just look at your relationship with money in the game: at first, it is a scarce resource that allows you to buy materials from shops. Soon, those materials fall behind the ones you can gather, so your gold piles up. Then the wholesale mechanic becomes available, boom, you need lots of dosh again. Item traits become more relevant as they overpower items with raw quality, so money is useless again since it can’t buy traits, but then later you need piles of cash to create endgame weapons and armor… you get the idea.

The way such a simple game is constantly twisting and turning is insane, and I have to applaud the designers’ deviousness. As a player, though, I have to admit, the gameplay’s frantic pace does get frustrating sometimes. I actually felt like dropping the game when I got stuck at one point, and even though I eventually figured it out, it took looking at tons of guides online.

Looking at the game as a whole, I’m certain it could do with being more generous, both by giving the player more materials, and by lowering the time requirements for certain activities. It would certainly make for a less stressful experience.

Also, as much as the game doesn’t have the strict schedule something like Persona does, you’ll have to spend some time reading guides for another reason: there’s a lot of essential knowledge about the crafting system only found in Youtube and GameFAQs’s forums, courtesy of folks like MrSalaries, Solarys and others. You have to read through their posts to be successful in the latter half of the game, and I can only hope those boards never go down, lest we lose all that information.

With all that said, if I was able to withstand Persona’s mercilessness before, I can definitely handle doing some research on mechanics to finish a game, and I’m looking forward to playing the rest of the series. Especially after playing the extra story segment that comes at the end of the Plus version of Atelier Rorona. It’s called Overtime, and in it, you get to meet Totori and Meruru, the protagonists of the next two games. It's a fascinating way to set up the sequels.

What can I say? It may have been a rough journey, but Rorona made me completely fall in love with the Atelier series. It’s a fantastic twist on the JRPG genre that I never knew I wanted, which may be why it flew under my radar for so long. It's a game, and a series, I wholeheartedly recommend.

Atelier Rorona was such a fantastic experience for me. It was a game I always wanted but never knew I did. With such praise, I would, of course, be justified in buying all of its sequels, but… by that point I had already done so. Sometimes keeping an unreasonable backlog is convenient.

Atelier Totori picks up many years after the end of Rorona, in a fishing village not too far from the capital of Arland. Our story begins with a huge explosion, as Totori’s cauldron has once again gone up in flames. Totori – short for Totooria Helmond – is a beginner alchemist, apprentice to none other than Rorona herself -- the normal ending's Rorona, instead of the true ending's, which means that, here, Rorona only barely has her stuff together and her teaching methods are sort of lacking.

Totori perseveres, however, not only because she enjoys doing alchemy, but also because it is a valuable tool to be used in the quest ahead of her. Her mom, once a renowned adventurer, hasn’t been home for a few years, and everyone has given up on her ever returning. Everyone, except our young protagonist, who dreams of becoming an adventurer and traveling the world in search of her mother. Not too long after that cauldron incident, the opportunity presents itself, and she sets out to complete that goal.

As it was with Rorona, I appreciate how simple the central conflict in Totori is: there isn’t a huge evil to fight, or a world to defend. This is a girl’s quest to find her missing mother. A personal conflict, something that means nothing to a passerby but means the world to a single person, making Totori immediately relatable. The game's intro focuses on the emotional struggle that Totori and her family have endured over the disappearance of their loved one -- how their family never fully healed. It’s rare for games to tell this kind of story, as it does not provide a baddie to punch, and the way Atelier Totori does it is incredibly sweet.

Over the course of her adventure, Totori will meet all kinds of people from a pool of new and returning characters, and it’s the latter that makes Totori into the sequel of my dreams. Ever wonder how all those characters you got deeply involved with in a story turned out after its ending? Wonder no more, as you get to see exactly how each of them ended up, how they grew and what they achieved.

You’ll be delighted to befriend Iksel and Cordelia again, meet a host of familiar shopkeepers, listen to Rorona and Sterk bicker about one another… almost everyone from Arland is back, and I can’t emphasize enough how heartwarming this reunion feels. Of course, the new cast is lovely as well. I especially like Mimi’s character and how she complements Totori, both as a friend and as a rival. Totori demonstrates how powerful the trilogy format used by Atelier is, and why Rorona got a fourth game.

Speaking of trilogies, by the way, if you played the previous game, you know what to expect from this one, gameplay wise. There are some changes to items and the synthesis system in general, as well as completely rehauled map and time systems that seem daunting at first, but I consider an improvement. Areas feel far less redundant now, and there’s less incentive to fight repetitive battles. It doesn’t take too long to get used to it.

If you disliked Rorona's game (how could you?) you will probably not like this one either, but for fans of the prequel, Atelier Totori is an utter delight: a wholesome adventure amongst characters I’ve grown to love and can’t get enough of. I am so glad this series exists.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a game that undeniably left its mark on the industry as a whole. Not only did its overall quality and polish single-handedly change the perception that license-based games were all trash, but it brought to the table many elegant gameplay solutions for problems with which AAA game designers struggled at the time.

As the game starts, Batman has captured the Joker and has taken him to Arkham Island to serve time in the eponymous mental asylum. However, the Joker then reveals that his capture was but a part of his bigger schemes, releasing not only himself, but also the other inmates. Your job, as Batman, is to recapture all the escaped criminals, including everyone’s favorite jester.

The jump from PS2 to PS3 changed a lot about how games were designed. More realistic physics and environments removed much of the floatiness that games from the previous generation, but that change meant that action games, especially those geared towards mass appeal, struggled with handling fights with crowds. After all, when you make the player character's actions heavy and slow, it's a lot harder for them to counter groups coming at them at once.

So you had stuff like the early Assassin's Creeds where, when you found yourself surrounded by enemies, only a couple of them would attack at once. For one, it looked silly, but it also meant already slow fights were made even slower, as your combos were interrupted randomly by enemies you had to block or dodge. You could say that it was the game's way of leading you towards stealth, but that was more of an unintended benefit of the game actually not knowing how to send enemies at you.

On the other extreme, if you let every enemy bash the player character's skull in at once... well, you get the Souls series, which began at around this point. There's a lot that can be said about Souls games, but I'll leave that to people who are more knowledgeable about them than I am. My point right now is that those games require crowd control abilities, and that alone raised the skill floor and made it harder for inexperienced players to get into it. That's an unappealing proposition if you're making a superhero game that's supposed to have mass appeal.

Arkham Asylum presented a clever solution: it did the Assassin's Creed thing where enemies don't attack all at once, but it made it so you could counter blows from any angle. Enemies were then made a lot more aggressive -- the moment you start punching a thug in the face, another will come up behind you and attack, and you can immediately follow up with a counter and start punching them. Rinse and repeat.

There is, of course, more to the game than that, like jumping over enemies and your bat-tools, but this two button gameplay is the core of the combat system that would send waves across the industry. Fights in AA played out like a choreography, a rhythm, and rarely felt like they dragged on. A skilled player would even make the game look like a movie, from how fluidly it played.

It's mindblowing to think that, while there's plenty of pure combat sections, this wasn't even the game's main focus. The rest of the game plays like a mixture of metroidvania and stealth, and it also did well on those fronts. In fact, it brought to the table another gameplay innovation in the detective mode.

Similar to AC's eagle vision, but a lot more powerful, detective mode allowed Batman to see through walls with the press of a button, an ability especially relevant during stealth sections, where enemies wielded firearms and Batman had to carefully pick them off one by one. The x-ray vision afforded by detective mode allowed you to plan your approach much more effectively, making these sections feel like you were a predator.

Another strong point is in the setpieces surrounding boss battles. Yes, the final boss is notoriously bad, but the Scarecrow sections, where the map twists around right before the encounter happens, are pretty memorable. Heck, even the collectibles in the game, in the form of the Riddler's puzzles, are somewhat memorable, even if they were insanely hard to find.

The game was, of course, not without its flaws, like an annoying sewer section, an atrocious conclusion and some unbalanced encounters. But worse than that, it's been a victim of its own success: it has had numerous sequels of varying quality, and its systems have been replicated and iterated on by so many other games, that it suffered a fate worse than feeling dated: it feels unoriginal, uninspired. And that's sad, because it used to be a fantastic action game, one that shaped the industry for years. Maybe check it out for the history lesson?

I have to say I feel kinda bad talking about this game, because I earnestly wanted to like it. It's known as a bit of a cult classic in gaming circles, so much so that, a few years back, Ubi announced a sequel/prequel. Which has been in radio silence for a while. Anyway.

BG&E does feel like a complete package, at first glance. Female protagonist, original mechanics, an unusual setting... The thing is, the definition of "classic" definitely does not apply to it. This is a game that needed more than an HD remaster, it needed an actual remake to fix its technical issues.

The camera is the biggest offender. It is god-awful. It sways all over the place to the point of causing actual motion sickness, and it almost always forces an inadequate perspective on the scene, such as too close to your character or staring at the floor. There's a case to be made for the necessity of reviewing the entirety of the control scheme, but the camera by itself is the cause of so many silly deaths, it makes the game a frustrating experience.

With actual effort put into updating it to modern standards, BG&E could shine, but as it is, it's a clunky game, hard to convince people to play. And seeing the state of BG&E2's development and how Ubi is looking to crowdsource parts of it... well, it doesn't seem like the original has much of a chance of being looked at again.

The PS3/360/Wii generation brought online stores to home consoles, but especially with the low storage in initial console models -- I have no clue how anyone got by with a 20Gb PS3 or an Arcade 360 -- it took a while until they caught on and became what they are today. For a while, there was so little stuff in there that you didn't have to be spectacular to hold the spotlight to yourself, and that made it a great time to capitalize on your small game.

Of course, there was a bit of confusion amongst developers on how to price games. $10 and $15 were kind of the norm, with price points like $25 and $30, which are common nowadays, being rare. Quality also wildly varied, with some cheap games priced high and the opposite situation as well. One particular game went all-in with its sales strategy: Blue Toad Murder Files.

It was one of the first, maybe the first episodic downloadable title released on the PS3. By all-in strategy, I mean it was outrageously expensive. I’m pretty sure each episode used to go for $15 when they released, with the first one costing even more. That’s at least 90 dollars for the whole series. Mind you, each episode is about an hour long, and the production value is incredibly low.

The game has you playing as a british detective from the Blue Toad Agency. After a triumphantly solved case, you decide to spend some time off in the countryside, at the village of Little Riddle. However, your vacation is soon interrupted by the murder of the town’s mayor. Without hesitating, you set out to investigate the crime, unearthing dark secrets of the tiny village on the way.

There are six episodes, and on each one, you investigate a new crime that occurs, solving puzzles on the way and using your powers of observation to, when the time comes, point your finger at the culprit. Sounds awesome, right? Puzzles? British village? The first game that comes to mind is Professor Layton, and that’s really fun. Unfortunately, that comparison does not actually hold in practice, for a myriad of reasons, beginning with the extremely low production values.

Despite being a PS3 game, the 3D models and animations in the game are of very low quality. There's glitchy facial animations, absent animations, animations that don't match what the narrator describes... Plus there's some garish 2D backgrounds that get used every once in a while instead of the game's usual 3D scenery. I can understand keeping a limited scope due to working on a tight budget, but it's a $90 game. This kind of art quality doesn't make sense.

And then there is the voice acting.

The story is led by a narrator, who does the majority of the talking, but characters are voice acted as well. By one guy. There is one man listed as a VA on the credits, and going through the game, it shouldn't be long before you realize that he's dubbing everyone. The worst part is that all the women’s voices are just that same guy speaking in falsetto. It is not only tasteless, but extremely grating. There are a lot of characters in this game, and this is sure to make you wanna punch the TV.

I respect the hustle, at least, he did put in some effort creating different speech patterns to try and make them different, but gosh, at least hire a woman for the female characters. Looking at all this, it's no wonder, after the game was complete, that the price fell so much over time. I paid $5 for everything on a sale, but even then, I question if it was that good an idea, as the gameplay isn’t very smart either.

There are twelve puzzles per episode. A handful of locations in town can be selected during each part of the plot, and when you visit one, you’re presented with a cutscene and a puzzle. After a while, you have to do a case review, which is a four question, multiple choice test about facts that were presented thus far. This happens three times per episode. Finally, at the end of the story, you have to pinpoint a culprit from a list of four people.

The puzzles are alright. A few of them are pretty good, others, okayish, and then there are the dumb word plays or listening challenges that just, ugh. The thing is, unlike the Layton series, in Blue Toad, the puzzles don’t ramp up in difficulty. Rather, they stay more or less on the same level, which I consider to range from easy to mechanically-intensive-but-otherwise-easy. To conceal this weakness, the designers added a timer to each puzzle so you have to solve it fast. It’s distracting and unbalanced: some puzzles have too much time, others, too little.

Then there’s the questionnaires, where you're asked details about the cutscenes. Some times it’s relevant stuff, like character names, locations, etcetera. Other times, it’s the color or look of a person or object, information that ultimately shows itself irrelevant. Which leads me to the part that really kills me: Finding the culprit.

If you’ve played Ace Attorney, then you’re used to huge trails of logic and deduction, going through all the evidence and testimony to link the killer to the time, place, means and reason for the murder. It takes a while, there are some leaps of faith along the way, but the full picture you get at the end is airtight. You know who, how, when and why.

In Blue Toad… Well, it’s far from that. The time you spend around town, solving puzzles… 99% of that time is wasted. In every episode, the killer is exposed by a single moment. One line. One item in the background. The way a dog barked when it saw them. Pure conjecture. One after the other, the cases’ conclusions outstupid themselves, making you ask "what is the point of this?".

The core of a detective story is the trail leading up to the culprit. The investigation, the clues, the hypotheses, all of these make the genre what it is. If we’re just going to stall for an hour and then wing it when the time comes, there might as well not be a crime, nor a detective. In fact, the end of the game never explains why the first murder happened in the first place, a cardinal sin in the world of murder mysteries.

The funny thing is, I played this game twice due to my atrocious memory, and the second time, I wrote a review to prevent myself from going through it all over again. And if you're still reading, I extend that recommendation to you. Just don’t. There are far better games that do what it does.