White mages: "I cast this life gain aura on my life gain token so that when I tap my life gain land I gain life from my life gain artifact every time I cast a life gain sorcery targeting my life gain battle so that I gain life when I gain life oops I forgot to put creatures in my deck"

Blue mages: "It's MY game and you can't play unless *I* say so!"

Black mages: "I have the most cards in my graveyard, making me the victor" (but actually)

Red mages: "Welp it's turn 5 and I don't have a clear path to victory, time to scoop"

Green mages: "A 2/2 creature that DOESN'T tap for mana OR let you dig for land? Trash."

Though it doesn't quite hit the highs of the first game, True Colors feels like a true return-to-form for the series after the somewhat ill-fated LIS 2. With that said, the characters of this game are a little too smooth around the edges, so to speak. Nobody in the cast has the same amount of Bite as does one Chloe Price from the first game, which may have been an attempt by the game's writers to placate those fans who devoted years of their lives to hating a fictional character for the grave sin of being a rebellious and at times self-centered and impulsive teenage girl.

Some will view that as a positive. I don't.

With that said, Alex' story is definitely one worth experiencing, even if her relationship with Steph Gingrich is unlikely to ignite the same passion as Max' with Chloe.

I liked that they greatly improved the lip syncing and the facial animations, but in trade we lost the dynamic title screen (unless you specifically futz with the menus inefficiently) and the between-episodes credit rolls, which I sorely missed. Also the credits music is absent.

With all that said, it's an interesting glimpse into the kind of person so devoted to this series as to have picked up the remaster to see how the player choice percentages differ between this and the original game. In that regard, all that I will say is that The Sapphics Stay Winning.

The graphical improvements are nice but not really worth dropping the money for a whole new SKU.

This game tosses you in the deep end pretty much from the word go. Before you have any time to get your bearings about the setting, your player character, or anything at all that's going on, you're in the thick of it with jargon-heavy conversations with characters who barely introduce themselves into a plot that only sort of makes sense at first blush.

However, once you do get your bearings, and develop an understanding of what you're doing and what's going on, there are a lot of genuinely interesting ideas here.

With all that being said, for a story about a people's revolution, you don't actually see anybody do any revolting. Most of the game's action takes place with each character presenting a mostly-static talk sprite, whose pose is the same whether they're witnessing acts of cruel violence or just hanging out watching TV together. This further obfuscates the narrative being told, and takes some getting used to.

Following in the spirit of the first Life is Strange, this is a choice-heavy game that plays around with the meta-game inherent to choice heavy games, specifically gaming your choices toward certain objectives outside of the core narrative. For example: if you've decided that you want to collect as many Chaos Crystals as you can, you're liable to choose branching story paths that have the most chaos crystals available to get, leading your character to make certain story decisions you might not otherwise have made absent these meta-objectives.

I was unsatisfied with the ending I got and getting another one means starting from the beginning with every unskippable scene intact, so I'm unlikely to ever see another one. By my count, there are at least 8 main endings available, so that's truly a shame.

The game has some interesting ideas. Can't wait to see some one make a good game out of them.

I love rhythm games and I enjoy playing this game, however I can not in good conscience recommend it to anyone because of the insidious gacha element. I'm thankfully resistant to gambling impulses so I've never spent a dime on this or nearly any F2P game, but I don't view that as, like, a moral victory. Games like this are dangerous and should be regarded as such.

Having said all that, FIRE BIRD is one of the best songs ever and I don't limit that to subcategories of "In a rhythm game" or "from a J-Rock Girl Band".