This is another one of those games that’s been talked to death, so we’ll see what I can actually add to the conversation! For the longest time I didn’t think I’d like Hollow Knight, mostly because I’m kinda hit or miss with metroidvania games (in particular, the only ones that’ve really sucked me in are the true blue metroid games) and I’m more miss than hit with hard, precise games. The only really hard games I’ve loved are the Souls games, and I knew HK was inspired by souls a bit, but I didn’t realize the extent. It’s kind of an exact halfway point between the genres it pulls from, and a well designed one at that, and while I wouldn’t say I loved the game as a whole, I certainly loved many parts.

I’m not really sure what about some metroidy games hooks me vs other ones. Right now my going theory is a dark, quiet isolation, going by how I like metroid 2 so much, and how Hollow Knight’s more Dark Souls-influenced atmosphere (imo) gives it more of a quiet resting melancholy than most in the genre. It feels more like a flattening of Souls into 2D than most of these games, I guess. That sense of tragedy definitely helped bring me in, until I was caught up in the adventure, regardless of difficulty.

That difficulty is something I’m not wholly in support of in souls games though, feeling like it crosses from fun to frustrating too often, and I have a similar feeling here. When the bosses are good, they’re great, and when you have the powers that some fights are designed around, they can be fantastic. But when they get tough, there can be this feeling that you know how to do the fight, you just can’t pull it off for whatever reason. The quicker fights got, the more I felt like I was flailing around until I got lucky and didn’t get hit, and some fights I Did Not get lucky for a While. My favorites were the fights with some room for error, still tough but built in a way where you can maneuver around the boss and learn its patterns within one or two runs, even if you don’t beat them for a few more. The Mantis Lords, the Broken Vessel, these are my favorite kinds of fight here, and luckily they’re pretty plentiful. There’s just a few in there that soured the experience a bit for me.

But that’s hardly unique to this game, and besides that and some really really too precise platforming, the game is hugely successful at what it wants to be. Cozier than souls and metroid, but still melancholy, still isolated, and still creepy when it wants to be. I mean what, am I gonna complain when an area like City of Tears exists? It was calling my name before I even knew it existed!!

Honestly, 2D games are so much more accessible than 3D games that even if you’ve given up on souls games, you should give this a try. For the most part it’s super manageable, and if you’re willing to explore to the MAX you can absolutely mitigate the harsher edges of the difficulty curve. That just isn’t the way I usually play stuff unfortunately, and so instead of wholeheartedly loving the game, I only like 75% love it and 25% like it! play it

Where the Water Tastes like Wine is an indie narrative adventure game that fits right in with the other artsy adventure games of the last few years (KRZ, Disco) in tone, but diverges strongly in structure. You see, rather than following your own narrative really, you travel around the depression era USA and collect others’ narratives.

In particular, you’re trying to hear the stories of 16 particular people dotted around the country, and to do so you need to collect your own stories, watch them evolve, and impress/open up the people you’re seeking out. These stories don’t really have anything to do with each other besides the country they took place in, but when you mix them together you get a wonderful tapestry of experiences and emotions around the reconstruction, the depression, and the great war. My favorite was Jimmy, a black preacher who’d served in the war and seemed just, lost. There was no glory in it, and nobody saw him as anything more when he got home.

The game as a whole plays with the idea of story as both currency and power in itself, oftentimes the only thing keeping you going as you trudge from city to city. Which I guess I should talk about, as it’s easily the weak link here. In-between gorgeously rendered art of the characters and picking up random stories that could transform into any one of a number of classic folktales, you play as a skeleton walking on a giant, heavily stylized map of the United States. It really feels like something out of some illustration of a tall tale, and it’s gorgeous, if a little cheap looking sometimes. Unfortunately, I had loads of performance issues as I played, not much more than a stutter every couple minutes, but when you’re trudging slowly for minutes at a time, nothing else on your brain, it gets distracting.

Besides that though, my biggest issues with the map-walking are that it doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the game artistically, and that it’s just kinda thin. I would’ve much preferred an illustrated 2d map, but even then, something like that implies exploration, and you’re not really exploring so much as drifting, listening to stories. I’m not sure how to represent that with gameplay, but I don’t think this game does it well.

Still, the stories really are fantastic. They feel very true to life, and the voice acting and art accompanying them just elevates them to a wonderful level. The rest of it is passable enough, so if hearing cool, well-written stories about the 1930s sounds like your jam, you should definitely give this a shot. Plus it might run better on things that aren’t macs lmao.

BlazBlue Continuum Shift follows Calamity Trigger by like 3 or 4 days I think, and directly follows up on pretty much every plot thread from its predecessor. Mechanically it’s much the same, a series of refinements and system changes that better get at what separated Calamity Trigger from its contemporaries, not dissimilar from the jump from Guilty Gear X to XX.

I still don’t really know how to critique it as a fighting game, honestly. The mechanics feel good. The characters seem like they make you play into their unique abilities much more (I was able to rush cpu opponents down with Rachel in Calamity Trigger, but that shit don’t fly here!). Beyond that, I’m kinda clueless, even as far as knowing what specific changes were made. But it still feels good, and it feels even more like blazblue.

As far as the story-mode goes, things have been improved a fair bit! Not only is there more to it (more characters will do that to ya), but the QOL is vastly improved. Now you don’t need to lose every permutation of every fight for 100% completion! Plus you can finally retry fights that don’t branch the path! That’s some good stuff, and both make going through the story more painless.

Even with all that though, I’m still a bit less impressed with this game than the previous one. Maybe it’s partly because it’s not a huge mechanical jump, but I think a lot of it comes from how the story is structured? This time each character has a canon ending, an alternate (bad) ending, and a gag ending. Sometimes there’s multiple alternate endings I think, but that’s the broad structure.

The bit that’s really different here is the canon ending, the true ending, for each character. In Calamity Trigger, at least as far as I could understand, the only canon storyline was the actual True Ending path that you unlocked after beating everyone else’s storyline. Sure it was confusing, but I really appreciated how they contextualized this fuzzy storytelling as “one of many possible futures”, and as a feature of the particular way the world of blazblue is built.

The new style results in much more concrete storytelling, which is much more parseable but also (I think) loses a bit of the unique burn the last game left going down? I wouldn’t say this is a downgrade for anyone but me though lol, but it still definitely matters to me.

That being said, it’s definitely a more full package and a more unique and polished fighter, and would be easy to recommend if, you know, there weren’t two more afterwards. Still, for the story it’s a good buy, and what’s here is good (even if I don’t love the less fuzzy storytelling and very early 2010s localization).

I'm not really sure how to write a review of either a visual novel or a fighting game, and this is both, but I'll give it a shot. As a fighting game, this is fantastic. I haven't played any of the later ones, and I'm sure they're more polished and stuff, but as it stands this is a wonderfully weird anime fighter from ArcSys.

You can tell that there's some lineage from guilty gear here, from the designs of Ragna and Jin to the music (composed by Mr. Guilty Gear himself, Daisuke Ishiwatari), but it feels rather different to play, or at least as different as an anime fighter by the same dev can.

I think if I had to describe the difference, it's that blazblue is more lenient input-wise but much more esoteric as far as character strategies, where guilty gear is stricter and more cracked altogether, but each character isn't quite as completely nuts as blazblue's characters tend to be. Blazblue is smoother but weird, guilty gear feels like heavy metal cocaine.

Story-wise it's wiiiiild, I think this is a better visual novel than any of the guilty gear games. It's not super clear how all the story-lines fit together literally, but they mesh together masterfully, drip-feeding information until you have almost half the picture, which is EXACTLY the right amount to explain. Plus, going through and getting all the endings is a lot of fun, and pretty painless as well (there's only 3-6 battles per route, so restarting isn't rough at all).

Anyways, I imagine this is a hard game to recommend since like, no one plays it anymore, but the story is cool and the mechanics are solid and cool, and it's only 10 bucks these days. Vibe on!