It’s really a shame that reactions to Stellar Blade are more focused on the fanservice or the coomer reactions. You got one group of people who just focus on the fanservice and hail the game to be the savior of sexualized women in gaming, and then you got the other group who view the game in a negative light because of the first group. And you know what? I can’t even blame them because the first group is really insufferable.

I don't care in the slightest about Stellar Blade having a "sexy" protagonist. I saw a trailer for it once and was immediately interested, because of how fun and unique it looked.

But coomers saw the female Protagonist’s butt and were obnoxious about it ever since. Like come on, it’s bottom of the barrel fanservice you’re going all crazy for. Literally everything I've seen about this game online is people with underaged anime character avatars cream their pants over how this game is "destroying wokeness" or whatever. Nothing against Eve, because she is really pretty and I actually really like her, but she looks like every female character in every korean MMO ever made. It's like people going to war over white bread. Apparently, these guys are now whining about censorship, signing petitions, and making videos of themselves (they look about as you'd expect) about why their cause matters lmao. These pathetic gamerbros will never not be incredibly annoying and cringe to me.

Because Stellar Blade is just so much more. Picture all those apocalyptic gachas and their really great world-building, fantastic atmosphere but really cheap and dull (chibi) gameplay, then amp it up to AAA levels – that's the magic of Stellar Blade.

The environments are beautifully crafted and the atmospheric soundtrack is another aspect I deeply appreciate and thoroughly enjoyed in this game. There's nothing quite like losing yourself in a captivating melody as you journey through vast, lonely landscapes and cities. Just like Nier, Stellar Blade really nailed its soundtrack.

The gameplay is just so much fun and showcases an exceptional level of refinement and polish. Every movement, dodge and parry hit the mark perfectly. The more skills you unlock, the cooler and more fun the combat gets. There's never a dull moment - the gameplay remains consistently exciting and stylish from start to finish.

I found the plot to be really intriguing, and I really enjoyed uncovering plenty of secrets and snippets of lore. But what really surprised me were the sidequests. Sure, some were usual filler content, but most served to make the world feel alive and deepened the lore. Completing them was enjoyable, they never felt like a chore. So good job there.

Oh, and I'm pleasantly surprised by Eve! Initially, I expected her to be the typical "waifu" (ugh, I hate that word), merely there for visual appeal with little personality beyond conforming to generic “anime girl” tropes. Most of these tropes revolve around being “innocent”, "naive" or a "sweet flower girl." But Eve defies those expectations, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Even though Stellar Blade took huge inspiration from Nier and other apocalyptic gacha games, it's still an extremely unique and fun game that everyone should give a chance. Don't listen to the manchildren throwing tantrums or all the buzz about the “fanservice," which is honestly vastly overexaggerated due to some optional skins. Honestly, aside from the optional skins, there are absolutely no horny aspects present in the game.

There are just so many little touches to the point where you can tell the developers really cared about making this game great, and they succeeded. Stellar Blade is simply a beautiful game.

Let me give you the elevator pitch on what might be the best action game of its decade: "What if Kirby played like Bangai-O?"

Copy Kitty rules. It whips, it melts, it owns, it slaps. Any butt-kicking verb capable of being performed, Copy Kitty performs it. I say it might be the best action games of the decade, and I mean it. Because while I might like other games with action more, Copy Kitty is pure action. It is action with a raw, molten core, full of dynamic challenges and massive explosions. It's art-style and lore are completely silly, but are genuine and charming. It also has a level editor and an endless mode and a completely seperate and radically different second playable character and??? It's just so damn good. If you love action games, do yourself a favor and check Copy Kitty out.

As I sat down and watched the credits roll after finishing a 12 hour reading session for Volume F, I might have relearned a lesson I learned many years ago. That I should never judge a book by its cover, or in Blue Archive's case, a book by its degeneracy. Blue Archive is truly a fantastic heart-warming story that is so earnest with how it portrays its themes via the multiple stories it provides.

Based on the stuff I've seen online, I expected this to be a pretty safe slice of life-ish gacha story, that would be good, but ultimately forgettable. The first two volumes exceeded that expectation, with the underlying message about an adult's role to guide young adolescents into growing and understanding what their goals are and how to achieve them elevating the pretty fun slice of life scenes and the serious moments when the plots get more involved with more stakes. Kivotos as a setting for Blue Archive expands the limits of what Blue Archive can do. It is both a very exaggerated and silly place that seems almost like a parody of slice of life series with how nonsensical many aspects of Kivotos work and are taken as the norm. But at the same time, these oddities are sometimes questioned and are used to expand the world, with raid monsters being these weird eldritch creatures, the main villain group Gematria having surprisingly cool and abstract character design, which makes the world mysterious in a way that makes you want to learn more about it while being vague enough that the writers can do pretty much anything for stories (kind of similar to Touhou now that I think about it).

The overall writing is very sharp and to the point, emphasizing lines that give situations more impact, both for levity and for serious moments, while having very little bloat (aka Arknights) present. There was a scene involving a bridge that takes place late in Volume 3 that conveyed a lot about two characters relationship with few lines of text, which really impressed me, especially coming from reading many Arknights events. Pivotal story moments near the ends of each Volume are voiced too, which greatly enhances the emotional impact of certain scenes.

Eden's Treaty surprised me though, with it ending up as one of the best stories I've read in a gacha (only behind FGO's Avalon le Fae as an absolute favorite). The entire conflict between Trinity and Gehenna and how the narrative explored the themes of communication via the irrational hatred both groups both hold for each other, the inherent flaw in trying to understand others, and the futility of living for a purpose, but to pursue a happy ending for everyone despite those logical fallacies was just so incredibly well executed and explored that it got me to really appreciate how uplifting and positive Blue Archive's story ultimately is, despite all the hardships and despair that can occur. Hifumi's "I love clichés" speech encapsulates everything about the optimistic themes of Blue Archive so well and made me tear up with how genuine and earnest it felt. Volume F continued the bar for high quality story-telling, delving more into choosing to live, despite all the bad circumstances in your life, and the role of an adult shouldering the mistakes a youth can make when they can rely on no one. The entire ending sequence of Volume F though was fantastic and captivated me from start to finish, making up for some bloated pacing during the battle scenes near the middle.

The characters are all very fun to see interact and do shenanigans with, which makes it very easy to be invested in them when the stakes raise and the students have to go through some real hardships. The group dynamics with each student in their specific club and school really allow some of these characters, despite not being the deepest, to just be really fun to watch act on screen (Make-Up Work Club my beloved). Not every character is the most complex or fleshed out, but the characters that are especially focused on (Mika, Saori, Terror Shiroko, etc.) are wonderfully explored and have lots of catharsis tied to their flawed ideologies, yet are guided to hope and grow through their Sensei.

Sensei, while being a self-insert, is a pretty damn good one, being a symbol of an adult just trying to lead their beloved students to a brighter future, despite the influence of corrupt deceitful adults that exist in the world (Gematria, Kaiser Corp, etc.). There is some degeneracy to the character, but the gigantic positive influence Sensei has on the students lives and struggles made me like Sensei as something much more than just a simple gacha self-insert protagonist. The students all get a lot of love too when pulled for, with each character having a unique Live2D lobby animation, and a support chain of events you can perform. These events range from very nice resolutions to story events, very silly but overall fun reads, to completely degenerate. There is LOTS to love about Blue Archive's cast and how the game treats them.

The music is fantastic, with it leaning very heavily into EDM style tracks. Story themes are very memorable and catchy listens, and the core battle themes and important songs in big moments being amazing (RE Aoharu, Alkaline Tears, Defective Pixel, Usagi Flop, too many more to count). It elevates a great story even more and makes the atmosphere very unique compared to other gacha stories.

If this was just a visual novel, I would probably come out loving Blue Archive, but unfortunately, this game is a gacha. To be fair, the game does use the fact that its a gacha for its story extremely well, with each Volume being very distinct from each other and exploring the multitude of students that exist in Kivotos rather than focusing on one centralized cast. But the gacha means that the actual gameplay is kind of bad... It's harmless auto battler stuff, with you selecting skills at the right times and timing skills for good positioning, but I just find that style of gameplay tedious and boring to deal with. The rates look great on paper (3% for a max rarity unit, 6% during certain limited banners), but the focus only being 0.7% means you'll have to spark most of the time (200 pulls) to get the desired unit you'd want. This is actually not the worst, as the average time to get enough currency to spark is 2 months, but the rates do look better than they actually are in terms of getting a focus.

Something that is greatly appreciated is how much this game respects your time, at least once the ball gets going with mission progress on your account. You can skip almost every daily task in the game with a simple sweep command, reaping all the rewards while skipping the tedium of the combat completely once you beat the node with a 3 star rating at least once. This significantly boosted my attention rate in this game, making it possible for me to focus entirely on the story without worrying too much about the gacha and being optimal, just sweeping dailies and completing missions effortlessly to idly progress. Story progression is rarely locked behind the gacha as well (with a few very notable exceptions), meaning that your story progress is moreso locked behind your account level rather than having the most optimal students and building a meta team. This again focuses the attention of the game less on meta and pulling for broken students, and more on just pulling for your favorites, to get their Live2D's, to see more of their characters in their Momotalk. The focus of Blue Archive is always on the students, no matter what.

Despite the actual game portion of Blue Archive being underwhelming to me, Blue Archive as a whole is a great time if taken as a visual novel, and is also so easy to maintain. Dailies take at most 3-5 minutes (unless raid events are happening), and all previous nodes can be swept at no additional stamina cost (unlike something like Limbus). One of my favorite gachas, and I'll definitely stick around for Arc 2.

There are two wolves inside you

One goes absolutely nuts as the audiovisual downpour waters your soul, lifting you off your feet as transcendental music guides you through the rhythm, rewarding your play with only more heavy sensations to feel. The expertly crafted experience moves through your heart in beats that feel second nature.

The other wolf is hyperfocusing on each block as the difficulty ramps up to where you're trying really REALLY hard to keep up because they may or may not suck at tetris god the last level took me more than an hour on normal I'm REALLY bad.

Oh and both wolves are gay and really deeply love each other and intermix a lot :3

I'm not sure what I can really say that hasn't already been said by someone, somewhere else. The story is obviously the main draw here, and it is incredible, but there's a lot more to love here as well.

The decision to make the game 3D with 2D characters really pays off. In-engine cutscenes are numerous throughout and are a cut above its contemporaries' pre-rendered ones, sometimes even Xenogears' own. The cinematography and direction of some of these are very well-done. The spritework and character portraits are beautifully done, as well.

Another thing I appreciate about the visual design in general is the verticality and sense of scale. There's always stuff in your way, from ceiling fans to overhanging pipes to bridges. Even later fully-3D JRPGs don't often play around with perspective and scale to the degree Xenogears does.

The towns are among the best in any JRPG I've ever played, so full of character and life. Every NPC has something interesting to say, and there are tons of little easily-missible moments scattered throughout. One of my favorites was a merchant in Av who tries to haggle with you if you wait too long before giving a response. There are tons of moments like this in all 8 or so major towns and cities.

The dungeons unfortunately are rather bland, with the exception of Babel Tower. If they weren't going to design these as thoughtfully as all the other locations, they should have been trimmed down a bit.

Yasunori Mitsuda's score elevates the entire experience. Continuing the trend from Radical Dreamers, Xenogears' score is a bit more subdued than Chrono Trigger's, but it sets the mood perfectly... sometimes. It's quite a shame the soundtrack is so short for a game of this length because some scenes lose their impact a bit due to repeated track usage.

The combat isn't anything to write home about, it's just there to give you something to do. The UI makes it look more complicated than it really is. There's ATB bars for some reason, but the system is actually standard turn-based. You can ignore all the gear combat UI stuff, none of it affects anything. Saving up your AP to do multiple moves in one turn sounds like a great idea until you realize the damage doesn't scale, so it's useless outside of the 1 or 2 bosses that heal themselves a lot. Gear combat is more interesting on paper since you have to be careful managing your fuel, but in practice it means you'll only be using your most efficient moves. I do at least appreciate the plethora of game-breaking gear to be found in this game, it's kind of a lost art. JRPGs today are too afraid to have things as insane as Ether Doublers and Speed Shoes.

This is a game you play for narrative and presentation first, so thankfully while the combat is undercooked, it never gets in the way, either.

Stories are a bit more subjective to talk about, so I'll just say this is the kind of story that only gets better the more you experience it and the more you read into its allusions and inspirations. While we never saw the full 6-part Xenogears story realized, the way Xenogears unfolds and dilvulges its secrets, including bits from previous parts, I think ends up working in the game's favor. Perhaps my favorite quality of it simply the structure of the plot, which feels like you're slowly unraveling things layer by layer.

Well worth checking out if you enjoy story-focused RPGs, there's nothing quite like it, not even Xenosaga. Runs great on DuckStation, and there are mods you can get to speed up text boxes and provide other QOL features if you so choose.

I played FE5 almost as a joke so my friends could watch it kill me in real life. I don't even like FE4. I wasn't prepared for this game to own. I wasn't prepared for it to unironically be series Top 3 material. What the fuck.

With a lot of beloved hard games, the refrain is that they're Hard But Fair. (I think it started with God Hand commercials?) Thracia's difficulty probably lives up to the hype, and the game is amazing, but I cannot overstate how much it's not fair. One of the great things is that it's hard to sum up why it's so difficult, because it's not any one main reason; the game is inventively sadistic. Every other chapter it pulls some shit that warrants brand new amendments to the Fantasy Geneva Conventions. In one map you may have to outrun an entire squadron of wyvern riders with Killer Lances who spawn closer to what you're trying to protect than you do and you're on slow ass mountain terrain. In another, you want to turn a bunch of powerful enemies into friendly green units by allowing them to talk to specific other green units, with no ability to steer either party toward each other, and also the enemies who are still red will immediately start butchering the turncoats. The game is an endless bag of absurd, dirty tricks being played on you personally, and it's honestly both hilarious to fail and immensely satisfying to finally solve the puzzle.

There are also a ton of little mechanical quirks, some of them infamous and none of which would be back-breaking on their own, but the cumulative effect requires your entire strategic mentality to be completely different from in any other game in the series. For example, most stats cap at 20 for every class, and a lot of your units honestly have pretty great growth rates, so that drastically changes the value of something as basic as EXP. The game actually has a Konami Code-style cheat you can use on the main menu to literally double everyone's EXP gains, but there's debate over whether it actually makes the game any easier. You gain items over the course of the game that increase a unit's growths, so everyone ballooning two thirds of the way to level cap before you get most of them can actually kind of fuck you. Love it or hate it, I think it takes an incredibly interesting game to make a unilateral gigantic level boost potentially disadvantageous to the player. Also, you've probably heard that healing can miss; that's not actually one of your bigger problems (though it can really come in clutch to ruin an entire plan sometimes), but it is an extremely funny indicator of the game's overall attitude towards the player. There are a lot of other innovations you don't hear about as oddities because they simply stuck around; weird and brutal as it is, the game feels shockingly modern (or I suppose I should say "like a 2000s-era Fire Emblem") compared to the other Shouzou Kaga games.

But the most important feature, and another one you've probably heard of, is the capture mechanic--you can actually nonlethally disable enemies (and steal all their shit)! But something you might not pick up on until you're playing the game is that it's basically your only source of income. You get a pretty typical number of items from treasure chests and villages, sure, but enemies never drop anything when killed, shop prices are fucking exorbitant and you NEVER, at any point in the game, get any money in any way other than selling items. There aren't even gems or anything that exist only to sell for a lot, everything you can sell is potentially useful in its own right and you get peanuts compared to how much it would cost to buy the same thing. It's not a minor or optional mechanic; if you like it when your army has weapons, you need to be capturing on an extremely regular basis. It makes for a really crunchy, interesting in-game economy where you're basically always tense about your equipment.

Luckily, the other really important thing about capturing is that it's really fucking hard and dangerous. You have to defeat the enemy anyway to capture them; you can't do it on enemy phase so it often requires some tricky baiting; some units can almost never do it at all because you need higher constitution than the enemy; doing it with other enemies around will definitely get someone killed because you have severe stat penalties while holding a captive; and worst of all, using the Capture command instead of Attack also gives you stat penalties. It turns out fighting with edged weapons is harder when you're trying not to kill the fucker, what's up with that?

This also means the better the loot, the harder it is to get, since rare and valuable items tend to be carried by stronger enemies who are deeper behind enemy lines. You're basically running a cost-benefit analysis every time you see something you really want; you may have to stick your entire head in a blender to get it, but can you afford to pass it up? The game is hard right now, but it's not gonna get any easier later on, especially if you're not building a stockpile of exactly this kind of resource. That extra Warp staff will be a huge lifeline. Did I mention that the guy is using it every turn, so by the time you get to him and take it, having run fucking pell-mell through an obstacle course of siege weaponry and cavalry that overextended you for the rest of the map, it has one cast left? The game is littered with honey pots like this, where it dangles something you DESPERATELY want in front of you, then makes it so difficult and costly to get that you don't realize it's not worth it until you're already hard committed. I hear you laughing at me, Kaga, you weird chauvinist fuck! This still doesn't make you cool!

So obviously I'm an idiot masochist, but there is more than pain here. Counterintuitively, for how much you're suffering, you get to fuck around with some of the strongest units in the series. (Relative to the game around them. Their stats cap at 20 they should not fight FE10 units--) You form the kind of attachment to characters like Mareeta and Asbel, to name just a couple of the more extreme examples, that you can normally only get with people you've ACTUALLY been to war with. They're your fucking rock. A fixed point you can rely on when you need them most.

It also helps that, in moderation, you get to be just as sadistic as the game. I know I just spent a small novel hyping up the scarcity of resources, but the thing about the game making you fight like hell to get anything is that it can make a lot more crazy stuff technically available. You won't get out of this map with a Brave Sword, a Sleep staff, a promotion item and two Silver weapons--but with some elbow grease you can probably get a couple of them, and that actually gives you a lot of freedom. Your toolkit is both limited and potentially really potent, and sometimes you realize you have the right combination of staves or something to completely ratfuck a challenge that looked impossible at first glance, as a reward for having worked hard earlier in the game. That's a rare, amazing feeling.

Okay, this is a stupid sentence but it's my review and it can be stupid if I want: I haven't played Pathologic, but FE5 kind of makes me feel the way people describe Pathologic. I mean, I wouldn't call them similar games, the narrative here is not exactly high art, but it's a story about being a scrappy underdog rebel faction fighting a huge empire and the gameplay genuinely commits to that feeling. It is impossible to forget while playing this game that everything is working against you, you have nothing but what you can desperately claw out of somebody else's hands, and you cannot win by fighting fair. Thracia really is a harrowing game, but inside the infamous struggle is something that sticks with you; something bold, fascinating, and incredibly rewarding.

although Saias being arbitrarily immune to Sleep and Silence in chapter 22 is fucking--

Fata Morgana, is the nice boy in class, he has all the good grades, he's not particularly ugly, he's cultivated, he'll likely gonna get into a good university once he's gonna graduate, he seems to have no flaws, except one, he's painfully boring in its flawlessness
Subahibi on the other hand, he's the bad boy , he's dark, sinister, a bit cringe , he has black hair, he makes barely passable poetry , he smokes marijuana and is involved with several case of high school crime, he always brings a guitar and listen to 21 pilot on his airpods, not the kinda guy you should get interrested in, he looks silly , he looks like a fucking looser, he thinks he's goat, but he's not goat, he's just a piece of shit edgy kids and oh my god I hate this guy, but one day you go to a party
Who did you end up in bed with ? That's right , not fucking Fata, he's too good for this, It's Sca-di, you woke up next morning, and he fucked you and you look past the bed border and your mom is lying on the floor , fucked like she never has been before. Then he wokes up with pancackes, kiss you goodbye and leaves you with a teen pregnancy he's never gonna act upon. But the memory of such an experience will last with you for the rest of your goddamn life

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart dares to ask a profound question: what if Tools of Destruction was good?

Fundamentally, this is the same approach taken by the PS3 and PS4 outings in the series: stripping out any pretence of social satire in favour of a modern Pixar/Dreamworks pastiche with almost overbearing earnestness, only executed with a degree of competence that those games sorely lacked. Rivet and Kit are cool characters who bring genuine pathos to the story through the discussions surrounding Rivet's prosthetic arm, though never enough to meaningfully put the brakes on this rollercoaster ride.

There's a few things holding Rift Apart back from greatness, and I think the lack of willingness to introduce friction of any kind into the experience is perhaps the major one. Drama amongst the cast is well-written and portrayed, but never lasts for long, and never affects the gameplay. Rivet and Ratchet both play identically to one another, and even play exactly the same with or without their robot buddies, making their partnership feel utterly superfluous in gameplay. You worked this out in the very first game, people!!! The shooting itself is fun and consistently pleasing, but one planet for each character aside, the dimension shifting gimmick never really evolves beyond a glorified grappling hook, and the arsenal all plays and feels very similalry, without any gun that makes me go "WOAH THIS IS SOME COOL SHIT" like the Visibomb did in the very first game.

Ultimately, Ratcher & Clank: Rift Apart is too determined to provide a smooth ride through it's extremely technically impressive worlds to really play with the interesting potential that's there, which is a shame, but it is also Gaming on the cutting edge. Ratcher & Clank is the ultimate showcase for the PlayStation 5: not just because it is jaw-droppingly pretty and silky smooth, but also because it represents the creative cost of a game with this much time and money behind it: all sharp edges sanded down into a completely smooth experience that leaves no mark on me.