I’m not going to lie, the only reason I even play RPGs are for the story. I feel that’s the heart of this genre, but also it’s Achilles’ heel. Nothing ruins a RPG faster to me than a poorly written story and Sea of Stars has one of the worst. The story is a disaster and most of it doesn’t makes sense partially due to the world building which is all of the place and without any clear direction. There are so many plot holes and certain things are just never explained throughout the story and sometimes you’re left with questions that are just never answered.

It also didn’t help that the dialogue in the Sea of Stars had some of the worst I’ve read and is best described as cringe worthy. The entire cast of characters felt like tropes and lack any real depth especially the main two characters, Zale and Valere. Holy shit, these two are some of the most boring characters I’ve ever seen! Neither one have any unique personality traits that make them stand out from the other cast of characters or even one another. Valere and Zale feel like one character most of the time and talk like your local average NPCs.

The ending of the game was extremely unsatisfying and felt so lazy. Granted there is the true ending that you can unlock, but you’ll have to spend several hours by completing specific side quests in order to get it. After watching the ending on YouTube because I couldn’t stand to play this game anymore and I’m glad I didn’t! In my personal opinion, it’s not really worth the time because ‘the real’ ending barely changes anything and the one change there is, takes away the only emotional moment in the entire game.

Another thing that really annoyed me was that the main antagonist didn’t get any real form of retribution in this ending despite all the horrendous things they did to others throughout the story. The worst they got was a case of wounded pride. I’m not saying the villain needed die, but why couldn’t the protagonists trap them in a time loop or something. Honestly, I think I’m putting more thought into this than writer/s did, clearly.

The combat is pretty mediocre and kinda of restrictive. Each character gets three skills and one ultimate which doesn’t really give you whole lot to strategize with and makes the battles repetitive. There are combo moves that you can use, but I found I mostly just used mending light to heal and to boost my ultimate meter. The rest of the combos I found to be kinda of useless. What also brings down the combat is that the fights can go on way too long especially the boss fights. On a bright note is that game gives you relic you can buy in game that make the battles easier.

Even with all this there are some good things in Sea of Stars. Outside of maybe Eastward, the pixel art is probably the best I’ve seen. I enjoyed the exploring of both the dungeons and towns. I found it fun discovering secret rooms and solving the puzzles which in all honesty were kinda of easy. I did find it annoying that in some of the towns you weren’t able to go in half the buildings. Most of the music was really well done and some of the tracks were really catchy. I think that’s mainly from Yasunori Mitsuda’s help with the sound track though.


Overall:

It isn’t enough to have both gorgeous pixel art and a good sound track in an RPG. You need a solid story with compelling characters to really bring it all together. It’s seems to me that Sabotage cared more about the visual aesthetics and the music than the narrative they were trying to tell. Sea of Stars is disappointing as it is soulless, and I’m so glad I played this on Gamepass instead of buying it. What a waste of time! That’s thirty hours of my life I’ll never get back.


Pros:
+gorgeous pixel art
+good sound track
+fun exploration and puzzles

Cons:
-awful story
-dull characters
-cringey dialogue
-lazy ending including the secret ending
-battles go on way too long
-combat feels restrictive

The nice thing about Nintendo Switch Online for old people like me is that you get a little involuntary nostalgia hit every couple of months. I wouldn’t download and emulate Mario Party of my own volition, but something about it being readily available on my Switch just makes the access to those old memories so much more enticing - even when said memories now launch with an updated warning about how they can cause permanent damage to the palm of your hand.

Funny story about this game - my younger brother and I had it in our heads that it was possible to be skilled at it. Our misguided belief that the winner of a game of Mario Party was in some way deserving of recognition and admiration eventually came to a head when our neighbour - who didn’t own or play video games of any kind whatsoever at any time - played a round with us one rainy afternoon. He came out comfortably 3 stars ahead at the end of 50 turns, brutally shredding our fragile preteenage egos to tatters. This trauma sent my brother crazy, and he had to be locked in the bathroom for an hour because he was quite simply going completely apeshit-crackers at the notion that someone who didn’t even hold the N64 controller correctly could beat him at a game he’d played for a hundred hours. Very funny to recall his little cheeky face lying on a floor sodden with Chance Time-induced tears. Great game.

You can jape endlessly about the unfairness of the original Mario Partys, but there’s nothing you can really say that’s more amusing than participating in it. Taking huge inspiration from the capitalist chaos of Monopoly, this is definitely one of Nintendo’s most postmodern games, directly stating on many occasions that the rules are made up and the coins don’t matter. It revels in unfairness and mean-spiritedness (literally, with the inclusion of a robber Boo) in a way I imagine Shigeru Miyamoto would frown very hard at, and I presume the meaning of Bowser hollering “That’s often the way things go in life!” while tap-dancing on the spot as Mario wails about being mis-sold a suspicious “super duper star” for the tidy sum of 200 coins just completely passed me by as a kid. Just like the game of Life, the lesson to be learned here is that no matter how carefully plot your course and how hard you twirl your joystick, all the money in your bank can be swept away in an instant because some stupid prick stepped on a big red button with your face on it.

Spent some time browsing itch.io the other day. Passing through all the wannabe FNAF and the [current meme] horror games on there, I found a category for art games. Video games as an art form seem to be in a questionable state with the fact that many will hold up any basic shooter game with garbage philosophy as being the peak of its genre or in other situations, just some game with hours worth of cutscenes that gets adapted into an HBO series that is 10x better than the game ever was. I'm sure the two games mentioned are obvious, and while I don't hate playing them considering how fun the gameplay in both games can be, I hate what they stand for. I hate the underutilization of their medium/overreliance on cinematic storytelling, their lack of good thought-provoking themes, and even just the fact that some of these "art" games can be told in pretty much any other medium. Monuments to Guilt on the other hand fascinates me. A game that doesn't even intend to be a game, but still manages to take advantage of its medium to push its idea of what it means to be exclusionary.

The idea of a virtual museum is always interesting. Most of the ones I've played have been ones that break what is possible with reality and a reasonable budget such as the Namco Museum on the PS1 or the Radiohead Kid A exhibit. There are also some examples of virtual museums just serving to be alternative options for those who will never be able to visit a museum. Monuments of Guilt lies somewhere between the two of them. Monuments of Guilt isn't named after its museum. It's not referred to as the Monuments of Guilt exhibit or museum, but instead just "Monuments of Guilt". Everything featured is real, but it's not real in the sense that this museum could ever exist in real life, because getting the money for this and getting all these benches gathered into one place would be impossible for someone like the creator of this game and yet it maintains it's realistic museum design.

From signs advising you to avoid touching to having a video for the benches that they couldn't get in person, to having bars that make it so you can never see the full screen, there's some kind of irony here. The creator Louis comes off as making much more than an exhibit, but instead making his own meta art piece. A commentary on museums, a commentary on exclusion, and a commentary on class culture. Why would anybody want their own museum art exhibit when when it's all just entertainment for the people causing issues towards society? The idea of Monuments to Guilt using video games to mock and rebel against capitalism and instead do its own thing is something that I adore about this game.

Not very often do I feel like we get games focused more on being art than a game, which makes me admire Monuments to Guilt a lot more than I ever expected to. Right next to Monuments to Guilt on the Itch.io tag for art games was a game called Pineapple on Pizza which is currently the most popular art game on the platform. I personally, don't have much of an issue with the game, but there's just something that bugs me about games as art and the way they can't really take the medium seriously. The idea that a game needs to be fun and goofy is what holds this medium back. As much as I do love goofy games and don't want them to go anywhere, I would really appreciate a push for more games like this in the future.

Well fuck. I'm not surprised that I liked Venba, but I am surprised I liked it this much.

It does feel a bit strange that it took this long for me to find a narrative-based cooking game; most of the cooking video games I've seen are either arcade-scoring style minigame collections (your Cooking Mamas), restaurant management titles like Cook, Serve, Delicious!, or sandboxes that felt so simple and structureless that they basically turned into meme simulators for me past the five minute mark. Conversely, Venba more closely resembles what I expect of my idealized cooking game: it emphasizes the puzzle-like qualities of cooking via mastering techniques at the right time (something that no other game I'm aware of has really capitalized upon) while also using cooking as a narrative vessel to impart past memories of learning/executing recipes and thoroughly exploring culture via the medium of the culinary arts. Granted, Venba's puzzles are easy enough to navigate but still aren't free, and that does wonders in aiding its lean towards storytelling: without spoiling too much, entire sections of recipes are often missing, and thus part of the fun is filling out the gaps as the player to "correct" the dishes. You won't get penalized unlike a restaurant sim though, and that's the fun of cooking! Sometimes, you just want to experiment a little and try out new techniques, and if you mess up, that's just kitchen learning in a nutshell.

What I wasn't expecting though, was just how deeply I resonated with the narrative. My immediate family and I are immigrants, and quite frankly, I've inquired a little here and there about what they've sacrificed to move to the US, but I clearly haven't asked enough. While I've never genuinely felt ashamed of my own culture, I've absolutely felt the pressure to "fit in" and in many cases, felt a bit of the old embarrassment rise up again from playing this game due to how disconnected I've often felt from my old home city versus having now lived in the states for a while. English isn't my first language, but it may as well have been now given my difficulties writing and sometimes speaking my old language, and losing my grasp of all these things that were once more familiar to me has always been a sore point in my life. This game is a reminder to me that even if I may have grown up in an entirely different world than my parents, they're still my family at the end of the day regardless of cultural differences and it's still my past; I might have had years slip by where I chose to remain intentionally apathetic to parts of my family's heritage, but that doesn't mean that I can't start catching up now to try and make up for lost ground.

The game is only about an hour long with just six recipes included (and a couple near the end are a bit too guided), but I'm willing to overlook its brevity because this experience is going to sit with me for a while: it almost feels like it was written for me at times. Definitely one of the best surprises to come out this year. Thank you for the meal, Venba. Think I'm gonna go call my parents now and tell them how much I've missed them.