I started this game 4 years ago when I first started getting back into playing single player games. My friend and I were playing it simultaneously, we got about 5 hours in and then we never continued it even though we both enjoyed it at the time. Fast forward to March 1, 2024 when the legend Akira Toriyama passed away, the sole reason I got into anime which eventually led to JRPG's. After the news I felt like I had to experience this game rather sooner than later so I hopped in the stu and started it from the beginning.

Chrono Trigger is a masterpiece that still holds up to this day. I can't believe that something of this caliber came out two months before I was even born, just crazy to think about lol. There's so many awesome details whether it be related to the story, the lovely sprites or even the gameplay itself. Obviously with a story about time traveling, things will be different in the future if you change the past but I love the way it's utilized here. It is best showcased during everyone's side quests during The Fated Hour, in my opinion. Minor spoiler and this is just an example but there is a certain part where you're trying to get an item but this person won't give it to you. So you go into the past and give their ancestor something they wanted for free, they in return won't forget about our good deed and then teach their children all about kindness. We now go back into the future, now this person with the item is very kind and gives it to us instead. So freaking cool and this was a pretty minor event from a damn side quest.

My favorite part about the game was the combat and by that I mean figuring out each and every boss. These encounters were all so different, with unique mechanics and gimmicks. It felt really satisfying figuring out their weaknesses as well as timing your turns to heal yourself after devastating attacks. Gotta love the fact that the combo moves are indeed literally combined moves, like how Frog's Slurp and Ayla's kiss becomes Slurp Kiss. Also can't forget that water is so good that they made water 2, that's crazy..

I love all the characters, especially Frog and Ayla for carrying me throughout the game. Everyone else... please forgive me. They all had their moments though and I teared up when I saw them in the animated cutscene during the credits. Just peak.

The soundtrack is phenomenal, every single piece is a banger and I definitely can not pick a favorite because there's just too many mighty fine tracks.

Very glad that I gave Chrono Trigger another shot after 4 years, I've always wanted to beat it ever since I started my little JRPG journey and now I have!

Rest in peace, Akira Toriyama. Thank you for everything.

I'll admit first and foremost, I saw the leaks before release, I saw the trailers for this game, and I thought it looked like absolute dogshit! I was terrified to see where Fire Emblem was headed with this, and lord knows I wasn't anywhere close to interested in those avatar designs. I thought it looked like complete and utter ridiculousness, but... time went on, and it grew on me. As wheatie does, the game released and I saw a few clips of it floating around on different platforms. It looked ridiculous. Almost... intentionally so?

The story is terrible, yeah, of course, I think that's been made abundantly clear by everybody, but I can't help but smile at it still. Everything about Fire Emblem Engage is silly, from its writing, to its character designs, to just its whole damn premise, it's absurd! And yet, they seem to know that! So instead of desperately trying to claw its way into a dark and brooding story, it almost felt like they were more leaning into the absurdity of what they had. This isn't a game you're supposed to take seriously, and I fuckin' love it.

Looking past that, though, as a Fire Emblem in gameplay, it does a stellar job. I don't feel the need to go over what everyone else already has countless times before, general consensus seems to be shockingly positive regarding the map design and the gameplay, but I also really enjoyed some of the paralogues, getting to revisit maps from the older games and even getting to walk around them somewhat freely after the fight's over. That's something I'd also like to talk about, because good god this game is so fucking pretty! Maybe I'm just surprised after having played Three Houses for so long and staring at its boring and repetitive maps so many times, but even besides that, the hub worlds like the Somniel or the post-battle, fully modeled maps, I was absolutely astounded by just how beautiful Engage was to look at. Could very well be the prettiest game on the Switch, helped by its already vibrant and colorful/flashy design everywhere else.

Now combine those beautiful atmospheres with a just as beautiful soundtrack, pure bliss. I spent so much time in the Somniel just spacing out and wandering the area, listening to whichever song fit the time, and at this point I think it's going to stay with me for the next while. The serenity that comes with these tracks is something I find scarcely matched in other media. Shit, I'm listening to them even now, writing this review, thanks to this cool little compilation I found of all of 'em. That's not to say the other tracks aren't amazing as well. Being as obsessed with this series as I have been for the last eight years or so, it was more than exhilarating listening to the throwbacks they whipped up for all of the Emblem Trial paralogues, or the slow and gratifying buildup of Last Engage at the end, to be followed shortly after by a lovely vocal track for the credits roll, among god knows how many others.

Engage was a stunning, whimsical, and just overall fun experience, in every sense of the word. I regret being so doubtful of this game at first, and I especially regret taking 14 entire months to finish it (oops). It's, as I said, absurd and ridiculous the whole way through, and I've learned to appreciate that sort of thing so much more over the years. I can't call it my favorite Fire Emblem, Sacred Stones has that nostalgia (and GBA) bias over me, but this was still a marvelous love letter to one of my favorite franchises ever, even despite some of its more prominent shortcomings.

"camp" as the kids say

Starved Ocean

Star Ocean is a franchise that remained largely out of my view for most of my life as I didn't make the crossover to JRPG's formally until I played FFX after it hit the Switch in 2018 or so. As a result, many famed series' borne from the Golden Age 90's flew under my radar and I didn't have a chance to experience them until fairly recently. Over time I've tried to dabble into many of these in an attempt to understand gaming history and get a taste of the genre as it grew. I didn't "play" my first Star Ocean until the Divine Force demo release on PS5, immediately confused by the plethora of mechanics going on and monotonous combat I dropped it. I'd only gotten into it because of name recognition, knowing that Star Ocean was one of the "big" Square/Enix titles from the SNES/PS1 era, but dropped it because I figured it wasn't going to be up my alley. I didn't want to remove Star Ocean from my lexicon though, because I'd known that a unanimously "good one" had to exist out there somewhere, and with The Second Story getting the remake treatment... I figured it was time.

Upon launch of Second Story R, I immediately fell in love with the science fiction setting and incredible HD-2D visuals. As a big fan of the graphical direction of the Octopath/Triangle Strategy team, Star Ocean's graphical sheen was an immediate reward to my eyes. I paused every few moments of meeting characters, running through villages, and existing within the world to take screenshots and send friends images from my playthrough. Enamored I was by the world and the plot leaving your imagination of what could happen next to a pilot landing in an unfamiliar world. That's kinda where the praise stops unfortunately, as the curtain fell pretty quickly after that into my Second Story R playthrough... along with my rating.

The bad wasn't necessarily as grating as a lot of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's bad was for me (which I reviewed recently,) it was just confusingly grating. To start is the seemingly random difficulty spikes and settings of Star Ocean: The Second Story R. I played on the "normal" difficulty equivalent for a majority of the game and it felt, fairly hard. I figured with some time dedicated to grinding that I could make the experience easier for myself and breeze through what I considered to be the "tougher" dungeons at the time. I found out after about two hours of grinding and gaining some thirty plus levels that there was no different "feel" in my strength levels. Enemies could still one shot you and perma stun your party with remarkable ease, your characters didn't feel like they did any better damage per hit, and the game didn't actually get any easier. Now this changed a bit later on as I grinded north of level 100 and gained new abilities for my secondary party members because they gained access to new spells that seemed to disrupt more and do more damage, but they got one shot just the same. All the way from world enemies to dungeon encounters to the final suite of bosses, I found myself furiously mashing resurrect items and healing spells to get through encounters that felt like they should have been a breeze with how much I grinded. I spent hours effectively AFK just listening to my own music while I ran around in circles soaking free exp, and nothing actually felt easier. I tuned up my stats across the board, which mediated issues I had with the difficulty, but I was still dying with 9999 hp from petrifications and paralysis' all the same.

This brings up another issue I had with Star Ocean... information and skill overload. I joke a lot about how Persona 5 effectively tutorializes the player for the first like, fifty hours of gameplay, but hey nothing feels confusing or rushed at that point in the game. Within the first few hours of Second Story R, the entire skill tree and IC/Speciality suite is opened up to the player to understand and dive through. It's more than just levelling up your attack, magic, and defense. It opens up the Pickpocketing, Crafting, Music, Writing, Alchemy, Cooking, list goes on trees that the player is supposed to fully understand. From what I knew with my experiences with these tertiary skills is that they accented the player and made it easier for me to level and be strong... but outside of training and scouting I had absolutely no idea. I couldn't tell how worth my time it was to construct books to level attack or perform songs to summon certain enemies because the tradeoffs were completely unclear and the materials necessary to do so were obfuscated or gated behind currency. This resulted in my levelling up train (sacrificing damage for exp gain) and scouting (populating more enemies on the world map) so I could stand still and let my characters go to town on consistently spawning enemies. I'm not sure if this was the best way to go about it, but I didn't want to have to study Star Ocean tactics for longer than I did to understand it. Grinding is pretty much never fun in games, especially in older JRPG's where the heal/save options aren't as desirable as they probably could be, but Star Ocean's levelling systems felt like watching paint dry, but the paint occasionally personified to get up and slap you in the face before going back to the fence it was being applied to.

Combat was bad, voice acting even worse, and the plot was lukewarm at best. Star Ocean: The Second Story R was an ultimately milquetoast experience that I'm not really even glad I got to play. It lands and bombards the player with lots of great visual fidelity (and the cutscene work/character portaits are rather impressive throughout) but lacks the sticking power to create a compelling experience worthy of note. I cannot recommend Star Ocean: The Second Story R to anybody except maybe fans of the old Action JRPG genre.

I cannot lie, I'm genuinely very disappointed in this game, especially with a company as consistently strong an output as Vanillaware it pains me that this game really only has those good ass Vanillaware visuals going for it.

In terms of gameplay, the game has a lot of elements that I would generally enjoy on paper, the formations and the way tactics form together should be so much better than it actually is, there's just so many variables to the point that it largely becomes a numbers game since character building, for the purposes of beating the game (played on the second highest difficulty) is really easy and it's not super hard to make even an unoptimal formation just work through sheer force of will, which really harms the strategy layer. Also the real time Ogre Battle style strategy has a lot of problems on its own. The worst being a lot of quality of life issues, such as not being able to see how your formations will do out of deployment, and the battle forecast changing at the drop of a hat. There's so many variables to battles that you can send a battalion over to an enemy where it says it'll be a sure win, and despite seemingly no other circumstances changing it suddenly switches to a stalemate of a battle which is incredibly frustrating for planning purposes, on top of the fact that if you make mistakes there's no backing out. In many ways I can't help but compare this game to the neighbouring turn based tactics genre, where at least I can make an assessment of which move I can take that would be the most optimal, Unicorn Overlord forces you to throw shit out and if it doesn't work then tough shit, which leads to an incredibly unsatisfying tactical experience. Also there's way too many liberation missions, which I know is for controlling the level curve, but even then the level curve is fucking wacked out by the endgame, there's like a 5 level recommended level jump for no reason. Nearly every gameplay element in the game is something that could work but has a botched enough execution that frustrates me because, man, I really do want to love this game.

But most frustrating of all is the story here, the only way I can describe is like bad Fire Emblem. There's a shitload of characters and they all interact with many others in the army but unlike Fire Emblem these characters offer the substance and flavour of white rice, these characters are truly bland in a way that seems almost alien to me compared to the characters in like Odin Sphere and 13 Sentinels. The story is also dead simple but still does a few things that really hurt its narrative, the villains in this game are fuckin terrible and their motivations never amount to anything interesting, meanwhile all the good guys are so generically good that even the bad guys that become good have some crutch excuse like mind control, hostage situation, or some other hackneyed out that prevents these characters from really flourishing. The rapport system is something I usually always like because it gives these characters that don't really interact in the main story a chance to be fleshed out as characters but all it can offer is the most shallow looks at these characters in their totality to the point that they're just functions to me, Armour guy, Horse guy, Bow guy they never offer anything more interesting than hating the evil empire because they're evil and it's just really surprising to see a game with so much love put into the production lean back so heavily on just being so consistently mid.

Just a really frustrating offering from Vanillaware from me, especially for a game that nearly bankrupted the company I expected so much better because this game really only has its visuals going for it, but I can get that from any other Vanillaware game and actually have a good game too.