It's a strange experience to go into a game, fully expecting it to be relatable and then it just... isn't.
This happened to me once before, when I played We Know The Devil.
How do I rate a game like that?

While procrastinating earlier this week I was browsing old Jimquisitions and stumbled across the “100% Objective review”, a video where they make fun of the concept of an objective review. Their original review of Final Fantasy XIII was incredibly negative and they got harassed for it not being “objective” so they made a “review” that was just listing facts. While reading the comments of that video I stumbled across something that really stuck with me. I don’t remember the exact wording, but someone was saying something to the extent of “If you were an English teacher, would you assign grades purely based on whether you like a paper or not? Hopefully not, when grading a paper, you need to put aside personal bias and grade it on the quality of its content. Same for a video game, you’re supposed to subjectively evaluate its features independent of personal bias.”
Putting aside the fact that English papers aren’t art and reviewing isn’t grading, that sentiment strikes me as odd. I don’t rate based on technical execution. A lot of games I have rated very highly have some pretty massive flaws. I sometimes joke that Nier Automata would be an awful game if it wasn’t also my favourite game. My ratings are pretty much exclusively based on how much I enjoyed something.

So, how do I rate Post-Disclosure, Devil’s Knight?
Based solely on enjoyment it’s probably like a 5/10 I guess.
But rating it as such would feel incredibly unfair. It’s not the game’s fault I went into it expecting something it could never deliver on. It’s not the game’s fault my lived experiences are so vastly different from what it’s trying to portray that I don’t relate to anything that is happening.
Besides, aren’t I always annoyed when cis people ignore trans stories because “it wouldn’t be relatable anyway”? Aren’t I being just as bad right now?
And I know this game can be relatable to people. I hope that Roxy relates to it, would be weird otherwise. Kye’s excellent review shows very well just how much this story resonates with her. If I slap a label like “two and a half stars” on this, I feel like I’m invalidating their experiences. Even worse, I might end up scaring someone off this game who would have ended up loving it.

The objective Final Fantasy XIII review has the following line:
“If you buy Final Fantasy XIII and like it, then you like Final Fantasy XIII. If you buy Final Fantasy XIII and you don’t like it, then you don’t like Final Fantasy XIII. It has things in it that some people might enjoy but other people who have different ideas of what is enjoyable may not actually enjoy it.”
As much as that is very obvious satire, it’s pretty much exactly how I feel about PDDK. I personally didn’t like it all that much but I know other people will.
Fortunately, unlike FFXIII, it’s a free game that will only take you 10 minutes to play. So why not give it a try, see if you’ll end up enjoying it? What’s the worst that could happen?

The worst that could happen is that you could end up writing a really weird review about the process of reviewing things and spend over an hour with that apparently.

I was planning to play through the game 2 more times, once with the Dark Urge Origin and once going the "evil"/absolutist route
But then I saw how much stuff Larian is already announcing to add and idk I am just so fucking tired. Yeah I felt like the ending was a bit lackluster and it's cool that Karlach will be able to get a better ending and all but like.
I would just like to be able to buy a finished game. And then play the game at launch with the knowledge that I'm not missing out on anything by not waiting 5 years until every single patch has dropped. It's so strange to me that there was this huge discussion when this game came out about setting new standards because you can just buy a complete game for 60€ when the game demonstrably wasn't complete.
Of course I like it when things get better over time but I don't have enough time to replay every single game each time it gets a patch so I'd just appreciate it if a game releasing meant it is now as good as it gets. Especially a title that spent 3 years in early access.

start writing a review
I was a teenage exocolonist (which I will call “exocolonist” from now on because that name is too long) is a beautifully queer game.
Just how queer it is becomes obvious immediately during character creation. The game not only lets you choose your pronouns, it lets you customize them. You can have neopronouns. You can have he/him pronouns but use feminine terms like girl and mother. You can have she/they pronouns and use a mix of feminine, masculine, and neutral terms. Literally every single instance of this game using gendered language to refer to the mc is customizable. And your appearance and physical sex are customizable separately from all of this.
The relationships you can have with the other characters (and that they can have with each other) are also beautifully multifaceted. No romance option is gender locked. Some characters will start (queer) relationships on their own, no one is throwing themselves at your feet. There are multiple trans and nonbinary characters. One character is aroace. Not every romance starts at a high friendship level. Not every “romance” is a romance, some characters are happy to be your friends with benefits. Multiple characters are polyamorous. And some relationships in this game are queerplatonic, which is what queer people call relationships we can’t describe properly but they’re really beautiful.
Exocolonist has the best portrayal of gender, love, and sexuality out of any game I’ve ever played, except for maybe Heaven Will Be Mine.
is that what I want my review to be about? Isn’t this game so much more than just a dating sim?


start writing a review again
Exocolonist is a beautiful game about growing up.
Your experiences shape you. The memories you make become the cards you end up using to win the challenges later in your life. I wish the game wasn’t as committed to being a game in some parts because removing some treasured memory because I need to optimize my deck kinda sucks.
This alone already tells a beautiful growing up story, but what makes the game really special is how your relationships to the world, and especially the other children around you change. You start out doing either simple tasks or learning in school and end the game doing things that require highly specialized skills. Most of the adults go from treating you like, well, a child to treating you like an equal.
Your childhood friends will all develop in vastly different directions. Friends thought to be inseparable become bitter rivals. Some go down dark paths and you desperately try to stop them, not always succeeding. But some also grow to lead happy lives and you’re happy for them.
Exocolonist portrays the journey from child to young adult, both the good and the bad.
did I just write this entire review without mentioning that this is a cool science fiction story?


start writing a review again
Exocolonist is a beautiful political science fiction story.
You live in a Utopia that is unlike anything possible with our current technology. There are some interesting political thoughts in this game like how to encourage art in a (mostly) moneyless society, but it unfortunately doesn’t ever dive too deeply into any of them.
The game is also kinda weird about violence. It presents the positions of “violence is good when justified”, “violence is always bad”, and “violence is always bad but sometimes it is still necessary and justified” but there are multiple instances where you are forced to choose between the first two.
As a sci-fi story it has everything you could want. You’re one of the first children born in space, you and everyone else has cool genetic enhancements, you are part of a small group who are trying to be the first humans to life on an alien planet, there are cool aliens and the story explores the theme of living in harmony with nature or bending nature to your will and there’s a cool AI you can befriend and a wormhole and…
A wormhole
Yes, a wormhole. What was so special about this wormhole? Come on, tell the people

Yes, I know how to review this game now, but I’ll have to spoil a game mechanic that you might discover as early as reloading an old safe or as late as starting your second run. I had it spoiled for me before I started playing the game and didn’t mind at all but if you want an unspoiled experience I recommend you stop reading and start playing now


start writing a review again
Whenever a game has multiple routes/endings, people will replay it over and over. Some games use this to pad their playtime, some use it to tell the same story from different perspectives, and exocolonist deconstructs it to a degree.
In exocolonist, the mc retains some knowledge from previous playthroughs when you start a new game. This allows you to save people you couldn’t save the first time, take shortcuts to things that took a long time to solve previously and just generally makes your life easier.
This recontextualizes replays from being something you the player are doing to see all the content in this game to something the mc is doing to improve their life. No ending is perfect (though some are much closer to perfect than others) so there is always a reason to come back and try something differently.
Unfortunately for this game I played it after I played Everhood, so now a story about constantly relieving your life to chase after some unobtainable perfection feels slightly wrong to me. There is a way to break this loop, but the game portrays this as a bad ending and offers you to restore the loop with basically no consequences.
I’ll just pretend that after I got the ending that is as close to perfection to me as possible, the mc decided to stop this loop. I won’t replay the game again anytime soon. Solana’s happy.

That’s a pretty decent review but I still feel like it doesn’t do the game justice


start writing a review again
No review can do this game justice. It is far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a queer dating sim, it’s about growing up, it’s a political sci-fi story and it’s a cool meta game, but it’s so much more than this.
This game is really special. Go and check it out.

This is an incredibly flawed game. There are way too many random encounters and there are so many balance issues that I won’t even bother listing them. Combat is fairly boring.

Despite this, I greatly enjoyed my time with this game. It oozes charm. The music and character design are amazing. It has a real sense of adventure. While it might not have much of a story, it can create great stories. Here’s an example for what I mean by that:
My Warrior and Thief were poisoned, I was out of antidotes and barely made it to a tavern thanks to the healing from my white mage. Nothing special. But the way I decided to remember this was that Glitz dragged an almost dead Morgan and Arael into bed, their bodies ravaged by the poison, while Aeneas prayed that they would make it through the night.

I played this game to prepare for playing Stranger of Paradise later this year, but I ended up loving it so much that now I want to play through all of the mainline Final Fantasy games. This game lays an amazing foundation and I can’t wait to see how other games expand on that.

Final Fantasy II is an incredibly frustrating game. It’s awful, but it has so many great ideas, but none of them end up quite working. This review is structured in four parts. The leveling system, balance, story, and miscellaneous. The section on balance has some mechanical spoilers, the section on story has some story spoilers, so avoid them if you care about that.

The Leveling System
Pretty much the first thing anyone brings up when you talk about Final Fantasy II is its unique system of character growth. Instead of gaining XP and leveling up, your characters gradually get better at the things they’re doing.
This is fairly unique in video games, but if you play tabletop rpgs, you’re much more likely to be familiar with this system. Call of Cthulhu, the second most popular system on Roll20 and most popular system in Japan has a system like this. If you succeed at a skill check during a session, you get to roll to see if you can improve it at the end. This works great narratively, because unlike in other roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons you’re not playing legendary heroes in that game. You play average people who suddenly get confronted with eldritch horrors, and the waitress who buys a .22 derringer for self-defense at the start of the campaign is never going to be a legendary gunslinger, but maybe with enough time she can become a pretty decent shot.
And the same is true in FFII. Guy isn’t some prophesized warrior of light, he’s just a teenager whose hometown got attacked so he picked up an axe, hoping to defend himself and his friends. Or maybe you decide that he should use a sword instead. Or fire magic.
So now that I have defended the concept of a leveling system like that, I have to admit that the implementation is actually fairly bad. It works for weapons, most skills, and some spells.
But what does “using your hp” even mean? In the original it meant taking damage and then not getting healed which was obviously awful but now it can also increase when you didn’t take any damage, so it feels like it just randomly increases sometimes, which isn’t much better. In Call of Cthulhu your hp mostly stays the same throughout a campaign, but that doesn’t really work for a game like Final Fantasy either.
I get the idea behind increasing agility when you have high evasion. Heavy armor decreases evasion, so character in light armor gain agility. The problem is that shields also raise evasion, so Firion, who was always wearing the heaviest armor available but also using a shield ended up with the higest agility by far for me.
Spells that inflict status effects have very low chances to work at level one and you have to get them to a high level for them to be worth using. So, either you waste them a few hundred times, or you do it like me and just don’t bother with them.
In the early game, the only status effect you can Basuna away is poison, but that’s so weak that you probably won’t bother. Later temporary status effects are also usually things you can just wait out, so your Basune is probably going to stay fairly low level. Which you’ll regret once you run into enemies that can confuse and your Basuna is like 4 levels too low to deal with that.
And then there’s spells that don’t really get better as you use them. So if you use Life a bunch, it mostly ends up being significantly more expensive without being much better. In the final battle I was using Guy to raise people who I had previously only used to raise Firion, because his Life 2 was just that much cheaper than Firion’s Life 9. Similar things apply to Warp and Teleport, at least if you don’t want to use them in battle.
Perhaps worst of all, the system leads to everyone just feeling kinda same-y, at least the way I played. Everyone was good with their weapon(s) and had some spells they were good at, the only real differences were what those spells and weapons were.
Regardless of all of this, I wish more games dared being creative with the way character growth works. Call of Cthulhu shows it can work.

Balance
Most of the balance issues in this game are either a result of the leveling system or were already present in FFI, but there are a few things I still want to talk about.
Offensive spells being way weaker than just attacks was already the case in the previous game, but now Ultima is also a victim of this, a spell that is supposed to be super powerful. In the original Famicon version of the game, Ultima was even weaker and that had interesting implications but now it’s just another mediocre spell.
While spells were fairly useless against single targets in FFI, at least aoe spells were useful against large groups. But now every spell can be cast aoe which causes its damage to be split among all targets, so magic isn’t even useful for clearing large groups anymore. The only thing it’s good for in this game is dealing with enemies that have high physical resistance.
The different weapon types feel somewhat balanced, but there are some stretches of the game where you just don’t get a new axe or sword or something for way too long, so your axe or sword user falls off compared to the rest of the group.
Getting ambushed in the late game is pretty close to a death sentence. Some enemies inflict status effects on each attack that can easily lose you the fight (especially stone and confused), other enemies just deal very high amounts of damage, and coeurls just kill everyone in 1 hit. It’s very frustrating to get ambushed, something you have no control over, and losing the last couple of minutes of progress.
Dungeons are also very frustrating to explore regardless of that. There is way less in dungeons, many rooms just turn out to be empty, and even if you find a chest somewhere, most of the time it’s just a potion or some gil (which you can pretty much only spend on healing items).
As much as I love the 4th party member system, some of them aren’t very well balanced. Josef is so much stronger than the rest of the party that the game just turns into a one-man show for a while, while Leila and Gordon start with so few hp that everything almost kills them for a while. At least Gordon has high stamina, so the problem doesn’t last for long, but when Leila left my party she had less hp than Guy when his wounded animation starts.
Chaos in FFI was somewhat frustrating to fight because he could just randomly fully heal himself with Curaja so they learned from their mistakes and make the emperor only heal himself with every single attack /s. I spent almost an hour fighting him, and at some point I realized that I shouldn’t heal, only raise, because that just gives him more hp to absorb.

Story
Criticizing the story of FFII in 2022 might seem rich. “It’s from 1988, how much story can you tell on the Famicon?” you might think. But I actually prefer the story of FFI over this game.
The story of four young heroes going on various adventures that eventually lead them to uncover a buck wild time travel plot while also growing up is much more compelling to me than FFII’s pretty generic rebels vs empire plot.
That said, there are some pretty good story moments and some of the character are also interesting.
The biggest issue I have with the story is how much it overuses death. So many characters that you barely know die (mostly through self-sacrifice) that it kinda just loses all impact. Especially bad is the death of Cid. Let me elaborate:
We are introduced to Cid as a former high ranking soldier of Fynn who gave up everything for his one true passion, the airship. If I was tasked with writing a story where a character like this dies, I’d have multiple ideas, depending on the kind of story I wanted to tell. He could decide to do one last job for Fynn and die protecting Hilda to show that in spite of abandoning his post, he is still a loyal soldier at heart. He could die during the dreadnaught bombardment, so you’d have both the irony of him being killed by what he loves, airships, and you’d blame yourself for not being able to stop the dreadnaught. Instead he dies from the wounds he got from the cyclone, something neither he nor you had any agency over. The entire cyclone thing is pretty out of nowhere anyway and it just feels like they needed him to die so he’d have a reason to give you the airship.

Miscellaneous
To close out this way too long review, here are a few minor things I’d like to mention.
The variable 4th party slot is such a great idea despite the aforementioned balance issues. It allows you to use way more than 4 characters without breaking the technical limitations of the Famicon.
I almost got softlocked in the dreadnaught because I was out of healing and wasn’t allowed to leave for some reason. Luckily I didn’t rely on just quick saves so I had an older save I could load.
Speaking of the dreadnaught, what is up with the random encounters in the dreadnaught and Palamecia? These are supposed to be highly empire-controlled areas but you’re mostly fighting the undead and stuff, barely any soldiers.
Leila and Leon being left-handed is such a nice touch, it barely changes anything but makes these characters feel so much more real.
The soundtrack is really good, but I wish there was a bit more variety.
Lastly, the most minor nitpick possible, please adjust keys for non-standard keyboards. I’m using a German keyboard, so my Z and Y key are swapped and games usually account for that. This one didn’t and I really feel like I can expect better from a game published by Square Enix.

June 2015. I am 14 years old (that’s right. I’m young!) and reading an article about asexuality. This is the first time I hear about the concept, and I keep thinking about it. A few weeks later I conclude that I am demisexual.

Early 2016. I am 15 years old. I am on my train home, and I let my mind wander. I think about how I am crushing on multiple people. Wasn’t there a word for that? Polyamorous? Maybe I’m that.

Slightly later 2016. Two of my crushes start dating. Awkward. One of them is also polyamorous but the other isn’t so there’s not much to do about this.

April 2nd, 2016. I kiss a boy and I like it. For the rest of the day, I keep thinking about that and conclude that I am pansexual.

July 2016. A friend (and crush) is celebrating her birthday. It is the first time in a while that I spend a significant amount of time with a friend who had until very recently spent half a year in New Zealand. I start crushing on her.
We start dating on October 24th. She is my first girlfriend. She is also asexual so that part of my identity isn’t an issue – until it is a few months later because I feel close enough to her to develop sexual attraction. We make it work though, for a while at least.
She breaks up with me after we’ve been dating for a bit more than a year. I’m not really saddened by this; we continue to be friends and something about this relationship kind of felt off to me anyway.

Early 2018. I am 17 years old. While scrolling through Tumblr I see a post saying “I was such a good male feminist ally that I became a girl… step up fellas”
For some reason I feel the need to reblog it with the addition of “Nah, I’ll remain male. I think. Not 100% sure.” OP reblogs this addition, jokingly calling me a coward.
This sends me down a spiral of self-examination and the next day I decide to try out being a girl. I knew my friends would be progressive regarding this stuff, one of my friends is a trans man and they’re all super nice to him. And indeed, they go along with it. But just two days later I call the whole thing off. It just doesn’t feel quite right.
That evening, I go to a concert and security mistakes me for a girl (I have really long hair) and I feel euphoric about that.

August 2018. I am 18 years old. After thinking about my gender for months without really coming to any conclusion I decide to just come out as unspecified nonbinary (any pronouns) for now.

At some point in 2018 I realize that I am no longer demisexual. Or maybe I never was demisexual. It’s not really that important really.

July 2019. I’m finally done with school and have 3 months before university begins. I spend a month in Japan and spend a lot of time just thinking about stuff while walking around in parks. I come up with the basic idea for a ttrpg system (it ended up not being very fun to play), I start drawing (I never pursued it much further once I was out of Japan again) and most importantly, I finally figure out my gender. It’s a bit tricky to put into words but the most precise way to say it while still being concise is “bigender woman”.

August 2019. I am 19 years old. I meet up with two friends from an online community. They only ever knew me as trans, and they are the first people I interact with in a non-digital space to treat me like a woman. It feels amazing.
Of course, I end up crushing on both which is awkward because they’re monogamous and dating each other.

November 2019. After spending another weekend with the friends I met in August I feel incredibly lonely and install a dating app. I get a few matches, but the conversations never really go anywhere. I feel like nobody on this app knows what they want out of a relationship, myself included.

December 2019. After spending yet another weekend with the aforementioned friends I decide to uninstall the dating app. It’s difficult to explain but I feel like there are some fundamental differences between what I want out of a relationship, what these two have in their relationship, and what I could get out of a relationship from a dating app.

June 9th, 2020. I start dating my current girlfriend. We’re very happy together, despite being long distance. I finally feel like I have everything related to gender and sexuality figured out.

2021. I am 20 years old. I start questioning what exactly the difference between a romantic relationship and a friendship is to me. On July 15th, I conclude that I am aromantic.
There is no real difference between what I feel and felt for the people I’ve been in relationships with and what I feel for close friends. This also explains why I kept crushing on basically all my friends.
I didn’t think about it in the moment but in retrospect I’m very glad that my girlfriend didn’t react badly to this at all. Our relationship can still be special because of the way xie feels about me.

September 7th, 2022. I am 22 years old. I play one night, hot springs. It’s a great game that I can relate to a lot. I plan on playing the sequels eventually, though I’m unsure if they’ll be as relatable.
October 15th, 2022. I play last day of spring and like this one a lot as well.
I then go on to play spring leaves no flowers (wow, 900+ words before the game this review is about is mentioned, this has to be some kind of record). I am blown away.
The mechanic of having crossed out options confuses me at first, but I end up loving it very quickly. Having things you want to say but you don’t feel like you can say is something I assume most people can relate to and the fact that your friends encouraging you can unlock these options is great.
Asexuality and especially aromanticism are things very rarely discussed in media. Even the most progressive of blue-hairs-and-pronouns-media is usually just going to include a character who is ace or aroace and then they might explain that to others but it’s not really about what it feels like to them. This game is a welcome exception, exploring what it’s like to discover you’re aroace while in a romantic relationship.
And yes, I wish there was any representation for people who are are but not ace but I won’t hold that against individual pieces of media

As I am writing this review, I keep thinking “This is stupid, this is way too long, this is way too personal, no one will care, you shouldn’t put stuff this personal out for strangers on the internet, just do a funny two or three sentence review like with the others” but I’m going to publish this anyway. Maybe someone will like it. Maybe someone will play this amazing trilogy because of this. Maybe someone will even learn something about themselves thanks to this.

Discovering a new aspect of your identity can be scary. Especially if you’re currently in a relationship. But with the help of our friends both me and Manami managed to do it.
You can do it too.

Wow.

This game is far from perfect, the middle to end part of the game wasn't very interesting, there are too many interesting characters that you barely interact with and the worldbuilding is in some ways pretty bad, there's some frankly weird gender stuff going on with who can or can't become a witch and describing the home planet of the only major black character as more primitive was certainly a choice that could have been entirely avoided.

But when this game works, it works really well. I was hooked for most of it (except during the aforementioned middle to end part) and especially the final chapter had me glued to the game like very few other games have managed.
It really made me feel like an incredibly powerful witch, a level of power fantasy I have never felt in any other game.
The game never really explains how its core mechanic works and I think that is a brilliant move to make the magic feel more magical. And i intend to keep that mystery up by not replaying the game, at least not for a while, even though there are so many possibilities I wish to explore.
I'd even go so far as to say that it's one of those games that managed to broaden my horizon of what a game can be.

Sometimes we have to make up meaning to cope with the pain

The plastic slowly choking you is your crown
The parasite that ate your tongue wanted to be your friend

Don't try to change anything about your situation.
The machine can't talk to you. Don't try talking to it.
Those who try to escape get crushed.

You have grown complacent.
Even when you're back in the water you're still flapping around like on land.

Do you want to go up or down?