Being a kid was pretty rad, huh?

This game portrays the feeling of navigating a new world with the language barrier inherent to being a child.

It almost perfectly replicated the feeling I had of playing Ocarina of Time for the first time before I knew how to read, forcing me to use other clues, means of progression, and sometimes just fucking around until something works.

But with Tunic, this is by design.

This was a fantastic game, but what really pushed it into masterpiece territory was the final puzzle, which really brings the game's intentions full circle and is one of the most impressive and creative puzzles I have ever seen in a game.

It's a magical little experience, the likes of which I have never encountered in my adult life.

When do the developers get that bigger does not equal better? Infinite Wealth improves on multiple aspects of the first outing, but stumbles in the most basics of things.

The combat is fun at first, but becomes extremely tedious as you basically just spam the same special moves over and over and over again. Changing jobs is an extreme chore and discourages any kind of experimentation. Less said about the damage scaling the better. Or the gear. Or the story.

The next one will remain on the shop shelf infinitely.

One of my bigger disappointments of the last several years. After the departure of the longtime studio head (along with, very notably, the longtime franchise producer) there was a big opportunity to reinvent the franchise, and re-casting things as a jrpg is a charming new direction. Along with a great, well performed new protagonist this game on paper should be very good. And the rpg content is serviceable, the mid-point of the plot has some cutscenes that roughly fit in among the series highs, and the shuffling corpses of some series favorite minigames are here again, like in every yakuza since 0.

Unfortunately, everything around the seams of this game fucking sucks. Along with judgment 2, there’s a palpable air of “budget game” choices — a dramatic cutback on polish, much more padding, simpler minigames (although the new quiz game is a charming standout), color by numbers bosses without any of the bespoke qte and mid fight cutscenes yakuza previously used to drive characterization, plus look, kiryus back for some reason, and he’s still the players best friend (ok, that might actually be in-character.)

The biggest disappointment is this games treatment of the classic yakuza “ludonarrative dissonance is good and funny” approach — not satisfied with throwing hundreds of goons out of windows and then laboring over kiryus refusal to kill a story character, this game has replaced it with… wacky mental illness? Our protagonist hallucinates regular people as goofy jrpg enemies, both in and out of the actual narrative? Deeply embarrassing.

Along with the big cutback on one off cutscenes and animations, the basic combat system manages to feel recycled and cookie cutter in a way prior games always avoided (despite similar amounts of actual re-use.) for the first time since some of the ps3 era spinoffs this feels visibly like a budget game. This likely has to due with the newer lead Producer rather than an actual budget cut. If anything, with all of the localized VO, this game is probably higher budget than 5 or 0?

The acting and UI design are high points. Objectively I think this game sits somewhere in the 2.5-3.5 range but I gotta follow my heart. One star.

This is one of those games that I really want to like. I’ve tried nearly a dozen times to get it to “click” and it never does.

I always bounce off of it and I’ve never entirely understand why.

Sure, the platforming is precision machined but maybe the fact that the game is too forgiving with its checkpoints leads to a lack of stakes or tension for someone like me that isn’t going to go for every strawberry.

I also think the levels might be too long and that the game forces you to spend too much time in individual biomes.

The story’s presentation, at least early on, may also be a bit too sappy and not engaging.

Idk. I know people really love this game and what I’ve played of it is fine. But it’s lacking something crucial.

Good OST, though.

I feel bad for anyone who had this game as their first JRPG, it's fuckin' awful. Did a 10 year old write the dialogue? It shifts from innuendo and american food jokes to melodrama in an instant. The combat sucks because half the characters are worthless and the bosses are poorly designed, the difficulty of them is often either 0 or 100 depending on if you place your party members in a specific spot, a binary choice isn't strategy. The voice acting is horrible and whoever had the great idea of having characters repeat a voice line EVERY time you cast a spell in a JRPG needs to be shot.

As a narrative adventure game, Mémoire 0079 is quite an interesting concept. Login in as a player into a fictional terminal to uncover reports about a distant future and exploring both sides of a war. A narrative focused in on two major players during this fictional sci-fi conflict: Vega Hawthorne of the United Earth and Raya Sokolova of the Ceresian Republic. Both held up by their respective governments as great heroic figures, through propaganda and personal ideologies. It's all a novel idea, pulling your sympathies in multiple directions on whose story you might read first. Well, but here can we get into the biggest issue with the game, the fact that it's infact nothing more than a surface level novelty.

There is no real game to speak of here, just walls of unwieldy text to click through and mountains of hyperlinks that pull your attention away from reading what seems like it could be an engaging story. Just to be stoped dead in your tracks while reading in order to look up words and events you really have no context for and there for might not even care about right away. I know that is the idea and the game's own web page describes itself as "a unique narrative adventure game about exploring a wiki-like interface", but I fell like if you want to fully engage the reader into your world, it helps to have a clearer structure to the events being told. You can still have all the gimmicks of personal logs, redacted sections in government documents and military propaganda. Maybe have some real time email traffic or chats you can respond to popping up on the side as you browse the wiki. Having you engage with the world in a tangible way, and perhaps even being able to make a choice for what side your sympathies align more.  All in all, the most important aspect would be reducing the amounts of hyperlinks. Even just including a separate glossary on the side to pull up would help. In my opinion, it's better to make the broad strokes of your Universe as basic and understandable as possible and then you can bombard your audience with the more complex stuff later. The Universe is still interesting, mind you, there is potential here, but it's the dialogue between characters where the game ultimately shits the bed.

Throughout many of the personal logs and transcripts present here, these two warring factions feel less like opposing cultures and more like drunk discord mods. It's the clearest evidence of to the fact that if you want to make a distinct fictional universe, you need to put in some effort in to establishing a culture and a way of language. Especially if the main point of your story is to contrast the two factions against each other. I don't think Captain Picard encountering the Borg for the first time and trying to contact the Federation about the immediate danger would have had nearly the same impact as it did, if they're back and forth dialogue mainly consisted of “Naaaaah”, “lol”, “lmao” or “can we talk about the fact that they suck shit”. Not quite as impactful I would say.

If I had to pull up one last positive at the end, it probably be the presentation. It's all presented quit nicely through the UI of an old school computer terminal, with atmospheric background tracks. Although I would have liked to have more tracks overall, having some pages be completely silent while the next one suddenly ear blast you with a loud background track was an odd experience. Overall this was a neat project, that needed about 5 more rewrites and revisions. It's free to play in your browser anyway, so there is no harm in checking it out and having a laugh at it atleast. Maybe the next one will be better, always possible.