Above and Beyond Sweetness

In 2022, a friend of mine recommended me Our Life: Beginning’s and Always, his reasoning being that since I am bisexual that this could be something I might end up liking. Initially, I was kind of hesitant to give the game a try. From my outside perspective looking in, it’s a romance otome visual novel, which it’s already hard to get me hooked into visual novels like that. However, it’s free, so I swallowed my pride and started a playthrough.
Almost immediately, I was sucked into a sugary sweet slice of California in Sunset Bird, and before long, I finished an entire “life” of the game, then went back, and did another. What I found was one of the most comforting, fluffy games that shuts out the outside world and allows a moment of reprieve.
The premise of the game starts with your main character at the age of six, who finds a man moving in next door. The man wants the main character to take $20 to befriend his son. Take the money or not, you’ll encounter the star of the show, Cove Holden. Fairly quickly you befriend him and will begin the first “step” of the game, the summer of childhood.
Each step of life is one summer in one of three (or four if you buy the DLC) parts of life; childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. In each step, you are given select activities to experience, each one putting you in a different situation with either family or friends, but most will focus on your relationship with Cove.
Each event has different options for you to take, and while some of them are inconsequential, a lot do have some impact on how Cove will act or what you do will alter events later in the game. While I could argue that the selections do not always allow for every type of response, and some of those missing would be more reasonable than what you’re presented, I quite enjoyed playing and seeing what I could do with each option.
But what I saw throughout each step of the game, and what made me love it more, is how nice the people around you are. Whether it be your character’s sister, your two moms, Cove’s father Cliff, or any of the friends you make in each step, each are well written and feel human, even if the dramatic and gloomy points of the game or their characters never linger long. The town of Sunset Bird is one I came to love, because of the likable characters, and the pleasant vibes it brought in every step of the game.
Cove is the star of the show, and the game goes out of its way to make sure that you will grow to like him. His inner struggles are very human and gives reason to care about him. Throughout each step, the game will nudge the player towards a (optional but c’mon) romance with Cove, and it’s super sweet.
I’m trying not to say too much about all the details of the game specifically, as I think just playing it and finding out each thing for yourself is the best way to experience Our Life: Beginnings and Always. However, throughout my experience at least, I found myself emotionally invested with every character, and Cove himself has shot up to one of my favorite characters.
What I do want to highlight is the game’s writing. I touched up on it in the options you as the player are given, but it goes further than that. GB Patch’s writing for each stage of life is not only good, but really believable. At least in my time with the game, I never read a piece of dialogue and said, “a six-year-old wouldn’t say something like that” or “they’re teenagers, this is not how they act”. It’s all very well written, and that writing is a strong reason I kept playing.
But more importantly, and absolutely my favorite part, is the handling of queer writing. Our Life: Beginning and Always embraces LGBT+ themes very openly. For starters, you can make your player character whatever you want them to be, and just like any actual queer person, have their feelings and own self change in each step of the game. Want to start off as a male, but have your character discover to embrace being transgender or non-binary? Then it’s possible, and incorporated with actual care.
Even further, a lot of the cast in the game is also queer. The player character has two mothers, who married and adopted both the main character and your sister. Not once did I think this was a strange decision, it just felt extremely natural here. You’ll also have an openly transgender character as one of your friends. With DLC, two additional characters can be romanced in a same-sex relationship as Cove.
In a lot of games, I never really find myself satisfied with how queerness is portrayed. Every so often we’ll get a game that doesn’t shy away from queer themes, but also embraces them either upfront or subtlety. However, there are also plenty of shallow duds, which either play it safe, use it as a bad joke, or do not even try to make it feel “normal”, but rather a gimmick tacked on for brownie points. Here though, GB Patch has put care into making a game that’s not only inclusive, but well-meaning and comfortable. That’s the word, it’s comforting.
With how much I hear of gay jokes or flat out homophobia, it doesn’t really bother me, but rather annoys me. How do we still live in a time where someone's life and way of life can be so despised? Why did I have to spend so much of it ashamed of who I was, and how others around me would feel about my sexuality? It's lame, and this game knows that those feelings are lame. So, it’s nice that Our Life: Beginnings and Always just feels like a nice warm hug away from the nonsense and venom people today can spew.
Would I recommend Our Life: Beginnings and Always to everyone? Absolutely not. Unless you’re queer, really into slice of life and/or visual novels that just keep it sweet, this really isn’t going to do it for you. But what I found is one of my favorite games, a game so good and so sweet that it being free is a damn crime. A game that is comfort for when I want to step away from the negativity of the world or the negativity of myself and want to have a smile plastered on my face. I would go to say it’s one of the best visual novels out there, with the likes of VA-11 Hall-A. But above all else, one of the best examples of queer writing out there in video games. To me, that makes it something special. I've wanted to write about this game for so long, and it felt good to do so.
Grand Theft Auto VI and Monster Hunter Wilds will be on their knees when the sequel, Our Life: Now and Forever, drops in 2025. Truly, it will be game of the year, I just know it.

"Are you guys ready for your God lessons?"

Jesus gulped

Sephiroth nodded

Ryuk shuddered

Arceus blinked nervously

"Yes, Hiker Anthony" they said in unison

Persona 4 Golden: A Maze of Complicated Feelings

If there's a single game I go back and forth on more than any game I love, it's Persona 4 Golden. At times, it's one of my favorite pieces of media ever. Other times, it falls off in my favorite games and I think, there must be other games I like better than this. If you asked me years ago, it was a lock in my top five favorite games. Now, it sits just under Portal 2 at number six.
Don't get me wrong, I still love Persona 4 Golden. It just took me awhile to figure out it's not a game I love based off gameplay, or the things in its story it does right, but more of what it means to me personally.

This Small World
Persona 4 Golden focuses your time on the small town of Inaba. For me, atmosphere is one of the key elements of any video game. While I love games where the atmosphere is so well realized they are unnerving, such as Bloodborne, Silent Hill 2, or Bioshock, Persona 4 Golden stands out because it makes such a small town not only feel so special but makes it one the player grows to love.
After spending something close to sixty to eighty hours in Inaba, you will know the entire town like the back of your hand. The local town shops that remain are pleasant to walk by, or something as dumb as visiting the local shrine to see the Fox is charming each time.
The big city is something to be curious about, what is out there in such a large space for you to get lost in. Some games have these massive places you marvel at because of scale. But I never feel truly connected to them. Inaba is so condensed it feels lived in, like you are part of the game's town. Even in it's empty, abandoned shops, it's believable when you realize that modernization is slowly turning the town into something completely different. It's a transformation that is realistic but sad to see. I don't usually get that kind of feeling from a game.
This strong world building is also highlighted by the cast of characters Persona 4 Golden hosts.

Friendships Built to Last
The cast of Persona 4 Golden is built off that small town feeling. The Investigation Team is well woven into feeling like a legitimate group of friends. The stakes are low in comparison to 3 and 5, so there's more time for the main cast to simply do dumb shit.
Each character is diverse, and while not every character is a hit, you really do get to know them well and their struggles. Being a friend is more obvious than ever in a game like Persona 4 Golden than the other modern Persona titles.
I love the characters that feel the most real:
Ai struggles with self-image.
Eri battles her own self-defeating attitude and problems with being a stepmother.
Kou is adopted and wants to find his own person against the choices forced upon him, while Daisuke is a character that builds up to be himself.
Naoki deals with the death of his sister from the events of the main storyline.
Hisano faces survivor's guilt and depression, who can't forgive herself about the death of her husband.
And how could anyone forget your guardian, Dojima, and the adorable Nanako? Both struggle to be around each other and bond and face their own demons in differing ways.
Each of these characters develop over the course of their time with the player character, and you are the person to bring out the "truth" that they should follow. It makes their character development real and gives you a reason to care about the tightly knit community of Inaba.
Then, there is the main cast in the Investigation Team. The ones that stand out to me the most are Yosuke, Kanji, and Naoto, who just so happen to be the most controversial characters in the game.
Yosuke is your standard 2000's teenager who cannot seem to appreciate the people around him or the place he is in. Yes, the things he says can be perverted and homophobic. But there is small hints of visible character growth in dungeon dialogue and change in attitude towards Kanji that show that throughout the story, he can change. And in his social link, he does change. He finds value and comfort in Inaba because the player brings a reason and perspective he has not encountered before.
Kanji is a character that fights conventional norms set by society. He hides behind a tough exterior to shelter his softer, kinder interior. This dynamic is always fun, and I think Kanji is one of the best examples of this. His own character doesn't suffer from any faults that usually comes from Persona writing. While the game tries to make him the butt of the joke, he has tough enough skin to brush it off, but also sticks to what he loves, no matter what other people think of him.
Naoto is pressured from a career field that looks down upon women. Naoto goes to the lengths to conceal her own gender, just to find footing and recognition. But after fighting her shadow, Naoto realizes she does not need to change to pursue her own passions, that isn't who she is. It's an empowering story for women, but it's also the one that from a modern perspective, can be controversial for people in the trans community. I think the way she is written; it does not exactly make sense for her to be trans, but interpretation of media differs for everyone, and I'm not one to stop others in seeing the character that way.

Withered Writing
Of course, this comes with some annoying writing caveats, and one of my bigger gripes with this game. The writing has not aged well. By standards of 2008, and specifically Japan, this game fits well. Hell, the things "said" in this game aren't even that far off from what specific friend groups say to each other in person. However, when playing Persona 4 Golden, on more recent playthroughs, that Hashino direction just comes off badly. I think the obvious homophobia is where the issue lies, but one comes from just how social links work. Social Links are optional, so that growth will never actually show in the main story for the most part. It just feels stiff sometimes to see incredible growth in party members, only for them to walk three steps backwards.

Signs of Growth
But I think the most important thing out of all of this is not that the themes are believable, but they feel realistic to me. As someone who grew up in a small town, Persona 4 Golden was a comfort. It's the kind of thing that I do not exactly see so often, but the feelings these characters go through I have been there and seen. Yosuke's disposition of the place and people around him, Ai's self-image, Kou's self-worth, Kanji's struggle with enjoying himself. These kinds of themes hit home super hard, where in my first playthrough, I had shed some tears from how impactful it felt. I have seen other people go through the exact same thing, but that growth is what makes us people. And that kind of realism is something I cannot see myself forgetting for a long time.
I feel as if I’ve somewhat rushed this reflection of the game, but these are my thoughts summarized. While I may look down upon the gameplay of Persona 4 Golden with its randomly generated hallways and see how something like Persona 5 Royal's Third Semester blows anything this game done out of the water, I cannot say there is a game that hits home quite like this game. It's a special experience with enough relatability that it will forever hold a special place in my heart.
Let's just hope they never do a Persona 4 Rerun and recast my beloved Adachi.

Games I ranked lower than this:
DOOM Eternal: The Ancient Gods Part One
Final Fantasy XII
Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories
Kingdom Hearts Recoded
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Ninja Gaiden 3
Pokemon X
Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse
Arms
Fire Emblem Awakening
Paper Mario Color Splash
Paper Mario Sticker Star
Pro Wrestling
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Challenger Pack 6 - Min Min
Bugsnax
Devil May Cry 2
Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness