In spite of being old and “clunky” to many, with not being able to see movement ranges or having to keep a sheet of notes with weapon stats handy, I really like the first Fire Emblem. It’s very charming and is relatively fair for an NES RPG. This game almost single-handedly invented the SRPG genre, and also my favorite series of all time. The plot is nice and simple, though I do prefer both of the remakes of this game. Still, I actually would find myself returning to it since most of the maps are fun. Biggest drawback is how insane of a spike in difficulty Medeus, the final boss, is. I had to pull out a bunch of flunkies from the bench of my party to be able to survive.

"The Commission alleges that the company’s ubiquitous advertisements touting their supposedly 'free' products—some of which have consisted almost entirely of the word 'free' spoken repeatedly—mislead consumers into believing that they can file their taxes for free with TurboTax. In fact, most tax filers can’t use the company’s 'free' service because it is not available to millions of taxpayers, such as those who get a 1099 form for work in the gig economy, or those who earn farm income. In 2020, for example, approximately two-thirds of tax filers could not use TurboTax’s free product." -Federal Trade Commission

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"Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting 'encroachment,' Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has.

Under the terms of [the IRS Free File Program], Intuit and other commercial tax prep companies promised to provide free online filing to tens of millions of lower-income taxpayers. In exchange, the IRS pledged not to create a government-run system.

Since Free File’s launch, Intuit has done everything it could to limit the program’s reach while making sure the government stuck to its end of the deal. As ProPublica has reported, Intuit added code to the Free File landing page of TurboTax that hid it from search engines like Google, making it harder for would-be users to find." -ProPublica

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"The IRS brags that 70 percent of Americans are eligible for Free File, but for the 2019 tax season, only 4.2 million returns out of 157.2 million total were filed through Free File, or 2.6 percent." -Vox

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Intuit, H&R Block, and others like them make their money by pulling a bait-and-switch on people who would otherwise take advantage of the system you would expect from a wealthy, modern country - one that lets them file their taxes for free. They have paid for millions of dollars in lobbying over decades to keep taxes as confusing as possible, and their efforts to deceive you will continue until you find yourself one click away from being done with this whole nightmare and going to fetch your wallet to just get this over with.

I can't recommend in good conscience that you put your Social Security Number into some mystery program (even though I find myself agreeing with MSCHF). What I will ask is that you avoid giving Intuit or H&R Block a single cent if at all possible, because they will only use that money to make your life worse.

Uhhh Iris is cute. Who doesn't love an office lady! The backgrounds here are pretty good and I never found the soundtrack grating. Would be nice if they had a fullscreen option, but for something this short, I had a pretty good time! Didn't expect to laugh so much, hehe!

https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-free

Giving this game 3 stars as the story (imo) was pretty weak and that's what carried this series for the past 2 games.

The 3 stars are mainly for the character interactions and how fun I find the combat.

I don't have much to say unfortunately, I'm excited to move onto the Crossbell and Cold Steel games to see how they evolve the series!

I would say overall you could probably skip this game and read a summery and move straight on from Trails Second to the Crossbell games.

Lotta people don't know this, but there's actually a really solid fan translation for the PSP version (more or less around Geofront quality) that you can just straight up drag and drop into the NISA PC version's files. Grab the addendum version on romhacking.net.

It's honestly criminal how underappreciated this game is. Fun as hell, has amazing level design, and a simple but engaging and emotional story. I did NOT expect it to have as many gut punches and awe-inspiring moments as it did— some plot reveals and visual spectacles left my jaw open in disbelief, and I was left wondering how this goofy little PSP scrimblo game could be so fucking COOL. Not to mention the soundtrack, which is honestly some of Falcom's best work due to the sheer variety in all of the stage tracks, as well as how much the emotional tracks heighten the cutscenes. Overall, it just has so much soul. It took me back to the refreshing feeling of playing Sky FC and getting absorbed in how much personality there was in every NPC and story beat, the epitome of JRPG comfort food. It also gives you more opportunities to grind for stuff than the main series, which is always fun if you're like me.

Trails fans will tell you that this game isn't very important or that it doesn't have any connections to the main series aside from meaningless references, but I'd honestly disagree. You won't find explicit connections, but there are a lot of bread crumbs that lead you in very interesting directions. I haven't played Reverie yet, so don't correct me if that game just totally invalidates my theory, but I see a lot of connections that could end being extremely important to Zemuria, and I wouldn't be surprised if this game contains some answers to secrets that span the entire series, hidden in plain sight and waiting to be unpacked in this adorable and emotional little game. If you're into Trails, don't pass up Nayuta; you might get a lot more out of it than you expect.

Playing Ys games “in order” the way I like to play series offered a unique challenge out of the gate. Falcom’s original flagship series was incredibly messy for decades, with almost every entry having multiple versions from back when different versions on different consoles meant often wildly different expressions of the same core concepts, from sound and visuals to level design and gameplay mechanics. Ys IV was famously outsourced for its two versions to two separate studios who didn’t collaborate at all and this resulted in two completely different games both titled Ys IV with different subtitles to differentiate them, which worked from the same design outline but otherwise diverged wildly. Things started to level out for the series with the release of Ys VI on the PS2 and PSP, and since then there’s a mainline Ys game every once in a while, but Falcom has also gone back and fully remade the first four Ys games alongside their work in furthering the series. These remakes are considered the definitive versions by the developers and “canon” to the overarching plot, such as there is one, but even they don’t totally simplify things. They came out haphazardly between Ys VI, VII, and Origin, and occasionally share engines with these games, which means that Ys Origin, VI, and III play the same, IV and VII play the same, VIII and IX play the same, and I & II live in their own little thing. There is currently no recognized Ys V because Falcom never remade it and it languishes on the SNES, technically having happened in the canon of the story but unrecognized by its own creators.

So here I am, playing Ys III, which is both the fifth Ys game chronologically and the second game to iterate upon this particular engine and play style, which originated in Ys VI. Do you see what I mean? This is outrageous. What’s going on here.

Anyway all of this is to say Falcom wins they broke me they broke my stupid shitty brain I do not give a shit about playing these games in release order I won’t do it I’m just gonna fuckin play the remakes in the order the numbers go in on the boxes. FUCK it bro. Origins can plop in after 6 I don’t give a SHIT. Maybe I’ll play some old ones later we’ll fuckin see.

A N Y W A Y Oath in Felghana fuckinggggggg slaps super hard bro this game is so fun it ALMOST makes me okay with the fact that they got rid of Bump Combat. Where Ys I & 2 Chronicle, the remakes of the first two games, are very clearly facelifts of the most beloved versions of those two games that otherwise preserve their cor designs and gameplay, Oath is a ground up reimagining of Ys III: Wanderers of Ys, which was originally a Zelda 2-like on the SNES. Now, rather than that OR the classic Ys style, we’ve landed on a fully 3D isometric game that kind of EMULATES the visual identity of classic top-down Ys games except when they think it would be cool to do anything else. All the characters are 3D models filtered and scrubbed to look sprite-ish, but the camera swoops and swerves with you to give dynamic or dramatic angles whenever it’s appropriate. Sometimes this is used for general sidescrolling, or classic spiral staircase traversal, but a lot of the time it’s just for the flair of things, and in a game that introduces as much platforming as Oath does it’s welcome to be able to offer different vantage points.

Combat itself evokes the FEELING of Bump Combat, expressed in a more normal mode. Adol has a six hit combo that you get by just mashing the fuck out of the attack button, a small combo when he’s jumping into the air, and a plunging attack he can execute at the height of a jump that stuns most enemies. As you acquire magical bracelets throughout the game you also acquire a ranged fireball, a spin attack, and a charge that doubles as an i-frame counter if you time it right. And that’s it! It’s not deep and it’s really arcadey-feeling, but where the game is clever is in the way the game works itself around your small skill set, always introducing new enemy types and frequently dolling out bosses with unique mechanics that require special deployment of abilities, often only for the moment of the game. I don’t think this works EVERY time (fighting airborne enemies in particular always feels a little wonky), and the balance of the game feels tuned a little too specifically so that often the difference between doing no damage to a boss and creaming them is grinding out only a couple of levels, but overall combat is as fast and fluid FEELING as ever even if that’s not practically true.

Something that I think is absolutely fucking insane about Ys is that it’s setting is like...Barely Fake Real World Plus Monsters??? It’s set largely on a continent that just looks like Europe ass Europe, the main antagonistic presence in the background of all of these is the Romun Empire with a U, there’s talk of the continent of Afroca with a O??? Why are you doing this Falcom, make something up!! The plot of this game revolves around this fake Catholic church which I would not blink an eye at aesthetically in a JRPG except that in this game they are explicitly a stand-in for the real life actual ass Catholic church it’s so weird! It just hits different when you’re hanging out in Fake Germany lol. It’s called like Garmany or something it’s so funny.

The region of Felghana itself though is very pleasant. Like the first two Ys games you still have a sort of central town area that you return to over and over to chat with the locals and upgrade your equipment and maybe pickup a sidequest, and as is typical for modern Falcom the flavor writing here is full of personality despite these people and their plight being super generic. You visit standard Mines and Icy Mountains and Lava Caverns but rather than feel generic in a bad way it does carry that classic vibe, like this game may be from 2005 but it’s really carrying the 1991 sensibilities on its back, which is what I want from this sort of project.

The driving force of the plot in this game is this guy who really wants to get revenge on the local tyrant and he devises this really convoluted and massively destructive way to do it (it’s poetic you see, because the Count destroyed his entire island and all the people on it, so it will be good to massacre people in proximity to the count, even though they are his servants and suffer under him and he doesn’t care about them). This kind of feels like a classic lib-brain “the bad guy is right but too much” thing right, like this guy is right that the Count did a genocide and deserves to die but people will be like nooooo killing is wroooooong nooooooo. Hilariously though this is not really what happens? Like yeah there’s a little bit of that but there’s more than one scene where people try to talk him down and their arguments are more like “what if you ONLY murdered the Count, or drove him into exile or something.” Both times they’re like “you know EVERYBODY hates the count right like if your plan simply wasn’t to murder everyone in the castle too you could get the whole town in on this EASY, NOBODY would care.” EVEN the count’s wife is immediately like “yo fuck this guy” when given evidence of his crimes lmao but no our buddy does in fact unleash a curse on the castle that literally just kills all the staff people and damn their souls to Fake Catholic Hell forever and unleash Mega Satan, WHILE GOING OUT OF HIS WAY to protect the countess and her children specifically. WHAT a prick lol.

But idk I feel like that beat is kind of my thing on the game in a nutshell it’s just kind of goofy and loose and hard to take too seriously and it’s constantly serving me fun shit to dig into even when it’s executing a lot of stuff in a way that feels just like 15% off the mark. As an expansion of the design core of Ys 1 and 2 I think it does a way more interesting job of incorporating magic into both combat and traversal but WAIT really I need to be comparing it to YS VI FUCK

anyway it’s good I had a good time it’s only like fifteen hours long that’s the sweet spot

Butterfly Soup é charmoso, mas podia ser melhor. O jogo conta uma história de 4 garotas asiáticas queer na califórnia, em um time de baseball no seu 1° ano do ensino médio. A parte principal, que é a sua história, tenho sentimentos mistos. A narrativa aborda temas como racismo, abuso infantil e homofobia, mas com uma atitude otimista e carismática, e por mais que eu aprecie abordar tópicos sensíveis sem perder bom humor, não acho que esse jogo faz isso muito bem. A comédia, mesmo me fazendo rir algumas vezes, acaba sendo forçada com as suas tentativas de ser memética e suas referências à cultura pop. Quando resolve abordar tópicos sérios, acaba sendo mal desenvolvido e esses momentos são breves demais pra serem impactantes, além das subtramas envolvendo esses temas serem mal resolvidas. Mesmo com seus momentos de vergonha alheia, admito que as personagens divertem um pouco com as suas interações, mesmo que boa parte dos meus problemas com o humor venham delas. Outra coisa que incomodou, foi na trilha sonora. As músicas são de terceiros e os efeitos sonoros foram pegos de Ace Attorney, mas esse não é o meu problema. As músicas são muito baixas e os efeitos sonoros são inconsistentes, alguns sendo um pouco mais altos que a música e outros absurdamente altos. Mesmo com o seu roteiro fraco e tom inconsistente, ainda respeito Butterfly Soup pelo seu charme e suas boas intenções.

Prós: As personagens conseguem divertir; Os exageros conseguem ser ocasionalmente engraçados; As músicas até são boas (mesmo não sendo originais do jogo); Aprecio que tenham focado numa comunidade asiático americana (apesar de não aprofundarem tanto); Tem opção pra idioma português.
Contras: Os diálogos conseguem ser dignos de vergonha alheia; Força a barra com memes e referências de Cultura Pop; Subtramas e tópicos abordados mal desenvolvidos; Volume mal regulado na trilha sonora.

Me and my friend often joke one of the biggest joys of Trails is busywork. CS1 does not seem to understand that this is a joke.
There is some truth to it (saying it as a completionist who is unreasonably upset about missing one enemy scan), but it's certainly not what most people come to the series for - they want a compelling, multi-layered character cast, tight worldbuilding, and an awesome soundtrack. This game only delivers on one of those at the absolute best.
The music in this game is leagues better than most of Sky, but still doesn't match the Crossbell games in overall quality (aside from standouts like Investigation and Path of Spirits.). However, the atmosphere it creates is refreshing.