Cute 15 minute read. Apparently the original script is full of wordplay but the English translation doesn't really have any of it? I wonder how much the translators are to blame, if at all, considering the inherent differences of language.

Regardless, wordplay isn't really the main point. It's a psychological visual novel where the protagonist imagines she... is in a psychological visual novel about herself. "A bit like milk inside of a bag of milk inside of a bag of milk". She manages to imagine a "Player", who "happens" to have the name we type in at the beginning at the game, to whom she is able to vent her feelings and trauma, which, as the final twist reveals, is in part allowed by her newest medication. In other words, we are the personification of this new medication. Unlike her previous prescriptions, this seems to be working well, considering this semi self-aware conversation was fruitful, thus ending the story on a happier note. "It'll take a lot of time and effort, but you can, eventually, start to get out of the pit you're stuck in". Or some motivational message like that. The game didn't say it outright.

The sequel seems interesting and I plan to check it out soon. The apparent presence of many branching paths intrigues me, because the first game has a different direction- the player is given dialogue options on a handful of occasions, but there aren't real branching paths beyond the protagonist addressing our response in a few lines, after which the script flows back into the linear story.
The tone and content of your potential words doesn't vary often in a given choice. However, if you say mean things a few too many times, a failure state is reached- in which the protagonist "discards" us, bringing us back to the name entry screen. "Looks like [Player name] doesn't help me at all... I guess I'll try something else next time." And once you enter a name again, she wonders if you'll do a better job than "[Previous player name]". This wording I would say adds further to us and our timely arrival being fundamentally related to her medication, which is an interesting meta layer to the story. I guess we'll be able to choose her fate now that she's starting to get better instead of going through the linear beginning of that process.

The meta framing of this project isn't explored very deeply- but I don't think it needs to be. Finding comfort in media by projecting our own experiences into it is far from an uncommon or invalid endeavor, and this sentiment directly flows into the creation of new media, through which we might be able to express our emotions in new ways.

The entirety of this small-scope project simply doesn't explore itself deeply, either- but I think that's fine. I'd say it's worth the dollar it's priced at. The ideas presented are interesting, the dialogue is appreciably emotional, and there are some entertaining tidbits that made me chuckle. It can get a bit heavy with its subject matter of trauma, though, so be warned.

I initially wanted to make a short comment about the final boss having "It Has To Be This Way" from Metal Gear Rising as its background music and leave it at that, but I might as well throw every thought I have on this fangame out there so that I never have to think about it again- apologies for the long review, in other words. Bear with me, if you wish.

On this second episode of "leo plays shitty games for discord nitro", leo plays some random fangame made with the Sonic Worlds fan engine. The author of this fangame, LakeFeperd, later created "Spark the Electric Jester", for context.

I'll talk about the story of Chrono Adventure first. It's pretty fucking stupid. According to the credits, the script was remade by a second person, which is fucking hilarious because it's full of typing mistakes like "akillies heal" (meant to be Achilles' heel... I can't take this shit bro). I don't know if anything about the actual writing was changed in this script """"redaction"""", but what I DID read in-game was horribly childish writing full of plot threads that serve no purpose. To name a few- Sonic falls into a pit and somehow is transformed into a different, artificial creature, and at the end of the pit is an underground metropolis full of these creatures. Apparently due to (presumably) faulty work on the genetic engineer's part, whenever these sentient creatures see a small animal, they lose all self-awareness and their primal instincts take over, forcing them to become predators of such small animals. There's a doctor of this race who's working on medicine that suppresses such instincts. After you find an ingredient for him, he tries to talk to the Queen, who says they "have these instincts for a reason" (does not elaborate) and she "likes how she is". Sonic chases the Queen, trying to convince her (Sonic is a silent protagonist actually so it was never going to work), but the Queen attacks him, and he somehow becomes a normal hedgehog again, which makes the Queen's instincts kick in, and thus she becomes a boss Sonic has to kill. She dies without any fanfare. I.. I didn't miss any details here, that's all the nuance this part of the plot presents. What the fuck was the point of all of that? What the fuck is the point of the "conservative" rebels that got deported from the Sky Empire by Eggman, who replaced the old emperor and became a maniacal despot and why do they keep appearing despite being so useless? Why is there a section where Sonic has a weird nightmare where his Green Sonic OC friend, who is one of the rebels, and the Empire's princess, try to kiss (but they can't kiss because the latter has a beak), and why is this weird nightmare explained through "this part of this enormous sky fortress, that runs on magnetic antimatter fluid (??), has stronger magnetic forces than usual, and staying around here for too long messes with your brain and causes weird dreams"???? Literally nothing meaningful happens in the story except for Sonic defeating Eggman, it's just a bunch of random shit with no thought or purpose let alone nuance mashed together, it's genuinely hilarious how pathetically infantile this story is.

...I got carried away a little there. Let's finally talk about the gameplay.

Uh... Chrono Adventure is pretty bad. It's technically a "Metroidvania", in the sense that you unlock abilities to progress, but I wouldn't even classify it as such. It's an incredibly linear romp and the "openness" is just an excuse to force you to backtrack and waste your time. "Go to the top of the map now." "Go to the bottom of the map now.". That's all it amounts to. Proper Metroidvanias recontextualize past rooms with interesting abilities related to movement and/or combat, making traversal faster and deeper, all while you memorize the layout of the game world and solve environmental puzzles- none of that actually happens here to any meaningful extent.

There's no puzzles, and there's only a few times where you aren't shoved right in front of the "ability gate" you are now allowed to open, and even then it's meaningless anyway because A) areas constantly reuse level chunks and tilesets and B) when the game doesn't straight up tell you where the way forward is, it's generally pretty close to your current location.
The issue isn't that the game isn't a Metroidvania, the issue is that it fucking sucks and borrows elements from Metroidvanias without actually thinking about why those elements work in the (good) MVs.

You do unlock abilities that let you go faster, but let's run through the game in order. The first ability is a sword that's too tiny to use in """combat""" and kills your airspeed instantly upon usage- its only application is destroying the mandatory barriers that halt your progress. Super barebones "abilitygating" level design in other words- press button to open the door. This being the first ability and the extremely empty and boring level design in the early game gives a TERRIBLE first impression.
The game does get somewhat better after that, at least.

Some interesting level gimmicks are introduced, like some flashing lights that lower your gravity immensely. The problem is that, after the basic applications and teaching elements, which take forever, the game doesn't really explore said gimmicks much by mixing them up with other elements and hazards. It often feels more like a showcase of concepts instead of a fleshed out game. You rarely feel like you're progressing when playing Chrono Adventure due to that and the fact that level chunks often look very similar, if they aren't being straight up copy-pasted.

The second ability you unlock is Jet Shoes that let you charge up energy and launch yourself in 4 directions, very similar to Kirby's Jet ability. It, doesn't really mesh with the speed based gameplay of Sonic. Charging to get any meaningful distance takes FOREVER, essentially meaning that outside of mandatory higher ledges that force you to sit on your ass and hold the charge button and nothing else, you can only use it as an awkward very short and decently slow airdash or second jump. Which isn't that bad in a vacuum, but it feels very out of place in this physics engine where you can reach high top speeds frequently. And of course, the game doesn't really challenge your usage of this small burst of movement.
Some occasional setpieces do actually make the Jet Shoes interesting, though- namely electric fields and water, which let you go pretty far with your charges essentially. The level design can be mildly entertaining at times, in other words.

The third ability is the Boost Shoes, which... let you boost. You know, like in the modern Sonic games. None of the level design is built around high octane, free flowing gameplay like those games, you kinda just get stopped by awkward setpieces and tiling, but never in a challenging way, it's all fucking braindead, you essentially just hold forward until you get stopped by a higher ledge that forces you to switch form (which you can only do on the ground for some reason) or by a spring that halts the pace, for example.

The fourth ability is some stupid boxing gloves, but you do get a proper double jump on top of them which does speed up things a little, but once again, it's not like old rooms are recontextualized in any meaningful way. The level design and progression are very linear. Even when you can get to a platform a bit faster with, say, a double jump, the game never actually presses you to. There's barely any hazards or enemies in this game. And an ability as simple but versatile as a double jump comes pretty late into the game. Too late.

Regarding the presentation- the art is actually not bad at all, though the constant recyclement of tilesets and backgrounds gets annoying, both in a navigational sense and an aesthetic sense. When it comes to the music, there were some pleasant songs here and there, but apparently it was all reused from various sources, including Kingdom Hearts and the OverClocked series of remixes you can find on YouTube among other things. ...I have no idea why he went with that fucking MGR song for the final boss. The dissonance between the depth of the lyrics depicting MGR's final conflict being a clash of ideologies and the complete lack of depth in Chronic Diarrhea's final battle (it's literally some random Sonic robot that just got introduced and never talks) is pretty funny.

In conclusion, some of the movement in the game can be fun, but I think it's way too easy to take a pre-existing engine and modify it a little for the project to be a praise-worthy endeavor. Not when the level design is so often half-assed and dull, the abilities are so unoriginal, and the structure of the game so pointless. This is more like a tech demo, really. ...of an already existing engine. (I guess I could've just condensed the entire review to this final paragraph, but it's too late now, is it?)

I wonder if I'll cave into the allure of Nitro again. It definitely won't be a shitty fucking Sonic fangame again, though. I won't accept that.

What I'm trying to say is this, too, happened to my buddy leo once.

Cave Story was a highly influential cult classic due to its nature as a lone man's passion project that evolved into a fleshed out, genuinely great game. How did Studio Pixel follow up on its success, on the 10th anniversary of the game no less?
By releasing a completely mediocre, uninspired, restrictive platformer.
Even when you deprive Kero Blaster of its context and accept it as its own thing, the game is painfully basic and uninteresting, with not much thought being put into the level design, the evolution of the layouts and mechanics, or simply introducing newer players to action platformer fundamentals (which is a niche an easy game like this can and should fill). A lot of KB plays itself, which is made worse by the fact that air control is so restrictive. There's some moments where that restrictiveness leads to some decent on the fly decision making as you're forced to dodge things, but it rarely actually matters due to the extreme straightforwardness.
Unlike many similar retro games, KB doesn't have overarching systems that at the very least acknowledge better play, either- no timer or score based ranking to be found anywhere, let alone performance-based upgrades and powerups (for clarity an example of that is Mario's Fire Flower) - so it ends up not being very replayable.
I do have to praise the improvements related to accessibility when compared to Cave Story. There's no tedious difficulty spike needed to get the true ending, and the permanent upgrade system paired with the abundance of money means that even if you do lose all lives and start the stage over a few times, you'll be able to upgrade weapons fairly quickly and go through the stage smoother. But in the time this game was released in, this is nothing new, either.
There's some fun moments every now and then, and the final boss was fairly good, but it's too little, too late.
I hear that Hard mode is quite a bit more interesting, and I suppose I'll get to it eventually. In the meantime, I'll be charitable and round the game up to 2.5 stars, I guess. Which might be too kind, it's probably closer to 2, but it's not like I actively dislike KB or anything. It's competent and mildly entertaining. The game has a pretty grounded design philosophy that doesn't contradict itself much. However, I would definitely call that design philosophy underwhelming, especially in context.

It's hard to write a cohesive piece about the entirety of Hello Charlotte and its stupidly interesting overarching (meta)narrative- so I won't, for the time being, as I wait for my thoughts to crystalize into something coherent.
That said, I am decently confident in calling Heaven's Gate, the final entry in the series, an excellent addendum and extension of HC.
Unlike the "mainline" episodes, which continuously recontextualize themselves in order to expand the scope of the broader story and its themes, Heaven's Gate works off the subtext the same mainline games already provided and "simply" fleshes out the characters' lives and relationships further. This brief read contains a lot of emotionally impactful and thoughtful dialogue, even without taking the rest of the series into consideration.
This emotional maturity and self-awareness the characters showcase is, sometimes, almost excessive- but I think it is a very intentional affirmation of the author's own journey, which is a common theme in this deeply personal and unique series. Said journey is, and will never be, truly over - something this bittersweet story directly acknowledges through Vincent's characterization and the ending - but it's always important to remember how far you've come.
Shame about the lack of music, though.

after years of playing stuff like mega man and castlevania I was VERY happy to play a game that actually explored its mechanics and gimmicks extensively instead of using them a few times then throwing em away
celeste gets the basics right for sure- it's a fairly simple game but movement feels quite good, and apparently there's a lot of tech, too (I really appreciate the super metroid-styled hidden techniques!)
I do have a few nitpicks, like some of the later levels getting annoying at times (6B, or the long ass rooms in 7C and 8C), the... several obnoxiously hidden strawberries (finding some of those fake walls just made me groan instead of giving me positive feelings), some of the mechanics being a bit underwhelming (an analog-based 360° mechanic on a dpad-recommended game? bumpers where getting the jump you want can require pixel perfect precision? ehh...), or the camera not always following you as you're falling, but celeste gets a lot right and it can't be underestimated how strong the core movement and the exploration of the mechanics are
the spritework could be... a lot better, but the visuals are never distracting, and it's fairly easy to understand the situation at a glance (the color coded hair indicating remaining dashes is great!). also it's impossible not to love the s quish usuqish suqsusuqs shqsuqsuuqsuqsus effect