I cannot lie, I'm genuinely very disappointed in this game, especially with a company as consistently strong an output as Vanillaware it pains me that this game really only has those good ass Vanillaware visuals going for it.

In terms of gameplay, the game has a lot of elements that I would generally enjoy on paper, the formations and the way tactics form together should be so much better than it actually is, there's just so many variables to the point that it largely becomes a numbers game since character building, for the purposes of beating the game (played on the second highest difficulty) is really easy and it's not super hard to make even an unoptimal formation just work through sheer force of will, which really harms the strategy layer. Also the real time Ogre Battle style strategy has a lot of problems on its own. The worst being a lot of quality of life issues, such as not being able to see how your formations will do out of deployment, and the battle forecast changing at the drop of a hat. There's so many variables to battles that you can send a battalion over to an enemy where it says it'll be a sure win, and despite seemingly no other circumstances changing it suddenly switches to a stalemate of a battle which is incredibly frustrating for planning purposes, on top of the fact that if you make mistakes there's no backing out. In many ways I can't help but compare this game to the neighbouring turn based tactics genre, where at least I can make an assessment of which move I can take that would be the most optimal, Unicorn Overlord forces you to throw shit out and if it doesn't work then tough shit, which leads to an incredibly unsatisfying tactical experience. Also there's way too many liberation missions, which I know is for controlling the level curve, but even then the level curve is fucking wacked out by the endgame, there's like a 5 level recommended level jump for no reason. Nearly every gameplay element in the game is something that could work but has a botched enough execution that frustrates me because, man, I really do want to love this game.

But most frustrating of all is the story here, the only way I can describe is like bad Fire Emblem. There's a shitload of characters and they all interact with many others in the army but unlike Fire Emblem these characters offer the substance and flavour of white rice, these characters are truly bland in a way that seems almost alien to me compared to the characters in like Odin Sphere and 13 Sentinels. The story is also dead simple but still does a few things that really hurt its narrative, the villains in this game are fuckin terrible and their motivations never amount to anything interesting, meanwhile all the good guys are so generically good that even the bad guys that become good have some crutch excuse like mind control, hostage situation, or some other hackneyed out that prevents these characters from really flourishing. The rapport system is something I usually always like because it gives these characters that don't really interact in the main story a chance to be fleshed out as characters but all it can offer is the most shallow looks at these characters in their totality to the point that they're just functions to me, Armour guy, Horse guy, Bow guy they never offer anything more interesting than hating the evil empire because they're evil and it's just really surprising to see a game with so much love put into the production lean back so heavily on just being so consistently mid.

Just a really frustrating offering from Vanillaware from me, especially for a game that nearly bankrupted the company I expected so much better because this game really only has its visuals going for it, but I can get that from any other Vanillaware game and actually have a good game too.

some of my First Discoveries:
Octohorse
Sex Nun
The Return Of The Homie
/r/showerthoughts
Neil Confused

Generative AI wasn't always so revolting disheartening. The appeal I found in programs like Big Sleep and the early versions of AI Dungeon was always in their chaotic flaws. Big Sleep produced grotesque, surreal images that could only be tangentially related to your prompt's concept. For early AI Dungeon, it had something charming in its inability to cohesively keep a story together and tendency to go off the rails to a batshit insane degree. Modern generative AI programs have smoothed out all those goofy edges, leaving their software less silly and more uncanny.

Infinite Craft brings generative AI to the old alchemy game trend. Like those games, the only goal is continuing to find as many valid combinations as the game allows. This grows your set of ingredients to work with. Every solution can hopefully serve as a part of another experiment.
The limitations on solutions used to be what the developers had already devised. With Infinite Craft, that restriction has been pushed all the way to the limits of a large language model. This reliance on machines for solutions leaves the game unable to match all of what was special and precious in what inspired it. This genre used to require some thought towards making concocted combinations to solve curated puzzles. Emotional intent is what chose elements in games like Little Alchemy and Doodle God.
In Infinite Craft, the systems in play have taken out all of that human expression to become an almost emotionless toy. New discoveries feel inevitable and far less wonderful. Your results are spat out by a heartless machine.

To make up for the lost human input, the AI is sufficiently absurd. As the phrases you combine stray further from your initial set, you'll find baffling random results and odd combinations. The deeper you go, the more chaos ensues. You may find yourself wondering how you got so deep in a long string of nonsense.
If Infinite Craft was made with more reasonable interpretations of inputs from its LLM, it would be a far less charming experience. This neat little time waster ends up being a pleasant trip back to that more experimental era of generative AI software.

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"MID SLOP PEAK SOULESS SLOP MID MID SLOP SLOP PEAK SOUL SOUULL SOUUUUULLLL" 😐

i don't care about this game, but it made me avoid any sort of discussion about it ever since release. i will be staying as far away from any sort of conversations surrounding this game as possible. and for the love of god, please stop spamming the words "soul", "soulless" and "slop", having posts about this game show up with the same three buzzwords used 500000 times made me never want to see them used in any sort of context again for the rest of my life

I'm afraid I've got some bad news.

Last year when Picross S8 released, I lamented the possibility that the curse of The Simpsons would soon take effect, and the series would jump the shark. As a matter of fact, Picross has indeed leapt multiple sharks in varying degrees of long jump altitude and species of carnivorous fish.

In order to even install the game, I had to delete 200 gigs worth of space to make room for all the 4k ultra wide assets and voice clips of Anime Electabuzz making noises. After I was finally done with installation, I had to sign and read through the terms of service backwards as I recited the lyrics to every song on Collective Soul's self-titled album.

Couldn't you believe it?! I made it to the title screen!

Then the game made me do mandatory tutorials for every version of Picross with fully voiced unskippable dialogue from your least favorite character. [It reads your Discord logs] After fifteen minutes, it asked me if I got all of that and proceeded to place my cursor on "No" by default, and I accidentally hit it as I was mashing the button!!!! Fifteen more minutes of tutorial!!!!

At long last! The familiar menu I've seen so many times before...my beloved Picross. I turned off all the assist functions, I navigated my cursor selection to regular Picross, I went to the first 5x5 puzzle to speed run my way through, the game told me to start, and then I went to fill in my first block....

"You do not have enough in your Nintendo account to purchase a block to put into this puzzle.....please add more."

Now imagine if this were all true and I wasn't shitposting on a review website. My real name is Armin Tamzarian.