Honestly, I understand why people say Crossbell is peak because this duology probably has the best two games overall in the series.

I just love everything about Crossbell. I initially played this game wih the horrid translation, but still enjoyed my time with it. It wasn't until last year where I actually got to play it with a real translation in my Trails marathon, and my opinions on it definitely changed for the better.

Honestly, I think I prefer Crossbell as a setting much more to Liberl, not to say that Liberl is bad per se. Crossbell is just that good. I just love talking to each NPC in each Crossbell District after every story interaction and seeing how their dialogue changes. I also love walking along the highways (or taking the bus) and visiting the more remote locations of Crossbell like Mainz and Armorica. Crossbell is just the perfect setting for this game, especially when they explore the dark sides of Crossbell, like the Mafia. I just found it interesting how after Liberl, we were sent not to Erebonia, but to Crossbell of all places. A highly contested autonomous state between two major superpowers in Erebonia and Calvard. Crossbell is definitely my favourite country worldbuilding wise because of how much it has to even further paint the world of Zemuria. If you couldn't tell already I think Trails is the only game series ever to actually get me interested in its political structure and world.

Now let's actually start this review. From a story standpoint alone, I think this is the best game that the series has to offer (so far). I say that because, yeah, the game does start extremely slow, but I think that's valid because the Special Support Section are a new section of the Crossbell Police Department, and haven't earned the trust of locals, like the Bracer Guild has. The group has only been functioning for a little while and they're already trying to deal with Mafioso's and threat letters to celebrities. The Arc en Ciel part of Chapter 2 got me hooked into the story, exposing Mayor MacDowell's secretary and apprehending him. Chapter 3 was probably the most hype I've ever been. You got the anniversary festival with high highs with Estelle, Joshua, Wald, Wazy, and Randy. You also got the auction where you get more interested in Wazy, Mariebelle, and Lechter as characters. This chapter introduces you to KeA, who's just the ray of sunshine that the SSS needed to feel complete. The boss for Chapter 3 after stealing one of their prized posessions from the auction is probably the highlight for me. It's just so badass. I love the little intermission that gives us a little glimpse into the life of the SSS with KeA being added to their numbers. Also, storming a mafia base is just badass, and mkaes me love Chapter 4 as well.

I think the finale deserves it's own little section. Everything just hits the roof. The army and mafia have been drugged with Gnosis, and we find out one of the doctors at the hospital is the leader of a cult. The raid on the SSS and the IBC was great, but I hate how side characters like Grace and Cao were just commenting on us fighting hordes of enemies, like bro, help us? Anyways, I love the badass driving scene with Sergei and Noel, and we get to use Joshua and Estelle in the final dungeon. The final dungeon was creepy, stupid D:G cult. Honestly, the final dungeon felt rather underwhelming till the Garcia boss, and then the final boss, Joachim. Dude just downed a bunch of pills and became a demon. If not for Renne, it would of been curtains for everyone. The final boss dies, and the Brights finally adopt Renne which made me shed a tear not going to lie, it's been a three game journey for them. Overall, a very epic story, and personally one of my favourites.

Character wise, there's a bunch that stick out to me: Randy, Tio, Wazy, Fran, Jona, etc. Randy is interesting because on the surface he's all silly, but he's actually very serious. I just love and adore Tio and Fran. Jona just makes me laugh with his silly shenanigans, and Wazy is probably my favourite because he's just so mysterious and intrigues me and makes me want to know more. I actually thought Lloyd improved over time, and is a great protagonist. I know people don't really like Lloyd, but I just like how he's supportive of the entire group, and you can really tell that he cares for the entirety of the SSS, even in the little time that they spent together. Elie, I'm a bit iffy on, because I don't know what exactly she brings to the story, but maybe that's just me. Overall, this game has really good characters.

Battling, there's not much that's different from Sky, besides new Arts. At least they kept the orbment system, which I adore. I also enjoyed the addition of Evasion. Evasion Builds are just so fun in any game. Yeah, not much to say with battling, it is mostly the same.

The music. slaps. so. hard. The crossbell main theme, the highway themes, the Mainz theme, the Revache theme, the Stargazer Tower theme, the Ancient Battlefield theme, it's all just such a bop. I actually think I might prefer the Zero battle theme to Sophisticated Fight from Sky, idk it just hits differently. But yeah, the music slaps.

Some extremely minor gripes. I hate how the translators treat Lloyd like a playboy and oblivious, idk it just grates me for some reason. Also, I do not understand Wald as a character at all, he actually might be my least favourite in the series so far. That's about it for the gripes.

Overall, the game is extremely enjoyable, and I would honestly love to redo it all and experience it all again. It was that enjoyable.

Reports of the mid-budget game’s death have been greatly exaggerated. They’re generally now something you have to more actively be on the lookout for, but there are still plenty of them with all the same hallmarks cynics’d have you believe we don’t get anymore – navigation by way of unique geographical landmarks as opposed to UI widgets, obtuse systems you only learn the inner workings of by throwing yourself into the deep end, visual design and mechanics strange enough to ward off the easily disoriented and more. Few games in recent memory exemplify it all better than this.

While that clip works a rough vertical slice of what you can expect from Clash’s combat, its little nuances aren’t immediately obvious at a glance. The way its blocking system works feels especially distinctive from other action games with parries, temporarily slowing down the enemy you block almost like a localised version of Witch Time, but key to the balance it strikes between complexity and accessibility is how it lets you cancel any light punch at any point into one of a special attack, jump or dodge. It’s a narrow but malleable core which enables a bunch of playstyles simultaneously; you can help speed along Zenozoik’s death by manipulating these mechanics to absolutely wombo combo its denizens, be less committal and whittle them down while dodging away and luring them into each other’s attacks, focus on filling Pseudo’s attack gauge to spend as much time in his superpowered first person mode as possible or take any number of other approaches. Chuck in unlockable combat styles you can find through exploration (complementing its revamped, Bloodborne-inspired level design) alongside some light moveset customisation and you’ve got the type of game you’ll be reloading saves before boss encounters just to replay them differently, this all being before you get into modifiers brought about by the Ritual.

This is essentially an in-universe dice game that you can challenge bosses to before the fisticuffs start, during which the pair of you offer up an artifact to either somehow alter the fighting area, debuff one’s opponent or introduce some other advantage to one’s side depending on who has the most dice remaining by the end. The effects can get pretty creative, thick fog rolling in and obscuring your vision in exchange for causing enemies to swing blindly at whatever’s nearby being a suitably chaotic standout, though my favourite has to be the paired Pact and Summon artifacts. Winning the Ritual with the former active lets you store the boss you’ve beaten as an ally which you can then summon to help you by upon winning a second game with the latter equipped – if you stack up enough of both, you can essentially turn an unusual beat ‘em up into an even more unusual version of Pokemon, pitting cannibalistic mushroom men against tripedal bright blue elk with faces growing out of their chests and all manner of other weird and wonderful mercenaries I’ve no idea how these guys’ concept artists dreamt up. It does sometimes feel tedious that there’s no way to forfeit the Ritual once you’ve challenged someone to it, but it’s a worthwhile exchange for the sheer variation it enables in combat encounters. It’s everything I mentioned in the first paragraph dialled up to 11, fostered by an almost totally optional minigame. How cool is that?

I’m already predisposed to love any fictional world conceptually bizarre enough to feature something like this as its sole governing law, but it helps that it’s got the art direction to match. It’s one thing to be able to point your camera anywhere in a game and have a new wallpaper on your hands, another entirely both to craft such a genuinely alien environment and render it consistently readable without anything resembling objective markers. It’s perplexion with a purpose: it’d have been much easier to just let the player’s map or some other immersion breaking visual cue do all the thinking for them, but instead, the environmental artists and modellers gave it their all and went the extra mile to make this nutcase’s fever dream a believable place you’re expected to organically learn the lay of. Their creativity even benefits the enemy design in a way – certain opponents not having a particularly big or varied moveset is offset at least a bit by how you can never really be sure how something as uncanny as a technicolour lion with the face of an elderly man (for example) is going to attack. It easily joins hands with Bayonetta Origins and Inkulinati on the podium of some of 2023’s most unique visual design, none of which received any industry recognition in this regard because why would those with large platforms ever try to raise awareness of anything actually interesting?

How or why any given game flies under the radar varies too much to pin it on a singular cause, it’s just a particular shame that it’s happened in this case because of the extent to which Clash is stuffed with things people commonly claim to want. It might sound like a hodgepodge of disparate ideas when you’re just reading about it, but to me there are clear throughlines connecting all of its esoteric mechanics, outlandish art, intimidatingly loopy level design and litany of music I can’t do justice to with words – a willingness to be different and respect for the player’s intelligence. You can only put so much stock into how a game’s number of plays correlates to its actual popularity on a site where Gravity Rush 2 has more than Starcraft and Minecraft has only about three times as many as a Yakuza game, but only managing double digits even in a place of relative enthusiasts wouldn’t seem to bode well for its prospects (or, at least, as well as something with these traits deserves).

That’s why I challenge you, whoever’s reading this, by the One Law: please take a chance on this game you may have missed. They don’t make them like this anymore, except when they do! And when they do, you’ll be reminded of how much we could still do with more games like it.

I think a term commonly associated with romance/sol animanga and games is “wish fulfillment.” Now, from my experience, it's a term usually met with some level of disdain or condescension. “Wow what a loser, they need this thing to feel good about themselves.” And, sure, I can understand where that attitude comes from, in fact I'm like that sometimes too. But I feel it's not that simple. People come from different backgrounds, places, and circumstances. Sometimes what we need is comfort from something, even if it isn't real.
Clannad, among many, many other beloved visual novels is boiled down to the common “your friends and family are important, your life is worth living” morals, but is it a bad thing to be so commonly communicated? I would assume that Maeda and the many other writers at Key are trying to convey this, and even if they were or not, intention does not always align with found purpose. Tomoya Okazaki, our protagonist, is a great stand in for players like me to some degree. He's still his own character, but I think him being a loner to align with the usual “wish fulfillment” protagonist role really works to its benefit. No matter your background or role, there is worth in finding friends and family, whether it be genetic or found. It finally gives us purpose to those who feel so aimless in life. Clannad is not simply “wish fulfillment” at play. It's inspiring us to fulfill those wishes ourselves, and fulfill the wishes of others.
I’ve seen complaints about Clannad’s core structure before, as for some people the routes are “not interconnected enough”. But is that a problem? In my opinion, anyway, Clannad is an anthology of the multiple “what if” scenarios surrounding Okazaki’s journey in life. While Nagisa’s route is what leads to the true ending of the story, it doesn’t make the other routes pointless. Regardless of what is the “true” outcome of the story, your experiences and how you see these characters develop will always live on with the player. You get to see Okazaki give these people true happiness in life, and by the true ending, he is repaid for everything he’s done. While in gameplay the route system is a little rough around the edges with much needed polish, I think playing with a guide allows for a very smooth experience.
Playing this after my most prior Key visual novel experience, that being AIR, really opened my eyes to how well thought out and executed much of Clannad is. While AIR suffers from an overly ambitious but ultimately meaningless structure, Clannad takes a safer approach and cuts out any filler. Jun Maeda and his team really wanted to make up for the mistakes of AIR, and you can really tell from how much more polish is applied to this game. Despite this being one of the longest games I’ve ever played, Clannad rarely falls victim to artificial padding. The game gives you and makes proper use of the “skip already read text” feature, which makes hopping into your next route a very quick and easy experience. It helps that the game is split into 10+ routes that all vary in length, meaning I don’t think the game can ever burn you out from a scenario. Each route (with two exceptions, one being entirely optional) is very different overall so nothing is samey either. I’d also like to make note of the amount of content on offer, Clannad is not only long from the main game but has TONS of little secrets and extra blurbs of dialogue to discover, it really feels like the team wanted to put as much as they could onto the disc.
And that’s the overall thing I love about Clannad: it’s very polished. Not perfect, but very damn close. Clannad may seem safe or tropey, but it uses those aspects and pushes them to a wonderful and engaging extent. The current top review tries to make fun of fans of this game and I’d have to say that this person probably has never experienced joy in their life. None of the huge visual novels I’ve played so far have been flops, and Clannad is no exception either. In fact, out of the three (Higurashi, Tsukihime, Clannad) I would say this is my new favorite, and knowing that Key still has some fantastic games in their catalog for me to still try out (Kanon, Little Busters!, and Rewrite) has me so immensely excited. But none of those games, or any visual novels in the future will take away what a special experience Clannad was for me. I had taken a long break from reviews and I needed to get out of that slump, and this game was what inspired me to write a little something again, especially seeing how none of the longer reviews about this game on this site are in good faith. I wanted to fix that. Thank you for reading, and if this review manages to get even one person to fully play through this game, I’ll be happy.

I've scarcely felt so undecided on a game, this is genuinely an oddball experience. This is basically a retelling of Evangelion but in game form. The cutscenes and sound have incredible quality, but actually playing it - crazy shit. The first couple of stages set you up to think this is a 3D fighter as you control Eva 01 and fight angels, but just as soon as you get used to that, you're slapped in the face by an 8 second mission where you're fighting with the controls trying to aim a missile. Then you're mashing buttons hard enough to give yourself an aneurysm as you chase down Jet Alone - and then its a fucking rhythm game with Asuka. Your head will be spinning, but not for long, because you can clear this entire thing in like an hour. Is it even fair to call this a game? It feels more like something you'd play with at a museum exhibit

Sure, there are aspects of Zero Mission I'd take ever so slightly over their Super counterparts, namely slight tweaks to the control scheme's shortcuts and some basic quality-of-life updates to the map system... but man, even if I've called Zero Mission my favorite Metroid for a long time there really is just no topping Super on most other levels this series operates on.

The soundtrack is one of the most impressive aspects of this game - it may not be the first game to do ambient and almost new age-ish music the way it does, but Super Metroid has such a distinct sound within the Super Nintendo's library that it's beyond impressive. Tracks like "Upper Brinstar", "Maridia - Swamp Caverns". and "Tourian" are pretty singular within the realm of 16-bit music, and you'd need to look to something like EarthBound to find sounds operating on the same level of experimentation within the console's library.

These sounds compliment a well-established atmosphere that's been discussed to death elsewhere, but for good reason. Super Metroid often toes the line from adventure game into action-thriller, and even horror thanks to its mood, colors, sprite artwork, and direction. One of the best things Super Metroid does with its color language is break its own rules, and early on: where much of the game paints Planet Zebes in naturalistic greens, browns, reds and greys, some of the areas depicted that the player should recognize on cue from the original Metroid title retain their spacey blues and blacks. Mother Brain's lair is kept more or less intact from its 8-bit depiction. Indeed, this leans into the minimal but effective story too - you really don't get the full weight of Super Metroid and all the impressions it sets to leave without the full trilogy under your belt.

Samus' arsenal is at some of its most balanced and effective here. The endgame combo of upgrades feels really fun to use, also I do feel the Screw Attack saw better and less finnicky days down the line on the Game Boy Advance. I'm actually a big fan of the X-ray Scope, except for the few times it doesn't work consistently - a few fake walls in Tourian spring to mind.

Still, for a trailblazer like Super Metroid, it would be excusable should time have worn down its gold sheen into ragged glory, but this isn't the case. I'm not the first nor the hundredth to tell you this, but this game remains one of the all-time greats. The small nitpicks I have here would be more or less cleaned up by the time Fusion and Zero Mission come around, and it should speak to how minimal these complaints are that even after having just replayed the game with my best friend, I'm already getting the itch to land down on Planet Zebes again.

Put this down as one I've got to sit with in order to give stronger, more detailed thoughts on. In the same way that revisiting CLANNAD was important as a piece of self-reflection and an analysis on my own growth and changes over the decade-plus since I'd first played it, Little Busters! served to embolden my understanding of how important my friend group has been every step of the way through those changes. One of the most tightly-organized Key games, with every route offering something to the grander narrative, and while After Story from CLANNAD remains the personal peak of their output for me, you'd be hard-pressed to find a true ending route with the sheer payoff and emotional conviction of Refrain elsewhere in the medium.

I'm going to take a break from finishing the Ecstasy routes, having completed Saya's, and go back for Kud Wafter in the same stretch of time. I'd like to let the original game sit a little longer, Refrain given time to wash over me a little more, and hell - maybe I'll even watch the anime, because I really do love this cast and their stories. The Little Busters are eternal, forever and ever.