what is love? some might say the essence of love is having the faith to thrust oneself willingly into the mortifying ideal of being known. some might say that love is selfless and altruistic, but others see it as a narcissistic projection of oneself onto the other; if that's the case then its closest cousins are exhibitionism and vanity.

perhaps, then, my first love was akinator. this jocular genie knows everything there was to know about me, seemingly reading into the deepest excesses of my heart. it could tell me what i didn't know i wanted and what i didnt know i needed. all i needed to do was trust in him

Always wanted to play this as a kid since I'm a huge Digimon fan, a ton of the games are on WonderSwan and in Japanese only. So I finally learned Japanese, and what this actually is is a cute, if basic monster raising game. A little repetitive and lost a lot of its mystery because I decided to eventually use a guide to figure out how evolutions worked (and from there it's a pretty linear route to whatever evo you want, I don't know why the gamefaqs guide made it out to be so confusing). Amazing sprite work, arguably the best Digimon has ever had in my opinion, though I do like the Digimon Story sprites for the most part. The story is a typical spirited away Digimon type story, but one cute detail is there is this meta aspect, when you start the game it frames that action as you stopping the deletion of this digital "Swan World", and in the game you are referred to as "the one who can input Digi-Codes". Kinda fun, especially since later one everything is just about "the" "Digital World" rather than this idea of pocket universes in every device. I actually didn't get to the end of this because I can't be fucked to build up a team of guys powerful enough to defeat Cherubimon even if the path to get there and min/max your team is not that hard (I watched some Japanese guy do it on Youtube, you can beat this whole game in 5 hours -- the two tricks you need are DNA digivolutions for power which you can guess with sufficient Digimon knowledge; and healers in the form of the Angemon line). In any case, felt really nice to solve the mystery of this game that has been kind of haunting me since my childhood, I can see this being a fun nostalgic time waster maybe.

cute and fun rhythm game where every song sounds like something you'd hear at a fast fashion store in hong kong. i really do love the neon pastel aesthetic that is trendy lately, i think it's super colorful and vibrant, though as far as the game itself goes it did make me a bit dizzy and made some screens hard to parse. the backgrounds and character designs are wonderful too, super cute and cartoony. this aesthetic also has a sort of neo-retro tinge to it in the same way as those future funk mixes on youtube or something, which is neat.

even though nothing in the 80s actually looked like this, i like that the modern remix of the 80s has its own aesthetic that mixes in harajuku fashion, pop art, k-pop flavored r&b and hip hop, streetwear, Y2K bubblegum pop, web 2.0 and niconico douga, rumiko takahashi, etc. though i think this aesthetic is ultimately stagnant and too mired in nostalgia to actually go anywhere and develop into anything, as evidenced by the fact that those future funk remixes on youtube sound exactly the same as they did 5 years ago. so yeah, i think this is on its way out, and this game is already 4 years old apparently, but i think it's still a fun and comforting vibe.

the way the songs are categorized in this game are not the usual genres but moods like "pop", "glam", "retro" etc which i find pretty endearing and again speaks to the specific kind of aesthetic it's going for. it's also of course a hilariously horny anime game which i guess has its own charm as well, you can tell this was made by some serious weebs and i'm gonna be honest, every great rhythm game player i've ever known has been a massive weeb so i think that's a good sign more than anything.

my only complaint really is that the game is too simple and the songs are too easy (at least what i played through so far) and i don't want to fucking grind to get better songs. also i wish there was more songs, but i bought this for 50 cents so i can't legally call that a complaint. i might buy some of that touhou heat later though. also you can play as marisa? lol

elegant puzzle-like level design that incorporates multiple routes in each level and is designed to be challenging even incorporating flexible margins of error. beautiful pixel art, and super snappy gameplay. addicting, pretty much the perfect platformer imo. i can't imagine anything better than this.

i didn't play the extra stuff (and might not since i was already reaching my limits by the end of the campaign and i don't feel like grinding it out) but the only two flaws of this game are a completely unnecessary and irritating story (luckily you can skip all the cutscenes because this game is designed for speedruns -- they really thought of everything) and the fact that the pacing means that at least for me, everything was a test of stamina even when i think certain portions would have been more impactful if they were shorter and more intense instead. to illustrate that last bit take the last boss for example, it could have been like 5 long rooms rather than 20 shorter rooms since the latter required the epic OST to loop so much it wore off a bit (because im bad at this game? maybe)

in fact, i think the marathon pacing of some levels is a result of the indulgent level design. it feels like most level gimmicks are stretched to their limits. maybe there was some pruning done later on but it feels like this game has a maximal amount of interesting puzzle setups for each new gameplay element (at least the ones that I found, I know there are more that are not necessarily told to you like a long jump which is hinted at throughout). it is exhausting but i also do like that a lot since it's the opposite of mario-style "one and done" level gimmick design. none of the levels are actually bad, it's just more good. if my only complaint about a game is there's too much of it that means it's a good game. actually this is making me want to check out the b sides even more because i'm starting to wonder if they introduce the long jump or dash off walls or any of the other tricks i did by accident and incorporate them into interesting platforming puzzles like the rest of the game. i have no idea how anyone could even think of all this stuff btw

When I was younger I used to spend a lot of time on online forums chatting with complete strangers. I still do, but I used to too. It was probably not ok for someone so young to be doing that, but luckily, and I don't know why I had this common sense, I rarely divulged information about my real life online. Though I was generally the youngest in the online spaces I was a part of, at least for my first few years of being heavily online, miraculously I did actually find a couple other people my age when I was in middle school, including a fellow user on the RPG RPG revolution forums and IRC chat. We both liked RPGs and RPGMaker, obviously, but I think for me it was more the idea of a creative outlet than any specific interest in video games that brought me there. I still have fond memories of my days emulating tons of games, mostly RPGs, on the GBA, and I used to play so much that maybe by the time I was looking for a creative outlet, this was the only thing that came to mind. I didn't really have a taste yet, so this was the closest I had to a personality. Meanwhile my friend (I think I can still use that word) seemed genuinely interested in video games to a kind of curious extent. As I learned more and more about him this became kind of confusing to me. He was smart, funny, and obsessed with parkour. I imagine in real life he'd be pretty popular, so why was he writing up game design documents in his free time? These are the questions I asked myself as I entered eighth grade and became more concerned with Led Zeppelin, making new friends, and the English teacher I liked so much that when she asked me to join the softball team, I actually said yes.

As time went on, I started playing games less and less. In the end, I only ever finished a couple of demos with some real struggle pixel art and bare bones environments and RPG combat. All my video games were fan games or fictionalized representations of my own life. I couldn't come up with anything original. I started to qualify all my amateurish video game opinions with "but, you know, I'm not a real gamer". To the extent that "game creator" was briefly a part of my identity during my adolescence, as I moved towards adulthood I was instead definitively "not a gamer". I continued to find myself drawn to video game Youtubers, who became very popular around that time, and the discussions around video games in general. But from that point onward, I was always an outsider. Looking back on it, I do think I know an awful lot about video games -- at least, for someone who doesn't play them.

My friend from the RPG Maker forums never stopped making games. Though I was guarded about my personal info online, when my time on the IRC channel came to a close we exchanged Facebook friend requests. I don't check Facebook super often, but I checked in on him again around 2017. Turns out, he's an indie game developer now, and seems to be really successful. I'm cheering him on. I think I wrote him a message one time congratulating him, but I don't remember if I sent it. He made a game at that time called Dad Quest, which was really popular. I think I even saw h3h3 make a video about it. I'm really glad he made some games that a lot of people played.

For a long time I had been thinking of adding it to my Steam wishlist, but I couldn't remember the name of the game or anything that it was about. When I saw Cat Quest, I thought, oh I think that's it, and added it to the cart. After playing it for a few hours, and only afterwards looking up some info about the game, it seems that is not the case.

So if you asked me my opinion of this game I would say that Cat Quest is a 2D open world RPG with the exploration of Skyrim, but set in the visual style of an overworld. This is a fantasy world that asks the question of how different it would be if cats lived in it instead of humans!

I actually played this on the SNES compilation game of I and II but I don't know how to find that...

This was a real charming game, obviously very simple and in some ways a bit outdated (you have to press A and choose to talk, it's like some kind of shudders tabletop RPG) but this is really a great game and it's not hard to see why this would launch a genre by itself. This game is just incredibly simple and fun, it's very easy for me to imagine being 5 years old in 1986 and having this absolutely blow my mind.

All of what I like about JRPGs is already here from the first one. Amazing monster designs by Akira Toriyama, weird and sometimes pretty funny dialogue, cute sprite work (I played the SNES version remember...not whatever this is), tons of secrets, and most importantly a truly epic score by none other than Hatsune Miku. The core gameplay loop is just so damn good that you wonder how so many modern RPGs manage to fuck it up; get to a new town, talk to the townsfolk, get some gear, go out and explore, grind up til you're strong enough (periodically returning to restock and heal), and on to the next town. This game also doesn't exactly tell you where to go all the time, so you have to actually talk to everyone and explore the world. It's a genuine adventure, and it pulls it off effortlessly despite the limitations. I am a boomer yeah but I do understand the feeling of "this is pretty good, for a game that's a billion years old" and I didn't really get that from this game honestly. The technical limitations were visible but not overbearing. A full vision is here, a whole world, or universe even, that of course isn't completely explored by the end of the game but nonetheless you can see the shape of the whole thing in just this short experience.

To me, the grinding is not a thing you have to slog through to get to "the good part", the progression is part of the fun and a core appeal of JRPGs. I realize I'm not everyone, but beating what...100? 200? Monsters before the end of the game is not at all a pain, it gives each area some character, makes the overworld feel constantly new and dangerous, and keeps the pacing of the game on track. The whole game is not even that long, it's like 10 hours max, and the grinding loop gives the player so many things to look forward to on a moment-to-moment basis (new levels = new stats, maybe spells; more gold to buy better equipment, etc; the excitement of seeing new monsters or a new form of an old monster) that I don't think it'd be nearly as fun without it. I bet a lot of people, like me, really do love these kinds of progression systems and that's a big part of the appeal, so I can't help but roll my eyes whenever I hear someone complain about grinding in JRPGs as if it's some kind of undisputable flaw.

Not a perfect game though, there are some obvious things that could be streamlined, like the aforementioned clunky menus and lack of interesting strategy in battles. A bigger, more lively world is also something you could always add on top if you double the size of the game cart, and no doubt that's pretty much what happened. From my experience though (having played 9 and 11 a bit) Dragon Quest really never strayed too far from this one game, and to me it's not difficult to see why. Sometimes all you want is an epic RPG adventure. Sometimes you just want to be a hero and beat up a big dragon or a demon or something. I think at the end of the day, this game (and genre's) surviving appeal proves that there is something fundamental in here about why some people (myself included) like video games in the first place. The fact that they figured this shit out 35+ years ago (granted, with a huge helping of tabletop RPG inspiration) is really impressive.