a year ago I tried ender lilies and thought combat is clunky, unresponsive and I shelved after beating the first boss without giving it a second glance, now with the sequel coming soon (early access at the moment) I wanted to get back to the first game and oh boy did I got back to it and did my first impression aged badly. I simply had to get used to the overall feel of it and after that it just flowed from start to finish. I couldnt give my attention to games for about 1-2 months but ender lilies broke it and ignited my gaming side again with me being absorbed in this visually beautiful but storywise bitter hidden gem for 3 days straight. only nitpick I do have is that (and its probably my fault) while backtracking after getting new movement upgrades I felt I wasted my time because sometimes it wasnt clear what to do or how to find the the way even if I knew which paths got open (I checked one resting site for maybe 10 times and found the secret at the end of the game lmao), probably because map isnt detailed, I had to leave 2 areas not full so no %100 :(
also mili slaps as always, even though I knew and listened to ender lilies soundtracks before playing, it got even better while experiencing the game
I was not familiar with your game binary haze, you can cook and keep cooking. ender lilies is one of a kind game and a masterpiece at that. I'll wait for ender magnolia full release

para nada el mejor juego de la saga, de hecho fue el inicio de la decadencia de la saga principal de Pokemon, pero aun así es un juego el cual le tengo mucho cariño por todo lo que significa. fue el momento donde me dedique más en serio al competitivo y al VGC, gracias a él conocí a varias personas en internet los cuales fueron mis únicos amigos en esa época, fue gracias a el que empecé a subir videos a mi canal, etc... me la pasaba noches enteras jugando ya sea participando en torneos de grupos de facebook, yo mismo haciendo dinámicas en mi grupo que tenía, haciendo crianza, farmeando PB, o haciendo combates por chat de voz con un compa.

ha sido el juego de pokemon que más horas le he dedicado y en general el 3er juego que más horas le he dedicado con un mínimo 3000 horas (el contador deja de subir luego de las 999 horas, pero haciendo cálculos esas fueron como mínimo las horas totales que le dediqué). irónicamente era probable que jamás hubiera jugado Pokemon Y ya que a pesar de ser un fan de la saga desde que tengo memoria, en la 5ta gen ya me había dejado de interesar y no compre black/white2 por eso mismo, pero no fue sino por un compa que prácticamente me obligo a las pocas semanas de que saliera el juego a ir con él a preorden y es que yo ni siquiera sabia que iba a salir un nuevo juego de Pokemon. al final fuimos y casi me quedo sin juego ya que tenia que preordenarlo con días de antelación, pero por suerte alguien no fue a recoger su juego y pude comprar ese. a veces me pongo a pensar en lo tanto que hubiera cambiado mi vida si él nunca me hubiera dicho de ir a comprarlo y también me pone a pensar en que otras cosas en la vida nunca se dieron debido a mis decisiones ya que si una decisión simple como la de ir o no a comprar este juego influyo demasiado en mi vida, estoy seguro de que así hay muchas que desafortunadamente por la decisión que tome nunca las sabré... pero bueno, ya he filosofeado mucho...

aun así es válido darle una calificación en base a mi experiencia personal, pero ignorando al juego en si? digo, me encanto la mecánica de las megas, me parece el mejor gimmic de la saga, el salto del 3d fue bueno para su época (a pesar de que en los siguientes juegos se la pasaron reutilizando los mismos modelos y muchas de las animaciones que aquí se incluyeron), pero el resto es mediocre... pero al final esto es mi review y aunque quiera ser lo más subjetivo que quiera, al final mis opiniones son subjetivas y aunque la calificación que le daré no debería de ser la que le tendría que dar, la verdad es que no me importa.

wew.

first thing i want to point out is that god damn does this game overstay its welcome. everything from its menuing, traversal, combat and even the script feel like they've been designed, intentionally or not, to stretch out as much time as possible. without delving too much into detail, it's especially noticeable in the dream world sections, where the party gets into wacky subplots that ultimately lead nowhere and add barely anything other than some scarce lore about a background item in the real world. some might argue that all that padding out is for character development's sake, but that's not it either. the main characters barely advance or change as the game goes on. their personalities are set in stone as early as the picnic scene in the forest playground on your first day. i'd excuse such padding if at least the inbetweens had some fun moments but no, this game's attempt at humor is the equivalent of a 2014 tumblr post that ends in keysmash.

combat is a chore, and i say this as someone who enjoys turn based combat. not only menuing in combat feels clunky with its four main cracters strewn across each corner of the game's window (seriously guys, simple is best. JRPGs solved this more than 25 years ago), fights themselves aren't rewarding most of the time. the game's reliance on emotions as a "rock-paper-scissors" type mechanic is very interesting... as long as you can apply it. most mob enemies die to regular attacks in a single turn, and spending juice or items to set the enemies' moods feels wasteful outside of boss encounters, especially when those same mobs can change their own emotions anyway.

i don't even want to talk about the plot. some might really like the narrative it (tries to) build interluding its dream and real segments, but to me that final twist legit felt like dropping the entire narrative down a flight of stairs for the sake of a punchy, serious tone. i'd expect it from a short RPG maker title, but for a game that's longer than earthbound with extra levity on top, it completely undoes whatever character advancements it tried to make during its almost 20 hour runtime. graceless doesn't even begin to describe it.

honestly, either play a short-form RPG maker horror game like yume nikki or a JRPG with actual decent combat and plot instead of going for this tepid inbetween.

probably one of the worst picross games available on the 3ds. the fact that progression is gated by both energy and picrites, both time-dependant resources (and picrites make you grind for them), really saps out any fun out of playing multiple puzzles in a single session. each puzzle features different goals that you must beat in order to get extra picrites, with some of them being as ridiculous as asking you to carry a specific pokémon that you won't be able to unlock until multiple stages later, or beating a 20x15 puzzle in under 6 minutes which is only feasibly possible by cheesing it with multiple legendary pokémon skills or by straight up looking up the solution online. the most fun aspect out of these games, micross (a massive illustration made out of multiple 10x10 smaller picross puzzles put together) is also gated behind these goals since you must unlock every single smaller puzzle (a tile) through this method.
gameplay is just like all the other 3ds picross games made by jupiter and its OST is as bland as it gets. also this is subjective but the actual pixel art you get out of these puzzles is pretty ugly, with some really putting in the effort to portray a pokémon as a 10x10 sprite.
there's basically no reason to play this before any of the many other picross games on the 3ds unless you like pokémon that much that you're willing to tolerate multiple f2p mechanics hindering your progress at every single roadstop, in which case not even arceus can help you.

Go
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Come on
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Come on
Come on
Thanks
Thanks
Thanks
Thanks
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Thanks
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Thanks
Come on come on
Go

gave the game another go and while it's not as bad as i remember and there was a lot of parts i thought were good, the game itself is just super boring. most of the characters are too one note for me to care beyond "their personality trait is annoying" or "i like their personality trait" and the story itself is incredibly uninteresting, even compared to some of the weaker fire emblem titles. it's a shame that the series went the direction it did since awakening as a launching point had a lot of good ideas and potential but i guess we had to run with mostly the bad ones for fates and just throw shit at the wall until it sticks after

Works better when it leans more on Wreden's more personal moments (like the epilogue, which is the only full sequence I liked). It's a lot less engaging, which is what happens when you change the focus from a choice-based game to a hour and a half essay about the expectation and perception that people have of sequels/expansions/re-releases, but even taking that apart there's just nothing interesting being said here. Yeah collectibles are useless and just an artifical way of engaging the player with extra content, yes the bucket is just a sorry excuse of an expansion and the new endings are nothing more than filler to fulfill your desire of an expanded game. Yeah expansions suck. I get, you get it, we all get it, nothing new. The bucket joke feels like a sore try to the companion cube and the commentary that it's endings try to make is just... boring, shitty even.

There's a couple of funny moments here and there, but I just bored playing through, maybe I just don't find the game's humor funny anymore or it's just a lot more uninspired. It just subtracts from the base game, though that doesn't matter since it's clearly more intended as a sequel than an expansion. You could tell me "the point of the expansion is that it sucks!!!" but idk and idc.

Or hey, maybe it's actually pretty cool and I'm just mad that I payed for virtually the same game and expected actual interesting stuff and got this instead!!

hello charlotte episodes 1 and 2 should be played not just to be caught up on the story, but to watch a developer gradually learn to express what is at their core. this also means that hc is a series with some growing pains, including but not limited to how it can be: hit or miss in its sense of humor, unevenly paced, and full of puzzles that even if thematically fitting are largely forgettable. i'd put hc1 as a little bit above average for an artistically inclined tumblr user's first rpgmaker game--plus i think its very funny in how eager it is kill you--but i can understand not liking it. hc2 is actually quite good and a very compelling leap forward from 1, and sows some very important seeds that make it ESPECIALLY crucial to be paired with hc3, but its still just shy of excellence on its own. they can still showcase etherane's specificity and intelligence pretty well, and having some of the context for what she's informed by and responding to--which is to say not just rpgmaker in general but that filtered thru tumblr fandom--lets you understand some of where she's coming from. but these two games alone do not exactly feel like fully confident and complete works.

by contrast, etherane's first game after hello charlotte, tomorrow won't come for those without ██████, has a more experienced and steadied hand guiding it. it's standalone and more concise, but this has its advantages over the relative bulk and bloat of the series etherane worked on previously. it's partly because its more contained and wastes less space that the fog of all the tensions twc suggests to us feel so dense, making it like a short story that invites rereads to find something new each time. its more distanced tone and tighter writing also brings a weight and sobriety to it that hello charlotte did not have as consistently. basically it's more "perfected" in what it aims to do with its narrative than any hellchar, and i would call it a capital G Great game for that. only the puzzles still feel hc-tier but that's not a big deal. i do wonder what i could have gotten out of this creator's oeuvre if i had started with hello charlotte and then built up to twc, but i think playing it first was a good way to assure me that ane is the real deal, enough to want to see their first series through to the end. even with the growing pains or whatever other superficial hangups i may have had as i went through it.

then there's hello charlotte episode 3, sitting between the amateurish but inspired explorations of the series before it and the more fully developed twc. childhood's end fits as a subtitle, a sign of not just the finale of hello charlotte as a series (mainline, at least), but also an assertion of itself as the break from the artistic immaturity of previous entries that's now been outgrown, so to speak. this may sound like i'm saying this is where etherane finally reached their potential of greatness, and my answer to that is, essentially, yes! but 3 has more of an adolescent energy to it; even as its subtitle declares being done with childish things, this can be taken not as an objective assessment of itself but coming from a sort of teenage urge to prove that they can overcome their past, by any means necessary. these means are often bratty and practically asking to be disliked. it diverts hard from the last 2 entries, sabotaging the mostly harmless and maudlin cringe for more provocative cringe that at times, tbh, can be offputting for the wrong reasons. at a glance, its lack of subtlety in its belligerence at points can make it seem like it amounts to little more than an overly hammy, bridge-burning heel turn. all these rough and serrated edges often do the opposite of bringing greater coherence that hc2 hinted at, making for an even more unbalanced experience than what came before.

alot of this is done to address a realization that the previous two games, even with their own strengths and self-awareness, lent themselves to being taken as scatterbrained misery entertainment; stories of a soft nice and easily likable character getting her shit kicked in constantly to “become relatable to the max", as a character puts it. fandom attaches to this easily and often uncritically, and as this attachment informs their own interpretations as told through fanart and fanfic, the work itself and characters within get untethered from the creator's control & intentions. many such cases of rpgmaker games--or rpgmaker-ish ones too--that this applies to, and hellchar practically speaks directly to that context it’s situated within. frustrated with the shallow regurgitation of angst back and forth, ashamed of having played into it previously without bristling at it enough, paranoid towards giving a personal story up for voyeuristic dissection (especially for this audience's expectations for authors to unload their traumas and neuroses in a correctly consumable manner), hc3 lashes out in order to separate itself from this and take the narrative back. the guro danganronpa nietzsche-pilled "this is LITERALLY 1984" theatrics, cringe they may be, have a sincerely felt anger and pessimism underlying them. it's painfully aware it's entrenched in a juvenile world and only knows juvenile means to escape it, writhing within what feels like a meaningless feedback loop.

this is the set up for one of the most scorched and restless reconfigurations of identity i've found. hellchar may have gotten so wound up about the subculture it's within, but it doesn't turn its back on it completely in the end because it remains, just as it had been previously, a vector for speaking on its specific preoccupations and troubles. idolization of creators, the ways presumptions about others reflect yourself, fear over losing some cultivated idea of purity from contact with people, having your own life dictated through your psychosis...these are things it wants to express that are inextricably tied with this world it has so much friction with. it comes to understand that even art that is embarrassingly derivative (figuratively and literally) or selfish projection can reveal something, if the author is really willing. its critique of stories that hand out catharsis like its nothing wouldn't mean much if it wasn't so committed to reaching an actually useful catharsis of its own. it strains itself to go further and deeper into its pain, despite all the nihilism it talks up, to eventually finding meaning within its own efforts to change, to keep moving on. here was when etherane showed what true vulnerability is: letting you in on something that would otherwise be kept secret, not hiding behind subtlety--its genuinely smart and incisive in its opaqueness--but also not oversharing or self-flagellating for cheap sympathy. anyone can speak honestly, but very rarely do you see someone really understand that you aren't just speaking in a vacuum. after pulling back all the layers of failed perceptions that attached onto it, being frank about its perceived failures to form attachment before, it's then that hc3 finds a space to hit more directly than anything else it could be compared to.

this game is a mess but it's also a maelstrom, one that's craftily and furiously and courageously leaned into to find where truth really lies. tomorrow won't come is technically a more respectable effort, but in retrospect it is the collected sigh after the panic attack that hc3 was. an extremely fraught but incredibly observant moment of soul searching that haunts what comes after, whether it's heaven's gate or twc or probably the freshly released mr rainer's solve-it service (haven't got to it much yet but i trust post-hc3 ane with my life so it will be the greatest gaming sensation of this week, at the very least). the big bang, scattershot as it may be, of etherane's full voice, and it's the instability specific to it that makes this my favorite game from them. with all its entropy and fevered tantrums in the background, it managed a connection and communicated something invaluable to me. it knows that anxiety of leaving yourself defenseless to others seeing the rear of your head, hating to imagine what their eyes see and doing that despite yourself--and also knows the desire to crane your neck backwards in the hope you'll see it for yourself. it will look grotesque and humiliating and idiotic to go through all those contortions, but don't you want to get one good glimpse for once? and if you can't do it, you might as well try to impress how hard you're trying to anyone who dares to watch.

"Whatever happens inside these scrunched, wrinkled fiber-bags of rotten-fruit-colored chopped hollow jumbo spaghetti bits is an accident of liquid physics. Our sentimentality is a coincidence. We are no smooth earnest factories; we are no diagram-perfect assembly lines. We are crowded hard bags of accidents down through which blood and other juices leak; we squeeze and our liquids spurt and rise. We must know the stupidity of this meat and we must permit it to terrify us. We must be afraid of this deadness. We must love each other. It is ridiculous if we do not"
-"just like hamburger;exactly like hamburger" by tim rogers

moon is a game that has been a phenomenon for many, many years, despite a whole lot of people probably having never played it until just this past year. my favorite game of All Time, undertale, owes a lot of its existence to moon's, and toby fox hasn't played it. before you play moon, you are immediately intrigued by moon and need to know more. it is a game that is equal parts obtuse 90s point 'n' click, social simulator and treatise on disarming ourselves and living (and more importantly LOVING) authentically. knowing about moon is a secret badge of honor among the in-the-know, or at least it was until its new translation and rerelease on modern hardware made the barrier of access 20 dollars instead of knowing japanese or using the gamefaqs guide to play a ROM or whatever.

but what about playing moon? a game that describes itself a remix rpg adventure makes it sound a little more complex than it is. it's at its core an adventure game that prides itself on telling you absolutely nothing and absolutely everything. a good portion of the game's puzzles require precise timing, memorizing patterns of both npcs and the environment, and the ability to navigate through surreal dialogue and cutscenes to work things out. but i think the developers also want you to collaborate as you play moon, as many games being developed in the early days of the internet wanted you to. part of my enjoyment of moon was reading along with a walkthrough, one with a writer sharing their own opinions and thoughts and strategies and victories and losses with me. they gave me their love in guiding me through this game, and this review is my best attempt at giving it back. gamefaqs user parrotshake, i love the living shit out of you.

moon's narrative is probably the key reason most people are here, and seeing what there is to see here is like finding a stone tablet with an ancient language's alphabet and grammatical rules inscribed onto it. understanding moon makes me understand a good 30 years of japanese game devleopment much more clearly. a lot has been said about how the developers at love-de-lic disseminated themselves into other studios like square and grasshopper manufacture, and their influence can be felt in games those people never touched. there's obvious titles like deadly premontion and undertale, but i also think games like persona 3 and final fantasy x took some of this game's philosophy to heart. and what a philosophy! in moon, a boy is trapped in his television or dreaming or something and has to pick up the pieces in the wake of destruction left by a traditonal jrpg hero. the most impactful of this for me was bringing the various killed animals back to life, and how much of this game's world is tied deeply to animals. they're deities, they're lifegivers and they're friends. saving perogon or exorcising gramby's summonbeast left me feeling so completely content, to see these characters whose lives were torn asunder by forces beyond their comprehension doing things they aren't supposed to be doing, and then lifting them out of their misery or saving them from it is a joyous act that moon revels in.

the whole game is joyous, it begs you to explore at your own pace and figure out the main story when you feel up for it, if you feel up for it. there's rarely any major pressure and for the most part its equally beneficial to watch filby fly his kite as it is to assemble pieces of a rocket ship. it's less elaborate puzzle box and more a series of events that seem almost unconcerned with the player's intervention or not, even though the player always brings about positive changes and helps the people in the game. it's nice to help people, it's nice to love people, even creepy cultists in the woods who make you memorize their stupid faces or wannabe idols or your grandma who's losing it and isn't fun to be around anymore.

the machines we inhabit are only going to fail us, eventually we will all be out in the woods desperate for someone to sing and dance and recite poems with us or play rock paper scissors with us or walk out dog when we're sick to. moon taught me to love the machine, even when the machine fails me and the machine doesn't want to work and when the machine ends up snapping us in two over and over again. open the door.