Like many short visual novels of its ilk, it's more of an experience than a game, but I wouldn't hold it against MILK too much. You can get all the endings in about two or three hours, so you'll be done pretty fast, but it's a nice, compact experience set in a gloomy, oppressive apartment. It's very meta in acknowledging common trappings of visual novels and point-n-click games, but not in a stuffy, pretentious way. You mostly just want to see this poor girl safe, even if you, the player, can't do too much to help her.

The existence of this obscure Master System title seems to raise some very interesting questions in regards to general gaming discourse. Those questions being:

What constitutes a ripoff? Is a derivative title able to stand on its own? Is mimicry really the highest form of flattery?

Ultimately I dislike drawing comparisons when it comes to different titles from different series by different developers but in this instance I seem to struggle in not doing so, mainly because for better or worse this game is blatantly aping on the formula established by The Legend of Zelda half a decade prior. For the most part.

Golden Axe Warrior is a semi-open ended exploration focused adventure game made by Sega for the Master System. A system that holds very little weight outside of South America due to a variety of factors I don't want to go into for fear of taking focus away from this particular title.

So when it comes to gameplay I must ask:

Have you played The Legend of Zelda? Particularly the NES game? If so you have a good idea how this game functions with a few differences. The game starts with you not only having 3 hearts but 3 magic bottles as well. You are able to use magic in this game for combat, exploration and healing.

There is Lightning for damaging a singular enemy, earth for revealing secrets and stunning enemies, fire for screen wide damage and water for healing. Having these spells in lieu of tools like bombs or arrows creates a different feeling of resource management since they share the same Magic meter. Healing can cripple your ability to explore dungeons unless you get magic bottle drops as an example. This layer of strategy you have adds a fun layer that separates itself from its clear inspiration.

It's a shame combat in this game is suffering at times. Enemies come in droves and they can be ruthless. Mix that in with a constantly escalating power level of your opponents can leave the player in a daze. Exploring is key to find upgrades. You also have two weapons. Your sword and axe. Both get upgraded including to the mythical Golden Axe itself. Both weapons have their unique uses in combat as well. Your sword attacking in a straight line in the four directions while the axe swings in front of you in an arc.

Dungeons are rather simple as well. One thing to note is that the player cannot push blocks rather you can push candles instead. Took me some time to figure that one out. I was shocked at how small and simple the final dungeon actually was as well. Same with the overworld as well. The game pens you in at the start giving you a small chunk of the world to explore and with upgrades and items you open more of the world piece by piece.

Ultimately how I can encapsulate the playing experience through the lens of Zelda is this: Combat is more difficult while exploration is more limited and focused. Now that should give you a decent idea on whether or not you will enjoy this game.

Another factor is a degree of references to the main series of games. Not only do you meet the playable characters from Golden Axe, they also teach your their magic. That and Death Adder being the obvious villain makes this atleast feel like a Golden Axe adventure game. This level of fanservice feels a little more niche in the current year where Golden Axe sits in a sphere of antiquity but those of us who are nostalgic will enjoy the small nods.

Musically things are simplistic but hey I appreciate the remix of the theme to the first level of the original game. The rest of the OST is rather small though. I was surprised when there was no final dungeon or final boss theme, something I feel was standard for 1991.

A key note I should mention is that this game was made for English speakers and that is a big deal for one primary reason: The dialogue won't be garbage. Typically in 8-bit games there is a layer of lost in translation that is missing here. NPCs in towns talk in a very nature way that doesn't feel alien and doesn't lack in punch. Hints are blunt, clear and to the point. No real guesswork in that regard.

The NPCs do make the world feel lived in. You feel a certain level of fear and uncertainty in the population with Death Adder throwing the world into disarray and the game isn't afraid to show this to you. People are melancholic and destroyed architecture houses cold corpses. The story isn't filled with nail biting anticipation or anything. Instead things just feel, to a degree, authentic in a way.

Ultimately though in the end this game sits slightly above the middle in my eyes. I had plenty of fun with this title but it really isn't for everyone. The 8-bit crust is there with its rather annoying at times combat and rather obtuse progression. Your mileage may vary but fans of the original Zelda game will feel at home here. To those who are fans of that style of game I can recommend this to you but to others I can ensure you that you aren't missing out on some underrated masterpiece.

This game left me broken for days after playing it for the first time. It's very easy to relate to these characters and this town, and man sometimes you really wish you didn't. I don't mean that as a criticism, it's genuinely great to me that this game got me so deep out of my comfort zone at times. It can be a lot though, especially if you're going through/have gone through a similar situation to any of the characters. The art style is one I adore also, there's a very specific design philosophy with these characters that fits their personalities exceedingly well. The environments also look super great and I love the autumn theming the world of Night in the Woods has.

you've turned to page 56 in our lovely gamedev cookbook--wanting to create a smash indie hit yourself? not to worry, i have you covered. first, you'll want some hyper friendly, super inoffensive art. really smooth those edges. "wait, i want a dark twist to it!" of course you do, because your indie darling isn't taking off without one. now what you're gonna do is contrast the inoffensiveness with, i don't know, edgy scribblings found on an eighth grade desk or somewhere in the 2008 archives of deviantart? obviously we can't have anything ACTUALLY visually disturbing or raw, because then you're going down the hylics path, and noooo one cares about hylics. no, it needs to be scary in the same way a hatsune miku vocaloid music video about a "serious" subject is scary--draw a circle a bunch over itself until it's got a tone of lines and looks super disoriented. creepy, right? yeah just do that for everything.

well, that's pretty much it! with the cutesy sparkle artstyle contrasting just the right tint of edge to unnerve slendermen veterans, you just need some basic, serviceable writing and to hire a musician better at music than you are at game dev, and you've got a real shot at things (but make sure it's real easy, too, or your players are gonezo)! what, don't believe me? just take a look at undertale, OFF, super paper mario, doki doki literature club: cute presentations, horror twists, easy to beat. except... you know... every single of these games (okay, maybe not doki) does omori's job better in just about every single way. see, these games have biting writing and make bold, aesthetic decisions, and they all do it in brevity. off, hylics, space funeral, and undertale may all be inspired by earthbound, but their developers each understood that aping its absurd, overly stretched out game length is a BAD idea. hoh, but not omocat!

no, in fact, omori is actually longer than earthbound.

and to what purpose? because after over eight hours, i'm completely checked out of this endurance tester designed to absolutely waste your time. and i'm not saying that in like a "every second of this game sucks" way, but a "no seriously, there is so much garbage and fluff in this game designed to waste your time". backtracking plagues omori like a virus as you juggle tasks and side quests that amount to a lot of holding one direction forward while running for five, six, twenty screens. worse, the game lacks the grace to let you run up and down ladders, so those to-and-fro journeys are best aided with a phone in your free hand. there's this minecart section where you slowly drift down a lane for two screens until coming to a missing piece that then... slowly sends you back another two screens. but perhaps the absolute most grating time and effort waste comes from trying to navigate absurdly inefficient menus.

no, seriously. here's how many actions i have to get through just to heal a party member with another member's heart spell.

1) b button for menu
2) 3 analog clicks to the right
3) a button to select "skills"
4) 3 analog clicks to the right
5) a button to bring up health character
6) a button to select healing spell
7) a button to select "use"
8) 1-3 analog clicks to the right to select character to heal
9) a button to heal
10) 4 b buttons to get out of all the menus and back into the game

holy fuck.

i'm being really hard on the game's pacing because it really, truly is miserable. it's annoying that nearly every object has a useless description attached--does pressing A on, what, a fire hydrant need to give me a text box that says "fire hydrant"? no shit. tell a joke or don't have the box at all. enemies respawn every new screen catching you in a battle with whatever variation of rabbit you're definitely sick of fighting by a certain point. the dialogue's the worst, though, and i'm not even yet discussing its actual quality: it's just so much. there's so much of it (like this review). there is so many words used and a fourth of them are to any actual merit. so much dialogue is wasteful, unfunny, flat, basic, and bloated, and you just sit through it hoping someone will say something interesting.

they never will. omori's a game that decides earthbound wasn't insufferably quirky enough and proceeds to ham it up to infinity but with little purpose, and it results in writing and a world that feels disingenuous. not always, of course--there's a very specific interesting contrast that occurs in the dialogue when you first go from real world back to dream world, and it feels poignant and interesting. this feeling also lasts a very limited amount of time as you realize, yes, you really HAVE been ripped from the curious part of the game and sent back to a creative wasteland, the game proceeding to hammer in a point you already got two hours ago.

let's talk more about that real world dream world contrast more but, first, the combat. it's actually pretty clever and i enjoy the synergy between your characters and how to manipulate that to take on even the biggest of challenges. but then, the game presents a different problem where MOST battle encounters will not actually involve using the system in any meaningful way, the simplest and most straightforward (and successful) way of fighting through your enemies being a mash A fest a la OFF. why? because nothing in this game has any fucking health. and you know what's really crazy about that? the people who play this game do NOT fucking care about the combat. oh, what, you think that's presumptious of me? at the time of writing this, only 29% of players bothered fighting and beating two optional minibosses early in the game. meanwhile, 60% of players finished the first dream world day (taking place post-minibosses)... which means another 40% didn't even bother to get that far.

what this tells me is that half of omori's actual playerbase don't understand the combat system and don't care enough to learn it, and they're just here for the very syrupy soft pastel story. oh, and i'm saying that with confidence because i'm among the only 10% that did not return a character's high five. it's telling.

additionally to combat, i really enjoy the effort put in to give several enemies different "mood" states that may reflect new animations and designs, and that's really cool. the battle ui is sharp, even, and its a great use of colors all around--easily beating out the utterly generic world design otherwise. but getting back to the real world/dream world contrast, what really bothers me about omori is that the game rips this system out of your hands and gives you something immeasurably boring to work with in the real world. but the thing about said real world is that it has the more "interesting" narrative going on and so, when you're sent back to the dream world, you've got the fun(er) combat back but are trapped with a half of the story that you don't care about or don't really need to hear. additionally, the real world shows just as much creative prowess as the dream world in its design--all a series of hallways. it's really flat.

there's moments of charm, like the sound effects similar to animal crossing on the gamecube, pushing over a cardboard dumptruck, and a character that holds a trophy for "most horse second place". and there are moments of complete reverse charm where the intention is inept, like a list of "whatchamacallit"s to collect, a character named smol, and that entire cheese rat segment that just goes on and on and on... like the game. like the game does. the game goes on and on.

i don't know, i've written SO much about this game i clearly don't enjoy, and a majority of where this is coming from really is in response to critical reception i can't understand whatsoever. and i didn't understand the reception undertale got six years ago and felt annoyed by its heavy presence on the internet, but then, well, i started playing it and the experience was instantly lovely, and there was no "oh dude just play thirty hours to get to the cuhrazey part!". it was fun from the start, like a video game should be, and half the length of omori, too. as is OFF, and hylics, and barkley, space funeral, ib, yume nikki--all of these brief indie rpgs i would recommend to anyone over playing ape inc's sloppy seconds.

when i look at omori, i certainly do see omocat in its design: bland, easily digestible, inoffensive, and round edged--just like those t-shirts. and then i realize what this game really is.

I realllly wanted to like Wario Land II. I was fine with the first one and Wario Land: Shake It is one of my favorite games of all time. The problem is that this one is just so...tedious. Maybe Wario Land is supposed to be extremely aggravating and I happened to play the oddball of the series first. Fully willing to admit that I was constantly getting hit and never getting used to the way Wario moved, so I can say that part of my frustration came from just not playing the game well. But even when accounting for that, some of the levels (especially the later ones) just got boring to play after the amount of times I had to redo sections to either look for treasure or just simply complete them. The branching path system displayed at the end of the game definitely was a surprise, I didn't expect a Gameboy game to have such a vast amount of content, but with the previously mentioned flaws, I didn't feel any incentive to go back and look for the rest of the unlockables and levels. Am I bad at this game? Yeah, probably. Is that likely hindering me from enjoying the game to its fullest? Definitely. Is it still pretty dated and flawed? I would say so, yeah.

There has been a lot of debate as to what can be considered a videogame. Many purists argue that if it doesn't include a fail state, it's not a real game.

I disagree. What Remains of Edith Finch is one of the best stories I've experienced in the videogame medium. This story could not be told in any other way. I urge everyone to give it a shot even if "walking simulators" may not be your thing. It's only about 2 hours long so you're not losing much.

I don't want to spoil much but the amount of detail and thought that has been put into each of the stories is mindblowing. You discover something new each time you play it. The visuals are stunning as well. The Finch house looms in the distance, like a tumour in the forest as you approach it. You can make out the personality of each member of the family just by peering into their rooms. The soundtrack is minimal but it blends well with the atmosphere. It's just an extremely well crafted experience.

i'm trying to think of when exactly i heel-turned on the pokemon series... i cut my teeth on third and fourth gen, returning back in time for gamefreak's arrival onto the 3ds with x and y, and the cracks certainly showed then, but nothing could have been more damning than the release of omega ruby/alpha sapphire, its absence of the beloved frontier explained away in an interview citing "well, who the hell finishes these games anyway?" and that sort of blew my mind, hearing a game director outright handwave inattention to the delivery of their own product with "oh, who cares?"

inattention... is certainly one word that comes to mind when playing pokemon legends arceus. the entire game feels cobbled together from breath of the wild's sloppy seconds, some mmo styled fetch quests and tasks, and youtube videos of pikachu running through an unreal engine wheat field, comments repeating one another with "THIS is the game eight year old me dreamed of playing!"

well, dream bigger.

here's the gameplay: you, the player, enter a map from rust with unloaded textures. in this ugly mess of morrowind bump mapping, you run around and collect resources. of the many things you can make with them, a pokeball is one, and that is how you'll build your team. once you've lobbed enough of the things at unsuspecting wildlife (or suspecting because you ran full steam ahead and threw the damn things like mad), your new goal is to train the team and fill out the pokedex... in addition to completing story beats, of course.

but let's talk pokedex. capture a 'mon and move on, right? wrong. capture 5 of that mon. kill 7. see it use 'ember' four times, and so forth. you do this for every single pokemon, these series of menial tasks designed to give players SOMETHING to keep them in their far cry 2 usermaps long enough so that they don't run through the game too quick. and you have to do this, by the way--the pokedex acts as gym badges do in the mainlines, each badge ("rank") allowing you to use higher leveled pokemon. don't give a shit about screwing around with budews and geodudes? well you better, and you better do it often lest you lose control of your own pokemon.

how about the battles? it's funny--i feel like the initial trailers made combat seem more involved than it really is, which is... your standard turn based affair, really. there's some reworked 'speed' stuff going on, but it's genuinely whatever you're used to from the mainlines with the strange addition of being able to walk around and harass the poor beast you're fighting (or, rarely, its trainer). it's fine, too--don't mess with what works. it's actually fantastic how smooth the transition is in and out of battle, too, a player in legends being able to cut through five starly in the same amount of time a bdsp player might take with just one. this begs a question, though: why no multiplayer? huh? it's the same battle system as anything else, so what's the excuse? why can't i go fight my friends with the shiny zubat i nabbed? gamefreak can't handle seeing me run around in an arena crouching really fast in front of the opponent?

let's get back to the map, again, where all these battles take place. there's not much going on in them. the moment you exit the city hub's gates and find yourself with newfound freedom (after an hour of excruciating tutorial), you see.... virtually nothing of interest. there are some poorly rendered trees out in front, and some... rocks to the left. some grass. there's mountains in the distance, but don't be deceived--this isn't an open world game. you aren't climbing that mountain. you're certainly welcome to piddle about around them, though, the only 'reward' for exploration ever being just finding large pokemon every so often (at turkey leg dangling higher levels, too). for all the ideas nipped from botw, creating intrigue in landscape design isn't one of them. it's just your very, very painfully average set of bump maps with repeating water textures, repeating dirt textures, repeating rock textures--

it's an ugly fucking game, is what i'm trying to get at.

"graphics don't matter!" graphics matter. they aren't the end all be all, but a book in light grey print on pages sopped with coffee certainly presents a more unenjoyable reading session than you'd like. it's questionable why the game is in this state at all, barely steps past the original alpha trailers. this is the part where i must iterate and reiterate: pokemon is THE most profitable media property in the world, eclipsing genuinely anything you or i can think of. gamefreak and the pokemon company bring in over 170 million dollars annually--so where the fuck has it all gone?

well, i can make a guess: straight into exec's pockets. these games hardly matter when the pokemon company's biggest source of income stems from merchandise of all things, so here's the position pokemon legends found itself in at gamefreak: the studio wanted to make a nintendo-hire-this-man type game, they were told "sure, and you'll do it in two years!" to which someone probably complained, asking why so little time, how they'd have to dramatically cut down the scope and intent, to which they were probably told "so?" among "it'll sell regardless" and maybe even "no one finishes these damn things anyway."

and that's where gamefreak found themselves, having to create a scope actually manageable. it has its good little bits that the team knew they needed to get right, like going in and out of pokemon battles, qol changes making managing a team easier than ever (choose when they level? choose their names after? hell yeah), and even the brief interest of just hearing a faint, familiar pokemon cry quite near you... but it all takes place in these ugly, lifeless worlds sorely lacking trainers, sorely lacking cities and towns and settlements at all, sorely lacking actual level design and creativity and care.

so maybe it isn't inattention. in all honesty, gamefreak probably did the best they could given the time they had and the ideas they wanted to work with, and they knew the shit that was bad... was bad. the end result is a barely fun gameplay loop with tried and true designs smothered in mediocrity, in fetch quests and genshin tasks, in a lack of art style and cohesion, in sandboxes that fail to justify themselves, in a story that i wanted to spend a paragraph writing about but what the fuck ever, it's a pokemon story, that shit was always going to be bad.

let me wrap this review up by describing the (spoiler free) circumstances leading up to deciding i'd had enough. i did my fair bit of exploring and leveling up, and it got very old very quick, so i plowed ahead with the story and ended up at a boss fight with baby's first dark souls mechanics on display--one i ended without even using a pokemon. this granted me access to a new area, and it was there that i found the same ugly level design but with 50% more brown. i hightailed it to a ruin (which was a large, square, empty box) and met a character who hated my guts. i found three bandits after a hyped up cutscene all to just face one level 23 pokemon, and then i returned to the ruin character who now suddenly loved me as a result, her character arc completed in the span of 5 minutes, and i then realized that if i wasn't playing any longer for the exploration, and i wasn't playing for the gameplay, and now i didn't even care enough to play for the story... then there just wasn't any reason to play a minute more.

gamefreak could've done better--even if you end up playing and loving legends, you may still find yourself agreeing with that sentiment. but they won't do better, and they won't have to when these games sell the incredible gangbusters amounts that they do. the pokemon company knows this, and that's why gamefreak's never going to get the dev time they actually desperately need. so long as half baked $60 early access crap like this is peddled out and sold in the millions, nothing will ever change. in other words...

should you buy pokemon legends, you aren't supporting a brave new direction to take the series. you're supporting a grindhouse dev studio forced into mediocrity, and that's the direction they've gone for the past decade, and it'll be the same till they or this series dies. just don't forget an arceus plushie on your way out.