This game does so many good things to improve the Fire Emblem format. The boss fights, which were always a weak point for FE are actually incredible, high stakes, and thrilling challenges. I love that they have many health bars and are aggressive against you. The somniel is some of the best hangin’ out time. The cast is vibrant and likable, but very much blank slates for you to customize. Gone are the days of anime chess, and instead we have insane amounts of choice for better or worse. The DLC however is terribly unbalanced and poorly integrated.

If I was ever going to play a mech game, I'm not playing the one by the Souls team, I'm playing the one by the Harvest Moon team!

Mechs in general don't really do much for me, so I was wary that the game might be unapproachable and overcomplicated, but I think this game strikes a pretty good balance for a “casual+” like me. There's also decent mission and landscape variety, and the early missions are fairly short and forgiving. I think using the trigger buttons was a smart way to design the combat of this game, however playing this in handheld mode or with joycons does not feel great. This game feels like it was designed to be sat in front of a screen with a pro controller or with the game’s custom handheld peripheral… not really designed for the vanilla Switch experience.

While this game is generally adequate all around, it struggles to maintain my interest too much or pull me back in after I set it down. The story doesn't have much intrigue. It introduces a ton of characters, so that you can later unlock them as teammates, but as a result you don't really feel connected to any of them. it’s hard to tell what the actual stakes are, and the enemies are undefined AIs without a clear motivation. There are some named enemies but the game has you destroy them at the end of each mission, so it does not feel personal. The progression is also slow and incremental, I don’t feel much different after an hour or two of playing. Overall it’s somewhat disappointing as a RPGish experience, but I’m ok with it being the type of game I can passively absorb over a long period of time, without needing to focus on. This isn’t a game I feel a need to finish or see everything, I can just chip away at if I ever want to jump back into a mech suit.

I’m tough on this one because it holds a special place in my heart. I love seeing Spira from this perspective and interacting with it in so many new playful ways. It’s close to greatness, but it fails on a couple of counts. First, the active time battle system is a little too overwhelming. I’m rarely in the mood for such chaotic battles. Secondly, the game suffers from too much optional side content required for 100% completion. There is something happening in almost every location during every chapter, and so if you want to see it all, you’re going to be stuck not progressing for a while. The game clearly tries to steer you away from it but showing the player the ‘percentage complete’ all the time activates my completionist brain. I intend to go back and finish it, but it’s fallen down my list of priorities unfortunately.

This game offers the player two different voyeuristic experiences. First, is the one the game designers created, where you creep around unlocking suggestive images. Second, is the one that you human behind the keyboard is doing, as you peer into the psyche of the type of person who created or consumed this game 30 years ago.

This is not a very good stat-raising game or dating sim. But it is sort of compelling, despite being very juvenile, aggressively horny, and having a messed up translation. The characters and their actions are often manipulative, creepy, or nonsensical in a way that is not making any kind of statement. The game, like many of its contemporaries, operates on its own game logic about women. This game avoids any attempt at self-reflection it clearly is just targeted at a certain kind of person at a specific place and time, and I think that can be interesting to experience. I would not recommend this game to anyone looking for the traditional things you get out of a game, be it storytelling, challenge, a sense of satisfaction, etc. But instead as an anthropological find, it's interesting.

It’s such a nice contained experience. It’s only about 7-8 hours to see most of the game, and the sense of humor and musical numbers are so much fun. The characters are very well realized, I love how Cornet’s relationships developed with Kururu and Etoile. My only complaint is that it’s incredibly easy. I set hard mode in the options before I started, but I still managed to get very strong very quickly and never felt in danger of having a character fall in battle. This really feels like a lot of care was put into it despite its relatively small scope.

The landscapes are the star of the show. The stunning environments slowly unravel and become more and more interesting as you navigate through the game. The game's symbolism is littered all over the island with breadcrumbs for the player who takes the time to stop and zoom in. The island itself changes meaning throughout the game, but the abstract nature of the story leads to many of the clues you discover becoming a dead end in a way that I'm conflicted about. As background ambiance the story didn't need much scrutiny early on, but as it becomes more prominent it also becomes more heavy handed, and it's easier to fixate on the flaws in the writing. I do not like the story or necessarily how it was told, which is unfortunate because you can tell it benefits from multiple playthroughs, but I have no desire to go back and fill in the gaps that I missed.

The game makes great use out of limiting the player to just walking, listening, and looking in order to create the atmosphere of helplessness and lack of control. The game teases the player with exploration but is actually quite linear, and unfortunately there were a couple of chapters I circled back to the beginning without really understanding where to go next. But you can't get too mad at a game that tried something and took some chances and did something very new and refreshing at the time.

I went in expecting the worst when it came to the game's performance, but I think I am more underwhelmed by the game's sim aspects. The performance is bad even with a decent PC, and the hitching feels worst. I empathize with Colossal Order, I think they ultimately got carried away trying to render too much geometry and likely had to release the game early and unoptimized due to contracts with Gamepass or Paradox getting impatient and wanting to start their DLC sales cycle as soon as possible. I think the game will always have this cloud looming over them even if a year from now the game will be running fine for most people.

Instead what I think is really troubling is how shallow a lot of the simulation feels after putting some time into it. Obviously Cities 1 had 8 years of patches, expansions, mods, etc. and this game is starting from scratch, but I feel like I've seen what the game has to offer much sooner than I expected. A lot of the improvements seem like they were done under the hood, and aside from a few quality of life improvements, this is highly similar to Cities 1, and there's no way around it. They could have gone further in any direction... making it more simulatory, more arcadey, something... but it's largely the same game.

Ultimately, the game is fine, and it will be a good base for CO to continue to develop on for the rest of the decade, but it does not make the best first impression. They traded in some old problems for some new ones, let's hope these are easier to fix.