I have to admit to having a certain bias towards Unicorn Overlord, and it's not just that I love Vanillaware. They're perfectly capable of putting out mid. (Guess exactly which games I'm talking about! If you're wrong I'll fill your bed with ants.) It's just that this is maybe the hardest Vanillaware has come for me specifically, as a person who loves old-school Fire Emblem. And also they came for me by putting Berengaria in it.

I'm going to be the smartest person on this website and not preface everything positive I say about the game with complaints about the story. Bitches see a simple, sincere fantasy RPG bursting with deliberately old-fashioned charm and be like "why did the developer forget to put in as many weird plot twists as they did in their sci-fi/mystery De Facto Visual Novel? Are they stupid?" The game is extremely effective at creating the ultra-specific vibe and tone that I associate with pre-Awakening Fire Emblem, but I honestly can't do a deep dive into my feelings about that without it becoming a long, terrible, disjointed, off-topic rant on which I've forbidden myself from going here, you're welcome. The point is, the writing (in tandem with overall presentation and particularly excellent voice direction, not that that's a thing Fire Emblem has ever had outside of maybe SoV) is in fact a huge part of why the game is an absolute delight to me. They know exactly what they're doing: feeding a niche that's been starving for years.

That said, none of them involve the words "boring" or "clichéd" but there are more interesting things to critique about the story. It is, in all fairness, a genre staple but UO does go heavier than most on being, just, relentlessly monarchist as a narrative--they're very much channeling Kaga here. (Do not be misled by my enthusiasm for specifically old-school Fire Emblem including a couple of the Kaga games, Shozo Kaga is fucking wack.) All the worldbuilding around Bastorias is also... look, we're gonna keep drawing Fire Emblem comparisons here, this was clearly an attempt at doing Tellius that falls really flat, although not as flat perhaps as a race of bunny people who were almost completely exterminated by the protagonist's own father and the one you recruit doesn't even care about that and it literally never comes up in the plot again outside of the one conversation with her and it only comes up in their supports as setup for a repetitive joke about how they want to breed a lot, get it they're bun[We apologize for this long, terrible, disjointed, off-topic rant about Fire Emblem Awakening. The reviewer has been tranquilized and will resume writing at a later date. Thank you for your patience.]

So the gameplay! Unicorn Overlord is a game with a vast breadth of different experiences you can get out of it based on what you put in. The core mechanics have a level of depth that can trap a certain kind of person on menu screens weighing their options for hours (this is a good thing), but the difficulty settings offer enough variance that you can either autopilot through it without understanding a damn thing or be absolutely required to master the system, to your preference. I didn't bother trying the lowest difficulty setting, but normal mode is already quite easy if you're getting absorbed in the strategy. The highest (starting) difficulty, on the other hand, is a hell of a jump--I think anyone who's complained about the gameplay being basic or too easy definitely didn't try changing settings. I won't pretend I stayed on it for most of the run--I basically 100%ed the game as I went along and ended up spending about 90 hours on it, which makes a challenge level at which you're routinely resetting battles a big ask. The game is also just not overly susceptible to being boring when you are having an easy time, since at least on normal you do still have to put together pretty strong units to keep cruising when you get to the later story maps. But I'm definitely cranking the difficulty up and committing to it when I inevitably replay the game a ways down the line--whenever I did dip my toe in, the tension was fantastic and all the mechanical depth felt heightened by how much more important it was to optimize.

A big reason I spent so long on the game is that even the overworld is honestly pretty great. It's shockingly big and dense. It's also just explorable enough for the process to be really addictive without feeling like a grind or a distraction from the main gameplay loop, and it's rewarding to do a lot of exploration because the economies for both gold and the secondary currency, Honors, are nicely balanced. Even doing basically everything, I never felt rich enough that I could just grab up everything I wanted in a shop without thinking about it, and it took right up until the end of the game before I had maxed out my unit slots with Honors, which freed up the remainder for weapon upgrades.

Oh, I did also really want to talk about the upgrade system! The idea of one in a strategy game sounded dicey to me when I first saw upgrade materials available in a special shop, not having encountered the game's only blacksmith yet, but I actually think it's genius. You don't gain access to the mechanic until the late game, and it accomplishes a lot of interesting things while also being rock simple: no matter which weapon you're forging, the upgrade just makes its stats equal to those of the highest tier of weapons (which can't be forged). This means getting to the smith is a huge explosion of new and powerful options, since you've been collecting weapons with useful secondary effects that fell off in terms of stats throughout the entire game--a thing that the game could do, making new equipment feel constantly exciting and juicy while maintaining an increasing power curve, because they knew the smith was coming and everything would be useful again in the end. Crucially it also rewards players with hoarding instincts, a moment of karmic catharsis that SRPG fans have had coming for decades. It's a relatively small part of the game, but it really stands out to me as a design masterstroke.

Probably the low point of the game is, just, everything related to what I guess I have to call the marriage mechanic. The fact that you can kind of a little maybe if you squint almost have Alain marry another man but not really is an extremely valid critique that I feel somewhat strangely about considering I mostly just think the game would be improved by not having a ludonarrative Marriage Mechanic at all. Sorry for still being salty about Fire Emblem, but I can just about, somewhat charitably, rate Alain average as a Lord. The last thing he needs is to moonlight as a fucking Avatar. And, true to Fire Emblem Avatar romances, even Alain's straight options that are actually explicitly confirmed are perhaps the blandest, most lifeless pieces of romance writing in the developer's catalogue. Still, as much as I'd rather just sidestep the romance, it must be said that I don't think Vanillaware realizes how gay their core audience skews, which is funny for a studio that made its name with a sexy anime opera about doomed romances between people with self-worth issues who can't decide how they should feel about their parents.

That's the heaviest ding I can give it, but I still think Unicorn Overlord is easily top three material from one of my favorite developers. It's a simple, nostalgic aesthetic experience layered on top of a vast, freeform, addictive tactical gameplay loop that can be as accessible or as crunchy as you choose to make it and, I think, will prove incredibly replayable for a game as long as this.

And don't let anyone fool you, this is peak fiction.

I had a friend once. A man I met under inauspicious circumstances. It was a trying time in my life, and at first, to be honest, I didn't trust him. An ally of necessity, not of my choosing. But if I can credit anyone with getting me through those hard times, it was him. Other acquaintances came and went, I couldn't tell if my ex was trying to help me or just using me, my second most constant companion kept getting kidnapped. But whenever I needed him, my friend was there, with a jaunty greeting and a cool new shotgun to sell me.

I lost that friend a long time ago. But recently, I've been seeing something wearing his face.

This new... "Merchant" has none of my friend's warmth or charisma. He has an oily, sneaky quality that some people seem to think is apropos. Are we really at the point of pretending Resident Evil, of all series, is too good for camp? Whatever happened to showmanship? My friend set the tone for the entire game, such was his force of personality. The only lasting impression I get from this wet blanket is of deafening, aching lack.

Also, the guy never shuts the hell up up. Who was it that decided vendor NPCs don't get enough voice lines in video games? Who decided they should periodically nag you about how long you're taking while you browse their wares? (No, seriously, what's patient zero? It's a very similar vibe to how all the companions complain every time you change your party composition in Baldur's Gate 3. Unpopular opinion apparently, but I like it when games don't make characters constantly whine at you for engaging in basic, necessary gameplay functions that should barely even be diegetic.)

When I was a child, a kind girl named Navi literally just said "hey" or "listen" about once every fifteen minutes if you were wandering around somewhere other than the critical path and she was absolutely reviled, pilloried and stoned for at least a real world ass decade. Just for being very occasionally heard. Just for trying to help. But this pod person, this soulless imposter, this fucking Cockney FRAUD stands here and belittles me every fifteen seconds for sitting in a pause menu pondering how I should spend my money in a game where scarcity of resources is a core mechanic, and gamers are silent??? The real Merchant was more than just a funny meme man, sir. He was a CONSUMMATE. CUSTOMER SERVICE. PROFESSIONAL. You really wanna bring this kind of naked rudeness with your only fucking customer? You think you've established that kind of rapport with me? You bring shame on his house.

And to all the sycophants and enablers, who settled for less and let this character assassination pass? History will remember your cowardice.

Anyway apart from that it's a great game! I was really worried about how it would sort of interact with the original in the cultural memory but I think we got basically the best case scenario, where it's a different enough beast that both versions have lasting creative value. It's not as replayable, I think--I always play a new Resident Evil early in the year when it comes out and then replay that October, but I got bored and went back to Armored Core during my RE4make replay--but the action just feels so good and Ashley is much more of a character.

I'm a retro Fromsoft fan now, nobody can say shit to me about not liking Demon's Souls.

Truly I just don't see what about it is supposed to not have been done objectively much, much better in basically all of its successors. Everybody talks about the atmosphere being so much more haunting and surreal than Dark Souls, and like, I've played Shadow Tower: Abyss and that's the game it sounds like they're talking about when they talk about DeS. When I think about what sets Demon's Souls apart visually from its successors all I can conjure to mind is every texture being greenish gray and every lighting source being horrendous piss yellow bloom. Genuinely fuck ugly game to me, and not because of the polygon count.

Combat is just straight-up bad--people don't really talk much about just how much better the basic gamefeel is in Dark Souls. Yeah, Dark is slow and, affectionately, clunky compared to a lot of games in different subgenres, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it's as big a jump in speed, fluidity and depth as Bloodborne was after it. Your dodge roll, even at low equip weight, is such dogshit in Demon's Souls that in almost all situations it's unironically more reliable to just continuously walk backwards while the rock-stupid AI swings at nothing every few seconds instead of doing anything you have to react to. And of course I'd respect this game not really being focused on combat, if not for there being 18 billion enemies in every level. You might as well play Drakengard, which is at least tedious on purpose.

Of course DeS does have some weirder ideas that didn't carry over into Dark Souls (1), and I'm a big fan of weird ideas, even if the execution is really janky. Take World Tendency, easily the biggest example and the thing Fromsoft has made the fewest overtures towards continuing to evolve (although I'd argue Insight in Bloodborne serves a similar function). The ways in which you manipulate World Tendency are incredibly janky and inconvenient, especially now that the game is offline-only, but that's the kind of thing I'm eager to forgive. But the levels changing into "good" and "evil" versions based on your actions is such an amazing concept.

What kinds of things do they do with it? Well, in levels... 1-1 and 3-1, in pure white tendency (and also pure black for 1-1, it's the same) you gain access to a small new area with some important items in it. And in every other, uh, world, not level, there's one NPC you can talk to for a basic fetch quest in white tendency and that same NPC invades you in black... and...





[shuffles notes]


Okay I swear I had a list of all the other cool things that happen due to World Tendency but--hm? Oh. Huh. Hm. Hmmmm.

So, yeah, interesting but janky I can fuck with. But in order to be interesting the game has to do something. That's what kills me about Demon's Souls; I would absolutely adore a weirder, even more unforgiving ancestor of Dark Souls, but it's not actually weirder in any way that matters. All the stuff that would make it so is an empty promise, ridiculously underbaked not just in quality of life but in substance.

Also the remake is fine, I played both versions so I can say that too, I hate this game and I played it twice because I don't want hypothetical people on the internet to think my opinions are invalid why isN'T ANYONE FIXING ME

"The characters only have a few conversations with each other!" pop quiz, in no fewer than 200 words describe the fleshed out and engaging relationships between Garrus and Liara or Astarion and Wyll

"It's so grindy!" unironically skill issue, sorry the combat system expects you to learn it instead of brute forcing the entire game with Big Number

"The stories and characters are boring!" you are not worthy to be a worm in the dirt upon which Primrose Azelhart walks

Okay, so I've been militant about this game as like... 5-10% a joke for years. In seriousness, I can acknowledge it's a flawed gem, especially now that it has a sequel that absolutely transcends it.

But I love the anthology-style story, as uneven as the characters are some of them (see above) are great, the artstyle and especially the music should be the stuff of legends, and the Octopath combat system is simply my favorite for a pure RPG, all time. It has a ton of depth but it's also so punchy and bombastic, the sound design alone on the break and boost mechanics is satisfying on an almost indecent level. There's no dopamine rush quite like fighting a group of enemies, systematically wearing down their shields so that they all break on the same turn, and vaporizing them with a fully-boosted AoE spell. It's a system that's tense and challenging and asks a lot of you strategically, and at the same time routinely makes you feel like a wrathful god if you use all the tools at your disposal and meet those demands. Absolutely peak.

The worst thing you can say about Octopath Traveler is that it's not Octopath Traveler II, but that's a devastatingly cruel comparison to make for most games.

I think history is being kind to this game, but I really believe that if we all work together, we can put a stop to that. Literally, all time, the most disappointed I've ever been about preordering a video game. That is not a joke; I was optimistic about fucking Star Fox Zero and it didn't burn me as hard as Arkham Knight.

The story? Dumbfuck Edgelord Sociopath Batman With No Redeeming Qualities at his most All Those Things, being menaced by the like three most obvious plot twists of all time simultaneously. (I remember with perfect clarity the moment I knew for sure I had made a terrible mistake having faith in Rocksteady, and it was when Batman tortured a guy by driving a car partway over his skull like a fucking cartel hitman.) The gameplay? At its best it's the same shit as the last three games, but you spend genuinely a solid two thirds of it playing a mediocre tank battle sim instead. But hey, at least you could make the tank look cooler with some of the shitload of obnoxious microtransactions and preorder bonuses!

The story, again, I'm not done complaining about the story? They killed off the Joker two games into a quadrilogy and still made him the main villain of all four games, I couldn't come up with a joke that scathing about Batman writers being terrified of trying to have an actual fucking idea. To be fair, when they do try to have ideas they come up with "you can run people over in the Batmobile without killing them because it has a taser force field that instantly delivers such a powerful (but nonlethal!) electric shock to anyone that comes within two feet of the car that, even if you're going 120 miles per hour, they are guaranteed to be tossed clear before you can hit them," a concept several orders of magnitude too fucking stupid to fit in with the Adam West show here employed in the service of being Dark and Gritty. Rocksteady was aching to have Batman just go full spree killer and as much as that would suck shit, they might as well have gone for it considering the entire game is just agonizingly dumb for the paper-thin pretenses on which they avoid it.

Also: the "I am vengeance" speech at the end is like. The apotheosis of shallow, masturbatory references to older and better versions of a franchise and Kevin Conroy clearly knew it because it was the most phoned-in, begrudging-ass line read of his entire career. This is praise for Conroy, to be clear, what an icon. I'm so sorry you had to be in this game and the Suicide Squad one, king, RIP.

Granblue has been my fandom-in-law through my best friend for years, so I'm just glad it's finally in a genre I can play.

I wasn't sure what to rate this, honestly; it's not that the highs aren't high, but most of them have a fairly significant low attached somewhere. The combat is great, so much so that I'm actually enjoying the postgame grind, but the way said grind works can be cloyingly reminiscent of its gacha game roots (despite not involving a real money gacha). The main story is more than charming enough in its context as a simple, self-contained onboarding point for a universe with years of sprawling lore, but even my Granblue friends are appalled by the writing in some of the Fate episodes. My favorite character has the same exact conversation with a little boy who has a crush on her about eight or nine times! It's genuinely torturous!

I guess what it comes down to is that I don't think I could really call Relink a great game, but it's good enough that I'm well past credits roll and still planning to spend a lot more time with it. I'd like to see more of these, honestly; I think with some further evolution it really could be something special.

Easily the second-best RPG of 2023.

I don't think it's really worth doing a deep dive into my opinions on BG3 because even though I didn't play it until December, I can kind of already feel it not really making much of a lasting impression on me. Like, it's good. I think it actually says a lot that BG3 is one of the very few big choice-driven/immersive simmy WRPGs I've been able to enjoy at all, which is why I'm not making this review a weird, intense rant about the genre as a whole.

But like... I dunno. That's just kind of all. It's Good. A well-above-average execution of a pretty old set of ideas about game structure and progression that I've always thought were radically overhyped. I guess it's kind of like Breath of the Wild in that respect, where a game comes across as revolutionary mostly just because it combines the basic appeal of its genre with, like, actual decent game des--oh I'm doing my WRPG rant AND my open world rant, I'm terribly sorry. Anyway.

Yeah, I had a lot of fun with BG3. Got messier in the third act, as everyone says. The combat can hit great highs, the game does make it feel really rewarding sometimes to solve a problem in an unorthodox way, and there's some decent character writing elevated by phenomenal performances. The plot is... certainly the events of the work devised and presented by writers as an interrelated sequence. (I couldn't, like, tear it apart as something fundamentally broken in construction, but the more they revealed about what was actually happening the more I kind of checked out in terms of personal investment.)

I'm almost inclined to call a shot that a few Larian games from now, a lot of people are going to turn on them and form oddly angry opinions about how overrated they've always been, with BG3 as a major sticking point. I'm not wishing for that or anything, I just feel like it's usually the fate of AAA games that become huge, huge critical darlings for high art value despite... kind of clearly being more of a really solid popcorn movie affair. That's kind of where I'm at with Baldur's Gate 3: it's the best MCU movie.

play Octopath Traveler 2

holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, why are video games so GOOD

I haven't played any of the other games in the King's Field metaseries (yet). I got here mostly because a lot of people were going around recommending it to everyone who liked Lunacid, last year's really good indie tribute to them. The influence is impossible to miss, but Lunacid is still going for quite a different mood from the source material; Shadow Tower: Abyss is a lot less friendly and nostalgic, and it's even more atmospheric and mysterious--perhaps the most so of any game I've ever played.

It's kind of amazing just how strong of a case it makes for art direction over graphical fidelity, and that's coming from someone who's been playing that tune faithfully for decades. Fromsoft was still dealing in the low budget range in the PS2 era, but even by their standards... let's just say you could show me quite a few screenshots of this game telling me it was on the PS1 before I got suspicious. It's not even like it's a really early PS2 game, 2003 was around the middle of the console's lifespan.

And yet, however angular the models and crispy the textures, and despite its world and inhabitants often being deliberately grotesque, Abyss's overall effect manages to be hauntingly beautiful. The environments are highly varied, but I don't think I'll ever get the sort of main hub area out of my mind. You walk around on earthy platforms suspended high in a vast, pitch-dark cavern, lit neon green by sources clearly neither natural nor manmade, populated by bizarre creatures that just stare at you with obvious distrust and speak to you either in cryptic, just-short-of-hostile sentence fragments or not at all, and all the time you'll periodically hear strange, loud noises that seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. Like Jesus CHRIST, guys, leave some cool spooky vibes for literally every other game in the world! There are poor Metroidvanias starving in the Epic Store!

But the enigma of this game goes beyond the aching need to see more of its fucked up world. I finished it, and there are very few questions I could possibly answer about its core RPG mechanics. The controls and UI are, affectionately, riddled with retrojank and nothing in the game explains itself even a little beyond item descriptions that spare maybe five words for the purpose. There's no map aside from the occasional crude one scrawled on a wall, and the level design gets labrynthine. You can full heal by sacrificing a piece of equipment at certain spots, and you repair equipment by sacrificing some of your health at others. There are items I picked up that I never figured out any use for at all. What the hell kind of stat is Solvent? What's the difference between Mind and Mentality? What do these status effects actually do? Okay, you have a carrying weight capacity and if you go over it it slows you down, that's perfectly basic, but I can't seem to drop items so I guess I'm just in slow-mo until I get back to the little shop node and pawn some things off, might as well keep picking up looh my god I'm moving even slower now and TAKING A SHITLOAD OF DAMAGE OVER TIME WHAT--

I'm not usually a "don't use a guide" kind of girl, but seriously, don't try to use a guide. I'm not convinced you'll find one that answers a lot of these questions, anyway. The game is honestly, and surprisingly, not super hard as long as you stock up on healing potions and watch the extremely fragile durability of your gear. You don't need to optimize, and it's more unnerving and intriguing than frustrating to get lost in these levels. Combat is extremely basic aside from a cool dismemberment mechanic (most enemies will not necessarily die if you cut off their heads, fun detail!), but that's because it's not the main draw. The game is also pretty short, maybe a ten hour joint or so.

Play Shadow Tower: Abyss. I can be cagey about actually universally recommending games since my tastes can run to the esoteric and janky, and that's extremely the case here, but I don't think that does anything but enhance the experience. If you have literally any interest in dungeon crawlers or surreal, dark fantasy as a genre or aesthetic, play it. You deserve to give this game a serious try as much as the game deserves to be a household name.

I played FE5 almost as a joke so my friends could watch it kill me in real life. I don't even like FE4. I wasn't prepared for this game to own. I wasn't prepared for it to unironically be series Top 3 material. What the fuck.

With a lot of beloved hard games, the refrain is that they're Hard But Fair. (I think it started with God Hand commercials?) Thracia's difficulty probably lives up to the hype, and the game is amazing, but I cannot overstate how much it's not fair. One of the great things is that it's hard to sum up why it's so difficult, because it's not any one main reason; the game is inventively sadistic. Every other chapter it pulls some shit that warrants brand new amendments to the Fantasy Geneva Conventions. In one map you may have to outrun an entire squadron of wyvern riders with Killer Lances who spawn closer to what you're trying to protect than you do and you're on slow ass mountain terrain. In another, you want to turn a bunch of powerful enemies into friendly green units by allowing them to talk to specific other green units, with no ability to steer either party toward each other, and also the enemies who are still red will immediately start butchering the turncoats. The game is an endless bag of absurd, dirty tricks being played on you personally, and it's honestly both hilarious to fail and immensely satisfying to finally solve the puzzle.

There are also a ton of little mechanical quirks, some of them infamous and none of which would be back-breaking on their own, but the cumulative effect requires your entire strategic mentality to be completely different from in any other game in the series. For example, most stats cap at 20 for every class, and a lot of your units honestly have pretty great growth rates, so that drastically changes the value of something as basic as EXP. The game actually has a Konami Code-style cheat you can use on the main menu to literally double everyone's EXP gains, but there's debate over whether it actually makes the game any easier. You gain items over the course of the game that increase a unit's growths, so everyone ballooning two thirds of the way to level cap before you get most of them can actually kind of fuck you. Love it or hate it, I think it takes an incredibly interesting game to make a unilateral gigantic level boost potentially disadvantageous to the player. Also, you've probably heard that healing can miss; that's not actually one of your bigger problems (though it can really come in clutch to ruin an entire plan sometimes), but it is an extremely funny indicator of the game's overall attitude towards the player. There are a lot of other innovations you don't hear about as oddities because they simply stuck around; weird and brutal as it is, the game feels shockingly modern (or I suppose I should say "like a 2000s-era Fire Emblem") compared to the other Shouzou Kaga games.

But the most important feature, and another one you've probably heard of, is the capture mechanic--you can actually nonlethally disable enemies (and steal all their shit)! But something you might not pick up on until you're playing the game is that it's basically your only source of income. You get a pretty typical number of items from treasure chests and villages, sure, but enemies never drop anything when killed, shop prices are fucking exorbitant and you NEVER, at any point in the game, get any money in any way other than selling items. There aren't even gems or anything that exist only to sell for a lot, everything you can sell is potentially useful in its own right and you get peanuts compared to how much it would cost to buy the same thing. It's not a minor or optional mechanic; if you like it when your army has weapons, you need to be capturing on an extremely regular basis. It makes for a really crunchy, interesting in-game economy where you're basically always tense about your equipment.

Luckily, the other really important thing about capturing is that it's really fucking hard and dangerous. You have to defeat the enemy anyway to capture them; you can't do it on enemy phase so it often requires some tricky baiting; some units can almost never do it at all because you need higher constitution than the enemy; doing it with other enemies around will definitely get someone killed because you have severe stat penalties while holding a captive; and worst of all, using the Capture command instead of Attack also gives you stat penalties. It turns out fighting with edged weapons is harder when you're trying not to kill the fucker, what's up with that?

This also means the better the loot, the harder it is to get, since rare and valuable items tend to be carried by stronger enemies who are deeper behind enemy lines. You're basically running a cost-benefit analysis every time you see something you really want; you may have to stick your entire head in a blender to get it, but can you afford to pass it up? The game is hard right now, but it's not gonna get any easier later on, especially if you're not building a stockpile of exactly this kind of resource. That extra Warp staff will be a huge lifeline. Did I mention that the guy is using it every turn, so by the time you get to him and take it, having run fucking pell-mell through an obstacle course of siege weaponry and cavalry that overextended you for the rest of the map, it has one cast left? The game is littered with honey pots like this, where it dangles something you DESPERATELY want in front of you, then makes it so difficult and costly to get that you don't realize it's not worth it until you're already hard committed. I hear you laughing at me, Kaga, you weird chauvinist fuck! This still doesn't make you cool!

So obviously I'm an idiot masochist, but there is more than pain here. Counterintuitively, for how much you're suffering, you get to fuck around with some of the strongest units in the series. (Relative to the game around them. Their stats cap at 20 they should not fight FE10 units--) You form the kind of attachment to characters like Mareeta and Asbel, to name just a couple of the more extreme examples, that you can normally only get with people you've ACTUALLY been to war with. They're your fucking rock. A fixed point you can rely on when you need them most.

It also helps that, in moderation, you get to be just as sadistic as the game. I know I just spent a small novel hyping up the scarcity of resources, but the thing about the game making you fight like hell to get anything is that it can make a lot more crazy stuff technically available. You won't get out of this map with a Brave Sword, a Sleep staff, a promotion item and two Silver weapons--but with some elbow grease you can probably get a couple of them, and that actually gives you a lot of freedom. Your toolkit is both limited and potentially really potent, and sometimes you realize you have the right combination of staves or something to completely ratfuck a challenge that looked impossible at first glance, as a reward for having worked hard earlier in the game. That's a rare, amazing feeling.

Okay, this is a stupid sentence but it's my review and it can be stupid if I want: I haven't played Pathologic, but FE5 kind of makes me feel the way people describe Pathologic. I mean, I wouldn't call them similar games, the narrative here is not exactly high art, but it's a story about being a scrappy underdog rebel faction fighting a huge empire and the gameplay genuinely commits to that feeling. It is impossible to forget while playing this game that everything is working against you, you have nothing but what you can desperately claw out of somebody else's hands, and you cannot win by fighting fair. Thracia really is a harrowing game, but inside the infamous struggle is something that sticks with you; something bold, fascinating, and incredibly rewarding.

although Saias being arbitrarily immune to Sleep and Silence in chapter 22 is fucking--

Without a trace of irony: god bless Vanillaware's hardline stance against game balancing. GrimGrimoire and 13 Sentinels are the only RTSes I've ever played and I am not here to learn how the genre works. I beat the original back in the day pretty much entirely by repeatedly summoning dragons and I regret nothing.

That said, I think it's a good sign that OnceMore made me really enjoy branching out more. Everything that's not dragons feels a lot more distinct and effective, and the fast forward button is a tremendously important addition. It's not as complete a transformation as Odin Sphere Leifthrasir, but Vanillaware is so good at jazzing up their classics with new game mechanics. The original I mostly considered noteworthy for the developer standard knocked-out-of-the-park presentation and also the lesbians, but OnceMore I can really recommend as an actual great game.

The obvious Harry Potter references have unfortunately only gotten exponentially more cringe, but the story is a cute, weird diversion nonetheless. And OnceMore contains a huge number of brand new gorgeous art CGs--you unlock one after every battle, and the fact that most of them are essentially little slice of life micro-vignettes helps make the characters feel a little more fleshed out.

I don't have a summary here, so, I dunno, buy Vanillaware games. Buy them for full price! I Am No Longer Asking.

Remember Ocarina of Time: Master Quest? Where they just kind of did a big random remix of the content in a normal game that was designed with purpose, and it was a kind of amusing novelty but clearly, objectively worse than the original?

Remember how Master Quest was like a bonus disc thing and not billed as a remaster and sold for full price? And how they didn't just treat it as the definitive version in collections and stuff going forward?

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A solid kiddie pool version of Devil May Cry stapled to maybe 10% of a just-about-average RPG. I didn't have much of a horse in the "should Final Fantasy pivot to action" race before it came out, and I guess even after playing it it's like, Okay, the results are Okay, this was maybe the Okayest game I played in 2023. It's just that you might hope a huge, deliberate change in a long-running series' identity would be, for better or for worse, more interesting than Okay.

Honestly, the RPG elements are so vestigial that I don't know who or what they're for. Surely nobody who was mad about Yoshi-P's comments about turn-based JRPGs was appeased by this incredibly perfunctory crafting system? Why do you level up in a game where leveling up has no non-numerical effects and there's not enough exploration to ever encounter enemies that aren't close to your level? Why do you have party members if you can't affect their behavior or equipment or skills or stats in any way and also the main one is Jill, a Dedicated Young Woman with No Characteristics? It feels like a game full of insincere half-apologies for being what it is.

The combat is quite good, if very simple and easy by the standards of the genre it's aping. It feels good to hit dudes with your sword, and Square-Enix has definitely struggled with that type of gamefeel before. It was a good idea to bring in Ryota Suzuki. I wouldn't want to throw around strong words like "depth," but I feel like the eikon powers give you just enough variety to be able to make relevant choices about your playstyle.

Sometimes people gas up the story and I feel, like, just a little secondhand embarrassment? I mean, I've seen. Worse stories about sci-fi/fantasy racism. That bar is not high. Clive as a character has his moments, I guess, but they're brief and don't amount to much. I wanna say the story gets dumber the more the big main plot (which has almost nothing to do with the racism plotline that dominates at least two thirds of the game and never gets a climax or resolution) unveils itself, but really it's a pretty uniform background level of dumb, the endgame is just more boring because you're not waiting to see if certain things pay off.

It was just kind of really funny seeing this get nominated for Best RPG when 1.) that's stretching the definition of RPG and 2.) it is not even fucking close to being the best RPG released by specifically Square-Enix in 2023.

I'm glad you were here with me. Here at the end of all things, Zinaida.

When it became official that I had gone insane and was going to Play Every Armored Core, I knew Last Raven had to be the last one. On top of being thematically the end of an era, it is by reputation the hardest game in the series, or depending on who you ask, the hardest FromSoftware game ever. I made the right choice, because this was an incredible note on which to end my idiotic nerd ass journey.

First things first: I think the difficulty is somewhat overhyped. I could be wrong; they say Nine Breaker, piece of shit that it is, is supposed to legitimately teach you how to play Armored Core properly. Maybe it actually worked. Maybe I'm good at video games now. Either way, Last Raven is definitely hard, but for my money, if you know how to counterbuild there are only a few really extreme spikes. It's not a grueling game. For my money.

More importantly, it's just, fuck. FUCK, this game is good. It further refines Nexus's big mechanical changes and then gives you drastically better material to engage with them. The mission design here is just about peak; there are a limited number of maps and it pulls that Another Age trick of having multiple missions where you're on different sides of what is clearly the same incident, but the map design is great (mostly), the scenarios are rich and varied and keep you guessing, and the pacing is airtight.

Combat itself is also incredible. This is my favorite arena in the series; I beat most fights in one or two tries but they were brutal, exciting tries. The AI behaves differently in Last Raven than in most games, but I don't know if I should say it's smarter or slightly dumber. Enemy Ravens have preferred strategies, are aggressive yet reactive to what you're doing, and generally seem to behave more logically--which can make them more predictable, in a good way. They're not pushovers (infamously, every single one of them has Human Plus/OP-INTENSIFY effects even though the player can't get those in this game), but beating one really feels like you're outsmarting a rival.

In general, the level of polish and depth on display here is as much what makes it natural Grand Finale material as anything. There's such a sense of completeness to Last Raven; every game that came before it was study material, and this is the exam. It's oldgen Armored Core in its most evolved form. There's a sense that something has been perfected, not in the sense that it's totally without flaws but in that it's realized its full potential at being what it is. It gives you kind of an insight into why AC4 was such a huge shift in direction; where the hell else would you go from here?

The story is kind of gonzo (affectionate), if only because of the structure. This is the first game in the series with multiple endings, and the one with the largest number at six (or seven, depending on what you count). The way this works is: a single playthrough is only between ten and fifteen missions long, you're choosing between several mission options at almost every stage, and there's an absurdly intricate and totally invisible pathing system in which previous mission choices dictate future options, eventually locking you into an ending.

Use a guide. You can get your first ending blind if you want (I did), but if your goal is to find everything yourself I do not know how long it's gonna take you. This is all paired with the ridiculous (affectionate) premise that the game, representing about a dozen discrete fully organized combat missions carried out by a single person, takes place over the course of 24 hours--you know, like that TV show. What was it called again?

This wacky progression structure is a double-edged sword, though; I consider it both one of the many good things about the game and probably the worst thing. It's a type of ambitious jank I tend to love and respect, but it must be said that on top of playing through six times for the six endings, according to the guide I'm using it takes at least another four to complete all missions, which is the requirement for unlocking a sort of EX Boss that I very much intend to get to. It's a short game, but ten runs is pushing it, especially considering how many times you have to repeat certain missions to get to the new ones.

In a lot of ways I was surprised by how forgiving Last Raven is, considering the reputation. As in Nexus before it, it's honestly quite difficult to lose money on a mission; even if you barely survive, most payouts are going to be larger than expenses on the order of a full digit or even two. Nexus's tuning mechanic no longer costs you anything, either. The upshot is that if you're importing a save and getting a head start on collecting parts, you will have more money than you could possibly spend at pretty much all times.

This is important context for the parts damage mechanic you may have heard of, in which it's actually possible for parts of your AC to be permanently destroyed so that you have to buy replacements; with how rich you are, this is not a major concern. And frankly it's very rare anyway; you have to be VERY near death, and even then it's far from a guarantee that a particular body part will have taken enough hits. The mechanic is more of a funny curiosity; it's kind of hilarious to get out of a really clutch fight and see the default legs on your AC in the garage.

That said, when the game decides to get really hard it does get really hard. A lot of people wholeheartedly advise you to give yourself an approximation of Human Plus with cheat codes; if every enemy is using it, why not level the playing field, right? I definitely don't blame or judge anyone who decides to do that, but I was having a good enough time that I didn't want to. The final boss of the sixth route, the most notorious fight in the game, almost broke me. Part of what stopped me is that it seemed so impossible at first that I wasn't sure how much H+ would even help.

But it was, unironically, a skill issue; I wasted a lot of time overthinking what build would be best, but I ended up literally just doing it with double rifles. All you need for Zinaida is patient, defensive play, good movement fundamentals, and Execution. Can't relate to people who get tilted at her. I for one love to see a girlboss win.

Armored Core: Last Raven is absolutely one of the best games in the series. I can't recommend it enough, but it's definitely worth playing at least through the rest of gen 3 first. The whole experience is designed to be an Ending, so make it a satisfying one.

Good work, Ravens. Let's head back.