God I finally fucking finished this shit. Where The Third was a big forward facing world expansion, Hajimari is a fucking victory lap. The way it doubles back on everyone's arc in the main plot is a little exhausting, where I often found myself wishing this was just C's story with occasional interludes with the rest of the cast. It's all really slight, which might feel like a downgrade considering how strong a game Kevin and Ries were able to support, but the main star is really the Reverie Corridor and the daydreams. The goofy ass expanded cast is so nonsensically power-scaled to reflect who's in the spotlight of the Erebonia arc that I can't get mad about shit like the Liberl team being horrible units. The numbers go up a ridiculous amount to the point where I feel bad for the bosses. The Reverie Corridor is definitely a little too long at a high level view but if it kept dripping out daydreams I would have never complained. If Trails had to pivot to being a VN should Falcom crumble, it might be to its benefit. Falcom has such a rich sense of character that they can put whoever the fuck in front of me and I'll clap and laugh like a seal. Sure hope Kuro is a little shorter 🫣

Really lovely game that will be a YA RPG cornerstone for decades. Holds itself back trying to do too much normal RPG stuff with horrible dungeons and muddy stat growth when it could have benefited from a tighter puzzle battle approach and an earlier integration of the Yume Nikki-type segments. It also would have been great to have had table setting for the bespoke twist sooner so that it could actually mean something other than being some twisted fucked up shit, but the character work and the vibe cultivated by the art and music are so so vibrant that I really don't care so much.

Middle of the road shmup with a neat cast and setting but really half thought out shot and power system lacking clear character diversity. There's a huge risk-reward system as you have improved shot while grazing, but focus shots are very situational and lack the same graze benefits. Enemies tend to drop just one power up so collection is more important than clearing the screen, but obviously certain enemies will be bigger hazards. Each character has mostly the same speed so there's a very singular way the game wants to be approached for the most part and that means just fucking dealing with the actual obstacles while you scramble to collect. I like feeling weak in a shmup but it feels like emerging genre staples were just kind of copied in (tap vs focus shot, breakable boss parts but they do nothing) The player needs just one more tool or a standalone focus to approach situations expressively.

Beautiful and methodical pseudo-fanfiction about the works of Kenji Miyazawa and really more about his legacy in culture. There's a big element of this game absolutely not having the same takeaway about Miyazawa's works, especially in the way this game thinks of the Galactic Railroad, but it is making delicate and future-looking moves with the adventure game formula that grip the RPG Maker community to this day that make it real easy to not get so hung up on that. Ihatovo Monogatari imposes a quest to chase down a fleeting mythical figure against the daily mundanity of the downtrodden workers, farmers, peasants, and youth. While you float through fantastical moments, life moves on: the young family moves south for the winter, the scorned worker is chased out of town suddenly, the boy you helped out last week died of a fever off screen. The things you chase in life can only amount to the character of your actions that get you there. Live wisely, fiercely, and kindly to struggle along side those who surround you.

CWs for Elsinore: Drowning, knives, body horror, torture, dismemberment.

A very exciting attempt at Shakespearean gaming that makes a bold pitch without too much substance behind it. Managing the time loop and all the disparate leads rocks for the front half of the game. Elsinore Castle has a strong sense of place and all of the characters are just rendered enough to both capture the play and suggest a larger thought about Hamlet. The game however breaks away from the original text a little too strongly and suddenly and reads a lot more like fanfiction without critical reasoning for the alterations made. Some of these alternate threads are really exciting, but the ones which are weighted as end states are too dull and head-nodding, punching back their chance to shine to instead hand you a list of monologues to pick from before credits The in your face Umineko references are frankly a little ridiculous when this game ends up demonstrating nothing about how WTC handles the gravity of time loops because I was definitely not playing with the intention of "saving" Ophelia at any point. Elsinore is a fun adventure-like Hamlet dollhouse to pick at for its opening hours or so, but if you're looking for careful thoughts on the original play or a tightly composed time loop narrative, you're not going to find it here.

CN for Void Stranger: Sexual harassment

A lush and witty sokobon-hybrid that stumbles over making sense of its mutli-genre style brakes. The way the tile swap game slowly shifts in and out of a Zelda-like dunegeon crawler to a La Mulana action-riddler is really breathtaking and exciting, but I ended up feeling way less about this as it came to a close. Where Zeroranger effortlessly lines up its sparse narrative with the stressful emotional player-arc of trying to 1cc a shmup, Void Stranger boasts a generic mélange of "don't give up" vibes that fails to celebrate its own strengths or its genre heritage. The constant micro genre-shifts really are delightful, but they walk too far away from the core frustration-to-lightbulb-moment cycle of this kind of puzzle game. I like the grunt work and guess-and-check solutions this game makes a player deal with, but after a certain point I really do not need to descend the tower twice per reattempt of the final sequence. I thought the problem with this game would be having too much text, but besides the dull swing at a System Erasure cinematic universe, the story is perfectly tender and understated despite all the women being naked for the entire last third. What I'd really like to see from System Erasure in the future is a bit more follow-through on the clear central design idea and an understanding of where to put the period on the game. Void Stranger is a blast and really so so so exciting to pull apart but it's far too gray in-between the text behemoth of La Mulana and their own debut arcade joyride.

A dramatic improvement over the main game that fails to do as much damage control as Torna did for Xenoblade 2. The logical connections to the franchise universe are made more clear, but I didn't want any of that in the first place! It's fucking weird but mostly very funny to make Shulk and Rex dad guys. Junya Enoki is great as Matthew here but he's also literally just playing Itadori Yuji. All that's really achieved here is getting to the caliber of shitty Chrono Cross, down to having very similar farewell scenes at the end. The modifications to the exploration and combat is a cool mix of old and new, but it fails to enrich or remedy the ludicrous gaps in the main game. Future Redeemed mostly highlights what really should have been in the game in the first place, in the sense of more obvious callbacks via environmental objects and narrative details, neither of which would be an issue of further dev time. The length of this expansion is its saving grace and, along with Torna, is a constant testament to the fact that Monolith should be making shorter games.

CWs for Xenoblade Chronicles 3: body horror, mind control

A very beautiful and patient young people's road trip RPG via the absolute sobriety of FFX which is unfortunately and devastatingly ruined by a botched retreading of Xenogear's big twist late in the game along with a generally shallow back third. The ways in which this game decides to be a Franchise Sequel at the last moment completely guts a placelessness and emptiness of the world that really flavored the meandering coming of age journey that most of the game is. This shift makes the unremarkable geology of the world instead feel like poor design rather than a meaningful choice, where clear environmental callbacks are discarded for indiscernible house-style melange.

The character work done in the first two thirds of this game is easily the best Monolith has ever done and then it gets spat on and torn apart for every hour the game continues after about chapter six. Literally everyone's character arcs have been resolved in totality, yet everyone is dragged around as they must bumble through resolving the equally incomprehensible nightmare of Xenoblade 2's ending. Entire factual details are left out or hidden at the margins while the combat goes completely unchanged for thirty grueling and needless hours. I cannot reiterate how much I loved this game and how severely I soured on it as it developed. Begging the powers that be to free Monolith from making Time-on-machine farms and have them make weirdo shit again.

CWs for Chrono Cross: child abuse, sexual harassment, burning alive, mind control.

Maybe the boldest and most tender RPG produced at Square pre- and post-merger, Chrono Cross is a pastoral re-phrasing of Chrono Trigger's thesis on the will of the individual. Where Trigger gives you buckets of endings to fulfil the endless possibility of time travel and the player's will as represented by our avatar Crono, Chrono Cross says you must live in society. Every day may feel like you're working with systems beyond your individual control which you don't yet understand, but the people you surround yourself with, how you order the tasks set before you, and who you share collective memory with create a bold and irreplaceable picture of life. Simply designing a vibrant world and filling it with life in animation and visionary approaches to pre-rendered backgrounds grants Chrono Cross a precious vitality I've always wished could poke through in Trigger.

The combat system is a little dinky and it's unbelievable that this game still runs like dog shit on its modern ports, but most video games to this day wish they could land their fantasy allegory for modern society like this game does so effortlessly. There's not really that much nuance because it just doesn't need it! Living in society has boundaries and structures that can hurt and help us and it's in our power to band together and do something about the ones that harm, send tweet.

CWs for Hashihime of the Old Book Town: graphic sexual assault, abuse, pedophilia, beheading, graphic violence, body horror.

I've had a really hard time assembling my thoughts on this one! Hashihime of the Old Book Town has some odd edges for being a Taisho period piece with not too much to say about the era in terms of global military movement, but it's often completely secondary to the moment-to-moment. But then I find myself very lost trying to piece together what that moment-to-moment is: something about delusions, having expectations for your life, career aspirations that muddy your connection to reality and your loved ones, or a poisonous obsession with the past. Something really provoking occurs when it's all happening at once, the modest period piece lounge jazz-y score, the anachronistic super flat CGs, and the drab cityscapes in the rain, but I think it still ends up somewhere very simplistic in the way that romance tends to. There's maybe a larger statement being made through the heavy reference to Yumeno's Dogra Magra that I'm completely missing, but that's where I'm at! This is a very fun game with a lot of fantastic revision to the middle era of BL VN where it's just normal about the BL stuff up to a certain point. I wish the routes were a bit more even or maybe in a different order, but I can't wait to hit more from Adelta.

A flagship to all those games that want to talk about work outside the sim genre, Even the Ocean is a methodical puzzle-platformer essay on how the mundane and crisis moments of the individual and society shape one another. Fantasy electrician labor is made into an independent state Uber model (why is every indie game about labor like this), your coworker dies gruesomely the first day on the job, and you persist against all odds. Aliph has a loose metropolitan society and no proper coworkers to inform how they should react to being left for dead and silently accepts the hero's accolades along with being wrung out for more deadly work outside the job description. I really dislike the moments trying to bespoke about its fantasy elements because obviously I know that Shinra is evil and that I should not destroy the giant stone wardens of the planet, but our hero-electrician's plain acceptance of the clearly evil work is a really great vehicle for refrained the disaster tourism of video game levels. The game is functionally paced by having to clock in and out of work before levels. Along with a little breakfast stand that dots the way to work, a very small touch is all Even the Ocean needs to pull out mixed drudgery of life with wage labor. The NPCs speak as if they've been gutted of something precious at a spiritual and social level while the fantastical elements of the world are trying to yank a hero does not exist within Aliph. I'm pretty down on the narrative and thematic bow tying that gets dropped suddenly at the end, but I generally enjoy the way the game culminates and the sensations delivers on the way there.