CWs for Wandersong: familial death, body horror

Wandersong is an earnest adventure-platformer. The game is packed to the brim with RPG homage and stapled to the dinkiest toy keyboard you've ever played with. The meta-narrative move to have the player characters discuss being or not being The Hero isn't really interesting to me when it's being on the nose or working through homage. The same thought, however, is really phenomenal when characters are dancing and bouncing off one another in this kind of comics and theater kind of mode. It's quiet and somber and kind of strange when you realize things do and don't revolve around you.

I have a lot of love for Chunithum. Sega has continued to make some of the most innovative and delightful rhythm game controllers to wrap your head around. Hitting an Air-Justice feels cool as hell and nothing Bemani has done will compare. Unfortunately Sega is not letting their team actually design the whole game. In maimai and Chuni both, there's just a bunch of songs and they hope you figure it out on your own nerd.

Where the Bemani sound team can effortlessly compose your climb through the ranks to more or less equip you for next big jump in difficulty, Chuni displays some of the weirdest gaps in patterns and general hand placement expectations I've ever had to stumble though. You'd think by the twelfth entry they'd work master notes in earlier but I guess not! The gatcha style character and skill system further muddles any attempt the game could make at describing your progress. In what feels like full combo-ing in Bandori with a C clear, I hopped into this game immediately getting AAA-S on sight read for 10-12s, but I'll still fail maybe every 2 in 3 songs while trying to experiment with skills.

I can't understate how joyous it is to use this controller, but the feedback of the game as a system beyond slipping and sliding and smacking the air creates so many deeply unpleasant moments.

CWs for Get in the Car loser, homophobia, transphobia, nazi iconography, racism, stalking, partner abuse, blood, partner age gaps.

Christine Love's rosy love letter to an era of Square-Enix somehow already lost, Get in the Car Loser throws you right into most genre-y genre thing ever with a mock gacha-fied remix of FF13 smash cut with 15 and random pulls from the rest of the franchise. The UI is lush and intoxicating without leaving genre conventions (the gacha pull screen is right out of KHCoM), but struggles a lot to unify or direct you to the behemoth amount of info coming at you in combat. All of the abilities and their flow are pretty discernable if you're an RPG freak or just a disciplined tool tip reader, but the combat puzzles don't necessarily hold you to learning everything. I have a mostly fun time with this game and did not once need to grind, but it's easy to see where that would happen for most.

Love misses a lot on the political content here (maybe fitting considering the kind of fantasy we're pulling from) but the sense of character when everyone is together and not taking a nose dive to do the worst Eva Instrumentality episode ever is absolutely immaculate.

There's a lot shoujo, JRPGs, slapstick, and YA greatest hits here. It'll all sing if you're willing to give it some space to become discernable, but will understandably be dull to many without the patience.

Easily one of the most elegant RPGs I've ever played and it's not even done yet. I Hate You, Please Suffer delivers a sense of antagonism that lives up to the title with a stellar and kind DQ remix grind hiding in the mix. Dungeon length, encounter rate, and quest design line up to give you exactly what you need to continue while driving home the urgent sensation of feeling like you're on the verge of getting evicted. I hit credits before even getting the last party member, so I'm packing this up until the full version is out.

CWs for The Legend of Sword and Fairy: sexual assault, kidnapping, blood, drowning, falling from great heights, getting crushed to death, fridging women.

Despite finding out about the franchise less than a week ago, it is unsurprising how familiar The Legend of Sword and Fairy feels. It may sound extreme given the very small footprint the game has on English language internet, but I think we don't arrive at FFX or the general modern tradition of cinematic RPGs without this game.

The maze dungeons overstay their welcome and a lot of the love triangle beats are deeply unpleasant to sit through given the ending, but the scale of the world and the way the cast members rotate as witness to each others' lives is so so so compelling. Sword and Fairy makes very delicate moves within the usual genre tools (skill progression, forced party changes, one-way map connections) to express loss and a general lack of control amid a magnificent, tumultuous, and reserved magical tragedy. An absolute must and a likely missing puzzle piece for RPG fans young and old.

This is a very bad Ace Attorney game that's loops back around to being very funny for me. There's a massive loss in tone, style, and character identity that is felt with the lack of Shu Takumi on staff, but the breeziness of the trials and the sheer amount of anime bullshit they cram in here won me over. I hate how streamlined investigations are and it's sad that most of Apollo Justice is basically scrapped, but they added a ESPer Scrappy-doo girl, turned Apollo into a Yamato reference somehow, and threw in an evil version of Phoenix that lectures him about hope and despair. They very poorly try to copy-paste the slow Trials and Tribulations build up (again!), but I could not take this shit seriously if I tried and I seemed to have had a better time with it than most because of it. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go eat the fuck out of the DLC where you defend an orca in court.

A game so painfully intimate that it often feels like the screen is bleeding, despite the complete lack of blood. Fallow is a reserved but maximalist RPG Maker adventure game with a very precise sense of time and mourning. Fallow compels you to move and look in claustrophobic ways; it drags your eyes across the digital mud and tries to pull your lids down to cry. Looking and searching for the path forward is such an intense and often discouraging experience, pulling you into a death throes of a world decaying along with our perspective character.

I don't really mesh with the world view here or the relationship to suicidal ideation deeply enmeshed in this game because of where I'm at in life. I also don't like a lot of the prose for the kinds of post-modern and psychoanalytic influence, but those are very narrow points of a much more gestural whole that I really really love for all its unresolved and unabashed misery.

A casualty of scope creep, NORCO consists of many methodical and haunting tone pieces and prose paintings that sparsely link well or command time effectively. I really enjoy the narrator writing, the broader strokes of mood, and the qualities of southern Louisiana and New Orleans brought forth, but the adventure game plotting doesn't give space to breathe or reflect in the way that I'd like. Combat feels tacked on and so removed from violence that the larger set pieces become the least exciting.

The most fun I had was zipping around the swamp to different text entries, just kind of getting washed over. I wish the more game-y parts were slower and less desperate to feel like a puzzle or to throw a bunch of character gags that felt out of place with the reflective narration. NORCO is quite fun and I'm happy it exists, but it's a little confused on its own identity and the kinds of politicized and class constructions it wants to discuss.

The dying breath of Castlevania is a really lovely and exciting surprise after the rest of the trash on the DS. Ecclesia is the most refined the RPG elements of the franchise have ever been with a reserved greatest-hits assortment of movement options. The world map + small castle is a really economical move; there's only so many ways you can connect the damn castle. I don't love the quests, but I also always potion through the end (though this is the first time in many releases I've enjoyed fighting Drac) and the quests seem like a fine way to route you through end-game grind if that's your thing.

The constantly sexy promotional art and amnesiac plot really had me worried, but Shanoa is earnestly very very cool. Her amnesiac plot is pretty basic, but a surprising amount of NPC dialogue is here to firmly state that there's nothing innate about womanhood; that our material experiences, memories, and connections are what form our personhood. Refuting the over-wrought burden of sacrifice many try to fix to the experience of being women, Order of Ecclesia offers a methodical and laborious rediscovery of memory and franchise past for the purpose of letting go.