So before I moved to Southern California I almost never ate fast food. Living in New York if I needed something cheap and fast in the middle of the night I'd just get a slice of pizza, or maybe Chinese food, hell maybe even a bodega sandwich. Then I moved out here and started grad school and found myself eating Taco Bell or Jack in the Box 2 or 3 nights a week because it was the only thing open at 1 in the morning. I guess it became a habit because now getting fast food and eating in my car in the parking lot next to the drive-thru is like a weekly occurrence. My go-to spots are Taco Bell, Wendy's, Popeyes, and In-N-Out, and I can't really eat at Jack in the Box anymore cause I had too many of the gnarly 2-for-a-dollar tacos and now everything from there makes me nauseous. (Psychosomatic?) When I first moved here I'd never tried Del Taco before, and my first experience I remember being like "this is awful, it tastes like nothing." The mild sauce tastes like someone literally just squeezed a tomato onto your food and the hot sauce tastes exactly the same but it makes your tongue tingle. The ingredients are all pretty fresh. Unlike Taco Bell it doesn't feel like you're eating a simulacrum of human food. It just kind of feels like someone made one of those Old El Paso taco kits, but they somehow lost the seasoning packet so they had to raid their own spice cabinet but all they had was salt and some cumin powder that expired 3 years ago. After that first experience I figured I'd never eat there ever again. But every once in a blue moon I'll find myself getting a craving for it. I eat at Del Taco probably once every 3 or 4 months now, and it's nice. I wouldn't say it's "good" or "tasty," but in some weird way it hits the spot.

ANYWAY! This was like... fine? Got to the final boss and kind of just didn't feel like finishing. But it wasn't a bad experience, just kind of a bland one. If they ever make a sequel I'll probably play it.

The controls are tight. Cool, diverse skill set. The enemy and level design are nothing special but aren't terrible. Some decently challenging boss fights. Lots of goodies to collect. A little on the linear side for a Metroidvania. The art is really well done, if not exactly my taste.

Does not tug on the heart strings or 'make ya think' as much as it seems to think it does. There's an area of the map filled with poison gas that quickly kills you if you don't have a special mask item, and it's straight up called "The Verboten Domain." That's the level of poetry we're talkin' about here lol

Also: Games have GOT to stop doing the Dark Souls "have a bunch of flavor text vaguely point toward a story rather than just telling you a story outright" thing unless they actually know how to write evocatively and have a lore that's WORTH BEING CURIOUS ABOUT!! Like idk, I'm an obsessive completionist so I picked up all of the notes or letters or engravings or what have you and what I can tell you is that this game is about princesses. Who are sort of like clones, maybe? And there was like a plague or some shit, for sure. Turned people into zombies, sort of? A king went mad at some point, definitely. I don't know who "The Ancients" are but they're definitely important. And some well meaning (?) wizards did some evil experiments or something? Whatever, who care.

✨𝒄𝒖𝒆 𝒕𝒘𝒊𝒏𝒌𝒍𝒚 𝒑𝒊𝒂𝒏𝒐 𝒎𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒄 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒈𝒍𝒐𝒘𝒚 𝒑𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒍𝒆 𝒆𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒔✨

WHAT?
HUH?
METAL GEAR?
HOW?
WHO?
THAT NINJA...
PSYCHO MANTIS?

An evolution of the first game in every aspect, the combat that was already great was improved even more, the styles are much more balanced, Tiger remains my favorite and the standard for dealing with smaller hordes of weaker enemies, Crane which was almost useless in the first one because it was much weaker than Tiger is actually useful now, it is very satisfying to use and the new skills are welcome, and of course there is also the new style, Snake, I admit that it was the one i least used, but it was more due to the preference for the other two than the usefulness of the style itself, it is focused on dealing with armed enemies and is the most difficult to learn how to use well, but it is still a good play style, changing styles is also very fluid, so you find yourself using all of them often. The secondary content is impeccable, I already liked the side cases from the first one, but the exaggeration of tailing missions severely harmed the game, in the sequel the side cases are much more fun and diverse, and we also have the School Stories, which by themselves are better written than most games i've played, and I don't recommend playing this game without doing them all. The main story is impeccable, there isn't a part that I found uninteresting or worse than the rest, it's all very well written and directed and the villains are the best in the franchise, facing the final boss to the sound of Unwavering Belief is one of the best moments of gaming. It's really difficult to find anything to criticize about this game and nothing detracts from the overall experience, this is the definition of a 10/10, and knowing that it's RGG's most recent game gives me even more hope for this franchise.

The infamous larp scene, how could anyone possibly forget?

LiS: True Colors was a controversial title even before release, not because LiS 2 was a flop and already tanked audience expectations, but because of Alex Chen. One visit to the official content posted on YouTube is enough to summarize the public perception of this character, her powers of "empathy" in reality are powers of telepathy, you'd somewhat understand this from the trailer but the fact that it is not framed as such doesn't help the case for this game.

LiS: True Colors loves to play safe, all the characters are different shades of nice, for a murder mystery the game is too relaxed and never do the stakes feel like they are weighing down on Alex. The town seems to be healing her slowly and you can't help but root for her a little, Alex feels like a complete character even when she seems to have a bit of a savior complex as she's going from person to person fixing their issues. I like this aspect of storytelling, but it's unsophisticated nature begs for more exploration, these depictions of LOUD emotions that can manifest for Alex as she is slowly consumed by these powerful emotive forces are accompanied by simple but effective imagery and changes in the environment, and all these segments are fun. You're in for a treat as you see these wonderful fluid animations, Deck Nine gives a gentle wave of goodbye to the long gone days of characters with stilted fish eyed faces with quivering lips as they talked.

Besides an offputting internal conflict and resolution for Alex in a neat 20-30 minutes in the end (which has been the main point of contention for mostly any sane person who played this game), Deck Nine made me feel thirsty, thirsty for more plot developments, thirsty for more character interactions, thirsty for more conflict, safe doesn't mean bad and it was necessary to give confidence back to the franchise and this title does exactly that.

True Colors puts LiS back on the map, a hope that seemed stifled after LiS 2. But it's fate lies in the hands of the game that proceeds it.