My favorite JRPG of all time. A bizarrely structured and designed game from top to bottom. The story of which is you (yes, you sitting there) and the player character work in tandem to recover gems for a curiously 8-bit professor.

Beyond the story, there's so many weird little parts of this game like the weapons, food items, cooking, lockpicking, fishing, romancing, and even just petting the dog on your freetime that just require you to just...do the same tasks a lot.

It's an unconventional, grindy game that strives more to look and sound wonderful and it definitely stands in an interesting spot with its very rough game design. It often focuses on combat, which is mostly automated and works with you applying stickers for your stats and just having a better weapon/buff set up.

The main draw to me was the story which, I won't spoil, but definitely has some twist and turns that made me wonder if I even did the right thing or what you do through the entire ordeal was actually correct.

A strange enigma of a game that I adored but recommend with much caution.

I dunno. This is sort of cute and quirky but it feels like the whole of the game is just an excuse to get to the eventual twist ending.

It could have been a more nuanced exploration of identity and determinism or whatever, but it really just feels like they had this random idea for an ending, never thought about it further than that, and just made a weird rpg to get to that point.

I know it was directed by one of the Love De Lic dudes, but it definitely lacks the warmth and substance of something like Moon.

That said the skill system sort of reminds me of the SaGa games which is, like, sort of funny but also sort of appropriate.

This game mostly reminded me that I still have to play Michigan: Report From Hell (also directed by Akira Ueda). As a kid I always used to see ads for it on TV but could never actually find the game in stores.

Contact plays like Akira Ueda’s previous Shining Soul series, but with a bulkier, clumsier MMO combat system and a truly bizarre premise: the player as a middleman and liaison between a cutesy, pixelated space scientist on the run and Terry, a normal modern-day boy thrown into the mix a la Secret of Evermore.

Unfortunately, the game is littered with pointless skill systems, necessitates an outrageous amount of grind, and, disappointingly, its trademark contrast between the three parties goes nowhere, serving no meaningful thematic or mechanical function. Contact wants to subvert and confuse like Earthbound, but it lacks the focus, polish, and purpose.