Flower Sun and Rain. O que dizer? Classificar ele como "divertido" ou "chato" seria errado, pois esse se aproxima muito mais da expressão artística autoral do que algo que liga para o compreendimento das grandes massas de jogadores. Esse jogo quer que você SE ESFORCE para chegar ao final, mas recompensa qualquer um com uma viagem rica e única. Uma das histórias que eu mais amo dos videogames junto com uma direção de arte hiper criativa.

O jogo é arte pura. Usa da frustração do jogador em completar desafios inúteis para criar uma metáfora sobre a vida. Flower Sun and Rain não é um jogo, é uma experiência. Obrigatório para quem liga para art games, além de ser uma sequência ótima de The Silver Case.

this is terrible, but its also way more thought out than most games despite that lol

genuinely good pacing past the 5th mission, constantly funny and chill as fuck.

how this story plays into the silver case vns is amazing too, giving a lot of substance to the anti game design nonsense that this shit has beyond the spectacle of the massive balls a company had to ship it.

In FSR, you are Sumio, a sort of detective who has been requested to come to a resort island, and your mission is to prevent a plane from exploding by stopping the terrorists and the bomb they have planted at the airport.Except that isn't what you do at all in the game.

For most of the game you will spend your time going up and down the stairs of the hotel you are checked in, walking ridiculous amounts of distance on foot, doing weird and unrelated favors to oddball islanders and solving obtuse and inconsequential math puzzles, literally repeating itself each day, as you, of course, find yourself stuck in a Groundhog Day type time loop. At every turn and opportunity it gets, FSR will prevent you from doing your job by putting roadblocks on your path with the sole purpose of distracting you, annoy you and discourage you. And it's great.

Many would , rightfully so, compare FSR with Twin Peaks, it being a game filled with quirky and strange characters that speak in unnatural and uncoventional ways, and surrealist moments that suddenly clash with the mundane and grounded tone of the island. But a more direct influence, and obvious inspiration for Suda, stands out to me, and that is Franz Kafka.

FSR is the videogame equivalent of a Kafkaesque tale. A game that utilizes it's interactive component to put you in the shoes of the protagonist so you can feel his frustration and confusion as he tries to navigate a world he doesnt understand and reach a goal that gets progressively more unobtainable, with the island and its inhabitants constantly detouring you somewhere else. At many points during the experience the game itself will mock you, calling attention to it's meaningless puzzles, gameplay loop, or even the graphics. The fantasy of being on a vacation in a tropical island is slowly distorted by the premise of having you repeat the same day over and over again, adding already to the redudancy of the core mechanics of the game, and even the act of walking around feels like it's a joke on the player, having you constantly readjusting the controls due to the camera that seems to have a mind of it's own.

The sum of all these uncharacteristically unintuitive design choices for a videogame create a very unique narrative about the idea of being stuck at a crossroads, where the knowledge of the past and the fear of the future constrict the protagonist from moving ahead, and how life's circumstances constantly takes us away from the path we think we want to follow, and it's achieved mainly through just the act of playing the game. Beyond it's ingenious design, FSR is an extremely funny game, and sports a very chill and zen atmosphere, with it's classical music based soundtrack.

Think of it as Link's Awakening for the masochists.

completely unjustifiable and anarchic. what we have in FSR is a surrealist pseudosequel to a 1999 visual novel that was not localized at the time that FSR was, making the game upon original release borderline incomprehensible. compelling analysis can still be written without knowledge of the silver case, but the vast majority have settled into a comfortable deconstructionist lens - austin walkers interpretation is one such prominent take, evincing the game's dissatisfactory DS implementations (useless bonus puzzles, step counter) as part and parcel of the game's antagonistic design, antithetical to its own industry ('It's mean. It's cruel. I kind of love it.')

despite this, one of the most beautiful games ever and the work of someone i am increasingly convinced by the day is one of the most valuable devs in the industry. masterful in tone and delivery, FSR sharply threads together various disparate narrative and thematic strands to excellent effect, resulting in an anti-game package that stands head and shoulders above the crowd by closely resembling something akin to video game poetry. what does FSR pontificate on, if not to act the provocateur or to senselessly challenge convention? in no short order: truth, mystery, identity, purity, artifice, colonialism, primitivism, paradise, death, rebirth, spirituality. the influence of kafka, jodorowsky, and lynch, for example, is felt strongly, but never so strong that it is cynical or unoriginal - to be ensnared in suda's mosaic of cultural references is only to gain appreciation for the ingenuity of his work.

i think FSR and NMH's reputations precede them such that suda is seen as a figure whose sole developmental shtick lies in deconstruction and satire, but FSR is so much more than that - it only requires the player to ascend to match its level, to bask in the sunlight and take solace in ocean waves, to intuit what can't be sensed through mere deduction and speculation. truth is, after all, as natural, forthcoming, and innate as the bright blue skies around us, sometimes.

Really not as tortureous as people make it out to be. Funny as hell, really well written, puzzles were pretty fun to me even though they probably weren't even really meant to be lol (tbf, I'm so easily entertained and have such little standard for how i should be treated that i could see myself leading a satisfied existence as a factory worker). Not my favorite ktp game but the one i always go back to for its unique summery yet strange aura. Please listen to the ost, Takada is a based god who shows his love for us through reimagined classical pieces and jazz standards.

At the time of its international release, the critical reception of Flower, Sun, and Rain was probably justified; the core gameplay loop isn't traditionally engaging and as a standalone work it's story makes little to no sense.

But in 2020, where fans have realised that numerous titles Suda51 worked on are actually thematically and narratively interconnected, an unofficial series of games dubbed "Kill The Past", it's clear that Flower, Sun, and Rain is actually the sequel to Grasshopper Manufactures inaugural outing: The Silver Case.

Going in with The Silver Case fresh in my mind, I can easily say that engrossing, entertaining and esoteric writing continues to make me enjoy games that I would have likely never played otherwise due to the genres they inhabit (visual novels and walking sims respectively).

Not to mention the design choice to technically give the player all the answers to every single puzzle in the game in the form of The Lospass, an in-game guidebook that Sumio Mondo (the protagonist) is given during the second chapter, is actually the most ingenious move I've ever seen.

It's good. Play it.

Flower, Sun and Rain is utterly fascinating. There are so many interesting little choices all over this thing, all lending to the overwhelming feeling in 2020 that this game was light-years ahead of its time. It's a "walking sim" 12 years before Gone Home, it carries an antagonistic streak that Suda would eventually trade off for fun action, and it's a Twin Peaks-y video game nearly a decade before Deadly Premonition.

The characters of Flower, Sun and Rain are simultaneously more relatable and more alien than the characters we saw in The Silver Case, which makes for an atmosphere that is as welcoming as it is hostile. There's a constant ticking clock in the form of a plane you have to save from a bomb, but you're also invited to take your time and read sections of a full 50 page guidebook in-game to solve logic puzzles. The game loves these contrasts.

Something that I think will get lost in some of the discussion is that Flower, Sun and Rain is very much a sequel to The Silver Case. It's to the point where I personally think if this thing ever gets remastered it should have the Silver Case branding to make this more clear. This isn't a problem I have with the game by any means, the callbacks to The Silver Case are some of the game's most delightful moments. It just really has to be said that if you haven't played The Silver Case, you will miss out on a lot of what this game has to offer.

If you're someone that really appreciates weird games, and particularly ones that want to mess with you in some hilarious ways, then this game will be an incredible experience for you. There were a lot of little moments where I couldn't help but laugh to myself at how much Suda was messing with me. Loved this one.

I really don’t know how to feel about this game. On one hand it has one of the most intriguing and thought-provoking plots (even though it takes a bit to get going) I’ve seen in a game. And then on the other it has some of the most infuriating gameplay I’ve ever had to sit through. But I think that’s the point honestly. I really do think that this game is designed to make you hate it, and in that sense it’s absolutely brilliant. I think my favorite part about this game are the characters and the many themes that the plot explores. I would love to see this game get a remaster one day cause I think this game really deserves it even if it’s insufferable at times.

an odd one out of suda's ouevre. largely avoids the fixation on violence grasshopper's games are known for, foregoing the hard boiled cybercrime noir of the silver case, the post-9/11 sentai horror bloodbath of killer7, and the sillier nerdfighter grindhouse bloodbath of no more heroes (which would set a pattern followed by most of the studio's subsequent games as bloodbaths, with suda only occasionally as the director. its humor is also pretty close to fsr's at times). tonally very different from these but thematically very familiar, flower sun and rain should be taken as both sequel AND side story at once to tsc, and its very hard to talk about without also bringing up that game, in a way i dont think is as true for the more standalone k7 or nmh. there really is an appeal i'm finally starting to understand with taking tsc, this, and likely 25th ward--which is next up for me--as a trilogy with its own arc.

the silver case itself, as the starting point, is obsessed with the internet and the city, finding a formal link between the two. it's in the clacking text boxes, the film windows, the backgrounds with rotating numbers and flashing shapes and out of context phrases, altogether an abstracted space of words and pictures that feels like website presentation. its also in the player movement thats restricted to hotspots with rigid pathing befitting of street grids, apartment buildings, your home that you make the same linear motions in everyday. both feel non-naturalistic and cramped, but that just emphasizes the experience we have with these spaces. surrounded by cold geometric cells online and off, everyone so close together yet so far away. it gets exhausting, being unable to find ourselves outside of these boxes, to get some picture of truth. the game recognizes the need to reach for the light within yourself, outside of this darkness, but what would that even look like?

fsr shows a world "outside" by taking the reverse approach. your movement is "freer", your sense of space perceivable with the player character's own two legs in relation to analog control. hotel guests, staff, and people of the island get in your way to ask for "help", more or less, with tasks that are nonsensical in their solution and often ridiculous in their premise too, but the experience of it creates a sense you are working for a net good out of mondo's own developing kindness. you gain more and more of the world to move in until you eventually feel your sense of self stretch across long roads and pathways--literally as the in-game guidebook itself says. you can check bathrooms, take unnecessary detours, hear the rolling waves and the chirping birds. maybe this is where you can find the light.

but this "naturalistic" feeling of freedom the game allows compared to tsc, however, belies the truth of lospass's paradise as being just as artificial as the 24 wards, in a different way. the puzzles you help others with are just solved with codes based off relevant trivia from a pamphlet, blatantly mechanical logic as it can get (reminds me a little of riven, though the juxtaposition of natural and unnatural here is more unmistakably intentional). the staff hide themselves behind friendly smiles, and some of those you help may be tricking you. the hotel, a temporary place to stay, is the only "living space" you can find. structures feel too new, too slick, to feel some engrained identity behind them. the island lost its own past, perhaps even had it stolen, with whatever it is that looks like "history" you find not necessarily being factual. it goes beyond feeling touristy, it's like people can't really live and be oneself here for all that long.

what i like about flower sun and rain not being a silver case sequel in name is that its another way the game frames itself as an escape from the confines of the wards--meaning then that 25th ward may be a return to the grime so to speak, to confront that space again. fsr is trying to forget the past that built it, only to find a new kind of artifice that reminds you of the one you knew before. this doesn't mean the game is saying its escapism is ultimately useless and selfish though, because when you're in the dark it might be a matter of needing to see something different, anything else, to gain a better understanding of yourself and your past that made you yourself. new memories tinged by a new sun, even as artificial light, might be whats needed to really move forward.

loved doing math homework and taking daily jogs on my tropical vacay. ps the walking around wasn't even as bad as it was made out to be, you guys are just weak and need to break your brain like i did with aimlessly backtracking for no real reward in other games that have even larger and emptier worlds