I really wanted to like this game. A roadtrip through 70s Italy, picking up hitchhikers, chatting with strangers, and seeing where life takes you is such a strong pitch for a game. But when I tried to play it, it all felt a little too messy. The conversations had an odd flow to them and constantly interrupted each other as every person in your car wanted to talk to you but when you spoke to one the others had to quietly sit and wait there turn. Some of the conversations were actually pretty good, some were interesting ideas that lacked execution. Probably the game's biggest issue was how bad the driving felt. You can leave it to auto-drive the whole time (which I did as much as possible) but getting prompted to do races with people or tailing missions meant having to manually drive which felt miserable and oftentimes it wasn't even clear which other car on the road I was following or racing. The good parts of this game just weren't worth the frustration of the bad bits.

It's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of criticism the game faced was for technical aspects that have been patched and now vary between "acceptable" to "completely fine". The game itself feels pretty good to play and might be the best feeling game in the franchise in terms of combat and movement. The writing is all over the place, though. Something like 30-40% of the writing is actually any good and the rest can go in the bin. The biggest, glaring issue with it is the colonialism is off the charts. "Oh, we're going somewhere no one is so we can settle new homes! Oh wait, there's an alien species here already? That's okay, shoot half of them, befriend the other half, and continue our settling plans without any change!" fuck off

There was enough good stuff in it that I wish they'd do another one but with how poorly it was received I doubt they'll take another crack at it.

Incredible vibes. I honestly love the tedium of this game: driving your car and operating your spotlight and interacting with the little bits of the world. It's just flipping switches and pushing buttons but something about following a specific order every time was satisfying to my lizard brain. Starting every mission and wondering what sort of giant creature I'd see next was always a treat. I love the little shitbox sedan with a spotlight strapped to the top of it. I love the weird mixtape of chill synth music and old radio plays. I love the dense fog and barely seeing the outline of something massive in the distance. It's a little janky at times (I got my car stuck in a ditch twice) but it's worth putting up with the little bits of weirdness.

After about seven hours (and 16 chapters?) I can't put up with this game anymore. The combat feels bad, the story is bland, the characters are mostly unlikable. There are plenty of interesting ideas and things that I want to like but none of it was coming together so I had to tap out. Seven hours oscillating between boredom and frustration is a lot more than I'd give to most games but The Last Story wouldn't give anything back.

The combat wants to be tactical but has too many limits on it for it to really give you the ability to think about engagements. You can order your allies to do specific actions but only when your meter has charged up enough so oftentimes they'll just hang out and maybe do something useful if they're feeling generous. You can use Gathering to draw aggro but I found that usually just results in death because of how limited healing is. The automatic attacking feels bad and makes it hard to move but manual makes it hard to dodge which became more and more necessary the further I went. It all felt so clumsy and like it needed some more refinement to make it all come together properly.

The characters. I wish I liked the characters. But Zael is just some bland guy, Calista is a generic love interest, Syrenne is 50% jokes about alcoholism and 50% sexual innuendo, Yurick is a jerk, and Lowell is a misogynist. Dagran and Mirania seemed alright, at least, but they weren't enough to salvage the cast.

The main plot is a pretty generic JRPG story, for better or worse. I've played more than enough of them to see this and have a solid idea of how it's going to play out and it wasn't enough to make me want to put up with any more of the un-fun combat to see it through.

Also, it is very funny to me that the title of this game is just a synonym for "Final Fantasy". They wanted it to be a Final Fantasy game so bad that they even named the dang game after it.

This game... kind of actually rules? Or, at the very least, I'm an absolute sucker for stories that reveal mysteries in two different times. The slow reveal of what happened to Ashley's mother and what happened to D's father was fun to work through and carried me through most of the game. Otherwise, the game is a pretty solid adventure game. The puzzles are never too easy or too obnoxious (aside from a few that required tedious backtracking). And it even makes good use of some of the DS's mechanics with the folding screen, built-in mic, and touchscreen, which is another thing that I'm a sucker for games doing. It almost feels like this game was crafted specifically for me.

On the one hand, the puzzles in this game are really good. There's a lot of very clever design and well-engineered moments that make you go oh. But on the other hand, some sections of the puzzles have accessibility issues that make them incomplete-able (for certain types of colorblindness or anyone hard of hearing). When asked about the accessibility problems, Jonathon Blow said something along the lines of 'you don't need to play the entire game' which is a pretty shitty and casually ableist thing to say. Just add some options, dude, it's fine. It won't ruin your stupid game.

There's also the problem that Jon Blow is kind of shitty. Remember that time he said women aren't as good as men at programming because of some kind of horseshit biological reason? Yeah, the dude sucks. Anyway, ignore all the audio logs and weird philosophy videos in the game and just do the puzzles. Or maybe play other puzzle games, I dunno.

This game does have some of the prettiest video game trees, though.

edit: docking a star for Jon Blow continuing to be a real piece of garbage, seriously fuck that dude and get vaccinated

Foregone has a very strong start with a good gamefeel and a striking visual style but falls off the longer it goes on. The third act of the game has increasingly mean level design and encounter design straight out of the "what if more" school of thought to the point that it became hard to discern what all was going on at any given time because the screen was so covered in enemies and effects. The story barely exists for most of the game and then at the tail end it does a dramatic reveal and a little twist to try and give it some kind of emotional impact and utterly fails at it which is accompanied by perhaps the funniest ending choice I've seen in a while. "Would you rather save the world, like you've been fighting for, or just give up and let evil win?" golly gee I wonder. Also, the skill tree feels mostly pointless? What's the point of giving me a skill to invest points in if it only increases my damage by 1%? I'm a believer that when you have a skill tree, each individual skill should have a noticeable, meaningful difference when you play and that describes maybe half of what's on this meager tree. The first two thirds are a pretty fun time, if a bit breezy, but a slog of a late game drags the experience down.

A fun little thing! It's maybe a bit short (I finished it all in under an hour) but maybe it's better that it doesn't overstay its welcome, y'know. Not a fan of the complete lack of tutorials. It's mostly straightforward but it relies on your knowledge of RE4 for combining things and doesn't tell you reasons why you wouldn't be able to finish a level (guns not loaded, not enough health, etc). Just some minor tutorialization would've been nice. Not a huge deal but it would've been nice.

Also, I really wish this had a "zen mode" or something where it gives you the maximum size case and a random smattering of items and just let you organize them in whatever way best pleases your brain. That's the thing people really liked in RE4, right? lining everything up in whatever way they decided was best/most organized? Feels like it's kinda missing out on a major thing people liked.

The art is pretty good with a few particular screens that look very nice and the chill music compliments it well. I personally wasn't a fan of the rhyming writing and felt like had more than a few lines that were real clunkers, either stretching for rhymes or didn't fit any particular rhythm.

The puzzles made this the kind of adventure game that I'm not a big fan of. It expects you to go everywhere, click on everything, and use every item on everything else. If you try to think logically about what to do next you won't get very far because you need to think like an adventure game and occasionally poke a frog with a needle.

The choice to make the aliens so obviously racially coded is pretty bad! You have aliens come and abduct someone and still turned it into a white savior narrative! Bad!

One of my things about this game is when you get a new object and it's unclear what exactly it is. You need to organize is somewhere, so you come up with your best guess as to what it is and sort it accordingly. Maybe you see a white triangle with some yellow on one side and go "Well, I guess I'll call this a tent and put it with the outdoors objects, next to the trees and mountains." But then you talk to a friend or see a stream of someone playing and they get that same item and go "Ah! This is a block of cheese, I will sort it with the food objects" A food? That's not a food, it's a tent! You can't eat a tent! But then you see someone else get that same yellow and white triangle item and they say "I Do Not Care about the thing itself, it is a yellow background and so it goes with the other yellow background items." How could they do that?? Putting a tent next to rings and hiking boots and dinosaurs. How will they ever find anything with a sorting system like that!? And yet these are all viable ways to play Wilmot's Warehouse because it's ultimately about whatever system works best for you. There is no "optimal" way to play like there is in most games because the most "optimal" way is for you to play in whatever way makes the most sense to you and I think that's beautiful.

A great follow-up to one of my favorite indie games! It expands on the original's mechanics a bit to add to the game in addition to just having a bigger world with more things in it. Getting 100% completion felt a bit more tedious that in the first game but I think that's an pretty small complaint compared to how much joy this game brought me overall.

At the time of writing this, it is exclusive to Stadia and I think that's a bad service so maybe wait until it's out on Steam or EGS or wherever and play it then.

To some degree, I don't know what I expected. It's a Dragon Quest game. Of course it's going to have pretty basic turn-based combat, a straightforward job and skill system, a generic storyline, and the same art style this entire series has. But there's always a part of me that goes into a game, regardless of what it is, thinking that maybe this'll have something special in it. Maybe it'll just be a lil nugget of an idea but there's at least something for me to latch on to and obsessively point at and exclaim "No! No, you don't get it! This is secretly really good!". But Dragon Quest IX seems to be sorely lacking in that "something special" department. I'm sure playing this on emulator and completely missing out on the various online features (co-op play, doing dungeons with people, whatever else there is there) makes for an incomplete experience but, if I'm being honest here, I don't think I would've messed around with those much had they actually been available. I'm just not much of a multiplayer gamer these days.

I need to talk about how miserable grinding in this game is but I don't want to get too long-winded and mechanics-dense, please bear with me, I will do my best here. The game expects you to grind. A lot. This isn't an inherently bad thing but it was a bit of surprise because I've always felt that this era of RPG is around when developers started making games that could be constantly progressed through and generally allowed for, but didn't require, grinding. But, see, this is a Dragon Quest game. So Metal Slimes exist and, in this game at least, are the objectively correct and most optimal way to grind. But the best way that I found to farm Metal Slimes is to use Metal Slash, a sword skill. So before I even got to the part of the game where I could figure that point out, I had already specced my characters into different weapons and had to spend time specifically speccing them differently so that I could be able to do the farming the game expected of me. (This is in addition to me, foolishly, having one of my characters put a significant chunk of their skillpoints into the Shield skill, which is borderline useless, before I had a strong grasp of how the skills and jobs worked.) So the game requires you to grind and funnels you into grinding in a specific way that restricts your character builds... but also because of how the jobs work it means all your characters are going to end up with the same stat bonuses and skills as each other and it really wears away any sort of personality an individual character can have. And as someone who tends to play RPGs more for the characters' stories/arcs rather than the big picture main plot, this was a pretty big disappointment to stack on top of the disappointment I faced when I found out that this game is entirely about custom created collections of stats and not having a party of actual characters to adventure with.

All that said, I did play this game for nearly 82 hours so if nothing else this game did wonders for my podcast backlog - listening to people talk about video games or books or whatever while grinding metal slimes.

And, once again, this is a Dragon Quest game so, to some degree, what the hell was I expecting. But. This game continues the franchise's long storied tradition of being Weird about women. And the ways in which it objectifies women is just so boring. Like, damn, this is all y'all got? Really? "What if a woman wore a bikini!!! OOOOO [eyeballs telescope out of skull, stomps feet on the ground, lights a stick of dynamite in mouth like a cigar, smacks myself over the head with a large mallet, all while a loud AWOOOGA sound effect plays]"

Rest in piss Koichi Sugiyama, you were a piece of garbage and your music wasn't even very good, this game's OST is mid at best.