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

This is partially a review of the game itself but also a bit of a PSA about the fan translation of the game that was released a few months ago.

The game itself is better than I was expecting it to be. The combat is a pretty different system that attempts to make it much more like an actual MMA game with different fighting styles and making each one play a bit different. The story (as far as I got, I quit after about 10 hours due to technical frustrations- more on that later) is largely unremarkable. You play as Tatsuya (who I did not find to be particularly likable) and you fight people until you learn to become a better person while also discovering a secret plot within the Tojo Clan. The vast majority of side content is untranslated which is unfortunate because I think that is where the Yakuza games hold quite a bit of charm and where some of the most interesting world building is done.

Now, about the fan translation. Enough of the game has been translated where you can play through the entirety of the main story but most things outside of that have been left untranslated (and because of how the translation was done, the original Japanese text has been replaced with asterisks, meaning you can't even get a rough machine translation without a Japanese version of the game). That on its own wasn't enough to dissuade me from trying the game out but the translated version also has a lot of technical issues. Several segments of the game crash, opening certain menus can cause crashes, starting certain substories can cause crashes. Most of it can be worked around but it because so tedious and frustrating to deal with that I eventually tapped out and decided to wait/hope for a better and more complete fan translation to appear in the future.

So, overall, I would only recommend playing the game through this fan translation to the most diehard of Yakuza/RGG fans. Are you absolutely desperate to return to Kamurocho one more time and are willing to put up with all kinds of technical issues? Well then this game is there for you.

Maybe the most unfortunate thing is that I highly doubt this game will ever get a re-release or a remake. In interviews, it's never been brought up whereas RGG Studio have talked about wanting to do something for Kenzan and Ishin. So it seems this game and its sequel may be lost to time.

My favorite moment in A Way Out is when you come across a small playground and, if both players interact with it at the same time, Leo and Vincent will sit down on the swing set together, stare into each others' eyes, and then blame the other for their own odd choice to sit down on a child's plaything. It combines the silly or absurd type of interactions that a video game allows with the game's strong characterization. Both Leo and Vincent are the sort of guy who might randomly sit down on a swing set for a moment but they'd never admit to it.

A Way Out is a game about moments like that. Strange interactions that are full of character depth that is conveyed in only a few seconds. They look at a plant and Vincent thinks it's nice while Leo wonders if it's edible. They see a chicken and Vincent tries to pet it while Leo tosses it in the air to make it "fly". Sure, they're on the run after breaking out of prison but of course they'll take the time to slow down and play darts or horseshoes together. If the entire game had managed to be moments like that interrupted by non-traditional action sequences like taking a boat down some rough rapids then I'd feel much better about this game overall. Unfortunately, the game is interested in playing around with a lot more than what it's actually good at.

The beginning of the game is simultaneously a boring slog with very little freedom to explore or play around and also a rushed series of events to get the characters out of prison. It leans heavily into the player's suspension of disbelief to connect one dot to the next. Don't ask too many questions about how they figured any of this plan out or why any of this works the way it does. Just nod your head and go along with it. Then, at the end of the game, it turns into, at best, and extremely mediocre cover shooter. The things the game is good at are completely stripped away in order to have climactic action to finish off the story.

But that middle part? When you've escaped prison and are working your way towards the climactic end? That's that good shit. Play a banjo. Pet a cow. Help a woman find her cheating husband. Watch the moon landing. Play an arcade game. The game fills an area with life and detail in a way not many other games do and does a great job of having these two knuckleheads poke and prod at the world in ways that are both the player doing video game nonsense but also believable for who these guys are.

But everything that's good has to come to an end. It's truly unfortunate that it comes to end via a bad shooting section followed by two chase sequences and then a second, worse, shooting section. What makes it even worse is how the game ends. One option is a pretty disappointing ending and the other is less disappointing and more satisfying but still not great. I'm not sure there was a really good or interesting way to finish off what this game was doing since it had been an extremely tropey and predictable 70's crime thriller up to this point but I wish it had gone for just about anything else than what it did.

The game desperately wants to be taken seriously but its schlocky pulp action that really should only be taken seriously enough to follow the story and laugh at the silliness of it all. Trying to be more serious than that is to the story's detriment and only leads to disappointment.

I did, however, have more fun with this game than I could ever possibly have watching the Oscars. So fair play to Josef Fares: fuck the Oscars.

Hey, this game is pretty good! And it has a fully-done fan translation as of about two years ago so it's more accessible than ever.

The combat is pretty simple as it's just your usual turn-based system. The five character classes are all pretty interesting and each have their own mechanic such as the Samurai having two 'stances' that you switch between to change what skills are available or the psychic being your main magic user and having to balance using powerful offensive spells with your heals and recovery spells. The game does offer some challenge in bosses and mini-bosses but it can be pretty easily overcome if you just grind out a handful of levels now and then (which the game makes very easy to do, because of some nice quality-of-life mechanics).

And while we're on the topic of crunchy mechanics, I want to mention the level design in the dungeons because it was pretty consistently very good. It had a lot of interesting moments where what is revealed on your map or what you're able to see with the fixed camera is taken in to account to either try and pull a fast one on your or to tease you about things that you won't get around to until later. It's all very cleverly designed (except for the ice dungeon which just felt cruel and confusing).

And, hey, speaking of design: this game is chock full of good design. I'm pretty ambivalent about the chibi character models but the portraits that go with them are all pretty cool (outside of a few that are a bit too fan-servicey for my tastes). The enemy design were all very cool, although I wish there was a larger variety of things. Seeing the same cool frog get recolored multiple times was a small bummer. The real star here, though, is the environment designs because they really went hogwild with it. Each dungeon has a unique aesthetic that is a part of Tokyo combined with some wild magic nonsense and it's always extremely cool. One of my favorite parts of the game was unlocking a new area so that I could see what it looked like.

The idea that you get to create your characters is neat but I feel like the game needed to either fully commit to more customization or not have it at all. Only getting to pick one of ten portaits, a custom name, plus one of fifteen voices (per gender) doesn't give me much to really play with in terms of making my own characters. Especially when you shove your trio of OCs into the main plot to try and fill the gaping hole where a protagonist would normally go. Since everything has to be written around that hole, it means that your characters basically don't matter. Sure, you're the ones fighting the dragons but anyone with your level of ability could do it and the game is sure to let you know that you're just one group of many that could be doing this (everyone else is either busy or dead, I guess). But also this is one of very few games that let me have a big tiddy milf as a main character so maybe that balances it all out. Who could say.

The main plot itself is pretty milquetoast. Dragons have invaded and it's up to you to unite and defeat them with the power of friendship or whatever. Also you fight god at the end. It's a lot of very common and predictable JRPG tropes shoved together and while it executes on them all pretty well it ends up with something that isn't going to stick in memory for much longer after beating it. The rest of the world, however has some very interesting bits of information that the game has seemingly no interest in actually exploring. Aliens, synthetic humans, secret goverment supersoldiers, plus more, that all get introduced on the fringes of the story but never given much actual detail of. If some of that had even been better incorporated into the plot then it could've been something more engaging but instead it's just a story that is only good enough to keep you going through 'til the end.

One thing I'd me remiss to not mention is that Hatsune Miku is in this game. You save her before she gets eaten by a dragon and then she rewards you with an alternate "Diva Mode" for the soundtrack. The developers got a bunch of vocaloid artists to make Miku remixes of the game's entire soundtrack. At first I thought that was an awesome idea but as I switched back and for between both OSTs I realized that I liked the original one better. Vocaloid music is good but the tracks in this game are just pretty mediocre vocaloid songs. Miku's character model and portrait are very cute though, so that's fun.

Finally, I need to talk about the post-game dungeon. After you roll credits, one of the aliens tells you you need to talk. So after you clean up the last few dragons it unlocks one last dungeon and each bit of progress you make in it rewards you with just a smidge more lore about the dragons and aliens and how they all got here to Earth. At first the dungeon was a neat idea - a mix of all the previous dungeons with only dragon enemies to challenge you with - but after getting halfway through it, it was just too much of a grind for me. The little tidbits of lore weren't worth all the time I was putting in to getting through all these day dragons and doing re-fights with all the bosses of the game. I'm sure I could do it and finish the rest of it off in a few hours but the game has just worn itself out and I wasn't having fun anymore. Whatever happens at the end is extremely unlikely to significantly change how I feel about the game anyway so I don't think I'm missing much there.

Overall, 7th Dragon 2020 is a cool game. It was fun to playthrough and it makes me glad that the fan translation has been completed. It's a little hidden gem of the PSP that I hope more people check out because, despite the issues I have with it, I think it's worth the time to play it.

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.

I made the mistake of going into this game immediately after finishing 7th Dragon 2020. I thought "Okay, I was a little tired of the relatively basic mechanics by the end of the first game but I'm sure the sequel will mix things up enough to make it feel fresh!" Unfortunately, 7th Dragon 2020-II is functionally identical. There's one new class that I didn't particularly care for and a bunch of balance changes that, as far as I could tell, only made my characters weaker. That second part is important because it made the game feel like it was pushing me to grind a bunch of extra levels right at the start because no one could survive more than two or three hits and all the costs of skills went way up so I couldn't get much stronger without committing to lots of extra fights.

On top of all that, the story sets itself up to be an exact repeat of the previous game. Oh, you killed the True Dragon who is a god that created all other dragons? Well, there's six more attacking Tokyo, please go kill them. Maybe there's something interesting later on but getting what appears to be largely the same story isn't worth the investment right now. Maybe someday I'll return to this and enjoy it, but not right now.

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.

I played around with this for about two hours before deciding I didn't need to see any more of it. When I had a rough fight or lost a run, it very rarely felt like I could have done anything better. Every run that died was because I would draw a card and have zero options for seven or eight turns in a row and, let me tell you, that feels real bad.

I've always heard this is a great game to play on your commute but I don't have one (and got this for free on EGS anyway) so maybe desktop is just a bad way to play it and I'd be more patient with it on-the-go.

Let me tell you a tale of the wasteland. The Courier was wandering, as she is wont to do, and stumbled upon Vault 34. She made her way through a cave full of geckos and the irradiated hallways of the vault full of feral ghouls, all the while uncovering bits and pieces of the story of what happened to the vault dwellers. Too many people, too many guns, a struggle for power, and a broken reactor. A tragic story but stories like that come a dime a dozen in the wasteland. Eventually, the Courier made it to the bottom of the vault and found a suspicious terminal that allowed her to do one of two things: reroute the vault's controls or close the reactor vents. No one had told her to do anything about either of them and she wasn't sure what doing either would actually do. So she pushed a button and left to continue her adventures elsewhere.

This was what a large chunk of my experience with New Vegas was like: stumbling backwards into an area or a quest, getting a fraction of context on what is supposed to be going on, and then being asked to make a Grey Moral Choice™ to decide the fate of some strangers. I looked up what was up with Vault 34 and it turns out you can either let some people who are trapped in the vault out or close the vents so the nearby NCR Sharecroppers would have less radiation coming out of the vault and messing up their crops. It maybe would've been an interesting choice if the game had ever indicated that to me or found some way to communicate that to me. But instead I just tripped on into the last objective in the quest and pressed a random button. This quest was basically incoherent and it happened with enough other quests that I encountered that entire swathes of the game felt incoherent.

What I want to say is that the writing was strong enough and that individual stories worked well enough that I didn't need it to all fit together nicely and be presented in a way that was comprehensible but honestly I'm not sure I can really say that. I visited nearly every location and did every quest I could find but so much of the writing is relatively bland. The game is so chock full of uninteresting characters and stale stories that I found it hard to maintain interest beyond the most basic level of "I guess I should be paying attention so I have some idea of the larger plot." Maybe time is a factor and ten years of other games and other stories make this game feel a bit more stale now but I can't imagine that would effect every bit of writing across the entire game, right?

I'd like to end this with at least one positive note, though. I think this game does a much better job at connecting back to the roots of Fallout 1 and 2 than 3 does. This is mostly due to New Vegas's proximity but just the simple act of having people be like "oh, yeah, I grew up in Shady Sands" or whatever makes the franchise feel much more like a singular whole whereas F3 is just like "I dunno, this ghoul you might know wandered across the entire country and turned into a tree or whatever".

Oh, and the game only crashed to desktop twice and corrupted saves four times which is much lower than I was expected considering how monumentally broken and barely functional the engine is! So, good job on that one, New Vegas.