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You often forget how much a sickness can drag you down until you catch it again. I've had such little energy and been nappin more frequently that it's pretty annoying! At least there's low commitment games to check out in the meantime.

Unfortunately it is with this licensed game that I began to realize something tragic: I am a terrible Puzzle Bobble player. It's the same ordeal that befalls my skill in Puyo Puyo, centering more on combo maneuvers and big plays than careful positioning and lineups, except not as strong since I figured out just randomly firing the pieces is an actual strategy this time around. Don't misunderstand me though, it's a fun time, and funnily enough a decent training wheel for when I play more of this line of tile-match franchise. It also goes without saying that it'd be fine to try this even if you've never seen the anime or read the manga it's based on (I finished Episode 7 at the time of writing this and have friends that discuss and share this as well).

Puzzle Bobble's already a series noted on its charm, making it a great fit for AzuDaioh, a comedy series based on exaggerated reactions and goofy scenarios. Each break creates a cut-in of various expressions the character of your choice does, which can sometimes be distracting if the tiles you need to line up happen to be behind it, but overall are pretty fun to watch. Alongside this, you'll also see different sorts of interactions and galleries available within the game, which is always a plus when it comes to this ragtag group of students. The 2D lineart can be pretty strong - though since I emulated it thanks to Flycast I'm actually unsure if its my dumbass messing around with enhancements or it looking like it as-is - but I'd rather have this than what happened with Sakura Wars Columns 2 where it looks like some weird mesh of filtered scalers and chibi-like proportions. I stuck with Yomi (GOAT) for both the single-player mode and VSCPU, only swapping out to Chiyo-chan since she's the second-funniest character. On that note, the order in the CPU mode is interesting cause it's positioned just how I imagined it: Tomo's moronic and pitifully easy, Sakaki's pretty chill and normal, Osaka is secretly a prodigy behind her dopey and absent-minded demeanor, Kagura's a tryhard, Chiyo-chan is surprisingly and worryingly a tough opponent despite being like 10 years old, Yomi's scary as hell, and Yukari-sensei is actually one of the biggest forces of chaos that has ever set foot in the school. Sad that Nyamo only shows up as an animated partner, but at least we got the other cats and dogs from the show, and thankfully no Kimura to ruin it as usual.

But yea, nothin else to say other than it's fun, and fits the series' esoteric comedy and charm like a glove. Since it's a Sega NAOMI title, you'll have to use the aforementioned Flycast to emulate it, and I believe Redream can also do this as well. NAOMI ROMs aren't as common but you definitely shouldn't go over to Emulation GameTechWiki and search its page on the system in question to figure out where to find them. Would totally recommend not doing that. What you CAN do though, is look at one of the greatest ending themes to have ever graced the television medium.

Chained Echoes is a pizza with too many toppings

First: I enjoyed Chained Echoes. It's an incredibly well-made, polished product considering the small team. The battle system feels good, the systems are balanced to prevent a need for level-grinding, and it didn't start to drag until I started pursuing the optional superboss stuff in the endgame. If this came out five years ago, I'd probably be singing its praises.

The dev has echoed a common sentiment with many of these retro-inspired indie games, which is that they want to recreate how those games are in your memories - how they made you feel - rather than how they actually were. If Chained Echoes succeeds in this, it's only partially, because it reminded me of other games constantly.

It's got a pretty standard JRPG narrative, but I have nothing inherently against that (unlike G4). The cast is full of the broad archetypes you might expect - hesitant hero, rebellious princess, self-interested thief - doing the sorts of things you might expect. Monsters roam the countryside, the empire controls dangerous magic, and the Pope's inquisitors make cryptic statements to each other about Gods' true intention. I think there's plenty of room for another retro-inspired indie JRPG out there, but there might be such a thing as too inspired.

Literally from the moment I hit New Game up until the middle of the end credits, I found myself thinking, "Oh, this is just that thing from that other thing." It reads almost like an extended X-meets-Y marketing copy: WHAT IF... the plot from Xenogears, the party dynamics from FFVI, the geopolitics of the Ivalice Alliance, the event scripting from Chrono Trigger, the Giant of Babil from FFIV, the Mana Fortress from Secret of Mana, the final act from FFVII, the introductory missions from Wild ARMs, the Yevon church from FFX, the home base from Skies of Arcadia, plus a special mixture of secret herbs and spices... were all in the same game?? Any individual identity Chained Echoes has is subsumed by slavish adherence to its inspirations.

To clarify, I definitely wouldn't say any of this is plagiarism or anything, and they usually aren't tiresome "hey, remember X?" direct references. It's that the whole thing feels like like every Squaresoft RPG from the 1990s was pureed in a blender and poured into a SNES-shaped mold, kitbashed into some kind of Franken-game.

Sometimes, I take my mother to a chain restaurant called "Pieology", which is basically an assembly-line style (Subway, Chipotle, etc) fast food place for pizza. She puts every single topping she likes on the same pizza without considering why you might use a specific ingredient. If you separately enjoy parmesan, ricotta, mozzarella, pineapple, corn, cherry tomatoes, basil, garlic, cilantro, artichokes, olives, peppers... putting all of them together should be even better, right?

But you get something underbaked. It tastes like everything and thus tastes like nothing in particular. It's still recognizably pizza, and you like the pizza genre as a whole... but "it's pizza!" feels like the only intention behind it.

For example, Chained Echoes has mecha, which stand out next to the usual JRPG airship fare in its otherwise Ivalicean setting. Xenogears has mecha. But Xenogears (for all its faults) also has a sci-fi plot about the intersection of man, god, and machine; mecha are a deliberate narrative device to buoy those themes. Why does Chained Echoes have mecha? Because mecha were in Xenogears.

It's that feeling, every 20 minutes, for 35 hours.

I genuinely believe there isn't anything inherently wrong with being an imitative work. Something like Signalis wears its aesthetic inspirations on its sleeve, but makes use of them for its own thematic goals. Crystal Project is transparently a FFV-style job system battle simulator that doesn't pretend to have any lofty narrative ambitions. And Chained Echoes is a perfectly good indie JRPG... but I wish it were a bit more than that.

Conocí a Pepe El Mago hace más o menos dos añitos, en plena crisis del Coronavirus y francamente me ayudó a sobrellevarla junto con otros canales que me acabaron entreteniendo en tan horrible época.

Para el que no conozca este canal -que lo dudo- se centra en hablar de videojuegos de la forma más blanca posible, haciendo tops y tonterías varias. Pues bueno, este creador (que por cierto, no se llama Pepe) ha estado varios años dirigiendo una suerte de retraux de la época de SNES y francamente le ha salido muy bien.

Desde el arte hasta la música, pasando por muy buen diseño de niveles, Mago es, además de un recuerdo muy bueno al pasado, un título con mayúsculas que cualquier fan del plataformeo deseará disfrutar. Si tengo que admitir que se me hicieron bola partes concretas (el jefe del sexto mundo y algunas fases del último) pero en conjunto este juego ha sido una gran sorpresa, especialmente en comparación de la morralla que muchos creadores de contenido acaban sacando.