This one was bit of a bummer, because there's a pretty nice SRPG core here, but the pacing just kind of kills it. I've gotten like 5 hours in, and a bunch of the battles end up feeling very samey (bar one escape map that was kind of neat).

This feels compounded on with how slow the battles are. Waiting for each enemy to cast their little buffs on the side and such gets old pretty quick. Especially in the case where the buffs are an apparently uncapped amount of an extra magic health bar to whittle away at.

This game's main strengths are mainly in its foundation. The combo system, where your melee units get to join in on attacking when someone else hits adjacent foes to them, is fun to pull off and helps give them an edge over the ranged units. There's plenty of skills and buffs to try and give to your allies as well, especially since you get access to most of the tricks of your enemies by summoning them. The element system was fun enough too.

I also think this game approaches worldbuilding well enough. It's got a bunch of fantasy species and locales, and it avoids the usual pitfalls of dumping fifty proper nouns for you to memorize. I think anchoring the different species with allies turned recruitable characters you fight alongside in some story sequences helps with that.

Overall, this was kind of fun, but the process of spending 50 minutes or so on one quest, with a large amount of that just being waiting for the enemies to get through their turn, got stale pretty quick. It's better in small doses, but it seems like there's a lot of content, so it feels like it's hard to get through it all that slowly. There's a game I like here, but it doesn't feel particularly worth it to play to that point.

These sorts of fad games are kind of hard to believe in retrospect. The fascination with the likes of plastic guitars, and in this case, plastic characters, is such a product of its time that I can't help but feel nostalgic for this. I just remember the action being fine and each character being unique enough to enjoy on their own merits. I definitely got softlocked on my first save file though.

To be honest, I haven't even played any Spyro games. I remember feeling like a hipster for upgrading his charge move instead of his fire move in this game.

Honestly reminds me of a Flash game, the kind that makes a small adventure that's not the most robust thing, but still charming enough to keep you invested for an hour or so.

It's sort of interesting, but the actual puzzle solving that surrounds the core concept ends up being really simple since they each all need to be visited and cleared within a minute. Meanwhile, there's never much of an urge to chain objectives within one play session, so the minute mechanic becomes more of a minor inconvenience instead of an interesting challenge. Overall, this game feels like more of a cute sampling of ideas instead of a time based concept pushed to its limit.

I definitely wouldn't have felt like this was $10 worth (I got this in an itch bundle), not particularly because of the inane "game length vs price" debate, but moreso since the game just ended up being unspectacular and a bit obtuse at times.

If you're a fan of Kirby's Star Stacker on Game Boy or being a nerd about how the Masked Dedede theme actually debuted in this game against Generic Unfair Puzzle game Final Boss #7000, this is the game for you.

Admittedly, I like Star Stacker well enough. It's like Puyo Puyo but a bit simpler for my smooth brain to look somewhat competent playing. The Dream Land 3 aesthetic is a nice touch as well.

If you've got a Japanese Switch account to get the online app with or perhaps some other dark forbidden method of finding old Super Famicom games (for the record, i definitely mean eBay), this is an interesting novelty. There's not a whole lot to it beyond an alright puzzle game, so I guess it going down as a trivia note in one of the franchise's songs is understandable.

This original version of the song doesnt even go that hard, not gonna lie

What does it mean for an RPG to be a "role playing game"?
The core concept largely stems from Dungeons & Dragons, where the most stereotypical vision of role playing would be some nerd overacting their part as a level 10 Paladin in a campaign. In the gaming sphere, the concepts and systems from D&D and other tabletop games have branched out into everything from Disco Elysium to Paper Mario, to the point where the title of RPG feels more like an admission that there's not a better blanket term for all these games. In the midst of that, some RPGs, such as the aforementioned Mario ones, don't offer that interesting of a role to play. The relationship between player and character gets boiled down to me pressing the buttons to make the gameplay happen while the characters experience a plot for me to observe from on high. I'm not particularly invested in the weekly struggle of the Mushroom Kingdom while figuring out attack tells, you know?

Recettear manages to bridge that gap and provide a role that feels easy to project onto. While the eponymous Recette is tasked with paying off her father's debt by running an item shop, every minute detail in that process comes down to your own decisions. Between whatever price you haggle to, how you stock your store, or maintaining a proper store atmosphere, managing each bit of the shop makes it feel more and more like your own. Thus, the fourth wall between player and protagonist melts away. I just found it really easy to act out the role of the little shopkeep while deciding what I needed to stock based off trends or thinking about how unfortunate it is that small children don't have more disposable income.

A lot of this fine control wouldn't matter without some outside reason to care, and as such this game places weekly debts for you to clear. This pressure really forces you to optimize every day to its fullest possible profit, which provides the emotional investment needed to make each bit of the game feel relevant. The art of finding just the right price to coax the most cash possible out of people just doesn't come as easily without a real threat for failing to put up the dough. Even writing this sentence reminds me of the used car sales-anime girl energy that the game gives to both the character and the player, all thanks to having a goal that can be terrifyingly high at first glance.

While the bulk of this game is this shop management side, there's a bit of dungeon exploration too in order to get some rarer supplies. It plays in a more real time version of mystery dungeon type games, both in map generation and how it generally goes in one ear and out the other without much incident. Although it's on the passable but bland side, that's probably to the benefit of the core fantasy of running a shop. The action of the dungeon is hardly relevant to one's finances, I suppose, and generally you would prefer to keep the shop open for longer. As is, it works as a decent pacebreaker that doesn't cannibalize the rest of the game, and the variety of adventurers you get to hire and their playstyles keeps it a bit more fresh than it probably should be.

Overall, Recettear manages to hit on a really specific and interesting idea for a game, and uses it to craft a pretty convincing role to play in this little world. The tactile nature of the shop combined with the everlooming need to maximize profits makes the experiencing of running this shop so engrossing. It's a charming RPG that brings a lot to the table with simple gameplay layered with some pretty unique ideas.

"ok boomer" is one of the rawest lines in history and it comes from Revolver and Co of all things.

for real though it's a pretty typical trivia game, good aesthetics but if you're not in the mood to estimate numbers about various facts well there isn't too much here.

Also there's a lot of questions about units for measuring wine bottles

Overall a really solid time with a compelling narrative and gameplay that stays interesting throughout the short but sweet campaign. It's vaguely Metroidvania adjacent but I wouldn't go in expecting one, since it is more focused on having linear levels in each local than building up a particularly cohesive world to comb through. The bosses were also bombastic and engaging, minus the one stealth boss with some annoying mechanics to trial and error through.

On top of that this game is an absolute aesthetic marvel, the pixel art is obscenely impressive. The soundtrack also goes for this very distinct vibe, very upbeat but still atmospheric. A bunch of songs use metal clangs as well, which may be pretty on the nose with the machinery theme, leads to some uniquely memorable songs like the boss theme. Great stuff all around on both looks and gameplay.

I still don't get why they made the running joke that Mina smells like a Smash fan though, it doesn't come off that weird but still