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Cinematic puzzlery before we were ready. Suzuki Bakuhatsu astounds with its production values, abound with turn of the millennium photography, set dressing, apparel, and unbridled contentment. For as harrowing as the premise is, that the mundane has been overtaken by sophisticated explosives, the often devil-may-care attitude of Rin Ozawa's character suggests a subconscious understanding that this danger could never really happen. This is a world before the War on Terror, before we were made to feel unsafe by government and terrorists alike. Why not watch a bomb defusal expert hurriedly carry out her craft on stage, how could the worst possibly come to pass?

These vague plot points and extensive production are indicative of Sol and Enix's attempt to break the conventions of the stagnant puzzle genre. Tetris and Panel de Pon with new coats of paint were not enough. Kula World and iQ weren't thinking big enough. If the medium was to mature into a legitimate mode of storytelling (or at least entertainment) it needed bombast across all genres. The puzzle game could (and is shown to be) so much more than the puzzles themselves. It can be as tense as a thriller, as lighthearted as a situation comedy. Yet the puzzles too remain a highlight, with fully realised, complexly nesting polygonal designs which are explored in the round in a step above Resident Evil or Skyrim. The bombs are as the puzzle boxes seen in Fireproof Games' The Room, a series of self-affecting pieces, more involved than they let on. Suzuki Bakuhatsu simply would not work in a two-dimensional space.

Tomoyuki Tanaka's shibuya-kei interstitial compositions are as much a highlight as Rin Ozawa's humming during defusal, and the cast and crew are dripping with talent. On the variety show Suzuki inexplicably becomes a part of, we see Yukiko Ehara and YOU THE ROCK★ flanking Minami Shirakawa. Asami Imajuku, Haruichiban, and Kiyohiko Shibukawa make surprise appearances as well. Though not quite a who's-who of the Japanese entertainment industry, these familiar faces (especially two decades after release) demonstrate that Suzuki Bakuhatsu was all about bombast. In a world before Portal and Catherine, however, perhaps we were unprepared to accept that puzzle games could be something more.

Plague Inc made into a clicker dressed in transfemme (but also autogynephilic (not that autogynephilia is a thing)) clothing. Femdemic, like gender and sexuality, is complicated. It is composed of too many independent truths to label it as wholly affirming or fetishistic. It instills profound sadness, regret, and frustration, not only with itself, but with the real world. It makes me feel horrible, happy, hollow. It confuses me. Since Femdemic labels itself as both trans-affirming and kink-affirming, it's only fair to look at it under two distinct lenses.

As a gender-affirming work (though the Liberation mode), Femdemic has you effectively playing the role of HRT under the guise of a microbe. You feminise your subject so they can spread to all the transwomen on the planet. Changes made to the host are subtle, slow, and limited -- there is no facial feminisation, no height changes, minimal alteration to the genitalia, some breast growth, some fat redistribution. In this capacity, Femdemic is shockingly honest with the limitations of non-invasive gender care on the AMAB body, in a way that is usually reserved for downvoted Reddit threads and doomposting on /lgbt/. Perhaps due to the primary focus on trans women, all sexual encounters only occur with other trans women, which is probably fine as sex is not the primary focus of Liberation, but it seems reductive in part of how trans women might express their sexuality. There is no engagement with cis women, nor cis men. As I'm not a trans woman, only a transfeminine NB, I can't speak to how positive of an experience this actually is, but at least it doesn't delve into full-blown fetishistic territory.

Compliance mode is full-blown fetishistic territory. Breasts balloon outward, the penis shrinks to the point it become a vagina, heights dwindle, the increased libido of the host has them in perpetual ahegao before they either perform oral sex on a man, or get fucked. If there was any doubt as to what the player actually is, here it become clear; you are an STD. The host can only have penetrative sex once they have a vagina. This PIV-centrism reads as a doubling down on the ignorance of how sex occurs; is the suggestion that heterosexual men have no interest in a pre-op trans woman? That trans women can't have sex with cis women (or other trans women for that matter)? That trans women, through their heterosexuality, in some way shed their yaoi hole? Is the host even a trans woman? Compliance doesn't render this particularly crystalline, but the need to dominate the host's immune system and irrevocably alter their identity to diminish the perceived negative effects of feminisation, and the emphasis on converting biological men leaves Liberation in a weird psychosexual gray area that's a mix of sissy hypnosis, gooning, forced feminisation, autogynephilia, transvestism, and transmedicalism.

Putting these affirming halves aside, Femdemic is simply one of the laziest applications of the Plague Inc. and clicker formulas I've seen in a while. The loop is rote, you always feminise a host, spread, reset your progress for some light bonuses, and do it again. None of the management involved in Plague Inc. rears its head. And you click to barely speed up an arduous process that puts even lengthy eroge VNs to shame. There isn't even the smallest joy of seeing number go up, just that of maxing your producers, closing the game, and coming back so you can see the boobs become more seeable or watch one of two animations of IMVU characters participating in what might be called sex.

Historically interesting in the sense of how Symphony made it more approachable while kind of fumbling/copying design decisions blindly, and how the rhythm to it feels really like Souls's fighting styles and focus on arcade-esque perfection. Of course, Souls added a lot to the mix with exporation/customization but it definitely wouldn't be what it is without borrowing from the way precise enemy placements slowly gate your way through dense levels.

I like Castlevania's creative level variety and enemy varieties! It's neat to see Wall Chicken, hearts and subweapons in a context they really make sense. But, even though this is so well designed for what it is, it just lacks that special something that makes it really shine as exciting to me - it's just thematically dry to me like a lot of games (even today). The design is really straightforward - layers of mastery culminating to a performance of clearing the game without dying.

On a nitpick level there's a level of trying to guess the enemy AI that's required to succeed (e.g. sticking close to phase 2 Dracula to prevent fireballs) and that kind of AI design just isn't my preference... it's also hard to learn later sections without save states. But I think those design decisions made a lot of sense for a time where people would discuss and share strategies, so you don't want the game to be totally self-contained. And to some extent memorizing those little AI quirks is part of the charm of these games.

Far and away the most egregiously misguided attempt at myth-making in games history. This isn't the worst game ever. It's not the weirdest game ever. It is not the 'first American produced visual novel.' Limited Run Games seems content to simply upend truth and provenance to push a valueless narrative. The 'so bad it's good' shtick serves only to lessen the importance of early multimedia CD-ROM software, and drenching it in WordArt and clip art imparts the notion that this digital heritage was low class, low brow, low effort, and altogether primitive.

This repackaging of an overlong workplace sexual harassment/rape joke is altogether uncomfortable at best. Further problematising this, accompanying merch is resplendent with Edward J. Fasulo's bare chest despite him seemingly wanting nothing to do with the project. We've got industry veterans and games historians talking up the importance of digital detritus alongside YouTubers and LRG employees, the latter making the former less credible. We've got a novelisation by Twitter 'comedian' Mike Drucker. We've got skate decks and body pillows and more heaps of plastic garbage for video game 'collectors' to shove on a dusty shelf next to their four colour variants of Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl on NES, cum-encrusted Shantae statue, and countless other bits of mass-produced waste that belongs in a landfill. Utterly shameful how we engage with the past.

Venba

2023

Most of the conversation I’ve seen around Venba has revolved around the story of the entire family the game is about, but centered on the point of view of Kavin, the child. A second generation immigrant, Kavin experiences the social pressures of otherness growing up and we see this expressed through his own insecurities with his situation and his attempts to fit in throughout his life as well as via the way his mother Venba vents her frustrations with how she feels he’s rejecting his culture and his family, with his dad Paavalankind of caught in an empathetic middle ground. I get why this happens – I think a lot of the people who like, actually play the game are more likely to identify with Kavin, and the game shifts more focally to his perspective in the back half, and he’s admittedly something of a reflection of the lived experiences of the game’s lead designer, whose life the game is heavily drawn upon. And I don’t want to downplay Kavin’s experience; obviously modern second gen kids’ relationships with their parents are stories that a lot of people connect strongly to – it’s a really common thing in my generation. But when I was playing the game I couldn’t help but find myself so much more drawn to Venba herself.

My wife is from India, and while it seems kind of funny in hindsight there was in fact a lot of hubbub when we first got together. We were dating in secret for a long time because there was sure to be controversy over my whiteness and my religion. When we got found out it was a little longer before I was allowed to meet her parents and then a lot longer before I felt like, actually accepted, which is fair. Things were very different from how they were expecting things to go, even if my wife herself never really planned to adhere to these expectations. I always thought her mom HATED me though, even after the CONTROVERSY of our relationship cooled off. She was so quiet around me, so distant, and I never knew how to talk to her. But it turned out she also felt that way about me. Insecure and weird about this stranger that she felt like she had zero common ground with.

Eventually we bonded over two things: our mutual love of roasting the shit out of my wife and my sincere appreciation for her cooking. She’s got this deep well of recipes and they’re all so fuckin good dude but neither of her kids have any real interest in cooking like at all, even before my wife became too disabled for that to be something she could realistically do, so I think she took some genuine pleasure from it when I started asking persistently for her to teach me how to make some of her stuff when we would visit each other, and now I have a pretty good stock of family recipes that’s still steadily growing, with my wife and mother-in-law’s seal of approval. (In fact I would say that if you have a working knowledge of how to cook most basic Indian foods then most of the puzzle elements of Venba will be essentially negated because it doesn’t matter whether you’re in Tamil Nadu or West Bengal, a masala is a masala and a biryani is a biryani and a dosa is a dosa). But I’ve also spent a lot of time with her now over the years, doing this stuff, and a pretty good amount of time with her alone, and you start to know people, and I see so much of her in Venba.

A woman who moves about as far away from her life, her home, her family as it is possible to move, unwillingly, as a matter of practicality, Venba never quite assimilates. A qualified, highly educated worker in her home country arbitrarily unable to find work in her new one for racist reasons, relying on a stressed partner to make ends meet while she handles domestic duties and isolates herself, partially because her new society rejects her and partially because she rejects it. “I have Paavalan,” she says at one point. “I have Kavin.” There are all kinds of reasons why and they might even create a twisted ouroboros sometimes but ultimately Venba just doesn’t like it in Canada, and she did like it in India, and if she had her way she would probably just like, go home. It hurts her to be apart from her parents when they get old and get sick. It hurts her to see her son so easily slip into this culture she feels embittered towards and treat her like part of the embarrassing thing to leave behind.

I think my mother in law feels that way a lot of the time, especially since both of her children have left the nest, although this is where her experience diverges from Venba’s. My wife and her brother are very close to their mom, and I think that’s part of what anchors her here, despite everything. They don’t have the contentious relationship that Venba and Kavin have that gives Venba kind of a freedom to return to where she’s happy, or to necessitate the reunion and reconciliation that they loosely share in the final chapter. ac

While my secondhand experience with a life that Venba so strongly evokes in my mind’s eye does make me feel a little frustrated at how cleanly this game resolves its lingering conflicts by the end of it all, I don’t think it falls into the trap of, as a friend of mine wisely phrased it yesterday, “barren sentimentality” that I think even well-meaning games often fall into when they try to tackle real subject matter. Venba may be a short game whose focus on food and small scope limits the windows into these lives that we’re allowed to peer into, but its dialogue is often cutting, it knows when not to pull punches, and it says a lot without words.

The writing is uniformly excellent but I think the best stuff is consistently the way the game communicates without words. The way Kavin’s letters unfold more slowly across his word balloons when he speaks Tamil vs when his parents do or when he’s speaking English for most of the game because he’s less comfortable with the language; the way that the last time you play as Venba there’s minimal interactivity because at this point in her life she’s memorized her recipes and developed her own techniques and using newer equipment for the most part, so there are no puzzles to solve and all the game asks from the player is a couple of button presses or stick rotations; the way that when you’re playing as Kavin he just kind of drops or tosses ingredient containers gracelessly back onto the counter vs the way Venba would put them back down like a normal person. There’s a moment where you’re texting and the game is auto-advancing the conversation but once you’re given the freedom to exit the conversation you can actually scroll up and see the entire thing again, including the beginning chunk of it that you weren’t originally shown and it is as horrible as you would imagine. Venba is such a short game and its vignettes are necessarily so focused that this intimate attention to detail makes a huge difference in the texture of the world.

Applicability is very real, I suppose. On its face Venba is an incredibly generic immigrant story, with only the food angle making it stand out narratively, but even then it isn’t even the only “wholesome indie game about a second generation immigrant trying to reconnect somehow to a parent via family recipes” that I know of off the top of my head. We all know people who have lived the broad details of this family’s story. But the particular voices that come out of their mouths are bold and articulate and human. Enough for it to evoke specific traumas in my wife, who loved this game, enough to make me wistful about my relationship with her mother, which is occasionally complicated. And I know other people who have felt similarly. It’s easy for me to imagine a lesser version of this game and I’m glad I don’t have to talk about that one haha.

As I write this we’re four days into a six day visit from my wife’s dad, whom I often struggle to get along with, and who doesn’t know that I’m transgender, and her brother, who is cool but who left early this afternoon. Today has been the first time we’ve had a break from work or being around them constantly since they arrived. It’s been a long and stressful week, but getting a couple hours to play through this game was in turns relaxing and sad and fun and cathartic. And we’re about to go out to eat at a South Indian restaurant with her dad, which was a happy coincidence that we’ve had planned for a couple of weeks. I think we’re gonna go ham on some dosas. Maybe try not to cry about Venba while we do.

Full disclosure: I did not pay for this (a "friend" "gave" it to me and I played it on a "nintendo switch"), so I have no fuckin' clue if this game has some dogshit payment model or whatever in terms of DLC, so that's not really something I'm bringing into consideration here.

Anyways, it's kinda cheating making a rhythm game for a series with a musical pedigree as monumental as Final Fantasy's; huge fucking shout out to Uematsu and his music teams once again coming making a game way better than it would've been otherwise. Moving from the 3DS to full button controls has made certain aspects of play awkward, but you get used to it after awhile.

Can't say I'm that amazing at this game; a lot of the higher difficulty tracks kinda enter the Taiko no Tatsujin zone of "damn there's probably some inhuman individual capable of doing this perfectly" level of complexity. But I wasn't really here for that, I just needed a comfy game to decompress with after work and it let me have a party of all the PS1 FF girlies and press buttons to my favorite video game music so it's a pretty amazing game for that alone.

Minus half a star for not including To The Edge, and then put that half a star back for actually acknowledging that Xenogears exists.

The Finals' servers will close on 08/11/2024. Screenshot this.

out infernoes dante's inferno (ps3, 2011)...the most passionate and open-hearted declaration of science and inquiry as our holiest pursuits...affirms multiverse theory as catholic and epic instead of marvel fan...christiaan huygens chuckles before launching his flaming moon attack and einstein knows capoiera...future devs bass boost your game or you will lose...brazil forever and forever amen

the lockdown during the covid’s pandemic made everyone appreciate a little more things that were common and even rejected by some people: going outside, having human contact, not using masks and looking at nature, especially, looking at the sky. can you imagine being deprived of looking at the sky forever? the people in breath of fire: dragon quarter (D¼) don’t even know what “sky” is, instead, they have blue-painted ceilings to simulate it. the concept of “sky” is a legend, living underground for thousands of years, the “sky” for them is almost like “heaven” is for us: it’s paradise. the thing is that pretty much everyone in this world is agnostic.

and is not a wonderful world! full of creatures that were initially created in order for people to have food but some of them went mad and became more like monsters. the air is not good too! is very polluted and if your d-ratio is low, you will live in the worst places possible. oh, yeah, “d-ratio” is a very important concept: D¼’s world has this species of caste system called “d-ratio”, where people have a fraction associated with them, which denominator is always a multiple of 4 (actually, is always 4 raised to an exponent) and the lower your “d-ratio” is, the lower your status in this world is.

you, the protagonist: let’s call “ryu” for the sake of simplicity. ryu’s “d-ratio” is 1/8192, a low rank, specially considering that he is a pig/cop/pest-exterminator-guy in this world – called “ranger”. he can never make the top with a “d-ratio” like that. his partner, bosch, however, has a 1/64 “d-ratio”. he not only can make it to the top but he can even become a reagent as well (basically the people that control this world, the higher class someone can have, they literally live at the top of the world). anyway, ryu and bosch are given the mission of escorting a top-secret-object to a top-secret-lab. shit happens, the top-secret-object is actually a girl with wings called “nina”, ryu feels the urge to protect her, allies with lin from the trinity (a group of rebels) and discovers that the rangers sucks.

if people are agnostic about the existence of the “sky”, nina is a true believer. she does not only have faith in the “sky”’s existence, but far beyond the ceiling painted blue or the stories of the ancients, she wants to see the sky in its best form and ryu feels the need to help her.

in the middle of all of this, ryu even connects with a dragon, earning the power of transforming into a dragon that, in-game, can trivialize everything. you can pretty much win all battles with a single button or a buff + 2 attacks combo. it’s amazing, it can turn all the difficult moments into nothing. there’s no struggle in reaching the sky after all! right? right??

oh, your d-meter is 100%, i guess this is a game over, you have to restart. the whole game.

and this is where the real D¼ begins. as soon as you gain access to all those new dragon features, a meter appears in the top right corner of your screen, probably at 4.00% after you obligatorily use it in a boss fight and is always increasing as you progress through the game. you can always “d-dive”, turn into a dragon and make your life easier but this will just increase the meter. 12.00%, 26.37%, 56.78%, 78.98%, oh no, it’s 100% again and you are not even in the middle of the game. i guess you gotta restart it again.

the thing about restarting your life after failure is that: it’s not easy. you lose a lot of progress, feel frustrated and may even consider if it’s worth it to continue chasing your dreams after so many times failing. however, you have more and more experience as you try and you may reach it sometime. it’s not so different in D¼: every time you restart the game, you maintain part of the money and party xp (experience that you gain in order to distribute it between the party), your skills, the items that were equipped and can even see some new scenes each restart (the so called “SOL system”). not so different from mr.best-action-game-of-2020, huh? D¼ is a roguelite. of course you can just “continue” (restore) the game instead of restarting from the beginning, you always have this option and the decision is yours. except for when your “d-meter” is 100%.

not only D¼ is a roguelite jrpg but it’s also a survival horror: this game atmosphere is very oppressive and claustrophobic. always walking through corridors, avoiding combat since every single enemy can kill you very easily if you don’t have a good strategy for every single battle and even your backpack is limited by the amount of items you can carry: you can’t have 99 “potions”, only 10. you can’t even save it everytime, you need a “save token” that is like resident evil’s ink: it’s very rare, sometimes not even worth obtaining since there’s a big-bad-can-kill-you-in-one-hit enemy in the front of it. the combat also is more like a crpg, having “AP points” to move your character in-map and also being the points you need to attack the enemy. gladly, utilizing items does not take off your “AP points” so you can pretty much survive the next hit even if you already did your movement. the combat depends a lot on positioning and you can even hide behind boxes, go around and hit the enemies on the back (which every single attack hits). D¼ is also a fighting game in a sense, since you have to do combos in order to do real damage in this game: press “circle” while holding “R2” then hit “square”, “square”, “x”, “circle” again and wow! a combo! a critical hit! or it may not even land! you can buy weapons as well but the best ones are obtained randomly after killing strong enemies or opening boxes (that need a key (that you obtain after killing strong enemies)), the same goes for skill. the “steal” skill is probably the best steal skill in any videogame since it’s a passive skill that activates every time you take damage so you can pretty much get fucked up but with a “????????+5” weapon (you gotta discover what it is in a shop (a girl with glasses (that is also the same girl that stores your items that you can take after every restart)).

this c-j-survival-horror-fighting-rpg is a very complex and most of the time miserable piece of gaming. the gritty, melancholic, tarkovsky-meets-anime style of its narrative does not help too. you are never secure in this world, even if you are, it’s more like being comfortable while a catastrophe is happening (not so different from the lockdowns, huh?). still, it is such an interesting and addicting experience, restarting it again and again, seeing new scenes, having new items, doing things faster and faster. one of my restarts i did ⅔ of the game in 3 hours, which, before, took me a lot more. D¼ is a game about perseverance. it teaches you that it’s not your “d-ratio” that will change the world: i mean, which time in history the higher classes actually did something significant for the people? when they did, they were pressured by the lower classes. D¼ tells us to not accommodate our situation but to break the blue ceiling and go all up to reach the sky, like a true dragon. it doesn’t matter how many times you gotta die each day, you can try again and again until you fulfill your dreams.

"man will gain wings and the sky will return to the world"



D¼ was very controversial for breaking with so many structures that breath of fire as a franchise constructed, for being so weird and hard and “unfair” and whatever people were saying back in the day. still is perceived as the black sheep of the series, the game that killed the franchise and this was repeated so much that a lot of people didn’t even try to play it! however, if you open your mind and especially your heart, you will encounter a very frustrating videogame, yeah, but very rewarding, both gameplay-loop-wise and spiritually. in this site, there’s more “backlogs” and “wishlists” for this game than actually plays! and is such a fancy designed experimental piece of gaming that did stuff almost 20 years before mr.best-action-game-of-2020 did and in a better way, in my opinion. so please, you reading this, know that i’m not the roger ebert of game’s writing but i really ask you with all my heart to consider giving it a chance. it’s not so hard to emulate it (even if it does have some graphic bugs) and it’s not so expensive if you live in the states and can buy it for your ps2. don’t mind dying a couple times before discovering what you have to do, just experience the beautiful story of a young dragon seeking for freedom.