The biggest compliment I can give Yakuza: Like a Dragon is just how much it reminds me of Yakuza 0. More than any other Yakuza title I always felt 0 had this perfect balance between emotional drama and hilarious bizarre situations. I remember an interview with one of the developer team who described Yakuza something along the lines of "doing silly things extremely seriously". This is the perfect description of the series as a whole but I feel Yakuza 0 and Like a Dragon perfected the balance of these that no other game managed, as great as I think they all are. Even Like a Dragon's conception originated from an April Fool's video in 2019 where they showed the game as a turn based RPG (which it wasn't actually at the time). The prank was so popular that they decided to change the entire gameplay mechanics for the Japanese launch 9 months later. Silly things, extremely seriously.

Honestly as both a JRPG fan and a Yakuza fan everything about this game was an absolute smash. The new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga is just wonderful. I wasn't sure at first, even for a Yakuza game I felt the start of this game was a slow burn and retread some ideas from the very original Yakuza game but once it gets started I fell in love with not only him but all the characters he meets. Not every story beat quite works but the cast and the fantastic voice acting (I played in Japanese) absolutely carry it in those rare moments. Interestingly I'm probably more attached to the cast in this game than other Yakuza games just because you spend so much more time with them all due to it being a party based RPG rather than a solo beat 'em up. I especially liked Adachi and Saeko but they are all fantastic. Also having a JRPG with a purely adult cast was such a refreshing change of pace.

The combat system is so full of imagination being both hilarious and paying homage to classic JRPG's in a lot of ways. Ichiban is a huge Dragon Quest fan and even being part of the Yakuza always wanted to be a hero. I'm not sure if he took too many hits to the head but in battle he sees some of the enemies as RPG type enemies. Drunks turn into beer knights, Fire Jugglers, and other weird enemies. The game has a job system such as Final Fantasy implemented but to change jobs you actually have to go to the job center to do it. I love the way they incorporated that into a real life scenario. Also the fact that apparently the job center in Yokohama advertises for Dominatixs, Break Dancers, Bodyguards, you know.....standard vacancies. My only complaint about this system (and game generally) is that for most of the game there is little need to change jobs. You become hugely weaker going from a level 30 Homeless Man to a level 1 musician involving a lot of grinding to catch up just isn't worth it stat wise, only to learn a few skills. I would like to see better balance and encouragement to change jobs and experiment as I only found that worth doing grinding for the end game dungeons.

Combat aside this is a standard Yakuza game, this isn't an insult. If you've never played one before it's essentially mini open world's set in cities. They aren't massive but tend to be dense and memorable which is how open worlds should be. Size isn't everything (snarf snarf). During these explorations there are substories or side quests and mini games many of which are hilarious. Some examples involving Japanese men in business suits and power ranger helmets, a whole kart racing game, running a business with a chicken, collecting cans in a rickshaw among others.

I spent 120 hours playing this and getting the platinum trophy. Watching a woman smack a yakuza in the face with her leaden handbag +2 simply never got old and with Ishin and two further Like a Dragon titles announced coming it's never been a better time to be a series fan.

+ Characters are great with fantastic voice acting.
+ Combat system is full of imagination.
+ Tons to do. Great mini games and substories.

- Job system needs slightly refining to encourage using other jobs.

(For personal reasons, I've decided against marking these types of impressions as reviews in the future. If you want to see more of them, be sure to check out the list I'm compiling of each.)


This is the most profound case study on how following industry trends a little too closely can bite you in the ass I've ever seen. The question of "in ten years, will you remember Babylon's Fall" is about as rhetorical as one can get; in less than twelve months, you won't even be able to play Babylon's Fall. And need I remind you, this game came out this year. I'd say it's unprecedented if it weren't so fucking depressing. Here you have this somewhat large group of people banding together to create something that, cynical or not, has pieces of them inside of it. I mean, sure, it's an aggressively cynical experience, but come on, it's there. And then what? The game comes out and, to the chagrin of its money-hungry publisher, is birthed to a mother who was warned her child would be a stillborn nine months in advance. Nobody buys it, but people are talking about it. So they create updates and try to get them talking about it for the right reasons—no Bueno. Sony released Morbius twice, and Platinum Games made more content for Babylon's Fall. Tomatoes, tamatoes. By the end of the day, they're staring at a pipeline of content that, even if it's better than it has any right to be, is going to see about as much exposure as the Backloggd page for Terrifying 9/11. Regardless if the decision came down to the developer or the publisher (I'm willing to wager it was the latter), you have to at least have some empathy for the developers in that experience. Their baby, their very, very mediocre baby, looks like Butthead.

Earlier this week, GameStop was giving away copies of Babylon's Fall for free when they weren't outright destroying them. The name No Man's Sky has grown to have a double meaning. It's the game's name, but it's also what many a gaming enthusiast will recognize as a solid redemption arc. Business doesn't make for involving storytelling unless you're playing a strategy game. And even then, are you really going to tell me that looking at fictional stock prices for ten hours is as gripping as the second season of Fargo? "Redemption arcs" don't happen. Perception can change over time, but a subset of enthusiasts will always howl at Sean Murray's name because of what went down in 2016. If you want to say that Cyberpunk is a good game, that's fine now, but eight years from where I'm standing today, that might still be a controversial statement with the wrong crowd. If you want your perception to improve, there has to be passion. No Man's Sky might have lacked a lot of promised features at launch, but the promise of a galaxy with a near-infinite number of planets to explore without explicitly being told to do so was still compelling. And Cyberpunk, buggy and half-baked as it was, was still pretty fun. What chance did Babylon's Fall have outside of the pedigree of its developer? What, you're expecting me to believe that James Franco will remake As I Lie Dying and not make it bad? Names don't mean anything. "What's in a name?—"nothing. Talent shifts, and among the talent that stays or is as competent as the talent that came before, humans don't breathe binary. If you're a creative person at all, falling on your face every so often is like a Monday. We don't like Mondays, but who are we going to complain to about that?

Babylon's Fall was shot in the foot early, and that wound dug deep. If one is to believe that this grabbag of investor-approved buzzwords is to fault for not attracting enough attention, they have to recognize that.

It's wild to imagine that I almost skipped Xenoblade Chronicles 3 this year. XC2 left such a bad taste in my mouth, Monolith Soft should be thankful that they won my good graces back with Torna: The Golden Country.

Out story takes place in a world plagued by endless conflicts, fighting for each other's literal life forces. War is all the Kevesi and Agnians know, until a chance encounter breaks our main Kevesi/Agnian trios free, gives them newfound powers, forcing them to live on the run from their own allies, begrudgingly work together, and find a new purpose in life. Some outside force is trying to keep these wars going, and our heroes are determined to put a stop to it. Discovering every colony in the game and witnessing the variety of lifestyles they lead was always a treat. Our main cast of characters bounce off each other really well, and I'm glad that they felt grounded in reality. The one part of the story I take issue with is the ones pulling the strings behind the scenes: The Consuls, also known as Moebius(plural). Every colony has at least one, and they spout some of the most cartoonishly evil drivel I've ever heard. There were a few that left an emotional impact on me, but they were definitely the minority. Most of them just run their mouths until I just wanna...just wanna...JUST WANNA--

...where was I? Well, I think that about covers how I feel about the story anyways. As weird and moderately backhanded as it may sound, one of the things that impresses me the most about XC3 is its quality-of-life features. It's a lot of little stuff that adds up in the long run to improve the experience overall. Just to name a few:

-there's a directional indicator so you know what side of an enemy you're on at all times
-a symbol appears when you're within auto-attack range
-clicking the right stick in battle does a quick dodge. it doesn't give i-frames, but it lets you briefly phase through enemies, allowing you to reposition yourself even when backed into a corner
-pressing minus activates auto-battle, good for mopping up aggressive small fry
-holding minus brings up a mid-battle pause screen where you can retry/abandon battles
-you can fight while swimming in a body of water
-all popup tutorials can be reviewed at any time from the pause menu
-there are optional, dedicated tutorials that more thoroughly walk you through the battle system's mechanics

I'm legit torn on XC3's battle system. The class system allows you to mix and match abilites and skills, building up all your characters into whatever role you desire. Fusion arts are a cool way to gain the benefits of two different moves out of one attack animation. Interlinking to become a superpowered Ouroboros form is also rad, but it's also where my problems begin to take root. Performing enough fusion arts will cause your interlink level to rise. When it's at level 3, your Ouroboros forms are ludicrously overpowered. Having so many options at your disposal already can make combat a bit of a clusterfuck, just a completely unintelligible flurry of particle effects and numbers. Sometimes I wondered if I was making a difference at all during battles. On top of that though is this game's chain attack, which is a complete and utter pacebreaker. It is not hard to game the chain attack in your favor, dealing disgusting amounts of damage for what feels like no effort whatsoever. I begin to question your combat's balance when the most dominant strategy is using fusion arts until Interlink level 3, fire off a bunch of Ouroboros attacks, and deploy a chain attack before the interlink ends. This method decimates about 80% of a boss's health bar, and they were likely already down 20% by the time you hit interlink level 3.

The amount of content on offer in XC3 is downright insane. I frequently postponed progressing the story just so I could check out all the colonies and see if there were new developments. At one point, I even stood outside the door to the final boss, turned away from the point of no return, and found 6 more sidequests to do. I could do with less of the sidequests that involved following an NPC along its scripted path, or the ones where you follow a seemingly endless trail to your destination, but regardless, most of the sidequests succeed in pushing forth their own slice of the narrative. All of it takes place in an open world so gargantuan in terms of scale that I'm impressed that the Switch didn't melt in my hands/dock. There's so much stuff to see and do packed into every corner of the map, and it felt like the devs tried to make every dead end worth my while. Wrap it up with a soundtrack packing both beauty and bangers, and before I know it, I've been playing the game for 5 hours straight.

Honestly, I have no idea how Monolith Soft does it. They have these innate abilities that no other studio seems to understand. How do they keep getting away with crafting these wholly unique open worlds, lovable characters, and engaging combat systems. They even managed to keep the tradition of a major character getting cucked (seriously Tetsuya Takahashi, what is your obsession with cuckoldry). Glad I didn't miss this one though. I'm gonna think about it over some Oreos. No particular reason why.

It's such a shame that the third Jumping Flash game never got an English localisation. It's such a treat for PS1 fans. What Tekken 3 and Ridge Racer Type 4 were to their predecessors, Robbit mon Dieu is to the first two Jumping Flashes; a real technical marvel, built with complete confidence in how to best present a PlayStation game. The in-engine cutscenes here are overflowing with charm, with fantastic character designs and even better utilisation of texture-based facial animation than Mega Man Legends. We've got your cardboard box tokusatsu squads, your mischevious frog girls, your flowerpotman gardeners, your smoking hawaiian shirt guys with full-head crocodile masks. Robbit mon Dieu is it, fellas.

To the best of my understanding, Robbit mon Dieu places Robbit on an island full of citizens, each with different requests for him. You have a big map to select different requests from before launching into a level. While Jumping Flash 1 and 2 kind of shrugged its shoulders at the concept of cohesive level design, Robbit mon Dieu actually gives it a little consideration. The different requests bring with them levels that are designed purposefully. There's obstacle courses, boss fights, traditional item-finding sandboxes, dungeons and combat-heavy gauntlets among others. This is definitely the most varied Jumping Flash game, for better and worse.

There's short, easy little levels that leave little impact. There's also full-on nineties scrambles full of impossible jumps, nightmarish obstacles and incredibly juddery controls. Thankfully, there's also a lot of middleground where you're just having fun in this gorgeous, ambitious Jumping Flash game that nobody else has even heard of.

Newcomers who have been playing the series for the first time will be thankful to hear that Robbit mon Dieu does support the Dualshock controller. They will likely be very upset to discover this only means it's got rumble now. You're still jumping around these chaotic 3D worlds entirely with the d-pad. Going from Splatoon 3 to Robbit mon Dieu is like being told your bed has been thrown out and you're going to sleep on a rock tonight. If you've got enough PS1 in your veins, you can weather through it and even find some charm in its rudimentary approach to concepts like "aiming" and "strafing", but this is NO BABY GAME.

Not being a Japanese speaker or reader, there's so much that went over my head. For all I know, there's probably an "enable gyro" option buried somewhere in the deep, dense menus. It's a real shame, because there's so much energy and care put into the cutscenes and voice acting. I'm sure that carries through to all the written epilogues after each level too. All I could follow was when someone said "tasukete" or "onee-chan". If any of those PS1 fantranslation folk are sitting around with their thumbs in their arse, I would really appreciate it if they helped out the twenty English-only idiots who cared about Jumping Flash 3.

If you're a big Jumping Flash fan, Robbit mon Dieu is a must play. That's your curse. You have to get through every agonising moment of the level where-you-have-to-shoot-the-birds-circling-the-towers-but-your-shots-don't-reach-some-of-them-from-any-point-on-the-towers-so-you-have-to-set-your-aim-and-jump-and-fire-a-couple-of-shots-for-the-two-seconds-they're-in-range-and-do-that-five-times-without-falling-off-because-then-you'll-have-to-climb-up-from-the-bottom-again. I'm very sorry.

I thank Splatoon 3 for giving me an actually charming low TTK, high movement arena shooter with a personality, I've missed having this since Titanfall 2 is dead and TF2 is still struggling with bots. I mean, I still have to deal with Nintendo servers, but I'm used to how bad they are. Wouldn't be a true arena shooter without some dogshit netcode.

AND it has a charming lil singleplayer campaign using the Octo Expansion format, too. It's no masterpiece of game design but it's still pretty damn fun.

A few years ago I got into collecting Sega CD repros, despite not actually owning a Sega CD. This wasn't a big deal, of course, since you can just pop the disc into any CD drive and play the game through emulation. This is how I enjoyed Snatcher for the first time, and shortly after I picked up a very authentic looking copy of Policenauts with an English patch applied.

Policenauts is may not be as good as Snatcher but still works well as a spiritual successor, borrowing just as heavily from movies Hideo Kojima likes as that game. Instead of being a love letter to cyberpunk classics like Blade Runner, Policenauts is a pretty straight-forward police procedural/buddy cop homage, with the two leads clearly being analogs for Riggs and Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon. In fact, if you want to be very reductive about it, Policenauts is essentially "Lethal Weapon in space."

The player controls Jonathan Ingram, sexual predator and founding member of the Policenauts, the first law enforcement entity in space. An accident during a space walk sends Jonathan adrift, though he's found many years later in stasis. Now estranged from his fellow officers, who have all grown older and found success higher up in the political food chain, Jonathan works as a hostage negotiator. However, he's soon called back into space where he reconnects with his former partner, Ed Brown, to unravel a conspiracy involving former members of the Policenauts and the mysterious Tokugawa corporation.

Like Snatcher, progress is earned by solving environmental puzzles, engaging in conversation with other characters, and (occasionally) whipping out a light gun and blasting some dudes. And, like Snatcher, the light gun segments are probably the weakest part of the game. They're very infrequent and they escalate in difficulty rather quickly, and since I played this via emulation I was stuck using a controller for all of them. One day I'll pop this into my Saturn and play it properly, but I suspect it will make playing these sections a lot more tolerable.

Puzzles are a lot more complex than they were in Snatcher, and a few of them can be pretty tense. One involves disarming a bomb under a tight time limit, and apparently this segment of the game does not play nice with emulators because the screen turns completely black during it. I could not fix this no matter how hard I tried and had to resort to using a youtube video as a guide and feel my way through it. Even without the added layer of anxiety, it's a pretty demanding puzzle, and I appreciate how much more Policenauts asks out of the player.

You also have to figure out where the bomb is even located before you can diffuse it, with one possible hiding place being a woman's chest. This does at least earn you a pretty funny game over, but... yeah. Policenauts is arguably Kojima's horniest game. In my Snatcher review I mentioned how Kojima's crass humor can sometimes cross a line, but at least Gillian wasn't capable of grabbing every female character he talks to.

It's also fun to spot all the things that show up later in Metal Gear Solid. Meryl is a prominent secondary character, Tokugawa Heavy Industry's logo is on the Cyborg Ninja's helmet, augments bleed white blood similar to Raiden in MGS4, hell Ed Brown was supposed to be a supporting cast member in Metal Gear Solid 2 before he was cut entirely. I always appreciated these little connective bits that loosely tie together Kojima's games, even if I don't think any of them can be considered part of one larger shared canon. It's just neat. I think it's fun.

Policenauts does lack some of Snatcher's personality and strangeness by rooting itself in a (comparatively) more grounded world, but that's not to say it's bereft of it. Every step of the way you can tell this is another project where Kojima was able to pour in a lot of references to media he loves while opining in his own unique way about real world theories on genetic engineering and space exploration. The sort of stuff you know is well researched, but still exists very firmly within the realm of fiction. There should be a term for that, really. Like... "Science fiction", or something. I don't know. Maybe not like that, sounds kinda dumb. I mean, it's alright too, you know, whatever.

Policenauts is not for everyone, and it is perhaps one of the harder games from Kojima's catalog to recommend to someone who is not already familiar with his work. It helps that this game is also pretty inaccessible. Emulation ain't great, and soft-modding a Sega Saturn and patching an ISO might be more work than it's worth for most people. However, if you find yourself drawn to Kojima's games then I do think you should try to check this one out. It's interesting to see how Kojima's storytelling grew (and regressed) from Snatcher, and as Metal Gear Solid's precursor, it makes for a good companion piece.

It's a strange experience to go into a game, fully expecting it to be relatable and then it just... isn't.
This happened to me once before, when I played We Know The Devil.
How do I rate a game like that?

While procrastinating earlier this week I was browsing old Jimquisitions and stumbled across the “100% Objective review”, a video where they make fun of the concept of an objective review. Their original review of Final Fantasy XIII was incredibly negative and they got harassed for it not being “objective” so they made a “review” that was just listing facts. While reading the comments of that video I stumbled across something that really stuck with me. I don’t remember the exact wording, but someone was saying something to the extent of “If you were an English teacher, would you assign grades purely based on whether you like a paper or not? Hopefully not, when grading a paper, you need to put aside personal bias and grade it on the quality of its content. Same for a video game, you’re supposed to subjectively evaluate its features independent of personal bias.”
Putting aside the fact that English papers aren’t art and reviewing isn’t grading, that sentiment strikes me as odd. I don’t rate based on technical execution. A lot of games I have rated very highly have some pretty massive flaws. I sometimes joke that Nier Automata would be an awful game if it wasn’t also my favourite game. My ratings are pretty much exclusively based on how much I enjoyed something.

So, how do I rate Post-Disclosure, Devil’s Knight?
Based solely on enjoyment it’s probably like a 5/10 I guess.
But rating it as such would feel incredibly unfair. It’s not the game’s fault I went into it expecting something it could never deliver on. It’s not the game’s fault my lived experiences are so vastly different from what it’s trying to portray that I don’t relate to anything that is happening.
Besides, aren’t I always annoyed when cis people ignore trans stories because “it wouldn’t be relatable anyway”? Aren’t I being just as bad right now?
And I know this game can be relatable to people. I hope that Roxy relates to it, would be weird otherwise. Kye’s excellent review shows very well just how much this story resonates with her. If I slap a label like “two and a half stars” on this, I feel like I’m invalidating their experiences. Even worse, I might end up scaring someone off this game who would have ended up loving it.

The objective Final Fantasy XIII review has the following line:
“If you buy Final Fantasy XIII and like it, then you like Final Fantasy XIII. If you buy Final Fantasy XIII and you don’t like it, then you don’t like Final Fantasy XIII. It has things in it that some people might enjoy but other people who have different ideas of what is enjoyable may not actually enjoy it.”
As much as that is very obvious satire, it’s pretty much exactly how I feel about PDDK. I personally didn’t like it all that much but I know other people will.
Fortunately, unlike FFXIII, it’s a free game that will only take you 10 minutes to play. So why not give it a try, see if you’ll end up enjoying it? What’s the worst that could happen?

The worst that could happen is that you could end up writing a really weird review about the process of reviewing things and spend over an hour with that apparently.

FF8 is like NIN's The Fragile, an insanely ambitious, huge, sprawling, and extremely different game to the smash mega-hit that preceded it, and not unlike FF7, it was very controversial. Thankfully, both the Fragile and FF8 seem to have gotten their due amount of love in recent years. Squall kind of looks like late 90s Trent Reznor too if you think about it...

Anyway, I am nearly at the finish line, but like FF7, I have hit a point in the game where I know my personal rating isn't going to change, and to me FF8 is a 5-star game as affecting and stunning as FF7. I might do a big writeup on how much I love it once I've actually beaten it, but for now I'll say that the amount of spectacle, visual variety, and really incredible emotional depth has turned me from a Final Fantasy VII fan into a Final Fantasy fan flat out. If IX and X are as good as this, and I have reason to believe they are, then I'm going to give even more of these games 5 stars.

With FF8 I've noticed a lot about the story mentioned by people who are incapable of Having Fun, and perpetuate the STUPID ass "Squall is dead" theory. BOO!! I hate that shit. To be honest though, I don't think the story was any more insane than Final Fantasy 7's, both are extremely grand and operatic narratives that are carried by a deeply human and colorful cast of characters. That is the strength of this series as I've found it: drop characters you want to see win in an insane and twisting plot. I think that's cool!! I want my fantasy game to be over-the-top and larger than life! I live a boring, consistent real life and it sucks ass!!

Suffice it to say, I fucking LOVE this game!!! The junction system is the most fun I've had experimenting with an RPG since Morrowind, figuring out the most interesting ways to break the game or alternatively, make it really challenging. I can see why this one is really divisive but I love this insanely ambitious game even when it is being messy. I don't really give a game a 5 if I think it's "mechanically perfect," because that's stupid. I give a game a 5 if I lay down at night thinking about it, if I'm at work thinking about it, and if I can't help but bring it up in conversation because I am so fixated on it, and FF8 is absolutely a game I can't stop thinking about or excitedly booting up to try new junctions, or play more triple triad.

If a review is a reflection of one's experience with a game, then it only makes sense that my review of Feather Park is a retrospective of my role on it as the sole composer and sound designer.

Since 2012, my raison d'etre was "I want to write music for video games!", and despite hanging around hobbyist circles around it for years, I never really had a real finished game to my name. I could name multiple factors - mental health, poor family life, most likely undiagnosed conditions, so on - but I've watched friends, acquaintances and strangers start from the same sort of place I began at and move on to do the very gigs I would have dreamed to score.

It always crushed me, and I'd be lying if I said I've overcome it for good with this one game. Still, the fact that I can say with complete integrity that "I wrote music for a game!" means a lot to me, as does the fact that Feather Park was the first thing to really break me out of my shell, my mental blockade of not being able to write and complete original music since my last gig, one October ago.

I'll get the gameplay out of the way first. It's a simple game jam game made in two weeks for the 2022 Cozy Autumn Game Jam - you explore a simple overworld (about eight screens), control this hat-wearing bird around to meet other animals, play their minigames or solve miscellaneous tasks to cheer them up and make friends with them. There's no text, and everything's conveyed through audiovisual context, meaning that my role as sound designer was probably a tiny bit more important than usual.

The rock-paper-scissors minigame, for example: you're supposed to figure out which the other animal is going to choose, then deliberately lose to them and give them the win.
With the deadline looming ahead of me (I'd put off sound effects for the most part until the last day of the jam) and reusing sound effects across multiple contexts being the only seemingly viable way to get everything done, maybe it was a little ham-fisted that I gave a stereotypical "incorrect" sound effect for when you, the player, win the game of rock-paper-scissors. Or maybe it's not, and maybe it was helpful that I laid it on thick that actually, winning against this creature is a bad thing.

There aren't any real answers when it comes to sound design, I think - just personal opinions and justifications on how you think your opinions will impact others' experiences. That open-endedness definitely stumped me for a lot of the more abstract sound effects: how do you represent a heart icon popping up, for example?

Music being my primary avenue, not sound, I ended up representing most of the abstract sound effects with musical elements - a jingle on mallet percussions for the heart icon, a guitar slide for question mark popups, and so on. I tend to do this kind of psuedo-Mickey Mousing a lot (my original plan was to have the main character's footsteps sync in time with the music to play a little xylophone sound, but it was too complicated), and it worked out for a silly, cozy cartoony game like this, but I wonder how I'll fare for a game that needs less of that and more synthesized, sci-fi sounds.

Getting to implement the sound effects myself within the game engine definitely helped, though, and it was a learning experience I value a lot. The developer, Jon Topielski, was happy to get me set up with the engine he was using so that I could go into the project myself in order to implement, test and tweak the sounds without going through a game of telephone. (He's a swell guy, really! I can't thank him enough for how everything turned out in the end!)

Not only did this save a lot of time avoiding said telephone game, but it meant I got to be a lot more hands-on in deciding how exactly these sounds were going to play. I felt like a real part of the game development experience, and - if I could do it once, I definitely can and would love to do it again!
Being able to say "I can do sound effects and implementation for your game" is bound to be an asset.

I guess that leaves the music. Following some mental health crises between September and March, and burnout both as a person and as a musician that had accumulated since all the way back in 2018, I spent most of the past year not really directly working on music. Most of what I did do was small experiments, tiny transcriptions and arrangements, mainly to justify the questionable amounts of money I was putting into music creation software as a means of coping with my ennui and anxiety.

It relieves me that just about every single purchase went a long way into helping this soundtrack come to life. Besides some stock percussion, and my live instruments, every single instrument in the soundtrack was from a purchase within the past year: the alto flutes in the main theme; the brush drums in both overworld and minigame themes; the jazz guitar whose sheer character lent itself so obviously to interesting chords that ended up being the backbone to the main theme; the horns on the minigame theme that I still think was the best possible value for something of its quality; even notation software I chose to write the ending theme on instead of on Logic to save myself from writing an entire grand staff piece solely on a piano roll; all of it.

It contextualizes my purchases as an investment, something I've committed to so that I can now just focus on getting the music written the way I want to instead of coveting over tiny, negligible upgrades because I'd chosen to cheap out on my equipment. As long as music's being made with them, I think I'll be alright - and especially as long as I'm writing music for video games with them just like I have here.

I guess I could tell my ten-years-ago self now:

"Hey! You know how you've always wanted to write music for a game? I've done it!"

"It took you so long? And it's just a non-commercial game jam game?"

"I know. I fear I might have taken too long to get here all the time. But I've gotten at least to where I have so far, so from here, I might as well appreciate what progress I've made and promise to myself to go further, as far as I can, and be proud of where I get."

"..."

In April 2013, my nine-years-ago self recorded a record scratch sample. I don't remember where I recorded it from, but I know that I could dig for a higher-quality version of the same sample in one of my virtual synths. On September 22th, I briefly considered doing that - but it would take too much time to look for when a version of the sample was right there in my hands already.

Was this a present I made to myself nine years ago, like a time capsule? A little something to make my life just a tiny bit easier down the road? Who knows. I had no idea where my life was going to be in nine years, and I definitely couldn't imagine it would be where it is now.

"Thanks, Can of Nothing," I said to myself, and inserted "KorgRecordScratch.wav" into the FailedMinigame node.
"I won't let your efforts go to waste. I'll write for more games, I promise."

Rebuilding life

I find it difficult to describe Terranigma to someone that has no idea what the premise of the title is about. It definitely feels like Quintet's culimination of efforts after Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia. In an era where SNES JRPGs are considered the absolute peak of the genre, Terranigma earns its place there with some of the best.

The story is great as it shows the duality of how the light side and dark side came to be. In stories where characters develop, the world also truly develops with you as well. This is what makes the games special in my eyes. Life itself progressing based on your actions. Ark wasn't the greatest of people in the beginning of his story, he starts by having to apologize for things he did before and even when you try to help people, the game won't let you initially. The narrative starts slow but it builds up in scope the more the world itself builds back up too.

Traversal through the world and defending yourself is pretty simple to a benefit and a fault. I think the combat is simple but it also feels extremely fluid, each attack gives you a specific benefit over a specific type of enemy and gives you a bit to go over. The magic system is not the greatest but it does an okay job. Leveling up is never a problem and overall dungeon design is overall good here. A bit of backtracking but it doesn't really dilute the experience too much. I wish the combat had a bit more to it, another type of weapon maybe but it works well and the game doesn't overstay its welcome.

The sprite work for the game is great as Ark not only feels fluid but looks fluid too in his animations. Seeing all of the creative designs including the modern stuff is great. The soundtrack is great to boot with some somber and some emotional pieces that are hard not to have an emotional response to. Elle's theme just does that and hearing the overworld theme for the first time after a bit to signal the adventure was truly beginning.

A great action JRPG that feels extremely solid in a variety of places. I was a bit bored with the combat and backtracking after a bit but I think that's really the most personal worst parts about the game for me. Everything this game offers is unique and something a fan of JRPGs should definitely play at least once.

DJ Hero 2 makes DJ Hero look like a rough draft, much like Guitar Hero 2 made Guitar Hero before it.

It takes the fundamentals of DJ Hero and iterates on it in little ways, such as adding head to head battles and new gameplay elements such as held scratches and freestyle sections that allow you to crossfade and scratch your own style into the game's fresh set of song mixes. They don't change the base gameplay in huge ways, but make the game feel like the full realization of the rhythm game - Guitar Hero never fully approximated the feeling of playing a guitar, but freestyle crossfading, managing effects, and simulating scratches gets fairly close to what video games can do with rhythm games.

The big way that DJ Hero 2 betters itself is in its presentation; DJ Hero 2 actually has a usable menu interface, and a full career mode that iterates on the setlist driven single player campaign of the original game. This career mode, even though it amounts to little more than tasteful menus to choose set lists from, allows for a real sense of progression as you move through the various cities that the career sends you to on tour. Your stars are tracked as you move from venue to venue with visible progress presented to the player between each setlist. It makes a substantial difference in terms of game feel that makes it a tighter overall experience.

DJ Hero 2 also adds head to head DJ battles, which act as skills checks throughout the career mode; these are like Guitar Hero's Face Off mode, tasking you with defeating various DJs at their own game; mixes are broken up into checkpoints of various lengths. You compete for percentage of notes hit in each checkpoint; the DJ with the most checkpoints won at the end of the song wins the battle. It's a great way to shake up the structure of the gameplay. The expert difficulty battles are especially rewarding to master.

The game's setlist continues onwards from the work that DJ Hero started with a tasteful mix of rap, R&B, pop, and dance music that gets blended together into a series of truly beautiful music experiences. It feels a smidge more mainstream in its sensibilities than the original title, but resonated more deeply with me as a listener; only one DJ Hero has 50 Cent's In Da Club mixed with Lil Jon's Get Low. Cmon now.

At the end of the day, DJ Hero feels like a promise of greatness. DJ Hero 2 IS that greatness.

There's quite a few influences that I assume rubbed off on Uchikoshi after he and Kodaka (creator of Danganronpa) formed their independent studio, Tookyo Games. There's a Tamogachi-esque pet that asks you questions every 20 minutes. It's completely optional, vaguely charming, and you can ignore it with no consequence, but I wonder why it's there all the same. It's feels eerily reminiscent of a similar distraction in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. While re-enacting the events of a crime isn't unique to Danganronpa, I do feel like the way the act is presented is reminiscent of how you fill in the blanks and re-enact the crime at the end of a trial in Danganronpa. These aren't necessarily knocks against either of these games or their creators, just a couple of observations I made.

On a mechanical level, the game's Somniums are a lot more satisfying to solve. Minor tweaks like the "keys" system really help push you in the right direction while keeping things appropriately abstract. It is a dream world, after all. A few still devolved into trial and error, where I often decided to save myself the headache and just reload my save file (so as to not sacrifice my limited checkpoint-based retries to some nonsense decision). Also, game ran kinda chunky on Switch. Lag spikes in odd places. It's not a deal-breaker, just a bit rough, that's all.

Something that I'm not sure clicks with me about the story is the structure. It's a bit too linear imo, in comparison to Uchikoshi's previous works, anyways. Without digging deep into spoilers, I will say that I ended up enjoying Ryuki's side of the story a bit more than Mizuki's, but both are enjoyable in their own right. The other thing that bothers me is that numerous events can feel a bit too reminiscent of the previous title's plot at times. One thing this game plays with a lot more than the original is the QTE action scenes though, which sometimes had the unfortunate side-effect of sending a lot of tension off the deep end in favor of spectacle.

On the other hand though, I got exactly what I signed up for; Kotaro Uchikoshi sitting by my side, reveling in a new opportunity to expose me to all kinds of pseudo-science, occult organizations, conspiracy theories, all the while making thinly-veiled horny jokes. The writing style of the previous game still rings true, and its quirky sense of humor of AI:TSF is something I could never get tired of. The characters, both new and old, bounce off each other really well.

Overall, I feel like I didn't get exactly what I wanted out of this title. It kinda drops a lot of the mystery in favor of "sci-fi thriller", in my opinion. That doesn't mean it's bad though. I still thoroughly enjoyed my time with the game. However, I'd still recommend you start with the first AI:TSF, even though this game claims that Nirvana Initiative can be played standalone. I just think the original has a much better narrative.