Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Feb. 7 – Feb. 14, 2023).

Majin and Sacrificial Girl is a game that consistently runs off the feeling of being almost a great time in every aspect of its experience. The atmosphere and aesthetic is almost excellent, the game loop is almost excellent, and even the narrative is in a similar position, but it's just unfortunate that it just falls slightly short across the board and leads to something that feels far less consistently engaging on any level. The aesthetic is easily where this comes most into play for me, with the monster designs all being really cool in their brand of surrealism going for something that feels like a midpoint between comedic and offputtingly uncanny. They all move in unnatural ways, never quite seeming like they mesh together correctly, further exacerbated by the faded sepia colour palette making it all feel horribly run down and on the verge of just crumbling, while maintaining a threatening aura the whole time. It's just a shame then that the aesthetic doesn't feel like it's something that is fully committed to, both thanks to the generic, "epic" music and the fact that all of the UI just screams default Unity, causing this weird clash where the visual design is either really awesome, or the cheapest looking thing ever without much in between, unfortunately taking me out of the atmosphere a bit.

In terms of gameplay this is a pretty standard deckbuilder with a couple of cool deviations that make it stand out a bit. The biggest of this is how you simply cannot fully die, with the worst outcome being that you just have to run away from the fight and try again. This lack of consequence works pretty well for a game like this where it's clearly more about just taking in your surroundings and progressing forward than one that's explicitly trying to challenge you, and it allows for some risk free experimentation as well. I also really, really love the little touch of the dithering of the entire screen intensifying with each failed battle, just something to further contribute to how it feels to play this. The main way in which this ultimately falls apart however, is the fact that not many of the cards feel at all interesting unfortunately. A lot of them are just basic variations on attacks where an almost universally correct answer is present. Why would I ever use lightning bolt when tornado exists and deals almost the same damage but also comes with card draw? Why would I ever use a card that costs 3 and deals 22 when there's a card that effectively deals 24 for the same price? Why would I ever leave out the card that's literally just free energy?

These sorts of choices hurt the game quite a lot in experimentation considering that a bunch just feel like lesser versions of others. It ends up leaving you with just a small handful of ones that feel at all worthwhile to mess about with. If the cards were given out in a set order, this could play into a sense of progression where you at least feel like you're getting stronger, but instead, they're all given out in a random order as you progress, which leads to a strange sense of pacing where you'll often be getting multiple cards in a row that feel functionally useless, with the lack of unique characteristics on most of them further leading to these pickups largely feeling uninteresting. The fact that it's totally possible to not get any of the somewhat more interesting, transformative cards until the last 10 minutes of the game feels like an especially egregious oversight. The bug where sometimes clicking on a card will cause it to play multiple times is also absolutely unbearable, as even though there's no real penalty for losing a fight, having to try again entirely on the account of the game deciding that you did something that you straight up didn't is never a good feeling. It's really a shame that this is almost something amazing in a ton of ways and falls flat just enough to become annoying, and also, the game ends about as unceremoniously and suddenly as this review.

Janky card battlers have never looked this good.

There's something to say about the surge of deckbuilding games in recent years. They aren't over-saturated — not really, as much they might feel like they are — but they've definitely become something of a very common spice added to the indie roguelite stew. Want to make something where the player progressively stumbles their way into new abilities, and don't feel like making time-consuming animations or design-document-busting gameplay changes for each one? Make it into a deckbuilder! Real, physical playing cards have long been used in tabletop games to represent beings or concepts that would be otherwise unfeasible to depict; digital playing cards are a simple, near-universal substitute for computer games that can't or won't showcase more complex ways of interfacing with the game. It's an appealing solution to a variety of problems, making it no small wonder why the adoption of deckbuilding mechanics has become so widespread.

Majin and Sacrificial Girl (the in-game English title goes for Majin and Sacrifice Girl, but it's "sacrificial" everywhere else) is different from your usual deckbuilder roguelites in some pretty major ways. You can't actually die, meaning that your runs never restart; you can escape from a battle at any time without any penalty, so there are no consequences for going into a fight unprepared; you gain access to all of the cards in the entire game by the end of your playthrough; and, above all else, you can edit your deck at any time outside of combat to include or exclude whichever cards you want. All this, of course, makes the game completely trivial. You can't lose. No matter what happens, you'll win eventually. You can throw yourself into a fight with whatever random setup you can think of, get dropped to zero health, abandon the fight, and try it again with something different.

In this, Majin and Sacrificial Girl stands out from the crowd. If you've played a lot of games like Slay the Spire, or Monster Train, or Fights in Tight Spaces, then you're more than well aware of how punishing these titles can be. Most of them are brutal and unforgiving, and one small mistake is all it takes for a run to spiral completely out of control and become an inevitable loss. Majin and Sacrificial Girl pushes you towards an inevitable victory. Whether or not you find this concept massively interesting or massively boring is going to fall on personal preference.

This is to say nothing of the creepy monster designs or the way they're presented. The look of this game was the first thing to immediately draw me in, and it kept my eyes on screen through its entire runtime. The various creatures you'll stumble into while you roam the dithered dungeon halls are fairly archetypal — there are dragons, angels, things that look vaguely like some sort of goblin or imp — but they're all designed in this wonderful, ominous, otherworldly style that evokes elements of gothic horror and Biblical monstrosities. Monsters have too many faces, too many heads, and too many body parts. There's a blend of bizarre and striking that hits all of the right notes for me, and getting to see a new design floating deeper down in the dungeon was always a treat.

The unfortunate part of game development, though, is that you need to actually program a game to showcase all of your cool assets in. Majin and Sacrifcial Girl is a bog-standard game, mechanically; you cast your cards from a resource of AP, you hit the other guy until one of you falls over, rinse and repeat until the floor is cleared out. There are a decent handful of cards, but most of them are wholly outclassed by others that are strictly better: Spider deals 22 damage for 3 AP, and three Monster Fish will deal 24 damage for the same cost. Fruit will heal you 2 HP for 0 AP, and a Heart will heal 25 HP for 2 AP (getting AP is trivial, so costs are as close to a non-issue as you can get). Energy Drinks give +1 AP for free, meaning that they'll be an auto-include in literally every single deck. Tornadoes deal 15 damage for 2 AP and draw a card, and it's easy to go infinite in a deck with just them and Energy Drinks. While it's impossible to lose by design, it feels more than a little too easy to autopilot through every combat encounter. Some extra restrictions on deckbuilding would have been welcome here. It's not like you can die, after all. If you don't give your players a reason to experiment, then they'll stick with the winning strategy they've already got.

To call this game buggy would also be underselling the fact that it feels like it's barely holding itself together. Cards will regularly double-play themselves, forcing their effects to play twice in a row. This is great when an Energy Drink gives you +2 AP instead of +1, and awful when a Shield permanently increases its cost by +2 instead of +1 while also draining all of your AP for the turn. The deck editor itself is separated on both ends by loading screens; judging from the way the game locks up for a few moments, it unloads and reloads the entire dungeon every time you want to swap cards around. Saving the game was also a three-minute ordeal that nearly crashed the entire program twice in a single attempt. I may not be a programmer, but these are also not shippable bugs.

All in all, Majin and Sacrificial Girl might be one of the more fun 5/10s I've played. For all of its flaws, it's a short, snappy game that teases at some more interesting game systems than many of its contemporaries. This comes at the cost of some much-needed polish and game balancing, but this isn't the kind of thing that most people would be playing for the mechanics, anyway. It's a weird, wobbly look into a dithered world of monsters and majin, and you'll have a much better time trying to enjoy the ride than making an attempt to get anything greater out of it.

I really liked the little mushroom man who gives you HP.

     「やっぱりアナタが来た。」

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Feb. 7 – Feb. 13, 2023).

takehata's productions are imbued with a style that always flirts with the horrific, yet does not completely embrace it. Shi-jigen no Koibito (2011) has inclinations reminiscent of Yume Nikki (2004) and already featured distorted creatures, which carry human faces in their sides and are covered with tentacles of varying lengths. Sometimes, their games lean more towards the absurd with characters whose design is reminiscent of Hoshi from Arakawa Under the Bridge (2004) or those from Hylics (2015). Majin to Ikenie no Shoujo follows this spirit, but trades the 2D over-the-top view for a dungeon crawler exploration and a card-based combat system, probably inspired by the recent success of deck builders.

The player takes on the role of an unnamed character whose goal is to rescue a young girl who has been offered as a sacrifice to a Majin. To find her, the player must navigate down the fifteen floors of a crypt of sorts, guided by the messages she manages to leave via octahedral crystals. Numerous enemies block the player's path and they must be confronted thanks to the various actions learned during the adventure. The combat system is quite straightforward, as the cards have no quantity: they are drawn entirely at random every turn and the player has to make the best of the energy reserve they have. In fact, encounters are particularly sensitive to RNG, especially in the second half of the game, where enemies can apply equally random effects to the various drawn cards: a Sleep effect ends the turn when said card is played, Poison wounds the protagonist and Death causes life points to drop to zero.

Because the game has little room for customisation and the RNG can quickly decide the outcome of a fight, takehata has rightly chosen to never really kill the player. If the character's hit points drop to zero, they can only draw cards that do no damage; the only way out is to flee the fight – and try again immediately. The lack of a penalty removes any dramatic tension that usually runs through a dungeon crawler. There is no reason to care more than necessary about one's deck, since it is possible to brute force the fights. Those are DPS races and the most important resource is HP, which has to be increased by the anthropomorphic mushroom for gold pieces. This forces the player to do all the fights in a floor, which becomes almost too repetitive towards the end.

Majin to Ikenie no Shoujo is indeed above all carried by its atmosphere. The dithering effect gives an esoteric touch to the exploration, accompanied by a sepia and faded colour palette. The game is built on this weird edge, which doesn't completely enter the realm of the horrific. The title is slightly disturbing, but never to the point of offending the player: its main purpose is to show them that they are exploring a different world, that of supernatural creatures, the youkai. The enemies borrow slightly from the works of Kazuo Umezu and Junji Ito. Simultaneously, the dungeon is remarkably clean, creating a constant dichotomy, which ultimately lulls the player's wariness. The last few minutes allow one to understand why the game is shaped by such aesthetic choices, something that the thoughtful player might have quickly suspected.

It is nevertheless a pity that the game halts on a half-measure: if the ending works properly, one remains unfulfilled. Some themes would have benefited from being explored more, to create a real narrative cohesion between the dungeon and why the hero goes down to rescue the girl: the subject is moreover at the heart of Japanese cultural anthropology, where the youkai help to shed light on behaviours and phenomena in Japanese life, as illustrated by Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (1776-1784) and all the following works. About halfway through the game, the walls become mosaics of rhombuses, which emit a strange light. It is unclear what takehata's true intentions were: it is as if the short hour of adventure was only an excuse to delay the end of the game, but that its content was of little importance. Hylics' aesthetic vision was much more coherent and had no trouble making its own universe distinctive; Inscryption (2020) had also found a justification for its deck builder mechanics. Majin to Ikenie no Shoujo has none of those qualities: it is an intriguing experience, somewhat engaging because it remains short and with a strong ending, but misses its true potential.

2023, The Year of the Rabbit; a year of terrible significance. In the great country of Eggstonia, an undercooked scramble was beginning......

Orange Julius, the emperor walks up the stairs to the Curia of Poinpy as he hails his colleagues. A bearded eggish soothsayer approaches and speaks to Julius, "beware the ides of starch...."; they quickly leave much to Julius' confusion.

Suddenly, from behind Brutus and Cassius draw out their egg beaters and plunge them deep into the back of Julius' eggshell, yolk spills out onto the stairs as yellow becomes it's new coat of paint.

"Egg tu, Brute!?"

Orange Julius has been beaten to death. Chaos ensues, the country of Eggstonia now in political ruin; giant rolling siege weapons in the form of what would be the chicken become a common sight of what formerly was the peaceful sunny side of Eggstonia. Cities smashed underegg by these terrible Easter Sunday monoliths of death as warring empires look only to expand their territories without a worry for the common cackleberry.

"Omelette du fromage...." they sang in hopes that the goddess Midnerva would protect their battered shells from continued damage as the oval-shaped monstrosities roll over their once fair cities. Flattened, beaten, scrambled, fried; the once great country of Eggstonia now nothing but a destroyed mess of protein and healthy calories. Breakfast will be served, but not to anyone in Eggstonia....

camera tilts upwards revealing the narrator and true mastermind behind it all...

...Time to eat.

stabs the camera with fork

chews and swallows a bite and begins the real review

Not really my cup of tea, but if anything it does perfectly represent one of the many reasons why the PS1 has my favorite library of any system; experimentation hitting peak levels of bizarre. I thought about playing Power Shovel quick, but I think I gaslit Detchibe enough with the Game & Watch title a bit ago.

continues eating scrambled eggs

“Find a sacred square of earth. Lay down, so you have the dirt at your back. Close your eyes. Close everything. Your ancestors are in that dirt. All the living and all the dead are holding you up. Now Stand. They’re still there, aren’t they? It’s time to move. To entangle yourself everywhere with everyone. So that next time you lay down in the dirt, you will have so much more to tell them.”

As I’m sure many of us can, I recall the time we moved out from our childhood home - the rooms I spent my most formative years and the battle scars they earned through the hustle and bustle of young family life. I’m thinking of my bedroom; my wooden crew bed riddled with teeth marks and Cartoon Network stickers. The pale blue colour of the paint on the walls, frayed and cracked in the areas I gormlessly taped posters without my parents’ permission. The doodles I hid in the corners of the furniture their eyes couldn’t reach, depicting my aspirations for the future, the riches and gifts and moments I’d give to my dearest friends and family. It’s been a good twenty~or-so~ years since I last saw those remnants of my past, and I’m a little stunned in how Season allowed me to think back to them so vividly for the first time in nearly as long. Everything can tell a story, host a spirit of the past - miniscule but never completely insignificant. I wish I could see them again, I wish I had the foresight to have taken photographs or something.

Ultimately, this is what Season: A Letter To The Future is about, sculpting in time out of photographs, sketches and audio recordings. Preserving memories of the world as it stands before a vague concept of calamity threatens to change it. In its opening moments, your character Estelle and her mother are making a pendant to protect Estelle’s mind on the journey ahead. Doing so means Estelle’s mother has to give up five memories of her own. The courtyard where you’re asked to gather your first recordings is staged perfectly. Decorations from a party last night still hang in a tree, and signs of the village’s lived-in past are everywhere. A leisurely stroll to capture all I could of the gorgeous little village, rendered lovingly with painterly oranges and purples.

I couldn’t believe my luck, it’s an amazing start to the game. The establishment of melancholic urgency and the world being rich with cultures and theologies that beg to be preserved for future generations, and the understanding of how frail the mind really is… How eager it seems to omit and alter the past to safeguard ourselves from oversentimentality. Couldn’t have been more captivated. And as my bicycle crested the final stretch of the hilltop, I tip over the edge, letting go of the controller, letting gravity take over and pull me down the long and winding road ahead, I realise that the game is a little special.

Season’s secret weapon is in its journal mechanic - wherein the player can freely personalise the entries afforded to you with custom placements of polaroid photographs you’ve taken, as well as sketches, decals, flora and whatever else you find on your journey. There’s a decent amount of freedom of expression here allowing you to capture the essence of a location however best you see fit. The kicker is that you only have two pages per key location. It can often be all too tempting to just sweep through a videogame map and hoard every shiny collectible like a kinda crow, but imposed upon the journal is a limited framework per key locale that forces you to be mindful of the things you choose to omit. My mind was on hyperdrive during this early stretch of the game; viewfinding striking angles for my photographs and designing the best notebook pages I felt an area deserved, and deciding what records were of the most importance.

Sadly, this doesn’t last too long. Eventually you reach the open-world segment where most of the playtime is spent - Tieng Valley. While clearly a lovingly realised zone filled with historic locales and mindful touches, it introduces a monotonous feeling to its exploration as things become increasingly clear that the scope of the game falls too narrow to match what I was hoping for. This isn’t Kino’s Journey, it’s one episode of Kino’s journey stretched thin over a 5~6 hour playtime. It slows down in its variety of unique stimuli and begins to focus more keenly on the mystery of the sole opposition in the game and their goal of ushering forth the ‘end of the world’. That’s not necessarily a problem on its own, but neither the mystery nor the few remaining citizens of Tieng Valley are all that compelling. The people of the valley are traumatized by memories of past conflicts, and much of life there is centered around how to live with that trauma or forget it completely. Season settles into the most anodyne musings on memory and how people live with the past… the transience of memory and the collective ability to heal. The themes tackled are so broad, it’s hard to pick a message out of all the noise, and it truly doesn’t help that the delivery is so flat. Its focus on small human stories and creative expression is admirable, even as they’re drowned out by a lukewarm plot, and the world’s beauty can’t be overstated. But rather than the meditative, meandering journey its opening suggests, Season gets locked into a single story that centers on the cataclysmic fate approaching its world more than the wonder that already fills it.

I’m disappointed, ultimately, but it was a nice pilgrimage.

After revisiting R-Type DX I decided to randomly boot up Gradius' offering to the Game Boy. This is actually known as "Nemesis II" in Japan/PAL, both it and the first Nemesis on Game Boy are apparently noncanon and considered spinoffs. Exactly two people on this entire site might care about that, so I'm cutting that subject short and before we all get confused by Konami's idiotic naming conventions. Seriously, it's very confusing what they did.

You know how some of these games have an escape sequence at the end of the game? Well this one begins with one, not gonna lie it took me a bit by surprise. Interstellar Assault/Nemesis II/Artist Formerly Known As Gradius definitely feels like a spinoff, it does a lot of subversions and still carries the feel of a Gradius game down to the "piss easy until you die and lose your shit" style of gameplay, though thankfully this game is nowhere near as ballcrushingly punishing as Gradius III or anything. At least a few people will be disappointed by that, I know who you are. Sadly, Moai are completely absent from this title. A huge dealbreaker for everyone I'm sure, but this game is still fairly fun.

Only five stages, but the game feels pretty good to play and is also fairly cinematic at times? A decent amount of in-game cutscenes in this one, I think my favorite is the shot of one of the bosses burning up on re-entry into a planet's atmosphere after being defeated. Quite enjoyed how every stage transitioned seemlessly into eachother with cuts rarely being used, I wanna say that's not normally done in Gradius.

Was good enough for me to play through with occasional save stating in one sitting, good stuff.

Solar Striker is a game that not even Nintendo wants to remember too much, a skeleton in the closet I guess you could call it. When the Game Boy released someone there went "shit, we need an STG for the masochism crowd" and threw Gunpei Yokoi and his team at it to quickly develop one for their brand new portable.

Solar Striker is about as humble and modest as one can get with a vertical shmup on such an unassuming system, but despite this it still managed to draw me in with it's simplicity. I always can't be helped but be charmed by games that have very little to work with, but manage to still be entertaining. Solar Striker has no bombs, no chargeable beam weapons, no homing missiles, no Moai, no nothing. No bullshit, just your gun and some limited upgrades to ward off the enemies.

It's obviously not all gumdrops and rainbows, the game has it's fair share of annoyances such as the enemies who begin appearing in stage 5(?) who speed across the screen from top to bottom in an attempt to crash into your ship like a suicidal sunday driver. The bosses also range from moderately difficult to just plain psychotic, look at this guy! Why was he not the final boss? He's insane!

It's interesting to note that when I booted this up on my emulator on my DS it defaulted to the "Space Invaders" pallete, which made the background black and the sprite outlines white, giving it the appearance of playing the game at "night mode". It was weird, but I played it like that anyway. I thought it was neat. No idea if it's like that elsewhere.

It's funny to think that Solar Striker representation might have less of a chance than Goku at appearing in Smash Bros, even X managed to get a nice music remix at least.

Hollow Knight thrives off of a combat system that ties pretty seamlessly into the exploration. Just by hitting a wall, you'll find yourself in a new area with several bosses/minibosses and usually they are all pretty solid. That's unfortunately about where my praise ends however, because although I respect its ambition, I feel it suffers from several choices that hinder both the combat and exploration elements that should naturally tie together.

Exploration-focused games usually go for relatively guided level design. Even if the world design itself is non-linear and lets you go anywhere, rooms will maintain a guided format because it allows the designer to add interesting trails to fall down. Going down into a new area off of a winding trail as the visuals slowly change and you have to interact with new mechanics is practically formula at this point for these types of games. Hollow Knight instead applies this philosophy to the entire map at large; where areas are effectively trails to other areas and that serves as their purpose. Ambitious in theory but troubling in execution; you will find that most areas effectively play out like big open boxes with a few mazes of blocks and samey rooms inside. Gimmicks are often relegated to extremely simple changes to the formula that don't compensate for the sheer amount of aimless wandering through repetitive, unfocused level design. If it's not an area you find in a wall, it's a generic item that isn't an actual upgrade and has very little gameplay purpose.

The progression of Hollow Knight is very weak overall to me; whereas Metroid-likes usually like to give you items for every milestone that would lead you being able to go back and open up a new area, Hollow Knight oft abandons the notion of backtracking because so much of it is open from the get-go. Abilities are spread out across hours of play and usually most of the most engaging parts of the game (the bosses) don't give you them and instead are just there to add clutter to the world. Now, in defense of the game, the boss fights are above average for sure. Snappy, fast combat that doesn't over-rely on tired tropes in action-platformers is satisfying to pull off and there's decent variety, but they don't feel meaningful. The fact is you'll probably in the end get more mileage out of random enemies rather than half of the optional bosses in this game since your most effective and active progression you'll be having is collecting Geo; the currency of Hallownest. The best way to collect Geo, is to farm respawning enemies. And there-in lies the issue with Hollow Knight. For a game with such scope and ambition, nothing feeds into another. You get currency to get trivial upgrades while sitting around to get the big cool abilities and fight optional bosses which more often than not give you absolutely nothing. I'm not opposed to a game being fundamentally unrewarding, but I'm opposed to it when all I have are blue mazes to explore. There's another game about blue mazes that released four decades ago, but at least that one has space dinosaurs.

What I Look For In a Life Partner: stereotypically Italian, makes pizza and knows how to perform a spinning piledriver.

You know what I'm tired of? Player characters who only do wimpy attacks like jumping on their enemies, or swiping with their dinky-ass little broadswords. What are ya gonna do with that buster sword? Tickle me to death? I'm here to grapple with every goddamn thing I see, and uppercut them through the ceiling straight into other enemies, initiating a combo and gaining points like an even more sadistic version of bowling. Like a demented pizza-making freight train I dash around colliding into everyone like an Ed Edd n' Eddy character straight outta Hell with nothing to lose. I do a sick body splash too. You see that stupid sunglasses-wearin' pineapple guy? I'm gonna beat the daylights outta him. I hate him! He ruins every pizza he touches! I'm gonna smash you into the ground Pineapple Man!!! BOOM! POW! SMACK!

BRUTALITY IS ME! I AM THE BRUTALIZER!

It kind of goes without saying what Pizza Tower is attempting to mimic. I mean, you know why I'm playing this, and I know why you're probably interested in it. Hell, it even has a golf stage perhaps as an allusion to the third game. Mario is jealous! He is so mad that Wario has better games than him! He can't take it anymore! He politicked to Nintendo and made Wario sit behind a desk to develop microgames for wee ant babies, while Mario continued to hog the spotlight! Denying us more pure Wario games with shoulder charging and butt smashing action! Say no more though, because a wacky Italian pizza chef straight out of some kind of What A Cartoon-ass 90s era CN show is here to deliver the good shit.

In the case of whether you're wondering if it pulls it off well, I personally think it passes with multiple flying colors of some sort. I would even go as far as to say it adds enough to become it's own identity regardless of it's painfully obvious inspiration. Peppino is a big-time brawler that I mesh with as well as tomato sauce and mozzarella, and just when you think the transformations are gonna start repeating they instead just keep cranking out more. Well, except near the end, they kinda go overboard on a certain one involving a semi-ranged weapon that people tend to hate in multiplayer. Still pastrami cool though, and it's gonna be really satisfying once you start making this game your main squeeze and master it to the nth degree.

THE CHECKLIST:
•Heavyweight character move-set with professional wrestling moves [X]
•Collecting shit, but not too much shit. [X]
•Blast Processing [X]
•Sick Boss Fights [X]
•Cartoon Aesthetic [X]

Yup, that's a bunch of boxes checked. Vee is in love maybe. Pizza Tower, I choo-choo-choose you to be my Valentine. Swoon

The most important games for me are ones that seem to pop in to my world at the exact time that I needed them, and Pikmin is a strong example of one of those cases. The moment I was living under my own roof, during the summer before I started college, I felt like a completely different person. I never knew what life was like without the every minor decision or daily bit of minutia being judged with a harsh eye, and subsequent fear, and my first apartment changed all of that. Living alone started as a party, I spent money and time in ways I previously never could, but as the high of freedom wore off, something took it's place, legitimate independence. Local transportation would allow me to effectively perform walkabout's in every area that interested me growing up, and despite growing up in a single parent household, as an only child, this solitude was something different, a vast world that began to teach me thing's. And it was about a year in to this unique solitude that I found Pikmin.
This silly gamecube launch title has valuable lessons about finding peace with death, discovering the logic behind a seemingly harsh world, and most importantly to me, how to deal with being left alone with your own thoughts. I remember sitting in my car in a massive parking structure, before a big event I was involved with, trying to squeeze in a few extra minutes with Captain Olimar and the Pikmin, knowing how important his journey's would feel parallel to mine.
At the end of the day, this is a neat tech demo about a tiny guy fighting monsters, but for someone attempting to finding their own voice; critically, profesionally, and personally, there could be no better companion than Olimar, and no better game than Pikmin.

Somehow every review I write on this ends up
hampered by issues in clarity,
issues of both creative phrasing and,
technically, meaningful content.

For certain, my critique on the game is simple;
on any grounds, the writing and story are harmful,
routinely espousing the most toxic of views towards victims.

Clearly, Bloober Team relies on shock tactics to earn clout, an
underhanded attempt to earn viral attention through harmful
notions and rhetoric. I'm not writing in clearest terms, and
that could be chalked up to being tired of thinking about this
shit for cunts.

Nothing can take away the raw earnestness D exhibits. The arduous journey of developing and releasing a full-motion video, two-hour, grotesque adventure game rump is a daunting one to undertake, and it becomes all the more demanding when you're a small time video game studio in Japan with no major industry connections. Nevertheless, D's lead director put his future in game development on the line to see that D becomes a success. The same man even went as far to purposely hand-in D's golden master late, all in an elaborate scheme to swap out the "clean" cut of the game with his uncensored, vulgar original vision.

This ambitious man is known as the late Kenji Eno, former president of Wrap and video game industry cowboy. A man so eccentric that he bundled in condom feelies in the packaging of one his studio's titles. A man so punk, that after the disastrous botching of D's PlayStation version pre-orders by Sony, he showcased a video of a PlayStation logo morphing into a Sega Saturn logo at Tokyo Game Show 1996. Not only that, but to further cut ties, he presented a video of his team at Wrap dancing and singing a song with lyrics along the lines of "Enemy Zero is a good game, Wrap is a good company", followed by him violently tossing a plush of Muumuu, the mascot of Sony's Jumping Flash!, onto the ground.

The legacy of D and Kenji Eno especially are inspiring to say the least, and it is what mainly attracts people to Wrap's unfortunately short but admirable list of releases. Successful the man was as well; for a creator who would probably be barred from the industry if he was still with us, Wrap's D went on to sell over a million copies, becoming a game that succeeded not only critically but financially. It's hard not to love D, and especially Kenji Eno. No other game, let alone developer, has such a chaotic yet down-to-earth backstory, and it's important to understand the kind of place D came from before diving into the work. For D without that context, relinquishes the form of an allusive, sincere, video game oddity and reveals itself in all its crude, banal essence.

Eno's intention with D's universe was to craft a bleak, sinister world first, with an enthralling narrative coming more as a second thought. It's due to this that D is rather light on story elements throughout. Yet in spite of that, what little narrative is there is one that tilts heavily towards the characters', Laura and her father Richter, rather than the meticulously crafted space of D's fully CGI castle. There's one resounding "why" throughout D's story, what drives a man to massacre an entire cluster of people so suddenly?

Lightly hidden about the setting are grotesque flashback sequences. These digressions are the signature flair of D, despite their sheltered-nature. They served as a vehicle to flesh out the plot after the adventure segments were basically complete. While these cutscenes don't offer much in the way of thematic nuance, they do act as the most spectacular, unsettling scenes the game has to offer and it'd be disingenuous for me to say they don't hold much merit given that D's graphical fidelity is one of its secondary selling points. Even so, it does significantly hurt D for it to not have much substance for one to sink their teeth into. Substance is what gives your journey through horror's typically hostile worlds meaning, and without much in the way in meat in D's world, it leaves the whole journey feeling somewhat hollow.

While it is damning that D's narrative is lacking in eloquence, it is essential to reiterate that the focus of D was to construct an ominous, isolating adventure game setting. D's CGI landscapes are nothing short of a technical marvel, every scene is confidently showcased via sweeping camera angles and dynamic cuts. The music is a constant, nice ambient throughout, and it cuts to silence at times to exacerbate the tension. Yet, just as with the narrative, there's a tinge of vapidness to D's world. The world never emits the same peculiarity nor hostility of your typical horror work. Every mystery the castle introduces is well within the range of human understanding, and anything that exists outside of these bounds has their mysticism robbed by the game explaining them away soon after their encounter. As a whole, the setting of D feels detached from its narrative, and more execrably, fails to capture the atmosphere that it strove to capture.

All we're left with now is D's gameplay, which is, to be frank, the most abominable aspect of a game that is already full of poorly executed concepts. D's pacing can only be described as indulgently methodical. Every FMV sequence takes at least fifteen seconds to play out. This very quickly graduates from charming to aggravating when you realize none of the decisions you'll be making contain enough gravity to make these slow, deliberate animations tolerable. Outside of a forced game over if one takes over two hours to complete the game, there is no fail state in D. You are never at any threat of harm, failure, or difficulty regardless of what action you take. The only purpose these FMV serve is to pompously showcase D's largely forgettable environments.

This is all amplified by the fact that D has the audacity to intermix puzzles within its already monotonous gameplay. No matter how rudimentary these puzzles are, nothing will change the sheer amount of time each of them wastes for absolutely no reason. Bar none, I've never reckoned with a puzzle that has wasted as much as my time as the central puzzle of D's Disc 2. For one-third of the game's runtime, you will be forced to engage with a puzzle that has no barring on the game's narrative, atmosphere, or anything of meaning whatsoever. Five minutes into the puzzle, you will have probably already figured out what the solution is, but that doesn't matter when you have to sit through D's plethora of 20+ second animations. These puzzles aren't here to be mentally engaging, they're here to extend the game's run time past the thirty-minute mark so audiences don't feel like they wasted their money on a game that has absolutely nothing to offer on any front whatsoever.

I want to love D.

Nothing excites me more than a game with a chronicle as offbeat as D, and Kenji Eno's legacy resonates with me to the core. It's atypical for me to go into anything with any other expectation besides it executing on what it's aiming to do, but it's hard to dash that feeling of D being meaningful when it has all the foundations of a game I'd fall in love with. I pondered on rather I would say D is meaningful for a good night after playing through it. To be honest, I don't think I quite figured out the answer till I went back and revised this review.

D, despite all my misgivings with it on a fundamental level, is still a significant experience. It's not significant because it did the nearly impossible task of satisfying even a quarter of the game's initial, enchanting allure. It's significant because the story behind Kenji Eno, his legacy, and his drive to see D succeed is a rattlingly human, inspiring tale, and regardless of how you feel about D coming out of it, his ambitions will always resonate deeply within any person who's felt a creative drive and I strongly recommend it to anyone who's one of those people.