Of the three new games put in fortnite in the last week or so, Festival is by far the most fitting. Lego Fort feels a bit tacked on and barely keeps touch with the main platform, and Rocket Racing feels like a minigame for Rocket League that for some reason, is found in fortnite, but Festival actually kinda makes sense. It's actually shares the styling of fortnite for one thing, but is also a pretty reasonable extension of the relationship the main game has had with celebrity and music for the past near-decade now. Add on top fortnite's very obvious avenues for the monetisation and licensing of everything involved with a rhythm game and it really feels like this should really work. It's so easy to visualise the way it should be - get the Weeknd skin and it comes with a Weeknd emote and a few tracks to use in what is basically rock band 5, the new live service music game that could ride on for god knows how long.

Well, first problem with that is Harmonix have presumably lost all the staff that knew how to make rock band, because festival is just fundementally terrible, keeping the worst aspects of rock band (multiplier scoring, uninteresting charting, difficulty coming from endurance and repetitive notes, note accuracy not mattering), but worse.

Main issue is really the charting. It is, for one, shockingly easy, with even the very hardest currently available chart (Kendrick Lamar's I on expert, vocals), being barely a mid-level Rock Band chart in terms of diffculty, and games like even the relatively casual DJMAX wouldn't rate it about the bottom half of its difficulty scale. Realistically, that alone is enough for the game to really fall apart for even new rhythm gamers quickly as there is next to no challenge, but the woes go further than that. In an adapatation to making this work on controller face buttons, the chart is now secretly split into two, a bit like djmax, and opposite holds arent allowed (i.e you cant hold the middle and fifth button on expert because they would be the Square and Circle PS5 Buttons simultaneously). Whilst this isnt a distaster on it's own, combined with the already weak charting of Harmonix and you end up with some extremely unengaging rhythm gameplay. It's repetitive and boring.

The song choices are just shit too. The licensors might have truly pulled all the big guns, but protip, Seven Nation Army, a song that repeats the same 3 second riff for 4 minutes, is not a good track for a rhythm game. A whole bunch of tracks will have 30 second plus sections where you just wait and emote, i guess? Don't put that in your rhythm game!

This last thing probably is a result of, for some reason, still sticking to the old guitar-drums-voacls-bass set up for song charts despite that no longer being neeccessary, and them all fundementaly playing identically due to the loss of peripherals and lack of imagination.

The nail in the coffin is really the monetisation, which is really poor. I know music licensing is silly and that rhythm games often come with a tax, but a super limited rotation of free songs, an awful battlepass that's twice the price as the BRs, and $4 a pop if you want to keep a song with no other frills attached is twice as bad as rock band's traditional pricing, which itself was pushing it. And when that's put side by side with content for the real game at a more reasonable price, it sticks out even worse.

I don't want to even bother talking about the Jam Stage feature, one of the most worthless game features ive ever seen, which lets you mix some samples with friends. It's remarkably limited, doesnt sound good, and you get a whole two tracks to sample from. It's embarassing.

The other two additions to Fortnite this month, rocket racing and lego fortnite, are also bad - Rocket Racing is kinda boring and Lego is cursed by being a survival crafting multiplayer game, basically delivering it straight to the pit of medicority, but Festival is the biggest stinker, and a huge waste of potential. Given time and a lot of work and deep discounts, epic can probably force it to be a long term thing - but the start here is the worst game i've played from Harmonix and you have to wonder whether they will just dump this and go all in on the lego.

It's interesting to look back at the year 1998 as a shooting game fan. It is a year where it feels like every company in the business was firing on all cylinders, yet simultaneously, the genre hung in the balance. In 1997 Cave released Dodonpachi, undoubtedly the most important shooting game made since their former selves in Toaplan put out flying shark in '87. And whilst it's basic formula defined both cave and the post-milennium shooter space, in 98 it was far from set in stone.

When you look at the other games from 98, it's easy to see a world where Radiant Silvergun, Armed Police Batrider, Dangun Feveron, Raiden Fighters Jet, Raycrisis or even Gunbird 2 and Blazing Star come out on top. A whole pile of ridiculously high-quality games that you can all make the case are the dev's finest, all at once. And whilst many of those games are still influencial, particularly RSG and Batrider - ESPrade is the one that truly came out on top.

Which is a bit odd on the face of it. Particulary in the western space a lack of localisation, ports and rights issues left it particularly obscure even among cave games, when it's stupidly important to shmup history and is one of Cave's absolute finest games.

The most important facet to ESPrade is it's presentation. Flying people over a cyberpunk tokyo fighting psychic battles with huge tanks, the psychic Yakuza and old women sitting on the cooles sprite of a statue head ever - it's all extremely cool. There's clearly a lot taken from Akira here (probably among others) but its far from a ripoff and is definetly itself. Artist and Mangaka had been working with Toaplan and it's offshoots Gazelle and Cave since 1991 but ESPrade was his first real shot to lead a whole project artistically and it's absolutely glorious. ESPrade is to this day Cave's best looking game and it's not particularly close. The stage backgrounds alone are some of the best sprtie art you'll ever see, but there's particularly fantastic use of renders here - particularly in the main characters which allows a ridiculous number of animation frames in their movement whilst somehow still blending in well. Cave rarely dropped rendered characters in the years following and they have never looked as good as they have here, it's incredible.

Junya Inoue is also, frankly, whilst an extremely talented worldbuilder and artist, is really best at either adding flavour to existing, drier worlds like he does with Dodonpachi in Daioujou, or leaving a decent amount to the imagination, and ESPrade is the true encapsulation of the latter. You get a tiny amount of short scenes to set up plot and conflict and if you want more all you'll get is a ridiculous barrage of art because Inoue has drawn each of these characters like 900 times, sometimes in his Manga BTOOM! without permission, but nary a lick of story to defile a perfect setup and payoff. As you do.

And there's just great majesty to it. Radiant Silvergun's remarkable storytelling beats it out for sure, and Taito were way ahead of the curve on this in general, but ESPrade's management of tension and minimal storytelling is just done so damn well. It's helped by effectively having 3 Stage 1s thanks to each character have their own and then playing the other twos, and they all benefit from the traditional lengths cave goes to making stage 1s incredible - but stage 5 is the real killer. A brutal part 1 the game testing all your abilities of routing and throwing piles of the enemies you've previously fought in greater density - only then to face an eerie, nigh-horrific stage 5b where you mow down hundreds of creepy psychic clones before facing down Ms. Garra.

Oh and Ms. Garra might be the best shooting game boss fight ever. A 7 phase behemoth, and even if you split them up they'd all make the top 20 cave bosses. Despite the ludicrous amount of amazing artistry the game has to offer, the image of Ms Garra casting huge wings across the snowy tokyo night, firing a beautiful mirage of bullets will always define ESPrade. It, and the earlier, also exceptional fight against Satouro Oumi are basically copied beat for beat by Windows-era Touhou. I do not blame ZUN one bit.

Aside from incredible bosses though, ESPrade just has a fantastic game loop. It does take a bit to get to grips with but tagging enemies with power shot then killing with normal to score is exceptionally fun and in a true CAVE moment, they didnt really give it another go. Stage design is also top tier.

Being such a fantastic refinement of Dodonpachi's ideas and a great encapsulation of it's own makes ESPrade the true shining star of 1998. Flying people, 10 phase bosses, emphasis on pacing and bombast, bullet patterns like blooming flowers fired by cute anime girls - whilst Story of Eastern Wonderland beats it by a few months, and DoDonPachi set the ground work, ESPrade is the true catalyst of the Shooting tropes that would define everything up to the modern era.

But more than that, it's just one of CAVE's finest. I'd say their second best game after Ketsui, and one of the top 10 shooting games outright. Only really Taito has beaten out it's presentation and matched with some of Cave's best ever work, its an utter classic.

When looked at among the class of 98, it's easy to contemplate and lust for the world of shooters we could have got if say, Dangun Feveron was the game to catch on - like if dragons dogma had been the game to define RPGs of the 2010s instead of demon souls, for instance - but like with Demon souls, when you look back on that spark - its hard to blame it for the road it lead us down.

Watching Sol Cresta's pre-release has felt like watching a car crash in slow motion. From it's bizzare pseudo announcement on April Fools day 2020 to actually confirming it's a thing to now, the road has been rocky and it's seemed so, so much, like this was going to crash and burn. From "oh god why does it look like that", to "why is nothing happening, and where are the bullets" to "Why the fuck is it $50 no one will buy that" - the decisions have been continuously baffling.

And, as predicted, the end result is messy, buggy, looks so weirdly terrible it almost warps back round to being cool, its too expensive whilst feeling like it was made for a lower budget than most of the good indie shmups. But, well, i'm here. I put my £38 into steam with the intention of refunding it but I ended up well overshooting the refund time - because I was having a really good time.

It's really fortunate that the game's core gimmick, the docking - where you arrange your 3 craft in different formations and order - is great. It's basically straight up taken from wonderful 101's line drawing, and weaving between bullets whilst making patterns, trying to pull out the optimal formation in tight spaces and moments - it works really well. It injects the peak flow state that clover studio and platinum's very best games have into a shooting game. And whilst there's a bit of hellsinker here and a bit of radiant silvergun there, but it does really end up feeling unique, and filling a niche i didn't know I wanted. Its helped by good boss design and - after the first stage - stage designs that keep you on your toes constantly.

It also helps that the game is very likeable in other ways. The Cresta series is something that even hardcore shmuppers mostly had to google, starting with the ancient moon cresta in frickin 1980. But there's a very cute degree of reverance the game has for the series that even as an outsider is nice. Between it's cameos, the dramatic mode, some legitimately amusing fakeouts with bosses, it's generally very pleasant. The neo-nostalgia here is dealt with very well, and im sure the 4 ride or die Cresta fans are ecstatic right now.

That extends to the Dramatic mode, which, ignoring the insane decision to be $10 dlc, is quite good. Its a very kitsch 80s tropey anime sort of thing in terms of story, but works as a bizzarely good way of giving context to the events of the arcade mode without any baggage. You play the dramatic mode once and then you know, pretty much. It's asinine that it's not in the base product though.

In terms of real issues, it's mostly technical. The game looks bad - it's made in unity with 3d models and some bizzare shader applied to try and make it look like 2d renders or sprite work interchangably. Ew. It's also absurdly buggy. In my time playing alone i've encounters bugs where you cant move, visual effects breaking - and other players have already found consistent invincibility glitches, softlocks, crashes, you name it. On a gameplay level, the deepest flaw is probably that it's a game with probably quite low a skill ceiling. The docking system is good, but clearly doesnt have the depth of plat's best action games and it probably leans a bit too hard on the stage memorisation side of things, which will probably mean this will never be anyone's "main" shmup. It just doesn't seem like the sort of game those superplayers will put literal days into runs for.

Before i forget, Special mention has to go to Yuzo Koshiro's soundtrack. It's both great in it's original pieces (Saturn, Mercury and Sol's themes are fantastic) but also in taking motifs from the original games, most notably the original Terra Cresta theme. I'm not good at music criticism so i'll just say, yeah - it's good.

Ultimately, I like the game. A fair bit actually - but I have to admit that trying to earnestly reccomend it at time of writing comes with too many asterixes for me to bother, which i hope i've gotten through in these thoughts. It's also a shmup, and shmups often need a while to be out there for an actually good take to emerge, so take this whole day 2 ramble with a good pinch of salt.

But despite everything, I like it. It's platinum's best game since Automata, and it's a good, unique shooter. I'm happy with that.

This trash website decided to yeet my good, proper ACVI review so you get the cliff notes

- Gameplay good
- Difficulty and balance is a complete mess
- Rusty gives me very pleasant ace combat Zero flashbacks
- Am i the only person who thinks this game is absolutely beautiful
- Fromsoftware really knows you'll just listen to a melancholic feminine voice
- Story is a surprising highlight, bit less bite on the anti-capitalism as a gameplay concession but good exploration of some neat sci-fi concepts and vibes
- Why'd they ever stop making these?

It's the late 80s. Shmups, along with a bunch of other genres, are in a renaissance period. Companies like Taito, Konami, Toaplan, Compile and Irem are all pumping out game after game to critical and commercial success.

But there was a problem. The gamers were getting too good, and arcade shooters? They were too easy.

Yeah, seriously. This was the opinion of a large number of arcade operators at the time, frustrated with STGs having long credit times, and as a result, poorer revenue. And whilst it could be argued that games like Gradius 2 and Flying Shark are fairly sedate shooters by the standards that would follow - it's charitable to say this attitude was anything other than pure greed, frankly. Because in the arcade space, the operators are who the games are sold to, and where the developers, at least back in the day, made their money.

As a result of this perceived problem, in 1989 alone, 3 major shooting game releases (probably more, these are just what i know is confirmed) were made wildly difficult in response to these demand. Darius 2 had it's default difficulty knocked up a setting making the game very cruel, Same! Same! Same! essentially starts on the second loop, and Gradius 3, perhaps the most infamous of all, was turned into pure hell.

Gradius 3 is comically hard. From the moment you get past the series' customary starting formations, you're met with horrible enemy spawns, tight corridors and nigh-impossible recoveries. Even a relatively experienced shmuper is liable to get 30 seconds into stage 1, die to something unexpected and then chain death due to painfully slow default speed and the credit's over.

I seriously could not get across to you how ridiculous it is. For such a major release from a big dev it feels an awful lot like an extravagant Kaizo hack of Gradius 2. Sections like Stage 9's Cube rush are infamous, and you'll be killed by some truly cursed hitboxes a good deal of the time you think you've actually managed to squeeze through.

And its a bit of a shame, because Gradius 3 is kinda great otherwise. Its got my favourite soundtrack out of the series outside of Rebirth, with the best usage of those glorious flute-synths that define the series. The feel is also on point, with the slightly silly space opera vibes of Gradius at their peak, especially with the game's huge variety in levels making it feel like a proper space odyssey.

And the levels are good! Packed full of variety, some of the series' best bosses, and a fair number of interesting, unique encounters. But it's hard as shit and the vast, vast majoriity of players wont see past level 2, because for some godforsaken reason the game doesnt even have continues.

Fortunately though, there's a better way. Two, in fact! Gradius 3 is blessed with two alternate versions which are dramatically decreased in difficulty - most know of Gradius 3 SNES, which is a great version and far, far more accessible, but I personally prefer Gradius 3's Asian Arcade Version, Presumably released in Korea or Taiwan originally. It solves the game's truly biggest issue in letting you keep a good portion of your power ups on death, as well as reducing the general difficulty, whilst preserving the original excellent aesthetic and sound of the arcade game. It's still a tough time thanks to Gradius 3's propensity for pure bullshit, but thanks to the series' quite lax extend rules it becomes more achievable.

Gradius 3 is also a game that has benefitted a lot from home conversions (excluding the SNES one which adapts a lot of things). Thanks to it's long length (at least 50 minutes), treating it as an individual level game can also help a lot, and Hamster's recent arcade archives port provides a tonne of ways to just tone the game down a little.

And the thing is with those nice, comfy versions in tow, in turn the stupid, obscene original japanese version of the game becomes easier to appreciate also. It is ridiculous and evil sure, but it remains to this day an ultimate challenge, a mountain in the distance that dares to one day be climbed. And much to the chagrin of those dumbass arcade operators, people have. There's a good number of videos on youtube and niconico of guys playing Gradius III for 14 hours on a single credit, and only even stopping because the game center they're playing at is closing or they had the power cut. It's a truly beloved game among the boomer shmupers in japan.

On it's own, Gradius III JP is cruel and bad. Designed to seperate players and their money at an obscene rate. But time, and ports, have been kind to it. In a twist of fate, the game is no longer for the fat cat arcade operators, but for the old-school shmuper that wants one final mountain to climb, and wants to rack up Mikado's electricity bill.

Still, if you catch me playing it, i'll be on Gradius III Asia.

"Proof of life" - so goes Astlibra's rarely used but pretty important subtitle. It's a major theme in the latter part of the game, where the sheer level of time travel shenanigans and fantasy bullshit happening makes it a pretty pressing issue - but I won't go into that. But deliberate or not, the term so brilliantly encapsulates the game itself.

Its impossible to talk about Astlibra without mentioning it's development cycle. As I write this, for instance, the dead space remake has just launched. When Astlibra started development the original was still a year away. Sole developer Keizo has plugged away at this and one or two other games in his free time over 15 damn years. And this is a guy with an office job. This game is his "Proof of life". And it bleeds out of every damn screen in the game.

There's a ridiculously large amount of ground to cover but Astlibra boils down to a sidescrolling ARPG in the vein of Ys III and Zelda II, shoved in a blender with stuff from Comiket. You get astonishingly flashy and silly combat combined with puzzle design from 1990, whilst some insanely hard doujin music which may or may not include hatsune miku goes obscenely hard in the background. And then you'll come across some insanely detailed boss sprite with cleavage that takes up half the screen and fires dodonpachi patterns of magic at you.

This is not only kinda silly, but also legitimately kinda great. The combat's main hook is effectively building up magic spells by dealing damage, and those magic spells give you temporary invincibility upon cast - which encourages super aggressive play. Bosses in particular are fantastic, but just clearing screens of enemies is somehow a joy after 30 hours of play, particularly as new engagement options keep on opening up even into the super-late game.

In general there's just so, so much you find, miss, or just ignore in Astlibra that feel like they meaningfully give you new options or feel impactful. I have absolutely no fucking idea how it does it. Things like triple jump boots and launchers are hidden in corners, random crossbows you get to solve two puzzles is powerful in combat, and mage staffs are widlly powerful but basically ignorable for the vast majority of players. The game clearly doesnt expect a player to get absolutely everything but also expects them to at least have some stuff - and the balance is struck just right.

Maybe most surprisingly, the story kinda hits. The current english localisation is a bit rough (it only really worksas it does because 2007-angsty fan translation tier fits well for the game) and you can undoubtedly pick a million holes in it's time travel/meddling gods bullshit, but it really nails it's emotional beats and hooks. KEIZO really knows how to turn a knife and throw in some good twists. The first two thirds of the game are a bit house in fata morgana-y in how they're individually story based whilst teasing at the greater whole - and that the batshit final chapters actually keep the emotional core and it's themes front and centre is remarkable. The core theme of butterfly effects and every choice coming with costs are very well done. And honestly the characters are also great - adorable crow Karon is effectively the voice of the unnamed protagonist for the entire game and is always a delight in particular. It hooked me, which is something i was not expecting at all.

Astlibra also does something very, very clever. It cheats. The revision release, whilst of course being extremely similar to just Astlibra's free version, is a result of KEIZO recruiting a handful of people, including ex-vanillaware artist Shigatake to refine the graphics, smooth the edges and add a few bits of content. And with it the game gains a much more defined aesthetic (the free version looks even weirder than the current release trust me) and refinement whilst still retaining that glorious individuals heart. It's kinda genius.

Yeah, looking at Astlibra truly critically it'll be very easy for someone to absolute rip into it. It's a bit overlong, it's difficulty balance is suspect, the postscript isnt worth playing, it's a bit too horny, it's aesthetic varies from looking like a straight up vanillaware title to looking like a geocities website and it's a bit repetitive. But as the sort of jaded asshole who was ready to make those sorts of comments, i really don't care, and it's not just the context of it's 17 year development. Astlibra is overwhelmingly charming at every single turn, fun, hype as hell and continually engaging with it's story, gameplay loop and seemingly endless secrets.

Something about this game just dredges up the wonder I had for playing RPGs as a kid which very little can manage these days - Ys VIII does, and Xenoblade can for moments - and I have loved it unconditionally. I have been up til 3am playing Astlibra just wanting to push ever onwards.

It's certainly not for everyone - the demo will probably serve as a good litmus test for whether you're into this sorta thing, and I'd reccomend checking it out first (especially as the game itself basicaly doesnt have a tutorial so it serves dual function). But I would like to think ive got it across in this review that if you're into this, you're probably going to be really into it.

Can you tell I love this?

After my first session of Dokapon, I put a review up on this site maligning how I had been dead for about a quarter of the playtime thus far, beset by a whole pile of RNG bullshit and being fucked over by every other player in the game. I was having a fun time but sheesh.

Oh, how little i knew.

Dokapon Kingdom's sheer chaos starts at a level that makes Mario Party look like checkers. From week 1, straight up murder is on the table, with all players having the ability to fight both each other and enemies within a RPG battle system which is, of course, heavily luck based. All the while you're meant to be clearing towns of monsters and doing quests to earn the highest monetary worth.

And then things get worse.

The sheer amount of things that WILL fuck you over in full playthrough of dokapon, often completely out your control, is remarkable. The game will both continually mess with you with random events, broken enemies, stupid locations which are hard to get to, random drops, etc, whilst also giving your fellow players all the tools to make it worse. Want to send a killer robot after your friends? Sure. Want to nuke your friend across the map with magic? Go ahead. Want to ruin two sessions' progress for everyone by forcing them to your current position? Yeah.

With Dokapon, it's not a question of will you get fucked, it's when, and how. And somehow, I have no idea how, the game constantly one-ups itself. Just when you think it can't get any more stupid, it does. This is partially due to the map opening up slowly throughout the game, giving access to more places to lose, more insane dungeons to get caught up with, more places to be crabs in a bucket together. And it's an absolute riot.

I think the genius of Dokapon is that it gives you just the right amount of control. It's an RNG-fueled madness festival for sure, but the game lets you influence things, lets you play in enough different ways, lets you go about enough diferent means to progress and raise your own stonks that there's a true tension to when the best laid plans of mice and men fall apart, or very occasionally, don't.

During the 30 hour ish playthrough we did, there were just too many great moments to count. So many story arcs of each of us all murdering each other as we pursued one goal, so many times where we just murdered each other for dubious reasoning, about 10 different truces and agreements broken, a lot of lying, a lot of begging, a fair amount of stealing, a few times sparing people by exchanging their deaths for putting poop on their head and only two or three complete collapses of the economy.

I could not begin to tell you how fun it is. After a first session where i was feeling kinda peeved at the game, I slowly began appreciating the absurdity, and when it was at my expense, I started laughing more. And somehow, between all it's randomness it did tend to even things out and make for a game that was tense and surprisingly close the whole entire time, even after 700 turns - which is a testament for how good a manged chaos it pulls off, and maybe also a testament to how much we enjoyed fucking each other over constantly.

Of course the game has plenty of problems. Many of which are intwined with it's benefits. If you don't have the right sort of environment for this I think it could legitimately make you lose friends (which to be fair, is advertised). There's a level of camraderie needed at some point, and you kinda need to understand that being murdered is really quite funny. If you take this game too seriously, and focus too hard on the ultimate winner, you will not have the best of times.

There's also just a fair amount of broken stuff, and weird balance. There's a handful of routes to effectively infinite money that you basically need to ban as a house rule, Magic is either incredibly busted or useless iwth no inbetween as a stat, and a couple of the super secret classes are weirdly useless despite being a massive pain in the arse to even obtain. It's kinda dubious and i'd chalk up a lot of it to this game effectively being a straight remake of the original Super Famicom Dokapon - warts and all.

A natural consequence of the game system is also that the endgame gets a little stalemate-heavy if you're trying to guarantee first place. Because the game finishing relies someone beating the final dungeon and getting the big final reward, but that also takes quite a while, it creates a game state where it's arguably best to let some other fucker do it. It's not a huge issue, but I think it's something i'd probably house rule around in the future.

But who cares about that, because this game is incredible. It really did not take long for Dokapon Kingdom sessions to become the highlights of my week, eventually trying to sneakily suggest the sessions happen more often than usual in our group chat and finding that, for some fucking reason, everyone was as ok with that as I was.

I have outright never had as much fun in a Multiplayer game. It's a game where i got 30 Hours plus of scheming, dying, killing, and most importantly, laughing my ass off. Yes, you probably a group that is level-headed enough to not actively want to kill each other afterwords. But as a lens for sheer absurdity, comedy, and extracting the best moments out of group interactions, I am not sure i will ever experience something again quite like Dokapon Kingdom.

It is an absolute masterpiece.

Special shoutout to fellow players:
Sombes (This was her fucking idea)
Arnust (Schemer and no balls)
Tacos (Banged his head on the table at least once this playthrough)

CW: Self harm, drug abuse, emotional abuse, honestly, you name it.

It has been a long time since i've played a game that has made me as uncomfortable as Needy Streamer Overload. It is grimy, blunt, and very arguably lands on the side of "in poor taste", like i've taken the wrong turn on DLsite and have found myself in the Rance section. All the while it presents events of clear distress and horror with this beautiful, bouncy, art style. And whilst "It's cute but actually a horrow game :O" is old hat by this point, the sheer glee with which NSO depicts what is essentially a torturous month of a woman's life is such a great horror hook.

If you force yourself out of the game's headspace, probably either later in your first playthrough or in subsequent ones, it's easy to see the deliberacy and commentary it's going for, but when I was sucked into it, it really got under my skin to the point that on my first attempt at playing i just had to shut it off after about half an hour.

And the game does a great build up of it's horror as well. Whilst the scenario clearly starts in a fucked up position, it near-inevitably gets much worse and throws a good handful of sucker punches your way, with a very cleverly balanced mixture of triggers based on days and values, and RNG-driven events. Stuff like the game throwing a straight up self-harm minigame at you is sickening, and a lot of the endings have odd triggers and come before the end of the 30 days of gameplay, which adds a very creepy spontaneity to it.

The writing and localisation is also surprisingly very good. Ame is essentially the game's lone character and if the presentation of her was off it would tank the whole thing, and it easily could have ended that way - but there's a great bluntness and relatability to what she says that makes her both someone you want to root for as well as truly nailing the "too online" side, for lack of a better term. It's a simple, obvious trick but the juxtoposition of her alter-ego k-angel and then her private account posting tweets after each other always works, and there's a cutting "realness" to all her DMs, etc.

Probably the most contentious thing of NSO is how unfiltered it is. It goes around slashing at a good pile of raw nerves with a machete - especially in a number of the ending sequences - and i think it's very reasonable to think this is crossing some lines. When things are being presented so matter-of-factly, in that same bouncy, eerily beautiful presenation, i wouldnt blame people for thinking it in bad taste or being shock-value/exploitative.

But the blunt presentation of the topics at play here really works for me. It see it as coming from a place of real anger - about abusive controllilng relationships, about youtube's policies encourange creators wringing themselves dry, relationships between creator and fan. On those repeated playthroughs where the horror inevitably fades, the commentary and grimness really takes up the slack. This incarnation of a fucked up relationship, a girl who's dissociated from a world that revels in her downfall. There's more twists down the tracks and down the 24 endings, but the core is what really resonantes. In particular, I really like how the game feels casts a shadow on to an extent, the whole raising game genre. I doubt this is untrodden ground, but looking at something like princess maker, and how much you control someone's life in that, feels almost tainted after.

Getting int those 24 endings is probably the game's only real problem in my opinion. They're very fiddly, a number of them basically demand a guide and doing multiple repeat playthroughs right to plan in these sort of things saps the game of it's spontaneity. It also just takes too long. Yes, the entire game can be beaten in about an hour, probably far shorter on repeats, but it still ends up way too much, and some are even tied to 1/100 random events proccing. I don't blame anyone for getting a handful of endings then watching the rest on youtube, which is probably not ideal.

The game's "main" ending, though, Internet Overdose, is just... horrifying. The game's true coup de grace and a fantastic way to go out. Its the apotheosis of what NSO - incrediblly presented and being confrontational with it's themes in a way thats hard to watch.

So if you can stomach it, and also go into it with some faith that's its not pure exploitational shock value garbage, I highly reccomend NSO. I'd honestly say its a truly great horror experience, the sort of thing that makes you feel like a gigantic piece of shit for even being involved with it at the time and has been living rent free in my conscience for too long after.

There are few games as utterly captivating as Elden Ring. Throughout it's runtime, I found the game's world and it's dungeons just absolutely sucking up my play sessions and spitting me out on the other side, way past 11pm and wishing i didnt have work the next day. It's a hard game to drag oneself away from, with an open world that constantly rewards curiosity, enormous main dungeons which you can now have a degree of vertical exploration and platforming, and constant beauty to be found in it's locales and vistas.

The world design and the main levels of Elden Ring are just astounding. If you exclude the copypasta mines and catacombs, which fortunately arent too common, nearly everything else is high tier Fromsoftware stuff, and the world design itself is fantastic. It's kind of like New Vegas in that whilst it's very open, there's a clear route the game is always nudging you in, and the world design being much longer than it is wide ties into that. Towards the end of the game it also gladly funnels a bit more, so just as the open world fatigue feels like it might set in and the world looks like it might be overstepping, it pulls it back just enough.

The gameplay itself is basically dark souls 4, which is pretty much what everyone wanted, so cool. If there is a significant difference between them, it is that Elden Ring is a game that encourges far more resourcefulness and usage of tactics and items that were pretty useless in previous games. The item crafting allows lot more liberal use of things like firebombs and knives, crossbows and bows are massively more viable, and multiclassing a melee build with some magic is a natural path to take as scaling seems way less important than stat requirements for wepons and abilities. With spirit ashes as well there seems a fairly large emphasis on using a wider variety of resources available to you, which is a good change, and discourages the R1-roll-r1 that souls can sadly boil down to.

On a core gameplay side, the only real issue i have is the scaling of enemy health and damage. It's just a bit overtuned. Unlike other Souls games, Vitality basically has to be your primary stat here - having about 40-50(!!!) seems appropriate for the endgame, in a game where other stat demands remain basically the same compared to previous games. Enemies also get vastly inflated health pools in harder areas than where you should be, and whilst i get the purpose to sort of corral the player in the right areas, it's a bit much. It leads to coming back to early areas being a cakewalk whilst lacking a few upgrades in a lategame area to be a nightmare - something that can easily happen becasue the drops required to upgrade weapons are kind of a mess to get and you may well end up in a situation where missing one low level stone prevents a massive jump in power. Reducing this quite massive range would have helped a lot, and I don't really get why the decision was made to be like this when none of the other souls are, excluding the chalice dungeons and the New game plus cycles - which is kind of what going to a new area feels like in gameplay terms.

The bosses are also a very mixed bag. Many are great, of course, but there's some serious dark souls 2 energy to quite a couple of them - bosses with really weird wind ups that track your position to an insane degree with only tiny windows to fight back with. And worst off, very occasionally you'll get to fight two of those fuckers at once.

There's also just too many bosses in general. I know they're often the best part of these games and that since you can run past so much of everything else in this game, it might be neccessary, but there's a large amount of copypasta of the minor bosses in particular, a lot of similar dragons - and the game basically ends with 5 bosses directly after each other, which is a bit much. They could have toned it down a bit.

Other than that, perhaps the biggest dissapointment for me is the narrative and world "lore". Especially in the early hours the world of elden ring feels a bit like bootleg dark souls, to the point i dont know why they didn't just make this a direct spinoff. There's so much stuff which is just "dark souls stuff but named different" that it feels a bit fake, and wheras something like bloodborne could get away with it due to a vastly different setting, Elden Ring's really is quite similar. The conflict of the game is also quite poorly defined unless you're really paying attention to stuff. Fortunately some very good NPCs (ranni my beloved) and the world design itself rises to the occasion, but yeah, I really think they should have made this just a dark souls spinoff, it just means it feels awkward at times, especially in the early hours which are just straight, boring high fantasy.

To be honest, there's an overwhelming amount of nits to pick with Elden Ring. I could write a review much longer than this one alone about individual locations in the game that feel like they were given to the team who made shrine of amana, or the weird quest design, or wonky performances issues or whatever. But, y'know, that's From. Every last one of the souls games - and all the earlier games of theirs i've played - have problems that I would dumpster other games for. I will forever make fun of the Cathedral level from Code Vein, but you'll probably catch me defending lost izalith if you got me drunk enough. Because just the general play experience of Elden Ring is so damn strong.

It's not the best soulsbornekirofieldtowerring - the honour still goes to bloodborne by a long shot as far as i'm concerned. Ultimately i do think enough of the issues i've mentioned, particularly the wonky balance, large amounts of reused stuff and some bad bosses definetly knock the game down a peg. But it's still clearly the best open world game since Gravity Rush 2, and FROM's first crack at this really doesn't feel like the sellout my cynical self thought it would be. It's like they've been doing this all along.

Well, what was the point of all that?

I have been racking the question in my head occasionally for bordering on two months now.

There is enough "good stuff" in FFXVI to carry 5 different games on their own. The performances, especially Ben Starr's exceptional turn as clive, are pretty universally excellent. I like the characters, as dirtily done as basically any woman is by the plot. Soken's score is excellent and the sheer level of bombast in it's action scenes is top tier. It is in many ways, a game where a bunch of top-tier creatives are putting out their best work.

And I feel nothing!

Final Fantasy XVI might have a bunch of good shit in it, but it's overall creative direction is very poor. The first half of the game gets carried hard by being focused Clive, who is so brilliantly portrayed (and often, improvised) that when the focus of the game shifts to the larger scale conflicts, and some of the other good characters get less time, it just meanders around towards an eventual ending which might have been good had the back half of the game not just, completely failed to make compelling stakes and interweave this conflict with the characters at all well. This has been a problem with FF before - when the character focus basically departs from FF9's final disc the game limps to the line, for instance - but XVI feels like it has even less of a point and it's lull lasts the majority of the runtime.

This leads to the back half in particular becoming a game of awesome peaks - usually in the Eikon set pieces where it feels like all the talented people in development were actually on the same page - amid a sea of mediocrity, especially on retrospect. I am currently talking to a friend who's playing through FFX and even though it's not my favourite, seeing just a scant screenshot or two of "filler" scenes from Luca or Zanarkand, and I feel right there. With XVI it's been like a month and I had to google the name of the main antagonist of the second half, and that guy has like, a really obvious name too.

Another thing comes out of FFXVI in the end is how... careless it is, to put it nicely. The game's poor direction and failure to make it feel like it's trying to make a point or idk, be art, makes its borrowing of tropes from game of thrones feel all the more egregious. Carelessly throwing about implied sexual violence and its whole slavery thing without having, like, a point - at best it's just weird and uncomfortable and unneccessary, at worst its very suspect, lets just leave it at that. The game's treatment of women in particular ends up as an extremely bitter note that is probably a result of a piling up of uncocious biases rather than malice, but that's not good either!

This is to say nothing of the continually weak sidequests and questionable game structure, that it should have culled way more RPG elements, that its way too easy on the first run and more! But these are incidental problems in a game that just fails to make me feel anything when that was clearly what the intention was.

I love parts of XVI. I love Clive, Gav, Cid, Mid and Jill even if the game doesn't. I love the Eikon fights. I love the music. I can't love the game they're in, which in poor direction just wastes what good it's got.

It really should not be the case that Final Fantasy XVI, a game produced by a development team of legends with a nigh-infinite budget and all the time in the world should not be a legitimately more careless and harder to love game than Wanted: Dead, the follow up to devil's third where a lot of the creative decisions were made by an eccentric Swiss billionaire who has probably defrauded the russian state and really likes Stefanie Joosten. But here we are.

Gran Turismo 7 is a lie. For all the words spouted about how this is a return to form of the massive singleplayer campaigns and content of Gran Turismos past, it's really not. It tries, goddamit, and definetly scratches the itch that we all have of Gran Turismo 4 and such... but it never goes more than skin deep.

Because Gran Turismo 7 is just an expansion of GT Sport, and with it, the promise of new stuff to come at an indeterminate date. At time of writing it's just a buy in to a live service.

The kicker here is content. Versus GT sport there's a grand total of... 4 new tracks and two new layouts of existing ones. I'm not joking thats it, and whilst the selection is mostly good - High speed ring, deep forest, and Trial Mountain are classics - there being no completely new additions outright is really sad.

The car selection is also quite small by mainline gt standards. 400 cars which are mostly unique (compared to GT6's deluge of 20 different types of Miata) and all beautifully modelled - but lots of these are ludicrously expensive, the vast majority are imported from GT sport, and there's very few additions in the racing car categories. The overall car selection is also, by now, quite old. Most of the cars here you can track back to about 2015-ish, and there's very few non concept cars from post 2020.

And it kinda all makes sense. The reduced scope of GT7 compared to - particularly GT4, is almost unavoidable. The level of fidelity demanded these days makes something the scope of GT4 or even GT6 basically impossible, and Polyphony arent the crazed madmen sleeping at the office and making Naughty dog's crunch practices look pedestrian anymore.

And thus, the campaign doesn't really work. There's the delightful level of gran turismo charm and cheese which is lovely to have back and is probably my outright biggest criticism of Sport, but the whole thing is too linear, short, and really lacks the freedom of previous GTs.

Particularly dissapointing is the lack of the super high level events from bygone days - Like the wind, Formula grand turismo championships, etc. It's outright bizzare, the game carries the license system from previous games, but there arent even any license requirements over A in the game at time of writing. And it's so weird, because the game dangles these awesome legendary cars in front of you for stonking credit values but there's like fuck all to do with them except online!

But despite it all, there's sparks here. S-10, the final license test, has you wrangling a classic Porsche 917 around a slightly damp Spa Francorchamps. It's probably the most fun i've ever had in a driving game. The handling model in GT7 is top tier, it's implementation of weather and changeable conditions amazing, it's level of fidelity so damn high, the Car such a fun beast to drive - that it all comes together and it's downright magical. It's the apotheosis of the driving fantasy GT has always been trying to fullfill, and it's the best it has ever done it. Some of the other missions and driving tests are also great, but this moment is what makes it, and proves GT7s potential.

But we'll have to wait, i guess. More than even GT sport, this is a game where buying it is buying into a live service and years of updates which will eventually make it the game we all wanted. GT sport eventually got there. And if there's more moments like S-10 coming... I guess i'll be there to see it in GT7.

Y'know, maybe I should have been more wary. RGG have now proven they have a serious track record of fucking up re-releases. Monkey ball 1+2 got borked physics. VF5 got racist netcode. Yakuza 1+2 got Kiwami'd. And now it really feels like Ishin has as well.

RGG will really add an unforgivably terrible gacha Card system on what already seems like a way too bloated game, but not address that you can just bait one attack and gun down from across the room every story boss.

RGG will really just change what seems like a pretty well thought out original cast considering the conceit in what is obviously a shortsighted fanservice move that will reek in like 3 years.

RGG will really just not address the game's blatant issues like a quarter of the runtime consisting of you running to and from work, attaching Kiryu's morality system onto thi main character requiring consant contrivance and the game's map clearly being hamstrung by loading times on the PS3.

Deep,, deep under Nu-Ishin is the best Yakuza game. And frankly, I get the impression that it's buried a fair bit under the original Ishin as well - I don't think the Yakuza stuff helps tell the story at play (not-Kiryu just sucks the life out of what seems like a truly fascinating real person imo) there's a pointless aount of RPG nonsense that only detracts from the combat that I can't blame entirely on the remake, and the map is probably the series' weakest if you arent a huge nerd for this shit like me.

But im a huge sucker for stories from this period (WATCH YOJIMBO) i love the aesthetic, the combat whilst having issues gainst greatly from swords and guns, and the general plot is really cool. Frankly, just experiencing thils state of japan from the viewpoint of an RGG game is satiation enough for me, huge nerd. But god it could be so much better.

And Nu-Ishin is just the worst kind of re-release. It reminds me a lot of Strange Journey Redux - making pointless changes that dont help and just alienate, whilst adding pointless new stuff that's both terrible and bloats out a game that if anything needs cutting down.

RGG are a very competent studio, but god they need to stop doing this shit.

PS: the translation/localisation here feels really rough. To the point i've spotted multiple spelling mistakes. Makes it particularly tempting to go back to the original once i've improved my Japanese... a lot.