Spoilers, obvs.

So going into this amidst the flood of toxic waste that is the discourse online about TLOU2, I didn't expect it actually turn out to be something I'd call a fairly faithful sequel to the original. It improves on the gameplay to an enormous extent whilst embracing and evolving on the storytelling concepts the first game brings up. Even as it's tearing down the relationship between joel and ellie, it improves upon it and wraps up that story well. Even if it wasnt particularly neccessary. On top of that, the game goes all in on embracing the way both games don't cast judgement on the characters themselves with the framing. TLOU2 essentially boils down to two of these characters smushing together and truly embracing the consequences of it, which you witness from both perspectives. And at it's best, it's really effective. Viewing these twisted spirals of pointless violence from both sides leads to some really powerful moments. A lot of which involve friends being shot in the face uncerimoniously. Maybe a few too many.

That core conceit is built on a world of absurd levels of violence/consequence and a "no country for old men" degree of 'well you can also just get fucked by unrelated things out of nowhere', which is where things could probably start to fall down for some. TLOU2 teeters on the line between achieving it's hyper-realistic immersion and a shlocky snuff film, and I can definetly see some people's suspension of disbelief breaking and never coming back due to this, along with some more questionable elements (playing with the dog, all the enemies screaming out each other's name as they bleed out, Ellie killing Mel). And since this is such an emotionally driven game, with character actions being dictated by rage rather than logic, once you've checked out looking at it from outside a layer of immersion i'm sure looks a bit stupid. Ellie chasing Abby to santa barbara is blatantly not a well thought out act.

The issues of the story I actually have mainly come down to pacing and a couple of elements not being developed or built up right. Pacing is a particular problem for the first 2 days of Ellie's part, with seemingly nothing happening for a large proportion of the game other than Ellie killing a bunch of people. Whilst Abby has her Sidequests with Lev, Ellie is just left chasing leads and getting into hijinks for an unreasoable amount of time. There's good stuff in these sections but about 10 hours of very little after a strong opening is a bit annoying in retrospect.

On Abby's side, the Scar x WLF subplot feels a little tacked on, and the Scars themselves dont really get enough time devoted to them outside of Lev, who is a great companion and very likeable.

The split campaigns also leaves a chunk of the supporting cast a bit underdeveloped. Dina's relationship with Ellie feels a bit rushed and would have worked better imo as an existing thing before the game's start. Tommy, Owen and Mel could have done with another few scenes each, and even Lev and Yara could have done with more time to flesh them out and build up the relationships. It's not a huge issue and god knows the game has enough quiet time as it is, but maybe the characters could have been consolidated a little bit.

I know i'm rambling but the peformances, animation and general technical prowess of the whole affair really elevates it. The heightened realism approach of TLOU2's visual design is a huge factor in it's successes and it not losing people imo.

Now, gameplay. I wont touch on it much because frankly it's far less interesting to talk about, but it's a massive improvement throughout, with some of the absolute best environments and level design of a thing like this ever. If there's any game that shows the value of production values, its this, as every room of every arena feels handcrafted and like it has it's own cool way of having combat encounters. The differing toolsets of Ellie and Abby are also enhanced over the first game, and are fun to mess around with.

Main problem with the gameplay is the difficulty. It's too easy to lose guards on any difficulty selection and the systems can easily be gamed if you really want to. It's a shame because the thrill of being hunted and hunting can be legitimately fantastic.

But the big issue here? Lack of Multiplayer. Yes, I know it's probably coming at some point in some form, but TLOU1's multiplayer was really the best gameplay experience the game had to offer, if not the best part of the game altogether - and it's a massive dissapointment for me right now to not be using those cool tools the game has in the challenging environment the first game had.

Overall, I think this is the better last of us game, and probably Naughty Dog's best singleplayer experience. I think the story is definetly a milage may vary thing, but the enormous improvements on gameplay and the environements cements it for me. Not a perfect experience, not the best storytelling in a game ever, messy and not for everyone, but definetly worth checking out.

I've started writing this review on Darius Gaiden 3 times now. And I havent finished them not because I don't know what to say, but because every time I end up in a rabbit hole of listening to music from Zuntata, Taito's sound team, and by the time I'm done this page has timed out.

Gaiden's soundtrack is really special on it's own. A wild, weird soundtrack that sets this ethereal, almost dream-like tone, as well as just being very enjoyable listens. VISSIONERZ and SELF in partiuclar are great bookends to the wild concept album that Gaiden's OST basically is.

And the kindest thing I could ever say about Gaiden is that listening to this music on it's own is a disservice to it. Because the game is so entwined with it and rises to meet it on it's own, and the combined experience is brilliant.

Gaiden was made partially as a showcase of Taito's F3 arcade hardware, and they went all out. Absurd parralax effects, some very effective looking 3D models (particularly for a number of the bosses) which surprisingly fit in very well with the rest of the visual design.

And the cherry on top is the gameplay. Truth be told, it's not a particularly special shmup purely down to it's gameplay - though still pretty solid, thanks to it's great bosses. But it's fast, tough nature that arcade shmups inherantly possess helps you fall into the flow state and pull you along into the experience that everything in the game is building up.

And it all comes together so well. Director Hidehiro Fujiwara worked very closely with lead composer Hisayoshi Ogura to create a truly dreamlike, wild experience, including timing a number of the stages to the music tracks and vice versa. The way the game achieves it's surreal vision so well is a testament to some incredible game direction.

Gaiden is both more than the sum of it's parts, and made with amazing parts. It's one of my favourite shmups and one of the finest early examples of great game direction with an eye towards presentation. Even if you're not a shmup fan, I heavily reccomend giving it a shot. It's 30 minutes long and there's very little like it.

There's only really a few tweaks stopping this game from being one of the great Turn Based Strategy games, to be deserving of being in spoken in the same breath as something like FFT or one of the better Fire Emblems. And whilst I say that with a tinge of dissapointment, for a sequel to an ancient cult game with a clearly shoestring budget, Brigandine is a great experience.

The first time I heard this game it was described to me as a Grand Strategy FFT. And whilst that's a terrible way of describing it, the general gist is similar - it's just a Macro Level resource/troop management layer above the tactics layer, and its ultimately very limited in what you can do, especially as the way battles take place means you typically have very few resources to be messing around with.

Ultimately, the Macro portion of the game boils down to maximising effectiveness of your units by managing risk. And it's good, especially as the game encourages risky plays and the consequences are blatant - sending some units the quest for resources and getting surprise-attacked with limited defensive forces can be great, for instance.

And the Tactics level is also good - if very conventional barring it's hex-based system. It's basically just a slightly simplified FFT with some thrown in positonal elements (enemies can't move past your area of presence sort of thing). It's nothing mindblowing, and I think most units probably have just a touch too much survivability, but it works well for what it is. It's main strengths are it's ties with the Macro elements - due to the ease of being able to retreat your units and the heavy unit limit in all battles - which can encourage interesting, and often risky and aggressive strateiges. Taking a risk with a weak defensive army to see if you can inflict damage to make a counterattack easier is the sort of good stuff the game's mechanics encourage.

All of this good stuff, however, is very nearly scampered by the game being slow as shit. Until you really get the Macro level down to a science and work around the dozens of quirks with the menus, you'll be spending an insane amount of time in the Macro layer, and it's probably too much even once you've done it. The tatics layer is also really shit for this. Armies start about 3 turns of movement away from each other, the cursor is really slow, the hex based nature makes it difficult to quickly snap units to exactly the right location, then because this is switch exclusive you have to wrangle with the joycon drift, the animations are slow, and then the relatively high HP draws out fights even longer. QOL fixes are apparently on the way but right now calling it anything other than garbage would be a lie.

There's also a few issues with the core gameplay. The Snowball-y nature of the strategy side only really comes together in the endgame if more than one nation snowballs, which can lead to some blowout victories (challenge mode solves this element substantially though). On the Tactics layer, some maps do tend to lead to massive balls of death where both sides just wail at each other until the statistically better one wins, which kinda suck. Doesnt happen too often though, and mostly on the lower difficulties.

Oh and there's also a story. It takes a backseat for the vast, vast majority of the game and is clearly not the focus, so it takes more of a worldbuilding approach, which benefits it when it's actually turning up. Nothing too amazing, but it's definetly not the focus.

In the end, I think your milage will vary a lot with this game depending on your patience for it, but there's a lot to like here for TBS fans. FFT Grand Strategy it is not, but I'd say well worth a look.

Note: Review made shortly after launch

Of all the things for this Takeshi's Castle battle royale to remind me of, I was not expecting it to be Rainbow Six Siege. Rainbow Six Siege of 2015, that is. A cool idea and a good heap of fun, piled over by about as many issues and terrible decisions.

Any time I hit play on Fall guys, there's like a 60% chance the game is going to deliver one of it's really bad games. Fruit matching, any of the variants of tail tag, Jinxed, Hoarders - games that vary from being trivial to being boring to feeling like you have little direction over the outcome of the game - usually more than one of those. And it can absolutely suck. A couple of these games, particularly tail tag, feel so poorly thought out i have no idea how they got through any rounds of playtesting unchanged.

And then there's the technical issues which compound this. As of writing, the servers are working half the time, and when they are, the tickrate feels like it's somewhere below 10. More importantly, however, I feel it controls pretty poorly. There's noticeable input lag (feels about 200ms) on seemingly all actions, and for a game about falling over, the game bugging out whenever you do so and being arbitrary about you getting up sucks.

But for all those problems, Fall Guys somehow remains pretty fun. Just like Rainbow Six Siege in 2015, the base concept is just fantastic and the execution has a lot of things going for it. It's the first battle royale i've played where it doesnt feel bad to lose, thanks to very quick queueing, short round time and the comedic nature of it all. At the same time, winning still mostly feels great, and most of the games balance the amount of bullshit and the amount of skill in just the right amount to never feel like you havent deserved it.

There's a long way to go for Fall Guys. I've heard the Human Fall Flat devs are possibly working on a similar concept, which could leave Fall Guys looking like the PUBG to it's Warzone. But if the development goes the right way and more games are brought up to the standards of Slime Climb and Hexagone, this game could go the same direction as Siege.

Also wtf this developer worked on Hatoful Boyfriend?

I have played 2 hours of this game, and I already know I could spend way, way longer talking about it than I ever could playing it. Somewhere beneat this absolute trainwreck there's the bones of a fun stealth action sandbox game, with cool mechs and interesting story elements. But on both a technical and gameplay level, everything is blatantly, absurdly bad, more reminiscent of fumbling around in an early access survival game from 2011 than a AAA release from Square Enix in 2019.

Just some of the questions this game has me pondering

- Why does the game drop you in an open area with dozens of guards and giant mechs with no stealth tools or real means to acquire them?

- Why is the player health so high, and why does it take 4 pistol headshots to kill a guard?

- What are these really cool, realised mechs doing in a field of such jank?

- Why is the morality system actually vaguely interesting?

- What the fuck happened here?

I must play on. Half of me wants to snap the disc in half and the other half must delve deeper, to try and work out this enigma of a game.

ZeroRanger is, more than anything else, a passion project. Two guys and a few other collaborators ground out ZeroRanger over TEN YEARS and they're still working on it. The thread for Final Boss, the original version of ZR, was started on the shmup forums in 2009. And you can really tell. An absurd amount of details, easter eggs and references, ooze from every frame of gameplay, to the point im fairly sure any random screenshot of this game probably has a few hidden details in it. The presentation is fantasitc, with excellent sprite work and great art direction, and the music is some of the best work i've heard in a genre which possesses probably the greatest concentration of god-tier game OSTs.

For a decent bit of time though, I was kinda dissapointed by ZR, because as a Shmup, it's comparatively middling in gameplay terms - Don't get me wrong, it's still fine, and somehow the 2nd best Shmup not made in Japan because no one else has a frickin clue, but it's nothing particulary special - the game is kinda indecisive about being a classic style shmup, a puzzle-focused shmup (like Ikaruga), or a modern Bullet Hell, and the Weapon system I generally find a tad unbalanced and a bit too straighfoward for engaging gameplay - the choice between which weapon to use in which situation is nearly always blatant.

Stage design is also a bit meh. Stage 2 in particular is pretty bad, and a combination of it being very long and being a quite sizeable difficulty jump, particularly with the midboss Artypo, makes it a slog in both loops.

And oh yeah, this game loops. And due to SPOILER, the game fairly explicitly doesnt treat completion of the first loop alone as a true clear - which leads to a traditional arcade run of this game taking almost an hour - 2 to 3 times as long as a typical arcade shmup, which, depsite the game's relatively low difficulty, makes it frustrating to practice and actually put a run out there, especially as the loops have significant differences. The scoring is also very forgettable.

But fuck that. This game still slaps. Not neccessarily as a shmup - but as a tribute to shmups, and as narrative shmup, like something in the vein of Darius Gaiden or Metal Black turned up a few notches in the story balance - interweaving a narrative that's legitimately fantastic and rewards the player for diving into it, with the structure of a shmup, and it's absolutely inspired at times. When everything comes together, particularly in stage 2-4, very little else matches it.

In this "Narrative/Presentational Shmup" guise, I only really have one problem with it, and that's it's usage of References. They're absolutely everywhere, and whilst a lot of the time they're somewhere between cool and very cute, particularly in the Credits and the Dream Sequence, and frankly for most of the game, they are overused a little, and to extent I do think it compromises a bit of the narrative of the game itself, and prevents it really standing on it's own at times. This only truly rears its head in sequences where there's a heavy narrative focus, especially since the game leans on imagery a decent chunk - trying to unpick the truckload of references from the game itself can undercut it a bit.

Mind, this will definetly be something where milage will vary, and I do still love the reverance this game has for the classics. I just feel at times it almost lacks a bit of confidence in itself when what it's doing is fantastic and doesnt need to make nods to those before it.

Still, as I said, it's an absolute blast, and there's nothing i've played that's really quite like it. Definetly flawed, but at it's peak, very little feels as passionate and well executed as ZR.

This stupid little shmup has no right to be as good as it actually is. It's crudely made, childish, and very, very irreverent, but Deathmofumofu really lean into how silly the base concept of a flying cat shmup is, and the end result is just great fun.

At it's core, Neko is a Horizontal shmup basically wholly focused on bullet cancelling with bombs - essentially building up meter and clearing the screen of many bullets as possible, with each bullet turning into score items. It's simple by the standards of modern shmup scoring systems, but it has a surprising amount of nuance, particularly when it comes to managing and routing bombs, taking deliberate deaths for more bombs (and when you're near the 5-life limit), and managing enemy health so they die at the right time. It's a really satisfying system, implemented well, and with the levels built well around it. It couldn't quite carry a traditional shmup alone, but that's where the charm comes in.

And Neko Navy sure is charming. A very silly sense of humour, the general cutesy artstyle with just an edge of bizzare pseudo-horror, lighthearted music, and a general sense of self-awareness that makes it very easy to just lose yourself to the silly little ride that this game is. I find it hard not to smile at the silly jokes, the references, the bizzare sense of space and time - and the stage 3 boss always makes me laugh.

There are issues, of course - The game is a tad easy, with only DEATH COURSE being any significant challenge. Production values are obviously rock bottom, and there's something to be said for the art definetly not being for everyone. I also think if you're not into the irreverant spiral of irreverance that Neko Navy is, you're probably not going to get too much out of it. The Character balance of the game is also a bit off, though the very fact im bringing that up should be telling that i'm taking this game way too seriously in the first place.

But seriously, this game's lovely. Very few games will put a smile on my face in the same way Neko Navy does, every dang time.

I've been wanting to start a series on writing about all of CAVE's shooting games (Shmups, STGs). I enjoy a lot of them, they're interesting, and I think there's a mildly interesting narrative I can weave about the evolution of a company's design over a decade and a half of being the most influential developer in a niche genre.

The problem with starting that series is that it has to begin with Donpachi, which is kinda boring. It's the sort of shmup that you'd see in the background of a sitcom taking place in an arcade. A extremely generic aesthetic combined with gameplay that's really not that compelling, decent but basic scoring, and a difficulty curve that often feels more unfair than challenging. The music is also very bland, especially considering the strength of the music in pretty much every other CAVE title.

The only things that really sticks about donpachi is it's very good sprite art and very good sense of control, which is something CAVE would continue to excel at. There's also the delightful announcer, who brings a certain energy to the game that only a foreign man pulled off the street for a mid-90s japanese videogame truly can.

It's really only in the minutae, and in the context of the past and future, that Donpachi becomes interesting - CAVE was formed from ex-Toaplan staff after that company went defunct, and Donpachi feels way closer to the style of Toaplan than CAVE's later work - fast bullets rather than lots of them, relatively large player hitbox, very little in the way of intricate bullet patterns. But just under the surface, the start of the style CAVE would effectively codify as "bullet hell" is just peeking out from under the surface. It's particularly evident in the second loop, where enemies stream large swathes of revenge bullets at the player on death, there's more of a reliance on hardware slowdown as a gameplay mechanic, the bullet count is generally higher, and the true last boss, Taisabachi, almost plays and feels like later CAVE bosses, albeit with far more of an emphasis on bullet speed than interweaving patterns. It's a shame that more of the game doesn't play like the second loop, considering it takes about half an hour of a pretty meh shmup to get to a more interesting, and absurdly brutal one.

In the end, I don't think Donpachi quite works. It's fundementally fine, but even comparing it to the work of late Toaplan - Notably Batsugun, Dogyuun and Grind Stormer- its pretty forgettable, and certaintly lacks thier flair. And to some extent, I think if it werent for who made it, and the game's successors, DonPachi would be mostly forgotten as one of many average shmups from the mid-90s. Fortunately for CAVE, their second STG - the sequel to DonPachi - was anything but forgettable.

I've got to commend P5R on the fact that it assumes all Persona 5 fans must already accept that the pacing is a lost cause and lean in even further into its absurd longevity.

But maybe when I feel a game doesnt respect my time when I play it through a fucking pandemic and am stuck in my house playing vidya more than ever before, it can actually fuck off.

There's good changes in Royal, from the minor to the more substantial, and there are things I like a lot about P5 in general. Its art style is fantastic, the soundtrack is a banger, it's very cozy. Royal makes appreciated changes to combat, bosses and dungeons, and theres a bunch of little things improved throughout the whole game.

The extra story content in this game should absolutely have been like the Answer in FES where you can just launch with it. Yes, the Answer is garbage, and there's a bunch of little changes in the main story but 90% of the game being a retread of a story that doesn't really stand up to the scruitiny of me getting increasingly frustrated at it.

And the thing is, if P5R was an edit, maybe with an extra story added at the end seperately like the answer, it could have been really great. Persona 5 is a game that could have more interesting story content added whilst also being shorter. Dungeons and characters could be consolidated, the introduction could be shortened, the calendar could be made basically half as long - but Royal does none of this.

It's a shame, really. If this game was 50 hours instead of 100+ I could probably see past more of it's issues. Until then, fuck it.

I do not envy Bluepoint and SCE Japan for trying to remake Demon's Souls. I don't think there is a perfect way to do so, honestly. DeS 09 is a very weird looking game. There's a weird sheen to the whole thing, the lighting is kinda bad, it literally flips assets from Enchanted arms and fucking Ninja Blade - the whole thing is honestly kind of a mess.

And honestly, I think Bluepoint/SCE Japan has mostly got it right here. DeS '20 definetly has some missteps in the remake, but I think they've mostly done a fine job of this remake.

And I will say there are definetly missteps here. Much attention has been given to changes in some character/enemy designs. Whilst I think some of these are pretty bad (Adjudicator and the Fat officials are the most obvious), I can at least see where most of them come from and honestly, the majority of characters remain fundementally intact.

And the strength of Demon's Souls aesthetic was never in it's character designs or assets. It was in it's atmosphere, sound and level design. And fortunately, the Remake retains that. The only area that I'd say feels worse than the original is probably boletarian palace, which is a bit too clean for my liking and doesn't really feel like a fallen castle town for the most part.

But Latria, Shrine of Storms, Valley of Defilement and even Stonefang come out of it feeling not really significantly different - and SoS and VoD both benefit from improved fidelity in particular. And running at 60fps is a godsend.

Also, the 3D audio is exceptional. I think it's honestly the biggest improvement in the entire game and I would implore anyone playing DeS '20 to wear headphones. Its an excellent extension of the sound design of the original game, particularly in Latria.

Of course, on the audio side, I have to say the soundtrack is a big step down. I know Kida gave it a pass and seems to have worked on it in some capacity, but there's a couple of moments where the new tracks just do not work, particularly Fool's Idol, one of my favourite original tracks. The arrangements are pretty alright on their own for the most part but a couple of tracks don't vibe with their original bosses very well. If the original soundtrack was an option this remake would definetly be closer to 5 stars than 4 for me, and I hope it happens - Bluepoint/Japan Studio have already listened to some feedback regarding the remake so I wouldn't count it completely out.

A few quick points before I finish

- The new animations are fantastic. I think the originals in this style would have looked a bit goofy.
- Whatever font they're using for the big screen messages has the worst U i have ever seen. actually the worst part of the remake.
- The quality of life additions are great, particularly those involving item burden.
- There's a weird dissonance with the game having a skin of a 2020 game but still playing like the budget 2009 jank. I have no idea how to feel about it.
- I could probably have a day-long conversation about them not doing anything with the broken archstone. I'm incredibly torn and I can see why they didn't add too much new stuff.

But yeah, I could go on about the minutae of this remake for ages. It's not perfect, theres definetly mistakes here - but what I think really matters I think Bluepoint and Japan Studio have gotten right. I think the results are far better than that of the Shadow of the Colossus remake, for instance - and I adore both original games.

I think if you put a gun to my head and said I had to pick between a 4k 60fps version of the original game and this, I'd probably say this (though yes, I would like both). I would not say the same for SOTC. So, yeah, as muddled as my feelings are on DeS 20 - I think its a fine job in the end.

Good news: Battle Traverse is a mechanically awesome STG with great bullet patterns, boss fights, stage design, and great pacing. An amazing tribute to Progear and Ketsui that in gameplay terms, almost exceed the games that inspire it whilst still feeling like it's own thing.

Thing is, it looks like shit.

Battle Traverse's art style is jarringly bad. Weird semi-chibi player characters fight against military aircraft and vehicles against boring backgrounds with a very weird sense of perspective. It's an art style that would have been far better if it was just generic (like say rolling gunner), but the weirdness and the way the sprites all clash is almost distracting. There's still charm to be had in the unusual tone, with some weirdly upbeat music and some good silliness thrown in. It would probably help if I could read the text, mind...

For the record, BT was primarily made by one person - including all the programming and art. Considering that, it's an astonishing achievement, an incredibly fun STG with depth and an awesome gameplay flow that matches some of CAVE's best.

Ultimately, the art style is distracting, and does stop it matching the absolute greatest in the genre for my money. But take that out of the equaton and my next biggest criticism is that you can't skip the arcade mode's 5 second long intro.

A hearty reccomendation from me, if you're into this sort of shit.

One cannot live on vibes alone. Getting 3-4 hours into a narrative focused adventure game and finding the narrative still doesnt have any hook or tension, whilst also being very deliberately slow as hell, basically leaves me 2 acts in with nothing in the narrative keeping me interested.

Yeah the aesthetic is great and the dialogue system is good. And I get the appeal of the game's setting and what it's going for.

I dont think it helps that I think the adventure/puzzle gameplay segments are outright bad. There's nothing compelling in them at all and they go at about half the pace they should do.

If you want an Americana story focused adventure game with cool dialogue play the Missing.