Coming off arguably the greatest western eroge ever made, I had high hopes and expectations for Love's next project. GItCL didn't hit anywhere near the high marks Ladykiller in a Bind did, but it does manage to be intriguing.

For one, the actual gameplay loop and combat is really fascinating. Its very frenetic, and ends up playing like a quasi-rhythm game as you set up everyone's cards and try to cycle as high as possible. It has a fairly high skill floor to get into, but I ended up really enjoying it once I got into it. I wish I could say the same about the way you actually acquired new skills--which is via a literal gacha--but I got over it even if that aspect was tedious. When you add in honestly the best combat theme of any jrpg in recent years, the actual act of playing the game is really exciting and it was easy for me to get into a flow state of clearing an encounter, driving, then getting into the next one. With a little clean-up of the surrounding systems I would love to see an expansion of this in another project.

What soured the game on me though was...everything else. The dialogue is something atrocious. If you're in on leftie twitter, you know most of the dialogue in the game already. If you're in the specific niche of "lesbian otaku twitter", you know all of it. Its a very weird feeling knowing the punchline to every joke before its said. The plot itself is not uninteresting but never exciting either, and feels very hamstrung by the road trip theming of the game.

Its a big step back from the tight, smart, and incredibly funny writing in LKIB.

And...thats it. This is an odd game where the gameplay is the game but not the game at the same time, and that sort of incongruity makes the game come out worse. I actually think the base game systems as a roguelike would be a wonderful take, and I think a visual novel that could really get into longer-form writing for these characters could also be wonderful. But smashed together...its just odd. I hesitate to even call it bad--I didn't not enjoy my time with the game. But I can't say I enjoyed it either.

Its just weird.

I don't like to go hard on games like this, but as someone who is ostensibly the exact target audience for this(ex-tumblr lesbian jrpg fanatic), its awful and basically the exact opposite of what to make a faux-jrpg as.

To start, lets get the combat out of the way. Its a mix of Paper Mario and Battle Network, except somehow lamer and significantly slower than either of them. Even trash encounters take 3-5 minutes because you spend an inordinate amount of time walking up to hit the guy only for them to jump away immediately. Combined with the generally low combat numbers and high HP pools of enemies, in addition to the action button combat making it so you can't speed up combat its just a miserable slog. By the halfway point of the game, I just turned on the "instant win all combat" button, except that STILL makes you wait until the protagonist's turn in-combat to activate so you're still sitting there 30 seconds each fight waiting. That alone killed any momentum in the game for me.

Next, the world. You'd think a Magic School would be a slam-dunk setting for a jrpg--lots of fun themes and tropes you can choose from, quirky npcs to encounter, etc etc. Ikenfell does a very bold move here and makes the entire map a dungeon. Besides one tavern at the start of the game(and ceases to be relevant 10% of the way in), there is no real "towns" or calm places. You walk into the school courtyard, which is a dungeon, which leads you to the dorms, which are a dungeon, which leads you to the botany labs, which are a dungeon, and so on. There is functionally no "downtime" from the combat portion of the game, you are just shuttled from dungeon to dungeon to dungeon. There also aren't really any npcs to deal with, no sidequests to handle, nothing of the sort. Just large dungeons bereft of anything interesting or exciting. This game is honestly a masterclass in how not to pace your game, the constant slog of enemy encounter after encounter just removes any tention or interest the game could have.

But surely, I thought, this game should be heartfelt. Perhaps to someone younger, it might be, but I could not connect with any of these characters. The most interesting one is the hot-blooded lightning lesbian, in part because she does something besides mope around the entire game. The writers focused so much on either the grander Plot stuff or the traumas the various characters have that any sense of comradery or fun is lost. And like, you can make characters who just mope around all the time--I recently played Tales of Berseria, where the main character is a deeply traumatized young woman who spends 80% of the game with coping with that trauma, but there she's surrounded by people who don't take things as seriously and the game isn't afraid to clown on her from time to time. The plot itself is also generally whatever, its basically just a collect the macguffin plot to lead you from place to place. It doesn't even really use the setting in any interesting way.

An odd note as well is that there's three vocal themes in the game, all of which belong to later-game party members who's function is just not plot-critical. Which, its fine, I love hip hop and am a huge sucker for vocal themes but its a weird choice. None of the main characters, just these three weirdos. It feels like a bit of a waste of dosh, but like sure why not.

What actually gets me is one of the songs has a lot of references to real life figures like Martin Luther or Bob Ross, and it took me out so much. Like, the game pretty expressly does not take place on Earth so..???? Petty concern, for sure, but its actually funnily enough the thing that stuck with me the most.

All in all, a waste of talent and time by all involved. I feel bad because every lesbian-themed western indie jrpg seems to disappoint(even Christine Love's Get in the Car didn't hit the marks it should have), and I don't want this to be the case because, well, thats me.

But that's the world we live in. Its a pity.

Animal Crossing 1 and Wild World gave you a plot of land, some villagers, and told you to make something of it. That inherent lack of modularity, the annoying lack of any real ways to change the world around you, was the crux of those games to me. This is a town, enjoy your life in it.

New Horizons is the opposite. You are the god of this island, you can sculpt the very land itself for perfectly-optimal pathing or maximum Aesthetic. Fuck that, put it back.

Besides open worlds, the greatest sin of modern gaming is modularity.

It manages to stem the bleeding that Sword/Shield started, but they really need to do something about how procedurally generated the game feels. I know it isn't, but in the race to have an open world I couldn't help but feel like Pokemon lost its soul somewhere. Seeing randomly generated swaths of pokemon everywhere on aimless terrain just really disconnected me from the actual adventure. None of the places feel unique or like places, its just a minecraft seed.

There is a sort of fun in the "create your own adventure" thing, and I did like comparing my route through the game with my friends on discord at the end to see how our adventures differed. It would have just stuck more if it felt like there was meaning to our routes.

I think ultimately what this game missed is setting. There's a specific fun found in just wandering around the overworld doing random little micro-challenges for game currencies that don't really matter, but the island setting just hurts. It hinders any interaction or devil-may-care attitude Sonic might have because he's chained to the solitude of these isles with a few scant cutscenes for warmth.

I couldn't help but think how much character the early 3D sonics had, even the ones without a dedicated hub world, just by setting them in places where things happen. A Sonic Frontiers in Central City would just solve so many issues, I feel.

I can only hope Frontiers 2 does it, because otherwise all the pieces are there to make a seriously great Sonic game once again.

At the end of my playthrough, I had a deep sense of melancholy. Not just due to the admittedly wonderfully-executed story and the fact there was no more content for these goofballs, but because of the game itself.

The Tales series has always excelled at "the whole package". If you asked me one single thing any of the good Tales games excelled at, I'd probably come up short--but, these games are significantly greater than the sum of their parts. This is not one of those cases. Tales combat has always been pretty bad, but this is definitely the worst version of the games I've played(I ain't touching Zestiria sorry), and combined with the most asinine useless gear system it makes actually playing the game kind of miserable. You walk around the huge empty maps skipping every enemy encounter because they don't give you anything useful and aren't fun to play. Its the definition of unexciting.

But, you play anyways because Magilou opens her mouth with another stupid but wonderful joke, or Velvet and Eleanor doting over Laphicet, or a "dudes rock" moment with Rokurou and Eizen and its just impossible not to love them and keep playing to spend more time with them. The plot itself also manages to perhaps not defy expectations, but it knows what its doing and knows how to treat these characters with the perfect amount of respect and sensitivity that elevates the material. It sticks with you.

The melancholy of actually playing it helps in a strange way for me, because there is a relief its over, but fulfillment I saw Velvet to the end in spite of it all. Its far from sad though, just...what am I gonna do now?

This is meandering, but Berseria really is something special and quite frankly not something I expected from late-stage Tales, which has mostly spun its wheels and rested on its laurels. Here's hope whatever comes next can capture some of this energy once again.

The Job System is arguably the best rpg progression system ever made, and even with very few changes since it's origination in Final Fantasy III, it still stands up today. You could put literally any game in it and have a really fun game regardless of the quality of the other elements.

Bravely Default 2 proves that. I have to assume the game released unfinished, because the shocking lack of care put into literally every other aspect of this game just drags it down. Even the combat in this one is a letdown--early on when you have no options, its difficulty is on par with Dept Heaven titles, but once you get to the third set of jobs you more or less instantly break the game.

I don't expect some Yoko Taro-esque meta story stuff here, but messing with the boundary of player and game has always been core to BD2, and the tact they take here is actually cool, but it only shows up at the very end of the game and generally feels wasted.

As to the plot, it doesn't exist. Final Fantasy I had a more interesting plot and characters. There is a small bright spot with some almost-juicy character drama in chapter 2 but it disappears more or less immediately too.

I don't know, I don't expect the Bravely series to blow my head off with originality or polish or really much of anything besides a fun romp with the job system, but this just feels like a step back from both BD1 but FF: 4 Heroes of Light too. It's a shame, too.

Just go play Yakuza 7 if you want this sort of thing.