31 reviews liked by GS_2011
This review contains spoilers
I was flinging my chair across the room and cheering like an argentinian football fan while a teenager was contemplating homicide
Ok I am dropping this because I need this music out of my head or I’ll go insane.
I am so fascinated by why this exists. Who approached who to get this Netflix-subscription-exclusive officially licensed Sanrio mobile game developed by people who obviously repurposed their existing code of a previous game? How did anyone make money off of this? Who benefited?
Obviously this game was made on the cheap. Look at these bands. Some of these videos have less than 300 views??? How were they found? How were they selected? Did anyone have to sign off on these? Does anyone know they were even included? Hell, there’s a non-mainstream Vocaloid in there!
The legal documentation on how this project happened is a tantalizing dream of a video essay I will never get to watch. (Because I sure as hell ain’t makin’ it)
This game is extra fascinating because I have no idea what is or is not outside the scope of expected Hello Kitty merchandising opportunities. Like, this exists. Are there any taboo topics for Hello Kitty to be associated with? Because some of the lyrics in this rhythm game’s dance club music made me a little uncomfortable when my nephew asked if he could try. Is Hello Kitty made exclusively for adults to post-ironically like something with a childish aesthetic?
Which makes me wonder, how important is quality to the brand of Hello Kitty? The animations for this game are bare bones nothingness. No one can even blink. Is it enough for the characters to be sculpted on-model? Lacking in polish as the renders are?
At the same time, this game doesn’t feel cheap. It is very honest and earnest with how little content it has. Unless there is a secret second map if I actually stuck through it and unlocked all the characters, what you see is what there is to have. The game is structured in runs - pick a party of animals for your parade, then try to play through a series of 6 songs. In each song, animals have a health bar. Tap in time to the beat to choose which of three lanes the animal dances, avoiding fences and picking up coins and upgrade materials. If they die, they’re out for the run. Run out of animals, and you’re out early. (I actually like that the animals’ health bar is separate from your score for unlocking goodies. You can still get points for perfectly timing the beat straight into a tiger trap.)
There’s a surprising amount of depth in the different characters’ roles and abilities. My Melody is the healer, and a near necessity in every run, as is Pompompurin the tank. I never figured out the use of Hello Kitty’s friendship ability, but Pochacco and Tuxedo Sam had enough health to be filler fodder at the front lines. Swapping characters or using an ability takes a beat, which means you can’t swap lanes. Juggling how many beats to move to the right position vs trying to heal or avoid obstacles while not missing out on collectibles can get pretty hectic!
Unfortunately, as this is a rhythm game, the mediocrity of the music killed my enthusiasm to unlock Kuromi. The brutal difficulty of her final lava-filled castle was tense and fun, but the piss-easy early levels were too much of a grind between attempts. Plus the game artificially inflated its difficulty with 1-hit KO hammer traps that threw off the game balance. I might have stuck with it even with them if the camera wasn’t so inconsistent with how many beats into the future it showed at a time.
I have absolutely no idea what star rating to give this. It was “free”, but not in the evil, predatory way that other mobiles games are free*. If this was a 3DS game, it would be easy to knock as not quite worth it. But being on my phone meant it was easy enough to slot into odd moments of waiting. An absolutely surreal confluence of market forces for how art gets made.
I am so fascinated by why this exists. Who approached who to get this Netflix-subscription-exclusive officially licensed Sanrio mobile game developed by people who obviously repurposed their existing code of a previous game? How did anyone make money off of this? Who benefited?
Obviously this game was made on the cheap. Look at these bands. Some of these videos have less than 300 views??? How were they found? How were they selected? Did anyone have to sign off on these? Does anyone know they were even included? Hell, there’s a non-mainstream Vocaloid in there!
The legal documentation on how this project happened is a tantalizing dream of a video essay I will never get to watch. (Because I sure as hell ain’t makin’ it)
This game is extra fascinating because I have no idea what is or is not outside the scope of expected Hello Kitty merchandising opportunities. Like, this exists. Are there any taboo topics for Hello Kitty to be associated with? Because some of the lyrics in this rhythm game’s dance club music made me a little uncomfortable when my nephew asked if he could try. Is Hello Kitty made exclusively for adults to post-ironically like something with a childish aesthetic?
Which makes me wonder, how important is quality to the brand of Hello Kitty? The animations for this game are bare bones nothingness. No one can even blink. Is it enough for the characters to be sculpted on-model? Lacking in polish as the renders are?
At the same time, this game doesn’t feel cheap. It is very honest and earnest with how little content it has. Unless there is a secret second map if I actually stuck through it and unlocked all the characters, what you see is what there is to have. The game is structured in runs - pick a party of animals for your parade, then try to play through a series of 6 songs. In each song, animals have a health bar. Tap in time to the beat to choose which of three lanes the animal dances, avoiding fences and picking up coins and upgrade materials. If they die, they’re out for the run. Run out of animals, and you’re out early. (I actually like that the animals’ health bar is separate from your score for unlocking goodies. You can still get points for perfectly timing the beat straight into a tiger trap.)
There’s a surprising amount of depth in the different characters’ roles and abilities. My Melody is the healer, and a near necessity in every run, as is Pompompurin the tank. I never figured out the use of Hello Kitty’s friendship ability, but Pochacco and Tuxedo Sam had enough health to be filler fodder at the front lines. Swapping characters or using an ability takes a beat, which means you can’t swap lanes. Juggling how many beats to move to the right position vs trying to heal or avoid obstacles while not missing out on collectibles can get pretty hectic!
Unfortunately, as this is a rhythm game, the mediocrity of the music killed my enthusiasm to unlock Kuromi. The brutal difficulty of her final lava-filled castle was tense and fun, but the piss-easy early levels were too much of a grind between attempts. Plus the game artificially inflated its difficulty with 1-hit KO hammer traps that threw off the game balance. I might have stuck with it even with them if the camera wasn’t so inconsistent with how many beats into the future it showed at a time.
I have absolutely no idea what star rating to give this. It was “free”, but not in the evil, predatory way that other mobiles games are free*. If this was a 3DS game, it would be easy to knock as not quite worth it. But being on my phone meant it was easy enough to slot into odd moments of waiting. An absolutely surreal confluence of market forces for how art gets made.
Class of '09
2021
It's all fun and games reading this with your friends in vc until the white boy in your group starts laughing a couple decibels higher than usual at those scenes with Mr. White.
Tomato Adventure
2002
This game is magic, but it's kind of like a magic show that goes on for too long, where you want the magician to stop and let your parents take you home.
AlphaDream's pre-Mario & Luigi outing is somehow even zanier than a lot of things in that series.
(I'll get this out of the way too, the final dungeon goes on for waaay too long.)
However, this feels like unfiltered creative energy, while Superstar Saga feels like it's more filtered, polished and focused creative energy. Like water put through a sieve and partially de-mineralized, thus more digestible.
As a result, the game can fly too close to the sun with regards to how nonsensical and unapologetically left-field it is - and it often wears thin later on in the game. It felt like they were a desperate street magician always pulling thousand of tricks out of their hat in order to get passerby's attention. Impressive, but ultimately 'clingy' if that makes sense as an adjective for a game.
The story is interesting but majorly confusing - and not that it has to be the most well written for a JRPG intended to be excessively lighthearted. Still, I came out of this at the end kind of bone-weary of all the jokes, and really, really wishing for some of the plot points to be explained or even a dredge of character development. Characters like Rellek and Sofubi (names in the wonderful English translation) don't really have that much depth to begin with, or motivations other than "this journey sounds cool, I'll join you now K?"
The battle system is not all fun and games either. You basically attack only with techniques called Gimmicks, and you get more Gimmicks as you progress through one way or another (there are multiple ways to attain them). All of the Gimmicks require you to do a kind of Warioware-esque microgame in order for them to have much power.
Yet, I just really wasn't a huge fan of this system. Imagine a Mario & Luigi game where you can only use Bros Attacks. Then add that there are like (at least) 35 different Bros Attacks to choose from and ones for each character + you have multiple party members to juggle. I don't think this is the most optimized or polished RPG system, not by a long shot.
Yet, despite all these faults, it's a three star game because it's quite amazing, for AlphaDream's "first" attempt at this kind of thing. Yes, they had another amazing debut game for the Game Boy Color, "Koto Battle", but I'd say this is the first game of theirs in this kind of extremely zany style. I wonder how they managed to imbue this game with the kind of stylistic organization that would become a hallmark of all their later games (until the companies sad alleged going-away recently)? It's undoubtedly wondrous. It's really hard to describe, and you can only understand by playing it. The bouncy music, the feeling that I'm in the imaginings of a strange and unique child (like I was). Whimsical, almost mad genius-like (like I wasn't). Daydreaming their own strange fairy tale based on the ones they hear in school.
It's not without cliche though, and it actually has a lot of those damsel-in-distress plot points, but overall for it's stylistics alone it's bumped up half a star from what it would be.
Overall, I'd recommend you play this after you experience at least a few of the Mario & Luigi games - for then you will appreciate how far AlphaDream had come since this release, and you'll also see a lot of the lineage of those games here.
It's ultimately a pretty imperfect and sometimes annoying game - but endlessly charming, surprising and enjoyable. If the PS1 game "moon", as the story goes, was a deconstruction of RPG's from without, this game is a deconstruction from within and using RPG mechanics. It's about as flawed as something attempting that can be - yet it's worth taking a look at, even a brief one, for seeing an attempt at that sort of thing, a really colorful attempt.
(My play time upon completing the game was about 14 hours 53 minutes)
AlphaDream's pre-Mario & Luigi outing is somehow even zanier than a lot of things in that series.
(I'll get this out of the way too, the final dungeon goes on for waaay too long.)
However, this feels like unfiltered creative energy, while Superstar Saga feels like it's more filtered, polished and focused creative energy. Like water put through a sieve and partially de-mineralized, thus more digestible.
As a result, the game can fly too close to the sun with regards to how nonsensical and unapologetically left-field it is - and it often wears thin later on in the game. It felt like they were a desperate street magician always pulling thousand of tricks out of their hat in order to get passerby's attention. Impressive, but ultimately 'clingy' if that makes sense as an adjective for a game.
The story is interesting but majorly confusing - and not that it has to be the most well written for a JRPG intended to be excessively lighthearted. Still, I came out of this at the end kind of bone-weary of all the jokes, and really, really wishing for some of the plot points to be explained or even a dredge of character development. Characters like Rellek and Sofubi (names in the wonderful English translation) don't really have that much depth to begin with, or motivations other than "this journey sounds cool, I'll join you now K?"
The battle system is not all fun and games either. You basically attack only with techniques called Gimmicks, and you get more Gimmicks as you progress through one way or another (there are multiple ways to attain them). All of the Gimmicks require you to do a kind of Warioware-esque microgame in order for them to have much power.
Yet, I just really wasn't a huge fan of this system. Imagine a Mario & Luigi game where you can only use Bros Attacks. Then add that there are like (at least) 35 different Bros Attacks to choose from and ones for each character + you have multiple party members to juggle. I don't think this is the most optimized or polished RPG system, not by a long shot.
Yet, despite all these faults, it's a three star game because it's quite amazing, for AlphaDream's "first" attempt at this kind of thing. Yes, they had another amazing debut game for the Game Boy Color, "Koto Battle", but I'd say this is the first game of theirs in this kind of extremely zany style. I wonder how they managed to imbue this game with the kind of stylistic organization that would become a hallmark of all their later games (until the companies sad alleged going-away recently)? It's undoubtedly wondrous. It's really hard to describe, and you can only understand by playing it. The bouncy music, the feeling that I'm in the imaginings of a strange and unique child (like I was). Whimsical, almost mad genius-like (like I wasn't). Daydreaming their own strange fairy tale based on the ones they hear in school.
It's not without cliche though, and it actually has a lot of those damsel-in-distress plot points, but overall for it's stylistics alone it's bumped up half a star from what it would be.
Overall, I'd recommend you play this after you experience at least a few of the Mario & Luigi games - for then you will appreciate how far AlphaDream had come since this release, and you'll also see a lot of the lineage of those games here.
It's ultimately a pretty imperfect and sometimes annoying game - but endlessly charming, surprising and enjoyable. If the PS1 game "moon", as the story goes, was a deconstruction of RPG's from without, this game is a deconstruction from within and using RPG mechanics. It's about as flawed as something attempting that can be - yet it's worth taking a look at, even a brief one, for seeing an attempt at that sort of thing, a really colorful attempt.
(My play time upon completing the game was about 14 hours 53 minutes)
i really enjoyed to see etherane draw the relationships between the individual self and the collective one (which is already portrayed in some of their other works) with a violet religion-tinted quill for this game from the lens of two different characters subjected by their society's expectations. it doesnt matter from where do you come from, we do not care about your previous hardships: each day you still have one role to fulfill for us. and since there is no escape because everyone longs to be accepted by others, how many sacrifices are you willing to do to achieve humanity? can you say that you are inert in front of an equal?
i cant, thats why i gave up to peer pressure and decided to play this game and even write a little review for the second game that was suggested for backloggds game club #1. thanks to whoever suggested this game (it also allowed me to enjoy other etherane works) and thanks to everyone who decided to participate on this.
tomorrow won't come for those without anyone
i cant, thats why i gave up to peer pressure and decided to play this game and even write a little review for the second game that was suggested for backloggds game club #1. thanks to whoever suggested this game (it also allowed me to enjoy other etherane works) and thanks to everyone who decided to participate on this.
tomorrow won't come for those without anyone
Harvest Festival 64
2023
Lo vi de mi youtuber favorita
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Experiencia inolvidable
xx_dessxericas691337_Xx
Experiencia inolvidable
Yo y mi compa:
Our World is Ended
2017
Don't let the shiny coat of paint fool you: this isn't worth your time.
I tried so hard to like this because of the art and presentation, but I just couldn't. On the visual side of things it's great, but the other half, the actual writing of the visual novel, is so god-awfully shit.
All of the characters come off as unlikeable or annoying in some way. It was actually painful to get through and watch. They have three or four gags which they make sure to repeat over and over again until you want to bang your head against a wall.
The ideas were interesting, but the execution was just really... meh. Not very engaging or interesting at all. The story would rather spend time on Reiji going "b-b-booba?!" every ten seconds within his inner-monologue. Weird pervy stuff or humour is pretty par for the course in a lot VNs, but it's done really obnoxiously here. I'm not even a fan of it anyway but even this stands out as really crappy.
The visuals really made me want to like this but I just can't. It's like a beautiful cocoon concealing a big pile of shit. My wording may come off as harsh and maybe I'm getting a bit too heated but I really wanted to like this and I'm so sad.
So yeah, don't buy this.
I tried so hard to like this because of the art and presentation, but I just couldn't. On the visual side of things it's great, but the other half, the actual writing of the visual novel, is so god-awfully shit.
All of the characters come off as unlikeable or annoying in some way. It was actually painful to get through and watch. They have three or four gags which they make sure to repeat over and over again until you want to bang your head against a wall.
The ideas were interesting, but the execution was just really... meh. Not very engaging or interesting at all. The story would rather spend time on Reiji going "b-b-booba?!" every ten seconds within his inner-monologue. Weird pervy stuff or humour is pretty par for the course in a lot VNs, but it's done really obnoxiously here. I'm not even a fan of it anyway but even this stands out as really crappy.
The visuals really made me want to like this but I just can't. It's like a beautiful cocoon concealing a big pile of shit. My wording may come off as harsh and maybe I'm getting a bit too heated but I really wanted to like this and I'm so sad.
So yeah, don't buy this.
Little Keepers
TBD
This is what real gaming is all about (i'm part of the art team) (envyro)
Know What I Meme
2023
The man hunched over his keyboard, eagerly waiting for his turn. "I'm going to post something funny this time," he said, grinning grotesquely, clicking to the tenor tab. "It better not be that unspoken rizz gif!" howled a trembling bronxite. It was too late. The cymro didn't even bother reading the prompt as his mouse zigzagged over to the results for "unspoken rizz" in tenor, and clicked the gif depicting a dwarfish, muscular, peanut butter complexion Nintendo fan gesticulating wildly, with the mawkish caption "Hows my unspoken rizz?" plastered below him. The seconds counted down. "I'm not posting the Dorcas gif this round" whined a vaguely Canadian voice. There was a deafening silence until the first gif was revealed. "Hows my unspoken rizz?" four times in a fucking row. Video games as a medium died that night. Thanks, Discord.
