Shadow Hearts is a game that is honestly trying its best to impress.

It's got the oppressive horror vibes here and there. It's got some real banging music. It's got some wonderful and creative gameplay systems with the whole judgement wheel mechanic even if it doesn't change a shit load over the course of the game.

The story however is just a complete and total letdown. It really ends up being a fairly bog standard and generic story with some awful jokes, gross sterotypes and one or two interesting character arcs with a bunch of others that kinda end up half baked.

All of the elements to make something genuinely amazing is all there but nothing brings these elements together to bring this game to above anything other than just fine.

This is a story that wants to talk about the consequences of Japanese Imperialism/Colonialism but doesn't actually want to do anything meaningful with that as a premise. Instead boringly both sidesing the issue with the more sympathetic side made into literal anime caricatures in order to show how evil they are too. It's dumb and extremely fucking lame.

I really honestly believe this game absolutely should've stopped after the Asia section finished. Everything in Europe just feels like wasted time and potential.

It's a little saddening because there's a lot of potential here but it honestly has me more stoked for how they improved on things in Covenant and to see where that game takes some of the good ideas this game had.

I made a video on this if ya want to see more detailed thoughts. I don't think this game is horrible but it's so genuinely disappointing that it hurts more almost at what the first in this series could've been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z0nL7ZO-z4

Unpacking is an interesting idea. It's essentially fairly freeform puzzle game of 8 levels unpacking boxes of someone moving into different houses. It follows an unnamed woman's life through her first room as a girl, through college house sharing and relationships to a middle aged adult.

The game makes use of environmental story telling to push what is happening along, moving in with their first partner, the lack of space or compatibility etc. Without meeting or hearing about this woman you can piece together the events of her life and interests. It's a really neat idea and I liked seeing the small changes to belongings from location to location or items she has taken with her through most of her life. It does wear out it's welcome after a little bit though as I don't feel it gets quite clever enough with it's items to progress that story as it could. There are only so many piles of the same books and socks I can unbox and put on shelves or in draws without feeling like the idea ran stale. There are also some sections where the simple music just stopped leaving an odd silence as I decided where to put the yoga mat under the bed again in the next bedroom.

Still I really appreciate what a neat idea and unique game this is. I would have preferred more interactive items, close up's of photos to show things our nameless protagonist had done, new hobbies or even problems in her life to flesh it out more. What I really took from this though is if someone unpacked my things for me if I moved house what sort of person would they think I am? So much of what we own, decide to keep and how we keep them at home speaks so much about us as people. For that alone I am grateful to this short and cute little game.

+ Interesting use of environmental story telling.
+ Unique game idea.
+ Nice pixel art style.

- Runs out of steam a bit in the last couple of levels.

Gave myself a day to kinda just sit with the whole experience of my first playthrough. Xenogears is one of those games that kinda just existed within the culture in a way where I always heard people vaguely gesture at its greatness, but never actually got any full details about what exactly made it so great. So for years and years and years and years and years I kinda just kept putting it off, playing many other games before and after it, hearing about its complexities but never really the details as of what those complexities were. Finally experiencing it for myself I completely get it.

An experience that is some parts Neon Genesis Evangelion, some parts Gundam some parts sci-fi novels and films, Xenogears wears all of its inspirations firmly on its sleeve and proudly bears it all as it goes into its own psychological, religious explorations of the self.

The ways in which it talks about running away from your problems rather than dealing with them and how that inevitably comes to bite you in the ass, there's a quite good example with the martial arts tournament you enter that genuinely surprised me when it happened.

The ways it delves into how trauma can inform and explain behaviors, can cause people to drift one way or another instead of facing the real problems within themselves, be lead to more and differing kinds of abuses, or completely shut themselves down due to their inability to truly cope with the things that've happened to them. But it also firmly discusses how important it is to continue to live, to continue to fight and go on despite the struggles we face in life, how we have to take responsibility for ourselves and the things we do despite our traumas, that again our traumas can be an explanation for behaviors and actions you may take, but at the end of the day you have to be responsible for your own actions.

There are a few characters I do wish were able to get more from the story (Rico, Maria, Chu Chu) and the very clear rushing of things does absolutely fuck with what was clearly supposed to be this ambitious and sprawling experience, though I will say in spite of the clear rush job that Disc 2 ends up as, I genuinely still quite loved the way they handle the presentation and style. Some of the quick cuts are really sharp and effective, I dig the kinda play stage type beat they do for some of the cutscenes they didn't have time to fully make enviornments for, I like the way they frame each part from differing characters POV's. There's a lot of cool things that make that second disc really interesting, kinda reflecting episodes 25 and 26 of NGE in ways.

It's such a strange feeling in ways cause like I kinda despised the gameplay at times (ground combat relies a bit too heavily on deathblows and grinding them out where-as I feel like the Gear combat is a bit better balanced in terms of building up to your deathblows and having to strategically manage your fuel levels in interesting ways). But even though I wasn't huge on the combat or some of the dungeon design (fuck Babel Tower) the whole thing just really came together for me. Everything it was doing was absolutely fuckin aces, it honestly reminded me of watching NGE for the first time as a teenager AS WELL AS watching both Shiki-Jitsu and Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0+1.0 with what exactly it was going for in its messaging and just how much it resonated with me. How much Fei's character arc resonated with me, how dense and packed of an experience it was overall.

I think I can safely say that I'm getting into the series cause I wanna see what else can come from anyone involved who was able to put this together.

A JRPG infamous for its length, but proof that more content isn't always a recipe for perfection.

Dragon Quest VII starts innocuously enough, as we follow the young son of a fisherman who spends his days exploring his island home with his best friend, the unruly Prince Kiefer. When the pair find a mysterious tablet it sparks a truly massive quest that sees them dive back in time to free their world from a mighty curse that shattered the world into fragments and sealed them in darkness centuries ago. There's a brilliant structure to this adventure, with each island you visit in the past having its own complete storyline but as you get further into the story these individual plots begin to weave together into one huge narrative.

However, it's also extremely slowly paced. It takes over an hour for the first fight to occur, nearly 10 hours can go by without a full party, and I'd played for about 20 hours before I unlocked the job system - and that was still barely a quarter of the way in! If you're not a fan of grindy JRPGs then you really must avoid this game, but if you're happy to sit in for the long haul, Dragon Quest VII can be exhausting but rewarding.