Something I've never appreciated about this game before until now is how it models itself after classic cartoons. Obviously there's stuff like the way the music starts and stops with you moving, and the fact that inflating someone to death feels like something right out of Tom and Jerry or Looney Tunes. But also, when I tried hitting an enemy with a falling rock and ended up hitting myself because I was too focused on having the enemy follow me, I felt like Wile E Coyote in that moment. There are lot's of little interactions I had with the Pookas and Fygar that felt very Road Runner esque, and the setting even resembles a desert. And of course the music that plays when you clear a level sounds exactly like the kind of music that plays as an iris centers on the main character's face at the end of a cartoon. It all fairly obvious when you put it all together, but I never noticed until now. I'm always impressed with how many different genres and influences were all over the classic Namco arcade line-up.

Being a cop is so antithetical to everything Sonic T. Hedgehog is and what he stands for. An icon of freedom and rebellion against societal norms cast as as the iron fist of the unjust law is like if you turned Lucas from Mother 3 into a capitalist. 'Oh but he is stopping Eggman from evil" or "He is still a cool guy on his off time" doesn't change the fact that this Sonic has probably incarcerated many innocent individuals on his own biases or because of how cruel certain laws are. This is not who Sonic is, I refuse to believe it.
Fuck this game.
All Cops Are Bastards.

engineered to make me wince but wanted a JRPG in the Switch's first year real bad and gave it a shot. has a feel adjacent to a crusty comedy seasonal anime about a 13yr old with fucked up teeth who can't stop kissing her older brother in an isekai world. i like a lot of its ideas but its tone and script are frustrating. i like starting as a diver-miner worker dude but i hate the guy who is that. he should be chill and real as fuck but he's this lame dork and not in an endearing sense. there are multiple scenes where the little boy accidentally touches tits and they go all "stupid baka pervert!" and i just don't care for it. i've seen this all too many times before, i simply cannot get down with these anime babes. i hear it gets better but it shoulda been good when it had the chance to hook me!!! aside from Nia, i didn't connect with any of the characters. Pyra and Mythra especially bored me to tears (i just don't like those sorts of tropes) and i wanted to throw Rex into an evil boiling cauldron. this game is stuffed with lame anime gfs who call u 'master.' the battle system has a gacha mechanic just to spite me and a UI so overstuffed it invokes violent urges in me like a caged, tortured gorilla. the environments and character models look really great for switch although this game's character design is mostly (Morag is pretty cool the game should be about her) some of the lamest, goofiest, and horniest (in a bad way) i've ever seen in a wide-release game of its pedigree. horny in the most boring way, in a vanilla ecchi way where it's too cowardly to get weird with it. the voice acting is silly (positive) and kicks ass tho. and Nia, she's pretty good.


why did they put this in Smash instead of my boy Travis Touchdown smh. i want the bad anime enjoyer, not the bad anime

personal dump ahead, feel free to skip this one ^_~
cw: vague game typical mentions of suicide and self harm, minor mention of gender dysphoria, minor spoilers

“No one really likes what I make, but I think that’s OK.
To create is my only smile, regardless.” ▷

i find as more time passes it becomes increasingly difficult to create a respectful, nongratuitous or exaggerated mental illness narrative in gaming. i don’t find the way my own brain speaks to me as very respectful either though. this little renpy title was released only around a year prior to this review, and i felt momo’s searing monologue and pleas were dangerously familiar during a particularly rough chapter of my mid to late 20s.

quite a lot is bad right now! i’m stuck presenting as a gender i don’t associate with in a meager retail assistant role, suffering customers who look at me like i’m a bug they’ve stepped on. i endure chronic muscular pain and poor circulation which leaves me barely recovered enough for my next shift. i bite back an intense anger that doesn’t feel like me, having to physically restrain myself from striking out against a wall. i’m creatively starved and have shamefully not drawn even a single sketch for weeks, contributing to my already passive guilt. “just draw for fun! just do it!” yeah, right.

it’s alright though, i guess. i’m medicated again on a comfortable dose, speaking with a therapist fortnightly, and trying to do what i love in the simplest way possible, like playing these games and writing these silly reviews!! like momo, there are people who love me, but my (her) brain doesn't take much effort to forget these wonderful things, of course.

it’s easy enough to say i saw myself in this cute doll, far from the first person to i’m sure. To echo Archagent’s sentiment from her own wonderful review you should totally check out, there’s something idealised about being a mentally ill doll, wearing a cute little dress with bright anime eyes and thin ball joint arms and legs. this allure is heightened in eve’s dreamlike vignette digital photography she (assumed pronoun, please feel free to correct!) posts to her twitter. plastic arms manipulated into a cheer, to brandish an item, or perhaps legs bent to sit upon something soft in introspection. these limbs are not my responsibility. nothing is.

12 years ago i almost fell just like momo did. i relapse, grow frustrated at those who care about me simply because they do, and overindulge in the worst in me. but i’d like to believe there’s joy and light out there, and that none of this pain was for nothing.

thanks for reading my diary! you should read momo’s too☆

An immensely, immensely cynical attempt at putting Overwatch back into the hype cycle by calling an arbitrary patch Overwatch 2 has at last concluded with the only remaining selling point — the long-promised PvE content — being cancelled. There is now significantly less of a reason for this to even be called a sequel, and it was already a tenuous prospect from the outset.

Overwatch was a game that started out middling and got progressively worse over the years. Overwatch 2 picks up from the lowest point Overwatch ever fell to and drives itself deeper into the ground than previously thought possible. The enforcement of stale metas, content droughts, heavier microtransactions, season passes, a community as welcoming as an acid bath, the fact that this is developed and produced by one of the most blatantly evil companies in video games; all of these have been exceedingly well-documented and complained about for years up until this point. Even then, staring down every single flaw that this game had, there were still players holding out for the hope that they'd get to have a single player/co-op campaign as the advertisements had promised.

It won't be coming.

Years of allegedly active development have resulted in nothing but thin air. Contrary to Blizzard's most famous bit of vaporware, Starcraft Ghost, you could actually buy this one before it got a number stapled to the end of the title. Anyone who picked this up in the hopes of getting what was promised later down the line will not be getting the product that they were told they'd get. You could say that these people were foolish for buying the mere promise of something to come later, and I would agree. I can also, however, clown the fuck out of Blizzard for fumbling what by all rights should have been one of the biggest IPs in gaming today and creating something whose legacy is going to be little more than the endless Blender porn animations of its cast.

Buckle down for the retrospectives and video essays that are going to start flooding in about this to try to explain why Overwatch failed as hard as it did. I imagine you're going to start seeing a lot of takes from a lot of people all speculating on what the exact, singular reason was, be it Blizzard's floundering reputation, or the death of the pro scene, or the moneymen deciding that more and more corners needed to be cut.

Allow me to share my theory, though: every story of "why you stopped playing Overwatch" is always the same, and it's never because someone decided they'd had enough fun and hung it up while their opinion was still high. This game is seemingly designed to make people flame out. Someone on your team fucks up hard enough, or you fuck up hard enough, or an enemy player pulls out some unbalanced trick that'll be patched in a week, and you rage and you quit and you never pick it up again. Overwatch is a game with no unity between players, with no community, because Blizzard has devolved into a company which tailors all of its experiences towards glory-seeking leaderboard watchers and nobody else. It's never enough to succeed, to win; you have to dominate, to be the absolute best, to be the first in the world to ever do it.

Look at the way that World of Warcraft has warped itself over the years from being an open and free journey into rote and optimized mechanical rotations, with bosses and dungeons literally designed under the assumption that you'll be playing with plug-ins that tell you exactly where to stand and what button to press at a given time. Overwatch followed a similar trajectory as its life went on, though perhaps made even worse by the fact that they were made compulsory; can't have too many tanks on one team, that's not allowed. Can't have more than one person playing a specific character, that's busted. Can't have a team without tanks or healers, so you're forced to play one if nobody else will. It's one of the worst and most obvious implementations of a forced meta I've ever seen in a game, and it's all in service of a competitive scene that no longer exists for pub players who think they're going to be scouted anyway.

If you're playing with friends and want to try an off-meta strategy, you are literally forbidden by the game's mechanics from drifting too far away from an intended vision of what your team comp ought to look like. God help you if you're in a public lobby and you decide to pick anything other than the highest winrate, highest complexity, most glorious and flashy characters that are available to you. You will be flamed into either submission or a shouting match if anyone on your team becomes suspicious that you aren't playing optimally. Everything has to be optimal. It's all about optimization. And why shouldn't that be what the players expect? It's the idea that Blizzard forces on them. Of course they're going to be toxic shitheads who cry and shout and scream when they perceive the game not being played perfectly.

They learned it by watching you.

the suburban pastiche of earthbound (and mother) was comforting thanks to its familiarity. it's a game where you can point at the screen and say "look, that's like my life!" pulling money from an ATM, stopping by the mall to grab a burger, or wandering around the natural history museum, these aesthetic choices work precisely because of how the expected unreality of the game world becomes subverted into a representation of reality. it's novel in its presentation, and enhanced by the quirky charm of the townspeople along with the tangents into both goofy myth and unsettling sci-fi horror.

which makes your first moments walking into a similar world after a between-chapters skip of multiple years in mother 3 such a slap in the face. our protagonist lucas, one of the few remaining denizens attempting to reject a new capitalist order, now glumly walks through these same suburban streets. former stalwart geezers contributing to the town's safety have been all but locked away in a dilapitated nursing home, while lucas's peers scarcely older than he work for wages in the nearby clay mines. the cheerful dialogue from the townspeople now solely consists of those chiding lucas for not getting with the times in between questioning why virtually every other defector's house has gone up in flames. it's the same carefree music of adolescence, the same bright thin-line artstyle, the same casual strolls around town, but tainted by your knowledge of the utopia of the society that came before and the decadence of the modernization that has come in its wake. it is, in essence, a loss of innocence. the unfair and early death of lucas's mother at the start of the game shattered it, and post timeskip you get a close glimpse of its proverbial corpse.

it is indeed somewhat funny the lengths that itoi went to establish the despair of modern civilization; endearingly awkward as his writing is, occasionally it gets into simply awkward territory the more it moralizes. yes, there is a token native american stereotype, and yes, his tipi gets blown to smithereens by artificial lightning post-timeskip. the magypsies as well, in attempt to enforce their alien nature given their status as immortal standardbearers of the world as it stands, are othered via their gender representation... which ends up being rather distasteful "okama" cariactures. my reason for pointing these out is not to discredit the rest of the work, but more to note that itoi bit off more than he could chew with some of the themes. he really wanted to demonstrate how fucked modernization is, man! so in the process some of the imagery gets a little hamfisted or straight-up ???... but that first time you walk into the modernized tazmily it hit me so hard.

likewise when you finally arrive at new pork city late in the game, the ghoulish tackiness of it all is so evident. the bizarre international mishmashes and cardboard cutout buildings, like toy props in a set of figurines (or buildings without polygons in the rear like a video game with fixed perspective) they illustrate gestures towards culture generation with vapid facsimile in place of rich tradition. it's a childlike conception of urban life: video games in walking distance and 24/7 screenings of heroes from another world. the idyllic norman rockwell landscape of earthbound has been grafted onto the communal tazmily like metal plates welded to biological creatures. all of it enforced by heiling stormtroopers in sneering pig masks... ok again, the imagery is really hamfisted. let itoi cook!

somehow even with this ideological shift in the people of tazmily, itoi still goes out of his way to illustrate the cruelty that lurks under the otherwise flawless exterior of their transactionless lifestyle. duster's bum leg, a physical reminder of his abuse at the hands of wess, is openly acknowledged, and yet the weight is silently borne by duster himself. his plain looks and questionable hygiene belie his thief tool mastery and serious upright bass chops, regardless of the verbal degredatation his father puts him through. likewise flint, stoic in his initial voiceless protagonist role, suffers a truly heartbreaking outburst of rage late in his campaign, indicating the dam about to burst on the societal shift to come. even lucas and claus play-act fighting with the local dragos at the very beginning of the game; the language of violence is still engrained in the minds of those living outside of capitalism.

the first three chapters are dedicated primarily to this plot, with the old rpg elements streamlined and the party limited. admittedly I'm not a big fan of the parts of earthbound where you're limited to a one or two person party; I just don't think you can come up with strategies that interesting when there's only a couple of moves to work with each turn. likewise, mother 3 provides different perspectives across each chapter with small parties carefully paced around the relative strength of the bosses they'll face. each character at this point can use special attacks and debuffs for free, removing the resource-management usually inherent in jrpgs. this isn't entirely bad, as it allows the player to experiment with various special abilities, but it would've gotten rather tedious after the six or seven hours it lasted. the point at which I got tired of this setup was in the lucas/boney fight against the jealous bass, which virtually necessitates using explosive items in order to outpace the devastating jam sessions they lay on you.

thankfully after this mother 3 wants to remind you that it's a real-ass jrpg, and thus the party is assembled... lucas, black mage kumatora, duster with his thief tools, and boney the dog. out of these mechanically boney is unfortunately undercooked; his only special move is "sniff" which senses the enemy's weaknesses, and his stats are gimped by being unable to use most equipment. thus most of the interesting fighting relies on the other three characters. I love how the mother series crystallizes the heroism of their heroes through making them healing mages, and lucas is no exception. while he has excellent attack, he's also equipped with a bevy of abilities such as setting up shields, buffing stats, and giving full revives to anyone or everyone in the party. kumatora handles all of the debuffs and attack magic, while duster is able to also apply free debuffs in exchange for a middling activation rate.

in turn the bosses get significantly more powerful, especially in the lengthy chapter 7. this whole section serves as a truncated redo of the same kind of "find the macguffin in each area" structure from earthbound, and with each needle pulled at the end of each area comes a more fiendlishly difficult boss. high base defense, extremely strong full-party attacks, switching between physical and PSI attacks, and even being able to destroy your shields at will all make character death frequent, and without smart planning and exploitation of the series's distinctive health counter system, it will be difficult to overcome some of the late-game fights. to my surprise other than the infamous barrier trio fight I didn't find that most of the fights revolved around simple weakness matching either; there's legitimately challenging turn-based slugfests balanced just right not to require grinding as long as you don't mind taking detours for items here and there.

complimenting the basics here are rhythm game elements which require the player to click the attack button in time with the backing beat to create a combo of up to 16 attacks in a row for a notable damage increase. while conceptually simple, the expansively eclectic soundtrack makes following the rhythm often require a significant amount of concentration. beats are dropped occasionally or sections will have tempos that vary, forcing the player to keep track of when they start attacking to ensure they don't get interrupted and lose valuable damage. following the beat itself rarely varies outside of simply tapping the backbeat however, which is a bit disappointing outside of a couple outliers like the 15/8 timpani-led Strong One. other songs occasionally try off-beat rhythms or more complex bass patterns, but unfortunately all of this is held back by the game's inconsistent timing windows. I played this on 3ds through rom injection which is generally considered to be extremely close to hardware-accurate, and yet I consistently noticed that the windows on certain songs required me to be a touch late. anything with eighth notes is a total crapshoot unfortunately, and thus I can see why they limited the songs that contained these pretty significantly. surprisingly enough the final chapter of the game features few difficult songs, making most of the encounters relatively easy to finish with only regular attacks, and I was hoping to hear the really bizarre tunes come out during the final mobs and bosses. however it's obvious the system was meant to be more of a bonus damage system, and thankfully the whole game can be managed without it if you're crafty enough with your PSI and thieves tool use.

without a doubt when compared to its meandering predecessor mother 3 focuses its satire on actually tearing apart the origins of the americana it draws from. at the same time it's a perfectly enjoyable jrpg with a neat rhythm mechanic and the same counter mechanism from earthbound to make timing your actions carefully utterly important; a rarity for turn-based games. as the game comes to a close those who played earthbound will receive an unsettling reminder of the artifacts from those games and the influence they played upon the creation of the world our heroes exist in, and the ending is cataclysmic and only partially resolved. for a game infused with so much levity, it's remarkably grim at the same time. I can only assume this juxtaposition of tones is what itoi was trying to summon all along.

“You know, the world could always use more heroes”

Before I start this review off properly, there are a few things I will tell you from the get go.
1: this will have little to do with the actual gameplay of overwatch. Go to ign if you really wanna know how the gameplay in a 5 year old game is
2: this review will be focusing very heavily on my personal experience with overwatch. If that isn’t something you want to read, bye.
3: This will probably be my longest review ever.

With that out of the way, it’s time for me to tell you how Overwatch has become the lowest rated game i will ever have on this website.

My story with overwatch started out not too different from a lot of others i’d imagine. I was a 15 year old kid with no money. From one source or another, I heard about a free first person shooter demo people were going crazy over: some game I knew nothing about, from a studio I knew nothing about: overwatch. Overwatch didn’t have to wait very long to draw me in. I believe I installed it within hours of the open beta going live. I was hooked then and there. I loved the world of this game, the characters, the art style, the gun play, just about anything you could really think of. I played that beta all day, if i wasn’t at school, i was trying my best to learn how to use high noon (and failing at it).

I could not get enough overwatch, i would say ages 15-17 were for me were essentially dedicated to overwatch. Making friends in overwatch, watching official overwatch media, speculating about overwatch, and most importantly, playing overwatch. For those first two years, it really was just me, a ps4, and 20 something heroes that held my attention better than most other games did. I made some good friends at that time, but by the end I held onto none, with the exception of a single one of them (who is now my best friend, go figure).

Around the age of 17, the faults of the gameplay of overwatch seeped in like a vile, red wave and broke the rose colored glasses right off my face. Losing started to annoy me immensely, and victories felt hollow. steam rolls happened every match regardless if i won or not. Trolls got to me more than ever, and I hated blizzard’s approach to balance at the time. This all ended up culminating in me not seriously touching overwatch for years of my life. I let it go for a very long time, and I can honestly say I was happier for that choice. I needed to do that, and should have done it sooner.

But that didn’t last forever. Eventually, Overwatch sinked its talons (ha ha, get it? talon?) right back into me and drug me right back to that hellscape i walked out of ,who knows how long ago now. You wanna know what I found out? I liked it a lot more then. Games felt more balanced. Heroes didn’t piss me off anymore. It actually felt good to play it occasionally, in small doses. Usually only during events, but that isn’t really the point. For 2 or so years, I continued on like this with one of my favorite franchises. Dropping by to say hello, and walking out before either of us grew tired of the other’s presence. It worked for me. I brought friends sometimes, had a fun time working towards certain skins, it could be a very fun time at points. But, as of a few months ago, things changed drastically, and this is the main point of this entire review.

Sometime in the last summer of the year I typed this review, the state of california found years worth of evidence pointing against the activision blizzard corporation. Blatant abuse of women and poc in the workplace, truly disgusting things i will not say here. I am sure if you’re on a site like this, and are somehow reading this part, you already know all about it anyway. Before I go any further onto my thoughts on this, the one thing I need to make abundantly clear is that a video game is not my main concern with this situation. I care much more about the human lives being abused than a stupid bundle of pixels. In no way does overwatch overshadow the innocent women harmed by the degenerates at activision blizzard. The reason I will be focusing on Overwatch is because this place is specifically for that.

It took a while to sink in, and even longer to understand why this news hit so hard in regard of being an overwatch fan. The most obvious thing is I simply had to leave it behind for the last time. A final goodbye that was simply not on my own terms. An unsatisfying slap in the face and a boot out the door. Or, you might think that it was because I could no longer be a fan in any context, and that stung as well. But no, neither of those things is what brought me here today. The reason why I hate overwatch with every fiber of my soul is that it gave me hope.

There was a time I genuinely believed in overwatch, Wholeheartedly. That quote at the top of this review? That meant something to me. With almost every short film, I could feel a lump in my throat. I genuinely believed in what the world of overwatch stood for. One person could make all the difference, one person could be a hero, one person could make the world a better place. It meant so much to me. For five years, it meant a lot to me. Even when I hated the game of overwatch the most, there was a piece of my heart that couldn’t help but love that world. But that piece is dead and gone now, and bitterness quickly filled its place. Don’t get me wrong, overwatch didn’t, like, destroy my mental health or something dramatic like that. I’m still a positive guy, I'd like to think, but there was a certain positivity that the world gave to me, and it is simply gone and can not come back. The people telling me to make a difference, and to be a hero, were sexually assaulting their co-workers the same day they fully thought these themes out. It makes you feel disgusted. To put faith into something, and have to realize how stupid you were to put any faith into it.

This is why I hate overwatch. Not some hero I don't like, not a map, but that hopeful part of me. The hope a 15 year old felt, being snuffed out in a slightly more bitter 21 year old’s heart. A hope that can never be given back. I miss the days where my biggest issues with overwatch were petty squabbles that meant next to nothing for anyone but me. Those days are simply gone. I can never go back to overwatch, and what it meant to me has been pissed on and defiled to the point it just pisses me off to think about. A promise from monsters, hiding in the cloth of good folk. There is nothing in Overwatch for me anymore, which disappoints me greatly to say. I was very excited for overwatch 2 before all this. I still loved that world, but it’s all ash now. Ash and regret. And I'm left here asking myself why I ever bothered. Overwatch can not and will not redeem itself. It is gone, and it will stay forever gone. Fuck blizzard for giving me hope for a time. “The world could always use more heroes” says the sex offender. Heroes my ass. What a waste of my teen years. I have sworn off blizzard activision products. And that’s where my overwatch story ends. I will not watch new cinematics, i will not buy overwatch 2, and i will never smile when i think about all that time i wasted. This would be a 0 if i could put it that low.

Attention. This is a pre-recorded message.

If you are reading this, it means that 2016's Game of the Year Overwatch servers closed down worldwide, for the best. The once fabled TF2 killer closing down when said game only received one major update.

The world shall experience peace like never before, for approximately 26:59:55 hours, until the launch of Overwatch 2.

Be happy. Prosper.

After dropping the game with 309 hours spent, seeing it get worse and worse, now banned user Meeeeeeee :3 whose crimes were picking off-meta picks in casual matches still retains somewhat good memories despite it all.

Such as:

- 6 v 6 Winston only.
- Release Mccree.
- Lucioball.
- Pre-Nerf Roadhog in Ilinois.

Those shall permanently stay as fond ones.
That be it, hidden behind other extensively more painful ones

Such as:

- Shitty e-sports enforced meta
- Queerbaiting
- Literally everything about lootboxes
- "The Cosby room"

That's all. No end messages or anything. Just a brief passage. Like the game it represents.

Goodbye Overwatch.
Thank you for killing Blizzard's reputation forever.
We needed that.

Hard to completely despise this despicable game because it's been polished to an absolute mirror shine through a lifetime of quality over quantity updates. Sadly, these updates were hyper-focused towards catering to the Elite Gamer demographic and far less towards the people who play games to have fun, and you're lying if you think there's no difference between the two. I went into this game at release hoping it would shape up to fit the hole in my heart left by Team Fortress 2, but Overwatch's walled garden content approach means the sheer user-created variety will never ever coalesce.
I'm not saying I'd love this game if it lets people make surf maps or play on servers with insane plugins - but I'd PROBABLY love it, if it even as much as let me set my spray to an animated gif of Konata Izumi.

My wildest hopes and dreams for Overwatch 2 begin and end at hoping they hired a writer this time. Overwatch trailers are seriously written like when you just press the middle suggested word on your phone keyboard. "We are heroes and we must protect this world because it is just the right thing to do and heroes must come together to do what is right and". I literally need to stop myself before I start talking about how good the TF2 comics were.