record scratch, freeze-frame

Yeah, that's me reviewing the pornographic furry visual novel. You're probably wondering how I got into this mess. Well, it all started when my friend, an erotic hypnotist, decided to troll me. Actually I guess it started when I was a genderqueer furry with weird fetishes but the trolling is more interesting as a premise.

Because you see I'm kind of a huge picky bitch and was a little 'eh' on the demo for this one, plus it generally had the vibe of being 'wholesome' which is both unpleasant as hell and also I like them fucked up. But she bought me the game as a present so I'm now like, oh for sure I'll just give it a shot. I play through two of the four routes and I'm having a good time.

Now, this is a visual novel about magically turning into shit and doing BDSM shit, so you feel however you feel about that. There are very few conflicts in this thing that aren't resolved within a scene, and the biggest attempt at having one is shockingly ill-advised and unmotivated. Most scenarios eventually turn into just a series of disconnected scenes happening months apart. Multiple routes have long scenes of just explaining what furries are and how great they are if you somehow got into this thing without already knowing-- which I think you could do! Everyone abides by the actual sensible rules of safety in kink relationships which makes sense in a story where it's supposed to be regular people actually doing that stuff as real people would aside from the magic powers that turn you into a lactating cow girl etc etc. There's also a suspicious lack of any real like, homophobia or anything in this world. They come close to a character being transphobic at once point and again the person in question just chills out immediately. What I'm saying is that this is low stakes cheesecake (mouse joke) aimed at specific kinks and I had a great time and that's my review. Back to the story of me being owned.

The third route I did was the one involving hypnotism, and like I said I'm talking to an actual hypno practitioner so I'm joking with her like "haha this will be just like your job." Apparently it's decently accurate according to her but I wouldn't know. But THEN. THEN it turns out that the actual story is about having an alt persona incepted into the protagonist's brain and them making a deal and now she's just plural in a somewhat cartoon way. And as I've written on my website recently, my ass just recently figured out I'm plural. I've been had. This gift game was a landmine set to own me. I've been owned.

The story of that route isn't actually about being a real-life system in any way, but it's got enough details that I think the writer didn't do it without research, at least. And then a bunch of other things in it have a lot of eerie parallels to things happening in my life that could not have even been predicted by my friend! Infinite damage is dealt to my psyche. She rolled a natural 20 on me. I was entirely defeated by this gesture and have no choice but to accept my fate.

Also, I made fun of the game a little on social media and the writer liked the post. That was bad but it's like the third person to hoist me like that after game designer Yoshiro Kimura and science fiction writer Matthew Stover so I guess I wasn't as devastated as I could have been. Zoe seems very nice I hope the next game's development is going well.

It is undeniable that if you talk about Dragon Warrior IV and what makes it great that you'll end up talking about Torneko Taloon, our favorite guy. He embodies all the best parts of the game! I do think it's interesting that for both Final Fantasy and DQ, the fourth entry took the freeform class sytem of the previous games and said "what if we made each of these an actual defined guy." Obviously the games went in very different directions with that premise, though. But you know, while Final Fantasy to me is always narratively at its best when it's a little bit of a comedy, Dragon Quest is at its best when it's a little bit of a tragedy.


DQ3 had some pretty distinct early attempts at this, but IV having a more developed story and characters means there's just a lot more of it. I'm not saying it's super original or developed, but I think that was the point. The D&D roleplaying roots were still here in 1990 and the way it manifests is that you just get presented with with stuff and you have to fill in the blanks. Your little green main character has their entire village wiped out within a few minutes of being introduced, and you're just left with a particularly lonely feeling, standing in the bombed-out ruins of her home. None of those characters got enough screentime for me to remember their names, but the vibe of the first moments of being a level 1 lonely child thrust into the world is real. The last scene in the credits is your protagonist returning to those ruins and magically having their friend come back to life or something, which isn't explained and maybe serves as an early warning of the series' later tendency to give every game a super happy ending where you retroactively undo every bad thing that happens. Including this one, actually, in the later remakes.


Take Mara and Nara, or Meena and Nina or whatever they translated them as later. They have a pretty straightforward revenge plot going. Just when they're about to get what they're after, it's pulled away from them by the revelation that things are Bigger than they realized. Even after you kill off the guy responsible, NPCs who know them indicate that their revenge isn't finished yet, probably because they realized they have to stick around and defeat the Real Bad Guy and so on. The bits are all there but they really wanted the player to put them together, and since this is a game for children it's pretty sick! I don't think any of the other party members have anything that could even be stretched to call a character arc.


Psaro, though. The bad guy. He's pretty cool. Probably a little TOO many missing pieces to his story, really. I know they took great pains to make him an entire spinoff recently so I assume this has been rectified to hell by now. The antagonist who hates humans because blah blah discrimination is a juiceless premise but I DO like the antagonist who is manipulated into throwing away his whole-ass brain and becoming a big monster but everyone agrees he's kind sympathetic. He also has a badass sprite so we're like 75% of the way there already.

The game is full of stuff like that, and having played through most of V I know they chose this kind of storytelling to refine in the next game. Torneko's chapter rightfully gets a lot of love for kinda inventing the entire minor genre of fantasy shop simulators but when you look at mainline Dragon Quest, it was the presentation, very ambitious for the NES, which kinda informed a lot of the next several years of the series. Seeing Dragon Quest steering itself in new directions with this one, a lot of the reputation the series has for being all the same does not seem especially justified!

All this having been said, I don't quite like it as much as III. It's neat that you don't control your party directly in theory, since it makes them feel a lot more like companions and it's a fun experiment, but holy hell Cristo stop casting freakin' Thwack on bosses. What is wrong with you my guy. That's not going to work! I could never play one of the remakes of this sucker and deal with an entire extra chapter with more dungeon, this version was already just a smidge longer than ideal. None of this makes the game too hard, though: the difficulty curve is very good and leans well within the range of easy enough. The original trilogy is pretty great, but I'm really looking forward to digging into the middle section of this series that I missed, and also V which I did not miss but it kicked ass and I didn't beat it so I'm still gonna enjoy that one.

You know I didn't actually play this again I'm just thinking that as time goes by I was waaaaay too nice to it lmao. Story revolves around the importance of Law and Order and Great Men. Virulent hatred of fatness. They brought back G'Raha Tia but lobotomized him so his only character trait is wanting to fuck the player now. I dunno what I should actually have given it and it doesn't really matter but god damn the story of FF14 is conservative garbage lol. Fun combat though love to do the trials with pals

I never actually completed Pokemon Red back in the day, stalling out around victory road. When the bug to play an old Pokemon hit, I wanted to get credits on at least one version of the Kanto experience, and maybe I'll be able to run the last stretch at some point, but you know what? I stalled out at victory road.

The old Pokemon games... they're not as good as the new ones! It took a lot of effort to hammer these babies into shape from a series of cool concepts into a really great experience and this ain't it. That's not to say it's some abomination, but I am once again kind of coming at this as a person who has gone back to old JRPGs (playing Dragon Warrior IV right now) and the inferiority of this experience is absolutely unquestionable to me. Dragon Quest has random encounters, but if the dungeons were designed around fighting the same two guys a few dozen times, or the level curve was this unsatisfying, I'd be thinking less of the experience and that's pretty much what LeafGreen has been for me. I continue to hold onto a simple belief that the newest Pokemon has always been the best one.

On one hand, this game has one of the most hilariously bad translations of all time. On the other, the fact that nobody at Nintendo was checking means that they got to put blood and religion in this sucker in 1994 and it kicks ass, so who can say if it's bad or not. The fact that they let it stand as-written for the GBA release is harder to defend, but it is extremely funny to crack open this script, remove a single swear and one (1) reference to Othello, and then call it a day.

But you know what? The script isn't actually mistranslated the vast majority of the time. You can get the intended emotional beats and gameplay instruction. The fact that this sucker remains a very solid game despite it stands in testament to the strengths of the game.

The first Breath of Fire endeared itself to me with nothing more than its experimental spirit, with all sorts of silly ideas for mechanics and area gimmicks thrown into the mix to keep you on your toes. The sequel is a bit less goofy, and focuses on refining some of those ideas, or at least remixing them. For example, the character fusion idea got turned into the shaman fusion system, which applies more equally to all characters, has more depth, and deactivates if a character goes below a certain health threshold so it's no longer just objectively correct to have it on all the time. I even found it factoring into my party composition, my god.

That's not to say there's nothing new: the town building aspect of the game was more novel back in 1994, and while it is an absolutely baffling mix of mutually exclusive choices that you don't know you're making, it's at least a fun idea. Honestly, making you choose things permanently (you can't give this poor beggar a house without sacrificing that slot for someone who can actually help you mechanically) isn't a bad idea, but everything is so arbitrary so as to be nonsense. I suspect future games will bring this back and remove the friction entirely so I'm glad we have this entry at least trying something.

I think it's ultimately the story and presentation that shine, here: you have a variety of party members again, and their battle sprites just ooze personality. Capcom absolutely the best to ever do it these are some fuckin great furries dude. Bosch Doggy walked so that Vanillaware could put a cunty owl sorceress in Unicorn Overlord. The actual plot has an actual focus and development now unlike in the first game, and while everything that happens is very broad, archetypical melodrama, it's well executed enough that-- again, even through the butchered script-- I could lose myself and say 'hell yeah' at it. Sometimes you just want the mysterious goofball in your party revealing his tragic backstory dude! Sometimes you have a duel with your old friend on a bridge during your unexpected and bittersweet homecoming! What the hell else do you want this is the good stuff!!

Holding the game back is the fact that the combat is the most workhorse stuff possible. Even though every character has unique abilities, very few are even slightly interesting. Offensive magic is extremely spotty in terms of effectiveness so most fighting is just mashing attack and healing when you need it, and only towards the end were a few more interesting bosses thrown at me. Levels are really important here, but benched characters do not gain XP and this is a pain in the ass.

In fact, it's pretty interesting to come to this after playing some old JRPGs that famously "aged poorly" or "are grindy" or whatever and be able to conclude that like, Dragon Quest 1 is way more mechanically interesting in the combat. The random battles in BOF2 are insanely frequent, uninteresting, and largely cannot be mitigated. The enemy sprites look absolutely sick as hell though. I think Capcom still being new to the genre shows here, as this is kinda what people who played these games as kids and haven't touched them since think NES JRPGs are like.

Overall, Firey Breath The Second gets a heck yeah from me. I am stoked to see what sorts of shenanigans they were able to get up to on the Playstation.

I thought this was like a run-based game going in and it is but it also isn't? Listen I messed up here I've definitely put this down but it's been a while and I ultimately don't have like much to say. I don't remember anything except that I like the character designs. They don't have a defeat animation which at first I thought was too bad but it does give the whole thing a certain feel, like okay we're done with this match time to move on. That's fun. I like that.

It's a good time-waster that really lives on constantly throwing new gimmicks at you. It's not quite compelling enough that I could see myself trying to like, 'get good' at dicey dungeons you know.

One of the weirdest localizations of all time. Like I know why they made Totally Rad, I understand that. What was the value of turning a penguin into a Funko Pop? Unknown. Freon Leon is an all-time good character name though.

Anyway the game's fine, but mainly held together by charm. The english script has an unbelievably terse quality that makes me smile everytime, and the characters are all lovely to look at. But it's like, it's fine right? It's just pretty much fine. Like it's no Castlevania 2 alright? One of the weird things about the pacing is that there's no health upgrades until the back third of the game at which point you get a bunch at once and have no hope of efficiently filling them. Mostly, the game's not too tough, but there's some tricky bits and you have to go back to one specific point when you die. And also it's a password system but listen. It's 2024 I didn't have to deal with that. I honestly feel like I'll like the new one better! Not planning to find out any time soon though. I have a lot of games to play and it's like 30 bucks.

You know we have lots of games these days. Was a time when if there was a free game there I'd have been like, heck yeah give me that free game. These days I'm not doing that. I saw this and thought: that's probably neat! And then I didn't play it.

UNTIL I saw a screenshot on the Steam page, which charmed me enough to actually download the thing. The way all the mazes are just tossed in a big pile for you to dig through: beautiful stuff. Could only be a video game, and yet feels so physical.

So I guess what I'm saying is that they're good mazes.

When it comes to run-based games, I'm usually less interested in ones that are too focused on luck and grinding as elements of success. Loop Hero sidesteps this by being essentially a weird hybrid of run-based and idle game, which makes the grinding feel like the point of the game, rather than a thing meant to arbitrarily gate completion from me.

The problem is maybe that it's not a great idle game. As much as the shifting of bottleneck resources is a part of that genre, everything in LH quickly became bottlenecked by a specific resource that can only be obtained via very specific builds, and drops pretty rarely. Still pretty fun, but I'm flagging on chapter 3. Overall, a fantastic gamepass game. Exactly the sort of thing I'm glad I played but also glad I didn't pay for.

It is honestly fucked up that this is so good. It's the Doom they made special for Nintendo 64. It has no business kicking this much ass. And yet I remember one fact, hazily, from when I caught part of a speedrun at a GDQ some year. As with any N64 game, if you hold the stick in a direction while powering on the console, intentionally or not, then that direction becomes "neutral" as far as the game is concerned. If you were holding downwards, then the untouched control stick, left in its true neutral position (not accounting for your stick being fucked up from trying to play Mario Party 1) is now up. Holding up, then, becomes interpreted as MORE up, allowing you to run at double speed.

This is the true essence of DOOM.

I didn't play that version, though. I played this newfangled 2020 rerelease on Gamepass. Also, while Doom is fantastic, I'm no True-Doom Murderhead: most of the content past the original release levels of Dooms 1 and 2 are way too tough for me, being designed for the folks who played it on release until they had achieved obscene levels of mastery. What I want from Doom is simple: the sound of an Imp dying as I unload a shotgun into it. Doom 64 delivers this, and more, at a level I can handle on "Bring It On" difficulty.

There are a scant number of additions to the formula here. The enemy graphics are just a little bit more detailed, though this seems to have come at the expense of the Cacodemon's buttholes which I do consider a misstep. There is a single new weapon, which starts pretty bad and becomes very strong IF you visit the secret levels and find the hidden artifacts which provide it with permanent boosts for the rest of the campaign. Those artifacts also make the final boss easier, making it feel a little like doing the superboss before the final boss in a JRPG and getting overleveled you know what I mean? It also uses the energy ammo type which made the other energy weapons feel.... less exciting that they normally would. I did have to use a guide to find those secret levels though so it's not that big a deal.

The subtractions actually loom a little larger in my mind. No archviles and no minigun zombies. Thank god. The regular zombies still keep their hitscan weapons but they're a more reasonable threat. The weak enemies with a dangerous gimmick that you have to watch out for.

And the levels are real good. There's a certain level of Old Shooter Bullshit still present where I ended up getting annoyed and just going for a guide purely because the way forward was a little too obscure, but it was kind of minimal? I've seen so much worse. Mostly, the flow of levels is kept reasonable and intuitive. It's just like a really good wad I guess. Basically. It's good stuff.

Oh, also this all applies to the "Lost Levels" campaign added to the remaster as well, which was actually Doom 2 in Japan. Our Doom 2 was called Doki Doki Panic

Tunic prepared me for a lot of things by wearing its influences really, REALLY prominently on its sleeve. The internet helped by preparing me for the kind of fiendish, higher-level puzzles that I associate with like, Fez and shit. What I did not expect was the degree to which they just put Dark Souls in here too. Like the first thing that happens is you find a big closed door and get told to ring two bells on opposite sides of the map to open it. Combat has the same weight. Boss fights are the same ur-DS boss that you circle strafe and block. This taught me a very important thing: that I'm still so fuckin sick of Dark Souls you have no goddamn idea. Holy shit I was so annoyed with every time I had to fight a boss. They aren't too tough it's just the cadence is grating to me.

Luckily, it's not just Dark Souls. It's also a bunch of other games I've already played. Primed for that kind of heavily referenced gameplay, I thought of Zelda 1 specifically. I thought of The Witness. I thought of Hydlide for a bit. The Fez comparison ultimately didn't bare out, and it's not really trying to be that. There's a language here, and I am pretty sure you can figure it out, but I don't care about that. The plot is clearly not intended to be interesting in any way that I care to learn and I got the good ending without needing to intuit a single word. I'm more interested in the text as a recreation of being a child with low/no reading ability, only able to slightly comprehend these simple video game worlds through context. Because that's what it is! Even without being able to read it, the manual clearly lays out the games big secrets for you directly. Tunic is pretending to be a simpler game than it is, kept from you by factors inherent to your outside-the-game existence. That's like the whole entire gimmick.

And god, it works. Manual pages are like, top-tier video game pickup to me. Each one is a little treasure trove of cute art and gameplay tips, and even the occasional little cheat of functionality that makes no sense, like the map pages actually showing your current location. Yeah a hookshot is cool but have you considered: a picture of a little fox doing a roll? I highly recco

So, while Tunic was all very nice and good, I do think it lacks that final oomph of real personality to be truely one of the greats. It's ultimately just a nostalgia piece, trying to recreate a feeling that never quite existed, at least for me. The time before I could read good was certainly not a time where I'd have had the level of patience needed for this. It's a charming puzzle box. I enjoyed the hell out of it while it was in front of me and now it's over and I'm not going to think super hard about it from here. Great gamepass game though I'll say that. Damn I love having a machine that can play real ass games.

What a game.

Impossible to comprehend the universe where Nintendo developed a game specifically for Western markets in the first place. Very easy to comprehend the universe where they eventually decided to never think about it again aside from throwing us the bone of putting the first one on Virtual Console. It's not like I'm demanding a series revival though: the things that make Startropics interesting largely don't happen in the current Big Gaming space, and nobody actually like gives a shit about the rich lore. What makes Startropics special is that it's just on something slightly out of step with most of its contemporaries. I think this is why when I saw it in Nintendo Power it looked like the coolest shit.


Because, y'know, games with a zoomed out "adventure" perspective vs a more intimate "action" mode were not unknown to me at the time. Zelda 2 is specifically a better comparison to make than Zelda 1 for ST in my mind both obviously both are in the conversation. Dragon Warrior is likewise a very popular game that had much more robust "talk to villagers" gameplay. What stands out to me here is more the structure of the game itself. If Zelda is about exploring a space. So's Dragon Warrior. Startropics is about having an ADVENTURE. Like the cartoons you were watching on Saturday morning. Mike Jones has an overarching goal, and he's largely responding to things that happen to him on the way. Dealing with local problems, getting little pieces of the mystery, that kind of thing. And I mean yes the "mystery" is stupid and revealed almost entirely in one late-game dump but it's about the journey. It's about the feeling that anything could be around the corner. The game is linear, but it feels vast, and interesting story beats are always happening in either the adventure or the action modes.


And honestly, it helps the interplay a lot that Startropics is freakin' difficult. It's slow-paced and it's deliberate and you can learn it but any little mistake can get you absolutely diced. Then when you complete an area you get a big fanfare and your pointless score meter goes way up and you're back on the overworld, where you get to talk to some guys and get little jokes and explore for hidden life-ups if you want. The tension differential is so strong, and it's a great cool-off. By the time you get to another dungeon level, you're a little stronger in a permanent way, from life or weapon upgrades, and you're ready to start the whole process over again.


Visually, and in terms of audio, there isn't a ton of variety in the locations, but mechanically I was actually surprised at how distinct the areas feel. There's almost always SOMETHING new in any given dungeon. Enemy types, powers, sub-weapons, or something else that gives every stage a distinct gimmick. The puzzle-action ratio is deceptively weighted toward puzzle, and finding the right way to use your tools to make an encounter manageable is ususally what got me through. This, too, feels like a very deliberate move to put us in a space distinct from most of the obvious points of comparison for the game, putting you in the shoes of a clever kid rather than a mighty warrior, that one subweapon that turns you into a teleporting martial arts master notwithstanding. I'm not likely to play it again too soon, but I'm curious if the sequel's decision to remove the deliberate, grid-based movement turns it into more of a straightforward action game.


Anyway, Startropics is really cool. I don't think we're likely to see anybody attempt to make a retro throwback indie title of it any time soon. I don't even know what it would like like if you did. Maybe something without a part where a guy in the South Pacific is like "oh yeah dude the British. Love those guys. So heroic." I think we'd all make fun of that now.