At this point, I feel like I’ve been playing Journey for half of my life. I’ve played through underwater Journey, forest Journey, air Journey, space Journey, cat Journey, and even boring Journey. Yet upon my yearly ascent in the original Journey on New Year’s Day, I find myself just as floored as when I first picked it up years ago, in spite of clone after clone exhausting my goodwill. What exactly then, is present in the original’s realized game design philosophy that every other spiritual successor has found themselves bereft of?

To answer this question, I want you to imagine a world where Journey doesn’t exist. A world where the formula to indie developers meant something more than just mindlessly tilting up on the left joystick to walk towards the next checkpoint while some narrator waxed poetic in the background. Before Journey, before Flower even, the closest ancestor we had was Ico. Fumito Ueda described his game as an execution of “boy meets girl,” and what it boiled down to was a minimalist adventure game with some puzzles cleverly disguised as platforming and timing segments. Occasionally, you also whack a few shadows while protecting and pulling your female companion Yorda through vast and still castle ruins. It wasn’t a perfect game by any means; the combat was frankly tedious, Yorda lacked much of an identity outside of pointing at objects of interest/opening doors/getting kidnapped, and at the end of the day, there really wasn’t much in the way of a balanced and developed relationship when the player was calling all the shots, but it was still the start of something beautiful. It wasn’t mechanically complex or esoteric in any fashion, but it was different. It was different, and it felt dangerous.

This write-up is not intended to be a critique of Ico, nor is it meant to imply that games proceeding Team Ico's philosophy of “design by subtraction” have since been inferior. Rather, I bring up Ico in particular, because there seems to be this general perception that minimalism results in a crippling lack of mechanical depth. That is, many seem to believe that discarding and minimizing a game’s various elements results in a dearth of tangible mechanics or imagery to cling onto, and thus appears to result in an empty and vacuous experience with little to justify further replays or deeper dives. To me though, this line of thought fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of addition by subtraction. It was never about creating mechanically deep systems with limitless possibilities like an immersive sim or a sandbox. Rather, the philosophy aimed to remove excess layers that distracted from the game’s “more realistic feeling of presence”, such as removing optional bosses and landmarks in Shadow of the Colossus or reducing enemy types in Ico to just a single design. In fairness, the goal wasn't just to remove extraneous elements that made something feel overly “gamey,” but also to marry mechanics in a way where the invisible layer of intended design never made itself too apparent (i.e. hiding the user interface in Shadow of the Colossus outside of fights). It was not just addition by subtraction; it was also addition through illusion.

To that end, I firmly believe that Journey is the best Team Ico game that Fumito Ueda never directed. Journey’s design philosophy was not necessarily revolutionary for its time, considering its predecessors in the forms of Flower and Ico, nor was its ultimate goal of reaching a final destination via walking/jumping/flying mechanics particularly exemplary. What was exemplary was its level of care and precision in how it implemented said minimalist design philosophy. Every time I play through Journey, I pick up more subtle details through its fusion of audio-visual presentation and gameplay that seemed so clear and intuitive that I had taken their presence for granted. There are the obvious strengths, like how Journey wordlessly conveys your path forward by keeping the shining peak of the mountain visible at all times while outside, or how it uses consistent visual language through cloth creatures and strips to demarcate safe zones where the player can recharge their scarf. But there’s more beneath the surface; what about the game's sneaky introduction to the sand-sliding mechanic from the introductory dune so it’s no longer unfamiliar during the exhilarating and committal descent, or how there’s a section of the underground that’s filled with these scarf jellyfish tinted in blue allowing you to remain in flight that evokes the feeling of being underwater, foreshadowing the next section as a tower ascension where the player must continually breach the surface to “swim” and escape? Sure, everyone knows about how the bitter cold disempowers the player by slowing their movement and lowering the scarf’s energy gauge, but I usually don’t hear about how strong winds can chip away at the scarf’s capacity itself or how it reduces the volume and area of effect of your shouts, making it far more difficult to restore your energy gauge from the growing frostbite.

There’s also the overlooked audio aspect of Journey. Granted, everyone loves to discuss the soundtrack’s thematics, like how the final chord of Journey’s motif never resolves a single time in any track until the end of Apotheosis or for that matter, how all the instruments are never fully present until that final ascent, when the entire orchestra finally comes together as one only to slowly fall away as the player and the world fade away. Yet, the sound design regarding Journey’s implementation of said soundtrack often goes underappreciated. Again, there are plenty of clear strengths that have been widely discussed, such as the punctuated stillness of the desert dunes providing room for the piddle paddle of the player’s footsteps amongst the vast desert winds and eventually swelling into triumphant bursts of adventure. But again, there are little subtleties that speak to the soundtrack’s interactivity, like how the backing drum during the aforementioned underwater section gives the track the impression of being muted and seamlessly drops this filter once the player breaches the surface, or how the player’s shouts are always in the key of the backing track’s scale, meaning that the introduced notes remain within the game’s tonality. It’s these little things that further round out Journey’s experience; the music is so seamlessly woven in that it takes a discerning ear to pick out every specific detail, in such a way where it feels like the soundtrack is organically supplementing every memorable moment of the game.

Of course, it’s not enough to just handle the basics well, even if there’s a master’s touch present to carefully disguise these additions so silently. As I mentioned before, popular works need compelling hooks to draw in an audience, but they also need an element of danger to keep that audience engaged. In the case of Journey, Thatgamecompany tackles this through their stealth multiplayer. This is where Journey easily outclasses its successors and may in fact, even have one-upped Ico. If Ico’s main limitation was a lack of autonomy for any non-player characters, then Journey circumvents this problem entirely by replacing the AI with real players instead. The loose implementation adds a catch: nothing in the game aside from the final completion screen listing your companion(s)’ name(s) ever hints on this, and not once is the player given instructions or suggestions on how to interact with said players. The only obvious mechanical incentive from cooperating with other players is the ability to recharge one another’s scarves via proximity/shouts, and there’s no consequence to merely abandoning random players or quitting in the middle of a session. It’s what makes this multiplayer so compelling; many times you’ll find other players just wandering about by themselves, despawning, or quickly rushing ahead without care towards your presence. There’s no guarantee that they’ll cooperate… which makes that one instance where they do that much more memorable. In this sense, I think Jenova Chen and his team solved two problems at once: the aforementioned challenge of granting outside elements a degree of realism, and his own personal challenge of creating a minimalist environment where players had no incentives to act in bad faith despite never having any major incentives to cooperate either, resulting in seemingly organic interactions.

Perhaps it is cheating to state that this spontaneous element is what gives Journey a step-up over its peers, but I also can’t deny that this same feature is exactly what lends the game its identity. It’s hard to provide drastically different experiences for focused single player games after all; no matter how much Fumito Ueda may have insisted that he was inspired by emergent gameplay mechanics and player autonomy to allow for more diverse experiences, there remains an upper limit upon how far those experiences can unravel. However, Thatgamecompany’s take upon the “single-player odyssey” alongside the game’s cyclical nature and short runtime means that Journey is a far more replayable experience while remaining every bit as compelling as its competition. Even after multiple trips up the summit, I continue to be amazed by the thoughtfulness shown to me by other players. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen down the temple from being blown away by the wind, only for my companion to jump down with me, or how many trips through the blizzard were spent slowly trudging together mashing my shout, just like strangers on a cold winter’s night huddling together for warmth while shouting cries of encouragement to take one more step forward. In essence, Journey didn't need an intricate or elaborate story told with fanciful cutscenes and voice-acting; it simply needed to provide a backbone with no other contradicting elements, allowing players to form their own stories by experiencing the game on their own terms.

Journey isn’t mechanically rich or wildly innovative in terms of its scope, but it doesn’t have to be. Rather, it’s a deceptively simple yet meticulous and thoughtfully different approach upon a respected design philosophy, which aimed to further refine said formula by whittling down any elements that detracted from the game’s constructed sense of reality. Similarly, it doesn't feel the need to present a grandiose narrative, instead stripping away any specific contextual layers as to allow players to create memorable experiences with no conflicting moments in-between. I should be sick of this formula after tackling so many misguided copycats, and I can't deny that I was afraid to label yet another old favorite as propped up by nostalgia. Thankfully, my fears have been assuaged. I keep waiting for the day where I’ll finally be content putting this down forever… but that day has yet to come. I was not the first adventurer to embark upon this pilgrimage, nor will I be the last. Maybe I just need to get over my cynicism and accept that there was never anything to be cynical of to begin with. I’m sure more developers will continue to lazily carbon copy one of my favorites until the end of time, but that doesn’t mean the good times have to end.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Happy new year, and here’s to another journey around the sun.

What a strange game that I unexpectedly loved! It's even got some strange quirks I wouldn't normally enjoy, like very fast respawning enemies and bonus stage portals that keep appearing (I've already cleared them but still find them in random spots in the level). Maybe the remaster and it not being on N64 are helping how I feel, but it felt great. Sure, there is some platforming, but it really didn't seem that bad to me, and it's much better than Doom platforming IMO. I fell off maybe once or twice here, compared to how bad I am at Doom.

Enemies here are pretty unique, even if they are basic mechanically, and it is always fun to watch two dinosaurs infight or a little beetle against a human or dinosaur. The levels themselves are large with some branching paths, and especially level 5 was amazing. Most of level 4 and all of level 5 take place in ruins or catacombs. Just delving deeper here and discovering all the pathways was very fun, and it all ends up looping perfectly in 5! Each level has three keys to find, an item to build an ultimate weapon, and some unmarked secrets. Getting the keys is so funny every time because it looks like you're going to drink from them when you hold them up. I will admit the ammo issue is a bit annoying, like how you needed to deplete secondary ammo to use the normal ammo, especially when I kept finding a lot of normal ones. Though this doesn't end up mattering too much in the midgame when you have tons of weapons, and there are a lot here (13)! It seems like playing on hard is a bit weird too, with ammo drops being removed and more health on enemies (ruins them IMO), but you're so fast that I just ran away from some pointless enemies.

Anyway, this game was really good, and I hope Turok 2 is even better. It also seems like I would love Powerslave, since it shares a few similarities.

I really enjoyed this at the start, and it was surprisingly a long time before you got the ability to make two portals. Even with just one, some of the puzzles were really involved. Sadly, I feel like past Chapter 5, it follows similarly with Portal 2. Get sent into an abandoned area and make a new friend; have one terrible room where you do nothing but toss white gel everywhere (this seems even bigger than the one in P2); slowly get a few more complex puzzles up to ch7; introduce a new mechanic (pretty cool); and it only has easy puzzles, feeling like they need to do another sequel just to fully utilize it. Then you get to the final boss, and yeah, it is different than the others, but it is still just as repetitive. At least the dialogue here wasn't bad.

Is Portal Mel Stories worth playing, or are there any other mods? Most seem to have complaints about getting way too complicated too quickly or just annoying humour.

Glass Rose is weird. There’s very little documentation for this PS2 exclusive that never released in the US, and I’m honestly left with more questions upon finishing it than when I first started a week ago. The only definite conclusion I can come to is that this is a sad example of an ambitious title that ultimately misses the forest for the trees.

On the surface, Glass Rose is described as a point-and-click psychological horror game with detective/investigation elements. It’s the first title ever developed by Cing (in conjunction with Capcom’s Production Studio 3), who you might know for DS titles such as Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk that cleverly utilized every feature of the DS as part of their adventure game puzzles. Meanwhile, Glass Rose is a standard point-and-click adventure game… on the PS2 (which you can play with a plugged-in USB mouse) and thus seems like a bit of an anomaly in the library, considering that it doesn’t really push the PS2’s controller functionality or hardware limitations whatsoever. You play as Takashi Kagetani, a newspaper reporter who is suddenly transported back in time to 1929 while exploring an abandoned mansion with his girlfriend, Emi Katagiri, finding himself in the midst of the “Cinema Mansion Serial Murders.” In order to free his girlfriend and get back to his own time, Takashi must get to the bottom of the mansion’s many mysteries while being mistaken as Kazuya Nanase, the long-lost son of the recently deceased Denemon Yoshinodou, constantly conversing with the many denizens of Denemon’s family and staff.

At the core of Glass Rose is its dialogue system, which the game’s back cover boasts of as follows: “Dynamic pacing, innovative clue and free-speech systems make Glass Rose an adventure game like no other.” This essentially boils down to Cing’s spin on constructing dialogue trees: when conversing with others, the player is taken to a screen of the last relevant NPC blurb where they must highlight specific words/phrases to follow up on key tidbits and cause NPCs to react differently in response to the intended question. By correctly highlighting the right words and phrases, Takashi can progress through conversations to learn more about the subjects at hand. While it sounds like a great idea in theory, the execution ends up being a bit shallow and clunky. The game is very picky about exactly what must be highlighted to provoke a response, even if the highlighted subject(s) are practically identical in meaning (i.e. highlighting “Denemon” will often do nothing, but highlighting “Denemon Yoshinodou” will almost always work) and accidentally highlighting punctuation or spaces will also confuse NPCs. Additionally, the intuition of what may sound interesting to highlight often does not overlap with exactly what has to be highlighted to progress (so not every distinct noun or verb will do the trick), and sometimes highlighting longer phrases will just create flavor text while highlighting a specific word within that phrase results in the actual trigger (i.e. highlighting “such a racket” will create flavor text, while highlighting just "racket" will allow you to progress). This means that navigating the dialogue generally devolves into trial and error (especially since many of the things that can be highlighted will only result in single-sentence flavor text/confirmations of the subject at hand), which I’d say detracts from the game’s premise of translating natural conversation flow into gameplay mechanics.

This dialogue system ends up becoming a sort of window-dressing for the rest of the game’s elements due to its linearity: most conversations only have one ending trigger to progress, and in the rare circumstances where more than one trigger exists, it still does not matter which is picked because they have no impact upon how the rest of the game plays out. Unfortunately, the moment-to-moment gameplay surrounding the dialogue is even more underwhelming. Between talking to characters, Takashi must walk around the mansion to examine other objects and stumble upon other rooms where he can progress the plot by talking to more characters. Sometimes it’s made fairly obvious where Takashi must go next with inserted cutscenes or relevant tidbits from the previous character’s dialogue, but a good chunk of the time, this necessary information is never presented to the player. Occasionally, the information is conveyed via a series of quick flashbacks as images/locations of interest, but this also isn’t very helpful because the player generally will not have the context of the image/location in the flashback to find their way forward. In addition, many of the hallways look very similar and objects of interest are often in new rooms (so not already present on the map) or are not distinctly outlined/colored to stand out. Thus, much of the player’s time is spent bumbling about the mansion, which is already extremely inconvenient, but made far more punishing due to the built-in time limit that will sap your strength and send you back to the beginning of a given hour to repeat all of the hour’s tasks if you fail to progress far enough during that time.

Glass Rose’s gameplay feels very undercooked as a result, made even more flagrant due to all the other mechanics that seem barely explored and rarely intersect with one another in any meaningful way. For example, the game’s built-in health is referred to as “Mind Points,” which serve as a safety check against game-overs when failing to complete enough tasks in a given hour or missing a QTE. Mind Points are also utilized when performing “Divine Judgement” (a mind-reading technique that must be used to progress certain conversations when NPCs become reluctant to elaborate, but only sometimes and again not always aligning with intuition), which in-itself becomes a liability since using it outside of dialogue just provides flavor text at the expense of health and using it on the wrong highlighted word/phrase in conversation will still sap health. The only way to restore Mind Points is to click on magical butterflies randomly flying around the mansion (a tougher task than you’d expect, if you’re playing on a gamepad and accidentally double click on a door/camera angle shift and lose the butterfly altogether), complete an optional tangram, or make it to the start of the next chapter. Also rarely inserted throughout the game are QTEs in the form of “Suspense Events,” where sometimes during cutscenes, Takashi will find himself in danger and the player must scroll and click on the correct response to avoid taking damage. Again, they’re not exactly difficult, but the process is made more annoying because scrolling over with a joystick is considerably slower than just scrolling over with a mouse, and later QTEs feature more than one possible (and often ambiguous) response, which can again result in more trial-and-error and excess damage. Finally, Glass Rose features collectibles in the form of “Heart Fragments,” of which a certain threshold must be met in order to potentially unlock the best ending. This system is extremely vague however: there’s no exact counter to show how many you’ve collected (only a picture of Emi used as a visualization of how many you’ve collected; the more fragments you’ve collected, the less her hands are visible in the picture), and no one is certain of the exact threshold for how many are required to achieve the best ending. There are apparently “tainted fragments” that can be collected as well which can skew your ending, but for what it’s worth, I never appeared to collect any and it’s once again unclear under what circumstances it would be “safe” and “unsafe” to collect fragments. Regardless, the best way to collect heart fragments is to solve optional riddles from Denemon’s Notes (read: probably necessary for the best ending) in each chapter, which are pretty simple affairs that require you to travel between some more rooms clicking on furnishings, but are often far more tedious in execution because there are no hints given on where the notes will spawn each chapter to even start the quest.

What is particularly damning, even looking past my gripes with gameplay, is that the game lacks any sort of glue to hold everything together. While my first impression was that this is a classic murder mystery, you’re not so much solving mysteries or deducing clues so much as you are following the obvious signal dropped by the last flashback/piece of dialogue to progress the plot, and clicking wildly around the mansion as a fallback when you’re given nothing to work with. Not once did I have to make any meaningful decisions that would have any impact upon the plot. The result is that the player feels like an observer whom has things happen to them rather than actively making things happen, and I couldn’t help but feel emotionally disconnected throughout the entire runtime. The narrative itself is extremely convoluted thanks to the various flashbacks further obfuscating any meaning, and having to dig through layers of flavor text and non-sequiturs to get to any key plot points while also switching between multiple character dialogues one right after another was exhausting. There is a player journal of Takashi’s notes that can be accessed at any time, but there’s no incentive to ever refer to it because the game refuses to hold the player accountable for any knowledge regarding the plot, as there are no knowledge checks that would ever preclude the player from progressing future character dialogues. I’m at least aware that Cing did learn their lesson here, since Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk contain end-of-chapter quizzes that force the player to recall recent highlights and thus adequately prepare the player for the next segment.

Glass Rose is a conundrum. At no point did I think the game was so horrid as to where I felt compelled to put it down, but not a single quality stands out as particularly noteworthy or even structurally solid. It fails as a detective/investigation game because you never have to rely upon inference/deduction, it fails as a psychological horror game because it never lets the player linger in its space undistracted to become truly unnerved, it falls flat as an adventure game because it never strikes the perfect difficulty with its clues (instead alternating between blatant telegraphs and vague/lack of messaging), and it even pales as a simple point-and-click because the basic act of clicking on objects is often frustrating due to unclear overlap between the cursor hitbox and background object hurtboxes. I so desperately wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt, but it really dropped the ball in the last couple of hours, when the game decided to abruptly rush every underdeveloped character arc to a conclusion (as opposed to Hotel Dusk, which has the restraint to focus and more thoroughly develop one or two characters per chapter), and finish the tale off with a last-minute introduction to a comic book villain. As such, I cannot recommend this to anyone but the most fervent of Cing fans looking to scan their library as a historical relic. I should feel more disappointed that so much of the game was left on an unsatisfying note, but frankly, I’m just glad it’s finally over. Glass Rose may not be bad, but I’d argue that it’s worse as it is certainly boring. Cing absolutely deserved better considering the quality of their later work; still, maybe some games were meant to be forgotten after all.

didn't really talk much about the combat in my last few classic RE reviews because so much of it boils down to pressing aim and shooting until the zombie goes down; the main appeal is the resource consumption, where every shot counts and evading enemies is often preferable. on its face re3's combat focus seems to violate this core appeal, as the increase in enemy counts across the board comes with a corresponding increase in heavy weaponry. shotgun shells weren't even sparse in re2, and in re3 you might as well just use your shotgun as your daily driver given how lush the ammo haul is. between this, chokepoints with explosive barrels, the contextual dodge, the wealth of gunpowders, and the grace pushdowns you get if you've previously been bitten in a room, it really feels like jill is nigh invincible in most regular encounters. with the more claustrophobic corridor design and increased enemy limit in rooms, there are certainly more times that the game pushes you into one of these options instead of going for straight evasion, but at the same time the core conceit is still the same: click aim, click shoot. a lot of mechanics to defray what is still relatively rudimentary gameplay.

however, the devs went out of their way to keep the routing intact. the addition of nemesis as a mr. X replacement so thoroughly trumps its predecessor that it feels a bit shocking they didn't get it this right the first time. mr. X was a effectively an ammo conversion spot; this lumbering beast you could pump full of cheaper ammo to get drops of the nicer stuff. nemesis completely flips this on its head by offering a real challenge between all of his different mutations, with attacks such as full-screen lunges, tentacle whips, and a rocket launcher. tackling him requires a much stronger focus on positioning and dodge acumen than mr. X (or even many other early RE bosses), and fittingly in return for choosing to fight you get parts for specialized weapons. granted, actually mastering the dodge in these fights plays up the issues with its seemingly random outcomes and directions, but at the same time tanking hits or controlling his speed with the freeze grenades gives much-needed leeway in what is probably the hardest boss up to this point in the series. unfortunately, killing him in optional encounters doesn't seem to influence rank at all, and I never got a sense that these optional kills help make his later obligatory fights easier, but his presence still gives the benefit of influencing your ammo route. killing nemesis isn't cheap, so if you're interested in his weapons, the regular fights that are so easily trivialized by the bounty of grenades you receive becomes moments for you to tighten your belt and conserve ammo.

small variations to the campaign are also more prevalent in this entry, from randomized enemy layouts and different item locations to subtle route-dependent event trigger alterations. the least interesting of these are timed binary choices that are occasionally given to you during cutscenes, which generally are nothing more than knowledge checks, especially when you can get a free nemesis kill out of it like in the restaurant or on the bell tower. occasionally these actually affect routing, as on the bridge prior to the dead factory, but more often than not the difference seemed either negligible or not a real tradeoff. the rest of these do affect routing in meaningful ways, from things as minor as changing a room from hunters to brain suckers to major changes such as the magnum and the grenade launcher getting swapped in the stars office. this plus the plentiful ammo fosters a nice "go with the flow" atmosphere where reloading a save and getting thrown into different circumstances is often a worse choice than just limping along through mistakes. on the flip-side, the actual effects of this feels like it would be most relevant between many separate runs, so I really haven't played around with really planning a route for this one as much as I would have liked. it already took me a year to play through this short game lol, hopefully next year once I'm done teaching I'll come back to this one.

with that in mind, the real thing that elevated this for me over re2 was the area design. re3 sticks with general design thrust of the first two -- bigger early areas, smaller later areas -- but it moves away from interconnected inner loops and major-key gating of the mansion or the police station in favor of something more akin to spokes coming out from a wheel, where each spoke has its own little setpiece and order of exploration feels more loose. the best example of this is easily downtown, which implements an item collection challenge similar to chess plugs or medals puzzles from previous games (get supplies to fix a cable car). each primary location in this section is a building, whether a sub station or a press office, all connected via alleys and streets with interactables strewn along the way. does a good job both corralling the player into fighting enemies in narrow spaces as well as providing many separated nodes with their own little sparks of action and intrigue. not really as genius as the mansion's taut, intertwined room layout, but it's cool to see them try something a little different. the later game devolves into mini-puzzle areas on par with the guardhouse (or even smaller in the case of the park or the hospital), but these are a significantly improvement over the undercooked sewer from re2. the puzzles themselves are pretty fun too; I like spatial puzzles more than riddles, and they lean into that more here with stuff like the water purification check near the end of the game.

This might be just a bit too short (2-3 hours) for the price, but I guess it's better than being bloated. I don't want to repeat too much of what I said here...There are more unique enemies, the levels are great, with maybe just one of them being a drag, and the developer actually makes good use of the scythe-start. Some of these levels are actually very open, letting you choose your own path each time you play the map. Unfortunately, all the weapons you saw in the demo will be the only ones you find in the game. I also wasn't too hot on the treasures (think treasure goblin) here and would have much preferred the standard secrets for some variety, especially on the levels that have no treasures.

I really wish I could just delete these from the game.

Even though I enjoyed this demo, I was a bit wary of the full game because of the price and how much it tried to be like Chrono Trigger, a game I wasn't the biggest fan of. Fortunately, I didn't have to worry, as I loved this. Combat is a lot more involved than CT, with being able to restore mana on normal hits (and on blocks if you have the accessory), button prompts for nearly every ability, managing your live mana, choosing your turn order, and managing your combo points. Later on, you can even use items as a free turn every round, making the game significantly easier if you want, but it was already easy enough without item abuse. The dungeons are also pretty nice, with some puzzles and great pacing. Sadly, the puzzles in here end up not really stumping you for more than a second, at least not until the optional end/postgame. I had hoped they also had a few fewer rest spots to force better food/resource usage. All the bosses had unique designs, and there are a lot of them! While they don't get too complex, there is a lot of variety in each encounter, making it very satisfying to fight.

Speaking of difficulty, the game is a bit easy on the baseline. There are some relics (pretty much accessibility options with some QoL) that do increase the difficulty, but the first one I found in the early game (4 or 5 hours in) was after I had already spent my gold, and then later on I just misattributed it to being the super expensive item, missing out on it. Meanwhile, the more interesting one was near the end of the game. I know it's partially my fault, but maybe the relic purchases shouldn't have been tied to the main game currency, or just give one of them early on for free like they do for others. I guess I'll just do a NG+ run with the relic later on.

The main cast here is all great, and I loved one of the later characters. You could tell they put a lot of effort into the animation of that character. The story was good, but I don't usually place too much stock in them, so YMMV. It did get me engaged for nearly the entire run-through, with twists I didn't see coming. You don't need me to say it, but the music is great, and I can already see myself spamming the boss music. There were a surprising number of references to the Messenger in the back half of the game. While you don't need to really know any of the story from there, it's nice to pick up on things you would miss otherwise.

Random other things...
- They really love to give you fights with limitations, like 5+ times at least, and I loved all of them (I want more JRPGs to do this)
- I enjoyed exploring here and felt the rewards were worth it. They include skills, cooking recipes, ultimate weapons, and rainbow conches (the main collectible)
- Traversal for everything but the main map (slow as fuck) was fun, especially when you get a certain upgrade
- The "sidequests" early on were mostly just random NPCs having little side stuff to do like clearing a field or feeding specific meals but, they got better towards the end
- The minigame might have a little too much RNG early on, and it's easy to abuse a strategy, although I still enjoyed it for reminding me of other similar games
- Cutscenes were used sparingly, but I felt they were effective
- I liked how it was a low-level numbers game
- This ending is going to be so divisive that some people are going to HATE it