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"MID SLOP PEAK SOULESS SLOP MID MID SLOP SLOP PEAK SOUL SOUULL SOUUUUULLLL" 😐

i don't care about this game, but it made me avoid any sort of discussion about it ever since release. i will be staying as far away from any sort of conversations surrounding this game as possible. and for the love of god, please stop spamming the words "soul", "soulless" and "slop", having posts about this game show up with the same three buzzwords used 500000 times made me never want to see them used in any sort of context again for the rest of my life

ENG:

Black is a game about shooting, but I don’t think that’s a big mystery. The box art, depending on where you live, is either a box full of bullets or an M4 broken in pieces, behind the box says “GO IN ALL GUNS BLAZING” and when starting the game, you’re greeted with animations of guns shooting and reloading in the menu. The first thing you do in the game is shooting a shotgun, not to kill someone, but to open a door, and that’s the way you open doors. The act of shooting in Black feels great and the excellent sound design reinforces it even more. Guns sound powerful and reloading them sounds satisfying. Most shootouts don’t even have any soundtrack, so all that sounds are bullets flying, and when the gunfight ends and all the noise is gone, the brief seconds when the background blurs to show in detail how the gun is reloaded are, so to speak, erotic. Plus the character seems to enjoy itself in how it reloads certain guns; When reloading the MP5, it hits the gun with the mag before inserting it, and with the Magnum, the bullets are quickly shown forefront before putting them in the drum.

What Black wants is for you to enjoy shooting. This reminds of Criterion’s star franchise, Burnout, which all it wants is for you to enjoy driving, only this time cars are replaced with guns. Something both Black and Burnout share is that they’re unapologetically unrealistic. In the case of Burnout, some cars had wacky names like “Annihilator” and the world design wasn’t nor did try to be realistic. In Black, some guns have no sense from a realism standpoint, the most blatant examples being the AK-47, whose bullet casings are ejected from the wrong side so they jump to your face, and the M16, which isn’t even an M16 and whose small mag doesn’t have the capacity to carry 95 bullets. But being fair, every gun has a shit ton of ammo regardless of the size of the mag. Black doesn’t want to be realistic, it wants to be fun, and those who come looking for realism will be disappointed within the first ten minutes.

A single Spas-12 shot is enough to blow up a car, and some enemies are strategically placed in areas full of explosives or spots where when shooting them it is fairly easy to blow something up, and there are so many things that can be blown up that it’s overwhelming. Basically anything that isn’t a fixed texture can be exploded to a point that it becomes ridiculous in how many things can blow up and how easy it is to do so. All these details come together to make every shootout an espectacle full of visual effects. In his video on Die Hard: Vendetta, Tehsnakerer mentions that back then some games tried to imitate cinema, not in that they were literal movies as they try to be now, but in that they tried to turn into mechanics things typical from cinema, usually from the action genre, and when thinking about it, Black could perfectly be the playable version of a lesser John Woo action flick or a movie by the Michael Bay that made Bad Boys. In its best moments, it could be said that it resembles a console F.E.A.R.-like.

But even with the great shooting mechanics, it still has its flaws that do more bad than anything and, due to how simple of an experience it is, overshadow the things the game is good at. The story is bad, is poorly told, almost nonexistent and completely disjointed from what you do in-game. While everything you do when playing is shooting, the cutscenes bore you with stuff about terrorism and covert operations that are uninteresting at best, and skipping the cutscenes make no trouble to understand what's going on when playing. Controls can make the game have some difficulty spikes due to how imprecise the joystick is, so when using the revolver or the sniper you’ll have to be careful. The enemies are absolute bullet-sponges, which is somewhat balanced thanks to the exorbitant amount of ammo you’re given, but when many enemies pile up at the same time it can become frustrating. The worst thing of all, and what almost spoils the game for me, is that the challenge doesn’t evolve past the first missions, repeating itself constantly with rather boring shootouts and repeating many situations already seen in previous missions. Even though with its fair share of flaws, there are like three or four first person shooters on the PlayStation 2 that are worth playing, and Black is lucky to be one of them.

ESP:

Black es un juego sobre disparar, aunque no creo que eso sea un gran misterio, la verdad. La carátula, dependiendo de donde vivas, es o una caja de balas o una M4 troceada, detrás de la caja dice “NO DEJES UNA BALA POR DISPARAR” y al abrir el juego, lo que hay en el menú son animaciones de armas disparando y recargando. Lo primero que haces en todo el juego es disparar una escopeta, pero no para matar a nadie, sino para abrir una puerta, y es así como se abren las puertas. El acto de disparar en Black se siente genial y el excelente diseño de sonido lo refuerza aún más. Las armas suenan potentes y las recargas suenan satisfactorias. La mayoría de tiroteos no tienen música, así que todo lo que suena son las balas volando, y cuando un tiroteo termina y todo el ruido se va, los breves segundos al recargar en los que el escenario se desenfoca para mostrar detalladamente cómo el arma se recarga son, por decirlo de algún modo, eróticos. Además de que el personaje parece recrearse en la manera en que recarga según qué armas; Al recargar la MP5, golpea el cargador con el arma antes de ponerlo, y con el Magnum muestra las balas en primer plano rápidamente antes de meterlas en el tambor.

Lo que Black quiere es que disfrutes disparando. Esto recuerda a la saga estrella de Criterion, Burnout, donde lo que se quiere es que disfrutes conduciendo, solamente que esta vez se cambiando los coches por pistolas. Algo que comparten Black y Burnout es que son descaradamente inverosímiles. En el caso de Burnout, algunos coches tienen nombres tontorrones como “Annihilator” y el diseño del mundo no es ni intenta ser realista. En Black, algunas armas no tienen ningún sentido desde un punto de vista realista, siendo los casos más descarados el AK-47, cuyos casquillos de bala se expulsan por el lado que no es y te saltan en la cara, y la M16, que ni es M16 ni su mini-cargador tiene la capacidad de llevar 95 balas. Aunque siendo justos, todas las armas tienen un porrón de munición independientemente del tamaño de su cargador. Black no quiere ser realista, quiere ser divertido, y quién venga buscando realismo se va a llevar una decepción en los primeros diez minutos.

Un único disparo de Spas-12 es suficiente como para volar un coche por los aires, y algunos enemigos se ubican en lugares rodeados de explosivos o en posiciones donde al dispararles es fácil provocar una explosión, y hay tantas explosiones que abruma. Prácticamente cualquier cosa que no sea una textura fija se puede explotar, llegando a un punto que resulta ridícula la cantidad tan grande de cosas que se pueden hacer explotar y lo fácil que es. Todas estas cosas se suman para hacer que todos los tiroteos sean un espectáculo de efectos en pantalla. En su vídeo sobre Die Hard: Vendetta, Tehsnakerer comenta que entonces algunos juegos intentaban imitar al cine, no el es sentido de ser literales películas como ahora, sino en que intentaban convertir en mecánicas cosas típicas de películas, por lo general de acción, y si uno lo piensa, Black sería algo así como la versión jugable de una película de John Woo venida a menos o del Michael Bay de Dos Policías Rebeldes. En sus mejores momentos se podría decir que es como un F.E.A.R. consolero.

Pese a que es un juego cuyas mecánicas de disparo son geniales, tiene un puñado de cosas que le hacen más mal que bien y que, debido a lo simple de la experiencia, hacen sombra a las cosas en las que el juego es bueno de verdad. La historia es mala, está mal contada, es casi inexistente y está completamente desconectada de lo que haces en el juego. Mientras todo lo que haces al jugar es disparar, en las cinemáticas te sueltan rollos de terrorismo y operaciones encubiertas que no interesan de nada y aburren, y no haría ninguna diferencia si decides saltarte las cinemáticas. Los controles pueden llegar a hacer a la experiencia un poco cuesta arriba debido a la poca precisión que tiene el joystick, y si quieres usar el revolver o el francotirador vas a tener que tener cuidado. Los enemigos son auténticas esponjas de balas, lo cual se compensa con la cantidad desorbitada de munición que te dan, pero si se acumulan muchos enemigos puede acabar siendo un poco insufrible. Lo peor de todo, y lo que termina de casi arruinarlo para mi, es que el desafío apenas evoluciona pasado las primeras misiones, redundando constantemente con tiroteos anodinos y reciclando muchas situaciones de misiones anteriores. Aún con su puñado de fallos, en la PlayStation 2 hay como tres o cuatro shooters en primera persona que merece la pena jugar, y Black tiene la suerte de ser uno de ellos.

I’m one of those Caligula Effect 2 people. Sick game. We love a low budget RPG with best in genre writing and a battle system based on juggling dudes and trans characters who actually read like human people. Couldn’t tell you shit about Caligula Effect 1. I know it’s widely reviled, and that even though I have a lot of friends who have played it only one of them actually likes it and she does a really bad job of selling it any time it comes up so I probably am not gonna look into it further. Blue Reflection is kind of a similar thing, where it was kind of on my radar as a long time fan of its developer, but I only knew it as the unlocalized vita game for perverts that I always confused with the gacha game on phones for perverts, Blue Archive. But then suddenly BR2 came out and all my friends played it and they were like yo this shit rocks this shit is incredible. And I was like damn ok dope what about that first one I see its PS4 rerelease got localized and everyone is like don’t worry that one sucks ass. Just play 2.

However in the intervening years I’ve fully become a “do media in release order” bitch so BR 1 it is and I really went in expecting the worst and given that mindset I was so pleasantly surprised. It’s not that this isn’t a game for perverts because certainly it is, deeply. But the creep shit in this game is simultaneously so present and also so incidental, so just kind of irrelevant to anything happening except that it’s there too, it very quickly kind of washed over me. Never not chafing but almost always accompanied by a game that, when I let it in, revealed itself to be more thoughtful, more economical, and more tightly constructed than it seemed at first glance.

Blue Reflection follows Hinako Shirai, a teenaged ballet dancer at the top of her game who has suffered a catastrophic injury that has left her able to walk but fully unable to exercise at all beyond a light jog, let alone continue her ballet career, which she had until now dedicated her life entirely to. She was good at it. She had a future. It was her passion. Gone. And she’s fifteen. So Hinako is experiencing the midlife ennui of a person mourning their life at an unfortunately early age, she’s entering her fancy school late in the semester due to her intensive physical therapy, in the regular program, not the scholarship program for gifted students that she was accepted into because her gift has been taken from her, and she’s depressed, and she’s ashamed, and she’s kept her circumstances as secret as she can.

This is the person that mysterious magical girls Yuzu and Lime intentionally target to enlist in their secret war against the Sephirot, ancient beings in competition to remake the world to their desired image, while the magical girl Reflectors fight to preserve humanity from within the Common, a realm of collective unconscious that manifests itself based on the heightened emotions of the people unlucky enough to find themselves in the vicinity of the Sephirot, like the people as Hinako’s school. Once she’s been roped into the scheme with the promise that if they win she’ll get one wish granted (she will wish for the returned use of her leg, obviously) and accepted her mantle as the point man Reflector of their little team, the shape of the game emerges, where each chapter is centered around one of the girls’ classmates going through some emotional crisis and the girls entering her brainspace to stabilize her feelings via the combo powers of beating up monsters and also Hinako learning to empathize with people. The literal power of friendship. Occasionally a fifteen story tall tank made of meat or something will roll in and try to level the school but this only happens like nine times.

All of this could come off as very rote, and because it’s a Vita game clearly designed with a handheld stop and go philosophy in mind, stories are relatively thin and their volume is high instead. Most chapters will have a girl be introduced in one scene, there will be a second scene where her problem is explained and she freaks out, there’s a very brief dungeon crawl in her brain, and then the resolution is an equally short cutscene. Then, between chapters there are periods of side questing and Persona-esque social linking for as long as you want before you opt into the next story events. Only maybe four of the twelve supporting characters factor into the story in a big way after their introductory chapter, so how well you get to know these characters is entirely up to you, and I wouldn’t say all of them are even worth getting to know. Maybe half? But with fifteen main characters I’d say half is a pretty good hit rate for interesting guys.

The glue here is Hinako herself. One of my favorite recent video game protagonists, she’s the only person who doesn’t realize that she’s in a story about the power of friendship. Or rather, she isn’t convinced that that’s a thing that is worth making all that big of a fuss over. Hinako is depressed, and short tempered, and inarticulate. She can barely find it in herself to be civil with almost anyone on a good day if whatever they’re saying doesn’t hold her interest, but she has good reason to be pissed off. People are needling her constantly: volunteering her for extracurricular activities without her consent, needling her about her absences, joking with her about her leg, pestering her Not To Give Up The Dream Of Ballet, bullying and then bribing her to be a superhero against her will when she’d really rather just be left alone. NOBODY will leave her alone, and nobody really tries to understand why she’s not happy to be treated like she should be happy or plucky.

Of course the story won’t let her be this way for long, not entirely, and her job does require her to understand and empathize with other people in order to help them heal emotionally, something that is challenging for her, because she’s not healed emotionally herself. But eventually she comes around enough to want to be for other people what she isn’t getting. “I want to understand her better” is a line that starts popping up over and over in the back half of the game, even when she backslides, even when she lashes out, even when she’s challenged by people who hate her and when she’s most vulnerable and when she feels betrayed by people she thought she trusted.

It’s okay that the immediate stories of the supporting cast are so thin because all of them feed back to Hinako’s interiority, and this story is so intensely focused on her growth from someone who is isolated and apathetic to someone who Gets It and wants to be the person who helps other people Get It, even when everything else is in pieces.

Because Blue Reflection understands how being a teenager can be such a deeply isolating experience, that this is a feeling so many of us carry around when we’re that age, and that it can manifest in a lot of ways and in so many circumstances. Every girl in the game is going through their own shit but almost all of them are really just experiencing a loneliness or a fear of loneliness that they don’t know how to get out from underneath. Hinako knows this better than anyone because the stakes of her situation aren’t reversible, which puts her in a position to relate to everyone easily but also use the experience of helping them to figure out how to cope with her own issues.

This is all enhanced by the structure and style of the game. While there are obvious stylistic cues from the Persona 3 school of anime teenager games in terms of the social link-esque systems that drive the side content, Blue Reflection strategically has no time management feature and no expendable resources that limit the way you interact with the cast or the world. As long as you don’t choose to advance the story, you can live out as many days as you want between chapters. You can max out your friendship with everybody, take your time doing those sidequests, spend your leisure in the Common grinding out materials for crafting. An endless malaise of this dreamlike, dissociative routine, cutting everything but the stuff than anchors you: no school, no adults, no travel, shit dude, no transitions between animation poses. Only the thick haze of the summer afternoons, locked forever into the twilight hour of a sunset so dense you can’t see people on the roof if you catch them at the wrong angle, slowly gliding through the hallways to the softly ethereal piano-led edm that never stops, just tinkling away through every moment of the game.

This malaise is so hard to break out of, but Hinako learns to, slowly. I think the power of friendship gets a lot of hate as like, a concept, but it’s good, it’s a good thing to hitch a story to, you just have to do the work. Blue Reflection does that work. It becomes meaningful when the person who utilizes the Power Of Friendship to battle gods and shit has to do a lot of work on herself and with herself and others to empathize with other people and reach out to them actively, even though she is loathe to do it. It’s not nothing. Throughout the game Hinako is doing this stuff but she’s also being used, manipulated, lied to, and betrayed, in cruel ways, ways that cut to the most vulnerable parts of her, by people who mean a lot to her because of her experiences as a Reflector. This doesn’t come out all at once, but unfolds, small revelations unwinding over the course of the back half of the game, and it means more for her to choose to love and to protect other people anyway when she thinks she will come out the loser for it than it would if Hinako was a plucky character who believed in hard work and like, enjoyed other people’s company lol.

All in all I’d say I had a great time with Blue Reflection, way better than I thought I would. I even liked the parts where you play it, which most people seem to think are bad too. But given how much I got out of the vibes and the narrative (the game is STRONGLY vibes-based I’m not gonna sugarcoat how much of this clicking has to do with music and visuals hitting heavy) when most people seem to think it’s not worth the bother or like, mediocre at best, maybe I am just built different. Perhaps I am simply the champion of mid RPGs. The world may never know. I do feel like I should clarify though, having not really mentioned it much, that the game is like 75% pervert shit, there is just really no talking around it. It’s nonstop pervert shit, just pervert stuff all the way down. All the good stuff is there too but it’s coated in this layer of pervo nonsense. You just gotta take your lumps sometimes I guess.

Anyway if you’ll excuse me I’m a busy lady I have to go watch a 26 episode Blue Reflection anime that nobody has even heard of that inexplicably got an English dub two years after it came out even though no Gust game has been dubbed for like fifteen years. So I can play the sequel game afterwards. Obviously.

you had to be there

when the online wasn't a ghost town it felt like the full experience it quite obviously isn't in any other context. the fashion; the modular create-a-wrestler style movelists; duels. it was delightful, if insanely obtuse in ways it never should've been allowed to be. absolver is a dreamer's game, made with the impractical grandeur of idealists

the dark souls veneer followed by the realization that the single player content was a total wasteland certainly turned some folks off, and it's not tough to figure out why. uncover this shortcut, now fight this boss, now calibrate the north western stance in your cardinal direction combo deck. regular people turned to goop when this shit hit; folks were disintegrated for thinking it's another R1 bonanza. this is a fighting game, baby, or at least the corpse of one

revisiting it now is a bummer. just doesn't hit the same way without player interaction. an extended tutorial devised to usher you toward a wider community that's dead and gone. bones long turned to dust. the fallout 1 death screen where you're slumped in the desert repeating for eternity

ppl talk about when mmos lose their communities, but there's something extra sad about this space + time for me. reaching for the moon, designing a combat system so heavy and nuanced, and then having it relegated to fighting hollows in the undead burg forever. purgatory shit. gustave dore woodcuts depicted this exact scenario and we should've learned from them

true marvel of ungoverned spirit. these kinds of indie games rarely felt so brazen and optimistic as in those ten minutes in time

Flawed in so many ways and filled with irritating AAA bloat, but I have literally been physically unable to get it out of my head for nearly a year.

One day I'll write something more substantive about this strange, stupid, smart, weird game. For now, I'll just say that I was 110% convinced I would hate this and it ended up being a game that sometimes, a year on, I'll just sit and think about for an hour. It's magical when that happens.

I truly miss that steel sky.

So, I'm pretty well clueless on what makes a good shmup tick, but I do want to highlight the brilliance of locking away continues for a while. It forced me to fully learn the game and it's mechanics to where, on my first run with them unlocked, I had reached the final boss before needing to use one. (Yes it was on the easiest difficulty, no I don't care it felt good)

That level of understanding my place, where I was so tantalizingly close to beating the game on it's own terms immediately forced the game's hooks into my psyche.

Good time.

Somehow went from exclaiming "this is the perfect videogame" multiple times in my first several hours in Rune Factory 4, to being 20 hours into it and pretty happy to never play it again despite only being around about halfway through the main storyline.

Rune Factory 4 really has everything. Effortless, overflowing amounts of charm with every character leaving some sort of positive impression, an expansive farming system with so much depth sprawling in seemingly every imaginable direction, arpg goodness with a ton of different environments each with plenty of personality and unique touches, a ton of weapons (some delightfully goofy) with meaningfully different movesets for you to go chew through all manner of environments with, the ability to turn almost any enemy in the game into your own personal Pokémon and either set your army of critters to work on your farm or take them out adventuring with you, loads of secrets, loads of polish (I can't really overstate quite how impressive the level of polish is here), always something exciting to be working towards both narratively and in terms of building up your home/farm/town.

Rune Factory 4 really has everything. My mind freezes up as I use my magnifying glass to see so many stats about the soil quality of this specific tile, half of that stats feeling like they mean nothing. Five different crafting systems, a few of those with several different subcategories of crafting system associated with them, all of which need to be levelled up individually, and you better engage with these myriad mediocre crafting systems because you have to sell all this pointless garbage you're making to get the shipping rate higher. Stats you can level up for literally anything you can imagine, from using a specific class of weapon, to walking, to bathing. Storage boxes and fridges stuffed full of literally anything and everything you've found that you haven't had to either sell for money or use up in crafting. Yellow speech bubbles above characters indicating you haven't talked to them yet today, begging you to go find every single one of them every single day because of course the game expects you to befriend each and every townsfolk. Endless rooms of enemies where you just resort to bashing the same two buttons over and over to grind experience. Vegetable and flower seeds that start at level 1 and which you can specifically go out of your way to individually grind up to level 9 one growth cycle at a time. A princess points task system that gave me nightmares of Animal Crossing: New Horizons' Nook Miles for all the pointless busywork it encourages. The same handful of trees and stones you have to return to day after day to get the ever crucial lumber and ore you need mountains of in order to build anything.

Leaving you drowning amongst its menagerie of empty compulsion loops, Rune Factory 4 is the perfect abyss. I loved a lot of my time with it, the game is genuinely beautifully made in many regards and it's hard to imagine a game really being better at the specific thing Rune Factory 4 is trying to accomplish, but despite this fuck I'm glad I got out when I did.

The last time I played Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep I was 14 years old.

I was just starting high school, completely afraid of what my peers thought of me, deeply in a closet I wasn't even fully aware I was in and hopelessly awkward and bad at socializing. You could say that Birth By Sleep was a comfort game of sorts at that period of my life like all of Kingdom Hearts in general was.

A kind of transitional title for a transitional period in my life, trying to make new friends in real life while learning more about this world and series that I'd grown up with.

I loved this game to death. I played it many many times, beat it on Proud mode which felt like a herculean task to me then as a child who was TERRIBLE at video games. It was a game very special to my heart and still quite special in my memories.

So my girlfriend has been playing through the series (I'm only reviewing the ones here that I played in this round of playthroughs, not the ones I'm majorly watching her play though I have played those) and I was quite excited to get to this one.

This special childhood game that I'd held near and quite dear to my heart, adoring the narrative, the way in which they took the things I loved about the series while managing to fit it all on a chunky UMD on the go, fitting right nice and snugly into my PSP library of Dissidia Final Fantasy and the constant grinding I was doing with Squall and Jecht in that game, the film RV starring Robin Williams and some Gundam SEED film for some reason when I don't even think I really watched the series.

There's a reason you don't revisit everything you once held up as "the greatest shit of all time" when you're like 14 huh.

This go around after so much time away revealed that wow this combat is kinda majorly ass. Introducing the new command deck system and styles was a cool idea! The problem is that it ends up replacing basic functionality in the move set in ways that just end up making the game feel like total shit to play at points, especially early on in everybody's campaigns. Things feel floaty but in a way that feels like a bad in-between of KH2's lighter snappier feel and 1's weight and heft to its movement.

The unversed as an enemy type are just kinda bland and nowhere near as interesting in terms of designs as the Heartless, Nobodies and the Dream Eaters even. Fighting a chunk of them when they can just kinda barrel through all of your shit with I-Frames with fairly little stagger opportunity makes fights just feel bad half of the time.

The level scaling is also quite strange. For I'd say Ventus and Terra's stories especially, there are multiple points where they go into a world for like 5 minutes, maybe have 2 fights, fight the boss and then leave. This constantly leaving you fairly underleveled and needing to grind if you want to do any meaningful damage in the next world at all. It's like the game is built around you running out and doing the Mirage Arena or grinding constantly and I just really didn't wanna do those if I didn't have to!

Hell, after a certain point in every story we had to grind AT LEAST once per character for like an hour just to be able to not get completely shit on by some random enemy we didn't have any trouble with before because now the world level is "6" whatever that even MEANS.

It was disappointing, coming back to this game that filled my teenage years. All the memories of how much fun I had with it are not necessarily overwritten but just given a different context of sorts. It's a bit of a bummer coming back to it and realizing that I wish I didn't have to play this game's combat for the things I genuinely do adore about it still.

The music is absolutely still phenomenal. Aqua's Theme is absolutely my favorite track in this series. The oppressive loneliness and distance of some of the tracks in this game, the way the tragedy is sewn through those strings. I would even go as far as to say that it's probably my favorite soundtrack in this series right next to 3 with how many memorable pieces are in this thing that hit my heart oh so deeply. Those notes fuckin move me!

The narrative as well still hits in a lot of ways for me. Though I do find it funny how much I've flipped on Ven and Terra's stories as I've gotten older. As a kid, I didn't HATE Terra's story but I had at the time thought that it relied on his stupidity for the plot to happen at all, not fully realizing a lot of shit about his story somehow but again I was 14 and VERY V E R Y dumb. Ven's story I think I liked because of the gaps it fills in for how Sora gets the keyblade and that kinda young naive nature Ven carries was relatable to me at the time.

Playing it now I honestly found more relatability in Terra and his struggles, his constant self doubt, his want to protect others but worrying about not having the strength to do it, people using him for their own ends and gains. It takes elements of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith but I think it manages to still both make the arc its own but also play it differently by having Terra wake up to and confront a lot of the direct manipulation at play with him even if he still stumbles and absolutely fucks up multiple times.

Ven's story this time around was still interesting but I don't know, it felt like it meandered a lot more. The second half of the game being this quest for connection was interesting, that sorta disconnect from childhood to adulthood, finding what true connection is and how the friends you’ve known for a long time may change in ways that scare you, in ways that you may not be able to understand or comprehend. Maybe it needed to meander a bit more to sit with those ideas but at points the meandering felt aimless in a very boring way that didn't hit at all for me. I guess where I’d settle on it is that it's not bad and the mysteries it illuminates are really interesting but I’ve grown colder to Ven’s story.

Aqua's story is still absolutely GOATed though. A tragedy in all its forms. Wanting to help your friend struggling with their own fears and insecurities, someone working towards the expectations and demands placed upon them but not particularly knowing the best moves either. Being so willing to believe in those you care about that you have trouble seeing the blaring red flags and warning signs in front of you. The introspective loneliness of her entire arc leading to its fairly tragic end. That final cutscene with her after the fight in the Final Episode still makes me cry honestly.

Aqua is still one of the best characters this series has and I desperately need her in more of it.

Birth By Sleep is messy but despite all of its flaws and issues I still have a warm place in my heart for it, but I won't lie when I say that I really wish it was more engaging to play throughout the entire experience. I wish the combat didn't feel the way it did. It's a genuine bummer in ways!

Also what in the FUCK are those secret episode requirements???? 9999 unversed on standard are you shitting me??????

The cool thing about being an adult is that you can look at a game with a ton of Discourse surrounding it, and just play it for yourself because you know that fiction is allowed to include Dark topics, and what matters is how its handled

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is........fine. Almost unremarkable if you remove the Discourse. The gameplay is peak bog standard RPG Maker walk and talking, where you press space on an object and maybe pick it up to bring it somewhere else. The kind that's perfectly servicable but occasionally slows the pacing down if you can't figure out what to interactive with, and therefore just start trying everything. If you take a break from the game and come back, you might stumble trying to remember where you left off

The writing is unabashedly edgy, and I think it would still be very polarizing without all the dialogue about Ashley wanting to fuck her brother. I actually found myself reminded a lot of Jhonen Vasquez's work, which I will admit I haven't read since I was 15 so maybe my memory is off, where they share that same slightly immature and incredibly cynical strain of humour that occasionally falls into the territory of trying too hard. There's a scene where you're in a public park and if you interact with a tree, the game is like "you picked up: used condom - you decide not to bring it with you". There's an billboard advert that says "are you tired of being alive? ask your doctor about euthanasia today!". Maybe RPG Maker is slightly to blame for this but a part of me is surprised Andy & Leyley came out in 2023, because it really feels like something that would've been made while I was in High School, and that someone like me would've loved back then

As for the incest stuff, I do think it's a bit disingenous to say "oh it's just a bad ending" when Ashley makes repeated comments that boil down to "I would like to fuck my brother". You don't need to justify your enjoyment of the game with "actually, it's a commentary on toxic relationships", because sure it is, but the game never really commits to it and that's fine! you're allowed to like this because it's a bit edgy and fucked up, that is okay. Alternatively, there's nothing wrong with saying "I'm not a prude but the gameplay is boring and the writing tries too hard"

I do think the game struggles a little bit with knowing what it wants to be, and because of that, it tends to go in circles sometimes. I did find myself getting surprisingly invested in the world and the characters, but kept wanting more since each episode length is pretty short so far. I wanna see more consequences for the fucked up things these characters do and feel, but maybe that'll be in the later chapters. I will say, the artstyle is very nice - every character is very expressive with their portraits. You can tell you're in a world of RPG Maker tiles but I think they make the most of it and the artstyle is there too