Sayooshi influenced doujin game set in what is essentially a magic academy, with the main character meeting various (strange) women while tending to his corpse cleaning duty.

Uses a mix of ADV style and NVL style for atmospheric purposes, with NVL style for dream sequences and less character focused writing. The level of care put into creating the atmosphere is impeccable, and on par with some of the best.

Features beautiful artwork, a never tiring soundtrack, an atmosphere that sucks you into the dark underbelly of the world, cute girls and boy, and a far more intricate setting than I expected. This is everything I want from a horror game.

Similar to Horrific Xanatorium, this is a another new-age "denpa" title heavily influenced by titles of old. Hopefully this one is able to find a cult following and fairs a little bit better than previous denpa-like games.

Read the demo.

yes i know this is an essay and a half and i am sorry
i finally took the time to finish the sequel to 2 of my favorite rpgs ever and i have… thoughts.

bravely default 2 is the definition of if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. every single deviation from the formula created by default and second ends up being for the worse.
the first thing i noticed when starting the game is all the accessbility and ui functions from the first 2 games that have been removed. you can no longer turn off random encounters, in favor of overworld encounters that can only be toggled by items. secondarily, auto battle has been completely neutered and UI features like creating favorites of your class compositions are gone entirely. there is also a new weight system where equipment has a weight and if you go a single point over your character’s capacity they lose dozens of stats. it isn’t an AWFUL idea but in practice it means new equipment has to be introduced at a trickle and the micromanagement is unfun and has such minor gains instead of the usually bump in power when reaching a new area. these things in a vacuum could be fine and a way to engage the player more (besides the removal of ui features there’s no excuse for that) but they also made the new overworld encounters as cumbersome as possible.

almost every random encounter from start to finish contains 4-6 enemies which QUICKLY becomes exhausting. most of my time was spent running from enemies because fighting such large groups was just unenjoyable and made grinding both unfun and annoyingly slow when grinding was one of my favorite activities in the first 2 games. they also removed basically all the exp multipliers and consistent battle chaining meaning by the late game bosses grinding levels is slow, arduous, and absolutely no fun. this could also be excused as a balance thing, and for most of the game it is, but the final few fights increase in power exponentially and grinding either exp, new class compositions, or both becomes practically necessary.

alongside the tedium of the gameplay changes, the story was just as tedious. the core cast just is not as compelling as any of the characters from the first games and the side characters do little to add to that. seth, the main character, is a played-straight self insert with barely any personality or plot significance to speak of, gloria is a princess of a forgotten kingdom with all the charisma of a sad clown, and elvis is scottish. the one bright spot in the core cast is adelle, who is the only one of our 4 playable characters with depth, personality and story significance. unfortunately, the side characters do the game no favors either. the villains are rotated through in minutes with little fanfare and the lucky few that get sidequests expanding on them still don’t reach the heights of the bosses in the first 2 games.

on that point, the sidequest system is also just spectacularly awful. there are about 100 sidequests scattered throughout the world that pop up with no warning and mostly amount to busy work fetch quests that really demonstrate the game’s lacking fast travel and methods of map traversal. there’s also no quest log which feels asinine when the quests are numbered and give no indication of when and where they’ll pop up. i did basically all the sidequests i could find for the first few chapters and then ignored all but the most obviously story relevant for the rest of the game, but as someone with that completionist itch, nothing about this game’s quest system felt like they were designed with people actually DOING them in mind.

as should be obvious with the 100 fetch quests, the name of the game here is PADDING. the game is easily the longest bravely game start to finish but i would also easily say it has the LEAST content. the dungeons are all lazy mazes that grow exponentially larger past the halfway point, combat feels sluggish, the environments are mostly flat plains that your party slowly runs across (unlike most rpgs, there are no boats, airships, bikes, or chocobos, it’s just you and your feet the entire journey), and there are actually LESS jobs than bravely second, going from 30 to 24, and yet the balancing of the jobs is also worse than ever.

jobs in this game are all over the place from their usefulness to even just the skills they learn. for some reason, all the magic classes now learn spells individually, meaning the level ups are wasted on individual spells like fire and thunder, making level ups on some classes just not feel all that impactful and making their final spell lists pretty lackluster. worse than that, there are some useless jobs like arcanist and gambler which require super specific set ups for minimal gains, temporarily overpowered jobs like thief that rip the midgame’s difficulty in half, and jobs like beastmaster that have uncapped permanent buffs that can make the entire game’s difficulty crumble.

speaking of difficulty and balance, the changes to the battle system and how the game creates challenge are also the main barrier to why i never played this game past chapter 1 until now. as mentioned, random encounters are all massive groups from the get go which makes them miserable to fight and makes combat feel like a punishment for not dodging rather than dodging being a last ditch effort when necessary. but the main villain here that casts a horrible shadow over the game from the first boss to the last is the counter system. new to bravely default 2 is the ability for bosses to counter and gain an extra action when you trigger some surprise condition. there are no ways in game to see what bosses have what counters beyond trial and error, and the counters can be excruciatingly specific. as an example, the first boss you’re likely to encounter, a wolf from an early sidequest, counter freelancer abilities with an extra attack that will 1 or 2 shot most of your party before you have even been tutorialized on what counters are. freelancer is the first job you get, and one of only THREE you will likely have at that point, and the game IMMEDIATELY punishes you for using it. the gamefeel this creates is just miserable and feels like punishing players for using the tools given to them. this problem is ALL over chapter 1. expect pretty much every boss in chapter 1 to counter the most recent job you’ve obtained, making it useless to try out the new classes you rightfully earned. it makes chapter 1 not only brutally difficult and frustrating, but just plain not fun. this first chapter is where my previous 3 playthroughs all ended, but this time when i powered through, i was gifted with a saving grace that also ruins the game’s difficulty.

in chapter 2, you unlock the ranger class which comes with a new passive ability, counter-savvy. counter-savvy singlehandedly brings the difficulty down from unforgiving to baby easy in seconds. it gives you a ONE HUNDRED percent chance to dodge all physical and status based counters (magic counters still land but they’re very few and far between) making the counter system immediately pointless for the next 75% of the game. the game created a problem and then hands you a one size fits all solution instead of just balancing things better.

at this point, the game became a cakewalk for a while. not a single boss between when you get ranger in chapter 2 and the middle of chapter 5 gave me ANY grief and most were easily felled by the sheer imbalance of some of these classes. unfortunately, around chapter 5+ the game starts to realize that it has made itself too easy and decides to heap on more bullshit. from this point on, every boss will generate bp (essentially bankable extra turns) from you using basically any ability in the game (and for end game bosses, LITERALLY any ability in the game) making cheese strats essentially required to fell the bosses’ massive HP pools before they fire off as many actions as they want all for free. the name of the game in both the beginning and end game is giving you tools and then smacking you for not using specific ones.

despite all this, i do want to include my few positives since i don’t want to pretend there were none. as mentioned, adelle is a real standout for the character writing, and there are some great side characters i didn’t mention like martha and lonsdale. i also actually surprisingly liked the implementation of turn meters instead of all actions occuring at the same time. finally, that stretch from chapters 2-5 where the game was super easy was also the most fun i had with the game. it was satisfying felling bosses, sometimes in a single turn, using the ridiculous tools the games gives you in the midgame, even if it felt a bit unearned and as such wasn’t very fulfilling.

just as a closing note on the negatives, the switch version of the game runs just embarassingly bad. some environments have hideous bloom that makes everything look horrendous, inputs sometimes drop for no reason, battles freeze for so long randomly that i fear a crash (for what it’s worth, i’ve only encountered 1 crash while playing and it was not during this playthrough), and cutscenes lag and load like crazy. i’ve heard good things about the PC port if your PC can run it (mine definitely cannot) so if you’re still interested in playing i would say skip the switch version for that.

overall, bravely default 2 fails both as a sequel and as an rpg. for fans of the series, the balancing is worse, the grind is worse, the story is less compelling, and key features from past games are gone for no reason. for people just getting into the series, the early game is frustrating, the mid game is too easy, and the late game is bullshit. it’s a game only for the biggest of masochists and i recommend it to essentially no one even as someone whose favorite traditional jrpg of all time is bravely second.

the characters, music, plot, art, music, game mechanics, job mechanics, MUSIC, everything about this game is my favourite thing and there isnt anything i dont like about it.

the weakest points of the game are the party interactions that can come off as vapid when important things arent happening, and the pure amount of repetition which turns a lot of people off the game- which is understandable for sure but i 100% believe that it would be a worse game without it.

the player characters and villains are (for the most part) fleshed out and have unique dynamics with each other, and the plot is engaging, makes sense, and has some incredibly impactful moments. the depth of the villain characters combined with how imaginative the plot is absolutely Makes this game for me. it could play like absolute garbage and it would still be one of my favourite games, but the gameplay itself is genuinely fun and rewards players for experimenting with different jobs and job abilities, giving you a lot of freedom in how you want to play. exploring dungeons and fighting random encounters never felt like a chore and there wasnt a single boss battle that i remember not actively enjoying.

also the music is really good!!!!!

It's impossible to predict what games give you comfort in what ways. I thought I almost died this week, and on the other side of that, I can't help but think of my time with Bravely Default.

I devoured this game at a time where it felt like my life was ending. My 3DS activity log showed that I played it in chunks averaging 8+ hours a session. To say that I thoroughly replaced reality with this game is an understatement.

I needed to find meaning and beauty in the world, and in Bravely Default, I found enough to tide me over. The repetitive nature of filling out the bestiary, maxing out every job class, even the repetitive nature of the game itself. When it reused bosses, I didn't blink an eye. I dutifully went through the long way of beating this game without a single critical thought, of any of the ways that I could have cleverly ended the game sooner. I needed that structure. I needed to not think about the freeform mess of reality around it.

When you need to find beauty in something, you do. I think Bravely Default still has one of the best soundtracks of all time. When I first heard the theme of the Land of Radiant Flowers, I almost cried. Obviously I was in a vulnerable state of mind, and now I don't think its one of the strongest tracks in the game. But I think about that experience a lot.

There were jokes I laughed at in this game that are objectively lame. I took screenshots on MiiVerse to save for posterity (lol) that I failed to remember the significance of within a month.

But that has to speak to something in the strengths of this game that I could use it as the refuge I needed it to be.

I remember very little about what it was like to play this game, because for a long time I needed to forget everything about that period of my life. Including this game. But like the experience I was trying to avoid, Bravely Default became a part of me. I still say "grgrgrgr" in real life the way Edea does. I have had Victory's Chime as my default ringtone for over a decade at this point and forget where it came from.

I'd like to think that was a form of healing. That I used that vulnerability to slot in the potential for something beautiful when I was at a low point full of pain. Maybe Bravely Default was a vapid thing to latch onto, but it was harmless. And at that time, as evaluated by my future current self, it was exactly what I needed. Or, now it has to be what I needed. Because I still got so much beauty out of it.

On its own merits, Bravely Default is an S-tier soundtrack on a mediocre game. Solidly B-rank, hard to recommend playing much more than recommending listening to the soundtrack.

But maybe the real lesson I needed to learn, or the lesson I taught myself through Bravely Default, was finding how to love something imperfect when it felt like the world would not love an imperfect me.

The game is absolutely fucking terrible.
The puzzles range from bad to tedious.
The graphics are lackluster.
You spend the biggest chunk of the game walking up and down the same 3 roads.
The story is nonexistent for 70% of the game.
When the last 30% of the story does pick up it makes no sense.

Soundtrack is good though.

But the game still, in spite of all of this, manages to weave an engaging experience. You might not understand the narrative, but you will be engrossed by it regardless. You might hate the walking, but you still want to see what happens next. You might not want to do another tedious puzzle, but you still want to read the witty dialogue after.

If you play this you'll come to see all these glaring issues aren't really issues at all. Everything about the game feels deliberately crafted to deliver a certain experience. And regardless of the merit you get out of this game, it definitely conveys what it wants to convey. How you interpret that is up to you. And you have to respect games like those.

After a week I already miss waking up in the morning and playing this on my 3ds.

Goodbye, Losspass. Goodbye, Paradise. A fever dream and a half, one that I oddly didn't wish to wake up from.

Story and dialogue-wise I would probably give it a 5, gameplay-wise... well. It depends on how much you love math and walking (and the movement system on the DS can be a doozy sometimes with the camera angle switching). Not gonna lie, I did end up loving some of the guidebook puzzles though. But it can definitely be a chore, funnily enough, just like it intended. Or maybe I've developed some weird stockholm syndrome for this game.

Its absurdist and 4th wall-breaking humor is definitely right up my alley, and the contrast between the bleak mystery and the casual, at most times even cheerful soundtrack and landscapes creates an interesting disconnect. It's both hilarious and unsettling. Its at (most) times incomprehensible dialogue and narrative really keeps you guessing and asking, and barely any answers are given to you outright which works to its advantage, in my opinion.

I haven't played Silver Case but this game definitely made me want to check it out immediately. Even though I still have a lot of questions and a lot of the plot probably went over my head (I'm still processing it as I'm typing this), I can recommend this game based off vibes alone.

Sumio Mondo is my spirit animal. Please play this game.

Another comfort game. Much like all of Suda51’s games, I feel inspired whenever I play Flower, Sun, and Rain. Makes for a great summertime romp, at least for me. Its willingness to intentionally annoy the player will probably frustrate most people but I love it. It’s part of what makes it so interesting. I can’t think of many other examples where the gameplay and writing are this effective at putting the player on the same page as the player character. When you have to repeatedly walk through several large, empty areas, you understand why the protagonist is so grumpy all the time. One of the funniest games I’ve played too. The protagonist punches a child at one point. That alone is worth a perfect score.

I ended up putting this game off for a long time despite knowing I’d really like it. So color me surprised when I played it and… I liked it. The insanely tedious and repetitive tasks each day when combined with the immaculate tropical atmosphere makes for one of the most unique experiences I’ve ever had in a video game. The writing is also really clever and metatextual, and I appreciate the ties this game has to The Silver Case both narratively and thematically. Plenty of other reviews on this site have said why this game is so great, so I’m not gonna waste your time with a long analysis of the sort. funny blah blah blah DS feeling! meta! ludonarrative! vibes! localize the PS2 version! suda!!! mondo!! KILL THE PAST! For my second KTP game, it’s another swing and a hit as far as I’m concerned.
KILLER7 IS COMING SOON….

Pay my 50,000! ▋

The second game in Suda51’s intriguing Kill the Past series. Intrigue is what drives this game and it’s fucking brilliant. Suda leaves me speechless once again goddammit. I went into this with minimal expectations and for the first half of the game I certainly thought it was good, but was a little confused by all the praise it receives from other bros on the site. Once everything came together it was magical and heightened my appreciation for Flower, Sun, and Rain, and Suda himself. In my last review of The Silver Case, I had mentioned that I can’t find the right balance between overtly referencing The Silver Case and articulating my own thoughts which is seemingly ironic now considering that’s exactly what this game does and surprisingly well.

Flower, Sun, and Rain’s iconic monotonous gameplay loop was absolutely despised by critics back in its Western 2008 debut. Another obvious video game critic L at first glance, but it’s understandable I find. There’s a specific mindset behind this game that the player has to recognize and connect with. Playing this game with a strict mindset focused on the gameplay is not what was intended. The gameplay is supposed to be monotonous. A constant reminder of Lospass’s confusing existence and a great device to build suspension. During my long walks between prominent story moments, I found myself on the edge of my seat. These walks only delay the inevitable, which is a simple yet effective method to create more intrigue. I also think that these walks are just, immersive lol. You’re meant to take in the superficial calm and relaxing summery vibes of the island, despite the story’s clear tonal contrast to this. Yeah it’s not that pretty on DS, but that’s still the implication and it definitely works in the PS2 version. Finally, I think the walks also give you time to soak in the story. When shit gets crazy you’re gonna need a minute to process it all lol. All of this I believe was completely intentional which creates an amazing connection between the story and gameplay that shapes this experience.

This was quite a great refreshing breather coming off of The Silver Case’s dark postmodern themes. Suda continually gets wacker as he finds his footing in the gaming industry. Loved the fourth wall breaks as they add comical flair to the story while not taking away from its much higher stakes. A lot more silly things happen here than in The Silver Case which is a bit more my speed despite loving TSC. Now I’m not really sure which story I prefer. FSR has a much better buildup to its main points while TSC has the better main points. It’s very weird to try and compare these games. FSR’s somewhat reliance on TSC both makes it simultaneously better and worse? Not sure. Although this is a spoiler free review I HAVE to express how the TSC returning characters and other shit made me feel. Insanely hype all around. Tokio Morishima I LOVE you. Also Eleki Island’s connections to the Silver Incident fucking got me so excited lmao. So many important points connected to TSC while remaining its own new thing. Although what really fascinates me is how the fuck people in 2008 played this shit on DS. People were probably completely lost at moments story-wise that are very clear with TSC knowledge. For all the mfs who had to wait until 2016 to help clear up FSR for themselves, my hat’s off to you.

Another amazing soundtrack! Great original tunes and remixes of famous tunes. Encapsulates the atmosphere as well as its predecessor. Invokes the paradise-y vibes while still having some of the suspicion present in the rest of the game.

All I have to say at the end of this is, play it! Play The Silver Case first of course though. I adore this game and its insane story. Mr. Mondo is an engrossing character that is our relatable connection as a player to these ludicrous events. He is (or continues to be?????) a great character. Also him finally being able to wake up and not fall over is some of the greatest character development in a video game. Very much excited for the 25th Ward after this.

Kill your past.