absolutely LOVE seeing gorgeous Soejima character illustrations in an isometric tactics game context, especially when paired with that very particular starkly overexposed angelic pearlescent rendering style I totally adore (think Armored Core: For Answer, Ico, El Shaddai, Drakengard 3, or literally just the cover art for .Hack: Infection). The actual tactics game design here (while fun enough) is very much a mid 2000's meat and potatoes Disgaea knockoff with a few tweaks, and it doesn't leave much of a lasting impression. For me this is kind of a sister game alongide Eternal Poison in the way the potent imagery and tone elevate a mostly adequate game into something more mysterious and memorable to reminisce on after the fact. I'm surprised screenshots or character portraits from this game don't get passed around on ~ aesthetic ~ blogs more because it's quite beautiful and distinct!

--to LOOK at... the audio really fails this game in a lot of ways imo! The english voice acting is hilaribad (borderline comparable to Chaos Wars at times) and totally makes a joke out of all the existential patter that would feel way more confounding and atmospheric as nonverbalized text, and while i love Sakimoto and his work on many games I think the conventional FFT orchestral treatment was a big mistake here and does nothing to accentuate the icy elegance of the artwork. This game needed to be scored by like FFXIII Hamauzu or Susumu Hirasawa or fucking ENYA or something, give me a SYNTH and some VOCAL REVERB for god's sake!!!!!!!! mute the game while playing and put this album on in the background instead and you will have a better experience https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nGYNlk-262RFCH-ONZf5IHywLRh9uxRHc

I have a lot of admiration for Baiyon's creative vision and the holistic way he develops his multimedia art universe. I get so excited when musicians explore games as communication vessels for their work this potently! The Pixeljunk Eden series feels like Bionic Commando enveloped in a Stan Brakhage terrarium set to a minimal house soundtrack that is spacious, cold, and truly mesmerizing. Eden 2 isnt a "rhythm game" in any conventional sense, but it has a lot to say about Baiyon's relationship to music. The way the organic floral illustrations exist in harmony with the syncopated nightclub/VJ background abstractions makes Eden feel like a visualization of the private and communal experiences that drive so much electronic music: it's empathically feeling the bodies of everyone in the crowd micro-reacting in unison while lost in a dj set and then walking home alone at 5 AM feeling hazy-headed and contemplative all at once. The tweaked controls and abilities here are great improvements to the sometimes unforgiving original, but part of me would have liked to have seen even more evolution between titles after such a long stretch of time. However, I also appreciate the continued singularity of focus and dogged obsession with a specific, borderline mantric set of images happening here--I felt totally beholden to this lush, fully realized visual world, presented exactly as desired with few caveats or concessions. The humble but confident sense of scope really establishes this as the expression of a driven voice rather than some bloated, desperate-to-impress tryhard studio project. It's totally up to individual taste whether you click with a title like this, but I was grateful to return to a vision this hypnotic and sensorial. The remix of 637 volpe made me emotional!

I feel like this was the last point in time Square could do a cute, cozy Final Fantasy with stylized proportions and NOT have it come across as some hideous funkopop claw machine plushy hell (looking @ u world of final fantasy / pocket edition / theatrhythm!!!). This game is warm and beautiful and Itahana's character designs are iconic series standouts with a lovely sense of ease to them. I think this is way less of an "old-school high fantasy throwback" in terms of narrative than people remember--a LOT of bizarre sci-fi shit happens in the back half of the story and it feels totally situatated in the middle of that pre-square-enix liminal zone.

I love this snug, rusty world and its simple but well-drawn characters, but imo like 2/3rds of the score feels like uematsu wrote it on autopilot and the combat system is also a little narcoleptic and sluggish. A jewel to remember but sometimes a little tedious to actually return to.

I was excited for this game as a fan of the OG and understand that licensing a plethora of artists across multiple genres is very expensive and not really possible for a Harmonix kickstarter project but turning this into a bathos-filled fugly EDM-opera about a dreaming coma patient's attempt to wake up as symbolized thru hyperliteral safe for work rap was.... maybe not the way to go here! Some of the ugliest music I have ever heard!

here are a few mad lyrical samplings CAUTION do NOT look up how any of the tracks from Amplitude 2016 sound or you WILL sustain permanent injury:

"You gotta fight and make right with you mind
You gotta break through this
You gotta fight, run the light, cleanse your mind
Digital Paralysis"

"Bombard the gates with explosions of four chords
You'll know they're bleeding when the distortion strikes
They had their chance but their first mistake was fighting on our ground--A battlefield of sound"

"There's too many sensations of Amplified Spectrum
Visions of ultraviolet sound, corroding my brain
I feel you trying to free me, free me from my mind
It might be too late, my sweet sweet synesthete"

I love the whole "evanescence meets bloodrayne meets yoko taro tragic white hair girlz meets urban fantasy eldritch horror meets xcom" thing this is doing a LOT! SRPGS are in a good place in terms of mechanical refinement lately but a lot of the worlds have felt a bit too dry or boilerplate 2 me as a sissy aesthete--this is one of the more lush and well-realized ones since The Banner Saga and I really enjoy moving my little 2004 The Birthday Massacre groupies around on these goffick monochrome grids! The skairie plague doctor masks are SO beyond over but Othercide feels like such a pastiche across so many other fun style axes that I will HESITANTLY permit their inclusion in this case!

The combat is thoughtful and punishing fun too! I appreciate the experimentation with incorporating a FFX-style malleable turn order system, and manipulating it opens up a ton of strategic avenues. The classes all feel valuable/have lots of cool synergies and the bosses are brutal but surmountable in well specified, satisfying ways.

The roguelike/reincarnation mechanic is interesting to me in theory, but the game doesn't have the diversity of maps/enemies to sustain so much repetition and feels sort of poorly conceptualized. I like how sparingly it makes you use your super powerful interception abilities (which cost health you can't easily recover) and the character building potential of reincarnations/sacrifices, but repeat runs get tedious fast and the game really could have used some more mechanics to abbreviate (or mix up) your catchup sessions. The options that are there feel more like an unconfident way to lessen the blow of a design choice the developers knew was iffy rather than strengthening/justifying the roguelike concept itself, and that's a problem. At the beginning the game gives you the "e-z mode" option to enable healing your daughters to lessen your cycle count, and I wish I had chosen to play that way because I really didn't get much out of "full early game catchup #7 but this time u start with 25% more hp" or w/e! The joy is in the style and the strategy, the slog not so much. I'm still not convinced that a genre with such a languid gameplay pace really benefits from roguelike trappings, especially something so narratively driven and lengthy. Still a very cool little game and I'm rooting for this corny emo studio!

this was my former roommate's absolute favorite game of the few she really got into--she was several years older than me but extremely naive/a little emotionally immature. She had a major Belle complex and the only media she consumed aside from K-dramas were the cheesiest of cheesy TV period romances and EVERY piece of supernatural/dystopian YA fiction meant for 14 year olds (which she said she "wanted to fill her library in her British mansion(?) with someday").

I (correctly) associate this game with that exact personality profile now

I'm not convinced by the "color the world with fun~!" snake oil De Blob is selling me!!! You can paint this totally depersonalized metropolitan hellscape with as many garish colors as u want and it will still be a PANOPTIC BIOME OF CORPORATE SUBMISSION AND CONTROL!!!!!!!!!!! De Blob as the neoliberal compromise candidate in contrast 2 Jet Set Radio's radical reclamation of the urban landscape as a communal artspace 4 anticarceral revolt!!!!!!!!!!! more like de COP!!!! go open a frozen yogurt store in a disenfranchised community u slimy gentrifying FREAK!

once again the Kingdom Hearts series achieves the impressive playfeel of the experience of purgatory!! Love you a lot Yoko Shimomura but turns out Theatrhythm doesn't work so well when 70% of the content is bumbling farty leitmotifs of other licensed music!

Love how tedious and plodding almost all of the Disney zone tracks are, and with some weird priorities--they included the Neverland tracks literally no one could possibly crave revisiting but left out certified panflute bop™ Deep Jungle? WHAT? Annoying that they didn't bother with a fun Persona: Dancing all Night style "let's ship these tracks out to cool upcoming musicians and remix artists for a varied new take!" thing (especially when there are zillions of weeb producers who would probably trample one another to death to participate), or even END THE TRACKS BEFORE THE JERKY LOOPS RESET come ON you guys!!! Also the snubbing of "swim this way" is erasure and a war crime!!!!!

my chains 2 this series are fully self-imposed but I can never escape. I am an eager piggy at Nomuras trough and I like it I love it I want some more of it!!

this is the only pastel twee game that's a mawkish metaphor about learning 2 cope with ur emotionz I can personally abide

It helps a lot that it gleefully turns its saccharine stupidity dial up to DANGEROUS levels and thereby comes across as a knowing satire of brain-melting veggie tales-style kid's media. i mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyUyNXEMw6w

it also helps a lot that it's literally one of the most visually beautiful games of all time!!! Every 23 y/o e-girl SAIC alum is trying desperately to imitate this style (and good for them!!!!)!

Such a cool (if shallow) oddity! For some reason The Lost Planet franchise really fascinates and frustrates me; every now and again i find myself wanting to get absorbed in this series I perceive as a moody Japanese take on The Thing meets Monster Hunter meets Every Western 7th Generation Shooter Ever, but I keep bouncing off of the mainline games despite trying to approach them with genuine interest. I think there's just not too much substance to the series despite how much I want them to be these uncanny spacious zeitgeisty hybrids, and my imagination fills in a lot of blank spaces with an aura of not-actually-there intrigue whenever my memory dulls.

BUT ENOUGH about those! this is EX Troopers--a totally different stylistic approach to the Lost Planet universe that hardly feels related to the franchise at all! It's a giddy day-glo romp doused in Jet Set Radio cel-shading, with an uber exuberant j-electro soundtrack to match! some of these songs RULE and the OST is worth checking out alone: https://youtu.be/ggwJw3OqzjE

The gameplay itself is quite slight and perfunctory, but in a totally pleasurable arcade shooter sort of way. Tiny missions on tiny maps that get right to the point and have you make full use of your small arsenal of abilities. Must have felt perfect for bite-size sessions on the 3DS, but its narrowness definitely shows when played on a console. Still, this is a deliriously upbeat game that feels lighter than air: a hyper-saturated cotton candy action title made to be played in short bursts. Pretty fun for what it is, and very interesting as a complete 180 representation of the Lost Planet universe.

IMO this is a fairly friendly import game even if you can't read much or any Japanese--the mission goals are quite clearly delineated and it's simple enough to navigate the small hub world and figure out who to talk to/where to go. The story is also a very archetypal "i am a spunky upstart and want 2 be the hero" shonen type of situation and the comic book cutscenes convey a lot of personality through the visual presentation. Even if you can only read katakana you will be in great shape because so many of the integral keywords are communicated that way. Dont be too intimidated to give it a shot!

Played the PS3 HD port.

for some reason this is probably the only time a piece of media has ever made me feel "triggered" to the point of trembling white hot panic and rage and I'm very lucky to be able to say that because it was a fucking horrible experience and I hated it a lot!!! As someone who watches a lot of "transgressive" or politically indefensible genre media and has a complicated fragmentary interest in it I'm no stranger to sadist exploitation and the justification of horrific, perverse acts committed against women as a callous means to reinforce a fictional world's steely hopelessness but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. The way this game doles out such repugnant torments to its one female character, a child (who was previously presented as a duplicitous saucy nubile cartoon temptress in a way that felt indefensibly racist and pedophilic), granting her zero dignity or humanity and utilizing her sexualized abuse as some cheap suggestion of a new "darkly-real, Kiefer Sutherland's war on terror" stylistic direction for this series.. is just... fucking grotesque and too ghoulish for me to even process. Kojima's misogyny was always something I had to internally justify or excuse up until this point--undeniably objectifying and ignorant but mostly absurd in a schlocky horny genre way I was personally able to overlook--and i think part of what I found so fraught about GZ was how intensely it laid bare how adjacent to abject misanthropy and callous hatred his views on female characters always were. I mean there are hints of this in MGS4 as well with the BnB's--the body oil moaning nymphoid war crime victim sequences that immediately transition into narrated monologues (not from them of course) about how these women had dealt with like the most lurid and sensationally violent trauma possible and you freed them via murder actually bc that was your job and right 2 do! That was disgusting to me at the time as well, but something about the treatment of Paz: an unrelenting violation of a character as a means of stylistic/thematic transition and an intended vehicle to generate hype (Metal Gear pulls no punches now this aint your momma's genre game we put Liveleak ISIS torture in it!) just utterly revolts me and makes me feel queasy 2 my core. The insult to injury was seeing this games attempt at some hateful cruel stylistic baptism for the series and then having Quiet's design revealed... Ground Zeroes isnt even an honest statement of intent for the series; Kojima isnt heralding in a new misanthropic world of mutilated dignity and constant desecration... he's simply incorporating that into his world where women are also sexy cartoon sidekicks with coo coo pulpy character designs... I think part of what upset me so much about this is envisioning the mental landscape of someone who is able to justify a narrative universe in which both of these ideas can non-schizophrenically coexist, let alone communicate anything valuable about geopolitics or war crimes. Utterly vile / fuck this piece of shit 4eva and tbh while I found so much of death stranding to be arresting and sprawling and deeply felt I also am unable to remove the stain of this fucking filthy worthless game from any of his other works! u marred your library forever u fucker I hate you!!!!!