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đŸłïžâ€đŸŒˆ he/himăƒ»ăƒ†ăƒ‹ă‚č野郎 ・ not above kissing a guy

Star ratings don't really mean anything. I won't take them too seriously if you don't.

Looking for more LGBTQ+ rep. Big fan of offbeat, weirdo stories and thoughtful presentations.

Some recent favourites: Citizen Sleeper, Dragon Quest XI, The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa, A Short Hike, Murder House, and Death Stranding.
Personal Ratings
1★
5★

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GOTY '23

Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event

GOTY '22

Participated in the 2022 Game of the Year Event

Loved

Gained 100+ total review likes

3 Years of Service

Being part of the Backloggd community for 3 years

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Become mutual friends with at least 3 others

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Liked 50+ reviews / lists

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Gained 10+ likes on a single review

Liked

Gained 10+ total review likes

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Favorite Games

Hotel Dusk: Room 215
Hotel Dusk: Room 215
Resident Evil
Resident Evil
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VII
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition
Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition

080

Total Games Played

000

Played in 2024

003

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

Baldur's Gate 3
Baldur's Gate 3

Dec 31

Stay Out of the House
Stay Out of the House

Dec 29

Bloodborne
Bloodborne

Mar 27

Murder House
Murder House

Mar 19

A Short Hike
A Short Hike

Mar 19

Recently Reviewed See More

An almost entirely miserable experience that gives you all the freedom in the world - to butcher, and butcher, and butcher, in unimaginative lands full of equally violent and miserable people as yourself, nobody with anything meaningful to say in their lengthy monologues, everybody sort of uncanny and ugly. It's not D+D, it's not Baldur's Gate, and it's not a good RPG. When it comes down to it, it doesn't even feel that big - it just feel torturously slow and clunky, with every battle taking forever, and painfully awkward traversal otherwise, all coming together to give the illusion of size, and of time well spent. BG3 is an enigma, if only because of how extremely shallow and juvenile the game is, and also how adored.

Well, I tried to like it. I promise, I tried. I spent more than two weeks playing this, and I can't think of a single quest or area or conversation I would like to revisit. Also, the UI is cluttered and the camera frequently worked against me. Also, it crashed 50 or so times during my time with it (on PS5), mostly when trying to load saves, sometimes after levelling up, and occasionally for no discernible reason at all. What happened to standards?

I keep thinking about all the unsurpassed freedom that this game supposedly offers. Well, I don't think a game needs to offer unlimited things to do and ways to do them, because games should focus first on doing one thing well, and then expanding where it has space to. Yet, since everybody and their grandma keeps bringing up how much freedom this game gives you...I never felt free to do what I wanted in this game. I felt trapped. Suffocated. More so than in most 'linear' RPGs I've ever played. You sort of have to do every quest you can find if you want to level up. Different dialogue choices lead to the same outcomes. You can never escape the endless vortex of (often meaningless) violence thrust upon you by passersby. There were so many fights I got into that I didn't want, so many people I had to kill that I would have liked to befriend, flirt with, talk to, be nice to... God, being nice! Acting like a regular human being to a fellow traveller! What a concept! Instead, your key interaction in this game is putting your fist through somebody's skull before they can do the same to you, through battle inputs that don't feel good or natural to use. It's mind numbing!

...Ketheric Thorm's voice acting was good. Stood head and shoulders over the rest of the cast.

Brilliant. Probably one of the most anxiety-inducing games I've ever played. Thoughtfully made and presented with a beautiful PS1/CRT/VHS style, surprises around every corner, and tricky puzzles to work out. Not for the faint of heart. Perfect for playing with friends. Also comes with multiple difficulty modes, including a no enemies mode, and a hard mode that tracks hunger and thirst, which are fantastic additions in theory, though I haven't tried them yet.

(This is the worst review anybody has ever written. I’m sorry. Basically, I hugely recommend this game to anybody looking for a good, relaxing, wholesome experience. I should probably just copy+paste this at the top so you can know my opinion straight up and skip the rest of this nonsense.)

-

I’m a little late to the party, here, but Dragon Quest XI is the best JRPG I’ve played in years. Five or six years after release, when everybody else seems to have finished talking about it, it is my game of 2023. It is a lungful of fresh air. It is joyful like I haven’t known in the longest time. It is a mirror that shows not the adult you’ve become but the child you forgot about.

“Oh. There you are,” you might think to yourself as you’re running through the greenest grass you’ve ever seen in your life, grass that glows at the edges when it catches sun. “There I am.”

Am I being a little too sentimental? Maybe I’m just tired. Over tired. I work five days a week, man, and I write fiction every morning and lunch time, and some evenings, and I'm training for another marathon. I’m probably a workaholic. I’m probably running from something. At any rate, video games are supposed to be my down time activity. Yet whenever I sit down to play something new these days, particularly new AAA games, I find myself growing even more exhausted. Exhausted by the mindless, cynical stories with nothing to say, by the recycled, towering mechanics, all waving at you to keep your attention, by grim art styles, edgy dialogue, blood and violence without stakes or point, existing just for its own sake, because most people won’t play a game if you can’t remove somebody’s brains from their head through a hole in the back of their skull.

If I’m lucky, I’ll play one big budget game a year that actually makes me feel something. It’s completely mind-numbing, and makes me feel hopeless about an activity that used to bring me so much joy. Memories of PokĂ©mon Yellow, Final Fantasy X, Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil (GC) and all my other childhood favourites are buried under a stinking and growing landfill of Resident Evil 7 and Borderlands and Divinity II, games that have absolutely nothing to say, just time to kill. Buried deeper, still, by ports and remasters of those old favourites of mine that just feel wrong now. Ocarina of time doesn’t feel good without the N64 controller, and Link’s weight is all wrong in the 3DS remake; FFX characters lose their expressive eyes in the HD remaster, which you wouldn’t expect to have a big impact, but it does; Jill Valentine has impossibly jiggly boob-physics in the HD remaster of Resident Evil (GC) (Maybe it was always there, and I couldn’t tell back on the CRT) and there are new ‘loading’ message screens that pop up during startup, made without any effort to mesh with the aesthetics of the game, as well as an analogue control system that doesn't work with the fixed cameras; did you play PokĂ©mon Let’s go? I could write all day about those games and how they hollowed out the originals. My favourite video game is probably FF7 on the PS1, for the strides it made but also the way it wears its faults on its sleeves, for its whimsy and strangeness and beauty (and music). The HD port, though, is full of weird audio bugs, and has these features that might well make the game more palatable, like speed up, but which end up ruining the immersion of the game. And as for the remake
! I spent about fifteen hours on it before I couldn’t freaking take it anymore and I just had to—


Well, Dragon Quest XI is a vital reminder that big budget games can, and do, still have souls.

It is a wake-up call that, likely, will go unheeded, even by its own publisher—in interviews, developers have spoken about making the next game in the series more mature. Well, we know what mature means in gaming. Edgy humour, swearing, dark colour palettes, violence... It means, potentially, more sales. It means, certainly, creative hamstringing in a rush to make money out of what sells right now.

This is supposed to be a review, isn’t it? Well, I feel strangely unprepared to talk about Dragon Quest XI, even after 80+ hours of gameplay. Maybe that’s why I’m dragging my feet about it.

Dragon Quest XI is bursting at the seams with excellence and elegance. The simple story is bolstered by incredible dialogue and voice acting. The characters are wonderful and whimsical. The stakes are high, the pacing is on-point, the politics are navigable and entertaining, the skits are hilarious, the tragedies awful. The battles, similarly, are simple yet effective. Turn-based, slow-burn affairs where your team works together to pull off fantastic moves and spells and combos, where buffs and de-buffs become increasingly vital as you move forward in the adventure (or, if you’re starting on Harder Monsters, vital from the get-go). The character development is slow and steady, rarely overwhelming, giving you hours to think about how you’re going to develop your characters while you traverse the world map, what skills and spells you’re going to have them learn, and then which team strategies and loadouts you’re going to employ. The side quests are good. The hero’s haircut and outfit are awful to the point of hilarity. The art direction is out of this world.




I should feel happier about it. I have a new game to add to my list of favourites, and it is a generous one, filled with extra difficulty modes that make it extremely replayable. But it is like being in the height of summer, knowing the trees will turn soon, and then
 I don’t know. Play this game at your own risk, I guess. It’s an eye-opener. It takes you by the hand and makes you stop and smell the roses, and you think, I love the smell of roses. Shouldn’t there be fields of them everywhere? Well, why aren’t there? And why is everything farmland without hedgerows or ponds or other important fixtures of local habitats? Why is all the topsoil damaged? What’s happened to the climate? Why did humans wipe out 60% of the world's populations of wild vertebrates over the last fifty years? Profits? Well, aren’t roses profitable? They’re not? But they’re so nice! What will Dragon Quest XII be? Will it also be nice? Or will it only be...?




(This is the worst review anybody has ever written. I’m sorry. Basically, I hugely recommend this game to anybody looking for a good, relaxing, wholesome experience. I should probably just copy+paste this at the top so you can know my opinion straight up and skip the rest of this nonsense.)