the only game where you can see Angel Gabriel swearing at you lol

Act I and Act II were pretty good.

has an interesting lore and cool aesthetics in some parts

Boss fights were pretty especially Gabriel bosses was fockin epic and it gives me DMC Vergil vibes...

"You make even the DEVIL CRY!"

it's only been like two weeks since my first review so i'm just here to say everything i already said but again, except take out that last little portion at the end. i really only wanted to replay genocide route because i felt like a piece o' shit for cheating the very last boss of the game and wanted to do it legitimately this time

I did what I set out to do, actually grew to enjoy the fight a lot more, this game is peak. I won't hold it against anyone that can't make it through though lmao

Unfortunately, this is probably the best yugioh sim ever made. Great accessibility, easy to pick up and fun to mess around in. However, this all comes at the cost of the gacha system - extremely hard to get cards you need consistently and can be hard to build multiple decks you want to use for this reason. The crafting system is excellent but you'll typically find yourself lacking SR and UR points pretty frequently. I've found it's best to plan around building a specific deck you'd like to play with for a good period (espc if you are F2P) so you have some consistency.
That being said, this game is also surprisingly free to play friendly as long as you're not itching to make multiple meta decks. While i can sympathize with new/returning players logging on, running into kashtira/vanquish soul/purrely, etc. getting chained into oblivion and getting frustrated with how much the game has changed, this remains the best way to experience a yugioh sim and i appreciate how it's let people (including myself) reignite their interest in the series.
As improvements, I would like to see the game's card base updated more frequently (as many others have brought up) as we're missing a lot of recent staples, and would like gems to be more frequent, which would fix some of the issues with the gacha system.

me: this is the most gruesome layer so far

also me: oh, its the violence layer. that explains it.

full long-form review coming once i p-rank everything

If you thought that the hidden-cat-like games were thriving this year, wait until you see how the introspective-cooking genre did this year; we got a ton of them and the ones I played were bangers!... Sure, I might just have played two, but still!

There's a sweetness to Venba that feels distant and incredibly familiar both at the same time: the elements that comprise its story aren’t anything new, these beats and themes have been seen time and time again in a myriad of ways, but what makes this little tale so special is how it uses all off them to create something unique, so deeply personal, like a delicious meal which contains ingredients time and time again, but prepared in such a way it forms its own special flavor… or like tasting food that now only persists in your childhood memories.

I’m completely alien to Tamil culture, a statement which I sadly could repeat when talking about many others, and I was raised in the land my family and ancestors were born, and yet nothing is lost on me; far more capable and intelligent people than me have talked about this in great length, but the globalization and specifically the ‘’Americanization’’ of the west is a sight that bears terrible results in the long run; instead of different cultures interacting with one another and understanding each other’s traditions and evolving and changing together, we see how little by little everything changes into not an unification, but to a macroculture of sorts imposed by multinationals and enterprises in every facet of the day to day life, only taking what sees of value and implementing it while treating the rest as lesser or nothing more that a novelty to look at and treat as a toy, like a hoarding dragon burning everything on its wake but adding the shiny stuff he finds to its pile. Venba doesn’t analyze these problems directly, but it speaks about its consequences through the life of a immigrant Indian family in Canada. Kavin neglects its culture not because he doesn’t care, not because he likes that his schoolmates call him Kevin, but because he’s terrified at the idea of being cast away by his peers and society because of it, he’s deeply scared of presenting himself as ‘’odd’’, as something that doesn’t fit, something alien. That sentiment persists through adulthood, only now its peers treat his past which he couldn’t really never connect as something ‘’neat’’, a cool thing to put on TV that’s aesthetically pleasing, something that can only exist on its vacuum, being judged while expected to be nice to look at. The moment Kavin finally reconnects with his mother and what he didn’t want to face is beautiful for many reasons, but one of them is that is an act of defiance and perseverance, and even if he doesn’t know everything about his roots, it doesn’t matter, he’s learning, he’s improving what came before and completing it, all through just having a nice cooking session with his mother, and that’s just… beautiful, there isn’t any other way to put it.

Preparing said dishes isn’t nothing really complicated or actually involved, but it manages to make it feel like it; you aren’t merely clicking and dragging on sone stuff, you are deciphering and learning ways to prepare plates of Venba’s past, seeing her remember in what order everything is needed to be done until everything is second nature to her, and it’s appetizing as it is cathartic. The game has achievements for making everything perfect, but also for screwing up, and I cannot think of another way of showing what this is all about beyond the game itself; it doesn’t matter if you fumble de bag, you are cooking, you are learning, and maybe you’ll do that mistake 4 times more but it doesn’t matter, ‘cause it’s still fun and fulfilling… and that’s what brought back memories.

I was originally gonna make fun of a moment that reminded me of that scene in Ratatouille (you know the one) but then I realized how insincere and condescending I sounded, ‘cause it’s also a moment I myself have experienced, the memory of my parents, my mother, my father, showing my how to prepare food, how to make desserts that to this day I cherish, but some that I haven’t tasted since then. Venba is not only a story about culture and its loss, it also can be seen about family and bonds, about sharing the little moments, both good and bad, and of ultimately you yourself deciding what you want to do or who you want to be, but your true loved one being always there during the whole process. It’s about regrets, the regrets of Venba, the regrets of Paavalan, and the regrets of Kavin, and the hardships of them all.

A stroll through the steam reviews shows just how many people have connected to this story, many driven to tears, to remember their past and their lives, reflected through this little 90 minute experience. I myself connected to it in a different way, and I just look at Venba wishing it sometimes was a bit slower, that it took the time to explore certain ideas, because I really wanted to see more, to experience more passages of this fragmented story, to see this family’s life, both in its happy and sad times.

And still, in just seven chapters, Venba makes me relish the past, my own memories, and it’s simple worth being seen, worth being valued… and why nor, worth crying for.

This year, over here a staggering amount of kids and even teenagers celebrated Halloween during the 31 of October and 1st of November, effectively making the festivity that would usually take place in Galicia during those days, Samain, completely ignored, and with it, its specific plates and traditions. As I said, at the end, everyone is free to choose what they wish to do, what they wish to celebrate it, and I’m not villainizing this fact whatsoever… but I want to truly appreciate those that still kept the tradition because they truly wanted too, because they really like it, because they consider it a part of themselves, and that goes for everyone in the world, of every country, of every culture.

That isn’t something to be ashamed of.

That’s something to be celebrated unlike any other thing.

have not played this but you all need to fuck off

so called free thinkers when somebody tells them to hate a game because they don't like a topic in it (They have also not played the game)

like seriously this is the same people pissed off at the ideologies of boomers wanting to ban games like gta for murder and extreme violence getting pissed off at incest, like massive hypocrisy here just saaaaaying