Waited for the dub patch before playing. Yong did a fine job. The writing in this title is really well done and keeps scenes mostly interesting. Music is decent. Game looks good. Loved the customization and dress-up, even if it was a tad limited.

Ultimately, I found this game to be pretty empty and full of meandering. I don't see myself ever playing it again and will be forgetting everything that wasn't in a marketing trailer within the week.

New "Agent style" is whatever. Giving Joryu a grapple hook wire sounds cool, but it's so lame. It's a crap-shoot if the wire even works. The best tactic for large group fights is to get some drones out to distract while you lay explosive cigs around the arena.
"Yakuza style" is a bit more fun and the charge moves work well enough to combat the constant kneeling and heaving most grunts do. Them hunched over would mean kicks fly right over their head- they are immune to throws as well. Not a fan. The best strat for the little guys is to mash light punch while they're down and tank damage with yakuza-style for the big guys. A certain part of me misses the old style of gameplay. Pop an energy drink, try to see as many unique heat moves as possible. New heat moves in this title are few and far between. Really lacking in that area.

Akane is a pretty neat addition, offering most of the "side content" and adding an additional currency to manage. Though, I gotta say, I did not like a single side-story. The best optional stuff to me was recruiting fighters for the coliseum- but even that side of things got old quick.

If this was a launch title for a new console generation, I could see some merit here. A little taste of what makes this series good in a cheap package. But that's not what we got. What we have is a story that could be summarized in 2 sentences, stretched out to make us feel like it was "worth more." That brings with it all the implied padding as well. I could see players who are new to this franchise liking this a bit more than the die-hards.

Now, why do I dislike this more than ground zeroes?
I think it's because Ground Zeroes was NEW. It was a bold taste of the next generation of metal gear. It was something to be excited for.
I was going to be excited for 8 because 7 was good. Not this mini adventure.

Just watch the cutscenes online if you really wanna know.

(This game also destroyed my entire SSD. The game crashed and caused the entire drive to fail. It's hilarious. I promise that had nothing to do with my score.)

After watching TransWitchSammy play Illbleed at the behest of myself and Appreciations, I knew Blue Stinger was the next game she ought to play in order to fully appreciate Crazy Games and Shinya Nishigaki's mad genius. However, I'd previously committed to playing the game myself and had intended to do so in December, coinciding with when the game takes place, and it was quickly settled that I would play and stream it instead.

I'd like Sammy to know I took a bullet for her and I hope she never forgets the sacrifice I made.

DINOSAUR ISLAND TRAVEL LOG

Day 1:

For a Sega Dreamcast launch title and a first outing by Nishigaki's Climax Graphics (rebranded to Crazy Games two years later), Blue Stinger leads with its best foot forward.

Elliot Ballade is sailing around Dinosaur Island with his friend, who is so busy occupying himself with fitting a PVC figurine into a jar that he gets caught in a time dilation bubble. Elliot is saved a short time later by Dogs Bower, and now might be a good time to mention Masaki Segawa of Basilisk fame did all the character designs for Blue Stinger. Not to disparage his future work, but he's really never designed someone quite like Dogs since.

The story takes itself a little more seriously than Illbleed, with Nishigaki preferring to skew more towards a tone similar to that of Jurassic park, carefully balancing action and suspense while sprinkling in bits of his humor. People are mutating into horrible amalgamations of mammal and reptile, and though you have an arsenal of traditional and high-tech weapons, you can also like, put on a sumo shirt and come at them like the gassed up middle-aged, denim shorts wearing freak of nature Dogs is-- and all while thunderous music by composer Toshihiko Sahashi (who later worked on Gundam Seed) blares at a level that's just a bit too high in the mix to be able to hear your friends talk over Discord even with the game dropped to 20% volume.

In other words: this is a crazy game by Crazy Games. Or it is for now....

Day 2:

It doesn't take long to reach the Hello Market section of the game, which is littered with tons of great examples of video game signage, including so much marketing for Hassy Recovery Cola that you might be forgiven thinking it's a real product you can put your real lips to. However, Hello Market also exposes an especially frustrating aspect of Blue Stinger's design that plagues it through the duration of the game: it's "gero camera," the Japanese onomatopoeia for vomiting, which Nishigaki unaffectionately refers to it as in in an interview with Game Developer's John Andersen.

The camera tightly follows the player-character, and is at times so closely zoomed in that your visability when entering a room is limited to the back of your character's head. This was the result of an edict by Activision, which felt this sort of camera system would play better in Western markets as opposed to the more zoomed out position it takes in the Japanese version, because why on Earth would you want your game to be readable?

Unfortunately, I don't speak Japanese and I want to hear Deem Bristow go "GAH'CHA!" so I was forced to constantly eat shit when entering into rooms because Blue Stinger's enemy placement is practically the template Signalis followed, only with greater and more devious intent. It's fine, I spent all my money on large cans of Hassy. Dogs is leaving Dinosaur Island with his life and the price is only a few thousand dollars in soft drinks and completely calcified kidneys.

Day 3:

I'm starting to get a little frustrated.

Elliot is equipped with a shotgun and Dogs has a god damn gatling gun, and both these weapons do shit damage. What the hell, man? How do you make a video game gatling gun feel bad. How do you make a video game gatling gun wielded by reigning sumo champ Dogs Bower feel bad.

The whole weapon economy is fucked. Your arsenal is largely purchased from vending machines, necessitating a certain amount of grinding to afford new armaments. But when certain guns feel weak despite their cache in gaming culture, blowing 8,000 bucks on a laser sword or bazooka carries a risk that the weapon might be a total waste of money. Do you want to horde your cash and trade it in for ammo, cheeseburgers, and hot dogs? Or do you want to see what's in the mystery box?

By this point, the wildly variable audio mixing was actively causing problems with hearing my friends and being able to absorb needed context for where to go and what to do. Sammy became my Otacon, using a guide to keep me grounded and focused on the task at hand, only we discovered so deep into the walkthrough that the author was littering it with half-truths and totally glossing over important pieces of information, as if they too were a bit fed up with Blue Stinger. If IAmYoFatha was on the job, this wouldn't have happened, but he's either dead or in jail.

Day 4:

Elliot swallowed monsters.

Day 5:

Ok, man, let me tell you about burger-frames.

The final boss comes after a three minute and 45 second long defense mini-game with no save inbetween, meaning at minimum you're doing that over again if you die. Or worse, you'll have to do that plus a run back down and up a tower to restock on bazooka ammo if you didn't have the foresight to overstock your supply beforehand, because it's about the only thing that does a reliable amount of damage.

Despite having predictable patterns and attacks that can be led, the final boss feels like a bunch of random bullshit. His fire breath frequently hits outside of the effect and sometimes does not actually harm you when standing directly in the middle of it. I cannot stress enough how wildly incongruous the hitbox is with the animation itself. It also deals an insane amount of damage, killing Elliot in two hits if you didn't upgrade his health (something I didn't know was even possible until after I beat the game) and Dogs in three.

This is where cheeseburgers come in. Of all the consumable items in the game, cheeseburgers have the longest period of invulnerability from the time you eat them to the time your health is recovered, meaning you could bypass potential damage by eating a cheeseburger at the right frame of the boss's attack. At worst, you'll get a little cooked but still heal, rubbing your tummy while your head is engulfed in flames. This was the only way I was able to keep myself alive and beat the boss.

By this point, I was already at my wits end with Blue Stinger, frequently flipping the high-speed toggle in Redream and going "VROOOOM" while throwing sumo chops at a million miles an hour just to keep myself awake and invested in what was happening. Towards the end of the final night, I was making plans to buy a Japanese copy of the game and frame it.

"Oh, you must like this game a lot, huh?" some unsuspecting guest might say.

"Fucking no I do not!"

___________________________________________________

Blue Stinger is brimming with charm, humor, and that signature Nishigaki style. It's also obtuse, frustrating, and ill-conceived. It has Dogs Bower and Hassy, and it also has the worst gatling gun in video games and a "vomit camera." It's Crazy Games - or rather Climax Graphics - at its most nascent but not at its most pure.

Stand for the national anthem.

it's a decent professor layton
it's a decent ace attorney

which it's something neither series managed to be on 3ds

This game takes way too long to get interesting, every single character is unlikable. ESPECIALLY compared to the cast of the prior title.
The biggest offender: Boring. I was so bored for a majority of the game.
This goes for the story AND gameplay.
They will explain the bracelets and "BP" and the chromatic doors over and over and over and over. The game will hammer in every little detail over and over. You start getting the gist of how the game works and start questioning why they need to repeat themselves SO MUCH.
You will watch the same hallway walk, the same doors, entering the same elevator CONSTANTLY. There is a total of 1-hour of traversing via the map screen and there is nothing you can do to speed it up. Agonizing.

I'd say the ratio for fun to annoying puzzles is 1:9. Some puzzles were as simple as "write down this text string and then enter it later" or "count how many things are in the bin and enter said number into a keypad."
Others had you doing sliding puzzles or click-one-tile-to-transform-the-tiles-around-it. AKA ones where the game doesn't give you any hint and it's just about doing it via trial and error. Time stuck will vary.
The inventory screen is mid. It gets bloated pretty quick and cycling through stuff is just slow.
The easy mode switch for puzzle rooms goes from "zero help at all" to "flat-out gives you answers to puzzles." The penalty for switching to easy doesn't even make sense. Once you have the secret file safe code, just go back in and enter it again while in "hard mode" (the code doesn't change between difficulties.) Bizarre choice.

The story... No spoilers from me but uh-
I did not really care? There's so many branching paths and """endings"""" that the whole experience blends together into this mush. You will see the same plot points repeated over and over with slight variations being who's with you. and because it's technically "new dialogue" you can't skip it.

The game cheats its audience by having a pretty interesting ending. I can see why there are fans of this title and why this game is currently sitting at 4 stars average. A good ending will leave people happy. I'm sorry. I do not forgive the other 25 hours of SLOP I endured. This game got on my nerves. Never want to revisit this one ever again. ZTD time.

Trailer videos and suda fans will make Killer7 seem pretty cool! Then you play it. It's first impression is a gnarly one. Everything feels stiff, lots of going back and forth to get the fire ring and gate keys, game systems and mechanics are bizarre- as are the cutscenes. Nothing wrong with a little intrigue but this game drowns in confusion.

It's hard to think "Whoa, these Killer7 guys are COOL!!!" when you are reading slow NPC dialog or the awkward in-game cutscenes. Everyone talks like an insane rambler. Sometimes interesting, but mostly boring. Hard to latch on-to what the character is saying when it's just nonsense. It's almost comical but it's not even funny.

The game is just UGLY, I'm sorry. Cell shading should help the game from aging too bad, but it does the opposite I fear. The menus and UI look way better than the stone faced character models.

The element rings. What a boring and needless addition. As you gather more rings, you never need to collect them again. So you'll run into an "Obstacle" that requires a ring you'll already have. By the second half of the game you'll have them all! At that point it's just "press the action button to press a switch" with extra steps. You can either trial and error all the rings if it isn't obvious enough or save yourself some time and use the map.
The map. The map is so good for just telling you what character skill or element ring is the solution for any puzzle. The fact there isn't any "You are here!" indicators on the map tells me that was their way of balancing it. While it turns "puzzles" into mush, the player could use the extra help so I'm still glad it's in.

The blood system is kinda wack. I get the idea, right. Make killing enemies worth a damn else the player just runs through the level as invisible Kevin. But what they came up with are "Character specific environment actions cost blood" "puzzle hints cost blood" "Healing costs blood" "leveling up character stats cost blood" "Combat specials cost blood" "waking up certain personalities requires a minimum kill count to awaken, varying per stage." The game is pretty linear though and enemies respawn frequently. Some levels you don't even need to think about how much blood you have, you're overflowing with it or you'll be looping a few same rooms to get by. It's not the worst thing ever but it just feels unnecessary... certainly wish the game explained it better.

The combat is kinda fun? There's a few enemy types that go beyond "a fun challenge" and go into "annoying as hell just turn invisible and run through them" territory, the biggest offenders are the boss fights. Parry timing is fun to pull off and I'm glad there's infinite ammo. Landing consecutive weakpoint shots feels pretty nice!

This game was rushed to save the gamecube, I get that. grasshopper had a way bigger vision for the game than this. Unfortunately, what we got is just not good.

The hardships of expanding Silent Hill as a series are not that different from why Indiana Jones is struggling while Star Wars or Marvel are thriving, Star Wars and Marvel represent entire universes to explore filled with characters and different literal and figurative worlds, while Indiana Jones is centered on one main character who thrived in the 80's and hasn't been nearly as relevant since. Silent Hill in this case is the real main character of the franchise, and while the first few games are very different from each other it becomes increasingly harder and harder to make something that is both original and unique enough to validate the existence of a new Silent Hill game while still making it feel like Silent Hill. There's an inevitable strain in trying to work within the confines of a Silent Hill game, because so much of what makes a Silent Hill game feel like a Silent Hill game is tied to that original setting despite the fact that even Team Silent was struggling to work with it by the fourth game.

It's because of this that I have a lot of appreciation for The Short Message conceptually, I think fans really need to get over the idea of Silent Hill games having the same exact setting and themes as the older ones if they want the series to continue to get new games. The new themes are also fertile ground to explore some interesting ideas, I liked the fact that this game touched on a lot of generational themes relating to my generation. The game has a lot of cringy topics and moments, but I couldn't really give the game that much flack for it a lot of the time because it felt pretty earnest and I think it was honestly brave to put out a product like this for a game franchise like Silent Hill where most of the people playing were probably going to be old men who don't give a shit about lesbian teenage girls.

Sadly there's one series convention I think that is almost required in order to make a Silent Hill game that's completely absent here: subtlety. Look, I won't lie and say that the subtlety of previous games completely matches up with the Life is Strange type story they're trying to tell here, but it just would have made the whole experience a lot better. There's a painful lack of subtlety here, because the writing isn't really good enough to bear the brunt of the trauma and cringe we're put through, and it would have just been a lot better to have the story be a bit less in your face. While the writing of the teenagers is generally ok, there's a lot less meat to dig into here with there being no nuance to details or ideas to ponder, the text files you see jthroughout the first few minutes alone basically explain the entire theme of the game right away. The voice acting also does not completely live up to the part, I can again say that the teenagers do a pretty good job though there is more cringe here than I would generally like but that's more of a me issue, the adults however are absolutely awful and I couldn't stand hearing them whenever you found their abusive messages. I did like the fact that the voice acting for Cherry Blossom is desynced from her visual performance, I thought it was a very nice intentional detail as it added an uncanniness to it and it reminded me a lot of behind the scenes commentary about how Silent Hill 2 purposely wanted to use more digital looking animation to appear more humanlike.

The gameplay in the game is pretty bad though, while I wouldn't say it's completely irredeemable as you can understand what it's going for immediately and it's pretty inoffensive, I found that the game just kinda dragged on. Not gonna lie for a game like this where you kinda just walk around and interact with stuff the highest score I'd probably give it is a 6/10, so in that respect the few gameplay complaints I have aren't terrible but it just generally doesn't have great pacing - it's a 2 to 2 and a half hour game that feels like a 4 hour game and that's pretty bad. The chase sequences are also pretty bad and feel very tacked on, I did the first three without even knowing what I was doing and I didn't die. I usually don't complain about cameras in games but the camera in this game is pretty problematic, as your phone basically has to alert you before the horror segment even starts that you're about to encounter a chase sequence, completely removing any tension whatsoever. I did like the last sequence though - it was a genuinely great blend of puzzles and horror gameplay and it was pretty intense.

It feels appropriate that Another Code, Celeste 64 and Silent Hill: The Short Message all released around the same time. All are about girls trying to solve some personal struggles, but only one of them is being used to prop up a cold dead franchise. I'm not going to say something like The Short Message is cynical because it's part of a major franchise, you can tell the people who made it put a lot of work into it. But the flaws are all a bit too much, and after a while you have to ask why did this really need to be a Silent Hill game? I'm all for the series changing and having new messages and forms of expression but not even the writing here really takes any queues from the qualities of the older games. And there's a very thin line between trying to use Silent Hill to greenlight interesting projects, and using major themes to promote the revitalization of a franchise. By the end of the game when you get to the parental abuse chapter, which almost feels like it was made to check off a box on a list of traumas and is genuinely the worst written chapter by far with irredeemably bad writing, I started feeling colder and colder to this game despite any good intentions have. For what it's worth I still hope they keep creating original stuff.

This is more like how i wanted Jeanne d'arc on the psp to be. For a Fire Emblem clone it has some gameplay elements that are uniquely it's own. Like multiple fractions to get reputation from (which give rewards).
The story is better than indie SPRG's usually have (intrigue between fractions around the French Revolution), and some characters have more personalty than some characters in modern FE counterparts. The art is beautiful for a small indie game studio, and the voiceacting (in chinese) is really nice and there is a lot of it. It even has subs so you know what they say.
As a SRPG enthusiast i enjoyed myself with this.

The game clearly had a lot of hard work put into it with it's great sprites and character art. It's a decent fire emblem clone for a while and the idea of making a more fire emblem-style game in a more recent historical setting is great. The writing is decent enough though the english language beta can be a bit shaky at times. I like the cute girls in the game, particularly Eugenie which is why I would've liked to continue the game. Unfortunately as the difficulty increases, the losses feel more and more unfair and it feels less like putting together your own strategies and more like figuring out the one or two ways you can clear a mission with little leeway given the frustratingly strict defeat conditions a lot of the time. I probably could have just repeatedly grinded with optional missions but I didn't want to waste time with that especially since the missions are probably just going to get harder and require more grinding. Basically it's more of a puzzle game than a strategy game, kind of like advance wars.

A solid SRPG with a strong Fire Emblem influence - I'd rank it over a good chunk of the FE games, even. A key difference is that instead of a permadeath toggle, allies retreat when their HP hits 0 but your reward money decreases if you let it happen. It's a unique take on the issue that I really appreciate.

The art is nice, the setting is a fun alt-history version of the French Revolution, and the unit classes are built to match. I enjoyed it more often than not, but the last few chapters can get frustrating as SRPGs do - even when you've invested in the objective best class (light infantry with the +1 range promotion).

Another pain point is that some of the side missions are actual puzzles with fixed stat rosters and a single solution. It wasted a bit of time before I just gave up and looked the solutions up online. The upshot is that side missions are mostly for achievement hunting more than essential in-game benefits.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with the game and I'm definitely looking forward to a sequel.

Strider is the most aggressively "pretty good" game out there. Physics feel pretty good, level design is pretty good, flow is pretty good, boss patterns are pretty good, spectacle is pretty good, voice acting is intentionally hilariously hammy with no sense of irony and I appreciate it. Some of the background art is nice to contrast the 2010's-era bland models, everything WORKS, this game would easily get an A in a game design course. The issue is that it really has no idea what it wants to BE.

Occasional moments of exhilerating platforming are often set back by dull segments of mashing the attack button through enemies. Neat movement upgrades like an omnidirectional air dash or a slide kick are never utilized except in specific points to make progress. You get a freezing attack that you use for platforming once in the whole game and then just use to break enemies who have blue shields that are allergic to ice but not explosions. You have a very fast attack that's satisfying to use and homages the old Strider well, but every single enemy has mountains of health that slows the power fantasy of the game to a crawl. There's a really neatly realized map of a futuristic eastern block dystopia that the game never has you explore by telling you exactly where to go at all times, and not in a Zero Mission "go to Ridley now" way, I mean a proximity alert to get to a checkpoint or screen transition. The game seems to realize that enemies can clip you for no reason and ruin your momentum, so there's tons of health pick-ups all around, even in the final boss fight, so you're very rarely in danger of dying. Bosses other than Solo are not reactive to your presence and just damage sponge their way through your attacks while you're only KINDA inclined to dodge theirs as you can probably tank through 80% of their attacks and still win unless it's a rapid-fire shot.

Strider is a game that has moments of fun; Strider inherently has a nice feel to him and jumps good. There are even some stretches that are legitimately nicely designed levels that work with the flow of the game. It is remarkable how a game can do everything so neatly and, through simple game design choices to make everything feel as standardized and fair as it can be, make for a dull, repetitive, forgettable experience for long stretches of its run time. I am not upset, I'm just disappointed.