Fire Emblem Engage. Got really, really into Fire Emblem right before its release, playing much of the series in a feverish pitch with this game's release being the climax. Was it worth it? Sure was. One of my favorite Femblems.

Gameplay? Fantastic. The difficulty of the Maddening mode has hands-down the best difficulty pacing in the series; they really got it with this one. It's enough of a toothy challenge right off the bat that always feels hard enough, and it keeps pace with you even as you gain more and more tools to deal with its challenges. It contrasts with Three Houses Maddening, which is comically difficult in the beginning with your do-nothing scrub kids until they grow into their own and it gets much easier. Pretty great last maps, though. It also contrasts with Conquest's Lunatic difficulty, which punches your face in from the start and every mission is a fight for your life. Yeah, Conquest is pretty great, too.

The systems of simple character customization with emblem ring skills and the emblems themselves were really fun. I was worried that the game would be a juggernaut-fest of steamrolling the enemy with superpowered transforming emblem units (this can still happen but only if you really know what you're doing), but was pleasantly surprised at just how fun the emblem engaging mechanics were. The series fanservice was pretty nice, too, having the player take on some of the hardest maps from the old games.

Other production value things - great soundtrack with its dynamic battle themes, excellent animation with throwbacks to GBA battle animations, the previous peak of the series, and some really nice optimization. The game actually runs well on the switch, which is a real shocker.

What I didn't like as much is pretty much what everyone else didn't like, the story and the character designs. The story is Fine, it's a campy Marvel story that I was checked out of and kind of enjoyed the villain's motivations metaphorically as a Femblem gamer who just like me fr. It had hype moments, so what more could I ask for. Oh, I know - less text. The game had so much text and said so little with it! Man!

The character designs. Many will kvetch that they are too "anime," too "weeby," because, well, Fire Emblem has never been animesque! Anyway, Mika Pikazo's art owns, and I like some of the really exaggerated designs. Seeing Celine flip around in a giant poofy onion dress and platform shoes is the funniest and best thing. The problem is, there's no cohesion. Like, none. No one looks like they live where they're from, no one looks like they inhabit the same world, and nothing looks real. They feel like a bunch of gacha game character designs slapped together, and that's pretty much how they were made - IS asked Pikazo to just go and design 50 characters and bada-bing-bada-boom here we go. Bring us back to Echoes... or at least, Thracia...

Anyway, great strategy RPG

Splatoon is a weird franchise. I honestly didn't get the hype for the first two games. It always had this 'baby's first fps' kind of vibe that turned me off of them. The idea seemed promising but I couldn't get behind the weird 'squid' music and it all just seemed so childish to me. I completely ignored them and stuck to my hardcore tactical shooters like Apex Legends and Rainbow 6 Siege that I knew and loved and let Nintendo's weird newest IP pass me by.
But then in 2022 I went through a really vulnerable time in my life where my future became extraordinarily uncertain and fell into a depression.... right when Splatoon 3 came out.

And thank god that it did honestly, because I was sleeping on one of the best FPS franchises of the last decade.

"They call it Splatoon 3 because really you're getting three games in one" is what my friend told me as a joke, but they're really not wrong. You get a single player campaign that lasts 4-6 hours, a multiplayer FPS that has way more depth than I gave it credit for, and an absolutely bonkers PvE game mode that rivals the likes of Left 4 Dead 2 as one of the best swarm shooters I've ever played.

I never finished the single player campaign though, so lets just call it a cool FPS with a great PvE mode.

The normal FPS aspect of the game is the same as the other two Splatoon games. You have guns that shoot ink, you can 'swim' in surfaces painted by your ink, and you can 'splat' your enemies by shooting them with your ink. Each weapon has its own loadout, with a secondary grenade-like throwable and a special 'ultimate' ability that every FPS has to have now-a-days. It's really a cool setup, and allows for a variety of different playstyles. If you want to focus on the ink part of the game there are weapons that are good for spreading ink, but you can also say fuck that and take duelies and roll your way into the enemy base to score a killstreak.

If I had a gripe with this system it would be that Nindendo seems absolutely terrified of ever making a weapon that's... well... too good? A lot of the weapons I like are best 2 out of 3 -- that is -- the Weapon is fun to use, but either the Ultimate of the Secondary or both don't play well with it. Have a weapon that's good at picking people off but is lacking in the ink category? Well then of course, the grenade has to be the angle-shooter, an extremely hard to hit grenade that only does piddly damage and doesn't ink anything. Have a roller that is slow to move but wide and great for inking? Well obviously any Roller player would want to stop everything they're doing and place down a Splash Wall right? .... RIGHT??? ROLLERS LOVE STANDING STILL RIGHT???? I honestly can't blame them though, on release there was a weapon that was good at inking with a really powerful ultimate that you could easily spam and it took multiple nerfs just to get it back in line.... just for another variant of that weapon it to take it's place. Ahhhh live service balancing <3

Anyway, the creativity in the design of these weapons are perfect too. Splatoon takes place after a vague end of the world event that killed off all the humans, so all of these weapons are repurposed version of human tech. There's a sniper fitted to a #2 pencil called the Snipewriter. There's a mini-washing machine called the Sloshing Machine that chucks ink all over your enemies. There's a whole class of weapons that are repurposed window wipers, it's great.

But if Splatoon 3 was just it's PvP mode I probably wouldn't bother talking about it, besides curtly saying 'yeah it's pretty good'. That's where we get to Salmon Run, the PvE game mode.

No joke, Salmon Run is some of the most intense gaming moments I've ever had in an FPS. You have to fight hoards of frothing bipedal salmon called salmonoids and try to collect their eggs by delivering or throwing them into a basket at a central location. Outside of the normal salmonoids you get harder variants called boss salmonoids that are more threatening and all require unique ways of defeating them. It's all pretty straight forward until you find out that your weapons are all randomized from a daily set of four weapons. You and your team must work together to fight off the swarm while also often figuring out how some of these weapons even work, and compensating for any disparities in ink or range.

Every once in a while you'll get the privilege to face off against one of the 'King Salmon', these giant kaiju-like salmonoids that can absolutely wreck your shit. If you manage to take them out you'll get some salmon-run-specific currency that can be spent on special cosmetics you can show off in the PvP mode too.

And the whole thing comes together perfectly. The atmosphere of the rest of the game is gone. You're now in the trenches of inkling 'nam, and all you have is the weapon in your hands and your coworkers by your side. I fucking love this game mode and I climbed to Executive VP, the highest rank, over the course of 6 months.

A side note:
My friend group figured out that there's a role in high level Salmon Run called 'princess', and it's typically a role given to whoever has the most garbage weapon in the set. 'Princess's job is to ignore all Salmonoids and just focus on getting eggs to the basket. This is absolutely hilarious and I refuse to play Salmon Run without bringing it up in conversation at least once.

The community of Splatoon is really what gets me honestly. You remember the Wii-U Plaza from back in the day where people would post images and shitposts on the homescreen of the Wii-U? They basically kept that and brought it all the way up to Splatoon 3. If you log on consistently enough you'll get to see absolutely wild drama play out, such as one user named 'gao' fervently writing out the phrase: "Throw me to the Salmonoids, I'll come back PREGNANT" and deciding to post it for the entire world to see. I can't get this kind of unhinged shitposting anywhere else man, and believe me I've tried.

And if you've gone your entire life without experiencing a Splatfest, then good god man you're missing out. Basically every month or two Nintendo decides to split the community up by asking room-splitting questions like: "what's the best ice cream flavor" and watching us all devolve into cavemen. For one weekend, the entire atmosphere of the game changes. The day before, you can see them start to put up decorations, and as night falls the entire plaza is turned into a mixture of a rave and a festival as we all party and have religious arguments about how Strawberry is CLEARLY THE SUPERIOR FLAVOR and how I will SPLAT THE NEXT FUCKER WHO TRIES TO TELL ME OTHERWISE.

And when there isn't a Spaltfest to look forward to, then there's a Big Run on the horizon. If normal Salmon Run is squid 'nam, then Big Run is Squid World War 3.

The premise is fucking genius. The PvE and PvP gamemodes have completely separate maps because they're completely different games. The PvP gamemodes have pretty, sunny, generally family friendly vibes, while the Salmon Run maps are hell in a handbasket. Red horizons, green seas, everywhere you go is death.

So what if the Salmonoids actually made it past us? What if they made it allll the way to our safe and pretty little PvP maps? Well then you'd get a Big Run. Basically one of the PvP maps gets overwhelmed by Salmonoids and it's all hands on deck, all out war, for all that is good for Squid-kind. The music in the Plaza? Gone. The skies? Red. The TV's? All showing an emergency broadcast. It's lowkey one of the most unnerving shit you can put in a E10+ game.

It's these scheduled events that puts Splatoon into a tier of it's own for me. It made me feel like a kid again, waiting for the next update, waiting for the next community event so I can do my part and take down more anti-strawberry heretics. You really don't get this kind of shit in live-service games these days because, despite what the community thinks, they really don't make much money for the amount of time and effort needed to pull it off. But I think that's a horrible way of thinking about it.

It's a bit embarrassing to say, but, in a time where I didn't know what the fuck to do with my life anymore, I had Splatoon to keep me going. Did you see todays Salmon Run rotation? What about tomorrows, is that going to be any good? Did you hear? The next Splatfest was just announced, I can make it to then right? And then there's the next Big Run 3 weeks after that? It gave me something to look forward to when I had nothing else in my life to look forward to. And it's made this wonderful weird community of idiots that I can't help but miss now that the games entering it's sunset phase.

In all honestly, I can't in good faith recommend Splatoon 3 to people these days because I think it's juuuust about run it's course. They haven't announced when the last Splatfest will be, but I'm predicting it'll be in the next couple of months and after that there will be no new content. The community is a lot smaller than it was on release, and the casual scenes kinda taken a hit because of it. I can't hop into a turf war these days without getting absolutely bodied by people with 300 more hours than me, but honestly that's fine.

Splatoon 3 was a highlight of one of the worst years of my life. I deeply cherish the memories I had with it and you can bet your ass I will be there on day 1 for Splatoon 4 ready to fuck up some 10 year old's with my dualie rollouts.

(review as the of the end of volume Final)

A game I completely discounted on release, Blue Archive is a perfect example of how gacha soshage have really taken the torch from the 00s/10s eroge scene. Of course, this has been the direction the space has taken since Fate/Grand Order's raucous success, but this one to me feels like the moment. Its hard for me at least to discuss the game except in comparison to its main two competitors in the Story Gacha, FGO and Arknights. Those games I often feel--as great as they are--get away from themselves, with their grand stories and rotating casts often running away from the presentation of the plot--if I was a smarter person, perhaps I'd make some reference to how Grand the scale of those games are and how the small phone screen ill-suits them, but I am not a philosopher.

Blue Archive keeps it simple. Its a game downright obsessed with the small, every day--even the most minor cursory thoughts about how Kivotos as a place works makes the whole thing crash down, but that same small nature just makes it work better for the phone format. I could easily shotgun entire chapters of Blue Archive while at work in a way I struggle to with FGO or (especially) Arknights. The focus on the more day-to-day "nichijou-kei" sort of writing helps this as well, I think.

But all of that would be missed if the writing wasn't up to par, which is where Blue Archive shines. The game's so endearingly optimistic and even the bit characters have too much charm that you can't not love them and buy into their struggles or lackthereof. It even made one of the worst character types--the person who Talks Only In Video Game References--arguably the best, most realized character in the game. The plots themselves can get quite grand in scale--be it Ancient Blood Feuds or Literally The End of Existence of Every Dimension Ever--but they never stop focusing on these girls, and your role in helping them overcome their various traumas, quirks, feelings, or whatever.
Which is where I should put my subnote--yes, the premise is that you're the good-hearted sensei who teaches these girls, and yes they are all very voluptuous and a lot of them definitely do want to jump your bones--but I was honestly shocked by how wholesome the whole game is. Its horny in practice, but in spirit? I'm not as convinced.

I actually really liked how far it takes the teacher conceit--although your character does take definitive action in the stories, it always comes from a place of growth for the girls you are helping. It has a lot of emphasis on how part of the reason Kivotos as a place is fucked is because the world ultimately does not help these girls and there's no mentorship, no people helping them out except themselves--this is exemplified by all the main antagonists being pretty explicit metaphors for methods of control and coercion of the adults these girls should be able to trust and rely on(and, mechanically, this is also tied in by the main character's Otona no Card--literally, adult card, translated into english as your credit card, an object that the other antagonists who are adults should have but don't because they don't accept that responsibility to the students). And that sort of sense of, I don't know, fulfillment? , is what makes the whole plot work.

And its beautiful.

As to the game? Its a passable idle game i guess, but who really cares about that.

「やさしさで守れるあしたなんかどこにもない」

Anti-humanist yuri SF. All too often stories about sentient robots really only serve to stroke the ego of the humans creating and consuming them -- see the utterly abysmal anime Vivy for a great example of this -- but Crymachina is unwaveringly transgressive, reaching the conclusion that there is no inherent value in "humanity" and going on to posit that human society does not deserve to proliferate if that means trampling on intelligent beings it views as inferior.

As with Crystar, Crymachina's characters are concerned primarily with their own happiness, acting for the sake of the people they hold dear. And yes, the game is unabashedly queer, with characters driven not just by familial bonds but romantic love; indeed I am hard-pressed to think of another JRPG where love is such a strong motivating factor for the principal cast. Leben and Enoa struggle against the system not out of a sense of obligation or duty, but because of their desire for a life with one another, because their future together is being threatened. While the world of Crymachina is built on high-concept SF, taking enough cues from the novel The Three-Body Problem to warrant citing it in the end credits, its conflict remains raw, poignant, and grounded to a degree a great deal of media struggles to achieve.

Where I think the game will prove divisive is actually its runtime. Crymachina clocks in at only 15-20 hours of playtime, so it has to cover a lot of twists and turns fast. I can completely understand someone feeling as though the plot and characters don't have time to breathe, but I personally would argue that the script is tight enough that anything added to it could be nothing more than chaff. On Twitter I stated that it has "Blue Archive pacing," and I meant that in a complimentary sense. Certainly a YMMV aspect of the game, but it personally worked for me.

What I think most players will appreciate, though, is how abbreviated, even cursory, the actual gameplay is when compared to Crystar. You may have to grind a few times, but the stages are short and you are not forced to repeat content ad nauseam; I would estimate I spent only around 5 hours of my 16 hour playtime actually controlling characters. As such, while the game is much shorter than Crystar, I would not be surprised if it actually had more text...

And of course I would be remiss not to mention another one of the game's strong suits -- the audio. Personally I think Crymachina's soundtrack is sakuzyo's best work period, with much more varied compositions than Crystar. It helps that the music is used much better here than Crystar, with fewer and less repetitious music cues letting you appreciate the individual tracks more. As one might expect, the voice acting is also sublime, with Tohno Hikaru's performance as Enoa in particular lending the scenario some real emotional weight.

All in all Crymachina is a very different game from Crystar, but it pleasantly surprised me with its powerful script, acerbic critique of the ugly aspects of human society, and willingness to be fully-fledged romantic yuri in a space where few works meaningfully depict love at all. This is definitely my favorite Furyu game... make of that statement what you will, I suppose.

The bottom line is that Sea of Stars is an ultimately mediocre title that manages to cobble together its form by stealing things from a dozen other, older, better titles. Each thing it steals is implemented worse than the game it steals from, but still good enough to not be bad. The act of playing the game is fine. It's Fine. It is the ultimate definition of Mid. Mid of Stars.

To list all this game's faults on a lower level than "wow it looks pretty" would to be sit here all day, but I can't help but go over some of the biggest issues I had during my time with it.

The first and foremost is the writing and plot--the plot by itself is pretty standard, just your basic "go kill the demon king" storyline when you get down to it, but its building off lore from a game pretty notorious for having nonsense lore(The Messenger) so it ends up being nonsense here as well--none of the worldbuilding details or twists really ever land because you never get the sense that this world is anything more than levels in a video game. There's like maybe five actual towns in the game, for gods sake. This is compounded by the character writing that manages to be completely uninteresting at best, and positively dreadful at worst. The worst of it is a major side-character in act 1 that speaks exclusively in video game references, who basically ruins every scene she is in and kill what little pathos there can be in this game. Once she steps aside, it gets a little better and I'd even say act 2 cooks for a short time, but then they do the very bold decision to put the only two characters with any sort of internality on a bus until literally the final boss door. Its frustrating. That's not to speak of the other issue with the game not respecting itself, every scene that gets a little tropey immediately gets a Marvel quip to kill any tension and remind you you're seeing scenes played out in a dozen older games with way more self-respect. It sucks.

Then, there's the game pacing. As mentioned, the game has I think six actual "towns" in it, and you only visit each of them at a single point in your journey which means you consistently go 4+ dungeons at a time without any "downtime" where you can sidequest, play minigames, talk to npcs etc. They completely missed the memo on the "vibes" of a jrpg in spite of aping these games so hard--those points where you're just sort of idly walking around town are important and this game just doesn't have any of that. This is compounded by what I'd call location issues--backtracking even after you get to the end of the game with all movement options is painful, consistently involving traversing old dungeons or going through two-three extra screens to get to where you need to go, so the game actively disincentivizes you from trying to do anything besides progress the main quest.

The actual gameplay is split into two--puzzle dungeons generously described as "Crosscode but worse" and combat described as "Mario RPG but worse", double-hampered by piss-easy difficulty. Like, this game has 8 different accessibility options but I struggle to find how anyone would need them when the game difficulty is toggled so low.

Which sucks, because the one place the game excels in is the economy/item management, you have a very limited inventory that heavily incentivizes consumable usage, and also the gold is a really tight resource that you have to manage. In theory, this is great and adds an attrition factor the long dungeon dives mentioned earlier--in practice, the difficulty tuning being so low means you never interact with those systems because you can easily go through the game never using consumables which means you can sell all the crafting supplies for a surplus of money.

Even the OST manages to not really be striking, like its perfectly serviceable but I never really found myself humming a tune or getting hyped by a song. Its just, rpg music. You could replace it with the rpgmaker default soundpack and I think the experience would have been exactly the same.

And yet, in spite of all this, I still finished the game including the true ending that demands like 95% completion because it was juuuust that not bad enough that I could sunk cost fallacy my way through it.

The final thing I'd leave you with that speaks to the shoddy nature of the game is the opening--after the framing device, the game opens with our new heroes going off to their first mission. You fight exactly one tutorial battle vs a goblin, then it forces you into a flashback where you see their backstory. This last an hour and leads up to exactly the beginning of the game. Why did they have the flashback? Why would you not just start the game from the backstory sequence? Its the sort of thing literally any editor would notice and rectify immediately.

Truly, the Mid of Stars.