Sky SC has to be one of the few games I cried as the ending credits rolled not because the ending was sad but because I couldn't believe it was over.

There's a lot of flaws to Sky SC. Namely how formulaic the story was, the amount of backtracking near the end, and how stereotypically anime the Ouroboros Enforcers were.

However the storytelling and characters more than carried the entire game on its back. FC was essentially a 60 hour introduction to the Liberl arc and SC is where everything pays off. And the payoff is so, so worth it.

Estelle Bright is one of my favourite protagonists. She's incredibly well-written and her character development across both games, from a type naive airhead to a maturing young woman, sure of her path and the people she wants to walk beside, is incredible and completely believable.

All the characters in the game are so well written. It was never a drag to read through all the dialogue in the game because I love all these characters so much. Do yourself a favor and install the EVO voice mods. I can't imagine playing the game unvoiced. From Agate to Oliver to Kloe and Loewe, watching their struggles to find their own path was no less a delight than watching the magnetic relationship between Estelle and Joshua. And Estelle and Joshua's relationship is peak.

FC was a good JRPG. SC is something else entirely. I'm struggling to put it in words but something about how comfy the game was despite the raised stakes, the well written characters and their relationships with each other, the incredible writing, story and world building makes this something really special.

Congrats Falcom. I'm hooked. I'm playing the next 11(?) games in the series.

I want to like Cris Tales more than I did. It has the foundation of something that could have been great but fails to deliver on almost every aspect.

The gameplay had the potential to be fun and creative with its time travel gimmicks but the tutorial battle is as complex as the game ever gets with the time travel mechanics. In the end it's relegated to a few creative spells and quick and easy puzzle solving.

The barebones of the story is fine. It's unimaginative in parts and overstayed its welcome in the end with all the backtracking but the biggest issue is that the writing is bland, cheesy and much too condensed. The characters never have room to grow aside from maybe K (and for that smidgen of character development alone he's my favourite character). The story never managed to make me really care about anything because it didn't manage to get me invested, a failure of storytelling and character development.

The soundtrack is fine with quite a few nice tracks and the art style is gorgeous, but it feels like they spent their entire budget on art and didn't focus enough on the rest of the game. Cris Tales has good ideas and it's frustrating to see the potential in it that is never realized. I went through the entire game hoping it would get better but it never did.

This game did not have to be 23 hours long. I felt like the first half just dragged, partly because the first four cases were very easy to figure out, and partly because I didn't care much for any of the characters. The majority just didn't live long enough for me to start to care about them. The others never broke out of their tropes and actually have a personality or developed in anyway. I only really cared about Sakura, Kyoko and Byakuya.

Maybe it was because I started playing this right after finishing Ace Attorney but I felt vaguely insulted about the game literally spelling out everything for me. None of the trials were particularly difficult either. I had more trouble trying to figure out what exactly the game wanted me to do to prove my point or even just hitting the right points with all the white noise (mean difficulty is more annoying than difficult) than actually solving any of the mysteries.

I also felt like the game just ran out of steam at the end and instead of letting the player come to the conclusion themselves, they decided to just info dump everything in one go. For a game that built up its overarching mystery over time in fairly decent way, it was a let down to have everything solved in one long exposition.

More than a decade later and I still love this cast of colourful wacky characters, the storytelling, presentation and everything that makes Ace Attorney so special.

An absolute classic and a must play for anyone that likes VNs.

Also plays perfect on Steam Deck for the nostalgic portable experience.

I love this for the same reasons I love Natsume Yuujinchou. It's comfy, it's slow, it's melancholic and achingly sad at parts and sweet in others. Ayakashi Gohan doesn't really jump out and grab you. It grows on you slowly, gently.

The art is gorgeous. The music makes me want to cry now after finishing the game. The game is fully voice acted, including fully voiced heroine. Rin is a wonderful heroine with actual character development in the human routes. She's a real character and not just a self-insert. The only minor issues I have is that some bits are really slow and/or kind of predictable/uninteresting and they really shove "eating together with everyone is happiness" in your face.

This game will always have a special space in my heart. If you think you would be remotely interested in this otome game, please give it a try.

Favourite routes: Asagi > Yomi > Uta > Haginosuke > Suou > Manatsu

I've tried to play this three times. The first time when it came out on the PSP and I dropped it about 2 hours in. The second time I got a bit further before again dropping it. Third time's the charm apparently.

The game starts so incredibly, almost excruciatingly, slow but once the game clicks it's such an enjoyable journey it's hard to put down. Trails in the Sky is the JRPG equivalent of an anime slice-of-life and coming of age story with all the strengths and pitfalls of a classic JRPG. The game is wordy. Almost too wordy but it helps bring the game to life when NPCs have different things to say after a big event, flesh out character personalities, and let the story unfold slowly. All the characters are endearing with distinct personalities and it is the characters that made me fall in love with the game. The JP voices are excellent and really help get you through the game and it's many many dialogue boxes. Download the JP voice mod, I can't imagine playing the game without it. The OST doesn't stick out all the time but there's a fair number of real good tracks to appreciate.

I like my otome games with plot and without stupid protagonists. Piofiore mostly checks off these boxes.

The plot in Piofiore was what you'd expect from a mafia game set in the Italian 1920s, and it was pretty good if predictable at times. It wasn't afraid to get dark when needed either. Please be aware that sexual assault occurs in some of these bad ends. Some of the bad ends were really, really Y I K E S.

Liliana is a decent protagonist. She comes off as naïve but that's to be expected with her background. She adapts to her situation, depending on whichever route she's on, and though she can come off as a little passive in some routes is overall a character with her own ideals and a backbone to to stand up for them and the ability to make decisions when needed.

It's easy to say the art is gorgeous, the setting well-done, the music suiting and voice acting superb. If you're looking for an otome game with a story that moves along at a fairly quick pace due to its interesting plot and don't mind the violence and questionable content in the bad ends (or willing to skip them), Piofiore is a very easy recommend.

If you hate good storytelling, complex characters (including MC) political intrigue, historical Chinese settings and more plot than romance you will not have a good time. If on the other hand, you adore all these things like I do, you will love My Vow to My Liege.

I don't think I'd ever played a VN with a protagonist I liked and admired more than AhYu. She's naive at times, too lost in revenge at others, stuck between she was was and who she has to be, and yet follows through with her own convictions and tries to damn best to protect her people and country. She's such a realistic, believable, complex character with her own agency that I don't know how any other otoge protagonist will ever beat AhYu's place in my heart. I care more about AhYu's journey than I do the love interests. Not that the love interests were uninteresting. They're all well-written characters in their own right (mostly), with their own different dynamics with AhYu, and their own believable character motivations who grow throughout the routes. We even get a female side-character who is well written, just as badass as MC, and doesn't exist just to talk about boys with the MC!!!

I loved the setting. I eat up political intrigue and warfare. I read lots of Chinese WNs, I was very comfortable with the historical Chinese setting, Wuxia concepts and intimacy of nicknames. (AhYu and AhJiu ow my heart). For those new to the genre it may be a bit confusing but the in-game glossary should help some.

The only things there were issues were 1) translation quality and 2) Chenfang.

The translation is fine for the most part but I noticed lots of typos especially towards the end of the game. Nothing that ruins the game but they exist to blemish great writing otherwise.

Chenfeng. Oh boy. Why did they do my Chenfeng dirty like this? His route is the worst one out of the four due to plot reasons that lead to less romantic interactions between them. Chenfeng is my favourite LI. I love his design and his VA, and I adore the bodyguard trope. My kink is devotion and loyalty okay??? So it really hurts me that they didn't flesh him out fully and give us a route as well written as Goujian or Wu ZiXu. Wu ZiXu hands down has the best route. I personally didn't like Goujian as a LI because of the decisions he made and the consequences of them and I'm not as forgiving as the MC. YiGuang kind of came off as too perfect, his route too "easy" in comparison to the others, and his carefree personality kind of put me off (also because his good end hurt my Chenfeng loving heart).

Favourite routes: Wu ZiXu >>>>> Goujian > Chenfeng > YiGuang

A very cute and charming game with beautiful sprite work. More VN than actual RPG (the combat is very simple and sparse), I found myself strangely invested despite how short the game is. Over the course of the three ~1 hr chapters, I've grown really attached to this serial liar and his lie-eating daughter. I wish there was more than the three chapters. I would love to play through many more hours of this duo's lives though the third chapter (good ending) did wrap things up satisfactorily.

Plays great on Steam Deck as well.

The Girl Who Stands Behind builds on the first game and improves the game design with the incorporation of a "Think" command that often gives a hint in what to do first. In general, TGWSB seemed less obtuse than The Missing Heir in moving the game forward but I did end up consulting a walkthrough for the last half of the game anyways. The characters were also more interesting and likeable in this game than in TMH, especially fan favourite Ayumi.

The story is still rather predictable but I would say less so than TMH and is just as engaging. Personally, I preferred TMH's story but that's more personal taste than anything to do with TGWSB's story which is just as fantastic.

I really hope to see a third game in the series at some point in the future as the Famicom Detective Club remakes are really a gem even with its outdated gameplay.

Plays perfectly on native settings on Steam Deck.

The game is beautiful and the gameplay engaging enough as a simple Metroidvania-lite with a bit of puzzling on the side. What I had issues with was the story. The worldbuilding is fantastic but the way the narrative is pushed just didn't jive with me. I like the idea of it and see what the creator was getting at, but I just couldn't care about any of the characters (except Royal) and at some points felt like I was getting the narrative pushed down my throat with its stiff writing.