Fished a dirty old cartridge with this game on it from the 50¥ bin when visiting the Osaka branch of Super Potato many years ago. The guy behind the counter, in typically super-helpful Japanese fashion, kept crossing his arms and shouting "NO!" to emphasise that the game would probably not work in a Game Boy - I didn't care, of course, as it was just cool and nice to have a 50p trinket with Kirby's face on it. When I got back from Japan, the trinket went into the back of my cupboard and was forgotten about.

... Until yesterday! I was digging through my storage to find my old GameCube copy of Killer7 (my Suda51 run continues apace!!) and ended up stumbling across this little rusty gem instead. And it works! I shouldn't have underestimated a games console that survived Operation Desert Storm.

It's really fun! Just super solid, simple pinball action that doesn't drown the player in a thousand gimmicks and storylines and all that shit that plagues more sophisticated pinball sims. Hit the ball and watch it bounce off stuff - that's what pinball's all about! Are the other Nintendo pinball games like this...?

Now I wanna go back to that shop and tell the guy that the cartridge worked... 😔

Rainbow Cotton is a 3D shmup with a forward perspective akin to Panzer Dragoon or Star Fox, but it is unfortunately very clumsy in design. Cotton's model takes up far too much of the screen, obscuring the enemies and crosshair, which loves to snap to the centre. On top of spongy enemies and a finicky EXP system to power up your beam, it's shockingly difficult to kill anyone in your path, let alone know you're even hitting them. The pathing is weird, too; you can just bounce and clip around the track haphazardly because the camera tracking is nigh impossible to predict. The experience is honestly so grating it's insane.
The saving grace is that this is imo the best looking Cotton game - charming anime FMV cutscenes, and low poly pastel coloured models and environments that are so kawaii in that Spyro PS1 way.

A curiosity is all this ever amounts to, if ever you want to experience a game that is bad enough to bury a franchise in the ground for twenty-one years - you can with the newly-released English fan translation!
( https://github.com/DerekPascarella/RainbowCotton-EnglishPatchDreamcast )

Yeah I did the first two chapters of the main story and I'm not coming back to this probably. Gotta love that music as always but once I booted it up and was greeted with the typical 100 currency gatcha nonsense my eyes glazed over. The actual game part is mind numbing too, it absolutely plays itself moreso than any other gatcha I've seen, and that's saying something. Gatcha really doesn't even work for the Nier series whatsoever, after doing some pulls with the starting gems and getting a bunch of literally who random nobodies with no personalities I was just left wondering who on earth would care enough to spend money trying to pull anyone who isn't one of the 7 or so main characters from Replicant/Automata.

Gotta say though the fact that the narrative of this seems to be about walking forever through an endless grind in an area literally called "The Cage" is pretty funny though. I choose to believe for my own sake Taro knew what he was doing there and didn't give much of a shit about this

Disappointing doesn't even cover it. The worst of gacha combined with the most phoned-in story Taro's put to paper, with a pace so ploddingly slow you'll fall asleep before you even unlock the main menu. Extending draken/nier's weapon stories to be a main mechanic backfires in a huge way.
Barely interactable, your avatar runs from one level gate to the next, the game begging you to put money into its loot roulette. There's no strategy, not even any real play: ultimately it's just a money vacuum.
Gacha is a poisoned well. Even the games that are entertaining (world flipper, love live, bandori) would be better without it, and Nier represents the very worst. A desolate, sinister creativity pit, it's sole purpose to empty lonely Japanese salarymen's wallets.

More like NieR: Auto[play]a.
Desolate in every sense! Combat is purely numerical and exists solely as power gates - simply upgrade your units, weapons and companions, then breeze through this battery vampire of a .apk for a few more missions before you need to upgrade again. OR u can Pay a humble fee for a chance to win epic units for you to also waste upgrade resources on :)
I just feel so wise and numb to the Twisted Mind of Yoko Taro. Grim "tragedy first" writing that passionlessly beelines towards an arc's desired sad outcome, a soundtrack that is essentially just spacy yoga music, vast post-post-magical-apoc environments that serve absolutely nothing. Sad to see Akihiko Yoshida designs wasted on this.

the "japanese take on half life" idea of breakdown is kind of hard to write off completely honestly, though it is different. want to call this an immsim even though that's not really correct, values realism of the choreography of your individual actions over providing a large multitude of possible interactions that're more streamlined in how they are perceived than they would be here. there's 3 kinds of food that are most of the health items in the game that aren't collected but eaten on the spot right then and there with very long animations, and a lot of exposition that isn't from character dialogue is exclusively in the form of clipboards your character flips each page of methodically, pretty much foregoing any system shockian wall scrawls or audio logs or other more varied conveyances of information. it really isn't concerned with "immersion" in how you perceive the world as much as being within derrick.

this kind of embodiment is also centered in the emphasis on hand to hand combat which requires an up close approach, with attention to enemy tells and your own attack distance/speed (and a surprising amount of combos/special attacks you can pull off if you experiment, even if their application can feel kind of crude), over controlling the level and utilizing varied modes of firepower that fpses prioritize. there are guns of course and you'll need them, but only 4 (except for THESE BABYS [fists][strong]) and they amount to locking on and hoping the bullets hit. and its definitely a slog at times with just how much you are fighting guys in empty corridors, but this was mostly not enough to be a big dealbreaker for me. in fact there is one point getting near the end of the game that i actually think it uses tedium pretty effectively, to emphasize how strong you become later on. that being said the un-lock-onable stealth t'lan are bad and FUCK that gauntlet in the big white room near the end in particular!!! shockwaves and neckbreakers are your only friends in this world.

i think the game is kept from being truly great partly from the above but mostly from a lack of strong connective tissue altogether. it has quite a few impactful moments and there's some interesting ideas within the twists of its sci fi story i think, but i feel disappointed with how little of it ties together satisfyingly. despite that i think its still largely good, this game feels kind of ahead of its time in its own immersive qualities and shows some ambition at times i find admirable, yet has a dumb fun wonky spirit that is irreplaceable. there's a part early on where you come into a cafeteria decorated with limp bloodied corpses, soft piano muzak playing from speakers to highlight the grimness of the scene, and then happen upon a hamburger on one of the tables for your character to aggressively grab, inspect with fascination like its an alien artifact, and then take a few chomps of in front of your camera and toss away. stuff like that is the heart of breakdown and puts its in stark contrast with the western fpses its compared with; its not so beholden to its representational atmosphere that it doesn't have a silly time with itself.

a cartesian nightmare wrapped in a winnie the pooh-esque husk, legend of mana goes out of its way to be unmarketable, genuinely weird, aimless, and wholly contrarian, but in the most charming way possible. koichi ishii is on record basically saying he wanted to be an asshole with this game and make a game about nothing.

legend of mana's development came hot off of saga frontier, which ishii and battle chief hiroshi takai both worked on. the team that made that game splintered into two, one for legend of mana and one for saga frontier 2, so it's interesting to compare the two and the relatively similar styles they both present. it kind of also represents the rebelliousness in which mana was made with - ishii wanted to go with these insane ideas he had for frontier which were shotdown (which evolved into many of mana's systems like the world make system and the monster raising), and takai felt like at least his take on turn-based games were crystallized and perfected with frontier.

there's this transgressive rub to legend of mana which will definitely turn people off, which is one of the most perfect aspects of the game. the true enjoyment comes with just not giving a fuck anymore and really sliding into the saccharine comedy and weird arcane elements of the game. you can really do whatever you want and interact with whichever systems you feel like, or totally ignore them. it's a game that really could not care less if you're playing it or not, yet has a weirdly emotionally resonant story despite all this - I mean, yoko shimomura did the soundtrack, so you know it bangs and is gonna make you cry at some point.

though the story is light and fractured, there's some excellent and creepy components that bind it together. one of those are the sproutlings, which are a hive-mind race of little cabbage fairies that once guarded the mana tree that walk around the world talking about how the world is all a giant lie. people react to them similarly to say a beggar or a soothsayer - some people like niccolo straight up detest them for no particular reason and most everyone else just ignores them as if they aren't there. but you as the player totally know they're telling the truth because you are actively reconstructing the world.

there's also a few plotlines that have several events that progress in sequential order. it can be very easy to miss these or forget what's going on within them. that's perhaps why the cactus diaries exist (which is another fun and sweet little system that you could wholly not know exists or participate in). the most compelling of these imo is the jumi plotline, but all of them are interesting enough to keep me pressing on. you have to finish at least one of the main story arcs to finish the game but you can theoretically do all three in one go and there's a few differences depending on how you do them.

there's a lot to dig into here - it's legit teeming with STUFF to read and ponder and replay. but it also cannot be understated how absolutely gorgeous the game is. the music is incredible. the drama of laying an artifact on the board and watching it froth with golden bubbles or ignite a geyser of fire is invigorating and mythic. and all the backgrounds are incredible - the style is somewhere between final fantasy tactics and beatrix potter. my favorite areas are probably the junkyard, tower of leires, and gato grottoes but a ton of them are genuinely memorable. the character designs are probably my fav thing from the game. the design team was told no one could be straight up a human besides the main character so you have people that are cornucopias, centaurs, onions... there's a little girl who's super angsty because her force her to dress like a fairy (her dad's a beetle and her mom's a butterfly).

this is probably the only thing i've played this year that i would actually replay. v happy with it!