one of my most defining traits as a human being is my obsession with Undertale/Deltarune. i grew up loving EarthBound, had unregulated internet access WAY too young and would browse the starmen.net forums never knowing how to post (which was a good thing!), and the ways both Undertale and Deltarune have shaped my life can't be overstated. i don't know if there's any single artist whose work has impacted me like Toby Fox's. this is all to say that i went into Undertale Yellow excited, i had heard a lot of great things, but i felt a lil cautious to see if it really had that sauce.

and Undertale Yellow does not have the sauce.

i think one of the most interesting aspects of Toby's design is how tight the pacing in his games are, Chapter 2 of Deltarune in particular being absolutely perfect. the way it builds and escalates its bits, the constant forward yet fulfilling momentum, the delicate balance of exploration to scripted events, and the way (aside from the music robots) every character is introduced and explored are my favourite in any game. you never forget walking past a dumpster and having some weird little fucker pop out at you, you can't not laugh at Berdly and Queen - two of the funniest characters ever to be coded into Gamer's History.

it's impossible for me not to compare that to Undertale Yellow. Yellow's nearly decade-long time spent in the oven shows, with its first half feeling extremely sloppy. there's not much in terms of interesting characters, story hooks, level designs, or setpieces. it gets more exciting as it goes to more original places (ie not the ruins or Snowdin) but the pacing only improves towards the end. i really like the concepts at play with the Wild East but it's a SLOG. reminiscent of the wrestling part in Thousand Year Door where you just hang around doing a half a dozen lame fights/mini-games. it feels like you spend half of the game in that town. everyone talks too much. dialogue isn't as punchy as it should be, conversations and scripted sequences tend to drag on. there's not much humour in it either.

Undertale Yellow's characters and story never come together in a satisfying way. Asriel Dreemurr made me cry and feel funny when i was 13, but the way everything ties into him and leads up to that final confrontation in Undertale is one of the greatest emotional payoffs in any game. Clover is more of a character than Frisk, they're not a kid who simply wandered into the underground - they came here for Justice. to save the souls of those other kids who died! i think this isn't very good? it never feels like a goal of the game, it never has any relevance outside of the genocide route. Flowey's aware of it but he feels like an afterthought in this (unrelated but Asgore is esp OOC and it bothered me). the real central story of the game is Ceroba's backstory, it's just that she only starts to get built up in the game's last 40%. it's not as focused as it should be, much of its time is wasted on disparate characters and segments that never satisfyingly connect or resonate with the player.

one of the only areas that Yellow gets close to Undertale in is its combat. there's some fun bullet patterns, great boss gimmicks, and the neutral/pacifist routes are pretty reasonably balanced (maybe a little too easy?). i gotta commend the unique content in its main three routes, especially the clay parts of Flowey boss fight in neutral (the parts where it looks like it came from newgrounds suck tho). genocide route also slightly makes me feel better about Martlet.

Martlet is the stand-in for Papyrus, a wannabe royal guard captain stationed outside Snowdin who's never met a human before. her first section is rough. Sans/Papyrus are possibly the most beloved characters in any indie game, it's easy to see why when you look at how well-paced their section is. they're introduced in exciting ways, have an escalating set of setpieces/mini-games, and have great designs. i can't say any of that for Martlet - who only makes an impact after her section is over, mostly in the genocide route for me. all you see of her before her fight are a couple scenes where she sets up a lame puzzle that, unlike Papyrus', are not jokes. it never builds to anything, instead it wastes time introducing the fuckass cuphead guys and the "made before Spamton but is a scummy salesman so i'm gonna think of Spamton" guy. Martlet is just Papyrus if he was a wholesome, boring furry woman without autism.

i am going to talk about Dalv now.

i don't think every character Toby cracks out is a total winner. Cap'n Cakes aren't very thrilling, Chapter 1's King is mostly there to be an evil guy you need to fight, and Alphys' dialogue in hotland can go on a bit too long (tho i do love her). they're all, at worst, a little boring but either don't have much of a major role or are merely slightly flawed. Dalv, Undertale Yellow's first major original character, does not have any redeeming factors. i straight up hate him. his design? looks like an Adventure Time OC a 16 yr old boy would self-ship with Marceline. his dialogue? boring as hell. the way he's supposed to be Yellow's Toriel stand-in? absolutely shameful. the way he's just a lame human-looking vampire and doesn't fit in? the way his only relevance to the rest of the game is that he used to hang out with little girls? the way he just has lightning powers for some reason? i had seen almost every major character in the game online in fan art at some point prior to playing EXCEPT for Dalv and i see why. despite being the game's first important new character he never shows up again or has any relevance to the game so he doesn't fuckin matter, he sucks ass bad and i hate him.

Ceroba's sorta neat, though. she's easily the strongest character in the game, her story plays off a few aspects of lore from Undertale that are fun to see explored - her having a daughter who ended up as one of the Amalgamates in the True Lab is great drama. she's also the most Toriel-like on the surface, having lost her husband and child through tragedy. she's very un-Toriel like in how she actually still loves her late husband, the ways in which she still clings to his memory and (undeserved) dignity in death is relatable. if my wife died, i'd be gassing her up constantly. her section is the stand-out portion of Yellow as well, the Steamworks have the best momentum and variety of gimmicks. i gotta ask tho - why is she japanese? how does she know what japanese culture is? monsters have been stuck underground for a millennia, she and her dead husband should not know what a kotatsu is. the game is defo too happy to reiterate her backstory but she's the sole character who has an actual motivation to fight you, which is nice. still feels horribly unearned when her boss fight theme starts incorporating aspects of Hopes and Dreams though. like you are NOT him.

that unearned feeling captures how i feel about it as a fan follow-up to Undertale. i don't think Yellow has enough ideas of its own to stand apart from Undertale, it spends 3/4 of its major areas retreading Undertale and most of its characters feel like lesser copies of Undertale's. mechanically, it harms itself by adhering too close to its inspiration. its design isn't ambitious or experimental enough. there's not many moments where i found myself surprised, feeling like i haven't already played this before. it doesn't have enough of its own identity and i found a lot of its original aspects to be really weak. it's like the Blue Shift of Undertale.

i think Undertale Yellow is okay. it's a remarkably professional feeling game. it seems like teenagers online really like it, tho it has been nearly three years since Chapter 2 dropped and UT/DR fans are starving. it's well-made but it's not cohesive or compelling, it feels more thrown together than particularly inspired. makes me appreciate Deltarune as a follow-up even more than i already did. if you're an Undertale fan and you haven't played thru some of its inspirations (ESPECIALLY MOON!!!!!! PLAY IT!!!!!!) i'd recommend you just do that over this. Undertale's writing is maybe its most important aspect and Yellow's writing simply isn't very good, there's no glue holding it together.

plus i don't remember any of its music and there was a really bad fnaf at freddy reference

Papas: Hmm? You are...? Is there anything I can do for you?

> Yes
No

Papas: What? You say you're my child?

> Yes
No

Papas: Hahahaha! The world could end tomorrow, but I'll only ever have one kid, and that's Jamie.

You can't even legally play the games you are trying to "buy" anymore thanks to the eShop's closure, so rather than make all the minigames free, the game just gives you the story of the game for free, but keeps you from accessing the games since you technically never paid for them, which is a bummer as I don't think Nintendo would lose much sleep by letting players preserve the experience of this game in full if they downloaded it before but haven't finished it.

The haggle system is a neat idea and the game's real inventive with it, making the monetization method a core part of the character while not using a made-up currency, which I don't think I've seen done anywhere else. (even if you still pay $15 or so if you wanted to play the whole thing so Nintendo still makes a profit) I don't remember much of the games themselves, other than that they were fine. But Rusty is the star here, and while his world can't function the way it used to anymore, everyone will remember this game for him and his haggling mechanics.

This is a game I've had a lot of conflicted feelings on, ever since my playthrough of it over two years ago. Not helping matters is how its become basically inseparable from the heated debate over how it handled LGBT issues, which has resulted in the speaking over and harassment of trans people. But you know, I get it. Not the speaking over and harassing trans people part, please go fuck yourself if you do that, but I get Persona 4's appeal. It's a game about coming terms with truths about yourself that you don't feel like accepting and if you play it as the teenage demographic it's aimed towards, that's a powerful message. So I'm going to be extremely charitable and separate Persona 4 from its politics to see it for what it is: a mechanically dull/pathetically easy RPG with boring procedurally generated dungeon design and a poorly paced story that's as repetitive as those dungeons

Calling something "good with friends" is often the cruelest thing you can ever say about a multiplayer game. Yeah, you can have fun with friends in basically anything, it turns out friends are good, not Phasmophobia. And it's so easy to see that in Lethal Company, especially from the outside looking in - some bullshit lame horror coop horror game to scream at, acting as the new steam flavour of the month game to merely moisturise the slip and slide of socialisation.

Despite the resemblance, Lethal Company is not that. Flavour of the month, maybe, but versus the thousand souless PC games out there of it's breed it's truly closer to something like Dokapon Kingdom and hell, Dark Souls, for the kinds of emotion and socialisation it brings up.

Because truly, Lethal Company is a game about having a really shit job. There's no real sugarcoating it. It's a game about being explicitly underpaid for dangerous, tedius work salvaging objects from ugly factories, where the corporation you work under and the true majesty of visiting planets and experiencing it's fauna are so stripped back and corporatised that you don't even notice it. This setting and the gameplay really sets out a very clever vibe for the game, as frankly, it on it's own, is almost deliberately not fun, but it is a wonderful way of building up a camraderie between players and really get into the boots of a worker in a bad job slacking and goofing off a bit. On my first playthrough with friends I found some extraodinary catharsis in one of the gang spending some of our quota on a jukebox playing license free music and just having a jam for a while, and likewise, a good haul which takes some of the pressure off others is appreciated, and the "man in the chair" - the guy left behind at the ship to deal with doors, turrets etc, feels both valued as part of the team, but also themselves lonely, tense, awaiting their friend's safe return.

It is also, as a more obvious point, very funny. Basically every run of this game you'll make something funny will happen. A comrade fumbles a wonky jump to their death based on bad information. You walk just inside the range of your comrade's voice to hear them screaming for help for half a second. You watch as the man in the chair as a giant red dot slowly bears down on your comrade, try to warn them and then see the red dot taking delight in eating them, and there's so much more. It's surprising really as a game with so little going on in gameplay and so limited in variety of stuff that it keeps on bringing up new stupid shit to happen.

Its rarely legitimately scary, even in the rare case you're alone amongst monsters with all your friends dead. The stakes established are just set too low, the animations a bit too goofy for the intensity to ever feel too much. And that kinda folds back in on that "shit job" thematic of the whole thing. Being almost indifferent to the surprising variety of monsters, seeing them as much as obstacles as hell demons that want to eat your face, is ultimately part of the job. Yes, the fourth angel from Evangelion wandering around whilst you slowly crouchwalk across the map to your ship is tense, but almost amusingly tense. Gotta roll with it.

It's a delightful experience, really. If you wanted to you could linger on how cobbled together the whole thing feels right now and how limited the actual gameplay really is, but they do nothing to take away from the truly great times Lethal Company sparks. The closest a game will ever get to being on the last day of your christmas contract with debenhams and just slacking with the other temps, giving people discounts on their items for no good reason and occasionally the weeping angels from doctor who come out with a giant spider and they're in the ONE hallway that leads back to the exit and Ernesto is dead, damn.

i think i like persona 4 less than persona 5 because at least persona 5 at least pretends for a little bit that it cares about going against the status quo, and it gives you the illusion that its going to actually do anything good. both games struggle with almost all of the exact same issues, the main difference being 4 doesn't have much style to prioritize over substance so you just don't get much of either.

i don't really care about 90% of the games writing or characters but i will directly point out that kanji and naoto's character arcs are some of the lamest things i've seen in video games, and no it is not because of any "headcanons" i didnt even have for these characters being contradicted. for kanji and naoto specifically i take a lot more issue with the queerbaiting and using queer identities as a stepping stone for their incredibly tame messages than the idea that they aren't actually queer. anyone who is upset about them not being gay or trans isn't necessarily wrong for feeling that way, but it obviously wasn't the intention of persona 4 to make those characters that way and i'm not going to act like it's fair to have problems with the game because of that specifically. the investigation team also do not at all feel like they are friends to me and it sucks, the way that most scenes that wouldve been used to develop SEES in 3 just aren't really there and it makes me care about the group way less

i liked adachi a lot though, he's a really good character

5 FUCKING YEARS WHERE THE FUCK IS SAIN FIRE EMBLEM YOU FRAUDSSSSS

Edit: Greatest game of all time I'm afraid.......

Edit 2: THEY FUCKING ADDED MARK FIRE EMBLEM THIS GAME IS SO BALLSY ITS PEAKKKK

The lyrics of english Persona tracks never sound particularly idiomatic. It never gets into incomprehensible territory but more often than not it sounds a bit awkward. Persona 4, however, uses this to it's advantage to have the lyrics really mirror the contents of the game's themes and narrative. The vocal tracks in P4 tend to have a clear aim but when you actually look into the lyrics you realize how little it actually says about what it's trying to cover.

Let's take the main battle them for example. "I reach out to the truth of my life" is one of the first things you'll hear every time you enter a battle so clearly the song is meant to resonate with the game's themes of truth and lies. However if you actually read the lyrics to Reach Out to the Truth, you'll quickly notice that a majority of the lyrics are nonsense that only connect to that core theme of "truth" through some pretty extreme mental gymnastics. This connects to the game as a whole because Persona 4 is very clearly trying to make a statement on topics such as truth and identity but when you actually read into the text at a deeper level you'll find that the game actually has fuck all to say on any of these subjects.

Before Engage was revealed, my biggest hope for a new Fire Emblem game was for it to not just be a carbon copy of Three Houses and be a return to form. Be careful what you wish for.

Fire Emblem Engage is shaping up to be one of the most polarizing games in a series where every game is polarizing on some level. I fall into the camp that does not care for it and I’m putting my extended thoughts on it here just to have them somewhere. This is not meant to demean anyone who enjoys it but rather to explain why I feel the way I do.

I actually do see why a lot of people in the FE spaces I frequent really enjoy this one. Breaking is one of the best mechanics to get added to Fire Emblem in a while, as it gives a nice flow to player phases and makes you have to put more thought into playing around enemy phases. Rounds of combat look absolutely stunning with quite possibly the best 3D animations in the series (Kagetsu’s crit animation gives me life) and other neat touches like the cool subtle effect for hitting someone with bonus damage. Ring abilities can just be incredibly fun to utilize, whether it’s busted stuff like Celica’s warp and Sigurd’s massive movement boost or more situational but still fun to use stuff like Lyn’s copies and Ike’s risk vs reward attack. And there’s plenty of maps that stand as some of the best designed in the series, with chapter 11 being the obvious standout, 17 being a tough but fair gauntlet of six strong boss fights, and 19 having a ridiculous surprise that feels like something from a rom hack but in the best way possible.

Based purely on gameplay, I have more positive things than negative things to say about Engage. But that’s not to say that those negative things don’t exist. There are some parts of the game where the map design falters. The earlygame maps essentially being scripted tutorials is a drag, the Solm arc has a desert rout map, a fog of war map with a dumb gimmick of having to break crates with the Ike ring, and a map with the Corrin ring that feels Rev inspired (derogatory), and there’s plenty of otherwise good chapters that suffer from excessive reinforcements that end up slowing down an already fairly slow game.

I also dislike how units feel in this one. The earlygame units are actively unfun to use and are ridiculously outclassed by any mid to late game unit with the same class. Furthermore, I’m not a fan of the effect rings have on unit feel. Plenty of aspects behind units such as skills and weapon proficiency are locked behind bonds with certain rings so it makes units feel less like actually unique entities and more so just vessels for rings.

Lastly, this may just be my personal preference but I’ve never liked the rewind mechanics that have been in every game since FE15’s turnwheel and they’re arguably at their worst now that you can save mid-battle and effectively give yourself infinite rewind uses. I get why these mechanics are there but they feel redundant with the existence of casual mode and really just take me out of the experience as they remove a lot of the interesting dynamics that permadeath creates. And this is before the assholish design choices that they tend to inspire.

So overall, from a gameplay perspective, Engage is a flawed but fun experience. Base Fire Emblem gameplay activates my neurons on a level that I can’t explain so not fucking it up too much is enough to make me happy. I might even go as far to say that a good chunk of my gameplay issues won’t be as much of a problem when a fair bit of time passes and the meta gets easier to understand. But my main source of issues with Engage is not so much its gameplay as it is its story.

I’m seeing a lot of takes from Engage enjoyers along the lines of “people only hate the story because it’s not as serious.” However, I wouldn’t mind a less serious Fire Emblem story if done well. I genuinely love the cheesy 4kids/saturday morning style English opening and I would look forward to Fire Emblem’s G Gundam equivalent: a weird outlier in the series’ history with the primary appeal of being really stupid in a fun way. Sadly though, Engage fails to capture scenes of true peak fiction like having Holland use a windmill mech or having the protagonist get detained in post apocalyptic Italy and interrogated by having his head shoved into a pizza.
The story just overall feels dry and uninteresting. Alear has the personality of cardboard and the four “lords” that join him don’t get much screen time after their respective arcs so none of them have any chemistry amongst themselves or with Alear in the main story. I’m sure that they have interesting dynamics with each other in the supports but if I shouldn’t have to go out of my way to find character dynamics that should have been there in the first place.

Beyond that, the plot is your standard Fire Emblem fare and almost everything that happens in it is something that has happened several times in the series, whether it’s a possessed ruler who’s the pawn of the main villain, a wyvern riding character who starts out on the villain’s side but defects to your army, or the main villain being a generic purple dragon whose main “Fell Dragon” title is the same as another game in the series’ generic purple dragon. For fuck’s sake, the game’s central theme of “going against what you’re fated to be” and the plot twist associated with said theme were both already done before and better in Awakening. It’s hard for me to enjoy this as a less serious game in the series when it just ends up being the same shit as before but with the most superficial layer of “irony”.

The sad thing is that there’s a handful of times where the less serious tone pays off. Yunaka is a fun twist on the bubbly personalities you see in the series by having a character whose bubbly personality is actually just a way of hiding her criminal past and her introduction chapter where she tries to hide the fact that she stole the ring is a fun dynamic. Alcryst is an entertaining parody of angsty characters like Takumi and his introduction scene cracks me up. Fogado is incredibly charismatic and you can tell that his VA had the time of his life recording for him. But these redeeming qualities are the exception, not the norm.

There’s also several moments where the game tries and fails to do serious emotional beats and its villains are the worst example of this. The game arbitrarily makes villains sympathetic with little build up, presumably because of the perceived notion that sympathetic villains are inherently better. It tries and fails to make you feel bad for the side villain who beats up children multiple times and the other side villain who looks like a DeviantArt user’s edgy Fairy Tail OC and whose primary personality trait is being a sadomasochist. Even worse is that the game waits until the very final chapter to give the main antagonist a backstory and then proceeds to treat their death as a sad moment in a way that feels completely unwarranted.

Finally, I’m not a fan of the way the emblem rings were implemented into the narrative. They don’t feel like the actual characters they were in their home series (although calling Byleth a character is a stretch tbh) but rather feel more like generic collectibles that have the faces of past protagonists attached to them as a marketing gimmick. In the main story, they’ll get a little bit of screen time in their join chapter and then get reduced to doing nothing but giving off exposition for the rest of the game. In the game’s side content, their supports are only two to four lines of dialogue so there’s not much they can add beyond generic advice or “remember this thing from the past game” dialogue.

Now because Engage has spawned gameplay vs story discourse, I’ll just say this: I can enjoy games with bad stories and there’s plenty of FE games that fall into that camp. I’m even in the camp that enjoys Fates: Conquest for its gameplay even if I do understand why some might not be able to. But the way I see it, the more time a story takes up, the more of an impact that said story has on my opinion of a game. Cutscenes are lengthy, even more so than Conquest’s, and the game is becoming notorious for how dragged on death scenes in particular feel. These cutscenes take up a lot of the game’s time so I would prefer for the time spent on them to have good writing. And no, being able to skip cutscenes doesn’t make the issues go away. That excuse doesn’t hold up for games I like (like the aforementioned Fates: Conquest) and it doesn’t hold up here either.

Minor tangent but the victim complex a small but vocal portion of the FE fanbase has for any criticism of this game is pathetic. I totally get it if you enjoy games primarily for gameplay and there’s plenty of cases where I do just that but you have to understand why some people aren’t able to do so. If you get genuinely mad at someone for not liking/being interested in a game primarily because of its story, you are part of the reason why video games aren’t treated as seriously as other forms of art.

I guess to explain my apprehensiveness towards Engage overall in spite of liking the gameplay for the most part is that there’s a feeling of soullessness to it, at least to me. It doesn’t exist to do anything new or interesting and primarily exists to reference pre-existing games. There’s been a fairly common take that Engage has a worse story than Fates. Suffice it to say that I don’t agree with this take. Fates’ story is a level of poorly constructed that is the lowest of low bars to clear and that’s before the mountains of gross shit in it.

However, I can see where this take is coming from, even if I find it disagreeable, to say the least. Fates’ concept of a choice between your birth family or your adopted family was a novel idea, at least at the time. Conquest in particular had an interesting idea of focusing on the flaws of implementing change within the system. Both of these ideas were squandered though, in such a way that resulted in some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen. But while Fates had the issue of trying and failing unbelievably hard, Engage had the issue of not trying at all.

And one last thing that I couldn’t fit in here: Fuck Nintendo/Intelligent Systems for putting in pedophilic romance options and fuck Backloggd for deleting my friend’s review because he told pedophiles to do something to themselves that would make the world a better place.
FREE BATTLEHUNTZ

Jesse: YO MISTER WHITE WERE IN MULTIVERSES

Walter: Jesse why the fuck are we in a shitty rip off

Jesse: that's the point mister white. There have been memes on this game because its just a overall shit game. this game exists to be a pay to win but also a cash grab on its characters cause why not, this is the smash bros but with batman, don't you want to play as batman or rick in a smash bros game even if there are better fighting games that have better controls better modes more interesting characters than a worthless game that does not take it's concept and do something with it.

Walter: Jesse what the f-

Saul: Hey guys you Better call Saul!