I admire this game intensely. It is immediately and overwhelmingly devoted to customization, from the path through the game all the way down to the details of the mech's center of gravity and precise energy usage. It swarms with the endless mindboggling stats of a JRPG at the same time as it refuses the core conceit of building up a character: in ACFA, all choices are reversible, all equipment can be sold back at cost, and you can build a new mech from the ground up for each mission if you so choose.

This deep and loving mechanical crunchiness is wed to an equally strong love of the aesthetically famously immortalized as "wow cool robot." ACFA goes to every length a PS3 game can to make playing it feel cool. It understands that frictionless translation between the player's thoughts and the mech's actions isn't the goal. Even the most badass mech is still a physical object and you can feel its momentum as it pivots or struggles to raise itself into the sky. This friction is crucial to the balance of the game, in fact, since it allows mechs to trade defense and power for maneuverability and speed.

With all my admiration now laid out, though, I have to say: I found ACFA intensely frustrating as well. It's difficult, sure, but it's also opaque—which I found quite surprising, since I consider FromSoft's modern works exemplars of a pedagogical approach to game design. But here, when I died over and over (particularly in one-on-one mech fights) I couldn't understand why and I couldn't figure out how to improve. Shots would hit me and miss my opponents. Players move much faster than the camera so I'd lose track of enemy positions. Worst of all, without enemy health bars incremental improvements in my skill were all but invisible.

I have no doubt that with dedication these skills can be learned. I may have been verging on that point myself before my emulator crashed and I lost enough progress to become demoralized about redoing it all. But I consider the process of bringing a player from 0% to 70% skill one of the most interesting aspects of game design, and I'll be very curious to see how they tackle it in Armored Core VI a decade and a half on from this and with the eyes of the world upon them.

The plot was the thing I was first sold on in Fires of Rubicon. Although it feels more than a little Dune-esque in the initial outline (factions squabbling over a planet that is the unique source of a precious resource, reportedly even called "melange" at some point in development) the game quickly makes clear that it's not interested in telling a cookie-cutter story. Even when I was struggling mightily with the combat, I was fascinated by the factional intricacies and the way they were portrayed in the game's mission structure.

Once I started my second loop (the game asks for three playthroughs to see all the missions and get the final "true" ending), I was even more impressed: when I or other characters made slightly different decisions, I could see how they ramify throughout the course of the game's plot. As I gain familiarity with the characters, I learned to recognize them earlier and found no small amount of affection for their quirks and foibles.

And as I pushed myself forward, I found myself beginning to really appreciate the combat as well. This didn't happen all at once: I spent pretty much the entire first loop frustrated with the game and with myself for failing to learn its language. I felt like I wasn't making a dent in bosses even when I played around with different builds and strategies, and that I couldn't make progress until I went online and copied specialized bosskiller loadouts from people on Reddit and Discord.

But eventually, reading these online resources and chatting with my friend Molly who was several steps ahead of me in the game, I realized something: From Software has always made their game bearing not just its own mechanics in mind, but the way its players will engage with it and each other. They are heavily influenced by classics like The Tower of Druaga, laden with ideas and secrets that can only be found and shared by an entire arcade's worth of players working together. I had thought of myself as failing by looking at these online resources, but From is well aware that they're releasing the game in an age of wikis and group chats. I was doing just what I was supposed to.

I still think there are some tweaks that could be made to make more different builds more viable against more bosses, but once I got over my own fear of learning the game the "wrong way", it suddenly clicked for me. With Molly's help and a deeper online understanding of the mechanics, I started blazing through challenges in the second loop that had stopped me dead in loop 1. The first loop took me over a week; the second loop took five days; the third took only a day and a half.

And by the time I got to the end, ooooo does the game feel nice to play. Especially against a boss I know well, dodging and weaving and building stagger and perfectly rationing my heavy hitters to punish it really does feel like I'm one with my mech. And it's hard to ask for much more from an Armored Core.

Baldr Sky had immense potential. It had a cool premise (VR cyberpunk mecha is incredible), setting and themes, immaculate visuals (both character design and the menu, as well as everything else, this is one of the best-looking VNs ever made) and soundtrack, wonderful vocal tracks by KOTOKO, plus awesome gameplay.

It was disappointing on several levels. For one, the VN doesn't recognise some text as already read text, even though it should be skipped, extremely often. What ends up happening is you have a 98% similar scene to one that you've already read, with one different line, so instead of skipping everything except for that new line, BS decides to make you reread and fish out the new line. This is exacerbated in Reminiscence, which makes you read all the flashback SoL sections that you've seen separately before, but this time in a row, in addition to a couple new scenes. I don't know if they did it because the VN came out split into two halves, but it should've had the option to skip everything except for the new content. It is the biggest disrespect of the reader's time that I've seen in the medium, and maybe in stories in general. Those who have read Muv-Luv and Muv-Luv Alternative could probably see an analogy for if you'd read bits of Extra during Unlimited and Alternative, only to read all of Extra right before the finale of Alt. Also, the non-true endings are usually decided by getting "humiliation scenes" which depend on you losing final boss fights, and they're just pointless to me.

And after all that suffering, the final route was underwhelming as a finale (especially compared to how many other VNs' final/true routes blow everything else out of the water), despite how hyped up it was ever since you saw Dive 2's opening.

That being said, though, besides the positives I've already mentioned, Rain Kirishima is one of the best anime women I've ever seen, so I can't give it a negative score.

The more gameplay-focused eroge tend to suffer on the gameplay side, but Baldr Sky is one of the few that actually had a sick loop. Reading the story made me want to fight guys more, and fighting guys made me want to read the story more--both parts are in harmony in a way. I wish I was good at the game tho.

Not to mention, the story on display here is just wonderful. Its fairly hard scifi with a military stint to it, but it never manages to lose the compassion and sentimentality, the human element is always at the center even when characters are talking in paragraphs exclusively comprised of technobabble.

The way it tackles its Big Ideas like AI, the connection of our net personas and our real selves, what it means to be human and all that jazz that has been done so many times before also manages to come off as novel and unique, with perspectives so very rarely really seen in the genre.

Just a wonderful game, really.

its a humbling feeling to find a game that feels bigger than you

i dont even know where to start describing it. at its core, its a game about not understanding. the gameplay revolves around trying in vain to learn about your surroundings - to piece it all together and find a solution to a problem - only to die not because of a lack of trying, but because we just dont have the time.

the beauty of Outer Wilds lies right there. its galaxy is small, yet feels huge and only gets bigger the more you dig. by all means it should feel like a hopeless venture to continue exploring, but its too engaging not to. there is no end goal, and it makes no promises other than the fact you will die.

and the magic is that we did anyway. even if i didnt know what for, i kept exploring its planets to find its secrets. i felt giddiness meeting every character and hearing their stories. i pat myself on the back after solving puzzles once i asked the guy at the starting campfire how to.

Outer Wilds - despite playing as an alien - is a deeply human game. a journey about facing adversity through sheer willpower despite not having all the answers, and knowing youre not alone in that.

i cant do this game a service with my $5 speak and someone else could do a much better job, and thats ok. because like i said, this game - like its setting - is big. theres so much to talk about, yet its message is so precise. its mysteries are so complex, yet so simple in retrospect. games like these remind me how special this industry is, and what kind of art it can produce. Outer Wilds is a profound experience i likely wont forget for a very long time.