Played this on stream with a low-end laptop for several hours and now whenever I hear one of the 00s pop songs from its soundtrack playing on the radio at a drug store I gradually put it together that this is the standard speed version of the song I'd heard playing at x.67 speed during this experience. I was briefly thrilled to learn that this is first and foremost a yuri dating sim where you court other volleyball players before realizing that there are no interactions between the characters beyond the basic gift-giving minigame.

Led to a conversation with a friend about the Rainforest Cafe, with which I was totally unfamiliar, almost as alienating as the game itself. The hotel in this one's a very well-realized little nightmare: variations on a recurring setting are used to really good effect in it. No zine joke in this series will top the one about pronunciation, but the Kickstarter dig got me. This is the entry in which it came together for me what the series is doing with this broad satire of patterns in modern consumption, using it to achieve that sophomoric brush with politics that exploitation cinema really needed to function. Loved the hometown section.

I would bet it all to smoke weed with Fang and Vanille in their dimly-lit bedroom full of empty takeout bags: I have never seen a burnout codependent lesbian couple depicted this plausibly. XIII is probably the first Final Fantasy to make intra-party dynamics a narrative priority, and the most successful in this. Good dub casting supports this, and it's the series title from which I came away most fond of the characters. Pretty much the gold standard of seventh generation console visuals, and the best version of the ATB system.