as far as games that take place in the last few synapses firing inside a dying man's brain go, this is way more family friendly than bloodborne (at least until frederic chopin starts trying to line the inside of his piano with eyes)

addictive and fun, so much so that we all sort of overlook the fact that it's an anime eugenics simulator

this game exists at this weird intersection of "absolutely amazing, groundbreaking narrative" and "borderline unplayable dogshit gameplay" and i don't really know how to quantify that with a numeric score; can i just score it a question mark instead?

if this game did better then the red crayon aristocrats could have been the root for an entire generation of wlw

astounding to see this amount of meaningfully impactful player choice in a game about playing with stickers

final fantasy tactics but with the compelling character development moved from the cast of named heroes to the charming generic mooks you roll up at the beginning of each game.
xcom, but if the the narratives for each procedurally generated missions were tense, well-written and clever.
fire emblem, but if the two heroes you play matchmaker for in order to play as their child were a skeleton woman with giant crow wings and someone's awful fursona they came up with in ninth grade.

on the one hand it kind of really earnestly leans into the cringy mid-aughts college comedy film but with all the characters replaced by stereotypically fit, conventionally attractive gay men, but on the other hand there is a sequence where you get really high and then decide to shove your pet goldfish up your ass, and then you get eifell towered by the two EMTs who show up to get said fish out of your ass while maurice ravel's bolero plays in the background
(also: the emts are twins)

come for the solid gameplay and old-school crpg feels, stay for the uncomfortably explicit lizard romances

me, 83 hours in: surely i must be approaching the endgame
world map triples in size
me: oh

starts as a soulsborne, ends as a diablo-esque loot pinata (complimentary); the transition happens somewhere around the time you fight the big tibby anime catgirl with a whip made out of some dude's spine while riding a burning wheel made of skeletons
it's good. there is an absolute avalanche of game content.

it turns out that the result of having a team of french writers in their 30s-40s attempt to write realistic dialogue for american teens in the pacific northwest is a game where everyone is basically steve buscemi in the "how do you do, fellow kids" meme from 30 rock

living proof that lesbians are cooler than gay guys. like, you don't see us forming badass tarantino-adjacent sukeban biker gangs whenever we need to get something done; we can barely organize brunch without having a nervous breakdown

the only game to accurately depict the famous arthurian legend where queen guenivere dies in the corner of a room because she couldn't maneuver around a small piece of debris in her path