For once, I'm entering a review with zero idea of what final score I'll give the game. Sonic R's flaws and oddities have been dissected like an open book, not that identifying them takes much work: the controls are slippery and weird for an on-foot racer, the course design is surprisingly labyrinthine, made worse by how the game makes use of tank-like turning, there's an embarrassing lack of content compared to other racing games, and the soundtrack is definitely love-it-or-hate-it.

If you walked up to me and told me that you dropped the game immediately over each one of these points, I'd definitely see where you're coming from. This isn't my first playthrough - I've already been somewhat acclimated, even though my last playthrough was probably a decade ago at this point (oh no, how the time has flown).

Sonic R is clearly not perfect, and I'm not going to even attempt to make a case that it's anything but absolute 90's jank. But I'm the kind of person who adores Super Mario 64, and defends Super Mario Sunshine, games with their fair share of jank that people these days find themselves split on.
And you know what? If you're willing to give this game a chance to speak for itself, I think it's possible you could see like I do how much of its oddities can be charming.

You might call me crazy for attempting to defend the loose, imprecise controls (especially considering both Sonic's reputation up to this point as a series with immaculate control, and my love for Super Mario 64), and honestly, you should. But... hear me out, if you will - and I assume you will if you've gotten this far into this review.

Like I mentioned earlier, Sonic R is extremely thin on content. With only four initial courses, one unlockable course and six unlockable characters that either have overly pathetic or overly broken stats, Sonic R would be exhausted in about fifteen minutes if it were structured like any other racing game. But Sonic R sprinkles in collectables within the first four courses: one or two Chaos Emeralds, and five coin... token... Golden Circular Things With Sonic's Face On Them.

But why on earth am I describing game mechanics? Wasn't I supposed to be making a defense for controls that don't deserve defense?
It turns out that in order to actually retain the Chaos Emeralds you collected, you need to finish a race in first place, and in order to challenge (not unlock!) an unlockable character, all five tokens need to be collected within a single race. These two objectives can be done separately, but this means that Sonic R asks for players to demonstrate a grasp on both execution and navigation.

Even if you hypothetically knew where all the Emeralds and tokens were from the start, it's quite possible that you might slip up on getting one your first time because of the controls, and by the time you've circled back to get it, you might have fallen quite behind on the competition. That doesn't mean it's a wasted run, though - by freeing yourself from the thinking that you have to win this race, it opens you to explore the whole map without the pressure of competition. And that's when Hirokazu Yasuhara's mentality of Sonic-like multiple paths shine brightest, turning these places into playgrounds to explore and find details, discovering how to get to a part of level in the distance, figuring out what's the fastest routes for the unlockable character races and... even taking in all the scenery in.

Did I mention Sonic R is a brilliant, impressive game for its time? Its graphics are gorgeous, having fully modeled 3D environments and characters in contrast to Mario Kart 64's rather basic geometry and pre-rendered character sprites. The fog and fade-in is done with excellent taste, allegedly all the more impressive considering that the Saturn had difficulty with effects like fog and transparency.

It's this level of visual fidelity that lets each individual route and the entire vast, open track as a whole breathe. And on the topic of the sheer amount of alternate paths that exist in Sonic R's tracks: you know how Mario Kart 64 doesn't show you racer positions in Yoshi Valley because the game can't actually determine it alongside gameplay? Sonic R manages to pull it off with every single track, while still keeping the visuals pristine and the gameplay smooth.

And no review about Sonic R and letting it speak to you would be complete without a mention of the music. Super Sonic Racing, Can You Feel The Sunshine and Living In The City are simply anthemic - there's no way denying that.
Funnily enough, I started this playthrough with the vocals disabled, only to get this nagging feeling that something was missing. Upon switching the vocals back on, I found myself singing along to the three songs above, and even to bits and pieces of Back In Time and Work It Out that found themselves lodged in my brain.

(I should note that I initially wanted to include a section of why I think Can You Feel The Sunshine is great, actually, but it basically ended up turning into a script for a video essay. I'll link it here if I ever complete it!)

For one short, janky mess of a game, all this adds up to something that's honestly really fun to complete, to go back to tracks multiple times to find and unlock everything. What Sonic R doesn't have in breadth, it offers in depth - it only makes me wish it wasn't as horribly rushed as it was because of the Saturn's lifespan.

...Wow. All this sounds like I love Sonic R to death. To be clear, I don't - I haven't played this game in a decade for a reason, and I probably won't play it again for another decade for those same reasons.
But the more I think about it, the more I feel like Sonic R is a classic example of my video game hypothesis that feels all the more relevant with each passing day:
That a key factor that's essential for games to remain interesting over time... might be a little bit of jank.

Recommended by C_F as part of this list.

On the cusp of the 11th century, you are brought into this world, writhing and bare within the desolate outskirts of the Japanese countryside, neck-deep in the overgrown grass and surrounded by the ravenous gaze of demons. The alarmingly-familiar stench of death brings you to your senses quick, and a quick crane of your neck puts you face-to-face with a mummified cadaver, its dried-out face gripped with fear and frozen with rigor mortis too familiar for comfort. Dawdling in this endless expanse of overgrown weeds and youkai as you are now is a death wish, so you'll have to do what you must: Rob the strikingly familiar corpse of its earthly possessions and make your way into the inner walls of the nearby capital. Within, walls of beggars & vagrants line the run-down streets, and demons await the unfortunate around every turn, devouring the unsuspecting and luring countless victims into deathtraps for their own amusement. Thieves and rouges patrol the barren alleyways, no better than the supernatural fiends they contend with for survival. Death here is a commonality that spares none, no more uncommon than the rising and setting of the sun. Welcome to the capital of Japan: Heiankyo.

Cosmology of Kyoto is ostensibly an adventure game, but more aptly put, it's an interactive cultural archive of Heian-era Japan, a loose collection of vignettes and folktales representative to the era, complete with a database of historical facts and folklore so in-depth it has an actual bibliography. As an unnamed wanderer, you will experience the many sights and sounds of this blighted town besieged by despair, encountering mythological and historical figures and bearing witness to their many antics and deeds. Whether it be through run-ins with youkai or the wayward blade of a bandit, you will die, and depending on your actions, be sent to one of the many accurately-recreated hells and afterlives described in Buddhist mythology, and get reincarnated back into the world of the living, picking the possessions off your last cadaver like you did when you first stepped foot into this world, and continue to explore every corner of this decaying capital.

The setting and atmosphere of this fictional recreation of Heiankyo is where Cosmology of Kyoto truly shines. From the moment you step into this world, it is made abundantly clear how unimportant you are: Events are quick & abrupt, and your avatar is rarely ever the provocateur, often being delegated to a mere observer as either a spiritual folktale or a random act of brutality takes place in front of their eyes, before life goes on and you continue walking. There's this sense of detachment that, while a negative in any other "immersive" experience, works heavily in Cosmology of Kyoto's favour, as you really feel like an observer to this world, transplanted to bear witness to this sparse moment in history, and just as quickly as it starts, its over, leaving you with a deep-rooted feeling of confusion and discomfort to take with you long after the journey is over.

If you let it, Cosmology of Kyoto will take you hand-in-hand in its beautifully crafted world of mysticism, and the overwhelming sense of atmosphere packed into this roughly 3 hour package knocks its contemporaries both past and present out of the park. If you like to truly get lost in a game and take in the atmosphere of a setting, Cosmology of Kyoto is a masterclass example of such an experience and I cannot recommend it enough.

in kingdom hearts chain of memories, sora is looking for riku and king mickey. he climbs a tower and while he does it, he starts to lose his memories. we learn, then, how memory is perhaps the most important thing that we, as human beings, have. to be honest, the sickness that scares me the most is alzheimer. the fact that someone can totally forget who i am or that i can forget everyone else is just... terrible.

wild arms 3 is a videogame all about memories. your party is made of a girl haunted by memories of her missing dad, carried by the feeling of, one day, finding him; a guy from a lineage of ancient people, who does not want to accept his 'fate' and follow what the memory of his people say is right, but rather, create new memories by himself; a boy that hasn't any memory from before he becomes a drifter (wild arms' mercenary), and is edgy because, huh, he is not really sure of who he is; and a middle age man, historian, looking for the past memories from the planet. while the game has every single aspect that a jrpg story has (criticizes colonialism, goes full kill-a-god mode, anime tropes (not the criminal ones!), learning how to be friends with strangers you just met, etc.), it never loses focus and, in the end, concludes every character arc and its message.

it can be rough around the edges sometimes, yeah. while it does have a lot of interesting stuff, the way it is presented is kind of archaic and can be a little difficult to fully understand everything. the dungeons are very creative and have some kind of zelda progression, in the way that you almost always have some kind of puzzle to progress and a new item or gimmick to utilize. it plays very well with the camera and perspective too. at the end, tho, it gets a little tiring. the game is very "anime" in a sense that not only is, in fact, directed by an anime director and screenwriter (which give the scenes very cool framings!) but also that is paced in a very episodic way. it gives vibes from a 2000s anime that you would probably love as a teenager but can be tiring if you play this very straightforwardly.

however! it was a very special game to me. it bothered me sometimes but made me think a lot about how i see games and if i am really positive about almost everything i consume or just don't have good taste -- in the end, this critical-existencial-crisis does not matter! what i love about living is having great memories about everything i do and learning how to take care of the bad ones, and this goes for gaming, too. wild arms 3 will forever be a good memory for me, just as this adventure will be for virginia, gallows, jet and clive.

[Emulated on PCSX2]

Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon is the sequel to the first Raidou game and fourth entry in Devil Summoner series. Despite loving Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army I found this game to be quite disappointing, both as a standalone game and a sequel.

Despite being a sequel, King Abaddon does not respect the original game. Kaya’s gone (apparently moved?), a certain character I won’t name is revived just to be a note-taker which totally defeats their death in the original, the cast from the original game get no more development and it feels like they are there because it being a sequel demands it (some are even reduced to mere comedy relief such as tae’s entire character being fainting since she faints every scene she appears in). King abaddon also tries really hard not to reference the previous game’s plot to the point the shopkeeper doesn’t even remember you which makes me question why they even made a sequel in the first place.

Story-wise I did not like this game at all. Story fell out all over the place without a clear idea of what it wanted to say and would dwell on certain plot points way too long that I was waiting for it to be over. I really do wish they would have brought back the original writer because it really shows that they didn’t work on this one (they probably didn’t even plan for a sequel considering how soulless army wrapped up its story perfectly). One big addition I was not a fan of is “alignments”, a staple of the SMT series that made its first and only appearance in the devil summoner series with this game. While they can be well implemented, king abaddon does a terrible job with it by awkwardly inserting philosophical questions into casual conversations which really took me out of the game. What's even stranger is that none of these choices matter - no matter which alignment you choose the ending will be the same with the only major difference switching the deaths of two characters. Content-wise they’re also almost identical with at most swapping out a mini-boss or two (final dungeon and final boss remain the same). With how poorly they’re implemented along with how they don’t even change anything makes me question why they were even added in the first place, to appeal to SMT fans I guess?

As for the gameplay, I was not a fan of it in this game. While raidou can dodge (which is a great addition), Atlus had no idea how to balance this out and their solution was to make every single enemy constantly teleport across the screen (which makes fights really tedious like a game of whac-a-mole). Guns have also become completely useless with the removal of elemental bullets and just letting the player have access to unlimited bullets. Unlike the first game, fights take an extremely long time to escape from making it more viable to just kill the enemies. Another change I was not a fan of was the MAG rework, giving all your demons a shared MP pool. The biggest issue with this is that, unlike the first game where you were encouraged to swap out demons when they ran out of mp, you can pretty much just use the same two demons the entire fight and when you run out of MAG fights become very frustrating (looking at the final boss). While I suppose it's not too big of a deal some mechanics such as combo attacks and sword fusion are missing from this game which was a bit of a letdown. With that all said, one of my biggest issues with king abaddon is boss reuse, the prime offender being the soldier bugs which are reused and reskinned throughout the entire game even up to the final chapter (appearing a total of 13 times) making the game feel extremely repetitive.

While I’ve said a lot of negatives, King Abaddon does make some changes I like. Gone is the tedious fusion where you had to grind to make loyalty to fuse, gone are the random encounters in towns, gone is having to go all the way back to konnou-ya just to fuse and heal. King abaddon also allows the player to use two demons at once and offers more control options such as hiding them (making them invincible while holding a button but they can not take action during this) and being able to teleport them to you. Fusion is also more robust with nice additions such as demons leaving notes when fused and the ability to pass on passive skills. Negotiations are also great, possibly one of the bests in megaten with demons having their own conversations if they recognize each other and being able to use your demons to help you out when negotiations are not going well. Demons leaving sad notes when fused was also such a wonderful way to make them feel alive and broke my heart every time.

Presentation-wise the game oddly feels a lot lower budget with lower quality prerendered cutscenes and a lot less. One of the funniest scenes is when a cow gets kidnapped by a bug and just flies into the flat background (it looks so bad). The redone models for characters such as raidou and tae also look noticeably worse.


While I personally did not enjoy it and have a lot of complaints about it I still believe it's a good game in its own right and worth giving a shot especially if you’re a fan of the series. I just wish this game wasn’t so disappointing for me because I really wanted to love it.

Recommended by ludzu as part of this list.

The funniest thing about Palette to me is that is shows that even as far back as the year 2000 (22 years ago, oh how time flies!), the biggest successes made in RPG Maker have basically never been RPGs. Not only did Palette sweep the awards at the Fourth ASCII Entertainment Software Contest, it managed to get a publishing deal and a full-blown remake for the Playstation, which means its rousing success despite a lack of any traditional gameplay probably set the Arthouse RPG Maker scene in stone for the rest of time. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. What is Palette, first and foremost?

Palette is, put simply, a game about memories. A psychiatrist being held at gunpoint has to walk a girl known as B.D. through her mind palace in order to help her piece together her fragmented psyche and unravel the mystery of her tragic past. This is not just simple set-dressing mind you, it's part and parcel of the whole experience: the visual and mechanical fundamentals of Palette are built directly on top of this foundation.

Visually, the rooms are framed as vignettes, snapshots of locations and events that you only see the relevant part of, people rendered as loose outlines only marked by their most prominent details, loosely connected by thin threads of logic and feeling, just like trying to recall a childhood memory. True to its name, the color palette is the star of the show here. The psychiatrist's office (the real world) is rendered in color, but the mindscape you explore is a stark black-and-white, with the important objects you need to interact with always rendered as a bright, contrasting red. As you step into memories, it seeps into either a warm sepia or a cool monochromatic blue to represent the tone of the memory and the events wherein. It's constantly shifting to set the mood with little effort for maximum results, pushing the engine to its limits as the game struggles to handle its artistic vision.

Mechanically, the gameplay centers around a Gauge on the right side of the screen. It's split into chunks, and moving to another room or clearing obstacles in your path consumes a chunk of the Gauge. You hit 0, and you're booted back to the psychiatrist's office to try again. You must find mementos scattered around your mind palace in order to increase the amount of Gauge you have to work with, as well as unveil more and more information about B.D. and her situation. In a great bit of story and gameplay integration, you start off very weak-willed, and it takes a while just to remember basic information, but as you gain more mementos, you're able to access more traumatic memories and power through the mental roadblocks preventing you from uncovering the truth of the situation. It's remarkably subtle storytelling that helps the mystery naturally build up towards its climax.

Speaking of, the mystery at the core of Palette is an intriguing one, constantly presenting questions and drip-feeding you information at the perfect rate, motivating you to continue playing and powering through admittedly tedious backtracking and pixel-hunt puzzles just to see how these pieces connect and intersect, but it kind of crashes into a cacophony of nonsense near the climax as twist upon twist is cascaded on top of each other like a 7-lane pileup, but that's not a negative, and I walked away both shocked and thoroughly satisfied with my time. If you don't mind jumping through a few technical hoops to get this game running, it's a landmark piece of RPG Maker history and a mystery story that's worth checking out.

this was my former roommate's absolute favorite game of the few she really got into--she was several years older than me but extremely naive/a little emotionally immature. She had a major Belle complex and the only media she consumed aside from K-dramas were the cheesiest of cheesy TV period romances and EVERY piece of supernatural/dystopian YA fiction meant for 14 year olds (which she said she "wanted to fill her library in her British mansion(?) with someday").

I (correctly) associate this game with that exact personality profile now

Back in 2017, ATLUS would reveal a teaser trailer for their upcoming project: A brand spankin' new mainline entry in the Shin Megami Tensei series, in high definition, exclusive to the (as of then) recently released Nintendo Switch console. While in retrospect quite foolish on my part, this announcement served as the impetus for me to buy my own Switch console, because there was no way in hell I was going to be missing out on the latest entry in my favorite JRPG franchise of all time. So with my Switch secured, all I had to do was wait for the game to come out. So I waited. And Waited. And Waited some more. Finally, 4 years later, after ages of "Never Ever" jokes amongst friends and colleagues, my most anticipated game of the year was actually primed and ready to play inside my glorified paperweight of a console, and it was finally time to see if ATLUS could deliver on a near half-decade's worth of hype.

Shin Megami Tensei V could best be described as the next generation's take on ATLUS' magnum-opus, Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. An average Japanese teenage boy is lifted from his average life and thrown into a world of demons and ideological warfare, fuses with a demonic creature to become a powerful half-human half-demon warrior, and must pick a cause to fight for in order to bring about a new world from the hotbed of chaos. But rather than feeling like a retread of old ground, SMT V serves as a culmination of the series' many mechanics, combining them into a Greatest Hits amalgamation of gameplay to create the best feeling JRPG I have played in years. Essence Fusion is the next step in the Demon Source mechanic from Strange Journey, constantly forcing decisions between defensive options like Affinity Fusion or offensive options like new skills for Nahobino and his demons, as well as offering new build depths via Passive Skills that can now be used by the main character. Character progression and party composition that makes the player design teams around both the highly limited skill slots you'll be working with throughout the game, while also developing unique demon builds catering to their innate strengths and weaknesses, building off the Demon Affinities and Apps from IV to offer a whole new depth of strategy to both battles and character builds. The new open world navigation bringing together the verticality of IV's dungeons and exploration with brand-new incentives to explore via the Korok-esque Mimans who provide invaluable character building resources, and the new Abscesses, which incentivize exploration, the way they unveil more of the world map and offer new character skills when eliminated. The absolutely sublime soundtrack by Ryota Kozuka taking the game in a more ambient, atmospheric direction with the overworld music while kicking it into high-gear with the many, many battle themes. It all comes together with a level of experience and polish, gained by decades of experimentation and refinement, that truly makes SMT V the best playing, most balanced entry in the entire franchise thus far.

While I could ramble about the sublime gameplay and the quality of life changes, there are aspects of SMT V that miss the mark. While the brand new open-world approach is a breath of fresh air and opens up a lot of new avenues for level design and exploration, this comes at the cost of the dungeons, of which there are only two in the whole game, both of which are fairly disappointing in terms of design and difficulty. The new open-world segments are fairly meaty and will make up most of your playtime, but the general aesthetic of "ruined city" starts to wear thin when its all you really have to chew on for ~30 hours. Alongside this, the story feels somehow both bloated and anemic, with sections in-between the open-world exploration that feel like monotonous padding full of exposition, but paradoxically having a finale that rushes towards a conclusion that feels unearned and slapdash, and the new approach to alignments killing any real incentive to make choices. It's a step up from Apocalypse's writing to be sure, but it's sad that it fumbles the ball, especially when the themes and allusions apparent in the world design, lore and plot beats are all so strong.

SMT V had the (somewhat unreasonable) goal of justifying a $299 console for me, and yet despite that high mark, it managed to pass with flying colors. Even with my criticisms, this is my game of the year: I could not put this game down for the life of me. SMT V is a shining gem of both the Megami Tensei franchise and JRPGs as a whole. I loved this game, and it was honestly worth the 4 year wait I endured for it. I don't know how ATLUS will top SMT V, or if they even will (on a gameplay level at least), but SMT V has skyrocketed to being both one of my favorite MegaTen entries and one of my favorite JRPGs of all time. God damn this game fucking rules!

the path is a video game in which you assume the role of little red riding hood on her way to grandmother's house in the forest. it is a shockingly vibrant game, with an art style rooted in modern pop art and the uncanny valley nature of playstation 2 models, which makes the long trek to grandma's house a blindingly bright experience. it is pure white, ketchup red and vomit green with inspired, whimsical character designs laser-focused on communicating character personality and nothing else. upon reaching your goal, you shuffle uncomfortably through grandma's empty, foreboding house with a sense of unease, and then your character's model settles on the bed next to the corpse-like image of her grandmother, and you get the news. you were ranked with a "failure."

as a walking simulator, the path is equal parts game and art experience. it is a horror tinted vision where the goal is to encourage you to think and relate to the game in your own way. playing the path felt like holding a microscope up to my own recollection of childhood memories, picking out the moments that seemed to echo the path. it is primarily interested in the dissection of childhood and what it feels like to grow up in a world that you're still learning about. each of the little red riding hoods has her own personality, storyline and wolf to encounter in the woods, adding to this feeling of growing up as you play. proceeding from youngest to oldest is a stark experience of growing up from a young girl to a teenager and then burgeoning young woman; it echoed my own life experiences in a haunting way, but perhaps it wouldn't be as such for every other person out there.

decorated with a unique artstyle that indulges in the doll-like appearance of ps2 models, the path also sounds lovely with an ambience that has not be replicated in games since it. it is handcrafted to feel like a fairytale that is held together with wire, drapes and shadows, never quite revealing what it's end game is until you decide you've had enough and want to digest it on your own. it has a vested interest in leading you through an emotionally uncomfortable experience, allowing each player to have a unique take on what they interpreted the game to be about. the closest thing to it is looking at a painting and talking to other people about it: everyone notices and feels something different, so robust conversation that gives you peeks into one another as human beings feels like a component that has been baked into the path.

it is a bug-laden mess that is a pain and a half to get running these days, and when you get it to, there's still hoops to jump through. still, getting it to play feels like hitting a coffin after digging into the earth for hours. it feels like a skeleton you shouldn't be looking at, like the past is haunting you as you play.

it's worth noting that there is simply no user interface to this game. in fact, it probably is one of the earliest examples of a modern game completely forgoing a UI to hammer in the experience of it's stage. it expects you to learn to walk on your own, taking the game at your own pace and exploring as you wish, alongside the red riding hood of your choice. in this day and age, this doesn't quite achieve the effect it did almost fifteen years ago, but i'm sure that it added to the sense of disorientation back then. it just felt like something worth mentioning: there are multiple instances where things feel dated. the intuitive ui is one example, but the writing can be another. overwrought at times with a desperate need to sound like a page out of a fairytale, it can miss the mark when it really cannot afford to.

i don't think this is a game for everyone and i would hesitate to recommend it even to close friends. if you like stuff like night in the woods or what remains of edith finch, this #ArtGame might be for you. it's a masterclass in atmosphere, topped with some of the most uncomfortable gaming experiences i've ever had that were completely on purpose. the path is also arguably the best of tale of tales' gaming catalogue, and the development team's thumbprint is still pressed into the silicon form of gaming today.

i made a whole-hearted attempt to revisit this for halloween '21. my first pass of this game was noteworthy for how quickly my opinion of it dropped; i cannot say that a second play through changed that. if anything, it solidified what a disappointment i found amnesia: rebirth to be.

it's worth noting that, i think, the biggest problems with rebirth are it's genre (cosmic horror) and the lack of, to be frank, scares. i have some personal gripes with it, but at it's heart, rebirth is a true gothic horror story. there's only one monster that poses any kind of threat to you through out the game: the ghost of grief. it's a somber walk through tasi's memories, unraveling her trauma and loss. after a while, it felt exploitative at best. i get it, something very sad happened to her and salim. this, combined with how the game shows it's cards early and disappoints on delivering it's scares, served me a slice of frustration pie very quickly. there's a few segments that feel like the dark descent, but twice as many that feel like imitators released on steam for $1.99.

it's a polished game with a lot of love in it. i admit that much. i appreciate the bold choices in it, too. i think the setting was a lovely, unique place to take survival horror. the pregnancy related mechanic was an interesting way to update the sanity meter. i just don't think this had any business being a mainline amnesia title. i have to wonder how it would have looked as a standalone title, allowed to breathe in it's own space.

Made a leap of faith and it ended up just what I was looking for! Made me love jRPGs again! Also made me explore the Atelier series, which I now appreciate. My gateway into Gust games. The game isn't perfect (the stealth missions in particular can really just go away!), but I rated it high based on personal biases.

Note that since this my first Gust game, I've never played the first Blue Reflection. Many people consider this an improvement over the original many aspects. I didn't feel I missed out on much by not playing the original or watching the anime, but I can see how those who have might get a bit more out of the characters.

the opening montage of Up really destroyed a whole generation's concept of effective nonverbal storytelling by making them think a parade of prefab domestic clichés embellished with flavorless Milestone clipart set to overbearing music is in any way sophisticated or interesting huh

this girl is a tasteless unfuckable dweeb and i wish her all the worst. the way she's simultaneously a self-insert wish fulfillment character AND the most hapless and bland cozycore dork imaginable is really dark tbh. inexcusable taste in stuffed animals! stop decorating with your diploma already you absolute MONSTER!!! When a sappy celeste-adjacent chiptune ballad plays as it's revealed via context clues that she came into her own after a trip to Japan (and returned w/ a bevvy of basic tourist kiosk tchotchkes) and now feels confident enough to explore rockabilly-lite fashion...hell. It's all so flavorless and antiseptic--she is 30 where the hell is her hitachi wand and why CANT i stuff her horrid garb into the closet in the ideal organizational format--the pile? the subject here is so unpalatable that i honestly would have preferred they scrap the whole progressing narrative concept entirely (esp. when its used in such an unambitious way that communicates very little beyond trite sentimentality; life has its ups and downs, #gratitude, don't make time for haters who dull your shine, the more things change the more they stay the same, when god throws out a mug he buys you a wacom tablet) and instead present a medley of varying rooms/spaces occupying a plethora of subjects, aesthetics, and experiences, but also idt the same devs who chose this protag have anywhere near the worldliness or savvy to attempt something like that. impressive amount of unique isometric assets and cool implementation of foley though!

one of the best games I have literally ever played, consistently ahead of its time to the point where the rest of us probably haven't caught up

also nowhere near as hard as its reputation had me expecting! it is near-impenetrable at first but supereasy mode is plenty forgiving and it has a surprisingly well-considered difficulty curve, it ramps up pretty gradually with the exception of a few "wall" bosses to serve as proper skill gates, like sniper honeyviper, seven force, etc

I need to also point out that on supereasy there's a fucking manual slow-motion feature!!! the madmen including an accessibility feature that's STILL rare all these years later back on the mega drive... insane

I do almost yearn for a version of this game made for the genesis 6-button pad but the insane, unwieldy control scheme is better than it has any right to be and mostly serves as a reminder of how bold treasure were willing to be, and besides, only having to move your fingers between three buttons probably does help with how manic things can get

but yeah, game is a technical masterpiece and damn near perfect, anyone want to go 68000 THE HEART ON FIRE with me