Playing this for the first time in 2024, it's easy to see why the game was so impressive in 1997. The iconic scenes hit well with good music usage despite the nowadays lacking graphics+brief text, and there's plenty of soul in the construction of the world. I was all for Aerith when I played FF7 Remake but the scenes with Tifa in the second half of the game really won me over.

Gameplay-wise I did not enjoy the ATB system and would rather play something made with the default battle system in RPG Maker. The dungeons were surprisingly short but I'll take it over something that is needlessly long given that I was playing the game for the story.

The Switch version giving you 3x speedup and the ability to turn off encounters is good, going up and down ladders take too long.

The first raising sim where I ended up doing a run every day for months. Clicking buttons to watch numbers go up activates a special part of my brain, the character models and animations are top notch, and I ended up looking up more about Japanese horse racing than I thought I ever would.

The highlight of the game, in my opinion, is that every uma musume gets to be the star in her training scenario. Even the extremely eccentric characters who would at best be a side character or a running joke (if not a background character) gets a main character-level training scenario that is full of references to the real-life counterpart's racing history, and a lot of care goes into balancing the irl horse's racing history with the characterization of the uma musume as an anime girl.

Agnes Tachyon 10/10 permanently rewired my brain

The game frankly starts in the oddest and least gripping manner possible for a mystery game , but it does indeed get a lot more exciting in its second half. The issue is that it's so centered around its gameplay system that the scene-to-scene writing and characters are overall too plain and hard to get invested in for a murder mystery.

Each chapter follows the format of something happens to someone --> protagonist and a few witnesses have a discussion on what happened --> everyone votes on who they think did it. The way each chapter is so stiffly structured makes the unfolding of events in the story a bit too convenient for the sake of gameplay, but I was pretty hooked in the last few chapters.

The main ADV game system is the discussion, and it's quite unique for a mystery ADV since every time you ask a character about a piece of evidence or someone else's testimony, or try to piece together the answer to questions by combining evidence and testimony, it takes up time. There's only a limited amount of time to discuss the issue before having to vote on whodunnit, but in practice you can just savescum if you're stuck. Somehow I found myself stuck in the situation where I knew what happened already but I need to find the exact 3 pieces of evidence to get the protagonist to figure it out quite a bit.