cyanplaza
2013
One of the seminal entries in the "games Brian Griffin would make" genre, except the surrounding game is decent.
Papers, Please was a game that I really enjoyed when it came out, and I think the overall gameplay loop and presentation carry the game in a way that similar disasters like Not For Broadcast can't. Unlike that game, I really enjoyed most of the cast and following their ongoing stories.
The thing that brings those stories down is that the narrative is tied to a very confused and outright reactionary view of the eastern bloc. It's to be expected, I don't think Lucas Pope mentally has left the suburbs of Virginia since his birth, but the Red Dawn tier depiction of a vaguely leftwing, vaguely slavic rogue state that willingly deprives its citizens of basic needs based on the market is a disingenuous and purposeful political statement. It's also one that's very hard to believe once you have a basic understanding of the history of these regions, and going back to the game even four years after its launch, this stood out to me.
It's also just hard to find the despotic nature of the setting that gripping compared to the immigration system of the United States, which is significantly darker and more cruel than anything depicted in this game. We have the secret police, we have the "work or die" economic system, we even go a step further and have outright concentration camps. These weren't recent developments within the writer's lifetime either. He was around for the formation of ICE! There's a version of this game, if you absolutely have to set it in the "evil gommunism" of the vague east, that cuts so much deeper than this game comes close to approaching.
It really fucking sucks, because if this game wasn't such a cowardly and confused mess of a setting, it would make the individual stories of the regulars you meet at your desk job so much more engaging.
Papers, Please was a game that I really enjoyed when it came out, and I think the overall gameplay loop and presentation carry the game in a way that similar disasters like Not For Broadcast can't. Unlike that game, I really enjoyed most of the cast and following their ongoing stories.
The thing that brings those stories down is that the narrative is tied to a very confused and outright reactionary view of the eastern bloc. It's to be expected, I don't think Lucas Pope mentally has left the suburbs of Virginia since his birth, but the Red Dawn tier depiction of a vaguely leftwing, vaguely slavic rogue state that willingly deprives its citizens of basic needs based on the market is a disingenuous and purposeful political statement. It's also one that's very hard to believe once you have a basic understanding of the history of these regions, and going back to the game even four years after its launch, this stood out to me.
It's also just hard to find the despotic nature of the setting that gripping compared to the immigration system of the United States, which is significantly darker and more cruel than anything depicted in this game. We have the secret police, we have the "work or die" economic system, we even go a step further and have outright concentration camps. These weren't recent developments within the writer's lifetime either. He was around for the formation of ICE! There's a version of this game, if you absolutely have to set it in the "evil gommunism" of the vague east, that cuts so much deeper than this game comes close to approaching.
It really fucking sucks, because if this game wasn't such a cowardly and confused mess of a setting, it would make the individual stories of the regulars you meet at your desk job so much more engaging.
2011
For me, video games are a social experience/lubricant first, and then an artistic medium with strengths not found in books/movies/etc, and then a source of comfort. There are games that I don't think are fantastic or that I don't actively play, but are games that I enjoy existing because I can connect with other people. We can have a chat and I can see what they value in media and we can connect from there, it's a nice time. The other day, I stayed like 30 min after my shift at work ended to talk to a coworker about Style Savvy. Dark Souls is a 0/5 game to me for how alienating of an experience it's been since this game blew up.
The presentation of the game doesn't do any favors. I don't like the visual direction of the game. I think the soundtrack is largely forgettable. I think the sound design in general is passable without leaving any notable impression. The enemy designs feel very bland, or what a teenager that just read the Golden Age arc of Berserk and didn't get it thinks is cool. It'd doubly frustrating because, even when they were less technically proficient, Fromsoft's audio and visual output in games like Lost Kingdoms or Armored Core resonated with me for years after I played through them.
The story of "you're a stranger in a dying world and any information you want has to be clawed out of the dead hands of its previous residents" is another aspect where, having played their previous backlog, it felt like EA version of a Fromsoft game. All of this atmospheric worldbuilding is in service to a stock dark fantasy setting and it's really hard not to compare those aspects to games that used similar approaches, but were alien enough to make the act of piecing everything together a unique experience, like Evergrace. So what you're left with is a largely empty world filled with NPCs that's hint of something more interesting.
Nothing about the gameplay works for me. The level design is one of those things where I'll hear people complain about basically every part of the game, or I'll watch them play the game and they'll just have this awful scowl on their face if it isn't a replaying of the game, but I get instant pushback if I point out that most of the "difficulty" either comes down to trial and error sections that lose all tension once you know the specific way the game's going to mess with you, or they're disasters like Blight town. I know they can have levels with decent flow, Bloodborne's level design largely (not always) avoided sections of the game that come to a screeching halt due to annoying enemy placement or stupid environmental gimmicks. The most praise I can give the level design is the interconnected nature of the game, but that's not a feature that Dark Souls does better than most games with similar structure, nor did I find it preferable to the menu system of Demon Souls.
The combat's way too limited to keep my attention. Weapons, outside of specific late game additions, have the same static moveset regardless of player or gear progression, and that moveset's too limited to warrant much outside of either "smack and run off to wait for stamina if you're unsure about the fight" or "aggressively position yourself to trivialize the encounter because all the tells are 90+ frames long". Player vs Player degrading into smacking your opponent into chugging potions is a telling sign. Magic might be the one saving grace of the game, I think access to these strong and possibly overpowered (they're not in Dark Souls) abilities in a RPG like this can change the way a playthrough is experienced and is cool, but still feels like a major step back from how it was implemented in Demon Souls, like they were worried about the player having too much fun and brought it into the same bland line as everything else.
The RPG mechanics in this game are just as dull. I do on some level appreciate how your progress isn't strictly tied to better gear, and if you find something that looks better than the most "optimal" piece of equipment, you can just keep wearing it with very little detriment to the overall experience. It does mean that every piece of gear I came across felt like either dull numerical increases or outright vendor trash, and the sense of progression that usually comes along with RPGs like this was totally lost. The souls system is in a similar boat. You're just increasing numbers with soul investment, you're not going to be able to spend your way out of a fight's gimmick. Death has less "meaning" when the thousands of souls you're supposed to be worried about dropping when banking up for an upgrade could be lost isn't actually that big of a deal. It deflates a lot of the progression or tension.
The community around the game is also a strong mark against the game. I have good friends of mine who really enjoy this game, even people who don't usually play a ton of video games. I don't mind those people enjoying Dark Souls, I like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we can both enjoy some bad media. The diehard "my main interaction with this medium is Dark Souls and I have 2000+ hours in the series collectively" fans are some of the most universally repulsive and mean terminally online freaks I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with, and I played League of Legends for 8 years. Skeevy people with a laundry list of accusations if you're willing to hang around those circles for longer than a couple of hours.
If this game didn't become one of the most popular RPGs of the 2010's, it probably just gets a 2/5 and I forget the game exists. This game has influence. This game is the "Oh, I don't play hard games other than Dark Souls" option for a generation of people. It's influence on FromSoft outside of "it payed the bills" was a malignant one and we only recently just got out from under the shadow this game cast with AC6. There are games that wouldn't learn from this game's mistakes, but quadruple down on them, like the myriad of largely awful Souls clones that came out in the following years. It defined difficulty in video games going forward, not as a skill set that has to be developed and iterated upon like in fighting or rhythm games, not as a means to push yourself and compare your progress to your peers like shmups, but as trial and error, and if you don't get it then that's a personal failing on your end. I've ran into so many people in real life that play video games, and when I ask them what they've been playing lately, they say it's Dark Souls and I have to politely dance around the fact that I think this game isn't worth the disk it was printed on, or the bandwith required to download it off of steam.
My favorite thing about Dark Souls is that it probably kept a lot of people at FromSoft employed for years to come. Outside of the barest fact that "it existed and people didn't lose their jobs", I can't think of anything else I enjoy about this game.
The presentation of the game doesn't do any favors. I don't like the visual direction of the game. I think the soundtrack is largely forgettable. I think the sound design in general is passable without leaving any notable impression. The enemy designs feel very bland, or what a teenager that just read the Golden Age arc of Berserk and didn't get it thinks is cool. It'd doubly frustrating because, even when they were less technically proficient, Fromsoft's audio and visual output in games like Lost Kingdoms or Armored Core resonated with me for years after I played through them.
The story of "you're a stranger in a dying world and any information you want has to be clawed out of the dead hands of its previous residents" is another aspect where, having played their previous backlog, it felt like EA version of a Fromsoft game. All of this atmospheric worldbuilding is in service to a stock dark fantasy setting and it's really hard not to compare those aspects to games that used similar approaches, but were alien enough to make the act of piecing everything together a unique experience, like Evergrace. So what you're left with is a largely empty world filled with NPCs that's hint of something more interesting.
Nothing about the gameplay works for me. The level design is one of those things where I'll hear people complain about basically every part of the game, or I'll watch them play the game and they'll just have this awful scowl on their face if it isn't a replaying of the game, but I get instant pushback if I point out that most of the "difficulty" either comes down to trial and error sections that lose all tension once you know the specific way the game's going to mess with you, or they're disasters like Blight town. I know they can have levels with decent flow, Bloodborne's level design largely (not always) avoided sections of the game that come to a screeching halt due to annoying enemy placement or stupid environmental gimmicks. The most praise I can give the level design is the interconnected nature of the game, but that's not a feature that Dark Souls does better than most games with similar structure, nor did I find it preferable to the menu system of Demon Souls.
The combat's way too limited to keep my attention. Weapons, outside of specific late game additions, have the same static moveset regardless of player or gear progression, and that moveset's too limited to warrant much outside of either "smack and run off to wait for stamina if you're unsure about the fight" or "aggressively position yourself to trivialize the encounter because all the tells are 90+ frames long". Player vs Player degrading into smacking your opponent into chugging potions is a telling sign. Magic might be the one saving grace of the game, I think access to these strong and possibly overpowered (they're not in Dark Souls) abilities in a RPG like this can change the way a playthrough is experienced and is cool, but still feels like a major step back from how it was implemented in Demon Souls, like they were worried about the player having too much fun and brought it into the same bland line as everything else.
The RPG mechanics in this game are just as dull. I do on some level appreciate how your progress isn't strictly tied to better gear, and if you find something that looks better than the most "optimal" piece of equipment, you can just keep wearing it with very little detriment to the overall experience. It does mean that every piece of gear I came across felt like either dull numerical increases or outright vendor trash, and the sense of progression that usually comes along with RPGs like this was totally lost. The souls system is in a similar boat. You're just increasing numbers with soul investment, you're not going to be able to spend your way out of a fight's gimmick. Death has less "meaning" when the thousands of souls you're supposed to be worried about dropping when banking up for an upgrade could be lost isn't actually that big of a deal. It deflates a lot of the progression or tension.
The community around the game is also a strong mark against the game. I have good friends of mine who really enjoy this game, even people who don't usually play a ton of video games. I don't mind those people enjoying Dark Souls, I like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we can both enjoy some bad media. The diehard "my main interaction with this medium is Dark Souls and I have 2000+ hours in the series collectively" fans are some of the most universally repulsive and mean terminally online freaks I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with, and I played League of Legends for 8 years. Skeevy people with a laundry list of accusations if you're willing to hang around those circles for longer than a couple of hours.
If this game didn't become one of the most popular RPGs of the 2010's, it probably just gets a 2/5 and I forget the game exists. This game has influence. This game is the "Oh, I don't play hard games other than Dark Souls" option for a generation of people. It's influence on FromSoft outside of "it payed the bills" was a malignant one and we only recently just got out from under the shadow this game cast with AC6. There are games that wouldn't learn from this game's mistakes, but quadruple down on them, like the myriad of largely awful Souls clones that came out in the following years. It defined difficulty in video games going forward, not as a skill set that has to be developed and iterated upon like in fighting or rhythm games, not as a means to push yourself and compare your progress to your peers like shmups, but as trial and error, and if you don't get it then that's a personal failing on your end. I've ran into so many people in real life that play video games, and when I ask them what they've been playing lately, they say it's Dark Souls and I have to politely dance around the fact that I think this game isn't worth the disk it was printed on, or the bandwith required to download it off of steam.
My favorite thing about Dark Souls is that it probably kept a lot of people at FromSoft employed for years to come. Outside of the barest fact that "it existed and people didn't lose their jobs", I can't think of anything else I enjoy about this game.
Originally, I posted a review comparing this game to other titles with a ton of depth that demand a lot from the player (like IIDX, +R, etc). I deleted that review, because I wasn't totally sure where I stood on the game after a few more races.
And then after doing even more races, I realized I was right the first time. This game fucking rules.
The tutorial is still awful, but I'm really glad I did it because I would not have thought to use stuff like quick drop without it, and the dialogue between Tails and Robotnik is endearing. It's probably the worst part of the game, and it's irrelevant after the first 45 min outside of the on-boarding process for new players. "Oh, you think you're hot shit? Beat this max CPU level race then" is based, actually.
Otherwise, it's a kart racer that asks more from you than most other entries in the genre, and that's rad. The ring system is sick as hell. The courses aren't all bangers, but an overwhelming majority of them are, and they all look and sound so good that you genuinely forget that the game is a fan project.
The Brawlesque unlock system is only frustrating if you want all the content at once and don't give a shit about the single player experience. The actual process of unlocking everything is, much like it was in Brawl, a fantastic way to encourage new players to plumb the depths of the game, and the key system lets you skip over any challenge you find especially egregious.
Nobody's mentioned the little pets that you can have follow you. I love having a little guy around me at all times for emotional support. No notes, should be a feature in more games in general.
This game is not trying to replace SRB2Kart, and divorced from the context of that game, I don't think it would have nearly as bad of a reputation. The average rating on this page has gone up steadily since this game's release, and as I posted before, in six months after the rough patches of the game are smoothed out (as they have been already in some cases!), it'll be appreciated for the home run that it is.
And then after doing even more races, I realized I was right the first time. This game fucking rules.
The tutorial is still awful, but I'm really glad I did it because I would not have thought to use stuff like quick drop without it, and the dialogue between Tails and Robotnik is endearing. It's probably the worst part of the game, and it's irrelevant after the first 45 min outside of the on-boarding process for new players. "Oh, you think you're hot shit? Beat this max CPU level race then" is based, actually.
Otherwise, it's a kart racer that asks more from you than most other entries in the genre, and that's rad. The ring system is sick as hell. The courses aren't all bangers, but an overwhelming majority of them are, and they all look and sound so good that you genuinely forget that the game is a fan project.
The Brawlesque unlock system is only frustrating if you want all the content at once and don't give a shit about the single player experience. The actual process of unlocking everything is, much like it was in Brawl, a fantastic way to encourage new players to plumb the depths of the game, and the key system lets you skip over any challenge you find especially egregious.
Nobody's mentioned the little pets that you can have follow you. I love having a little guy around me at all times for emotional support. No notes, should be a feature in more games in general.
This game is not trying to replace SRB2Kart, and divorced from the context of that game, I don't think it would have nearly as bad of a reputation. The average rating on this page has gone up steadily since this game's release, and as I posted before, in six months after the rough patches of the game are smoothed out (as they have been already in some cases!), it'll be appreciated for the home run that it is.
2023
this developer has two gimmicks:
- asset flips without any marketing or presentation, which probably don't recoup their very low production costs
- "fuck none of my games sold, have you considered the Soviet Union killed 10 billion people and NOBODY talks about it"
As a Polack, I feel like there needs to be an international movement to prevent more games from coming out of that goddamn country until there's an actual denatizifcation. You shouldn't be allowed to download Unity until you can screw in a lightbulb with less than 10 people.
- asset flips without any marketing or presentation, which probably don't recoup their very low production costs
- "fuck none of my games sold, have you considered the Soviet Union killed 10 billion people and NOBODY talks about it"
As a Polack, I feel like there needs to be an international movement to prevent more games from coming out of that goddamn country until there's an actual denatizifcation. You shouldn't be allowed to download Unity until you can screw in a lightbulb with less than 10 people.
2005
I'm not a nostalgic person when it comes to game preferences, or just in general. 2005 was the worst year of my life and most media from that time fills me with a visceral disgust. With that being said, We Love Katamari is one of my favorite games of all time despite a severe handicap. This game is going to give you a good time, or burn out your PS2's disc lens trying.
The soundtrack is self-evidently great, even better than the first game and the first game's soundtrack is a contender for some of the best video game music I've ever heard. It's not just that the main stage tracks are varied and fitting of the atmosphere. The little piano jingle at the beginning of the game, Overture II, goes harder than most game's OSTs and it absolutely doesn't have to. The sound effects are fitting of how weird this game is, and I don't think there's any improvements I'd want to be made.
Graphically, it's not a leap from the first game, but it didn't have to be. It's a chaotic mess, but you never have issues reading what's happening on screen, and the visual direction of some of the stages, especially the gimmick ones adds more variety than the first game. For a Playstation 2 game, it looks fantastic and it's telling that the art style was mostly kept in tact for the remake, not much to fix outside of scaling up the resolution.
The King of All Cosmo's story is relatively simple and melodramatic for the sake of humor, but also played just straight enough to give this comedic character a meaningful arc that I got invested in. The flashback "plot" tying your progress through the game together could have been more comedic cut scenes like the original, but everything in this game is executed with such competence that I cared about the arrogant drunk and his connection with his father.
The gameplay introduces a few quality of life improvements over the original game, like less annoying collision physics and a better camera. On paper, the little tweaks this game does to the original's formula don't seem like they'd make a big difference, but they eliminated almost all frustration that I had from the original game. The stages have more of a gimmick focus, but not in a way that I found distracted from the core focus of the gameplay, and more traditional stages still existed. The game's amount of cousins and presents gives the game a ton of replayability, and I could see other people getting burnt out by the collection aspect of the game, that just never happened to me. If I start a fresh playthrough of We Love Katamari, it's easy for me to devote the next couple of days getting everything/going for larger planets.
I just have such a nice time playing this game. I'm very picky when it comes to video game humor, and all the bits in this game land like a Season 7 Simpsons episode. It's a loud and chaotic game, without coming off as obnoxious. I find the game really relaxing despite it's concept. We Love Katamari puts me in a better mood in a way that even games I'd say I like better can't. I think this game's one of the most sublime releases of the 6th generation. It's one of those games you can recommend to people who haven't touched video games before, and the most jaded brain-poisoned fans on the medium. One of the highest Smiles Per Minute pieces of media I've ever had the joy to play through.
The soundtrack is self-evidently great, even better than the first game and the first game's soundtrack is a contender for some of the best video game music I've ever heard. It's not just that the main stage tracks are varied and fitting of the atmosphere. The little piano jingle at the beginning of the game, Overture II, goes harder than most game's OSTs and it absolutely doesn't have to. The sound effects are fitting of how weird this game is, and I don't think there's any improvements I'd want to be made.
Graphically, it's not a leap from the first game, but it didn't have to be. It's a chaotic mess, but you never have issues reading what's happening on screen, and the visual direction of some of the stages, especially the gimmick ones adds more variety than the first game. For a Playstation 2 game, it looks fantastic and it's telling that the art style was mostly kept in tact for the remake, not much to fix outside of scaling up the resolution.
The King of All Cosmo's story is relatively simple and melodramatic for the sake of humor, but also played just straight enough to give this comedic character a meaningful arc that I got invested in. The flashback "plot" tying your progress through the game together could have been more comedic cut scenes like the original, but everything in this game is executed with such competence that I cared about the arrogant drunk and his connection with his father.
The gameplay introduces a few quality of life improvements over the original game, like less annoying collision physics and a better camera. On paper, the little tweaks this game does to the original's formula don't seem like they'd make a big difference, but they eliminated almost all frustration that I had from the original game. The stages have more of a gimmick focus, but not in a way that I found distracted from the core focus of the gameplay, and more traditional stages still existed. The game's amount of cousins and presents gives the game a ton of replayability, and I could see other people getting burnt out by the collection aspect of the game, that just never happened to me. If I start a fresh playthrough of We Love Katamari, it's easy for me to devote the next couple of days getting everything/going for larger planets.
I just have such a nice time playing this game. I'm very picky when it comes to video game humor, and all the bits in this game land like a Season 7 Simpsons episode. It's a loud and chaotic game, without coming off as obnoxious. I find the game really relaxing despite it's concept. We Love Katamari puts me in a better mood in a way that even games I'd say I like better can't. I think this game's one of the most sublime releases of the 6th generation. It's one of those games you can recommend to people who haven't touched video games before, and the most jaded brain-poisoned fans on the medium. One of the highest Smiles Per Minute pieces of media I've ever had the joy to play through.
If you're a new player, and you pick Sol Badguy, this game drops to a 2 and stays there until you switch to another character. This isn't like, "oh, he's really strong how do you deal with this" complaint, I've seen so many people try this game, pick up one of the hardest characters in the game with dogshit combo routing that can't play neutral outside of dash-blocking or wildboy bullshit and then drop the game after a month of saltposting.
You're not Billy Badass, better people than you have tried and failed to get consistent at Sidewinder routes. And there's no negotiating around learning character specific Sidewinder routes, Sol's gimmick that keeps him viable is that he spends 3/4ths of the match getting bullied by most of the cast, and then he converts one stray mistake into the exact same special move done with increasingly difficult timing, and ideally that'll chunk your opponent for 70 percent of their health. Wanna take a break from the game for a week or two? That's muscle memory that you're going to have to build back up, and it's going to feel awful until you get back into the swing of things.
This is unlike most characters in the game outside of I-No, which most people in general know well enough to not put time into unless you're already a human synthesizer in other games. The reason this game's a 5/5 for so many people is that you can learn the basics and add what you need through play and go from there, and +R Sol doesn't reward that. Pick Faust and have a good time like the rest of us.
You're not Billy Badass, better people than you have tried and failed to get consistent at Sidewinder routes. And there's no negotiating around learning character specific Sidewinder routes, Sol's gimmick that keeps him viable is that he spends 3/4ths of the match getting bullied by most of the cast, and then he converts one stray mistake into the exact same special move done with increasingly difficult timing, and ideally that'll chunk your opponent for 70 percent of their health. Wanna take a break from the game for a week or two? That's muscle memory that you're going to have to build back up, and it's going to feel awful until you get back into the swing of things.
This is unlike most characters in the game outside of I-No, which most people in general know well enough to not put time into unless you're already a human synthesizer in other games. The reason this game's a 5/5 for so many people is that you can learn the basics and add what you need through play and go from there, and +R Sol doesn't reward that. Pick Faust and have a good time like the rest of us.
2015
A coworker of mine the other day was talking about Fallout, and I mentioned how I thought Fallout 4 sucked shit (in a much more polite way, we're cool). She asked why, and in response, I asked her to describe her favorite character in the game and why they resonated with her. I didn't get an answer, nor did I expect one.
As an open world game where you walk around in the woods for 40-80 hours and pick up used candy bar wrappers to repair your guns, Fallout 4 is totally acceptable. If they offered PS4 games on flights, there would be worse ways to kill a few hours.
As a narrative, it's a Bethesda game. I don't think there's any other developer that could do a worse job with the story of Fallout. Idea Factory would be a welcome improvement. The changes to the core setting of the game are, at best, lazy and at worst outright contemptuous of the themes of the previous games. None of the characters work. Their use of pre-war American iconography totally misses the point of the previous games. Even divorced from the previous games, the role playing aspect of Fallout 4 looks barren compared to even other flawed WRPGs like Mass Effect. It's a game that railroads you in order to tell a very specific story, and that story was written by hollow men.
This game set the tone that the franchise would take going forward. I think about other Bethesda games like Skyrim and laugh at their total ineptitude. Fallout 4 actively makes me upset. If there's any just and loving God, Zenimax will be bought out by a private equity firm and stripped for parts like Sears, or Toys r' Us.
The mid 2010s were so bad for gaming, it's insane how much better things have gotten.
As an open world game where you walk around in the woods for 40-80 hours and pick up used candy bar wrappers to repair your guns, Fallout 4 is totally acceptable. If they offered PS4 games on flights, there would be worse ways to kill a few hours.
As a narrative, it's a Bethesda game. I don't think there's any other developer that could do a worse job with the story of Fallout. Idea Factory would be a welcome improvement. The changes to the core setting of the game are, at best, lazy and at worst outright contemptuous of the themes of the previous games. None of the characters work. Their use of pre-war American iconography totally misses the point of the previous games. Even divorced from the previous games, the role playing aspect of Fallout 4 looks barren compared to even other flawed WRPGs like Mass Effect. It's a game that railroads you in order to tell a very specific story, and that story was written by hollow men.
This game set the tone that the franchise would take going forward. I think about other Bethesda games like Skyrim and laugh at their total ineptitude. Fallout 4 actively makes me upset. If there's any just and loving God, Zenimax will be bought out by a private equity firm and stripped for parts like Sears, or Toys r' Us.
The mid 2010s were so bad for gaming, it's insane how much better things have gotten.
2023
This review contains spoilers
homo groundhog day gave me a headache
For a full hour after I finished this game, I looked through my game collection and my backloggery (my entries on this website are incomplete as of the time of writing). I have never played a game that I've felt this divided on. Throughout playing the game, I entered different ratings on here to gauge how I felt, and they went from 5 stars to half a star. In Stars and Time has some truly dreadful ideas that would tank any other game, ideas so bad that you question how the hell nobody during the lengthy development of this game didn't point out how bad they were. The first line of this review isn't a joke, I have a pounding headache after finishing this game.
With all of that typed out, you gotta understand how good the writing and characters are in this game. I adore the entire main cast unconditionally. In terms of my favorite party members in a RPG, they're all probably in the top ten. The game starts at the end of a long journey, there's character interactions and development that we clearly missed, and yet the characters were written well enough that I had a deep connection to everyone and would look forward to seeing new bits of dialogue around the main dungeon. I'm not generous towards this game at all, and I tried to look for specific lines or scenes that might not have sat well, and I couldn't find anything.
The presentation of the game is, again, way too good for how bad of an idea this game ended up being. Despite being in (mostly) black and white, I never had any visual confusion towards what I was looking at. The key pieces of art during specific cut-scenes were a highlight, and somehow augmented the already stellar dialogue. The music and its permutations, even if those permutations were bad, was fitting for each of the scenes. A ton of talent went into the AV sections of the game, time well spent.
It's a shame the game itself is such an awful waste of this talent. Waste might be going too far, because what we got was still fine, but the entire time I was playing this game, I just wished I was playing the previous 45 hours of this JRPG that we're never going to get. The time looping elements of the gameplay compare poorly to other games with time travel elements. The main dungeon gets monotonous by the second time you've played through all of the floors. The final boss fight is really fun and engaging the first time you go through it, and feels like a chore the 12th time. The game has limited ways of alleviating looping frustrations for the player, like being able to warp to higher up floors or having reminders of where items are, but they come off more as band-aid solutions for an underlying system that isn't fun to play through. Why do I have to grind random fights just to warp to higher up floors? There are times in the game where the only new piece of dialogue requires that you know exactly where to go in the dungeon, and that requires either playing through 20 min of content you've seen a hundred times already, or paying this limited currency to skip that monotony for two minutes of dialogue, after which you'll speedrun killing yourself.
That frustration's supposed to be the point, right? The player is supposed to feel the frustration that Siffrin has to deal with, going through the same events over and over. Mission accomplished, when I had to go through the semi-randomized version of the dungeon at the end of the game, I was not having a good time at all. There's reviews on this website that mention how much they like elements of the game, but dropped the game because it was too repetitive. If you set out to make a bad game, and succeed, you still made a bad game.
If the game itself was just kinda butt, and the rest of the narrative was a 10/10 I'd give this game a perfect score and move on with life. There are specific narrative directions that drove me up a wall. The king being irredeemably bad was such a missed opportunity. There's an attempt midway through the game to talk to and empathize with the main antagonist, and initially I thought this was going to go in the direction of "even if you try to choose peace, the main character is still trapped in this time loop for reasons that'll be explained later". A real gut punch that fits with the tone of the game. Instead, he'll backstab the party and crush a child in his bare hands, something that doesn't fit the vibe of the game and makes the character less interesting. I didn't give a single shit about the king after that scene, he was just a monster that had to be dealt with.
The endgame also left a sour taste in my mouth, to the point I almost dropped the game. There isn't a gradual degradation of Siffrin's mental state, after hitting a specific dead end they just snap and attempt to destroy all of the relationships the game had lovingly built up to that point. I think that the way he went about this was out of character and poorly done, flat out. I hated having to sit through each of the scenes. The final permutation of the dungeon and the character's inner battle didn't work for me at all, and again, even if that's the point, it's a stupid point. Act 5 is the nadir of the game. It feels like this otherwise touching, wonderful game got its shirt stuck on the "what if we made an earthbound like game but secretly it was really fucked up" current that needs to die and never come back. We've had enough of that trope for a lifetime. I thought whatever comment the game was trying to make on mental illness was flaccid and incoherent. This game was a 1/10 for me at this point.
My frustrations with this game have been made very clear, but how I feel about the main cast may not have been. They are all still some of my favorite characters I've seen in a video game in years. How they react to Siffrin at the end, and their not-parting dialogue made it worth it. In Stars and Time, despite being critically flawed, makes you feel every emotional beat that it wants you to. This game will play you like a damn fiddle, in ways that nothing else that came out this year can. Despite the game's many issues, In Stars and Time stuck the landing. It won.
For a full hour after I finished this game, I looked through my game collection and my backloggery (my entries on this website are incomplete as of the time of writing). I have never played a game that I've felt this divided on. Throughout playing the game, I entered different ratings on here to gauge how I felt, and they went from 5 stars to half a star. In Stars and Time has some truly dreadful ideas that would tank any other game, ideas so bad that you question how the hell nobody during the lengthy development of this game didn't point out how bad they were. The first line of this review isn't a joke, I have a pounding headache after finishing this game.
With all of that typed out, you gotta understand how good the writing and characters are in this game. I adore the entire main cast unconditionally. In terms of my favorite party members in a RPG, they're all probably in the top ten. The game starts at the end of a long journey, there's character interactions and development that we clearly missed, and yet the characters were written well enough that I had a deep connection to everyone and would look forward to seeing new bits of dialogue around the main dungeon. I'm not generous towards this game at all, and I tried to look for specific lines or scenes that might not have sat well, and I couldn't find anything.
The presentation of the game is, again, way too good for how bad of an idea this game ended up being. Despite being in (mostly) black and white, I never had any visual confusion towards what I was looking at. The key pieces of art during specific cut-scenes were a highlight, and somehow augmented the already stellar dialogue. The music and its permutations, even if those permutations were bad, was fitting for each of the scenes. A ton of talent went into the AV sections of the game, time well spent.
It's a shame the game itself is such an awful waste of this talent. Waste might be going too far, because what we got was still fine, but the entire time I was playing this game, I just wished I was playing the previous 45 hours of this JRPG that we're never going to get. The time looping elements of the gameplay compare poorly to other games with time travel elements. The main dungeon gets monotonous by the second time you've played through all of the floors. The final boss fight is really fun and engaging the first time you go through it, and feels like a chore the 12th time. The game has limited ways of alleviating looping frustrations for the player, like being able to warp to higher up floors or having reminders of where items are, but they come off more as band-aid solutions for an underlying system that isn't fun to play through. Why do I have to grind random fights just to warp to higher up floors? There are times in the game where the only new piece of dialogue requires that you know exactly where to go in the dungeon, and that requires either playing through 20 min of content you've seen a hundred times already, or paying this limited currency to skip that monotony for two minutes of dialogue, after which you'll speedrun killing yourself.
That frustration's supposed to be the point, right? The player is supposed to feel the frustration that Siffrin has to deal with, going through the same events over and over. Mission accomplished, when I had to go through the semi-randomized version of the dungeon at the end of the game, I was not having a good time at all. There's reviews on this website that mention how much they like elements of the game, but dropped the game because it was too repetitive. If you set out to make a bad game, and succeed, you still made a bad game.
If the game itself was just kinda butt, and the rest of the narrative was a 10/10 I'd give this game a perfect score and move on with life. There are specific narrative directions that drove me up a wall. The king being irredeemably bad was such a missed opportunity. There's an attempt midway through the game to talk to and empathize with the main antagonist, and initially I thought this was going to go in the direction of "even if you try to choose peace, the main character is still trapped in this time loop for reasons that'll be explained later". A real gut punch that fits with the tone of the game. Instead, he'll backstab the party and crush a child in his bare hands, something that doesn't fit the vibe of the game and makes the character less interesting. I didn't give a single shit about the king after that scene, he was just a monster that had to be dealt with.
The endgame also left a sour taste in my mouth, to the point I almost dropped the game. There isn't a gradual degradation of Siffrin's mental state, after hitting a specific dead end they just snap and attempt to destroy all of the relationships the game had lovingly built up to that point. I think that the way he went about this was out of character and poorly done, flat out. I hated having to sit through each of the scenes. The final permutation of the dungeon and the character's inner battle didn't work for me at all, and again, even if that's the point, it's a stupid point. Act 5 is the nadir of the game. It feels like this otherwise touching, wonderful game got its shirt stuck on the "what if we made an earthbound like game but secretly it was really fucked up" current that needs to die and never come back. We've had enough of that trope for a lifetime. I thought whatever comment the game was trying to make on mental illness was flaccid and incoherent. This game was a 1/10 for me at this point.
My frustrations with this game have been made very clear, but how I feel about the main cast may not have been. They are all still some of my favorite characters I've seen in a video game in years. How they react to Siffrin at the end, and their not-parting dialogue made it worth it. In Stars and Time, despite being critically flawed, makes you feel every emotional beat that it wants you to. This game will play you like a damn fiddle, in ways that nothing else that came out this year can. Despite the game's many issues, In Stars and Time stuck the landing. It won.
1998
Gas leak board gaming. Cruelty Squad's aesthetics and disdain for the capitalist subject's condition are on display here, except nobody involved was in on the joke.
Cruelty Squad's graphic design is also here, because this game is disgusting to look at in a way that you assume (hope?) was intentional. Everyone has the Big Head Mode cheat on. The characters have two emotions:
1) WASPy irritation
2) the Black Hole Sun music video
and neither of them feel good to look. This is preferable to some of the still images they use for specific tile events, which look like they ran out of budget to fully animate the game and touched up some storyboards they had lying around. Ugly comics, and sadly they take up the bulk of the game's events.
The board itself is very detailed and colorful, but what they choose to render was so innocuous that the effort goes to waste. The game's audio, however, was focused and refines on the atmosphere the rest of the game set. Much like The Sims, the soundtrack attempts to invoke, 1950's consumer culture but in the most obnoxious way possible and through heavy audio compression. Rockabilly and do-wap tracks that would suck without sounding like they were being played through an intercom, but instead are just unsettling. As the game progresses, it lampoons other musical trends through the decades leading up to the 90's, and the rest of the soundtrack lands with a dud. There's an announcer and voice actors for events. They're easily the most normal, and consequentially the least interesting thing about the game.
The gameplay is still The Game of Life. There aren't many decisions to be made and most of the real board game is Candyland with a spinner that comes loose. This game improves upon the original by keeping the flawed game play in tact, except occasionally you get to see an unfunny animation and if you're really lucky, it's kinda racist. The most daring game design choice is to have occasional ""minigames"" which consist of randomly picking boxes and praying that the RNG rewards you monetarily.
I played this as a kid, and even at the time this game came off as low rent. I was the target audience for this game (children too stupid for RISK) and even I thought this game was too greasy and offputting for anything other than a game or two with my family. I had a hard time finishing the game, mostly because it ran poorly on hardware from the time. This was a port where you could tell they didn't care too much, and when they did you wish they cared less.
Cruelty Squad's graphic design is also here, because this game is disgusting to look at in a way that you assume (hope?) was intentional. Everyone has the Big Head Mode cheat on. The characters have two emotions:
1) WASPy irritation
2) the Black Hole Sun music video
and neither of them feel good to look. This is preferable to some of the still images they use for specific tile events, which look like they ran out of budget to fully animate the game and touched up some storyboards they had lying around. Ugly comics, and sadly they take up the bulk of the game's events.
The board itself is very detailed and colorful, but what they choose to render was so innocuous that the effort goes to waste. The game's audio, however, was focused and refines on the atmosphere the rest of the game set. Much like The Sims, the soundtrack attempts to invoke, 1950's consumer culture but in the most obnoxious way possible and through heavy audio compression. Rockabilly and do-wap tracks that would suck without sounding like they were being played through an intercom, but instead are just unsettling. As the game progresses, it lampoons other musical trends through the decades leading up to the 90's, and the rest of the soundtrack lands with a dud. There's an announcer and voice actors for events. They're easily the most normal, and consequentially the least interesting thing about the game.
The gameplay is still The Game of Life. There aren't many decisions to be made and most of the real board game is Candyland with a spinner that comes loose. This game improves upon the original by keeping the flawed game play in tact, except occasionally you get to see an unfunny animation and if you're really lucky, it's kinda racist. The most daring game design choice is to have occasional ""minigames"" which consist of randomly picking boxes and praying that the RNG rewards you monetarily.
I played this as a kid, and even at the time this game came off as low rent. I was the target audience for this game (children too stupid for RISK) and even I thought this game was too greasy and offputting for anything other than a game or two with my family. I had a hard time finishing the game, mostly because it ran poorly on hardware from the time. This was a port where you could tell they didn't care too much, and when they did you wish they cared less.
why did they start naming these games like this
like who asked for "Ratchet and Clank: We're gonna fuck you in the ass (with guns)"
like who asked for "Ratchet and Clank: We're gonna fuck you in the ass (with guns)"
2000
Evergrace is everything I want out of the medium of video games.
Is this game "good" in a traditional sense? Obviously not. The game's tumultuous development from PS1 to PS2 resulted in the game's scope being both cut back, while awkwardly lurching onto new hardware. This game feels like a strange in-between of a 5th and 6th generation more than any Dreamcast release. The plot is borderline incomprehensible, with key elements of the plot being inaccessible to western players due to a translation error with the bestiary. There are sections of the game that drag on for entirely way too long. There's an eclectic collection of stats that are incrementally increased through random drops from specific enemies, and even then, you won't notice a ton of difference. Combat is slow and lurching. Instant death from the environment is a constant. This game isn't polished in the least bit.
You'll never play anything like it though. Not even the sequel. I got this game at launch, and it's stuck with me throughout my adolescence as this alien, haunting action RPG.
Noriko Meguro's character designs and art direction are in full display here. I love how each of the game's disparate cast are instantly recognizable, even translated in game as clunky as they were. The world design is phenomenal. The skies have this pale, sick green color to it. The "trees" are bare spikes that have more in common with nuclear waste disposal barriers than foliage. There aren't any stock enemy designs in the game, the closest thing to "recognizable" is a boss halfway through one of the routes that looks like a demon. It feels like all the best parts of Morrowind's art direction, without ever feeling the comfort of a more mundane space. The entire game feels like you're in this hostile, foreign land and any respite you manage to get is something you carved out.
Kota Hoshino's soundtrack supersedes the game's own popularity at this point. The in game tracks differ from the original compositions, but not in a way that detracts from the overall experience (if anything, having a more subdued version of Buying Goods at Palmyra is a good thing). Nothing else, outside of Forever Kingdom, sounds close to this game. The highlight track for me would be Omen, the track that plays during the final cutscene/credits track. There's an assumption that this game has a very amateurish, ill fitting soundtrack (partially due to the fact that, as of the time of creating the OST, Hoshino didn't know how to read sheet music). I think the soundtrack fits the game's atmosphere perfectly, and I have a ton of respect for Hoshino for pulling off what he did.
The voice acting, at least in the english version, is terrible. It's never boring, and it instantly careens into "so bad it's good" territory. Don't play with an undub, it's part of the fun.
The large collection of equipment (that you can and HAVE to visually customize!) is admirable. Some players might have reservations with the fact that none of it is going to look like you're walking around in a traditional western suit of armor, I find that to be a selling point. Each piece of equipment also comes with abilities that have either use in combat, or exploration utility that you can only come across through experimentation. While a lot of my runs do devolve into "hit everything with the piko-piko hammer that's inexplicably the second best weapon in the game" (no prizes for guessing the first, check the dev), you are rewarded for exploiting elemental weaknesses and dressing for success.
The story requires external reading to fully understand, due to the game being the car crash that it is. That being said, fully understanding what this game's story isn't impossible and was rewarding to piece together, and unique enough to where I don't want to talk much more about it here. The main "antagonist" never shows up in the game at all and is mentioned only a few times.
All of this adds up to a game that's resonated with me since I picked up a copy back in 2001. A lot of this review just devolved into me saying "damn this game is weird" twenty different times, but I've played so many games and very few of them have such a distinct personality like Evergrace does. It's a challenging work of art to stumble through, one that requires patience. Having 100 percented the game, despite its glaring issues, it's a challenge that's rewarded me enough to call this a game I would put in my top ten. You want something different? This game will give you something different.
Is this game "good" in a traditional sense? Obviously not. The game's tumultuous development from PS1 to PS2 resulted in the game's scope being both cut back, while awkwardly lurching onto new hardware. This game feels like a strange in-between of a 5th and 6th generation more than any Dreamcast release. The plot is borderline incomprehensible, with key elements of the plot being inaccessible to western players due to a translation error with the bestiary. There are sections of the game that drag on for entirely way too long. There's an eclectic collection of stats that are incrementally increased through random drops from specific enemies, and even then, you won't notice a ton of difference. Combat is slow and lurching. Instant death from the environment is a constant. This game isn't polished in the least bit.
You'll never play anything like it though. Not even the sequel. I got this game at launch, and it's stuck with me throughout my adolescence as this alien, haunting action RPG.
Noriko Meguro's character designs and art direction are in full display here. I love how each of the game's disparate cast are instantly recognizable, even translated in game as clunky as they were. The world design is phenomenal. The skies have this pale, sick green color to it. The "trees" are bare spikes that have more in common with nuclear waste disposal barriers than foliage. There aren't any stock enemy designs in the game, the closest thing to "recognizable" is a boss halfway through one of the routes that looks like a demon. It feels like all the best parts of Morrowind's art direction, without ever feeling the comfort of a more mundane space. The entire game feels like you're in this hostile, foreign land and any respite you manage to get is something you carved out.
Kota Hoshino's soundtrack supersedes the game's own popularity at this point. The in game tracks differ from the original compositions, but not in a way that detracts from the overall experience (if anything, having a more subdued version of Buying Goods at Palmyra is a good thing). Nothing else, outside of Forever Kingdom, sounds close to this game. The highlight track for me would be Omen, the track that plays during the final cutscene/credits track. There's an assumption that this game has a very amateurish, ill fitting soundtrack (partially due to the fact that, as of the time of creating the OST, Hoshino didn't know how to read sheet music). I think the soundtrack fits the game's atmosphere perfectly, and I have a ton of respect for Hoshino for pulling off what he did.
The voice acting, at least in the english version, is terrible. It's never boring, and it instantly careens into "so bad it's good" territory. Don't play with an undub, it's part of the fun.
The large collection of equipment (that you can and HAVE to visually customize!) is admirable. Some players might have reservations with the fact that none of it is going to look like you're walking around in a traditional western suit of armor, I find that to be a selling point. Each piece of equipment also comes with abilities that have either use in combat, or exploration utility that you can only come across through experimentation. While a lot of my runs do devolve into "hit everything with the piko-piko hammer that's inexplicably the second best weapon in the game" (no prizes for guessing the first, check the dev), you are rewarded for exploiting elemental weaknesses and dressing for success.
The story requires external reading to fully understand, due to the game being the car crash that it is. That being said, fully understanding what this game's story isn't impossible and was rewarding to piece together, and unique enough to where I don't want to talk much more about it here. The main "antagonist" never shows up in the game at all and is mentioned only a few times.
All of this adds up to a game that's resonated with me since I picked up a copy back in 2001. A lot of this review just devolved into me saying "damn this game is weird" twenty different times, but I've played so many games and very few of them have such a distinct personality like Evergrace does. It's a challenging work of art to stumble through, one that requires patience. Having 100 percented the game, despite its glaring issues, it's a challenge that's rewarded me enough to call this a game I would put in my top ten. You want something different? This game will give you something different.
The medium in which games are experienced should dictate how they're made. What you want out of a game when you're willing to spend two hours on the couch is different than the sort of game you'd want to play for 15-30 min on a lunch break. SaGa 1 (which I'll be referring to the game as from this point on) succeeds because, in a time before handheld game design had a standard to follow at all, the staff that worked on this game understood their assignment. They got with the program.
This is a game you can spend half a hour in and make significant progress, while not compromising on the sort of experience you could expect from a JRPG around this time. The pacing is excellent. The overworld(s) that you visit are large enough to create interesting exploration, but small enough to where even if you're totally lost, you can reliably exhaust every nook and cranny the game will let you in and probably get on the right track. Fights are quick and reward enough XP to where grinding sessions, if they need to happen, wouldn't last more than a single bus trip. The story is sparse, but there's enough worldbuilding to make the journey engaging.
All of that said, the game is still the first SaGa game. The franchise has been willing to experiment with JRPG mechanics through most of their entries, and this game manages to balance experimentation and accessibility. The different party combinations allow for replayability that goes beyond what Final Fantasy 1 offered, but there aren't a ton of wrong choices. The monster transformation system of eating meat rewards players who are willing to break the system over their knee, but the way that meat is tiered doesn't punish players for rolling the dice blindly. As long as you're progressing the plot, you'll be given what you need to clear the game. This game has permadeath that matters, but if you're willing to spend the time to gather enough cash, you can buy your way out of having to actually worry about it. None of the fights take more than that sweet fifteen minutes mark, but still require the player to optimize their party to the best of their ability.
It's such a unique RPG, especially for the time it was released, but it also makes total sense as to why this was the second "Final Fantasy" game that Square brought over. For years, the only real competition this game had on the Gameboy were the other SaGa games, and neither of them managed to be as concise as this game. God is a tiny amish man in the gameboy screen, and I don't think it was unreasonable at all to ask the RPG luddites who owned a Gameboy for Tetris to walk up a bunch of stairs and saw him in half.
This is a game you can spend half a hour in and make significant progress, while not compromising on the sort of experience you could expect from a JRPG around this time. The pacing is excellent. The overworld(s) that you visit are large enough to create interesting exploration, but small enough to where even if you're totally lost, you can reliably exhaust every nook and cranny the game will let you in and probably get on the right track. Fights are quick and reward enough XP to where grinding sessions, if they need to happen, wouldn't last more than a single bus trip. The story is sparse, but there's enough worldbuilding to make the journey engaging.
All of that said, the game is still the first SaGa game. The franchise has been willing to experiment with JRPG mechanics through most of their entries, and this game manages to balance experimentation and accessibility. The different party combinations allow for replayability that goes beyond what Final Fantasy 1 offered, but there aren't a ton of wrong choices. The monster transformation system of eating meat rewards players who are willing to break the system over their knee, but the way that meat is tiered doesn't punish players for rolling the dice blindly. As long as you're progressing the plot, you'll be given what you need to clear the game. This game has permadeath that matters, but if you're willing to spend the time to gather enough cash, you can buy your way out of having to actually worry about it. None of the fights take more than that sweet fifteen minutes mark, but still require the player to optimize their party to the best of their ability.
It's such a unique RPG, especially for the time it was released, but it also makes total sense as to why this was the second "Final Fantasy" game that Square brought over. For years, the only real competition this game had on the Gameboy were the other SaGa games, and neither of them managed to be as concise as this game. God is a tiny amish man in the gameboy screen, and I don't think it was unreasonable at all to ask the RPG luddites who owned a Gameboy for Tetris to walk up a bunch of stairs and saw him in half.
1996
What the FUCK did they do to Yoshitaka Amano's artwork
2014
Probably never going to finish it. I think this game is great, I still listen to the soundtrack regularly. It has its heart in the right place and if you were to ask me if you should play through it, I'd say absolutely.
I'm really not a body horror/gore fan at all. It's not even that the visual direction is bad, I can acknowledge that especially given the sprite art limitations this game looks great, but I just get sick to my stomach trying to look at the game half the time.
The vibes are too fucked. I respect it, I wouldn't want it changed, but I haven't emotionally progressed past Wattam and it's too much for my baby brain.
I'm really not a body horror/gore fan at all. It's not even that the visual direction is bad, I can acknowledge that especially given the sprite art limitations this game looks great, but I just get sick to my stomach trying to look at the game half the time.
The vibes are too fucked. I respect it, I wouldn't want it changed, but I haven't emotionally progressed past Wattam and it's too much for my baby brain.
2009
A testament to 2009. You can pretend that it was never funny, or that it was an anomaly that everyone hated at the time. This was what we were. This is what you were like, if you were around online. There are posts you, the reader, made from around that time that are indistinguishable from any of the unfunny or problematic bits still in the game as of 2023.
I've found a lot of cool tracks through the in-game radio, and the actual mechanics of the game aren't balanced, but they're thematic and require more player engagement than a lot of board games I've played.
Bear witness to what the internet used to be like, it wasn't very good but at least it didn't cost nearly as much to have a decent time.
I've found a lot of cool tracks through the in-game radio, and the actual mechanics of the game aren't balanced, but they're thematic and require more player engagement than a lot of board games I've played.
Bear witness to what the internet used to be like, it wasn't very good but at least it didn't cost nearly as much to have a decent time.