Coming into this game I had very little experience with pure farming games which is Stardew Valley and Rune Factory 4. Yes you read that right, I have never played a Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons before. I'm not the largest fan of this genre, what got me into wanting to try this was the whole "life" aspect. There aren't many games that I've played where you go through the whole rigmarole of going from young adult, to married with children, to growing old together. I had the ending of this game spoiled for me but I can't be all that upset because the original game is old, I was very much alive and able to play it at the time, and the ending STILL got me so it doesn't matter. Also this game took me longer than most jrpgs, oh my lord. I didn't think it would have taken me over 2 weeks to beat this game.

While it was a bit repetitive, the game definitely could have used more automation upgrades, that is a staple of the genre as far as I'm concerned but I got REAL tired of playing musical chairs with my chickens. Animals also didn't seem to die and from what I can tell that is new to this remake. Speaking of animals I really wish there was a way to put the horse back in the barn without needing to call all the animals back out only to put them all back in. Putting in the effort to get the best tools was worth it because of how much more they let you do. I also wish you could fuse more than one crop at a time, instead of needing to do it for each and every one in the stack you intend to. I get why its limited but its still tedious as af especially when Vinny is needy as all fuck and won't shut the fuck up EVERY TIME you talk to him.

I was iffy on the artstyle. The bachelorettes all looked fine, some of the bachelors were ok and others were not. But some of the regular residents were hideous to me, like Sully. The man looks like what an Easter Island head would be with a full body.

I named my character after myself and played a male character which is something I haven't done in decades. I just don't really care about being "myself" in games but it felt like it should be done here. I married Nami, anyone who knows me even a little bit shouldn't be surprised by this. This game has the Animal Crossing New Horizons issue of lots of repeated dialogue. Outside of events, you get the same couple of lines form everyone and it made me not wanna talk to people unless I had to and even those evens play out mostly the same each year. Also you couldn't gift people items while they were doing ANYTHING but standing still or walking (LET ME GIFT YOU GORDY PUT YOUR FUCKING ARMS DOWN FFS) but you can give them request items during those actions so that dumb stipulation should have been removed along with needing to shove the item in certain characters faces several times before they accept them.

Another thing I don't really agree with or understand is this game's profanity filter. First of all, its a single player game so why is it even here? There is no online connectivity whatsoever. Second half of its triggers didn't make sense. How is Cream not allowed but Creamer is fine or using the number 14 (despite the game calling said crop Crop 14) is unacceptable?

As I said above the whole life aspect is what got me to play. Seeing my character age throughout the game, as well as other characters, just seemed so novel to me. I can't name a game that does this outside of like post credits "where are they now" type deal. Seeing my child become her own person was something I didn't think I'd get to see again in my life, though I think making the kid such a depressed mess was a little too real. I cried right after the credits finished, I held it together but that whole last year had this underlying sadness all throughout its events. Every single one I saw just made me sad which is a far cry from the excitement for seeing each one earlier in the game. The people of the town seemed to think highly of me, my family and animals loved me and the farm was in a great state.

So despite the repetitiveness in actions and dialogue, some iffy character designs, I think the life aspect is what sets this game apart from the rest. If you have some interest in this game I say go for it. I can assure you that you'll most likely have...

A Wonderful Life

Still trying to get my thoughts together on this one, so I think I'll try and keep it simple and do some bullet pointing here.

- It's Danganronpa 4. Which I mean, everyone expected, but I was still pretty shocked at just how Danganronpa 4 it was. "But can you spell knife" and "next you get to make a comic book" are in full effect, for better and for worse.
- That said, I am glad Kodaka's willing to move away from the DR setting, even if "hope" and "despair" kind of get search-and-replaced with "truth" and "justice".
- I think the mysteries in this are pretty weak. Chapter 4 (case 5) is fun but the rest aren't much to write home about.
- The bit in chapter 1/case 2 where you had to walk through a room and recreate how the culprit created a locked room was really good, and got my hopes up for more stuff like that later on that would really challenge the player's use of visual space... but alas.
- I think the final case twist was a lot of fun, with one detail that had me clapping and cheering... but man, Kodaka still doesn't know how to make an interesting "mystery-solving" game out of his final chapter twists yet. I was hoping for something more like V3 where you'd be solving a murder and the big mystery simultaneously, but instead it was more like 2's "get a bunch of clues that lay out the plot for you, then repeat the plot 3 times in the gameplay portion."
- Honestly Kodaka just take off the power limiters and write a fully fantastical mystery game already. Don't save the big setting shakeups for the final chapter, use them in the murder plots.
- Characters were fine? I feel like the game expected me to be more invested in the agency detectives than I was. Maybe that's on me for not reading the Gumshoe Gab segments.
- I try not to be too much of a graphics/performance guy but wow this should not have been a Switch exclusive. Even putting aside the vaseline filter in handheld mode, the load times are atrocious.
- The most Danganronpa-ass moment of all time occurs in this game where, following a character's emotional end, you then must play a minigame to spell "email" and are rewarded with an ass shot

Josef Fares is a man filled with an unbridled passion for co-op games, and I truly appreciate his presence in the triple-a space. A Way Out may have felt a little hamstrung by its Telltale-y filmic “your choices matter!!” structure - it ends up working out pretty well in that game, but all throughout were glimpses into small, fun 2-player mechanical concepts in the interactive moments in-between the cutscenes.
His excitement to explore the possibilities of co-op is on full display in It Takes Two’s rambling, playful adventure, repeatedly plunging the two players into unique scenarios with asymmetrical toolsets.

The game features constant genre and mechanic switching. Levels boasting third-person shooting, top-down diablo-esque combat, flying, sailing, karting, and all kinds of bizarre puzzles in-between; reinforced by how they simply never feel under-developed and are tossed away the second they wear out their welcome. Many of this can be chalked up to EA funding, I suppose; many of the ideas this game conjures and then swiftly casts aside would essentially make up the sole backbone of a smaller-scale indie title. It’s consistently inconsistent. A driving force in our playthrough was an element of excitement to simply see what the game has in store for us next.

Very charming how the game is a hulking toybox, absolutely littered with interactive elements and versus minigames. It truly has everything, from a fully-fledged chess board, to musical chairs.

I say that because the narrative certainly wasn’t a driving factor for me, personally!! Cody and May’s bougie divorce story feels the need to throw a child in the mix for any sense of jeopardy before wrapping up with a neat, tidy and highly derivative bow. I simply sleep. The writing is, on the whole, very unremarkable - unfunny, a frankly unbelievably high “wooaaaah” count.

Very very gorgeous 2 look @ though. Whenever they’re not in photorealistic mode with Cody’s Seth McFarlane looking ass, it’s always a stunningly realised Honey I Shrunk The Kids environment. A significant portion of my playtime was spent boring the pants off my co-op partner as I stared doe-eyed at everything. From the sweeping picturesque vistas to the minute graphical details like specular maps and shaders to the unique illustrations adorning every corner. So sikk!!!! The character mo-cap feels like a blunder imo. It looks fine on the human characters where the discerning gamer eye almost expects it to look like shit, but the problem is expounded with the more cartoonishly proportioned characters. Never is it worse than with Fares’ own Dr Hakeem character, a fiendishly fucked talking book that looks and acts like a Facerig preset. Cody and May just seem like theme park mascot costumes with faces that are barely permitted to emote. Hand-touched stylisation with cartoony characters goes a long way - squash and stretch some more. The motion data should be a reference point, not the final product.

Anyway, idk. A very cool game. It’s nice to play a co-op that is oodles more creative than a looter shooter. I like its purchase model where only one person has to buy the title, allowing the other player to download the full client for free - spitting in the face of remote play. More of that, please.

Honestly, the older I get, the more I realize how much I hate time-wasting mechanics.
I really dislike stamina bars and time restrictions that limit what I can do in a "day", especially when that stamina bar dictates everything - from exploration to combat - and does not regenerate automatically for some fucking reason. I dislike trekking through overly-long levels and dungeons with a bunch of inconsequential loot as a reward for exploration. I dislike meandering story-telling where all of the characters are idiots and the pacing is constantly slowed down to explain things to you or being forced to "regroup" and stop your exploration.
I've just been having such a hard time getting into JRPGs lately, even though it used to be one of my favourite genres to play, and I dislike that I don't have the patience for this genre any more. As an adult and having to manage my time to make a place for things I enjoy like gaming and movies and reading, I really appreciate a game that doesn't waste my time more than anything else in the world.