Put this down as one I've got to sit with in order to give stronger, more detailed thoughts on. In the same way that revisiting CLANNAD was important as a piece of self-reflection and an analysis on my own growth and changes over the decade-plus since I'd first played it, Little Busters! served to embolden my understanding of how important my friend group has been every step of the way through those changes. One of the most tightly-organized Key games, with every route offering something to the grander narrative, and while After Story from CLANNAD remains the personal peak of their output for me, you'd be hard-pressed to find a true ending route with the sheer payoff and emotional conviction of Refrain elsewhere in the medium.

I'm going to take a break from finishing the Ecstasy routes, having completed Saya's, and go back for Kud Wafter in the same stretch of time. I'd like to let the original game sit a little longer, Refrain given time to wash over me a little more, and hell - maybe I'll even watch the anime, because I really do love this cast and their stories. The Little Busters are eternal, forever and ever.

Get ready for the game that mixes Wolfenstein, Bioshock, Fallout, and a dystopian/utopian 1950s-era Soviet Union. From characters that fuck robots to the robots that want to fuck you, this is one of the horniest games I have ever played without the game being explicit. Bombshell robot twins that you can undress via mods. Kinky robot fridge Nora that is good at dirty talk to distract her partner from noticing she is a fucking fridge.

This game both exceeded and fell short of my expectations. Even though I don’t like souls-like-esque(?) games, I enjoyed this one.

For a game of this scale, I would expect the environment to interact with the player in a sufficient way, but this was not what I got during the gameplay. Also, there was a 10-minute shader load when I first launched the game. I am not even going to talk about those long ass elevator rides where I can binge-watch The Lord of the Rings.

Oh, did I mention forced constant internet connection? BECAUSE THERE IS! But fret not! They compensate this with long and boring formal dialogue filled with complex terms uttered by a creepy robot with the most robot voice possible. Hell, even the main character says he didn't understand jackshit.

Enough with the negative aspects, let’s move on to more negative aspects. 5 FPS animations that you see in various cutscenes even if you MAX every setting and have an RTX4090. And to make it 60 FPS, you must alter some configuration files in the game directory. When you think you had enough, the game slaps you across the face with the same tutorial popup that says the same basic shit.

The big brain of a game spoils itself by showing every enemy in its lore category right at the intro. Oh, also you must grind so hard you can’t even call it zero to hero, you gotta call it minus thousand to hero. BTW, the fuck is wrong with these facial animations? Like, everything is buttery-smooth, and you get to a dramatic moment in the story, and the voice actors are doing their best, and then you get the facial expressions of my dead grandmother, WHO IS DEAD BY THE WAY! Totally ruining the whole experience.

There are minimal QTEs in the game that you come across several times in your playthrough. They are minimal, but their impact is huge, like, you can die. You get a QTE and fail it because you did not expect it, then get to that point again and successfully complete it, then a long time passes and you get a QTE again in a critical moment and you have a partial heart attack because you weren’t expecting it, and then you fail again like you did your whole life.
Now it’s really enough with the cons of this game. There are mad fun lock-picking minigames that you generally must complete. Also, there are some puzzles that utilize physics beautifully. It’s nice to see they pulled off placing puzzles in such a game and got away with it. There are not-so-great cars in the open world that you can use to travel between faraway places and run over some robots in the process, but since the car mechanics are so messed up, you might end up in a ditch and have to walk two kilometers to your destination since you can’t find any other car.

The story is captivating too, and you get great plot twists in every part of the story. No spoilers.

3.5/5, would fetch the robot maid’s limbs again so that I could go through a simple door.

I feel like I say this every time but damn if there was a game I was certain I wasn’t gonna like upon revisiting it, Skyrim would’ve been my number one choice. It’s a big budget western game made by the developers of all of my least favorite Fallout games, it simplifies the remaining Elder Scrolls RPG systems even more than Oblivion did, and, I mean, it’s just so lame to be like “I LOVE SKYRIM” in 2023. BUT JUST LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED!!!

Basically, as much as Skyrim’s design builds heavily off of Oblivion’s, it’s setting and mood are much more reminiscent of Morrowind. Not that it feels the same, Morrowind is all alien and ash-covered, where Skyrim is all vikingy and snow-covered. It’s a more classic setting for sure, but there’s a lot of unique flavor on top that Oblivion simply didn’t have, with its throwback-to-daggerfall tone. There’s a culture to explore, a land to learn, and a complex system of faction relationships to untangle, whether they be classic TES guilds or almost Fallout-ey political factions. What’s really great about these factions is that the division between them, the civil war that sets the scene for the game, is incredibly morally ambiguous, in that classic way that no matter who wins, so, so many people lose. Morrowind had wonderful factions as well, but the factions in Skyrim feel more active, more direct, like you should choose a side even if you don’t really want to. The flora and fauna are less varied and less… strange than Morrowind’s, but put Oblivion’s collection far to shame. All this to say Skyrim feels fleshed out and thick in the places Morrowind did, in all the places Oblivion felt thin and repetitive.

The design systems Skyrim continues from Oblivion aren’t my cup of tea generally, but they’re also not the kinda things you can walk back. In particular, the non-diagetic fast travel cat is out of the bag, and the amount of people who want it removed and/or the game designed to be fully playable without it is.. not that large, and it was certainly tiny back in 2011. However, in the recent versions of the game, there’s a survival mode you can enable. Basically, it makes you need to eat, sleep, and stay warm, and removes your ability to fast travel. Since I wanted a more detail-oriented experience than my fast-travel-laden sprint through Oblivion, I decided to try it out, and honestly I’m glad I did. While it’s suuuuuuuper tacked on and clear the game is not built around it at all, for most of the game it was great to have to plan my routes, stock up on food, and make sure to rent a room every time I went into a city. I used the carriage to travel from city to city all the time, and would hide out in caves along paths if I was getting too cold. I would definitely recommend trying it out, but also being ok with turning it off at certain points of the game (at one point I almost froze to death during a particularly long story-required dialogue on top of a mountain). It’s dumb and tacked on for sure, but putting it on during the early and mid game really accentuates the rpg elements of the game, and makes you treat the world as a place instead of a backdrop.

Really my only large issues with the game are that 1. they really needed to hire more voice actors, so many (sometimes major!) characters have one of two voices and it really hurts the immersion, and 2. for a special edition rerelease of one of the most successful games ever made, wow there’s so many bugs and weird bad-feeling failure modes. Like, and this is carried over from oblivion, if you’re walking up a slope and it becomes too steep to walk up, you just stop. You can’t jump, but you can move laterally?? And if you stop moving you VERY SLOWLY slide down the slope. Feels terrible. Also like, the shouts and the magic are tough to use in a pinch, as their animations have strange timings and the shouts in particular just like, don’t happen sometimes. I’m ok with this kinda stuff in general, and most people know skyrim is buggy as hell, but it’s also wild that it’s so buggy at this budget and level of success.

But yeah, broadly, Skyrim is a return to form while still keeping the grandeur of Oblivion, in a way I’ve never really seen a studio pull off before. It feels bigger and more streamlined, but also well detailed and deep if you look at it, and most importantly it lets you know “HEY, LOOK AT THE DEEP COOL PARTS, DON’T JUST GLOSS OVER THEM”. It’s considered and well made and goddamn I feel so lame for gushing on Skyrim lmao

This was the first world I ever truly felt lost in. I played this game for hundreds of hours on a camping chair in my dad's old ass apartment. He used to burn cheap incense from a flea market and that smell instantly takes me back to the sprawling fields of Cyrodiil.

Listening to the soft overworld music walking through the streets of Skingrad, fighting back the Daedra at Kvatch, the busy port at Anvil - I could probably write a book about how beautiful this game is. This game is the absolute definition of comfort for me, and to this day, I can still turn on Oblivion and lose myself for hours. It still feels like a world where anything can happen.

The soundtrack, the painterly vistas, the amazing side quests and story - the flawed, but lovable AI - for the rest of my days I'll treasure Oblivion. As Todd Howard famously said at some point in his life - it just works.