Sonic Frontiers is kind of a miracle. I hesitate to call it good but it's oddly compelling. It's a mishmash of competing ideas and new concepts bolted onto existing gameplay elements, and yet somehow it works. It borrows heavily from other games, often shamelessly, but never strays too far away from what makes Sonic tick. It's got that familiar Sonic Team jank but is also the most polished game they've probably ever made.

In short...yeah, it's alright.

I'll chalk that up to a win for a developer that's truly struggled to find an identity for this franchise going back over 15 years now. I don't know if Frontiers will be that going forward, but there was at least an attempt here to right past wrongs and fully commit to this change in direction until it was truly ready to be released. They weren't lying when they said they would take their time to ensure better quality. There's a lot I'll take issue with as this review goes on but I'll take no umbrage with their execution of what they were going for here.

So what was Sonic Team going for here? Well, an "open zone" game as they'd call it, which is really saying it's a series of segmented open-world areas for you to run around in. And truthfully, they nailed this part of the game in a way I was not expecting. They've created a huge playground for Sonic to have fun in, filled with obstacles, platforming, and puzzles that smartly funnel you from one area to the next as you explore the islands. I wish it was all a little more natural looking and built into the geography instead of appearing like random game elements plopped down all over a Windows XP landscape, but they do absolutely achieve their job of keeping you busy and always giving you something rewarding for interacting with them. It's so basic but it's also why I easily vibe with these types of games. One can't help but wonder how much higher they could have reached with this concept if they were willing to move off established conventions and opt for a more momentum-based system for players to experiment with, but I digress.

Unfortunately, now and then you'll need to pop into Cyber Space to grab a particular collectible and it's here where the experience gets dragged down a notch. The Cyber Space levels are entirely in the style of past Sonic games like Unleashed or Forces and it's very clear Sonic Team didn't have enough confidence in their new vision so they threw these levels in for some misguided sense of variety. Worst of all, these stages reuse both visual designs AND stage designs from past games, cut into smaller chunks, so if you've already played them this will just feel like a bore. I won't mince words: this is incredibly lazy and if they couldn't be bothered to design entirely new levels for this part of the game it should have never been included. I never looked forward to having to grind these levels for the necessary vault keys and quite frankly it's a good showcase for how dated that style of Sonic gameplay has become.

One other aspect of Frontiers' gameplay that also deserves criticism is its upgrade system. I don't mind having to unlock new moves for combat but there's no reason why a game like this requires a system that forces me to increase Sonic's attack, defense, or speed (or the number of rings for that matter, an entirely useless upgrade). It's like they looked at other modern games and said "We need to do this too" without really considering why those systems can often be a detriment to those games as well. If you have to make your character move and feel worse to justify later upgrades and "fix" the problem you created, that's bad game design in my book. And yes, this problem does get mitigated about halfway through the game when you've done enough of the upgrades to where it stops mattering, but that doesn't erase the problems I had with it in the early game, and the best example I can give is the encounter with the Squid enemy on the first island.

The Squid requires you to run along a path until you're in range to attack it, at which point it'll switch to a combat field to allow further damage. The problem is that early in the game, your speed is slow, so it can take minutes for you to catch up before you're in attack range, and that's not even counting the section where it's entirely automated and you simply can't catch it during this time. Once you do achieve this, you find your attack is so low that you simply cannot do enough damage to dispose of it in a timely fashion, forcing you to repeat the chase section. You'll probably have to do this three or four times before the Squid finally goes down. It's unnecessarily tedious and frustrating when all I really want to do is be tested on how well I've mastered the combat. It's a small point in a larger game but this sort of thing is a pet peeve of mine and I think it illustrates the larger point of how unnecessary these systems are. They merely exist to give you the illusion of progression but it's not really required as the sense of progression you get from working through the islands is where the game's real satisfaction comes from.

Moving back to another of the game's strong points, let's discuss the story and characters because at long last Sonic Team has woken up and realized that Pontac and Graff were hacks who were strangling the series with their take on its tone and characterization, and have brought in Ian Flynn to rectify the problem. And boy does he, as not only do the main cast of characters finally get some nuance to them but the story itself is allowed to actually connect back to older games. This gives the Starfall Islands of Sonic Frontiers some immediate credibility as a setting in this universe and helps to bridge the series back to a time when you could get invested in a Sonic game's story because the characters were allowed to grow with it. What a novel concept.

There's so much to like here. I was genuinely worried that the side characters would exist as objects for Sonic to rescue and not have much interaction outside of that, but even in their transient state, they're still able to influence events and have meaningful conversations with Sonic, who himself has returned to a genuinely likable character and not spouting the most obnoxious one-liners imaginable every five seconds. Hell, the entire sidestory with Tails felt like Flynn deliberately calling out how shitty the past 10 years of characterization have been for Sonic's fox friend. It was incredibly refreshing to see the series acknowledge its faults and commit to doing better. If there's one gripe in this department, it's that most of Eggman's motivations were put inside audio logs that you need to do the fishing minigame to acquire. Given Eggman's relationship with the new character of Sage is incredibly vital to the proceedings, I wish this stuff would have been more front and center, but hey, at least the fishing was fun.

I touched a little bit on the game's visuals but I'd like to expand a bit more because I do think how this game looks is a bit on the disappointing side. Not so much in terms of fidelity or framerate; Sonic Team did a surprisingly good job here and overall Frontiers ran extremely well on my PS5, at least in performance mode. This is more to do with the game's visual identity, or perhaps the lack thereof. Despite having five islands, Frontiers only has three level themes: grass and forest, desert, and volcano. Island 4 and 5 looks practically identical to the first one, and the same style of ruins persist across the entire game. From a narrative standpoint, this makes sense; it was one ancient civilization across the whole island chain, but it does give the feeling of sameness and there's an overall lack of variety to the locales here. The realistically rendered worlds also contrast greatly with the cartoonish characters who inhabit them, and I would have much preferred the game to go in a more stylized direction consistent with past Sonic games. This isn't a major point; just a preference of mine.

Much like the visuals, the music can also be a little jarring and inconsistent at times, but this is more toward the good end of that spectrum. You'll go from the quiet and laid-back tracks that inhabit the open world (some of which feel very reminiscent of Sonic 2006), while enemy encounters, cyberspace levels, and boss battles will hit you with more mechanical-inspired themes and vocal tracks that are more akin to the Adventure era. There's a lot of variety here, and it's pretty much all good. One of the safest bets you can make is that a Sonic game will have good music and you will not be shocked to find that Frontiers continues that trend.

If you're a hardcore Sonic fan you'll find a lot to like in this game, but if you're someone who was hoping Sonic Team would be able to elevate this franchise to greater heights, you're not going to find it here. Frontiers pulls the franchise back to the level of "acceptable" and for some that may be enough, but for me, I'm still yearning for something that can give me the highs of Sonic Adventure 2 again. There are moments of Sonic Frontiers that invoke the spirit and energy of that time (especially those boss battles), but there are also moments where you realize this is a game in 2022 and it can encapsulate the worst elements of that. The result is an experience that, again...is fine. Just fine.

Perhaps I should be happy with that.

Touhou Luna Nights is a mostly fun, but also at times very frustrating game. The game revolves around two main mechanics: time stopping/slowing to avoid attacks and enemies, and the graze mechanic from the mainline Touhou games in which you get as close as possible to enemies/projectiles without getting hit by them. Grazing gives you back magic and health, which is vital for the boss fights especially since you need magic just for your basic attacks.

Conceptually, the game is fantastic. The controls are great, the time mechanics and graze mechanic are implemented extremely well, and I assume the story is fun for fans of Touhou due to all the characters that appear (along with their themes of course) that I didn't understand because the only thing I know about Touhou is bullethell and cute girls in frilly dresses.

I say conceptually though, because while the skeleton of the game is good, the meat of it is a bit on the lackluster side. Level design is pretty basic and uninteresting, with the later levels just shoving annoying enemies and hazards everywhere. It's not terrible, but Super Metroid this is not.

The game shines with its boss fights, which are animated beautifully and have some really crazy looking attacks, but I can't help but feel like sometimes they were just too tanky. The final boss especially got tedious with how much health it had.

The game also features a level up system and a shop, but both of these are so inessential that it's easy to forget they're even there. I'm sure leveling up more and getting some more shop upgrades can make some bosses a bit easier, but hardly enough that it's worth the grind.

Overall it's a fun game, but probably not one I'll be returning to anytime soon. Best way to sum this up is really great mechanics that are unfortunately trapped in a decent-mediocre game.

The systems are fruitless, the construction is tainted, everyone will use these mechanics of 'justice' for their own ends because they have accepted that where one comes shadow they must also come with shadow. But that doesn't mean that light, that 'truth', doesn't exist. To avert your eyes and act like the pursuit of truth and justice is naive and nothing more, is cowardice. Cowardice at the enormity of the issue, the complexity, the sheer size of the web. We must strive "to keep going down the straight and narrow road."

The politics are all simplified, but I couldn't help but have it hit me within a current situation that has me viscerally frustrated both in my ability to speak and others' ability to speak. In the modern world the idea of acquittal is a self made one in that the players of power and in power will do everything to keep control of the exploits they've crafted to stamp on my rights, so even if one untouchable person was brought down, nothing would change. In a sense, Resolve, asks for some hope in the people to find their way. The comparison is trite if I try to make it any more tangible, it's simply a feeling I had while trying to keep my positivity afloat amongst the sludge of pain recently. I'm not even in a good enough emotional state to try to conclude the train of thought on what I should be doing, it's radicalizing and disgusting to continue to swallow. So really I don't know where I'm going with this to a very insecure extent. I guess what I'm trying to say is that at the least, GAA2 Resolve offers comfort in a belief that we'll get there together again. I doubt me saying that will offer any solace, and it's of no use to others to oversimplify this shit.

But like at some point you have to confront the message of the work, what the characters believe, if you want to talk about it right? "To fight those who dwell in the darkness requires at least some of us to occupy the darkness ourselves." is wrong, that's wrong. It doesn't feel good though. Like an hour and a half ago I watched an excruciatingly fucked up 3 minute video of some absolutely infuriating vein-popping preacher openly saying to kill queer people with the only response being applauding and agreement, and to my side my SO is watching a 5 minute news clip of senator's arguments juxtaposed with other real senators full audibly feigning to care about mental illness of a school shooter to then say trans is the problem. If I loaded up any additional social media right now it would be a hilarious juxtaposition to the game I just played because it would be complete doomscrolling. Because like, what else is there to do? they'll say.

I want Sholmes' ray of light. I want to believe.

In 2022, a skeleton appears on the Shijima estate, prompting a mystery author to investigate their strange family history.

In 1972, a hostess tries to protect a singer from murderous threats,

In 1922, a young heiress tries to retrieve her family’s treasure and survive the murder and manipulation from enemies who want it for themselves.

The infamous “Fruit of Life” pops up in all these stories and its promise of immortality leaves violence and betrayal in its wake…

FMV games are strange beasts. They’re often inherently stilted, making long pauses while the actors wait for the player to cooperate and equipped with some actors of questionable quality. But I’d argue that, if you know what you’re getting into, those are features instead of bugs. It's always going to be an interesting balancing act between the constraints of real life filmmaking and creating exciting gameplay. Most of the game is split into two major sections. The investigation phase mostly involves watching a movie and watching the emotional soap drama play out. The game tries to add a sense of player agency by creating time based little button prompts to highlight a clue the characters are discussing, but you’ll receive all the clues at the end of the phase anyway. It's sort of a cheap way to trick players into forgetting how long its been since they pressed a button. The more useful feature, I think, is the suspect/evidence button. This lets you open up some notes while the movie is still playing and review the facts without stopping the ongoing action. It feels like you’re checking your notes with the detectives, and its just a little feature I appreciated.

This was first announced at a Japan-only Nintendo direct and I was 1000% positive this would never receive any kind of English translation. So it was a welcome surprise to see it get the support of an English sub/dub. I experimented with both audio formats a few times, which is relatively easy to change. While I wasn’t expecting too much, I think the English dub is just really unpolished, with voice acting that really contradicts how the actual actors spoke those lines. For example, early in the game, the two main characters are talking about their mutual friend. Haruka says “Are you just here to flirt with her?” The English dub makes her sound accusing, or even jealous. But when I revisited the scene in Japanese, the actor sounds like she’s just playfully teasing. It's the sort of thing that makes you reflect on the art of dubbing and how it works with live action performances. There’s nuances there that feel like they weren’t taken into account.


The deduction phase proper involves piecing together different clues to form your hypothesis. The game dumps dozens of clues on you and encourages you to connect them all. Most of them will probably connect to a bad hypothesis, which could lead you off track, but it also helps narrow down useless clues that you want to get rid of and connect more relevant facts. Its not a perfect system, but among the “put all the pieces together” mechanics that mystery games try to pull off, I can’t find much to really complain about in it.

Honestly, the real highlight of the game is how the whole cast works to pull off this huge narrative. Each actor plays a different character in different eras, which means you get to see how far these actors can stretch their performances. A shy little bookworm in the 2020s is a bitter playboy in the 1970s. A hyper competent assistant becomes a flirtatious mean girl, followed by a nervous, naive singer in another. It's just really fun to see these actors have fun.

Its huge time skipping narrative also means it gets to do really exciting things with recontextualizing characters. In the 2020s, Ryoei Shijima is depicted as a bitter old man who is potentially hogging the Fruit of Life for himself. His son Eiji theorizes that, if this immortality granting fruit exists, Ryoei is selfishly hoarding it from the needy or the scientists that could use it for good. This image of his selfish father extrapolates in Eiji’s mind and convinces him that Ryoei is happily letting innocents die for his own power.

But in the 1970s, we get to see Ryoei in his prime and how his own history shaped his life. He’s introduced explaining how he was outvoted by the other Shijimas. They want to give the fruit to a poor and needy soul… so that they can kidnap that person and experiment on them through generations. When Ryoei hears Eiji talk about using this mythical fruit to give to the needy, he thinks of immoral, violent acts in pursuit of personal wealth.

Both Ryoei and Eiji are motivated by helping others, but they both have different contexts for what that involves. Ryoei sees helping others as doing everything you can to give a person peace. Eiji sees it as doing everything you can to give a person life. That conflict and how they can’t communicate those distinctions to each other makes for some delicious, subtle drama. And its something this game excels at in its lengthy narrative. And its in these storylines where the game excels. These little micro tragedies throughout history are where the game’s at its best.

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Now here’s a confession, I wrote all of that before I hit the finale, because I was so jazzed on the game I thought I could spew all my thoughts then and there and be ready to post with only minor edits once I was done.

But the finale is… frustrating. For a lot of reasons. I won’t go too deep into spoilers, but here’s a quick layout of the pause menu. Right in the center is a text box labeled “Rules of Reasoning.” Two of the rules are as follow:

There is only one killer in each case, no accomplice

Superhuman abilities or paranormal activities should be ruled out

The final case just kind of ignores those rules right out the gate and just expects you to follow along without any question. And don’t get me wrong, I was all for the game swerving into weird shit. But I also just don’t think a mystery game should… lie? Part of the final case also retroactively reveals that one of your previous successful cases was a frame job. Maybe its ridiculous to be annoyed by that, but when a game steers you directly towards a wrong answer just to reveal how wrong you were for completing the only way to complete the game… It's frustrating. It works in something like Spec Ops the Line, because that game is trying to tell a story about military expansionism and how it justifies itself. But in a mystery game you’ve just dedicated ten hours to… you want the mystery to be fair. Something you can feel accomplished for solving.

Also the epilogue involves a back to back “oh it was gay!” to “oh its When Marnie Was There” and I just despise that shit.

Still, its a really fun experience in spite of how frustrated I got towards the end. Special highlight to chapter 5. Just as the routine of cutscene/gameplay is wearing thin, the game transforms into a first person escape room. It's those creative choices that help me want to forgive this game in the end. You can tell how much fun these people had creating these mysteries, even if they were making things harder for themselves. And it's nice to see Square Enix fund these kinds of projects with that hot FF14 money. With things like this and the Live A Live remake, I hope more of these strange little productions come through the woodwork.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne is honestly not that difficult of a game, at least not in the way you’d think it should be. It’s a game that tests your patience more than anything, and it feels like it does everything in its power to make you hate it. I wouldn’t say I hated it myself, but it definitely overstayed its welcome and became a massive slog around halfway through.

Dungeon design ranges from tolerable to downright infuriating. Most of the game in terms of exploration is running down bland hallways, reaching a dead end, and then backtracking to find the right path. This tediousness is compounded when you get to the dungeons with super fun gimmicks such as hidden teleporters, pitfalls, and getting warped to a dimension where all paths are blocked until you go back and walk through a beam of light. Literally every single mechanic of the dungeons involves impeding your progress and forcing you to backtrack. On top of this, you’re constantly getting into unavoidable random battles with enemies that could very easily sneak a Hama or Mudo attack on you and instantly kill you, forcing you back to the main menu to load from your last save, which is often quite far. To some, this may give the game a sense of tension and difficulty. For me, it was more annoyance and boredom.

I am aware that there’s a skill and an item that supposedly lowers the encounter rate and makes it so that only high level enemies can be encountered. Towards the end though, these don’t even matter. You’re still going to run into every enemy encounter you would have run into without activating those. I got so annoyed by the enemy encounters in the last dungeon, I just started running from everything. The time it takes to fight enemies compared to the experience you get, along with the fact that your level generally doesn’t matter that much, makes fighting enemies not really all that worth it.

Speaking of fighting, Nocturne is the game that introduces the press turn system to the franchise, which would be great if the game really took advantage of it. The press turn system works around exploiting the enemies’ weaknesses in order to get extra turns and deal more damage, while also avoiding moves that the enemies nullify to ensure you don’t lose your turns. The problem is that the vast majority of boss fights don’t even have a weakness, and normal fights are generally easy enough that you can get by simply by punching everything. What this ends up doing is making the game revolve more around buffs and debuffs more than anything else, effectively allowing you to get through the game with basically the same exact strategy for every single major fight.

Here’s the general pattern for pretty much every boss fight: use a skill that buffs evasion/accuracy or debuffs the enemy’s evasion/accuracy, increase your attack, increase your defense, now wallop the enemy with the most powerful moves you have that aren’t resisted, absorbed, or reflected. Some bosses may take a while, but you’re going to win no matter what because the boss will almost never hit you. Even if they do, the only thing that could potentially be a threat is an unlucky crit or an instant kill move. As long as you have a healer, you’ll most likely be fine. Long story short, buffs and debuffs in this game are way too powerful, making the battle system mostly boring.

What also disappointed me was the story, which is really not all that much better than SMTV’s. In fact, it’s almost identical to SMTV’s. The demon apocalypse happens, a group of kids get warped to the demon world, they develop their own vision of what they want the world to be (some getting mindfucked in the process), and you all end up fighting for the chance to make that world. I’d actually argue that SMTV has more interesting things going on with its story, which is why the lack of development and obvious rushing of its plot was so unfortunate. In Nocturne, all the characters are just there to be walking philosophical ideologies, none of which are particularly very good or agreeable, some of which are downright insane. Their ideas are so extreme that the only reasonable endings are the Freedom ending or the True Demon ending, because at least one feels like a good ending and the other gives you more content. Almost every ending option sucks. It’s like Fallout 4 before Fallout 4.

With all that being said, a good chunk of the game was still enjoyable, arguably up to the halfway point. The battle system up to that point is still novel and you have to rely on certain elements of the battle system more that aren’t just buffs, buffs, and more buffs. The game is oozing with atmosphere unlike any other JRPG. It’s more designed like a survival horror game than anything else. Demon fusion is still fun, and the HD version allowing you to select skills instead of randomized ones is a godsend. Lord knows how much that would have annoyed me and made me dislike the game even more if I played the PS2 version instead. Character design is fantastic, and the music is catchy and memorable. There is a lot to admire in SMT Nocturne to the point where I hesitate to call it a bad game or even say that I dislike it. A lot of passion certainly went into developing it, even with as little of a budget as it so clearly had. I just wish the dungeons weren’t such a chore to get through and the game had a better way to avoid random late-game battles outside of turning on easy mode.

Again, Nocturne isn’t a bad game, just a frustrating one. One that requires a level of patience and a mindset that I apparently lack. At least it led to SMTV happening, which I loved, so I guess that’s something.

The reputation of the Souls Series has long been its downfall. Dark Souls 2, with its global death tracker prominently displayed at the beginning of the game, delighted in making encounters artificially difficult by adding a multiplier to the enemies one would face at a time. Dark Souls 3, having seen that players took to rolling through attacks to avoid them, added immense amounts of unnatural delay to all boss attacks to punish players for dodging prematurely. All of this felt too meta to thoroughly enjoy an experience. Instead of an organic challenge galvanizing the player, the omnipresence of an unseen hand ensuring a needless difficulty discouraged them.

It was only Sekiro and Bloodborne, two games unfettered with a similar name to their predecessors, that managed to iterate on an increasingly stale formula in a satisfying manner. The latter leaned into fast paced aggression following the all-time slow pace of DS2, what with its lack of shield options and healing-by-damage-dealt mechanics. Sekiro turned the entire combat system on its head by introducing the slightest amount of depth. This was not only evident in the parrying system but also the variety of combat arts one could unlock. These games weren’t without flaws, but they felt more like a studio expressing itself rather than one needing to deliver on the promise of the baggage that comes with “Souls”.

Which is all to say that I had high expectations for Elden Ring. Despite the mechanical similarities this wasn’t a Souls game and thus From Software would have more freedom to craft whatever experience they wanted to deliver to players. Unfortunately they seemed to intentionally aim for derivative, and the parts of the game that displayed innovation floundered.

I think the problems here can be sorted into two boxes: Old and New.

The old problems I wrote about earlier: there are still too many multiboss encounters. Exacerbating the issue is that the bosses in question were clearly not designed to gel with one another a la Ornstein and Smough or double Maneaters (the rare times pre-DS2 games played this card). This is easy to see based on the fact that without fail players will encounter half of a multiboss fight elsewhere in the game, sometimes even paired with a different partner.

These bosses, solitary or otherwise, are still full attack delay out of nowhere. Imagine cutting into your steak as you eat dinner. You spear it with your fork, raise your knife, wait the customary 3.5 seconds, then cut in. Ridiculous, no? Imagining the steak strafing around you as you rotate in place during those 3.5 seconds only serves to weaken this metaphor, but hopefully you see my point on how unnatural this all feels.

It’s almost paradoxical in a way. If bosses take forever to attack, then it should make fighting two of them at once more manageable. This is true, but it misses the point. The problem here is never the difficulty, it’s the feeling one gets from the encounter. Organic vs artificial. Natural vs unnatural. The more these scales tip towards their latter ends, the less patience the player has to tackle a challenge put before them regardless of its difficulty.

These topics have been written about for years since prior From games have released, but luckily Elden Ring also provides plenty of new topics for discourse insofar as missteps.

The largest issue, perhaps with the entire game, is how the open world impacts the player experience. I have never seen a game that demands as much self-regulation on the part of the player as this one. Almost any challenge one comes across can be circumvented and returned to later at a higher level. And I want to be clear, I’m not speaking of grinding. That was always an option for lower skilled players in previous games.

No, one can go encounter new novel experiences, level up naturally, and then return to a previous roadblock hours later. While this might sound like a positive to some, it only serves to undercut what could have been a carefully designed difficulty curve in a more linear game. What makes this so problematic is the fun delta between something that is challenging and something that isn’t.

Combat remains relatively shallow in Elden Ring, and when one applies that shallow combat to an easy to defeat enemy, the triviality of the experience can only result in boredom.

I spent plenty of early hours pushing myself through the Caelid area of the game, one I now know is meant for somewhat higher level players, such that by the time I reached the Liurnia area I demolished everything. The magic academy? I don’t think I died once in my time there. It took some time before my level reacclimated to my surroundings, but the threat of sabotaging my own experience was always there. The fun I had in Caelid came at the expense of my fun in Liurnia.

This all comes down to agency and information. I believe that this is a high agency, low information game. You can go anywhere, but many of the game’s systems and objectives are hidden from you. For someone who loves adventure games, this is the dream. But it absolutely does not gel with the need for challenging gameplay and the game’s RPG mechanics. And it is all caused by the decision to go open world.

What does the open world offer? Surely not the agency I just spoke of; that was still present in spades in the much more linear Dark Souls. But it does offer discovery and diversity, both of which are quite meaningful.

Part of the fun of Elden Ring is the social aspect. Chatting with friends, conversations would often follow a pattern of:

“You know this thing I found 20 hours ago?”
“What the fuck no?? I never found that. What is it?”

And that latter surprise was both genuine and matched with an equally strong sense of interest. In an era of games that don’t do much to endear themselves to players outside of a visceral yet fleeting sense of “fun”, Elden Ring’s sense of discovery is sorely appreciated. It also plays into a feeling of diversity between any two players’ experience.

Looking at things in context, I’m happy Elden Ring’s open world exists to differentiate it from the other games in the “series”. They are all dangerously close to being identical, so any identifying characteristics are appreciated. But the decision to marry that open world with these gameplay mechanics was a misfire. This is yet another reason From shouldn’t shackle themselves to “light attack, heavy attack, roll”.

A new game engine would not necessitate a strict monitoring of a difficulty curve that could be undercut so easily. And it would surely be more interesting.

All the same, I can see why they’ve stuck to this. It is fun to fight big bosses while rolling around and punishing their weak points. It’s thrilling when you run out of healing items and the boss is almost dead. But sticking with what works isn’t how one makes a masterpiece, and it’s not how one commands respect for one’s art.

I feel compelled to issue an immediate correction: this isn’t “one’s” art. This game was made by a duo of directors: Miyazaki and someone I will only acknowledge as “the Dark Souls 2 guy”. My enjoyment of this game decreased noticeably once I learned this, as the more confounding areas and encounters of the game suddenly had an explanation behind their presence. The game was tainted.

I’ve been very harsh on Elden Ring, but only because I believe the floor on Souls games to be relatively high. My rating is still a 4/5; I still put 170 hours into it between my 1.25 playthroughs. I’m still playing it. I don’t need to tell you exactly why this game works. But when a series is this successful and this committed to reusing concepts, it’s much more important to note what isn’t working rather than what is.

One final note: there has been a lot of discussion on difficulty options in this series. “Should they be added?” etc. The clear answer is that they’ve had an easy mode since the original Dark Souls: summoning. They’ve had final resorts for people who are stuck: grinding. And now with Elden Ring they have another option for those of blunted progress: ignoring the problem altogether for several hours. Any calls for a mode labeled “easy” are willfully ignorant of the options available to them. And if these options aren’t enough, you can always load up a different game.

Pretty good. 4/5.

Really fun game that combines Mario Party board game shenanigans with a side of card collecting. I was roped into this game by friends having no idea what it was and came out having an absolute blast. If you're interested in giving 100% Orange Juice a try, just remember these three helpful tips:

1. Make sure to achieve Norma
2. Always put Saki's Cookie into your deck
3. The seagull's name is Shitbird

If you're looking for a quality and fully-functional mahjong client with slick presentation and a healthy dose of cute anime girls, there's none better. I cut my teeth learning to play mahjong in Clubhouse Games 51, but after struggling to maintain a good connection with friends to play online with, stumbled upon this instead, and have stuck with it ever since. MajSoul has some decent tutorials to teach you the game, but honestly the best way to go about it is to learn some basic hands and just jump in and play, ideally with friends.

The only major downside is that the gacha mechanics are absolutely terrible, so if you're looking to snag a particular waifu, you WILL have to shell out money here; there's no efficient way to grind for what you need. Even then, the odds are so bad that you're probably not going to get what you want despite spending the cash for it. It's rough, but considering the monetization of this game is entirely cosmetic and you otherwise have an incredible free mahjong client to enjoy, the trade-off had to come somewhere. I wish this aspect of the game were better, but I'm glad there's a place online I can just go play mahjong with friends and have a great time.

The anime tie-in game that every anime tie-in game wishes it could be. The Blank of Three Years is a sound novel that serves as a sequel to the original anime series, and one that is pivotal to understanding the feature film released the same year. I'm still not sure what happened to Nadesico, or why they chose to take a multimedia route instead of just making a sequel TV series, but it ends up working rather well, perhaps even better. After the whiplash-inducing, abrupt ending of the TV series, it falls on this game's shoulders to give us the exposition dump we need to even begin to understand the film. Given that the relevant content isn't enough to carry a full series, and that a visual novel lends itself to the task more naturally than the mile-per-second, schizophrenic structure of the TV series, this is a good thing.

The game has four main routes (plus an extra that's dumb and goes nowhere unless you're an obsessive Getter Robo fan), and roughly 20 different endings depending on the girl you go for, the choices for which differ depending on which route you find yourself on. These routes are not created equal, however, in terms of the content of their plots and narratives: one route that ties up the loose ends with the Mars ruins is heavy on hard sci-fi, while another route sees the protagonist setting up a ramen stand with Akito, Yurika, and Ruri (who, of course, gets two endings across two separate routes in this game). A special shout out goes to the idol management route, wherein the right sequence of choices turns your character into a woman offscreen, apropos of nothing, and you get to lez out with your idol. The breadth of content here is great, but also unfortunately means - and this is my first complaint with the game - that certain girls will take a backseat to the plot in their own routes, so you won't be spending much quality time with them. The aforementioned ruins route, outside of a couple cosplay scenes and short epilogues, gives its girls nothing unique to do. One route seeing Ruri become the captain of the Nadesico B, due to plot reasons, literally will not give you a good ending with any girl except one of the new characters (who was curiously designed by Kia Asamiya, who penned the loose manga adaptation of the series), though it does give each girl a hefty amount of unique CGs and scenes with the protagonist at least. There are simply too many endings where, despite doing everything right, you either don't get the girl, or someone dies, or the protagonist does something stupid. Though perhaps it's a little silly to be asking for across-the-board happy endings from a series as irreverent as Nadesico.

The game's presentation is stunning. It looks great, with hundreds of CGs, some of which are such a huge resolution that you have to pan them to see the whole thing (these are usually the sexy cosplay ones). The game is fully voiced, meaning every single line of dialogue is spoken by the anime's original actors, and it's all newly recorded. The music from the show is right at home here, and never gets annoying. In fact, some of the tracks ended up being rather catchy. The OP, both the animation and song, is a total banger, and the ED isn't half bad either. I'm not sure how much I can blame this on the game's age, but the UI is pretty awful. The CG gallery doesn't use thumbnails, but asks you to pick a number from 1 to 205 with no indication of which number corresponds to which image. Replaying the game - which you will be doing a lot if you want to get all the endings/CGs - can occasionally be a chore as the game has a lengthy intro segment it uses to determine which route to set you on, and even then the routes themselves usually don't change all that much depending on your actions. There is a skip button, but it's a skip ALL button; as far as I could tell the game does not make any distinction between read and unread text, so you have to be on your toes constantly lest you miss some new scene.

Of particular note concerning the characters is the inclusion of Itsuki Kazama - who appears in episode 13 and is promptly squashed to death that same episode - as the main heroine (turns out she just teleported!). She shares a deep bond with the protagonist, who at the beginning of the game teleports onto the Nadesico's kitchen with no memory and a picture of Itsuki in his pocket. Each route will expand upon and reveal the protagonist's past with Itsuki, but - and this is something I had to get used to - each explanation completely contradicts all the others, so it's better to treat that aspect of the game as a "what if" scenario rather than trying and failing to connect all the dots. One of the game's gimmicks, because every visual novel needs to have something stupid, is called "Passionate Gaze," whereby your protagonist will lock eyes with a given girl and you need to gaze with the appropriate intensity - that is, not too weak and not too strong - in order to increase her affection for you. To do this, you move the cursor to a part of her body, usually the eyes (NOT the boobs!) and rapidly press A, B, and/or C. It is exceedingly difficult, and I dare say impossible, to do this perfectly without a turbo controller, and finding out a single girl has a single CG locked behind a perfect gaze event promptly convinced me to not even try to go for 100% completion.

All that said, it's a real pleasure to interact with the characters outside the context of the breakneck pace of the TV series. The huge cast and fast-moving plot meant a lot of characters fell by the wayside in the show, and thankfully even those with relatively fewer scenes in this game still feel nicely fleshed out and fun to talk to. One of my favorite bits is the ability to romance a girl who probably had two minutes of collective screentime in the show; in fact, she gets more content in the game than some of the more relevant characters. Compound that with the tying up of loose ends from the show and the ever-present mystery of who Itsuki is, and you have, much like the TV series, a game that checks pretty much every box and far exceeded my expectations.

One final thought: I was a little shocked to find that the game does not have a "canon" route leading up to the events of the film; it's more that the film follows an amalgamation of the four routes, though it's not hard to tell what information you need to take into the film. A novelization was released just a few months after this game that tells, I imagine, a canon, linear account of this period from Ruri's perspective, but it's incredibly hard to get ahold of for a reasonable price outside of Japan. Oh well!

I was very worried that in going back to Persona 5, the game would lose some of its luster for me; that it wouldn't hold up as one of the best games I had ever played when I first experienced it back in 2017. Thankfully, during my time with Royal, that never materialized, and in fact only strengthened my love of it. A lot of welcome quality-of-life features have been added here, all of which help to sand down the few rough edges the original game had, but I was also very impressed with how well the new story content was integrated into the game. Outside of perhaps the final end scene, it didn't take away too much from what I liked about how the original ended, and instead merely built off of it in a believable way. It connected in a much stronger and more emotional fashion than what they attempted in Persona 4 Golden.

If I have any complaint about the new story content, it would be that it was perhaps even too good to exist as a mere expansion of an existing game. The story beats here likely could have been fleshed out even further as a full-fledged narrative of its own. As it stands, though, it was good excuse to return to this world with these characters again and spend more time with them. Royal hands-down is the definitive Persona experience for the time being.

part of the reason I love old-school sega games is because I just love the way their games feel. games designed by sega straddle the line between nuanced, logical physics and exaggerated, arcade-y physics with aplomb. the sega rally series captures this perfectly, where the terrain material and topography are intimately factored into the performance of your car while at the same time you can perfectly drift around corners and fly over hills with a bit of squash-and-stretch going on. the tightrope here is between making the player feel like they're in total control of the car (with the consequences that result) while simultaneously hand-waving the internal mechanisms that limit player expression. the early monkey ball games are the same way: the level design is punishing yet it's addicting because any strategy you devise can probably work thanks to how controllable the ball is. it's why I've stuck with this series so long: from barely making it past beginner as a young child, to learning the extra levels as a high schooler, to finally conquering master and master extra in both games as I whittled away time during a global lockdown.

that being said, I didn't want to go into this game with unrealistic hopes. I knew the original engine was not being used here, so I figured it probably would be a bit stiffer and maybe a little hand-holdy. after all, this remake is partially meant to introduce new players and give them leverage to actually succeed in comparison to the original games, where over half of the levels were tucked behind some serious execution barriers. when I popped it in for the first time this mostly held true: I ran smb1 beginner (newly christened as "casual") without much issue. it wasn't until I touched smb1 expert immediately after...

167 deaths. 167 deaths without including expert extra no less, which I accidentally voided myself out of thanks to misreading the helper option menu that pops up automatically (protip to UI designers: don't make both your selected and unselected options bright colors!!!). these levels are no cakewalk, let's be clear, but I know these levels by the back of my hand. I've 1cc'd expert + expert extra in the original many many times, and even now out of practice I can manage 10 - 15 deaths. it just shocked me that this game felt so different, and so much less precise. in a lot of ways it felt like the original levels popped into Unity with a basic sphere physics plugin, and the results were not pretty. my roommates (also long-time monkey ball fans) also immediately wrote off the game after playing it. even though we had been so hype about finally getting an HD monkey ball - a monkey ball game that wasn't garbage and didn't require us to pull out our CRT - all of our energy immediately dissapated once we got our hands on the game.

so what exactly is the issue here? basically everyone agrees that the physics in this game are noticably different from that of the original, but I want to delve into why. after playing this game for quite a bit (all of story mode, up through master mode in smb1, all the deluxe levels, and poking around into other stuff here and there) I think I've narrowed it down to frictional differences between the two games. for those of you who haven't taken high school physics in some time, let me present the equation f = μN, where f is the frictional force applied parallel to surface we are moving upon (usually horizontally), μ is the coefficient of friction, and N is the normal force applied perpendicular to the surface (hence the name "normal"). before your eyes glaze over, let me connect these to some intangible game-feel statements:

coefficient of friction: this refers to how difficult it is to move over a material; for example, it accounts for why it's more difficult to slide your coffee table when it's on a shaggy carpet versus a finished wood floor. as it relates to the how it feels in this game, I'll borrow a quote from my roommate when he was playing the game: "it feels like every single floor is made out of glass"

normal force: this refers to how hard the object is pushing down on the surface, which in this case mainly refers to the gravitational force the object exerts. this scales with the mass, so we can think of it as how much the object weighs; a cardboard box is a lot easier to move than a full wardrobe. this affects the game-feel, as my girlfriend eloquently put: "it's like there's no monkey at all, and you're just rolling around a hollow ball"

so tldr: there's a severe lack of friction in this game in comparison to the original. in the original game, the ball was weighty, and the friction on the goal posts or ledges allows you to grip them easily (and a bit unrealistically for that matter). these things are boons to the player that go a long way towards making impossible looking courses just barely doable with practice. here the stages refuse to budge when you try to force them to, and you end up without a lot of the gravity-defying tricks you could initially pull off. I'll give some examples of situations that pop up that break under the new physics:

stopping the ball: this took a lot of adjustment for me, and while it's just a matter of relearning muscle memory it very noticeably makes some stages harder. in the original game you could stop pretty much on a dime (unless you were rolling to the point of sparks flying), whereas here the ball will sliiiiiiiide all over the place unless you very deliberately deccelerate. this is more of a general issue but a good example of where this becomes frustrating is Twin Cross, where you're expected to roll across a series of 1x1 tiles in diagonal lines. you need to keep a certain level of speed up to avoid falling off when crossing the corners of two tiles, but then also must deccelerate at the right moment to keep your ball from flying off at the end of a line (which itself is just a 1x1 tile floating in space). Edge Master also becomes more annoying than its prior appearances thanks to this issue, as staying within the bounds of the upward face of the first rotation becomes very precise given how much speed you gain when the stage rotates.

narrow lines: approach a ledge in this game and you'll notice that the bottom of your ball will just be barely close to the ledge when your character starts trembling and attempting to balance themself. compare that to the original, where the characters won't start said animation until their feet are literally touching the ledge, far closer to the center of mass for the ball. you basically have a lot less wiggle room on the edge, and it can become very apparent in certain levels that depend on this. kudos to the dev team for adjust Catwalk to accommodate, but on the flipside look at Invasion. I'd say this level was middle of the road in terms of its original difficulty, but here it's fucking brutal towards the end, where you're expected to navigate in a curve on a ledge around staggered bumpers. comments I've read on early gameplay capture on youtube were quick to point to this stage as one of the biggest difficulty bumps for a remade stage.

slopes: friction is the reason why we don't instantly slide down slopes in real life, hence why we use snowboards and skis instead of just standing on mountains waiting to gain speed. however, in monkey ball the goal is usually not to slide down slopes unless you're explicitly supposed to, and many levels depend on you being able to balance yourself on slopes either while waiting for a cycle or when speeding through before you have a chance to fall off. Drum and Twister back-to-back in smb1's ice world were originally breather stages, where you simply had to keep yourself balanced in brief intervals before reaching the goal. here they became much more precise than I feel was intended, as even slightly moving from the narrow top of the curve on either of these levels will send you careening to your death with no recourse. from smb2 I can absolutely not forget to mention Warp... oh my god Warp. this level was already surprisingly difficult in smb2, given that the flatter part of the curves here are covered with bumpers and maintaing yourself on a slope is already a trickier technique to learn (I see a lot of more casual players get stuck on Floor Bent from smb1 for this reason). here it's nigh impossible to do thanks to how little grip you have. Cross Floors is another smb2 example that requires a lot of practice in the original and here feels terrible to attempt.

centripedal force: some of you may have seen charity donation recepticles shaped like curved funnels (I've seen them in american malls at least), where you can put a coin into a slot and it will spiral around the funnel down and down until falling through a hole at the bottom, much like water spinning in a drain. there are multiple areas in the original monkey ball games that utilize this phenomenon to great effect, and it relies on the friction of the slope or wall that the ball is on to keep it from dropping out. however, when I first played Spiral Hard in this game, I was very surprised to find that I could not simply drop in as I was accustomed to, as even with a decent amount of speed the ball does not grab onto the slope and instead falls off. it took me several tries to successfully drop in, where I had to come in with an exceptional amount of speed, heavily tilt against the slope to avoid falling off, try to balance out before I lost the speed I needed to stay in, and then continue on my way. this level is already difficult enough as is, with a path that narrows the further it spirals down and a goal that is difficult to aim for, so I don't see why dropping in needs to also require a lot of set up when it didn't originally. the end of Stamina Master is also much more difficult than before thanks to this, as the spiral towards the end becomes nearly vertical, and I would often drop out of it completely before I reached the goal. the pipe stages also seem to struggle with keeping you moving, such as the smb1 expert extra stage Curl Pipe, where the second hill virtually always stopped me dead in my tracks (though I've had this happen occasionally in the original as well).

this would be a good time for me to also mention how the camera has changed significantly from the original games. the camera used to rather aggressively stick to the ball's back, whereas here the camera will follow your stick without really staying glued to a particular orientation on the ball. to solve this there is now camera control on the right-stick... this sort of defeats the purpose of the original one-giant-banana-joystick control scheme, but I'm sure plenty of players will feel more comfortable with it there. the big issue here comes when trying to line up straight lines: in the original game it was very doable to turn in place with the camera lining up directly with the center of the monkey's back. here it's already hard enough to turn in place given that you slide around with so little provocation, and now you must center the camera manually using... non-analog controls? yes, the right stick does not seem to have a real gradient of turning from my time playing with it, giving it little more functionality than d-pad camera controls. you can at least adjust camera sensitivity, but I feel like you're forced to sometimes go in and change it per stage, ie high sensitivity for when you need to turn quickly or steadily on fast stages, and low sensitivity when you line up precise shots. the latter was a necessity on Exam-C (a particularly infamous stage) and the aforementioned Twin Cross, as well as Checker, and it made all three of these stages much more tedious than I would've liked. sometimes the camera just breaks entirely, most notably on Centrifugal from smb2, where the speed of rotation in the giant wheel of death causes the camera to get stuck outside the level geometry, or flip in front of you to mess up the angle you're tilting the stage in.

I wanted to include this diatribe about the physics in here just to have some sort of document with the issues I've noticed with this game, and as to provide a detailed summary of why and where the physics are different without just saying they are. players who know the levels above might have noticed that they're virtually all pulled from expert and master: this is because the beginner and advanced difficulties (casual and normal) are totally playable regardless of the changes. that is not to say they aren't still difficult (I still have not beaten Polar Large in this game and, much to my consternation, can not even figure out a good route through it for some reason) but if you're coming in just to fuck around a bit, play through part of story mode, enjoy the cameos, and play minigames with friends, you're not going to notice the different game-feel to the extent of it being overbearing. on the flipside, I do feel justified in presenting my opinions on this in pedantic detail because beginner and advanced only make up 108 stages out of the 258 total stages between the non-DX games, which is to say that for over half of the game you will likely notice what I mentioned above unless you have never played the originals.

regardless of everything listed above, I've actually rated this one a bit higher than super monkey ball deluxe, a collection that still has the original physics intact. my rationale: banana mania is an amazing package overall. what honestly frustrates me more than anything about this game is that it perfectly captures the features and content I'd want in a remake of these games without the tight gameplay I originally adored in the originals. whereas deluxe (on ps2 mind you) was a poorly performing mess with overly-long course structure and a lack of improvements over smb2, this game is packed to the brim with extra modes, great cameo characters, and accesibility features. not everything really hits, but I appreciate how much effort and material there is here with so little development time.

the main game specifically deliminates between the first two games for its courses, unlike deluxe where stages from both games were interleaved. each course is 1:1 with their original set of stages, with extra stages now being unlocked if all the regular stages were completed without the helper functions active. master mode for smb1 is now accessible just by completing expert without the 1cc requirement or even extra stages being finished. there are also marathon modes for each, which while not as wild as the ultimate course from deluxe, still are great additions. stages in both have been rebalanced, with the original layouts being included in a special purchaseable game mode. overall the rebalances were really well done: probably the most notable for me was Arthopod, a stage from smb2 that was complete bullshit originally and has now been made less annoying to deal with by far by removing gaps. virtually all of smb1 master was rebalanced as well, with Stamina Master getting a much-needed nerf to its infamous middle 1x1 moving tile balancing section (which balances out the more difficult first and last sections a bit). the other master changes honestly make some of the stages like Dodge Master and Dance Master trivial, but I don't really mind considering that the requirements for obtaining master are less restrictive now. other changes are more subtle, such as adding curved inlets to the titular launchers in Launchers (which honestly don't help very much) or an extra 30 seconds for the timer in Exam-C (which helps an insane amount).

there's a story mode identical to that of smb2, with truncated cutscenes in mime retelling the lovably bizarre plot of the original. personally I don't mind this change, as the story isn't really that important or complicated. I'm a little puzzled at why they didn't use the expanded worlds of deluxe's story mode, but it's not a big difference either way. as I mentioned prior stages that were changed have their original versions present in a standalone mode, and all of the deluxe-exclusive levels have a mode as well. playing through them all back to back, I have to say I still like them for the most part, as there's a lot of great ideas present (maybe one too many maze stages tho). there are also a few modes that remix the levels. golden banana mode is probably the best of these, where you need to collect every banana in a stage in order to clear it. this actually changes how the stages need to be approached quite a bit. the opposite of this is dark banana mode, where any banana touched instantly causes a game over. while the idea is good in concept, they're designed for a level of precision I just don't think exists in this game. finally there's reverse mode, where certain levels start you at the goal and make you work your way back to the starting point. the best level of these is Free Throw, where they make you throw yourself backwards onto the starting platform in a cool twist. the others mainly just require you to tread the same path as whatever the hardest goal is, so they come across as rather redundant.

minigames are also back in full force, with all of the features from deluxe retained to my knowledge. the big thing that turned me off here was the lack of alternating multiplayer, which even in a patch could be such a trivial addition. I bought this on ps4, where I don't really have extra controllers to work with, and it's frustrating that my roommates and I can't play monkey target or billiards by passing the controller around. overall the minigames seem to be pretty much as I remember them from the old games, with all the customization you could want to boot. I can't really pretend something like monkey race isn't scuffed as fuck, but they were in the originals as well so it's pretty faithful. all that I played other than monkey target look very solid... monkey target is honestly a "Made in Dreams"-ass game here, but it's so annoying in its original form that I'll let it slide here. most of the other games here I can just experience via yakuza or really don't care that much about, beyond perhaps trying to go for completion later down the line.

I also wanted to briefly mention the art design for both the menus and the levels, which are absolutely phenomenal. beyond some UI nitpicks I mentioned earlier I think the interface is very clear and clean, and feels like an accurate translation from the older games to a modern style. the world designs are really gorgeous, and blew me away with their accuracy. I really would not have thought a quickie project for RGG would capture the style and detail of the original worlds so well in HD, but they absolutely nailed it here. the banana blitz-era monkey designs I'm not crazy about but they do the job fine, and the cutesy redesigns of kiryu and beat are so fun; I still can't believe they're in the game!! the music has all been remixed as well, though I personally think they're pretty middling overall. the original soundtracks are legendary so I definitely didn't expect them to live up here, but they really veer into tacky EDM territory more often than I would like.

finally, I wanted to bring up the accessibility options, which are much-needed additions for newer fans looking to try the series out. you can use helper functions in each level to double the timer as well as open up a very useful slow motion mode for the cost of receiving no points upon clearing the level and disabling the extra stages for the course. I messed around with these a bit and I think they do a good job of covering the bases for someone learning a given stage. if stage is too taxing, you can also pay 2000 banana coins to mark it as cleared. which is a hefty toll but honestly worth it when poking around in the special modes to skip annoying levels that would take a lot of practice. finally, the jump from banana blitz has been added in as a purchaseable item, and surprisingly it doesn't void trophies/extra stuff like the helper functions (though it can't be used in ranking mode). when watching trailers I thought I wouldn't touch this at all but I decided to try it out when struggling on Warp and wow did it really save my ass. because the jump wasn't present in the original games, it opens up a lot of ways to break previously challenging level design, and honestly that became the most fun part of the game for me at points. skipping all of the tiring maze levels from smb2 feels so great, and I even managed to pull off a strat equivalent to the speedrun route for Stamina Master by jumping at the peak of the first ramp. it honestly made the final worlds of story mode a lot more enjoyable given how many frustrating and gimmicky levels are contained within it (they were bad in the original too, not just this game). when I eventually get around to smb2 master and master extra, I'm sure I'll have fun finding ways to break levels that originally took me dozens of lives to beat.

I think I've exhaustively covered every aspect of this game that I've played so far... and now that I've finished this giant wall of text I can finally move onto some other games. I don't think I've wasted my time with this game at all, and I'm glad this package exists, but man does it really not scratch that itch that the original games do. perhaps an engine on par with the original simply isn't capable of happening without the original source code available... but at the end of the day I'll still have the original games to return to when I really want to experience monkey ball as it originally felt.