I intentionally played this game wrong. I didn't touch any story whatsoever. I arrived at the Lodge and left with the intention of doing all the side stories, as that's a favorite part for many and myself. So these are my thoughts on just all side content. I plan on playing this game with mods and a discount later.

Starfield feels like "more Fallout 4" in mostly worse ways. I don't like Fallout 4 because the world, side content, and some mechanics didn't appeal to me. So now we have Starfield where the setting's mostly ok, there's 2 cool faction storylines, and the skilltrees are horribly bloated and redundant.

Another stellar short rpg I will have trouble convincing people to play. Fuga is my 1st dive into the Little Tail Bronx games that isn't me looking at old silent let's plays of Tail Concerto and Solatorobo. Never found the 2 latter games anywhere in the wild and I was convinced they didn't exist. All this preamble to say that this is a very new experience for me. Now what I do know about and like are rpgs with time management. Fuga wants you to be balancing the needs and wants of 12 kids, which sounds daunting, but the children are unrealistically easily pleased and usually want something simple. The kids always want something you could feasibly do like making a meal you have all the ingredients for or upgrading a weapon with all of it's components ready. Really the AP requirements in the Intermissions feel more like a restriction on you so you don't get horribly overpowered early on. Most of the game is spent looking at the map and planning which route to use based on how well you're doing. The "war is hell" message is actually taught through the necessity to extinguish life by destroying as many and/or the biggest war machines throughout the map (jokes). These kids need a lot of xp to get cool new skills to deal with the baddest machines the Berman Empire throws at them. So the strategy outside of battle is to take what the game will call the "Dangerous Path" in every fork in the road. Yes you could take "normal" or "safe" but that's not advised unless you are really going to die if you fight a bigger encounter. One thing to note is that danger paths also usually give you consumables to replenish your HP and SP if it went REALLY poorly as well as better upgrade parts. Actual battles are pretty tough if you do the advised danger path spam, requiring a lot of resource stat management as well as figuring out what skills, enemies, and when you should use each. Sometimes it's worth having half your hp off if you need to conserve your sp and there's only an hp heal node coming up in the map. Now usually I hate timeline based rpg combat but I have absolutely no complaints with it in this game. It only makes sense that your machine guns are the fastest in the timeline and your cannons the slowest. All the kids control their own type of weapon with a buddy to passively support them and you can swap out any of your kids every timeline reset. It's really cool to just tag out all your party members at once to say set up your grenadiers to stat effect a boss before swapping to all cannons to get in obscene damage, then swapping back out to delay the boss on the timeline and start it all over again. Unfortunately there is a combo a little too good. The characters Chick and Socks synergize way too well by Chick reducing enemies' stat resistance and Socks following up stunning whatever you need. All grenadiers have lots of debuffs to give to enemies so you always end up having them in your party regardless, it makes cannons feel a little weak. I gotta say though that stunning the chapter 5 and 9 bosses into having ZERO turns did scratch the SMT part of my brain. With the story I feel a little weird with this game. The story is very light early on and told in a past tense 3rd party narrator way, which fine I guess it's more about the kids being friends right? I didn't get as much as I'd hoped as the affinity events are shorter than Fire Emblem's. The events are about as intense as kids passing through the hallway between periods at school. "Hey man can you please teach me how to talk to girls later? Move it tubby you're in my way you are so uncool fatso." And only at level 10 affinity do you really get anything. Honestly it feels more like the Taranis tank itself is the protagonist. We see it through it's long journey through Gasco and we want to see it and the kids by extension get stronger to liberate the whole country. Even when one child has a particular story arc it's in service to the Taranis because the Taranis is linked with the kids and all the kids are sad. The last 3rd of the story is very good with the finale having crazy biblical sized events happening throughout the country. I just want to say that I don't hate any of the children or find them all really boring or anything, it's just that the way they're telling the story isn't telling me what I would find interesting about them. I am anticipating playing the sequel to see what sort of improvements they make, and if I really like that I'll be hyped to the moon for the 3rd entry.

If you are a casual YGO enjoyer, this is probably the best OFFICIAL game for the card games. It's not like Duel Links which is for milking anime fans. The best reason to download this app instead of using the fan made sites and programs is to play this weird ass format that your friends or anyone else can download and play. The game throws enough currency at you when you start out to make about a deck and a half. You can just tell your friends to DL the game and mess around with decks for a few nights. Whoever is in charge of this game does seem to be listening to some of the fan input regarding banlists and releases. The biggest actual criticism of the game I have is connection issues, like having to ping servers for basic menus is a pain. Sometimes it feels like people are playing the game on their phone using mobile data in an awful location for a lunch break, because every phase shift takes like a minute to go through. I may slam my head on the wall every time I brick, I may throw my hands up and scream when I get whooped by the current meta, but I would never had reconnected my love for this dumb card game without this flashy app that's easy to use with great presentation.

Being a big fan of Furi, when the devs announced this was going to be the next game, I bought it day one but set expectations to zero. So I ended up with this kind of ok vn with skating exploration. This game wants you to take it veeeeeeerrry slowly and almost forget the turn based battles and hover skating. You're gonna stare at 3 scenes of the space nerds Yu and Kay fighting who gets to use the shower 1st and you better like it. The 2 leads are fine, they're 2 horny nerds who always be doing cute things. The devs wanted this to be a relaxing game you could always come back to, but I was blinded by mario sunshine-ing maps, the game's main goal. The game has a big danger plot introduced that goes directly against the chill vibes the game's trying to achieve. Please understand I can't say much about the games plot without basically spoiling everything. Maybe it sounds like I'm being too hard on the game, but it really is just a strange experimental vn. Not to dissuade you but as a point of comparison, I recently played I was a Teenage Exocolonist and it hit a lot of goals Haven was trying to achieve. Recently they added the option to have f/f m/m versions of Yu and Kay, I might update this harsh review after I do a run with a m/m pair.

Furi is a short, basic, and challenging experience I would recommend all to play. It's a blend of hack and slash with bullet hell elements. Really it's just learning a dance of dodging and blocking. It's almost like FFXIV raids as a character action game if you are familiar with either. There's not much to say about the game other than it controls nice and it's cool landing your charged swings. Honestly, a lot like the Nier series, the music does a lot of heavy lifting. You can't forget Danger's 6.24 being the intro to the game or being blasted by Carpenter Brut while getting your ass kicked.

I would call this game a surprisingly cool smaller rpg. Even without knowing what you're doing, a run(or route if you prefer) only eats up about 8 hours of your time. Getting through what's basically a quick visual novel route can just be a cozy little thing you do for a day or weekend. One thing I was actually surprised I liked was that the card games were skill checks. It made every check feel like you could pass it with what you had on hand. You aren't blaming rng for shitty dice rolls or getting pissed off you didn't upgrade your speed to 50. It's a wonderful system that I hope the devs or possibly someone else will use again. Dys is best boy, Tang best girl, I hate Rex and Vace.

The minute I saw Cuno, a child portrayed exactly as I remember them from my middle school, I fell in love with the writing. I admired Kim and all he does to help you. I loved the different vibes of every npc. However I must come clean and admit I save scummed my way through the game after one check I don't remember but thought was complete bullshit. Another thing I happened to miss was the chapel side quest, something I've been informed is almost a third of the game as a side option. What can I say? I thought those punks were hiding more shit from me. I really do need to do a purer playthrough of this game. It's what it deserves of me.