The man hunched over his keyboard, eagerly waiting for his turn. "I'm going to post something funny this time," he said, grinning grotesquely, clicking to the tenor tab. "It better not be that unspoken rizz gif!" howled a trembling bronxite. It was too late. The cymro didn't even bother reading the prompt as his mouse zigzagged over to the results for "unspoken rizz" in tenor, and clicked the gif depicting a dwarfish, muscular, peanut butter complexion Nintendo fan gesticulating wildly, with the mawkish caption "Hows my unspoken rizz?" plastered below him. The seconds counted down. "I'm not posting the Dorcas gif this round" whined a vaguely Canadian voice. There was a deafening silence until the first gif was revealed. "Hows my unspoken rizz?" four times in a fucking row. Video games as a medium died that night. Thanks, Discord.

OHHHHHH THIS IS SO BAD JUNIOR
WHERE'S THE WEAPON COMPLEXITY
WHY ISN'T JUNPEI HERE TO KICK ME IN THE BALLS
OHHHHH JUNIOR THIS IS SO HOMOPHOBIC TRANSPHOBIC FATPHOBIC ETC.
OHHH WHY ISN'T THERE A SCENE WHERE A FEMALE COMPANION IS SCREAMING ABOUT HER DEAD DAD OR SOMETHING, THUS CONNECTING THE CHARACTER TO THE PLOT LIKE AN ANVIL TO MY NUTS
OHHHHH THE DUNGEONS HAVE GIMMICKS? I'M GONNA WALK OFF A PIER
MAN THIS IS ALMOST AS BAD AS ADVANCE WARS 🔥🔥🔥

Hampered by the lack of a proper tutorial, Overworld is still a great Gundam SRPG worth your time if you're a fan of the franchise. The step system incentivizes aggressive play, and setting up combos with other units is a lot of fun. The big draw of the game is its massive roster, including every series just short of Gundam AGE, so your favorite characters are almost certainly in the mix. The Master/Leader system can lead to some great battles, but the aforementioned lack of a proper explanation means that you'll be screwing around for at least a couple of hours before the fun really begins. Even so, there are a ton of missions available, and collecting mobile suits never ceases to be fun. My biggest gripe with the game is the size and linearity of some of the maps. One objective is "Move to this point before X turns", so you're moving all your units in one straight line, so boredom can quickly set in if enemies don't come fast enough. Makes me wish for an RTS "select all and move" option.

Certain pieces of media are dedicated to the tumultuous era in which they were made. Wall Street was about the yuppies and sociopathic "go-getters" of the 80s, Generation Kill was about the crushing malaise surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and Needy Streamer Overload is about the streaming craze that peaked in 2020 and has slowly declined since then. Even so, chaos has never been in short supply for the medium of streaming, and Needy Streamer Overload gives the player a bevy of opportunities to create it.

The fact of the matter is that this is a funny game. Ame is a shitbag, you're a shitbag, and the game takes advantage of this to make everything a great big joke. Yes, you can optimize your strategy and try to max out everything … but do you think there's a big pot of gold waiting for you at the end of the proverbial rainbow? There are 20+ endings and the answer will be different for each, some hilarious and some tragic. The resource management side of things is quite fun, as options increase with the more risks you take. There's a laudable level of choice here, and the many topics one can stream provide entertainment that can extend play time to a respectable degree. The setting of the game is always shifting and churning, with fans switching from adoring to vile on a dime. It's all very captivating to watch, as the fortunes of one day might shrivel up the next.

The aesthetics of the game are richly detailed, varying from psychedelic to psychotic. At its most base level, you're looking at a silly 2016 vaporwave UI that sits between cutesy and outdated. I won't spoil anything, but some choices have a sharp and immediate effect on the visuals that turn them from forgettable to memorable. The sound design is top tier, switching from sugary sweet to hellish depending on how the playthrough's going. It was definitely a factor in my continued play, as I was curious to see how chaotic things could turn out.

So downsides... I think the big one is that unlike the aforementioned "era-media" pieces I mentioned at the start, Needy Streamer Overload assumes the player has some level of knowledge concerning streamers and drama prior to playing the game. Otherwise, a good majority of the jokes and freakouts will seem foreign and random. I didn't really have that problem, but I can understand the whole thing falling flat for some people. There is also the matter of hunting for the couple dozen endings available: but I say to that "Why force yourself to get all of them in one go?" It's just unreasonable. I guess it's a flaw, but it's a flaw in the same way playing New Vegas four times in a row to get different endings makes you realize the gunplay is kinda shit.

At the end of the day, Needy Streamer Overload provides an unforgettable experience that encapsulates not only the streaming craze of years past, but the age we live in now as well. If you're interested in seeing a psychotic vision of the digital age, it doesn't get a whole lot better than this.

There are two routes you can take when rating this game:

- You can tear it apart for not being mentally ill enough, or for the protagonist being too cutesy in design, or for it not being real enough, or for the prose not being eloquent or pretty enough, or all of these factors plus a couple more.

- You can appreciate how the sound design gels perfectly with its combination of ambiance and low humming tracks, how the storytelling draws straightaway from the first game with new threads and a sharper, more striking art style, with additions like new endings to spice up the mix, while also appreciating how it joins with the first game to create a unified narrative of milk girl's life, but also be slightly put off by her having the Animal Crossing speech sounds.

I'm in the second camp!

Early on I took a joke option and was quickly scolded by the dev for choosing it. "I spent a year working on this game! Go back in and play it some more!" It's mentioned a couple of other times here and there, and by the end, I became painfully aware of the game's purpose for existing: it's an unfunny gag with good art, and a couple of well-worn platitudes for good measure. The visuals have a year's effort put into them, the dialogue much less so. I'm being soft here: the dialogue fucking sucks ass. It's a 50/50 split of buzzwords and cheap sentiments, and my first thought was that I wished the dev spent more than a year working on it. Then I realized that had they done that, the buzzwords would be even more outdated than they are now. So I'll cut it off here and end it with this: good art, bad everything else. Fuck off.