when i'm an adult i hope to be a kinder one.

sobre trauma geracional e a dificuldade não só/necessariamente de se conectar, mas de procurar empatia, procurar quem entenda e quem ajude. talvez a única maneira de romper com o rito seja dar um fim completo ao último na linhagem da maldição, mas a bondade prevalece sob a angústia e praticá-la, mesmo ao ver o pior reflexo de nós mesmos em outrem, é a chave para tornarmos pessoas melhores.

outro banger do parun. rip.

All of the let's play narration for these random-build-focused slot-machine-action-games is like 'ohh after your 50th run you'll have enough gopher coins to now unlock the Zuckerberg's Icon so now when you play Billy Boy and choose the Steven Stone for your 14th Arcana Tier you'll be able to Yummymax your way past the 4th Tier of Encroachening when you face the waves of 23 Yeti-men. Make sure to spend you 1.0% APR Slammy Shards only on Subtle-enchanted Attack Boosts to make sure the chance of reaching Heaven is fulfilled on a blue day! Like comment and subscribe

this game feels like hiring a master chef, but they have their budget limited to cook for less than 10 dollars: while the individual ingredients may not be the best by themselves, the craft and expertise used to prepare the final dish still give you a good ass meal.

i can't also help but think about actraiser, a game that has some reviews on this site praising its ability to mix genres with excellent results. while i do agree with these, sakura wars also acts as a good contender for that field, merging its srpg and dating sim bits without any issues, managing to provide an engaging experience that doesn't overstay its welcome. also, actraiser doesn't have sumire kanzaki.

just a casual update on this. prior to the game's newly implemented master rate update - which introduced ELO as a separate, zero-sum figure which factored into matchmaking and more clearly delineated skill in players - a charitable interpretation of the game's ranking system would be as an extension of the game's thesis, the idea that the journey for strength is never-ending. and there was certainly an appeal to that: now that you've reached master rank, you'll have to duke it out with every other person who put in the time and managed to make it to the top.

on a mechanical level, though, this felt tangential at best, and over time would likely only result in an increasingly lopsided system where most players had managed to get into master rank just by playing the game over a long enough stretch of time. having master rate now lends each and every battle this genuine tension & palpable weight. after all, nobody wants to be at the bottom of that leaderboard. nakayama's team designed sf6 with the notion that the versus mode is philosophically endgame content, a mode that, for absolute newcomers, should best be reserved until after the completion of world tour and some additional reps in practice. with this in mind, master rate goes beyond just 'endgame' content - it feels like a high level expansion where you're invited to prove your salt.

for my part, i've enjoyed two brief stints in the top 25 north american dhalsims, although as it turns out the mantle is hard to keep (as of writing: #45). is it impressive? i dunno, i feel like i have a lot more to learn and my character is underplayed by a margin of almost 200,000 players (as of august 14, there were around 221824 ken users. this is to be contrasted against a paltry 29183 dhalsim users). im not actually really a competitor in the FGC, but id like to keep growing stronger and keep fighting strong opponents. so i dunno, we'll see where this goes.

it's a significant motivator, then, that this is probably my favourite street fighter at this point, as well as probably my favourite fighting game. not to say that this is without fault - i appreciate world tour's inclusion immensely but it's half-cooked, the in-game economy leaves something to be desired, battle passes suck and the devs need to do more to encourage casual retention (further costumes is one thing but what about alternative winscreens, a functional music player, further customization of titles and versus screens, etc), matchmaking needs to be further expanded to utilize the game's strong netcode (why am i somewhat region locked), and no, you're not imagining things, the game's input register really is kind of wacky.

but i think a lot of other complaints at the moment stem from the amplification of certain voices on social media - as well as the fact that these people are also vying for a million dollars in the capcom pro tour and need things to resolve in their favour. so if we can learn to accept third strike as one of the apexes of this genre, a game constructed around problems with no clear, safe answers, a game where half of the normals kind of feel like shit, a game where chun li and yun and ken and all manners of bullshit are allowed to run rampant and free, then we can accept sf6 as a similar work in progress too. an evolving slate, one in which we have to learn - with time - to deal with strong characters and strong universal systems and strong offensive options.

this game really hits this absolute sweet spot of accessibility and depth of systems without presenting straightforward or clear solutions in a way that gets my brow furrowed in concentration and my brain eager to keep playing. i come from a samurai shodown background so everything to do with this central notion of not going on autopilot and guarding against the tendencies of players, in a sense moreso than worrying about the characters they inhabit, strikes a resonant chord with me. im really excited to see where it goes, and of course it goes without saying EVO top 8 this year belongs in the pantheon of fighting game tournaments. just a total gem. thank you capcom for giving me aki on my birthday

addendum: KB0 third strike review, november 2020:
"rather than establishing new legends, this game is about characters unsure about what the future entails, about what their next move should be, about what it even means to continue fighting - they waver, they fail, they practice, they move on. "

what a joy, then, that this is the overarching idea that propels world tour! street fighter has never really had traditionally good narratives, but when it chooses to it has pretty good vignettes and pretty good character writing, both of which world tour thankfully has in spades. very smart to organize a narrative around each character kind of just doing their own thing instead of trying to wrap them all into a sweeping narrative ala SFV.

I usually don't think about rewriting things on here, but my prior HC3 review is currently the most liked one on this page and, Unfortunately, one that I have a deep embarrassment towards. Not that I didn't speak my truth, but lots of time has passed since my first interaction with the game, and my words on it were much more of a riposte of the thought-cyclone the game left me with than anything, like, substantial. And frankly, the feeling I get when I receive a notif about it, that someone assumes I still ride with those thoughts is - boy, no wonder I gave this shit a 5 - enough to coax a second try out of me. After all, as I said in my old review, to confine it to one conclusion would do it a disservice (though now I mean that in a more direct way than I ever did before, lol).

As far as more formal things go (character depth, conciseness, visual splendor) it could be argued that etherane has outdone HellChar 3 a few times by now, but to be honest, the more I sit with it, the more I think the circumstance of Hello Charlotte as a series is a worthwhile feature more than any kind of problem. Playing HC1 and casting it off as a study of RPGMaker more than a developed game in and of itself feels almost necessary to eventually get to the part where HC3 throttles some purple and blue into your cheeks. To put it more directly: even if I didn't see myself in it (which I do), I still think it's incredibly worthwhile to see this rare glimpse into the game creator's artistic trajectory.

What makes this game part of that trajectory, let alone the extremum of it? Well, with all its internet-coded self-reflection, the nihilistic lashouts at just about every aspect of the game as an object/piece of entertainment, the audience as a collective entity (crucially, the audience of people who were there at the time of HC3's release, who played HC2 and asked, "please may I have some more"), and the ensuing story as the byproduct of an intellectually and emotionally laborious creative process. It works through that initial stage of self-awareness games this metafictionally occupied have and into a world of razor-thin separations between idea and story. And none of this is strictly contemptuous, but etherane does not mince words and speaks to certain things so directly that the aforementioned separation of fiction is liable to break down, if only for a moment. (I believe the less-nice way of saying this is "preachy", but stick with me)

Hello Charlotte always has been very artificial as a fiction, but here its worldstate is so rebellious that it's a wonder any coherency occurs. Though, I will say, the conceptualization of creator and creation here is perhaps more vital and centers more than that explanation leads on, and there's a layer of, for lack of a better term, knowing bratiness that IS SO IMPORTANT TO INTERNALIZE by the end or else you'd just fuckin' hate this shit. But, even then, these things are likely to someone's distaste (understandably so) given how brash and just straight up trying it all can be at the best of moments.

BUT, that's the thing, and I'm gonna just come out and say it, HC3's rigor and vulnerability remain unmatched in the space of games, even in the rolling wake of personal games or w/e tag you'd ascribe to them. It has a pinpoint line of sight to the core of tumblr's now-ruinous identity and truth politics and proceeds to shred the Earth's mantle to get there. You could not make this up if you tried - etherane shoveled the trenches of that distinct blog-era mental-to-digital-to-mental anguish and isolation, and the dirt and clay, cracking in the fiery kiln, forms this completely unstable work that cannot be any less angry or confused than it is, lest it fail to... be itself. But it succeeds, and I am so fucking thankful that someone out there spoke to it with such bare intentions, because it's a cultural aftershock that affected me and continues to affect me on multiple levels - I reckon this is at least partially why the game gets such a strong response years after its initial release, because it's prodding the tender points of a life so common among its demographic but also one that's, from my own experience, hard to come to terms with. I've seen some people struggle to understand or even outright despise this game for this, but in my case, there's no way, man. This game got it.

ALSO sneak-attack Heaven's Gate review because I finally played it: so much more than the AU tag gives it credit for, at least in the sense that it doesn't feel at all out of step with anything else in the series. I mean, rigid fiction HellChar is not, so what's a couple of smudged details to stop you from feeling out Charles, Anri, and Vincent as a graduating class? It pretty much sledgehammers the layers of abstraction left in HC and becomes unfettered conversations with these ideologues that the True Realm characters have assumed the roles of. Despite that, though, it's maybe the most natural dialogue of the series and every conversation with these three ends up being just SO emotionally fulfilling and a great treat for those who already liked the sprite versions of them. I guess that is etherane's twisted idea of an AU? God, please miss, just once.

immerse urself in perfect stasis courtesy of the insatiable breast milk fiends at blizzard. u will always be two levels below the evilest demon in your area. u will respec and upgrade and +5% Crit Chance your third eye wide open ... the ideal video game budget is gigantic enough to eliminate poverty in a major metropolitan area. the ideal video game is a lifestyle choice, like equinox or erewhon. the ideal video game is a subscription to more of itself ... forever ... ! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON! I LOVE HOLDING THE X BUTTON!

edit: its august 7 and im still playing. i keep hitting X girl... they got me — they got me — Its too late ...

probably my favourite system mechanics in any fighting game, battle hub perfectly encapsulates the arcade setting as cordial yet caustic, netcode is excellent, this is the best starting roster any of these games has ever had, world tour gets dry after a little bit but finally manages to capture these characters essences in a personable and human way which has been a rarity in SF up to this point, endless quality of life features officially make this the new standard to aspire to for all pending releases, dhalsim sounds like he’s telling opponents to kill themselves whenever i land drive impact. five stars

     'We floated off into that quiet world which love made possible because the power devils had been admitted and therefore banished.'
     – Mary Wings, She Came Too Late, 1986.

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (4th Jul. – 10th Jul., 2023).

The 1980s saw a shift in American lesbian fiction away from coming-out stories and towards the detective genre. This transition was not entirely smooth and was met with highly polarised critical responses. Reagan's presidency unleashed a national conservative fever that sought to normalise homophobia, while the AIDS epidemic was greeted with outright inaction by the federal government. Anna Wilson defines this decade as a point of transition for feminist and lesbian identities, as 'the focus of the women's movement had gradually shifted away from an emphasis on exploring and enhancing the "liberated" self toward a preoccupation with that self as embattled and endangered' [1]. Furthermore, the new discourses on sexuality also sought to de-essentialise lesbian sexual identities, rejecting the clichéd labels that sharply distinguished between butch and femme.

     American lesbian detective fiction in the 1980s

Unlike the coming-out story, which revolves around introspection and the exploration of domestic life – since the discovery of lesbian romance takes place largely out of the public eye – lesbian detective fiction reinvests the public sphere, especially the streets. Despite its persistent aura of threat to women, the street has become a place where lesbian detectives can express themselves. Some take on the authority of institutions: Kate Delafield, the protagonist of Katherine V. Forrest's novels, recognises the structural abuse caused by the family, a place of male domination, and upholds the weight of the law – which she believes to be just – as the only way to bring about change in society. Not all detectives are as reformist as Delafield, but the whole sub-genre recognises that society is constructed in the service of male power [2].

C. M. Ralph's Caper in the Castro echoes these changes. The player assumes the role of Tracker McDyke, investigating the disappearance of her girlfriend, Tessy LaFemme. Behind this mystery lies a series of murders that underline a vast anti-LGBT conspiracy on Castro Street – the main avenue in San Francisco's historic gay district. Finding one's way around the various screens is difficult at first, as the interactions are so rigid and the context so minimal, but after a few minutes it becomes clear that Castro Street is plagued by a wave of violence. Ralph – undoubtedly inspired by the events leading up to the White Night riots (1979) – repeats the same stern observations as crime literature, highlighting not only public inaction but also the murderous impulses of the privileged ruling class. The title makes no attempt to hide its ambitions, ridiculing white heterosexuality through the detective's pithy tone.

     Stigma reversal and agency through the detective's eyes

Caper in the Castro is not the first game to explore the place of lesbians in a patriarchal, heteronormative society. Moonmist (1986), another investigative game, made this a crucial aspect of one of its four scenarios. However, Caper in the Castro is notable for being written from the perspective of the lesbian character. Whereas the events of Moonmist are merely tragic, Tracker McDyke reclaims her agency and directly confronts the oppressive system. Many of the interactions necessary to progress are resolved by gunfire, reclaiming this symbol of masculinity from hardboiled fiction and turning it into a woman's preferred instrument. Surprisingly, Caper in the Castro also avoids essentialisation, thanks to its detective's perpetually mocking gaze; although some passages are clumsier and rely on glib puns, they nonetheless overturn the insults and 'social stigma' [3].

While the somewhat cryptic nature of some of the interactions is regrettable, sometimes made more complex than necessary by the overly rigid text parsing system, Caper in the Castro remains an enjoyable game for its lack of concessions and the tribute it pays to San Francisco's LGBT community, which suffered reactionary violence. Despite the tragedy of the murders, there is something comforting about following a detective who ultimately succeeds in her mission, self-assured and with such a witty take on the world around her. Much like lesbian crime fiction, Caper in the Castro is perhaps less interested in exploring the gender and sexual identity of its protagonist than in the means available to fight injustice. Anna Wilson mentions the contradiction of the lesbian detective who somehow fits in with the rules of the social order while performing her homosexuality in public; Caper in the Castro avoids this dilemma: its answer seems to be, unequivocally and albeit naively, the revolution.

__________
[1] Anna Wilson, 'Death and the Mainstream: Lesbian Detective Fiction and the Killing of the Coming-Out Story', in Feminist Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 1996, p. 252.
[2] There is an extensive historiographical debate about whether lesbian detective fiction can accommodate reformist, assimilationist and individualist positions without denying its radical heritage. The question is complex and deserves a close reading of the various novels of the period, but a central idea is that the lesbian detective, because of the female gaze, does not have the same lived experience of the streets as the hardboiled, misogynistic male detective – this is particularly explicit in Barbara Wilson's Sisters of the Road (1986). The traditional hardboiled view is that the detective's acts of justice are isolated and cannot change society; the feminine and lesbian view emphasises above all that 'violence is never random; there are no haven' (Anna Wilson, op cit., p. 266). See also Catharine R. Stimpson, 'Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English', in Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 2, 1981, pp. 363-379 and Timothy Shuker-Haines, Martha M. Umphrey, 'Gender (De)Mystified: Resistance and Recuperation in Hard-Boiled Female Detective Fiction', in Jerome H. Delamater, Ruth Prigozy (ed.), The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1998, pp. 71-82.
[3] Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1963.

“he’d love to spend the night in zion / he’s been a long while in babylon / he’d like a lover’s wings to fly on / to a tropic isle of avalon” - digital man, rush

dense, layered, and easy to get lost in all the same as its island centerpiece, flower sun and rain endures as personally-tailored perfection in a video game.

some years ago when i was working my way through kill the past, a good friend of mine advised me to not bother with the completely optional and not at all mandatory lost & found puzzles, as “they suck and they ruin the pacing of the game”. as a matter of pride i simply decided to not heed that advice and go through the game solving as many of the lost & found puzzles as i possibly could. in doing so i’ve made the playthrough likely much longer and more drawn out than it should have been, but it’s only until as of writing this in 2023 that i’ve realized that doing these puzzles actually held some value to me.

flower sun and rain is a game of multifaceted allegory and metaphor, where no ‘truth’ is singular (despite what sumio initially says) and just about any way of reading into it is a valid reading. to me, flower sun and rain is a metaphor about a man unwilling to acknowledge the past and move on to the future; a man eternally stuck in the present. the titular hotel claims its stake on being a paradise to forget about time in, and like a moth to a flame, sumio does as much as he can to waste away in paradise for as long as he possibly can. he lets himself get distracted with the denizens and their issues, letting paradise pull him deeper into itself so sumio doesn’t have to think about the airport and everything outside of this paradise. 25th ward puts a wrenchingly satisfying end to this thread as his life outside of paradise has become completely void of enjoyment. in the end he lets paradise subsume him, never to move on again.

paradise as an idea is something i had touched upon earlier in my thoughts on kaizen game works’ paradise killer, which for anyone who’s played a decent number of suda51 games, can very much see the unabashed ktp cribbing it proudly flaunts. it is rooted in a need to escape human problems ironically caused by humans and the societies they’ve built up. in building these paradises, it comes down to exploitation of resources and people to cultivate these getaways and romanticizing a world fundamentally incompatible with the systems that even lets a vacation spot like this exist in the first place. vacation spots like the flower sun and rain hotel are inextricably linked to colonial structures thriving off of that exploitation. this brings flower sun and rain close to an idea proposed by writer mark “k-punk” fisher known as capitalist realism, in which he proposes that due to the sheer widespread influence of global capitalism, it’s believed that it is the only viable political and economic system and that it would simply be impossible to even begin to imagine any viable alternative. in that sense there’s no such thing as a true-to-definition paradise; it is at best only a temporary state of mind, but it’s one that a person can find themselves unfathomably lost in.

there’s probably not a lot of people who went out of their way to do the ds port’s lost & found puzzles, as they’re technically not really rewarding the player with any juicy lore or narrative revelations, just some stuff to look at in the game’s model viewer and maybe the satisfaction of solving esoteric puzzles that have nothing to do with anything. or so one thinks they have nothing to do with anything relevant. for the player to deliberately seek out the lost & found puzzles and forget about time solving them, it is, to me, the perfect way to reinforce the narrative flower sun and rain presents. sumio is a man who lets frivolous people distract him and seeks out these meaningless problems to solve for others, and for the player to do these lost & found puzzles, they act as an extension of sumio to drag out every second possible to indulge in paradise. one of the most potent executions of a ludonarrative tool i’ve seen in a video game, and it’s entirely done through optional puzzles that a good deal of the people who played this game likely did not do.

i don’t regret doing the lost & found puzzles. i think they’re the best part of the game.

Recommended by XenonNV as part of this list.

Partway through OMORI it dawned on me that there's a timeline where this game managed to release when I was in high school and I would've 100% made it a core facet of my personality for years.

OMORI is more likely than not the game that comes to everyone's mind when they think of the quintessential "Quirky Depression Earthbirth RPG", the hypothetical dead horse that encapsulates a lot of people's gripes with the modern indie scene and all it's eccentricities, and, to concede to that stereotyped image somewhat, it's for the most part true. OMORI is part lighthearted and surreal RPG about the titular main character and his adventures in the wonderfully quirky dream world of Headspace, and part mental health story about Omori's real-life counterpart Sunny and his struggles in the mundane reality of Faraway Town with his own mental health and relationships. The primary issue with OMORI however is not really with it's oft-maligned aesthetic or subject matter, but rather the fact that it's a complete tonal mess.

Headspace, as a dream world inside of Sunny's head, is obviously allowed to be a little surreal, as it's where most of the game's Earthbound DNA is apparent, from it's cutesy enemies to it's fun cast of eccentric NPCs and elevated sense of reality where anything goes. It's where 90% of OMORI takes place and is, for the most part, incredibly charming and fun. The tonal issues start to become apparent though when the Headspace sections lead into the Faraway Town segments, where, despite supposedly taking place in reality, still have a little too much whimsy and Earthbound-esque atmosphere. There's still wacky NPCs to talk to and goofy part-time jobs to have, which, while still enjoyable, isn't enough of a contrast to Headspace and doesn't mesh well with the relatively grounded and serious interpersonal drama between the core cast that revolves around grief and loss. It results in OMORI feeling like two disparate Quirky Earthbound-likes being duct-taped together without any real cohesiveness between the two halves, and only causes more issues down the line when the plot in Faraway town starts to actually go somewhere.

Headspace initially starts off as a low-stakes kid's adventure, which is perfectly fine for the Prologue, where it uses that initial impression to disarm the player when they first enter Faraway Town in the real world, but as is soon made apparent, Headspace is pure fluff, a complete nothing-burger that only really serves to pad out the runtime. Compared to the snappy pace and relative brevity of Faraway Town, Headspace tends to drag on for hours at a time with absolutely jack-shit happening, both literally and thematically. The various sprite animations, fancy textbox effects and UI is very charming and appealing at first, but the frequent use of them & their annoying length results in a start-and-stop gameplay flow that delights in wasting your time, and it's an issue that only gets worse as the game goes on, where long stretches of overly-goofy filler plot happen without anything substantive to bite into, that do nothing but pad out the runtime so the game can hit an arbitrary length quota. In addition to this, the idea of Headspace reflecting Sunny's inner thoughts is frankly underutilized, when that connection to the main character's subconscious could've been used to give the lengthy Headspace segments some more weighty thematic story relevance beyond simple visual callbacks to Faraway Town.

Despite the long stretches of nothing filler that feel like having a sugar crash, when OMORI wants to get serious, it can actually deliver more often than not. The subtle underlying horror of Headspace is pretty effective when it wants to be, and the drama of Faraway Town, while coming across like an afterschool PSA more often than not, is actually quite engaging and emotionally competent, but because OMORI is trying to maintain it's pastel Sanrio Lo-Fi Kawaii Future Bass Tumblr aesthetic at all times, this results in even the serious moments lacking punch because of the fact it's edges have been sanded down as smooth as possible for the sake of palatability. This is made most apparent with it's final plot twist at the very end of the game, which, without going into spoilers, is an insanely dark and out-of-left-field bout of tonal whiplash that is not only a massive misstep in the solid framework of the game's plot up until then, but is scrapping against the game's Instagram Self-Care™ Awareness Post-ass final message of overcoming depression and self-doubt by not being afraid to rely on your friends for help. It's way too big of an elephant to ignore and not something you can just drop in the player's lap and treat with the same levity with which the more mundane mental health struggles are in the plot. It's the most frustrating aspect of OMORI by far because I can see how it could work! It's not even presented badly in-game (in fact, the reveal is one of my favorite moment of the game bar none), but it's consistent adherence to the vibe initially established by Headspace ends up dragging what should be a master-class twist down hard.

OMORI is a frustrating, mixed bag of a game I want to like more than I do. It's playing all the right notes, and even manages to tug at my worn-out heartstrings with a surprising frequency, and I can see the appeal behind it; how it's managed to gather such a devoted fanbase that was emotionally wrecked by OMORI's style and presentation. However, it's too bloated, too messy and too toothless to make the landing it desperately wants to make. The video game equivalent of eating raw sugar by the handful.