an odd one out of suda's ouevre. largely avoids the fixation on violence grasshopper's games are known for, foregoing the hard boiled cybercrime noir of the silver case, the post-9/11 sentai horror bloodbath of killer7, and the sillier nerdfighter grindhouse bloodbath of no more heroes (which would set a pattern followed by most of the studio's subsequent games as bloodbaths, with suda only occasionally as the director. its humor is also pretty close to fsr's at times). tonally very different from these but thematically very familiar, flower sun and rain should be taken as both sequel AND side story at once to tsc, and its very hard to talk about without also bringing up that game, in a way i dont think is as true for the more standalone k7 or nmh. there really is an appeal i'm finally starting to understand with taking tsc, this, and likely 25th ward--which is next up for me--as a trilogy with its own arc.

the silver case itself, as the starting point, is obsessed with the internet and the city, finding a formal link between the two. it's in the clacking text boxes, the film windows, the backgrounds with rotating numbers and flashing shapes and out of context phrases, altogether an abstracted space of words and pictures that feels like website presentation. its also in the player movement thats restricted to hotspots with rigid pathing befitting of street grids, apartment buildings, your home that you make the same linear motions in everyday. both feel non-naturalistic and cramped, but that just emphasizes the experience we have with these spaces. surrounded by cold geometric cells online and off, everyone so close together yet so far away. it gets exhausting, being unable to find ourselves outside of these boxes, to get some picture of truth. the game recognizes the need to reach for the light within yourself, outside of this darkness, but what would that even look like?

fsr shows a world "outside" by taking the reverse approach. your movement is "freer", your sense of space perceivable with the player character's own two legs in relation to analog control. hotel guests, staff, and people of the island get in your way to ask for "help", more or less, with tasks that are nonsensical in their solution and often ridiculous in their premise too, but the experience of it creates a sense you are working for a net good out of mondo's own developing kindness. you gain more and more of the world to move in until you eventually feel your sense of self stretch across long roads and pathways--literally as the in-game guidebook itself says. you can check bathrooms, take unnecessary detours, hear the rolling waves and the chirping birds. maybe this is where you can find the light.

but this "naturalistic" feeling of freedom the game allows compared to tsc, however, belies the truth of lospass's paradise as being just as artificial as the 24 wards, in a different way. the puzzles you help others with are just solved with codes based off relevant trivia from a pamphlet, blatantly mechanical logic as it can get (reminds me a little of riven, though the juxtaposition of natural and unnatural here is more unmistakably intentional). the staff hide themselves behind friendly smiles, and some of those you help may be tricking you. the hotel, a temporary place to stay, is the only "living space" you can find. structures feel too new, too slick, to feel some engrained identity behind them. the island lost its own past, perhaps even had it stolen, with whatever it is that looks like "history" you find not necessarily being factual. it goes beyond feeling touristy, it's like people can't really live and be oneself here for all that long.

what i like about flower sun and rain not being a silver case sequel in name is that its another way the game frames itself as an escape from the confines of the wards--meaning then that 25th ward may be a return to the grime so to speak, to confront that space again. fsr is trying to forget the past that built it, only to find a new kind of artifice that reminds you of the one you knew before. this doesn't mean the game is saying its escapism is ultimately useless and selfish though, because when you're in the dark it might be a matter of needing to see something different, anything else, to gain a better understanding of yourself and your past that made you yourself. new memories tinged by a new sun, even as artificial light, might be whats needed to really move forward.

loved doing math homework and taking daily jogs on my tropical vacay. ps the walking around wasn't even as bad as it was made out to be, you guys are just weak and need to break your brain like i did with aimlessly backtracking for no real reward in other games that have even larger and emptier worlds

there's a lot said already abt the hypnotically repulsive audiovisual presentation with the frantic camera and barebones controls, it made me feel tweaked out and paranoid in a horrifying way and it rocked, but the thing worth talking about for me is the structure of this game, how vitally spartan its character is. how utterly, necessarily devoid it is of much sympathy for its leads. i skimmed through a playthrough of K&L1 after playing this, which i have no desire to ever play, and it just felt very of its time. a pair of antiheroes make a huge mess of things and argue incessantly and ruin lives but you gotta love their camaraderie and attitude!! and then the women in their life dare to nag nag nag at them about all the fucked up shit they get put through because of them until they inevitably get shot, because they talk too much

the second game inherits their disgusting personalities and their capacity for misery--in fact increases that aspect to a fever pitch--and you might look at it as just following in the boring footsteps of its predecessor with a more interesting aesthetic going for it. but the difference is how unsettlingly off things feel from what you'd expect. the cutscenes are so curt, there is hardly any kind of relatable stakes for the characters other than some vague deal to further imperialism (they dont care abt that part obviously why would they). everything happens with hardly any dramatic rhythm, just hot headed banter and death, with things getting worse and worse. the misogyny is still here but even that has a different tone; the women in kane and lynch's lives this time become little more than convenient excuses for them to continue their evil rampaging, not the motivation to do better that they probably tell themselves they are to help them sleep at night. they're in a hell of their making.

the bluntness behind the narrative helps make the bond between the two MILES more interesting. lynch's schizophrenia isn't exploited for :twisted: funny comedy this time but instead to render him as a pathetic crazed animal with a gun. and the stroke of genius of basically ignoring how K&L1 ends gives kane's more levelheadedness by comparison a delusional sociopathic underpinning. they scream at each other about how much they ruined each other's lives (much like the women they love in the previous game hmm [thinks really hard abt this]) yet at no point in the game does that tension come to a head between them like the first game would tease. it always evaporates away awkwardly. there's no bro moments of "heh you're alright" or anything like that ever in sight because they do not deserve that, they just drop their in-the-moment tantrum and go back to doing the only thing they ever know how to do. this is because, despite how they are unable to actually feel love or not destroy things, they ultimately understand each other better than anyone. they NEED each other so bad. AND YET!!! not even this is portrayed with much more than a kind of pity, if that, it's just a human tendency to prefer not being alone in your cosmic punishment. it's nothing to get too attached to.

if this game has anything that could be called a positive human emotion it wants to hone in on, it's this, and it is so incredibly compelling in its smallness to me that it sticks out beyond the rest of the genre subversion in the game to heighten it further. even a couple of rabid dogs will feel loyalty towards each other, when they know neither of them's going to heaven

6 stages of enlightment:

1. dp is bad

2. dp is so bad its good

3. dp is good in a genuine way, despite the controls and graphics and everything else besides the story and characters being bad

4. dp is good in a genuine way.

5. the endgame and the final bosses are bad for reasons relating to how dp treats its characters in need of the most crucial care, with the turn of events throughout being too dumb for its own good. and in retrospect the sequel may have only made it obvious that swery is not all that great of a writer, as far as the main stories around his protags and major supporting characters in general goes. every other problem with the game that has been talked to death about, i really dont care. the scale of greenvale and the scripted lives of its residents remind me that swery is a genuinely good director/designer if nothing else (not to ascribe too much credit to him over others). york in this game is a neurodivergent king and im not interested in anything to the contrary. the lynch comparison is inevitable even if its a little overspoken, and you can say that swery's attempt to translate the humanity of loss that made twin peaks what it is yielded mixed results, at the very best, of dp's climax. but expressing mundanity in the weird is dp's greatest asset; its more self-aware in its camp than it will get credit for, and it is always sincere in its ambitions to make the player become accustomed to both the socially oblivious weirdo you play as and the people of a pacific northwest town that is not so far off from him in their own quirks. and i think it does have some humanity in its more understated moments, particularly the series of sidequests that kicks off after talking to anna's mother, or from talking to certain character once they are arrested. even if there is some kind of auteur excess type ugliness to be found underneath the "ugliness" of the gameplay that is truly not as bad as its made out to be, sometimes monotonous and something to just get out of the way wrt the combat sections at worst imo--it can never detract from the passion within this game i feel when i am simply in it, without any flair or tonal whiplash to disturb that. a lifechanger for me that, in all the ways that really matter, still mostly deserves that title.

6. tee hee (executes a mathematically perfect 90 degree turn with a flick of the e-brake, blowing off the police investigation YET AGAIN to collect [Right Hand Bone] while york feeds me tremors movies trivia bc im about to starve to death) yay!

(i put some hot tips on playing chulip at the end of this review and i beg you to look at them, if nothing else here, if you are planning to play this!!!!)

moon, chulip's predecessor that laid the foundation for its general gameplay and writing style, is a game about "love" in a broad sense. you must observe people, hear their thoughts on things/others, give items, and practice good timing and patience while each tick of the timer brings you closer to "death". you give "love" and in turn receive it as a kind of experience, which as it accumulates allows the player-character to persist in the world for lengthier periods of time. the idea behind this "levelling up" with love, to extend this life timer, is that love is what drives us to exist at the most fundamental level.

moon ties its passivity of the player into a critique on rpgs' getting experience through violence and its obfuscation of that violence, and forms much of its identity around this. despite some uneven execution, i do think its statement of intent that comes out of this critique, taken more broadly a thesis on what we take from games in general, makes moon an incredibly passionate game in own right. but its kind of passivity presents its own problems to me; you become an intangible ghost in moon's world, impervious to all its elements EXCEPT for time. it presents its own challenges for the player through with the concept of passing time, but because its only really the timer and being patient enough you'll have to worry about (and you practically forget about the timer once your love level is high enough), i do feel like there's some lack of complexity to moon's definition of "love" past this. this lack unfortunately lends itself to simplistic woobified arguments for moon that arent totally its fault, that its a cutesy escapist sim patterned after animal crossing, revolutionary just because its non-violent, smoothing out the complexities and contradictions that do exist within the game.

yoshiro kimura, one of moon's three main designers and the one responsible for the bulk of its script, would go on to found punchline and create its first game, chulip, after suffering a health crisis and travelling the world (not sure in which order, but i think both inform this game's figurative/literal troubles of the heart and its internationalism, respectively). chulip is one of three spiritual sequels to moon along with giftpia (by moon designer kenichi nishi's skip inc) and endonesia (by moon designer taro kudo's vanpool), all three of which lift moon's "love" gathering mechanic but ditch the rpg critique to utilize it for stories about growing up and adolescence...at least from what i can tell, because only chulip has an english translation. i believe giftpia is about considering what path one takes to realize they are an adult, and i believe endonesia frames adulthood as an understanding of one's own emotions and rejecting escapism, but i'd love to be able to understand their text fully someday and see for myself. the point is, all of them take moon's bedrock and mechanically and narratively add their own spin and layers of complexity beyond that original game's meta, genre-defying statement.

chulip frames adolescence as "learning how one can attain happiness"...which can be interchangibly interpreted as attaining love, since the game revolves around getting kisses and all, but happiness is the operative word that comes up time and time again. its a harsh world, one of artists unhappy that their dreaming days are long gone or contending with leaving them behind, working adults unhappily fighting over scraps of money no one can get, lovers unhappily separated by death that came too soon, workers unhappy to be stuck in dead end jobs in perpetuity, people with secret passions and vices unhappy that they cant be known, students of life so unhappy that they shut themselves off from the world, so on. the main goal is attaining a lasting happiness in winning over a girl you saw in your dreams, and to do that you need to strengthen, i.e. "level up", your heart by getting practice kisses from everyone else in the game.

to make the player understand the world as one that tests happiness, to take them out of complacency that stems from being nothing more than an observer, moon's timer is replaced with hp, heart points. same basic idea as health but damage is not just physical (though it often is), but emotional too: when you get yelled at, overhear a snicker at something you did wrong, pick up a gross RNG poopie out the trash, you take damage. a game over in chulip is not becoming starved of energy like in moon, but becoming heartbroken. chulip teaches that finding happiness is a difficult journey that requires a vulnerability to pain that moon largely shields you from. you must learn how to deal with being hurt, sometimes to the point of wanting to give up, much like its underground residents seem to have. but even they have moments where they want to come out and be happy. thus the game is not just about comfortably observing examples of love in the world, but exposing yourself to an often unkind world to find happiness, to both enjoy the smaller moments and to become closer to a revelation of oneself.

so the elephant in the room: chulip's reputation. that it wastes the players time constantly, that its puzzles are cryptic to the highest degree and its never clear what to do, and that its viciously eager to hurt the player in many different ways until they die and lose progress. even people who found something to love in moon--itself a time wasting, highly cryptic game--would say chulip has worse design. moon can be accepted for its supposed wholesomeness, but then chulip by comparison is downright abusive for daring to be a cute game about gaining love from others that then has you taking figurative and literal blows from them constantly, and discouraging exploration when the most harmless seeming, insignificant interaction might hide an unwelcome, barbed wire surprise. i have heard all this, considered it carefully, and decided i am far too in love with chulip's whole being to care or even think of most of it as actually bad. i cant think of this game as truly mean-spirited when it sincerely makes me laugh, humbles me, and has this aura that kept me from ever being mad at it for too long. its entire essence envelops me, making everything it throws at me feel utterly right with what it kind of experience it is.

im playing the trangressive design card here somewhat, one usually used for more self-serious, "cooler" experiences in which theres no real question about their intentionality--pathologic, nier/drakengard, certain kill the past games spring to mind. its wasting time is inherited from moon, both sharing an unconventional design element in having the player feel time go by passively, so that even boredom adds color to a world as it turns with or without you (though chulip having no timer makes waiting around by itself less of a problem, the one "non-stressful" edge over moon). i find its even more cryptic puzzles are actually more fitting than moon's, or any other adventure game i can think of, because its obtuseness is so over the top and specific to itself when taken altogether that it feels hilariously in tune with the strange and opaque nature of the characters and the world. same can be said for its threats to your health from every corner; im drawn into the world when it strikes back, not simply out of some dour sense of brutal reality, but because its jokes hit that much harder when you mechanically feel the punchline (heyyo). im not saying all of this is intentional, though i think more of it is than its been given credit--dont even get me started on the factory as a simulation of grueling tedious work--but it doesn't matter to me when so much of what might not be intended just works so magically for me. all of it adds up to become THE single best work of comedy ive ever found in games, slapstick with uncanny timing, bewildering beyond belief in its impish way.

not to mention that this is a love-de-lic like we are talking about; an airtight clockwork construction of character-based narrative design with an incredible level of detail to discover on your own, genuinely deserving of greater appreciation. will always love the planning out of what to do that happens in my head with every daily commute to different areas, working my way through the showa-era diorama of long life town with its lovely rustic atmosphere. its mundane ritualisticness got nailed into me as i played and became insanely endearing; getting up, passing michelle beside the empty lot dream girl is living in, going under the train tracks where that fortune teller is, walking by the fountain up the stairs to the station, buying a ticket from the two-faced man and then waiting for the train...soothes my autistic brain like nothing else. the goddamn SOUNDTRACK and SOUND DESIGN is taniguchi arguably at his very best, full of variations on that one theme of the entire world of the game thats seemingly composed to be perfect biding-your-time music. AND its a game so tantalizingly bursting with secrets that i have played it and replayed it often these past 5 years, and in all these years, i have only been able to go a few months at most before i find or hear about something i never found before. not kidding, i literally found something new the week before i wrote this. ok full on rambling at this point ill wrap up

im too stubborn to make concessions, or to fall back on ironic appreciation. i love chulip immeasurably, it epitomizes so many of the feelings within games that i want to explore most, as a singular and highly considered vision within the medium that ALSO reveals this medium's tendency towards fraught, confused architecture. an intricate piece of simply spoken poetry with a wonderful rhythm of life to it, yet brutally and hilariously esoteric as can be. looking back on an embarrassing temporary defeat and laughing, listen to the sounds of your hometown at night, speaking honestly and being true to yourself to others, all of these have happiness in them. the rules of love are the rules of the universe, the rules of the universe are the rules of long life town.

SOME TIPS:

- im not going to say you wont need a walkthrough and i dont blame people for using one BUT dont assume this game wont give any hints on how to do anything. i would say to try a walkthrough only when you feel like youve exhausted your options, especially if it isnt related to an underground resident or the "main quest". when you need a guide i recommend using the fandom wiki for help, as gamefaqs is ocassionally misleading.

- tying into the above, i cannot stress enough that the third rule of love suzuki mentions is extremely, EXTREMELY important. you follow that rule by showing items and name cards to people in long life town, you can buy blank business cards from the shop next to the train station. if you engaged with moon's name cards/item showing system, you probably understand, but id argue its even more crucial in this game. take in and learn as much as you can.

- the english localization makes the game playable but it is incomplete and downright bugged in places (i still love how its deadpan delivery makes everything feel extra bizarre, even if things were translated too bluntly). the worst offender is that it left out a major hint for a main quest, which ill tell you about here: you'll find a computer that displays a message onscreen, that message is "dempou soccer".

- save often. in new areas, prioritize kissing residents who clean toilets. this game can kill you easily especially early on, tread carefully until you have more hp and health items to recup from blows.

i had some mixed expectations going into this. on one hand it seemed not to my taste; i looked at the flashy geocities/angelfire era it was going for and was worried it would just feel like a kind of nostalgia pandering to me, seeming too over-the-top ironic with its cheesy autoplaying midis and brain-melting scrolls thru choppy 3d gifs. on the other hand i saw a great deal of sincerity and consideration in dropsy, a game jay tholen made before this, so i felt like i needed to look past my weird hangups towards its aesthetics, and a couple years later i felt like i could.

turns out i was way wrong and it easily surpassed the positive expectations i had from his previous game. not only does hypnospace greatly amplify the subtle worldbuilding and christian faith of dropsy, it sets that up with a more critical take on irony poisoning seeping thru the cracks as not representative of the whole, and this allows its own sincerity to shine through even more strongly. truly affectionate depictions of the most innocent cringe are interspersed with people's real flaws and sins put on full display: children's digital growing pains causing them to express themselves violently and angelically in ways we all recognize, old people's sweet prayers and sorrowful mourning are taken with their absolute inability to take in what the net throws at them with any nuance, creatives both humble and full of themselves do their best against the corporate sanitization that threatens their spaces. tholen and co's love for people and how they interact with the virtual world, combined with a frankly staggering attention to detail with those numerous interactions among many characters, is really something to behold. they made a character out of hot dad and gave him pathos.

there's a lot said about this game as replicating 90s internet and yearning for a time of more wild and unrepressed expression, before more entrenched social stigma and algorithms, but what drew me in to hypnospace was the feeling of how little things changed at their core. it understands that pining for "the good old days" can be blinding, and goes to great pains to make clear that it wasn't all that pure in many ways; what's mourned is that its problems were only superficially cleaned up rather than compassionately solved most of the time. the cliquey conflicts and cruel mockery and cynical capitalist machinations in the background in hypnospace just felt like blunter versions of whats still here, well after 2000. yet there's some resemblances of naivete and sincerity and love that still exist in the net too, no matter how small it must feel, and the game wants you to understand your own self and others in the here and now through those moments. try to forgive the faults of all of us as individuals on the web if you find it in you, including yourself, because it's y2k that let us down.

[post-25th ward face] haha ummmm yea!

first thing to get out of the way: the presentation here is a beast, even by grasshopper's standards. if it weren't for killer7's audio design i'd call 25w their aesthetic peak, so it follows then that this is some of the coldest atmosphere in games ever. you'd think the original silver case was the mobile game.

i mentioned in my flower sun and rain review that i expected 25th ward to be a "return to the grime" after the vacation away, but it turns out that's not entirely the case. 25 coming after 24 implies sequentiality, certain concepts and people do make a return, but the 25th ward--both the game and the setting--won't provide as much continuity as you might assume. in fact it will at many points try to shatter that continuity, and then dare you to look for it anyway. the 25th is influenced by the 24th, its a more rigidly enforced and even more claustrophobic city box, but its acceleration and sterility also makes for a keener sense of meditation on itself from so many angles, honing on in not just the city-net idea but also on the dynamics of surveillance, identity within gender/work/metafiction, exorcising the past, anachronistic reflection on the work from the authors, and games and the player-character.

this is best felt in the interactive space of the game, hugely improved and more considered than its direct predecessor. tsc tries to connect urbanization with cold unfeeling logic by having you solve codes to unlock doors and shit, but they are too infrequent and don't have much behind them beyond the numbers and ciphers themselves. 25w by comparison utilizes wizardry-esque navigation thru indoor hallway mazes, sex chat as repetitive dialogue trees, and constant password/pin entering (i don't make a lot of comparisons to fsr but this element feels the most like that game) to hone in on tsc's original thesis, expressing it more starkly and confidently. one really vivid example for me being when you are dropped into an apartment complex of four 7 floor buildings with 10 rooms per floor, in order to find a man hiding out in one of those 280 rooms. the "city" has been crunched down to "the apartment building" as a database, dehumanized yet also video gamey, onto itself; your partner is a "searcher" who can feel out where he is, so you search by building/disk, then by floor/folder, in order to target a piece of data that is a person.

that said i really had to think over this one, i practically immediately replayed it to sort feelings on it. tsc has the clearest sense of "character development"--how i took it anyway--guiding it and concludes on a more directly emotional note, and the interplay between its two scenarios feels the most effective compared to 25w's further and further divergences between its scenarios. BUT 25w is much tighter its in thematic construction, managing to be ballsier and THE most weapons-grade cryptic shit without completely toppling its jenga tower, and its more fun to think about after the fact in some ways. your preferral of tsc or 25w may depend on, at the risk of oversimplifying what its doing, how willing you are to accept characters that are more seemingly static in their personality, or at least foggier (the big exception being in matchmaker, imo the weakest scenario that feels unfinished by its end but is enjoyable on its own terms for having the most bluntly dynamic arc for its characters) for the sake of interrogating their role in the world. in many cases the players perception of them changing with their understanding of the story is what matters, and that is admittedly used to great effect with further readings. but its difficult to say how i mean this kind of thing exactly

i was ready to call it my least favorite of the trilogy after first finishing it but now it may be slightly better than tsc? im still not 100% sure where to place this, other than that i know fsr was basically predetermined to be my favorite so i can say its not at that level for me, but ultimately all three games are bangers so yeah. did my best to make a review that wouldn't need a spoiler-tag but my god at this point i am just constipated to get into this more

so badly want to dispel certain preconceptions of this game--ones set by some who dismiss it ("its a vn with no real agency/choices dont do anything") AND ones set by some who gas it up ("the next great american novel" canonization discourse). so badly want to just talk about the many little optional-to-contend-with details ive come to love in this game that's so dizzingly full of them, interpretative or intertextual or something snuck into the code or otherwise, that i immediately forgive it for not caring much abt how indulgent it must look. so badly want to express the episodic experience as bad and good with the excruciating waits, tantalizing peeks of a world that crosses the boundary of the game space into other mediums and irl, and having a closer understanding of a work that changes from part to part, on an almost exponential scale, with the shifting priorities and moods of the creators--and the ideology of obsolescence that extends to both unity as an engine and the game's themes and perceived relevance--over time. and so badly want to talk about my own cowriting of this story that became a mirror into myself; fear of genetic alcoholism, anxieties on separation between "work" and "hobby", the shame of guillibly falling into something i couldn't really foresee but well you shouldve, the worry of constantly forgetting, the difficulty of accepting records and archives and memorials as washed away and lost, for me all of these and more are in it. but ky0 sprawls in my imagination so far and wide that its so intimidating, with so much i want to address.

maybe ill just lose any sense of restraint someday and spread out thoughts on the other nine or ten entries of acts/interludes that count as kentucky route zero on this website, because its an anthology of smaller games strung together at its heart and there's something to say about each element on its own. or maybe ill express how much i love the game in an actually useful and productive way instead. but for now ill settle with saying this is my favorite of them all. sometimes i forget why but i only have to go back to it, slowly replaying it all and loving the finale so much more the second time around, and then i remember. i realized why i love games most of all, after forgetting for a while, because of this one.

replayed on switch and imo, pc is the slightly better option if you got one that can handle it. i dont think its that demanding but idk how the complete version's specs are, plus on pc you can "hack" into the save files by opening them in a text editor and see the variables for yourself, becomes another aspect of playing ky0 for me. no idea if other consoles are better or worse.

have been trying to emulate this outside of the rhizome site, bc the online emulation there has worsening audio lag as it goes on and this is the only theresa duncan game with a rom ive yet found, but no luck. starting to think the rom itself was dumped wrong too. its too upsetting to think about these games just not being playable without problems anymore.

despite that, this and duncans other 2 games are still some of the best game worlds ive ever encountered, full of imaginative energy and subtle interpretive detail that every new playthrough creates new associations. the most memorable part for me is exploring the "loved and lost" aunt vera's room, taking on the playful curiosity of the bugg sisters having fun with her; still makes me want to cry for how fantastically real it feels.

edutainment genuinely made to show children something beautiful and that is a greater duty to fulfill than any "highbrow" conceit for cd-rom games, or any games really. rip theresa duncan and jeremy blake (the artist not for this game but smarty and zero zero, which are also worth playing)

if interested in playing despite the problems i mentioned, here: https://sites.rhizome.org/theresa-duncan-cdroms/ i recommend resetting often to keep the lag from getting too bad EDIT: scummvm should emulate it decently enough now!! unfortunately ive not been able to find downloads for smarty and zero zero, we're stuck with rhizome for them for the time being :(

i go back and forth alot figuring out whether this game or its sequel is better. we heart feels nicer to play, its soundtrack has an emotional depth and even more eccentricity to it that endears me to it more even if it isnt as fantastic as the first game's as a whole, the visual aesthetic of these games is at its peak, and the new stuff like co-op and playing as different cousins adds a lot to me. technically speaking its the best katamari, and i come back to it more.

but there's 2 things that might make me default to the original as the best one. the first is that i will never ever forget the christmas afternoon i played the last level of damacy, laughing the hardest that i ever had in my whole life probably, so hard that i scared other family members in the house. the purest sense of fun ive ever gotten from a game, capped off by a beautifully sincere sequence in the credits. we heart, great as it is as "more katamari", couldn't measure up to those 25 minutes i had, and i don't think it would've even if i happened to play it first. so i highly suggest playing the original first, in the hope that you can also have that feeling that i did.

the second thing, tying into the first a bit, is that we heart has a bit too much cynicism underneath it, injected by a director who did a good job but wanted to let us know, personally, that he hated doing a sequel. i dont blame takahashi that much for feeling that way, and maybe you could say it adds a more interesting angle to the game as the start of katamari inevitably being a franchise i guess, but pitting the two games together makes me a little sad. because the bells and whistles reluctantly added after the original, as genuinely great as some of them are, cant make up for a lack of the excitedness and ingenuity that inherently came with dreaming up with the idea of katamari in the first place. the first game wears this on its sleeve without any qualifiers (even the message abt consumption behind it or the prince's deadbeat dad don't really drag it into ~dark and fucked up~ territory or whatever), beaming with its unique kind of purity and optimism that its imitators, wearing the katamari name or otherwise, can't distract me from. the first might be the best because it 100% wants you to love it; its both unapologetically happy and intensely cool without being too cool for itself. pessimism can poison games too easily, and ill always love a game that refuses to have any.

for all the breadth of sim mechanics that would normally be endearing in swery's games for their goofy excess, like a pile of cherries on top of a nothing fancy but lovingly home churned vanilla ice cream, here thats all there is to appreciate with nothing all that enticing centered around it. characters are nothing and the eccentricity feels forced, falling into a largely worsening trend since d4. felt my heart sink when i saw there was crafting materials fetch quests in this one too AND it does the same "protag rolls eyes loudly rpg tedium am i right gamers!" schtick. marginally better than deadly premonition 2 possibly (it does function better), but they also hinted at another incest thing they probably arent gonna do anything interesting or tactful with, so who can say really. im done with this dude