I played my first game as Mammon with three friends & two AI. I was dead last for half the game, bumbling around unsure of how to maneuver the disparate parts into a longer strategy until I finally got a prestige engine churning with max rank Charisma and rank 4 Prophecy. Methodically, I maneuvered the Gilded of Mammon to bully Beelzebub and earn small prestige victories, as I continuously levied demands against the stupid AI -- as we all did -- and I prepared my ritual table.

Belial and Andromalius were making political maneuvers all game; so I popped a midgame Elocution earning me 6-30 prestige a round as my rival archfiends desperately tried to crush each other, then I popped Burnt Offerings, the max level Charisma ritual, to milk my subjects for 9-11 prestige every turn. Over the following half of the game I swung from last place with an overwhelming prestige in the 300s as Mammon's economy engine finally earned me massive notoriety in hell.

The Archangel himself then descended from heaven up high and systemically erased all of my legions, including my Gilded of Mammon, who had made themselves tremendously powerful over a long series of small victories. Any attempts of war neutered, I sat on my economy and farmed prestige.

Belial, previously vying as the conclave favorite, realized favor was slipping from him and plotted against the crown. He summoned massive super legions and swarmed Pandemonium, Hell's capitol, eliminating all prestige victories and excommunication himself, but if he retained control of Pandemonium for 5 turns, he'd win the game.

At the same time, in a bizarre stroke of fate, the stupid AIs triggered events sealing the gates of hell and preventing us from collecting tribute, stifling our economy, and soon followed by another event which closed our ritual tables; Belial weaponized this with his max rank deceit to loot our stores while tribute was shut down, stifling his opponents' economies even further to maintain the upkeep on his massive infernal hordes, and took advantage of the disabled rituals to make himself virtually untouchable.

I anchored down and maxed out my Prophecy so I could wait for the moment to unseat Belial the Usurper and waited for my quaking opponents to band together and slay him. Andromolius recruited a moving Fortress and forged a dimensional cube to warp the Fortress right next door to Belial's stronghold one turn before his Usurper victory, and, in the penultimate turn, I used Demonic Interference -- the max rank prophecy ritual -- to exile his artifacts, terminate his rituals, and destroy his ritual table. With his ritual table destroyed, he had no means to protect himself from Astaroth, who levied powerful Destruction rituals at Belial's stronghold, nor Andromolius, who had a fortress ready to blow him into oblivion.

In his final breath, Belial teleported his massive hellish beasts across hell, destroying Andromalius' and Astaroth's strongholds in the very same turn his stronghold was conquered; all three of them were crushed in one pivotal turn, leaving me the only surviving Archfiend -- excluding the idiot AIs.

Belial weighed destroying me by conquering my stronghold the turn after usurping Pandemonium, but instead decided to warp his legions to protect his bases, leaving him too far away to get to me in that one turn my other rivals were systemically murdered. Three turns before his impending victory, I activated an event restricting all legion movements to 1 canton per turn, creating the conditions where Belial now felt unstoppable and teleported his beasts within striking distance of Andromalius and Astaroth, then yet unaware Andromalius had that dimensional cube.

With Belial, Andromalius, and Astaroth all ended in one fell swoop, my Gilded of Mammon returned reborn. I, the infernal Mammom, swat aside the meaningless Murmur and Beelzebub -- the idiots -- and was legally elected by the Conclave the rightful ruler of hell, standing atop the corpses of my opponents and a veritable horde of wealth.

With countless moving parts and a few strokes of luck wherein if one thing had happened a turn sooner or later it might have been a dramatically different conclusion, it was maybe the most satisfied I ever felt winning a multiplayer game.

all 3 of my opponents eliminating themselves in one turn was godly. 10/10 experience

Spooktober 2023, Entry #2

The retro RPG Maker graphics, stylized art direction, the surreal yet playful aesthetic, the cerebral jumpscares: this made for a genuinely frightening experience. And that was all before the true ending.

I got the normal ending, had my fun, rated it a 3/5, and nearly sat this down without batting an eye, completely oblivious to what I was missing. The true ending recontextualizes the entire game so dramatically it had might as well not exist without it. It's a fantastic example of lateral storytelling and how to make a tragedy deeply personal. Fuck all that scary monsters, blood-and-gore, watching-people-die Michael Myers nonsense; J-horror really does hit different.

And it's wrapped up neatly in a 3-hour package. In a quagmire of 70-100 hour JRPG epics, I desperately need these single-sitting pick-me-ups, even as they drown me in their despair. I'll be thinking about this one for a while.

Demons Roots is an incredible statement that a powerful ending can redeem any kind of garbage, tropey, degenerate writing to cement itself as one of the greatest video game stories of all time.

Most JRPGs have a dreadsome mid-game lull or, even worse, blow their load early and the final quarter turns into a slog. Demons Roots is in many ways a stunning counterexample, not the least of which because the game absolutely betrayed my early expectations. There is no praise strong enough to emphasize how good the pacing is here. I loved the first couple dozen hours, I really did, but political intrigue withstanding, it was evident to me this story was riding its tropes and nonsensical eroge twists into the ground. Dumb party members will reveal everything to an antagonist because anime bullshit; the script waylays you with tomfoolery like "hot guys really think they can get away with anything." Early Demons Roots is riddled with Jappojank and the tropey characters that propel it along.

And it's all a fucking ruse, because as the game unfolds, the one-dimensional characters reveal little shades of nuance. The script, keenly self-aware, makes fun of itself. And this rich, harrowing political drama about war and racism absolutely explodes with intrigue, betrayal, death, twists, and delicate, deliberate writing that redeems all prior plot conveniences. One guy wrote this is "Game of Thrones if Game of Thrones was good" and there is two things I know: I'm tired of all political dramas being compared to Game of Thrones, and I fucking love Game of Thrones. Yet as I crawled through chapter 4, the similarities between these two stories became uncanny.

At the heart of it is a tragic and heartcrushingly human story about the tolls of war. Humanity is motivated by a shared hatred of some nebulous other; "us" vs "them" mentality; can we accept and learn to cohabitate with this inherently evil "other," demons vs humans, humans vs demons, disparate peoples desperately trying to cohabitate when propaganda, tradition, and their own cultures demand them to hate each other? A single human may forgive, but can an entire culture? This theme carries the game to its final heartbeat, explosive revelation after explosive revelation, culminating in an immensely powerful ending occupying my very first thoughts as I woke up this morning.

By the end of it all, this disparate and distinctly eroge cast of bikini-clad, isekai'd, crossdressing, freeuse mages, equal parts insufferable and adorable, evolved into one of JRPG's most nuanced, poignant casts, and it happened so subtly I hadn't even realized how attached I was to these characters. This is not faint praise. I find most JRPG casts merely "acceptable." The Xenoblade series, Tales, many Final Fantasies... some of them have characters I love, but mostly I find casts as a whole exist to shade the plot. Demons Roots deftly balances both; I would not care for the world's plights were it not for its cast, and I wouldn't care for the cast were it not for the cursed world they inherited.

All of the game's flaws can be summarized neatly by the RPG Maker design limitations. The smut is (mostly) lame. The traditional, turn-based combat is pulled straight from 1994, and even JRPGs from that era have more cinematic presentation than Demons Roots. This is indisputably the lowest budget, most obviously JRPG Maker JRPG I've ever played. There are other indie JRPGs coming out this decade with better production; Astlibra and Chained Echoes immediately spring to mind. I know, I know; I hate people who bitch about graphics as much as anyone else might, but video games are just as much a visual art as they are a musical and written art, and Demons Roots is, visually, absurdly boring. I do love the music, though. This soundtrack bops. It's dynamic and eclectic, rich with chiptunes, orchestral, chamber music, metal, and it all just works.

Exploration is rote; towns exist, but there's not much to them, and the only real reason to explore them is to indulge in flashes of interaction with side characters that might miss integral character shades otherwise. Dungeons are stylistically the same boring isometric dungeons you've seen in any other SNES [inspired] JRPG. The saving grace is that lootable objects are everywhere, with numerous hidden trails; scouring them is the primary means of obtaining new equipment, so exploration is rewarded and almost mandatory if you don't want to grind your ass out of more challenging boss encounters.

The combat design carefully navigates around the genre's common pitfalls: every character is good, some a bit more than others, but they all have their moments; debuffs are consistently useful, including in boss fights, and often mandatory; party members can be swapped in and out without wasting a turn; and encounter design is usually just complex enough you can't X-mash your way to victory. For an RPG Maker game, everything was designed with as much of a modern touch as possible, but there's no getting around the limitations of its system. I'd be overwilling to overlook all of the game's flaws if it had an even somewhat exciting progression system. Earn EXP and level your characters linearly? Literally 1994.

I was prepared to write a frustrated diatribe about all the praise this game is getting from the select few willing to overlook it's an eroge and play it """for the plot"""; at minimum, I was certain everyone praising the shit out of this game just happened to be among the small herd of weirdos that love goofball anime comedy and Jappojank storytelling (fucking shounen lovers), and there's no way Demons Roots would appeal to anyone else. Well, I was wrong. If you, like me, find yourself slightly disillusioned in the early hours thinking you got jebaited by a bunch of trolls voting "Pingu in the City" to MyAnimeList's top anime charts, press on, because literally every hour is better than the last. After spending the early year balls deep in Astlibra, these two games make clear the indie JRPG scene is where the most insane, off-the-wall design is going to happen, and I hope to see these games get more mainstream attention. I'll close this with a final thought:

Deathpolca is the greatest JRPG protagonist of all time.

The rains have ceased, and we have been graced with another beautiful day. But you are not here to see it.

Grief has driven many to suicidal ideation. What if you were bound to that grief forever, and no matter how desperate, could never find escape?

It's been two years since I've finished Shadowbringers; as my frail mind loops through modern and past traumas, its scale of loss, its personal devastation, has cemented itself a permanent fixture in my mind. Shadowbringers is one of the most beautiful stories ever told.

Isometric Spyro sounded cool on paper, and it was cool for the first 30 minutes. Then I spent 5 minutes fighting the stiff controls trying to blast a fruit or some shit into a hole in the ground while Spyro would just not face the direction I needed him to.

Another half hour later, it was obvious how slow, clunky, and straight up dull the rest of the game is. I was barely an hour into the game and I already wanted to pull up a guide to help me collect faeries. BARELY AN HOUR. Literally the thrill of this kinda game is supposed to be exploration and collecting, and it'd already turned into a chore.

God I hope the classic Spyro games weren't also this frustrating and I was just too young to realize how valuable my time is.

Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories is one of my all time favorites in no small part because Castle Oblivion is one of the most memorable JRPG locations of all time despite its only identifying characteristic being designed as if it were Tetsuya Nomura's hospital room. There's a tremendous charm to a JRPG nestled comprehensively into one location; the location has scope, majesty, grandeur, and you get to feel like you know it better than your own house.

Enter Ys Origin, set 700 years before Ys Chronicles, an entire game set in Ys 1's final dungeon, Darm Tower, as if Ys 1 didn't already grant it a massive scope. There's three playable characters, three routes, and each one illuminates a new side of a story laying the foundations for Ys Chronicles. And it absolutely did not need to be three routes.

Maybe it's my own fault for playing each route in full back to back to back, melting through the entire third character in one day, but for how much I loved exploring Darm Tower in all its pseudo-Metroidvania glory, I didn't need to do it three times. While the three characters all play differently enough to justify, the dungeon layouts are almost universally identical, including the same platforming, the same treasures, and, for the most part, the same bosses. Playing a new character effectively means replaying the game. Thankfully each route can be ran start-to-finish in a solid 6.5 hours, even if you're taking your time.

And honestly, I could overlook the repetitive gameplay design if the story justified it. Hugo's route is effectively identical to Yunica's route with a tacky Sasuke/Riku I NEED POOOOOOWEEEEER coming-of-age arc thrown into it to replace Yunica's relationship with the goddesses; Claw Man's route is different, sure, but only from perspective, because the events and encounters unfold bizarrely similarly. You'll encounter similar NPCs at the same junctions in each route, with similar exchanges, and one has to question: why did this need to be three routes?

Each story does not happen in tandem but rather in alternate universe fashion; key events happen in one route that override another, yet not enough to give each character a firm narrative identity. While an argument could absolutely be made Claw Man needed to be his own route, Yunica's and Hugo's should've been fused, creating a gameplay wherein you alternate characters exploring different floors of the tower ala Kefka's Tower in Final Fantasy VI. With their individual stories being 80% identical, the remaining 20% could've developed their one note character arcs more tactfully as a single 8-10 hour playthrough rather than two 6-8 hour playthroughs. And, frankly, Claw Man's could've easily been assimilated into it, painting a massive three protagonist origin story, and the whole game would've been elevated. There are no events which occur in one route that mandate another route's events can't occur simultaneously, so there's no reason they don't other than poorly conceived narrative design.

It's hard to say this doesn't screw over the gameplay too, because, man, the gameplay is fun. I love how all three characters play, I love the light Metroidvania elements, and I love how fast it all is. You're rewarded for melting through rooms of enemies as efficiently as possible with stacking EXP and stat buffs, creating a sense of urgency in darting through floor to floor, ascending the tower in search of the goddesses before the opposite faction. But it doesn't need to be done three times with virtually zero distinction between any of the playthroughs. Did I still enjoy the ascent playing as Claw Man? Yes, because Claw Man is fuckin' fun to play. But I also absolutely felt like I was speedrunning it in attempt to get from point A to point Z ASAP; repetition beat the thrill of discovery out of me as my urgency to ascend the tower was twisted from "gotta save the goddesses" to "gotta finish this game."

And the worst of it all, there's no real excuse for any of it, because each route concludes the story almost identically.

None of that dismisses the simple yet addictive gameplay loop, the creative mapping, the brilliant boss design seeming more and more like the Ys franchise's bread and butter; nor the magical worldbuilding that uniquely makes every one note character important. Indeed, just like Ys Chronicles, every character has a name, a personality, and ideals; that sort of character building, no matter how mundane the characters are, gives the world a depth other JRPGs lack.

Do I recommend Ys Origin? Yes, resoundingly. It's a blast, and the way it lays an origin story for Ys Chronicles is a joy, banal shounen tropes notwithstanding (how many times do I need to see an Itachi character arc? Itachi set the standard; let's move on). But play with distance between the routes, or balance Yunica & Hugo's routes by playing them in tandem, or even skip Hugo's route entirely; his character arc is weak, should've been fused into Yunica & Claw Man's routes, and primarily serves to foreshadow the latter. With The Oath in Felghana getting a fresh coat of paint, one can hope Ys Origin is on the agenda, perhaps with new scenes, environments, or bosses to justify three isolated playthroughs.

My very first MMORPG. Countless hours idling in Valkurm Dunes LFP, the first treacherous trek to Jeuno. Finally unlocking Dark Knight after countless hours of grinding.

I was, maybe, 15 years old, a late night somewhere around 11pm in 2008 and I finally found a party, a special thing in a game like FFXI. We partied for a while and my uncle just got off work at the UPRR; he'd swing by to use my PC just to check the Huskers website. I told my party what was going on and I'd be back as soon as I could. He was on there for three fucking hours; it was probably 2 or 3 in the morning by the time I returned. My party was still chilling, waiting on me, doing nothing because I was the tank and they needed me to pull.

Partying in Final Fantasy XI made special moments, made you feel important, and as much as I adore FFXIV and its phenomenal lore & story, nothing can ever replicate that feeling of community FFXI brought me in my formative years.

I never saw much of this game's story, if any at all, and didn't play much past finally unlocking DRK. And I know it's not the same experience I had in 2009; that style, that era of MMORPG is deceased. World of Warcraft killed it, and we'll never get it back. But I will one day return to Vana'diel and see everything it has to offer, to experience what FF veterans heralded as one of the finest stories in gaming well before they were making the same claims about FFXIV.

I know an MMORPG can't exist like this in today's culture, but I still wish a game could feel truly community-driven like this game did once upon a time.