one of the most videogames of all time. yo-kai watch was a good game, i wasn't the most crazy about it, but it was fun, the writing was good, the monster designs were amazing. this game just gave more of that. WAY more. it makes me think of the jump from pokemon red and blue to gold and silver. just take what's there and double it (not even getting into how much 3 did this, but holy fuck.)

the game does have one big flaw, honestly my only major problem with the game. the capture system is bad. it's just terrible. even maxing out your odds trying to befriend a yokai it feels like the chances are still 50/50 at best, and it makes the game truly depressing at times. it's the kind of problem you would hope they fix in a sequel, but i guess not! the only other negative i can think of (that's not a real negative) is that the game is fucking huge. and not in a bad way. this game doesn't have any bloat, all the content there is good. maybe the singleplayer version of the yo-kai blasters mode is weak, but it's not really necessary to anything the way it is in 3 (and they made it way better in that game too.)

yo-kai watch 2 feels like such a perfect sequel. especially in terms of a pokemon type game, it's not the type of sequel i expect anymore. when a pokemon game does a sequel to a generation it's the same with a little more content, but this is something new entirely. it builds on what's there in a whole different direction. i think comparing this game to pokemon so much is a disservice to it, but we aren't getting more yokai watch games and we're getting pokemon games every year until the end of time. the big difference is that no pokemon game in the last 8 years has made me feel the way yokai watch has. and that fucking sucks. i get that this series is dead (and even more dead in america) and is probably gonna get turned into nft's. i just hope whatever made each yo-kai watch sequel more insane than the last can spread into something, anything at all. happy komasan sunday

sea of thieves has given me some of my best experiences in multiplayer games ever. it is a game so well tailored to going on adventures with friends and even with how formulaic it is, not one of them feels the same. at the end of the day though, that's a tragically small amount of the time i ultimately spent on the game. the majority of my time with this game was being slowly sunk and killed by griefing players for hours at a time.

there's some good quest variety, but ultimately it's all the same formula. get a location, go there, do a thing. whether that's killing skeletons, wrangling wildlife, solving riddles, etc. and this loop is perfect. manning a ship with friends is something that seriously never gets old. they found the perfect balance of actual complexity and making stuff Just Work so you can feel competent while still scrambling around not really understanding anything. the quests are fun. some of the skeleton fights can drag a bit, but besides that it's all varying levels of fun. last time i had a group of friends playing this game we tried doing one of the bosses with just 4 of us (they usually require multiple crews), and we somehow cheesed it and got so much loot it took us nearly half an hour just unloading it. and toward the end we got attacked by some other pirates, but just barely made off after selling it all. that's the height of the game, but the lows are bad enough that i'm never going to play this game again unless they seriously restructure how pvp works.

light pvp is fun. tangling with another crew, maybe sinking them and nabbing their loot occasionally is all in good fun. what makes them so painful is how slow they are. it can drag on for literal hours. slowly trading blows. just trying to repair your ship while damaging their's a little bit faster. the battle isn't about skill or resources really, it's who will get sick of playing first. and that is terrible design.

i know this game is getting a pretty big content update. and i want to get excited about the customization and stuff, but until they fix the whole pvp thing for sure, i just don't think this game is for me. and also i never played the pirates of the carribean dlc thing bc god that's fucking dumb why did they do that

i should start by saying i didnt play the first one. my only exposure to this series was gaming website waypoint’s stream of monster prom when it came out. and that game looked like shit. every joke missed, every character was annoying, every scene seemed to inexplicably be about cocaine. the cocaine jokes weren’t necessarily bad, they just felt very out of place and not very funny. it was a very bad first impression, and it disappointed me because i love the yawhg (the game this series is inspired by). knowing that, i saw this game was on sale and i figured i may as well see if this one was better. and i gotta admit, if nothing else this game is better than monster prom.

for one, they added some toggles for removing more sensitive topic-based scenes from the game (i opted out of drugs immediately, fearing another cocaine situation) and there were mostly new characters. and immediately i matched with a character i actually liked a lot! dahlia aquino is probably my favorite character in the game, and thank god i got her first or i probably wouldve refunded the game. out the gate, i think keeping the system of not necessarily knowing who you are romancing is kind of a bad call. the characters have very strong personalities, so you will probably end up loving or hating each of them with no in between. if you get stuck with a character you hate, tough. there’s no takebacks.

it feels like a lot of this game’s design choices are split between making it a kind of rogue-like dating sim and being a party game dating sim. it wants to be repeatable and hard to learn, but also possible to pick up and play with friends. the problem is, if you just know the game more, you will always win any pick up and play game where your less experienced friends just won’t. with a full group of people who know the game i imagine it’s really fun, but all my friends have better standards than me and don’t want to memorize each character’s romance conditions.

i think at least the parts of this game that are just the yawhg are great. i’ve played the yawhg enough to get tired of it, so this is a good alternative. i’ve probably spent all the time i’m going to on this installment, but i know the third game is coming soon so i’m hoping they continue to improve. my biggest suggestion: just let people pick who they romance, no weird trivia question to decide. please.

this game breaks my heart. it is the best digital version of a real life tcg i've ever played, only really matched by the pokemon tcg game for gbc. it's clunky to control, it's not great about explaining some of the weirder mechanics, and online is pretty dead. but i would KILL for another tcg videogame like this one. but it's just never going to happen.

i have impulse control problems. i spent an obscene amount of money that wasn't mine to spend on hearthstone packs when i was a teenager. i burned money i needed for medication on mtg arena packs while that game was still in alpha. all this to say, i am not safe playing most online versions of card games even though it's a genre i love. this game shows a much better alternative. a digitized tcg with no microtransactions and lots of singleplayer content. playing this game made me realize instantly why no company will ever produce a non-online non-microtransaction based digital tcg again. when choosing between the better experience, and bleeding vulnerable people dry a corporation will make the same choice every time.

yea, the game's not technically perfect. but if getting more cards and a better ui means being subjected to the grossest most exploitative bloodsucking monetization system ever devised, then this becomes the best one by default. also i won from gimmick puppet leo's affect while playing once and it felt awesome.

without a doubt my favorite jrpg i've ever played. an amazing job system, a great story with a better postgame, an endless dungeon crawler, and seamless multiplayer. this game showed me what rpg's could be and every one i've played since pales in comparison.

honestly, i often think my jrpg days are behind me. i'm too busy and too easily distracted to give these games the attention they need. the same is true for dq9 at this point. i've tried to start new playthroughs, but i'll never be able to immerse myself in this game like i did when i was younger. i hope some day i can find a game that makes me lose myself in it the way this one did. or they could just remaster it. i'd buy it again in a heartbeat if they remastered it.

i'm not that familiar with the steamworld series, the only other one i played was dig and i didn't get that far. when i heard this one was a deckbuilder i wanted to give it a real try though. i'm glad i did. it's a great time. the story was really not for me. it's serviceable, but i was completely tuning it out by the end. the card game part is great though. all the characters have fun archetypes and i loved playing around with them and mixing and matching. by the last quarter of the game, i felt like my deck was more or less perfect and it carried me through the end of the game without much struggle. on one hand, it sucks that there wasn't enough variety in the cards that came after that point to sway me from the archetype i'd built around, but on the other hand it felt awesome to build a strong deck that could handle any situation. not many deckbuilders nail that feeling, but this one really did.

ultimately, it feels like a great deckbuilder for beginners. a younger kid would probably enjoy this more than slay the spire, but it's a little shallow for anyone who has much experience in the genre.

i've never liked empty open worlds full of collectibles very much. i loved every minute i spent wandering around in this game though.

everything about this game is beautiful. the world, the ui, the music, the characters. every popup and pickup and textbox i saw made me exhale in delight. looking at this game is such a treat. and all of it serves the worldbuilding so well. i loved piecing together the story of this twisted society that worships genocidal gods. i loved seeing the contrast between the people we talk to who operate that society versus the scattered keychains and photographs left by the everyday people. i'm not someone who likes to take screenshots in games very much. if a game has a photo mode i'll probably never notice. but i took a LOT of screenshots in this game. bits of scenery, dialog, item descriptions. i just wanted to be able to look at them again.

the mystery solving part of this game is brilliant, but it does run into what my main criticism of this game is. the judge tells you at the start of the game that you will be the one who decides who is guilty of these crimes, that you can decide the truth as long as you have evidence to support it. i love that. i love the malleability of truth in this world, and the way it wants you to engage with that. it creates a bit of a problem though. the characters in this game are brilliant. each feels like a perfect ace attorney witness waiting to be torn apart by a contradiction. but until the VERY end, talking to the witnesses is a very frustrating experience. you would think going up to one with evidence blatantly contradicting their testimony and calling them out would lead to them letting something slip, admitting the truth, trading info, SOMETHING. but 9/10 times you just get "no you're wrong shut up" and have to walk away. it makes a lot of the witness interviews frustrating. in the trial you'll get to see them finally crack and tear themselves apart in proper ace attorney fashion, but that's after hours of futilely presenting evidence with world-altering consequences to them and them not so much as flinching. luckily i found every characters' dialog entertaining enough to not get too bothered by it, but if i hadn't then i'd probably have a much lower opinion of this game.

ok, now that i've gone over the more negative side of the game's whole truth and investigation system i want to go over the positives. the way this game gives evidence is amazing. there's lots that it hands you pretty freely. anyone walking in a straight line can pretty quickly find evidence that directly contradicts the story you've been told so far. but there's so, SO much evidence that turns the case completely on its head. and it's everywhere. there can be critical evidence in a spot you can only reach by skyrim climbing a mountain for 20 minutes. i felt like i explored enough to find a pretty complete picture's worth of evidence, but looking at some other peoples' playthroughs i realized there were piles of evidence that i never could've thought of. what is probably the most damning piece of evidence in the game is something i fell into accidentally while trying to grab a collectible. and i found it right before i was planning to go and wrap the case up. it was such an exciting and confusing moment. i spent a whole extra hour after looking around carefully for more things i could've missed. i'm not sure if other people had similar experiences playing this game, but it made the experience feel really special.

if you have seen any part of this game and thought "wow that looks cool", i think you should give it a try. even if you ignore the mystery, i think the game is worth it just to run around paradise and see what you find.

i think plague of shadows is a great example of dlc. it can be considered a great game in its own right for sure, but it adds tremendously to shovel knight. shovel knight is on its own a very good game, but plague knight adds depth and color to its world in a way dlc very rarely does. i don't even think shovel knight's other dlcs come close to doing it at the same level as plague of shadows.

the strength of plague of shadows comes from the kind of story they decided to tell with it, specifically a love story. shovel knight was also a love story but a completely different one. it was a classical tragedy where plague of shadows is a romantic comedy. it fits plague knight's persona of cartoon villain perfectly. the story was genuinely heartwarming and the ending left such a big smile on my face. it stands in such perfect contrast to shovel knight's story, and having them both exist in the same world makes both feel so much richer.

and the gameplay was perfect, but who cares

this game is basically everything i wanted pokemon to be when i was a kid. i think as just a pokemon game, its not great. dynamaxing is a bad mechanic. i think the open world element is really shallow. the story is dumb. luckily those things dont matter very much to me at all.

what i love about this game is making curry for my pokemon, wearing cute outfits, customizing my trading card, playing the tag championship in postgame, the battle tower is good. thats not much of the total game, but i liked that much of it.

also i honestly don't understand the complaints about graphics. i don't care if a tree looks polygonal. it looks fine.

when huniecam studio came out i saw some youtuber play it and thought it looked fun and pirated it. i spent the next week engrossed in getting perfect runs over and over. i got every unlock, got the highest tier victory on hard mode and i loved it. then i deleted it and forgot about it for several years. then, last year, i saw this game on steam and it seemed like something similar. i thought i'd pirate it and play it for a week then move on. i ended up playing a while longer than a week, and actually buying the game too.
to start off with, as a management game its perfect. i loved management in huniecam studio, but this puts it to shame. great sounds, ui, and gameplay. if the game was just this, itd be amazing.
the narrative, at first glance, is what you'd expect. the kind of humor you'd expect from a game like this. lots of 2012 "epic gentleman" shit, the kind of stuff that feels like its there to make youtubers make react faces at, that kind of stuff.
the thing this game does that so few do that makes it genuinely one of the funniest games i've ever played is that it says "yes, and" to every dialogue choice it gives you. there's some exception, but usually only in service of some greater joke. i found myself actually getting really invested in the dialog choices (which all have no bearing on the actual story) just to find the funniest options available and see how the game would justify them.
i really like most of the characters. i found a couple of the guys kind of flat, but its a dating sim and i'm a lesbian so that was always going to be hit or miss. i like more of them than i thought i would which is something! my favorite character is probably pip. shes a funny little detective and her storyline probably made me laugh the most.
as far as the sex parts, i think the ones i read were pretty good. the game cares a lot about consent and giving content warnings for stuff that will show up. there was an option for police roleplay in the pip sex scene that you could opt out of and i thought that was a nice touch. it also makes every character openly bi or pan and queerness always feels like a part of the conversation surrounding sex in a way i think is done well. being a game about being a victorian aristocrat, the game has generally very good politics. it is aware of classism and racism but manages to keep things lighthearted still.
my biggest criticism of the game is that there is a lot more body type diversity among the male characters than the female ones. theres no fat women at all. theres smaller women and kind of muscular women and thats it. it felt like a trans character was missing too. theres so much conversation in this game about queerness and body positivity, so not having characters representing that makes it feel like something is missing.
all that being said, i think the game is good. i like going back and just doing runs of it with new characters and strategies. more than anything, i hope there's another game in this series.

this game is aesthetically and narratively an absolute triumph. i'd say the same for its gameplay at least in a bubble. the game is fun. the critical issue that makes it come apart at the seams is how in conflict the narrative is with the gameplay.

if you havent played, this game is a fast paced stock market simulator where you accept requests from people looking for organs and buy them off a market with fluctuating prices, trying to turn a profit. the game's several endings are gotten through fulfilling the requests of different characters in varying ways. the issue comes into play because these wonderfully written requests that serve as the game's main narrative are something i barely looked at. i had a tight time limit to buy and sell enough organs to turn a profit so the only thing i'm going to have time to look at is what organ they want and when. its a tragedy.

when i got my first ending i was completely blindsided. i was just desperately slinging organs and doing requests when boom. black screen, dialog, cool art, the end. and none of it made any sense to me at all. that moment killed me. i wanted so bad to love this game, but i knew that playing it as intended and enjoying the narrative would be impossible.

i can understand what they were trying to do. this game is about doing something unethical for profit. moving so fast, you don't have time to consider the damage you could be doing providing organs to mass murderers. but if i dont even have time to read it it's not gonna work.

there are options to slow down the game, but at slower speeds the stock market becomes a total slog. there's no challenge just find the lowest or highest number and buy or sell. and switching the speed requires going through 2 menus so you cant slow down to read requests, then speed up to play the stocks very easily.

i want to love this game so bad, but it feels like there was just no way to make this game concept work in any real way. im glad it exists for its beautiful music, art, ui, and the idea at its heart, but this game feels like a failed experiment

this is probably the closest thing i have to a "forever game". i cant foresee a point in my life where i wont be able to turn this game on and have a nice time. ive played this game hundreds of hours spread across multiple platforms and even though i dont play it nearly as much as i did, its always a game i know ill go back to. i still havent beaten the rat's punchout game even once. i know when i get everything and see the finished gun, i still wont be done with this game. thats something i havent felt about any game but this one.