A shmup/bullet hell-cum-arena fighter is a helluva pitch and G.rev delivers - this is a blast and after running through arcade mode I'm v pumped to try out the rest of the cast. Popping off your special to turn into a shmup boss and rain hell on your opponent is terrifically satisfying, though actually dodging attacks in that mode is a motherfucker when the placement of fire being thrown at you is not consistent by design. Still, you're never entirely without the means to dodge around and the options for regular combat (main shot and subweapon, with different effects depending on whether you're attacking while guarding or dashing) are streamlined enough to be fairly easy to get a handle on while still offering decent variety, at least at first blush. This is such a rad idea for a game and I'm glad it exists!

Sadly mid as hell despite the strength of the premise and gestures in more interesting directions - feels oddly undercooked for something with around 2-3years development time so far as I can gather. Carried along by the strength of the presentation (shout out Hiro Kiyahara for some v cool but not overworked character designs and Izanagi Games for genuinely impressive spritework), performances of the voice cast (Yu Kobayashi giving it 200% as Binko the easy MVP), and G.Rev, but the VN mystery/death game portion feels like a minimal effort first draft and the shmup segments, while occasionally gorgeous for the least interesting segments, are solid but unexceptional. Would be interested to see a sequel that develops some of the ideas here further tbh.

Pure fabulous id-scratching meathead spectacle. Rewards the same bullheaded daredevil style of play of a Ketsui with a significantly lower skill ceiling overall. Not one for those who come to shmups for strategy or "challenge" per se, but balancing how much of your regenerating life bar to use for your souped-up laser sword in any given situation is still thrilling enough to make up for it. Great entry-level title and definitely recommended for the curious.

EDIT: Echoing BeachEpisode's observation that this desperately needs an epilepsy warning up front btw

First Castlevania and search action title generally I've actually played to completion! Technically need to fight the final boss again on Castle A to get actual 100% completion but maybe another time lol. This was fun tho, assorted thoughts follow:

-The Fusion Spell system is p cool albeit in serious need of an option to automatically revert to the normal equipped subweapon when your MP runs out.

-Idk where ppl are coming from dumping on the soundtrack, even the name entry music is a banger.

-Also really like Juste as a protag - his sassy little directional-up action pose, the fact he finds one empty room in a cursed castle and just reacts with an arch "well THIS won't do" and proceeds to make it his pad, he's fun (shout out to twinks-and-femboys-only queen Ayami Kojima for a v slick player character design too).

Think I've finally found my way into enjoying This Sort of Thing after years of bouncing off them maybe, looking forward to trying the others.

EDIT: Forgot to mention I am absolutely tickled by how the general plot can be read as like an anime-Gothic rated T for teen take on Miike's Gozu (man is desperately in love with/wants to fuck his best friend and represses it so hard he manifests a harrowing psycho-spiritual hell for himself with a woman brought in as a fig leaf over/proxy for his tormented homosexual desire to fuck aforementioned best friend until an act of mutual recognition/desire and lots of viscera finally allows him to be honest with himself and the two of them and their unharmed lady friend waltz off happily into the sunset arm-in-arm).

What if the US occupation of Afghanistan but the Taliban are aliens who only communicate with grunts/guttural laughter/high-pitched Flea in THE WILD THORNBERRYS gibbering, and Afghanistan itself is the weapon of mass destruction, and it's all of the worst aspects of ALIENS (which is most of ALIENS) and none of the good but with zombies, and we just make everything after "The Silent Cartographer" a beyond tedious grind with copy-pasted corridors so we can shove this thing out the door on time.

tl;dr JockJamz MARATHON, or the BIOSHOCK to that game's SYSTEM SHOCK. Some interesting/compelling production design and gameplay dynamics throughout (hopping in a Warthog with a buddy is all-time and the assault rifle feels great) but otherwise utterly fucking dire even when playing co-op with a friend, not to mention grossly jingoistic and racist without the polish or design muscle to make it worth fucking with. Just skip to the sequel imho.

A marriage of 90s wuxia spectacle and dynamic combat to 00s wuxia graceful weightlessness of movement realized in play with a level of sheer craft and maniacal mechanical tightness unlikely ever to be seen again in any context as accessible to players who are not Fighting Game People (and that includes Smash Bros., which has been a fighting game for longer than it was an arena fighter-cum-party game at this point, to its detriment). As close as any game I've ever played has come to genuine eternal replayability, and one I've been returning to off and on for more than ten years. It's worth your while to get a PSP/Vita in general, but it would absolutely be worth securing one just for this game alone, especially as the closing of the PS3/Vita PSN Store will banish this eternally to the realm of UMD or emulation-only. I've bounced off every Final Fantasy game I've ever attempted save this one (we'll see about FFXII), so I kinda do have to join the chorus of other reviews here in calling this the only good Final Fantasy game lol. Go seek this out if you haven't already, flashy arena fighters genuinely do not get better than this.

(S01E01)

The decision to couch what appears to be an examination/critique of evangelical-adjacent/non-denominational Protestant Christian culture/environments in a fictionalized scientology-esque cult is one I'm not entirely convinced doesn't dilute some of what this appears to be attempting to do (or won't in the long run if it sticks with it) but it also doesn't prevent this first episode from hitting a lot of v familiar dynamics with painful accuracy - I had variations of the convo between Twigs and her mom abt associating with non-believers with my own mom growing up and even as a young adult once I started dating lol. Not to reduce this solely to that of course - this a refreshingly ambitious and sharply observed piece of work even if its component parts are all things I've encountered before elsewhere, and the presentation is phenomenal accross the board - terrific soundtrack, character designs that strongly invoke Shigeru Goto's design work on Okage: Shadow King, the believably typo-ridden text itself as expression of its teenage protagonist's processing of the world and her own thoughts (which also reminded me of the writing and speaking style of a very dear friend of mine - if I had to imagine what kind of kid they were at this age Twigs isn't too far off lol), the Anno-esque editing, etc. Also those FMV sequences have a genuine sense of scale and mood sorely lacking in games today, especially on the indie scene, the one capping off episode 1 was genuinely breathtaking. Anyway big fucking vibe, looking forward to seeing how this unfolds!

Sheu mynds on than that even a comet

is rived by the weyght o whit hid passes,
an whan hid's fired ootower the starns,
the starns is tirled by thir awn wheel,
an that wheel tirled in anither wheel,

til ivry escaep is anither orbit,
an ivry orbit anither still,
an ivry still aye makkan the promiese
that wi a tirl thoo'll win tae free.

-Deep Wheel Orcadia, Harry Josephine Giles

I thought of Giles' novel in verse often while playing this. It's an easy contender for my best book of 2022 and, like this game, I reached a point where I wished it would never end.

I have been thoroughly allergic to fighting games for literally the entirety of my engagement with video games, but a partner of mine who loves them has slowly been wearing me down and, after receiving a snack box micro from my parents as a Christmas gift, we finally properly sat down for her to start schooling me in SFIII, one of her all-time favorites, and folks I'll tell ya - after her coaching me through various fighters I took Chun-Li for a spin and the tumblers finally, resoundingly, started clicking.

I'll save further thoughts for another time when I have a better handle on this, but: I think I could, in fact, learn to love fighting games after all.

"Whereupon to Finian Lynch, who most certainly came from somewhere in Mayo, I wanted to say, 'No, Finian, Love is not just a miserable lie, although prevarication, if you know anything, does come into it. No, it's not a lie just because you feel cheated. Love is not much to do, after all, with how you feel - with whether Eddie Mars let's you win on red and then gets his goon to hold you up in the parking lot. It's none of that - prearranged or no. All that is sentimental - or, as the girl said in her cups, Thass sediment. It's still less to do with what you have to say about what you feel, either in or out of your transports - which can be gay - but is like the flower growing out of the girl's ass in The Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado in Madrid - where I didn’t go this trip, but its a detail I've never forgotten. Or like the worm in Caravaggio's still life at the Pinacoteca Brera in Milan. The flower growing out of the girl's ass is fascinating, but you'd hesitate to pick it and put it in a vase. . . . No, Finian, love is what you do - and what you don't - what you put up with, and why. That's all love is. Now go with God.'"

-James McCourt, Time Remaining

EDIT: I experienced issues with missing chipsets and a yellow screen on the second screen of the game (the one immediately after Granny's Pistol Shop) while playing this with the default Easy RPG Player included in the itch.io download, neither of which rendered the game unplayable but did require me to refer to a YT walkthrough in order to initiate the final area of the game - @MendelPalace pointed out to me on tumblr that these can be fixed by downloading and installing the run time package for RPG Maker 2000.

Playing this really drove home that I was right about Dark Souls being the almost note-perfect translation of the search action template into 3D that people wanted from the 3D Castlevanias, only it refuses to compromise or accommodate in certain areas (save and warp point placement most obviously, but also enemy mob rooms that are never as lacking in any actual strategic options for dealing with them nor as frustrating by just knocking the player around, albeit with negligible damage) where SOTN practically bends over backward to such an extent that it terminally borks the game's difficulty curve after the first few hours and renders the entire inverted castle as effectively just busywork, especially with its weapon damage scaling (e.g. some of SOTN's game-breakingly OP special weapon abilities such as Shield Rod + Alucard Shield). From an aesthetic and production design standpoint it absolutely deserves its reputation as a masterpiece, and Alucard feels luxuriously satisfying to play (ridiculous knockback when damaged aside) but as a game it feels - whilst highly enjoyable - surprisingly three quarters baked and at once a bit too eager to avoid alienating anyone for its own good while simultaneously demanding a level of bullshit pixel-hunting obssessiveness to actually fully complete the map that I cannot conceive how people did it without guides. I'm glad I finally gave this a fair shake but I can see how the slavish devotion to the formula established here would go on to frustrate people down the line. Still, looking forward to jamming Aria of Sorrow next to see how they refined it further.

"contest not with monsters lest ye become a monster, and if you spot long a white woman, the white woman spots also."
- frederick neetchah

the parts of this that really hit do so to such an extent that I was both genuinely moved and got that someone-walking-over-my-grave adjacent sensation of "oh this would have Done Shit to me as a teenager" but everything else really just gave me a new appreciation for fatomoru as a group of people looking at this and saying "hold my beer I can hurt you way worse and more gay-ly and with none of the gratuitously ill-considered sexual assault as gratification."

Arc and Hisui/Kohaku routes the obvious standouts and the opening and closing segments with Aoko put a perfect lil' bow on the thing, so bring on witch on the holy night I'm sold lol