>looking for a new NES game
>ask the balding retro game youtuber if their game is playable or peak
>he doesn't understand
>pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is playable and what is peak
>he laughs and says “it’s a good game sir”
>downloads a ROM
>it's playable

The term hidden gem gets thrown around too often, especially when a console's library is small. So in a world where about 70% of the Vita's library have been described as 'hidden gems' (even if they suck), it was surprising to find an honestly really interesting game that I'd never seen discussed beyond 2 or 3 blog posts saying it's alright. After beating it twice, I'm both glad I did but can also see why it's not as well regarded as it had the potential to be.

Lost Dimension can be summarized as Fire Emblem meets Xcom meets Among Us. Each chapter consists of taking 6 of 11 characters, all with unique skillsets, through maps filled with enemies. When you're done with the missions each chapter, you'll be prompted to eliminate the traitor among your cast. In any given save, the traitors are randomized (except for the first one on the first run). Once they're gone, their learned skillsets can be equipped to other characters, unlocking further powerful abilities with certain combinations. There's also a social link system where you talk to your allies and get an exclusive mission that you must complete to S-Rank them.

Let me say this: the gameplay is really good. It's a tactical RPG where there's no grid to move along to like other ones I've played thus far. The attacks are either targeted or positioning-based. Although the maps reuse the same enemies constantly and aren't really interesting overall, building your characters and making them wreck shit up is really fun. There's a dude who can teleport, a dude who can copy another dude's skillset, a dude that deals massive targeted damage, a dude that does massive AOE damage, a dude who buffs everyone.. etc. The cast feels well balanced, and after you start losing characters, it only adds to the customization. In New Game+, this only gets better (and is probably where the game is at its best.) You'll get a ton of skill points from the get-go, so you can complete a character's whole skill tree very fast. Sure, the difficulty kinda turns to shit that way, not that it was too high to begin with, but it then becomes a test to see how low your turn count can go. 

The character designs and graphics are also neat plus the soundtrack is great. That's pretty much all the nice things I have to say about this game. Here's what doesn't work: 

>The traitor system is shit

Between missions, you get a cutscene where 5 of the characters talk and some of their voices are red. If no voices are red, none of those 5 characters is a traitor, If 1-2 of them are red, they might be a traitor (or not). If 3 of them are red, there's a traitor in that group. You also get around 3 "Vision Points" per chapter, which you use to find out for sure if a character is a traitor or not. You're not the only one deciding who gets the boot, though, so once you find out, you'll need to spam missions without the treacherous character to get everyone else to vote for them. So not only is it pretty much a crapshoot whether you find out the traitor or not, it's also annoying to then kick them out. What happens if you do have traitors by the end? You'll have to fight them in the final battle, but nothing up until the very last chapter changes at all. It poses questions such as "do you sacrifice a weaker ally and keep the stronger traitor that'll fuck you up later?" but realistically, the "fucking up" barely affects you and the only reason you have a traitor in your party is because you fucked up who to kill. Can't savescum that,by the way! Also, in the penultimate floor you'll have to choose 2 traitors. Remember this.

>The story is just ok

In your first run, you probably won't get what the fuck is going on. You're on this tower, you lost your memory, and there's an evil guy,climb tower fight evil guy save the world yeah ok whatever. In the second run, you'll start noticing some differences; suddenly, there's this really white child loredumping the fuck out of the game and it turns into a chosen-one plot and the bad guy is actually somewhat sympathetic, yada yada yada. For a game you gotta play twice, this should have probably been divided better instead of every big revelation being saved for the back half. It also has the Fire Emblem problem where, since the game doesn't know what characters you have, none of them have much bearing on the plot. (though at least they talk,sometimes)

>Your second run might fuck you over

Personal annectode time. I picked this game up somewhere during the last week. I got like 10 hours in and was like yeah this is fine I guess. I stop playing for a while. 2 days ago, on a caffeine binge while procrastinating doing my portfolio, I pick it back up and get to the end. "wow,this ending is kinda weird felt like there was a lot left unsaid also uhhh that sword guy in the beginning, I think I'd like to use him". I google "lost dimension endings" and realize oh, I gotta beat it again to get the real ending and a different boss fight. To get the "true" ending, you'll need:
-All characters S-Ranked.
-Eliminate every traitor correctly
In my first run,I had managed to complete 7 of the 10 social links, so all that was left was the sword dude, the magnet dude, and the buff lady (I had actually done that one but forgot to talk to her after the character quest,which is what actually triggers the S-rank). On a GameFAQs thread, I start reading that oh shit, the traitors are randomized, so it's possible that I don't even get to complete the social links before I have to kill them! The earliest you can trigger S-ranks is the 4th chapter, so it might take 2 runs to get the best ending or it might take 3,4,5 runs to get it. A few people recommend using your second run just to max the missing characters, even if they are traitors. Fuck that, I'm not playing this shit a third time. I pray to RNGesus and press on. 

Thankfully, it seems to be going well. I get to the fourth chapter in just a few hours between yesterday and today, none of the needed characters have been traitors yet and I managed to find the traitors out. I get to the elimination part. I had used Deep Vision to find out the copy dude is the traitor. Ok I liked him in a first run but fine. He gets booted off. The antagonist shows up and goes "uhhh yeah you got kill one more lmao". Fuck. This had also happened in the first run, but I assumed it was just because I fucked up and had one extra traitor,somehow. I gather that the telekinesis kid was probably the traitor but my dumbass teammates boot someone else off. Oops! Reloading the save file doesn't do shit either, the damage is done. 

So there's no way to get the true ending in this run now, right? I'm already dreading having to replay the game again and possibly fucking it up when I boot the final mission. The boss goes on the same spcheel, the telekinesis kid (fuckin called it) goes surprise! traitor. I beat him easily and get to the final boss. But wait, there's a cutscene that wasn't here before despite the boss being the same? Here's what's happening. The ending and the boss you get are unrelated. The ending only really requires you to beat the game a second time and have all the S-Ranks (afaik), but says nothing about no traitors. If you want a slightly stronger final boss, you do need to have no traitors, but all the lore that gets spouted at you in the last 10 minutes is the exact same. I beat the boss in one turn using a busted-ass move that allows me to skip the opponent's turn. I'm done. Just Youtube the true boss.

It's not often that I feel the need to 100% beat games or even 90%,80% or 70%. In this case (it's like 95% beat if all that was gonna change was the final boss), the feeling of finding a cool game not often discussed was what propelled me to want to see all of it. And even though I technically didn't, it was still a fun time, and this is for sure what I'd call a 'hidden gem'. Sure, it might obviously be a budget game, the mechanics might not fully gel with each other and it may be miserable to see through the end for a RNG determined fraction of players, but it warrants more discussion than Drive Girls ever should,so.. at least try it out.

Even if Sword and Shield's DLC was probably the best thing about that game, it was the best part of what I'd consider one of the most sauceless Pokémon games ever put out. Scarlet and Violet on the other hand, I actually really liked, which made me excited to see all the cool things they could do with it post release (if it was just fixing the performance, which they didn't). Unfortunately, I came out of this with another conclusion; the way they make these DLCs just pisses me off.

Let's get the biggest caveat out of the way; when are you even supposed to play this? The level scaling is super fucked up. If you played the base game at all after completing the main quest, there's no way your party isn't totally overleved. Do they expect you to catch new Pokémon and make a party out of those? Sure, I did that. It still doesn't work when things jump 20 levels from one area to another. And it's not like you'll ever grow particularly attached to these fucking nobodies you catch unevolved at level 60 something and use for 4 hours. That was already something I felt about the Gen 8 DLC and it undermines any enjoyment I could have playing this. It's not like these games aren't easy, but even if you use terrible underleved shitmons in any main series game just to make it slightly harder, you'll grow attached to them. That's the magic of Pokémon as a franchise, in my eyes. If I'm either plowing through the games with 0 effort or just catching "some guy" that I form no connection to, it makes me judge the rest of the experience way harder and take it at face value, as I do here.

The structure has been simple enough: provide players with a big area to explore, catch returning and a couple of new Pokémon, play some minigames for rewards, do a little story thing, add competitive QOL features that should have been there in the first place and catch a legendary that's slightly overtuned for OU but not so much that it gets banned immediately.

Kitakami itself is surprisingly big but there's not a lot in terms of landmarks that I'd consider particularly notable besides the FPS dropping crystal lake and some nice, hang-outtable parks. There's really only one "town" with a few NPCs. I'd normally consider that a downside but honestly, with how much they've already retreaded similar Japanese settings, it's not like it's anything we haven't seen or won't see done again in the future. If anything, there was an opportunity to do something closer to Paldea's real life inspiration but whatever. It's alright.

In terms of returning Pokémon selection, YMMV. What gets me is how much of the supposedly "new" Kitakami dex are actually just guys who are in the base game. I completed the Pokédex in the base game because it was fun to do so but here it felt really underwhelming since I already had half of the 200 entries done. 100 is a fine amount for new+returning Pokémon, I suppose.. but if they needed to pad it out THAT badly, it's not like 50 more returning ones couldn't have been crammed in just for the sake of feeling fresher.

Getting competitive Pokémon in Scarlet and Violet was already easy but the biggest complaint has always been how much grinding you needed to do for Tera Shards. Now you can get an item to grind them faster so.. cool? It really should have been like that from the start. Same thing with the new EV resetting mochi. It's not like this is the thing that'll stop players from just hacking in their Pokémon... but it's nice to have.

The story content is decent and about what you'd expect from this generation; teens traumadumping on you for 2 hours and uhh, a legendary is there. The school trip set-up is ridiculous when the only other students present are 3 nobody NPCs with no personality whatsoever, but you're not really meant to think about it. If they brought in the main characters from the base game, they'd steal attention from the new characters so that was the only way they could have done it,IMO. I'm interested at how a certain character's development is going to carry on to the next part of the DLC, which is something they've not attempted before.

I was disappointed by how lacking the photography quest was. Judging by the trailers, I was expecting it to be something like BOTW's or TOTK's Hyrule Compedium feature but nah,just a 10 minute section. That ties nicely into a complaint that'll be completely irrelevant in a few months but I really dislike how they promoted this DLC. Why show so much of the second DLC when you're still announcing the first? It ended up just confusing the fuck out of me in terms of what's were, specially since the second one seems to be the meatier offering. The fact that these two are even sold together comes off as a bit problematic to me because... this isn't worth even half the asking price. But there's a vague plot connection between them now, so "obviously" can't be sold separately.

Overall, it doesn't feel substantial enough on any front. If you're a casual player you'd probably tolerate the content at offer but feel ripped off until the second part eventually comes out, by which point you'll have forgetten everything that happened in this one. If you're a competitive player, you'll probably need to pick this up to make life easier but still feel ripped off because it's just not enough to not learn to pkhex better.

You could put Eva BGM over the most boring ahh shit and still have it be enjoyable, but they do spin a cute story here which I'd honestly have loved to see developed beyond the confines of being a pretty basic 3 hour VN here but alas. Specially enjoyed the choppily animated backgrounds like all the escalators in the NERV headquarters (I don't know why, they just ooze late 90s PC swag). I just wish I stayed put and didn't check the other endings I didn't initially pick because while one of them was fine, the other one had tits (they really couldn't help themselves huh) and the other other one (which wasn't even in the original version,afaik?) was just legit fucking dogshit.

It's ok. Decent conversion of a fighter into a beat em' up but severely held down by a lack of variety in enemies and stages. Yes, there's a kazzilion characters you can unlock and play but they all go through the same places, all fight the same generic lizard dudes (extremely curious to know if they're in any other guilty gear tbh) and all get chunked for half HP at the final boss so it leads you to believe there's more content than there actually is.

In the end I think it'd actually be better if there were less stages per campaign and just have each character go through a cherrypicked few so it wasn't such a chore to play through the game with everyone because there are actually ending CGs I'd like to see!!... just not so much that I feel like doing all that for.

Fucked up. Evil. No character in media has elicited such a visceral negative reaction for me as this dumbass yellow entity. But you have to admire how the second game in the generation where Pokémon's popularity was crumbling is this weird repackaging of N64 era models, new models that might as well have been on the N64, a 20 minute anime short and a Gamecube tech demo as a weird virtual pet card collector trivia idle game type beat. That's probably giving it too much credit. It's not that deep and if anyone paid full price for this game back then they'd likely feel empty inside but you're not so... try this, I guess?

After over a decade of watching people talk about it, it was exciting to see none of those videos ever managed to relay how perfectly adorable of a package this game is. From the cutest fucking hub areas to the actual stages, there's surprisingly little I'd want NOT to be in the game. It's just all so precious. This would have slotted in so well with all my childhood games and probably turned me into a better? worse? person for it, but instead I'm on the bad timeline where I played Heroes instead. Anyway, no doubt one of my favorite games this year and I doubt there'll be any Sonic game I have yet to play that I'll enjoy this much.

It sucks. Very early on I thought wow, THIS is the worst Sonic game I've played thus far. The level design is atrocious, graphics are cool but dip into the eye-searing territory too often, cast is interesting but can all pretty much do the same thing and the tether mechanic is annoying and ever so slightly broken.

But it grows on you. Maybe not in a "aw,this is so endearing" way, more like in a "i'm suffering from a terrible bacterial infection" way. If anything, admire Sega for making yet another strange and unconventional Sonic game for a doomed-from-the-start Mega Drive add-on but then only rerelease boring ass CD while Knuckles' Chaotix is relegated to emulation and having it's soundtrack overused in gaming Youtube videos.