the game development equivalent of the 93 chicago bulls developing the video game equivalent of pulp fiction. a game so wildly ahead of its time that it still feels a good twenty years past where jrpgs are at now.

this game thrives on keeping the content lean, briskly paced and engaging throughout. the varipus chapters runtimes give you just enough time to learn a character's toolkit and quirks before letting you step right into the next one. the combat system in the remake is very self-explanatory, and lets you discover most of the nuance to it with time. in keeping with staying lean, it never gets super deep or intricate but it also never really felt like i was on autopilot either. anyone who's played enough jrpgs knows this is a razer thin line to balance on, but some how live a live makes it all feel effortless.

to touch briefly on the visuals, i was never a particularly big fan of HD2D when it first rolled out. octopath's oversaturated instagram lighting had me worried this was part and parcel for the style, but live a live proved me wrong. the environments are gorgeous, the devlopers deftly utilize space to make the world feel large and real without the tacky dollhouse feel that other titles had. props to the team for making bold choices with the visuals, they somehow manage to feel true to the original but contemporary. i havent played the original to know how much was changed, but i can respect and appreciate what was done here.

i think something that hasnt been discussed much is how much agency is afforded to the player and how that connects thematically to the core narrative. i was surprised to see a pacifist and genocide routes, time-based decision making based on player intuition and context clues, and the ability to sequence break and poke around where you shouldn't pop up rather frequently as well. live a live takes a great deal of time to express its care for the player and their freedom to choose. games since have questioned what role the player has in a game's story, either catalyst or observer, but live a live takes a great deal of care in considering the player's own perspective.

in much the same way playing moon earlier this year did, i find myself enriched coming out of live a live and with a better understanding of game devlopment and how things id have had no exposure to growing up were quietly laying the groundwork for some of my favorite works. i hope the small trend of cult classic jp only releases getting worldwide rereleases with this level of care and respect continues and more titles like these can be brought to new audiences. flower sun and rain next please?

the first tales from the borderlands was an intriguing experiment from the getgo. telltale had basically shot itself into the stratosphere, however briefly, and had announced collaborations with IP after IP. most of these were middling, such as the illfated game of thrones and guardians of the galaxy, but many others were quite good! especially interesting was in the post-walking dead world of telltale, was that the poorer the IP being adapted fit to their style, the better it worked. fables was a mostly mediocre comic carried by a solid-gold concept, but telltale managed to turn that into easily one of my favorite titles of the gen. borderlands, a series that had a good story in the sense that it had a really amazing bad guy and lore that made sequels incredibly easy- new evil corporation, new vault to find, bring protags from prior game back as NPCs, was the other biggest surprise of this era.

and now some eight years later, a sequel is announced and release in a three month span. as someone in the unfortunate position of a borderlands apologist, i was easily sold. and what i found here... is very confused. it occasionally hits the same notes as tales, spinning a decently funny tale about the nonpowered, everyday denizens of a world that is built around violence, crime and killing. but when it tries to do anything besides riffs on classic borderlands tentpoles, it seems dead in the water.

the three protagonists are all enjoyable, but they never gel together in the way the game kind of needs them to. anu, an anxiety riddled scientist, doesnt really seem to have a bad relationship with her estranged brother when they meet- but we're told they had a major split. same with fran, who's supposed to be a rageaholic with a tragic past that... is explained away in a joke? when the intrigue of the world takes a backseat to characters, new tales struggles to find footing, a shame compared to how incredible the character dynamics in the og are. this is all made worse by how badly the game tries to have recurring bits for every character in the game, it's insane. there are very few jokes, and a TON of recurring gags and bits- tell more than one kind of joke please! borderlands gore is very funny! do that and never use the word "himbo" again!

i can't say new tales isn't worth the time for a borderlands fan, nor can i say i didn't enjoy it in all honesty. it's a world i begrudgingly enjoy despite it's almost universal disdain on the internet writ large. chalk it up to all the late night skype (later discord) calls with my brother while we farmed loot and raced each other to finish questlines or find items before the other. new tales isn't going to convince you to change your mind on borderlands, nor do i think it cares to. i just wish this sequel gave a little more effort to follow up to its predecessor and a little less to making bits land. (a good half don't, the other quarter are tolerable, the last quarter actually made me chuckle)