An unusual sort of tactics game where fog of war rules the day. Success in battle, especially the first time you encounter a scenario, hinges on accurately predicting your enemy's loadout and position. I suspect that the winning strategy for must fights is to hold back, fortify a perimeter, draw out units into vulnerable positions, and pick them off until you have overwhelming ground superiority.

Most units can't move and attack in the same turn, and even those that can will deal more damage if they're stationary. This, along with strict line-of-sight rules, gives the defender a substantial advantage: if the enemy wants to approach you, you get the first (or hardest) attack. It leads to a very slow and deliberate style of play that I can imagine someone really liking—but that person is not me.

Given how much unknown information is internet in the core design, it's an interesting decision to also add randomness to most attacks. While standard infantry attacks only do 1 damage, most other machine gun fire does 1-2 and anti-vehicle attacks tend to do 2-6—a colossal amount of variance. With the game already encouraging such a conservative approach, extra randomness just serves as drag, forcing the player to assume the worst will happen and slowing down already sluggish fights.

Rarely have I played a game that's made me more intensely question why it's a game. I was attracted to Genesis Noir by its visual style, and that turns out to be about the only thing this game has going for it... so why not just make it a cartoon instead? The interactivity in the game ranges from "press forward to progress the plot" to "click arbitrarily around the screen until you figure out what obscure thing you're supposed to do to progress the plot", and never once does it justify having interactive components at all.

Fortunately for those who might feel obligated to play it anyway, the plot does nothing to make up for the mechanical unsophistication. The jumble of biblical and scientific metaphors are too arbitrary to have anything interesting to say and too obvious to be intriguing. They act like a mountain of unflavored buttercream frosting, hiding the fact that the paint-by-numbers noir plot underneath has barely anything going on at all.

Well, fuck me for thinking this was just "weird Gradius, but not quite weirder than Parodius." Neither did I ever think that the cute winged spaceship was going to have deep father issues to start and suffer from psychological trauma by the game's end, nor in a billion years did I ever expect a fifteen-minute shooter released in 1986 to have big things to say about the pitfalls of adopting commodity currency vs. fiat.

It's also wild that this thing was almost the official Sega mascot by that much. Can you imagine a weird alternate reality where instead of Sonic, Mario competed with the likes of a cute spaceship with legs for dominance in the hearts and minds of nineties videogame-playing boys all over the world? Imagine it in all the Sega and Mario olympics games, imagine it in Tokyo 2020 with its little feet puttering across the track trying to get to the finish line like the little engine that could. But I mean I get it, in the end Sonic is just better fodder for deviantart sickos. Try as they might, one simply cannot jerk off to Opa-Opa.

beyond incredible

still refreshingly playable, but also STILL ahead of its time. so much nuance baked into each facial expression and quip, an ocean of complexity buried in thousands of branching trees that you will only ever see a small portion of.

TokiMemo perfectly captures the constant worry of high school, in a constant environment of crazy-making conversations where you overthink every possible interaction in every way that it could go. you become the emergent gameplay, even when your character's words/actions betray how you actually feel.

the pain of being on a date with the girl you like and saying something to upset her is a spine-chilling dagger running through you, knowing that you COULD reload and have to relive the same few weeks to try again or you could let your initial choice lie and have to deal with the consequences. do you fulfill a promise you made earlier to your childhood friend you have a crush on who is CLEARLY emotionally struggling lately, or do you choose to spend time with the girl who loving is easy and carefree, who clearly likes you more, who is honest about her feelings toward you? you can only choose one, and the other will be upset. when the bombs start rolling in, you only have yourself to blame.

to play perfectly, you must become a pervert freak like Yoshio. to seek the Perfect Love, you must (in some small way) become a manipulator. to find the love you actually want, all you have to do is wait and consider how they want to feel, how to make them feel supported best, but also offer them new experiences that they might not have had without you.

this is only after my FIRST PLAYTHROUGH also!!!! Mio, i'm coming back for you....

The hubris of naming a game "____ Souls" in 2015 is astounding.

Reducing a combat-focused game to a series of boss fights is not an intrinsically untenable concept, although it certainly raises the question of what value a large and barren overworld brings beyond adding a load screen between each attempt. The issue is that this design puts tremendous pressure on the design of the combat and the bosses to be stellar, since the game has nothing else to offer. And stellar these bosses are not.

Of the six fights I beat and eight I played before setting this game down in exhausted disgust, I'd consider every one of them to be a "puzzle boss" in the context of other combat-focused games. The challenge isn't in mastering the combat system, and sightreading is completely out of the question when a single hit is fatal. The challenge is always just engaging in trial and error until you find the cutesy little weakness every boss has and manage to eyeball the correct arrow angle in your half-second opening. It's the worst parts of the worst kinds of bosses you'd expect to see in a generic Metroidvania, not something worth showcasing as an entire game.