The worst thing about this game is that you can only play it blindly one time

Everything about this is perfection, ingenious, creative, and wonderful. The music is fantastic, the presentation and visuals not only are striking but go well with a lower budget game. This is a title that takes full advantage of its limitations.

It has truly shocking and jaw dropping moments. Ones that will stick in your mind long after the experience.

Lucas Pope is a brilliant and incredible game dev. This is a game that defines a career.

I don't consider many pieces of media perfect, but this is one of them. Don't look anything up, just know it will challenge you and force you to be observant and to really think. Must play.

I had always been offput by the art-style but man I am so glad I played it. It is so so so fun to go through this game and experience the story how it is told through the deaths of the members of the Obra Dinn in vibrant and exciting scenes that you walk through and uncover. The puzzle element of finding out the name of the crew and how they died is always interesting and thank god for the system that correct you when you get 3 right at a time cause I would of lost mind if I didn't have that. I played this with a friend who had already played it so she helped me out when I needed it but never gave me the answer straight away so I would say a non-spoiler guide can be a help in this game to truly enjoy it while having a interesting, sometimes challenging, and amazing puzzle to uncover in the return of the Obra Dinn.

Talking about Return of the Obra Dinn without spoiling anything can be quite difficult, so to avoid spoiling this incredibly unique, wonderful experience, I won’t be delving into details.

Obra Dinn is an investigation game through-and-through. This is actually the main reason I’ve been putting it off for so long, since I honestly feel like I’m, uh, maybe a little “dumb” for these types of games (not an investigation game, but I basically cheated my way through The Witness. Eat your heart out, Jonathan Blow). Without going into details, one of the many things Obra Dinn does expertly is its way of handling all of that. The game makes sure you never feel lost, and if you do, it’s probably intentional. It rides a very thin line between it spelling the solution out for you and it frustrating you throughout its entire run.

The same goes for the rest of the game. Everything is fine-tuned to a T. The main gameplay loop, the story, the (fantastic) score, et cetera. All of it feels so…handcrafted. Lucas Pope had a vision, and he fully committed to it.

The game, obviously, isn’t perfect. The ending is a bit disappointing, and the story, while still interesting, isn’t as interesting as it may seem and tries to do way too many things at once. I also wish there was less guesswork involved, but that might be more of an issue with me missing a few things than an issue with the game itself.

Still, it’s a wholly unique and incredible experience, and absolutely nothing short of an absolute feat.

(BacklogBeat’s Game Club - February 2021 Nomination)

Its got great pacing, art, and music, but the combat is really shallow with little moment to moment choice, the fixed encounters make exploration a huge chore, and the story and characters are a little too stock to find personality in. It's got heart in a lot of places, but like the most polished, studio-made work, despite being so handcrafted, it's kind of a vapid blockbuster. Not trite, but vapid. You could say it was too many cooks. Too many hands building towards a really general, mass appeal vision.

I often hear this game lauded as the best of both worlds with regards to the creators of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy coming together, but it would honestly feel like the weakest entry in either series if put side by side to them. I don't like this frame of looking at it.

Dragon quest games use simple plotlines to convey often extremely subtle and sometimes very complex themes. They feel timeless because of that. The combat systems are made from really simply conveyed choices that feel really weighty; even simple attacks feel intentional, and have the ability to perform unexpectedly to lots of random factors like enemy stat variations, class stats, and flat fractional critical rates. Its combat is like a wizardry 2.0. The best dragon quests have a random encounter rate just low enough to make the player think they can get away with peering just around the corner, while dreading every step in case they run into something truly devastating. Every treasure nets a huge boon, but each one may be your last, with penalties for death being very real. Exploration is the method, and adventure is the dream. To reiterate, complex themes, simple plots, simplified combat terms, devestating and exciting blows with real choice that furthers the desire for more exploration and adventure.

Final fantasy has often really complex plots that have simple themes guiding them. They feel personal and grandiose at the same time. The characters are often commentaries on the tropes they wear on their sleeves, with a lot of hidden depth and backstories to chew at for miles. Exploration is there, but it's in favor of highly scripted and exciting setpieces. Like those setpieces, the combat favors theatricality and performance that heightens the player-character relationship, and the product of that relationship guides the player to navigate the often complex character-building systems of those games. The combat then has complex terms and systems although streamlined for a mass audience to operate on a base level, and play the entire game that way if they so choose. Rather than having a combat around survival and risk/reward, between loot/exploration/death, final fantasy combat is about giving the player a language to understand the world and personality of its inhabitants. It is communication serving the themes of the story (DQ does this too, but in very different ways). To reiterate, complex systems made feasible guided by complex characters, in a complex plot guided by simple themes.

Chrono trigger has simple characters, a pretty simple plot, simple themes, and a simple combat system.

You don't have much say over how you build the characters, the combat doesn't serve as a language, its a bit too easy with penalties too light to serve a vehicle for adventure, not to mention most battles playing out the same way, with a generally unchanging player psychology (tactics are simple, rules generally stay the same, even the introduction of magic mostly keeps characters fighting the same way as before). It's just kinda alright. I play it when I want a simple linear game. (But tbh even ff4 is kinda better at that)