This game is endless. Not in the sense that you’ll never finish a single playthrough (though the chances are pretty high considering its difficulty and unpredictability) but because the possibilities are limitless. In Crusader Kings II you play as whoever you want to be, count, duke, king, emperor, ruling your dynasty from scratch until you are uplifted to great power or until you fail miserably and get wiped out in a cleanse war or deathly plague.

I certainly never once finished a game, it was hard enough to grasp every little mechanic you could use in the first twenty to thirty hours and after that I mostly focused on exploring possibilities and the hidden events, role-playing as a wise king and caring father or a ruthless unforgiving tyrant that had everyone who even dared to look at my wife beheaded.

Hilarious combinations are daily occurrences, there are plenty of reviews, memes and threads about Satanists popes, centuries old inbreeding dynasties, dumb rulers being murdered by their own stupidity, comedic cuckoldry, disastrous wars, you name it. One might complain that it’s mostly a RNG game where every risk calculation is bound to be wrong, but that’s exactly the point. There is a reason why Ironman mode has only one automatic save slot, so that you can experience your campaign, your story, as a real medieval life simulator: you carefully planned the assassination that will lead you into a sure-win succession war for the reign of your brother? Too bad, the assassination failed, everyone knows it was you, rebels arise, vassals revolt and your brother calls his allies to wreck doom upon your sorry head. That’s life, not every thing plays the way we imagined or wanted it too and more often than not it screws you in the behind, hard.
Not like you couldn’t play in normal vanilla mod with a plethora of cheats, if you just wanted to chill and cause havoc all around the world with unlimited resources and armies, as I said the game possibilities are limitless.

Play this game if you want to experience the unpredictable, the unavoidable, the unexpected, the unsolvable and generally to have a great time in the most complete, complex and vast strategy and role-playing game ever conceived.

Ever wondered how Ghost in the Shell would have worked if it was made by Michael Bay? Well, look no further, because Binary Domain answered the call.

In a world where sci-fi has to be slow paced, philosophical and filled with atmospheric music to be taken seriously (yes, I am referring to Blade Runner, of course), one game dares to defy expectations, presenting a thought-provoking but still familiar theme such as what separates human intelligence from artificial intelligence and lets you decide what to think on your own, while also giving you a big fat machine gun and telling you to shoots robots down to pieces. God, I love this game.

Binary Domain is not especially well designed in terms of graphics or gameplay, although it comes with an immensely satisfying shooting system where you can blow any parts of the enemies you are aiming to, in a bullet rain so huge that it makes The Matrix feels inadequate. What makes it shine, aside from this, is the speed-light paced adrenaline rush that is the campaign story, the possibility to order around people to blow up robots as big as skyscrapers, the sensation of having hordes of cannon fodder scrapheads to mince to pieces and a cover system which is… it’s nice, it does its job.

I’ve said ‘blow up’ and ‘to pieces’ far too times in this review, may this serve as a testament of how gloriously epic it’s the sensation of playing the game.

In a time where horror games are either first person jump scares fest or RPGmaker-made jump scares fest, it’s rare to find a game which gives a good example of the meaning of horror without the need of scaring the viewer. Taking the definition from the Oxford dictionary, horror refers to “an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust.” The reason most horror games and movies fail to me nowadays it’s because they all focus too much on the fear and shock part of the equation, forgetting the importance of that ‘intense feeling’. By that I’m not saying making a louder, piercing scream or a bigger monster but rather something that will stick with the players, that will haunt them during nights and waking hours, something strong enough to leave a mark even after the experience is passed, something that, in particular cases, might be realer and scarier than your average zombie or serial killer.

Detention is not scary because there are ghosts, sudden loud noises or because it puts the player at peril, rather these circumstances happen in very rare occasions during the game. It is scary because it presents a scenario far too real and common, based on real events moreover, and spins on it so that the player is forced to realize the reality of what is presented, the truth behind the shown atrocities and just how frightening human beings can be in certain environments.

It is not surface horror, it’s pervasive horror, which seeps into the mind and brings psychological consequences on one’s perception of reality, akin to what other more famous titles such as Silent Hill 2 or Rule of Rose managed to achieve. The horror is not something necessarily stranger or far from us, it might be near, behind you, or even inside of you.

Himawari’s most pressing issue is that it tries to be a story oriented visual novel while being a character driven novel. I heard many referring to the huge plot twists ending every route, especially after the epilogue for the last one, yet I feel each and every one of them fell flat for the simple reason that I had been given not enough knowledge or reason to care about the mechanics behind the world, as the plot mostly focused on characters’ interactions, which aren’t that impressive too.

Each route, except maybe 2048, focused heavily on slices of life, mundane and every day content with sparse dramatic revelations and climaxes, so I was involved with the characters, I could relate to them (especially Akira, he’s my man) but as for the events I couldn’t care less or, in some cases, understand their importance. I was presented with a cast of characters having a simple, initial objective, to send a homemade rocket to fly into space, and from there it develops into a complex tale regarding the ambitions, the motives and, sometimes, the madness of the men reaching for the stars. What already made my emotional involvement with the story collapse were the inevitable comparison I unconsciously made with a comic named Planetes, which dealt with basically everything that is in Himawari only in far more depth, with better characters, a shorter more cohesive story and general better writing. I won’t make any distinct parallel between the two since it would be unfair and not say much about Himawari’s own merits. As for one last, personal digression, I hated the character of Daigo, from beginning to finish I couldn’t fathom his personality, his goals, his involvement with the story, everything he meant, did and stood for. Those who already read the novel may imagine how my impression of the story and the characters related to him was undermined by this, I won’t deny that what are often times considered to be the best parts of the game were, in fact, what had me the most groaning and rolling back my eyes for this reason.

Lastly, what hammered the remaining nails in the coffin, was the lack of an aftermath in every, single route. They just end, show you some plot twists, build a circumstantial resolution but leave so much open you’d just hope the next route had the answer you sought. They don’t, never. If you have questions in the middle of the game better forget them and hope it’s something the game thinks is deserving of an explanation before the ending. Regardless, oftentimes the more you will go on with the story the bigger will be the twists presented and the more the lack of any epilogue, explanation or context will leave you with just the build up for a grander sci-fi story that is never going to be told.

Spec Ops is something I always wanted from a game but realized so that I won't get any satisfaction from it. It's a third person war shooter game dealing with the psychological, brutal side of war rather than putting the player in a power fantasy of being the super soldier saving the world and both of these aspects are flawed in too many ways to speak positively of my experience.

As a war story, it is an uninspired spoof of Apocalypse Now which tries to depict the same descent from the ordinary to hell but fails by giving the player too few choices to prove his or her ability to think instead of just mindlessly killing hordes of enemies. It wants you to feel bad for something that you can't avoid, we are far from the choices in Mass Effect where sometimes your errors and conduct meant consequences that later you'd be obliged to face. In Spec Ops the choice is only to kill, and the consequence is only to kill more, I'm so very reflecting on the meaning of war right now.

As a cover shooter, it blew my belief that every Gears of War-inspired game was better than Gears of War. Yager managed to make something more clunky, unresponsive, linear and uninspired that waving the same chainsaw rifle for three games straight. At least not all the enemies are bullet sponges this time. The AI, for enemies and companions, is obviously terrible and you'll have to do most of the work every time to either protect yourself from being the target for every conceivable grenade and saving your dumb soldiers because they charged against the machine gun, or the sniper, or the fortified hill position. Screw them, seriously.

I'm bashing this game pretty hard, but it is admittedly not as dumb as a story or unplayable as it may sound, its mechanics just didn’t work for me, at all, and the negative opinion mostly derives from large expectations of deep, thought-provoking content that the game did not meet and the frustration arisen in certain sections I replayed times and times again because the character controls as smoothly as a sack of potatoes.

To put it simply, Valkyria Chronicles has one of the best and unique gameplay I ever came across in a videogame. I agree that it is similar to Xcom’s gameplay, especially the most recent iterations of the latter, yet there is something about the setting and the way Valkyria Chronicles presents its war that fascinates me the most.

Instead of being a nameless commander put in charge of an army and sending your soldiers to hopelessly die, the protagonist in Valkyria Chronicles has a name and a face, Welkin Gunther, a gentle but naïve guy who joins the army of the small reign of Gallia (Belgium) to defend its country from the invasion of the Imperial Alliance (the German Reich) during what is basically World War II, with the help of some side character like everyone’s big brother Largo, the spunky Rosie, the quiet genius Isara and the lovable and brave Alicia. Sure, the plot and the characters are pretty filled with anime tropes, and side squad members are relegated to being just descriptions and stock phrases of even more anime tropes, but at least you are presented with a unique face or story before deciding to send him or her in a suicide action to break through the enemy lines or protecting your squad’s retreat. They are handed to you as they are, instead of being custom made and named as it was in Xcom and, moreover, there are just so many chances you can prove yourself to be a bad commander because after you let them die there are no more spares to be procedurally generated. Which is a nice way to set the importance of mastering leadership and strategies but quite useless in the long run since the game is easy enough to be played without letting anyone die. Not much war realism in here, I know, but, as I said, the setting and story are filled with many happy-go-lucky anime tropes.

Yet, despite some ridiculous over-the-top moment which just put you out of the immersion of being a soldier fighting the old trench warfare, the game attempts (and mostly succeeds) at dealing with its themes in a mature and respectful way. It does know how to discuss things like war crimes, death, camaraderie, sacrifice and duty, many times by dumbing down the content but it deserves to be acknowledged as one the firsts Japanese game which tried to dealt seriously with what it means to fight a war as an infantry soldier. There’s no Spec Ops or Valiant Hearts to be found here, it reiterates that war is bad but it doesn’t try to strike for much more, which is a real shame to me, but it gets the job done regardless.

Gameplay-wise instead, I love everything about it: I love how every turn starts with a tactical map in which you can see your troops and the terrain to decide who and how to move accordingly, I love the order system to boost stats and give you the feeling your leadership is having a positive effect on the characters morale, although it is small stuff compared to larger game systems like Total War’s. I love how characters move, take cover (I don’t love how they can’t crouch anywhere but behind sandbag though) fire and react to enemies, and vice versa. I love the palette-coloured graphics, the character design, the boot camp grinding to level your soldiers’ classes, the R&D department to enhance your tanks, the freedom you are given to just end a mission in a turn for a good score using the goddess that is Alicia or to roleplay as a real commander by slowly moving and defending with your characters, taking covers at every corner instead of always mindlessly charging. I just love this weird attempt, half-success at making a strategic-roleplaying hybrid video game. It’s a weird mix I find myself often appreciating when it does something special with it, such as in Crusader King’s II or the Rance series.

Valkyria Chronicles is one of those rare cases where a developer tries something new, and considering the Japanese market that is indeed an incredibly rare event on its own, but it also succeeds just enough to be a memorable, satisfactory experience. The original game made on the PS3 always received strong approve from niche fans but thanks to SEGA porting the game to Steam, with no bug or problems to speak of in my experience, it finally got the world-wide massive recognition it deserved.

To put it simply, Valkyria Chronicles has one of the best and unique gameplay I ever came across in a videogame. I agree that it is similar to Xcom’s gameplay, especially the most recent iterations of the latter, yet there is something about the setting and the way Valkyria Chronicles presents its war that fascinates me the most.

Instead of being a nameless commander put in charge of an army and sending your soldiers to hopelessly die, the protagonist in Valkyria Chronicles has a name and a face, Welkin Gunther, a gentle but naïve guy who joins the army of the small reign of Gallia (Belgium) to defend its country from the invasion of the Imperial Alliance (the German Reich) during what is basically World War II, with the help of some side character like everyone’s big brother Largo, the spunky Rosie, the quiet genius Isara and the lovable and brave Alicia. Sure, the plot and the characters are pretty filled with anime tropes, and side squad members are relegated to being just descriptions and stock phrases of even more anime tropes, but at least you are presented with a unique face or story before deciding to send him or her in a suicide action to break through the enemy lines or protecting your squad’s retreat. They are handed to you as they are, instead of being custom made and named as it was in Xcom and, moreover, there are just so many chances you can prove yourself to be a bad commander because after you let them die there are no more spares to be procedurally generated. Which is a nice way to set the importance of mastering leadership and strategies but quite useless in the long run since the game is easy enough to be played without letting anyone die. Not much war realism in here, I know, but, as I said, the setting and story are filled with many happy-go-lucky anime tropes.

Yet, despite some ridiculous over-the-top moment which just put you out of the immersion of being a soldier fighting the old trench warfare, the game attempts (and mostly succeeds) at dealing with its themes in a mature and respectful way. It does know how to discuss things like war crimes, death, camaraderie, sacrifice and duty, many times by dumbing down the content but it deserves to be acknowledged as one the firsts Japanese game which tried to dealt seriously with what it means to fight a war as an infantry soldier. There’s no Spec Ops or Valiant Hearts to be found here, it reiterates that war is bad but it doesn’t try to strike for much more, which is a real shame to me, but it gets the job done regardless.

Gameplay-wise instead, I love everything about it: I love how every turn starts with a tactical map in which you can see your troops and the terrain to decide who and how to move accordingly, I love the order system to boost stats and give you the feeling your leadership is having a positive effect on the characters morale, although it is small stuff compared to larger game systems like Total War’s. I love how characters move, take cover (I don’t love how they can’t crouch anywhere but behind sandbag though) fire and react to enemies, and vice versa. I love the palette-coloured graphics, the character design, the boot camp grinding to level your soldiers’ classes, the R&D department to enhance your tanks, the freedom you are given to just end a mission in a turn for a good score using the goddess that is Alicia or to roleplay as a real commander by slowly moving and defending with your characters, taking covers at every corner instead of always mindlessly charging. I just love this weird attempt, half-success at making a strategic-roleplaying hybrid video game. It’s a weird mix I find myself often appreciating when it does something special with it, such as in Crusader King’s II or the Rance series.

Valkyria Chronicles is one of those rare cases where a developer tries something new, and considering the Japanese market that is indeed an incredibly rare event on its own, but it also succeeds just enough to be a memorable, satisfactory experience. The original game made on the PS3 always received strong approve from niche fans but thanks to SEGA porting the game to Steam, with no bug or problems to speak of in my experience, it finally got the world-wide massive recognition it deserved.

Dark Souls isn’t hard or unfair, you just need a whole playthrough before you have a decent character. Can’t believe all the times Seath wrecked me, how did I even manage to suck so much?

But that is not what I wanted to discuss here, there are already far too many dank memes about Dark Souls to just imitate other funny reviews joking about the learning curve of the game. What I wanted to focus on was what hooked me initially to the game and what I came to appreciate the most about the series as a whole (yeah, including Demon’s and Bloodborne): the storytelling.

It all begins with the simple fact that I am a huge fantasy fan when it comes to narrative, and Dark Souls does something that I have rarely seen in fantasy in my recent memory, especially eastern made: it does something original. We are all too accustomed to Tolkien and D&D’s pastiches to realize there is something more to fantasy than just adding alien species which still act and think like humans, sucking every sense of wonder from the experience of exploring a fantasy world. Orc, dwarves and elves are as familiar to us as dogs, cats and other house pets: sure, they are alien to us humans but we grew used to them being there and they don’t give us any sense of discovery or surprise.

Dark Souls subverts this by building a world devoid of species inspired by such mundane mythologies, or villains striving for world end or riches, and instead focuses on a far more attractive premise: the world was once empty, void, there was no life or death to speak of and the only living beings were immortal Dragons whose main occupation was to just chill around for all of the eternity. Until, that is, evolution happened, in the form of a flame which symbolizes disparity, and that disparity holds an immense power. Then came the Lords, the rising gods of this empty world, using the flame to challenge the Dragons and claim their role as sovereign of all creation. After a long, brutal war, the Gods came out victorious and built their reigns while still holding the power of the fire, nurturing it so that it shall never fade. That’s the intro of the game, and basically the only time the game will spoon-feed you with important informations. Not that anything more is needed because any major point is eventually subtlety conveyed to the player, but by talking to characters you will meet during the game and reading item descriptions (or by just simply exploring and being observant) you’ll receive much, much more: in depth details about where exactly are you, who the being surrounding you are, what are their goals and motives and what is your role in all these plays among Gods. It is a world as subtle and as mysterious as Nihei’s Blame was. The game director Miyazaki mastered the art and meaning of show-don’t-tell in this series, which in itself is amazing, but what made it so much more than it initially appears is the actual content.

What is the player’s role in all of this? The protagonist is just an unnamed, weak human, now undead, who just kind of arrives at the land of the Lords and wander around killing (or rather, being killed by) everything in sight, no much story to be told about him. Yet, while you’re slowly descending in a hell of decay and undead, crawling through ruins and slaying god-like beings, it is unavoidable to start wondering “Why is everything falling to pieces, and why a single strip of bacon such as myself is able to single-handedly stab a God until it dies?”. That is, my friend, because they are Gods no more. Playing through the game and meeting the right characters will let you realize that you are no more in the ancient era of the Gods, but millennia after, their powers are now fading and what was once luminated by the light of the fire will inevitably succumb to darkness once the fire ceases to shine. You are exploring through a lie, a deception the Gods created to protect themselves from the unavoidable. They have gone mad, once terrific beings now by comparison powerless, now scared to lose everything they created, to die and be no more as the Dragons they themselves slaughtered. Which bring us to the player role in all of this, what exactly do you have to accomplish? Basically, some sort of doom is imminent upon the world and all humans, something so jarring even Gods are unable to deal with it. Is there a way for you to salvage the situation and bring a happy ending?

No, there is not.

Because you are not the hero, you are not the knight rolling in town with a shining armour and master sword. Rather, you are the judge. Dark Souls is a trial, a trial where you are presented all the evidence of a case of mass murder, crime against humanity and hoax, with aggravations such as intentional deception, hubris, arrogance, cruelty, the list goes on. You are not slaying the Lords to correct the inequality and injustices in the world, in fact many of them you could just avoid to fight at all. You are being shown their crimes and have to bestow judgment upon them. By the ending, when you face the final boss, this is all the clearer as you think back on your journey and realize exactly what you are facing, and that’s where you have to decide based on what you’ve seen, what you’ve been fighting. Did you murder senselessly what was already dead? Did you bring castigation upon being undeserving any mercy? Or maybe you put them out of their misery? Or, as I did in many playthroughs, you left them where they are, silently condemning them but understanding why they acted that way and, in some way, respecting the gentle illusion they were trying to protect. The Gods in Dark Souls are flawed Gods, they built a world which wasn’t perfect or eternal, they believed they had the power it took to rise above ground and strike for the sun, just to burn and fall down on earth again. These are Paradise Lost’s Satan-like Gods, who are not faulty for what they attempted to do, for their pride and their ambitions, after all they are just as human as the beings they tried to corrupt.

Dark Souls is filled with the moral ambiguity this realization holds. It shows you the aftermath of a glory that once was and let you decide its worth.
I love this moral ambiguity.
Thus I love Dark Souls.

The indisputable thing about Trails in the Sky is that no matter where you are or how thought of a battle you are facing, it never gives up its light-heartiness. It may sound ridiculous considering some twists and events undeniably dramatic, but overall the charm it displays comes from a deep sense of familiarity you perceive from the world and its characters. Being the first chapter in a trilogy of the Legend of Heroes series you start having little to no clue regarding who is who, what is what, how things work and what kind of monster will come at you in every dungeon. But here’s the thing, all of the answers to these points are either pretty standard fare or predictable: you have kind of slimes, kind of insectoids, kind of monster birds, and the whole grid combat system and quartz equipment are pretty easy to catch up and recognize after few tries. The characters are the kind of broody gary stu, the kind of energetic female lead, the kind of cute little girl, the kind of uptight aristocratic, the kind of funny pervert, the kind of reliable jokester and so on.

From what I’ve been saying up to now it may sound as if I am dissing the game for being boring and uninspired, which is undeniable for me considering the average JRPG, and initially this was a big point behind the disappointment in my first playthrough. Yet there was something charming about the game, something not really flashy or amazing or memorable, but it just drew me in it again, and in its sequels. What it was, was the familiarity.

Playing Trails in the sky is returning to a game you have always played when turning on a JRPG: it makes the players discover a world where there are problems and stuff to solve (after all it would be an Atelier game otherwise, wouldn’t it) but rarely puts them are put into a spot where there isn’t a handful of warm, good feelings, where the people living in this world won’t smile and help the characters, give some nice trivia, or just crack a light, unfunny joke. All of these set up the mood for the heroes to feel the need to save the day and beat the bad guys, because they are concretely showed what is so important to protect, not just generically preventing the world to burn but an everyday worth of living made of significant people and hopes and dreams and children and all the kind of saccharine stuff edgy guy won’t relate to. To me, at least, this is a remarkable achievement.

Albeit, one may argue that this is by no mean something new, something unique, something that make the game stand out from many other similar JRPGs. I won’t deny this because I think so as well, I just think it’s more a part of Trails in the Sky’s charm than of its let-downs. Then again, if one wants still to immerse in an enthralling and challenging game you could always crank up the difficulty and let Lorence obliterate you time and time again without a specific quartz build to counter his one-hit kill attacks. Not that it will really matter if one spends just the tiniest amount of time exploring, looting and levelling up, strategizing is very intuitive and easy to master. Moreover, the grind in this game is really light and I’ve never been put into a spot where I wouldn’t be able to collect all the weapons and abilities compared to other games. Or, you could also just spam Joshua’s black fang and make every random encounter trivial.

If one just came for the story though, what they’ll get is a classic reinvention of the “the princess is in another castle” formula, where the player is given an episodic format of reaching a new city, meeting new people, investigating their own matters and finishing involved in something else entirely to solve. The nice thing about ending a chapter and leaving everything that the player explored or met behind is this is the kind of game that won’t forget to make everyone come back and fulfil their roles by the endgame, so that not one major quest will ever feel unnecessary or too gratuitous to alienate the player from the main objective. The game also ends on a quite nice cliff-hanger, which was subtlety built and hinted to thorough the whole story, but without leaving anything relevant presented up to that point unresolved: the bad guys are defeated, the princess was indeed in one castle, the world is save (for now), everything noteworthy was achieved, you are just presented the prologue to the next story in the epilogue to build the will to keep on playing the series. And admittedly, it works like a charm.

I wouldn’t recommend this game if one was searching for an innovative game, or a game which takes stereotypes and does something completely new and inspired with them (if you want a better “princess in another castle” game just go to The Witcher 3), rather Trails in the Sky was made for those people who unconditionally love JRPGs for the feeling the genre mastered, the feel of live inside a warm fable.

Chaos;Child is already five years old and yet its social commentary is still as relevant and real as ever. Cleverly subverting the trend of teenagers solving with their youthful confidence conflicts greater far than them (de facto rendering steins;gate, from the same series, far more stupid than it already was), the story of chaos;child revolves around a chain of horrifying murders and the shocking truths that supposedly hide beneath the surface of a modern day media sensation.

Yet, that is indeed just the surface. Chaos;Child ventures into many different territories but at the core it is a work on the excessive power of mass media, internet noise, information wars and the terrifying coldness and the feeling of lack of purpose in modern times. While maintaining a coherent flow, sometimes slowing its pacing by giving the readers many moments of characters interactions, insight and respite to breath in and assimilate the many events transpiring, the plot always moves forward, asking relevant questions about the contemporary world and letting its characters answer them as they see fit. Are those the right answers? The wrong ones? It is hard to say. Living through difficult times is such an idiosyncratic experience that it is tempting to judge and impose our external views upon them, but even though we can express judgment is it really more important to understand and explain than to just simply understand?

Chaos;Child looks upon its characters, their struggles, their decisions, their successes and failures and, like an indifferent, omniscient eye, witnesses the worst inhumanities and never relents. When something bad happens there ain’t no silver lining or positive angle; characters might suffer and then have to deal with the consequences, even accepting their own mistakes, recognize their own flaws and act upon them, trying to better themselves or keep on running away. The underlying heroism in chaos;child does not equates to saving the world, sometimes it is just enough to accept our own limitations and do the best we can to make things slightly less worse for those we care about. As said before, there are no easy answers about what can be done to solve every problem; a tragedy is the misfortune brought upon oneself as a result of one’s own action. Oedipus was a tragic character because he killed his own father and married his mother as a result of his beliefs; Milton’s Satan was a tragic character because he decided to rebel against God due to his own hubris; Miyashiro Takuru is a tragic character because… well, that is the story to be found in Chaos;Child.

The production values in the visual novel are also amazing. The characters’ sprites are expressive, well-acted, Matsuoka Yoshitsugu probably gave his performance of a lifetime as Takuru. The sound design and soundtrack are eerie, creepy, haunting at times; there are many genuinely tense and scary moments, where the tension is so fully realized by combining sounds, writing and acting performances, reading on for too long in those moments might prove painful, yet one can hardly stop as long as the rhythm doesn’t relent.

Chaos;Child should be on everyone’s read-list for the sheer importance of the story, for how well it understands what is fundamentally nonsensical about the culture in 21st century and for how, rightfully so, it has proven to be the heir we were waiting for to the likes of serial experiments lain or kon satoshi’s works.

Spoilers in the review because who even cares anymore

Steins;Gate is one of the most successful mess ever written. It is a confused, overlong slog devoid of characters, pacing and meaning. A walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

It presents itself as a comedic, thriller-themed, sci-fi-ish slice of life piece about a group of wacky nerdy friends, as aware and believable in their roles as the big bang theory’s cast, which spends the first half of the game concluding nothing of relevance and the latter half of the game undoing the former. There is a significant attempt to deliver a message about the importance of free will in humanity, about our own limits, to face and accept the choices and consequences of our own free will and actions, establishing that we cannot have an ideal, easy, cotton-candy life because there is always a part of the world beyond our control, that we do have an impact on the world, and then the message is sent down the flush because we need an happy ending so here’s the resolution done off-screen for the main characters and believe in yourself, coincidence and improvisation will solve every conflict. Hours after reading through the misery of characters you are supposed to like, the game just gives you the comfortable solution that none of that matters, people will still be happy and you have to pretend those conflict never existed.

The protagonist, okabe, is a useless slab of wasted air, he fancies himself a science genius when he has no theoretical expertise aside from googling and reading stuff on Wikipedia and online boards, no technical skill, if it were not for the clear instructions others give him. Every major important concept in the story is introduced, theorized, discussed, solved and then engineered by someone else, he just uses them with barely knowing how any of those work. He also behaves like a daft twat for half of the game toward anyone, yet people still stick around him and act like he’s a dear friend despite being showered in his chauvinism, arrogance and terrible, terrible manners. When at the midpoint of the story he’s supposed to grow and start act like a caring individual, as said before he just undoes and forgets gradually every conflict his ‘friends’ have, and when he has to face the consequences of his actions, once again someone else hands him the deus ex machina, without him having to do any effort except crying and be sad about it for a bit. You aren’t even given the time to assimilate and feel the weight of the events, as you already expect a convenient solution to be on the way by that point.

The pacing is all over the place: many chapters that should be focused on progressing the story just digress and forget any sense of urgency despite time being the central idea of the story. A whole chapter is dedicated to having someone win a yu-gi-oh tournament, which isn’t even the main conflict of the arc’s protagonist, and then the real issue is presented and quickly dealt with in ten minutes before undoing it again and moving on to someone else’s life to ruin. This is gorilla-tier writing, how do you spend over half of your chapters’ length like this, with no editor to cut out the unnecessary bits, is beyond me.

The side cast is a mix of unfunny, clichéd anime tropes, with the major actors being a dumb happy-go-lucky girl whose major defining traits are being dumb and happy-go-lucky, a supposedly genius engineer and hacker constantly acting like a dangerous sexual molester, a psychotic super soldier so stupid she’d forget to eat or breath if you didn’t tell her to, another psychotic super soldier which should solve all the plot within minutes of playing start but there’s another idiot I guess, the genius tough but shy girl that should sound conflicted but actually has an emotional disorder and is just made fun of by everyone else, writer included. I didn’t even touch upon the token moe stereotype with no growth because, let’s face it, all the female characters can easily apply for the role.

The CGI and character design are hideous, poorly drawn, with terrible proportions and depth, weird colouring, unnatural and unhuman faces, body proportions and expressions (those eyes will hunt me in my sleep), that make the story seem like it takes place in alternate universe where everyone is the creature from the movie ‘the fly’. Credit where credit is due, the voice acting work and sound is pretty impressive, there are some really powerful tracks in the background music and most of the voice actors, from miyano mamoru to seki tomokazu, from tamura yukari to googling imai asami, each of them play their roles and the emotions they should convey very well.

That being said, even as a sound novel steins;gate is still overlong and riddled with dumb twists and nonsense to serve shock value rather than compelling, meaningful progression and satisfying conclusions based on its own terms, development and themes. If you want a visual novel dealing with sci-fi and thriller there’s plenty of dumb fun to be had with the nonary games, as bad as those can get, or just read chaos;child and experience the better sci;adv novel.

William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typing machine, kickstarting the cyberpunk genre as we know it and imagining how computers and virtual reality would actually work decades later. Years after, he claimed to have been disappointed by the real thing, probably because he played this game and found out how some people imagined virtual reality as a good place to play incest with your sister.

So, Baldr Sky, one of the most legendary visual novels, teased for years and arrived on the English scene just last december. This game is all in all massive, it takes over a hundred hours to even complete the main story and the scope of the game shoots to achieve the matrix-levels of thought-provoking insights on virtual reality and the role of men in a world of rising AIs. Sounds terrific on paper, but the plot is at best very cool and poignant and at worst (and more commonly) barely serviceable. Despite beginning in medias res in a futuristic battlefield where mecha pilots are gutting unmanned wardrones, which is how most of the game will play out, the average time spent on the story of Baldr Sky will deal with teenagers and young adults going around, talking about sci-fi jargon and interesting concept but without much charisma to deliver a compelling narrative. Tens of hours of explanations grow tiring in a story which is also riddled with repetitions, stereotypical dialogues made by stereotypical characters, and where many sections just drag on and on, seemingly forever.

I get the sentiment that long flashbacks segments and info-dumping were needed to create a connection with the cast and understanding the core concepts, I really do, it’s fundamental to feel invested in the emotional climaxes and to appreciate the thematic answers at the end of each route. Yet, was it really necessary to stretch the story over so much with so many plodding bits? As an ulterior testament to how mind-numbingly slow this is, despite its length and scope Baldr Sky only has around twenty recurring characters, and not even all of them receive an in-depth arc or development to fully understand their personality or motivations. Almost all of the villains for example have their share of reasoning behind, but that doesn’t make them less repetitive and annoying when they are mostly just the same stereotypically evil caricatures (fat greedy rapists, arrogant violent psychos, narcissistic monomaniacal churchmen, etc.) in every route, furthermore never providing a satisfying counterbalance to the obvious ‘good’ of the main characters.

A huge portion of the game isn’t limited by its story restrictions, thankfully, sometimes actions calls in and the gameplay starts. The gameplay is the meat of the game, and it’s worth the entry price: structured as an isometric beat ‘em up, Baldr Sky offers a wide arrange of progressively unlocking weapons (for a grand total of just about 130 different weapons), which can be developed and chained in combos for massive style and damage. The weapons cover every possible playstyle, from long to short range, bullet vs explosive weapons, light vs heavy, slash vs smash, there are tons of finisher and other stuff to try out, but the game doesn’t want the player to just choose a category and roll with it. A long-range stagger can be combined with a dash move to close the gap and then immediately go to an air launch, followed by a high kick, a sword stun, heavy smash, a drop and close with an explosive punch. This is just one possible combination, not even a full one, out of thousands viable approaches to dispatch single enemies or crowd control hordes. It looks like a very retro take on modern action games on the vein of devil may cry, or bayonetta, and the adrenaline rushes are just as strong. There are videos out there showing people one-shotting the final boss in a single, two-minutes long combo on the hardest difficulty and it is just pure video games aesthetic.

Of course, it doesn’t always work perfectly. One major complaint regards how chains and weapons can be decided only before every fighting sections and never be changed midway until it’s over and story resumes. Meaning that if the players poorly planned a combo, either they have to start all over again (which can mean even half or a full hour of gameplay) or stick with it and hope there isn’t a boss encounter. This can happen quite often because, and here’s the other great issue, before every section the player is given a simulation where to choose weapons and try them out, yet a combo working ten times in a row in a simulation can still fail during the actual combat or on actual enemies, for some reasons. Moreover, same as for the story, many battle sessions just last far too long: for example, closing almost every major route there is a gigantic rush of enemies that kills the pacing and makes the final boss seems a beath of fresh air after so much repetition, rather than the climax one should be expecting.

Art style and sound design are competent, the characters likability requires having some degree of appreciation for anime and the likes, even in the voice department which is pretty good regardless but riddled with typical onomatopoeic clichés. The soundtrack is a banger while the mech designs, despite being small sprites, are very varied and a pleasure to look at.

All in all, Baldr Sky is a hard one to recommend, it is certainly worth if one felt invested in anime on a similar vein of fullmetal alchemist, attack on titan or code geass, but it also presents many of the limits of the genre. The gameplay may seem tiring at first to someone just interested in the story, but it grows on the player, and it is also one of the rare cases where the normal to hard difficulties are recommended to fully experience the investment throughout the highpoints of the story. If one can afford the tens of hours needed to reach even a single ending, the tens more needed to form a somewhat complete understanding of the story’s stakes, and can digest standard anime-tier writing, this game can prove to be absolutely amazing.