this is a very charming game.

i initially started playing it because of my friends, who were all surprised that i had somehow missed out on it. well, i was surprised to find out that literally EVERYONE in the world had played these games in the late 2000s. and that everyone romanced garrus. i now truly believe that if i walked up to a crowd of random people and asked them about mass effect, they'd all tell me that garrus is the perfect husband. guess i have no choice but to find out what the deal is with this alien man.

well! this game IS fun. my thoughts:

1) the gameplay is janky, but not as janky as i thought it'd be. look, i don't like FPS games. this is the first one i've played in a long, long time. but i got used to it pretty quickly! i played on the easiest setting, using my steam deck (so, using a controller instead of a mouse and keyboard) and i thought it was pretty comfortable. i really liked using liara's abilities - she made it very easy to pick off enemies.

the gameplay sequence for the main planets goes like this: get dropped off somewhere. run and find a group of hostile enemies, maybe four or five. kill them. then run to the next group. you can't save while the enemies in front of you are alive, but you can save before or after that. it really felt like the devs were thinking about people who were playing this game primarily for the story. thank you, old bioware.

2) i really loved the worldbuilding. just loved it. the lore, the sense of history, everything. LOVED getting a new codex entry that would help you make sense of the world. for example, it'd tell you why turians usually wear face paint, and then you'd look at garrus, and then you'd look at saren, and you'd think ah! very fun.

also, the salarians are super cute to me. i know they're kind of ugly but they look kind of like hairless cats.

3) the characters. i'm told that they develop more in the second game. but i did end up liking them a lot! i liked wrex - he was always the most level-headed in the elevator conversations. i found it funny how RUDE garrus is to tali and wrex, though. turians really do think they're superior to krogans and quarians, huh? i'm told he calms down a lot later on. it really is funny, though! it makes him seem kind of very young and naive, like he's not used to interacting with non-turians, despite his very important line of work. i really liked liara, too. she's so enthusiastic about the prothean ruins in the last mission, which made exploring them feel much more emotional and bittersweet.

i don't have many thoughts about the human characters.... except that the humans look kind of weird. older graphics, yes, but i remember them looking a lot less weird in dragon age? well, my shepard was perfect and beautiful, of course. very difficult job, being the most beautiful person in the universe.

onto the next game!

played on steam via the legendary edition

ultimately, i really only liked shiraishi's route, and found myself rushing through everyone else's. shiraishi IS very cute, though.
my thoughts on each LI:

- enomoto: feels like five different gimmicks in one character. would be cute if he lost the fake eyepatch. not very memorable. i think it's been like a month since i played his route and i can't really remember a single thing.

- sazasuka: WORST BOY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sucks so bad. wish i could delete him permanently from the game.

- okazaki: felt like his route would have been a bit more emotional if ichika could have been a tiny bit crazier while romancing him. two crazy people feeding off each other. as it is... well, i guess he's cute enough. i'll never forget his words of wisdom:
"Yep. That's right. Pillows are suuuper important to people living in a modern society. Yeah. I'd love to average 24 hours of sleep a day."
so true!!!!

- shiraishi: my adorable quirky little catboy. wish i could introduce you to ffxiv. you'd have so much fun there. ichika is at her best in this route.

- yanagi: boring. too perfect. the villain in his route is much more interesting, and to be honest, i wish we could have gotten more of them. felt so disappointed because both ichika and yanagi are so idealistic and naive in this route! their righteousness is kind of irritating, to be honest. let me romance the villain, instead!

a funny thing i just remembered is all the people on r/otomegames saying this game has so much commentary on current events. what? no, it absolutely does not. i felt like the writers were all sitting around and then someone said "what if cults........ could be sexy?" i don't think it gets any deeper than that. but it was a fun little VN, all the same. will probably pick up the sequel soon.

loved this game. the main story was gripping, and i fell in love with the side characters: hamura, higashi, saori. just loved them. the mc, yagami, was harder for me to get a grip in - he's noticeably much more bitter than the previous rgg heroes - the guilt he's carrying around with him makes him somehow seem like more of an adult than kiryu or ichiban. but maybe that's because the tone of the story feels much more serious than the mainline rgg games.

things i did not like:
- no karaoke :( and one of my friends told me that takuya kimura is literally one of the most famous singers in japan! i guess it would have been too expensive to have him singing in the game, but still. how am i supposed to understand a character if i can't see how they imagine a music video starring them and their friends?
- the combat felt a bit clumsy to me, but maybe that's just me.
- mafuyu, unfortunately, really does nothing in the game. she has one of the most beautiful character designs in the entire series, but all she does is show up and look worried occasionally :( sad!
- no way to tone down the random encounters. it got to be kind of annoying at around the middle of the game, where i just wanted to focus on the main story because i was so enthralled.
- don't like the dice and cube minigame. yagami looks stupid with the glasses. sorry. actually i don't like his outfit either. he looks better with the lawyer get-up.

things i did like:
- whatever was going on with hamura. wow

- i loved the characters. ichiban is so charismatic! and i loved saeko and adachi, specifically. they all have good reasons for following him. i especially loved seeing the little dialogue that pops up whenever you're walking around town - it really makes them feel like a group that enjoys hanging out with each other!
- also love the fact that pretty much everyone is unemployed. except for saeko, who is probably using up a crazy amount of vacation time for this.
- i liked the story a lot - very compelling! i had some issues w/ a few things but i won't go into it too much. i don't see the need to nitpick.
- the gameplay could be improved a little. hopefully they polish it up for the sequel. i don't like how enemies move around, which means that some of your AOE attacks don't hit them! i didn't like the sudden difficulty spike in the last quarter, either.
- the music was not as good as the other yakuza games i've played - namely yakuza 0 and kiwami. 0 had an AMAZING soundtrack and unfortunately, this just isn't as good. the dungeon crawling music was so, so, so grating.

all in all, i would recommend this game!

i do enjoy experimentation in games. i swear i do! but i think having us follow eight different characters around was a bit more than the writers and the devs could handle.

as a result, every character's route feels more like a rushed summary, than an actual story that you can get emotional about. hikari's story is really very tragic! temenos's story could have been a great murder mystery! but we move around so fast, constantly swapping between characters, that it's difficult to get attached to anyone. the pacing is off, too. it's bad.

another thing: why are these characters all following each other? i mean, really. osvald was imprisoned for murdering his wife and child. one of his actions is mugging strangers. so why would relatively normal people like agnea or partitio even believe a thing he says? the group dynamics are so bland! bland, bland, bland! they accept each other without a single thought. they all come from different backgrounds, so why would they choose to travel together? fight for each other?

i think a game like dragon age origin does this better. these people all have a good reason for travelling together, but most of them can't stand each other. which is fun! i love seeing people bicker and argue just because they're petty! a manga i enjoy (dungeon meshi) does fun group dynamics really well, too. i like it when characters are weirded out by each other! it's even better if they don't bother to hide their discomfort!

all in all, my thoughts are: this is game is a mess, with some fun ideas. i would recommend it to others! the music is beautiful, the gameplay is fun, and if you're lucky, you might like one or two characters. but in the future, i hope the devs ignore the title OCTOPATH and let us follow... maybe four or five characters in total, with stronger, better written stories. that is my hope for octopath traveler 3.