I started playing SIF during one of the worst periods of my life, and quite honestly it made it worse. Love Live School Idol Festival is filled with lots of things. Good songs, good characters, good art (sometimes), memorable story moments, and quite honestly, great gameplay. However, SIF by it’s nature of being a free to play gacha games has a lot of nasty components, and it took me a long time to be level headed and mature enough to handle them.

The game is designed so that people who feel lonely, depressed, or want some semblance of control in their lives are reeled in day after day to feel validation . There’s the daily log in goals, that usually offer a pittance in gold or friend points will net you 1 love gem or even a scouting ticket if you just keep up the log in streak every day (psst ignore how many of these made up currencies that you’ll need to even pull an 11 scout in with less than 3% chances of even getting a UR). Theres how the events are set up, and how you’ll need a beefed up team to even hope of getting into the tier you want or the game gets so tedious you set up an AFK team to just play maps so you can get the event rewards without wasting your time. There’s the fake currency itself, with love gems being awarded every few days, for completing a song on expert/master for the first time, or FC’ing on expert or higher but the way that the boxes are set up is that you’ll have to be stockpiling for months until you get what you want. Then there’s the cards themselves, with a good chunk of them focusing on sexualizing these teen girls or putting them in uncomfortable poses. There’s the fatphobia in the main story and how characters who aren’t European/American/Japanese are treated weirdly. There’s the fact that there’s even a function in the game that has the girls say lines if you tap on them that makes it really creepy. There’s the whole fan culture that behaves as if sacrificing your mental health, physical health, and financial stability over jpegs is good and healthy actually, and lord help you if you have actual criticisms or don’t like certain characters or groups!

And yet, I still got back into playing SIF during it’s last month of existence. Granted, I’m a much mentally healthier and mature person now. I took breaks when I got annoyed and limited my play time. I have other games and hobbies to focus my time now and my self worth isn’t based on how many FC’s I got or my UR count.

I enjoyed playing SIF during it’s last moments. I played new songs as well as old ones that I missed as a teen, and the way that SIF sets up it’s beat map is unique to it and quite engaging. A majority of the maps are charted really well and the difficulty curve is handled pretty well. I had friends who never played SIF jump in and work their way up from normal to Master in less than a month, and quite honestly I think that the care that’s put into the charting should be taken note of and applied to other franchises.

My favorite experience of all was playing with my friends though. Back when I played it, I don’t think there was an option to play co-op or set up rooms and even if there was I didn’t really have friends to play it with. But in those last few weeks of SIF, me and my friends set up near daily rooms to have fun, choose silly songs, cheer if someone FC’d, complain about the poor servers, spam stamps to make an auditory hellscape, and share what we scouted with our event rewards. Those conversations were the highlight of my SIF experience and I wonder if SIF2 will have that same feeling.

TL:DR SIF is a great rhythm game, especially with friends, it just has the baggage of being a gacha and a love live game.

The sprites are absolutely gorgeous. The world is uninspired. The story is phenomenal. The narration is confusing. The human combat system is exciting and fast paced. The mech combat system is atrocious. And do not even get me started on the puzzles or the platforming levels of the Tower of Babel.

Look, I understand why so many people love this game. Unfortunately I played it for the first time in 2021 and it did not age well at all. It's a chore to play through nowadays, and I ended up liking the second disc more than the first one, because I could enjoy the story without having to grind my way through ugly caves or sewers.

I've owned this game since ? 2015. It's a game that I spent a lot of hours and I do enjoy playing it. However, as I've grown up with this game a lot of cracks start to appear.

For one, the gameplay is fun! But once you've played it a few times, the energy system and limited inventory becomes grating beyond belief. The speed of the player movement and spending all my energy watering my plants is no longer appealing, and I always have mods on because of it.

For another, as much as I was excited about this game in 2015 for having gay marriage options, now I feel very weird about it. There's no character who is solely a lesbian or a gay man, and there's no real thought given to characters being attracted to the opposite sex or being bisexual besides throwaway lines. Also ? a really big lack of people of color and I really disliked the whole "abandoned" island thing that just kind of reeked of something not great.

Aside from these complaints, it's still a fun game and especially great when playing with friends online. I had a blast stealing my friends furniture in their houses and hiding it somewhere else.

Pretentious the game. Rarely have I played a game so high on its own self-importance. Heavy Rain really thinks it tells a dynamic and emotionally resonate story. For those that made the effort to play the game, they were rewarded with a straight to DVD cinematic experience that is both exploitive and derivative. Where to start? The villain is Walmart brand, diet Jigsaw. Madison exists to get naked, sexually assaulted, and be a mere love interest in the best of the game’s its endings. Do you like quick-time events? You know that popular mechanic from the early 2000’s that EVERYBODY loved? Well, you better because that is all the game is.
What is the story really trying to say? What is anyone supposed to take away from it? “How far are you prepared to go to save someone you love?” Well, if you don’t go far enough, I guess you are at fault, not the serial killer. I suppose the motion capture was pretty good for its time, and the actors do their best to make the stale characters presentable, but that is the best that can be said about Heavy Rain. I will never understand how David Cage was able to keep making games after this nonsense.

after a lot of people died in sin's attack, yuna dances. this dance is called "the sending", where she makes sure their souls are not staying on this plane, wandering, with envy for the living and then turning into fiends. instead, she sends them to the farplane, where they can live in peace. a lot of cultures around the world have rituals for the dead where you dance to celebrate how great their lives were or to just be a kind of grieving. you see, our bodies express our feelings more than we could ever think they do. when you are anxious you are always shaking your legs, even grinding teeth sometimes. i like to believe that yuna's dance is not only to send those people to better places but also her cope mechanism to deal with everything -- spira's condition, her father's dead, her destiny.

then yuna finds a pair. this blonde boy that appears from nowhere, claims to be from a thousand years old civilization that does not even exists anymore. he is also constantly dancing. he has problems with his father, which calls him a crybaby -- and he is, really. he is constantly expressing his pain through his smile but you know he's not always happy. he just don't want to show his sadness or, as everyone, just don't want to be sad. yuna's not so different, too. and since her has a pair, it's important to say that when you are dancing with someone, at first it may not work -- your pair can be at the wrong tempo, overstepping you etc. when your steps synchronizes and you are connected, though, this is what we call love. not necessarily romantically, of course. yuna have a lot of friends with their own dances, grieving and trying to live their lives as hard as it can be. but, when everyone is together, even dancing with the dead, they can share their insecurities, being open about their problems and, truly, overcoming it. maybe not stopping dancing but dancing towards the truth -- the painfully beautiful truth.

the last time yuna dances, she's not only grieving, but also celebrating.