15 reviews liked by yokoelf


Dps de zerar o Horizon Chase resolvi rejogar Top Gear, já tive a fita de SNES e joguei bastante aos 7/8 anos, a música desse game é extremamente nostálgica.
Acabei subestimando o jogo achando q seria fácil mas realmente foi bem desafiador, principalmente em ter q poupar combustível e acertar as trocas de marcha.

>> Prós
• SOUNDTRACK : O maior ponto positivo do jogo com ctz é a trilha sonora, principalmente pela música tema nostálgica.
• JOGABILIDADE : No começo achei os controles bem complicados mas no decorrer do jogo acabei me acostumando ( joguei com a opção D pq n curti a A ).
• DESAFIO : Não só pelo combustível mas tbm pq algumas pistas era chatinho acertar o pit stop ( Nice ) e desviar de certos obstáculos ( San Francisco e Nice ).

>> Contras
• POUCOS CARROS : Podia ter mais carros ( o Sidewinder é a melhor opção dos 4 ).

>> Carro Favorito = Sidewinder ( Carro Branco ).

>> Mapas
• USA = 3/5 ( 80 pts / 1st )
• AMÉRICA DO SUL = 3/5 ( 58 pts / 2nd )
• JAPÃO = 2.5/5 ( 65 pts / 1st )
• ALEMANHA = 3/5 ( 72 pts / 1st )
• ESCANDINÁVIA = 3.5/5 ( 80 pts / 1st )
• FRANÇA = 2.5/5 ( 70 pts / 1st )
• ITÁLIA = 3/5 ( 80 pts / 1st )
• REINO UNIDO = 3.5/5 ( 80 pts / 1 st )

Just play the Pre-renewal servers, they really screwed up the game afterwards

ESTAMOS FALANDO DE GRANDEZA SEM TAMANHA, ACABOU A DISPUTA, TEMOS O MAIOR DE TODOS OS TEMPO, GOAT

The game exceeded my expectations.
All the levels feel to me a lot shorter than what we were used to in previous installments of the franchise but it’s all made up by the lack of a timer in them.
Having no time limit to finish a level and most of the time being able to backtrack to the beginning allows you to not need to rush each stage and take your time to really enjoy the mechanics and find the collectibles in each of them.

The best feature in the game is by far the online multiplayer, done in a way I’ve never seen before: instead of actually playing with other people, Nintendo will connect you to up to 3 other players playing the same level, but you only see them as a ghost. You can help them and vice-versa in a number of ways.

In online multiplayer, you can donate items to the other players and revive them if they die either by touching their ghost yourself or placing a standee on the ground, that revives them if their ghost touches it. It’s like a cardboard cutout of yourself.

The online and the talking flowers help the world to feel populated, something that the other games in the franchise lacked a bit.

The only thing holding this game from a 5-star rating is the lack of boss variety, but this is a problem that plagues the entire franchise as a whole. They do make some changes, like having some of the worlds not have a boss fight at all, which I welcome, but fighting the same Bowser Jr. fight 4 times in different stages could have given space to more interesting boss designs, which would only further enhance the lovely chaos of Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

Definitely recommend.

This review contains spoilers

It's very rare that a game goes back and retroactively makes everything else in the series worse. Somehow Matsuribayashi does this.

For starters, the backstory for Takano is just weak. I found myself not relating with her story, but instead finding it melodramatic and strangely simple in its psychological description. Overidentification with a caregiver begetting a Nietzschean God complex that lasts several decades, eclipsing all other pieces of personality? I understand that Miyoko is mad at God. I think that the way that we are to believe that this backstory — and her single-minded focus on her grandfather's research, who is essentially just Richard Dawkins trying to pawn off his ideological epidemiology thought exercise as actual biology? — is stronger than God and trapped two thousand people in a time loop lasting a century (seeing as they themselves remember the other timelines) ... just makes all these stories weaker, and makes her less mysterious and sort of less human, too.

"Perhaps that's the point," you say, "Takano is traumatised and never recovers by reaching out to others, instead maintaining a superficial friendliness even to her boyfriend." She holds the idiot ball forgetting her dad's only piece of advice in the sake of his death for months; and then she has an ultimately happy life afterward, except that her grandfather got a little humiliated this one time. I feel like there's so much room for change; while the other characters in this series change over a period of a week, we're to accept that Takano stayed like this her entire life, unrepentant to the end.

Anyway. The game then moves to a fragment section that I can understand but got frustrated by; after a while I had to start guessing which one to do next because the clue provided by the translation didn't line up with the information provided on a few different occasions.

After that, we have a chapter spanning about 3 and a half hours as we have an unbelievably long climax that leans on Ryukishi's weak points as a writer. It took a while for me to grasp why I didn't like the writing of the climax at all; it's that it's in third person omniscient. In it, we are constantly informed as to the current state of mind of a character to then justify why they're about to do the thing they're doing. This is, on one hand, necessary because we are jumping between characters too often; but it also inadvertently reveals how Ryukishi's process works, and why the other stories are so strong: he primes himself as to what a character is feeling, and then writes in first-person, and it works. It works so, so well in that perspective.

Because of this, the curtain falls a little and the magic is yet again just a little less magic in all the other stories...

Finally technically speaking this is the only game in the rereleased series that crashes. And it crashed a few times for me. So that just also frustrated me. I don't know.

Higurashi is a surprise Christian story, so that's nice, but I was hoping something would top Meakashi: the one that is an extremely intense and violent, slow self-destructive orgasm, culminating in a post-nut clarity as to what you should've done...that one can't be taken away, though. We always have Meakashi.

The entire time I just kept thinking about how good Meakashi was. Is that bad?

Minagoroshi starts so strong but it just didn't seem to land it for me. I hope the next chapter does...

edit: also yea could've gone without Hanyuu's dog noises. I kept fast forwarding every time she made noises.

This review contains spoilers

Tsumihoroboshi is Ryukishi’s masterpiece. This chapter is not only my favourite of Higurashi, but one of my favourite pieces of fiction in general. It continues Meakashi’s theme of showing tragedy as avoidable, but while Meakashi is one of Higurashi’s most tragic chapters, Tsumihoroboshi is a brilliant work of anti-tragedy. This chapter reveals just how important the slice of life scenes are to Higurashi as a whole. The common perception of Higurashi is that it uses the facade of a cutesy story about friendship to reveal a gory psychological horror story. Tsumihoroboshi reveals Higurashi as something very different. It’s a story about being able to confront all of the horrors of the world, all of your sins, all of the evils you’re capable of committing, and still being able to come out of it believing in love. I find Ryukishi’s optimism is believable because of how painfully aware he is of human failings and the world’s failings in general, but it’s also clear that he has faith that we are not condemned to those failings.

On the narrative level, Tsumihoroboshi is perfect as an “answer arc”. Rather than retelling Onikakushi from a different perspective, Ryukishi answers it through telling a new story. The adoption of shifting perspectives is one of his strongest choices here because it allows the reader to reach the answers implicitly. Rena’s perspective is a standard Higurashi storyline at this point, and the desire to find the answers to the mystery makes it easy to buy into what we see until we return to Keiichi’s perspective and realise that Rena is tragically mistaken. Because of the similarity between Rena’s storyline and Onikakushi there’s already an implicit confirmation that Keiichi really was just paranoid. The direct confirmation is saved for a point where it serves an emotional purpose rather than the simple answer. The shifting perspectives also serve a thematic purpose for a theme that is evident in Ryukishi’s work as a whole - emphasising just how easy it is to get lost in your own perspective and fail to take the challenge of understanding the other. It’s interesting how solving Onikakushi’s mystery requires looking beyond the perspective you’re given and trying to understand what you’re not given access to. I think it’s fair to argue that Ryukishi isn’t the strongest mystery writer, but one thing he is great at is utilising the audience participation of a mystery and weaving it into his empathetic storytelling. His work does not just inform us of empathy’s power, but challenges us to actually engage in it meaningfully by looking beyond the information and perspectives we’re given. Much like Meakashi, Tsumihoroboshi’s answer could sound unsatisfying on paper, but Ryukishi’s weaving of it into the drama is so brilliantly done that it works excellently.

Tsumihoroboshi is also one of the strongest chapters in terms of presenting religious themes in a secular context. This chapter still emphasises faith and miracles, but its primary theme is sin and atonement. It confronts each character with their own sins and failures. The junkyard scene is a dialectic between Rena and Keiichi’s worldviews regarding friendship and trust. Rena challenges Keiichi’s worldview of friendship and loyalty by detailing the club’s collective sin of inaction during the time where Satoshi and Satoko were being abused. This sin does not make any of the club members horrible or evil people, but it reveals to Rena the inadequacy of friendship - we enjoy other people’s company, but when we can’t help them in times of need how much does that friendship really mean? Rena values friendship for giving her moments of happiness, but it is not something that she has faith in like Keiichi does. I find this scene resonates so much with me because of my own personal flaws of cowardice. While Rena’s argument is the one refuted by the narrative, it’s something that holds a lot of weight. Fortunately for the narrative, Keiichi’s refutation is even stronger, especially when he points out that Rena’s cynicism is ultimately a coping mechanism so she can accept her action of murder as the only possible outcome to her situation. Meakashi sets up this arc’s theme perfectly by emphasising how pointless and avoidable the tragedy was, resisting the initial fatalism of the question arcs. Tsumihoroboshi builds on it with an explicitly anti-fatalist worldview - if we accept sin as an inevitability, then we will continue dwelling in it. Keiichi argues that we should accept our sins as a part of our selves, but we should not accept them as inevitable, and that we can always become better people in the future despite our sins. These worldviews are nothing new, but the scene makes the dialectic truly resonate because it feels as if the series up to this point has been building up to it - we have witnessed the darkest depths that these characters are capable of, but we also know that their love is true.

Another key scene in this chapter is Keiichi remembering the events of Onikakushi. I love how this is delivered after we’ve come to the ‘answer’ of Onikakushi ourselves, and so the direct confirmation is more about the emotional context than any expositional purpose. This is a scene where Keiichi’s worldview is put into practice by having him confront a greater sin than the collective one of the club members. Here, he confronts that whatever state he was in that led him to shooting children with a BB gun was one that consumed him in another world. The scene is so heartbreaking because Keiichi remembers with such affective intensity that it’s as if he really did just kill Rena and Mion - rather than separating this sin as something that another version of him did, he takes it on and acknowledges that he is capable of evil. Acknowledging that you are capable of evil and actually being evil isn’t the same thing, of course, and Keiichi embraces that he can still choose to be good. Much like Watanagashi, he chooses friendship as a faith in the face of evil. While this faith may have been naive in that chapter, here it’s a perfect defense mechanism from falling back into evil. His monologue about how he’ll continue to love Rena as she kills him just as she did when he killed her is just as perfect a representation of love as martyrdom as the climax of Watanagashi. I really love how the religious subtext of Higurashi is brought out in these scenes to give the sense of an epic sweep to this intimate tale of friendship. Representations of love as a spiritual power are usually reserved for romance rather than platonic love. That doesn’t mean it’s absent in media (‘the power of friendship’ is a common trope, after all) but Tsumihoroboshi really makes it mean something by rooting this power in the specifics of the actual character interactions/dynamics.

Finally, the chapter’s climax is the point where Higurashi reaches its synthesis - it’s the scene that all of Higurashi was building up to. This is a story about children who have their childhoods robbed of them. By this chapter, we understand that this happened long before the story of Higurashi began. Everyone has had to confront something that they shouldn’t have at their age, and while this obviously extends more to Satoko and Rika than anyone else, nobody is truly innocent. This is why the club games matter - they’re a space where they get to reclaim this innocence and childishness rather than lose it entirely. This is made explicit when Mion mentions that the club was formed to give Satoko and Satoshi a place to find comfort in while they were being abused at home. They’re not a facade and they never have been, both in-universe and in the story as a whole. The goofiness we see at the beginning of each chapter are just as core to the characters as their traumas are - in the club games we see that their trauma does not define them. This reclamation was possible after the tragedies of 1982, but this is the first time where it’s become possible in 1983. While Higurashi has returned to the purity of friendship in its suspenseful moments before, Tsumihoroboshi is the first time that the childishness of the club games has returned in a serious context. They’ve been kept separate for so long that the development is truly unexpected - it initially feels like a breach, as if the story’s rule of keeping the silly and the serious firmly divided has been broken. It also breaks the rule of having every chapter end in tragedy, and it’s this breaking of the story’s ‘rules’ that help to make this scene’s anti-fatalism so powerful. Once we get over the rupture, it becomes clear that this scene was truly earned and that these ‘rules’ were always set up to be broken. This is where Higurashi was always heading, and it’s something truly beautiful.

Claw

1997

Not as interesting as circle of the moon or aria of sorrow, it's just alright

This review contains spoilers

DDLC but worse