Scores are just a metric of enjoyment I had when playing these games. The only game that wasn't a newly, freshly played game for me here is Doom, which I've played for most of my young life, all the others are new experiences I've had in the past few months.

1) dnd (1975, PC/PLATO system) - the origin of role-playing video games - 5/10.

I like a good RPG grind, and it doesn't get much more simple than this - kill monsters, level up, be stronger, get the McGuffin orb from the boss (a trope which Rogue and traditional roguelikes will very much yoink for themselves).

Pure, simple & primitive fun. Not much depth (who would have thought), but surprisingly not cumbersome to play and interact with.

Shoutout to the first videogame boss in history as well.

2) Space Invaders (1978, Arcade) - the origin of shoot 'em ups - 3/10.

A static, single-screen shmup with the most basic, straight-line projectile dodging while destroying enemies before they reach the player's ship.

Expectedly, it's an extremely primitive game when looked at today, but there's a certain pure charm to it, even though its gameplay lasts for around 10 minutes before it gets boring.

With at least some enemy attack pattern variety it could have been immensely more enjoyable, but what can you do when you're revolutionizing something that barely even exists (on hardware that probably couldn't even do more).

Shoutout to score-chasing & (accidental) difficulty ramping as time goes on.

3) Rogue (1980, PC) - birth of the many games that are like (and lite) Rogue - 8/10

Rogue is such a gem of a game, because it understands that system complexity is best derived from wonderful simplicity of controlling the game. There's a reason why Diablo's David Brevik came up with his "mom test" (can a basic mom play his game without any prior knowledge) while making a game directly inspired by Rogue... Diablo.

It's such a simple dungeon crawler - go into a randomly generated dungeon, find potions, weapons, armor and scrolls, kite & kill enemies and try to get to the end.

It isn't fair by any stretch of the imagination - random chance can fuck you up in the middle of a great, deep-floor run, or at the very beginning of the whole game.

But Rogue managed to pack unfairness into something that produces dopamine - random generation. It's such a genius way of mitigating most frustrations, since it's so easy to just start a new, different run in a matter of seconds from losing the last one (instead of banging your head against a stupidly designed level/boss/enemy or whatever that other unfair games tend to suffer from).

Even its ASCII graphics, or lack thereof, give it, and many other later traditional roguelikes, some creative charm.

No sound design to speak of though and kind of clunky keyboard controls/shortcuts before you get used to it after a few runs.

Shoutout to the creator of indie games' most beloved design philosophy today, but also the creator of the traditional roguelikes genre with gems such as DCSS, NetHack and many more.

4) Wizardry (1981, PC (with some nice console ports, and even a modern remake, though)) - the origin of DRPGs and JRPGs - 8/10

One of Japan's favorite franchises, the dungeon crawler directly responsible for setting the whole entire historical course of JRPGs.

Wizardry has many of the same positives as Rogue has, but it also has higher highs and lower lows than Rogue does.

It's a permadeath, party-based dungeon crawler with static dungeon levels that are meant to be mapped out manually by players while they learn everything about the dungeon. Each party member can be one of the many different fantasy classes with their own skills.

What Wizardry does better than Rogue is gameplay variety (both player-gameplay variety cause of the party and enemy variety in general combat), immersion, a much more fun combat system and a much better sense of permanent exploration & learning layouts with the static dungeon.

What it does worse is most definitely the QoL and interface controls, the lack of randomness (ironic for that to be both a pro and a con isn't it) and the brutal difficulty combined with the previous con.

Wizardry is wonderful, it truly feels at points like a desperate fight to survive and return to town at all costs, just so the party can attempt another dungeon delve.

Shoutout to... creating two whole RPG genres lol. I feel bad for missing Ultima or Akalabeth in this thread, it would really neatly encompass the whole origin of computer RPGs.

5) Super Mario Bros. (1985, NES) - the revolution of 2D platformers - 7/10

Original Super Mario is still hella fun, it thrives in its simplicity. While I do wish there was some more enemy variety (and maybe a slightly better art style), it is undeniably a fun game to play even today.

It controls almost perfectly, since I find Mario's inertia/weight to be a bit too much on some jumps, it has that iconic music and character designs and it's a short & sweet romp.

Limited continues kind of suck though (this particular point is a critique I have for a lot of console games in the 80s and even 90s, what with that being just a shitty and player-unfriendly way to make the game seem like it has content depth and lots of runtime, while the reality is anything but, but oh well what can you do) and some parts of some later levels feel unfun.

As a whole though SM is an essential 2D platformer, distilled almost all the way to its very basics. Even though there came out much better 2D platformers after it, it is still a unique and fun playthrough for anyone that likes the genre, and that is always impressive when talking about any kind of action game that is this old.

Shoutout to console gaming's mascot basically.

6) Double Dragon (1987, Arcade) - the origin point of modern beat 'em ups - 3/10

I adore beat 'em ups, probably in my top 3 genres at this point, especially with so many pristine modern outings, so I was hyped af to try this one out (especially considering how I like Final Fight).

There are numerous reasons as to why I didn't like Double Dragon, and even less so on the NES. Both versions share the same problems:

• Dogshit hit detection - kicks and punches go through enemy hitboxes at random;
• Combat floaty-ness - attacking enemies feels disconnected from their sprites at times, what with sprites clipping into each other constantly and phasing through each other;
• Combat randomness/lack of coherent combat system rules - enemies can just randomly decide to break out of basic punch/kick combos and attack the player cheaply, some enemies will just randomly ignore hitstun altogether no matter which hit of the combo the player is on;
• Non-existant move balance - the fact that I, out of curiosity, wanted to see how people that "know" how to play the game do 1cc runs, and was met with people spamming a single move or two and abusing enemy AI tells me enough about how balanced moves are... Which is to say, they aren't;
• Random cheap level design towards the end of the game (even more on the NES version);
• Bosses... I mean beat 'em up bosses generally didn't get good until much more modern games, even something like Streets of Rage 3 still suffers from random hyper-armor untelegraphed bullshit, but these fights in DD suck even more.

In my humble opinion, when looked at today, Double Dragon's whole combat system and general gameplay sucks ass. I have no idea what kind of logic there is programmed here nor do I have a lick of clue, even hours upon hours of attempts to learn later, as to how anyone plays this without cheesing the everloving shit out of every combat encounter (can't risk those limited continues now can we).

Shoutout to the very first revolution of the beat 'em up formula, a genre which would rise to unfathomably fun heights.

7) Doom (1993, PC) - saying what Doom did for gaming is like saying what color the sky is, everyone knows already - 9/10

Possibly the single most important video game of all time, a genre-defining titan, a revolution in gaming graphics, an icon of the 90s. And crowned with some very beloved (and not so beloved) ports to a massive variety of different systems. Everyone wanted to have Doom, and for good reason.

Historical fame is not all Doom has, for it's packed with pristine game design that is impossibly modern in its sensibilities while being so purely fun.

Let's see what Doom does not only good, but top-tier even compared to games today:

• Sound design - each enemy is easily distinguished in all of its states (idle, wake up and alerted), each weapon sound is distinct, each shotgun pump is satisfying, each item pickup is memorable, each piece of music is atmospherically energizing. This all continues to improve in Doom 2.
• Level design - the way the first Doom's levels just let the player flow freely through its more open ended design, the way the action is constant, the way Romero & Co. place items and secrets all around all make exploration and movement through missions so smooth from beginning to end, from run & gun blitz levels to absolute slogs in hell.
• Weapon design - each weapon serves a very distinct purpose, bar the starting pistol, and each is useful in a variety of ways in combination with the level design and proper resource usage throughout the game.
• Excellent controls - Doom's movement is quick and snappy, with just a tad bit of inertia to convey speed without getting out of the player's control. Doom's autoaim also always knows what the player wants, which is quintessential for good combat flow.
• Enemy variety - Doom's bestiary will only get improved with Doom 2, but the first game's demons already provide adequate AI and threat variety to satiate any combat situation. The fact that there are modern Doom WADs (mod level packs) that use strictly Doom 1's assets that still manage to pump out engaging encounter design to this day is testament to that.
• Simplicity - remember what I said about Brevik's "mom test"? Launch Doom today and it'll still be piss easy to get into game and start blasting, while the game passively teaches you about item pickups, enemy threats, level design quirks and everything else as you play along.

Doom isn't perfect, neither is Doom 2 (which has massively weaker level design), and my thousands of hours playing community MegaWADs, some of which had 30+ years of game design to pull from atp, definitely makes it easier for me to notice just how underutilized some of Doom and Doom 2's mechanics were... But that does not in any way change the fact that both Dooms are extremely fun and playable games.

Shoutout to the father of what would eventually shape to be the modern FPS we know to this day & the progenitor of online deathmatch.

Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader is a CRPG developed by Owlcat. Released in 2023, Rogue Trader reminds us that there are no downsides to nepotism so long as it's us that benefits the most from it.

We play as the Rogue Trader, chosen of the Emperor of Mankind, on a mission to explore strange new worlds, reclaim abandoned civilizations and make a hell of a lot of money.

Gameplay involves landing on a planet and deciding which half of the population you want to Thanos snap with your chain sword. Between missions you spend most of your time helping your officers handle issues on the ship they deem too difficult to delegate themselves like teaching crew members to wipe properly, microwave popcorn and murder cultists.

The Good

The sound and visual design is absolutely top notch. 40k music just hits on all levels no matter what game you're playing it seems and this one comes close to the Mechanicus sound track. The set pieces and art is amazing. The voice acting, as always, is really well done and I loved every minute of it. Makes me almost mad that they only have voice acting for about 20% of the lines. I want it all damnit. I want Pasqal to read me bedtime stories and Abelard to tell me my soup of the day.

They also nail the grim dark thing. It's almost always a choice of evils. If you want to do a goody two-shoes playthrough you still sort of can, but they still toss in that, "You saved the orphanage from being turned into evil cultists yay! Now the orphans can grow up to be slave labor instead yay!" Often the most kind outcome you can offer anyone is just ejecting them into space.

I also loved that they really made use of the diversity of the IP. It's refreshing to not just face the same 2 enemies over and over again. You get to murder Nurgle-spawn then go and smack around legally distinct elves and Tyranids and more just to keep things fresh. Sometimes they even let you purge humanity a little for funsies.

Favorite Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/XrSPJxX.png

The real goal of game is to amass the trading empire fortune required to afford your candle addiction.

The Bad

The constant interruptions suck. The first instance of this is when you make your first 2~4 warp jumps and get a dozen cutscenes giving you 30 sidequests that just murder any sense of early game pacing. In one section of the game you get the space flu and for the next hour every 20 seconds you lose control for a bit while a cutscene plays of your character horking up. There are the metric shitton of cutscenes that are unvoiced and feature you walking for 30 seconds before you start even talking.

And for kripes sake Owlcast it's been 3 games now. If my player spots a trap, make my character path around it. I identified the trap. I pointed it out. It's highlighted. I click disarm on the trigger. I run right fucking through the trap. Son of a motherfu...

The Questionable

I'm not sure how I feel about the story on this one. It has a bunch of really neat areas and I love the individual stories. They just didn't do a great job of tying it all together. I think they were going for a "Eureka!" moment at the end where it all came together, but there were so many sides and missed/dropped plot points that I wasn't sure what even mattered.

There's also significant chunks of story you miss out on if you bring the 'wrong' companions to certain areas. Multi-companion games do this now and then as a way to encourage replaying the game and it's starting to border on that "doesn't respect your time" border.

It feels like they had 5 different writers all vying for attention and instead of working together to make a cohesive, interesting narrative you get all these spin off soap operas that are on their really cool, but it all clashes and makes the end generally unsatisfying. The end doesn't even feel like the end, just a sort of "Yeah we ran out of time this is good enough I suppose" point.

Final Thoughts

I feel like it's hard carried by being a Warhammer game. To be clear I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it because I love WarHammer and I love Owlcat and want to continue to support them. It feels like 20 different mini Warhammer 40k stories that just so happen to have the same protagonist, rather than one central plot.

Bonus Thought

I love that the inquisitor whose job it is to purge heretics and burn them for the church is the -least- likely companion to possibly murder you in your sleep if you romance them. He'd at least have the common decency to do it over breakfast.

Thank you for reading! I try to post new reviews every Tuesday morning. I'd love to hear your thoughts! Am I off my rocker? Did you have the same experience?

My other reviews on patient gaming

Stellar Blade wears its inspirations on its sleeve: FromSoftware games (especially Sekiro), Bayonetta, NieR, The Matrix, and to some extent even the Christian Bible (though in Eastern media Christianity is so watered down that I’m not sure you can really call it inspiration). You can see all of it here, but when it works for gameplay, it doesn’t always work in other places.

Gameplay: The main reason that I finished the game

Combat is great, with a few asterisks. I hated it at first, but that’s on me: I started on Hard. Hard Mode is not balanced for NG0. It wasn’t available for NG0 at launch, and I believe it was later “unlocked” because of pressure from sweats who wanted to do an NG0 run on Hard. Enemies have just too much health, and combat becomes boring fast. If you don’t make the same mistake I did and start on Normal, you’ll be fine.

Combat also suffers from a slight “IKEA effect”: a lot of essential skills are locked behind a perk wall, which should not be the case (this was especially punishing on HM). Why the forward/back dodge is locked behind a skill tree, I will never understand.

Apart from that? Combat is stellar (pun intended). When you find the rhythm, you feel like you’re in the best moments of Sekiro. Combat relies heavily on parries and dodges, which gives you that classic feeling of flow. Even with the harder bosses it felt right, and not like some of the roll-spam bosses from Elden Ring.

What I really liked is enemy variety and design. While they’re more or less “generic mutants” or “generic robots,” they’re designed in such way you can instinctively tell how they’ll behave: which ones are tanky, which are nimble, which have high damage output but low health, and so on. And they’re varied enough that you probably won’t get bored.

My biggest disappointment is honestly “Devil Trigger” (Tachy Mode), which was at the same time overpowered and underpowered. The damage was too low, but it also made enemies braindead if you just spammed the highest-damage skill, so I tended to avoid it. It seems tacked on (haha).
And this is where the fun ends.

Music: We’re going shopping.

On an individual level, the music is mostly not offensive. I could see some people adding the OST to their Spotify playlist and praising it, but for me it was more often than not overly repetitive and not really fitting the setting, especially the open-world themes. A lot of the tracks sound like K-pop that would be constantly played in a shopping mall. Not really fitting for exploring a desolate world.

Fanservice: The elephant in the room.

Okay, let’s address the thing that is often used as a reason to dismiss this game: butts and boobs. I’m no stranger to this kind of thing; I have some adult games under my belt. I’m not offended by it, but... showing off Eve’s curves falls flat here.

What do I mean? Eve is nothing more than eye candy for eye candy’s sake. If she were changed into an average dude-bro from games, nothing in the game would change. She’s not sexy, she’s just pretty. Take Bayonetta, a clear inspiration for this game. If you replaced her with Dante from DMC, the game would not work. Bayonetta uses her femininity as a tool, both in combat and in the story. The game relies on her femininity.

In Stellar Blade, the way Eve looks is never addressed. Never. It’s just “dress-up” for the sake of looking at a big butt in a thong. While that’s nothing bad, I wish her looks were part of the story and not just an excuse for people to rub one out.

Story: Yeah, let’s talk about that.

Stellar Blade is described by its creators as a “story-driven action adventure.” I really can’t see that.
The story is just awful, predictable, and a worse version of NieR: Automata (which I don’t hold in high regard).

I could explain everything wrong with it, but I’d probably spend more time on it than the game’s writers did, so I'll try to keep it short. The whole plot is kill the Elder Naytiba, which means running around collecting MacGuffins from the big bosses to build a Master MacGuffins, a magic key to a gate, even though Eve carries a railgun that could level that entrance.
The game has no real antagonist and no real conflict. There’s one recurring enemy who shows up in the intro and then gets fought twice, back-to-back at the end, with no setup or reference in between. Naytiba are not enemies in story sense: they are a force of nature. Imagine The Walking Dead but without any conflict amongst survivors.
Additionally for a post-apocalyptic sci-fi game, there’s also a lot of unexplained magic. Magic Key was already mentioned but in one ending Eve and Adam can merge in a flash of white light, with no setup that this was even possible.

The story made me roll my eyes multiple times and audibly groan whenever characters acted surprised by something ALREADY EXPLAINED. (OH WOW, A SPECIES THAT LOOKS LIKE MUTATED HUMANS AND IS LITERALLY CALLED “NATIVES” IS INDEED ORIGINAL HUMANS AND YOU ARE JUST ANDROIDS? WOW.) Every time a some revelation is finally mentioned by a character they act surprised, while I was flabbergasted because how XYZ is not common knowledge?
If you play games for their stories, avoid it.

I believe half the blame goes to the voice acting. Everyone (especially Eve) acts like they’re reading the script for the first time without any context. If not for the curves, I could not tell if I was playing a block of wood with a British accent.
I’m not sure whether I hate Adam or Eve more. Eve was worse, but Adam talks so much I wish I could mute him. He really felt like Navi from TLoZ combined with those "If Mario 64 was made today by Ubisoft" videos.

TL;DR

This game feels like fast food. It looks great in pictures, fills you with calories, and tastes good, but you know it’s not something you should eat every day.

Eve looks gorgeous, the combat is snappy, and the “GAME” part is fun. But once you pay attention to anything besides Eve’s curves or the satisfaction of the gameplay, you realize it’s mostly empty calories.

I did not play this game when it came out, a friend had it, and I played a bit, but really my first GTA was San Andreas, and because it was my first GTA game, it was naturally the best. But my friend had Vice City and I would play it sporadically and drive around listening to music, enjoying the blue, pink, and orange aesthetic of 80s Miami, and just genuinely have a good time. I got the definitive edition because I was itching to play San Andreas, but decided to finally complete this game first, and man is there in incredible game under the hood here that they seem hell bent on screwing up.

First and foremost is the weird updated graphics. This game was built on a mobile port of the original game and then used AI to upscale the graphics and man is it weird and ugly a lot of the times. And its important to remember, this game was ugly when it came out. In 2002, we are talking Metroid Prime, Wind Waker, Splinter Cell, Mario Sunshine, and Ratchet and Clank; among others. Vice City was graphically way behind, but that wasn't why you played the game. It was the open world. So they created an art style that looked good enough and still allowed for the open world to function properly. It was never meant to look realistic. But now, character bodies are smooth and Gumby like, and it looks like their face is a png glued onto the model. There is also this thing where 90% of the vehicles have a reflective paint that just looks dumb.

The other major problem is the lost music because Rockstar didn't, or couldn't, license all of the tracks from the original. This at first isn't terrible, there are still a lot of period specific songs, and as much as I miss hearing Billie Jean, it still feels good going 100 mph and blaring I Ran by a flock of seagulls. It only becomes a problem when you play longer and longer, and the same songs appear more often because there are less of them. Then it starts to really feel different.

So how does that effect the game? Not as much as you would think which is crazy. The underlying Vice City that has been converted to a mobile port, the reconverted to a console port, AI upscaled, and stripped of music, is still there enough to make the game fun. It is a Frankenstein game but it works.

A lot of that has to do with the Miami in the 80s vibe and the cast. They have patched this game to fix bugs and animations and more importantly added a classic lighting feature that turns the sky an appropriate mix of blues, purples, and oranges. Flying down the strip during sunset in a sports car with neon lights glowing and Kurtis Blow singing about the breaks is still an incredible experience. Then there is Tommy Vercetti who is a psychopathic killer with no redeeming qualities, but he is just so damn cool in his Hawaiian shirt and watching him grow from a regular ex-con to the kingpin in Miami, and watching the relationship with Lance Vance, also an amazing character, evolve is stellar.

And another important part of the game that the definitive edition could not ruin is the map and game length. The map is one of the best open world maps because it is small and everywhere you go is something different. You can go from the stadium, to downtown, to little Havana, across the bridge to the mansions then to the malibu club, and end up on the beach, all within a few minutes. And you learn the map by landmarks because things are so distinct and compact.

I won't spoiler the story, but I will say, my main non-definitive edition complaint is the story structure. About halfway through you stop getting story missions. You have a hint that you should invest in real estate during a cut scene, but that's literally what you have to do. Drive around, find businesses to buy, and complete those missions. I had no idea this was a thing, so once I finished the 2 businesses that I owned and had no more mission markers, I was genuinely confused. And only one of those properties will actually move the story forward. It was very strange.

There are also a few missions that remind you this was made in the early days of open world 3D games and they didn't really have it all figured out yet. Like the mission where you come up to a drug den standing on a boat, no cover, and 10 guys are all shooting at you at the same time. Trauma.

In the end, I don't know, man. I don't want to support these sloppy remakes, but I also want to play the old GTAs sometimes, and all other versions got delisted. If you love the game, you will probably hate what they did to your boy, if you have never experienced it before, there is still a classic game in here, if you're somewhere in the middle like me you'll be confused and filled with mixed feeling.

Spoilers!

The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine is the second expansion to The Witcher 3, and until recently it was the final expansion. Blood and Wine takes Geralt to the vibrant fairytale-esque world of Toussaint where saturation is turned to 11 and vineyards sprawl through much of the territory. The vivid colors are very welcome after the dreary Velen and Skellige, and I had a great time questing and exploring within it.

Story & Gameplay

The story of Blood and Wine is compelling from start to finish. Geralt is called upon by Duchess Anna Henrietta to solve the targeted murders of her knights, and to deliver justice to the person(s) who are responsible. The journey is fairly action oriented, and my highlights primarily involve the action sequences, specifically the final battle. Despite the story being loaded with twists and turns, I do not think that it is hard to follow. There’s a lot of steps from start to finish, but each step is easily understood.

Compared to Hearts of Stone, *Blood and Wine is more action focused. Some of the best fights in the game are in the Blood and Wine expansion, which concludes with an epic final battle. The combat fights are fun from a conceptual level to the execution of them. Hearts of Stone has the better story, one that dives into the philosophy of life and death, and what it means to be immortal. When it came to the final choice in Hearts of Stone I stared at the screen for at least 2 or 3 minutes thinking about what I would choose. Blood and Wine is straightforward by comparison, and left me with no decision that felt difficult or thought-provoking.

Of the main questlines in The Witcher 3 I feel that Blood and Wine has the weakest. That’s not to say that it’s a bad story, but it didn’t leave an impression on me.

New Features

In addition to a new setting and story, Blood and Wine introduces many new features for the player to explore, such as: Grandmaster crafting and tier set bonuses, mutations, owning a vineyard, armor dyeing, and a new Gwent deck.

I was most excited about the grandmaster level witcher gear, because grandmaster level witcher gear unlocks set bonuses, which had been teased in the descriptions of the entry-level witcher gear from very early on in The Witcher 3 base game. It is a costly venture to craft the full set of Feline gear but I was thrilled when I completed it, and it was fully worth it for the combat benefit.

I was also very excited about mutations. Mutations are additional abilities that are unlocked using ability points and greater mutagens to create powerful synergies with existing abilities. Only one mutation may be active at a time, and they are color-coded like the abilities are. Unlocking mutations will also unlock up to 4 additional ability slots, giving Geralt a total of 16 ability slots if every mutation is unlocked. Unlike the existing slots, these new slots do not unlock additional power bonuses that are tied to a specific mutagen color, but color is very important. The color of the active mutation will dictate what abilities may be placed into these new ability slots, allowing the player to go all in on a specific type of ability.

It’s a very fun system that works in conjunction with the grandmaster set bonuses and Heart of Stone’s enchants to fine-tune your combat style. It further refines and personalizes combat, while making Geralt extremely powerful.

The vineyard is low-maintenance and unlocks alchemy materials that are used to convert mutagens to a different color, places to display your favorite armor and weapons, and a few buffs when resting here. I didn’t touch armor dyeing, and the new Gwent deck has interesting mechanics but I’m still using Northern Realms.

Above all, the new features feel like natural additions to existing gameplay. The mutation questline is underbaked, but the features fit into my gameplay without me feeling that it required significant effort to participate. This is a stark contrast to how I felt about the enchanting in Hearts of Stone, which I so badly wanted to deeply engage with, but it felt like a grind to do so.

The End of The Witcher 3

As the game came to a close I started to feel sadness of the void that was to come. I spent approximately 130 hours in The Witcher 3, which was played over an approximate 3 month period, and now that time was to be filled by something else. The routine became comfortable and I really enjoyed my time on the journey.

When I think back on my time with The Witcher 3, the phrase, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” stands out to me. There is a lot of good, and some great, but rarely excellence for any individual part of The Witcher 3 experience, but the whole achieves excellence to me. It takes a special non-forever game to hold my attention and make me care about it for 130 hours, and The Witcher 3 did just that.

Final Thoughts

This is a must play for anyone who enjoys The Witcher 3, and now that it’s included in the baseline game, all players have access to it. It’s an incredible addition to the game and is everything a DLC should be.

9.5/10

TL;DR

FFXII is a well-designed and remarkably coherent RPG, but its design philosophy just doesn't mesh with what I enjoy about Final Fantasy. The Gambit system is an interesting concept, and I can appreciate the appeal of customizing party AI and building an efficient combat ecosystem, but in practice it left me feeling like I was watching the game play itself. The combat lacks the moment-to-moment engagement and audiovisual spectacle I love about other FF titles, and even with the speed-up function, the gameplay loop became monotonous after dozens of hours. The story has an interesting political backdrop, but I found its characters dry, its central conflicts poorly executed, and its main antagonist underdeveloped. The world also felt visually repetitive, particularly in the first half, and the soundtrack rarely left much of an impression on me.

That said, I don't think XII is a bad game. Its RPG mechanics and party customization are among the series' strongest, the side content is genuinely good, and the game feels like a cohesive realization of a particular design vision. I can understand why that vision appeals to people, even if I found its execution tedious. After 60+ hours for my full playthrough, I came away appreciating what XII was trying to accomplish while finding the actual experience aggressively boring look at, listen to, watch, and play.

Intro

I've been playing Final Fantasy games for years, starting with I and IV when I was a teenager, and since then gradually working my way through the series with a few spin-offs. It became a personal gaming goal of mine to at least finish all the mainline non-MMO titles. The only non-MMO mainline games left on my list are II, III, V, VI, and XIII.

Of the titles I played, my favorites (including non-mainline titles) were IV, VII, X, Remake, Rebirth, and Tactics. In this review, I'm going to be drawing a lot of comparisons to VII (the OG specifically, not so much the Remake Trilogy), X, and Tactics. Mostly because VII and X are the freshest in my mind, the newer games make for a bit of an unfair comparison in certain aspects, and Tactics is also highly relevant taking place in the same world and having a similar writing style.

One of the things I appreciate about FF titles is precisely that they're so varied. They take risks and aren't afraid to switch things up and try new approaches to gameplay mechanics and storytelling. It's also one of my least favorite things about FF, because a game might introduce mechanics that could benefit from further iteration, only for the next entry to rip everything up and start over. The VII Remake Trilogy is a great example of what progressive iteration can accomplish, and its combat system is one of my favorite things about those games.

The Story - Star Wars at Home

So I figured, now is a good time to try XII: The Zodiac Age. Seems to be one of those titles where SE decided to take a big swing and try something different with the combat and story. FF protagonists in particular frequently become the face of their particular game and follow similar tropes. XII deliberately eschews this and doesn't involve your typical FF protagonist who has some extreme personal stake in the conflict or whose existence is inextricably linked with the nature of the world and/or the villain's master plan. Vaan is just some random street kid who gets swept up in a conflict much bigger than him. Vaan primarily serves as a one-sided mirror for the player. He's our window into Ivalice: we generally know as much about the world as he does, and when something needs explaining to the player, it's usually explained to Vaan. At the same time, he often finds himself present for important moments in other characters' lives, acting as a mirror that helps facilitate their decisions and growth. It isn't the typical FF structure, but I can see what it's going for and I can appreciate it. More than that, I actually think I quite like it. Vaan gets a lot of criticism in discussions of XII, and while I can understand why, it's probably the least of my criticisms. I do overall like the way the game chose to approach and integrate his character into the story, even if I didn't find Vaan himself to be compelling.

Unfortunately, the story never really grabbed me. I'll keep spoilers minimal here. It's very Star Wars-coded, and not in a good way because it seems to lean more heavily on the prequels than the original trilogy. For me anyway, a lot of the fun of Star Wars came from the charm and charisma of the flawed but likable characters and the spectacle of the lightsaber duels and grand space battles colliding with the very character driven central conflicts. I like the aesthetic of the prequels, but they focus much more heavily on politics and world-building over an emotionally direct story with foregrounded characters (though the prequels do make an attempt at that). While XII seems to draw inspiration for its main cast from the original trilogy, it places them in a very prequel-oriented world and as a result it doesn't allow them to shine the way they could. With the exception of Balthier, most characters are very dry and wooden and their established personal conflicts simply weren't compelling to me.

I'm fine with the idea that there is no "main" protagonist but the result of that is characters fade into the background unless a scene pertains to their personal arc. Otherwise, the story very much defaults to Ashe as the "main" protagonist. And, to be honest, I can't say I cared enough about her personal conflict considering it easily got the most screen time out of the entire cast. It's not that the idea that she's struggling with how she wants to reclaim and steward her country isn't compelling. The execution is boring: she spends so much of the plot silently waffling over whether to destroy her enemies or seek peace another way, while the story does little to develop her in other respects or explore the emotional toll of her husband's murder and the betrayal surrounding it, beyond occasionally gesturing at it. Basch's story of honor and redemption and how that intertwined with Gabranth was interesting, but there were very large sections of the plot where it was just completely sidelined only to be resolved cleanly at the end.

It's not unusual for Final Fantasy games to be visibly inspired by Star Wars, but FFXII in particular seems to really wear that inspiration on its sleeve, and only in terms of its aesthetic and not its execution. The fact that it seemed to want to focus more on the politics than the characters isn't inherently a problem, but another big part of Star Wars' appeal (and FF's, because this is about FF ultimately) is the villains. Vayne simply wasn't very compelling. While it's obvious the story establishes Vayne as the main antagonist early on, he remains mostly an off-screen abstract political threat for what feels like 60% of the story, if not more, and doesn't even start to become foregrounded until you're heading into the game's last acts. I appreciated his motivations by the end, but there was never a point where he became compelling as an antagonist. In fact, I actually burst out laughing when the party confronted him in the end and he opened his monologue with "Who are you?" Obviously he wasn't being literal, but I thought it was very on point considering it's the first time he speaks to the party.

The thing is, I don't even dislike that the story is politically-focused. I dislike the execution of it and that it seemed to come at the expense of compelling character arcs and villains. Tactics also takes a grounded, political approach to fantasy, but I could still rally around Ramza because of his personal connection to the central conflict, and because the game gives its villains enough screentime to make me want to oppose them. I wouldn't be able to tell you a whole lot about the plot in Tactics, but I would be able to tell you about the characters. That's what XII misses for me.

"Mature" Versus "Childish" Storytelling

Note: This section is a bit of a tangent, so you can skip to the next section if you'd rather stick to the review itself. I bring this up because I think this gets into a larger discourse around writing, and the idea that I've seen come up that stories that are emotionally heightened or lean on traditional fantasy/anime tropes are inherently less mature than stories that are more grounded and don't involve "chosen ones" or "save the world" plots.

If you browse FFXII discussions on the Final Fantasy subreddits, you'll occasionally see people describe its writing and dialogue as mature or Shakespearean, often while criticizing other FF titles as childish. Sometimes that criticism takes the form of calling those games shōnen, using the term less as a genre descriptor than as shorthand for predictable, childish tropes. I think these specific terms are overstatements regarding FFXII and do other titles in the series a disservice when used as comparison points. As best as I can tell, what they're referring to is the more heavily political tone of FFXII combined with the more verbose, slightly wooden and archaic dialogue characters frequently speak in. They're writing choices that I can see kids being bored with, which is where I think the mature descriptor comes from. Shakespearean, I think, comes specifically from the archaic tone of dialogue. But Shakespeare's writing is much more sophisticated than just archaic "ye olde" English. FFXII's dialogue is MUCH closer to The Phantom Menace than it is The Merchant of Venice.

As mentioned, I also think these descriptors do other FF titles a disservice when used as comparison points to XII's more "mature" tone. Yes, the dialogue in X is awkward sometimes and the voiced delivery and cutscene direction can be stilted in a way that comes off as unintentional and aged compared to XII's more deliberate voice and cutscene direction. Yes, the political structures in VII are significantly less fleshed out than they are in XII, with antagonists that signal their remorseless evil by cackling maniacally every other sentence (a trait characters mock and berate them over multiple times). But those stories are doing very different things also, choosing to focus instead on the development of their respective characters and metaphysical constructs in service of their themes, like identity, environmentalism, memory, grief, sorrow, and death. X in particular is significantly more emotional in its characters and story than XII is. Even the infamous laughing scene carries significant emotional and thematic weight for Tidus' and Yuna's character arcs precisely for the reasons it's (in my opinion, unfairly) criticized.

Ultimately what it comes down to is which style of writing you prefer. XII's writing is, very intentionally, much more grounded than other FF titles and more interested in fleshing out Ivalice's political structures and having characters sit around a table or walk down a hall and ominously discuss the political situation. Many of the other titles lean heavily on shōnen tropes, but something can also be shōnen in its tone and tropes while also dealing with mature subject matter and themes. They're not mutually exclusive, and I think that gets confused sometimes. I'm not gonna say one is better or worse than the other. I will say, I preferred the way Tactics handled its grounded fantasy and politics over XII, whose politics often felt very disconnected from the actual party and their moment-to-moment adventure.

The Combat - I can see the appeal, but...

Like I said, one of the things I appreciate about FF is that it's willing to take big swings with its combat systems and try something new. Straightforward turn-based, ATB, CTB, ATB-action hybrid (my favorite), CAG-like action, whatever XV is doing... I found something to like in all of them, even if some offer more depth than others.

Then there's XII and its gambit system. And, well... I can appreciate it, I'll put it that way. Combat is still menu based, but instead of your characters lining up and taking turns smacking the enemy, they operate in real-time using a rudimentary AI system called Gambits. I can see why someone would find it fun to customize and tweak party AI to create a combat ecosystem. I can see the appeal in running across a landscape and watching your party mow down groups of enemies using a combat ecosystem you designed. It doesn't appeal to me.

I suppose my fundamental criticism of it is that I never viewed menu-based combat as something that needed to be automated, even when you're grinding or fighting weaker enemies. I can see the appeal of a speed-up function, which in XII feels more needed than ever. I never even used the speed-up boost in IX of all games, but 15 hours into XII and I couldn't imagine playing this on 1x speed the whole way through, which is apparently what the original expected of the player.

The thing is, it can be kind of fun to customize gambits and watch your party execute them and take out groups of enemies. But the game has an exceedingly slow start and is almost afraid to let you take control and dive into the gambit system.The gambit system doesn't unlock until 2.5–3 hours in. Before that, the game spends its time tutorializing basic movement and menu navigation, and your only combat option is to open the menu and select Attack. Even when gambits finally unlock, you can barely do anything with them.

The game places extreme limitations on gambit conditions and actions that only start to lift 6-7 hours into the game when you finally have the opportunity to buy more gambit conditions. Imagine if VII didn't allow you to slot in new materia to your weapons outside of what the game defaults to until after the Kalm flashback. That's how slow the early game progression is.

So fine, you finally buy some gambit conditions, you find and buy some magic and technicks, you set up your Gambits and outfit your party with gear, and then you just... watch as the combat automates itself. Characters draw their weapons, automatically approach, crowd around enemies, and start running through their own pre-programmed routines. And again, I can see the appeal, I can see why people like it. It can be fun and is fun. Until it isn't. Because that's all you're doing. And what ends up happening is that when you're playing the game well, it ends up feeling like it's playing itself. And yeah, there are situations where you need to step in, particularly during hunts and bosses, but even then you're still just watching most of the time. Usually the response to this is just "don't use gambits then." I don't think this is a valid pushback on this critique. Choosing to play the combat manually, you'll just end up fighting the systems the game was fundamentally designed around. The sheer quantity of enemies in the game, along with how many actions are taken in any given trash fight (let alone bosses) is just gonna make manual control feel worse. Exploration and combat were designed around your party being automated.

15 hours in and I hit a wall at the Sandsea. I had my gambits set, and all I was doing was watching. I nearly stopped because I was just so BORED, and I took a look at the Sandsea map and saw yet another massive environment to just watch my characters fight in. I didn't foresee the game getting any better. I saw the combat loop. I saw what it was trying to do. And I didn't like it. Furthermore, it was at this point the job system wasn't opening it up like I expected it to. At that point it felt like the main differentiation between jobs was the type of weapons and armors you had equipped. That seemed to impact physical classes more than magical classes (which did have variety inherent to the different types of magic). But the physical technicks, from what I could tell, looked extremely thin as well as situational or even nigh useless compared to magic. I was expecting, 15 hours in, for it to be opening up more than it was.

But I stuck with it and it did get better in some respects, but still not great. The job system opened up when the game finally let me choose a second license board for each character. But I was still optimizing less for synergies between abilities and passives, as in Tactics, and more for maximizing stats and compensating for each job's deficiencies. This comes down to a few things. Physical jobs especially are held back somewhat since most of the Technicks are either highly situational or totally useless. There is also quite a bit of redundancy in the license boards, so you're really encouraged less to specialize and more to spread out what a character can do. The progression systems also need to accommodate the flow of battle with the gambit system automating combat.

By the time I was 50 hours in, I had reached total saturation with the combat system. By that point, I had just finished the story trip to Archades, I had done probably 28 hunts, found and defeated 4 of the optional espers, and done a smattering of other small side quests I found. And I was just done with the combat system. I extracted all the fun I was going to get out of it, and it was at this point I decided to mainline the story (which ends with probably the worst final dungeon I've yet to experience in Final Fantasy, complete with a teleporter maze) and ignore the rest.

Mind you, this was all done maybe 65-70% of the time on 2x speed. Now imagine how miserable the experience is on the original PS2 versions that DIDN'T have the speed-up options. It gets to a point where when you drop back down to normal speed, the game looks like it's playing in slow motion.

To be clear, the game is actually quite coherently designed because everything ultimately feeds back into the gambit system. But when you've engaged with it well enough, you become mostly a passive observer to combat, and I just want to press some BUTTONS, GODDAMIT! Even though I left a massive portion of the side content untouched, I was still able to mainline the remainder of the story by letting my gambits handle almost everything. Every single battle with trash mobs and bosses (including the final boss), I just watched as my characters ran through their gambits and took care of it all, only intervening to deal with a particularly troublesome status effect or cast Syphon on my MP battery. And that brings me to my next point...

Where's the spectacle?

Something else about the combat is that it lacks the flair and style of other FF titles. And I'm not even talking about the over the top spectacle and particle effects you see in XV, XVI, and the VII Remake Trilogy. I'm talking about the animations and camera effects you see in the classic PS1 era titles and FFX. See, in those ones, battles are events.

You're exploring a dungeon/field. You suddenly get a cool transition effect. The battle music kicks in. Characters line up and draw their weapons. The battle begins. The menu appears, waiting for your first command. The camera reacts to and tracks characters and enemies as commands are inputted, queued, and executed. Attack animations are fast and impactful while spell animations are powerful, dramatic, and flashy. XII deliberately strips all that out. Its combat lives and dies by its gambit system.

But the issue is, when you're playing it well, moment-to-moment gameplay boils down to running across **VAST, EXPANSIVE** environments for too long and watching your team auto-fight enemies. Even the fast forward doesn't do a whole lot to alleviate the fact that you're just gonna be running around most of the time, watching your characters auto-battle with mundane animations and limp sound effects. Occasionally you'll start a Quickening chain or you'll see a boss use a similarly flashy attack, but these moments are few and far between. 99.9% of the time you're just watching these rote, mundane animations play out with no style or flair.

The World, Art, Music, and Optional Content

I haven't discussed the art style much because it's more subjective than some of the other aspects of the game. I will say, however, the game seems to have a preoccupation with deserts and orange/brown environments.

And this is one of the more baffling design choices of the game, especially in the first half. Part of the reason I hit a major wall 15 hours in was that the color palette had remained exceptionally one-note. I was spending most of my time walking through deserts, dry fields, caves, mines, and settlements where the primary colors used were all yellow and brown. Then the game was asking me to spend several MORE hours trekking through even more desert, tombs, and caves. Finally I get a break from it when the Giza Plains turn rainy and I head to the Ozmone Plains, but then the game turns right back to dry, arid, and brown when entering the Jahara settlement. I mean, the environments do become more varied in the second half when you get into Golmore Jungle, the very Kashyyyk-like Eruyt Village, and Mt. Bur-Omsace and beyond. But it still occasionally defaults back to yellow and beige tones, and you'll continue to travel through the desert and orange-brown environments throughout the game. I am actually struggling to understand why so much of the first half of the game takes place in very dry, samey, and frankly unattractive looking environments. Even the characters' scleras are flesh-colored, which is kind of a gross artistic choice to me. I don't like that.

I also wasn't a fan of so many dungeons being very geometrically samey. This gets into a level design point too, but many of the dungeons are comprised of hallways constructed at rigid right angles with rectangular rooms as connectors and ends. Even the architecture itself is very angular and boxy. It just wasn't interesting to look at, especially given the limited color palette.

I think there is something lost in the transition from the smaller dense and highly detailed environments of VII, VIII, IX, and even X to the expansive but flat and visually less interesting maps of XII. Yes, it's a lot bigger. But it doesn't feel as detailed or interesting to look at, and isn't as fun to traverse.

Musically, most of the soundtrack just faded into the background. There were a few good tunes here and there, but nothing that really gets pleasantly stuck in your head the way other FF soundtracks do. I also think you can really hear the Star Wars inspiration in many of the ambient tracks, which detracts from the game's musical identity when I was playing and suddenly heard a very Star Wars-coded musical motif.

The side content is quite good, especially for FF where it's extremely hit or miss. Having said that, I think a major reason why it stands out is because the story itself is just so uninteresting and just kind of dithers along. I do appreciate that it's deliberately designed to be done organically along the main story and for the most part isn't overly obtuse to access and complete. The way FFX handled its side content was my single biggest criticism of that game - essentially appending it to the main game as mostly intended for the end/post-game and being overly reliant on grinding battles and perfecting janky mini-games. It's still not my favorite selection of optional content in the franchise... I think I prefer how FFVII handles it overall and (unpopular opinion) even prefer what the Remake Trilogy does with its side content, but it is up there.

I do prefer when side quests reward you a bit more with extra insight into the major and minor characters, or they meaningfully flesh out the world more... XII seemed somewhat light with this compared to VII or XVI, but I can't deny I did have the most fun with the game when doing the side quests in the second half, whereas in XVI and dare I say even X the side quests were easily the least fun part of the game.

I rarely engage with extreme endgame challenges because I'm usually ready for a game to end before then, so my opinions on side content mostly concern what's organically available during the main story, rather than intensive grinding or optional superbosses. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I enjoyed the central gameplay loop, but like I said earlier I reached a saturation point 50 hours in where I was just done and I mainlined the story the rest of the way and STILL found it too easy despite leaving I would guess over half of the optional content untouched.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the beginning, finishing every mainline non-MMO Final Fantasy has become a personal goal of mine. That's largely why I stuck with XII. I love Final Fantasy. I love what the games do, I love that they experiment, and I love that each game feels different. I don't like each individual game the same way though, and after playing XII, I think it's near the bottom of my mainline ranking. I don't hate the game. It's certainly not bad or poorly made. Far from it. It's very well constructed and coherent in its design, and there are several aspects of its design I do like. Its RPG mechanics and degree of party customization are among the series' strongest, even if I'm not a fan of how the job system is implemented. The side content is also among the best in the series, even if it takes a while to get there. But I also just don't enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay loop and find the game itself to be excessively dry while the story and characters just fade into the background. As I was playing it, I just found it to be so aggressively boring. It's boring to play, it's boring to watch, it's boring to look at, and it's boring to listen to.

I don't regret playing XII. I'm actually glad I finished it and engaged with it to the degree I did, because I can now understand why it has such a devoted fanbase (even if I think claims that it's "universally loved" are a bit out of touch... even VII isn't universally loved). I can see the design philosophy. I can see what it was trying to accomplish. I just don't like the result very much.

I don't know where I first heard about the Colorgrave games but on the last Steam sale I decided to pick a couple up for cheap and had the pleasure of working through their first game Prodigal this last week.

If you are the kind of person who likes exploration, scouring the map for secrets, solving a lot of puzzles, and lore that you're likely to not understand without serious investigation, then you gotta play this game.

It presents as a very nice 2D Zelda like adventure, and even acts like one at a base level. Your hero is delving into dungeons, solving puzzles, gaining helpful items, beating bosses, and helping folks around town. You'll realize pretty quickly that the townsfolk are quite fleshed out, with lots of dialogue, triggerable events, and relationship progression, similar to Harvest Moon. You can even romance several of them.

You can roll credits on this game in well under ten hours depending on how much faffing about you do (glitchless any% speed runs are about 20 min to give you and idea). But it mentions that you can continue on the post game, and there's a good chance you're going to have a lot of questions unasnewred at that point. The game shows you openly how many items there are to collect and there are likely to be a lot of missing boxes at that point, not to mention uncompleted achievements that don't seem to make any sense and a lot of lore that isn't clear.

So I continued on and ended up spending more time in the post game than the main game, discovering more and more and more and wow there is a LOT! I still haven't looked anything up yet and I'm undecided whether I will, but I think I'm going to call it done with just over half the achievements unlocked. There's more out there I never found, or maybe locked myself out of due to my choices, but I'd be happy to move on at this point. I have done a number of very important-seeming things that I do not understand the significance of, and multiple characters have told me as much so I think it might be intentional. However I do think it might be possible to sort the lore out as one big final puzzle if you were keen to. Maybe if I were aware of that from the start I would have taken notes and made the effort, and I'll definitely do it if I ever decide to replay it. So much effort that most players don't even see really speaks to the passion of the developers and I'm looking forward to trying their other games.

This was an awesome game and I wholeheartedly recommend it. To me it seems like the kind of game where a guide would ruin the experience so I recommend just taking your time and scouring as much as you can. Enjoy the process of discovery!

I've become fascinated with immersive language learning, particularly through sites like Dreaming Spanish where you get basically zero instruction and have to learn everything from context cues. When I heard Chants of Sennaar was a game about learning alien languages, I was immediately intrigued. Chants wound up being a bit different from my dream, but it also did a lot more than I was expecting in some ways. Concisely, CoS was bigger both mechanically and narratively than I was expecting. I would definitely call this a story-first game (reminds me a bit of classic Zelda games).

The thing that threw me off most about CoS was really the first two acts. They focus heavily on more classical puzzle adventure mechanics that don't really dig into the language mechanics very much. There is a tendency to give the player exact translations which I also felt was spoiling the good part of why I came.

On the plus side though, there was a lot more to the world than I was expecting coming in. I was expecting a pretty shallow story mostly exploring the language mechanics, but the story and worldbuilding feels comprehensive and well thought out. The story beats of act 2 kept me invested even if it felt like it was missing something.

Luckily though all of that pivoted for the better in the following acts. Act 3 really loosens the chains and throws you into a large area with a lot of freedom to figure things out on your own. The notetaking and partial understanding came to life for me here. In particular I recall one distinct point where I was fuzzy on the sentiment of some of the conversations. I thought something meant "enemy" then I was convinced it probably meant "hero"; I got a laugh when I realized it meant "fool".

Act 4 is as good as act 3 although in a different way. I think it did a good job of mixing deeper puzzle solving with the narrative aspects, though I think ultimately act 3 was my favorite. In both acts I really enjoyed using my notes to try and track different bits of info and then later retreading my thoughts or clarifying things a bit.

The rest of the game felt weaker as the narrative started to wrap up, but again that lack of understanding clearly how to feel about this and figuring it out as you learn more continued to be the highlight for me until the credits rolled.

All in all I thought it was a great game. The language bits weren't as forefront for as long as I would have liked, but the game supplemented with a large variety of ideas, a solid story, and some surprisingly cinematic scenes. While I did look some things up only so I wouldn't have to spend hours trying different grammatical structures (some of these sections were super annoying on a controller) or staring blankly when things were brute forceable, in general I thought the game was the perfect difficulty: tricky but never unsolvable.

First JPRG that I played (unless you consider Dark Souls to be a JRPG). Game is certainly enjoyable and addictive but it has a lot of cons. Game is sitting at 94 at Opencritic and 95 on Metacritic. For such a highly rated game I expected there to be very few cons or cons that could be ignored easily. That wasn't the case, so I needed to rant a bit. I clocked in over 250 hours on a single playthrough sampling almost every side activity I could find. I would personally rate it about 85/100. A good game but not a 90+ game from any angle. There will be some minor spoilers but nothing too major.

Some terms to know before starting:

Persona: A manifestation of a Persona user's personality that gives skills

Palace: Dungeon levels in the main story that ends in a boss fight

Mementos: Dungeon levels meant for grinding

Fusion: Combining 2 or more personas into a new one

Let's start with the good stuff. Game has a pretty stylish presentation that hooked me immediately. The train commute where everyone looks like zombies felt relatable. The part where the gymnast girl gives up her seat to an old woman and immediately being snatched by an office guy also was very relatable (I know that feeling). The presentation of the crowd is great considering the original game was meant to run on PS3. The art style and detailing in every corner and shop just adds to the atmosphere. Even though most of the animations are reused, there are a lot of unique animations even for irrelevant things like Futaba scratching the cat's ears or Yusuke eating fries on loop. The OST that is over 150 tracks just slaps and more than 70% of them could be listened to on loop outside the game. Inclusion of Japanese audio is nice. The UI is stylish, creative and lot of work has been put into it. I have never seen UI like the doctors or the airsoft shop menus before in any other game. The palace levels are designed well, non symmetrical, not too repetitive and each palace has different art and some have unique gameplay mechanics too (turning into rats and eating cheese?). The gameplay itself, I would say it's engaging enough to finish the game. But i guess the main reason why people like this game is the overall theme where you are fighting against the people in power considering the state of events we have in the real world. I think this particular steam user review sums it up well:

"You can tell it's just a video game because you fight to change the corrupt system and actually succeed."

You can find all the glazing reviews from critics. But this post is about the cons.

The biggest con the game has is that it does not respect the players time. The game in fact will try to waste your time at every opportunity it gets. The Japanese devs need to understand that the average player's age worldwide is increasing and players have responsibilities in real life. For example, getting a stat boost from the Fortune teller requires you to:

- Open map

- Navigate to Shinjuku

- Fast travel to Shinjuku (loading screen)

- Run to the place fortune teller is at.

- Click through 5 - 10 prompts that cannot be fast forwarded - the worst part.

Doing that takes a whole lot of time for something as simple as a stat boost. It already requires money so why keep the stat boost behind 10 prompts? Money was never a problem for me and I decided to NOT get these stat boosts simply because of the time I lose doing it and the annoying prompts. This applies to most of the "prompts" in the game. There are a lot of repetitive prompts the game gives you to click through. For example, a party member will interrupt you at a station junction to remind you we could go to the palace/mementos. You can fast forward but it's not really an option as you can't really tell if something "unique" will happen. If you fast forward you simply miss the unique thing. Lots of reminder prompts on your phone too. Unnecessary repetition of facts that I already know. I know this game is kind of meant to be played on or off and the player needs refreshing coming back at it later. But that only makes sense if we were in the 90s. We can search for anything on the net today. I feel like if these repetition did not exist it would shave off like 20% of the playtime. Another example I can say is that when I do some mementos levels, just going through the levels (mostly gameplay) happens in like 5 mins (thanks Ryuji) but the fusion and other stuff at the velvet room (mostly UI) after that takes like 15 mins!

Now onto the utter lack of save points. And I am not talking about the save points in palaces/mementos. The life sim aspect of the game has some horrible save points. First you are introduced that you can sleep on your bed to progress to the next day, but later the game automatically progresses to the next day and you have to witness another 5+ mins of not being able to save. Wished they kept the manual going to bed everyday. There are several instances where you literally cannot save your game for several days in a row like the Hawaii trip and that's a very long time. The save points in the palaces/mementos are at least more bearable but it would have been better if they pointed out the save points on the map in advance. Because if you miss a save point the next one is going to be a long way off. And it wastes considerable time if you want to simply quit the game when you want to.

This is going to be controversial. The UI has seen a lot of praise. It's great for the first 10 hours. After that functionality takes precedence over style. And a game that I personally played for 250 hours functionality mattered the most. The UI takes up like half the game screen and yet it fails at showing important info. Status ailments on your party members are shown as icons and it's hard to remember what those icons are, especially when you get them rarely. Had to look up a reference image on the net to see what it is. Could have had some short form text representation of it on the HUD. It's also harder to see the status ailment on the enemies like burn and could have had info on the HUD again about this. Also HUD info for ATK/DEF/EVA/Crit for party would have been good.

Using the persona list menu for any purpose requires you scrolling a lot as there are like 250 personas. They could have made some sub category switching like with Lvl 1-10, Lvl 11-20, etc or arcana switching so you could find your persona faster. There was an utter lack of sub category switching in general across menus. It was also harder to "find" things in menus as each menu is unique. It actually took me a while to realize that you can actually switch subcategories in the items menu. Not really a fan of UI buttons changing shapes and sizes when you hover over them as the mouse does not behave well with them. Not a problem for gamepad but I think 3+% of my clicks did not register on the skills menu (in pause menu) where you click on the party members buttons.

There are 23 confidants that you interact with out of which half feel like filler confidants. The devs should have gone with half of them and given them more unique interactions and depth instead of adding filler characters that have only one thing going for them. Quality should be greater than quantity. Mementos (grinding) levels also seems unnecessary. It could have been cut and only kept the story relevant parts. The grind to me seems completely pointless since it overlevels you which makes the game too easy. Fusions also does not have any weight since you can just grind them. If the grinding was gone, each fusion would have had more weight and thinking through.

There's also an overload of mechanics some of which aren't even needed and are just there to waste your time. Skills, items, accessories, skill cards, fusion, group fusion, network fusion, sacrifice, lockdown, showdown, fusion alarm, the list goes on.

The original game was meant to run on a PS3 so you get PS3 era graphics. Levels are very small and there is frequent transitioning between levels though they are very fast. There is very bad aliasing and the in built SMAA does not fix it. On PC you can use Luma mod to enable DLSS or FSR which does improve anti aliasing by a lot. The crowd NPCs just move along a predefined path and do not try to avoid each other and simply overlap and pass through each other. Most of the NPCs do not have eyes and nose for optimization. NPCs far away turn into 2D billboards. The art style is doing very heavy lifting on making the players NOT notice this.

The life sim aspect of the game is kind of a mixed bag. It's good to explore the city levels but "playing" it isn't really fun. Story events can happen any day and they lock you out of doing life sim activities. Since they are completely unpredictable you cannot really plan ahead on what you'll be doing unless you have already played the game and know what happens each day. So basically you end up doing the first available thing you can do. Most of the side activities consume time and will not let you do it again which is annoying. I had more fun playing Tycoon card game in the Thieves Den (outside the main game) since I can play it back to back with no downtime.

I played on normal difficulty but felt it was too easy. Looking up some discussions it seems like the merciless difficulty is actually easier as you get higher XP multiplier and technical damage multiplier. You will automatically get over levelled which will make it more easier. There were some odd bugs/design like Severe magic skills doing less damage than Heavy. And I wasn't the only one.

The battles are turn based that requires you to use skills tactically. Normally one would expect that the normal battles prep you for the boss fights. But the boss fights are a different game altogether. Bosses are basically just bullet sponges and are resistant to most things which makes everything you learn in the normal battles pointless. They also had this odd design decision to have it be game over when the player character in the party dies even if all other party members are alive. They could have nerfed something else instead of doing that. But it's also not much of a problem as the game is too easy. The hardest battle is the first boss fight because there isn't much room to get over leveled till that point. Once you are over leveled (which happens automatically as long as you do most of the stuff) you just steamroll. In one boss fight you had to beat the boss within a time limit and the best strategy to win this boss fight is to skip the dialogues as fast as you can because the dialogues consume time! The challenge battles in the velvet room were more interesting to play than any battle in the main game as you had to actually use tactics there.

Even though they did include Japanese audio (which is better than English VAs) they did not add subtitles for a lot of the background voice overs like in battles or the doctor/airsoft shop menus. Maybe it was the lack of space on the overly used up UI. But the lack of those subs really makes it a tough choice to switch to Jap VAs.

Minor story spoilers incoming. The game starts with "You are the trickster" and in the entire game of over 250 hours, the trickster thing happens only once by the Joker. Almost every other time, Joker is the one getting tricked. For example, the treasure in second palace is replaced by a fake and Morgana! does not even realize it's a fake and they get trapped. Joker thinks Kasumi is Kasumi. I thought the story would be about Joker playing tricks on the enemies with each trick becoming bigger than the one before. Well I was very disappointed. Even for the event where Joker is the trickster, all the decisions and planning were made by the party and not Joker himself.

In fact the game does not actually have any real choices to begin with. There are only a few choices where the game immediately ends as a bad ending. Every other dialogue choice you have in the game results in a one line of unique dialogue immediately afterwards and does not affect the rest of the game. The only other choices you have are whether you romance or friendzone your female confidants, which isn't much of a choice either because there are really no repercussions on romancing them all. There is only one day where you have a negative reaction because of that which can be easily ignored. Also all the romance interactions are from the same template which is very disappointing. Why have dialogue choices at all really? Could have been a fully voiced protagonist.

If you watch anime on a regular basis there aren't much surprising things happening in the story. Almost everything is predictable. Of course if your consumption of anime and other mediums is too low, then there are a lot of surprises to be experienced in the story and one may even consider it a masterpiece. But the story isn't really doing anything new or groundbreaking.

Did critics really play this game or just went through the most straight path in the mainline story which could indeed be good and consume less time?

I think Norco falls more into the categlory of visual novel rather than adventure game or point and click. There's very little game play involved. You're only required to use your inventory a few times, and there's a few weird rhythm based "battle" sections as well.

I wish there had been more game and puzzles involved. The use of the mind web and connecting your thoughts to ideas and others is nice but could have required more player interaction

What the game has going for it, is atmosphere. It's set in rural Louisiana in a town that's basically just an oil refinery. Everything just feels, surreal and creepy.

Then 10 different bizzaro ideas get thrown into the post and stirred together. Aliens, cults, sentient robots, Jesus' bloodline. The game isn't the "prodigal son" returns home narrative that the opening cutscene indicates.

I didn't even realize the main character was female until about a third of the way through. The game just has a unsetteling feel but you feel very compelled to see what happens next.

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I actually wrote this out some months ago, but never got around to posting it. But I just read that the last game in the trilogy came out October 15th 1996, so it seemed fitting to mark the occasion here.

The Marathon series holds a bit of an odd spot in gaming history. For the longest time it was probably best known vaguely as one of the things Bungie did before Halo put them on the map.

But if you had the questionable fortune of owning a mac in the 90's, the trilogy was the platform's gaming crown jewel. It held a spot of special significance as about the only Mac exclusive that wasn't shareware, and could claim to rival what was going on at the cutting edge of the PC scene at that time.

I was in that latter group. In fact I had (and somewhere still have) the elaborate trilogy boxset.

I played the first two to completion more than once, but never got around to the third for reasons I'll get into. This time I went through the whole trilogy in order for the first time to see how they hold up. The versions I played were the (entirely free!) Steam versions, which in fact use the Aleph One fan source ports.

Marathon (1994)

Story: you play a human security officer (though nothing in the game itself states this) who has been sent to the titular colony ship, which has been invaded by a race of insectoid slavers known as the Pfhor. Most of the game (and, indeed, trilogy) is you getting ordered around by one the three onship AIs: Leela, the sober helpful one; Durandal, who has gone 'rampant' and is following his own objectives; and Tycho, who is completely malfunctioning, and in fact barely appears in this first game. Also in the mix are the S'pht, an ancient enslaved race who play an increasingly complex role as the series goes on. The story is told mainly through text terminals you encounter as you go along.

The story and writing is often considered the series' strong suit, and this one lays the groundwork for what's to come. But the writing here is fairly straightfoward alien invasion stuff that's mostly concerned with laying out whatever your next objective is. We'll have to wait for the later games for the deeper stuff.

Note: you can, if you want, read the whole story like a novel because someone kindly put all the terminal screens online on a page which has been kept updated since 1995!

Visuals: a mixed bag. The comic-booky sprite art is often excellent (the Pfhor and S'pht that make up 80% of the enemies look great, maybe even better than in the following games), but some of the other enemy types are a little sloppier. And the chapter art is frankly a bit amaturish.

Considering the game is named after the colony ship, it's not at all clear what the ship itself actually looks like, or even what general shape it is. Apparently it was built out of the Mars moon Deimos, though that piece of info is only ever mentioned off-handedly in a single terminal part way into the game.

By default the HUD takes up two thirds of the screen, and yet can't find space for a mini map. This is unfortunate because the cramped, labyinthine layouts and dark visuals means you'll be needing to switch to the map view a good proportion of the time. Not even the Aleph One port really corrects this - the only option there is a transparent overlay which isn't much more usable.

The game is also incredibly dark, which added to the atmosphere at the time, but adds to the frustration in terms of actually navigating around the game.

Gameplay: aside from the limited screen size and obvious general age of the thing, first impressions are decent. The early enemies and the sound design is excellent, and some of the most memorable moments in the game (e.g. a S'pht descending on you through a narrow corridor) happen early on.

One aspect I enjoy is the checkpoint system. I've never much liked the boomer shooter convention that you can quicksave and quick reload anywhere in the game, it has a way of sucking the tension out of a game. All three Marathons use a checkpoint system that removes any temptation to savescum your way through, and forces you to be a bit more strategic.

The main problem is that much of the level design often hasn't aged all that well. To the game's credit it aspires to something more elaborate than being a mindless shooter. But in practice the objectives can be overly complicated, often requiring you to push anonymous looking buttons that trigger doors or lifts elsewhere on the map, with little indication of what has just happened. You will likely do a lot of circling around the maps trying to find what you just opened up.

There is a sense sometimes that they're throwing in ideas without fully knowing how to implement them. There's an oxygen meter onscreen for the entire game, but it's only utilised on a single level. Duel-wielding pistols is a very cool feature, but the reloading is so slow, and the ammo for other weapons so abundant, that you'll most likely never have much need to use them.

Oddly several enemy types seem to disappear in the later stages of the game. There is something resembling an end of game boss, but it doesn't really do anything and is positioned so far away you'll probably kill the thing before getting a proper look at it.

Some of the levels are straight up unfair. The final map of the game features no checkpoints or health, and ends by demanding you stumble blindly through lava pools until find the final terminal. This means unless you conserve enough health, you have to start all over again from the previous level.

Overall: more historical document than a timeless classic. There's still fun to be had and it's worth playing few the first few levels to get a sense of it all. It's well paced and doesn't outstay its welcome (all three of these games took me 12 to 14 hours to finish).

Marathon 2: Durandal (1995)

Story: in a slight retcon to the ending of the first game, 17 years on you've accompanied Durandal to the S'pht homeworld Ll'owon, to carry out his archeological mission to uncover their lost technology, and to reveal the fate of a lost clan who managed to avoid slavery.

As the title suggests, Durandal is the star of the show this time, driving most of the plot and increasingly playing the anti-hero. Tycho has a much bigger role as a more straightforwardly villainous AI. You learn a lot more about the S'pht and their history, and at points even the humans get to take charge for a change.

The writing gets a big upgrade here with more elaborate characters and worldbuilding, opening things up beyond straightforward alien invasion plots into galactic conflicts with a history spanning thousands of years.

Visuals: all the sprites have had a refresh in this game, and there is much greater consistency. Also they more than compensate for the amaturish chapter art of the first game with chapeter artwork that are quite spectacular even today.

After the dark claustrophobia of the first game, this game has a lighter, more welcoming tone from the off. Open spaces, bright colours, pleasant ambiant sounds, ad almost mediterranian feel - even the first level title 'Waterloo Waterpark' has a more welcoming vibe.

It does feel distinctly '90's' though, and not just because of the technology. A lot of early digital, new agey textures on display, reminiscent of Web 1.0 site backgrounds.

Gameplay: this is generally the best regarded of the trilogy, and for good reason. The level design is more confident, the gameplay more balanced. Though the levels are still labyrinthine, there's very little here that I'd call unfair. The basic mechanics are much the same, but features that were underutilised in the first game finally come into their own here (e.g. dual pistols are now very useful). You also get to dual wield shotguns which is, frankly, awesome.

One nice touch, something that was also there in the first game but is expanded on here, is how the layouts of the maps have distinct architectural styles that reflect the different settings. Even though the levels are quite abstract (as with most early 3D games), you can tell just from the shape of the maps whether you're on a Pfhor ship, or Ll'owon environment, or an AI datacenter.

Another nice touch I appreciated: there's one level where you're given a very specific objective, to follow a specific path, and do a thing and come back the way you came, and you're warned not to stray from the path. If you follow the instructions, you can be done with the mission in minutes. But if you stray, there's a full-sized map to explore, as elaborate as any other in the game.

I suspect this was basically a cut level they decided to repurpose, but either way it's a fun detail and adds to the sense that you're exploring a world that exists beyond the immediate mission perameters.

This also might include the first instance of the common FPS trope of having you lose your arsenal halfway through the game and having to work your way back up with the most basic equipment.

Overall: if you're only going to play one of these games, this is the one to go for. Easily one of the best 2.5D shooters of its era, and with better writing than most games even now (though in terms of 'lore' this drops you in the deep end a bit if you chose to skip the first one).

Marathon Infinity (1996)

Story: now this is not an easy one to summarise. Just from playing the game and not having done a ton of outside research to get to the bottom of it, this is my best guess as to what's going on in it:

Possibly as a result of the Pfhor triggering some kind of apocalyptic super weapon, the player is shifting through different realities which mostly seem to be alternate versions of Marathon 2, but occasionally veering into abstract, almost poetical realms.

Sometimes you're working for Durandal suddenly on the back-foot, sometimes you're working for Tycho actively working against humanity. Either way, you just do what you're told like a rat in a maze (as the game explicitly points out). Literary references, prose flourishes, and general confusion abound.

As a piece of game writing it's certainly heady, mind-bending stuff. The downside is (by design) you don't have much sense of where you are, what you're doing, or why. But you have to hand it to them - they were doing meta-commentary on the nature of videogame free will a full decade before Bioshock.

The nature of the story also means the game is entirely optional as a continuation of the first two games. It's certainly interesting for players of the first two, but it's offering twists on them rather than continuing the plot in a direct way.

Visuals: this is an 'expansion pack' sort of sequel, so one new weapon and a handful of new sprites and textures are all you get. What's new is pretty good, but for the most part this game looks just like the last one.

Gameplay: now there's a simple reason why I never played through this game before, and that's because the first level is so obnoxious and convoluted that I never got past it, and assumed the whole game would be the same way.

Apparently it was one of the later maps designed and they were quite proud of it, but it's fair to say if the plan was to kick things off on a strong note, it backfired. It's 'clever', but it sets the opposite tone to the opening of M2 - dark, obtuse, and brutally hard.

Once you get past it, it turns out most of the rest of the game is fine! It doesn't surpass M2, but it gives you a lot more of what worked there, with increasingly complex and elaborate maps. Again: it's basically an expansion pack.

There are some significant problems though. The difficulty curve and balance are often all over the place. There are a tiny number of oxygen replenishers in the game, even though several levels (sometimes sequenced one after another) put you either in vaccums or water-heavy environments. There were two separate occasions where I was forced to look up spoiler guides online and speedrun my way through maps to find oxygen, because I had no way of surviving otherwise.

Similarly the game is extremely stingy with save points. Sometimes there will be multiple levels in a row with no checkpoints at all, some of which have a low margin of error even aside from that, meaning a single mistake will set you back several missions. It's a hassle!

They also give you so little ammo for certain weapons that you barely get a chance to use them. Restricting you on the plasma pistol was a good idea (it tended to become your default weapon in the first two games even though it's a bit boring to use), but it was odd introducing a new fletchette gun only to give you so little ammo for it that you barely get a chance to use the thing.

Overall: this is fine if you like Marathon, and definitely interesting as a piece of game writing, but not really essential. Most definitely not the place to start.

Worth noting as a sign off that the reason the third game existed in the first place was as an excuse to release their level editing software to the public (hence: "Infinity"), resulting in a bunch of total conversion projects, many of which are pretty well done.

200+ hours. Over 8 in-game years. A marriage (to Penny for those who care, though I found making that decision weirdly stressful, delaying it for in-game years) and two kids, and I have finally achieved what the game calls 'Perfection'. Even if I am still missing three achievements (one I'm locked out of unless I start a new game, the other two related to a twin-stick shooter mini-game I am really bad at), I think it's fair to say I'm basically done.

What's funny is I didn't know this was the end goal. When you start the game, the game points you to the community centre and encourages you to try and restore it. You have two options, either gather a bunch of disparate items (many of which you only get through farming, as it is a game all about running a farm after all), or making enough money to buy upgrades from a big corporation. Like I assume a lot of people, I went down the former route.

Perfection was evidently added later, as pat of an update, and it scratches that completionists itch. Without it, I don't think I would've put in anywhere near as many hours into the game, simply because otherwise, once you've got the community centre, you're basically done. There's plenty of things you can do after the community centre, there are still house upgrades, community upgrades, tasks for NPC's and achievements, but perfection basically ties all that together, and gives what could've been an aimless process some focus.

At the same time, the chase for perfection ruins the cosy relaxed vibes. Perfection requires you to basically do everything. You need to have completed every item compendium, grown and sold every crop, fished every fish, own some of the most expensive items and buildings, maxed out friendship with every NPC, and reached the depths of the games dungeons.

When I first learned about Perfection, I was at 51%. I was missing a bit of almost everything. I had most but not all maxed friendships, the museum was not complete, there were a dozen fish I'd not caught, crops I'd never planted and so on. I hadn't even cooked a single recipe. I honestly don't know why I pursued perfection, considering how far I was from it. I had dropped numerous other games with completion markers that were closer to done due to lack of interest. But at the time I found it, I didn't feel I was done with the game, and what was 51% quickly became, 60%, then 75% as I quickly ticked off the easy things I missed. Then at around 80% that completion metric stalled.

Chasing perfection forced me to change my playstyle. Before I knew about it, I was content to just let my farm be inefficient. I had buildings placed purely on the space available to me at the moment I bought them. I had little fields of whatever crops I wanted haphazardly organised. I had wild trees left sprouting wherever they wanted, and a boatload of grass left to grow just so I could cut it own midway through winter to feed my animals.

But once I seriously pursued it, and realised just how much money I needed, relative to how much I had, I tore everything out and began being ruthlessly efficient. The sprawl was gone, buildings were all arranged in a line in the order I would want to enter them for my morning routine. All my trees got chopped down only for me to plant a handful of intentional ones that I had sappers on for the materials, and I spent the better part of a year cultivating what was a small handful of ancient seeds into fruit only to turn them back into more seeds, all the while growing and selling Star fruit, because they were the two most expensive and valuable crops.

In between these sessions I intentionally dove into specific floors of the mines chasing specific enemies, leaving only when I cleared out the leves the enemies I needed to kill spawned, then reseting back to that floor again. Or I would go fishing for the specific fish I needed. The Legend -a rare fish that only spawns in one place on a rainy spring day- in particular was a nightmare, and I reset multiple times until I actually caught it, something I avoided entirely otherwise, just because I did not want to wait an entire year to try again, or waste extremely rare and valuable resources to make magic bait for it.

By the end, I had stopped caring about the things that at the start I put the most value in. I loved talking to the villagers, but by this point I was already at max friendship with them. They had nothing new to say, and I gained nothing from it. Even my in-game partner was just an empty vessel wandering around. I stopped foraging because the fruit wasn't worth my time to pick up, and the only quests I bothered with were the ones for Qi gems so I could buy more things that would make my farm even more efficient and allow for better use of the space to plant those Ancient seeds.

The final stretch of the game was just money for the clock. 10million gold. After having spent most my cash on all the other objects necessary for perfection, and having caught every fish, killed enough of every monster, and basically done everything else, all I had to do was plant a massive field of Ancient seeds, then harvest them.

I must've looked like a man possessed. If my partner in-game had been real, they probably would've assumed I had some form of obsession/depression. I didn't leave my farm for days. I didn't speak to them. I got up, fed animals, grabbed their milk/eggs, and put them in the cheese/mayonnaise machines for overnight processing, put whatever had been there from the day before in a sale box, then checked my field and unless it was the harvest day in the week I was back in bed by 9am, just to sleep for the rest of the day then repeat that routine.

What had been a relaxed and chill game had run it's course. No-one had new dialogue, there were no new missions. No new surprises to be found. No new anything. The game was beaten, save for an arbitrarily expensive clock and the farming grind to get it. All in, it took about an in-game year to raise the 10million gold that clock needed, and as soon as I had it, I bought the clock, placed it on my farm, confirmed I had done everything else, and did one last sleep.

The cutscene you get for Perfection is cute, if not necessarily a worthy reward for the effort. But maybe that was the point? In trying to achieve this optional and unnecessary I took what was a cozy and relaxing experience and turned it into a slog and a chore just to meet some arbitrary metric. Maybe it would've hit differently if I'd happened upon it one day, rather than consciously pursued it. But then again, considering how complicated the fish alone were, it's very possible that, without the knowledge of there being a definitive metric, I might not have bothered. So in a sense, despite how it ruined the vibes, Perfection meant I spent longer with the game, and at no point despite everything did I feel it was a total chore or waste of my time.

But I do wonder how many people achieved a full completion prior to the patch that added the Perfection score? Did adding a way to measure it incentivise more people to go for it? Or did most people ignore it entirely and assume it was too much effort?

RELEASE: 2024

TIME PLAYED: 23 Hours

PLATFORM PLAYED: PC (STEAM)

SCORE: ★★★

Hated It | Disliked It | Liked It | Loved It | All-Time Favorite

(The bolded score is the one chosen for this review; the rest are simply to show what the scale is grading on and what the stars mean to me.)

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THE BREAKDOWN

+Interesting characters and a novel Steampunk setting

+Commitment to avoiding a combat system displays a confidence in design

+Game feels pretty well-paced and has some interesting plot threads

-The writing, while solid, doesn’t distinguish itself enough for how laser-focused the game is on its content

-The personality as skills system feels a bit thin due to being split between a trio of characters

-The constant jumping between perspectives can make getting attached to anyone a bit difficult

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It’s difficult to speak about Sovereign Syndicate without referencing Disco Elysium, the game that so clearly inspired it. In the wake of the disaster cop-shaped hole in gamers’ hearts due to its developer, ZA/UM, being fractured by accusations of hostile takeover and losing much of its creative talent, there’s been surprisingly few ‘Disco-likes’; games that forego combat and traditional RPG mechanics for an emphasis on text-heavy descriptions, abstract skill checks, and deeply exploring the psychology of their protagonist. Sovereign Syndicate, however, not only takes a shot at this particular niche, but swings for the fences with multiple protagonists, intertwining storylines, and a novel fantasy Steampunk setting. The result is a mixed bag that’s mostly quality, but perhaps could have benefited from a little more focus.

Taking place in an alternate Victorian London first-established in developer Crimson Herring’s Hunter’s Moon: A Sovereign Syndicate, the CRPG follows not one, but three primary characters – an alcoholic minotaur with a talent for illusion magic, a clever courtesan with a rebellious past, and a dwarven tinkerer as loyal to his mechanical sidekick as it is to him – whose stories start out independently, but quickly become entangled. It’s an ambitious premise, and I have to give kudos to the studio for pulling it off. Character writing is a strong suit; Atticus, the minotaur, is the most ‘Harry-like’ of the trio, with his drunken binges, reputation for wasting his talent, and hazy memory – this might be why he’s the first that players step into the shoes (hooves?) of. With a strange new voice in his head, he’s cornered by a bounty hunter who initially seems interested in the price on his head, but who actually is far more interested in helping Atticus – by force, if necessary – track down his missing mother for reasons he refuses to share.

Clara Reed and Theodore “Teddy” Redgrave are even more unconventional, and a good reflection of the developer trying to do its own thing despite its obvious inspiration. Clara’s working at a brothel now, but there’s hints even early on that she escaped the United States for London for darker reasons. Teddy, meanwhile, is obsessed with his two jobs: monster hunting and inventing. He’s convinced he’s on the cusp of making his robot, Otto, an unrivaled artificial intelligence, and he might be right. All three characters share a simplified version of the ‘personality skill check’ system of Disco Elysium, but it felt a little bit thin; with only a few ‘voices in the head’ for each protagonist, their influence is simultaneously disproportionate and a little bit lacking; they talk often, but due to the relatively linear nature of the game, don’t have all that much influence on Atticus, Clara, or Teddy’s core personalities outside of rare scenes. I did appreciate a few highlights, such as Atticus’ Discipline helping him reel in his vices, but I would have liked to see more.

Exploration helps give a better sense of this London’s districts, and this is a highlight; steampunk isn’t an overused setting in gaming, and the emphasis on fantasy elements kind of gives it the vibe of ‘if Shadowrun took place two hundred years ago.’ Mysticism is as woven into society as technology, with an entire area dedicated to lycanthropes to let them [or force them] to sit out their transformations peacefully and opium dens being popular among sorcerers due to their elevated awareness of their own dreams. There’s a lot to miss in each chapter, and much of it can’t be revisited due to the swapping between protagonists. While I did find this occasionally irritating, I can appreciate the commitment to time passing in a realistic way.

The majority of gameplay is exploration and talking to people, and while there’s novelty to the game’s structure – seeing how one NPC respects Clara while openly insulting Atticus, for example – the lack of depth to Sovereign Syndicate’s systems starts to rear its ugly head here. The writing is solid and often flavorful, but I didn’t meet many characters who stuck in my mind for long outside of the main trio; with the skills of how I ‘built’ my protagonists feeling more like flavor than core design, it was difficult to feel invested in seeing how I bounced off anyone they met. That said, the plot itself does go some interesting places, exploring themes of self-control, transhumanism, and more with enough sincerity that I never doubted something full of heart and value was being expressed.

I feel some degree of guilt comparing Sovereign Syndicate repeatedly to Disco Elysium, but ZA/UM cast a long shadow with its esoteric masterpiece and, while Sovereign Syndicate has some novel ideas, it doesn’t quite do enough to step outside into the light on its own merits. This isn’t to call it a bad game – as a conversation-driven visual novel kind of experience it’s enjoyable, and I felt its plot twists and strong final act did it a lot of favors. I still had a good time and think it’s worth playing; I just wish I could have stretched my legs a little bit more when it came to the RPG side of things.

For those not in the know, Final Fantasy Tactics is a PS1 tactical RPG released in 1997. Telling the intertwining stories of Ramza, youngest son of the powerful and respected noble house Beoulve, and his common-born friend Delita Heiral, it follows the events surrounding a civil war in Ivalice between two dukes contending for control of the throne after the king’s death. It was praised for its depth of systems and complex, mature story exploring the themes of duty, class struggle, and whether or not the ends justify the means, and is widely regarded as a standout of the genre. In 2007 a remaster/update called FFT: The War of the Lions (WotL) was released for the PSP, and in 2025 a second remaster/update, FFT: The Ivalice Chronicles (TIC), was released for all major platforms. I just finished this most recent version for the first time recently, and I have some (many) thoughts to share.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will say upfront that I have massive nostalgia goggles on when it comes to this game. It’s a top-3 all-timer for me and, as the title of this post suggests, I have played both the original and the WotL version many times. Because of this, I’m not really looking to do a review here; there are already hundreds of those out there for you to read if you want, and this would quickly turn into a multi-page gushing fanboy essay if I started talking about the story and characters. I’m more interested in taking a look at the differences between the versions and seeing how the game has evolved over time, what it’s gotten right, and where (even after three attempts) it still goes wrong.

First off, I have to talk about the writing. The story itself is amazing, but the original translation is… Bad. Like, ‘actively makes it hard to understand the plot at times’ level bad. There were beats of the story I still had never fully grasped until playing later versions with updated scripts, and that’s after several playthroughs. WotL completely redid the script, but went with an oddly heavy-handed Shakespearean style of prose which had not been present in the OG. It was far better overall and made the intricacies of the plot much easier to catch, but the language could make you roll your eyes with how flowery it was at times.

TIC, on the other hand, hits it straight out of the park. This third and presumably final script is clean, clear, and has just enough ‘old-timey knights and shit’ flavour to feel like the proper high fantasy political drama it is. I really can’t overstate what a great job they did bringing these characters to life; it’s top tier, best-in-class writing and without a doubt the definitive version of this story. The voice acting is also superb, which is one thing I was a bit nervous about going in.

WotL and the OG are basically identical in terms of HUDs and menus and such, but TIC makes some sweeping changes and with only mixed success. The new combat HUD is excellent, the addition of the turn sequence indicator and the ‘reset move’ button specifically are massive QoL improvements. The icons next to abilities to indicate damage/healing/support were a nice touch as well in a game where abilities often have highly nondescriptive names.

On the other hand, out-of-combat menu navigation felt generally worse to me than it had in previous versions. Menus have been completely overhauled, and the shops, equipment, and jobs menus all felt clunkier and slower to navigate. Like it was taking more button presses to do the same things, which is definitely not ideal for a game where you’re going to spend a lot of time in menus.

Navigating the world map felt much better, as all random battles are now completely optional. You can reject them if you run into them, and you can trigger one yourself when standing on a map space where random encounters occur. While this makes traversal feel much better, especially later in the game when crossing larger sections, it does have the less-than-ideal side effect of completely trivializing the ‘errands’ system. There’s no longer any risk to sending all your best guys on every job, because you know you’ll never be forced to fight while they’re unavailable. This means the entire errands system is now just a button-clicking simulator with no strategy or thought required, but you’ll still want to do them for the xp/jp/money and that’s kind of a bummer.

Unfortunately, while you might think that getting rid of forced random battles would naturally mean reducing grind, according to the fine folks at SquEnix (and this is a direct quote) “fuck you”. TIC is every bit as grindy as the other versions, so get ready to spend a fair bit of time opting in to those random battles if you want to keep your level high enough to progress. The optimal grinding strategy is still to kill every enemy in a battle except one and then group all your guys up and have them hit/cure/buff each other over and over for like 20 straight minutes, which is lame. It’s a real shame that they didn’t take this opportunity to rebalance xp/jp gain or even include an auto level scaling option or something to allow you to opt out of the tediousness, but here we are. You’re also incentivized to grind random battles for the money, as upgrading your gear is even more crucial in this game than most and the in-game economy stays reasonably relevant throughout.

Finally, in the OG and WotL releases, there are (somewhat famously) a couple of points in the game where it is possible to lock yourself out of further progression by entering certain sequences of story battles while at too low a level to beat them. This could actually brick your entire save file if you weren’t using rolling saves and didn’t have a save from before you entered these un-exitable sequences, so unless you knew about this in advance it was entirely possible to find yourself having to start over from scratch after getting 20+ hours deep into the game. Fortunately this has been corrected in TIC, and all multi-battle sequences can be restarted or exited to the world map at any point. In fact, normal one-off battles can now also be restarted directly from the in-combat menu, making it less annoying to reset a fight if it’s going south on you. Very nice touch.

Anyways, I could go on but this post has gotten way too long. If you’ve made it all the way through then thanks for reading, and if you haven’t played FFT yet I seriously suggest correcting that oversight at your earliest opportunity. It is, in my opinion, the best game in the entire Final Fantasy franchise, and I’ve played just about all of them.

For whatever reason, growing up I never got around to playing the James Bond game, Everything or Nothing. I was a Goldeneye man through ant through. Well. . . I finally got around to it and recently finished the game. I was soooo impressed with it. This game is FULL of ideas that are so much better than they needed to be - the enemy Ai, the rappelling off ledges, but the bit that stood out to me was how fucking good the driving sections are.

There’s a literal rally race section that has fantastic physics, challenging AI, a dynamic course, that is better than 80% of dedicated driving games. They were clearly incredibly proud of the driving as there are quite a few sections using it, even one that feels like a Motorstorm race, where you can choose from a bike or a car and the race plays out completely differently.

What games or sections, or mechanics feel unnecessarily good, like they were swinging for the fences on a game that didn’t necessarily require it?

RoboCop: Rogue City brings the classic film franchise to the modern day gaming audience, and if I had to draw parallels, it feels akin to the revitalization of Alien through its gaming media (although, apples and oranges really considering there's been a veritable flood of alien themed games comparative to RoboCop).

On the whole, despite any criticisms I may level, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience. So do keep that in mind where I may seem to be quibbling or particularly nitpicky.

A weak opening level

RoboCop opens with a lot of flair and a uniquely absurd premise where a local gang commandeers a media outlet to advertise their services to the "new guy". The fact the signal was never terminated until the de facto leader had finished his proposition was nothing short of comical. Still, this didn't color my opinion one way or another. Instead I found it more amusing than anything else.

No, the game starts out by thrusting the player into a firefight with said gang in the lobby of the media tower. The premise is very clear: guys bad, robo good; shoot them. Extremely simple, but highly engaging. Part of this is because of how visceral some of the appendage reactions can be. It's not Fallout levels of a gore explosion circus, but much more contained and believable as you blow off a hand or ballistically lobotomize a frontal lobe.

Another aspect is the environmental damage that sees you blowing chunks out of the concrete walls and pillars. It hearkens feelings back to FEAR and the kind of environmental destruction that gave that game so much identity. However, the issue here is the environmental interaction is inconsistent. It seems concrete readily responds to the player's shots where plywood and tarps didn't provide any sort of feedback or particle effects. Reasonable from a development time and quite possibly an optimization perspective, but it didn't stop the inconsistencies from sticking out.

The real villain of the first level isn't the gameplay, but what felt like a rather weak introduction to the world. You spend much of your time in maintenance tunnels or corporate cubicles and offices, neither of which are particularly inspiring. Instead of feeling like a proper showcase of the world, it feels more akin to a demonstration of Unreal Engine's stock assets.

A visual identity crisis

The most disappointing part of the RoboCop game carries through its entirety: a distinct visual identity. Let me preface the rest of this section by saying this did not dissuade me from completing it (let alone enjoying it far more than I'd hoped) but still worth calling out amongst both lauded and loathed game aspects.

The foremost issue is the HUD itself feels reminiscent of Fallout 3. It's a stark green that's nearly unmistakably, and rather unfortunately, etched into my mind as the Fallout HUD colors. Evidently, it elicited the same reaction from my much-less-gaming inclined wife.

That's not a nail in the coffin by any means, more an unfortunate color choice that only acts as supporting evidence to bolster some of my other arguments.

The real culprit lies in environments that feel inspired by life, but give no real sense of place. For instance, the main hub area where most missions take place is a rundown neighborhood. It's entirely believable in its presentation, but not particularly memorable. If I think to any of the games I previously mentioned, Alien Isolation or Fallout 3, there's a wholly distinct art style and direction that's much more recognizable. Even in the case of FEAR or Condemned, which also feature similarly cluttered and rundown environments, at least had their own horror setpieces to act as a kind of lightning rod for grounding player attention.

Instead, RoboCop felt more to me like a push in demonstrating graphical fidelity than securing a solid identity. Nothing wrong with that, but a focus on realism isn't exactly why I choose a particular title.

Satisfying gunplay and a touch of absurdity

I had such a great time with the gunplay and gameplay. It doesn't deliver anything particularly innovative, but what it does bring to the table is competent and fun. Really, it's the difference in effectiveness between the start and end of the game that I found satisfying.

You have both a skill point system to distribute amongst a handful of stats as well as a PCB chip board for your personal Auto 9 handgun. It's the combination of both of these that delivers noticeable growth and slight variations in weapon performance.

The most egregious part of the actual gameplay is the arsenal of the gangs you encounter. They're better equipped than the military it seems and toss grenades around like monkeys and their poop. Not to mention just how cavalier they are with their drugs and products and you've got some caricature level absurdity.

Funny enough, despite how over the top the game is at times, I really appreciated the consistency in RoboCop's stilted movement between cutscenes and actual gameplay. Others may not like the slower pace the player moves at, but I've seen too many games where there was a disparity between gameplay movement relative to cutscene outcomes that it was quite refreshing.

Lastly, I'd thought perhaps they'd fumble the reality of being a cop until I'd threatened a noise complaint with the comparable justice of broken bones. From that point forward, I knew they'd done their research.

Exploring Alex Murphy

The most compelling aspect to me about this game was the exploration of the man behind the robot: Alex Murphy. RoboCop shares a level of capability and indominability with someone like Superman, which can be a bit boring in regards to tension since there's little threat of defeat. Inevitably, this turns the stakes outward: protecting friends, family, loved ones, and even the public itself.

However, given the events in the game, it also does come back to Alex Murphy and a focus on his psychology which was executed well enough.

Ultimately, both aspects took what would be an otherwise straightforward shooter and introduced enough nuance to captivate the player despite my previous criticisms.

The world of Old Detroit

While the actual environmental design didn't capture my adulation, the setting itself and the writing that supported it certainly captivated me. While the Cyberpunk genre as a whole has been well explored by this point, it's wonderful seeing some of its roots going back as far as the RoboCop film and brought forward to modern audiences. Specifically, it's the aspect of the OCP corporation taking over a public service: the Detroit police department.

An interesting premise, sure, but not particularly engrossing by its own merit. It's how the writers chose to showcase public opinion around Old Detroit's current struggles and OCP's interference both inside the precinct and amongst the populace. It's well done and demonstrates the volatile and incongruous mixture of water, oil, and gasoline you'd expect in a situation like this. What makes it more effective is the constant tension someone or something is intent to strike a match.

While the constant tension kept my attention, it's the range of responses you hear from your colleagues and the citizens of Old Detroit that secured my adoration. It's here you'll see a rather apt reflection of our own society: a cautious optimism dripping with naivety that the mega corporation has the city's best interests at heart, hearty skepticism coupled with unmatched cynicism about the city's downfall, and even your peers opining about the infiltration and undercutting of the forces autonomy and capability in the midst of OCP to name a few.

There's too much here to cover, but I found the political and public discourse within the game captivating and one of the game's primary draws. Also, fuck Mayor Kuzak.

Final Thoughts

Having no real exposure to RoboCop prior to this, I'd always found the premise a tad silly or maybe even cheesy: part cop, part robot never struck me as engaging. That feeling didn't fully evaporate, but I certainly see the merit after completing my playthrough and I now have a much greater appreciation for the source material.

I think what the devs ultimately delivered was a surprisingly well-balanced experience, expertly delivering solid gameplay with an engaging world. While I found the primary antagonist and that resolution a bit subpar, the exploration of Alex and his humanity and the OCP's worming their way through the city and police force made up in spades.

I didn't expect a lot coming into this game, but I did leave it looking forward to the sequel and can easily recommend it to fans of the story-driven shooter genre.

The amount of creativity, passion, and detail in this game was beyond what I could have expected. The moment I booted the game and saw all the cutscenes, character banter, warping terrain, and colorful collectibles, I knew I was in for a wild ride.

There were times when the game blew me away to the point that I just had to put it down and take a break. It was too much to take in at once! For example, I went into the mind of the crazy guy who thought he was Napoleon. I was just messing around with the door item thinking "eh, I wonder if it would work on anyone." So I go in his mind, see a small room with two characters playing a board game, and think ok! I guess everyone does have something, if at least a simple small room. But then I accidentally jump into the game and seamlessly get SUCKED IN.

I felt the same awe with this game as I did when I played Little King's Story and Earthbound. Just wildly creative and deviously deep games that are just as much abstract art.

I will admit, the last stretch really tested my patience, especially the section where I have to escort Oly. And man, the camera was worse than Mario 64 overall. I had many moments of frustration, thinking how unfortunate it was that this game just didn't understand its limitations and was overly ambitious in its level design.

But honestly? Bless the team for trying anyway. I think their vision was worth the frustrations.

9/10 thank goodness there's a sequel out now.

Bought a fancy new graphics card then just played Doom instead.

There's no logical reason a game from 1993 is still this good to play in the year 2026. Could you call something where you play as a figure simply known as Doomguy relentlessly taking on demons from hell art? I'm not sure, but the best art persists and Doom persists.

I can play the opening level through in my head. Every part of it. I do think I could probably finish it with my eyes closed. Still to this day I don't think there are many games that have bettered the combination of tight levels, satisfying gameplay and pure exhilaration.

I went back to 1993 after bouncing off The Dark Ages when they made me ride a dragon like I was Daneyrs herself. A game made in the modern, corporate era with corporate masters and by people who I suspect hadn't really ever understood what it was that made the original work.

For me, Dark Ages was a victim of the current industry and it's obsession with feature bloat. There is power in simplicity and brevity. I don't need a shield. I'm Doomguy. I don't need combos. I'm Doomguy. And I definitely don't need a ****ing dragon.

At the danger of being old man shouts at cloud and the misty eyed nostalgia imp staring at me and the fact that I'm not 12 anymore I think the environment Doom was created in goes partly towards explaining why the game is so good. There is power in conflict. The team didn't always get on. They disagreed and argued and fell out and I doubt they had a HR team back then and you put all of this into a giant mixer and this is what comes out.

I rolled credits on 1993 for the very first time. I don't honestly even think I'd ever really touched episode three before which is quite wild really. What surprised me was that this was a game I could shoot through in an evening or two. The levels are short and snappy. The game treats you like an adult. There are no quest markers here. Play without a guide. You get stuck then you're gonna need to work this out for yourself big guy.

The pace is fast and relentless and I don't think that shooting an imp with one click of your shotgun has ever been bettered in all of gaming. Why is the sound of a door opening somewhere still so scary and off putting? The ability to recognise exactly what's around the corner by the noises the demons make is exhilarating. I'm down to my shotgun now but it doesn't feel hopeless. Well it does feel hopeless but if I can just make it around this corner, take out those imps and grab that health pack then maybe...

Then you get to the final level and your stick a few BFG shots at a spiderdemon and you're done. 10/10.

Is this the best game that's ever been made? It might be.

I don't know if this is the type of writing fit for this sub, but here you go:

There is a montage of scenes from the events of 1989 to 1993 in the former Soviet Union, serving as a music video to Kino’s harrowing song, Кончится лето or Summer is ending. When the song was released Tsoi was already dead and republics of the union already breaking away. This montage haunted me for many nights, often accompanied by a drink or two, seldom accompanied by tears—mind-numbingly swift dissolution of this corrupted worker’s state, this union of deserters of internationalism, this bureaucratic mass of apparatchiks, this social-chauvinist refuse, this greatest achievement of humanity, this shining beacon of hope, this possibility of salvation on earth.

Kujlevka takes place in this period.

And it kept reminding me of лето.

Summer is ending, and thus one year after another will slip away and thus life itself will go by, and for the hundredth time the sandwich will fall butter-side-down. Unlike us who are doomed to live in a world where the collapse of the Soviet Union actually happened as it did, Kujlevka offers a door out of this mess, a flying saucer collapsing right into a kolkhoz chairman’s office. The premise is, the saucer operates as a wish-granter and hearing what is the one thing that people desire the most is a perfect foil device to understanding the people of an era where confusion was the primary modus operandi.

Vasily, the kolkhoz chairman, acts as a translator layer between the people and the saucer. We can either translate verbatim what they claim to want, or blunt their wants to ensure that their wants are in line with our wants, or understand people to understand their actual wants. If you think the process sounds rudimentary, as if it is just applying Papers Please formula to the Soviet collapse era, you would be as wrong as Gorbachev. Kujlevka is something much more. The saucer, the alien visitation is a foil, not only to the wishers themselves but also for Vasily who is far from a blank slate. Each wish, each chapter brings out what we want for Vasily into materialization, his dreams in between guiding us to make, not the right choices, but the informed choices.

You, the individualist, may think the right choice for Vasily is to get back his family, his loved ones. You, the capitalist, may think the right choice for Vasily is to be filthy-insanely rich. I think the right choice for Vasily is the glorious restoration of Soviet Union, red flags adorning every facet of life, and the people are guided by the loving but firm hand of the party, just not corrupt this time. You and I may be adamant in our decisions, but this voice that guides us in our surreal dreams will subject our beliefs to a ruthless and affectionate critique. Being challenged in the dream state, in the real space material conditions will sow doubts in each turn, we will see if our choices hold up then.

The apparition of Stalin visits me in my dreams, I tell him that I hate him, not because I think he was a dictator, on the contrary I think he was not a dictator, he asks me what I think communism is, I tell him it is ultimate freedom, he agrees with me, and Yeltsin starts blabbing on the TV, I turn off the TV, summer is ending, Vasily is waiting for an answer and there is no more hope. In a part of my brain лето’s opening riff keeps blasting, I keep humming, and think to myself this is the only game Lunacharsky would have loved.

I understand as wishes pile up, the ordinary people of the Kujlevka village and eventually the world, wish for nothing more than an immediate relief to all their problems. A woman wants more milk from her goat, a man wants vodka, a cripple wants a better wheelchair and the saucer brings this relief they desperately need. Then, what was the Soviet state if nothing but a wish-granter? Dilapidated, hollowed out, neglected by the late 80’s and early 90’s maybe, but while the cogs were new and the whole machine was well oiled, it was granting homes, dachas, maternity leaves, summer camps, and pride to the Soviet citizen, and only the Soviet state and aliens could have done that.

The fact that there was such a state, the fact that it collapsed in the manner it did, I do not know if our past is more surreal or more magical realist. Kujlevka itself has its feet planted on both shores. Sometimes it is haunting and oneiric, sometimes it is heartfelt and didactic. Sometimes matters pertaining to Vasily’s own past feel surreal, sometimes the world itself. There is no great barrier of perception between introspection and extrospection, we evaluate matters by applying the same dreamlike but real lens on both. Sometimes Vasily and I shivered at the sight of an intergalactic express, sometimes we shivered at how material our compatriots’ desires are.

Despite my late-night drinking sessions to лето, I would not call glasnost and perestroika emotional affairs, but as the game lays out, what else could be so dramatic? There is a video on Youtube about a couple of guys exploring Baikonur, where remnants of the Buran programme reside. Buran sitting in the background, unmaintained, its outer plaques falling off and some even being sold on Ebay, they go on a solemn but brief explanation about how, after a couple of successful missions, the programme was cancelled by Yeltsin. I cannot help but compare Buran, just a small part in the greater story of dissolution, to tragedies, such as Hamlet or Oedipus, and think about which is more emotionally devastating.

So this is Kujlevka, a playful, real, soulful, surreal lamentation for a beacon and season long faded. Not faded out of memory though, and I don’t know if the yearning will ever cease for this object of terrible love and hate. Even if what I wrote here does not solely belong to the domain of Kujlevka, I believe art is often as strong as the connotations it recalls.

On the day I started playing Kujlevka I received the Summer Eternal anthology on my doorstep, created by one faction of ZA/UM exiles and it starts with Abimael Guzman’s lines:

“Now comes the new humanity,

The humanity of joy, the proletariat,

The only blaze that will never be extinguished!

We are one of its sparks. We are a small part of

This immense bonfire, it is our turn to set them on fire.

The sparks are fanned by storm winds.”

And I think to myself, maybe this is just a blip in the long summer.

Summer is ending and summer eternal/10

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.