2022 (3/3): Furry Detective Funfest

It's finally time for the third part of my 2022 blog! In hindsight it was a good idea to cut this blog into pieces, every segment stands out more as a result, and it makes my thoughts fresher. For this blog in particular I also wrote my thoughts as I finished games, rather than all in the end. 

Make sure to read the other parts of this year's blog, too! 

But without delay, let's get into the real meat and potatoes of the blog!

Rank-up-Videogames: The Fifth One

Trolley Problem Inc.

Immediately starting with a controversial game, oh my! This one did the rounds a bit on my Twitter feed as an example of people not getting the game's point and leaving negative reviews.

The game's whole gimmick is that it's a whole series of Trolley Problems where it keeps giving new scenarios and prompting you to choose. The big sticking point for people seems to be that the narrator often berates you regardless of your choice, that the game's always withholding info and that the choices are binary in nature. 

Titania & Saphira's favourite choice

Which is, well, yeah. Duh? Isn't that the whole point of the game? Isn't that the whole point of binary moral quandaries? The scenarios are meant to be dumb white void scenarios with a lot of unknown variables. Most scenarios would probably immediately swing to "I won't do that" if they added a "But you will be arrested if you do that" addendum to them. The voice berating you with things like "Good job, one of those five people was going to cure cancer" turns out to be a big joke when you go back and do the other route and she says "Good job, that one person was going to cure cancer.", because how on Earth is anyone meant to know that beforehand? Anyone in these scenarios can grow up to CURE CANCER or BE THE NEXT HITLER, it's silly! 

The biggest joke of that kind is one where you choose whether to ignore or euthanize a dying dog, and the game's like "Wow, you didn't even save the dog?" despite it being a totally binary choice. Apparently some people get actually upset by that?? How thin-skinned are these people, my goodness. It's so obviously a joke. 

Anyway, that's not to say I wholly like the game. It's pretty short, and I doubt it'll stick to my mind that long. I do like the sheer breadth and diversity of the questions. The game does kinda derail near the end and gets all metaphysical and whatnot. It might because of you consuming the redpill (literally) but some of the last stuff just gets too fantastical.

Let It Die, Let It Die, Let It Shrivel Up And Die!

The game also does this thing where it seems like your choices will affect later questions, but AFAIK it never really does. Pushing the fat man in front of the trolley seems like it affects a later question, but if you don't do it he dies of a heart attack anyway so it doesn't matter. Sometimes the story advances in a specific, pre-determined route even if you take an option where you explicitly do the thing that shouldn't lead to it. It's just weird. 

This is also where apparently the game pulls a trick, since you CAN save the dog, and it DOES affect something, but you need to take a third option in like that one specific question. And I don't like that. That just undermines the rest of the game. Not sure why the game decided that for that one specific case it was going to bend its own rules. Weird. 

The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game

A cute, wholesome little game where you're playing as a frog detective solving a case on a mysterious haunted island. This game caught my attention for its chill vibes, both in its simplistic low-poly artstyle and the silly nature of the writing. It's short, it's sweet, it's just a good time. Just don't go into it expecting an actual mystery, it's about as mysterious as any given AF:C quest!

Peak aesthetic

There's honestly not much else to say about the game! What you see is exactly what you get with this one. I really do appreciate the way it looks though, it's extremely goofy and silly but it's also very earnest about it. The sheer awkwardness of much of the dialogue is also a treasure, and I mean that in the good sense where the writers know these characters are a bunch of weirdos whose small talk quickly devolves into the realm of the bizarre. And that's good!!

I ship it!

Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard

I don't know why the naming scheme of this sequel is different than the first game's!!

But I do know this, for fans of the first game, this sequel gives more of everything that was fun about the first game. Frog Detective is back, and the plot picks up immediately where the first game ends! Like, very immediately. I'm talking like a minute or so between games, maybe less. 

LOBSTER COP

Newly added to this game are two things: LOBSTER COP and THE NOTEBOOK. The former of course speaks for itself, but the Notebook is a handy way to keep track of the cast of characters and their needs. Though given how short the game is, I wonder if anyone would ever need it...

Regardless, the first game's charm is still there throughout this whole second game. More of the same is a winning formula in my book, if the same is a good thing. And in this case, it very much is.

I'm always saying this.

Frog Detective 3: Corruption at Cowboy County

Hello!! Mania from the future here, putting this game directly after Frog Detective 2 even though I only played it months after, as it wasn't out yet when I finished Frog detective 2! 

*Thunderous applause*

Going into this, I was hoping for and expecting more of the same, but with a more grand conclusion as it seemed this was gonna be the end of the trilogy. I'm happy to say that was exactly what I got! The gameplay still plays out much the same, you explore the area, talk to all NPCs and solve their tasks to obtain items to solve other tasks, until you did all tasks and you go through the conclusion. 

What's different is that this time the conclusion has more oomph behind it, unlike the first game where there wasn't really any culprit at all and the second game where the culprit kinda was also the victim. This time there's an ACTUAL ANTAGONIST!! It's also pretty obvious who it is, but still! The game puts in a fun twist near the end and has a satisfying and on-brand conclusion. 

Epic.

Overall it's a fun trilogy of games that knows it's light fare and doesn't try to be more than that. And I can respect that, a game knowing what it is and being the best it can be within that framework.

Also Frog Detective is gay, which is a big fat W for me personally, who is now invested in his budding romance with his new boyfriend. 

Investi-Gator

I sure did play a lot of cute mystery games back-to-back! This one also has anthro characters! And a very much not super HD 3D artstyle! And it's goofy and not serious!

Economic law is very serious!!

And yet the games are very clearly distinct. Where Frog Detective is all about chill and laid-back vibes, Investi-Gator goes all-in on the utterly silly and the perpetually subversive. This game is made of curveballs, it's constantly twisting and contorting the standards of what a detective game should be.

This is most obvious in the fact that the protagonist is a completely bumbling yet ultimately good-hearted buffoon while the antagonist is desperate to get caught for his crimes but just keeps getting away with it all. It's a delightfully silly romp all the way through.

He seems innocent.

This one's actually got 3 cases, though the first one is incredibly short at just a single 8-minute segment. The other two cases are substantially more substantive, substantiated by the fact they're cut up into multiple parts each. What starts as a simple theft turns out to be anything but...

Drama! Tension! Fish!

Honestly, yeah, this game's held together by its charm and humour. And it's both charming and humorous! The only complaint I have is that one room in the game was buggy since I kept getting scenes interrupted by a different scene, which broke stuff. Thankfully I could just go back to the main menu to fix it, but it still took me out of the EPIC CLIMAX. 

Overall I'd recommend all these silly detective games! 

BROK The InvestiGator

Haaa!! You thought that was the last of the Furry Detective Games?! Think again! That was but a mere prelude to the ultimate Furry Detective Game! Also, spoiler warning! Skip this segment if you wanna play the game.

To speak honestly, this game really caught me by surprise for how good it turned out to be. I went into it expecting a more serious and traditional point-and-click adventure game with some beat-'em up mechanics, but the actual breadth of the game's inspirations, the polish in the execution and the sheer heart of the game's core father/stepson dynamic amazed me. The game nails the look of a 90s era Disney cartoon such as Darkwing Duck, but the tone of the game is much more dark and serious than that would imply. And despite that it also manages to have that sense of PG-ness and earnestness to it. 

BROK's plot in a nutshell

I was ready to say the GOTY for 2022 was gonna be an easy sweep for Bugsnax, but now I'm not so sure. Bugsnax definitely resonated with me, and it's certainly the bigger budget title, but BROK combined so many elements I love, it had so many "Wait we're doing THIS?! YEEEES!" moments and it was overall more directed, being less of an oddball game. Neither game's perfect of course, and perhaps they can both share the number one spot... (In hindsight, as I am editing this blog I would say this was my personal GOTY.)

Ok, so what actually is this game? BROK's a mash-up of the typical point-and-click adventure gameplay with elements of a visual novels (big focus on plot and character relationships), detective games such as the Zero Escape and Ace Attorney series with a smattering of beat-'em up action to spice up the gameplay. 

But maybe not too much.

The setting is a vaguely post-apocalyptic country inhabited by anthropomorphic humans, with a strict segregation between the people living a comfortable life under a giant protective dome and the people eking out a difficult existence in the wastelands around the dome. The wasteland is covered in a perpetual haze that requires all inhabitants to take a pill daily lest they die from respiratory failure, and problems with the wasteland's pill delivery system make up the overarching mystery for private investigator Brok to solve. Meanwhile his stepson Graff is doing his very best at school to earn his diploma, the only way he'll ever be able to earn the right to live under the dome. 

🥺

While there's overarching mysteries regarding the interconnected cases Brok goes on and the trials Graff has to complete, the emotionally resonant core of the game lies in the fractured relationship between the protagonists Brok and Graff. Brok tries his best to be a good father, but circumstances keep conspiring to drive an ever-deeper wedge between him and Graff.

Do NOT tempt him, Graff

I was genuinely surprised by how hard the game goes with this relationship. Both the script and the voice acting keep churning out some extremely raw lines and deliveries. I expected the game to go through your typical arc of the well-meaning and bumbling father and the brooding, edgy teenager, but the game spares no effort to point out just how consistently Brok keeps failing his promises to Graff and keeps piling on more and more secrets, or how Graff clearly has severe lingering trauma about the mysterious circumstances of his mother's death and Brok's potential involvement therein. The way he freaks out every time Brok tries to physically comfort him was painful to see, in a good way.

It's the player's actions throughout the game that dictate the success of Brok's assignments, Graff's trial and the resolution of their familiar bond, or the complete dissolution thereof. There's 11 endings, but none of them have entirely happy resolutions. Some are definitely happier than others, while the definitively worst ending feels like well-earned consequences for a playthrough of utterly violent and destructive behaviour. 

Kinda true

That's because the game's incredibly flexible in how you approach your typical point-and-click sequences. Pretty much every single puzzle can be solved through action, combat or violence instead of thinking, and the consequences thereof range from mild to severe. Some of the options and routes you can take actually surprised me, you can be just heinous or sloppy and it's a 50/50 coin toss on whether it's a game over or the game actually proceeds, and the consequences if the game does continue tend to come back later. 

Oops.

I also liked the rest of the game's core cast, they all felt like the fit naturally into the game's setting, and there was a palpable chemistry between all the characters and the two protagonists. The voice acting quality is top-notch across the board, too. I'm actually still blown away by the sheer amount of voice acting there is to the game, every single line is fully voiced, and there's over 20,000 bits of dialogue in total. 

The game also wins big with its aesthetics, the game's artstyle really brings back memories of those shows I'd used to watch as a kid, there's a lot of appeal to the character designs and overall art direction. The amount of frames of animation isn't as smooth as it could be in a bigger budget production, but this rarely felt like a detriment since the game had very expressive character busts during dialogue. I especially appreciate how the posing of the characters' bodies varies a lot between expressions. 

My favourite pose, for obvious reasons.

The game's OST is good too, as one might expect. The music for the brawler sequences feel like out of an action game, while some of the music would feel right at home in a Zero Escape game. I'm especially impressed by how many tracks there are, there's over 50 I'm pretty sure. 

What really impressed me was the unexpected inspirations the game has. While there's some clear Ace Attorney inspirations early on, a later chapter is a full-blown Ace Attorney case, with a perky assistant, a defendant, witnesses, a victim, and a culprit whose actions and motives you need to piece together over an hour-long logic confrontation that hits all the highs from an actual Ace Attorney case, including a full-on culprit meltdown and s shocking end-of-case twist that contextualizes the whole case. 

The twist

And my favourite thing is, you can totally botch this case in 5 different ways and the game will accept it. You can beat the shit out of everybody until there's nobody left to accuse, you can accuse the defendant because it's easy, you can scrape together some crappy logic about how it was actually suicide all along or charge someone based on nothing but actual prejudice and the real culprit will be assisting you through a whole gameplay sequence of bogus logic, it's amazing. You can even accuse your own assistant, despite the utter impossibility that he could be guilty. Hilarious. 

It was the lovable assistant all along!

What surprised me most of all is how much Zero Escape inspiration there is in the game. From the wacky timespace science theories from the mysterious best friend to the Escape Room trial Graff goes through, these sequences had be lose my mind with theorizing and speculation. 

The game also leaves some very interesting open strands for a possible sequel. While the game does set up and properly resolve its own central mystery, there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes that clearly implies there's a larger mystery to the setting, and the man-behind-the-man is still out there. What makes this game's resolution satisfying nonetheless unlike Virtue's Last Reward is that there's still several others endings that are satisfying conclusions in their own right. Having both satisfying endings that give a closed and self-contained narrative alongside an open-ended conclusion that leaves room for speculation gives the best of both worlds.

And now comes the part where I glurge about specific stuff I like. That's right, it's time for Mania Mode. 

NEXTRA

First and foremost, wow, I really do love the way the characters look in this. They're all very top-heavy designs, which emphasizes the heads. The 90s cartoon style is also something you just don't really see much in games, which is weird since a lot of people grew up on it and it's very visually appealing. There's a large variety of the species of NPCs, too, and they're all very expressive as I mentioned prior, which really adds to the cartoony look. Which of course contrasts humorously with all the dark subject matter, despite the game's refusal to use naughty words or have any blood or gore or whatnot. It's kinda unique, honestly, to have a game with such dark content matter but otherwise no 'mature content' whatsoever.

Though the game does have some absolutely CURSED MOMENTS, little bits of dialogue that suddenly hit you with some really weird implications out of nowhere, which are always a lot of fun, such as:

-Goat cheese from actual sapient goat milk

-That time it seemed like a robot could give birth

-The exhibitionist scientists who loves to make his robot undress him

-Brok inflation

-That time Brok got horny at the final boss

-Cynical ending

YEEEEEES

One of the first things you can do in the game is beat the shit out of your adopted son, who understandably gets really upset with you. You can also murder a vagrant moments later, and destroy a seemingly somewhat sentient robot to "put them out of their misery". This is only the start of the sheer amount of assholery you can do. Another good one is that time you need to get a kid who's guarding a room to go to the toilet, where you can either do some puzzles, or knock him out cold and make him piss himself.  

Same, TBH.

A sequence that was a lot of fun was the lie detector interrogation after getting arrested at the end of chapter 1. The music and questions keeps getting more and more intense, and then the big twist of the interrogation is that Brok has apparently murdered someone at some point, even if the player never made him kill anyone. He doesn't even seem to remember who he killed, either, which makes for an interesting running mystery. Due to his memory issues, it's hard to know exactly when Brok knows more or less than the player. And to think this isn't even the only electroshock sequence...

Near the end of the first day is when the cool best hacker friend suddenly starts rambling about spacetime theories and time travel, going on a true Akane Kurashiki-style stream of exposition, including a weird analogy and everything. From that point on every scene with her becomes more and more Zero Escape-y, culminating in an actual plot twist that she is indeed building a legit time machine, and has been doing some stuff behind the scenes to prevent a time paradox. Piecing together that this was actually going on was a mindblowing twist, since everything else up to that point was so grounded in reality. 

Akane Momento

Day 2 is when things really start to spice up. Graff gets two sequences that are both extremely Zero Escape, the first of which is a whole SEEK A WAY OUT puzzle room with inventory item puzzles, out-of-the-box thinking and whatnot. What then follows is Sigmund Connol's favourite room, the electroshock trap. Either Graff, or his preppy annoying rival student needs to chain himself to the wall and then play a twisted game where messing up makes the one stuck to the wall get electroshocked. You can imagine the myriad of ways in which this can go wrong. 

THE DECISION GAME

Putting yourself in there can either lead to a nice session where you get shocked once, or a nightmare where the rival keeps smashing the electroshock button on purpose until you're nearly dead. But putting him in instead lets you push it even further and just outright kill him, which seems like it'd be a game over, but the game actually keeps going regardless. Oh, and his mom confronts you moments after, as she's been monitoring the trial, so that's an extra layer of fun.

Meanwhile Brok gets his own super extended murder investigation sequence. It really is something just how expansive this sequence is, I think it took me around 3 hours in total, which is about the lenght of an early Ace Attorney case, minus all the fluff and filler. Which is funny when you can skip all that and solve the case in a minute by accident, or just beat everybody up to skip all of it. Again, I love the freedom the game offers. The culprit also goes through all the classic AA motions, except this time you actually get to fight the culprit rather than just see their breakdown. 

Is this YGO 5Ds?

I like the big lore room in the final Graff trial, where the big reveal is that the game's actually set millions of years in the future, where humanity seemingly got wiped out and instead these anthropomorphic animals became the new humans. Us regular humans are known as "Tamed Earthians" instead, and regarded much as we regard Neanderthals now. This actually explains why the cast keeps referring to themselves as humans rather than animals, they basically replaced us regular humans at some point. Funny how this furry confusion plot point actually turns out to be relevant to the worldbuilding. 

RIP Homo Universalis

Some recurring bits are Brok's nightmares, where he's wracked with guilt over something he did in the past, and his family keeps accusing him of murder and whatnot. I love the super dark tone of these sequences,which is amplified by the tense music. It's not until the end of the game that the mystery of what's up with that gets some explanation, just enough to piece together a coherent theory while leaving enough open bits for a sequel. 

That should be sufficient, yes. Overall I do wholly recommend this game! It's good!!

I've also joined the game's Discord server since beating it, and it's been a lot of fun! I got to do so much awful shitposting. And a lot more has happened since!~

Steven Universe: Unleash the Light

This game's a sequel to a game I'd talked about before in my 2020 roundup, the third in the Prism series of Steven Universe games. First there was Attack the Light, then Save the Light and now finally Unleash the Light. I feel like what I said back then could be said again for this game:

"Remember this? It feels like the Steven Universe fandom hardly does, I never see anybody talk about it! I can see why though, while it is a neat game and the plot fits in with SU's established world, it also has to force itself to be a side story at most with no impact on the actual show."

Back then Unleash the Light was already out on mobile platforms, but it's only gotten ported to Steam after that. The game's since gotten some free content updates, the content of which I did get to sample indeed.

The plot of this game would be interesting, as it's set between the events of the show's climax and the sequel continuity of Steven Universe: The Movie and Steven Universe Future, but the exploration of the impact that the grandiose Era 3 would have on the SU setting is dealt with mostly through some brief banter with generic NPCs.

Georgio Manos

Basically, the plot here is thinner than it was in the previous game. While Save the Light had an imposing villain and immediate threat in Hessonite, the dual antagonists in Unleash the Light (Demantoid and Pyrope) never really feel like they are truly a threat. At this point in the continuity Steven could very well just order a task force to take them down, the idea is mentioned in the game itself, and it's only through good will and optimism that Steven decides to handle the matter of these would-be tyrants himself.

The result is that there's just very little time spent exploring much character work. The basic concepts are still there, characters are indeed in-character, and the things they say all make sense, but there's less oomph to it here. Though I do appreciate that they decided to cast the previous game's villain as a goofball ally in this one.

Literally me

I can definitely tell that the game was a mobile game first and foremost, the overall combat and world traversal from the previous game has been simplified down. Combat isn't in Active Time anymore, and the position aspect has been reduced to a simpler formation system. Honestly, I think this system is overall less prone to imbalance, and I think it actually makes the game's pace quicker, especially in the simpler overworld traversal. But it also feels like there has been something lost.

Combat's also still pretty imbalanced, as soon as I unlocked the latest update character Greg, who basically is the group's bard-like character, my strategy basically became to pair his ability to chain an attack/heal to any action performed by an ally with a cast of allies who can perform a lot of cheap and free actions per turn, to basically try and KO enemy groups ASAP and heal to full HP quickly. I really decimated the game's later boss battles, both the penultimate boss and the final boss went down in 2 turns.

I did enjoy the game overall, still. They got back all of the vocal cast except for Bismuth's VA (who's a big star, so no shock there), and there's a lot of references and dialogue bits to enjoy for fans of the series. I can tell that Corona forced Peridot and Connie's VA's to record from home though, as the quality of their recordings is notably lower quality than others. SU:UtL would hardly be the first game I've covered that suffered dev issues from Corona, though... 

Peridot caused Corona

Anyway, as I said before, this is worth checking out if you're a SU fan and like the RPG combat they had in Attack & Save the Light.

Binding of Isaac: Fiend Folio Reheated

Ah, Binding of Isaac. Not my first rodeo. Every once in a while, I get a hankering to just play some Isaac. Usually I just do a vanilla run using regular Isaac, though lately I've also been enjoying Greed Mode runs as Keeper. They really made that character so much more fun to play when they released Repentance...

Anyway, yes, last month a pretty big mod dropped its own Repentance update, Fiend Folio! This one has all the usual things you'd expect from a big collaborative Isaac mod, there's new enemies, bosses, rooms, items, trinkets. challenges. The only thing it doesn't add is a new game route, but it makes up for that by expanding on the existing routes so much, and diversifying the different paths each chapter can have. 

I've been having fun playing the game since then. The Fiend character has a pretty difficult playstyle, where the order of your health actually matters and it's easy to get into a position where even 12 hearts still have you 3 hits from death in any given room. The Golem character is just totally busted, it gets a ton of free resources on every floor, and gets a ton of control on how to best use these resources. The only drawback with it is how this system also just slows down gameplay a lot. I've not messed around much with Tainted Fiend yet, but it seems like kind of a gimmick like most Tainted characters do. I don't often play as any of them these days, TBH. I do wonder what Tainted Golem will be.

I do wanna shoutout all of the new art in the game, like the sprites, the animations, the music, etc. A lot of it doesn't really fit with Vanilla Isaac, but that's why it's a mod in the first place. The sheer variety is nice, and the visual flair updates to a lot of rooms makes the environments less stale after so many runs. Sometimes it does feel overwhelming though!

I also got the Andomeda mod, which adds much fewer content, basically just the titular Andomeda character, its Tainted version and associated unlocks, but I really dig the theming of them and the playstyle focus on the rather underused Planetariums. The astral aesthetic in general is also just cool.

I ALSO played the Revelations Mod, which is another big impressive overhaul that adds new characters, items and floors and enemies and bosses and whatnot. It's very polished, but also feels quite overtuned in terms of gimmicks and difficulty.

Demetrios: The BIG Cynical Adventure

So, before making BROK, the developer COWCAT made Demetrios. This is actually a remake of a work he made as a teenager, and it kinda shows. 

BROK is very earnest. While it can be silly at times, there's a heartfelt emotional core. Demetrios is the exact opposite, it adamantly refuses to take anything seriously, it's a lot more vulgar and crass. 

You don't add this option for no reason

Well, the good part is that the puzzle logic does mostly check out. If anything I'd say the only times I really got stuck was times when I had to go talk to an NPC, usually when I'd gotten a new objective and the solution was to ask an NPC for an item/assistance. The sort of thing that can be solved by just talking to NPCs frequently. 

The game's also funny, sometimes. The game's got a lot of jokes, and a lot of them do hit. I like it when the game's just about this gaggle of horrible people and their pathetic lives. The problem is when the game veers into the territory of just being outright problematic. The script throws around the word "retard" and its variations way too much, and it's just so awkward each and every time. There's a whole segment in a just overall kinda racist depiction of not-Syria. The protagonist also seems to just hate women in general, like, I'm not sure if it's because the female NPCs are generally lesser assholes so the protagonist's overall attitude is much less justified, or he just hates women. 

Bjorn when no women

So yeah, while on the one hand I can see how the same person made both these games, I can also see just how different they are. I do rather wish that when Demetrios got adapted for this remake, it'd gotten a bigger finetuning to the script, as that part of the game really needed more sprucing up. 

This is despair.

I did enjoy the game overall, it just has some really rough edges. It shows it's from 1999 in its story design, rather than gameplay design.

Why this guy hot tho

Now that I'm editing the blog, I daresay I went way too easy on this game. I still think it has good parts, but oof, the writing really lets it down hard. 

Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Or Like a Dragon: Like a Dragon as it's known as now) is the 7th entry in the Yakuza series, but serves as a sort of soft reboot of the series. With a new protagonist in Ichiban Kasuga and a wholly revamped gameplay system that's a pure JRPG rather than a 3D fighting game, this was the perfect starting point for me to get into the series. 

And hot damn, what a game. There's a lot going on in any given Yakuza game, it seems. The series has a reputation for being a giant time sink. My final runtime for Yakuza:LAD amounts to about 95 hours. Some of that is spent AFK, but most of it wasn't. This game really is long and packed with content. The main campaign has a bunch of long cutscenes, there's a vast amount of sidequests which range from pretty short to very involved, and of course there's plenty of random battles and chances to grind throughout the game.

That feeling when a number goes up.
That feeling is me. MANIA.

Let's go over all that stuff one-by-one, starting with the game's biggest point of interest: How is a Yakuza game a JRPG? The way they explain this in-story is pretty hilarious, all of the JRPG flavouring is just a product of Kasuga's overactive imagination. He imagines himself and his friends as JRPG protagonists, and the random thugs he fights as all sorts of bizarre weirdos. This also explains why everybody can pull of all sorts of wacky moves, like summoning giant mountains of wine glasses, or ladder acrobatics, or Kasuga's orbital death satellite. The game never really fully explains just how or why this all works, but it does explain why the things that happen in combat needn't be reflected in the actual story. Even if you trounce a boss, that's just Kasuga getting carried away in his mind, in the next cutscene he'll still look battered and bruised.

Finally, a proper JRPG boss battle

It's also fun to see all these JRPG staples applied to a contemporary modern-day setting without it being a quirky Earthboundian-style JRPG. Pretty much every staple is there, but with a modern spin. Healing items are energy drinks or food, the job system is accessed through an Employment Service Center, the dungeons are underground tunnels, office spaces and skyscrapers, there's boss battles with construction equipment, summoning magic is phoning your friends in to perform some powerful ability. Lots of wacky nonsense. 

As for how the combat plays out... Well, it's not the greatest JRPG combat I've experienced. It's fine, if honestly just very basic. The game has 7 primary attack elements: Blunt/Slashing/Gun/Magic and Fire/Ice/Electric. There's elements of positional strategy, as the game's AoE skills usually only hit a certain area, but this is hard to make work as everybody in combat is always randomly walking around and the AoEs are not made clear at all. There's status ailments, but only the ones that stop actions like Paralysis matter. You can boost and lower stats, but even though I used them they never felt too impactful. 

For the most part random battles are just a matter of spamming AoE skills to beat everybody before they get any turns in, while boss battles are a matter of slowly whittling down their large HP pools through attrition. The only boss that ever felt like a threat was the dual boss in chapter 13, that was a sudden spike in difficulty, and all fights after that felt easy again. 

This is one area where I hope the sequel can do better, JRPGs have evolved a lot over time, and it's definitely possible to make a game that's like a classic JRPG while also having actual depth and strategy. It shouldn't take until one boss battle like 80% into the game and maybe the bonus bosses for the game to pose a challenge, while every other battle can be dealt with the same way. Combat can also start to feel slow after so many hours of gameplay, once I got the item that turns off random battles I immediately put it on since by that point I was just done with them entirely anyhow.

But in the end, the combat is just a way for the game to put some content between the main story beats and the sidestories. That's where the real meat of the game is.  The main story is quite the rollercoaster ride of emotions, but definitely leans on the heavy stuff. Yakuza seems to have somewhat of a reputation for having serious stories alongside super silly side content, and it seems to hold up for this game. There were some story beats that I didn't care too much for, such as how much importance is placed on the money fabrication scheme that occupies a large part of the middle of the plot, but once things pick up near the end, they pick up hard.

ZETSUBOU

The characters do a good job of carrying the plot. Kasuga's a very likable protagonist in both the main story and side content, and he's backed up by a good cast of allies and enemies. The party member friendship missions in particular do a good job of setting up Kasuga's relation to all the party members, and all the party banters have them acting like a bunch of complete bozos, which is of course always a good time.

And then there's the side stories. Whew, the side stories. These are some of the wackiest sidequests I've seen in a game, and of course they're always played with just the right level of sincerity to make it work. Whether it's a masochist's quest to feel pain, go-kart racing, becoming the top 1 company in the region or fighting a monkey in an excavator, Ichiban's always getting roped into these shenanigans and willing to go along with it, often reluctantly. There's a good mixture of comedic relief and heartfelt moments in these sidequests, and the rewards for them often contain good equipment and summons, so they're worth doing both for the satisfaction and rewards.

No lies detected.

There's also a bunch of minigames, which vary from can collecting on a bicycle to playing Shogi or Mahjong to baseball and karaoke. These vary in how much fun they are, but I enjoyed the Corporate Governance Sim and Dragon Kart minigames the most, probably since they're the most fleshed out of the bunch. 

Average sidequest character

One thing that does recur throughout all of this, however, is how slow a lot of the game feels. Nothing ever feels fast or snappy in this game, and over such a long runtime all the little delays just add up. I also noticed that cutscenes in a few specific areas ran extremely slowly, meaning I had to manually skip through bits in a voiced cutscene, which is awkward. 

So overall my experiences are generally positive, but there are some problems here and there. The game has heart and soul, it's never the plot or characters that let things down, but the technical performance and janky gameplay sometimes hold it back. I'm hoping a sequel can improve on these things! 

Séance: Spectral Noise

I already talked about the demo of this game last year, and since then a second demo has come out, which includes the second of five total chapters. Chapter 2 is rather longer than Chapter 1 was, having a whole sequence preceding the titular séance. I liked it a lot! The core gameplay of the Séances is still compelling, and the second Chapter lays out a lot of plot threads and nuggets, which gives me a clearer idea of what the rest of the game might look like. I look forward to the full release, whenever that might be!

Tessa Moment

Having read through an Exit/Corners playthrough earlier this year too, I can say that while I still really love E/C, I am so far enjoying the character writing for S:SN more! 

Beacon Pines

I found out about this game from some kerfuffle in the BROK server about people saying it was their GOTY and it having a very high rating on Steam, but also some people saying it was super underwhelming. I of course had to know more, so I decided to try it myself since it was still 20% off from its launch discount.

Is Beacon Pines shit? Opinions are divided.

Beacon Pines is basically a visual novel where you can walk around and have very limited interaction with the environment. There's multiple branching points where you can pick one of several words to change the course of a story, which functions somewhat like plot locks where you need to explore certain branches to learn the word needed to open other branches. the marketing might make it seem grander than that, but it's not far off from the plot lock system in Uchikochi's games, just they hide the exact number of locks and options every branch has. Most have two, some have three, and it's the ones early in the game that matter most. Much like those Uchikochi games, there's one true route, but unlike them in this game there's only one truly good ending route, there's no real Pyrrhic Victory route or anything.

The Cursed Ending

The game's plot is cohesive, and there were two twists about the identity of some characters where I only realized right before they happened what was going on, and immediately connected some dots to realise every clue to piece it together has indeed been established before. There's also some twists that veer more into the deeply silly, tho one of those occurs in a moment where the scene is well-written enough to enable suspension of disbelief.

I did like the characters overall, and the villain eventually was fun in a kind of pathetic way, but the plot did seem oddly short overall, so a lot of things need to happen in a pretty quick pace. That leaves very little room for little side stuff or filler to flesh out the world, which I think is what I most missed. There are some moments where it's meant to be big and important, but the game's not big and important enough to carry that burden. There's optional cutscenes and dialogues, but they feel very limited, and most of the unimportant townsfolks basically just have 1-dimensional characters. 

I think the game's biggest selling point is the presentation, the artstyle for the characters is undeniably appealing, and the character designs are charming. The writing also gives the core cast clear and distinct personalities, which is a plus. Obviously, being a furry game, all the villains are super hot too and I would smash them all.

Pic unrelated?

My verdict? It's a perfectly serviceable game, a linear Visual Novel with a little hook that its marketing oversells. It's not my GOTY by a long shot, but neither was I disappointed. It's really anodyne in that way. 

Orwell

Man, I've had this one for YEARS! I think I got this for free on Steam all the way back in 2017 or 2018, but never got around to playing it. Perhaps as I'd been so spoiled already, but after this many years my memories had gone vague enough to warrant playing the game when I was scouring through my backlog of Steam games.

Orwell reminded me a lot of Hypnospace Outlaw, which I'd talked about in my 2019 and 2020 blogs. Much like that game, this is a detective game set in a fictional online network. The player is tasked with inputting chunks of data into the titular Orwell, a mass-surveillance system that's meant to be a tool in cracking down on crime. You get assigned a target person suspected of setting off a bomb in an act of domestic terrorism, and from there basically unravel a large spider web of people-of-interest and data points of interest, ranging from the public and private corners of the internet to mail/telephonic/chatroom correspondence and direct PC and Mobile access. 

What unfolds is a pretty gripping and complex narrative about a group of people acting against this Orwell system, and how your selection of data to input into the system when some of the data is contradictory or misleading will affect the overall trajectory of the case, and the final outcome of the game. 

The torture of going out.

Much as in Hypnospace, there's fun to be had in scouring through a fictional version of the internet, this one set not in the past but in the at-the-time present. It's funny seeing some things and thinking how 2017 they seem. The game also raises some interesting questions about algorithmic systems and the human factor therein. The Orwell system presented in the game is obviously extreme and very all-encompassing, but the concept of the tech world pushy shady algorithms as miracle cures for all sorts of societal ills is a relevant one.

2017

That said, while a lot of your actions shape the progress of the case, such as determining whether certain characters live/die/get arrested, the ultimate deciding factor for the end does come down to your actions during the final half of the final day. While it's fun to see how different data chunks can change the shape of the investigation, none of them to my knowing lock you out of or unlock specific endings. A minor point all things considered, I think, as the first run felt solid all the way through.

Backbone

Ahh, Backbone. I was gifted this game by someone who is very near and dear to my heart, a special someone. What a gift it was. The gift of hatred.

Backbone self-describes itself as a "post-noir narrative adventure" in which you "become raccoon private eye Howard Lotor and explore dystopian Vancouver inhabited by animals as you uncover a deeply personal story of change and transformation."

I cannot deny that he is best boy.

It is a visually beautiful game, with an incredible soundtrack.

Its rating on Steam is 62% positive. Decidedly mixed. And for good reason.

Like, let's examine that description. What the hell is a post-noir game?? What does that mean? It's post-apocalyptic? Yes, that is a thing that the game veers into, though it's not immediately obvious. Is it post-modern? Hell if I know what that means, but it's certainly not afraid to pontificate gratuitously on its own navel. 

You do become a PI, yes. And I can confidently say that Howard Lotor is one of the Noir PIs ever made. He truly is just every PI trope kinda just rolled into a rather pathetic package of lacking characterization by way of extremely divergent yet also extremely convergent dialogue choices. 

You do explore Vancouver, though as far as I can tell there's nothing especially Canadian about the setting, and it might as well just have been a generic fictional Noir city. The inhabitation by animals is also just coded language for Zootopia-style furries, with all the allegories that entails. Hehe, tails. 

And yes, it is very unfortunately a deeply personal story of change and transformation. Even though I really wish it wasn't!!

There's also the kickstarter trailer, which honestly promised to be a very different kind of game and features more things that aren't in the game than are, so...

Let's find out

My experience was interesting, since I went into this kind of knowing the game takes this weird curve where it becomes a very different thing. I also went in knowing it's very linear. And honestly, my initial impressions were rather cold, as the game begins in media res, which is always risky as you really need to establish early on why I as a player should care and be invested. And I really felt like the game didn't truly do that, until at the end of the first of its four acts. In Beacon Pines I felt the game kept wanting me to find things more whimsical than I did, with Backbone I felt the game truly wanted me to be more invested in the gritty noir than I really was. 

The game's start is just rather uninspired, you walk around and clean up your apartment as Howard, the lovable racoon PI, and then you talk to your first client. This is where the dialogue system steps into play. I find the dialogue system rather, weird? It's not uncommon for games like this to give you very divergent options in the tone of your reply, but they're so very divergent in this one, yet every conversation always ends up with you in the same position regardless. The only thing you can really influence is how thorough you are in asking questions and follow-up questions, and yet most of these additional questions also just turn out to be wholly meaningless in the end anyway, just a lot of extra fluff to prop up a world.

What's Howards canonical stance on veggies?!

A lot of the dialogue choices are also just rather weird, it almost feels like the game wants you to roleplay as an interpretation of Howard, without any of the burden of adding consequences to it beyond immediate in the moment recognition. Do you keep being mysterious in your introductions, are you forthright, or do you insist on a fake identity? Are you a social moron who never shuts the fuck up? Are you daddy's obedient little subby bottom? Are you an unrepentant asshole contrarian? Are you a sweetie-pie to your best friend, do you riff on him, do you kinda hate his guts? Are you kind and understanding to your old friend, a fellow raccoon, or are you kind of an asshole to him and keep reminding him of his drug habits? Do you love your love interest openly, or are you reserved? Yes, to all these questions. Howard is in a flux of being all of these things, and also none of them. This is very deep. He is. He is. He is.

Like, this is also a complaint I could level against BROK, where the main playable characters also exist in very variable states, but in that game there are actual lasting consequences to your actions. Being mean, being violent, being kind, being thoughtful, these do influence the outcomes of events and can shape the narrative to different conclusions, or at least affect the path to your conclusion. Obviously there's limits to what a game can do, but BROK manages to do more with less. I think it also helps that in BROK you only choose a general mood of your reply a few times during dialogues, whereas in Backbone every time Howard has to say anything at all I have to choose the whole thing he says. It's exhausting!

She's right about the linear thing.

Anyway, things do get better as they go along. Following the rather boring intro you get into the meat of the game, which is you running around, talking to a vast number of wholly irrelevant NPCs in a beautifully crafted cityscape until you talk to the NPC that progresses the plot. There's some light actual branching as you work your way into a skeevy bar, after getting kicked out prior by the game's villain, a crime boss bear. There's some actual stealth and puzzle mechanics here, very basic stuff and also somehow the only time the game has either of those, until the big end-of-prologue twist happens that finally actually gets me invested in things. Howard meanwhile continues to be sort of whatever, going through all the noir motions of requisite self-loating and despair and meeting the mysterious foxy fox lady who becomes our ally, though she's more like a boss who tells us what to do and sasses us when we don't pick the dialogue options she likes. Pretty much every NPC sasses the hell out of Howard, who's usually kind of just a bitch about it. There's only few times you get the upper hand on an NPC. 

Act 2 opens with a really truly snazzy opening, which is oozing with charm and dripping with, uh, drip. I'm kinda getting into it, y'know, the plot is thickening. The game's still throwing a lot of excess fluff at me with its honestly forgettable NPCs, and it's sorta just also plotdumping on me when plot stuff does happen, but I kinda can keep up. The pacing here just feels weird, like the game's expecting me to be more invested than I am, so it expects me to sponge up this intel more than I truly was. You follow various leads and it concludes with you getting this huge-ass infodump where you basically rifle through the files on someone's PC and find out like the whole core plot. It feels really clumsy, but also it does kinda do the job.

There's also the bit where the game mocks Ayn Rand
Which, like, yeah true. But also, relevance?

At this point the stakes are pretty clearly defined, there's multiple established and relevant villains, many avenues the direction of the investigation could take. We've had suspenseful scenes, sad scenes, there's been some character-building and whatnot. It's shaping up really good.

Then act 3 happens. This is big plan time.

Remember how there were puzzles and options to get into that skeevy bar in act 1? Now we're breaking into a honking, chonking secret lab. This is like high-stakes shit. This is the sort of thing where the game establishes that getting caught here isn't a matter of getting kicked out but a matter of life and death. So, how does that go? Well, you get a tour of the place, then during the toilet break you just keep shitting until the tour goes on without you, you just ride the elevator up there without any extra steps, and you just talk with the guy who works in the secret lab and coerce him when he's alone. There's no puzzles. No stealth. No actual failstate or stakes of any sort. There's a few NPCs, who undercut the severity of what you're actually doing. You just walk out and threaten a guy and you're in. That's it. Getting into the bar took WAY MORE effort than this. What.

So, this scientist guy basically is held at gunpoint and explains he's been working on some top secret project, and the game suddenly skews hard into body horror and away from conventional noir. The scientist tells you very clearly that you have to be careful and use protection and not touch anything. The protagonist of course does not listen to any of that and touches something that he shouldn't. In a single, lacklustre scene, the whole game basically completely fucking derails away from its core established plot into this truly bizarre and wholly unasked for segue into existential dread and vague allegory. There's a visually amazing sequence, where also at the end your character kills the best friend character, and they don't explain why. It's just a shocking thing that happens, that isn't truly ever addressed nor does it ever happen again. It makes no sense at all. 

What follows is a sequence of MISERIES. I hate the direction the game takes here. You get these really just dreadful, annoying, immersion-breaking sequences where the main character pontificates on the intrusive thoughts flooding his mind, and it just keeps happening and by the last time it happened I was just outright skipping it. You wake up with your old raccoon friend in this homeless community under a bridge, and there's a mind-numbing sequence where rather than advancing the mystery or plot or addressing what the fuck is going on, you're just getting to know these like 6 homeless people while your raccoon friend fucks off outta the plot and presumably dies offscreen.

And just after a whole gameplay sequence of getting to know these NPCs who are barely a step above the usual fluff NPCs, you're hunted down by the bear mob boss from before. Those NPCs? They never come back. They're all introduced so late into the game and none of them matter a single iota. Truly bizarre writing,

Speaking of bizarre, the whole next sequence is a dull and dreary sequence in the dull and dreary experimental facility than the mob boss just apparently owns I guess?? Like, ugh, I don't even wanna write about it. Howard is a fucking bitch-ass motherfucker. This rabbity asshole scientist bitch, she can die but I can't kill her?? Ugh. Clarissa Bloodworth is that bear lady and she's like the GIRLBOSS WHO GASLIGHTS AND GATEKEEPS. Super empowered. Blegh. I WANTED TO SOLVE A CASE. I DON'T NEED A HAPPY ENDING OK, BUT I WANNA BE A DETECTIVE. I DO NOT WANT BODY HORROR. I DO NOT WANT TO RUMINATE ON THE NATURE OF BEING AND CHANGE.

You're not clever for subverting story structure, game!! I know real life doesn't follow a narrative, but also, in real life, we're not all anthro people, and also there's no dumb stupid DNA splicing bullshit nonsense!! It's not clever! You had me going with your plot, you really did, and you threw it all away! You have your protagonisty Howard kinda just limp away all limp-dicked and die in some forgotten wasteland nobody gives a flying fuck about and then he turns into a meat tree or whatever. I've already seen this in Iconoclasts! That game also blew a lot of its story beats, but it still was better than you, Backbone! You ratty-ass grody-ass bitch-ass bitch Howard fucking fuck! Fuck!

AND THEN THE EPILOGUE. It's not enough, no, they gotta let you fuck up not just Howard. Now I get to also play as love interest Renee, and as the villain Clarissa! Now I get to totally ruin their characters with the protagonist powers of very conflicting motivations! Remember that Clarissa? You know, she ran that skeevy bar where heinous stuff happened? She tortured Howard? Yeah now she's making the schmoves on your love interest, and she's fucking purplewashing her horrid crimes.

"Oh, I butchered lower-class people and sold them off for the upper-class to eat? Umm, actually, sweetie, those were AWFUL MEN who did MISOGYNIST CRIMES. They're also middle-class. Also I don't do that anymore. I'm actually an ethical crime boss who consolidates power for a good cause. I'm a feminist icon, I sure do hate how women are oppressed, a thing we very barely set up in this hellish setting. Let's rebel against the establishment, Renee."

RENEE DON'T LISTEN

Like, yeah, women are oppressed in this setting and it does suck, but it's like, 99% of the women are oppressed and 98% of the men are, so it's like... Huh?? Where does this come from?? And now Renee just chooses to GO ALONG WITH IT?? Like she joins the villain, and it's meant to be like an empowering moment and I'm meant to feel good about this? HOWARD DIED FOR THIS.

Fuck that. Ugh. What a dumb ending!!

What else is there? Uh, the game is pretty. The music fits. 

But, like, I'm not gonna look up the OST. Also the pixel art is good, but I could not for the life of me distinguish 80% of the characters if I saw fanart of them, because the pixel style doesn't make them look at all distinct. We only get close-up shots of about 4 characters: Howard, the best friend, the bear boss and the love interest. I kinda wish there were more, but there aren't aside from a scene with the cannibal upper crusts, who never appear again anyway so fuck them. How am I supposed to get invested in any of this? The writing, the plot and the art style, none of them build investment in the characters. This truly is like the anti-BROK in that sense.

There's a reason I'm writing smut for BROK and not Backbone.

I would suck Larry and Howard's dicks, but we all know they'd rather suck my dick instead. But y'know... I think I'm above that? I think I can do better. And that's just sad. Shame, Backbone, real shame.

Howard is such a bitch

Resident Evil 2 Remake

It's been a while since I last played a new Resident Evil game, last time was the RE1 remake back in 2019... While REmake was a very faithful adaptation of the original that sadly didn't leave the impact it should've due to its limited GameCube exclusivity, RE2make came out to wide praise and fanfare for its new spin on the old RE2 classic, being a sort of marriage between the over the shoulders style pioneered by RE4 and the return to a purer style of horror that made RE7 such a return to form.

Going into this I was rather curious how well I'd mesh with the game. Well, actually, my primary worry was whether my PC could even run the game! I spent the first hour of gameplay just fiddling with the graphics, and it still came back to haunt me late into my repeat playthroughs as I kept getting crashes in the laboratory area. Annoying! This is the payoff of having such a visual masterpiece. The tech is undeniably impressive, both the enemies, characters and environments, but the trade-off is that I had to turn the quality down to potato mode to actually run the thing. 

But worth it, ultimately. While it is not a fully faithful remake, this game stands well on its own merits. A particular standout is the way they did actually faithfully recreate the original game's Police Department. The rooms truly feel like how the originals had intended them to look if they had the tech and used this camera system. Exploring it just feels good, it scratches that same puzzlebox itch that the original did, now with more complexity than before as there's a bigger abundance of items to clog your inventory and with a much-increased difficulty.

The rendered Licker anuses really ramp up their threat.

The original RE2 was honestly kinda piss-easy, throwing oodles of ammo and health at the player without an equal amount of opposition to deplete it. Come RE2make, there is still ample ammo and health if one plays perfectly, but the game is much more difficult to play perfectly and more punishing of mistakes. Enemies are harder to hit now that you need to actually aim, they're always moving around and can be very unpredictable, and they deal a lot of damage. Most attacks on Hardcore immediately toss you into Danger status.

The game feels well-paced, and never truly lingers too long on any single segment. The sewer complex and lab aren't quite as tight as the PD, this is a curse all RE games seem to share, but the sewer offers its own unique challenges, and the lab feels short and divided into self-contained chunks, so it works out in the end.

I wanna give props to the game for making the Leon and Claire campaigns feel meaningfully distinct, as they did in the original. Many parts of both runs are the same, but both campaigns have their own exclusive areas, setpieces and some divergent enemy layouts. They also both get totally unique weapon kits, which all feel satisfying to use. Although I kinda hate the shotgun in this game? It feels really weak compared to other games, like it's just useless for anything above your common zombies and dogs. The rest of the weapon kit makes up for it, I suppose.

MFW Grenade Launcher

A point of controversy was the Second Run campaigns, where after doing your initial run as Leon you'd unlock Claire 2nd, and same for Claire unlocking Leon 2nd. The Leon A/Claire B and Claire A/Leon B runs of the original did overall have more points of uniqueness between all four campaigns overall, whereas Leon/Claire 1st/2nd feel more homogenous overall. There's still enough to make the two 2nd runs feel both distinct from the same character's 1st run and the other character's 2nd run, but just not as much as there used to be in the original. The plots in particular really don't line up at all, events that should only happen once happen twice, which once again makes it impossible to chart out a canonical run. Perhaps all runs are canon to some extent? I always liked to think that in RE1 and RE2 the canon run was a weird amalgam of all possible routes...

Speaking of controversy, though! Boss battles! They suck ass!! Birkin's first form is super slow and tedious and just not fun, he can barely hit you so it feels like so much walking in circles. Birkin's second form is just awful, one of the all-time worst RE bosses with a horrid puzzle element that reminded me of that plane boss in Code Veronica. Birkin's third form was alright, but mostly because by that time you can just unload as the end of the game's there anyhow. Honestly the only boss that's good at all was Mr. X in his role as a chaser, and even his presence can be mitigated real hard with proper knowledge of the layout of the building and Mr. X's workings. He was a menace on my first run, but pretty manageable on all others. Regardless, the system they made for him is undeniably genius and I cannot deny the memetic impact he had. Even on my 4th run there were still times where I was very cautious to avoid his wrath. 

And don't forget about the Dommy Mommy Ada boss fight

There's also like extra and bonus modes, but like whatever. I didn't care for them honestly. I had my fill doing the four campaigns. 

What else is there? Plot! Yes, plot and characters. The plot and characters are surprisingly faithful to the original overall, though obviously with changes to better fit modern RE's tone. Leon's still a naive and well-meaning rookie cop, Claire's still a caring young student who's in over her head. I like their adaptations, as well as Ada's and Sherry's who're better overall. Annette's certainly a more compelling character here, which is funny since she's also way more heinous. Ben and Irons get somewhat of a short end of the stick however, the former shines in his one short scene before his death, and Irons has dropped any and all veneer of being reasonable right from the start. I kinda liked his clearly deranged art appreciator angle in the original, but it is what it is, he's still a real bastard of a villain and plays the role well. The production values and voice acting are top-notch overall, though Birkin's G IS MY CREATION will always just be a meme to me.

MFW G is my creation

One other area where the game indisputably downgraded is the music. The original RE2 had an all-time great score, as did many of the classic RE games, but the remake basically strips the soundtrack of all its oomph. Music's hardly ever present and even during boss battles it fades into the background. Apparently there's an original OST DLC, but like, I shouldn't have to pay for that... The game should just have good music! Big letdown in this regard, as I feel all RE games have been since RE6.

Ah well, that doesn't stop this from being a great game, but it is a crying shame!

Now... R3make would be next, wouldn't it?!

Coromon

No you fool! You fucking idiot! It's Coromon!

It's Pokémon! But worse!

That's... Not a good place to be at, obviously. In fact, that's pretty much my overall core issue with this game, why should I play this when I can play so many Pokémon games? Emerald, Platinum, HGSS, BW, BW2, XY, ORAS, USUM, even SwSh or SV. There's just so much competition, and that's not accounting for mods and fangames and the like.

What does Coromon have to compete? Well, it does have well-animated 2D spritework. Better than gen 5 Pokémon I daresay, likely because there's not 649 Pokémon but about 117 Coromon. Which just isn't a lot, right? Less than Gen 1. And the designs that are there from what I've seen do feel like your basic and average fanmade dex. Not exactly mimicking Pokémon style, I'd say the designs are a bit more detailed and edgy/cool for lack of a better set of terms, but it is in the end just rather bland. Nothing I'd seen in my look-up of the dex online really struck me, or wowed me. 

Another issue is that GODDAMN this game is slow! Jeebus! It's slow like Pokémon games are, but like in a Pokémon game, right, I'd just emulate it and plug in my team ASAP, hax in 999 Max Repels, turn on walk through walls, enable speedup during boring bits. I can't do that here, and I don't wanna sit through this sluggish overworld traversal or these annoying random battles. Ugh, the random battles alone are what killed this for me. Just 0 lessons learned from the horrid times of old. Like with Yakuza:LaD, this game feels so dated in some aspects.

The graphics and music are for lack of better term just anodyne. They exist, they're plain, they're boring. The indoors area music is like the most boring composition I've ever heard for example. The graphics are clean and colourful, but fail to represent anything actually interesting. Character design is wholly nonexistent, everybody just uses the same character generation that you do, so every NPC is wholly unique and wholly forgettable and plain. Nothing stands out here. 

The graphics of all time

I wanna give credit at least to the game having a determinism setting. There's an option to reduce RNG, which reduces several RNG factors by making them deterministic and trigger conditionally, letting you plan around them:

-Less than 100% accurate moves become 100% accurate at the expense of an equivalent power drop

-Crits happen by accruing some Crit points per attack (high-crit moves accrue more points) and performing a crit when your crit meter reaches its threshold

-Moves with random added effects trigger after every X amount of uses, depending on how high the % is normally

-Random turn losses from status ailments seem less random too

Overall an interesting system hidden away in an otherwise thoroughly uninspired game.

I won't return to this game. My thirst for mon games will be quenched with, like, the leading brand. But only emulated, and modded. I just can't go back to vanilla, I've tasted the chocolate and want more.

Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back

Oh shit. Oh fuck. It's Bubsy, and he's back. Back in action. Back in a certified Bubsy creamer adventure.

The game might seem familiar if you remember my review of Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, as this game uses the exact same engine and reuses a lot of concepts and content from Giana Sisters. It's basically the exact same game, but with different branding, they took out the shifting mechanic and replaced the fireball dash with a horrible pounce ability. Instead of dashing in a chosen direction like Giana, Bubsy launches himself forwards in a set arc with zero control once you start to pounce. 

And that's really just what this game is overall, Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams but worse. The enemy variety is still bad, the game's overall a lot easier but has a pretty crappy limited lives system that refreshes per level. The boss battles are all generic UFOs with some aliens in them which do some big attacks and after several attacks reveal their weak spot. Pretty generic.

There's honestly just little to say about this game! There's a setting to turn Bubsy's amount of quips up or down, which I of course cranked up to 100% because memes. They got a VA for Bubsy that sounds suitably annoying, and the quips are extremely bad as you'd hope. I also fell out of bounds once. That happened.

Bubsy Moment

So yeah. I got this for the meme value and it was kinda disappointing. Just a game I already played, but worse. 

Other Assorted Medias

The Return of Despair: PC Problems

Sadly, this year in gaming ended in a big fart, as not long after beating Bubsy my PC broke down again. That's twice now in one year, it broke just before Christmas and I'm doubting I'll have it back by the year's end. This rather put a big damper on the end of year festivities, as one could imagine,

Thankfully I do have Master Duel and Duel Links installed on my mobile this time, a lesson I'd learned after being stranded without them, and I also have someone wonderful to chat the time away with. I'd still like to have my PC back, though!! Even writing this blog feels weird and different without my trusty PC.

The Deepest Hole: Fanfiction

Hey, I really liked BROK, didn't I? I sure did. I met someone really wonderful through BROK, someone who inspired me like a muse to try something new: Creative writing! And what's more creative than writing smutty fanfiction of a game you loved?! That's right, we're delving back into the realm of NSFW!

As I write this I've already published 6 chapters, totaling about 17,000 words of one fic featuring BROK's shady hacker character and the dumbass himbo bear. As it is a smut fic, every problem is resolved with a thorough application of the mouth area over the hacker's client's nethers. 

And what more, I'm now over 40,000 words deep into a different fic entirely, which has spun wholly out of control into something that has been monumentously fun to write! I'm really eager to finish this one, get it out there, and resume my other fic! My head is full of all these ideas!

I should say also, while these fics are indubitably smutty and sexual in nature, the former in particular has fully described sex scenes, I also really enjoyed delving into the actual emotions and personalities of the characters, as well as aspects of their lives and the setting overall that the game never casts a light on. There's big elements of "what if?" divergent pathing, where in a sense the protagonist role is handed off from Brok to someone else, with their own deuteragonists and antagonists to deal with, with all the ramifcations that might have on the narrative. 

I feel quite proud of what I've made so far! 

Friendship is Dragons

Remember that Griftlands mod I played, Arint's Last Day? I talked about it back in my first 2022 blog. It feels like it's been longer than that!

And now for something completely different. Remember My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic? The show marketed towards little girls with an explosive niche audience? Feels like ages ago that I got dragged kicking and screaming into the show only to wind up watching it all the way through. That was, what, during season 2? 3? And it wound up getting 8 full seasons of 26 episodes and a half season of 13 episodes and a movie and a spinoff and a lot more.

Of course there were gonna be fanmade things. Of course someone was gonna reimagine the series as a tabletop RPG. Of course that idea was going to be great. Of course.

What I didn't expect is that the same person made both these things: Newbiespud. But it was indeed when I was browsing TVTropes that I found out that the maker of this mod I'd played also had a wholeass webcomic, with an archive of over 1700 pages. Going into this comic knowing the author did the stellar writing for that Griftlands mod had be confident it was going to be good.

It, it was good. It's still good, actually! It's ongoing, y'see.

Me when ponies

The genre of "popular property reimagined as a tabletop RPG with an adversarial DM versus a group of players" is one with many entries, there's ones for Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and doubtless more. These usually tackle their properties in a pretty direct and linear fashion. What makes FiD stand out is that it really actually feels like its source material in its central messaging and how it's willing to mix and match episode orders to create wholly new experiences and carefully recrafted contexts. 

While it's a staple of the genre and indeed somewhat needed for media in general to have conflict at the Tabletop, FiD takes an interesting approach where much like the series it's based on there's an undercurrent that these people at the table are a group of friends, each out to have a good time. They all have their weaknesses, of course. Twilight's player is prone to derailing and overanalysis. Rarity is somewhat of a spotlight hog and overly eager to RP. Applejack is a constant metagamer and riffer. Rainbow Dash always wants to fight and joins in on the riffing. Pinkie Pie's always tossing around zany ideas and does all sorts of prop comedy. Fluttershy really, really has anxiety issues. The DM always wants to impress his players and isn't always on the same wavelength on what the players actually want from this weird pony campaign.

But the comic's also about what they all contribute to the table, to the group dynamic. The biggest overarching theme is exactly about the health of the group dynamic, and the importance of communicating oneself. This actually comes to a fever point when the GM, wanting to create a truly memorable villain after the lacklustre anticlimax that was Nightmare Moon and the rather accidental stroke of genius that was Elusive (a wholly comic-original arc) invites a co-DM to play the role of Discord. 

This! Is! Epiiiic!!

This is where the comic became truly epic. The fallout of DiscorDM's adversarial playstyle and its effects of the group dynamic is utterly gripping, and it has caused truly epic proportions of disagreements in the comments over who's in the right or the wrong. I wouldn't say the comic has any villains per-se, but its antagonists are always interesting because they, just like the players, are truly human in the end and doing what feels best to them. Even with Discord you can tell he puts in huge amounts of effort in his persona, and I can't help but love him for it. What a beautiful trainwreck of a session.

As mentioned I also greatly enjoy how the comic mixes and matches its plot structure. The comic starts as a pretty faithful adaptation of several episodes, but the Parasprite episode is completely derailed and after that chapters start combining wholly disparate episodes into unified plots. It's actually really interesting how they do this. One of my favourties combines Gilda the Brush-Off and Pinkie Pride, two completely unconnected episodes, by having Gilda's player shift from the Gilda character to Cheese Sandwhich to basically Out-Pinkie Pie Pinkie Pie. Just really clever in general, and it just works. Honestly an easy recommendation to any MLP fan.

Yes Corelis, that means you. Go read the comic. Now!

Smiling Friends

It's been a while since I've gotten around to just watching some cartoons, ones other than Bob's Burgers, which is why I made a shortlist for myself of things to watch. The first of this was Smiling Friends, chosen due to its fast-paced nature and short first season of 8 episodes.

Smiling Friends follows a duo of the ever-optimistic Pim and the more jaded and realistic Charlie as they go about their job of basically helping unhappy people become happy again. As you can imagine from an Adult Swim show, this usually goes horrible wrong, or horribly right. The first episode is an immediate banger, as they go to help a man who turns out to be so suicidal that he spends the entire rest of the episode with a gun held to his own temple, a joke that just gets funnier the more and more this guys keeps doing it despite the bizarre situations that occur. 

This show was overall just really frantic, energetic and fun. I enjoyed the time I spent on it, and its shortness made it easy to get through the whole thing in two days. Easy recommendation.

Harley Quinn (The Animated Series)

Remember when Harley Quinn was just some perky minion all the way back in Batman: The Animated Series? She sure has come a long way since then. So much exposure! Some might say too much. I wouldn't know, as I don't generally delve into all this superhero content, be it Marvel or DC. I'm more of a Kaiju Big Battel follow, of course. But Harley Quinn did get herself an honest-to-goodness animated series, and I've heard a lot of good stuff about it. I've also heard that it's super woke and insufferable and crass and that it SPITS ON EVERYTHING THE FRANCHISE STANDS FOR, so, y'know, all the more reasons to check it out.

And I was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed the show overall, especially season 1 which felt very tightly put together. Season 1's mostly about putting together and establishing the core crew, and of course there's plenty of Harley Quinn/Joker drama going on. I can appreciate that the show doesn't really dance around the fact at all just how much of a horrid scumbag The Joker is. The crew that bands together is also just a lot of fun, everybody meshes well together. Doctor Psycho in particular stands out for being such an utterly unpleasant gremlin of a man. 

Season 2 focuses more on the budding ship between the two female leads, Harley and Poison Ivy. Kinda funny how even all the way back when these two characters first interacted it was already dripping with Sapphic energy, and now they get a whole arc about just that. The first half of the season is also fun, as Harley and her squad basically take on a whole stable of villains. I do like this show's takes on all those classic characters, they often take aspects from all sorts of continuities, and generally look pretty faithful to the old Batman TAS designs. The show's take on Bane is especially funny, the guy's the biggest pushover ever, has that weird BDSM outfit and also has that ridiculous accent inspired from the Nolan movie. He just comes out looking like a complete doofus, obviously to contrast with how SERIOUS and EDGY he usually is. 

I can definitely tell that Corona happened during season 3's production, since the animation quality takes a nosedive in some episodes. Sometimes it feels like half or more of the frames in a sequence are missing. Season 3 also does quite some cast expanding and cutting up the main crew, which makes things feel unfocused at first, but it does actually come together really well in the end. Apparently a fourth season has already been greenlit, so I'm looking forward to that!

The Bob's Burgers Movie

The very creatively titled Bob's Burgers movie had me wondering one thing before going into it: How are they going to adapt this show's format to a 100-minutes movie? It turns out the answer is that it's kinda like an earlier 40-minutes double feature episode, except there's some more padding here and there and the mystery of what's going on gets played out more.

That's not to say any of this is bad, I thought the movie was good overall. It felt mostly in line with the rest of the series, just with more musical elements and a bigger animation budget. There's a main plotline revolving around the discovery of a corpse buried in front of Bob's restaurant and the mad quest to get the accused Felix Fishoeder acquitted because the Belchers are in financial trouble again.

This main plot is the strongest part of the movie I find. The reveal of who the real antagonist is wasn't very surprising, but I do appreciate that they didn't just make up a new character form the movie to be the antagonist, but actually used an already existing character. He also gets a music number that's sung so intentionally bad that I have to assume they were trying to do everything in their power to make sure nobody was gonna Oncelerify him or something. A weird choice, but a good villain overall who does pose a real threat while also still being grounded and silly enough to fit the show's vibes. 

It's the subplots that are the weak link of this movie. Bob and Linda's plot is the usual "we need to make money before the end of the week!" plot, where things go from bad to worse before getting resolved in the end. Nothing mindblowing, but it's a tried and true plot point. Louise gets a more personal plot about that hat she's always wearing and letting some bratty girl's comments about her being a baby get to her. I do agree it seems too soft for Louise, like she takes this sitting down too much and tries to prove herself in all sorts of roundabout ways, but it still works in the end.

It's Gene and Tina that get the short end of the stick here. Tina's subplot is about as basic of a "I want to take things to the next level with Jimmy Jr. but I'm too anxious!!" subplot as it gets, and really doesn't crossover with any of the other plots at all. We've already seen this a million times before, and the will they/won't they thing isn't really compelling when Tina obviously is way more into Jimmy Jr. than vice versa. And then Gene gets a complete nothing plot about wanting to perform on stage with some annoying instrument he made up. That one really felt like the writers were just phoning it in...

Still, like I said I did enjoy the movie overall! That said, I am pretty surprised they went for a theatrical release for it, it doesn't seem like the kind of movie you'd go to a theater for.

Moment of Reflection

Abandoning Hope: 2021's Remnants

This is the part where I discuss the things I said I'd intended to do in 2022 and then see how much of it I did not in fact do!

Here's some games I'd already listed in my 2020 blog as stuff I intended to do in 2021... Oops, I've only done the Sam & Max Remaster one from this list!

-THE LONGING
-Sam & Max Remaster
-Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

And the stuff I added to the list in 2021!

Inscryption: I did play Kaycee's Mod, yes! Man, that was early in 2022 yet it feels like ages ago... Breaking this blog up in three parts does make it feel like all the stuff in the pevious two blogs happened ages ago!

Disco Elysium: I still intend to play this, come 2023!

Resident Evil 2&3: I did play RE2 and enjoyed it a lot! Meanwhile my PC totally broke while downloading RE3, so hopefully that's not a sign of things to come... I still want to play R3make, even though it seems to be universally regarded as inferior to its predecessor. 

Memody Sindrel Song: As intended I did replay this early in 2022! I still really like this game overall, as I discussed in my blog dedicated to it. 

Xenoverse: I intended to play the DLC, but I only got partway through it. The DLC just seems like a huge difficulty spike, which I didn't care much for. I consider this one finished enough for my liking.

The Wishlist

Games on my Steam Wishlist that I'd hoped to play in 2022, assuming they release by then! Spoilers, most of them did not!

OTHER: Her Loving Embrace: I still intend to play this, but it's not come out yet!

Yakuza: Like a Dragon: I did actually play this one! Great JRPG, but with some obvious growing pains. I hope Yakuza 8 can iron out the wrinkles for a truly great experience.

Together in Battle: No release in 2022! Apparently it'll go into Early Access come 2023, though!

Walthros Renewal: This game seems to be very nearly on the cusp of release, and everything I've seen of it has been wonderful. Here's hoping for a stable 2023 early release!

Mr. Triangle's Maze: I played this one! I liked what was there, but had some problems with progress in some of the later levels.

Bravely Default II: Still waiting for a big discount before I get this. 

Atonal Dreams: No release yet!

From the Bundle

I did finally get around to playing the games from the Humble Bundle! Let's recap my thoughts from memory!

-Clam Man: Funny and charming P&C adventure game.
-Interactivity: One of the Stanely Parables ever made
-Islands: Toybox, but for adults
-Kids: Funny meme
-One Shot: Wouldn't launch properly
-Parallax: Nice puzzler
-Ruya: Feels like a high-production puzzle game, neat
-Social Interaction Trainer: Bad
-Starseed Pilgrim: Awful
-Vignettes: I don't remember what this even was??
-Your Future Self: Wouldn't launch properly

TRULY AMAZING BLOGGING!!

The Rest

Stuff that doesn't fit elsewhere!

Pizza Tower: It's coming early 2023! I'm excited for this one!

JoJo Part 6: I'd held off on this till it all aired, and now that it has I'm gonna watch it in January 2023!

Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V: Whoops, didn't get around to this. But maybe I got someone now I can subject this to? Oh my. 

Victory Fire: I did get around to reading this! Sadly it's still on hiatus AFAIK, but it was an enjoyable webcomic that paired various Pokémon continuities in interesting ways!

Suzumega Medabot: Didn't get around to this, however! It's still in my dA backlog!

Embracing Despair: Meklord Army of 2023's Obbligato

So, though my PC did break at the year's end, I still got quite the backlog accumulating near the end of the year due to some smart shopping and eagle-eyed giftings during the Steam Winter Sale. Let's see what's left to do come 2023!

Crash Bandicoot: I liked the Spyro Trilogy remake quite a lot, so I figured that with the same company making a remake of the Crash Trilogy prior and putting out a wholly original 4th game it'd be a good idea to sink me teeth into them. I never played the originals to compare them with, so I'm curious what my opinion will be!

Eden's Last Sunrise: This one's a FFT & Fell Seal-esque tactical RPG. What really interested me in this one is that it also contains furry characters, and that it blends both fantasy and sci-fi together in two different campaigns for each. I don't know much else about it, so I'm curious to see how this'll pan out!

Floppy Knights: Stop me if you heard this before. A game, but also, a deckbuilder!! Oh, you heard that before? Well, still, I like decks! This one I got into since the same artist who did Dicey Dungeons also did the art for this, and it looked interesting. We'll see how it stacks up!

Shadows over Loathing: I loved West of Loathing, so I've no doubt I'll love this too! I could've played this one already, but then other games kept getting in the way! Definitely gonna play this in 2023.

So, overall that gives me enough to play come 2023!

That Shows List I Alluded To

Hey, remember that list of shows to watch I mentioned? Turns out I had more than like 3 items, but never got around to most of them. Here's the remnants!

-Rise of the TMNT

-Tuca and Bertie

-Apple and Onion

-Bob's Burgers Season 12

-Jellystone

I intend to watch more shows come 2023, as that's one area where I feel I didn't do enough of in 2022.