Goodness! It's been forever since the last blog! So much for trying to cut this year up into three blogs! There's so much to discuss in this one, I've been a busy media consumer and been getting ahead in life.
Last time I spoke quite a bit about scope creep. We'll see how that goes this time! Some of these games I'll have a lot to say about, others not so much... And some of these I played over 6 months ago and barely remember! Last time I prewrote a lot of the bits as soon as I finished the games, but I didn't bother this time! I should have!
Anyway, this turned out to be about 15,000 words worth of rambling! And there's no images, as Blogger basically just died when I tried to add images. At some point the thing even just crashed, so you'll just have to sit down and read without having any distracting pretty pictures with an amusing subtext affixed to them.
Life Stuff
I figure I should at least do a little bit of a retrospective on 2023, since it's been a year full of new events. I talk about this in the previous blog too, but wow, I have a new job now! A real stable and sustainable job at that, pretty much the job I'd always wanted to have.
Aside from that I've been participating in a TTRPG, I've been participating in a cozy and casual weekly YuGiOh tournament event and I had the absolute blessing of having my partner over for two weeks in November.
All in all it's a start contrast from how things looked at 2022's end! That's the power of saying yes to things, I suppose. The next step forward will be to get myself a nice and proper house, have my partner over again, and after that look into an immigration process. How much things change over the course of a few years!
Now for the real meat and potatoes, videogames!! I'll try and see if I can get images to work, last time I tried to do this it made the editor really laggy.
Paradise Killer
I could swear I covered this in my last blog! Apparently not.
This is definitely one of the odder games I played. It's a self-described open-world adventure detective game. Fitting enough, the core conceit of the game is that you're investigating a mass murder locked room mystery by gathering clues and interrogating suspects scattered around the game's setting, a sprawling island. The narrative is open-ended in the sense that the game lets you choose who to accuse and how thorough you want to be with your investigation, you could wind up with the whole cast being found guilty or without any successful convictions depending on what you do.
Honestly though, I spent most of my time just fucking around, platforming my way through the island trying to look for collectables because I'm a True 100% Gamer. This is completely optional though, but a lot of these collectables do expand on the setting's lore quite a bit.
And it is the setting that is the most remarkable part of the game. The writing. The aesthetic. The game is obviously very much vaporwave inspired, this bleeds into the soundtrack, the graphical style, the character designs and the writing. But that's not to say the game is just a shallow bout of vibes, the setting of the game has plenty of lore to dive into.
It's a bizarre setting too, you're not some rote detective, but "Justice Freak" Lady Love Dies, a recently freed exile from the bizarre government of the island. It's not just the pleasure island that the vibes make it seem like, since the whole place is ruled over by a council of a selected few agents of divinity and most of the population are basically nothing but sacrificial fodder and workforce. For all their theologising, though, most of the cast seems perfectly happy to chase their own interests over their actual goal, not caring much for the population of the island.
And that's the last part that makes the game work, the exuberant cast of characters. They sure are a colourful and wacky bunch, I quite enjoyed just doing hangouts with them and figuring out what makes them tick.
Y'know, before I crack the case and execute them with EXTREME JUSTICE. But then even if you fail to convict someone, you can just walk up to them after the trial and shoot them anyway. In my run I wound up getting pretty much the whole cast of suspects convincted using evidence, which is amusing. At the end of the day those people are all participants in a horrible regime who don't really deserve their artificially lenghtened lifespans anyhow.
So overall I'd recommend this game if this sounds like a fun romp. I sure had fun chewing my way through the game, soaking in the vibes and aesthetics while connecting the clues.
Hue
Honestly not much to say about this one. I believe this one was part of some bundle I got at some point. It's a puzzle platformer where you can shift the background colour of the stage to make certain level elements start or stop blending in with the backdrop, effectively altering whether they exist or not.
It feels and plays very much like a polished flash game from a site like Kongregate. There's a narrative to it, but I can hardly remember it, so I doubt there was really much going on. It's a fun game overall, the puzzle sequences can be fun brainteasers while the action platformer sequences tended to be more on the annoying side. The base price point of €15 seems like quite an overcharge, but it's a neat little thing to get when it's on discount.
I didn't even take any screenshots of this game! Next!
Resident Evil 3
I should not have played this after Resident Evil 4! Out of the Resident Evil remakes thus far (1~4) this one is near-universally agreed upon to be the worst of the bunch. And I have to concur, it doesn't feel like it stacks up to either the original or the remakes of 2 and 4 which it's wedged beween... In most ways this just feels like an expansion of RE2make, except even then the progression and areas felt more interesting in RE2.
The game takes a huge amount of liberties in relation to its inspiration, the original Resident Evil 3. Far more than any of the other remakes did, whole areas are cut out or skipped and the way the story is structured and ordered is also quite different. I don't think the game had to be a 1:1 replica of the original like the RE4make for the most part was, but the unfaithfulness here feels jarring when whole sections are just not there or replaced with something more standard. It's not like I can see why they made the changes they did, it just feels like they were on a tight budget in terms of time, money and manpower.
The game opens with an entirely too scripted and cinematic sequence of events, basically blazing through a bunch of areas that might've been fun to explore at a more reasonable pace and practically rushes through the introduction of the originally titular Nemesis monster. And speaking of...
They really squandered Nemesis in this game. He was iconic in the original, a hulking beast both powerful and fast, capable of outlasting and outrunning the protagonist and as a series first even capable of following the player through different rooms. This was unheard of in the series! A massive subversion, and all-around genius way to build on the Mr. X system that RE2 had set up prior.
But in the remake, almost all Nemesis encounters are scripted battles, and the ones that aren't have him go down like a chump to even a single basic grenade... It feels flaccid compared to the girthy erection of the original. I want the full Nemesis cock experience, of something. Tentacles.
Anyway, the point is that this just feels like a limp game stuck between RE2make, RE4make and the original. It surpasses none of them, leaving it in a weird spot where its existence just feels unneeded. Well, I suppose it does fare better than RE2make in terms of music, since R3make at least has music.
Still, I find this such a shame! Resident Evil 3 was my favourite of the classic Resident Evil games by quite a wide margin! I was really hoping they would make a fantastic remake the likes of RE2 got, it's not like they didn't have a solid blueprint with the original, but then they deviated so much from it... Alas.
Fall of Porcupine
Hold on, let me just take out my Steam review for this one...
"I've been playing the game for hours now, going out of my way to talk with NPCs in search of an actual conflict, but there just doesn't seem to be one. It's rare that I outright drop a game, let alone one I was eagerly wanting to play, but I find the idea of even booting the game again a chore
The game clearly is trying to emulate what made Night in the Woods great while putting its own spin on it, but it doesn't succeed at either. The characters feel dull and listless, the painfully inoffensive protagonist most of all. Finley is unimaginably anodyne as a protagonist. He has no driving force, and from what other reviews say this isn't going to change when the story suddenly happens around him at the last second.
The game certainly loves to go for a comedic tone, but this falls flat on its face when a significant chunk of the jokes don't land or go on too long. Rarely do I find myself wanting to skip dialogue this much.
The game looks and sounds pretty, but these large vistas work against the game when so much time is spent on slowly walking everywhere. The game's maps are too big and empty to keep me interested."
The game clearly is trying to emulate what made Night in the Woods great while putting its own spin on it, but it doesn't succeed at either. The characters feel dull and listless, the painfully inoffensive protagonist most of all. Finley is unimaginably anodyne as a protagonist. He has no driving force, and from what other reviews say this isn't going to change when the story suddenly happens around him at the last second.
The game certainly loves to go for a comedic tone, but this falls flat on its face when a significant chunk of the jokes don't land or go on too long. Rarely do I find myself wanting to skip dialogue this much.
The game looks and sounds pretty, but these large vistas work against the game when so much time is spent on slowly walking everywhere. The game's maps are too big and empty to keep me interested."
I haven't anything more to add, really. This game really interested me before I bought it, and I was so disappointed by how milquetoast and mild it is. AFAIK the twist is that it suddenly turns into a COVID-adjacent story, but from what I can tell the game doesn't do a great job of resolving that either. Just a big old disappointment, sadly. Even the Steam reviews can't crack that 80% positive ratio. It hardly ever bappens to me that I buy a game and just come away so disappointed, I hardly ever write negative reviews, but this game sadly earned it.
BROK the Investigator
I believe that back in 2022's blog I wasn't sure whether to list Bugsnax or BROK the Investigator as my Game Of The Year 2022... Well, I think it's Bugsnax.
Replaying this game in the way I did, painstakingly poring over it together with a special someone in a stream format was a lot of fun! Talking about it with people was also fun, even if some people tried to get in the way of that. It made me appreciate some parts and characters of the game more... But it also made me like other aspects less, in particular some of the endings. Mainly the actual canonical ending and its sheer utter lack of resolution, both in the mystery the game sets up during the prologue and the sudden complete swerve that undoes the game's events and leaves the plot entirely dangling.
The whole game is just full of interesting ideas that don't really go anywhere. Lots of things are set up and never come back again and so much of the supplemental dialogue is just the main character being an annoying boomer. The titular Brok is probably the character my thoughts on sunk the most, but others like Klay, the Dirctor and Gherkin also just seemed so undercooked. I did wind up loving the Chapter 4 Investigation and its cast more than ever, though. Dee also proved to just be a consistently great character, and Ott was just lovable in every scene he was in. Wes deserves an award for how good his character build up is only to crumple like a house of cards in the end.
I am still curious about the sequel, perhaps in part as much to see how much never comes up again as how much is actually resolved. We'll see when that happens, it's probably still years away from now. Still, if the sequel hopes to really tie up all the loose ends and bring back most of the old cast and introduce new characters and have multiple endings...? Yeah, I won't be surprised if it pulls another "Buy the sequel for the resolution!" in the end. It'll either be that, an unfocused mess or it'll just not satisfying resolve the many open threads.
Bravely Second
Ah, this is an interesting one. I intended to replay this game after falling down a rabbit hole of watching videos of the cutscenes.
Honestly, the writing in this game is a tropey JRPG mess, but it is also just fun in a certain sort of way that's hard to lay my finger on. I wanted to immerse myself into that feeling, but...
Ah, the JRPG grind. The grindset. I just couldn't make myself keep going through the random battles. I suppose a challenge run was possible, but eh... Didn't feel like that either. I think the nail in the coffin was that online got shutdown and my attempts at populating the online feature just bricked my savefile. I just gave up at that point. Alas. These games are just never as replayable as I'd like since so much of the gametime is taken up by pointless random battles. It's just not worth the time investment.
I still think it's a good game and overall a better experience than the first game. I really need to give Bravely Default 2 a try one of these days. That one's been sitting on my desktop unplayed for ages now! I do wish they had made a sequel to this game instead, though. We'll probably never get Bravely Third.
Superliminal
This was a fun one to replay! One of those types of first person puzzles that loves to mess with concepts like perception and reality. A Portal-like, if one would. I've always found that a compelling genre, and replaying this game it definitely felt like a solid entry into that genre.
The core gameplay concept of being able to pick up items and then being able to put them down again with their size being determined by perspective just works wonderfully as a core rule to base gameplay on, and the game gets good mileage out of the idea. I wonder if the devs did anything else, actually? Sadly, it appears not.
It also bears some mention that while the game does have a basic narrative, it never feels like it gets in the way of the gameplay or grates on me. This will be relevant later.
Guacamelee 1 & 2
I think I got this as part of a bundle too? These are self-described "Metroidvania-style action-platformers", which is apt enough. You start the first game with a very limited set of abilities, slowly unlock more as the game goes on, which lets you explore more of the interconnected world all the way up to the final boss. The second game is much the same, though it does the usual thing where you spend half the game relearning abilities you had in the first game and the other half expanding with new abilities.
Probably the most notable thing in the game is the Mexican theming. It's kinda there in the title, there's sombreros and luchadores and chickens everywhere. It's not exactly a cultural deep dive, but it's not like the game was trying to be that either.
The gameplay is fine. Probably. I honestly don't know, I rarely play these games and I mostly just spammed my way through combat. I think it's fine, anhow. It kept me wanting to advance thorugh the game and it's fun to see the big combo meter go up.
I did kinda shoot myself in the first game by fooling myself into thinking the best approach was to spam the throw command, rather than just spamming special moves. I did just that in the sequel and had much more fun. The sequel in general seemed like the better game to me, as one might expect. However, there's one thing that really sticks out like a sore thumb...
The writing is definitely all over the place. The tone overall I'd say is "irritatingly 2010s memes". I'm not one to shy away from that on principle, but the game sure goes about it in an annoying way, but it did get a laugh out of me in the sequel when they put a dungeon full of negative Steam reviews about the meme stuff. It does make me wonder why they decided on this tone, it really did more to hamper the game than help it. It really doesn't fit the game's artstyle or anything and feels dreadfully aged.
Shadows over Loathing
The sequel to West of Loathing, which I had a lot of good to say about! Set once more in the same universe, this game tackles the 1920s instead of the Wild West, with a particular Eldritch Horror vibe to it all.
Honestly, everything I said about West of Loathing still applies here. It's a great comedy game, the artstyle is still iconic due to its simplicity and clarity, all of the banter is still there as is the exploration.
In comparison to its predecessor, the progression in SoL feels clearer as you progress from themed area to differently themed area, while in WoL every area had the same general Wild West theming from start to finish. Areas still have an interconnectedness, and even late in the game I was still backtracking to old places to finish off subplots. That said, the theme is definitely more strained than in the previous game. 1920s is a much more vague theme than "Wild West", and while the game gets a lot of mileage out of it, it's not quite the same as the previous game.
The biggest differences compared to the predecessor is that this game's gameplay is overall intended to be much more balanced, no longer letting you stack stats to such a ridiculous degree that you can just turbokill everything. Except they sort of messed up and you can still do that with a certain game mechanic, oops. In my case that was by being able to order my pet to attack dozens of times in a single turn, obliterating most enemies in the game in a single round. The combat overall is intended to be more strategic, but it still somewhat feels like busywork getting in the way of the actual good stuff, the writing.
Overall the tone of the writing also skews somewhat more to the serious side this time around, the original was consistently nothing but goods and silliness, but this game has some rare scenes where it does get a little bit serious. I think that's fine, it does fit the theme the game's going for, and it's still engaging. I do sense however that the game was somewhat rushed at the end as the final area is barely explored and mostly comes down to a very brief and quick showdown with the final boss who'd been built up the whole game. That felt like a letdown.
Regardless, I hope they make a DLC as they did with the first game! I also am curious what is next for the series, there's plenty of eras that are ripe for an Of Loathing experience!
Pokémon Elite Redux
It's not a blog if there's not at least one Pokémon entry, I guess. A ROMhack, of course. I have a reputation to uphold, after all.
Elite Redux is an Emerald mod that drastically revamps the core series's ability system: Every Pokémon now has free choice from one of up to three abilities, alongside a fixed set of up to three extra innate abilities. In addition to this, many new abilities have been added. I believe it also does some of the usual ROMhack edits where various underpowered Pokémon and moves get buffed, to make sure pretty much anything is viable and has some niche. The four abilities thing in particular goes a long way to making Pokémon more unique overall, though many Pokémon of the same type tend to share some type-themed abilities.
As you can imagine, having up to four abilities is quite powerful! That's basically how the game balances itself, when everything is absurdly OP, nothing is. Probably. It's an interesting way of playing the game, and to accommodate for experimentation the game basically entirely removed all of the game's exploration and training mechanics, you can set your Pokémon's parameters basically entirely freely and you get a huge stock of all items you'd ever want basically right from the getgo. As such, there's not really any reason to explore or do anything except battle.
That's basically why I stopped playing, I didn't want to play just a battle sim, without that sort of JRPG progression a lot of the fun was just gone. This is an issue ROMhacks run into often when they levelscale too high too fast and very quickly run out of new things to hand out to players to keep their teams feeling dynamic.
It's good for what it is, but not something that'll appeal to someone looking for an adventure. I'm sure it's a fun format to explore and exploit, though!
Pokémon Luminescent Platinum
Now this is a more conventional Pokémon ROMhack experience. This is basically just a recreation of Drayano's Renegade Platinum ROMhack inside the Switch's Pokémon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl. It's quite faithful to that, from changes to moves and Pokémon and the places where Pokémon can be found and enemy team rosters. All of the changes to the exploration order of the region are also maintained.
Being that it's using a solid template, this experience itself was also solid. I'd say it was harder than Renegade Platinum since AFAIK enemy teams in this ROMhack actually have EVs, meaning they're numerically stronger than in older ROMhacks. Despite that I was able to win with a mono-Bug team comprised of the following Pokémon:
-Scizor: Gets first billing because with a Sword Dance/Bullet Punch build it single-handedly swept a lot of battles as soon as a chance to set-up arrives. Indisputable MVP of the team.
-Flygon: Actually a Bug/Dragon type now, it simply hits like a truck with an improved Sp.Atk stat and can sweep with Quiver Dance, but has a hard time setting up due to its meagre resistances.
-Masquerain: Sticky Web setter, secondary Quiver Dance sweeper and Intimidator. Amazing utility and can hit decently hard with its Hydro Pump.
-Armaldo: The physical powerhouse. Slow as molasses but hits like a truck. Sufficiently bulky that it can come in on most Pokémon and tank a hit before knocking them out in one blow.
-Shuckle: Pure stallmon, but its Toxic lets it outlast many annoying opponents that the rest of the team has a hard time with. Rock subtyping lets it not be weak to types the rest of the team has issues with.
-Illumise: Surprisingly useful throughout the run with its new Fairy subtype and access to Prankster Dualscreens. What it lacks in pure power it makes up for in sheer utility, enabling the rest of the team to function well thanks to fortified defences.
So, which is better? Luminescent or Renegade? Well... For right now, I don't think either is necessarily better than the other. It's somewhat pathetic that the remakes of generation 4 fail to definitively be better than the original Platinum. It is really just the same game but in 3D now, but in a just rather ugly and unflattering style... What a waste. They perfected 3D style in gen 6, every other 3D game since has just looked worse than those aesthetically I'd say.
MARDEK Nineveh
Didn't I say I wouldn't play this game again for a while...? Well, oops. I did a Hard Mode run using Sharla and Donovan regardless. That was fun! You can find the run on my YouTube channel.
I was surprised at how well these two did overall, they are head and shoulders by far the best elemental specialists in the game. Both output huge amounts of damage, have decent support and utility options, Sharla is numerically the strongest healer in the game and with the changed spell attack formulae your mages in particular benefit a lot from being in the party consistently for that extra EXP.
I used Elwyen and Meraeador too. Elwyen really impressed me, there's always something she can do, including buffing the damage output of Donovan and Sharla so much that the extra damage is worth far more than an extra attacker could output. Meraeador meanwhile gets an award for most turns spent using basic items, the guy's offence is just meagre and he's mostly good for Shield stacking.
Hard mode for the most part just meant I had to be smarter about my teambuilding, the only time it felt truly gross was for the Chapter 3 endgame content, the superbosses in particular.
Viewfinder
Oh hey, here's another entry in the list of "FPS puzzle games with reality-defying game mechanics"! This one has a particularly good central mechanic, the titular viewfinder. The game will let you place photographs into the level to basically override the area your placed photograph covers with the contents of said photograph. It's hard to explain, and to wrap your head around! But it works wonderfully and is simply a genius concept to build a whole game around.
The game is cut up into several worlds, each cut up into levels which each have several stages where you need to reach the exit from the starting point, sometimes needing to collect batteries along the way. You can actually destroy these stage elements with your photographs, but that just means you need to restart of course.
The game has a pretty smooth difficulty curve, it starts off by giving you simply photographs you can place before introducing stationary cameras so you can affect your photograph before taking it, and then finally giving you a mobile camera, at which point the sky's the limit. Anything's possible from that point on. Along the way the game also introduces several gimmicks, one particularly nice one is how the artstyle of a photo or image will affect the graphical style of the stage once it's laid down. Some of the later levels also get really tricky, though I don't think I ever had to look up a solution online except for one single puzzle.
There's one point where the game just lets itself down though, and that is the narrative. The game has two narratives, the narrative of the people who made the simulation the game takes place in, and the narrative of the people who discovered and are exploring the simulation. The latter's somewhat infamous for being cringy and pointlessly accentuating the "ooh" and "aah" moments in the game even though those moments already work on their own merit, so it's just distracting. This layer of the narrative doesn't really add anything to the game. The narrative of the people who made the simulation isn't exactly cringy, but I also didn't feel that aspect of the narrative added much of anything.
Simply, this game didn't need a tacked on narrative, it didn't need audio clips, it didn't need all these justifications and lame pontifications. And still, if the game did want to have these things ar they seem to be a genre staple, at least make sure they're good and not, well, annoying. This is a game where I earnestly would suggest turning down the voice volume and turning off the subtitles, you're not missing anything and will have a better overall experience.
Do not let that keep you from playing the game, though! It is so good!!
Resident Evil 4: Separate Ways
Gasp, Resident Evil 4 again! I really enjoyed this remake when it came out earlier in 2023, and then we got the Separate Ways expansion and I got all into the game again. I gave the main game another run before biting into the new expansion campaign and the expanded Mercenaries Mode. Does the game still hold up? Did Separate Ways complete the package?
Yes. Absolutely yes. Replaying the main campaign, I loved it just like I did before. The game simply has a pleasant feeling of flow, going from combat sections to exploration and loot collections sections, with fun gunplay, diverse action scenarios and all that. It was fun using different weapons for my run! The weapon arsenal in RE4make is just fun to mess around with, the only thing that's missing is a grenade launcher, but the mine thrower works well enough for that purpose.
Still, a common complaint was that for all its faithfulness, some areas from the original game weren't in the remake, and one particular boss battle was missing. It was commonly believed most of these missing facets would be implemented in Separate Ways and... They were! Wow. It's actually rather staggering how pretty much every missing area from the base game was implemented in Separate Ways in some way, I think only the silly lava room didn't make the cut.
And the new campaign is also a vast improvement over the original Separate Ways, featuring much more unique content and a progression flow that's more faithful to the base game than the original's Separate Ways. The Castle segments in particular filled out the missing bits from the original while offering mostly new content, I really loved that part. I do wish the island bit had been longer, though, but it's still good for what it is.
I also did all of Mercenaries, trying to get a S+ rank on all 4 stages with all 8 characters! It was actually quite a lot of fun, more than I expected! I did miss this sort of game mode in the remakes of RE2 and RE3, RE3 in particular felt jarring since the original RE3 first implemented Mercenaries mode... Anyway, in this game the player feels more powerful than ever with special timed abilities. It feels more accessible than previous mercenaries modes, more like it's properly balanced around one player rather than two. The characters also feel distinct from each other. Wesker in particular was fun to play as.
Speaking of Wesker, the game's new ending clearly sets up the events of Resident Evil 5, which makes me wonder if they'll remake that one next. The first main series co-op RE game, and IIRC the best selling to this day. It's got pretty big shoes to fill, it makes me want to replay RE5 to see how it stacks up. It has often felt underappreciated to me.
Anyway, out of the remakes so far, I'd put this one up there with 1 and 2 as great remakes. Sorry, 3, you're not part of the cool remake club.
Dark Seed 2
Okay, this one is less "I played this game" and more "Help, I fell into an obsessive rabbit hole for two weeks about this old weird game".
This was spurred by a YouTube video discussing Dark Seed and its sequel Dark Seed 2, and it just reminded me of this old and lost era of gaming. FMV point and click adventure games, games with bizarre and dark and twisted premises, unhinged and untethered from what would become common game and narrative design principles. There's just something about games like Harvester, [MODE], Dark Seed 2 or Phantasmagoria 2, their weird aesthetics, uncanny writing and clumsy yet intriguing themes, wrapped in a layer of eerie music and tense ideas with goofy executions.
What gets to me about this game is what an antihero the protagonist really is upon reflection. A mentally ill, washed-up loser who lives with his mother and whose delusions drive him to commit murder upon murder while convincing himself it's all part of some grandiose quest to save the world from dark forces. You spend the whole game trying to find the culprit of a murder that, really, in the end was committed by yourself. It's such a strange premise, and the execution is so bizarre, but when you delve into it more deeply it's so compelling too.
I'm sure there's indie games out there now trying to do similar things, but today's technology makes the kind of jank you find in those old games just not a part of the design process anymore, or something like that. It's not that janky games don't come out anymore, but they feel janky in a different way. It's hard to put into words. It's cool, anyway.
Talos Principle 2
I totally forgot this was going to come out in 2023! The release really blindsided me, and I immediately got and started playing the game upon release. I wrote about the original Talos Principle many years ago, that one came out December 2014, and finally in November 2023 the sequel came out. A nine year break, but playing the game I think it was worth the wait.
Much like the predecessor, Talos Principle 2 is a first person puzzle solving game with a highly philosophical narrative. Yet the game feels very distinct from the first game, too.
First, the gameplay. The game still uses the same sort of basic puzzle construction of pressure plates, beams, giant fans and beam connectors. But While the original game only added two new puzzle elements from start to finish, the sequel ramps it up by introducing a new puzzle element in every area, and every area is themed around that specific puzzle element. This affects the puzzle progression quite a bit, in the original game the difficulty progression for puzzles was a linearly upwards curve throughout the game, in the sequel this curve exists inside each of the 12 areas, but in every new area the curve resets and the first few puzzles act basically as tutorials for figuring out the new mechanic.
I did enjoy this new difficulty curve overall, the original felt like I was running into stonewalls all the time, this happened much less in the sequel, the experience felt smoother and less repetitive. The original had a lot of puzzles that felt super similar, just with more and more convoluted steps but ultimately the same basic ideas behind them.
I do however miss the real challenging puzzles, but I hear the devs intended to save those for DLC, so maybe we'll get DLC? The original had DLC that built on the original's themes in an interesting way.
Ah yes, themes. And narrative. The other part of the puzzle. Apparently for the first game they basically made the gameplay first and then constructed a narrative around it, hence why the narrative is cordoned off to its own part of the game in the ASCII terminals and the disembodied voice of ELOHIM. It worked surprisingly well at justifying its own existence and all the philosophical text logs were genuinely interesting to read.
For the sequel, the scope is much bigger, as the game is no longer set in a simulation but in the real world. The core question is no longer "what makes a human?" but "what makes a society?", and with this increased scope comes an increased world and cast. The original game was unmistakable isolated, you only run into other actual people near the tail end of the game, and are genuinely all alone for most of the game, bar the pointed critiques of the Milton Library Assistant and the nebulous paternal voice of ELOHIM.
But the sequel immediately throws you into a conversation with a fellow person as soon as you finish the intro, before having the player walk out of the building they awoke in to a whole party of people celebrating your awakening. This is followed by a ride into a whole city with nearly 1,000 inhabitants.
Needless to say, the tone is very different. And I'm there for it. I can tell the devs must've thought this was a huge risk but chose to commit to it anyway. One of the first thing the game lets you do when you get free roam is to not go do puzzles ASAP but instead go explore the big city area you whisked past in a monorail. Just talk to NPCs, soak in the sights, it's nothing like the first game, but it's compelling! I loved it! I was so happy when I got to revisit the town and the things I said to the NPCs both in person and inside the game's social media system reflected back in their dialogue.
I can just tell that for this game the narrative and gameplay were built in tandem, as they fit together much better. I think the narrative expanded in a good way, it feels faithful to the original, asks new questions and all the optional philosophical ramblings felt as poignant as ever. Some of the insights in these files were really resonant with me.
Also, it should be said that the game is graphically amazing. One of the game's themes is beauty and the perception thereof, so it was important that the game actually shows off both natural beauty (impressive landscapes) and artificial beauty (impressive architecture), and the game succeeds at both. Things just look real good in this game, especially the architecture really impressed me in a way that made the awe the narrative hinges on feel earned. I am not for the graphical arms race that gaming has landed itself in, but for this game it actually suits the narrative.
I am looking forward to what's next for this franchise now. The game does have some aspects that feel like set-up for a DLC, but otherwise the narrative also feels like it's concluded with this game, but we'll see. Maybe nine years from now we'll get The Talos Principle 3?
Disco Elysium
No, not another philosophical banger! Not two in a row! Nooooo!!
Disco Elysium is quite the odd game. I'd say the best description for it is a mix between a classic adventure game and a RPG without a combat system. But that really doesn't do this game justice. What makes Disco Elysium is the skill system, the writing and the setting.
Quite simply, Disco Elysium has the most interesting implementation of a skill system I've seen in a game. The protagonist gets 12 points to put into the four main skill types: Intellectual, Psychological, Physical and Motorics. These four each have six associated skills, totaling up to 24 skills total that determine how the player is able to interact with the world. How this takes shape in gameplay is that every skill is basically a whole character inside of the protagonist's mind, chiming in during the game's many conversations with their own opinions, observations and advice. If your encyclopedia skill is high enough, your mind will bombard you with useless trivia on a constant basis and prompt you to correct people, if your authority is high enough your mind will start taking affront with any little remark and push you to establish your authority, and if your shivers is high enough the literal city you're in will talk with you.
It's weird, it's bizarre, it's wonderful. I love how often these skills will tag team to tell you to do something, or conversely get into arguments with each other. The writing and voice acting for these skills is magnificent, they all feel like unique characters trying to pull you in their direction.
And this incredible writing extends to every other part of the game. The game's setting is apparently the work of over a decade of TTRPG play by the lead developers, it's intricately detailed in an amazingly immersive way. The setting feels both familiar yet alien, very much like an alternate history but set on a distinctly un-Earthlike planet where reality is uncanny. Basically, the setting feels overwhelming at first, but it's clear that the setting has an ironclad consistency. There's a real weight and history to all the made up people and places in the game, it truly feels like the game's set in a small part of a larger world, rather than everything resolving around the player and anything extraneous being ignored unless needed. It seriously impressed me how well-developed it all feels.
And the same goes for the writing for the characters, everything fits together like an intricate puzzle. The game is supposedly about investigating a lynching, but in reality it's about immersing yourself into the world in the shoes of an extremely fucked detective. And the protagonist is the secret sauce that makes it all stick together, much like Francis York Morgan was in Deadly Premonition.
I also appreciate that the game is openly and brazenly political, it doesn't shy away from political themes and diving into the how and why of these politics. So often games cover topics that are political but then just don't say anything about it and Perform A Centrism or such, but Disco Elysium cranked the politics dial up to 11 instead and is both comically political but also earnestly political. It's wonderful, and a testament to the writing skills of the game that I found this part of the game consistently amusing or compelling.
Honestly, I'm just not sure what else to say. The game's got a lovely aesthetic too, and the voice acting is phenomenal. It's just truly solidly good. I have no complaints, no criticisms, no ifs or buts. It's just that good.
Small Saga
A cute little JRPG about a bunch of funny little rodents banding together to upturn society, stick it to predators and kill God.
This is a game that's been on my radar for a while, so it was nice to see it had actually come out. The moment I found out I decided to buy it, a game to play after I'd finish Disco Elysium. I didn't think I'd be playing two blatantly political games in a row!
Small Saga presents itself as a highly graphically polished JRPG with two core pitches:
1. The game's cast is mostly comprised of little rodent people, with the occasional gigantic monstrous predator and perhaps even a God (a human, basically).
2. It is a JRPG that contains no filler combat or grinding, enemies do not respawn and EXP is earned by milestone plot progression.
Let's start with the second pitch, the gameplay. I actually quite like how the game structured itself, characters earn EXP based on plot beats, usually getting a level up after an intense boss battle happened or when they resolved some sort of character beat. It's the same for characters learning new skills, they are tied to their character progression in the narrative, the bard only gets his basic attack when he's forced into a 1v1 battle. I like that! Aside from stats going up with level, you also get one point you can spend in the character's skill tree, increasing HP, Attack, Special Points or granting Passive Abilities. These can be reset any time to tweak a build as needed.
The game also has a neat system for consumable items, they're actually a type of equipment. Oh, and yes, the game does have GOLD and equipment you can buy with it. The consumable items can be used once per battle and are restocked at the end of each battle, so they're more like one-time use skills during battle than anything. It reminds me of the item system in Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a clever system if you ask me.
However... The game is easy. It's really easy. The gameplay and narrative are quite undercut with the absolute effortless combat, I'm talking about boss battles with cool themes that are resolved on the second or even first turn, I'm talking about threatening foes that hit like a wet sock when they strike. I only felt like the optional superboss was adequately difficult, and that was due to it having a particularly nasty AoE DoT skill.
Basically, the game could really use a Hard Mode. Looking at the game's reviews, this is a common and recurring complaint. And I don't really get myself why the game is so easy, the fact that there's no grinding means that it should be easier to balance, I thought? I get wanting the game to be casual, but the combat felt so easy that it made me question the purpose of it. All they would need to do is tweak some numbers, the actual encounter design seems quite fine.
The actual graphics for the combat are great, by the way. Very colourful and charming and with a banger OST.
So, what about the funny rodent people premise? The game sold itself heavily as a JRPG where you play as rodents and fight against titans like house cats or even DEFY GOD [If God were a rodent exterminator, that is]. Well, that stuff is definitely there, but it's less of a focus than I expected it to have going in.
Certainly the protagonist's focus is to slay a God, and the way how the societies interact with the humans comes up various times, but I wouldn't say it's the core focus. Neither would I say the titanic predators are that much of a factor in the plot, one is important early in the game but handled quite swiftly and another one is part of an arc but not really the core focus thereof. Most of the conflicts in the game are between the funny little rodent people.
And how this manifests is in... Politics! Whoo! Something I kept seeing when people discussed the game was how political it is, how it's filled with leftism and wokeness and LGBT pandering. You know, things people say about like every single game ever these days. I was quite sceptical about it, the narrative about the boy who cried wolf and all that, but this one time... Yeah, the game is brazenly political. And it's very queer, like holy shit these rodents are gay as fuck! Good for them. There's a gay squirrel, bisexual rat, the shrew becomes non-binary during a timeskip with their mentor who's too busy with SCIENCE to bother with silly concepts like gender. Based?! Oh and the two goofy henchmen rats turn out to be boyfriends at the end of the game, which is cute. I ship it.
Anyhow, the politics in the game start off pretty milquetoast, in the first area you defy the common dogma of not bothering the pets of the gods, instead choosing to fight the common house cat to stop it bothering a burrow of shrews. It's only when the plot progresses and your bardic red squirrel goes on a mission to his homeland to reclaim a family heirloom that things get overt.
In what turns out to be a real world phenomenon of red/grey squirrel animosity, the red squirrel's home tree has been taken over by grey squirrels and what remained of red squirrel society has been burnt down. Then it turns out the grey squirrels are your stock JRPG evil empire. Y'know, they dress like Nazis, the people under them are miserable, it's not really different from the evil empires in Final Fantasy games.
But then you talk to the guy in charge of it all, and basically he's like this weird memelord of a character? He vapes, he talks about how people just want to be subordinated, it's very... Twitteresque? One of his henchmen is a consultant who keeps dropping a "lol" all over the place, his lieutenant is a guy who keeps talking about logical fallacies and the marketplace of debate, again, it's very Twitteresque. It hit me like a truck when I was in the middle of a serious infiltration mission and suddenly this clownfest happens. I liked it more looking back at it in someone's stream and chuckling, but in the moment it was jarring and confusing.
Also they're homophobic! Like, they arrest the red squirrel on a bunch of charges but make sure to point out that one of the charges is "degeneracy" cuz he has a hamster boyfriend. And then another party member in jail's a bi rat who got locked up cuz she flirted with the big tall lady stoat.
On the one hand, it's like, yeah, let's beat up the homophobes. On the other hand, it's kind of a heavy thing to casually drop into the game and then to resolve in what basically amounts to a series of several easy combat routines and now we have solved homophobia and the tree is once again filled with pretty rainbow banners and the red squirrel and hamster have a gay kiss and it's cute as fuck. I dunno, something about it feels jarring.
This also goes for all the other fascist stuff, you beat up all the bad guys, kick them out of the tree, the vore stoat lady goes feral and your epic lab rat party member punts her out of the tree because filling the craving with fascism is bad and then she eats the evil emperor and basically fascism is over. It's defeated, gone, it just doesn't come up again unless you really go out of your way later in the game and go on a pretty big detour into the prison cells to talk with the One Remaining Fascist about his belief system. The following conversation is probably my favourite in the game, the ORF turns out to be a complete dick who won't change his mind, but it actually forces the writers to engage with the politics on a deeper level and I appreciate it. It actually makes the protagonist declare what he stands for and what he thinks a new society can look like without falling into the same pitfalls again and we get a cool mycological allegory and such.
This does however influence the rest of the narrative as the resident Rat King of Monarchy hears about what happens with the Fascism Squirrels and basically freaks out and starts thinking his subjects must have it out for him too, and develops an Evil JRPG Scheme to use a bomb to deal with the filthy peasants, which culminates in him being stabbed by the Royalist Monarchist Lackey and then the Lackey has a breakdown and if you spare him in combat the protagonist basically informs him that anarchy exists and Lackey retorts that sounds completely unworkable.
There's also a sequence where the party lead basically gets eye-gouged, winds up at a farm, gives in to despair, and the Gay Squirrel [who is now an ambassador and wears a cute kilt instead of a nice harlequin bodysuit] goes to rescue him except it turns out party lead's basically become a Slave Of Capitalism and the squirrel has to fight in the Roman Rodent Arena and when the guy in charge finds out what a political shitfest it'd be if people found out they put an ambassador in the Arena they basically repossess the Capitalist's assets and give the farm to the party leader, who gives it to his colleagues because Worker Owned Business.
The thing is, "fighting the evil empire", "liberating the slaves" and "deposing the corrupt king" are by all means common JRPG tropes, it's always just dressed up as righteous rebellion without really applying any political labels to anything. At best you might get a singular instance of the party being called terrorists and maybe a single "fascist" if people feel spicy. They never really call out the fact that the stuff you do is super political, so when this game does do it it feels sudden.
But it also feels sudden since the game's narrative and gameplay make the process seem so effortless and easy, like it's a foregone conclusion, when in reality we know that's really not the case.
So, why is the game like this? I do think that in the end everything boils down to a core theme, which is defying nature. The King thinks he has a natural right to rule: He gets his ass kicked. The Shrews think nature orders them to passively allow the cat to consume their burrow: the party kicks the cat's ass. The fascists think people naturally want to be dominated and that some behaviours are unnatural and 'degenerate': The party kicks their asses. It's probably the recurring theme of the game.
Uh, right. This got unusually long. I do really like the game! I think that the only things I would change are adding a Hard Mode and explaining the weird squirrel dialogue by having them be influenced by human social media or something like that to explain their lexicon and why they seem so memetic.
Super Lesbian Animal RPG
Time for another gay furry RPG! Didn't think I'd play two of those in a row, but that's how the cards played out.
This is a game where the title immediately raises an eyebrow. It sounds extremely descriptive in a tongue in cheek way. Is this an actually serious JRPG that features Super Lesbian Animals, is it more of a fun joke game like Franken RPG? Overall it's mostly the former, it is a serious story about a group of adventurers that happen to be furry and also lesbian on a quest to Fight God while also delving into their personal and interpersonal anxieties, but there are aspects of the latter, as the tone of the game does often veer into silly RPG and parody.
This game is actually a re-imagining of sorts of Super Lesbian Horse RPG, a late 2013 My Little Pony fangame. It's my understanding that the overall structure and plot of the game are similar to the 2013 version, but the plot and characters are much more fleshed out in SLARPG and of course all the MLP content is now OCs. I never played this old game, and SLARPG is a game that stands on its own merits, it doesn't expect the player to know about this old game.
So the game starts out pretty normal, after a little intro sequence magical powerful you really start the game by yourself and you slowly work your way through assembling the party. What's notable is that out of the four party members, two of them are already in a committed relationship from the moment the game starts, one party member is is a committed relationship with an important NPC and the last one confesses her feelings during the course of the game for another NPC.
I like this, because the game actually spends a decent part of its runtime delving into the adorable relationship dynamics of the existing couples as well as showing how a rift can form in a couple and how it's possible to mend it and come out of it as a stronger couple. It's a whole sequence during the midpoint of the game and the writing is just good for this whole part, so few RPGs actually delve into this stuff, or games in general, as most stories just stick to will they/won't they and such.
And the game doesn't hold punches either, some of the stuff in the game hit me hard, like really hard. Actually like feelings in my chest hard. The game presents itself with a very cheerful and colourful style, but it's not afraid to throw around character angst. Of course, in the end things do have a happy resolution, and there's even an MLP-style epic powerup.
And yes, the game is cheerful and colourful! The palette in the game is very bright and vibrant, and the music is for the most part energetic and upbeat. I quite like the OST! The writing for the most part is also silly, the main antagonist is a Tumblr Sexyman whose head is a tape recorder who wants to turn the world into a glitchy mess of neon colours, the enemies and NPCs are jokey, and much of the party's dialogue is like internet banter between friends. Claire the cow in particular is just always on fucking fire, she's just like me for real.
As for the gameplay, it's rather standard JRPG fare. The game's made with one of those conventional RPG Maker engines, the same one that Small on Top was made in. You have your healer, physical fighter, magical fighter and the aggro-drawing tank. One unique system is that some of the party's skills cost Star Points to use, and SP are gained during battle by using skills that match the character's role, like healing abilities for the protagonist. This means you can't just mindlessly spam the strongest abilities.
Regardless, outside of a few cool boss battles late in the game, the combat felt rather routine for most of the game. Random battles don't occur, instead enemies roam around on the map, but they're often hard to avoid. They thankfully don't respawn unless you leave the area, at least. The game just doesn't really innovate much on JRPG gameplay aside from some cool gimmicks late in the game, this is very much a game where the narrative and the aesthetic do most of the legwork.
Oh, and as for whether the game is political, not really. You do destroy a cryptomining facility though, which is based.
I did really enjoy my time with this game overall, the writing and spritework quality is overall superb! The game also has a very insightful post-mortem that is very much worth reading, it even talks about the expectations of the game and the "quirky, silly JRPG that tackles depression" label that people love to stick on games like SLARPG.
UNDERTALE Yellow
TALK ABOUT QUIRKY SILLY JRPGS THAT TACKLE DEPRESSION!!
We're probably all aware of UNDERTALE at this point, I believe I wrote a whole blog about it and named it my favourite game ever and all that. I'm not sure if I'd still stand by that today, but it's definitely still up there in the top five for certain.
UNDERTALE Yellow (I'll just say UTY going forward) is a fanmade prequel to that, following the Yellow Soul's adventure through the underground, the penultimate human to fall into the Underground. The game looks and plays similar to UNDERTALE, you walk around the overworld and in combat you can choose between pacifying and attacking enemies and enemy attacks take the form of a great variety of little bullet hell minigames.
What really impressed me with UTY is how well it captures the same vibes and feelings of the original in every sense. The writing, the character designs, the area designs, the graphical style, the music, the combat flow, it all feels greatly faithful to the original game, something that is not easy to do for a fanwork like this. I don't even think the game ever truly strays from canon so much that it actually contradicts the original, except for one specific route that's intentionally noncanonical.
I did play all of the game's three routes, starting with Pacifist, then doing a quick Neutral run and capping it off with the lovely-titled Genocide run. Did you know the game never even calls it "Genocide" in the script? It's not even really a fitting name since the goal of that run on the original is omnicide, total erasure... Well, anyway.
One thing that I do really appreciate is how sparingly the game directly uses locations and characters from the original, while the game starts off really similar to UNDERTALE it quickly deviates heavily from it route-wise. Your trek through the Ruins takes place in a totally different part of the Ruins, with new enemies and a new boss. Similarly, you never actually make it to Snowdin, your journey through a wintery place instead passes by a wooden lodge resort and you deal with a different puzzle-appreciating goof. And the third area is wholly game-original with a completely new cast once again but would feel totally at home in UNDERTALE. It's really only near the end of the game that you see more original UNDERTALE areas and characters again, but even then they feel meaningfully and understandably different and they expand on some areas the original skipped over. You even get to briefly explore New Home, wowie! This lack of OG Undertale areas and characters is even directly explained in one of the endings in a rather clever manner.
In terms of gameplay, the game's bullet hell sequences are definitely more difficult and complex than the original's. Pacifist's final boss in particular is a pretty big step up from pretty much any non-genocide or non-bonus boss in Toby Fox's games in a way that did feel rather unfitting, since the boss battle doesn't seem to have a particular reason to be that powerful. That aside the balancing is mostly fine, I think. The boss battles exclusive to the Genocide route are also quite difficult, but that's really not different from the original, you have to simply get good, it's a part of the route's narrative that you run into greater opposition.
What did feel rather off is the layouts of the random battles and their spare methods. In the original most spare procedures weren't that extensive, and enemies would often pair up on duos or trios and your interactions with one enemy could affect others, in UTY this happens much less. A lot of enemies have act commands that really just do nothing, even if other enemies are present. I also noticed enemies rarely appeared together, only in the Genocide run did I see it start to happen more. It's a shame, the game went out of its way to give enemies distinct hurt sprites and react better to if you get violent, but it hardly appears.
As for the narrative, I think every route is great in their own ways. I think that like with UNDERTALE the narrative in UTY works best if you do or at least see all the routes, it gives more context to the characters and why they do what they do.
I did the Pacifist run first, and a large chunk of its lategame is taken up by a specific character and plotpoint in a way that did seem like it wasn't exactly final boss material, but the actual backstory of all the goings-on simply fit so well with the events of UNDERTALE as well as building on some of the concepts explored in UNDERTALE that I really hadn't actually seen that often in fanworks. The actual ending is also just perfect, and funnily enough it's not the first time I'd seen it suggested that it's how the Yellow Soul came to be inside that jar. Justice.
Neutral is of course the route that can be anywhere from almost entirely pacifistic to almost entirely violent, but it has an absolute banger ending, probably my favourite ending sequence of any of the routes. It was also neat to see how the Steamworks Factory area feels completely different in this route compared to the Pacifist route.
And the Genocide run is just great like UNDERTALE's was. I adore how this one feels totally different from UNDERTALE's, the gameplay still is about eradicating all random battles from the areas, and NPCs still do mass evacuations, but Clover's reason for doing this run is nothing like the player's in UNDERTALE. They also never grow as busted OP as the player in UNDERTALE does, so the route actually has four difficult boss fights instead of just one. The implementation of these battles and their narrative are super cool, and the ending is also really powerful. I applaud that they went out of their way to make this route really feel distinctly its own both relative to the other UTY routes and UNDERTALE's Genocide route. Also the way one of the areas basically plays out as the complete inverse of other runs is super cool.
I do lament the lack of a cellphone though, the game substitutes that with a mail system that lets any NPC send you messages which is cool as well as sequences where an NPC follows behind you and you can talk to them in different rooms, but the Papyrus and Payrus & Undyne phone calls in UNDERTALE were just peak writing.
Anyway, overall this is a fucking nice package. I can tell why this took seven years to make, it's just perfectly polished. The game even has all of the secrets and easter eggs one would expect of an UNDERTALE game. Strongly recommend this to any UNDERTALE fan.
Inscryption P03 Kaycee's Mod
Oh hey, Inscryption. It's been a while, hasn't it? I believe the last time I covered this I talked about how I like all of the three acts in the game and might even like the third act the most... Well, the game did get an official expansion that turns the first act into an infinitely replayable mode. No such thing for act 3, sadly!
But that's where this fanmod comes in, it takes the base game's act 3 and expands on it to make it into a replayable experience. I dare say they did a great job! Both the gameplay and writing feel polished and true to the spirit of the original act 3. The mod adds a whole bunch of new cards and mechanics, but they largely build on concepts that already exist inside of the original base game. Some of the stuff that is just outright new also feels right at home inside of Inscyption.
So yeah, I've been doing a lot of runs of the mod and even recorded some of the boss battles. It's fun!! Maybe one of these days I'll give the other two Scrybe mods a try too, we'll see.
Not Videogames?!
What the fuck is this? Things other than videogames? Is that even legal? It definitely should be illegal. Let's talk about them, while I still can.
Link Click
I could swear I watched this early in 2023, but apparently not since it's in this blog and not the previous one!
Link Click is a Chinese animated series following a pair of employees of a small business that specialises in traveling back in time through the use of photographs, returning to past events at the behest of their clients to look for certain titbits of information to help them in the present while playing them out in such a way that no timeline alterations are caused.
The premise is definitely strong with this one, and you can imagine there's a lot of intrigue with all of the clients and their wishes as well as a lot of emotional drama and such. As any good series there's also a mystery that's set up in the first episode that implies there's more going on behind the scenes, something that's the main focus of the final client of the first season.
The second season has apparently aired since, and it has been dubbed. I look forward to watching it, probably early in 2024!
Owl House
This show came highly recommended to me by several people, so I was interested in watching this one. It turned out to be really good! Like really just a solidly enjoyable experience overall.
Owl House is a fantasy adventure show about a human who finds herself inside of a magical dimension and gets herself entangled in all sorts of complex magical hijinx, a complex web of interpersonal relationships and a big ominous governmental conspiracy.
It very much reminds me of shows like Gravity Falls and Steven Universe, featuring a good mix of effective comedy and character exploration and drama. Oh and of course a dose of dark themes, which people who complain that SHOWS THESE DAYS AREN'T LIKE THEY USED TO BE will ignore so they can pretend old cartoons are so much darker and so much more mature.
Well, anyway. It's good! It's finger-licking good. The comedy is just totally on point in this series, I found it much more consistently funny than its peers, both in terms of the character concepts and the overall tone. It just suited me perfectly, like a snug glove. I was particularly fond of Eda, the middle-aged witch who is just an endless wellspring of good lines, King the adorable weird little scrunkle who is preciously megalomaniacal, and Lilith once she turns down the edge and just turns into an absolute failwoman. Love that for her. Oh, and Hooty of course. Hooty is fucking awesome.
The game also just does its character relationships well, the friendships feels believable, the budding romance that develops over the course of season 1 and just becomes an outright romantic relationship in season 2 is precious and adorable and so much better than any level of love triangle or will they/won't they slop would ever be, and the villains perform their roles well. I just got invested into this setting and its people, wanted to see things go well for them and all.
The show also has a pleasant artstyle! Very bright and colourful, lots of wonder and magic. It suits the show well.
Also, I guess she show is also super duper gay and stuff?? Lots of that in this blog, it seems! It's nice to see that shows can just have a lesbian kiss or whatever now without the universe exploding or a billion seething parents starting World War 7 or something like that. You didn't have anything like that when I grew up! I guess you can only see things like these in modern cartoons!
Anyway, very much a good show! I loved season 1, season 2 and season 3! Apparently season 3 really got cut short by Disney, but the three long episodes that we got still left me very satisfied with the show.
Harley Quinn Season 4
It's Harley fucking Quinn!
Season 4 has turned out to be quite contentious between fans of the show from what I've seen. Harley Quinn has joined the Bat Family, Poison Ivy has become the new leader of the Legion of Doom and the rest of the villain posse has gone their own ways, basically becoming minor characters.
I'm actually fine with the choice of the show to have different seasons put focus on different parts of the cast and to mix up Harley and Ivy's relationship. That doesn't take away however that this season definitely feels less focused than the prior seasons. I remember season 1 having a really tight narrative structure, while season 4 has a huge amount of plot strands that jump in and out of relevance and get inconsistently powerful resolutions.
The Harley Bat Family stuff wasn't a huge hit for me, but her dynamic with Alfred was surprisingly amusing. In contrast, I found Ivy's new stint in the world of corporate girlbossing really fun. There's a lot of focus on the amusing cast of villains there. Some of the sideplots like the Bane pastamaker arc also worked really well, while others like the Nightwing investigation and the culprit reveal felt undercooked.
In general it feels like part of the season exists mostly as set-up for season 5, the season even ends on a clear cliffhanger. I am looking forward to season 5, but I hope that season 5 mixes things up again and has a more consistent plot arc. I also hope we get to see more of Harley and Ivy being together after season 4 swings between Harlivy focus and wedging them apart. It would also be nice to see more of King Shark and Clayface.
Dead End: Paranormal Park
Basically discount Owl House.
Okay, that's too brief. Like the title implies, Dead End is an animation show with paranormal vibes. It takes place inside of a haunted theme park that also contains a portal to Hell and Heaven. The show follows the adventures of Barney, who has blue hair and pronouns, Norma, the second best character and all-around autistic nerd, Courtney, the actual best character and all-around horrible Gremlin woman, and Pugsley, who is a pug possessed by a demon. Together they mostly have wacky adventures come to them, but sometimes they go on wacky adventures instead.
Okay this probably makes it sound like I thought the show was mediocre, that's not the case! The show does suffer from putting its worst foot forward, the show gets much better after the first two episodes. But it never really reaches the height of the other stuff I watched this year, it's good and it's filling, but it's not "tell your friends and family to come to this restaurant" good.
One thing the show is guilty of is having a cool season 2 finale that then actually ends on a cliffhanger. Don't do that unless you know you'll be renewed! Apparently the writer intends to resolve things in a book instead, which sounds weird. Best of luck to him, I guess.
The Amazing Digital Circus
I could write about this, but I already wrote some thoughts about it in a reply on Tobias's blog, so I'll just link to that instead. It's good! I can see why it got so popular. It has 209 million views now! Wow! It turns out that making shows that are "Tumblrific" is actually good.
The Bad Guys
Ah yes the gay wolf movie.
Wait, I have been informed the movie contains nothing gay...? That can't be right. Must be a mistake.
Anyway, yeah, this is the movie that all the furries love. And one of those movies that really nicely blends some 2D design ideas into a 3D movie! Like, wow, the characters look really appealing in this movie!
The movie itself is a pretty standard narrative about a group of bad guys who aren't really that bad going up against a supposed good guy who's actually the worst guy. It's predictable, but that's fine, since it's also just entertaining. It's a fun romp, a good way to spend some time.
Anyway Mr. Wolf and Mr. Snake should have hot gay sex.
Into & Across the Spiderverse
Hey, it's the animated movie that looks so good that it started a stylistic renaissance! Or was that Puss in Boots 2...? Well, anyway, wow! What a cinematic marvel! Marvel, yes, and not DC. I never remember which one is which, really.
This series of movies is pretty much universally beloved, and I can see why! Aside from the visual spectacle, it's also just an interesting and compelling story with a likable cast. Honestly, what more could one want? The second movie in particular really ramps up the tension...
Only to end on a cliffhanger! I figured as it was coming near the end that it was setting up a ton of hooks but wasn't resolving any of them yet, but apparently they already knew they would make a third movie before working on the second?
But yes, good movies! I particularly like the protagonist here, Miles Morales is just such a compelling character. I'm rooting for him. I'm sure he'll do just fine.
Ernest & Celestine
A movie about a scrunkly little mouse and a big bear who come together over their status as outcasts to upheave societal prejudices and such.
It's a good and cute movie.
I just don't have a lot to say about it! I could do a long analysis of whether the bears and mice are meant to be a class-based or a race-based allegory or something, but probably it's just your typical animal parable where it really doesn't map 1:1 to any real life equivalent.
Anyway the mouse dentist should have had more scenes.
Barbieheimer
That's right, I watched both Barbie and Oppenheimer! And I'll put them under the same header! You cannot prevent me...!
As is customary, I watched Barbie first. I heard a lot about this one before going in, all sorts of discourse, but I actually had no idea what the movie was about! The patriarchy, apparently, if I had to believe the internet.
I guess it was kinda about that. I find it interesting this movie even exists, Mattel always struck me as being very protective of their brand, but this movie has a girl just calling Barbie a fascist and whatnot, which is hilarious to think about some grey Mattel suit approving.
It's a fun movie overall, it has a great Barbie-esque aesthetic and an interesting premise. Barbie goes to the real world, finds out she isn't all that and her girlbossing hasn't just solved gender inequality. Meanwhile Ken has a whole arc about how he's basically just a useless satellite character to Barbie while in the real world being a man he surely can just waltz up anywhere and demand a job. Hijinx and drama ensues, whoo!
Just the perfect appetizer to Oppenheimer, of course. The movie about the funny little scrunkly scientist who helped create the atomic bomb. Just a wholesome fun romp.
Or not, maybe it's a darkly compelling biopic about Oppenheimer and his personal struggles and failured and the political intrigue around helping create something that might well spell doom for the whole world. And the rationalizations and justifications after the creation thereof and the ever-increasing arms race.
Apparently this movie got some criticism for the last third being mostly about post-WW2 political intrigue rather than the bombing itself, as well as questions about whether the sex scenes are BAD or not.
Well, actually, the intrigue is GOOD. Watching Oppenheimer sitting in a cubicle closet while a bunch of old white men yell is GOOD. Sit your ass down and shut the fuck up and appreciate the scene, goddamnit. It's GOOD!!!! Also, the nude scenes are NOT GOOD ENOUGH because it lacks OPPENHEIMER DICK. But seeing him sitting naked in the shitty cubicle while being interrogated is FUNNY. I've been informed that scene is meant to be thematically relevant and shit, however, counterpoint: It's FUNNY. Sit down and chuckle at the funny naked scrunkly scientist.
Anyway, yeah, good and compelling movie. Would recommend the overall Barbieheimer package.
Bob's Burgers
Here we go again, the yearly segment where Mania says "Bob's Burgers is still good."
Well, guess what? Bob's Burgers is still good. Oddly enough season 14 started on a mediocre episode, but then immediately follows it up with a complete banger and has been good episodes since. Well, the Christmas one was also middling... But good season overall so far. It's impressive the show's ran for this long but is still overall consistently good. Impressive!
What is this...?
Good gods. Do you smell that? It smells like... Ponies. What is this? This feeling...This sensation... No... NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Friendship is Dragons
Are you familiar with those webcomics that take still shots from a movie or a series and add in funny captions that recontextualise the story into a TTRPG campaign? I believe it started with DM of the Rings, an adaptation of Lord of the Rings but with the Fellowship as a party at the behest of the ultimate lore-bore DM.
Friendship is Dragons is somewhat like that, but it adapts the MLP generation 4 animated series instead. A group of 6 girls come together with their DM to roleplay in the DM's homebrew setting, Equestria. Magical horses, Cutie Marks, the Elements of Harmony, all that stuff.
What I like about this one is that it isn't just trying to be nothing but gags. The relationship between the DM and the party isn't just adversarial, it's more just that at times their styles just clash in a way where you can't just easily say one person is wrong.
As you can imagine, the players line up pretty well with the characters they play. Rainbow Dash's player is forthright and prefers just fighting a way through things, Applejack's player is always metagaming, Pinkie Pie's is an enigma and just wants everyone to have fun, Rarity's is a drama hog and cannot reject a good narrative beat, Fluttershy's restrained and new to the scene.
But the real stars in my opinion are the DM and Twilight's player. The former turns out to be a wellspring of creativity and quick thinking, but also has a strong tendency to want to impress with grand narratives and imposing opponents. This is hindered by Twilight's player's uncanny ability to throw a wrench into ideas with clever lateral thinking, averting whole arcs with keen insight and a deep understanding of the rules. It's an interesting conflict, one where nobody's really being unreasonable, it's just a difference of expectations.
It's overall just an interesting character piece, and the comic also loves to play around with its source material. The ways the episodes play out are often wildly different from the show, mixing and matching screenshots from different episodes or giving totally different contexts to scenes from the show. The season 1 finale resolves around a wholly comic-original arc, just because the DM got derailed so far from his plans.
Doubtlessly the best arc is the Discord arc. The DM feels disappointed in his inability to tell a satisfying narrative, so he asks his mentor and idol to step in as a co-DM to host the best session ever. Things go horribly wrong in a variety of interesting ways, a lot of drama unfolds, and the DM is left scraping together all the pieces. It's a whole romp of absolutely juicy story and character beats and is beautifully capped off with the co-DM merrily making off with the reveal that as a celebrated and accomplished game developer, he can just divest from the whole story without needing to learn any friendship lessons because he's already made it and already has an audience that enjoys his style. Sheer perfection. The comments on that story arc were an absolute goldmine of discourse.
Elements of Justice
Another absolute banger of a series, this one is a spiritual successor and sequel series to the much-beloved Turnabout Storm. Turnabout Storm was a crossover between the Ace Attorney series and My Little Pony, following Phoenix Wright as he is whisked off into Equestria and tasked with defending his client in a suspected murder case, a most grave and rare crime in the rather idyllic world of Equestria.
Elements of Justice is made by a different team, but takes place after the events of Elements of Justice. Seven years have passed in the human world, Phoenix has regained his badge and is working at the Wright Anything Agency alongside his pupils Apollo and Athena, as well as his adoptive daughter Trucy. Meanwhile, only a year has passed in Equestria, and Twilight is a Princess of Friendship now.
Once again Phoenix is whisked into Equestria to defend a client accused of murder, but this time the rest of the Wright Anything Agency come with him too. But what seems like an isolated suspected murder case quickly is followed up by another murder case, and the suspects are two children at that.
That's right, Elements of Justice isn't just a singular case, it's a whole series of cases! Two of them have been released so far, Turnabout Theatre and Crusading for a Turnabout. The first feels like any starting case in an Ace Attorney game, but has a rather surprising ending. There might be more to it than it seems, though...
The real star here is the second case. Athena takes the lead as the attorney for this case, and it turns out to be an extremely emotional and twist-heavy case, easily up there with the final cases in any Ace Attorney game. I think that what makes this work so well is that unlike Capcom's official games, this series has zero reservations about spoiling the events of previous instalments, letting the characters actually mention how past events and cases affect them and how it drives them to make particular choices. This is exactly what Phoenix and Athena need, as the 'rule' in the official games to not do these spoilers severely hamstrings what these characters can think and feel.
Of course, the MLP cast is no slouch either, the official characters feel on point and the OCs fit in well. This especially comes to light in the second case, Luna takes the stand as the prosecutor and she absolutely steals the show, remaining true to her persona in the show and standing out as a prosecutor who shows a great level of insight, integrity, is unwilling to take nonsense from the courts but is not altogether unflappable or perfect. Also kudos to the rest of the cast for making the second case such an emotionally gripping rollercoaster, I doubt the official series would ever have the guts to make things play out as they did here.
I should also say kudos to them doing full voice acting for all of the dialogue, it's seriously impressive and most of the voices fit very well. The show also starts using proper 3D models for the Ace Attorney cast midway through case 2 and it just looks right.
Yesteryear's Despair, The Future's Hope
The part of the blog where I look back at the things I said I'd do in 2022's blog and also see what I have planned for 2024!
Apparently I still haven't played THE LONGING or Dark Messiah of Might and Magic! I need to get around to those.
I did however get around to finally clearing Disco Elysium out of my backlog, and enjoyed it greatly! I also listed RE3make as one of the games to play, which I did... But it wasn't really amazing, sadly.
OTHER: Her Loving Embrace: This one still hasn't come out of early access!
Together in Battle: This one is also still in Early Access, but I did play it!
Walthros Renewal: This was a fun game to play! Happy to see this one released in a good state, and I got to fill my OHRRPGCE quotient this year.
Bravely Default II: I got this on discount, but I haven't gotten around to playing it yet!
Pizza Tower: Man, this game dominated early 2023. I should give this one another go some time.
JoJo Part 6: I did watch the whole of Part 6 this year! I'm wondering when Part 7 will release?
Suzumega Medabot: The dA backlog on this one has gotten huge. Like, massive.
Crash Bandicoot: I did play these remakes and the fourth game in early 2023! I stand by my ranking of these games, the third one is the best by a long shot.
Eden's Last Sunrise: This one was rather odd in retrospect, how the game has four different campaigns but no way to skip to the branching points... I still think I picked the best route first, Kara and Skint are the best.
Floppy Knights: Haven't really thought back to this one, it's a shame that the game has such a clear meta where one deck is just the clear best one.
Shadows over Loathing: Yup, this one released and I finished it!
So overall I'd say I actually did get around to most things I intended to get around to in 2023!
Outstanding Duties
Regardless, there is still some stuff on my desktop I should get around to in 2024!
TUNIC: This one's been on my wishlist for a while, and I got it for Christmas. I think this'll be an early 2024 game for me.
BRAVELY DEFAULT II: I've played a lot of JRPGs lately, I'm wondering how this one stacks up.
Ghost Trick: This one's been on a mental to-do list for a decade now! With the HD rerelease, the time is ripe to play it!
In Sound Mind: Something that was recommended and sounded interesting and was on deep sale. Let's see if I actually play it!
Sonic 2006: Listen, I can explain. Some guy has basically remake this game entirely in a new engine and it's supposedly quite good! I didn't play it in 2023 since my controller's R2 button was borked, but I have a new controller now, so I wanna give it a shake.
SIGNALIS: Resident Evil-esque horror game I tried getting into, but then other things got in the way and it fell to the wayside. I intend to give this another shot in 2024.
Resident Evil 5 & 6: I want to co-op these games with a certain special someone if I get the chance.
The Wishlist
And of course there's games on my wishlist to get to, too!
Knuckle Sandwich: This one's been on my wishlist for a while, and it's actually out now. For this one I'm just waiting to see what the public reception winds up at, and it seems to be landing solidly into 90% approval on Steam.
Chicory, A Colourful Tale: Seems like a comfy and cozy game! Heard only good things about it.
Arzette, The Jewel of Faramore: I AM SO GODDMAN HYPED FOR THIS GAME GRUOAAAAAH!!!! I WANT TO ENJOY THIS.
Pro Philosopher 2, Governments & Grievances: The long-awaited sequel to the philosophical flash game! I'm excited about this one.
But wait... Wasn't there something else? What's this... This feeling. Is this... No. The influence of award shows? What is this? YUOAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!
THE GAME OF THE YEAR AWARD
THE GAME OF THE YEAR 2023 IS DISCO ELYSIUM.
ALSO THE GAME OF THE YEAR 2022 IS BUGSNAX.
IT IS NOT BROK THE INVESTIGATOR.
EAT MY GRUMPUSSY.
