2024: Mania Upgrade Patch

Hooboy, I hope you like well over 20.000 words coming your way! It's a good thing I cut these blogs up now, because they just keep getting wordier. I suppose I've just had a lot to say about the media in this particular batch, and might've been better off had I cut it up on a 4-months or even 3-months basis, but it's easy to just keep writing away words and it's hard to actually write some prelude and closing thoughts to these blogs.  

As I've been doing in the last blog, I wrote down all these thoughts soon after I finished playing/watching the subject, so there's some writing in here that's months old! I'll add a comment at the end of any bit if the passage of time warrants some further elaboration on a topic.

 

Oh, and I suppose if there's one thing worth saying before going into the meat and potatoes it's that I am now living in an apartment all to myself! Wow! I started househunting back in January, but already was moving in in the midst of April, this whole process has went exceedingly more rapidly and smoothly than expected! I'm all well and settled now too, and I am quite enjoying the new place. It's been less of a hassle than expected to take care of it all, and I'm overall feeling confident in all the progress I've been making in my personal life for these past two years. What a turnaround after all those years of stagnation! Of course I couldn't have managed all of it without my family and my lovely boyfriend. I do owe so much to them!

 

But we're not here for any of that, oh no. Clearly that is but an appetizer to the main dish that is my scorching, scalding positively lava-esque hot takes about video games and television series and movies. That's what life is truly really all about.

 

Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction (Upgrade Patch)

Talk about a blast from the past! YGO: Reshef of Destruction is a card battling RPG for the GBA that is loosely similar to the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, yet also in a myriad of ways strongly dissimilar. I used to play the hell out of this game when I was a kid, alongside the Sacred Cards game that used the same general engine and gameplay style.

Unlike modern YGO games which mostly aim to be faithful dueling simulators, which includes the modern Duel Links and Master Duel, Reshef of Destruction plays like the ancient handheld YGO games from back in the Game Boy days, with rules that try to emulate the manga before the manga adopted its rules to be more similar to the TCG. Alongside that, the game also has an RPG-like progression system where every card has a certain deck capacity cost, and you earn more cards and more capacity as you keep playing the game, having a sort of level-like progression to the game where you can't just put all the best cards in your deck if the total cost exceeds your total capacity. 

 

Reshef of Destruction is infamously stingy with handout out deck capacity, you begin with 1600 and only earn between 1 to 3 extra per duel, in contrast with the predecessor which gave out between 5 to 30 per duel. This made said game a total grindfest. This mod fixes this by increasing capacity gained back to a minimum of 6 and scaling as high as 300 for the final boss of the game, with increases generally going up the stronger opponents are, and of course the opponents get stronger as the game progression.

 

Basically, this mod gives a much nicer difficulty curve and deck improvement curve to the game. It furthermore also drastically speeds up the pace of duels by cutting out slow animations and tedious continuous effect activations as well as rebalancing the costs of many cards to better reflect card power, both upwards and downwards. The game also adds many new effect monsters to the card pool, replacing useless cards from the original. 

 

It is simply the optimal way to play the game and I quite enjoyed it! It was fascinating going back to this game knowing what I do now about the YGO card game. The format in this game is drastically different from the TCG, yet the things I've learned in the TCG have actually taught me a thing or two about how to be better at this game as well. Mostly in terms of not overextending and trying to bait out the enemy AI to waste cards. The AI in this game is really bad, as it turns out.

But yeah, this was a fun experience. Quite nostalgic, too. Something I really appreciate about this game is that the whole plot of the game is not just a retread of a season of the anime/manga, but a completely non-canonical sequel to the Battle City storyline. This leads to all sorts of bizarre scenarios where the characters pretty drastically deviate from the manga and anime continuities. I rather wish they did this more often in these games, the Tag Force games and Duel Links somewhat do it, but those often spend their time also just recreating anime/manga scenes. 

 

It does make me wonder whether we'll ever get a YGO RPG like this again, but the total failure of Cross Duel makes me think Konami will just stay in its dueling sim lane for now in regards to YGO videogames.

TUNIC

Ah, TUNIC. It's like Zelda! No, it's like Dark Souls! Umm, actually.. It's The Witness. You fool. You rube. You thought this was going to be some CUTE and KIDDY game?! Think you'll slash your sword and a beam comes out, and you get a bunch of active items and use those to destroy bosses? You idiot, you swing your dinky ass pathetic sword, its range sucks, you can't cancel out of an attack... Well, actually, you rube, you fool... It's actually just obscure puzzles. Everything can be a puzzle! 

Ok that derailed, what is TUNIC?

TUNIC describes itself as "an isometric action game about a small fox on a big adventure". Easy enough, the game presents itself quite clearly as being much like the older Zelda games, the small fox's titular tunic certainly reminds me of Link. You find a sword, you find a shield, a rod that shoots fireballs, you explore a big land, fight monsters, beat bosses, and gradually the world opens up as you get more tools to explore it with.

But the combat itself is also very much Souls-like, apparently. I never played any Souls-likes, but it does have an emphasis on a stamina meter, dodge rolling, checkpoints that renew your healing potions but also respawn all enemies, not being able to freely cancel out of your attacks, steeply challenging bosses and a system where you can recoup some of your losses upon dying by fighting your way back to where you died. 

And then there is the game's most famous aspect, the MANUAL. The big, game-long journey of learning how to actually play the game. See, the game has you find pages scattered about the in-game world that clue you in on the workings of the world as well as the controls of the game itself. Much of the text in the manual is illegible, but the judicious use of readable words and helpful illustrations do a lot to clear up what's even going on and many of the game's more obtuse control aspects. 

The game really does like to have its "Ooh" and "Aah" moments, where things suddenly click because of a manual, or when you find a shortcut that was hidden in plain sight by the game's forced camera perspective. Much of the things you can do in the game are immediately possible, you just haven't figured out how to do it or haven't spotted it yet, so you just don't. It's certainly impressive how the game was crafted so meticulously, everything folds in on itself like an intricate puzzle.

But is it a fun puzzle to solve? Uhhhh. 

Where the game faltered for me was three general points:

"Where do I go?" was a question I found myself asking for two hours the moment I finished the game's clearly signposted first quest, ringing two bells. Suddenly the world is seemingly my oyster, and I am off to collect a set of three handily colour-coded gears. Cue me being lost and getting my ass kicked in areas I discovered by accident where I was clearly not meant to be. Miserable. It was only when I forced myself through this that I got back on the path again and the path forward for the rest of the game was mostly smooth sailing.

 

Then the second barrier was the boss battles once you've bested the 'starter bosses'. I hated these bosses, the combat system is really just not built for these boss battles. They're clearly all about understanding tells and whatnot, nothing at all like the boss fights in any of the few Zelda games I'd played, and the camera just made it hard for me to even keep track of all that. There's only so long that the same boring slash/slash/strike sword combo will keep me engaged, and the game more than wore it out... There's also a combat gauntlet in one section where your stats are absolutely decimated that just felt like needless filler and padding to increase the playtime that should have just been optional content. Awful.

 

And the third part is... Extremely spoilery, but I'll echo the words of my friend Corelis that the game was on a really good roll with its lategame puzzle content until it decides to stick in what I could only describe as more needless filler and padding to increase the playtime that should have just been optional content, but this time it's puzzles instead of battles. A sour note that reminded me of the Witness of all things, pointlessly preceding what is in my opinion the game's best moment with what might also be its worst moment.

 

And I'm clearly not the only one, if you look at the negative reviews is basically an ocean of praise that also laments the above points. The obtuse camera, the battle system and the lategame perplexing puzzles. That's what it all basically boils down to, but for many that is enough to ruin the experience. It nearly was for me! Not that I would give the extremely high praise that some give to the game even if it did not have those pain points, as the game was good those points aside but wasn't necessarily blowing my mind as some games have.

So, did I like the game? Yeah, I'd say I did whenever I wasn't dealing with one of the points above. When I was exploring areas, fighting my way through enemy encounters, when I was immersing or appreciating the game's pleasant soundtrack and low-poly artstyle, those are the times I really quite got into the game! It's just a shame the game kept pulling me out of that flow by making me run headfirst into a brick wall.

Honestly I was for a time seriously thinking I'd just quit the game, but I am glad I persisted and got the golden ending... But whew, this is definitely a game that's best enjoyed if you have a friend feeding you light hints and outright telling you when you really should just look something up online rather than smashing your face on the wall.

Portal Revolution

A Portal 2 mod that I've been hearing good things about! It promises to be a "new story with original characters, spanning over 8 hours of gameplay and featuring over 40 new challenging test chambers which make use of new mechanics."

 

And, well, it is that! The game is an interquel, set between Portal 1 and Portal 2, featuring a new narrative with new characters, going through many puzzle rooms and involving a few new mechanics. It absolutely delivers on its promises, and not much more, but I'd say it ticked all the boxes I'd want and expect a Portal mod to tick. Well, except that the game doesn't really have an exciting new mechanic. There are new mechanics, but none of them are as cool as the titular Portals. That's to be expected, of course, but they're not exactly more cool than Portal 2's new mechanics either. In fact, I think the only new mechanics are an expansion on the laser cubes and more usage being made of the Pneumatic Diversity Tubes. 

But it doesn't have to be sexy, so long as it's more Portal. And it is more Portal! The puzzles here all feel like they very well could have come from the official Portal 2. The game introduces new concepts in a good pace, builds on established mechanics with increased complexity and difficulty, and then starts to mix them together. It all felt finely balanced.

The only gameplay aspect I would complain about is that some puzzle rooms were simply hard to wrap my head around since they were so big that I just lost orientation and couldn't keep track of all the elements inside a puzzle. The game is also similar to Portal 2 in that a lot of the puzzles happen in less than pristine testing chambers or outright outside of puzzle rooms, where it is just much harder to gauge where you can even put your portals and where you cannot. I won't fault the game for this too much, Portal 2 had this issue too, but it's just not as fun when the puzzle isn't hard to solve but finding the components of the puzzle is harder than I wish it were.

So, while the gameplay is faithful to Portal, and the graphics and audio are too, how about that new narrative? Well... It's fine. It's what I wanted, it's better than I expected, since I worried there might be a degree of cringe, but I genuinely can't say the dialogue ever made me cringe. The game primarily revolves around two new characters, both of them personality cores much like Wheatley from Portal 2, and their dialogue is fine. There's some comedy, but the dialogue is definitely more dry than that of Portal or Portal 2. That is not to say any of it is bad, though! I wrote about how Viewfinder botched its narrative in my previous blog, but Portal Revolution really isn't anything like that either. While I think the narrative is to some degree obligatory, the game could've worked without it, I do think it still added charm to the experience. 

 

That said, I did find the ending to be sudden and rather a letdown. I realise that a good ending would never really be in the cards given what has to happen between Portal 1 and Portal 2, but UNDERTALE YELLOW had that too and that game had a very satisfying set of endings. This game ramps character dynamics up near the end, only to have it all flaccidly deflate right at the end. It's a shame!

So, overall? A neat, polished package. It's solid, it's good. It's not sexy, or particularly exciting, but it is more Portal, and I do like Portal. If you liked Portal 2 and would still like it even if it didn't have GlaDOS and Cave Johnson, you'd like Portal Revolution. 

TS!UNDERSWAP

It didn't take very long for me to fall down the UNDERTALE fangame rabbit hole again! Just near the end of last year I played UNDERTALE YELLOW, and now I just beat the second TS!UNDERSWAP demo.

So, what is this game then? In their own words, TS!UNDERSWAP is "an unofficial fan-made reimagining of Toby Fox's UNDERTALE, made by Team Switched (TS). Featuring a reimagined Underground with new area themes, level progression, and expansive locations rich with original content." I'll just call it UNDERSWAP going forward. 

So basically, it's a playable UNDERTALE AU (Alternate Universe). The big gimmick here is that the game divided characters and areas up in pairs and swaps their respective roles and order of appearance. So for example, in UNDERTALE, TORIEL is the motherly figure who guides you through the start of the game, and ASGORE is the fatherly figure who acts as the final boss for the Underground. Meanwhile, in UNDERSWAP, ASGORE is the fatherly figure who guides you through the start of the game, and TORIEL is the motherly figure who acts as the final boss for the Underground.

 

The trick is that despite swapping roles, the characters maintain their original personality, with their actions altering to fit their newfound rule alongside their existing characterization from UNDERTALE. This mentality of swapping extends to much of the original game's cast, but also extends to the locations the player visits. The lonely and isolated RUINS from UNDERTALE are now the RUINED HOME, a much more jovial and lively location featuring a whole city of people to talk with. The frigid Snowdin is now the summery Starlight Isles.  

The demo as such only covers the events up to the end of the second major area. And I must say, the game blew my expectations away! I came away thoroughly impressed with this game, both for its sheer quality and also just how faithful it feels to the original in every facet. Much more so than UNDERTALE YELLOW, really.

And that's no small feat, as the game contains a truckload of content, as one'd expect from an UNDERTALE game. The degree of polish is simply unmatched, the game has a giant deal of responsiveness to what the character does, and the writing always managed to both feel in the spirit of the original while also putting a whole new spin on the cast. It's humorous, heartfelt, horrifying, just the right blend that made me love UNDERTALE so much. 

And alongside familiar faces and familiar places, there's also a whole ton of outright new content! Compared to UNDERTALE YELLOW, which was mostly new content, the new content takes more of an equal billing here. Alongside returning random battles, minibosses, boss battles and NPCs both minor and major are a whole cavalcade of new friends and foes, all of them brimming with the sort of charm I would expect of an UNDERTALE character.

UNDERTALE YELLOW has gotten some flak for making its main cast overall too pretty, too conventionally humanoid, but the new characters in UNDERSWAP do feel more similar to UNDERTALE in that their designs aren't afraid to be silly, goofy and all-around unconventional. 

Aside from the writing being top-notch, the musical score and the graphics are also quite wonderful. The graphics in particular strike a good balance of being reminiscent of UNDERTALE, but with the higher level of detail and animation that existed in DELTARUNE. I love how animated monsters are in battles, while still being clearly UNDERTALE.

Honestly, it's just an all-around great package, one I could just gush about forever. And I have been gushing about it on one server! I adore what they did with ASGORE, for example. I love what they did with Sans & Papyrus, two characters that are often mishandled. I loved the whole Koffin-K sequence in the Starlight Isles, a whole area that's basically entirely original content and all good. I love the Burgerpant sequence! I love that they made Mad Dummy a recurring rival. I love how the game is extremely responsive to the player's actions, even more than UNDERTALE was.

I just love this game, honestly. I eagerly look forward to the third demo!

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore 

Now here's a game I was looking forward to for a while, as I'm sure I made publicly known by rambling about it before its release over and over. A spiritual successor to the CD-i Zelda sidescrolling platformers, how much more perfectly Mania does it get? As a fan of the YTP scene as well as a fan of those games, you can imagine I was over the moon with excitement! This was one of the releases I was most hyped for, and the pre-release coverage all made me quite certain the game would deliver on its promises to be a worthy successor to the legendary interactive animated adventures that inspired it.

Did it meet up to my expectations? Mostly, yes! My expectations for this game were very high, so the fact it matched them so well is in itself impressive, I think. I don't think the game's perfect, there are some bits that are janky and overall I think the game is stuck between trying to be a faithful follow-up to the style of the originals or a dismissive parody that ironically doesn't reach the same 'peaks' as the original.

 

Starting with the gameplay, I would say the game overall does a great job of sticking true to the spirit of the originals while improving upon it. If you'd played the PC remasters of the original CD-i games, it's quite like that but finetuned more. The game's still divided up into clear stages, one being a friendly town and the others dungeons full of enemies. Compared to the CD-i, the screens in Arzette are much bigger and thus the enemies are more spread out and less cluttered. There's also no more of the enemies spawning out of thin air that the originals loved to do so much. Overall the screen is also more zoomed in, but in a good way. I'd say the gameplay was crisp and clear, it didn't feel janky as one might fear.

 

The game has quite a lot of items and power-ups. All of the game's resources are still tied to Rubies that you mostly gain from beating generic enemies, though items that used to cost Rubies to use now require a separate currency you can buy in the store for Rubies. I think it makes more sense that way. Overall not all of the power-ups and items are all that useful, but there is definitely a tangible sense that Arzette grows stronger throughout the game.

The game is pretty easy for the most part, the hardest bit is the start before you get any of the power-ups or even a basic shield. You can thwart enemy projectiles with your own sword, thankfully. Two of the bosses gave me some trouble, but the others were all quite easy, especially the projectile spam bosses since the rebounding shield just reflects attacks back at the boss.  

In terms of overall presentation, the music and the art in the game quite impressed me. The musical score feels very faithful to the composing style of the original, lots of emphasis on melody and the type of instrumentation you heard a lot in games of that era. I think the composer did a great job, my only restraint is that the original games had multiple different variants for most tracks depending on the room you were in, adding/removing/changing certain bits of instrumentation while keeping the same melody and rhythm. Arzette instead adjusts the music volume down in certain indoor rooms. It works, but it's not quite the same, and I think with modern technology the modular music the originals were going for could be much more well-implemented than they were in those games.

The spritework I think is lovely and the aspect of the game that most stands out compared to the originals. It's simply much better, it's got higher fidelity, has more colour and overall conveys more character than the rather stiff spritework of the originals. Paired with this I also think the overall character design is quite good here, the designs varying in how much they are clearly based on CD-i characters or doing their own thing. The rather high degree of furry NPCs and enemies was a fun surprise. I kinda wish we got to see some of those enemy minions inside of the cutscenes since I really like their designs. Thankfully they do have full body renders in the artbook!

The background art in the originals was something that always stood out to me for how unique it was, as it was all handpainted. It gave every room a distinct feel as nothing ever truly looked alike. It also was infamously hard to parse what actually was a platform or not at times, however! Arzette goes for a similarly painted look, but I believe it does reuse assets from time to time and isn't as rich in detail. On the flipside, it is much more readable, meaning the artstyle doesn't impede the gameplay like in the originals. The overall style is still very reminiscent of the originals, and I think it strikes a good compromise.

But you're not here for any of that, are you? You're just here for the cutscenes. The funny YTP fuel. That's what you vultures really want. You want deranged animation, you want bizarre dialogue, you want insane close-ups and totally zonktacular off-model screengrabs. Well, does the game deliver on that?

Yes? No? Kinda. Much like the originals, it's once again the cutscenes that will most likely steal the show, though not always for the better. Let's rip off the bandage: The cutscenes are as a whole worse than the CD-i ones, and not in a way that makes them better. The originals had a very clear and distinct style that is hard to truly imitate, being so very animated is actually a hard feat to perform, and the cutscenes in Arzette vary in how well they achieve this style. Some scenes I think work really well, and feel like they could truly be from those classic games! Others... Well...

The first thing that sticks out is the inconsistent framerate, some of the cutscenes just don't have enough frames of animation, making the animation look somewhat stilted. I don't believe this was ever an issue with the originals. Likewise, some animations are very animated in their posing and the camera angles, but others are unusually stiff, lingering too long on a certain character striking a certain pose and just talking. Boss defeat scenes in particular lack the oomph some of the classics had, there's no "you've killed me!" "good!" moment in this game. 

And part of that lies in the writing. The pacing and writing quality of cutscenes once more varies, some feeling faithful to the original's brisk and bewildering pace, while others feel lethargic and are stuck in making referential jokes in a way that feels aimed more at being a YTP source than trying to match the originals. You might've seen there's over 30 minutes of cutscenes, but I genuinely think the game would've been better off with shorter and snappier cutscenes with more animation per scene.

 

 The writing sometimes also leans too much into being self-aware of what it's trying to be, rather than being faithful. This is pretty clear with Arzette, who feels less like Zelda and more like a video game comic version of Zelda who's exasperated of dealing with the gaggles of bizarre and deranged NPCs. It's funny sometimes, but I think it happens too much. I wish she was a bit more like Link, like the box art of Arzette looking smug implies. The game does have a Link-esque character, but he's basically useless and very annoying, again just feeling just too on the nose.

That said, the vocal performances are on-point, one instance of bad audio equipment aside. And making all these animations truly can't be an easy job. This is quite a tight budget game by my estimations, Cuphead it is not, nor was it trying to be. It doesn't always live up to the technical standard or the soul of the original, but I still laud the effort and the quality of the end product.

So overall, I'm quite happy with the game! I think it was well worth the price of admission, and I'm glad the game ends on a sequel hook because I want more!

Regency Solitaire II

It was all the way back in 2020 when I played the first game! How short my blogs were then, compared to the rambly reviews of these days! Well, I suppose it's more fun to write about these games at some length. The prior review didn't really say much about the game, except how it's not like the games I usually play. It still isn't, but that didn't stop me from enjoying myself!

Regency Solitaire sells itself as a romp through romantic Regency Britain and a charming solitaire sequel. Cozy card gameplay, a love story told through still cutscenes and a distinct aesthetic all make the game stand out from the usual fare, but in the end I believe the game is mostly a case of an unexpected breakout success, as games of this sort, cozy puzzle game interspersed with visually appealing cutscenes, are a whole market unto themselves, tapping into an audience that most gamers would balk at. Not me, apparently, considering I played the game to completion!

 

As a sequel, Regency Solitaire II is not ambitious, the story progresses where the first game left off and the gameplay has a few new elements, but for the most part it is pretty much the same game as the first, but with a new coat of paint. And that's quite fine! I liked the first game, and went into the second one wanting little more than more of the same. This game delivered on that.

In terms of gameplay, it is much the same as the first game, but some bits and baubles have been added. The basic gameplay still consists of trying to build chains of matching cards, with Bella now having 6 rather than just 3 special abilities to help her make chains, but also dealing with new stage hazards in the form of pots and hedges, alongside the returning regal locks and padlocks. Overall these changes don't do much to make the game feel tangibly different, the extra power-ups are nice but the game's difficulty slowly skews up so by the end of the game you really need to play well to achieve the rather demanding combo requirements the game asks in hard mode.

It's the new story that's entirely different. Bella returns as the protagonist, now wedded with her beloved Henry Worthington. Rather than dealing with Bella's troubling suitor and foolish brother, the focus this time is squarely on Worthington's side of the family, with Henry's brother causing a social scene when he marries his childhood love, a simple maid. Meanwhile, Bella wishes to prove her worth and capabilities to Henry's mother by throwing a lavish garden party, a party which might be spoiled by gossip if she can't discover the maid's secret origins...

Well, honestly, the stakes in the sequel do feel rather lower than the first's. I think it's the lack of a clear and overt antagonist, as Bleakley was in the first game. There's some characters who cause a stir, but they're either quite unimportant overall or the narrative has them come to their senses quite handily. The antagonist in the second game is more society at large, the game takes the stance that it shouldn't matter if Henry's brother marries a maid, but it also goes for somewhat of a cop-out by revealing the maid is of noble heritage anyway, making the story overall somewhat of a nothingburger. Bella hosts her party, people love it, and they live happily ever after. It's fine, but it does feel lacking in spice, no doubt hampered by the tone and vibe the game is trying to go for, it can't poke or prod at its society too much without compromising the appeal of being a romanticized Regence narrative.

Unexpectedly, it's the bonus levels after the main game that captivated me more! Rather than Bella's efforts in high society, it focuses on the maid's efforts to matchmake the commoner side characters that had some scenes in the main game. The conflict here felt much more tangible and biting than in the main game, but as one'd imagine still happily comes to a joyful and wholesome conclusion. I like how it took some of the more unreasonable and underdeveloped characters from the main campaign and fleshed them out and made them a bit more sympathetic. It's nice!

The bonus campaign levels were also only 6 hands long each, and lacked bonus objectives, which made them shorter and easier than the main campaign levels. I like how they felt much more cozy due to that!

So overall, I'm satisfied with Regency Solitaire II. It matched my expectations, and got me hoping some years from now I might play Regency Solitaire III. No doubt the game will cover Bella's misadventures of motherhood, as the game ends on a pregnancy reveal! Oh yes.

Balatro

The hot new roguelike deckbuilder on the block, following in the footsteps of games like Slay the Spire, Luck be a Landlord, Inscryption, Griftlands and Monster Train. The game describes itself as "a hypnotically satisfying deckbuilder where you play illegal poker hands, discover game-changing jokers, and trigger adrenaline-pumping, outrageous combos" and has earned a reputation for being exactly that.

And it's easy to see why, the game's starting deck is a basic 52 playing cards deck, being immediately more recognizable than the cards in most deckbuilders. The hands are just like poker hands. It has a strong sense of familiarity and being rooted in pre-existing poker rules, before of course twisting all those rules with the game's mechanics, all in service of those sick combos. 

Unlike most roguelike deckbuilders, there are no real battles or enemies in Balatro, every encounter instead tasks you with reaching a certain score threshold given a limited about of hands you can play, which can each contain up to 5 cards. It's quite different from the other roguelikes I've played, focusing basically entirely on getting your big combo going rather than on a mixture of offence and defence. Instead the game focuses more on assembling all the parts needed to keep making combos big enough to keep up with the game's steep score requirement ramp. While you start out needing 300 score, by the 24th round you need 100,000 or as much as 300,000. 

The way you ramp up the score is in the store that you access each time you win a round, there you can buy upgrades for your deck, your hands and purchase jokers, the game contains 150 jokers that augment your score in some way, boost your economy or provide unique effects. This is basically the core of the game, the things you find in the store will define how your run goes. It's the game's greatest strength, and perhaps also its downfall. 

In short, I feel like I just don't have enough control over the shop. To get a good run going you want to have a way to increase the chips your hands provide, meaning you either need a good chip source from a joker or a reliable way to upgrade a specific hand type alongside a proper source of score multipliers and multiplier multipliers. But it's all basically a ton of RNG and a lot of the time I spend in shops is just wasting away money on rerolling the store a few times and then realizing I didn't want anything on offer and carrying on. After a certain while I just don't look forward to stores anymore unless I have one of the specific means of ensuring useful shops with certain jokers or passive effects.

 

Part of this is also that not all poker hands are created equal. It initially feels nice to try and make big impressive hands, but the game's systems pretty strongly reward making builds that have an extremely high floor and score well even on a high card, rather than building around zany combos like Five of a Kind or Royal Flushes. Some particular victims of this are all hands that contain Straights or hands like Full House and Three of a Kind that sit in an awkward middle ground between the more reliable hands and the more rewarding hands.

I don't usually bounce off these games this hard, but I think it might be just because of how hard I got into the game at first, it is really good at sucking you in with juicy joker effects, clean and neat UI and overall a just really powerful game feel and flow. But play enough and cracks just start to show, and then I wonder "why am I doing another run of this?" and it got to the point I removed it from my desktop. I should try other things.

Regardless, I expect that if the game gets a content update, I'll give it another shake. It is a really good game, but it just needs some more polish. That's fine, as this is usually the case with roguelike deckbuilders on release. I expect it to get there. 

 

[July Mania here! The game has gotten some bugfix and balance patches and has a modding scene as one might expect, but I've yet to get back into it. We'll see if I ever will! I wouldn't call this my GOTY.]

Pizza Tower

It's Pizza Tower, again! Just a year ago the game came out to outstanding positive reception. I wrote about it very lovingly in my last blog, which is odd to think back about because when I try to remember my first run I remember being pretty commonly frustrated, and how I didn't even bother getting all the game's collectable toppins and secret ingredients. 

Why was my review so positive, more so than my actual play experience was? Odd! That, and the fact that the game just got a big content update that adds a whole new playable character got me back to Pizza Tower. Was it as good as I said it was, or was it like I remembered, a great game that was often frustrating to actually play?

Well, it turns out it's as good as I said. I can only describe my actual play experience this time as a true joy, exploring these levels, running like a madman through Pizza Time and tangling with all the bosses, it was a blast. 

I believe my different play experience came down to going into the game with a greater familiarity and play knowledge than I did initially. Pizza Tower is the sort of game that gets better to play the better you get at it, and my playthrough just felt much smoother the second time around. The only parts of the game that stood out as less smooth were some hidden areas that felt too well-hidden and the second boss, which I actually had a harder time with this run than the first run! How odd!

Regardless, Pizza Tower holds up. It was the 2023 Indie Darling, and it very well deserves to be. 

Oh, as for the second playable character... I briefly played with him, but I didn't feel like doing a whole second run right now, so I'll hold that off until I feel the itch to play the game again. The secondary character plays somewhat differently from Peppino Spaghetti while being similar in the core gameplay.

Epic Battle Fantasy 4

Epic Battle Fantasy has its way of worming into my life over and over again. Not as much as MARDEK, but it's always there in the background, lurking, waiting for me to go on an epic adventure of fantastic battles again. And that is exactly what I did, in nothing less than Epic Battle Fantasy 4's 10-year anniversary update. 

I haven't played EBF4 in many years now, I believe I must've played it once as it had just come out and might have done a second run at some point, but I really haven't looked back on it much after EBF5 came out which honestly felt like the culmination of everything the series had been so far, the definitive final edition, the one game to rule them all, sticking out over all the others with graceful ease.

Playing this updated version of EBF4... I stand by that, I believe that overall EBF5 is the far superior product. The combat system, the exploration, the art, the narrative, the overall joyous game flow of EBF5 is simply not paralleled within the earlier entries. (Well, EBF5 still does have the whole Lance thing going on, but it's still ahead of 4's just sheer apathetic irreverence.)

But that does not make EBF4 a bad game by any means. I quite enjoyed playing it, and came away very satisfied with the experience. No doubt the big list of improvements for this anniversary update was a large part of that, but the core design of the game also just holds up well. 

It was fun to play out battles and actually be strategic about them in a way I never really managed as a child. It was fun to slowly accumulate power by upgrading skills, equipment and learning new abilities. It was fun to explore the world and slowly have it open up more and more, and to backtrack to find optional little goodies. The game's art isn't as evolved as EBF5's, but still holds up. The soundtrack is stellar as expected.

Honestly the only thing that didn't hold up was the narrative, both the plot and the characters were really thin and bare in this one, and the quality of the writing varies a lot from irreverently amusing to cringeworthy. Some of the writing really just doesn't hold up. Comparing EBF4 and 5, there's just a start improvement in all areas, but I think the fact EBF5 really actually tried with the story and characters even if it doesn't always succeed is the biggest jump up, because these older games really just didn't even try at all... 

But that's never really been a big factor for me in these older games to begin with, it was always about the gameplay and the overall experience, with the plot mostly just being a way for the game to have an excuse to have these epic adventures and a way to get some laughs. And that's fine, cringeworthy dialogue here and there aside.

In the end I played through the game on Epic mode and tried to be as thorough as I could be. I explored every nook and cranny, fought every enemy, and completed all of the optional Battle Mountain area except for the rushes at the very end. I simply felt I got my money's worth already, and didn't want to go through five rushes worth of content. 

In the end I settled on a magic cannon Natalie, physical cannon Lance and support Anna build, with Matt being left to eat dirt in the pavement I suppose. The game was mostly smooth sailing, with only a few battles prompting much in the way of having to reconsider my build. Rather fittingly, I'd say the final boss was probably the hardest, which I can appreciate. I'd say that most battles do somewhat blend together once you find a strategy that just works regardless of what enemies throw at you, but that is genuinely a common point across most JRPGs so I don't hold it against the game. It was still enjoyable while it lasted.

Next time I play an EBF game it'll probably be a modded version of EBF5, as it seems modders are working on making mods for that game. Should be interesting! 

 

Turnabout Retribution

This one came highly recommended by a certain someone's blog, so I just had to check it out. Turnabout Retribution is a fanmade Ace Attorney case that  has an amusingly bizarre premise that nonetheless plays out like an ordinary Ace Attorney case, which of course means that what seems like an initially open and shut case devolves into a madhouse of unreliable witnesses and perplexingly complicated murder schemes that will make your head spin. 

The big draw in this one is not the deliciously baffling twist the case takes in the second half of court, but the downright fascinating character interactions the case contains. Most fancases will either make the protagonist an original character or a common protagonist from the core games, but Turnabout Retribution makes Kristoph Gavin the player character instead, with series hallmarks like Phoenix and Edgeworth instead being your co-counsel and the prosecution. Anyone who played Ace Attorney 4 will know just why that is such a fascinating idea in and of itself.

 

Phoenix and Kristoph aside, the cast is also still mostly comprised of returning characters, mostly from AA1 and AA4's titular Apollo Justice. They all felt suitably in-character, there are some things they do that wouldn't happen in a core game, but more in a "they could never get away with this in a long running franchise" way than a "that's out of character" way. Good stuff. The few original characters worked well, too. The defendant isn't all that prominent, but feels right at home with any given official defendant, while the one original witness is a fittingly bizarre character with a fair share of odd behaviours as one'd expect of an Ace Attorney character.

What I love about the case is that it really goes in quite deep on the dynamic between Kristoph and Phoenix in particular, something that AA4 never did enough of I'd say. Kristoph in general is just such a fun character to play as too, and the actual case he's handling pulls him through the wringer hard. The circumstances around the case are such that much like in AA2-4, Kristoph's win condition is much more complicated than a simple acquittal, making for a highly different set of stakes and some extremely counter-intuitive moves from Kristoph for a defence attorney. 

The actual case itself also deserves praise. I had a hard time keeping track of what exactly the case logic was here and there, and the initial case built by the prosecution regarding the exact conditions of the locked room murder mystery were rather hard to follow, but once I got past that it was a lot of fun to cross-examine witnesses and poke holes in their testimonies. The flow of going from well-rehearsed testimonies to ad-libbed explanations was fun as ever.

The game's investigation also deserves some praise for its brisk pacing and funny banter. It lasted just long enough, nothing went by too quickly nor did anything drag on. I also appreciate how all the evidence found ties back into the case in different manners. Solid all around. I definitely recommend this case to people who enjoyed AA1~4 and want to see more of Kristoph Gavin. And who doesn't want more Pisstoph Gavin? 

Bravely Default II

Bearing no relation to Bravely Default I, Bravely Default II describes itself as "a new entry in the Bravely series", immediately giving itself shoes to fill, as Bravely Default I and its sequel Bravely Second (BS) are quite the darlings among JRPGs, coming out as a mostly traditional job-based JRPGs with a novel twist to its combat system in the Brave/Default system and some meta shenanigans going on near the games' ends. 

Does this adequately describe BDII? Well, yeah. I admittedly went into this game worrying I might not like it that much, but it wound up consuming me for the past two weeks during a period of mild sickness. It's by no means an all around superior sequel to BDI, but it definitely forges ahead in some ways while falling behind in others. Chances are a BDI fan will like this game, but I don't think it's guaranteed and it seems to be a controversial entry in the series among fans, no doubt in part because we got the new standalone entry in the series in the form of BDII instead of a proper sequel to Bravely Second, and BDII has some heavy divergences from the old formula.

 

Overall I would describe my experience as positive. The plot had some aspects I enjoyed a lot, the voice acting had a lot of good and amusing performances, the soundtrack is a true return to form with the return of BDI's original composer, the game has some wonderful-looking hand-drawn cityscapes and the 3D dungeons and character models look quite good too and have a timeless quality due to their stylisation. The game was appropriately challenging on hard mode and the boss battles were quite a lot of fun indeed, particularly the bonus bosses near the end. 

But like BS felt like a much refined version of BDI in its gameplay, BDII's radical new approach to the combat system means it has a case of being the first iteration and lacking polish here and there. This lack of polish also extends to some other areas of the game, including segments of the game that greatly feel like they had a greater ambition behind them that did not transition into the actual game due to the unfortunate lockdown that happened during its development. COVID's spectre lurks over the game, especially near the later parts of the story.

 

The biggest difference in gameplay is definitely the transition to an ATB-esque turn system away from the FF1~3-style system of the previous games. Quite simply, this makes it easier to plan things out on a moment-to-moment basis, but makes it much harder to predict the coming flow of battle. This game really could have used a FF10-style of indicator of what the coming turn order is like, as the exact mechanics of turn order feel like a mystifying black box.  It definitely also makes certain statistics more important than others, as usual with ATB games the one stat to rule them all is Speed, the stat that makes you get turns more quickly.

Yet another stat that affects this is the Weight stat, a new addition to the series. Depending on your job and your level, your character has a cap on the Weight of their equipment, and the way Weight works is that the better the equipment, the more it weighs. But the closer you are to the cap, the slower your turns come, too. This leads to some odd cases where a lot of the time the best thing a character can wear in a slot is nothing at all, I ended up with one character in a high-Speed and high-Weight class who had no weapons equipped and wore light armour, and she got three turns for every turn of some other characters, it was ludicrous.

As is usual for Bravely games, combat with basic enemies can just be summed up as "Brave 4x and kill everything ASAP", and it's boss battles that are the interesting part. Thankfully you can still just use the 4x speedup for random battles, but it does make me wish that the game was less grindy than it is. Compared to previous games, the amount of Job Points gained doesn't much increase as the game carries on and the JP costs for maxxing out jobs also doesn't scale up as much as before, meaning it's very possible to master jobs early, but you'll only be able to master a lot of them when you're at the final dungeon where the designated JP Piñata enemies spawn. I rather wish the game had less random battles and just gave more per battle. The removal of the ability to turn off random battles is a big miss honestly, it was a beloved QoL feature from BD and BS, I know they replaced it with roaming monsters on the map, but these were often impossible to avoid anyway... There's various other missing QoL too from BD/BS, most egregiously dungeon maps!

Boss battles make up for it though, being overall more difficult than those in BD and especially BS I'd say. As usual the bosses are divided into enemy Asterisk users, who you obtain jobs from when you beat them, and various monsters and whatnot. The Asterisk holder bosses definitely are the more interesting bunch, but there's plenty of regular bosses too. Of note is that relative to the previous games, enemy bosses here have a lot of counter abilities, countering anything from specific job abilities, inflicting magical/physical damage, applying (de)buffs, healing, defaulting or even using items. Some lategame bosses even counter pretty much any ability by getting a free BP so they can brave away and use lots of abilities. This seems to be something a lot of people dislike, but it never bothered me too much. It mostly acts as a counter against spamming the Brave command too recklessly. I think it only got excessive during the optional endgame Asterisk rematches, where they counter any ability with +1 BP, but those are basically superboss tier anyway so it made for a fun 'puzzle' to solve those fights.

The star of the show of course is the job system, and the game contains a fresh batch of 24 jobs, featuring both recurring staples with new spins on old jobs, new jobs that mix and match elements of multiple old jobs and a few wholly new jobs. Relative to BD and BS I would say that fewer jobs are useless in BDII, though there are still some jobs that allow you to just wholly break the game in ways that have become expected of the series. This definitely means there's a power differential between jobs that enable or benefit from these busted combos and jobs that just don't interact well with other jobs. Most jobs can be made to be part of some wacky trick, but sometimes that is only through some specific singular skill interaction. Sadly I feel like with every one of the 24 jobs having 15 levels of active and passive abilities, a lot of abilities and passives are clearly just useless clutter, with jobs generally only having a few actually worthwhile skills you really use them for. BDI had this issue too, but BS was better about it with its new jobs, so it's rather sad to see this step back. 

Another controversial part of the game is the plot and the characters. The writing definitely feels different from Bravely Default, it feels more similar to Octopath Traveler in that regard... But I didn't like Octopath's writing, whereas I did enjoy BDII's! Odd indeed. Overall I think that people in general overrate the plot of BD, and are too negative on BDII's plot. Which is not to say BDII is perfect by any means!

The core cast in this game definitely is much less dysfunctional than those of prior games, everyone is squarely an adult, seemingly being in their 20s except for Elvis who acts like he's in his late 30s or early 40s instead, and they act the part. They don't squabble much, and when they do it's clearly good-natured. Aside from the blandly heroic and dutiful protagonist Seth, the other characters are given clear characterization. Gloria, princess of a ruined kingdom, is prim and serious, being almost single-mindedly devoted to her tasks as a princess at the expense of the wholeness of her self. Elvis seems like he'd be the game's lech, but truthfully is an all-around decent man and no doubt the most grounded party member. Adelle is the perky and fiery one, and tends to be rather mysterious about her background and true motivations. The cast overall is less wacky than those of BD and especially BS, but I still think it works. Only the protagonist stood out to me as bland, really, and that is a criticism I have of BD as well. These games seem unable to let go of this idea the party needs to have a flat and boring straight man in the party, at least BS had the guts to not make that character the leading protagonist.

But a story needs its villains too, and the Bravely series has always had a bevy of villains for the party to confront, how else would you gain their jobs after all? Compared to the previous games where the Asterisk holders were all part of a singular military force, the Asterisk holders in BDII are a lot more varied in their allegiance and how they obtained the Asterisks. They still vary from sympathetic, manipulated or outright good to despicable and vile, but there is much more focus on their personal relationships with the other Asterisk holders in their respective areas and the party than how they fit into the general grand scheme of the overarching villains. I found it makes for more interestingly written antagonists, especially since unlike previous games they don't actually all die as part of the narrative, meaning some of them go on to stay recurring characters in the narrative or get explored more in side-quests. This gave them more breathing room than previous antagonists, a welcome change.

That's not to say it's all peaches and cream. While most Asterisk holders get extra context for their actions even after their defeat, some of them simply do not, including the main villains of the second and third chapters, while the overarching villain for the first four chapters is almost a comically stock and stiff basic evil warlord hellbent on world domination "for the good of the world". The execution of the sidequests also varies a lot, some of them are voice-acted, others are not. Some of them have exclusive boss battles, most just make you roam around and talk to other NPCs/gather some items/fight some monsters. 

I'd say the story is at its strongest in chapters 1, 2 and 3. The prologue starts off on a very generic foot, while chapters 4 and onward is where the COVID crunch starts hitting the game and I can sense that they had to rush through some areas and plot beats they clearly had greater ambitions for. But for those three chapters, which comprise most of the game time just like in BD and BS, the motions of unraveling the evil schemes plaguing every area and getting those new jobs was quite fun and all comes together quite well.

It is sadly those later chapters where the pacing gets oddly brisk, culminating in a confrontation with the villain puppeteering the other villain that gets handled and then subsequently basically stops mattering, because there's another villain puppeteering the puppeteer, who has a lot of interesting concepts behind them and the devs clearly had bigger plans for, yet ultimately feels like nothing more than a generic doomsday villain whose lore is all but relegated to a few scattered diary entries. It could have been so much more!

Overall, I would say BDII is a worthy successor, worthy enough to get my all roped into playing it as much as I did these last two weeks, but it was clearly held back by the adverse effects of COVID on its development cycle. A pity, but it makes me wonder what's next for the series. Bravely Third, a sequel to BS? Or Bravely Default III? I could go either way, but I don't feel much need to get a sequel to Bravely Default II.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale

Following Bravely Default II's full-fledged JRPG romp, I needed something lighter to follow up with. Chicory: A Colorful Tale had been on my wishlist for some time, and it seemed like a good time to get it and give it a shot. It did look like a compelling and cute game, after all. Surely it's all just rainbows and sunshines in Chicory: A Colorful Tale!

The Steam description gives a good summary of what the game's about. "Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a top-down adventure game in a coloring book world where you can draw on anything. Use your painting powers to explore new places, solve puzzles, help your friends, and change the world 

 

Something terrible happened. Chicory, superstar artist and wielder of the Brush, is missing, and all the color in the land vanished with her. It’s up to you, Chicory’s number one fan, to pick up the Brush and fill in for her. It’s a big job… but you’re ready for it! Probably!"

Accurate! Most of the gameplay in Chicory is indeed colouring the world after an incident turns the whole land black and white. The game's structure overall is rather like a Metroidvania, as you continue playing the game you unlock new abilities and steadily more of the world opens up until you have all abilities and all areas are available. It's a satisfying gameplay loop, and you unlock both new ways of traversing the land but also obtain new ways of painting, such as the ability to easily draw in straight lines, draw specific patterns, new painting textures and such. It very much feels like as you progress through the game you become better at colouring in the world and start developing a clear style.

 

Aside from colouring in the world, most of the gameplay is a mixture of platforming & puzzle challenges and conversing with the game's many NPCs. The platforming plays smoothly, nothing ever feels too difficult nor is it brainlessly simple. The game introduces a variety of mechanics that interact with your character movement and brush ability in distinct ways, and some of them make good use that your character's movement and your paintbrush abilities can be controlled separately. The game also has a lot of art prompts where it asks you to simply paint something specific, and the things you create actually appear inside the game world, which is a nice detail.

The NPCs in the game actually impressed me! They all have wholly unique designs, despite there being well over 100 of them, and they generally have some fun conversations you can go through. Many of them have sidequests and a lot of them are recurring characters who will pop up now and then to appraise your painting abilities. They do a good job of selling this seemingly idyllic coloring book world and there's in general a nice wholesome and comfortable feeling to the setting. The story goes go into some dark elements, but by and large the game's atmosphere is a joyous and upbeat one.

The game's story mainly covers topics like creativity, making art, feelings of self-worth and mental illness. I definitely got Celeste vibes from aspects of the game, in particular the boss battles where you use the brush as a weapon and you're dodging bullet hell attack patterns instead of platforming, though none of the bosses were all that difficult. Overall I'd say the story does a good job at the things it's trying to do, both in the main narrative and in the little sidequests and character arcs some recurring characters go through. 

I also want to give shout-out to the game for being so accessible when it comes to 100% completion. The game has a lot of side content and collectables, but the game has some NPCs who're very helpful in guiding you to the right spot to actually get that full completion. You can even call your parents and the mom will give a general hint on what to do next while the dad will give a full on detailed guide on how to do it, which I think is a great way to do a hint system. I did end up 100%ing the game, and I'm glad I did!

I also want to give a shout-out to the game's aesthetics, the graphics and the audio in this game are on point. The world really does look like a colouring book and both the environmental and character designs are appealing and varied, while the music and sound effects just really fit the game's vibe. Turns out the game's OST was by Lena Raine, who also did Celeste's OST. Fitting!

 

Anyway, I would recommend the game.  

Cryptmaster

A pretty recent release, coming out on the ninth of May 2024, Cryptmaster suddenly came into my view when I came across someone playing it on YouTube and it quickly nestled its way into my heart. A self styled "bizarre dungeon adventure where words control everything", the concept of a carefully curated dungeon crawl with typing-based gameplay seemed like like the exact sort of bizarre premise I needed. 

The gameplay of Cryptmaster is as it says, you control a party of four heroes resurrected from their graves by the titular Cryptmaster and roam around the game's square grid maps using the arrow keys and engage with the world, NPCs and enemies by typing the appropriate words. NPCs are either vendors you can buy items from, character who you can converse with by saying the appropriate keywords, riddle-givers who ask you to solve a riddle to proceed or earn a reward or enemies you battle by using combat words. Many of the game's systems reward you with letters, which you use to unlock the four heroes's combat abilities and unlock their memories to extend their maximum health (indicated by the letters of their name) in a sort of Wordle or hangman-like word guessing mechanic. 

The game certainly varies up how your words interact with the world, though the systems themselves don't particularly evolve as the game goes on. The riddles are mostly classical riddles, requiring lateral thinking, while there's also a second type of riddle where you have to guess a box's contents by telling the Cryptmaster to interact with it and provide matching descriptions, some of these riddles I managed to solve very quickly while others had me scrambling on how anyone was meant to figure them out, short of looking them up of course. It does help that the Cryptmaster will provide hints and outright offer to give the solution if you get stuck enough, meaning you never need to look anything up.

The combat can be either set to real time or turn-based, but I went with the suggested real time function. Against expectations, the combat doesn't take a Typing of the Dead-like form where enemies correspond to letters/words/sentences you need to type out, but instead you type out your own gained skills to use them, with some enemies having modifiers that interact with certain letters. I think the combat system works well for the most part, but I definitely developed specific routines that work for most battles assuming the enemy didn't have a special modifier. What I wasn't a fan of though was how using skills costs souls, and the game's soul economy partially exists in the riddles you solve. Once I'm out of riddles, it's easy to get stuck in combat without the souls to pay for anything but the most basic and weak skills. 

If you play the game, I definitely recommend turning up the settings that make the game easier, like looting extra letters from slain enemies and enabling more guesses during the chest guessing riddles. I wish the game also had a setting that could make the soul economy less stingy, or make actions cost less. Personally I ended the game with just about half of each hero's skills unlocked, which seems rather wasteful and also meant I was underpowered during the endgame as lategame skills are often just better and more letter-efficient than low level skills.

What really ties the game together is the writing and the presentation. The game's presentation is very much like those old monochromatic black-and-white dark fantasy illustrations, it rather reminds me of Return Of The Obra Dinn, something that suits the undergrounds that most of the game takes place in. This also extends to how the characters look, they all look grungy, with very detailed faces, covered in detail and creases and wrinkles and whatnot. 

Yet the game's tone is anything but, it's much more silly than the art would make seem. The cast of characters are a bunch of weirdos, bozos and altogether nobody in the game even approximates being heroic. One of the first tasks you have is to get wedded to a massively obese toad king, all hour heroes at once, and all the while you can chat away with him and whatnot. The lore you glean about the setting would all fit into a grim and serious picture if it wasn't delivered with such a lemony tone, and often interspersed with some bouts of irony and whatnot. It rather reminds me of MARDEK, but much less puerile?  Unless you make it puerile by asking people to FUCK or SEX. Which you can do, of course. But you can't FUCK any of the giant ratmen. Shame.

I think special credit also has to go to the game's soundtrack and voice acting. The music is rather atmospheric, but it works well and does a good job of selling every area's atmosphere, with a blend of intriguing puzzle tracks, dungeon delving exploration tracks and more snazzy actiony tracks for the game's combat encounters. The voice acting meanwhile really reminded me of that era of 90s voice acting where most of the acting was done by developers and their friends or such, all doing earnest and wacky performances. Part of the fun of talking to people was not just what they said, but also how they said it. Special praise should go to the titular Cryptmaster, he's a delight to listen to, which is good since he has by far the most lines of dialogue of anyone in the game!

Overall I think the gameplay could have spent a bit more time in the oven and the game's narrative did have a more sudden ending than I would have wanted, but I definitely would say I enjoyed my time with the game and do recommend it. I do sense that there might be just a bit more to the game than what we have so far, so I am cautiously optimistic we might get some sort of content update down the line. We'll see!

Dawnsbury Days

Dawnsbury Days is a turn-based tactical RPG using the rules of Pathfinder Second Edition (PF2e), featuring a campaign that spans 21 battles between levels 1 through 4 as well as a free battle mode and modding support.

 

This game caught my attention when I was having a sort of sudden fixation with PF2e, it's the first computer RPG that is using the system's ruleset, and I did have some familiarity with the system from my prior fixations on the system. I never quite got to shake that fixation during the early days of the first TTRPG campaign I was in, and so I set forth and spent €5 to get the game.

 

It's neat! It's not a comprehensive collection of all level 1~4 content, that would be a rather massive amount of content for such a budget release, but it still has an impressive amount of options and choices. There's some ancestries, a variety of classes and subclasses, and a ton of feats and spells to choose from. It's all mostly faithful to the system, with some compromises made here and there to accommodate for the limitations of working using a computer system rather than the flexibility of a GM. The player will always have perfect information about enemy stat blocks unlike at a tabletop, and there's some missing mechanics like large creatures or melee reach weapons, but it also has all the advantages of being a computer game, meaning it's always perfectly arbitrated and there's no fretting over obscure rulings. It's overall definitely a close approximation of how combat plays out in the real thing, which is impressive for a one person game! 

 

The actual design of the campaign is quite good, too. It has a nice mixture of encounter designs, there's some exploration-based battles, some where you have to guide and protect an NPC, some boss battles, some battles with hordes of enemies, a wave-style siege, some battles with one big enemy and minions, some battles with roughly evenly-matched evil adventuring teams and such. It does a good job of making sure that different mechanical niches can shine in different battles, sometimes you want AoE, sometimes you want to shred a single enemy. 

 

The game does have rudimentary presentation, as it is a low-budget project. It's all adequate, the maps are clear, the portrait art is mostly cohesive, the music and sound effects are stock, the voice acting and writing is amateur but it fits the overall vibe the game is going for. 

It's also got a pretty active modding community, there's mods adding ancestries like Goblins and Halflings and there's also some modded free battles and short campaigns. The developer is also still working on expanding the game, and it seems there are plans to extend the game up to level 8 alongside a DLC campaign and perhaps even the addition of large creatures and reach weapons. I look forward to that!

[There was actually an update adding more content to the game between me writing this above segment and me posting this blog, so the development is quite active indeed!]

 

The Talos Principle II: Road to Elysium

It was late in 2023 that the sequel to The Talos Principle came out, and I quite enjoyed that! The first game eventually saw a DLC release, Road to Gehenna, so people were expecting a DLC for the sequel too. Come June 2024, The Talos Principle II - Road to Elysium released, featuring three distinct scenarios set after the events of the first game and expending on its setting, characters and giving a glimpse of what to expect in the inevitable Talos Principle III. And a whole lot of puzzles, of course. So many puzzles.

The first part of the DLC, Orpheus Ascending, is the most self-contained narrative and has the most self-contained puzzles. At its core it's a love story, which is delivered quite well through the process of self-actualisation to a budding relationship to the realities of a long-term relationship. I quite enjoyed this part of the scenario. 

The puzzles meanwhile are quite different from the usual puzzles in the series. The focus is a lot more on fixed puzzle elements with preset locations and connections with the player has to use the puzzle pieces they can control to make the already existing puzzle infrastructure solve the puzzle. This requires knowledge of mechanics that existed since the base game, but weren't needed nor explained before, so the first few of the puzzles in this section act more as tutorials than anything. 

This is a radically different approach to puzzles from the rest of the game and even the rest of the DLC and this part of the DLC is rather controversial due to it. Personally I quite enjoyed the puzzles, but I got stuck on the final regular puzzle that I just couldn't get a proper grasp on... I think this part of the DLC is just short enough and it does just enough iterations on its core concept before it starts to wear out its welcome. 

The second part of the DLC, Isle of the Blessed, is a direct sequel to the events of the main game, with a more lighthearted and slice-of-life tone. It establishes which of the endings to the main game is canon, and it happens to be the ending that obviously would be canon and also was the ending I got. It mostly asks the questions of where the core cast are at after the end of the game and resolves some dangling plot and character hooks.

None of this is meant to be denigrating towards this DLC! It still has a philosophical underpinning that the Talos Principle series is known for and I loved all the character bits and seeing where both the main and side characters wound up after the end of their personal arcs, because realities don't just end in a clear resolution, there's still work to be done, and this DLC gives a glimpse of what that work looks like and why it is worth doing even if it's not necessary. 

In terms of gameplay this DLC is the most like the main game, it has regular puzzles, bonus puzzles, star puzzles, the whole lot. The puzzles overall are at the level of the final puzzles you'd find in each chapter of the main game's campaign, featuring a lot of puzzles that mix and match different elements, though some are definitely more prominent than others. The design of the puzzles doesn't stray far from how the main games are designed, but it does get clever and tricky at times. It all culminates in one big puzzle set inside a huge crooked hexahedron, a puzzle which feels super satisfying to solve and is definitely more imposing than it is actually difficult. A great capstone to a great DLC.  

The third part of the DLC, Into the Abyss, takes place during the events of the game with a framing device set after the second DLC's conclusion. It is both narratively and mechanically the most challenging of the DLC's. It is set inside a mindscape of The Talos Principle I's protagonist, Athena, and covers her doubts, anxieties and concerns over her actions during The Talos Principle II.

Narratively much of the dialogue in this game is not from the characters themselves but from Athena's anxieties, and it makes for some really fucking raw deliveries from the cast from The Talos Principle II when they tear into Athena's positivist and humanist philosophy and indeed the core philosophy of the series. It still ends on a positive note, but it still made an impression, and it's hard to argue some of these nightmare constructs don't raise some valid counterpoints. 

Mechanically the DLC outright sells itself as being a clear step above the core game with its puzzles, the first achievement is even called Difficulty Spike. It is clearly more demanding than the puzzles in the base campaign, but the approach to difficulty overall relies less on overly lengthy and convoluted puzzles that the first game had a lot of and more on novel puzzle designs and obtuse or unintuitive gameplay mechanics. You only need to complete 8 out of 24 puzzles in the DLC to finish it, and there's enough variety in the puzzles that anyone should be able to beat it without needing a guide. 

I personally solved 19 of the 24 puzzles legit, but did need to use a guide for the first puzzle because it's the one that established one of the new core themes of the DLC, which is using laser connections to block other laser connections, rather than to power puzzle elements. That aside there's all sorts of mechanics on display here and they got some ones that seem impossible at first but then click quickly after a break and when you return to them. 

But I did look up those final four puzzles because I had been spending 20 hours of the DLC and was wanting to move on with things! It's certainly got bang for your buck, both in terms of story and gameplay. The DLC left me looking forward to what the hell The Talos Principle III would even be about. There is a clearly set-up threat of a cosmic anomaly at the end of time, so perhaps the story is about how a lasting society has to deal with this unavoidable inevitable entropy... Or not! Who knows?! I don't, but this DLC has reaffirmed my interest in the series and I will definitely play the exciting conclusion to the Talos Trilogy!

Yu-Gi-Oh! Playground Progression

Here's one that I hadn't written about last year, but I have been spending a lot of time on. Last year in september I and some friends started doing a Yu-Gi-Oh! drafting format where we go through every core set and open a scant few packs and add them to our collection, augmenting our decks every week with whatever new cards we pull.

This format was... Not exactly the greatest, I suppose. Removal was king and stall was a recurring headache while a lot of fascinating deck types were just unattainable if nobody really drafted all the required pieces. There was also the issue of GX looming ahead and promising to have several sets worth of nothing worth playing, and nothing that would be even remotely interesting. Something needed to change, or so I felt at least.

Thus came the grand process of looking at every card that had released as of yet and making a wholeass new banlist for all of them. The goal was to repurpose the format into a constructed format, while attempting to keep a "playground power level" of sorts. This turned out to be quite the task, as the game has a lot of cards that were just brazenly ahead of the powercurve, a metric ton of generic removal cards that punish Tribute/Ritual/Fusion Summons and a lot of cards that aren't necessarily powerful, but are obnoxious in some fashion. 

But how to shape all that into a banlist? Just slapping all removal cards on the basic Limited List would just create a new GOAT format, where every decklist is comprised of a slew of staple removals. Whatever list we made, it wouldn't just be a TCG/OCG banlist. So I looked to Duel Links, and its fascinating implementation of the Limited 1/2/3 lists. What if we combined elements of both? 

 

And if we were going to do our own thing, we could go even further beyond. Duel Links is no stranger to locking certain cards behind deckbuilding requirements, a recent example is requiring the player to be playing Chevalier de Fleur to access Baronne de Fleur. The game has a lot of cards that are too powerful as staple cards, but are also clearly related to a certain archetype. Thus we came up with the Archetypal banlist clause, where certain cards could ignore banlist restrictions if played in the corresponding archetype.

We also could make bespoke lists, like a 1800+ level 4 list that prevents the play of more than 3 generically high-ATK low-level monsters, or a Monarch list that restricts decks to only one of any of the Monarch cards.

Thus we had made a new type of banlist, containing Restricted, Limited, Archetypal and some other types of regulated cards. I honestly worried it might be overly complex, but I find it has made for an earnestly fun format.

Of note is that certain powerful cards like Pot of Greed and Graceful Charity are actually part of the format, but as part of the Limited 1 list, and only 1 card out of all the cards that are LIMITED 1 can be put in the Deck/Extra Deck, meaning there is an opportunity cost to these powerful cards.

Likewise, the LIMITED 2 section are mostly 1-for-1 removal cards while LIMITED 3 section is mostly 2-for-1 removal cards, a way to try and ensure that the format has room for big boss monsters without running into a plethora of removal in every list.

There's also the RESTRICTED and SEMI-RESTRICTED list, which function like the regular TCG banlist does, that's where we put cards we just don't want to see too many copies of in a deck but are fine to all run together. Of note are powerful RESTRICTED traps like Waboku and Solemn Judgement, as well as SEMI-RESTRICTED staples Sangan and Witch of the Black Forest.

Overall I think we managed to create a really fun format with this. There's a big amount of deck variety, and people are constantly making all sorts of wild new lists without a concern for trying to play an optimal meta deck. Just this week we had Venoms, Cyberdarks, Greed Burn, HERO, Volcanics, Relinquished, Dark World, Huge Revolution, Gemini, WATER Goodstuff, Convulsion Crystal Beast Hamon and more wacky brews. We've really embraced the jank, and I think it has created a much more fun format than what we had before.

We're now finally getting to the parts of GX where the packs start containing really powerful cards again, notably the Gladiator Beast deck, and 5Ds is not far off either. I suspect the format will be staken up a great deal when we get these cards, and our current banlist will definitely need revisions when we do. I look forward to it!

 

Link Click

The first show I watched in 2024! I watched the first season of this Chinese animated series around the middle of 2023, a season which for the most part focused on the two protagonists cooperating to dive into the past through photographs at the behest of the clients, possessing the person who took the picture during that time period in their past life, with the important caveat that they are not to ever change the flow of the timestream. 

Usually this means they go into the past to discover some nugget of information or to gather evidence, but the season plays around with why the clients want them to travel back in the past and what kind of person is being possessed. 

Season 1 ends on a cliffhanger with the tritagonist being possessed by a mass murderer with the implication that this murderer has powers too. Season 2 dives headfirst into this mystery, and I really mean it when I say it dives into it, as the show basically wholly flips its focus from a varied assortment of clients to basically one mystery. To put it shortly, the show takes a turn for the Death Note, a show that itself wasn't always good at being Death Note, and Link Click certainly fumbles its way into trying to be Death Note more than Death Note ever did.

That's not to say I didn't like the season overall, a lot of the season revolves around two new characters who have some form of mysterious powers and their oh so very tragic backstory. Much time is spent going over their psychology, why they do things, and they overall come out of the season as sympathetic and complex characters whose actions make sense.

Where the season falters is in three aspects:

First, the season is absolutely obsessed with non-chronological storytelling. There were a lot of moments where I was confused on when in the timeline scenes were even taking place because the story keeps presenting its narrative completely out of order, both in the present time and in the several points in the past the story revolves around. Often the show does this just to create gotchas, presenting some facet of the past and then later revealing that facet means something completely different. There isn't really a single cast member who doesn't either know much more or much less than I as the viewer did, and overall the story is so much less complicated than it seems once you just actually have the full chronology. I think it's fine to do this to some degree, but this season is just obsessed with it.

Secondly, the season is riddled with absolutely pointless fight scenes. Several times in the season the plot progression just flatlines while some characters get involved in gratuitous and needless fight scenes. Almost all of these could just be cut out entirely and would only need very minor rewrites to keep the season working, with only a scant few actually being meaningful or interesting. The action isn't even really good, it just feels like tedious padding.

Thirdly, the secondary villain of the season suuuuuucks. They build this guy up all season as this calm and cool and collected dude who's totally principled and must have some sort of epic and tragic backstory, but in the end he just turns out to basically be a Jokermoding incel loser who has zero composure, like he just does a total 180 the moment things go wrong and becomes a completely different character. His motives aren't interesting and the whole season would genuinely be better off if he wasn't a character to begin with. He feels like he's just there so the season can have a real bad guy villain who isn't sympathetic, but he's not even really good at that, and it comes at the expense of the much more interesting primary villain's screentime. The dude also is constantly sending goons at people, so I blame him for all of the season's dumb fight scenes.

The season also commits the BROK sin of ending the season on a sudden swerve that raises huge questions without answering them, but season 1 rather did that too... But season 1 still felt like it had more of a resolution than season 2, as season 2 doesn't even end with the primary villain being dealt with, only the secondary villain. It also does the Star Vs The Forces of Evil thing where all show the protagonists are rambling about how they can't alter the past and the villains are wrong for trying to do that, but then the secondary protagonist does so anyway at the end, so it just seems super hypocritical. 

We'll see whether season 3 is the ZTD to season 1's 999 and season 2's VLR or not. At this rate I'm not sure what to make of it.

Kung Fu Panda

The Dreamworks trilogy about a Panda who learns Kung Fu! That must be why it's called Kung Fu Panda.

The KFP trilogy are a series of 3D animated martial arts comedy movies. It has the expected 3D style that Dreamworks is known for, with a distinct Wuxia setting. The series follows Po, the titular Panda, as he grows from an average Joe working in a noodle shop to the Dragon Warrior, a legendary figure in the world of Kung Fu. Can he rise to the occasion, can he overcome the villains who stand in his way and overcome is inner turmoils?

 

Well, obviously, yes. He has to appear in the fourth movie, after all! Still, let's go over the movies one by one regardless. And keep in mind that I'd only ever seen the second movie before deciding to watch this trilogy. [You can tell I wrote this part BEFORE the fourth one came out!]

 

The first movie... Honestly blew me away! I had no idea it was going to be that good, but it very much was! I can see why it's generally held in pretty high regard. It's just an overall very solid movie, featuring a wonderful art style and aesthetic, with a compelling cast of characters, a proper narrative and jokes that successfully land. It is very much a traditional Wuxia tale, a far cry from the parody I was expecting it to be. There's clearly a lot of reverence behind the movie, and an earnest wish to make something that's not just a lame joke. But that doesn't hold the movie back from being funny, either.

I think what really made the movie work were all the character dynamics at play here, both between Po and the cast as well as between the antagonist and the cast. Po's chosen to become the Dragon Warrior by the archetypal wise old master Oogway, much to the bafflement of the stern master Shifu. Much of the movie's about Po and Shifu coming to terms with why Po was selected, an arc that plays out as one would expect, and manages to hit all the beats of such a story expertly. It simply felt good to see these two grow as characters. Meanwhile the antagonist Tai Lung is out to claim the title of Dragon Warrior for himself, full of pride and lacking a shred of humility, but with the important context that Shifu was the one who filled his head with grand expectations and a powerful sense of entitlement. Po and Tai Lung contrast wonderfully with each other, and it's a joy to see their final confrontation at the end of the movie.

Just overall I really can't think of any criticisms for the movie, it's firing on all angles. Imagine my surprise when the second movie is even better.

While the first movie was about Po's conflict with his peers, his master and his rival, the sequel goes for a much more personal direction, Po's conflict now comes from within, his inability to find inner peace as Shifu and Oogway have. During a bout of saving China from raiders and bandits, Po comes across a symbol that triggers unknown painful memories for him. It causes him to start questioning where exactly he came from, as he's never met any other Pandas and it turns out his Goose father is -gasp- not his biological father!

Cue the antagonist of the movie, Shen. A peacock prince with a fascination for machinery of war. In a dark page of history, a soothsayer predicted that he was heading down a destructive path but would meet his fate at the hand of a black-and-white warrior. Wanting to subvert his fate, Shen raided the only known Panda village in China, committing genocide against them so that his fate would never come to fruition. This horrible act got him banished by his parents, only to return after their death and seeking to conquer all of China under his banner.

As you can imagine, this only was a part of the prophecy. Po survived, a fact that frightens Shen deep down. But while Po is a more skilled fighter than Shen by a wide margin, Shen has the upper hand against Po because Shen can answer Po's burning questions, a fact he gleefully exploits. It's only in the very end after Po learns the truth and accepts that he is Po, the son of a Goose, that he unlocks the next stage of his mastery of Kung Fu by finding inner peace. 

It's honestly just amazing. Everything good about the first movie is still here, but even better. Better character dynamics, better aesthetics, and Shen is simply a great antagonist. Tai Lung was Shifu's villain more than anyone else's, but Shen is Po's villain. The man behind the massacre. This link between Shen and Po is something the movie uses to its fullest potential, and all the scenes the two share with each other are simply great. Tai Lung was the strongest antagonist, but Shen was the greatest antagonist, the one who left the biggest mark on Po's life.

And then the third movie. It turns out that the wise old mentor Oogway used to have a friend called Kai, who is stealing people's Chi in the Spirit World until he can return to the Mortal Plane, which he does. He then embarks on a quest to steal every kung fu master's Chi! Po has to master Chi to overcome Kai, but to do so he must find inner peace. I think? Or come to terms with his role in life? Didn't he already do this?? The movie does make a point of him taking over Shifu's role as a teacher and master and how he fumbles this, but it honestly still feels like they regressed his character rather than just shining a light on something he simply hasn't had any experience in and has to learn.

The end of the second movie also revealed that Po's biological father had in fact survived, and there's even a whole village of them out there. Movie 3 reveals that Oogway sent Po's Panda father a message informing him Po is out there, and much of the third movie is spent on Po bonding with his new father, while his old father feels left behind. Po goes to the Panda village to learn how to master Chi, as the Pandas are the experts on this and the ones who first thought Oogway to do so, but it turns out that none of them can actually do it and Po's dad was lying to him. Meanwhile Po's dads have a heart to heart on how they will both be a part of Po's life.

While Kai keeps stealing more people's Chi, Po decides to turn the tables and teach all the other Pandas instead of learning from them. He does so successfully, then traps himself and Kai in the Spirit Plane, while in the Mortal Realm the Pandas and Po's Goose dad all realise the power of Chi to help Po. Po manifests his Dragon fursona, fucking explodes Kai, commiserates with Oogway and reflects on why he was chosen to become the Dragon Warrior to begin with, and chooses to return to the Mortal Realm. 

It's... Lacking. The villain feels flat, just some random conquering brute. No compelling backstory or reasoning behind his actions, just a guy whose Power Level is higher than anyone Po faced before. A big step down from Tai Lung and especially Shen. Meanwhile Po feels like he's been nerfed since the end of the second movie, regressing as a character and having to relearn lessons he'd already learned in the second movie. It's fine to make him realise he's not yet fit to be a teacher, but they even have some random characters shit talking him behind his back like he didn't save China twice. 

The arc with the dads also didn't sit right with me, Po's Goose father was a wonderfully positive and supportive character in the first two movies, seeing him be so much more antagonistic in the third didn't feel right at all. Some of the other auxiliary characters also got shafted pretty hard in the movie, no doubt to make Kai seem more menacing and to leave more focus for Po and the Pandas.

Disappointing. Not a bad movie, but not the rock solid calibre I was expecting after the first and second movies. We'll see how well the fourth movie does, apparently it'll feature the return of Tai Lung, the first movie's villain. Perhaps Po's big internal conflict this time will be whether he can redeem Tai Lung's heart?

 

WELL. Not really, apparently! 

 

While the third movie's theme is Po's status as a mentor and guide to others following his self-actualisation in the second movie, the fourth movie follows up on the third movie by...  Having Shifu tell Po to find a successor to the Dragon Warrior title and Po insisting that he should stay the Dragon Warrior and not pass on his title and become a spiritual leader for his community? Huh??

First of all, why would Po have to give up his title and find a successor? He just became the Dragon Warrior, why does there need to be a new one? Didn't the third movie establish Oogway's motive for making Po the Dragon Warrior was to fight Kai? Which Po did? So why do they even need a new Dragon Warrior to begin with? Why does Shifu order Po around like that??

But also, why has Po regressed into insisting he's nothing more than a fighty punchman Dragon Warrior who fights things good? The third movie already put him into a mentor role for the Panda village. You could say he was only a Kung Fu guide but not a spiritual guide, but the movie doesn't frame it that way...

So, Po has to make someone the new Dragon Warrior, and conveniently the least fitting person for the role pops up and does awkward voice acting all over the movie and tries to girlboss her way to winning the audience's heart, but instead just girlfails really hard and not in a lovable way. The newly introduced fox girl Zhen just doesn't really work at all for me, least of all because her motivations and backstory feel so shoddy and ramshackle and she basically spends most of the movie poised to stab Po in the back only to have an immediate 180 when she realized her obviously evil adoptive mother is actually obviously evil all along. Oh no!!

And wow, what a villain the Chameleon is. And I thought Kai was a step down! Hoo boy, she spends the whole movie basically just being a lame amalgam of Lord Shen [warlord, commands an army, wishes to rule the world] and Kai [wants to suck up Kung Fu powers, spirit world schemes], but all the menace she actually inflicts is... she intimidates someone down some stairs one time? She makes threats, but they don't feel threatening, and she certainly doesn't feel like she's any more powerful than the previous villains, nor has any of the personal connection to the cast. She doesn't even know Po or Oogway or Shifu, she has 0 connection to any of the heroes, except Zhen, which is a connection they did basically nothing worthwhile with.

Uhh, the movie also brings back the old villains, most notably the first movie's Tai Lung. Everyone was hyped to see him return and perhaps reconcile with Po and Shifu, earn a redemption arc or at least some closure, but he basically does nothing except smarm a bit while mojosucked in a cage and then acknowledge Po is the Dragon Warrior and fuck off. The other villains who returned got to do even less, their presence was a total waste...

Overall, it's about as good as you'd expect a movie called Kung Fu Panda 4 to be, which is a big step down from how much better than expected the first two movies were, and even the lesser third movie which at least had some good character bits. 

There is some good action and comedy, but even those didn't seem quite as tight as the previous movies. The movie does look gorgeous though, I'll give it that much. I did also like the silly arc about Po's two dads coming to find him, even though it seemed overall pointless and the movie didn't really do much with the dichotomy between Zhen's mom and Po's dads. At least we got to have the dads seeming super duper really gay. Don't believe the artists, Mr. Ping is a top and Li is a total bottom. That's my insight.

Robot Dreams

I'm surprised I haven't seen more people talk about this one! Robot Dreams is a 2D animated tragicomedy centring around the friendship between a dog and a robot in furry Manhattan in 1984. Wait, 1984?? That's what Wikipedia says, but it has no bearing on that one novel. You know the one.

The movie's most unique facet is that it does not contain any verbal dialogue, save for the licensed music that turns out to be an important motif throughout the film. What also stood out to me was how appealing the art style was, everything has a nicely colourful and rounded cartoony look, and the movie is full of a huge range of character designs, which is a weird way of saying it's diverse. 

The movie starts by basically showcasing that the protagonist, simply named Dog, is somewhat of a sadsack who seems to spend all day just lazing around in his living room. He has no friends, no family, nor even any acquaintances, it seems. So he decides like any normal person would to just buy a robot to be his friend! 

The rest of the movie basically follows their developing dynamic, but as the movie is a tragicomedy, you can imagine that it's not all just rainbows and sunshine for the two. I won't spoil what happens, but it's quite a lot. The movie's ending in particular could have easily struck me the wrong way, but instead I felt it ended things on the perfect note, in a way that just felt very right. Bittersweet, but with an emphasis on sweet and with an earned feeling of closure. I really recommend going in blind for this one, as I did, as it can be quite hard to predict where things will go.

So, overall this was a delightful movie. I really cannot think of any faults. It's cute, funny, a little bit heartrending... All I could ask for, truly.

Megamind

It was due time for me to watch this classic Dreamworks movie, to celebrate the release of its apparently awful made-for-TV-esque sequel. Megamind is a 2010 American animated superhero comedy film centering around the titular Megamind, an intelligence-themed supervillain who has always been an outcast and social pariah, forever locked in conflict with the clear Superman-esque Metro Man, defender of Metrocity. 

It sounds very much like a typical superhero movie, except of course it's from the perspective of the villain, and what more, the villain actually succeeds and defeats Metro Man... And then what? That's the whole premise of the movie, it's basically a big character examination of the titular Megamind and what it is that he actually wants to be relative to what society expects him to be. 

And it's damn good at it! Just a very compelling movie, with an interesting cast of characters, solid writing, amazing performances and excellent music choices. The movie was full of moments that had me laughing out loud and I really adored all the character dynamics and the twists and turns the movie takes. The villain in particular stood out to me, that character has aged wonderfully and is honestly ahead of his time. 

So overall a movie well worth watching! One of the best Dreamworks has done, I'd say. It's a pity the sequel is just slop, as I believe there was a lot of potential to explore where the characters would go next after the movie's ending.

Gon' E-Choo!

Alright, this is the one everyone reading must be wondering about. Strap in, it's a long one.

"Mania, why the hell are you reading this furry webcomic where a gator is always trying to vore an otter? Is there actually a story to this?"

Well, the why is easy to explain! A certain special someone wanted me to read the comic with him, and that is enough for me to read it. I was also rather interested myself, as I vaguely knew the author from the BROK Discord server, and I had heard some elements in BROK also occur in Gonechoo. After reading it, I can definitely say there are some similarities, though not to an extent that I'd say one influenced the other. 

As for whether there's an actual story... Yes. There is an actual explanation behind everything in the comic, and there is a clear end goal that existed for the comic ever since its inception, on that very first set of pages.

 

The comic is self-described as "a newspaper styled comic where a 40's era antagonistic cartoon alligator pairs up with 80's era savvy cartoon otter for gags and occasional pithy social commentary." An apt description for most of the comic! The comic contains 364 pages, a figure very close to how many days there are in a year, and is formatted like a newspaper comic, meaning you get 5 weekday strips that are in black and white, followed by a Saturday comic that has some colour and a full-page full-colour Sunday comic, which is often more fantastical than the usual comics.

 

Notably, while the comic contains timestamps that date back to the 80s, the comic itself was written in the 2010s, releasing in the 2010s over the span of six years or so. 

The comic has a rather tight cast, with almost all focus being on the protagonist Gonechoo Gator, a lanky and childish swamp alligator with a thick Southern accent and his odd friendship with a young Otter. Gonechoo is a gator out of time, a stranger to a modern world, seemingly having been stuck in time since the 1940s, and has a fixation on being the "apex predator" by way of devouring others. But in a odd fashion, wherein he imagines the people he devours simply are transported to a city inside his body, where they can live happily. Pretty much all the actual devouring he does is within his fantasy and imagination, though.

"So it IS a fetish comic?!"

Yes? No? Honestly, it can be hard to tell with things like this. I have no doubt that some people read the comic with the intent to get sexual gratification from it, some people do have vore fetishes and that's quite fine. It's nice that there's art that caters to those sensibilities, I genuinely think that is a good thing. But I don't get the impression the comic was specifically made for that purpose. None of the characters actually ever really talk or act in an overtly sexual fashion, and the comic overall could be described as entirely SFW, containing nothing explicit or the like, nor is the act of the devouring ever really given a sexual subtext. The most the comic does is some tame innuendos and likening some things to marriage or romantic intrigue.

What actually stuck out to me just as much was how prominently the comic featured the undersides of feet, detailed drawings of gator and otter soles... But I've been told that is just how some comics are, apparently. I'm not used to seeing comics so consistently drawing characters in poses that have them show off their feet though, but it's not that important anyway.

Does that mean I beat the vore allegations? Well, that would be a silly allegation anyway. I didn't find any part of the comic sexually scintillating if that's the question, I read it out of interest to see why the comic is the way it is, and where the characters would wind up. It turns out there is an explanation for why Gonechoo has his fixation, and it is deeply important to the conclusion of the comic. I'll have more to say on that later. 

Anyway, Gonechoo is clearly a fish out of water. His Otter friend is intent on hiding Gonechoo from anyone else, and Gonechoo himself has a very loose understanding of society, which much of the comedy in the comic is derived from. A large part of the comic can be summed up as "Gonechoo misinterprets common social constructs, basic concepts and 80s technology and trends", probably more than "Gonechoo keeps trying to convince the Otter he should definitely get in his mouth".

Meanwhile, it also becomes increasingly clear the Otter himself is also a social pariah. There is a reason he spends his time in that swamp and befriends Gonechoo, he does not get along with any of his peers nor does he seem to be on the best terms with his family. It's easy to say he doesn't even have peers anyway, as the Otter is always walking a tightrope of being Gonechoo's guide to a society that he is himself clearly an outcast from.

I realise I keep calling Gonechoo and the Otter "he", but to my knowledge nobody in the comic actually even has a definitive gender to begin with? The comic has a lot of times where it pokes and prods at societal assumptions, being set in a reality that works very similarly to the rules of an 80s comic, something like gender is truly as arbitrary as "putting a bow on actually makes you a girl, you're a girl if you put it on and a boy when you take it off".

This strange reality the comic takes place in makes it hard sometimes to parse when the comic is literal or metaphorical, and oftentimes the reality of the comic is clearly its own thing, but also reminiscent of our society. I've been told the comic is somewhat autobiographical to a degree, but not to an exhaustive degree by any means. Some of the prejudices that Gonechoo and Alligators at large dealt with reminded me of the treatment of black people in a post-Civil War US, while the Otter's outcast status and bullying by others felt super queer-coded to me, one comic cutting off right at a point where it seems a bully is calling him some unknown slur, which prompted me to immediate shout "faggot!" to my boyfriend mid-stream in voicechat. We all laughed, cuz we were all thinking it. Of course, it turns out the explanation is more complex than that, but I have no doubt it was written to bring to mind queerphobia or other forms of othering on purpose, too. Is that why the Otter is an otter, because he is literally othered?! Probably not.

And inside that paragraph is another important aspect of my journey through the comic: The fashion in which I experienced it. I read the comic while streaming the panels and voice chatting with my boyfriend, and sometimes one or two other fans of the comic, who were interested to experience my experience of the comic. It was a fun format, and I had resolved from the start to be quite analytical with the comic, keeping track of things here and there, and seeing some patterns and clear signs of foreshadowing. I have no doubt that the comic was planned in advance, as even in the first batch of 28 pages some concepts and characters are introduced which are of great importance in the ending.

My overall experience was that the comic is largely a slice of life comic, following the budding friendship of Gonechoo and the Otter, both in their ups and downs. The duo spends their time doing all sorts of things and going to all sorts of places, meaning the comic could be divided up into a lot of little separate arcs. Rather notable is that when you contrast the early and later comics, both the characters and the art style definitely seem to evolve. The early art style is much cruder than the arc of the final parts of the comic, and the Otter definitely seems to do a lot of growing up over the course of the comic, looking and acting much more mature near the end of the comic than at the start. It makes sense, as the comic seems to take place over the course of a year, and it's somewhat ironic the childish Gonechoo would make the Otter grow up, the two almost rotating in which of the two has to be the parental figure to the other.

Gonechoo himself does some growing throughout the comic too, he becomes less rigid about the whole devouring the Otter thing as the comic goes along, but he does have lapses and regressions here and there. He never stops having imagination sequences where he just devours all sorts of people though, which often have no real bearing on the rest of the comic, or such it seems at first anyhow.

So, how did I like the comic, then? Well... It's alright. Despite having all this to write about it, I can't say I was the biggest fan of the overall premise or writing! Much of the comic is slice of life, and that kind of premise is only as good as the character dynamics are, and the comic's dynamic duo fared alright, but didn't really blow me away. I overall found the Otter's character more interesting than Gonechoo's, whose dense naivete was the source of all sorts of hijinx of variable levels of comedic effectiveness. Some of the jokes land, but a lot of them just got a basic "I get it, but I ain't laughin'" out of me, to outright bizarre jokes that didn't make sense to me until someone explained them. It often felt like the comic was just going through the motions and ending up a page with a rather mediocre joke.

It's not exactly helped by how Gonechoo's thick accent sometimes actively gets in the way of understanding his dialogue. It's not really a very accessible comic, vore premise aside, as some things only make sense if you're familiar with Southern US culture or societal tidbits from the 40s or 80s. A joke is never funny if someone has to explain it to you, and the format of the comic makes it so you always know when a joke is happening that you clearly didn't understand. 

What interested me more about the comic was the promise of the grander narrative, the evolving dynamic of Gonechoo and the Otter, the emotional core of the story, the twists and turns, all that. I went into the comic knowing the comic had some sort of rather perplexingly twisty ending, and that it's more than just a slice of life comic. There's more going on here than a pair of bozos going to the mall or an arcade or playing Snakes and Ladders, there are moments in the comic where implications that something bigger is happening occur, and I was curious to find out what it was all about.

And that... Is sadly where the tone of this review will turn sour, as I emphatically did not enjoy the ending of the comic. It left me with a bitter feeling of "that's it?!", with a healthy dose of "it could've been great!".

When reading the comic, I decided that it could well be chopped up into 13 segments of 28 pages each, basically reading 4 weeks worth of comics per session. If the comic was a seven course meal, the first eleven segments can be summoned up as the first course, a slowly simmering plain and humble broth. Then for the final two segments, the remaining six courses are all basically flung at the table in an utter disharmony and after eating the dessert you're left wondering what the fuck just happened. That's not how a seven-course meal works. And just like that, the sudden breakneck pace that happens at the end of Gonechoo is not how narratives work.

While the villain appears early on in the comic in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo, their actual introduction happens legitimately on page 336 of 364 total, right before the final and 13th chunk. Preceding that is basically a whole plot dump of Gonechoo's sad backstory and following it is a complete spiral into total madness as a character who was just properly established basically goes through a whole comic's worth of villainy in less than a tenth of the actual comic. The same happens with other characters: Otter's parents, Otter's estranged friend, Gonechoo's old family, there's a lot going on there that basically is all crammed in at a breakneck pace and just not giving the time it needs, the time I would have gladly spent with it.

Elements that had been subtly set up and been hinted at are basically all laid out in the open in a very sudden fashion, as the stakes escalate from an argument between friends to literal apocalyptic and galactic stakes in the blink of an eye. The mystery of what this setting exactly is and what is going on with the town that ostracizes Otter is basically rushed through with barely any explanation, allowing no time for any of these individually interest elements to rest before moving onto the next beat that gets resolved with an equally absurd pace.

This whole bizarre ending sequence gets about as much time as a visit to the bowling alley would get earlier in the comic, culminating in a climax that can best be described by what Otter says of it: "It'll do."

I do not mean to diminish the importance of all the set-up the comic did, but I would gladly have done with 28 pages less of the typical Gonechoo/Otter antics if it means 28 more pages for the endgame, preferably interspersed throughout the comic more evenly so it's not all so lopsided at the end. It truly feels as if half the story got crammed into about 15% of the comic, leaving a dissatisfying imbalance between all the build-up that feels ultimately wasted and wasteful, and the climax that was screaming for more space. 

It left me feeling bitter, as I truly felt like the comic was exploring deeply interesting themes and concepts in its extremely eventful final arc, themes and concepts that desperately needed more time to breathe. But that is not the comic we wound up with. Those final moments of the stream, as I got to the end and was chatting with others, was me basically in utter disbelief at what just happened, looking for an explanation and finding signs that the ending was clearly planned, meaning this was either always the author's vision, or perhaps real life issues got in the way and the comic had to be cut short. 

For a while I assumed it might be the former, but now I think the latter is more likely. It is a shame it ended up that way, but that does happen... At the very least, I feel better if it is that way than if it was always intended to be like that. It's unfortunate, but then I can just blame the cruelties of our society and the limitations of our humans minds or whatever. Rational it's not, but people aren't rational.

But still, it is now somewhat hard to look back at the comic, knowing where it ends up. It's not helped by how in some ways the comic ends up in a spot where it might as well have started, or at the least ends up in a spot where things could just once again devolve into the events of the comic, another BROKian ending so to speak Given I was reading the comic for reasons other than the comedy, there's frankly very little value left for me now in those comics.

I've been informed several times that there are mysteries in the comic left unsolved, ARGs in the form of ciphers perhaps, but I can genuinely say I am just not interested at all in solving those. I doubt I would have been even if the comic had truly impressed me, ARGs are really not my thing by any stretch, but the ending really eroded all of my interest in the franchise. I'm aware there's a prequel series and a videogame, but I am not interested in playing the game, but might give the prequel a shot. But I'm not intending to pore over mangled computer code and stripes and lines to figure out some secret code that Suddenly Makes The Ending Good. If such a thing exists then it should've been in the comic itself, I choose to think better of the author than that and assume the ARG wouldn't really impact my view of things any.

Still, my overall takeaway from the comic is how hard it can be to truly convey the full breadth and scope of one's vision. I have no doubt that all the holes I see in the story, especially in the Swiss cheese of an ending, are actually filled in in the author's mind, that there are subtle clues and whatnot that one could piece together if they had the key. But I don't have that key, and the comic hasn't made me want to find that key either, wherever it may be. A webcomic is basically one big message being relayed from the author to the reader, but no matter how clear the author's vision is, the message simply just doesn't feel complete to me, I just didn't receive enough at the end. Were I a mind reader I could fill in those gaps and realise there might've never been gaps to begin with, but I can't actually read minds, contrary to popular assumption. 

Well, I think that's all I had to say on that... This very well is one of the longest rambles I've done about a piece of media on this blog! I suppose I feel like I owe this to the people of that fan server who read the comic along with me, and to my friends whom I pestered with a most curious assortment of suspiciously cropped parts of the comic. Yeah, you all must've expected me to ramble on about vore a lot, huh? Too bad, turns out the vore is honestly quite insubstantial to my overall enjoyment of the comic. It turns out to be critical to the actual ending of the comic, but again, it's all quite rushed, which is the actually interesting thing to discuss.

Anyway apparently my thoughts had some effect, as the author of the comic left the fanserver for it after I posted my review. Oh well.

 

[Future Mania here! Reading this back is rather bewildering... Were I to write this whole bit again I'd surely be a lot more negative as certain events have really tainted my view of this comic. This whole piece just reminds me of how insipid and toxic my whole experience with the BROK Discord server was, me reading this comic was definitely an extension of that server, and also how the reaction to my ambivalent review of the comic panned out. I'm honestly glad I left the BROK server, it was not doing my any good anymore when a lot of the people I enjoyed talking with left or went more and more silent, while becoming more and more full of frustrating, inane and annoying people. I'm much more glad to spend my activity on other servers where people actually do appreciate me. Hooray!]

 

Outgrowth

Well, after all that I figured it'd be a good time to give another webcomic I'd been intending to start reading a try, an obscure little webcomic known as Outgrowth, a slice of life comic about Ty and Zip, two longstanding Goblin friends. The comic is clearly homoerotic, featuring a lot of male Goblins wearing very revealing outfits, lewd and sexual discussion and casual nudity here and there. One recent bout of strips saw the protagonist Ty getting head from another Goblin in the shower, though the action mostly happened offscreen.

This is one of those cases where it basically feels like a comic was specifically made for me. The Goblin designs are really cute, they're little weirdos and come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, I could honestly see my Goblin OC [it feels weird to call him that!] living among all these other Goblins. It's also just brazenly gay. There's a lot of butt, bulge, nipples, all that. These Goblins get around, and the first arc of the comic takes place around a fertility festival, which immediately sets a specific tone. I really can't think of any comic with this exact combination of premises, but it's nice to know there's other people out there with similar tastes who like things like this.

I also just like the writing in general, the cast of the comic is mostly what I imagine are mid 20s young adults who're still finding their way in life, some more successfully than others. My favourite has to perennial fuck-up Zip, who is convinced he's the epitome of sex and starts the comic off drinking a potentially lethal potion and has been spending much of the comic since basically going through all sorts of coping mechanisms.

I find it fascinating that by all means Zip and Ty could just be boyfriends, they're both into men, but instead are just best friends, though not without the occasional flirty comment. I can't think of many times where a piece of work has two gay leads but they're not in a relationship, instead both having their own relationships. Zip's basically been going around and having little flings with all sorts of men, while Ty seems like he might be getting into something with the man who happened to sell the toxic potion. 

There's definitely some larger plot happening in the comic, seemingly related to a mythical creature that the fertility festival is celebrating. Meanwhile the characters have also been going on some adventures, setting up other potential plot and character hooks along the way.

The comic updates thrice a week, and I'm hoping it'll continue to do so for a long time. The pages generally don't have too much writing on them each, it's not as wordy of a comic as something like Order of the Stick for example. The comic's visual style is also generally rather sketchy and not flooded with details, a choice which I can definitely get behind given it means the comic gets to keep such a release schedule. 

I look forward to seeing more!

[Future Mania here again! The comic is still going strong as ever! It's currently in a MURDER MYSTERY ARC, and I just adore it!]

Everything Everywhere All At Once

The oddly named Everything Everywhere All At Once is one of those movies that I'd heard nothing but good things about yet was also absolutely in the dark on as to what it's actually about. And boy, what a movie it is! It's definitely one of those movies where it's best to go in knowing nothing about it, and it is full of utterly baffling and bizarre moments that are both deeply comedic and also emotionally hard-hitting. 

Basically, what starts out as a grounded movie about the difficult life of a Chinese immigrant family that owns a launderette currently undergoing a tax audit turns into a genre-blending exercise in the stupid and sincere. The movie's had me laughing out loud frequently but also tightly gripped me with its compelling characters and simply wild premise, all executed superbly. In particular I loved the action of the movie, it takes a clear and loving inspiration from those old Kung Fu movies with janky and cheesy but extremely lovable special effects.

 

Honestly, I don't want to spoil any part of this movie. Just know that it's strange, heartfelt, all-encompassing and wonderful. Watching this delight of a movie was 150 minutes I greatly enjoyed spending with my boyfriend. 

Ratatouille

A Pixar movie! Haven't watched one of those in a bit. I watched it in particular because there was a hilarious bit in Everything Everywhere All At Once that's basically an absurd reference to this movie.

Now, Ratatouille is basically universally beloved. Does it deserve that praise?!

Well, yes. It's good, as people say. You've probably seen it yourself and don't even need me to tell you it is. Everybody loves it because it's just a solid movie with a fascinating core conflict, good character writing, beautiful visuals and a wonderfully satisfying resolution. 

Knives Out & Glass Onion

Murder mystery movies always seemed like the sort of thing that was big in the past, but never really get big releases these days. Well, enter the running anthology of standalone murder mystery movies, Knives Out. It's got two movies so far with a third apparently on the way, and I love them both. 

 

Both movies are murder mystery movies, with mostly a whodunnit focus. Basically, both movies have ensemble casts led by Benoit Blanc, an eccentric genius gentleman detective. In both movies there's a range of valid suspects, all of which have ample motives and means for murder, and it's up to the watcher to see what they can figure out before Benoit does. 

It's a lovely duology, really. The first definitely is more of a classical mystery, the murder happens within a rich family, the setting is an old manor and what seems like an open and shut case turns out to be much more twisty and turny than anticipated. The secondary lead here is so completely out of her depth and element throughout this movie, it is genuinely hilarious to see. While both movies are murder mysteries, they are also very much comedies, with a lot of moments that had me genuinely laughing. It also all comes together simply brilliantly in the end, with every element no matter how small or insignificant it seems actually being a part of the carefully constructed mystery. The movie wastes no screentime, which I adore.

The sequel is a lot more bombastic than the first, being less conventional a murder mystery and upping the 'Knives Out' factor. It's rather like Ace Attorney sequels, the good stuff is still there, but it's definitely got more zany antics and more wacky characters, even if there's also grimness cuz it's still a murder mystery. The sequel spends a lot more time before the murder happens and definitely ramps up the action, impressive setpieces and the thrill factor. It makes for a very different movie to the first that nonetheless believably is part of the same series. I personally loved this movie's sheer energy and it was a delight as ever to see every thread once again come together in the end. But it does leave me wondering what angle the third movie will take.

Overall a delightful duo of movies, and I eagerly look forward to more. 

Closing Thoughts

Well, that was lengthy! I had a lot to say, I suppose. More about certain topics than others, certainly, but it was fascinating to read all this over myself. 

 

It still feels surreal to think about just how much has happened these last two years, or just this bundle of six months... In many ways my goals in life are being met at a rapid pace, there's currently one remaining long-term goal I have, which is my boyfriend moving in with me. A daunting goal for sure, but I feel like I am on a roll and that this too shall work out. Then I suppose my goal after that will be to appreciate what I have, and to maintain and cherish these facets of my life. 

Oh, I suppose I had also mentioned that I'd left the BROK server, but I'll say again how good of an idea it was to declutter that place directly out of my life. Sometimes an improvement isn't in what you gained but in what you leave behind.

Anyway, enough of that! Here's what I'm planning to watch and play these remaining months of 2024.

Suzerain: I got this political simulator that has been compared to Disco Elysium earlier this year, I think? Or perhaps back in 2023. I need to get around to playing it!

SIGNALIS: Another game I've been putting off for a bit, I should play it as a classic Resident Evil fan.

Ghost Trick: One of these years I'll play Ghost Trick. I owe it to someone.

Animal Well: Bigmode's first published game has turned out to be a smash hit, proving perhaps there is something to a publisher ethos of "simply publish great games". We'll see how that pans out, but I did purchase this game cuz I've heard great stuff about it and it sounds intriguing.

Knuckle Sandwich: This is one of those weird, quirky indie turn-based RPGs that always catch my eye when they are in development. This one actually had the blessing of releasing and to a 87% positive rating to boot, so I got it during the latest Summer Sale.

The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo: Another Summer Sale item, this one promises to be a very charming point and click adventure game.

Sam & Max, The Devil's Playhouse: After much waiting, the release date of the final part in the Telltale Sam & Max Trilogy Remaster has been announced, releasing in August 2024. I'll be sure to give this one a shake, as I felt the third game could most benefit from the tune-up of a remaster.

I've also been watching Dungeon Meshi with my boyfriend, which has been fun so far! I look forward to watching the rest of season 1, and of course there is a season 2 on the way as well!