chaosh.at

Cai's Casuality: Altered

2026-09-22T00:00:00.000Z

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave

Beaten Cai's final battle. It was good! Story was fine. I maintain Cai feels like a character in the wrong franchise and nothing about his story really changed my opinion of that.

Some spoilers: [spoiler]

[spoiler]

Overall I think subsequent runs will go much faster without all the side questing to do. Which, good! The game takes too long between major plot elements. I just wonder how much there will even be to do. I now know I don't need to recruit as much so there's kind of a double lessening of time pressure.

We're on to Theodora next. She seemed like the opposite side of Cai's coin. Going to try to reduce overlap with some of my characters from last time.

Oof, it is ROUGH to go back to level 1, three units, and intro fights. I think the overall tutorialization could be further reduced here.

Dyan sucks but we're laying it on a bit thick with the forked tongue? It's so hard to take this greaser with the pompadour seriously. He's so anachronistic. There's a lot of tell, don't show about the Saraminians being a sea people.

Overall her story feels much more in line with a standard Fire Emblem, at least to start. A lord with a mission for their people. It also goes MUCH faster this time between story battles which is a good thing. Part of that is definitely me just knowing the ropes better, and part of it is just that by having done the other route a lot of things are just done for me.

It really feels like THIS is the way the game should be played. Although one caveat, don't go so deep in the paint on the karma shard prizes. They can really quickly trivialize the game and it's a one way ratchet: I can't reinstate 10% exp boost, now it's 30% or nothing.

Chrono Trigger Happy

2026-09-22T00:00:00.000Z

Chrono Trigger is a great game but while playing it I can see the seams. This feels like a game where there just wants to be more time and room to let the beats hit and show the characters. The campfire scene is so good and I wish there was more stuff like that in here.

I got the "bad ending" to Lucca's vignette and was so irritated and upset by it that I went back and redid the entire scene after looking it up (I couldn't figure out that they literally wanted me to input it with the buttons). I connected with this moment and this character so completely: just like Lucca, I rewound time to fix that tragedy.

Everyone is here, all at once, for once.

There's definitely room to add this stuff in. Chrono Trigger isn't an overstuffed ninety hour odyssey. It's brief and that's one of its strengths, it (mostly) doesn't waste your time. The characters exude personality, their silhouettes are so clear and crisp you can click with them very quickly.

It does a lot with that economy of time, but we can trade some of those instances where it runs overlong and instead get some more character beats. Give me more of these characters! Chrono Trigger is so trim that if we added a couple hours to the run time that time wouldn't feel bloated, I'd just feel like I got a more decadent and full meal.

And some of this additional characterization exists already! I wish the party was treated as more present. You can swap them out freely, which is a surprising and wonderful quality of life thing for a game of its time period (100% I expected to have to go back to the end of time every time I wanted to switch) but let's just treat them all as there.

There are so many cool character moments in the story but you only get to see how the current party reacts and I wanted to see more of that. I was dying for a fourth party member here just to be able to fit all my favorites in. Poor Frog riding the bench while Ayla and Robo soak up all the screen time.

The Hat canonical party.

I get that is a "replay the game to see" thing and that made sense when it came out and this was someone's only game until next Christmas and so they were going to replay it to death, but I'm an adult. Realistically, forcing me to replay the entire game to get a few scraps of alternate dialogue is the actual bloat.

Also under the "my time is valuable" umbrella, Chrono Trigger could also point the player better, there were a number of instances where you just had to keep talking to everyone until the correct person gave you the next breadcrumb as to where to go. That's just wasted time that we could be doing something interesting with instead of letting me flounder.

Some of the fat we could trim is in the Tyranno Lair or the Black Omen, the end of which I was ready to have fewer encounters. They feel long out of a sense of obligation to build to something more grueling and epic as the game builds toward the climax, not out of a fun maximization way. I would have quit the Tyranno Lair if not for the ability to use save states to wind back before the pitfalls to avoid doing the same fights over and over. It's not cheating, it's a game about time travel. I'm method role playing.

Taking some additional breaks would give the game more of a cadence. The comparison is obvious due to the Toriyama connection, but Dragon Quest does this really well, settling into a nice rhythm of go to place, do thing, get a beat.

Overall, Chrono Trigger is an all timer, everyone knows this. It's one that largely holds up in the modern era and that in and of itself is a gigantic accomplishment. The showbiz saying is to always leave the audience wanting more and Chrono Trigger does that a bit too well.

The sun begins to set on Cai's weave

2026-09-21T00:00:00.000Z

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave

The paralogues are so good and they made me smile the whole time with how interesting and inventive they are. Some of the best fights this game has to offer so far and I just wish there were more.

For all my gripes, I think my biggest one is that I can't recruit Anatolia.

I'm getting close to turning off combat animations to speed it up. This game never totally recaptured the charm of the pixel art versions.

Ending a battle with the turn based boss mode is a cool idea...if the turn based jrpg battle thing was more interesting.

The restart chapter button really shouldn't be so close to the battle one...

Alright, we're on Cai's final chapter. Initially I had thought to play Leda next but now I'm not sure! I might want to save her for even later, when she'll be even more powerful. Bwahaha.

Weaving paralogues

2026-09-20T00:00:00.000Z

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave

It's getting pretty interesting and I've gotten to the part where I've unlocked the paralogues.

One thing that I do find frustrating about this is just the recruitment requirements and I wish they would telegraph that stuff in advance: "Oh I need to save money" or "I need to be gathering these items out on the overworld to be prepared for it." That would just be a nice quality-of-life thing.

I do also really like the Roman Mediterranean setting and I wish Fire Emblem would do this stuff more. I thought it was such a cool breath of fresh air when we got Face and there was a Japan-inspired one. Why haven't we revisited that? Can we do more? Can we go to a Nordic-inspired area or a Middle Eastern-inspired area?

The first paralogue was really good. It was a three way battle with bandits and birds to collect treasure. Fun and interesting, so much better than your standard boring overworld battles.

Busily weaving

2026-09-19T00:00:00.000Z

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave

The lack of a weapon triangle definitely I think removes some texture. Sure, it's just rock paper scissors, but it means Cai can't just tank EVERYONE, an axe wielder makes you think twice. And sure spears do more vs mounted units but you can dismount for very free.

I think I'm also not using weapon arts aggressively enough but the game doesn't make me so...

Bird time is the silliest mechanic ever. Every time I do it I just think about how dumb it is in fiction. Imagine being a bystander for this exchange.

"Bird, do you ever think I'll be better than my dad with a spear?"
Bird sings a song
"You're right, I'll NEVER be as good as him. I'M A FAILURE! ...so anyways, today's a perfect day for fishing, you wanna come along?"
It is currently the middle of the night.

If they want to rip off persona so much just do it harder in the dungeons. Make it a one more system. Make it at least mildly interesting.

The weaving continues at a rapid pace.

2026-09-18T00:00:00.000Z

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave

Chapter 5's battle was the first one I felt I wasn't absolutely facerolling. It was a fun one, (but damn those chariots). The battle was so good, and so fun, and the plot around the main story stuff is so good and then there's just a lot of extra between me and the next part.

Cai is growing on me, but fighting alongside Theorora or Dietrich and their retinues, his friends feel woefully out of place. They're bog standard jrpg "kids save the world" characters in the wrong game.

This game is one that I do think benefits from a guide because there are so many options for every step of what I could be doing with my time that it's just paralyzing. And I guess to be fair, this game is so easy it really doesn't matter, but it feels like for advanced classes I want to be planning that out. And I personally just don't know enough to look at this and say "ah, Cai should do this, therefore I should do this into that."

As I play this game I'm reminded a lot of Tom Haverford in this episode of Parks & Rec where they're trying out food and Tom declined to eat something because it came with a dipping sauce. His reason: drizzle it on there for me! I'm not here to do work.

I feel like that a lot with a bunch of the mechanics here. Let me just skip the dungeons, press the button, get the rewards. Let me skip the overworld battles! Just make everything faster. It's not like there's actually good content here. Once you've seen it once you've seen it.

Having said that, I'm having a lot of fun. I've gotten as far as the chapter 7 main battle and I've managed to get a couple characters to the next level. I think some of the problem is a lot of QOL shit is gated, you get the fast travel stations waaaaay too late.

The weaving begins

2026-09-17T00:00:00.000Z

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave

Oddly futuristic. UI elements look so good. Read a helpful tips and tricks thing that says it's better to play the characters serially instead of in parallel.

I've decided to play as Cai first, the character I care about least, since if I fuck up any of the systems as I'm learning I won't care so much. His start feels very not Fire Emblem and just kind of bog standard jrpg stuff. I like the lords and ladies and the military paegentry and all that jazz.

Cai's story is really just fucking wild and random. His party members seem not very good so far or maybe he's just very strong. It's hard to keep a balanced party, they just don't deal good damage.

Settings wise I really like the Mediterranean/Romanesque vibe.

The turn based dungeon battles haven't really justified themselves to me so far. Mechanically it's very shallow and before I used to get all the stuff I needed via battles and the monastery and now I have to do this other second thing which seems bolted on and largely filler. Maybe they'll get better.

I'm also getting like...Triangle Strategy levels of nonsense between the actual story battles.

It's fine right now. I feel like there are so many systems and yet they don't bother to go very deep on any of them in explanation, even when some of the systems are actually deep. I'm not sure what to equip on who.

Alright I really don't know how I feel about this. The main battles are so good and there's SO MUCH FILLER between it. I wish it would just let me sim the overworld battles. They're extremely boring and sometimes you have to do them multiple times. Same battles, same map. Same boring.

And it's so easy. I'm playing on hard and it's still easy. But I also wouldn't want it to be harder because then the stupid repetitive overworld battles would just take longer.

I think I might have to let go of what Fire Emblem was/what I want it to be and evaluate my relationship with it now based on what it is. Which I'm fine with that. I don't want to come across as someone who fears change and wants stuff to be the same. I can evaluate it without the baggage of my hopes or what it was as a stand alone unit.

But I'm not sure what it is what I want out of it. Or at least not large chunks of it.

The eve of the weave.

2026-09-16T00:00:00.000Z

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

We beat this! It was very fun. I didn't go back and get all the maiamai or the heart pieces because I just didn't need to and it sounded boring.

I would say the difficulty on this is a touch too low and the game as a while suffers from optionality. The game can't punish you very hard because maybe you're a kid and you're bad at the game and you keep dying and losing your items and you can never afford to buy them outright so the poor stay poorer (perhaps this game is a scathing take on capitalism).

But in the last dungeon, very few items are mandatory, much less their upgrades because they can't know that you definitely have all of them, or that requiring all of them would put the player in this unfun loop where they have to rent it, then they die, then they have to go back and buy it, run back to the dungeon and try again, then die, repeat. A rent to own would have fixed this.

But instead they just make it not that hard.

There is the hero mode but my gut is that it won't actually reward what I want, it'll just ask you to be better at the base skills of the game (dodging, blocking, swording) instead of making it so enemies have weaknesses and you NEED to use the boomerang or something.

The game gestures at this some, there are definitely some enemies where the hook shot is really useful to rip shields away but that kind of cleverness isn't really necessary.

Fire Emblem: Binding Blade

Played this a little today as I had nothing to play this evening and maybe I had some pre-emptive Fortune's Weave energy. Played through the first map and a half. The waves of nostalgia at seeing old Eliwood and Hector were...intense. Might chip away at this some in parallel.

In which we Zelda and do nothing much else.

2026-09-15T00:00:00.000Z

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Another sage freed. One fun thing about this game is that you tackle it from a normal 2d top down Zelda perspective and then sometimes you remember to think with portals and you solve something you were stuck on. Oh yeah, I can cross that gap.

And it feels really good when you remember off the bat and you don't get stuck at all.

Another good design thing about this game is the Maiamais. I was a little disappointed earlier thinking I may actually want to try to grab them all, but it would be so challenging to look up which ones you were missing if you were stuck since you'd grabbed them all out of order. This is a common issue where you have to go back and say well dang, I don't remember which ones I got and you spend a lot of time backtracking to realize you did actually get that one.

But then I remembered the game divides them into zones, so worst case scenario I'm sure something exists that tells you where they are, divided by zone, and it's easy to check that way.

I also thought I got some of the Master Ore in the Lorule Lost Woods dungeon but I didn't. Maybe I got it but died and never re-got it.

Lava turtle khezu dungeon also done. One to go.

I kind of dislike the item system in this game a bit. On one hand, yes, it lets you have a lot of freedom. On the other, I feel like the boomerang is so totally gapped in usefulness by the bow? The bow is just better boomerang 99% of the time.

Final dungeon complete, Master sword upgraded. Yes I have played a lot of this. It's very good.

Look at me, I am the Metroid now

2026-09-15T00:00:00.000Z

Metroid Dread tells you, right from the title, that it gets it. We're here because we want that feeling of exploring a space station alone. We're frightened and everything has gone to shit but there's no way out but through, and through we'll go. Like Ellen Ripley, Samus is a survivor. She'll find a way. Metroid Dread masterfully dances between making you feel powerful and powerless, flipping between Alien and Aliens effortlessly. That's what makes Metroid Dread the best Metroid game.

Let's start with Alien. The EMMI zones are the pure essence of being isolated in a cramped ship with a xenomorph. They're everywhere and nowhere at once, jumping out at you from unexpected angles. You can hide only for so long before it's a full on sprint for the exit where the door slams shut with the monster right on your heels. The EMMI design itself understands what makes things creepy. They're humanoid but they don't move like humans, they're so, well, alien.

It's the most powerless Samus feels in the series, regardless of how far you've come in the game. The EMMI zones make you reconsider, "do I really want to go through here?" You feel the namesake dread whenever Samus returns to them.

Even when you're able to fight them, charged up with the Omega Cannon, it's tense. Do I stand my ground, will I be able to break through the shield? Or do I need to abort this attempt and try to find a new angle, even though that's an opportunity for it to catch me? It's the slow charging of the final weapon while the movie monster creeps forward, its victory is assured, your doom inevitable.

"Get away from her, you bitch!"

Then you defeat it, cathartically blowing its head off and draining the Omega Cannon's power. It's reminiscent of countless action movies when the hero collapses after a fight, tossing their weapon away, it and themselves spent. It's in these moments where Samus and the series best mirror their clearest inspiration, an exhausted Ellen Ripley taking a moment to gather herself after another close call with a xenomorph. This is Aliens territory. Yes, you've defeated this one but your awesome power still wasn't enough to end the threat.

At the same time, Samus feels the most powerful she ever has here, we're in full Aliens action movie mode. She controls like a dream, the analog aim stick here lets you pick things off with precision compared to the clunkier d-pad only games. The melee counters feel strong and impactful highlighting Samus's bravery and strength against the unknown. She moves so well, the platforming here is the best in the series, allowing you to navigate with precision. The controls work with you, like a well calibrated power loader.

The Varia suit is truly a triumph of miniaturization compared to the 1986 version.

The game is able to show you Samus's growth better than ever not only through the cutscenes where we can see her own awe (and a bit of fear) at her new power, but just in how everything is presented in game. The Omega Cannon feels powerful. The Super Bombs look and sound earth shattering.

I wrestled for a long time with where this one ranked for me in the grand scheme of Metroid games. It repeats some design issues I had with Samus Returns (most notably the Aeion block detector mechanic which I won't relitigate here, go read that piece for more). It's too hand holdy, blatantly cutting off routes to funnel the player in the right direction instead of letting you get lost a bit. There's one section early on where half of the map is just lost to you, you must move forward into the fire zone, no grabbing any pickups you didn't get.

For a long while, it was chiefly that (and probably a bit of a hipster streak) that made me want to keep this game out of the Canon in favor of Fusion. Fusion is the game that better respects the player learning the design tells of the world, figuring out how to navigate, which blocks are breakable and which aren't. The SA-X is the precursor of the EMMI and a better version of the horror of it. What is more terrifying than an alien version of ourselves, here to replace us?

But where the SA-X does Alien better, Dread is again both Alien and Aliens. You get the inhuman monster, you get to fear that it will find you and hate how weak you feel in front of it. And all that builds up to the joy of blowing it away. And then you get to experience it again in a new way. You gain new powers, like the ability to turn invisible, and the EMMI, like any good implacable movie monster, evolves with you, finding new ways to be scary, getting faster or freezing you.

Ultimately it's this synthesis of everything Metroid can offer that makes Dread the best. Other games do certain elements better, but nothing else does all of them this well. Where Fusion is one note, Dread alternates and it gives you highs and lows.

Dread has merged these two halves together, like Samus and Metroids and like her, it IS Metroid now.

Deep in the dungeons

2026-09-14T00:00:00.000Z

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Alright, needed something short and sweet to fill the void between now and Fire Emblem.

This game IS very addictive and fun.

Every Zelda apparently needs a water temple. They love those puzzles.

Ravio, you can't credit me the amount I put down to rent for my own? COME ON DOG. This game does do a really good job of making money feel worthwhile though. I feel like in a lot of Zelda games it's whatever.

I really like collecting the Maiamais. I'm not going to find all of them but it's such a nice treat and its a little reward you get every once in a while.

We are three sages down. Man that ice dungeon is annoying.

Double victory

2026-09-13T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Two more bosses down, we're pretty close to the end here. Found my wife statue, not entirely sure why she can't just be unrocked like me. Overall I'd say I'm pretty disappointed in how long it takes to get the wife back especially because it was billed as such a huge, monumental choice.

The monsters that change your party tactics need to be removed from the game. It's a cute thing the first time but it's purely a time waster.

We beat this too. Okay, so meeting your mom and then losing her didn't land as well for me. I think there is an issue where the story isn't as resonant due to lack of voice over and real cinematics. The wife also has shockingly little to say.

Speaking of, I consistently feel like this game could/should run twice as fast most of the time. The sage's stone is essentially broken.

The victory lap here is much too manual.

I think this is primarily a let down of expectations and in hindsight it never could have capitalized. The ds is just not going to be able to execute on it. There are great ideas here but the end result falls short.

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

Beat it today. I did use a cheat to just help me over the hump. I just wanted to see it through.

I think this game is fine. The Castlevania series is much weaker for me overall compared to Metroid. I think the backtracking is possibly weaker because the verb gaining is much weaker. In this game for example, you get paries and wings so late and there aren't many other traversal powers beyond the double jump.

Also getting weapon upgrades is pretty underwhelming. Once you have all the variety it's mostly just getting the slightly more powerful versions. And for me at least, not much got better than rapiers. They deal so much damage so quickly.

Getting close to finishing (and unfinishing)

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Alright, I had to grind to get both parts of this dragon eye. I did turn on a cheat to do 4x exp gain because I find grinding offensive to my valuable time. We're close to the end here and well, I'm ready to be over it.

DQXIS was definitely more captivating. The mechanics here are a little thin. I thought the monster recruitment might be more interesting but it just isn't because you ride with Slime Knight so long and the rest are just okay, and then the kids come in and they're better than everyone else.

I also think this game is pretty good story wise but like it's gated through optional party talk. Sometimes I'll be playing and then I realize I should just be checking in with the kids or the wife or whatever.

Which is another weird strength/issue with this game! There are stretches (pretty long) where there's nobody to talk to and check in. That chat is awesome but they just don't let you do it.

Hollow Knight

Lily wanted to watch me play a game on the big tv and when I was scrolling through Steam she saw this and wanted me to play it. Okay sure.

I ended up doing like an hour or so of this, I beat two (1.5?) bosses and had fun. I've owned this forever and played it a little and then bounced off it for some reason? I'm not sure why.

I do dislike all souls like oh no you died you lost all your shit hahahaha get wrecked but other than that it's pretty fun. It does extremely minimal handholding which I understand is it being a throwback to the genre but I think I like mine a little more authored.

If anything causes me to abandon Order of Ecclesia (and not start Portrait of Ruin) this is it, but according to HLTB it's just way too long for that.

STAR WARS Zero Company

I think I'm going to just officially put this on pause right now. I'm not going to have time to finish before Fortune's Weave and I don't have a ton of desire to anyways.

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos

Well, they announced a new campaign for this so I guess I have to try it? But I'll probably just have to replay the whole thing?

Ugh, why did they drop this like right before Fortune's Weave?

BE STRONG. FINISH SOME GAMES.

There's a metaphor for parenting here...

2026-09-11T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

The kids after being weak, ineffective, and an overall drain on resources are now coming into their own and pulling their own weight.

I almost quit this game tonight. I finished up the Zenithian thing, needed to leave to find the gold orb and had to go back through Diggery Pokery. Like come on man, let me evac, is that not what this spell is for? I did not want to walk back through this mine cart nonsense. Legit almost decided I've seen enough!

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

We have made it to Dracula's castle. Every time I kill a boss and it doesn't have a cool new ability drop it makes me angry.

I'm really uncertain I'm going to finish this. I think I've seen enough to make a real judgment on it and it's "cool ideas kind of okay execution." What might get me to push through it is that I'm so very close to the end and Fortune's Weave is around the corner so am I going to start something NEW? Probably not. Although I'm so close to the end of this and DQV I'll probably have some left over time before Weave.

It's about family

2026-09-10T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Debora kind of sucks right now but Mr. Briscoletti is awesome as hell. So much love from that dude.

Enjoying this overall. I don't think it's as good as DQXIS but how could it be? It's just missing a ton of QOL stuff and improvements learned over the decades since. I also miss the big skill tree in XIS a lot. The progression is definitely lacking in this game and yet it still remains fun.

I think the choice to have basically no party members just monsters for long stretches is highly questionable. It's also a little frustrating that the recruit rate is so random. I feel like this game would be so much easier with one of those cureslimes and I spent a good hot minute trying to get one.

Also thank the lord I'm playing this emulated, the ability to fast forward is so nice.

God damn some dramatic stuff happens in this game. Got the kids though.

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

Rescued all the villagers baby. Still having a moderate amount of fun here. I think I'd say this slots in under Dawn of Sorrow but maybe only just?

MORE METROID?!

2026-09-09T00:00:00.000Z

AAAAAH METROID RAVENOUS AND IT COMES OUT SO SOON INFINITE HYPE

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

Okay, so the type matching and resistances thing is a cool idea but if you're going to do that I feel like I need more slots for glyph loadouts. I gotta switch between slashing and smashing and poking and then I want something that's a bit more ranged and then I want a magic one.

It's just very annoying and breaks flow to have to be like "fuck it's a skeleton let me switch my sword glyphs for hammers."

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

How on earth was I supposed to know to go get Maria to get in the tower? It's also very annoying that the monsters don't listen to you. I get that they eventually will but it sucks. Also this old ass man wouldn't let me take the portal back to Coburg at night for no apparent reason?

Extremely frustrating fifteen minutes of gameplay.

I finished the prince's quest extremely glad I never wasted any seeds on this mofo and then got my cat back.

Also got through picking my wife. After consulting THE INTERNET I went with Debora. Kind of crazy that the ds exclusive wife is considered the best written and the best mechanically? If I replay again I'll pick Bianca.

Final Fantasy Resonance

Finished the demo! It was fun. I look forward to the rest. Emma is clearly the Maria of this game. It's really right down the middle, it's just everything you would expect from this and it's kind of a love letter to the series.

STAR WARS Zero Company

Picked this up for the first time in a while. It's still fine. It's kind of uninteresting. I'm hoping if you push through you get some cooler units or upgrades or SOMETHING.

Introducing the Hat Canon

2026-09-09T00:00:00.000Z

I listened to a podcast recently, Triple Click, and they had the concept of a canon that they would come back to: ten games that are an example of what they like in games so someone could understand their perspective. I thought this was a fun idea! Another thing I liked was that this was a living document, it was meant for you to come back and update it to show how you've changed.

So I'm going to do that here. I'll list my ten games and why they're on here. In future posts, I want to document why some things were on the cutting room floor, but for now, let's commemorate our first ten games!

Baldur's Gate 3

I think Baldur's Gate 3 is quite possibly the best game of all time. It had to be on this list. I was blown away by the ambition of this game and how well it executed. The game really feels like D&D, you can solve problems creatively and the devs somehow found a way to work that idea in, even the dumb goofy ideas you'd come up with your friends.

The other amazing thing is that while the story itself isn't anything too insane, the other party members are so well done. They feel like real characters and have the kind of depth you and your friends wish you could pull off at a home play session.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk is the 1B to BG3's 1A. What this game does is make it feel so much more intimate through the first person perspective, something I never really liked as much in other rpgs. Johnny Silverhand, your friends, your enemies, they're all talking TO you. Even though V is voiced, I don't know if another game has felt so immersive to me in that aspect.

Also, I love the setting. I really like cyberpunk settings because they hold up a mirror to our society and what it could be and is already becoming, in all the best and worst ways. It's a setting filled with awe inspiring advances and shows us that those things won't fix our problems. In fact, it just might make them worse.

Fire Emblem: Awakening

There was a lot of competition for this spot. Blazing Blade or Three Houses were both worthy candidates, but neither of those has the exact right balance Awakening does. Awakening has a strong story and great mechanics. We keep the weapon triangle, the right amount of class changing and character building, and the kids mechanic is one of my all time favorites. I love the added layer of considering how to build your characters in the present to set up their kids for success.

Monster Hunter Rise

Monster Hunter games have such a tightly well refined loop that really makes me feel like I'm the one getting better, not just my character. Sure, you get gear, and maybe that's doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but no amount of gear is going to keep you from carting. You have to learn the fight, the monster's tendencies, and then take it down. And then you do it over and over in the search of rare materials and in the process you master that fight. Rise wins for now, as the one I've put the most time into so far.

Metroid Dread

Dread reminds me what I like about the genre so much, that sense of exploration and gaining power and strength. This game does the best narratively with Samus, not just in the actual narration, but in subtle moments where you can feel her fear, or her power that surges. While Metroid Dread might not be the best Metroid in every aspect, it controls the best and has the best balance of story and mechanics and how those things interact to immerse you in the atmosphere of the setting.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

This game is the best a remake can do, it takes the old game and updates it for a modern era with an abundance of love and care for the source material throughout. The combat system is fast and dynamic while still paying homage to the original. Most importantly, the characters are here and alive in the way we imagined them when we played it all those years ago. A stunning tribute and a damn good game. Watch this space for when I actually beat Rebirth though.

Crusader Kings III

Plenty of options here for a grand strategy game but CK3 is the one that feels most personal to me. The scope of the game being a pretty narrow slice of history (compared to say, Civ) and the fact that you're really managing a family, not just the concept of a civilization helps feel like you're really in it. Someone taking your territory feels like more of an affront, how dare you, that was my second favorite child you just took! It's less detached, less being some omniscient being from up on high.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

Thousand Year Door is and was a revelation for me. It was the first turn based game that really clicked for me and replaying the remastered version now really cemented how good this is. The real time button presses still hold up as a fun but simple way to keep engaged with the game after you've selected your attack and during the opponent's turn. The badge system lets you be really creative with how you build Mario, you can go all in on hammers, jumps, regular attacks, special attacks. The game is also just witty and fun and creative. Making the battles take place on a stage and then having the audience interact with the game is a great idea.

Pokémon Pokopia

Pokemon Pokopia is here because of what a surprise it was to me. When you told me it was a cozy Pokemon game where you played as and became friends with Pokemon, that idea sounded wild to me. It turned out to be incredibly cute and cozy and the progression in this game feels fantastic overall. It's full of tiny little moments you want to show your friends and family to show how cute this game is.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2

I love Spider-Man and yes I know that's not a unique stance. Spider-Man 2 managed to show both Spider-Men and realize why the web crawling superheroes can be so much fun. It's an open world game where the open world feels alive and the events worth doing because it fits with the character and the story. Peter Parker is never too busy to stop and help someone in need on his way to bigger things. It makes you feel like him in essentially every aspect, his braininess, his sneakiness, and then how easily he can beat up on bad guys. When you master the systems here you feel like Spider-Man.

That's all of it folks. Watch this space for updates, it's something I'll likely reassess periodically, or as a new game demands to be on here.

Throwing monsters in my wagon.

2026-09-08T00:00:00.000Z

Final Fantasy Resonance

God damn I did not expect this to go so hard in the feels right away. [spoiler]

Like everyone else, I also find the switch to the Vision powers being 3d cgi really jarring.

Also did not expect the guy in a white labcoat and name badge.

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

I found a slime knight! And now we're investigating the happenings at Harry's old house.

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

I'm not a giant fan of how I have to do these little quests to then get the upgrade. I am not really feeling this one currently.

I really don't know how I feel about this one. It's different and it's trying things. I feel like it's hard to get into a good flow with the glyph weapons and I'm not sure I like this early on distributed structure of the locations. I guess I do like having a hub it's relatively easy to zip back to.

Why is this game so bright and yet so dark?

2026-09-07T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Alright, we made it out of the childhood act. God damn this game gets dark as hell. They are not pulling any punches with the "boy it must suck to be a child slave for ten years." It's so random and feels out of place with the brightness of the look.

We got to the monster recruiting part and it’s still fun. My biggest issue so far is just the aimlessness of it. Just point me at things better. I feel like I just need the outline of a walkthrough. Go here, talk to this dude next. The game is just willing to let you flounder for a while until you get to the right spot. I ain’t got time for that!

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

The progression curve on this feels weird. I don't feel like my weapons are strong enough currently.

Undone: The DQXIS article

2026-09-07T00:00:00.000Z

If you want to destroy my ~~sweater~~ story, Pull this (plot) thread as I walk away. -- ~~Weezer~~ Me

When the credits roll, DQXIS is wrapped up in a nice bow. Its story of hope in the dark is best shown in the transition between acts one and two, where we're getting the band back together.

Sylvando shows us the power of optimism when we're at our lowest, things may be bad, but that doesn't mean we can't make it the best possible. His hope lifts up the community in doing so. Erik commits everything for the promise of fighting another day. He may lose his memories, but if he's alive he can make more. His hope allows him to persevere. Jade fights for others because it's right and she's okay with the possibility of failure because others will take up the fight. Her hope inspires others to fight with her.

Rab declines a false paradise in order to make sure his body is ready for the next opportunity. He's given the option to check out to an ideal world, Dundrasil still standing, his family together, celebrating a birthday. Surely if anyone is worthy of laying down their burdens it's Rab, but he declines. To accept paradise while others suffer would be tragic. Instead, he trains relentlessly to prepare for the next shot at fixing the world. Even though it's bad, he remains hopeful that it will get better and he's ready to seize that chance.

Serena is the best example here. She loses her twin sister but bravely holds herself together because she knows Veronica's sacrifice wasn't so she could be sad about Veronica, it was so she could finish the job. She not only picks herself back up, but becomes the most powerful mage in the party, carrying her sister's power within her. Serena goes from the most boring, empty character to one of the most compelling as she battles through her grief to become stronger for everyone around her.

We've had our big emotional moments, the catharsis of beating the villain, and possibilities for the future. So what do you do when you decide you want to tell more stories?

You have to pull at the bow.

When the hero chooses his own personal New Game+, he unravels everything that happened before.

Going back to our best examples, the hero chooses that paradise and leaves his friends and family behind to pursue it. I don't want to get too timey wimey/multiversal about it, but he literally leaves them behind over their protestations. It is a selfish act as he explicitly takes the out Rab refused.

And why does he do this? So Veronica can come back. Ostensibly noble, textually insane. Veronica made the sacrifice to allow her friends the slim chance to fix everything for her, because she believed in them. Her belief was paid off in spades. Choosing to undo the Doctor Strange 1 out of however many million for the chance of "but what if it was better" is the height of hubris. I guess the hero read the script.

We undo most of the cast's growth, except for Serena whose hair grows back as the rest of her growth is undone. She returns, meekly, to her much more flamboyant and bombastic sister's shadow and dutifully gives up her new powers as she does so. Her grief is gone and so too is anything interesting about her.

Then we try to redo the growth, Sylvando, Hendrik, Erik, all get similar but different beats. This is where Lucas would say "it's like poetry, it rhymes" which makes us ask why even do this? All of the sacrifice, the beats are cheapened by this. It's seeing the funhouse mirror version of what we did already, grotesque and distorted.

The story descends into nonsense as a result. The character can't speak and tell the other characters what's happening, so we all blithely follow the possessed king of Heliodor to a party that must obviously be a trap. The hero can't even tell Serena that he liked her hair better short and must make a wish to make it happen (which is also weird from an agency perspective).

There's so much effort here in making something half new that I wonder what they could have done had they just...continued the story with the post game and showed our heroes tackling the challenges of building a new world post ruin, rebuilding Dundrasil perhaps, a more policy oriented Sylvando parade of happiness.

So as I faced down the Crystalotl and got absolutely demolished, I found I had a choice. I could grind it out, come back, and fight this beast to plow deeper into this warped reality of what I had liked, or I could pull the ripcord and take the credits as my exit. Yes, I'd miss the Calasmos fight and the resolution of the story, but really the story I wanted had resolved fifteen hours earlier. No use throwing good money after bad.

That's the ending of my game, and it was really rewarding and cathartic. I wish I hadn't sunk another chunk of time into figuring out that I should have taken that off ramp, but it's an ending I can be okay with. All that stuff happened and I don't think it's good, but I think DQXIS is good and worth playing despite that. I don't want to let the devs off the hook, but it's a way for me to be sane here, opting out of the parts tacked on that didn't work.

I suppose at the end, I'm going to take the paradise while everyone else suffers in the real ending.

We fail fast and we learn from it.

2026-09-06T00:00:00.000Z

Final Fantasy IV

This game is annoying. Screw the bombs, and this needle attack that just destroys people? It's really vexing how they don't tell you anything (standard for the time I assume) like what is Yang good at? Is there a point to kick? What does pray do? Why is it so much better than Edward's heal?

Additionally, what is the point of the antlion fight? It's just so easy. Why are we wasting my time with this interactive cutscene.

The game does a really bad job of expectation setting too. Cecil hits hard, everyone else sucks.

Also some annoying qol stuff, I'm used to Phoenix down just auto targeting or at least being unusable on your up characters. Nope. Wasted one and a turn that way. Also tents don't get people back up. That's how I would describe this half hour. Annoying.

Yeah, I'm just out on this. I think I've learned a lot here about what makes me tick. This game is just too thin mechanically and the story isn't enough to pull me through.

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

Levels are really horizontal here at the start and I don't care for that. The glyph system is interesting, soul adjacent for Soma.

Game looks really good though, I love the flair in Shanoa's animations.

Also fuck these weird floating tentacle monsters.

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

This game is so cute and cozy with this art style, this might be the correct way for these games to be.

I also thought the first person perspective for fights was weird, but now I kind of dig it. It's very cute.

I don't know why I like this more than FFIV but I do. It seems basically similar to it, with a similar shallow depth of combat.

It's probably because it's actually challenging?

Final Fantasy Resonance

I've put about an hour and a half into this demo and it's pretty fun so far. I cannot stop gushing over the art style. I've always liked this in Octopath and Triangle Strategy and I think this is the best-looking version of it. In addition the vision system seems like a fun way to build characters. I would say the in-combat mechanics are so far just okay. The stagger system is pretty standard but I think it's good enough.

Endings, both fake and real

2026-09-05T00:00:00.000Z

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

I cheated myself the soul getting ring because you know, fuck farming. I know it's more reliable now but dang there's still some farming!

Got through a massive chunk here, "beat" the game with the wrong ending, so had to go back and track down Paranoia and then I went around jumping into all the mirrors for a while before actually beating Dario.

Okay, stayed up a bit later than I should have to beat this, which I suppose is a good sign. I do like how fast it is to chunk through these.

This felt fine though overall. I think the evidence increasingly mounts that I need to replay Aria and Fusion to see how I still feel about both, although I'm pretty certain I beat Aria a few years ago. But I think Order of Ecclesia is next.

Playing these games now has really just shot up my love for Metroidvanias. I have some ideas for why I forgot about this but I think this is fodder for a Deep Thought so I don't want to give too much away right now.

Final Fantasy IV

I do feel myself uncompelled to play this at all. I'm not totally sure why. It's just not grabbing me. I don't feel frustrated with it or anything. Uncompelled.

I think it could be a lack of hand holding and direction? Also it's not compelling me visually.

I don't know. I'll have to reflect on it more.

Soma? More like Slowma.

2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z

Final Fantasy IV

If this game loses me it'll be because the random encounter density is too high. There's an option to turn them off which I may flip on and off. I wish I could just tune it instead of it being so binary.

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

Killed like four bosses now? It's pretty fun. Soma still moves sooooo slowwwwww.

I'm liking this a lot more. I'm not totally sure what's so different yet.

NO I DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM STARTING GAMES

2026-09-03T00:00:00.000Z

Chrono Trigger

Too many fights here in the end game dungeon. I've also definitely settled on Crono, Robo, and Ayla as my main 3.

I do like how Lavos just seems to be some kind of entity. It's not a dark demon with goals. It's just some kind of...animal that wants to become the "perfect life" or whatever?

Also it's Cell?

If we're so worried about Robo not being made in the future he could just hang out here. Frog too!

I got what the wiki says is ending 1B. It's a very good ending.

This game holds up. I think compared to it's contemporaries and even now, it does a good job at a lot of things. This has to be the best turn based combat on the SNES, it and Super Mario RPG. The characters exude personality and are easy to keep straight. They each have very clear lanes that communicate a lot very quickly, which is really important in this era.

Final Fantasy IV

Well immediately on to the next one. We're doing the Switch Pixel Remaster!

It was called a bomb ring Cecil what did you EXPECT?

Already I can tell this has some of the speed issues of VI. Like we get to the point very quickly!

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

Also needed to continue our Metroidvania series! Soma moves like fuckin MOLASSES. Beat one boss.

Final Fantasy Resonance

Demo for this came out today! 20 minutes in but already impressed with the visuals, but I'm a giant sucker for this style.

Split Fiction

Played some of this tonight with Nate since D&D was off and we had the free time anyways.

My opinion of this game is roughly the same. It's cute. It's fun. It doesn't have a ton of mechanical depth, it's really getting by on being something you do with friends and by keeping it really varied, ideally before you get bored. It's honestly kind of like a co-op Mario Party in that regard. It just keeps changing what you're doing and being chaotic.

2 September 2026

2026-09-02T00:00:00.000Z

Chrono Trigger

Moving through the side quests here. MAYBE WE COULD JUST CHECK THE BASEMENT FOR THE RAINBOW SHELL?! The chancellor could have tried harder here.

I think if this game has a miss, it's that there's not more of stuff like the campfire scene leading into Lucca's side time travel journey. That scene is so dread inspiring and I up entered the password the first time because I didn't understand exactly what it wanted me to do. I reloaded the save to go do it again, which I think is a testament to how powerful that is. Obviously she would go back and redo that moment if she could in the exact same way. I would go back and redo that moment if I could and it's not even real and it's not even my mom.

Metroid Dread

We beat this. What a really good game. The ending really gets at what I was saying yesterday, it makes Samus feel powerful. That moment when she beats Raven Beak and just has that primal scream is so intense.

Crono died on his way back to his home time.

2026-09-01T00:00:00.000Z

Chrono Trigger

Got through the ocean palace, lost a Crono, gained a Magus. All quite standard.

Oh I see. We're doing a fetch quest through time.

Metroid Dread

Did some roaming around to gather some upgrades, now it's on to the final fight.

UGH, that second phase threw me for a loop! At least let me pick up from the midpoint cutscene!

I've been trying to think about why in spite of some of my gripes Dread succeeds in a lot of ways and I think he's a real contender for my favorite of the series. I think it comes down to storytelling. One thing I was mulling over was that I mechanically have issues as a player with how Samus gains her powers. I think the missiles, super missiles, ice missiles thing is the clearest example of how the progression feels weird but in the story Samus's progression feels really satisfying.

I think that's because really this is the most well-shown Metroid. We can feel the power that Samus feels and we can see her face as she gains these powers. I think the most notable example is when she defeats the EMMI and is able to absorb that power directly and then looks at herself with wonder. The advancements in being able to show real cutscenes with great detail help because Samus is so silent and the beats are so subtle.

Now they dread ME

2026-08-31T00:00:00.000Z

Metroid Dread

I dunno how I feel about super missiles superseding regular missiles! Seems like a skill gap! Also it makes them feel less impactful. Now it's just a "keeping up with the joneses" thing, things will become more powerful to compensate. And obviously they did in the other games, but they probably didn't assume as many missiles.

The X being out seems canonically bad.

Getting the ice missile directly after also makes it seem quite pointless. I actually think I have that issue with a lot of the upgrades. The pulse bomb(?) is nearly immediately outclassed by the power bomb. I know it's not limited but it feels like it supercedes.

The disliked Aeion Pulse returns. It doesn't feel as bad this time. I'm not sure why.

I have reached the point of no return. I'll go find some more stuff before ending.

I really don't know how I feel about this. I felt like maybe it wouldn't hold up, due to the pulse, the item acquisition issues (again, the pacing is weird, changing how they work), and the fact that it feels maybe a bit too hand holdy. It seems like it just directly shuts off other ways to go, it funnels you strongly.

Despite that, it feels really good. It looks good. The fights are great, they feel fair and I can feel myself learning them. Even the repetitive fights (the EMMI, the brain things, the X spear fighters) aren't too often, too clustered together like the metroids in Samus returns and they're kept fresh.

Like the EMMI are fucking annoying and I hate them...which means it feels great to beat them finally. There is a tension and a catharsis to beating them, beating them doesn't feel perfunctory, it feels like a triumph. I feel like an action hero, Ripley or Sarah Connor, having finally defeated this terror by the skin of my teeth, panting and exhausted in victory.

For all the flaws, it feels like this game gets Samus and the tone and atmosphere of what these games should be totally correct.

Chrono Trigger

I found out that Crono's name only doesn't have the H in it because of character limitations. I don't know what's dumber: that they wanted to name him Crono, that they couldn't name him Crono because of the limitation, or that they were unwilling to fix the limitation.

Like his name as is isn't so good or anything but it's at least less on the nose. You could imagine it being a character's name in the universe as opposed to the one with the H or it's just like, "Oh it's time boy. I named my child Time."

I do feel like it is bogging me down with too many little fights. That would be my biggest complaint so far.

Samus Returns but lost her receipt so she only gets store credit

2026-08-31T00:00:00.000Z

Metroid: Samus Returns is, going by release order, the game that makes Samus feel the most badass, the most powerful. She can now effortlessly aim in 360 degrees, she punches monsters fearlessly right in the face before finishing them off with a quick salvo. She's never been better at finding the traps and secrets and staying one step ahead of her enemies and environment.

Normally, Samus gains power by taking it from the Chozo, or her enemies. This time, she takes it from the player.

The most obvious example of this is Aeion Pulse. What is likely an homage/update to the X-Ray Scanner in Super did more to sap my enjoyment out of the game than anything else. Because you can just spam a button to find the secrets, a huge quantity of the secrets aren't visibly distinguishable without it anymore. In past Metroid games an eagle eyed player would have noticed a crack in a block or vent and known this was a hidden route. Instead, worry not player. Samus is on it for you. Don't bother. You don't have her special eyes.

This removes a mastery loop for the player, learning to explore and find these secrets is a small triumph, a reward for a perceptive player (or sometimes just persistent carpet bomber who's stuck) that can really put the wind in your sails and propel your exploration forward. Forcing the use of Aeion Pulse robs the player of these moments and turns exploration into a series of chores. Just tell me where the things are already. Please?

Aeion Pulse also seemed to give the designers license to make the navigation far more frustrating. So many times I would be walking across a bridge or rolling through some maze to find the floor instantly give way and dump me out, forcing me to start the sequence over again.

Should have used Aeion Pulse there idiot! Samus would have known those were fake blocks!

It was a very Lucy with the football thing, where I would keep going and then it would keep getting me and I wouldn't ever learn "hey, just keep spamming Aeion Pulse" but coming immediately off two prior Metroid games, this simply wasn't in my exploration vocabulary. This could happen sometimes, but it was rarer and the game was better at communicating these weak spots.

An insidious way the game also takes away the feeling of progressing as a player is how samey the 40 Metroid bosses are. Normally, each boss in Metroid is pretty unique and a player can feel as though they've grown when they've mastered a new challenge and defeated it, their prize on the other side.

In Samus Returns, these Metroid mini bosses are largely the same, so the player doesn't feel like they're accomplishing anything new. There's no reward for the routine, it's just something you have to do. The game doesn't give you the option to test out of Gamma Metroids, I've got it from here game, we can just skip this part. It feels like padding for its own sake.

It's additionally tragic because there ARE good boss fights in the game, it's not for a lack of ability or imagination. The Diggernaut was fun and exactly the kind of mastery loop Metroid should be known for. You try, you fail, but you get a little farther, you learn the pattern and the finish line is so agonizingly close!

The only interesting Metroid, the baby, is gotten far too late in the game where its additional power seems more optional than anything. After you get it, you can go directly to the final boss fight, or you can backtrack every zone to pick up everything you missed. I loved the baby (insert either the Brooklyn Nine Nine Rosa or Simpsons Do it for her memes). I did spend the additional couple hours looping around to get a bunch of pickups, hence my highest completion percentage ever for one of these, 92%. But also that's just free. Players will bond with any little pet you give them, even if it's a horrible little vampiric alien monster whose entire species you wiped out.

Ultimately the baby doesn't really add a cool new verb to Samus's arsenal. It just kind of eats the crystals which isn't really how Metroid power ups tend to work: sure, the high jump unlocks more of the map, but it's also useful for dodging boss projectiles. Further, it's not something either you or Samus uses, you just stand by and watch Samus stand by and watch it do its thing. It's just underwhelming for a final unlock.

I suppose that at least Samus knows how I felt watching her solve all the puzzles with the Aeion Pulse without me.

I wanna hold hands with somebody

2026-08-30T00:00:00.000Z

Chrono Trigger

I dislike how old school jrpgs expect you to have all the time in the world to just talk to everyone until you happen to talk to the right person to advance the plot.

Other than that standard old school game lack of handholding I'm really enjoying it right now.

I do wish it was easier to look through all the techs, it's a lot of scrolling through.

I have been playing through a lot of this game. It's pretty fun. I might be playing it too quickly to properly digest all of the reasons why I like it. I've been trying to be more mindful and not write as many notes during.

Some gripes. I really think that the UI is a little bit in my way. Having the stuff on the second screen is better than having it on the main screen. I tried classic settings because I felt like I couldn't pay attention to what was happening on the screen because I was trying to pick my character's stuff at the same time. I was just missing stuff that was going on there so I thought classic would help me do both. It's so cramped.

The dinosaur dungeon takes too long and there are just too many fucking fights. This thing literally broke me until I realized that I could save scum because what would happen is you fall through the floor and then you have to refight the things that you just fought. It's like, why? It's like, oh I can just reload the save state before I do all the button pressing and then I won't fall through the floor.

This has killed every other game for me today though. I did feel a pang to play a little bit of Metroid Dread but I was like, let's just keep grinding on this.

Thoughts about characters? Well I like most of them. They all have their own charm and I think that's partially just because there are fewer of them. (I'm gonna keep comparing this to Final Fantasy VI just because they're both super great SNES JRPGs and VI is the one I played recently and bounced off hard.) But part of the issue that I had with Six is that there are so many party members that I'm supposed to care about and then they just keep going in and out of the party. It's just hard to build an attachment and I find that very frustrating about JRPGs.

For the most part people stay. You get to keep at least your core three: Chrono, Marle, and Lucca. Then Robo stays as soon as you get him too. Alya and Frog dip in and out but it doesn't feel like forever between it. I do really wish you could play with the fourth party member although I wouldn't be able to juggle the ATB effectively at that point.

Maybe I should try the wait mode or a slower game speed but that seems also worse in it's own way (making combats take longer).

One thing I do love about these older games is that you can finish them a lot faster, as we've seen with the Metroids and this game. I am finishing games more quickly than I can write post-mortems about it though.

Nothing but time

2026-08-29T00:00:00.000Z

Chrono Trigger

I was really concerned if I'd like this because I bounced off FFVI so hard but that seems like much less of a concern here. Lucca and Marle seem like much more interesting characters and they're not portrayed so... seriously. The entire thing doesn't take itself seriously, it's clearly trying to be funny. And to be fair, FFVI was funny, but it just gave some severe whiplash, melodrama to absurdity and back again.

The combat is also better. Timing (I get it) being an aspect beyond just atb is really good!

Kingdom Hearts

Started this today, Lily's been asking to watch me play it. I got it on steam sale a bit ago, I've never played it.

The intro is the most early 2000s ass thing of all time. The character designs, the music, the cool twilight lettering.

The disney characters look so lovely and Sora looks like a fucking nightmare.

Game is sooooo basic and soooooo slowly paced.

Metroid Dread

Got in about 45 minutes of this and it remains great. I think this is a strong frontrunner to be favorite.

Had a cute clever girl moment with an EMMI. Was charging the beam waiting for it to come so I could blow its face off and then it showed up behind me. You little fucker.

I'm not dreading this playthrough

2026-08-28T00:00:00.000Z

Metroid Dread

Yep we started this right away.

Already I am getting Good Feelings from it. I started playing this a long long time ago, I'm not sure why I stopped. My progress was like 50% of items.

It feels good and looks sharp and like it has all the best things of Samus Returns. Let's see if it keeps the worst.

I've beaten the first boss, the decision to keep Morph Ball from you seems Very Intentional. Like you get the spider climb first, which is usually a Morph Ball thing.

Also the EMMIs are so fucking creepy and they nailed that. The designers know that the creepiest things are human shaped but act in ways humans don't. They're theoretically bipedal, but move on all fours with ease and contort their bodies in uncomfortable ways.

Dragon Quest XI S

I think DQXIS is done. I thought about farming to be able to beat the Crystalotl and was just like...no, I'm good on that. What I might do is cheat heavily, give myself a bunch of free levels and then just finish out the game? But also I suppose I could just watch the ending on Youtube or something? I dunno. It's definitely done For Now. Maybe I'll come back.

Chrono Trigger

I started this because I needed another game to play on the bike. You know, something slower paced. Easy to start and stop. The art is interesting so far. I had a moment of triumph where I refused to buy a new sword for Crono because I could just feel in my bones I was going to get a newer, better one for free and then I did!

STAR WARS Zero Company

Played another hour or so of this. It remains fun. A little frustrating technically. Like it just runs so poorly and I don't think it looks that good.

Zero to Hero

2026-08-27T00:00:00.000Z

STAR WARS Zero Company

All right the game is very fun. Some issues though, mostly technical. It does run so bad and toning down the quality did not meaningfully improve my frame rates. I don't know if it's just poorly optimized or maybe it is just that good but I have a 4070 Ti super. I feel like I should get pretty good frames on 1440p

More critically I ran into a bug where, at some point during the enemy turn after it went, it just sat there forever. I waited for multiple minutes and it just never went and kept going. It wasn't frozen or anything like that. I could access the menus and stuff like that but it was just stuck.

Other than that I don't know how I feel about the option for faceless rando crew members since there are fully voiced real characters who are important to the plot. Why would I use the randos especially when you can free respec anyone at any time? Just keep it to those people.

Metroid: Samus Returns

Beat this tonight. About 12 hours? Would have been shorter but I unlocked baby metroid and was like well, you can't give me this baby and then expect me to just end the game instantly. So I went back and got a bunch more upgrades which made the final boss significantly easier to boot! 92% completion.

On to Dread next.

Dragon Quest XI S

Did this Sylvando/Hendrik quest. Well tried to. I got to these bosses that you're supposed to take down with their pet power and then accidentally killed one so I had to restart. Then I didn't accidentally kill one and I switched in Hendrik and found out that I didn't have the pet power learned because you have to have a specific set of unlocks in both of their skill trees to do it. Which I don't think it told me, maybe I missed it. That's very annoying. I just assumed that as part of this quest they were given the pet power and would be able to unleash it.

Went to do the Crystalotl and it beat the shit out of me. Damn.

The end?

2026-08-26T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

Well, I'm not going to finish this before Zero Company, but that's fine. I'm pushing the critical path a bit more after doing some exploring and grabbing some more recipes and such.

Overall I still don't really know how I feel about the third act, or the concept of it. It just kind of tosses away the big moments of the first two acts and presents a new villain that I have zero attachment or caring about. It feels reminiscent of P5R, [spoiler]

[spoiler]

The more I think about it, the more likely it is that zero company coming out is not going to just mean that I play Dragon Quest in parallel. It might just be a break from it

Metroid: Samus Returns

I really thought I was so done with this game but then I beat this last big-ass Metroid and I got this little baby Metroid and I love it. Insert Brooklyn Nine-Nine meme of "I just met this but if anything happened to it I would kill everyone."

I went around and started gathering up a bunch of the old power-ups I missed just because now the Metroid unlocks, getting rid of all these crystal things that I never knew how to get past before.

It's been mostly fun, except for the fact that I got fed up by these long rows of spikes and I was like, "I have basically everything and I have to assume I am adjacent to the end of the game." How do I get past these long long rows of spikes? The answer is they don't tell you how but you're supposed to use the power bombs and use those to rocket you past it. I got so frustrated that, like, why would you gate this? What a stupid thing to do. The power bombs are like, you don't get so many of them to the point where it feels like you can just burn them on experimentation. Maybe that's just me

Diggernaut? I hardly know 'ernaut!

2026-08-25T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

Alright, advanced the plot some. Tried to get this thing for Serena's harp and got my ass beat by this Crystalotl thing. Gonna have to do some grinding!

Metroid: Samus Returns

Got the gravity suit. Another annoyance about this game: it has a high number of puzzles that seemed designed to waste my time. "Haha there was no way for you to know that this was a floor that gave away try again idiot."

Defeated the Diggernaut. Good fight!

A Tale of Two Metroidvanias

2026-08-25T00:00:00.000Z

It took me a while to understand why I loved Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night felt kind of grueling to play through. In fact, I liked Super Metroid so much that as soon as I was done, I basically instantly fired up Zero Mission and the thought of playing a (probably better) Castlevania sequel made me recoil. I started playing these because I wanted to play these two foundational games that directly led to two things I loved playing growing up: Metroid Fusion and Aria of Sorrow.

Legitimately I thought I was going crazy. The moment I booted up SotN I was wondering why I took so long to play it. The look of it was just exactly my memories of Aria. It felt like it. Woah. And then very quickly I was going crazy in the other direction. Did I even like Aria? Was that the same game, made by the same people? What was the difference here?

It boils down to the RPG of it all.

SotN's problems are twofold and they both relate back to the RPG mechanics. First, Super Metroid is giving Samus new functionality constantly. She gains verbs. She turns into a little ball. She double jumps. She shoots through walls. She murders everything she jumps into.

Verb gaining in SotN is so much lower for Alucard. You get some things sure. Just like in Metroid, Alucard learns to double jump. He learns to fly (basically space jump). But overall the things you're finding aren't new things to do. They're just number changers. You find a piece of armor. You find a new sword. This leads to scenarios where very frequently you're going through the thrill of exploration to be met with something underwhelming. Oh, I already have a cape better than this one. Hooray I guess?

Missile expansions are the worst loot in Super Metroid and are still pretty fucking great. I always need more missiles. Have you met my friend Ridley? He loves to eat missiles. So many missiles. Directly into his face.

This is where we get to our issue with signposting in SotN (admittedly not an rpg mechanic but I still have beef with it). SotN does such minimal handholding (so too does Super Metroid) but at least your idle poking around is rewarded as Samus. Brute force sweeping on where to go is still rewarding with those Missile Expansions compared to finding a weapon or armor you've long since upgraded past. There's just less of the brute forcing necessary in Super Metroid (maybe some occasional "fuck it we bomb every square inch of this until a block gives way") since the design language is so much more consistent. Metroid gives you color coded doors, it signals which blocks are damaged, it even shows you a symbol for the correct explosive to blow up this block.

The Clock Room has three different things to solve and it doesn't really tell you. You can fly out the top, that's pretty evident. The floor will open if you manage to find the Gold and Silver Ring in two different spots, and worst of all, the upper left statue moves only every other minute to reveal a vital passageway. Nothing tells you this, and the Clock Room is small, with little to do in it. It's not like a player is going to be in there for a minute fighting things and then see it slide open. The PSX version also has a translation error on the rings, they say "Wear in Clock Tower" which is actually a completely different location.

The second way the RPG of it all fails SotN is the fact that you can level up, you can grind, and therefore the developers have no idea how strong you are. This means the early game is attrition hell, getting death by a thousand cuts'd which makes exploration a fucking chore. So many times I'd look around the map, trying to find my next step and then laboriously fight my way over there to find out it was nothing (or essentially nothing) of value. Then I'd sigh and have to figure something else out as I did a lap around the castle for things I missed.

Metroid lets you heal up on the go. A bad room means you might sit around and farm some energy in Metroid. In Castlevania it means a detour to the nearest save room. Samus feels like a wily explorer able to live off of this strange and exotic land whereas Alucard is lost without a GPS, looking for the nearest gas station after slowly watching his tank empty.

Then later, you can just bulldoze through everything without a care. Because SotN cares more about making the uninteresting numbers go up, it manages to have the worst of both worlds at different times in the game. Super Metroid gives you more missiles, but it doesn't make them more powerful. You can still die. You can still miss.

This means I, the player, feel more powerful throughout the game. Yes, they've increased my margin for error, it's harder to run out of energy with this many tanks, I don't have to be as precious with my missile spam, but I'm doing it. It's not the broken weapon doing it for me.

This is why Castlevania was something I felt like I needed a walkthrough to help me finish and also was fine with cheesing the hell out of it with the Alucard Shield/Shield Rod combo. The game felt like it was actively repelling me from it.

Aria of Sorrow does a better (albeit not perfect) job of solving this gap. Souls are usually verbs, they let Soma do new shit. Some of them suck and they're unpredictable to get, but at least they suck in a new and exciting way, like having a different arc on a projectile. You also know once you've gotten it you've ticked it off. There's a Pokemon-like "gotta catch em all" element. Even if it sucks, you get to fill in that box in the souls menu.

Soma also benefits from having more friends who are more willing to help. There is much better signposting in Aria of Sorrow. Arikado, Yoko, Hammer, and Julius are willing to hop in, drop some exposition, and a hint at which way to go. Alucard is mostly on his own aside from a couple of pretty unhelpful chats from Maria.

Of course, Aria doesn't fix everything. There's still the grind and gear equipment issues. It fixes the rewards but not necessarily the numbers.

I haven't played Aria in a few years, so I'm going off memory. It's probably something that deserves a replay here while SotN is fresh in my mind, but it's how I remember it making me feel which in many ways is the most important part. I'm also really interested in testing out Dawn of Sorrow and the other games that came after.

It must be hard to land the planes.

2026-08-24T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

Alright we've rolled credits but as I understand it there's quite a bit left!

Act 3 spoilers: [spoiler]

[spoiler]

I think it's weird this game expects me to care about Gemma. I really thought she would be the first party member.

Metroid: Samus Returns

I think this is pretty easily my least favorite one. My backtracking has not yielded much. The game feels very stingy with upgrades and the path seems very fixed. Like I feel stuck and there are lots of things I can see I CAN'T do and I can't really tell which way to go from here without a new thing.

Yep. So I figured it out and got farther. I'm just very over the bog standard Metroid fights here. I did it once. Do I have to really keep doing it? This chasing me down the hallway thing also sucks and is infuriating.

There are other issues here. The Aeion Pulse thing has made the game worse. I thought this would be an “I’m stuck” button but they’ve used it to make the environments unreadable. Gone is the ability to check the environments with your eyes for vulnerable blocks. You just have to spam the pulse button. You can’t even opt to not use it. Some of the blocks just aren’t differentiable without it.

Additionally this grinder thingy chase through the tunnels sequence made me want to throw the game in the dumpster.

Dragon revenge

2026-08-23T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

Beat that dragon and it was a total walkover this time. I think just having Rab and Serena in the starting lineup helped. I just needed that healing throughput. Also felt like the dragon focused people else and spread the damage around.

Any time these characters do a charge up I just absolutely want them to go Super Saiyan.

What the fuck is Gyldygga doing here restraining the team?! Mia is a liar?!

Metroid: Samus Returns

Super stuck on this one fight, I don't want to backtrack because I'm apparently far away from everything but fighting a gamma Metroid low on missiles and energy. Fuckers deal so much energy.

I think this one is my least favorite of the ones I've played recently. It feels like they dole out new function upgrades really slowly. It also just feels very samey as a result and I feel like there could be many fewer Metroids to have to kill on each level or at the very least they could be more different.

Totally lost, just backtracking now, seeing if I missed an upgrade I can now go get.

A death in the party

2026-08-22T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

Man Serena is just the most non-character. For a while it was her and Erik but Serena is the most plain toast person in this cast. Maybe Henrik too I suppose. At least give Serena the protector reveal instead of Veronica? Part of my cynicism is that I don't believe Veronica will stay dead, if she does that's a real change for Serena.

I really like how the game commits to "talk to pink dot on map get a thing pointing to what to do next."

Oooookay so maybe Veronica is dead. Serena just getting her entire playbook seems definitive.

This dragon absolutely beat the shit out of me in the volcano. The town was so easy. I started to think this was a battle you're MEANT to lose.

Metroid: Samus Returns

Got stuck in one spot, had to look it up, felt like a total idiot for missing the thing. It was just so subtle. The thing where the Metroid DNA machine points you in the right direction is so misleading sometimes too. Like I don't think where it was pointing me was the next one, it was the one I ended up doing last.

Save states aren't working for whatever reason on Azahar either. Real pain in the ass for being able to stop and pick up wherever. Was stressing out trying to find a save spot when I was in a new area.

There's SO MUCH GAME IN THIS GAME

2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

This game goes ON. Damn. It feels like most of the runtime of act 2 is going to just be getting the band back together.

Rab does some noble shit and they can't stop shaming him for his girlie mags God damn.

My biggest issue with this game remains the music. The music is good, there's just not enough of it. I just like cannot give this game my full attention because it gets on my nerves.

I'm not certain by what right Irwin is king but I'm not sure whether I'm more offended that Eleanor should be queen and the realm is sexist, or if I should be mad at me for saying just because Irwin doesn't have the right to rule due to his birthright.

It's interesting to me how bloodless this game is. Like some dark shit happens, like betrayal and such but the blades always come out clean. It's also just tonally so weird in general. We get some whiplash from the tragic end of King Irwin to the GLOOMIVORE.

Erik's memory loss seemed so random and unnecessary. Like we could have just not had that plot beat at all?

Mia says she hasn't been Mia for a long time but she was a gold statue until the world tree fell which seems like it wasn't actually that long ago. Maybe she was thinking inside the gold statue in which case I would say she's SHOCKINGLY SANE. Impressively so.

I also feel like Erik got on board with sororicide very quickly. Like of course at the end he can't do it but he spent almost zero time being like "there must be another solution."

Okay I liked this arc but I feel like I got general whiplash from it. Mia was very evil "for a long time" and then was not very evil. They didn't really make it seem like "oh no she was under a spell" it was just she didn't...want to die? Which I guess fair. We also just found out about this sister, and what happened to her, and then that was undone off screen. And Erik being so gung ho for murder and then actually no.

Serena really gets the shortest fucking preamble to join. Everyone else was off doing shit and she's just kind of...around.

Metroid: Samus Returns

It's so fucking annoying to play this game after Zero Mission because the A and B buttons now do different things.

Aside from that this is pretty fun. I'm not totally sure how I feel about it in terms of ranking overall among the 2d Metroids. This Metroid fighting stuff is getting a bit repetitive.

Hanging out with buds, killing fate

2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z

This is my second time having beaten FFVII Remake and I just really like this game a lot. I don't even have a particular ton of nostalgia for the original, but this game grows it out of you. It's done with such love and care for the old game, it feels like FFVII came alive. The characters look and sound the way you imagined they would when you played it originally, the soundtrack bigger, fuller, meeting the grandness of the story. The game makes you understand why people fell in love with it so long ago and why it holds such a singular place in Final Fantasy and gaming canon.

The characters feel basically perfect, there's a warmth to them and how they interact with each other that really makes it feel like getting the gang back together to go take on megacorps and the personification of destiny. It earns its way to that spectacular climax by building these relationships in real time, both between our main cast and with its own legacy. Because we know this story, where it goes, and who these people are already, they get to fight fate.

The combat system is also really fun, a great homage to the old system while making it more active and engaging. If there's a complaint here, it's that your party members are a bit too shitty at generating atb, although one could say maybe that's a feature to not overwhelm the player with continual play stoppages.

The game's best and worst parts are the same: every element of the original is looked at and expanded. Where the expansions are best they add additional texture to the characters. The biggest glow up here is Avalanche, the characters die in the original and there's not a lot there to make us care but here they're actually fleshed out enough to make us feel something when they die.

Then there are the sections that were expanded almost out of obligation, like parents who don't want to be seen as picking favorites. "We did so much in the sector 7 slums, we gotta add more to the train graveyard."

No, you don't.

The craziest spot for this was in the Shinra building. Right after you meet Sephiroth in Hojo's lab you're just totally side tracked by doing whatever Hojo does and it's just so pointless. We're at the most exciting, the meatiest part. Let's go! I guess they spent a lot of time on that Red XIII animation and the phs system and damn it they were going to show it off!

The brand new characters can be more hit (Roche, I found him fun and over the top) or miss (Johnny, why are you so annoying?)

For a moment I thought about going back to clean up some achievements that I was close on but eh, I just don't care. I've been really trying to care less and just do the things that spark joy and not fomo myself. As I've become an adult I think there's more of a desire to turn games into Disney World. I'm just going to ride everything here because damn it I paid for it and I may never do it again so I don't care if I'm tired or sick I'm seeing it all.

But realistically I don't look at the Steam achievements after the game is done so why go through the effort of getting that last ride on the Tea Cups if it's just going to make me vomit all over the place?

Metroids are short and/or I have a problem

2026-08-20T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

Okay we're back in the main thrust of the story here finally. The king thing was mildly confusing at first since I thought he just...wasn't real or had died or whatever.

I don't understand why I'm so deferential to Hendrik or why he's such a dick! I really expected a contrite "hey I really fucked up but I'm here for you to help right this wrong and my part in it." I also don't get why the king is just the guy in charge either. Shouldn't everyone be looking to help ME instead of giving me orders?

I guess my silent ass couldn't tell them what to do anyways. I really think this game suffers from the devotion to the concept of a silent protagonist. It just makes them so weird and agencyless. don't think there is any value to that in this game. Just make him a regular person.

Hendrik is also the worst robo party member. Dude just hit them, stop buffing and stuff. I do find a perverse joy in looting all this stuff in front of him. Your king's shit is my shit now.

Okay, a bit of contrition from Hendrik. Thank you for acknowledging you suck and I did nothing to deserve it.

The fuck is this shit King? Hendrik saved us all? That dude was just in the vicinity while heroism and history happened. I see now why other guy went to the dark side.

The little vignettes are apparently only in the S version and I cannot imagine how fucking random Sylvando's whole deal feels without that extra information.

Metroid: Zero Mission

Yo fuck the Mother Brain room in this one.

And we beat this one too.

The final section is really fun, I really like the tension of having to be depowered and wandering the space pirate ship. It felt dangerous. Scary.

I think I'll do Samus Returns next. Really enjoying knocking these out. AM2R is also highly possible. Maybe after though. Should probably do a Castlevania too.

Focusing

2026-08-19T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

I'm thinking I'm not going to end up adding anything, I have quite a bit of DQXIS to get through still and I'd like to get that done before Zero Company comes out.

I've finished the vignettes, I was really afraid there'd be one for every character which would have felt like a bit much.

I appreciated the comic nature of the fisherman pulling my character out in full plate and just assuming I'm another fisherman stealing bait off his line, and the surprising warmth and care of the character.

That's the recurring theme within dqxis, warmth and hope in darkness and while it does bludgeon you over the head with it and that's anything but an original story, I think it wears that with such earnestness that it still feels good.

Metroid: Zero Mission

Game is a blast. Super addictive and a great portable pick up and play game for a few minutes. This game is also pretty short feeling. I'm like two hours and some change in and I'm at Mother Brain? I assume this is basically the end of the game. I definitely haven't been as exhaustive as possible in finding every pickup but I think I'm doing a pretty reasonable job. I suppose I'm missing a lot of classic Metroid items that might point to this being longer (Power Bombs, Space Jump) but I suppose it's possible those didn't exist in the original and were Super Metroid innovations.

Love the platforming, although it's mildly more annoying with the screw attack. I keep killing things I want to stand on.

Walking Simulator VR without the V

2026-08-18T00:00:00.000Z

MagiQuest

So we've been at Great Wolf Lodge the past couple days and they have this game called MagiQuest where you get to walk around the first floor and wave your wand (obviously costs additional) to interact with some things they've placed. It's basically a series of scavenger hunts and an amount of backtracking that a Metroidvania would call excessive.

Lily likes it though.

Super Metroid

I have beaten this now and I've said it before but man, it's really good! I got like just over 2/3rds completion which I'm saying is probably pretty decent. I have no metrics for this, that's just what I'm saying. There are a few frustrating parts where I think there could be more hand holding overall but you can really see why this thing is what set the standard and spawned a genre.

I'm definitely very interested in further exploring the genre, especially since these games are just so quick. I think Metroid Zero Mission is likely next, and then Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow on the other end.

I'm pretty interested to see how Zero Mission goes and I cannot for the life of me remember how Fusion worked, but like, I already felt like Super Metroid had too few buttons and the Advance has two fewer.

Dragon Quest XI S

I played a bit of this to get through Jade's vignette and a bit into Erik's. You know, I'm not sure I need vignettes for EVERYONE but maybe it'll payoff at some point?

Metroid: Zero Mission

Yeah I started it big whoop. I also technically started Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow but I feel like I'll end up doing Zero Mission first.

Overall? So far I feel like the controls are really refined here, the platforming seems so much better.

I'm into s&m, if the s is for super and the m is for magical

2026-08-17T00:00:00.000Z

Super Metroid

So after banging my head against a specific platforming section I just...went a different way. I think this game is so much better overall than SotN, I could do with slightly more signposting though because you know, I'm an adult. If I recall, this is something fusion did better, giving you a general heading. It also doesn't discuss the tools well enough. It took me this long to realize you could lengthen the grapple.

This game is also frustrating because it will make you feel like so many things are possible and maybe they are, maybe they aren't, and maybe you could but you shouldn't. There's no good indication of "no, you actually cannot make this jump I know it's really close but you're not like two pixels off you just can't."

Okay this game is really good (hot take), because as frustrating as it is sometimes (how the shit was I supposed to know to grapple beam the electricity on this boss to kill it) God damn does it feel so good and make you feel so smart sometimes.

Symphony Done

2026-08-16T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

Poor Hendrik. I'm very here for Sylvando Quest so far. So apparently I'm roughly a third of the way through now? Stunning how much game there is here.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Okay, I beat this last night, yes I did cheese stuff to death. I don't think I would have beaten it otherwise. I'm interested in putting Super Metroid more front and center to really compare and contrast.

Additionally, I found out that basically every Metroid and Castlevania tops out at tenish hours? I might just blast through a lot of these.

Super Metroid

I really like this game except the controls suck so bad. First, I hate the select to switch between weapons thing it's so annoying. Second, Samus is so floaty and her platforming is so weird in general. Thirdly, there are occasional platforming sections that make me want to die.

What if I added more shit to my backlog?

2026-08-15T00:00:00.000Z

World of Warcraft Playerbots

I saw a thing about being able to run wow for free with bots and I was like...that sounds fun. And then it was very quickly set up and hey, it is fun!

My kingdom for a time machine to know exactly what my old keybinds were. I have this like half muscle memory half regular memory where I kind of know where things are and then I realize I don't when I try to press it.

The overwhelming nostalgia from the sounds is so crazy. I picked a draenei mage, I mostly played horde so I wanted to do something new. It's nice to be able to do stuff like give yourself gold and tweak the exp ratios.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

I found the alucard shield by accident. No guides in the inverted castle so far. It is hilariously broken in a way I don't really mind. Is it taking all the skill and everything out of the game? Yeah maybe, but it's funny and the game is so annoying in some sections here that it deserves it.

It's very funny melting death by walking at him. Collected another dracula part, just need to find one. This seems like the thing where you could go forever walking around in circles not stumbling across the one room you need. Which is crazy because I feel like I've gotten so many taking pretty random walks. I'm not like methodically going through, I just kind of go forward until I hit a dead end. If I missed it waaaaay back somewhere I'm going to be pissed (partially because I only found like one teleporter room.)

Dragon Quest XI S

We continue ever onward. I assume there's some big act 2 turnaround about to happen at this big ol' tree. I'm banking the pep of my people for the big lottery pep power. I love that thing, getting the huge payout feels awesome.

STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order

I played about another 30 minutes of this, died to a big monster a couple times. The block button being the opposite bumper from FFVII Remake is a huge pain in the ass.

Remake Rebeaten

2026-08-14T00:00:00.000Z

Final Fantasy VII Remake

One thing that always trips me up is that Cloud is supposed to be some elite Mako infused SOLDIER and then randos like the Turks or Rufus Shinra can go toe to toe with him no problem.

I do like the boss rush nature of the endgame.

Fuck me I died at the motorcycle boss and had to put the game down and puts you all the way at the start of chapter 18 that's so fucking annoying. Why?

Alright, I've beaten it now. Didn't mean to, just didn't realize there was literally no saving after you step through the glowy portal.

I think this game is a rare jrpg that earned it's insane epicness. It makes sense to fight fate here, much more than it made sense for high schoolers to fight the god of control. It seems that by cashing the checks it wrote all those years ago. We understand why these characters have to fight fate and why here, this time, it's appropriate.

I really like this game overall though. I'm not even someone who's that nostalgic for the original. I played it once in high school and thought it was fine!

Probably won't roll directly into Rebirth after? Before I didn't think so for sure, but the ending is so epic it just makes you want to keep going. Might just do Jedi Fallen Order. I might wrap up a few things in Remake too. I have a couple more battle intel to turn in, I could knock out a few achievements. But I'm not really an achievement hunter guy? I dunno, I'll sleep on it.

Dragon Quest XI S

Okay I really liked the ice city arc and I don't know why. Maybe it's because Krystalinda can get it. But even considering my time wasting out of sequence here I found myself looking fondly at it after we left. Maybe it's the fact that there's just some odd stuff and this place doesn't feel done. The Krystalinda/Queen thing doesn't seem done (the queen is a doofus the witch literally just tried to imprison you again and yet you'll trust her?) There was also the frozen dragon in the fjord on your way out that's definitely going to come up again.

Also poor Rab just randomly getting embarrassed for no reason.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

So I kept going and beat the orb around Richter Belmont. I'm definitely using a walkthrough, this shit is too annoying otherwise. The inverted castle is kind of trippy and hard to get around.

Actually it's a giant pain in the ass. There are rooms here that seem designed to drive one to madness. I'm at three dracula parts so it would seem wasteful to not finish.

Cowardice reigns

2026-08-13T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

Yeah I turned off the Draconian Quest. Got absolutely bogged down just dealing with trash mobs in the hekswood. Also the fact that the Draconian Quest thing just stays up there the whole time is so annoying.

Also found out I sequence broke some after getting totally lost? There was just nothing to do in the library nor the hekswood, so I googled it. Apparently you have to visit the Queen first? Went around and did the things I needed to do. It wasn't bad, went much faster without the Draconian Quest.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

The decision to have the Sephiroth reveal at the Shinra building in Hojo's lab and then the long pointless party switching phs stuff is mind boggling to me. Like there's so much narrative momentum and excitement and then we're just going to waste time dicking around? I literally was like "you know what? I did this once already. I could be done with the game."

I persevered though and got to the glowy Jenova blood trail so now it's really all downhill from here.

STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order

Well I got to the blood trail and was like "I have maybe 30 minutes I don't want to start anything what's something short I could do." I played like two hours of this and it's been something that I've continually felt I should go back, and an Into the Aether podcast I listened to liked it a lot, so that was the thing I needed to actually put it on The Official Backlog. And I figured why not.

It was fun for 30 minutes! It's stupid to start something, I probably should have played Super Metroid but I didn't want to reach over and grab the Thor.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

I think I figured out the problem with this game. It's fucking annoying. I played through more, I looked up some shit because I didn't want to keep going around this castle in a circle looking for some little hint that I missed the first time. Super Metroid like clearly advertises (HEY THIS DOOR IS A DIFFERENT COLOR COME BACK AT EXACTLY THIS TIME). I got the power of mist and the power of bat and it's just meh.

Like it's annoying to get around. The travelling and platforming doesn't feel great, and you're getting chipped at by these annoying ass armored fleas and then you're like "fuck I've actually lost a lot of health I guess it's not a good time to fight a boss" and then you have to backtrack your ass to the save point to reheal.

Also if you die you have to go through the world's longest screen and reload back into the game from the title. Thank god for save states. Me finishing this game seems unlikely but it's not long? I think I'm going to give myself the option to quit whenever since I think I've gotten what I need out of it.

I make decisions and then unmake them. It's fine.

2026-08-12T00:00:00.000Z

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 Super Turbo HD Remix was on sale today. Sure, let's throw another onto the backlog. That's a "more the merrier" thing right?

Dragon Quest XI S

Okay, so the draconian change is significant and does make combat more interesting than the prior faceroll. I did the Royal Library dungeon, apparently out of sequence, and it was tough. I basically ran on empty MP wise, I had a fight with a mimic too that REALLY put the hurt on me.

I'm not sure I'll end up keeping it though just because it takes so much longer and it does actively make me kind of want to play it less. Like I had the option for it, or Castlevania earlier and I was just like uhhh, Castlevania, I don't want to slog through it more. And again, it is more interesting, but I think it might be something like 50% more interesting for 100% more slog. Not a good trade off.

DQXIS doesn't have to be a challenging game to be good though. It can just be kind of warm and fun and welcoming, like a good Pokemon game. Another thing I do like about it is that I don't feel the need to really do everything. The Tickington stuff just...didn't really resonate with me and I don't feel compelled to do every side quest. This is something where I can comfortably just follow the critical path and be okay with it.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

I don't know if this game is going to have the distance for me. I find it pretty frustrating. I don't love traveling around and it feels like it's just very willing to waste a lot of your time and there's just no hand holding here at all. I can see the bones of why it's so good and so influential but I don't know exactly what it is. It's just not captivating me in the way that Aria of Sorrow did. I would be interested to try Aria again and see if I can figure out what it is (although of course the comparison will always be different because of the nostalgia). I did just play it last year I think, but it's hard for me to tell what's different, a more fresh comparison could help. Speaking of...

Super Metroid

Okay, so I started THIS to contrast with Symphony of the Night, since I think these two are the two ur-classics of the genre and well, I kind of immediately found it more fun. So much more fun that I might just immediately retire SOTN. I think a HUGE thing is that you can actually get more health while you're adventuring in Super Metroid so it doesn't feel like a really awful, attrition-y experience.

Another benefit is that exploration feels more rewarding and I feel like I grok the design language better. For whatever reason I just understand both where things are likely to be hidden, but what is likely. With SOTN, sometimes you find things and you expect it to be this huge upgrade and then it's a sword that I have better versions of. You don't get that really with Metroid, and when you do find tiny things they're always useful. I'll take a missile pack upgrade.

Neither game is so long so I might power through SOTN anyways, a little more, but I'm not about really forcing the fun here.

Of note, I am playing the Project Base version of the game.

Metaphor ReFantazio Post Mortem

2026-08-12T00:00:00.000Z

Battered and bruised, I've fought my way through his final dungeon and beaten all the traps to make it here. Beyond this door lies Louis for the final confrontation before time expires. I steel my party for the coming battle, burning precious, rare consumables to patch wounds and replenish mana. Now ready for the worst, I enter the final stage.

Metaphor ReFantazio is a game I liked for the vast majority of the run time. Most of the game has something to say and where it commits to that it succeeds.

Let's take a look at the systems. Metaphor looks at the lineage it comes from, Persona, and makes the mechanics clearer, more immediately legible, and they're better for it. The archetype system is a welcome change from the confusion of the Velvet Room. We've traded throwing things into the guillotine blender, fingers crossed, for a system that is vast and deep, but crystal clear. It's easy to understand how to build your characters and there's a lot of freedom in doing so. And that's right, characters, since the whole party gets in on the Archetype system which makes them more flexible and more a part of the team, not some tagalong following our chosen one leader. You can play who you like instead of saying "Sorry Ann, this one's fire immune, enjoy the bench!"

The game trusts you to be able to navigate this system and it feels rewarding and empowering, right up until the Royal Archetypes where it puts its thumb on the scale: THIS is how the character is meant to be played.

The calendar and social game are less opaque too, the game largely respects your desire to plan and doesn't interrupt your days with random events, throwing your carefully sculpted social calendar into disarray. There are also fewer pitfalls and dead ends, it's easier to see what's worth doing and what needs to be done, to the point where I easily maxed out confidants and stats with days to spare.

Combat is faster and more rewarding. The ability to rewind combat doesn't penalize you for wasting turns learning enemy weaknesses and the big new addition, overworld combat, adds another dimension of mastery. You learn the mob's pattern, you dodge, you go in for the kill, and you're rewarded with a sweet stun round of combat to get the edge. Failure has real teeth too, get hit and you're the one on the back foot. When creatures become too weak to stand toe to toe in turn based combat, they're easily dispatched in overworld combat, a transition point that marks a real milestone and growth for the player as they progress in dungeons.

Mechanically this game is clearer, trusts the player more, and generally follows through on that. The story itself has a clear message it wants to send: the power of dreams and story, of democracy, that people of humble beginnings can change the world, for better or for worse. Spoilers abound below.

Our cast is mostly a bunch of nobodies and castoffs ranging from a noble with nothing to show for it but the title to a pagan priestess in a land that calls her a heretic. Our main character is even worse than nothing, a despised Elda. Metaphor says that stories can give people a common dream and when united with that hope that anyone can make a difference. Unfortunately, it immediately weakens that argument by making the main character the prince: the opposite of a nobody in a succession war.

To be fair, even he didn't know that at the time.

Nowhere is this more obvious or tragic than Maria's story. She starts as a character in a similar spot to the main character and can look to him as a role model. The main character says "I am nothing and nobody respects me, but I'm doing my best to make a difference and you should too." She believes this and does the best a little girl can in her position. And then the prince revelation says "Sorry Maria, all your dreams are nice, but you need someone with power and legitimacy to actually do it." We get the little kid at the ending of The Last Jedi and then the Rey Palpatine reveal, immediately undercutting the message.

I already understand Metaphor's counter argument: while the main character drives the action they're just a messenger, a vessel for the story, a way for it to work in the real world. A story can inspire those with power, and the story can come from anywhere. That it's the true force of change in the world.

And then More turns out to be the king. So even the dreams have to come from the right person. It's elite inspiring elites and we need to wait for our benevolent leaders to show us the right way. It's an odd flavor of great man theory.

Maybe their defense is that the game shows the power of democracy. Even if the dreams come from elites and have to be enacted by elites, they still had to win the hearts of the people. But the game doesn't really have a firm commitment to the democratic process, I mean, the other leading candidates are killed. Our prince isn't really the chosen one so much as the only one remaining. The main character never makes a commitment to enduring democracy either, it's right back to the status quo.

The other candidates aren't taken seriously, one's platform is to keep the kingdom in a constant state of inebriation, another is really just doing it because it's good advertising for her business. No, in order to be taken seriously, you have to come from institutional power, the royal lineage, the military, or the church.

The final thing Metaphor tries to talk about is the power of demagoguery and its ability to channel our anxieties into their own power. In the world of Metaphor this is literal, magla is formed by the anxieties of people.

Our charismatic strongman is Louis, a decorated general who pulls people into his orbit with his promises of equality. We see how desperate people would accept him as a savior and his offer to totally upend the system. The current game is rigged against the people, so flipping the table at least evens the odds even if it's not a guarantee of a better life. This makes him a delightfully compelling and realistic villain due to gestures at everything happening.

We as the players (through the characters) know this is a bad bargain, his ideal world where the strong prevail and everyone pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps is not better, in fact it's calamitous and leads to undue suffering. Some of our best characters realize this (Del and Basilio) and come to our side.

And then Louis turns out to be a three headed demonic monster who literally eats people for power in his quest to see it all burn, not just the systems but the people. Everyone deserves to die, they're all (literally) monsters on the inside anyways. This lets Louis's ideology off the hook, maybe his ideas were fine, any policy goals would be bad and compromised if Dracula was espousing them!

The plot definitely has interesting things to say: it pokes at how racism and anxiety can impact democracy and the value of story and communicating a dream in combating that. I think that's legitimately cool and worth thinking about. The bones of something truly great are here, I just wish the game had the conviction to actually land it instead of weakening the message by choosing twists and spectacle at the Elda Village and Skybound Avatar. It's another Atlus game with this pattern and I'm not sure if they don't understand that or they're pulling punches to chase dollars. It's disappointing to get this close and just back away from it at the end.

Louis has been going on with his genre obligated monologue for some time and I'm ready to end this, to bring this 80 hour campaign to a close here in the throne room of the Skybound Avatar. What other ending could be more fitting, surely everything has been leading to this. And then Louis finishes with:

"Your battle is in another castle."

I'm left alone, emptied bottles of consumables rolling around at my feet. The battle they were spent for was never really there to begin with.

The first (technically second) of many

2026-08-11T00:00:00.000Z

Alright, the thing auto posted yesterday as planned so that means everything is working and the site is live. Still more stuff to do before I'm ready to actually start sharing.

Dragon Quest XI S

I appreciate that this game is easy enough that I just feel like I can ignore a lot of little things. I just got this magic key, and am I going to go back and hunt down all the spots from before? Heck no. If I see it I'll get it.

Preliminary party member thoughts:

Erik seems generic as a character but since he started dual wielding he does good damage and is a go to single target guy.

Jade is kind of a slightly more useful Erik in that she has more stuff to hit wide and it feels like she has abilities that hit more specific classes of units, but in bosses I like Erik's toolset better. I think I might slightly prefer her as a trashmobs/exploration person just because she can do some aoe.

Sylvando has kind of improved into a good all-rounder. He's using whips so he's good at cheaply dealing with mobs, he has some support and a bit of healing that's useful.

I can't talk about the twins without talking about Rab, who is basically my magic user of choice. He's well rounded enough to toss a heal when needed or damage when he's got a free turn.

I also think, realistically, that the difficulty of this game is so low that it doesn't matter who you use at all? I know there are ways to make it harder but I'm concerned that it'll just make combat more LONGER and more damage spongey without making it more interesting since the combat system appears to be very basic here, or at least it doesn't tell you how it's not basic. (Are there resistances? Weaknesses?)

I used cheat engine to change the flag on it, damn thing also installed some garbage on it I didn't realize. This should be a crime. Punishable by death.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Hojo is the fucking worst. "She came of her own free will, what is she your property?" He's just some sort of bad faith internet troll and he sucks so hard.

It's been a minute but the back half of the Shinra building, I think basically after you get Aerith back is when it really starts kicking into high gear. The first time, the Sephiroth being here, everything with the whispers really led to this tension of I don't know exactly what's going on here, but it was exciting to feel like that.

It's like the decision for adaptations not to follow too closely so fans of the thing can also be along for the ride. I think that's a really risky decision, you can turn those fans away, but done well you can really breathe new life into it and I think that's what this succeeds at.

10 August 2026

2026-08-10T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

The structure of the game is pretty good now that I can fully see it. It's like an old season (as in like 24 episodes) of television. You have your monster of the week episodes and that are their own self contained little story but it still feeds into a slow burn ur-plot. I assume it'll mostly keep that structure until we get to the equivalent of a multi part season finale.

I wrapped up the northern section of the medals academy, beating up a giant bird for an orb. It isn't lost on me that my first Dragon Quest game has me collecting a bunch of spheres that were scattered around the world to collect with characters designed by Toriyama. Where have I seen that before? Hmmmmm.

Flamecraft Duals

We played this for the first time tonight, two games back to back. Within a couple minutes I knew it was good. Really easy to understand, mostly fast playing (I think there's definitely a possibility for analysis paralysis but the number of decisions to make is pretty small), and it's pretty short (in a good way, it doesn't overstay its welcome.) The presentation was really good and I initially regretted not getting the deluxe but I looked into it, I don't feel like I'm missing much there.

9 August 2026

2026-08-09T00:00:00.000Z

Final Fantasy VII Remake

I'm not sure the shinra building needed to take longer

8 August 2026

2026-08-08T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

Holy shit the mermaid?

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Got into the first section I think is kind of slow and laggy, the barrage of side quests after the sector 7 plate drops. It's just a weird moment to stall the game out before it really starts to accelerate into the end game.

Didn't finish the pull ups thing. I'm proud of me? I struggled because I was like I should do it now. And then I was like well, I could come back and do it after! I realized though that I would never do it, and not doing it meant I wouldn't get the achievement.

That's okay. Who cares?

Unsure if I'll redo the Yuffie dlc. I feel like I can sneak in finishing a game before Star Wars Zero Company comes out? I'm not saying I'll get it, but it's the first thing I'm very interested in.

7 August 2026

2026-08-07T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

I think Vince is let off the hook pretty easy for being pretty heinous.

6 August 2026

2026-08-06T00:00:00.000Z

Final Fantasy VII Remake

One thing I dislike about these kinds of games is the ludo narrative dissonance of having to look for items in every nook and cranny. Quick, they're going to drop the plate! Okay, hold on while I look everywhere.

5 August 2026

2026-08-05T00:00:00.000Z

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Like an idiot I started this. I don't even know why. I just wanted to test the PSX emulator I guess. It's really fun though. Two seconds in I was like "oh this is basically exactly the Aria of Sorrow engine." And I love Aria.

Dragon Quest XI S

I thought I was getting close to burning out on this but kept going. I dunno what it is. It's just...fun.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Still cranking through at a good pace. It's really fun. I feel like I haven't quite gotten combat mastery but it's just a fun game.

3 August 2026

2026-08-03T00:00:00.000Z

Final Fantasy VII Remake

I think the music is definitely doing so much work in this game. Aerith's theme is also so good and comforting. I also don't understand what the church is for. Does Midgar have Jesus? The combat is fun though I consistently feel like I'm just scratching the surface of competency with it.

2 August 2026

2026-08-02T00:00:00.000Z

Dragon Quest XI S

This game is pretty boring and basic and yet I still am interested in it after like eight hours? No idea what it is. I think it's short enough with just enough visible over the metaphorical narrative hill and minimal friction to get there to be like "okay let's go see what's over there." I have no idea if it'll pull me through the entire runtime, it's very long, but I said that about P5R.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

This game feels so...welcoming and cozy at times. The sector 7 slums section really just feels like hanging out with friends getting to know each other after a long time which, it is. I also think Tifa's theme feels so warm.

27 July 2026

2026-07-27T00:00:00.000Z

Final Fantasy VI

The drama seems totally unearned here. It has a lot of emotional whiplash and there's a lot of build up out of nowhere. It's also silly which really undercuts it. The cast is too big and the cuts from person to person prevent you from building any kind of relationship with anyone.

The game is really easy and the combat is pretty boring so far (I think mostly because it's too easy for any amount of nuance or strategy to matter.)

I think a lot of these gripes are absolutely me playing it 30 years after release, the genre and games in general have evolved significantly. Still though, it makes me less sympathetic to a lot of arguments I've seen that VI is actually the best in the series and VII is overrated. I think setting quality of story aside (whatever that means, I guess some measure of plot without considering execution of it), VII is a much more emotionally resonant story.

Persona 5 Royal

2026-07-04T00:00:00.000Z

The thoughts I have about Persona 5 Royal could probably fill a gigantic book. At first, a couple days ago, I thought my opinion was that this was not a very good game. It was a fine game, but it wasn't very good. I then realized that has to be silly. I wouldn't be closing in on nearly 90 hours of gameplay here if it wasn't very good. I've bounced out of "better" games in far less time. So what does it do well?

The characters are the stars of the show here, which is both good and disappointing since they're 90% of the way there overall. There are enough interesting characters to pull you through, and there's probably something for everyone. Characters I didn't much care for are probably someone else's favorite. But the character interactions feel thin, there aren't durable changes to how they act around you in other scenes. All of both their personal growth and your relationship is totally siloed. That's a huge miss for me.

The game has a very strong one more turn loop. The social days I continually found myself going "oh, but I need to do this before I forget! oooh, I have a new interaction opportunity with Makoto, I can't stop now."

The early game has this Ann/Kamoshida/Kawakami problem. The Kamoshida story is really good and I think tackles some important stuff. The problem is that the game is tone deaf to it and at the same time, sexualizes Ann. It tries to have its cake and eat it too by having Ann try to use her sexuality as empowerment, but it cannot stop being extremely male gaze-y at her, and the other characters continue to sexualize her against her will, there are some randos, but also Ryuji and Morgana. It's really gross and I don't like it, especially because they're all minors.

Kawakami's story is also weird as hell post Kamoshida. This is an adult teacher getting involved with her minor student. I don't want to stigmatize her sex work, there's a story here about teachers not making enough money they have to supplement it with work that they would consider degrading, the problem is the interaction with the minor student especially after we just had a looooong story about how inappropriate that is. It's just male gaze-y fantasy "oooh hot for teacher." It reminds me of that South Park episode where the cops just keep saying "Nice."

That goes for ALL OF THE ADULTS who are happy to get into a relationship with a minor (Ohya, Chihaya) but the Kawakami one is by far the worst because of the Kamoshida story. It just undercuts her story so much and she could have easily been a diner waitress, or hell, just a regular non sexy maid who doesn't get romantically involved with a minor (at least ten years her junior I would guess?) and the story would have lost so little.

The game stops shoving that contradiction in your face so much as the story progresses.

The story is overall fine and the messages it pushes are good, but it does make it a little clean and easy on itself. There's no possibility of friendly fire, they know their target is a bad person because they have a palace so you can take em down guilt free. There isn't an acknowledgement of conflicting perspectives or shades of gray, just a determination of the righteous from the corrupt handed from on high. If only life was so easy.

Maruki may end up being the best arc of them all, it includes most of my favorite characters front and center (Akechi and Kasumi/Sumire) and Maruki is an interesting, somewhat sympathetic villain (even though a counselor telling Sumire to live a fantasy life as her dead sister is just so fucked up) but it at least poses an interesting question. I almost forgot about Sae's story, that one was also really good and I feel like the transition of post Sae was the story hitting on a lot of cylinders. It actually felt like...you know, a heist movie.

That's where I am right now, I'll likely beat the game tonight or tomorrow and I'll revise these thoughts.

Okay, I beat it. Maruki's arc is among the best in the game, maybe THE best, like I predicted. My favorite characters front and center, a villain who's actually sympathetic, and it poses a real question instead of just pointing at another generic bad guy. Sae's relationship also develops into one of the best in the post game. She feels like someone you genuinely changed for the better, and notably, she isn't trying to inappropriately have sex with a minor. Low bar, this game keeps tripping on it anyway.

But the ending. The ending is literally HOURS of cutscenes, and I think I might like the game less now because it cannot stop talking. The right ending was sitting right there: Joker walks out of jail, his friends are waiting for him, roll credits. Hope, possibility, their stories unwritten, they could do or be anything. Hell, the end of Maruki's palace is literally them rejecting a world where their futures were decided for them. That's the cliffhanger to end on. Their stories aren't written.

Oh, but actually they are. In excruciating detail. Over the next few hours.

This is the exact same failure as the Ann/Kamoshida problem: the game makes a point and then immediately undercuts it with its own hands. You spend the whole third semester fighting a guy whose crime is writing everyone a comfortable, well-intentioned ending, you win, and then the epilogue writes everyone a comfortable, well-intentioned ending. The only difference between Atlus and Maruki is that Maruki gets a boss fight where you can tell him no.

And the futures it writes? Everyone kind of ends up on the same path they were already on. There's all this talk about breaking free and doing what you want, and it turns out most of what people want is what they already had, they just own it now. Ann still wants to be a model, but now she's in charge of her sexuality. Ryuji still wants to run, but now he actually tries instead of moping. Yusuke paints, Sumire does gymnastics, etc etc. The Phantom Thieves don't really change anyone, they restore them. The only main characters who actually change direction are Sae and Futaba, and their starting states were the wound itself, so removing the wound produced real change. Everyone else's wound was next to their dream, so fixing it just handed the dream back.

Nobody actually rebels. Not one person says fuck the system, I'm blazing my own trail. If even ONE character had done that, you could say the story was showing different forms of rebellion. Instead the only characters who genuinely reject the path society handed them are Akechi, Maruki, and Shido, and the game kills, defeats, and imprisons them. Rebellion is villain-coded. The heroes rebel as a phase and then get back in line. Joker's big noble moment is voluntarily going to jail so the paperwork comes out right. Even Futaba, who is one of the most capable hackers alive and does not NEED any of it, gets marched back into high school and it's framed as healing. This is a very conservative story wearing a punk jacket, and I don't think I fully saw it until the epilogue rubbed my face in it.

Makoto's ending bugs me the most. I get the intended read, reform the rot from inside, pick up the fight that killed her dad. But the game spent 100 hours showing me the police are corrupt from the SIU director down to the interrogation room where detectives drugged and beat a teenager, and her takeaway is: join up. Meanwhile Sae, with twenty years inside, concludes the system can't be fixed from within and leaves. These two sisters came at this exact problem side by side, through the same events, and walked out with opposite conclusions, and the game never stages that conversation. They live in the same apartment! One dinner table scene would have turned the contradiction into a thesis. Instead both arcs resolve in isolation, which is my siloed-relationships complaint again wearing a different hat.

Honestly I think they gave the sisters each other's endings. Sae has the rank, the connections, and the guilt to be the insider reformer, that's penance, that's a real arc. And Makoto's entire contribution to the team is investigation, she tails people, builds case files, connects dots. She should be a journalist, exposing corrupt institutions from the outside. That's the legal version of a calling card. Instead she gets "police commissioner," a job she can't hold for twenty-five years of rank-and-file rule-following, which is exactly the failure mode her whole arc warned about.

On romances: I don't even know which one I like best, because almost none of them feel earned. They're all friendship arcs with a fork at the end. Rank 8 hits and suddenly it's "hey btws I love u, do u love me?" out of nowhere. Makoto's is the most natural, the fake-boyfriend-to-real-boyfriend thing reads real because the romance has somewhere to live before the fork. Sumire's gets uncomfortable the more you think about it, half her confidant happens while she is not in her right state of mind, sincerely being a person who doesn't exist. "Took advantage of" isn't the right phrase for the player, but it might be the right phrase for what the game did to the scenario. Futaba is real little-sister vibes the entire way and the hard romantic pivot actively weirded me out. All the adults remain crimes, see above. Ann is structurally the cleanest option, same age, same trauma survived together, no power imbalance, and the game STILL makes it weird because the camera can't stop leering at her.

And then there's Hifumi, who I completely forgot about because I pushed her confidant early and never had a reason to go back. (Time-gate more of these, Atlus. Keep people relevant across the whole calendar.) She might quietly be the best one? Playing a two-player game together over and over is genuinely how people get close, it's private, it's intimate, you actually learn who someone is across a board. And her arc is the one "return to your path" story that's actually earned. She loved shogi the entire way through, the game itself was never at odds with her story the way modeling is the crime scene for Ann. Her mom corrupted the fame around shogi, not the thing itself, so when it all collapses she chooses to earn it back from the bottom on her own merit. That's what re-choosing your path looks like when it costs something. Everyone else in the epilogue got Hifumi's ending without doing Hifumi's work. The funny thing is the game did to me exactly what it does to its characters: it restored my original opinion, I'm just more conscious of it now.

Notes from the playthrough

Written as I went, before the essay above. I didn't have the daily writing system in place yet, so this was it.

It continually bothers me that these kids are high schoolers

It's impossible for me to get over how shitty a teacher Kawakami is and I want to root for her redemption but she's also a sex worker (I have no problem with this) who is getting entangled with a student (I have a problem with this) and it's just hard to see past that.

It feels like there are a lot of issues where the fact that these kids are high schoolers is an unnecessary problem and it would fix a lot of shit for me.

In a lot of ways I feel like this game is its own worst enemy. The Kawakami thing seems to directly just undercut itself. She has a story that is sympathetic and yet it is totally undercut by becoming a sex worker who is involved with a student. Why? Why? I don't get it. It's needless and it just makes the story worse.

The story is also just so childish at times. The way it's just like, "Oh well, what a smoke show," about some of the characters. That's like, "Don't need to do it," and again they're fucking high schoolers.

I also really don't like the long unpredictable stretches where it just doesn't let you go through the loop and the day-to-day stuff just plays out like one long semi-interactive cutscene. I would like to build my confidant scores and stuff like that.

Okumura's Palace is a slog. The random puzzle you can just accidentally lock yourself out of and the first boss fight that you can't just face roll? Why the sudden jump with zero warning?

I kind of have already felt like the palaces are kind of the weakest part of the game, they're just too long and the "puzzles" just feel time wastey. Like they're just linear and obvious for the most part, but this big step up didn't make it better. The airlock puzzle just isn't fun or interesting.

I really dislike how often the game locks you out of doing shit. Like I would like to save more often and then also it just eats up multiple days in a row without letting you do the loop.

I think some characters are just added too late to be meaningfully impactful or have nearly the same weight. Like Haru? Akechi and Kasumi are at least important characters even if they don't join the party. I think Futaba was kind of the last chance to get on board.

When you max out your confidant your further interactions are so underwhelming.

I also feel it slow rolls itself well enough, which is another thing I think cuts both ways. I liked Kasumi/Sumire's story, I thought Akechi was great, but those characters really only hit that level right at the very end, and it would have been nice to play with them more, early on. However, I do think that adds a lot of continual novelty to the game. Even though you've seen most of what it's going to do mechanically, it still finds ways to keep you invested.

The linearity is, to my surprise, something I think is actually beneficial here. The game has a straight line to go through narratively, you cannot get bogged down or overwhelmed by infinite side quests. The sidequests that exist (Mementos) even encourage you to just maximize your time by doing as many as possible at once, and again, the process of doing them is linear. You cannot have decision paralysis of which quest to do because this one takes you that way, this other one takes you another.

My #1 thing is that the game doesn't respect your time well. I found palaces/mementos waaaaay too long and the combat is not as deep and interesting for the amount of time devoted to it. Further, the dungeons give you "puzzles" which are really just pretty linear anyways. If it's going to be linear, I feel like we can cut to the chase a lot faster.

There are also just a lot of social day scenes where I feel like it could cut to the chase too. There's a section right at the end where you have to meet with all of your teammates again to see how they're doing in the reality and you have to go to sleep and walk through the subway like seven times on subsequent days and deal with all the load screens and animations.

Similarly, I found combat just FRUSTRATING sometimes, especially at the end. Oh great, this thing has no weaknesses, I've fought it a bunch, and now I just need to grind it out again. I'm looking at YOU Abbadon you asshole. There's very little value in fighting it so many times.

Let's get to The Story here because I feel like I've largely forgotten about the problems I initially had with it, and it's not because they went away, they just stopped showing up.