Game Reviews: Ex Astris and Arknights

Ex Astris (2024) (iOS, Android) 

I really liked Ex Astris and I have absolutely no idea how to sell folks on it. From the outside it looks like a standard anime RPG. So, let’s look at the story and fighting, since those are two main pillars folks connect with these games on.

The story is mostly episodic and in the background. It’s divided into roughly three acts, without many cutscenes. What big story moments there are are understated and poetic. The episodic structure means it doesn’t build to a huge finale the way other games would. I like the writing and characters here, but as a part of a larger whole, not an end unto themselves. I’ll talk more about the theming later, but I don’t think “the story is so good” sets the right expectations for the game.

The fighting is semi-action based. It’s about learning the rules and timing of different moves to build combos for big damage. (Enemy attacks, naturally, can be dodged with timing-based parries.) The combo rules are rich and interesting, and it’s genuinely fun to lab out your own combos. But once you’ve figured out one you like, there isn’t much reason to vary your approach. I spent most of the game executing the same few combos over and over. There aren’t many random encounters by RPG standards, and the game is under twenty hours long, so I didn’t have time to get sick of the somewhat shallow and easy fighting. I think it’s cute; it works for a game of this length. But it’s not a real reason to jump in either, not for me at least.

So what’s left? Why’d I like Ex Astris? It’s something more ethereal and hard to grasp — something to do with the game’s mood, how it feels to exist in its world.

Most modern studio rpgs are loud and noisy. I played Tales of Berseria in the past year and it was a non-stop assault on the senses. But once you get past the fairly dense combo tutorials up front, Ex Astris is relatively subdued. It still has modern RPG nonsense like a waypoint radar and collectible crafting materials; it’s not an itchio RPGMaker game. But, compared to something like Xenoblade, it feels very restrained to me.

Dungeons in Ex Astris are hours-long and fairly empty. I spent large stretches of the game wandering vast monochrome alien architectures, listening to light character banter and gently noodling synths. I thought these sections were beautiful. AAA games spend so much money making huge, expensive-looking 3D environments, but they’re so afraid to step back and let you actually enjoy them. Ex Astris knew when to back off and let me appreciate the quiet grandeur of its spaces.

In the world of Ex Astris, the World Tree initiates a planet-wide “reset” every generation or so. All living creatures return to the lifestream and are born anew. Your avatar follows a priestess who's deliberately working to protect this cycle of reincarnation, and to preserve the memories of those alive so they can be shared with the next cycle. Each of the game’s three acts center around someone fighting to escape or end this cycle, and each time you have to stop them. 

It’s like a reverse Final Fantasy X. The cycle is understood to be the natural state of things, an inescapable ending and beginning. Raging against the dying of the light is portrayed as sympathetic but ultimately misguided. I think it’s very lovely theming (although they botch it a bit at the very end).

That thematic consistency for 99% of the game is what ties the whole package together to me. This is a mood piece, a quiet twenty hour poem masquerading as a Tales game. I don’t want to oversell it; it’s ultimately a small story, and the sentimental ending did sour me on it just a little. But it made an impact on me, it’s something I want to share with friends.

This was my first Chinese RPG I played to the very end, and I had a great time. It’s a phone game, but unlock Gryphline’s other mobile offerings, it’s not a free-to-play gacha. You pay $10 and that’s it, you can play the whole game. You do not own it though — not only is it locked to iOS/android ecosystems, but despite being single-player you must log in to Gryphline’s servers to play it. I’m not sure the game is popular enough for a PC rerelease or for folks to hack around the log-in down the line. Even with emulation, it’s likely Ex Astris is destined to be lost to time before long. Does that innate impermanence compliment the game’s theming? Who’s to say…

And I don’t know where else to put this, but the shoegaze credits theme is one of the loveliest RPG vocal ending tracks I've ever heard.

Arknights (2019-Present)

I played Arknights constantly for two straight weeks. For nearly any other game that’d be enough to clear it or at least get close, but for Arknights that was enough to see maybe 2% of the total content (through the end of chapter three, specifically). I’m also not a fan of this genre even a little bit. Take my read with a grain of salt.

So: this is the most fun I’ve had with a gacha game. After extended false starts with Fate/Grand Order, Dragalia Lost, and Honkai Impact 3rd I finally feel like I get the appeal of these stupid games. I’m gonna make my best argument on the devil’s behalf first, then explain why these games are still resolutely not for me.

The main obstacle for me with gacha games is that they overwhelm me immediately with their dozens of competing systems and currencies and game modes. Arknights did its best to dole that stuff out for me slowly. But by a week in, it was still too much. When I hit that point in Fate GO, I soldiered on anyway, only half-understanding what I was doing. That was miserable, and I didn’t intend to play Arknights the same way.

This time, I took matters into my own hands. I spent two full hours pouring over the in-game UI and cross-referencing it against the fan-wiki. The wiki explained in-depth how each mode worked and when it was added to the game. If a mode was added years after the game’s 2019 launch date, I knew it wouldn’t be essential to the early game progression. By the end of the two hours, I had a reference spreadsheet covering every major UI element. This cut down on the gacha systems noise tremendously, and let me see through to the specifics of what the game wanted from me.

Gacha games are defined mostly by their meta-systems: the clicker game progression and (of course) the gambling. The clicker game here was mostly familiar to me from Fate GO, with the much appreciated “auto-play” nicety for my “dailies.” I’m not immune to the power of idle game happy-brain-chemicals-go-brrrr, and I had a lot of fun leveling and ascending my characters. Thanks to my handy dandy spreadsheet, I could see through all the piled-on nonsense and actually enjoy the clicker game.

The number-go-up brain chemical appeal here is stronger, in some ways, than in a traditional rpg. A normal rpg has an ending, a finite length. After the credits roll, the time you put into grinding up your characters no longer matters, because the game is over. But Arknights is essentially endless. There are already hundreds of maps and millions of words of story, with more still coming down the pipeline.

It helps that the grind here is much slower than in a normal rpg. That slowness adds to the sense of commitment, that I’m building something substantive brick-by-brick that will last through dozens of stories. I think this is likely the same basic appeal as leveling up characters in MMOs, another genre I’ve struggled to connect with. It feels good to understand it, at least more than I did before.

The nugget of actual gameplay in Arknights is a tower defense game. Initially it made me laugh; seeing play that reminded me of old dinky flash games at the center of this multi-million dollar media empire was funny. But I like the tower defense a lot. Arknights gets hard much faster than Fate GO, and while leveling up my units played a massive role, my strategies actually did matter as well. I found I could beat missions under the recommended level if I played and replayed them, trying out new strategies until I found one that worked.

But the tower defense wasn’t the real reason I kept playing — if it was, I could’ve just loaded up a real strategy game, like X-Com or Fire Emblem. I certainly wasn’t playing for the visual novel. Maybe it gets better later, but the best thing I can say for story sequences in early Arknights is that they aren’t as intrusively awful as Fate GO’s.

Ultimately, the tower defense and visual novel were scraps of real art meant to distract me from the fundamental emptiness of what I was doing. I was playing for the clicker game, to see my party get stronger.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so. Everyone needs trash in their life, something they can completely turn their brain off to. Reality TV, vtuber streams, meandering serial fanfics — it doesn’t matter what it is, so long as we can fully decompress while engaging with it. If someone gets that from grinding their dailies in a phone game, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

It’s just not for me. I struggle to stay engaged with any one game (or any piece of media really) for more than like, two or three weeks. And I don’t like reaching the end of that attention cycle without a real conclusion in sight. I don’t watch unfinished TV shows, I don’t read cape comics or ongoing manga, and I don’t play MMOs. I don’t play “episode one” or “prologue” games on Itch or Steam for that matter. I like complete stories. My decompression trash of choice is watching YouTube with my fiancee while we eat dinner, or playing grindy retro RPGs with finite endpoints. Endless live service games simply do not fill the niche for me.

So, I quit playing Arknights. On a dime. It was easy.

Is it that easy for everyone, though?

I spent 99 cents on Arknights, for one of the time-limited “starter packs” that give tons of resources to new users. Otherwise, I didn’t give them any money. I didn’t care about rolling for new characters — I was content with the many operators I’d been given for free, including several max rarity ones. I’ve never been a completionist in RPGs; I’ve never completed any Pokedexes or fused the very best demons in a MegaTen. I was limited on how much I could grind in Arknights by “daily energy limits,” which you could pay money to circumvent. But I have a full-time job, and I was already struggling to play enough daily to use the energy they gave me for free.

Gryphline doesn’t care that I quit playing. I’m not who they’re after. They want players who will spend lots of money rolling gacha for specific characters, and I’m just not wired that way.

But through no fault of their own, some players are. And those players will often give hundreds or thousands of dollars to Arknights and games like it, sometimes more money than they can afford. The fiscal model of Arknights depends on it. I find that pretty sinister, personally.

The moral component here has been litigated elsewhere plenty, so I won’t dwell on it more than that. Speaking purely to what I viscerally enjoy, I finally have enough experience in gacha games to know, resolutely, that I don’t care for them. The clicker game is fun, I get that now, but it’s also largely identical between different games. The actual art, that air-thin slice of “real videogame” that’s unique from gacha to gacha, is a tiny fraction of the experience. That ratio isn’t acceptable to me as a player. 

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: Death of a Wish and Kirby's Return to Dream Land

Death of a Wish (2024, PC) (Itch.io, Steam, Switch)

Lucah: Born of a Dream was the first character action game I got really obsessed with. I got the true end twice, and I played all the post-release material (including the murderous gauntlet mode update). Apparently the secret to getting me into beat-em-ups was to occasionally cut the action with some really good queer text games. I was extra-jazzed for this sequel because it stars Christian, a character from the first game I wanted to spend more time with.

Death of a Wish is a strong follow-up that preserves much of what was special about the first game, but in a slightly tighter and more coherent package. I came away from it very pleased and satisfied. I'm focusing here on ways I think Death of a Wish improves the first game's language, but I still love Lucah, and I definitely recommend playing both to get the full effect of the story. (Warning for some light structural spoilers to both games below.) 

First off: the presentation of the all-important corruption meter is cleaner here. The first game paused the meter for an important climactic boss and gave you extra room to breath for unclear reasons when you first hit 100%, little choices that served to muddle the Dragon Quarter dread of the Big Scary Number On-Screen At All Times. Lucah also splits the story across two playthroughs, with the full scope of how the corruption mechanic works not being introduced until the second loop.

In Death of a Wish, the meter starts shortly after you boot up the game, and then never stops. The story is contained to one loop this time, and it generally introduces important mechanics much earlier than Lucah did. The communication across the board is tighter, more up-front. If there's a new wrinkle here, it's that it technically allows for grinding down your corruption meter on easy encounters — I recommend Not doing this. I believe it's actually slower in the long run. Just trust the game and play as well as you can.

Additional elegances: the one big interlude section is largely presented from Chris's perspective. The first game had more interludes with a much wider spread of POVs. Lucah was a huge ambitious debut commercial game that sometimes struggled with how many ideas and stories it wanted to squeeze into its run-time. Death of a Wish focuses more squarely on Chris's journey, letting the rest of the casts' stories play out around his instead of having them take center-stage. As a result, it felt more propulsive and dramatic to me to play.

I'm still not a "character action" guy, so I don't have nuanced thoughts about all the different possible builds, how the action is balanced. But I really like the decision to make parries deal "guard damage" instead of instantly breaking enemies. I played Lucah in a slow and reactive way — I'd park right next to the enemies, wait for their big attacks, then nail the parry and cream them with Thanatos. But parries aren't an insta-break in Death of a Wish, so Christian has to play more aggressively to wear them down and nail the breaks. No stamina meter this time also encourages aggressive play. Chris feels scrappier than Lucah, not in a way that makes him feel weak or unpleasant to play, but in a way that suits his character and encourages more proactive strategies.

The game hit a perfect formal climax for me after six or seven hours of play. If it had ended there, I would've been happy with Death of a Wish as the "super-tight concise action game follow-up to Lucah." But I'm glad it kept going for a few more hours after that. The twists, turns, and rule changes in the real climax perfectly suited the story they were going for, and they're what make Death of a Wish a complete follow-up to Lucah. As a story it's "tidier" than Lucah, which I could see putting off some of my artier games friends. But the tidiness felt earned and un-saccharine to me. I enjoyed the dark catharsis of queer solidarity in the face of unrelenting institutional evil, and finished it feeling warmly satisfied.

Telling a substantive, affecting story in the context of long, mechanically robust action games is one of the hardest things in the world. And they really are robust: you could play Lucah and Death of a Wish for 50+ hours apiece and still pick up on new nuances. I know because I've seen friends go on that journey, and they had a great time. Having played them mostly casually, I still had a blast. I'm very excited for whatever this crew puts out next.

Kirby's Return to Dream Land (2011, Wii)

This was my first Kumazaki-directed Kirby game, and it made an extremely positive impression. The pithy way to describe it is that it’s a long-delayed marriage of the immaculate action, speedy pace, and sophisticated movesets of Sakurai’s Kirby Super Star with the storytelling of something like Shimomura’s Kirby 64 (a plodding and miserable game to play with an unforgettable finale). That describes the broad strokes: it plays like Super Star with delightful levels and amazing crunchy boss fights, and the climax goes really hard.

What more do you need? I got obsessed with this game. I 100%’d normal and extra modes back to back, gold medal’d all the challenge rooms, and beat the true arena. I had a ball the whole time.

Let me drill down on a specific aspect of the storytelling I liked. Many studio platformers have cool storytelling moments for the final boss — Sonic Colors, Mega Man 11, and Mario 3D World all come to mind as games with memorable, exciting finales. Return to Dream Land goes a step further. It plays its obvious “cool final boss storytelling moment” card at the end of World 5 of 7. That means the actual finale has to go several degrees harder. They play the big card, and then keep going. The result is one of my favorite climaxes in a platformer I can remember, plus a memorable mid-game act break, something the earlier platformers I mentioned, for all their joys, just don’t have. This extra punch even elevates it for me over Adventure and 64’s amazing climaxes.

I have complaints. Kumazaki was apparently brought in after several false starts with the project. Parts of the game don’t fully hang together. The Mega Powers, which freeze the action for multiple seconds while a canned animation plays, are a flatly bad idea, executed as pristinely and unobtrusively as possible. The void levels are wonderful but feel like a mostly random inclusion thematically until a few nods to them late in the game. And of course, there’s absolutely no reason to lock Extra Mode behind completing the normal game. Extra Mode is not particularly hard, but it’s more demanding than the baby-easy first playthrough, and I would’ve had a more densely excellent time if I’d been able to start on it.

But those aren’t breaking issues. This was a delightful experience. Kumazaki’s Kirby feels great to play, and for the first time there’s enough weight and thought to the storytelling that Kirby feels like a real videogame hero, like Adol, or Sonic on his best days. I’m very pleased that I have four more Kumazaki Kirby games to savor and enjoy down the line.

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Some Cool New Websites!

I wrote about Lockirby2's challenge runs last year. In short, his videos have been a huge source of delight for me in the years since I started watching, and his Facets playthrough blew me away with its exquisite play and attention to detail. His latest videos have focused on commentated damageless tutorials of Mega Man Powered Up stages. Give 'em a look!

I'm writing a follow-up because of his beautiful new website. All his challenge runs are documented here. It's a joy to read his excellent playthrough commentary on clean HTML pages with embedded videos, instead of navigating a maze of YouTube playlists and description boxes. I think the Final Fantasy challenge runs will be most of interest to my social circle. I'll of course also plug his Facets commentary. But poke around the site, it's just a very cool thing. If you've gotten deeply invested in HideOfBeast or Jaimers videos before, you'll find something to enjoy here.

Small specific sites like this mean a lot to me. When I get invested in a community resource that's only on a single centralized corporate platform like YouTube, I get anxious. What if the channel gets struck down for some arcane reason. What if the platform itself suddenly dies? We've been given plenty of cause to worry about these things. Seeing Lockirby's challenge runs get a home outside corporate ecosystems makes me happy. 

Here's some funny timing — shortly after Lockirby messaged me about his new site, my friend Polly started work on a new home for her games to supplement her Itch page. She's posting a new page/commentary each day for the next few weeks, and they've all been really fun to read. Itch.io is a wonderful resource, and this isn't meant to replace it. But now she has a backup, a place for her games that belongs just to her. Just in case. As someone that adores her games, I think that's really nice.

If you're reading this, there's a good chance I personally care about work you've put online. If it vanished forever, I'd likely be sad. You don't necessarily need to make a whole site for your art. But consider exporting your YouTube videos or your Tumblr Archive. Make an extra copy of that source code that's sitting on a single eight-year-old hard drive. Give some love to that piece of yourself you shared online years ago and forgot about. A little extra care goes a long way.

Consoles Are a Bum Deal Now

In 1988, personal computers were built for word processing and spreadsheets. Relatively affordable IBM-compatible PCs were still a new thing, and the home PC market was split across many brands and architectures. There was a thriving ecosystem of games for these machines. But outside more niche options like the Commodore Amiga, the games worked against the limitations of hardware not designed for them in the first place.

So, in 1988, a Sega Mega Drive was a good deal. It had specialized hardware that allowed for smooth scrolling in action games, FM Synth music, and other nifty features. If someone wanted a gaming experience like they’d get in an arcade, a Mega Drive would get them much closer than a home PC would. If they wanted to play games on the go, they could try lugging one of these around, or they could get a Game Boy for a fiftieth the cost.

This relationship between consoles/handhelds and PCs continued while technology advanced in ways that meaningfully changed videogame experiences. A console could be specialized towards running games specifically. Comparable experiences on general purpose PCs cost much more.

But, at some point (I’d say ten-ish years ago), the technology race topped out. The aesthetic difference between The Last of Us on PS4 versus the remaster on PS5 obviously matters to some people. To me, it sounds like audiophiles arguing over the relative merits of different pairs of $300 headphones. If someone cares, that’s fine. But it’s not a titanic shift like the difference between Metal Gear 2 and Metal Gear Solid, or Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2. The modern graphics race is a niche interest that’s been unnaturally elevated into something broadly important by the corporations selling the hardware.

Comparison Image by VGC

A modern game console is just a computer. It’s exactly like any other computer. People buy it in part because they like how the hardware looks, how the controller feels in their hands. Moreso, they buy it because Nintendo paid Monolith Soft an ocean of money, and now audiences are only allowed to play Xenoblade 3 on Nintendo’s special computer. If they try to play it on a different computer, Nintendo threatens them with state violence.

This isn’t a good deal for players! Apple-style walled gardens strictly advantage corporations at the detriment of the consumer. The only sane, sensible way to buy and sell digital media is a Bandcamp/Itch-style storefront where you buy a piece of art, download it to your computer, and then keep it, copy it, do whatever you want with it forever. Anything besides that (especially streaming platforms) exists to screw artists, audiences, or both.

There are countless commercial alternatives to the walled garden. Steam is not a good one. Twenty years ago, Valve decided it forwarded their own interests for intrusive DRM for PC games to be the norm, and we all just went along with it. But there are still excellent DRM-free storefronts: the ones I purchase from regularly are GOG, Mangagamer, JAST, DLSite, and of course Itch.io. On these platforms, you can buy your games, and actually own them. Modern AAA PC games often release only on Steam and require expensive hardware. But all the games I’m playing in 2025 run fine on my five-year-old laptop, and 95% of them would run well on decade-old hardware you can get on the cheap. 

If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers by Laura Hunt and Thomas Möhring

There are more alternatives to the walled garden. Freeware games are as bountiful a world as ever. You will never run out of rad free games to play just on Itch, and that’s only a fraction of what’s out there. There’s Glorious Trainwrecks, there’s the Flashpoint Archive, there’s the IF Archive. There are ZZT's, Knytt Stories levels, ROM Hacks, DOOM WADs, and Japanese-only games on Freem. And always, people are hosting games on personal websites, just for them.

You, dear reader, can make a game and share it online too, if you want. And unlike your Mario Maker levels, you won’t lose access to them forever when the servers go down.

There’s also emulation, of course. I can’t overstate the joy of owning a little Raspberry Pi full of MAME ROMs I can pop credits into at my leisure. I can play Klonoa: Door to Phantomile on my Anbernic RG35XX+, and there’s nothing Daddy Nintendo can do about it, at least for now. (Tariffs mean acquiring little open computers like these is likely to get much harder and pricier soon for US residents — but that’s true of consoles as well.) Retro games are an endless treasure trove of wonderful experiences. I don’t have to wait for compromised remasters, to let corporations dictate the terms under which I engage with these treasures.

A Playstation 5 Pro is seven hundred dollars. The Switch 2, ostensibly the budget console option, will be four hundred and fifty dollars, assuming tariff bullshit doesn’t spike things even further. It’s looking like many or most Switch 2 releases will be essentially digital-only, without the option for true physical releases that contain the entire game on the cart. I played one game on my Switch last year (Star Ocean: First Departure R) and it sucked ass. I grew up on consoles, but now they’re at best a bum deal and at worst an outright corporate grift. I’ve largely opted out of the ecosystem, and I feel great about it.

I’m not asking you to abstain from something that brings you joy. But walled gardens train you to believe you can only find joy within their confines. In reality, they’re one of innumerable ways you can derive interest, pleasure, and delight from videogames. Buy a Switch 2 or a new Playstation if you want. But keep your heart open to what’s outside the garden. There's a whole lot of good stuff out there.

Anthology of the Killer by thecatamites

Further reading:

• Reframing Abundance by Em Reed
• Divest from the Video Games Industry! by Marina Kittaka
  

Game Reviews: Tales of Berseria and Megami Tensei

Tales of Berseria (2016)

I'm at war with myself on this one. I just slammed out several paragraphs of impassioned complaints (the god-awful fighting, the void of a soundtrack, the interminable length). But, reading it over, it doesn't feel representative of my experience with the game. I was irked constantly playing Tales of Berseria, but the fact is: they got me.

I loved the characters. The size of the script may have ballooned the game length to the point that it took my partner and I five tortured months to get through the game. But it also gave me time to fall in love with everyone. It's a tight cast, with only six playable characters and an economical stock of villains and supporting roles. Everyone gets a big moment, gets their time to shine. Ys VIII came out the same year as Berseria. That game has a more concise script (and infinitely better combat), and as a result it's a more propulsive and overall delightful play experience. But I don't feel anything about Hummel, Laxia, Ricotta. That game is purely Dana's story, whereas I love just about everyone in Berseria.

I loved Tales of Vesperia's cast too though, and while I enjoyed that game in the moment, I cooled on it as time went on. A big difference with Berseria are the stakes. Characters die constantly in Berseria, and (for the most part, sort of, it's complicated) they stay dead. The characters left behind have to process their grief and work to find a way forward from it, and it's all dramatized, all on-screen. It's a story full of loss, and they don't flinch away from that. It's still a firmly PG-13 anime RPG — I wish I could play an R-rated version that leaned into the earned edge even further. But I went into this expecting a Tales game, and for a Tales game this all surprised and satisfied me.

The other thing that worked for me: Berseria stays committed to the scenario it lays out in its impeccable prologue. After the initial episode with the lost water blastia, Vesperia's story wibble-wobbled around incomprehensibly for dozens of hours before arriving at its charming and dramatically limp conclusion. I couldn't tell you what any of the villains wanted, what incompatibility in ideals set the heroes against them. Berseria is extremely precise in comparison (as precise as an RPG this long is capable of being anyway). It's a story about revenge and tearing down a corrupt status quo. Even as the scenario ascends to the god-battling stakes you'd expect from a Tales game, it never loses track of what it's actually about. I think that's commendable.

For a variety of reasons, I don't think Berseria works as an RPG. My brain would dissolve and leak out my ears if I tried to play more than one game like this in a year. But the fighting is over quickly, and it was easy enough for me to enjoy it as a genre-confused visual novel. If you're up for that kind of experience, I think this is a real good one.

Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei (1987/1995)

Played the Super Famicom version, which is good because I’m pretty sure the Famicom original would’ve killed me.

I enjoyed this! I played through Shin Megami Tensei years ago, so this is my second exposure to classic MegaTen. Unlike SMT, Megami Tensei is a pure strain dungeon crawler — no overworld here — and pleasingly open-ended. When I first reached the Minotaur and Medusa, I wasn’t strong enough to beat them (even after finding Tabasa’s Statue for Medusa), so I just kept exploring the next area. I back-tracked to defeat them later. The only hard check that you’ve beat the Tyrants is once at the very end (at least I think it’s a hard check), so until then you’re free to approach the major obstacles however you want. This meant I never needed to grind.

Of course, “I never needed to grind” is misleading when the exploration is as bone-dry as it is here. The map designs (which are different from the Famicom version for the record, I don’t know how they compare) are massive, sprawling, and largely empty. I would’ve welcomed more Wizardry tricks honestly. Pits, damage floors, teleporters, and spinners are few and far between, at least until the last area. Outside of combat threats, exploring the maze is mostly mindless. I remember Shin Megami Tensei being denser with interesting encounters and dungeon shapes.

The saving grace is that the combat encounters stay scary the whole game. Every boss is a monumental event — I actually screamed when Lucifer finally gave up the ghost. You can never fully relax against regular enemies either. Just when my characters were getting beefy enough that party wipes were no longer a real concern, they start throwing level draining enemies at you. It’s cruel, but I appreciated that the tension never let up all the way to the end.

The maps are barren, demon fusion and character progression are dirt simple, and combat isn’t tactical enough to sustain the game’s ballooned run-time. The game is a historical artifact in a way Shin Megami Tensei definitely isn’t. But the central arc of it is still solid. The core journey of exploring the first dungeon and getting strong enough to beat the minotaur is as powerful here as it was in SMTIV. Somehow they’d nailed down all those same fundamentals in the very first game. I’d rather play a game that’s all bones and no sauce than one that’s all sauce and no bones. 

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: Lunar: Silver Star Story and Last Bible

Lunar: Silver Star Story (1996)

Games like Lunar: Silver Star Story consistently knock me on my ass with their modest precision. I adore how Funbil put it in their review: "A quiet, unassuming first act gingerly constructs an expertly-arranged cavalcade of narrative dominos which cascades forward with an unrelenting momentum all the way to the end of the game." That's exactly it — Lunar takes its time quietly putting its pieces on the board, without feeling the need to dangle keys in front of your face to keep you invested. Then it plows forward inexorably towards its insane climax. It feels ahead of its time for 1996, and even more ahead of its time for 1992.

Lunar excels in ways that are mostly invisible, and if you haven't played a lot of RPGs they might not be super-obvious. But that storytelling care is always there, carefully weaving its magic under the surface. The difference between an RPG that nails this stuff and an RPG that doesn't is night and day, and it's something mainstream games crit has always been unequipped to discuss. I don't know if Lunar will hit you quite the way it hit me — its particular cocktail of over-the-top romance and "we have to choose our own destiny!" theming was concocted in a lab to make me cry. But it builds that theming with exact care, with gorgeous presentation and long meaty dungeons and chunky boss fights, and I think that's something any RPG fan should be able to appreciate.

Some practical matters: I had a nearly ideal play experience thanks to all extra options on the iOS version. I doubled the battle speed and set the difficulty balancing to match the original JP release (versus the jacked up NA difficulty). The pacing and battle balancing felt perfect to me; I never really struggled, but I always felt like I was just scraping by the big story fights. I don't think this story calls for the merciless, grindy challenge the NA version seemed intent on providing. I played with the JP dub as well. The actual translation (which is still based on the original Working Designs script) landed fine for me. The dumb pop culture jokes were mostly constrained to incidental NPC dialogue, and the big story and character moments had all the gravitas they called for.

The upcoming remasters seem to offer all the same QOL and authenticity options as the iOS version. If those are done well, they'll likely be a definitive way to play these games that isn't constrained to Apple platforms (and includes Eternal Blue, which I'm now very excited to play).

I've been in a bit of an RPG funk the last five months or so. It's very nice to play a game that reignites my passion for my favorite game genre. Excited for whatever's next!

Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible (1992)

Pleasantly mediocre Megaten-flavored Dragon Quest riff; I can't complain because that's exactly what I signed up for booting the game up. Played the GameBoy Color version, localized as Revelations: The Demon Slayer.

Good: it has teeth for the whole game, the big fights never stop being scary and the random encounters ramp up fast enough that you never get comfortable. Bad: the dungeons are all really short! You spend maybe 10-20% of the game's runtime in capital-d Dungeons. Weirdly enough the towns are all really big and mazey, which makes it extra-taxing when you're sloooooowly walking in and out of them to stop by the inn, the bank, the stores over and over and over.

The basic Dragon Quest loop worked enough to keep me entertained for most of the runtime, but it started losing me near the end. Meaty dungeons are important for an rpg like this. Without them it all just feels too bare, especially when the overall structure is really linear. It has a decent finale at least (I like all the little optional endgame quests after you get the ark), although the actual last dungeon is as brief and spare as the rest of them.

There's a little bit of a haunting Final Fantasy Legend feeling of "a story is happening around you that you're mostly not privy too" where the half-bakedness almost adds to it. That's the main appeal of the package to me honestly. FFLegend/SaGa 1 is one of my favorite games; Last Bible is nowhere near as cursed or interesting as that game, but I still enjoyed getting a taste of that flavor again. I'm still on-board for playing the other two Last Bible games, but I definitely need something with real dungeons first.

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Kit's Cookies & Kat's Cookies

New game! It's a Puzzlescript release called Kit's Cookies. I got inspired last week and slammed it out, then spent a few days polishing it. Thanks to Narf, Zeloz, and Rhete for playtesting; I really appreciate it!

My last Puzzlescript game blew up; this one's a lot easier, so I'm not expecting it to resonate with genre enthusiasts to the same extent. I'm certain you can make complex puzzles with this ruleset, but it's harder with the free-form nature of the match-3 win condition. There's just way more room for solutions I didn't anticipate, since you can line up the cookies in multiple places on the board. I tightened it up as much as I could though, and I still think the final game is a cute challenge.

I'm only a dabbler in puzzle design, but I've gotten a lot of joy out of making my puzzlescript games. I can see the path to being a real pervert for this kind of gamedev. I'd like to get there someday, but it'd definitely require making more than a handful of puzzles every few years.

I wrote the above paragraphs the day after putting out Kit's Cookies, but I held off on posting them because something neat was happening. Vextro friend Zeigfreid loaded up the project source in Puzzlescript's web editor, made a few cool levels, and shared them in our discord. After that, sraëka, sylvie, and wasnotwhynot joined in. I had a ton of fun playing their levels, and before too long we had enough to make a whole new game!

I'm really happy with how Kat's Cookies turned out. Kit's Cookies was a gentle game. Like I said above, I struggled to come up with challenging puzzles using the ruleset, and I was ultimately content to release it as a short, easy thing. My genius friends came up with some delightful and fiendish puzzles though, and I think together the two games form a satisfying, substantive package. Go give them a whirl!

My puzzle dev brain's leveled up through this whole process. I released a little game and was only somewhat satisfied with it. Then, unprompted, friends filled in exactly the gaps in the original release I'd struggled to fill. I like making tiny, single-screen puzzlers with simple rulesets — I don't feel any urge to make the next Baba Is You or what not. But next time I make a puzzle game, I want to sit with the ruleset longer, draft and discard more puzzles, and hold off on release until I'm confident I've made the best puzzles I can.

Oh, and for the record: puzzles 1, 4, and 7 are by sraëka, 2 and 6 are by sylvie, 3 and 5 are by Zeigfreid, 9 is by wasnotwhynot, and 8 is by me! Thanks so much again to everyone who contributed; this was the most spontaneous collab I've been a part of and it made me happy.

And thanks to Bart Bonte for plugging the original release on his excellent puzzle blog! He linked Gorgons' Gaze too a few years back. I'm still a puzzle dev amateur obviously, so I'm delighted any time actual genre connoisseurs enjoy my work. I hope to continue improving!