Game Reviews: Breath of Fire and Sweetest Monster

Breath of Fire (1993)

Breath of Fire's so goddam fiddly. There's always some shit you're missing because you didn't note down all 817 locked doors you're supposed to come back to once you've unlocked one of the 39 different powerups/keys. There's so much layered-on Videogame Bullshit, all their attempts to complicate the (extremely basic) formula just get on my nerves.

It's very funny that your level doesn't matter. The whole game's about finding the right equipment and transformations (by backtracking to locked doors). I kept a full stock of repels (available cheaply in the very first town) and played like two thirds of the game with encounters turned off. I expected that to catch up with me at some point, but it never did.

It's long and slow and relentlessly obtuse; it's also lock-step linear with brainless, meaningless fighting. The big story beats whiff. I can see having a better time if you're not as annoyed by all the lock-and-key Zelda shit as I am, but this is not the kind of journey I personally want out of a console RPG.

Sweetest Monster (2017) and Sweetest Monster: Refrain (2022) (Itch.io, Steam)

Loved these stories to bits. The first game wears its meta-commentary on its sleeve — the slow-burn build-up is fun and funny and hot, then the payoff hits like a truck. The second game is more grounded and miserable, a slow-motion train-crash unpacking all the ramifications of the previous game's twisted conclusion.

The games never flinch, never soften the blow. They also don't lean so hard into the exploitation elements that they become comical and uninvolving. They're stories about a weak and cowardly man that refuses to make a real choice until it's too late. Violence comes in many forms. I think Bell is best understood as a metaphor, a devil on the shoulder for a husband and father who doesn't understand what he has until he's let it all slip away through his own pathetic inaction.

The story itself is obviously fantastical; the portrayal of sexual violence doesn't map to the real world in any way that makes sense. But men don't have be ensnared by a demon to hurt their families in devastating ways. And they can be wretchedly self-aware the whole time they're doing it.

2024-2025 Wrap-up

Episode Art by Sayara T.

It's been a while since the last proper wrap-up post! Let's do a little run-down of what I've been up to over the last few years.

• Rhete, Polly, and I restarted the Sockscast after a couple of years off. Between equipment updates and a much tighter episode run-time, I think we're making better radio than ever. The 2025 GOTY episodes are a great place to jump in!
• Launched a new website! Take a look around — I have links to my various web presences, lists of games I really like, and a whole mess of links to other cool sites. It feels good to have a home online that's mine again, instead of being wholly dependent on services like Itch or Blogger.
• Made five little games for Glorious Trainwrecks.
• Contributed to the 2024 Tunnels of Vextro and the 2025 Vextro Unplugged anthologies.
• Wrote a 45k word Twine, my largest prose work to date (published under a different label), plus a big post-release update a year later.
• Started writing games criticism again.
• Judged for the IGF twice, met some cool peers, played a bunch of very cool games. 
• Contributed to the first Unearthed Treasure Room games showcase.
• Made a little Puzzlescript and then made a collab level pack with friends.
• Made a little Videotome horror short.
• Contributed a map to the Caves of ZZT Remix collab ZZT. 

There's nothing more reinforcing for an artist than having a community of brilliant, supportive peers. My friends in the Socks, Vextro, and Domino communities (plus friends that don't fit neatly into any of those boxes) have done more for my creative drive than anything else. 

This year's starting strong with the Cookie Cutter jam. We're getting an insane number of submissions! I made a whole one-hour micro-RPG in ten days! That's a very fast turn-around for me! After the jam, I'm hoping to polish off at least one of my two extant mega-projects, then slam out some more short-form works. Look forward to it!

Cookie Cutter RM2k3 Jam and Demon's Keep

pixie forest by peb

I still can't believe this one is happening. After being lightly bullied into it by some gamedev friends, I pulled the trigger on a game jam idea I've had in my back-pocket. I made a handful of maps in RPGMaker 2003, and challenged friends to make a complete game using only the maps I made. You can read the complete jam rules here.

The response has been insane! This is the first game jam I've run on Itch, and we've already gotten seventeen entries and counting. Over fifty people have joined the jam! I've played about half the entries so far, and I'm having a blast. The gamedev channel on the Socks discord has been popping off constantly since the jam started. The vibes have been warm and supportive and exactly what I'd want from an event like this.

Descent to the Underworld by onamint

RPGMaker 2003 is on sale on Steam for $2 until the 23rd. There are still nine days left on the jam — please feel free to jump in! Make a big epic project or a tiny shitpost or anything in-between, all are welcome.

I finished my entry, Demon's Keep, in about ten days. My aim was to make a Completely Normal RPG using the template maps, then balance and present it as tightly as I could with the RPGMaker skillset I've built up over the years. I think it turned out really good — give it a play, along with everyone else's submissions! I thought I'd be an early entry (and give friends a "normal game" baseline to bounce off and twist in wild directions), but instead a bunch of folks beat me to the punch. 

I couldn't be happier or more humbled by the response. I love to see a mix of gamedev vets and complete newcomers joining the jam. There are a lot of entries that are friends' very first uploads to itch! I hope to run (or help run) more events like this in the future. I get a tremendous amount of satisfaction from helping empower folks to make art.

Distant Times and Vextro Unplugged

I participated in my fourth Vextro anthology! The 2025 theme was "Vextro Unplugged," which everyone interpreted in different ways. This was a smaller one with just four entries, but I think they're all bangers. 

My entry was Distant Times. It's a collection of flash fiction I've written with my local writing group. At the time I got this together, I had about twenty pieces. I picked eight of them I particularly liked, polished them up, then figured out how to present them as a website, ePub, and PDF. (I also went back and updated Wayward to have proper web and ePub versions.) 

Formatting fiction for web is non-trivial. It took a while to figure out how to make the web page and ePubs look nice to me. There's a lot of overlap thankfully — behind the curtain, ePubs are just zipped up HTML/CSS files with some extra metadata. I generated the PDF with Pandoc. In the future, I'd like to build a pipeline with Pandoc that easily generates a web page, ePub, and PDF from a markdown file. I plan to release more prose fiction online in the future, so I want to make it as straightforward to maintain as possible.

I really like the eight pieces I picked. Many of them have the violent immediacy that I think characterizes a lot of my storytelling. A few go for something different though, in ways I think strengthen the overall collection. My favorite piece is probably A Wake (which I based the thumbnail image off of), but reader reactions have been pleasantly varied in terms of favorites. The total word count of all eight stories is a little under 10,000 words — give 'em a read if you're interested!

War in the Gut Biome by Sunday

Some quick rundowns of the other entries (plagiarizing my own itch comments since it's been a few weeks):

• it's easy and it gets easier by nilson. nilson is a champion at creating warm wet human texture in whatever medium he works in. This one is a short 3d walk-around game; like all his works it pulled me in and didn't let go, I felt something welling in my chest the whole time I played.
• War in the Gut Biome by vitasunday. PDF zine mixing RPGMaker assets and tropes with local LA food culture. Pure joy from start to finish, had a big grin on my face the whole time I read it.
• SIMROT by wasnotwhynot. Wuzzy writes stories that sit in my spine and spiral inward, tightening and tightening the more I read. This one shares some elements in common with Whole Numbers, another recent fave from their output. This one is meaty at 12k words, and I really enjoyed the journey it took me on.

I love my cool brilliant friends and I love participating in these jams. I can't wait to see what everyone makes next!

Sketch Gamedev and Glorious Trainwrecks

Since late 2024, I've shared five little games on Glorious Trainwrecks, a site I've adored for a long time. The intent was to embrace "sketch gamedev," to slam out tiny games in a few hours a-piece. I've enjoyed many games made in this mode by others. I thought posting on the site, which is all about this spirit of playful experimentation, would help me enter it myself. (Glorious Trainwrecks is also a creative crucible that helped forge many of my all-time favorite freeware devs. In my arrogance, I thought contributing to the site would help my own light shine similarly bright.)

I failed miserably at my goal. I did successfully slam out a couple games in a day or two each. Then the third one took a week. Then the fourth and fifth ones took multiple weeks spread out over several months each. Ah well. 

The first game was Broccoli, a tiny RPGMaker 2003 "horror" game. I made it the same way I've continued approaching flash fiction for our local writer's club. I generated ten random words on this site, picked two ("broccoli" and "horror"), then made a game. I got the bulk of it down in 2-3 hours, then polished it up and posted it the next day. I consider this a Success in terms of "embracing sketch dev," and if I'd continued with this approach I'd be writing a different blog post.

A little before Christmas last year, I released Action Sketches on itch. It collects the remaining four games I released on Glorious Trainwrecks, all action games made in Love2d. (My favorite is probably Danse Macabre, made in about a week, but I like all of them.) 

If I really wanted to make sketch games, I needed to use easy tools I'm comfy with like RPGMaker, Bitsy, or Twine. I'm still very much a newbie when it comes to coding games from scratch, and making even simple games in Love takes me a long time. I did learn a lot about how I like organizing and building games on the back-end, and I feel much better equipped to tackle other projects in the future. So, still a win ultimately, even if I didn't turn out a whole feast of games like I wanted.

There's one more "problem" that got in the way of me making sketch games. Every single one of these I put out, friends immediately jumped in, live-posted them, and said nice things to me. I have an intensely supportive peer group of artist friends; I want to reward their care and attention with competent, enriching art. That's an extra bit of self-imposed (and obviously optional!) pressure that makes it harder to just throw something together, to not worry endlessly about whether it "works" or not.

I want to keep experimenting with quicker modes of creation (in addition to longer form works, of course). I might try approaching it like I have my flash fiction, mostly keeping it to myself and a few close peers, then releasing a collection of works I particularly like all at once. Or maybe I'll get over myself and post a bunch of art on Glorious Trainwrecks (or elsewhere) again. My friend sraëka has been doing that on itch for the last few months and they're having a lovely time.

It was a good experiment. I've been at this in earnest for thirteen years; I think I'm finally figuring out what I want my art practice to look like, one teeny tiny step at a time.

Game Reviews: Etrian Odyssey and Chrono Trigger

Etrian Odyssey (2007) 

I loved this! Pure joy from start to finish, just a precisely tuned machine for generating happy brain chemicals. Loved the art, the music, the crunchy sound design, the battle tactics, the varied and distinct map layouts, the minimal restrained storytelling. I especially loved the FOEs; those are Etrian Odyssey's "big idea" and they explore them beautifully.

One interesting wrinkle: stratum four felt to me like "the real climax" of the game. It has the most demanding map layouts and the hardest scariest finale (which incorporates the FOEs in a wonderful way). The fifth stratum is more of an extended wind-down. Your party has already proven their resolve to discover the labyrinth's mysteries. All that's left is to see it through to the end.

I finished the game happy and satisfied. I'm glad I played the original DS version, since the FM Synth, crunchy bosses, and overall spareness of the game were big parts of its appeal for me. I'm okay putting it down for now without playing the post-game dungeon. I'd rather finish the game feeling pristinely warm and content than play it for 10+ more hours and then potentially quit in frustration at the superbosses.

I've wanted to open my heart to epic 40+ hour dungeon crawlers for a long time. Etrian Odyssey got me there. This was a perfect comfort food game; I'm happy I've found a new source of joy I can turn to next time I'm feeling beaten down by life stressors.

Chrono Trigger (1995) 

Chrono Trigger was the first RPG I played to the end as a kid. I imprinted very hard on it and replayed it probably a dozen times. This was my first playthrough in a decade though, so I'm up for sharing some fresh thoughts.

The obvious triumph of Chrono Trigger is its editing. I can't think of a more cut-to-the-bone RPG story of this scope. There are shorter and faster games, but they get there by building smaller stories with more intimate stakes (e.g. Undertale). Chrono Trigger has the same grandness as Final Fantasy VI and VII, with two momentous status quo-upending act breaks before the finale, with maybe two thirds the run time. Coming off 50+ hour modern Tales or Xenoblade games, Chrono Trigger feels even more revelatory.

Nearly everything forwards the story, the slow unfurling mystery of how exactly the world ended. The "find and repair the legendary sword and defeat the evil wizard" arc of the game seems like standard RPG fare, but even that quietly sows the seeds for major reveals later on. Dungeons last exactly as long as they need to to serve the pacing requirements of the story and not a second longer. Major locations like Tyrano Lair or the Undersea Palace felt endlessly expansive to me as a kid, but now I'm struck by how compact they are. There's very little you could cut from the game without immediately weakening the overall skeleton of the story.

What elevates it for me though are when it slows down for just a moment, just long enough to make a beat stick. Slowly dragging Robo across the world map after he gets trashed at the factory. Wandering Melchior's workshop for a minute or two as he and a teammate refine and repair the sword. Getting wasted at a playable dance party with Ayla and your friends. A conversation around a campfire. A classic like Phantasy Star IV matches Chrono Trigger's breathless pacing, but it's these arty flourishes that make Square's successes resonate even more warmly with me. 

 

 

I don't need to replay Chrono Trigger often. Even after ten years away I was struck by how much the game plays itself once you know its tricks. I frequently avoided enemies and finished the game in 16ish hours, and I still dismantled all the endgame bosses. I think it's fine to streamline systems and sacrifice hardcore RPG credentials at the altar of pacing, as long as you meet the challenge of making the story engaging enough to make up for it.

Chrono Trigger isn't a miracle. It's not a lost Eden we can never return to, despite the repeated missteps of its would-be successors. In the 80s and 90s, a handful of creatives made console RPG after console RPG for a decade and slowly honed their craft. They had the resources to work consistently in a single medium to tell stories, but not so many resources that they could afford to collapse under the weight of their ambitions. Chrono Trigger is one gem among many from that period.

I'm gonna speak directly to RPG devs for a moment here: don't set out to make "a Chrono Trigger successor." That's a recipe for failure. Make story-forward games that don't waste the player's time. Make them quickly, make a lot of them, make them for a long time. If you do that, your own gems will emerge naturally.

Game Reviews: Pokémon Odyssey and Pokémon Sun

Pokémon Odyssey (2025)

I haven't played a mainline Pokémon game to the end in over ten years. My last ones were X/Y and OR/AS which left me feeling very cold. I've also never played a Pokémon ROM hack or fangame before. I think it speaks to Pokémon Odyssey's considered construction that I both finished it and had a good time throughout despite not being in its target audience even a little bit.

To my eyes, there are two big mechanical changes in Pokémon Odyssey versus the GBA games it's based on. 1) QOL additions make it much easier to raise the team you want. Big changes are reusable TMs, easy EV (stat variance) editing, buffs for weaker Pokémon, UI that tells you outright if a move will be super effective or resisted versus the enemy, and free level-capped rare candies to help new Pokémon catch up. 2) The trainer fights and especially the bosses are much more crunchy and technical. All trainer fights are double battles and almost no one has monotype teams. It's up to you to build a quality squad that can handle a variety of threats, and the QOL additions make that process much less tedious.

My arc with the game is that it kicked my ass early on (again I've never played competitive Pokémon or any other ROM hacks). Around the third stratum, I nearly gave up because it felt like every single fight was a grueling ordeal. Then I retreated back to the overworld, explored, and did side quests for a few hours. I found the EV editor and some good TMs, and leveled up my mons. I put more thought into my type coverage and team construction. Then I went back into the third stratum and crushed it. The process was very very satisfying.

I got cocky and switched to hard mode briefly after the fourth stratum. I barely scraped by one minor boss, then tried the next boss maybe fifteen times before switching back to normal. I didn't have much trouble with the rest of the game, but I wasn't bored either. I think the balancing here is smart: normal mode requires you to make use of the tools you have access to and build a quality team, while hard mode requires you to build many quality teams so you can tailor your party to individual threats. I wasn't up for that level of engagement, but I think it's cool that the option's there for folks.

Despite the Etrian Odyssey aesthetic trappings, I don't think Pokémon Odyssey functions as a dungeon crawler. The economy collapses early and healing becomes essentially free. The maps themselves are gorgeous, winding, and a joy to explore, but they're functionally extended Routes from the mainline games, more trainer gauntlets than real RPG dungeons. I did start to feel the slog later on, and took a week-long break after the fifth stratum. The overworld and towns are very pretty and a good inclusion, but they ultimately make up a small portion of the actual game (which is wise, this is an Etrian riff after all).

The story stays in the background for the first third or so of the game. The writing is cute and goofy and made me laugh out loud several times. Once the real conflict is introduced though, the cutscenes grow longer and longer, and I don't think the writing chops are there to justify the sheer word count. The story expects you to keep track of too many characters and villains, and the main story resolution didn't hit for me (which is the big reason I didn't continue on into the post-game). There's an endearing webcomic charm to the story still, which helped carry me through the game. It's also excellent at deploying boss fights in unexpected dramatic ways — the game set me up to expect "eight stratums with eight captains at the end of each," and I was delighted by how much they shook up that basic shape.

I haven't played many ROM hacks or fan-games, I don't respect mainline Pokémon as an institution, and I'm disconnected from "fandom culture." I have criticisms obviously, but Pokémon Odyssey was a very positive first impression of a creative scene I'm largely unfamiliar with and was predisposed to dislike. I'd be happy to see this crew make more (ideally smaller) RPG-shaped stories. They're plainly capable of good, weighty RPG design, and with more stories under their belt I think their writing will catch up to their design chops quickly.

Pokémon Sun (2016)

Something immediately striking about Pokémon Sun is how soft, pleasant, and safe the world feels. This applies to the aesthetics of course, the tropical vacation theming and the lovely soundtrack. But it applies to the story too. The main quest of the game is a Fun Obstacle Course explicitly set out by adults to help you and your Pokémon grow. The villain squad is a goofy non-threat. Nearly everyone you meet is personally rooting for you to succeed, to have a fun adventure, to find yourself.

That feeling of safety applies to the play language, naturally. This is a rigidly on-rails RPG. You have a diegetic mini-map constantly telling you where to go. Non-essential paths are blocked off until later; you can never stray too far from the critical path. Actual dungeons are nearly non-existent. The Pokémon games I played as a kid on GameBoy were gentle and accommodating, but this is on a different level.

None of this felt grating to me, somehow. There’s a charm to playing a game for nine-year-olds that’s in large part about the relationship between adults and children. Because Pokémon Sun is itself an artificial obstacle course constructed by adults for the joy and edification of the children playing it (and their parents’ money). That interplay between the game's form and theming is interesting to me.

The story gets its teeth from a pair of scared and mistrustful children. I love both characters with my whole heart. They aren’t used to trusting adults – the main adult in their life growing up was a narcissist who saw the Pokémon, adults, and children in their life as toys to play with, resources to exploit. The real heart of the game is watching these two grow from the support of their friends and the grown-ups that actually have their best interests at hear.

The main conflict of the game is between you and the asshole adults, introduced later in the story. The contrast between the friendly adults and the assholes is stark. It makes the villains feel scarier than they do in other Pokémon games. But thanks to the support you got throughout the game, you’re ultimately strong enough to take them on, much to the assholes’ surprise. Then you get to go home and meet the good adults head-on, now as equals. There's a strong catharsis to both the main story's resolution and the epilogue on Mount Lanakila.

The energy I feel from this game is that people who helped make it wanted children to play it and feel empowered. That they can affect change in the world, help the people they care about, and stand up to people who hurt them. To make friends and care about them, to not look at other people as tools or objects.

That’s what adults should want for children. The most wonderful thing in the world is a kid figuring out the person they want to be. The best, most righteous thing adults in that kid’s life can do is support that journey. In grand ways by friends, family, teachers and the like, and in tiny incidental ways by near-strangers, or even game developers miles or half a world away.

I want to be clear: most of the game is just going through the rote motions of Playing Pokémon. You fight five hundred trainers in a line and level up a team until you can take on the boss gauntlet at the end. My whole read here is rooted in pretty flimsy characterization that demands a lot of filling in the blanks. The main villain would’ve really benefited from a few more scenes before their big turn, and I would've liked a few more scenes between Lillie and Gladion near the end.

But I think the bones are there. The story struck a real nerve and earned the tears it wrung out of me. I don’t think this is an essential modern RPG, not when the play language is this relentlessly basic. But it’s a warm nice thing, and I’m glad I played it.

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)