Orion's blug.

Public blog of ElvenChevalier, aka EC Orion. I post my thoughts about games and anime and movies and whatever I consume. This is my attempt to work writing into my life more often.

[elvenchevalier]

henlo

I am Orion. Aspiring writer/editor who doesn't write often enough. So this blog is my attempt to work writing into my life more often and develop a healthier writing habit.

Here I'll be posting my thoughts about games and anime and movies, whatever I happen to consume over the course of the year. And next year, probably. Every year, really.

よろしくおねがいします。

[elvenchevalier]

Blasphemous 2

It's getting heretical in here.

Blasphemous 2 is the long-awaited sequel to Blasphemous 1, giving us a new Penitent One to watch stumble through their penance. Blasphemous 2 starts off immediately differentiating it from 1 by giving you a selection of weapons to start with; a giant ball on a chain, a rapier-dagger combo, and a sword. Each of these weapons interacts with a different object; the ball and chain (Veredicto) can hit blue bells, which send out ripples that cause platforms to appear or certain doors to open; the rapier-dagger combo (Sarmiento and Centella) can strike mirrors that teleport you a short distance forward, bypassing walls or pits; and the sword (Ruego al Alba) can dive-bomb the ground, releasing shockwaves that destroy certain barriers. Each of these objects are present in the early-game, sending you into different directions when starting a new run based on which weapon you choose to start with, keeping the early-game fresh for at least two additional runs.

In combat, the weapons have their own pros and cons as well; Sarmiento and Centella are fast, with Lightning-based buffs that, so long as you can avoid getting hit and losing it, vastly improve their DPS. You can also aim the weapon up or down when in the air, allowing for a little bit of extra utility. However, the weapon is abysmal against enemies that are small, as you can’t aim at the ground while standing, its short range makes it difficult to fight aerial enemies, and the lightning buffs the weapon can acquire through repeated hits are lost when you take damage. As a result, Sarmiento and Centella are high-risk, high-reward, and hugely satisfying if you can keep the damage going.

Ruego al Alba is a one-handed saber and is similar to the Mea Culpa from the first game. As such it’s fairly well-balanced in terms of power and speed. It can be similarly buffed with Mystic-type damage. Ruego’s buff isn’t lost upon getting hit, but it does pass over time. With wider swings, Ruego al Alba is better for smaller enemies than S&C, and its slightly greater range makes it better for aerial enemies as well. Both Ruego al Alba and S&C can block and counter, giving them a defensive option that Veredicto doesn’t have.

Veredicto is slow, but its swings are incredibly wide and it has more than double the range of Ruego al Alba, making it ideal for dealing with crowds and aerial enemies, as well as fighting from far enough away that any enemy using it would have me calling bullshit. Veredicto has an active Fire-damage buff that consumes Fervor and can be toggled on and off at will. It is, in my opinion, by far the best of the three weapons, as its slow speed isn’t enough to counterbalance the raw damage it can deal or the distance from which you can deal it. Once you acquire it, whether you start with it or not, it quickly becomes your primary damage dealer. The only time you might swap to another weapon is during boss fights, but even then, Veredicto’s wide swings allow you to attack from basically anywhere you feel safe. The only real downside is that you can’t dodge while making your swing, meaning it is possible to botch your timing and get hit by an attack that otherwise wouldn’t have hit you if you were using Ruego al Alba or S&C.

Basically what I’m saying is, just start with Veredicto. (Although I started with S&C.)

Blasphemous 2 has two expansion DLCs, each adding a new region and weapon of their own; DLC1 adds the Mea Culpa, and DLC2 adds a whip-like weapon called Embrujo, and these weapons interact with new objects that appear only in their new locations. The Mea Culpa can be made to interact with all three of the objects that the starting weapons interact with, but by default it basically replaces Ruego al Alba. Embrujo takes the place of Veredicto and can also interact with the bells.

On top of all this weapon stuff, you have access to a suite of spells called Prayers, which take the form of quick-cast Verses and longer-casting but more impactful Chants. They cost Fervor to cast and can cover for basically any weaknesses of your preferred weapon.

One weakness Metroidvanias are at risk of is late-game exploration being tedious and boring. Blasphemous 2 avoids this, making extremely good use of the different abilities you can acquire to encourage exploration with every new movement tool you acquire by putting things basically everywhere. Even the very starting areas have places you can only reach in endgame when you’ve acquired specific movement options. There is always something new to find, and every new movement ability you get means another sweep of the entire game’s map.

Supplementing these sweeps is an increasing ability to fast travel; at first, you can only use special mirror rooms to fast travel to other special mirror rooms, but eventually you can fast travel between Prie Dieus (effectively bonfires a la dark souls), and there are a great many more Prie Dieus than mirror rooms, making the former effectively obsolete. You can also earn a Chant that allows you to teleport back to the main hub’s Prie Dieu from anywhere, meaning you don’t even have to hunt down a Prie Dieu when you need to fast travel; you can just use the go-home chant to get to one quickly. You aren’t ever able to fast travel from a mirror room to a prie dieu or vice versa, however.

The boss design is peak, and I’ve been taking notes on how they function for my own Metroidvania project. No boss feels unfair or cheap; every attack is avoidable, even if they come out fast and punish bad positioning or timing, and they are all very cool fights to boot. Getting better at the tougher ones after each attempt feels amazing, and it’s equally amazing when you lock in and manage to one-shot a boss. This is only helped by the super tight and responsive controls; at no point ever do you feel like you didn’t go *exactly* where you intended to go, and so platforming challenges as well as bosses that demand a lot of movement from you feel incredible.

The music is, as usual, very good. The voiceover as well; there’s this sense of dread and melancholy coming from nearly every person you interact with, as their lives are affected irrevocably by the Miracle.

And speaking of the people you interact with...well, at this point, it’s time for the spoiler cut, so reader beware!

The world is dark and unforgiving, every single nook and cranny marked by the Miracle. Every NPC feels mysterious, with an unknowable past and various inflictions put upon them by the Miracle for their sins. One man’s punishment is to be made into a pot of honey; another spends the game being literally PEELED ALIVE, though she seems remarkably non-distressed about the whole thing. You can find a man stuck in a guillotine, and he doesn’t even remember why he’s there! It feels as though our Penitent One is not special; almost the entire world of Cvstodia is undergoing some form of penance. The unknowable Miracle is a cruel judge.

The final boss was something of a letdown, as far as difficulty goes; the boss immediately before him was significantly harder. I was fully expecting a beefy phase 2 from the boss, but it just didn’t happen. And then the boss of the second DLC was also a letdown; particularly easy, though it took a couple of tries nonetheless. Brother Astarion, an NPC who follows you around from the first DLC, was much harder himself, in both encounters—as the final boss of DLC1, Astarion was a much greater challenge.

All in all, Blasphemous 2 was a phenomenal title and a great Metroidvania, worthy of a spot on my top 10. There was a post-credits scene showing Astarion’s sword, which contained a person, and it cracked, suggesting they’re planning a third DLC expansion or it’s a hook for Blasphemous 3. Either way, I’m absolutely ready for it.

じゃ！

[elvenchevalier]

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

To put an end to an eternal curse.

This’ll be another short review. I was streaming this game and took few notes (which is to say zero), and my longer reviews benefited strongly from my taking of notes during my playthroughs, which is a bit more difficult to do when I stream a game. (The same was true of Death’s Door. In the future I’ll try to take notes while I stream, but I make no promises as I’m focused on commentary during streaming.)

Castlevania was never too strong on my radar, to be honest. I’ve been a huge fan of Metroidvanias in general for a long time, and Metroid itself was always a favorite series, but Castlevania always managed to be a blind spot for me.

This changed relatively recently when I played Symphony of the Night, which was sold to me as “the -vania half of Metroidvania”; an accurate descriptor if ever I’d heard one, as SotN very much played like any Metroidvania I could name. And I loved it a lot!

Fast forward...honestly, like, a year. I hadn’t played another Castlevania since, until I decided to stream Order of Ecclesia.

So unfortunately, I don’t have a lot to say to compare it to any other Castlevania title except for SotN, and on that I can only say that I was very much not misled—I had been told that Ecclesia was exactly as hard as Symphony of the Night was easy, and Ecclesia kinda kicked me around like a deflated soccer ball for a while!

Order of Ecclesia stars a woman named Shanoa, who lost her memory and her emotions as part of a ritual involving a powerful spell that can be used to destroy Dracula once and for all. After some tutorial nonsense, you’re tasked with hunting down a man who turned his back on Ecclesia and stole the spell, and onward to victory you ride. As you progress, you find various villagers in the dungeons that you rescue and bring back to Wygol Village, your central hub, where they can then sell you items or send you on fetch quests to grant you new equipment or expand the shop.

The game is not quite a Metroidvania—you have Wygol Village and various levels you can go to that sort of act like Metroidvania levels in themselves, but the game isn’t a true Metroidvania. That doesn’t detract from it, however, as it works for Ecclesia.

My favorite part about Ecclesia has to be the various types of attacks you can use, and the Union system allowing you to combine attacks, though I found that union attacks were less useful than they sounded, for the most part. Some of them had a niche—that crab boss in the tower really didn’t like the dual bow union, I’ll tell you that much—but by and large I found it more useful to just spam the regular attacks. You get all the various weapons you’d expect to see in most fantasy games, but especially Castlevania; you got your swords, your lances, your axes you throw at an arc allowing for great utility, and then you got magic, where you have various elements but really you just have Ignis because if you aren’t spamming fireballs then you are fundamentally misusing magic. Ignis is just that good okay

That isn’t to say spamming fireballs is gonna get you through the game, though. Some enemies just don’t give a crap and will kick your ass despite your affinity for channeling Fire Man’s raw charismatic aura. The game is hard!

Castlevania never fails in the music front. 10/10, no notes, would rock out again. It consistently matches the aesthetic and never feels out of place.

I think that’s about it for the open segment.

Spoilers to follow.

The game has a couple of difficulty spikes, but none so egregious as the one the final boss bestows upon you. Dracula himself hits you like a truck, and many of his attacks are nearly unavoidable at first.

At first. Once you learn the tricks, he can’t touch you. And Ignis remains your best friend.

...That’s it. I don’t have much else to say and I’m tired of reopening this doc every other night to add nothing. We pick back up with reviews on games I’ve taken proper notes on next time!

またね

[elvenchevalier]

Death's Door

What would you do if death never came?

This one’s been a bit of time coming, as my friend had been asking me to play it for a while. Recently, as part of a sort of gift exchange, he bought it for me and instructed me to play it on stream, and far be it from me to deny the Benefactor his whim.

Death’s Door is an isometric action-adventure game similar in scope to something like Tunic. It stars a crow that works as a Reaper—a bringer of death to a world where nothing dies. On a standard job to retrieve and deliver a soul of particular note, you are ambushed and your prize stolen. You track down the culprit and find that he is a much older crow, and he needed your Giant Soul to open a door he calls “Death’s Door”. One wasn’t enough, however, and he reckons three more will be required to open it. He sends you away with instructions to find those three Giant Souls, and the game begins in earnest.

Your three targets are souls that have long since overstayed their time in this world, ancient beings that have lived for many years beyond their time. An old witch, a frog king, and a yeti, each desperate to sustain their lives in spite of you. But their souls, ancient as they are, have begun to rot, and their deaths are as much a mercy to them as they are necessary for your quest.

Now, one thing I like about the game is how tight the controls are. When you really get in the zone and find a strategy that suits you, it can feel like you’re just flying along. Every time I made a mistake it was genuinely my own, no jank to blame whatsoever. Even when I was aiming magic, which due to the way it works FEELS like it should be next to impossible, was quick and easy, as the game would correct your actual aim up to a point. Combat is fluid and responsive and feels damn good. Hookshot spell supremacy. 10/10.

The game is mostly fairly easy, but it does have its difficulty spikes. There are specific enemies that you find to upgrade your magic, and one of them is significantly harder than the rest despite being the first one you fight. Let’s just say I came out of that fight with a healthy fear and unhealthy hatred of fire.

Now for a characteristically short paragraph on music: It was good. Some of it had me wondering if it was truly dungeon music, but ambiance is king at times. Boss music was fittingly tense, with the intro accompanied by the screen-filling text displaying the boss names (which was kind of cool in itself). A lot of it really helped the game to feel like you were there to kill.

For all the theming around death and mortality and the lack thereof, Death’s Door has its humor. It takes itself seriously when it needs to and lets itself be funny when it can. One of your coworkers is obsessed with typing—she’s always down to fill out forms or copy, whatever lets her clack her feathers against her typewriter. Your other coworker is a cynical bastard of a crow who’s ready to throw wings if you make his job any harder (which, honestly, is valid). Eventually you meet a definitely human vertebrate chef with multi-digited mammal hands and just trust me this game is funny.

Exploration is rewarded; there are always little nooks and crannies with goodies to find, and if you want the true ending you better get to findin’, because it requires you to find all of them. Thankfully, the game shows some mercy in this regard; once you’ve beaten the final boss and are given control again, the various doors in the main hub glow when collectibles are still to be found in the areas to which they lead. However, these areas are still fairly large, so you might still be searching for quite a while.

And on the subject of the true ending...

Here’s the spoiler cut, baby.

The Lord of Doors, the game’s primary antagonist, feared his own death. He knew the day he would die from the moment of his creation, and in fear of that day he sealed Death behind a door—no points for guessing which one—which resulted in the world stagnating, as without Death nothing can die naturally anymore, because he himself did not want to die. And I can’t blame him. If I, too, knew the day that I would die, it would consume me.

Death’s Door is, to the surprise of a great many, a game about death. About the fear of death, and the importance of it as well.

A lot can be said about it, but nothing that hasn’t already been said for thousands of years. Death is scary. No one knows what’s on the other side; if we come back in a new body, or we find a new place, or if we just fall asleep and never wake up. It’s the one universal truth, the singular thing every person on the planet has in common. And yet, Death’s Door tells us that it’s okay. Death is inevitable, and it’s okay to be afraid, but we all must face it eventually. Life is precious, but it only has that value because it is impermanent. Just as we know the warmth of the sun because we also know the chill of its absence, so too do we appreciate life because someday it will end. Death’s Door tells us that that’s right.

The greatest irony there ever was is that Death itself is the only thing that is undying, and that’s how it should be.

I highly, highly recommend this game to anyone, ever. Please play Death’s Door.

また。

[elvenchevalier]

I wanna go back and revisit the Air review. I didn't do it justice, nowhere near enough for how foundational for me it was, as an anime fan. I just...summarized the bloody plot. It deserves better.

[elvenchevalier]

Yohane the Parhelion – BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE

Okay I beat this game like a few weeks ago and then I just never wrote the writeup I got lazy let’s go

So we all know I’m a huge Metroidvania fan. Well, I suppose “we” is a strong word considering this is only the second Metroidvania I’ve written up on this blog, but nonetheless, I love Metroidvanias. They’re my favorite subgenre. I’ve played every Metroid game and...well, not every Castlevania yet, but it’s a work in progress. Eventually.

My experience with Metroidvanias outside of the namesakes includes such greats as Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, Ender Lilies, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and the Ori games, non-exhaustive. I think I’ve played enough to know what makes a good one tick, and Yohane the Parhelion...kinda strikes a middle/middle-high chord.

Oh, and it’s based on a school idol anime called Love Live! Sunshine!!.

It stars one Yohane, a second-year chuuni girl who fancies herself a mystical fortune teller, but like, for real, as it’s part of a whole multimedia spinoff starring Yohane (real name Yoshiko). A dungeon has appeared below her hometown, and she’s taken to exploring it. As she travels deeper into the dungeon, she finds each of the other eight girls, giving her new methods for exploration, and each with their own fun quirks. It kind of made me want to watch the anime again.

As far as the game goes, it’s nothing special. It’s a fairly simple Metroidvania without a whole lot to comment on. The level design is good, but not stellar. I rarely got lost, which as far as my directionless ass is concerned is a huge plus; each room is distinct enough that I could maintain a mental map of each section without too much issue, and each area is visually striking in its own way.

The combat is...what’s the best way to put this. It’s easy. Blaze in the Deepblue is one of the easiest Metroidvanias I’ve ever played. Now, that isn’t to say I breezed through with my eyes closed or anything; a few bosses and regular enemies still managed to throw me for a loop, but by and large, the game is not hard.

You start with one single attack—summoning a loyal wolf ally called Lailaps to strike with her claws—and each time you find a character, you get something new. Not all of them are useful for battle (being designed more for exploration), but by the end, you have a fair amount of utility to work with.

Yohane will call the name of the character that you swap to, which is very cute. For Hanamaru, Yohane will sometimes call “Zuramaru”, referencing Hanamaru’s verbal tic. Again, very cute.

Summoning a character costs Darkness Points, or DP, except for Lailaps who is free. Yohane can increase her DP through equipment that she can craft using materials dropped by enemies or found in breakable objects. She doesn’t level up in the traditional sense; you get better equipment to increase your HP and DP, as well as gain special effects.

Aside from defensive and stat-boosting gear, Yohane can also craft special weapons that have different utility (Axes for raw damage, crossbows and throwing daggers for range, etc). These also cost DP to use, and you’ll run through your DP meter a lot faster using the special weapons than your ally attacks. I’m a sucker for utility, though, so I tended to swap weapons to suit the situation—until near the end when I was simply using a big axe for the damage.

The music is great. It’s based on an idol anime, so subpar music would have been...sinful. It’s no Snow Halation, but there isn’t a single track that disappointed me.

I never have too much to say about music. That’s fine.

As for the story… Blaze in the Deepblue drops the ball pretty hard. Instead of sprinkling in lore as the game goes on, it dumps basically the entire thing right at the end when you encounter and defeat the final boss. Right up until then, the entire game is “Wow, this dungeon is weird, why did it eat all of my friends?” I would not go into Blaze in the Deepblue expecting or even just hoping for a compelling story.

This game is for Love Live fans, and as far as that's concerned the game is fine. The game is fully voiced, the portraits are very cute, and the character interactions basically carry the whole thing.

I don’t really have much else to say about it. If you’re looking for a good story or a difficult challenge, Blaze in the Deepblue isn’t for you. But if you like Metroidvanias, or even if you have never played one and want to dip your toes in, and you like Love Live...give it a play. It’s still fun, even if it’s easy.

みんあ好き！

[elvenchevalier]

AIR

Dreams and the 1000th Summer

I was still fairly new to anime, barely out of high school, when I discovered AIR. I’d picked it up on a whim at some DVD store. This was in my real anime heyday, when it was basically all I cared about, so I threw myself into this cool new show.

It quickly became one of my favorite anime for years to come.

AIR tells the story of one Kunisaki Yukito, a travelling puppeteer who comes into town with nothing but the shirt on his back and a small puppet he controls through his will—a technique he calls Houjutsu. He journeys in search of a girl with wings in the sky, a story his mother told him when he was young. A girl who has been up there for a very long time, crying, suffering. Yukito isn’t actually sure the girl is real, but chose to search for her anyway, to honor his deceased mother’s request to save her.

He makes this sleepy seaside town a stop, resolving to earn enough money to take the bus to his next destination. He falls asleep on the seawall, having failed to make any money at all. When he wakes up, he’s met with a girl—an eccentric, airheaded girl named Kamio Misuzu.

Misuzu had been waiting next to him for him to wake up. She pokes and prods him, but he doesn’t budge. Two small children on the beach take notice and wave to Misuzu. Eventually Yukito wakes, and to his annoyance, she has decided to make him her friend and refuses to leave him alone, and eventually wins him over by offering him a meal and a place to stay.

Yukito quickly discovers that Misuzu’s relationship with her mother Haruko is distant and strained. Over time, their relationship deepens, and he meets two other girls—the peppy Kirishima Kano, a blue-haired girl with a yellow bandana on her wrist, and the quiet Tohno Minagi and her best friend Michiru, plagued by troubles of their own.

Plot summaries will wait until after the cut. For now, the basics!

Music

There are certain types of tracks that strike you in a way you weren’t expecting. Much of AIR’s music fits that bill. The vocal tracks were performed by Lia, who did such good work that I truly don’t believe those songs could be sung by anybody else.

Overall, the music was on point. Each track executed masterfully, placed exactly where they need to be, and they always managed to fit the context. I’ve read some VNs where they weren’t quite so good with this, but it probably also helps that every track is really good at triggering the exact emotion it’s going for. When the music get somber, get your tissuebox in reach.

Art

Well… Older Key’s art was… Iconic, I think, is the word I’m going to use here. Hinoue Itaru’s style has definitely evolved over the years—her portraits in the ONE remake are evidence enough of that—but I can safely say that Air’s portraits and CGs run the gamut from pretty good to hilariously wonky. It’s Hinoue’s style that spawned the memes of anime girls having their eyes seventeen and a half million miles apart.

That isn’t to say I dislike them! The CGs that matter most are generally free of distractingly bad proportions, and they don’t take away from the impact of the scenes they’re part of. Trust me, that tissuebox will come in handy.

Story

Without delving into spoilers, I loved AIR’s story. The overall plot centers around Yukito and Misuzu and the circumstances that drew them together, while Kano and Minagi’s routes offer extra context to supplement Misuzu’s story. To that end, I STRONGLY recommend this read order: Minagi → Kano → Misuzu.

Obviously since it’s a VN you can read them in any order, but I truly feel that Misuzu’s should be done last, and Minagi’s first. I’ll go more in-depth as to why this order makes the most sense to me under the spoiler cut.

AIR divides its story into three distinct arcs; Dream, Summer, and Air. The Dream arc consists of the three girls’ routes; clearing all three unlocks the Summer arc, which tells an ancient tale, and Air, which leads into the story’s true ending.

I think I’ve run out of non-spoilery things to talk about. SO UNDER THE CUT WE GO. Also half of what's left is a plot summary lol

I FORGOT TO ACTUALLY PUT THE CUT IN WHOOOOPS

So! First things first: It’s clear from the start that Misuzu is the central heroine, and in fact the ending of her route launches perfectly into the Summer arc and then the Air arc beyond that, making it all feel like one long route. That much is obvious. But why is it I think Minagi’s should be done before Kano’s?

Because of increasing relation to the main story. Minagi’s route isn’t actually directly connected to the girl in the sky at all. Yukito gets closer with Minagi and her best friend Michiru, goofing off at the town’s train station. At some point, he meets a woman buying a frankly hilarious amount of rice. It turns out that woman is Minagi’s mother.

Over time, it becomes clear that something is wrong; Michiru avoids Minagi’s house like the plague. Eventually Yukito goes to Minagi’s house, only to learn that Minagi’s mother calls Minagi “Michiru”. Minagi explains that Michiru was to be the name of her younger sister, but her mother suffered a miscarriage and, in her grief, chose to live in a dream where she sees Minagi as Michiru, going so far as to forget Minagi entirely. After some investigation, Michiru tells Yukito the truth: that she isn’t who she seems. Michiru is a wandering spirit who, after meeting the girl in the sky, saw Minagi and wanted to help her be happy, so it descended and became Michiru, or a fragment of a dream of who Michiru could have been. Only a tangential relation to the girl in the sky, but one nonetheless.

Another reason Minagi’s should come first is because it is LONG.

Minagi’s route is VERY LONG. It takes forever to get anywhere, and there are three or four distinct points where it feels like the story’s over but then BAM, plot twist and three more hours of text. Furthermore, there are some gags with Michiru that go on way too long, repeating the joke four or five too many times. It’s best to get that out of the way first. When Michiru starts eating something out of Yukito’s plate, go ahead and just mash the mouse, cuz you’re gonna be here for a bit.

Kano’s route should be second because it DOES have a clear connection to the girl in the sky. The cause of Kano’s possessions was one of the winged girl’s feathers, that had fallen into the hands of a woman called Shiraho. The feather carried the winged girl’s curse, and thus cursed Shiraho and her child, Yakumo, who developed a mark on her wrist that was believed to be an omen of destruction. Shiraho, unable to kill Yakumo herself, commits suicide, thus apparently sparing Yakumo from that grisly fate. Her spirit possesses the feather, and when Kano touches it as a child, her spirit finds a way into Kano’s body. All in all, a much stronger relation to the girl in the sky, although this is the only route in which we hear of Shiraho and Yakumo. It's also worth noting that Kano's route is way shorter than Minagi's.

And then, of course, Misuzu herself as the central heroine should be last. She’s plagued by some strange ailments, not least of which is her tendency to launch into a crying fit whenever she’s about to make a friend. As a result, Misuzu is often alone, with no friends of her own. Over the course of her route, she and Yukito fall in love, and Yukito realizes that she is the girl in the sky he’s been looking for, and resolves to save her—not just because it’s his destiny, but because she's his love. Misuzu’s ailments get worse and Yukito remembers more of his mother’s teachings. She starts by dreaming of her other self in the sky. Time moves backward in those dreams, and as the dreams reach a critical moment, the curse progresses. First, she loses her ability to walk; then she will experience phantom pain; then she will lose her memories; and finally, she will die. As she approaches the moment of her death, Yukito, in despair, wishes upon his puppet, sacrificing his own life to keep Misuzu alive and give her a chance to break the curse on Kanna. And like I said before, the end of her route is a perfect jump-off point into the Summer arc.

The Summer arc isn’t actually about Misuzu, per se; it tells the story of one Ryuuya, a guardsman appointed to a shrine to guard a winged being named Kannabi no Mikoto. Ryuuya, even after learning who Kanna is, treats her just as he does anyone else, up to and including straight up grabbing her butt because she’s got a nice ass. She never liked being treated as some divine entity, and while she didn’t appreciate the ass grab, Ryuuya treating her like a person was enough to endear him to her.

They quickly learn that Kanna is to be moved to another shrine, and instead of allowing that, Ryuuya and hypercompetent lady-in-waiting Uraha smuggle her out of the shrine and escape in order to find Kanna’s mother. The story goes on to detail how Kanna and Ryuuya fall in love during their journey. Eventually, they find Yaobikuni, Kanna’s mother. She avoids physical touch, saying her body is corrupted, but that doesn’t last long as she’s shortly found and shot down by archers. Kanna holds her, thereby unwittingly transferring Yaobikuni’s curse to herself. The curse in Kanna manifests as an inability to become close to anyone; people who become close to her, who become her friends, fall ill and die. Still being chased, and then surrounded by soldiers, Kanna sacrifices herself to save Ryuuya and Uraha from certain death. Enemy monks place a second curse on Kanna to bind her to the sky before she, too, is shot down by archers. The latter two live out their lives together; Uraha, who has been able to hear Kanna’s voice, learns Houjutsu from a master of the craft and discovers that she’s still alive, in the sky, crying and seeing the same sad dream over and over again. Uraha notes that the curse will weaken over time and Kanna will be able to incarnate, but she is fundamentally still trapped in the sky suffering her curse. Uraha and Ryuuya have a child before Ryuuya succumbs to the curse and passes away. Uraha makes a small puppet and teaches her child Houjutsu, which eventually is passed down the bloodline to Yukito.

With that, the Summer arc ends, and we cut back to the Air arc. Our PoV character is now a crow, who befriends Misuzu almost immediately and is granted the name Sora. It isn’t long before we realize that the crow is Yukito, having gone back in time via his wish to try to save her again. It’s in the Air arc that we actually see Haruko’s character develop as she and Misuzu, with Yukito gone, try to repair their broken relationship. Misuzu, over time, reaches the point of her death (and subsequent rebirth to suffer the cycle again), but with Yukito's sacrifice and a little encouragement from Sora, she manages to stave it off and keep going. Misuzu and Haruko continue to develop their bond, through drama with Keisuke, Misuzu’s biological father, and through Misuzu’s worsening ailments, and eventually, Misuzu realizes she’s succeeded. She’s made genuine, true, happy memories with Haruko. But the curse remains; Misuzu cannot bear a Winged Being’s soul with her human body, and so Misuzu accepts her death in Haruko’s arms. She brings those happy memories back to Kanna, and the curse of endless sadness is broken.

One thing I want to note here is that, like I said, AIR was one of my favorite anime way back when. So I knew everything that was going to happen, though I had forgotten many details. Despite that, though? The VN completely floored me. It’s a different beast entirely. How they crammed that VN into 13 episodes is a mystery all its own.

All in all, I would give AIR a solid 9/10, easy. It’s probably going to be, and stay, one of my all-time favorite VNs for a very long time, even if I read more Key works like Little Busters, Clannad, Kanon, Angel Beats…

Why Key so good, anyway? Goddamn.

AIR, for me, is foundational. It's an irreplaceable part of my identity as an otaku. I have a deep love for it, and I hope others might read it, too.

Next VN on my list is probably Aiyoku no Eustia, which got a full translation patch released recently. I was going to move right into Kanon, but I think one Key work at a time is probably enough. Lord, I only have so many tissueboxes.

まぁ！じゃな

[elvenchevalier]

path of exile 2 is kinda ballin you guys

[elvenchevalier]

Fire Emblem Fates

You are the ocean's gray waves.

Wow. What is there to even say about this game that hasn’t already been said a thousand times?

Full disclosure, I played the fan retranslation patch which, hilariously, is unfinished, so while the main story and 1st gen supports were all done, some of it simply remained untranslated, and a lot of what is was unpolished. As such I won’t be discussing localization here too much. Just a couple points, really.

1) The name changes were silly. “Kazahana” and “Suzukaze” are not overly complex for English-speakers, to say nothing of Midoriko or Mozume. Nishiki and Kinu also fit the characters much better than Kaden and Selkie. Benoit is also not that hard! It’s just French! And then WHY on God’s green earth did they change Harold’s name to Arthur??? That man is the most Harold man to ever Harold!

2) Screw Treehouse for not only removing Saizo and Beruka’s C support for a lame-ass “haha ninjas quiet funny” joke, but also removing Niles and Rhajat’s unique same-sex support chains with Corrin and copypasting in the opposite-sex ones. Not cool, Treehouse.

So, with that out of the way: The music is far from being one of the game’s flaws. Lost in Thoughts All Alone still stands up there with Edge of Dawn as some of the best music in the series and I will die on that hill. (I do prefer Edge of Dawn, though.) I have nothing much to add about the music, I just wanted to say I liked it.

The main gimmick in Fates is the Dragon Veins, special tiles that characters with dragon blood can use to make changes to any given map. Every map does something different with the veins, which some might argue makes the game too gimmicky, but I actually appreciate the Dragon Veins for setting Fates apart from the rest of the series. With effects ranging from covering water with ice to activating healing tiles to burning deep forest to create new pathways, the Dragon Veins run the gamut of special map effects and as a result, Fates maps work in a way that they can never work in other games.

That is not to say the map design is always good, however. Even with the fun Dragon Vein effects, some maps were simply godawful, with some actually made worse by the Dragon Vein effects. Kana’s recruitment map, for example, is one giant plains with a few rivers acting as a barrier against the enemies trying to come beat up your kid. The Dragon Veins here act individually for one of the three rivers, either draining or filling them to allow for manipulation of enemy placement (you can force the enemies to bottleneck on the bridges, or drain the rivers to let them come impale themselves on your swords). It’s almost unilaterally better to keep the rivers full, making the Dragon Veins effectively worthless unless you’re going for low turn counts which I literally just thought of as I wrote this paragraph so maybe there was something there.

Some maps don’t need the Dragon Veins to make them worse, though. There are two very good examples that I can think of off the top of my head: Revelation Chapter 10, wherein the boss, Zola, covers the entire map in ice and you have to effectively dig through it to reach him to clear the map, and Selkie’s recruitment paralogue which is positively covered in forest tiles and a ton of bottlenecks. Movement on Selkie’s recruitment paralogue is torturous without fliers, and fliers alone aren’t going to clear the stage.

The weapons see a pretty big change in Fates; weapons no longer have durability, but they do have different effects. Steel weapons reduce a unit’s effective speed by 3, making it easier to get dual-attacked and harder to dual-attack themselves, silver weapons actually reduce Strength and Skill by 2 points per use (recovering by 1 each turn), there are weapons that reverse the weapon triangle, weapons that debuff (Kunai and Shuriken, which didn’t make any further appearances)… I actually like the lack of durability, but the caveats make the weapons a bit harder to use effectively.

Story time. Let’s start with Birthright.

Birthright is a scenario wherein you side with your Hoshidan siblings to take out King Garon for being a butthead. It’s pretty standard Fire Emblem fare, if you want to count the ability to grind outside of the story as Fire Emblem fare. (I do, because my first Fire Emblem game was Sacred Stones which had grinding, so it works for me.) The maps here are decent, for the most part, but Birthright is sorely lacking in unique objectives—almost every chapter is a rout map.

All in all, the story is...well, I’ve got my thoughts about that I’ll expand on later, but it’s all right. Nothing spectacular. The final boss of Birthright feels very Fire Emblem and that’s fine by me.

Conquest is next.

Conquest sees you side with your Nohrian siblings, helping King Garon reach Mikoto’s throne to force his true form to be revealed. It has no grinding as you don’t get out-of-story Challenges as you do in Birthright and Revelation, so your gold and EXP management have to be up to snuff. It features better maps with more diverse objectives, such as Defense and Seize, although the majority are still either Rout or Defeat Commander. Diversify your map objectives, kids.

The story is somewhat more engaging than Birthright’s because the tension of dealing with Garon is omnipresent, and then the final boss is...kinda cool, actually.

Revelation.

First of all, Revelation is the canon route—unlike Three Houses, where each route is equally canon and they tell different parts of the story, Revelation is just the canon and true end of the game, and this is where my contentions most strongly lie. I’ll dive more into the story after the spoiler cut, but for now, it’s enough to say that Revelation should have received a fair bit more focus than it did. As the obvious canon route, I fully, 100% believe it should have been longer than Birthright and Conquest—and indeed, BR and CQ should have been shorter, rather than treating all three routes as equally canon. If I’d had my way, BR and CQ would have been cut in half, with that extra time allotted to Revelation and BR and CQ relegated to shorter what-if scenarios. A lot of the problems with Revelation could have been solved with some more focus and better pacing.

Secondly, the maps in Revelation are...interesting. Kind of. A lot of the earlier maps use the same locations as ones in Birthright and Conquest, with the Wind Tribe map and its wind gimmick being taken wholesale right out of Conquest. Where it gets interesting is when you finally reach Valla after chapter 18. The world here consists of fields of floating rocks, and the maps use teleporters, shifting platforms, and similar to allow you to get from A to B. I can see the vision here, but unfortunately I have to say it wasn’t always executed very well. One map very late in has you using shifting platforms to move between different rooms to hit Dragon Veins to grant you access to the boss, and if you split your party up you’re in for a rough time; I finished that map with only five of my units left. But that all being said, it did do a fairly good job of differentiating itself from BR and CQ.

Third, and arguably most important, Revelation offers the single greatest number of individual maps by sheer virtue of having access to every child unit. This is already tedious in Birthright and Conquest when you only have half of the fathers in either route, but in Revelation you have everyone. And that means a lot of support grinding.

A lot of support grinding.

A LOT of support grinding.

The tedium is thick enough to build a house out of, and then there’s the fact that you have to clear every Paralogue to recruit everyone. That’s twenty-one Paralogues. Twenty-two if you include Mozu’s map early on. That adds up to a whopping total of forty-seven chapters, and forty-eight if you count Chapter 27 and Endgame separately as each route’s final chapter has a second Endgame map.

No Fire Emblem game should be forty-eight chapters long.

Which is a very funny statement when you add all three routes together. Each route consists of 27 main chapters and an Endgame map at the end, plus twenty-two paralogues split between Birthright and Conquest. Unless my math isn’t mathing, that’s 28x3=60+24=84+14 (BR and CQ both feature 14 paralogues with six shared)x2=28+22 (total paralogues in Revelation)=50= One Hundred And Thirty Four Chapters throughout the game. (Of course, if you count only unique maps, then one route has 14 paralogues, the next adds 8, and you wouldn’t count any in Revelation at all so you’d only have 22 paralogues to count rather than 50, but you would STILL have One Hundred And Six maps. Minus, uh, however many maps get reused in Revelation, as stated earlier, but I’m not mathing that one.)

Don’t worry about the actual equations there I promise it’s just how my brain maths I fully understand it’s not even close to how one would write that nonsense out.

And the worst part is, they aren’t even named in the map select menu! They’re all just “Paralogue”! Sure, they have descriptions to let you know whose paralogue it is, but this is wild to look at!

I think maybe now I can move into spoiler territory. As such,

SPOILERS for Fire Emblem Fates under the cut!

OOOOkay.

So, first and foremost, I’m happy that Fates doesn’t shy away from character death. It does a damn good job of showing Corrin’s resilience in the face of adversity.

That being said, some of the deaths did seem somewhat forced; Lilith, for example, is never shown to even be accompanying Corrin outside of My Castle, but she jumps in front of an attack and dies in Birthright and Conquest anyway. That would have had much more impact if Lilith had a greater part in the main story rather than just being a fish you feed in My Castle so she can help in castle defense maps.

Flora’s death in Birthright is honestly kind of hilarious. She has no REASON to set herself on fire, and no, I don’t buy her “I must atone” nonsense because she opposes Corrin in Conquest as well and DOES NOT in fact set herself on fire, actually joining Corrin instead.

Kaze’s death, also in Birthright, is also kind of hilarious, because he only dies if Corrin has not achieved an A-rank support with him by chapter 15. He gives his life unless he’s sworn fealty to Corrin as their retainer, at which point he apparently has the capacity to actually see that weird purple crystal and explode them back to safety.

This also has an effect on his kid; most units, when reaching an S-rank, immediately unlock their child’s Paralogue, but Midori’s paralogue doesn’t unlock in Birthright until chapter 16 and only if Kaze survives. It makes me laugh because it implies every character immediately gets down and dirty when he puts that ring on it, EXCEPT Kaze and ONLY in Birthright where, even though he absolutely can S-rank beforehand, he waits until a near-death experience to bone his wife. Silly Kaze.

The other character deaths are much less silly. Birthright and Conquest both see at least one royal death, and those are proper painful. Revelation also sees some deaths, so there’s no path where you can genuinely save everybody. In Conquest in particular, Takumi himself is the final boss, possessed by Anankos and not saved by Azura as he is in Birthright and Revelation, and it's honestly a pretty cool fight.

Now… The main story. We all know it’s contentious, that a lot of it doesn’t make sense, that it has a ton of holes.

To my knowledge, the scenario writer actually pumped out FIVE HUNDRED PAGES of material for this game, and 90% of it got gutted for the final product. As a writer I’m deeply saddened by that, and genuinely wish I could know what the rest of the story could have been like.

That being said, I don’t actually hate what we got. It’s fractured, incomplete, but it’s still a fun experience and I can still care about the characters, one-note as they can be at times. I mentioned before in my Engage writeup that this has been an issue for a few games now, and Fates is no exception. Also this happens in Revelation and I love these idiots.

Anankos—or Hydra, in the JP—is a genuinely tragic figure. As one of the First Dragons, his age and draconic instincts led to degeneration of his mental state, and he became controlled by his baser instincts. Before he could fully fall to his own instincts, he sealed his body away. Over time, his love for humanity turned to hatred when he saw that they were more free, could flourish, while he lay suffering, abandoned and forgotten. It’s hard not to feel for him, even as ruthless and cruel as he is in the story. He’s among my favorite villains in the series for that reason.

In a nutshell, I genuinely do love Fire Emblem Fates. It’s flawed, and it’s weak in places, and my god there’s more maps than sense, but I still love it. Even so, I probably won’t be playing it again—it is, after all, quite a time commitment.

I hope to have another game cleared much sooner than this one took. Two months without a new writeup was a bit silly.

じゃ！

ま！た！ね！

[elvenchevalier]

I finally cleared Fire Emblem Fates.

I'll do my writeup later because I gotta go to work right now.

God, it's way too long. No I will NOT be playing 3H for this blog that is not happening I am not doing FOUR routes LMAOOOO

[elvenchevalier]

Hello

It's been a month, but I haven't actually played or watched anything new this month. Except Fire Emblem Fates--which is a replay, but it's also

three friggin games

so it's taking me some time to get through it. There will definitely be a writeup though!

Beyond that, I've been playing a bunch of Elden Ring (both vanilla and the Convergence mod) and Risk of Rain 2. So nothing new, no single-run games to write about.

Yeah, I could do one on RoR2 or ER...but I don't particularly want to. LOL

[elvenchevalier]

Armored Core 6

Got a job for you, 621.

Wow. What a game. Now, I’m not very good at action games. I’ve always been a platformer kinda guy myself; where my friends would excel in the high-octane thrill of battle, I was honing my ability to get the funny Italian man to go wahoo really well.

So, as a result, Armored Core 6 was a challenge to start with. The first few missions went well enough. The tutorial mission’s boss is every bit as tough as it needs to be to convey to the player that you ARE expected to get good. If you can’t handle the tutorial boss, then the rest of the game will grind your bones to make its bread.

Of course, after the tutorial, you aren’t left with zero options. The shop opens up near immediately, and you can start building your mechs. The nice thing about Armored Core 6’s shop is that you buy and sell parts at exactly the same rate, so you never lose money if you decide you don’t like how a part or weapon functions. If the rifle cost 50k credits to buy, it will sell for 50k credits.

You can also save different loadouts, and if you sell a part that one of your loadouts uses, it prompts you to repurchase missing parts when you go to load it, with a single button press, so you don’t have to remember what parts you’ve sold or where in the ever-increasing shop list they’re hiding.

The loadouts are a fundamental part of what I believe is the main strength of the game: the wide variety of parts allows you to swap between different loadouts whenever you need to, and you will often need to because different parts are better-suited for different situations. Often, when you hit a wall and none of your current mechs seem capable of climbing it, the solution is to build a new mech.

The above fight gave me a ton of trouble until I built Bottlecap there. (She remained one of my best mechs for the rest of the game.)

Armored Core 6 is the first game in the series where each leg type fills a different niche. Quadrupedal legs can hover. Tank legs are bulky and can hold a lot of weight. Reverse-joint legs allow for high-mobility ground combat and ease of transitioning to air. And then you have your general-purpose bipedals. It’s generally wise to have one mech for each leg type at least, as between the four leg types you can cover basically anything the game has to throw at you. (I also recommend the smaller, miniature tank legs; they can’t hold as much, but their mobility outshines even reverse-joints on the ground—though unlike reverse-joints, their aerial capabilities are limited.)

It isn’t easy to make a true all-rounder mech that can do everything—indeed, I would argue that’s actually impossible, and you *are* necessitated to create multiple AC loadouts. But, again, I am not the best at action games, so maybe it’d just be impossible for me who knows. At any rate, I ended up making almost a dozen ACs and swapped between them regularly, based on my whim and on which mech would suit a particular mission—although by the endgame I was really focusing on my four top-performing builds (one with each leg type, natch).

These screens look intimidating, but the numbers—while important and should not be ignored outright—aren't the be-all and end-all of your build design. Your own skill as a player play an equally important role.

One thing that’s worth noting is that some missions are simply not viable on the first run. There’s an early mission where you have to fight a ground-based mech called the CATAPHRACT, and it’s next to impossible with the parts you have access to by that point in run 1. Building a new mech doesn’t help simply because you’re really meant to do missions like that in run 2 or 3.

Oh yeah, I didn’t mention: You have to beat the game three times to see the true ending. It’s absolutely worth it and not as much of a slog as it sounds, as the early missions do not increase in difficulty unlike the Souls formula games, allowing you to take your previous endgame mechs and steamroll them, and missions that seemed impossible become almost trivial.

Now, that all being said, unfortunately the game is not very clear about what’s a new or altered mission in NG+ versus what was already there. I had to follow a guide written by my friend to make sure I didn’t miss anything. And by “not very clear”, I mean it simply doesn’t tell you in any capacity that I could determine.

Think it’s about time I talk technical stuff before moving into spoilers.

The presentation is gorgeous. Graphics and music. And it should be, since half of the fun of creating an AC is painting and adjusting its look to your taste. You can adjust weathering, luster, reflectivity, each part has five distinct color segments and they can be colored individually or as a group with the entire frame. The same applies to the weapons any given mech uses. Five color segments, luster, all of it. You can also color those separately or as a group. With customization at that level, the graphics absolutely should be—and are—gorgeous to match. And then there’s the music—also incredible. Every NPC boss theme is jam-packed with emotion and they really serve to drive home what it means to be fighting them.

A notable thing about Armored Core is that you never actually see any of the characters. You see their mechs, and they talk to you a lot, but the characters themselves never make a single appearance. What this means is that each character needs to stand on their own two feet and can’t rely on appealing design to get by. This is, I believe, to the game’s benefit; imagining what these characters must look like is far better than having that knowledge. Walter is gruff and serious, so it’s easy to imagine him as a grizzled war vet type with a full face of hair. If it turned out Walter was a balding middle-aged guy with a goatee and a bad toupee, it would ruin him completely.

I’m a big fan of how the story ramps up the stakes over time. It never really feels like a huge jump up, but it always increases. I was kept thinking about the implications from basically the start of run 2. It’s very well-done, very organic.

[Here there was talk about endings and character stuff that I misinterpreted badly. I apparently missed some of the narrative being shoved into my face. so I deleted it because it was mostly wrong and misinterpreted nonsense. Gonna go lament the fact that my brain refuses to work before I get to my next game, I guess lmao. Next time I'll do my research and make sure I didn't miss anything before doing my writeups.]

All in all, Armored Core 6 was an amazing time, and for any fans of mecha or action games it comes completely recommended. I will for sure be sticking with the series going forward, and I may even go back to play others.

Rusty is best boy.

And because I am proud of them, here are my four top-performing mechs:

They are called Spiderlock, Pious Hammer, Sweet Tooth, and Bottlecap. View them, for I love them.

またまた～

[elvenchevalier]

I only just realized I reblogged something on this blog that I had meant for main. Hm. lmao

[elvenchevalier]

Carrion

Uh, this one’s a few days late. Over a week, even. Just because I’ve been preoccupied, you know how it is.

So, Carrion is sort of a reverse-horror Metroidvania where you take control of an amorphous mass of horrible teeth and writhing tentacles and you eat people. You work your way around the facility where you were being kept so you can escape to eat more people.

There’s not a lot to say about this, to be perfectly honest? It’s maybe a five-hour game, the graphics are appealing, the movement is smooth as silk (if a little awkward when you’re a huge biomass trying to squeeze through a small opening like

Despite my lack of sense of direction, though, the level design was very friendly. I almost never got lost because every area is visually distinct. 10/10 level design. It very much helped that the people never, ever respawn, so as long as you dutifully devour every human, then finding a new area is as simple as entering a room that has living humans in it.

I had maybe a little too much fun beating the people into the walls and floors instead of eating them.

Speaking of beating things into walls though, some obstacles really presented a challenge for me—namely, drones. They quite literally shredded me on the regular, and they are not easy to fight. Outside of using the spiderweb ability in the first form, I’m not sure how else to fight them, but that was enough to make it through.

“First form” means there are three distinct forms all based on your size, and each one has its own pair of abilities, requiring you to deposit biomass in special pink pools to get smaller or eat more humans (or retrieve your biomass from the pink pools) to get bigger. It’s utilized with expertise—every time you see a pink pool it’s because something nearby needs you to be smaller. It doesn’t just drop them wherever.

I’ve been wracking my brain, but to be honest, there really isn’t that much. Carrion is kind of what it says on the tin. You go around, eating people, get powers, and escape the facility. Or maybe I just need more practice with reviewing games, who knows? I sure don’t. We’ll see, I suppose.

There aren't even really any spoilers to talk about, like with Mystic Quest. The game is what it says on the box.

If you like metroidvanias and you wanna be a scary tentacle tooth monster, then Carrion comes highly recommended.

Today is a short one. Next: I keep saying Armored Core 6, but honestly I’m progressing through that more slowly than I’d expected, so I make no promises this time.

許してください。またね～

[elvenchevalier]

"hey ori are you gonna play assassin's creed 2 sometime soon"

maybe. i own it on ps5, but the trouble with that is getting regular access to my own ps5 lmao

[elvenchevalier]

Fire Emblem: Engage

This was...probably a long time coming.

Fire Emblem Engage was certainly an experience. It had some of the best maps in the series, the characters were quirky and loveable (if not particularly deep), the art was appealing, and the story was what it promised it would be.

That isn’t to say it’s a perfect game, though. Especially right at the beginning, the characters chew the scenery something fierce. In particular, they tend to overemote, which lessens the dialogue’s impact as it sort of takes you out of it. Eventually the characters settle into their roles and the writing starts feeling more like Fire Emblem, but you do gotta get past those first few hurdles.

Speaking of the writing, I felt it was enjoyable, if somewhat predictable at some points. The characters often feel a little flat at first as well, with one notable trait overshadowing what else the characters may have. Chloe is obsessed with fairy tales. Louis likes to watch people and drink tea. Yunaka is definitely NOT hiding anything. Alfred is heroic, Celine is kind. You get the picture.

This is most noticeable in Alcryst, an archer who joins you early on, who, despite being probably one of the best archers in the series, CANNOT seem to stop being self-deprecating. Nearly every interaction the boy had was colored with his self-loathing. After about the third time he explicitly rejected praise, I wrote him off. He was insufferable.

It is exasperating.

It can be argued that this has been an issue with the series over the last few titles, and I think I would agree with that assessment. While I do recognize that the characters are deeper than their introductions might suggest, it is still clear that they were based on their one major defining trait.

That being said, it was quite funny to see that Alear was in fact the only sane person in the army, reacting with confusion and concern to everyone else's shenanigans.

Characters aside, the story wasn’t anything particularly special. It gave Alear an objective and the story is about completing that objective. It’s not complex, but it isn’t trying to be, either. It delivers on what it promises. The various nations weren’t anything to write home about, either. You have the peaceful Green Greens nation in Firene; the warlike Brodia; the mountainous and chill Elusia; and the desert-laden land of Solm. You really do just get what you see. But again, that’s fine; Engage is more about Alear than about its worldbuilding, and so Alear gets most of the focus.

There were some funny choices, though. The first paralogue has you rescuing some medics on an island just off of Firene, and even though the Firenese characters all have a pretty standard American Midwest accent, the people of that island—which is JUST BARELY off of Firene—are painfully British.

(I played in dub, as you can tell. I don’t know what the choices were in the Japanese voiceover.)

But enough about the writing. Let’s talk about mechanics. My favorite thing that Engage did was to completely remove weapon durability without the weird caveats Fates’ weapons had. Some of the weapons have been nerfed over the course of the series—Brave weapons are just a shadow of their former glory—but that allowed for removal of weapon durability without creating a situation where you just give everyone a Brave weapon and call it a day.

I’m on record as believing weapon durability never really added much to the series. It’s just an excuse to spend the gold you get, and while managing funds is just as much of a trait of a strategy game as any other, I feel like there are better uses for it, and Engage gives us exactly that. You can still buy and refine weapons, buy items, all that good stuff.

But on that note, this game came out in Anno Domini the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty Three.

WHY on God’s terrible blue and green marble do the shopkeepers have EXACTLY ONE VOICE LINE for each type of transaction? And why do they repeat it with EVERY. SINGLE. TRANSACTION? It got bad enough that I had to mute my game whenever I needed to do shopping. It gets incredibly grating to hear “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” ad nauseum when you’re stocking up on, say, Vulneraries. It is now 2025. Shopkeepers with voice lines should ALWAYS have at MINIMUM 3 lines per transaction type, AND they should only actually trigger every 4-5 transactions, and if I find myself in a position to add voices to my own game I’m going to do exactly that.

The Somniel is the best iteration of the home base yet. My Castle in Fates was rudimentary, but served its purpose; the Monastery in Three Houses was just far too big. The Somniel is smaller and easier to find your way around, which I and my lack of sense of direction deeply appreciated.

Another feature Engage introduces that I find incredibly neat and hope the series continues with is the post-battle segments where you run around in the map you had just cleared, talking to people, picking up stuff on the ground, and adopting pets. Exploring the areas outside of battle gives them a brand new perspective and makes me appreciate the map design all the more.

I have noticed the last two games in this series also having abilities that work similarly to how skills function in Fire Emblem Heroes, where characters get stat bonuses based on who they’re standing nearby (as distinct from supports). At first I was apprehensive about it—I didn’t want the series to start being like Heroes, as much as I did enjoy the gacha—but it seems to have found a middle ground that’s comfortable and adds another layer to player positioning.

This is only helped by the incredible map design. Engage has some of the best, most interesting maps I’ve seen in quite some time, and I’m taking notes from them for my own map design.

Despite being the primary mechanic, and in fact literally part of the game’s name, I didn’t actually...engage with Engage all that much. I did mostly for particularly dire situations and usually to theatrically finish off a boss, but through most maps I didn’t see much need for it. That will likely change when I come back to play the game on a harder difficulty, though—I played on Normal, as I always do for a first run.

As a character gains skill points and bond levels with the different Emblems, they can inherit skills from those Emblems to keep permanently, even when switched to a different Emblem. This is a fantastic feature, but it’s overwhelming for people like me who get intense choice paralysis. In the end I just forewent the skill inheritance entirely just to make it easier on the brain juice.

The Emblems also offering weapon proficiencies, unlocking class changes for the unit they’re bonded with, is probably my favorite thing about the emblems.

The last thing I want to say before I dive into spoilers is that I continue to be of the belief that Fire Emblem should not have ever engaged with shipping. I understand it saved the series in Awakening, but I prefer dedicated romantic subplots over “oh man those two are cute”, even if I DO enjoy shipping. That being said, ONLY Alear gets an S-rank in this game, severely limiting the shipping opportunities and outright denying paired endings outside of Alear’s S support, which I feel is a genuine shame. There are SEVERAL pairs of characters whose romances might make for really nice romantic subplots, and Engage just isn’t interested in exploring those over the Alear self-insert shipping.

I wanted to see Yunaka and Louis together, man.

Spoilers to follow! This isn’t like Mystic Quest where the story is so simple and barebones as not to HAVE any spoilers, so this is your warning!

Where to begin, though.

I think the first thing I want to say is a criticism of the events of Chapters 10 and 11, when your Emblem Rings get taken from you by Veyle.

While narratively that part of the story is fine and dandy, the problem arises when you realize Micaiah and Celica are your *only* two options for providing Tome and Staff proficiency to units, and they are among the rings taken from you. You don’t get Micaiah back until Chapter 19 and Celica until 22. Out of 26.

So if there was a unit you wanted to make a mage or healer—like, say, Anna, who makes an incredibly strong Sage—and you didn’t provide her with Tome proficiency before Chapter 10, you’re struck until you get Micaiah back. (Or buy the DLC, as Veronica also provides tome and staff proficiency, though I don’t believe the choice was made with making the player buy the DLC in mind.)

The Fell Xenologue was an interesting what-if kind of story that effectively makes the other gender Alear canon in an alternate world, which I thought was neat. It also doesn’t let you just bring your overpowered monstrosities in; your characters’ levels, classes, and inventories are set per chapter, and scale with your progress in the main story. (Emblems synced and bond levels are not set, however, and can be brought in.)

It introduces a few new characters, including alternate forms of the Four Hounds and two unique characters, Nel and Nil, who the Xenologue center around. It explores a scenario where Alear actually died during the war with Sombron, sacrificing her life to defeat him. The people in the Xenologue are effectively mirror versions of the characters we already know; Celine is ruthless, Alcryst is abusive toward Diamant, you get the picture. In turn, the Four Hounds are on your side. At the end, of course, they all come back with you to let you play with them in the main game, which doesn’t mean a whole lot if you do the Xenologue when you only have five chapters left in the main game like SOME people.

Toward the end, it’s revealed that Emblems can’t really leave their world, that they’ll vanish if they do. Naturally we get a scene where that happens, and Alear gives us a Power of Friendship speech to bring them back, and it was a pretty neat moment! (It also isn't mentioned in the Xenologue, likely because it's a lategame revelation and you can access the Xenologue as early as chapter 6.)

Sombron was a fine villain. Proper evil dark dragon stuff. His backstory is only even touched on right at the end, during the final confrontation. It brings up something called the Zero Emblem, Sombron’s only friend from his own world (oh, by the way, he is also from an alternate world) who vanished many years ago (by virtue of the aforementioned inability to leave their world), prompting him to commit hilarious amounts of murder to reunite with his friend by returning to his own world.

How that works, exactly, isn’t really explained. The game never even tells us who the Zero Emblem is, just that it’s also known as the Emblem of Foundations. It felt like it was just a desperate last-minute attempt to give Sombron some level of sympathy so he didn’t come across as a Pure Evil villain, but you know what? He would have been better that way. There’s nothing wrong with a Pure Evil villain; they don’t ALWAYS need to have some level of sympathetic backstory. He’s the hero of his own story by virtue of being the Big Bad Evil Guy and that’s fine.

All in all, Fire Emblem Engage was a SOLID 8/10. I’m a pretty big Fire Emblem fan, and Engage felt like a beautiful celebration, even a love letter, to the franchise. I have heard the opinion that the game would be a fine place to end the franchise, and while I know that won’t be the case as it’s making far too much money to just stop, I think I might even agree. Engage would be a great sendoff.

But as a fan, I continue to look forward to the next title.

ね、ゲームあそぶ？

[elvenchevalier]

Inscryption

Lord almighty. What do I even say about this game? I beat it a couple of days ago, but the words just refuse to come to me.

And even if they did, the majority of this writeup is going to have to be under a spoiler! This is very genuinely one of those games that you MUST play blind. So here above the cut I will only be discussing parts of the game that don’t constitute spoilers.

For one thing, Inscryption does something quite unique with its title screen: you cannot select New Game. You must select Continue.

Then we have the music. Eerie, contemplative, ambient, like sitting at a warm campfire, but there is something in the forest in front of you. That’s really about it. The music is good, don’t get me wrong, but it isn’t stellar, either. It suits the game and enhances the vibe which is pretty much what you want out of a soundtrack.

Finally, graphics. Your entire environment is dark and foreboding, with many areas shrouded in shadow. But the table is where you will spend most of your time, because the deck isn’t going to build itself. Honestly, like the music, the environment suits the vibe.

Inscryption starts with you playing a roguelite deckbuilder against a weird pair of glowing eyes who appear to have you captive in his cabin. The only thing you can do is to play his game. It's a roguelite deckbuilder where you play various animals with different stats and abilities to do damage enough to tip the scales--literally, as the scale is what determines the winner, when it tips fully to one side or the other. Cards are played by sacrificing other cards, if they have a Blood cost, or by spending Bone tokens, which are earned every time a card dies (including by being sacrificed for a stronger card). The cards will attack either the opponent's cards or the opponent himself to apply weight to his side of the scale, and then he does the same.

Very quickly, one of the cards you can get starts talking to you. I’m not calling this one a spoiler by sheer virtue of how early it happens. The Stoat is a sarcastic, foul-mouthed little prick, and I kind of love him. Later, two more talking cards get added to your deck.

On top of playing costs and attack and health, the cards sometimes have sigils, which are special abilities the cards have while in play—some are Flying and thus aren’t blocked by most other cards, some have a split attack where they’ll attack to the left or right, but NOT in front, etc etc. There are a few places where you can sacrifice a card to put its sigil on another card, and the best part is there’s no limitation on it other than the maximum a single card can have. You can make some pretty busted cards and it’s amazing.

Another way to make busted cards is by dying, which you will likely do a few times over the course of your run. When you lose your lives, your captor will use a camera to create a “death card” of you. This is the actual you—you’re turned into a card, and a new player comes in to take your place. But it takes the cost of one card out of a select few chosen from your deck, the attack and health of a second, and the sigil of a third. I made a zero-cost card with Grizzly stats and the “Immortal” sigil—sacrificing that card doesn’t remove it from the board, so you can continuously use it for sacrifices. A free turbosacrifice bear, as it were.

The roguelike game itself isn’t all there is, though. You can actually stand up from the table and explore the room—though the eerie glowing orange eyes are still all you get to see of your captor. There are puzzles to be solved all over the room, and they grant you more cards and other bonuses, so you’ll want to do those whenever you find the information required to find the solution. You don’t have to wait to find the information; it’s technically possible to brute force the puzzles right from the get-go.

As you move on, solving puzzles and reaching further and further into the eyes' game, things start to get a little bit

meta.

I’m going to go ahead and put the spoiler cut here. MASSIVE spoilers for Inscryption UNDER the cut, if you plan to play this game DO NOT READ BEYOND THIS POINT. This game MUST be experienced blind. Hopefully this is long enough to prevent any wandering eyes from accidentally seeing the text below.

Moving on then,

The end of the first act introduces us to Luke Carder, our protagonist. We don’t see him very much—the game as we are playing it is being played by him, so occasionally he’ll make a comment. His first comment comes at the very start of the game, when you first fire it up, but it’s after the first act when we get to see the camera recordings that we REALLY get to meet him.

And the game executes that bit perfectly. Over the course of the game, we get to see him find this game, play it, go a LITTLE bit off the deep end, and ultimately...well.

Play the game to find out.

Speaking of the game, it’s a little bit hard to describe how I feel about it without just… summarizing the game’s plot? Which kind of just defeats the purpose of a review. There are no sidequests—there are a couple of things in act 2 that aren’t directly tied to the main progression, but that’s about it. Act 1 had you playing this roguelite with Leshy (you don’t learn his name until act 2).

Act 2 has you building a deck, finding and buying card packs to build your collection, and defeating the four Scrybes (Leshy, Grimora, P03, and Magnificus) to replace one of them. You make your choice, and regardless of who you choose, P03 forces a battle with you where he plays an incredibly glitched card, and once it attacks, the game goes haywire and suddenly you’re back to the eerie, dark 3D segment, except now it’s blue, and in fact it is the factory from act 2. (Worth noting that Leshy’s cabin is the same in act 2 as well.) Act 2 also introduces a new feature for the game—the Hammer, which is a tool you can use at any time to kill your own cards, which is a lot more useful than it sounds. If you need a space open to play something, the hammer allows you to do that. (It can also enable an infinite loop for a very funny purpose. The hammer persists in act 3.)

Act 3 now has you playing with P03, who has taken over Inscryption and become the prime Scrybe. Now he’s obsessed with this “Great Transcendence”. You can tell he’s up to something, but you play the game anyway.

This act also shifts the mechanics to Energy instead of Sacrifices, and I vibe SO much better with the energy system than sacrifices. Rather than playing weak monsters to feed strong ones, each card costs Energy to play, and your energy refills every turn--starting at one max and reaching six max by turn five. It also isn’t really a roguelite anymore; more like a point and click RPG, so every act is unique and satisfying. There are also a plethora of new sigils to explore in act 3. You do much the same as you did in act 2, though—you go to the four corners, beat a boss, and then return to the center, doing puzzles in the factory along the way.

The finale is an emotional rollercoaster. I won’t say much about this simply because it must be experienced.

Leshy just wants to play his game, man. That’s all he wants.

Clearing the game unlocks a new mode called Kaycee’s Mod, which adjusts Act 1 to be a true roguelike. I haven't delved deep into it, but it looks like it is just Act 1, with just the sacrifices and bones, but I could be wrong. I hope I am. Energy is my favorite system here, after all.

All in all, Inscryption is a WILD ride, and I genuinely suggest not spoiling anything for anybody who plans to play this game. They must play it blind. And even if you haven’t, and you’ve read up to this point, I’ll have spoiled a bunch already—but the finale and Luke's deal alone are worth playing through this game.

I give it a Holy Shit I’m Still Processing This out of 10.

I will probably be finishing Fire Emblem Engage next, as I’m fairly close to the end of that one.

また！