#taupe talks

[castleinthemist]

Spinning Discs - March 2026

Spinning Disks is a feature where I collect thoughts on a smattering of games I’ve been playing lately, over the last three months. Often th

Here's my first quartly entry of Spinning Discs for this year! I've tried something a little different this time 'round and gone for some longer thoughts than I usually do with these entries, so please, take your time with it. This entry has got a mix of stuff I've been enjoying and some stuff I haven't liked as much!

[castleinthemist]

Played through Orangepeel, Onionskin - an entry for the EroHorror Vn jam - and... it's pretty fantastic! It has a wonderful presentation with its simple textbox, but the combination of how to text presents itself -paces itself with the timing of it - and how the art is reserved for the moments that punctuate the emotions really adds to the flow of the writing. It builds up its dread well and it gets uncomfortable in the ways i want it to, and best of all - it's short! Go play it!

[castleinthemist]

2025 End of Year Wrap-up

Since this is my end of 2025 round up, I’ve forgone a final Spinning Discs entry for the year due to my play of new videogames throughout th

I am (hopefully) fashionably late with my 2025 End of Year games round up! There's some games I've talked about on here before and some others I haven't gone into too much detail about - please enjoy!

[castleinthemist]

So i've been playing Makai Tōshi SaGa and Final Fantasy V lately, the former in sporadic bursts fitting its handheld nature and the latter in more concentrated bursts (to bide time during work commute) and going from SaGa to FFV threw me off with one minor thing:

How targeting in combat works.

As most command-based RPGs have done for a long while, when you target an enemy the available character attacks it using whatever action you've chosen for that turn, and if that enemy you targeted is downed before the chosen character can get an attack off, it'll shuffle that action to the next enemy. Now SaGa, being handheld and from an earlier era, doesn't do this. If you select an enemy in combat and that enemy dies before the chosen character can attack them their attack doesn't go through (effectively "misses") and their turn is used up. There is a key difference in both games' approach to this and it's down to how the encounters are presented.

Both games have random encounters. FFV goes for the series staple of lining up your party members on one side of the screen, with the enemies on the opposite, while SaGa opts for a "first-person"-esque view (perhaps the only conventional thing about it), one that shows only enemies opting to display the party through the command menu. Multiples of the same enemy type are represented by one sprite and conveyed to the player through a number next to their name, and SaGa caps out at three enemy sprites in the battle screen. This differs from FFV, which only offers the name since you can count the amount of enemies on the screen through the visuals, and can features larger groups. I had become used to how SaGa handles this, so when I started FFV I was still in the habit of selecting targets with the idea of pre-planning my attack to avoid "missing" a turn.

I've explained how this works because it is important to establish due to the way both games handle multi-enemy targeting.

I'll start with the more well known one: Final Fantasy. For now I'll also only mention basics, I won't talk about specifics of the jobs in FFV because while they make up a lot of how you approach combat, explaining exceptions and getting into the weeds of it will make this post run away from its focus. Usually in FF games choosing "attack" will let you target a single enemy and only one, while magic offers you (dependent on the spell, so an attack spell like Fira can do this) an option to select one target or multiple, usually at the cost of less damage per target.

Whereas in SaGa, battles are turn-based through collective action. You select what each party member is going to do for the next turn then the action begins between your party and the enemies, as the turn order is determined by the agility of each combatant. There is two types of muti-target attacks you can choose from: hitting multiples in a group or hitting all enemies onscreen. Due to the way weapons and spells work in this game, where they have a set amount of uses, especially with group-target or all-targets spells (both usually have a lower usage amount) you’ll tend to reserve this for the more problematic groups or enemies with higher defence that you will encounter.

This difference is key as SaGa proceeds in a batch of actions. Becoming lax in your approach to combat, having the possibility that one of your party members might kill a weaker enemy in one turn, thus wasting another member's action, isn't ideal and can feel like it works against you. By weighing up the differences in strengths of the party you can make the payoff of successfully completing a fight feel great, and is balanced by how resource heavy combat in SaGa often is.

Additionally, both games allow you to hold down the action button allowing the fight to proceed with expedience, as the selection cursor will remain on what you have previously actioned for each party member (otherwise it will default to attack). In FFV this makes the random encounters feel more automated, in the sense that it can be completed with great ease and little attention. Something that goes hand in hand with how easy levelling up is - there's a greater immediacy to your growth in this game than is apparent in SaGa. For that one, growth feels gradual as you explore the tower, and a new floor is always a tentative bout against new foes. Since levelling is dependent on what type of party members you have hired, and damage output is often dependent on new gear and weapons (which have limited usage), healing resources are especially limited out in the field; paying closer attention to fights is key to winning them. It all feels very gradual in a measurable way and both games breed familiarity with their particularities.

I find this all well considered for the combat quirks of either game. Of course, there is also the technical limitations: SaGa only displays enemies in such a manner due to the visual constraints of the handheld console (it also re-uses enemy sprites often, so paying attention to the name helps you comprehend the fight). Overall I think it makes SaGa feel far more intimate, whereas FFV gets to feel large and bombastic at times; a continual growth of strength and abilities through it's rapid and very active combat.

[castleinthemist]

My piece on Metal Garden, a game I have not been able to stop thinking about since I played it earlier this year.

[castleinthemist]

always annoyed me whenever i'd come across a pyre review and it would go along the lines of 'the people who like the story might not get much out of the [sports] part, and the people who like the gameplay (read: "sports part" (the first problem)) will feel the story gets in the way of the bits they want to play' and like i get the intent behind that line of thinking but i don't understand how you fail to see those as something that exists within the whole (rpg). sure isn't pyre if you try and split those into two disparate parts, there is no juxtapostion between the two because they influence each other so totally that i can't consider it that way

or rather, if i take it as a juxtapostion - then it heightens the two in assemblage because of the influence they enact through each other

[castleinthemist]

If you've been following me over the last month and a bit, you'll likely have come across my Higurashi live blogging as part of my first time playing through the game - I've collated and written my thoughts on the first four chapters for the game here, as well as what I'm picking up from the game along with what I am hoping to see going into the Answers Arc!

[castleinthemist]

Last one for tonight is Sieve - one of the entries from this year's Toxic Yuri Game Jam. I don't have too much to say about this one, it's roughly an hour and a fun read, with a pretty unique feeling look to it what with the animated pre-rendered backgrounds and the 2d sprites for the characters.