veebs hates video games

It's kind of become a running joke that I hate all games because I complain about them constantly. Really it's more that I like games and I also like complaining, or at least being critical of things. Opinions range from "this is terrible and here's why" to "this is great but here's how it could be better".

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There are enough posts on here at this point that I feel like maybe a pinned post with a little more info and some navigation links might help.

This is the fault of @vibratoryblurriness if for some reason you want to know anything more about me or who to blame any of this on, and that's who likes/follows will show up as being from.

This mostly exists for my own sake because I have a variety of health problems, sometimes including memory problems, and it's nice to be able to look back and see what I thought about something if someone asks about it a few years later. Occasionally someone else stumbles on it and that's neat too.

I think I've finally settled on a tagging scheme, but I haven't gone back and edited everything yet. If I remember I'll change this message after doing that (current progress: everything from the beginning through nearly the end of May 2022, plus everything from the end of December 2023 until now). The plan is to tag full names of games, "x series" for things that are part of series/franchise x, and anything that shows up in the list after "mentioned:" comes up in the post but isn't the main focus of it. I'll try to keep an updated list with all of them in this post under a read more, but we'll see how that goes.

Actually forget about that probably. I just realized that with the number of posts I've made the list is going to be waaay over the limit for the number of links you can have in a post, so I'm going to have to come up with a better way to do it. I'm still updating all the tags and keeping my own list of them anyway until I figure out something that works in every web version of Tumblr plus the app though.

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Oh no, now I have a real physical keyboard and can finally write my 2025 end of year post. That seems intimidating though because there are one hundred and ninety two games on 2025's list (this year is on track to be much lower, which is probably a very good thing). So instead there's this for now.

I just finished replaying Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and its DLC because of the Switch 2 update, which I was not planning to do. I had tried replaying XC2...I forget when. A couple years ago? Whenever it was, I gave up somewhere in the middle, partly because it was kind of annoying going through the first half again because it varies so wildly in quality from moment to moment (while the second half is pretty consistently great), but also pretty significantly because it's by far the jankiest game in the entire series at this point with the fewest QoL features, and it doesn't feel great to play to me.

I had kind of been hoping for a more significant update for its tenth anniversary next year like the first game and X both got, but this is what we ended up instead, and while it did address a couple issues, mostly anything that bugged me about it is still exactly the same. It looks much nicer and runs much better though, especially handheld like how I usually play, so that helps.

It's frustrating, because the world and story are great, and the characters are generally better written than anything Monolith ever did pre-XC2 (which they've continued to get better at since then too). I wasn't even planning on finishing my abandoned playthrough this time, just seeing the new stuff with Momo and leaving it at that, but once I got back into it I wanted to see the rest of the story again too.

And I did have a good time, but mostly because of the characters (not necessarily the character designs, which are still very hit or miss, and some of the misses miss by a lot) and story. It still feels the worst to play to me out of any game in the series. The menus still kinda suck. The map still kinda sucks. Lots of people say it has the best combat system, but half the stuff in it is just very poorly explained bloat that doesn't make it more interesting to me, just more complicated.

But on the other hand, the stuff it does well it does really well. It still has a lot of the best and most memorable environments in the series (aesthetically, at least...they can be kind of annoying to navigate sometimes). The music is also still some of the best. And when the story finally gets going like halfway through the game there's lots of great stuff going on, along with generally better character development than the first game too.

I do still think the ending would've been stronger without the post-credits happy ending stuff, which I've thought since the first time I played it several years ago, but it was made much funnier retroactively by XC3/Future Redeemed, so I'll allow it.

And then of course I also had to replay Torna The Adventures of Tomboy and Sadboy afterward, which feels so much better as a game because it drops so many of the sources of fiddly annoyances from the main game. A large number of my gameplay problems with XC2 are a direct result of common blades existing, and by switching to a fixed party it eliminated most of those issues. I also still appreciate that they finally got their shit together with (mainly female) character designs too.

I have a few smaller issues with it, like the pacing being kinda off because so many of the not-really-optional side quests don't open up until nearly the end of the story, so even if you're keeping up with them as you go along it still works out a little weird in the end. Or it still being a bit weird about gender/romance sometimes (let Sarah stab Leo, she deserves it, and don't think I didn't notice only the female party members tend to get involved in stuff like that).

But overall I think in a lot of ways it's better than the main game, or at least more consistent/coherent as a whole, and it can really change or recontextualize how you see the main story in a good way.

Ultimately my biggest complaint is that it was very rude of them to release new updated versions of these with new stuff in them I wanted to see, because now my replay of XC3 I'd just started earlier in the year before these were announced has been delayed by months, and I've spent like another hundred hours on 1 and 2 when there was other stuff I had been meaning to play instead. How dare they make me spend more time playing my favorite series?

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My game time recently has been almost completely consumed by Fantasy Life i, but I found a little time to play A Game About Feeding a Black Hole. It's pretty ok!

I finished everything in the main game mode in a couple hours (and will probably not bother with the others), and while it's not revolutionary or anything, it doesn't drag things out any longer than it needs to, and it has pretty satisfying and consistent progression. It's extremely linear, even the upgrade tree, but I did appreciate how the balance of where your income and damage output shifts throughout the run, with some things changing what you focus on while playing and others becoming less useful only to come back to relevance again with a future upgrade. Until the final tier or two of upgrades anyway, where there's one thing that's just objectively better than everything else in the game, and everything else is either useless or just exists to activate that one thing. And weirdly the very final thing you unlock/upgrade is orders of magnitude worse than that and just a waste.

Kind of a little bit of a letdown to have it end by forgetting what balance is or how to make upgrades/abilities feel meaningful and worthwhile, but otherwise it mostly feels pretty good. So that's nice.

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This time I've finished two things I actually liked. Will wonders never cease?

The first as BALL x PIT, which I'd been working on on and off for a while. I think it's a good example of how that recent post about The Case of the Golden Idol was an outlier. I don't love the art style in BALL x PIT either (and it's partly why I was less interested before trying the demo), but I usually have a pretty high tolerance for that if there's other stuff about the game I like or find interesting.

I knew the name Kenny Sun looked familiar, and it turns out he made Yankai's Peak too, which was a solidly "fine I guess" game to me that I never finished. This one was much more satisfying to me. Once it got going and I started to unlock a few things I could see the potential for shenanigans, and it did not disappoint. By the end you can do some absolutely game-breaking stuff if you're a little clever about it and the RNG is on your side, and it feels good when a dumb idea turns out to actually work.

My biggest issue was probably the RNG at times though. You have fairly limited means to manipulate or compensate for it, which is ultimately fine if occasionally a bit frustrating, but where it's really a problem is when trying to unlock everything in the encyclopedia. It can be an enormous pain spending run after run throwing all your banishes and rerolls at it over and over just to still not see the one combo you're actually looking for even a single time.

I did ultimately overcome that and fill the whole thing out, and aside from that I generally had a pretty good time with it. It was good for doing a run or two between other things and stayed enjoyable for weeks, and it was overall better than I expected it to be.

The other thing was All the Words She Wrote, yet another ebi-hime yuri VN. I don't think I have a whole lot different to say about it from what I tend to say about most of the others. None of them are life-changing or anything, but they're familiar tropes well executed with a remarkably consistent level of quality. When that's what I'm in the mood for a couple times a year I know I can nearly always count on whichever one I pick up to deliver exactly that, and this one did too. It's one of a handful where I've had mixed feelings about some of the character illustrations (many of them are cute, but it does sometimes feel fanservice-aimed-at-straight-men-y in some of them, like I think it was Blackberry Honey that I felt like that about before), but at the same time the point where the main conflict reaches its peak was particularly intense, and I felt it stood out among the other of her VNs I've read, in a good way.

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This will be a short one. Every time I scrolled through the games I hadn't started yet I got increasingly annoyed every time I had to see the icon for The Case of the Golden Idol. The art style is distinctive and expressive and immediately recognizable, but I also unfortunately find it very offputting. I figured I should just play it already and either finish it or give up on it, because one way or the other it'd be off the list and stop showing up there.

I finished chapter one, and I think that's enough for me. Mechanically it's fine, but there are plenty of similar games I could go play instead that I don't hate looking at. It's too bad, because more than one person I know liked and recommended it, everything else about it seems fine (although the UI/controls are slightly wonky on console), and some of the music I've heard from it was pretty interesting. I have a pretty high tolerance for games with art styles that aren't really my thing (e.g. my 3000 hours in Grim Dawn over the past more-than-a-decade), but it's tough when I actively dislike it. Oh well.

So true, autocomplete.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Guess it's still demo time.

Grim Trials: It's very "we have Hades at home", but it feels like it might have potential. Not so much in the characters and story department (although I will award it unintentional humor points for having a wide variety of unusual names, and then John and Timmy), but it looks and sounds nice enough, and the combat and progression might turn out interesting with a few tweaks.

Disgaea Mayhem: Terrible demo. There's zero tutorial or explanation of what you're doing or even anything that tells you what the buttons do (unless you go into the settings menu for changing them). There are three very basic and not very interesting levels, and it hard resets to the main menu after finishing one of them. It shows you absolutely nothing of the progression/upgrade systems, which is an absolutely wild decision for a spinoff of a series so focused on that stuff. It doesn't look anywhere good enough to justify having to drop from quality to performance just to have it run smoothly. The highest camera speed is still way too slow. And on top of that the minimal gameplay they do let you experience is a low tier at best musou game. I hope there's something in the full game to justify its existence, because otherwise I feel sorry for anyone spending money on it just to end up with this.

Denshattack!: I was a little worried about this one because I had a really hard time telling what was going on in the trailers because of my wonky vision, but it's much less of an issue when playing it myself. Unfortunately I don't really enjoy playing it that much (and could not get the hang of what it was trying to get me to do with the trick system, like it felt like it just wasn't registering 80% of the time), which is too bad because I dig the vibes and the music is fun. I can see other people having a good time with it though.

Pragmata: Seems alright but not really my thing, which is exactly what I expected. I could see them doing some fun things with controlling both characters simultaneously though. It's kind of impressive it even runs on a handheld, but it's pretty noticeable how low the shadow resolution is. That was an issue when I played Romancing SaGa 2 recently too, which otherwise tends to look pretty good. Somehow in a bunch of games shadows have gotten significantly worse than they were ten years ago if you're not running on high settings. Also I still think HDR was a mistake. Doing the calibration for minimum brightness for it the entire screen was still solid black even with the slider all the way to the right. How does this help me?

Star Fox: Star Fox is Star Fox. They have successfully made the same game again, and it feels pretty faithful. I don't remember where any of the enemy spawns are anymore because it's been probably 20+ years since the last time I played it, but it only too like 30 seconds for the feel of it to come right back. I don't have enough of a desire to replay it to buy the full game though, and I could just pull out my N64 if I really wanted to. Maybe it'll lead to them making a new one for the first time in forever though. Which is now making me picture Frozen but with furries, so that's a thing.

Kingdom's Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster: I had to grab this along with the others just because of the ridiculous title. There's almost something there but not quite. Lots of dungeon crawling that feels just ok at best. I could see it maybe being acceptable as one of those things for when I need a distraction but am too out of it for something more substantial if it's heavily discounted, but I don't think this is going to be the next big thing. I did stick with it longer than most of the others though, so that's something.

Twofold: I've been holding off on blindly picking up more Studio Élan stuff after the one I played last year didn't quite click for me (despite liking some aspects of it). I'm feeling the tone of this one much more though and curious where the full story will go with things. It's not a priority, but I'll probably pick it up at some point on sale or in a bundle.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I guess it's time for a few demos again, because I have the misfortune to be awake during the day when it's sunny and everything is noises, and I don't want to play stuff I'm actually invested in under those conditions when it's hard to concentrate.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book: I wasn't sold on it at first, but the final level of the demo convinced me. As someone who could never get into most of the older Yoshi games, I'm actually glad this one is so different. The focus on experimentation and discovery feels good after getting past the tutorial-ish parts. I was a little concerned when it opened on Bowser Jr. because I've never liked Bowser Jr., and I will always be disappointed every time Yoshi makes any noises in a game made less than like 35 years ago because it's not the same as in Super Mario World, but otherwise I see what they're going for and appreciate it. Now to wait like three years until I can find a cheap copy somewhere somehow...

Rhythm Heaven Groove: The demo is delightful, but I expected that because I played Megamix before. It's still a bunch of quirky rhythm minigames with extremely catchy music. Also bonus points for giving an accessibility feature a personality. It has a built-in screen reader (which can just read the text or also describe what's on screen), except it's an actual character who looks so sad if you move your cursor to the option to disable it. So I didn't. *beep!*

Granblue Fantasy: Relink - Endless Ragnarok: Well, they can't all be winners. This one feels terrible to play to me. Raising the camera speed by like 300% helped a little, but it desperately needs lower graphics settings to run better handheld. That did not incline me to be very charitable toward anything else about it. I can imagine the combat being ok later on, but I didn't love how it felt or the controls, and none of the characters or the little bit of story made any impression on me before I quit in the middle of a cutscene and uninstalled it.

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I don't know how, but I keep managing to play games straight through uninterrupted instead of getting sidetracked in the middle for 18 months. Most recently it was Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven, the recent-ish full remake of the original from 1993. I had to give it a try when I found a copy on sale, because I tend to like (but not love) SaGa games, and Xeen (Spirit of Wonder!) did such a great job with the Trials of Mana remake a few years earlier.

I've sort of been playing SaGa games on and off since SaGa Frontier 2 (which I still have a physical copy of), but they've never really been a priority for me. They tend to do really interesting mechanically but have kind of underwhelming characters and stories, and when I could have both of those things be good with something like the Xenoblade games instead, I tend to forget about these for a while until something reminds me and I'm in the right mood. Apparently I've really been in the mood in the past year or so, because I'm also halfway through replaying The Last Remnant for the first time in nearly 20 years, and I was working my way through SaGa Emerald Beyond too for a while until I lost access to what I was playing it on.

Anyway, I think this one might now be my favorite out of all the ones I've played. They did a great job of preserving the feel of an older game while improving almost everything about it along the way, exactly like they did with Trials of Mana. I'm less familiar with the original of this than I was with that one, but it's easy to see how faithful they were to character designs and the overall structure and progression of the game, while also fleshing out the story a decent amount, adding tons of QoL features, and retrofitting some parts of the combat system of newer games into it.

Some things are rather something or other because of the faithfulness to the original, like some of the female character designs being a bit iffy because 1993, but they're not too bad, and there are also some pretty neat character and enemy designs preserved pretty well from original through the transition from pixel art to full 3D. It's also funny playing it now in Current Year, because half the time it'll stick so close to gender stereotypes that it starts getting mildly annoying, and the other half of the time it feels like it was made in a cave somewhere where gender hasn't been invented yet. Some of that is just for convenience, since your emperor can be pretty much anyone most of the time, but it's still funny having people they/them the emperor while also making her wear heels because her class has an (F) at the end.

The real main part of the game is just so much murder. There's enough story and people to help out along the way to keep it motivated and moving forward, but the overwhelming majority of time in the game is the combat. Luckily it's plenty of fun. It doesn't have quite the complexity of something like SaGa Emerald Beyond with its additional turn order manipulation on top of everything else, but that just makes it more approachable. There's still tons of customization and plenty of room for experimenting and putting together broken characters and entire parties, and it all looks and feels good to play around with. Toward the end I did end up playing in shorter sessions because of how much there was, but I was still enjoying it right until the end.

Overall I had a lot of fun with it. I occasionally missed the extra layers of Emerald Beyond's combat, but other than that this does just about everything else better. It looks better, the characters and story are better despite still only being ok, and the exploration I guess is better by default because it actually exists. If someone wanted to try getting into the SaGa series, I think this would be a great place to start. I wouldn't mind seeing Xeen (Spirit of Wonder!) get to make more original games than just Paranormasight (which I really have to play one of these days) after they've thoroughly demonstrated how capable they are, but if Squenix also has them do more remakes like this and Trials of Mana I will not be complaining.

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I don't think I can bring myself to finish Corpse Factory. It's just not doing it for me.

I got it on sale at some point and then forgot about it for a while. I vaguely remember seeing reviews that said it doesn't really all come together, but it has some interesting enough stuff along the way, so I figured I might as well give it a try.

The prologue feels like a creepypasta written by and for 14-year-olds, which isn't inherently a bad thing, but it's not really my thing. It does enough to establish what the deal is with the story that I was curious enough to keep going a bit further though.

Luckily for me, once I got past that the way the story is written beyond there clicked better for me. It did still feel like too much stuff was being written by someone without experience with what they were talking about though, and I don't even mean anything around the deaths. I don't know who the writer is or what their background is, but it feels like so many other stories set in Japan written by someone whose only experience with it is anime/manga. There's also a bunch of tech stuff about security and avoiding being tracked that feels written by someone with only superficial knowledge of how any of that works, which fine, whatever, I'm used to that, except it comes up so often and seems plot-relevant, which makes it more frustrating to me.

The presentation is generally pretty good though. The characters and backgrounds are drawn pretty well, even if they're probably not going to leave a lasting impression on me, and some of the music is pretty effective at setting the tone of different scenes. I'm not 100% on board with some of the choices with the voice acting direction, but there are a surprisingly large number of big/recognizable names in the cast who are always at least ok at worst in anything they do, so it's mostly fine anyway.

I think it's really just the writing itself I have a problem with, which is itself a problem in a VN. I don't love any of the characters, but a couple were at least starting to grow on me. Too many still weren't a few hours in though. I don't hate them or anything, but either not enough had happened with them or had been revealed about them yet, or if it had it hadn't been impactful enough the way it was handled.

I was starting to get impatient waiting for things to start to be revealed, and it felt like a time to start wrapping things up, but then it spent like another half hour getting increasingly implausible before finally informing me act 1 was over. I'm sitting here having a harder and harder time suspending my disbelief that this whole thing hasn't already completely fallen apart on them multiple times over, and you're telling me there's still another 2/3 of the story left?

I just can't stick with it anymore to find out if it actually ends up going somewhere with all that. Maybe it does, and there's a point to all of it, and it all pays off eventually. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that queerness or mental illness aren't used as reasons or excuses for people doing bad things because I haven't seen how that plays out in the end, but there were definitely points where I was worried it could be heading in a bad direction with how they were handled. Enough of it was handled ok and had some realistic enough elements included that I hope it does do ok with it in the long run, but there were a few scenes that did make me wonder.

I dunno. It's clearly not my thing, but there also seem to be a decent number of people who do like it. It just feels strange for a VN to somehow pull together a cast like that and have fairly polished presentation with obviously talented people involved in the art/music too, and then to have probably the weakest writing of anything I've read recently. I want to like it more than I do because there are elements of it that I do like and some interesting ideas at times, but it's just not all coming together as something that works for me.

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I bought Stilstand without looking up anything about it or even reading the description, entirely on the strength of this screenshot, it having positive reviews, and it being on sale very cheap. It's actually good! Huzzah!

It's more of an interactive comic than anything. The main character (who's in that screenshot) is having kind of a rough time with depression and feeling directionless while also getting increasingly isolated, which is relatable. I appreciate that she's drawn slightly chubby, a little lumpy, and like she's struggling to keep it together and be presentable, which is also relatable.

She's definitely a bit of a trainwreck, but even though the subject matter is fairly dark the tone isn't necessarily, with plenty of surreal or absurd elements to represent her experiences and feelings.

I guess there's only really so much I can say about it before it gets into "just go play it yourself" territory, but if you have an hour to kill and a dollar or two to spare, I thought it was a good use of both of those things.

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I have successfully failed to play Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana, and I really should've known better. I'm still not convinced any of the older games are actually all that good even though I played some of them a bit a while back.

I kind of figured if this was a release from a couple years ago that they would've maybe improved anything at all compared to the 2005 version other than how it looks, but it still has all the same problems as Ys Origin (which was released within a year of that, so it's not surprising). I did not particularly like Ys Origin for a variety of reasons.

I will say that this at least has a more interesting setting and characters than Ys Origin, so I was cautiously optimistic that would be enough to get me through. I was willing to at least try to put up with the much worse female characters and fat characters and everyone's favorite g-word and sometimes-ok-sometimes-questionable voice acting (all relative to the modern games, i.e. 8-10), but the actual gameplay still kinda sucks.

I really miss being able to block/dodge after playing the newer ones. Your only defensive option being "don't stand there" doesn't feel very good a lot of the time. And your main offensive option being spamming the attack button isn't great either, with no skills or anything yet in these older ones. Add to that the terrible stat scaling I'd forgotten about (one or two levels makes things abruptly go from extremely difficult to completely trivial) and flying enemies being miserable to fight and I'm not having a good time, in the exact same way I didn't with Origin over a decade ago, because they're basically the same game mechanically.

As much as I really like the new games and they've been some of my favorites from the past decade, I think this is the last one pre-7 I'm willing to go back to to try to play/replay. I'm willing to give 7 and Revelation in Celceta a chance if they go on sale cheap enough because I think they have enough of the newer features the series is known for these days for me to get along with them better. Otherwise I'll just stick to the newer ones as they come out, or maybe they'll do modern remakes of some of the older ones some day like they've started doing with Trails in the Sky (which has been great so far). I'm glad someone out there liked the older ones enough for them to keep making them for like 40 years at this point, but they're not for me.

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I wasn't planning to play the first Xenoblade game for the third time. I had been replaying the third but was taking a break from it to do other things, and then suddenly they announced the Switch 2 versions of all three, so they got put on hold until December. I still wasn't going to replay the first one though. Then I decided to check out Xenokart, and here we are a few dozen hours later.

I didn't realize how fast NG+ goes compared to starting from scratch, and the Xenokart speeds it up even more. I'd never played NG+ before because I originally played the Wii version, so I couldn't exactly use that save file when XCDE came out. I think it took me about a third as long to finish the game and even more of the side quests and other optional stuff compared to the first time I played.

I had finally convinced a friend to play the game...last year? early this year?, but she got frustrated by the Fiora of it all and hasn't gone back to it since. That inspired me to specifically pay attention this time to anything that might bother someone like that, which made it less enjoyable for me, but there really is a decent amount of it in the first half-ish of the game.

The setting and world it takes place in are immediately super interesting, but that specific event and a lot of other stuff early on does make it seem like it might be using some fairly standard tropes in some kind of overdone ways, and it takes quite a while before it starts subverting them. It also at no point ever in the game manages to handle female characters particularly well (as much as I still like some of them anyway), and honestly the character writing in general is much weaker than in the later games. Having gone through all of the Xeno games again in some form or other in the past five years, this one feels a lot closer to Xenosaga in terms of how it handles characters than it does to other Xenoblade games, which kinda makes sense considering it was made closer to when they were.

I still think most of the strongest parts of the game are in the second half or last third of it. That's where most of the things in the story happen that make it stand out. I also still think a lot of the antagonists are maybe conceptually interesting but pretty weak in execution, like all the Faces. I've always liked the two main antagonists though, and they still hold up. And the sequence of reveals and recontextualizations in the last few chapters are still a wild ride this passage of fate.

And of course I also had to play Future Connected for a third time (once when XCDE came out, again when I replayed the base game, and again now). I know a lot of people say it's pretty skippable because it's short and has minimal relevance to the overall story of the series, but I always think it's extremely worth it every time.

I think it actually does a lot of things better than the base game and shows how much more they learned about making games in the decade between. The environments manage to simultaneously feel like they fit right in with the base game while also being better laid out and just better thought out in general, and like the DLC side games for both 2 and 3 a lot of the mechanics are more streamlined and a bit more refined. You don't have as many ways to break the game, which makes you have to actually engage when the systems instead of just overpowering them.

And this might be a bit of a hot take, but I think Future Connected is also actually better written. The main game has a much bigger and more consequential story with a lot more going on in it and a bunch of great moments, but the way the characters themselves and their interactions and relationships with each other are written in FC is much better and a lot closer to how good at it they did in XC3.

Kino is the goodest boy and a fairly realistic child character who isn't annoying for a change, unlike a lot of media. Nene captures the adolescent experience of being almost an adult and trying to be mature but not having gotten there quite yet. Melia has a huge amount of character growth, and especially the interactions between her and Tyrea are probably my favorite character moments out of all of XC1/FC and a big part of why I like both of them so much. Also Shulk is there too, I guess.

And they finally figured out how to write female characters and it's great! They can actually have a conversation with each other that doesn't involve talking about their feelings about Shulk for a change. They actually get to be full, complete people. It's nice.

I do still rather enjoy the story of the main game and am glad I went through it again, but it's a little hard to go back to in some ways after playing everything they've made more recently. I think playing Future Connected is actually a better experience for me these days though. We'll see if I take another pass at XC2 in a few weeks depending on what QoL features they add, if any, because it's definitely the jankiest and least polished one at this point, which is why I never finished my previous replay of it.

Either way I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of my XC3 playthrough at the end of the year and especially to the new game next year. I'm very curious to see what they do with something (allegedly, but we'll see) completely new, and I'm very hopeful their focus on better character writing and development over the years continues, because they've gotten quite good at it.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I want to like A Game About Digging a Hole, but I don't think I really do. It feels like one of those things I should appreciate, and it does kinda feel like there's something there once it gets going, but it just didn't come together for me.

It feels pretty janky at first, but with a few upgrades things start feeling better, which is standard for games following this kind of progression. I was ready for it to be over way before it actually was though. By the time I saw lava for the first time I had already been hoping for it to just end already, or at least hint toward anything about what's going on to motivate me to keep going, even if it's silly or stupid. I kept going until I hit the stealth section and then immediately uninstalled the game. I don't get along with stealth to begin with, so when I'm looking for a reason to keep playing, that's going to be the opposite for me. It also didn't help that the Switch version apparently never got the patch that fixed dynamite clipping through the ground, so it's completely useless.

In the end I mostly just feel mildly annoyed, but at the same time it's not even too far off from what I expected and wanted it to be, which is a weird combo. I wish the guy who made it well with his main game he's been working on though (but I will not be playing it because after multiple tries I've learned that survival crafting games are very not my thing).

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I just finished Illusion of Itehari, and I have mixed but ultimately mostly positive feelings about it.

Before I get distracted and forget, I do want to say how much it sucks that it takes a good 80 seconds or so just to get to the main menu, even skipping everything you're allowed to skip (if you don't it's nearly three minutes). There are so many unskippable logos and warnings and stuff. Go away and stop telling me to not pirate games. I already paid you real actual money for it. Do not do this in games. The maximum amount of time it should take before giving the player control over at least the menu cursor should be exactly as long as it takes to load the game far enough for the menu to be available. It's a minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but it makes it such a chore to start the game up again every time, which is not a good feeling to inflict on your players before they even start playing.

Anyway, aside from that it does most things much better. Usual disclaimer I should be including on more things where romance is a significant component: this is from the perspective of an aroace person who's perfectly fine with stuff like that but also doesn't entirely get it in some ways and probably sees it a bit differently in general.

Part of why I gave it a try anyway is that I saw positive reviews that said it focuses so much on worldbuilding that it gets in the way of the romance at times, and I can totally agree with that. The setting is very interesting and well developed, while some the romance parts of it feel kind of cliche in places and a bit tacked on.

I do genuinely like a bunch of the characters and think they interact in interesting ways, and the multiple competing factions and intrigue are mostly handled pretty well. And even the ways their relationships develop with the main character are often good too. It just sometimes can't resist falling into some very well worn cisheteronormative aimed-at-straight-women cliches in too many of the "romantic" scenes they deemed worthy of illustrating. They kind of feel like "this is romantic because we all understand that it's a signifier of romance in media" without really saying much about the relationship in question or developing it much.

Those were the weakest parts to me, but at other times they did a much better job showing how the relationships develop and why, and also tying that in with the different characters' perspectives on the story, their motivations, and how they and the main character influence each other as they spend more time in each other's lives. Between that and the surprisingly well thought out world and political drama I think that's what made the weaker of the romance scenes particularly stand out to me, because a lot of the rest of the time I really did enjoy it and looked forward to seeing how things would play out on different routes.

I guess the other thing that bugged me a little is that sometimes they lean a bit too hard into generic stock character tropes, particularly in the weaker of the romance scenes. They can been fully fleshed out otherwise and then just suddenly turn into whatever stereotypical That Kind of Guy, and it feels a bit off to me sometimes.

Between that and the abusive cop love interest, who's a worse person than the antagonists of most things I've read in the past few years (girl, you can't fix him, the best you can do is push him down the stairs), I found myself occasionally wondering if the writers don't have a healthy view of relationships, the target audience doesn't, or they're all just following expected genre conventions of not having a healthy view of relationships, just like the rest of our society as a whole. Evidence is inconclusive, but I still think straight people deserve better.

But I really did like the world a lot, and when they didn't get weird about stuff like that most of the characters too. I wouldn't have minded if there were more than two fairly minor other female characters in the entire cast who appear in maybe 3% of the story. I think the main character's supposed best friend doesn't even appear in more than one route, and she's barely relevant when she does. But the guys she spends all her time with instead are mostly interesting and get up to interesting things.

I also think it's maybe a little confused politically. Like it doesn't say anything explicitly, but I'm pretty sure just about every time someone uses violence against their oppressors other than in direct self defense it ends badly for them or someone suggests it won't work and they should find a better solution. It definitely feels like it's saying people should gradually reform their way out of hereditary monarchy, or even just get the nobility to be nicer, or else people's lives would be disrupted too much and it would freak them out.

On the other hand it's for the most part very opposed to the class divide in the first place and spends a good deal of time showing the harms of it to people unaware of what's been going on to try to win their support, and also the good parts of people working together across that divide to try to improve things for everyone.

I dunno. I feel like this came across more negative at times than I actually feel toward it, maybe because the things that bugged me stood out more in contrast to the well done parts. I still think out of other stuff I've gone through recently I definitely enjoyed Iwakura Aria more overall and thought it was more consistent, but I had a good time with this too, for the most part.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Speaking of things that I was morbidly curious about that happened to be cheap enough, Shadow Labyrinth: not good.

I honestly don't have much to say beyond that. It doesn't look like much, nothing interesting happens in the first however long I stuck it out (although it vaguely hints at stuff that may or may not be eventually later), and it feels kinda eh to play.

I'm still fascinated by the idea that someone tried to make a hybrid of metroidvania and Pac-Man, but it didn't actually work. There's a nearly infinite supply of much better indie metroidvanias available these days, so I can't see why I'd play any more of this one.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I wasn't planning the play the Super Mario RPG remake because I've always thought the original was only ok, but I found a copy super cheap, so what the heck?

The short version is that I still think it's only ok and don't really get what the big deal was. I never really did. I played the original in Snes9x back when the current year still ended in 9x, so it's not like I was coming to it super late or anything like that. It just didn't really do it for me like things like TTYD did later on.

I suppose I'll save my favorite parts for the end to finish on a high note, so let's get the rest out of the way first: it's a very ok 90s JRPG with a very ok story and very ok characters, none of which I've ever had a problem with but also none of which ever really stood out to me or left much of a lasting impression on me. Original characters like Mallow and Geno are totally fine, but I had completely forgotten what their deals were, unlike the extremely dedicated decades-long "Geno for Smash" fans. The story is fine too, which is par for the course for games of its type from that time too.

I have mixed feelings on the gameplay. I always thought and still think movement doesn't feel great, and any platforming it makes you do tends to fall on the bad side of mediocre too. The combat is more successful, although it did start to annoy me how much it seems to be balanced around either perfectly timing nearly every action command or spamming heals once you're later in the game. The timing of some of them just feels off to me, which is a little frustrating to go back to when I clicked well enough with TTYD's to finish the entire game with 5 hp because I could hit every prompt reliably. And I won't complain about it too much, but the last couple areas are still so tedious and annoying, like they consciously decided to stop making the game be fun anymore.

On the plus side, it looks much nicer now. I appreciated what they were going for in the original, but it didn't entirely work for me. I just don't think the SNES had enough memory or a big enough color palette to make it work, and I felt the same way about other games that tried something similar. They were able to actually pull it off this time around though, while retaining the feeling of the pseudo-3D sprites and designs, and I liked what they did with it overall.

Something that didn't really occur to me right away but that grew on me over time was how even for pre-rendered cutscenes they kept largely to the same very restricted set of poses and animations the original had, which I don't know if I've seen other remakes like this do in quite the same way. Rather than fully animating everything they stuck to having everyone emote using the same handful of poses that were originally chosen because of memory restrictions meaning they only got like a dozen or so frames total per entire character to use for movement, combat, dialogue, etc. It works surprisingly well at capturing that feeling from old SNES games despite being so much higher fidelity otherwise, which is a neat trick.

And of course a lot of the music is still great. It's still Yoko Shimomura, so what do you expect?

In the end I don't think it was a bad choice for me to replay it, but that's probably enough of this game for the foreseeable rest of my lifetime. It's still just ok to me, and I don't see that changing, for better or worse.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I actually finished Vampire Crawlers at least a month ago, much closer to when it came out, but I held off on its post because I could still think of one or two more things to try that might unlock something else. I finally got around to trying today, and while it turns out I was already done already, it was fun being reminded how ridiculous but satisfying it is to play.

I think it'll be much less influential than Vampire Survivors and have much smaller of an impact on the world, but at the same time I think it's a better put together game. They successfully managed to keep a lot of what worked in the previous game (very accessible, good sense of progression, plenty of silly but viable ways to play, and no reservations about letting you scale things up to the point you break the game) despite a huge shift in genre, and they even avoided some problems they had before (e.g. in this one it's still possible to actually tell what's going on and play normally when you're in game-breaking territory).

It's a much smaller game with nowhere near as much to do, but even if they never add anything else it still feels worthwhile. I wasn't sure how I felt in the first couple runs when it's still teaching you how the game works, but once it starts to open up it keeps unlocking new toys to play with at a steady pace. At the point I'm at I have a setup that completely and consistently trivializes everything in the entire game, but it took some work to figure it out and rig everything in my favor for it to be reliable, and it still actually feels good to play despite having zero risk because they still know how to give the player feedback that makes things feel satisfying and rewarding anyway, just like in Vampire Survivors.

If they add anything else in future updates or DLC I'll gladly come back, but as it is I already got some of the purest video game-ass video game enjoyment I've found so far this year.