faea gaming: October '26
table of contents
» Intro» Games
»» Threads of Fate
»» Duo Princess
»» Castle Crashers
»» Many Nights a Whisper
»» Out Zone
»» Radirgy Swag
»» Space Bomber
»» METRO QUESTER
» Outro
» Writing Share
» Sign-off
Hello, again. Happy Halloween, if you’re reading this on the day I posted :p. I’m not really one for festivities, but I guess I’m probably most aligned with this one more than anything else. Maybe one day it’d be nice to do something for it; dress up as a witch, or a bat, or a really strange spider standing up on two legs, or something else. Incidentally, since I know these posts regularly shoot above five thousand words nowadays and are probably scarier than any sort of spider, I added a little table of contents so you can click around to what sounds interesting if you feel like it, instead of having to just read the whole thing front to back.
Games I Played This Month
Threads of Fate
Could genuinely be my first ‘been with me through a lot’ game, since I started this 15-hour game mid-way through August and only just finished it at the start of this month. I suppose Monster Hunter: World basically single-handedly got me through COVID lockdown isolation, but these past six months have been a different sort of emotional turmoil. Anyway, I love this game a lot. I don’t think it plays very well. Both characters have a three-hit combo swing with very intense input buffer, and a level of tracking that magnetises you towards the nearest enemy like an Elden Ring boss. Most enemies don’t do a great deal other than walk towards you and occasionally throw out an untelegraphed melee combo of their own that can break out of yours – it is incredibly easy to accidentally input a full combo and lock oneself into getting hit, and multi-enemy fights are less about positioning around enemies, and more around positioning yourself around not locking onto the wrong enemy, flying into them, and getting hit. But most importantly – combat is, when enemies can’t be dispatched in a single combo, about waiting for them to swing, hitting them two or three times, and jumping away before they swing again. Less ‘bait-and-punish’ than ‘wait-and-punish’ – it’s just kind of boring. The input buffer, though, is mostly noticeable against bosses who tend to launch out high-damage swings before you can safely finish a combo, demanding an almost saint-like level of self-control if not launching jump attacks at them even more passively.
The two main characters have distinct special abilities that add their own wrinkles to the combat while somewhat matching up with their own personalities. Rue’s lack of self-identity – basically standing in as the prototypical PS1 Final Fantasy Guy – plays through his transformation mechanic, allowing him to transform into one of the last five enemy types defeated, whereas Mint’s comedically self-centered gluttony expresses through her spell system, letting her combine one of six elements with one of six spell properties for a total of thirty-six spell combinations that she can swap between on the fly. Both of these are used for light ‘colour-matching’ puzzle-solving – bringing the right transformation ability or spell to the right place to open a path – but in general-use combat, give a lot of options and experimentation that lean into the ‘RPG’ flavour of a Square game that its perfunctory stat-leveling systems imply. Many of Mint’s spells aren’t really that practical, so aside from beating elemental weaknesses there won’t be that much variety in how she plays despite the breadth of options, but Rue’s transformations are very fun to play around with due to all their different movement properties, even when Rue himself winds up better for combat.
The star of the show, then, is basically everything else being at the top of its game; I don’t tend to play Square games very often, being very misaligned with their most lauded output being post-crawler RPGs with bespoke-ish ATB combat systems, but I really do love the rest of their sensibilities with the right vessel to experience it through. The music here is so lovely that I had to go and see what else the composer was up to straight away, and the artstyle is really beautiful: some of the most impressive stuff I’ve seen on the PS1, large character models whose details read extremely well up close, and lovely use of colour that accentuates the character models against their backgrounds, while still leaving enough saturation to let each environment pop without being overwhelming. The localisation script is really charming to me, not only for being genuinely really funny – especially on Mint’s side – but particularly in the characters’ mannerisms feeling very ‘normal’ in how they speak with a very casual cadence and tone, where I feel a lot of game and particularly RPG dialogue can feel very acted. Not that there’s a problem with that, but I always love the former style when I see it. Fittingly, it’s a fairly straightforward story driven mostly by its character interactions, and that doesn’t ramp up the stakes until quite late into the show, especially on Mint’s side – Rue’s story is about the death of a loved one and his single-minded journey to avenge her and try to bring her back to life, while Mint’s is that she got kicked out of her kingdom for being kind of annoying, and now she wants to take over the world.
I think it’s good to play Mint’s story before Rue’s. Not only is Mint way cooler than any of us will ever be, I think Rue’s part of her story gives just enough insight into his own self to make his story intriguing, whereas Mint’s contribution to Rue’s story is mostly her popping in on occasion for sort of awkward comic relief that I don’t feel carries the same charisma as seeing her fuller personality in her own story. I don’t think I’d have been particularly taken by her if I’d played Rue’s story first, really?
dewprism is a way better name can we be honest. why’d they change it
Duo Princess
Ran through as Maya, who is definitely much worse off than her sister in this game thanks to a ranged three-shot combo and a pretty dire jump attack that just cannot control enemies as well as Mint’s fast, high-hitstun melee combos, jump-kicks, and pretty ridiculous magic. This does make the game more interesting, really: Maya has to put a lot more effort into controlling crowds than Mint does, and her magic being limited to stricter timings and ranges than her sister’s explosive spells means her spacing has to be fairly deliberate to tack real damage onto enemies since her basic attacks are so weak. Enemies aren’t very interesting to challenge this, though, with most directly charging directly towards her at varying speeds that typically range from “slower than her” to “not much slower than her” to try to hit her with melee attacks, meaning most encounters are round up fairly cleanly by circling around them until they fall into a neat little group. More complicated rooms, like the constantly-respawning adds in the penultimate stage’s boss gauntlet, are mean in a way that bare genuinely interesting challenge – even if the solution is still a more complex permutation of “run around in circles to group up adds while your mana bar fills back up” – most of the game remains very quaint. I still can’t help but be positively charmed by it, though – the particular style of 2D / 3D visuals, the drawings of all the characters with stupid moeblob eyes, the fact that you can despawn most of the enemies by running far enough away from them, the fact that that one character is the final boss for reasons I still can’t tell but can maybe try to intuit a little better this time. I am very taken by this one, and very excited to tear through the rest of EasyGameStation's catalogue, hopefully soon...!
Castle Crashers (purchase here)
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It’d be easy to negatively compare this thing to any other beat ‘em up, but it’s not really one of those; it’s some other thing. Enemies are intensely passive, doing their little Donovan footsies halfway across the screen from you and generally doing very little without having a projectile. Enemies don’t do anything different from each other unless they have a projectile – there is exactly one enemy type and behaviour in the game, only differentiated by their access to projectiles, except for the rare Beefy, who lumbers around slowly, has a proximity auto-grab with maybe a little too much range, and sort of collapses helplessly to your spread magic which probably covers half the screen. Most other enemies? You can infinitely air-juggle while flying. The most threatening enemies are the ‘player-clones’ (that’s the first type) that have higher weight values that mean they can’t be juggled infinitely. There are three enemy weight classes – lightweights, that can be infinited; middleweights, that can be air-juggled for a little while; and heavyweights, that can’t be lifted at all – the only threatening enemies, really, are the latter two types if they have access to magic or projectiles. The hardest enemies in the game are the early-midgame Coneheads, that vary from middle and heavyweight and have access to untelegraphed, frame 1 bomb throws; the trouble is, the answer to the heavier enemies is simply standing at the other side of the screen and using magic or arrows while they all amble towards you.
It’s an RPG, with stat-leveling and gearing based on level, but experience gain is simply: one experience point per hit. Not only does this make multiplayer play………….??????, but ‘optimal’ leveling (not just for stat points, but for better, higher-level weapons) then relies on simply not leveling strength at all to optimise the amount of hits you deal to an enemy before it goes down. Perhaps overdoing it? But you want high magic so you can kill heavy enemies easier and melt bosses, you want at least some defense so you don’t have to keep running back and buying potions, you want some agility because… you can level movement speed in a video game. Want to play Insane Mode for some reason? My friend and I did, for a little bit, but because I’d only just got the other stats as high as I wanted them (and because my friend was, like, thirteen levels below me), we were sat whacking stage 1 and 2 enemies for minutes at a time before they went down. It’d feel better if it felt like it made the game much harder – I’ve gone into a bad stat build, my bad – but it doesn’t, really! You can pretty easily infinitely juggle every enemy on a screen at once. So – it just makes it take longer! It just makes it more boring!
my bad. I played the 2008 indie darling that I’ve known I haven’t liked for almost two decades. blame my friend not me!
Many Nights a Whisper (purchase here)
I like it! The conceit is playing as a Dreamer: spent ten years training in a temple, away from home and family, for the ceremony of firing a flaming shot into a beacon in order to make people’s wishes come true. The catch is – if you miss the shot on the day of the ceremony, none of the wishes are granted. Spend the day practising the shot: get to grips with shooting, figure out the right strength and arc to fire into the grand chalice, and pick up on any aids to help line up the one important shot; spend the night listening to people’s wishes, and decide whether or not to grant them. The dialogue between the Dreamer and her Mentor, and the dreaming townsfolk towards the Dreamer, touch base on a lot of different ideas that centre around the ethics of the ceremony itself, and the weight of the responsibility and expectations on a single person; while some of the ideas – particularly those centred around the weight of the ten-year training regimen for the Dreamer – feel somewhat uncommunicated through the game’s rather brisk ~1 hour runtime, the discussions as a whole do a lot to challenge the meaning of succeeding at the shot. I was already somewhat hoping I’d manage to miss the final shot, despite having lined it up perfectly in practice, because of my aversion to the idea of wish-granting magic, but while landing the shot is framed and celebrated as a straightforward success by the society, by the narrative it is simply another outcome, no better or worse than the alternative.
Out Zone
Games like this and Pocky & Rocky are what I’d call ‘soft memo’: they are driven more by setpiece memorisation than anything like precision execution or adaptive play, but the ‘memorisation’ is more driven by figuring out broadly how to approach each challenge than puzzling out and drilling strict movement sequences to pull apart individually-brutal setups. Out Zone has some good tools for a game like this: a pickup-driven weapon swap that completely changes how the player character controls – a free-aimed shot that requires the character to physically turn to aim, and a fixed-aim shot that can only fire upwards, but allows the character to strafe while firing – and very strong, random power-up drops – a massive speed boost, a destructive short-ranged flamethrower, a spinning ball that circles the whole screen on a very specific trajectory – that lean into the ‘looseness’ of the challenges by offering huge extra power at the cost of having to reinterpret the challenges under the downsides of the power-ups, or try to improvise it. There is a genuinely much-appreciated level of variance just through this system – power-up drops being not only being random, but dropped from different enemies in a wave each play, can lead to the occasional unwanted pickup being dropped in the way, suddenly forcing weighing up whether it’s better to go off-route by taking a different path, or to go off-route by picking it up and going the normal way. Beyond these, the base two weapons make routing reasonably interesting since a particular section will never tend to be perfect for one weapon or another, having parts that push against the ‘ideal’ weapon for each before allowing a switch: the free-aim weapon struggles with individual tougher, bullet-heavy enemies, and the fixed shot does worse in denser sections where enemies spawn all over – it literally cannot do anything about an enemy spawn below it!
It was a very fun learn until about Stage 4, where the stage setups start running out of momentum somewhat – often repeating previous motifs and struggling to throw in any new really transformative challenges into the mix, at which point I struggled to hold interest: another enemy-dense maze where I wiggle around the free-shot, another death-pit maze without much more pressure than the occasional aimed bullet, another section where I slowly inch up with the fixed shot and tap-dodge large enemies. There are a fair amount of interesting setups, but the vast majority of the game falls into one of a small few categories with repeated ideas and elements that don’t change them enough for the game to stay overall interesting, even in its short ~15 minute runtime. Nonetheless, I think it has quite strong fundamentals! I played a little bit of its successor FixEight and it seems to trade the higher degree of variance for more varied stage setups, as well as just being slower in a tactile sense – slower character movement, slower bullets and traps that are easier to see coming (though not necessarily easier to deal with). I don’t mind it, but I miss what was lost from this game moving forwards; would be interested in seeing a purer iteration on what this one’s doing.
Radirgy Swag (purchase here)
Radirgy Swag isn’t the first Radirgy remix game that Milestone / RS34 put out: Radirgy de Gojaru, part of Noa’s Xbox 360 release and later a standalone 3DS title, truncates the game into a fully caravan-style experience, with no real stage progression or bosses and instead being focused on quick-killing waves of enemies for score, and repeated use of the series’ defining ABSNet system – a meter that leads to a large bullet-cancelling aura – to build up the meter as quickly as possible, and use it repeatedly before it expires to increase its radius. Swag isn’t too different structurally, but instead of focusing on the ABSNet as its core mechanic to expand on, it focuses on item juggling with the sword. Swag is built around pink items that increase the entire game speed: increasing the speed of enemies, their attacks and their bullets – to quite literally undodgeable extremes at higher speeds – and most importantly: the score multiplier. Radirgy’s own item juggling is woefully under-explored beyond unreliably high-level optimisations, so Swag locking high scoring behind juggling into a specific item constantly highlights the interesting dynamics of this: moving up towards items while juggling them swaps them faster but with higher risk of accidentally swapping it away from an important item, and grabbing items requires letting go of your sword – your highest damage by a long shot – or they’ll just keep getting juggled. It’s a fun response to Radirgy in specific, but it doesn’t feel totally robust: the loop is basically to fly on top of enemies, flick every item into pink speed items or big score items, and tap the ABS button repeatedly while everything explodes underneath you at eight times speedup.
Swag leans heavily into unlockables with its position as a post-arcade game: the left side of the screen is used to track a neverending spew of quest objectives (that are largely passively completed through normal play), and picking up the brown and yellow ‘garbage’ items progresses towards unlocking an album of character illustrations, as well as largely somewhat silly gameplay modifiers. I’m very fond of the idea of using meta-unlocks for these sorts of light, gameplay-agnostic bonus unlocks as a little bit of extrinsic motivation for committing to an arcade grind and, so long as the scope allows, I would love to see more post-arcade titles implement little bonuses for consistent play. The trouble here is twofold: one is that one of the main attractions of the game is its endless mode, uncapping the distance limit (and the forced end of a run) through fulfilling certain in-run requirements – including picking up specific items, which makes the core of the game much more dynamic!… as well as, at least according to a dubiously-sourced shmupswiki page, unmarked meta-progression progress? I don’t know if this is actually true, because I’m unsure if I’ve ever actually reached the in-run requirements myself – I didn’t know about them while I was playing – but if that’s true… oops lol
The other is that you can quite comfortably reach top ten on the Steam leaderboards* without really denting the meta-unlocks at all; despite all of this showmanship, the game is just too linear and straightforward for there to be much of a grind to accommodate much in the way of unlockables to begin with. Though that’s coming from the point of view of tracking it as a more traditional White Knuckle STG Grind, which realistically I don’t think it’s really meant to be: the simplicity, low difficulty, short runtimes, and heavy focus on bonus unlocks despite all of those strikes me as something deliberately more casual, to while away an idle thirty minutes or so every once in a while. Does that counter my personal little gripes with how it all comes together? I’m not sure, really, and I’d definitely appreciate there being more than ten people all-time on Steam who took this game seriously for a little more motivation to keep playing… but that realistically is how I was playing it – something small and light to pick apart and learn over the course of a week or so when I didn’t want to do anything more demanding. So, I like it : )
Space Bomber
Lots of cool mechanics here that you can straight up remove the ability to engage with if you enter a coin and then press ↑↑↑↓↓↓↑↑↑↑↑↑↑ before starting the game. Instead of playing as the standard ship, which can grab enemies with a claw to pocket them and remove them from the field, then being able to deploy them as allies or throw them as bombs for scoring, the tetromino ship – an upside-down T-block – can only have a single set of its bullets on-screen at once akin to early shmups, and replaces the claw mechanic with a drill; instead of being able to capture enemies and deploy them strategically as with the claw, the drill simply deals damage. A lot of damage – enemy deployment can match its damage under perfect scenarios, but the claw can only hold three enemies at a time, many of the later bosses spawn very few adds, and the drill can speedkill them before they get to attack without having to worry about all that.
The stock claw-grabbing mechanics make for really interesting routing, and definitely more active and multifaceted than Drill, but the tetromino ship is transformative enough to remain interesting despite most of the nuance being stripped away. The claw ship can instantly remove a non-boss enemy from the field with the claw, while the tetromino has to approach and hold out the fairly close-range drill for most of its duration to take out most difficult enemies – sometimes not even being enough damage for some of the later, scarier ones. Routing stages seems much easier for the claw ship, while routing the later bosses seems much moreso for the tetromino, which still has the extra wrinkle of needing to play up close to stay in drill range and to fire its shot quickly, whereas the claw ship only needs to leave the bottom of the screen to grab a new enemy if its stock is out. Don’t get me wrong, the tetromino is still the clear less interesting option – if you’re not here for really cute enemies pushed through late ‘90s pre-rendered visuals, or the bare lightest amount of Psikyo Bullshit Patterns, you’re probably here for the claw.
Despite this clearly being a score-focused game, I am earnestly trying to get a survival 1cc of this – it’s about 10 minutes long, cute, fairly easy, and I find the aforementioned Psikyo Bullshit to be fairly fun to route out. I don’t tend to do this, but I’m fairly generously using practice savestates for this clear. I don’t really like straying too far from what would be the Stock Experience of a game, but two things make me care a little less about this: we are, unless playing Space Bomber on a real coin-operated cabinet in an arcade, extraordinarily detached from the reality and culture these games were even designed to exist within; and the early game of these things tends to get a little boring after playing too much. I was also averse to it because I felt it would make the experience of play feel more like an obligation than a hobby – something to be Completed more than enjoyed – and I don’t even value 1ccs or the culture around them very much nowadays, but I think the puzzle of it is rather compelling for the right sort of game: route out each section individually, and then get to see the culmination of your efforts in the full runs (or blow up in the first half of the game because the routing was stricter than you thought and you forgot to practice it for the past six hours). I think for games with less strict routing, or just higher executional demands than I can really match, I’d find this approach kind of horrible and would prefer to just play full runs and care less about rigorously working towards a goal, but for something like this I find it quite fun.
METRO QUESTER (purchase here)
Lots of mechanics that, when sinking 1hr+ sessions into this at a time sat motionlessly in front of your computer, come off as awkwardly-tuned DRPG ideas: you have a resource that spends every time you take an action in a dungeon, limiting each excursion to very small, minutes-long sessions; and enough food needs to be gathered every ten days to keep the party fed. It sounds interesting on paper, but doesn’t really play out that way: food is incredibly easy to find, which means food-gathering is never really a deliberate concern, which means it doesn’t force itself into decisions for how to spend your limited movements per day, which means your limited movements per day don’t really cause any interesting decisions themselves, instead just acting as an overbearing means of limiting how long you can stay in a dungeon in the same way that, say, taking damage in Wizardry might end up forcing you back to town more organically. Play long enough and you might accidentally move your mouse or something, and reveal… the mobile game touch-screen UI. And suddenly the harsh limitations on how long an individual crawl can last make sense: it’s not meant to be Harsh Decision-Making Game Play Mechanics so much as it’s meant to force the game to fit itself into tighter schedules: fifteen-minute bus journeys, a slow lunch break. Unfortunately, building itself to accommodate shorter sessions enforced by real life mean it doesn’t give itself much ‘off-boarding’ when playing on the big screen on a weekend with no obligations… I finished this ~10 hour game in three sessions, my bad.
Certainly a much better fit for actual mobile play than what I did, and while I’d have much rather done that – and will do if I get round to playing any of its three successors – I still had a pretty good time. The dungeon-crawling isn’t very involved, and the combat almost feels like an autobattler, not really leaving much minutiae beyond having your skills already set up, hitting the ‘start battle’ button a bunch, and watching things explode – so the core of the game revolves around party-building and the gear system. New gear is acquired fairly frequently, and aside from a few innate and learned skills, most combat abilities are tied to equipped weapons rather than the characters themselves, so build-crafting and overall strategy-building is very free-form and has just enough nuance to it to tease out some strange skill combinations, but the momentum of finding new tools to play around with is what kept it most interesting for me, even when I was sticking to what I already had that was working. Since RPGs are so heavily tied to character progression, I’m very sensitive to the methods and the pacing they use to hand it out – the breakneck pace of party choice and growth in a Pokemon game is why I always seem to tear through at least one a year, even when I’m not in the mood to play Pokemon. I suppose QUESTER isn’t that different, really: it doesn’t have the breadth of character choices, but new options are picked up so quickly that character growth happens incredibly quickly, and with a lot of personal control over how characters change, and I find all that very compelling, even without necessarily having high enough difficulty to really challenge all those choices.
~*ʚїɞ*~
Thank you for reading, as always. Last month I was thinking out loud about how to structure these to take some load off myself, and make them a bit more digestible. I added the table of contents to hopefully make them a bit easier to read, but maybe another short-term answer is just to summarise some of the things I didn’t feel like writing a full ‘thing’ about down here. So, what else have I been doing? I cleared Wild Guns Reloaded on Hard, and Wild Guns SNES on Normal. The former is still one of my favourite action games right now, and sitting down and grinding it out on 1p really sunk in how well-constructed it is, and gave me a real appreciation for the new stages that I didn’t get to play much beforehand as well. The latter almost feels like a demake in comparison, lol, just because of how well the widescreen fits the game – the 4:3 resolution is just so easy to control in comparison, the screen scroll isn’t that impactful due to how optimal play is just to not move the character – and by extension, the screen – anyway, and scoring is easier for factors other than the game being easier as well, so it’s incredibly easy to stockpile extends. It’s still a lovely game, but I think I do just like Reloaded a lot more overall. I played some more Platine Dispositif games: I cleared Royal Edoma Engine on Novice No Miss, Advanced, and I tried no-missing Advanced but got annoyed at how strict my Stage 1 route was and stopped; I cleared Occultist Girl Magatsuhi, an extremely easy and fairly pedestrian Space Harrier / Night Striker deal with a cute aesthetic but didn’t do much more for me than get me interested in its inspirations; I cleared Gundemonium Recollection on Novice, which is a very fun Touhou-inspired-but-not-Touhou-inspired, if you catch my drift?, horizontal bullet hell that probably deserves much more time than just the couple hours for Novice; and I played some way into Bunny Must Die!, which I didn’t enjoy very much for its standard Metroidvania structure more than anything more particular it was doing, and the more particular things it was doing include having a wiggling cat photo as one of its bosses, which is kind of awesome.
Did I play anything else? I’m not sure. I haven’t been able to do a great deal beyond playing games, watching YouTube videos of other people playing games, and lying in bed making strange noises. I’ve been trying to push myself towards more hobbies the back end of this month, though. I love creative hobbies, but the act of creating an entire thing is sometimes a little daunting for me to actually get started, even if it’s something really small and low-stakes, so I’ve been sort of avoidant of the things I’m reasonably good at. My solution is to do even smaller things, and things that I’m not very good at. I bought a really big and extremely detailed colouring book as something adjacent to drawing, but isn’t actually drawing. I also got a cute looking sewing kit from Hobbycraft for £2 that I thought would be fun to do because I’ve wanted to get into some sort of needlework for, like, most of my life? It seems like a nice little introduction. My feet shrunk two sizes without me realising, which made shoe shopping this month sort of interesting, and because I’m starting to sink more deliberate time into these arcade games, I made a little list of ones I’d like to pick at and try to clear. I had to awkwardly put that bit at the end of this paragraph where it doesn’t really fit because I didn’t want to break it with an image, but here you go:
Maybe I want to do Gundemonium Recollection on Advanced as well? I also want to do Platine Dispositif’s ‘_____’ shmup, which I put some good time into a couple months back but never finished up or talked about. It’s fairly easy, but really good and interesting; definitely one of my favourites of theirs. I’m least passionate about Deathsmiles of these, but I want to give another CAVE an honest go and it seems like the pick of theirs I might find most interesting. Touhou 1 I specifically want to clear on Lunatic, since I’ve done it on Normal and Lunatic doesn’t seem much harder beyond less room for error. I doubt I’ll actually land many of these in the near future, though. It’s more aspirational than anything, but I want to try to focus harder on landing clears so it’s nice for me to actually note down the games I want to play for when I’m in that sort of mood, lol. I’d like to do some other genres, too. I played a bit of Pang a couple weeks back and while I don’t know if it’s a 1cc grind game for me, I was really into what it was putting down. I love Snow Bros., and while I don’t think I’m capable of clearing that game any time soon, I’ve been told Rod-Land is a cute and easier single-screen action game and they got Tsukasa Tawada on that one so I have to do it for him. I’d love to learn a beat ‘em up, but they’re all so long :( and none of them are cute enough for me anyway.
I didn’t read much again this month, but I want to keep the writing-share going, so I’m going to boost a few pieces from some friends of the site about some things that are more personally relevant to me.
Streets of Rage 2, Final Fight, The Floor, The Ceiling | lakespirit.love
We must have played this game together for… god, like thirty hours according to Fightcade? It’s a really, really wonderful game – one I don’t feel I have the broader genre knowledge to write about myself – and lakespirit breaks down the belt-scroller fundamentals, SoR2’s own enemy layering, and expresses hope for the future of a medium that’s still younger than my dad.
Makai Toushi SaGa | birthbydrip
The first SaGa is one of my favourite RPGs – enough for me to have written my own article on it – and pang breaks down the playful, scattershot structure of the game: the aesthetic layering of its world, the differing narrative structures between its scenarios, and its penchant for one-off jokes and ideas.
Mother and Immanent Adventure | scenicsystems
The other RPG I’ve written about on this site…! Mads takes the Dragon Quest-parodic structure of MOTHER and discusses how – despite joyfully wearing the formula of the prototypical fantasy RPG – its framing recontextualises a structure built to express conquering and subsuming a world, to simply existing within it.
Mioko Yamaguchi, the princess who never dropped her crown | once bitten, twice shy
I’ve been listening to a lot of Yamaguchi again lately, but I would likely never have even heard of her were it not for this piece. Shy goes through her personal history discovering Yamaguchi’s music and combs through all of her album releases in order, talking about each release and the artists that helped create them.
It’s coming close to the end of the year now, isn’t it? I guess with the temperature dropping a lot over here recently, it’s starting to feel more real, and I’m starting to get a bit sentimental as is sort of tradition for me around this sort of time. How’s your year been going? Better than mine, I hope. Keep yourselves safe. Reach out to an old friend, or a new one. Do something that makes you happy. Let’s talk again soon, okay? ~♡