#ame reviews

[amewinterswriting]

Ame Plays: Littlewood

A cute little life sim that's perfect if you like Stardew Valley but felt the pesky 'farming' bit was keeping you away from more interesting things.

You are the hero who vanquished the Dark Wizard and saved the world. The problem is, you can't remember any of it. Still, there's a town to rebuild and your trusty travel companions are by your side. Along the way, you can make new friends, pick up some new hobbies and maybe learn about what really happened in your past...

The good:

All characters who live in your town (except Dudley, the wise old mentor-type character who practically raised you) are romanceble regardless of gender.

There are canon queer 'default' romances between the villagers if you don't romance them.

Everyhing has clear lists of what you need to progress: I especially liked that in order to get particular travellers to visit, you need to sell certain items and it tells you exactly what you need to sell in your journal. Other games would make it a trial-and-error discovery process.

Absolutely everything about your town is decided by you - the position of houses, decor, paths, elevation, plants, etc. This can be edited at any time and destroying anything reimburses all the materials used to create it, meaning you are free to tinker and redesign with no penalty to progress.

The plot and characters are all nicely written with a surprising amount of depth.

A surprisingly good card game built-in - a simple trading card structure with a fair bit of strategy and anticipating opponent's plays.

No combat - the only 'dangers' just exhaust some energy and kick you out of an area if you are 'hit'. You mostly just have to avoid getting hit.

The bad

After marriage, your spouse just hangs out inside your home despite having their own and doesn't roam around outside or have dialogue about their interests/personality anymore.

A lot of the late game is dependent on random chance for acquiring the right items. At a certain point, you will be advancing time just to refresh the items available in the shops or areas. At this point, it starts to feel very grindy.

The last few achievements are literally just grinding for the sake of it. By this point in the game, you have more resources than you can ever use but you will still need to spend a few more hours mining and chopping trees if you want that achievement. This is more a case of 'when do you decide to stop playing?' - if you feel like you've achieved everything you want, you can absolutely call it quits earlier than this.

I thoroughly enjoyed the game while I was in the early/middle stages of it, but it felt like it just needed a little more to keep it interesting in the late game. Perhaps more interactions post-marriage - not just between yourself and your spouse, but also the budding romances we get a glimpse of after the wedding. Perhaps a set of community requests where your villagers want to add in more facilities or have noticed their neighbours would benefit from a new thing. Maybe a few more events - there's usually only about 3 a month, which makes 12 all year. It often feels like a long time before anything different happens to break up the grind. That said, it's a small indie game and I've sunk a good 54 hours into it, which is comparable to most JRPGs but at a quarter of the price, even if I had picked it up at full price (I actually picked it up as part of a Humble Bundle, but it also goes on sale very regularly). I've definitely gotten my value for money out of Littlewood and would recommend for a cozy, chill game.

[amewinterswriting]

Ame Reads: Charmed Life by Diana Wyn Jones

I'll be honest - this one was a reread for me. I read most of the Crestomanci books as a child and could still remember the broad brush strokes of the plot.

What I couldn't remember was just how skillfully written it was and still is. While the book is marketed at children as young as 10, and the plot moves quickly because of this, it never feels rushed or oversimplified. In fact, I've read adult and young adult fiction with less complex plots, character motivations and language.

(Spoilers after the cut and discussions of themes which does include familial abuse and mentions of death)

I remembered that Gwendolyn was not a nice person (to put it mildly). I didn't remember exactly how much of an evil little shit she is. In any other children's story, it would have been easy to paint her as selfish but simply that, in the way many children can be. She sees that her brother has something she doesn't (magical power) and takes it from him simply because she wants it for herself. But the story makes it explicit that she planned the sacrifice of her own brother and she even casually mentions that they will need to kill him multiple times due to his extra lives, showing that she has thought about this for months in detail and clearly has not had any hesitation or stirrings of guilt whatsoever.

In a more subtle way, the story does make it clear that Cat has been abused by his sister for his whole life - Janet, Julia and Robert all comment on it in various ways, even if the word 'abuse' never comes up. Crestomanci and the other adults are also aware but unsure of what exactly to do, especially as they aren't entirely certain that Cat isn't a willing participant in Gwendolyn's plans. For a book written in 1977, aimed at children, it's really quite radical that Diana Wynn Jones even hinted at abuse within a family unit, let alone an older sibling as an abuser.

Reading as an adult, the way in which Cat and Janet are profoundly let down by the adults is also radical and quite tragic because it's very understandable how it happened. Crestomanci is aware of virtually everything the whole time (or very early on) and yet the whole plot is Cat and Janet trying valiantly to fix the mess Gwendolyn's left them in without any adult help because they don't know the adults can be trusted and the adults think that not revealing what they are aware of is the best for everyone involved. Everyone is doing what they believe is best given the information they have, but everything could have been resolved with a few short conversations and more trust shown from both sides. And I'm really glad Janet gets to point out that Crestomanci should have talked to them sooner and he doesn't brush her off.

Other surprisingly dark things in hindsight - Gwendolyn summoning the 'drowned life' of Cat as a petty power play not once but twice, and Cat not realising why exactly it gives him the heebie-jeebies but having a very strong reaction to seeing his own drowned corpse (understandable) each time. Except that the second time, it's accompanied by the other times he's died, including at birth. A giant foetal corpse is not exactly something you expect to see in a children's book!

Anyway, I'd love to see the Chrestomanci series adapted into a television serial that really takes it seriously. Like the recent (ish) adaptation of Pullman's His Dark Materials that the BBC still hasn't finished. Hour-long episodes, I reckon, something like Charmed Life as a two-episode special to introduce the world and concepts (and Janet waking up in Gwendolyn's bed would be the perfect place for a cliffhanger at the end of episode 1, let's be honest) and then take an episode for each book in the series so while the episodes could be watched in any order, watching them all will give you more information about who reoccurring characters are and what they're doing.

In the meantime, I definitely think I'm going to dig out the rest of my old books and go through the rest of the series myself. Diana Wynn Jones' writing is complex enough that it really demands a second look. If your only exposure to her work has been through (the magnificent) Studio Ghibli adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle, consider this your sign to delve into her works, too. Charmed Life is an excellent starting point for the whole Chrestomanci series but you really can read them in any order, as the plots of each book are self-contained, with some characters making regular appearances throughout.

[amewinterswriting]

Ame Reads: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

The queer myth retelling that everyone and their mum has read. (At least, mine has!) (Mild spoilers)

I really don't know what to say about this one. The prose is good, just poetic enough to invoke feeling but sparse enough to keep the plot moving. It's a very queer story that doesn't simply revolve around taboo and the difficulties of being queer. It's a tragedy about pride and hubris and the complications of being put on a pedestal.

The book assumes a bit of familiarity with Greek mythology in general (which is just as well, if it stopped to explain who everyone was in any great detail it would certainly slow the story down to an interminable crawl) but it does a very good job of putting the characters choices into context, explaining the social norms of the time.

In fact, I think that's the greatest triumph of the novel - humanising these characters of myth and legend and making their tale all the more tragic for that humanity. Even though we know that the lovers are doomed (if you didn't, uh, sorry for spoiling one of the oldest tales of humanity but also the novel itself tells you early on), you still feel some hope that somehow, through some trickery, they may be able to somehow escape that fate.

In short, a very moving read and thoroughly recommended.

[amewinterswriting]

Ame Plays: Little Dragon Cafe

Very cute, but annoyingly short of the mark.

I want to love this game. You play a child struggling to run a cafe with their sibling and raise a dragon, with extra flavour thrown in by the wide cast of guest characters, all with their own problems that can be solved through the magic of a good meal.

There are some great elements: the aesthetic is cute and cozy, the dragon is adorable and does a lot to help and support you, the island is really well designed to give you a lot to explore in a relatively small space and the soundtrack is way better than it really needs to be.

The problems start when you realise that the game isn't quite sure what it wants to be. You are encouraged to be physically present at the café to help during rushes (and stop the staff from slacking) and failure to step in will lose you customers because after long enough waiting they will leave in a frustrated huff.

If you spend too much time not gathering ingredients, however, you will inevitably run out of ingredients for your dishes. In fact, towards the late game, even if you spend all your time foraging, you will likely run out of ingredients and have to swap dishes around in your menu - it's just mathematics. If you get 25 customers in a day, and each one orders a dish with three ingredients, that's 75 ingredients used. (You can choose to use up to six ingredients in a recipe, which would obviously deplete your ingredients faster) Which means you need to gather at least that many ingredients per day. The ingredients are somewhat randomly generated at gathering points, so even if you keep the numbers up, you might not get the specific ingredients that you need for the dishes you currently have on your menu. My best attempts at efficiently foraging result in under 120 ingredients in a day and that involves completely ignoring the cafe and any reasonable bedtime for a small child, gathering from dawn till midnight - or beyond. In fact, you don't have to sleep at all unless plot demands it - there's no passing out and being carried back home, there's absolutely no penalty for simply staying awake and gathering ingredients. Which I like as a game mechanic, but given you are controlling a small child, feels very odd and at odds with the cozy aesthetic. Just don't sleep and work yourself into the ground for the sake of your cafe feels like the wrong message to send, somehow...

The actual act of helping out in the cafe feels very cramped and clumsy, which doesn't help matters. You have to run around taking orders, submitting the orders in the kitchen, delivering the food and cleaning up the dishes afterwards, plus interrupting anyone who decides to slack off - and they will, frequently. Everyone gets in the way of everyone else, the little galley to clean up dishes is a particularly bad spot for getting pushed around by NPCs as everyone tries to get in and out of the small space.

Still, you can ignore the actual act of running the cafe with little penalty. Your approval never actually drops as far as I can tell, not even if you decide to skip the day to trigger the next bit of plot and go straight to sleep at 7am and have no customers for the day (because for some reason, the cafe is only operational while you're awake, despite your sibling being somewhat capable of running the place when you aren't there). This at least means you aren't losing ingredients that day, but it does present the best way of completing the game as...not actually engaging with the game and skipping as many days as possible as being the most rewarding way to play.

The perplexing part of the cafe is that the 'customers' don't actually pay for their meals. There is no currency in the game nor a shop to spend it in, so that makes some sense. One of the staff characters starts working for you to pay off his bill - he was just going to dine and dash - but apart from that one scripted mention of money, there's no actual exchange of money you see as the player. Which makes the bad reviews and frustrated customers really funny - like guys, you are literally getting a sit down dinner for free, maybe be nice to the kids?

The other half of the game is exploring the island with your little dragon companion, which does at least feel more relaxing and fun. There is a bit of an issue with the jump mechanic - occasionally the button will be unresponsive and occasionally you'll catch on ledges and not be able to get the full jumping height, which is mostly only an issue because there are so many little steps and ledges to jump up that you will run into both multiple times a day. Once your dragon grows a little, you can ride him to traverse and he can thankfully jump much better than the human kids. The dragon will also help gather some ingredients, and randomly emote around you and he's genuinely a delight to be around.

There are also monsters and egg-birds. The monsters will 'attack' you but given this is a cozy game, they'll only steal meals from your pockets - there's no health to lose. They can be hunted for their meat, which is a gamble (the dragon sometimes gets distracted and doesn't hunt the monster the first time you ask) or you can lure them into running headlong into a rock which also results in meat. The egg-birds must be collected and then they will live near the cafe and produce an egg a day you can pick up...for a few days. Then they'll return to where you got them from. Which feels like annoying busywork for no reason - you already know where the bird is, you just have to go back there every so often to get them back.

You do have a small garden that will produce ingredients as time passes, or instantly if dragon manure is used, but you cannot choose what it produces or how much, it will just randomly generate anything you have already gathered from elsewhere. Including meat, oddly enough. There is a fish hatchery that does the same. This is the best way of getting a lot of ingredients all at once, but in order to get dragon manure, you have to feed your dragon, and the larger it gets, the more food it needs to produce manure. And you need to cook every dish manually using a small rhythm mini game - no batch cooking. It kinda feels like the game just wants me to spend an hour cooking lots of dishes, then force-feeding my dragon to get the manure to spend on speeding up the garden to get the ingredients (which I am also spending on the food for the dragon, so the game is incentivising me to use as few materials as possible to maximise returns). That feels like no fun so I'm not going to batch cook 30 single scotch eggs (using just egg, no meat or breading here) and force-feed him eggs until he poops...at least not for very long.

There are also some short stories revolving around some guest NPC characters who usually show up with an emotional problem, stay in the cafe for a few days, open up about their issues, need a particular dish cooking for them to resolve their emotional conflict and then leave, leaving a space ready for the next character to come and stay. These are actually pretty well written compared to other cozy life-sims like Harvest Moon and the characters are really charming and relatable.

To be honest, it wouldn't take a lot for me to love this game. Like, let customers pay for their meals and then give us a shop to buy upgrades for the cafe or the staff (so that you wouldn't need to personally intervene when they start slacking, for example, or that they would slack off less often) or let us buy 'basic' ingredients like flour and rice, but still have us forage for more exotic food and the upgraded ingredients. That would help take the big pressure out of trying to forage more ingredients than you use daily. Otherwise, tweak forage spots so they give multiple ingredients per interaction, which would save time, or give us more options in the garden. Say, use materials to upgrade the amount the garden yields, or let us choose what types of ingredients we would like the garden to produce. Basically a little more customising in general and a little automation would turn the grindy chore bits of the game into something a little more interesting.

Because there isn't really a penalty for failure, there also isn't a reward for doing well. The game will mostly chug along at its own pace regardless of how well or badly the cafe does, only requiring an increase in customer satisfaction between NPC story episodes and that can usually be achieved in a single day. This is probably by design - to avoid frustrating younger players - but it does make mid to late game feel like a grindy chore that you don't actually need to deal with. You can progress quickly by skipping most days, only sticking around to trigger the scenes and then going straight to sleep. But at that point, why bother to still play the game?

[amewinterswriting]

Ame Reviews: Obscurer Square Enix

Final Fantasy Type-0 HD

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting. I knew that the title had been intended to be attached to the Final Fantasy XIII universe (back before lackluster reviews of the main game - I get the feeling there was a very hasty scrub away of all plot references to leave Type-0 as a standalone game with only a few references hinting at it's origins, such as mentions of L'Cie and Cieth). I also knew it was originally a PSP game so I wasn't expecting the graphics to particularly wow me. I'm also pretty sure I knew that the cast were school-age, so I think I was expecting fantasy high-school hijinks and quests.

I definitely wasn't expecting the first hour of the game to be a gritty warzone with minor fantasy elements movie - though given the Square Enix proclivity for starting out with a long cut scene, I should have expected that, at least. There is blood and at least two named character deaths - and they don't spare the chocobo, so if violence to animals upsets you, be warned. I didn't get a warning. It's also not a quick death. And that's the opening cutscene, just so we're absolutely clear.

When the game actually allows you to play it, it's split between 'missions' - focused levels with particular objectives - and downtime - limited time between missions that you can use to trigger side plot events, restock, take lessons and train up.

The missions feel much like the missions in Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core - action-based combat on a small map with limited elements to interact with besides the enemy. Shows the PSP roots and I don't mind that - I knew going in - but if you were expecting a full PS4 game, you would be disappointed. The combat also takes a while to get used to - despite being real-time, it doesn't want you to smash buttons, more thoughtfully select your actions. Adding into that a full roster of 14 playable characters that you are encouraged to use and keep at similar levels to each other that all have different playstyles and customisation to them, there's a bit of a learning curve and if you're underleveled, you might be learning a new character at the worst possible time: when you've managed to kill all the characters you're actually good with.

The downtime is where most of the interesting things really happen - character get development, world building elements get revealed and the quirky NPCs get a chance to make an appearance. I would have liked a few quality of life things - shops accessible through the menu instead of physically walking through areas to visit them (and there's at least three merchants on campus selling different things, all in different areas), sidequests/plot events having markers on the map to stop me scouring the whole school between every mission and being able to swap characters on the fly outside of missions (since some events can only be triggered by some characters and you need to visit a save point to swap between characters).

This is maybe only really one for the die-hard Final Fantasy fans, but it's got some annoyingly good bones. There's the wide cast of playable characters all with their own quirks and personalities - it kinda feels like being able to play a highschool simulator with Organisation XIII! And there's some interesting plot in there, though in recent Square Enix fashion, it's a bit obscured behind the myriad bits of required reading to understand. Also some of the actual dialogue writing feels very flimsy - with a large cast of characters to play with, it's understandable but unfortunate that some of them feel very thin.

World of Final Fantasy

My expectation for World of Final Fantasy was a cute little fluffy game aimed at kids. Babies first JRPG. Simple plot and mechanics with a cute varnish of Final Fantasy legacy characters.

What I got was Pokémon meets Final Fantasy by way of Kingdom Hearts.

The combat is turn-based and features capturing and leveling and evolving (though it's called transfiguration) the normal staple Final Fantasy monsters (but now they are adorable as all hell) and stacking them up on one another (along with the protagonists Lann and Reynn). Stacking is simple to learn, difficult to master, as different creatures will add their stats, strengths and weaknesses to the stack, as well as affecting speed, stability and potential special skills. This was an amazingly refreshing way to approach turn based combat and it's actually annoying Square Enix haven't done anything similar since.

In terms of Final Fantasy, I was expecting the usual crowd favourites - pretty much everyone from VII, Lightning, Squall, Tidus, Yuna...but I wasn't expecting them to pull from older titles. Bartz, Warrior of Light, Sarah and Eiko make plot appearances! Also more obscure characters get a look in, like Shelke from FFVII Dirge of Cerberus...which I was half convinced even Square Enix had forgotten about! I didn't even know where Shantoto or Sherlotta were from (FFXI and Crystal Chronicles) but their inclusion was an absolute delight and made me curious about their stories.

For the Kingdom Hearts element... remember when you control Roxas in the beginning of Kingdom Hearts 2 and his Twilight Town is charming but something feels off and there's more going on than meets the eye? That's a lot of the plot in WOFF - Lann and Reynn wake up in their home town but all the people are gone. All except a mysterious woman who knows a lot more than she's telling anyone and starts the kids off on a magical adventure through Final Fantasy lands... except the plot just gets more twists from there and the kids realise they really don't know much about...anything.

As for Lann and Reynn themselves: wonderful original characters, really think they nailed the sibling dynamic and they told such a powerful story about power, loss, grief, forgiveness and redemption that rekindled my hope that there is someone employed by Square Enix who knows how to present and tell a story effectively!

I'd heartily recommend to anyone and I'm desperately hoping they make a sequel.