veebs-hates-video-games

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Ok, while I'm here there's another thing I've given up on to start the new year. Congratulations to the Trails series for being the latest entire series to get completely banished 🎉

I really tried, and I don't doubt that the huge overarching story both exists and is plenty interesting, but after trying to play two different games in the series neither clicked for me. The original Trails in the Sky last year seemed kind of interesting but felt too dated for what I'm willing to put up with right now, so I was hoping the remake would help. In the meantime I jumped forward to Trails of Cold Steel, and it's just not doing it for me.

I made it several hours in and through roughly the first chapter or so, and I'm straight up not having a good time. It's not even because there's anything particularly bad about it, but the much hyped stuff that's supposed to be good about it either still hasn't shown up or just isn't my thing.

The characters are fine, but none of them grabbed me enough to make me feel like I need to spend more time with them and find out what their deals are or see what happens to them. What I saw of the story is fine and might go somewhere, but up until the point I reached it's pretty standard and doesn't stand out in any way. The battle system...exists. It's functional, but I don't find it very satisfying.

Basically there's a reason why when I took a bit of a break from it and started playing Yakuza: Like a Dragon I stuck with that until I finished it instead and had a really hard time getting back into this one afterward, and that reason is that Yakuza: Like a Dragon does basically everything better than Trails of Cold Steel (at least what I've seen of it anyway).

The characters and story and writing in general are immediately compelling and hooked me instantly. The turn-based combat is fairly similar in a lot of ways, but it's even simpler. The difference is that it feels much better to actually use. I think a lot of that just comes down to much better animations and stuff happening a lot quicker in general so the pace of battle feels snappier.

And sure that's a much newer game, but other Falcom stuff from around the same time period like Ys 8 also starts off much stronger and feels much better to interact with, so I know there were people working there at the time who could manage to do that. I think it also helped that it had a more unique setting than yet another anime high school, and that allowed for more variety in party members. It would be pretty funny to see Sahad attending anime high school though, like still as a middle aged man with nothing about him changed.

I dunno. It's kind of a bummer. I was really excited about Trails because it kept coming up in conversations about other stuff I really like like Xenoblade, but now that I finally got around to it after saying I was going to for like a decade I think it's just not for me.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I think I'm done enough with a couple more things.

Like I've mentioned before, Hi-Fi Rush does so many things really well. It's one of maybe two and a half rhythm games I've ever played that aren't explicitly just rhythm games and have other things going on that actually manages to successfully combine the music and the rest of the game and world, and it's the one with by far the biggest budget (the other two are 140 and arguably Vectronom).

It's unfortunately the one I enjoy playing the least, but it's so satisfying seeing the way every single animation in the entire game and the timing of everything all lines up with the music. Even though I wasn't into actually playing it enough to finish more than maybe half of it, I'm still mad the studio got shut down, because you can tell from every inch of the game how much they cared about it.

On the plus side, not playing any more of it after this means I don't get jumpscared by the Bethesda logo every time I launch the game anymore (I have an entirely negative and antagonistic relationship with Bethesda even though I have several friends who love their stuff).

And then there's Nordic Ashes: Survivors of Ragnarok, which is pretty ok but not great, and kept falling into "why am I still playing this?" territory. Like there isn't much in particular wrong with it if you're into that sort of game (aside from some aspects of progression being unreasonably grindy even for what it is), and there are some things it even does pretty well, but it only really all comes together now and then.

When it does work it's pretty satisfying, and it gets into a good rhythm with so much stuff to constantly run around the map to do that there's never really much standing around waiting for stuff to happen. I just also kept ending up in situations where things I tried to do with builds would work great in one case and not at all in another slightly different one, and there wasn't any obvious reason what made that weapon or upgrade or whatever work so differently and not contribute anywhere near as much.

Trying out all the new stuff I unlocked was fun, and so was trying to learn different characters' abilities to see how far I could push them, but that pretty quickly gets into a state where there's very little available progression that isn't like "kill 18 billion of this one specific enemy" so you get like 10% closer to being able to afford another upgrade in the permanent upgrade tree, and there are dozens of them that are equally as boring and tedious as that. And don't worry, the UI for them is awful too, with them all just dumped into one giant list that scrolls far too slowly and doesn't even have a way to jump from one category to the next.

If progression were faster and more consistent and the big, ugly checklist menus were sorted in any sort of reasonable way and easier to navigate it would be be pretty good, because it does a lot of the other stuff well enough. Well, aside from the dash being garbage and feeling bad on most characters, and seemingly their only solution to preventing bosses from getting instakilled on higher difficulties is giving them long enough invincibility phases that it gets boring (which is a shame because some of them have some decent mechanics going on aside from that, at least for this genre).

[veebs-hates-video-games]

And now it's time for 2025's first batch of smaller things.

Hear Your Path: I genuinely like the idea of navigating a maze by ear, needing to know the next note of the music, and a lot of it is stuff I'm extremely familiar with from having played it on the piano when I was younger or otherwise having heard it dozens of times, but actually playing this one isn't quite satisfying enough for me to have finished more than half of it. Maybe more like 40%? I don't mind having spent less than a dollar and a little of my time to see what its deal is though.

Banner of the Maid: What if Fire Emblem was about the French Revolution but also anime girls? Apparently it wouldn't quite be interesting enough to keep my attention for more than an hour, that's what. I think I've been spoiled by Engage's maps and mechanics and have a hard time going back to less compelling SRPG systems.

Tesla vs Lovecraft: Just as ridiculous a premise as the previous entry on this list, but this one actually worked for me. It's nice to play a proper twin stick shooter for a change instead of the bullet heaven stuff I lean toward when I'm not sleeping well and my brain's not working, and this one lets you do some pretty silly things if you combine the right weapons and upgrades. I don't think I'll go back and do the postgame stuff, but finishing the story was a good enough time that I'll probably check out Tesla Force some day.

Super Crush KO: Speaking of silly premises, a girl's cat gets kidnapped by an alien, and to get it back she has to punch a bunch of robots so hard they explode. A surprisingly solid 2D brawler/spectacle fighter with a fun art style too. The moveset isn't super complex and the levels aren't too hard to finish, so it's easy to get into, but there's a lot of flexibility for more advanced stuff you can do, and actually maintaining your combo and getting a good score takes a good deal more effort. I can tell both that this was the same people who did Graceful Explosion Machine and that they definitely learned some new tricks between making the two.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I have somewhat mixed but ultimately overall pretty positive feelings about Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and I'm going to get the bad stuff out of the way first. If you don't want to hear about it, go ahead and skip the next half dozen paragraphs until I have nice things to say.

The really big one is that chapter 12 is one of the worst things I've experienced in a while in a game that was otherwise good enough for me to keep playing. There have certainly been much worse things in much worse games, but not in games I was enjoying enough to force myself to keep suffering through them.

The pacing and progression of the first 11 chapters was for the most part handled really well. Then abruptly there's an absolute bullshit boss fight that's almost 15 levels higher than I was at that point despite doing nearly every side quest and optional thing available up to that point. It's probably doable without a ton of grinding if you have a more optimized party setup, but I sure didn't because I was having fun messing around with the different options it gives you, which had never previously been a problem.

So I got to waste a few hours grinding, and then at closer to the actual level of that area and boss fight it was still much harder than anything before it in the game, but mostly in a fun and satisfying way. If they had properly balanced the progression it would've actually been a great story and gameplay moment, but instead it really made me hate my time with the game for a while, which didn't fully recover by the time I finished.

And that still wouldn't have been as bad as it was if level/experience scaling wasn't so awful too. Once you're at that point in the game almost nothing gives any meaningful amount of experience and you have to either grind the arena or hunt down what basically amount to metal slimes in the dungeon, because otherwise it'll take literally dozens of hours to make any progress. I get Dragon Quest did it first, and you're heavily borrowing from and referencing it, but there are some things from 80s and 90s JRPGs that should remain firmly in the past because they suck so hard. I started playing JRPGs back then and I do not miss that garbage.

The other worst thing is instant death attacks, especially from the final actually hard boss (slightly before the final final boss), because if the main character dies you just instantly get a game over. I found out afterward that he does learn an auto-revive ability, but because they're too invested in copying bad ideas from decades ago they decided that instadeath attacks were a good idea and you can totally miss the exactly one thing available to mitigate them. I changed jobs when my experience gain got too slow to level up whichever one I was currently in, so I never actually learned that ability, and it took a couple tries before I was able to perfect guard that attack four times in a single fight just to not get wiped by RNG hating me.

Also being penalized for switching jobs by suddenly having your stats be terrible until you level the new job up sucks, the extremely heavy movement running around that's biased way in favor of the animations looking good instead of it feeling good to play sucks, and the karaoke minigame is the worst music/rhythm game I've played in years.

Ok.

I think I got it all out of my system.

Aside from that stuff? Pretty much everything else ranges from good to great.

It has a really good sense of place, with lightly fictionalized versions of real world present day Japan, which makes sense with how many years they've been making these games in these locations. I'm not usually one for realism in art styles, but the cities look good and feel lived in, and there's always something going on without it becoming too big or too bloated like stuff like this sometimes gets.

And of course the characters are great too. One of the reasons I'm not usually into crime/mafia/yakuza/etc. stories is so many of the characters, especially so many of the protagonists, end up being these stoic cool tough guys, which I get that some people like, but I find them kinda boring. Kasuga's great though. He manages to still be extremely masculine/manly while also being super emotional and expressive, and he gets to have and express more feelings than just 😐 and 😠. He's silly and playful and sincere and caring and will also punch a hole straight through you if you hurt his friends or family.

Lots of great supporting characters too, both returning ones from previous games and ones who are new to this one. Their relationships with him and each other and how they develop really do a lot to keep the game going, and they're all fun to spend time with. It's a bit of a bummer Eri's completely detached from the main story though, because she was a permanent party member for me as soon as I got her and carried the entire team through some fights, but then she was conspicuously absent from every cutscene that has everyone but her in them.

The story? Also good. Sure a lot of it is guys being dudes doing crimes, which isn't usually my sort of thing, but the great characters and way it's ultimately about friendship and both biological and found family keep it interesting as the crimes and murders are used to explore those relationships between the protagonists and antagonists and each other.

The gameplay's fun most of the way through, although I did get a little tired of it from chapter 12 on. It was a good call to borrow heavily from simpler JRPGs like early Dragon Quest for a series that hasn't previously been a JRPG series, which keeps it more accessible for people not used to it, and most of it works out surprisingly well. The majority of side quests and minigames are reasonably fun too, which you'd kinda hope after they've been doing some of the same ones for all these years.

Overall I mostly had a really good time with it, and the ending was good enough to at least partly make up for the significant annoyances in parts of the last few chapters. It must be doing something right if I spent like 90 hours on it over the past month and didn't take a single break from it to go play something else instead like I usually do. I'm looking forward to playing Infinite Wealth and future games eventually, but I'll definitely be looking up ahead of time if there's any bullshit I need to work around so I can plan for it ahead of time.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

It's that time again where I make an entirely too long summary of every game I played this year. There were far too many of them this time around (well over 100, but some of them I only played long enough to know they're not my thing, and a bunch are weird short little things), so I'll try to keep it to a sentence or two for most of them. On the off chance anyone's interested in more of my thoughts they should nearly all have at least one other more detailed post on here somewhere, hopefully all properly tagged at this point and everything.

Also hopefully the formatting makes it easy to skim through, broken into categories and with each individual game bolded, because I would be astonished if anyone actually reads the entire thing. It's over 180 games and 7500 words, so, uh...good luck?

I think I'll just stick with the same categories I've used in the past couple years. On average the categories further down the list have things I liked more, but there are things in one category that I might've liked more or less than some things in the categories next to them, and they're mostly not really ordered within each category.

So with that said, let's start with the worst gaming experiences I had in 2024:

Bomb Dolls: Probably more fun with other people, but it was borderline unplayable for me so I didn't want to subject anyone else to it.

Sayonara Wild Hearts: Anything that feels like it was designed in a lab to give me seizures and migraines simultaneously isn't allowed to place higher than this.

Gwenblade: It tries to do something interesting, but it has a pretty profound lack of polish that makes it just not work.

Survivors of the Dawn: It must get better later on, but it felt so sluggish and unsatisfying at the beginning that I couldn't be bothered to find out.

Neverwinter Nights 2: I guess I still really don't get along with RTwP and most CRPGs.

Persona 5 Strikers: This finally convinced me to give up for good on the SMT/Persona games, because I clearly do not click with their pacing or storytelling conventions in general.

Mouthwashing: The most profound sensation of boredom I experienced all year. Extremely not my thing, but I'm pretty picky when it comes to horror.

On to games that weren't the worst but still completely failed to live up to whatever (possibly incorrect) expectations I had of them:

Strawberry Vinegar: Weird miss for ebi-hime, with characters that felt awkwardly written and like they didn't suit their ages.

Scanner Sombre: Incredible tech demo, frustrating game.

CrossCode: I liked most things about it except for the actual gameplay, which was really not my jam.

Nier: Automata: Somehow feels substantially worse to play than any other Platinum game I've ever played, and the story and characters completely failed to grab me in the first half dozen hours.

Death end re;Quest 2: Huge let down after how surprisingly interesting but flawed the first was. They dropped almost everything I liked about the original, and even though they thankfully toned down the visual fanservice, the character writing was enough worse to counter that.

Dead Cells: Seems like probably a pretty good game, but having pretty obvious influences from Dark Souls in your gameplay mechanics is usually a good way to make me not have a good time.

Owlboy: It's pretty? Not much else going for it.

Night in the Woods: I did genuinely like a lot of stuff about it, but it just felt like it wasn't really going anywhere, and some of the night scenes were impossible for me to see with my weird/bad vision without turning the screen brightness to retina-searing levels.

Her Name Was Fire: What if 20 Minutes Till Dawn except everything was slightly worse?

Final Fantasy XIII-2: The first half was great and felt like a weird hybrid of Radiant Historia and Pokemon with a Final Fantasy skin, but the closer I got to the end the worse everything about it got until I quit in the final area. A contributing part of why the entire FF series is now banished.

Muse Dash: It's alright? The UI is a nightmare about a trainwreck though.

Final Fantasy VII Remake: I love the metanarrative of the story commenting on itself and how much more fleshed out the characters are, but as a game I didn't have a very good time playing it, and I continue to not vibe with the way Nomura/Nojima tell stories. The other main reason FF is now banished.

God of War: I was pretty hopeful about Dad of Boy, but I just don't like how it feels to play. A contributor to why I'm increasingly skeptical of giving most AAA games a shot.

It gets so lonely here: Second person is not a valid POV (for me personally).

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor: The mining mechanic is pretty neat, but otherwise it's one of the less interesting/satisfying things I've played in the genre.

Spider-Man: Most stuff about it is...fine? But aside from the great movement nothing else really makes it above fine other than the typical stuff that comes with throwing lots of money at making a game. Another major reason why I'm increasingly wary of buying or playing most AAA games.

Vampire Survivors: Ode to Castlevania: The least fun I've ever had playing Vampire Survivors, almost entirely due to it not having its own separate adventure mode to introduce stuff on its own terms in more digestible chunks.

Neva: Not bad, but basically everything about it that's different from Gris is different in a way I don't personally like as much.

Once on a windswept night: see: It gets so lonely here

Stray: I only lasted a couple hours before getting bored. I don't even mind that it's mostly a walking simulator since I've enjoyed plenty of those since they were first a thing, but aside from the novelty of being a cat nothing about it really clicked with me.

Next we have games that I liked what they were doing overall but they're just not really my thing:

Gorogoa: Good art and a clever way to structure the puzzles and how you navigate them/between them, but it's not really my kind of puzzle game.

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights: Probably the closest I've come to liking a game with Souls-like influences. Well put together metroidvania that feels good to play, but the combat got exhausting the further I went.

Snakebird: The addition of gravity and puzzles make Snake a lot more interesting, but I wasn't into the flow of it enough to want to finish it.

Please, Touch the Artwork: Good framing device and clever way to turn recognizable art styles into puzzles, but the individual puzzles didn't stay interesting enough to me after a while.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder: It does some really clever stuff, but I think I just don't really jive with how movement feels in modern 2D Mario games anymore compared to the ones from the 80s and 90s (but I still love the 3D ones). Also maybe kind of a victim of how sometimes Nintendo polishes their games almost too much, and the removal of any rough edges ends up detracting a bit from things I personally like.

Toodee and Topdee: The dimension/perspective swapping is neat, but it wasn't quite enough on its own to pull me through the entire game.

Tens!: Reasonably satisfying, and a pretty polished presentation, but this one also didn't hold my interest all the way through.

The Shape of Things: Another one with good presentation and decent (but slightly janky) puzzle mechanics that didn't quite hook me.

OscarWildeCard: Excellent name, and card battles to determine who has the gayest dinner party is a fun idea, but it's not really my style of card game in the end.

From Ashes, Bloom: I really like the creature and how it moves and interacts, but in the end it's a tower defense game, and those have never been my thing.

Cypher: I really like Matthew Brown's puzzle games in general, and I liked this too at first, but once I got to the point where I couldn't mostly hold the puzzles entirely in my head anymore I lost interest. I probably would've had a great time with it when I was younger and had more patience for taking my own notes though.

Manifold Garden: It looks good and has some good ideas, but kind of like Antichamber I feel like it'd be more interesting to me if I didn't instantly already wrap my head around the way it messes with space. The burdens of having an intuitive understanding of unusual geometry, I guess.

Burly Men at Sea: Seemed like it had potential, but the UI is awkward enough on the Switch that I didn't feel like finding out.

Railbound: Another puzzle game where I liked learning how it works but didn't feel like sticking around beyond that.

Rabi-Ribi: It seems cute enough, but I didn't click with how movement feels and the pacing was a bit off for me.

Cureocity: Has a good premise, and I liked the idea of the combat system, but I felt like I wasn't getting enough out of it for what I was putting in.

Parallax: The core puzzle concept is solid, but it gets a little tedious having to run around the map to actually put solutions into action. Also the most broken default controller layout I've seen in a long time.

Kero Blaster: Nothing really wrong with it, but it didn't hook me. Definitely not another Cave Story.

Nora: The Wannabe Alchemist: There's almost something there and the art's pretty decent, but the Switch version is Not Great, and it feels like it could use a bit more work in general.

Psychopomp: Seems like there could potentially be something interesting going on there, but it's borderline unplayable with a controller.

Press Any Button: This one also might eventually go somewhere interesting, or at least it definitely hints at it, but the gameplay segments started getting pretty tedious before I found out.

stitch.: Great presentation of the puzzles, crappy mobile game presentation for the menus, and solidly average actual puzzles.

Thumper: Pretty unusual aesthetic and music style for a rhythm game, but I don't have the reaction time to keep up with it when brain no worky like lately.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: I can appreciate what they're going for, and it definitely addresses some of the issues I had with BotW/TotK, but I'm still having a really hard time getting as into it as older games in the series.

Spitkiss: I'm into the idea, and the presentation is really fun, but I bounced off somewhere in the middle as the levels got more heavily focused on tighter timing of actions. Seems fun for someone more into that sort of thing though.

After those we have the ones that are the most "fine, I guess" of the year that I had mixed feelings about:

Townscaper: More of a toy than a game, but I got it in a game bundle and messed around with it on a Steam Deck. It's fun briefly to see what you can make with it, but that's about it.

Little Noah: Scion of Paradise: Most of my time with it wasn't actually this year, but this is the year I concluded that even though the characters are cute and the way you build combos is kinda neat, the game itself is only ok. Also the Switch version doesn't run great.

Star Ocean: The Second Story R: The first 2/3 or so of it is great. The art style used in the remake is gorgeous, and the characters and running around doing typical JRPG stuff feels like all the things that made 90s JRPGs great. Then I got to what previously would've been disc 2 and it all fell apart into what makes 90s JRPGs so hard to go back to sometimes.

Fallow: I like most stuff about it except for actually playing it, which was kind of frustrating. Her music's still great though.

Ape Out: It's alright. I'm not very good at it.

Downwell: It's fine. I get what they're going for, and it feels like they succeeded, but I didn't stick with it super long.

Looking Up I See Only a Ceiling: This one gets an award for suffering the most from a bad translation or not being written in the creator's native language. It'd probably be pretty decent if that was cleaned up.

Astronomical Club for Queers: Dialogue's a bit awkward, but overall it shows potential for making something decent in the future.

Hardcore Cottagecore: This one has serious student project/game jam vibes. With some polish and balance they could make something alright though.

A Little to the Left: Deserves an award for "game that most makes me want to go replay Unpacking instead". Fine, but I lost interest after a while.

Twilight Survivors: I've definitely played worse bullet heaven games, but at least when I tried it this one didn't have much unique about it good or bad.

Geometry Survivor: It's close to being pretty decent, but it just doesn't quite feel good enough to play to me to stick with it too long.

Ikenfell: The characters are good and the story is ok, but I could've done without the gameplay. The "instant victory" button was one of my favorite buttons I pushed this year and saved the game enough for me to actually finish.

Star Ocean: First Departure R: It probably would've been more fun if I'd played it in the 90s. Significantly less compelling than SO2R but not actually bad or anything.

Cats Organized Neatly: Presentation's alright, but the process of solving the puzzles isn't the most satisfying for me.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Fixes a lot of the issues I had with BotW, and the abilities feel a lot more polished and like they complement each other better, but I still ultimately don't love the way these recent Zelda games play and am probably done with them until the next major franchise overhaul.

The Average Everyday Adventures of Samantha Browne: It's fine. There's just only so much it can really do in like ten minutes.

Jewel Match Solitaire Summertime: It's a perfectly competent solitaire game, just like all the other Jewel Match Solitaire games. Good for when brain no worky, but it doesn't stand out in any way.

Xenogears: The first time I tried playing it was before Xenosaga was even out. I tried going back to it to finally finish it, but I forgot how rough the translation was and how janky some stuff like the camera is. At least now I remember why I've never finished it.

One Deck Dungeon: It plays out in an interesting way with the way everything is built around dice rolls, but it just didn't grab me enough to get me to keep playing.

the static speaks my name: It was just strange enough to be a little bit interesting, but not strange enough to stick with me at all for more than a day or two.

Stray Cats in Cozy Town: Might be my least favorite Devcats game I've played because the different angle makes it harder to come up with a good search pattern.

TREE: Another ten minute free one. I liked it more before replaying it to get the last achievement.

Witcheye: Pretty unique movement and fun for a while, but the difficulty increase later in the game didn't feel like it fit as well with what the controls let me do.

RYB: Some pretty good puzzles, but the more mechanics are introduced the less well it reads visually.

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia: I've tried more than once to go back and finish it, and while I still like most things about it, the map design and a couple enemy types annoy me enough that I finally had to accept I'm not going to beat this one.

Graceful Explosion Machine: Surprisingly well balanced and an interesting gameplay loop swapping between weapons, but sometimes I lose track of enemies in the visual clutter. Also it's physically painful for me to play some of the later levels.

Frincess&Cnight: Good pixel art and fun interactions between the two characters' abilities, but the increasingly tight timings and need to start levels over for any mistake got a little annoying at some point.

CARS: More interactive art than a game. Fun to poke at for a bit, but probably not leaving a lasting impression.

VOYAGER: Slightly more of a game than the previous one, but mostly it's just tracing out fun patterns with your orbit while pretty good music plays.

Dragon Quest XI S: I played the demo on Steam a while ago and loved it, but having to replay the entire opening dozen hours when I got the full game on the Switch was painful enough to make me lose interest. There's so much stuff it does well, but It sure does start slow.

Project X Zone: I do enjoy a lot of stuff about it, but there are so many levels that each take so long to finish that after a while it got kind of tedious.

A Slug's Dream: Pretty good puzzles and presentation, but at some point I drifted away and never went back.

Puddle Knight: Same as above.

Please Fix the Road: Also same as above.

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout: The most atrociously paced intro ever before suddenly becoming very good a few hours in, but the tediousness of needing to replace all my stuff at once toward the end of the game instead of stuff opening up more gradually killed my enthusiasm before finishing it.

Otoko Cross: Pretty Boys Mahjong Solitaire: A friend gifted me Pretty Girls Mahjong Solitaire years ago as a joke, so I impulsively got this on sale in memory of that. Totally fine but nothing special as a game, and if they toned down the horniness a bit some of the character designs/outfits would actually be pretty cute.

Death Becomes You: Some decent ideas and an interesting world, but some of the writting is kind of off-putting and some of the endings feel kind of abrupt and unearned.

this morning I decided to die: I get what they were going for and can appreciate it, but it didn't entirely land for me.

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age: One of my favorite mainline FF games since the 90s, and I did genuinely have a pretty good time with it a lot of the time, but every time I got back into it it would pull some annoying crap to pull me back out again.

Tales of Berseria: I liked a couple of the characters enough to keep me playing for a while and the story is fine, but I got bored of the actual gameplay eventually and gave up.

Tales of Arise: Feels better to play than Berseria, but even though it hints at something interesting going on nothing in the first couple hours hooked me enough to get me to keep going.

KarmaZoo: I love the idea, but it doesn't get to go higher than this because it requires other people to play and I couldn't find any when I tried.

Margo: Definitely a fan of the art style, but the overall experience was only ok. It was probably somewhat negatively influenced by it being a pain to get it to run on the Steam Deck and still running terribly when it did, a very rare experience for me.

Berserk and the Band of the Hawk: It continues the pattern of most Musou/Warriors games that aren't affiliated with Nintendo in some way just not really being as good these days. It's ok, but it's noticeably more clunky and less polished than even the original Hyrule Warriors was and just doesn't feel as good to play.

Moving on, next we have games that were pretty good and generally met my expectations:

Luna's Fishing Garden: I didn't love either difficulty option for the fishing minigame, and it dragged a bit toward the end, but overall it's pretty cute and chill. Special mention to the "you got a fish" animation for being great.

Kuukiyomi 2: Consider It More! - New Era: I apparently never mentioned this in a post anywhere, or at least I can't find it. Anyway, it's more of the same from the first one, which is a good thing for the most part. It's basically WarioWare, except the minigames are about being considerate (or being a jerk if you'd prefer) in various situations. Cheap, short, and a decent way to be amused for a little while.

TET: Cute, funny, includes recipes. A good use of ten minutes and $0 if preparing food for Vietnamese Lunar New Year sounds like a good time. Also feels much better with a touchscreen.

Clickolding: Like I said earlier this year, it's the most about sex work anything's ever been without explicitly stating it's about sex work, and it will do its best to make you vaguely uncomfortable about that. Didn't leave quite as much of an impression on me as their other game I played last year, Can Androids Pray, but still pretty good.

An Arcade Full of Cats: Not my favorite Devcats game ever, but still enjoyable. As someone old enough to remember arcades it was fun seeing all the terrible cat puns on old games, and they did a pretty good job of capturing the general feel.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore: Most of my time with this was before this year, but I finally made it through the last third of it. I have some issues with the dungeons dragging on too long and the almost non-existent quest tracking, but the characters and story and combat are mostly fun, and it's the only SMT/Persona-adjacent game I've actually enjoyed other than BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle.

Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between: It didn't hit me as hard as the original over a decade ago, and a couple sections just didn't really land for me, but when it does work it does some interesting stuff. The train section was probably my favorite because it actually gets to expand on its ideas a bit more there.

The Fairy's Song: What if La Belle Dame sans Merci but make it yuri? Nothing revolutionary, but it does everything well enough to be enjoyable, enough that I'll probably get through the sequel one of these days too.

Bury me, my Love: Manages to capture both the surreal horror and mind-numbing mundanity of being a refugee seeking asylum and does a fairly effective job of it. The lack of typical VN QoL features kept me from going through again to see stuff I missed though.

Takorita Meets Fries: Fluffy nonsense about merpeople in search of french fries, and I mean that in a good way.

GOODBYE WORLD: The story and art were just enough to keep me going through the annoying platforming sections (which make narrative sense to be there, and even for them to be bad, but still), and the way it all came together in the end is what bumped it up as high as this.

Blackberry Honey: Yuri that's mostly cute and fluffy and fun while it lasts. I have Questions about the way the main character's boobs are drawn though. What's wrong with your boobs?

Voxelgram DLC #1: One one hand it's good because more Voxelgram is good, but on the other the larger puzzles are mostly just more tedious. Still good enough puzzles to get my poor ADHD brain to focus on something while listening to podcasts or whatever.

rat chaos: A replay of something I played many, many years ago. Not my favorite of the Twine boom back in the day, but having an "unleash rat chaos" button makes it memorable.

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line DLC: Still not my favorite style of music/rhythm game so it doesn't go higher, but there's some good music in there, and it was still enjoyable enough that I had fun going through everything.

A Hero and a Garden: Cute, fun characters, good music (including the unlockable remixes after you finish the game), and somehow made in Ren'Py, which is not intended for this genre at all.

Hide & Dance!: I like it for similar reasons to the other games I played by hap (which will be further down this list), but it doesn't have quite as many opportunities for the silly humor that makes their games work.

Subsurface Circular: "You are a robot detective solving robot crimes by talking to other robots on the subway" is a great premise, and I was not expecting Thomas Was Alone (still my favorite Mike Bithell game I've played) to be canon.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land: It was genuinely great for a while, and they did an excellent job translating what makes Kirby fun into 3D, but I kept finding more minor annoyances the closer I got to the end, and I gave up entirely on the postgame stuff pretty quickly because it wasn't doing it for me.

Clear Skye Thinking: More cute yuri fluff that won't leave a lasting impression, but it was a good palate cleanser.

Regency Solitaire 2: Basically just Regency Solitaire again, which is fine with me. These always feel a bit more substantial and more polished than the other solitaire games Grey Alien publishes, so it's nice to have another of these after years of mostly just Jewel Match Solitaire.

Zenzizenzic: Good bullet hell game with good music, and everything is so many squares. Sadly not available anywhere anymore, and neither is the soundtrack. Also sadly I'm not very good at it.

Wedding Witch: I got it mostly as a joke after it popped up in a Steam friend's activity, but it's actually pretty competently made. I wouldn't mind seeing some of the stuff from this in a little more substantial game that's somewhat less horny.

A Park Full of Cats: More Devcats hidden cats. If you're into it you're into it, and this is more of it.

Gordy and the Monster Moon; One of the more recent entries in the Frog Fractions Cinematic Universe. A successful attempt to see what would happen if you made a traditional Zelda game without most of the things most people think of as making something a Zelda game.

Art Sqool: I've seen people complain that it's janky and gives you bad tools for drawing, but the whole point feels like that even if you only can make "bad" art you still did something creative and made an art. Fun to mess around with if you can engage with it on its own terms.

Fire Emblem Engage DLC: I played the main game last year, but I didn't get around to doing DLC stuff like the Fell Xenologue until this year. Not quite as good as the main story (which was one of my favorite games last year), but I still overall had a good time with it.

Super PSTW Action RPG: Replay of something I played years ago, so it can't go any higher, but if it didn't break my own self-imposed rules it would be GOTY every year.

A Tower Full of Cats: More Devcats? More Devcats. See every other entry for them.

Shovel Knight: Really well put together platformer inspired by old 8-bit ones on stuff like the NES and clearly made by people with a deep love for and understanding of them.

Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk: This and the next one go together. They didn't completely win me over, but I'll give them points for managing to nether glamorize nor stigmatize trauma or psychosis and avoid having an ending that's either tragic or fixes everything. Not perfect, but they at least tried to do something interesting with it.

Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk: See above

Meet Her There: Does what it's trying to do pretty well even if the writing's a bit stiff. Content warnings on this one aren't messing around. Also it's funny how many people totally missed how full of gender it is.

Florence: Effective storytelling with almost zero text or dialogue, and they actually manage to do some clever things to tie the very minimalist gameplay into that to enhance it.

Boyfriend Dungeon post-launch content: I played the game itself right when it came out and had a good time with it, but it took me until pretty recently to go back and do the additional stuff added after it came out. I probably would've liked it more if I'd been able to do it all at once, but it was still enjoyable enough to be worthwhile.

Star Ocean: The Divine Force: Definitely an improvement over SO2R (which was great in the first half but kinda fell apart in what would've originally been disc 2). This one still stumbles a bit toward the end but holds it together a bit better. Enough characters I liked and satisfying enough combat/exploration to keep me going until the end, and the nyoom button might've been my favorite button to push all year.

Be My Horde: Or at least what of it is finished up until now. I like the idea of having your only resource being dead enemies you've killed and most abilities revolving around upgrades/enhancements of your resurrection ability. The voice acting is also surprisingly good/fun. Definitely has potential if future additions to it can build on its strengths, but we'll see how that goes.

Pesticide Not Required: Possibly the most unusual premise for a bullet heaven game I've played, crossing it with a farming sim. Somehow it actually works? Builds feel kinda samey after a while unfortunately, but it's cute enough and interesting enough seeing how farming/fishing/mining manages to work simultaneously with killing hundreds of bugs at once to be enjoyable for a bit.

Golf Club Nostalgia: I'm absolutely terrible at the actual gameplay (thank you story mode), but the story and worldbuilding told through the radio broadcasts were interesting enough and kept me going. Not subtle about its politics or who it's commenting on even though it doesn't name any names.

I commissioned some bees 0: Not really anything special on its own, but I'm a big fan of the idea of commissioning multiple artists to draw whatever they want as long as they can fit a hundred bees in it somewhere.

Point of Mew: Short enough that its cuteness and charm can carry it through to the end.

Locke(d): I appreciate that someone took a hypothetical scenario from an essay, interpreted it completely literally, and then used that setup to talk about the ideas of the essay.

The Great Voyage: Not nearly as good as their second game, Vengeful Heart (which will be further down the list), but you can see how they got from here to there and how some of that stuff was already here to begin with.

CATO: Buttered Cat: Some reasonably clever puzzles, and building your game mechanics off the idea of a cat with buttered toast strapped to its back is silly enough that I can't not like it.

The Knight Witch: It didn't quite win me over enough to finish it, but what I did play of it was pretty well put together and enjoyable enough.

Peglin: It has a pretty fun loop, and turning Peggle into a roguelike is a pretty neat idea that works surprisingly well. I could see myself going back to it for a few more runs now and then.

Words Can Kill: It has a pretty fun loop, and turning Scrabble into a roguelike is a pretty neat idea that works surprisingly well. I could see myself going back to it for a few more runs now and then.

Across-Stitch: The tweaks to the typical picross/nonograms rules are just enough to keep things interesting, and I probably would've spent even more time with it if it didn't have some unfortunate color palatte choices.

memories: Another little yuri VN, this time sad. I liked the way it tied different memories to different outfits, and it's reasonably well told for what it is. It desperately needs a way to adjust the text speed though.

Next but not quite last are the ones that exceeded my expectations in some way without necessarily being better than the ones in the previous category (although some are here because they were good). I could also just have gotten more out of them than I was led to think I would:

Seraphim Slum: A VN that isn't afraid to get weird with it, and by weird I don't mean rawrxdlolrandom, I mean surrealness and strange metaphors and corruption/destruction as a form of love. I can dig it.

9th Sentinel Sisters: Seems unfortunately abandoned at this point, but what they finished of it is a fairly enjoyable bullet heaven game with a bit of a different feel and aesthetic from what I'm used to seeing. Translation's pretty awful though.

20 Minutes Till Dawn: One of the better bullet heaven games I've played, with a great monochrome-plus-one-accent-color aesthetic (the character portraits are particularly good) and different builds that genuinely feel different to play. Play on anything but the Switch if you have the option though, because it has atrocious slowdown with certain builds (although it still remains remarkably stable even then).

DoraKone: More yuri fluff about four queer girls spending the summer playing the my OC do not steal version of Pokemon GO. It's cute, and I liked the way they managed to tie the developing friendships/relationships into playing the game together in a way that actually felt like it worked.

A Time Traveller's Guide to Past Delicacies: More surreal weirdness, but this time with sock puppets too. I'm still undecided on what it's trying to say, but I really enjoyed the way it said it, and it captures both the fun and the janky parts of 90s FMV games well.

Bayonetta 2: The main reason this counts as exceeding my expectations is that the first game was full of great ideas but felt really unpolished in a lot of ways, and I wasn't expecting something that's still an entire decade old to have really fixed all that. But they did for the most part, and all the potential from the original finally came together properly.

Vectronom: Aside from pure rhythm games, this might be the first thing I've played since 140 that integrates the music and gameplay as well as it does. Bonus points to whoever decided to include some stuff with odd time signatures and rhythms later in the game.

Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting and Operation Guns: I liked both of these as much as I disliked Ode to Castlevania. They're much more interesting than the previous DLC was and experiment a bit more mechanically, and the adventure mode does a great job of introducing all the new stuff and teaching you the new mechanics and maps.

Lies as a Starting Point: A good example of how this category isn't necessarily better than "worse" categories in my list. It's pretty decent and the three storylines come together in a satisfying way in the end, but the translation is awful. I still got more out of it than I thought I would though.

Before I Forget: Ironically for a story about memory problems I forgot a lot of it because of my own memory problems. This nearly ended up in the best category though, and I appreciated how they made the story about who the character is as a person instead of just what's wrong with her.

Mom Hid My Game!: This and the next two are basically three parts of the same game, which is the offspring of a point and click adventure and WarioWare. Pretty short with lots of little bite-sized puzzles and a silly sense of humor.

Mom Hid My Game! 2: see above

My Brother Ate My Pudding!: see above

Soulstone Survivors: Another of my favorite bullet heaven games I've played. The addition of an active dodge and a lot of layered interactions between abilities makes it a bit more involved to play, but in a good way if you're looking for that sort of thing.

Bio Prototype: Not my favorite to actually play and the UI isn't great, but you can do some absolutely wild things with what basically amounts to a programmable build system to DIY your own weapons with very few restrictions.

20 Small Mazes: A great example of something that takes a simple concept, explores it thoroughly, and then ends without wasting time or energy on anything unnecessary.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe: As someone who's been playing the different variations on this since the original mod, this was a more effective story commenting on its own (re)telling and its own audience's expectations than FF7R was, at least for me.

Halls of Torment: What's this? Another of my favorite bullet heaven games? The standout for this one might be how so many of the achievements/unlocks are really well thought out to get you to approach playing the game in ways you might not have tried otherwise and are often little mini-puzzles themselves.

SeaBed: Very slow burn VN that ultimately pays off in the end even if I liked the journey a bit more than the destination.

Everything is going to be OK: On the surface it's very coping with adversity through absurdity, but if you keep digging it has more to say about trauma and depression and misogyny and the value of artists and so on.

Will The Man Get Frog: Cute little PICO-8 game/toy for creating haikus using an extremely limited set of randomly chosen words. Fun to mess around with to try to come up with anything remotely coherent.

The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place: Interactive poetry about being a willing participant in the destruction of history and trying to explain or justify it while also being aware of the sense of loss.

Luckily, My Arm Is a Shotgun: Nothing revolutionary, but it's surprisingly polished for something so small and cheap, and the titular shotgun is very satisfying.

a completely normal dating simulation that is definitely completely sweet, innnocent and normal: SOMETHINGETH ANIVERSARY EDITION: It feels like someone in high school in 2011 dumped their Tumblr into Ren'Py while also feeling like a flash animation from the 00s. I'm not sure the humor would hold up for me if I did all the different routes, but what I did play of it was the kind of thing I haven't seen in years.

And finally we have the ones I enjoyed the most or felt I got the most out of, not really in any particular order other than vaguely the order I finished them and added them to my list:

The Witcher 3: Absolutely my least favorite gameplay of anything anywhere near this high on the list, but the world and characters are so interesting and well developed that it more than makes up for it. I know they had an entire series of novels and short stories to draw on, but they've added so much more on their own, and it's only gotten bigger and better with each new game. They do a great job of making it feel like the world is much, much larger with a lot of stuff going on outside the small corner you're seeing at any given time.

Ghost Trick: It has a ridiculous premise and clever puzzles and a good sense of humor, but something else that particularly stands out about it is that despite the relatively simple art style it has some of the most fluid and expressive animations that give a ton of personality to everyone.

Vengeful Heart: Possibly my favorite retro aesthetic in anything I've played recently and definitely the best anyone's nailed the PC-98 look in a while, but even more than that the characters and story are great. They do a great job showing people from totally different backgrounds with totally different approaches working together against an oppressive power structure, and rather than everything working out perfectly there are definitely problems, but it still shows hope for overcoming them and a path toward the future.

Unicorn Overlord: Unlike Vanillaware's previous game the writing is only ok, but the art continues to be excellent, and it's easily their best iteration on their RTS ideas to date. I don't think the story will leave much of a lasting impression on me, but I had such a great time with the gameplay for the entire time I was playing that I don't mind.

OPUS: Echo of Starsong: Definitely kind of a slow burn that took me a bit to warm up to, but I really liked how things came together in the end as I got to know more about the characters and what was going on. It's also good at showing restraint though, not neatly wrapping everything up, and it left me with more to think about than when I started.

We Know the Devil: Another one that's good at hinting at and suggesting things without explicitly coming right out and directly telling you everything, and some scenes hit differently when replaying to see the other endings when you know enough to be able to read it as commenting on itself.

Jack Jeanne: A strong contender for my favorite thing I played this year. Definitely my favorite music/rhythm game, the best music in general, and the most gender. So many things in it can be read on multiple levels at once as being about the nature of art and performance, what gender even is, and how (or even if) to engage with an audience.

Visions of Mana: It's a shame the studio got shut down right when it released, because they definitely understood what made the old games in the series so much fun, and they finally made a new non-remake Mana game that's actually pretty great for the first time in over two decades.

1000xRESIST: I'm undecided on whether it's my favorite thing I played this past year, but it's definitely my favorite piece of media in general that came out in 2024. It's another one where everything works on like 17 levels simultaneously, like generational trauma, the nature of language and communication, the protests in Hong Kong, the experience of being an immigrant or a child of immigrants, both biological and found family, memory and what we choose to forget or to pass on, and like a dozen more things.

A Highland Song: If you're noticing that most stuff in this category is here because it has great writing/storytelling you're not wrong, and this one is no exception. The way what's going on is gradually revealed is satisfying, and the way it's structured across different paths keeps things interesting. It also does a great job of seamlessly blending realism and history with myth and legend, treating them all as equally meaningful and important to the people and world.

Ys X: Nordics: Sometimes you just need to go on a wacky adventure though, and Adol's shenanigans continue to be fun. The gameplay continues to feel tight and polished, and they also keep managing to have a large cast of interesting and likeable characters. It's just a good time.

I guess this time I'll only be tagging that last category because I played entirely too many games in 2024 and don't actually have enough tags for the top two categories like usual. There were some huge disappointments, but there were even more things that I didn't expect to like as much as I did, and there was a bunch of really great stuff in general.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Ok since it's taking a while to finish my enormous post of every game I played in 2024 (mostly because the construction outside is still neverending and is ruining my sleep and ability for form coherent thoughts) I guess I can make a quick list of stuff I didn't finish yet for one reason or another but am still at least in theory working on.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon: Almost everything about it is great except for chapter 12, which is bullshit. In a less great game that would've been enough to get me to give up, but the characters are too much fun not to keep hanging around with them and seeing what they get up to in the last act of the story.

Hi-Fi Rush: The presentation is incredible, with so many little details animated in time with the music. A lot of people had a lot of fun making it. I don't 100% click with the gameplay though, so it's been slow progress.

Froguelike: I couldn't resist just based on the name. Another frog-themed bullet heaven game. It's not done yet, and it feels not done yet, but it definitely has potential, and the way each run ends up being a little narrative story is nice.

Wylde Flowers: If I had finished it in 2024 it would be very near the top of my list. Instead it'll probably be very near the top of my list this year. It fixes just about everything that stresses me out about stuff like Stardew Valley, and the characters are way better written and developed than I expected at first.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel: I decided to try jumping forward in the series a bit after the first game felt a bit too dated for what I'm in the mood for now. I'm several hours in and it's going better, but it still hasn't really grabbed me yet.

In Stars and Time: I really was hoping to finish it by the end of the year, but it's one of those things that deserves my brain actually functioning, and that's been really hit or miss lately and hasn't aligned with also being in the mood to play it for a while.

Slay the Princess: I started playing it like a week before they announced the huge update, and then having to wait a week for that kinda killed my momentum. I'll get back to it at some point though.

Live A Live: Having a good time with it, but I've only been doing a single chapter at a time every now and then because they're self-contained little stories that work that way. It holds up better than a lot of stuff from back then does.

Astral Chain: I really meant to finish this a while back but got distracted and forgot about it. It might be heretical to say this, but I like literally everything about it better than the previous Platinum game I played, Near a Tomato (except maybe the music).

Radiant Historia: Yes I first made a post about this one multiple years ago. No I still haven't finished it. Yes I still think it's excellent and will get back to it when I get the 3DS off the shelf and put it somewhere I see it and remember it exists.

And now just 27 more entries to go on the year in review post (out of I think 182 total if I counted right).

[veebs-hates-video-games]

A few more short things for the end of the year that may or may not end up being the last ones. We'll see, I guess.

Across-Stitch: Pretty decent variation on the usual picross/nonograms formula. I might've done more puzzles than I did, but some of the color palettes are bad enough that they make it a lot harder to tell at a glance what certain clues or squares are marked as. If you're color blind this might be the game that kills you instantly.

a completely normal dating simulation that is definitely completely sweet, innnocent and normal: SOMETHINGETH ANIVERSARY EDITION: This feels like someone who was in high school in 2011 took their Tumblr and dumped it into Ren'Py, but it also feels like a Flash animation from the 00s. I didn't finish all the routes because I don't think the joke would hold up that long, but what I did make it through was surprisingly entertaining.

Mouthwashing: I understand a lot of people really, really, really like this one, but it was the most profound sensation of boredom I experienced all year. I forced myself to keep going for almost 2.5 hours hoping there'd be some sort of payoff or something to win me over, and it just never happened. Eventually I decided I didn't care enough to bother finding out what happens in the end. Extremely not my thing, but I have weird taste, and I'm particularly picky when it comes to horror ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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I seem to have bookended my year with the two VNs by Salmon Snake, Vengeful Heart at the very beginning, which was excellent, and their first one, The Great Voyage, at the end now. It was less ambitious and not nearly on the same level, but I still enjoyed it and can see how they progressed from one to the other.

The art and writing are the main draw in both, and they went from good in this to great in Vengeful Heart. The main characters in this are enjoyable enough, and the story doesn't waste any time getting to the interesting part, but the world and characters don't have nearly the depth they managed in their next game (which to be fair is a lot longer), and the art went from pretty good in this one to absolutely nailing the PC-98 style perfectly the next time around.

You can see bits and pieces of thematic elements in this that they revisited again later too, like the revolutionary elements, just looked at in different ways from a different point of view.

Definitely a good use of a dollar (on sale anyway) and an hour of time, although I'd strongly recommend Vengeful Heart over it, and I'm really curious about their third game they've been working on for a while now.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

More Tales from the Depths of Deku Deals. I'm having lots of fun looking deep at the bottom of the 70+ pages of recommendations to find the stuff it doesn't know how to rank because it's free or hasn't been released yet.

I commissioned some bees 0: Pretty straightforward non-narrative hidden object game, but I like the idea of going to multiple different artists and paying them their commission rate to have them draw whatever they feel like (within the loose general theme) as long as they can hide like a hundred bees in it somewhere. That could potentially be a very fun commission request to receive. There are apparently a whole bunch more of these, but I'm not sure I necessarily need more. Also certain pieces of art in this one definitely are more suited to hidden objecting than others.

Margo: Slice of life space lesbian basically just trying to keep herself distracted/busy while her girlfriend moves to another planet. I dig the melty, drippy art style. I think I would've enjoyed the experience more if it weren't one of the most broken things to play on Linux through Wine I've seen in a while while still technically being playable. If you ever stop moving the mouse it stops rendering graphics and video just goes black, and that was with the best version of Proton I could find to work with it. The others I tried, both newer and older, were broken in different ways that prevented playing it at all.

Point of Mew: First person cat game about helping the small human you live with find stuff to make a boat. Cute with light exploration, and some of the objects you can use in your boat and their descriptions are fun.

Locke(d): They basically turned a paragraph from an essay by Locke into a 15 minute long dialogue. No particularly new ideas that other stuff hasn't talked about before, but it's fun that someone said hey what if we took this hypothetical situation he describes completely literally and then use that as a way to present the ideas he's talking about with it.

Yay random free stuff that's just interesting enough to be worth my time. It helps that these are all very short, like 30 minutes each or less for all but the first one, which was still under an hour. Feels kinda like the early 2010s when I was at my peak of keeping up with every weird little indie game and art game I came across that sounded remotely interesting. I still miss Porpentine's column on RPS and all the stuff on freeindiegam.es sometimes.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I am so going to stay on top of these posts, for real this time (I will not).

I have once again fallen victim to "I'd buy that for a dollar" when I randomly stumbled across Luckily, My Arm Is a Shotgun on sale for a dollar. Luckily it's actually pretty ok!

Nothing particularly remarkable about it, but it was a good enough use of a dollar and like 25 minutes. Cute-ish retro graphics, catchy enough music, surprisingly polished, and the massive recoil on the shotgun is very satisfying. There isn't a ton of writing, but what's there on the datapads scattered around the map...well, it's not laugh out loud or anything, but a lot of it is in sensible chuckle territory.

Basically I went in expecting absolutely nothing and came away a little while later pleasantly surprised.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Ok I actually have something nice to say this time. I totally missed The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place when it came out a few years ago even though it was included in a bundle I bought, but it just popped up again today lurking on page 74 of my recommendations on Deku Deals.

(I feel like I should specify page 74 was the last page, and I had started from the end and was working backwards, just in case someone assumed I had already looked through 73 pages to get there. Which is reasonable to assume because that's something I would do.)

Anyway, it's more of an interactive poem than anything, about being a willing participant in the destruction of history, trying to explain or justify it while also being aware of the sense of loss. It's an experimental little art game that's all of 15 minutes long and free on Steam or itch.io, and it's worth the time if that's your sort of thing.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

97% of the 132,595 user reviews of this game are positive.

I guess that makes this one a pretty unpopular opinion: I think Stray is kinda boring.

Like there's nothing really wrong with it (aside from the contextual "jump" prompts sometimes being finicky about your precise positioning), but by a couple hours in I'd already lost interest. Maybe I never really had much to begin with.

It just doesn't really feel like there's all that much there. It looks nice enough, but nothing about that wows me. Running around exploring is fine, but the traversal itself isn't anything special, and I don't feel like I find much interesting by going out of my way. Maybe there's more to it later on, but the characters and story in the first couple hours aren't particularly memorable or developed much either.

I feel like I'm missing something, because so many people really liked it so much, but it's just not really doing it for me¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I've been slacking on posting when I finish/give up on stuff again, so you get to drink from the firehose.

Everything is going to be OK: On the surface it's cute and silly in a kind of cartoony edgy way, but actually it's all about coping with adversity through absurdity (and poetry), whether that's depression or trauma or misogyny or the devaluing of artists or any number of other things. I haven't managed to do everything in it yet because it does not play nice with the Steam Deck and my desktop has no sound for a couple more days, but what I've managed to get through without it breaking is good.

KarmaZoo: I love the idea of a multiplayer game that actively uses game design to incentivize and require cooperating with other players and being nice to them. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anyone playing it anymore when I've tried.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: Most of my time with it was actually closer to when it came out, but this is when I've officially decided I'm done with it. I get along with it a lot better than BotW/TotK, but I still don't like the core design principles of the current phase of the Zelda series. Like I get why other people do, but they're just not doing much for me. I hardly ever feel like I came up with a clever solution to a puzzle, just threw random kludged together crap at it and it worked anyway, so it's not very satisfying. The handful of more challenging/interesting puzzles have been totally optional stuff like a few of the heart pieces. I think I'm done with Zelda until they get this out of their system and try something else in another 5-10 years, which is a shame because I've been playing and mostly enjoying them since the first one was the only one.

Be My Horde: Or what of it is currently finished anyway. Another bullet heaven game, this time with a dommy mommy necromancer. I like how it plays a bit differently from the typical stuff in the genre because of how everything is built around resurrecting the enemies you kill and ways to modify that ability, but how well it works in the end will depend on how much more they add to the base that's there now and if that manages to create some more interesting interactions and viable ways to build.

Pesticide Not Required: Also bullet Heaven, but this time it's...a hybrid with a farming sim? Also you're a frog. Sure, why not? Very silly idea that actually somehow works, fighting off bugs while growing crops, mining ore, and catching fish. Different builds ultimately don't feel very different (aside from focusing more/less on farming/mining/fishing), and a lot of weapon combinations ultimately end up playing exactly the same. Also for such a cute and lighthearted games the different frogs' abilities feel designed less in a "here's an interesting puzzle for you to solve" way like Halls of Torment's unlocks and more "screw the player and I hope you enjoy having stat nerfs that make the game feel bad to play". I say all that, but I still think it's mostly reasonably fun overall.

Golf Club Nostalgia (or Golf Club Wasteland, depending on where you look): Surprisingly more interesting than I expected. Post-apocalyptic golf (which I'm glad I played on "you can't lose" story mode, because I suck too much at it to even attempt getting par on some of those levels) with a not-so-subtle story that doesn't name names but is clearly about Elon Musk having destroyed Earth and now moving on to destroy Mars. The most interesting bits are the worldbuilding done through the radio station that plays in the background, both the songs and the stories people tell about the past.

Spitkiss: I really want to like it more than I do, and I actually did for the first couple chapters. It's I guess technically a puzzle platformer? Except about little guys who communicate through bodily fluids and emojis. This is not the first time something like this has lost my interest by adding moving creatures/enemies of some sort that make the puzzles a lot more timing-focused right after I started getting into it. Oh well. In conclusion, these bitches gay. Good for them.

Will The Man Get Frog: I had to find out what it was just from the name, and what it was is a PICO-8 haiku game based on very limited and randomly chosen words. I had coincidentally just been remembering magnetic poetry was a thing, so great timing with that. Great idea, fun to mess around with, and I could see myself keeping it installed and spending a few minutes with it here and there when I don't know what else to do with myself.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

And now a couple more random things I forgot to mention in the main posts for a couple games I played recently, mostly UI stuff.

The devs of SeaBed should be ashamed of themselves for their menus, especially the settings menu. The sliders for stuff like volume and the labels for them don't even pretend to be aligned, and you have to look at the highlighted label to see which slider you're moving. That's a one million years dungeon kind of UI crime, which is weird because almost everything else in it is totally fine.

The other thing they did with menus is make the transitions for them waaaaaay too long. It's definitely not hiding loading screens or anything because you can load a saved game in like 0.2 seconds and it jumps right into it nearly instantly. For some reason though the main menu and its sub-menus have like three second transitions on them, and it just makes them feel terrible to navigate, which is weird because almost everything else in it is very responsive.

And speaking of slow menus, Star Ocean: The Divine Force has a similar problem. It's one of the reasons crafting sucks, because you open the pause menu and it takes just long enough before it's responsive to be slightly annoying, and then switching tabs also has a slightly too long delay/transition, and you have to wait for each one to load before you can switch to the one after it, and the crafting menu is three tabs over from where you start. Then it has multiple sub-menus you have to dig down through. Then actually crafting has an obnoxiously long and pointless animation too (which at least that one you can skip). All of these things should be nearly instantaneous.

It also has some seriously Xenoblade Chronicles X-ass tiny fonts (hopefully those get fixed finally in XCXDE). The smallest ones used are right on the border of unreadable on the Steam Deck, and they're still on the small side even on a 1080p screen. My vision kinda sucks in a mostly uncorrectable way, so please do better.

Also the world map kinda sucks. SO2R managed to provide more information on its than SO6, and that's a remake of a PS1 game. This one kept giving me warnings if I fast traveled that I'd miss certain events. Did it tell me if they were at all important, like private actions or story-related stuff? It did not. Did it tell me where they were or why I would be missing them? It did not. At some point I gave up and just ignored it because it's an extremely useless warning when there's not really any way to act on it. SO2R managed to include on the map which locations had private actions available, but SO6 tells you absolutely nothing about anything going on anywhere. If you're going to harass your players about stuff like that you need to give them the information necessary to act on what you're telling them. Otherwise you're just annoying them or making them feel like they're missing out on stuff.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I just realized all three games mentioned in the previous post (Tales of Berseria, Tales of Arise, and Star Ocean: The Divine Force) have music by the same person: Motoi Sakuraba. Go figure.

Anyway, Star Ocean: The Divine Force is an extremely ok game. I'm beginning to think Star Ocean in general aspires to be a B-tier JRPG series but doesn't always actually manage to pull that off. I haven't played all of them and have only finished two of them, but I just want one to actually live up to its own potential and be consistently good the whole way through. They really have some good stuff going on there, but something always manages to get in the way.

Both SO6 and SO2 (the only two I've finished all the way through) have the same problem where the first half or even 3/4 of the game is pretty consistently good-but-not-quite-great, and then the rest of it just isn't anywhere near as much fun, and by the end I just want it to be over. And for some reason the problems usually show up or become significantly worse around the time you move from whatever swords and sorcery planet you're stuck on into space, which is kind of funny because part of me wishes they had a better balance of those two things until I remember the space sections are worse.

This one was genuinely quite fun for most of the first three of four acts/chapters/whatever they call them. Like I said before the nyoom button is great and makes exploration and combat feel a lot faster and more fluid, and the characters grew on me more since then and are mostly what kept me going at the end. The doll-like character designs even mostly won me over eventually (except for everyone in the Lawrence family looking extremely goofy), although a few of the female character designs are a bit questionable (please let Chloe wear more than 2/3 of a skirt).

The story has its moments, and it's kind of amusing following following along with it and seeing how many things map one-to-one directly onto Star Trek, just with the names very slightly changed. The entire series feels like the adventures of the United Federation of Planets Pangalactic Federation trying and failing to uphold the Prime Directive Underdeveloped Planet Preservation Pact, and there's a bunch of other stuff in this one that has very obvious Star Trek counterparts that I'm not going to get into because spoilers. Star Trek did it better, but I at least enjoyed what they did with it here for the most part until the ending parts of the game/story.

And unfortunately it's that last act of the game that really dragged down my opinion of it in the end, just like with the really underdeveloped disc 2 of SO2. I did appreciate the fakeout ending, but some stuff dragged on longer than it had to, and the motivations of a lot of the main antagonists toward the end got kind of muddled or bland or boring or all of the above. Lots of handwaving and not a lot of satisfying payoff for much.

It didn't help that by then the gameplay kind of started to fall apart too. I realized by then how much the combat system was being carried by the nyoom button. The more stuff you have to fight that can't be effectively nyoomed the less fun it gets. Also the crafting/IC system somehow sucks noticeably more than in SO2R (where it was actually pretty good), so I didn't use it as much as I should've because it's just so much slower to use and hides so much information from you, and at some point even the best buyable gear will still result in all your fairly stupid AI party members getting one-shot by several of the bosses as they charge directly into something that's about to kill them.

What also doesn't help that is that a lot of the stronger attacks have such painfully long animations compared to the quicker ones you use earlier in the game, but if you don't want fights to take forever you need to use them because they're so much stronger. It just doesn't feel awesome switching from quick individual attacks to pushing a single button to do an entire combo that you're locked into for like five seconds, and then something knocks you out of it and you get to eat another five seconds slowly falling through the air and then getting up from the ground. Even like 40 hours in I was still tapping the dodge button trying to recover from knockback/knockdown attacks like you can do in better games.

It also might be the most heteronormative game I've played in a while. I don't think queer people exist in this universe, at least not in this game. Like not only is it never mentioned, but it's always universally assumed by everyone that everyone is attracted to the opposite gender and wants to get married and have an extremely normal life, which after a while started to really stand out and feel kind of weird. And it's also weird how many of the private actions between female characters end up being them talking about boys or astrology or girls be shopping, while the guys are fighting with each other over who's the strongest. There are rare exceptions like Albaird liking candy and fluffy animals, but they're pretty unusual.

And I actually like that the girls are allowed to be girly sometimes while still being just as competent as everyone else, like Nina and Chloe were two of my favorite characters. It's just kind of jarring how stark the gender divide is a lot of the time, even if Albaird is allowed to not always be a badass manly man and Malkya is allowed to be sometimes (also her design is...questionable).

Also it somehow decided I needed to see the Laeticia/Midas ending, which was the absolute lowest one on my list if I'd been allowed to choose. Please do not make the old man get flirty with the 18-year-old princess. It's weird and creepy. Also the internet claims that the game says he's 37 (which is still far too old), but that man looks like he's at least in his 50s. What's wrong with you? That was a terrible note to end on.

Anyway, in conclusion Star Ocean is still struggling to actually make a complete and consistent game that lets the genuinely good stuff they have going on shine without getting bogged down by some flubbed design decisions and iffy writing at times. I just want the whole thing to be as much fun as I was having when I said this on Discord:

More games should let you play as a princess in a scalemail dress with two swords and a jetpack who goes up to people like IT'S TIME TO DUEL and then pulls out a board game

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Friendship ended with Tales. Now Star Ocean: The Divine Force is my best friend.

Ok let's back up a bit.

The first Tales game I played was Tales of Phantasia, like the original Super Famicom version way back when the fan translation first came out, and it was pretty fun. I also had a great time with Tales of Symphonia back in the day too. I've kind of struggled to get into the ones I've tried since then, and they might just not be my thing anymore.

I was having a reasonably good time with Tales of Berseria when I played the first couple dozen hours a few years ago, but I ended up taking an extended break because of both computer and health problems, and I had a really hard time trying to get back into it recently.

I like a handful of the characters enough for them to have carried it for a while (mostly Velvet and Magilou, even if Velvet's outfit is terrible and Magilou's is almost as bad in some ways), and the story is fine I guess, but that's not enough to get past finding the actual gameplay fairly boring at this point. Like it's probably not entirely fair to compare it to stuff I've been playing that came out this decade, but even sticking to things from roughly when it came out I found Ys 8 or XC2 a lot more engaging (and also the characters and stories in those too, not just the combat system).

So I decided it wasn't a good use of my time if I wasn't enjoying it anymore and tried Tales of Arise instead, because I found it absurdly cheap earlier this year. It's bugged me visually since the first trailer came out so I wasn't getting my hopes up, but I figured I should try anyway.

It's fine? Probably? It's just also not really doing much for me. It looks better in the actual game than the trailers usually (even if it feels like it still doesn't rally have a cohesive art style sometimes), and it feels better to play than Berseria, but nothing in the first couple hours really grabbed me. I'm kinda curious about what the deal is with the story and why there are spaceships and guns in the opening cutscene, but mostly it just made me want to play Star Ocean instead.

So I did.

I had already played the first half dozen hours of Star Ocean: The Divine Force this past summer but got sidetracked by other stuff and forgot why I liked it. The nyoom button is the greatest invention ever. Just point your character in any direction, even into the air, and press nyoom to nyoom. It feels great every time and makes everything so much faster and more fluid, even just running around town. Let me be a dumbass as fast as possible and I'm your new best friend (see also: Athena in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel or Vanguard in Mass Effect 2 and 3).

I have mixed feelings about the art style (I don't love it hate the doll-like character designs, but Ray's face/head looks particularly ridiculous compared to everyone else), and the characters and story are fine but nothing special so far, but I'm pretty consistently having a good time whenever I do stuff, and that's good enough for me right now.

Also bonus points to whoever made the ongoing minigame not be yet another Triple Triad knockoff and made it Go instead.

Also also it's making me look forward to XCXDE next year even more, because that's an even better sci-fi JRPG with ridiculous movement options that I never got to completely finish before back when I played it, so that should be fun.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I actually did finish one of the things I've technically been in the middle of for years. I played Boyfriend Dungeon right when it first came out because I backed the Kickstarter, but then they went and released the rest of the game a few months later. It took me three years to get back around to going through the rest of it.

I think I probably would've enjoyed the new stuff more if it had been in the game at release. It was still fun, but it was kind of rough to go back to after so long. It didn't help that even though I liked them enough as characters, I didn't really enjoy playing as the new weapons as much as some of the old ones, and the new dunj/boss were much easier with my beautiful disaster enby Sawyer instead of Jonah or Leah.

Still, it was fun to go back to for a few hours and have some more interactions with characters I liked (not you Sunder or Eric) and meet some new ones too. And it's still nice that there's just as much story and the relationships are just as meaningful if you go full aroace platonic playthrough. Hardly anything else out there actually gives you that option without making it worse in some way.