Orion's blug.

I am Orion. Aspiring writer/editor who doesn't write often enough. So this blog is my attempt to work writing into my life more often and develop a healthier writing habit.

Here I'll be posting my thoughts about games and anime and movies, whatever I happen to consume over the course of the year. And next year, probably. Every year, really.

It's getting heretical in here.

Blasphemous 2 is the long-awaited sequel to Blasphemous 1, giving us a new Penitent One to watch stumble through their penance. Blasphemous 2 starts off immediately differentiating it from 1 by giving you a selection of weapons to start with; a giant ball on a chain, a rapier-dagger combo, and a sword. Each of these weapons interacts with a different object; the ball and chain (Veredicto) can hit blue bells, which send out ripples that cause platforms to appear or certain doors to open; the rapier-dagger combo (Sarmiento and Centella) can strike mirrors that teleport you a short distance forward, bypassing walls or pits; and the sword (Ruego al Alba) can dive-bomb the ground, releasing shockwaves that destroy certain barriers. Each of these objects are present in the early-game, sending you into different directions when starting a new run based on which weapon you choose to start with, keeping the early-game fresh for at least two additional runs.

In combat, the weapons have their own pros and cons as well; Sarmiento and Centella are fast, with Lightning-based buffs that, so long as you can avoid getting hit and losing it, vastly improve their DPS. You can also aim the weapon up or down when in the air, allowing for a little bit of extra utility. However, the weapon is abysmal against enemies that are small, as you can’t aim at the ground while standing, its short range makes it difficult to fight aerial enemies, and the lightning buffs the weapon can acquire through repeated hits are lost when you take damage. As a result, Sarmiento and Centella are high-risk, high-reward, and hugely satisfying if you can keep the damage going.

Ruego al Alba is a one-handed saber and is similar to the Mea Culpa from the first game. As such it’s fairly well-balanced in terms of power and speed. It can be similarly buffed with Mystic-type damage. Ruego’s buff isn’t lost upon getting hit, but it does pass over time. With wider swings, Ruego al Alba is better for smaller enemies than S&C, and its slightly greater range makes it better for aerial enemies as well. Both Ruego al Alba and S&C can block and counter, giving them a defensive option that Veredicto doesn’t have.

Veredicto is slow, but its swings are incredibly wide and it has more than double the range of Ruego al Alba, making it ideal for dealing with crowds and aerial enemies, as well as fighting from far enough away that any enemy using it would have me calling bullshit. Veredicto has an active Fire-damage buff that consumes Fervor and can be toggled on and off at will. It is, in my opinion, by far the best of the three weapons, as its slow speed isn’t enough to counterbalance the raw damage it can deal or the distance from which you can deal it. Once you acquire it, whether you start with it or not, it quickly becomes your primary damage dealer. The only time you might swap to another weapon is during boss fights, but even then, Veredicto’s wide swings allow you to attack from basically anywhere you feel safe. The only real downside is that you can’t dodge while making your swing, meaning it is possible to botch your timing and get hit by an attack that otherwise wouldn’t have hit you if you were using Ruego al Alba or S&C.

Basically what I’m saying is, just start with Veredicto. (Although I started with S&C.)

Blasphemous 2 has two expansion DLCs, each adding a new region and weapon of their own; DLC1 adds the Mea Culpa, and DLC2 adds a whip-like weapon called Embrujo, and these weapons interact with new objects that appear only in their new locations. The Mea Culpa can be made to interact with all three of the objects that the starting weapons interact with, but by default it basically replaces Ruego al Alba. Embrujo takes the place of Veredicto and can also interact with the bells.

On top of all this weapon stuff, you have access to a suite of spells called Prayers, which take the form of quick-cast Verses and longer-casting but more impactful Chants. They cost Fervor to cast and can cover for basically any weaknesses of your preferred weapon.

One weakness Metroidvanias are at risk of is late-game exploration being tedious and boring. Blasphemous 2 avoids this, making extremely good use of the different abilities you can acquire to encourage exploration with every new movement tool you acquire by putting things basically everywhere. Even the very starting areas have places you can only reach in endgame when you’ve acquired specific movement options. There is always something new to find, and every new movement ability you get means another sweep of the entire game’s map.

Supplementing these sweeps is an increasing ability to fast travel; at first, you can only use special mirror rooms to fast travel to other special mirror rooms, but eventually you can fast travel between Prie Dieus (effectively bonfires a la dark souls), and there are a great many more Prie Dieus than mirror rooms, making the former effectively obsolete. You can also earn a Chant that allows you to teleport back to the main hub’s Prie Dieu from anywhere, meaning you don’t even have to hunt down a Prie Dieu when you need to fast travel; you can just use the go-home chant to get to one quickly. You aren’t ever able to fast travel from a mirror room to a prie dieu or vice versa, however.

The boss design is peak, and I’ve been taking notes on how they function for my own Metroidvania project. No boss feels unfair or cheap; every attack is avoidable, even if they come out fast and punish bad positioning or timing, and they are all very cool fights to boot. Getting better at the tougher ones after each attempt feels amazing, and it’s equally amazing when you lock in and manage to one-shot a boss. This is only helped by the super tight and responsive controls; at no point ever do you feel like you didn’t go *exactly* where you intended to go, and so platforming challenges as well as bosses that demand a lot of movement from you feel incredible.

The music is, as usual, very good. The voiceover as well; there’s this sense of dread and melancholy coming from nearly every person you interact with, as their lives are affected irrevocably by the Miracle.

And speaking of the people you interact with...well, at this point, it’s time for the spoiler cut, so reader beware!

To put an end to an eternal curse.

This’ll be another short review. I was streaming this game and took few notes (which is to say zero), and my longer reviews benefited strongly from my taking of notes during my playthroughs, which is a bit more difficult to do when I stream a game. (The same was true of Death’s Door. In the future I’ll try to take notes while I stream, but I make no promises as I’m focused on commentary during streaming.)

Castlevania was never too strong on my radar, to be honest. I’ve been a huge fan of Metroidvanias in general for a long time, and Metroid itself was always a favorite series, but Castlevania always managed to be a blind spot for me.

This changed relatively recently when I played Symphony of the Night, which was sold to me as “the -vania half of Metroidvania”; an accurate descriptor if ever I’d heard one, as SotN very much played like any Metroidvania I could name. And I loved it a lot!

Fast forward...honestly, like, a year. I hadn’t played another Castlevania since, until I decided to stream Order of Ecclesia.

So unfortunately, I don’t have a lot to say to compare it to any other Castlevania title except for SotN, and on that I can only say that I was very much not misled—I had been told that Ecclesia was exactly as hard as Symphony of the Night was easy, and Ecclesia kinda kicked me around like a deflated soccer ball for a while!

Order of Ecclesia stars a woman named Shanoa, who lost her memory and her emotions as part of a ritual involving a powerful spell that can be used to destroy Dracula once and for all. After some tutorial nonsense, you’re tasked with hunting down a man who turned his back on Ecclesia and stole the spell, and onward to victory you ride. As you progress, you find various villagers in the dungeons that you rescue and bring back to Wygol Village, your central hub, where they can then sell you items or send you on fetch quests to grant you new equipment or expand the shop.

The game is not quite a Metroidvania—you have Wygol Village and various levels you can go to that sort of act like Metroidvania levels in themselves, but the game isn’t a true Metroidvania. That doesn’t detract from it, however, as it works for Ecclesia.

My favorite part about Ecclesia has to be the various types of attacks you can use, and the Union system allowing you to combine attacks, though I found that union attacks were less useful than they sounded, for the most part. Some of them had a niche—that crab boss in the tower really didn’t like the dual bow union, I’ll tell you that much—but by and large I found it more useful to just spam the regular attacks. You get all the various weapons you’d expect to see in most fantasy games, but especially Castlevania; you got your swords, your lances, your axes you throw at an arc allowing for great utility, and then you got magic, where you have various elements but really you just have Ignis because if you aren’t spamming fireballs then you are fundamentally misusing magic. Ignis is just that good okay

That isn’t to say spamming fireballs is gonna get you through the game, though. Some enemies just don’t give a crap and will kick your ass despite your affinity for channeling Fire Man’s raw charismatic aura. The game is hard!

Castlevania never fails in the music front. 10/10, no notes, would rock out again. It consistently matches the aesthetic and never feels out of place.

I think that’s about it for the open segment.

Spoilers to follow.

What would you do if death never came?

This one’s been a bit of time coming, as my friend had been asking me to play it for a while. Recently, as part of a sort of gift exchange, he bought it for me and instructed me to play it on stream, and far be it from me to deny the Benefactor his whim.

Death’s Door is an isometric action-adventure game similar in scope to something like Tunic. It stars a crow that works as a Reaper—a bringer of death to a world where nothing dies. On a standard job to retrieve and deliver a soul of particular note, you are ambushed and your prize stolen. You track down the culprit and find that he is a much older crow, and he needed your Giant Soul to open a door he calls “Death’s Door”. One wasn’t enough, however, and he reckons three more will be required to open it. He sends you away with instructions to find those three Giant Souls, and the game begins in earnest.

Your three targets are souls that have long since overstayed their time in this world, ancient beings that have lived for many years beyond their time. An old witch, a frog king, and a yeti, each desperate to sustain their lives in spite of you. But their souls, ancient as they are, have begun to rot, and their deaths are as much a mercy to them as they are necessary for your quest.

Now, one thing I like about the game is how tight the controls are. When you really get in the zone and find a strategy that suits you, it can feel like you’re just flying along. Every time I made a mistake it was genuinely my own, no jank to blame whatsoever. Even when I was aiming magic, which due to the way it works FEELS like it should be next to impossible, was quick and easy, as the game would correct your actual aim up to a point. Combat is fluid and responsive and feels damn good. Hookshot spell supremacy. 10/10.

The game is mostly fairly easy, but it does have its difficulty spikes. There are specific enemies that you find to upgrade your magic, and one of them is significantly harder than the rest despite being the first one you fight. Let’s just say I came out of that fight with a healthy fear and unhealthy hatred of fire.

Now for a characteristically short paragraph on music: It was good. Some of it had me wondering if it was truly dungeon music, but ambiance is king at times. Boss music was fittingly tense, with the intro accompanied by the screen-filling text displaying the boss names (which was kind of cool in itself). A lot of it really helped the game to feel like you were there to kill.

For all the theming around death and mortality and the lack thereof, Death’s Door has its humor. It takes itself seriously when it needs to and lets itself be funny when it can. One of your coworkers is obsessed with typing—she’s always down to fill out forms or copy, whatever lets her clack her feathers against her typewriter. Your other coworker is a cynical bastard of a crow who’s ready to throw wings if you make his job any harder (which, honestly, is valid). Eventually you meet a definitely human vertebrate chef with multi-digited mammal hands and just trust me this game is funny.

Exploration is rewarded; there are always little nooks and crannies with goodies to find, and if you want the true ending you better get to findin’, because it requires you to find all of them. Thankfully, the game shows some mercy in this regard; once you’ve beaten the final boss and are given control again, the various doors in the main hub glow when collectibles are still to be found in the areas to which they lead. However, these areas are still fairly large, so you might still be searching for quite a while.

And on the subject of the true ending...

Here’s the spoiler cut, baby.

Okay I beat this game like a few weeks ago and then I just never wrote the writeup I got lazy let’s go

So we all know I’m a huge Metroidvania fan. Well, I suppose “we” is a strong word considering this is only the second Metroidvania I’ve written up on this blog, but nonetheless, I love Metroidvanias. They’re my favorite subgenre. I’ve played every Metroid game and...well, not every Castlevania yet, but it’s a work in progress. Eventually.

My experience with Metroidvanias outside of the namesakes includes such greats as Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, Ender Lilies, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and the Ori games, non-exhaustive. I think I’ve played enough to know what makes a good one tick, and Yohane the Parhelion...kinda strikes a middle/middle-high chord.

Oh, and it’s based on a school idol anime called Love Live! Sunshine!!.

It stars one Yohane, a second-year chuuni girl who fancies herself a mystical fortune teller, but like, for real, as it’s part of a whole multimedia spinoff starring Yohane (real name Yoshiko). A dungeon has appeared below her hometown, and she’s taken to exploring it. As she travels deeper into the dungeon, she finds each of the other eight girls, giving her new methods for exploration, and each with their own fun quirks. It kind of made me want to watch the anime again.

As far as the game goes, it’s nothing special. It’s a fairly simple Metroidvania without a whole lot to comment on. The level design is good, but not stellar. I rarely got lost, which as far as my directionless ass is concerned is a huge plus; each room is distinct enough that I could maintain a mental map of each section without too much issue, and each area is visually striking in its own way.

The combat is...what’s the best way to put this. It’s easy. Blaze in the Deepblue is one of the easiest Metroidvanias I’ve ever played. Now, that isn’t to say I breezed through with my eyes closed or anything; a few bosses and regular enemies still managed to throw me for a loop, but by and large, the game is not hard.

You start with one single attack—summoning a loyal wolf ally called Lailaps to strike with her claws—and each time you find a character, you get something new. Not all of them are useful for battle (being designed more for exploration), but by the end, you have a fair amount of utility to work with.

Yohane will call the name of the character that you swap to, which is very cute. For Hanamaru, Yohane will sometimes call “Zuramaru”, referencing Hanamaru’s verbal tic. Again, very cute.

Summoning a character costs Darkness Points, or DP, except for Lailaps who is free. Yohane can increase her DP through equipment that she can craft using materials dropped by enemies or found in breakable objects. She doesn’t level up in the traditional sense; you get better equipment to increase your HP and DP, as well as gain special effects.

Aside from defensive and stat-boosting gear, Yohane can also craft special weapons that have different utility (Axes for raw damage, crossbows and throwing daggers for range, etc). These also cost DP to use, and you’ll run through your DP meter a lot faster using the special weapons than your ally attacks. I’m a sucker for utility, though, so I tended to swap weapons to suit the situation—until near the end when I was simply using a big axe for the damage.

The music is great. It’s based on an idol anime, so subpar music would have been...sinful. It’s no Snow Halation, but there isn’t a single track that disappointed me.

I never have too much to say about music. That’s fine.

As for the story… Blaze in the Deepblue drops the ball pretty hard. Instead of sprinkling in lore as the game goes on, it dumps basically the entire thing right at the end when you encounter and defeat the final boss. Right up until then, the entire game is “Wow, this dungeon is weird, why did it eat all of my friends?” I would not go into Blaze in the Deepblue expecting or even just hoping for a compelling story.

This game is for Love Live fans, and as far as that's concerned the game is fine. The game is fully voiced, the portraits are very cute, and the character interactions basically carry the whole thing.

I don’t really have much else to say about it. If you’re looking for a good story or a difficult challenge, Blaze in the Deepblue isn’t for you. But if you like Metroidvanias, or even if you have never played one and want to dip your toes in, and you like Love Live...give it a play. It’s still fun, even if it’s easy.

Dreams and the 1000th Summer

I was still fairly new to anime, barely out of high school, when I discovered AIR. I’d picked it up on a whim at some DVD store. This was in my real anime heyday, when it was basically all I cared about, so I threw myself into this cool new show.

It quickly became one of my favorite anime for years to come.

AIR tells the story of one Kunisaki Yukito, a travelling puppeteer who comes into town with nothing but the shirt on his back and a small puppet he controls through his will—a technique he calls Houjutsu. He journeys in search of a girl with wings in the sky, a story his mother told him when he was young. A girl who has been up there for a very long time, crying, suffering. Yukito isn’t actually sure the girl is real, but chose to search for her anyway, to honor his deceased mother’s request to save her.

He makes this sleepy seaside town a stop, resolving to earn enough money to take the bus to his next destination. He falls asleep on the seawall, having failed to make any money at all. When he wakes up, he’s met with a girl—an eccentric, airheaded girl named Kamio Misuzu.

Misuzu had been waiting next to him for him to wake up. She pokes and prods him, but he doesn’t budge. Two small children on the beach take notice and wave to Misuzu. Eventually Yukito wakes, and to his annoyance, she has decided to make him her friend and refuses to leave him alone, and eventually wins him over by offering him a meal and a place to stay.

Yukito quickly discovers that Misuzu’s relationship with her mother Haruko is distant and strained. Over time, their relationship deepens, and he meets two other girls—the peppy Kirishima Kano, a blue-haired girl with a yellow bandana on her wrist, and the quiet Tohno Minagi and her best friend Michiru, plagued by troubles of their own.

Plot summaries will wait until after the cut. For now, the basics!

Music

There are certain types of tracks that strike you in a way you weren’t expecting. Much of AIR’s music fits that bill. The vocal tracks were performed by Lia, who did such good work that I truly don’t believe those songs could be sung by anybody else.

Overall, the music was on point. Each track executed masterfully, placed exactly where they need to be, and they always managed to fit the context. I’ve read some VNs where they weren’t quite so good with this, but it probably also helps that every track is really good at triggering the exact emotion it’s going for. When the music get somber, get your tissuebox in reach.

Art

Well… Older Key’s art was… Iconic, I think, is the word I’m going to use here. Hinoue Itaru’s style has definitely evolved over the years—her portraits in the ONE remake are evidence enough of that—but I can safely say that Air’s portraits and CGs run the gamut from pretty good to hilariously wonky. It’s Hinoue’s style that spawned the memes of anime girls having their eyes seventeen and a half million miles apart.

That isn’t to say I dislike them! The CGs that matter most are generally free of distractingly bad proportions, and they don’t take away from the impact of the scenes they’re part of. Trust me, that tissuebox will come in handy.

Story

Without delving into spoilers, I loved AIR’s story. The overall plot centers around Yukito and Misuzu and the circumstances that drew them together, while Kano and Minagi’s routes offer extra context to supplement Misuzu’s story. To that end, I STRONGLY recommend this read order: Minagi → Kano → Misuzu.

Obviously since it’s a VN you can read them in any order, but I truly feel that Misuzu’s should be done last, and Minagi’s first. I’ll go more in-depth as to why this order makes the most sense to me under the spoiler cut.

AIR divides its story into three distinct arcs; Dream, Summer, and Air. The Dream arc consists of the three girls’ routes; clearing all three unlocks the Summer arc, which tells an ancient tale, and Air, which leads into the story’s true ending.

I think I’ve run out of non-spoilery things to talk about. SO UNDER THE CUT WE GO. Also half of what's left is a plot summary lol

I FORGOT TO ACTUALLY PUT THE CUT IN WHOOOOPS

You are the ocean's gray waves.

Wow. What is there to even say about this game that hasn’t already been said a thousand times?

Full disclosure, I played the fan retranslation patch which, hilariously, is unfinished, so while the main story and 1st gen supports were all done, some of it simply remained untranslated, and a lot of what is was unpolished. As such I won’t be discussing localization here too much. Just a couple points, really.

1) The name changes were silly. “Kazahana” and “Suzukaze” are not overly complex for English-speakers, to say nothing of Midoriko or Mozume. Nishiki and Kinu also fit the characters much better than Kaden and Selkie. Benoit is also not that hard! It’s just French! And then WHY on God’s green earth did they change Harold’s name to Arthur??? That man is the most Harold man to ever Harold!

2) Screw Treehouse for not only removing Saizo and Beruka’s C support for a lame-ass “haha ninjas quiet funny” joke, but also removing Niles and Rhajat’s unique same-sex support chains with Corrin and copypasting in the opposite-sex ones. Not cool, Treehouse.

So, with that out of the way: The music is far from being one of the game’s flaws. Lost in Thoughts All Alone still stands up there with Edge of Dawn as some of the best music in the series and I will die on that hill. (I do prefer Edge of Dawn, though.) I have nothing much to add about the music, I just wanted to say I liked it.

The main gimmick in Fates is the Dragon Veins, special tiles that characters with dragon blood can use to make changes to any given map. Every map does something different with the veins, which some might argue makes the game too gimmicky, but I actually appreciate the Dragon Veins for setting Fates apart from the rest of the series. With effects ranging from covering water with ice to activating healing tiles to burning deep forest to create new pathways, the Dragon Veins run the gamut of special map effects and as a result, Fates maps work in a way that they can never work in other games.

That is not to say the map design is always good, however. Even with the fun Dragon Vein effects, some maps were simply godawful, with some actually made worse by the Dragon Vein effects. Kana’s recruitment map, for example, is one giant plains with a few rivers acting as a barrier against the enemies trying to come beat up your kid. The Dragon Veins here act individually for one of the three rivers, either draining or filling them to allow for manipulation of enemy placement (you can force the enemies to bottleneck on the bridges, or drain the rivers to let them come impale themselves on your swords). It’s almost unilaterally better to keep the rivers full, making the Dragon Veins effectively worthless unless you’re going for low turn counts which I literally just thought of as I wrote this paragraph so maybe there was something there.

Some maps don’t need the Dragon Veins to make them worse, though. There are two very good examples that I can think of off the top of my head: Revelation Chapter 10, wherein the boss, Zola, covers the entire map in ice and you have to effectively dig through it to reach him to clear the map, and Selkie’s recruitment paralogue which is positively covered in forest tiles and a ton of bottlenecks. Movement on Selkie’s recruitment paralogue is torturous without fliers, and fliers alone aren’t going to clear the stage.

The weapons see a pretty big change in Fates; weapons no longer have durability, but they do have different effects. Steel weapons reduce a unit’s effective speed by 3, making it easier to get dual-attacked and harder to dual-attack themselves, silver weapons actually reduce Strength and Skill by 2 points per use (recovering by 1 each turn), there are weapons that reverse the weapon triangle, weapons that debuff (Kunai and Shuriken, which didn’t make any further appearances)… I actually like the lack of durability, but the caveats make the weapons a bit harder to use effectively.

Story time. Let’s start with Birthright.

Birthright is a scenario wherein you side with your Hoshidan siblings to take out King Garon for being a butthead. It’s pretty standard Fire Emblem fare, if you want to count the ability to grind outside of the story as Fire Emblem fare. (I do, because my first Fire Emblem game was Sacred Stones which had grinding, so it works for me.) The maps here are decent, for the most part, but Birthright is sorely lacking in unique objectives—almost every chapter is a rout map.

All in all, the story is...well, I’ve got my thoughts about that I’ll expand on later, but it’s all right. Nothing spectacular. The final boss of Birthright feels very Fire Emblem and that’s fine by me.

Conquest is next.

Conquest sees you side with your Nohrian siblings, helping King Garon reach Mikoto’s throne to force his true form to be revealed. It has no grinding as you don’t get out-of-story Challenges as you do in Birthright and Revelation, so your gold and EXP management have to be up to snuff. It features better maps with more diverse objectives, such as Defense and Seize, although the majority are still either Rout or Defeat Commander. Diversify your map objectives, kids.

The story is somewhat more engaging than Birthright’s because the tension of dealing with Garon is omnipresent, and then the final boss is...kinda cool, actually.

Revelation.

First of all, Revelation is the canon route—unlike Three Houses, where each route is equally canon and they tell different parts of the story, Revelation is just the canon and true end of the game, and this is where my contentions most strongly lie. I’ll dive more into the story after the spoiler cut, but for now, it’s enough to say that Revelation should have received a fair bit more focus than it did. As the obvious canon route, I fully, 100% believe it should have been longer than Birthright and Conquest—and indeed, BR and CQ should have been shorter, rather than treating all three routes as equally canon. If I’d had my way, BR and CQ would have been cut in half, with that extra time allotted to Revelation and BR and CQ relegated to shorter what-if scenarios. A lot of the problems with Revelation could have been solved with some more focus and better pacing.

Secondly, the maps in Revelation are...interesting. Kind of. A lot of the earlier maps use the same locations as ones in Birthright and Conquest, with the Wind Tribe map and its wind gimmick being taken wholesale right out of Conquest. Where it gets interesting is when you finally reach Valla after chapter 18. The world here consists of fields of floating rocks, and the maps use teleporters, shifting platforms, and similar to allow you to get from A to B. I can see the vision here, but unfortunately I have to say it wasn’t always executed very well. One map very late in has you using shifting platforms to move between different rooms to hit Dragon Veins to grant you access to the boss, and if you split your party up you’re in for a rough time; I finished that map with only five of my units left. But that all being said, it did do a fairly good job of differentiating itself from BR and CQ.

Third, and arguably most important, Revelation offers the single greatest number of individual maps by sheer virtue of having access to every child unit. This is already tedious in Birthright and Conquest when you only have half of the fathers in either route, but in Revelation you have everyone. And that means a lot of support grinding.

A lot of support grinding.

A LOT of support grinding.

The tedium is thick enough to build a house out of, and then there’s the fact that you have to clear every Paralogue to recruit everyone. That’s twenty-one Paralogues. Twenty-two if you include Mozu’s map early on. That adds up to a whopping total of forty-seven chapters, and forty-eight if you count Chapter 27 and Endgame separately as each route’s final chapter has a second Endgame map.

No Fire Emblem game should be forty-eight chapters long.

Which is a very funny statement when you add all three routes together. Each route consists of 27 main chapters and an Endgame map at the end, plus twenty-two paralogues split between Birthright and Conquest. Unless my math isn’t mathing, that’s 28x3=60+24=84+14 (BR and CQ both feature 14 paralogues with six shared)x2=28+22 (total paralogues in Revelation)=50= One Hundred And Thirty Four Chapters throughout the game. (Of course, if you count only unique maps, then one route has 14 paralogues, the next adds 8, and you wouldn’t count any in Revelation at all so you’d only have 22 paralogues to count rather than 50, but you would STILL have One Hundred And Six maps. Minus, uh, however many maps get reused in Revelation, as stated earlier, but I’m not mathing that one.)

Don’t worry about the actual equations there I promise it’s just how my brain maths I fully understand it’s not even close to how one would write that nonsense out.

And the worst part is, they aren’t even named in the map select menu! They’re all just “Paralogue”! Sure, they have descriptions to let you know whose paralogue it is, but this is wild to look at!

I think maybe now I can move into spoiler territory. As such,

SPOILERS for Fire Emblem Fates under the cut!

I'll do my writeup later because I gotta go to work right now.

It's been a month, but I haven't actually played or watched anything new this month. Except Fire Emblem Fates--which is a replay, but it's also

three friggin games

so it's taking me some time to get through it. There will definitely be a writeup though!

Beyond that, I've been playing a bunch of Elden Ring (both vanilla and the Convergence mod) and Risk of Rain 2. So nothing new, no single-run games to write about.

Got a job for you, 621.

Wow. What a game. Now, I’m not very good at action games. I’ve always been a platformer kinda guy myself; where my friends would excel in the high-octane thrill of battle, I was honing my ability to get the funny Italian man to go wahoo really well.

So, as a result, Armored Core 6 was a challenge to start with. The first few missions went well enough. The tutorial mission’s boss is every bit as tough as it needs to be to convey to the player that you ARE expected to get good. If you can’t handle the tutorial boss, then the rest of the game will grind your bones to make its bread.

Of course, after the tutorial, you aren’t left with zero options. The shop opens up near immediately, and you can start building your mechs. The nice thing about Armored Core 6’s shop is that you buy and sell parts at exactly the same rate, so you never lose money if you decide you don’t like how a part or weapon functions. If the rifle cost 50k credits to buy, it will sell for 50k credits.

You can also save different loadouts, and if you sell a part that one of your loadouts uses, it prompts you to repurchase missing parts when you go to load it, with a single button press, so you don’t have to remember what parts you’ve sold or where in the ever-increasing shop list they’re hiding.

The loadouts are a fundamental part of what I believe is the main strength of the game: the wide variety of parts allows you to swap between different loadouts whenever you need to, and you will often need to because different parts are better-suited for different situations. Often, when you hit a wall and none of your current mechs seem capable of climbing it, the solution is to build a new mech.

The above fight gave me a ton of trouble until I built Bottlecap there. (She remained one of my best mechs for the rest of the game.)

Armored Core 6 is the first game in the series where each leg type fills a different niche. Quadrupedal legs can hover. Tank legs are bulky and can hold a lot of weight. Reverse-joint legs allow for high-mobility ground combat and ease of transitioning to air. And then you have your general-purpose bipedals. It’s generally wise to have one mech for each leg type at least, as between the four leg types you can cover basically anything the game has to throw at you. (I also recommend the smaller, miniature tank legs; they can’t hold as much, but their mobility outshines even reverse-joints on the ground—though unlike reverse-joints, their aerial capabilities are limited.)

It isn’t easy to make a true all-rounder mech that can do everything—indeed, I would argue that’s actually impossible, and you *are* necessitated to create multiple AC loadouts. But, again, I am not the best at action games, so maybe it’d just be impossible for me who knows. At any rate, I ended up making almost a dozen ACs and swapped between them regularly, based on my whim and on which mech would suit a particular mission—although by the endgame I was really focusing on my four top-performing builds (one with each leg type, natch).

These screens look intimidating, but the numbers—while important and should not be ignored outright—aren't the be-all and end-all of your build design. Your own skill as a player play an equally important role.

One thing that’s worth noting is that some missions are simply not viable on the first run. There’s an early mission where you have to fight a ground-based mech called the CATAPHRACT, and it’s next to impossible with the parts you have access to by that point in run 1. Building a new mech doesn’t help simply because you’re really meant to do missions like that in run 2 or 3.

Oh yeah, I didn’t mention: You have to beat the game three times to see the true ending. It’s absolutely worth it and not as much of a slog as it sounds, as the early missions do not increase in difficulty unlike the Souls formula games, allowing you to take your previous endgame mechs and steamroll them, and missions that seemed impossible become almost trivial.

Now, that all being said, unfortunately the game is not very clear about what’s a new or altered mission in NG+ versus what was already there. I had to follow a guide written by my friend to make sure I didn’t miss anything. And by “not very clear”, I mean it simply doesn’t tell you in any capacity that I could determine.

Think it’s about time I talk technical stuff before moving into spoilers.

The presentation is gorgeous. Graphics and music. And it should be, since half of the fun of creating an AC is painting and adjusting its look to your taste. You can adjust weathering, luster, reflectivity, each part has five distinct color segments and they can be colored individually or as a group with the entire frame. The same applies to the weapons any given mech uses. Five color segments, luster, all of it. You can also color those separately or as a group. With customization at that level, the graphics absolutely should be—and are—gorgeous to match. And then there’s the music—also incredible. Every NPC boss theme is jam-packed with emotion and they really serve to drive home what it means to be fighting them.

A notable thing about Armored Core is that you never actually see any of the characters. You see their mechs, and they talk to you a lot, but the characters themselves never make a single appearance. What this means is that each character needs to stand on their own two feet and can’t rely on appealing design to get by. This is, I believe, to the game’s benefit; imagining what these characters must look like is far better than having that knowledge. Walter is gruff and serious, so it’s easy to imagine him as a grizzled war vet type with a full face of hair. If it turned out Walter was a balding middle-aged guy with a goatee and a bad toupee, it would ruin him completely.

I’m a big fan of how the story ramps up the stakes over time. It never really feels like a huge jump up, but it always increases. I was kept thinking about the implications from basically the start of run 2. It’s very well-done, very organic.

[Here there was talk about endings and character stuff that I misinterpreted badly. I apparently missed some of the narrative being shoved into my face. so I deleted it because it was mostly wrong and misinterpreted nonsense. Gonna go lament the fact that my brain refuses to work before I get to my next game, I guess lmao. Next time I'll do my research and make sure I didn't miss anything before doing my writeups.]

All in all, Armored Core 6 was an amazing time, and for any fans of mecha or action games it comes completely recommended. I will for sure be sticking with the series going forward, and I may even go back to play others.

Rusty is best boy.

And because I am proud of them, here are my four top-performing mechs:

They are called Spiderlock, Pious Hammer, Sweet Tooth, and Bottlecap. View them, for I love them.

Uh, this one’s a few days late. Over a week, even. Just because I’ve been preoccupied, you know how it is.

So, Carrion is sort of a reverse-horror Metroidvania where you take control of an amorphous mass of horrible teeth and writhing tentacles and you eat people. You work your way around the facility where you were being kept so you can escape to eat more people.

There’s not a lot to say about this, to be perfectly honest? It’s maybe a five-hour game, the graphics are appealing, the movement is smooth as silk (if a little awkward when you’re a huge biomass trying to squeeze through a small opening like

Despite my lack of sense of direction, though, the level design was very friendly. I almost never got lost because every area is visually distinct. 10/10 level design. It very much helped that the people never, ever respawn, so as long as you dutifully devour every human, then finding a new area is as simple as entering a room that has living humans in it.

I had maybe a little too much fun beating the people into the walls and floors instead of eating them.

Speaking of beating things into walls though, some obstacles really presented a challenge for me—namely, drones. They quite literally shredded me on the regular, and they are not easy to fight. Outside of using the spiderweb ability in the first form, I’m not sure how else to fight them, but that was enough to make it through.

“First form” means there are three distinct forms all based on your size, and each one has its own pair of abilities, requiring you to deposit biomass in special pink pools to get smaller or eat more humans (or retrieve your biomass from the pink pools) to get bigger. It’s utilized with expertise—every time you see a pink pool it’s because something nearby needs you to be smaller. It doesn’t just drop them wherever.

I’ve been wracking my brain, but to be honest, there really isn’t that much. Carrion is kind of what it says on the tin. You go around, eating people, get powers, and escape the facility. Or maybe I just need more practice with reviewing games, who knows? I sure don’t. We’ll see, I suppose.

There aren't even really any spoilers to talk about, like with Mystic Quest. The game is what it says on the box.

If you like metroidvanias and you wanna be a scary tentacle tooth monster, then Carrion comes highly recommended.

Today is a short one. Next: I keep saying Armored Core 6, but honestly I’m progressing through that more slowly than I’d expected, so I make no promises this time.

This was...probably a long time coming.

Fire Emblem Engage was certainly an experience. It had some of the best maps in the series, the characters were quirky and loveable (if not particularly deep), the art was appealing, and the story was what it promised it would be.

That isn’t to say it’s a perfect game, though. Especially right at the beginning, the characters chew the scenery something fierce. In particular, they tend to overemote, which lessens the dialogue’s impact as it sort of takes you out of it. Eventually the characters settle into their roles and the writing starts feeling more like Fire Emblem, but you do gotta get past those first few hurdles.

Speaking of the writing, I felt it was enjoyable, if somewhat predictable at some points. The characters often feel a little flat at first as well, with one notable trait overshadowing what else the characters may have. Chloe is obsessed with fairy tales. Louis likes to watch people and drink tea. Yunaka is definitely NOT hiding anything. Alfred is heroic, Celine is kind. You get the picture.

This is most noticeable in Alcryst, an archer who joins you early on, who, despite being probably one of the best archers in the series, CANNOT seem to stop being self-deprecating. Nearly every interaction the boy had was colored with his self-loathing. After about the third time he explicitly rejected praise, I wrote him off. He was insufferable.

It is exasperating.

It can be argued that this has been an issue with the series over the last few titles, and I think I would agree with that assessment. While I do recognize that the characters are deeper than their introductions might suggest, it is still clear that they were based on their one major defining trait.

That being said, it was quite funny to see that Alear was in fact the only sane person in the army, reacting with confusion and concern to everyone else's shenanigans.

Characters aside, the story wasn’t anything particularly special. It gave Alear an objective and the story is about completing that objective. It’s not complex, but it isn’t trying to be, either. It delivers on what it promises. The various nations weren’t anything to write home about, either. You have the peaceful Green Greens nation in Firene; the warlike Brodia; the mountainous and chill Elusia; and the desert-laden land of Solm. You really do just get what you see. But again, that’s fine; Engage is more about Alear than about its worldbuilding, and so Alear gets most of the focus.

There were some funny choices, though. The first paralogue has you rescuing some medics on an island just off of Firene, and even though the Firenese characters all have a pretty standard American Midwest accent, the people of that island—which is JUST BARELY off of Firene—are painfully British.

(I played in dub, as you can tell. I don’t know what the choices were in the Japanese voiceover.)

But enough about the writing. Let’s talk about mechanics. My favorite thing that Engage did was to completely remove weapon durability without the weird caveats Fates’ weapons had. Some of the weapons have been nerfed over the course of the series—Brave weapons are just a shadow of their former glory—but that allowed for removal of weapon durability without creating a situation where you just give everyone a Brave weapon and call it a day.

I’m on record as believing weapon durability never really added much to the series. It’s just an excuse to spend the gold you get, and while managing funds is just as much of a trait of a strategy game as any other, I feel like there are better uses for it, and Engage gives us exactly that. You can still buy and refine weapons, buy items, all that good stuff.

But on that note, this game came out in Anno Domini the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty Three.

WHY on God’s terrible blue and green marble do the shopkeepers have EXACTLY ONE VOICE LINE for each type of transaction? And why do they repeat it with EVERY. SINGLE. TRANSACTION? It got bad enough that I had to mute my game whenever I needed to do shopping. It gets incredibly grating to hear “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” ad nauseum when you’re stocking up on, say, Vulneraries. It is now 2025. Shopkeepers with voice lines should ALWAYS have at MINIMUM 3 lines per transaction type, AND they should only actually trigger every 4-5 transactions, and if I find myself in a position to add voices to my own game I’m going to do exactly that.

The Somniel is the best iteration of the home base yet. My Castle in Fates was rudimentary, but served its purpose; the Monastery in Three Houses was just far too big. The Somniel is smaller and easier to find your way around, which I and my lack of sense of direction deeply appreciated.

Another feature Engage introduces that I find incredibly neat and hope the series continues with is the post-battle segments where you run around in the map you had just cleared, talking to people, picking up stuff on the ground, and adopting pets. Exploring the areas outside of battle gives them a brand new perspective and makes me appreciate the map design all the more.

I have noticed the last two games in this series also having abilities that work similarly to how skills function in Fire Emblem Heroes, where characters get stat bonuses based on who they’re standing nearby (as distinct from supports). At first I was apprehensive about it—I didn’t want the series to start being like Heroes, as much as I did enjoy the gacha—but it seems to have found a middle ground that’s comfortable and adds another layer to player positioning.

This is only helped by the incredible map design. Engage has some of the best, most interesting maps I’ve seen in quite some time, and I’m taking notes from them for my own map design.

Despite being the primary mechanic, and in fact literally part of the game’s name, I didn’t actually...engage with Engage all that much. I did mostly for particularly dire situations and usually to theatrically finish off a boss, but through most maps I didn’t see much need for it. That will likely change when I come back to play the game on a harder difficulty, though—I played on Normal, as I always do for a first run.

As a character gains skill points and bond levels with the different Emblems, they can inherit skills from those Emblems to keep permanently, even when switched to a different Emblem. This is a fantastic feature, but it’s overwhelming for people like me who get intense choice paralysis. In the end I just forewent the skill inheritance entirely just to make it easier on the brain juice.

The Emblems also offering weapon proficiencies, unlocking class changes for the unit they’re bonded with, is probably my favorite thing about the emblems.

The last thing I want to say before I dive into spoilers is that I continue to be of the belief that Fire Emblem should not have ever engaged with shipping. I understand it saved the series in Awakening, but I prefer dedicated romantic subplots over “oh man those two are cute”, even if I DO enjoy shipping. That being said, ONLY Alear gets an S-rank in this game, severely limiting the shipping opportunities and outright denying paired endings outside of Alear’s S support, which I feel is a genuine shame. There are SEVERAL pairs of characters whose romances might make for really nice romantic subplots, and Engage just isn’t interested in exploring those over the Alear self-insert shipping.

I wanted to see Yunaka and Louis together, man.

Spoilers to follow! This isn’t like Mystic Quest where the story is so simple and barebones as not to HAVE any spoilers, so this is your warning!

Lord almighty. What do I even say about this game? I beat it a couple of days ago, but the words just refuse to come to me.

And even if they did, the majority of this writeup is going to have to be under a spoiler! This is very genuinely one of those games that you MUST play blind. So here above the cut I will only be discussing parts of the game that don’t constitute spoilers.

For one thing, Inscryption does something quite unique with its title screen: you cannot select New Game. You must select Continue.

Then we have the music. Eerie, contemplative, ambient, like sitting at a warm campfire, but there is something in the forest in front of you. That’s really about it. The music is good, don’t get me wrong, but it isn’t stellar, either. It suits the game and enhances the vibe which is pretty much what you want out of a soundtrack.

Finally, graphics. Your entire environment is dark and foreboding, with many areas shrouded in shadow. But the table is where you will spend most of your time, because the deck isn’t going to build itself. Honestly, like the music, the environment suits the vibe.

Inscryption starts with you playing a roguelite deckbuilder against a weird pair of glowing eyes who appear to have you captive in his cabin. The only thing you can do is to play his game. It's a roguelite deckbuilder where you play various animals with different stats and abilities to do damage enough to tip the scales--literally, as the scale is what determines the winner, when it tips fully to one side or the other. Cards are played by sacrificing other cards, if they have a Blood cost, or by spending Bone tokens, which are earned every time a card dies (including by being sacrificed for a stronger card). The cards will attack either the opponent's cards or the opponent himself to apply weight to his side of the scale, and then he does the same.

Very quickly, one of the cards you can get starts talking to you. I’m not calling this one a spoiler by sheer virtue of how early it happens. The Stoat is a sarcastic, foul-mouthed little prick, and I kind of love him. Later, two more talking cards get added to your deck.

On top of playing costs and attack and health, the cards sometimes have sigils, which are special abilities the cards have while in play—some are Flying and thus aren’t blocked by most other cards, some have a split attack where they’ll attack to the left or right, but NOT in front, etc etc. There are a few places where you can sacrifice a card to put its sigil on another card, and the best part is there’s no limitation on it other than the maximum a single card can have. You can make some pretty busted cards and it’s amazing.

Another way to make busted cards is by dying, which you will likely do a few times over the course of your run. When you lose your lives, your captor will use a camera to create a “death card” of you. This is the actual you—you’re turned into a card, and a new player comes in to take your place. But it takes the cost of one card out of a select few chosen from your deck, the attack and health of a second, and the sigil of a third. I made a zero-cost card with Grizzly stats and the “Immortal” sigil—sacrificing that card doesn’t remove it from the board, so you can continuously use it for sacrifices. A free turbosacrifice bear, as it were.

The roguelike game itself isn’t all there is, though. You can actually stand up from the table and explore the room—though the eerie glowing orange eyes are still all you get to see of your captor. There are puzzles to be solved all over the room, and they grant you more cards and other bonuses, so you’ll want to do those whenever you find the information required to find the solution. You don’t have to wait to find the information; it’s technically possible to brute force the puzzles right from the get-go.

As you move on, solving puzzles and reaching further and further into the eyes' game, things start to get a little bit

meta.

I’m going to go ahead and put the spoiler cut here. MASSIVE spoilers for Inscryption UNDER the cut, if you plan to play this game DO NOT READ BEYOND THIS POINT. This game MUST be experienced blind. Hopefully this is long enough to prevent any wandering eyes from accidentally seeing the text below.

Moving on then,