Cannot recommend this game enough. If you like classic zelda games, especially the gb ones, then this game will scratch that itch. Great dungeons, great powers (zelda items), great soundtrack, just overall a really solid game. Only a couple minor complaints that are really only relevant for 100%ing it, there's a couple weird things I had to look up because I probably never would have figured out the solution myself, and there's a bit too much backtracking at the end when you have all the powers just to get rooms to 100% (especially in the mines). But in the grand scheme of things, these are very minor complaints compared to how much fun I had with the rest of it. Took about 20 hours to get 100% completion, so not a bad deal at all

The end of the tank trilogy. I reviewed the previous two games, so I might as well finish it off with the third. The game feels a bit all over the place, so putting down my thoughts is a bit difficult. Overall I think I mostly enjoyed it and it's a decent ending to the series, but there's also a whole lot of weird stuff going on too. There's going to be some spoilers since this is about the ending of the trilogy and it's hard to be vague about some of these things.

Gameplay was largely unchanged, and all the new features (support units, combos, tank skill tree, and every child having a passive that can randomly activate) really only serve to make an already pretty easy series even easier. The support units were the most interesting addition, but even though there's almost a dozen of them, I largely ended up using just two of them because they were so much more useful. The passives the kids have that can randomly activate are very strong, and they activate WAY more frequently than I would have ever expected, which lets you just chew through most fights with no real rhyme or reason.

The other new feature, the Akasha Panel, is just a timeline and doesn't actually open up until the postgame, but it is very convenient because it makes it a lot easier to jump around and fulfill the requirements for things like the bad ends without having to replay the entire game. You also unlock a challenge battle mode which is just a ton of back to back fights through the 12 chapters of the game with no story, dialogue, or intermissions to break it up. Again, it's not very difficult because at this point I've got everything maxed out and can just cruise through most of the fights, but man there's a LOT of them. After every couple chapters you unlock some background story chunks about Ash, which was interesting, however it takes several hours of largely mindless battling to unlock them all. And the final two chapters don't even unlock more story, your final reward for beating the whole challenge mode is a reused CG with the characters recolored and "CONGRATULATIONS" slapped on top of it.

The main 11 chapter story was alright and it felt like it had a decent ending point, but then if you still have all the kids (and again, it's very easy NOT to use the soul cannon) you get a 12th chapter with a true ending that feels strangely tacked on. Chapter 11 ends with you fighting the main villain who has established motivations and has been involved with the plot throughout the game, and then chapter 12 begins with "Actually the CEO of racism is still alive somehow and you have to stop him from nuking the city because he's EVIL!!!" It just feels a little jarring to suddenly switch gears so hard and for seemingly no real reason.

Once you do all that you unlock extra ending vignettes for the kids if you've maxed out all their friendships. They range from dull or expected (Boron is very strong, Jin and Flam end up working together, Sheena leaves to better study magic) to ones that came out of left field (Kyle is a mafia boss? Mei is having weird visions of three versions of herself that are identified as "witches"?? Hanna ended up with Kyle and has a human baby???). Though between the final ending vignette with a large timeskip and punished Malt, and the final secret video teasing a new noir/murder mystery looking type game, maybe all the weird stuff is just leading into that future title and these weird things will make more sense eventually, I dunno.

Music and art are still good, and it seems like there's a lot more CGs this time and they even have some light animation in some of them. Unfortunately though they seem to have heavily cut back on the French dubbing this time around, which is a shame since it is canonically how they're speaking in this universe. The French narrator was entirely gone this time, so those parts are just silent. The director of the previous two Fuga games was French, but he left the company shortly after Fuga 2 released (to go work for PlatinumGames right before they started imploding, whoops!), so I do wonder if that's connected. Though the previous title in the Little Tail Bronx series, Solatorobo, was only voiced in french and that was before he joined CC2, so it's hard to say either way. French is still an option and it's nice to still have, it just feels a lot emptier than before, which is a little sad.

In the end it's all a bit mixed. The Fuga series as a whole is fine, but never really anything too amazing. I don't really ever see myself replaying these games, but it did make me want to replay Solatorobo. I am still interested in what the next title in the Little Tail Bronx franchise will be, and if it does end up being directly connected to Fuga again, just after 15ish years have passed, then I hope it's presented in a way that allows for more interesting character development, because the specter of the soul cannon potentially erasing any character from the story has weighed heavily on the ability of all three of these games to have any real meaningful character development.

It's... fine. But that's a pretty big sin for a Doom game.

The combat is dull and never really changes because parrying is the solution to EVERY big demon. Weapon swapping is almost nonexistent now, I basically only used 2 or 3 guns in the end, and several of them felt downright pointless (I don't know why are there two energy guns, and I literally never used the rocket launcher or grenade launcher). The story was already really bad in Eternal, but they decided to really double down hard on it for this game and it's painfully generic and uninteresting. The music wasn't terrible, but it wasn't particularly memorable either. The mech and dragon levels are slow and not fun and have even less going on than the normal combat. Secret hunting is tedious, and they removed the backtracking feature from Eternal, so if you miss a secret and go past a point of no return, too bad! Gotta replay the whole stage now! Weapon masteries no longer unlock a cool final upgrade for the gun, just a golden skin, so there's no point in doing the tedious challenges outside of completionism. The achievements are only tied to 100%'ing the game, so there's no replay value in playing on higher difficulties or trying different things. I did everything in just over 20 hours (the extra hour was showing a friend how bad the game was), and I feel no desire to replay it. I usually do my first playthrough on UV difficulty, but here I ended up changing a lot of the settings because it was way too slow and easy. I think in the end most of my sliders ended up being harder than the nightmare settings, outside of damage taken (120% speed, min parry window and resources, max projectile speed, etc.).

It's absolutely not worth the price they're charging. I'll play the DLC when it comes out (since I already paid for it), but I'm not looking forward to it either. What an abysmal wet fart of an end to an otherwise enjoyable reboot trilogy. Whatever bonehead at Id (or more likely, Bethesda or Microsoft) decided "Doom should have a strong focus on the story and really needs a lot of EPIC LORE" needs to be let go and have their Reddit account banned.

A very enjoyable Ace Attorney styled game, but with enough new ideas and different twists to it to still feel fresh and not like a cheap imitation. I've been a fan of AA games for a very long time, and since it's been so long since there'd been something new in the series, I've started playing other games inspired by it, and so far this one scratches that itch the best (though admittedly the only other one I've played so far is Tyrion Cuthbert).

This game is also interesting since it's a bit of historical fiction, and I don't know a lot about Chinese history, so it was enjoyable to learn more about that culture and era while I played. The game gives you little history tidbits you can read in the menu when they come up, so you don't really feel left out if, like me, you've never really looked into Chinese history or culture much before. One thing you'll learn for sure playing though is boy howdy opium really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ the country up, huh?

The translation quality is pretty decent. There were a few constant nitpicks throughout the game, like some awkward phrasing or dropped particles, but it's never so bad that it gets in the way of understanding and enjoying the story. Though strangely, the translation takes a big dive in quality in the epilogue. It suddenly becomes much more stilted and fragmented, more "translation-ese". It feels as if it's a first pass translation that hasn't been cleaned up yet. It's still possible to understand what's being said, but it feels a little jarring and unfortunate for the quality of the translation to drop so sharply at the very end. The devs have an email on the title screen to report things like this, but the email appears to be inactive and you can't send anything to it.

As far as the rest of the game is concerned, the art has a wide range of styles and it gets the job done (though I will say the game is a bit drab, it could do with a little more color). The music is good and the characters are fun and enjoyable. The game also has a decent amount of voice acting, mostly in Chinese obviously, but there are a few characters who speak English as well (including a small British child whose mic quality is noticeably worse than everyone else's for some reason). The game is pretty railroad-y, it doesn't let you move on until you've looked at what it wants you to look at, for better or for worse. It also has a little hint system you can access if you get stuck, and even if that isn't enough, you can hold a button to reveal the answer, so you don't have to worry about ever getting totally stuck. There's also a few non-investigation segments, like lock-picking, stealth, and weight puzzles, but you also have the option to skip those if you really don't want to do them (the stealth segment even prompts you to skip it every time you fail).

Overall, I think the game was very enjoyable. If you like Ace Attorney or just mystery stuff in general, I suggest you check this out. It also has a pretty lengthy demo so you can play the first couple bits of the game and get an idea of if it's something you'd like. Between the main game and the demo, it looks like I probably have about 10 hours of playtime, though I read fairly quickly and I'm not one to let voice acting play out in full before I move on to the next line of dialogue. The demo hooked me enough that I bought the game at full price rather than waiting for a sale, since I figured by the time another sale came around, I'd be a bit hazy on the details of the beginning cases, and I feel like I got my fifteen bucks worth.

No matter how long of a gap there is between Homestar content, they always manage to come back and nail the writing again as if they never stopped. If you're looking for a fun little game point-n-click game with tons of great new Strong Bad dialogue, then this will scratch that itch

A new bite sized adventure from Twinbeard. I was hoping it would feature a bit more of his writing, but the little bit we got was still enjoyable. The main focus is exploring and discovering new stuff, and has a fun zelda 1-esque feel. I seem to have missed a candy corn and I CAN'T FIND IT which will frustrate me forever

One of the best games on the DS, with an incredibly memorable plot and some great characters and animations. Unlike other DS ports (TWEWY, 999) Ghost Trick didn't rely on the features of the DS so heavily that it would suffer being ported off it, so this is a great way to play the game.
(Don't let my low playtime fool you, I mostly played it with a friend on his account. Plus I beat it on the DS years ago as well.)

Since I wrote a big long review for the first game, I figure I should make a follow up for the sequel. There's not as much to say this time though since the gameplay is largely unchanged from the first, for better or for worse. There have been some attempts at balance (RIP in peace my big beautiful boy boron, nerfed into the ground), but stunlocking is still king. The Managarm is an interesting alternative to the Soul Cannon in that you can still use it if you're struggling with a fight, but it doesn't kill a kid so it doesn't destroy the plot. The Soul Cannon randomly selecting a kid and automatically firing after 20 turns if your health gets too low in a boss fight is a cool idea that can add some tension, but it's also annoying when it activates the turn before you were going to do a big heal, so now you're totally safe but have to start the fight over anyway because you won't be able to kill the boss fast enough (this only happened to me once but it WAS mildly annoying).

The plot was a definite improvement though, as were the character interactions. Everything felt very shallow in the first game, but now there's some actual character development and Malt gets to actually be a protagonist. The Judgement system also adds a little extra flavor by allowing you to make dialogue choices between being nice or not which not only give you different skills that can randomly activate in battle, but also lead to more character development scenes sprinkled throughout the game. The character interactions in the intermissions also feels better since the kids know each other now and it's not just endless introductions, so their differences can actually show through their dialogues now.

But other than that the game is still largely the same. If you liked the first game you'll like this one, and if you didn't like the first game then this one won't change your mind. I got about 35 hours out of it getting the true end on the first playthrough, and then doing a ng+ run to choose the other dialogue choices to get the other epilogue and using cheat engine to talk to everyone and get all their little character vignettes. I've seen people say they found the first game hard, or that this game was harder, but I never struggled with either one, so your mileage may vary. I gave the first game a 6-7 on a true 1-10 scale, and I think I'd probably give this one a 7-8. The game once again had a secret video teasing a sequel, so I'm excited to see the conclusion to the trilogy (though also slightly concerned since the director of 1 and 2 left the company a couple months ago).

Very enjoyable little metroidvania game. The bungee cord is a lot of fun to use, and as you get more upgrades and you unlock even more movement tech, you can really zoom along. Balance is a bit all over the place, some stuff is really easy, and some stuff is ball bustingly hard, but it was still enjoyable. Good art, music, and plot as well, would recommend.

tl;dr game is decent, but pretty simple. On a proper scale of 1-10 with 5 being average, I'd probably give it a 6 or 7

Fuga is the newest game in the Little Tail Bronx series, which previously was just Tail Concerto for PS1 and Solatorobo for DS (there was also a mobile game, but that was Japan only and shut down ages ago so it doesn't count). It’s a prequel that takes place several hundred years before the others though, so connections are fairly minor and you’re totally free to play this game before playing the other two. I'm a big fan of the series so I was really excited when they announced this game.

The previous two games had very basic gameplay that mostly amounted to just button mashing, however the weak gameplay was carried by the fun characters and interesting worldbuilding. You were willing to put up with basic combat because you wanted to see more of the character interactions and learn more about the world. Unfortunately, the same cannot really be said of Fuga.

Fuga’s gameplay is decent, definitely a step up from Tail Concerto and Solatorobo, though those were both action platformers, which is very different from the strategy game that Fuga is, so they’re a little hard to compare. Fuga has a lot of mechanics to potentially keep combat interesting, but a lot of it is overshadowed by how strong status effects are. Each of the 12 children use one of three different weapon types, have a different selection of abilities and access to a unique special attack mode when they’re in the front, and offer unique passive buffs and special moves when they’re in the support role. So the idea is you can mix and match pairs to find interesting combinations that work for you. But none of that really matters when the vast majority of the small enemy pool can be quickly destroyed by setting them on fire, stunlocking them, and wailing on them until they explode.

Repetitive combat would be fine if the story and characters were interesting, but because of the way the game is structured, neither one really gets fleshed out. The main story is nothing to write home about and basically boils down to “not-nazis kidnapped everyone’s parents, so the kids used the super tank they found to fight the not-nazis and eventually rescued their parents and stopped the not-nazis from destroying the world with a super tank of their own.” As for the characters, each of the game’s chapters has 2 or 3 intermissions where you can choose to spend a limited pool of action points doing things like upgrading the tank, gathering materials, talking to other kids, etc. with the latter being the only way you see characters interact with each other. Each child has 3 vignettes with the 11 other children, but because you can level up any pair of children in any order and at any time (and you can potentially kill any child with the soul cannon at any time), they can’t really build any meaningful character development up. Instead of character development, you just end up with a lot of small character bits, so you have things like “I don’t trust you” “we both have daddy issues” “I guess I trust you now” and “the small child wants to be friends, but the older one is shy” “she is less shy now” “now they are friends”. And because these developments are all self-contained in their character pairings, you’ll see the shy child who opened up to another child when you maxed out their affinity go right back to being shy as soon as you start talking to her with a different child.

Another problem is one of the main selling points, the soul cannon, is basically worthless. When Fuga was originally announced, it was going to be more like a roguelike, so the idea was if you got in a jam, you could make the decision to sacrifice a kid to save the run, rather than getting a game over and having to start all over. But at some point, the game became linear and the roguelike element was dropped. So now the soul cannon can only be used during a chapter’s boss fight if your hp gets low, but now every chapter also has a save point immediately before a boss. There’s never any pressure to actually use the soul cannon because if you fail, you just load your save and try again. And there isn’t even a reason to use the soul cannon from a completionist’s perspective either because killing a child just gets you a couple lines like “I have to be brave and save my friends!” “hey what happened to X, where did they go?” and then their death is never acknowledged again and does not affect the main story.

This is CyberConnect2’s first self-published game and I get the feeling a lot of things had to be cut for budget/time reasons. The music and art are very good, but cutscenes are all static CGs, actual character development is largely relegated to videos they’ve been uploading to youtube instead of somehow working that into the game itself, there’s not a lot of enemy variety and consists mostly of “red means it’s harder” recolors (even the final boss is just a reskin of a previous boss), and ng+ is just a small stat boost for the enemies. If you meet a bunch of secret conditions, you unlock a (currently untranslated) (EDIT: it is now translated) secret video which seems to be teasing a sequel or expansion of some sort, so combining that with the youtube videos and the newly announced manga, you can tell they had big plans for the world of Fuga, but unfortunately, they just weren’t able to actually fit it all into the game.

All I’ve really done here is complain, but I did still enjoy it, I’m just disappointed the game wasn’t quite able to live up to its predecessors. I got about 37 hours out of playing the main campaign and getting the bad end, playing ng+ to get the good end, and then using cheat engine to talk to all the kids and see all the vignettes, which isn’t a terrible deal for $40. As for the $60 deluxe edition, the in game benefits are really not worth mentioning, so whether it’s worth the extra $20 or not really comes down to “do you want a small artbook and sample soundtrack?” If not, just get the base game. I bought the $60 deluxe edition because I want to support CC2 and let them make the games they want instead of being trapped in Naruto Hell forever.