It's Halloween month, which means it's time to revisit the moody puzzle-adventure series Forever Lost for one last spin around the perplexing, multi-symbolled block. I first tried this series back in August of last year with IGotW #183 after picking up the whole trilogy of episodes in that big Summer Itch.io charity bundle, moving onto the second episode in that same year's Halloween-themed feature The Itchy, Tasty Spooktathlon, and my impressions of Forever Lost as a whole haven't really shifted since then with the conclusion of Forever Lost: Episode 3, its third and final episode. Forever Lost presents an amnesiac hero wandering the halls of a disused mental health facility, and later the surrounding buildings, as they desperately try to figure out who they are and whom trapped them there by completing one hindersome puzzle after another. It's very much of the Myst lineage if in spirit alone, or perhaps the many Escape Room sims available on mobile devices, with tidbits of lore scattered around the more puzzle-centric clues and hints adorning the game's many walls and notepads.

Forever Lost: Episode 2 ended by deepening the central enigma behind the protagonist's identity and the reason they're trapped here, suggesting that the tragic end to a marriage is key to the mystery, and the third episode works to wrap everything up to conclude the story as a trilogy. I was only half paying attention to the story in previous instalments and have mostly forgotten most of it a year later, but even as a standalone Episode 3 does a fine job quickly getting you back up to speed as to who all these important people might be and lays all its cards out on the table, figuratively and literally in one puzzle's case. Determining the protagonist's identity from all the various proper nouns being bandied around wasn't the most challenging riddle to solve, but the game did end in an intriguing enough way to justify any investment in its thin plot.

As ever, the traits that held the greatest significance to me were the nature of the puzzles and the convenience of the game's user interface and quality of life features. In one specific way the game felt a like a step back from the second game: the conspicuous absence being the second chapter's elaborate hint system that was written in a loose Q&A format to minimize the risk of seeing solutions you weren't looking to have spoiled. It must've been a tricky method to deliver the very specific advice players needed if the developer dropped it for what is probably the most challenging of the three games. Episode 3 does, however, retain the ingenious camera/photo album information-gathering feature from previous games and has expanded its utility by including a "picture-in-picture" feature that allows you to refer back to saved images and scribbled overlying notes while simultaneously looking at the specific puzzle to which they pertain. I could, for instance, see a pattern of colors on a wall, snap a quick photo, then bring that image up when I find a similar interface awaiting a specific sequence and imitate the pattern without relying on my terrible memory. The format of the game's puzzles and how their hints could be many screens away from where they can be solved encourages the player to take photos of anything odd in case it relates to a future puzzle (as well as the puzzles themselves - for instance a peculiarly-shaped indent waiting for an item you may have just picked up). The album can then be pruned once you've solved puzzles related to those images for the sake of keeping things tidy, essentially working like a second inventory.

The third episode's difficulty largely relates to how expansive its map becomes after you've been playing a while. Chapter breaks usually arrive once you've opened a door to another large zone, or group of screens to visit, but these new areas are often meant to be compounded with all those you've found so far; to explain what I mean, you'll open up a new region only to find key items and hints relating to puzzles you abandoned unsolved half the game ago. Though the game is only about four or five hours long, it's easy to forget what was left behind in earlier sections unless you're impulsively taking photo evidence and the game even tricks you a few times by letting you think a puzzle is over when in fact it still has some part to play. An example of this, spoiler-blocked if you want to go into this game completely fresh, involves the following:

The game still has some issues regarding the convenience of getting around. The game world is quite large and many screens are arranged in a linear order, so without a fast travel system or a map it can take a while to return to some specific spots at the end of long chains of rooms or remember which domicile has the particular kitchen area you need to find for a puzzle. Another issue that extends to the whole series is a lack of any sort of compass navigation, that is to say letting you know which directions on any given screen are connected to other screens. A compass or a mini-map or even opaque arrows that highlight nearby exits is a feature that has existed in this genre since the MacVenture series of the late '80s, so its absence in modern point-and-click adventure games like this seems conspicuous and unfortunate. Unless you make sure to tap every doorway, hallway, and edge of the screen in case it takes you to a new area it can be easy to miss whole zones with vital hints and items.

Overall I think I enjoyed the puzzles a bit more in this third chapter, including some that recontextualized some of the wall messages I'd seen so far from useless graffiti to something of actual importance; realizations that only come late in the game, after you've passed by most of the related messages. It also has something that those HOPAs or something like The Room series has where you can start a chain reaction of puzzle solutions by finding one vital item as a reward after the next, which can be very satisfying if you've been staring at those puzzles for a while. I wish the developer could've implemented more ways to make the game easier or at least more transparent in terms of navigating its world, and it feels like the same bugs continue to appear from episode to episode (it has a real bee in its bonnet about accidentally registering double-clicks, frequently skipping screens in the process), but if you liked the first two episodes the third works as a steady progression in difficulty and gives you all the plot-related answers you were looking for so I'd say it succeeds in that goal at least.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

So... I've been watching a lot of Hololive (a VTuber talent agency of sorts) clips of late and recently they've all been playing a lot of Minecraft after the servers for the Japanese and English-speaking members were combined. It's been cute seeing both sides struggle with the language barrier when encountering each other, but more than that I've been impressed by all the elaborate construction projects everyone's been showing off to their newly connected neighbors. It gave me the itch to get back into a construction sim in a big way too, and therefore it seemed the perfect excuse to dust off this copy of Dragon Quest Builders 2 I picked up last year to see how Square Enix and Omega Force have improved upon Dragon Quest Builders 1.

For a while, the gameplay experience felt very similar. The progression of the first island, for instance, teaches you all about the sequel's new farming mechanics but couches it narratively in a familiar riff on the first game's poison country and how all its quests revolved around purifying enough of the terrain to make a sanctuary for travellers. Despite these story similarities though, the game is filled with major, sweeping changes to the core mechanics and is much more confident and expansive in its approach; I get the sense that it acquired a more concrete idea of what an audience wants from a Minecraft clone, which is to say A) a greater sense of freedom unfettered by too much linear quest progression of the type that usually defines a regular entry in the Dragon Quest series, and B) the opportunity to keep expanding a permanent location instead of continually starting over with new parameters and goals.

As such, while this series continues to walk a delicate line between giving players not enough direction and too much, DQB2 finds a better balance than its predecessor while also addressing the issue of the first game's non-permanent locales: while you still have similar "scenario" towns to build from scratch each time, the central location of the Isle of Awakening is a persistent and enormous landmass that awaits continual development. In-between your time on these story-based islands, you can spend hours just renovating and constructing the Isle of Awakening's Minecraft-ian blank canvas world: the chief motivation to complete these story islands then becomes unlocking many more crafting recipes, room plans, building blueprints, and other unlocked mechanics and tools to improve your "home base." It's an intelligent compromise between the original game's goal of turning Minecraft into something more directed and quest-focused, completing objectives in a manner akin to constructing LEGO kits from a set of instructions, and the appealing open-ended creativity of same.

Moreover, there's so many welcome changes to the extant DQB formula that I've found myself enjoying this sequel far more than the original game and, for my sake as much as anyone else's, I'd like to go through an itemized list of these superior additions to understand why this outing is that much more compelling. I should clarify that I'm only a couple islands into the game so far - the agricultural Furrowfield and the mining town of Khrumbul-Dun - but I'm thoroughly hooked in a way that I haven't been with a construction sim since Terraria all those many moons ago.

Tabula Raiser

On the Isle of Awakening, you're left to your own devices for the most part but the game still wants to give you some boundaries if only for the sake of not being totally overwhelmed by indecision. For instance, when you get back from the first island - which is all about creating arable land and partitioning and preparing parcels of tilled earth for growing specific types of crops - you're given some directions to make a similar farm back on the Isle of Awakening albeit with a much more generous land size.

One of my favorite RPGs, Dark Cloud 2, also has its own building mode that operates mostly on vague objectives rather than the rigidity of Dragon Quest Builders's blueprints. Requisites like having a river of a certain length or building enough fencing to encircle a farm, but the shape of either is left to the player's discretion. On the Isle of Awakening, you're given a few direct goals and then a whole mess of optional ones to pursue and yet none of them are so specific as to restrict the player's creativity or agency when crafting their own settlement. If the goal is to make a restaurant, it's down to the player how large they decide to make their eatery and the themes and menus it might have. As you play more of the game and unlock more block types and furniture from geographically and culturally diverse islands there's a wide number of interpretations for those simple suggestions. I always work best with a goal in mind but I also enjoy the freedom in being able to build anything I want as long as it suits a required purpose.

Explorer Shores

In addition to the story islands and the Isle of Awakening discussed above, you can visit these proc-gen islands for some resource gathering. There's something like a No Man's Sky scavenger hunt for item types while there - which works simultaneously as a list of possible things to find if you're on the hunt for specific components - and scouting them all means unlocking an infinite amount of one resource in the rest of the game. Having infinite wood, for example, isn't just a medical condition any more: it's also a means to build as many wooden structures, or useful items like chest containers and platforms, as you'd like in either the Isle of Awakening or in the next chapter of the story.

What I like most about explorer shores is that it offers a slightly different variation on the gameplay, in particular when contrasted with the Isle of Awakening. The Isle of Awakening is almost all building-related while Explorer Shores has no building at all, at least if you're doing it right, but is instead all resource-gathering and exploration. Its rewards are tangible and its scavenger hunt is something that can be made easier with certain upgrades during the story progression (I'm not far enough in to acquire it yet, but a certain tool will help you find missing resource types while jogging around). They're optional and mostly filler given their randomized nature, but those infinite resources are too tempting to pass up. I'm hoping for infinite stone and common metals next, since I've a hankering to build myself my own metal city like Vector from Final Fantasy VI.

Civil Engineering

One of my favorite little mechanics that makes itself known towards the end of each island is how you're tasked with creating a huge building with multiple floors, but suddenly everyone in town is inspired by all the building you've done and decides to pitch in. After a certain amount of solo input to get the ball rolling, the NPCs will not only gather the resources needed to complete this megalithic structure but will put down all the requisite pieces in addition. If you really want to build the entire edifice yourself, the blueprints for the floors stay with you so you can recreate them on the Isle of Awakening (though it will take much longer without all that extra help; fortunately, having infinite supplies of certain materials helps a great deal).

It feels like NPCs are just more useful in general in DQB2. While they still mostly stand around and occasionally give you requests for certain buildings with specific conditions, many of them will join you in fighting off the occasional attacking horde of monsters and most pull their weight in other, career-oriented methods. The farmers plant and harvest a lot of crops, the miners fetch up large supplies of metal ores each day/night cycle, and so on. Everyone also drops gratitude points: the game's chief currency, one used to expand the size of the towns during the story mode and spent on acquiring new item crafting recipes on the Isle of Awakening. As long as you've built a town that attends to their various needs, they will if nothing else be a constant supply of happiness cash.

Dragon Quality of Life: Fast Travel, No-Loss Respawns, Endless Inventory, and Gliding

As well as the more overt mechanical additions, it feels like DQB2 is just more hospitable in general. There's a fast travel system that makes getting around convenient and doesn't require farming Chimaera Wings from specific mobs (usually only found in high-up places), you acquire a means of gliding over long horizontal stretches before the end of the first island, and any death just spawns you back in the nearest settlement during the daytime with no loss of items. Best of all, the game quickly eliminates inventory limits by introducing a bag that has near-infinite carrying capacity: you are limited to what you can hold in your "active bar" but anything else can be dumped in a sack for future access and will also be available while crafting.

Death is often inevitable in these crafting sims, especially as your attention is frequently divided enough that it's easy for some beastie to get the drop on you, so ensuring that there's no repercussions for letting your concentration slip (or your entire body in the case of navigating a precarious walkway several tiles above ground) minimizes the amount of frustration involved if you're eager to get back to your construction task. Any given Dragon Quest is still going to throw its menagerie of cute, pun-named monsters at you regardless of whatever genre it happens to be appropriating that day but they're far less of a threat in this game: many types aren't even hostile, letting you initiate the encounter if they have drops you might need. Likewise, while the game still has the requisite boss battles where your entire settlement is at risk if you're unable to prevent the boss's attacks in time, the inspired populace will instantly rebuild everything as it was before the boss fight was initiated - no running around post-battle refilling blocks of dislodged earth for the sake of your perfectionism.

There's many other little helpful features, but with many of them I can't recall if they were in the original game too. Like how setting down a blueprint in the world means every component you need to finish it is highlighted in your inventory or in the crafting menu: there's never any ambiguity as to what you still need to complete the plan, and thus no need to keep checking over and over or writing down what's left to acquire.

Online Envy

I don't recall if it was in there or just not as prominent, but DQB2 frequently introduces impressive constructs from the online community via a notice board feature or the Explorer Shores. In the latter's case, you'll occasionally come across curated content just sitting in the wild - sadly, you can't take any of its components with you for fear of jumping ahead in the progression - and can explore it and study it in detail in case you want to recreate it. I don't think there's a way to download custom blueprints so you can build other projects yourself (unless I've not been looking hard enough or it's a post-game privilege). They also stick community creations in the loading screens, which is a novel place to put anything of value that isn't a tooltip (it has those too).

It feels like a no-brainer for a game based on creativity like this to implement a means to show off your big imagination to inspire others, but I don't recall the first game doing a whole lot with the conceit. Having them actually appear in the procgen Explorer Shores mode is a genius move, since it lets you poke around them like interactive dioramas, but I'm guessing the developers just have a selected handful that might appear.

Sometimes you see free games while browsing Steam or GOG and your curiosity is every bit as piqued as your sense of parsimony. Symphonia, especially, intrigued me by its screenshots: this was an Indie platformer with a strikingly vivid artstyle of flowing contours and detailed backdrops, with an elaborate orchestral score; visually and aurally it's easily the match of a professional video game like Rayman Origins or Hollow Knight. Not only was it relatively new, but it was free on GOG (and Itch, I'd later discover) and would apparently stay that way in perpetuity. Was it a game that ran into music licensing issues and could only be given away? Was it so abjectly terrible despite appearances that the developers didn't feel right asking for money? Was it some kind of charity affair where the developers were instead asking for voluntary donations to save some opera house from closure? Is it mafia-related? (I've seen The Godfather, I'm sure there was classical music in there somewhere.) Or maybe it was an unusually high-quality student project that's less than an hour long and given away gratis as a means to generate interest in more substantial projects (including perhaps a fully-featured version of Symphonia) from the same studio in the future? If the latter sounds the most correct, it's probably because it is in fact the most correct.

Symphonia presents a land of music and clockwork machinery, the latter of which has ceased to function causing the many music-making devices around the place to go silent. Philemon, a concert violinist and dextrous hero, determines the problem to lie somewhere in the core of Symphonia's mechanical world and singlehandedly travels there to restart its engines. He then returns the same way he entered - though with more hazards to overcome with the machines now functional - to finish the concerto he originally set out to perform. The entire exercise takes about thirty minutes, give or take a roadblock, and the player is able to resume the game at any of three checkpoints when starting anew. While music plays a significant role in the world design there aren't too many mechanics tied to it, excepting certain moments where Philemon has to power machines with his violin music to put them in motion including moving platforms and gates. Fortunately, there's no accompanying game of Simon or anything, though I could see a rhythm mini-game being implemented in the "final" product.

From what I can tell Sunny Peak, the student studio that launched Symphonia, based much of the game's movement and mechanics on a few major Indie platformers known for their fluidity: the two chief mechanics involving the violin saw that Philemon carries with him, along with his violin. Using this flexible bendy saw he can pogo himself over longer gaps (though spikes are always fatal) and make higher jumps, and can also use it on cushioned surfaces to launch himself in the opposing direction held. The game doesn't quite last long enough to use these two mechanics in tandem for more elaborate platforming sequences - the pogoing and fluidity reminded me of Shovel Knight, and in particular its expansion Specter of Torment - but it's certainly something a larger version of the game could explore. The game does still have some challenging sequences towards the end, and there's a game-wide collectible hunt that gives you a post-game rank based on how many you found if you feel like taking on every challenge the game has to offer.

To some extent, Symphonia in its current student project form resembles more of a demo of what a final game might resemble, even if it presently has a beginning, a middle, and an ending in its short, dialogue-free narrative. There's little Sunny Peak could do to improve the core of what's already here, besides perhaps add a few more mechanics and tweak those already there to improve the game's flow even further, and this point it just needs severalfold more levels and concepts for set-pieces to get to where it needs to be. Notably, regarding the protagonist's similar sinuous appearance and movement animations, Symphonia might be the closest we're going to get to Hollow Knight: Silksong until the real thing finally shows up. I'll admit to being a little apprehensive about reviewing a game that took less than a hour to complete but I figured enough people were as intrigued by this freebie as I was to warrant a full investigation; turns out it was worth slaking that curiosity because for as short as it happened to be, Symphonia has an abundance of confidence in its presentation and gameplay. It really only needs a bit more substance to cross the threshold into being commercially viable.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro blog.

As I mentioned last time, the intent for September was to dedicate myself to the single most pressing game in my 2017 homework pile: Nihon Falcom's The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd. The game originally debuted way back in 2007, but it took ten years for the localization to happen - A) because the game's script is enormous, and B) because so were the scripts of the prior two games and they kinda needed doing first - so it appeared much later as a 2017 release in the west, already a few years after the Trails of Cold Steel localizations began popping up. It's a bit of a weird series, but one that has rewarded the patience of those diehard fans who have to play them in order: the next two games after Sky, Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure, are confirmed to be on their way and will take less time due to having competent fan translations to build upon. (Incidentally, I bought the first Trails of Cold Steel for PS3 almost five years ago but have been putting it off until I'm all caught up. Just two more intervening games to go!)

Anyway, I'll get more into Trails - significantly more, since I've little else to talk about this month - just below, but suffice it to say it's been a lean month with regards to this project specifically. There's a bonus short Indie I managed to squeeze in during the final hours of September, but I think I'm going to spend October making a big push towards completing as many of the remaining smaller Indies on my to-do list as I can. I'm also going to focus on the more horror-themed 2017 games I have sitting around, like the acclaimed Detention and the visual novel The Letter (which will be doubling-up as this month's VN-ese Waltz entry also, since I'm very economical with my laziness). I'm hoping to make one last push to get over that 100 list entries milestone by Halloween and dedicate most of November and December to playing newer games for the sake of GOTY season... with perhaps a few 2017 stragglers here and there too, of course.

For now though it's time to hit the Trails, pardn'r.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd

[The prior Trails in the Sky the 3rd review can be read in last month's entry of Dredge of Seventeen. This is meant as a continuation, after completing the game.]

When I started Trails in the Sky the 3rd, or expressed my intent to start playing it, one of my Twitter mutuals told me that she was glad that I was giving it a shot because there's a fan sentiment - particularly from those hurrying to catch up to where the series is currently, some eight games later - that Sky the 3rd is considered "inessential." She also asserted how bizarre she found that belief, given the quality of Sky the 3rd and how right it does by fans of the first two games and that of Trails as a whole. After completing the game, I feel I have to concur with her while also understanding where that sentiment originated: Trails in the Sky the 3rd is easily the match of Trails in the Sky Second Chapter and well worth the investment in its slightly unusual format, though with the caveat that it exists mostly as an epilogue or an interstitial entry - something that wraps up the previous story arc set in this universe while sowing the seeds for those yet to come.

In fact, I have a tremendous amount of respect for how it sets up the next two sequel series - Azure/Zero and Cold Steel - by discussing the regions of Crossbell and Erebonia respectively, establishing the current precarious political climates in both nations that their related games will go on to develop further and make central to their overarching narratives. I'm not sure how solid Falcom's sequel plans were at that stage, but putting into motion that early for what would eventually become six games' worth of plotting is some pretty confident worldbuilding. Of course, I'd expect nothing less from the team that developed Trails in the Sky and the level of detail involved in creating Liberl and its vast number of named ancillary characters. It feels very "Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 2": reaching that point where a franchise has already spun enough gold that everyone's fully on board with seeing how far they can take it. Given Japan just saw the release of the eleventh game to carry the Trails name, Kuro no Kiseki, it sounds like an investment well made.

The best way I can describe Trails in the Sky the 3rd is by going back a few decades to a time in my life when I was buying up cheap DVDs en masse. In this analogy, the first two games are like a fantastic movie and its equally good sequel and the third constitutes all the featurettes, deleted scenes, documentaries, commentaries, and other short-form bonus goodies you received by buying the special edition DVD boxset. The 3rd's story and structure barely hold themselves together under closer scrutiny barring the moments when it focuses on protagonists Kevin Graham and Ries Argent and their strained relationship, but for proponents of the first two games it's all the fanservice and extra lore you could want. Each Sun, Star, and Moon Door is a portal to a post-script (or prequel) short story based on all the characters that filtered in and out of your party across the first two games. The main progression also gives you the opportunity to recruit a couple of reformed villain types who turn out to be way more fun when they're on your side.

However, the game is also as much of a mechanical evolution as the second game was to the first. Not only did Second Chapter start you off at a higher level, but from the outset it granted you all the mechanics that were slowly introduced across Trails in the Sky First Chapter - like the powerful "S-Crafts" - and continues to add to that complexity, side-stepping the usual "slow start" issue that plagues most RPGs of a certain length. Second Chapter's combat system starts off fully formed and only continues to develop from there, and the 3rd provides a similar set-up though with perhaps slightly less development involved. Instead, most of the 3rd's mechanical development comes from outside development: the unusual rules and systems of the spectral world of Phantasma where the game is set, where each dungeon might warp around and drop you somewhere unexpected with new rules that you're required to follow to make progress. The 3rd's boss fights are also some of the toughest in the whole series: the game fully expects you to know how everything works by this point, including an ideal orbment set-up and using certain time-manipulation mechanics to their utmost (especially the AT-Delay and Impede functions) and throws every challenge it can at you.

The new format - everyone's trapped in a dungeon apparently powered by thought and illusion - means there's some ideas they can implement that wouldn't really work in the more realistic version of Liberl and the Zemurian continent the franchise calls home. A minor but amusing narrative touch is having everyone comment on the new enemies based on undead monsters and demons: neither exist, or can exist, in the game's "real world" and serves as an early indication that this is an illusory world, whereas in most other fantasy RPG universes the characters just kind of accept that hellspawn are walking the Earth. It also allows the character designers some fun coming up with models for what are mythical beings in the religion of the game's world, thematically fitting with Kevin's and Ries's roles as "Gralsritter": powerful enforcer knights of the Catholic-esque Church of Aidios. After all, with all the strong monsters you've taken down throughout the first two games, the only place left to go is legendary demons (something I believe was the case for the later Baldur's Gate expansions too).

Even stronger than those demons, though, are certain characters known in the overarching narrative for their sheer overwhelming strength that you also must fight: the most notorious of which being Cassius Bright, former S-rank Bracer and current Brigadier-General of the Liberl Army (and Estelle and Joshua's father). Much like Loewe the Bladelord during the late-game of Second Chapter, this is a wake-up call boss battle that will absolutely ruin you on the first attempt and any attempts thereafter until you intuit the very specific tactics required to defeat them (which for me involved a lot of turtling with the overpowered Earth Wall spell and hitting them with any stat-down debuffs I had available). It's an exciting if frustrating battle against the person who is regularly touted as the series' most powerful warrior - one that, in their prime, was utterly unstoppable.

On the hero side of things, Trails in the Sky the 3rd is the first game to allow you to play as former antagonists Alan Richard and Renne, a.k.a. the Angel of Slaughter. Richard is an absurdly useful ally due to his sheer speed and the minimal delay after using his katana crafts: you can buff this advantage even further with the right speed-up and auto-CP gear to ensure total dominance of the battlefield, denying opponents an opportunity to act for as long as possible. Renne's another character like Joshua in that she's a potent balance of strength, speed, and magical ability: she comes with a unique quartz orbment that allows her to insta-kill foes 20% of the time (provided they have no immunity) and some powerful S-Crafts. I don't believe Richard will appear again in the Trails series in any significant role but Renne will several more times, so I look forward to seeing how her complex characterization develops. (I do think they may have gone a little too dark with some Renne-specific backstory stuff in this game - she's always been a bit too edgy as a construct, but one that's easy to root for all the same.) For the record, my preferred party was Richard, Joshua, Kloe, and Kevin, though I felt a little bad leaving Estelle behind - she apparently has unique dialogue for many of the bosses.

Not to speak too much on the final dungeon (beyond that its BGM is fantastic) except to say that it forces you to use all sixteen playable characters in your assemblage, which meant some grinding towards the end to catch everyone up. It became clear in retrospect that the game wanted you to spend enough time with everyone so you're not caught with your pants down during the finale, but the final castle itself has plenty of resources to help you if you survive long enough to reach them. Given every one of the four parties has to face a boss fight at the end of their leg of the journey, you can't really run past everything and hope for the best either. It made me wish that inactive characters still earned XP - a modern convenience that came into common practice some time after Trails in the Sky's era back in the '00s - but at least the game has Suikoden's weighted XP system where those flagging behind in levels earn considerably more XP to help them catch up fast, and it only takes a few battles against the strong foes in that last gauntlet before everyone's in fighting shape for the final battles. I would've liked to have seen more "trial fights" behind character-gated Sun/Star/Moon Doors to help introduce or re-introduce these characters and their particular strengths - for example, I barely used the female knight Julia Schwarz when she became playable for the first time towards the very end of Second Chapter, but she's a quick swordswoman and an excellent support character that you spend some time with early in Trails in the Sky the 3rd due to being one of the few characters available at that point and I'm glad to have been given an excuse to use her beyond curiosity. Ditto for the Erebonian knight Mueller Vander, who like Agate Crosner is a powerhouse tank and useful in a party of ranged attackers like Olivier or support characters like Kloe. Given the level difference and the expenditure in getting the best equipment and quartz for everyone, there's little incentive to switch around too often during the main game but at the same time tinkering with party dynamics is much more at the forefront of Trails in the Sky the 3rd due to its structure and those moments where everyone in the group is called to action. (Another cute touch about the final dungeon is that all the chest messages - usually sarcastic jabs at your kleptomania or silly jokes - are sweet and encouraging, pushing you towards the finish line.)

Last thing I wanted to point, even if it's a little redundant since this is a Falcom joint, is the game's exceptional soundtrack. Not only are there a selection of great tracks unique to this entry - including at least eight different battle and boss themes - but the format that bounces chronologically through various characters' pasts means ample excuse to bring back the music from the previous two games, so you get what is in essence a "best of" of all the Trails in the Sky games in one package. The music files are actually included with the Steam version of the game in a BGM folder: there's something like 144 Ogg Vorbis tracks in there, so you can definitely get your fill of Falcom Sound Team jams. Of the new tracks, I particularly liked the final dungeon theme (linked to above) as well as the music that plays in the chill hub area of the Hermit's Garden both in its normal form during the game and a special version during the end-game where it's pouring on the suspense. Then there's boss tracks like the standard (and jazzy) battle theme Determination of Fight, the special boss track Overdosing on Heavenly Bliss, and the cathartic final boss track Dreamy and Boisterous Holy Land (gotta love JRPG BGM names). There's a few new arrangements of older tracks too, so it's almost like a Smash Bros. OST.

Ranking: S. (That's right, that means it's going into my top ten for 2017. I've yet to decide quite where to put it, but its inclusion will be enough to knock fellow Falcom game Tokyo Xanadu+ down to eleventh place. I suppose it's only fitting that a Falcom game dethrones another (and there's a third in the top ten as well - Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana - so I'd say the developer is well represented regardless). Between the confident worldbuilding and deeply clever and tactical combat, I am a devoted fan of the Trails franchise from this point onwards I think it's safe to say.)

Love 2: Kuso

My other 2017 game this month is Fred Wood's Love 2: Kuso, a modest sequel to an already modest 8-bit retro platformer that nonetheless has its charms and deeper aspects. With a mostly monochrome aesthetic torn from the same Sinclair ZX/Commodore 64 era that VVVVVV was inspired by, the player's goal is to make it through a series of tough platforming challenges with some basic jumping. Nothing as elaborate as a double-jump or a wall-jump or anything like that: the game is deliberately simple and straightforward, giving every stage a single color tone and indicating anything that might potentially kill you with a stark white sheen for visibility's sake. The levels are tough and uncompromising, requiring close timing and precision platforming, but with the requisite Super Meat Boy-style rapid respawn.

However, the game - like its predecessor Love - also allows the player to make their own checkpoints as well as providing infinite lives in the standard "Unlimited" mode. This allows the player to make the game as challenging as they like as they make their way through all its levels, and offers an additional menu of various assist features to ameliorate the difficulty even further. Love and Kuso alike are less determined to have you pulling out your hair but to become better at the game at your own pace: it's going to be tough going for a while, but since you can set a checkpoint almost anywhere (though it's a good idea to put it on a safe platform, since your checkpoints can "die" and vanish if they get hit by a projectile or something) anything it throws at you is eventually surmountable at any skill level. From there, you can retry challenging the game with fewer checkpoints and lives lost, and eventually become confident enough to attempt its "Arcade", "Hard", "Speedrun" and "YOLO" modes, where the lives are strictly limited, or pursue any of its tougher achievements. Given a full playthrough is only about an hour or so the first time through, what it lacks in content it makes up for in ways to approach the game from a more seasoned perspective. As was the case with Celeste, it's a game that wants to challenge you until your thumbs have worn down to nubs, but also doesn't want to lose you from the get go with its absurd difficulty. I was content with a single playthrough, since I'm not really the score-chasing or speedrunning type, but I admire the amount of staying power it packs in there.

I also appreciated its chill EDM soundtrack - germane to the type of gaming experience it offers - and how all the Love levels are included for free, much like how the Rayman Origins levels are available to play in its sequel Rayman Legends for those who were late to the party. The game offers a mode that lets you play all of Kuso and Love's levels mixed in together, which might be the ideal if you've yet to play either: this way you get a steady increase in difficulty, rather than having to start over with Kuso's easier, early levels after cutting your teeth on Love's hardest, final ones (either that or they randomized the level order and I never noticed). Since it regularly dips to around a dollar or so in Steam sales and Switch sales alike (I played it on the latter) it's definitely worth the small time and money investment, even if you're not some obsessive platforming savant who intends to conquer every challenge it throws your way.

Ranking: C. (At this point even the C-rank, which is mid-tier, is no slouch. While the game is extremely basic by design there's a lot of thoughtful ideas going on behind the scenes working to draw players into the game from any skill level. It's very accommodating to anyone willing to take a chance on it, and offers many reasons to stick around.)

Seeing the discourse around the recently released Axiom Verge 2 - surprise, surprise, I'm fascinated by yet another Indie explormer - reminded me of a Quick Look for a different Indie game with an interesting approach to subtly changing the game world by essentially hacking into its base code, from changing an enemy's health value to its core abilities and behavior. The Magic Circle, released by Question back in 2015, is a game about game development. In particular, it's about a studio that has let perfect become the enemy of progress: this studio eventually scrapped their '90s space-faring FPS for the sake of a fantasy adventure-RPG, but is no closer to finishing that project either after almost two decades of development. The staff is in something of a chaotic state - the director hems and haws over every decision, the head level designer is trying to get herself fired since she's unable to quit for contractual reasons, and a new recruit with an obsessive love for the developers' prior games is planning a Machiavellian gambit to bequeath these never-to-be-finished projects to the fanbase to complete. However, the player character is none of these people. In fact, it's a big question who the player actually is: they're treated as a nameless playtester, but it's evident they have more control over this incomplete world than they should.

The game's title has a double meaning: the fantasy game-within-a-game (and the sci-fi non-entity that preceded it) is named The Magic Circle for lore-related reasons, but the Magic Circle is also a real-life association of stage magicians whose first and only rule is to never reveal what's going on behind the curtain or under the hat. You, however, will see every line of code and every asset, active or temporarily deleted, as you explore the Magic Circle's fragmentary and (mostly) monochrome setting. After a brief intro, you're dropped into an open-world to explore methods to get the game closer to a complete state, but first you need to work your way through and over a number of obstacles and broken bridges (literally, in one case). Given a set of developer tools, you do this by changing the behavior of wandering monsters and other objects. A rock, for example, comes with the fireproof behavior: you can pull this behavior from it and make something else fireproof instead, ideal for crossing the river of lava blocking the volcano. Monsters can have their allegiances changed in order to target whichever foe is in your path (or just stop them attacking you) and you can even choose to upgrade a companion creature by powering up their stats or changing their attack patterns to something more powerful: a meagre cyber-rat becomes a little more formidable when given a Securitron's railgun or the fire breath of a flame elemental.

In the midst of all this code tinkering, you're picking up bits of lore not from the game world, which seems to be barely formed even after 20 years, but rather that of the studio behind it and its unfortunate past. The studio founder Ishmael Gilder - voiced to sardonic and delusional perfection by James Urbaniak, formerly of The Venture Bros. - created a compelling world way back in the text adventure days but seemingly has no idea how to translate his ideas and stories to a modern 3D action game and has long since lost his verve for this line of work and the fair-weather fans that seek to demolish any carefully-built world for their own amusement, and while the eager new recruit Coda appears on the surface to be a breath of fresh air for this struggling studio she plans to sabotage the game and depose its director for the sake of some misplaced fan entitlement. Maze, the lead level designer, is more savvy about Coda's schemes but has her hands tied after years of answering back to the boss due to him dragging his heels about implementing a multiplayer mode, and at this point no longer cares either way and is looking for an exit. All this dev drama is made apparent as the player digs into audio logs and visual files, many of which are purposefully hidden in glitchy assets, giving the player reasons to explore every nook and cranny beyond picking up new behavior protocols to exploit - these logs more or less explain why the Magic Circle is stuck in the state it's in and comprise the meat of the game's storytelling.

My first concern with any game involving programming (or in this case scripting, and yes there is a difference) is whether or not they make it simple enough for the player to understand. I've done my fair share of scripting in the past and the parser used in the game is considerably easier to use than the real thing - it's intuitive too, which is more than can be said for most programming tools - and there's often multiple solutions to problems in case your brain happens to work differently. For instance, there are these enemies called "flamers" that need to be removed because they're guarding bridges, though you can't edit their behavior directly because their flame attacks tend to demolish your avatar before you get close enough to use the tools on them. Instead, you can either program an ally to have a powerful ranged attack to eliminate them all from a safe distance, or you can give that same ally the fireproof status from those rocks I mentioned to let it safely melee them all to death as they try in vain to roast it. When you finally find a monster capable of flight, you can then use a combination of a flat creature (the rocks will do - they're much more versatile in this game than in others) and the waypoint tool to ride them around as your personal hoverboard and overcome a lot of hazards that way. The game's not particularly long and doesn't have too many of these puzzles to solve, but it fills what geography it has with enough incidental storytelling and surprises to make it feel much more expansive. The endgame too goes in a completely different direction, albeit in a fashion germane to the themes of the game.

The Magic Circle is an unconventional game that can be a little too meta for its own good on occasion, though like similar games about game development - The Beginner's Guide and There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, both of which I've yet to try, and to some extent Baba is You - there's a subversive and almost self-defeating streak about trying to convey the countless difficulties inherent to creating a piece of interactive media that would resonate with a wide enough audience to justify the cost of making it. Its message is less some "woe is me" artist kvetching or about how toxic entitled fans are ruining the joy of making games (there's a few jokes about both however) than it is shining a spotlight on the unique challenges faced by those in game development that mostly go unknown by those embracing the final finished product. The Magic Circle heightens the drama and comedy alike of this process by envisioning a studio truly stuck in developmental hell: its visionary leader stymied by indecision and embitterment while his many subordinates fret about the future of the game and their careers both. While the real thing is rarely as tragic, there's a sense that any project might stretch on for eternity given the right (or wrong) set of circumstances and it takes almost a literal deus ex machina by way of the player's unpredicted interference to finally push the project over the finish line. While its true appeal is in that comedic exaggeration of how the game industry can be a merciless taskmaster to amuse those who closely follow in-progress game development and regularly partake in betas and fan mods, there's enough clever puzzle design and dark workplace comedy to enjoy for those less invested in that world.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Decided to spend the second half of 2021 checking out some renowned visual novels. Sometimes my ideas aren't any more elaborate than that. I've tried to discuss the following games in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, with a very spoilerish section at the end for my final thoughts on where the story goes.

In retrospect, I've been pretty lucky with all the visual novels I've played so far, both for this VN-ese Waltz feature and overall. VNs have many negative connotations from both those seasoned with the format and those too dubious of the genre to give them a fair shake, and I've known that - in order for those stereotypes to exist - I would inevitably encounter a game where I'd frequently feel embarrassed for playing it. One steeped in harem anime clichés, awkward sexy fanservice, and a branching structure that is too cumbersome to effectively navigate. Our World is Ended is that fearsome epitome of VN tropes made manifest. That isn't to say it's a complete write-off, though. Its thirstiness is usually played off as a joke - though even the implications raised are troubling - and there's no actual ecchi content to be found beyond anime ladies in swimsuits. It's pretty earnest about its feelings, and does eventually flesh out its one-note characters as they all go on their individual arcs. But, boy, it's a journey all right.

So, to set the stage: Our World is Ended follows one of Japan's worst video game developer companies, Judgement 7. Comprised of seven employees, it's a company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and obscurity after a string of maligned failures. The "company culture" is best described as a chaotic quagmire of competing egos. Its lead programmer and founder is a raging lech, its scenario planner and its graphic designer are both hopeless chuunibyous (i.e. delusional nerds hiding behind personas), its chief musician is a tone-deaf walking disaster of a woman who is more or less Britta from Community and treated with a similar level of disdain and pity, its other programmer is a child prodigy who splits her time hyped up on sugar and fast asleep after crashing and thus needs constant attention, and the only two normal employees are the part-timers given all the thankless tasks to do. You naturally play one of these part-timers - an "Assisting Director" rather than an Assistant Director - whose job it is to corral this messed up bunch into a semi-productive unit. Add to that dynamic a very Steins;Gate conspiracy involving virtual worlds, a shadowy evil cabal planning to rule the globe through AR technology, and the digital specter of the prior, much-beloved director of Judgement 7, and it's a recipe for an episodic anime about deeply flawed people learning to face their fears and overcome their worst impulses by drawing strength from their makeshift dysfunctional family.

To circle back around to Steins;Gate, even in my limited experience with VNs and anime in general it feels like that game - and the series it belongs to - is the most significant source of inspiration for Our World is Ended. The group dynamic and setting is similar (Tokyo's Asakusa district is substituted in for Akihabara) and the story structure is especially similar in the odd way it thematically veers from slice-of-life dating sim lightness to sci-fi outlandishness to suspenseful thriller. The only significant difference is that it took a while to warm up to Steins;Gate's protagonist Rintaro Okabe because of his obnoxious flaws, ones that eventually softened and disappeared with time: while that's the case with almost every character in Our World is Ended, unlike Rintaro these flaws are treated as endearing quirks and left intact throughout. Characters do grow over the narrative so it's not like they're all paper-thin caricatures, but you'll probably find yourself regularly skipping over the voiced dialogue for certain characters (especially the rotund scenario planner Iruka #2, who tends to scream every other line of dialogue). There's a significant amount of sexually-charged humor including some jokes about minors so... well, excessive would be one word for it. Problematic might be another, more accurate one. Basically, if you have a low tolerance for the prurient aspects of low-brow comedic anime this game will test it like an overcaffeinated QA intern.

Then we come to the more mechanical aspects of Our World is Ended, in particular how it deals with branching paths. Mostly, it doesn't: what happens is that you can make decisions, usually responses to lines of dialogue, that brings you closer to one member of Judgement 7 in particular. It's similar to, say, how Final Fantasy VII decides who Cloud goes on a date with at the Golden Saucer: there's a semi-invisible tracker that remembers how many times you jumped to the defense of one character over another, or prioritized them in some other way, and in the pause screen you see the top three matches based on the points you've accrued with them at any given moment. This won't effect the first playthrough: besides a few scenes that change depending on who you're with, the story progresses right up to the "normal" ending regardless. It's in subsequent playthroughs, where you're deliberately picking options to build affinity with a specific character, that you can unlock specific routes that end the story in different ways depending on who you've built the best rapport with. The first playthrough gives you glimpses of what each pairing is like, letting you get an idea not only of what that route might entail (helping the shy artist become more confident in herself, for example) but which choices are more likely to appeal to which characters.

Complicating this is how most of the game's decisions use the "SOS" or "Selection Of Soul" system: those times when the protagonist Reiji is put on the spot and has to quickly think of a response. These responses fly across the screen at different speeds and sizes, making it hard to get a sense of the full spread of options available until some of them have already disappeared. Some responses will earn you points with specific characters so they are integral if you're hunting for the character-specific endings, but it's not always apparent which is the best one and you may take a neutral option without noticing that a far more ideal option has yet to appear or may have already scrolled by in a smaller font. Silence is the result of any SOS decision where you're unable to choose something in time, which usually doesn't affect the subsequent dialogue too much but does make your character come off as a little aloof. It's a bit of an irksome mess, but sticking the other endings behind subsequent playthroughs does make it easier to use that first run as preparation for what's to come. The Skip Text function, vital for replays, will also pause on the line of dialogue immediately preceding one of these SOS decisions thereby giving you time to make a quick save before you jump in and carefully consider all the options available, so the game does at least offer a few QoL boons.

Our World is Ended is easily the worst of the VN games I've played recently, though since that's a short list of Steins;Gate, Raging Loop, and The House in Fata Morgana it's not quite the admonition it sounds like. For all its lasciviousness and awkwardness it does create a compelling story with some decent character and background art, and even if it's incidental you get a pretty decent tour of the sights of Asakusa such as its famous Shion-ji temple and the nearby Tokyo Skytree. Its scenarios - seemingly disconnected misadventures into the virtual landscape of "New World" and its limitless possibilities - have some imaginative if silly ideas involved. (One such instance is when a trickster character forces the group to play the "normie game": they have to spend their time doing normal people (as in, not nerdy shut-in) activities like going on dates and will accrue or lose points each day based on their actions, with the goal to hit at least 100 points by the end of the week. Naturally they all have some trouble with this.) There's a lot of requisite hacking talk which is never so advanced to lose the less tech savvy members of the audience and exploring the characters in more detail helps get past any lingering distaste with their archetypal roles: similar to how the casts of walking clichés in the Tales and Persona franchises are allowed to blossom into something approaching real people with how much of their games' lengthy runtimes are alloted to their development. Our World is Ended does have an issue with typos in that they are plentiful, though fortunately not in the sense that the entire English script felt machine-translated; more that the localizers were seemingly only afforded so much time/resources for proofing the script before the final release deadline, which I imagine must be common enough to games in genres like VNs with all that text to translate. The intent is always clear, at least, and stuff like Japanese puns are properly localized into applicable English versions rather than dousing the screen with Translator's Notes about shiritori and dajare.

I feel like if this review keeps going it'll eventually take on the cadence of someone at an expo trying to convince someone else to check out an anime despite a "rough" first few episodes: make no mistake, this game is sometimes an ordeal to suffer through and sometimes it makes you want to check your door's closed and the curtains are drawn, but overall it isn't a catastrophe and many of its jokes will land in a way that won't have you reaching for the Jim Beam or a 12-gauge. If you like (or can tolerate) media where the hero is continually getting into compromising situations and yelled at by anime girls for being a "hentai" then knock yourself out. Caveat emptor to the rest of you.

I guess I finished the previous rundowns with some spoilery story analysis, so here:

Turns out that I have one more horror-themed VN in my stash and next month is the ideal time to play it. I'll see you all then, page-turning pals.

It's been almost two weeks since the last one, so here's another explormer review for you to closely examine top to bottom for secrets. (Here's one: I probably play too many of these games.) This time around we're taking a look at Batbarian: Testament of the Primordials from last year (2020), which is already scoring points for its pointlessly elaborate subtitle. It's also a rare explormer/RPG hybrid, and rarer still one that isn't based on the Souls formula to any significant extent. I've only played one other game with those criteria before - UnEpic from Francisco Téllez de Meneses - and there's a few similarities between its mix of fantasy tropes, sarcastic humor, and a zoomed out perspective that allows for a lot of detailed environments filled with hidden surprises.

The protagonist of Batbarian is a barbarian who has a bat for a partner, so it's anyone's guess why they named the game that. As well as being generally cute, the bat is luminous and most of the dungeon is dark so she also acts as a handy self-carrying lantern. While she cannot be controlled directly the player can manipulate the bat's behavior somewhat by throwing out food for her to eat, which can allow her to activate crystal buttons or stun enemies with her radiance. This bat utility expands more as the game continues and the player finds more varieties of food to feed her, in a fashion similar to the game's other explormer-common traversal upgrades. The player can also throw other items such as rocks, useful for activating switches in remote places: as you might expect, this throwing system uses an analog stick for aiming and gives you some idea of the trajectory with a dotted line. It's a bit finicky in boss fights or other timing-intensive scenarios, but there's enough ingenious environmental puzzles that make use of it to justify its inclusion as a mechanic. In fact, on the whole Batbarian is a very cleverly-designed game - something it almost takes pains to hide with its silly jokes about barbarians that yell a lot and hate to read. The classic LucasFilm graphic adventure appears to be a big influence, as you'll occasionally converse with NPCs in the form of branching dialogue prompts which are the chief source of the game's humor.

As an explormer/RPG hybrid, you have a specific goal - escape the labyrinthine cave system you fell into after an unfortunate encounter with some ogres - but plenty of opportunities to earn XP and acquire loot. Secret areas confer XP bonuses and goodies alike, making them highly sought-after, and there's a currency system needed to buy goods at a store run by a myconid that lets you restock rarer thrown items or buy new upgrades. The game has plenty of the latter to be found in addition to gold and item refills: you have three main stats that you can increase every level (the game even lets you min-max one over the others, if you wish, with an oddly superfluous roulette level-up feature) and you can find permanent boosts to all three in the form of potions, in addition to the much rarer permanent health increases. The rarest collectibles are the "pure gems": you'll need to find the right NPC to trade them to, but they're also a source of some permanent upgrades. You also have the customary aforementioned traversal upgrades that unlock more of the dungeon to visit, the first big one of which unlocks a much appreciated and immediately helpful fast travel system between bonfires (the saving/restoration points). Other appreciated quality of life features include custom map markers: the player can drop one of around ten different icons on any given map square provided it doesn't already contain a bonfire or the merchant (since they have their own icons). It's a useful tool for delineating if a spot has an out-the-way chest or an exit that's currently inaccessible, more so if they're in enclosed parts of the screen that require you enter them from a different direction (there are directional icons that help with that too). Bosses are tough but also well telegraphed with a Mega Man-style sliding door interstitial screen, so you can always plonk a skull icon there and come back later when you feel a little more confident about your current status.

Presentation-wise, Batbarian's zoomed-out perspective allows for some deeply-detailed pixel artwork for its cavernous environments and the low-lighting helps to establish the grim and desolate mood of the setting, only occasionally alleviated by the levity in the script. The dynamic lighting is paramount to many of the game's mechanics so it's no surprise that a lot of care was lavished on its implementation here, providing its sprites with different levels of luminosity and various hues. It's not too dissimilar to how Noita looks at any given moment, if not quite as chaotic. The titular bat, Pip, provides the most consistent source of illumination but there's also wall torches, campfires, and fireball projectiles for other bursts of vivid light, and the more subtle radiance from bioluminescent enemies and background fungi are usually enough to give you some idea of the rest of the current screen's topography and its potential hidden areas. The music's been pretty great so far too, composed by Will Savino and Derris-Kharlan (bonus points for that name too), and provides a germane synth-y Dungeons & Dragons score to the adventure.

I'm slowly making my way through what is promising to be a much larger game than I anticipated. My (and everyone's) usual source for this kind of information, HowLongToBeat, posits Batbarian as having a 20-hour runtime which sounds about right for a game that's half explormer and half RPG. I'm presently lost in a venomous maze of mesmerizing carnivorous plants - very "lotus-eaters" in here, as I've already been tricked once with an illusory treasure vault - but I'm appreciating how different each of the game's regions feel: the prior region was evidently an ancient ocean bed that had long been drained of water, filled with elemental spirits that you often needed to pit against each other to solve puzzles. On the whole I've definitely been enjoying Batbarian's mix of tricky puzzles, hectic combat, and mordant sassmouth, and am invested enough to see the game through to its end even if all its fancy luminosity tech is enough to drag down the framerate in spots (though it's very much a "me and my potato PC" problem, I suspect).

(NB: Worth also noting that the game was free with the Itch.io Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid that came out last summer, so feel free to give it a trial run if you bought that bundle.)

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

As many of you are no doubt aware, Nintendo recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Nintendo GameCube by continuing to not acknowledge it much at all regarding rereleases and the like, and this period of retrospection has me considering its legacy and place in the Nintendo console canon. I certainly wouldn't call it a failure by any stretch, even before I did any digging into its overall sales figures or Metacritic aggregates to back up that assertion, but at the same time it feels perhaps... the least essential? (After the Wii U and a good half of those mid-gen portables with affixes like "New" and "XL" anyway.)

With its relative portability - is it still the only console with a handle? - and inherent sense of fun and frivolity, and almost a complete lack of forward momentum or innovation, it feels the most like the Nintendo progeny that partied their way through college and never amounted to much of anything. Perhaps that's an unfair assessment, but I'd imagine being nestled between its overachieving and paradigm-shifting siblings the N64 and Wii probably gave it the worst case of middle-child syndrome imaginable. (And this strange anthropomorphization is actually endearing the console to me a little bit more, have to say.)

Because I have the brain problems, this train of thought then led to figuring out which of the many (though not as many as I'd like) GameCube exclusives would best epitomize the system's place in video game history and its mix of strengths (optical media! Finally!) and drawbacks (the infamous kidney bean buttons) as a platform. Which of its games best embodied that combination of being small, cute, fun, and wanting to take life easy breezy, to the possible detriment of treading water for a whole generation?

So... which game is the most GameCube? Hypothetically?

	Luigi's Mansion (2001-09-14) + It was a launch game and first impressions count for a lot. + Luigi's usually seen as an underdog and underachiever, much like the GameCube. + Off-beat game that doesn't scream "launch window killer app" but might've had a moment to shine with less pressure.
	Pikmin (2001-10-26) + Pikmin are also small and cute much like the system. Endearing little workhorses all. + Most successful new Nintendo IP during this era (if we don't include intra-franchise spin-offs like Luigi's Mansion or Metroid Prime). + The advanced tech of the GameCube allowed for dozens of the little guys to be active at once and performing different tasks, so it also works as a tech demonstration of what hardware could do at that moment in history.
	Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001-11-21) + The GameCube game to have endured the longest, still seen in FGC tournaments today to the chagrin of Sakurai and the many Super Smash Bros. successors he's since helped create. + Expanding on the first point, Melee is usually the GameCube game that comes to mind when seeing the system in the wild. If anyone's at a convention toting a GameCube around or holding a bunch of component cables, it's probably to squeeze in some quick Melee.
	Super Mario Sunshine (2002-07-19) + The big Mario platformer for the system. Decried as much as adored for its new F.L.U.D.D. mechanics and tropical island setting. The Jimmy Buffett of Mario games. + Technically no longer exclusive, as it was recently rereleased in a Switch compilation. However, that compilation is now no longer for sale, so I'm counting it here. + This, plus the five dozen Mario Partys that were released for the GameCube, makes me realize how much the system was responsible for a lot of suffering among the Giant Bomb staff (that became our enjoyment).
	Star Fox Adventures (2002-09-22) + In most of the above cases of "the GameCube entry in this franchise is one of the weakest" I feel there's some counter argument to be had, especially regarding Metroid Prime, Super Mario Sunshine, and for sure The Wind Waker. Not the case here. If you really wanted to bang the "GameCube dropped the ball" drum loudest you'd do so with this game and its weird last-minute substitution of Star Fox into an unrelated dinosaur-based action-adventure title. Fox McCloud spends 90% of the game outside his Arwing, hitting raptors with a stick! + If you were a GameCube detractor, this might be the game you'd use to make your case as to why it was a disappointment in much the same way Paper Mario 2 or Pikmin 2 could be used as a defense by the system's proponents. + It's still actually a pretty decent game all told, though far from the system's best. I think more recent Star Fox failures (Star Fox Zero, Star Fox Guard) may also put Adventures in a better light. It certainly would've been better received - if mostly forgotten - without the Star Fox connection.
	Metroid Prime (2002-11-17) + A 3D revival of a Nintendo franchise that never gets enough love. Metroid itself could represent the GameCube if it wasn't so sleek, serious, and spooky. + Like others on this list, there's a split with those who love this series and those who feel it strays too far from the 2D format that made Metroid and Super Metroid so effective. There's a similar sentiment about the 3D Castlevanias, which would make sense given the connection between the two franchises. Another example of how the appeal of the GameCube and its library can be divisive.
	The Legend of Zelda; The Wind Waker (2002-12-13) + Best represents the dichotomy of hate it/love it that the GameCube faces: The Wind Waker should be rightly regarded as a classic, but many couldn't get past its cute appearance. + Also spends a lot of time treading water, though in a literal sense. The first Zelda in a while that was more about exploring the world and soaking in the island vibes than it was about making constant forward progress through dungeons. + Sure, this got rereleased too. But not recently, am I right?
	Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (2003-08-08) + While it has since been re-released, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was one of the few games to take advantage of the GameCube's Game Boy Advance Link-up capability. In fact, you needed all your friends to have a GBA and link-up cable too if you wanted to play together. + Along with Odama, was an early indication that Nintendo intended to go full steam ahead with the obnoxious hardware gimmicks - best typified later by the DS and Wii and how all games for a time were adapted to use their stylus/motion control features.
	Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (2004-07-22) + Like its N64 predecessor (and Legend of the Seven Stars before it) but to a greater extent, Paper Mario 2 parodizes Mario lore as much as it deepens it and emphasizes a understated trait of the Mario franchise: that Mario and his friends are and always have been performing for an audience. That feels true to the spirit of the GameCube also: the most playful and irreverent of Nintendo's systems. + Probably the highest-rated game for the system by those that remember its library fondly. Would be a game a fan of the GameCube might choose to represent what the platform contributed.
	Chibi-Robo! (2005-06-23) + Small, cute, and mostly overlooked - much like the system. + Began (or perhaps bolstered) the era of Nintendo exclusives from second- and third-parties that were deliberately strange and unconventional with their gameplay and formats; a phenomenon that would become much more pronounced on the Wii with Elebits, Little King's Story, Opoona, et al.

Runners-Up and Disqualifieds

Here's another, shorter list of major GameCube exclusives that, while they had their qualities as games, don't really represent the system the same way as the above do. Feel free to argue if there's a strong case to be made:

• Animal Crossing (2001-12-14): Actually an N64 game, and it's hard to divorce it from that fact despite starting one of Nintendo's currently most important franchises. Otherwise it'd have that "cute and small and kind of pointless" comparison point on lock.
• Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (2002-06-24): This has to be the strangest, conceptually and existentially, of all the big GameCube exclusives. Just what about this subversive horror game caught Nintendo's eye? Did they think it would be their Silent Hill? I really like the game, more recent Dyack troubles aside, but it's the one I'd struggle to connect to the GameCube's personality the most.
• Pikmin 2 (2004-04-29): It's a bigger and more confident sequel, but wouldn't exist without the first. It also didn't need to make a strong case for itself the way the first did and the struggle to find its place in the wider Nintendo universe is something Pikmin 1 and the GameCube had in common.
• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (2004-11-15): Same argument as Pikmin 2, albeit Echoes was slightly worse than its predecessor rather than better. Maybe its status as an underappreciated underdog (and a middling middle-child) makes for a more suitable GameCube comparison than the first Metroid Prime though.
• Baten Kaitos Origins (2006-02-23): I like Baten Kaitos a lot, and it certainly is a weird-ass game from top to bottom that one could argue as a Nintendo-only curio in the same vein as Chibi-Robo!, but it never felt very "GameCube" to me. Ditto Tales of Symphonia, Lost Kingdoms, Phantasy Star Online Episode III: C.A.R.D. Revolution, and the Skies of Arcadia remaster. They all feel like PS2 JRPGs that got lost on the way to Albuquerque.
• Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest (2002-02-21), P.N.03 (2003-03-27), Giftpia (2003-04-25): I'd love to hear a case for any of these exclusives being a perfect metaphor for the GameCube. I sadly never got around to playing them.
• Mario Party 4 (2002-10-21), Mario Party 5 (2003-11-10), Mario Party 6 (2004-11-18), Mario Party 7 (2005-11-07): (Just insert that "Corporate needs you to find the differences between these two pictures" meme from The Office.)
• To a similar if lesser extent, Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (2003-11-07), Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour (2003-07-29), and F-Zero GX (2003-07-25) are all fine games that felt a little too iterative to work for this exercise.

I now open the floor to the rest of you: Which GameCube game best exemplifies what the GameCube meant to the world, if not necessarily your favorite? Was the GameCube a system you loved or one that just kinda came and went without much fanfare? Maybe it was your first Nintendo console, and introduced all those new and long-running Nintendo franchises one after the other. Maybe you skipped it entirely to focus on the Xbox, PlayStation 2, and/or the Dreamcast and couldn't find a spot in your heart (or around your TV) for Nintendo's purple cuboid buddy. Twenty years later, I'm curious what kind of legacy it left behind and I've only really my own experiences to draw from.

On the colonial planet of Novo Solo and its chief city-state Solo Nobre, the citizens have endured several years of rule under a statesman known only as the Great Leader. After emancipating the colony from its corporate overlords, the Solo Nobre Concern (or SNC), the Great Leader enacted numerous isolationist policies and worked on improving the general quality of life of the occupants of Solo Nobre. However, the Great Leader is dead - assassinated, perhaps - and the SNC is looking to recoup its investments. Since Solo Nobre has installed multiple orbital guns designed to deter spacebound foes, SNC's best bet is to recruit morally-flexible mercenaries already on the planet to carve out a path for a massive invasion from SNC forces: those known as the Brigadors. It's into this dystopian world of conflict that the player is introduced, slowly picking up on the lore as they complete missions for faceless suits somewhere out in deep space as they trample, explode, shoot down, and otherwise destroy large swathes of Solo Nobre (and the Solo Nobreans) for personal gain.

If Brigador is not lacking for something, it's a sense of aesthetic. A sci-fi universe of warring mechs, tanks, and anti-grav vehicles vying for control of a remote city-state in disarray, all scored to an intense synthwave soundtrack that arrived just as said musical genre was about to see a renaissance with the first season of Stranger Things later in that same summer of 2016. For whatever reason, in my pre-playthrough notes I'd put down Brigador as an RPG in the vein of Harebrained Schemes's BattleTech or a Front Mission: it's very much a pure action game instead, albeit with some tactical considerations regarding pre-mission loadouts, and reminiscent of the isometric mouse-driven action games Bullfrog and Sensible used to put out in the early '90s: Syndicate and Cannon Fodder first and foremost (or, were I a little more versed in mech games, perhaps a Future Cop LAPD?). Prowling an isometric landscape from a greatly zoomed out perspective, the player is tasked with driving their selected vehicle to mission goals and other valuable targets of opportunity - their approximate destinations marked on the boundary of the screen like a compass - and quickly destroying them, earning bonuses for surplus destruction and conditions like incurring only a small amount of damage or never setting off the enemy alarms. The money earned is tallied after a mission - successful or otherwise, though obviously the former pays more - and added to the player's total for future "acquisitions."

Brigador is split into two modes: Campaign and Freelance. I've just been sticking to Campaign for the time being, which has a series of missions with pre-determined loadouts. The first few missions are tutorials for each vehicle type - a mech (all-rounder), a tank (slow but powerful), and an anti-grav car (maneuverable but weak) - and after that are around two dozen missions in which the player has a small assortment of loadouts they can select between: the more challenging a vehicle is to win the map with, the bigger the payout after a successful sortie. From what I've gathered of the Freelance mode, it's where you spend all the money you've accrued to acquire better vehicles, weapons, pilots, and new and more difficult missions to create bespoke challenges for yourself as you work your way through unlocking everything the game has to offer. You can also put that money towards unlocking lore entries on the various proper nouns the mission briefs throw at you, or intel on every vehicle type in the game.

For all its spectacle, Brigador does manage to feel strategic in its approach to certain mission objectives. For one, the weapons you bring are best suited for certain targets, whether that's other enemy units or the structures you have to bring down. If a mission's goal is to destroy some buildings, you'd best bring something along that can do the job and do it well. Some weapons are best at removing shields, which many of the tougher or faster enemies have to soak up damage, while others are suited for removing armor fast through corrosion and high-velocity piercing. Maneuverability might count a great deal in maps with many slow moving heavy-hitters, though if you're expecting heavy resistance it might be prudent to enter the mission in a tank the size of an apartment building (and about as fast to turn around). Different vehicles call for different strategies, and you can use things like volume - certain buildings explode very loudly, and there's only so stealthy you can be with an enormous tank cannon - to your own advantage by drawing enemy hordes into bottlenecks and other ambush-ready zones. Ammo is a frequent concern - you'll sometimes start with none at all - which means keeping an eye on where ammo depots are located, and specifically the ones carrying the sort of ammo your current vehicle uses. Depots are another valuable secondary target though, so you might be inclined to destroy them and reap ammo from fallen enemies instead. Last of all, each vehicle has a cooldown-based support weapon that has effectively infinite use: these might range from non-combat tools like smoke grenades or stealth camo to powerful short-range attacks like a shockwave. They're best employed when you're in trouble, though depending on the vehicle they're often indispensable throughout the mission. It's considerations like these that stop Brigador from feeling too mindless or too repetitive: there's always some wrinkle to address, or some new dynamic that requires some additional ratiocination.

Brigador strikes me as the type of game best suited for shorter intermittent sessions, playing through a scenario or two at a time as a cleanser between games that require more of an investment. That's not to say that Brigador doesn't do a fine job immersing you into its grim corporate-funded universe or that it isn't full of dense worldbuilding to peruse, just that the game's structure - the Freelance mode in particular - feels purpose-built for the same kind of experimentation, slow progress, and frequent failure that you'd enjoy from a run-based game like Into the Breach, Heat Signature, or the many other tactical "roguelites" out there. Currently I think I might just call it a day after the Campaign missions are done - they seem to be the closest thing the game has to a story mode - but I could see myself dropping by for a few Freelance missions every now and then when I find myself in a mood to disintegrate a futuristic city block or two. (NB: Played on PC with the 2017 "Up-Armored" enhanced edition of the game.)

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

Look. I know. I know I play a lot of these explormers. I know I have to keep linking the word explormer to the metroidvania page because no-one would know what I'm talking about otherwise. It's become a well practiced routine here in Indie Game of the Week Central. And yet, I couldn't help but find myself with a huge stack of these map-traversal types and I'm never not in the mood to play one. So here we go, this week's explormer is Super Win the Game: a commercial sequel to the freeware game You Have to Win the Game, following similar simple-directive Indie games like You Have to Burn the Rope that end up having some additional surprises in store.

Naturally, the more explormers I cover the more I'm drawn to what's different about them. Super Win the Game is superficially straightforward enough: it has a specific 8-bit style overtly modeled on the second Legend of Zelda game, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, but plays like a standard platformer with zero combat and, initially, not a whole lot else beyond a single jump until you find a few upgrades. What intrigued me first of all is that it has an overworld map: not the most common sight in an explormer game, even for those that delineate zones as separate areas to explore. It's another aspect it borrows from Zelda II as well, which means there's plenty of secret nodes hiding in conspicuous single-tile forests or along the furthest contours of the geography. The dungeons are big on secret areas too: there's plenty of secret walls to feel your way through, and it's easy to overlook barriers like pools of acid or lava until you suddenly find an upgrade that lets you swim through caustic fluids and are left trying to recall the areas in which you passed over them.

Other Zelda II flourishes include a dungeon key feature that gives you some options if you're not eager to find all them in the wild - you can buy them individually, you can borrow them at astronomical interest rates, or you can just buy a skeleton key that ensures you never have to worry about locked doors again - and a collectible currency by way of gemstones. Each region mercifully tells you how many gemstones there are to be found in the current map, as well as map icons if you happened to pass by one. Beyond that, it's mostly poking your nose into dungeons, finding some new upgrade, figuring out where else in the wide world you can go with this new upgrade, and maintaining that loop until the end-game when you need to find six heart fragments to restore the kingdom's cursed monarch. Up to that point, the game offers a free fortune teller service to point the way, but finding the heart pieces is left to the player's own resourcefulness and ability to take notes from hint-offering NPCs in the various villages and nooks across the world map. The game does a fine enough job replicating the mystery inherent to the first two Zelda games without necessarily being too obtuse for NES nostalgia's sake. No trying to figure out what the hell "a graveyard duck" is supposed to be, for instance.

The gameplay, for being no-frills, is as responsive as you'd want with traversal upgrades adding much to your ability to whiz through areas you had to take slow and steady the first time through. A double-jump naturally helps a lot, as does a way of ensuring bodies of water can be explored instead of instantly fatal, but it's a wall-climbing glove that really makes it easier getting around places. Each wall-jump resets your double-jump, so with enough finesse you can triangle-jump your way up even arched ceilings to find out what lies above. Most dungeons need to be visited at least twice to explore everywhere within, not to mention acquiring all the collectibles, and some may in fact have more than one traversal upgrade. The challenge level is just right for an 8-bit throwback too: you'll probably rack up a death count measured in the hundreds before the end, but frequent checkpoints and fast resets ensure a minimum of frustration. It's not a huge game by any stretch but it felt like there was plenty to explore at all times, and the end-game heart piece scavenger quest relied upon all the skills I'd been taught so far and the familiarity I'd gained with the world and its various themed regions.

Finally, the game has a certain surreal undercurrent that could've been explored in a little more detail. At the end of every dungeon, usually just after the traversal upgrade, is a magic book you can read: they serve to warp you to the start of the dungeon as a convenience, but prior to that each one will first teleport you to a black-and-white realm of the unconscious where the game briefly becomes a bit meta with its commentary, with each of these smaller dream realms playing with the level design in some odd ways. An example would be a corridor where the surrounding walls eventually melt away to nothing but a black hallway before it spits you back out into the real world. An alien race of helpful advisors that call themselves Arcadians are said to have first come to the planet through these liminal spaces of thought and mind and found themselves trapped, and it leaves a slightly surreal subtext to the game's otherwise standard minimal-plot video game tale of a wandering heroes, evil wizards, and cursed kings. It's not significant enough to factor into the game much - there's no post-game business where you're breaking down the reality of this 8-bit pocket universe or anything - but it's a theme that the developers explore again in Eponymous, based in an empty Minecraft-like world.

Super Win the Game is fairly standard as far as Indie explormers go, though given it was released in 2014 when they weren't quite as ubiquitous as they are currently I'm willing to give them some slack. Its use of an overworld map and discrete zones to visit (and revisit) does provide a distinction over its more common contiguous-world peers at least - there's precious few stage-based explormers out there, including the likes of Order of Ecclesia and Demon's Crest - and while basic the platforming is smooth and concise and aided ably by the slow trickle of traversal upgrades. I think it has been left behind in the dust by several subsequent years of imaginative and elaborate evolutions to the genre, now that explormers have to do more than ever to set themselves apart over the competition, but I found its modest charms to be the tonic I needed between larger playthroughs. (For what it's worth, after finding all the gemstones, I super won this game.)

Rating: 4 out of 5.