John takes over for a sickly Rose as the crew discusses the ethereal 2002 series Haibane Renmei. We also discuss the trifecta of nightmarish shows we subjected ourselves to this season, including Even The Student Council Has Its Holes!, Magic Repo Man, and FX Fighter Kurumi-chan.

{EDITORS NOTE: I removed most of John’s cats from the podcast but there’s only so much we can do, enjoy their desperate pleas for papa.}

Our theme song is by Kirsten Carey, who can be found at @kircarey.bsky.social!

Send questions to podcast@gamesline.net, with a subject denoting it’s for URW!

The post Unlimited Rail Works Episode 144: Haibane Renmei appeared first on Gamesline.

To me, Chrono Trigger is an ambitious take on the RPG formula that had been cultivated across the NES and SNES libraries over the decade leading to its conception. Seeing Final Fantasy morph from static turn-based screens with skill pages to the absurd cinematic presentation of Final Fantasy VI where characters flip and flop around was a jump in itself, but Chrono Trigger considered every aspect of these experiences to make something familiar yet new. Multiple endings, mini-game integration, more active combat scenarios…everything about Chrono Trigger was a reaction and evolution to what the powerhouse creatives behind it had learned up to that point.

When we see a work inspired by Chrono Trigger, conversely, it is often the freshman project of its budding developers; the long held dream of a few creatives to recreate that magic from their youth. Yet this was not how something like Chrono Trigger was made, and thus it becomes increasingly hard for a developer to capture the things that made this art work when they themselves haven’t experienced the level of self-reflection that such a work requires. Yes, they can capture the surface level concepts of multiple time periods and having a funny animal-based companion, but they lack the framework and experience to create something evolutionary. 

All this preamble is to say it’s been exceedingly funny watching Square Enix go on to create their own riffs on Chrono Trigger that run into these exact same problems.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is a game most similar to Secret of Mana or something like Ys: Memories of Celceta. From a top-down perspective you wander around, cutting down various enemies and solving rudimentary platforming or block-pushing puzzles. You have access to several weapons, but unlike in something like Secret of Mana where you’ll choose what to employ based on an inherent weakness of your foes, you can pretty much use whatever you want, whenever you want. There’s benefits to using ranged weapons on fast enemies that are constantly moving as you’d assume, but you aren’t doing tangibly more damage with a lizardman-slaying sword as an example. In this way things feel a lot closer to something like A Link to the Past, where you just sort of stick to your defined sword, level it up, and use side weapons like boomerangs or bows as desired or if a puzzle demands it.

The only really interesting wrinkle to this tried but true formula is the addition of Faie, Elliot’s fairy companion with her own slew of magical abilities. You can control Faie by using the right stick of your controller to move independently of Elliot (or through local co-op) and gain access to super speed, teleporting, fire magic, wind magic, and a mirrored clone of Elliot to help in combat. I was immediately charmed by the idea of operating a second character with the same controller. It’s not exactly the most common thing in games; with the only immediate example coming to mind being The World Ends with You, and even modern releases of that game have neutered the concept. 

The story is pretty straightforward, even compared to JRPGs of eld. Elliot is an adventurer, he loves doing quests for people, and he lives in a world with fantasy racism against “beast tribes”, where humanity has been pushed back behind the protective magical walls of a castle town. As one might expect, Elliot finds himself quickly wrapped up in bettering the state of his world, primarily through the usage of Doorways that lead to three past eras: The Age of Budding, The Age of Magic, and The Age of Reconstruction. While Elliot makes his way through the rise and fall of a precursor civilization, he comes to understand various secrets about the world, and himself.

The Adventures of Elliot is a pretty idea that becomes a banal slog, and its lack of growth and imagination become more and more clear the further you get into the 25 or so hour game. It’s not completely devoid of ideas, but its refusal to provide a meaningful backbone to its mechanics, its world, and indeed even the very story it spends lavish amounts of fully voice acted cutscenes on, has left it as nothing more than a quick memory in my past.

Starting with the core gameplay loop; you’ve seen pretty much everything Elliot has to offer within your third hour of play. Weapons function differently, but you merely use them to break your way through certain paths, rather than meaningfully changing the way you approach combat as a whole. Even Zelda games go out of their way to present you with enemies that are more easily felled with whatever new item you found in the dungeon, and that’s been the case for over 30 years. I played on Elliot’s hardest difficulty to see if there was anything to combat when faced with a greater challenge, and found myself using the same two or so weapons for basically every enemy I ran into.

Equally simplistic are the various puzzles you’ll find scattered throughout the dungeons of Elliot’s world. If you’ve played an older 2D Zelda, you’ll feel right at home here, but I truly believe we shouldn’t accept that as good enough anymore. Countless indies like Hyper Light Drifter or Unsighted have come out over the years, bringing with them complexity in puzzling and pugilism, yet Elliot is content to have you push a block and call it a day.

Things almost get interesting when you take Faie’s abilities into account, especially her teleportation and cloning powers, but the mostly optional nature of these abilities mean that much of the game doesn’t account for them. This was especially frustrating to realize after I took advantage of the game’s co-op features with my wife, which allows a second player to control Faie freely. What started as a fun game of her blasting me with fire and teleporting me as a bit quickly fell into “look at your phone” levels of tedium, since so much of the game was resoundingly simple, there wasn’t much for her to do.

What confused me most about Faie was how an item you can buy at the very beginning of the game invalidates most of her skills. Right from the get go, you can buy a cloak that allows Elliot to float over gaps like Princess Peach. This almost entirely negates the need to use Faie’s teleportation and many of the skills used to solve puzzles since you can effortlessly fly over the environment to wherever you need to go. It’s not like this was some weird Minecraft type accessibility option I turned on accidentally—it’s just an item you put on! It’s in the first shop you find in the game!

Hearing about the ease of exploitation may lead you to believe you could at least have an interesting or fun time cheesing your way around Elliot’s world, but it’s so resoundingly dull. There’s no real difference between the ages outside of the main (and only) city, and what rooms of the cookie cutter dungeons you’re allowed to get into for a treasure chest. The overworld looks the same regardless of age, the enemies are always the same, in the same places, with the same items. Even the least inspired Ys game squeezes out a baffling amount of enemy diversity on their meager budgets; this is the best Square Enix can do?

Speaking of treasure chests, what you actually find in them is similarly disappointing. You either find a statistical and visual upgrade to your weapons (two for each weapon), or one of Elliot’s most baffling items: magicite. 

Magicite are little gems you can slot into your various weapons over the course of your adventure that modifies how they feel to use, or the types of buffs they offer. There’s two ways to obtain magicite; from random treasure chests out in the wild, or by crafting them via a random draw system that utilizes a currency you get from defeating monsters. This “gacha” system is profoundly puzzling, and feels like it’s been implemented purely because gacha games are the game de jour in the mainstream RPG space. Each time you do a “pull” you’ll get one of a dozen or so magicite that exist for each weapon, and the magicite you find out in the world are drawn from this same pool. If you remember to go back to town for your magicite 10x pull, you’ll accrue several hundred magicite just by playing the game, leaving most of the treasure chests in the game feeling largely useless as they reward you with the same magicite you’re raking in by the dozens.

This is hardly a problem exclusive to Elliot—indeed most modern RPGs have struggled with rewards in an era of crafting—but even compared to the endless side-paths culminating in a potion or antidote in your Personas and Bravely Defaults, getting duplicates of a gem like it’s junk gear in a sloppy ARPG is rough. It’s one thing to play God of War and get the bracers that increase poison resistance by 2.8%: it’s another to get them again, and again, and again as your only rewards. In something that’s meant to be a call back to Square RPGs of eld no less! Is nowhere safe from gambling’s foul corruption?

Similarly frustrating is the story of this underbaked Millenium Tale. We’ve talked ad-nauseum about fantasy racism and the laziness of its usage in works of fiction over the years, but Elliot doesn’t even try to be as heavy-handed as a Final Fantasy XVI or a Metaphor. Instead, despite ostensibly being the main crux of the game, Elliot spends much of the time talking about the savage beastmen, and how it’s only right to kill them all because they attack you on sight, like faceless Fire Emblem bandits. Well, he does until he meets the beautiful humanoid catgirl the later game is based entirely around, who receives just as much prejudiced scorn as the speechless slimes in the jungle. 

What’s going on out there, genuinely, where so many works have this fixation on the othering of fantasy races as if it’s compelling or says something? Is this where we’ve ended up as it’s become gradually more unwelcome to make offensive globe-trotting Indiana Jones style stories that portray the other as disturbing and savage? Even Final Fantasy XIV retired their “beast tribe” moniker in-game several years ago, realizing the issues and connotations inherent to the concept. Why are we still making games where it’s okay to kill entire societies of conscious creatures because we can’t understand them?

The story isn’t all bad; I enjoyed some of the more unique characterization ideas, and especially the events leading up to the true ending, since they more meaningfully connect to Elliot himself. Voice acting is surprisingly good, which isn’t that surprising since Octopath Traveler 2 has one of my favorite dubs I’ve seen outside of Tales games (Temenos my beloved). There’s a charm to the simplicity of the story, especially with how it really wants to believe in the idea of people being good at their core. But its mashing of that ideal up against the reality of how the beast tribes are portrayed, and the completely static presentation of the world state across the ages is not exactly endearing.

There’s a degree of almost familiar comfort to the sort of story The Adventures of Elliot tries to tell; it’s the type of comfort I’ve often heard fans of the Dragon Quest series espouse. As we grow, the types of stories we find interest in can change and deepen, trading base level black and white fables for deeper, more intimate stories with the type of nuance we become acquainted with as we age. It only makes sense then, that we would find a sense of calm in a return to that way of thinking, those stories that planted the seeds of imagination in our young hearts. I can’t deny it had some sort of effect on me in the opening hours, but as I progressed I gradually began getting a grip on exactly why I had grown out of these basic parables.

What confounded me most about the game, came at its end. Similar to Chrono Trigger, Elliot attempts to present you with multiple options on how to approach its final boss. Unlike the malleability of Lavos—and the way that game considers its routing in an almost jokelike manner that plays off your expectations—Elliot basically directs you into two different half-written bad ends, with its true ending hidden behind several unmarked quests on the world map that add several hours of gameplay. I’m not one to deride the concept of a “bad end”, but at the same time neither of these conclusions that head straight to the game’s credits present anything approaching an interesting lens on things. You’re basically being directed towards two different game over screens, so that the game can confidently declare it has deceived you.

I didn’t completely hate my time with The Adventures of Elliot; I just expected more, especially out of Team Asano, a development group that has gotten consistently better with each of their games. This doesn’t feel like a culmination of the things they’ve learned from Triangle Strategy or Octopath Traveler. It’s a work that wears out its welcome, losing the grace its first impressions and calls to nostalgia elicit. I think a second Elliot game that seriously interrogates both what type of world it’s in, the people in it, and the minutiae of its combat system could be a really great time! As is, I kind of wish I had the time I spent with this game back.

The post A Story All Too Stale – The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales Review appeared first on Gamesline.

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The post Lily Gets Spooked: F.E.A.R. Part 2 appeared first on Gamesline.

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Crystal, Rose, and John discuss Konami’s Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, the 2003 debut of the Castlevania series on PS2, distinguished by its 3D exploration, experimental combat, and striking visuals and music. Please note that this is a full-spoilers episode.

Next month’s Game Club will be about Okage: Shadow King!

If you like this Game Club format, let us know! You can voice your feedback and suggestions at our our Discord channel gamesline.chat or our email podcast@gamesline.net!

Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/gamesline

Follow us on Bluesky: @gamesline.net
Crystal: @crystal.undertow.cards
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Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Crystal

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 109: Castlevania: Lament of Innocence appeared first on Gamesline.

Rose hosts Maverick and John through yet another anime preview session. It’s one of the most harrowing ones yet. Elvie should count herself lucky she wasn’t here for such evil. We also are going to watch one of three shows for the full season. Which one? Tune in next time to find out…

Our theme song is by Kirsten Carey, who can be found at @kircarey.bsky.social!

Send questions to podcast@gamesline.net, with a subject denoting it’s for URW!

The post Unlimited Rail Works Episode 143: Banished From Fall 2026’s Anime Season Preview appeared first on Gamesline.

As the Fata Morgana superfan, I was quick to dive into Schrödinger’s Call as soon as it was released, and similar to my experience with Fata Morgana, I made sure to establish an hour minimum reading period each night so I could ensure I’d get through it in a reasonable timeframe, something I’ve only done for visual novels I’ve truly resonated with such as Tsukihime or Muramasa. 

I was immediately in love with the game’s scribbly yet defined art style, its cutesy interpretations of other characters as animals, and the way every line is delivered with the Animal Crossing “animalese” style of speaking (incomprehensible gibberish sounds strung together like a half-heard phone call). The chapter format echoing Fata Morgana’s doors with different people in wildly different situations was quickly recognizable, and as you progress through the game it becomes clear its creators understood exactly how to utilize its soundtrack the way that visual novels do best.

Unfortunately, that’s where my love for Schrödinger’s Call runs dry. Unlike with Fata Morgana, where my affection only grew over the course of my journey—and its conclusion cemented my adoration—Schrödinger’s Call was an experience of waiting for growth and coalescence that never came. 

Schrödinger’s Call takes place within the confines of a single nondescript room. You, as the player, watch a young girl named Mary answer phone calls from ghosts, people who couldn’t move on from their death for one reason or another. You’ll see parents separated from their children, starcrossed lovers, and all the other archetypes you’d expect in your average tragedy. The twist? All of these people died at the same time, when the planet’s moon suddenly and inexplicably fell, killing everyone.

It’s a hell of a conceit; navigating the sci-fi underpinnings of this setting through the more mundane heartbreaks that make up our day-to-day lives is a stark contrast to the type of story you would normally expect from an apocalypse. When we talk about certain genres becoming oversaturated (i.e. superhero movies, coffee shop AUs), it’s usually predicated on an overreliance of formula over innovation. Humans are finicky pattern-recognizing creatures, and we’re most fascinated by that which breaks the molds our brains presuppose. The disparate nature of Schrödinger’s Call seemed fit to slowly build up to a slam dunk, or at least I had hoped.

Yet there really isn’t anything going on in Schrödinger’s Call to make good on the promise of its premise. Instead, we’re treated to a series of all too familiar narratives that are just as basic as they appear, and the moment things finally seem to be taking a turn towards the more interesting, it all suddenly ends.

As an example; the first call follows the story of a mother, her son, and the final conversation they shared together before the moon fell. You discover the mother went to prison for murder, and was forced to let her son live with her former boss, with their relationship being forbidden from rekindling due to her criminal past. At every stage of this storyline, I was thinking to myself “well it’s pretty obvious what’s happened here”, but the game forced me to walk through every stage of the deductive process repeatedly over and over again, while regurgitating the same information over and over again to every character I interacted with, only to have the most obvious basic reveal delivered to me at the end like it’s a stunning revelation.

There’s a recent trend I’ve seen slowly work its way into story-focused games with the advent of the gacha game where the player is forced to hit a perfunctory “keep talking” choice prompt, and Schrödinger’s Call is inundated with it. You have to prompt someone to finish their thoughts with a “yes?”, you have to call them back to repeat the same thing you said to them last time but with greater emphasis, you have to manually enter each individual phone number on a rotary phone to call the one-note NPC who has the answer to whatever question you’ve already figured out an hour ago, only to then immediately hang up and deliver the same conversation to someone else. It’s tedious, exhausting, and honestly just plain lame. 

When I opened this review by talking about that Fata Morgana interview, it wasn’t just to explain how I came across Schrödinger’s Call. Certainly that set the expectations I had, but more than anything as I progressed through the incredibly straightforward fables, I was shocked at just how obvious and surface level its inspirations from the game were. 

The House in Fata Morgana, for those who don’t know, tells the stories of various residents of a cursed manor over the course of its long and storied existence. As the story goes on, you realize that all of the characters you’ve run into and seen, as well as the more basic struggles we’re privy to in their narratives, are in part metaphorical aspects of a much larger story. By the time you reach the end, you’ve had dozens of aha moments about the hidden natures of all you’ve seen, and it makes the whole work feel inconceivably well considered.

On the flip side, Schrödinger’s Call has no tangible payoff to the more basic nature of its storytelling. At best, the connective tissue between the core narrative of figuring out what’s going on with Mary in her room and the stories she listens to is that sometimes you hear a key word related to what you’ve seen. One could make the argument that the theme of the story is how empathy and sympathy can inform the understanding we have of ourselves but like…that’s it? 

Even the format of the game apes Fata Morgana: three disparate stories of different people in different places punctuated by a fourth “core” story that reveals the true nature of the work. Most egregiously, the third call of Schrödinger, and the third door of Fata Morgana are so similar in tone and events that it’s comical, and you’d be forgiven for mistaking one as a parody of the other. 

The biggest killer to Schrödinger’s Call is that it ends after its fourth call. Half of Fata Morgana’s narrative is hidden beyond its fourth door reveal, and it’s the part that makes its whole story work, so ending right as the ball gets rolling makes for an incredibly painful case of “what could have been”. 

Which is exceedingly agonizing as that fourth call is the best part of the entire game! The presentation is amped up, the music hits a crescendo, the art is switching perspective and tone with new gameplay tidbits…and then it all just ends. The moon’s fall isn’t referenced in a meaningful way—despite being an obvious metaphor for a specific event—and none of the ghosts you’ve met along the way actually represent anything intriguing beyond the surface level stories they told you again and again.

I don’t need to know why the moon fell—I’m not a TV Tropes page begging for the YouTube Explained of everything I read—but for such a compelling hook, it means absolutely nothing . There’s multiple interpretations you can come away with that make it seem as if nothing even happened at all, which isn’t as hot a story twist as it was for Bob Newhart in the 90s.

If you take away the conceit of the moonfall, what are you left with? Three stories you could find in the seasonal lineup of any long running procedural, told painstakingly slowly with forced choice sequences to break up the conversations in case you forgot you were playing a video game. I’m not one to opine about “depression porn” or media that feels like it’s designed purely to elicit an emotional response, but at the end of the day, that’s what it feels like everything in Schrödinger’s Call exists for: to make you feel sad. You’re not to think about or solve why you feel sad, but it’s all just for you, the player, to feel sad.

At its core, Schrödinger’s Call is a story about Mary and the situations that have led her to becoming the “world’s last confidant” at the other end of a telephone. The reason this happens is explained in great detail (just like everything else), but there’s no real purpose to it, or message to take away. The House in Fata Morgana resonated with me because it’s the story of several people, and it approaches each of them with an open mind and willingness to believe in the inherent good of humanity despite immense suffering and pain. It’s a story that works because it goes out of its way to go the extra mile every single time, even when you think it’s shown its hand. Schrödinger’s Call ends when it thinks it’s beaten you thoroughly into the ground with the emotion it intends.

My playthrough of Schrödinger’s Call took me around 6 hours, but your mileage may vary. Despite being less than ⅓ the length of The House in Fata Morgana or many other VNs I love, there were so many points during my read of the game where it felt like the longest story I’d read in years, just because of how redundant and dull its prose was. I feel bad about being so critical of something clearly made with a degree of sincerity and incorporates base themes of empathy and care, but those topics should mean something, and I always hope to come away from a work thinking of at least one thing new, instead of thinking about how it’s all just the same.

The post Musings on a Moonfall – Schrödinger’s Call (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

We’re back with another somewhat regular episode of Unlimited Rail Works! Sans John, Rose has been rewatching some isekai of yore, Maverick has been rocking with Science Saru, and Elvie checked out the retro Red River while revisiting some old faves.

Our theme song is by Kirsten Carey, who can be found at @kircarey.bsky.social!

Send questions to podcast@gamesline.net, with a subject denoting it’s for URW!

The post Unlimited Rail Works Episode 142: Summer Vacation is Over appeared first on Gamesline.

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The post John Messes with the Spyro the Dragon RetroAchievements Revision w/ Rose & Lily appeared first on Gamesline.

Crystal, Lily, and Rose discuss Bungie West’s Oni, a 2001 third-person brawler-shooter with intense difficulty, intricate controls, and anime-inspired artwork. Please note that this is a full-spoilers episode.

Next month’s Game Club will be about Castlevania: Lament of Innocence!

If you like this Game Club format, let us know! You can voice your feedback and suggestions at our our Discord channel gamesline.chat or our email podcast@gamesline.net!

Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/gamesline

Follow us on Bluesky: @gamesline.net
Crystal: @crystal.undertow.cards
Lily: @gallowlessdatura.bsky.social
Rose: @fatamorgana.bsky.social

Review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

Send questions to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

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Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Crystal

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 106: Oni Game Club appeared first on Gamesline.