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.

This warping of context becomes even more apparent when you consider spatial difference. My life as a North American woman, living in American society, under this political regime, is completely different from a Pakistani man living in Karachi. I don’t understand his jokes; he does not understand mine. We’re both still people, alike in dignity, but there is a gap—he probably laughs much less at Youtube Poops and is a better person for it.

BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4: DEMONS FROM THE PORTAL TO HELL I OPENED ARE STILL IN THE FAVELA AND NOW I HAVE TO SAVE MAMADAS FROM RONALDO is the video game equivalent to my prior opining. I, from moment one, was completely lost. The experience was not unlike entering a friend’s group chat only to find they possess an entire pantheonic religion worth of inside jokes. The ostracizing comradery becomes impossible to take part in without an archaeological dig of a Discord server.

Despite my background knowledge in shooters, BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4: DEMONS FROM THE PORTAL TO HELL I OPENED ARE STILL IN THE FAVELA AND NOW I HAVE TO SAVE MAMADAS FROM RONALDO, in this, made me feel similarly.

JPEG Artifact Quicksand

Early this year, I talked about the value of inaccessible aesthetics. Something being “ugly” to your sensibilities does not make it valueless or the product of a broken mind. I still absolutely believe this to be true. However, this blade cuts both ways: no matter how open-minded you may be, there is always the risk of something absolutely missing your sensibilities.

Brazilian Drug Dealer 4 alienated me with relative immediacy. The audio-visual presentation was the equivalent of hearing a song so bass-boosted as to be auditorily illegible. The extremes sandblasted away subtlety to a degree which removed all sense of what was or wasn’t a joke. The health icons are emojis; enemies are incomprehensible cocktails of cultural references I have no way of reliably parsing; the view models employ vertex wobbling so sickening I was left questioning how it was even possible.

Brief as the game is, I was exhausted within minutes. Music pounds in your ears, looping in a way I can only describe as oppressive. Encounter bleeding into encounter. Gunfire only adds to the drone of pure, unadulterated noise.

When I thought I could endure no more, the game granted me the gift of relative silence.  I took a deep breath, allowing relief to wash over my fried nervous system. The next room was open to me and a surprise was promised as I intruded. Within moments of entering the chamber, I was deafened by a cacophony of screaming so loud I had to remove my headphones entirely. Tinnitus now activated, I closed the game and began to reflect.

From that moment on, I was disengaged. Not out of spite but out of absolute incompatibility. The aesthetic overabundance washed right over me. The enemies which wielded the sonic weapon became a normal entry in the game’s roster—not getting any funnier with their repeat appearances.

Try as I might, I could not find the hook to pull me further in.

To Feel Something

Speaking only of the gameplay for a moment, this game is Quake. I don’t mean this hyperbolically: the game is constructed atop Id Tech 2. The movement is familiar to anyone who has bunny hopped or rocket jumped around a deathmatch map. You can double jump—because you are Brazilian—and you can dash—because you have fireworks up your ass. On a moment-to-moment basis the game is enjoyable to interface with because, again, it’s just Quake. I would be a hypocrite among hypocrites to say the game was unenjoyable when it borrows most prominently from the bedrock of the FPS genre.

Having said that, I continued to play the game in a state of absolute dissociation. Levels passed me by with no thoughts in my head. The weapons bleed into one another. Whenever something took more than five seconds to die, I scrolled the mouse wheel upward until a weapon of suitable killing capacity terminated the thought my brain was desperate to have.  Ammunition was plentiful enough that any other tactical thoughts were rendered unnecessary. With lidocaine numbness, I passed through the game with naught but a single death even playing on the highest difficulties.

Even the levels evoke an uncomfortable thoughtlessness in me. Things resemble their real-life counterparts, but when the game told me where I was I often had to just say, “I’ll take your word for it.” Perhaps at a squint I could identify that I was in a football field, or an airport, but for the most part my eyes were unseeing, save for the area immediately encircling my crosshair.

Strange as it is, this itself forms its own sort of backhanded compliment: never once did I get lost. In fact, the level design is a maximalist endpoint of the stupid “yellow paint” argument everyone was addicted to for several months. It is difficult to get lost in this game because every surface has an arrow plastered on it; those arrows have arrows telling you exactly how you’re supposed to interact with the thing it’s pointing at. This made the navigation effortless even in my violent delirium.  

After finishing my first playthrough, I felt grossly cynical. Try as I might, the only word which came to mind was “serviceable.” I pondered. I have played games far less mechanically satisfying than this and come away less negatively. Ultimately, it was research which gave me the perspective I have now. 

Bode Expiatório

The cultural impact of this game has—in what was immediately accessible to me—achieved a similar sort of memetics which has disgusted me in the past. When I spoke of Cruelty Squad or Beyond Citadel, I took several paragraphs to speak on what I found repugnant about the response to both. Similarly, I think there is a comparable reaction here. There is not an extensive amount of critical reception for this game or its predecessor. In those that did exist, the most common throughline I could find was:

“I don’t get it but I’m glad they’re having fun up there.”

This obviously went hand in hand with the memetic response from less inhibited user reviews. This game is sitting at overwhelmingly positive on Steam but this reception is choked in irony. They talk about how it’s brainrot, how it’s absurd, how it’s “just like going to Brazil” but speaking with a type of flippant generality which made me a little nauseous.

The cultural obsession with irony is toxic at the best of times, especially when authenticity is difficult to find. Watching the developer speak openly about the passion they had for this game leads me to believe in the heart put into its creation. I don’t believe that this was just another thoughtless product slopped onto Steam in the hopes that it will make the dev some money.

What seemed at first to be a lazy attempt to make something absurdist was instead attempting to portray an unfamiliar experience. A love letter for the underground modding and bootleg scene of Brazil. It is here that I repeat what was said at the article’s onset. Context is everything for understanding where art is coming from. Incoherence may be a flaw, but often it’s just as likely that the internal schema the work is operating from is inapparent to the audience.

My prior words were something of an act—please forgive my deception. Those statements were reflective of the reactionary way people often engage with art. That which does not flatter you is bad, poorly thought out, the product of an ingenuine mind. I lied because without reflection it is easy for even a well-intentioned person to succumb to such a mindset. I, too, am not immune to it.

The Anglocentrism of art is a problem that many people fail to reckon with.  The western world, and more specifically that of the Northern hemisphere, often operates with a pre-assertion that it is they alone who exist to determine what “relevance” is. Look at how people tantrum when they are forced to read a subtitle. Look at how people view the diverse medium of something like anime, seeing only a hotbed of pedophilia and degeneracy with nothing of any importance to say.

It is frightening to be an outsider; yet many people endure this every day. It is frequently othering to see only art which does not represent you. It would be boorish of me to expect all art to perfectly cater to my own personal understanding. Put bluntly, sometimes a work simply isn’t about you.

I don’t know what it means to be Brazilian. My grasp of Brazilian culture in many ways begins and ends with this game and some of the loose overlap my interests have, with things like movies and music (please listen to the album Celestial by the Brazilian band Papangu, thank you). If something like the 2025 despelote can talk about the incredibly specific experience of being Ecuadorian in the midst of a near religious fervor of a football game and be praised for it, I think even this game—as absurd as it is—has a place to exist as well. It isn’t just American nostalgia which has value.

A game like this can be made by a passionate dev, with a genuine heart, who says loudly, “I care about this, this is relevance, this is important,” even if some don’t have the context to appreciate it. Even after everything I said, I don’t “get” Brazilian Drug Dealer 4, but it’s not my place to. I don’t get it in the same way I don’t “get” the nostalgia for the Wii and Windows XP and other aesthetics that are just aesthetics to me. In much the same way that I don’t expect to gatecrash a friend group and demand to be accommodated, this simply isn’t a piece meant to flatter me. I am genuinely glad it exists though.

Rather than doing the tried-and-true method of declaring what numerical value this game has, I instead say: this is not a review. It is not my place to determine the value or quality of something not made for me. I wanted only to talk about this to give some perspective into a world that is not your own, and perhaps, maybe offer introspection on the things reactionarily cast aside or discredited. If this work in any way provokes a response from you, I encourage you to play it. 

Go wherever your curiosity guides you.  

The post This is not a review of BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4: DEMONS FROM THE PORTAL TO HELL I OPENED ARE STILL IN THE FAVELA AND NOW I HAVE TO SAVE MAMADAS FROM RONALDO 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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It is an appealing dream. It is also, increasingly, one I distrust.

Lilith’s recent Gamesline feature Ouroboros: The Game and Everything, Forever gives this hunger a wonderfully dangerous name: the “Omnigame”, the fantasy of a game capacious enough to become everything. Star Wars is almost uniquely vulnerable to that fantasy because the setting already looks like it contains every game genre at once. Dogfights, sword fights, westerns, espionage, political drama, racing, tactics, horror, smuggling, archaeology, gambling, droid repair, questionable food. The galaxy is a design document written by someone who refused to delete any ideas.

But when I look back at the Star Wars games I remember most clearly, the pattern is almost the reverse. They are rarely memorable because they let me do everything. They are memorable because they knew what I was doing there. Scope and ambition are not the same thing. Sometimes the most ambitious choice a Star Wars game can make is deciding what it will not let you be.

A cockpit can be a whole galaxy

Star Wars: X-Wing did not need to let you stroll around a Rebel base, flirt with a smuggler, customize an apartment or abandon the war to become the Outer Rim’s least qualified moisture farmer. It put you in a cockpit and took that cockpit seriously. The briefings mattered. Shield and laser energy mattered. Mission objectives mattered. Being a Rebel pilot was not a costume you wore between more important activities; it was the game.

That specificity made the universe around the cockpit feel larger, not smaller. You knew there were commanders, technicians, transports, convoys and battles continuing beyond your view because your job depended on them. The game did not have to model the entire Alliance to make you feel employed by it. There is a peculiar magic in being given a task and realizing that the galaxy will continue whether you become a hero or accidentally fly into something expensive.

Dark Forces found a similar strength from the opposite direction. Kyle Katarn begins as a mercenary doing intelligence work for the Rebellion, before later games pull him deeper into Jedi mythology. In the first game, Star Wars is Imperial facilities, stolen plans, weapons research, elevators, locked doors and corridors that occasionally seem to have been designed by an architect who hated navigation. That is enough. It is a very specific slice of the setting, and because LucasArts commits to it, the Empire starts to feel like an institution rather than a collection of movie props.

Michael’s old Gamesline piece on four favorite Star Wars games gets at something important when it remembers Dark Forces as a game about feeling weaker on the battlefield, armed with ordinary weapons rather than destiny. His Battlefront section makes the same point even more directly: sometimes the interesting perspective is the grunt. You do not need to be the most important person in Star Wars to feel like you belong there.

The galaxy feels bigger when you have a job

Star Wars: Republic Commando understood this almost aggressively well. It did not ask whether the player might also want a lightsaber skill tree, a swoop-racing league and a property portfolio on Naboo. You were Boss. You had Delta Squad. Doors needed breaching. Positions needed covering. Sev was probably saying something that would concern Human Resources if the Republic had remembered to invent it.

The squad commands are not a side system. They are the fantasy. Ordering Fixer onto a console, Scorch onto explosives or a commando into a sniper position turns the Clone Wars into procedure. The war becomes more believable precisely because the game reduces it to rooms, objectives and four soldiers who depend on one another. The galaxy outside those rooms feels enormous because the player is not allowed to own it.

Bounty Hunter is rougher, and I am not going to perform the retro-review trick where age magically transforms awkward controls into secret genius. But it understands its job description. Jango Fett has contracts, weapons, a jetpack and a professional relationship with danger that borders on administrative. The pleasure comes from inhabiting a particular kind of Star Wars life. You are not auditioning to become the franchise. You are a bounty hunter. The title was not being coy.

This is why “small” is the wrong word for these games. Their maps may be smaller. Their verbs may be fewer. Their promises are narrower. But the world around the player can feel much larger because it is allowed to remain outside the frame. A good job implies an economy, an institution and other people doing other jobs. A game that lets you do absolutely everything sometimes implies the opposite: that the galaxy has been waiting patiently for you to arrive and operate all of its machinery personally.

Outlaws is huge, but it still knows who you are

Star Wars Outlaws looks like the obvious counterargument. It is an open-world Star Wars game. It has multiple planets, vehicles, faction relationships, stealth, shooting, exploration, upgrades and enough icons to make a map designer wake up sweating. If my argument were simply “small map good, big map bad,” Outlaws would be standing outside with a blaster and a very reasonable grievance.

What saves it from becoming a Star Wars sampler platter is Kay Vess. The world may be broad, but the fantasy stays narrow. Kay is a scoundrel. She sneaks, steals, hustles, bargains, takes jobs, worries about syndicates and escapes problems on a speeder. Even activities that could feel disconnected usually orbit that identity. The game is not asking what every Star Wars fan has ever wanted to do. It is asking what Kay would plausibly do next, which is usually something illegal followed by something urgent.

Iris put this better than any feature checklist could in her 2025 favorites when she wrote about simply enjoying the feeling of existing in Star Wars. Her memory of wandering Akiva in the rain is not really about content volume. It is about inhabiting a place long enough for it to stop behaving like a theme-park attraction and start feeling like somewhere a person might live.

That distinction matters. A large game can be focused. A small game can be unfocused. Scope is not a measurement in square kilometers; it is a question of how many different fantasies the design asks the player to believe at once.

When “broader” sounded like the future

Gamesline has an unusually neat fossil of the opposite philosophy in its archive. In 2017, when EA closed Visceral Games, Michael covered the announcement and the fate of Amy Hennig’s still-unreleased Star Wars project. EA described the project as a story-based linear adventure, then said it wanted to pivot toward a broader experience with more variety, agency, depth and breadth.

I do not think one corporate statement from 2017 proves that linear games are morally pure and open worlds are secretly organized crime. Development is messier than that, and we still do not know every problem that existed inside Visceral’s project. But the wording captures an idea that became extremely powerful across big-budget game development: broader sounded like progress. More systems, more choice, more hours, more reasons to return. Width itself became a feature.

The strange thing is that Star Wars had already spent decades demonstrating the opposite lesson. X-Wing became special by locking the player in a cockpit. Republic Commando became special by caring about four clones. Dark Forces became special by turning Imperial infrastructure into an FPS playground. None of these games suffered because they failed to also contain a farming sim.

A game can absolutely be broad when breadth is the point. Knights of the Old Republic needs planets, companions and choices because role-playing is about building an identity across them. Battlefront needs battlefields and armies because scale is the fantasy. But “more” only helps when it sharpens the promise. Otherwise the galaxy becomes a buffet, and Star Wars has enough strange cantina food without turning game design into one.

2026 is rediscovering the trick

This is why the two Star Wars games that interest me most in 2026 are almost comically different from one another.

Star Wars Zero Company, released in August, is a single-player turn-based tactics game set late in the Clone Wars. It gives you Tesh Keff Hawks and a company of odd professionals to learn the language of war through tactics game mechanics like positioning, team composition, and mission prep. There are Jedi in this universe, obviously. Star Wars keeps those around the way an office keeps a printer: everyone assumes one will appear eventually. But the tactical fantasy does not depend on becoming one. It depends on deciding who moves, who covers, who risks the shot and who you cannot afford to lose.

That focus is what makes its wider campaign systems work. Character relationships in the form of Bonds matter because they change how people fight together. Injuries matter because they change who you are willing to send. The base matters because it prepares the next operation. If you want to see just how many different roles Star Wars games have tried over the years, the complete Star Wars games archive is a useful reminder that the license has rarely needed one definitive form. It has needed lots of specific ones.

Then there is Galactic Racer, released on October 6, which throws the tactical grid in the nearest bin and asks what Star Wars looks like when racing is not a diversion between story missions but the entire point. Fuse Games has built a competitive, runs-based repulsorcraft league around vehicle handling, rivalries, upgrades and decisions made between events. Its wonderfully direct promise — “No Force. No prophecy. Just skill, strategy, and the will to rise” — is not a rejection of Star Wars. It is a bet that one particular corner of the galaxy can support an entire game. Even the paddock and the mechanic Hibi reinforce the idea that racing is a profession, not a minigame the Jedi stumble into between adventures.

With the game now released, that argument is no longer simply about what Fuse Games hopes to achieve. Galactic Racer commits to a distinct racing culture, with different vehicle types, workshops and a campaign built around competing, rebuilding and trying again. That does not mean every design decision must be perfect for the larger point to hold. The game does not need to squeeze in a lightsaber sequence because someone in a meeting worries that players might forget which universe they are in. Give the racing enough character, friction and consequence, and the galaxy beyond the track begins to feel larger than any checklist of franchise features could make it.

We do not need The Star Wars Game

I understand the fantasy of the definitive Star Wars game. I still want it sometimes. Give me the ship, the blaster, the cantina, the apartment, the racing league, the tactical squad, the smuggling route and a completely unnecessary fishing minigame on Mon Cala. Let me live there forever. Then let me complain that the fishing economy is unbalanced.

But I no longer think that game would automatically be the best use of Star Wars. The galaxy has lasted this long because it suggests more lives than any one story can contain. Games are uniquely good at taking one of those lives and making us perform it. Pilot. Commando. Mercenary. Bounty hunter. Scoundrel. Tactical commander. Racer.

The strongest Star Wars games do not need to prove the galaxy is large by giving us all of it. They prove it by giving us a corner with enough rules, texture and consequence that we can imagine everything continuing beyond the edge of the map.

Maybe that is the real lesson buried in all those decades of licensed games: Star Wars gets bigger when the game stops trying to contain it.

Søren Kamper is the editor of Star Wars: Gaming, an independent publication covering the history, design and development of Star Wars video games.

The post Star Wars Games Got Better When They Stopped Trying to Be the Whole Galaxy — by Søren Kamper appeared first on Gamesline.

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!

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Edited by Crystal

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The post John Messes with the Spyro the Dragon RetroAchievements Revision, Part 2 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…

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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.