If I truly only cared about my own reaction to games, I would keep a private journal. Instead, I post my thoughts online so others can read it. Actually, I’m more likely to post about a game that I played by myself, because that means I haven’t gotten to talk about it with someone else yet. Even if you only read this article, I have still communicated to you. However, I’d love it if you said something back to me in the comments form below.

11. Collective Unconscious

Collective Unconscious is currently unavailable for online play, but it’s the Yume Nikki fan game I spent the most time with friends in on Yume Nikki Online. Honestly, I don’t think I could distinguish one Yume Nikki fan game from another; I just appreciate coexisting with others in odd little RPG Maker maps with ethereal music.

I don’t like pressing the run button in Collective Unconscious, nor do I ever want to have a full understanding of every world and secret. I like walking slowly and making lots of stops and sitting on a bench to quietly chat. Games can be toys, but they can also just be a pretty interactive screensaver for Discord calls.

10. Demon’s Souls

My haughty intelligence-type royal came to Boletaria to plunder the secrets of sorcery from the demons, and mercilessly slaughtered all who opposed her quest for greater power. Some have quibbled over the placement of the apostrophe in the title of Demon’s Souls, but its meaning is clear to me: I am the singular Demon, and I am gathering Souls. There is little vagueness to the story of Demon’s Souls: the truest narrative of a game is what you do in the game.

At the lowest point of the Valley of Defilement, beyond a lake of piss and shit and whatever other disgusting byproducts an animal’s body can produce, dwells an immobile Archdemon who dares to absorb the impurities of those who have been abandoned by God. Like all other Archdemons, you must slay her and take her Demon’s Soul, so you can turn it into a spell, or a sword, or a couple points of Endurance.

There are few highly-technical boss fights in Demon’s Souls, as there are in its descendants; bosses are mostly characterized by a single gimmick or setpiece that demands patience, not skill. The greatest challenge in this game is carefully navigating through dangerous terrain where your footing is unsure and darkness obscures the distance. You must judiciously prepare your limited inventory to endure a whole level with no checkpoints, which makes any shortcut enormously valuable. Dark Souls III remains a fan-favorite because it’s a smooth fast-paced ride from boss fight to boss fight, but Demon’s Souls constantly asks you to slow down and observe. That might give you enough time to think about what you’re doing.

9. The Endless Forest

The Endless Forest is a social screensaver, as described by its developer Tale of Tales. You’re meant to leave it idling in the background, which many of the long-time members of this 20-year old community do. When I played this game with Ava, we found numerous deer sleeping peacefully in the forest, each in their own little spot. There’s not much to do in this really-quite-compact forest, but there is a lot of ambience to absorb.

We were just about satisfied with our time in the forest, when one of the deer woke up and started casting appearance-altering spells on us. There is hidden magic in this forest, and this veteran player was excited to share it with us. More deer arrived to greet us, and we danced and ran and rested at all the places they were excited to show us. New players don’t seem to come too often, and I was immediately identifiable as a new player because I started with a fawn character, rather than a fully-grown deer.

There is no voice or text chat in The Endless Forest, only movement, expressions, and spells. There is, however, an active forum filled with art, writing, and friendly conversation between the dozens of veterans of this niche community. I’ve never felt more like a tourist than reading the beautiful detailed character profiles people write for their deer, or reading reminisces of years-old holiday gatherings in the forest. It’s not my corner of the internet, but I’m really glad I got to visit it.

8. Combat

I played Combat in online netplay with three different people who had never tried the game before, and it was a hit every time. Decades of increasingly complex shooter design have been unable to match the pleasure of curving a bullet around the edge of the screen to hit your friend from behind and hear them say “Holy moly!” Forget left-trigger-right-trigger, forget reloading, forget aiming at a distant target on the z-axis. In Combat you have one screen, one button, one enemy, and it made me wonder why I ever desired anything more.

7. R4: Ridge Racer Type 4

Style goes a long way. Every run through R4 is the same eight tracks in the same order, with the same thin visual novel storyline per difficulty setting. It’s a joy to play through every time, because the whole game looks and sounds like that. It’s so much easier to play an amazing 1-hour game 50 times than to play an uneven 50 hour game once. Especially if you have a rival to motivate you.

6. The Chrono Jotter

Even in a world filled with horrors, you still have to go to work. Ran Ibuki’s situation is even worse, because she hallucinates horrors that feel as real to her as the actual horrors. Her most meaningful relationships will not make these hallucinations go away, nor will her work as a cool paranormal detective. She must simply persevere, for the sake of the most important thing in this world: complicated love between women.

Even so, Ran is a gloomy and untrustworthy character. She isn’t easy to love. She will crash out for reasons the people around her do not understand. She gets angry at people who try to help her in the wrong way. She has unsettling habits, like eating pages out of a diary that feels like her girlfriend’s skin. In other words:

5. Peak

I’m often disappointed by environmental challenges in video games. Death Stranding is supposedly a game about keeping your footing in unsteady terrain, but it never actually made me sweat. Climbing in Assassin’s Creed carries no risk of falling, unless enemies throw rocks at you. Peak made me seriously think about how the hell I’m even supposed to make progress, and it was willing to harshly punish me for being careless with my movement. I lost my grip at crucial moments, I fell off cliffs, I slowly starved until I no longer had the stamina to climb.

My favorite memory is spending too much time in a dead-end cave with KB, to the point where we could no longer escape the creeping fog that was coming to kill us. We went through all the stages of grief before finally accepting our fates, and we sat together and talked while waiting for our destined death.

That bittersweet despair is also balanced by frequent moments of faith and friendship. Hand-holding is a major mechanic, and many seemingly-impossible jumps can be made, to my surprise every time, by simply reaching out my hand to the friend who is reaching out to me. It’s equally thrilling to be on the other end, assuring my friend that they can make that jump if only they trust me.

I’ve played a ton of Final Fantasy this year, a series that can’t tear itself away from themes of hope and despair, but none of them have been half as effective at communicating those themes as surviving a grueling climb to the top of a mountain to roast marshmallows with the people who helped you get there.

4. Seabed

Seabed loves the tiniest mundane details of life. I don’t know how many sentences I read exhaustively describing every step of making dinner: deliberating over what ingredients you want, going to the store, buying the ingredients, going back home, chopping your ingredients, cooking them, eating them in the proper sequence, and washing the dishes. 

I doubt I would have made it to the end if I played Seabed alone, but reading it with Isabelle over several months provided a stable ritual of using all these mundane details as a springboard for conversation. How do you make dinner? Where do you like to visit? What do you think of the San Francisco Fisherman’s Wharf crab sign in front of the Applebee’s? Life is a string of small moments, not dramatic events, and those moments become memorable when they’re shared with a loved one.

3. BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets

Ancient Stone Tablets is simultaneously a 50-minute score attack version of Zelda 3, the secret precursor to the NPC schedules of Majora’s Mask, and a testament to the magic of ephemerality. In its originally designed play experience on the Satellaview (one 6pm-7pm broadcast per day over four weeks, with a new episode each week), Ancient Stone Tablets does not give you enough time to fully dissect it. What secrets could be hidden that you simply missed before the timer ran out? Once the broadcast season ended, months would pass before you got a chance to play a rerun, and one day it was simply gone forever.

Due to the efforts of many dedicated fans, I was able to approximately simulate that original play experience alongside Cameron and Monica. We played one episode per week, with the additional constraint of one play session per episode, and gathered afterwards to compare our scores and experiences. I don’t remember who got the highest score, but I remember the way these conversations recaptured the enthusiastic wonder of discussing video games during recess.

The 50-minute clock really does make Hyrule feel bigger, denser, and more mysterious than it actually is. As the hero, you are tasked with completing two dungeons in that time, and it’s very possible to fail your objective if you’re not taking it seriously. (I was genuinely worried I wouldn’t even see the final boss!) The dungeons are not any more grueling in terms of combat or puzzles than any other Zelda game, but combination of haste and impermanence make each second you spend on a screen more meaningful.

Since I was competing for a high score, I also felt the tension of finding as many items and exploiting as many scheduled events as I could. If you look at a walkthrough, you can see that there isn’t really *that* much to find in this world, certainly far less than any modern-open world game. But where those games suck away the hours with the dull hypnosis of a gameplay loop in a world of endless content, Ancient Stone Tablets both magnifies the world and keeps my brain engaged simply by adding a time-cost:score-reward analysis to every treasure. I can’t afford to waste this much time thinking about how to get that heart piece, especially since I only have 30 seconds left to get a discount on the Zora’s Flippers!

Ancient Stone Tablets is a portal fantasy where your avatar in The Town Whose Name Was Stolen, the hub world of the Satellaview, gets transported to Hyrule for one hour of “Zelda time”, only to be transported back at the end of each episode. After defeating the final boss, I had only a few minutes left to be Hyrule’s Hero of Light before my little project with this game ended permanently. I spent my last minutes saying goodbye to my favorite NPCs, thinking all the while how much better it feels to visit Hyrule than to live in it.

If you’re interested in another simulation of the Satellaview experience, I highly recommend the Satellaview+ project. It has not yet been able to live-broadcast Ancient Stone Tablets, but you can explore the hub town that changes seasonally and download a scheduled selection of broadcast games. It’s cool!

2. Final Fantasy VIII

Squall Leonhart wears a necklace of his lion OC that inspires him to be strong. He loves to project a stoic demeanor while resentfully ranting in his thoughts. Squall’s the kind of guy who locks in at work and then cries in bed as soon as he’s alone.

Squall loses himself in trying to live up to his lion OC. He forgets crucial details of his life, but the vivid memory of his childhood abandonment persists through the fog. He often flashes back to this old trauma, emotionally regressing to his child self, as if all time and space has been compressed into that moment. He can’t escape it, no matter how hard he thinks about it, not by himself.

In a moment of true romantic connection, time feels frozen. You might want it to last forever. Perhaps the world around you disappears as you daydream about that moment. Its warmth is always there for you, no matter how cold the world gets when your lover is gone.

A beloved memory carries with it an impossible wish: what if you could compress all time and space into that beautiful, final fantasy? Perhaps it would look something like this:

1. VRChat

As you may have understood from my inclusion of Collective Unconscious and The Endless Forest, I love the quiet ambience of a virtual space. Few games offer as many virtual spaces as VRChat. I’ve continued to explore and socialize in VRC quite a bit since hosting A*RAVE, and the psychological influence of virtual embodiment has not lost its effect.

Videos, music, and conversation are just more engaging in VRChat. There’s something to the glow of a television softly illuminating the environment, or the spatial processing on music and voices, or seeing yourself and another reflected in a mirror as you talk on the couch. There’s an intimacy to it that I didn’t think was possible to achieve in screen-mediated interaction, and nothing is more valuable to me than intimacy.

The post Crystal’s Top 11 Games of 2025 appeared first on Gamesline.

Recently, I’ve gotten into the catalog of FuRyu, a lower-budget Japanese publisher more famous for their figure production than for their games. While it’s understandable they’ve flown under the radar, it’s also a bit of a shame. In the past year alone they’ve released Trinity Trigger, a passable send-up of the top-down Mana games of old, and Crymachina, a game about robot lesbians that I was extremely effusive about late last year. They’ve also been behind games like The Caligula Effect 2, which I’ve never quite gotten into, but appreciate from afar for its usage of music and its interrogation of social issues beyond the well-trodden standard. FuRyu publishes games that, at the very least, leave me impressed by their novelty or character concepts. On the other hand, with every game they publish being made by an entirely different outsourced developer, they consistently feel disjointed, rushed, and incomplete. 

Earlier this year, FuRyu announced Reynatis, a love letter to the long canceled Final Fantasy Versus XIII. After how much I enjoyed Crymachina, I was pretty excited! I’ve always been a fan of Tetsuya Nomura’s works, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that games like Kingdom Hearts and The World Ends With You are the cornerstones that established exactly what I love about video games and art at large. The idea of some similarly-inclined creators taking a crack at one of the most pined-after “what ifs” of gaming was incredibly enticing. Many of the pre-release discussions and interviews gave off a similarly positive impression, specifically finding out that Kingdom Hearts series composer Yoko Shimomura was on board, and that they had managed to somehow get an official collaboration with NEO The World Ends With You.

I wouldn’t say I was expecting the best gaming experience ever conceived, or even anything close to the imagined highs of a real Versus XIII successor, but I was still expecting something that I would come out the other side of with admiration and respect for developers trying something new. Unfortunately, I instead finished Reynatis with an overwhelming disappointment in what should have been an experience elevated by a development team’s interest in the works that shaped them. Reynatis is a game lacking in depth, character, and, worst of all, any sense of cohesion.

Reynatis takes place in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, in a pastiche of 2024 where a small subset of the population have become magic-wielding wizards after near-death experiences. You play the early parts of the game through the viewpoints of two different characters: Sari Nishijima, an agent for a wizard enforcement agency that controls and deals with the various types of crises that arise in a world where people can just do all sorts of random magic; and Marin Kirizumi, a rogue wizard sneaking around the city trying to become “the strongest”.

One of the magical issues in this alternate Shibuya is the distribution of Rubrum (shortened to Rub without a hint of irony), a magical drug engineered from the blood of wizards that gives the standard effects of a recreational drug, with an on-the-nose added effect of gradually turning users into mindless monsters known as “the Damned”. Rubrum is distributed to the masses by an evil group known as the Guild; old-money wizards who got rich off of World War II and live in a pocket dimension, traveling across the world through gates of fog to cause all sorts of chaos and mayhem. 

Now if you, like me, have read all this outrageous exposition and thought, “Awesome, this all sounds pretty unique and interesting!”, yeah! From the outset, it seems like Reynatis has crafted a world that, while clearly iterative of various urban fantasy works, feels fairly unique and engaging. As you make your way through the game and uncover more about the worldbuilding through concepts like “Wizarts” (graffiti that teaches you spells like a modern-day spellbook), or “Legacies” (transformation spells that allow higher-level wizards to don supervillain-style outfits or monstrous forms), it seems like they thought a lot about the various concepts and underpinnings of their magical world, with a mind towards what would be cool first and foremost. Even the core conceit of being a wizard in that world is interesting, with most wizards being called “Replicas”, implying that they’re more of a copy of the person that died, rather than that same person suddenly gaining magic powers. 

The problem is, Reynatis never connects all these disparate ideas and concepts together into a meaningful whole. Instead, it just keeps rushing to a new idea they had, a new concept, a new bit that “feels like it should happen now”. By the halfway point of the game, it comes across like the writers have given up almost completely and just started implementing story beats 1:1 to their rough story outline, rather than thinking about how to flow from one scene to the next. 

To give an example: female protagonist Sari Nishijima is the standout golden child of the magical police. Not only is she consistently on the promotion fast-track for her success in dealing with drug dealers and rogue wizards, she’s also the poster girl for the entire agency, with her style and finesse making her a popular choice for the agency’s recruitment drives, advertisements, and overall public image. When you engage with sidequests, or even just walk down the street, you are bombarded with this assertion that Sari is widely beloved by the populace, a sort of idolized magical girl defender, and representative of the power and control the magical police have within Shibuya. 

Around a quarter of the way through the story, Sari is, for one of the vaguest reasons I’ve ever seen in a game, branded a traitor, exiled from the police, and put on the most wanted list. Instantaneously, everyone hates her. Everyone in the entire town now submits police reports against her, and she has to fight off not only the standard monsterlike enemies, but also her ex-coworkers. I understand why this decision was made, obviously a classic narrative trope is to subvert and change a protagonist’s relationship to the world around them, but here’s the thing: Sari’s posters and videos and all that idle dialogue about how she’s the best are still in the game world. You cannot cross a single block without running into those recruitment drive posters for the police, or giant billboards with her face on them. The story has decided that structurally, it would be interesting to have Sari become a traitor, but nothing in the world enforces or engages with it, and within a couple of chapters it barely even matters anymore. 

This problem continues in other aspects as well. I said the developers talked up their love of Tetsuya Nomura games and you can feel it throughout. You run into characters that are functionally identical to characters like Joshua from The World Ends With You, but they lack all of the depth and setup to make them memorable. You spend an entire third of TWEWY with Joshua, having conversations and getting hints at his true nature, whereas the Reynatis equivalent maybe spends a total of 10 minutes with you across a 30 hour video game and they expect it to make you…feel anything? It’s just completely baffling to me!

One of the worst aspects of this rushed narrative structure is the way that they’ll suddenly decide to execute upon an idea that’s had zero build-up or explanation. Marin’s character concept is a rogue wizard seeking power, right? He’s trying to build up his magical energy to become the strongest wizard ever of all time. Over the course of the game, he’s forced to push past his edgy teen aloofness to help people, though he often couches it in selfish rhetoric to make it seem like he’s not doing it for the sake of others (edgy boy 101, classic technique, basic execution). Randomly throughout the game, however, characters will suddenly go “Marin…you’re so evil and fucked up…you’re really a bad person…it scares me…”. The thing is, he has not done anything even remotely questionable. In fact, one of the main characters that is constantly saying this, and making it clear he wants to make sure that Marin opens himself up to love and change, is a guy who makes slave bomb collars to control people with. 

Not only is there nothing to back up these constant moments of fear and concern (there aren’t any Marin killing sprees or anything that makes him seem worse than any of the other characters in the game), the game consistently transitions into sequences where everyone is going “oh see Marin is so nice hehe, what a dweeb”…FROM THE SAME CHARACTERS!!! Everyone’s personality is basically switching back and forth to whatever the writers thought would make sense to complement a later plot beat. There’s no consistency, no flow. Nothing builds off of what had come before, nothing leads into what’s going to happen, and what happens in any given chapter after that halfway point is basically determined by whatever vague character concept for a boss fight they want to implement.

Speaking of boss fights, gameplay wise Reynatis is pretty much exactly in-line with every other FuRyu game I’ve mentioned in the sense that it certainly has gameplay. It’s actually almost comical how similar the upgrade systems and game design is between Trinity Trigger, Crymachina, and Reynatis, and while it’s not necessarily any worse in Reynatis than it is in those other games, it does stand out as more noticeably flawed since there’s nothing else to really distract you from its mediocrity or encourage you to push through it. 

The main gimmick of Reynatis’ combat (an otherwise fairly basic third-person action RPG), is a mana bar mechanic, in which the player has to charge mana through evading and parrying attacks in order to fight back. The way this evading and parrying works, however, is that you have to stay in your non-combat form, and wait for on-screen prompts to appear that allow you to do air dashes and ripostes in a similar format to the reaction commands from the Kingdom Hearts series. I actually really liked this system in spite of its simplicity, because the idea of having to specifically observe  and react at the correct times to trigger animations instead of relying on just becoming invincible with a Dark Souls-style dodge roll was a breath of fresh air, and the fact you have to engage with this system to attack at all is a really good way of making players interact with the different elements at play. 

Unfortunately, Reynatis is over 20 hours long, and this unchanging loop quickly becomes tiring as you’re forced into battle after battle after battle. It doesn’t help matters that the combat you’re doing once you fill that mana gauge is incredibly basic as well. You can do a standard attack combo with one button press (that’s it, only one button press), or use two different spells that you can equip from a set of fifteen or so options, with some shared between characters and others being specific to their weaponry (one of your party members has guns so he can use gun spells, as an example). Not even an hour into the game, you’ve probably seen all its combat has to offer; you charge your mana up a bit by doing one of the parries or dodges (as you level up you start with more mana, making this even less necessary), and then you use one of your spells and mash the attack button until the enemies die. I don’t think any fight I experienced in the game outside of some late-game boss fights took longer than 20 seconds; even when I was doing optional challenge fights over 40 levels above me, the fights ended incredibly quickly as long as I didn’t get hit. 

If the combat is so easy and exploitable, you might think you could get away with skipping over most of it, but Reynatis forces you into fights nearly every few seconds. If you’re not doing one of the game’s story missions, or its dozens of identical sidequests, there are countless random identical NPCs roaming the streets that will just start attacking you immediately. Even worse, engaging with these fights immediately triggers a Wanted rating (yes, like in GTA), causing a meter to gradually fill up until you either find a designated spot located within some of the areas to idle in for a few seconds, or just fast travel out of that area. The Wanted system makes Reynatis far more exhausting than it already was. It means that every time you enter an area trying to do a side quest or anything else, you have to thread your way through and around the random enemy encounters on the map, or you’ll have to leave and return to try it all over again. You’d better hope that the side quest you’re doing doesn’t involve a fight either, because if it does, that means you’ll have to do the fight (without triggering any fights beforehand), then leave the area, then return to the exact same spot to talk to whatever NPC resolves the quest (because you can’t interact with them while you have an active Wanted rating). It’s tiring, it’s vapid, it’s inane. I can understand the idea of a system punishing you for utilizing “illegal magic”, but the way that it’s implemented, and the way you can just circumvent it by switching areas instantly, makes it a completely pointless drag.

It doesn’t help that most of the sidequests are incredibly dull as well, offering very little in the form of characterization, or any sort of emotional response. Whenever you start a new chapter, you’ll be prompted to open your phone and look at a list of requests ranging from “Help me find an item” to “Help me stop my boyfriend from doing evil wizard drugs”. While the latter’s concept is at least slightly original and feels like it should tie into the world at large, the reality of it is that you’re probably just going to kill someone’s demonic boyfriend and get a musing on how tragic this world is. This is pretty much the status quo for…every chapter until the end of the game. There’s no sidequest-specific NPCs with their own storylines, there’s hardly even any writing in these quests that prompts even the most idle of thoughts, it’s the most obligatory system imaginable.

At a certain point it even felt comical that after Sari’s falling out with the magical police, more than half of the sidequests become honeypots designed to trick her into helping that are all just “surprise” fights against random police grunts. If the game ever made any sort of stride towards implying this was because of Sari’s rich character trait of believing in justice and the good of the common man, maybe I would’ve felt this was at least expressing something. As is, you could skip all of the sidequests across the game (save the post-game superboss quest that includes random tidbits of lore), and have the same experience as someone who did them all.

So many of my problems with Reynatis could have easily been salvaged if there was literally any care or interest being put into the characters whatsoever. For a work inspired by the design philosophies of Tetsuya Nomura, I find it incredibly hard to believe that the party members of Reynatis are as dull as they are. If there’s one thing that’s consistent between Nomura’s works, it’s a stable of loud and diverse characters that ooze style over substance at every turn. You might not feel that Roxas from Kingdom Hearts II has that much going on from a writing standpoint, but the concepts behind his design and the relationships he has with other characters become distinctive and establish him as an incredibly cool guy you want to learn more about. Reynatis sets up many characters that could be interesting given a similar element of care, but without any sort of actual compelling communication between them, it’s hard to find reasons to care about what happens to them, or even believe that they care about each other at all.

Outside of the occasional talk-and-walk plot-apropos conversations, the only time your party members meaningfully talk to each other is through text messages you can read on their phones. These conversations are sometimes structured in a cute way (it’s fun to see RPG characters type “ffs” at one another), but for the most part they frustrated me by either being too cookie-cutter, or implying a character trait that would never be explored in the story proper. Does it matter if Sari has this character trait of being bad at romance and addicted to customizing her outfit and gun if it never comes up anywhere else? Does it matter that your other party members apparently have other jobs and friends that will never get mentioned ever again? So much of Reynatis for me was spent going “Is there even any reason to care about these characterizations and concepts that are tossed aside just as quickly as they were typed out?”

Most egregious to me is the treatment of Sari and her party as characters. The longer the game goes on, the more the focus shifts to Marin and his storyline and friends, leaving Sari and her two party members sitting in the background of most major scenes going “That’s right Marin!”. Neither of her friends get any sort of side quest chain expanding their characterization, or even the smallest amount of integration with any of the main plot beats going forward. It’s comical that in a game that wants to be so much like the works of Tetsuya Nomura, the only aspect they managed to nail completely was forgetting that a female lead exists.

A lot of my fatigue and apathy towards Reynatis goes hand in hand with the game’s performance and presentation, which is really not that great. I am willing to put up with pretty much any performance issues (I mentioned I loved Drakengard 3 earlier so you can trust me on that), and while I didn’t mind the incredibly rough frame rate that Reynatis has on the Nintendo Switch, the degraded visual quality and stiff animations make everything look bad. Outside of pre-rendered cutscenes (which actually look alright!) every character looks like a rough draft with absolutely no anti-aliasing done to their model. Spell effects clip out of existence at random- sometimes just taking forever to load in- and the jagged low resolution on everything makes the constant wizard dodges and flips you’re doing through the air absolutely nauseating. I admire a game with grand ambitions, but did Reynatis need simulated traffic, a ton of fully modeled NPCs walking around, and incredibly busy environments filled with animated billboards? Even larger budget games like the Persona series exercise restraint when it comes to these things, usually leaning towards either smaller-scale environments or animated crowd effects that imply the existence of something larger behind the immediate focus, so why all the unnecessary bells and whistles?

The load times aren’t unbearable, but when you have to constantly switch locations because of that Wanted system, you’re going to be seeing a lot of black screens during your time with Reynatis. Every single menu option has the classic Switch problem of input lag, with some status screens and party menus taking far longer than they should to open and navigate. Becoming comfortable with this rough performance was even more frustrating in the late-game, as almost every single boss fight in the last 1/3rd of the game would idle on either a slowly loading dialogue box or black screen before crashing entirely. I would sit there every time thinking “oh this is just par for the course, it’s coming back any second now” when it would have been faster just to restart the game. I imagine some of these problems are solved on other consoles, but even with my time playing the PS5 demo version of the game, the visual design was still messy and rough in a way that betrays the hyper-stylized concept art behind it.

It might seem unfair to compare a work like Reynatis, clearly a more budget title, to the more complex and expensive works made by people like Tetsuya Nomura, but the game is inviting this comparison at every single turn. I didn’t even need to get to the NEO:TWEWY crossover event portion of the game to feel like the developers were hovering over my shoulder going “Look! The World Ends With You!!! We got a writer from Kingdom Hearts! Are you hearing this Yoko Shimomura music? It’s just like those games!”, and when I did get to that crossover, I just thought about how much more I liked NEO: TWEWY. 

I feel bad for being so cruel to Reynatis, but at a certain point it really feels hard to believe that there was that much care being put into its ideas. I don’t even know how to outline every problem that I have with the game! This isn’t a case of rampant idealism- a game with creators who have eyes bigger than their stomachs-  it feels like a game where everyone involved just had to give up at some point. I wanted to care about Reynatis, but it felt almost impossible to. With how it came about and was released, it almost feels hard to believe that its creators even cared that much either.

The post Wizardry Without Wonder – Reynatis Review appeared first on Gamesline.

Losses of All Kinds

Tencent and NetEase have both expressed intention to pull out of Japanese game development, and NetEase has taken the first step out. Ouka Studios, developer of the just released Visions of Mana, is reportedly getting shut down by the Chinese holdings corporation. Tencent has reportedly backed out of multiple new funding ventures as well.

Take This, a nonprofit focused on mental health in the games industry, is in danger of closing. They are currently reporting that they are underfunded, and would need to raise $80k by the end of September or will have to cease operations.

The global version of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius will be shutting down. The Japanese version will stay online for the foreseeable future.

Hideaki Itsuno, director of Devil May Cry 2-5, both Dragon’s Dogma titles, Project Justice, Capcom vs SNK 2, and contributor to many more classic Capcom games, is leaving the company. Itsuno says he will be “developing a new game in a new environment,” which means he’ll still be in the industry.

Co-Creator of Wizardry, Andrew Greenberg, has passed away. Wizardry is considered the origin of the RPG genre, and was the direct inspiration to Dragon Quest and Megami Tensei.

Ports and Remasters, As Usual

Guilty Gear Strive is getting a Switch port. Releasing January 23rd, it’ll have rollback netcode, but will not be crossplay with the other versions of the game.

Naoki Yoshida, also known as Yoshi P, has said that the Final Fantasy XIV team is working on a version “for Nintendo consoles”. He isn’t saying it outright, but he is most likely referring to a version of the game for Nintendo’s next platform.

Long-running children’s MMO Wizard 101 is getting ported to current consoles.

Argonaut Games, joint developer of the original Star Fox games, has been revived after closing in 2004. To coincide with their rebirth, they will be releasing a remaster of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, which is due out this year for consoles and PC.

The post The Bulletin: Croc Of Shit appeared first on Gamesline.

It hit me pretty immediately why folks were mad about FFXIII. The promise of a huge, “next-gen” RPG experience was something the mainstream audience was expecting, putting the power of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 to good use. Instead, we got The Hallways. This was the thing I’d heard over and over, that most of the game was railroaded by long corridors. When I was met with this, I thought about it for a bit, and compared the maps to other RPGs I’d played. Dungeons are just…like that, JRPGs were, for the most part, like that. You have a few side paths, but you’re entering an area, going somewhere, then moving on.

A big issue is the utter lack of towns or side content. There’s a monotony to Cocoon, the floating nation where you spend the first half of the game. There’s no real connection to the world these characters live in. Even in the level where Sazh and Vanille go to an amusement park, it’s just that, a place of joy and celebration that doesn’t match the rest of the world. You can never meet others struggling under the grip of the fal’cie, powerful beings that can enthrall humans, and the party members don’t really get a chance to bounce off each other and the world around them. There’s a smidgen of character development here and there, but it’s never complemented by a deeper interaction, and I never felt like I got to know any of the party members beyond a list of events that happened to them.

Once you make it out of Cocoon (after 30 hours!) you reach Gran Pulse, the lower part of the world where the less opulent were not protected from the fal-cie’s wrath. Once you’re there, you’re introduced to a sprawling landscape, full of roaming creatures that are often far too strong to fight. This reminded me immediately of Xenoblade Chronicles, which was released a few months after FFXIII. Xenoblade’s sprawling plains are far better than Gran Pulse, as there’s more character interaction and further layers of combat besides avoiding strong foes. 

I can feel a strong foundation here! The combat, in which you can swiftly swap between assigned roles for each character in battle, is exciting and deep. I fell in love with the soundtrack, and the characters’ designs are memorable and lovable. That’s what kept me coming back, not the world or the story, the gameplay and music! That can carry some games, but not RPGs, not something that’s dozens of hours long. I can’t feel good about a world I’m literally living in that isn’t allowing me to actually experience what’s going on there. 

There’s a codex that does most of the heavy lifting in the story, which is only “heavy” in comparison to what goes on in the cutscenes. Oftentimes events are detailed in writing only, the history of each nation is told by wistfully written mythical texts, and none of those aspects meld with what’s going on with the characters in the moment. Sure, the gods and their creations are the source of our heroes’ woes, but even with them fighting back against their fate, it still doesn’t feel like Lightning and crew are actually doing anything to fight any of the fal’cie besides a specific one that’s antagonizing them. The party changes the world, but they don’t feel a part of the world until the exact final scene. 

Combat is the strongest aspect of the game in my opinion. Paradigm shifting provides a ton of freedom, allowing for each character to specialize in a variety of roles that can be swapped on the fly. Boss battles are far more interesting, as you can basically form a handful of parties that fit into each phase of a fight, and it makes these big fights more like puzzles to unravel instead of button mashing frenzies or just picking the same option in a menu over and over. You can’t lean on a single party, as each character has their specialties and won’t learn certain moves even if they have the same paradigm. Once you hit the late-game, you can even start to dip upgrade points into non-specialized paradigms, meaning a character who can normally only do tanking, healing, and DPS can also do a little debuffing if you really need to lay on the debuffs. 

It’s what I think the ATB system should always be! It’s actually active, as your moves come out in real time instead of just when your turn hits. It’s the perfect balance between RPGs of the past and action RPGs of today, and it’s pretty apparent why Final Fantasy XV plays the way it does after XIII set the course. It’s what I think Final Fantasy should be using all the time! Reject current trends, Square Enix. Bring us back to how it was. A middle ground is more unique than just leaning on real time combat like half of the RPG scene does. 

Due to the combat being as good as it is, I ended up doing nearly everything in the game, since so much of the game is combat. I only skipped on the grind to fully level every character and to get every weapon/accessory. That sort of thing is unnecessary, even as someone who has been enjoying getting all achievements and trophies in games lately. There was challenge and excitement behind getting strong enough to beat the final boss with a five star ranking, not so much in fighting Long Guis over and over until I hit max level in everything and buy every weapon. 

I’m glad I spent the time I did with this game, but I would never tell someone else to do this. It’s a complete experience, but what’s there isn’t a complete world. I now know why FFXIII flopped, and it’s not because of the hallways! It’s the writing, there’s not enough there. And that’s why I’m still interested in the sequels, since there’s a chance to expand on the world and spend more time with the characters. If that’s what the sequels do, I’ll warm up to it. Final Fantasy XIII as a stand-alone title, however, left me expecting and longing for more.

The post Why The Hell Did I (Almost) 100% Final Fantasy XIII? appeared first on Gamesline.

Mama mia. This is quite the meat-a-ball-a of a podcast! This week, we discuss Super Mario Bros. Wonder, how much Redfall still sucks, an attempt at a Final Fantasy XIV news update, Scott’s feelings on the Final Fantasy gacha’s current meta, Maverick’s enjoyment of the previous Spider-Man entry, and John’s still Samurai-ing.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @TheGamesline, @john_michonski, @MaverickDrifter, and @fkasocks.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to our ask box at gamesline.tumblr.com/ask.

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

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

Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or directly to our RSS feed.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Ep. 22: John Italiano appeared first on Gamesline.

Directly to You, The Mario Section

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is being remade. It’s unknown what exactly will be changed (besides the graphics, which are quite divisive) in this version, but there seem to be fully animated cutscenes! We can all see Mallow and Geno again on November 17th 2023.

Princess Peach will be starring in her own game next year. Nothing besides a teaser was shown, but it seems to take place on a stage? Hopefully this one isn’t as sexist as the last time Peach was the star of the show.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe‘s next wave will include three new racers and some new tracks. The racers are Kamek, Petey Piranha, and Wiggler, and the tracks include a brand new course set in The Bathroom called Squeaky Clean Spring.

Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, the most mid Luigi’s Mansion game, is getting ported to Switch next year. (Please put the first Luigi’s Mansion on something that isn’t 3DS thank you!)

The final Mario announcement was the series’ return to 2D with Super Mario Bros. Wonder. With a gorgeous art style, playable Daisy, and an elephant power up, Wonder seems like the kick in the pants 2D Mario has needed for many years. It’s due out October 20th.

The Rest of the Direct

It’s related to Mario but not fully so it’s not in the section above: We’re getting a new Warioware game that’s specifically a sequel to Smooth Moves on the Wii, which was arguably the best in the series. Warioware: Move It! will release November 6th and promises over 200 new microgames.

Pikmin 4 got a new trailer, showcasing new modes such as Dandori Battle, in which you fight plant based foes to show off your Pikmin prowess. There’s also nighttime missions, which task you with gathering resources from glowing mounds and teaming up with new Glow Pikmin. Pikmin 4 sprouts July 21st.

Pikmin 1 and 2 are also now released on Switch digitally. Physical copies will release September 22nd.

We got a new look at Pokemon Scarlet and Violet’s DLCs. Not too much new info but there’s a handful of returning Pokemon confirmed for each set. Game Freak claims “The Teal Mask” will be out in the fall and “The Indigo Disk” will release in winter.

Detective Pikachu Returns sees our favorite Ryan Reynolds character not played by Ryan Reynolds solving new mysteries with his…are they going to have the same twist as the movie in this? Like, we all saw the movie already, it’ll be pretty deflated if they’re just building up to the same thing, right? Whatever, new game on October 6th.

The Rocksteady Batman trilogy is coming to Switch in the Fall.

A new Dragon Quest Monsters game, The Dark Prince, has been announced. It seems to take place around the events of Dragon Quest IV, since Solo shows up at the end of the trailer.

Star Ocean: The Second Story is getting a remake too. This will be yet another 2DHD Square Enix game, and will be releasing on PS5, PS4, and Steam as well.

The Switch version of the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 1 will include the NES version of Metal Gear as well as the non-canon second NES game Snake’s Revenge.

Penny’s Big Breakaway is a new 3D platformer by the folks at Evening Star, who previously worked on Sonic Mania. You play as a girl named Penny who uses a yo-yo to traverse a colorful and bouncy world.

An adaptation of tabletop roleplaying game Gloomhaven is coming to Switch September 18th. (Let’s hope they fix the frame rate by then though—because yeesh.)

Vampire Survivors is dropping on Switch August 17th with a new four player couch co-op mode.

Mythforce is a new melee-focused roguelike that’s stylized after He-Man era cartoons. It’s due later this year.

Splatoon 3‘s next splatfest will have you choosing between vanilla, strawberry, or mint chocolate chip ice cream. I know my allegiance.

Palia will allow you to build a “cozy life” in its free to play multiplayer adventuring world. It releases this winter.

Don’t worry folks, there’s another farm RPG. Fae Farm is that. September 8th. Have at it.

Silent Hope is a new XSEED RPG set in the same universe as Rune Factory. Seven silent heroes are tasked with reclaiming the power of speech through dungeon crawling. It’s due out October 3rd.

There’s a few more things in the Direct, so if you want to peruse at your leisure, here’s the full video:

What Else Do We Got?

Following up on the previously discussed Metal Gear Solid Master Collection, at least some of the contents of the next volume seem to have surfaced. Twitter user Nitroid found some evidence on the website for the collection pointing towards Metal Gear Solid 4, 5, and Peace Walker being included in the future release, with IGN later corroborating this. Let’s all hope we get Metal Gear Ac!d, Portable Ops, Revengence, and Ghost Babel in there to truly complete the series.

Final Fantasy racing game Chocobo GP has been re-released as a $50 game that allows for access to all the previous microtransaction content. All content can now be unlocked in game without paying extra. If you downloaded the demo version, Chocobo GP Lite, you can buy an upgrade DLC so you can keep your progress.

The original version of Call of Duty: Warzone, “Caldera“, is going offline on September 21st. This version lasted three years, with the current 2.0 version attached to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II.

And finally, according to information pulled from a recent meeting report of the Los Angeles Tourism Board of Commissioners, E3 is possibly canceled in 2024 and 2025 as well. Long may Keighley reign.

The post The Bulletin: Remakes and Returns at the Nintendo Direct appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s time for E thr- I mean the Summer Games Fest presented by disorganization, which means there is a lot of news for John and Lorelai to go over. John’s still playing Live A Live while Lorelai’s been avoiding the summer heat by enjoying Final Fantasy XIV, Diablo IV, and a metric boatload of Street Fighter 6.

The news this week is completely dominated by the Summer Games Fest as we go over the news from the main event, the Xbox showcase, and the Apple AR Headset news. Shadows of the Damned is getting a remaster, Illumination and Nintendo are probably doing a Zelda movie, and Sega is terrible and trying to do a lot of union busting as every corporation that sucks does.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @TheGamesline, @john_michonski, and @judgementscythe.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to our ask box at gamesline.tumblr.com/ask.

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

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

Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or directly to our RSS feed.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Ep. 7: Dungeons Of Hindenburg appeared first on Gamesline.

Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XVI has had its release blocked in Saudi Arabia due to “the publisher’s unwillingness to make the necessary changes to the game”. The offending content? A reported gay party member, who is rumored to have an “explicit” scene in the game.

Gacha game and anime powerhouse Cygames has opened North American and European subsidiaries. It’s unclear what these wings of the company will do exactly, but we did recently get what seems to be the confirmation of the extremely popular mobage Uma Musume: Pretty Derby outside Japan a while ago.

Nintendo-focused video game history site Forest of Illusion shut down on April 28th due to its curator’s inability to devote enough time to the project. Luckily, all of their previous discoveries and archived content has been backed up on Archive.org.

Activision and Sony have released data that says the $69.99 price point for games has led to fewer game sales. Please pretend to be shocked.

Following the announcement of the end of their Waypoint vertical, Vice as a company is reportedly nearing bankruptcy if they cannot find a buyer soon.

The Writers’ Guild of America is officially on strike. Concerns with residuals from the rise and fall of streaming and the looming threat of AI brought the union into picket formation. While this doesn’t fully involve games, there’s plenty of video game shows that will be impacted, and the WGA has expressed frustration that more games writers haven’t joined in the past.

The first trailer for the Gran Turismo movie has dropped.

The post The Bulletin: They Added Gay to Final Fantasy appeared first on Gamesline.

Kritiqal has helped organize the Trans Witches are Witches games bundle on Itch.io, comprising of various magic and/or magically-themed LGBTQ+ games, zines, and music.

Writer Caroline Delbert has been organizing a compilation of all types of games that have magic or magical themes in them.

A group of European games professional have launched the Gamedev Fund, a fund that hopes to support local games makers.

A couple of episodic series are set to be produced based on the Roblox games Creatures of Sonaria and the Twilight Daycare Series. Wind Sun Sky Entertainment is set to create the adaptations with Productivity Media, an entertainment company based in Canada.

Dead Island 2 is apparently real, and is coming out much earlier than anticipated—despite the fact that its release was already delayed several times prior.

Ubisoft claims that they intend on being present at E3 2023. According to CEO Yves Guillemot, the company intends on attending in-person. Guillemot suggests that the company’s recent shakeups were simply the result of the overwhelming amount of projects that were being developed all at once.  Last month, Ubisoft Paris employees were calling for a strike against Guillemot for constantly shifting the blame of the company’s shortcomings.

A new trailer has been released for Apple TV+’s Tetris, a biopic loosely based on the legal battles that surrounded the game of the same name during the Cold War. The film stars Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers, one of the key figures behind securing Tetris’ distribution and licensing. Rogers today manages The Tetris Company.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down from her position. Neal Mohan, the company’s current Chief Product Officer, will be rising up to take over Wojicicki’s position as the new CEO. Last week, YouTube contractors went on strike in protest against policy mandating that employees must return to the work in-person by the Alphabet company.

The Saami Council, a voluntary NGO made up of several Sámi member organizations representing various countries, is requesting that Square Enix remove a character costume that they allege is inspired by elements of Sámi traditional clothing.

Following allegations of sexual misconduct and predatory behavior, Hoyoverse has cut ties with voice actor Elliot Gindi. Gindi was voicing the character Tighnari in Genshin Impact. Hoyoverse will be reacasting the role due to what they official describe as Gindi’s “breach of conduct”.

Prepping for the game’s physical release, the Japanese edition of Cuphead will feature stunning artwork by Yoshitaka Amano that reinterprets the game’s cast in his signature artstyle for the DLC soundtrack. 

https://twitter.com/StudioMDHR/status/1625918015995879424

The post The Bulletin: Building Blox appeared first on Gamesline.

Rieko Kodama, producer of Skies of Arcadia and a core leader behind the original Phantasy Star games has passed away. Kodama’s career with Sega spanned over three decades, especially significant when she began her career in a time when women’s presence and contributions in games were largely overshadowed.

Takahiro Sakurai, the Japanese voice actor for Cloud Strife in the Final Fantasy franchise since 2002, has admitted that he has been in an extramarital affair with a work colleague for about ten years. The affair has forced the cancellation of his radio travel show, P.S. Genki Desu. Takahiro this past week. Sakurai’s marriage—and specifically a marriage to another industry professional—has been withheld from public information until now, and his talent management agency has acknowledged and published a statement apologizing to the impacted women, who both remain anonymous. Sakurai prominently works in anime, and has been recently performing as Giyū Tomioka in Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Reigen in Mob Psycho 100 III, and Tsubame Ozuno in the Urusei Yatsura 2022 remake. These roles and others currently have not been impacted.

Rocksteady Studios’ co-founders, Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker, are leaving the company by the end of this year. The news comes accompanied by the information that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is almost finished with production.

Unable to meet the demands of the guidelines set by Japan’s CERO rating system for games, The Callisto Protocol will not release in Japan. The game’s marketing has made its excessive level of violence a point of highlight, and the game’s developer, Striking Distance Studios, does not want to make changes to said content to secure a CERO rating. The company has vowed that Japan pre-orders will be refunded. CERO’s standards have grown increasingly stricter over the years, impacting game releases in order to produce region-specific copies of titles like Cyberpunk 2077, The Last of Us, and Resident Evil.

After accusations against PQube for exploitative behavior, Toge Productions and Mojiken Studio’s A Space for the Unbound was successfully able to find a new publisher under amicable terms. The game’s developers accused their former publisher of withholding grant money to leverage and increase their own revenue.

Following the outcome of a a slow, internal takeover that pushed out the original core team behind Disco Elysium, Robert Kurvitz, one of the co-founders of the original ZA/UM collective, is attempting to file a lawsuit against ZA/UM the game studio. This information was discovered on public Estonian court records, accompanied with the scheduling of a hearing date in late November.

The Communications Workers of America have officially filed unfair labor practices charges against Activision Blizzard due to threatening, anti-union messages made by executive Lulu Cheng Meservey via Slack. Meservey was recently hired with a wave of new employees in attempts to bring more women onto executive positions into the company, but has been quickly critiqued based on her prior working for Substack.

Meta’s Reality Labs is steadily hemorrhaging billions of dollars. The company’s latest third quarter financial report show that profits are also continuing to shrink since their foray into exploring VR, while Horizon Worlds, their proprietary virtual space, is attracting less than 200 thousand monthly active users. Meta’s own stock shares has plummeted at its lowest in the last four years.

Capcom’s latest financial reports confirms that Street Fighter 6 will likely not see a release until 2023 next year. The Resident Evil 4 Remake is also slated to be released around that same time.

CD Projeckt Red will be remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5. It is confirmed that this is the same project that was publicly teased under the code name, “Canis Majoris”.

And the wait is over.

Blaseball is back.

The post The Bulletin: Playing Chess appeared first on Gamesline.