I’ve seen hell and it’s featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry™ series. I’ve been playing Persona games since like 15 years ago, and was always acutely aware of the Shin Megami Tensei series, but I was never actually tempted to pick up any of ’em. But I recently got Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster (presumably named that because visually it’d look right at home on a 720p TV) as a…
This has been a weird year for me, with the biggest thing being that I suddenly found myself without a job. This was a bit of a new experience for me, since I hadn’t been unemployed ever since I graduated. Had to fill all kinds of government paperwork about it. Not exactly the happiest of circumstances to find yourself in, but I came into it from a much better starting position than many of my…
Cinematic brilliance on the Sunset Boulevard. I absolutely adore the writing and the story in this game. It’s so masterfully done, both gritty and hilarious, and really pulls you into the story and the setting. This also applies to the characters, who all have excellent characterisation and dialogue, including your man Cole Phelps himself. Anyone who is a fan of detective novels, noir, or just…
Rather be out of control. The story of Control is weird. You go into an empty government building to look for your little brother, meet a strange Finnish man, and get appointed as the director of the bureau within minutes. And unfortunately, it never gets any better. One of the characters you meet at the beginning of the game succinctly describes the story: "This is fucking unbelievable." I feel…
A punch line without the set-up. It’s frankly amazing how little effort PQube has put into this release while asking 49.99€ for it. The Steam version is shipped broken. As soon as you launch the game from the launcher, Steam will mark Punch Line as not running and thus will not update your gameplay time, won’t show you the Steam Overlay, and most importantly, will not allow you to use Steam Input.…
Not another Victory. When I started playing through Megadimension Neptunia VII, I thought that this was Neptunia finally reaching a level of effort and polish never before seen in the franchise. Character sprites were improved, there were levels that weren’t just recycled from the previous games, enemies were voiced and so on. Unfortunately, despite the seeming jump in quality, I started noticing…
The final stretch. Everyone knows that Uchikoshi loves nothing more than non-linear stories, and Zero Time Dilemma might be him taking it to its ultimate conclusion. It feels like Uchikoshi wrote the final part of the Zero Escape series, fed most of it through a woodchipper and then made you scavenge the plot in a random order from the remains. The game lasts for about 20 hours and you’ll spend at…
Back agAIn. The Somnium Files are back except this time instead of running around as Date Kaname, you’re now given control of two different protagonists, who split the game’s plot into two halves: the past and the present. The past/present split gives the game a more linear presentation than the first game’s non-linear, wilder branching. Otherwise the gist is the same: run around like crazy and…
I recently got convinced to switch from rTorrent to qBittorrent for my Linux-downloading needs. Tried it out for a bit and decided that it was indeed the superior of the two, meaning I fully migrated all of my Linux ISOs to it. Unfortunately, I didn't really like any of the available clients for it, so I asked myself what any good software engineer would at that point: how hard can it be ? I first…
The catch in the Rye. One of my least popular takes as a Professional Python Developer™ seems to be that I don’t actually consider the Python ecosystem and its tooling to be "hot garbage". I also haven’t really bothered with project management tools like Poetry , since I think you can use virtual environments and pip and be just fine . Really, the only tools in my arsenal that I consider to be…
Welcome back. Like for many others, Persona 3 was my first foray into the Persona series, having played through FES back in 2011, and will always hold a special place in my heart. I have also been wanting for a Persona 3 remake since at least 2020 , so I’ve been extremely excited to play through Persona 3 Reload ever since the rumours were confirmed to be real. And yet, with years of lofty…
Everyone’s favourite Scooby-Doo game on the PlayStation Vita. Y(o)u're a Japanese youth, kicked from the big city into the boonies, when shit kicks off and people start dying mysteriously in an otherwise quiet small town – and the only one who can reach out to the truth is you and your merry gang of superpowered high-school students. A role-playing game lives or dies by its story and thankfully…
Time to mix drinks and change lives. VA-11 Hall-A is basically a cyberpunk visual novel about a bartender and her clients, with a bartending minigame firmly attached to it. A relatively simple concept really. I'd actually cleared this game once already on the PlayStation Vita, but decided to get another playthrough in it for the yearly Daily VA-11 Hall-A, which I guess is already indicative of the…
Mr. Howard's Mild Ride. The very first impression I had with Starfield was that the world design looked really good. The art direction of Starfield is great. I'm a big fan of the "NASA punk". However, the further I progressed in the game, the less impressed I got with the world. While the individual aspects of it might look good, it's way too repetitive. You land on a single wasteland planet and…
Press any key for schizophrenia. CHAOS;HEAD is a really interesting story. On the surface it appears to be a murder mystery story but it's not really that. There are murders and mysteries, but they don't meet in the same way that they would in a whodunit. I guess I'd rather call it a psychological horror, even if it's not really outright horror. And much like STEINS;GATE, the entry in the series…
I can't believe it's not kusoge! The story of Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 isn't really anything special. It's ultimately just kind of a generic save-the-world adventure story and the actual substance is in the (comedic) character interactions more than anything else. I don't think I can claim to have loved the story, but I did find it charming in its own way. At least I don't regret reading…
Eye spy with my little AI. AI: The Somnium Files is an interactive murder mystery story. You play as Date Kaname, an amnesiac special agent trying to track down a mysterious serial killer using an AI-powered eyeball and a machine that allows invading the dreams of investigation targets to unlock the secrets of their minds by solving puzzles. But despite being a murder mystery, it kinda doesn't…
My favourite game of the 2020s (so far). I've poured about 400 hours towards Cyberpunk 2077 across all the platforms but I'm still finding it quite hard to write a review of the game. Cyberpunk 2077 has famously been kind of a mess, so why have I dedicated so much of my time towards it? I'm not sure if I know the answer. I think one of the reasons why I like Cyberpunk 2077 is just the world. Night…
Underwhelming spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio. While I may not be the biggest Jet Set Radio fan out there, I still find it to be a pretty fun action/platform game. And when I saw that someone was going to create a Jet Set Radio style game for the modern age, I did get quite excited. However, having dipped my toes into the game now, I feel rather disappointed. The movement in Bomb Rush…
This thing is horrendous. I'd heard that Portal with RTX didn't run great, but I thought that when people said that, it meant that their RTX 3060 couldn't run the game. Thankfully, I have an RTX 4090, so I can just brute force through any bad optimisations. What I didn't expect was that the game runs like dogshit on whatever piece of technology you throw at it. I launched the game and alt-tabbed…
A first-person game about trying to break out of a time loop. When DEATHLOOP was first shown to public audiences, I figured that it'd be a shooter game focused around on a time loop. And while it does involve both of those things, it's not really that. It's more of a repeating exploration game, where you go around in circles, collecting clues so that you can solve the temporal puzzle and bust your…
The Total Eclipse anime was actually my first experience with the entire Muv-Luv universe – which I imagine was the case for a lot of current anime-watching Muv-Luv fans. I actually don't remember anything about it other than the first two episodes (which are not even covered in the VN). And while it has been eleven years since the anime premiered, having a forgettable story is not exactly a good…
I've had my Steam Deck for six months now and I am surprised at just how transformative of a device it has been for me. When the Steam Deck was first announced, I was very sceptical of it. Back in August 2021, I remarked in a conversation how I only saw the use case for the Steam Deck in emulators and visual novels. And in January 2022, I commented how I wasn't interested in buying one. To be…
Time for some hot bourgeois takes. I recently ordered some manga from Book Depository right before they shut down all operations (RIP). In fact, I got five total volumes of My Dress-Up Darling in English, as the impending closure of the site prompted some good discounts: on average I paid 13.37 € per volume. On other online book retailers, each volume was closer to 17.50 €, and my previous Book…
Time for the second Muv-Luv side story collection. This time with three stories: Adoration, Resurrection and Altered Fable. Adoration Adoration is described as "a rare glimpse into what the world of Muv-Luv Alternative is like outside of Japan", taking place in Dover, England and focusing around the Cerberus battalion. However, it is not a hardboiled European military action as you might believe…
The worst graphics card I've had the displeasure of owning. Now, I'm not going to lie: I'm no graphics card expert. Before the RX 7900 XTX, the three graphics card that I've owned were the Nvidia RTX 3060, the Nvidia GTX 760 and the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT. If I don't misremember, those were bought in 2021, 2014 and 2008 respectively. Having only had experience with four different GPUs over a span…
Promise updates, take the money, and then ask for more. Secrets by Outer Corner is a password manager for macOS and iOS. They just released the latest version of the software, Secrets 4, today and rarely do I feel as outright scammed by software as I do now. I decided to start using Secrets a couple of months ago after looking for a successor to my previous password manager. It had many good…
Time for another blast from the past, this time Bastion from 2011. I actually played through Bastion for the first time way back in 2012, when it took me about 12 hours to beat the game and do whatever side tasks I did back then. A decade older and wiser, I got through my first playthrough in under eight hours and mopped the rest of the achievements in another ten. Turns out that Bastion is still…
It's finally out! My first ever Rust project! Get it on GitHub now! yurizaki is a file copying and sorting daemon written in Rust, made specifically for anime and fansub releases. It's specifically meant to automatically upgrade files in your library with better release groups and newer versions. You can specify multiple release groups and it'll replace lower-ranked groups with higher-ranked…
I've obtained quite a few games from various kinds of bundles, and I imagine that this was one of them since I cannot remember paying money for this one. And having played through it, I feel like that was the right choice. The story and writing aren't really that good. I couldn't really get into the story and the characters, who don't really feel like actual people. I guess the androids get a pass…
Just got out of the movie theatre after watching Suzume no Tojimari . I've never really self-identified as a Shinkai Makoto fan, but if I keep going to the movie theatre to see his movies and love all of them, I guess I just might be one. Definitely feels like that keeps coming true ever since I watched Kimi no Na wa in a theatre back in 2017. (I have seen Shinkai movies before Kimi no Na wa but…
Everything old is new again. Seeing as Twitter has been ( unsurprisingly ) in a constant backslide since last autumn, I've decided that I need to start diversifying where I output all of my thoughts and opinions. And considering what a craptastic thing Mastodon is, I'd rather not partake in it either. Therefore, I have decided that I should have a web log. Just like in the good old days. I have…
Muv-Luv photonflowers* is a collection of side stories from the Muv-Luv universe, both Extraverse and the Alternative timeline. Extra The Extra side of things contains one longer story and six short stories. In my opinion, the short stories are kind of a waste of time. They're not particularly interesting and don't really have any payoff. The correct time to read through them is probably right…
NEEDY GIRL OVERDOSE is definitely an interesting experience. The gameplay is essentially a raising simulator, where you make decisions for OMGkawaiiAngel to make her the biggest streaming star on the Internet. It doesn’t take long to wrap your head around the available choices and the day-to-day rhythm. Advancing through a single day is also quite fast, so you can make through the game pretty…
Finally, the explosive finale to THE DAY AFTER series. Except it’s not really the finale – they’re just calling the continuation “Muv-Luv Resonative” instead of “THE DAY AFTER”, but I digress. When I gathered my thoughts about THE DAY AFTER 02 , I described it as "the best that THE DAY AFTER had to offer so far”. This was definitely correct – the best so far, as the best that THE DAY AFTER series…
The third instalment of the THE DAY AFTER series, unless you decided to skip THE DAY AFTER 00 for some reason. I read somewhere that THE DAY AFTER 02 was the best yet that the THE DAY AFTER series had to offer. To be honest, I didn’t really believe it for approximately half of the story. It didn’t feel like the story was really progressing, but rather that I was getting a beat down. Luckily that…
THE DAY AFTER 01 continues the story in the Unlimited timeline. Mood is a bit all over the place, ranging from very serious politics discussion on life-and-death matters in a ruined world to Extra-esque slapstick comedy moments where the main character accidentally fondles tits. The most lighthearted moments even come with complementary chibi art. While I found the lighthearted moments of the…
First things first: the environmental design in Ghostwire: Tokyo is great. You have an expansive virtual Tokyo to explore, and not just on the ground level, as you also have access sprawling underground systems and rooftops to explore. And not only is the world expansive to explore, but it’s also dressed up in this spooky veneer. And in parts of the game you also get these trippy sequences where…
Taking place after the events of Unlimited, the story has quite a different pace than Unlimited or Alternative with the BETA threat gone. I wasn’t completely sold on the story at first, but the characters are thankfully mostly likeable and interesting. However, I did find myself enjoying the read towards the tail end of the game. The tail end that won’t take too long to reach – it was around a…
Short but sweet (soul brother) Two decades later and Jet Set Radio is still a great game. Luckily the visual style keeps the game looking quite fresh despite 23 years worth of patina. The movement and camera controls do show some age, but not to a degree that you can't get used to them. Once you do, the movement does actually become rather nice and ever-so stylish. And the soundtrack is still one…