As great as the soundtrack to LISA: The Painful was, its DLC episode LISA: The Joyful fucking OWNS it! My favorite boss theme from The Joyful is the final boss theme Brokentooth March, but the subject of this article is a pretty close second. The title is kinda weird since America doesn’t exist in Olathe but I suppose “All Olathian Badass” just doesn’t have the same flair to it.
I’ve made it clear that I have a very strong appreciation for video game music in the past, enough so that I have done multiple countdowns before in addition to my Amazing VGM series. My Disturbing video games song countdown was a nice way of showing off a variety of different game songs, so this time I will talk about game songs that make your eyes wet and not your pants.
This countdown is precisely for video game songs that make you cry. Game music can be very powerful and emotional, and the following 25 tracks are among the best examples of how. Of note is that I am also sticking to games I’ve played or am remotely familiar with given that context is an important element. Anyway, make sure you have a clean Xbox on hand for this one.
Also there will be spoilers for most of these games to fully describe the context.
LISA: The Painful is newest addition to what I consider to be the “elite” class of games that I have played. As a critic, I have been known to go into meticulous detail about the games that I review AND to be very thorough in explaining why something in a game does or does not work. The reason for this is that I don’t view games as mere “products” like most do. I don’t think that creating an experience that aces the test of time can be propped up to doing the exact same shit as everything else but with better graphics.
My contempt for most professional game critics comes from the fact that they often claim that games are art, yet treat them like products. True works of art are those that break the mold and that put quality and artistic vision over profit. Contrary to popular belief, the game industry is not so stagnated that there are no games with new ideas; they just don’t sell well. Read more
Sorry there has been an absence of game reviews and or related content as of late. I recently became rather bogged down with the amount of content to write about that I needed to take a break. If one couldn’t tell, my next review is going to be of LISA: The Painful. I just got done playing it as well as its DLC expansion LISA: The Joyful recently, and I found them both amazing, although I don’t consider The Joyful to be a separate game due to its short length.
Anyway LISA is probably my 4th favorite RPG at this time behind Earthbound, NieR Automata, and Undertale. I really like how it refuses to shy away from a lot of seriously dark subject matter the same way most games do, and I even think it has a lot of advantages over the previous three games I mentioned.
I have covered the best games reviewed on this site in its first year and now it is time to look at the opposite side of the coin. The bottom of the barrel, the cream of the crap, the digitized disasters, etc. While I tend to focus more on the critical analysis of games that are remotely decent or substantive, I certainly have not been any stranger to tearing terrible games a new one. Hell that’s basically the entire point of my Steam Greenlight Landfill series.
As a reminder, the entries on this list are only including games I reviewed between January 1st of 2017 to May 6th of 2018. The reason for this specific time frame is to include the titles I reviewed for Brash Games before starting up this blog in the running since I like having more material to work with. However I also prefer to be working with stuff I actually reviewed remotely recently as opposed to four year old GameFAQs edits. Anyway,, without further delay, let’s revisit five terrible Steam releases you never heard of an will promptly forget about after you finish reading this! Read more
CW: Suicide
There are certain games that I hear mentioned a lot as being “inspired by Earthbound/Mother.” Among these include games like Undertale, Off, LISA, Contact, Opoona, and the subject of this review; Yume Nikki. I have had a bit of an on again off again relationship with this game kinda like those ones in bad sitcoms where they try to pad out the drama across multiple seasons. Needless to say, I just didn’t get it at first. However, I decided to finally finish it up recently and I still don’t get it. Okay technically, I kinda understand why people like this game, but it didn’t do much for me personally.
Yume Nikki has often been described as Eraserhead in RPG Maker. For those that don’t know what Eraserhead is, it is an art house film directed by David Lynch that is known for being highly disturbing and also difficult to understand. It tends to be a case of “you either get it or you don’t” Read more
Good fucking god why did I even bother to play this piece of shit? I was not thinking this game would turn out good after the first game was such a train wreck, but this one is not only worse, it is a FUCK LOAD worse! The first Final Quest is Mother 3 compared to this miscarriage of a game! Final Quest II is so bad that I now take back every positive thing I said about it’s developer. I take it back because a game as bad as Final Quest II CANNOT be released at retail without the developers noticing. A development team that would knowingly release a game as unplayable as Final Quest do NOT deserve your money or support.
CW: Mentions of and references to strong sexual content, rape, incest, pedophilia, homophobia, biphobia, and domestic abuse. Images are blurred but still sexual in nature.
Meltys Quest is a bit of an oddity to me. I can normally just place a game in the “good” or “bad” category and be done with it. I did enjoy Meltys Quest overall, but there were also a lot of issues that I had with it, and those issues are ones that prevent me from giving it a blanket recommendation across the board. One of the key reasons that I choose to do away with review scores is because some factors may be more or less important for some people than others. A review is merely one interpretation of the game in question, and one’s own interpretations will be based very heavily on their own backgrounds.
My own background as a radical feminist is one that makes me a lot more critical of certain aspects of this game than most of its target audience will care about. While I am far from sex negative, I do tend to hold a lot of disdain for porn, or at the very least mainstream pornography. I don’t believe that it is doing direct harm or needs to be banned like the stereotypical angry triggered feminazi stereotype does, but rather I think that most porn… kinda sucks, and I don’t mean in the sexy way (although it does that to). If anything, I actually have far more respect for the eroge genre than most do because I don’t think that being an eroge justifies shitty writing or immaturity. Yes, the intent of the game is kept in mind, but such a thing is just common sense when reviewing.
TW: Ableism… what did you expect in a game subtitled “An Autistic Journey?”
The observant eye might have noticed that the puzzle piece is a common symbol that is used to represent people with autism. The reasoning behind this was to represent both the puzzling nature of the condition as well as the fact that every autistic person is a unique individual. The puzzle piece is also a recurring symbol in Max, an Autistic Journey, due to the game’s focus on autism as a central theme.
As a “high functioning” autistic individual (that means I can talk), I dislike the use of the puzzle piece as a way of representing autistic people as a whole. We should not be labeled like autism makes us some kind of unnatural enigma that is incomprehensible, when we are human beings just like everyone else. I am not the only one who feels this way either as this can easily be seen by Google searching “autism puzzle piece” and seeing several articles stating their disfavor with the symbol. Also it does not help Professional Imagination’s case when they Read more
And welcome to the other variation of JRPG Update that we currently hold. This series is meant to post a round up of news related to indie RPGs that are reminiscent of what are often considered JRPGs, regardless of the country where they were developed. Anyway, this one will be a bit different than JRPG Update Pro given that obscure indie titles tend to get far less coverage, so a lot of the news is basically “this game exists.” Anyway let’s get started.
