Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 9 Comments

Yume Nikki (PC): Abstract Surrealism, but Not Much Else

Yume Nikki | Seizure Trigger

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

Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 3 Comments

Steam Greenlight Landfill: Final Quest II

Final Quest II | loading screen save

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.

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Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 4 Comments

Meltys Quest (PC): Shameless, Trashy, and Oddly Compelling (Detailed Review) (NSFW)

Meltys Quest | title screen

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.

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Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 1 Comment

Max, An Autistic Journey (PC): Could Have Been an Artistic Journey, but Wasn’t (Detailed Review)

Max, an Autistic Journey | Title

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

Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 4 Comments

JRPG Update Indie: January 2018

JRPG Update logo

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.

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Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 2 Comments

A Bird Story: True Artistic Confusion (Standard Review)

A Bird Story | title screen

I honestly expected much more out of A Bird Story than what I got. Its developer, Freebird Games, was the studio that was behind To the Moon, which was perhaps one of the most emotional and strongly written games I have ever played. Its writing and presentation were so powerful that most that played it completely overlooked that it had virtually no real gameplay.

A Bird Story, on the other hand, completely lacks what made To the Moon such a great game and instead takes the same pretentious approach that artistic indie games are obsessed with. While A Bird Story is superior to titles like Gone Home, Depression Quest, or The Graveyard, it still does not speak much in its favor with how low the bar is set. The key problem with A Bird Story is that its narrative lacks any sense of coherence or anything that can be remotely entertaining; and considering that A Bird Story has no real gameplay, that leaves it pretty much dead on arrival.

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Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 6 Comments

To the Moon: True Artistic Brilliance (Detailed Review)

To the Moon | Poster

If there is one discussion topic that I wish would just disappear from the gaming community forever, it would be the question regarding whether or not video games can be art. The more this question is asked the more it implies that games cannot be art and holds video games as a whole back from being accepted as an art form. Comparisons in these discussions are often made to the film industry, which is a form of entertainment that is commonly believed to be “art.” What most people do not seem to consider is that games have often used elements of cinema and literature in them which means that, based on their association, video games are also art.

Now the question is, why did decide to bring that topic up regarding this game? The reason for this is that many of the games that are used as examples of “art” are ones that try too hard to tell a story in a unique manner, which often results in these games coming off as pretentious to most gamers. Read more

Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 3 Comments

The Death and Return of JRPG Update

JRPG Update logo

JRPG Update is back folks… sorta. In order to make things easier on myself, I decided that some revisions needed to be made to how I would handle things, simply because I was overloaded the way that JRPG Update worked before. I tried to post weekly updates by covering as much JRPG related information as I could, even things that seemed insignificant. As such, I am deciding to do some vetting for the content that I cover and will try to avoid posting redundant news such as “such and such has new screen shots” or “details have been given about the shape of the hair of the NPC off to the top right corner in the second house in the games 13th town.” Also, updates will be posted monthly as opposed to weekly so I have time to actually work on other content.

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Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 3 Comments

Steam Greenlight Landfill: Vickinachi

Vickinachi | Title Screen

I got Vickinachi through a trade with someone on Indiegala for a spare code I had for a game I had no interest in playing. Going into this game, I knew it was going to be bad based on the Steam reviews, and I decided to go with it due to morbid curiosity and because it can usually be fun to tear into terrible games in reviews. I did not expect it to be THIS bad though. Steam Greenlight Landfill is a bit of a misnomer when applied to Vickinachi as the more accurate descriptor would be Steam Greenlight Septic Tank, along with the likes of The Interview, The Graveyard, Tokyo Hosto, and Pregnancy (and also technically because it was released in 2017, but Steam Direct Landfill just doesn’t sound the same).

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Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 3 Comments

Amazing VGM: Giegue/Giygas Battle themes (Mother: Cognitive Dissonance)

The last one of these I wrote was for Undertale’s “Reunited,” and that was back near the beginning of January. Naturally, I’m kind of overdue for an update, and since I took so long, I’ve got a special one for you all.

Instead of covering just one song, I’ve decided I will talk about a bunch of songs from the same game that pertain to a specific character. For those that do not know, Mother: Cognitive Dissonance is an Earthbound fangame of exceptionally high quality that I played for the first time last year. I have already talked about the game before so I will skip that fanfare, but I have wanted to go more in depth about its music for a little while. Its music really is amazing, some of it I may dare say is better than the music of the official games.

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