Reviews

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined – Fragments of a Rearranged Past

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I’ve enjoyed nearly every Dragon Quest I’ve played, but it took me decades and a streamlined version to finally complete Dragon Quest VII. I might be the exact target audience for VII Reimagined – busy, a fan of the series, and dangerously prone to nostalgia. But I feel VII Reimagined ultimately drops the ball by overly simplifying dungeons while not addressing some core issues with a disconnected structure and lack of character development.

The main problem I have with the changes to dungeons in DQ7R is that things have been made too effortless. The classic “Dragon Quest loop” (or if you prefer just a “classic JRPG loop”) is one of attrition – in battles you have to determine the most efficient way to make use of limited resources (primarily MP, but also things like rare revive items or, early on, HP recovery items). In Reimagined, HP and MP are restored on level-up, and additional save statues which restore MP have been added at the start and end of most dungeons (in all difficulty levels). →  Welcome to read.

Shin Maou Golvellius – A Valley of Quality

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videolamer’s Chris sent me a link to a sale on EGG Console games the other day. For well-adjusted people who don’t know what I’m talking about, the EGG Console is a line of old Japanese computer games rereleased for modern consoles. So like Hamster’s Arcade Archives line but for Japan only games that generally require actual reading (in Japanese) as the collection is of computer stuff. I had looked at the EGG titles years ago when it first surfaced in North America and was composed mostly of Hydlide and Xanadu but then lost track of the releases. Luckily for me, Chris knows what sort of garbage I’m into and he noticed Golvellius on the list of games on sale. I immediately bought it and then spent an hour looking into the other EGG Console games, even the ones not on sale because I am fiscally irresponsible.

The Japanese version of Miracle Warriors, my beloved mediocre Master System RPG, was apparently released on the ol’ EGG in late 2025. →  You think about everything.

Reviewmancing Saga – Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven

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I often feel that things I have missed out on are better than things I have experienced. I’ll occasionally read a breathless article about a game I haven’t heard of that does something unique, and I want to experience it. Trying to stay on top of modern games coming out is difficult on its own, to say nothing of entire backlogs’ worth of games that we never saw even back when the United States wasn’t a dystopia. This odd form of nostalgia-FOMO is often unwarranted. I’ll occasionally pick up one of these games to find it isn’t particularly compelling compared to what we got, but the feeling remains. Romancing SaGa 2, though, is worth the play, particularly in its remake form.

The Romancing SaGa series, originally on SNES, has been fully accessible since its remasters about a decade ago, but they are dense games at best, convoluted at the worst.. My experience with the Romancing SaGa 2 remaster was initially positive, but it is a difficult game to understand, it has very frequent combat, and it requires quite a bit of fiddling with each generational change (which can happen at least a dozen times). →  It’s not you, it’s me.

Almost Famous – Dice, Scavengers, and Bastards

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The idea that publishers and platform-holders determine the games the vast majority of people are aware of through marketing, promotion, and their ensuing hype is appealing to a critic of consumerism such as myself. What appears to be freedom of choice is actually a heavily curated set of options presented by million and billion dollar corporations; our choice is largely an illusion. But at the back of my mind, I worry that this may be overly simplistic and the argument that quality games will be found by an audience seems compelling. And then I find a game like Circadian Dice, which reinforces the initial premise – an awesome, smartly designed game that never found the large audience it deserves.

This is the first post in a series on unpopular indies and will be driven by the pursuit of discovering more Circadian Dices – more games that should be much bigger than they are. Perhaps it will be a fruitless endeavor, maybe we will discover almost all worthwhile games are surfaced and I managed to find a needle in a hay stack, or we will learn production values are tied to game quality so intrinsically that it’s almost impossible for a small, niche game to be amazing when it looks bad and controls terribly. →  In the beginning games created the heavens and the earth.

Waving the White Flag – Wartales

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On the surface, Wartales looks a lot like other games I like. I enjoy large-scale simulations, I like fiddly minigames with bonus rewards, I love RPGs, and I even sometimes play tactical games.  But in the end I stopped playing Wartales before getting to the second town, waving the white flag of freedom after 15 hours.

There are a few different reasons for this. One is that it’s not possible to focus on just a single aspect of the game. While you have the freedom to, for example, forge weaponry for your squad using the blacksmith “profession”, the materials required to do it must either be purchased in limited quantity or mined from nodes that respawn at unpredictable intervals and are spread throughout the map.  While traveling between those spots, you’ll be accosted by brigands or boars, forcing battles that are unavoidable and unskippable. So yes, you can forge equipment, and you should forge equipment since it’s so useful, but you can make maybe two or three pieces every few hours of gameplay before you need to spend more time traveling and fighting. →  The post still burns.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

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It’s hard to confine everything I felt as I played Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes to a single post. Or even to the written word. A mixture of relief, frustration, sadness, and joy in different measures and different times will have to do. It took me months to gather my thoughts enough to write about it and months more to refine it and each time I have revised I’ve felt a little different.

Here’s a little bit of history, since this is the backdrop for my experience with the Kickstarter. You may know the original writer behind Suikoden (Yoshitaka Murayama) left the video game industry for years. I heard he specifically wanted to limit his time at Konami and it was an amicable split. Two more Suikoden games and three more spinoffs were made afterward, and they were still pretty decent games. I’ve long been a fan of the series – their eastern flavor, their heartfelt moments, their fun and varied cast of characters and attention to both large and small scale are a breath of fresh air in a genre that mostly sticks to smaller groups, bigger stakes, and plot twists with maximal shock value. →  SNK Article Classics Vol. 1

Raging Loop – More Rage than Loop

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It had been a while since I played a visual novel. Root Letter had left an unpleasant musty and earthy taste in my mouth, and only a crack gumshoe can predict when the next Jake Hunter will come out. Raging Loop has fairly good reviews and seemed somewhat well regarded by fans, who I learned too late I should deeply distrust because a huge swath of them are pervy weebs looking for hot anime girlfriends. Raging L, which I will hereby refer to as R Loop for brevity, is a horror themed Japanese visual novel with very limited gameplay – basically just selecting the answer to a question every hour or two. This is fine to me but may put off people who have played a video game or read a book. I have a few positive things to say about R Loop and a lot of negative stuff, including one or two things I think completely pacify the rage… cross the loop? →  I got served!

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord – More Mounts, More Blades, Less Fun

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The original Mount & Blade was the very first game I wrote about on videolamer. I was really impressed by the sandbox approach it used. The world advances, in real time, as you move from place to place (in a kind of real-time-with-pause simulation style). This has been done before, for example in Uncharted Waters or the excellent Space Rangers series. Mount & Blade adds excellent combat mechanics that incentivized (but didn’t require) a shield and allowed for seamless, interesting mounted combat. It also brings in a character growth system that extends to companions in your party. While other games might see you becoming a “superman” in a few hours, in Mount & Blade you max out at “mighty” – and will always be vulnerable to an enemy’s morningstar or crossbow.

As revisions came in for the original games, new factions and weaponry were added and eventually Mount & Blade: Warband came out. Warband could be considered Mount & Blade II but was more of an expansion, adding more complex politics and a couple of new factions as well as multiplayer. →  SaGa 3: Shadow or Write

A New Ratings System: A Framework for Inertia, Flow, and Satisfaction

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I did not enjoy Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.  Playing it felt like a chore much of the time.  I was satisfied, though, when I finished it.  This juxtaposition made me think more about how I feel about games and gaming.

There are games that I enjoy playing and that make me feel satisfied when I finish them (most RPGs).  There are also games that I enjoy playing that leave me feeling unsatisfied when I finish them (Roguelites).  Many games are somewhere in the middle – for example, grand strategy games such as Europa Universalis IV or Civilization get me into a flowstate, and there is satisfaction in seeing a nation develop over the course of a 10-hour multi-session save.  All the same, completing that save (particularly in Civilization) feels empty.  Some story-heavy games, like Disco Elysium or 1000x Resist, make it harder to start a gaming session as there is a lot of context or the game is hard to navigate.  →  Genghis Khan II: Clan of the Gray Post

Switch 2 Technical Review – Shocking frame rates exposed!

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Currently playing: Foretales

I haven’t been following the news for some time because what you don’t know can’t hurt you, like the origin of this blood I’ve been coughing up for three months. If ICE comes to send me back to Africa, where I have on good authority all humanity is from, I can let them know I haven’t been following their activity and they will let me go because clandestine police forces with vague accountability are anything but unreasonable. At least that was my experience during my brief internship for Pinochet.

But news of the Switch Deux did somehow make it past the spoons and forks guarding my cave, and like any caveman, I am wowed by shiny things. Yes, I immediately bought the console after deciding I wasn’t going to buy it and ignoring the preorder period while judging the marks who wanted to buy an expensive piece of hardware sight unseen. Then, as if to mock those who want but cannot have the thing (which is likely evidence of a moral failing), I got one. →  Game. James Game.