Ashtear

You'll likely appreciate Sky 3rd more as you go on. If you happened to miss Star Doors 8, 14, or 15, I strongly recommend pulling them up on Youtube or something. They are all quite important.

Too busy to finish stuff lately, but I did do some of Fire Emblem Engage (I think I'm almost halfway?). I also started Breath of Fire IV, I've got a bunch of big positives and big negatives with this one. For example, the spritework is gorgeous, along with dynamic character portraits in the text boxes. Feels like it'd be another one of my pet "lost sprite generation" games for fifth-gen games, except they sprinkled in a bunch of 3D models in for some reason. That hasn't aged well. The control scheme is also bizarre. Everything's at a diagonal for some reason, and Triangle to cancel? Oookay.

That said, for not-JRPGs, I also finished Kaizen: A Factory Story, which I really enjoyed even though I'm not normally into puzzle games. If you're looking for something different that's set in real-world Japan, it might be worth a look.

August doesn't have any big releases for me so I'll likely be continuing on with FE and BoF4. Not the case in September though, stuff's coming!

The good news is that it feels less gacha as you go, since there's a limited pool of stuff to draw from for the goodies you want (like the Daydreams and the characters).

Mario & Luigi games are still JRPGs, which is a genre that's more of a vibe than something easily defined. Here it's a little easier because the series traces back to a major JRPG developer in the 1990s.

Even Expedition 33, another one with timed gameplay, is frequently getting lumped into the category (though that might change in coming years). That's why I prefer the term Japanese-style role-playing games, as the genre is increasingly seeing game dev outside of Japan.

Yeah, I'm still waiting for Bar Stella Abyss. -_-

I just think it's ironic that it came to mirror the books in that you can enjoy absolutely top-notch storytelling for a while and then can't enjoy the ending.

Quite adorable. I audibly gasped when I saw the newspaper recipe visually showing how to make puni drink in Atelier Meruru 😂

Celine's super cute, though.

For Trails, it's gotta be Mishy.

Worth it just to get your socks blown off by the opening theme, if nothing else.

It's not the best Civ has ever been, but RomanHoliday's AI rework seemed to mostly resolve the biggest problem I had with it, which was the AI falling apart by the Renaissance.

No nookie with blue-skinned feminine people, no.

Everyone seems to be more interested in the latest techbro feud so I wanted to highlight what he said about Unknown Worlds staff not being given specifics on what their compensation will be. The statement was quite nebulous on that.

Gods, I hate this culture. Make concrete, public promises to your staff to follow through on your acquisition deal? Nah, can't have that. Open yourself up to liability by throwing the former execs under the bus, in detail? No problem!