Joel 
The last #PlayAsia package arrived! These are the last 3 games I ordered before my commitment to not buying more games for my #NintendoSwitch
Michael Macaw (Zai)Smile for me :)
Happy Halloween and see you at #MAGFest2025!
Manic Emo Dream GhoulOverall I really really enjoyed it. Just to be clear, it's absolutely not a horror game, but a solid and concise traditional detective short story. It's oddly refreshing to have something so hearty and so conventional, considering all the major mystery titles in the past decade were triple time travelling body swapping space alien cyborg spirit summoning global conspiracy theories. Sure, I loved my Zero Escapes and Danganronpas, but it's just nice to have something that's more grounded, almost like a subversion to what's default. I agonised to decide whether I'd file it under 本格派/ほんかくは/Honkaku or 変格派/へんかくは/Henkaku, in the end I thought it's probably a Honkaku Lite that's done pretty well.
What it stood out to me, is whoever wrote the script clearly lived a real life. I love the initial fallout between the Kuze siblings made so much sense in child mindset: adults would find someone picked their grown flower kinda irritating, though it's probably not even going to affect the crops. For children, the same thing means the sky had fallen. And I found the section involving the teenagers were particularly well layered: the adults can't stop being patronising to the teens, while the teens were addressing their own issues in their own ways. And for Shoko, to flatly state that children from abusive households want to distant from their surnames, I've never seen fictions flatly stating this fact like the commonsense it really is.
Say, in terms of gathering information. This is going to be a bit of marmite, essentially you have to ask a person the same thing like three times before you get the full info. Not usually done in visual novels, but as anyone who suffered the whole "would you like salad or chips" and get a "yes" as reply, yes this is the most accurate human interaction simulator.
The protagonist is unusually young, normally I just figured hey it's a video game they can't have anyone old enough to hit two decades unless it's like, a white stubbly guy who abuses everyone around him but love to pretend to be the victim. But later on it really shows that the protagonist's youngness is part of the narrative. He's relatively competent, but lots of nuances flatly whoosh over him, or in some instances he intuitively felt something was off but lacked the self assurance to comment on, mate knock it off that's fucked.
I'm just glad the protagonist is mostly a hired investigator. My least favourite subgenre is the protagonist's own sob story overtakes the main mystery. There are situations where it works, chances are whoever thinks they can make it work couldn't.
With the disclaimer that I think the writers have very clear understanding on what are "off" behaviours, and what are "off" behaviours that the protagonist failed to fully recognise, let me tell you how much I detest Tsubasa Fukuyama and Daisuke Kamihara. The idea of being trapped to work with Daisuke the Serial Sexual Harasser is bad enough, he's actually more bearable than Tsubasa Fukuyama.
I get that Tsubasa Fukuyama is only 23, but even taking into account of his age, the way he completed treats every social situation as soapbox on how altruistic and caring and selfless and virtuous he is just makes me think he's basically a Well Actually As A Nice Guy. My most generous reading of him is he's an emotional truffle pig. Even then, as a teacher he pretty much mishandled every single issues possible, then still had the audacity of turning the whole thing all about how he feels. Also he's so sleazy, to the point that even the protagonist was creeped out by his grossness toward Ayumi. I'm just mad that I don't have an option of telling him as Ayumi, please quit teaching and get therapy. Or, don't. He comes across as someone who'd use therapy speak to further fuel his self-obsessiveness.
Kuze is a hot mess through and through, it's pretty much implied right from the beginning. I'm sure she resigned instead of being removed and asked to literally never hold a position of trust ever again. Probably for the best.
The Minoru route went a little more in-depth about domestic violence. There are various social systems, it takes a village to raise a child, or formalised child protection service. Both were still deeply ingrained in the mindset that children are the properties of their parents. The village knew something was wrong, but the social awkwardness of confronting an abuser is deemed as less acceptable than preventing a property's death. As for the child protection service, Ayaka knew it was about look like they were doing something then just to return the property to sender. It's not inaccurate to reality.
This is the strength and the weakness of this game. It's half social realism that approaches 社会派/しゃかいは/shakai, half body-horror boogieman, so a lot of the time I don't know how seriously I'm expected to take a scene. Is it meant to be serious? Is it meant to be gaudy? Much like early Richard Gadd anti-comedy, even if it's international it makes the serious subject matter difficult to gauge. It's not quite mood whiplash, it's literally I don't know what's expected for the audience to react, and in here it's more a bug than feature. Like when it hard fixated on sure Kuze slashed up the smiling man in the back while being strangled on the front (???), which felt really really out of place given the game's own brand is about tight coherent logic. Then there's the prolonged amnesia plotline, one so absurd that even the first writer 27 years ago hated it. However, I do like the resolution of Eisuke's death, one that makes most sense given the clues within the game.
I do like how it has some complete banal moments, like the protagonist just don't seem to know how to charge his phone. Come to think about it, whatever happened to that huge bag of eggplants?
Sword of SeirosMy last post was at the start of the month and in the meantime I’ve been “here and there,” as a beloved colleague often says. Here and there means not here, mostly, because I’m somewhere else for an indefinite period of time. This is obvious, but I may be here sometimes, in the video game world, but at the same time I’m somewhere else inside my History books where I usually feel more confused than usual, but also a bit more accomplished. This could be a prologue to The Sekimeiya that I left unfinished, but no. Even though I’m always time travelling, I don’t need an egg to do it. I can open a book or install Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3) instead, and travel to another world, one very reminiscent of what we associate with the Middle Ages in pop-culture.
I think my journey in BG3 went very well at first. I was totally immersed in the game, loved the story, the characters, and my companions. The game was extremely beautiful and ran perfectly on my PC, or so I thought. No stutters, no frame drops, detailed textures, beautiful light leaks, everything felt so real and alive in that fantasy world. The graphics were so sharp and the world almost bled into my own. I managed to play for five or six hours at first with no problems. In my second session I started getting constant Direct X crashes. It happened at camp, during combat, in the course of an autosave, never with cutscenes, at least so far. I pressed on and tried to run the game with Vulcan. It was way worse. Back to Direct X, sometimes I was able to play for about an hour with no issues. I changed some graphics settings and got myself an extra thirty minutes.
Next day rolled around and my crashes got worse. Now it wasn’t only the Direct X crash, but also a BSoD. I got it about three times. Not only did the game crash, it completely shut down my PC. Worldly problems seemed to be bleeding into the game. I looked it up online and wouldn’t you know it, I wasn’t the only one. A lot of people have been having the same issue. People tried to help each other with solutions to the problem, some I tried myself with no good results. Many attempts and many tweaks later and I was back to square one. I contacted support and they suggested a number of ways to fix it. I did half of it, still no results, and when I felt ready to continue trying, I stopped. I tried to analyse what I was feeling in the midst of all the frustration and I think the most likely answer is that I got bored. I was immensely bored. Every time I started the game I knew I’d only have the pleasure to play it for one hour tops and then the rest of my free time would be used to solve my issue. I don’t know if it’s wrong or not, but I didn’t have time for it, at least it felt that way. I have a list of things that I could still try, I just didn’t have the energy to do it then and needed some consolation. And where do I find consolation in the gaming world? On Nintendo Switch, of course. The most perfect little device ever made.
There’s this game called Emio – The Smiling Man (Famicom Detective Club) that I was very eager to start and I decided to jump right in. I still don’t know if there’s branches but it plays like an interactive visual novel. So far it has been a very straightforward investigative story about a string of murders, some old and some new, apparently connected to the urban legend of the smiling man. We play from the perspective of two young detectives from the Utsugi Detective Agency – our own character, to whom we can give a name of our choice, and our partner Ayumi. We interact with the environment and people via a menu displaying different actions: call/engage, ask/listen, look/examine, take or show (in some situations), use phone, think and open notebook.
Interacting with Detective Kuze. She wasn’t pleased.While questioning someone, we can mention a given subject from a sub-menu. When the character answers back there’s highlighted text which can be used to expand on a specific element of the conversation. Using the option ‘observations’ we’re able to extract more knowledge about a line of questioning. Recourse to the option ‘think’ is used to ruminate on some loose ends and initiate dialogue as a reaction to any new information. At the end of a chapter we do a wrapup of the new findings so far. At this point we have to answer multiple-choice questions and complete some sentences by typing the right words. These words can be Japanese proper names and are hard to type because we can’t go back to check how the name is properly written. We can, however, check the internet. I only had to do it once, when we met Mama Shoko at her bar. We had to figure out her real name, which we did, but when the prompt to write it came up, we couldn’t go back to see how it was written.
We have to agree with Mama Shoko, at least sometimes.At first, I didn’t know if there were consequences if we failed some of these quizzes in the deduction phase. I reloaded and confirmed that the feedback from our fellow detectives changed according to our reasoning, but didn’t notice any particular changes anywhere else. Maybe it could affect our relationship with Ayumi for whom our character had a special fondness. However, it took me so long to publish this post that I eventually finished the game. I can confirm that this is a straightforward interactive visual novel. Whether we get choices or not, the narration forces the player to follow the plot. So, why are there any choices at all? After finishing the main story we unlock an epilogue chapter.
The extra chapter tells the story of the smiling man and ties some loose ends. It was surprising that a big part of it is a short anime movie. It’s equal parts beautiful and tragic. After we reach the end, an ‘extras’ section is unlocked and there’s an option called Mr. Fukuyama’s Report Card. Fukuyama is the teacher extraordinaire. In the card we get information about our performance in the quizzes and other choices through the game. I don’t think he was very pleased with my performance and he told me that my favourite drink was green tea. False. He also told me that I was very serious. Maybe he’s right, because I often think I’m not serious enough. Anyway, I think the game’s replayability could be tied to his assessment, and if that’s the case, it’s very lacking in new elements to even consider. The advantage of it being a short game is that I’ll eventually pick it up again to replay the story. I enjoyed how the story developed, even though it had an unnecessarily big cast of characters registered in the notebook.
It’s more about what’s left unsaid.I think it was a game that came at the right time to help me focus on other things and forget about my PC problems, but I can’t hide a certain disappointment because of its short duration. I’d really love to play cat-and-mouse with the smiling man for a bit longer and maybe have more screen time with some of the characters in my notebook. The absence of the usual visual novel tropes made me want more than what I got – this is a compliment, by the way. What I really wanted was more stories like this, touching what we call “mature themes” in a respectful way, where things don’t necessarily get happy endings, they’re the result of violence patterns leaving nothing but trauma, confusion and more violence. Emio made an excellent portrait of that nuance, beyond the criminal investigation, the interrogations, and the horror bits.
https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/2024/09/29/emio-the-smiling-man-nintendo-switch/
#baldurSGate3 #bg3Crashes #crime #detective #emioTheSmilingMan #famicomDetectiveClub #gaming #murder #nintendoSwitch #pcGaming #VideoGames #VisualNovels
SBirdIt's been a while! I played #EmioTheSmilingMan (Famicom Detective Club). While I was at it I wrote a mini #rant about my experience with #BaldursGate3 I will eventually get back to it because there's a new hotfix. #videogames #visualnovels #Nintendoswitch
https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/2024/09/29/emio-the-smiling-man-nintendo-switch/
LilimCoraz częściej spoglądam na swój backlog giereczkowy i staram się planować w co by tu zagrać po ukończeniu obecnie ogrywanego tytułu. Jako że kręcę się od kilku miesięcy w klimatach japońskich ( #Utawarerumono , #13Sentinels , #EmioTheSmilingMan ), również w tych kręgach szukam kandydatów. I jest jeden tytuł, który bardzo mnie zachęcił przed premierą, włożyłem weń kilkadziesiąt godzin po premierze, a potem... przestałem grać 🤔 I tak patrzy na mnie z dysku konsoli, niby wiem że ma wszystkie elementy które mnie interesują i nawet nie wiem dlaczego go nie ukończyłem.
Tym tytułem jest #ScarletNexus i coraz więcej znaków na niebie i zmieni wskazuje, że właśnie pod ten adres zapukam po ukończeniu fenomenalnych #13Sentinels 😁
Tymczasem dla osób które w ogóle nie słyszały o tym tytule (a takich jest sporo, bo marketing niestety nie był na najwyższym poziomie), zachęcam do zapoznania się z recenzją @tenartur na łamach @pograneeu 👇🏻
Już za 3 dni premiera trzeciego i ostatniego dodatku do #Remnant2 od #GunfireGames – #TheDarkHorizon
Możecie się oczywiście spodziewać lawiny wrażeń na gorąco z mojej strony, ale zanim nadejdzie 24.09., warto odświeżyć sobie pamięć – co takiego oferuje graczom ten tytuł i wydane już dwa dodatki?
Na pierwszy ogień – podstawka wydana w 2023 roku. Dla mnie absolutne zaskoczenie, tytuł którym początkowo nie byłem zainteresowany, a skończyło się na szaleńczym rajdzie do sklepu po własną kopię w dzień premiery 🤣 Zupełnie jak niedawno z #EmioTheSmilingMan 🤔
Warto jednak zapoznać się z bardziej stonowaną opinią @Czesionyo z @pograneeu 👇🏻
Maxi-GeekReady for a killer adventure game, as #EmioTheSmilingMan delivers across the board. Find out why with our review
Review: https://www.maxi-geek.com/con/emio-the-smiling-man-famicom-detective-club-review
W wasze ręce oddaję kolejną recenzję na łamach @pograneeu – #EmioTheSmilingMan na konsolę #Nintendo #Switch 🪻
Tytuł który prawie przeszedł mi koło nosa, a teraz przez niego poluję na dwie poprzednie części (niestety na zachodzie wydane tylko w wersji cyfrowej 😒). Solidna visual novela, intrygująca historia i ciekawy pomysł na zakończenie.
https://pograne.eu/emio-the-smiling-man-famicom-detective-club-recenzja-switch/
Recenzja #EmioTheSmilingMan gotowa, pokisi się jeszcze do jutra i leci do korekty i – miejmy nadzieję – publikacji 😁
Od lat tyle nie pisałem co ostatnio. Gdyby jeszcze ktoś (poza korektorem i moją żoną) to jeszcze czytał 😅