Finished Shuten Order. Game of the Year for 2025, if only for being better paced and less bloated than The Hundred Line 2, and THL2 itself is also a once a life time kind of good. Also, same issue for FFVII Rebirth, otherwise a GOTY title.

Shuten Order made lots of odd QoL choices. Which imo is the worst thing about it. Also, the English localisation is noticeably weaker than the Mandarin, and most certainly weaker than English THL2.

If you can ignore that, it kinda has the flavour of best of Nier Automata, Will the Wonderful World, Fragile Dreams, The World Ends with You, Voice of Cards, and even a hint of Rain Code; but I feel that it took a different route to all of these and it's just cynical-sweet. Think of it as an anthology of multiple short stories, each self contained with distinctive gameplay as well, and somehow other than the VN and final chapter all of them felt strong in game-feel as well. Its other impressive achievement is to make the VN most unpleasant to play, idk how they managed that.

And the story comes together well. All mysteries had a solution, everything that made no sense earlier made sense in the end. I'll write a more spoilerish version later.

2025, what a year for gaming.

#ShutenOrder