Hiiiii, absentee internet guy here! I actually started a bona fide article back in December then didn’t finish it because it was pretentious as fuck and now isn’t even topical! So I just thought it was a good time to check in and report on some games I’ve enjoyed recently, dump some sketches, then come back in another three to four months. You’re fine with that, right? I like that about our relationship.

Alchemy Stars: Aurora Burst (Mobile)- First off, yeah, a lot of these are going to be mobile games. I’ve played entirely too many of them lately, and keep trying new ones just to see what looks promising and which turns into a dull slog of daily quests and template generated moeblobs and/or gijinka. Alchemy Stars is really cool, though, since it has a unique battle system involving drawing a line through like-colored tiles to move your squad around and attack enemies. It’s goofy as hell watching a conga line of characters run in awkward panels to either do a hit and run or just burn up tiles on the far end of the map, but I love the ‘gameyness’ in the same way I love STING RPG’s. It’s simplistic, yet has some nuance in how you build your teams and trigger your active skills. I broke my rule about joining games for collaborations since a Dragon Maid crossover was going on at the time, but I like the game itself enough to keep picking away at it a while every day.

I give it a 3 out of 2.

Guardian Tales (Mobile)- Okay I broke the rule again with this one due to peer pressure: there was a Slayers collab going on and other members of the fan discord I’m on were really enjoying it, so I bit. Guardian Tales is a surprisingly fun sort of Zelda-like title that gets bogged down a bit for me with Gacha Things. Overall, I’d say it’s worth a play but I prefer the bite sized stages, puzzles and exploration parts of it to the resource grinding, active and passive PVP, and vestigial but compulsory co op elements that every mobile game (or ‘mobage’ if you’re like that) and kind of wish it was just a stand alone thing that was just that. It’s got an interesting sense of humor and likes to casually slide dark notes in your way, which really made that Slayers crossover make sense.

I’d call it a 2 out of 2. Fun, nothing glaringly bad but I wouldn’t say I’m hooked.

World Flipper (surprise, it’s also Mobile)- I’ve always kind of had a soft spot for video games that take a physical game and do things with it that you couldn’t do on a real pinball table/race track/line at the urgent care. World Flipper is a pinball RPG where you build teams of adventurers then fling them violently at enemies and obstacles to score points and charge up for Power Flips and active skills. I love the presentation (tiny sprites for the actual game, colorful clean character art for dialogue and menus) and it’s pretty easy to get a fix in short bursts since each stage is usually just a two-screen ‘table’ that can be beaten in a couple minutes. The flip (heh) side of the whole thing is it’s a very light, fluffy kind of experience so don’t go in expecting LORE! or anything especially deep. It’s just a really good game to toss on when you’re in ‘head empty, actual RPG take too long’ mode. Given that’s been the philosophy of most of my attempted game projects myself, I can’t help but love it. Also worth pointing out the game just automatically ticks off daily quests and achievements as you hit them, so you’re never consulting a checklist and being compelled to do all of the menial bullshit on it on a daily basis, so it is a surprisingly guilt/FOMO free experience for what it is.

2 out of 2.

Final Gear (Mobile)- I like mechs. This shouldn’t be remotely surprising for long time readers, new readers, people I’ve sat next to on a bus, or those who quietly just stop responding on Discord after several paragraphs explaining the different VF-1 Valkyrie variants and who used them in Classic Macross. Final Gear is a mecha RPG that plays a bit like a side scrolling beat em up with guns added, until you can turn on Auto battle and much like Azur Lane, there’s rarely a reason to go back. Of course, these mechs are piloted by cute, merchandisable anime girls. They seem to have pretty frequent collab events, which could be a selling point if you’re into mecha because if there’s anything we mecha fans love is seeing a mecha we know in something else. The guest character art seems to be all done by their own staff though, which isn’t outright *bad* so much as kind of uncanny in some cases. A smiling, moe-fied Major Motoko Kusanagi is one of the more cursed examples. (Original characters look fine though.)

Final Gear is a tough recommend for me. I like mecha, the construction system is cool (if you get the full parts set and pilot for a Custom unit, you can transform it into a cooler looking, more powerful version) but resources for upgrading can get really grindy and as far as I can tell, whaling is about mandatory for some machines (you get points from making gacha pulls on a banner which can be used to buy parts of a character’s Custom from the banner, but going through the Eva collab f2p only ended up giving me enough parts for Eva-02’s backpack and arms.) It’s worth playing if you just can’t get enough robots in your life, but it has a lot of annoyances that might dampen your enthusiasm including crashes, typos, and a high maintenance base that seems to consume a baffling amount of system resources when you visit.

If I gotta be real, this is a 1 out of 2 but has potential to improve if it survives. On the other hand, my Research on -booru sites has yielded mostly official art rips and barely any risque fan art so that may not bode well for its popularity.

Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack (Switch)- I bought the individual games at launch on my 3DS, plodded through them, then never touched them again, but I’ve been on a major Inti Creates fanboy kick lately and decided to go back to the beginning of the series to see how I like them now. And, as happens to me a lot, really, I enjoyed the replay a lot more. I’ve heard that some tweaks were made to the collection, like additional platforms in Zonda’s upside down flipped sequences and the script to GV1 was essentially de-4Kids’d, but I barely remember the first time around so I got to just appreciate it as is. Hunting for jewels for… Joule was less obnoxious than I remembered, but the bosses remain as tough as I thought. I think I’m just more welcoming of challenge than I was back than- at least not counting attempting the good end- fighting those bosses a second time without prevasion on sucks. I like GV2 more overall, due in no small part to just liking Copen’s play style a lot. Gunvolt’s tag and zap mechanic is neat, but physically ramming enemies to tag them, ricocheting off walls and air dashing is just plain fun. I jumped at his spinoff when it came out. Overall, it is two good games bundled together, so it’s easy to suggest.

I’d give the Striker Pack a 3/2 but the limitations of my forced point scale means I can’t give iX a slightly higher score, I guess.

Luminous Avenger iX (Switch)- Gunvolt’s edgy boi rival Copen gets a spinoff where it turns out he was right to want to kill all the Mutants Adepts, actually, because in the future they’ve taken over the joint and hunt the surviving humans through their ruined cities. This game is a joy, it’s all about mastering Copen’s movement and weaponry to rack up combos and score, and it’s been polished and streamlined a lot since the 3DS entries. Since I didn’t get too deep into it before, basically the GV series are Mega Man X-likes as they appear, but designed more around getting through stages quickly, untouched, and chaining up points. Survival itself is actually pretty easy since both characters have an ability called “Prevasion” that basically trades their electric gauge or bullets to take a hit before you start losing health, and either of those things can be reloaded by double tapping down at any time. So if you play deliberately, it’s usually pretty simple to get out of the way and quickly reload before going on the offensive again.

Also, considering Copen’s play is based around different kinds of dashes, combos, and the bosses in iX2 are more or less expies of Mighty Numbers, the entire thing kind of feels like a big flex on Mighty No. 9 and I love passive aggressiveness in the games industry.

Luminous Avenger iX gets a 3 out of 2 in my book, nudged slightly higher than the previous games as mentioned above, though honestly, play ’em all!

Gal*Gun 2 (Switch&Steam)- Yes, I own this game. Twice. If you have to pick, I would pick PC for mouse aim. I don’t know where to really begin breaking this down while still keeping things kind of snappy since this list is getting longer than I planned, but do you like rail shooters like House of the Dead or Lethal Enforcers? It’s like that, but horny. You play a nondescript loner boy who is given a Pheremone Shot and Pheremone Goggles that will help drive out and defeat the mini-devils serial prankster Korona is spreading to cause mischief. The side effect of this demon busting gear is it makes every female member of the school irresistibly, violently attracted to you, so you must take them down by ‘satisfying’ them with Pheremone Shots to their weak points. It is exactly the kind of game you think it is assuming you know they stop short of actual nudity because it’s a console game for Grodd’s sake. GG2 has a surprising amount of content in it though, in the form of numerous side missions, different types of stages including defense stages (which suck), hidden object searching (which kind of sucks), and the route-ending Doki Doki stages where you just get right in there and drive the devils out of your chosen gal pal’s body at point blank range while they writhe and my friend judges me and tries to think of an excuse to go home.

Really, it’s just a goofy as hell anime fanservice game that’s more fun than it has any right to be. I was laughing my ass off when it gets to extremes like the girl next door revealing her pet project of an Anti-God Laser or classmates chasing you in the air vents like Xenomorphs. If you miss light gun or shooting gallery type games, it’s a pretty fun one though it feels like a missed opportunity to let you use the detached joy-con to aim like a pistol instead of doing the awkward Splatoon whole-Switch tilt on console. Steam’s port has mouse aiming which makes things much easier (much, much easier- they probably dumbed things down a bit expecting console aiming response times.)

I give it a solid 2/2. I had a blast playing through it (Chiru best gal, classic gaming five-ever) but I’m not really itching to return to it any time soon.

I think that about does it for stuff I want to dish on right now, I’ve been in aggressive CONSUME MEDIA mode for the past month or so and felt like sharing. I haven’t gotten as much PRODUCE CONTENT done as a result unfortunately, but hope to turn that around once things stabilize a bit. Had a lot of vet trips for Nia over the past couple months and work is jerking my schedule around for the first time in a good while, so here’s hoping it’s stable hours even if they’re not the ones I prefer to work. Friday Raffles have also been getting back in swing over on RGL, so I can be caught there most Fridays when an event isn’t going on. But I’ve been thinking lately, I really need to just nail down a project and get it out there instead of talking endlessly about My Game that doesn’t actually exist as yet so I can’t show it off.

Until next time, adios.