Listen to the Rain

This is one of those indie games I saw people raving over for months. On a Cataclysm community discord I'm on, basically every single time anyone even mentions it people talk about how great it is. I remember aaron.hosek talking it up too in the bros game chat I'm part of, and when I saw it was for sale at 50% off as part of the Steam Autumn Sale, I bought it with the idea that I would play it as my final game for my twelve games in twelve months series, and that's what I did.

Not without some trepidation, since I have a bit of a rocky history with visual novels. Friends recommended 2064: Read Only Memories to me and I hated it because it only offered the illusion of choice and the further I went in, the deeper the cracks were. On the other hand, I absolutely loved Night in the Woods because it had a branching narrative and actually committed to letting you decide what to do. Which way would Citizen Sleeper fall?


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I used to play a spooky game every October, like Maniac Mansion or Resident Evil IV or Silent Hill II, as a theme to pick a particular title out of the massive mountain that is my backlog. That fell off in 2019, where I basically stopped playing any games at all for months until the Plague Years drove us all inside and I had nothing else to do with my time, and then Laila made it pretty difficult to stick to the schedule. But this year with wanting to play a game a month I wanted to bring it back, and a while back sashagee suggested the game Darkside Detective to me because it was an adventure game and because it had pixel graphics. I took one look at it and put it on my wishlist, and when the summer Steam sale rolled around I bought it, and then I played it.

Was it spooky? Absolutely not. But it was fun.


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Once again, I went to go see a play that lisekatevans was in, this time with Black Button Eyes Productions. The last show of theirs I went to see was Whisper House, a musical involving ghosts, which sounds much cooler than my final impressions of the play were. It was disjointed, with the "singing ghosts" and the "exploration of prejudice during World War II" parts never really coming together in a satisfying way. That's not the fault of Black Button Eyes, of course, since they didn't write the script (Duncan Sheik did), and the acting and singing was good, but it was true nonetheless.

Kind of giving away the game here.


If you look at the page for the show and read the review excerpts, you'll see they praise the casting and the special effects and mostly do not mention anything about the story. And there's a reason for that.

But first, as the reviews say, the casting and the special effects were good! The actor playing Cornelius Agrippa (the older wizard mentor) had great stage presence and timing. lisekatevans played two characters--a lady's maid and a cacklingly evil servant of the Ancients, giant Lovecraftian monsters threatening England--and looked like she was having a great time leaping around the stage and issuing dire threats of vengeance from her master. The special effects for all the magic being performed were very good, with a lot of lights of various colors and what lisekatevans said were called "Kakubi streamers" that packed a ton of material into small packages so that it looked like streams of fire were coming from the actors' hands. My favorite trick was probably when Henrietta Howel, the protagonist, was being needled by one of her fellow magic students and they kept swapping out the paper globe representing the size of her fireball as her emotions surged. The tentacles sneaking in from when Korozoth, the Shadow and Fog, attacks London were surprisingly realistic-looking for stage prop tentacles.

Alright, so.

A Shadow Bright and Burning is an adaptation of a young adult fantasy novel, and it's hard to tell if my problems with the story are due to the original story or the adaptation. Some of them are definitely due to the difficulty of switching mediums--especially early on in the play, there is a lot of "As you know" dialogue to explain what's going on. For example, the play begins with a description of the three types of mages: sorcerers, who calmly allowing the elements to flow through them and enact their will; magicians, who use trickery and deceit and illusion; and witches, who use the "power of nature," whatever that means. Not that it matters because not a single witch appears in the story. Early on, Henrietta will narrate some of her actions, which seemed counter to the entire point of a stage play to me, like saying that she slipped into the covers and was almost instantly asleep instead of just acting it out. Or the way that there's a lot played up with the relationship between Henrietta and Rook, her childhood friend without magic who was marked by the Ancients and bears scars related to them, and then Rook disappears for big chunks of the play. Those are definitely problems with the adaptation.

But the original story is very clearly Shadow and Bone crossed with a bit of Harry Potter. Main character in a mundane profession (schoolteacher), who discovers her secret magical powers. She is proclaimed the Chosen One, destined to save the country, and taken away to a sorcerer's school to be trained. She is an orphan, who knows very little of her parents, and is the only known female sorcerer. Why this is so rare and believed impossible is never explicitly stated but is implied to be because sorcery requires supreme control and emotional calm and ladies be crazy, which we could pass off as a representation of misogyny that the main character has to overcome except:

Spoilers for an eight-year-old book

Henrietta is not a sorcerer, she's a magician. Her father was a magician and she inherited his magician powers, which...seems to confirm that women are too emotionally unstable to be sorcerers? Admittedly I'm basing this off the play and maybe the book goes into it more, but in the book there are two (one) female sorcerers. One of them went crazy due to dreams sent by the Ancients and devoted herself to their service, and the other isn't a sorcerer at all. So I guess those Victorian mores about women are right? That doesn't seem intentional.

Henrietta studies her powers, deals with her fellow students (as well as Rook), faces threats, and at the end loses her mentor but has a triumph that shows she is ready for future. You've seen it all before and I don't think there's anything new or interesting here other than the Lovecraftian monsters, but despite them sending dreams to people they seem to act more like kaijū. Korozoth repeatedly attacks London and has to be driven off, there's some dialogue indicating that Nemneris the Water Spider is cruising around the English Channel and the North Sea just sinking any British ships it can find. They're not exactly incomprehensible, though this is a young adult book so maybe that's the point.

It is definitely A [Noun] of [Noun] and [Noun] story.

Afterwards, lisekatevans and I went out with one of her coworkers and her coworker's friends, who all met at Bavarian Instrument-Making School (I think it was this one). We had a nice conversation about politics (German and American), what to do in the Bavarian Alps in the winter (cook), and Philadelphia vs. Chicago (they're all in Chicago now). It was a lovely evening.

A while ago, I read about a game called Crypt of the NecroDancer on Rock Paper Shotgun (of course), and it sounded intriguing. A rhythm-based roguelike, with all of the base characteristics of a roguelike but with the important caveat that you have to move on the beat or you lose your turn. It's like an inverse Superhot, "the smash-hit FPS where time moves only when you move," where the beat moves even if you do not move and so if you don't move you lose. That came out in most of the reviews, which tended to describe it as punishingly hard even for people who had beaten Angband or Nethack--which makes sense, because those games do not require fast reflexes--so I skipped it. Years later though, I heard that the same people had teamed up with Nintendo to make a game they called Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda, which sure is a title, and I heard that it was much easier than the brutal difficulty of Crypt of the NecroDancer. And hey, I am trying to play all the Legend of Zelda games, even the spin-offs and non-canon ones. Time for some beats.

The title is just a transliteration of the English title.


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I usually don't review the same game twice, but MMOs are different. With most games, I play them once, I do all the content, and I'm done. Even with games that receive extensive post-release updates like Wasteland II or Divinity: Original Sin that had enough post-game changes to warrant doing another review, I avoided it by not playing them at all until years after they came out, long after all the additional changes had been made. But I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV for years at this point, through every patch and with all the changes that come out, so I've seen the game as it developed. And my original Endwalker review only covered the story and none of the mechanical changes and was written over two years ago before the patch content. A lot has happened in the game since then!

As before, this review will contain spoilers for Endwalker's story.


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This game passed me by when it originally came out. The first portable gaming device I owned was...well, technically it was the Sega Game Gear with its fantastic 30 minute battery life, and I got a lot of usage out of it on family vacations for the 30 minutes that it lasted. But past that, I didn't buy a portable until the PSP, and I didn't buy a Nintendo portable until 2008 right before I moved to Japan, so the entirety of the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance passed me by. That includes Kirby's Dream Land, which I only read about in Nintendo Power barring a few minutes' play on a friend's Game Boy. Lacking any preconceptions, I came into Amazing Mirror and was having a fun time and then I happened to be looking through old podcasts I hadn't finished and found the Retronauts Kirby 3 episode. I loaded up it at the 30 minutes remaining and was immediately greeted with people trashing the game's map and the progression.

I had no idea it was so controversial! But you google it and find out that Nintendo Life gave it a 6/10 and people online are arguing whether that's fair or not. This is what ubiquitous internet access to information has taken from us. By virtue of never playing the game, I went into it with no expectations and had a nice time, whereas if I had gone in after reading a bunch of people trashing it I would have been primed to dislike it. Instead I got the nice surprise that people did twenty years ago: "What you mean they made a Kirby metroidvania?!"


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I don't usually play visual novels--if you look back through the visual novel tag, you'll find only two other examples of games. It's not because I don't like them conceptually or anything, since I've had the install discs for Ever 17 sitting on my hard drive through four computers and I keep telling myself that someday, someday, I'll get it to. And someday, I will! I got to this one first, though, for three reasons. The first is that sashagee told me about it and said it was probably the kind of game I would like, I think because the sequel was advertised to her on Playstation when she was browsing through sale games. The second is that the background is full of fantasy races, with a line about how the "elves have left the forest to build their startups" right in the intro, though that ended up grating on me in the end for reasons I'll get into. The third is that the playtime on HLTB was around five hours and I was running out of time in the month. Even though I intended to play it two weekends ago, and didn't, and then I intended to play it last weekend, and didn't...

Well, I started it on Tuesday and finished it on Friday after about five hours or so. At least an hour of that involved Laila sitting on my lap, wanting to see the game with the "chairs" or the "blue dresses." That makes me feel like I'll probably be playing more visual novels in the future.


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This is the game that made JRPGs.

Not sure that Horii Yūji knew when he decided to adapt the Wizardry and Ultima games that he loved on computer into a console RPG that he would change Japanese culture permanently. Words like クエスト ("quest"), 勇者 (yūsha, "hero"), 魔王 (maō, lit: "Demon King" but more often just "main bad guy") that are all over the place in Japanese culture now can point here as the source of their popularity. The series that rapidly grew so popular that Enix only released new games on weekends so that schoolkids wouldn't skip school--and so salarymen wouldn't skip work. It never really made it big in America, though, because Final Fantasy came out first and so when Dragon Quest came in America in 1989--a year later than Final Fantasy here, and three years after its initial release in Japan--it looked extremely dated, because it was. By then they were already onto Dragon Quest IV in Japan. Even Nintendo Power giving away free copies didn't help.

I didn't get one of those free copies because I didn't know RPGs existed. I didn't encounter Dragon Quest until I got to university, discovered how many people had uploaded things on the internet, and tried some of the games I had missed either because I had no way to play them (I never owned an SNES) or because my interests were different and I played through "Dragon Warrior." And it was fun! So when I was looking for short game, I thought about how there's supposed to be an HD2D remake of Dragon Quest III coming at some point and I wanted to play through this game and Dragon Quest II before it comes out, and I thought about how I need more Japanese practice.

Descendant of ErdrickLoto, defeat the Dragon King!


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Around six years ago, the group chat I have with a couple of guys to talk about video games (I'm sure you have one too, right?) blew up with discussion of a game called Hollow Knight. I had heard about it on both Rock Paper Shotgun and Bonfireside Chat, of course, but this was people I knew talking about the game, like listening in to a discussion on the playground the way that the designers of The Legend of Zelda hoped that people would do when talking about their game. It sounded amazing and right up my alley, especially when those same group chat friends started talking about a planned sequel called Silksong that was supposed to be coming out in a few short years.

Well, that was six years ago and I've beaten Hollow Knight and Silksong still isn't out. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I started playing Hollow Knight in April and originally thought, oh, this is a thirty-hour game, it'll take me a couple months to finish. But if you've been reading you know that I've gotten pulled into modding for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, which takes up a chunk of my free time, and I also have Laila, which takes up a much larger chunk of my free time. Don't let the fact that I took almost eight months to beat this game imply anything about the quality of the game itself, however--Hollow Knight is a gaming masterpiece and I can perfectly understand why it monopolized gaming chat for weeks on end.


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I originally learned about Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead from the same place I learned about so many other games--a Rock Paper Shotgun article. As an old devotee of Dwarf Fortress (from before Z levels!) and UnReal World, I loved the article's description of an expansive crafting system and an apocalypse where nearly everything went wrong at once, so I downloaded the stable version--despite the disclaimer on the article, I was put off from downloading the experimental version--and made a character and loaded into the world. I started in the evacuation shelter, talked to my starting NPC who gave me some mission I don't remember, and with some bare supplies I left the shelter. There was a road to the south but I struck off into the wilderness for a while, reasoning that a place with a large population was a place with a lot of zombies, and saw a few wild animals and some giant insects that I avoided before noticing the outskirts of a small town. With a stout branch in my hands, I snuck from the forest to the closest of the houses and shattered a window and entered the house.

Mistake. I immediately hear shuffling footsteps approaching from the street outside, and as the thumping started on the front door I grabbed a couple cans of food and climbed out the window, cutting myself on the broken glass. I was greeted with a zombie coming around the corner of the house, and I laid into it with the stick. I managed to kill it, but the noise attracted a few more, and though I tried to run a tough zombie grabbed me and I couldn't break free. RIP.

That's a pretty good summary of how a lot of CDDA games go to this day.


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A Kirby game that I'm not a big fan of? It's more likely than I thought.

Squeak Squad used to be a meme for me (and others) because the contrast between its beginning and ending is so vast. Despite that, there's a lot of posts across the internet asking if it's the worst Kirby game out there. Since I don't play Kirby games for the challenge, I play them for cuteness and fun, I thought this must be exaggerated and maybe there was some redeemable core stuck underneath all the complaints but honestly, the collective wisdom of the internet is right this time. This game took me close to two months to beat, just because playing it was such a slog. I finally forced myself to sit down, do a level at a time, and slowly ground it over over the course of the last couple of weeks, and "slowly ground it out" are not words you should use with a Kirby game.

The meme is good though:


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I'm excited for Endwalker, but I don't have the overwhelming, burning hype that some people seem to

Well, that turned out to be accurate.

Normally I'd be waiting years to do this review, after all the patches and systems and everything was put into place, and I'm still going to write that post eventually once we wrap up patch 6.5. But Endwalker's story is structured differently than previous expansions--in something like Heavensward, the main x.0 patch resolves many of the story beats but leaves some open, and it's not until x.3 that they all finally come to their conclusion. Patch 3.3 was the final defeat of Nidhogg and the real end of the Dragonsong War, for example, and then 3.4 and 3.5 built up the Garlean Empire and the war in the east that eventually led to Stormblood. Endwalker is different, with patch 6.0 being much bigger than a usual x.0 patch and resolving all the story threads--the 10 year Hydaelyn and Zodiarc arc, as the marketing puts it--in one single journey. Patch 6.1 is called "New Adventures" and represents a clean break into a new saga, to the point where they've said that maybe some day in the future it could represent a new entry point for players who are intimidated by the hundreds of hours of story that FFXIV makes you play through to get to the end. That also means that I can write a review of the story now without having to see how the patches resolve things.

The general consensus is that Endwalker is a masterpiece, but I can't agree with that.

(Obviously, massive Endwalker spoilers below)


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Shadowbringers is the second big piece of FFXIV news I remember paying attention to after the news that Kefka was being added as a raid boss in Stormblood. Once again, it was an article on Rock Paper Shotgun and reading the tweets of nova_crystalis as they covered the Live Letter reveal of the title and basic plot. Travel between worlds. The Warrior of Darkness. Unyielding light devouring all in its path. I remember being interested mostly because World of Warcraft had done something similar with 2014's Warlords of Draenor that, by 2018, was widely acknoweldged to be a complete disaster. Could FFXIV really pull off a story of alternate worlds and time travel?

Well, Warlords of Draenor has a 4.8 user score on Metacritic and Shadowbringers has a 9.1. So.

I will say at the outset that I do not have unmitigated praise for Shadowbringers the way that most of the internet seems to, but that may be because it's hard for me to compare it to anything else since I only started playing when ShB was half-over already. The only systems and skills I've ever known have been ShB ones, even when I'm doing lower-level content, so it's possible I'm not giving ShB its clear due because I've never experienced an FFXIV where Tactical Points exist or where crafters are a gruelling nightmare grind to level. My view is ultimately skewed by being a latecomer.

But you're reading this because you want to know what I think, so here we go.


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