Woodlings draw near!

This was a little thing for a game jam but because I'm bad at it, it took about an hour to complete. Was still neat.

Deepest Sword is a physics game about a knight on a quest to plunge his long, deep sword into the heart of a dragon. Alas, the dragon, who has seen many a long sword in her day, only ends up size-shaming the poor knight with "is it in yet?" type comments for the inadequate length of his tool, then roasts him and sends him back to the beginning. Your blade is enhanced, the cave on the way to the dragon gains an extra room, and you repeat the process, until at long last you have the Deepest Sword, whose length and girth are unequaled throughout the land.

This is a very intentionally subtext heavy game, is what I'm saying. (Even the dragon's expression after filling her depths is a bit... hmm.)

As far as the actual gameplay, it kind of reminds me of that Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy-inspired bonus stage in Journey of the Broken Circle, sort of. It's a physics ordeal where your controls are walk left, walk right, and rotate your sword clockwise and counterclockwise, so expect a lot of using your sword to grab ledges and lift yourself up and so on, especially as it gets longer. One thing I thought was neat was how the earlier stages change in feeling as the sword gets bigger. You have to walk from start all the way to the dragon each time you get a new sword, and each time the cave has one more section in it, but as for the ones that were there already? The physics of getting through the first few rooms with a long sword are drastically different than with a short sword; some parts that used to be the entire challenge of the room are now trivial if not entirely skippable, while parts that used to be trivial are suddenly a lot more challenging to fit that bigger sword through. Every section somehow feels like an entirely new challenge each time, which speaks to some brilliant level design when one single room just works on so many different levels.

Anyway, all that said, it is a game jam thing, so there's not too much (ahem) depth here beyond the premise: There are five sword lengths and a "you win" screen at the end, with most of the playtime coming from how long it takes you to physics your way through. Still, it's definitely worth checking out if you find the idea clever.

Timespinner is a PS1-styled good old pixel graphics Metroidvania with a time travel theme. You are Lunais, a Time Messenger--a member of your extremely persecuted nomadic tribe on "if the empire ever gets us then you need to go back in time and warn the others" duty. Sure enough, the emperor himself invades and burns down your entire backstory, setting you up for a roaring rampage of revenge. Oh, and maybe to like, fix everything? But first and foremost those assholes need to pay for what they did.

Or do they? After having been tossed around in the timestream for a while and traversing through a thousand years ago as well as the present time, things start to get more complicated. Maybe the original founders of the empire a thousand years ago were rebelling for a reason. Maybe blind revenge cycles aren't the healthiest long-term solution.

But this is the ever quick-tempered and hot-blooded Lunais we're talking about. "Who do I have to kill to solve this problem" is such a core part of her personality that even though there are four endings based on your choices, all of them (even the "solve the empire's problems in the past and make them peaceful so they're not such dicks to us in the future" one) involve finding someone who's ruining everything and needs to die.

Anyway, that's the story. Gameplay and presentation-wise, this is an outstandingly well-crafted Metroidvania with two interconnected maps (past and future versions of the world,) stuff to find, bosses to beat, and sidequests to solve. Time manipulation is a mechanic both in the teleporter checkpoints and in the ability to freeze the action at any time, which allows you to do things like use enemies as platforms or get out of the way of a boss's charging rushdown attack. The graphics are gorgeous. The music is also gorgeous. Controls and gameplay are satisfying. There's a lot more story here than in your average SOTN-like Castlevania, and it's a good story that's told and presented well. There's even a good amount of LGBTQ representation, which is always awesome unless you're one of those "I liked this game before it had an agenda" types, in which case why are you following us?

Armor and accessories follow the traditional SOTN-and-beyond approach of being pieces of gear for which one finds upgrades scattered throughout the adventure. For weapons, though, they did something unique. Lunais wields Orbs, each of which have unique playing styles akin to the various weapon types in your average Castlevania (you know, equipping a short sword versus a giant heavy overhand-swinging one versus a whip versus a spear or the like) only without any of them really being a clear upgrade. Defeating an enemy with a certain Orb earns a separate type of experience for that Orb, and its strength and damage increase with levels. Each Orb is situationally useful--I personally tended to favor the Radiant Orb for swatting hard-to-hit flying things at close range, the Blood Orb for dealing with shield knights, and the Forbidden Tome (which counts as an Orb somehow, shut up) for basically everything else--but at the end of the day, the best Orb in the game is the one you favor and have used until it became deadly. There are no wrong answers and no Orb obsoletes any other; the ones you find later merely give you more options.

Simply put, this game is phenomenal. The Orb system works well for introducing variety and a sense of replay value; at this point I've seen every ending, unlocked every Achievement including the Achievement for unlocking every Achievement, and beaten every boss in the game without being hit or stopping time, but I could always go back and play through again on a New Game Plus just to see what playing with some of the other Orbs might be like. (There were quite a few that I was curious about, that I could really see being good if I'd gotten them up to speed, but I was just too married to my current setup.) And when I have hundred-percented this game twice and I'm still curious about things like that, that's how you know just how great this game is, how lasting its appeal.

I was browsing r/tipofmyjoystick, a Subreddit wherein people describe games they half-remember in hopes that someone can tell them what on Earth that one game was. Someone asked, and I quote:

"[Flash] [2010s] A Newgrounds pixel art game were[sic] you play a bizarre and nonsensical game of cards with made up rules against an eyeless man. Behind him is a perverted praying mantis who constantly makes innuendos."

This was solved in the comments--it's Mond Cards, apparently--but with a description like that, you just know I had to check it out.

So Mond Cards is... yeah, it's pretty much that. I don't really have a lot to add here. You play a made-up Calvinball card game you always lose until a twist reveal at the very end, it's barely interactive and your choices don't matter, the praying mantis in the background really wants to fuck you, it's about ten minutes long. Newgrounds-brand trippy art games sure were the days, huh?

Yeah.

Look, I'll be honest with you: The focus end of my mental health has taken an absolute nosedive, I've been so bad at getting around to doing basically anything that I completely forgot about IFComp this year, 2020 has been a thing as I'm sure you're all aware, and there is a tremendous urge to just crawl back into bed forever while the completely ignored work and house tasks and unpaid bills (my finances are fine and I can totally afford them; I just, like, forget to get around to sending in the payments) and concerned "hey I haven't heard from you in like three months, are you still alive or what" IMs pile up. It's gone well past the point of me just being lazy and sucking and into the territory where I think I have a legitimate neurodivergency-related problem here. (Either this is an antidepressant side effect or there's an undiagnosed "okay great we nuked the anxiety, now what about the ADHD" or something lurking back in there somewhere.) Kurt joined our system several months ago and (as of when I'm writing this, updating it is on the to-do list for later) this Dreamwidth icon of the system still only has Ardei, Sara, and me. There was a whole big story about how he came to be, his relationship with us, the struggles and growing pains we had getting used to the new addition to the family, that I just... haven't told yet. People who hang out with us every day on Telegram have watched it unfold, but to the Dreamwidth audience, there's just this sort of "oh yeah there are four of us in my head now, don't worry about it, I'll explain later maybe" handwave that has yet to come to fruition.

Basically what I'm saying is that the final few months of 2020 have seen me blow past the point of not just dropping the ball, but somehow losing my hands in a tragic rock/paper/scissors accident and evolving into a lesser form of life that is now physically incapable of grasping the ball. As such, yeah the gameblogging awards are a little late this year.

We're expanding to let all four of us (yes there are four, I'm going to add Kurt to the icon eventually, shut up) weigh in with our respective picks and preferences. As always feel free make your bets and predictions as to how we're each going to vote, though we're on a bit of a compressed schedule since I was maybe a little behind schedule turning the nominations post in.

2020 by the numbers: 24 games completed, 8 abandoned (though that includes a bunch of last-minute housekeeping entries,) and 3 ongoing, for a total of 35 games blogged, a number that exactly ties last year's overall total. Considering how much of a void day the entire last quarter of the year has been for us, I find that hard to believe unless we had a really strong early lead that I just kind of blew at the end there, but that's what the figures claim, anyway.

Anyway! Awards. Nominations. Categories. Words.

( Awaaaayyyy )

More housekeeping. I was really trying on this one until fairly recently, until I wasn't anymore. It still feels weird to be writing these, like I'm letting them go before they're actually dead. That feeling is wrong (I could still come back at any time,) but knowing something and feeling it... you know how it goes.

NO THING is a strange little indie gem that we acquired on the Switch eShop, but it was also in the Racial Justice Bundle, so there's a good chance you actually own it and you just didn't see it in there. If you do, you should play it! It's neat.

It the retro-future year 1994, and you are a simple office clerk tasked with delivering a message to the queen of ice. The game is a first-person auto-runner with exactly two buttons: Turn Left and Turn Right. Your speed gradually increases each time you make a turn, starting out at a brisk jog and eventually feeling like an F-Zero game, and your task is to stay on the path, not turn too early or too late, and not fall. Meanwhile, a non-solid visions of people, objects, or whatever nonsense the game wants to throw at you appear everywhere to sell each level's overall look and theme, there are randomly cycling aesthetic filters, and a robotic voice spouts cryptic lines every few turns. It... I think there's a plot here? I think? Or at the very least there are litcrit-able dissections and explorations of themes, which the game handles very well.

Consider level 6 as an example, which is done up to look like a suburb: the ghostly visions that float by look like houses, SUVs, and suburbanite families. The stage's main gameplay gimmick is that the entire first half of it takes place on a J-shaped track that just keels looping around in enough laps to lose count, and that alone plus the imagery gives it a sort of intentionally monotonous "everyday work routine" feel. Then the voice helpfully adds things like... well... the soundtrack is available on Bandcamp and includes bonus track "vocal" versions where the in-game voice is preserved for the full effect, so here's the level 6 one.

Anyway, as with a few other housekeeping ABANDONEDs from tonight, the main problem we ran into in this game is that it is brutally hard. Again, the object is to turn left and right and not fall off the track, which sounds easy enough, but by the time the speed gets blinding enough the timing can become... tight. The visuals and voice are intentionally distracting, and if you hear a line that makes you go "wait, what?" or can't quite see the next turn through the cloud of floating Ben Franklin heads or whatever and end up missing your turn and flying off the course, that's part of the difficulty. I made it all the way to level 7 (out of 10) and I want so bad to push on because we're past the halfway mark, only four stages to go, come on we're almost there (no we're not) etc. but man. Man.

So, yeah. This is 3D first-person vaporwave Clinger Winger complete with Talking Heads lyrics. Which is cool, I'll give it that. It's interesting as heck and I want to see where this all leads, but I'm just not skilled enough. Not... right now, anyway.

Anyway, if you're curious, the itch.io trailer has just about everything you need to know in a "That's it, that's the game" sense.

Another housekeeping ABANDONED entry. I have nothing against this one at all. I never quit it on purpose, I was having a lot of fun with it, but at some point my attention span struck, other games came along, and I guess at this point it's been months since I touched it? Oops. I'm still not used to these housekeeping ABANDONEDs yet; it still feels weird to write this up like this one's dead (even though I can always go back and that's literally what the Extra Life category is for.) Still trying to get used to this. Please bear with us.

Mario Adventure is an incredibly ambitions Super Mario Bros. 3 ROMhack that adds a lot of features I would not have expected the SMB3 framework to support. Infinite lives (we know you're just going to try again and death is nothing more than a "go back to the world map and try this stage again" bounce, so let's not even bother with the unnecessary counter there,) coins are persistent and strictly a form of currency, the Toad houses can be visited as many times as you want as long as you have coins (thus making them shops more than anything else,) stages can be revisited as well, overall the world map feels more Mario World-like, speaking of Mario World the box for holding a backup powerup/item is there too, there are all new items and powerups....

It's an astonishing feat of turning SMB3 into an entirely new (obviously all the stages are original too) game that almost feels more like a demade Mario World hack than an SMB3 one at times. It's impressive as hell just from a technical standpoint, and the end result is a vast world that I really want to explore, and I had quite a lot of fun doing so for a while there until ??? . It takes a special patch for the game to work on hardware emulation (that is, if you want to put it on your NES Classic instead of playing it on PC) but it seems to work well enough for us once the patch is applied. Overall, it's neat and if it sounds like your sort of thing from the description, then it probably is.

I only have three major knocks against it, and two are the difficulty. First off, being a Mario ROMhack and all, this game is hard. It's... I mean, it's not Kaizo level or anything. It's not one of those Super Expert levels where they assume you're playing it on an emulator anyway so they may as well escalate things until savestates are required. There's no trolling. There's no reliance on arcane physics mechanics that casuals wouldn't have needed to learn before. There's none of this bullshit. It's like, hard by normal human player playing a normal Mario game standards. But it's still hard by those standards. Maybe comparable to some of the meaner parts of the Special World in SMW, I guess? The Mario version of Mega Man Unlimited, perhaps. It is fair, and I cannot stress that hard enough or frequently enough because yes I know how many Mario ROMhacks out there aren't, but you still will be grateful for those infinite lives.

The second complaint is the key mechanic, which on its surface is actually pretty cool. Beating the warship and the Koopaling of each region is no longer the end goal of that region; finding the key is, and that's a matter of some "in level 4, crouch for 7 seconds and then make a jump standing between these two specific bushes in the background to reveal a secret" nonsense. It's still worth it to beat the Koopaling, because clearing each region in that sense unlocks free travel (you can move all about the map and stages you haven't cleared yet will no longer stop you... roaming forced encounters like the Hammer Bros. still will though) and the thank-you letter from the Princess reveals a big clue about the location of the key in that region. However--and this is purely a matter of personal taste, but according to my standards--I feel that the key locations are a little too arcane even with the hint, approaching "bring a walkthrough" territory.

The third is the weather system, in that there are daytime, nighttime, raining, etc. versions of every stage and which one you will play is chosen at random every time the stage is selected. In theory, "the stage can cycle through different weather effects" seems like a cool and mostly harmless little visual boost that adds some variety to each level, and for the most part it is. However, one weather pattern in particular (when it's snowing, naturally) adds ice skidding physics, and the others do literally nothing except look pretty I guess. Thus, in practice you have a 1/(4? 5? I forget) chance of "oops, it's snowing, maybe I should just not even try and throw myself into the nearest pit and just load the stage again because the last thing this already-difficult section needs is to also be an ice level." This can be obnoxious when you started the stage as Raccoon Mario or one of the other high-level powerups because of course you still lose those on death.

Still, this is a cool hack. Even if it felt like beating my head against a stage I just couldn't clear, I was still having fun slowly (very slowly) forcing my way through it until I randomly stopped.

Before I get into this review, I have to warn you all about something: there is a certain spoiler regarding the endgame of the original Dragon Quest 2, also known as Dragon Warrior 2. The nature of said spoiler should be fairly well known at this point. However, just to be excessively safe, I didn't mention it in the write-up from when we beat Dragon Warrior 2. That write-up did not spoil Dragon Quest/Warrior 2's ending. (The poster said write-up links to technically does, if you see what I'm obliquely referring to here and you put two and two together, but I didn't call attention to it in my writing.) This write-up, however, explicitly will. No, it's not much of a twist by today's standards (more on its impact at the time below, though.) Like I said, you probably know it already, anyway. Still, I'm just warning you... like... just in case?

( Yeah. Just in case. )

See, Dragon Quest Builders is a spinoff series that sets out to answer the age-old question, "What if Dragon Quest were Minecraft and also Breath of the Wild?" It has all the zillion-hour plot-heavy plot of a full-on Dragon Quest game--it is a full-on Dragon Quest game--only the gameplay is more of a Minecraft-like "go around and craft and build things in a world of cubes," complete with at least a few Breath of the Wild-like open-world exploration action RPG elements. Plot-wise, the first Dragon Quest Builders game was a direct spinoff of the first Dragon Quest game, with the same setting and a simple what-if twist: Dragon Quest Builders 1 is set in an AU where the hero of Dragon Quest 1 said "Yes" to the Dragonlord's offer of joining him and ruling the world together, at which point the two of them conquered and destroyed everything, there was a long time skip, and then the Builder comes along.

( Oops, there's that Dragon Quest 2 spoiler again )

Anyone who talks to us on IM or even has us added as a Nintendo Switch friend has seen how much this game has utterly claimed my life in the past few months. I've easily sunk a good 140 hours into it so far and I show no signs of even slowing down, let alone stopping. People, I'm an anxiety-ridden adult living in late-stage capitalism. I don't do 100+ hour romps like I'm eleven anymore. The original Dragon Warrior 2 was probably 15-20 hours, and in terms of how many actual calendar months I spent picking at it, I'm pretty sure I completed the main story of DQB2 in less time than I did DW2. That doesn't happen. But it did.

DQB2 is the perfect combination of everything I wanted or needed in a game right now. It has all the virtual Legos, customize-your-island, "let me show you this big mansion I spent 50 hours building" energy of Animal Crossing and Minecraft. It has all the emotional, impactful story-driven story of a hundred-hour Square Enix game. It has a nearly infinite number of things to do, even well into the post-game, without Animal Crossing's time-based shoot I forgot to do the Halloween event yesterday stresses. Every time I start the game, I look around and... let's see, what still needs doing? There are those rather ugly primitive rooms I made in the first settlement before a lot of the fancier materials were unlocked that could really stand to be remade at some point. There are tablet targets (basically in-game miniature Achievement-like objectives, things like "create X different kinds of food recipes," "tame and recruit Y different species of monsters," etc.) that I still need to complete. Oh, I never did finish a bedroom for the big castle in the third settlement before the plot kicked into high gear and I had to go run off and save the world; I should go back and do that so they have a place to sleep. The people in the third settlement are cooking egg dishes like stuffed omelettes faster than I can keep them supplied with eggs; perhaps I should go back to that one procedurally generated resource-gathering side island and tame and recruit some more chickens. I still want to turn the hollowed out space between the inner and outer walls of the second settlement's pyramid into a giant aquarium. Oh, there's an entire post-game epilogue story chapter that I'm told is amazing, so there's even more story stuff to do, though unlocking that has a whole bunch of prerequisites including finishing all the tablet targets. My ultimate goal is to take Kurt's castle--which we've seen a pretty clear image of in our guided imagery meditation sessions and spiritual visualizations, vivid enough to include a finely detailed floor plan--and bring it to life in this game. Kurt has such a big and beautiful castle. I wish you all could see it. You all will be able to see it. Eventually.

I highly recommend this one. Now that I've fallen into this pit, I'd love for you to join us. The free Jumbo Demo includes everything up to the final battle of the first entire story region of the game--a good 20-30 hours of content right there. If you get into it, maybe we can trade friend codes and you can tour our island.

As for us? Well, this game is complete in the sense that I have conquered the main story, defeated the end boss, saved the world, and seen the credits. However, this is clearly an ONGOING entry because a Builder's work is never truly over.

When I was younger, I had a poster.

To set the scene a little: The original Dragon Warrior (AKA the localized American version of Dragon Quest) was the first game I ever beat. It wasn't the first game I ever played (the NES did come with Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, after all, and I'm sure there were others,) but it was the first one that had an ending that young me was able to reach. The Dragonlord was defeated, Alefgard was saved. I did it. It was over. I won. The rush I got from that, to someone who had never experienced it before, was... immense, a feeling I can still remember.

We never owned Dragon Warrior 2, and I never got to play it until just now. However, we sure had that poster. I think it was part of some Nintendo Power promotion or another (much like Dragon Warrior 1 itself had been,) a giveaway advertisement meant to entice people to continue their adventure with this all new game. I'm honestly not sure why we never bit on that, because I couldn't have been more into the concept of it. I read and reread this poster, the enemies and items, and just imagined what this game could be like. I'm not sure whatever happened to the poster, but it disappeared ages ago, and I kind of regret its absence to this day. I've been meaning to track down a replacement on eBay or something, but they're kind of expensive these days.

As for the game itself... well. I guess I finally got tired of being wondering about it from afar and realized that, hey, I'm an adult now and I could just play the dang thing if I'm that curious.

Early Dragon Quest titles, like early Final Fantasy titles, have been ported and remade and ROMhacked and fan-translated a zillion times over, so the first step in the journey of correcting this age-old oversight was deciding which Dragon Quest/Warrior II to play. Each version has a lot of pros, cons, and apples-to-oranges comparisons about the localization versus the game balance and quality of life features versus the touchscreen controls and so on. In the end, for a variety of reasons, I settled for the good old original NES version, including the original western "Dragon Warrior II" localization and script. The only modifications I accepted (which admittedly were fairly big and important ones) were an XP/GP reward doubler because original NES DW2 is grindier than Breath of Fire II, and a thing to fix some menu display issues.

(And for those keeping track of self-imposed challenge levels: in addition to the payout doubler, there is an well known exploit that lets you farm Staves of Thunder to raise lots of gold as soon as you have access to all three keys, and an exploit that lets you get two Water Flying Cloths, both of which I used. There are similarly well known exploits that let you get the attack power of cursed equipment without the drawbacks, and those I did not use.)

After the events of the first game, the Descendant of Erdrick and Princess Gwaelin went on to found not one, not two, but three new kingdoms. You are [enter name here], the young Prince of Midenhall, and one of the Descendants of the Descendant of Erdrick. The evil priest/cultist Hargon is up to no good, and his army sacks and burns the kingdom of Moonbrooke. News of the tragedy reaches Midenhall, and your adventure is underway. You must team up with your cousins, the Prince of Cannock and the now-missing Princess of Moonbrooke, stop Hargon's army, and save the world.

Dragon Quest/Warrior II is an ultimately fascinating milestone of JRPG history, in that you can move from 1 to 2 and instantly see how it's the same game at heart but also see all the upgrades and innovations they were able to add.

Like, recall primitive Dragon Quest/Warrior 1 was. It starts with a text dump of the king of Tantegel giving you the entire story and sending you on your way. It has so many engine limitations that they accidentally establish rules--a town tile on the world map always leads to a friendly town, which plays the town theme and has no random encounters, you only hear the dungeon theme in caves and actual dungeons, and so on. That was what made Hauksness (the ruined ghost town from this icon) so traumatizing as a child and a gaming location I still find creepy and unsettling to this day: when it broke those rules, it was like... you can't do that, that's illegal. D:

The second game, by contrast, starts with an honest to God cutscene, using battle sounds and sprite flashing and disappearing to depict actors fighting and dying. It has a party of heroes and groups of enemies instead of one-on-one encounters. It has a boat, making water tiles accessible. It's... well, by modern standards this is still something you could probably make in RPGMaker, and it would be considered a fairly low-effort beginner game even then. But back then? Young me would have been blown away... and, somehow, current me kind of still is. DW2 remains similar enough at its core to DW1 that I find myself able to slip into the mindset I had back then, and see it with a DW1 fan's eyes.

I also saw it with the eyes of someone who grew up with that poster and it was really weird seeing the game namedrop all these enemies and spells and items after I'd heard and fantasized about the names for so long. Lottery tickets are kind of garbage items in this game, it turns out, because it's absurdly hard to win anything more valuable than a medical herb. The first time I ever found one, though, I instantly had a flashback to the poster and its cool artwork of it, and treated it like some kind of precious holy relic.

Mind you, all this isn't to say that DW2, especially the NES version, doesn't have its share of balance issues and bad game design decisions. I was playing with the doubler patch and still had to stop and grind a few times, especially in Rhone. Rhone... now I understand why the Cave to Rhone and Rhone itself are infamous That One Levels among series fans. The entire endgame isn't difficult so much as it is broken. The heroes' ever-advancing levels and power are counterbalanced not with tougher enemies, but cheaper enemies, the kind that know 100% unfailingly accurate party-wide instant death spells (if anyone ever casts Sacrifice that's a wipe, period) and various nonsense tricks like that. The final bosses... actually went down pretty quickly for me, mostly because they have a lot of cheap tactics they probably could have used but the RNG decided not to. The endboss can completely 100% full-heal himself at will, for example, but the only time he ever did that was at the start of the first round, acting before the party and casting it before anyone had even had a chance to damage him yet. Then we beat him in three and a half rounds before he had a chance to try that again. I can list at least five random encounters that gave us more trouble than he did. In fact, the only time the party ever ate a full-on Game Over party wipe was when one of said random encounters got off an unlucky Sacrifice.

The party inventory space is horribly restricted, at least in the NES version. Large parts of the main quest feel self-guided. (That is, the king gives you very little to go on besides "Go stop Hargon." There happens to be a dungeon over there, which you may decide to explore because that's what dungeons are for. The locations of a lot of required-to-complete-the-game key items are... not obvious. I feel like this was intended to be a "share secrets with your friends at recess" kind of game at the time; these days it's "you'll need a walkthrough.") There are large stretches of the game wherein the party's equipment is more powerful than they are--as in, "You over there, your function in this party isn't so much as a person as it is someone who goes into your inventory and use the Staff of Thunder as an item every round." The Prince of Cannock in particular is a roller coaster of a character who goes from being an absolute essential lifesaver and team MVP, to completely obsolete once Shields of Strength become available, then some of his buffs and debuffs and ability to heal other people (like when the Prince of Midenhall is too busy hitting bosses with his sword to have time to use his own Shield of Strength) finally start to become useful again just in time for the game to be over. There are probably other things I'm forgetting, too.

This game has a lot of new-for-its-time innovations but is still incredibly rough around the edges, is what I'm saying, here.

Still, there is an undeniable charm that shines brightly beneath the unpolished surface, especially for the kid in me who grew up with the original. This is Dragon Warrior 2. It's Dragon Warrior, only 2. Even now I can feel that it is everything that I would have wanted back then, and I'm thrilled that we finally got to experience it.

Especially because it was the "I dunno, I want to play this game but I should probably get through DW2 first" prerequisite to a whopping three other games on our radar (Dragon Warrior 3, Dragon Quest 11, and Dragon Quest Builders 2.) That plus finally answering the ancient curiosity from that poster made for a pretty worthy accomplishment here, I feel.

This one hurts.

Welcome to Moreytown by S. Andrew Swann is my first personal experience (friends have gone through other works and I've read their reviews) with Choice of Games, a publisher whose entire thing is Choose Your Own Adventure-style interactive fiction games. No graphics, no flashiness, just reading, multiple choice prompts, and some background stats that affect your chance of success when overpowering/sneaking around/persuading/etc. They also tend to be very open as far as your character's gender, gender identity, sexual orientation (including everything from "anything that moves" to "let's just keep things platonic, thanks") and more, which is nice.

This story, specifically, is about a city of anthropomorphic animals called "moreys" (cutesy reference to "Moreau," as in "Doctor," "The Island of") which is... okay, look. They're furries. I'm sorry, but they're furries and they're called "moreys" presumably in an attempt to come up with something grim and serious for this grim and serious setting, but like many of the endgame decisions (oh, I'll get to those,) I think it backfires a little. Anyway, an entire race of f... "moreys" was created for some war in the distant backstory, then given basic rights and such (sort of,) and now exist in a highly discriminated-against underclass relegated to run-down slums, low-paying retail jobs, and a very difficult relationship with the police. This game is very subtle with its metaphors, you see.

There's a gang war, a doomsday cult, a probably-doomed peace and love movement, lots of danger, and options. Your goal is to... well, that depends, I guess. You could try to foil the big terrorist attack at the end without casualties, take over leadership of at least a few of the various factions, become lovers or mortal enemies with several characters, and probably a few other things I either am forgetting or didn't see in our runs. Much like the gender and sexuality options, this openness appears to be a selling point of Choice of Games products, and on paper this is something that Welcome to Moreytown in particular does right in at least trying to include it.

This review hurts because on paper Welcome to Moreytown does a lot of things right, actually. The writing is well done and engaging. The character options only feel limiting in any way if you happen to be a furry whose fursona is not represented here. (You can get an actual type-whatever-you-want text entry box for your gender if you declare the need for one, but you're out of luck if your chosen species isn't on the predefined multiple-choice list. Which, yeah, that's probably because the game depends on those options for some stats--a bear is bigger, more powerful, but slower and worse at stealth than a rat. Fine. Stiiillllll.) Other reviews complain that this is very short, but I found that to be a good thing, as it makes it easier to replay. I was ready to declare it one of my personal GOTY candidates after the first playthrough, which was a whirlwind of adventure that ended in a near-flawless good ending almost by complete accident. It's just... there are two major, fatal flaws that become apparent upon closer examination.

One, a lot of that whirlwind turns out to be badly railroaded. Most of the plot beats will happen, whether you try to avoid them or not. There is no way to avoid being all but conscripted into one of the gangs, for example; you will be close enough to a certain incident to attract their attention, they will find you shortly afterward, you will come with them (you can agree or be kidnapped,) and you will cooperate with them (you can either lose the "initiation" fight and be at their mercy, win and accept the offer anyway, or win and be extorted into accepting when they threaten your friends/loved ones, and if you try to go to the detective or reporter contacts afterward they just want you to do exactly what the gang wants you to do anyway.)

Two, for as inevitable as the endgame is, it's also upsettingly hard to get through it in one piece. You are dealing with some incredibly twitchy suicide bombers, and while you have an impressive array of tactics to try (Tackle them? Try to talk them down? Warn the crowd? Work with any of the various factions, or confront them alone?) it breaks immersion just how blatantly the author has their finger on the "this option somehow works, that one backfires spectacularly and kills everyone" button. Choice of Games does not believe in a "save" function since it enables scumming; they say your choices should matter and you should live with the consequences of them, period. Fine, I respect that, but given how quickly and capriciously bad endings come in the last chapter, and how each one means a full restart from the beginning, let's just say it boggles my mind that anyone wanted this story to be longer.

I've seen and done about 68% of the things there are to see and do in this game, according to Achievement stats. There are even a few of them that I'm curious about. I kind of want to go back and see where some of the other roads lead, but I also kind of don't because I already know. It's strange how a game can feel so open and so on rails at the same time.