Annual Summary 2025

What a year.  Like, Jesus Christ.  Even 2020 wasn't this bad.  God damn.

Well.  Here are the RPGs that I played this year.


Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA
Bravely Default 2
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Dragon Quest 2
Final Fantasy 7 Remake 2
Hades 2
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1
Metal Max 1
An NPC's Odyssey
Pokemon Legends: Arceus


Yup.  That's right.  That's all.  I took the damn year off from ranting, freed up a bunch of spare time in doing so, and that's still all I have to show for it.  10 RPGs.  The smallest number I've ever played in the course of a year since hitting adulthood.  That's not even a single game per month, for fuck's sake!

I don't know what excuse I could have for this.  I mean, okay, sure, most of those games are really fucking big ones.  Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 is like 100 hours just on its own!  To say nothing of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Final Fantasy 7 Remake 2, and Pokemon Legends: Arceus.  And Hades 2 and Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA are the kind of games that are deceptively drawn out, where it feels like you're making quick progress through a moderately sized venture, and then somewhere along the line you realize you've hit 30 hours and you're relatively sure you're still only in the mid-to-late game.

But I always have some titanically sized RPGs on my plate each year, and I still manage better than this.  And that's when I'm taking the time to pump out a ton of rants on the side!  I dunno, man, I think I've just fully lost my touch for powering through RPGs.  At this point, I'm barely even holding steady to the number of games I get gifted each year for holidays and birthdays and whatnot.  It's annoying.

At any rate, here were the usual factors of time loss this year:



Anime: Anime barely even registers in my distractions this year, really.  I only watched 2!  I failed anime like I failed RPGs in 2025.  What I did watch were good ones, at least.  The first was Dungeon Meshi (its first season, at least, as the second has not yet arrived), and while I think that its loudly positive reception in the anime world might be a little more than it really warrants, it's definitely a fun, solid anime that I enjoyed.  And I definitely appreciate its message of the importance of self-care and the fact that pushing yourself to your limits constantly ultimately accomplishes less than going at a pace that allows you to stay at your best.  It's a message that we badly need to internalize, and Japan even more so.  With this and the confrontational approach to certain unhealthy attitudes toward sexuality found in I'm in Love with the Villainess and Gushing Over Magical Girls, and of course the aggressive critique of collectivism and several specific societal failings found in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 (granted, it's an older game by now, but through rereleases and sequels it's managed to maintain a relevant presence nonetheless), I continue to see promising indications that the creative minds of Japan are struggling more and more directly to effect a positive change in the country's populace, and it makes me pleased.

The other anime I watched was Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, and it's pretty great.  I was legitimately not expecting an anime that both paid skillful homage early on to personal favorite Revolutionary Girl Utena, and then launched into being an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest!  Like, that they managed to make a war-themed giant mecha anime work as an adaptation of a Shakespeare play is awesome to begin with, and the fact that they did so for one of his comedies just makes it all the better.  I mean, think about it--Shakespeare's works get adapted fairly often, but how many times have you seen something made of his comedies that wasn't just a direct retelling?  Cases where the beats and ideas of his plays are adapted to new and individual stories almost always seem to draw from Shakespeare's tragedies, stuff like Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, or sometimes some of the historical dramas; I don't think I've ever seen a sincere effort to make an adaptation of his comedies before, just the occasional retellings.  And GTWfM's ability to transform the concept of The Tempest into something very serious, dramatic, and at times violently dark just makes the whole venture all the more laudably interesting.  Not to mention, the anime is very good simply in its own right, too.  Really, really cool.


Books: Didn't get to many books this year, either.  What I did get to included The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall, which was an interesting and foundational work of LGBTQ culture and rights, but more drawn out than I might have wanted it to be—and it had such a downer of an ending, although of course it realistically had to, given the time period in which it was written.  Still, good to have experienced it.

I also did a bit of nostalgic reading of some books I enjoyed as a kid with Mother West Wind's Neighbors, by Thornton Burgess, which was fine enough, and My Father's Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett, which was a clever, fun classic that I enjoyed re-experiencing after over 30 years.  Man, time really is crazy.  Finally, I returned to a couple of favorite authors, as well, with A Caribbean Mystery, by Agatha Christie, which was...sadly pretty mediocre, but then, with a repugnant Mary Sue like Miss Marple in its starring role, that's about all one could hope for.  With how often Miss Marple's materialized in my reading of the past few years, I'm becoming concerned that all that's left of Christie's canon that I haven't already read is the Marple stuff.  Here's hoping I've just been getting a sampling of the stinkers by chance.  Finally, the other favorite author that I revisited was Suzanne Collins, with her most recent offering, Sunrise Over the Reaping, and it was great!  Not as much as the rest of the Hunger Games series, I have to say, certain parts of the ending are too contrived and/or too prequel-y and overt, but great all the same, and a treat to read through.


Non-RPG Video Games: I got an itch this year for something of the cyberpunk genre, and as a result found myself playing Invisible, Inc., which is a pretty well-made and fun stealth game that I'd recommend, as long as a disappointing ending isn't a dealbreaker for you.  I also checked out Danganronpa 3, which is somehow both the stupidest of the trilogy, and also the only one that's actually profound.  Lastly, as a chaser to my experience with the Ancient Greek pantheon in Hades 2, I played Atone: Heart of the Elder Tree, a pretty decent game that's rooted in classic Norse mythology.  Overall, decent year in non-RPG titles.


Streaming and the Like: Man, I fell way behind even just on watching cartoons and junk.  All I did this whole damn year was to finally finish DC Legends of Tomorrow, which for all its schlock still was pretty amusing guilty pleasure content right to its end, and DC Superhero Girls, which was so damn much fun and so damn clever and I just love it to death.  Oh, and I finally, after many years, picked up Bravest Warriors again and watched it to its completion, which...WOW did that show fall off fast and hard after its original 2 seasons.  Like, more than The Flash did, even.  There were still a few episodes in seasons 3 and 4 that were bizarrely fun and creative like the way the show started, but as a whole, what happened to that show?


Other Crap: I dunno, guys.  I mean, I worked at my job, I hung out a bit with friends, I spent time with family, I periodically explored new recipes, I cared for my pet...a lot of time went into this real-life type shit, but not significantly more than in previous years.  I guess I have spent a lot more time keeping up with current events than I used to, but it's hard to imagine that I've done that to such an extreme degree that it can explain the drastic drop in RPGs, animes, books, cartoons, and all the rest of my traditional pastimes.  I honestly have to wonder if maybe I'm depressed?  It's not exactly a crazy idea, given what's happened in the USA this past year, and the genuinely awful, relentless, and inescapable campaign to force widely unwanted and vastly worthless AI slop upon us all that's accompanied all the rest of 2025's vile happenings.  Maybe I'm just losing my appetite for the things I enjoy out of a psychological imbalance.  I dunno.  Probably something I should look into.  But anyways, yeah, normal stuff happened and took up some of my time and there's nothing especially interesting to report in that department, either.



Well that was fun!  And pathetic, and a completely inappropriate place for me to suddenly come to the realization that I might want to look into some hot single mental health professionals in my area.  Meh, whatever, I've made this rant super awkward now so it can really only get better from here, right?  Let's move on to the RPG content!



RPG Moments of Interest in 2025

1. Metal Max is well-named, because it's like if Mad Max was Metal Slug.  Well, actually, it's like if Mad Max was Metal Slug, except also they were both Fallout, and none of the enemies could decide whether they wanted to be in Mega Man X or Power Rangers, but Metallout Man Max Rangers isn't quite as catchy.

2. Wow.  Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 actually looked at Wild Arms 3's Gimel Coins and said, "Oh, this doesn't even come close to living up to its potential as a terrible idea!  Let me show you how awful game design is DONE, amateur: behold, Savior Schnapps!"

3. It's not exactly a surprise that Dragon Quest 2 wound up doing very little for me, lifeless and stale as its story and cast are even in an early enough time that the DQ approach wasn't willfully archaic and lazy yet.  But I will admit that having experienced it and DQ1 has given me a little contextual perspective on A Dragon's ReQuest, and that, at least, has some value to me.  So even if it's not really by any merit of its own conscious doing, I at least can regard DQ2 slightly more fondly than I do most of the rest of its series.  I think that's progress?

4. Speaking of Large Battleship Studios titles, its 4th creation, Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA, wound up being the 444th RPG I've played.  Neat coincidence!  And a great game to celebrate my single-digit palindromic quadracentennial RPG!

5. So when rampaging Pokemon burned his hometown to ashes, Pokemon Legends: Arceus's Kamado made a vow to create a community where people could live without fear.  And to do that, he...founded a village in an entirely new and essentially unsettled region filled to the brim with untamed, violently temperamental Pokemon.

Genius.

6. Remember that year where I coincidentally just happened to play 2 entirely separate RPGs that featured Grigori Rasputin as a major character?  Got another coincidence like that this year, only even more strikingly bizarre.  Prior to 2025, I had never, in my over 40 years of life on this planet, heard of the word or concept of Petanque before.  Not once.  And then suddenly, not just 1, but 2 RPGs, completely unrelated to each other, release in the same year that involve the word petanque.  Like, it was crazy enough to play 2 games that happened to include Rasputin as a cast member in the same year, but they were at least released at different times and I just happened to play them in close proximity.  Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, however, were both released during this same year, less than a month apart!  That is the kind of coincidence that'd be downright spooky if it weren't so benignly pointless.

7. Speaking of the game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the first ultra-hyped RPG that I don't think is overrated.  Yeah, Final Fantasy 7, The Witcher 3, Baldur's Gate 3, they're all absolutely great RPGs, and FF7 even made it to my list of the Greatest RPGs ever, but as excellent as they all were, none of them were the pinnacle of perfection that the general popular consensus perpetually seemed to tout them as (and I haven't played Elden Ring yet, so I can't comment on that one, but I have my doubts).

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, though?  It's pretty much as amazing as it's purported to be by the major gaming populace.  It's actually a really fun feeling to be able to just completely agree, no caveat, with the majority consensus for once.



Quote of the Year
Runners-Up
"Hrm.  Yeah, I guess I did get my head cut off.  Maybe I should take the rest of the day off."
  --Simone, Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA

"Men trip not on mountains, but they stumble on stones."
  --Esquie, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

"Out of the question.  I will never join you again."
"There will be a lot of fighting though."
"Oh yeah, that's true."
"Yeah, it's true."
"There will be a lot of fighting."
"Exactly."
"Count me in then."
  --Monoco and Verso, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

...You know what? On second thought, just count, like, 70% of the scripts of both Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA, as the runners-up of the best quotes of the year.  Because seriously, pick a good 3 random lines of dialogue from either game, and you've more than likely got some quotes that are absolutely shining examples of witty comedy or eloquent profoundness, possibly both, that'll beat anything else you hear or read this year.

Winner
"I worry that your cat is going to be a bad influence on that impressionable vampire."
  --Lasca, Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA


Best Prequel/Sequel of 2025
Winner: Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA

Aside from just being a genuinely excellent next part of Large Battleship Studios's expansive series of related stories in its own right, AAAVXA is great as a sequel not just for building on and incorporating the lore, ideas, and events of previous games, but for retroactively lending useful context to its predecessors.  It's fun that it incorporates characters and events from Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle, Quantum Entanglement, and A Dragon's ReQuest (often in very pleasantly unexpected ways; I was floored when I realized the origins that connected Knaves and Tuppi to previous games!), but it's really awesome that it also revisits its predecessors in such a way that improves them and ties up loose ends in the process.  There's a whole sidequest in AAAVXA, for example, that establishes where Chelisera was during the whole fiasco of 1 of the bad endings to ADRQ, and even resolves that ending in a manner that transforms it into a legitimate timeline, while also paying off the implications of Hinoki Jr.'s role in the LBS multiverse that were only established at the final moments of A Dragon's ReQuest.  Saint Bomber is not just a creator always adding to his palace of canon, but carefully rebuilding the existing elements of that palace to be strengthened and expanded by each new piece they connect to.  It's impressive and very cool.

Runners-Up: Bravely Default 2; Dragon Quest 2; Hades 2
I wouldn't say that either Hades 2 or Bravely Default 2 is as good as its predecessor, but BD2 is nonetheless a fine enough RPG that at least doesn't detract from the greatness of the first Bravely Default by association, and Hades 2 is, even if not as thoughtful or meaningful as its forebear, a solidly good RPG that incorporates the events and cast of Hades 1 well while very strictly maintaining its own identity.  Neither stands out as a sequel, but they do alright.

You might be surprised to see Dragon Quest 2 here, but even if I think it's pretty bad in its own right, there's no denying that the scope of its story and the effort put into its cast (even if still woefully inadequate) is a huge step up from Dragon Quest 1.  It builds itself off the lore and events of the previous title, expands them with its new adventure, and generally improves upon the foundations it's adopting--all the hallmarks of what a sequel should be doing.


Biggest Disappointment of 2025
Loser: Final Fantasy 7 Remake 2
For pretty much the entirety of the first Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and also this continuation, I found myself waffling back and forth on whether they were a net positive or a negative.  For every negative addition that the games made to the story of Final Fantasy 7, every botched or careless piece of writing or bit of forced unfunny humor or example of crappy pacing just to draw things out longer than they had to be or unwelcome addition of spinoff lore elements, every extra tiresome bit added of Sephiroth or the Turks or that idiot motorcycle SOLDIER guy, there seemed to be at least a good counterweight of an addition to the plot and cast that was unequivocally positive, be it the expansion of the characters of Wedge, Biggs, and especially Jessie (hell, Biggs's alternate-universe role in FF7R2 is some of my favorite content from any iteration of FF7!), the pitch-perfect portrayal of Aeris and the terrific extra time that characters like Barret, Tifa, and Red XIII have had to better shine within, additional elements of the world and its history being added that made sense and enriched FF7 as a whole, the drastic improvement of Cait Sith's personability, or so many more positive elements.  Hell, even some of the annoying new crap in the remake series has its positives to go with the negatives--for example, sure, Yuffie's bean gag is possibly the cringiest thing I've ever seen in my entire life and whoever decided that THAT was going be her comic thing should be savagely beaten in an alleyway, but on the other hand, Yuffie's way, way more appealing overall now while seeming completely true to the character she was always meant to be.  Hell, she's legitimately cute sometimes; her bored song to the chocobo tune is downright charming.  Similarly, even though the constant need to make every low-life villain encounter into some kind of comedy skit is tiresome, every now and then it DOES actually work, like with that 1 guy in the desert whose flunky won't stop making little side-hype comments the whole time he's speaking.  Basically, for the entirety of FF7R1 and most of FF7R2, I was torn about whether or not this remake series was ultimately a positive or negative for FF7, and honestly, there's a timeline out there where a perfect version of Final Fantasy 7 exists that's a combination of the original game, and quite a lot of the remakes' elements.

But by the time Final Fantasy 7 Remake 2 was over with, I finally had my answer.  It's bad.  The scales have been tipped too far, the stakes of the franchise cheapened too much, by this multiversal Sephiroth Lifestream bullshit to recover from, short of some very unanticipated miracle.  And worse than the disappointment of a remake of such an excellent game being unworthy of it, is the disappointment of that remake coming so close in so many ways to being a genuine article of its pedigree.  A lot of work, a lot of care, a lot of effort, all went into treating the cast and story of Final Fantasy 7 with dignity and sincerity in Final Fantasy 7 Remake 1 and 2, enough that it made a strong show of balancing out the idiotic George Lucas-esque narrative instincts of SquareEnix that kept dragging it down, and it's a real shame that it's now wasted on a remake that's gotten too caught up in its own extraneous, over-complicated silly nonsense to be especially good as a story.  Disappointing.

Almost as Bad: Bravely Default 2; Hades 2; An NPC's Odyssey
Like I said, Bravely Default 2 is alright--there're even a few parts of the game, such as the situation with the Leaps of Faith, that are earnestly quite good!--but it's simply not as good as its predecessor, and it kind of just overstays its own story by the end.  Not a bad game, but Bravely Default 1 was great, and Bravely Second was pretty solidly good, so it's still a step down.  Similar with Hades 2--it's a strong RPG as a whole, with likeable characters and a passable story that shines in how intelligently and cleverly it uses Ancient Greek mythology, but it can't seem to pull its ideas and themes together with the same succinct, warming, profound talent that Hades 1 had with its perspective and messages on family.  As for An NPC's Odyssey, there's nothing wrong with it, it's a silly, lighthearted comedy that I enjoyed even with its rough translation...it's just that it's really quite short, and I was having such a good time chuckling at it that I was sorry to see it end so abruptly.


Best Finale of 2025
Winner: Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA
Yeah, I know, it's crazy that the heavy, moving, philosophically complex endings of COE33 didn't make it to the top here along with the heroic final push that precedes them, but...for all its nuanced, intellectual value, the finale of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 doesn't satisfy as wholly as Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA does with its conclusion, and the desperation and Homura-esque relentless attempts to finesse the timeline to find a happy ending for all those who deserve it and justice for the cruel manipulator playing this con make for a more compelling and suspenseful lead-up to the true ending, to me.  Also, AAAVXA's best ending is one which retroactively enriches the story and approach of the game to anime and audience, and transforms the story of the game into not just an adventure, but the origin of a creation given life for all she's done for those who she's touched.  AAAVXA's true ending left me feeling not just satisfied and fulfilled at the way it finished its story, but also encouraged, celebrated for being the audience for and by whom ideas and passion are brought to life.  Too many RPGs try in their final moments to flip their paradigm on its head and fail completely in a way that worsens all that came before them--looking at you, Mass Effect 3, looking at you again, always, forever--but every now and then, you come across an author who really can re-contextualize everything that came before in a new light, genuinely for the better, with an unexpected twist or direction in an ending, and AAAVXA's finale and true ending is 1 such rarity.

Runners-Up: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33; Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1; Metal Max 1
COE33's finale is the heavy, artful, frightfully intelligent one that you would expect from this magnificent work of art, and I expect players will be passionately divided on the choice it offers for decades to come.  Metal Max 1's finale is a classic case of a hero saving the world (to the degree that a postapocalypse can be) and returning home to his humble beginnings, and while it's nothing special, it's comfortable and it feels right.  As for KCD1, the battle to retake the fortress is exciting and action-packed, the chase that follows and the showdown that concludes that chase are engaging, and finishing the game with Henry riding off to continue his journey for justice in this politically tumultuous age alongside his boy(friend, someday!) Hans Capon is great, and makes you ready to drop another 80 hours minimum on his continuing adventures.  Seriously, I was honestly sick to death of the actual act of playing KCD1 even if I was enjoying its story, but seeing that ending had me half ready to jump straight into the brand new sequel.  It's the kind of finale that's simple, but great.


Worst RPG of 2025
Loser: Dragon Quest 2
Look, the plot barely exists and what's there is generic and boring, and when I say that, I mean it's generic and boring even by 8-bit standards.  This guileless uninspired by-the-numbers stiff save-the-world story came out in the same age as Final Fantasy 1 and Phantasy Star 1; there was never a time in the history of console RPGs in which some nuance and creativity in story direction simply weren't known of and DQ2 just doesn't have an excuse for what it is.  The main cast barely speak, and what dialogue's there has no art or life to it.  All you can give DQ2, really, is that there's a little bit of lightheartedness to a fair few of its NPCs; beyond that, it has as little personality or value as any other member of its dry, witless family.  Early game or not, more could and should have been expected from Dragon Quest 2.

Runners-Up: Bravely Default 2; Final Fantasy 7 Remake 2; Pokemon Legends: Arceus
Again, BD2 isn't a bad game.  It's just an okay one.  And while that's no sin, with as few games I played this year, there's really no worse game to take the last spot in this category.  And I mean, in fairness, even if it's no worse than okay, there's something negative to be said for being wholly forgettable--I genuinely don't even remember the names of any of the main characters a mere 4 months after playing it, for Alephan's sake.  It's the kind of RPG that you go along with well enough while you're playing it, but put out of your mind forever once it's over, incapable of making a mark upon you.

As I mentioned earlier, the problems with FF7R2 finally stacked up, by its ending, to outweigh its positive elements, and once they did, the frustrations I've had with the remakes became all the more grating.  Just...too much self-important nonsensical bullshit piled on top of itself, too much adoration for annoying and shitty edgelord villains, too much of an overdose of the fucking Turks, and just trying too hard to make an already great and meaningful story into some overblown, grand multiversal conflict that winds up cheapening everything by inflating itself to be bigger than it's meant to be.

As for Pokemon Legends: Arceus, it's...well, it's just a Pokemon game.  I'd heard that it was supposed to be heavier on the story, and I guess that WAS a slightly more present factor in its sequence of events, but it still just didn't say or accomplish anything notable.  The feud between tribes that you solve by just sort of being there never seemed especially vitriolic or problematic, the whole resolving-the-magical-space-time-conflict thing is just some stuff happening that you eventually catch or defeat enough Pokemon to stop, and the secret villain is boring and, like everything else, just kind of there.  It doesn't seem like anyone was trying any harder on this Pokemon title than the typical main series ones, and they tend to be pretty bland.


Most Creative of 2025
Winner: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
This game is art, art that has not been seen before and like as not shan't be seen again, art that stands out and art that embraces all that it has built itself atop of.  From premise to story to its truth to its characters, COE33 is creativity in some of its highest form.

Runners-Up: Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA; Kingdom Come Deliverance 1; Metal Max 1
Honestly, Metal Max 1 was kind of robbed of the win, here.  I mean, a post-apoclyptic RPG based on tank combat and customization, with wacky and bizarre weapon-beast hybrids infesting the world and an out-of-control genocidal super computer tied to environmental concerns gone too far?  An open-world RPG, on the SNES?  That is insanely creative and ahead of its time!  In the same year that Cecil was plodding dutifully from 1 plot point to the next in Final Fantasy 4, Metal Max 1 was telling a loose but functional non-linear story with events and explorations that were pursuable largely at the player's discretion of order.  Fallout, 7 years before Fallout!  If COE33 was anything less than a paradigm-changing work of genuine art that will be remembered in the same reverent breaths as Nier: Automata, Disco Elysium, and Planescape: Torment, Metal Max 1 would absolutely have been the most creative RPG I played this year, no question.

A magical girl RPG is by itself a pretty neat and novel idea, and Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA leans into its premise, and the premise of anime in general, as it adapts the format of its storytelling and the content of its world and plot to pay homage to anime from the classic age of the 80s through the early 2000s.  But it's not just a by-the-numbers tribute to the medium; AAAVXA cleverly incorporates the mechanics of its homage into its lore and story in creative and at times shocking ways.  Additionally, it's chock full of inventive, unique misadventures, ideas, and characters; in no other RPG will you find a cocktail of pure-hearted Clerks homages, batteries with survivor's guilt, the Akashic Records, frog racism, a discussion of the ethics of rigged ojou-sama laugh competitions, a man who married Science, the genuine tragedy of slut-shaming, the most maliciously incompetent sign-writer ever, the proposal that our bulwark against nihilism is the person making your coffee, too many googly-eyes, a heart attack at a mime convention, potshots at gacha games, and just a whole heckin' lot of elongated vowels--and trust me, that's really only scratching the surface of all the weird, interesting, amusing, and/or profound directions that AAAVXA unexpectedly heads in from moment to moment.  And in terms of the main plot, well, there's a lot of heavy-hitting twists to Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA, and the truth of its real villain and conflict are not at all what you could expect; it somehow walks a tightrope between joyful embracing of its genre like Sailor Moon, bitter deconstruction like Madoka, and turning away to tell a different story altogether like Gushing Over Magical Girls.  While being very much what you might expect from its developer, AAAVXA is also uniquely its own beast, and just wildly creative all around.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 is notable for its dedication to portraying the medieval setting like no RPG I've encountered before--it's determined not to simply use the medieval setting for the fun and draw of it, but rather to celebrate the reality of medieval times, for which its story of war and heroism is simply a tool rather than the purpose.  It's also neat and different for just how personable it feels overall; Henry and the people around him seem far more like real, everyday individuals with significantly human personalities and traits than you might expect.  While not being distractingly different, KCD1 is far more creative with its approach and its humanity than I had expected.


Best Romance of 2025
Winner: Miriam x Simone (Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA)
Beautifully developed, genuine romances are Saint Bomber's specialty, and he's contributed far more than any single developer's share of the greatest love stories to be found in the RPG genre.  Even by his standards, though, I think that the connection between Miriam and Simone is touching, compelling, and a truly lovely meeting of hearts and souls.  There's so much time and care put into developing and deepening their relationship with chemistry that you can see advance and grow, containing such support and affirmation of affection both gentle and fierce...Miriam and Simone have such magnificent devotion to one another, as they're there with and for each other through both their lowest moments and the truly good times.  Love as it is when shared between Simone and Miriam is sweet, and genuine.  Each makes it possible for the other to be the best self of a person she hadn't even known she would become.  It's absolutely great, some of the best work in Saint Bomber's considerable portfolio of love stories.

Runners-Up: Debbie x Felicity (Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA); Mille x Simone (Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA); Nina x Red Wolf (Metal Max 1)
If I have 1 complaint about Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA, it--no, hang it, there's that other thing I'm gonna be making a whole rant to complain about.  Okay, if I have 2 complaints about AAAVXA, the second is that the way its narrative unfolds just doesn't make enough time for Mille and Simone's love to truly hold its own alongside the romance between Simone and Miriam--and the events of both the early and late game throw up too many obstacles against really showing and selling their love story.  Heck, the fact that even though canonically Simone, Miriam, and Mille are all, by the finale of the game, in a relatively mutual three-way relationship, I've nonetheless separated that triangle's halves for this category, should tell you just how inequal it is.  And that's a damn shame, because I really, really like Mille, and I was pulling for her as a love interest more than Miriam all the way.

With that said, Mille and Simone still have a great, believable, and often heartwarming romantic connection, and even though a lot of it happens off-screen, the way Mille's feelings for Simone develop to become something far more than they started as is 1 of my favorite parts of AAAVXA's many arcs of relationships and perspectives on love.  Mille and Simone also share the most engaging and easy chemistry as people who like each other, not just romantically but just genuinely as human beings, in the entire cast--you definitely can understand why Miriam herself ships them even as she's dating one and gently wooing the other.  I love me some sweet, fun, can-do romance, and that's Mille and Simone all the way.

Debbie and Felicity is a side-story romance, but their dramatic shared history, the events and the outpouring of Felicity's heart that brings them together, and the natural and positive glimpses we get of them in their life as a couple make them the equal of, or even superior to, most RPGs' main character couplings.  Almost more than the main love stories of the game, seeing Felicity refuse to put aside what they could and should have, and Debbie finally accept something good for her and someone good to her into her existence is therapeutically satisfying and warming.

And lastly, keeping AAAVXA from a hat trick in this category, we have the poignant case of Nina and Red Wolf.  It's simple, but it's compelling, and heartwrenching, to see the devotion this starcrossed couple has to one another--a love stronger than death itself, yet tragically unable to surmount the sins of their ruined, rotten world.  Simple tragedy, but in its simplicity, powerful.


Best Voice Acting of 2025
Winner: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Expedition 33's voice acting is top-notch, and more than that, its direction and arrangement is distinctively, singularly real and vivid.  Lines don't just go back-and-forth, they interrupt, they speak in conjunction, they make the next response possible, they convey the nature of characters' relationships by virtue of timing and tone, and it all adds up to a script that's brought alive as a living, breathing conversation like few other works can boast.  The interactions in COE33 often have more realistic fluidity than even live action media; even actors actually facing each other, directly speaking to and responding to one another, don't often reach the level of cooperative engagement that Verso and Monoco achieve multiple times in this game.  Like all else in COE33, it's really something else to witness.

Runners-Up: Bravely Default 2; Final Fantasy 7 Remake 2; Hades 2
Not every single performance or conversation is especially great or noteworthy in FF7R2, but as a whole, it's a darned solid example of voice acting--major characters sound right, and often even go above and beyond to make sure their inflection and approach helps a joke or charming moment land just right.  Considering that SquareEnix has had a tradition for over 20 years of always being at least 2 steps behind the rest of the gaming industry when it comes to voice work, it's nice to finally see them consistently display competence in this field.

Hades 2 is exactly what you'd expect from Supergiant Games in terms of voice acting: pure excellence.  We're a long ways past the days when they just patted Logan Cunningham on the back, told him "Go do your thing, Chief," and let him carry the game's entire script solely on his more than capable vocal shoulders, but somehow Supergiant Games always manages to get a great and memorable performance out of every artist that so much as slightly grazes their games.  Hades 2 is great talents doing some of their better work, and if Expedition 33 wasn't essentially the discovery of a whole new tier of vocal performance, Hades 2 would've topped this category, easy.

Bravely Default 2's voice acting is generally pretty good, but rarely anything to write home about.  But I have a weakness for the voices of garrulous Scotsmen, and also I do dearly love Martha and that sweetly cheerful Welsh (I think?) voice is definitely a part of that, so BD2's definitely getting its spot here.


Funniest of 2025
Winner: Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA
As ever, the same engaging wit, love for turns of phrase and puns, and clever approach to poking fun at the tropes and mechanics of a beloved genre and/or artistic medium that defines Large Battleship Studios's comedy is at work in this newest title, and it's as smile- and chuckle-inducing as ever.  The same humor that made Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle and A Dragon's ReQuest so damn funny, and gave us the contrast that both drew us further into and helped us cope with the tension of Quantum Entanglement, makes AAAVXA hilarious, too.

Runners-Up: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1; An NPC's Odyssey
I genuinely did not expect a lighthearted tone to be so significant a part of KCD1; I thought the game would simply play it as straight as any other open-world medieval RPG would.  But even if it's ultimately an expectedly dramatic venture, KCD1 always seems ready to let a bit of levity in when there's an opportunity for it, just enough to qualify it for this category, and surprisingly enough, it actually really works for the game as a whole.  The shenanigans with Hans Capon, delivering a sermon for Father Godwin in the middle of the hangover from Hell, Henry's frequent good-natured quips and sarcasm...the comedy of KCD1 doesn't just perform the usual duty of juxtaposition to its drama as the humorous moments of most dramatic works do, it also lends a distinct and pleasing personality to Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and also makes it feel more real, more human, to the player--and for a game with a major goal of accurately bringing the past to life once more, that's actually a pretty significant virtue.

As for An NPC's Odyssey, well, even if it does suffer from a shaky translation, you know how much I love humor that specifically pokes fun at RPGs and their conventions, and that's Job 1 for this game all about the journey of an NPC frustrated by heroes' callous disregard and the special treatment that the universe awards them.  It's silly, it's weird, it's clever and dumb at the same time, the main characters are appealing freaks...and I honestly love it all.  I still frequently mourn the fact that You Are Not the Hero never did come to fruition, but I feel a little more at peace with that loss now that I've played An NPC's Odyssey; it feels a bit like a glimpse into what YANtH could have been.  Honestly, if this game wasn't so damn short--it up and ends right while you think you're still in the thick of the adventure!--then it might actually have won this category.  As it is, though, it's still a fine, funny time!


Best Villain of 2025
Winner: Renoir (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
Renoir's an excellently written antagonist with depth and purpose to his actions and mindset, whose role and character can be dissected, discussed, and debated in indefinite detail along with the rest of the game.  He's an artful adversary and entity with the narrative weight to carry him through his part in his majestically thoughtful game, and the fact that you can hotly debate whether he even is a villain gives him all the more weight as a great one.

Almost as Bad: Mercy (Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA); The Sorceress (Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA); Toth (Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1)
Mercy came really close to winning this one.  Like, I actually want to say that she's the Best Villain of 2025.  Honestly, Renoir's edging her out is more on principle than anything else, as I generally believe that the best character and villain is the one with the most depth, nuance, development, and so on, and Renoir's the more layered, fascinating individual of the 2.  But man, Mercy is a far more loathsome entity, and the shape that her villainy takes is much more personally, penetratingly harmful to her victims than the theoretically well-intentioned desperation of a grieving father that Renoir perpetrates.  Mercy is selfish and pettily uncaring, an apathetic, simple, greedy 2-bit con in spite of all her grandstanding as something greater--and God, isn't that an exhausting and familiar monster to us all now?  I hate Mercy in a way I couldn't hate her as a grandiose RPG supervillain; she's lousy and evil and petty and vicious in her apathy and it all makes her a great villain whose like bleeds from fiction into reality and back again.

The Sorceress is another solid villain from AAAVXA, one whose personality is established very well with lots of development, and whose motivations are interesting and imbalanced.  Mostly, though, she's an awesome villain for her truly calamitous origin story, a disaster and twist that honestly just kind of floored me when it was revealed and laid out.  As for Toth, he's just 1 of those bad guys who's the exact right amount of spiteful and evil that he just really works in his role and gets the player to fully understand why the hero's so driven to bring him to justice, a memorable baddie by villainous virtue of personality alone.


Best Character of 2025
Winner: The Entire Main Cast of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
It's a cop-out and I don't care.  If we took them individually, as personalities and layered creations and intentions and conceptual/philosophical icons, the major figures of COE33 would dominate this category, and trying to sort them out to determine who's the best-written of all would be too damn difficult.  So we're keeping it simple: the strikingly, magnificently written cast of COE33 as a whole wins top accolades this year.

Runners-Up: Biggs (Final Fantasy 7 Remake 2); Mille (Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA); Miriam (Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA)
As with all Large Battleship Studios titles to date, the cast as a whole is where AAAVXA most greatly shines, chock-full of prominent, singular, engaging personalities at every level of its cast, and of them, I think Mille and especially Miriam are the ones who receive the most care and development, "most" in both quantity and quality.  The transformation of Miriam over the course of the game is both striking and subtle, a major shift in her perspectives on the world and particularly on herself that nonetheless is so naturally effected and carefully paced that at no time does she feel like a different person or personality, simply an ever-better version of herself thanks to the positive influence of the woman she loves.  Mille, meanwhile, has a course of development less overtly seen, but meaningful and intriguing all the same, and if she can't quite match the narrative devotion to Miriam, she's still a terrific character, and makes up some of that gap with, I would argue, the most assertively interesting personality in the game. 

Biggs was a really surprising, terrifically positive addition to the retelling of Final Fantasy 7's mid-game, and I found his combination of survivor's guilt, existential quandary, and determination to still try to make a difference in a doomed world to be a really compelling, skillfully-crafted personal arc.  Even though he's sort of meant to just be an accessory to Zack's own personal story (which, I should mention, was also actually quite good), Biggs's questioning, difficult story had the most life out of all the subplots in FF7R2.  The moment that Zack catches up to him at the reactor, and Biggs is just sitting there, eating chips because the truth of the end of it all is staring him in the face now and he's accepted it...great moment.  For a guy who was a minor side-character in the first few hours of the original game and basically only there to provide motivation for the main heroes with his death, and for a guy whose transformation in the Remake was basically just to do the same thing but also be a weird and distracting reference to a couple of 90s parody movies, Biggs really managed to become someone profound in this second installment of FF7 Remake.


Best RPG of 2025
Winner: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Sometimes an RPG comes along that pushes the boundaries of what we believe games can be, exploring a new tract of artistic and/or philosophical territory that redefines what we believed the medium of video game could convey and embody.  There are RPGs that have such significance that they can, should, and likely will be milestones of human thought and expression reviewed far into the future with the same reverence and academic fascination as classic literature is today.  And I strongly believe that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will be joining the same worthy ranks as Nier: Automata, Planescape: Torment, Disco Elysium, and a few others in forming the backbone of this emerging genre of lasting, thought-provoking interactive classics.  COE33 is a magnificent and heavy RPG, and playing it is almost sure to be a formative event for anyone.  2025 as a year doesn't exactly have a lot going for it, and I doubt many of us are going to be able to look back fondly upon it, but COE33 is certainly 1 shining light that the year can cling to as proof that 2025 still had its virtues.

Runners-Up: Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA; Hades 2; Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1
One of these years, it's going to be Large Battleship Studios's year.  Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA is the fourth time now that Saint Bomber's put out a wonderful, excellently emotional and fascinating RPG that's been well worthy of earning the top spot of RPGs I've played that year, only to just barely be edged out by another.  Hell, it wasn't even right that Quantum Entanglement didn't take the win in 2021--I gave it to Horizon 0 Dawn that year, but when I recently revised my Greatest RPG List again and looked back on them, it was QE that made it onto the list and not H0D, so I guess logically that means that Quantum Entanglement was the real greatest RPG I played that year, and I made a stupid mistake.

Now granted, I'm pretty confident that this time around, retrospect will still favor Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as the greatest game of this year, but the fact remains that AAAVXA is a truly excellent title that more than merits best-of-the-year status.  Inventive, passionate, filled with clever and quirky writing that forms a palatable coating to the harsh and difficult pain and trauma within its core, boasting an interesting, unexpected, and well-developed plot with a backbone of unique and excellently crafted characters, pleasing with its wonderful romance and eager, amusing humor even as it refuses to shy away from dramatic pain and darkness, AAAVXA is very much another iteration of Saint Bomber's great gift for poignant, affecting games, and it, like all his previous creations, is highly recommended.

In all honesty, Hades 2 is not Supergiant Games's best work--it just doesn't have the cohesive thematic strength that Hades 1 did, even with its recently improved additional finale content, and it certainly doesn't measure up to Transistor or Pyre, either.  But there's really no shame in being in the lower half of the Supergiant Games canon--even at their earliest and least capable, SG was still making high-quality content that garnered wide acclaim and helped lay the foundations for an age of Indie gaming that continues to grow today.  Hades 2 is still fun, wildly creative with and knowledgeable about ancient Greek mythology, and highly engaging with its story and cast.

I'm always very happy when a game I helped crowdfund turns out to be as good as promised, but I admit that I'm still pleasantly mystified by the level to which Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 exceeded what I thought it would be.  I had hoped and expected a reasonably sincere, decently written open-world adventure that better captured the realities of the medieval life and times than most, and to be sure, KCD1 does a damn respectable job of that.  But I was not expecting it to be so personable.  The characters and goings-on of KCD1 feel uncannily human and realistic, less a story played out through the efforts of actors and more a genuine snapshot of the human beings involved in the life, politics, and warfare of early 1400s Bohemia--and just as real as the drama and determination of Henry and the people he encounters are their everyday attitudes, their occasional flippant perspectives, the ways they interact, and their understandings of their lives and world.  When Warhorse Studios set out to convey the medieval age in complete accuracy, they made sure that a part of that was to convey the human beings of that age, too, and it's the realism of Henry as a person, and of his allies and of the many people he interacts with in his journey, that makes Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 a really good RPG just as much as its solid story, concept, and narrative construction do.  



List Changes
Funniest RPGs: Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA and An NPC's Odyssey have been added; no games have been removed--A Dragon's ReQuest, Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA, and Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle have been condensed into a single spot (since, while all distinct and worthwhile games, the humor in all is the same recognizable brand, and relatively equally great).
Greatest Deaths: [REDACTED] from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been added; [REDACTED] from Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume has been removed.  Sorry, you [SPOILERS] parent who put himself in protagonist's place for pain and pleas for him to put away his persisting profane pique.
Greatest Examples of Battle Systems: Not a major change exactly, but the slot for the greatest Action RPG is now shared between Hades 1 and 2, since the games share the same overall impeccable mechanical virtues.
Greatest Romances: Miriam and Simone are definitely getting added to this list, but since I wholeheartedly refuse to have a version of this list that doesn't include Arueshelae and the Protagonist of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, I'm gonna just be doing a full-on update to it sometime next year.
Greatest RPGs: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been added; Final Fantasy 10 has been removed.  Sorry, you stirring story of sweet sentiments and selfless sacrifice.
Weirdest Characters: No change to this one yet, but as with the Romances list, I think it's high time I expanded this a few places, because when Sammy the Renaissance Somnambulist from An NPC's Odyssey isn't quite bizarre enough to make it to a list of the biggest weirdos in RPGs, something is clearly wrong.  COE33's Monoco should have a fighting chance at it, too, for that matter.


Music Additions
Note: Bolded songs were rated an A+.

Them's Fightin' Chords
Baldur's Gate 3 Final Battle
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Epic Battle
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Francois
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Spring Meadows Battle
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Tutorial Battle
Super Lesbian Animal RPG Boss Battle

Hither, Thither, and Song
Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA Abyss
Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA Final Dungeon
Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA Sewers
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Boat Graveyard
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Coastal Cave
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Stone Wave Cliffs
Bravely Default 2 Forest
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 Town
Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Arena

Chime Really Feeling It!
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 [REDACTED]'s Funeral
Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Sad Memories

See You Bass Cowboy
Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA Worst Timeline
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Monoco

All That and a Bag of Chiptunes
Chrono Trigger Lab 16 Ruins Remix
Super Mario RPG Remachination Remix

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is now the third best RPG soundtrack I've heard!  And if they haul Lorien Testard back into the recording studio for some new material in the inevitable DLC, it might just wind up supplanting Undertale at second--or even start gunning for Chrono Trigger's top spot!


And that's it for 2025!  And good fucking riddance to it, at that.  I mean, yeah, okay, great year for gaming as a whole with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Silksong and Chrono Gear: Warden of Time and Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA and Split Fiction and a ton of other titles treading new ground of excellence across multiple facets of the gaming landscape.  But outside the bubble of great games and Indie developers really cementing a foothold as full-on competitors to the lackluster so-called AAA publishers, the year was not good to us all.  Not that I expect 2026 to be a substantial improvement, honestly, but perhaps, having taken the blitzkrieg of beatings that the greedy and vain scum of the political, economic, and tech worlds began raining down on us all this past year, we'll fully rally ourselves to make 2026 the year we push back against fascism, egregious wealth disparity, AI pressure, and so on hard enough to actually beat them back a bit..

And who knows, maybe I'll actually somehow rally myself and play a respectable number of RPGs for someone who has the audacity to assert that he is a Genius at them.  I mean, I've already given up on hitting 20 or more like the good old days, but surely my goal I mentioned last year of 15-ish is still attainable?  At the very least, I've got a couple I'm aiming to play that'll almost certainly be pretty great, chief among them Metaphor: ReFantazio, and I think Large Battleship Studios's next venture, which will doubtless be awesome, might be planned for a 2026 release, too.  Who knows, maybe I can restore my yearly RPG experience of quality AND quantity come 2026.  Crazier things have happened!  Someone made a good Superman movie recently, and it was good even though Guy Gardner was the Green Lantern they chose, and somehow he was even part of what made it good--fucking anything is possible!

Anyway, enough of all this yapping.  Once again, I'd like to express my sincerest and warmest thanks to my friend Ecclesiastes, and my sister, for continuing to be my sounding board and test audience for these rants.  The lighter load this year doubtless gave them cause for a sigh of relief, but they weren't fully off the hook, and the fact that they've just always been fully willing to let me yammer at them about all this stupid inconsequential nerd shit without even the hint of complaint continues to fill me with utterly mystified gratitude.  A hearty thanks to my friend Angel Adonis, too, who's generous enough to do the same with a few rants now and then on the games that he's familiar with.  All y'all are great.

And of course, a further, humble bow of gratitude is given to Ecclesiastes for continuing to be my Patron.  The man must surely have some deep, dark secret sin that he's trying to work off through the penance of allowing me to sling the thoughts in my head at him in their least refined state and then rewarding me for doing so with a monthly gift of cold, hard gil, and Orsa bless the man, I selfishly hope he never finishes this road to redemption in which I play the part of the rocks in his boots.  As ever, sir, thank you.

And lastly but never leastly, I say thanks to all of you who read these rants (at least, those of you who aren't just AI models sabotaging themselves by training themselves on my offerings).  I know you had lean pickings this year, but for those whose morbid curiosity was tenacious enough to stay with me through it, I promise to be back to at least some relatively decent rant schedule next year.  I'm not decided on what it will look like--even with a year to build up some rant reserves, I don't think I can keep up my traditional thrice-a-month schedule--but we will be properly back come 2026.  Until then, happy holidays, take care of yourselves, and never give Ubisoft money.  See you in a few weeks!

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Theory: Lune is a Paintbrush

Alrighty, 1 more regular rant for the year, I think, before the Annual Summary at the end, and then we'll be back to some form of ranting schedule in 2026.  Thanks for bearing with me on this little hiatus I've taken this year!

Credit and thanks to the ever-esteemed Angel Adonis and Ecclesiastes for each having the generous, indulging patience to listen to me spew at them the nonsense that follows, and through that allow me to collect my thoughts enough to construct a "proper" rant out of it.  Peak gent energy at all times from these guys, lemme tell you.  Thanks, fellas!



So, I think Lune is a paintbrush.

Symbolically, I mean, not literally.  Although this is Expedition 33 we're talking about, a game which has so masterfully dovetailed theme and symbolism with lore and concrete fact that you almost can't find the seams between them, so who knows, maybe I'm picking up on something that's got an in-universe presence and explanation, too.  Either way, I've noticed certain things about Lune's presentation and design that, when put into the context of COE33's overpowering and omnipresent theme (and literal setting) of the art of painting, make me think that she's meant to represent a paintbrush--or perhaps that the idea of a paintbrush was used as inspiration during her creation.

Alright, so, first of all, let's look at the most physically distinctive part of Lune: her feet.  Aside from the very real possibility that some woman or man on the development team was gratifying a fetish while on the clock--and I can't really blame her/him that, because after spending an entire game watching Best Girl flaunt the things, I'm pretty sure I'm starting to get where Tarentino is coming from on this subject--there may be a distinct purpose to how emphasized they are.  Lune's default outfit, as well as several of the others you can collect for her, have her going barefoot--not generally advisable when engaging in a world-spanning trek through wild and hostile territory, but when your version of running is to gracefully glide full-speed just above the ground like Chrono Trigger's Magus, the original magical powerhouse badass of RPGs, you can tell hiking boots to go take a hike, just not the one you're on.  Additionally, her approach to combat is very foot-heavy, with many of her attacks and abilities incorporating kicking in some way, which is a very interesting and unique approach for the party's mage.  Several of Lune's spells involve her zipping through the air and bringing her heel down in various jump-kick pantomimes as various elemental attacks like Rock Slide, Crystal Crush, and Elemental Genesis are made--or sometimes very literally kicking the enemy multiple times with elemental power, as with Lightning Dance--and of course her basic attack is an outright double-foot dropkick like she's an obstinate anime horsegirl.  Yes, there's plenty that Lune does that involves more traditional magic-y gestures of her arms and hands as she calls elemental wrath upon her foes, but her feet seem to be the foundation of her magical combat style.

Most interesting to me, is the fact that many of Lune's elemental skills involve her physically connecting to the ground below her, most of the time through her foot.  She stomps down as she casts Wildfire and Earth Rising, leaps up and brings herself crashing down to the soil once more as the warm-up for Hell, and she gathers electric energy by rubbing her heel on the ground as though building up a static charge for Lightning Dance, among others.  Again, there are times when it's her hands making contact with the ground, such as the secondary motions for Hell and Earth Rising, but, as would only make sense, it's most often that it's her foot that touches the world's surface during her attacks.  Frequently, this connection is visually represented by a jagged glowing pool on the ground at the connection point with her of whatever color corresponds to the element she's making use of.  Red for fire, blue for ice, and so on.

And you know what it kind of looks like?  It kind of looks like she's a paintbrush making contact with the next color that she's about to apply to a painting.

I mean, really, that sort of IS what she's literally doing, to some degree.  For a great number of her spells, Lune is very clearly drawing out the elemental energies of the world itself with which to attack her enemies.  And not only are the elements she's drawing on clearly color-coded,* the very energy of her world, the life force that's being converted into fire, ice, lightning, and earth, is known as Chroma, a term connected to color whether you're looking at it through the lens of English or French.  In a world physically made of color as a form of matter and energy alike, Lune is drawing that color up through a physical connection to it, with the intention of applying it (albeit with extreme, damage-in-the-literal-millions hostility) to that which stands before her. 

It's exactly what a paintbrush does—connect to the desired color upon a palette, and then convey that color onto a canvas before the artist!  With her kick-centered style of spell combat, it's even frequently the same physical part of her, her foot, that touches upon color base and target both, as a paintbrush's tip** and bristles do.  Said foot also interacts with the ground she's drawing Chroma from in similar ways as a paintbrush does as it gathers the colors on its palette--an energetic back-and-forth motion for one attack, a forceful dab for others, and so on.  And not for nothing, but in the strong majority of her skills, a visual side-effect of whatever elemental powers have been brought to bear on Lune's enemies is that there's a brief moment in which the same kind of glowing splash of color is on the ground beneath them--the pooled residue of the deadly color energy Lune has hit them with--as forms beneath her when she's gathering the power for her attacks.  She really is taking color from 1 spot and splashing it onto another as a paintbrush essentially does.

Also?  Lune's weapon, her companion accessory, is totally a palette.  Like, look at the thing.  It comes in many different shapes and with varying quirks and features, but every version is a thin little board that she literally uses to hold color stains.  With the stain mechanic of Lune's gameplay, the colors that she's taken from the world at her feet are put into her weapon's slots...as they would be applied to any palette for its paintbrush partner's future use.  And the fact that these color stains can make her spells more powerful even makes symbolic sense: the elemental power she's applying to her enemies is made richer, its hues more complex, as the remains of previously used colors mix with the main color of the current attack.

Additionally, though this is a small detail and a bit of a stretch…the fact that Lune's hair is black is probably just a coincidence, but it might possibly be another intentional paintbrush-like quality, as the tools usually have bristles that are either black or white.  Lastly, Lune's form of running, that being gliding in that awesome Magus-esque fashion I mentioned before, could be another part of this symbolism, as, when considering that her feet are essentially the bristles to her brush, it's sort of showing the idea that an artist isn't just dragging their brush all over the place, but rather holding it aloft as they move it into place, only allowing it to touch down when there's a purpose to doing so.  Similarly, Lune glides along to each destination without touching herself to the ground unnecessarily, only doing so once she arrives at her destination or encounters an enemy that needs a fresh coat of hurt.

Now, could I be reading way too much into Lune's style and presentation, assigning it greater significance than was intended?  Sure!  Every theory rant I do is pure conjecture and probably utter nonsense, you all know this.  Still, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a game that builds significant meaning and layers into practically its every facet; it's unarguably 1 of the most thoughtfully artful games ever created, and I'd bet I'm not sharp enough to come up with an idea this peculiar and specific if it weren't intentionally put there to be seen.  So I think there's at least a good chance that this concept of Lune as a spiritual paintbrush might very well hold water!  Or paint.  Whatever.









* In fairness, toddler-level association of color to elements is a thoroughly ubiquitous practice in RPGs.  But I do think that it's safe to say that it has an actual thematic function in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, even if simply through a convenient coincidence of RPG conventions.


** Fun fact: I have just discovered that the official term for the tip of a paintbrush is "toe."  Also, the back of its brush part is called the "heel."  So even the real, actual terminology of a paintbrush backs up my idea here that Lune is meant to be one.

Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA

My vacation year continues, but come on, the 8th day of the 8th month, on a blog that usually publishes on the 8s?  It just wouldn't be right to let today go by without posting a rant!



Large Battleship Studios has released another RPG, and given that its captain, Saint Bomber, has in the past half-decade become one of my favorite RPG creators, and because I like to encourage everyone to give small independent developers a fair shake, it was pretty much a forgone conclusion that once the game finished downloading, this rant was forthcoming.  Well, I mean, it might have been avoided if the game wasn’t very good, I don’t recommend-rant every Indie RPG I play, but the newest offering from LBS is as great as expected.  I mean, hell, it’s a game that’s slinging around quotes from Clerks, Ghost Stories, and Delita Hyral, while referencing The Musicians of Bremen and the save points in Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden; there wasn’t much of a chance that I wasn’t going to love it.

So, Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA!  What can be said about it?  An RPG Maker creation with a heavy Magical Girl theme, AAAVXA tells a deceptively colorful and friendly story that follows and highlights an interesting, layered cast of characters with memorable personalities, and rich emotional depth and conflicts, as it expertly digs into their psychological foundations, and uses the tools of an expansive and provoking level of lore, and flippant, sometimes witty, sometimes simple, always charming humor and wordplay, to aid it in fully unearthing the myriad complexities its characters have to offer, both in their own right and in tandem with one another.  There’s romance galore, some of which is strikingly genuine and beautiful, for both how sweet and how bitter it is as lovers share their highest moments and bring one another out of their lowest.  There’s terrific banter and witty reactionary monologue, entertaining both in its own right and as meta-humor.  And there’s darkness and existential dread, twisted and chilling moments of selfish evil, terrible psychological hurt and trauma that makes your heart beat in painful sympathy for the suffering of these characters you’ve so organically grown to care for.  Angelic Acceptor Alouette is a poignant web of joy and life and hate and love and pain and callousness, and all the ways they intersect.

So, you know.  The usual!

Yeah, that’s the thing.  The fine qualities that I outlined in my enthusiastic recommendations of Quantum Entanglement and A Dragon’s Request, and that I managed to mention in my fumbling rant on Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, they’re all here.  So is the tenacity and gift for endless and authentic exploration of characters and relationships that I mentioned in another rant about Large Battleship Studios’s works as a whole.  The assortment of terrific virtues most prominent about Angelic Acceptor Alouette are largely the same as those of the developer’s previous works, and if all the glowing praise I’ve heaped on QE and ADRQ previously didn’t convince a reader that he/she should be checking out Large Battleship Studios’s creations before, I doubt retreading the same ground for a third or fourth time around is going to suddenly change that.  Now of course, AAAVXA is by no means itself a case of retreading the same ground, and the undeniably great story, characters and relationships, themes, purposes, and lore of Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA are very much its own.  But the reasons and behaviors through which it achieves its greatness are largely the same methods that made Quantum Entanglement so amazing, Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle so endearing, A Dragon’s ReQuest so touching, and all of them so fulfilling.

So then, instead of what can be said about AAAVXA, maybe the question is, what can be said about it that hasn’t been said about its predecessors?

At least a little, I think!  To start with, there’s some decent novelty to the idea of a Magical Girl RPG; I’ve only ever played 1 other before AAAVXA, and that was based on a preexisting franchise (Sailor Moon), while Angelic Acceptor Alouette is its own thing.  Not that it’ll be any less familiar for its being an original work, though--AAAVXA is by and large a sincere and comprehensive love letter to Magical Girl anime, and its story elements, concepts, and approach pay loving homage to a wide sample of the genre’s franchises.  Often directly and by name--the characters of AAAVXA are anime fans themselves, and frequently make mention of Magical Girl shows like (their legally distinct version of) Precure as they muddle through their own roles as warriors of love.

But even when not outright referenced, the influence of genre staples like Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura is easily seen in the trappings of the game and the execution of its premise, and the gradually increasing depth and darkness of AAAVXA’s plot likewise takes recognizable cues from series like Lyrical Nanoha and Madoka, cornerstones of the genre’s growth over time.  It even incorporates elements from animes that are more Magical-Girl-adjacent than true examples of the genre--there’s no way you could ever convince me that there wasn’t a lot of Revolutionary Girl Utena’s student council in AAAVXA’s antagonist coalition, for example.  Thankfully (and a little impressively), though, Angelic Acceptor Alouette always manages to maintain its own distinct personality through it all, and it makes that which is borrowed undeniably its own each time, making it a pleasing best-of-both-worlds combination of reference and original content for a Magical Girls fan.

Actually, it’s kind of just a love-letter to anime in general, really.  I mean, Magical Girls are obviously the predominant genre in the spotlight, but AAAVXA’s got entire significant sequences devoted to (legally distinct) Beyblade and Pokemon, protagonist Simone’s favorite anime that dominates her free time is of a more action-adventure 90s-esque variety, her school’s vice principal is over-the-top and amusingly obsessive in the fashion that more comical animes like Ranma 1/2 enjoy portraying school staff, there’s an entire lengthy isekai sidequest...and hell, during AAAVXA’s events, there’s also an entire other major Kamen-Rider-styled storyline happening in the next city over that overlaps with Alouette’s several times, which represents arguably a more substantial battle between good and evil than AAAVXA’s actual plot (by the game’s own admission, mind you).  Also, whereas the most frequent subject of Saint Bomber’s bread-and-butter referential and meta humor in previous works like A Dragon’s ReQuest and Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle was RPGs--much to my delight, of course--the lion’s share is devoted to anime this time around.  If you love anime and you’ve been a fan of it since it first got its real foothold into western geek culture in the 90s and early 2000s, you’re going to really enjoy Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA as it celebrates what you love.

And for that matter, as well as celebrating the anime that you love, AAAVXA also celebrates that very love you have for it.  The story that it tells is subtly one of both the power of fiction, and the importance of that power.  Protagonist Simone frequently contextualizes her experiences through pop culture, memes, and most of all anime shows and tropes, and while this behavior is most often the tongue-in-cheek reference humor and lampshading signature of Large Battleship Studios’s brand of comedy, it’s also frequently a way that Simone deals with stress, panic, and the darker side of both her current life and her past.  In his expansive and ongoing quest to explore trauma and how we react to, handle, carry, and attempt to resolve it, Saint Bomber displays the value of anime, and fiction as a whole, for its ability to help us cope with the harder parts of our reality and what has happened to us, not just as a means of escape, but as a tool to help us process our life and experiences.  Events of importance to fans, such as the death of one’s favorite character, are shown with care and weight, and in some ways the ultimate purpose of AAAVXA’s tale is the triumph of fiction gaining a life of its own.  Angelic Acceptor Alouette takes a fan’s investment in what they love seriously, which is perhaps a little too rare a thing in RPGs and media as a whole--even when well-meaning, such as, say, Conrad Verner from Mass Effect, invested fans are usually portrayed ultimately as punchlines in a manner too close to that of the graceless Big Bang Theory’s exploitation.  But as the true ending of AAAVXA concluded, not only did I feel that I’d witnessed a game that recognized the depths to which I care about the art that I watch and play,* I also felt that my being an audience has worth.  And that was a really neat thing for me.

So, yeah, Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA is another game from Saint Bomber that I highly recommend.  I recommend it for the usual laundry list of reasons that have made his stable of offerings unique and great, and have made him one of my favorite RPG creators--possibly my favorite, period.  And I recommend it for anyone who especially loves, and/or has been greatly influenced by, anime and fan communities.  It’s at its best if it’s not your first foray into Large Battleship Studios’s works, mind you--the events and lore of AAAVXA, and even parts of its cast, are built very directly and significantly on Quantum Entanglement and A Dragon’s ReQuest, so at least a fair bit of the pleasure of experiencing AAAVXA is found in the context they provide and the ways in which its storytelling intermingles with those titles.  But if this recommendation has resonated more than the ones I’ve done for its predecessors, if you just really like the idea of a Magical Girl RPG to a degree that QE and ADRQ didn’t appeal to you, then AAAVXA stands more than well enough on its own, too.

As usual, of course, I do have to at least give a couple caveats to my recommendation.  As with all of Saint Bomber’s creations, the game has some sexually explicit content--but you can turn it off at the start, and it’s actually unexpectedly less prevalent in AAAVXA than in the previous Large Battleship Studios games (which there’s actually an in-game reason for), so that shouldn’t be much of an obstacle.  Additionally, as usual for LBS titles, AAAVXA both is heavily invested in romantic relationships, and has an almost entirely female main cast,** so...if you don’t like it when girls are in love with girls, then this ain’t it for you, chief.

There is, however, 1 aspect of the game that could turn off a potential audience that I do think is somewhat legitimate: Simone harbors some pretty deep romantic interest in her aunt, and the feeling is revealed to be mutual.  These feelings aren’t really consummated physically or emotionally, but they’re a real and significant part of both characters and their relationship to each other, and I...can’t say that it hasn’t been a stumbling block for me for a pretty substantial portion of the game.  Which might be a little surprise, I suppose, given that, while I roll my eyes and constantly crack wise at Fire Emblem’s expense for all the incest it will make any stretch to include, I generally don’t let the presence of in-family romance prevent me from being able to enjoy something that’s well-made.  Hell, I’ve said that the romance between Corrin and Camilla in Fire Emblem 14 was the best love story the game had to offer, even, and the fact that Revolutionary Girl Utena contains multiple instances of blood-related attraction and beyond certainly hasn’t stopped it from being 1 of my favorite animes of all time.  But Simone and Aunt Raye’s feelings nonetheless bothered me on a level that other instances of incestuous feelings in fiction rarely have, and while I did eventually get past it, grappling with my discomfort over it was enough of a process (one which I’m probably going to write about in a later rant, in fact) that I definitely think it worth giving fair and full warning on this point.  I was able to get over it--or resign myself to it, at least--but Simone and her aunt’s feelings for one another is a point which I can understand being a deal-breaker for some of AAAVXA’s potential audience.

So long as those factors don’t scare you, though, I can’t think of much reason not to play and enjoy Angelic Acceptor Alouette: VXA.  Whether you’re out for some great romance, an insightful and earnest exploration of trauma, a celebration of anime and those for whom it means something important, a well-written, thoughtful, and emotionally provocative story as a whole, or just a generally solid RPG on a budget (have I mentioned that AAAVXA, as with all of Saint Bomber’s creations, is free?), this is a solid choice for your next game to play.















* Very specifically and personally recognized, in fact; Simone’s aunt has a whole story about her reaction to Nei’s death in Phantasy Star 2 that could almost have been an adaptation of my own experience with that moment.  My old friend Angahith, the generous benefactor who gifted PS2 to me to begin with, could testify that I would, for months afterward, occasionally just spontaneously open a conversation between us with a text-scream of “NEEEEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIII!”

Can’t say I’m on Aunt Raye’s wavelength very often, but man, I was there with her in that particular memory.


** Which actually is quite sensible, considering this is a Magical Girl themed RPG.

Final Fantasy 6's Poisoning of Doma

My year-long rant vacation continues!  But since I traditionally take June off from ranting to rest up after the busy season at my job, I figured, why not fully invert things and take some of June off from resting up to throw a rant up here?  So here we are, the mid-year break from taking a break, typed up and ready to go!

Of course, you might expect that, after such an absence and before resuming that same hiatus, I might at the very least leave you with something insightful and profound.  But you probably wouldn't, because I make this joke every time I do something like this, so yeah, today's just a stupid rant where I indulge my dumb sense of humor.  Except that it's somehow even worse than that, because it's also an adaptation of a conversation I once had in the comments section of 1 of my rants--and no, I don’t possess enough shame to apologize for that.  Enjoy the reminder that maybe we're all better off when I don't upload!



It’s funny the kind of stuff you’ll just nod your head and accept when a game’s good enough.  I’ve spoken about the weight of quality allowing for a greater weight of disbelief to be suspended and balanced against it, and I definitely think that the Doma incident of Final Fantasy 6 is a good example of this, because...there is no way anyone would buy the poisoning of Doma if Final Fantasy 6 were a lesser RPG.  Had we been any less engrossed in and entertained by the story of Final Fantasy 6 as it progressed, this moment would probably have been immortalized as an example of when a writer has to overreach and make a story event happen no matter what.  Because Doma’s poisoning doesn’t make any damn sense when you scrutinize it on any level.

Alright, so let’s just go over the events here.  Sabin sneaks into the Empire’s camp from which it’s launching its invasion of Doma.  He opens some treasure chests, beats up some guard dogs maybe, and winds up eavesdropping as Kefka reveals he’s gonna poison everyone in Doma to wrap up this whole invasion in a jiffy.  Sabin steps in, attacks Kefka, chases him around, tries to stop him, but gets caught up in fighting guards while Kefka slips away.  Kefka goes up to the nearby river, by himself, and puts his poison into it.  We then cut to Doma Castle, where a lookout remarks to Cyan that the Imperial camp is full of activity--presumably the havoc that Sabin is causing--after which Cyan notices that the water looks odd (a nice touch is that the color of the water at the beginning of this scene, seen at the corner of the screen, is different from the color of the water by this point; the water becomes more discolored as the scene plays out).  Doma guards suddenly start dropping dead left and right, Cyan and the lookout realize poison’s at work, Cyan races through the castle and finds that the king and pretty much everyone else is dead, including his own wife and son.  Infuriated, he runs out to the Imperial camp to start killing everyone he can.

So yes, it’s a great and memorable scene in RPG history.  Very diabolical.  Very unsettling.  Very tragic!  Very moving!  Very...uh...very........um, say, how far away from Doma was the Imperial camp, again?

Uh huh, uh huh...okay...yeah...mmmhm...so...relative to our own planet, about the distance from Switzerland to Portugal.

Man, that one lookout guy has got really good eyesight.

I’m sorry, you’re telling me that the poison that Kefka dumped into the river was able to travel along a body of water that looks to be equivalent in length to the Red Fucking Sea over to Doma inside, what, 10 minutes?  20?  An hour, tops?  Remember, the scene in which Doma’s citizens succumb to the poison opens with the lookout noticing the extra activity in the Imperial camp, and the implication of that is that Sabin is still currently causing a ruckus over there, so the maximum amount of time between Kefka dumping the poison and its taking effect is however long we can realistically assume Sabin can keep fighting off an entire camp of enemies without getting killed or captured--he is, after all, fully free and able to come assist Cyan later, when Cyan arrives at the camp to take his vengeance.  So unless you think Sabin A: can, at this time, successfully combat presumably dozens or hundreds of armed opponents for hours without a break and essentially solo an entire military invasion army, or B: retreated at some point (leaving the camp still noticeably active) and decided to just chill and let this whole poison thing work itself out without his further intervention, neither of which seem terrifically likely, then we have to accept a timeline in which the river has managed to bring Kefka’s poison from the camp all the way to Doma within, at the absolute most generous estimation, an hour.

Honestly, for anyone getting a drink from the Doma river that day, poison should have been the least of their concerns.  The speed those waters were going would’ve left anyone who bent down for a sip missing the bottom half of their skull!

But okay, let’s back up a bit.  We can’t really say that we know how far away the Imperial camp was from Doma, because we don’t know the size of FF6’s world relative to our own.  Maybe FF6’s entire globe is only as big as, say, our own world’s state of Texas.  Maybe Cyan’s ability to run all the way from the castle to the enemy camp before Sabin’s rampage has ended isn’t evidence of the popular fan theory that he was secretly Sonic the Hedgehog all along.  We don’t know the metrics of FF6’s world, and it’s not likely that the random Doma lookout NPC had telescopes implanted into his eye sockets at birth, so logically we should at least allow for the possibility that the actual distance that the river covered between these 2 points was not terribly far.

Maybe not so short a distance that this scenario’s time frame could still make sense, but, uh, it’s not too far-fetched, right?

Certainly not as unbelievable as the striking efficacy of Kefka’s poison, that’s for sure.  Holy crap, just how potent is this stuff?  The guy drops 1 dose of the stuff into the river by his own camp (sure hope no one on HIS side was planning to have a drink between now and the end of their tour of duty), and that’s enough to pollute the water supply of the entire castle so thoroughly that almost the entire population succumbs to it!

I mean just think of the logistics for a moment here.  We don’t see a barrel sitting next to Kefka during the scene of releasing the poison, nor any other large object that could be a container.  Whatever amount of poison he has, it can’t be more than what he can realistically carry on his person--and even then, there has to at least be enough free space on him that he can take a couple hits from Sabin in their preceding fights without the impacts dislodging, freeing, or otherwise causing a loss of the poison.  There’s an implication that the poison is in a quantity and container accessible enough that it was handed off to him by a subordinate, even.  So it’s basically, at the maximum, as much poison as 1 guy could carry, being spread through an entire river, and somehow there’s still enough of its presence uniformly in the water after its journey to be fatally ingested by not just a few, but dozens of people.

Holy shit, Kefka, what kind of insane fatality-to-ppm rating does that toxin have?  This stuff makes botulinum toxin look like ketchup by comparison!  That poison’s knocking people dead after being more diluted than the fruit flavor in a can of La Croix!  Forget being so prevalent that the entire body of water turns purple from it--given the volume of water surrounding and running through parts of Doma Castle alone, the Imperial camp could be just down the street from Doma and it’d still be a miracle for there to be enough poison molecules to go around for everyone in the castle to manage to get some in their next cup!

Actually, the real miracle is how everyone in the castle even managed to drink this poisoned water to begin with.  I mean, the water only starts turning purple moments before the residents of Doma begin keeling over from it.  Like, the river’s normal-colored at the beginning of the scene, Cyan and Lookout Lad exchange something like 5 sentences, and by that point the water is noticeably discolored and the bodies start hitting the floor.  If we’re supposed to take the water turning purple as an indication of the poison’s arrival, that means that the first guy that we see die would barely have had the time to get a sip of the water if he’d been STANDING in the stuff.  And he most certainly wasn’t; he was up on the ramparts, in fact!  The implication here is that somehow this guy had the ability, as Cyan and Lookie-Loo exchanged a total of 4 text boxes, to dash a glass through the water, take a gulp, and then run up to the second floor and across the length of the castle in order to get in place for his collapse, IF we’re generous enough to assume that he started down where the water was.

Meanwhile, the king’s sitting in the middle of the castle, fully isolated from the river, yet somehow has also managed to get ahold of the magical purplewater in time to have collapsed before Cyan shows up--and we have to assume that he was drinking at about the same time as everyone else nearby, because otherwise His Majesty was watching his court fall to their knees gurgling in agony all around him after taking a sip break, and thinking to himself “Ooh, Imma have what they’re having.”  Doma’s royalty had to have some of the most ferociously dedicated and fleet-footed water-boys ever conceived for one to have fetched a drink from the river as Cyan notices it discoloring and gotten it to the king before any kind of the commotion of people dropping dead in droves could catch up to him.  There’s so little room for error that the royal water courier must’ve just plunged his head into the river, filled his cheeks up with water, made a mad dash for the throne room, and the moment King Doma opened his mouth to ask what the fuck was up, spat the entire volume of it into his face.

Why’s the king drinking the same dirty river water as everyone else, by the way?  What, there’s like, not a single cask of wine or mead or such left in the entire castle?  You’d think that if the castle was already that low on supplies, Cyan wouldn’t have been so hot for the “lock the doors, board up the windows, and let the walls do their job” strategy that he suggested last time we saw him and that I employ every time I hear my doorbell go off.

But hey, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we’re not beholden to the actual water coloration timeline.  We’ll say it’s a narrative flourish, not literal, and the poison’s already present in the water as soon as Kefka pours it in, rather than just once we’re visually alerted.  It STILL doesn’t make any damn sense.  We’re still stuck to the timeframe of Sabin’s fight actively occurring in the camp, so that means that, at some point in the past hour, every single person in Doma besides Cyan and Sir Looksalot got thirsty.  I know hydration’s important, but you’re telling me that only 2 people in the entire castle were too busy to grab a drink in the past hour?

And keep in mind, everyone’s dying at about the same time, with only intervals of seconds between them.  So not only was EVERYONE in Doma both thirsty and picky like that kid in Signs who doesn’t want to drink water that’s been in a cup for more than 30 seconds, they all just happened to drink the water simultaneously.  From the guards to the civilians to the king, everyone must have had a water break at functionally the same time.  There was, over the course of that morning, a point at which the safety of the entire kingdom was held in the hands of exactly 2 individuals, as every other soldier in the entire military went on a synchronized water break.  What, did the king just happen to host a ritualized, communal Koolade meeting every morning--one that Cyan and Looksmaxxor93 weren’t invited to--and through some tragic cosmic irony this drinking tradition happened to end the same way as the last time someone did it?

No matter how you look at it, the Doma poisoning event is ridiculous.  Whether it’s the river needing to flow with a power and speed that would make most water jet cutters envious in order to deliver the poison in time, the poison somehow being so incomprehensibly effective that the amount a single person can carry will so lethally pervade an entire geographical body of water that dozens of people can all take a sip and be guaranteed to have ingested a lethal dose, or the fact that an entire settlement’s worth of people minus 2 managed, regardless of location, responsibility, or circumstance, to all happen to take a drink of water within the same 60-second window of the same hour of the day, the logistics and requirements for it are ludicrously impossible.

And because that’s amusing to poke fun at, I’ve written this rant.  But I do have to say, it also kind of makes this scene a testament to just how good Final Fantasy 6 really is--in a game that wasn’t so compelling and engrossing, we’d be removed enough from its events as an audience to recognize the absurdities of this situation and chuckle at the stretch it’s making.  But in FF6, we’re caught up in the flow of its storytelling enough that we don’t have enough distance to question the logistics of Doma’s poisoning; all we experience is the tragedy of Cyan’s loss and the outrage of Kefka’s evil, and all we remember is a poignant milestone in a great plot.

General RPG Valentines 7

As I said last time, I'm going to be largely taking 2025 off from ranting, to hopefully come back to it fresh next year...but as I also said last time, I'll be damned if I miss the chance to inflict a bunch of stupid RPG Valentines on all of you, vacation year or no.  Because I believe in love, dammit!  And also (far more), I believe in amusing myself.

And seeing as I'm depriving (read: relieving) you all of the delight (read: burden) of experiencing my usual rant-load (read: a very different, distinct other kind of load) this year, I think the least I can do (no, really, there is literally nothing less I could do for you than this) is to give you a bonus 5!  So here you are, a heaping extra portion of 25 RPG Valentines for 2025 Valentine's Day!

And of course, if I'm gonna give you an extra 5 RPG Valentines this year, it's only right that I also gift a bonus 5 RPG Anti-Valentines, too!  And yes, that may mean that you're getting only 25% more positivity compared to an increase of 100% negativity, but insert witty reason to explain this situation here!