Revier's Stuff of Dubious Value

 So I finally beat Tactics Ogre: Reborn today. Well, more accurately, I saw my friend beat it. And by "beat" I mean "get through a huge ass dungeon, fight through the last few villains, and then get totally walled by the final boss, who has an absurd amount of HP and can out attrition any player not prepared for him". Reborn on the whole is a good game, and a good remake of a now ancient game, but I really can't forgive some of its design decisions. It really feels like a half finished project where the developers were mostly on the right track but couldn't really implement everything they wanted, or test how their changes worked in practice. In that regard it's honestly rather frustrating, as there are glimpses of potential greatness that's held back by all the awkwardness and lack of polish. Still, I will not be too harsh. It is still Tactics Ogre, and it does cure several major flaws of the PSP version, and it does preserve a lot of what made the

Just got done playing through Chapter 2 of this on the Chaos route. I still think this is a solid remake, but there are flaws that are starting to get dangerously prominent. The battles from Ashton to Tanmas were largely fine, and honestly I enjoyed the battles where the enemies were better geared and so presented a decent uphill challenge. While the challenge escalated afterwards, it did so in a pretty awful, inelegant way, by adding way more meat than the situation called for. I was forced to switch Denim and a warrior to two handed weapons to get sufficient damage, which isn't a good thing, as the game had not ever indicated the team's damage falling off before this. What really soured the experience was the Vice fight. After a tense, grueling battle in front of Amorika's gates, I was greeted with a uber fast enemy that not only tanked everything, but also got in meaty swings, including an extremely dangerous finisher that often struck Denim for more than 2/3rds his heal

So I got through Chapter 1 of Tactics Ogre: Reborn today. It was fine. Arguably good, even. Let's get the negatives out of the way first. I was personally disappointed to see the combat being heavily skill based again. There was a certain simplistic charm to the combat of the original, and while I get why they added skills to make it seem more appealing to a modern audience(who likely have experienced Final Fantasy Tactics and thus have their expectations shaped by it), it does take away from it. This version also uses the pseudo Shakespearian, theatrical script of the PSP version, with some mild edits. I'm personally not a big fan of it, I like purple prose but sprinkling it everywhere just makes the dialogue feel a lot less natural and thus a lot less emotional than the original. I also felt like most fights were too easy. Now, granted, this is the very first chapter of the game, it's supposed to ease players into it, and even in the original these weren't hard battle

  This is the first portion of the fourth chapter of my Impostor Factory parody. I had published it on the Freebird Games discord on November of last year, with the intent of finishing the series, but since then I've grown increasingly pessimistic about both the franchise and the company's overall direction. Thus, I see little chance of finishing this project, or ever making any fan content for the Sigmund Corporation franchise again. I hope that you'll find this bit enjoyable, despite that. Many apologies.

 So this is something I made on a whim, just because I thought it would be neat if it existed. Obviously, it's not affiliated to either Kan Gao or Freebird Games, and I doubt there's going to be a bunch of new converts rushing to play the game due to this, but hey, you never know! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li2SVrV0YDI Enjoy!

 Fiction is, in essence, distortions of reality, in service of conveying specific messages and narratives to an audience. It is little surprise then, that many works share tropes, ideas and even similar incidents. What is surprising, however, is when considerable similarities are found among works that look nothing alike. And so, we come to our topic here. Frankly, I was quite surprised to discover this, as, despite To the Moon borrowing some trappings of a JRPG, it clearly tries to be something else entirely, with its focus on its melodramatic relationship drama between a man and his autistic wife...huh, does it really? A commonly overlooked aspect of Johnny is his backstory. Specifically, the bit where he was jealous over his sibling, and then, post accidental fratricide, got brainwashed to act exactly like him, forever leaving his "true self" behind. "But it isn't a major part of his story!" you might think. That's simply not true. The brainwashing was wh

 Hello! Today we're going back to the past, and looking at a 2008 RMXP game made by Freebird Games, wayyyyy before they made TtM. Well, actually that's not quite right, I'm playing its second installment, which was made after TtM's release, but doesn't change much besides adding a TtM credit screen and a "Retro Vacation" option.  Said option just opens this: A weird Pac Man like parody of Quintessence: The Blighted Venom, which has Vikon, of all people, star as the main protagonist. He dodges the other protagonists of that game only to be caught in a comical army of Salories, and the game ends with a bizarre ad for To the Moon.  Now, it might seem like just a silly minigame. But this minigame originally existed in Did You Remember My Lullaby, the other side story they made back when they were still working on Quintessence. There, it had a fairly different ending. Lunair woke up from her sleep, commented on how she spent two months dreaming of "this c