Duke Reivier's Grand Game Emporium

Repost of a review I wrote two years ago, saving it for posterity and better visibility. It holds pretty well even today. I think the game is an interesting and surprisingly heavy story of people stuck between the politics of two warmongering empires. I particularly like the character writing for the two central leads, Lunair and Revier. They start out rough, but over time, solidly build up a complimenting relationship, featuring reckless, well intentioned bravado on one side, and cold, calculated yet oddly humane pragmatism on the other. But that's the rub - it takes so long to truly get going. The first Act is extremely rough, and even when getting to the considerably tighter second Act, there are still multiple rough patches of poorly paced and ill fitting scenes to get past. However, the experience at the end is worth it - there's an intensely tense plot involving high politics and personal stakes, which eventually escalates to a dramatic, sober finish. The third and fourt...

  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.

 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...

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