Update Three Hundred and Six: 12 May 2019

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

This VN really shouldn’t exist. If you have a sequel, and spend half of that sequel recounting what happened in the preceding title, then that sequel shouldn’t exist.

That’s XBlaze Lost: Memories. The first XBlaze title was, like… it was aight. Not groundbreaking, but the dynamic sprites are lively and, when they’re not getting lost in Unfortunate Anime Tiddy(tm), the art is well done and appealing. It’s a VN spinoff of a fighting game, so I’m not expecting the House in Fata Morgana here. The sequel makes everything worse.

This is a VN that I had to fight to play. A poor Vita port, I spent the better part of an hour when I first started trying to just get the game to LOOK okay, always a bad sign in a fuckin visual novel, of all places. The anti-aliasing in this game, at least on my computer, is non-existent - no matter what setting I had it on, how I displayed it, the lines remained distractingly jagged, flickering across the screen and ruining the dynamism of the sprites. I eventually just had to give up and just live with it. The game’s default setting is to be in auto-mode, which is annoying enough, but when you turn auto-mode off, the ‘standard’ click-through mode’s default is to have no subtitles. The port’s keybindings are goofy as fuck, where I had to dig to find out what does what. So every time I launch the visual novel, intending to read it like a visual novel, I’d have to press l to stop auto mode, confirm I want to stop auto-mode, then press 9 to turn on subtitles. It sounds petty, but it really fuckin grated on me, like having to do a little secret handshake every time I wanted to leave my home. It adds up.

The story is similarly aggravating—there’s a weird story wrapper about this new girl you don’t know in a different universe who gets sucked into the ‘Phantom Field’ and she meets a character with the most bullshit costume design I’ve ever seen, made by someone who has never seen and has no knowledge of breasts, gravity, wind, motion, physics, and breathing, let alone the idea of having your character design inform, uh, u kno, your character’s character. New girl protagonist uncovers the memories of one of the characters from the previous game, and you spend, like I said, half the game sitting through that again. The whole previous game.

More bullshit happens, nothing matters, I am so fuckin crabby about this game. As I was first getting set up with it I saw a post someone made on the steam forums saying something to the effect of ‘why would they even release this game on steam? The first game only sold like 2400 copies on steam, even less people would go for the sequel. Seems like a pointless release.’ At the time, I thought that was kind of mean and uncharitable.

I don’t think that anymore.

Next up: I made a promise and I’m sticking with it! Next is—

See you soon!