Hope you all are having a Happy New Year!
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| A Coincidental Fusion (Captured on Switch - Handheld Mode) |
With the results tallied, the decision is final: I'll be doing a review of Shin Megami Tensei V!
Those coming straight from Twitter will how excited I was for this game over the course of two years alongside the Turrican Anthology from Strictly Limited Games. As for the Shin Megami Tensei series itself, I was hooked in the same way I found myself playing video games—watching someone else play through Nocturne on YouTube...
Back in my final semester of college—between losing my eyebrows and sleep over my senior thesis among other things—I would dip heavily into LoadingReadyRun's new foray into streams. This was a part of their "Year of LRR" Kickstarter campaign where they intended to do one more full year of sketches upon reaching their funding goal. I wasn't able to chip in while the campaign was accepting donations because college took priority with regards to room and board, but I was happy and grateful that they were successfully funded.
Alongside their use of the SID chip (and tunes) in some of their videos by composer Bradley Rains, LoadingReadyRun was a comedy comfort food during my college years. When Flash was still thriving, and when I still had it on my computer, I would go to their website and binge watch their back catalog of sketches alongside the other videos on their YouTube channel. Anytime I got nervous over a paper, I could queue up a few sketches to laugh off the stress, then head back to my draft and type up the rest of a hot mess.
Senior year was no different on that front. Their first iteration of streams—where the actors and writers in the LRR crew each hosted shows similar to radio disc jockeys—reminded me of their video series, Graham & Paul Let's Play. They were essentially the only YouTubers in the video game space outside of Chip & Ironicus, Jennyverse, and Steve Benway who I enjoyed watching back in the early 2010s. Graham and Paul brought their comedic style from Unskippable and their sketches into their playthroughs, which they brought over to the livestreams and, more recently, in Running Start where they continue their riffing traditions by focusing on a game's beginning as a whole.
Because of the time difference—they were three hours behind me—I could never catch them live, but I was able to watch some of their past streams on a separate YouTube channel, LoadingReadyLive. Of course, GPLP was huge but I also loved catching up on Beej's Backlog and Kathleen Saves the World. The embedded video makes it rather obvious, but the latter series introduced me to the weird world of Shin Megami Tensei.
I don't really know what motivated me to look into the games—it's possible that Kathleen naming her character Ford Prefect had an impact—but around a year after I got a 3DS as a gift, I bought SMT IV...and ended up giving it a proper playthrough after finding myself deep in the retro gaming YouTube rabbit hole. I've talked about giving that game a proper review in the blog's archive on the Wayback Machine, but of course, that never happened.
I'm going to make sure that this doesn't happen. I am determined to write a review of Shin Megami Tensei V...
...which brings us to a change of plans. In my December 11th entry, I said I would work on a double review of Axiom Verge and Axiom Verge 2, making it partly a retrospective on my experience with Metroidvanias, before diving into a review voted for by the readers.
In short, I'm switching the reviews around: SMT V will come first and AV 1&2 will follow.
Shin Megami Tensei V is not only a game that's still fresh in my mind, it's also one that I haven't stopped playing...
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| Thus far, with as little spoilers as possible... (Captured on Switch - Handheld Mode) |
What I ideally want to do is to complete the game before I write out the review so that I can properly give the story a fair critique. I made a goal for myself to complete the review within January or early February so that I can reach the endgame which, looking ahead, isn't too far off. I'm also going to set a word count limit of 600-850 words so that I focus on covering the bases without diving too much into tangents or digressions. I based this off the goal that Nintendo Force's editor-in-chief, Lucas M. Thomas, gave me for my review of Hypnospace Outlaw which helped me to condense an aesthetic experience into something much more tangible for readers who may also want to play the game.
I don't think I'll have any trouble distilling SMT V's story and gameplay into a recommendation or a "must-avoid". The story and characters are a bit more allegorical, but everything else is clear cut.
The biggest concern I have is regarding the screenshots—the ones here and the one that I used for the tweet announcing the review are all from the Switch on handheld. There's some blurriness and I'm hoping that there's a significant reduction of that in docked mode, but if not, I'll see what I can do.
As for the Axiom Verge review, my worries are mostly the same, but for completely different reasons. I'm not working off a capture card and so I can't properly capture the action in those games. I may end up using the pictures from the press kit and link that instead. Between both AV games, the same word count range feels appropriate, giving each game almost an equal amount of time in the spotlight along with a mini-retrospective.
My plan is to write out and post the Axiom Verge dual-review within February or March.
I might do a couple of regular entries next week just to help keep my writing fresh and to remind me that I have work to do. But until then, this blog will be entering the new year on a promising note!
See you all next year and may 2022 be a prosperous one!
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