feltmonkey

Yeah, I'm steering clear of that one. I thought Danganronpa was a bit too long! I'm not going to finish a 200-hour visual novel.

No, sadly I tried to eat it.

Play
Still Death Stranding 2 which I think is one of the best games of the generation, along with Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring. Elden Ring might not even count, actually as it's on PS4. I play on PC mainly, so I have no idea when generations start and end. I don't know if I prefer this or the first Death Stranding, but this is definitely the one I would recommend to someone coming to the series fresh, despite the fact that the game assumes a LOT of story knowledge of the player. The game part is just much more comprehensible. The difficulty curve makes more sense. The first game went from a horror walking simulator to a cosy pootle-em-up over its course. This one stays an open-world exploration, delivery, and action game for it's run time. That's not to say there isn't variety, because there absolutely is. There's a bizarre sci-fi bike race at one point.

It's still perfectly possible to get completely lost in a self-imposed side mission of building roads and monorails, or delivering kangaroos to the band Chvrches. There's always another gadget or weapon to try out, which seems to tie in cleverly to the game's (much more coherent this time) theme. I say "seems to" because there's still time for the game to throw everything away in a cut-scene twist and for Kojima to say, "Surprise! It's actually all about toenails!"

Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc - I actually finished this, after a decade of false starts in which I played through the first few hours of the game repeatedly over the years. It's really good, but I'm not going to jump straight into the sequels yet. There are two reasons for this - it's so long, and it's so dark. It took me something like 30 hours to finish, maybe more. Being as I play games for at most 40 minutes a day if I'm lucky usually, and don't have any days off in a normal week, it took me most of last year and into February this year to get through it. As for the darkness, it's a game about getting close to a selection of characters, and them being suddenly killed off. It's pretty bleak.

So in case anyone is unaware, all these characters are trapped in a school, and the only way to escape is to commit, and get away with, murder. Every time anyone dies, there is an investigation period, followed by a class trial. The trial consists of Phoenix Wright style logical deduction, pointing out contradictions and building a picture of what happened, combined with some light action elements such as a rhythm game and shooting "Truth Bullets" at characters' statements. It's well judged in that I went into every trial (with the exception of one or two which contained mid-trial rug-pulls) with a clear idea of exactly who had done it and how, but I had only put it all together right at the end of the investigation period. The only problems that arose during the trials were the times when I knew what had happened but was unsure of how the game wanted me to communicate it. If anything though, it's generally a bit less prone to this problem than Phoenix Wright.

I think I need to play something shorter and breezier next.

Want
I dunno. Good things to happen, I suppose. They never do, though.

Bin
Expensive car repairs that come up a couple of weeks after Christmas. That I could have done without. The same goes for dental work.

@feltmonkey

I'm also playing …and Roger

Back here to compare notes in a few days m'kay?

What was the verdict in the end?

It really did a number on me, despite, or possibly because of, the fact that I worked out what it was doing almost immediately.

Two in one day, it's been a while since that happened.

Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

This is such an oddity. A crossover between two series that were huge at the time but which haven't seen new entries in years now, and the only Wright game still stuck on the 3DS, in itself now a dead platform.

It's kind of great. It's a Phoenix Wright game but with the investigation sections replaced by Layton-style wandering and puzzling; the crossover works perfectly. Both characters and their respective sidekicks get their chance to shine, and there are some truly great moments that I won't spoil here. It's got a bizarre fantasy-style setting that's unique to both series, and a bravura ending that I understand has been quite divisive but which I personally thought was very clever and tied everything together surprisingly well. And it's got amazing production values for the 3DS, with loads of voice acting and some really high-quality anime cutscenes. The pacing is a bit wonky (it goes a bit visual-novelly in the middle section, with little in the way of courtroom drama or puzzling) but it pulls it all together in the end.

Will it ever get a rerelease? Who knows. If you've got the means to play it, though, and you like either of these two series, there's a lot to enjoy here.

This is a brilliant little game, and it's a shame it hasn't escaped from the 3DS at all yet. The Phoenix Wright games are gradually being released on PC (after I panic-bought the 3DS titles in the final days of the e-shop) so perhaps it will turn up on Steam. It's extremely expensive to get hold of a PAL copy now.

The game has got some incredible Phoenix Wright character names. The names in PW are always a highlight, such as the character called Wendy Oldbag who is a windy old bag. The guy who crashes his car in the opening cutscene turning out to be called Carmine Accidenti really takes the cake, though.