Tsugu no hi -Tozasareta Mirai-（つぐのひ ー閉ざされた未来ー）

Update

Oddly enough, this is the most viewed post on this blog and the old link to the game was dead so I updated it. The whole series of games are also now on this one convenient page as well: https://www.gamemaga.jp/tsugunohi/.

I will definitely try the latest Showa kara no Yobigoe so stay tuned!

Original Post

I was trying to play Blood Drive for Halloween but it's obvious I'm not gonna finish it any time soon (probably wasted too much time playing Majin Tensei), so here's a quick look at a dead (ha!) simple game that only takes 15 minutes or so to finish: Tsugu no hi -Tozasareta Mirai-, the latest in a series of freeware games so popular(?), it even spawned a movie.

JK and shoes, what more do you want?

The "gameplay" if you can call it that, consists of moving left until you get to the river. Apparently, things are not going as you'd hoped (you're a JK, isn't that good enough?!) and you decide to redo the day somehow.

Anyways, after repeating the walk a few times, there is a little bit of scary to enjoy especially with headphones. On the phone, it was a bit annoying that I couldn't hide the browser bar but I somehow managed to cope.

The ✋ woman! Worry about the ✋!

Score: 2 JK first world problems, cry me a river out of 5

Not much to say about this one except it's not the worst way to spend 15 or so minutes.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Avalon Code（アヴァロンコード）

Cute girl smiling sadly while boy disappear into dust, so deep

Yes, this blog has kind of been in a slump these days as my posts seemed to get kind of stale. However, I should remember one of the original reasons why I even started the blog, which was to catalog what I've played.

I'll still continue to make little swipes at the absurdity of the so called "gaming community", for example how people think games are the way to go to disseminate social agendas instead of, oh I dunno, politics? Oh golly gee, why are Republicans trying to pass a record number of anti-trans bills when we "fixed" Deadly Premonition 2?? It's almost like boomer politicians don't play games?? Naw, that can't be it!

To be clear, I really don't care how Nintendo labels gender in Animal Crossing either way. Putting aside the fact that Animal Crossing is a chore game I don't care about, it's all the "articles" and griping on social media by privileged westerners or Chinese that would be so comical if it wasn't so ridiculous.

Where's the petition to remove these toxic words from the English vocabulary?

All of which has nothing to do with Avalon Code, ha. So yeah, I hated this game and every minute of it was so painful. And no, it has nothing to do with the fact that I chose the girl and failed to woo that bad boy from the desert. IGNorant has a 8.3 GREAT score because of course they loved it.

The "deep and engrossing story" is about you putting shit in a book before the end of the world. And the "innovative game play mechanics" is hunting through page after page for the right size pieces to make shit. It's not so bad at first if you haven't played through the end, but I'm sure the professional IGN reviewer MUST have played to the bitter end. Later on, you really do want to tear your hair out trying to find 3 pieces of fire, 4 pieces of spiders, or whatever through pages and pages of characters, monsters, weapon, etc. again and again and fucking again.

Shuffling shit around might seem dandy now but wait till you're flipping through all the characters, enemies, weapons, and items in the game

I even resorted to looking up a guide because surely, this couldn't be how you're supposed to actually play the game but nope, there was no secret menu of categories or sorting or anything at all really. I threw all the deaths into a piece of bread to keep it handy to weaken bosses. Hmm, maybe I should've organized the shit on random characters so I don't have to dig through page after page. No, fuck that shit! Why do I have to WORK to make up for what the game purposely made a chore? Even Atelier Marie, made over a decade earlier, had fucking menus and blue/green/etc. categories. To add insult to injury, to make the better weapons, you have to solve fucking sliding puzzles. The difficulty near the end was just fucking ridiculous having to match just the goddamn background patterns. And no, just looking up the recipe online doesn't work. You HAVE to solve the puzzle for the item to appear, which logically makes no sense.

I have a life so I'm proud to say I didn't touch this shit

Fortunately, the last boss wasn't too hard to beat with a weak weapon that didn't require torturing oneself with this shit. Putting aside the "innovative game play mechanics", all the dungeons are boring stupid time trials, which I quickly stopped giving a shit about and the story so unremarkable, I don't even feel like writing about it. Oh yeah, except of course for that part where you lose all your spirits so you have to collect them AGAIN but in reverse order.

To sum up, the best part of this game was when I was finally able to trade it in to get some store credit. It felt so good to get rid of this piece of shit that honestly, I would have been happy to get Gamestop level pennies as long as I wouldn't have to see it sitting on my shelf of DS games.

Score: 0.5 well at least I can retire on my GME stock out of 5 (just kidding, I tried to cash in at the peak and eventually had to sell my cousin's truck to pay off my payday loan)

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Cosmic Fantasy: Bouken Shounen Yuu（コズミック・ファンタジー 冒険少年ユウ）

Well, it's fucking 2021 and shocker, things are still shitty as ever but hey, at least we still got video games. Oh, I don't mean the shit they're churning out these days according to "global standards" (aka whatever China will allow). I'm pretty much resigned to sticking with games made up to 2020 at this point except for maybe the occasional Falcom game here and there. Fortunately, there's plenty of games on my backlog so let's play some classics from the good ol' PC Engine: Cosmic Fantasy.

Stop peeping over the Great Firewall, China!

Yeah, I know, I know, same ol' gripes. Even I'm getting tired of my own blog. Still, the last thing I want to do is to write about games in-depth like Hardcore Gaming 101 or something. I would think most real gamers would just prefer to play the damn game instead of reading some lame blog about it. Maybe I'll try some pro gaming journalist tactics and find some potentially transphobic dialogue that needs to be wiped off the face of the planet.

16 years old but at least no gender is specified here

By all accounts, Cosmic Fantasy is a pretty mediocre RPG. It plays like one of those super barebones, fap PC RPGs such as Dragon Knight except without the breastasees. Speaking of characters that might identify as a girl (not that I would dare to assume), Saya is the only other party member that can fight despite that motorcycle robot and others who supposedly join your party. The Sega CD version seems to have added having more than two characters in your party but I don't know if I'm going to ever bother playing this again.

Why don't you DO something, motorcycle mouse?

However, despite the bare bones mechanics, it's still an extremely impressive technical showcase of the PC Engine CD using animated cutscenes with voiced dialogue. Along with Tengai Makyou Ziria, it must have been exciting to see in early 1990, when the competing consoles were just the Famicom and Mega Drive.

Look at that cutting edge very round technology!

These days, I'm much more appreciative of the freedom developers had to umm "innovate" with games like this even though I woudn't say this one is a great game. Nowadays, it seems we have all this fancy technology only for it to go completely to waste due to racist coporate policies and the latest social media rage fit. Sometimes, you just want a simple lighthearted RPG story with maybe a hot spring scene thrown in for fun. Is that too much to ask nowadays? Yeah, apparently it fucking is.

Yeah, yeah, another DQ clone

What, should I talk about the game? I mean, there was that one part of the story where you probably want to grind before Saya leaves the party temporarily for story reasons. The items get kind of ridiculous near the end with how many elixers you get but really, there isn't much to say.

I stocked up on these Camp Capsules for nuthin

Score: 2.5 (CONTENT WARNING: Full nudity screenshow below!!!) out of 3

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Sike! You perv!

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely