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While a lot of people praise Chrono Trigger (and right they are! Play it! It's an often recommended game for a reason), its sequel Chrono Cross doesn't get as much love. There are valid reasons for that in my opinion, but I want to argue that CC is still a strong and good game, but it needs to be looked at separated from its ancestor. They didn't call it Crono Trigger 2, in order to separate it more from the first game, but people still expected a sequel to the characters they loved in the first game. And they didn't get that. Spoiler for CC now:

While the game is obviously set in a different world than CT, there still is a connection to the first game.

That is the biggest problem in my opinion. By including this link to the original game they hindered CC of being its own thing and instead alienated fans of the first game and non players alike.

But Chrono Cross has its own strengths, which still create a good game in my opinion. First and foremost I would praise the world itself, set in a tropical archipelago, which was great to explore in combination with a wonderful soundtrack. The atmosphere is often nicely serene, but there is also humor and drama there during the story. I don't know many other RPG games building a tropical world to explore. The story has some interesting twists in it and the parallel world setup means some interesting interactions between them. And while 42 playable characters is a bit overkill, I was surprised how well their language modification works to give nearly every character a characteristic speech tic.

So it should not be seen as a direct sequel, but rather as a story in an universe adjacent to the original one. To keep those stories separated makes both stronger in my mind.

This one got a little longer since there are so many things to talk about. TL;DR at the end

Valkyrie Profile's world and story is nordic mythology inspired. Meaning it takes some characters and concepts from it but gives everything it's own spin and also adds its own characters, like the main heroine for example. You are playing as the valkyrie Lenneth tasked by Odin with finding worthy souls to train them and bring to Valhalla as Einherjar in order to fight the giants in the coming battle of Ragnarök. Since Odin has clairvoyant powers, he knows when Ragnarök is coming, meaning you play under a certain time limit. The game is made up of a set amount of chapters, which themself have a set amount of periods depending on the difficulty. One period means you can visit one location on the map or rest & heal. The available locations change between the chapters and could either be a dungeon for monster slaying, a city to buy things/progress the story or the recruitment of a worthy soul. The worthy souls are the characters you can use in the battles and each one is unique. If you know your nordic mythology, you know that you have to be dead to become an Einherjar. Meaning you will see each and every single character you can recruit first die and the circumstances that brought them to their death in a 2D pixelart style cutscene (or some 3D animated cutscenes if you play the remaster Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth). And if you don't like cutscenes, this game is definitely not for you: the YouTube "all cutscenes" video for Valkyrie Profile 1 is longer than 5 hours! The stories range from bittersweet to downright depressing, as is fitting to the nordic myths. They even managed to connect some of the stories, so you will meet some characters again, sometimes because you will recruit them this time. The main story is about who Lenneth is and what her part in preventing Ragnarök means for herself and for the world.

As can be expected from so many cutscenes, the story is front and center for this game. But Valkyrie Profile doesn't need to hide its gameplay. They also included a lot of interesting and, as far as I know, for its time unique features. While fighting, your team is always made up of Lenneth and up to 3 other Einherjars making a diamond shaped formation. The position of each fighter corresponds to the same positioned button on the right side of the controller. When you press a button, the corresponding character will start its attack animation. Each hit fills a combo meter and when it reaches full capacity, you can start a special move, again with a button press for the character you want to attack. Now it is your job as a player to learn the characters moves, when to activate the next attack sequence and in which order to start the special attacks. It is a great feeling when you finally manage to fire all 4 special attacks for the first time and do massive amounts of damage. Only downside is, that you always want to use this attack sequence after finding it, since every other one would be suboptimal play.

To shake this up, Valkyrie Profile doesn't let you keep your characters forever. As I said in the beginning: your mission is to train Einherjar for Ragnarök. So after training and giving equipping good items, you need to let them go and send them on to Valhalla to fight in the Aesirs war. While you can just send anyone or even noone, your rewards from Odin change depending on the fighters strength and attributes you send him. Odin often has requests, for example a mage or a person with the cunning trait, which stirs things up for you as you need to decide: do I fulfill Odins request and send my best fighther with the ruthless trait to get a better reward from Odin or do I send this untrained & useless mage but risk making the Aesiers side in the war too weak? After each chapter you gain information on how the gods do in their battle against the giants. Depending on Odins favour you can also gain strong items, so sending strong warriors with strong items themselves to increase their worth is also a viable tactic.

Due to this mechanic you are forced to always change your team composition and seek out new worthy souls, in order to stay strong enough but also gain Odins favour. The forced change in characters is something I first experienced in Pyre. There it also worked to make you experience the many different stories of the characters and then letting them go. Only while writing this review did it occur to me, that Valkyrie Profile already established this mechanic nearly two decades earlier, to the same great effect.

Edit: I misremembered, you need to play on normal or hard to get the best ending

One aspect that was not good when it came out and isn't good today: You need to play on the Hard difficulty to get the best ending. And I seriously doubt that many people got that ending without a guide. You need to reach specific thresholds and do certain actions in the right chapters, making it everything but clear how to reach that ending.

And last but not least: the music is one of the best of the Midi era. The simple but satisfying melodies evoke a lot of emotions in me, even now years later. They effectively use the music to convey the emotion of the situation.

What fascinates me about this game is that they managed to make the game mechanic fit to the story so well. You need to train the warriors but then let them go, because Odin needs Warriors.

If you like JRPG even a little, I highly recommend to try this game via emulation or playing the remaster on PS4/5, because it really is a great game with a great (albeit deprimistic) atmosphere.

TL;DR: great music & atmosphere, nice interplay of story and gameplay for ludonarrative harmony, sadly need guide to reach best ending

I highly recommend this game to all those who want to have a more wholesome game and bemoan that so often we can just solve things by violence. In fact, that is one of the main ethical points of the protagonist: he doesn't want to use violence. The problem is just, the world is ending and a hero is needed. And what is a hero who doesn't wield a sword and uses that sword? Well, play this game and find out if the protagonist can stay true to their convication or not.

The protagonist is a bard or in fact The Bard, no other name given. Every problem the bard encounters is solved by what the bard can do best: singing. This is represented by you selecting the note for his singing via a radial menu, using either mouse or gamepad stick. The developers managed that this simple mechanic didn't feel annoying to me over the roughly 10 hours playtime. Instead they reused/recontextualized it in different ways multiple times, so that it doesn't felt overused. In general this is an easy game without really difficult parts besides some rythm parts. But even then you don't need to hit the right note by ear, it is shown which note to hit like in other rythm games.

It is sometimes a silly game, but silly in a wholesome way. Where I often couldn't stop smiling due to the siliness. Like who has ever heard of singing coffee pirates? Or the fact that there is a dedicated dance button, which you can press nearly at all time, making some cutscenes a bit less serious. It feels similar in a way to Night in the Woods regarding the atmosphere and talks between the main characters.

This game is not however for people who want to have action sequences, a realistic graphic or can't stand some silliness in their games.

One of the games that cemented Tim Schafers reputation for creating fantastic games. This is a classic Point & Click adventure from 1998, so keep a spoilerfree guide open if you aren`t up for trying each item combination.

In a little longer than 10 hours Grim Fandango tells the story of Manny Calavera. He is a guide for the dead working in the department of death... selling them packages how to reach their after life depending on how good they were on the other side. Sadly Manny isn't doing so well, he only gets the loser souls who aren`t worth anything. But this is only the beginning, you will puzzle your way all around the afterlife, through cities and forests and oceans. And you will learn that Manny is a suave and cunning businessman who manages to turn nearly every situation to his advantage.

The underworld is astethically styled after the aztecs and wonderfully brought to life by the story. The dead built their own unique society with the same vices already present in the living world. the atmosphere is a little grim noir themed, but still with humor in it. While the polygon count on the characters may be low, the world itself is beautifully pre-rendered.

This game probably is not that unknown, considering it sold more than 1 million copies, but I still recommend it because it fantastically showcases the power of the human mind for anthropomorphism. The game is only made up out of rectangles. So graphicwise, a potato could run it.

The charm comes from the narrator and the characters (meaning the colorful rectangles you can control) he brings to life. The game is a platformer where each character has a special skill (can jump high or be a trampoline to others, etc) and you need to find the right combination of combining their abilities to reach the goal of each level.

The story isn't anything great, but with the narrator it feels much more emotional and at the end you don't see a small red rectangle, you see Thomas, who is not alone anymore, because he found some friends.

The game is a 2D side scroller where you can create clones of yourself which mimic your movement and you can also swap into those clones to solve puzzles with switches and pressure plates to find out what happened on a derelectic space station stranded on a planet. Fitting to the central mechanic is also a bit philosophy about what is the mind etc. involved, but not as explicit as in Soma.

The puzzles are not so convoluted that you don't understand what you need to do, but also not so easy that it's just busywork. The art style is a bit different, because they modelled everything in clay and then digitized it, leading to a pretty unique style. Together with the sparse lightning it creates a wonderful eery atmosphere in the space station. The story plays into this atmosphere, but it is not the main focus of the game. Still, I found a certain philosophical concept they introduced fascinating, because I never thought about it.

So all in all it is a fun little game of around 5h with a little bit of philosophical concepts if you want to think about it or just some neat puzzles and atmosphere if you don't.

Eternal Darkness is a game for the GameCube and was the first Nintendo published game to receive a Mature rating by the ESRB. If you play the game today, I think most will agree that that rating was a bit too much. But the damage was already done, the game didn't sell enough copies and was a commercial failure. A decade later, two attempts by the game director to finance a successor via kickstarter failed, so it seems the game is as cursed as its protagonists.

But why do I recommend it here to you?

Because it has a great story and atmosphere (two big criteria for me in games) and it also has a fascinating (but sadly underused) magic system. The magic system is based on runes, which you can freely combine to try and cast a spell. You will also find translations of a rune and the recipes for spells, but in principle you could cast every spell if you have access to the runes and want to try things. The runes correspond to either a verb or a noun. If you combine Protect with Self, you will cast a shield on you. If you instead combine Protect with Area, you will place an enemy damaging area on the ground. Sadly they did not utilize this magic system to do many interesting things, as you can only combine one verb with one noun and that's it. You will find greater magic circles where you can put in more runes and in principle could cast more complex spells. But alas, they only allow you to put more Pargon runes, which just increase the power of the normal spell. Since every rune is voiced after you cast a spell, I think the last memory of my dying brain will be pargon, pargon, pargon...

The game is horror themed but doesn't include jump scares (with one exception), but instead tries to unnerve the player via sanity effects, as befits its name. Sanity is one of the resources next to health and mana and when it gets low, the chance increases that something will happen, maybe while changing the rooms you will enter an upside down room or your controls will be mirrored. They even included some meta fourth wall breaking stuff like decreasing sound. But nowadays those will not work on you any longer, as the interface looks different today. But still, the goal was to fuck with the players mind and that they achieved. You often question yourself while playing: is that real or not? Which is a masterfully done mechanic for a cosmic horror game.

And did I mention that they patented this and thereby hindered other developers from doing fun stuff like that? Maybe it was deserved karma that the game failed...

But now onto the story and atmosphere: in the game you don't fight against a cosmic horror, but instead three. They each keep one other in balance, so that no one can get the upper hand without being overpowered by the third one. But there are plans in motion to topple this delicate balance. And you are only able to interfere with these plans, because you are the pawn of anotger ancient one yourself. The binding element throughout the story is the Tome of Eternal Darkness, which binds the wearer to it in a nice little ritual with a floor of eternal damned souls and architecture made of bones, oh and did I mention the suspiciously agonized looking statues of the former hosts? Oh and did I mention that the book is bound in human leather and bones? Yeah, your patron isn't exactly nice either. Armed with this good book you fight and puzzle your way through different places around the world which you visit multiple times at different epochs from antiquity to our modern era.

This cosmic horror atmosphere of never really being totally in control is in my opinion wonderfully captured in this game. And due to time shenanigans, it is also made clear, that the power scale is so far outside of humans reach, that cosmic horror insanity is the only sane response.

The controls aren't exactly the strength of the game, but it is functional after getting used to them. If you want to play it nowadays, emulation is probably the easiest way to do that. I used that and was glad for the additional save states and higher resolution.

I highly recommend this game to all those who bemoan that all games are the same and nothing new gets released.

Gorogoa is best described as a really pretty puzzle game with a gameplay mechanic I haven't seen anywhere else. The puzzles are non obvious at first, but at the end you get an eye for them, a little bit similar to The Witness. You have 4 different panels of a comic and you have to align and combine them in a way that they interact to solve the puzzle. It's easiest to understand if you look at a trailer or let's play, since it directly works with the visual medium of comics (but don't watch too long or same problem with every puzzle game, you will know the solutions already).

The developer started in this direction by cutting up comics and rearranging the panels. This gave rise to the idea to incorporate a similar mechanic into a video game.

There is even a story being told in the panels without a word in the roughly 2 hours of puzzling. But you will probably not understand it completely till a second play through, since the story is told in the background pictures and isn't chronological, but disjointed, as fits the games central mechanic of rearranging panels. But this anachronistic storytelling style in combination with the pastel color and very ornamental graphic style is the reason I compared this game to an LSD trip. A highly enjoyable one.

The Longest Journey takes apparently 17 years, because that is the time span between the release of the original game in 1999 and the last game of the series in 2016, which finally finished the story. The Longest Journey is a classic point and click adventure game, meaning it has a wonderful story and world but sometimes really, really, REALLY stupid puzzles. But luckily only sometimes, often they are both entertaining and brain teasing, but you should still keep a guide nearby to not get frustrated.

You mainly play as April Ryan, a college student in a low futuristic SciFi world. But as it turns out, there is not only one world, but two. There is Stark, where April and technology (as usual, mostly defined as electricity and higher) lives and Arcadia, the world where magic lives. And as it turns out, April is a shifter, somebody able to travel between the worlds. Which is sorely needed, because you need to travel between the two worlds and try to bring balance back, since certain forces try to destroy this balance and forcefully merge both worlds.

That is the basic premise and starting point of a long adventure through two worlds, where you meet a lot of colourful companions, first and foremost "Crow". He is a speaking, well..., crow that follows April after she freed him and always has a comment regarding the situation but sticks to April trough everything and is a true friend and companion. The story starts a little more on the whimsical side, especially when you first reach Arcadia, but the more you progress the more dire the situation becomes and towards the end it leaves the humor completely by the wayside and rather chooses drama as a traveling companion.

While the original game is a full story from beginning to end, it created a fascinating world where many more stories could be told in. So they did and in 2006 they released Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, which tells the continued story from three perspectives: Zoë Castillo, a stark resident, Kian Alvane, from an theocratic empire in Arcadia, and April Ryan again. The sequel was no longer a point and click adventure, but rather a 3D adventure. Sadly, it released in the mid 2000s, which meant it of course had to have stealth and some basic combat sequences. While not disastrous, it still was not really necessary. This time the story is much more melancholic and darker than the original game. Kian is part of an invading empire in Arcadia, April is part of the resistance against them and Zoë tries to find out in Stark why people disappear and a new VR headset+drug combo turns many people into zombies. While I did miss the more whimsical nature of the first game, I still highly enjoyed this game and its story. Walking again through Arcadia and Stark felt like visiting old friends, especially when you meet characters from the first game. I was invested into the player characters and always wanted to know, what happens next. Especially if you remembered a certain name from the first game, you couldn't help but wonder how 2 characters will come together. But sadly the game ends on a big cliffhanger.

... Which wasn't resolved for 8 very long years. In 2014 they finally released the first of Dreamfall Chapters, which concluded with its fifth episode in 2016. As the name suggests, the gameplay was again rather a 3D adventure like in Dreamfall, but this time they cut out the combat & stealth, which was the right call. The story that mostly began in Dreamfall finally got its ending and also the framework story around The Longest Journey in general. Albeit partially in a very quick way at the end where I would love to play 2 or 3 games in that in between time that is only mentioned with a "ah remember that time...".

The problem I have with talking about these 3 games is that I mostly enjoyed them for the story, which I don't want to spoil, and the world, which takes a lot of words to explain. While the concept of two worlds with magic and technology is by no means unique, Arcadia is for sure unique with a lot of love and care taken in creating it and its characters. The gameplay is okay, nothing I would recommend playing the game for.

Let's talk about a more well known game this time. Bioware is most known for their 3D RPG series Mass Effect and Dragon Age nowadays, but in the past they created isometric RPGs like the Baldurs Gate or Neverwinter Nights series. So how did that transition happen? Well, they published 2 games between those periods that helped them find their formula for 3D RPGs. While the first one was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which fits more to Dragon Age:Origins due to the pausable real time combat system with multiple party members (which I couldn't play till now due to gamebreaking bugs), I want to talk about their second intermediate game today: Jade Empire.

Many of the elements found in Mass Effect were implemented first and tested in Jade Empire: RPG character development but real time action combat sequences, a group of companions of which a few are romancable and a great epic story with many twists, where the player can influence the outcome somewhat.

#Combat

The combat and character development was build around 3 ressources: health, chi and focus. Health is self explanatory, chi is mana and focus is a third ressource for activating time slow mode or special weapon styles. You can choose between different weapons and magic attacks (ranged or melee) and also later transformations, which were really awesome. Nothing like transforming into a giant golem and smashing the ground to attack all enemies around you. You can also select one companion to follow you around and into combat.

#Companions

The companions are one of the highlights of Jade Empire. By fighting with them side by side they will reveal their past to you and also comment on your actions regarding their own orientation regarding the Way of the closed Fist or the Way of the open Palm. For example The berserker like Black Whirlwind will congratulate you on a well done ambush but will scoff if the solutions don't involve at least 2 murders. The characters are all a joy to experience. They even included a romance for three of the companions.

#Way of Fist/Palm

The way you could influence the main and side quests is also with a unique twist: You have the Way of the Open Palm, which stands for friendliness, understanding and helping each other BUT it could also mean you just want to squeeze a little higher reward out of people with problems by being chummy with them. The opposite concept is the Way of the Closed Fist, which stands for autonomy, strength and doing things YOUR way, but also for teaching people to stand for themselves instead of cowering. Both paths can be used selfishly or for helping build a world more fitting to your ideology. I haven`t really seen that concept elsewhere, in that the normally "evil" way is not only selfish, but rather wants to instill strength in everyone worthy.

#Story

While Jade Empire is set in a faux east asian world, it is an amalgam of many different concepts and best described as east asian counterpart to standard kitchen sink western fantasy with sword, magic, orcs & elves. You are a young spirit monk and after the destruction of your order in the tutorial actually the last one of your order. Due to your training you can interact with the spirit world, which is a highly sought after ability, since the spirits of the recently departed don`t leave the world any longer but linger around. Your goal is to find out why your order had to die and how you can help the spirits move on. The story contained some great executed twists which give the story a nice flow. And it is I think the first game I played, where you can agree and join the antagonist in lieu of a boss fight at the end.

While this game is by no means a forgotten gem, I don't really see a lot of discussion about it online. So if you haven't played it yet, I highly recommend it, especially if you like Mass Effect.

This time I want to put the spotlight on a free game called Iji, named after the main character and developed by Daniel Remar. As the titular character, a nanomachine enhanced human, you are the last hope in the fight against alien invaders to rescue the last bits of humanity that survived the alien invasion. It is mostly a 2D action game with a little bit of platformer & RPG elements. You put ability points gained by finding them or killing enemies into different stats. Thereby you gain more health, more attack/kick power or can even use the weapons of the enemies against them. There are multiple difficulties for those who seek a challenge. The gameplay consists of you running and jumping through the levels and fighting against the enemies via weapons, kicks or tricks (like making enemies fight against each other by dodging a rocket and letting it hit the enemies behind you).

The game may not look like much at first glance graphic-wise, but it shines with its personality in world & story and the action game play. The characterization of the invading aliens is really well done for such a small game (~5 hours per playthrough). While they have destroyed most of humanity, you can kind of understand them with time, as you read their logs and see their side of the story. So it gets a bit more interesting then the DOOM like beginning. This game uses the video game medium in an interesting way to tell a story about violence and revenge.

What I also enjoyed about this game besides the story and game play is the level design, which is surprisingly complex but well thought trough. You need to learn to navigate the levels and you often have keys and buttons to search for to be able to continue. Another high point are the boss fights. Except the first, who is just to teach you a bit more, all others feature special mechanics and are nice orchestrated tests of skill, especially the final boss fight.

The developer updated this game for 13 years after publishing it in 2008, showing his determination to make it a great game. He incoporated player feedback into the story and switched some things around in order to even make a total pacifist playthrough possible, albeit with the caveat that I needed a guide to make it through a certain situation. But Daniel is merciful and also provides a complete game guide on his website for the game.

The Vale is a game like no other game I played before, because you see it through the eyes of a blind woman. Meaning you won't see shit. Instead you rely on your ears to navigate and fight. The game was developed based around the thought to create a video game for blind people. This meant that at minimum a stereo speaker system (so at least a headset) is necessary, since the attacks will come from left, center or right. You have to block and counter them with the correct timing by listening to the sounds your enemies are producing. Menues are also visually presented in addition to being read by a narrator, so that you don't need to select each option in order to know it, if you are not visually impaired.

According to the comments on steam, a lot of people directly refuse this game, just because it has no visuals. Which is a shame, because when I played it and closed my eyes, I was strongly immersed in the game world after a few minutes. The voice actors of the two main characters, Alex (a blind princess who got attacked by foreign enemies and wants to travel back to the capital as fast as possible in order to warn her brother, the king) and Shepherd (a shepherd who found Alex after her entourage got killed by an ambush and helps Alex get back & is her eyes) do a wonderful job of bringing those characters to life. When Alex gets another bad case of CHS (chronical helper syndrom) while Shepherd gives off cynical quips as answer, but helps nonetheless, it shows the nice dynamic between these two. Since there are no visuals, the whole game happens in your head. Which was a great experience, because it made it pretty easy to imagine to be the protagonist. Listen to your right, don't your hear the laughing of playing children? And on the left your companion is murmering to finally continue on and not just stand in the village square.

You also orientate yourself on the village maps by sound (e.g. go to the hammer hitting the amboss for a smith, a merchant will cry out their good wares, the pub will have laughing and music, etc.), but I couldn`t translate that into a mind map. But luckily the village maps were not complicated, but mostly on a central plaza, meaning everything was around you and nothing was in your way. The fights are of course not on a dark souls level, but I still lost some times, because I wasn't paying attention.

For me I could immerse myself best into the game by playing with closed eyes. But since my brain was not used to all that navigating by ear, I played it in 30-60 min bursts, because I got mental fatigue from it. If you have a blindfold to put over your eyes, it will make it easier, since you can relax your eyes and can also play with opened eyes while not being distracted by your real surrounding.

The main highlight of the game are the two main characters, but I still liked the world and the immersion it offered. And playing a game blind was an experience I didn't had yet, so the novelty factor was also there. The game is not very deep mechnically, but I hope the developers will learn from this beginner step and build more complex and even better games for the blind, because I enjoyed this one. If you want to try this game, there is a demo on steam as well.