Forums > Contributor Zone > RotW: Feb. 17-23, 2020 -- Simple and easy, just the way I like it!

You know what's awesome? Having a week with only two new reviews and one holdover from the fairly recent past that may or may not have been forgotten last week. At least (a) I didn't do the forgetting and (b) I wasn't the one being forgotten. Both of those would suck, but instead it was Marc forgetting Gary and, well, none of that bothers me! Even better, both new reviews are by Joe, meaning I have only two places to type for this week. Really good, as I'm really busy with work and stuff this week and if I had some 10-review week, it'd likely be mid-March by the time I got around to it. This time of the year is always like that -- you can look at my usual writing output and it seems very little gets done from mid-February through March. Such is life.

So, here are the placers for this week.


THIRD PLACE

There is none, so I'm giving this place to me as my thank you to myself for still doing RotW after however many years. MARK UP THAT POINT IN SITE KING FOR ME!!!

SECOND PLACE

Joe's Space Pioneer (Switch)

Of your two reviews for this week, I liked this one the most. Both of them were variants on the "game that seemed great, but really wasn't" review tactic, but this one felt more convincing for me. Primarily, I think, because the "seemed great" for Octodad felt more "in theory" where you loved the concept far more than the execution. Here, you reviewed a game that seemed great and was great for a while, but then faltered badly. And you do a great job of taking us through that progression. How you're constantly rewarded, so you'll be wiling to play for an extended time because you're really close to boosting something or other with regularity. And then, you realize you're playing a shallow title that simply doesn't hold up from beginning to end. You did a good job of pointing out the game's immediate appeal and also showing how the experience loses steam the farther into it you get. It looks like damning with faint praise when you essentially get second place out of two reviews, but I think this is one that'd find a way to the podium most weeks, regardless of numbers.

REVIEW OF THE WEEK (aka: Overdrive Place)

EmP's Utawarerumono: Mask of Deception (PC)

Credit given where credit is due. I struggle with JRPG stuff and all its now-boring tropes to a pretty big degree, so this series seems to be firmly in the "might have loved it some number of years ago; not overly interested now" category for me. And you started out with a few lines that had me anxiously expecting to spend a few minutes alternating between reading your review and looking at my computer's clock to see how damn long I'd been reading it. But then you switched to pure gushing enjoyment after that first picture break and did a great job of selling me on at least reading up on this game, if not actually playing it (I have enough SRPGs I haven't gotten to yet to add another series of them to the backlog!). As you said early on, it's a visual novel dressed up as a strategy game and you took that to heart, downplaying the actual gameplay to focus on the characters and their stories and how they wound up providing a gripping narrative that wound up vastly exceeding the expectations those early paragraphs led me to believe you had about the game.


Currently mainly playing Kingdom Hearts III, Hollow Knight, Nier and Divinity Original Sin. Or not CURRENTLY playing them due to being at work, but you get the idea. Maybe by next month, one or two of those games will have been replaced by something else. Assuming I get enough time to beat them, which is always in question.

I'm not afraid to die because I am invincible
Viva la muerte, that's my goddamn principle

Thanks for the thread, but I can't believe you snubbed Fix.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

Wait, what?

I don't have to prove I'm refined - that's what makes me refined!

I have this memory of Fix-snubbing being a thing that happened in the way-back, but I, like, party too much, man to remember too many details other than Fix being snubbed.

I'm not afraid to die because I am invincible
Viva la muerte, that's my goddamn principle

It's funny, because you'd have thought what with Marc being the local authority on snubbing, he'd have got that reference.

Playing Uta's been a real labour of love that I wasn't entirely sure I still had in me, so I appreciate the win and the kind words, 30% of which actually manage to sidestep talking about yourself. Impressive!

For us. For them. For you.

I dont get the reference, but thank you for the comments and quick post!

The only thing my milkshake brings to the yard is a subpoena.