Return of the Obra Dinn - A Gaming Diary

Hey, everyone, doing a little introductory paragraph here to establish what I feel is always implied: big time spoilers in the diary section of this post.  All of my diaries are spoilery, I feel like that's kind of the whole thing.  I'm talking about a game as I'm playing it so I'm going to discuss and react to things I see.  But like, this one will be very spoilery, I'm solving a big ol' mystery, I'm talking about numerous plot points, it's a whole thing.  Beware reading past the review. 

Review:

Return of the Obra Dinn is a true work of art.  This game is possibly one of the most perfect mystery games ever made.  It's an incredibly unique idea for a mystery for starters, solving the events of the disappearance of the Obra Dinn with the ability to go to the exact moment of people's deaths.  But it's also an incredibly fun puzzle box to solve.  The game gives you loads of clues but no definitive answers, trusting the player to solve the mystery with the information given.  Love games that trust the player to utilize the information given effectively without pushing them even a little.  This game doesn't even have a hint button!  Crazy, love that.  The atmosphere is amazing, the story is incredible, I find myself getting unnaturally attached to random people who died several years ago and I know very little about which is insane.  The art style and music also really push this over the top, it's such a unique aesthetic for a game to adopt but I'm so into it.  Just in every way it possibly could, Obra Dinn made me fall in love with it.  An easy 10/10, a true GOTY contender.

Diary:

8/18/25

Hey so uh.  I think I might already really love this game.  Like, it's actually become kind of an issue for the playthrough how much I love the game, lol.  First off, I just like spent WAY too long playing it last night.  Normally I have like maybe 2 hours I can afford to game a night and last night I played for like four hours straight through.  I just couldn't stop myself from getting the next bit of the story, trying to solve as many fates as I possibly could with the information I was given.  But also, also, I am keeping a notes document to make sure all my theories are written down and all my information is in an easily accessible place where I can cross reference it.  And I got so into the game I forgot to keep updating it, so now I probably need to do some housekeeping on it next time I'm able to play.  What a problem to have, you know, loving the game so much that it's causing issues with me loving the game.

I really love how the game eases you into the mystery too.  Starting you at the ending of the story, you piecing together what happened on the ship's final days, with the last members of the crew.  Like, they have very obvious deaths you can sort out and it's a very effective tutorial without really seeming like one.  It's super good.  And then the immediate escalation to a much early part of the journey and the ship being besieged by a Kraken.  There being now an entire set piece with a dozen people to take note of an keep track of?  What a hook, what a great hook.  The way they introduced the layered flashbacks, where you have to find an already dead body in a flashback.  So good.  I love a game that pushes you enough to get the mechanics and then just lets you go.  Also I grew up reading the last chapter of the book first anyways so literally starting with the last chapter of the book feels very right to me.

The Memento Mortem is such a cool device too.  Like what a concept.  This ability to go back to the exact moment of a person's death and hear their dying moments/see the exact point of their demise is so cool.  I love how experimental they get with it, layering various dead bodies inside of death scenes to where you can get kind of a structured little story through a series of flashbacks.  It's so good.  And they use this to such good storytelling potential like.  There's this one layered scene where you initially believe a man got stabbed for no good reason, but as you peel back the layers more and more you start to realize that this is happening AFTER the captain has started to go a little mad and the crew is contemplating staging a mutiny.  And the man whose death you were watching in the first layer was going to report the mutiny to the deranged captain.  A real cool moment though was when you went back into a cow's memories and got to the moment it died and that unlocked a chain contextualizing a major piece of the puzzle.  So good.

I'm very proud of how many theories I've had have either not yet been disproven or were definitely reinforced.  Like, don't get me wrong, I've had to rework a lot of theories.  The identity of a specific member of the crew has proven particularly daunting as he appears in a million flashbacks and I know he has an administrative role, but I can't quite place who he even IS.  Currently my theory is he is third mate Martin Perrott but that might be subject to change, I spent a lot of this game theorizing that he was Edward Nichols.  But like, I've had a lot of major "aha" moments and pretty spot-on deduction.  There's a lot of theories unexplored but like, I was able to pretty reliably piece together who the identity of the first mate was just by inferring things about him, and also who his mysterious partner he's always seen with.  I've gotten on a roll of figuring out a long series of passengers in a row by just dominoing off one of them which is always nice to see like.  I'm making waves, I'm getting close to solving this mystery.

But there are also a lot of hanging threads I still need to answer.  A specific passenger, one adorned with a lot of very distinct tattoos, has eluded me.  I feel like the tattoos are meant to be a pretty clear identifier, and they have definitely narrowed down my list, but I am having more than a little trouble identifying if they are Celtic or Norse or like.  I don't know, French.  I feel like at the point I am at, with the information the game has given me, I kind of have to guess me best with the Chinese crewmen.  Like, there are four Chinese crewmen who ONLY speak Chinese and nobody really says their names so like.  I did feel like I had a million IQ moment though when I pieced together that the four Indian crew members had numbered hammocks in the lower deck, I may need to revisit that memory and figure out if there are any other clues there to the identities of the other crew.  I do like how much this game relies on educated guesses, though, like I'm not mad I'm having to put forward "guess your best" because the more names I check off, the more clues it gives me, and the more I can infer.  Such a good game.

I literally had an epiphany moment as I was writing thi.  I had mentioned the first Kraken memory earlier and given the information in that memory I was of the opinion that the subject who died in it was Emily Jackson.  I had concluded this because the dialog that they put forward for the subject was about her asking for a "Martin" and talking about her husband, being told that "he was below deck".  I had come to the conclusion, therefore, that this must be the wife of Martin Perrott, the ship's third mate and, not seeing another Perrott in the log, I had concluded that they must simply have not changed their name after marriage.  This crossed off the actual identity off the list, ironically, I had assumed that was someone else, leaving two possible options: Emily Jackson and Miss Jane Bird.  Miss Jane Bird, having the title of "Miss", made sense to cross off immediately, leaving, in my mind, Emily Jackson as the only possible identity of the dead passenger.

HOWEVER, something that hit me while I was writing this is that I was thinking of the lines in her death scene wrong.  She was saying these lines TOO Martin (which come to think of it, I need to revisit that memory and see who she was talking to, it might confirm my theory about who Martin is), her husband is the captain, who she asked about in the same breath.  Her line was "Martin, where's the captain?"  This is Abigail Horcust Wittrell, wife of Captain Wittrell and brother of first mate Horcust.  I'm a little embarrassed I didn't piece this together, my train of thought was just somewhere else that I don't think the game would have my think in hindsight, but I think it was sound.  The biggest evidence though, I would've thought of if I had been thinking of the location where the bodies ended up resting more, is that Abigail is being kept in the Captain's cabin.  

I had, erroneously, assumed that this was just to honor the dead, to ensure that Abigail, whose body was still intact, could return home and be buried by her family.  But her being the captain's wife makes perfect sense.  Furthermore, the chronologically final memory, the memory of the captain ending his own life after killing the last few members of the crew who remained on ship, has the captain mourning his friends and talking to "Abigail" his wife, about how he killed her brother.  I had been operating under the logic that this was poetic, that he was speaking to his wife and the sister of his best friend in a non-literal sense, a man at the end of his rope crying about everything that had happened.  But no, he was literally talking to his wife, whose body was sitting right there next to him.

Legitimately, I think the next time I play is going to be a lot of going through and getting my notes in order, checking off everyone who I have confirmation of, be they dead or not.  Get all my ducks in a row, all my theories and facts in order.  Revisit a lot of memories and see if any new revelations come to me.  So far though, my read on the story is this:

I know very little about what happened in the precursor to the events of the second part of the narrative.  What I can assume is that the Obra Dinn was an English ship departing from England to a destination in the East, most likely Formosa, a path that took it around the Cape of Africa.  It had a sizable but not necessarily noteworthy crew and several passengers aboard, including the captain's wife and a couple members of the Formosan royal family.  At some point early in its journey, a bitter cold wracked the ship, and various passengers began to fall ill with pneumonia, taking the lives of two of the Seaman, Soloman Syed and Renfred Rajub, and already the ship's food and supplies were running down and they had to begin butchering their livestock.

Many more days passed on the journey and tensions likely became high.  I imagine the crew began to become suspicious of and resent the Formosans, people of wealth and status, who likely were taken care of while the remainder of the crew suffered under harsh conditions.  It likely got out that the Formosans were carrying a treasure back to their homeland and many members of the crew likely wanted to steal the treasure, ultimately culminating in Second Mate, Edward Nichols, making an attempt to find and steal the treasure, assaulting one of the Formosan Royal guard, who I am 100% sure is Hok-Seng Lau.  He was, however, caught by a passenger passing by the scene, the Italian musician Nunzio Pasqua.  Nichols then attacks Nunzio, killing him and framing Hok-Seng Lau, who was then executed by firing squad, an incident captured in the art of ship artist Edward Spratt.  The people who wish to steal the treasure from the Formosans make another attempt on the royal family, this time holding them hostage, and an unknown crew member gets shot.

 I'm missing a lot of information between then and now, but at some point the sea gets angry.  Maybe it's because of what's happening with the Formosan Royal family and their treasure, maybe it's actions I haven't seen yet, maybe it's related to the "shells" that the crew would later be asking the captain for.  Either way, the ship gets blown incredibly off course, ending up in the middle of the sea far away from land.  It is at this moment it gets assaulted by a supernatural storm, killing one crew member with lightning as giant monstrous spider crabs with the bodies of demonic women growing out of them assault the ship.  The beasts wreak havoc across the ship, killing 5 men whose identities I am still unsure of, as well as the surgeon's mate James Wallace and Emil O'Farrell, the butcher.  In a moment of calm, people begin to abandon ship, with one such abandonment resulting in the death of Lars Linde, a Danish seaman, at the hands of one of the Peters brothers, alleging that Lars had killed his brother earlier on in the journey.

 This calm would not last, however, as the storm would pick up yet again and a monstrous Kraken would assault the ship, the attack resulting in the deaths of Edward Spratt, Abraham Akbar, Christian Wolff, a man who I believe to be Olus Wiater, a man who I believe to be Thomas Sefton or maybe Roderick Anderson, a man who I believe to be Marcus Gibbs, that tattooed man who I currently believe to be Charles Miner, and, finally, Abigail Horcust Witterel, the captain's wife.  Seven other people are mysteriously unaccounted for after this section as well, 6 unknowns and a man who I believe very strongly to be Omid Gul.  At some point in time, the Captain appears to have made a mysterious bargain, one which made the monsters stop.  In the aftermath of the attack, Alfred Klestil, the bosun, mourns his mate Charles Miner before succumbing to his own injuries, and the few remaining living crew and passengers try to abandon ship, with many people dying in scuffles to find room on lifeboats.  The few remaining crew after this are tense, antsy, and begin to speak of mutiny, leading to all of them dying in a conflict below deck.  The very few remaining crew members then decide to abandon ship themselves, at which point they are all murdered by the captain, who then ends his own life in anguish, leaving the ship abandoned, a ghost ship stuck far off the coast of Africa.

 8/20/25

So, I just played through the rest of the game last night, oops.  I also didn't do the reworking on my notes doc because I just ended up kind of going.  Like, a big thing was that there were several pretty substantial holes in the narrative that I wished to fill, I had not yet found my way down to the Cargo Deck, which is where the rest of the mystery started to unravel itself, and once that happened I was just bouncing from memory to memory, trying hard to figure out if I could find any other identities.  And then because I figured out more fates, it narrowed down my crew list, so I can deduce more identities, etc. etc., eventually I played through the entire rest of the game.  Once again, the problem with the game is that I just love the game too much.  What a problem to have, amirite?

I want to once again state how in love I am with how creative this game gets with its memories.  I get down to the Cargo deck, open up a door, and then one of those giant spider crab demons is sitting there dead in front of me.  And that's the memory I enter into, I go to the moment of ITS death.  Like it's just so cool how many ideas the game explores with the Memento Mortem, it's almost kind of sad we'll probably never see a followup.  Apparently this was intended as a series but developing this was a greater challenge than expected and so it ended up a one-off.  I guess in a way that's good, ultimately this gets to stand on its own as a distinctive piece of art.  But also, I could do a million Obra Dinns, as long as the deductions are as solid as this one, I'm there.

Speaking of the memories, by the way, we had an extended sequence of memories that take place entirely divorced from the boat?  I didn't even expect that as a possibility!  This is probably my favorite bit of the game, being out on the open ocean tracing the events of this section backwards by watching the moments of death happen very rapidly.  It's a very interesting segment that breaks the flow of the game, you normally aren't used to tight timeframes in this game, outside of this you only have encountered the one that makes up the ending of the story.  There's also just a very spooky quality to scenes on the open ocean, like, there's nothing concrete about it at all, just an endless blackness that's only occasionally broken up by particles representing the swell and splash of the ocean.  So good, so eerie.

This moment is also super tense, like, it's a very engaging conflict.  Watching these mermaids assault these life boats, killing all but two of the passengers before dying themselves is such a great little scene.  It's made even better by watching it happen in reverse, watching one of the Formosan royalty sacrifice themselves to ensure the mermaids die first and then walk backwards through the attack, watching them take out the small crew of mutineers one by one.  Best sequence in the game.  It's also very sad, one of my favorite character, Bun-Lan Lim, faces a pretty brutal death in this sequence, getting eaten by a Mermaid.  It's also really the moment when I realized that basically everyone is dead, that very few people have good fates in all of this.  The mermaid design is also peak, they don't go full monstrous with it, the mermaids are still pretty recognizably humanoid, but there's also a wrongness to them.  They have like spiked shells and stuff, it's super good.  God, this game rules so hard.

I am a little mad at myself for not picking up on a few identities/fates pretty quickly.  I think, while I did end up getting to the end game pretty quickly all told, I 100%-ed it in under 7 hours, I could've gone faster if I had tunnel visioned less.  Like an excellent example of this is the fate of Henry Evans, the surgeon.  Henry Evans is the character who sets you on this quest of learning what exactly happened to the ship.  The book you utilize throughout your journey is a manuscript originally started by Henry Evans, in fact, and he gives you his location out the gate.  But I got so tunnel visioned trying to solve all these fates that I was halfway done before it hit me that, hey, Henry Evans is alive, and also, also, it took my much longer to discern that meant that the people he abandoned ship with would also, therefore, be alive.  Sometimes I'm a genius and sometimes I'm a fool, what can I say.

Oh, and Peter Milroy. I felt so stupid when I figured out what happened to Peter Milroy.  Once again, like, I had a bad habit of getting too hyperfocused in solving the individual scenes instead of how they connected.  Very tunnel visioned.  So I should've solved Peter Milroy's fate, like, HOURS before I finally did because they literally tell you who he is.  One of the memories, you have to cover is of the death of a Midshipman, one of three, he's part of the grouping of memories I mentioned in the previous section of this post where you see three men die very close together and uncover a small little story of two men trying to mutiny and the guy telling on them.  Anyways, this Midshipman's last words were about telling "Pete's mom" that he tried to pull him back in, that he tried to save him.  If I had been paying more attention I would've parsed that this Midshipman appeared in a different memory, wherein a crew member sacrificed themselves to cause an explosion to hurt the Kraken.  In this one, said midshipman is holding a rope that connects into the explosion and the subject of the memory.  Who is, of course, Peter Milroy.

Last one, I promise.  So I correctly identified one of the Peters brothers in an earlier part and was on the lookout for the other brother.  Specifically earmarking Lars Linde in various memories, trying to figure out points in time where he either was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of another crew member.  And I was so confident that I had found the memory, because in early chapter 6, there's a scene where Lars is standing there watching a crewmate get attacked by a large crab demon.  However, I had forgotten/missed the part where Lars said that the Peters brother who died earlier on the journey died because the ropes were loose.  So it took me a lot of elimination to realize that the Peters brother who died much earlier on the journey was the first person to die on the journey, the poor soul who died before they even shipped off, being crushed by some of the cargo.  The worst part about it is that if I had again not gotten tunnel visioned and looked at all my information, that identity would've been really obvious because he's next to his brother in the big image of all 60 passengers and crew who set off on this voyage.

But at the same time like.  I'm more mad at myself than anything.  Like this is all information I was given and the fact I had issues deducing it is entirely my fault.  I think there are, ultimately, only a couple of crew members where the game doesn't give you any hints on, and those can still be pretty easily pieced together by process of elimination.  Like I don't think the game ever tells you exactly which Chinese crew member is which, but you still can figure it out by educated guessing and process of elimination.  It's an incredibly well constructed game and truly amazing mystery, you never have to blind guess anything.  Every revelation made me go "oh, of course", which is always a great sign.  I love this game so much, y'all.  So much.

OH, and speaking of which, to answer the two questions big crew members with question marks I talked about last time.  So, the guy I talked about who was seemingly in like every flashback?  That WAS Martin Perrott.  I did check Abigail's memories, was right about that theory too, and that made it confirmed.  The mysterious omnipresent crew member was Martin Perrott, it was who she was talking to.  He's the absolute goat, by the way, all my homies love Martin Perrott.  The guy with the tattoos though?  Was so far off and felt like an idiot when it became clear to me.  That was "Maba", a Topman from New Guinea.  I really should've pieced that together, the most out there country on the log is where the most visually striking crew member was from.  I embarrassingly never thought of Maba is a candidate because I hard locked onto the idea that he must be European.  I did a colonialism, y'all.  I'm so sorry.

Also, just love how exciting it was to start trimming down the possible suspect list and just starting to get them rapid fire.  Like, I felt like I got into a flow state of solving fates, next thing I knew I went from "15 solved" to "all 60 solved".  Or 58, I guess, you leave two until after you finish off in the Obra Dinn.  Like, it's obviously not surprising that the more people I get confirmation for on the list, the faster the remaining fates are solved.  But I just love how like the last 45 minutes were just me solving every fate on the Obra Dinn, checking them off one by one.  Like, literally, on my playthrough I'm pretty confident that 6 hours were spent collecting data and then 45 minutes were spent solving every single fate on the ship in a crazy flow state.  I am once again asking for a followup to Obra Dinn, I want to feel this experience again.

The sound design in this game is also superb.  Just like genuinely brilliant.  I love how atmospheric it is in the present time, there's just nothing there.  The feeling of death fills the atmosphere, the ship is static, empty, devoid of anything but the aftermath of the events of the story.  It's a bit spooky in a way, to the point where you could, in theory, get jumpscared by something that has been dead for days, weeks, months.  It's me, I got jumpscared by one of the crab demons.  But then as you go to the moment of various characters' deaths, the ship literally comes alive, you hear voices, sounds, and music.  It's so good.  The soundtrack is also a great little score, despite its short length and utilization of only 11 tracks, one for each chapter and the credits, it's all great work.  Sets the mood perfectly, it's often this very epic "seafaring adventure" vibe with a lot of creepy, surreal vibes mixed in.  So good.

I also love the decision to save the third to last chapter of the story, the Bargain, until after you've left the ship.  Like, first off, it feels very in line with the game, which tells you straight up that some fates may not be cleanly revealed, you will not be given all the information of what happened, and you're going to kind of have to trust your instincts that you're correct.  Secondly, it lets the game have one final mystery for you to unravel.  You've heard about how the captain got the attacks to stop, that he went down below deck and came back a while later saying he had made a deal.  But unless you return with the finished log of the Obra Dinn, you never get to see what that deal is.  But lastly, it lets the game have a final plot twist, a complete shift in the narrative that totally changes how you view the people involved with the ending of the story.  The fact that the Captain himself, who had been setup as a man who had to make difficult decisions to save the Obra Dinn in a moment of crisis almost damned the ship himself in his rage and grief?  Great twist.  And who was there to pick up the slack?  You know him, you love him, it's my boy and yours: Martin Perrott.  Truly the goat, he deserved to have the highest reward sent to his family.

I also love the usage of monkey's paw imagery for this chapter.  The monkey was always an element I was curious about, he appears periodically throughout the game and like.  It was such a bizarre element to include for me?  Like, I'm not mad about seeing a monkey, don't get me wrong, love a monkey.  But it's such a bizarre inclusion for what is otherwise a very standard voyage out of England.  But it becomes clear once you unlock the eighth chapter.  Henry Evans, the ship's surgeon who set you on this journey of figuring out what happened to the Obra Dinn, mails you the paw of this monkey when you return the book to him, asking you to complete the final, missing chapter.  And, seeing the monkey's paw, it starts to click into place.  Across this journey, many people had wishes.  Wishes to protect others, wishes to get rich, wishes to save the ship.  All of them went wrong.  The Monkey's Paw here represents the fate of the Obra Dinn, a classical literary device that communicates to the audience one simple theme.  That being that the Obra Dinn was cursed by mankind not leaving well enough alone.

But, it also leaves you with one final question: what is the motivation of Henry Evans?  Why is he telling you this, why does he want you to know the truth about the events of the Obra Dinn?  Moreover why did he withhold information from you that was crucial to this goal until after you had already long left the ship?  My own personal interpretation of this is as follows: Henry Evans knew what the ship still held.  Despite their best efforts, the Captain had kept some of the treasures that rightfully belonged to the sea and said treasures remained on the cursed vessel until the end.  Evans also knew that the East India Company, who often accepted losses like the Obra Dinn, would likely allow the ship to simply drift until it sunk, at which point the treasures that belonged to the sea would be returned to it.  The only living soul who knew of the treasure that remained being the person whom Henry Evans sent the information too anyways, information he did not trust them to have until the Obra Dinn was long gone.  And, in a way, he was long gone with it.  Leaving the insurance agent with what is essentially a novel, a story so fantastical that no one would ever believe it to be true, not that they could ever tell them their sources anyways.

With that, I think the only remaining thing to do is to give a full rundown of what my interpretation of the story was.  Here we go:

The Obra Dinn, an English ship under the East India Trading Company, is set to sail from the UK to the kingdom of Formosa around the Cape of Africa.  The ship is carrying on it visiting Formosan dignitaries and is returning them and a mysterious cargo back to Formosa.  The total number on the ship would be 60, all told, comprised of a mix of officers, crew, stewards, topman, seaman, midshipman and a number of passengers including the Formosans and, notably, the captain's wife.  Tragedy would first strike the voyage before it even set sail, however, as while the ship was still loading, a loose rope came undone causing barrels of supplies to roll down, crushing Seaman Samuel Peters and a mysterious stowaway that attempted to gain passage on the ship.  This incident would impact Samuel's brother, Nathan, who would come to believe that fellow crewmate Lars Linde intentionally murdered his brother.  A death like this is always tragic, however, in this case at the start of the voyage, these deaths could do nothing but temper the voyage.  Sailors are superstitious folk, and a death before the ship even sets sail is a bad omen.  But, the ship set sail anyways, curse or no curse.

The voyage would progress without much issue, however several of the Seaman would fall ill as it progressed.  Likely, they caught the illness in the UK from a temporary lodging they were staying in, many of the crew members that fell ill were workmen from India, surgeon Henry Evans believes that it was a lung disease.  But, due to poor weather conditions and a bitter coldfront, this illness progressed rapidly in the two inflicted by it, the seaman Solomon Syed and Renfred Rajub, both of whom succumbed to it.  At this point, the crew was already having to tap into their backup supplies, starting the process of slaughtering their livestock for meat and leather.  While all these incidents seem pretty disconnected, to the likely superstitious crew, they see bodies piling up and the already tense situation of this bitter cold likely sewed the seeds of paranoia and distrust among the crew.  This situation likely resulted in resentment of those who weren't struggling, like, say, the Formosan royals who were likely still being treated well while the crew suffers.  With enough time, somebody is likely to make a play at the Formosans.

And make a play they did, as a bit farther into the journey, second mate Edward Nichols would assault Hok-Seng Lau, the Formosan guardsman who had been, up to this point, guarding a mysterious room in the cargo hold.  Within he finds the treasure the Formosans were guarding, a treasure he attempts to abscond with, a glowing shell.  Until an unfortunate passengers walks past the sight of Nichols assaulting the Formosan.  Nunzio Pasqua, the Italian fiddle player who had gained passage on the ship, heard the confrontation and went to check it out.  Not wanting a witness, Nichols murdered Pasqua, and then reported to the captain that it was Hok-Seng Lau who committed the murder.  A sea court was quickly put together, but Lau, being a foreigner whose only translators were Chinese men with conversational Formosan, likely didn't have good defense and he was found guilty.  He was hung from the side of the ship and executed by a firing squad made up of the Seaman Patrick O'Hagan, John Naples, Aleksei Toporov, and Henry Brennan, one of the most important characters in the end of this tale.  Nichols, however, did not give up, and later on, possibly during the night, absconded with not only the treasure, but two of the three remaining Formosans, It-Beng Sia and Bun-Lan Lim.  During this kidnapping, he murdered Topman Timorthy Butemont and sailed off with a small crew and his hostages in lifeboats, attempting to make land in the Canary Islands, pawn off the treasure, and leave the Obra Dinn far behind him.

Bringing the treasure in such close proximity with the sea, however, awoken its protectors.  The treasure belonged to the sea, it's an artifact of its people, and by bringing it so close, those people wish it to return.  Mermaids, all bearing treasures identical to the one in the Formosan chest, rise from the sea and hunt the small party, directly killing Topman Li Hong, Seaman Patrick O'Hagan, and the Formosan dignitary Bun-Lan Lim, as well as causing the Seaman Aleksei Toprov and Alarcus Nikishin to fall overboard, drowning to their deaths.  In the scuffle, It-Beng Sia knifes Nichols' loyal steward, Samuel Galligan, and opens the treasure, sacrificing himself to stop the beasts' assault.  Pillars of a shining substance rise from the chest and the ocean surrounding it, burning It-Beng Sia to death and killing the assaulting mermaids.  With no crew left to him, Nichols plots a course to the Obra Dinn, bringing back with him not only the treasure, but new treasures harvested from the ocean depths.  He attempts to parlay for his life with these new findings, but the remaining Formosan, Chioh Tan, takes vengeance for his fallen comrades, killing Nichols while he attempts to bargain.  But Nichols brought back more than just treasures.  He brought back a curse.  A real one this time.

The true horror of the Obra Dinn begins as they try to reclaim the treasures of the sea brought back by Nichols.  A massive, monstrous shell is brought aboard and as the crew members panic, trying to figure out what to do about it, it begins firing spikes at the crew, killing Chioh Tan and Seaman Hamadou Diom.  They attempt to bring the monsters inside, trying to bring it down to the Lazarette to quarantine them, and they retaliate by killing the cook Thomas Sefton.  This causes the people carrying the monsters down to lose their footing, also resulting in the death of seaman William Wasim.  They do, however, successfully bring the creatures down to the Lazarette.  Unfortunately, their troubles are just beginning.  The treasure, now activated, now so close to the sea, begins driving people mad.  The captain's steward, Filip Dahl, is driven mad by the curse, and starts assaulting people, killing seaman John Naples before becoming imprisoned in the Lazarette himself.  The curse is still only starting, as the Obra Dinn gets blown off course, a storm incoming, trapped in the open ocean.  Trapped in the domain of the creatures.

As the storm reaches its height, the crew attempts to secure the boat, attempting to make it survive its rough patch.  At this moment, Huang Li, one of the Topman, gets struck by lightning.  This seems directed, some ancient manifestation of the sea itself manifesting all its might to assault the boat, barely missing due to a ill placed crewman.  But the crew is not yet aware of what truly has occurred.  Beneath their struggle to get the ship secure, demons from the depths have boarded, monstrous spider-crabs with the bodies of women sticking out of them.  They besiege the ship, going top to bottom and killing anyone in their way.  They take out Topman Nicholas Botterill, the carpenter's mate Marcus Gibbs, the surgeon's mate James Wallace, topman Jie Zhang, midshipman Charles Hershtik, the butcher Emil O'Farrell, and the carpenter Winston Smith in their path before, finally, the monsters are taken out, Winston sacrifcing himself to slay the final one.  Along the way, an ill-timed shot to attempt to end one of the savage beasts misses and hits Zungi Sathi, the ship's steward who had taken refuge in a hallway in an attempt to avoid the monsters.  But even with this, the ship was not out of the woods yet.

In what appeared to be a brief moment of respite, several crew members attempted to flee.  One of the only remaining life boats is being boarded by Seaman Nathan Peters and Alexander Booth, as well as the ship's purser, Duncan McKay.  Lars Linde, you know him, you love him, attempts to join this fleeing crew, but unfortunately Nathan Peters believes that Lars killed his brother and quickly executes the Danish Seaman.  The trio will, however, not make it off the Obra Dinn, as their attempts to flee are interrupted by the arrival of a massive Kraken, which tosses the three under the water, drowning them.  The Kraken's seige is relentless, artist Edward Spratt, seaman Abraham Akbar, and topman Maba (my guy) were all crushed by the beast and the topman Omid Gul and Wei Lee, helmsman Finley Dalton, and bosun's mate Charles Miner were thrown overboard and drowned by the monster's assault.  In the crew's attempts to fight off the beast, the gunner Christian Wolff and seaman George Shirley were blasted by a loaded and lit cannon that did not make it to its firing window.  As well, a loose cannon is thrown by the monster's assault, crushing the third mate's steward Roderick Andersen.  In another attempt, Peter Milroy throws himself with gunpowder barrels at the beast, as his friend Thomas Lanke tries to save him.  But there is one final death, one that sets the course for the remainder of the story.  The death of Abigail Horcust Wittrell, wife to Captain Robert Wittrell.

The Captain, full of rage and grief, makes his way down to the Lazarette.  He's there to "bargain" with the beasts.  When he gets down there, he finds his steward, Filip Dahl, already dead, having been burnt to death by the same energy which had earlier killed It-Beng Sia.  The captain, however, is not there to free the imprisoned beasts.  He's there for one goal: get them to call off the Kraken, or kill them trying.  He brutally and savagely assaults his captives, stabbing them and shooting them as they mock him.  Having accomplished nothing, the captain leaves the lazarette, still full of anger, still full of grief, certain his ship will be sunk.  But, that's when Martin Perrott steps in to save the day.  A small group comprised of third mate Martin Perrott, first Mate's Steward Paul Moss, fourth mate's steward Davey James, and surgeon Henry Evans come to a conclusion: these monsters will not stop until the treasures that belong to them are returned to them.  They mount a prisoner's escape of sorts, reuniting one of the mermaids with the treasure that started this whole mess, and throw it back to the sea.  Unfortunately, Martin loses his life in this attempt, sacrificing himself for the curse placed on the Obra Dinn to lift.  His last words being "see the Obra Dinn home".  After a brief curiosity of Evans' is sated, where he proves that the curse corrupt and changes those who come in contact with it by sacrificing the monkey, the group knows what must be done: take the few remaining people and leave this accursed voyage behind them.

In the aftermath of the beast's attack, the captain states that he "chased the Kraken off".  I'm not sure if even he knows what sacrifices were made to fix the mess Nichols brought aboard, the mess he himself almost made so much worse.  As the bosun, Alfred Klestil, who dies shortly after the Kraken disappeared from injuries he sustained during the attack puts it "a curse like that doesn't lift for nothing".  The small group who truly saved the ship puts their own plan into motion, Henry Evans, Paul Moss, and Davey James find the only two remaining passengers from the voyage, Miss Jane Bird and Emily Jackson, and commandeer the final lifeboat.  Their singular goal?  Escape the Obra Dinn while they still can.  However, one of the remaining crew, Leonid Volkov, doesn't take kindly to their escape.  He assaults the group, angry that the five of them seek to take the only remaining life boat for themselves and strand the rest of the crew on the ship, killing Paul Moss.  When he tries to board the vessel, however, he gets shot and killed by Emily Jackson.  The ship containing the remaining four, Evans, James, Moss, and Jackson, sets off, the Captain just letting them go.  In some ways, the curse, still lingering, letting them go.  The only innocent people and the only remaining people who tried to do right by the sea, getting a chance to shove off from this nightmare.

Tensions remain high on the Obra Dinn.  The captain has, after the escape of the four, seemed to go insane.  He's perhaps spending a lot of time in his quarters, talking to the corpse of his dead wife, a corpse he insists on keeping on the ship, in her bed, as if she were still alive.   In the gun deck, believing they are out of earshot from the remaining crew, the gunner's mate Olus Wiater and fourth mate John Davies are hatching a plan.  At this point, the crew are suspicious, they believe the captain is keeping the beasts and their treasures on board still, and the two of them begin talking of mutiny.  Waltzing up to the captain's quarters, seizing the boat, trading the remaining monsters for gold and sail into the sunset.  They were, however, overheard by the one remaining midshipman Thomas Lanke.  Olus Wiater stabs the midshipman to death, seeing him as an inconvenience to his plan, and in response the fourth mate, who still has a conscience, shoots the gunner's mate.  As Thomas Lanke crawls back his cabin, still bleeding out, Henry Brennan and William Horcust, the first mate, arrive at the scene.  Not knowing that Davies was trying to protect Lanke, Brennan kills him as well.  Horcust grips a dying Lanke, whose last words are of guilt, guilt for the friend he tried to rescue but could not.  The curse claiming many more lives, leaving only the four remaining crew.

As we know by now, the curse corrupts absolutely.  It is greed and death and retribution incarnate.  Captain Wittrell had been consumed by it long ago, and now, it comes for the three remaining members of his crew.  Horcust, Brennan, and topman Lewis Walker find themselves staging a mutiny, a mutiny identical to the one Wiater and Davies had planned days before.  They arrive at the captain's door, demanding that he give them the shells or forfeit his life, planning to assault the captain with every weapon they could find still on board.  The captain, however, was ready for them, armed with the remaining working gun on the ship.  He says they'll never take his treasures, murdering Horcust as he stands at the door.  Brennan beseiges him but the captain manages to overpower the man, killing the most effective crew member in the tale with a single swing of a club.  Walker attempts to assault the captain from behind, but too ends up falling before him.  The captain is alone.  Consumed by his hatred, and greed, and grief.  And then, the curse lifts.  The sea has a sense of humor like that.  The captain is able to think clearly for the first time in a long time, no thoughts of greed consuming him, and he ends up in deep misery.  He murdered his remaining crew.  His best friend is lying dead outside his doorway, dead because of him.  In his last moments, the captain talks about how he failed his wife, whose corpse is sitting in her bunk, how he killed her brother, his best friend, how sorry he is that it had to end.  And then, he ends it.  The Obra Dinn is abandoned.  56 dead, 4 missing.  The 4 would eventually find their way to Africa, living together in Morocco, never wishing to face the crown or their tale again.  But Evans had made a promise to Perrott.  A promise to see the ship home.  And in a way, he did.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a masterpiece.  Every single thing about it is amazing.  This is not simply one of the best games I've ever played, it's one of the best mysteries I've ever experienced.  There are a lot of great mystery games but there are few that elevate the genre like Obra Dinn.  It's an incredibly well crafted and engaging mystery that makes the player solve a story that has no definitive answer, itself up to interpretation.  You have to guess motivations, place your understanding in educated guesses, and work with very limited information because the only thing you're ever given is the exact moment they died.  If I played it fresh, I may have an entirely different understanding of the story.  It's atmospheric, brilliantly built, incredibly engaging.  And it most importantly manages to make minute observations and informed guesswork incredibly fun in a way I'm not sure other mysteries can.  It's a strong contender for my game of the year, it will have to duke it out with Mother 3 for the spot.  An obvious 10/10, adored this game.

Freedom Planet - A Gaming Diary

Review:

Freedom Planet is, in many ways, a better game than its inspirations.  It's gameplay is super fun, fast paced and polished, the addition of a combat system is incredibly nice, in my opinion it has more likable characters and a more coherent and well thought out setting.  The music is also great but that's to be expected from this kind of game.  There's a lot to like about Freedom Planet.  However, I also feel like the level design is quite there, with many levels being either forgettable or frustrating.  As well, there's, in my opinion, a pretty massive quality shift between the first and second halves of the game, with the latter half really dropping the ball to me.  I could see why people love this game, I think objectively speaking it's a rather good game.  I just didn't like it that much by the end of it.  I'd be curious to play the sequel, though, see how it is with another decade under its belt.  6.3/10

Diary:

8/9/25

I wasn't expecting to make this diary, tbh.  I'm like "what do I possibly have to say about the Sonic-like platformer".  And I don't think I'll have A LOT to say, I think this will probably be a short one all told.  But like, I was thinking about what I might say about it and was like "you know what, maybe I should do Freedom Planet, maybe I do have thoughts".  And really that's the only thing that spurs me to make a diary, tbh, "do I think I can say something interesting about this game or my experiences".  It's why I don't keep a lot of diaries for shorter games and/or platformers, because without being able to show you how it plays there's not really that much to discuss about them.  But this one I think might prove fruitful.  So, here we go.

I think a good baseline would be to start with my feelings about the Sonic the Hedgehog series because Freedom Planet borrows a lot from that series, specifically the classic games.  I respect the Sonic series a whole lot.  At one point in my life I was a massive Sonic fan, during high school I was very annoying and very defensive about Sonic.  I got into a lot of arguments online and unironically believed things like "everybody who criticizes Sonic is just a hater trying to keep him down, we have to fight for his honor", an absolutely ludicrous assertion to make about one of the most successful multimedia franchises of all time.  And unfortunately one that still exists considering the heat some critics got for not treating Sonic Frontiers as anything but "a game I liked but had problems with it".  Anyways I just grew out of that and now I think most Sonic games are kinda fine.  

A big thing for me is that the Sonic the Hedgehog series has always been defined by a specific gameplay ideology wherein the player gets the most out of it if they kind of devote their life to it.  A lot of games kind of operate under this logic actually, I like to think of it like sort of "playing to the kids" because children are likely to only get a few video games growing up that they then will get super into.  Between trying to S rank every stage in the later games or trying to find the fastest route/all the Chaos Emeralds in the older games, Sonic is usually at its best if you kind of hyperfixate on it and get really good at it.  And I respect the hell out of this ideology, I kind of roll my eyes at people criticizing Sonic for "being about speed" when, that kind of true, but the way it's designed is built around the idea of "learning how to go fast".  I just personally can't stand it myself.  I want a game that's at its best on the first playthrough because I have to really like a game to even entertain the idea of a second playthrough so if the game is at its best once you've learned it super well, I've already bounced off it.  

However, there IS a Sonic game I do love, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, a game which I think balances the exploratory nature and "earning your speed" of the first 3 Sonic the Hedgehog games; understanding that the player maybe wants to have a great time the first time they play a game instead of having a fine time that they can then grow into making it a great time.  Sonic 3 & Knuckles is designed in a way where you feel as a newbie like you are able to go the fast.  Fun fact, I played this like 5 games after I played Sonic CD, a game I absolutely cannot stand because it does basically the opposite thing Sonic 3 & Knuckles does where not only does it constantly roadblock you but you also have to figure out a specific series of paths to follow WHILE knowing how to stay going fast/keeping your momentum to even get to the ending.  Sonic CD is one of the worst Sonic games, don't @ me.  Anyways, Sonic 3 & Knuckles is superb, I love that game to death and, thankfully, Freedom Planet feels closer to that game than it does the others, at least in the ways that matter.

Freedom Planet's gameplay is spectacular, I'm just gonna say on rip.  Like, it has everything good about classic Sonic while also really understanding how to tap into a wider playerbase.  Like, Alpharad made a video a long time ago where he started out calling Freedom Planet "not Sonic the Hedgehog" and then had to stop and change topics partway through because he found himself enjoying Freedom Planet significantly more than Sonic.  And I think that's a fair assessment.  As someone who is put off by Sonic's desire to roadblock speed on a first playthrough, I feel like Freedom Planet does a good job of not doing it too much.  I feel like while it definitely encourages me to learn routes to keep up my speed, it doesn't punish me nearly as much for not knowing and/or falling off a route.  I can recover pretty quickly and head back to my destination.  There's plenty of opportunities for me, a newbie, to go the fast, and I want to go the fast.

The addition of proper combat to this gameplay too is just excellent.  Like it adds a lot being able to do simple combos both on the ground and in air, and also being able to double jump and spin right into enemies for a multi-hit.  It feels like I have more control over enemy encounters than I do in classic Sonic.  I've always found the ways you're meant to deal with enemies in classic Sonic games to be pretty finnicky, ngl.  Combat though, fixes this superbly, I feel like every hit I take is on me and not on the game, and it's just really fast and fluid too so it doesn't feel like you're fighting enemies forever.  It also allows the game to get very big and inventive with the boss fights in a way that Sonic was never able to do because you're able to actually fight them.  I've beaten the first four levels of Lilac's story so far, don't know if I'm going to do both Lilac and Carol, and the bosses have been real fun, I've liked them a lot.  I especially like the mobile boss against the jaguar mech, it's super cool.

That being said, though, I don't like the level design that much unfortunately.  I think the level theming is great, don't get me wrong.  There are some excellent recontextualizations of classic theming from the genre.  I'm especially a fan of the decision to make the fill in for the Casino level this huge theme park city with gachapon machines that was fun.  Moreover, though, they do a great job of making this feel like an actual world, which isn't always something platformers in general do well.  Like I totally buy these are all locations in this world that exist properly in context.  It's just... man.  These levels go on for FOREVER.  Like, I've put 69 minutes into my actual playtime so far (nice) and I think 40-45 of that was just the first two levels.  Every level overstays its welcome, in my opinion, and a lot of it is being forced to run back and forth solving puzzles and beating minibosses.  I don't think I ever beat Relic Cave when I tried to play this many years ago because I just got so tired of it.  And like, I would like these levels if they were shorter, they're well themed, there's a lot of good parts to them.  It's just man, they go on for way too long.

I'm trying to meet the game on its level so I'm going through the story mode and it's like.  It's not that I don't think the story of Freedom Planet is good.  There are things I like about it, I like this sort of sci-fi take on the War of the Three Kingdoms, I like some of the characters on paper, I like the stakes being very high and there being this sort of conspiracy underlying all of it.  But I don't like how much story there is in Freedom Planet.  It's not surprising to me that a Sonic-alike would be so story heavy, story is like a whole thing for the Sonic series, but like.  I think for a fast paced throwback platformer, I don't want to be sitting in like 5 to 10 minutes of cutscenes between stages, actually.  This is a me problem, totally, I like when things exist in specific contexts and I'm pretty critical of said things attempting to break out of their context because I don't see it as "this is doing something so above what the product normally would", I tend to see it as "okay, now it's on a different playing field and has to compete with things on that playing field, which it's going to struggle with".  This is one of the core reasons I dislike Super Paper Mario, I don't find it to be endearing that it's telling this very un-Mario story about existentialism and the end of the world, I just feel like it's now putting itself in the running with much better art on the same topic.  And that's kind of the thing I'm feeling with Freedom Planet right now, it's not bad per se but I just find it kind of like "I wish this was more simple and fast if it's trying to evoke the retro Genesis-style platformer".  The voice acting isn't great though, that part is a genuine detriment, sadly.

8/11/25

Before I talk about how this section of the game went, I really want to compliment the game on the thing I've been sorely slacking on: the music.  I tend not to really comment on music until a song really grabs me, and in this case it was Thermal Base 1.  It's such an absolute vibe of a track, I love it so much, I was jamming out to it the whole time.  But this soundtrack is really good in general, it has the classic Sonic the Hedgehog rule of "even if the game isn't doing it for you, the soundtrack is still fire".  Jade Creek 1 is another fun track I like, I'm a fan of Fortune Night 2 as well.  Pangu Lagoon 1 another straight vibe, Freedom Planet just has really excellent music and I just wanted to highlight before I get too unhappy.  The composers of this game, there are three credited, did an amazing job on the soundtrack, these songs will probably stick with me long term, I should probably put the ones I like on a playlist.

Anyways, this section of the game was awful.  Just a game ruining second half, like my lord.  I had my problems with the game in the first half obviously but like, on top of those problems the things I liked about the game are now just much worse.  Like, I don't know, it feels like the gameplay has gotten considerably more gimmicky and less solid as it went on, levels are trying to do things that I don't think really fits what the core gameplay is built for.  Like as much as I liked the Thermal Base as a song, its level is boring.  You have to keep going back and forth trying to find key cards and it's like, man, these levels are already kind of too long in my opinion, and this just makes this so much longer.  Pangu Lagoon, Pangu Lagoon might've been my favorite level in the game, the vibes are immaculate, the song is great, I hated playing it.  The whole extra dash mechanic was just kind of frustrating to me.  And there's a shmup stage!  I wish to never play another shmup stage in a platformer I swear.  I don't know, it feels like the gameplay was so perfect, so well designed and well polished and what not and now it's trying so hard to build upon it for no reason and it's making it lesser, in my opinion.

Also, the bosses suck now!  Like genuinely, it just kind of feels like the game has fully fallen apart in the second half.  Like they're way too long now, it feels like there's a difficulty spike where now the bosses are just able to drain your entire health bar by stunlocking you, they're all way more particular about where they can even be hit and usually are only vulnerable for tiny windows of time.  It's sad, I really want to like this game but it feels like as it goes on its just nosediving.  Pangu Lagoon once again breaks my heart here with its boss, the Ice Dragon, a larger than life monster that I wish was so much cooler than it was, but like.  High key, I think this might be a bottom 50 boss in gaming history, I hated fighting this thing so much.  Even if I played optimally, it still would've been awful, it's just not a good design.  It's heartbreaking, honestly, this game was going so well in the first half.

I think weirdly though I'm like.  I'm not invested in the plot necessarily, it's just not something I care too much about.  But I'm enjoying it more than I was in the first half.  I think it's just that I do, at the end of the day, like Lilac, Carol, and Milla.  They're very cute characters and I love their dynamic a whole lot, how Carol doesn't really want to be a hero and just goes along with it because Lilac is her best friend and her sense of morality is too strong.  How Lilac is kind and moral drive, but also self-righteous and throws herself head first into dangerous situations because she feels like she needs to prove herself, needs to redeem the sins of her past.  How Milla is excitable and extroverted but also keeps her distance from her other friends because she has too much baggage.  They're good characters, I like them.  I'd almost be interested in playing Freedom Planet 2 if it meant seeing how these characters and, moreover, these actors in these roles, evolve.  Like I have and will criticize the voice acting, I don't think it's very good, but by and large I just attribute that to inexperience like.  Lilac is voiced Dawn Bennett, a now accomplished video game and anime VA who, at the time, was still new to voice acting.  Her other roles besides this were Fairy Tail and a game we don't talk about or acknowledge anymore.  Freedom Planet 2 is probably much better.

But also I'm probably not putting Freedom Planet 2 on the list because, man.  It's just upsetting, you know.  Like, this isn't the first time and probably won't be the last that I've encountered a game where it really had me in the first half.  Final Fantasy XV was like this, really liked that game until it stopped being a Route 66 themed open world JRPG.  Banjo-Kazooie, I liked that game until you got to Freezeazy Peak and then I just couldn't with it anymore.  Link to the Past, loved that game during the Light World section, started really not vibing with it once you got to the Dark World.  This is where Freedom Planet sits with me, just a game I liked until I didn't.  And it's depressing every time, because I was ready to score this high, despite my issues with it I was really enjoying the game and now I'm just not.  I even have four levels left and I'm just like "I'm not sure if I wanna do this" but like.  I'll see it through, I try to be very choosy about which games I shelve and it's usually if "I'm not having fun but also I'll be not having fun for another 6 hours".  See you on the other side, I guess.

8/12/25

Before I get into the remainder of the experience for me, I just want to talk about the jumpscare I had in the credits.  So, Alejandro Saab, who is now a very big voice actor and also a pretty big VTuber named CyYu, voices one of the characters in this game.  This was one of his first professional roles, like, period, much like the previously mentioned Dawn Bennett his career as a professional voice actor kind of began with Freedom Planet.  So like, obviously, he's in the credits for the game, that's how credits work, that's not the jumpscare.  But then in the "Special Thanks" section they list basically everyone who was involved with the project's online handles, so right in the middle is "KaggyFilms", a YouTube channel Alejandro used to run that was huge like almost a decade ago now but slowly wound down before finally ending a while ago.  Seeing KaggyFilms appear out of nowhere was wild.  Anyways, the game.

So, for the purposes of finishing the game, I did lower the difficulty.  And I will admit, I had more fun on the lower difficulty, being able to blast through at higher speeds without much worry.  Probably something I should've done earlier since I was having a rougher time but like.  I don't know, I always feel bad judging a game on a lower difficulty because it feels like I didn't get the "full effect", you know?  Like this isn't an "ego thing" you know, I don't particularly care about challenging games at the hardest difficulty.  Trust me, I have no misgivings about my skill level, I talk about being bad at games in most of these things.  I just believe very strongly in trying to meet games at their own level, it's why I did the story mode in the first place instead of just rocking in Classic mode.  I feel like too many people don't try to meet games at their own level, they come into them with too many notions of what they should be, and I'm not going to act like I don't do that.  I spent a lot of this diary comparing Freedom Planet too Sonic, a probably unavoidable comparison but one I still regret.  But like, I feel like a lot of people ruin their own experiences with games by coming into them deciding what they want them to be ahead of time.  Anyways, that's why I was trying to beat it on Normal and I definitely could've, like, if I still liked this game enough to try to go for Normal I would've.  But I did just want this to be over.

I don't really have a lot of thoughts about the final levels.  Like, the theming is kind of standard for this kind of game, it's a pretty bog standard space station stage.  The only real unique flavor it has is that, because Freedom Planet has combat, they're able to take some notes from beat 'em ups and have parts with waves of enemies.  But other than that, it's pretty no frills.  The one thing that definitely stood out to me though was the boss of the third section.  Such strong Cave Story vibes coming from it, I kind of wonder it was a homage.  Like, it's a "taking a small cute creature and turning it into a grotesque version of itself" thing, which is obviously common in Cave Story, but also like.  It looked so much like a mutated Mimiga, I swear.  It was the one neuron firing in an otherwise pretty standard and totally fine finale, again, I lowered the difficulty so that's gonna temper my feelings on the final four stages but it felt like the gameplay was better than stages 5-8 but it's also just.  Way less interesting thematically.

Something I haven't complimented the game on but I do want to before the end is how much it plays into Lilac's verticality.  The way you gain top speed through most of the game is through Lilac's "Dragon Dash", an ability to allows her to dart off when her meter is full to reach top speed very quickly.  It also plows through enemies, making it a very effective combat tool if you're facing a mob.  But what the Dragon Dash also lets you do is dart up at an angle, allowing Lilac a lot more verticality than at first glance.  She can also, then, pinball off walls, allowing her to gain even more height.  The game uses this level design ideal to pretty solid effect, allowing them the freedom to have just giant tubes going up off screen with no clear way to enter them because Lilac can just Dragon Dash up them.  It's a fun little thing and I meant to talk about it earlier on in the playthrough but just never got around to.

So, again, I haven't been the most interested in the plot.  It's not bad, I just want to put that out there, the story is fine.  If you are more into the stories of colorful cartoony retro platformers like Freedom Planet's target audience would be, it's decent enough, and I can definitely see why so many people wanted more of this.  But I do really like the core trio, I like Lilac, Carol, and Milla.  So, the fact that the big bad made you fight Milla, potentially killing her, by turning her into a big monster was actually kind of a thing I was invested in.  Milla's fine, for the record, she's on the cover art for the second.  But like, I already liked this Cave Story-esque boss they put in there so the fact that it's just a mutated Milla too.  So good.  A plot beat I definitely cared about.  Glad I didn't give up on the game after how the last section went.

In conclusion, Freedom Planet is a game that certainly has its ups and downs.  I really liked the core gameplay, characters, world, and music.  Those were all real strong, and I think if I had only played the first half of this game, it would rank top 20 on my end of year list.  On the other hand, the level design and late game bosses really do just hurt this game so much.  And I'm indifferent on the story.  I think I might actually be, cautiously, interested in the sequel, because I think this game actually does have a ton of potential.  There's enough I like about it to give it a second chance, maybe I'll look into Freedom Planet later down the line or maybe I'll play through the other stories to see how I feel about them.  We'll see.  As it stands though, man, I really wanted to like this game more than I actually did, I was really having fun in the first half.  6.3/10

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles - My Life as a King & My Life as a Darklord - A Gaming Diary

 Okay, so this one is going to be a little weird, right?  But bear with me.  So, one of my favorite Wii games growing up was the digital only title "Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King".  I loved this cozy little RPG town-builder so much, I've probably played through the whole game like four times.  And I've long wanted to play its sequel, My Life as a Darklord.  But you know, there's just never been a good time for it.  Now though, it's the game I rolled on my backlog and I'm stoked to play it but... I kind of feel like it's a little weird to play this without playing My Life as a King and refreshing myself on the whole like.  Deal.  Of this whole story.  Because it has been literal years.  And so I'm doing it.  It'll double the length, sure, but I'm doing a total runthrough of the "My Life" duology.  Replaying the first game and then experiencing the second one.  I'm actually pretty excited about it and I hope for you, the reader, this creates a better experience overall, gives you more context.  So, without further ado.

Review:

(Note, the following is only a spoiler free review of My Life as a Darklord because that is the game I'm actually clearing this time around.  If you want to know my thoughts on My Life as a King, please read through to the end of that section.  Thank you~) 

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord is a very average game.  It's a decent enough little tower defense with a good sense of humor, great soundtrack and pretty easy to pick up gameplay.  The key problem with it though that keeps it down is that it's really poorly paced.  The game takes a pretty long time to get into a good flow and/or good gameplay loop, taking far too long to introduce pretty basic elements in its attempts to keep a specific progression going and at times just making a level unreasonably difficult by holding off said elements.  Many critics have criticized the game for feeling as if, by the time you finally get all your toys to play with, all your pieces to strategize with, the game is just almost over with nothing to do.  But the good parts about it are really good, it doesn't fully save its unsatisfactory gameplay and progression but it does a good job balancing it.  It's fine.  I don't think it's a great loss that you can't buy this anymore but it's a solid little time if you really like Tower Defenses and want one with JRPG-trappings.  6.2/10

My Life as a King Diary:

7/25/25

Man, the good vibes just rolled in immediately.  This game is such a wholesome little game, I swear.  It's really sad that Square-Enix hasn't made a remaster/port of this game, I think people who like city-builders and/or RPGs would really enjoy My Life as a King, even if it's pretty simple overall.  It's like, the whole game is about building your own little wholesome RPG town and it gets the vibes right immediately.  It also just feels good playing it again, this game, as mentioned previously, is a game I played quite a bit in the past.  I even purchased all of the DLC, I think this might be the very first game I ever purchased DLC for, which is CRAZY to me.  I'm not one to be taken in by nostalgia but it does bring back some great memories strolling through the town.  By the way, growing up, had the BIGGEST crush on Chime and her goth outfit, while not awakening anything in me that wasn't already there, definitely fueled a flame, lol.

I'm a pretty big fan of the fact that rather than convincing people to move into your town, everyone who is in your town already lived there in the past and you're just magicking them back.  My Life as a King takes place after the events of the original Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, so up until recently the entire world was consumed by an evil miasma and we are among the first venturing out into the world to reclaim our towns and cities.  So many of the residents are ex-refugees who are now restarting their lives and they come with interpersonal relationships and families and what have you.  Despite this being a simple download game with very limited space, it really enhances it that these people feel like they already have a rapport.  One of my villagers, Zack, wanted me to open a bakery in town and obviously that's a good idea but we come to find out the owner of the bakery is one of Zack's friends from the before times and he'll comment on how excited he is to have his bestie back in town.  You'll also see your villagers running off to spend time with other villagers they're close to or having conversations in the street, it's nice.  They're not particularly deep or complex characters but for a simple Wii era download game, it's a surprising amount of depth.

The adventurers in My Life as a King are the funniest things about this game.  Like, you have to hire the town's teenage residents as adventurers to go out and replenish your stash of "Elementite", because without Elementite you can't make buildings.  It's a whole thing where you pay adventurers to go find elementite so that you can build more buildings, collect more revenue, and better pay your adventurers and improve the town's infrastructure.  Basic stuff.  The adventurers are so funny.  So the adventurers can have multiple different reactions and success rates for the day.  When they show up to take jobs they'll either be excited, resolved, or despaired at the listing and you can either tell them to take the job, go on a side mission to gain EXP, or just like.  Go home.  If they're despaired.  Take the day off.  And also when they head off to gain EXP or do the job they either will succeed, fail, or just like have an existential crisis and give up.  When they return to town they'll be like "am I really cut out for this, is this what it means to be an adventurer".  So you can start to fill in personalities for these guys pretty quickly.

Like, my strongest adventurer, Val, is great.  All her stats are really high, she gets jobs done very effectively when she's out on them, she's probably going to inevitably be the sort of "leader" of our little guild when it's built.  Her stats also give her a million options on what to do about classing, she can be an excellent knight, thief, or black mage due to her high strength, constitution, agility, and intellect.  The thing is though, Val is a disaster.  She has no confidence in herself, she often freaks out while in dungeons and comes home early feeling miserable, she often has to take days off.  This woman has just the worst case of imposter syndrome I've ever seen, despite being the best in the village she really does not think she's cut out for this.  Like part of me is like "girl, you can quit if you don't want to do this" but also I desperately need her not to quit because right now she's holding the fort down because ya boy thought he was doing a million IQ play by recruiting someone with really high wisdom for when I unlock the white mage school and he sucks and I want to fire him.

My Life as a King also does the fun thing where it has a singular theme that gets increasingly intricate as the game goes along.  It could do more, admittedly, I believe it ultimately only has three iterations, an early, mid, and late game version.  But it has a pretty simple melody that grows more grand and complex as it goes along.  I feel like this is probably just a common element of city building titles that I simply find novel because I'm largely unfamiliar with the genre, but if city builders are not doing that, they should.  It's such a good thematic element for the genre, I'm brought back to the early days of New Horizons, the best part of New Horizons really, where before you had the hourly themes you just had this "island music" that would grow and change as you turned this island into a proper town.  It's such a good note, and it's really a shame that here we only get it in these three parts, because the music is also real good.  The My Life as a King soundtrack is short, I think only 13 tracks, and for all I know is reusing tracks from the first Crystal Chronicles, I've never played that one admittedly, but it's real good.  I'm sad Kumi Tanioka doesn't seem to do composition work as much anymore, it seems like it's for good reason mind.  She apparently prefers live performance to composing.  But her music is super nice and super unique, she has a lot of "world music" influence, and her main thing is mixing and matching various culture's musical stylings to create super unique sounds.  She mostly did Crystal Chronicles and bounced, only doing stuff from time to time mainly on Minecraft strangely enough.  Her composition stylings are missed.

Oh also there are tons of frogs.  Like just so many frogs.  We're told by one of our advisors in a story about our parents that the Queen loved frogs (based) but the King hated them (cringe).  However, the King loved his wife so much that he made the entire Kingdom frog themed.  The royal crest is a frog, hanging above the door to the castle is a golden frog, the job boards are frogs, the wooden has frog prints carved into it.  There are even frog prints carved into the stone work around the town.  Our dad is already dead by the time the game starts but we already know that, a, he was a wife guy, and b, he had just full commitment to the bit always.  And you know what, good on him, I love seeing all these frogs about.  I wish I could capture from my WiiU so I could show you all the frogs, frankly.

7/27/25

The villagers in this game are so funny, y'all.  So, in this part we finally meet the antagonist of this game, simply titled "The Dark Lord".  In a shocking turn of events, the Dark Lord appears to be our own father, not just in his appearance or his mannerisms but he even has a few of our father's memories.  It's a pretty decent plot twist for this early in the game, especially since so much of this game is built on this idea that our father was this kind, noble king whose footsteps we're following in, so seeing him be the villain in all of this is pretty wild.  But like, most importantly though, our villagers react to this in one of three ways: despair at the revelation, resolve to double their efforts to defeat the Dark Lord, and, the funniest, simping.  Many of the female townsfolk had crushes on the king, who is a handsome man admittedly, and now they're just like fully on team Dark Lord because of this revelation.  Hilarious.  10/10 writing.

I've finally unlocked the class system in the game!  Every single adventurer you hire, at least if they are human (which they're always going to be if you don't have the DLC) starts out as a warrior and then as you progress in the game, you unlock the facilities necessary for changing their class.  Namely a casino for thieves, a school for black mages, and a church for white mages.  Moreover, the game not only incentivizes you to keep a variety of classes in rotation but also to kind of set up your town to where the adventurers all live near their facilities.  Like, your adventurers will get better at their jobs if they live close to the black mage school or the church or whatever.  It's also just good for convenience to keep everything together because the more you add to the town for adventurers to do, the longer it takes them to go off adventuring, which is a problem as they frequently will be out much later which like.  I don't KNOW if it has an effect on their performance, but it feels like it does, especially if they are on their own.

Which, speaking of being on their own, I unlocked parties!  In classic RPG fashion, you have to build a tavern for your adventurers to meet in order for them to form a party.  Such a good bit.  I love how taken aback Chime is by your want to build a Tavern, which, by the way, isn't just like RPG shorthand, it's a literal tavern, they serve alcohol there.  Their sign is a barrel of beer.  But then she is the one who runs the taverns, she sits there and serves drinks all day while also tending to the kingdom's taxes and helping you build buildings.  Having parties is nice because, a, it cuts down on the amount of time adventurers need to spend preparing for quests because the party leader will just arrive at the board in the morning while all the others gather their supplies for the day automatically but also, unsurprisingly, your adventurers are better as a unit than they are as individuals and are better equipped to handle tasks accordingly.  Parties will form naturally, but you can also assign a party to each tavern, so officially my girl Val is the first time leader of my little town.  So proud of her, she's adapting to the role well, she doubts herself way less now.

I also unlocked the non-human races this past play session.  I need to expand my ability to build houses before I can really do anything with it mind, the game puts pretty hard limits on what you can build at any given time until you progress in the game for balancing reasons.  Still an RPG at the end of the day.  These guys were, originally, DLC and the main thing about them is that, unlike the humans, the other races in the game are class locked but excel at that given class.  It's not something I'm the biggest fan of, admittedly, I know for a long time that loads of RPGs either locked your available classes to race or strongly incentivized you to go with a specific class setup dependent on your race.  But like, idk, it's always felt weird to me to be like "oh all of this race is just naturally good at stealing stuff, they are all thieves".  It's really amazing how little fantasy tends to have evolved from the Tolkein days sometimes, I swear.  But like, it's nice having them, I feel like the eccentric races are something that makes the Crystal Chronicles series visually interesting and it's kind of bonkers they weren't already in the game, y'know.

Unfortunately I've gotten to the part of this game where you're just like.  Waiting.  Constantly.  I mean you get to walk around and talk to your villagers and that part's nice but they run out of new things to say pretty quickly.  The sad truth is that at least half of your days are wasted in this thing, you hit your caps on buildings you can build and you're kind of just waiting around for your adventurers to find new stuff for you to do.  Thankfully the game lets you skip to the end of day at any point so if you can't do anything that day you can just skip to end but like.  Idk, I wish that progress was happening at a faster pace, you know.  Like, I get it, it's a way to get more content out of a pretty basic game and I appreciate the effort given that this was, originally, one of the most expensive WiiWare games at $15 I think it sold for.  But still.

7/29/25

Y'all, I need to tell you about Oz.  So, Oz is one of the first villagers I gained in my little Kingdom, in fact he lives basically in town square, I would not be surprised if he was one of the first five houses built in the town.  Oz lives in a small house with his younger sister Alma, who wants nothing more than to be an adventurer and help the kingdom thrive.  He's often seen wandering the streets throughout the day, in particular seeming to prefer crossing town to get better prices on his baked goods.  And Oz is the most hated man in my Kingdom.  For a long time, I did not actually know who he was or where he lived, I would just hear the legend of him.  I would check profiles of my villagers and if they ever mentioned Oz, it was always the same message: "Oz has been distant".  Which is just a pretty nice way of saying "we don't like him".  But he was usually at home, seemingly not bothering anyone.  I thought maybe, genuinely, people were just expressing concern, saying he has been distant because he's such a homebody.  And then Oz started roaming around town and boy howdy, did I find out why he's hated.  

I mentioned Oz walks across town to go to the bakery, it just so happens that the route he takes just so happens to take him to basically every house with a young, unmarried woman in town.  And he never stops in to say hi, just always leers at them through the windows it feels like and then makes uncomfortable comments about them.  He doesn't even buy anything from the bakery, it's literally just an excuse to be weird.  He also appears to be a habitual drinker and is always stopping in to see Chime who, I'll remind you, is also the prime minister of the kingdom.  He makes several comments about catching the woman bending over, revealing her stockings to the world.  This guy sucks, just the worst guy, throw him in jail, nobody likes him and nobody will miss him.  I don't even think his sister likes him.  That's not true, his household affinity score is always very high, Alma might be the only person who likes him.

As the town fills up more and more I genuinely feel like there's less and less I can do with it to still make it look good?  My Life as a King has specific lots where you can build buildings and it often feels like the deeper into the game you get, the less likely you are to find a place to put things to make them look and/or feel good.  It feels like there are also specific lots where the game is choreographing you to place things, like.  The school and the church are the largest buildings you can place, being 6 squares each, 3 wide and 2 deep.  There are two exactly 6 square lots in the town, both of them near town square, and it feels like they're telling you just "hey, put these here".  And like, admittedly, it's a convenient placement, but it also ends up looking pretty ugly because no matter how you arrange these two buildings in the lots in question they don't look good.  They block each other and mess up the sight lines.  But also they equally don't look good anywhere else because there's not really a better lot for them where they don't look off center.  It's rough.  I would love to see this idea re-explored with way more freedom, I think that would go hard.

I'm also never sure how to feel about the dismantling system.  Like on the one hand, I kind of like how inefficient the ability to move things is given how choreographed the town layout tends to be.  It really makes you have to live with your choices because undoing a bad placement is a time sink, you have to mark something for demolition and then wait a day and then rebuild it and you can only dismantle so many buildings in a day.  Your town becomes unique because of the errors you made, in effect.  On the other hand, like, in the late game especially when you really want to start being serious about what the town layout looks like, you're spending just a lot of days dismantling and moving.  It honestly kind of feels like dismantling was an after thought, something they realized they should add later on into production.  Like again, I do love this game, but I'm really starting to realize why for all the times I've started a new kingdom, I've only ended up finishing one like twice.

Oh also I unlocked Inns.  That part is cool.  Inns, obviously, bring in more revenue to your kingdom but the fun part is that adventurers, while they're staying in town, will help out around the city.  They'll show up to the quest board and be like "hey, I want to help out your guys, I like your kingdom's vibe".  This can sometimes help you out immensely, the traveling adventurers tending to be at or above your own highest level adventurers.  It also incentivizes you to leave your options open when planning dedicated party structures as to allow these new adventurers to aid and assist properly.  Or you could just be like me and have so many adventurers wrapped in existing dynamics that the wanderers end up squadding up with each other most of the time, that's cool too I guess.  The other neat thing about inns is that they bring in new random NPCs into your kingdom who have very unique descriptions.  One of the first outsiders staying in my kingdom, for instance, was a traveling diplomat from another nation having a brief vacation in the countryside.  It makes the world feel that much more alive, you know?  And I think in the base game, it was the only way to encounter the other races of the Crystal Chronicles world?

8/2/25

Progress stalled this session, my god.  For some reason, none of my adventurers were accomplishing like ANYTHING for what felt like an entire in-game month.  They would keep going out on missions but because they took so long at the start they would basically get to the dungeon and then immediately turn around.  It was so frustrating.  The worst part about it is that like, I needed them to complete the tasks given to them specifically so that this exact scenario wouldn't happen.  One of the buildings locked behind one of the dungeons they weren't completing was the Emporium, a massive bazaar which not only drastically increases the happiness of your townsfolk, but also improves the stock of every adventurer shop in the city.  It unlocks stuff like Daggers, Shields, and most importantly, torches.  Torches allow adventurers to stay out later, making them far less likely to come home early from a mission because it's getting dark.  So the situation torches were designed to prevent was exactly the thing stopping me from getting torches.  Infuriating.

The Dark Lord finally showed himself truly.  I guess technically he showed himself last time and I forgot to report on it because I was too busy talking about the real villain of this game, Oz.  Something I find really interesting, and which sets up the theming of the next game very well, is that the Dark Lord's appearance creates something of a sympathetic atmosphere among the townsfolk.  The Dark Lord reveals that the kingdom that we are currently occupying was originally built by him, designed to be a safe haven for the monsters of the realm, and that our father stole it from them as they retreated when the miasma cleared.  It's why the Dark Lord seems to have a vested interest in the continued development of our civilization, it is his hope that he will one day return to claim it for his people.  And the town has largely adopted this atmosphere of "we don't believe what the Dark Lord is doing is right, per se, but we do wonder if a future can exist where we can coexist with the monsters that we fear, rather than just sending our adventurers out to kill them".

Something insane I learned, or at least remembered, I guess, is that because of how the game determines how parties function, if you have three parties set but only two job boards, then one of your parties will just go on autopilot and train forever every day!  My best party, the one belonging to Val, just spent several days this play session going on unproductive training missions.  What I have to guess is that the way the game codes parties, it counts the party leader standing at the board accepting the requests as if the entire party is there, accepting requests.  And it is not coded to accept/understand the idea that 8 or more characters will arrive at a board seeking jobs.  So it forces a completed party to go on autopilot until another job board is added to the village.  What a wacky way for that logic to work!  I fixed it though, the third party I made is benched as a cohesive unit until I unlock a third job board.

I don't know if I'll have another update between now and the end of the game.  I'm kind of in this weird point in the game where like, the next story beat is going to be end game, iirc, and it's just a matter of clearing dungeons until that happens.  I know it seems like I've been increasingly negative on the game and I will admit, it definitely kind of goes wonky in the midgame, but I really do enjoy this game a whole lot.  Part of it may be nostalgia, mind, like I said me and this game have a pretty intimate history together.  But this game is just so warm and cozy.  I would love an improved remake of this game a whole bunch, I've said it a million times but I think there's a real untapped market for this city building game where you make a cozy RPG town.  I'm really happy I replayed this, it's been a fun experience.  And I think it's good to look back on things you're nostalgic for and re-evaluate them when you're older, tbh, rather than just letting your nostalgia lead you for the rest of your life.

8/3/25

I beat the game!  The final boss is actually super interesting, they effectively do a raid boss for it.  Like, instead of how the game usually functions where dungeon bosses are taken on by individuals and/or parties as a specific job, when you declare the battle against the Dark Lord, your entire selection of adventurers are put on that job for the day.  Or at least as many adventurers as can fit on a singular job board because instead of making it appear on every job board it just appears on one, causing the issue to happen that I mentioned in a previous section.  Anyways, you send out everyone and then they battle the Dark Lord, taking down as much HP as possible before they die.  Pack it up, restart the next day.  The Dark Lord doesn't appear to heal in between days, it may in fact do so, mind, but on a day to day level it's so minimal that it's not even noticeable.  I think you'd likely have to leave it alone for an extended period of time for it to heal any health for it to be a real problem.  It took me like an in-game week to defeat it, all told.  And the person who took down the final boss?  My girl Val.

I'm pretty sure there was a spy in my kingdom.  One of the people who would come in and out of staying at the inn was a traveling diplomat from the Selkie people, a race of primarily attractive women.  I believe there are males but if you see a Selkie, it's going to be female.  Even our prime minister, or "chancellor" as the game calls her, Chime is half-Selkie.  Anyways, this diplomat's descriptor literally says she keeps coming back into town to learn the secrets of the king's magic, the Architek that he uses to summon buildings.  I'm like PRETTY confident that she was spying on us, especially since other townsfolk often imply the Selkies tend to keep up unscrupulous company, with some even positing that they're closer to monster than human.  A rumor even starts that the Dark Lord himself, under all his armor, is a Selkie mage.  She also was very weird about the King, commenting how handsome he was despite being, you know, underage, and saying stuff like "I look forward to seeing you grow up".  Weirdly common thing in this game actually, older women hitting on the King, it's such an out of pocket detail.

I'm surprised how long it takes you to unlock villager requests.  You have to raise your town up pretty high before the game allows you to gain the ability to do favors for your villagers.  Or rather, spend a day sending your adventurers to do favors for your villagers.  It's a surprisingly late game ability, you upgrade your town into a different civilization type by using spheres you collect by talking to your townsfolk or them talking to each other.  And I think it's the upgrade that requires 16 of them that unlocks villager requests!  They're fun little bonuses though, especially if you have three job boards but only two available jobs for that day.  Just send your adventurers around town looking for some rando's lost trinket.  This is a scenario that happens more often than you think, actually, there's always like one party out exploring a new dungeon and another party fighting the boss of another dungeon and party three doesn't really have that much to do!

Something I found extremely cute was that, when you get the cutscene to be like "okay, go fight the final boss now", everyone says how much the King and Kingdom means to them, except for Chime who can't bring herself to really say it.  Instead, what Chime does is write it in her journal, the game is revealed at this point to be Chime recounting the events of it inside of her journal, and as you go around town entering all these buildings you built, Chime has little comments to say about them.  How the King was so worried about his people getting hurt that he built a weapon shop, or how he built a bakery so the town would stop having to subsist on stale bread from the castle's storerooms.  Basically every building has one of these, unless it was a DLC exclusive building.  It's really nice going through town and reliving all these memories, hearing what these buildings meant to both the townspeople and Chime herself.  This is YOUR town, that you built up from nothing into this thriving civilization.

I'm really glad I revisited this.  Sorry I've been lacking on the saucy drama department, unfortunately my villagers end up kind of boring and nice 90% of the time.  I still think this game is solid, I think it's a perfectly fun, perfectly fine time.  But I also found more criticisms with it than I did back in 2009.  It's definitely an excellent concept for a game, I don't know how this hasn't become a more common practice in the life sim/farming sim boom.  Executionwise though, you can definitely tell the game is really padded.  Like, it was a downloadable Wii title, this thing is tiny, it lags when you try to go to end of day because it has to make a hundred different checks on the adventurers you've sent out to see if they succeeded or failed their missions.  It's simple, it's basic, it could be fleshed out way more.  But I still think it's a fun little time.  In the past I would give it like an 8/10, maybe an 8.5/10.  I think now my rating is more like a strong 7-ish.  It's very imperfect but still very fun.  And like, I'm never going to hate this game, I have too much nostalgia caught up in it.  7.2/10

My Life as a Darklord Diary:

8/5/25

My Life as a Darklord starts out with a very interesting idea on rip: that the giant battle with the Dark Lord, the thing that took me an in-game week to complete in the previous game, was staged the whole time.  That the Dark Lord, seeing that he was fighting a losing war, intentionally let himself be imprisoned so that his people would be spared from any further assault by the people of the Kingdom from the first game.  This game then picks up an indeterminate amount of time after the first game.  It's really hard to figure out how long exactly, as none of the characters from the first game have physically aged at all, but also it's been long enough to have people begin to settle the wilderness that the Dark Lord once ruled over.  We pick up with our new protagonist, Mira, the Dark Lord's daughter who recently turned 16 and thus is finally old enough to ascend to the throne her father left vacant.  And she is MAD.

Mira is so funny, y'all.  So, her father literally sacrificed himself to make peace with the humans, right.  Just totally took the L so his people would stop being killed en masse by an invading army.  Mira, frankly, thinks this was dumb.  Mira is not about the "live peacefully with humans" life AT ALL.  What Mira wants is to crush the entire world under her boot, bringing in an era of monster domination that made the miasma days from the OG Crystal Chronicles look easy by comparison.  She is a petulant, spoiled brat who truly believes that she's owed world domination just because she's the Dark Lord.  She's so funny, I love her so much.  She assaults her own soldiers for annoying her too much, she almost executes her chancellor, Tonbetty, yes really, for thinking that apples are an appropriate end goal when clearly apple pies are what we should be after, she throws temper tantrums when she loses and gloats relentlessly when she wins.  She's so good, she's such a brat.  But she does also have a softer side, she is quick to hype up her minions during battle and is fiercely loyal to those who are loyal to her at the end of the day.  She's a spoiled child who was gifted a mobile fortress for her 16th birthday and is now like "time to crush everyone" but there's also a heart in there somewhere.

Speaking of the mobile fortress, My Life as a Darklord goes in a very bizarre direction for a sequel to My Life as a King.  Like, it being so closely tied, you may think it's a city builder from the other side, maybe building up a monster encampment in the wilderness to try and reclaim your father's kingdom.  It's a tower defense.  You build up the literal tower of your mobile fortress, using dark energy you obtain from knocking out adventurers to add floors to the tower and then staff those floors with monsters.  The goal being to not allow adventurers to climb all the way to the top and take the crystal sealing your father that you have hidden up there.  I think Mira mostly needs it to channel her dark magic through, tbh, because otherwise there's not a lot of reason why she specifically would even want her father to stick around.  She seems to resent him actually, he gave up on their dreams of world domination!!!

Low key, I actually thought this was going to be an immediate wash.  Like, I don't know if this is just a me problem but it's not necessarily that I dislike Tower Defense games.  Plants vs. Zombies is literally one of the only games I've ever rated 5/5 stars and is the reason I even started dabbling into PC gaming.  But it's definitely the genre where like, at the start of it I'm usually going "this is boring and simple, I don't know about this".  That being said, I also feel like this game is taking way too long to introduce mechanics.  Like, I understand using my example of Plants vs. Zombies, that game is always introducing mechanics, in the vast majority of levels you are getting a new plant that can completely change how the game is played and how you choose to strategize going forward.  But I think by the end of level 1 or 2 you still, like, get it, you know?  The basic gameplay loop is spelled out for you and so it's just up to you to figure out how to strategize with the different pieces they add in later.  Darklord introduces a class triangle, warriors beat thieves who beat mages who beat warriors, but by the end of Chapter 2, when they finally introduce warriors, they have not given you the tools to dispatch with them.  So you're just like low key hoping you can outpace them in damage before they get to the top of the tower.  I'm not asking the game to hand me a win con without any work, mind, but I do wish they would get on with introducing mechanics so I feel more like I'm making educated decisions.

Speaking of class triangles, I do find it super interesting how the game handles adventurers climbing the tower.  When an adventurer climbs up the tower they HAVE to stop at a floor if it is unoccupied by another adventurer.  Each floor has a built in trap to it and the trap will go off if an adventurer stops on the floor, assuming the trap is not meant to provide support for monsters that may be on the floor.  If there are no monsters, the adventurer will attack the trap, dealing a bit of damage to it, before moving on to the next floor and repeating.  Here's the fun part though, if there are monsters, they will initiate a JRPG battle with them.  This is your primary way of stalling out and defeating adventurers, forcing them to battle your waves upon waves of summoned minions until it wears them down.  Each adventurer only spends so much time on each floor, however, so you really have to bulk up the tower ASAP if you're going to be battling a wide variety of adventurers.  Furthermore, as previously mentioned, floors that are already occupied by another adventurer will be skipped over by other adventurers, so you really have to rely on your tower's height as well as its defenses to properly deal with adventurers.

It's very funny how they choose to incorporate the characters of My Life as a King as well.  Like these are characters with their own specific roles and histories in the original game, many of whom are not even proper adventurers in the first place.  Like Chime, the chancellor of the first game, very clearly tells you that she has no stomach for adventuring and, despite her education at the Black Magic Academy when she was very young, she only really uses her abilities to better serve the King as his advisor.  And in this game, she's the first boss!  She's now a powerful wizard, defending one of the cities from your mobile fortress.  It's kind of an insane place to take her, given that she strongly implied that once the war was over and the King was able to take on more duties of his own, she was going to take a sabbatical to get married and raise children.  Like, settling down was legitimately a very important, hopeful note for her, and now here she is, defending a sister city from a giant monster tower roaming the countryside.  Objectively it seems like things have gotten worse for her!  And also the world!  It seems like the war is going poorly, actually!!!

Admittedly, I'm not super sure if I'm going to ride this one out until the end?  Like, I'm enjoying it, don't get me wrong, it's fun enough.  But I feel like I kind of "get it" already, you know?  Like, again, I don't dislike Tower Defense games, but I tend to feel like of the genres, it's the one the one more than others where I get a couple hours in and go "okay, I feel like I've seen everything this game has to offer".  I'll do at least one more play session, but don't be surprised if I bounce off this one in the end.  Which would be a shame because I put so much time into playing an entirely different game to prepare for this one, completely reshaping how I felt about a favorite growing up, only to then be like "yeah I'm just not feeling this one", lol.

8/7/25

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord is not long for this world, y'all.  I mean, it literally isn't, it's a WiiWare game so officially there's no way to play it right now.  But I also just... I don't know.  Maybe it's because Tower Defense isn't my speed, but I've gotten most of the way through chapter 3 and I'm like "I don't think I really want to continue this".  I'm very sorry if this is, like, anticlimactic, but you gotta go with what you feel, right.  And I just was not feeling this that much.  I frankly wish they had just made another city builder and tweaked it a bit, that would've gone hard.

So the big reveal at the end of Chapter 2 was that Mira is half human.  This is not unexpected, Mira just does not look like a monster.  It's kind of something that I haven't been super fond of, that they really didn't go hard enough with making the Darklord look more monstrous, especially when there's so many ways to make a monstrous character design look cute.  Mira just looks like a teenage girl with weird hair and different colored eyes to indicate her monstrous half.  It's disappointing, I want a proper monster girl.  Anyways, she does not take this news well at all.  She assaults her own citizens in anger for not telling her, and then realizes they didn't know either, which is even worse for her.  Because that means the only person she can talk to about this is her father, and she hates that guy.  I had speculated she hated her father before, but in this part of the game she just says it.  She thinks he was a coward whose quest for peace made him weak.  So talking to him, not exactly on the table for her, instead she's going to rampage across the countryside until she feels better.

So, the thing that finally made me go like "nah, I'm good" was the introduction of White Mages.  White Mages are, on the surface, pretty unproblematic.  They don't deal any damage to either your units or the floor and kinda just slowly go up the tower, stopping on each floor to do nothing.  The only thing they can do is heal!  This is the reason why they made me give up.  White mages are so overtuned.  First of all, they don't really have any weakness per se, so unlike most units in the game you can't counterpick them to get an advantage.  You simply have to outdamage them.  At the current capabilities I have in the game, the highest damage output I have available to me is a room of 3 Scorpions with a trap that deals damage such as the Iron Ball.  This setup will net us about 45-50 damage on a white mage.  They heal for 30 on each of their turns.  At level 1.  If they're a higher leveled white mage, they heal for considerably more.  White mages warp the entire game around them in a very unfun way, you no longer are really rewarded for smart planning, good strategy, and good improv.  You're now only rewarded for having a real big, real well stocked tower that can hopefully out damage the white mage's healing capabilities.  It sucks, it's so bad.  It almost feels like luck sometimes, like if my monster's movement bars aren't in the right sync, I just lose.

I do want to compliment this game's soundtrack, real quick.  Kumi Tanioka returns to do the soundtrack and I loved her work on the first game a whole lot, y'all know.  I think this one is leaps and bounds better.  It's honestly kind of a shame that this game is unknown that it doesn't even appear people have uploaded the soundtrack, it's a super underrated one.  It has this great main battle theme which evolves over the course of a battle as more powerful units start coming in.  The boss theme is great.  A lot of the incidental music is fun.  Kumi Tanioka cooked and so few people get to enjoy the dishes, travesty.  Maybe I need to learn how to get music online so I can introduce y'all to this great soundtrack (I won't, that takes effort, lololol).

Having now given up on Darklord, I decided to just go ahead and look to the future, see what I was missing out on.  It doesn't seem like the strategy gets great at any point unless you bought the DLC which, you know.  I can't anymore.  But the plot seems to go exactly where you think it's going to.  Eventually Mira realizes she has to talk to her dad and hash things out and finds out his wish was for Mira to finally be the bridge between human and monster.  I can only imagine she doesn't take that well but as she nears the end of her campaign, she comes to realize that her father was not a coward but rather a noble leader doing what is best for not just his own people, but for all the races of the world.  And after confronting the kingdom of the first game and taking down the little King, she decides to form an alliance, ending the way once and for all.  I do like that these two games, King and Darklord, do have this thematic throughline of "maybe there is a better way, maybe monsters and humans don't need to fight" and it's realized through Mira's conquest.  She may be a reluctant bridge, but she is a bridge nonetheless.

I don't think My Life as a Darklord is a bad game.  I know that seems contradictory because I've abandoned it but like, low key, I've abandoned a lot of games I've liked or even loved.  I think if I was MORE of a tower defense person, I would've seen this to the end, but like.  I guess Tower Defense needs to move faster and be more of a vibe for me.  I did enjoy this entire process though, revisiting such a fun game from my past and finally experiencing its sequel.  I have to wonder if I had played it when it was new, if I would've enjoyed it more too.  I feel like I had more patience for games being kinda mediocre when this came out, certainly more than I do now.  And like, this game IS fun, when a level was going well or had a neat structure I was having a blast.  I just think it's kinda too slow, too poorly paced.  6.2/10