games

I'm a sicko, so I'm neck deep in Last Defense Academy. The choices actually do matter is super refreshing. The included story flowchart branching at your choices reminds me of Radiant Historia in terms of bouncing around trying things out. Thankfully Kodaka is not too precious about anything and so the melodrama works. I doubt I get all 100 endings, but I'm going to get way more than I thought I would when I first heard about the concept.

The tactical RPG gameplay itself is fairly straightforward, but as someone that plays every Fire Emblem game at launch, I enjoy it. I should maybe be playing on a higher difficulty than normal, I've gotten an S rating for every battle I've done outside of two of them, but honestly being able to just shred through it has it's own fun to it.

The visual novel type gameplay between battles is good enough. I wish it had just a little more depth, maybe some extra power-ups unlocked for getting friendship points ala Persona would be nice. But it doesn't punish you too much for not min-maxing, which I'm sure most people will appreciate.

I do appreciate just how many gameplay systems have in game lore and plotting attached to them. It doesn't feel like gameplay is divorced from story at all. The way your character navigates the flowchart to the way character death is handled during the tactics RPG sections all tie back into the main story, which makes it feel less discrete than some games that just sort of have story and have gameplay and never the two shall meet kind of stuff.