This game means so much to me. It is really difficult for me to be objective about it. My current playthrough would be the fifth time in my life I will have completed Legend of Mana and whoops I missed an early quest so I guess I will have to do a sixth playthrough down the line to get the achievement for doing all the quests in one run.

I think this game's story was really misunderstood by the Western market when it first came out. Its episodic structure and collection of deeply poignant short story cycles set in a lush, interesting world would probably have been lauded as an artistic breakthrough in games if it came out ten years after it did. Fa'Diel is a beautifully painted, extremely memorable, masterfully scored and orchestrated, handcrafted world. Every time I play this game, it feels like coming home.

I also think that richness of elaborate oddball mechanics and the dedication to secrets that this game possesses is something that I admire a lot, and which I actually wish I saw more of in modern games which often streamline and smooth to the point of feeling depthless. Few modern games understand the virtue of mysteries.

To cite a flaw though and have even accounting, I feel very whelmed about the combat in this game. It can be fun in places, certainly it scratches the power fantasy itch when you come in hot with a weapon you've just stuck a bunch of clown or cleric cards on, but it's definitely not what makes this game the jewel that it is.

I think I like all the changes I have noticed in the remaster, particularly the ability to turn off encounters and save everywhere. I think this is pretty good preservation work from Square Enix or whoever they outsourced. Though, they should have made it work on Steamdeck.

I don't know that there has ever been another game like this. I don't know if there will ever be another game like this again. That's okay. Stars spin as they fall, when you're trying to catch your breath. What's that mean? It's a secret.

You know, Yoko... I don't think painful things and happy things are mutually exclusive.

I wanted to play this when it first came out but I wasn't willing to buy a Switch. So I put it aside mentally until the day came that I knew it was coming to PC. I couldn't wait that much longer after its upgraded rerelease to get my hands on it. Sometimes you are just compelled to a piece of media, and you know it's for you. Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance is for me.

The gameplay is superb, a delight, a supreme display of turn-based design excellence in a modern game. The soundtrack is killer. The demon designs are top tier. The protagonist is a book loving, blue haired femboy with a hot man inside of him. I feel a strong affinity for him. I am represented at last. JK. Unless?

I kind of expected it to be good in those ways. I know how SMT is. I know how Atlus is. But story was the surprise highlight for me, strangely, given that I had heard so much about how poor it was on initial release. There is such a delicate handling of Vengeance's iterations of Law and Chaos, the eternal warring ideologies of absolute control and absolute freedom whose dichotomy is what the whole series is based on. At least in the new (and from my understanding superior) Canon of Vengeance, I've only finished one ending.

What does an ideal world look like? Is it one where we can fix all the problems we already have? Or is it one where we can wipe the slate clean and start anew? Both of these are ideal in the sense that they are deeply impossible, and yet Vengeance tours you through the human experiences and doubts of this question: What does it mean to make a better world? And can we get to that world, without hypocrisy?

This is a story told not through absolute ideologues but through humans who have doubts about whether or not they are doing the right thing. Though they lose many of these doubts in the final stretch, there is something to the way the story then transfers these human doubts into me, the player. "I don't believe it's right for anyone to unilaterally decide what's good and evil," says one character. Yet in the end, a decision must be made, a decision has been made long before, and it is your decision, it is the culmination of all your choices. You have chosen what the world ought to be. Is that right?

I haven't seen everything the game has to offer. In fact I don't feel very done with it at all, even after having reached an ending. I plan on eventually seeing all the endings and discovering whatever secrets there still may be. Yet for now, and maybe even then, I will sit with the complex feelings this game has offered me. I have great love and admiration for it. Painful things and happy things are not mutually exclusive.