Gaming Report Q3 2025
Another short list this quarter, BUT! I have officially kicked the Zenless Zone Zero habit. Again, not that I disliked it; it just doesn’t respect my time. Here’s what I got up to instead.
Maliki: Poison of the Past
Man, I wanted to like this one. I felt bad when I finally dropped it. The characters were enjoyable, and their conversation portraits were wonderfully animated with all these cute little touches, which sort of makes sense when you find out that the game was based on/made in collaboration with a long-running webcomic. I haven’t read it. Maybe I should have?
Because the story wasn’t hitting for me, even though I wanted to be engaged with it. It has this time-travelling aspect where you need to jump back to various points in Maliki’s life to prevent the apocalyptic entity from messing up the timeline. Fun idea that, in one case, actually leads to a fantastic concept for a boss battle. Unfortunately, everything feels so dragged out. To progress between story beats, you have to explore large areas that offer little of interest aside from battles and puzzles. The puzzles are clearly padding but otherwise fine; but the battles are unremarkable turn-based RPG fare built atop a time manipulation mechanic that is so fiddly it’s hardly worth using half the time.
The idea is that you can move the timeline around to control who acts when or give them bonuses; but what’s most emphasized is shifting two characters onto the same turn, so they can work together and perform a powerful combo move. Sounds good on paper, but the implementation is honestly a bit of a mess:
- Shifting requires expending a resource that accumulates slowly over the battle, or you can have a character give up their turn to generate a bit more. But the cost of shifting is high enough to dissuade you from using it regularly.
- Characters are frequently too far apart on the timeline to pair together without stringing together multiple shifts. They can also be on the same side of the timeline, which means you can’t pair them without using another shift to flip one to the other side first.
- Because you are shifting an entire side of the timeline rather than a single character, it’s frustratingly common to end up pairing two enemies together and giving them a combo attack, which frequently results in a one-hit KO. Or, your might pair up an ally with an enemy, which forces you into a situation where the enemy gets to attack with a huge buff; you get a chance to react first, but no matter what you do, it still frequently results in a one-hit KO.
- Even if you do get two characters paired up, in order to perform a proper combo, they each need to use a special ability. But it can’t be any special ability; it has to specifically be two special abilities that were made to combo with each other. Not every special even gets a combo, those that do typically only combo with one other move from one other character, and a character can only have four specials equipped at a time. The odds of two characters having matching skills are not great, and that’s assuming the combo you get produces an effect you actually want to use.
- And if you do manage to set up a proper combo after all this, the characters still need to have enough MP to use their special ability. This is particularly egregious for the tank character who has such a low MP pool and such high skill costs that even by mid-game she can only use two abilities before requiring an MP refill. The best way to refill your MP? Expend a shift.
For basic encounters, it’s far easier just to all-out attack and only engage with this system for the occasional HP/MP refill. Boss battles are drawn-out enough that you’ll have more opportunity to play with the mechanics, but in many cases the boss can also influence the timeline and will just shift at random intervals to power themselves up and do massive damage, frequently turning these encounters into a nerve-wracking half-hour siege where you are expending all your actions and resources simply to keep one team member standing for another turn.
I hate being brutally critical of a game like this, especially from a smaller studio… and there were enough delightful aspects that I want to finish it out. But I can’t do that to myself. Maybe I’ll just go read the comic.
Oblivion: Remastered
We’re back! I can focus on picking this back up now that I dropped ZZZ. And by that I mean: I created a new character and started over.
It seems like the developer heard enough complaints about the locked-in difficulty levels that they at least added an intermediary right where I needed it. So I didn’t need the difficulty fix mod after all. But, the author of that mod also happened to assemble an entire collection of mods centered on enhancing the role-play experience, so…
Yeah, I’m running a modded version now. Nothing that overhauls anything, just small little tweaks, like removing quest and location markers from the compass. I’m now finding myself exploring the overworld way more than I ever did when I was younger, popping into dungeons and Oblivion gates as I see fit and just being leisurely with my pace. It took me 50 hours before I got around to visiting every major city. I don’t know how much of it the mod collection versus just letting myself sit down and get immersed for once, but whatever it is it’s working. I also classed as a spellsword, so this might be my first time really engaging with the magic system (in other words: finding creative ways to make damage numbers go up).
Funny thing I noticed about how I play RPGs, though. When I was young, I always played noble, larger-than-life characters who did the right thing, aimed to please everybody, and would stop at nothing to save the day. Now, all my characters are bitter burnouts who don’t have the energy for this bullshit; they’ll do your quest, but they’re going to gripe about it the whole time. I wonder what this says about me.
Dodgeball Academia
God, I am a sucker for dodgeball. Despite being the easily-winded nerd who finished the mile run second-to-last every single year in high school, I loved dodgeball days in gym class. I was absolutely not good at playing it, but I was amazing at hurling my body at reckless velocity onto the wooden floor of the basketball court any time a rubber ball entered my general vicinity. I wonder what this says about me.
I haven’t had the pleasure of playing a video game rendition of dodgeball since My Street, a pretty awful PS2 game from 2003 you’ve never heard of (and shouldn’t bother looking into) that featured dodgeball as its final and, by far, best minigame.
…Actually, shit, wait, that’s not true, I played a bit of Knockout City shortly after release.
Anyway, I played Dodgeball Academia! It was fun! I was surprised to find that it wasn’t a straight one-hit-you’re-out dodgeball experience; instead, characters have health bars, stats, and abilities like in an RPG. Still, it was largely an action-first game. I never felt like I was very good at it, but it’s colorful and zany so it’s good enough for me.
Little Problems
Little Problems bills itself as a “cozy detective game”, and that’s very apt. You follow protagonist Mary and her friends and family through ten static scenes that take place over the course of a couple months. You’re dropped into each scene cold, with little knowledge of what’s taking place. Your job is to scan the scene for clues to piece together what’s happening; many clues will reveal keywords, which you’ll then use to fill in the blanks of statements in a style similar to the Duck Detective series. These are not high-stakes scenes, though; you might be determining what books were reserved at the library during a server outage, or identifying the members of Mary’s extended family at a party and who brought what gift. Fairly short, but a nice little distraction.
Tchia
I did a pose but the screenshot hotkeys on the Steam Deck cancelled it out. Ah well.
I'm still fairly early into this one, but I really like it.
It kind of has this “wander around a map and find a bunch of collectibles and do a bunch of activities” thing that you get with a lot of open world games, but like… I'm not mad about it. It’s lame in Assassin’s Creed because you don’t want to collect stuff, you just want to run around and do Assassin’s Creed shit. But collecting stuff is the game here, so that’s okay. It has a lot of the same movement options you get in Breath of the Wild, but also a couple new ideas. In the forest I showed in the above screenshot, you can climb those skinny trees, then sway back and forth to build up momentum and fling yourself across the map, landing on more treetops and repeating the process. You can also temporarily control animals, and play a ukelele that lets you hit so many notes that you know people are going to learn to perform entire songs on the thing.
I’ll probably have more to say next quarter, but yeah. Real gem so far.
As for next time… well, I have Tchia to finish, and goodness knows I'm nowhere near done with Oblivion. I’ve heard good things about Expedition 33, and I’d like to start that sooner rather than later… but we’ll see. Time, as always, tends to have other plans for me.