The general premise is right there in the title. Our protagonist reincarnates into the world of game his sister had blackmailed him to play for her. Which is a reasonable explanation to have someone who would not be the target audience of such a game play through it. The description of the game from the prologue also allows the world to be nonsensical and inconsistent in various places due to it being based on a silly game and thus still fit the story. The one part that doesn't really fit for me is the protagonists insistance on following through with the 'logic' of the otome game world when it comes to his position and what's expected of him with finding a marriage partner. He's perfectly willing and even hoping to throw away his title to avoid having to marry some harpy, but when that fails he goes right back into the mindset of having to find a wife. There is an explanation given, but considering Leon's ownership of Luxion he hardly has any reason to be concerned. Aside from that it's a rather enjoyable story overall. Leon just can't stay out of trouble.

Well I attempted to update the theme of this site to one of the available options. I was looking for one with a default dark or night mode since the white is hard on my eyes. Nikola makes this fairly easy, run the command to download the desired theme, alter one or two lines in the conf.py file and it's done. Except github gave me an error on trying to rebuild the page and to try again later. So Ill have to see if it was just a hiccup in their system or if it just doesn't like this particular theme. If it continues to cause problems I'll have to look at using the custom css option or forking a theme to modify.

A fairly trope laden isekai LN. Protagonist is overpowered from the start? Check, can use all magic? check, early harem setup? check, harem includes royalty? check, picks a katana as weapon? check. There's no real surprises here folks. The smartphone gimmick from the title is a handy McGuffin item. Allowing the protagonist to referrence the internet to look up things he doesn't know how to do, exploit it's mapping feature in conjunction with magic, look up new recipes to introduce new food items, all the standard things you often get when a protagonist is some kind of isekai prepper but instead is just a regular guy but still has access to google thanks to the smartphone cheat. I can't remember exactly what volume they get foreshadowed around 3~4 iirc, but volume 6 introduces mechas. So if you miss the earlier foreshadowing like I did and end up invested in the story having this addition really throws a wrench in the more traditional fantasy setting I prefer and goes full mech otaku. A feature that will be present in one form or another in pretty much every subsequent volume that I've read (currently have read up to and including volume 12). I've honestly debated dropping this series but tend to fall for the sunk cost fallacy and feeling that I've come this far, I might as well just keep going. It's still a fun story if you enjoy isekai series.

That's it for the games I've played in the last while. So no more reviews, unless I feel like reminiscing about some game or another I haven't played in years. I've got some backlogged book reviews I'll post next and then I'll probably be looking at Nikola themes and customizing to change the appearance of this site.

Another mobile game from the same studio as Genshin Impact. After starting Genshin I was curious about Mihoyo's other game. So I tried this out, it's another gacha waifu collector. The battle system is quite similar to Genshin's with swapping characters to use abilites, a type system, some enemies having shields, etc. Although most parts of the game were localized there were some that were not, leading the already confusing story to be even more confusing. The gameplay was pretty fun, but the confusing story eventually lost me completely and my interest in continuing waned. There were some good events during the time I did play though and the game was quite enjoyable. So it might be something I pick up again at some point.

An island survival game that truly simulates the tedious drudgery of surviving on a deserted island after a shipwreck. You get to look after your fellow survivor and try to keep them alive by gathering enough food and water each day, and leading them around the island from time to time when you need their help to move a log or solve a puzzle that allows for deeper exploration of the island. Each day is the same, fetch water, gather food, explore and gather materials. It's like looking after a pair of tomogachi. Even though there's a map, there's no feature to make annotations of what supplies appear where so you can check back for when they respawn, and the overall movement speed just feels so slow after awhile and there's no setting to increase it. Eventually I gave up, the grind was just too much and unlike other grindy games where you always felt like you were making some progress, it was possible to make no progress while playing due to bad luck with food collection, or wasting time looking for some item that hadn't respawned, etc. The pacing just felt too slow and frustrating for me, which is too bad, because my initial impressions when starting the game were quite good and it felt like a novel game experience. I'm not sure if later titles in this series address any of my complaints or not, I hope they do.

I made a brief return to Blade and Soul after seeing that some new classes had been released and the story had progressed a bit since my last time playing this over a year prior. So I reinstalled to see what's changed. And the answer was, not much. The main quest rewards to catch a new player/character up to speed to begin the dungeon grind have been increased a bit, but at the same time, so much content in the game is being made redundant and retired. And it's not being retired well, much of it is sloppy, it was confusing as a returning player and I feel it would also be confusing for any new player. Which all added up to the feeling that the game was running on the fumes of whatever dedicated fanbase remained. After catching up on the story and trying out the new classes I quit again. The story is pretty grim and dark as far as MMORPGs go. And I just can't be bothered to learn the dungeon or raid encounters with my reduced level of interest in playing this game long term. Many of the features that originally got me to try this game have been stripped away or streamlined. Which is good in some ways, they were complex and grindy, but a shame in others. Maybe I'll see where this game is at in another few years if it's still around.

I was purely f2p during my time playing Genshin Impact. When I first started seeing comments about this crop up on social media one of the descriptions I came across was "Breath of the Waifu/Husbando" for it's open world gameplay and combat combined with a gacha system for monetization. So I tried it out for longer than I was intending to, completeing all the current story content and doing the daily grind of farming primogems to pull for characters. The open world is fun to explore, hunting for chests and solving the odd puzzle. The game suffers from the same problem as others within the gacha/mobile genre, stamina limits, grinding, rather predetory monetization with paid stamina refreshes. That being said I never felt overly pressured to spend money, the natural resin(stamina) refresh was enough to do a few events each day, and the game gave out a reasonable about of resin potions that I saved up until hitting the appropriate rank to utilize them effectively. The team building is pretty flexible although as always a lot of min maxing takes place to build up some kind of meta, and although conforming to the meta might help clear some of the hardest content sooner and with easier to acquire equipment, you can stray from the meta and still clear most of the content the game has to offer. Once the story is cleared and the higher ranks are hit, the bulk of the game turns into grinding for artifacts/equipment. This is heavily RNG based and a massive source of frustration for many players especially if you're attempting to clear the harder challenge dungeon with a sub-optimal team comp, or even an optimal team comp if your gear RNG has been terrible. After playing a few months I've had my fill, I'll likely check back in from time to time as new patches hit to keep up with the story and try some of the events. The tower defense mini game in the previous event was pretty fun. But the endless rng gear grind just really kills my motivation to play daily any more.

Another entry in the Zelda franchise, this one makes extensive use of the stylus for its controls, which was weird and awkward at first, and in a few areas having the stylus block part of the screen made one or two bosses more of hassle than more traditional controls would have made them. After getting used to the controls the game plays smoothly enough with some practice. Controls aside this is a solid Zelda game with everything I've come to expect from this series. It did feel a bit on the easier side though as far as bosses went, and I attribute that to the stylus controls, not that they made it easier, but the designers had to tone down the fights due to the somewhat janky and slower nature of using the stylus compared to a dpad and buttons.