StarcrossedSouls streams of thoughts reviews

Happy 2025 everyone! (I am posting this super late because I started writing this on January 23rd and literally the next day I had a death in the family. So whoops, it's march and I'm finally getting around to finish writing this) I know I neglected to use the my Blogger account to continue to document my first impressions of a game I finished over the course of last year after having done so with Tales of Arise. That was the best game I had finished in 2024 and had a lot to say about it. Aside from playing Mass Effect for the first time which I ended up having so much to say that I hit a writers block. Thankfully, the media I consumed last year was extremely well documented with the help of my wife and if you have seen our 2024 recap video you know I was able to finish more games out of my backlog than I had in years and remembered quite a bit about each one for discussion in that very very long video.  But here we are in 2025 and much like how I got obsessed with Tales of Ari...

So I finally beat Tales of Arise. Time for a little story about my history with the "Tales Of" series. I vividly remember playing Tales of Symphonia on Gamecube on co-op with one of my best friends who lived next door to me at the time. Years later, some friends I would make via conventions, cosplaying via the Final Fantasy fanbase who were JRPG enthusiasts introduced me to the rest of the Tales series which had been continuing for years at that time. Unfortunately, that dear friend who introduced me to such games as Graces and Xillia went their separate ways from me. So due to this negative association with this "friend breakup" I started to fall out of love with the series. I doubt I will ever finish Abyss, Graces or Zestiria. But I know I will always be able to go back to Symphonia and Xillia and I have a feeling I will enjoy Berseria when I get around to that one as well in spite of another, different former friend trying to ruin that game for me too. My love fo...

If you told me in 2022  we would be getting sequels to two of my favorite cult classic games that nobody asked for but me I wouldn't have believed you. But sure enough, Soul Hackers 2 and Gungrave G.O.R.E. released in the same year. Two flawed games that most people will probably forget about, but I will hold near and dear to my heart in spite of their flaws. Soul Hackers 2 is such a weird game, even I, a huge fan of the original game am very puzzled by the fact that this game exists at all and exists in the state that it does. For context, the Shin Megami Tensei series of JRPGs has been going on since their first adaptation from the novels in the very early 90s. The Devil Summoner games were a spin-off of the mainline SMT games and Soul Hackers was one of the entries in that series. So Soul Hackers 2 is a sequel to a spin-off OF a spin-off and was released 25 years after the game it draws it's namesake from and 10 years after the 3DS port of it, which was the way that most peo...

Happy New Year everyone! For the first time ever I was intentionally given New Years day off as a holiday from work which is really nice. Being that I am really ahead on other creative projects I decided to use this time to knock some games out of the backlog and complete some shorter titles and go ahead and get them finished. It's very nice to just have a day to simply relax, do nothing and play games when you feel like your time off is very finite and you spend a lot of time being very hard on yourself about productivity on your days off. Michelle and I uploaded our year end video on the channel recently and got some very nice feedback from our friends and viewers who watched it. It was a lot of fun to discuss with friends and celebrate our experiences and the media that resonated with us in 2023. Recapping my list of completed games from 2023 I realized that there were only 4 titles that were newly completed out of the backlog, Halo Infinite, Samurai Warriors, Yomawari: Lost in ...

Introduction: Let me start off by saying this is going to be an extremely personal recap of AWA 2023 that details a lot of the specific things myself and my friends spent our weekend doing. If that doesn't interest you, this might not be for you, but it does include a critical assessment of the convention itself and how it was structured/organized. With that out of the way, let's get into it.  I do not intend to do one of these for every single convention I attend but this one was particularly special. Anime Weekend Atlanta is my favorite con that I attend every year. I first attended it in 2007 while having a broken arm after being thrown off a horse mere weeks after Dragoncon 2007, my very first con ever. One of the biggest reasons I love this con so much is the venue itself, it aesthetically has a very cool vibe to it, the convention space and the hotel space are connected but feel just separate enough to allow you to escape from the crowds and there are some truly beautiful...

If you have talked to me at all in the last decade you probably know that some of my favorite games other than JRPGs are Immersive Sims. These kinds of of first person decision based RPGs among the likes of System Shock, Bioshock, Deus Ex, Prey and Dishonored. It's hard to talk about exactly what makes these games work because when you tell someone "oh yeah you don't really fully appreciate this game until you've played it at least 4 times" it comes off as really pretentious. But it's partially true. Your first play through with a game like this will be extremely different from your second and so on. So most of these games I have played SEVERAL times even as recently as last year I replayed Dishonored and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and had started another playthough of Prey 2017.  Recently, my wife and our two best friends have been doing a regular game night and it has been an absolute treat for us to share our favorite games with each other. It's been a re...