Recent reviews by Comrade Yurika

A masterful new game from Kotaro Uchikoshi of Zero Escape fame. AI: The Somnium Files has a really engaging mystery that continues to reveal itself over the course of its playthrough, with some really memorable twists that feel incredibly well earned. I especially liked the cast of the game, with all of the game's central characters feeling pretty well fleshed out and likable.

I have a few complaints with the game, such as the utterly terrible action sequences which mix poor controls and incredibly out of place toilet humor despite the gravity of the situations. Mercifully, these sections are pretty rare, but I have no clue how they even made it in to begin with. The soundtrack is fine, but it lacks the punch of something like 999 or Virtue's Last Reward.

Overall, despite a few minor issues, I think AI is a really fantastic contribution to the medium, and anyway interested in sci-fi mysteries will get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

An excellent management sim that invokes memories of Sim Tower while standing on its own two feet. I was really interested to check this game out due to how much I loved Sim Tower as a kid, and while it's a very different beast, it really scratches that same itch in terms of building a large tower and managing the different residents in it. Project Highrise lends itself more to micromanaging, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's definitely a different sort of game. The scenarios are also excellent at helping you learn different ways of playing the game and facing unique challenges.

About the only major issue I have with the game is that there's no option to build an unlimited sized tower. You'll come up against size limits relatively quickly, and this feels like a real shame for a game like this.

An excellent collection with two all time classics. Ys I is a very good game that still stands the test of time remarkably well with a very unique and different battle system, but Ys II is where this set really shines. Even 30 years on, it's almost certainly in the running for one of the greatest games ever made, with the bump system being taken even further towards perfection, a masterful soundtrack, excellent and unique storytelling decisions, and one of the greatest final dungeons of all time.

If you have any interest in action RPGs or even just an appreciation for gaming and the places it has come from, you owe it to yourself to play these games.

The best baseball game on the market gets even better. I've been a fan of the Out of the Park series since playing Out of the Park 2 all the way back in 2000, and it amazes me how much the series has improved since then. OOTP 19 doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it doesn't have to. The graphics during the games have definitely been improved a lot, though. As a long time skeptic of ever wanting the series to have anything more than a text log during games, I'm now a believer.

If you love baseball and statistics and really want to dig into the nitty gritty of the game and run your own team, you won't find any better game out there than Out of the Park Baseball.

A truly heartwarming yuri romance VN. All of the characters are reallly well developed (Nena is the best, though), and I found myself getting very wrapped up in their stories as the game progressed. The main story does a really nice job at developing them, and taking some of the characters in surprising directions. Yuna makes for a great protagonist, and I found that her story really resonated with me in some big ways. The art is also a major plus; I really felt like all of the CGs had their own personality to them.

And completing all of the extra scenes after the credits roll is essential in my mind. Not only do they flesh out the characrters even more and give some great scenes with characters who didn't really interact much in the main game, but the final scenes unlocked serve as a really great epilogue that ties everything together. It's only been a few hours since I finished the game and I already feel like I miss the cast so much. You won't regret the time you spend on this game.