Letheka

It's frankly astonishing that Labyrinth of Galleria is a commercial game.

Not because it's bad, but because it's very opinionated in a way that is bound to have driven away a lot of players. Those opinions appear to be "stories should be as transgressive as possible", "people who aren't perfectionists and completionists deserve mockery and contempt", and "people who aren't willing to wait tens of hours for a story to get anywhere deserve nothing."

The latter two things don't sit well with me either, but in the end, Galleria was a rewarding experience. Let me tell you why.

I am not a fan of Jun Maeda's work. I think that just about everything he's ever had a hand in has some interesting ideas, but wastes them by drowning them in other wacky story beats that clash with the setting, on top of being plotted with the finesse and subtlety of a sledgehammer. People celebrate him for being a master of tragedy, but I've never been able to suspend my disbelief enough to shed a single tear at any of his stories.

That's the opinion I would have given you of Maeda two years ago (HBR launched a bit earlier than that, but due to my low expectations I was late trying it out.)

And now?

As I see it, Maeda just took a long, long time to figure out how to play to his strengths.

I've had this in the works for a while, so I'll just go ahead and post my top three, then do a continuation post later if the mood strikes.

I thought about translating the song/album names, but they're probably easier to find if I don't. Also, some of them are terrible to translate. Nazokake Kanten for example means something like "The Salon for Posing Riddles" if I don't try to make it sound good.

A lot of the musicians that I like have uploaded their own music legally on YouTube, which is cool. (I think some of them are on Spotify too, but I'm the one person left who doesn't use it.)

Blue Archive is a mobile gacha RPG created by Nexon Games, formerly NAT Games, a Korean development studio active since 2013. The studio's past projects were largely free-to-play PC games using the Unreal Engine which amassed little in the way of popularity; one such game, Overhit, had the distinction of having its global servers shuttered only six months after they first opened.

Director Kim Yong-ha and writer Isakusan's most notable past credits were on Qurare: Magic Library together, a card battler developed by Smilegate that made only slightly greater waves. Tapping this studio and these staff to develop a gacha game for the Japanese market was a quirky choice.

Nexon itself is a name notorious overseas for bungling the global releases of a bunch of free MMORPGs like MapleStory and Dungeon Fighter Online, but nonetheless rising to be one of the largest players in the space over the course of its decades of misrule. Despite the involvement of the slightly more reputable Yostar Games as the Japanese publisher, this was a game with the opposite of a promising pedigree.

But sometimes, miracles happen.