Dumping a bunch of my screenshots and capture footage onto my networked storage so I have easier access to all of that stuff in the future across any and all of my devices and it's been a pointed reminded of just, what a tremendously framed game Fuuraiki 4 remains. Yes, you have the free camera that you can manipulate and it's a genuinely fantastic addition, but none of that would mean anyhing if the scenery chosen to admire wasn't pitch perfect, as well as the juxtopositions of the heroines into the photography.
What a god damn game, and that's without getting into the sublime writing. It'd be such a challenge to localize well for a number of reasons, but it kills me it's stuck in Japanese. The GOTY conversations abroad felt genuinely incomplete to me in 2021 without this game able to be in proper contention and was a stark reminder that no amount of internationalizing judges' panels on stuff like The Game Awards can compensate for the barriers such games face in getting proper recognition without carving out specific spaces for them (which is to say, yes, I think at the barest of bare minimums, The Game Awards really ought to have a best foreign game category specifically for unlocalized stuff, or, hell, multiple such categories by region).
Anyway, please play this game if you have the Japanese chops for it, and especially play it if you haven't played any of the previous Fuuraiki games. It's got storytelling like nothing else in the entire Japanese industry and has a lot of touching ruminations on subjects you'll be hard-pressed to find anywhere else within it.
