Square Enix has announced that they're releasing a remastered version of Final Fantasy Tactics in September.

This can only mean one thing: Yasumi Matsuno will be mixing it up on Twitter with his slightly rabid Anglophone fanbase.






(On the other hand, I could do without all the nerds on Twitter being weird to him about the War of the Lions English translation, which he's obviously sick of discussing.)

Saw my first elm seed bug of the year today. Summer is here!

Invisible, Inc. (2015, PC) -- Beat the Contingency Plan DLC on Experienced. In retrospect, deciding that I was going to beat the DLC campaign, come hell or high water, was a weird choice for me (a person who found the vanilla game slightly too difficult to be enjoyable), as the DLC just makes the base game twice as long and twice as hard. Oh well! I have now doubled my played hours for this game on Steam, but the important thing is that I popped one (1) new Steam achievement. I made heavy use of Internationale, Nika, Parasite, and Wisp.

Blue Prince (2025, PC) -- Your uncle leaves you his gently creepy and ever-changing estate...if you can find the unmarked Room 46 by playing a lot of Carcassonne by way of Gone Home.

This has been the big buzzy secrets-upon-secrets game of 2025, like Animal Well was for 2024. (And, like Animal Well, there was a Discord of journalists playing this game before release that helped whip up a coordinated media enthusiasm for the game's launch.) You play the core game by putting down room-tiles in a 5x9 grid that is your house. By doing so, you create a slow maze that may lead to your long-sought destination. Though usually it does not! And then you start over again the next "day" with a reset house and a shuffled deck of room-tiles. Along the way, you learn ~secrets~ about your family's past.



I reached the Antechamber around Day 20; I finally made it to the credit sequence by Day 30. It took me about twenty hours over the course of three days. Obviously I'm enjoying the game, but now that I've reached its latter stages, I am increasingly sympathetic to the players who are frustrated with the randomly generated deck of room-tiles each day. (In related news, I've been trying to align the Pump Room and the Boiler for several runs, and it is...not going well.) The story starts off with a mildly sinister tone, but I fear it is going to turn out a lot sweeter than I was expecting. Although! There are intimations of a certain major twist on the way, so I'll reserve judgment until I see it through.

[a difficult and stressful deadline looms closer on the horizon]

MY BODY: "what if we embraced a nocturnal schedule that prevents you from sleeping at night lol"

ME: :(

(It is certainly a continuing consequence of jetlag, but it's also very annoying because different tenants live in the basement of this house, so I can't be rambling around my place at 3 in the morning, which means I just lie in bed and vibrate. Maybe tonight I will just go into the office and be a vampire-gremlin there instead.)

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona (1996/2009, PSP) -- Continuing to pick dutifully at this game. Made it to mole-ridden Harem Queen.

Invisible, Inc. (2015, PC) -- According to Steam, I played this turn-based stealth game intensively in January and February of 2018, a period of time which I remember as a nadir of personal mental health. The more things change~! I don't think I've seriously played it since then, and picking it up now, I am finding it a mixed experience: often genuinely suspenseful and nail-biting, but it's a rogue-like, and the essential "fail repeatedly and start over again and again" mechanic is one that I don't really love. (The game sweetens the pill by unlocking new characters and tools every time you cash in a failed run, but still, I'm more aggravated than not.) Oh well! I bought the DLC, so I'd like to keep trying until I finally beat it. (Also, in my current mental state, the length of the average Invisible, Inc. run is the correct dose of short, constrained fucking-around-ness during my work breaks.)