A Half-Baked Review Of Highway Blossoms

 In 2022, I played Highway Blossoms, and I had many thoughts on the game. Enough, in fact, to write about 75% of a review. While digging through my documents, I found it, and I still generally agreed with most of my points. I cleaned it up, and posted it to tumblr. Now I have a Blogger, I'm posting it here too

Highway Blossoms is a yuri visual novel released by Studio Elan in 2016, with a remaster in 2019, and DLC in 2020. The game follows the story of 2 girls, Amber and Marina, as they go on an adventure across the American Southwest in order to discover a long-lost Miner’s Treasure. While it starts off as a goofy adventure story, it slowly morphs into a poignant story about grief, relationships, and letting go. It’s one of my favorite yuri VNs, and its southwestern setting combined with its realistic characters caused me to heavily connect to its story.

Highway Blossoms starts off simply. Amber, a 19 year old woman on her way to a music festival in Palm Springs, ends up picking up a hitchhiker, Marina, whose car has run out of gas. She drives her to the gas station, where she learns of her goal. To find the Miner’s Treasure, the location of which is detailed in a journal. Amber believes it’s a scam, and plans to drop Marina off at her car after hearing about it. However, Marina’s car has been stolen, with her phone and wallet along with it. Amber offers to drive her back to her home of Carlsbad, New Mexico, but she declines, and asks Amber to instead take her to the first site of the treasure. There, they meet the three supporting characters and rivals, Mariah, Joe, and Tess, who are also searching for the treasure. (and who also were the ones to steal and scrap Marina’s car.) After some arguing, Marina and Amber secure equipment and find the first piece of the treasure, starting off an epic road trip across the Southwestern US.

The characters in Highway Blossoms are what make the game, it being a romance novel. The two leads, Marina and Amber, are wonderfully written, with their personalities being explored across the course of the game’s 4-5 hour runtime. Amber is a blunt, sarcastic skeptic, though she quickly grows a soft side for Marina’s antics, though she still has her own problems with being stuck too far in her own head. Marina is a stifled kid looking for freedom from her large family, though it’s clear she isn’t fully mature yet. Together, they make a wonderful duo, bouncing off of each other beautifully, and their developing romance feels incredibly genuine despite the short timeframe. 

The supporting cast is a bit lacking in the original release, but with the release of the Next Exit DLC in 2020, we got a much more in-depth look into their personalities, motivations, and backstories, which made me really care about the lovable goofballs. Joe is an almost impossibly chill man, able to go with the flow no matter what. He has his own reservations, but typically he’s the logic of the group, and sticks with Mariah and Tess despite Mariah’s personality. Mariah is a control freak, an alcoholic, and a generally unpleasant person. However, despite that, she drags her sister and best friend across the country in search of treasure, stealing, lying, and cheating her way out of most situations. Despite all of that, she’s got a good heart, deep down. (and I mean really deep down. Like down to the ocean floor, and keep digging.) Tess is a small girl with emotional issues, through the DLC heavily implied to have autism or a similar mental condition. Despite her lack of personality, she manages to form a sweet friendship with Marina postgame, which is mostly the focus of the Next Exit DLC.

With the characters out of the way, the story itself is also something to focus on. It can feel very unfocused at times, bouncing between irreverent comedy, serious drama, and cheesy romance, but in a way, the erratic nature of the game reflects the erratic nature of life. What’s important most of all is not Highway Blossoms’ tone itself, but the ability to keep its emotional core intact, which it does beautifully. While more cartoonish than most characters, the cast feel like humans as much as they do characters, contrasting their wacky antics with down to earth moments that make you feel for them. 

Overall, the Studio Elan lineup is generally very strong, but their first game is especially one people should keep their eyes on. A heartfelt tale of love and loss, a goofy comedy adventure, and a beautiful story all around, Highway Blossoms is a visual novel I have not stopped thinking about since i played it for the first time all the way back in 2022, and it is one I will continue to think about for a long time. 

A Review Of SMT Nocturne: Maybe This Time Susie Will Let Me Kick The Football

 So I recently beat SMT 3: Nocturne, using the Hardtype hack of the game, and I had some thoughts about it. specifically, attempting to sort out my thoughts on whether or not it's good. All thoughts are on the original PS2 release of the game, unmodded.

SMT Nocturne is an anomaly of a game on a lot of levels. it was the first fully rendered 3D title in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise*, it was the first Shin Megami Tensei game to be localized without censorship, and it has become infamous through discussion of its difficulty, memes about its music, and one very special skeleton.

I will tell you my opinion of the game right now. I don't think Nocturne is a good videogame. it's incredibly outdated, its story leaves much to be desired, and it feels like everything in the game that you need to succeed is a knowledge check.

but despite my opinion on it, I'm continually fascinated. Nocturne is a game with so many layers to it, and as you dig deeper, you learn more and more about this strange little game from 2003, and how insanely complex it is. how Magic's formulas are fucked up. how the Labyrinth Of Amala, the Fiends, and Lucifer weren't even in the game originally. how insanely challenge-runnable the game is, with people coming up with new ideas seemingly every week. seeing how the game can be broken in so many different ways, learning all the ways it can be beaten, and busted open, so on and so forth. it's so fascinating in a way that few games can ever dream to be, just by how unabashedly strange it is

I think the best way to explain Nocturne is to explain a part of my own personal lexicon. the "stupid gnome trick" is something I believe I picked up from the blogger Toskarin, but I can't be entirely sure. A Stupid Gnome Trick, in my eyes, is actively bad game design that is meant to hurt the player, but done in an endearing way that keeps you interested in the game. some other examples would be things like Fear and Hunger's Rusty Nails, or Daggerfall throwing you into an insanely hard dungeon that you will never be able to beat unless you were powerleveling like crazy for the sin of following the main questline too hard. design quirks that fascinate me to no end, how a game can do something so actively harmful, but still endearing.

Nocturne as a game feels like a stupid gnome trick. it's a bag of terrible programming, bad game design, cryptic puzzles, and mediocre atmospheric storytelling. but it's so endlessly fascinating and endearing to me, that despite my dislike of it on a critical level, I can't help but love it.

*there are several caveats to this but NINE is a glorified tech demo and uses VN style portraits for its dialouge and Ronde doesn't exist