Recent reviews by suikoder

The essential question here is "do you like fairies"? Exactly! What's not to like?
That's why I easily can recommend this game for everybody. You can stop reading here and go play a game. Want to know more? keep reading

The game has fairy simple and straightforward story, the battle between good and evil, it's not particularly interesting but passable. Characters are not bad, even though some of them have seelie habits.

But most importantly a game is fun to play. How fun? In sprite of being very combat heavy it doesn't feel like it, mostly because dungeons aren't big and manageable in one sit.

Enough puns, let's get serious.
Onto combat itself. All characters have skills (unique to character), magic, physical attacks of different weapons styles and one special skill which can be used in fairisied form. All of those have range, hit count and power. String of attacks until you are hit by enemy is a combo of course and you'll get that tingly feeling all over after launching a good one, also you can trigger avalanche attacks and do aerial combos. All this makes combat varied and fun.

There is a slight balance issue, though. A game is supposed to be played at least twice, first time around it feels like you are underleveled most of the time, the second time that you are too powerful already. It could have been easily avoided by having normal and hard modes, imo. On the bright side, it being as it is, makes all playthroughs after the first one really fast.

And not so good part: some of those ingame challenges and some achievements are mean, unfair and unnecessary time consuming.

Avoid like plague, no mouse controls.

I think that it's best to go into this VN blind, that's why I'm putting part of my review in spoiler tags. These aren't really spoilers but rather surprising things.
An Octave Higher is an interesting VN, I could recommend for anybody, mostly because it's not a dating sim, it's not lewd, it's not gory or depressing, nor silly.
It is a branching story about people, music, magic, science, revolution, betrayal and life.
It has multiple main characters, or rather story is told from point of view of several characters, what's unusual for a VN.
There aren't that many choices, but most of those matter. As the story is branching, there are several endings.
A game is accompanied by classical music, what's also somewhat unusual. Music is definitely strong part of An Octave Higher.
It's rather long, takes about 10 hours to finish.
Visual part is weak, though. While backgrounds are nice and detailed, characters are somewhat simplistic and don't go well with those backgrounds, also there is certain lack of variety here.
OTOH writing is not bad, even with some mistakes there and here.

Crystal Story II is a flash game that manages to be: Final Fantasy of old somehwat, funny, loot game, fishing game, match three game, tower defence game, kill them all game, too many bosses to count game, let's backtrack some game, skiing is hard game, playing cards till you are blue game, nothing is ever fair game, random drops laugh at you game, cute game, robots telling lame jokes game, stealing is hard game, hacking is piece of cake game, nobody ever dies but can be defeated game, special attacks are amazing game, nothing good is ever cheap game, post game is a game too, long game and that's not all!
In short it is a game, no doubts about it
10/will play Crystal Story III

The oldschool JRPG that slightly overstays it's welcome. It would be a very hard game if not the fact that there is no death penalty and every battle can be repeated as many times as needed.
The story and characters aren't particularly interesting and quite simple. The ingame (not battle) character animation is funny in jumpy-jittery way, it grown on me with time for some reason and I find it hilarious now. The characters are partly voiced (Japanese only), the important dialogs and combat, most of dialogue is just text.
The story ends in a way that makes apparent there is a sequel (not really a cliffhanger but close). I know it's the series, so no surprise here.
Combat is probably most interesting part of the game, it's somewhat overbalanced with negative sides to everything, these are partly countered much later into the game. Character progression and growth is slow in this game and it's impossible to overlevel. Maybe not exactly impossible but close to it. If underleveled though, party stands no chance against stronger enemies and bosses, so a game does make you not to avoid battles, even if it is possible to run from all of those except with bosses.
The game has random encounters and uses overpainted monsters method to populate lands and dungeons, too much for my liking.
There is an arena, which gives no xp at all.
Dungeon design is boring and very repetitive, not being ingame dungeon maps too, it's too easy to lose or rather forget you way for this reason.
It might seem like a game is just bad, but it's quite enjoyable at first, it's a tad too long for it to stay this way.

It's good, only fishing is no game, fishing is serious business.

Also you get better hats when you no longer need those, what's a pity.

Loot Hunter is a pirate sim, mostly economic one as you are out to get rich, filthy rich of course, with some twist. The twist being that you have match three combat. That's not so original these days if not the fact that there are no combos in this game, only matches you do yourself count what makes it play very different from other genre mixes with match 3. The game is fairly easy and relaxing, also fun to play.
There is trading, rather extensive, side quests and certainly hidden pirate treasure hunting, no pirate game is complete without it. There are skills to buy, lands to acquire, riches to get and ships to plunder. What else one can want?

Trails of awesome
Adventure awaits you, maybe not adventure of your lifetime, but one not easily forgotten. You go through hardships, kill monsters that nobody can take on but you, explore world and do good deeds, mostly of protecting folk, but most importantly you talk, and oh boy if it isn't the best kind of talk, the one you have with your best buddies at your best times. Estelle is your girl for all fun talk needs, but others help too, NPCs aren't NPCs, they are people, they have names, histories, characters and something to say on every subject. Liberl is alive and oh so real.
Battle system is interesting, creative, complex, at times unfair, but always fun.
Cooking is helpful, even if coming by ingredients is problem of sorts. Magic is something of your creation, as it depends on what orbs you craft and which ones you put on.
Sidequests are for the most part not bad, some even good. You get to play detective a lot.
To borrow from Estelle's treasury of sayings:
- We can kill three birds with one stone!
Three birds being: fun, good read and engaging gameplay.

We need the second chapter, pronto!

LYNE is equivalent of scribbling doodles on paper, only with purpose, but has the same soothing and calming effect.
Added bonus: goes very well with contemplative music of your choice.
Awesome/10 for relaxation and pondering the answer to life the universe and everything is connected.

Remember when your grandma used to read you Cinderella and you were thinking: "what's wrong with her, why she never stands up to those nasty sisters and horrid stepmother, at least, she could drop some flies in their soup, get some ants to their beds and some giant spiders to they rooms".
Well, Cinders doesn't do all those childish things, but your childish dream can be more than fulfilled in this game. Cinders can do things and go places and be mean if need be, and there is need, as we all know.
Another great thing about Cinders, we see motivations behind actions, nobody is evil just for the sake of making somebody else look pitiful.
This VN is satisfactory on many levels. It looks nice too, dialogue is good and great at times.
There are many endings and some heavy choices. Choices are most of the time too obvious, though, but it's hard to expect otherwise when we are talking about so well known tale.

I recommend it for all VN fans out there.