AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative

Platform: Switch (also on PS4, XB1, and Windows)
Release: 2022

I didn't think that 2019's AI: The Somnium Files needed a sequel, but I wasn't opposed to one either, so when AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative was announced my biggest concern was that they changed protagonists, introducing Date's daughter Mizuki as the new lead (and later announcing newcomer Ryuki as co-protogonist). After all, it was the charm of Date and Aiba's working relationship that really made the game for me, and seeing Aiba with Mizuki left the question of: What happened to Date?

AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, which I'm going to abbreviate to AINI for sanity's sake, is still a relatively recent release, so this is your spoiler warning that I'll be covering everything up to the ending of both this game and the first one as well. Spoilers will appear after the break.

My Top 5 Blog Posts of 2022

I'm not sure I'll do one of these every year going forward, but I was looking over my stats for the past year and I figured. Sure, why not?

I'll provide a link to the top 5 posts of the year with the #1 post being last along with a little commentary on why I think a particular post got as many views as it did.

#5 - RPG Talk: Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse

Though its ranking is probably boosted a bit by virtue of being posted in January of last year, allowing it more time to be picked up by searches, SMTIV:A is also one of the more off-beat entries of the franchise, being a pseudo-sequel to a 3DS entry rather than a console installment of the series. This means that it hasn't gotten the same amount of love as other entries and there just aren't many places to get information on it, let alone another person's commentary.

#4 - Betrayal Legacy Board Game

Considering I rarely write about the adventures of my tabletop gaming group, I'm assuming this surfed up to the top 5 by virtue of Betrayal Legacy's popularity. And it's a good game! If you can find a regular group to play it to completion like I did, it can be an amazing experience. Doing so is time-consuming, it took us years (which was not helped by the pandemic), but the group that finished was almost entirely the same group that started, and that helped a lot. By the end we had so many shared memories of things we'd done to each other, but that's all part of the fun.

#3 - VN Talk: Pre-Odyssey: Odysseus, Penelope, and her Ducks

Pre-Odyssey is not the only indie otome game I've covered on my blog, but what it is... is a recent release, which you'll see is a trend with the remaining two posts that placed above it. I discovered Pre-Odyssey within a month of its release, and while it was still new-ish, I was plugging it to anyone who would listen to me. It doesn't have high visibility in the otome community, so I suspect that anyone who wanted to know more about the game or wanted to read another person's take in the aftermath (am I the only person who likes reading reviews after finishing a game?) inevitably ended up here.

#2 - VN Talk: Variable Barricade - Part 6: True Route

Variable Barricade was a 2022 release so it's not surprising that people looking for spoilers about the true route would find my post dedicated specifically to it. Seriously, this one post almost had more views than all my other Variable Barricade posts combined. People want their spoilers. I'm not someone who usually looks for spoiler-specific posts, so I'm not sure visitors got specifically what they were looking for, but I definitely spoiled.

#1 - VN Talk: Billionaire Lovers

This was my #1 post of 2022. Billionaire Lovers launched in English with an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam thanks to blowing up in China well before its translation. But this left English coverage of a popular indie title lacking, and as with Pre-Odyssey, I played this both very close to launch and posted my story breakdown soon after. To be frank, I'm not surprised this was my most popular post of the year, given the subject matter. It's otome-adjacent, but appeals to a wider audience. I just happened to get in early.

And that about covers it! I'm not sure I'm going to go quite as hard on the indies again this year. It's really unusual for me to play something so close to launch, but we'll see.

My Favorite Anime of 2022

Attack on Titan failed to end this year, resulting in people poking fun of the fact that its "Final Season" has been broken up into three parts releasing in three different years. It'll probably all be worth it in the end, but in the meantime this is yet another year I'll be leaving it off since I watched enough to only want to consider new or finished series this year. Legend of the Galactic Heroes is in a similar position, though in its case a fifth season has not been announced yet. I'm just assuming one will be because there's a lot more of the novel series left to adapt.

The series below are the eight I liked enough to finish, presented in the order I completed them. My top three picks of the year are marked with an asterisk (*).

Arcadia of My Youth *

The lone movie of the bunch and admittedly a nostalgia pick, but the reason I'm including it for 2022 is because this is the first time I watched the uncut dub. I was introduced to the movie via the dubbed and edited (to remove the worst of the violence and the "boring" stuff) Vengeance of the Space Pirate release as a teenager, but I'd heard there was a full version of the dub somewhere out there and finally found it this year on Retrocrush. If you've ever been curious about Leiji Matsumono's Harlock series, this is a nice self-contained entry point. Parts of it haven't aged well. It's got logic gaps, things that don't make sense, the science is outright bad (DNA does not work that way!), but for all that, I found it a memorable story about standing up to live the way you want, even though that may mean a life of hardship and pain. Might be my all time favorite movie, and certainly the most watched.

Ya Boy, Kongming *

Three Kingdoms tactician Zhuge Liang (courtesy name Kongming) dies campaigning on the Wuzhang Plains and is reborn in modern day Tokyo as a younger version of himself. At first he thinks he's in hell because it's Halloween and people are dressed up weird, but one thing leads to another and he ends up meeting Eiko, an aspiring club singer hoping to make a career out of her music. Charmed by her talent, he pledges to be her tactician and they embark on a journey to make her a star. It's a really weird premise, but it works! The music portion of the show is handled extremely well, but there are also lots of easter eggs for viewers familiar with the Three Kingdoms period (particularly pop culture depictions of it).

Spy x Family

I like to think of myself as an early adopter of this one. I started reading the manga when the first chapter dropped in English and fell in love with Loid Forger and his fake family (which will surely end up a real one by the time the story is over). Though the stakes are nothing less than world peace, he has to go about it by infiltrating a parents' meeting at an elite children's school which requires him to not only have a child, but a wife, in order to appear like the perfect nuclear family in a society modeled after 1960s East Germany (complete with secret police known for hauling off people who don't seem quite right). But what he doesn't know is that his new daughter is an esper and his new wife is an assassin. It's a bit of genius that only the daughter knows everything that is going on, but it's all filtered through the mind of a five-year-old.

Love After World Domination

The title is a little misleading, since our central couple is not waiting until after world domination to have a go at a relationship, but it's admittedly a striking title. Our leads consist of the red ranger of the Gelato 5 superhero team (what we would consider Power Rangers in the US) and one of the enemy generals from the evil Gekko organization that is trying to take over the world. This is a comedy, so it's perfectly possible for Red Gelato and the Reaper Princess to sneak away for some alone time in the middle of a battle, especially since ordinary citizens are so blase about the fact these battles happen in the first place. It's all very silly, but Fudo and Desumi do their best to support and understand each other and the shenanigans are usually happening around them rather than doing anything to suggest the possibility they will ever break up.

Fanfare of Adolescence

One of those niche appeal sports anime that speaks specifically to people like me. We follow a group of students through three years at a high school jockey academy intended to propel them into careers in the racing industry. Pacing is a little unbalanced considering half the episodes are devoted to the first year, followed by an abrupt timeskip that moves away from our primary protagonist to upgrade our deuteragonist to co-protagonist, and it doesn't quite work. The CG for the horses is also a bit off at times, though I completely understand not wanting to animate all that by hand.

Phantom of the Idol

One thing I love about anime is that it has a very easy time blending the fantastic with the everyday, and in this case Yuya Niyodo, the lazy half of a male idol duo, meets the ghost of a popular idol who wants to keep performing. The two strike a deal where she gets to possess him and perform and he gets to reap the benefits of not having to work. (Yeah, he's a bit scummy, but he gets better.) The anime really goes all in with the song performances, so if you love music, there are a lot of original songs written specifically for this series, and Yuya's VA does a lovely job with conveying the two personalities inside the same body.

My Isekai Life: I Gained a Second Character Class and Became the Strongest Sage

I am generally a reluctant viewer of the current isekai genre, what western viewers might call "portal fantasy," because there is a certain sameness to a lot of it. Most of them involve a generic medieval European fantasy world, often with menus and restorative items and essentially being a video game without actually saying it is one. So I generally only watch if I like the particular take a given isekai has, and in the case of the blandly named My Isekai Life, it's that the main protagonist is obscenely powerful but just wants to travel around as nondescript wandering adventurer with his gaggle of slime buddies and a nervous wolf, except he's a nice guy who he can't help but help people out even if it means slaying things he really shouldn't be able to kill.

Raven of the Inner Palace *

I love Raven of the Inner Palace for its lovely worldbuilding that takes the general trappings of imperial China and weaves it into its own mythology. We follow the Raven Consort, an unusual member of the imperial court in that she is the only consort who does not perform nighttime duties for the emperor and she has the power to see and send off the dead. The English translation choses to subtitle the names as they would be read in Mandarin Chinese, which can be confusing if your ear is good enough to understand the spoken Japanese, but I feel it was the right choice given the setting. I hope when the novel series comes to the US it makes the same choice as I would love to follow Shouxue on to further adventures, but it's going to be really hard to get used to her being called Jusetsu.

My Favorite Games of 2022

I played a fair number of games this year, but that said, I had a decided indie bent involving shorter games so I don't feel I played as much in 2022 as others. My top three picks of 2022 are marked with an asterisk (*) as I do every year, but it was much harder to pick my top three than usual. I ended up leaning indie because even though I may have dropped ten or twenty times the number of hours into a time sink like Civilization VI there aren't the same number of people talking about the bittersweet gem that is Hungry Hearts Diner, and it's games like that that I want to sell people on.

So with that said, these are the 12 games I liked the most out of the ones I finished in 2022, in the order I played them. If the game is available on multiple platforms, the one I played on is listed first.

Hungry Hearts Diner (iOS, Android) *

I downloaded this on a whim, and two things stood out at me from the user reviews that immediately made it different from most restaurant sims. 1) The game has a story and 2) it has an ending. Aside from that, you play as an elderly grandmother and how often do you get to be one of those? When Grandpa gets laid up, Grandma takes over the diner and serves food to a variety of customers, most of whom have their own stories which progress as she serves them helpings of their favorite foods. The overall mood is just a little melancholy with discussion of loss and lost opportunities, but also learning to move on and reconcile with family. It's a short little game (probably 10-15 hours depending on how fast you are), but very charming. You may need a tissue at the end.

Sid Meier's Civilization VI Anthology (Windows, Mac, Switch, PS4, XB1)

Bundle containing Civilization VI and all its expansions and DLC. It's the usual pick a civilization, build them up, and "win" by a variety of methods before other civilizations get a chance to meet their own goals. It's not anything groundbreaking for Civ fans, but it's a graphical upgrade and some nuances have changed so a few strategies from Civ V are no longer necessary or even desirable. I feel like the spread of non-western and/or southern hemisphere civs is a little better than in years past (I love that DLC introduces cultures like the Maori, Vietnamese, and Mapuche for the first time), but European countries still outnumber any other continental group despite their small geographic footprint.

Metro PD: Close to You (iOS, Android)

This is one of Voltage's Love 365 pay-per-route otome games. I didn't cover this one on my blog because I was playing sporadically, picking routes every now and then, and wasn't sure I'd like the game that much. You play a newly assigned detective to the Special Investigation 2nd Unit and solve crimes while getting involved with a variety of the unnamed protagonist's coworkers. Some routes jump awkwardly from the explosive ending of the prologue to several months later where the protagonist is an established member of the team, which I found weird. I didn't like Himuro, my first route, but played his route for free as part of Love 365's then weekly promotion. One of my friends likes this game though so I gave it another shot. Of the other routes I've played, I enjoyed Eiki, Kirisawa, and Nomura.

Billionaire Lovers (Windows, Mac, Linux)

Don't let the cheesy title fool you. There's a pretty good story locked in its 2-4 hour playthrough. Much like Doki Doki Literature Club before it, it uses dating game tropes (this time from otome) to suck the player into a game that really isn't about romance. Though it has some creepy moments, it's not as horror-oriented as DDLC and is more about the strange things happening in the main character's life. There is a content warning and it's warranted, but despite the 18 and up age inquiry upon starting the game, there is no sex or nudity. (This was originally a Chinese title and I suspect the 18+ may have to do with the in-universe gacha game, which is part of the story.)

The Battle of Polytopia (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux)

My brother described this as a simplified version of Civilization, and there's certainly a similar feel to it. You make new cities, you learn new things to build or ways to train your people through a tech tree, but it's all wrapped up in a small package that makes it easy to pick up and put down at a moment's notice (because you're playing on a phone and it's now time to go). The best part about the mobile version is that it can be played offline with no internet connection and there are no ads.

Variable Barricade (Switch)

Teenage heiress Hibari Tojo knows that one day she will need to find an appropriate husband, but she didn't think her ornery grandfather would saddle her with four potential suitors while she's still in high school! I love Hibari for being unafraid to speak her mind if someone happens to piss her off. She's not in a position where she wants to get to know her potential love interests, let alone romance them, and of course her grandfather has managed to find four unemployed men with such awful flaws that she wonders just what he was thinking by making her live in a house with all of them until she picks the one to marry. I enjoyed the common route a lot, but the wacky hijinks drop off in favor of angst on most of the routes after the common one is over.

Crystal Warriors (3DS, Game Gear)

I bought this because the 3DS eshop is closing and I never beat Crystal Warriors on Game Gear when I was a kid because my battery backup died, making it impossible to save. Despite only getting partway through the game, I had fond memories of it, with its elemental strengths and weaknesses system, and my first experience with permadeath in a strategy RPG. Playing it now, thirty years later, there's something to appreciate in its low frills approach. The maps are smaller and the story elements light, but the tactical gameplay is all there. It's too bad the sequel never came to the US.

Pre-Odyssey: Odysseus, Penelope & her Ducks (Windows, Mac, Android) *

Delightful little VN made for the NaNoRenO 2022 game jam. You play as Penelope, who (in this timeline) is better known for being surrounded by ducks than as a Spartan princess. She meets Odysseus after he arrives as one of Helen's suitors, and from there you can follow the mythology or deviate as you like. The characters are drawn in an anime style and the dialogue is present day vernacular, but all that combined with the general ridiculousness of Penelope's duck friends makes for a charming story that made me laugh. You don't need to know Greek mythology to play this, but if you do, you'll get so much more out of it.

Strange Horticulture (Windows, Mac, Switch) *

Short binge-worthy game about taking over a strange little shop in a strange little town that sells a bunch of odd plants for various purposes. I love how the story gradually unfurls through conversations with customers and notes you can discover as you explore, but even though there is some flexibility in solving various problems and thus earning one of multiple endings, the plants themselves are static so it didn't feel like there was enough replayability for me to want to do it more than once. Discovering what something is and what it's used in is most of the fun and that's completely absent a second time around.

Yrsa Major (Windows, Mac, Linux, Browser)

Another game jam VN, this one came out of Otome Jam 2021 and follows the titular carpenter Yrsa. Being a big, strong woman capable of killing monsters with a shovel, she has concluded that she will never fit into the neat little box of a "typical" woman, and thus she has cut off some of her desires as being unsuitable for a person like her. So when she has the opportunity to bond with an elemental spirit she hopes for an earth spirit to help her defend her village, but what she gets instead is a peace-loving water spirit, Uribel. Though there are a few action bits, this is a lovely story about how what you ask for isn't necessarily what you really need. Bonus points for the atypical protagonists, with Yrsa's body type (and age given the genre) and Uribel's appearance. As an ageless water spirit who can change his appearance at will, he has chosen to look like a frail elderly man.

Escape Simulator (Windows, Mac, Linux, PS5, Xbox Series X)

Online multiplayer escape room game that comes with pre-built rooms, DLC rooms, and the ability to play user-made ones. I played with one other person and it was pretty fun, though I found the rooms to be very small and cramped compared to real life rooms, or even the rooms in the Zero Escape series. There's no player collision so there are no worries about bumping into another person, but it feels a bit claustrophobic because of the room size and if this was a real room it would feel very small for a single person, let alone four. If you want a quick fix though, this is affordable (especially compared to real world rooms) and will scratch the itch.

AI: The Somnium Files - nirvana Initiative (Switch, PS4, XB1, Windows)

Sequel to 2019's sleeper mystery game AI: The Somnium Files. I loved the first game to bits, but found the sequel to be a mixed bag due a particular narrative trick that I'll go into spoilery detail about in a later blog post and some new gameplay mechanics in the somnium segments that I just didn't like. The new characters are fun and quirky in the manner of the older ones, Ryuki might be my favorite protagonist in the series now, but the story isn't as personal as it was in the last game. Combined with a disappointing finale, I just couldn't like it as much as its predecessor.

My Favorite Books of 2022

2022 was an odd year for me. I didn't end up reading much and ended up starting and stopping multiple books multiple times. For a while I was wondering why this was happening since I was still interested in the story, and eventually, by the end of the year I realized what the problem was. I just needed to find a book that would sing to me, not just so that I would enjoy the characters but also enjoy the world they lived in.

Normally I would list the twelve books I enjoyed the most, and mark my three favorites with an asterisk (*), but this year because I didn't read that much, I'm just listing the six I finished and while three are still marked, two are in the same series so it feels like calling it three books is cheating.

Yes, I'm Hot in This: The Hilarious Truth about Life in a Hijab by Huda Fahmy

I'm cheating a bit in that this is a collection of comic strips Huda Fahmy originally posted on Instagram, but they're still enjoyable even as someone who is unfamiliar with the religion but all too familiar with what it's like being a perpetual foreigner in the land you were born in. She handles the misconceptions of white America with humor and aplomb, much of which I could only fantasize about doing in my head.

The Legend of the Galactic Heroes Vol 5: Mobilization by Yoshiki Tanaka

This is a turning point volume. For the first time since the start of the series, the Galactic Empire is invading the Free Planet Alliance with a competent commander at its head and the Free Planet Alliance is on the backfoot. We haven't had a chance to see Yang and Reinhard directly face off since the opening chapters of the series and finally it's time for the rematch. The battle comes together well and though the inevitable end to the battle aggravates me, it's so in character that it wouldn't have worked any other way.

The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

Stand alone graphic novel about a gender non-conforming prince and the dressmaker he hires to make him dresses. It's a fairly standard coming of age title, but made more relevant in today's climate given that it's often considered inappropriate for a man to be feminine, especially in one of the last bastions of femininity; clothing. I would have liked a little more of the dressmaker's story, since it's primarily told from her POV, but her personal story tends to get drowned out given the prince's higher stakes.

The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson *

I am a Mistborn newcomer and picked this up because I was under the mistaken impression this was a fantasy western since I read the prologue years ago and it's set in the fantasy equivalent of the Wild West. It's just… the rest of the book is not. Instead it's more gaslamp fantasy, but I found I enjoyed it quite a bit. Though having Wax's partner be a guy called Wayne so the subseries can be called Wax and Wayne is groan-inducing for me, I really like Wax as a protagonist and Sanderson's way with language and worldbuilding. This was the book that turned around my year as a reader.

Crest of the Stars Volume 1: The Imperial Princess by Hiroyuki Morioka *

I enjoyed the Crest of the Stars anime years ago, and figured I'd never get a chance to read the series in English since I never picked up the first English novel translation. But I'm glad I waited. The new publisher also picked up the sequel/main series Banner of the Stars and just seems to have made a better put-together package including a lovely series of hardbacks and copious notes explaining translation choices made between previous English renditions of the story, the current translation, and the conlang that is used liberally throughout the book (because Morioka loves his Abh like Tolkien loves his Elvish.) If you'd like a more personal and (somewhat) less military oriented example of Japanese science fiction novel-writing, I think Crest of the Stars does quite well.

Crest of the Stars Volume 2: A War Most Modest by Hiroyuki Morioka *

Picking up immediately where the first volume left off, A War Most Modest is a bit of a weird duck since it wraps up the danger at the end of the last book, but is also clearly setting up for what will be the final leg of our journey in the final book of the trilogy. What it does do though is really look at what it means to be Abh and what it is like for Jint now that he has been adopted into Abh society, where all of them are genetically engineered humans while he is an unmodified human himself. Jint's gradual and often reluctant adoption of his new place in society is what I love so much about the series.