February 2025 media
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Luminescent Creatures: This is Ichiko Aoba’s latest album, just released today—though I was very lucky and got a copy in November due to a clerical error on Bandcamp. It’s incredible stuff. The prior album, Windswept Adan, was something of a sea change for Aoba; after years of records minimalist arrangements, often just single-tracked guitar and vocals, the sonic landscape suddenly bloomed with strings and flutes and chimes. Luminescent Creatures occupies a broadly similar space, though it expands in both directions—there are more old-school stripped-down guitar-and-vocals tracks, but also some even more ambitious arrangements. (In reductive video game terms, maybe it’s the Tears of the Kingdom to Adan’s Breath of the Wild.) I haven’t stopped listening for months, and I can’t wait to see it performed live this spring.
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The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II: To be honest, 25+ hours in I think this is one of the weaker games in the series. Splitting the party, while understandable, means the plot moves at a snail’s pace even by Trails standards. Situating a large chunk of the combat in another procedurally-generated Reverie Corridor-esque dungeon makes it feel like busywork, and prevents the world from really cohering into anything. And the story is really spinning its wheels—after collecting seven out of eight MacGuffins in the first game, the last one is revealed to have been split into pieces to drive the plot here in the second game. (Maybe the last piece will itself split into pieces, after Zeno’s paradox.) All that said, a mediocre Trails is still a game of the year candidate for me, and I’m enjoying myself despite everything.