June 2025 media
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Mario Kart World: The game is fine. I’m ambivalent about many of the changes—increasingly so, as I spend more time playing—but it’s still Mario Kart, and it’s still fun. The new Knockout Tour mode is the clear highlight of the gameplay additions, and it feels appropriately chaotic. The real unexpected coup here, though, is the soundtrack. It features hundreds of tracks spanning forty-plus years of Mario’s history, all with fantastic new arrangements. (I especially love the ones that treat Mario themes as though they’re jazz standards.) Forget an $80 game—they could have sold me an $80 CD collection.
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Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time: I remember being charmed by the original Fantasy Life, though I never finished it for some reason (Dragon Age: Inquisition, probably). Fantasy Life i has much of that same charm, as long as its grind falls on the right side of pleasant for you—it has a cornucopia of progress bars to fill up, and a variety of enthusiastic celebrations on completing them. It also has a bit of a kitchen-sink design philosophy–in addition to the expected crafting and action RPG stuff, there’s also an Animal Crossing-esque town builder, a lightweight open-world area, and a roguelike dungeon mode. It’s a lot!
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Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma: This was my actual favorite game of the month. I’d bounced off of Rune Factory in the past, but here everything came together: the story and characters all clicked for me, the combat was at worst passable, and its basis in Japanese folklore and aesthetics felt fresh compared to the Western fantasy mishmash that many of these games use. I worried that the farming bits might involve too much tedium, but it’s surprisingly incidental–the town-side gameplay is really more of a management thing, where you assign tasks to your villagers and then help out as you see fit. Highly recommended!