The premise of the game is in the title, and it seemed contrived, but Overwhelmingly Positive always catches my eye so I decided to give it a chance. I regret nothing. This was really good. Of the four main routes, two of them go deep into the relevant lore regarding the curse, so you might miss it if you pick the "wrong" route, but the NPCs will helpfully nudge you toward those and the early choices seem designed to funnel a first-time player into one. My only real criticism was that one of the bad endings (I won't say which) is almost impossible to get without a guide, which I found a bit odd.

Meh. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. The very first scene of the intro was apparently one of the last scenes written for the game, and it shows. The quality of the writing never quite lives up to the initial impressions. Several antagonist characters are set up and done relatively well at first, if a little cliche, but their story threads are abruptly dropped before they can cause any real problems for the protagonists, because the protagonists couldn't realistically do anything against them in their social class. The ending is convenient, predictable, and comes rather abruptly. The character designs and general tone of the romantic scenes were clearly designed with a male audience in mind (that's not a value judgment, it simply is the case and it's worth mentioning). Some aspects I did enjoy were the unabashedly flawed protagonist, the banter between the female leads, and its unexpected but tasteful portrayal of religion, of all things. It's not a major feature of the story, but when it was there it was relevant and well done. All told, it held my attention until the end, and left me hopeful for better from ebi-hime's later works.

Ah, another old classic 3D mascot platformer collectathon that I couldn't resist playing again. Why is this so? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. Perhaps it's because the game is unabashedly enthusiastic to be exactly what it is. Ty is very pleased with itself. The game doesn't seem to care if the audience it was made for has already grown up and might think that the "90s cool" protagonist is actually kind of a dork. The characters are absurd parodies of themselves. The voice actor for your designated tutorial NPC laughs at their own lines after reading them with disregard for the subtitles, and the "bloopers" are left in the audio. During the credits, the antagonist is so ready to be done with the game that he tells the player to "go read a book or something." Honestly though? I forgot about all that stuff a long time ago. I played it again because I remember enjoying it despite not remembering why. It's just a vibe. I've never played the sequels, so it'll be interesting to find out if they kept that vibe or followed the Jak and Daxter example and turned edgy. The Steam version adds a hardcore mode, which feels kinda unnecessary. If you're even a little bit careful, you won't die in this mode. There are no instant deaths that I know of, and there's no situation you can't escape by simply exiting the level. It doesn't change the game in any way that I know of other than replacing the extra lives with full health items, which makes the game easier, and forbidding you from saving. That might've been nice to know in advance.