Spinning Discs - July 2026
Spinning Disks is a feature where I collect thoughts on a smattering of games I’ve been playing lately, over the last three months. Often these are smaller works, or games I haven’t finished yet but still wish to talk about.
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Final Fantasy Origin: Stranger of Paradise
Ok so I’ve finished it – depending on if I do a fuller write up on it, I’ll remove what I wrote here to add to there in the future but for now:
Right when I thought I’d seen everything this game had to offer enemy-wise it throws new beasties into the mix for the back half. Seeing a classic Final Fantasy enemy like an Ahriman was a neat surprise!
I had a great deal of fun with this game and I ended up becoming quite endeared to the main party… although I do wish, especially with the later reveals around Serah and the party members, that some of that was leaned into more earlier (but the game does drop enough hints about what’s going on pretty early if you’re exploring levels and finding the “Fool’s Missives” but in this particular case it does not feel like enough was established prior for the reveal). At the very least, the side missions where you fight the other Strangers transformed should clue you in that this isn’t the first time the party has gone through all this. Besides that, the game continued to be a blast to play through. My only major gripe would be that the more labyrinthine and layered the maps became, the less time I wanted to spend exploring them. The later levels in particular become a bit trawl, and the rewards of that exploration (more loot, the occasional story notes) felt less and less rewarding over progression through the game. Fantastic needle drop at the end though: Jack did it his way...
Panzer Dragoon & Panzer Dragoon II: Zwei
Pretty damn cool games. They’re both on-rail shooters that heavily rely on lock-on chaining, which’ll often have you sweeping your aiming cursor across the screen, usually in a rotating or back and forth motion to try and select everything for a burst shot. This is usually achieved by holding down the shoot button, but the option to do singular, repetitive shots on one target is there.
Panzer Dragoon took me a few tries to clear as I’d lose all my continues on the last two levels (that and my turbo buttons would not work until like the fifth clear attempt, and the turbo input kinda breaks the game because you can clear things so quickly) but repeated plays of each level got me clearing them faster and faster as I acclimated to the level layouts and incoming enemy directions. It also gave me nauseous bouts of motion sickness throughout thanks to how erratic the game camera moves (mostly due to the combination of the aiming and movement being tied to the same input motions + the speed of the on-rail camera movement through some levels). The second last level, where you fly through the city was perhaps the worse of it. The mixture of the way the water is rendered (like billboarded to the camera?), the texture of it, and the motion of the flight through the level, forced me to take an extended break.
Despite that I am impressed with how Panzer Dragoon looks and it’s wild to think that this was a launch title. Coupled with that gorgeous score and intriguing setting of weirdly bio-mechanical looking creatures, it’s all very cool to see and play through.
I really like that both games can be completed in an hour and a half or under. Real good. I do love it when I play something and it feels like I’ve been in it for hours and hours and having a blast the entire way through but then you complete it and it’s only been an hour! I love a fulfilling yet short game.
Panzer Dragoon II Zwei somewhat surprised me in how much more “traditional” of a rail-shooter it came across to me. In that sense it’s sorta a refinement of the first one, where the first game feels like this in-between point between older arcade design (think the way continues work, where you only get a new “credit” upon a shot down score of 90% or higher at the end of a stage) compared to Zwei. Oddly I found this one to have a lot more “dead space” in levels, where there is a long cooldown period between enemy spawns and what you can shoot. For example Level 1 has the path split and if you take the left path, which will have you flying over a lake/sea for a long period, there isn’t… anything to do aside from the on-rail flying...? You can look around, since these games let you adjust the camera relative to you position (i.e. turn the camera around you in locked 90 degree angles to the left and right). I wonder if parts of that emptiness it creates related to the way the game loads data or assets or something? But it always happens, in every level this is this longer-than-it-feels-it-should be period where no action is happening on-screen. Nothing to target, nothing to move around to or from. Just on-rails. It’s on odd contrast to Panzer Dragoon where those periods are very minimal to almost non-existent and I do kinda of wish Zwei kept that. Aside from my issue with the downtime in it, the rest of the game has some pretty fun yet challenging fights, a more lenient continue system, and this cool score based levelling for your dragon that transforms it at set stages. Depending on your score metrics this changes the attributes of the dragon’s speed, health and shot capabilities.
I am also planning on playing the rest of the series. Super curious about Panzer Dragoon Saga’s mix of rail-shooter and ATB rpg battles, as well as whatever is going on in Orta.
Rez Infinite
Keeping the trend of playing some on-rail shooters I finally bit the bullet (hah) and played Rez Infinite. It’s cool! I don’t have too much to say about it otherwise... The audio-visuals are unsurprisingly the meat of the game but the shooting isn’t slouchy at all, although very lock-on reliant. I found it to be a very ‘slap those headphones on and vibe’ type of game, and I wouldn’t mind playing it again.
Pathologic 2
I’ve kinda sunk right into this one in a way I wasn’t expecting myself to. It took a while to get its hooks into me but I’ve been consistently coming back to it when I have the time. If you’re not familiar with Pathologic 2, it’s a sorta of survival game where you play as a healer in a steppe town where a plague has broken out which takes place over a period of twelve days. There’s other things going on too during all this but that’s the core crux of it. I’ve set it for the ‘recommended’ difficulty and during that learning period of acclimatising to the game, I did at some early point place myself into an unprogressable situation (no food, hunger bar maxed out so I would take damage from starvation, no money to get food, dying of exhaustion and hunger etc.) so I did have to restart my playthrough and perhaps play smarter about how I was routing myself through the town and towards quest locations/places of intrigue.
I really adore how this game marries up its quest system with the town map and how those two pieces are displayed together – the mind map for the quests always feels like it gives you just enough to go on with while also hinting at any possible alternatives or other paths though subtle visual hinting, like an empty space in the mind-map chart or some proximity to another quest chain in the map. I like how it updates with new information as well and how sometimes, by finding more information from NPCs or items or testing with tinctures, that some questlines can connect up with others. There’s also this really engaging barter system with the NPCs that builds up your familiarity for the trades and character types, both through recognition of what they might carry and what items they prefer. e.g. kids love nuts, so it’s always better to carry some for bartering purposes instead of using them to stave off hunger (since they do very little for that) since kids usually have harder to acquire items or ones that can be traded with certain adults to help you out.
Tangle Tower
I did a quick little replay of this one in preparation for Mermaid’s Mask (the follow up game) and yeah! Still super charming and enjoyable. A lot here to like, even if I don’t quite enjoy the ending. As usual, the character acting and animation are stellar and the puzzles themselves are really fun to do. I had actually forgotten one little detail that is apparent early on, so even though I remembered the main crux of the mystery, I still got a nice surprise when that reveal happened.