What game are you currently playing?

July 9, 2021

Just finished a dry run of Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory, and while I ponder the merits of trying to 100% that, I've started Zombie Army 4: Dead War. I'll never finish it, since I have no one to play it with, but a complete runthrough of the campaign should be fun while I figure out what to play afterwards.

August 21, 2021

Playing both Lethal League Blaze and Parappa the Rapper 2

August 22, 2021

The remake of ZOOL released a few days ago :

August 23, 2021

I am apparently a glutton for a certain type of punishment. I 100%ed Age of Calamity on normal difficulty. Then I (pre-dlc) 100%ed it on very hard. And now, I'm well on my way to 100%ing it on apocalyptic. I've got...kind of mixed feelings about it.

The early game is absolutely brutal; you'll die in two hits, and it'd easily be one if the game didn't cap damage to leave you with a quarter heart first. And the recommended levels are hilariously behind; with my lesser-used characters I struggle even being twice the recommended level, and even with 1H Link, easily my best character, it took ages for me to be able to handle even the lowest-level Vicious Monster missions, which really stalled progress on the dlc quests for a good while. The difficulty has also made it hard to use anyone but Link; I can't afford to experiment when any misstep risks death, so most other characters have been perpetually underleveled and underequipped, making it even harder to justify using them (though I've got a good grinding setup now so I can afford to buy level-ups if I need them...though with most of my characters in the 80-90 range before even finishing the main story I'm going to hit the cap pretty soon). I've even been struggling with some of my usual secondaries; I can't afford to take more than a rare few hits on this difficulty, and without a decently-built weapon and all of their upgrades it's hard to get deep enough in their movestrings to use their best abilities before I get swatted by something. Also Rudania fucking sucks ass, worst divine beast by far, every level is a bumpy mess so the aiming reticle is always bouncing around everywhere, no shield only a shitty counter that only works on one attack if you're lucky, why did they screw Daruk in every way in this game I like the big guy he deserves better.

I have gained a greater appreciation for Mipha in this run, though. Primarily for her healing, of course, as even getting just a few more hearts above a quarter is enough to get out of OHKO range, but I've also got a better appreciation for her moveset in general and how, in the right circumstances, she can layer several sources of damage on an enemy at once (a strategy I always enjoy). I'd probably still rank her as fairly average outside of this difficulty, her stasis is actually really bad in that it cancels/is cancelled by any of her water attacks which gives her some trouble breaking WPG, but she's better than I gave her credit for and has absolutely saved my ass many times on this run.

Overall I have been enjoying it, despite some frustrating missions. But I am worried about the postgame, once I hit that level cap and the difficulty just keeps going up. I'm clearly in this for the long haul so I will get through it but...I definitely predict some suffering in my future.

August 24, 2021

I took advantage of the Indies sales on PS4 to get some titles i was planning to catch back on for a while, some of which i got on PC but couldn't go through due to my toaster not working as intended for gaming: Apotheon, Jotun, Bound by Flame and the Banner Saga trilogy. Right now i'm binging the Stormblood portion of Final Fantasy XIV, but i'll sprinkle these in-between.

August 25, 2021

Guilty Gear -Strive- (warning, long)

Spoiler

I admire a lot of what they tried to do here but I think they need to rethink some things if they want this to be a viable. long lasting fighting game. I'm playing it now because the netcode is great but I keep being left with the feeling of "If the last game had rollback I'd drop this tomorrow." In fact, if any of the other big 8th gen fighting games had rollback I'd just play one of those instead. This game is giving me a newfound appreciation for Street Fighter V. I already liked Tekken 7 a lot but I never thought I would be thinking of going back with those lobbies.

This doesn't mean the game is bad, but it is...barebones. Not just in terms of content but in terms of what you can actually do in combat. The best way I can describe is that, short of some outstanding weird inputs and hard(but not worthwhile) combos, this feels like if Nintendo made Guilty Gear.

They've basically removed the air game and with gatling combos gone a lot of the freedom you got in terms of pressure and combos are gone. Each button has a pescribed series of followups ala SF. You have to get creative with frametraps, but with less buttons than SF overall it feels more limited in both cases. Air dashes have been slowed down dramatically and hampered in invisibility to stop any fast high/low shit from happening. It's a pretty stale feeling neutral game and even aside from all the big brain critic stuff it just doesn't feel good from a gamefeel perspective. Hampering every movement and pressure tool just makes the game feel unresponsive.

I only have Xrd as a reference point, but each character has had their kits scaled down dramatically in this game. This is usually meant to carve out a specific focal point in that character's gameplan. They have a thing that they're very good at performing and a situation they're bad at that you should avoid being put into. Characters in the previous game were more flexible, having multiples jobs they could do and tools that they could use in less than ideal situations to escape. In this game though the weaknesses are more defined and meant to be exploited. You're supposed to avoid getting put in a bad situation to start with.

The problem I have with that is that it makes situations feel too one note IE: Zato has trouble getting out of the corner. Ram does massive. easy damage in the corner. Shove him in the corner once and I win, bar an enormous mistake on my part. It feels too predictable. Too RPSy. Hero shooters and team fighters are designed with a similar philosophy but you can't design a team to cover individual weaknesses in a 1v1 game. I heard Zato had a reversal before and like...why remove it? It's not a big deal to take one more step and bait out a reversal before the Reckoning starts.

Maybe my perception of this game is skewed pretty hard by my decision to focus on the Ram blender, but I was playing Ky before and my opinion wasn't that different then. Ky just feels bad at the role he's supposed to be playing, so matches didn't end as decisively. I'm learning Millia now because I guess I'm a glutton for punishment and while I'm having more fun I don't think it changes anything about how I feel.

That's another thing about this game: It's pretty easy for me to pick up characters compared to most games I play. I feel like you can kind of just watch a character for a couple of minutes and get what you're supposed to be doing with them on a very basic level. I'm not sure how much I should praise arcsys for that though since it's a byproduct of things that I think were mistakes, but at least you still have to work to unlock their full potential.

Overall the cast feels too simple and that's kind of a problem in a game with a small cast. Probably will be appreciated for people who had trouble coming to grips with fighting games, but a little on the anemic side for the rest of us. There are still a couple cool looking characters that interest me though so I'm gonna keep poking around. I haven't exhausted all my options yet.

I'm going to keep it short because this is too long, but the last thing I want to point out is how...everything outside of this game's core is a pain in the ass to interact with? Sluggish, poorly designed menus? A lobby system where you have to walk around and find a match in a poor, glitchy platforming minigame?There are so many basic UI errors with this game that it doesn't feel like one of the most experienced FG devs in the business made it. Arcsys has had many of these problems before but never all at one time and to this degree. A lot of these problems are structural too, and I don't remember DBFZ or Xrd having serious changes to the online infrastructure in their lifetimes.

August 25, 2021

Short version: I think some of your gripes with the game are coming from playing Ram who's a super straightforward, super linear character. Ky Also seems just plain wack unless you're into the huge brain dash grab, run up DP->PRC, cancel everything into RTL insanity that is coming from japanese players lately.

I think you're on the right track with moving to Millia. She has the fantastic air mobility, lighting fast left right high low mix, extended air combos, complicated frame traps and pressure and if you're feeling bored by ram she's a great pick.

Absolutely agree on the sluggish shitty menus though. Every time I see the obnoxious "Communicating with server" message I blow a blood vessel. It makes me even madder knowing that it was easy enough to fix that a guy made an app to do it. 127 seperate connections every time someone goes to the title screen? are you serious arc?

I also think some characters could use some more moves, but I have no doubt that will happen in whatever their equivalent of a season 2 Revelator style patch is. In every other GG characters are almost unrecognizable by the final revision compared to the first.

Long lockdown induced fanboy raving:

Spoiler

3 hours ago, Wraith said:

They've basically removed the air game and with gatling combos gone a lot of the freedom you got in terms of pressure and combos are gone. Each button has a pescribed series of followups ala SF. You have to get creative with frametraps, but with less buttons than SF overall it feels more limited in both cases. Air dashes have been slowed down dramatically and hampered in invisibility to stop any fast high/low shit from happening. It's a pretty stale feeling neutral game and even aside from all the big brain critic stuff it just doesn't feel good from a gamefeel perspective. Hampering every movement and pressure tool just makes the game feel unresponsive.

The first part about gatlings:

I think gatlings were way overrated in terms of "creativity and freedom" in the P-K part of the P-K-S-HS chain. Most of the action (frame traps, mix) happens in the C.S F.S 2S H.S part or gatling 2k, 5p into command normals, which is preserved in Strive. You were not catching someone in some part of you p->k->s gatling in X2, or doing anything interesting or creativity they were just sitting in blockstun, even in old games you were shooting for a C.S counterhit starter for big damage, and starting a combo off of P or K was just asking for shitty damage. Furthermore: sitting in long ass block strings sucked ass. I guess whether or not you like long block strings depends on taste but I'm happy to lose them

I also disagree about frame trapping being more limited than SF. Because you can delay gatlings in GG and create small frame trap opps where normally there wouldn't be, as opposed to the fixed timings of SF. When I used to play kolin, I had like 3 frame trap options, st or cr.mp into st.mk and st.lp tick throw, other than that i was fishing for ch with cr.mk. The gap was always the same and once I hit cr.mp on someone's block it was a completely will they press a button or will I try to tick throw them. When I'm playing giovanna in strive I have a preposterous amount of options once I hit a comparable c.s, not to mention frame trap, air dash crossup/grab mix off of 5k

By removing the old gatlings they cut out the filler and preserved the parts of the system that are good, You prevent players from doing shitty combos and onboard them onto using high damage starters, p and k are still useful for short combos, and you also removed the parts that are boring (sitting in some guys 10 year long blockstring) and pushed the game towards being more interactive. Strive in general seems to have a design goal of sticking both players in neutral and forcing them to fight as much as possible. I think this is a net good even if there is a loss of perceived combo depth.

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The problem I have with that is that it makes situations feel too one note IE: Zato has trouble getting out of the corner. Ram does massive. easy damage in the corner. Shove him in the corner once and I win, bar an enormous mistake on my part. It feels too predictable. Too RPSy. Hero shooters and team fighters are designed with a similar philosophy but you can't design a team to cover individual weaknesses in a 1v1 game. I heard Zato had a reversal before and like...why remove it? It's not a big deal to take one more step and bait out a reversal before the Reckoning starts.

Well, it's like that because that's Ram's win condition and Zato's absolute lose condition. If you've shoved a zato into a corner with ram you have basically done your job and won the round and in other Guilty Gear game you would win also. Furthermore: Everyone in this game has a reversal, It's Burst. If you shove the zato into the corner, eat his burst, and he doesn't have bar to YRC and he can't block, he lost! He fucked up! Even then, the wallbreak still gives him one more chance to play neutral and come back, without it being some artifical X-Factor like comback mechanic.

Corner being death is a fair critique of all the older guilty gear games, but I think strive actually

Zato has that weakness because Eddie allows him to have absolutely ridiculous offense and damage You have a disjointed little asshole that gives him insane pressure and Zato also has great aerials and buttons, (in previous games, also had unblockable touch of death combos sometimes...) So when he's on the defensive he's shitty. He's a glass cannon. If you gave him a Sol style DP or reliable reversal he would be completely obnoxious to fight against. I am getting a cold sweat thinking about a zato that not only has crazy left/right/dust mix and year long block strings but also can hit you with a dp on the few times you knock him down. Sounds like Leo actually orz.

Like maybe Zato could have had a 50% tension reversal like Millia and I-No but IDK. I think he's an untapped character in strive and doesn't need it. I don't think it's inherently bad that characters have big weaknesses and strengths. It allows the characters to be unique, and for there to be weird characters like Zato, Faust, Axl, I-No, Gio, Pot and Leo (mediocre facing forward, insane with back turned) to exist where they're strong in their element but wack outside of it and don't have to cover all the bases. It makes it fun to play against them because you both know what that characters game plan is and they are constantly trying to execute it while you are trying to stop it.

But I'm probably bias because strive has been the most fun I've had playing FGs since I was like 10. I've liked guilty gear since I was 10, actually but the netcode in this makes it kinda the first one I can play against other people, so having all this fun while I have essentially been stuck in my house unable to leave due to covid lockdowns is amazing. I have more fist pump fuck yeah get up out of my seat moments playing this then I have had in a very long time so my opinion is intensely colored at best

August 25, 2021

4 hours ago, Remy said:

Hide contents

The first part about gatlings:

I think gatlings were way overrated in terms of "creativity and freedom" in the P-K part of the P-K-S-HS chain. Most of the action (frame traps, mix) happens in the C.S F.S 2S H.S part or gatling 2k, 5p into command normals, which is preserved in Strive. You were not catching someone in some part of you p->k->s gatling in X2, or doing anything interesting or creativity they were just sitting in blockstun, even in old games you were shooting for a C.S counterhit starter for big damage, and starting a combo off of P or K was just asking for shitty damage. Furthermore: sitting in long ass block strings sucked ass. I guess whether or not you like long block strings depends on taste but I'm happy to lose them

I also disagree about frame trapping being more limited than SF. Because you can delay gatlings in GG and create small frame trap opps where normally there wouldn't be, as opposed to the fixed timings of SF. When I used to play kolin, I had like 3 frame trap options, st or cr.mp into st.mk and st.lp tick throw, other than that i was fishing for ch with cr.mk. The gap was always the same and once I hit cr.mp on someone's block it was a completely will they press a button or will I try to tick throw them. When I'm playing giovanna in strive I have a preposterous amount of options once I hit a comparable c.s, not to mention frame trap, air dash crossup/grab mix off of 5k

By removing the old gatlings they cut out the filler and preserved the parts of the system that are good, You prevent players from doing shitty combos and onboard them onto using high damage starters, p and k are still useful for short combos, and you also removed the parts that are boring (sitting in some guys 10 year long blockstring) and pushed the game towards being more interactive. Strive in general seems to have a design goal of sticking both players in neutral and forcing them to fight as much as possible. I think this is a net good even if there is a loss of perceived combo depth.

I prefer long blockstrings over short ones, but I grew up on team fighters so that's probably a taste thing. I like locking someone in a blockstring and having access to fast high/low/mixup options. In this game opening someone up more is about giving someone enough room to hang themselves first IE delayed 6p into garou/rekka, exploiting them panic mashing next to the sword etc. Fast lows usually lead into sweep instead of letting me lift people off the ground like in Xrd/DBF

I get why Arcsys tried to lead people away from junk combos but I don't think they're that big of a deal. Most players of any game aren't going to be doing optimals and I think preserving the game feel is more important for casual players anyway. DBF has a lot of non-optimal shit most people use just because it's cool or fun or easy or w/e. I'm used to the gatlings now though so it's not a big deal.

I can concede I might not be experimenting enough with the gatling system though because as soon as the other player gives me an inch I just autopilot as Ram and things kinda tend to to work out. Part of why I swapped.

I also don't like modern fighter tendency to drag players back to neutral at any cost. There's this consensus now that that's where the real game lies but I never really felt like that was true. Risking going for a harder combo or using a safer one with less damage added layers in it's own right. reining in the combo game to this degree kinda takes a lot of that away. GG had way too long combos sometimes but it also had a way to mitigate it with burst so it was a good game flow to me. Now half the time I even use burst in this game it's to keep someone locked in the corner since top tiers have burst safe combos/most combos are short and have frontloaded damage.

...This game is a lot to cover in one post.

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Well, it's like that because that's Ram's win condition and Zato's absolute lose condition. If you've shoved a zato into a corner with ram you have basically done your job and won the round and in other Guilty Gear game you would win also. Furthermore: Everyone in this game has a reversal, It's Burst. If you shove the zato into the corner, eat his burst, and he doesn't have bar to YRC and he can't block, he lost! He fucked up! Even then, the wallbreak still gives him one more chance to play neutral and come back, without it being some artifical X-Factor like comback mechanic.

Corner being death is a fair critique of all the older guilty gear games, but I think strive actually

I disliked the idea of wallbreak because it gave the player a free out but the more I play the more it feels like creates the opposite situation. The damage you get from breaking the wall along with positive bonus are so fucking good that it's usually the end of the round, at least for me. Probably intentional, but then why have wall break in the first place if the intent is still to oppress the other player? Just let us go back to fun corner combos and shit.

Quote

Zato has that weakness because Eddie allows him to have absolutely ridiculous offense and damage You have a disjointed little asshole that gives him insane pressure and Zato also has great aerials and buttons, (in previous games, also had unblockable touch of death combos sometimes...) So when he's on the defensive he's shitty. He's a glass cannon. If you gave him a Sol style DP or reliable reversal he would be completely obnoxious to fight against. I am getting a cold sweat thinking about a zato that not only has crazy left/right/dust mix and year long block strings but also can hit you with a dp on the few times you knock him down. Sounds like Leo actually orz.

Like maybe Zato could have had a 50% tension reversal like Millia and I-No but IDK. I think he's an untapped character in strive and doesn't need it. I don't think it's inherently bad that characters have big weaknesses and strengths. It allows the characters to be unique, and for there to be weird characters like Zato, Faust, Axl, I-No, Gio, Pot and Leo (mediocre facing forward, insane with back turned) to exist where they're strong in their element but wack outside of it and don't have to cover all the bases. It makes it fun to play against them because you both know what that characters game plan is and they are constantly trying to execute it while you are trying to stop it.

My thought for the first...month I was playing was that they could have at least given him the 50%. Ram has one to mitigate a similar weakness and she's a much easier character. After they nerf top tiers/change damage I might not think he needs it anymore though. We'll see. Balance wise I think the game is alright but I'd like to see changes just to make characters more interesting/less gimmicky.

And Idk it just makes matches feel kinda volatile to me once I'm playing someone in my orbit and it's just...I hit my win condition and then next round you hit your win condition and it's just back to back to back shut outs. We could be players on a similar level and it'll just be back to back 60% combos with wall break. Granted this could be true of Xrd too but the more varied kits, lower damage and all the characters having deeper gimmicks and stuff meant a lot more interesting situations could happen.

Idk I don't really hate this game or anything, I think the RC system is great and keeps it fun. Nago and Gio feel designed from the ground up for this game and thus feel really cool and powerful without being too much. Just a little let down by it so far.

August 25, 2021

For what it's worth Wraith, that seems to be the general consensus around Strive in my circle of Fighting game heads. Its a great game if you've never played prior Guilty Gear games and accessible to almost anyone, but at the cost of a lot of creativity with the system mechanics.

I just bought the game last week but I'm not really motivated to play it for that reason.

August 27, 2021

I finished L.A Noire a while ago, but right now I'm just going back to do the things that I didn't quite get around to doing.

August 28, 2021

On 8/26/2021 at 1:20 AM, Wraith said:

I disliked the idea of wallbreak because it gave the player a free out but the more I play the more it feels like creates the opposite situation. The damage you get from breaking the wall along with positive bonus are so fucking good that it's usually the end of the round, at least for me. Probably intentional, but then why have wall break in the first place if the intent is still to oppress the other player? Just let us go back to fun corner combos and shit.

I remember reading an interview or something about it and it's that they found that usually once someone is pinned in the corner in older GG games the round is pretty much almost over anyway. (try getting away from Xrd millia after she knocks you down in the corner) and then everyone watches one player get pinned in mix/try to escape while the other steam rolls them. Fun corner combos are only really "fun" for the attacker, being stuck in something like that is miserable if you're the one eating shit. Or at least it is for me.

So I believe the purpose of the wall break is a "stop wasting everyone's time and get on with it" mechanic where they fast forward the combo, give you damage and tension and get back to the game again. It's both an out for the person eating it and a massive reward for the aggressive player.

And Ram's burst safe combos ARE BS and so's her reversal super. The only relief I get in this fucked up world is that I know if I ram is knocked down with half a meter she's going to reversal overdrive so I just don't do Oki, block and get a fat counterhit combo

On 8/26/2021 at 1:35 AM, Kuzu said:

For what it's worth Wraith, that seems to be the general consensus around Strive in my circle of Fighting game heads. Its a great game if you've never played prior Guilty Gear games and accessible to almost anyone, but at the cost of a lot of creativity with the system mechanics.

I just bought the game last week but I'm not really motivated to play it for that reason.

I've played Guilty Gear from all the way back to ggx2 #reload I like it wayyyyyyyy more than I did Xrd when Xrd came out. Disagree about creativity being restricted too. If you watch evo top 8s from asia, europe and NA you can see heaps of completely cracked shid. Watch Xyzzy vs. Bonbonbon in losers final. Nuts

Kinda interested in what high level game your friends are into. If you say Tekken or that they're waiting for melty blood my eyes are gonna start rolling and not stop.

Saying it's accessible to everyone like it's some easy mode braindead game is not right though. Yeah, it is a lot more intuitive and easier to understand than previous games, but the high level stuff remains preposterous. The only thing accessible to everyone in this game is getting their ass whooped

EDIT: I wrote this before the patch and it was sitting in my drafts for two days

August 28, 2021

I mean, SonicFox himself said the game was kind of boring and he got 2nd at EVO soooo, take that as what you will.

August 28, 2021

16 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

I mean, SonicFox himself said the game was kind of boring and he got 2nd at EVO soooo, take that as what you will.

https://twitter.com/SonicFox/status/1431245708879876100?s=20

Yeah that lasted like... two weeks

classic twitter FGC personality combo of "this game is boring, breadead, EZ GG, not playing it anymore" but then proceed to just play the shit out of it everyday.

I get that now that strive is "popular" it's uncool to like it compared to Xrd or X2... But it's a really good game. Take it from someone that has liked this series for a long ass time (the a.b.a badge on my profile is from 2012...)

You already own it. You should just play it and make up your own mind instead of going off what others say

August 28, 2021

Yea man, what a scrub. I only really brought him to illustrate a point for consensus', because SonicFox isn't the first one to express that opinion. It was actually fairly common in the early stages of the release cycle. It just took him saying it to give it SOME validity, as stupid as it is.

I mean, I never I don't LIKE Strive, I think its a fine game. I just prefer the stuff that AC and Xrd established more.

August 28, 2021

47 minutes ago, Remy said:

I remember reading an interview or something about it and it's that they found that usually once someone is pinned in the corner in older GG games the round is pretty much almost over anyway. (try getting away from Xrd millia after she knocks you down in the corner) and then everyone watches one player get pinned in mix/try to escape while the other steam rolls them. Fun corner combos are only really "fun" for the attacker, being stuck in something like that is miserable if you're the one eating shit. Or at least it is for me.

So I believe the purpose of the wall break is a "stop wasting everyone's time and get on with it" mechanic where they fast forward the combo, give you damage and tension and get back to the game again. It's both an out for the person eating it and a massive reward for the aggressive player.

Like I said I played DBF/marvel before this so disgusting oki shit is like...fun. Not that fun when you get hit by it, sure, but I always got a rush when I managed to escape so it's a double edged sword for me. Part of the fun of R2 for me was mixing one on one gameplay with some of that madness. If the developers saw that and thought it was an bug and not a feature idk I just don't really agree with that philosophy. I can sorta simulate that "You're in my world now" feeling with Ram/Millia though so it's not the worst thing.

August 28, 2021

Putting people in the vortex of Okizeme is one of the best parts of Guilty Gear.

August 28, 2021

1 hour ago, Wraith said:

Like I said I played DBF/marvel before this so disgusting oki shit is like...fun. Not that fun when you get hit by it, sure, but I always got a rush when I managed to escape so it's a double edged sword for me. Part of the fun of R2 for me was mixing one on one gameplay with some of that madness. If the developers saw that and thought it was an bug and not a feature idk I just don't really agree with that philosophy. I can sorta simulate that "You're in my world now" feeling with Ram/Millia though so it's not the worst thing.

I mean, I play Giovanna so basically every time I land a hit someone is getting put into an Oki situation and suffering the pain. I also understand the rush of blocking it properly. If I ever guess correctly against a back turned Leo trying to high low left right me I pretty much pop out of my chair.

I guess where I disagree is there's this rhetoric that this game doesn't have gross oki setups when it absolutely does, they just have a cap on them now. I think the design choices in the game show developers totally understand the importance of oki as you can see in the patch notes they mention changing Gio's  ->HS I-No's dash and Ram's Dauro to get oki.

In general, the discourse around the game is they made a dumbed down baby game but I absolutely don't think that's even remotely true. I like this game because it feels "designed" to me. Like the developers really thought about what works and what doesn't work when they were making it and are pushing towards making the game a distillation of "guilty gearness". The latest patch notes really fill me with confidence for the direction of the game. The developers are showing a pretty deep understanding of the game they're making.

Taking Sol as an example, they could have responded to the shrieking about Sol clean hit combos and left it there, but instead they made a bunch of really smart changes, to a variety of his options but still preserved what makes him a unique character. I think for example his air bandit bringer was a fucked up move that created a completely incomprehensible situation when you block it, so I'm chuffed about that. and the f.S FD change is great. S.VV getting slowed down so you can react to it, but also being made a better anti air? good change!

Spoiler

dunno what they were thinking with that leo buff tho

In general, I think people on twitter/forums talk shit about games they think they understand and they really don't. Like the discourse of this game has been horrible. It really reminds me of like League or Overwatch community whining for nerfs constantly without really trying to understand the game at all

1 hour ago, Kuzu said:

Putting people in the vortex of Okizeme is one of the best parts of Guilty Gear.

Go actually play your copy of Strive and tell me if it has Okizeme in it

edit:

1 hour ago, Kuzu said:

I only really brought him to illustrate a point for consensus', because SonicFox isn't the first one to express that opinion. It was actually fairly common in the early stages of the release cycle. It just took him saying it to give it SOME validity, as stupid as it is.

I missed this earlier, but what people were saying "early in the release cycle" was complete nonsense. And when the game came out everyone swept that shit under the rug because they realised how stupid it was.

I remember all the pearl clutching about Milia and I-No "not being able to exist" in strive because "no oki" before they were shown... Which was completely bullshit.

Pretty much every fighter's first month is filled with useless takes because no one knows how to play and people just spout hot take garbage. Like MVC3 where everyone thought Sentinel was gamebreaking but he wasn't shit.

Like Sonic, oh this game is boring -> One new character comes out -> Oh this game is fucking interesting let me spam 100 tweets in a row about Jack-O Tech = Clearly the bones of the game weren't that boring.

August 28, 2021

I can only give my perspective; I like Strive, I don't think its a bad game at all. I'm actually having a lot of fun with it, playing Nagoriyuki and might pick up Chipp somewhere down the line.

And maybe its my own personal feelings on the matter, but I do feel like something was lost in the transition to Strive in the attempt to streamline it. It's not BAD, but it's certainly not my preference even if I acknowledge that it's still ultimately pretty good. And if some of the people I speak to have a similar sentiment, then that tells me that I'm not completely alone in my feelings.

Call it whatever, but we've had the game for almost three months. I think people have more or less settled on how they feel about it by now.

August 28, 2021

Oh I didn't realise you actually played it and liked it, in that case who cares what randoms say online?

I guess I think a lot of the new additions are good, like the big slowdown counterhits, the wallbreaks, throw command + tech/whiff animations, and the new RC mechanics are all improvements to the game. and the things missing from Xrd: like air teching, blitz shield, danger time, variable wakeups, Hellfire, burst overdrives were just garbage and the game is better without them.

Especially fucking Danger Time. Love how everyone skims over that when they talk about good xrd is.

October 28, 2021

My estimation of which games I'd have played by the time of my next review were way off, and it's largely due to a pair of behemoth games which released at the end of July. I'm only just starting to get back on track...

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir / The Girl Who Stands Behind (Switch) - These I thought would be fascinating partly as historical pieces and partly as counterpoints to Great Ace Attorney. It's an interesting concept for a remake; the visual style is boldly enhanced and looks quite incredible, with an animated style that looks halfway between 2D and 3D, to the extent that it took me a while to figure out exactly which it was - but the gameplay itself, right down to the text, is a completely literal representation of the original visual novel / adventure title. In other words, this is both an extraordinarily faithful remake and a completely different experience; a bit of a paradox, really. Given that, and given the contrast to Great Ace Attorney, it's hard not to talk immediately about the gameplay - or rather, what passes for it. ...You sometimes hear people talk about "outdated" gameplay; personally, I'm not sure there can be such a thing, any more than there can be a truly outdated style. But at the same time, nobody is going to design a game this way now. Broadly speaking, the game is structured as a series of scenes which you navigate through via a broad menu of interactions, until you've unlocked enough new dialogue or information to move onto the next scene; new dialogue choices or examine options are highlighted in yellow as they appear. So far, so good. But sometimes you have to examine objects repeatedly, or pursue the same topic of conversation again and again, to trigger new interactions, with the result that you spend an awful lot of time trial-and-erroring your way through your options trying to figure out exactly what it is the game wants you to do in order to move on. This is combined with the fact that the UI is extremely slow; menus opening, the cursor moving, it's all wildly sluggish - and I can't help thinking that this and this alone is to blame for the remakes having roughly double the playthrough length of the originals, because as I said, the gameplay is literally identical!

That being the case, it's a good thing that the stories themselves hold up quite so well. The Missing Heir is heavily inspired by the Seishi Yokomizo classic The Inugami Curse (with detective Kosuke Kindaichi even getting a visual shout-out!), and hits the classic mystery beats with a country house, a wealthy family, a bizarre will, and a number of ruthless murders - plus a satisfying amount of character development for what could easily have been a silent and voiceless protagonist. (It also features the sole variation on the usual gameplay of the titles, with a first-person maze that's an obvious homage to the one in The Portopia Serial Murder Case.) The Girl Who Stands Behind is a slightly more modern and relatable take centring on seemingly supernatural goings-on surrounding a creepy old school, with a noticeably less obvious solution. These are proper detective stories with clues and deductions, but also plenty of character and more than their fair share of gothic ambience - really, they could have been aimed directly at me.

In other words, they're potentially a real Marmite experience, with almost absurdly dated gameplay, modern visuals, and timeless stories. Odd throwbacks, to be sure, but I'm delighted to have had a chance to experience these classics - and hope it will lead to more modern remakes of early mystery adventure games. I have my fingers crossed especially for the obscure Satellaview sequel (variously translated as Lost Memories in the Snow or The Past That Disappeared in the Snow) which promotes sidekick Ayumi to the protagonist role - though I gather that had a unique structure which would be not necessarily hard but definitely weird to reproduce in a remake. Still, weird gameplay didn't stop the first two remakes. Here's to more of the same!

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (Switch) - Thoughts on Adventures here; thoughts on Resolve here.

NEO: The World Ends With You (Switch) - Thoughts here.

In progress: SaGa Frontier Remastered... largely as I decided I would be playing through all eight character stories owing to the amount of unique content and the relative brevity of each character storyline. I'm on the fifth at present, but it's taking a long time as I've been treating it as a between-games game - and I've been playing some long games. The pace should increase now that I'm back onto shorter games for a time.

Coming up next: Metroid! WarioWare! Finally.

December 5, 2021

Has nobody else been playing any games the past month or so? Well, having gotten NEO: The World Ends With You and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles out of the way, I'm zipping through my backlog.

Metroid Dread (Switch) - For a Metroidvania fan, I was very late to the classics; by the time I played Metroid anything, the mainline series was in cold sleep, and I was probably first exposed by Metroid Fusion through the 3DS Ambassador program. Some years and the odd halting rerelease and remake later, we have Metroid 5, at last - and it's a fine thing. Samus's design is excellent, her suit half-human and half-alien, and it lifts the game a surprising amount to have her front and centre. And the movement is so fast and fluid! The game is one of the most moreish I've played as a result, the temptation always to go out on on more trip, to one last save point, simply as the whole thing just zips and it can't take long. The story is everything I could have wanted from a new Metroid game, too; on the one hand it's quite minimalist, but it's also absolutely steeped in the lore and has the boldness to change the meaning of the title of the whole series, even. If I have one criticism, it's that I would have liked it to be more open; the opening areas gradually funnel you forwards through a series of one-way set-pieces and it takes a while before you feel you have freedom to even backtrack, and while it does open up a little then in my head I'm imagining something almost like a 2D open world - or at least something like Hollow Knight, where your route through the game stood a strong chance of being very different from any one playthrough you looked at. The game could also have used a few more bosses, but frankly, I'm prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to anything developed during COVID. I very much look forward to a future title under this team, developed under more favourable conditions.

WarioWare: Get It Together! (Switch) - And speaking of games developed under COVID, here we have the latest WarioWare, and it's a bit of an oddball one even by Wario standards. It's normal, as these things go, for Wario games to use all kinds of janky input mechanisms; not just the standard buttons, but the touch-screen, gyro functions, even the microphone... WarioWare Gold on the 3DS, which in case you haven't got the memo is the best and the definitive WarioWare, embraces this. Get It Together!... does not; or not in the same way. Instead of controlling the games directly, you use the standard button controls to control a little avatar of a WarioWare character, who manipulates the game. It's an interesting new tactic, and there are stacks of characters with increasingly weird and janky gimmicks, and having to play each stage with a number of them being shuffled through at random brings something of that WarioWare randomness. But the thing is... I can't help but feel that it's actually a condition imposed from above. The Switch has tons of input methods; it has a touch-screen, I'm pretty sure it has some sort of gyro function, there's loads of stuff in the JoyCons! But this game uses none of it, and the vibe I get is that the team were given the message from above that the game had to be playable in all Switch modes and with all available controllers. So all the special input stuff attached to the Switch - junked, and instead the extended cast get brought forward to front the game as playable characters. It works, I guess, but it's not the same.

The microgames themselves are, fortunately, good as ever, with themes and art which vary wildly from moment to moment; and a good thing too, as they're the meat of the game. Or are they? The game itself treats the solo playthrough almost like a prologue, with various multiplayer features only unlocked once the main game is completed. Not interested in multiplayer? Then a significant wedge of the game isn't for you. Setting this next to WarioWare Gold, which had stages for just about every character and then some, it's hard not to feel a bit short-changed on the single-player front. This is a feeling exacerbated by a relative lack of additional gimmicks and toys and minigames and bonuses. Is this COVID rearing its ugly head and shortening development time? It's hard not to feel so when the game has some weird cuts in other areas; the game is partly voiced, but not fully, and the disparity is jarring - Gold managed full voice acting - and, for I think the first time, each stage has an animated intro but no outro, even when the story seemed to be inviting one! It really feels like they just didn't get done in time. I'm fond of WarioWare - at least, in the absence of a new Wario Land - and I hope for it to do well; but this entry feels a little undercooked on a number of fronts. Here's hoping for a future title that's allowed to spread its wings.

Astalon: Tears of the Earth (Switch) - Here's a game I expected to be playing months ago. Astalon is, yes, a retro-style Metroidvania, but it has its own neat little selling points. The first is that you're handling three different characters in a single playthrough, which you can switch between periodically and each of which has their own strengths and weaknesses - so you can choose to do all your exploring with just one and switch to the others when there's something only they can do, or you can mix-and-match at will. The second is that the game is built around the idea of regular (but not necessarily frequent) death. For narrative reasons, the in-game shop and most of your upgrades are only accessible when you die; in-game healing is very rare in order to expedite this, and so your explorations are something of a matter of survival and attrition until you eventually and inevitably get chipped down to nothing. Fortunately, you lose zero progress on death; merely your place on the map, being booted back to the start of the tower (right next to a fast travel point) with all your kit intact. It works; and what helps it to work is that the game, while broadly linear, does tend to open up multiple paths to you and have various ways you can explore at any one point, with increasing numbers of hidden side-areas the farther you go through the game. A couple of alternative character modes expand the game's longevity overall; the first alternative character has a limited moveset which can't access some of the castle's areas and is best thought of as a kind of speedrun to the final boss, and the second is more of a free mode for playing around. There's also a boss rush which is, if we're honest, a bit too harsh to be worth pursuing.

The big problem with the game? It's glitchy. Very glitchy. Not game-ruiningly glitchy, not "don't buy this it doesn't work" glitchy, but you have to be aware that you will suffer from them (I have a sneaking suspicion that they become more common as a play session goes on, but I could be wrong; worth saving and closing out periodically just in case). There are bugs with ladders which can make it hard to leave a climbing state or make it so you simply fall down ladders when you step on them. There's a bug which causes you to turn invisible and phase through moving platforms when you try to step on them. There's a bug which causes you to move constantly on the ground, powerless to halt in place. I suffered a bug with the second alternative character mode which robbed that character of its main movement gimmick (which was the point at which I decided I was done with the game). For a game which is otherwise fairly well-polished, this is disappointing. As I said above, none of this ruined my playthrough, and I look forward to a sequel; but I hope that that sequel will be a more stable release.

SaGa Frontier Remastered (Switch) - The SaGa series is undergoing a kind of quiet remaster renaissance as more and more of its old titles are rereleased, in my case on Switch; and this one, which has been my between-games game for months now, I have finally wrapped up. SaGa Frontier! It's a bit hard to describe. Like most SaGa games, though, basic RPG gameplay involves a significant degree of randomness and unpredictability. Instead of conventional levelups, your stats will increase at the end of each battle based on how that battle played out; and you have a chance of glimmering new arts for your weapons in the heat of battle, or learning new magics. SaGa Frontier follows some of the Romancing SaGas in offering you a choice of eight characters to choose from; but unlike the previous titles, rather than there being a single common main storyline, each character has their own relatively short storyline with unique events and dungeons, situated around a vast sort of open world of areas which you can visit to recruit new characters, delve miscellaneous dungeons, or pursue magic-learning sidequests. While each character has certain areas only they can access, many storylines will intersect with areas which other characters can access freely; and part of the fun of playing through all eight characters is in seeing the world from different perspectives, and coming to understand how it all fits together - how this character has a role in that story, or what this area or that is really for.

Still, playing through the game eight times would be a big ask... were it not for a feature common to all the SaGa remasters, an extremely flexible New Game+ which can be used at any time and can carry forward almost anything at your discretion, with choices made from a big list. So you can train up a set of characters through one scenario, beat it, and then New Game+ into a different scenario and go around recruiting the same characters, just as powerful as you left them! Other features unique to the remaster include a gorgeous update to the graphics, with the frequently muddy and somewhat garish backgrounds upscaled to, if not beauty, then at least comprehensibility; and what is possibly the only upres of 2D character sprites to actually look genuinely excellent. The remaster also includes a number of previously cut events in one character's scenario, and, at last, the cut eighth character from the original - whose scenario is formatted as a series of case files based on the other seven characters, taking you on a whistlestop tour through their story and up to their final boss. Across all eight characters, I ended up putting over eighty hours into the game, and I don't regret it. I think, on balance, I preferred the Romancing SaGas; but I'm greatly enjoying experiencing this legendary RPG series I've otherwise had so little contact with, and look forward to future remasters and releases.

Coming up next: VN, Vania, V!

December 7, 2021

Finished Super Sonic Robo Blast 2.0. The level design on this version got exponencially better compared to the prior one. The lategame stages are, however, too demanding in regards of the player's proficiency with Sonic. Such as the race against Metal Sonic, there's a lava section where you have to perform precise jumps on narrow platforms while keeping the momentum so you don't get too far behind for instance.

February 22, 2022

I hope this thread isn't becoming just me rambling on at length. I think it would be best if I started putting my extended text under spoiler tags...

Again: Interactive Crime Novel (DS) - CiNG's penultimate game is Hotel Dusk without the heart.

Spoiler

As part of my increasingly prescient-looking attempts to obtain and play 3/DS titles I never owned the first time around, I finally got my hands on a game I wanted to play back in the day but couldn't - because it wasn't published in the EU. (Contrast CiNG's final game, Last Window, which came out in the EU but not the US.) CiNG in their heyday were responsible for some wonderful detective/adventure games, such as Another Code: Two Memories (better known as Trace Memory in the US) and the legendary Hotel Dusk: Room 215. Again is not one of those.

The premise is pretty standard: You are an FBI agent with a troubled past sent in with your partner to investigate the apparent re-emergence of an infamous serial killer. The game mostly plays out through you selecting locations from a list and then choosing various actions from a menu in that location, such as talking to people, making phone calls, and so on; the selling point gameplay element is that, when visiting certain crime scenes, you can use the DS's two screens to explore (in 3D) both the current room and how it appeared in the past, unlocking visions by identifying differences in the two. Gameplay-wise, the game is adequate if uninspiring; the DS's low resolution makes some of the differences genuinely difficult to see, but otherwise it doesn't really do anything wrong.

CiNG was increasingly experimental with its graphical styles, and Again features a new one: The characters are all represented by live-action actors, photographed in various poses for their sprites (and with the occasional heavily filtered video sequence). The inevitable catch there is that they all look rather too... normal. The main characters in particular have a bit of a drama-school vibe, so many over-emoting twenty-somethings in rather boring suits and jackets. I applaud the effort, but it adds to the sense that the game is on the generic side.

And on that note, the selling point of most CiNG games is really the narrative, and unfortunately this is a fairly subpar effort from that otherwise fine development company. The premise is a little generic for CiNG, and while the serial killer story which unfolds is actually fairly original (with elements anticipating Deadly Premonition, or perhaps just borrowing from Twin Peaks), it's hard not to mark it down for the obvious culprit's descent into cartoonish villainy in the climax, nor the rather lacking effort to explain the protagonist's unique psychic ability. The occasional localisation flub doesn't help (is it Clockford, or Crockford?). But where it really falls down compared to CiNG's other efforts is on characterisation; the better CiNG games have focussed on a highly compact cast of characters, drawing out their individuality, their traumas, their hopes and regrets - but Again's characters are little more than cardboard cut-outs, too numerous to serve as anything more than plot waymarkers. The game ends on a forever-unresolved sequel hook, although it's fairly easy to guess roughly what the plot of a sequel would have involved, but this one was never destined to set the world on fire. Perhaps if it had followed the Japanese release, with its striking boxart and amazing title: "Again: FBI Parapsychological Investigator"!

Dicey Dungeons (Switch) (Hallowe'en Special) - Previously released on PC, a trio of new Hallowe'en-themed episodes made its way to Switch, with new adventures for the Warrior, Inventor, and Witch! Warrior's is a fairly vanilla episode which is largely just an excuse to see the entire monster cast in silly Hallowe'en costumes (despite already being monsters), but Inventor's episode has all-new and deliberately janky and bad equipment, while the formerly nightmarish Witch has an episode which is either very hard or very easy depending on your point of view: A pure puzzle episode, in which you are given predetermined equipment and dice per fight and must beat each opponent in one round. By the end, I was genuinely statting out strategies on my computer to figure out what combination of moves would net me the result I needed. This was a gem, and something of a palate-cleanser after how rough the main game could be; and it's got me looking forward to a promised further DLC with episodes for all six characters, to appear sometime in the future. An excellent game continues to excel.

Blasphemous (Switch) (Stir of Dawn update) - To be honest, I'd more or less had my fill of Blasphemous, so I raise my eyebrow at the addition of yet more material which requires a new game (much though it was an opportunity to try a new Penance). To its credit, the game makes its new questline meaningful, revisiting the fates of some of the characters you mercifully executed on your original run and pulling back the veil on previously unexplained parts of its mythos. There are a number of new areas and bosses tied to this new questline, all of them pointing you towards a new ending which sets the stage for the game's upcoming sequel. It's a meaty update, in other words; but at least one of the new bosses feels like too much of an HP sponge, and the new questline, up to its denouement, feels to me like it lacks some of the obscurity and injustice which made Blasphemous stand out. But that's not to say that it's uninteresting, and I'm certainly intrigued to see where they take this ending in Blasphemous II.

Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair (Switch) - Surprisingly adept indie mystery VN shows considerable promise, with the odd caveat.

Spoiler

I have a fondness for indie games which, if you like, show their indieness; which have the sort of messy individuality you don't get from professional-looking releases with all the rough edges sanded off. That might sound like a bit of a backhanded compliment, but it explains what drew me to Shinrai: I could tell that it was a game by mystery fans, for mystery fans.

Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair is a mystery visual novel in the Ren'Py engine leveraging that classic premise: Ten people, in this case young teenagers, get themselves trapped in a closed-circle location where mysterious and baffling murders rapidly trim their numbers. Fortunately, this is very much an orthodox mystery rather than a slasher, with gothic trappings, character psychology, maps and crime scene investigations. It's also a surprisingly meaty and a surprisingly clever mystery; the story continued for rather longer than I expected and with more twists than I initially gave credit for, and ultimately I would rank it as a pretty respectable mystery story (speaking as one who's read a hell of a lot of them). What makes the game for me is the amount of credit it gives to the player's intelligence: Every now and again the story will pause and give you the opportunity to figure out what's going on - with the possibility for mistakes and failure, which you are graded on at the end of the story. Fail to make the right deductions as to what's going on, and bad endings and an unsolved mystery await you; nobody is going to solve it for you. Conversely, if you're good enough, you the player are very much the one solving the mystery - and it's even possible, if you hit on the right combination of ideas, to influence the narrative in its closing stages and save one of the potential victims! I was really very impressed.

This isn't to suggest that the game doesn't have flaws. As I suggested above, the art doesn't have the kind of commercial polish you'll get from most releases, and while this endears it to me then other people might have difficulty overcoming it. Another potential pitfall is that, although this is a game set in Japan about Japanese characters, I'm not necessarily convinced by it; the game feels very western and I frequently forget that it's meant to be set in Japan at all. I sense that perhaps there's an anime influence on some elements of the game which comes across as unfortunate; when the protagonist gets a pat on the head from her crush near the end of the game, all that tells me is that he's treating her like a child rather than an equal, and the decision to show our fourteen-year-old heroine shirtless within the first five minutes of the game is one hell of a red flag. There is also one character whose dialogue is consistently M-rated, and it feels distinctly out-of-place in a game which is otherwise pretty chaste once the mystery gets going. I would like to see less of this in a sequel.

Because there is going to be a sequel! And I'm looking forward to it. The team are currently working on another mystery set in the same universe, with a Shinrai sequel to follow, and I'm quite excited for both of those as the team show an adeptness for mystery plotting.

Shin Megami Tensei V (Switch) - The Pokemon evolution I've been waiting for!

Spoiler

I'm not certain that I am competent to judge this as a Shin Megami Tensei title. The fact is that I haven't actually played many games in the series - just IV and IV Apocalypse back on the 3DS; though there are many earlier titles and spin-offs. What I got wasn't what I was expecting from those two titles, but it might be more the norm - I don't know!

In any case, what I enjoyed about IV/A is how plotty they were, and going in to SMTV I was concerned that there wouldn't be so much of that. I was, broadly speaking, right. This is a heavily gameplay-focussed title, where you will get fifteen minutes of plot and then be thrown into the netherworld for fifteen hours. In actuality, the game is more of an exploration title - and fortunately, that it pulls off excellently. The game is set around four vast post-apocalyptic areas, cities levelled and toppled and swallowed up by desert, which themselves are broken up into large sub-areas you pass through one by one. Objectively, every area is using more or less the same assets. As such, it is very much to the game's credit that it does a fantastic job of building them into areas which feel distinct and which have a powerful sense of place. I never got lost, I never felt like the areas were samey, because they were all constructed to be distinct in their arrangement and in how you move through them. Even simple tricks, like giving each major area its own colour scheme, helps tremendously. There's also no shortage of stuff to do in each area, either. Varied demons show up from place to place; there's dialogue-based world-building, sidequests with unique bosses, collectibles tucked into interesting out-of-the-way areas - your travels really feel very full.

Battle is a compelling, meaningful affair, too, in which criticals and exploitation of elemental weaknesses, if timed properly, can score you extra turns, and understanding the kinds of techniques your foes can employ is crucial. You're never quite safe, and even a normal battle can turn the tables on you. It's one of the areas in which the influence of the game's staff, many of them sourced from the Etrian Odyssey series (to which I hope they can now go back), is felt - as is the extremely flexible character-building system which allows you to tailor your strengths and weaknesses and your whole party's moves pretty much however you like. If there's a drawback, it's that the game often risks being too easy, thanks to this customisability. Full disclosure, I played on the game's Normal difficulty, as I gather the others just put the Normal values through multipliers; I'd rather play the difficulty the game was balanced around. Is it balanced, though? With careful customisation of your team, it's possible to defeat bosses five or even ten levels above you. I don't have a problem with that; what is a problem is the buckets of EXP this rewards you with, leaving you overlevelled for much of the rest of the game. Take on the superboss, and the final boss will be such a pushover that you won't even see his gimmicks. I only faced a few battles in the story which felt like real challenges for which I needed to reconsider my team composition. Perhaps I should have played in Hard? But really, I just think that Normal should have been harder.

So, as for that plot? While very much on the thin side, I feel like I appreciate it more in retrospect. I see now that, like Apocalypse, it is trying to open up a different perspective on the series's trademark Law-Chaos conflict. In this case, it's by presenting a world in which the major players of that conflict (which is to say, God and Lucifer) have left the gameboard, leaving their forces to figure out what to do in their absence and what form of world they should build. It's also a game which presents an alternative interpretation on the two sides, depicting a Law which looks like Chaos and a Chaos which looks like Law; Law is advocated by renegade strongmen who want to rule through brute force, while Chaos is advocated as a democratic vision by a politician on the global stage. The game doesn't really give enough weight to either before the denouement, and some characters feel underdeveloped or too rapidly developed. Many of the side-characters, on the other hand, feel like they vanish from the plot entirely - although this is because the game chooses to resolve their storylines through sidequests rather than through intertwining them with the main plot, which I feel is a valid decision even if it looks like it's sidelining them.

In closing, as somebody coming to this game from Shin Megami Tensei IV and Apocalypse, this wasn't what I expected - however much I enjoyed it. What it did feel like, though, is a great model for a future Pokemon game. Increase the environmental diversity and add PokeRide to alternately gate and expand your movement through it; slap a town at every chokepoint, and a gym at every other town; replace the collectibles with "rare Pokemon which spawns only in this one spot" - and I think you'd be looking at something very promising.

Castlevania Advance Collection (Switch) - Learning that I was a sucker not to have played these years ago.

Spoiler

I'm a latecomer to Castlevania, having only arrived at the series with Portrait Of Ruin on the DS... a game which wasn't so far away from the series's de facto cancellation. I missed out on the GBA titles despite them sounding right up my street in retrospect. Konami may be nickle-and-diming people with these collections, but I never played any of the games in this package before, so I'm very grateful for it.

Before we get to the games themselves, I will note that the collection itself has all kinds of nifty features; per-game savestates, bestiaries, annoying little drop-signifier widgets you can turn off, galleries and music players and so on. I didn't necessarily use a lot of these (and the widgets should've been off by default), but I'm glad that they were there. So.

Circle of the Moon (GBA) rocks in like it has something to prove, starting you off not at the gates of the castle but right in the middle and then dropped into the catacombs, leaving you stranded in the middle of unfriendly territory. It's a really effective opening for leaving you feeling tense and endangered... an effect compounded by my subsequently taking a route which skipped two or three save rooms before I finally stumbled into one. Elsewhere, the game's approach to bosses stands out: Few, but memorable, and generally as oversized set pieces. A lot of these have the flaw of actually being quite difficult to safely lay a finger on, but my personal favourite, the twin Dragon Zombies, are dangerous in a way that feels fair and are a highlight of the collection. A major feature of the game is its magic system, the Dual Set-Up System, by which magical cards dropped by enemies can be combined to various effects. Of course, the factor of this being drop-dependent is something of a common theme in this collection, where the games attempt to give players a unique experience by the sheer stinginess of the drop rates ensuring you'll only ever get a handful of the cards, and thus what you have available to use will be quite different to any other person's game - but it doesn't exactly feel fair, despite the presence of other game modes existing which give you more freedom to experiment. Elsewhere, the somewhat janky controls and existence of an excessively overtuned optional Battle Arena don't do the game so many favours either. (The Underground Waterway sequence break, on the other hand, isn't so much a flaw as a rite of passage.)

Harmony of Dissonance (GBA) also rocks in like it has something to prove, largely as CotM was made by a different team. I think it's in this light that HoD has a broadly similar premise involving a friend/rival who you must eventually do battle with, but also takes a very different approach in all other respects. CotM had just a handful of showstopper bosses, so HoD throws in loads of bosses which are rather less memorable (but give you bang for your buck); CotM had a somewhat random magic system, so HoD makes sure its magic system is based on fixed drops (treasure books combined with your subweapons for often overpowered effects). CotM also had a fairly conventionally designed castle, with a central "hub" of hallways off which each subsequent area branched, but HoD is a bit more - well, linear to begin with, but then it opens up into something with a high degree of freedom... and perhaps a low degree of significance to each individual area. The central gimmick of the game, spoiler alert, is that it pulls back the curtain at one point to reveal that you've actually been voyaging through two different castles, and even changes the map screen to demonstrate it; but as the castles are actually just "layers" of a single place, they use more or less the same layout, despite the fact that you've only ventured into individual areas of each so far. What I mean is that the "layer" trick doesn't feel meaningful, as you haven't thus far seen multiple versions of the same place, and the two castles themselves aren't meaningfully different. There are a handful of places where your actions in one castle influence the layout of another, but they're so rare and ephemeral as to feel optional. The overall impression is of an idea which sounded good in the concept phase but didn't really work out that well in practice. More successful is the game's alternative character mode, Maxim Mode, which embraces the idea of a non-linear game by giving you a character with fixed stats and rebalancing the game's enemies to all be on about that level.

Aria of Sorrow (GBA) is the big one, perhaps the highest-acclaimed Castlevanias next to Symphony Of The Night (though Order Of Ecclesia is up there just for being so well-constructed). I'd played the sequel, but I was excited to finally visit the original - and it didn't disappoint. The premise is startlingly fresh for the series, and the story as told is actually a pretty effectively-communicated mystery in which both the good and bad endings hit strong emotional beats. It's also a solid Metroidvania with an extremely enjoyable castle and boss set, including the showstopper Balore, and even the odd tough-but-fair sequence break. What people remember Aria for, though, is the breadth of ways to attack; and while we can't neglect that it's the first GBA 'vania to give you main weapons other than the whip, the real innovation is the highly ambitious decision to associate every single enemy with a magic attack you can learn, and use three of at the same time: The Soul system. This alone makes you look at every single enemy in the game differently: What power could it give me? Like the DSS system from CotM, the exact set of souls you end up with is heavily random and likely to be quite unique between playthroughs. It's just a shame that, like so many Castlevania games, the drop rates are so atrociously stingy that it's difficult to really experiment - and if there's any one soul you want, you're stuck with grinding. Overall, though, this is a really solid send-off to Castlevania on the GBA, and must have felt, at the time, something like the end of an era. Perhaps it's in that respect that the decision was made for the alternative character mode to star a far more traditional type of Castlevania character, Julius; and there's something of the Maxim Mode in its set-up, in which your stats (but not your HP) increase for every boss you kill, allowing you to go through the game in your own order but still face varying difficulty depending on your direction.

Dracula X / Vampire's Kiss (SNES), on the other hand, is more in the linear, arcade style of the earlier Castlevanias, something which is a lot less my jam; movement is extremely limited and you will be booted back to the start of a stage if you lose all your lives (and back to the start of a room if you lose just the one). I freely admit to having used the collection's savestate function to effectively give myself infinite lives via per-room saves (with a slightly more intensive savescumming approach in some of the more irritating areas, like the achingly slow final boss), so that I could take a tour through the game to the best ending. I'll give the game this, though: It is a lot of fun, clearly built around its limited movement options and demanding a certain level of care and mastery... if, sometimes, a bit too much. It's also interesting to see the source of some of the sprites I've seen elsewhere in the series. Still, it's a bit of an oddball entry in this collection, being neither a GBA game nor a Metroidvania nor, I gather, a particularly well-regarded version of this title in particular (which I gather differs wildly across iterations).

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (DS) (replay) - Sequel takes two steps forward and one step back.

Spoiler

So, I played this back in the day, sometime after getting the other two DS Castlevanias and then eventually realising that the series wasn't getting a (proper) 3DS entry... but, having finally played Aria, I wanted to experience the sequel as a sequel - and as a progression from the GBA. (Of course, having played the GBA entries on the Switch, going back to a smaller system and a smaller screen was actually quite jarring, but we'll set that aside.)

Dawn sets... mixed first impressions. The opening immediately gives you one of each type of soul, which immediately makes them feel that bit less special, and your build that bit more railroaded. The decision to switch to anime-style art severely damages the game - not just because it's less original, but also because it's not particularly competent; Yoko perhaps is the only one to come out better, but the antagonists in particular come across as artistically very generic and unfitting, and the spritework on the characters can reflect this. And the writing veers very close to the tropey, with cartoonish idiots of villains taunting you before teleporting away, repeatedly, whilst setting up a kind of tournament arc to see who gets to be the villain. This is something of a shame as I actually think the plot when considered as a whole is surprisingly well-devised, as I'll touch on later - but for here I'll say that Dmitrii's role in the game is actually very clever and clearly foreshadowed. I also think Celia's cult, With Light, is genuinely interesting and deserved more attention.

The game proper is more promising. The first area, a snowy village, feels refreshingly novel for Castlevania whilst adhering to the series's gothic roots - and this is something which, I think, you see throughout the DS trilogy of Castlevanias, a desire to take the format to places it could otherwise never go (a ruined manor, freaking Egypt). At first glance it's fairly jarring to see all the familiar enemies replaced with completely new sprites and designs, but while some I feel have less charisma than their inspirations, others grow on you. Having one of the first bosses be a new and considerably less interesting interpretation of Aria standout Balore is, I think, a definite mistake - but does highlight that bosses require more care in the confronting, requiring you to learn their moves rather than just tanking through. Similarly ambivalent is the series's first halting experiments in the DS touch-screen, first by compelling you to complete the touch-screen equivalent of a quick-time event in order to make a boss stay dead, and later by introducing obstacles which can only be destroyed on the touch-screen. (There's also a slider puzzle, but that has button controls too.) One can't fault them for trying, but it's not difficult to see why these elements were phased out in later titles; no, the real dual-screen gimmick is being able to see your map at all times, and frankly going back to a single screen after the 3DS is a definite climbdown.

The Soul system is largely intact, miserly drop rates and all, but there are two new quirks. In Aria, you could get duplicates of the various souls, but this served no purpose whatsoever. Dawn introduces two new purposes for excess souls: Firstly, having more copies of a soul empowers it; and secondly, souls can be traded to forge new weapons. You quickly realise that these two ideas are at complete odds, and then at odds again with the game's terrible drop rates; you can have any two of these, low drop rates and forging and power boosting, but you can't have all three. The power boost simply means that souls aren't as good until you work your fingers to the bone grinding up nine of them (though a rather arbitrary few are one-offs), and forging requires you to give up some honestly pretty good ones - and sometimes in multiple, despite the sheer volume of different souls the game sports. These ideas simply aren't well-conceived.

As I touched on earlier, though, I think the story is actually better than it looks - for while it's pretty bad moment-to-moment, it actually rewards a thematic reading. Consider: Dracula's latest incarnation refuses to be the villain, whereupon he is confronted by three hardcore Castlevania fans (one of whom has the power to exactly copy his predecessors' achievements); who together have built their own replica Castlevania and are seeking a final boss to sit at the top of it. The final boss sees our hero essentially fighting himself, or rather a vision of his own power used to its monstrous full extent. It's a story about Castlevania's break with the past and how some aren't ready to move on. Sure enough, the very next game is a largely vanilla Castlevania. (This isn't to suggest that's a problem, mind; Portrait Of Ruin was my first Castlevania and I enjoyed it. I just think it's ironic.)

So, as a sequel - well, it's difficult to judge what it must have been like to play Dawn at the time it came out, but from where I stand now there's a certain ambivalence; it's a solid DS title, but experimental and far from perfect. I think it sets the stage well for the two titles to follow, though, and overall the DS trilogy really stands as quite a diverse and successful trio of games.

Fuga: Melodies of Steel (Switch) - Excellent anthro strategy title which risks overstaying its welcome.

Spoiler

The premise: In a world of dog and cat people, a military invasion by an expansionist empire sees a village's children fleeing to the mountains - where they discover an ancient and powerful tank, which they commandeer to pursue their family's captors, turning the tide of war in the process. And thus, we have a turn-based encounter-focussed strategy title! The tank rolls forward along a linear path, branching occasionally and inviting you to choose from selections including Safe, Normal, and Dangerous, reflecting the number and intensity of the encounters you will face; after each battle, you roll over resource icons, and perhaps heals of health or MP, and then the cycle repeats. This is the most basic form of the many choices you face in this game, which is determined to hand over considerable leverage to the player.

In battle, your characters represent one target with one health and MP pool, but you can deploy three characters at once to man it. Each character corresponds to a colour-coded weapon type with a specific niche: Blue has the best accuracy and armour-depleting attacks, Yellow has more of a focus on status moves, and Red is pure damage. You can deploy any combination of weapons, limited only by your available characters; and each character can be backed up by a support character who adds an effect, like increased accuracy or damage, speed ups, regeneration, and so on. Pairing characters together like this strengthens their bonds, thus strengthening their support effects and also their link attacks: Powerful moves which build up over time and which depend on the weapon type of the main child plus an effect from the supporting child. Actions take place on a timeline on which enemy actions are also shown, and the actions you take may see your and your enemy's turns advanced or delayed; while both sides have unique status effects.

Outside of battle, every so often on the timeline you'll reach an Intermission: A chance to roam the interior of your tank, undertaking all manner of possible activities. Once again, choice is paramount here as you only have so many Action Points. Will you have your characters talk to each other, further strengthening their bonds - and periodically unlocking Link Events between them (think Fire Emblem support conversations)? Upgrade the tank, or fish for the materials you need to upgrade? Prepare a stat-boosting meal, or farm the items you need to stat-boost? There are many possibilities and you won't have time to do everything you want by a long chalk. You may also encounter short dungeons outside of battles, where you can recover items to upgrade the tank; these start off brain-dead but do require actual thought and skill towards the end.

The plot is okay, for what it is, but not the focus; you'll be fighting a fair number of battles between each short plot event, and if I'm honest the game is a bit drawn-out; I won't spoil the number of chapters, but suffice to say it could probably be cut by two without harming the development of the plot (perhaps taking it from a drip-feed to merely a slow-burn). The fact is that, once you're in the midgame and have a fair number of moves available, what you do won't feel particularly different at any following point - an effect compounded by the relatively limited number of enemy types (frequently recoloured to indicate difficulty). Boss fights, too, can be extremely spongy; one of the few types of moves you don't have is a true defence debuff, and I think it was needed. If you really love this game, there's a vast amount to 100%; fully upgrading the tank will take a New Game+ playthrough, and maximising all character bonds will take even more (there are perhaps two hundred link events, by my calculations?), plus some datalog entries which are either missable, rare, or outright locked to New Game+; the requirements for the best ending are also slightly more obscure than you might think... which I confess is vexing as I probably wouldn't have done a second run if I hadn't needed it, but oh well.

Overall, this is a great game which I will happily recommend to any strategy aficionado; but you will need to set more time aside than you might expect.

Jisei: The First Case HD / Kansei: The Second Turn HD (Switch) - Bite-sized mystery duet promise more for the future.

Spoiler

Much like Shinrai, Jisei/Kansei are visual novels made in the Ren'Py engine and ported to the Switch by Ratalaika Games, though they've been around a lot longer and there's a third game already in existence but not yet ported and a fourth apparently on the way. Given the similar title structure, I wonder if they inspired Shinrai on some level? Or perhaps they're both homaging something else I'm not aware of.

Jisei and Kansei are a different beast to Shinrai, though, largely in that they are short stories to Shinrai's novella. They're single-sitting mystery games, Jisei especially, in which you play as a teenager with psychic abilities and a troubled past (aren't they all?) who gets swept up in a series of intriguing murders - and it is very much a series, with Jisei leading almost directly into Kansei and both setting up plot hooks for future installments. That may be a drawback for some, that these titles don't really function as standalones, even if their mysteries do.

One of the reasons why they're so short, I would suggest, is that they actually allow the player a certain degree of freedom. This isn't leveraged very effectively in Jisei, where you spend the game essentially rattling between two rooms, exhausting your dialogue options in each before the game unlocks more dialogue options. Kansei, though, gives you more meaningful choices in how the story unfolds and where you direct your character and his investigation. This actually unlocks a couple of fairly distinct routes through the game with their own endings - although, as a player, it can be difficult to appreciate the results of your freedom as the only way of keeping track of what you've seen or haven't seen is through a CG gallery.

The writing is very readable, and the narratives, however short, are reasonably well-plotted - although they do have an unfortunate tendency to end quite abruptly and with little warning; the pacing is pretty choppy. It's tough balancing player freedom with a linear mystery narrative. Still, the development from Jisei to Kansei shows promise, and I look forward to the third installment whenever it should be ported, and the fourth whenever it should exist.

Astalon: Tears of the Earth (Switch) (New Game+ Update) - This wasn't a game I had intended to revisit, and indeed I didn't do so for long, but it has very recently received a new patch which supposedly fixed a lot of the game's major bugs (I can't vouch for that, only that it needed it) whilst adding a New Game+ mode. I gave the latter a spin up to the first boss; you keep all your characters and all purchased upgrades, but treasures found in the tower (including keys) are all lost. The tower has also been remodelled slightly, with a few new enemies and bits of level geometry placed here and there. These partly serve to alter your route through the castle, cutting you off from one direction and forcing you to approach things differently, and also rejigging things like key and treasure locations. Having played perhaps half an hour of this, then it's interesting but not novel enough to replay the entire game for unless you are real Astalon devotee. I can't fault the game for content, at least.

February 26, 2022

Been throwing a lot of time at Monster Hunter World recently, just picked up the new KOF, and I'm currently trying to decide which game to move onto next. I still want to Plat Sonic Forces and TSR, but I got some new JRPGs recently and kinda wanna give them a go. Decisions, decisions....

April 20, 2022

I'm in long RPG hell and it shows no signs of letting up, so it's a good thing I'm enjoying them. Since my last reviews I've played the best SaGa, plus two different Square Enix isometric strategy RPGs with hybrid pixel-3D art styles and branching narratives.

SaGa Scarlet Grace: Ambitions (Switch) - Minimalist RPG with maximum content.

Spoiler

An upgraded port of a 2016 Vita game, SaGa Scarlet Grace is the most recent new title in the long-running SaGa series, which emphasises player freedom in character-building and exploration. It's also a series which plainly doesn't get much in the way of a budget; SSG has lovely stylised 3D graphics, but a lot of what you would expect from a typical RPG is completely abstracted away: The game has neither towns nor dungeons. Or at least, not per se: You move your chosen character around on a lush world map, and can "enter" towns to select facilities from a list of options, or "enter" dungeons to engage in a string of battles. In other words, exploration is solely confined to the world map. Fortunately, it's absolutely massive; there are twenty regions, each teeming with towns, dungeons, or other landmarks to be examined. The vast, vast majority of it is strictly optional, and different characters have different levels of freedom of exploration within their stories; but there is still scope for hours of adventuring between points A and B on your storyline.

The battle system I've seen described by enthusiasts as the best in any RPG, and it's true that it's damn good. It uses a round-based timeline system, where each round you input your commands and they play out according to the speed of characters and enemies and their particular moves; so far, so conventional. But you can see, in advance, exactly what order each character and enemy will take their turns in, and what move each enemy will take; and can use this knowledge to set up guard moves, or interrupt moves. When a character or enemy is defeated, their icon vanishes from the timeline; and if this causes two characters or two enemies to become adjacent on the timeline, everyone involved engages in a united attack against the next enemy - which can itself chain into further united attacks if that enemy is defeated! Furthermore, what move you can take each round is determined by a number of "battle points", which refresh and usually increase each round; for instance, if the first round of battle gives four BP, your team and the enemy can only use moves costing up to four BP between them (for instance, two 1BP moves and a 2BP) - so not everyone will get a go, and you have to decide whether to favour one strong move or multiple weaker ones... There's no MP, no SP, no item use, no generic attacks - it's all determined by per-round BP. It's an incredibly fair system that levels the playing field between different character roles and between player and enemy. Also, since it's SaGa, there's no levelling up per se; HP and weapon proficiency may increase after battle, skills will rank up with repeated use, and new skills will occasionally awaken in battle - while equipment upgrades are largely limited to forging at a blacksmith's with acquired materials. Enemies will also level up with how many battles you fight, rendering grinding for its own sake redundant - though if you're a determined explorer you will fight many battles; and the final boss will expect you to be pretty good by the time you reach it...

Story-wise, the game is set in a post-imperial era in a world which has endured the repeated comings of an evil and ruinous god; but for the most part, lore about the world is discovered by exploring and interacting, and how much that background matters isn't initially clear. You start the game by selecting one of four characters (the game will assign you one based on a survey, but you don't have to follow its recommendation), and each character has their own broad storyline which mostly plays out by completing a series of long-form quests. Quests are sort of shared between characters; each starts with an assigned quest, and on completing it, can run into one of the others by exploring, until eventually you reach the climax. Which quests you tackle and in what order may be affected by the character you play, and may in turn affect your ending. But the game is, as I've already indicated, absolutely teeming with optional side-content tailored to each region; and a lot of the "feel" of each character comes from their particular personal responses to the events they get swept up in. In other words, if you beat one character's story and then start again as another, you'll encounter much that is familiar; but it won't feel quite the same...

For my own playthrough, I chose to play as Taria, one of the more advanced characters, and had an absolute blast. I explored as much as I could, but I know there was more out there which I never came across. I enjoyed it enough that I would, eventually, like to play through the game as all four characters; but given that a full-exploration playstyle will have a story last fifty hours or more, that's a long-term goal.

Triangle Strategy (Switch) - Ambitious yet accessible strategy epic.

Spoiler

What do I mean by "ambitious yet accessible"? Well, on a broad examination, Triangle Strategy isn't subtle. The stakes of its conflict are rooted in a world of exactly three nations with clear political positions and with one major resource. Characters can't change jobs, merely promote within a job, and likewise, every character has but a single weapon with multiple upgrades. This could easily have been a very simple game.

Fortunately, the game builds a great deal of sophistication onto that simple base, so that it is easy to get into but with a great deal to learn and decide. Each nation has multiple factions with their own agendas and their own plans for how to get or to keep power, internally to their nation and externally in the grander world. Your characters, caught in the centre of the conflict, must take great, and frequent, choices which determine the direction of the plot, and which can cause a common situation to play out very differently. This plot that's based on resource control and scarcity finds its echo in the game's upgrade systems, which are incredibly resource-intensive and will require you to make tremendous choices about who to promote, whose weapon to upgrade and which upgrade to take, whether to spend money on upgrade items, attack items, or healing items. Each character's class is completely unique and has a tailored set of skills which affect the battle in sometimes extreme ways; skill use costs points, of which you have the merest handful, refreshing at a rate of one per turn - do you use a costly skill or save yourself for a better one on a later turn? There is always, at every level, a lot going on - and you can't always do what you want.

Even within the game's choice-based narrative, you can't always do what you want! Choices are democratically voted upon by key NPCs, each with their own worldview and moral alignment, favouring different approaches. You can try to argue to sway them one way or another - but your arguments need to be founded both on your own convictions (determined by actions and conversation responses throughout the game), but also on that character's inner logic; but it's entirely possible to argue so badly that the characters choose the opposite plot branch to the one you were going for (though this never happened to me).

The narrative branches weave in and out of a common plotline; so, while you diverge for a time, you will eventually converge again on a single plot. This allows the game to keep a strong central narrative whilst leaving some of the details in your hands. This approach does have its weaknesses, though; once you re-converge on a common path you may find it doesn't entirely seem to follow from the decisions you've been making, as if those exact decisions don't matter much once their particular dilemma has been resolved. There are subtle ways in which particular decisions will follow through - choose to flood a city, and if later you end up fighting there you'll find it considerably wetter underfoot - but one area I would like to see improved is that of consequences clearly following through even back to the main path. I also found that any decision involving the "Utility" conviction ended up feeling like a choice of "necessary evil versus hopeless good"; but because of the format of the game, we know that there is, in fact, no necessary or hopeless, that every path is viable - and so taking the "necessary evil" felt like being a jerk for no reason. That's another thing which could be improved.

Because more of this I would like to see! Triangle Strategy is a wonderful epic, with grounded, believable characters and a complex political plot which mercifully fails to devolve into "oh the baddies were just demons/dragons/whatever". It's a human story throughout, something so rare in an RPG, and one that perfectly matches its emphasis on scarcity and difficult choices. There's a lot more I could say about it, but I'm sure it's already been said elsewhere; these are the points I wanted to emphasise. It's made me more of a strategy fan than I was, and I hope that we'll see a sequel (not necessarily set in the same world but definitely with the same format) one of these days.

Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume (DS) - A simple strategy game with refreshing bleakness.

Spoiler

I had long heard about this as one of the best DS games, so in my continuing campaign to ensure I've played everything I might ever want to play on the 3/DS systems, I snagged a copy. As I indicated above, like Triangle Strategy it's an isometric strategy RPG, with pixelart characters on 3D maps and with a branching narrative. I'm not familiar with the wider Valkyrie Profile franchise, but on doing a bit of research I found that this strategy title has a lot more in common with the mainline games than I expected, both in terms of world and enemies to the various systems and graphical flourishes. It's lost on me, but it must be easy for a regular VP player to adapt to.

It's a far, far simpler strategy RPG than Triangle Strategy, though. You can bring only four characters into battle; maps are therefore necessarily small and of limited ingenuity, but the game ekes a fair amount out of it with different elevations, terrain conditions, units and so on. The game's major strategic system is borrowed from the mainline titles, and that is that, when attacking, any allies in range of an enemy will attack also (the enemies get the same advantage); individual damage is limited, but you are encouraged to turtle up with your crew before ganging up on solitary foes. Attacks are played out according to timed button presses; time them well and get your number of hits up to a certain figure, and you can unleash a powerful single-character attack. It's not particularly hard, but it does require thought. Repeatedly attacking an enemy after their HP is already drained will also generate "Sin", but we'll come to that.

But the showcase mechanic of the game is the Destiny Plume. Each battle, you have the option of using the Destiny Plume on one of your allies, boosting their stats by a multiple of ten - at the cost of their melancholy permadeath at the end of that battle, leaving behind only a unique skill for the protagonist. Of course, you only have so many allies - and the plot won't allow you to use the plume unlimited times without funneling you into a game over. It's more of an emergency tactic, a panic button. Another thing it will do, though, is to instantly fill your battle's required minimum Sin - and if you don't, later battles will be invaded by additional powerful foes... which may require you to use the plume to deal with. Once you know what you're doing, this shouldn't be a problem, but it's all part of the game's way of reinforcing its systems.

What really surprised me about the game, though, was how unexpectedly bleak it was for a DS game! The protagonist is intent on a mission of meaningless revenge, openly spurred on by the forces of darkness; he fights in an unnecessary conflict born of a succession crisis between brothers both pushed to war more by their duplicitous advisors than their own inclinations; and your recruits are largely broken people using violence to fill the hole in their souls. Each chapter is a self-contained vignette in this wider conflict, and which chapter you'll enter is dependent on how many times you use the plume - with each use pushing you towards the darkest path. If you control your plume usage to play each path in full, though, what you'll find is that each version of the chapter shows a different perspective on that particular chapter's storyline; you may ally with a set of characters in one path who are your enemies in another, and vice-versa. Also, while it is a bleak game, if you get all three endings then the game will unlock a lengthy just-for-fun bonus dungeon with endless battles... and absurd comedy skits. It's quite a contrast!

Thus ends my first and probably my only encounter with the Valkyrie Profile series. I enjoyed it a lot, but that enjoyment is probably meaningless in terms of the wider franchise. Still, it's interesting to get a window into a series I've long heard of but never knew very much about.

Coming up next: Well, both Kirby and 13 Sentinels are out now and I want to play both of them... so obviously instead I'm playing the obscure and not very well-received 3DS SaGa-like, The Legend of Legacy. Gotta start clearing that 3DS RPG backlog sometime!

What game are you currently playing?

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