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Beating Games

Victories so far this year:

Undertale Yellow. Astoundingly high-quality fan prequel to the indie darling. Like, its visuals are generally better than Undertale's, the soundtrack has a few stellar tracks that are comparable to Fox originals, gameplay is basically "more Undertale, like it says on the tin", and the writing is almost UT/DR grade. If you're a fan of those games at all, and haven't checked this out, give it a peek. It's a free download you won't regret!

Potionomics. This game has a ton of heart! I love the visual style, and while the characters are pretty simple archetypes, the writing and voice acting are impeccably executed, so you can't help but smile. It feels like a rejected Pixar or Dreamworks pitch, salvaged from the cutting room floor and rebuilt as a video game. Gameplay-wise, it unfortunately overstays its welcome. The first couple weeks are tightly balanced; you really have to strategize with your resources, in time, ingredients, and money, to hit the progression goals. After that, though, if you've got the hang of it at all, your production ability will vastly outpace the pressure. If you're wiser than me, you'll coast, fast-forwarding through most of the mid- to late game to a chill conclusion. If you're me, you'll continue to micromanage your ever ballooning facilities, grinding out percentage optimizations that ceased to be relevant ten hours prior, until you roll credits exhausted and thankful it's over. Buyer beware!
 
Finished off Metroid Prime 4

While it certainly did enough right that I didn't regret playing it, ultimately, I was pretty disappointed by it. Thanks mostly, if not entirely, to the hub world; a vast, empty desert between the regions you do proper Metroiding in. If you're playing a Troid game, and your main reaction to getting a new ability to expand your ability to explore is to say "Aw dammit, now I have to revisit old areas with new tools" something has gone *terribly* amiss.

On the other hand, I really genuinely enjoyed the new NPCs the game thrust upon you. Which is a first for the series, and the puzzle solving elements are, while not brain busting mind-ticklers, above and beyond what you'd see in the rest of the games, and the act of exploring a new biome and blasting the hell out of the enemies within it is as fun as ever.

While I'd put it on the lower end of the spectrum of Metroid games, it's certainly no Other M or Federation Force
 
You don’t speak etecoon, they may have been spouting off all sorts of pleasantries as they showed you how to wall jump.

But they were probably just talking shit after the 8th time you failed to leave the pit.
 
Rolled credits on Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo today. I wanted to love this game, but as it went on it started to wear a little thin.

Things I liked:
-Solid exploration, lots of unexpected hidden things.
-Surprisingly deep mechanics for those who want them, some pretty clever puzzles.
-Absolutely killer Yoko Shimamura soundtrack.
-Cute art and animations.
-Pretty decent dialogue, strong anti-capitalist themes.

Things I disliked:
-Your character is slow and clunky.
-Combat never really feels good. Outside of potentially the second upgrade you can get in the game, you never get to raise your base attack power ever again. Enemies get stronger and you stay exactly the same.
-Boss fights in particular always felt extra bad. They almost always hop around their arenas much faster than you can follow, and when you're able to get a hit or two in, you only chip off a tiny sliver of their health bar. It's such a gigantic difficulty spike compared to the regular enemies you fight in the rest of the dungeons/on the overworld, every single one of them felt like a slog.
-I really disliked the upgrade system. For those unaware, to unlock the next point in your skill tree, you enter into a contract where you get the upgrade as well as a significant downside (things like less max health, less attack power, can't equip as many trinkets, etc) until you pay it off. Half of the money you collect goes towards paying down your debt, and once that's done you return to the character who gives you your contracts and they remove the downside. In theory I can see how it's supposed to add some interesting tension to the gameplay, but if you want to be learning new skills it means in practice you're constantly handicapping yourself. By the time I was ready for the final dungeon, I still had some upgrades left to earn, but at that point their downsides were so high that it didn't feel like they were worth taking. I feel like this could've been balanced more in the player's favor -- either by making money more plentiful, or making the upgrades themselves more powerful -- but ultimately for me it just led to a game where I never felt like I could actually enjoy building up my character because I was constantly laboring under some extra limitations.

I don't want to poison the well for anyone who was thinking about picking this up; it's a fine game and there's plenty of fun to be had. I still enjoyed my time with it, I just hit some abrasive spots and the risks it takes (like the upgrade system) didn't really land for me.
 
Beat Eien no Filena (aka Eternal Filena). It was fine. I enjoyed it, but I'm also ready to move on.

It is pretty ambitious for a snes rpg. The systems, I mean. You have three weapon slots per character, and can equip three weapons (or two, if one needs two slots, like most (all?) hammers). Depending on the weapon, you have different abilities, and you can freely switch between them, when a character has their turn. Like, at some level you learn the skill where you attack two times, or later three, but it is a specific spear skill. One of the things you can equip there is a first-aid kit. It lets you do a free, low heal, but it is also the thing you need to use healing skills. So you can make different characters the healer.

Not the dog, I guess. The characters still need to learn the skills, so I guess you would only be able to do the free, low heal.

Yes, a party member you get in the second half is a dog, bread partly from wolves or so. He is pretty good. Misses less often than my other party members (they miss A LOT).

It also uses ATB.

Like, it seems mechanically interesting, but in the end, I used the same few skills all the time, and most often only the same weapon type. Maybe because nothing is really challenging? But the same is true for Final Fantasy games, most of the time, and I don't mind. Or maybe it's just, because the battles aren't that interesting to me.

The story is about a fallen kingdom, that was destroyed by the Evil Empire that rules over the world, and who genocided the members of mentioned kingdom. Or so they think, as our main character, Filena, is the princess from that kingdom. You start as a kid, where her grandpa, a gladiator, starts training her, and makes it clear that she has to pass as a man (so she doesn't get used for even grosser stuff). When becoming a gladiator herself, she gets a female slave as a, well, companion. Who learns, that Filena is a woman, and who then not only lives with her (as in, they become a couple), but also as a party member. The only two, who will stay in the party for the whole game.

It's a decent game, and clearly has some special, interesting parts. I enjoyed my time with it.
 
Beat Tiny Lands 2. Lumber Baron and I have been playing it together since came out last year. We haven't found all the hidden puzzle pieces in every level so might continue to play to find those, but we've cleared all the invidual levels. The way they integrated two player mode into this one is lovely.

The only gripe I have is the level select screen, you can't zoom out so scrolling around to find levels is really awkward. The first game did that much better. But overall huge improvement and they've noted they'll fix the level select screen in a patch.

 
Credits rolling on Final Fantasy 7 Remake, still have Intergrade to get through but dang am I looking forward to Rebirth now.

I bounced hard off the game when I first tried to play it on PS5, but the inexorable power of playing a game on a Nintendo console can’t be overstated and I absolutely devoured it.
 
Sonic the Hedgehog (16-bit). This one is not the best regarded in the series, but I had fun with it. I did use save-states, which probably avoids a lot of the worst issues. The highlight for me was the enemy design, which felt a bit more wacky/experimental than later games in the series.

Professor Layton and the Last Spector. All I really want from these games is puzzles. The exploration/story part is fine. I actually liked that this one was a bit more vanilla than the last few, and that the big twists were not quite as out-there. But yeah, this is all about puzzles and it was a game that had good puzzles in it. Recommended for puzzle fans.
 
I beat the Metroid batman beyond. The elemental areas were fun, the peanut gallery was fine, the desert was boring. Final boss was too annoying to beat without turning down the difficulty and the ending was unnecessarily depressing. I got all the items but missed like 4 scans and can’t be arsed to go find them so I guess Samus doesn’t get to relax in her jammies or whatever.

Didn’t love it! Hope they build on it for a follow up title, though, there is some promise there.
 
Beat Donkey Kong Bananza and the post-game material. I didn't quite hundred percent it but came close (by the end of the post game, I just didn't have it in me to get all the balloons from the snake level). Fantastic and fun game.
 
Played through Shadow Hearts. I gave this a go years ago, which didn't last; the total tonal shift from Koudelka was too much to bear for someone who adores that game. Despite not liking my time with it, the itch remained to return to it in full someday, with awareness that it would and could not be what its predecessor was. It doesn't mean I like what it does any more than I previously did, but at least I'm not pining in futility against a completely different creative direction--a frame of mind which carried me to the end this time.

Koudelka is largely distinguished by its unconventional dignity, among its many virtues, and that's why Shadow Hearts is such a jarring whiplash on a constant basis. The rude boy hero man spends the early game gleefully contemplating sexual assault on the unconscious women in distress he encounters (who end up party members) and the weapon upgrade acupuncturist is played up as a leering gay molester and predator who takes advantage of his (young, male) customers as he performs his services. These few things were enough for me to drop the game the first time, but the game is exceedingly committed to juvenile gags, ambient bigotry and overwhelming sexism. You might be forced to behold an upskirt as part of Margarete's standard attack animation, or as part of Alice's ultimate battle skill, like it's a crucial part of the game's visual language. The developers go as far as changing the colour of Alice's underwear depending on the accessories you have equipped her with, which are pairs of panties that consist of 1) her best unique defensive accessory 2) the game's only New Game+ unique content, and the reward for completing the bestiary. These aren't "just" off-colour asides, but given obsessively prominent billing in the game's overall presentation and reward structure.

It's a boys' club RPG through and through, the kind that the genre is full of, and sensibilities of which feature in countless works, even those not typically viewed as the lowest of dregs. When I picked up a porn magazine in this game, I didn't feel like it was an exceptionality only this game was capable of; the same thing has happened in various Final Fantasies as the same kind of indicator of largely male creators signaling their playspace in insidious ways. For Dragon Quest, it's a hallmark and tradition that only sees de-emphasis as the old, set-in-their-ways men in charge of the material begrudgingly alter their work for the sake of ratings and their commercial impact and for no other reason at all. Shadow Hearts stands apart from these shared genre baselines mostly for its all-encompassing thoroughness in denigrating the player. If Hiroki Kikuta's range of inspirations for Koudelka numbered various 20th-century novelists in an effective fusion of pulp, occult and historical fiction, then for Shadow Hearts Matsuzo Machida just picked at Go Nagai staples via Devilman, which goes a long way explaining the game's exploitative and simultaneously shallow approach. Machida, for his part, was the art director for Koudelka, and directed and scripted here; perhaps owing to that background, engaging visuality is the least of the game's problems.

Shadow Hearts also styles itself as something of a romance between the leads Yuri and Alice, and I'm confident that it's one of the worst romantic arcs the medium has ever put forth. Yuri's initial contact and entanglement with Alice is prompted by Koudelka's telepathic urgings for him to protect her, as various forces vie for possession of Alice and her supernatural power. This is not a Tidus and Yuna dynamic where two individuals on a similar wavelength get to know each other, exchanging perspectives and sharing private worries and organically creating a bond of affection; this is an abrasive jackass possessively claiming another person (Yuri begins calling Alice "my woman" toward the end of the game and it's supposed to read as sweet) for himself and her glazing him with unbelievable appeals to his "purity" when nothing of the sort has been established about him. There's just nothing about their relationship that stands up to satisfying narrative scrutiny, but it's one of many things that are done in the game to push it toward a more conventional RPG expression.

For Koudelka's part, if you were interested in what another game appearance might have in store for her: she spends the entire game kidnapped and in peril, patiently assisting the leading man with her abilities, and thereafter saintly and ever-so-patiently waiting for her teenage son to finish up his adventures with his new friends. None of the fire that defined her in her own game is here, and it doesn't even feel like she's written as the same person she was, and is only reduced to a benevolent mother. She might as well be a microcosm for what Shadow Hearts is to Koudelka, the game.
 
I finished Fantasian: Neo Dimension last night. It’s a much more substantial game than I had thought. I reached the “halfway point” in about fifteen hours. My total playtime was over 70 hours. It follows the FF6 playbook, where the second “half” of the game is extremely non-linear and full of side quests that prepare you for the big showdown. And prepare you must, as this former Apple Arcade exclusive is brutally difficult, even on the easier Normal mode that was added for the complete version. I could imagine doing this on the original difficulty. I enjoyed my time with enough that I did every major and minor quest in the game, and still just managed to eke out a win at the final boss after reading a strategy guide.

I wish more people had played this one. It looks and plays like no other game I’ve seen.
 
Was home sick from work so I finished up Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Mechanically and conceptually, it reminds me a lot of Ico. It's a good game that never gets frustrating. It feels like it wants to be more of a vibe than a heavy challenge. I never got comfortable with the controls despite being really simple but this was only an issue in traversing between puzzles rather than the puzzles themselves, so that was a pretty low stakes issue.
 
I've been completely engrossed, against all odds, in the NES port of Might and Magic. I've always wanted to play through this one - it looked super cool in Nintendo Power, and I used to pine for a copy I'd see in a Walmart around two hours away. They actually had like ten-plus copies, and they never would price them down, either. It was weird.

Anyway, the game! I'm incredibly impressed by the sheer scope and scale of the game, both for a 1986 PC game and for a port of said game to the humble NES. That they managed to squeeze so much into 512 KB is nuts. I put in around 73 hours to beat it - you can go faster, but only if you straight-line it with a guide. It's pretty slow-paced, but somehow it kept drawing me in every evening. I'm not actually sure if it's the case, but this might be the best WRPG port I've seen on the NES. (Second place for now is the very JRPG-ified Ultima: Quest of the Avatar, one I beat before this one.)

Oh, and it looks better than its PC counterparts, with some excellent spritework all over the game, even if it reuses enemy sprites a bit too much (a flaw also in the PC versions). It also has a really good soundtrack, which puts it quite a bit above the PC versions. I've even read this is some folks' preferred way to play, and I see why. Anyway, the dungeon music is a jam.

 
Sarge said:
I put in around 73 hours to beat it - you can go faster, but only if you straight-line it with a guide. It's pretty slow-paced, but somehow it kept drawing me in every evening.
Click to expand...
Did you grind for gear or did you use any tricks to short-cut that process?
 
YangusKhan said:
For an NES game??
Click to expand...
Yep, for an NES game. It's long! Lots of optional content. The game doesn't even really reveal what your endgame looks like - it's an incredibly open experience. You find messages along the way that you'll eventually decode that tell you what you need to do to achieve victory. In the meantime, you spend your time chasing down quests from kings and just exploring in general.
Torzelbaum said:
Did you grind for gear or did you use any tricks to short-cut that process?
Click to expand...
Not particularly - I never really stopped to milk any fights, and while I did read some things in guides, I tried to play it more organically along the way. The advice is usually to farm Wyverns in the early-mid game until you can fight stronger fights, which can jump you from 1500-2000 per fight to 7000-15000, which is a big chunk, especially since the requirements for each level stops going exponential around level 10. You can technically beat the game at level 9 if you know what you're doing.

I did, however, do the whole questline that lets you boost your base statistics. There are spots in the game that boost your core stats, but you can "recharge" them by visiting the Clerics of the South and completing their quest to be deemed "worthy". It's repeatable, so I ended up with core stats above 40 (except Endurance, which weirdly capped at 27). I got some solid equipment along the way, but I never got the best swords and whatnot. I did cheat one thing - the NES game has a bug that keeps ranged drops from happening, so I ended up using an item morph trick to actually get a good weapon for my archer.

Levels are really where your survivability comes in, though - the HP boost (especially if you get that max endurance and maximize your HP gains per level by reloading if you get a bad roll) and the increase in number of attacks every couple of levels (at least for knight/paladin/archer) helps you both survive hits from much stronger optional bosses or take them down quickly before they can do too much damage. I still can't beat the succubus queen, though, at level 15. Not that she's that strong, but she's got a cadre of demon kings with her, and they one-shot my people still and eradicate them on top of that. (Turns them to ash, which is much worse than faint or dead.)
 
The item morph trick was mostly what I was referring to.

Did you use the infinite item charges trick?
 
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Crystalis is done. Never played this game originally but it's a pretty fun techno-fantasy action RPG. There's a bit of bullshit that's not super clear without using a walkthrough but mostly it's mercifully straightforward.
 
Torzelbaum said:
The item morph trick was mostly what I was referring to.

Did you use the infinite item charges trick?
Click to expand...
Ah, yeah, I just used the item morph just the once, although I actually got inadvertently screwed up when I didn't know about it and it turned my Merchant's Pass into a King's Pass. I honestly didn't need to do it, from what I could tell, as my melee from three members was still more than fine to finish it.

I rarely used items at all. I probably should have used skill potions more, though. Probably could have taken on some tougher battles earlier, although a lot of my issues were more HP-related than anything, at least with several bosses. Since I only rerolled two of my squad, they tended to be pretty slow until I did the stat-boost stuff. I plan on abusing items more liberally whenever I take on the sequel.
Johnny Unusual said:
Crystalis is done. Never played this game originally but it's a pretty fun techno-fantasy action RPG. There's a bit of bullshit that's not super clear without using a walkthrough but mostly it's mercifully straightforward.
Click to expand...
Crystalis is rad, had it growing up and I liked it more than Zelda. Didn't realize how much Ys influence there was until years later. Much less all the Studio Ghibli stuff.
 
Torzelbaum said:
Which version / port are you planning on playing? (I've played the first two games in the series but none of the others.)
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There's part of me that would like to play the same developer's SNES version, which has a fan translation, but that also seems to maybe have more changes, including reducing the party size to five? Aesthetically it looks even more anime, and also seemed more JRPG-styled. There's a later SNES port by an entirely different team that came out in PAL territories, but I doubt that's the optimal way to play. There's a Genesis version, too, which I remember from a VG&CE mag I had. But... I may shift over to PC for this one. I'm open to recommendations! I have the first six games on PC through GOG, at any rate.
 
For M&M 2 I played the DOS version (using DOSBox for some extra funkiness). It was mostly a fine experience except for having to use a guide in another window to translate the spell abbreviations into something actually meaningful.

I never played the Genesis version but back when it was first released I saw someone playing it, read a little bit of the manual and was instantly enamored. I didn't have a Genesis so I was disappointed until I learned about the SNES port. And then I became disappointed again when it never came to the US.

I didn't know that the Japanese version reduced the party size to 5 or changed anything else.
*Looks up the Japanese version.*
Wow... That seems really quite different. It feels way too far off for me personally but I guess it depends on how faithful you want the version to be to the original game.
 
Torzelbaum said:
For M&M 2 I played the DOS version (using DOSBox for some extra funkiness). It was mostly a fine experience except for having to use a guide in another window to translate the spell abbreviations into something actually meaningful.

I never played the Genesis version but back when it was first released I saw someone playing it, read a little bit of the manual and was instantly enamored. I didn't have a Genesis so I was disappointed until I learned about the SNES port. And then I became disappointed again when it never came to the US.

I didn't know that the Japanese version reduced the party size to 5 or changed anything else.
*Looks up the Japanese version.*
Wow... That seems really quite different. It feels way too far off for me personally but I guess it depends on how faithful you want the version to be to the original game.
Click to expand...

That's all very useful, actually. I was messing around with them last night, and the Genesis and SNES ports seem very close to each other, but the Genesis version had some really blaring sound (and I like a lot of Genesis music, but good grief), and I've heard the SNES version has some really odd bugs, and can potentially wipe your save. Which... I guess wouldn't be an issue if I'm save stating.

The Japanese version looks a bit too far afield, I tend to agree. If it had been closer to how they handled the NES game, I'd probably be on board, but as it is, it feels a bit too far from the original experience. So... seems like DOS might be the right choice. I hear the Amiga version looks really nice, however.

The other thing I'm looking at right now is eventually playing the original Wizardry. Lots of versions of that, too. I don't think I'll be doing it after sinking this kind of time into M&M, but if I knock it out, that will be the third of the big three early CRPGs that I've managed to beat (I beat Ultima several years ago).
 
Sarge said:
So... seems like DOS might be the right choice. I hear the Amiga version looks really nice, however.
Click to expand...
The MobyGames page has screenshots of most of the different versions, including the Amiga version. It does look quite nice (and better than the DOS version) but I don't know how it plays.
 
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